The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files)

by Frank Tuttle

  Stitches stood in the center of the storm, her arms upraised. She wielded a staff above her head, moving the head of it in time with silent flashes of light. When she spoke, it was not a tongue I knew.

  Her back was to me. I diminished and approached, wary and silent. I’d watched Stitches take down Hag Mary and a pair of giants with less effort than I expend making pancakes. Dream or no dream, caution seemed prudent.

  I drew close without incident. Close enough to see that Stitches was wearing a tattered white bathrobe which bore the House Avalante seal embroidered on the back. Her feet were enclosed in equally worn fuzzy house shoes.

  I considered my next words carefully.

  “Hey diddle diddle,” I said. “The cat and the fiddle—”

  She lowered her staff, spoke a pair of harsh ugly words, and turned to face me.

  “Who dares intrude?” she said, her gaze passing over me as she looked about.

  “The cow jumped over the moon,” I finished.

  I took another step forward. Her eyes locked on me. Her staff suddenly crawled with lightning, and she filled her free hand with wobbling blue fire.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Hold off on the fireworks. Nice slippers, by the way. Darla has a pair just like them.”

  She hurled her blue fire. It sailed through me, leaving only a mild sensation of cold in its wake.

  “I tell you it’s me, Markhat,” I said. I raised my hands in surrender. “There’s trouble at home. I could use some advice. Sorry to pop in uninvited. Please stop that.”

  She’d loosed the lighting from her staff. Bolts worried the air about me, but could find no purchase. I felt nothing as arc after arc of fire lashed the air where I stood.

  After a time, she lowered the staff and called back her thunder.

  “You cannot be Markhat,” she said, glaring. “We are on the moon.”

  “Oh, but I am,” I replied. “I’m dreaming. Getting here was interesting, but not that difficult. It’s just a dream, after all.”

  “I am most certainly not dreaming,” said Stitches.

  “Oh. I didn’t think of that,” I said. “But still, here we are. Nice place. What is it?”

  “If you are indeed Markhat, you know my other name,” said Stitches. “Speak it.”

  “Corpsemaster,” I said. “Among others. Does Evis know you have that bathrobe? I’ve tried to get one for months, but he says they’re only for visiting dignitaries.”

  “How are you here?”

  I shrugged. “I walked. Like I said, there’s a situation down there. I need some advice. It’ll take ten minutes.”

  As I spoke, a gargantuan, mad-eyed face appeared on the ceiling. It was faint, its outlines formed of silver tracings of light, but its eyes shone red and I didn’t like the way they turned to fix on me.

  The mouth moved, though I heard no words. Stitches spat a string of nonsense words, apparently in reply, and dismissed the face with a wave of her staff.

  “The landlord?” I asked.

  “The guardian of this place,” she replied, scowling. When her eyes aren’t sewn shut, they’re a pretty shade of light brown. “I must assume you are in fact real. The guardian reports a subtle disturbance in a number of ward spells. That would be consistent with your claim.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Don’t be. You have no idea what you’ve done.” She shook her head. “I’ll give you your ten minutes. But not here. Follow. Touch nothing. Speak nothing.”

  “I will walk in silent awe of your house-shoes.”

  She rolled her eyes, and away we went.

  Turns out a life on the moon is a life of luxury.

  Stitches’s chamber, as she called it, lay at the end of a gently curving corridor lit by a line of radiant gems set into the ceiling. Her door opened as we approached, and closed silently behind us.

  The chamber was huge. The ceiling was thirty feet high. The walls were smooth gray stone, shot through with veins of silver. The corners were rounded, the floors inlaid with a series of complex spirals that spun and turned slowly in the light.

  There were chairs, cushioned and comfy. Tables and desks. A whole wall of shelves and books.

  And every chair, settee, sofa, or table was built with someone twelve feet tall in mind.

  Stitches kicked off her fuzzy slippers. I took that as a sign the prohibition against speech was lifted.

