by Frank Tuttle
The black tent sought to fold space around me, trick me into walking in a direction that hadn’t existed until I saw it unravel from a hole in the dark.
I laughed, and dismissed the deception with a wave of my hand. Then I followed Buttercup’s voice to her prison.
The howls and cries around me grew more agitated, more strident. I remembered how cats and rodents had fled from me along Rannit’s streets.
I should have been frightened at the realization that I might not be invisible in the midst of so many nightmares.
Instead, I was unmoved. If they come forth, I heard myself think, I shall simply cut them down.
Buttercup sat upright on her bed. The doll was tangled around her, holding her fast, its head resting on her right shoulder, the doll’s face pressed against the banshee’s ear.
Buttercup’s eyes were squeezed tight shut, and her lips moved as though she were repeating the same word over and over and over, as if to drown out the whisper of a doll.
“Enough,” I said. A chorus of monsters replied with roars. “This I will not have.”
I put my ghostly hand to the glass. I passed through it, unimpeded.
I stepped inside, wound up standing right in front of Buttercup, and I spoke.
“I am come,” I said.
Buttercup’s ice-blue banshee eyes snapped open. The doll’s face turned toward me.
“Let her go,” I said to it. “Trouble her no more.”
It flew upon me, doll-hands swinging, doll feet kicking. In an instant boneless stuffed arms were wrapped around my neck while legs wrapped around my waist. Its painted doll eyes, dull and faded and crude, bore into mine. It started to squeeze.
I grew, stooping to remain inside the small chamber. The doll’s arms fell away. It tried to drop, but I caught it by an arm. As it flailed and struggled I grabbed a stuffed, shapeless foot, and then I simply pulled.
Stuffing erupted. The leg tore free. I took its head, grasped its neck, twisted. The doll made a single brief squealing sound, and then it went limp, just as Thorkel had done.
When it was over, I had hair and yellowed cotton stuffing and a handful of cloth scraps.
I kicked it all away. Buttercup leaped from the bed and I caught her up, and she buried her face on my chest. She never cried. After a time, she relaxed and began humming a nursery rhyme.
I took her hand, and tried to lead her out. I passed through the glass without effort, but she remained trapped.
From without, I raised my fists, brought them hard against the glass, willing it to shatter.
It did not.
I stepped back inside. Buttercup was on her knees, scrambling under the bed, and only then did I recall that her pet sorcerer’s skull lay there.
She brought it out, rubbing the crown of the skull, chattering gleefully with it. The skull replied in dry whispers. I could not glean the meaning behind their words, but a part of me knew, was so sure, that I would begin to understand if only I would sit and be still and listen.
I could not. I remembered how time moved inside the black tent, on my last visit. I couldn’t afford to vanish for a day by the world outside’s reckoning.
I resolved to simply increase, and burst the chamber by filling it beyond its volume, in the hope that the glass too would burst.
Before I could begin, Buttercup tugged at my shirt. She hefted her pet skull, giggled, and then she took one of those deep, long breaths that always precede her bone-shattering banshee cries.
She let loose. I reminded myself I was dreaming, and instantly her cry sounded distant and faint.
She stood on her tiptoes, arms spread, mouth wide open. Her hair blew back. A golden glow enveloped her.
I heard a faint tinkle, and saw a tiny crack appear in the center of the glass.
It didn’t heal.
It grew, slowly, but perceptibly.
Buttercup kept screaming. Her skull joined in, chanting a long harsh word.
The crack spread.
“I will return,” I said.
She didn’t stop screaming, but she did dip her head in a small nod.
“I will return, and take you from this place.”
The skull’s chanting quickened. Buttercup’s scream grew louder and louder, despite my efforts to impose silence upon it.
I stepped out through the glass. Howls and cries assailed me. I grew, and my anger grew with my stature, and something dark and enraged rose up from the depths of my soul.
“I seek the master of this place,” I said. My voice boomed and echoed. “I call thee forth.”
