The Five Faces (The Markhat Files) (23 page)

I stood still for a moment, waiting for something, anything, to move among the gutted ruins.

Nothing did. No dog barked. No rat scurried. No crow called out or flew.

The coin lay cold in my hand. The face of it had changed, neither sword nor crown, but a crude rendering of a bare skull face.

I’d seen it before on each of the drawings.

I took in the bones, the charred buildings, the chill that rode the air. The creature claiming to be a god of fate told me the coin would let me walk out of time.

I wondered just how far ahead that single flip had carried me.

I took another careful step, straddled another pitiful corpse.

Was this Rannit’s future? Was I witnessing the aftermath of Evis’s battle at the tower, which had only commenced moments ago?

Moments or months?

I stepped on a finger-bone. It snapped like a twig, the sound loud in the eerie, oppressive silence. I froze, crouching out of old habit, waiting for the sound of I knew not what.

While I waited, I wondered. Had I just trod upon Mama’s finger? Darla’s? Was everyone I knew, those few I held dear—were they too withered and unmourned, silent and still beneath a lead-grey sky?

I cussed, flipped the coin again, caught it in the air.

Night fell, without preamble. A half moon rode high above, just bright enough to highlight the ends of bones and the grinning faces of upturned skulls.

The air was warm now. Warm and scented with the stench of decay. Flies rode it, buzzing and busy, landing on my lips, trying to squeeze into my ears.

I cussed and batted. Bones crunched. But where the day in winter had been silent, this warm, foul night was filled with sound.

Moaning, coming from the north. Not a single person moaning, but hundreds, thousands.

And screams. High wailing screams cut short, only to resume again from a different throat.

I heard scuttlings and scratchings in the darkness around me. The storefronts were hulks, though some still smoldered and spat sparks.

They broke cover and charged me, half a dozen of them, clubs and axes raised in the moonlight.

They might have been men once. Might have been shopkeeps or bartenders or barrel-wrights or bankers.

Then they’d died. Died and been resurrected, stitched back together by someone with little skill in needlework and no concern for their craft. One had the arms of an Ogre. One had a woman’s head. All were voicing bubbling screams, and all were racing toward me as fast as their bloated, mismatched legs could carry them.

I flipped the coin.

Another night fell, this time with a huge harvest moon. The street was still littered with corpses, though their bones were cracked and crumbling, and even their leather shoes were mere scraps where they remained at all.

Rannit was quickly reverting to wilderness. Saplings sprouted amid the corpses. Leaves moved in a warm wind, rising up through the skeletal remnants of structures. An owl floated overhead, silhouetted briefly against the fat, orange moon.

I turned in a circle, saw movement to the south.

The slilth, taller than any mountain, ambled past, well beyond the old wall. Its many silver legs glinted and shone in the moonlight, and I could hear, faint and delayed, the
stomp-stomp-stomp
thud of its footfalls.

There rose a grumbling behind me as the godlet’s voice rang out, muttering from heaven. The sky lit up as a bolt of silent lightning arced down upon the slilth, but it merely batted the bolt away with a casually upraised leg and continued its stroll, apparently unconcerned.

The god grumbled curses, but fell silent, and soon the night was quiet again, save for the distant footfalls of the slilth.

It took me most of the night, but I made my way back to Middling Lane.

I knew I wouldn’t find her there. Rannit was dead. Dead and nothing left but bones. I didn’t think about her every time I stepped on a bone, every time a hollow-eyed skull caught my gaze. I didn’t think about what might have happened to her, or that she was likely among the dead, her bones weathering away to dust beneath a merciless moon.

Our house was gone. Not a foundation stone remained. The ground was bare and blasted, glittering in the moonlight. I picked up a clod of it and crumbled the soil, and found something like bubbled glass amid the dirt.

I called out her name, just once. There was, of course, no answer.

After a while, I turned my face toward the blasted mound that was the Hill, and I picked my way slowly through the dead until I came back to the banks of the Brown.

Chapter Eighteen

The Brown River Bridge was no more.

A single pair of pilings remained, far out in the middle of the river. Twisted iron girders drooped from each, rendering their appearance that of monstrous trees gone bare and gaunt for the winter. Under the pilings, sluggish water swelled and curved, hinting at debris just beneath.

I spent the day making a raft out of charred lumber. I lashed the whole mess together with scraps of belts and chains, forgot I’d have to pull the works down to the water myself, and wound up chopping it in half just so I could move it.

By the time I took to the river, it was dark. I didn’t dare show a light, even if I’d managed to find a working lantern. For all I knew, the death god still kept watch from his tower, probably desperate for a snack since he’d consumed the whole of Rannit.

I got soaked, of course, and spent the whole wretched trip clinging to the world’s worst raft after it came apart halfway to the other side. But I’d chosen my launch point wisely, and the slight bend in the Brown put me in swimming distance of the far bank. I made it, sputtering and coughing and cussing, but alive.

Alive. I wondered if I was the only living thing in all the world, aside from owls and frogs. I heard a single frog sing as I clambered up the muddy bank to lie gasping just beyond the water’s reach.

I should have been hearing tens of thousands.

The Hill was a blasted mound. Rubble lay strewn across rubble. The Dark Houses had put up a fight.

But if the shattered masonry and scattered bones were any indication, they’d fought in vain, and in the end they’d all died, halfdead and human alike.

The roads were gone. I was left to pick my way through debris, slipping and sliding on broken slate roof tiles and treacherous heaps of loose bricks. How I managed the ascent without breaking both legs and three arms is beyond me.

