The Incorruptibles

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Dedication

  For John Ronald Reuel, George, Elmore, Colleen,

  and Larry

  Strange bedfellows

  John Hornor Jacobs

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

  ONE

  We rode through fields burning like the plains of Hell – Fisk on the black, Banty on the roan bay, and me on Bess, the mule, leading a string of ponies. We came up from the delta and the lush watershed of the Big Rill through the edge of the farmlands. Settlers worked the fields, shovels in hand, throwing dirt on fallow fires. The farmhands looked lean and scrappy; poor folk, eking a living off the land.

  ‘The praefect orders another hunting expedition, they’ll be floating his body back to New Damnation,’ Banty said, low and through his teeth.

  Fisk sniffed, glanced at the smoke billowing above us and then back out over the Big Rill’s sun-hammered silver. No one moves the way Fisk does. Slow and deliberate, each gesture languid and relaxed. Until it isn’t.

  The Cornelian churned the wide waters of the Big Rill, brag-rags whipping in the wind, steaming upriver, while we kept pace. Fisk and I had picked up the escort contract from Marcellus out of New Damnation, but the proconsul’s tribune had saddled us with Banty, the greenhorn, who was good for nothing, except big talk and no action. The tribune wasn’t a bad fellow, but even good folks make mistakes.

  Fisk watched the Cornelian, the sky, the land. He remained still but his gaze never stopped roving, his grey eyes bleached by sun and years in the elements. We’d been partners for the last decade and I still didn’t know anything about the man, other than scraps and pieces. Had a family once. Could shoot out the eye of a sparrow on the wing. Feared no man or vaettir. There would be no rest for Fisk until the stretchers were gone from the earth. He hated them with a passion wronged men reserve for gods, dangerous women, and whiskey.

  Head-count conscripts milled about on the boat’s galleries, staring out into the West, no doubt scanning the horizon for stretchers, terrified. Up on the top deck, in the shadow of the pilot’s roost, stood an umbrella sheltering patrician women. The stacks, daemon-fired, blew ash and cinder skyward as if answering the flames of the fields.

  Fire calls to fire, they say. I believe that.

  From where I sat on Bess, I watched the other scouts – Sharbo, Ellis, and Jimson – riding the western shore, stirrup-high in fallow growth. No farms that side of the river, so close to the mountains. Stretchers come down, raiding.

  Fisk said, slowly, ‘How d’ya come to figure that, Mr Bantam?’

  Banty put a hand on his pistol, a Hellfire six-gun with imp rounds. Sure to sully his soul, but deadly.

  ‘I’ll kill him.’

  Fisk glanced at the young man, taking in the rumpled uniform, the tight grip on his pistol.

  ‘You might be stupid enough, at that.’

  I laughed at the pup’s posturing and watched as his face went through a series of expressions, from shame to embarrassment. Maybe some anger in there as well. When they’re as young and full of juice as Banty, you never know which way they’ll jump.

  At the sound of my laughter, Bess showed gum and green teeth and turned her head to nip at my leg, but I swatted her with my hat. There isn’t anyone, anything, any animal, like Bess. Stout, indomitable, with feet that never slip, not on mountain trail or riverbed. She was the lead mule, the fountainhead, immovable and cantankerous and full of mirth. Behind us followed the string of ponies, bays and roans, dappled and skewbald. None would challenge her lead.

  Except maybe Fisk’s black. That bitch was fierce.

  Then Banty laughed too, barking a forced, childish sound, and said, ‘I almost had you there, Fisk.’

  He was quiet, my partner, holding the black’s reins lightly in his big, rawboned hands. He watched the sky to the east of us, up high in the heavens, as turkey buzzards circled slowly above the plains.

  He didn’t even turn when he said to Banty, ‘That’s right.’ He slowed the black and took a Medieran cigarette from his vest pocket. ‘You almost had me, Mr Bantam.’

