The Five Faces (The Markhat Files) (14 page)

Darla lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a nice trick. Any idea how she did that?”

“Something involving mirrors, I imagine.”

“We’re not going in there, are we?”

I leaned on the gate and looked out over the gravewards. They stood tall in the dark. Some leaned with age and neglect. Lightning lit the scene briefly, sending shadows flying.

A chill ran tiptoe up and down my spine.

“I think not,” I said, pretending to stifle a small yawn. “It’s just a cemetery. Bones and whatnot. Let’s get back to the wagon before poor, elderly Mama grows fearful and has a fit.”

“Let’s.” She took my arm again and we headed back to the wagon at a pace that might be called brisk.

“Well?” asked Mama.

“If we hurry we can catch her,” I said. Mama gobbled something about graveyards and fools.

I snapped the reins, and we headed toward the storm.

Five cemeteries later, the rain began in earnest.

I was glad for it. Rain masks noise, limits vision. Rain at night is as good as a black cloak and a mile of thick fog.

Mama sputtered and cussed. Darla produced a hat and bore the deluge with a smile.

The woman in black rolled through locked iron gates as though they were made of cobwebs and shadow.

High up on a lonely hill, one of Rannit’s oldest Church-sanctified cemeteries keeps watch. The church name for the place is Calthon Knoll, but everyone knows it simply as the Pale.

The Pale because of the white outcroppings of chalk that dot the hillside. Rain dissolves it, and the chalk stains the slope white. From the north side, the Pale bears an unfortunate resemblance to a human skull, partially buried, one baleful eye staring upward.

We watched the woman in black leave her wagon and wind her way up the Pale. Lightning showed her in high relief against the chalk-stained hill. She marched three-quarters of the way up, the wind whipping her hair and cloak every step of the way. Finally, she stopped at a tall, freshly polished granite crypt.

“Oh damn oh damn oh damn,” muttered Mama, singsong, as she squinted through the rain. The woman stood before the crypt, her arms uplifted, her voice rising now and then over the storm. “Oh boy, this ain’t good at all.”

Lightning flared.

There was the woman in black.

More lightning, and for the briefest portion of an instant, I thought I saw the shape of another person standing with the woman in black. A second female, clad in flowing shrouds, decidedly lacking in feet, ankles, or anything below the knees.

Darla’s fingernails dug into my arm.

“I saw it too,” I said.

The woman in black was alone again.

“I seen enough,” said Mama. “She’s trafficking with spirits, boy. Dark spirits. We need to go, right now.”

Mama’s voice held genuine urgency.

I counted crypts, made mental notes of tall or unusual gravewards.

“Right now, boy.”

I snapped the reins. The ponies, no fools, didn’t need any coaxing. I put our back to the Pale, kept walls and roofs between us, and made for home.

Buttercup came out of hiding before we’d made the block. She danced and leaped from roof to roof, glowing like the moon. Mama railed about her for getting wet, but when I dropped Mama off a few blocks from her shop, Buttercup sailed down from the roof, bone-dry and giggling.

Darla and I returned our rented wagon and exhausted ponies before catching a cab to our hotel. We got there right before the doorman locked the place down for Curfew.

Waiting for us was an envelope, addressed to me in Evis’s neat hand. Beneath my name was a single word—URGENT.

Darla sighed and lost her smile as I tore the envelope open.

Come at once,
read the letter.
A carriage waits behind the Brass Lantern.

“Be careful,” said Darla. “Wake me when you’re done.”

There wasn’t much else to say. I gave the doorman a hard look when he complained about unlocking his doors, and as the Curfew bells bade honest folk to lock themselves indoors, I took to the empty streets, bound for a long carriage ride in the rain.

I’d spent my day crawling through weeds or shoving through briars, and my night chasing a madwoman through a rainstorm.

Still, I doubted I looked as haggard as Evis, because a haggard halfdead is a sight to behold.

He raised an eyebrow at me and glared over the stack of wet papers on his desk.

“Don’t say it,” he said.

“You look like death itself.” I seated myself. “I have things to tell. But you go first, since you’re buying the beer.”

He groaned, but reached down and produced a pair of bottles.

“Here’s something to read while you drink.” He pushed a pile of rain-soaked waybills toward me. I took a long draught of beer before I gently pried the top one off the stack, and held it up in the dim light.

ELIN FORTHER,
it read. Below the name, a crude drawing depicted a dismembered corpse. Someone had thoughtfully arranged the severed limbs atop the torso, and balanced the head on top of the pile.

Below the drawing was a date and a time. The date was today’s and the time was just before Curfew.

And then, of course, the five faces, spaced neatly across the bottom.

“I take it the unfortunate Mr. Forther is as dead as dead can be?”

Evis nodded. “Dismembered, just as drawn.” He picked the next one off the pile. “Dead. Just like Norvil Scot here.” He tossed me the soggy waybill and selected another. “And Mabus Court. And these others.”

Scot was drawn with his head bent sideways. Court was hanging from a banister.

“Why do these names sound familiar?”

“Because you’ve heard them before. Elin Forther ran most of the brothels at the foot of the Hill. Norvil Scot was the boss of the Top Button gang. Mabus Court was the judge House Lethe kept in their pocket.” Evis poked the stack of waybills with a bony, white talon. “Someone has been cleaning house. We’ve found two dozen of these things littering the streets.”

I whistled. The Top Buttons were a street gang that graduated from strong-arm robbery and extortion to the more genteel but no less rapacious art of banking. Rumors claimed Forther was never far from his small army of bodyguards. Judge Court did the frequent legal favors for and enjoyed the protection of House Lethe, although that protection hadn’t kept a noose off his neck.

