by Various
One of the dilapidated farmhouse’s doors was hanging open, so I slipped inside—where a lantern was suddenly lit, dazzling my eyes.
“Majesty,” said a slightly bored-sounding voice.
“Malko?” I said, dumbfounded.
“I have a horse, fresh clothes, some food and water cans, and gold, sir,” my old valet said. “You should perhaps make haste. Unless I can discourage you from this folly.”
“How could you possibly be waiting for me here?”
“I have seen your break-fall in use before, sir,” he said, a small, neat man who had always served me loyally, though I was never quite sure if he liked me. “I could imagine no other way you would escape apprehension in the sky, and given prevailing winds, it seemed likely you would be blown this way, and make for whatever shelter was most convenient. As this is the only structure in the vicinity…” He shrugged, as if his actions were obvious and inevitable; but he was always that way. “It would be better for us all if you came back. Your departure has been the cause of… much speculation. Some say you went mad, others that you fell in love, others that you are on a spiritual quest.”
“Hardly any of those. I committed war crimes,” I said, kneeling to check the provisions he’d bought, busying myself so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “You know that.”
“I suppose the argument could be made, sir, but you need not fear prosecution—the only court that would dare apprehend and try a sitting head of state was in the capital of Carolignia, and… that place is no more.”
“I know.” I closed my eyes. “I saw its end.” I engineered its end. Carolignia was my country’s principal rival. We’d skirmished at our borders for generations, and when I took over as king after years in charge of the army, years overseeing young men dying in the foothills, I decided there must be a cleaner kind of war, a definitive end to the conflict. Cloudboats had been invented in my country, the first ones built by my ancestors in the Mountains of the Moon, among those peaks that touch the clouds, where there are lamaseries and temples built of pure silver. All those years later we only had two of the ships left—most were burned when the treaties outlawing cloudmining were enacted generations before—and I oversaw the reconstruction of one, a ship that became the Avenging Crow.
I’d had a simple realization, you see. Clouds are a complex interaction between two substances, the impossibly buoyant cloudstuff and their heavy silver linings. The weight of the silver holds the cloudstuff down, a mere several thousand feet in the sky, and fortunes (and droughts) had been made by removing the silver and letting the vaporous cloudstuff float away.
But the cloudstuff also held the tremendous weight of the silver up. What if the cloudstuff were removed, suctioned off by suckhoses, leaving the silver entirely unsupported? I reasoned that such an act wouldn’t even break any treaties—those rules outlawed extracting the silver from the clouds, not vice versa.
It seemed to me that if the cloudstuff were removed, the silver would quite simply fall from the sky.
“I thought it would be a show of force,” I said, sitting in the darkness of a broken house. “I thought the silver would punch a hole through the roof of their Senate, perhaps kill one or two of their philosophers. I would show them that we could strike the very heart of their capital, drop rocks from heaven and spoil their weather, and the Carolignians would agree to an expansion of my borders. I didn’t expect… I didn’t calculate…”
Malko was silent.
“Do you know what happens, when you let several tons of solid silver fall seven-thousand feet to the ground? I do. I’ve seen it. The capital city was obliterated, Malko. You have heard descriptions, but you cannot imagine. Nothing remained but a smoking hole. The noise was deafening. The plume of dust rose so high, I could almost reach out and touch it from the deck of the Avenging Crow.”
“It is a potent weapon,” Malko said. “And it served its purpose—Carolignia surrendered unconditionally.”
“It was an abomination. An abomination my generals were eager to see used again and again. Especially Iorek, who wants to rule the whole of the world.” I shook my head. “Never again. Not by our people. I will not allow it. And while my brother could poi son me in the palace, he cannot so easily remove me when I am loose in the world.”
“How long will you run?” Malko asked.
I shrugged. “Until I’ve invented a device that can knock cloudboats out of the sky from the ground. Until I’ve built prototypes and placed them in the hands of every government I’ve ever heard of. My pack is filled with sketches, some quite promising. I will come back, Malko. When I’ve neutralized the threat we’ve become.”
“I suppose I understand,” Malko said. “The business of kings is not my business.” He paused. “But I must ask—why did you hide on a cloudmining vessel? You despise such outlaws, you always called them scavengers of the sky, and had them hung when they were apprehended inside our borders.”
“They are horrible people,” I agreed. “But every scrap of silver I remove from the sky is a scrap of silver that can’t be dropped as a weapon on the people below. Drought is a terrible thing… but there are worse ends, Malko.” I clapped my hand on his shoulder. “Good-bye, old friend.”
“Where will you go?”
“If I don’t tell you, no one can make you say. But I promise I’ll send the occasional letter, if only to let Iorek know I’m alive, and still king. Now—where’s that horse? I think I’m ready to spend some time traveling a bit closer to the ground.”
