SMOKE AND BLADES

by D Elias Jenkins

  Damn it Scurlock. Now you’ve crossed a line.

  31

  THE VIGILANTE’S TALE PART 11

  Gaunt lay still with his cheek pressed against the cold stone floor.

  Behind him the Slip began to slowly close.

  In the half world beyond, a throng of emaciated ghouls advanced through the bone dust towards him. Their dry voices echoed from the land of gloom to the world of breath. Their filthy broken fingernails grasped for his living flesh as they squinted from the glare of true light that shone into their dimension of shade.

  Rak Tan Dang stood before the light, holding his staff high and reciting the mantra to close the portal. He whispered desperately, but the words would only work if formed correctly so he forced himself to enunciate.

  Gaunt tried to rise from the floor but his strength was gone and he collapsed back down onto the flagstones.

  Just behind him, the first pale hands grasped the shrinking borders of the portal and began to pull themselves through. Rak Tan Dang heard the panic in his own voice as he struggled to remain focused. He concentrated every mote of his power on sealing the wound in reality and cutting off the link between worlds.

  Suddenly one emaciated arm shot through and grabbed Gaunt by the ankle. In wheezing breaths it pulled, slowly dragging him back into the underworld. Gaunt feebly tried to kick himself free but his energy was spent. More grey limbs began to appear and grasp for his legs. As the ghouls flailed into the world of light their skin shed in dry sheaths and blew across the floor. As Gaunt dug his fingernails into the cracks between the flagstones as he felt himself dragged across the floor. His feet began to chill as they returned to the land of the dead. Around his legs the portal was a shrinking disc of pale light. Gaunt peered behind him and desperately began to claw himself forward but the ghoulish limbs gripped him with inevitable determination. Rak Tan Dang rushed forward and smashed his staff upon the grasping hands, cracking fingers and wrists like balsa wood. The hands shot back to their own side and the mist-priest hauled Gaunt as fast as he could into the room.

  “Your legs! Gaunt you need to push!”

  Gaunt saw that the portal was almost closed and was moments away from severing his legs below the knees. With the last of his strength he kicked forward and threw himself fully into the room. Like slaves sealed in the tomb of a desert king, the cries of the ghouls were suddenly cut off as the portal sealed.

  Rak Tan Dang let himself sink down against the wall, breathing hard. His yellow eyes were glittering with excitement and fear such as he had not felt in decades. He was wheezing and his feathered chest rose and fell rapidly. He let go of the staff and it clattered on the floor.

  Gaunt did not dare move. He could feel every lungful of air burning him as he inhaled. The candlelight seared into his eyes like burning nails. He could feel the dust and grit in the air bombarding against his skin like meteorites. He tried to speak but his body was suddenly wracked with a hacking cough. When it finally calmed, he just lay on the floor wheezing.

  “Everything hurts. How can everything hurt this much?”

  The mist priest reached out a slim black hand and patted Gaunt on the shoulder. To Gaunt it felt like being punched by a prizefighter.

  “Your body will have forgotten what being alive feels like. The sensations that bombard you now, you have tolerated every day of your life without noticing. The last time you felt like you do now-”

  “Was when I was born.”

  Rak Tan Dan squeezed Gaunt’s shoulder as gently as he could.

  “Was when you were born. It will pass.”

  With great effort Gaunt pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned back against the mist priest’s stone table. He sat there breathing hard. After a few moments he reached down and brought up his water skin. Tearing off the top he poured the cool liquid over his face and neck and into his mouth, almost choking as he greedily gulped. As the bone dust washed from his skin and his thirst was slaked, Gaunt looked down to the sack at his side. He pushed it across the floor to the mist priest.

  “Got you a present.”

  Rak Tan Dang stared down at the leather sack for a few moments and then reached down and tore it open. With glittering eyes he held up the statuette. He ran his black talons over its smooth green surface and smiled. Gaunt had a horrible moment of panic where he expected to be told that he had stolen the wrong artefact.

  “Well? Can you do anything with it?”

