The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files)

by Frank Tuttle

  “You best put that away, boy,” said Mama. “Ain’t gonna do Buttercup no good if’n you charge into that accursed place and get kilt.”

  “She’s stayed out all night plenty of times,” said Gertriss. Her eyes were puffy and I didn’t like the way she kept her arms crossed over her chest. She’d taken a bad fall in the dark, and I was sure she had a cracked rib, or worse. “Anyway, she’s a banshee. They can’t hurt her.” She took in a breath and forgot to hide her wince. “Can they?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I remembered the spider-thing scurrying up the riding wheel. Remembered a witch riding a broom through the air. “But even if they can’t hurt her, they might be able to hold her.”

  It had taken Mama quite a while, but she’d figured out a way to bind Buttercup by using a rope made from the tiny banshee’s own hair.

  If there was one way to immobilize a banshee, I thought, might there be others?

  Mama took the corncob pipe from between her teeth.

  “She ain’t dead,” she said. “That much I know.”

  I didn’t argue or ask.

  “So we go get her.”

  “I reckon we do,” said Mama. “You said there was a woman flyin’ about on a broomstick?”

  “Called herself Vallata the swamp witch. Saw her eat a live snake. Does that tell you anything about her?”

  “Tells me she ain’t got good sense,” said Mama. “But she wasn’t doing any flying until after the carnival closed?”

  “All we saw before that were second-rate carnival acts,” said Darla. “But something changed, once the show closed down.”

  “How many ogres did you count, boy?” asked Mama.

  “Half a dozen. And one drunk runt Troll.”

  “I can round up twice that many Hoogas,” said Mama. Hoogas are a local Ogre clan. Mama is practically one of them, to hear her tell it, and for all I know maybe she is. “You reckon you can ask your fancy friend from Avalante for some help?”

  Gertriss piped up. “His name is Evis, and he’ll help. This isn’t a House matter, but he’ll help just the same. You know he will.”

  Mama pretended not to hear. She might have softened a bit toward Evis personally, but her hard line against her niece walking out with a halfdead hadn’t changed.

  I rose, joints cracking like kindling-wood. “All right. Here’s how this goes. I’m heading for Avalante, with a stop at the Watch on the way.”

  Mama snorted. “You know damn well the Watch ain’t going to be any help, boy.”

  “I know that. But people are going to start turning up missing today. Those weren’t weeders or beggars in that crowd last night. Maybe somebody with enough pull to be a nuisance isn’t coming home this morning.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Gertriss, wincing as she prepared to rise.

  “Like hell you will. I mean it, Miss. You’re staying put right here and watching for Buttercup. The three of you will sleep in shifts. I’m not arguing.”

  Miracle of miracles. No one argued.

  “So when you reckon we’re leaving?” asked Mama. She lit her pipe and sucked at it. “Sooner the better, I reckons.”

  “Depends on how long it takes at Avalante. Get the Hoogas together.” The skull on the shelf caught my eye. “Mama, you still got that hair rope?”

  “She took to cutting it with a paring knife she keeps hid, but I still got most of it.”

  “Got a bag for that skull?”

  Mama nodded, beady little Hog eyes gleaming with the promise of mayhem.

  “Reckon I do,” she said, blowing smoke.

  Darla rose and hugged me at the door. She smelled of pine needles, and her eyes were swollen and red.

  “There’s no way we can do this peacefully, is there?” she whispered, as we embraced.

  I didn’t bother answering. The last man who’d tried to retrieve his daughter by stealth and sheriffs died in the carnival’s shadow.

  “Love you,” I said, and then I stepped blinking out into the sun.

  My first stop was the new Watch house on Copper Street.

  I asked for Captain Holder, who more or less runs the Watch these days. He’d twice threatened to see me decapitated and my still-twitching remains fed to sewer rats, which still ranks as the nicest thing a Watch officer has ever said to me.

  Captain Holder was out. A bored Watchman not yet past pimples took my statement, and while he lacked a proper beard he had the customary Watchman’s expression of utter indifference down perfectly. He didn’t even blink when I added flying witches and giant spiders to the report.