The roars and howls continued. Amid the varied calls were strains of mad laughter.
“I seek an end to you,” I said. “You would bring calamity to my house? I bring annihilation to yours. Face me. Let us test our rage.”
I waited, alert for the scuff of Thorkel’s boots, or the tap of his cane.
I heard neither.
“So be it,” I said, my voice ringing like a bell filled with thunder. “You dug your grave. I’ll be back to fill it.”
I grew. I grew tall enough to push my head and then my shoulders and then my knees up through the black tent’s top.
Tents and carousels and tiny pinprick fires lay at my feet. I kicked idly at the nearest of them, did no damage.
The eastern sky was showing the first blush of pink.
“Not much time,” I said aloud. Birds erupted from the trees all about me. “They’ve got better sense than you folk,” I added, looking down on the carnival. “When I return, it’ll be too late to fly away.”
I turned my face toward the slumbering bulk of Rannit, and began my dream-walk home.
At the water’s edge, I paused. I had intended to simply step over the dark ribbon of water, but a fire flickered on the far bank. I diminished, walked across the face of the water, and nearly awoke when I recognized the ragged figure hunched over his meager campfire.
His cart full of lightning rods sat a yard away. The steel tips gleamed in the flames.
I drew close to his fire. Close enough to touch him, had I wished it.
Shango, the lightning rod man, rubbed his hands together briskly and then held them, palm up, before the fire.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said. After he spoke, his eyes turned up, tiny flames reflected in each. “Be welcome at my fire.”
“You can see me,” I said.
“And hear you,” he replied. “Hold out your hands. You can feel the warmth of the flames, as soon as you accept the fire as part of your reality. Try it.”
I kept my hands at my sides.
“Your name isn’t Shango,” I said. “And you’re no lightning rod salesman.”
He nodded, smiling amiably. “Might be some truth to that,” he said. “But here’s the thing, Markhat. That’s not an important truth. Who I am, what I am, all the questions crowding your jaw—they’re not the questions you need to be asking.”
“I’ll pick my own damned questions.”
“That you will. Plenty of time for that, later. But right now, there’s only one question that matters.” He pointed at the sky. Dawn was breaking. “You’re running out of time. Better ask it quick.”
“Why would I ask you anything? Your wares failed me. My house is ashes.”
“Failed you?” he asked. “What did you lose, that was precious to you? Whom did you lose?”
I bit back a reply.
Darla had escaped the initial rain of hostile magic. She had just enough time to scoop up Cornbread and run.
Shango smiled, his eyes bright below his floppy porkpie cap.
“I told you I smelled a storm coming,” he said. “I gave you what you needed. Heaven’s fickle wrath, I believe I mentioned. Was I wrong?”
The witch had hurled down magic, then fire.
Fickle wrath, from Heaven.
“No,” I said. “You weren’t wrong.”
“Good. You’re beginning to see. You know what you have to do next.”
“I do?”
“If you don’t, I can’t help you,” he said. “What you need is what you lost. Good luck, Markhat. Don’t let the darkness take over. You’ll want to, but don’t do it. That would be a shame. A damned shame.”
He vanished. As did his fire, and his cart of lightning rods, and the footprints he’d left on the sandy riverbank.
I was all alone. The last, brightest stars winked out, fleeing a blood-red dawn.
The sky rolled and shook. The ground beneath me heaved.
“Honey, wake up,” said Darla, and I did.
Preparations took all morning.
The rotary guns had to be cleaned and greased. Mama, who had turned up in the wee hours but refused to reveal what she’d seen, oversaw the process, claiming she was hexing the barrels. I didn’t point out that the bullets were the actual danger to enemies, because having Mama sit in the back of a wagon and wave a pair of dried owls at the guns was preferable to having Mama dog my footsteps.
And footsteps I made. I made my rounds of the newspapers, making sure the advertisements we’d bought were being printed as we specified, word for word. They were.
