The Incorruptibles

by John Hornor Jacobs

  ‘When’re we gonna have this rodeo?’

  ‘I imagine you’d like to rest. Is tomorrow too soon?’

  ‘Just fine.’

  ‘I’ve taken the liberty of arranging a room here on the Cornelian for you. Cimbri has covered your duties as scout, and we’ve sent a rider to Marcellus in New Damnation requesting replacements for you and Fisk.’ He spoke as a man used to being in charge. So different from the sodden patrician we’d known before.

  He stopped, peered at me. ‘This pistolero will retrieve Isabelle? You are sure?’

  I swallowed. ‘Can’t be sure of anything in this world, Mr Cornelius. But if anyone can, it’s Fisk.’

  ‘I hope so. For his sake,’ he said, and he gave Livia a considered look.

  I think I liked the Senator more when he was drunk.

  SIXTEEN

  It’s strange sleeping on a steamer. My dreams were liquid and the phantom ground never remained still, even when I saw myself on a mountainside beneath a drunken sky, climbing back to my mother’s workshop. The mountain gambels hid stretchers, and legionaries bore a black body through the trees to be fed to a massive fire, daemons prancing amidst the flames. With great horror I realized I was trapped in the centre of an orbis argenta, captive and burning with the touch of silver.

  When I woke, I found a tray of food and a note.

  Meet us in the great room, hora secunda – Beleth

  The food was plain, if plentiful, and accompanied by strong ale, which did much to settle my nerves about the proposed interrogation.

  In the great room, Cimbri, Beleth, Samantha, and Secundus waited in front of Agrippina, flanked by shotgun-toting legionaries.

  ‘We should strip it,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Strip it? How do you suggest we do that?’ Cimbri replied, working a cheroot in his teeth.

  ‘It’s chained to the floor. Not like it’ll hop up and dance a jig,’ said Samantha.

  Secundus put his hands on his hips and considered. ‘Get two more legionaries in here, would you, Cimbri?’

  Cimbri tromped off and returned with two additional soldiers.

  ‘You seem fearful of it, Secundus,’ Beleth said.

  ‘You haven’t seen the vaettir in action like I have,’ he replied. ‘You’d think a devil-handler like you might have a little reasonable fear yourself.’

  ‘Fear is a taint that corrupts resolution, Secundus. In my profession, it is a liability.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘In my line of business, it’s a necessity.’

  ‘Ah, Mr Ilys. Glad you’re here. Tell the creature to lie down on the ground, face down.’

  In dvergar I told the stretcher to get down.

  She remained sitting, cross-legged. I couldn’t be sure she even registered our presence. Maybe we did resemble flies to her.

  ‘Ma’am, I suggest you get on the floor.’ It had been a long while since I’d thought in dvergar and there was calmness there – in the cadence and rhythms of the words from my mother’s people – a feeling I’d long forgotten. For an instant I remembered Mam calling me to dinner, her voice high-pitched and irritated because I was so late.

  Agrippina remained still.

  Beleth said gleefully, ‘This promises to be fun! Samantha? The brand?’

  On the great table was a canvas kit, four feet long. Samantha opened it, revealing tarnished metal rods, skewers with leather-wrapped hafts. And what looked suspiciously like cattle brands.

  ‘The dolor glyph, Samantha, I should think.’ Samantha withdrew one of the brands and handed it to him, haft first.

  A legionary went to the wall and cranked a handle. The wickerwork cage lifted, and Agrippina was free of the holly mesh. Beleth smiled and without ceremony jabbed the glyph into the vaettir’s stomach.

  She hissed an insectile sound, thrashing, cringing away from the point of contact with the glyph as much as her bindings would allow. Which wasn’t much.

  ‘Have the Gossip’s Bridle ready, Sam.’

  Samantha withdrew a metal contraption, steel with a leather harness.

  Beleth nodded at the legionary, who raised his shotgun and trained it on Agrippina. ‘Go ahead.’

  Samantha, with steady hands, slipped the bridle over the vaettir’s face and then shoved her onto her side. The silver-threaded chain clanked and drew tight; Agrippina’s good arm straightened and she rolled onto her back.

