The Damnation Affair (the bannon & clare affairs)

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “A place by some pretty jessum trees, Kittycat. Keep your eyes closed.”

  Chapter 31

  The gotar shambled forward. Why are they attacking from the south? “Give ’em Hell!” Gabe yelled, and the men of Damnation went to work with flails and scythes. The mud-creatures were falling apart; Granger had actually thrown a charm-blessing that spread and sparkled between drops of rain, turning the water fair-holy. He stood upright behind the defense-line, holding the mancy active for as long as he could.

  It was bad, but there was hope. Russ Overton had limped into town, madder than a wet cat and all over mud, his clothes scorched from the shattering of the west charterstone. A group of men were hauling a chunk of granite from behind Ma Hainey’s boardinghouse—she’d braced two boards on it and used it to chop off chicken heads, so it was already blooded—to the west border in Cam Salthenry’s rickety wagon, with Russ perched atop the chunk of stone muttering charter-charms to prepare it. The instant they heaved it upright among the shattered ruins of the other stone, he could repair the boundary—and that same group of men would go with him to ride the circuit and keep any undead off the chartermage.

  It was now a question of how long they could hold. They still had the gotar bottlenecked south of Pig Street, but there were more of them every time thunder rumbled overhead. At least the rain had slowed.

  Jack wasn’t sanguine, though. The sun was sinking, and if Russ and the stone didn’t get to the west in time, it could get ugly. Underneath the stormclouds, a furnace of gold was turning orange and red, giving the entire town a coat of wet gilding. The gotar gleamed like seals, too, but the sunlight raised steaming welts on their dirt-skins.

  Where are all the other undead? Salt put a boundary around the graveyard, but—

  “Sheriff!” A boy’s voice, high and piping. “Sheriff! Sheriff! They’re here! Help us, they’re here!”

  It was Zachary Corcoran, and he was running down the street as fast as his thick little legs could pump, throwing up clods of mud and dirt. He gabbled, pointing to the northwest, and the pins-and-needles all over Gabe’s body were almost driven back by cold fear.

  The dead from outside the boundary shambled, their jaws working, and Gabe finally had an answer for a question that had bothered him a long while. It had to do with the undead in the schoolhouse, and why they’d gone after Catherine.

  It was Jack’s fault, actually. He’d buried Robert Browne in consecrated ground; Robbie would find charter-boundaries no bar to his passage. The thing in the claim had probably forced the boy to carry corpses over the line, to see if it could be done. Once over, those dead could spread contagion and break the charter-circuit from the inside.

  They clustered in shadows, some of them freshly dead—he recognized Amelia Gerhardt from one of the outlying farms, her head stuck at a strange angle and her eyes blazing with unholy red pinpricks as she shuffled toward him on bare, flayed feet. The sun flashed, clouds scudding and tearing as the wind rose, and the thing that had been Rich Gerhardt’s wife squealed and fell, its flesh smoking.

  Zach Corcoran was sobbing with fright. The gotar set up a chilling rumble-noise—their version of a battle cry, maybe.

  I have had enough. Gabe drew in an endless breath. “Keep them back!” he roared, and pointed at Granger. “Protect him!”

  “What are you doing?” Emmet Tilson screeched at him.

  What I should have done a long time ago. He faced north, and walked toward the approaching undead, his boots sinking in squelching mud. Zach Corcoran wailed, and the hiss-rasp of dead throats working as they tried to eat clean air was fit to drive a man mad.

  Jack Gabriel spread his arms. The pins-and-needles of grace rose through him, and he stilled the fruitless inner thrashing.

  The surprise was how easy it was. He’d spent so long hiding it, avoiding the questions, like a hooded horse, just plodding ahead and refusing to look. But the space inside him that had opened at his Last Baptism dilated, and inside it, the still small voice spoke.

  Not for myself, but for others I may ask. Underneath the words was a single thought.

  A pair of dark eyes and a sweet little face, dark curls and the feel of her against him. Her teeth sinking into his lip before the startlement passed, and then the sweetness and the thundercrack inside him as her name rose like the charter-bell’s clanging.

