Way Out West (The Markhat Files Book 10)

by Frank Tuttle

  I was expecting it, so I ducked under it. Then I turned my revolver around and handed it to him, butt-first.

  “We don’t have much time,” I said. “I know Miss Hasty isn’t the killer. I have no intention of hurting her. But you’ve got to play along, or odds are we’ll all end up dead, so if you’re going to use that, you might as well do it now.”

  “Mister, you’re as batty as they come,” he said. But he sighed and handed me my revolver and grinned. “What do I do?”

  “We get the body, like I said. I’m going to stick Miss Hasty in a room. You’re going to insist on guarding her. You’ll be there not to keep her in, but to keep everyone out.”

  “You think she’s next?”

  “I do,” I said. “I think I can stop it. But in case I can’t, I’ll have my hands full, and keeping her alive will be up to you. Can you do that?”

  “I reckon I can,” he said. “Is she going to come out of whatever fit she’s in?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I lied. “As soon as the wand-waver is dead or cooperative.”

  “I vote for dead,” said Killins, as we got to the dead man’s door.

  “We’ll see,” I replied, and we stepped into the bloody compartment.

  Forn Foley was still inside. Still dead.

  But he was sitting upright, on his knees, pulling himself up with his hands on the bunk. When we entered, he turned his bloodless face to us, and his mouth worked as he tried to speak.

  Killins knelt, going for the gun I figured he had tucked away in his boot. I put my hand down in front of him.

  “Wait,” I said. I couldn’t see the red-skinned imp driving the dead man, but I was fairly sure one was there. “Ammunition is the only advantage we’ve got. Let’s not waste it until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “I reckon I’ve got lead to waste,” replied Killins, and he put a round through the dead man’s forehead.

  Foley didn’t blink. The impact made him jerk a bit, and he slowly rose to his feet, jaw still working, lips moving, dead tongue like a pale grub squirming in his mouth.

  “You have to push the air out of your chest before you can make any sounds,” I said as Foley turned to face us. “The boss sent me. You’re moving too slow. The boss isn’t happy.”

  “Vessels,” it said, as it exhaled with a rasp. “We are promised vessels.”

  “Indeed you were,” I said. “Vessels aplenty. Tall vessels, short vessels, small vessels for the kids. Step right this way, and we’ll get you and all your friends sorted.”

  The dead man glared and hissed.

  “Look, the boss sent me,” I said. “Do you want vessels or not? We haven’t got all day.”

  The former Foley fixed Killins in its dull gaze.

  “This vessel?” it asked.

  “An excellent choice,” I said, beaming. “If you’ll follow, we’ll get you right inside. Mr. Killins, the door, if you please?”

  Killins made his way to the rear of the car and flung open the door, holding it against the rush of sooty wind.

  The dead man and whatever animated it was still for a moment. Its dull eyes moved gracelessly from me to Killins and back again. I gripped the pistol I was fairly sure would be useless and hoped I could outsmart a man with a stone-dead brain.

  “Vessels,” it muttered and it stumbled awkwardly past me, a thick dribble of something black and wet hanging from its lips.

  “Right this way,” I said, patting the dead man’s back as he stepped out onto the platform at the end of the car. Killins hopped aside. “Now, mind your step,” I said, “or this might happen.”

  I knelt, grabbed the corpse’s ankles, and heaved for all I was worth. Killins got a grip on the left leg and between us we managed to toss the dead man over the rail and down onto the tracks.

  He didn’t make a sound. But the Western Star’s iron wheels did, cutting through flesh and bone as the body was tossed and rolled beneath car after car, wheel after wheel.

  Killins had gone pale as the defunct corpse. “Mister,” he said. “What in hell’s name was that?”

  “The least of our worries,” I said. He hadn’t looked at the sky yet, but I had, and it felt as if the hairs on the back of my neck were trying to crawl for cover beneath my hat.

  I saw two moons. The stars moved, every damned one of them, each tracing out some crazy pattern in the sky. Some trailed sparks. Some collided in bright flashes, causing rains of plunging cinders.

