by Frank Tuttle
It was dusk by the time I managed to wind a fresh bandage across my belly and have a wash and head for Avalante. I even picked up three bunches of daisies, one each for Mama and Gertriss and Buttercup. I doubted that a day of captivity, even in the shadowed opulence of Avalante, had left anyone but the banshee in an amiable state of mind.
I made my way back across town without being followed. I knew Gertriss would insist upon leaving, so I spent most of the trip preparing careful arguments against that.
House Avalante, I noted with some relief, still stood, shaded beneath its monstrous oaks. The mighty doors were intact. Jerle, the day man, met me with his customary lack of a smile. The air inside was cool, distinctly lacking in the odor of wood-smoke, and no screams issued down the walnut-paneled halls.
“Did a woman named Mama Hog make it here today?” I asked.
“Indeed, sir. You are expected.” He took my hat and coat. “Mr. Prestley is occupied. Bentley will show you to a parlor.”
“Just don’t let her at the wine. Makes her want to dance. We don’t want that.”
“Indeed not, sir. Bentley.”
A well-dressed halfdead glided out of a doorway. His eyes were covered with dark glasses. He smiled with his lips, without showing any teeth.
“This way, Mr. Markhat.”
I went.
Bentley took me a parlor I’d never seen before. It was only one floor down, which is at least three floors above Evis and his cavernous rooms. He opened the door for me, motioned me inside, and closed it behind me.
I sat. My stomach growled. The room, despite being underground, was hot and stuffy. I was loosening my tie when the door opened again and Gertriss and Buttercup darted inside.
Buttercup darted, actually. Gertriss was merely hanging on. Buttercup squealed at the sight of the flowers and did a happy little dance around my knees.
“Here you go, kid,” I said, handing her a bunch of yellow daisies. “And for you too,” I added, handing another to Gertriss.
I didn’t like the look on her face.
It was, in fact, the I-have-bad-news look I’ve come to know too well.
That, and Mama’s absence, sent me sinking back in my chair.
“Oh no. Don’t tell me. They’ve locked Mama up already.”
“Worse, boss.” She pulled up chair to face me and sat herself before brushing a lock of golden hair out of her eyes.
“Boss, Mama’s not here. She slipped out right after we arrived. I’m sorry, boss. She’s gone.”
“Gone where? Back to Cambrit?”
“She’s not in Rannit at all. She’s heading home. To Pot Lockney. Going after the hex-caster herself.” Gertriss fished in a pocket. “She left a note. I was trying to get Buttercup settled in, and by the time I noticed it was quiet, it was too late.”
I took the paper and cussed.
Mama, I realized, had this stunt planned the whole time she pretended to argue about staying at Avalante.
And I’d lapped it up and not seen it coming. “Not your fault, Miss. Mama played us both. I just gave her a head start and an excuse to pack a bag, bringing her here.”
Buttercup reached up and stroked the stubble on my chin and giggled. Gertriss pulled her back and sat her on her lap while I unfolded Mama’s note and read.
“Boy,” it said. “You ought to have knowed I wasn’t going to sleep in no house of the halfdead. And that hex-caster ought to have knowed not to mess with Mama Hog.”
I snorted. Typical Mama. How she crams so much ego into such a tiny frame ought to be studied someday.
“I’m going home. I keeps a house outside Pot Lockney. House is called the old Plegg house what sits on Plague Hill. I’m going there, and I’m going to set up shop and before I’m done I’m going to nail me a hex-caster’s head to my front door. It’s partly about you and my niece and partly about me. If’n I don’t pull this here hex-caster’s teeth, boy, people hereabouts are going to start taking the name Hog lightly. I won’t have that. You wouldn’t either, and you knows it. Now, I reckon you’ve got your hands full with your work, and I’ve got mine to do. So don’t be coming to Pot Lockney, thinking old Mama needs help. Because I don’t, boy, and that’s a fact. You tell Miss High and Mighty the same thing, you hear? I’ll send letters back as I can. And when I’m done, boy, you won’t be needing to worry about no more hexed folks setting your door alight. I’m going after blood, and I aims to spill it. Mind that banshee and my niece. And yourself. I’ll work as fast as I can but this ain’t over yet so you watch your step.”