  “Interesting decor,” I said. I leaned against a chair-leg. My shoulders stood level with the chair’s seat. “I think your furniture maker needs a new ruler, though.”

  “The scale was appropriate for the creators of this place,” she said. She led me to a corner where a Stitches-sized cot and plain wooden chair sat on a new brown rug. “Sit. This advice you seek. What does it concern?”

  I perched on the edge of her cot. She sank wearily into her chair. I dived right in, starting with my hire by the unfortunate Ordwalds and ending with Evis falling off his stool at The Cat and Fiddle.

  Stitches rested her chin on her fist and listened silently until I was done.

  “And that’s all of it?” she asked when I fell silent.

  “I may have skipped my lunch menu, and I didn’t specify the color of my socks, but I didn’t leave out anything important,” I said.

  “Liar.” Stitches yawned. “Nevertheless. You have examined the Ordwald girl?”

  “Enough to know she doesn’t have a heartbeat, and doesn’t exhale,” I said. “She can speak, with some difficulty. Can think. I’ve seen her cry. “

  “Necromancy is a foul practice,” she said. I must have raised an eyebrow, knowing as I did her own expertise at reanimating the dead in great numbers as the Corpsemaster.

  “I took control of vacant bodies,” she said. “I rarely troubled their spirits. It appears your necromancer killed the girl, animated her remains, and then bound her spirit to her own corpse.” She frowned. “Monstrous, but hardly atypical behavior.”

  “Is it reversible?” I asked.

  “Death seldom is,” said Stitches. “Destroying the reanimated body with fire would probably negate the binding, and free her spirit. Pumping the body full of certain compounds would slow or even halt decay. Those are the only two options I can offer, I’m afraid. Neither is optimal for the girl or her family.”

  I’d feared as much. “Buttercup, then. How do I get her out of that glass?”

  She lifted her chin off her fist and stretched. “Without a detailed arcane inspection of the mirror, I cannot say what forces create the space inside the reflection, much less offer you a way to reverse them.”

  “I was afraid of that. Any chance you might be coming home soon?”

  She shook her head no. “I cannot leave until my work here is done. I mean that quite literally. The guardian you saw earlier? I defeated its geas to annihilate all visitors, only to discover it is also determined to keep intruders here, should they survive entry. I lack the means to defeat the guardian a second time.”

  “So you’re stuck here? Forever?”

  “For the moment.” She smiled a tired smile. “I appreciate your concern. Be glad it is misplaced. Once I gain entry to the vaults below, defeating the guardian will be a simple matter. I will return to Avalante within the month. Two at the most. But return I will.”

  “You came all the way to the moon to rob a vault?” I whistled. “Must be something special in there.”

  “Oh, indeed there is,” she said. She rose and began to pace. I kept my seat. “When the last magical summer was ending, and the lords of the earth felt winter’s chill, they stored the most powerful of their arcane implements here,” she said. “They believed their treasures would be safe. Until they wake and need them again.”

  I shivered. I’d seen a few trinkets from the days of high magic Stitches referred to as the magical summers. The huldra was one, an
d it had nearly eaten my soul on a whim. I’d slain a mad god with a silver cylinder Stitches called the Wrath of Heaven, and I gathered both objects were mere firecrackers compared to the real thing.

  And the vault below my dream-feet apparently held enough such terrors to hold the world in thrall.

  “Anything down there strong enough to blow up a carnival?” I asked.

  “You could break the world in two with the least of the items,” she replied. “Which is precisely why no one should have them.”

  “No one but you,” I said before wisdom prevailed.

  Stitches turned and sighed. “Do you truly think so little of me, Captain? I have walked beside fierce powers for longer than your city has stood. I understand the corrupting nature of power.” She moved to her chair and dragged it over to face me before sitting. “You, on the other hand, know nothing of that struggle.”

  “I may know a little,” I said, remembering the huldra’s whispered promises of magic, if only I would yield. “And look. I’m here with you, on the moon.”

