by Frank Tuttle
“Something bad,” added Mama. “Something that smells old. I don’t mean right before your grandpappy’s time old. I mean older than weather, boy. What they calls eldritch.”
I nodded. Telling Mama about Stitches was a stratagem I wasn’t ready to consider, much less employ.
“You was there today,” said Mama. “At that old heap of stones. I knows you was. You got the stink of it all over you.”
Darla lifted an eyebrow at me, a sure sign of spousal disapproval.
“I kept a careful distance,” I admitted. “All I did was watch.”
Mama fell silent. The shock of it tricked me into describing my sighting of the watcher and my surmises as to the tower’s true nature.
“Well, there might be a brain under all that hair after all,” said Mama when I was done. “Makes sense, if you’re a murderin’ bastard aimin’ to keep hid as long as you can.”
“We should tell the Watch,” said Darla. “Let them handle it.”
“Won’t be nothing to handle,” said Mama. “They see the first Watch wagon rolling their way, and they’re out the back door and scattered in the woods.”
“For once I agree.”
Darla frowned. “Well, why not just blow it up? Surely Evis has more powder handy.”
“Blow what up?” asked Mama.
“Never mind,” I said, maybe a tad too firmly. “Look. We need to know a lot more about this person who cannot be spoken of before we even contemplate paying him a visit. And when I say contemplate paying him a visit, I mean hide somewhere safe while Avalante pays him a visit.”
Buttercup appeared at my feet, wiping sleep from her eyes. She’d sauntered through the locked door, Darla said, mere moments after Mama assured her she’d left the banshee fast asleep in her bed.
“Hello, honey,” I said and got a quick hug for my trouble. “Is that a new doll?”
She was pushing a doll toward me when I asked. I wasn’t really interested in the doll until I got a good look at its face.
I took it carefully from her hands.
“Mama, did you give her this thing?”
Mama shrugged. “I reckon, people is always bringing me toys and whatnot for her…”
Mama’s voice trailed off when I turned the doll to face her.
Someone had used dark ink to cross out its eyes, so that they looked like the eyes of the faces drawn on the waybill that had heralded Chuckles’s death.
“Damnation,” said Mama. She stood and snatched the doll out of my hand.
Buttercup solemnly produced a second doll. This one too had its eyes crossed out.
“I do not like this,” said Darla. “Not one bit.”
I got down on my knees and met Buttercup’s calm gaze. “What are you trying to tell us, honey?”
“You think she done that?” asked Mama.
“Who else?” I held up the second doll and pointed to its face. “Buttercup, sweety, what do these marks mean?”
She pondered the question for a moment, and then she tilted back her head and opened her mouth and let loose the first strains of her otherworldy banshee scream.
Mama deftly popped a sweet between Buttercup’s lips before she alerted the whole of Rannit to her presence. Buttercup smacked solemnly on the sticky mass of chewy candy for a moment, and then she reached up and drew careful X’s across both my eyes.
“That does it,” said Darla. “What more in the way of warning do you need? A banshee just stopped screaming long enough to cross out your eyes. We could be at Avalante before Curfew and halfway to Bel Loit by noon tomorrow. That’s the smart thing to do. I’m right, and you know I’m right.”
“You’re right. That’s the smart thing to do.”
She let out her breath in a puff. “The only time you agree with me is when you plan to do the opposite of what I say.”
“I’ve got no choice. And who’s to say trouble wouldn’t follow, sooner or later. Bel Loit isn’t that far away, these days.”
“Wasn’t this supposed to start and end with finding a little girl’s missing dog?”
“I haven’t forgotten Cornbread. I just didn’t know he was hidden in a hornet’s nest.”
Mama stuffed the dolls into her bag, pulled the drawstring tight, and stood.
“I’d best be gettin’ home,” she said. She glowered at Buttercup. “And you’d best be following me, you hear? With none of that walking through things, or floating, or glowing. You just takes my hand and you walks with your feet, you understand?
Buttercup giggled but didn’t try to get free when Mama took hold of her.