She’d left it unsigned. I folded it and handed it back to Gertriss, who sighed and patted Buttercup’s tousled head.
“Got to give Mama one thing. She caught us both with this one. Did you know she had a house in Pot Lockney?”
“Everybody knows Plague Hill, boss. It’s haunted. Been haunted forever. I had no idea Mama owned it. There’s going to a panic when she starts lighting lamps, I can tell you that. The whole hill is cursed. Something from the old days.”
I grunted. “It’s cursed now if it wasn’t before. All right. We can’t go chasing after Mama with a banshee in tow, and even if we caught up to her there’d be no turning her back. Agreed?”
Gertriss nodded. “If she’s gone after the hex-caster’s head she won’t stop until his teeth are in her pocket.”
“Well put. So. We work our end, figure out as much as we can about the people the caster is sending.”
“Sounds good.” Buttercup began to sing softly, her words either a made-up babbling or some pre-Kingdom tongue dead so long all knowledge of it was lost. “Of course, that leaves you here with Buttercup. Could be a long stay.”
Gertriss bit her lip. She wanted to protest, but Mama left her without any real options, just as Mama intended.
“So I just sit here. Take naps. Comb my hair. Is that it, boss?”
“Enjoy it while it lasts, Miss, because it won’t last long.” I rose. Buttercup played with her flowers. Gertriss glared, not at me in particular, but at everything in general.
“I’ve got to see if I can roust Evis out,” I said. “Then I’ll head home. I’ll drop back around tomorrow, check on you two.” I crouched and put myself eye level with Buttercup. “You be a good girl for Aunt Gertriss.”
The banshee pinched my nose and broke into squeals of laughter. Gertriss gave me a forced half-smile and gathered up Buttercup, and we were both nearly at the door when Bentley swung it silently open.
“Allow me to show you to your rooms, Miss,” he said. “Mr. Markhat. Mr. Prestley would like to see you. Take the hall to the stairs. I believe you know the way.”
“I do indeed. Miss. Miss.”
Gertriss bade me goodnight and followed Bentley away. Buttercup looked up at me from her shoulder and winked as they vanished around a corner.
I took to the stairs. I’d never been left alone in the House before. It sounded of that peculiar quiet one can only find in deep places underground.
I hurried even deeper into the dark.
Evis is indeed a vampire, but the man keeps fine cigars.
Chapter Twelve
It was my turn to puff away on an expensive cigar and fail utterly to blow smoke rings while Evis did the fuming and muttering.
“Markhat, you don’t understand. Mama left the House unseen. Unseen, I tell you. That can’t happen.”
“Maybe not, but it did.” I let smoke crawl out of my mouth. “Mama is mostly put-on, but the old girl has a genuine trick or two up her sleeve, I suppose. Although I suspect she just sat in a dustbin and let Jerle put her by the curb.”
“This isn’t funny, Markhat. An elderly soothsayer breached House security. From within. You couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. But Mama did it, somehow.”
Evis rose and paced. The lit end of his cigar glowed bright in the perpetual shadow of his office. His dead eyes shone bloody in the glow.
“We’ll ask her how she did it when she gets back.”
Evis shook his he
ad and sagged a bit. “Yes. Yes, we will. And you know damned well she’ll just cackle and spit in our eyes.”
“Probably. But if you bring a House wand-waver or two into the room, and have them ask her, politely, how she pulled one over on them, she might spill it. As long as they are appropriately awed by her obvious skills.”
Evis looked at me, his eyes still glowing in the cigar’s crimson light.
“You think that would work?”
“An appeal to Mama’s ego? Seriously? How could it fail?”
A ghost of a grin crossed his pale face.
“You just earned another cigar, Captain.”
I grimaced. “Finder. I’m not in uniform. Won’t ever be, hopefully.”
Evis returned to his chair.
“Speaking of the Army—”
“Let’s not.”
