City of Corpses: The Dark Avenger's Sidekick Book Two (Moth & Cobweb 5)

by John C. Wright

  He was fast, but she was faster. She turned and neatly caught him in midair with one hand.

  “Mercy!” he cried, now blubbering. An abnormal, impossible amount of water came from his eyes, far more than his body size could account for. “Mercy, great lady!”

  “Don’t worry. I will not hurt you.”

  “Mercy, O lady with the sweet, luscious, peach-shaped–!”

  “Or, if need be,” she interrupted, “I may hurt you.”

  He kicked his legs. Her fingers entirely circled his small form, pinning his arms to his sides.

  She brought him near her nose. “Are you drunk?”

  “Oi, aye. Drunk as a lord. Drunk as a house of parliament full of lords, and a long parliament session at that! Willy meant to keep me poor old bones locked tight in the bottle, so I would be too addled with strong drink to gather my wits and remember the runes and sleights, riddles and couplets, to work me mighty charms. Your lips, from this angle, are huge and wonderfully lush! How ’bout a kiss?”

  She gave him a shake. “Why were you in that bottle? Tell me!”

  “I was saving it!”

  “What?”

  “A prisoner am I! Out of my right wits! Strong drink will do that! And bonny, buxom lasses. Tell me! Keep you your keys or hanky in that fair bosom? I ask only because if you need me to fetch anything you’ve tucked away…”

  She dunked him headfirst into the first glass of whiskey. Bubbles flew from his nose, and he writhed and kicked his legs and made outrageous faces through the transparent wall of the glass, but he did not actually seem to be drowning. She waited, eyes narrowed, wondering how much lung capacity someone only ten inches tall could have.

  After a while, he stopped kicking, opened his mouth, and sucked half the glass into himself. Perhaps he knew the same trick as whatever seamstress who made the pouches of her suit, for his body was too small to hold the volume of alcohol he had just imbibed.

  She pulled him closer to her eyes once more, squinting. “Why does he keep you here?”

  He expelled a stream of alcohol toward her eye. This was not like a man spitting. It was more like a carnival mask through whose mouth a firehose has been threaded opening up a blast. But she had half expected such a thing and parried with a quick motion of her thumb. The beam of fluid splashed back in his face, harder and harder as her thumb came closer. He yelped. She clamped her thumb over the lower half of his face.

  She turned and saw where melted ice water had collected in the bottom of the bucket. She plunged her hand and her prisoner in.

  She held him under the freezing water until he stopped squirming.

  Now, she drew him out and deposited the little man on the blotter. “Are you sober?” she asked. “Speak respectfully to me.”

  He shook his limbs and wrung his long locks like a woman wringing a washcloth.

  “Hah! You coyless colleen! Why should I rule my tongue for you? I am of the Night World, vast and dark, and what are you but a halfway lass, a by-blow? My blood is better than yours! And I– I… what’s the accursed word? I outrank you!”

  “Then speaking to an inferior will be all the more humiliating. First you must bow.”

  “Hoo hah! Must I, now, says she? You’ve let your hand away! I can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes or ere a leviathan can swim a league! This bone I hold can shrivel the spots off a giraffe and fold his long bones into a cockleshell! If I take it in my lips, I weft invisible and unseen! Or waft? Is it waft or weft?” He raised his hands to the bone stuck through his topknot, but his fingers seemed lax and rubbery, and he could not dislodge it nor undo the knot. “Higher magic is mine! Dire magic is mine! What have you? What can you do?”

  “It is a fair question.” Reaching across the desk behind him, she snapped her fingers sharply with her left hand, and when he whirled drunkenly to look, she snatched him up with her right hand.

  “Good reflexes you got there, missy.” He said, mournfully.

  She put him headfirst back into the ice water and looked at the gold-plated clock on the desk. Her lips grew thin. Eventually, she pulled him out again. He sputtered and snorted.

  “Water! Foulest element! No one can drink that stuff!”

  “Time is short. The Magician returns at any moment. Tell me…” And she was paralyzed for a moment by the sheer number of questions she desperately needed answered.

