by Frank Tuttle
And we were off. I held on and bounced off walls and tripped on gods-know-what and got soaked to my waist, but I kept the Misters in sight. Along the way I tried to memorize turnings and windings but finally had to just give it up-if I got out before daylight it would be with the Trolls or not at all.
So I gave up plotting our course and decided to ruminate on other matters instead. First and foremost, my talking Trolls.
Translator spells-or spells of any kind, shape, intent or fashion-had always been anathema to Trolls. Perversions, they called magics. Betrayals of the land-spirits, or something. Trolls used no magic during the War, and it cost them dear all along, right up until they lost.
Our wand-wavers never quite came to grips with that. They were always expecting some last-minute barrage of deadly Troll magics, a barrage that never came because of some ancient philosophical taboo no Troll ever broke.
Until now. Here were three Walking Stones with translators. I was beginning to suspect they weren’t human-made translators, mainly because they worked too well. And though I’m no expert on Troll optometry I was beginning to suspect the Misters had some night vision spells going, too-we were charging headlong and Troll-quick through sewers blacker and darker than the Regent’s shriveled heart and the Misters never missed a step.
Trolls with magic. Magic-and the half-dead-gave us the slightest of edges in the War. A dozen Troll sorcerers could have easily tipped the scales the other way.
I picked up the pace. Half the time my feet were off the ground anyway. It’s hard to keep up with a Troll in a hurry.
It’s even harder to beat them back.
“Here,” said Mister Smith. Our charge slowed and halted. We all stood panting, though where we stood was a mystery to me.
“Hold out your hand,” said Mister Smith. I did.
A short, gnarled stick was put in my palm.
The sun rose in the sewers. It wasn’t much of a sun-dim, green, and it flickered like a candle in a breezy window-but it let me see.
I’d had night-eyes cast on me during my Army days. This was nothing like it.
Troll magic. I shivered.
“Do you see, my brother?” asked Mister Smith.
“I see,” I said. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
It wasn’t, really. We stood at the dead-end of a tunnel maybe ten feet high and twelve across. The stones were wet and covered with nine hundred years of foul on foul on foul. Bones lay strewn all down the length of the tunnel; all had been cracked open for the marrow, and though most were canine or feline, the big one by my right foot looked like it might once have been part of somebody’s favorite leg.
The smell? Take three hot and sweaty Trolls and run them through an aging urban sewer. Toss in a few thousand decaying rodent bodies for spice. Add another millennia of mold and human waste.
I didn’t retch, but it did cross my mind.
“So what now?” I asked. “We do what?”
“We stand,” said Mister Smith. “We wait.”
I shivered again. “If the half-dead follow us down here-”
“They will,” said Mister Chin. “They shall follow, and they shall seek, but they shall not find.”
“You hope,” I said.
“I know,” he replied. He lifted his hand.
His four-fingered hand began to glow. A dozen fist-sized globs of shimmering goo, like luminescent soap bubbles but thicker, formed and made tight orbits around his claws and then shot off down the tunnel, out of sight.
I gawked. “Behold,” said the Troll. “Confusion. Wrong scents. Wrong sounds. Wrong movements in the dark. They will see what is not there, not see what is before them. They will see Markhats in the shadows, Trolls faces in the waters, hear footfalls, always out of sight.”
Mister Chin was a wand-waver. A Troll wand-waver, casting Troll spells.
“And if the half-dead do stumble upon us,” said Mister Smith, “they will die. Here, they cannot fly. They cannot surround and strike our backs. They cannot ring us round and tear our flanks. Here, they must face us, claw-to-claw.”
I was still staring at Mister Chin’s Troll hand.
“You did magic,” I said at last. “Magic.”
Mister Smith grinned. Trolls shouldn’t grin at people they like. “Yes,” he said. “Magic.”
“Isn’t that a no-no?”
“It was,” he said. “Then. But no longer. Nor ever again.”
I gulped. “You would have won.”
“Yes.”
“You could win now.”
“We are not at war,” he said. “Nor do we wish to be.”