  Catherine.

  Grace burst free, a point of golden brilliance that shrank before it exploded outward. Time halted, and the wetness on his cheeks was not mud or blood or rain.

  It was, after all, so easy. The Word spoke itself in silence, and the undead cringed from the sound. Their faces smoothed, the corpseglow leaving them in puffs of gold-laced steam, and Jack struggled to hold the place inside him open.

  One question nagged him, though. From the north. Catherine. Dear God, Catherine. Please, if I have ever served You, let her be safe.

  The golden light winked out, and he fell heavily to his knees with a splash of liquid dirt. The silence was immense, broken only by little Zach’s sobbing for air and Emmet Tilson’s wondering, breathless curse.

  The charter-bell had stopped ringing. And now everyone in town would know what he was.

  Gabe shut his eyes. I don’t care. Catherine. I have to see her.

  But when his group of Damnation’s citizens reached the schoolmarm’s house, they found it afire like half the northern part of town, smoke rising into a rapidly clearing sky.

  * * *

  He stood before the burning cottage, and the whispers rose in a tide behind him. The sun finished dying in the west, the stars peeping through torn clouds as the storm moved away.

  Man of God. Turned the undead back.

  But we all saw him kill Parse Means that one time, and he drank and visited the whores—

  Sweet on the schoolmarm too.

  Maybe one of those Papists. Maybe he’s a spy for the Vaticana Arcane.

  Naw, it’s just Gabe. His reasons are bound to be good.

  Where’s the marm? And that Chinee girl?

  Gone. Nobody can find hide nor hair.

  Well, maybe there’ll be a body in the house…

  The cold closed about him, and the pins-and-needles of grace left him, cold ash after a fire. His face froze, and the flames crackling through the snug little cottage mocked him.

  Perhaps she had not reached the town after all. Or if she had, was she inside the flame and the…

  “Gabe?” It was Russ Overton. Mud cracked on his face and his bloodshot eyes blinked furiously, a muscle in his stubbled cheek twitching. “The charterstone’s solid, it’ll hold. What now?”

  Why the hell you askin’ me? he wanted to howl. But it wasn’t a fair question. He was the one they looked to. The responsibility was his. “Contain the fires. Go house to house. Deal with every corpse we find.” Who was using his voice? He sounded harsh, and savage-sullen. “Get the wounded to Doc Howard and Ma Ripp, and ride the circuit in groups all night. And give Freedman Salt a goddamn tin star; if he hadn’t put a boundary over the graveyard we would’ve been in a world of hurt.” He stared at the flames. It was an inferno, and he thought he knew why.

  The thing from the claim was not going to be happy with this turn of events.

  “Gabe—” Russ’s hand on his shoulder, fingers digging in. “Did you find her?”

  He shook his head. Don’t ask me, Russ. You don’t want to know. “Later. We need to deal with the dead.”

  “You…” This was Emmet Tilson, and he was pale under the mud and the blood, his moustache a limp caterpillar clinging to his upper lip. “You’re a goddamn priest, Jack Gabriel. Don’t you try to deny it, we all saw you. You’re a goddamn Papist!”

  He didn’t think he could explain the history of the Order of the Templis to this jackass whorehouse dandy. Even if he had the urge, he doubted he had the patience. “I was something, once. Then I got married to a nice sweet girl who showed up dead one day.” The words tasted like wormwood. “I had to shoot my own wife,
the woman I’d broken my vows for. Do you want to give me some grief, Tilson, you’re welcome to. And I’ll answer.” By God, will I ever answer.

  “That’s enough.” Russ was between them, for Gabe had turned to face Tils, and the firelight played over both of them as the drenched wind cut through sodden clothing and laid a knife to the skin. “We have other problems right now, God damn you both! Tils, take a group of men and start ridin’ the circuit.”

  “I don’t take orders from no tarbrush son of a bi—” Tils began, but Gabe stepped forward.

  The punch hit clean, with a high cracking sound. It threw Emmet Tilson to the mud, and Gabe had his gun out. It was a damn good thing too, because Tils had drawn, and pointed his own iron up at the sheriff. The skin on Tils’s cheek bled, laid open, and his eye was already puffing.

