by Frank Tuttle
“But we can’t open it.”
He nodded. “Each chest carries a protective spellwork,” he replied. “Most often in the form of a virulent curse. Unless the chest’s spellwork is disengaged as the chest is opened, the curse is activated. Have you ever heard of Sellwith Hill?”
I rubbed my eyes. “No. Should I?”
“It is now called Sellwith Lake,” he said. “A century ago, a careless sorcerer in Avalante’s employ attempted to open a Triplett chest without the proper keys. The lake is said to be bottomless. That may in fact be true.”
“So we leave it where it is,” I said. A tiny seed of suspicion sprouted and began to grow. “Anything special about these Triplett keys?”
“Nothing visible. But this is a small chest. The lock is fitted with three small keyholes. I expect the keys themselves will be small as well.”
I fished in my pocket, removed the key I’d found on the dead man. “This small?”
Evis regarded it carefully. “Just so,” he said. “Although we’d have to put it in the lock to be sure. And since we lack the other two keys required, and we don’t know the order in which they must be inserted and turned, that would be inadvisable.”
I put the key away. “War-time waybills. A fancy sorcerer’s chest. A couple of dead bodies.”
“It has been an eventful day,” Evis agreed. “I sealed the larger crate, put it back where it sat. I cannot say whether or not my intrusion will escape the notice of the owner, if they are indeed a sorcerer.”
“I’d bet money they are. Three keys. Two bodies. The math is disturbing, especially if you subtract the dead Watchman. I doubt he was a rogue sorcerer.”
Evis yawned, revealing his shiny fangs. “If we disregard the Watchman, and we assume each conspirator has a key, then two remain alive and at large.”
“There’s no damned way they got off at Wetherneck and left their precious box behind, is there?”
“None at all,” said Evis.
I stared off into the night. “Two keys left. I’m betting what started as a trio of fast friends is now a pair, circling each other, each waiting for the other to blink.”
“As a working hypothesis, it seems complete,” said Evis. “I still can’t get used to sleeping at night,” he added.
“Not a worry on this ride,” I said. Gertriss and Darla strolled up, and we checked our weapons and divided the night into watches.
Evis and Gertriss joined Rowdy and his compatriots for the first watch over the sleeper car gangways. Darla and I opted to nap in the bar car. Jiggles the clown joined us, armed with a stout length of oak and a case of halitosis capable of mayhem at four feet.
I propped myself against the window. Darla parked her head in my lap. Jiggles laid himself down on the floor.
We were all asleep within minutes.
It had been a long day. Murder. More murder. Magic I hadn’t seen since the War. I was exhausted, tired to the bone, couldn’t have lifted a finger in that last instant before blessed sleep came at last.
So naturally, I rose up out of my weary body and walked all the way to the Moon.
Chapter Eleven
Dream walks are becoming easier every time I take one.
It started the moment I whispered my true name to the huldra, when I thought Darla dead. Stitches claims something took root in me at that moment. I guess maybe she’s right, because I stepped out of the Western Star and increased my stature with nothing but a whim.
The train crawled away from my feet, a clumsy iron caterpillar puffing out tufts of smoke. A few lights showed from her windows. I watched for a moment and then turned, curious about the dancing light the station keeper at Wetherneck spotted.
The speck of light danced, capering and leaping, miles behind the train but gaining ground. I grew taller still, as tall as the Slilth, and I walked toward the light, my giant strides gobbling up the miles without effort or fuss.
When the bobbing spark fell beneath me, I diminished so that I might better see its true form.
The Troll had been right. It was a radiant wisp of a child, not quite so insubstantial as me. It glowed, a little girl, very much like Buttercup the banshee in some respects.
But as I shrank down toward her, and I saw her face, the resemblance to Buttercup ended.
This child’s golden face was a mask of rage. Her every feature was touched by it—mad glaring eyes, mouth open in a perpetual silent scream, dainty little hands curled into claws outstretched to rip and tear.
