Way Out West (The Markhat Files Book 10)

by Frank Tuttle

  I clamped my hands over my ears. Mrs. Krait stood frozen, rooted to the spot, even when I barged in front of her, putting myself between Mrs. Krait and the skull.

  “I assume I have the pleasure of addressing the former Merry, known as the Playful,” I said. The skull’s bare eye-sockets began to glow as a tiny pinprick of intense light was born in each. “Good morning. I didn’t steal your box. But I could just throw it off the train, let you have it. How does that sound? You get your box, we go on our way.”

  “ALL DIE,” replied the thunderous speaker. The last few teeth popped out of their sockets. “NO MERCY.”

  “You’re justifiably pissed,” I said. “Betrayed. Murdered. Raised. I’d be mad, too. But I’m offering you the box. Saves you a lot of trouble. No smiting, no chasing, no more yelling through skulls. You take what’s yours and go home.”

  “I GRIND THE BONES OF MY BETRAYERS,” it replied. “DRINK THEIR LIVING BLOOD.”

  “I’ve got a riddle for you,” I said, leaning close to the skull, forcing myself to gaze into the eye-lights. “What burns at twelve hundred degrees and isn’t the least bit afraid of old ghosts?”

  Mrs. Krait clutched my elbow. “Are you insane?” she hissed.

  The pinpoints of light in the skull’s eyes expanded, casting wild shadows across the car, but it did not speak.

  “Time’s up,” I said. “The answer is this—we’ve got a coal fired boiler handy. It’s so hot steel pokers left in it for less than a minute glow red. Now maybe whatever is in your precious case won’t burn. If that’s true, I’ve just pissed off a wand-waver’s shade for nothing. But if I’m right, and your box will burn, then I can stick it in that boiler and warm my hands on the flames and that’s exactly what I’ll do, old spook, if you come one step closer to this train.”

  The skull’s burning eyes blazed.

  “Think I’m bluffing?” I said. “Try me.”

  “I CHEW THY SKIN,” it began. “WORMS SHALL CONSUME THY—”

  I put my revolver to its nose and pulled the trigger.

  The skull exploded. The voice fell silent, and bit by bit Mrs. Krait’s machine began to wind down.

  “Angels and Devils,” she said, in the silence that followed. “You damned fool.”

  “I bought us some time,” I said. “Or would you rather I offered to drop you and the box off, all trussed up and decorated with a festive ribbon on your head? I could have, you know.”

  “You heard her. The Playful isn’t going to let anyone escape.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Moot point, though. I’ve given her pause. Will that case burn in a coal fire?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Bet she doesn’t either. But I do know wand-wavers well enough to know periods of careful introspection never last. She’ll soon come dancing down the tracks faster than ever. Now, what did you learn that we can use against her?”

  She sagged and sat as the last pitiful spark sputtered and died amid the ruin of her machine.

  “The nature of the curse is even more dangerous than I feared,” she said. “It was potent enough to draw Merry back from the dead. We do not face a mere facsimile. It is her.’

  I nodded. “And the other mass? The one approaching from the West?”

  “Death itself,” she muttered. “Fueled by the Playful’s former power. Violated by her return to land of the living. Gathering strength, even as she increases in influence.” She licked her lips and swallowed hard.

  “Death personified,” I said. “Pardon me if that sounds ridiculous.”

  “I don’t give a damn what it sounds like,” she spat. “I tell you it is the truth. What fools we were. All of us.” She looked up at me. “Don’t you see, Captain? The Playful planned this, all along. The case—she intends to use it, to restore herself to life. She must have foreseen her murder. She always had a plan. Always.”

  Darla joined us, giving Mrs. Krait a hard look.

  “Is this shade being drawn by a curse, or not?” she asked.

  Mrs. Krait nodded a yes. “The spellwork is, at its heart, a curse. Far more potent than most, but a curse nonetheless.”

  “Then it has rules,” said Darla. “What are they?”

  Mrs. Krait shrugged. “Nothing remarkable. An old tried and true configuration. As the only surviving member of the original three who took the crate, I am the primary target.”

  “So if you die?”