“You writes that name down for your friends at Avalante,” she said. “Be sure and tell them who give it to you. I don’t reckon there’s a new pair of boots hereabouts, is there?”
“Sorry, Mama. Ran out of time. But I won’t forget.”
“See ye don’t.”
With that Mama, Buttercup in tow, stomped out of our room.
“There are times I contemplate drugging your beer,” said Darla without a hint of insincerity. “Are you determined to pursue this?”
“I have to.”
“Wogsroot. Stomaline. Ketcher’s Shade.”
“Bless you.”
Darla crossed her arms over her bosom. “One drop of each, dear, for each fifty pounds of body weight, will result in five hours of deep, restful slumber.”
“You wouldn’t.”
She sighed. “I should. But no. I won’t. I can’t talk you out of it?”
I took her hand. “Afraid not. Wish you could. There are reasons.”
“Always are.” She kissed me then, and my plan to return to Avalante to share the name that cannot be said aloud evaporated.
I left her sleeping, well before sunup. I had a long day ahead.
I tiptoed from the room and put my boots on in the hall. I was out on the street so early the dead wagons weren’t even half full. Had a scare two blocks from the hotel, when one of the pale forms under the dead wagon’s tarp sprang up, gibbering and crying, struggling to escape the wagon that passed not three feet to my right.
The driver clubbed the newly-risen halfdead through the tarp without even dropping his reins. A blot of dark blood appeared and spread, but the body beneath it lay still.
“Early bird gets the worm,” guffawed the driver as he whacked the bloody spot once more.
I crossed the street and hurried north, toward the soot-blacked wall.
Chapter Eleven
When people say city life stops at the wall, they mean it.
I encountered my first rattlesnake not fifteen feet from Rannit, just beyond the tumbledown West Gate. Pulled the first tick off my leg a dozen paces after that. Stepped in my first pile of something moist and rural a quarter mile after.
By the time I got within a mile of the old tower, I was surrounded by a cloud of biting flies, my shirt was wet with sweat, and my pant legs were spotted with beggar lice all the way up to both knees.
I hid in a copse of scrub pines and swatted flies with my hat and did a fair amount of whispered cursing. The wind was at my back, and I had to wait it out and hope it shifted, because if the bunch I was after had any sense at all, they had dogs. Dogs no doubt trained to bark when sweaty, bug-bitten strangers approached. There might be woodsmen who could sneak up on a dog’s keen nose, but I knew I wasn’t among their number.
So I waited and I listened. You’d be surprised how far sound carries when Rannit isn’t adding to every swaying branch and every snapping twig with its cheerful cacophony of mayhem.
A pair of squirrels played not far away. Crows cawed back and forth. A jaybird called, and another answered, and somewhere off to my right a man chopped wood and sang between blows of his axe.
So, a mile from the tower, and life carried on. That’s about what I expected. But I knew that as I approached the tower, the sounds would likely fail, one by one, until nothing but a deathly silence remained.
Back down the weed-choked path I’d just quit, I heard the sound
of a wagon rattling toward me. I hid myself behind a thick growth of brambles, nearly stepping on another damned snake. He slithered away, and I pushed my hat down and made myself as small as I could.
The wagon rattled up to my little stand of dispirited pines and stopped.
“I reckon we walk from here.”
If the snake had been in reach, I swear I would have grabbed it and thrown it, because the voice was unmistakably Mama Hog’s.
“You’re sure he came this way?”
And that was Darla. I peeked around my brambles and there they were, all wrapped up in hats and veils, perched on a rented wagon while a pair of fat, brown ponies munched on weeds.
I stood up. They dismounted and Mama tied the ponies to a stump. I caught a hint of movement, high up in the trees, and realized Buttercup had slipped whatever bonds Mama had set and was along for the outing as well.
I snuck around the brambles, exited the pines, and came up behind the wagon. Neither Mama nor Darla turned.
I was damned near within slapping distance of Mama’s back when she realized she wasn’t alone.
“Dammit,” I said. Darla whirled but had the good grace to blush. “I’m within two feet of you, Mama. One knife blow and done. And you, young woman. Mama I expect this of. Not you.”
