Rusted Heroes

by Andrew Post

  “I got him out,” she said, her jaw aching it was clenched so tightly. “Like you fucking wanted.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Is this because I talked back? Gave you shit—deserved shit—because you told Markus to kill us?”

  Ruprecht said, “The gun was not loaded, Miss Demaine.”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “No. And now he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter. Do as I say. I have to manage Peter, keep him on track. You and your fellows are second chair; I can’t waste the time managing you too. Do your part. Be a hand. Heed me. And everything—that which needs to remain under the rug, and your success in general—will go smooth, I will see to it.”

  After she had struggled down off the caravan, any weight on her leg whatsoever bringing her to nearly wailing, Ruprecht snapped his horse back into motion, brown dust swirling in his wake.

  Fanning it away, coughing, Anoushka caught sight of Peter in the back of the caravan as it continued ahead. The rear door was hanging open. He didn’t have a dead stare any longer but was awake and looking right at her. How much had he heard?

  Teetee passed, panting determinedly along.

  The others came a moment after, clattering and huffing. Russell’s shirt was already damp with sweat, and Lodi looked about to collapse.

  “So what’d you say this time?” Kylie-Nae said, ducking under Anoushka’s arm to help her walk.

  “Nothing. Let’s just get to town.”

  Flesh & Blood

  With bad sunsburns and bleeding feet, Anoushka, Kylie-Nae, Russell, and Lodi passed under the arch of Yarnigrad’s main gate. Within the curtain walls, the city boasted many high brick wyrm defiances with small shops and saloons shoehorned between. Under the glass face of the central clock tower in the square were fruit stands, butchers’ stalls, and firearm salesmen in top hats declaring their wares the best in the land. A majority of Yarnigrad’s visitors were soldiers—hundreds of blackcoats. The Rammelstaad banner draped down the stone front of the clock tower and swayed on every lamppost. Troops filed into formation under the whistle blats of commanding officers, climbing onto horseback, or milling about the train station, smoking and joking. Their trepidation wasn’t masked well; after all, these were merely boys and girls, really, each fighting prewar ants in their pants: pacing in circles, looking to the sky for divine spine-steeling. If it came to any of them, Anoushka couldn’t say. She’d never found any up there.

  The Associated Bards’ caravan waited in the shadow of the city wall, away from the noise and confusion. Approaching, Anoushka saw Ruprecht in the back with Peter. She’d interrupted their conversation—or, more accurately, interrupted Ruprecht talking. When Peter looked at her, Ruprecht followed his gaze and frowned. “About time.”

  “Ye had wheels,” Russell said, shrugging off his pack, “and we’ve got one injured.”

  Kylie-Nae helped Anoushka have a seat on the bricks. Her pant leg was tight as the skin of a boiled sausage around her swollen leg.

  Clicking her cane, Lodi approached the caravan. The entire back of her cloak was dark with sweat. “How’s he doing?”

  “Better.” Ruprecht turned to smile at Peter lying just within the caravan. “Isn’t that right?”

  The berserker’s dark eyes moved to Lodi, then Ruprecht. He shrugged and lay back on Ruprecht’s straw mattress, his lower legs dangling off the end. When still, between breaths, he looked gray and shrunken, like a corpse. An apple and a cup of wine sat at his elbow, untouched.

  “He’ll be fine,” Ruprecht told Lodi. “Ready to lead in no time.”

  “What’s the plan?” Lodi said.

  Ruprecht closed the caravan door and approached Anoushka, Kylie-Nae, and Russell, who sat with their backs against the cool stones of the city wall. On a scrap of paper, Ruprecht scribbled a note. “Here’s his former workplace. He rented a room upstairs. Check everything. Here’s our forms, if anyone should ask for credentials.” He handed Lodi the address and the wax paper envelope containing their search order from the Committee. “If possible, steer clear of butcher shops, the fishmongers, taxidermist; anyplace with dead things as part of its trade.”

  Sitting up, Anoushka nodded past Ruprecht. “It’s gonna be tough.”