I managed to make maybe a quarter of the Hill’s height before both night and my strength failed. With dawn touching the empty sky, I found a heap of weathered masonry and hid within it, not wanting to expose my pitiful scramblings to the light of day and the gaze of a ravenous death god.

Soaked and stinking and miserable, I finally drifted off to sleep.

I dreamed of home. And Darla. I dreamed we were back in our house on Middling Lane, that Rannit was whole and bustling and alive, that the streets weren’t littered with bones. That Death himself hadn’t risen up and swallowed the city whole.

The last thing I remember of the dream is hearing Buttercup humming a lullaby. Then I slept, a chunk of granite for a pillow, bones beneath my feet.

I woke just before sunset. I scrambled from shadow to shadow, crawling most of the time until night fell. By then my hands and knees were so bruised I didn’t much give a damn whether I was seen or not.

From my vantage point partway up the Hill, I had a good clear view of Rannit.

There wasn’t much left to see.

A few structures still stood here and there, though I could see stars through gaps in the frames.

Not a single light shone. Not a single meager cookfire flickered in the dark.

The old wall was still there, in places. I scoured the dark where I knew the death god’s tower ought to be, but that portion of Rannit lay in deep shadow, and I might as well have tried to see the bottom of the Brown.

Around midnight, the slilth wandered into view, this time towering over the western horizon. It ambled about for half an hour, so distant the godlet didn’t stir, and then it strolled out of sight.

I climbed. It was slow going, as my every step was dogged by sliding debris or hidden holes. I judged I was three-quarters of the way to Avalante when I saw the yellow-gold light bobbing amid the destruction a quarter-mile up the Hill.

I dropped and froze, cussing every rolling pebble, every snap and crack of debris. In the absence of frogs and crickets and nightbirds, the silence was absolute, and the soldier in me was aghast at the noise even the smallest movement made.

I peeked through a gap in the rubble.

The glow was descending, darting from place to place, coming right at my hiding place.

I unsheathed Toadsticker, risked enough movement to position myself so I had room to swing if I was discovered. I laid down a pistol by my knee, thinking if one swing of my sword wasn’t enough, I’d drop my blade and break the dead silence by opening fire.

Buttercup popped her head over the rim of the debris and stuck out her tongue.

She vanished, reappeared directly before me, and wrapped her skinny arms around my neck in a fierce, giggling hug.

I dropped my sword, caught her up, sure for an instant I’d fallen and concussed my fool self and was hallucinating.

But Buttercup remained. Her hair was wild and matted. She smelled of dirt and ash. She hugged me so hard we both heard bones creak and she giggled and let me go.

“How?” I asked.

She shrugged and spun, wild hair flying. I sank to my knees and put my hand on the top of her head, just to reassure myself she was solid.

She squealed and disappeared. Instantly, tiny hands slipped around my face from behind and covered each of my eyes.

“I have never been so glad not to see someone,” I said.

She returned to stand before me.

“Uncle Evis? Aunt Gertriss? Darla? Mama Hog?”

Her radiance failed. She lost her smile, and in that instant she looked like a dirty, hungry child, and nothing more.

“I’m going to Avalante,” I said. “Would you like to go too?”

She giggled and clapped her hands. I sheathed Toadsticker and retrieved my revolver. Buttercup took my hand, and we headed uphill.

Avalante was gone.

In its place was a crater, at least a block across. Smokes and fumes still rose from the darkness within.

I’d hoped part of Avalante survived. I knew most of the House was far underground, but I also knew that wasn’t common knowledge. My plan, tenuous as it was, was to find the remains of the hidden tunnels and hope part of the House lay intact in some deep secret chamber.

But there was nothing. Just a hole, filled with impenetrable shadow.

I found a brick, tossed it into the chasm, counted seconds as it fell.

If it ever hit the bottom, I didn’t hear it.

I fought back an urge to leap in after the brick.

“I could use some light, Buttercup,” I said. “Just enough to see twenty feet or so.”

She nodded and glowed.

Her banshee radiance revealed the edges of the depression, which showed every sign of having been formed when a monstrous hand reached down from the heavens and simply scooped up the earth.

“Damn, Evis. You never had a chance.”

All about us, bathed in Buttercup’s unwavering glow, lay skeletons. The mix of human to halfdead was more or less even. Buttercup giggled and pointed.

I crouched, inspected the remains of the closest. The elongated finger-bones, talons, and fangs showed them to be halfdead. Their clothes were mere scraps of rags, clinging to bones that showed signs of weathering but hadn’t yet begun to decay, or even fall apart.

Looking around, I realized each of the skeletons scattered about me was whole. Intact.

I grabbed the nearest one by the neck-bones, picked it up, brought its skull close to my face.

“Knock knock, old spook,” I said, thumping the skull for emphasis. “It’s me. Come out, and let’s have a talk.”

Silence.

“I know your name before it was Stitches,” I added in a whisper. “Anybody else know that?”

The bones twitched and moved. Pinpricks of blue light flared to life in the dead eye-sockets.

I let go, and the bones rattled to life. It stood before me, jaw dropped.

“Markhat? Captain Markhat?”

“In the flesh. And Buttercup. You wouldn’t have any beer down there, would you? Rannit seems to be in the midst of an economic slowdown of sorts.”

All around me, bones moved, rising to their feet.

“You died. You died years ago. I was present at your funeral.”

“I hope the event was well attended. I was serious about that beer. Look, can we come in? I’d rather our friend the death god doesn’t glance my way and decide to join the party.”

The skeletons closed in. The human ones bore knives. The halfdead merely flexed those killing claws.