Way Out West (The Markhat Files Book 10)
Page 18
“Mayor Bern Jenkins,” he said. “Here to welcome the agents of our benefactor, Mrs. Hog. I present to you this key to the city.” He glared at a man lurking in the station door. “Ennis, you dolt. The key,” he added.
A nervous gentleman in undertaker’s garb hurried out, holding a crudely-carved key. He thrust it in my hands and bobbed his head half a dozen times. He mumbled something about “our precarious journey West” and praised our pluck and fortitude.
“I see the stories of our journey beat us here,” I said, taking the key. “Thank you for this. We are all deeply honored. Let me assure you there’s nothing aboard this train that might get up and start causing trouble. We left all the bodies behind.”
Mayor Jenkins deflated with a long heartfelt sigh. “Thank Angels for that,” he said. “No offense meant, of course. But yes. We’ve all heard the rumors. All seen the buzzards.”
“That’s all a very long distance away,” said Darla. The look she gave the Mayor wasn’t hard, but it let him know it could quickly go that way. “We’ve been in the same clothes for four days. We’ve had nothing to eat but biscuits and jerky. Now point out your finest hotel, give me the names of the best clothiers, and have a picnic basket sent to our room as soon as we’ve checked in.”
He blinked, but only twice. The handwritten speech he’d retrieved from his vest pocket vanished without further consultation.
Scarcely an hour passed before I was soaking in a copper tub, hot water sloshing all around. Darla’s toes peeped out of the suds beside mine.
“Welcome to the West,” she said, mimicking Rowdy.
About that bath, no more need be said.
Turns out it takes a full three days to buy a town, even if you came armed with a heavy pile of Old Kingdom gold.
My plucky right hand cramped from signing papers. Every paper I signed then had to be witnessed and notarized and then all that had to be signed and in some cases notarized and signed again. I met every lawyer in the territory, most two or three times, and became quite adept at the two-second handshake.
Railsend—pardon me, Hogstown—sports a modern rarity: the official photographer. Another recent spawn of Avalante’s private projects, photography is rare in Rannit and I hardly expected to see a cameraman’s black box this far in the wild, but there he was, insisting on staging photographs at every juncture of the process.
“For posterity,” he claimed, before vanishing under his black cloth hood. Then the camera would light up the room with a flash and a bang, and we’d rub our eyes and reach wearily for the next stack of papers.
While Evis and I fielded lawyers and bankers, Darla and Gertriss paid Mama’s school a visit.
They came back awed.
Turns out Mama had been pouring money into Hogstown far longer than any of us knew.
The school was eight buildings. They were teaching reading and math and writing. Sewing and carpentry and farming. Baking and cooking and running a business.
Darla reports the teachers are mostly from Rannit. She recognized a few names and reputations.
Apparently Mama is free with her coin where Hogstown is concerned.
By noon on the third day, I was convinced we’d signed every scrap of paper ever manufactured in the West, and was looking forward to an evening of beer and big copper bathtubs, when Oldkins, the dour president of the territorial bank, bade us meet him in his office for a matter of “no small urgency.”
Evis and I trudged over. Evis had been quiet all day. I hadn’t asked, didn’t really need to. Sooner or later the C&E would repair whatever tracks we’d destroyed and then a train would come, and he’d be faced with going back.
“Gentlemen,” puffed the bank president, as we sat. “I regret to inform you there is a discrepancy concerning the funds sent by Mrs. Hog.”
Evis went suddenly vampire-still. The banker paled.
“We’ve counted it four times,” hurried the banker. “I assure you, gentleman, there is no mistake. The funds are well in excess of the agreed amount.”
“In excess?” I asked. “By how much?”
He rattled off a figure.
Evis took off his sunglasses. I whistled softly.
“That’s well in excess, all right,” I said. “And you’re sure.”
“We are. Gentlemen. As the legal executor of this process and these funds, Mr. Markhat, I require your instructions. What shall be the final assignment of this sum?”