Down the tunnel rang a crack of distant baby thunder. Mister Chin guffawed.
“Booby traps?” I asked. Mister Smith nodded.
“One of many,” he said. “Laid days ago, waiting, watching, gathering strength. My Clan knows the ways of the caves, of the winding dark places, of the hidden things that crave blood. It shall be, as you say, a long night. For some. Shall we sit?”
I kicked trash and bones out of the way and sat. The Misters folded their knees backwards and made themselves at home.
Hours passed. Bells rang. Distant shrieks echoed down the dark tunnels. Booms and bangs followed, now distant, now close. Once light flared, and Mister Chin loosed a volley of bubbles from his claw, and shortly thereafter dozens of voices cried out, whether in agony or fear I could not tell.
But the voices fell silent, and aside from the now-constant rumbles of echoed Troll blasts we were left alone.
Just after the fourth bell, we heard furtive footsteps, the telltale tinkle of metal on stone. The Misters rose, Mister Chin’s hands suddenly full of bubbling Troll magics.
A rat the size of a bullmastiff dog rounded the corner. The skeletal human arm it bore in its jaws still wore a dangling length of silver bracelet. Mister Jones growled. Rat feet made fast pitter-patters back into the dark.
The Watch sounded the fifth hour, and soon after that little slants of sunlight crept past trash-choked storm drain grates. Between Mister Chin’s night stick and the sun, the sewers grew bright, like some civil-minded giant had lifted the streets to air the place out.
The sixth bell sounded, and traffic noise began. The Curfew was lifted; the day had begun; the night people were yawning in their holes, too sleepy to hunt that crafty Markhat any more today.
“We made it,” I announced. “Hurray for us.” I rose. My knees and back popped so loud Mister Jones asked me if I were injured.
I offered Mister Chin the night stick. “Keep it,” he said. “We have another night to face.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. Our own wand-wavers were never so free with their treats. “Shall we go back to my office and see what’s left?”
Mister Smith rose. “We shall,” he said.
We went. Three mighty Trolls and one stiff, sleepy human, all bathed in sewer-stuff, a bevy of barking dogs trailing us just for the fun of it. It wasn’t quite an Armistice Day parade, but we had almost as many oglers.
We rounded the corner at Cambrit.
I’d had callers in the night. They’d ripped my door off its hinges, stepped right in and made a mess visible from nearly a block away. Watchmen buzzed in and out of the hole in the wall like fat blue bees. Mama Hog waddled around among them, waving her fingers in various faces and snatching pens and the like-my pens, mind you-out of pockets and paws.
Mama Hog spotted us. “Get over here,” she bellowed, “before they steal everything that ain’t broke.”
Heads turned my way. Mister Smith chose that moment to yawn.
Trolls yawn like tigers roar.
Only two Watchmen were there by the time the Misters and I strolled on down the street.
The oldest Watchman, a gray-headed sergeant named Fleetcab with a scar all down the left side of his face, stood in Mister Smith’s shadow and tried to pretend that he had dealings with Trolls every day. “Somebody tore your place up, Markhat,” he said. “Any idea who that was?”
He grunted. His partner, a skinny kid of maybe twenty, stepped forward. “Could it have anything to do with your new associates, Mister Markhat?”
I was tired and wet and filthy. I’d spent the night in a sewer. Thirsty half-dead were sleeping with my picture under their pillows.
“My cousins?” I asked. “Now why would you say a thing like that?”
Mister Chin growled.
And that was that. No long hike downtown, no afternoon on the Square answering the same questions over and over in a ten-by-ten room decorated in Stifling Heat and Rank Body Odor. I scribbled my initials at the bottom of an incident report and waved the Watch goodbye.
Mama Hog was inside sweeping. Mister Chin was scooping out debris. Mister Jones was hammering together a new door out of two of Mama Hog’s old tables.
Me? I had plans to make, plots to hatch, baths to take-so naturally, I stripped, rolled up in an old green Army blanket and slept like the dead I was so very close to joining.