That, and the fist-sized wound where her heart should have been, told me this was no gleeful child spirit, out for a lark along the tracks.
I watched the apparition for a time. It didn’t seem aware of me, even when I spoke to it, even when I passed my dream-hand through it.
But it did interact with the world, on some level. Grasses that the radiant child brushed with her thin legs withered instantly. In those places where her feet fell, frost appeared. Sparks arced up, bolts of baby lightning, whenever her tiny buckled shoes rose from the iron railroad tracks.
Her dance, which seemed a random series of leaps and bounds from afar, was another expression of her rage up close. She pounced and grabbed and ripped and tore, attacking some invisible enemy with a fury far in excess of her apparent age—but the hatred in her eyes, when they met mine, taught me this was no ordinary shade, and she had been no ordinary child.
I watched and walked, keeping pace with the ghost easily, shrinking and growing as I pleased. At times I towered up, to better survey the empty plains, to make sure the Star still crawled westward.
I saw things moving, out amid the plains grasses. Shards of darkness, or of light, some in pairs, most alone. With a few exceptions, the majority of the walkers made their way east.
Toward Rannit. I moved close to a few, concealing myself in emptiness and silence. A few saw through my concealment, and gibbered and railed. Most ignored me. None faltered, or turned back.
Some were things of the dreamworld, much like myself. Some were extensions of it. Some merely hid in the dark, not yet able to fully materialize, but not far from doing so, either.
There were women, bright and fair as Angels, and as dreadful. There were red-skinned devils with horns and pitchforks, capering and cackling with infernal glee. There were men with the bodies of horses, and great slavering beasts, and mad-eyed creatures of legend and folklore.
An Angel, two hundred feet tall with wings of purest snow and a voice like sex itself, called my name. I rebuked her, and her wings flared and became things of leather and claws. She railed at me. I bent, plucked a yellow daisy from amid the grasses. I escaped the furious Angel only by towering and leaping and flying, soaring, up out of the night and into the cold, airless space above the world.
The Moon shone upon me, its scarred gray face beckoning. I remembered the way. The cold and the silence, they troubled me not at all.
I set foot on the Moon, found the footprints I’d left there twice before. I followed them to the same door, and knocked, because even when one is five hundred feet tall and composed of dream-stuff, one is polite to sorcerers, if one wishes to see tomorrow.
My knocking echoed beyond the door. I waited, and soon heard the sound of footsteps, and then the door was flung open.
A light poured out. I blinked, and when the glow faded, I was standing in what had to be Paradise.
The air smelled of honeysuckle and rang with birdsong. A warm sun shone down on me, easing me, and I turned my face up toward it.
The sky was an impossible blue.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” I said. “Frankly, the last time I was here, it reminded me of an ash-pit.”
Laughter sounded, and Stitches joined me, stepping out of a blur in the mild summer air to stand at my side. “I saw no reason to continue my work amid joyless austerity,” she said, motioning me forward. “Let us sit and talk.”
Green grass, neatly manicured, appeared below my boots. A splendid garden materialized after t
hat, surrounding us with vibrant blooms and flowers of every possible color and description. Water burbled and splashed from unseen fountains. A peacock saw us and spread his fan of feathers. Stitches’s hand brushed mine as we walked, and she took a half-step away.
“What brings you to the Moon, Captain Markhat?” she asked. We rounded a gentle curve, and a table greeted us. Shaded from the sun by a canopy of red silk, the tent bore a table filled to overflowing with fruits and meats and buckets and buckets of dark golden beer.
“Beer,” I said.
She laughed. “I might have known. Sit. I am glad for the company. I trust all is well down below?”
I sat. She sat beside me. She appeared to have aged a good fifteen years since we last met, but done it in reverse. I lifted my gaze from the length of shapely leg that escaped from beneath her dress, turning my attention to loftier matters—namely, Moon-brewed dream-beer.