  “That changes nothing. She is loosed upon the world. If I am deceased, she comes after her crate. And anyone in proximity to it.”

  “We didn’t steal her precious box,” I noted.

  “The Playful was never one to limit herself to mere technicalities,” replied Mrs. Krait. “Consider. We are no longer traveling on a railway across the plains. We are in a bubble universe. We are, in fact, its sole inhabitants, along with her precious case. She will snuff us out, one and all, if for no other reason than to amuse herself.”

  “Bubble universe,” I said. “That’s not quite right, is it? It’s more of a flattened sphere.”

  Mrs. Krait raised a narrow eyebrow in surprise.

  “Don’t ask,” I said. I pulled a chair around and sat. Darla did the same.

  “What did the skull tell you about the space around us?” I asked.

  “Very much what we already knew,” she said, obviously uncomfortable with the notion that a peasant such as me might be privy to any knowledge of arcane volumes. “It is bound by the train, the Playful, and Death itself.”

  A ghost of an idea whispered in that dark place the huldra had burrowed out in my mind, so many sleepless nights ago.

  “The tracks. What about them?”

  She shrugged. “Three thousand miles of cold iron. Yes, they play a role in shaping the loci. The rate of travel of both the Playful and Death has been determined by the span of the tracks. I doubt even the Playful anticipated the effect such a long conductor would have.”

  “What if we added a fourth point to the loci?” I asked. “And in so doing, what if we added a third dimension to all this? Something outside the plane defined by the tracks and the Playful and Death. Say we put this fourth point way up high, up in whatever passes for a sky outside. What would happen then?”

  She pondered that for a moment. “The volume would expand,” she said at last.

  “When it expands? What happens then?”

  “The density of the arcane influence within the volume would decrease,” she said. She grabbed for her pen, found a scrap of paper, scribbled for a few moments. “Significantly,” she muttered, glaring at the paper.

  “Would it be possible for us to pop out of the bubble, make it back to the prairie?” I asked.

  More scribbling. More muttering. She bit the end of the pen off, spat it out.

  “Possibly,” she conceded. “But surely this is all academic. What means do we have to add another point to the loci?”

  I produced my pair of shiny gold keys. “I’m told that these are magically linked to the lock on the Triplett case,” I said. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But throwing them off the train will only deliver them to the Playful’s hand.”

  “Which is why I’m not throwing them off any trains,” I replied.

  Darla caught on first. She caught on and she squeezed my leg just above the knee.

  “Dear,” she said to me, while looking down her nose at the perplexed Mrs. Krait. “Let’s go fly a kite.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Something in the iron coffin tried to claw its way out.

  Evis, ever bold, put his fool ear to the top and listened. “Sounds like a lot of small things moving at once,” he said. “Some kind of worms with teeth, I surmise.”

  “Dear, do shut the hell up,” said Gertriss. “Come and help me with this crate.”

  Evis grinned, his shiny white vampire teeth gleaming in the lamplight. But he straightened and joined Gertriss, easily tearing the lid off the crate before her.

  �
�We need string,” I reminded them, when I saw that telltale grin of Evis’s widen into something more matrimonial. “Ten thousand feet of it.”

  “Found some!” cried Darla, from the shadows. “Good grade of twine, anyway. Couple of hundred feet.”

  “Add it to the pile,” I said. I found a couple of skeins of yarn in the luggage I’d chosen to pilfer and tossed it toward the heap.

  Evis tore the lid off another crate and peered inside. “How big is this kite of yours going to be?” he asked.

  “Ten or twelve feet across. Silk. We need silk for the kite itself, or a good grade of cotton bedsheet. Anybody see anything like that?”

  “Winnings’s robes,” said Darla. “Probably enough silk in that box to make two kites.”

  Gertriss stood. “I know which one it is,” she said. “I’ll pull out all the silk ones.”

  Evis stayed close. “So that’s really your plan?” he asked, his voice pitched low enough that the rumble and rattle of the train nearly drowned him out up close. “Try to break this arcane whatsis with a signal kite?”

  “Well, I’d get married again instead, but Darla might object,” I replied.