  “What would you have of me, beautiful lass? A kiss?”

  Only for a moment. She knew her top priority. “…Tell me where Tomorrow Rocket Moth is!”

  “Seek him in the City of Corpses, for he is among the dead.” And the horrid little man laughed.

  Her eyes narrowed again, and her lips grew thin. There was little actual change to her expression, but a dark fire glinted in her eye to make her face seem like a mask through whose eyeholes the Gorgon gaze of a long-necked ghost were blazing.

  Yumiko pulled the little bone out of his hair. The topknot had been tightly knotted indeed, and his scalp tender, for he started to yowl something horrible until she submerged him once more.

  Up she brought him again. “I am Japanese,” she said. “We invented all the truly hideous tortures.”

  “I am a fairy of the Springtide lands, beholden to the May Queen. Neither truth nor gift am I compelled to give thee! But only lies and curses, half-blood dipsy doxy! Curse your absurdly gorgeous figure and that sweet, warm scent from your hair. What is that, by the bye? Perfume or just hair soap?”

  “Sweat.” She had been in the chorus line before she was summoned here.

  “Smells nice.”

  “Thank you. I am about to crush you to death if you don’t answer.”

  “You’re welcome. What was I saying? Oh, yeah. You are a half-breed halfwit! A really, really, very attractive one though. All the Moth girls are lovely.”

  “Thank you. How do you know my bloodline?” But she frowned as she said it because the little man might have been in the room during her first interview and heard everything she had said then. Not to mention any conversations between anyone taking place in this room thereafter. Plus anything his magic charms might tell him.

  He writhed in her grip and gnashed his teeth, “Prepare to receive the curse of the Goodly Folk! The curse of Nebuchadnezzar romping on all fours and chewing grass will be the least of the plagues I will visit on you! The curse of Zahack and his arms twisted into venomous snakes is second! Next, I’ll put a hump on your back that will grow its own mouth and sing crass limericks! Give me my magic cat-bone so I can cast these evil charms!”

  “Have you no sense of right and wrong? I saved you from the bottle. I shall free you from the Magician.”

  “Right and wrong! Prose and song! High and low! To and fro! A fairy heart is a wild harp plucked whither way the mad winds blow, never chary and never still, and it flits as flitting will. No conscience can compel us, but only the charm of names enspell us.”

  She sniffed again. Whiskey. In the Magician’s office. In the very building she had seen Elfine depart, back when first they met. “You are a house hob.”

  “That I am!” The little creature seemed to deflate. He said in a voice that tried to sound brave, “But– but– It does not mean my magic is any less ferocious! I can mess up your bookkeeping!”

  “Ah? So?”

  “I can put dirt in your casserole, mud in your pillow, or… or… I can have important bills get lost before you pay them! And see your guests are irked with any divertissement… musical groups double-booked…”

  “So you only do, what, again? Housework magic?”

  “Erique Claudin had a hob who could make stars in his opera house succeed or flop. He dropped a big chandelier on the audience. Hob authority extends to any kind of house with guests, public or private! But you still cannot compel me! Go ahead and try! Try to grind me between your teeth! Or, better yet, rub me against your–!”

  “Your name is Sly Jack Crookshank.” At least, that was the name Elfine had said. Yumiko blessed her mem
ory that had recovered that scrap of information out of all the confetti of comments and quips Elfine was wont to speak. Maybe Yumiko’s ancestors, whoever they were, on the elfish side of her family had given her a touch of the photographic memory Elfine had mentioned. Yumiko giggled at the thought.

  She had to cover her mouth when she laughed, so she had to let go of the wild little sprite in her hand. But the little man seemed to deflate before her eyes at the sound of his name and her laughter.

  And he bowed low to her.

  3. The Magic of True Names

  He said, “The ancient rule I cannot escape. My name you have. One wish I grant, no more.”

  “Why not three?”

  “Elfin blood grows thin and stale. Only the greatest and most ancient grant three. I command no terror in the hearts of men. One wish is yours. You must claim it now or count it lost! Speak!”