  The cold all through Gabe didn’t alter one whit. “One more body to put iron and salt in won’t be no trouble tonight.” He stared at the man, realizing just how small Tilson really was. “You want to meet me, Emmet, you do it at high noon. Say so now, or shut your goddamn mouth and get to work. I ain’t havin’ no more of this from you.”

  It was, he realized, all the same to him. He could kill this man now or later; it didn’t make a goddamn bit of difference. He’d sent Catherine to her death.

  Told her to go home and bolt her doors, and they would probably find her corpse in the flames. Iron and salt in that body he had held, filling the mouth he had kissed; the kiss that still burned all the way through him.

  How could the kiss be in him if she was gone? How was it possible? Was the God who had spun the world into motion that brutal? That…that unrighteous?

  Tilson lowered his gun. Gabe’s finger tightened. It would take so little to solve the problem of this irritating jackass once and for all.

  In the end, though, he holstered his own gun, and offered Tilson his hand. “Get up. Let’s get the town cleaned out, dammit.”

  But Tilson scrambled to his feet without help, and glared at Gabe. He shoved off through the crowd, and Gabe ended up having wide blond Paul Barberyus gather a group to ride the circuit with a hollow-cheeked, glaze-eyed Russ. Who, thank God, asked him no more questions.

  Maybe Russ knew there were no more answers to be had. In any case, Gabe had enough work organizing the shattered town back into some semblance of order.

  Then, he told himself as he cast one last glance at the burning wreckage of the schoolmarm’s house, it was time to go hunting.

  Chapter 32

  Perched on the wagon’s swaying front seat, Cat peered through the rain. Each time it jolted, her side ached; her bottom was never going to forgive her. She clung to his thin, stone-hard arm, and blinked away falling water. Her hair was an absolute sodden mess. Neither of them were respectable at this point, and the heaviness of the trunks in the back of the wagon probably kept the entire contraption from flying away in this dreadful storm. “Does it…hurt?”

  “No more than living.” Robbie’s laugh was a marvel of bitterness. “Neither of us will be carrying on the Barrowe-Browne name, I fancy.”

  Of course not. The undead do not procreate, even the conscious ones. “Don’t be nasty, Robbie.” She sighed, exhaustion swamping her. “But please do answer me honestly: Does it hurt?”

  “What’s pain? For God’s sake, would you rather be one of its corpses?”

  She jabbed her fingers in just under his ribs, and pinched him. The skin gave a fraction, resilient stone. He actually laughed, and it was Robbie’s old carefree, surprised merriment. “Ow! Very well. It stings, Kittycat. I won’t lie, it stings a bit. But that’s only until you fall asleep. I’ll do it as gently as possible.”

  “And you’re…you’re certain I’ll wake up?” She suddenly felt very small, and as the rain intensified and the wagon’s wheels cut into a sludge of mud, she huddled closer to her brother and wished Jack Gabriel were here too.

  But he won’t take very kindly to what Robbie is, and what I’m going to be. She shuddered a trifle, but her brother was right. The…the it, the master, or him, as Robbie inevitably referred to it as, had contaminated her brother. A man of Jack Gabriel’s stripe would not allow such a contaminated thing to live. He was a sheriff, for God’s sake. And so irritatingly…well, he was so irritatingly Jack. It was the only word she could find.

  “I’m absolutely certain.” Her brother’s tone was so grim she dared not question further.

  Now that Cat’s throat was throbbing with pain, she was contaminated, too. The thing had not outright killed her, perhaps because it still needed Robbie’s aid. But it had put her in that ghastly underground cave…and the bodies, dear God, the corpses piled up, waiting to serve the master’s bidding at some future moment—perhaps when it was certain it could overwhelm the town and add to their number in one great mass.

  Some of them were merely bones, and older ones, slowly mouldering in the labyrinth’s depths, were dressed in strange and primitive costumes. The removal of the clothes was a newer tradition, it seemed, and Cat’s shudders were coming regularly now, in great gripping waves.