  The mist priest seemed not to hear Gaunt at first. He kept staring at the jade artefact as if he could see a shifting pattern in its surface privy only to him. Gaunt let his head rest back on the stone and he fumbled in his coat for a rillo. As he caught his breath, Gaunt lit the rillo and let it hang there in the corner of his mouth. He called across to the sorcerer.

  “Hey Rag-Time. Is it what you needed? Can it kill him?”

  The little golden eyes flicked up and peered at Gaunt. His pliable beak broke into a grin.

  “Yes. If I can work this material as I hope to, I believe I can create a weapon that will kill this demon that threatens your city.”

  Gaunt breathed a sigh of relief and let himself sink back. He blew out a trail of smoke and closed his eyes. He did not recall ever feeling so exhausted. Yet with each inhalation of air he felt his strength slowly returning. Rak tan Dang peered over at him. Gaunt’s skin was as pale as snow, his skull a hairless dome and his eyes the colour of winter sky.

  “And you, John? Did you also find what you were looking for?”

  Gaunt felt something writhe and shift beneath his skin. He felt a foreign entity shifting in its new prison, testing the walls for weaknesses.

  He suddenly realized what he had done and a wave of revulsion washed over him. As he looked up at the mist priest it settled into a grim acceptance. A dark smile broke on his pale face.

  “Yes, Rag-Time. I have everything I need to get back to work.”

  32.

  Maeve crept along the tunnel, her moonglobe held in front of her like an offering. The pale light source presented a thin section of tunnel at a time, beyond it total darkness. Her senses ached from strain and her heart jittered at every unexpected movement.

  The moon globe’s eerie glow cast as many unsettling shadows as it did light, Umbral fires that licked the ancient brickwork. Rat’s and toad’s eyes shone like stars as Maeve’s light hit them and then they slid away into cool murk.

  She had never been this far into the Warrens. As a child her family had lived close to the Neverfog Tunnel, a small conduit of ancient architecture that burst like a petrified rockworm from the wall that surrounded their district. Thousands of years old and long disused, the locals called it ‘the hole in the wall’ and used to throw coins into it on passing for luck. The older members of her extended family told her that it was not for luck, but rather payment to the angry spirits that lived deep beneath the city. They sometimes left small offerings of food or incense at the entrance. Maeve’s aunt Tramella told her it kept the monsters bellies full so that they forgot to drag children down to devour.

  The local children sometimes played a game, daring one another to crawl into the tunnel as far as possible, with a rope tied around their waist. The rope was marked then knotted each time so that it could be judged who had crawled the deepest. Maeve remembered the horrible feeling of claustrophobia, the sweating palms and shortness of breath. She recalled looking back and seeing the tunnel entrance as a little circle of white surrounded by laughing children’s faces, jeering and urging her onwards. The circle had seemed no bigger than a Florrek from her position and terrifyingly far away. It had smelled of stagnant water, rat droppings and more disturbingly, the faint energy of thaumaturgy.

  The game stopped one summer when a school friend of Maeve’s, a fat girl called Jessy Krabilla, crawled deeper into the tunnel than anyone had before and never came back. All the children dragged back out was a soggy stinking rope frayed at the end.

  Some thought the shifting nature of matter in th
e Warrens had looped her into some pocket dimension, or that she had slipped down some oubliette to another level, but the children had felt the pull on the rope and believed that some unnamed horror of the deep had sniffed her out and dragged her plump body into the depths.

  After that it had been barred and a small fence built around it. Scattered in the little enclave between fence and wall there was a shimmering carpet of coins amongst the dead leaves, flicked over the years to appease the deep spirits. No one ever vaulted the fence or stole them, not after Jessy’s disappearance.

  Now, years later, Maeve found herself exploring deeper than she ever had, seeking out a real monster that she knew lurked beneath the city. This time it was not for a children’s dare.

  This time she was seeking its help.

  She knew what she was attempting was insane, that she would most likely never find her way out again as the tunnels shifted their position or fogged her mind. She would die of thirst or terror or become the meal of some denizen of the dark before ever finding her quarry.