  There wasn’t any warmth in Fisk’s voice. But there was never any warmth in it, except maybe when he cooed to his horse and nuzzled the beast’s canescent neck, or rubbed down her flanks. She was a bitch and a brute, but his and his alone and valuable. Never could understand why he didn’t name her.

  Banty kept talking. ‘He’s a devil for the hunt, Cornelius is. When we hit that thicket of quail, Fisk, you shoulda seen the look on his face. Like Ia’d done forgave him all his sins and he’d gone straight to Heaven.’

  Fisk’s expression hardened. He wouldn’t shoot the boy, not now, not for foolishness alone. But Fisk’s a killer, natural born. I didn’t know much about the man after a decade, but I knew that much. With every bit of idiocy issuing from Banty’s mouth, he put his life in jeopardy.

  Banty slapped his knee and laughed again. ‘Nice gun he’s got, though, ain’t he?’

  ‘It’s a nice piece,’ I said. ‘Real nice.’

  ‘Now that you’re with us, maybe things’ll be different,’ Banty said.

  ‘Possible,’ said Fisk. ‘Contract is to escort the Cornelian and to scout the territories she’ll be passing through. Doesn’t say nothing about hunting.’

  Fisk had joined us at the confluence of the Big Rill and the Snake. He’d been south in Harbor Town to restock his ammunition from an engineer there. I don’t have no truck with engineers, for fear of the final disposition of my eternal soul, Ia help me, but Fisk and Banty – and it seems like every other able bodied man in the Hardscrabble Territories – does. Which means I have to be polite, and small, and humble as a saint. Show no aggression or some pistolero will give me extra breathing holes, which ain’t high on my list of priorities. Hellfire pistols – their upkeep and ammunition – are expensive, and men who’re moneyed well enough to afford them are usually prickly in their honor, or the appearance of it.

  But I keep various sharp, pointy metal things on my person, and I’m good with a blade, and I can bring down a running rabbit at fifty feet with a sling. But there aren’t enough good deeds in the world that can counter-balance the taint you do your soul once you pick up a Hellfire pistol. Each bullet takes a bit of you with it.

  Fisk thumbed a match into fire and lit his cigarette, which smelled of spice and brimstone and brown ladies on a tropical shore. S
moke is a vice that sullies your body, not your soul, so I’m not finnicky about it and enjoy a puff every now and then myself, Ia forgive me.

  ‘He’s highborn. A senator, with proconsular imperium. That’s big. And acting governor of the Territories, so I’ll remind you to watch yourself. But, it’s true, he’s mad for the hunt,’ I said. ‘With his cohort behind him, if he wants to hunt, he’ll hunt.’

  Fisk did this thing with his eyebrow as he looked at me. Hard to tell what the man was thinking, other than he was thinking.

  He turned the black to the east and rode out a fair distance.

  ‘There’s his private engineer to think about,’ Fisk said over his shoulder. He took a long draw off the cigarette, held it, and expelled the smoke that whisked away on the breeze. He spat loose tobacco into the dry grasses at his feet. ‘Shoestring?’

  ‘Yeah?’ I answered.

  ‘Believe I’ll outride a bit. Take a gander there.’ He nodded at the pinwheel of turkey buzzards, hanging in the sky like dead cinders on the wind.

  ‘Huh. Might be something. Might be just a lame shoal auroch.’

  He nodded again and pulled his hat tighter on his head. Everything about him was weathered. The grey hat, the faded riding leathers and vest, his gunbelt.

  He squinted at me and said, ‘There’s stretchers about.’ And then he looked back to the grey-washed plain. ‘I’ll catch up with you,’ he added, and rode off. We watched him go, up the far rise, over the slope and into the east where the buzzards wheeled under a big sky.

  ‘What’s stuck in his craw?’ Banty asked. Always talking, that one.

  ‘He’s just hard.’

  ‘There’s always hard men. Garrison’s full of them.’

  ‘Yep. You’re right there.’ I touched my forehead, my lips, my heart. ‘Ia save us from hard men.’