  “I don’t feel quite right,” she murmured.

  “Try to rest. You lost a lot of blood.”

  “How gruesome.”

  He shook a spatter of rain away, the familiar forelock falling over his pale forehead. “Well, that’s what it is. Cattle are good, other animals—but you won’t have to bite anything. You can just take from me; I’ll hunt for the both of us.”

  This was a highly indelicate conversation, and her stomach was none too steady. “Robbie…”

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  Well, you shouldn’t have left in the first place. “I had to.”

  “I know. I just wish…” Mercifully, he stopped. “Should be around here. Why this patch is consecrated, I can’t tell you. You’ll feel it as soon as we get there. It’s actually pleasant. And then, after dusk tomorrow, we’ll set out. We’ll go to San Frances. If we’re careful, we may actually pass unnoticed.”

  “We won’t for long. Or do you think our presence will not spread the contamination, and cause a great deal of suffering?”

  “Well, I haven’t turned anyone into a slavering undead yet. I believe the consecrated burial is what saved me from…” Robbie trailed off, lifting his head. The rain was coming down harder now, and Cat discovered she was quite sick of frontier living, no matter how Miss Bowdler rhapsodized about its purity.

  I will never see my students again. Or the ladies from the Lucky Star. She found, much to her surprise, that she quite missed them already. And Li Ang’s round, now-familiar face, and little baby Jonathan’s piping cries. She even missed the heat and the dust. Any heat would have been welcome now.

  Is Jack well? He stayed behind at the cave, to do…what? He said he had business there. Oddly enough, the thought of him—dirty, stubbled, and comforting—hurt somewhere in the region of her chest. A piercing pain, as if she had been stabbed.

  Her head ached quite dreadfully, too. “I truly do not feel well.” Her voice was high and rather young, as if she were nine and afraid of the shadows on the nursery wall again.

  “Don’t worry.” Her brother tautened the reins, and the horses—thin nags, but tough as bootleather—halted, switching their tails. “We have arrived. Straighten your fan, dearest.”

  The words—just what he would say before a ball, in the carriage as they braced themselves for another night In Society—made a small, forlorn giggle escape her. How far they were from Boston. Here, in the middle of a wet night in the cold, and her throat throbbing terribly…but still, she clung to his arm until he fastened the reins and hopped down from the wagon.

  It was dark, and the rain came down in sheets. She could just make out a roaring river, its curve reminding her terribly of the crescent of sandy beach and the soul-eating blackness on its other shore. But there were white-trunked jessum trees, shaking their jangling bracelet-leaves under the wind, and as Robbie lifted her down she felt a tingle along her s
kin. It was a comforting warmth, and even though her breath came in puffs of white cloud as the wind veered and cut through her sodden riding habit, she felt it like a blanket about her shoulders.

  “Oh,” she said, a thin breath of wonder, and her brother laughed again.

  “I told you that you would feel it. Now, step this way, sister.”

  She did, holding fast to his arm, and the rain was a curtain of jewels. The jessum trees waved their long fluttering finials in greeting, and there was a patch of sunken earth with a stone at its head.

  Robbie drove the shovel in at the foot of the grave, his booted foot stamping it cleanly home. It would wait until needed.

  She clung to his arm with all her remaining strength, and when he turned to face her, there was a break in the heavy clouds, and starshine played over his pale, ravaged face.

  “Are you quite sure?” he asked her, pointlessly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Her throat really did hurt most awfully, and her head was full of rushing noise. She stepped away, her hands falling to her sides, fisting inside the ruins of her gloves. “We shall go to San Frances. The opera there is quite fine, I’ve been told.” There was a gleam in his hands. The rain slackened. The gleam was a pistol, and the fear was suddenly very large, and she was lost in it. “Robbie…” Breathless, and she lifted her chin. I am a Barrowe-Browne. I shall not cry. “Do it, for God’s sake. Do not let me become a mindless slave to that thing. I would rather…well.” I would rather die, but I will, won’t I? Either way. It is six of one, a half-dozen of another. At least this way I shall not become a slavering hag.