by Frank Tuttle
“I’ve always loved you,” said Darla, slipping her arm around my waist.
“No one can blame you for that.”
Stitches spoke, shouting wordlessly across the waters.
Your vocal cords are several yards long, at your chosen stature, she said. I cannot understand your speech. Please repeat your demands.
Idiots, she added, in a whisper I was sure only Darla and I could hear.
Another flash of daylight. This time I managed to close my eyes in time. When I opened them again, Hag Mary and her strolling companions were reduced in size to a mere hundred feet, knee-deep in the muddy Brown River maybe fifty yards away.
“Give unto us this upstart you name the Regent,” said the armored giant.
“We will grant thee the boon of a swift death,” added the robed wizard.
“Give him to me,” screeched Hag Mary. Her eyes glinted like dirty stars beneath her mane of hair. Gobs of foul-smelling spittle fell like sleet as she spoke. “I will have him!”
Stitches put her elbows on the rail.
Do you even understand what it is your masters wish to bring about?
“I hath no master,” bellowed the warrior.
“Nor I,” said the wizard.
Hag Mary spat, raising a splash that nearly reached the Queen.
Darla poked me, raised a finger to her lips, pointed at the sky above the Hag and the wizard and the warrior.
A star grew brighter as I watched, and brighter still. It grew larger as well.
I understand, continued Stitches. I remember the last time your masters walked the earth. I remember their cruelty, their violent whims, their mindless caprice. I remember. And I tell you, I will not have it. Not again.
The star went from the size of a coin to that of an apple. It grew so bright the Hag and her companions began to cast faint shadows.
“Tear the vessel apart!” screamed the Hag, striding forward, waves breaking about her thighs. “Find him!”
They advanced. Stitches rose.
She turned to me and smiled a bloody little smile.
All those long years digging, she said, soundless voice booming. Digging ever deeper, scrambling for trinkets, for things best left buried.
Hag Mary was nearly upon us, growing taller than the Brass Bell tower, or the tallest spire at Wherthmore. Her arms were outstretched, and I could see her hands were filthy by the light of the growing star.
A faint roar rose, and the line of trees began to lean, blown over by a sudden growing wind.
Stitches shook her head.
All that time digging, Hag. You would have been better served had you looked up. Astronomy, bitch.
Have some.
Stitches raised her glass staff. Hag Mary howled and grabbed at us, but her nails scratched uselessly against a transparent bubble.
The light grew bright as day. I saw the warrior and the wizard turn, saw the Hag tower up against a blinding new sun—
—and then the bubble turned inky black and rang like a bell.
The Queen’s deck pitched forward, and we all went spilling down into the night.
Chapter Sixteen
According to Stitches, the sky is full of stones.
I pondered that often in the days that followed. There wasn’t much to do but ponder. The Queen, more or less intact, rested on dry, scorched earth at the bottom of a pit we determined to be two hundred and six feet deep and nearly two miles across.
That’s what happens when one of these sky-stones falls to earth, says Stitches. The impact is so great the very land is changed.
I know this to be true. I sacrificed my best pair of boots climbing the shallow grade of the pit. A dozen of us made the trip and peeked over the smoking rim to view the devastation beyond.
All about us, the trees were laid flat, their trunks radiating out from a point in the heart of the pit. The soil lay bare and baked. The Brown River was gone, and the sky was an angry red, still choked with the ash from a thousand small fires.
We searched, we did, for the remains of Hag Mary and her companions. We found nothing. Stitches assures me nothing unprepared for such a force could possibly have survived.
As I sit on the deck of a boat in sudden want of a river and watch steam rise from fissures all about me, I am inclined to believe her.
These stones in the heavens, said Stitches, float in great slow circles. She’d captured one, years ago, and started drawing it ever closer, keeping it ready for the time she would need a single irresistible blow.
Even Hag Mary’s legendary might hadn’t been enough to save her. Stitches claims we survived only by the narrowest of margins.
