The Builders (4 page)

Gertrude came in through the back door, looking very little like the criminal despot the Captain had spoken to some three weeks earlier. She had swapped her Eastern garb for a faded calico dress, homespun and homely.

Cinnabar leaned over to the Captain. “That’s everyone, then?”

“Not quite.”

The crew was arguing. The crew spent a lot of time arguing.

“It was Harelip and Half-Eye Pete. How do you think he got that half-eye?” Barley asked.

“I had always assumed he was born with it,” Bonsoir said.

“You thought he was born with a knife scar running from his forehead to his lip?”

Bonsoir shrugged and made a popping sound with his mouth. “It was not an issue I felt compelled to contemplate.”

“We worked with them for two years,” Gertrude insisted. “How could you not have known they were lovers? Or that, when they stopped being lovers, Harelip cut out half of Half-Eye Pete’s eye?”

“Hello, friends,” interrupted the creature who appeared then from the darkness.

Cinnabar had a revolver out and cocked almost instantaneously, and a second thereafter Bonsoir kicked his chair from beneath him and came up with a length of steel. Gertrude shifted behind Barley, who had assumed his full height menacingly, and Boudica went for the holdout piece she kept in her boot.

Only the Captain remained in his chair, unruffled, sipping from his jug. “Hello, Elf.”

Elf was small for an owl, barely taller than Bonsoir. Her feathers, once smooth and tawny, had grown mottled and spare with age, but the cold horn of her beak seemed keen as ever. Her eyes were sulfur-yellow and wide as saucers, and they seemed not to blink, nor even to shudder. She stood indifferently on talons sharp as the scorn of a lover, the weight of her body tilted with curious asymmetry. Some earlier injury had shattered the bone of her left wing, and it curled up against her body and contorted her posture.

A long moment slipped past as the crew resumed their resting positions. Once seated, they did not fall over themselves in excitement to greet the new arrival. Cinnabar nodded. Barley allowed himself a brief grunt.

It is generally not possible to determine, from their expression alone, what a bird is feeling—a beak can tear, rend, or peck, but it cannot smile or frown—so it is possible that Elf was terribly offended by this lackadaisical welcome, and simply unable to show it. It seems unlikely, however.

“Why don’t you have yourself a seat?” the Captain asked. “Reconquista can find you something to drink.”

There was something very much like a collective gasp of discomfort from the seated assemblage.

“No, thank you, Captain,” Elf responded in her quiet monotone. “The trip here was long, and I much prefer the stars.” She ducked her head in a nod, once to the mouse, once to the rest of the group, then turned toward the door. Belaying the utter quiet of her approach, her exit was loud and slow, claws rapping against wood. “Oh, Captain,” Elf began again, head swiveling backward, “if the rat might find a bowl of milk for me, I would be grateful.”

“Of course,” the Captain responded amiably. “I’ll have it sent right out.”

Elf nodded the full moon of her backward face, then swung it forward and hobbled out into the night. The silence filled with apprehension.

“God of the Gardens, Captain, what the hell is she doing here?”

“We’ll need her before the end.”

“I was sure she was dead.”

“She can’t even scout for us anymore, with that wing.”

The Captain growled, more of a squeak really, but it had the same effect. “We’ll need her before the end.”

The crowd quieted and turned back to their drinks. The Captain had given the word, and if you didn’t trust the Captain to take care of his end, then there wasn’t any point in being there. But still, no one looked happy.

“So that’s the plan,” the Captain said, although actually it was only part of it.

Boudica took her hat off, looked at it a while, then put it back on her head. Gertrude twittered her snout. Cinnabar smoked a cigarette.

“What about when it’s over?” Barley asked. “What do we do then?”

Bonsoir chittered suddenly, his oblong body shaking with mirth. “‘When it’s over?” He laughed again, louder and longer, till his fur stood on end; he seemed convulsed with glee. “We are planning on facing the entire might of the Gardens with only the seven of us, and you are worried about your soft retirement? Do not worry, my friend, we won’t be around to enjoy it!”

The good humor spread back to Barley, who smiled sheepishly. Gertrude offered her meaningless little smirk, and Boudica was grinning anyway. Lizards don’t exactly have lips, but Cinnabar seemed vaguely happy all the same. Even the Captain smiled.