By late afternoon the papers would be all over Rannit, and then our scheme would be well and truly hatched, with no time for revisions or retreats.
I mentioned paying Captain Holder a visit. Darla decided she’d go sit with Gertriss, who was busy trying to punch holes in Avalante’s sturdy walls using nothing but the intensity of her glare.
And I did intend to pay Holder a visit.
But that wasn’t my only, or even my first, stop.
I took a cab to Middling Lane. I got out at the corner, a block away from our house, and I walked the rest of the way.
The day was bright and crisp. Leaves were beginning to fall. They crunched on the cobbles beneath my boots. Ordinarily I’d have smiled at the sound.
I wasn’t smiling when I saw what remained of our tidy little house.
The fire had been intense. Nothing remained but the stone foundation. Most of the stones were cracked and split from heat.
The fence was scorched and blackened with soot. The young oak tree in our yard was barren and charred. Our flowerbed was ash.
There were no steps to climb, no porch on which to sit. No front door to open, no red Balptist rug to welcome me home.
I stood at the gate until I felt eyes upon me. When I turned, our next-door neighbors were hurrying inside their house. They slammed the door, and an instant later drew their curtains shut.
So much for the special kinship between close neighbors.
I pushed the iron gate open. The paint had peeled away from the heat. Its squeal was at once familiar and heartbreaking.
I circled around the ruin. A few bits of charred timber jutted up through the ashes, their broken ends exposed like the bones of some fallen beast. Here and there small objects glittered in the sun. Melted glass here, a scrap of shapeless metal there. Darla’s clothes. The silver serving set she’d spent months saving for. Her mother’s modest but tasteful collection of jewelry and its tiny cedar box.
Gone.
There was nothing to salvage. Nothing to save.
I pondered the dream-Shango’s words. What I needed was what I had lost. Unless I needed charred oak, I didn’t see anything remaining that might be of any use.
I found a stick in the yard, used it to poke about in the ashes. I didn’t want to walk among them. Didn’t want to take burnt particles of our home back to Darla. She’d see, and she’d know, and she’d be hurt I hadn’t brought her.
My stick struck something heavy. I pried.
A length of blackened copper cable came up with my stick.
I yanked, and the copper cable moved. I yanked again.
Toadsticker’s hilt popped out of the ashes. Two loops of copper were wound around his hilt.
“Can’t be,” I muttered. I’d lost Toadsticker two days after the house fire, when the mastodons charged.
I pulled the sword out of the ruin.
It was Toadsticker. Every dent, every scratch, every worn spot was there. I found the old nick in the blade, two finger widths from the hilt. I’d put it there swinging at a vampire. I felt for, and found, the tiny scratches Buttercup had left on the butt when she’d thrown the sword from my roof. The leather wrapping around the hilt was gone, but it was Toadsticker I held in every other way.
Or so it seemed.
I waved the sword around. It didn’t throw thunderbolts or hurl mighty winds.
“What are you?” I asked.
I stood there for a long time. I knew damned well I wasn’t holding Toadsticker. My best guess was the steel that had once been a lightning rod was now the thing I held.
I didn’t know who or what Shango was. Whether he meant me good or ill. Whether he was real, or some trick of the huldra’s ghost, haunting me from inside some dark and hidden place in my heart.
Taking up the sword might mean doom.
Leaving it behind could mean death.
“Ask the right question,” Shango said.
I mulled that over, while my former neighbors peeked out of their lace curtains.
I’d walked as a dream. Traveled to the moon. Seen people and things that were certainly not what they claimed or seemed to be. Lives were at stake. Fates were to be determined.
A question sprang to mind. I asked my heart of hearts if I wanted a beer, and we agreed a beer was harmless if not prudent, and I wiped soot from Toadsticker’s blade on the scorched remains of my lawn.
Then, sword in hand, I left Middling Lane once and forever behind.
