Banty squared himself and threw his cloak over his shoulder, freeing his gun hand.
‘Don’t have to come to this, Mr Bantam,’ Fisk said, and was surprised to find himself meaning it. Now, when the moment was on him to shoot the boy, he found himself strangely reluctant to do so. ‘We take the girl back to the Cornelian, and I’m fine with letting you go on your own way. No harm done.’
Banty laughed – a hard, desperate sound. ‘You gonna plug me with that rifle when I turn to leave? Don’t look like you’d let me go.’
Fisk dropped the carbine and held up his hands. ‘You can just ride away, son,’ he said. ‘There’s too much at stake for us to let the girl run off with the likes of you.’
‘Ain’t your son, goatfucker.’ Banty spat each word.
Fisk tensed, and he eased his oilcoat behind him to better get at his six-gun.
‘Hold on. You don’t want to leave here in a box.’ Fisk’s tone was placating.
Banty laughed again, a little wild and jittery around the edges. ‘We’ll see about that. Ain’t like the Ia-damned Senator’s gonna let me wander wherever I want if I give her back. Prickly sonofabitch’ll send out bounty hunters.’ He swallowed. ‘And we’re lawful wed.’ He held up his left hand. A cut crossed his palm, angry and red. The girl, no doubt, would have a matching one.
Fisk nodded. ‘Figured as much. Sure you said the vows, took the oath, and gave each other the wedding wound before the Cornelian was out of sight. You bedded her soon after. If not before.’ He shifted his weight, hand near his six-gun. ‘Enough bickering. The girl. I’m taking her back, wedded or no. We ain’t going to war just because you played house with a noblewoman. You throw down your piece, I’ll let you get a horse and leave.’
Banty telegraphed everything. His shoulders went up, his face scrunched into an ugly, petulant grimace, and he drew. Fast as shit, Fisk told me later. Banty drew and fired.
Before Fisk’s hand slapped his pistol-grip, there was a great boom and the phantom image of a daemon ghosting the air as something tugged hard at Fisk’s shoulder and a piercing heat spread across his chest. Ignoring the pain, Fisk cleared his pistol from the holster, steadied himself, and let loose the Hellfire.
Smoke and brimstone covered the men, each in his own little cloud of damnation, until the winter wind whipped down the street and ripped the smoke away.
Both men remained standing, but Banty’s gun was at his feet and he held his gut in an unmistakable pose. Like some supplicant come before the Emperor, he slowly sank to his knees and looked at the blood on his hands.
Fisk holstered his pistol and approached Banty, who by now had begun to cry, making a high painful keening sound like a coyote in a trap. It held all sorts of pain: the physical agony of the gut shot, the realization that nothing had worked out the way he’d planned, the desperate sting of the loss of the girl, the loss of the world that held her.
Fisk grabbed Banty and eased him into a supine position. The boy’s legs weren’t working right, and his arms and hands had tremors running through them like an axe-struck tree.
‘Oh my,’ the boy said, staring. ‘Oh my.’
‘Shhh, now, Mr Bantam. Shh.’ Fisk held the boy’s head but turned to the door of the saloon. ‘Doctor! We need a doctor out here!’ Strange – there were no faces at the door of the saloon watching the gunfight.
A commotion sounded from inside Ruby’s, the shuffle of feet, a yell, breaking pots and glassware, the clatter of a chair falling to the floor, the tumble of a body. The doors remained shut but shadows played across the window-front. A man bellowed, another screamed.
Banty hissed in pain, and Fisk turned his attention back to the boy.
‘Mam. I want …’ Banty was having trouble breathing then. He spoke in gasps, like a child in his pain. ‘I want my mam …’
‘We’re gonna patch you up, Mr Bantam.’
‘I got you, though,’ the boy said, looking at Fisk’s shoulder.
‘Yep. You sure did. Hold on, now.’
Another scream came from the saloon. There was a bright flash in the small leaded windows, then something heavy slammed into the wall with a thud, and then a terrible screech and more thumps. Another blast of Hellfire.
Silence then except for Banty’s crying. It came in short gasps now, his weeping.
‘Mam … I want …’
‘Reeve! Get over here!’ Fisk screamed, looking at the stables.
