The Incorruptibles (2 page)

TWO

He didn’t look at me when I brought Bess abreast his black, though she chucked her head and nickered and tried to pull ahead.

‘Thought I might tag along.’

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the buzzards.

It’s a big country, and the vast expanse of it calls for silence, at least from humankind, though I’m not quite human. Got enough
dvergar
blood for folks in New Damnation or Passasuego to look at me twice. To rough me up maybe, spit on me, if they’ve a mind to. Lynch me if I look funny at their women. Might be different if I carried Hellfire with me, if I was willing to tarnish that immortal part of me, but I won’t do that. Not for pride, or station. Not for rudeness.

Fire calls to fire.

Fisk seemed to sense what I was thinking because he tugged his carbine out of the long holster on the black’s flank and began feeding
imps
into it. He popped each one off his belt, thumbed the intricate wards to make sure of the round’s integrity, and slipped it into the chamber. The silver of the bullets was tarnished and black, but the warding was bright where it caught the light. When Fisk was done, he levered the action and unloaded and reloaded his pistol.

We rode, trotting through the long plains grasses. After an hour or so, we came upon a tangle of scrub brush and fragrant but stunted sumac trees. Fisk dismounted, and I followed suit.

He gave the black a small nosebag of oats, and I let Bess forage the sumac berries. She’s sure got an iron belly. Found her chomping brambles once, and I had to tug her away.

I tossed Fisk a hunk of jerked auroch tongue and some hardtack, and we both ate a little underneath the unbroken sky, watching those damned turkey buzzards circle and bank.

‘There’s something dead there, I think,’ he said.

I didn’t argue. ‘Most likely a lame calf or cow.’

‘Seems like.’

He dropped the hobble rein, pulled the carbine, and looked at me expectantly. ‘We walk the rest of the way?’

‘Yep.’

We strolled under the big sky, up a shallow rise, through the long shoal grass. Occasionally Fisk slowed and let me catch up, but before we reached the peak and could look down on the carnage there he’d broken into a run – a big ungainly lope, his spurs jangling with each footfall, his arms pumping even with the carbine clutched in his fist.

Fifteen or twenty of the shoal auroch sprawled in a disarray of lumps on the plain; woolly little hillocks. But that’s wasn’t what Fisk ran to. When I caught up, I saw the remains of the settlers.

At our approach, the buzzards erupted in a flurry of black wings and a stench of blood. But the corpses were pretty fresh. Probably no more than a day old. Hours maybe. The carrionfowl had only had time to take their eyes, lips, and other soft bits.

There was a boy, no more than eleven, a shattered rifle in his lap, an arrow through his throat, whose shocked, eyeless face was turned to the low, gunmetal grey clouds. There was a man, nearby, leaning against the carcass of an auroch, his mouth gaping wide in a frozen scream, his stomach split open. Wasn’t until I got closer that I saw he was holding his own tongue and liver.

Fisk hissed air through his teeth. ‘And this one.’

A man, spread-eagled over an auroch, his back flayed open.

He pointed. ‘They took his backstraps.’

Stretchers are many things, but I’d never heard of them eating a man. At least I’d never imagined they would. The man was skinny, though. Not much tenderloin on him.

‘Buzzards probably snatched up the straps. There’s a bloody mark on the ground over here.’

Fisk remained silent, his grey eyes scanning the bodies. There was a tenseness about him. At times like these I felt there was some doom waiting for us just beyond the next hill, and nothing Ia or the old gods or Hellfire pistols and
daemonlore
could do about it.

Still get that feeling, sometimes. There ain’t no bottom to the well.

Fisk squatted on his hams by the boy, looking at him, maybe trying to fix his image into memory, or maybe trying to get an idea of how the boy might have looked before he died, putting the puzzle of his face back together to honour him.

He reached out and snapped off the end of the arrow with the fletching.

‘It was Berith, I think.’

‘Who?’

‘That big red son of a whore.’

He turned the arrow in his hands, ruffled the feathers that’d been daubed with paint in a triangular pattern.

‘What, the stretcher from Broken Tooth last year? That his name?’

‘No. Just what I call him. Nobody understands their Ia-damned gibberish anyway.’

‘I’m curious. Why Berith?’

‘Just seemed like the sort of name a murderous arsehole would have.’ He stuffed the arrow haft in his belt. ‘And there was a big red-haired tussler at Fort Verrier by that name. This stuff reminds me of that son of a bitch.’