  I recalled my trip to the Moon. Remembered seeing the Star chugging along between the radiant child and the growing storm. Realized suddenly that the squashed circle of magic had grown so heavy that it had simply dropped out of our world, plummeting through spaces I didn’t have words to name.

  “Damn,” I muttered. I pushed Killins into the next car and shut the door behind me.

  The next car was still empty. I pulled Killins back before he could go any farther. “You wouldn’t happen to have a bigger gun stashed away in your compartment, would you?” I asked. “If you do, now’s the time to fetch it.”

  He grinned. “I might at that,” he replied. He shoved his popgun into a pocket. “I reckon the normal railroad rules are being relaxed?”

  “Brother, the rules are so relaxed they’re passed out drunk,” I said. “Get your piece. Things are about to get dicey.”

  That wiped the grin off his face. I waited while he retrieved his weapon.

  The sky wasn’t the only thing changing, as our bubble of magic fell. The prairie was lit by the flashes as stars collided, now and then, and what I saw was different from flash to flash.

  Flash. The Star sped through a dense forest of pine, spruce, and fir. Snow blazed white in the noonday sun. A ragged man, dressed in crude furs, turned and watched gape-jawed as the steam locomotive passed.

  Flash. Dark sky, endless plain of shimmering frost. Towers rose from the blue-white ice. As we drew abreast with each tower, a light flared atop it, growing brighter and brighter in our wake, until I had to shield my eyes from the glare and there came a great roaring as if all the winds in the world were loosed upon us at once, and—

  Flash. Diffuse dancing light. Things flying past—no, fish swimming past, disturbed by our presence. The Star was beneath a sea, still hurtling west, as a long-necked leviathan spied us, turned its baleful eyes upon us, and surged toward us, its body of silvery scales glittering like a thrown polished knife, and—

  Flash.

  Killins had joined me. He too stared out the window, speechless.

  “We’re caught in a collapsing volume of arcane influence,” I said, as though such was an event I attended every other Tuesday.

  Flash. We rolled through a mist that coiled and blew. Through ragged gaps in it, I saw ranks of still gray people standing in rows just beyond the Star.

  I pulled down the window shade. “Nothing out there concerns us yet,” I said. “What’s in here with us does. Follow my lead. Do you remember what I said?”

  He nodded, all business.

  I opened the door to the bar car and marched inside.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Every face turned our way.

  “You seem to be short exactly one corpse,” remarked Evis. “Do I need to guard the door?”

  I shook my head no. “The remains of Mr. Foley won’t be joining us this evening,” I said. “But they won’t be troubling us, either.” I pointed to Miss Hasty, who still chewed her gag and looked wildly about. “Mr. Killins. See that she is locked in a compartment, and that she doesn’t leave.”

  Killins approached the woman, gun in hand. He pulled her up easily by her elbow. She lolled and wobbled but didn’t fight.

  “I’ll make sure she stays put,” Killins said. Then he led her out. I shut the door behind him, leaned against it, let out a weary sigh.

  Everyone present, save Darla and Evis and Gertriss, erupted into shouts. Even Jiggles joined in the commotion, though all he did was honk his nose and bang his shoes on the floor.

  I pushed
myself off the door, raised my hands for silence. “Shut up and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t you throw that mad woman off the train?” demanded Mr. Sands. “If she’s a witch of some sort, she could still kill us all!”

  “She’s tied and gagged,” I said. “She couldn’t cast a spell right now even if she hadn’t lost her mind. She’s not a threat.”

  “So she was behind the murders?” asked an incredulous Dame Fabbers. “Her? Such a sweet young woman. Whatever motivated her to such terrible acts?”

  “The murders were done out of greed,” I said. I righted a chair, sat down wearily in it.

  “I hardly understand how knifing that poor Watchman or Mr. Foley would bring her profit,” said Dame Corniss.

  “This wasn’t about money,” I said. “Never was.”

  “Then what was it about, Mr. Markhat?”