  “Return Tomorrow Moth here and now safely, hale and whole, with no evil coming with him or following!”

  The little man raised his hands, “That is not a domestic matter! It is beyond my authority!”

  “It is not your… genre?”

  “That is one way to put it.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I arrange the house. I do not even clean and cook, but merely make such chores come out well or ill. All the success of Wilcolac is trapped in me. Do you really think a magician knows aught about running a restaurant, hotel, theater, gambling hall, bar, and more? Him? A snake charmer? A thimble-rigger? He counts stars and reads cards! He torments the shadows of the dead! By freeing me, you’ve ruined him, robbed him of house luck, no matter what else you wish or do not wish.”

  “You suddenly seem sober now.”

  “Life suddenly seems sobering now.”

  “What happened to your Irish accent?”

  “It immigrated.”

  “What?”

  “That voice was for play. This is toil. Ask! And be done with you!”

  “Tell me where Elfine is.”

  “Do not ask that. I sent her to the tower where you slept your first night here back on earth. I know less than you.”

  “Then you know who I am.”

  “The girl sidekick of Winged Vengeance, the Archeress, the Ghost-slayer, the Foxmaiden. Of course I know. You are of this house, and I am its lares.”

  Ghost-slayer. What an interesting title. But she did not ask about that. She said, “Crookshank, can you restore my memory?”

  “No. I do domestic tasks. Arrange parties. My blessing can grant a good review in Theater Weekly.”

  “Does the Magician know who I am?”

  “How could he? You are about to free me.”

  She shook her head. “I am not. Your powers are worthless.”

  “I am a sprite of the May Queen’s realm! Magicks most dire! Hire! Fire, um–!”

  “But nothing I desire. I do not need clean plates or a comfortable bed.”

  He raised one finger, and suddenly the tiny bone that had been in her hand was in his. He smiled. “But I arrange this house, or I did. I arranged you to be called to the office. Wilcolac means to punish you for some error of yours, some misstep. But I arranged to have him called away on the phone. I am arranging it so that he is being kept away while we talk. There is no hurry. Take your time. Ask wisely.”

  She said, “You have something in mind?”

  “I do. Something you want very badly, something you need most of all. Because you might think you can creep and sneak so subtly that even Jack-o’-Lantern, the Widow Joan’s sad bridegroom, will not see, but he is one of the most famed ghosts still trapped on our side of the veil. He did not see you, but he saw the bed you left empty during that crucial hour before the fire alarm was pulled, and the men all saw the Foxmaiden swing away on a wire.”

  “Why hasn’t this watch ghost reported this to his master already?”

  “Time between the living world and the dead world is not coherent. There is no ratio, no fixed rate of exchange. Besides, I arranged for the Magician to be very busy since one of his special guests, someone he had to truckle and bribe and call in favors to lure into this place, just so happened to arrive.”

  “Not to mention the shipment arriving today.”

  The little man looked surprised and then impressed. “So the Foxmaiden knows about that, does she? You are quick.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No doubt you want to see where that shipment is heading, don’t you? But you are kept too busy, watched too closely. You see, the one thing you really want and need is a way to escape from the people watching you that arouses not the slightest suspicion.”

  She said, “How?”

  “Pour all the whiskey back into the bottle, and I will show you why my leg is crooked.”

  Yumiko did so. Crookshank took the bone in his hand, and it elongated to the size, compared to him, of a hiking staff. He struck himself in the leg. Immediately, his foot swelled up to twice and thrice its size. The big toe swelled up faster, like a balloon, and the swirls of his toe print formed into the crude shape of a face. The second and third toes stretched like spaghetti and became crude arms. The pinky toe and the one next to it puffed out and became caricatures of legs, and then they migrated along his foot to the heel to take up a position opposite the crude arms. Crookshank’s leg was now no longer reaching to an ankle. Instead, his ankle was thin and entered the small body which once had been his foot at the navel.