The sun broke through the cloud cover, sending a bright column of slanted light sweeping across the carnage. Fisk stood upright and raised his rifle.

The creature on the rise seemed to have just coalesced out of air, or risen up from the earth, a thing of dirt and grass, wind and sky, and the blood of settlers. He stood there, impossibly tall, long red hair whipping in the wind. All pointy ears and sharpened teeth.
Vaettir
.

Everything was silent but I could tell he laughed at us. And when he moved, it was a blur so damned fast I recognised an arrow in the air before even registering that the stretcher had moved. The first arrow stuck out of Fisk’s thigh, and then another drove into the ground at his feet. A figure appearing beside the
vaettir
Fisk called Berith, also impossibly tall, cradled something over his shoulder.

Even with the pierced leg, Fisk didn’t fall. He had the carbine up and firing.

The gun belched Hellfire, and there was a boom as the
daemon
was released inside the chamber, behind the bullet. In the half-lit, grey world of the plains, the muzzle-fire left an after-image of a winged horror, expanding and rising, loosed into the world. An
imp
.

You can’t hear their screams of joy at freedom, the
imps
, but you can feel them, and every shot tears at the air, beats at your ears and exposed skin – as damaging as lying in the too-hot sun. It’s an invisible pressure. The pressure of damnation.

And Fisk loosed them. If the stretchers were fast, Fisk was their equal, like light moving across water even while arrow-struck. One shot after another, he levered the rounds, his hands moving blindingly fast.

He stopped firing only when it was clear they were gone. Disappeared into the grasses, subsumed by sky, eaten by earth. Who knows how they move? They appear and disappear. They’re beyond man. Beyond
dvergar
.

‘Ia-damn. Ia-damn.’ He said it over and over. He was pale then, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the arrow wound or the after-effects of gunwork. I’d felt each of those rounds as they loosed. I didn’t like to imagine their effect on him. ‘Got to follow …’

‘No, you’re struck.’

‘You see that other one?’ Fisk tried to push me away. ‘Carrying something. Maybe a settler. Ia dammit, he took a settler.’

‘Nothing you can do about it. Here.’ I grabbed his arm and laid him down. He still clutched the carbine. No telling how many bullets were left or how much damage he’d done his immortal soul.

There wasn’t much blood coming from his leg, so it didn’t look as if he was going to expire from blood loss.

‘We gotta get back to the
Cornelian
. We’ll get this out.’

He groaned, pushed himself up off the ground and hobbled west, toward the White Mountains and our horses.

He stopped and turned to me. ‘Don’t let all this auroch meat go to waste, Shoestring.’

Opening my oiled satchel and withdrawing my longknife, I went to the nearest auroch, still warm to the touch. I took its tongue and liver and, moving to the next animal did the same. I harvested the carcasses until my satchel was full of meat, bloody, still warm.

Then I jogged to catch up with Fisk, the eyes and breath of the plains upon me.

THREE

Banty was wet and miserable by the time we returned to the
Cornelian
and the gurgling waters of the Big Rill.

The leaden clouds had opened up, the sun slipped behind the mountains, and the land was dark and rainswept.

Banty’d managed to start a fire and set up a lean-to in the lee of a bank break. The ponies, still tethered together, stood stamping and steaming on the sand. A johnboat lay on the shore, while a legionary and two lascars moved among the ponies with a feedbag.

We came into the firelight and Cimbri, the legion prefect, raised his whiskered head. He wore his oiled greatcloak and uniform. His phalerae from old campaigns, those brass and golden gilt plates indicating his rank and accomplishments, peeked from the open flaps of his coat – small, but conspicuous, and absolutely necessary to enforce his command, given his low birth. Cimbri’s wide-brimmed hat bore the crossed spears – two pila – of the classic Ruman legionary of old, before Hellfire and artillery had been introduced. A bragging stick was jammed into his belt alongside his six-guns and longknife. Cimbri looked as irritated as Banty looked miserable.

‘There you are, dwarf. Where’s the pistolero?’

By then I was leading Fisk’s black, who kept tugging at the reins and pulling away until I had to hobble her front legs. Fisk was awake, but he’d gone into some kind of muttering dream while his leg oozed blood. I keep a flask of cacique on my person for medicinal purposes – solely medicinal, on my honour. He had drained it the moment I’d handed it to him.