  The legionary, keeping his shotgun pointed at her face, stepped hard on the stretcher’s handless arm.

  Her face resumed the blank stare, as though whatever intelligence living behind her eyes had fled far away and what was left was pure resistance.

  Beleth chuckled. ‘This will be fun. It’ll be obstinate, I believe.’

  Samantha looked at him with curiosity.

  He blinked and said, ‘I’ve been coercing and suborning daemons, from imps to archdaemons, for the last thirty years.’ He swung the brand and placed its end on Agrippina’s stump. Her arm jumped and twisted and smoked, but the legionary’s boot kept it in place. ‘This damned wog should present no problem. It just needs softening up.’

  I looked at the engineer. A short man, a soft man, doughy around the middle. Delicate hands. Nicely dressed in a tweed suit with a watch fob running into a vest pocket. Groomed whiskers, slicked hair thinning on top.

  A gentleman.

  Not a patrician, but one of the new class of equites who’d risen far on ability, intellect. You see them in New Damnation and Harbor Town, these bright, avaricious men, faithless and sharp and rich – on their way to market or counting houses. Men of industry, men of intelligence.

  I’m not sure they don’t scare me more than the vaettir.

  The stretchers now, they’re inscrutable, opaque, and beyond the ken of man. Some ways, they’re like the bear, the shoal auroch, the mountain lion, the killing frost. They have desires, but they are natural, the instinctive habits of their species. But Beleth? He was driven solely by ambition and appetite.

  ‘Secundus, have I ever told you of my time among the Autumn Lords? I was young, and my master had taken up rooms in the Howling Quarter in the city of Kwanti. We would spend the days in the great libraries, among the scrolls and collected knowledge of three thousand years of Kithai civilization.’

  Secundus shook his head, wary yet polite.

  ‘The Autumn Lords don’t look at the infernal the way we do. The Tchinee, in general, see things different from us Rumans. In some ways they are hopelessly backward. In others, you’d be surprised at their insight. Daemons are considered raw forces to be harnessed, thought to be without malevolence. Or beneficence.’ He moved to the kit and picked up a particularly jagged and evil-looking blade. It was serrated and long and possessed of a deep tarnished patina. He thumbed the edge, whistled. ‘But we know better. Do we not, Samantha?’

  Her moon-shaped face displayed no emotion, neither excitement nor disgust. I hoped mine remained equally inscrutable. For a long moment, we all focused on Beleth and that knife.

  Under Beleth’s direction, the legionaries manoeuvred the vaettir onto a wide sluice-board fitted with various hasps and straps. They swiftly bound Agrippina to the board and then refastened the silver-threaded chains to it. With a grunt, they lifted the whole contraption and placed it on the long dining table, underneath daemonlight fixtures. Trussed up like a hog, she was. And Beleth’s eyes shone like a butcher’s.

  ‘Now the thing is in position, please remove the Gossip’s Bridle. She’ll need to be able to speak. To cry out.’

  Samantha approached the vaettir’s head, unclasped the buckle to the evil looking mask, and stepped back with remarkable swiftness once the bridle was in hand. Beleth withdrew a thick leather strap, whipped it over Agrippina’s head, and pulled it taut so that the vaettir’s head was flush against the sluice-board.

  ‘Remarkable constitutions
, these elves. They can take as much pain as a corporeal inferis or daemon.’ He tsked, and moved to stand above the vaettir. ‘I learned many things, though, in far Tchinee. Not just their curious opinions on daemons. An elder August One took my master into his confidence, and it was at his hands that we became initiates into the art of Lingchi, which means “slow slicing”.’ He bent, pinched the vaettir’s ear between thumb and index finger, and drew the knife down its length, a light, shallow cut. ‘The Autumn Lords, and all of the Tchinee, have such artful names for everything. Daemonwork they call “Fire Gardening”. Gravedigging is “gatekeeping”. But Lingchi is called “Death by A Thousand Cuts”. For the Tchinee, Lingchi destroys their afterlife … it doesn’t preclude it, but they enter their heaven with their rich integument of flesh corrupted and flayed. The thousand cuts destroy their souls as well as their bodies.’ He patted the vaettir’s cheek. She snapped at him. He jerked his hand back faster than I would have thought possible, given his podge. It seemed the prospect of bloodshed made him spry. Agrippina blinked slowly, and her lips pulled back to reveal jagged, triangular teeth. ‘Yes, my dear. Your deathless flesh shall see such pain – a thousand cuts is only a small taste of what I shall visit upon you. And that was just the first.’