I had a beer. Bought a plain black sword belt. Then I paid Captain Holder a visit, mainly to shave a single lie off my day.
Holder wasn’t in. He’d left a letter for me, in case I came around. I found a corner out of everyone’s way and read it there in the bustling Watch house.
Markhat, it read. We didn’t see a thing until after midnight. We stopped a dozen worthies and five carny clowns heading for the place after it was shut down. One of the clowns had a big mouth. We shut it for him, and sent the worthies home. I’m told a few of them snuck back later. My men in the woods heard screams.
I sent a report to the High House. The House has assigned a Corps sorcerer to the case. You might want to get your business done before an Army wand-waver wades in. They won’t be taking prisoners or rescuing survivors. I doubt anything will happen tonight. Too many links in the chain of command. But tomorrow, for sure. Don’t be there when it starts.
Holder
I cussed. I shoved the letter in my pocket and cussed some more.
It wouldn’t matter which of Rannit’s deranged Corps sorcerers was chosen to deal with the carnival. All wand-wavers tend to deal with problems the same way, by hurling killing magic around until the wand-wavers are the only ones left standing.
Even if Buttercup survived the assault, they’d snatch her up in the aftermath.
I paid the cabbie extra to get me back to The Cat and Fiddle at speed.
Chapter Seventeen
“That looks just like Toadsticker,” said Darla after we shared a kiss.
“Holder’s men are experts at spotting swords in ditches,” I said. For all I knew, they were.
She nodded. We sat at the bar, and Randy put down a glass of wine for her and a beer for me. I shoved coins his way and had a drink.
“What did the good Captain have to say about last night?” asked Darla.
“Plenty.” I gave her the letter. She read it and sighed.
“We have tonight, then,” she said. “Only tonight.”
“That’s all we’ll need. We get Buttercup home, try to figure
out what they did to Alfreda. Then tomorrow we let the Corps hammer the whole place flat. Problem solved. No more flying witches coming to town.”
“If we can’t get Buttercup free?”
“We can and we will.”
The front doors banged open, letting in sunlight and street noise. Marshal strode in, a smile on his face and a stack of newspapers in his arms.
“Evening editions of every paper,” he said. “Hot off the press. I imagine you’d like a look.”
I rose, grabbed a stack, and spread them out on the bar. Darla and Gertriss fanned the pages, looking for our secret weapon.
“Found it, boss,” said Gertriss. She flattened her page down and turned it around for me to read. “The Rannit Times.”
I read.
COME ONE COME ALL, proclaimed the paper, in letters too big to miss. FREE ADMISSION TONIGHT! DARK’S DIVERSE DELIGHTS. PRIZES! RIDES! FREE FOOD AND DRINK FOR VETERANS OR ACTIVE MILITARY!
Below that was a drawing depicting free food and drink, along with a helpful map showing the location of the ferry and the carnival.
Darla found our ad in the City Daily. They’d included a drawing of a man in a tall hat holding back a manticore with a whip and a chair. A frightened lady looked on, too stricken with fear to notice her gown was hanging by one shoulder.
The Rannit Reader, the Evening Star, even the stalwart Old Kingdom Crier ran variations on the same theme.
“Gonna be a riot for sure,” observed Randy as he produced a fresh beer for me. His father shot him a look.
“Hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Darla.
“They’ll be outnumbered a hundred to one. Maybe more. Soldiers everywhere. Watchmen too. They won’t have a choice. I’ll see to that.”
Darla laid her hand on mine, and we listened to the clock in the corner tick off the moments until dusk.
Pandemonium.
The crowd filling the River Gate plaza was a single hurled cobble from turning into a mob.
People pushed and shoved and yelled. Red faces abounded. Fists were raised and shaken in righteous indignation. Canes, too, were raised in protest, as were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of familiar newspaper pages.
The gate-keepers relented, throwing the rusty iron gates open wide. The crowd surged ahead, cheering.