The Queen’s smoke-stacks would agree. One is a melted, slumping lump. The other was cut off clean at the top by Stitches’s final spell.
It took two full days for the Brown to begin to flow again, coursing down the north side of our pit first in a trickle and then in a stream. The heat from the blasted ground turned the trickle to steam at first, but soon the water reached the bottom and our hole became a shallow but deepening lake. It took ten days, but the Queen rose with the water, and we knew we would soon be able to turn her battered face north and steam for home.
Before the waters rose, we dug twenty-eight graves, out there at the bottom of what was soon a lake.
Evis and Gertriss and the rest of the dancers were freed the moment the sky-stone struck. Evis is credited with turning the tide of battle in the casino. At one point he apparently wielded both rotary guns like pistols and charged a dragon. There’s a rumor the Ogres are writing a song about it.
Gertriss slept for two days with Mama and Evis hovering over her like fidgety nursemaids. Halfdead and soothsayer nearly came to blows more than once over the application of cold cloths to Gertriss’s forehead, but Darla believes that’s how they’ve decided to proceed with their newfound friendship.
Our current best guess at our position puts us some hundred and forty miles south of Rannit. Stitches claims the blast probably flattened every tree in a circle twenty-five miles across, and tore the hell out of an area twice that large.
All that, from a sky-stone she claims was not much bigger than my house.
Astronomy, she calls it.
I don’t think I want to know what else is circling me, far far above.
Gunfire left seventy-seven holes in the Queen’s hull. Patching them took three full days, even with a dozen Ogres pitching in.
The moment we were seaworthy, Evis ordered the casino restored and opened for business.
He declared all remaining foodstuffs and every drop of surviving liquor free for the duration of the voyage.
The party was in full swing by sundown.
Laughter and happy shouts sounded from inside. Gambling machines chimed and tinkled and rang. Cheers went up when someone won and roars sounded when they lost.
You appear to be deep in thought, said Stitches as she sat down in a deck chair beside me. She balanced a plate of biscuits and a two hot cups of tea on her lap. Care to share your ruminations?
“How are you going to eat that?”
She chuckled. I brought it for you. I thought Mrs. Markhat was here as well. She expressed a desire earlier today for simpler fare than the kitchen is serving, so I made these.
“You made them?” I reached for one out of politeness.
I find simple culinary tasks relaxing. She gazed with ruined eyes out across the shallow pond that was only now beginning to lap at the Queen’s patched hull. After my recent exertions, I am in need of considerable relaxation.
I took a cup of tea. It wasn’t bad—certainly nothing like the vile bitter brew Mama is so fond of. I took a bite of biscuit and washed it down.
“A couple of things don’t make sense,” I said.
Only a couple?
“I’ve narrowed the list in the interest of expediency. The fake huldra. It lit up that Elf like a fresh-oiled torch. You said it could barely pass as real, even from a distance.”
The Re
gent’s creature must have imbued it with something of considerable potency.
“Sure. Right. Had to be that.”
I took another bite of the biscuit, another drink of tea.
“So the conspiracy of the summer-born lost this round,” I said. “Lost in a big way.”
We were lucky.
“No.” I wiped my chin and put my tea down on the deck. “We weren’t lucky. This was all planned, right down to the last detail. The Regent led them out here, far away from Rannit, so he could skip back to the High House and you could drop the sky on them.”
I was unaware the Regent had the means to leave the Queen, but yes, your surmise is correct on the other points.
I nodded and laced my fingers behind the back of my head.
“It’s disheartening when old allies keep secrets from each other. Isn’t it, Corpsemaster?”
For a single horrible instant, I thought I’d finally fulfilled Mama’s long standing prophecy that my mouth would be the death of me.
But then she laughed.
Well done, Captain Markhat! Well done, indeed. Tell me—how did you deduce my identity?
