Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths: And Other Tales of Dark Fantasy

by Connolly, Harry

  The unexpected meeting had delayed him so much that the midday sun was already high and hot. He was a madman to live here in this so-called free city; Increase was correct. Every building he passed was covered with images of war and bloody ritual, and the doom that had come to this city, the one that had left it an empty shell to be ransacked by vicious white traders… Whatever it was, it would come again. He was sure of it.

  By then he hoped to be back home with his wife and daughter, living on his family’s hilltop stone estate, trading gold, fur, and ivory. He only needed a little more money. Just a little more.

  He passed down the narrow, shadowed street that lead to his building, went under the two corbelled arches that marked the entrance of his plaza and strode across the grass toward his shop. In Zimbolay, this mud and grass would have been replaced with smooth blocks of close-fitting stone, but in Taux the streets were full of weeds crushed under square-heeled shoes.

  Mariella was already waiting for him in the front room. The house, being one of the original stucco and limestone buildings, was cool inside. Best of all, the walls were bare; Emil had long ago erased the carvings inside his shop with acid.

  He stopped in the doorway, letting the door swing shut behind him. Something was wrong. “Mariella, did you deposit the note?”

  She didn’t answer. Emil felt a little tingle. His apprentice was especially sensitive. Sometimes, when she sat alone in the dark, she heard whispers.

  “Sir?” she finally asked, her long, pale face looking morose in the lamplight. “Do you think they were better than us?”

  He didn’t need to ask who she meant. He glanced at the wall, where he’d brushed away a scene of a slave being ritually knifed. “They killed, we kill,” he said. “But we went into their ullamalitzli, the ball court where they played sacred games, and we built a whorehouse. They could hardly be worse. Come on. We have work to do.”

  They worked together in the basement lab for the rest of the day creating the love potion. The next morning, Emil met with Rene in the market, as planned. They exchanged bank note for vial in an herbalist’s shop, and Emil had no cause to think of the matter for half a month.

  * * *

  The days were growing shorter as the autumn equinox approached, and even dried spring herbs like woodruff had become dear. Emil had spent long hours haggling in the market over a bundle he absolutely had to have for the long winter, but the asking price was ten times what it should have been. As a result, he did not return to his shop until after dark, and he was irritable and distracted.

  As he hurried down the narrow street toward the double corbelled arches leading to the little plaza in front of his shop, he noticed too late the squelching footsteps of the man following him. Emil glanced back and saw a tall pale man in a quilted vest only a few paces behind. The man’s right hand lay on the hilt of his undrawn rapier, but his dagger was naked in his left hand.

  Emil broke into a run, knowing there was little hope the man was alone. He ran under the arches into the muddy plaza and was met by three men. All their rapiers were drawn.

  Emil sidestepped, backing into an alcove. The stone wall was rough against his shoulder blades… Carvings. He had bumped against the ceremonial carvings that covered so much of the city. These were a scene of war, he suddenly remembered, just as the moonlit blades moved toward him.

  There were two men standing close, and two behind them. Emil raised his hands beside his face so his sleeves would slip down, showing his golden bracelets. “There’s no need for violence. I will turn over my valuables without a fight.”

  The man who’d followed him down the alley came close, the point of his blade aimed at Emil’s heart like a long needle. “Oh, we’ll be taking your valuables, and I don’t expect much of a fight.” The other men laughed nastily, moving closer.

  So be it. Emil pressed his left bracelet against his mouth and, snapping a latch open with his teeth, blew into it with all his strength.

  A cloud of fine powder billowed out, engulfing all four men. They gasped and shook their heads, staggering a little. Their swords dipped toward the mud.

  “By the saints,” the nearest one said. He sounded dumbstruck. “I…

  “You love me,” Emil said. “All of you.” None of them disagreed. They just stared at him, enraptured. “But I’m terribly sorry to say that I can only love one of you in return.”

