by Frank Tuttle
“They’re brilliant. I agree on that. But they’re just paint. Could’ve been a ruse. What’s happened to you, Markhat? You used to be so marvelously cynical.”
“Still am. But look. If all it wanted was to get Buttercup down there, it could have done that without my help. It could have taken the Lady anytime it wanted.”
“It still could.”
“It won’t.”
Evis nodded, but didn’t open his eyes. “I hope you’re right. I really do. Learning there are things in this world scarier than the Corpsemaster is causing me to lose sleep.”
“Me too.”
“You haven’t asked once about the weapons that brought down Werewilk.” Evis leaned back in his chair and took in a long puff and let the smoke come hissing out between his mouthful of fangs.
“Wasn’t sure you wanted me to.” I don’t have fangs, despite what some will tell you, but I followed suit as best I could. “Still not sure I want to.”
Evis chuckled. “I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“Why? I’m not on the Avalante payroll.”
“The House wants the Corpsemaster to know exactly what nearly killed her,” said Evis. “And that’s when it gets complicated. They want her to know, but they don’t want to be the ones to tell her. Politics.”
My cigar was beginning to taste a bit harsh.
“So why not send a runner with a note?”
Evis grinned, all white eyes and fangs in the dark.
“She’s your lady friend, Finder. They figure it’s better coming from you.”
I nearly snubbed out my cigar and remembered pressing appointments elsewhere, but Evis cleverly stayed my hand by producing that specially brewed dark beer he won’t tell me the name of.
“The House has many interests,” said Evis as he poured. “Some financial. Some scientific. Some are even military.”
I accepted his glass and took a long draught.
“Military?”
Evis nodded. “During the War, Finder, efforts were made, in secret, to produce a weapon capable of inflicting great harm over long distances by purely mundane means.”
“No magic?”
“None. At any phase of the process. No sorcerous fuels, no ensorcelled objects, no magic whatsoever of any kind.”
“They’re usually called bows and arrows and swords,” I said. “Although catapults work nicely too, until someone like the Corpsemaster kicks them over with a couple of eldritch spells.”
Evis folded his hands. “I speak of a new kind of weapon entirely,” he said. “We were nearly complete with our work. We needed only to refine certain chemical processes, which I believe would have been done within a few months, had the War not ended.”
Realization dawned. “The things in the yard. The iron things. Someone else finished what your House started.”
“They did indeed. They are called cannon, Finder. They are merely thick iron tubes, closed at one end. When they are filled with a certain substance and a projectile, the substance is then ignited. This expels the projectile outward with such force that even the Corpsemaster’s sorceries failed to deflect them.”
I whistled. “You’re sure about that?”
“I am.” He poured more beer. “Each cannon required a crew of four. None of these men were sorcerers. The training took only weeks to complete. And they nearly brought down Encorla Hisvin, with half a dozen cannon.”
I employed one of the colorful words of which Darla does not approve. Evis merely nodded again.
“The House has re-initiated our own efforts to produce this explosive substance,” he said. “I am confident that, within a few weeks, we will begin testing our own cannon.”
“And you want me to tell the Corpsemaster that you’re building more of the same things that shot holes in her spells last week?”
“We do. In fact, we hope she will assist us financially, or perhaps encourage the Regency to invest in our efforts.”
I ogled. “The Regency?”
“The cannon we faced were from Prince. It would not do to find thousands of them suddenly circling Rannit’s walls. I believe we have just seen how easily such a tactic could defeat even Rannit’s most potent sorcerers.”
I drained my beer.
“So much for the peace.”
“I hope that is not so. But I see no other choice open to us.”
I didn’t either. I smoked and Evis smoked and we drank all the fancy beer and Evis had to send for more.
“Mama Hog?”
I didn’t need to ask the rest. I laughed and set down my glass.
“Still fuming. Gertriss is staying with me. I made her a junior member of the firm. She’s out dining alone at a place on Sickers right now, waiting for a rather careless but extremely married man to have dinner in public with his mistress.”