  “Please see that Holder gets that,” I said, as I turned to leave.

  “The Captain a friend of yours?” asked the kid. He didn’t bother hiding his sarcasm.

  “Hell no. Holder hates me. Swears he’ll see me hung the next time we meet. Something about his sister. Don’t mention her. The baby isn’t due for a month.”

  I sauntered out, whistling, and caught a cab for Avalante.

  I wasn’t expecting anything out of the Watch. The Dark Carnival was camped well outside Rannit’s walls, and as long as the carnies restricted their predations to the woods, they could slaughter whole villages and fry up babies by the dozen, for all the Rannit City Watch cared.

  Holder was a different story. He was neither stupid nor corrupt, and if he came across a missing person who hadn’t wound up in the dead wagons as a Curfew-breaker he might remember my report and decide Dark’s Diverse Delights was a danger to Rannites after all.

  Would he break tradition and poke around beyond Rannit’s walls?

  Maybe. I didn’t know. But by filing a report I’d completed my civic duty. I’d also handed Holder information he wouldn’t otherwise have, and though I didn’t expect any lavish show of gratitude I might have stored up a crumb of goodwill I could nibble on later.

  If, of course, I had a later. As the cab rattled through Rannit’s busy morning streets, I pondered Ordwald’s death, and dreaded my meeting with his plain-spoken widow.

  Ordwald had tried threats. He’d tried sheriffs and finders and even men at arms.

  He’d failed to bring his daughter home, and then he’d died.

  I pulled my hat down to the bridge of my nose and tried to nap. The sight of Ordwald falling wouldn’t let me sleep.

  He’d done everything right, I decided. Everything right, but all of it wrong.

  He’d reacted. He’d demanded. He’d coerced.

  I thought back to my meeting with Thorkel. All those masks and wigs and prop limbs hanging in his tent. Macabre, yes, but aside from run-of-the-mill greed and a penchant for being overly dramatic, the man hadn’t struck me as being anything more than a carnival master.

  So what changed, after the crowds left the carnival midway?

  What transformed second-rate side-show acts into things out of nightmares?

  “Sorcery,” I muttered.

  And now sorcery held not only Ordwald’s daughter, but Buttercup.

  Buttercup isn’t a child. Certainly isn’t my child. But child or not, she’s certainly slipped into that role. Darla bakes her cookies and sews her new dresses. I play dolls with her and she goes to sleep on my knee.

  And now the carnival has her, I thought, and I’m about to charge their tents just as Ordwald did, except I’ll be doing it stone cold sober.

  It was a long ride up the Hill to Avalante.

  House Avalante is not the biggest of the Dark Houses. The estates on either side of it dwarf Avalante by two and three stories, respectively.

  Whereas the other houses opt for building up and out, Avalante chose to hide their expansions deep underground. I’ve enjoyed the illusion of freedom within Avalante for years now, and even so I have no idea how deep or how wide their subterranean chambers reach.

  Evis maintains a cherry-walled office f
our floors beneath the street. Jerle, Avalante’s unflappable day man, greeted me at the door to the second underground level.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Prestley is unavailable today,” said Jerle with the smallest sympathetic tilt of his graying head. “I shall tell him you called. Good day, Mr. Markhat.”

  Give me some credit for being a fast thinker. I didn’t hesitate, didn’t falter, didn’t fumble, even under Jerle’s unblinking gaze.

  “I’d appreciate that, Jerle. I was just passing through to say hello. On my way to the firing range. Lost a bet with Evis, and if I don’t work on my aim pretty soon he’ll start charging me for cigars.”

  “We cannot have that, sir. Good shooting.”

  I smiled and trotted down the stairs, rubbing elbows with silent, black-clad vampires who didn’t give me a second glance.

  I headed for the range. Borrowed a long gun. Fired off two hundred rounds and earned myself a reluctant grunt from the range master.

  Then I tiptoed back up the stairs. Jerle was gone. The halfdead idling in his place nodded when I passed, but failed to tear my throat out.

  I knocked softly at Evis’s door, got no response.

  “Dammit, Evis, I know you’re in there,” I said. “We need to talk. There’s been an incident.” I cussed silently, knowing what I had to do but hating it anyway. “Gertriss is hurt.”