  “Happy Birthday!” shouted Crookshank, and he drove the magic bone into his own heel, severing it with a crack. There was no blood. The foot, now shaped something like a hairless monkey, something like a cartoon, and something like a potato, opened its mouth and began to cry.

  “Quick! Feed him whiskey! Booze! Booze! No time to loose!” shouted Crookshank. Yumiko proffered the whiskey bottle, unsure how to get so wide a bottle mouth up to so small a creature’s mouth. But the new creature clung eagerly to the mouth of the bottle, and Crookshank solved the problem by kicking the new creature sharply in the rump and toppling him into the interior with a splash.

  Yumiko said, “Does he need alcohol to live?”

  “Not a bit! I just want him to grow up with the same vices as mine, so he will not look down on me. Now! Put cork in bottle and bottle in bucket. I will dance the great dance of growing pain and weave my charm, and when all is done, this will be my very brother.”

  Yumiko watched with mingled amusement and disquiet as Crookshank hopped and jigged on one foot in a circle around the rim of the ice bucket, chanting blasphemies and calling on old names of pagan goddesses. Inside the bottle, the homunculus twisted, expanded, and grew like a balloon being puffed up. In a short time, the creature in the bottle was exactly the image of Sly Jack Crookshank.

  He said, “You must give it a name.”

  She said, “Let it be called Bakemono, for it fakes another’s shape.”

  “That is not a proper name! I was thinking something like Wee Jon, Hairy Knob, or Darkheart Dick! Why did I ask you?”

  “Why did you ask me?”

  Crookshank shrugged irritably. “You have more of Adam’s blood in you than I. Adam is the namer of names.”

  The new little man, Bakemono, now tapped against the glass. “Wait! Aren’t you going to free me, too?”

  Yumiko was caught by surprise. “I…”

  Bakemono said, “I can cut off my foot and make a copy to replace me, so no one will see that I am gone!”

  Sly Jack shouted, “Silence, Fake! When you wake, you will think and say, and, indeed, play my part in every way!”

  Sly Jack pointed his bone wand at his twin in the bottle and uttered a word Yumiko did not hear. Bakemono fainted and fell to below the surface of the whiskey.

  “He will not drown?”

  “Not if he knows what is good for him!”

  “And where is your escape?”

  He said, “Take me over to the window.”

  Yumiko looked around. “I see no window.”

&n
bsp; “Step over to the wall behind the desk. Notice the seam in the wainscoting and the similar seam between the wall panels. On the floor near the corner, see the tiny carved design of the Mock Orange bloom, which is Deceit. Fifty-eight inches above it, which is the exact height of Wilcolac’s walking stick, amid the line of bloom designs carved into the seam, is an Acacia, which is Concealment. Touch them at the same time. Since you do not have a walking stick, use your finger on the wall and the pointy toe of your shoe on the floor.”

  She looked. Stripes of wood, as broad as her thumb, ran along the wainscoting where floor met wall and similarly ran vertically up the wall panels. They were carved in a variety of floral designs, but eventually she found and touched the two Crookshank described.

  She did not feel any button or latch under her finger. Nonetheless, a panel of the solid wall retreated three inches and then slid silently aside. There was no noise of gears, so it might have been magic.

  Behind was a full-length window, a French door, opening out onto a sheer drop.

  4. Windows and Mirrors

  Yumiko blinked in the sudden dazzle. The street, so far below, beneath the bright morning sun was like a forgotten world. It seemed like ages since last she had seen crawling cars and strolling pedestrians, garish signs, and lovely storefront displays.

  The little man hopped up and lit on her shoulder. His severed foot had grown back but was more deformed than before, bent at an uglier angle than it had been.

  He sat with a sigh and rubbed both hands over the tiny patch of skin between her shoulder and her neck, like a man might do to smooth couch cushions. “Nice! You have nice skin! We should do something unnatural together. What do you say? The Dark Powers would like it!”

  “No, thank you. I belong to another.”

  He grimaced. “The Darkness does not like that kind of talk! You have to be more independent! And much more impolite!”