  I leaned back. The car was dead silent. Even Jiggles was listening, his sweaty face alert.

  “Right after the War ended, the Regency decided to clean house,” I said. “They started with the wand-wavers. The ones who’d shown enough talent to be deemed dangerous had a rash of sudden accidents. Falls down stairs onto knives, inexplicable rains of flaming arrows, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s treasonous talk,” said Sands in a hushed voice.

  I shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s also true. Wand-wavers died. That left a lot of magical doodads lying around, ripe for the taking. And taken they were, probably in a mad rush as apprentices and servants and students hauled ass while the big old houses burned.”

  “And Miss Hasty was somehow involved in all that?” asked Mrs. Krait. “She hardly seems old enough.”

  I shrugged, turned to face her. “Wand-wavers. Altering their appearance all the time. Anyway, it seems that three persons in the service of a sorceress named Merry escaped with a smallish box. A box they dared not open, even though each bore a key.”

  “What’s in the box?” asked Jiggles.

  “No idea,” I said. “Not even sure they knew. But it was important enough to be protected by a potent curse, laid by Merry herself. So our three intrepid thieves got away with a treasure, yes—but they couldn’t make use of it. At least not right away. Maybe they thought they could remove the protective spells. Maybe they tried. Either way, they were wrong, and they spent the next ten years waiting for the spell to fade.”

  “Until all of them got on this train,” said Jiggles, frowning. “Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “I am,” I said. “I figure they got impatient. Maybe they decided taking the box out of Rannit would weaken the curse. They were wrong about that, but they were just apprentices or servants, after all.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Mrs. Krait. “How would you possibly know all that?”

  “I’m a finder,” I said. “It’s my job to find out things.” A lie sprang readily to mind. “The Corps wants that box back, too. They hired me to fetch it. Surely you don’t think my presence on this particular train is a coincidence?”

  “I still can’t believe that poor slip of a girl killed a Watchman and two other grown men,” said Dame Corniss. “She simply couldn’t have.”

  Mrs. Krait’s right hand moved toward her purse. The wide barrel of my revolver touched her forehead before she could open it, and she wisely stayed her hand.

  “Miss Hasty didn’t kill anyone,” I said.

  Mrs. Krait blinked. But that’s all she did.

  Maybe there was something in my eyes, too.

  “Evis, how fast do the bullets from these guns travel?” I asked. “Darla. Empty her purse.”

  Nonplussed, Evis raised a finger to his chin and pondered the question. “Your Mark V has a muzzle velocity of seven hundred feet per second,” he replied. “Mine is a bit faster, by perhaps an additional hundred feet per second. The scattergun held by the lovely Gertriss is slower, but of course the rounds are larger, and—”

  “Thank you, Captain Prestley,” I said. “So it’s safe to say that my bullet would splatter her skull all over the car before she could pronounce the first syllable of a spell, isn’t it?”

  Darla dumped out the contents of Mrs. Krait’s purse. I heard the clatter, but didn’t take my eyes off Mrs. Krait.

  “If yours doesn’t, dearest, mine certainly will,” said Darla. “So. Quite the assortment. A wand. A variety of small charms. What appear to be finger-bones, wired together with silver. A key. A number of stoppered vials, the contents of which I should not care to drink.”

  “You’re caught, Mrs. Krait,” I said. “You can’t lie your way out of this. You can’t fling a spell before I pull my trigger. You can’t outrun what we both know is out there in the dark. Not now.” I pushed the barrel harder against her skull. “I don’t like you,” I said. “You tried to bring harm to my wife and my friends. Ordinarily, I’d have shot you dead before we had this little talk. But as bad as it pains me, I’m going to offer you a chance. One chance to get out of this alive. Misbehave, and one of us will cut you down. Is that clear?”

  She glared. It took her a moment to answer.

  “Yes,” she said. It came out in a hiss.

  I pulled my revolver away, but kept it aimed at her.

  “Good. We need each other, for the time being. You know more about the box and what’s chasing us than anyone else. And you have some knowledge of sorcery.”

