The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files)

by Frank Tuttle

  “And what if some Army sorcerer finds out about Buttercup?” I said. “They’d come for her, hon. You know they would. I have to end this now. So we can go home. All of us. Here. Hold this. Pull hard if the monsters attack.”

  I put the free end of the rope in Darla’s hand and kissed her cheek.

  “You smell like smoke,” I said. “But I love you anyway.”

  Buttercup yanked, and away we went.

  Silence.

  And darkness. Not complete dark. Not like in the tunnels. More akin to the dark you’d find in a big old empty room, if a single dim stub of a candle gave off its last few flickers of light.

  Buttercup began to glow. I reached down and felt for the rope. It was taut, reaching from my waist to the dark, carved wood panels that covered the walls. The rope met the wall and vanished into it, passing through it as easily as Buttercup and I just did.

  Darla gave the rope a cautious tug. I tugged back.

  Then I drew Toadsticker, and took a pair of steps toward the center of the chamber.

  A tiny speck of light, gold as the dawn or a fresh-minted crown coin, appeared before me. Buttercup planted her feet and yanked at my hand. Her skull began to whisper and chant.

  I stopped. The speck of light grew, and with it a voice emerged, as faint as the light was small.

  A figure began to form. The golden light became hair. The hair found a head. The head gained a neck, and a torso, and limbs.

  It was a child. A radiant boy child. Translucent and white, save for the golden hair and the golden eyes. He was dressed in an old-timey lace-collared smock, and short britches, tight leggings and little buckled shoes. He glowed like Buttercup, and I knew without question he was dead, long ago dead.

  His gold hair was curly. I imagine Mama would call it tousled.

  The voice grew louder, and became the sing-song voice of a child at play.

  The words were foreign. I lowered Toadsticker.

  “I will not strike a child,” I said. “Even one past harm.”

  Buttercup held her skull up, put it as close to my ear as she could. It whispered, and then I understood the child’s words.

  “Round and round goes the wheel,

  Hear the little people squeal!

  The horsies turn, the music plays,

  No one leaves! Every one stays!”

  The ghost-child glowed brighter. On the floor around him, other things took shape.

  A man in a tall black hat marched forward while the clockwork key in his back slowly turned. As he walked, his toy cane rose and fell, striking the floor with a click.

  A skeletal figure crawled behind the toy in the top hat. Its bones rattled and shook, moved by means of some wind-up clockwork mechanism.

  A clockwork witch astride a tin broom rolled past both. A mechanical cackle sounded from her.

  While I watched, the whole carnival took shape, outlined in glows and shimmers. The carousel was there, turning by itself, playing a faint, discordant song. The riding wheel spun beside it, seats filled with dolls, springs and gears whirling and clicking as it turned.

  Clowns walked amid it all, keys turning in their backs, their movements stiff and aimless.

  I thought of Berthold Ordwald falling, arrows in his throat.

  Of Alfreda, pale and bruised, weeping the black tears of a corpse.

  “A toy,” I said. “All this, because of a toy?”

  The radiant boy looked about, his bright gold eyes turning as though he’d heard me speak, but couldn’t find the source.

  He spoke, and a moment later the skull whispered.

  “When can I go out?” it said. “I’m tired of playing! Tired of this room! I want to go outside and play with Maya and Siri!”

  “He doesn’t know he’s dead.”

  “I don’t like this game!” The child kicked at the toy circus master, but the doll avoided his foot and waggled its cane at him accusingly. “You’re mean! I don’t like you!”

  I sank into a crouch. Toadsticker weighed heavy in my hand.

  The toys gained solidity as I watched them. The taint of magic deep in my soul whispered to me.

  “Toys,” I muttered. “They’re just toys.” Sorcerous toys, I knew. From the time of arcane summer.

  “Who’s there?” shouted the child. “Nurse, is that you? Why won’t you open the door? I want to go out!”

  “I’m sorry, kid,” I said. I was sure he couldn’t understand Kingdom, even if he could make out my words. “I wish I could help you. I truly do.”