  There was a pause while his meaning sunk in. The first to understand was a man at the rear; he plunged his rapier into the back of the one who’d followed Emil into the plaza. The man’s death scream shocked the others into action, and their swords slashed and clashed against each other.

  Like most fights, it was over in seconds. The first man to be struck had been pierced through the heart and was stone dead. The man who’d killed him lay in the mud, his slashed throat bleeding fiercely. The one who’d cut his throat had managed a short fight with the fourth man, but the fourth had pierced him three times before he’d managed to thrust his knife under the man’s chin into his brain.

  He managed to take one unsteady step toward Emil, then collapsed. “I’m dying,” the killer said. “By the saints, I just found you. I just found you and I’m dying!”

  Emil knelt beside him. If he’d known healing magic, he could have saved the man, but there was no hope. “My love,” Emil said. The man’s spark, fueled by the magic in the powder, made him feel feverish. “You fought so bravely.”

  The man looked deeply into Emil’s eyes. The moonlight was dim, but Emil could see that he had a square, ugly face, bulging eyes and a squashed nose. The face of a thug. “I just found you moments ago, and now I’m going to slip into the next world without you.”

  Emil laid his hand tenderly against the side of the dying man’s face. “Do you think anything could come between our love? Even death?” Tears brimmed in the man’s eyes and he laid his hand on Emil’s, but his strength was fading and his arm dropped into the mud. Emil lowered his voice to a whisper. “Tell me, my sweet, who sent you here.”

  “Oh!” the killer said as though suddenly remembering he’d done a great wrong. “Oh what have I done?”

  “Sssshhh,” Emil said, laying a finger on his lips. “You could never do anything to harm me. I know it. But someone told you to come here and hurt me, yes? Please, my sweet, tell me who it was.”

  “It was my captain, Rene LeCroix. He didn’t tell me why—”

  “That doesn’t matter now. Don’t trouble yourself over trifles. Not now.”

  “I’m so cold! By the saints, I just found you, and now I’m going to die!”

  Emil caressed his face tenderly once more, feeling it grow cool as his fire spark dwindled, then bent low and kissed him. When he raised his head, tears streamed back over the killer’s temples. Emil stayed with him, looking tenderly into his eyes, until he died.

  He stood. The man with the cut throat had already died. Emil checked the latch on his bracelet, then shut it.

  He glanced back at the carvings behind him, but they were too deep in shadow to make them out. They could hardly have been worse.

  * * *

  He went inside and barred the door. Mariella had already gone to sleep, so he woke her and sent her onto the roof, where she lit the lamp that would catch the attention of the city guard.

  Within the quarter hour Emil unbarred the door long enough to admit a pair of sturgeons. He knew these men well—he’d done business with one of them some years back, and they did not treat him as though having a public name was the same as being a fugitive. He needed very little time to explain what had happened, but much longer to answer all their questions. By the way they spoke, he could tell there was something they weren’t telling him, but of course the city guard didn’t share information.

  After they left, Mariella brought him a cup of tea. “Sir…” she said, and hesitated.

  “If there’s bad news,” he told her, “I want to hear about it immediately.”

  “Well, sir, you’ve been so busy p
reparing for the winter, I didn’t want to distract you, but Rene LeCroix was arrested for murder last week, and he was released today.”

  Emil slumped in his chair and rubbed his face with both hands. “Murder? Of his wife?”

  “Yes, sir. It seems she had taken a lover. He surprised them abed and slew them both. The sturgeons arrested him, of course, but the magistrate burned the writ against him. He was found innocent because—”

  “—Because it was a crime of passion.” Emil stood out of his chair and paced around his little shop. Even the Burgunzi family wouldn’t punish him for a scandal like that. Not openly. In fact, they had probably offered him a full purse to sail away. “Damnation! I’ve been such a fool!”

  “Now that word is out, though, the sturgeons will arrest him again.”

  “For the death of a Burgunzi?” Emil realized that Rene had never said the girl’s name, almost as if she didn’t matter. But with a family name like hers, she would matter very much. “The whole duelist’s guild will be called out to hunt him. And I will be pleased to testify against him, discretion be damned.”