“This is good,” I said, after filling a glass and taking a long drink. She followed suit, smiling that patient smile and nodding. “I’m not sure I intended to come here for any specific reason,” I said, wiping my lips. “I inhaled the smoke from a Troll smudge-stick earlier. They stuffed a little weed in with the sage.”
She laughed. There was genuine merriment in it, and it tumbled and played just like the water in the fountain behind her. “Troll magics do tend to be overly potent, in a strictly herbal sense,” she replied. “Nevertheless. You would not be here had that not been your intention.” She crossed her legs, and I nearly choked on my beer. “Unless you often dream of me, in a less than professional manner?”
I spilled it. The whole mess, in a rush, trains and bodies and sea serpents and all. She listened, nodding.
Things stirred in the garden as I talked. The backs of walking engines rose and fell as they traveled to and fro on errands as mysterious as the woman herself. Great machines soared past overhead, blinking and roaring, causing me to fall silent until they passed and the thunder of their engines faded. Twice, something so large it blotted out the sun made its way over us, a mild but lingering chill in its wake.
I don’t know how long I babbled. I drank beer after beer, but never got more than pleasantly buzzed. She did the same, her dark eyes regarding me intently as she drank, and for the first time since she’d stopped adopting the persona of the Corpsemaster, I was fearful beneath her gaze.
When I finished, she rose, began to pace, her hands clasped behind her back, a frown on her face.
“Troubling,” she said. “But in light of recent events, not at all unexpected.”
I nodded as though I had any idea what the hell she was talking about.
“Seems to me magical summer might be coming sooner than expected,” I said, hoping I might spur her to elaborate. “Is that possible?”
I was one of the few outside Rannit’s sorcerous community that knew of the seasonal nature of magic. The Kingdom’s history, all the thousands of years of it, had taken place in the arcane winter, when magic was hibernating, barely active.
The return of summer meant the revival of the old magics, and the rebirth of the walking nightmares that might easily crush most of humanity without ever realizing we were perishing by the score beneath their heels.
Stitches sighed and halted, facing me. “It is not only possible but probable,” she said. “I, too, have seen indications. At first, I thought myself responsible for them, that by meddling here, with this trove, I had somehow tipped the delicate balance of the seasons. I no longer believe that is the case, though.”
“Oh?” I said. “Well, weather doesn’t run by clocks.”
She shook her head. “The arcane seasons do. There has indeed been interference. But not accidental interference, and none by me.”
A shiver crept up and down my spine despite the cheery sunlight.
“I thought you said this loot made you the most powerful person in the world,” I said. “You even mentioned god-hood. The word omnipotent made a brief appearance.”
“It appears there is another,” she said. She raised her hand before I could say anything. “No. I do not know who, or where, or what they intend.”
I forgot my place and snorted. “I can supply the latter. They want your head, and this place, the sooner the better.”
She nodded. “I am inclined to agree. I imagine I have been shielded thus far by the remote nature of my new home. As soon as I emerge, or use my newfound resources, I will be exposed.”
“My money is on you, if there’s a dust-up,” I said, and I meant it. She’d not survived ten centuries, maybe more, of mayhem by being a soft target.
She smiled. “It is not my own well-being in a conflict that is my primary concern,” she said. She gestured toward the sky, and the blue went to black, and the world—my world—hung there, impossibly close, a blue-green globe shrouded by clouds and ringed by a halo of sunset. “The conflict would have disastrous consequences below.”
For lack of a better plan, I reached for another beer. “So you wait them out. Bide your time. Let the other guy pop his head up first.”
“Just so,” she replied. Blue skies returned. “Your own situation is nearly as dire, finder. And it will arrive at its conclusion much sooner than mine.”
Dream-stuff or not, my gut tied itself in knots. I put down my half-full beer and sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
She chuckled. “No. You knew I was going to say so. It’s why you came. You must cease this willful neglect of your arcane insights, Captain. You are what you are, and denial will not serve you. Quite the opposite.”
“Just what the hell am I, Stitches?”