“Leaving you to revel in your sloth.”
“Mama’s exact words. But I enjoy sloth. It comes with beer and good cigars.”
“The Lady Werewilk was by yesterday,” said Evis. “She bought her own gallery, by the way. I imagine there are puffy red faces all over Mount Cloud.”
I raised my glass in salute to the Lady, and Evis did the same.
“I hope she runs them out of business.”
“She might. She said she’s recovered nearly three hundred intact works from the ruins. And she plans to start reconstruction of her House next Spring, on the very same spot, of course. I wonder if Old Bones will still be dreaming, by then.”
I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. I know I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near there if the dreams turn bad.”
“Art is never without risk.”
“I know. I’ve still got a blister on my pinkie.”
Evis chuckled. “They came back to Rannit, you know. All of them.”
I didn’t ask what they he meant. I didn’t need to.
“I imagine their numbers have grown considerably. You did mention that the Corpsemaster was given an artifact by the alarkin, before we were returned.”
“I doubt any of the soldiers survived. I’m sure none of the sorcerers did.”
“And you’ve had no word from Hisvin at all?”
“None.” That haunted me. Every cab, every wagon, every carriage I heard on the streets made me look up and wonder if this was the hour Hisvin would send her black carriage for me, for another little talk.
Now it seemed that I’d need to seek her out, if she failed to send for me. Which would only serve to remind her that I alone in all of Rannit knew where she laid her head.
Which put me knowing two of her secrets.
Another silence fell. We filled it with beer and unspoken fears. When it lingered too long, I took my leave and left Evis alone in the dark.
Darla met me on the street. She’d hired a cab and brought me a yellow daisy for my lapel.
“Did it hurt?” she asked, wide-eyed and innocent.
“Did what hurt?”
“Falling in the brewery, dearest.” She laughed and leaped aboard the cab and patted the seat beside her. “And next time bring me one of those fancy cigars.”
I clambered up. If Hisvin’s black carriage was out there, it could go straight to Hell. There’d be time for talk of cannons and Regents another day.
“I’ll bring two,” I said. “We can smoke them in front of Mama, and watch her change colors. It’ll be like springtime, only louder.”
Darla smiled. “Buttercup learned a new word today.”
“What word?” The tiny banshee had demonstrated an inerrant ability to select and repeat curse words. Mama was nearly beside herself with shame, since Buttercup also tended to pronounce them with Mama’s trademark brogue.
“Chair. She calls everything that now. But she left her wings on all day. Mama said old Mrs. Gershon brought Buttercup a bag of sweets. I think it’s going to work.”
“Knew it would.” We’d let it slip to a number of neighborhood gossips that Buttercup was actually Gertriss’s stunted daughter from a failed back
woods tryst. Then Darla had a pair of silk wings made, which Buttercup wore on a harness beneath her dress. Mama introduced her to her clients as a rare friendly forest sprite, and while a few of the most gullible believed that most took one look at the obviously false wings and recalled the rumors about Gertriss and merely smiled and nodded.
Which allowed Buttercup to live without hiding, out in plain sight. At least for the present.
“So where are we off to, light of my life? A mysterious errand? A sinister rendezvous? A nice steak and a helping of baked potatoes?”
“I was thinking fish and wine. But they can be sinister fish, if you insist.”
I kissed her, right there in the open, and I didn’t care who saw me.
The cabman snapped his reigns, and Darla took my hands, and we headed back to our side of town.
About the Author
Frank Tuttle discovered writing at an early age. Later, when Frank figured out that writing did not in fact involve mixing seahorses with caustic lye compounds, he began to enjoy writing. And when Frank was first paid to write about things that never happened to people who never existed, he knew he’d found a vocation to take the place of professional carnival weight-guessing.