  ‘You believe that shit?’

  ‘Yes. Matter of fact, I do.’

  Banty grinned then, and placed his hand on his six-gun. ‘Can’t deny you Ia. But if he gives a shit about us, he sure is doing a good job hiding his concern.’

  Just a boy, playing at being a man. There’s nothing to do in the company of the faithless. Or the addle-brained. ‘Ia will keep us from hard men, stretchers, shoal beasties, and daemon-born. Never you worry.’

  ‘I’ll give you a full gold denarius if you can tell me how.’

  ‘Ia sends us our own hard men.’

  Banty looked puzzled; then his expression clouded as he looked after Fisk.

  We’d come out of the farmlands, into the dry flat plains before the foothills of the White Mountains, a wide expanse of wind-whipped shallow hillocks wreathed in grass. The Cornelian churned the waters, silvering its wake, while lascars in johnboats paddled ahead to plumb depth and search for rocky shoals and sandbars. The Big Rill was wide here, and shallow. The boat’s daemon-fired engine pumped a tilted column of ash and smoke into the brittle sky, and gunfire, like the crackle of cooking pig fat, echoed across the open spaces. The Senator was shooting again.

  Ignoring that Banty had opened his mouth to speak, I threw him the ponies’ lead rein.

  ‘Watch for the skewbald mare. She balks at streams.’

  I turned Bess to the east and followed Fisk.

  TWO

  He didn’t look at me when I brought Bess abreast his black, though she chucked her head and nickered and tried to pull ahead.

  ‘Thought I might tag along.’

  He nodded, keeping his eyes on the buzzards.

  It’s a big country, and the vast expanse of it calls for silence, at least from humankind, though I’m not quite human. Got enough dvergar blood for folks in New Damnation or Passasuego to look at me twice. To rough me up maybe, spit on me, if they’ve a mind to. Lynch me if I look funny at their women. Might be different if I carried Hellfire with me, if I was willing to tarnish that immortal part of me, but I won’t do that. Not for pride, or station. Not for rudeness.

  Fire calls to fire.

  Fisk seemed to sense what I was thinking because he tugged his carbine out of the long holster on the black’s flank and began feeding imps into it. He popped each one off his belt, thumbed the intricate wards to make sure of the round’s integrity, and slipped it into the chamber. The silver of the bullets was tarnished and black, but the warding was bright where it caught the light. When Fisk was done, he levered the action and unloaded and reloaded his pistol.

  We rode, trotting through the long plains grasses. After an hour or so, we came upon a tangle of scrub brush and fragrant but stunted sumac trees. Fisk dismounted, and I followed suit.

  He gave the black a small nosebag of oats, and I let Bess forage the sumac berries. She’s sure got an iron belly. Found her chomping brambles once, and I had to tug her away.

  I tossed Fisk a hunk of jerked auroch tongue and some hardtack, and we both ate a little underneath the unbroken sky, watching those damned turkey buzzards circle and bank.

  ‘There’s something dead there, I think,’ he said.

  I didn’t argue. ‘Most likely a lame calf or cow.’

  ‘Seems like.’

  He dropped the hobble rein, pulled the carbine, and looked at me expectantly. ‘We walk the rest of the way?’

  ‘Yep.’

  We strolled under the big sky, up a shallow rise, through the long shoal grass. Occasionally Fisk slowed and let me catch up, but before we reached the peak and could look down on the carnage there he’d broken into a run – a big ungainly lope, his spurs jangling with each footfall, his arms pumping even with the carbine clutched in his fist.

  Fifteen or twenty of the shoal auroch sprawled in a disarray of lumps on the plain; woolly little hillocks. But that’s wasn’t what Fisk ran to. When I caught up, I saw the remains of the settlers.

  At our approach, the buzzards erupted in a flurry of black wings and a stench of blood. But the corpses were pretty fresh. Probably no more than a day old. Hours maybe. The carrionfowl had only had time to take their eyes, lips, and other soft bits.

