False Covenant (A Widdershins Adventure)

by Ari Marmell

  Julien nodded once, brusquely, and stepped out into the corridors, his actively not-grinning friend close on his heels.

  Not at all unlike his namesake, Squirrel crouched in the branches of a large tree that sprouted alongside the partially paved lane. Between the thickening darkness and the lush foliage of late spring, he was utterly invisible to passersby. (Or he would have been, had there been any.)

  But while the world might have been oblivious to him, he was not at all oblivious to the world—much as he might wish he were. While the smell of the leaves and the fading aromas of Davillon's busy days might have overpowered the distant smell of peppermint, nothing—not even the hands he clasped desperately over his ears—could drown out the sounds emerging from the shop across the way.

  “Ooh! Are we playing hide-and-seek? How high am I supposed to count?”

  “Help me! Get away from me! Get away!”

  “Well, that's no good. How are you supposed to hide from me if you're screaming like that? You really have no idea how to play this game, do you?”

  “Help me! Somebody, please! Help…Oh, gods!”

  “You're making me cross, now. Here.” Squirrel winced at the horrid, wet ripping sound, followed by a gurgle only vaguely recognizable as a human voice. “There! Won't be screaming without one of those, will you? Now we can play!”

  The gurgle sputtered once, then faded.

  “Oh. Huh. You're all so fragile.” The shop's old walls and shuttered windows kept Squirrel from seeing so much as a single gesture of what was happening inside, but he was certain the gaunt creature who was now his master must have shrugged. “But delicious.”

  Squirrel's whimpers masked the worst of the lapping, squishing, and dry crackling to follow.

  But what followed those, oddly enough, were a series of crashes and thumps, as though the thing inside was ransacking the shop. And accompanying the not-so-musical tones of a careless search, a cheerful, jaunty whistling.

  Eventually, the clattering and the whistling both ended with a satisfied, “Aha! Here we are! Some of those and some of these, some for you's and some for me's…”

  Wood thumped against stone, and one of the shuttered windows flew open. The floppy hat emerged, followed by the rest of Squirrel's master. He crawled across the wall with only a single hand; in the other, he clutched what appeared to be a bedsheet, tied into a makeshift sack and stained with fresh blood. Where the bricks ended, he dropped to his feet and progressed directly to the tree in which his reluctant servant was concealed.

  “Come down, come down! I have surprises for all my good little boys and girls!”

  It took every ounce of will for Squirrel to pry his hands free from the bark and force himself to descend.

  “Uh, master?”

  That mostly human head cocked to one side. “A question, a question! I think I have an answer or two just lying around. Shall we see if they match?”

  “Well…I was just…”

  “Oh, no. Never be just.” A long finger wagged in Squirrel's face. “Never, ever, ever. Understand?”

  “Um…Yes?”

  “Goody!”

  “I was ju—that is, I was wondering…Was the shopkeep enough for tonight? For, uh, for you? I mean, that wasn't, well, it wasn't exactly quiet, and the Guard—”

  “Enough? Enough? Silly, stupid child, there is no enough, oh, no. Never. The loud old man was stale and dry and not very sweet at all. We didn't come to him for supper.”

  “No? Then why…?”

  The creature's grin widened enough to split his face clear across the middle. With a dramatic flourish, he flung the bedsheet upon the earth, yanking it so that it rolled open as it landed. Within rested an entire array of glazed pastries; brightly colored hard candies; and rich, sticky toffees.

  “I told you already, forgetful thief. Surprises for all my good little boys and girls! Just as soon as you show me where to find them….”

  Squirrel stared in horror at the tempting treats spread out before him, and softly began to cry.

  He'd known it had to be bad.

  From the moment Constable Sorelle had appeared in the doorway to his office, scarcely capable of stringing two words together in any coherent fashion, his face fish-belly pale and his eyes wide as carriage wheels, Julien had known that his day was about to become very, very unpleasant. Throughout the journey, as Paschal led him through the afternoon crowds, carving a path through Davillon's bustling streets, he'd contemplated and considered, imagining a dozen and one scenarios, each worse than the last. He'd questioned the constable time and again, but the normally unflappable Guardsman was so distraught that Julien couldn't find it in him to berate the man for his unprofessional demeanor.