Cimbri noticed Fisk, slumped on the black, and raised his eyebrows.

‘Trouble?’

I hopped off Bess, and moved to help Fisk down. Cimbri stood up, kicked at Banty, and said, ‘Fool. Go help.’

We got Fisk under the lean-to and I retrieved the whiskey from the packhorse that carried what Bess wouldn’t. Fisk was delirious, almost insensible, but not quite far enough gone not to take a swallow. A man’s got to be pretty far gone not to swallow when whiskey is at hand.

I gathered up my barber’s bag, scissors and clean linens, pliers and hacksaws, and spread out them out on a scrap of clean canvas. I split Fisk’s britches from cuff to crotch and pulled the flaps out of the way. There was blood, but not too much of it, and it was doubtful he’d lose the leg. For a man doomed to perdition’s flames, he had been granted luck by Ia, that’s for damned sure.

A good amount of whiskey went into Fisk, and Cimbri and I both took long pulls from the bottle before I drenched his wound in liquor and pulled free the arrow shaft. He didn’t yelp or make a sound, but his eyes were open, looking straight into my face. It wasn’t an empty stare, but it wasn’t altogether with us, either. His body jumped some when the shaft cleared flesh. I followed the removal with another dousing of liquor, and wrapped his thigh in clean linens.

‘Those’ll have to be changed in the morning,’ Cimbri said. ‘You want to bring him to the
Cornelian
? We can have Miss Livia look after him. She’s schooled in bloodwork.’

‘Let’s just let him settle here before we get a highborn woman involved. Leave us a lascar and Banty.’

Cimbri nodded. ‘I’ll send back the lascar. Report?’

‘Stretchers.’

‘I figured that.’

‘Murdered a group of settlers just about an hour distant. Took one of them to Ia knows where.’

Cimbri glanced at Banty. ‘Take care of their mounts. Groom them, then half nosebags, each.’

Banty scowled, stood up, saluted. ‘Sir, yes, sir.’

He waited until Banty had reached the horses before saying, ‘That boy is a nuisance, and I’m sorry I saddled you with him. But he’s the youngest son of a rich equite out of Harbor Town. It’s my job to keep him out of trouble, and alive.’

‘Might want to keep him on the boat, then, rather than riding scout in stretcher territory.’

‘Hell, if he stayed on the boat, one of my legionaries would split him wide open in a matter of days.’ He laughed and tilted his head toward the whiskey bottle. ‘And the only thing he knows how to do is ride. And sulk.’

I gave him the bottle and dug around in Fisk’s vest pockets until I located the tin of Medieran cigarettes. Cimbri and I shared them sitting by the fire.

‘There’s more.’

‘What? The
vaettir
?’

‘They left a dead boy alone, but they took a man’s liver and tongue, and the backstraps of another settler.’

‘Ia be. That’s some gruesome shit. Why?’

‘Can’t be ’cause they give two damns about the shoal aurochs, I know that much. I’ve seen where they slaughtered thousands of the beasts, back when we were pushing west out of Fort Brust, nigh on a century past.’

Cimbri raised his eyebrows at that and looked me over. He knew my
dvergar
blood, but it was rare we talked about the differences between us.

He considered me for a while, smoking his cigarette. ‘So, why now?’

‘No idea. Fisk might know – he’s so damned wrapped up with them. Think they killed his family. Whatever the case, they’re getting more active. On the warpath.’

There was a groan. A cough. ‘Bullshit.’

We looked back at Fisk, who was struggling upright. I clasped his hand and pulled him up.

He grabbed the whiskey, took a long pull, and then patted his vest.

‘Ia-dammit, Shoestring. Gimme my smokes.’

I handed them over. He took out one and tamped down the loose tobacco on his wrist, very slow and deliberate, like he was drawing out his audience. Or it might have been that I’d dumped half a bottle of whiskey into him. And the cacique.

‘Was a message.’

Cimbri snorted. ‘They smart enough to deliver messages?’

Fisk nodded. ‘Hell, yeah, they are. Smart as you. Or me.’

‘That ain’t saying much,’ Cimbri replied.

Banty joined in. ‘I hear tell they’ve got a
vaettir
whore at Pauline’s in New Damnation.’ We hadn’t seen him come back, and now the pup’s voice was loud and eager. ‘Heard she’s got the sweetest pussy known to man, but they gotta keep her bound.’