  Yet something kept her feet moving forward, taking one squelching step after another into the labyrinth.

  Maeve felt her shoulders leap as a low rumble came from deep in the dark behind her. A mournful wail that she could not identify but she felt was filled with vengeful threat. Her breath was shallow and labored, her heart fluttering. Maeve’s hand moved to her holster, her slick palm almost slipping from the handle of her gun. The wail came once again, more distant as it retreated down some other passage, the lonely moan sounding like the cry of a troglodyte whale.

  Maeve took a deep breath and steadied herself. She leaned back against the slimy mossy wall and began to wonder what the fuck she was doing.

  Then she heard the music.

  At first she wondered if her brain had finally succumbed to the intoxicating vapor of the deep springs, and that she was now doomed to an ever decreasing spiral away from reality as the fever dreams took her. She rubbed her eyes with a filthy hand and craned her neck towards the sound.

  She was sure that she could see a faint light around the next bend, as pale as her own moonglobe but definitely there. She straightened up, resisted the temptation to draw her pistol, and plodded on.

  The music grew louder and when she finally took a deep breath and turned the corner, she was greeted with an unexpected sight.

  The dancers spun around the island of smooth rock that sat surrounded by a phosphorescent green moat. They moved with such precision and grace that to Maeve it looked like a clockwork toy come to life. On a small table sat a battered old gramophone playing the kind of orchestral music popular in Zalenberg. It echoed in the round chamber with an eerie haunted air that sounded more like the memory of music.

  The strangest thing of all to Maeve was the dancers.

  The Vigilante had shed his many daggers, pistols and bombs. His lizard-skin coat was hung over a chair and he wore only his breeches and a loose white shirt. His eyes were closed and his bald, bleached head was swaying gently to the music as he spun. Maeve thought his bare skin was so white that it almost glowed. His Wraith was wrapped around him like a ragged storm cloud. It was a hard entity for Maeve’s brain to comprehend. There were corporeal parts to her, such as her long deadly fingers and her mask, yet they seemed attached to nothing but ethereal rags. She cooed and cosseted him as they danced, universal emotion beyond language. The very sight of the Wraith terrified Maeve, not because of her physical appearance but because she seemed like a primal, impulsive thing, a sorcerous limbic system, as volatile and capricious as a god-like child.

  Maeve suddenly felt embarrassed as well as afraid, as if she was intruding on an intimate moment, which she realized that perhaps she was. Yet she had not come all this way down into the dark to turn back now and she doubted that she could find her way our anyway.

  Maeve took several deep breaths and cleared her throat. She prepared herself to be torn to shreds and found her voice suddenly echoing around the chamber.

  “Uh. Mr. Gaunt?”

  Before the echo of her own words had returned to her ears, the entire scene shifted.

  The Wraith moved too fast for Maeve’s eyes to follow. Suddenly the Vigilante was standing alone still poised as if holding a partner and his guardian spirit had rocketed across the chamber.

  Maeve found herself pinned against the slimy bricks with impossible strength. She gasped as ten glimmering curved claws pricked against her ribs, ready to whisk out her lungs. She saw the thing’s face close up to hers, its mask gone and the ruined countenance beneath the very picture of horror. Maeve could not look directly at it, so she closed her eyes and waited for the mortal wound.

  She heard a harsh voice echo across the chamber.

  “Izabella!”

  Maeve opened her eyes and saw the Wraith crane its neck from Maeve to the Vigilante and back again. It looked like a trained wolf torn between its natural hunting instinct and the voice of its master. Maeve felt the pinpricks of its claws dig tighter into her ribs and was sure they were drawing blood. She winced and the Wraith hissed at her then turned its head back to its master. The Vigilante called across again, calmly and sweetly.

  “We did not finish our dance. I felt I was improving. She is a friend. Are you not, Inspector Scurlock? A friend?”

  Maeve fought to find her voice. She opened her mouth to speak and the Wraith drew close in, her eyes burning distrustfully.

  “I…I…am.”