She ignored me. She swept her hand across the table, and the beers and the fruits and the platters of sandwiches vanished, replaced by the plains down below.
Tall prairie grasses waved in the moonlight. The silver ribbon of the railroad bisected the table. A miniature Western Star chugged dutifully on, the diminutive chug-chug-chug of her pistons barely audible above the birdsongs that filled the garden. I wondered briefly what would happen if I put my giant’s eye to the Star’s windows and searched for Darla.
“Cute, but incomplete,” I said. As I spoke the words, the radiant child appeared, trailing the Star but bounding ever closer.
Stitches clapped her hands in delight. “Well done!” she said.
“I didn’t do that,” I replied.
“Denial,” she warned. “The scene is nearly complete. I shall supply the final element, which you chose not to see.”
I didn’t have time to argue the point before a shadow fell over half of the table, hanging a couple of feet above the prairie, coming to a point and descending toward the Star.
The shadow boiled and worked, a troubled soup of inky thunderheads. More of it gathered in the west, rushing toward the head of the storm.
There was a structure to the thing, despite its writhing, fluid nature. The longer I looked, the more apparent it tried to become, until I was seeing past the dark and into the substance that lay beneath.
“Consider the whole,” Stitches warned, and I pulled my gaze away.
I considered. The train lay between the child and the shadow. As the train moved, so did they, keeping the Star in the center somehow.
Stitches waved her hand over the scene.
It changed. The prairie, the tracks, the night—all that vanished, leaving nothing behind but the child and the Star and the gathering dark. The ghost of the huldra whispered in my ear, and before I blinked and dispelled it, I saw what Stitches had probably seen all along.
The child, the train, the shadow—they were all parts of a whole now. A whole bound by magic. Magic with a shape—a flattened circle with child and shadow at each sharp end, and the Star describing a center that changed by the moment.
“Your train is now the loci of an arcane influential space,” Stitches said. “Something aboard has severed your ties with casual normality.”
“I thought I felt a pinch in my ass,” I said. �
�The Triplett chest?”
“Most likely,” she replied.
“Any idea what’s in it?”
“None. At the end of the War, the Regency wiped out two dozen sorcerers who were instrumental in holding back the enemy,” she said. “All murdered in a single night.”
“The thanks of a grateful nation,” I muttered. I’d heard the rumors. Everyone had. Until then I’d doubted them. I pointed to the darting spark. “Remind you of anyone?”
“She might be the shade of Merry,” replied Stitches. She squinted. “Yes. Merry, sometimes called the Playful. My own intention was to murder her as soon as the peace was established. She was a monster, quite insane, but also very skilled.”
“So maybe that’s the curse laid on the Triplett chest,” I said. “Trigger it, and you raise her shade, and she skips up behind you and tears off your head. But how did her chest wind up on my train?”
“The sorcerers were murdered. Their apprentices and staffs were largely ignored.”
I groaned. “Which means the survivors grabbed anything they could carry as they fled.”
Stitches nodded.
I pointed to the boiling shadows. “What’s that, then?”
Stitches shrugged, smiling an enigmatic little smile. “You tell me.”
I stared at it for a minute.
There was power there. Blind, unfocused, growing power. What I first thought were random writhings and turnings inside it were actually unfoldings of a shape so complex our world couldn’t quite hold its every angle and curve.
“That’s what Merry took with her when she died,” I said. “The source of all her magic. Come back to—what? Rejoin with her?”
Stitches made a who knows gesture with her hands. “Resurrect her. Drag her back to the Underworld. Spill its energy content as simple heat and bake the West—we have no way of knowing yet. But your immediate concern, as your body is located at the loci of this event, is to either exit the areas of influence, or prevent the child and the dark from intersecting.”
“And just how do I do that, Stitches? Fine, I can take walks in my dreams, visit old friends, enjoy their beer and company. That doesn’t give me the ability to stomp ghosts back in the ground or puff out my cheeks and blow shadow storms away.”