Frank is a hairy, nine-foot tall hominid weighing nearly six hundred pounds who makes his home in the heavily-forested wilderness of the American Pacific Northwest. And he wishes all you people would stop trying to film him, and that business of making plaster casts of his footprints is really beginning to cheese him off.
To learn more about Frank Tuttle, please visit www.franktuttle.com. Send an email to Frank at [email protected]. Send money to Frank any way you please, but quickly.
Look for these titles by Frank Tuttle
Now Available:
Dead Man’s Rain
The Mister Trophy
Hold the Dark
The Cadaver Client
Coming Soon:
The Bonnie Bell
Demons in a feeding frenzy drive the world-weary Markhat to the brink…
Hold the Dark
© 2009 Frank Tuttle
A Markhat Story
Quiet, hard-working seamstresses aren’t the kind that normally go missing, even in a tough town like Rannit. Martha Hoobin’s disappearance, though, quickly draws Markhat into a deadly struggle between a halfdead blood cult and the infamous sorcerer known only as the Corpsemaster.
A powerful magical artifact may be both his only hope of survival—and the source of his own inescapable damnation.
Markat’s search leads him to the one thing that’s been missing in his life. But even love’s awesome power may not save him from the darkness that’s been unleashed inside his own soul.
Warning: This gritty, hard-boiled fantasy detective novel contains mild romance and interludes of suggestive handholding.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Hold the Dark:
I picked up the candle and followed.
The door wound down a long dark hall. Walls, floors and ceiling all bore water damage, but the warped pine wood floor had been repaired in two places. Recently, too, the nail-heads shone of new-beaten iron in the light, which meant they hadn’t had time to rust.
The hall abruptly ended. I stepped down, nearly stumbled, onto a cobble-brick floor, and my candlelight lost sight of any ceiling, and all the walls. It did illuminate the backs of four black-clad halfdead, who stood in a small circle a dozen steps away.
Evis and his dark glasses turned to face me.
“They are friends. They do not see you.”
“Wonderful.” My mouth was so dry I spoke in a ragged whisper. My new friends didn’t turn, didn’t leap, so I licked my lips and took a step toward them. “What is it we’re seeing?”
I wasn’t seeing a thing, aside from vampires and a flickering ring of shadows and floor-bricks.
“Blood was spilled here. Spilled in such quantity that it rushed onto the floor.” He indicated the area, which the halfdead surrounded. They pulled back a few steps, and Evis motioned me forward. I took my guttering candle and went.
All I saw were bricks, just like all the others—black and smooth and rounded over with age and wear. Half the old buildings in Rannit were built over even older roads, just like this one. The builders merely scraped the dirt off the cobbles and called it a floor.
I knelt down, put my nose near the cold baked clay. If there was any blood there, it was too old and too faint for human eyes and a stub of a candle to see.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, rising.
“Do,” said Evis. “You see no trace because soon after the blood was spilled, the floor was cleaned. I suspect they used a mop and tanner’s bleach. My associates and I can still smell the traces though. Some must have run between the cobbles.”
“Rannit’s got more blood-stains than pot holes,” I said. “What makes this one special? What does it have to do with Martha Hoobin?”
Evis sighed.
Then he frowned.
“Mavis. Torno, Glee, come here.”
Three new vampires appeared and glided near, their ghost-white faces turned down, their dirty marble eyes turned away from my light.
“What the—?”
Evis raised a hand and the halfdead stopped still, faces down, beside me. I shut up.
A moment passed. I strained my ears, since my eyes were proving useless. I heard nothing at first—then, faintly, I made out scratching, like a mouse in a wall, chewing away. I held my breath but couldn’t locate the source.
Evis put his dark glasses away. “Dear God,” he said, in a whisper. “Dear God.”
A fourth vampire appeared at my right elbow. Evis nodded at it.
“Go now, Mr. Markhat. Sara will take you to safety.”
I opened my mouth. The scratching grew louder. Was it coming from the floor?
“Sara!”
Sara reached out, put both cold hands on my waist and hefted me a foot off the floor.