  When Maeve saw the Wraith’s face darken in an all too familiar feminine expression she hastened to add;

  “In…a purely platonic way, of course.”

  The Vigilante smirked slightly at this and beckoned her across.

  “Izzy, let her be. She hasn’t realized it, but she is on the same business as us.”

  The Wraith suddenly let Maeve go and drifted casually back to the central island. Maeve dropped to her knees and caught her breath, rubbing her bleeding side.

  She looked across at the strange Vigilante, a man with so much blood on his hands.

  “We are? And that business is?”

  The Vigilante, John Gaunt, craned his neck this way and that. He rolled out his shoulders and beckoned her across to little bridge of bricks to his subterranean island.

  Maeve tentatively walked across the narrow bridge of stone to the lair of the man she had hunted for weeks.

  Gaunt turned to her and gestured that she sit. Maeve reluctantly did so and he produced a bottle of Beardance. In a courteous gesture that utterly amazed her, he placed two glasses on the table and filled them up.

  “Will you join me for a drink, Inspector Scurlock? My wife has lost her taste for it.”

  Maeve glanced over at the Wraith as it hovered at the edge of the little island. It glared at her with its dead eyes.

  “That’s very kind, but I don’t want to interfere in anything.”

  Gaunt smiled and glanced over at the Wraith.

  “I think she’s a little jealous of all that flesh you’re wrapped in. She’s probably fantasizing about stripping it all from you. She can’t get it in that wispy head of hers that I only have eyes for her.”

  Maeve tried to calm down her racing heart as she glanced at the Wraith’s razor claws. She quickly reached across the table and downed the shot of brown spirit in one. It burned her throat and took the edge off her fear.

  “I’m here in a professional capacity, Captain Gaunt. Jonas Reach has the artifact known as the Dark and he’s going to use it. I need your help.”

  Gaunt raised an eyebrow and refilled her glass.

  “The full force of the wardens? The Magi? The military? And you come to me?

  Maeve sank another shot and watched Gaunt do the same. She tried not to stare at his deathly pale face and hairless head. He looked like almost as much of a ghost as his departed wife.

  “There’s more to this than just Jonas Reach. It’s a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.”

  “Times must be bad when I am your last h
ope, Inspector. Hope is not what I bring or offer.”

  “I know what you bring. And maybe it’s time for a little vengeance.”

  Gaunt smiled. It was a dangerous smile and without warmth.

  “Vengeance I understand.”

  Maeve looked up at Gaunt. She was still terrified of him, but could also catch the occasional glimmer of the man he must have been.

  “That can’t be all you are now John. If we are working together, you have to be the law. We stop them, but it’s about more than blood.”

  Gaunt looked at her thoughtfully.

  “You think I’m almost as much of a threat to Free Reign as the demon I hunt, don’t you?”

  Maeve shook her head.

  “No. But we can’t have chaos here like there is outside. That’s why you can’t just run amok. Free Reign shouldn’t work but it does. And it’s precious, John. You’ve seen the world, travelled all over, you know how much senseless violence there is out there. What we’ve got here, it isn’t a dead end. There are endless possibilities for this city. If we keep it protected it will still stand in ten thousand years, and who knows what a wondrous place it could become. But there has to be law and order.”

  “Or it could be dust.”

  Maeve nodded and smiled.

  “Or it could be dust.”

  Maeve looked at him for a long moment, trying to fathom him, but his pale face was inscrutable.

  “I visited Longforgotten John. Spoke with your friend Beerbolme.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I understand what you’ve lost. And the years you dedicated to this city long before Reach took your family from you.”

  Gaunt gestured to the subterranean chamber around him and the hovering Wraith.

  “As you can see, we’re not the template of a perfect family, but we make do.”

  Maeve was doing her best not to look at the Wraith or provoke it in any way. She had not sat this still in years.

  “I was sent to Longforgotten by high councilor Michael Crawl. I thought he was helping me. Now I think he was just trying to get me out in the wild and isolate me. Three men tried to kill me on the way back. They had the mark of acolytes. Specifically Crawl’s mark.”