The Incorruptibles

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Livia turned back to face her father. ‘You old sot. You can’t ignore this.’ She put her face close to his and said, very loudly and slowly, ‘We must cut off your leg.’

  Fisk glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. I could tell Fisk’s leg pained him as well.

  ‘I want Beleth.’ Cornelius’ voice turned petulant and scared. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

  ‘He’s an Ia-damned engineer, father, not a medic,’ said Secundus, his tone less imperious than his sister’s but his exasperation clear. ‘He’ll tell you the exact same thing as she has.’

  Livia cast her eyes around the room as though looking for help. She spied us standing near the exit next to a disgruntled legionary.

  She came over to us, her bodice spattered with wine and her hair loose. She looked absolutely gorgeous. Fury became her.

  ‘Mr Ilys, you would have done us all a great favour if you’d chopped off his damned leg when you had him on the mountain.’ Though upset, she managed to give a half-smile. She turned to Fisk. ‘And you, Mr Fisk. Shouldn’t you be off your own leg? I seem to recall tending your … less grievous, yet more than insignificant … wounds yesterday.’ She brushed her hair from her face and sighed. ‘It seems so long ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. I thought you might have been able to—’

  ‘What? Suture my father’s torn flesh back together? No. I’m no magician. That requires medical expertise far beyond my skill. Far beyond anyone’s skill.’

  ‘What about this Beleth fella? He do something?’

  She arched an eyebrow and put her hands on her hips. ‘Well, let’s see, shall we?’ She turned to me. ‘Mr Ilys, will you take this lictor to Beleth’s chambers and request his presence. Demand it, if necessary.’

  ‘Beleth answering to a dwarf?’ Carnelia giggled again. ‘How apropos.’

  ‘Me?’ I asked Livia. ‘He don’t even know me. Why would he come to my call?’

  ‘Because you are asking for me.’

  I glanced at Fisk. ‘You come with me?’

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry, pard, I’ve got to take a load off.’

  He hobbled toward a bench on the back wall, but Livia said, ‘Fisk, please. Come sit near Secundus and me. We wish to talk with you regarding the events of the day.’

  ‘Shoestring’d be better suited to tell you ’bout what he found up in that bear den.’

  ‘Yes, but you might help us make sense of it while we wait for Beleth.’ She turned back toward Secundus and asked, ‘Where’s our brother gone?’

  ‘Rutting with one of his chambermaids, most likely.’

  She nodded. Both of them seemed relieved he was not present to complicate things.

  I saw Fisk think it over. The man has a natural reluctance toward making connections, even when a woman as beautiful as Livia is doing the asking.

  After a moment, he nodded and slowly walked to the front of the room near the divans. Not before spotting Banty sitting in the corner, half obscured by an urn. Banty jumped up, then sat back down, his blush colouring his face like a port stain.

  I approached Cimbri. ‘This Beleth engineer … he ain’t too frightful, is he?’

  Cimbri’s moustache quivered. I couldn’t tell if it was anger or mirth or fleas.

  ‘Why don’t you go find out, Shoestring?’

  Ia-damn him.

  ‘Young Banty’s sitting in yon corner, behind that urn,’ I growled.

  ‘What?’ Cimbri turned and stomped over toward where Banty lurked, his hackles raised, jaw clenched.

  I didn’t stay for the rest. I motioned to the lictor, and we left the stateroom.

  The silver wardwork looked much different at night. It gleamed and shimmered in light thrown from the gaslight fixtures – marvellous contraptions themselves. I’d seen them on the streets of Covenant, far east, and on the main mechanized baggage train line, but never this far west and never in a private domicile. In my worst imaginings, I’d never thought I’d find them on a boat. But as I got nearer, I realized it wasn’t gas flames burning in them.

  Daemonwork. Tiny imps battered the confines of a filigreed cage of silver wardwork, burning bright and smoking with hatred and madness. They writhed, they fumed, they incandesced.

  Ia-damn this boat.

  I knocked heavily on the door.

  ‘Mr Beleth! Pardon the interruption! You’re requested!’ I looked at the lictor, who raised his fasces – I noticed the fronds were of holly and the axehead, buried within the bundled fronds, had a silver spike.