  She licked her lips. Her knuckles went white.

  “And what need have I for you?”

  “Evis,” I said. “The key. Give it to me.”

  Evis pressed the key in my hand. I breathed a mental sigh of relief, seeing it was identical to the one I had.

  I held it up. “I have the things you need,” I said. “I’m sure you recognize this key. You spilled enough blood trying to get it for yourself.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I shrugged. “Fine. Evis, open a window, toss this out.”

  “No!” She shouted before she could stop herself. Evis amused himself by raising a window anyway.

  “It’s no good, lady,” I said. “You’re caught. I know you had a key, Foley had a key, Winnings had a key. I figure your harebrained plan all along was to trick Foley and Winnings into tussling. That way the winner would have two keys, and you could just kill him, and have all three for yourself. Isn’t that right?”

  “You’re mad,” she said.

  “That’s why you killed the Watchman,” I said. “So you could convince Foley and Winnings that the other one had done it. Convince each the other was a traitor. Warn them they’d better act first, before the other crept inside his room. Trick them into turning on each other. Wouldn’t matter who won. Because you already had the master key, making it easy to kill the victor.” I shook my head. “That part of the plan worked. But nothing went right after that, did it? First, Foley’s search for the Triplett key was interrupted before he found it. I found it, though. Next, you killed Foley, using poor Miss Hasty, but she didn’t find his Triplett key either, because something scared your spooks away.”

  “This man is deranged,” Mrs. Krait said, searching the faces staring back at her for help. “Are you going to let him rave all night?”

  “I’m almost done,” I said. “You know what your biggest mistake was, Mrs. Krait? The one that tipped me off?”

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  “That red gown. That ugly blood-red gown. You stabbed a Watch officer. You held him while he died. And then you marched in here, making sure everyone saw you. You knew you’d have blood on you, so you had a gown made the color of blood. To make sure Baker’s blood wouldn’t show.”

  “Ridiculous,” she said.

  “Then show me the gown,” I said. “I can have Gertriss and Evis search your belongings right now. If they find that red gown—that everyone here saw—I’ll apologize and give you my revolver. But they won’t find it, will they? I imagine you balled it up and threw it out a window before you changed into the bl
ack outfit you were wearing when the mome attacked you. Yes, that’s what you did. The blood would have gone dark by now. Unless I’m wrong about all this. Just show us the gown.”

  She had nothing to say.

  “I have no love for sorcerers,” I said. “Frankly, if you’d stuck to killing each other, I might have been inclined to mind my own business. But no. You had to stick a knife in a working man’s throat. A man who was just doing a hard, thankless job. Then you had the gall to parade around in front of me, covered in blood you thought I was too stupid to ever see. Well, Mrs. Krait, you ought not have done that. You injured my vanity.”

  “He’s right,” said one of the Dames, in a loud stage whisper. “I remember that red gown!”

  “Me too,” added the good doctor. “Still, a search should be made for it, in case—”

  “Enough,” said Mrs. Krait, her voice loud and cold. “I must have the other keys.”

  The car went quiet, until Jiggles broke wind.

  “The shade of Merry is following us,” I said. “Something worse is approaching from the West. Were you honestly daft enough to try opening the case?”

  “It was Foley,” she said. I remember the displaced thread. “He had some ludicrous plan to trick the lock. We refused to let him try. But it appears he somehow gained access to the crate, and tried anyway.”

  “Which loosed the curse.”

  She nodded, once and curt.

  “Fine. Here’s the deal. You’re the closest thing we have to a genuine wand-waver. You find a way to turn Merry and the other thing back, or get us away from them. Once we’re safe, you get the other two keys. We stick you and your box in the last car and unhitch it and you get a few days’ head start before the Corps come after you.”

  “No. The contents of the case are the only thing capable of defeating the Playful. Without access to the case, we are all doomed.”

  “Not happening,” I said. “If whatever is in there is really that powerful, you’d whack us with it before you took a swipe at Merry, and we both know it.”

  “I would give you my word,” she replied.