“All the dead men are crooks?”

“One man’s crook is another’s civil servant,” said Evis. “It’s the pattern I find disturbing. There’s no singling out of one gang or House or avenue of endeavor. This is a systematic, methodical extermination of Rannit’s extralegal community, from the bottom up.”

“Extralegal community. I like that.” I was so thirsty I finished my beer. “I’m confused, though. Someone is killing ne’er-do-wells and celebrating their exploits with amateur sketch art. Are you hoping to stop them or give them a medal?”

“Each of the drawings was distributed well in advance of the actual act of murder,” said Evis. “In some cases, many days before.”

I put my empty bottle down with what I hoped was an emphatic hollow thump.

“I suppose that explains the Watch’s interest in all this,” I said. “But I’m missing something, aren’t I?

“An example. A blackmailer named Gosset Kemp received a drawing. Having heard the rumors about the five faces, he fled Rannit. His horse threw a shoe. Kemp wounded his forehead in a fall and then sought refuge in a woodman’s shack. He was impaled on a hay-fork during the night.”

“Which is why I never leave the city,” I said. “Too many hay-forks. Too many rage-filled hay ranchers.”

“How, Markhat? How did the artist know Kemp would flee? How did he know Kemp would die with a gash on his forehead, or be forced to take refuge in a shack? How did he know, days before the events, that Kemp would be impaled on a hay-fork with a bent middle tine?”

“He didn’t. He couldn’t. The whole scene had to be staged.”

“It was not staged. Nor were the others. I have directed the full force of Avalante into this investigation. It appears magic is involved.”

“Stitches agree with that?”

“She does
,
”
said Stitches, who simply appeared from thin air.

I jumped. Evis grinned a weary grin.

“Good evening, Mr. Markhat.”
Her eyes moved behind the bleeding stiches that held them shut, as though she was observing my disheveled attire
. “I see you have not been idle.”

“Not nearly as idle as I’d like to be.” I pointed to the stack of flyers on Evis’s desk. “Others have been busy too.”

“Indeed they have.”
Stitches moved to stand by the desk.
“I surmise the effects of this campaign are no longer a secret.”

“Hell no,” said Evis. “Half of Rannit’s criminal underworld is holed up in the old bunker six floors down. They’re terrified. They think we can save them.”

“Can you?”

“I doubt it. The House isn’t even sure we should try. None of the remaining crime bosses is a particularly valuable ally.”

“My advice is to turn them out at once,”
said Stitches.
“No good can come of unnecessary involvement in this matter.”

“Harsh but practical,” I said. “These crime bosses. Anyone I know?”

Evis sorted through the stack of damp drawings.

“Here they are. Ecols Rorshot runs most of the gambling houses. Stales Tin is in charge of the shipping unions. Nato Pung handles the barge fees, and Frant Mark is the taxman. Names ring any bells?”

They didn’t, but my knowledge of Rannit’s minor underworld figures was sketchy at best. They tended to die accidental boating deaths so often committing their names to memory seemed like a waste of time.

The drawings were typically gruesome. One fellow perished by fire. The next was missing most of his throat and gut. The next—

I held the page close and strained to see details in the dim light.

The name above the drawing was Ecols Rorshot. His body was crumpled on a plank floor, his skull crushed in by a brick.

The date and time were two weeks in the future.

“Ecols Rorshot,” I said. “You don’t by any chance have him cooling his heels down in this no doubt tastefully-appointed bunker of yours, do you?”

Evis nodded a yes. “Why? He a long-lost twin brother?”

I turned the page around. “The wide-brimmed hat on the floor. The dog leash in his hand. Hell, the little dog lying by his side. None of that suggest anything to you?”

“Oh.” Evis looked at the page as if for the first time. “I was mainly interested in names and dates.”

“Does this Ecols speak with an accent?”

“I don’t know,” said Evis. “I’ll ask.”

“Your missing canine?”

“Probably not,” I said. “But if nothing else I’ll find out where he buys his headgear. First bit of luck I’ve had today.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Evis. He opened a drawer, withdrew a binder, shoved the heap of flyers to the side.

“Our people found these a few hours ago. Somebody dumped them at our door. Take a look.”

The binder was sealed with a band of black silk. I untied it, opened the binder, pulled out the papers inside.

Stitches lifted her hand. A soft, golden light floated below her palm, illuminating the pages enough so that I could see the images clearly.

EVIS M. PRESTLEY, read the name. Evis was drawn below it, his halfdead features exaggerated, his body cut in half at heart level, his lower jaw torn away.

The date was six days hence. The time, appropriately enough, was two minutes after midnight.

“They really didn’t capture the youthful insouciance in your eyes,” I said.

“Everyone’s a critic. Keep going. It gets worse.”

I turned to the next page.

There was my name. My birth name, first, last and middle. The name only known by Darla, as Mom and Dad and any others who knew it were long dead.

I was crumpled on the ground, my graceful neck bent at an angle sure to cause discomfort. An appalling volume of a liquid I assumed to be blood flowed from my open mouth. If there was any doubt as to my vital status, the artist had crossed out my eyes with little Xs, just as Buttercup had done not so many hours ago.

“I’m sorry to report that I outlive you by a full three days,” said Evis. “How very rude of me. Still, I hope you spend your twilight moments wisely.”

“There’s another page,” I said. “If it’s Darla, I don’t want to see it.”

“It depicts Watch Captain Holder,
with whom I believe you are acquainted,”
said Stitches.

I shoved the pages back in the binder and tied the damned thing shut without looking.

“So we’ve got three days to put this creature in the dirt.”

“That’s the look of it,” said Evis. He took the binder and put it away. “Stitches. Any word on the missing names from our stack?”