‘I want …’
His words failed. He scrabbled at Fisk’s chest with numb, uncoordinated fingers, trying to find something to hold on to, to tether him to life.
The blood was coming hard and fast, pooling in the wound and steaming in the cold air. Snow fell onto the boy’s upturned face and quickly melted into the gut wound. Banty’s tremors stopped and his arms sagged, losing strength.
He looked up into Fisk’s face and Fisk looked back, watching the boy’s eyes widen – as though suddenly seeing new plains and vistas open up before him as he topped a rise, sun at his back, on a spring mare. His soul, whatever taint it might have on it, had begun its passage through the shadowlands to await judgement by the Pater Dis – that he be seated in the hall of Ia at his feasting table. Or to be cast into the fiery abyss.
For the boy’s sake, I hope Dis held his finger on the scales pointing toward Ia.
Banty exhaled. He didn’t draw breath again.
Head bowed, Fisk sat in the centre of the main street for a long while, holding the boy’s body. Fisk brought two bloody fingers to Banty’s face and closed his eyes.
‘Ia-dammit,’ he spat.
Dazed, Reeve stumbled across the opening of the main street to where Fisk sat. Reeve bled from a deep, furious gash on his forehead. Blood streamed down the man’s face and clotted in black bolls in his tawny beard.
‘Came outta nowhere.’
‘The stretcher?’
‘Aye. Whipped above me like a bat or something, with big pale arms. Snatched at my hair and cut me. Took the girl. I couldn’t stop it.’ The blood ran into his eyes.
‘Ain’t this all gone to shit,’ Fisk said. He narrowed his eyes, looking at Reeve who was touching his scalp, tentatively. ‘Be thankful you still have a head of hair.’ He paused. ‘Or a head to grow it on.’
Fisk freed himself from Banty’s corpse, pushing the body away and unfolding each leg as though the joints were hinges, creaky and frozen stiff with the cold.
‘Help me pull the boy out of the street. I won’t leave him like this.’
Each man took an arm and began dragging Banty’s body to the plank sidewalk that lined the street. When they were through, they arrayed the boy’s limbs as best they could and Fisk removed Banty’s gunbelt, slinging it over his shoulder.
‘After he and the girl came out of Ruby’s, there was a commotion inside. Gunshots.’
Reeve’s face remained blank. But he said, ‘There’s a darkness on ye, centurion. It follows ye.’
‘Might be, sheriff,’ Fisk said. He pulled his pistol, turned the chamber, pulled bullets from his own belt, and thumbed the fresh imp rounds into the cylinder.
‘Let’s check out the damage,’ said Fisk, and he chucked his head at the saloon doors.
They turned to go in, but there came a great screech and then a rising sound that was pitched higher than the wind, higher than the thrum and surge of their own heartbeats.
The two men looked up.
Upon the apex of the saloon stood a vaettir, long red hair unfurled in the wind.
It made a harsh barking sound, the likes of which neither the Northman nor Fisk had ever heard before. Over its shoulder was slung a dark object. Cloak-wrapped and delicate.
Fisk had his pistol drawn in an instant and took a bead before Reeve even had time to react. But the stretcher leaped, lancing through the air in a blur, landing on a nearby roof and leaping again sk
yward, not in the least hindered by the bundle on his shoulder. Fisk tracked the creature with his pistol, but did not fire for fear of hitting what, or who, was wrapped in the cloak.
The vaettir plunged toward the stable, hit the weathered wooden shingles and rolled, coming to his feet, his teeth blazing in the early morning darkness, sharp and bright.
Snow flurried around him. He hefted the bundle easily. In the wind, the wrappings of what the vaettir held came undone, revealing dark hair, an olive-toned cheek.
It was indeed Isabelle.
The stretcher laughed again, that same barking sound they’d heard before. The vaettir thrust an arm upward in a fierce, defiant gesture. Victorious and savage, mean and full of mirth, but a familiar gesture all the same.
At first it was hard to tell what the creature held aloft, it was so dwarfed by his massive hand. But when Fisk saw, his stomach sank in his belly and he cursed. He cursed both himself and the gigantic, terrifying thing perched on the stable’s roof.
The vaettir held a severed hand. White as alabaster and bloody at the wrist.
