The Five Faces (The Markhat Files)

by Frank Tuttle

  Finally, I settled back into the cushioned seat and closed my eyes altogether. Hah, I thought to the coin. Show me things now.

  “One of our special guests managed to sneak away,” said Evis. “The dog-thieving gambler. Rorshot.”

  “What?” I sat up straight. “When did that happen?”

  “When did what happen?”

  “You just said Rorshot flew the coop.”

  Evis lifted an eyebrow. “I said nothing at all. Certainly nothing about Rorshot. Were you dreaming?”

  “Must have been,” I said. Damn you, I added silently, in case my money was listening.

  “We have an excellent medical staff,” said Evis. “If your hallucinations persist.”

  “I wasn’t hallucinating. You never dream?”

  “Not on duty.” He peeked out his window. “We’re nearly there. I assume you have checked your weapons?”

  “More than once.”

  “Good.”

  Our carriage rolled to a smooth halt. Around us, I could hear soft footsteps, hushed voices, the creak of wagon springs.

  Evis popped out. I realized the smart thing to do was stay put and stay out of the way, so I sat in quiet meditation until Evis shook me awake.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Markhat, wake up.”

  I clambered down out of the carriage.

  We were alone on an empty street.

  I recognized the place. The neighborhood hadn’t fared well during last year’s riots. Burned storefronts stood empty, some boarded up, some open to the elements. As I watched, bats began to pour from a gap in a leaning, charred wall.

  “Cheerful,” I said. “Where is everyone?”

  We’d arrived in eight wagons and three carriages. None remained. Even the one I’d just quit was easing away, quiet as a mouse on tiptoe.

  “Hidden. Stitches has suggested you conceal yourself with her. Let’s go, before the unlucky Mr. Ray-ray makes his entrance.”

  He glided away, and I followed. We reached the charred remains of a door set in a stoop of crumbing bricks.

  Stitches stepped out of the wall. “Take my hand,” she said to me. “Good luck, Mr. Prestley.”

  “Same to you,” said Evis. He turned and the moonless night swallowed him up.

  I took Stitches’s hand, and the world went bright as day.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I went a little blind.

  “Pardon me,” said Stitches. “I should have warned you. Take these. Put them on.”

  She put something in my hand.

  “They are light blocking spectacles, like the ones Evis wears in daylight. Affix them to your face.”

  I fumbled with the things, but finally got them perched on my nose and hooked behind my ears.

  I blinked away spots and marveled.

  Stitches and I stood in a bubble of bright white light. Our shadows stopped at the edge of the bubble, though, and the light that shone from it illuminated the street and the alley without casting any shadows of its own. I tried to make out where we were and realized I was seeing right through at least one solid brick wall.

  “Please refrain from walking about,” said Stitches. “This volume of space is protected.”

  “Good to know.” I played my fingers through the light, marveling at the way the shafts felt cool against my skin as they flowed around it. “You Know Who can’t see us in here?”

  “No. Nor can the godlet that rides him. We are in a congruent but uninvolved space.”

  I nodded sagely, as though I occupied congruent but uninvolved spaces twice a day, every day.

  At her back was the crate I’d watched the three halfdead bear away. It was still wrapped with copper rope, one end of which was looped around Stitches’s slim waist.

  “Speaking of gods. Is it possible there’s more than one mixed up in this?”

  “Unlikely. Most of the old gods lie slumbering, awaiting the coming of arcane summer. The world in this stage cannot bear the weight of their existence. Why do you ask such a thing?”

  “Met someone claiming to be a god of chance,” I said. “Not the god of chance. He was clear about that. Just a god. Does that make any sense?”

  “None.” Stitches, with her sewn-shut eyes and bloody, thread-closed lips, was hard to read, but she looked troubled. “We shall speak of it later, though. I sense the time is nearly at hand. Indeed. Observe.”

  A man came staggering down the street. I knew he couldn’t see the pure white light that revealed his unsteady gait, his labored breathing, or the terror in his eyes, and for some reason that raised a pang of guilt inside me.

