Rusted Heroes

by Andrew Post

  “The sheriff’s here,” Anoushka shouted. “Stall him. We need time.”

  Nodding, they withdrew.

  “Shit. That’d been a good place for it—where I would’ve put it.” After pulling herself from the vent, Lodi looked around at the surrounding buildings, other wyrm defiances as tall as this. “We’ll have to run this lead for all its worth and then start looking elsewhere around town.”

  “We need to go,” Anoushka said.

  “If we don’t break his connection here,” Lodi said, “he can come at us any godsdamn time.”

  “I understand, but I really doubt we’ll be any more productive in jail.”

  Anoushka was already turned away to head down when Lodi said, “She’s in cahoots with him, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “The beauty queen ledger wench.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “She’s held his apartment for months—but clearly runs a tight ship here. You can tell by the cowed looks on her employees. Lyle was her exception. I can guarantee when he took off, it was her job to ‘scrub’ his room. I’m counting on her having forgotten something. There was probably a repeater up here, but she took care of it, moved it somewhere else. We should check his room—really check.”

  Anoushka was doubtful. She ran her hand through her hair. “And if Sharona was thorough?”

  “I’d like to question her.”

  Anoushka took out the search permission form. The wind kept trying to snatch it away. “This doesn’t cover interrogations.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you think she’ll tell us—if she’s in his pocket?”

  “Can’t say. The rock he’s currently under would be preferable. You want a lead? I’m trying to get us one.”

  Anoushka sighed. “Fine.”

  Once back down the rocking fire escape and inside Lyle’s apartment, Lodi began pulling Lyle’s drawers out, dumping their contents to the floor. She tore open books, kicked over his music cylinders for anything stashed underneath. Anoushka stepped near the open door, listening downstairs.

  Sharona Howell screamed.

  Kylie-Nae screamed back, “I wouldn’t need to push you if you wouldn’t push me.”

  Another voice, male, gruff, said they were only there to do their jobs.

  Matter-of-factly, Russell said he didn’t care.

  When the sheriff threatened cuffs, the dwarf belly-laughed.

  Anoushka closed the apartment door. “Anything?”

  The wizardess stepped down off the bed, having retrieved a shoe box from above the bookshelf. Turning with it, Anoushka saw the cardboard box had been converted into a diorama. Small furniture, each piece hand-carved and meticulously painted. Colorful, glossy rose-and-thorns wrapping paper for wallpaper, a cigarette box fireplace. A dining room, complete with a bobbin for a dining table. Seated opposite one another, in rotting dolls’ clothes, were a mouse and a rat. Both were decayed to fragile skeletons dotted with clinging tufts of hair, eyeing each other with empty sockets as if engaged in mannered conversation over bottle-cap dinner plates. Bony hands held a knife and fork of intricately folded tinfoil.

  “He’d been practicing,” Lodi said, setting the box on the nightstand. Noticing something, she reached through the tiny living room, overturning the bureau, to curl fingers up inside the miniature fireplace. She withdrew a crumpled piece of paper, balled tight around a pinch purse, like what old ladies keep their spare change in. Sniffing inside the leather pocket, Lodi said, “Mothdream.” She skimmed the letter that had wrapped the foul-smelling dead plant; chuckled.

  “What is it?”

  Pocketing the mothdream, Lodi held the typed sheet out to Anoushka.

  Attn: Lyle Eichelberger

  Thank you for your application to the Crown Advisory Board. Though you possess many strong qualities we look for when choosing potential scryers, at this time, we will not be extending an invitation for an interview. Also, it should be noted our records show you have not had yourself, as inclined, registered. Please correct this error immediately, or we will be forced to inform the authorities. Thank you for taking the time to apply, though, and good luck with your future endeavors. Be well.

  “He hadn’t registered,” Lodi said. “I can only assume he knew if his inclination was of this sort”—she motioned toward the dining-mice diorama—“he’d be pinned as dangerous during the examination and sent off to a detention center. Can’t really blame him for running; he was facing either a place about as bad as Breakshale, or—some would say the worst option—remaining here, pushing pencils, knowing what he could do and be but not allowed.”

  Footfalls came from outside the door. Bursting in, Sharona’s hair was mussed, face so red she looked boiled. “The sheriff’s here, ladies. Time to come downstairs and . . .” She noticed the diorama had been brought down—and Anoushka still holding the rejection letter. Before Anoushka could stop her, Sharona kicked high heels through Lyle’s things and grabbed Lodi roughly by the arm.