“I’ve only tasted a biscuit this bad once before,” I said. “You’re adding too much salt.”
Undone by a rural pastry. How fitting.
Without any fuss or flash, Stitches was gone, and the weary older woman I’d seen only once before was seated in her place.
“So is the missus going to find herself a widow?”
“No. Of course not. I’ve grown rather fond of you, Captain. And by now I’m sure you’ve also surmised that Encorla Hisvin and her madness is no more me than Stitches and her sewn-shut eyes.”
“I thought as much.”
“The Corpsemaster has nearly served her purpose,” she said. “Stitches will rise as the Corpsemaster fades. And so forth, as needed. My peers fail to recognize the need to periodically re-invent themselves. They wear the same cloak of identity so long it drives them quite mad in the end.”
“All that about the world of the summer-born? That was all true?” I hesitated. “Just how old are you, Lady?”
“One never asks a lady her age, Captain. I shall not answer that, save to say I have on no other occasion enjoyed an evening aboard a boat in wait of a river.”
“That was a real huldra, wasn’t it?”
She sighed. “No. It was not. And the Regent’s creature played no role in its efficacy.” She sighed again. “You have earned the truth.”
My heart sank.
“I still carry it, don’t I? The one I crushed and burned. It’s still inside me, waiting.”
“It is more precise to say you are the huldra, Captain. That is why the Elf burned.”
“So why not just throw me at Hag Mary? Why all this?” I gestured out at the newborn lake, its waters still struggling to rise.
“The huldra is old, Captain Markhat. Older than I. It came down through many summers, many winters. I spent centuries trying to discern its true nature, unlock its secrets.”
“Find a way to tame it, you mean.”
She shrugged. “In essence. It defied my attempts. Remained capricious.”
“So you pushed it off on me. And then made sure I was handy when it came time to make use of it.”
“We would not have survived the impact of what you call the sky-stone without the huldra’s stored energies.” She waved her fingers at me and mouthed words I couldn’t hear. “If it is any consolation, for the first time since you took it up, I can detect no trace of the huldra within you now. I suspect confronting the impact destroyed it completely. You are free.”
“Mr. Simmons. He did spit in my eyes, didn’t he?”
She smiled. “Daroth was always fond of poisons. I merely took precautions against such.”
I looked out over the infant lake, wondered what it would look like in fifty years, in a hundred. There’d be boats, I decided. Boats and docks and tanned kids laughing on the shore and patient fishermen hunched over their lines.
“Was it true what you said, about the times when the summer-born critters walk? That the world is a waking nightmare?”
“Yes.”
I let out the breath I’d been saving. Maybe it was true, that we’d struck a blow against slumbering monsters. And maybe, if that was true, I could forgive the odd lie, or three.
“I think we should name it Victory Lake,” I said. “Before someone starts calling it Mud Bend or Reek Hole.”
“Victory Lake,” said the erstwhile Corpsemaster, whose name I realized I would probably never know. “I believe I like that. Very much indeed.”
Laughter and cheering sounded as the Queen’s casino doors flew open. Darla’s voice rang out, and she walked a tad unsteadily toward me, a pair of tall beer glasses in her hands.
Stitches, Stitches once more, rose.
Good evening, Darla, she said.
“Stitches! So good to see you up and about. Are you rested?”
I feel a thousand years younger. Perhaps more. She picked up her plate and teacups, and after a moment she cast them all over the rail. Good evening, you two. I believe I will go watch Mama Hog and Mr. Prestley pretend to despise each other.
Darla sat and watched her go.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything,” she said.
“Not at all.” I took a sip of beer and grinned. Darla had found the good stuff. Even the Dutson-imposter hadn’t cracked the best casks.
Poor Dutson. We’d found him in the false boiler Evis had given me the key to. Evis and I did the best we could, laying him to rest.
Darla tweaked my nose. “Uh uh,” she said, grinning. “No poignant reflecting tonight. We’re both here, both alive, and as soon as we have a lake under us we’re both heading home.”