  “Are we just going to stand here and watch him die?” I asked.

  “He is directly responsible for the deaths of a score of innocents,” said Stitches. “His time has come. Pray we may learn enough from his death to prevent our own.”

  Ray-ray stumbled near. He nearly lost his footing and he halted, leaning on the wall with both hands, his breath ragged and wheezing and fast.

  He was so close I could have reached out and grabbed him. Could have pulled him into the safety of our bubble of uninvolved space.

  But I didn’t. I watched him gasp and watched him whirl around, listened to him whimper when he heard the sound of footfalls coming up the empty street.

  He stepped away from the wall. His wild eyes swept the burned-out storefronts, the empty doorways, the shattered windows. He knew—I knew—he’d run out of places to hide.

  The footfalls came ever closer. Slow and steady. Unhurried.

  Inevitable.

  Ray-ray made a mewling sound, and then he raced into the alley.

  Our bubble expanded, granting us an unobstructed view of Ray-ray’s short flight down the alley.

  The otherworldly light let me see that the alley ended in a tall heap of rubble just thirty feet back. Ray-ray didn’t see the pile until he ran headlong into it. He picked himself up and tried to climb it.

  The footfalls turned a corner, and the giant came into view.

  The light that had touched Ray-ray refused to flow so easily around the behemoth. It only touched his garments, leaving his skin and eyes in deep shadow.

  He carried no weapon. He wore no sword. His face was just a shadow.

  The serpent tattoo coiled and writhed, barely visible in the dark.

  Stitches did things with her hands. Coils of radiance gathered in them, pulsing and changing color while she kneaded them like dough.

  “Impressive,” she said. “Note how he seems to increase in stature as he nears his prey.”

  I nodded.

  “You may speak freely,” she observed as the globs of light in her hands expanded and boiled. “He can neither see nor hear us.”

  The giant was maybe a dozen, good long strides away now. The ground shook with each fall of his booted feet. He was growing, as I had done when I went walking with the huldra wrapped around my soul.

  Tromp. He was nine feet tall.

  Tromp. He was ten.

  Tromp. Eleven.

  Stitches lifted her arms, and the nimbus surrounding her hands dispersed, flowing out of our bubble like fog in a sudden, strong gale.

  The giant stepped into the alley. His shoulders met the leaning walls on either side and pushed through them, sending bricks and rubble showering down.

  It was only then that Ray-ray turned and saw death approaching.

  Ray-ray screamed. He screamed and tried to scramble up the vertical heap of rubble and he never got more than a couple of feet before he lost his hold and came sliding back down.

  The giant chuckled. I’d never have heard his laughter over the crack and fall of bricks were his voice not growing in volume like the rest of him.

  “Raymon Ray-ray Toles,” said the giant. His words rang like thunder. “I put my claim upon thee.”

  Ray-ray turned and screamed. The giant simply reached down and put Ray-ray’s head between his thumb and his forefinger and squeezed.

  Ray-ray squealed and jerked, arms flailing, legs ki
cking.

  I heard a brief, wet popping sound.

  Ray-ray went limp.

  The giant tossed Ray-ray’s corpse down onto the rubble. It landed amid the trash just as depicted in the drawing.

  Stitches’s light withdrew from the giant then. I saw only a form in the darkness, towering up to the rooftops.

  The giant stood there for a long moment, staring down at Ray-ray’s pitiful remains. Then he turned and went stamping out of the alley, diminishing in stature with every heavy tread.

  Stitches made a complex tracing in the air with her fingertips. Lights coalesced around her hands again, whispering as they gathered.

  “Surprisingly mundane,” she said. “I may have overestimated the strength of the godlet.”

  The alley was shadowed. When Stitches withdrew her clever flowing lights, the brightness about us began to fade.

  Something in the shadows, though, caught my eye.

  I pushed the dark spectacles down to the tip of my nose and looked over them.

  “Damn,” I said. “Stitches. Look.”

  I pointed.

  She looked away from her playful handfuls of light and followed my shaking finger.