  He looked at me and waved the knife in my direction, beckoning me to move closer. I did, reluctantly.

  ‘Ask her where her kind sleep.’ He kneeled and began cutting away her clothing.

  ‘Where they sleep?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Ilys? Where they sleep.’

  I put the question to her in dvergar.

  She remained unmoving and silent. Beleth had cut away her clothes and now she lay before us, naked and pale, a foreign creature splayed before captors, her arms stretched away from her body, her legs parted.

  They were beautiful, the vaettir. Her skin shone milk white and unblemished except for the mark on her stomach and stump where the dolor glyph had burned her. Blood oozed from her pointed ear. She had high, small breasts, each tipped by a rose-colored nipple. Her sex was tufted with white hair, and once she was totally bare I watched the legionaries’ reaction to her body so I wouldn’t have to think about my own. They shifted their weight and gripped their weapons tighter. There was magnetism there, even for me, and I could see how the rumour of the vaettir whore in New Damnation could have gotten its start.

  Beleth made a long, slow cut on the palm of her good hand in parody of the wedding wound, the nuptis sectum. Not very deep but deep enough.

  ‘Repeat the question, Mr Ilys.’

  I did. Silence.

  He smiled and chuckled in the back of his throat. It was a sound I was to become all too familiar with. And one I soon wished to never hear again.

  He instructed a legionary to hold her head, grabbed her upper lip, and ran the knife point across the length of the soft tissue. It split and poured blood.

  ‘It’s important, during Lingchi, to alternate focus from the sensitive areas to those with less sensitivity. Should you focus too much on only the hyper-sensory areas – the lips, the fingers, the pubis – that pain will block out the rest of the injuries.’

  I shuddered. Ia save me from the hands of gentlemen.

  There weren’t a thousands cuts, not that day. But many more than I’d like to think about. By the time we were through, Agrippina looked like a blood covered statue. Immobile and silent and covered in bloody rivulets. The sluice-board gutters were a thick, crimson-clotted mess.

  Secundus and Cimbri, giving me guilty glances, had left after the first few wounds began to flow freely.

  Eventually, it was just Beleth, Samantha, four legionaries, and me. Beleth instructed me to keep asking the same questions, going back and forth between, ‘Where do your kind sleep?’ and ‘Where is your home?’ And one other. ‘Have you seen the great wyrms?’

  Ia help us, the Senator must want another hunt.

  Agrippina answered nothing.

  When we neared the end of the day, and Beleth had begun exploring her privates with the knife – something I wish I could scour from my mind’s eye with lye – he looked up at me from his ghoulish crouch above her and with a grin he said, ‘Ask it when it was born.’

  Holding back my gorge, I said, ‘Drae gnell vae ferth?’ which translates loosely into ‘When/where did you come forth?’ which is the dvergar way of asking birth, or parentage, or origin. A common phrase.

  This question, she answered.

  ‘Ya gnell vis teine! Vis teine!’

  And then her mouth opened and closed, swimming in blood, and a sound came from the ruin of her chest up and out past flayed lips. It was a cough, a bark. A strange low-pitched ululation choked with phlegm. A laugh.

  Beleth hopped up, knife dripping. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘She said—’

  ‘She?’ He laughed, making a bright, jolly sound – lively in contrast to the noise coming from the vaettir. He pointed to the stretcher, now just a mass of white flesh streaked with red. ‘There’s no woman there. Don’t be coy, dwarf. What did it say?’

  He came closer to me and the crimson knife was very near my chest. I looked at its tip. He saw where I was staring, grinned again, and gave two small jabs in jest. ‘ “Now, sir, before I prick thee.” ’

  What a great comedian, this engineer, quoting from the master wordsmith, Willem Bless, and his play Our Heavenly War.