The doors opened again. I heard Mama bellow Buttercup’s name, heard Evis and Gertriss laughing, heard footfalls on the deck heading our way.
I lifted my glass in a toast.
“Together, my dear. To the Queen’s maiden voyage. To victory over the forces of evil. And mainly to our thousand crown fee, forever may it wave.”
Darla raised her glass with mine. “Captain Markhat, I will always drink to that.”
About the Author
Frank Tuttle is a seventy-foot long, snake-necked water creature who lurks beneath the icy waves of Scotland’s Loch Ness. When Frank isn’t dodging sonar equipped boats or teasing hopeful photographers, he writes fantasy, which he claims is “bloody hard to do with just these enormous flippers.” Frank would be thrilled from tail to gills if you would visit his website at www.franktuttle.com, and he loves getting email via [email protected]. He asks that if you send fish, please send halibut, as tuna gives him the vapors.
Look for these titles by Frank Tuttle
Now Available:
The Mister Trophy
The Cadaver Client
Dead Man's Rain
The Markhat Files
Hold the Dark
The Banshee's Walk
The Broken Bell
Ask not for whom the wedding bells toll…
The Broken Bell
© 2011 Frank Tuttle
The Markhat Files, Book 6
There’s no way Markhat can turn away his newest client. Who is he to refuse the woman he loves—especially when she bribes him with breakfast?
This time it’s Darla’s friend Tamar Fields, whose fiancé vanished days before the wedding. His wealthy family insists Carris Lethway is simply away on urgent business. Tamar smells a lie, and she needs Rannit’s most famous finder to figure out if the source of the suspicious aroma is a conspiracy, or the groom’s cold, sweaty feet.
As if his plate isn’t piled high enough, Mama Hog’s slip of the tongue has landed him in the middle of a good old-fashioned Pot Lockery clan feud. Plus, Rannit’s streets are abuzz with rumors of war—and Tamar’s case has his own lady love hearing wedding bells of her own.
As Rannit arms for battle, Markhat finds himself torn between o
ld alliances and new commitments, and a growing, awful fear that no matter which way he turns, all he loves is about to go up in flames.
Warning: This work of fiction is known to contain dangerous vowels and at least two instances of provocative folk dancing. Readers should be prepared to produce fresh emus for inspection at any time while reading pages 78 or 134. Neither the Publisher nor the Author condones the formation of covalent hydrogen bonds, although the Author does wink at them when his attorney isn't looking.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Broken Bell:
The House was quiet. If bustling was being done, it was being done elsewhere. I picked a hallway at random, ambled down it, found a flight of stairs leading up, took to them. I met an older gentleman clad in a butler’s black tails halfway up the first flight. I saw his eyes cut to my Avalante pin and then cut away.
I picked halls at random, left closed doors shut, ventured into a couple of open ones. The second floor was surprisingly empty, aside from servant’s quarters and a couple of unfinished guest rooms. I did find a family portrait—Mom and Dad Lethway, he much older than she, flanking a ten-year-old kid who must have been Carris.
No dirt on his face. No straw hat on his head. My, what a difference a few dozen copper mines make.
I ran out of things to explore, so I gathered my nerves and took to the final flight of stairs leading up.
At the top, voices and footfalls sounded. A woman laughed. Glassware tinkled. Knife and fork clattered on a plate.
Lunchtime. I headed away from the sounds and the smells, preferring to lurk a few more moments.
I wish I could claim I followed the pattern of wear on the floors or discovered Carris’s room by recognizing the patina on his doorknob as only a man his height would make. But the truth is I was guessing, and I opened every door that wasn’t locked, and his was the third one I tried.
Tamar’s picture, painted by someone with talent, hung on his wall. There was a pile of fabrics and fake silk flowers heaped on his dresser. Beside the pile was a notepad, just like the ones I use, and on it were scribbled notes.