  You had to squint to see him. Look from the corner of your eye. At first, I thought I was seeing nothing more than a section of broken wall, a happenstance outline amid the shattered and broken bricks.

  But as I looked closer, I saw that wasn’t true.

  The giant was still there. He had shrunk down to mere mortal size, leaning against the wall, sketching something on a pad of paper like the one I kept in my desk.

  “Stitches, tell me you don’t see that.”

  She froze. I cussed.

  “Be very still,” she said. “Very quiet.”

  I went stiff as a board. I held my breath. I turned my eyes away from him, irrationally fearful that my gaze alone would alert him to my presence, so it wasn’t until I saw Stitches take a sudden step backward that I knew my fears had been realized.

  “Who art thee, that spies from the dark?” asked the giant.

  “Oh shit,” said Stitches.

  The giant tucked his paper pad into his waistband. “A second time, I ask thee. Who art thou?”

  He began to grow.

  “This god of chance you met,” said Stitches. “Did he or she give you a talisman? Any object, of any kind?”

  “A coin,” I whispered. The giant began to tower. “I tried to throw it away. It keeps coming back.”

  “A third and final time I ask of thee,” said the giant. His voice sounded of young thunder now. “Who art thou?”

  Stitches raised her hands and emptied them of light. Her glowing wisps flew, but if they had any effect on the giant, it wasn’t one I could see.

  “I am called Mary,” she said. “Hag Mary, though I do not love the name.”

  “You lie,” growled the giant. “Hag Mary is dead. Three times I have asked. Now I shall feast on thy bones and drink thy living soul.”

  “Feast on this,” said Stitches, and the alley flared bright as the sun.

  I raised a hand to shield my eyes, saw the bones move in my palm and fingers. Stitches grabbed me, pulled me close.

  “Get ready to run,” she said. “Run and don’t look back.” She let go.

  In the midst of the blinding light, the giant laughed.

  The light simply winked out.

  And with it, our bubble.

  Stiches cussed. She grabbed the copper coil at her waist and yanked at the knot.

  “Flee,” she said. “Fool, flee!”

  The brick wall between us and the giant exploded. A massive fist withdrew, taking most of the wall with it. The giant peered down at me, his eyes burning bright red, his face lit here and there with what looked like distant fires.

  “Mortal,” he said, his eyes meeting mine. “I see thee.”

  “Can you hear me too?”

  “I will soon hear thy screams,” he said. “I place my claim upon thee.”

  “Too late,” I said. An epiphany dawned in the back of my mind. “I already have a drawing. I can’t die for two days, or you undo your own prophecy and vanish in a puff of smoke. So go threaten someone else, you ugly bastard. I’m invincible at the moment.”

  He growled, but his fist did not fall.

  “I hear truth in this,” he said. “I will take my leave of this place and time, and amuse myself watching thee die.” He leaned down, pushing his face through the rubble. “You shall have no escape.”

  I didn’t have a snappy retort, so I simply pulled both my pistols and emptied them in his face.

  I saw blood. I know damned well I did. The giant howled and flailed and walls exploded and bricks flew and Stitches hurled another handful of daylight and when that faded, the giant knocked the remaining wall down and waded in, bellowing.

  I grabbed Stitches and yanked. The copper rope around her waist must have still been tied to the crate, because she stopped short.

  The giant towered, fists raised against the night, and it occurred to me that nothing in my drawing indicated I would meet my demise with no unbroken bones, and nothing at all prevented the giant from smashing Stitches to a pulp.

  Buttercup, glowing like a harvest moon, came skipping through the rubble, her ragged dolly in her right hand.

  She skipped up to the giant, tapped his calf, and when he looked down, she waved, smiled, and then opened her smiling little banshee mouth in a world-rending banshee scream.

  I yanked again, and this time Stitches slipped free.

  The crate she’d been tied to exploded.

  Evis and his men converged on the alley, rifles blazing. A rapid-fire rotary gun opened up from the mouth of the alley, sending bullets ricocheting off the walls. The giant howled and batted at the air as if being stung by wasps.