  One finger coiling her wrist, Lodi snarled and wrenched away, throwing out her free hand. An invisible rush was set free—an electric trace of it crackled across Anoushka, making her hair momentarily stand on end. The blast tore apart the diorama, scattering delicate costumed rodent skeletons.

  Sharona, receiving its direct brunt and went tumbling over the floor across the room. Overturning a bookshelf onto herself, trying to brake her violent tumble, she slammed into the wall and slunk, moaning, to the floor, her lip split and bleeding.

  Anoushka moved to help.

  Lodi stepped in front of her. “If you know anything, now would be the time.” To Anoushka: “Close the door, girl.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Question her, as we agreed. Close the door.”

  Reluctantly, Anoushka did, shutting away the sounds of Russell and Kylie-Nae, downstairs, all but guaranteeing they’d be sent to prison for this. Breaking into a treasonist’s apartment was one thing—a judge would probably look the other way, given the circumstances—but assaulting a local businesswoman before engaging in a fistfight with the law? Something heavy slammed downstairs, likely Russell hip-tossing the sheriff into some filing cabinets as he would a halfling clown.

  Kneeling, Lodi wrenched Sharona’s face up. “Where is he?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.” Tears rolled down Sharona’s cheeks, leaving bare shiny strips behind her troweled-on foundation. “Please, I’m hurt. I’m hurt.”

  With the hand that wasn’t clamping the woman’s cheeks, Lodi rummaged into her satchel. Popping the cork from an elixir with her thumbnail, she downed its oil-black contents in a pull. “Emulsified willow seed,” she said, shaking the empty vial in front of Sharona’s face. “Your boyfriend teach you what it sharpens in one who has the inclination?”

  “Please, please . . . I don’t know where he is. My back . . .”

  “We’ll get you to somebody in a minute. Did he ever take you to the Hall?”

  “No. Stop, stop. Please, please.”

  The door opened, nearly giving Anoushka a heart attack.

  Kylie-Nae ducked her head in. “So, um, Russ is getting his ass handed to him down there . . . We should maybe consider going to plan B, if we have one.” Leaning farther in, she noticed what the wizardess was doing to Sharona. “Uh, Annie?”

  “Go back down,” Anoushka said. “Buy us more time.”

  Kylie-Nae’s gaze drifted to Lodi and Sharona in the corner. “We sure this is the best idea . . . ?”

  “Yes. Go. I’ve got this.” Anoushka practically had to close the door on her. She wanted to join Kylie-Nae but forced herself to stay, watching from a distance, near the far wall.

  “Where is he?” Lodi shouted in Sharona’s face. “Where?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. All he said was he was leaving. I didn’t do anything to help him. I knew what he was going to do, but . . . I was just his friend. He was upset and felt trapped because of what he was and the
Committee threatening him like . . .”

  “Oh, boo-fucking-hoo. Where did he run, huh? Where’s he dug in? Talk.”

  “I don’t know!”

  Drawing a shriek from Sharona, Lodi took her by the wrist and turned her hand to the light. “Fancy ring. Wendal stone doesn’t come cheap. Is this how he bought your trust?”

  “Please, please . . .”

  “Tell me. Talk. Last chance.”

  Gaining nothing but whimpers and grunts from Sharona, Lodi reached into her satchel again, this time taking out her shadowpane. Cover off, she propped it against the wall. Anoushka glanced the mirror’s way. In its scratched surface, an indistinct shadow self stood there idle, same as she. But it smiled—not the same as she.

  “Are you coughing it up for me or not?” Lodi demanded.

  “Please . . . it really hurts.”

  “The hard way, then,” Lodi said. “But remember, you invited this upon yourself.” With one hand holding the woman’s head up, Lodi thrust her other toward the shadowpane, fingers curled as if grasping an invisible doorknob. She twisted, and the air grew thin at once. The lights flickered, dimmed. The filament inside one popped and died.

  Sharona screamed as a small slice opened across her forehead. Forming a shallow split, blood crept down her nose, diluted pink by tears.

  Too far.

  “Lodi!”

  “Don’t distract me. I nearly have it. Just . . . a little . . . deeper . . .”