  “Assuming they bring him back alive.”

  Emil nodded. There was that. He opened the shutter a crack. There were no sturgeons or duelists in the little plaza in front of his shop, but once word spread some number would arrive, to lie in wait in case Rene tried again.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Emil said. “The doors are locked and the windows shuttered. We’ll sit tight behind stone walls until the morning, and we’ll find safer lodgings then, until his men are all rounded up.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Mariella said.

  She went to her room in the basement, and Emil climbed the stairs to his small room at the top of the building. He checked all the shutters twice and the roof hatch three times before stretching out his bed.

  Sleep was impossible. A young woman was dead, and it was his fault that her killer had been set free. Scandal was the best thing that could happen to him: the worst would be to hang as an accomplice.

  After several hours, Emil heard a chair move downstairs. Thinking Mariella must have been having a sleepless night of her own, he went down to find Rene LeCroix sitting at his dining room table, naked blades lying before him.

  “Don’t try to run,” Rene said. “And don’t move your hands.”

  Emil stayed very, very still. “How did you get inside?”

  Rene shrugged. “Does it matter? I am here. I’ve snuck into better defended homes with less motivation than I have tonight.”

  “It’s too late,” Emil said. “Even if you kill me, you will be a hunted man in every port from here to Thalonia. What you did is known.”

  “By whom?” Rene asked. “A pair of stuffy old guardsmen with aching feet and feeble swordplay? They never had the chance to tell anyone.” He gestured toward the corner of the room, where a pair of swords identical to those the sturgeons carried leaned against the wall.

  Emil forced himself to take a breath. No one knew what Rene had done. “I must admit, my friend,” Rene said, “I underestimated you. Not only because you killed four of my best men, but because you were so damnably right about this potion of yours. My heart is aching with the loss of my bride—sometimes I start weeping uncontrollably. Me! I can’t fight off these feelings, even though I know they’re counterfeit.”

  “Because they’re not counterfeit.”

  Rene took a deep, quavering breath and released it. “Even so, this heartache would be reason enough to cut your throat, even if I did not need to silence you. Don’t move! You can not imagine the things I could do to your horse-faced apprentice downstairs. If you try to use a potion or powder on me, I will make her an anvil for my grief. If you let yourself be taken quietly, she will die in her sleep, peacefully.” He stood. “So make sure your hands are empty.”

  “You’re right about one thing,” Emil said as Rene moved toward him, rapier held high. “I need a potion, fume, powder or salve to make someone fall in love. But I don’t need any of that to destroy love.”

  Emil spoke a short, powerful incantation.

  Rene staggered, his sword clattering to the floor. His eyes went wide with horror, and his mouth twisted in revulsion. He cried out in disgust, and then cried out louder.

  Emil moved toward him and took his dagger. “Every human being has a mix of self-love and self-loathing, my friend, but your arrogance has been like a suit of armor, has it not? Any self-doubt, and twinge of empathy, any speck of conscience has been swept away and drowned by the deep and abiding love you feel for yourself.” Emil moved close to him. “Or should I say the love you used to feel for yourself.”

  “By the saints,” Rene said. “By the saints, what have I done?”

  “You’ve murdered the only person in this world that you loved, sir. Have I mentioned that I met her? I didn’t recognize you at first, no, but I recognized your wife when you mentioned her family name. She came to me in tears, wounds on her wrist, and twice now I thought I was helping her be rid of you. Sir. To think that you imagined yourself a great man. Sir.”

  Rene suddenly shuddered as though he wanted to jump out of his skin. “I can’t bear it!” he shouted. “I can’t bear what I’ve done! Help me! Please!”

  “There’s only one thing that will take away your pain,” Emil answered, and tossed the dagger onto the table.

  Emil backed away and went down into the basement to wake Mariella. She was a strong young woman, and he would need her help to move the corpse.

  Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths

  Back when Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry was located near the Montlake Cut, they had a wonderful exhibit about life in Seattle before the big fire of 1889: there were fake, scaled-down storefronts and wooden sidewalks… you could wander past one shop after another, looking through windows at representations of historical figure in carefully-arranged tableaus. Every time I walked on those planks, I’d have the urge to write a historical fantasy set in old-time Seattle.

  Sadly, that building has been torn down and the exhibits in MOHAI’s new location don’t have anything with the same charm. When that fake street vanished, so did the urge to dive into that setting.

  Still, at one point I’d planned a series of novels with Quincy Johns as the protagonist, and the first line of the first book was going to be “Eli Sutherland was dead and nobody cared but me.” The story below, which was meant to be a prologue to that series, shows why no one would give a damn about old Eli.

  A few readers have mistaken this for a Twenty Palaces story; it’s not. The Twenty Palaces setting doesn’t have actual ghosts while this story does.

  The title came from author Sherwood Smith. I mentioned online that I had been asked to write a retelling of a fairy tale (for a charity anthology that never happened) and did anyone have a favorite to suggest? She offered “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” then explained that she didn’t like fairy tales because so many taught that bad little girls die horrible deaths.

  I thanked her for the idea and the story title, then got to work.

  –– –- ––

  I stood in the mud at the edge of the Duwamish, water soaking through the stitches of my cheap boots. Wallace Fielding’s knife was still hid deep in my pocket and I clutched at it hard on account of fucking up my big payday. Lord only knows why, but I had waited too long to knife Quincy Johns in the back and now he had his gun on me.

  He claimed to have one bullet left and I believed him. One last silver bullet. Good old Quincy had counted his shots, and he’d saved one for me. Smart fellow, Quincy was, not one to let the excitement of killing get to his head.

  He waded into the water, dropped the package into the shovel-nose cedar canoe, then climbed in himself. I couldn’t do a thing but watch as he took off his battered Union slouch hat and hung the revolver around his neck by the tether. Then I watched him paddle away. I cursed at him for leaving me behind, but my heart wasn’t in it. We both knew what I’d been about to do. He to
ld me to come to his room at Mother Damnable’s to get my share of the money.

  And he’d give it to me, too. The fool.

  The smoke from the fire we’d set was foul in my nostrils, and the rising sun was warm on my woolen great coat. I took off my forager’s cap and wiped the sweat away. We’d left a pair of dugouts by the camp, but I wasn’t going to risk the flames on the slim chance they hadn’t burned. Besides, we might have missed one of those things back there, left it alive, and I’d used up all my silver. Best walk back to town.

  Then I felt it: A tingle at the back of my mind. For all my skills and all my workings, that tingle was my only true gift. It always directed me toward the things I needed. Sometimes it led me into danger, and I often ended up with something I hadn’t expected, but the one thing I could never do was ignore it.

  This time it was calling me upriver, away from Seattle and my cut of the reward money.

  I pushed through blackberry brambles and deer fern as I worked my way south, circling wide to avoid the fire. At mid-morning I passed a field of hops that had been overrun with weeds. An abandoned farm. It seemed a settled fact that the owners would return once they heard about the camp we’d burned. I searched the house and barn for a way they could demonstrate their gratitude. Sadly, they hadn’t left anything worth stealing.

  When I stepped out of the house, I had the sun in my eyes and a rifle barrel in my face. Unfriendly fellows. There were two of them and they had horses, so there was no point in trying to run. My own empty revolver sat in the pocket of my coat.

  “Well, lookee here,” a distressingly familiar voice said. “What are you doing out this way, Eli?”

  “Looking for folks who might need warning about the fire over those hills, Art.”

  Art snorted and rubbed a hand across his bulbous nose. He liked to keep a crooked grin behind that thick black beard. His companion was a broad-shouldered Slav I’d never seen before, wearing a ridiculous stovepipe hat. “Said fire having nothing to do with you, naturally.”