  I shivered. Maybe it was the magic speaking, the ghost of the huldra putting images in my head again. Or maybe it was my imagination.

  Either way, I saw the kid standing in the middle of the room, crying. Heard the last refrain of an angry adult voice. Heard the slamming of the door, and the throwing of a bolt.

  The boy had stood there crying for a long time. Then he’d gathered his toys, and played and played until finally he died.

  Even after that, the carnival clowns walked. The rising wheel turned. The carousel tinkled and chimed.

  When the boy had returned, as a thing of lights and shadows, the carnival simply played on.

  The tiny carnival master turned toward me, walking my way, tapping his cane on the floor as he approached.

  As he neared, the clowns began to follow. And the witch, and the Man of Bones, and all the rest. No longer translucent, each was solid enough to leave trails in the dust on the floor, to move aside the fragments of what I now knew to be bone or scraps of clothing.

  More miniature monsters emerged from a toy box resting against the far wall. The lid of the box was open, revealing a number of neat compartments, each lined with shiny mirrors.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “Let me out!” cried the child. He rose to his feet. Tears like shards of ice ran from those blank golden eyes. “Please let me out! I’ll be a good boy! Please!”

  Toadsticker’s hilt was warm in my hand. What was it the lightning rod man had said?

  “What you need is what you lost.”

  “Kid, you’re a ghost. Just float through the damned door.”

  “Let me out!”

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t dream, so I tried to peer into that peculiar dark that lay beyond the walls of sleep.

  Nothing. When I opened my eyes again, the wind-up carnival master was tapping his cane on the toe of my boot, and the rest of his miniature band were closing in.

  “No one leaves!” said the toy carnival master, his painted eyes turned up toward me. “Everyone stays!”

  The ghost child cried. His wails never reached the volume of Buttercup’s cries, but they rang in my ears all the same.

  I felt a tug on the rope at my waist. I wondered what might be going on, out there. Darla and Mama and Gertriss could be fighting off monsters. They could be fighting, and losing, and here I was, safe and sound, a step from the carnival’s heart.

  Could I really end it all with a blow? Was the new Toadsticker able to deal out blows to ghosts?

  “Kid, if you can hear me, look up.”

  He didn’t stop bawling, but he did lift his face. His empty golden eyes turned about the room.

  “Daddy?”

  “No. Don’t you see a light or something? Dammit, isn’t there an Angel around?”

  “Daddy!”

  Darla yanked hard at the rope. I tugged back, and she yanked again, harder.

  I kicked the mechanical carnival master away. He and a dozen of his fellows bounced off the wall, righted themselves, and came trundling back toward me, gears whirring, determined little metal feet scraping across the dusty floor.

  I moved to stand before the ghost child. His eyes still turned, and he still sobbed, and with my free hand I reached down and tried to pat his glowing head.
/>   My fingers stroked cold air. He gasped and reached up, trying to grab me, chilling my hands and wrist with every futile grasp.

  Darla yanked so hard I nearly lost my footing. The gondola rocked, struck by something big and angry. Claws raked the gondola’s exterior.

  “Damn it all to Hell,” I said, and I plunged Toadsticker straight down through the radiant boy’s tousled head until the sword bit an inch into the gondola’s hardwood deck.

  The boy vanished. Vanished without a wail, or a struggle, or the faintest of cries. His light was simply extinguished, and the gondola went dark as a cave. Even Buttercup’s glow faded to nothing, though her skull continued to whisper.

  I tugged at the rope. Darla tugged back, but she didn’t yank.

  I found a fresh box of matches, lit one. The floor was alive with scurries and clicks.

  It took six more matches to find all the pieces of the toy carnival, and stomp them into ruin. Then I put a boot to the toy box, smashing every tiny mirror and grinding the fragments to bits.

  When it was done, I took a somber Buttercup’s hand. We walked through the empty gondola’s wall and into the fire-lit night.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We stood there till dawn, and watched it all burn.