  “Yes. For better or worse, you have set foot upon this path, and for you there is no turning back. I am partly to blame for that. I am sorry.”

  Her eyes bored into mine. For a moment I missed seeing her eyes stitched shut.

  “I make my own decisions,” I said.

  “For now. Yes. But you have tasted power.” She tilted her head, and continued to stare. “You have tasted more than power,” she said. “You have tasted blood.”

  I pushed the memory of the Elf’s whispered name out of my mind.

  She sighed, as if she saw even that.

  “Do you know how I became a sorceress?” she asked.

  “Mail order lessons?”

  “I was a shepherdess,” she said, not smiling. “A child, one of nine. We were savages. We had little shelter, less food, no knowledge at all of the world beyond our valley. One day, I came upon a clear, still pool of water. I had never seen such a thing. Did not recognize my own reflection. I ran away, at first, only to come creeping back later.”

  I tried and failed to picture the mighty Corpsemaster as a child in filthy rags.

  “I spent hours at that pool, Captain. I began to ponder the nature of reality. How could I stand in one place, and yet see myself in another?”

  “Squinting plays a role.”

  “One day, my reflection spoke to me. Moved when I stood still. We began to converse.”

  “That’s not typical behavior for a reflection,” I said.

  “Nor were our conversations typical,” she said. “The child in the pool spoke to me of magic. Of sorcery. She didn’t use those terms, of course. But one day she showed me how to see behind shadows. It was such a simple thing, once I knew the way of it. From that moment, I was doomed.”

  “I’m still trying to picture the mighty Corpsemaster as a shepherd child.”

  “Once I learned to see through the dark, I discovered other wonders,” she said. “The girl in the pool was patient, always patient. Finally, I resolved to join this other self, in her realm. Being a child, I decided the most expedient stratagem was to simply leap into the water.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. I sank. Swimming was not among my skills. I drowned, Markhat. I felt water pour into my lungs. My world went black. But I wasn’t quite dead, and with my last bit of consciousness I reached out and I twisted the dark. When I regained my senses, some time later, I lay in a dry stone reflecting pool in a land far removed from my home.”

  “You yanked yourself out of the water with magic.”

  “Out of the water, indeed. I spent decades trying to locate my valley, trying to find anyone who shared my language. To this day, I have found neither. What I did find was this—once you make that intuitive leap, once you engage in the least act of sorcery, you leave your former home behind forever. Nothing will ever be the same.” She leaned forward, pointing. “You will never be the same.”

  “So you’re saying I’m a sorcerer now? All I’m doing is dreaming. You showed me how.”

  “I did not. I shared a dream with you, yes. But only someone already on the path could repeat the act, without assistance. Have a care, Markhat. Sorcery can consume you. It will consume you, if you allow it.”

  It was my turn to stand and pace. “Bah. I’m a finder. Right now I’m trying to find a way to get Buttercup away from that carnival. If I can’t get her loose by throwing salt against the glass or rubbing it with a dried frog’s leg, I’ll have to try another approach. What would you do, ma’am? I’m open to suggestions.”

  “If you cannot control the glass, you must instead coerce the one who can,” she said.

  “One minute I had the carnival master Thorkel by the throat,” I said. “The next I had a pile of clothes and a dirty wig. I’m not sure who is what or what is who, come sundown at that place.”

  “You must look behind appearances,” she said. “See past illusion.”

  “Which means what, precisely?”

  “If the carnival is your opponent, find its heart. Strike the heart, and you need strike only once.”

  “I was hoping for something a little more tangible,” I replied.

  “I was hoping to grow up and marry Fjalfi,” she said. She rose, and her staff turned black as midnight. “You must go. The guardian has located your essence. It comes. Flee.”

  I looked around, saw nothing. “How in hell do I find a carnival’s heart? That doesn’t even make sense—”

  I never finished my sentence. Stitches leaped to stand before me and shoved her fingers right into my eyes.