She’d taken a single gliding step toward the door when the brick floor at our feet exploded and a long bubbling scream broke the silence.
A scream and a smell. A stench, really, louder in its way than any noise—rotting flesh, warm and wet, thrust suddenly up out of the earth.
A brick struck Sara in the side of her head, and she faltered, tripped and went down, and me with her.
I heard Evis shout something and felt whips of motion around me and in that instant before my dropped candle flicked out I caught sight of the thing that we’d raised. It leaped toward me, a thing of loose and rotted flesh, slapping Evis casually aside when he grasped its right arm. There was no face upon that head, which was itself only a dark, swollen mass that sent sprays of thick black fluid flying with every movement. It had no eyes, no ears, no lower jaw—but it saw me, somehow, and it raced toward me, arms outstretched, ruined belly burst open and trailing shriveled entrails as it came.
The candle went dark. I scrambled up, and I ran. Behind me, I heard a thud and a gurgle as Sara rose and grappled with the dead thing. Evis shouted again and a pair of crossbows threw, thunk-whee, thunk-whee.
I charged across the cobbles. I couldn’t see the door. I couldn’t see the wall. I couldn’t see the thing behind me, but I could hear it, hear Evis and his halfdead as they grappled, leaped and struck.
The ruined thing screamed again, so close I smelled its foul exhalation, felt cold spittle on my back.
I slammed face-first into a wall that might have needed new plaster and new paint but hadn’t suffered much loss in the way of structural integrity. The room spun. Blood spewed out of my nose.
It shrieked at the scent, maybe a dozen steps behind. I put the wall on my left and charged, arms groping for a door, any door.
More crossbows threw. A bolt buried itself in the wall a hand’s breadth from my head. I ducked and kept moving—had I turned the wrong way? Was the door behind me now?
Something hissed. Something cold and wet laid itself on the back of my neck. I bello
wed for Evis, lashed out with a back kick that sank into something soft. The smell hit me anew. I whirled and kicked again and it screamed, wet and triumphant, nearly in my bloodied face.
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see at all, but I felt the air rush past me, heard the pair of grunts and thuds as a pair of vampires dived into the creature and pinned it to the wall. A thick, foul spray of fluid caught me square in the face when the halfdead hit, and I retched and stumbled away, pawing and spitting.
A cold hand gripped my shoulder. “This way,” said Evis, shoving me forward. “Go. Find the carriage. Tell Bertram and Floyd to wait with you.”
Behind me, I heard shrieks and blows—short wet shrieks punctuated with fast, hard blows. I assumed they had the dead thing pinned and when Evis let go, I moved.
I wasn’t followed. The gurgling shrieks behind me grew fainter and shorter. I heard the faint sound of steel slicing the air and, suddenly, all was silent.
I found the ruined door, cut my hand on the splintered doorframe, darted through it and was down the hall at a run. My footfalls were loud in the dark, and all the way out to the street my mind played tricks on me, hearing the sounds of pursuit behind me, hearing a faint growl that crept from a bloated, gurgling throat.
But I made it. I stumbled whole into the street, mopped blood from my nose, tried to pick out my rights and my lefts from the shadows and the warehouse fronts. That way, I decided. Right. Right for Evis’s carriage. Left to just skirt the whole mess and head for the country and raise a crop of sheep or do whatever it is they do out there.
I’d taken a single step that way when hands—gentle hands—fell on my shoulder. “That way,” said a voice, and I was turned around, and a clean white linen handkerchief was placed in my hand. “The carriage awaits.”
I mopped blood and blinked.
The street was full of halfdead.
Ten or more glided past, quiet as ghosts. My giver of handkerchiefs joined them, gliding toward the warehouse like a black-clad puff of wind.
I shuddered, but I held the cloth tight to my nose and marched toward the carriage. More halfdead popped out of the shadows. Each and all ignored me, though I tottered and stank and dripped their favorite beverage liberally out onto the street.