  “You wound me. Still. You know damned well the widow is going to make a move sooner or later. You sure sending her precious keys up on a kite is a good idea?”

  “Best one I’ve got.”

  He shrugged, shot a sideways glance at the widow’s cursed case. “So what do you think is in there?”

  “Nothing good. Whatever it is, it isn’t what the widow believes.”

  “She claims she doesn’t know.”

  I snorted in derision. “She’s lying through her pretty white teeth. She didn’t spend her entire adult life and murder her pals on the off chance she might come away with something more valuable than the Playful’s dirty socks. No. That old dead wand-waver set the hook good and deep. The widow thinks she knows, but she’s a fool.”

  “Won’t argue that point,” said Evis. He withdrew a bright yellow spool of surveyor’s line. “Hello,” he said. “Ah. This must be the prospector’s case.”

  “Keep digging,” I said. “We need every foot of line we can find.”

  “Someone certainly knows an awful lot about sorcery all of a sudden,” Evis noted, keeping his face in the dark.

  “I’m just guessing,” I said.

  I saw him nod. “So how is Stitches these days?” he asked. “The barren, airless void of the Moon suiting her sunny disposition?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “How the hell indeed.”

  Darla joined me, touching my shoulder. “I’ve got enough silk,” she said, hefting the armload of robes she bore. “And several sewing kits. This kite of yours—is there anything special about the frame?”

  “Nope. Just follow the diagram. Fancy isn’t important. Sturdy is.” I kissed her on the cheek. “Although if you can incorporate at least one pair of my old underbritches, that might tell all sorcerous parties involved something of my opinion of them.”

  Darla nodded gravely. “I’ll work them in somehow, dear. I’ll go get started. Unless you need me here?”

  “We can look for line. Take Gertriss with you. Be careful of the widow, hon. Don’t turn your back to her. Not for an instant.”

  She kissed me. “Never,” she said, and she was gone.

  Evis straightened. “I’m an idiot,” he proclaimed.

  Gertriss, from somewhere in the dark, sang out. “I love you anyway,” she said.

  “The pull cords in every car,” Evis said. “The ones that summon a conductor?”

  I groaned.

  “Must be a mile of the stuff, if we took both sides of every car, and all the compartment runs too,” Evis noted.

  “Bring what line we’ve got. Grab anybody standing idle and set them to cutting,” I said.

  The scratchings from the iron coffin grew louder. Assorted thumps joined the mix.

  “Somebody is getting grumpy,” Evis said. “How thick is that iron?”

  “Thick enough.” I picked up what scraps of cord I could carry and then found the lamp. Evis followed me out, locking the door behind us.

  The wind clawed and grappled out on the platform. The air was cold, and it smelled first of sulfur, then of fresh-cut cedar. The sky was a dim red when we emerged, turning an icy bright white before we managed to get the opposing door open and spill into the bar car.

  The bar car was busy. Darla and Dame Corniss were cutting up robes. Gertriss and the embalming fluid man were lashing thin lengths of fir together, making spars for the kite frame. Miss Hasty, pale but lucid, sat close beside Drum Killins, who was seated across from Mrs. Krait.

  Killins glared. The gun in his hand was a monstrous Welkins four-shooter, blunt and crude but reputed to be reliable and effective. The expression on Killins’s face suggested he was all too eager to test his weapon’s effect upon the first wand-waver who gave him cause.

  “I need a hole in the roof,” I said, moving close to Killins. “Big enough to drag a piano through. Why don’t you take a break? I’ll keep Mrs. Krait company for a time.”

  Killins didn’t ask why I needed a hole or what I intended to do with a piano or how he was to go about creating such an opening. He just stood, holstered his revolver, and took Miss Hasty away.

  “You’re making friends,” I said to Mrs. Krait. I sat in the chair just vacated. “I assume you exchanged mailing addresses, so you can keep in touch.”

  “I have no patience with blathering,” she replied. “Do me the courtesy of going away.”

  “I know you’re not done yet,” I said. “You’ve got something up your sleeve. Let me do you the courtesy of warning you, one last time. Cross me and that last iron coffin is yours.”