  “Flee,” she screamed. I stumbled backward, tripped over what was probably her cot, and fell back into my sleeping body with a start.

  Darla rolled over and caught me rubbing my eyes.

  “What’s the matter, hon?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Go back to sleep. Love you.”

  Darla slept. I didn’t.

  I’d walked to the moon. The act hadn’t seemed significant while I engaged in it. Back safe in my borrowed bed, though, it was becoming clear I’d crossed a line.

  “You will never be the same,” Stitches had said.

  I stared at the ceiling and listened to Darla breathe and heard Stitches’s words, over and over, until at last I slept.

  Chapter Fourteen

  If I dreamed at all, that awful fitful day, I don’t recall it.

  A pair of Avalante day staff woke us in the afternoon. They brought coffee, bread, and a tray of cut meats. We ate quietly, bathed in a big white iron tub, and dressed ourselves in the same soft white bath-robes I’d seen Stitches wear on the moon.

  I sat on the bed and pushed my feet into a pair of white slippers and realized the only clothes I still owned lay in a soiled heap at the foot of the bed.

  In fact, they were all I owned. The rest was ashes.

  Darla sat down beside me, smelling of soap. She put a sandwich in my hand and smiled.

  “Eat it. We can’t pass up free food. We’re nearly broke, you know.”

  I took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “Right you are, sunshine. But I’m a man with numerous prospects. We’ll have a new house in no time. A bigger house. One with battlements and crenellations.”

  She snuggled up beside me and wiped away a tear. “I despise crenellations,” she said. “What are they, anyway? Some kind of duck?”

  “Possibly. We’ll rebuild, hon. As soon as this is over. I promise you that.”

  “I don’t want to rebuild,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. What if we don’t move back into a house at all?”

  “Live off the land, you mean? Roam wild and free, amid Rannit’s vacant lots and numerous green spaces?”

  “No, silly. I mean what if we buy a boat, and live on that?”

  “A boat? One of those things with a hull
and sails and able-bodied seamen running all over?” I put my hands on her head and began pushing my fingers gently through her hair.

  She laughed. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for the bruise on your head,” I explained. “Surely you’ve been knocked senseless.”

  She caught my hands. “I have. But hear me out. After the attack last year, someone bought up a few blocks along the Brown. They tore down the ruined warehouses and built wharfs and slips. It’s beautiful, hon. We could have our own houseboat, right there, right on the water. And if things get bad—” She paused and swallowed and I could see her fight back tears. “If things get bad, we can just throw off the lines and head downriver. Go anywhere we want. You and me and Cornbread. We can go where it’s safe. Go to the Sea, if we want. We can just go.”

  I held both her hands. “What’s got you so spooked, hon?”

  She hesitated. I watched her face as she weighed her words.

  “A witch just burned my house down. Will you live on a boat with me, hon? Please say you will.”

  “I’ll live with you in a tree, if that’s what you want. We can start building a boat tomorrow. I’ll ask Evis for some empty beer barrels, and maybe Mama has a big old steel tub we can use as a bedroom.”

  She kissed me before I could elaborate on my plans to employ a hat-rack as a mast.

  “I’ll always love you,” she said. “Always.”

  “Naturally,” I replied. “My charm only grows more potent with age.”

  “You’ll cut quite the romantic figure, as you stride the decks of the Dasher,” she said. “We’ll have to get you a Captain’s hat.”

  “Dasher? You’ve already named our hypothetical houseboat?”

  “Oh. Yes. Perhaps I forgot to mention it. I bought her two months ago.”

  “You bought a boat?”

  “I have money of my own, you know,” she replied, in a mock downtown accent. “One hardly needs to beg one’s spouse for every petty purchase.”

  “Why in the world did you buy a boat?”

  “It only seemed appropriate, given that I own half of the property that provides the slips and wharfs,” she said. “I was planning to surprise you with it this Yule.”