by Frank Tuttle
But, as usual, it all came spilling out. And, also usual, Darla listened without comment until I was spent.
She hugged me, put her head on my shoulder.
“No word about Cornbread, though.”
“No. I haven’t forgotten. Other concerns got in the way.”
“Other concerns.”
I wanted to get up and pace, but I didn’t.
“Somebody had to put a stop to it.”
She nodded. Her hair smelled of lavender.
“You never talk about the War. About the tunnels.”
“Not much to tell. It was dark. It stank. Very few opportunities for beer or pleasant female company.”
“Dark. And foul. Like the chamber beneath the warehouse?”
I gently disengaged myself from Darla and stood up. She stood with me, put one hand on my waist, the other on my right shoulder.
“Dance with me,” she said.
“No music,” I replied, but she was already swaying. Being a gentleman, I swayed with her.
“It’s not dark now,” she said, her lips brushing my earlobe. “I don’t smell bad, do I?”
“You know you don’t.”
“You don’t ever have to talk about it,” she whispered. “But I do want you to know this. Dark or light, there’s no place I won’t go with you, if you ask.”
I pulled Darla close, lack of music be damned.
Later, we dined.
The food wasn’t bad. Neither was the wine. At no time were we joined by half a dozen angry Watchmen come to haul me to the Old Ruth.
“To our home away from home,” I said, raising my glass. “May all our evenings here be as relaxing.”
Darla joined me in my toast. We were just finishing the wine when a knock sounded at the door.
Darla raised a pair of sleek, black pistols.
“Easy, soldier,” I said, pulling my shirt closed and working the buttons. “It’s Gertriss. Three knocks, then two, then three again.”
The knock was repeated as I spoke.
Darla put down her guns and helped me with my shirt. Then she scampered into the bedroom and closed the door while she dressed.
Gertriss brought me a change of clothes, but not much in the way of news. Stitches hadn’t identified the faces on the waybill. Evis hadn’t managed to ferret out the name of the person or persons who sent House Lethe scampering away from a huge pile of easy money.
The only tidbit of business Gertriss did reveal was the warrant the Watch issued bearing my name. I was wanted as a material witness in a murder investigation, and word was Captain Holder himself had signed the order. Rumor had it a bonus was being promised to the Watchman who brought me in.
I shooed Gertriss away. Darla and I played cards and listened for the tramp of heavy Watch boots in the hall. By the time we played our last hand, I owed the woman eight thousand crowns, but the hall remained silent and our door remained unknocked.
We went to bed just after dark. We didn’t light any lamps.
I didn’t hear the Big Bell strike out Curfew, but I did hear the bedroom door open. Heard slow, quiet footsteps sound on the polished oak floor. Heard the scratch of a match and saw the lamp by the door flare to life.
Stitches stood there, lamp in her hand.
One instant she was Stitches, with her ruined and bleeding eyes and her thin blue lips sewn shut.
Then she opened her eyes, and she smiled, and her color pinked and she was damned near pretty.
“Boo,” she said through her lips. Her teeth, which I’d never seen, were straight and white. “Rise and shine, finder. I’ve come to engage your services.”
I sat up in bed. Darla didn’t stir.
“This incarnation is much prettier than the last, don’t you agree?” She spun, her robe lifting to show shiny, black boots. “Pity no one ever sees her in this way.”
“Let’s not wake Darla,” I said.
“We won’t. You’re dreaming, Markhat. You’re lying in bed, deep in slumber. Nevertheless, get up and get dressed. You and I have business, this night.”
“If I’m dreaming why do I need to get up and get dressed?”
“Because it takes years of practice to master detailed lucid dreaming to the extent you can skip the mental steps required to pull on your trousers, and I have no desire to see your undergarments.” Her voice took on some of its old steel. “Get up. Get dressed. You’ve kicked a hornet’s nest.” She turned her back to me. “Now, Captain. I must insist.”