  There was a boy, no more than eleven, a shattered rifle in his lap, an arrow through his throat, whose shocked, eyeless face was turned to the low, gunmetal grey clouds. There was a man, nearby, leaning against the carcass of an auroch, his mouth gaping wide in a frozen scream, his stomach split open. Wasn’t until I got closer that I saw he was holding his own tongue and liver.

  Fisk hissed air through his teeth. ‘And this one.’

  A man, spread-eagled over an auroch, his back flayed open.

  He pointed. ‘They took his backstraps.’

  Stretchers are many things, but I’d never heard of them eating a man. At least I’d never imagined they would. The man was skinny, though. Not much tenderloin on him.

  ‘Buzzards probably snatched up the straps. There’s a bloody mark on the ground over here.’

  Fisk remained silent, his grey eyes scanning the bodies. There was a tenseness about him. At times like these I felt there was some doom waiting for us just beyond the next hill, and nothing Ia or the old gods or Hellfire pistols and daemonlore could do about it.

  Still get that feeling, sometimes. There ain’t no bottom to the well.

  Fisk squatted on his hams by the boy, looking at him, maybe trying to fix his image into memory, or maybe trying to get an idea of how the boy might have looked before he died, putting the puzzle of his face back together to honour him.

  He reached out and snapped off the end of the arrow with the fletching.

  ‘It was Berith, I think.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That big red son of a whore.’

  He turned the arrow in his hands, ruffled the feathers that’d been daubed with paint in a triangular pattern.

  ‘What, the stretcher from Broken Tooth last year? That his name?’

  ‘No. Just what I call him. Nobody understands thei
r Ia-damned gibberish anyway.’

  ‘I’m curious. Why Berith?’

  ‘Just seemed like the sort of name a murderous arsehole would have.’ He stuffed the arrow haft in his belt. ‘And there was a big red-haired tussler at Fort Verrier by that name. This stuff reminds me of that son of a bitch.’

  The sun broke through the cloud cover, sending a bright column of slanted light sweeping across the carnage. Fisk stood upright and raised his rifle.

  The creature on the rise seemed to have just coalesced out of air, or risen up from the earth, a thing of dirt and grass, wind and sky, and the blood of settlers. He stood there, impossibly tall, long red hair whipping in the wind. All pointy ears and sharpened teeth. Vaettir.

  Everything was silent but I could tell he laughed at us. And when he moved, it was a blur so damned fast I recognised an arrow in the air before even registering that the stretcher had moved. The first arrow stuck out of Fisk’s thigh, and then another drove into the ground at his feet. A figure appearing beside the vaettir Fisk called Berith, also impossibly tall, cradled something over his shoulder.

  Even with the pierced leg, Fisk didn’t fall. He had the carbine up and firing.

  The gun belched Hellfire, and there was a boom as the daemon was released inside the chamber, behind the bullet. In the half-lit, grey world of the plains, the muzzle-fire left an after-image of a winged horror, expanding and rising, loosed into the world. An imp.

  You can’t hear their screams of joy at freedom, the imps, but you can feel them, and every shot tears at the air, beats at your ears and exposed skin – as damaging as lying in the too-hot sun. It’s an invisible pressure. The pressure of damnation.

  And Fisk loosed them. If the stretchers were fast, Fisk was their equal, like light moving across water even while arrow-struck. One shot after another, he levered the rounds, his hands moving blindingly fast.

  He stopped firing only when it was clear they were gone. Disappeared into the grasses, subsumed by sky, eaten by earth. Who knows how they move? They appear and disappear. They’re beyond man. Beyond dvergar.

  ‘Ia-damn. Ia-damn.’ He said it over and over. He was pale then, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the arrow wound or the after-effects of gunwork. I’d felt each of those rounds as they loosed. I didn’t like to imagine their effect on him. ‘Got to follow …’