  Dvergar, like vaettir and daemons, have an allergy to silver. That we share this trait is, I think, one of the causes of our status among mankind: the general hatred or dismissiveness we receive. In my case, the allergy is much lessened, due to the dilution of my dvergar blood. But being hemmed in here, caught like a fly in the lattice work of silver warding away the damnable and the immortal, my eye caught the spike in the fasces and my skin crawled with the thought of it entering my flesh.

  I knocked again, harder.

  For a long while I heard nothing but the light pat pat pats of the tiny bound imps in the light fixtures. So I banged again at the door.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe that this engineer would appear in a puff of smoke, with forked beard and tongue, cat’s eyes and an evil stare.

  Instead I heard a cough and a thump, and then a pale, plump little man, not much taller than me but twice as soft, opened the door and stood blinking in the hallway light.

  ‘Wha … what’s all this banging?’

  ‘Mr Beleth?’ Hard to believe this fella had the forces of damnation and more in his hands. His thick brown hair looked like a wind-shaped scrub-brush. He stood in his long nightgown, showing pasty white legs.

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ he said and disappeared in his cabin to return with a pair of spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He glanced at the lictor, sniffed, and then gave me a once-over.

  ‘Ah, a dvergar! Why would a dwarf make such a clatter at my door after sundown? Hmm?’

  He seemed surprisingly genial in spite of being disturbed from his rest. Fisk would have answered the door with a pistol in hand or not even bothered.

  ‘Mr Beleth, you’ve been requested in the great room. Mr Cornelius is grievously wounded.’

  He frowned and looked up and down the hall. ‘What do you think I can do? Livia is an accomplished medico.’

  ‘She wants to cut off his leg, and he won’t—’

  ‘Wait. What?’

  He had a straightforward, uninflected accent, and I could tell he had spent many years in the colonies, maybe even the Imperial Protectorate, where I’d banged around for a few decades as a pup, watching the immigrants flow in and the shoal aurochs move west. But he was a Ruman, through and through.

  ‘Bear stripped his leg yesterday on the hunt. It needs to come off, below the knee. He’s drunk as a skunk and won’t let anyone touch it until he sees you. Seems to think you can fix it.’

  ‘Damnation.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Give me a moment, will you, and I’ll put on some suitable clothes?’

  He ducked back into the room, quickly re-emerging in a brown suit without a necktie. As he tucked in his shirt and adjusted his jacket he said, ‘Bear? Truly? I’d imagine the rifle I crafted him would keep the creatures at bay.’

  ‘You made that gun, sir?’ I whistled. ‘It sure is a Hell of a rifle. What’re all those doohickeys for? – the glasswork?’

  ‘Sighting. The combination of any two lenses will provide a magnified view of whatever stands before the shooter.’

  ‘You mean you can see far off, then?’

  ‘Yes. That, coupled with the longer barrel, allows the shooter to hit targets at a greater range than someone firing a normal pistol, carbine, or rifle.’

  ‘Pardon me for asking
, but how much further are we talking about here?’

  ‘Oh, two hundred to three hundred strides, I should think. Depending on windspeed and atmospheric occlusion.’

  I stayed quiet. I wished he could talk normal.

  He walked down the hall, and I jumped to follow. The lictor came behind us.

  ‘Drunk, did you say? Damn that man and his appetites.’

  I looked at the paunch he carried but said nothing. He noticed.

  ‘Eh? Well observed, Mister …?’

  I debated whether to tell him Shoetring or my Ia-given name.

  ‘Ilys, sir. Dveng Ilys.’

  ‘We don’t see many dvergar folks around here.’ He waved a hand, gesturing to all the silver wardwork. ‘Not the most comfortable of spaces for them.’

  ‘No, I reckon not, sir. But there’s some has got more resistance than others, depending on blood.’

  He smiled. ‘True, of course. But I’m thinking your resistance isn’t that strong, is it?’

  I nodded. ‘That’s right. I fall more on the dvergar side of the fence, I do.’

  ‘You come from the tinkers? Or diggers?’