Dream or no dream, pretty face or the Corpsemaster’s bloated visage, I got out of bed and found my trousers.
“Feels real,” I muttered as I pulled them on.
Stitches didn’t turn, but she raised her right hand and snapped her fingers.
My hotel room filled with trees. The ceiling vanished, replaced with night sky.
“Show off.” I pulled on my shirt, realized it was on inside-out, shrugged and got it closed.
“All right, I’m decent,” I said.
Stitches turned. She smiled at me, and we were down on the street.
Moonlight turned the puddles to pools of silver. A half moon rode high, casting faint shadows, dark on dark on dark.
“Walk with me,” she said. She turned and headed north.
I fell into step beside her. My feet were bare, but the street was neither cold nor wet beneath them.
“Damn. I am dreaming.”
Stitches nodded. “You are sharing my dream. It is rooted in this night. What you see is real.”
We passed a weeder pissing on a shuttered storefront while jabbering about the Regent and fallen Angels.
“I’ll accept that as truth. You said something about nests being kicked.”
She nodded. We grew as we walked, ten feet with each step, twenty, forty, fifty. Soon we towered over Rannit, rooftops at our knees, and still we grew.
I’d walked this way before, more than once, striding over mortals and their works, my head just below the clouds, my eyes seeing things in the dark that mere words could never describe. Stitches, then the Corpsemaster, had tricked me into speaking my name to an ancient magical artifact she called a huldra. Its dark power had taken root in me and had nearly consumed me.
Stitches must have guessed my thoughts. “Remember, Markhat, you walk in my dream. When I told you the huldra was gone, I spoke the truth.”
Strange lights began to play on the horizon, dancing just beneath a thin bank of clouds like late summer lightning. But this was no far-off storm. By extending my focus, I could see shapes amid the lights. Monstrous figures, as large as me, moved in some frenetic dance at the edge of the world.
“They may be ignored, for the moment,” said Stitches, following my eyes. “Look closer to home.”
I obeyed. To the west, where Rannit’s sorcerous elite made their homes, I saw flickers and hints of movement, heard snatches of strange music, of distant laughter. A great pale face rose up, contorted in agony, but when it opened its mouth to scream, a dozen skeletal arms reached up from the ground and dragged the face back down into the dark.
Stitches muttered an earthy cuss word. “Imbeciles,” she added. “Witness the result of unbridled self-indulgence, Captain. They command vast powers, but cannot control their own base urges. No. I speak of something new. Something—” She halted, her eyes sweeping the dark. “There,” she said, pointing with her right hand. “Tell me. What do you see?”
I stared. I squinted. I raked the night with my towering new eyes, but for the life of me, all I could see was darkness.
Stitches took my hand.
The night shone bright as day. Rannit was laid out before and beneath us, shot through with a pulsing, moving tangle of lights that shimmered and spun and changed.
But there, just inside the north wall, a ragged patch of darkness remained.
It wasn’t large. It encompassed a pair of tumbledown houses and the ruin of an old wall tower. Within its unchanging volume, no tangled lights moved or shone.
Stit
ches spoke a word. We stood before the silent tower, at the border of the darkness.
I watched as hundreds of beetles poured from the timbers of the houses and forced their way through cracks in the crumbling masonry of the wall. Fat and black, the beetles advanced on the dark, unhurried and utterly silent.
And one by one, when they crossed its borders, they died. Instantly, with no fuss. They simply ceased moving.
Stitches whispered again. The flow of insects halted. The living beetles retrieved what dead they could and fled back into the walls and the cracks and the ground.
“It grows,” she said, when the last of the beetles was hid. “Little by little.”
“What is it?”
“Something that has no place here,” she replied. “I’m afraid I lied to Mr. Prestley, Captain. I have seen those five faces before. It was so long ago I thought never to see them again. But here we are.”
I groaned. Streetlamps for a dozen blocks flickered. “Why lie to Evis about it? Why tell me?”