Cimbri snorted. But he didn’t send the boy away.

Fisk lit his smoke from the fire and drank more whiskey. I hated it when the man went dissolute, but I imagine his leg hurt something fierce. ‘Just what I heard,’ Banty said. ‘Cornelius himself was smitten with her.’

Cimbri raised a hand as if to cuff him. Then stopped and lowered his hand. ‘Mr Bantam.’ His whiskers quivered with outrage. ‘You don’t talk about our charge in that manner.’

Banty ducked his head and covered his ears.

I felt a tad sorry for the boy, so ungainly and over-eager. A damned deadly pup with a Hellfire pistol. I said, ‘I heard the same thing too, but that’s just camp talk. If there was someone they were touting as stretcher pussy, must’ve been a tall whore they tricked out to look
vaettir
, but she weren’t no
vaettir
.’

‘How could you know that?’

‘Don’t argue with him, boy, green as you are,’ Cimbri said.

‘Just want to know how he could know that.’

Fisk shifted and stirred the fire with a branch, his leg sticking out at an angle. ‘Ain’t no
vaettir
woman gonna allow herself to be touched, not to mention fucked, by some Ruman. Highborn or not.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Look around you, pup.’ He took a long pull on the whiskey, then shoved it at the boy and waited until he’d taken a swallow. ‘This is a big land. But it ain’t big enough for man and stretcher to live side by side and never conflict.’ He spat. ‘They don’t age, the stretchers. They don’t change. They’re proud. They’ll skin you alive. They’ll fuck their own sister, or mother, or brother. They ain’t got no laws nor decency, as far as I can tell. When you’re never gonna die except through violence, why worry about salvation or morality or whatnot? Huh? They’d spill your blood for pleasure, and slaughter your Ia-damned children …’ He stopped there, swallowed, and, passing a hand over his eyes, shook his head. I didn’t have to guess what he was thinking.

I stood up, went to my saddlebags, and took the satchel of meat I’d sliced from the aurochs. I returned to the fire, opened the scorched piece of leather – my outrider’s kitchen – and began prepping the livers and tongues for roasting. I had some salt I’d won in a card game, a small onion. Sweetgrass and winterfat grew thick in these parts, too. I crushed the sweetgrass, sliced the onion, and then flayed open two livers and stuffed them with the spice and herbs.

Finally, Fisk said, ‘No. No
vaettir
woman would ever let you stick your cock in her and make a half-breed. She’d kill you first.’

‘She might try.’ Banty chuckled.

‘She
would
. Stretcher women are as fearsome as the men. More, if you count their terrible beauty. You’ve never seen how they move. It’s like light, or
daemonfire
. Wouldn’t be no
trying
.’

Banty closed his mouth then.

I had the livers on spits and crackling in the fire. Cimbri stood up.

‘You said it was a message.’

Fisk nodded, his face seemingly devoid of pain or drunkenness as he stared into the flames.

‘What is it?’

‘Pretty simple, really.’ He took a last drag of his smoke and flicked it away, making a little red falling star which cut through the night. A lascar near the johnboats raised his head at the tracer, his breath pluming in the air. ‘You harvest these aurochs, we’ll harvest
you
. Not because they give a shit about the animals. But because they like games. They’re bored. And tormenting is their favourite sport.’

Cimbri blinked, then stood there for a while, thinking. Finally, he snapped his fingers, and a lascar went to the johnboat to prepare for the ride back to the
Cornelian
.

‘Might need you to talk to Cornelius. He’s quite leathered right now and who knows what mischief he’s up to. They spotted a mama bear on the western shore this afternoon and now he’s a tad excited about his hunt tomorrow. Rest and we’ll send a relief in the morning. Sharbo and Horehound, most like.’

He strode to the boat, hopped in, and the lascar shoved them into the waters of the Big Rill. The rain beaded and pattered on the sailors’ oiled jackets, down their cowls. In the distance, lanterns lit the galleries of the
Cornelian
. Around us, the air had begun to mist and close in tight, but we could hear the sounds of revelry and the clatter and crash of bottles, the high-pitched laughter of women. And below it, the banked thrum of
daemon
-fired engines idling, pushing heated water through its innards.

Fisk hocked and spat into the fire. ‘Get me my bedroll, Shoe. There’s a saint.’