I sat back in my chair. Evis produced a trio of cigars. Banker Oldkins graciously accepted one, and we all puffed in contemplative silence for a moment.
“That’s enough to set us all up for life out here,” said Evis before blowing out a smoke ring.
“In comfort,” I added. “Hell, in more than comfort.”
“Luxury would be the word,” added Oldkins. “Might I add, gentlemen, that you and yours would be welcome here? Not because of the money. No. But because you are men of honor and some renown.” He grinned an un-bankerly grin. “Who have impeccable taste in cigars.”
I nodded. “Thank you, sir. For the record, this town is a treasure. I can think of no better place to settle down, nor better people to call neighbors.”
We didn’t talk much, after that.
Later, we finished signing papers. That evening, the newly-carved WELCOME TO HOGSTOWN sign went up over Main Street. The brass band played, there was a cookout, beer and laughter flowed.
Buzzards still streamed east. I noticed people glancing idly up and looking quickly away.
Chapter Seventeen
It took the C&E three weeks to get a train all the way to Hogstown.
The Prairie Princess rolled into the station one bright morning, her shiny new funnel puffing smoke, her whistle waking the whole damned town. I heard the whistle and got shaved and dressed and was quite prepared when the pounding on our door began.
A bevy of Watch officers, a pair of Army majors, a sinister Corps wand-waver in a robe, and a furious railroad lawyer awaited me.
I hadn’t been idle. A whistle of my own summoned a pair of mighty Ogres, who flanked my door, arms crossed, in a silent reminder for all and sundry to mind their manners. The Ogres knew their business well; any voice raised to more than a friendly tone of conversation resulted in a low, rumbling growl and a raised Ogre nape.
The only one of my visitors immune to that was the Corps wand-waver. He or she—robed and hooded and whispering, gender was impossible to guess—never raised their voice anyway.
The Corps never does. They don’t have to.
I told the story a dozen times, then another dozen times just for fun. The wand-waver left after the first iteration and a pair of whispered questions, and I never saw him or her again.
The C&E lawyers were determined to sue me personally for the loss of their train. The Army pointed out that I was coerced into acting, and casually inquired if the C&E might enjoy re-negotiating land rights through Vale and Turkey, and that shut up the railroad men.
The Watch just wanted the widow. They claimed there was no trace of the luggage car or her. I wasn’t surprised, but couldn’t help them.
I figure whatever is left of the widow is moldering somewhere under a disturbing, alien sky.
When they left, Evis and Gertriss and Darla and I had a quiet dinner in the hotel’s excellent restaurant. We didn’t speak directly about the Prairie Princess, or her departure two days hence.
We didn’t say goodbye, either. But we all felt the weight of the word.
Darla and I spent a sleepless night in our room. We didn’t speak much. We did open the curtains and look out at the stars and listen to the coyotes sing.
When morning came, we packed. There was no discussion. One moment we were laying in bed, the next Darla was opening drawers and folding clothes and I was getting our new luggage out of the closet and laying it open on the bed.
We had breakfast. Said goodbye to the staff. Left an enormous tip on the table.
Then we bought a pair of one-way tickets
to Rannit.
The Princess arrived full of newspapers. All were a few weeks old, but some enterprising steward had collected them from the cars and arranged them in stacks by date beside the station’s departure bench.
We dived in, starting with the oldest and working our way forward.
The summer of monsters hadn’t ended with our departure.
A second sea serpent joined the first. Like its sibling, it coiled itself around a Brown River Bridge piling before turning to stone. Right below the story was an advertisement for a tour barge that sailed right between them—SEE THE SERPENTS! Read the copy. 10P A PERSON!
“Glad to see the end times are being monetized,” I said.
Darla read aloud the story about the mass rising of corpses from the Chalk. Hundreds of bodies not interred in crypts or vaults had clawed their way out of the ground a week after we left, rising to walk the streets. They hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t done more than shamble aimlessly about, peering in store windows and causing traffic jams. The ones that could be identified were taken to their families.