  He'd known it had to be bad. But not even in the darkest of his imaginings could Julien Bouniard—who had been a member of the Davillon Guard all his adult life, who had been present a few years back at the discovery of the worst massacre in the city's modern history—have anticipated how bad.

  A crowd had gathered in their path, facing a small courtyard formed by the corners of several modest houses. An angry grumbling pawed at his ears, punctuated by sobs and the occasional gasp. Scattered throughout that assembly were several men and women in the black and silver of the Guard; men and women who should have been dispersing the crowd, or otherwise securing the scene, and yet instead were only staring alongside their fellow citizens.

  Major Bouniard began to shove and elbow his way through, barking orders and scowling at every constable failing in his or her duty…. And then stopped as something crunched beneath his boot. He looked down to study the broken slice of candied fruit, cracked and smeared on the roadway, and initially assumed it was simple litter, unimportant and readily dismissed.

  Or so it seemed, until he saw a second sliver of the same confection, as well as an uneven wedge of chocolate, a peppermint stick, a gooey handful of pastry stuck to the brick of a nearby wall…

  A trail. It was a trail of sugary leavings, just as one might find in the wake of a passel of schoolchildren or unsupervised urchins. It led…Why, it led toward that same courtyard to which Paschal had been guiding him!

  A courtyard whose entranceway Julien could now see. An entryway in which lay a little toy pony, its stitches torn, its stuffing scattered. And beside that, just the faintest scrap of what, beneath the drying blood, might have been the hem of a brightly dyed floral print dress.

  “Oh, gods…”

  Julien didn't have to push his way through anymore. The crowd melted aside, allowing him to pass—now that he desperately didn't want to.

  They were all so small. It was hard to imagine that they'd ever been anything more than heaps of clothes and flesh, hair and bone; that they'd ever laughed and cried, run and skipped.

  That they'd ever squealed with delight over the sweet promises of the scattered candies.

  Half a dozen of them. Half a dozen voices that would never laugh again, half a dozen lives that would never be lived, half a dozen families that would never be whole.

  Julien literally, physically reeled beneath the enormity of it. He might well have fallen, had he not been near enough to slap a palm against one of the neighboring walls and hold himself upright. Beyond that, however, there was nothing. He did not cry, as many of the crowd, and even several of his constables, were doing now. His gut didn't churn, though several wet and rancid stains on the cobbles outside the courtyard suggested that more than a few of the witnesses had emptied their stomachs over what they saw.

  It wasn't that Julien had grown suddenly hard, that he didn't care. It was that, for the nonce, he'd simply been numbed by it all. Later, he knew, it would hit him. He would shake, and he would sob, and he would beg Demas or Vercoule or any other god for an explanation that he knew he'd never receive. But for now, it remained at some small remove, outside him rather than a part of him. He couldn't take it in, not all of it.

  And that was good. It meant, for the moment, that he could do his job. Julien allo
wed himself one second to think I wish old Sergeant Chapelle were here, and then forced himself to take in the entire scene.

  It took some time to notice, because it required examining the tiny bodies directly, and neither Julien nor any of the others had any desire to do so, but eventually he recognized a peculiar inconsistency. Whatever it was that Iruoch did to most of his victims—draining? drinking? desiccating? Whatever process led to the cracking, parchment skin, the shriveled flesh, the relative paucity of blood…it wasn't universal here. Three of the poor children were, indeed, nothing more than bones and dusty leather. But a fourth was, for lack of a better word, floppy, as though the process had only been about halfway completed; and the other two were merely murdered (as if that wasn't bad enough), their pale skin showing wounds of the foulest sort, but their bodies otherwise left intact.

  Had the creature's appetite finally been sated? If so, had he only slaughtered the remaining victims to indulge some sadistic pleasure?