  The riding wheel was the last to fall. Flames rose up from the wheel’s base, licking at the timbers that supported the gears and the chains that would set it turning no more. Soon the central hub caught. That blaze radiated out until the wheel was, for a single brief moment, a tall and lovely thing formed of dancing, eager fires.

  The wheel leaned, timbers snapping, iron beams sagging in the heat. The top flattened, the hub gave way, and the whole thing came crashing down with a terrible, thunderous groan.

  It fell full on the carousel, which was already engulfed in sheets of flame. Both wheel and carousel disintegrated, sending up an enormous column of sparks before the fires settled and joined their many fellows burning low across the grounds.

  The monsters burned too. The dragon went up like a pile of resin-rich pine kindling, leaving nothing behind but tangles of wire. The Man of Bones burned bright for a long time until nothing was left but ash.

  The battle was over when Buttercup and I stepped out of the gondola. The Hall of Horrors fell instantly. The mirror denizens lingered on, slowing, Darla said, as though wounded, or winding down.

  They say Mama caught hold of the flying witch’s cape and snatched her right off her broom. Mama’s cleaver did the rest. I gathered Mama was truly disappointed the witch hadn’t put up much of a struggle.

  The only survivors were Malus, who looked decidedly less than magnificent, and his assistant Molly. Mama had shaken her birds over them and declared them free of any touch of darkness.

  I wondered what Mama’s dried crows would say about me.

  Mama yanked up the swamp witch’s head by its matted black hair. She held it up and spat in its face. “That’s what happens to them who lay a finger on me or mine,” she said. Then she hurled the severed head into the nearest bank of flames.

  “One less monster in the world,” said Mama.

  “Or maybe one more,” I replied.

  Darla squeezed my hand. She’d asked what I found, inside the gondola. All I told her was that I’d found the carnival’s heart, and stopped it beating.

  That’s all I’ll ever tell her, I think. Dead or not, shade or not, I struck down a child. I’ll not burden Darla with that. I’ll bear it alone, for all of my days, and die wishing I’d found another way.

  “It’s all gone,” said Darla. She leaned in close, laid her head on my shoulder. “All over.”

  I nodded.

  Half the sky was veiled with a high bank of clouds. The face of the sun that peeked above the horizon painted the clouds with red and gold. The same gold as the ghost child’s hair.

  A pair of sooty, grinning gunners came trotting up. “Nothing moving, sir,” they said, to me. “If it wasn’t on fire before, it is now.”

  “You sure?” I asked. “It’s all burning?”

  “Every last scrap,” said one.

  Weariness washed over me. “Good. We’re leaving. Get everyone on the wagons.”

  “Yessir,” they chorused.

  The midway was flanked by fires and smoke. We picked our way down it.

  The wagons waited. We clambered aboard, day folk and halfdead and Troll alike coughing and wheezing and exhausted. Slim managed to clear his throat and start bellowing some Troll walking song, and we turned our wagons toward home.

  The Corps hit the carnival right after we took to the boats. There came a great booming thud, as though a mountain fell to earth, and a moment later the normally sluggish river water showed whitecaps and spray.

  We paddled like madmen, and though the sky lit up with flashes and roars, I didn’t see anyone looking back.

  Ask any Markhat, and he’ll tell you with a smile that life on the water is the only way to live.

  Dasher is steady as a house. She doesn’t rock, or pitch, or yaw, or do whatever it is boat folk speak of when they mean rock.

  Majestic, claims Darla. That’s how she described Dasher’s motion, the first time we took her out of the slip and tootled around the Brown. It was a warm, bright afternoon, and I was wearing my new captain’s hat. Darla was smiling, a red scarf in her hair, her white dress whipped by the wind. She stood on Dasher’s blunt bow and lifted her hands and said simply, “Majestic.”

  I’m not one to argue with a happy wife.

  Cornbread mastered the fine art of stairs his first day aboard. Now he charges up and down them all hours, his little doggie toenails clicking away, his tongue hanging out, his fuzzy face alight with simple canine joy.