  Buttercup wailed. She rose as she screamed, glowing bright. The giant stopped batting at bullets and clamped his hands over his ears.

  Beside me, something stirred in the fumes left behind from the explosion of the crate.

  It whirred. It clicked. I heard a metallic scratching, as though rats were hurrying past on tiny steel crutches.

  Something brushed past me. I caught a brief glimpse of it, thin silver legs by the dozens moving, something silver and plate-shaped glinting in the flash of the rotary gun.

  The sky above parted. Parted like a scroll, just as the priests preached. I saw faces against the sky. Mad-eyed faces, greedy and cruel, and then a hundred wizened arms reached down, and a hundred voices rang like thunder from the heavens.

  “The slilth!” they cried. “Give it to us! It is ours!”

  They reached.

  Buttercup howled. The world shook.

  Walls fell. Roofs too, timbers spinning. Stitches lashed out, threw handfuls of light, knocked bricks and wood aside. She stumbled, I caught her, we managed two halting steps, three, then we both went down. Debris crashed and rolled mere inches away.

  Explosions sounded all around us. Things like fireworks, but bigger and faster, flew past trailing flames. Each thudded into the giant and exploded. I thought I could hear Evis shouting, his words lost in the hiss and roar of the missiles.

  The giant howled, writhing as columns of fire arced out of the dark and slammed into him. From the sky, taloned hands reached down, raking at the giant’s face by the dozen.

  Buttercup took my hand. I tightened my grip on Stitches and as the roof came down upon us, Buttercup tugged and leaped.

  I watched the roof collapse from fifteen feet away. Stitches rolled to her feet, flinging ragged lightning blindly about. I let go of her and dropped flat, yelling for her to stop before she leveled the neighborhood or incinerated her favorite finder.

  She stopped. We watched Evis and his band of halfdead fire flaming missiles from bulky contrivances held on their shoulders. Evis bellowed and pointed, directing the fire, and the missiles struck home, one after another.

  The figures in the sky flew low, circling and swarming, their m
ad cries sounding all at once and rendering their demands unintelligible. Now and then something out of a nightmare would swoop down and grapple with the giant, who bellowed and howled in a voice that shook the cobblestones beneath my feet.

  Missile after missile exploded in the fray. Evis kept his men firing even as the walls around them began to shake and split.

  “The slilth!” shrieked a voice from the sky. “Mine! Mine!”

  “Markhat. Mr. Prestley. We must withdraw,” said Stitches. “At once.”

  “What the hell is a slilth?” I asked.

  Stitches pointed. There, rising up beside the giant, was the many-legged thing that walked out of the crate.

  It towered up and up, silver legs glinting in the light of many fires, striding unhurried about the giant.

  Instantly, the shapes in the sky descended onto it, keening and howling. The silver thing simply raised a few dozen of its jointless, flexible legs and batted the airborne sorcerers away, sending them hurtling across the sky with cracks of sudden thunder.

  “That is,” said Stitches. The slilth slashed at the giant, who stumbled and roared.

  A building collapsed. Fires rose up. Bells and whistles and shouting sounded from all about.

  The slilth raised a dainty leg and sprayed the sky with blinding sheets of fire.

  “Now,” said Stitches. “Withdraw!”

  I had just enough time to see Evis wave his men back before Stitches raised another brightly lit bubble and sent us soaring away from the fray, barely clearing the rooftops as we sailed toward the Brown.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The fires raged.

  We watched from a vantage point high up on the Hill. Evis and his men, scorched and limping but all present and intact, joined us half an hour after Stitches put our bubble down just across the Brown River Bridge.

  From a boiling mass of blood-red clouds, tens of dozens of mad-eyed sorcerers raged, hurling spells and curses with wild abandon. The giant stood his ground, massive fists punching, monstrous hands rending and tearing when a sorcerer flew too close.

  The slilth grew tall enough so that its dome-shaped body brushed the underside of the ruddy clouds. It ambled about in slow circles, swatting and spraying blinding, white-hot flames from the tips of its dainty metal feet when attacked.