  That did it.

  I heard movement behind the door. Rustlings and thumpings. A chair creaked. Footfalls, light and fast, raced toward me.

  Locks clicked, and Evis flung the door open, stepping back out of the light it let in.

  “How bad?” he asked, motioning me inside.

  “She’ll live. Broken rib, most likely. You, on the other hand—damn, Evis, what’s the matter with you?”

  He slammed the door and staggered back to his desk.

  Evis is a halfdead. On a good day he looks like a freshly exhumed corpse. His skin is pasty white. His eyes are cloudy soft orbs, no irises, just big black pupils. Wherever his skin is stretched thin, over the knuckles for instance, it darkens to the sickly hue of an old bruise.

  All that I’m accustomed to seeing.

  I’d never seen Evis a light shade of blue before. Never seen mottled patches of dark green beneath his eyes. Never seen thick black goo ooze from the corners of his eyes, his nose, his lips.

  He’d lost that famous vampire glide too. He stumbled as he walked, had to catch himself on his desk. His gait was slow and pained.

  He sneezed. Black goo flew.

  “Pardon me,” he muttered, dabbing at his face with a monogrammed silk hanky.

  “Angels and Devils,” I said, following him to his desk. “Are you sick?”

  He fell into his chair, stooped, and came up with a thick wool blanket, which he wrapped around himself.

  Hell, the man was shivering. I expected his fangs to start rattling any second.

  “What? I can’t get sick? Hell yes, I’m sick. What happened to Gertriss?”

  I laid it all out for him. The Ordwalds, the carnival, Ordwald dying, Buttercup being taken. He sneezed and coughed the whole time.

  I’d never heard of a halfdead falling ill. Hell, they hadn’t suffered during the yellow fever epidemics during the War, or the wet lung plagues after it.

  “So Gertriss. She’ll be all right?” he asked.

  “Sure. Unless she dies of a broken heart. I hear you’ve been dodging her the last few weeks.”

  He glared at me as he wiped at his nose.

  “Not the time or the place,” he said.

  “When would be a good time? Thursday? Next May? Never?”

  “How did you get in here, anyway?”

  “I am an expert in the ways of stealth and concealment,” I said. “I hid under a doily. Fine, you don’t want to talk about Gertriss, that’s your right. I thought you’d want to know what we’re mixed up in. Say, is Stitches around? She might know a way to swat pesky flying witches out of the sky.”

  Stitches is House Avalante’s up-and-coming sorcerer. Only I know that Stitches was most recently known as the Corpsemaster, and that as the Corpsemaster she faked her own death. Such knowledge doesn’t lend itself to peace of mind or easy slumber.

  “She’s on the moon,” said Evis.

  “The moon.” I rose. “Sorry to have interrupted your busy day.”

  “Sit down,” he said. “Dammit. Wait.”

  He flew into a fit of coughing that intensified into a full-blown doubled-over retching session.

  “Damn, Evis, should I fetch a doctor? A mortician?” I sat. “That’s not sick. That’s gravely ill.”

  “Dead already,” he gasped when it was over. “Look. Don’t want Gertriss. To see me. Like this.”

  “She’s not some fainting socialite,” I said. “She’s seen a lot worse.”

  He shook his head. “Going to get a lot worse. Fast.” He paused to let another epic choking coughing fit pass. “Trust me,” he said. His skin flushed a darker blue, veins pulsing just beneath the surface. “Don’t tell her. Any. Of this.”

  I didn’t like his eyes. His pupils expanded and contracted, but not in time together. The black ooze ran thicker and faster.

  “Have I ever asked you for anything, Markhat?”

  “No,” I said. “Are you asking now?”

  He nodded. His jaw was clenched tight.

  “Tell her anything,” he said. “But not the truth. None of this. Can I trust you?”

  I just nodded yes. I had a thousand questions, but from the way he started shaking and coughing, I knew asking even one was asking one too many.

  The door behind me flew open. A trio of white-coated Avalante doctors barged in, all scowls and glares. One pushed a silver wheeled cart loaded with sharp pointy things and stoppered vials that glowed in every color of the rainbow.