The ones too far gone were being rounded up and hauled across the Brown. There was already a protest against this practice taking root. Calling themselves the Voices for the Dead, the corpse-advocates demanded that the dead be “treated with all the respect due them.”
Considering how Rannit treats perfectly healthy poor people with no homes to go to, I decided the ambulatory corpses were getting a relatively fair shake.
We were barely through the first few papers when we were joined on the platform by Evis and Gertriss.
“Fancy meeting you here,” said Evis, stacking their luggage beside ours. “Must be the morning for making bad decisions.”
“Must be.” I handed him a thick stack of papers. “Word from home. Have a seat. I reckon the train crew is sleeping in.”
“No hurry,” said Evis. He and Gertriss took the bench next to ours.
“Speaking of the train crew,” said Evis, opening a ragged copy of the City Crier. “They claim a hundred miles of track went missing. Along with a big bowl-shaped hunk of fertile prairie ground.”
“Do tell.”
He nodded. Gertriss grabbed a section of her own.
“They claim it looks like someone just scooped it all up,” Evis said. “Couple hundred feet deep at the middle. Already filling up with spring water. A town’s going up where the railroad moved. They’re already calling the new section of track Markhat’s Mayhem.” He grinned. “Thought you’d get a kick out of that.”
I chuckled. “They can call it whatever they like.”
“The Corps is incinerating the giants,” Gertriss said. “The train crew heard it might take a year to burn both bodies down.” She shivered. “I never ever want to see anything like that again.”
“We’ll close the windows,” said Evis. “So we’re all going home.”
“Looks like.”
“I guess that’s where fools belong,” said Evis. I saw his hand move, watched him begin to reach toward his pocket for a cigar. Then Gertriss laid her head on his shoulder and he grinned and put his arm around her instead.
Boots pounded planks. The train crew, bleary-eyed and squinting, emerged from the station and began swarming over the Princess, making her ready to depart.
There was banging and shouting. Smoke began to waft from her funnel. Hisses and groans sounded from deep inside her black locomotive, and her pistons shuddered and clanked in a furtive half-thrust forward.
A conductor shouted for us to board. Rowdy himself, wearing Stoddard’s battered engineer’s cap, stuck his head out of the cab and waved.
“Time to go,” I said. We all stood.
“I much prefer boats,” said Darla. She didn’t look back. “The peace. The silence. The relative lack of murdering sorcerers. I’m so glad we own one.”
“Boarding call for Rannit,” Rowdy yelled. He looked back at me and doffed his cap. “Rannit, by way of Markhat’s Mayhem.”
The train’s whistle blew. Evis and Gertriss stood, holding hands. Darla took my arm, and we filed onto the Princess for home.
About the Author
Frank Tuttle first began writing under the woefully mistaken impression doing so would release him from the burden of ever doing honest work. “It turns out writing is hard,” said Frank as he pulled out great handfuls of hair. “That was never mentioned in Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.” Frank’s first published works appeared in print magazines such as Weird Tales and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine in the late 1990s. Since then, Frank has published seven Markhat novels and a variety of shorter works. Frank rarely resorts to hair-pulling these days, preferring to weep inconsolably while affixing his toupee.
Find Frank Tuttle Online
@Frank_Tuttle
www.franktuttle.com
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Also by Frank Tuttle
Now Available:
Saving the Sammi
Wistril Compleat
On the Road
Passing the Narrows
The Far Corners
The New Author’s Guide to Writing
The Markhat Files
The Mister Trophy
Dead Man’s Rain
The Cadaver Client
Hold the Dark
The Banshee’s Walk
The Broken Bell
Brown River Queen
The Five Faces
The Darker Carnival
Way Out West
Paths of Shadow
All the Paths of Shadow
All the Turns of Light