“I wish to remain Stitches where Avalante is concerned,” she said. “And that is why I tell you. This must be stopped. And you must be seen as the agency by which it is put to rest.”
I spoke a few earthy words of my own.
Stitches let me finish.
“The faces are those of a minor prehistoric deity,” she said. “A death god, naturally.”
“Naturally. This death god have a name?”
“None I shall speak. Nor should you. This godlet devours souls, one by one, gaining power with each ritual killing. The killings are, at first, performed by the godlet’s priests, and each victim is warned before the act in the manner you have already seen.”
“With the drawing? The name, the date?”
Stitches nodded. We’d grown so tall Rannit was more rug at our feet than city around us. Still, I could see the play of lights and the small but distinct blob of pure shadow.
“The priests play a dangerous game, Markhat. If they fail to collect their victim in the manner and at the time specified, they themselves must satisfy the godlet’s hunger. Do not underestimate his determination. He literally has nothing to lose.”
“You went from priests plural to priest singular there,” I said.
She nodded. “I suspect only one man is acting for the godlet at present,” she said. “Else the darkness would be much larger.”
“So all I have to do is kill a single man. Or get the Watch involved and let them put him in a cell under the Old Ruth.”
She shrugged. “I suggest you kill him. But that is your choice.”
“Damned generous of you,” I muttered. Thunder sounded from the clear sky about my ears. “Can you tell me anything specific about my murderous priest?”
“I cannot. His visage is hidden from me, by the godlet’s emerging powers. I would rather not engage it directly. I would almost certainly win, but in doing so I would reveal myself to those yonder.”
She indicated the lights of her self-indulgent kin with a nod.
“What can you tell me?”
“The cult is old. Pre-Kingdom. The priests were marked by equal measures of rage and insanity. I suspect the godlet will begin to manifest shortly after claiming another half dozen souls. Once it emerges into our plane, it will grow exponentially in power and ability. I would sooner see it crushed well before that juncture.”
“So yank the priesthood up by the roots and the death god goes back to farming turnips in Nether Hell, is that it?”
“Something like that.”
I cussed some more. Stitches pretended not to hear.
“All right. It’s not like I have a choice.”
“You do indeed have a choice,” she said. “The same choice as I. You can walk away. Let the situation progress according to fate and caprice. I will not coerce you to action.”
We watched the infant shadow gobble up a wandering line of fire.
“There’s something you can do for me in return,” I said. “Help me find the dog.”
She grinned. I didn’t know what she was expecting me to say, but that wasn’t it. One thing I’d learned about dealing with her, no matter what name she used—the old spook likes to be surprised, now and then.
She laughed. She laughed so loud thunder broke from the starry clear sky.
“I mean it. You want this pesky priest poisoned. I want Cornbread. Do we have a deal?”
She kept laughing. She laughed so hard she doubled over, gripping her stomach, struggling for breath. The peals of her laughter echoed across the world, until I was sure the figures dancing at the edge of it would hear and turn their fearsome eyes upon us.
“Yes,” she gasped at last. “We have a deal. You save the world. I’ll find the dog named Cornbread. Wake up, Markhat. Wake up and get to work.”
I raised my hands to cover my ears against her thunderous voice. I shrank, diminishing so rapidly I fell. Rooftops rose up, and I tumbled toward them, screaming, until I woke in my bed to find Darla prying my hands away from my ears and shouting my name in my face.
“Honey! Wake up! Wake up!”
The rooftops vanished, just before I fell among them.
My bed was warm and soft. Darla was warm and soft.
I collapsed back into the sheets, holding her close, and I didn’t speak until my heart stopped pounding and the echoes of mad laughter died at last away.
Chapter Eight
Darla was quiet all through breakfast.
That’s usually a bad sign. It can mean anything from I failed to notice a new cut to her hair to I came home late smelling of one too many beers. Regardless of the cause, a trip to the florist on the corner for a trio of bright red fireflowers usually breaks the silence.