  The six o’clock chugged into Yarnigrad, sounding its arrival with a steam-whistle cry. The boxcar doors skidded aside, groans and cries dumping free, loud. Bloody soldiers emerged, many hobbling on crutches or cradling stumped, gauze-wrapped limbs. Lastly, those able paired up to unload bodies wrapped in sheets, lining them along the train platform.

  One man, blind, with his entire head swaddled in bandages except his howling mouth, was led by the hand. “They wouldn’t stay down.”

  The soldiers who had been playing cards or wrestling in the dirt were now watching—a few who weren’t too shocked remembered themselves and doffed their helms when their brothers-in-arms passed.

  “Yarnigrad is a way station,” Anoushka said. “Not gonna be much avoiding dead things.”

  “Still . . .” Sighing, Ruprecht regarded the clock tower. “You have three hours before the train with Joan—and Zuther Fuath, if he decides to grace us with his presence—is due to arrive. Get something concrete.”

  * * *

  After a quick lunch of spicy beans and rice from a vendor—fantastic after nearly two days without a meal—the four wound their way deep into town. They passed the tannery and the metalworks, the odors of chemicals and freshly smithed metal washing over them. It was a regular town this far from the train station, shadowed under the wyrm defiances and swaying telegraph wires.

  Except there was one thing new since Anoushka’s last visit: a man in a chartreuse suit shouting to passersby, “For only a half-jula, behold the modern miracle of moving pictures! Traverse the snowy peaks of the Leslie Mountains, see the wild heathens of the Islands in all their paganistic debauch—all without ever leaving your seat!”

  As intrigued as Anoushka would’ve been any other day, now was not the time. “Hold up,” she said. “I’m gonna step in here a second.”

  The bell over the barbershop’s door jingled. The short little man behind the counter with his impressive handlebar mustache stood, stepped into his shoes, and tied on a bloodstained apron. He’d taken only one quick look at Anoushka and her limp before saying, “I’ll tell you the same thing I told the others who came in here this morning with a similar bullet-made hitch in their giddyup: it’s cheaper to just take the leg.” He lit a cigarette and shook the disinfectant from a hacksaw he’d lifted from a porcelain soak tub. “If you’ll hop up on the table here, I’ll pour you a whiskey and we’ll get it over with.”

  “Just pills, if you have them,” Anoushka said.

  He seemed disappointed . . . until Anoushka showed him the color of her money.

  While the barber counted out tablets into a tin for her, Lodi padded on bare feet over to the barber’s array of tonics and cure-alls he kept behind a locked glass case. “Know anyone who sells alternative medicines?”

  “Like chicken livers and islander shit like that? Afraid not,” the barber said, chin to chest, counting out the pills two at a time.

  Kylie-Nae set a few things on the counter—gauze, salve for her burns, towels, a roll of tape. Her kit, even this far into the trip, had already started to run low.

  “I was thinking more in the area of leaf of mothdream,” Lodi said.

  The barber closed the tin for Anoushka, handed it over, and accepted his ten julas, ringing the cash register. He didn’t raise his voice. “I think you should leave, if you would.”

  They exited through the back. In the alley, piled next to the trash cans, was a heap of arms and legs of countless young men, covered in flies and maggots.

  They pressed on, Anoushka slapping four of the chalky tablets into her mouth.

  A block later, they made a bad turn.

  On the undertaker’s shop, right out front, a corpse was slunk inside the open pine box, his posture a lazy S. He wore a bowler hat
, a slate pin-striped suit. From his neck hung a plank of wood: Swindler. Once confident his subject would remain posed for a moment, the undertaker ducked under his camera’s dark canopy. Click, and without ceremony, Mister Swindler got his lid. Anoushka couldn’t be certain if it was the sensation of looking at any open-eyed dead thing, but she felt watched.

  * * *

  “This it?”

  A brick tower stood sandwiched between two others with a faded Pearlmann Barrel Company stretching down its long side in tall, once-yellow letters.

  “It’s the address he gave us,” Lodi said and knocked.

  The blinds were wound, and a middle-aged lady peered out at them—hair in a high bouffant that undoubtedly took her hours to arrange and a form-fitting business suit the color of plums.

  She looked over the harrowed four before her, bloodstained and dirty, and opted to not open the door for them. She fogged the glass shouting through it: “We’ve already had someone come by selling war bonds.”

