The Five Faces (The Markhat Files) (21 page)

He turned and glared. “I don’t go after women when I have a problem with the man,” he said.

“Exactly. Because you’re fundamentally decent, Captain. You never threatened Darla. Never sent the toughs around to toss Mama Hog’s place. Hell, the worst thing you ever did to me was raise your voice. No. You’re a decent man in a profane world, and you’d no more lie about official charges than I would set fire to a Rannite street.”

He didn’t have an answer. Or maybe he was just too exhausted to speak.

“There are things you ought to know,” I said.

“What things?”

“Nightmares come a’ walking.” I took in a good, deep breath. “One crawled out of a prison in Prince. Some big underground jail.”

“Heard of it,” he said. “Called it the Pit.”

“Aptly named. He’s the one drawing the murder scenes. Doing the killing. Taking over the gangs and the drug trade. The giant people saw. That’s all him.”

“He got a name?”

“None I can speak. Anyway, it’s not the man we’ve got to worry about. The man we could kill. It’s the thing that rides him. It’s not going to die just because we poke holes in it.”

“Got anything to do with an old watch tower on the north wall?”

“That’s where he sleeps. But don’t bother trying to storm it. You’d just see another ten blocks razed. Maybe more.”

“Damn.”

“I know you got a drawing,” I said. “Shows you dying in what, five days?”
 

“It’s just a damned piece of paper,” he said.

“I wish. It’s prophecy, Captain. Religious stuff. You a Church man?”

He gave me a red-eyed, sideways glare. “What the hell do you think?”

I chuckled. “Still. This is more than just a drawing meant to scare you.” I tried to think of a way to explain stepping outside of time and walking from the present to the future and then back to the past, but decided to skip it. “You need to take it seriously.”

“Word is you’ve got a drawing too,” he said.

“I do.”

“So are you heading for the Sea? Digging a hole and planning to pull the opening in after you?”

“Both thoughts crossed my mind.”

“But here you are.”

“Here I am. I guess we’re both stubborn that way.”

“Stubborn to the last.” He coughed a bit. A clown scurried up and offered him a tankard of liquid, but he wisely batted it away. “So what do we do now?” he asked. “Wait to die? Watch monsters knock the city apart? You know what’s going on. All of it, or part. Is there a way to stop it?”

“There’s one way. The only way, as far as I know. One of us has to live. Has to prove the drawing wrong. If we can do that—if we can cheat the prophecy—then the thing that crawled out of the Pit goes poof.”

“Goes poof. Just like that.”

“Just like that. It’s a god, of sorts. It’s already watched us both die, even though neither death has happened yet. If we manage to live, somehow, then it pops like a soap bubble.”

“You’re not drunk,” he said. He wasn’t asking, just observing. “You’re serious.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’ll be damned.” That, too, was spoken as a simple statement of fact.

“That’s what I know,” I said. “But there’s something I don’t know. Maybe you can help with that.”

He spat into the night. “Happy to be of service to the great Captain Markhat,” he said.

“There’s a crypt in the Pale.” I described the witch-woman’s unmarked crypt to him, until I was sure he could find it. “The Church keeps records of who is buried there. I need a name.”

He grunted. “Any point in me asking why?”

“The giant has a girlfriend,” I said. I surprised him by telling what little I knew about the necromancer Granny Knot’s spooks called Szerzhenkap. “Not sure where she fits in all this, but the name is a good place to start.”

“Why don’t we just knock the damned crypt down and see what crawls out?”

I glanced toward the dying fires.

“Oh. You might have a point.” He mopped his sooty face again. “You can let your wife go home,” he said. “If I need you, I’ll send word.”

“So we have a truce?”

“Hell’s bells. I suppose we do.” He turned and stuck out his hand and did not smile. “So, who dies first? You or me?”

I shook his hand. “Me,” I said. “By a few days.”

“Damned shame. Well. I’ll go sit on a priest. Send the name to your office?”

“That’ll do. And Captain. Thank you.”

“Go to hell,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. “And save me a seat, when you get there.”

“Happy to oblige.”

He stomped away, his back to the flickering torchlight.

I watched him go, watched him wave off the Guardsmen I still couldn’t see. It was only then I let out a sigh of relief, because I knew I wouldn’t be spending the night in jail.

I left a pair of coins on the rail for the bridge clowns, doffed my hat to the dark in a show of genteel manners, and went to fetch my pistols.

My pistols lay right where I’d left them.

Both barrels smoked. When I touched the black steel, it was hot, as though the weapon had just been discharged.

I picked one up, pulled the cylinder. Every round had been fired, though I hadn’t heard a thing.

Buttercup rose up through the planks and timbers to stand before me. She glowed moon-bright and didn’t bother making her bare feet come anywhere near the bridge.

Clowns broke and ran from every shadowed nook and night-cloaked cranny. I waited until they were gone before I spoke.

“Honey, have you been playing with my guns?”

She solemnly pointed at my face.

“Damn.” I stood, loaded both pistols, reflected that I was ejecting the spent rounds I’d just loaded, all without firing a shot.

“The crypt.” I knew it was the crypt. I’d briefly considered going there, hoping to catch a glimpse of the necromancer, maybe get an idea who she was, or what she was up to.

Now I knew that’s what I’d done. What I was going to do.

My empty pistols proclaimed the foolishness of the decision.

But they also made it inevitable.

“Any chance I killed the old spook?” I asked.

Buttercup regarded me without expression for a long moment.

Then she floated away, turning her luminescent face back toward me to make sure I followed.

I did.

No point fighting Fate more than once.

After an hour of walking, I borrowed a drunk’s horse. Buttercup got impatient and took to the rooftops, leaping and shining like an exuberant comet.