  To the eastern-born and the Rumans, there’s only two kinds of dvergar: tinkers – the smiths and farriers, the wheelwrights and carpenters, the folk with clever fingers and cunning tools – or the diggers, those dvergar suitable for only brute labour, digging and mining, burrowing and excavating. I’ll admit there’s mighty few others of my kind more than that. Haven’t yet figured out just where I fit in, though.

  ‘My mother was what you’d call a tinker, sir. She worked metal. Had a real knack for it too. Still does, I guess. Haven’t seen her nigh on fifty years.’

  ‘You have the look of a tinker, Mr Ilys.’ He placed a finger against his nose, winked at me, and said, ‘Raw intelligence, moderated deference, and tact. Definitely tinker.’

  Don’t know how I felt about that, some engineer making personal judgments about me, filing me into his tidy little classification system that didn’t even take into account all walks of life.

  It’s a miserable world we live in that places one man above another by virtue of birth. I’d like to see Beleth manage on the plains or the mountains for a fortnight and then see his judgments.

  However, he was an engineer, so I nodded again and smiled. For a moment, I felt a great need to be off the boat and on the shore, by a fire, watching the camp smoke stir the stars and listening to the horses nicker and stamp.

  Cornelius seemed even drunker than before. Livia, tense and pale, her lips tight and bloodless, sat watching her father thrash about. He attempted to rise on his good leg, waving a tumbler of whiskey in his hand.

  ‘Ah, Beleth. Beleth, tell them.’ He gestured with his glass, sloshing whiskey onto the floor. ‘Tell them you’ll have me patched—’ He fell back onto the pillows and slurped at his drink. ‘Have me patched up in a trice?’

  Beleth walked around Cornelius’ divan. He stopped, put his hands on his waist, and then looked from the gore of his employer’s leg to Livia.

  ‘Looks bad.’

  ‘How very observant of you.’

  I thought he might get ruffled, the little engineer, but he smiled. Didn’t go all the way to his eyes, though.

  ‘I’m no doctor—’ He paused, waiting to see if Livia would interject again. She didn’t. ‘But I think right here should suffice.’ He leaned forward and touched Cornelius right below the knee. Then he touched him again higher, on the lower thigh. ‘Or maybe here, if you can’t get that leg off soon.’

  Cornelius’ tumbler shattered on the floor. How someone could lurch and wobble while reclining, I’ll never know, but the old senator managed it.

  ‘What?’ His voice was thick and slurred. ‘Can’t you … can’t you summon up …’

  ‘A daemon? Of course. And it can bite off your leg, if you’d like.’

  ‘No! No, to heal it. To fix it!’

  Beleth laughed. Livia can mock and laugh, yet still convey love – I had learned this even in the short time I’d known her. But not Beleth. His mirth just sounded mocking.

  ‘Daemons do no healing, sir. They can only corrupt and weaken. But the fire of their hatred can keep you warm – heat water to cleanse the wound.’

  ‘No.’ Cornelius shook his head. He lay gasping, defeated. ‘No. No.’

  Livia took charge. ‘Mr Fisk? Mr Ilys? Will you assist?’

  I stepped forward. Blood and bone don’t bother me. Nor Fisk.

  Secundus asked, ‘And me? Where should I … what should I do?’

  ‘Hold his head. Roll up that napkin, thick, and put it in his mouth. He’ll gnash his teeth.’

  Fisk grabbed Cornelius’ uninjured leg. I took an arm; Cimbri moved forward to grasp his other. The man struggled, but only feebly.

  I pulled out my flask of cacique, put it to his lips, and said, ‘Go on, Mr Cornelius. Drink it all down, now. All of it.’ Then I tilted it up and he opened his mouth and sucked at it like a calf at a teat.

  When he drew away, I watched his eyes dissolve into watery pools, unknowing, brimming with oblivion. Livia withdrew from her medical kit the steel saw I had noticed earlier. She held it up to the yellow daemonlight, put it back down, poured acetum down its length.

  She looked at us all, thought for a moment, and gestured at a nearby lictor and slave to come closer. She jabbed a finger at the lictor. ‘You hold his thigh. You—’ She looked at the half-dvergar woman. ‘You stand ready.’