  “We were clear in our instructions,” said one physician.

  “You are to have no visitors,” said another.

  “Tsk, tsk,” added the third.

  Jerle marched in behind them, saw me, and glanced pointedly at the cutting tools on the cart.

  “Mr. Markhat seems to have lost his way,” he said. “Shall I show him out, Mr. Prestley?”

  Evis, bless his motionless heart, lifted his finger. “No, Jerle, you most assuredly shall not. See that he gets a pair of the new rotary guns and a crate of grenades. Then see him gently home. Gently. Is that clear?”

  “As you wish, sir.” Jerle moved to stand at my side. His smile was untouched by the least hint of murder. “If you will accompany me?”

  I nodded amiably. Jerle wasn’t halfdead, but he probably had a dozen lethal gadgets hidden under his suit coat and that bland, unassuming smile.

  I put out my hand to Evis.

  “You can trust me,” I said. He nodded, took my hand, shook it.

  The doctors hustled me out of there. Jerle stuck closer than my shadow.

  I got my rotary guns, in long wooden crates that each weighed more than I did. And I got a box of two dozen grenades, which Jerle claimed would explode with sufficient force to take down walls or reduce me to tiny wet bits if I didn’t throw the thing at least forty feet after pulling the ornate silver pin.

  But it wasn’t guns or grenades on my mind as I left Avalante.

  It was the touch of Evis’s hand.

  His skin had been warm. As warm as that of any normal man. Far warmer than the cold flesh of a halfdead should be, unless he was recently pulled from a fire, or burning with fever.

  Was it possible, I wondered, for a halfdead to die twice?

  I found Mrs. Ordwald at her hotel. She was seated in the lobby, her work-worn hands resting flat on a table, a glass of water untouched before her.

  I’ve relayed news of a loved one’s death more times than I could be paid to count. Fathers, mothers, br
others, sons—everyone leaves someone behind. I’ve watched hope be born only to quickly die in a thousand pairs of eyes, and watching despair take root never gets any easier.

  I took off my hat and sat across from her.

  “He is dead, my Berthold?” she asked. Her voice didn’t falter. Her lips didn’t tremble.

  “He is,” I said. Sometimes you try to sugar coat the news. This wasn’t such a time.

  “You are sure.”

  “I am sure. He died bravely.”

  “He died a raging drunk,” she said. A tear crept out of her right eye and rolled slowly down her tanned cheek. “He was a good man, before all this. You should know that. Gentle. Kind. Not given to drink.”

  I nodded. If she wanted to talk, I would listen.

  “I tried to stop him from going,” she said. She sounded weary. I supposed she’d been sitting at that table staring at that glass all night and all day. “I tell him, fool, they will strike you down.” A second tear escaped. “This is what he wants, I believe. An end to it all. No more of the shame, could he withstand.”

  “For what it’s worth, I believe he was correct,” I said. “I believe the carnival took your daughter. I don’t know how yet, or why, but I believe they did.”

  “And now they have taken my Berthold too.” Her jaw clenched and she shook, but only for a moment.

  “I have no more money,” she said.

  “I’m not asking for any.”

  “Widow I am,” she replied. “Beggar I am not.”

  “Agreed. You’re not a beggar, and I’m not the kind of man who takes advantage of widows. Your husband died on my watch, Mrs. Ordwald. I don’t tolerate that. I owe him, not you, and I’m going to get your daughter out of there and see you safely home.” I raised my hand when she opened her mouth to protest. “I mean it. You paid me to work the case and work the case I will. How long is your room paid for?”

  “A week,” she replied, in a near whisper.

  I stacked coins on the table. “Don’t speak. Meals. Clothes. You can make travel arrangements when I’m done. We have a custom here, Mrs. Ordwald. You’ve heard of a widow’s urn?”

  “I will take not a single copper.”

  “When a man dies and leaves a widow behind, an urn is placed on his grave. The man’s friends come around and fill that urn, because learning to be a widow is hard enough without starving to death. Your Berthold won’t have a grave, won’t have an urn, but by the Angels you will take this, and not as charity, but as your due.”