We reached the Pale in that hour between the deep of the night and the first frail glow of dawn. I turned the horse loose at the gate, and it trotted happily away.

The cemetery gates were closed, but the shiny, new steel chain hung loose in the dirt. I picked up one end and examined it by Buttercup’s glow. The steel was cut so clean I saw my reflection in the new surface.

Rather than force the unchained gates open and risk a loud metallic squeal, I decided to climb. I put boot to gate and heaved myself up, mindful of the spikes and blades, while Buttercup giggled and made a game out of skipping back and forth through its menacing bars.

Once inside the Pale proper, she was all business. Her ever-present ragged doll became a child’s skull, and when it spoke, it did so in short, nervous whispers.

I held out my hand. She took it, and we walked together up the winding, chalk-white paths until we reached the unmarked crypt halfway up the Pale.

I stopped ten feet from the sealed door-slab of the thing. Buttercup stopped too, neither tugging nor fidgeting.

The crypt was polished marble. It cost someone a small fortune. I supposed that Vucik and his necromancer girlfriend could afford it, now that he was running the drug trade and most of the other vices along the Brown.

The grass was neatly trimmed. A bouquet of fireflowers leaned against the crypt. The petals hadn’t even begun to wilt.

There was no inscription on the crypt. The single graveward beside it was tall and unadorned.

Worst of all, peeking out from behind a willow tree was the necromancer’s black wagon. It was empty, but her wild-eyed mares stomped and whinnied and dripped with new sweat, so I knew it hadn’t been parked there long.

I checked my pistols out of habit and put one of them back in my pocket and took Buttercup’s tiny hand with my free one.

“If things go bad, you get out,” I said. “You go home to Mama, you hear?”

She tugged and I took a step forward, and Buttercup did the odd little skip-step that took us both inside the nameless crypt.

Silence. And darkness.

Buttercup squeezed my hand. Her skull flared to life.

Time stopped.

Still in her nightgown, Darla lay face-up on a marble slab, straps at her wrists and ankles. Her eyes were open, wide and staring, but she was still. Too still. I tried to take a step toward her, but Buttercup held me fast.

The necromancer stood to Darla’s right, grinning down at her. The necromancer’s hand was poised to stroke Darla’s cheek.

I raised my pistol and squeezed the trigger but it vanished from my hand before it fired.

Buttercup put her finger to her lips.

“Dammit, Buttercup, that’s Darla.”

She pointed.

At the far end of the slab, sunk in the shadows in an ornate marble chair, was a dead woman.

The corpse’s head was thrown back. Her dry, toothless mouth gaped in the silent, eternal scream of the dead. Her arms were outstretched, her skeletal hands resting on the marble on either side of Darla’s face.

She’d been an old woman when she died. Her long, white hair proved that, where it still clung to her wizened skull. Her eyes were empty sockets each filled with something shriveled and shrunk, like peach pits left in the sun.

Her cheeks were patches of flaking corpse skin. Her neck was open, just bone and paper-dry ligaments.

My wits slowly returned to me. I took in the size of the room and the height of the marble table and the length of the dead woman’s torso and arms.

She’d been a giant too.

Buttercup moved the skull about, sending its glow probing into the dark crypt. There was no movement, no sound. The necromancer’s long fingers never quite touched my Darla’s pale cheek.

I tried moving. I couldn’t. My feet were stuck as if nailed. I tried shouting, but no words would come. I remembered walking with Stitches in a dream and hoped this was more of the same.

Bones littered the floor. They weren’t those of the seated corpse. Skulls had been stacked in a corner, ten deep.

On either side of the table, there was a shrouded body. The flesh that showed was black. Bones protruded, ends splintered as if chewed.

Again, I tried to go to Darla, but my feet were rooted to the floor.

Buttercup squeezed my hand. The air suddenly reeked of death and the motionless tableau came alive.

The necromancer’s fingers stroked Darla’s cheek. “There, there,” said the witch-woman, her voice deep and husky. “You be still. You make a good meal for Momma. She eat you all up, skin and bones. Maybe I make the hat of your hair.” She ran long fingers through Darla’s hair. “You like that, no? To be winter hat for your betters?”

The witch-woman leaned down and spoke in Darla’s face.

“You want I should let you scream now? You want I should let you beg?”

The necromancer did something with her fingers.

Darla took in a sudden breath.

“Go to hell,” hissed Darla. “Go to hell and take that cheap necklace with you.”

“Get your hands off her,” I shouted. My voice should have been loud in the tiny crypt. It barely reached my own ears.

The necromancer didn’t so much as glance my way.

“She eats souls,” said the witch-woman, smiling down at Darla. “Oh, bodies too. The bodies of the dead, most times. But you—oh, you she will enjoy.”

She ran a finger down Darla’s chin, down her neck, between her breasts. “She has not tasted the flesh of the living in years. You will remain aware while she consumes you. Bite by bite.” The necromancer tore Darla’s gown, leaving her naked. “Come, Momma,” said the necromancer, smiling. “Time to dine.”

She moved to stand by the dead woman. Once there, she produced a short, wicked dagger, slashed it sure and quick across her right wrist, and then held the dripping wound over the corpse’s open mouth.

“Is treat for you tonight,” said the necromancer. Darla began to struggle on the table. “Is live one. Warm flesh. Living blood. So sweet. Enjoy her, Momma. Take your time with this one.”

The corpse stirred, twitching. As blood dripped past its withered, black lips, its limbs began to jerk and move.

The necromancer laughed. “Make her suffer, Momma. For me. Later, I come for what is left. Leave her hair for me, please. She make good hat.”