  She spat in my face. I found my hanky, wiped it away.

  “So much for courtesy.” I rose. “Need to see a man about a horse,” I said. I caught Gertriss’s eye. “Watch Her Highness for me, won’t you?”

  “Glad to,” Gertriss replied.

  I sought out the door and sauntered through it. Colliers, the nervous slip of a jeweler, was heading toward me from the other end of the car.

  “Just the man I wanted to see,” I said quietly. He gobbled and sputtered all the way back to his compartment.

  By what should have been nightfall, we were ready.

  Killins made a crude scaffold out of booths and cut-up bed-frames. Sawing through the roof of the bar car took several hours and no small volume of cussing, but in the end we wound up with a sizable opening.

  Smoke from the Star’s funnel blew in, as did the occasional spark. The sky above changed every moment—now bright, now dark, now striped with bands of both. The flashing effect was so unnerving Mrs. Krait herself assisted with the addition of a makeshift shutter, hinged on one side, which could be raised to block out the worst of the ever-changing heavens.

  One of Rowdy’s boys appeared just after noon, again with demands from Stoddard that I report to the locomotive engine or else. I sent the lad back with a two-word note, writ large and signed with a flourish.

  “Good news,” said Jiggles, who came sidling up as the skinny lad departed with the note. “The galley is out of food.” He pitched his voice low enough so that only I could hear.

  “Completely?” I asked.

  “There’s some bread left. Maybe some jerky. Water, sure. Coffee, getting low.”

  “Beer?”

  “Mister, you’ll know when we’re out of beer because I’ll hang myself right here,” he said.

  I nodded. “Save me some rope. Look. Starving is probably the least of our worries. All the same, see if the kitchen can make soup or something. No need in making this public just yet.”

  Jiggles frowned. “Bread and jerky soup?”

  “Tell the galley to give it fancy name and claim it’s an Old Kingdom delicacy,” I said.

  Jiggles honked his nose and saluted. “As you wish, Your Highness.” He trundled away, waggling his gloved fingers at Mr
s. Krait as he went.

  She followed him with her eyes. She refused to look my way. She hadn’t spoken in a couple of hours. Hadn’t budged from that booth. Hadn’t offered sarcasm or insult.

  I didn’t much care for the expression she did not regard me with.

  “You’d do better by keeping up the whole haughty sorceress act up until the very moment you pounce,” I said to the car at large. “This sudden determination to be quiet and hopefully go unnoticed is producing the opposite of the effect you desire, Mrs. Krait. I attribute this misstep to your lack of experience with both murder and people in general.”

  I sat and pulled out my old Army knife and made a show of putting an edge to it with my whetstone. “Any time you feel lucky,” I said, looking straight at her. “Anytime at all.”

  She picked out a spot on the back of the booth across from her and glared at it.

  “One of my first cases as a finder involved a man named Needy,” I said. “He just up and vanished one day. Left for work, never arrived, never came home. His wife came to my door two years after that. She’d saved up enough to hire a finder, and she wanted her husband found.”

  “I couldn’t possibly care less,” she muttered.

  I gave the knife’s blade a pass with the whetstone.

  “Mr. Needy wasn’t hard to find,” I said. “Took me less than two weeks. Like some other people I know, he wasn’t really that good at scheming. Turns out the day he vanished, he’d been walking in the shade of the old east wall. You know that wall, Mrs. Krait? They put up warning signs. Chunks of it fall, every day. No warning, just splat. But Mr. Needy ignored the signs, because he liked to walk in the shade. Easier that way, he said.” I shrugged. “Well, that day, a hunk of old masonry the size of an Ogre-cart fell. Landed right beside him. So close it knocked off his hat and tore his coat right down the middle of his back. Killed a weed-head not three steps away—but Mr. Needy, he didn’t have a scratch. Do you know what he did, Mrs. Krait?”

  She did a passable imitation of a granite Church gargoyle, still as stone.

  “He just kept walking. Something about coming so close to being snuffed out freed him, he said. So he walked away from his wife and his job and Rannit, and he wound up in a tiny little jumble of shacks a few miles outside Bel Loit.”