Sort of. It was close. It counted for the Captain.

“What happened to the Captain’s eye?” Bonsoir asked Barley while getting steadily drunk in the corner.

“That day when—”

“What day?”

“That day.”

“Oh.
That
day.”

“Yeah. Anyway. Remember Alfalfa the hare? Said pistols bored him, liked to do his work with dynamite?”

“Sure. He still owes me money.”

“I wouldn’t expect to collect. Mephetic turned him, I dunno how. Once the trouble started he lit one of those boom sticks. Captain put him down, but . . .” Barley shrugged his swelled shoulders. “Not fast enough. The explosion took out the Captain’s eye, and it did for that half of Reconquista that isn’t there anymore.”

“I always liked that half.”

“I imagine Reconquista was partial to it as well.”

“I don’t remember her being so crazy,” Bonsoir began. Bonsoir often began things wiser members of the company preferred to leave sleeping.

“She was always off,” Barley said. Slurred, really.

“She was always off, but she was not always like this.”

“You can’t trust a bird.”

“You can’t trust anyone.”

“She took the betrayal hard.”

“I didn’t like it any more than she did,” Bonsoir responded. “But I didn’t let it drive me mad either.”

“You didn’t lose your arm,” Barley growled.

“It’s not the wound,” Gertrude chimed in. “It’s the one who made it.”

“You mean the Quaker?” This from Bonsoir.

“Can you remember how they used to be together? They refused to be separated. Not in camp or on a job, not sleeping or waking. When Elf toileted, he used to coil outside.”

“I remember.”

“One thing to be betrayed by a friend. Another entirely to be betrayed by a lover.”

“Wasn’t that either,” Cinnabar piped in. His chair was tilted backward, his legs up on the table. “It’s the ground.”

Bonsoir looked confused. “The ground?”

“She wasn’t meant for it. She’s a flyer, and she’s spent the last five years hobbling.” The brim of Cinnabar’s hat still covered his eyes. “That would drive anything crazy.”

The Captain had just finished marking his territory when a shadow hooted greeting. He buttoned unstained trousers and turned to face her. “Well?”

“He will be there?”

“He’ll be there.”

“You’re certain?” Elf’s eyes were bright, and between them and the moon there seemed no distinction in circumference. “You’re certain?”

The Captain was not honest, exactly, as many a creature had learned to its despair. But the Captain had a word, and once that word was given one did not question it, not even if one was Elf.

“Excuse me,” she said, turning away from his scowl. “It’s just that I’ve so longed to see him.” Her malformed wing shuddered against her torso. “I’ve just longed to see him so.”

When the Captain walked back into the bar, the rest of them assumed he was only unsteady with drink.

The rows of empty jugs had multiplied with the speed of caged rabbits. They piled onto the table and flowed over onto the ground. They were stacked high in the corner. They rolled out the back door.

“Down with the false lord!” Reconquista shrieked suddenly. “Long live the Elder! Long live the true Lord of the Manor!”

Bonsoir borrowed a pistol from Cinnabar and fired into the air. Barley beat his chest as if to break a rib. Boudica hooted once then fell silent. Drunk as they were, they’d have cheered for the moon to make war on the stars, and offered odds on the result.

Morning had begun its assumption over evening. The fire was long gray, no one left awake interested in tending it. In the corner Bonsoir and Barley had fallen asleep leaning against each other. The stoat had one arm around his old friend and the other coiled protectively over a jug of liquor. The badger snored loudly enough to awaken anyone not in a drunken stupor. Happily this was exactly how Boudica found herself, passed out behind the counter. Gertrude and Cinnabar were still at the table, drinking quietly. The Captain was nowhere to be seen.

Reconquista’s bar had seen better days, though the rat himself, collapsed on the back porch, didn’t seem to mind. Most of the windowpanes were unbroken. No permanent structural damage had been done. There weren’t any corpses to dispose of. Still, the bartender would have work to do when he woke, shattered jugs and empty bottles and overturned chairs and overturned tables and green stains on the walls and brown stains on the floors, both emitting odors that, as a rule, were best confined to an outhouse.

“Funny thing about it,” Cinnabar began softly, “I didn’t like the Elder.”

“I could never tell one from the other,” Gertrude admitted.