Copyright © 2009 Tim Pratt
Books by Tim Pratt
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
Blood Engines
Poison Sleep
Dead Reign
Spell Games
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Little Gods
Hart & Boot & Other Stories
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Chicago, 1971
Sammy Ricca poured himself a slug the color of old honey, spilling hardly any of it. He lifted the glass to his mouth, and the cheap whiskey rippled as he tapped it with his upper lip, pretending to drink it. He peered through the blurry amber at a tall, lean shadow in a gray suit, and he said, “I heard they were using that old tree again. Word’s getting around.”
“That was the idea,” the button man murmured. And then, “You may as well drink that.”
Sammy threw back a mouthful, as suggested. He shifted his ass so he could sit on the edge of his desk. A pen cracked under his weight, and dark blue ink pooled beneath his thigh. “This isn’t about Angelo.”
“I already know about Angelo.”
“I could tell you—”
“Everything you know, you sang already.” Beside Sammy’s swiftly staining leg sat an ugly Lucite ashtray. It was emblazoned with the logo of a bar that’d burned down years ago. The button man sighed, and wished he had a cigarette.
“Raul, the money wasn’t—”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do. Before me it was Dragna, and before him, Carlo. What we had in common, it wasn’t just our names on the Murder Tree, it—”
“The Deadman’s Tree. Subtle difference, there.” He withdrew a Colt 45, checked it, and tried not to hear how hard Sammy swallowed. “And it doesn’t matter now, after the mess you made of things.”
“No, I
didn’t make a mess. It’s not Angelo. It’s not the money.”
“And it’s not up to me.”
The button man might’ve said more, but a warm, prickling sensation began a slow swell around his wrists. His shirt cuffs tightened. His collar was the same damn story. He wished he weren’t wearing a tie. He wished it wasn’t so warm in the small, gray office with the creaking fan and the window that couldn’t open far enough to let Lake Michigan breathe inside.
With his free hand, he tugged at the knot that pressed uncomfortably against his throat. It was his turn to swallow hard.
“Hey Raul is … is something wrong?” Sammy stalled.
He hesitated. He hadn’t told anyone, which didn’t mean nobody knew.
“Raul?”
“No. Nothing’s wrong.” His wrists felt puffy. His left hand hurt from the pressure, from the lost circulation. In another minute, it’d be numb except for the pins and needles if he didn’t get those cuffs unbuttoned. He lifted the Colt and aimed it between Sammy’s eyes.
Sammy drank his last drops fast and hard, like he didn’t even taste them. He slammed the glass down on the desk. Then, as the Colt twitched, ready to fire, he squawked, “Wait—just wait a minute, please? One last request.”
Raul’s hands burned. They were swollen and marbled, white and red. “Make it fast.”
“Don’t dump me in the lake, would you? Leave me here, or stick me in the street.”
“What do you care?”
“Elaine and the kids. It’ll be easier on them, for the life insurance. Leave them something to bury. I’m asking you—in case you got family I don’t know about. Promise me that, and do what you gotta.”
“All right, I promise.”
“And I need to tell you…” Sammy’s voice sped up, desperate for these last seconds. “You don’t even know why you’re really here—”
Raul pulled the trigger twice. Sammy Ricca fell back across the desk and tumbled to the floor. A small curl of smoke escaped his forehead.
Raul checked the clock on Sammy’s desk. The cleaners wouldn’t come around for another twenty minutes.
He could’ve broken his promise if he’d wanted, but it felt like bad form, and anyway, it wasn’t Elaine’s fault that her husband thought he was smarter than Moe Shapiro and Angelo Licata. So the button man picked up Sammy’s corpse, taking care to avoid the long streaks of ink and the sliding drips of blood.
He left it in the alley behind the newspaper, just behind the advertising division, where Sammy’s shattered skull would make quite an impression on the first bum to come by for a piss. And while Sammy lay there, mucking up the pavement with his brains, the button man fought the urge to tear off his jacket and rip at his shirt cuffs, then his tie, at anything he could loosen or adjust. One thing after another, in any order that would let his skin breathe free.
But no. Not here.
Instead, he stumbled out of the alley and ducked into the onrushing glare of a car’s headlamps, then out of it again. Keeping to the sidewalk only briefly, he found another dark spot between two buildings and he could’ve cried with relief. He knew this place—this was the back end of a restaurant Angelo liked, and the cooks kept their mouths shut unless they were taste-testing the specials. It’d do in a pinch and thank God for that, because tonight’s pinch was about to strangle him.
The back door was hollow and it rang like a metal gong when he knocked. It cracked open and a round face covered in steam or grease looked at him with confusion, concern, and then the careful blankness of a man who knows when to pretend he doesn’t know a goddamn thing.
“Mr. Esposito,” he said. “How can we help you tonight?”
“I need a minute inside.”
The door opened wide enough to let him in to a world of bright steel pots and simmering gas stoves. He dodged big-breasted waitresses with damp, round trays and kept his head down when the men at the ovens shouted back and forth in Italian or some second-generation’s pidgin.
Whoever’d let him in didn’t ask for details and didn’t follow him back to the bathroom the staff used, a big gray box with one fizzing, swaying light bulb dangling on a wire. Raul shut the door, locked it, and leaned forward on his hands, staring down into the sink.