  ‘She …’ I paused as his smile faded. ‘It said, “I came with the fire.” ’

  He raised the bloody knife high, and for a moment I was frightened her words had angered him and he intended to strike me with the already soiled blade. But he just scratched his head with a bloody hand, still holding the knife.

  ‘ “I came with the fire”? That’s it? Exactly?’

  ‘Yes. It could be said as “I emerged from fire”, I guess.’

  For a moment, he looked stunned. His face went slack and the fierce intelligence that usually informed his features fled, and he looked just like any well-dressed, ageing man. A butcher. An engraver. A clerk, possibly, or a wheelwright. But Beleth quickly composed himself. His eyebrow arched, and he said, ‘Hmm. Interesting. Very interesting.’

  I couldn’t see it. But I’d have liked to know what surprised him so.

  He wiped the blade on the clothes he’d cut from Agrippina and then tossed them in a bin.

  ‘We’ll keep her like this. Naked to all eyes.’ He returned to the table and replaced the bloody knife. ‘A good day’s work, all said and done.’ He waved his hand, crusted brown to his elbow, at the legionaries. ‘Clean up the blood on the floor, on the stretcher. Sponge her off. I’ll want a clean … canvas … for tomorrow.’ He turned to leave, stopped, and looked back at them. ‘Feel free to take any liberties you might want with her body.’

  Beleth actually winked at the men and then walked from the room. I looked at Samantha, and her face remained blank, waxen. She ignored my stare and followed her master.

  Neither of them noticed the looks of absolute horror on the faces of the soldiers.

  Later, in my room, I sat on the bed and watched the flickering yellow light of an imp batting its tattered wings against the fine silver cage. I felt more worn than after a week of riding in stretcher territory.

  I opened the window and let the frigid air in. I wanted a drink but didn’t know how to go about getting one on the Cornelian, and right then I couldn’t move to save my tainted soul.

  I don’t know how long I sat like that, staring into the wood panelling. Eventually, a soft knock came at the door. I opened it. Livia stood there, holding a bottle.

  She said, ‘Secundus told me what Beleth is doing to the vaettir.’ She put the bottle on the writing desk and took my hand in hers. She looked at me, close, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘You want to tell me about it?’

  I shook my head. What was there to say? It’s a monster of a world, and we make
our way through it as best we can.

  She released my hand and poured two glasses of liquor, I don’t know what kind. She put the tumbler in my palm and I drank – sweet, fiery liquor I’d never tasted before, amber-coloured, full of spices and the hint of citrus.

  When I had finished, she poured me another, patted my shoulder.

  ‘Shoestring,’ she said, and I realized this was the first time she’d called me by my nickname. ‘I’m sorry for what we’ve done to you.’

  I looked at her, and she stood there, nervous, pale, and beautiful. I realized she truly was sorry. I nodded. She smiled sadly, making the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes crease, and went to the door.

  ‘I’ll have Lupina come around, bring food.’

  I nodded again, watching the imp throw itself against its silver cage. Livia left.

  I lay down on my bed and thought about Agrippina for a long time. Eventually I rose, pulled on my boots, pulled on gloves, and put a gilded silver longknife in my belt. I went back to the great hall.

  The legionaries guarding Agrippina nodded to me as I entered. She was naked still, and most of the injuries from her interrogation had become angry red scars – a fine lattice-work crisscrossing her face, her breasts, her stomach and legs.

  Vaettir heal fast.

  Her head pivoted toward me on a long, gimballed neck. Her lips, flaked with dried blood, pulled back to reveal her jagged teeth in a horrible parody of a smile.

  I put a gloved hand on the haft of my longknife.

  ‘I can end this for you,’ I said in dvergar and watched her face. It was like stone, and her watery eyes remained still as a mountain pool untouched by man or wind. ‘You say the word, and I’ll end it.’

  She remained motionless for a long while, staring at me, her eyes like pools gathering light. She glanced at the nearest guard. Then back to me.

  ‘They might not kill me,’ I said.

  Her smile grew. She moved her shackled arm, and the chains gave a faint rattle.