  Arm around Kylie-Nae, Anoushka said, “We’re not selling war bonds. Think we could ask a few questions about one of your employees?”

  “Regarding?”

  “Is this the office where Lyle Eichelberger worked and rented a room?”

  At the mention of the necromancer’s name, the woman’s face fell.

  The barrel factory, since closing, had been split up into offices. It still had the same open floor plan, but instead of assembly lines and work areas and massive tool chests everywhere, it was all desks, long rows of identical dark green filing cabinets, and shelves that required ladders to reach the top.

  Anoushka and the others passed through, following the woman who had introduced herself as Sharona Howell. The office workers momentarily stopped what they were doing to gawk. They were all mousey and mostly bespectacled, furtive eyes dyed green by their banker’s visors. The rustle of paper was constant—rubber thimbles on their first two deft fingers to shield against paper-cut occupational hazards, the dears. With how rough and out of place their visitors looked, the file clerks would have material for break room chitchat for weeks.

  “He oversaw False Claims cabinets A through M,” Sharona said, leading them into a cramped corner cubicle.

  Brass plaque: Eichelberger, L. Empty day planner, typewriter, a cup of pencil stubs. Handing the search permission in its waxy envelope to Sharona, Anoushka pulled open the desk drawer. Nothing pertinent to their pursuit. Lyle’s handwriting unnecessarily crowded many words per line. He was a careful man, economical. She tried picturing Lyle here, working, not yet wearing his long cloak and letting his beard grow wild to look the part of necromancer, but instead a tie and waistcoat, oil-slicked hair, a prisoner in pinstripes.

  Sharona handed the search permission back. After peeking over the partition to see if any of her office minions were out of earshot, she said, muted, “What’s this about? Is Lyle in some kind of trouble?”

  Russell guffawed. “Ye could say that.”

  Keeping her back to the rest of the office—and they were certainly trying to listen in—Sharona crossed her arms. “What’d he do? Get caught with his pants down in some brothel raid? I work with adults. If a grown man, in the grip of a midlife crisis, chooses to go off gallivanting about Rammelstaad, I absolutely refuse to beg anyone to act their age. Nor will I hold their position while they leave me cripplingly short-handed. But let me guess: he requested me to post his bail? Well, he can fucking forget it. If you’re through here, I’d appreciate it if you all left—”

  “Actually,” Anoushka said, closing the Baron of Decay’s pencil drawer, “Lyle Eichelberger has been revealed as a treasonist against the realm. We’re here for information to help us find him.”

  Sharona laughed, a sound like two rocks being banged together. “Fuck off. A treasonist? Lyle?”

  “It’s true,” Kylie-Nae said. “And we’d like to know where he is. When did you see him last?”

  “Springbloom, the eighth.” Sharona didn’t need to think about it, Anoushka noticed. “Next day, he didn’t come down. Thinking maybe he was sick, again, I went upstairs to see if I could maybe get a half day out of him at least. No answer, I let myself in. Gone. I asked if any of my others heard anything. Nope. Just flaked.” She shook her head, laughed again. “Lyle the treasonist. Can’t say I saw that one coming. Wow.”

  “Did he have any friends, belong to any clubs or societies or fraternities of any kind?” Anoushka said. “Anything outside of work, people he’d always sit with at the pub? Any talk against the Ma’am, anything like that?”

  She shook her head, her blonde mountain peak of hair unmoving, like her expression. “No,” she said, arms remaining folded. “No, Lyle simply did his day’s in-box, punched out. Can’t say he didn’t have a life outside of the office, but if you knew him, it didn’t seem likely. Kept to himself. Quiet.”

  “His stuff’s still upstairs?” Lodi said. She was standing close to Sharona’s side, something the office manager didn’t seem too pleased about. “No one’s come by?”

  “No one’s come by, no. Would you mind stepping back a little? You carry an unpleasant aroma.”

  Lodi’s bare feet remained on the hardwood where she’d planted them. “So his room’s as he left it?”

  “Look,” Sharona said, “if there was anything suspect, I would’ve reported it. I’m on a first-name basis with the sheriff.”