  Shadows swelled wide pools under the furniture and along the walls, crawling. Sharona fell unconscious—her screams dying in her throat. It was a thankful thing she didn’t have to feel the break in her face creak wider. Muscle parted like a curtain, giving a yellow peek of pale skull. “It’s in there,” Lodi said, strained, “Lemme have it . . .”

  Anoushka stomped across the room.

  With a wrenching motion, Lodi twisted the invisible doorknob the other way, then back. Sharona was lifting off the floor, as if by a noose made of air.

  Anoushka flinched—crack.

  Trying unsuccessfully to avoid it by turning away, Lodi still caught the pale knots of torn brain as they leaped out from Sharona’s forehead.

  The shadowpane sucked back its darkness, its surface clouding over again.

  Sometime during the questioning, Anoushka had drawn her mammoth-killer. A brief nomadic itchiness toured her. “What the fuck did you do?”

  Wiping off her face, Lodi said, “Lyle covered his tracks in her well.”

  “Or she didn’t actually know anything,” Anoushka shouted, refusing Lodi’s hand to help her up.

  Outside the apartment door, spurs jangled. While the deputy remained in the hall at the top of the stairs—leading Kylie-Nae and Russell both in handcuffs—the senior lawman stopped short in the doorway. Sharp eyes under a ten-gallon brim, he estimated the dead office manager. Then the retching wizardess pawing around on the floor for her cane. And the blood everywhere. And finally Anoushka. She didn’t need to be asked. After resting her gun on the floor, nice and easy, Anoushka presented empty hands.

  * * *

  Seated on the bench bolted to the cold cement wall, Russell touched at the purple mass swelling keeping his right eye from opening. “We managed to break in—and out—of the worst prison in the realm . . . yet, here we are.”

  After depositing them inside, the sheriff and his men returned to the file office to gather statements.

  Their trial would be ten minutes—if they even bothered.

  On the deputy’s desk, far from reach, was their gear in a heap of bullet belts and holsters, guns and knives.

  Past the bars, the windows across the room allowed a restricted view of Yarnigrad’s Main Street. By both torchlight and buzzing electric lamp, dead soldiers were unloaded from the trains and replacements dispatched like clockwork. The station platform was crowded; but from this angle, she could see little of the depot. What cargo had been dropped off, she saw only rows of dead men. So whether Joan had arrived—or Zuther Fuath, fresh from the monastery—remained a mystery. She watched a bent-backed muckrake in a top hat try to sneak up close with his camera tripod. He’d barely gotten himself under the dark drape and his aperture angled toward the heap of dead soldiers when a blackcoat—a knighted general, by the look of him—noticed and kicked the camera over, stomped it apart, and threatened the photographer with a gauntleted fist. The Ma’am didn’t want that kind of thing showing up in the Trib. Bad for morale.

  Anoushka, in the past, had been asked by many muckrakes to pose with Joan, sometimes even suggesting she hold an orc head under her arm like a doffed helmet. She agreed. She smiled, very proud, the head heavy in the crook of her elbow and black blood running down off her arm. She’d never seen the pictures printed. Didn’t really care if they served their purpose in bringing the realm’s bloodlust to boiling. As for the dead on the Ma’am’s side, her boys, snapping photos of that sort was a no-no. We’re always winning.

  “She’d still be alive if the silly broad would’ve just let go.” Lodi, slouching in the far corner of the cell, rubbed her gnarled, arthritic hands. “And you gave me the go-ahead, I’ll remind.”

  Kylie-Nae sat up. “Is that true? You told her to kill her?”

  “No,” Anoushka said and looked at Lodi. “You said you were gonna question her.”

  “And I did.” Lodi pulled herself up by the wall of bars. “I went overboard. Guilty. But I’m telling you she knew.” Lodi approached the wall of iron bars.

  Past the front windows, a carriage trundled by. A horseless carriage burbled after, followed by a man on horseback. Workies, townsfolk, blackcoats marching in lockstep. A woman bloomed an umbrella before stepping down the front steps of the hotel and tiptoeing around puddles to cross the road. As if it was waiting for her to show her face, the rain came down harder.

  “If Lyle had a repeater device here in town,” Lodi said, watching the woman with her flowery fascinator and knee-high boots pass, “whoever he had maintaining it—if it was someone other than Sharona—is surely spooked now. They’ve probably taken it down, chucked it in a well or something. We’ll have to hope he doesn’t have an underling in the next town.”