But this was different. She was quiet. She never smiled. She toyed with her food. She didn’t even butter her stack of pancakes.
When she let her coffee go cold, I pushed back my plate and looked at her until she couldn’t pretend she was avoiding my gaze any longer.
“Something has you spooked, hon,” I said. “Spill it.”
She took a small swallow of her tepid coffee.
“That was a bad nightmare you had last night,” she said, her tone neutral.
I shrugged. “Not the worst I’ve ever had, but yes, it was no picnic. People have nightmares. But I woke up and I’m here and I’m fine.”
She looked at me over her cup.
“Are you?”
“I am.” I sighed with dawning comprehension. “This is about something Mama said, isn’t it?”
“I don’t need Mama to tell me when you are troubled, my first and so far best husband. But now that you mention it, Mama may have made a point or two.”
“Such as?”
She put down the cup. Her hand was just beginning to shake.
“You may have killed a man yesterday.”
“Maybe. They were three. I was one. They were none of them saints.”
She nodded. “I know what they were,” she said. “And I know where you were. Down in the dark. Among the dead. With a dog.”
She reached across the table and took my hands.
“The War was a long time ago,” I said. “Twelve years. What happened yesterday had nothing to do with—what do they call it? Going war-crazed?”
“Why don’t we just leave Rannit for a while? We could go to Bel Loit. To the Sea. Or we could book a room for a few weeks on the Queen. We can stay up all night and sleep all day and eat Evis out of boat and kitchen. Please, honey. Please, let’s just go.”
I squeezed her hands when she stopped for breath.
“Whoa there. Easy. Look. I know Mama can be convincing with her cards and her birds and that witch-woman cackle, but I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
“Fine, like you were when you walked with the huldra? You lied then too.”
I knew she regretted the words as soon as she spoke them.
But, being pig-headed and occasionally foolish, I let go of her hands, stood, and marched out the do
or without a word.
I milled around on the street for half an hour, torn between going back to Darla and getting to work.
Foolishness won out. Hatless and empty of pocket, I made my way on foot to Cambrit, all thirty-six blocks away.
I added another block to my aching feet to avoid passing by Mama’s place. Finally, I made the corner at Cambrit, only to be greeted by the sight of Watch officers at my office, pounding away and shouting.
I cussed and turned on my heel. Of course the damned Watch was scratching at my door. I realized I’d been lucky I hadn’t been grabbed on the street.
Maybe Mama was right, said a little voice in the back of my mind. Maybe I am not quite myself.
I pushed the thought aside. The Watch officers hurled a final fusillade of blows on my door, yelled a final pair of demands, and then put their backs to the wall, crossed their beefy arms over their barrel chests, and settled in for a long morning of muttering and glaring.
I was engaging in glaring of my own when a tiny little hand slipped into mine.
Buttercup beamed up at me, then put her finger to her lips in a perfect mimicry of Darla’s own signal for silence.
“Sweety, you shouldn’t be out on the street in daylight,” I whispered.
She giggled and did a dainty little dance step. Her shadow lagged a bit too long behind her actual movements, and the sight made my hair want to stand on end.
“Does Mama know where you are?”
Maybe she squinted because the sun was in her eyes.
Or maybe she winked, knowing exactly what she was doing.
She tugged at me, trying to lead me toward my office.
“I can’t go that way, honey. Those rude men will shout if they see me.”
She seemed to ponder that. Then she giggled and tried to pull me again, not toward the street, but into the alley old Mr. Bull uses to dump his night soil.
There, propped against the alley wall, was a ladder.
Now, following a banshee onto a series of poorly maintained rooftops in an effort to escape the Watch and gain entry to my office by banshee wall-walking might not seem like the best way to start one’s day. But I was without my hat, without any coin, and completely bereft of beer or revolvers, so I followed Buttercup up onto the roof and we climbed and crawled our way slowly toward my office.