Chapter Three
I was dreaming. A tall, green-eyed blonde was stroking my hand and whispering my name. She had perfect elfin features and a mischievous wind threatened to remove her last few gauzy veils. I leaned a little closer, heard a noise, woke up-and was face-to-face with Mama Hog. I think I may have screamed.
Mama Hog was holding my left hand. And mumbling something under her breath. And she wasn’t a bit like the tall, elfin blonde in my dream.
I sat up. She hung on tight to my wrist and spat out a string of nonsense words.
“What the-”
“Shut up, boy,” she hissed. “You mess with the half-dead, you need this.”
I was wearing a bracelet or a wristlet or whatever you call a finger-width ring of tarnished brass chain a sham-artist soothsayer wraps around your wrist.
I snarled something and grabbed the thing with my right hand. “I’m a tolerant man, Mama, but I don’t appreciate people sneaking around and messing with me in my sleep,” I said. “I’m taking this thing off, and you can take it with you when you leave, which better be soon.”
But I wasn’t taking it off. It didn’t have a clasp or a joint or any way I could see to open it or loosen it.
“Mama-” But she was gone. I got up and stepped on a chunk of my broken desk and cussed some more and was still cussing when Mister Smith poked his head through my door.
“A child brings a message,” he said. A grime-streaked street urchin darted past the Troll and marched right up to me, a roll of paper gripped tight in his grimy little fist.
No fear in that kid’s eyes, not even for Trolls. I guess the street takes that early, these days.
“You Markhat?”
“I am.”
He handed me the paper. “They said you’d feed me.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Not today. But go next door-the door with the cards on it. Ask for Mama Hog. Tell her Markhat sent you. She’ll feed you till you bust.”
He went. I snickered and unrolled the paper. There was a map of the streets down by the river. An arrow pointed to the rear of a warehouse, the fifth one south of the big barge-docks. A hand-drawn clock lay at the arrow’s tail; the hands were both straight up. One stick figure stood at the door; three other, much larger stick figures stayed back in the street.
“What does it say?” asked Mister Smith.
“We meet them behind a certain warehouse, down by the river,” I said. “At midnight. Vampire lunchtime. I go in alone.”
Trolls grumbled.
“Mister Chin feels we should go now,” said Mister Smith. “Mister Jones is undecided.”
I yanked a clean shirt out of the pile in the floor. “They won’t have your cousin’s remains at the warehouse, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “Going early would just hack them off. They’ll be watching. You can bet on that.”
“They are without honor,” said Mister Smith.
“They are indeed,” I said. “And they’ll expect us to be the same.”
“So we wait, and we go, and we trust they will keep their bargain?”
“We do,” I said. “It’s that, or just declare war. And they’ll never hand it over if we start shoving. Trust me on this, Walking Stone. The rich don’t get richer by giving things up easy.”
Mister Smith’s big owl eyes bored into mine. “Haverlock would fight to keep a bauble, a thing of no worth?”
“Yep.” I hunted down socks as an excuse to look away.
“But gold-” he dangled the three chunks of gold he wore around his neck “-this yellow metal-it is worth fighting for? Worth dying for?”
“It isn’t the metal,” I said. “It’s what it will buy.”
“Will gold buy you life, my brother?”
I found a shoe. “It’ll buy roofs that don’t leak and food that doesn’t kill you. And a lot else. Around here, that’ll pass for life. Any day.” I stood. Mama Hog’s bracelet was still on my wrist, and I was tempted to ask Mister Smith if he wouldn’t mind tearing it off.
A second glance at a meaty Troll-paw and I pulled my shirtsleeve down instead. “I need a bath and a meal,” I said. “What about you gentlemen?”
“We will bathe in mountain streams ‘ere long,” said Mister Smith. “But a meal-have you sellers of fish, hereabouts?”
“We do,” I said. “Tell you what-you boys watch my back while I visit the bath house up the street, and I’ll treat you to a wagonload of Brown River catfish. Deal?”
“Deal,” said Mister Smith. His claws popped out an inch, and his big wet Troll eyes got wider. “Are these, perhaps, large catfish?”