  Or had something happened, something to distract Iruoch from his ghastly repast? Something of sufficient import to draw him away? Julien had no evidence to that effect, but every instinct he'd developed as a City Guardsman screamed at him that this latter possibility was indeed the case.

  Thus, when another moment's investigation actually did provide the evidence to support that assertion, he was already prepared to act on it.

  In the smears of blood on the cobblestones, and small patches of dirt in or alongside the road, Julien found sporadic tracks. The first set was bizarre, puzzling, and difficult to follow. They were more smears than prints, only occasionally taking the shape of a shoe, as though the man who left them behind hadn't been walking so much as skipping, sliding, even pirouetting on his way. These tracks began just beside the partially drained body, which was splayed and broken on the earth. Unless Julien was badly mistaken, it had simply been dropped and abandoned in the midst of—of whatever it was that was being done to it.

  A second set of prints, smaller than the first and far more normal in both shape and pattern, joined the first toward the edge of the courtyard. They followed behind—a companion, perhaps, or a servant?—and whoever left them seemed to be making some effort to avoid stepping through the worst of the carnage.

  The trail would never be sufficient to lead them to the perpetrators of this ghastly crime. Blood on the boots, patches of mud in the road; such signs would fade quickly enough, especially given the added complication of additional pedestrians on the street. Still, it might continue far enough to give Julien some general sense of direction, maybe even reveal the district into which his quarry had gone.

  “Constable Sorelle!” And then, louder, as Paschal continued to gawk vacantly at the scattered remains, “Constable Sorelle!”

  “Sir!” The constable practically shot from his boots. “Yes, sir?”

  “Select two Guardsmen. One is to remain with you and secure the courtyard; the other is to report back to headquarters and summon extra investigators to search the scene.”

  “Yes, sir. And you?”

  “I,” Julien said grimly, “will be taking the rest of the unit with me, and we're going to do our damnedest to hunt this monster down and end the gods-damned thing!”

  The gathered Guardsmen didn't have to be told twice. Hearing the major's intent, they shook themselves from their fugue and converged on him, whereupon—accompanied by the angry mutters and bloodthirsty encouragement of the crowd—they set out to follow the feeble trail for as long as the gods, fate, or plain dumb luck would allow.

  Madame Berdine Jolivet, the Marquise de Lamarr, was not among the wealthiest, most powerful, or most popular of Davillon's aristocrats. She wasn't in disfavor, by any means; she just didn't particularly stand out in high society. At any other time in modern history, any party she might host at her manor would have garnered only a modest attendance, with a few semi-impressive guests, and perhaps a few whispered words of gossip over the course of the following day or three.

  But this was not any other time in modern history. Not only were Davillon's nobility actively struggling to avoid showing any concessions to (or even awareness of) the city's economic woes, but now the growing threat of some horrid phantom or murderer stalking the streets made the comfort and safety of numbers even more appealing. Tonight, then, a great many private guards from half a dozen different noble houses strode the lawn and the garden paths of the Lamarr estate, and the house itself was absolutely crammed to capacity, and beyond, with aristocrats of every rank and position, to say nothing of the army of servants required to feed and entertain aristocrats of every rank and position. Had Beatrice Luchene, the Duchess of Davillon herself, thrown such a party at this same time last year, it probably wouldn't have boasted as many attendees.

  Every space not occupied by people was, instead, occupied by tables. These had long since lost the strength even to groan under the weight of the piled meats and fowls and pastries and fruits, and instead settled for the occasional despairing whimper. Nobody leaned against the walls, despite the press of the throng, because doing so would have entangled them in the hanging banners of Vercoule and other various gods. Dancing was simply out of the question as well, as there was insufficient space for more than a few couples at a time. Despite this fact, Jolivet's hired musicians played on from a balcony above—played on for an audience consisting largely of themselves, since only the most keen-eared members of the throng below could possibly have heard more than every fourth or fifth note.

  And as it happened, the keenest of those keen ears was listening for something entirely unrelated to the music.