  ‘Now that he’s bound and gagged, I’ll take his purse,’ Carnelia giggled. ‘For safekeeping, I swear.’

  ‘Sister, you think you’ll have free reign when Gnaeus is head of our house?’ Livia glared at her until Carnelia, still grasping her wineglass, turned and walked out of the stateroom in the overly precise way drunks have.

  Not much more to say, really, unless you want to hear about the blood and gristle, how the Senator howled through the gag, how, even though he was as drunk as I’ve seen any man, he twisted and strained with surprising strength.

  It was done. Miss Livia, spattered in her father’s blood, drenched the stump in tersus incendia – sending Cornelius into another writhing fit – and then wrapped it with as much linen as she could.

  Two lictors, under Miss Livia’s watchful direction, placed him on a stretcher and took him back to his quarters. She followed them but paused briefly to address both Fisk and me, ‘Thank you, gentlemen. I cannot express how much I appreciate your help.’ She seemed about to say more, but then turned and left. The engineer nodded in our direction, adjusted his glasses, and stifled a yawn. After a moment, he followed in her wake. It was then I realized he was holding Cornelius’ amputated leg, raw side down and dripping.

  I looked at Fisk. He wore an expression totally new to me: his face at once softer and harder than I’d ever seen it before. He wasn’t paying any attention to the engineer, that’s for damned sure.

  We turned to leave, but Secundus held out a crystal decanter of whiskey.

  ‘Join me? We won’t be moving upriver for the next couple of days, so there’s no need for undue “spiritual” restraint, Mr Fisk, Mr Ilys.’ His solemn expression was broken by a quick smile, but I could see the tiredness lining his young face.

  So we sat with the young highborn, and he asked questions about the land we were in, about the river, about the mountains, while I twisted smokes and Fisk poured the whiskey. It was early morning by the time we left and a bleary-eyed lascar took us back to the eastern shore.

  No sign of Banty when we arrived. But his horse was still there, so I felt confident he’d turn up, much as I wished he wouldn’t.

  It was cold and crisp, and my breath made crystal plumes in the air as I lay in my blankets by the fire, under the moon. A thin cloud passed across its face. Then I closed my eyes and I slept.

  NINE

 
Fisk spent most of the next day, and the day after that, sleeping. I took Banty outriding and tried to dry the wet behind his ears. We scouted the eastern arc, a half circle starting a mile upstream the Cornelian and ending a mile down, out in the prairie, big sky above us, rippling grass all around.

  ‘Mr Bantam, a word of advice.’

  He acted like he couldn’t hear. It was a mite windy.

  ‘You’re like to get ventilated if you keep squaring off with Mr Fisk, I reckon.’

  He glanced at me, scowling.

  I went on. ‘We like you fine, Mr Bantam. But respect ain’t just given, willy nilly. It takes time, needs to be earned. You keep your head down, do what Mr Fisk says—’

  He kicked his horse off into a gallop and rode on ahead. I didn’t follow.

  A pair of roosting quail, startled by his approach, burst from the ground in an explosion of sound and feathers.

  Banty whipped out his gun, fast as lightning, sighted down his arm, and fired.

  He fired again. I was far enough away not to feel the blast of the infernal. But he must have.

  One bird dropped.

  When I joined him, he sat still, holding his smoking pistol, looking down at the small body of the quail, brown, speckled, and almost invisible in the grass. He didn’t look at me.

  ‘That was some nice shooting, son.’ I stopped myself. ‘I mean, Mr Bantam. You’ve got a right talent there.’

  He looked at me, and his eyes narrowed. Not a normal squint into the sun, or in anger. But like he was in pain or washed in remorse. His face, normally unlined and youthful – handsome, even – looked gaunt and pale. Gunplay does that to some men. And the boy was upset.

  ‘Let Fisk know I won’t be talked down to no more.’ He swallowed. ‘He talks down to me again, I’ll—’

  ‘Yessir, gotta say, that was some good shooting.’ I turned Bess and moved off, into the taller grasses. ‘Mr Fisk wouldn’t have wasted a shot, though. When he pulls his gun, what he’s aiming at—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dies. Never seen him miss.’

  ‘He missed them stretchers. I heard you say it yourself.’