“Big as my arms,” I said. “Let’s go. Big night ahead.” Last night ahead, said a snarky little voice in the back of my mind.
We went. The bracelet chafed and pulled hairs.
As I passed by Mama Hog’s, I smelled something cooking and hoped the kid ate like a Troll.
A wagonload of day-old catfish costs a crown and three jerks. I could have made twice that back by charging admission to the small crowd that watched my Trolls eat by tossing whole, raw catfish straight up and then leaping to gobble them out of the air as they fell.
“I always wanted to join the circus,” I told the Misters when the catfish and the crowds were gone. We were all stretched out on the grass under an old water-oak in Rannit’s one and only park. Kids were flying devil-faced kites on a green hill across from us. A woman and a manicured poodle-dog got caught in a Troll-belch of catfish fumes and ran off, yipping and shrieking.
“You should join this circus, then,” said Mister Smith.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “After tonight, maybe I will. If there is an after.”
“The spirits tell me all will be well,” replied Mister Smith. “They say our goals will all be met.”
“Spirits ever wrong?” I asked.
Mister Smith chuckled. “All the time,” he said. “But they mean well.”
I shut up and watched the grinning devil kites until the sun got fat and sank.
A chill hit the air. My Troll warriors belched catfish and scratched and sat up, all business.
“It was fun, gentlemen,” I said. “All of it. But we’ve got work to do.”
“We have shared a meal, shared a day,” said Mister Chin.
“We thank you,” said Mister Jones.
I stood and brushed grass off my butt. “You’re welcome, Walking Stones, the honor was mine,” I said, hoping that would suffice. Their words had the sound of some Walking Stone ritual, but it wasn’t one I knew.
Mister Smith yawned again and grumbled something, and after I pointed them toward the River we headed out.
The walk would take us until well after dark.
We’d be at the waterfront by Curfew.
And then, we’d see if Mister Smith’s well-meaning spirits had improved their foresight any since the War.
/> Night fell. Curfew fell. Drizzle fell. We were so close to the Brown River I could smell the cattle-barges through the stench of slaughter houses and paper mills.
Trolls can shut their nostrils, and hold them shut. I hadn’t known that. They were doing it now, except for Mister Smith, who kept his nose open to sniff for half-dead.
About half past the tenth bell, the drizzle became a downpour. That kept the Watch off us-they might wander around with the half-dead, but you won’t catch them getting wet-and left the night so dark and loud I could have paraded twenty Trolls with flags down the street and no one would have noticed.
So we found a burned-out building with two walls and a rubble heap standing and tried to spot half-dead through the storm. I’d wrapped a string around my nightstick and put it around my neck: as long as the stick touched my skin, night was day in shades of sickly green. The Haverlock warehouse was just ahead, all shadow and gloom.
Across town, down at the Square, the big old bells rang out eleven times. Nothing moved on our street. A barge drifted by our backs, a few lamps guttering, stinking of the mound of garbage that it bore. Mister Smith slammed his nostrils shut until the wind shifted.
Time passed. Then the bells on the Square boomed once, marking the half-hour.
My back ached and rain was running down it and no hat in the world can keep a driving rain out of your eyes.
“I’ve had it, boys,” I said. “Early or not, it’s time to go and knock on a door. Shall we?”
They rose. I watched them tower up and up and took what comfort I could from their bulk.
“We go forth as one,” boomed Mister Smith.
“Our cause is just,” said Mister Chin.
“Our hearts are brave,” said Mister Jones.
“My ass is wet,” I said.
We walked out in the rain. The street was empty. The warehouse was dark.
Mama Hog’s bracelet got hot. Not hot enough to burn me, but hot enough get my attention. I swatted it and yanked on it, but I swear it pulled itself tighter.
Mister Smith saw. His claws came out, and he barked something to the other Misters.
Dark, windowless warehouses loomed around us like canyon walls. The rain sleeted down sideways, soaking man and Trolls alike. Up close, I noticed that water slid off the Misters without wetting their fur.