  Widdershins—or, rather, Madeleine—made her rounds of the hors d'oeuvres, the wines, and the various social cliques with as much grace and poise as the overly friendly conditions would permit. Her golden-blonde wig and the expert makeup (designed not so much to enhance her appearance, but to further blur the similarities between each of her two identities) were the same as they always were, but her garb—customarily emerald in hue—tonight consisted of a gold-and-burgundy-trimmed gown rather less full than the hoop skirts that were currently in fashion. Much as she hated the damn things, her failure to wear one now wasn't a stylistic choice; rather, the effort of getting into one, let alone supporting it throughout the evening, aggravated the stiffness in her chest and shoulder that Olgun hadn't entirely healed.

  Fortunately, she wasn't the only lady present who'd chosen to eschew those monstrously stiff fabric enclosures, so while she wasn't exactly the height of fashion, neither did she particularly stand out. And it meant she was far more comfortable, and far more agile, than most of the women crammed into the Lamarr household.

  Gliding through the room (or, more accurately, shoving and elbowing her way through the room with as much courtesy as shoving and elbowing permit), she took a dainty bite of this, a small sip of that, an appreciative sniff of the other; bestowed a dazzling smile or a respectful nod to all who knew her; and otherwise allowed her body to coast through the party-going motions while straining her own ears and Olgun's magics to pick up any words of import.

  Unfortunately, while most conversations she overheard touched on Davillon's current woes, she learned precious little that she hadn't already known. Conspiracies regarding the identity of the crazed killer ranged from some sort of demon summoned from the Pit, to a witch preparing for a horrid ritual, to a scheme on the part of city officials to take more power from the private citizens and place it in the hands of the Guard, to the ghosts of the poor who had died during Davillon's financial difficulties. (There were, of course, a few who assumed that none of the rumors were true, and that no such attacks or murders had occurred at all, but these were largely excluded from the conversation by those who knew better, or thought they did.)

  She learned that the Guard patrols had indeed doubled in size and frequency, that every noble house had hired on extra soldiers of their own, and that—in the face of the murderer's apparent supernatural nature—attendance at religious
services had quadrupled in the past week, as people's anger at the Church for its treatment of the city slowly gave way to their need for protection against the ghouls and goblins of the night.

  But as to hard facts, believable theories, or actual plans regarding what the city should do about it all…well, they were about as common at this aristocrats' party as honest smiles or genuine compliments.

  “Why, Mademoiselle Valois! What an exquisite pleasure to see you here!”

  “Oh, goose muffins. Olgun, you really need to learn how to make either me, or other people, completely invisible.” In a far louder and more cheerful tone, she called, “Baron d'Orreille! As I live and breathe!” And then, once more in a tone far too low to be overheard, “And gag. And possibly retch.”

  She felt Olgun's chuckle across the back of her scalp.

  Charles Doumerge, the Baron d'Orreille—or “Baron Weasel-face,” where Madeleine was concerned—scurried and twisted his way through the throng so that he might bow obsequiously to her and kiss the back of her hand with thin, dry lips. Since Madeleine couldn't have escaped without Olgun's supernatural aid (aid, it's worth pointing out, that she seriously considered calling upon, despite the need for secrecy and subtlety), she kept the smile plastered firmly to her face and allowed her hand to suffer in order to protect the rest of her.

  Doumerge's bony form straightened so awkwardly, Madeleine actually found herself looking for the strings that must surely be puppeteering him. A gray-faced, straw-haired, limp rag of a fellow, Doumerge had attempted to gussy himself up in tunic and trousers of pristine white, a vest sparkling with gold lace, and a broad sash of a wine hue. The last was so near to being royal purple that it not only bordered on insolence, but stuck a toe across that border and mouthed various obscenities at anyone on the other side.

  None of it did the tiniest glimmer of good. He remained a gaunt, unimpressive rodent of a man. But he was a man with powerful friends, and who himself hosted many elaborate soirees, and whom Widdershins had successfully robbed more than once, so it paid to stay polite, however difficult it might be.