“Oh, but we must. I did something yesterday, you see. I think you’ll be interested to hear about it.”
“Unless it involves desertion, probably not.”
Evis chuckled and fished another cigar from the case and clipped the end off with a silver clipper before handing it to me. I snuffed my old one out and took one of the fancy matches from the box and lit it, first try, on the scratching-stone beside the box.
I sucked and puffed until it was well and truly alight. Evis waited until then before speaking.
“I rode down to the Old Wall. Same place you did, I understand. Busy place. Soldiers milling around. Officers thicker than flies at a funeral. Do you know what I did, Markhat?”
“Ran over the first lieutenant you saw?”
“I walked right up to the man in charge. I identified myself only as Evis Prestley of House Avalante. I ordered the man to assign fifty of the troops guarding the street onto the scaffolds so they could lay bricks. I ordered another twenty-five to assist with the mixing of mortar.” Evis took a long draw. “Can you guess what happened next?”
“Before or after he ordered you beaten to a bloody mess?”
Evis shook his head.
“He complied. With each and every instruction. Without question. Without hesitation.”
“You’re joking.”
“I am not. Un-uniformed, un-credentialed and outranked, I gave a series of orders. Orders which were immediately followed. I suspect you could do the same.”
“What the Hell?”
Evis waved his cigar. “Why were we drafted into the Corpsemaster’s army?”
“Because she’s a capricious monster who thought it was funny?”
“Possibly. Or partly. But consider this. We have apparently been given authority far in excess of our assigned rank. We were inducted, but not deployed. Indeed, we have been given no orders of any kind—is that so?”
“So far, that’s true. What are you thinking?”
“Politics. Finder. Even the Corpsemaster has obligations. Allegiances to maintain. New alliances to forge. Enemies to quell. Friends to placate.”
“Victims to torture. Corpses to steal. I get that. She’s a busy old spook.”
“The cannons. The gunpowder. Developed in secret. The war, kept secret thus far. What does that suggest?”
I took a puff and longed for beer. “I just assumed she was keeping the cannons to herself. Wand-wavers don’t like to share their toys. Especially the toys that make magic obsolete.”
“True. But what if one or more of Rannit’s other wand-wavers is working with Prince? What if the Corpsemaster is working alone because she is the Regent’s last ally?”
I took that in.
“Beer would be nice.”
Evis pressed the thing behind his desk that summoned a servant and a bucket of ice-cold beer.
“That would put us on the wrong side of some very nasty people.”
Evis nodded in the dark. “Indeed.”
The beer came. We cradled our bottles and drank in silence for a bit.
“So why bring us in? The Corpsemaster hardly lacks for bodies, warm and otherwise.”
“I wondered that too. Until last night. Now it seems obvious.”
“I’m afraid it’s not obvious to half the room,” I said. “Take pity on the unschooled finder, and spell things out for him, will you?”
Evis drained his beer. “It’s like this. She hasn’t given us orders because she doesn’t want to know what we’re doing. Because if she knows, maybe somebody else does too. We’re dealing with wand-wavers here. You and I know there’s no telling what kinds of things they get up to.”
“So we’re to operate outside her camp because, despite all the precautions she’s taken, you think someone on the inside is working for Prince?”
“Working for Prince. Working against the Regent. Working for the highest bidder. Doesn’t matter to us. We’ve been given the means to upset everyone’s apple-cart, at least once, and I think she expects us to do something so clever that even she’s surprised by our wit.”
I drained my beer. “And what, pray tell, would that mighty feat be?”
“No idea whatsoever. I figured all that out. It’s your turn to stop the war.”
“Going to need more beer.”
“Cutting you off after that one. Military decorum, you know. Can’t have our esprit de corps coming out of a bottle.”
I blinked.
“You’re serious.”
Evis nodded. “I am.”
“You think the Corpsemaster wants us to win the war. Us. You and me. All by ourselves.”
“I think she wants us to do whatever it is she can’t do.”
“Which is?”
“That’s what we’ve got to figure out. Here. Look at this.”