  “Next one?” Kylie-Nae shouted. “There isn’t gonna be a next anything.”

  “We need to break his connection. We follow the chain of repeaters, town by town, like a breadcrumb trail. It’ll lead us right to him.”

  “That’s a great idea and all, but it won’t be us. We’re gonna hang—because of you, you nutbag.”

  “If I could reach my bag, tart, I’d split you just for the fun of it.”

  Smacking palms to her knees, Kylie-Nae stood. “All right. I’ve been in jail before. And there’s ever only one way to shut up the mouthy bitch you inevitably get bunked with.” After tightening her bandanna over her hair and rolling up her sleeves, she presented balled fists to Lodi’s turned back. “Go ahead. First licks.”

  “We’ll be dangling from a tree in the next hour.” Lodi turned. “Here, I would’ve thought you’d want your face, when the undertaker takes your picture, not all messed up.”

  “Won’t be me with the messed-up face. Not that I could do much to worsen yours.” Coming in low, Kylie-Nae feinted right and popped a jab to the wizardess’s chin. Lodi’s head snapped back and clanged against the bars behind her.

  Lodi dabbed at her bleeding nose. She joined the blood with the many stains already badging her cloak and, shrieking, rushed Kylie-Nae. She dragged long gray fingernails down Kylie-Nae’s bandaged burned arm . . . slow.

  Thrusting the wizardess back, Kylie-Nae backhanded Lodi, turning her in place. Coming in again, twisting a hand in Kylie-Nae’s hair, Lodi held her there to drive a fist into her teeth. Once, twice—but before the third could land, Kylie-Nae pistoned a knee up into Lodi’s stomach, doubling the wizardess over.

  “I suggest you stay there,” Kylie-Nae said, blood dribbling off her chin.

  Lodi declined. The fight, as they always do, degraded to an embarra
ssing wrestling match.

  To give them space, Russell scooted down the bench. “And here I used to dream about gettin’ locked up with three high-spirited women.”

  Something across the street caught Anoushka’s eye. Stepping over the tumbling mass of arms and legs, she pressed her face between the bars. With it so dark outside and so well lit in here, she couldn’t make out much past her own incarcerated reflection. But angling herself a little, she saw the clock tower across the street. Its stained-glass face glowed orange from electric light within. At its base, a man stood at its corner. Rain-soaked suit, shiny shoes. His grave pallor couldn’t be blamed on the blue flame of the gas street lamps. Though he wasn’t wearing a sign around his neck to identify him, it couldn’t have been anyone but Mister Swindler.

  He saw her, pinched his bowler’s brim, and stepped back into the alleyway. At the far end was another well-lit street. Traveling between, he became a silhouette. He turned the far corner and was gone.

  “The device is in the clock tower,” Anoushka said. But it went unheard with Lodi busy trying to pluck Kylie-Nae’s eye out of her head.

  Russell had to peel them apart.

  “Lyle is here,” Anoushka said for the third time.

  “The clock tower’s certainly a high place,” Lodi said, wiping blood and snot from her cheek. One of her fingernails was gone—just a pale damp circle where it’d been attached. “Shit, see what you did, tart?”

  Favoring multiple new scratches, Kylie-Nae stood, reached into her hair, and pulled free the grimy four-inch fingernail. “Gross.”

  “That’s all he’d need,” Lodi said, snatching the nail from her and depositing it in her pocket. “A place to put the device up high.”

  The iron bars were cold in Anoushka’s hands. She watched. They warmed. The clock tower rang the half hour, then the hour.

  Passing into where she was staring, a dark-skinned man walked. He was bone-thin, and an enormous bulb of hair nearly outcropped his shoulders.

  Having spotted him too, apparently, Kylie-Nae shouted, “That was Zee!”

  They shouted their former compatriot’s name until the man drifted back into view. Looking out into the street, turning in a slow circle, Zuther scanned about, trying to zero in on who was yelling his name and from where. He turned toward the sheriff’s office window, saw them, his face twisting with befuddlement. He entered, still clad in the House of the Loving Flame–sanctioned loose cotton trousers and thin drawstring shirt. His hair was peppered with silver at the temples, and he’d lost considerable weight.