“Keep your voice down,” snapped Mama. “And ain’t none of this her idea. I come up with it. I brung her. You want to be mad, be mad at me. See if I care.” She waved a stubby finger in my face. “But you hear me. That man what ain’t to be spoke of has hexes. Powerful hexes. Without me here to keep you hid, you’d be found out, and that’s a fact. You think that fancy wand-waver you think is your friend showed you this place because she wanted you to stay away? Fie.” Mama spat. “She showed it to you ’cause she knew you’d start poking around at it. You ain’t nothing but a stalking horse to her, boy. I aims to see you don’t get kilt playin’ the fool.”
“Then why bring Darla?”
Darla put her hand on my arm. “She tried to talk me out of it. She did. But you’re not yourself, hon. I’m staying. Whatever you’re going through, I’m going too.”
“You’re both going home. Right now.”
“Like hell we are.” Darla met my eyes. “What if Mama is right, hon? What if she can spot things we can’t see?”
“What if she’s just a meddling old—”
“Shush!”
I shushed. Not because Mama said to, but because at that very moment the squirrels stopped scampering and the crows fell silent and the merry singing woodsman let his axe fall still.
“Take my hands, both of you, right now,” ordered Mama.
A chill settled over us, despite the warm, bright sun.
Darla took my hands and shoved them over Mama’s.
The ponies stomped and whinnied. Mama closed her eyes and muttered under her breath. Things in her big, stinking bag started moving and writhing, as if trying to escape.
It was over as soon as it began. The crows resumed cawing. The squirrels leaped from branch to branch. Our stalwart, and no doubt ruggedly handsome woodsman, took up his ancestral axe again, toiling merrily away.
“And that was?”
“I don’t rightly know,” said Mama. She was sweating and her eyes were wild. “Best I can describe it, something big and nasty sits up high, and every now and then it looks around, turnin’ in a circle, like.”
Darla squeezed my hands. “That’s why we came,” she said. “Mama can hide us. If she didn’t—”
“I’d just be another man on a trail,” I said. “Mama, how many times can you do that, before Big-and-Nasty realizes what you’re up to? You look rattled. Don’t deny it.”
“I can do this all damned day,” she said. “All damned day.”
The ponies and I exchanged looks.
“I doubt that. But I guess we’ll see. And don’t think I’m forgiving or forgetting, either. You’re pushing the limits, Mama. This isn’t how friends treat friends.”
“We going to walk, or we going to talk?”
I walked. I set a brisk pace. Nobody spoke until a quarter of an hour later, when Mama signaled for us to join hands again while a wide slice of winter chill swept over us without a hint of wind.
That’s how we traveled, all the way to the tower. Walk fifteen minutes. Join hands and shiver while Mama sang her nonsense hexes. I kept us off the overgrown road and off the game trail that paralleled it. That’s where I’d hide traps, if I was hiding atop the tower and sweeping the woods with my baleful, icy gaze.
Pushing through the sword-thorns and the saw weeds and the ever-present corpse ivy slowed us to a crawl. Mama huffed and puffed and mopped sweat. I tore a rip in my hat batting at a hornet in a sword-thorn thicket. Darla strolled through it all without a scratch or a tear, only confirming my long-held suspicion that my wife is in fact a powerful witch.
When we first caught sight of the tower’s blunt apex through a break in the foliage, I insisted on going ahead alone. I did just that, on my hands and knees, moving only one limb at a time and listening between each motion for any hint of shouts or alarm from ahead.
Maybe I’d gotten a little softer and a little thicker since the War, but I made it out of the trees and behind a fallen pine trunk just fine. A sword-thorn bush gave me enough cover to stick my head up for a peek, and I did.
They weren’t much bothering to hide. I counted a dozen men, four wagons, six horses, two mules, and an Ogre. Chickens ran underfoot, pecking and clucking. The Ogre amused himself by snatching up a hen and munching contentedly on it while its idiot brethren pecked blissfully about his furry toes.