He reached into the shadows at the end of his desk and twisted the neck of a lamp. Light flared, revealing the map spread over the entire right-hand side of his enormous oak desk.
Rannit was at the south end of the map. The Brown River bisected Rannit and ran the length of the map, all the way up to Prince.
Evis stabbed Prince with his bony fingertip.
“Word is they’re sending four hundred barges. Each loaded with twenty-two cannon, seven man crews, and enough ammunition for five hundred volleys.”
“That’s eight thousand, eight hundred cannon.” I frowned as I multiplied. “Fired four and a half million times.”
“Give or take, yes. With forty thousand infantry marching along the Brown as escort, who are in turn supported by at least three wand-wavers. If my information is correct, that would be the Storm, the Quiet Man, and Mother.”
I knew the names. They were Hisvin’s equals, if not her betters.
“How good is your information?”
“Very good. The House has been watching this situation for some time.”
“Forget their cannons. Does the Corpsemaster have a chance against those three?”
Evis shrugged. “Hard to say. Storm is getting on in years. We hear the Quiet Man went daft after the Truce. We know Mother nearly bought it during the War when Hisvin dropped a mountain on her. And there’s always the chance the wand-wavers will only stick together until they see a weakness in one another. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they went at each others’ throats on the march here.”
“We can hope.”
“We’d better do more than hope.” Evis leaned over the map. I did the same. “You know anything about barges, finder?”
“Worked a couple of summers on the docks as a kid. Barges are slow. They don’t steer worth a damn. They stink. Any of that help?”
“Four hundred barges, finder. I’ve never been up north. How wide is the Brown, most of the way?”
“Wide and shallow. You’ll see barge masters run five or six abreast, some places. Single file, others. ” I frowned. “Are these Gantish barges, Evis? Or the ones they use up above Prince?”
“They’re not Gantish. We checked. They spent last year building them about twenty miles north of Prince.”
“Then you can’t sink the damned things, Evis. Gantish barges, maybe, because they have hulls a
nd decks. But not these northern barges. Most of them are nothing but three layers of logs planed down and banded together with iron and chain. They don’t sink, and they won’t burn.”
Evis nodded, his white eyes distant.
I rose. I knew Evis’s office well enough to pace it in the dark.
“And they’re flanked by an army.” Something in a display case flashed at me. “With arcane support.”
“Some would call that unassailable.”
“Which is why the Corpsemaster isn’t attacking the barges.”
“Possibly. Or perhaps she knows there isn’t time to move men and material to a suitable ambush location.”
I halted close enough to see the map.
“They’ve got one shot at this, don’t they?”
“One, and one only. If they don’t take Rannit quickly, they’ll be bankrupt and unable to pay their troops or resupply their cannon. The principals have each committed their personal fortunes to this, as well as emptying Prince’s coffers. I suspect the Regent and the Corpsemaster are in similar straits. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. But maybe we’re thinking too big. We can’t sink the barges, or burn them out, or take a whack at the troops. You agree with that?”
“Sadly, yes.”
“But maybe we can delay them. Keep them hemmed up. Make them bleed money. How long can they pay the troops?”
“I’ll have to inquire as to the specifics. I suspect no more than a matter of weeks. What are you thinking?”
“The Battery. Remember where Hisvin showed us her toys?”
“I do. What of it?”
“Those big holes in the ground? The ones that used to be buildings?”
“I believe she said those sites were the result of accidents. Accidents involving the gunpowder, which is unstable during production.”
“We can’t get enough cannon up there soon enough to just blast away at them. Even if we did, the wand-wavers would knock them down. I see that. But Evis. This place.” I put my finger on a squiggle in the River, about two-thirds of the way from Prince to Rannit. “Sheer high bluffs. The River narrows to a spot barely wide enough for two barges to pass. I know we can’t get cannon up there—but what if we just dumped a couple of wagons of the gunpowder on the bluffs and lit it and ran like Hell? If we could knock the top off the bluffs, we might make the River impassable, at least until they spent a month hauling rocks out of the mud.”