  “Mind if I go up and have a snoop of my own?” Lodi brushed past Sharona to walk through the cubicles toward the door at the far back wall marked Stairs. “This way? Which room? Eh, never mind, I’ll find it.”

  Turning back to face the others, Sharona scowled. She was expecting answers.

  “Forgive her,” Anoushka said. “She’s very devoted to the Ma’am, and she sometimes forgets her manners.”

  “Regardless! To demand to go through a man’s things when he’s not here?”

  “Like you did?” Kylie-Nae said.

  “Who are you people?” Sharona said, no longer measuring her volume to avoid her office’s gossip mill. “Search permission or no, to be so brusque—it shouldn’t come as any surprise to any of you why the common man despises contractor squads. Hooligans with borrowed power—that’s all you are.”

  “Your feller’s sided with the War King,” Russell said, moving to block Sharona’s way from the cubicle. “So maybe ye’ll let our friend’s brusqueness slide, aye?”

  Silence, as Sharona burned holes into them.

  A muffled crack sounded as, apparently, a door was shouldered open upstairs.

  “Excuse us,” Anoushka said.

  * * *

  It’d probably been a supply room before. An unmade bed in the corner, a roll-top desk, piles of books, a tidy pyramid of music cylinders leaning against a dusty spiralphone. On the rim of the washbasin: pill bottles, salves, creams, poultices, curatives, tonics. Only some of them were over-the-counter; most were prescribed, Lyle’s name on each. Expectorants, congestion helpers, migraine tablets. Pills for irregular heartbeat, tremors, and no fewer than a dozen allergies. Enough to stock a country surgeon’s bag a few times over.

  A horse whinnying outside drew Anoushka’s attention to the curtains curling out an open window.

  Anything heavier than a pigeon’s weight might tear the fire escape off the side of the building, it seemed. It swayed and creaked in its moorings, moved by just the wind. Leaning out and looking up, Anoushka saw Lodi clanging up the last of the uppermost steps. Ignoring Anoushka’s shouts, the wizardess reached the roof, stepped up and over, out of sight.

  “Godsdammit, Lodi.”

  Ducking through the window and out, Anoushka felt the entire thing rollick under her. Metal moaned. A wisp of crumbling mortar dusted her shoulder. “Godsdammit, Lodi.”

  With her leg biting each time she lifted it, she climbed to the old factory’s flat roof. In the full suns, she could see over the city’s walls. Green hills, forests, the serrated back of the Leslie Mountains in the hazed distance.

&nb
sp; Down in Yarnigrad’s square: Ruprecht’s caravan sat parked amid the bored, waiting soldiers. She couldn’t see its back door and didn’t know if Peter had gotten up and around yet. Some resentment stung at her; here they were doing all the legwork and none of this would likely find its way into Dark Against Dark. It’d be a paragraph or two of “as the others went to investigate.”

  A curse drew Anoushka’s attention. Lodi was searching around the raised vents and antennae derricks speckled with bird shit, currently prying her cane under the base of a chimney. It wobbled on its cement moorings, bricks rattling loose.

  “Anything?” Anoushka said.

  “Yeah, I found it already, but I thought I’d keep looking.”

  Anoushka sighed. “What’re we looking for, anyway? Let me help.”

  “Glass tubes, circuits, copper wires, maybe a crystal or two. Like the shit inside a radio.” Lodi levered her cane, hard. The chimney toppled, shattered, sending shards of brick and mortar sailing over the roof’s edge to the street below.

  “Blazes, Lodi. What if someone was down there?” Toeing carefully to the edge, she looked over.

  Below, the tops of three heads. One was unmistakably the gold puffball of Sharona, but the other two, on horseback, wore wide-brimmed hats. As the chimney pieces hit around them in chalky cracks, spooking the horses, the three looked up—Sharona screaming for the two men to do something. Before drawing back out of sight, Anoushka noticed one wore, pinned to his fringed vest, a copper star, shining bright in the suns.

  She drew back. “Lodi, I think he’s the sheriff . . .”

  Having kicked open a vent, Lodi ducked inside. “Dearie me, not the police.”

  Anoushka, fast as she could, hobbled to the fire escape.

  Through the open window below, Kylie-Nae and Russell were leaning out, neither keen to try the fire escape.