Mephetic had just left his office when the messenger arrived, and he was in an off mood. He was often in an off mood these days, weighed down by the endless bureaucratic details involved in being High Chancellor—grain harvests, floundering tax revenue, banditry, relations with neighboring kingdoms. When he’d organized the coup that had deposed the Captain and his pet claimant five years earlier, he had imagined his life involving more drunken bacchanals and fewer hours double-checking the sums of petty functionaries. Owning the crown, Mephetic had discovered—or, more accurately, owning the creature who owned it—was not all it was cracked up to be. Needless to say, the toad himself was no help. Most of the time he was barely awake.

So perhaps it was understandable that Mephetic’s first reaction upon discovering that his old nemesis was not only still alive but actively working toward his downfall was not fear, or anger, or even anxiety—it was outright excitement. He clutched the letter to his breast, and a slow smile stretched across his jaws. He hadn’t expected he’d ever need to make use of the traitor again, but he’d been paying him a bit by way of upkeep, just in case of this eventuality. The Captain’s body had never been found, after all. When he threw the last handful of dirt on the mouse’s coffin, then he’d be certain. Not before.

On his way to the cellars Mephetic caught himself in a mirror, spent a moment reflecting on his reflection, and decided he was not displeased. It had been years since there was a challenge to his position, and years before that since any wetwork had been required of him; most days he didn’t even bother to carry a gun. But he had kept in shape—the mask of his face was still a vibrant black, and his reek was sharp as old cheese. He nodded to himself. If the mouse was coming, he’d find a fit adversary.

More than one in fact, Mephetic thought as he headed toward the officer’s mess.

A long walk (the castle was a large place) found the skunk in one of the many sumptuous quarters of the vast estate: walls with bright watercolor murals, antique furniture, bottles strewn over the floor. Brontë reclined on some couches in one corner. A sleek, handsome fox, her fur bright red with fetching streaks of white, her claws neat and sharp and clean. Above her forehead was pinned a bright purple ribbon. Leaning against the wall behind her was a double-barreled blunderbuss, filigreed and shaped to fit her paw. For a smaller creature it would have been a shotgun, but for Brontë it functioned effectively enough as a pistol. It was a lovely looking thing, and Brontë liked using it whenever appropriate, and in a good number of situations where it strictly speaking wasn’t.

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss’s watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you’d walk away with enough money to retire—though if you left him alive you wouldn’t have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss’s vanity was his sadism.

Puss was rough and Brontë was worse, though as far as Mephetic was concerned neither could hold a candle, in terms of sheer menace, to the last member of the trio, coiled tightly against the back wall. They were his top ranks, the troubleshooters who helped to keep the Gardens running, any one of the three as dangerous as a battalion of rat guard. And if they didn’t quite snap to attention when Mephetic came through the door, well, they weren’t exactly your run-of-the-mill grunts, now were they? And they knew enough at least to pay him his due. Mephetic hadn’t gotten to where he was by being made of tissue paper.

He laid the situation out for them quickly, with little preamble and no aggrandizement.

“Well welcomed, as far as I’m concerned,” Puss said. Puss had drawing-room manners, and he was as amoral as a loaded gun. “I haven’t had anything interesting to do since coming to this backwater hellhole.”

“Not up to the standards of the Old Country?” Brontë asked.

“Nothing is,” Puss said, doffing his hat regretfully. “Would that father had been willing to overlook my . . . youthful indiscretions.”

“Which indiscretions were those? Dueling or buggery?”

Puss mulled this over for a moment. “You know, I can’t quite remember.”

Puss and Brontë laughed merrily. They were the best of friends. One of them was likely to kill the other before long.

Brontë turned to face the third of Mephetic’s high commanders. “You worked with them,” she said. “What can we expect?”

The Quaker had fed recently; you could tell from the fat knot stuck midway down his coil. This was the only reason Brontë had been willing to speak with him, and even so she asked the question from across the room, out of the serpent’s effective range, or so she hoped. The Quaker’s head was perched atop the tight weave of his body, and for a long moment it seemed he had not heard the question or simply didn’t care to answer. But then his ghost-white tail began to rattle, like rain falling against a windowpane, though far less comforting.

Mephetic nodded to himself. He was ready for the Captain.