They’d done just as I suspected by making themselves a back door into the tower simply by yanking big stones out of the wall. They’d erected a crude, tin-roofed lean-to over the opening, and were hard about whatever business it was that bloodthirsty demigods and their hirelings get up to.
A jaybird squawked behind me.
“Hist,” whispered Mama. “Time to get hid, boy!”
The Ogre lookout snatched up another hapless hen. The only three humans I could see were huddled around a fire, shivering as though it was the dead of winter rather than summer side of spring. I supposed being that close to Big-and-Nasty might chill one to the bone.
I waved Mama and Darla to me. They had sense enough to stay low and stay quiet. We held hands again until the ghost of winter was past, and then we turned our eyes on the enemy camp and watched.
A wagonload of what appeared to be food arrived and was unloaded an hour later. The driver remained. The Ogre consumed half a dozen hens before putting his furry back to the wall. I wondered if his employers knew Ogres can sleep with both eyes open. I had to assume they either didn’t know or didn’t care.
The soldier in me railed. They hadn’t set up a perimeter. They hadn’t established a watch pattern. The trio around the campfire stared into the flames from whence an assault was unlikely to emerge.
I frowned. Darla saw it and showed me her questioning glance.
“They aren’t afraid,” I said in a whisper that went no farther than her ear.
“Good or bad?” She mouthed the words in mine.
“Don’t know yet.”
We kept watching. When the black wagon arrived, I had my answer.
The Ogre sprang to attention, his ears fanned back, his eyes narrowed, the crest of fur on the back of his neck and the top of his head going erect with Ogre terror. The men around the campfire stomped it out as soon as they heard the first faint rattle of wheels. They were gone, inside, before the wagon rolled into sight.
Hell, even the chickens took to the trees.
Mama Hog grabbed our hands and squeezed her eyes tight shut.
The wagon was covered with black burlap. The driver sat alone on the buckboard, and she sang as she drove. Her voice was wavering and hoarse and everything but pretty, but what she lacked in talent she had in volume. The tune wasn’t one I knew, nor was the tongue.
She braked the wagon and leape
d down, her long, black skirts whirling. She wore so much jewelry the effect of her leaping to the ground was much like that of someone dropping a wind chime. She tied her ponies beside the others and did a quick walk around the camp, and I was suddenly glad we hadn’t come a step past my sword-thorn bush.
The Ogre pissed the ground after the woman passed him.
Darla’s eyes got big at that. So did Mama’s. I didn’t risk an ‘I told you so,’ but the thought did cross my mind.
The woman stepped into the shade of the tin-roofed lean-to and barked out something in the same strange tongue in which she’d sung.
I got a good look at her then. She was tall and muscular. Lantern-jawed and a bit bug-eyed. She had a long mane of straight, black hair and rings on every finger and eyes ringed with dark make-up that lent her long face a skeletal cast. When she spoke, her teeth flashed white and wet, and her canines were a bit too long and a bit too sharp.
Mama drew in her breath with a hiss and damned if the woman’s black eyes didn’t rake the tree-line as if she’d heard.
The wagon shook, and a flap on the back lifted, and its passenger stepped out into the sun.
He was as tall as the Ogre. As tall and as wide. I’ve heard the old stories of giants in the frozen wastes of the north, but until that moment I never believed a word of them.
He’d been hunkered down in the wagon. Now he stood and stretched and when he made his hands into fists and yawned I knew damned well those storied northern giants were as real as clay.
I heard his knuckles crack when he rolled his hands into fists. His mouth, opened wide, could easily swallow a man’s head whole, and those yellow teeth and that massive jaw could easily bite it off.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His barrel chest rippled under a network of old scars. Hell, his biceps were as big as my waist, and none of it fat.
A tattoo coiled its way down from his face to his neck to his waist. It was that of a serpent, done in red ink, and as he flexed and moved, it seemed to coil and tighten about him.
The woman’s voice sounded again, muffled. The giant roared back, his words unintelligible, his tone clearly annoyed. He spat on the ground and stomped off into the wall, his booted feet sounding like those of a Troll on the barren, hard-packed ground.