The taps were the old-fashioned sort: one for hot and one for cold, but shit-out-of-luck if you wanted lukewarm. He twisted both faucets on, letting the hot side steam and the cold side swirl, all of it making a friendly white noise to thwart any curious ears that might be dumb enough to come close.
Above the sink was a smudged rectangle of glass that passed for a mirror.
The button man met his own eyes as he pulled off his suit jacket and hung it on a hook that might’ve held meat as easily as towels. His shirt came off next, though his hands trembled as he fed the slim white buttons through the holes, one at a time, until the cotton parted with a soft, sticky sound. He knew better than to look down. He didn’t want to see that he’d ruined another Van Heusen. Didn’t want to look at what was growing there on his chest, not just his wrists and neck.
He stripped to the waist.
Beside the toilet squatted a knee-high trash can. He picked it up and set it on the sink’s edge, then reached inside his limp jacket for the inner pocket, and pulled out a switchblade. As quickly as he dared, he sliced the bubbling lesions away.
He started at his wrists, since those growths had blossomed first, and were largest. He pruned them one by one, scraping the blade along the clustered stalks. They popped free and dropped into the steel waste bin with a spongy little ping that made his teeth itch. Some as small as his pinky nail. Some the size of his thumb. Brown-capped or gray, with creamy undersides and speckles.
Perfect, round mushrooms. Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe—if he gave them another hour in the dark, and the sun wouldn’t be up for another six hours if he was lucky.
They were less trouble from dawn ’til dusk, and less prolific when he kept his skin dry. That much Raul knew. He was still learning what worked and what didn’t, but the truth was more horrible every day: He couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t manage them. He could only hide them.
He’d drawn a card, and it’d turned. Simple as a noose.
Another flick of the switchblade and another half-dozen smaller chunks of fungus fell into the bin.
It didn’t hurt. Once he’d gotten over the sheer gruesomeness of it all, it was almost easy. A bit of unfamiliar pressure. A moment of disconnect, and the chilly sense that he might be bleeding—but wasn’t. He couldn’t carve the things free, but a simple scrape would temporarily excise them. It wasn’t altogether different from trimming his nails or blowing his nose—not in principle, and that’s what he told himself as he methodically filled the bin and wondered what he was going to do with the damn things. Flush them down the toilet? Cover them with paper towels, and pray nobody noticed?
He laughed, a grim grunt that didn’t hold a drop of humor.
I could leave them in the kitchen.
Stick them on the pizzas, or in the carbonara. Garnish a salad, or what have you.
One more. Beside his belly button, growing almost while he watched. He picked it off with the blade and absently rubbed his thumb against the round, white patch of skin it’d left on his stomach. He tumbled this last tiny cap between his fingers and brought it up to his nose. It smelled like nighttime, like mulch and butter.
Quickly, before he could talk himself out of it, he popped the cap into his mouth and chewed.
It squished between his teeth like any other mushroom might, its texture firm but loamy, its flavor familiar but specific. He swallowed.
He knew the right mushrooms could give you visions—and the wrong ones could kill you, and he didn’t know what his own personal brand might do. He felt a fast pang of fear, but it went its merry way when he told himself, No way. It came from the outside. Won’t hurt the inside. And maybe he didn’t believe that, but it kept him from sticking his finger down his throat and asking for a recount.
A knock on the bathroom door almost sent him out of his skin.
“What?” he barked, anxiously squeezing the trash can.
A timid voice on the other side said, “Mr. Esposito, sir? Are you all right in there?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s been…”
Half an hour probably. “I know. I’ll be out in a minute.”
He glanced around the naked little room and would’ve given his right arm for an incinerator chute, but the toilet would have to suffice. He took two handfuls of the mushrooms and dropped them into the bowl. The first flush took them away with a sweeping swirl, and while he waited for the tank to refill, he wondered what the hell he was going to do.
Ten minutes later he turned off the faucet. Redressed, if somewhat hastily, he exited through the kitchen door, and he didn’t say a word to anybody.
Outside he heard sirens, so someone had found Sammy and called it in before the cleaners found him. Good. Get that life insurance policy rolling, why don’t you. Raul’s business there was finished and really, he should’ve been long gone—but he wasn’t, and he wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. Home was better than no place, but he was restless and itchy, and he wanted to walk. So he walked.
He took a rambling path through Little Italy, trusting the El to pick him up when he did eventually feel like riding. Just this once, the lake smelled clean when the wind rolled off it, sweeping through the brick jungles that would never burn again, cow or no cow; and it was probably his imagination, because the lake always smelled like cold decay and dirty sand. Maybe it just smelled better than mushrooms and blood, or sweat and the kitchen of a second-rate Italian place where people went to talk more than they went to eat.
The button man wasn’t entirely sure where he was headed. It didn’t dawn on him until he was right there at the clearing where the old park used to be, back when anybody gave enough of a shit about the 19th Ward to give it a park. He’d made a beeline for it without even thinking about it.