  If Darla and I are officers and Cornbread is first mate, Slim makes up our crew. He sleeps under a tarp beneath the covered porch, and he keeps a good sharp axe in his mighty Troll hand, and Darla sleeps soundly knowing a Troll, even a smallish one, slumbers lightly right outside.

  I was afraid the Troll might return to his beloved whiskey after we buried Alfreda. She’d wound down with the rest, lingering just long enough for us to fetch her mother, so they could say goodbye. Mrs. Ordwald left for home the next day. She didn’t shed any more tears.

  Slim asked to stay with us, and we’d gladly agreed. Darla cooks him hams, and Mama brings him bitter black tea. He’s getting a belly, and teaching Mama a few words of Troll, and I guess all that beats a cage lined with dirty hay and all the rotgut moonshine you can drink.

  They tell me a sorceress called Wither whacked the carnival site. They say there’s nothing left except an enormous bowl-shaped depression in the charred ground. Never heard of Wither, and don’t care to see the havoc she wreaked.

  After all, my little band did all the work.

  There’s another benefit to life aboard a boat. Our neighbors are hardy seafaring sorts too. The boat to port is the Elegant Lily, and her owners are a pair of opera singers who throw the best parties this side of the High House.

  Look starboard, and you’ll find the red and black paddle wheels of the Furious Caleb. The Caleb’s occupants, a trio of self-described ‘ladies of leisure,’ put on their own fireworks show the last evening of every month. The whole street lines up to watch, and the celebration goes all night.

  Buttercup pays us regular visits, of course. She is fond of dancing atop Dasher’s single smokestack.

  All of our new neighbors have seen her. None did more than wave and shout a cheery ‘hello.’ The opera singers treated her to a few lines of song, and applauded her when she sang them back.

  “It’s a seafaring life for me,” I said to Darla.

  She mumbled an affirmative and fell back to sleep.

  Evis recovered, right on schedule. I’ve seen him a dozen times since the night I slew the carnival’s heart. Each time, he looked more and more like the m
an he must have been before he was turned, during the War.

  He’s a handsome fellow, if still a bit pale. His eyes are kind, like I always knew they’d been. His smile is quick and easy.

  When he smiles, that is. These days he’s more prone to frown. Gertriss moved her things out of Avalante and isn’t answering his letters. She’s barely speaking to me, either, but in time she’ll forgive.

  I keep telling Evis that. And I believe it’s true. She understands he kept the truth from her because he didn’t want her burdened with guilt if he had died.

  She understands, but can’t accept it. At least not yet. I think she’ll forgive, one day, but even my much-vaunted wisdom can’t say when.

  So Evis, who discovered the secret of immortality but lost the girl, moons around like a lovesick teenager with his first broken heart. And Gertriss, who found true love and incidentally a way to live forever, spends her evenings moping on our couch while Darla tries to cheer her up with hats and shoes and board games.

  “Love,” I muttered. “Ain’t it grand?”

  Darla stirred. Cornbread kicked and moaned, dreaming doggie dreams.

  I lay there and stared at my ceiling, fighting sleep. I went to Mama the day after the carnival burned, told her I didn’t want to dream for a while. She keeps me supplied with a bitter black tea that so far has prevented any walking dreams.

  Tomorrow, I decided, I’ll get up early and hire a wagon and buy a few cords of nice dry pine. Slim can split it into boiler-sized wedges while I see to the arrangement of our deck chairs.

  Then we’ll cast off and head south. Troll and dog, man and wife. We might put in at Bel Loit for a few days, or we might just keep churning toward the Sea. It won’t matter where we go. We’re just going to go.

  Darla turned over, tickling my face with her hair. I snuggled close and drifted off, listening to the lazy Brown lap gently against our hull.

  Despite Mama’s ink-black tea, I dreamed.

  I dreamed Dasher sprouted wide white gull wings and took me aloft. For a time I flew, crisscrossing Rannit, soaring so low over the park I sent idlers fleeing and pulling a dozen hats along in my wake.