The stretcher flung the hand at the men in the street below, winging it at them as if tossing a bone to a pack of dogs. Then he erupted into the air with a great leap, his garments ruffling with the speed of his passage. He barked his laughter, bounding from rooftop to rooftop down the main street westward, taking the girl with him.
‘Ho-lee shit,’ Reeve said, blood pouring down his face, into his beard. ‘Yonder son of a bitch wants killing. Truly.’
‘Damnation.’ Fisk turned and picked up the severed white hand. ‘Help me find a bag for this.’
It was a slaughterhouse, walls painted red, blood splashed across the bar, the bottles, the tables, the rough slats of floor.
While Fisk was slipping out, Berith was slipping in.
The vaettir had come in through the rear of the building, using a door facing the scrub and shale and bramblewrack of Broken Tooth, into the relative warmth of Broken Tooth’s saloon.
He’d had a blade on him. A big blade, flat steel. There was no way all the heads could have been severed otherwise.
Everyone. The fat man and his companion, the dvergar bartender, the whores, the men playing trumps in the corner, the Gallish piano player, the field hands and labourers.
All dead.
They built a pyre. The frontier-chapped, ruddy-faced women came out of their mud-spackled huts to help Fisk and Reeve pile the bodies and their parts in a great heap behind the row of main street buildings.
The few children old enough to understand what had occurred, grieved. The others latched onto their mothers, dazed and scarcely comprehending the news that their fathers and brothers and uncles would never return home.
Fisk found a bucket of pitch in the stable and drenched the planks and wood beneath the bodies.
Reeve chanted words of blessing in a strange northern tongue, holding his hands up to the gunmetal sky and beseeching the old gods, the prodigal ones, for the souls of the dead’s protection and their forgiveness.
When it was all done, and the pyre as high as a cottonwood was aflame, Fisk brought Reeve a bottle from the blood-spattered interior of Ruby’s, uncorked it, and handed it to the sheriff.
‘My new friend, ye carry damnation with ye.’ Reeve took a long drink from the bottle. ‘What we do in life dictates out afterlife. It’s a slow corruption of the soul, this Hellfire we carry. Ye will regret it. And so will I.’
‘You sound like my partner.’ Fisk took the bottle and drank, staring into the fire. ‘You tell me some other way to protect myself without corrupting my soul.’
‘I carry it as well, centurion. I don’t fault you.’
‘Then that’s enough Ia-damned talk of damnation.’
‘As ye say,’ Reeve murmured. A pause, then he declared, ‘I’ll be coming with ye.’
‘You should stay here. These folk need you.’
‘They’re loading the wagons in the morning and heading to Fort Brust, or so Velda informs me.’ He snorted. ‘She seemed to think it was my fault.’
‘Nothing you could do to stop that stretcher.’
‘Aye. So ye say.’ He waved a hand at the huddled folk warming their hands at their kinsman’s funeral pyre. ‘But these people will ne’er trust me again. So, I’ll ride with ye tomorrow.’
‘You said you reported to Fort Brust.’
‘Aye, ’tis true. But yer a centurion.’
Fisk nodded. ‘I’ll stamp some papers with the eagle before we leave.’
‘Thank ye.’
They clasped forearms as they had once before. And drank.
TWENTY-ONE
No one poured drinks. No one laughed. The Cornelian brood had stared hard at Fisk, waiting for him to begin his story. They had studied him and the wild-haired Northman he had brought with him through the snow to the Cornelian.
It had turned bitter cold, and the Big Rill had iced solid at the edges, making it hard for the lascar to ferry the men. Eventually, Skraeling turned the boat and lowered the swing stages in preparation for the winter, bringing the ponies into the hold. The season would be spent far from Passaseugo, out on the plains, beneath the White Mountains. Sharbo and the other hunters had ridden for miles east and found no sign of shoal aurochs, nor geese, nor deer.
Livia tried to smile, but it didn’t touch her eyes. Carnelia, sitting in a wide reading chair, was flipping her foot nonchalantly, and chewing a bit of hair. Secundus kept his arms crossed and looked grave. Beleth sat very still, with Samantha and Cimbri behind him.
Cornelius himself was sober and pale, dressed in a clean tunic unblemished by wine or whiskey stains. He tapped a forefinger on the triclinium’s table and said, ‘Now, if you please, Mr Fisk.’
Fisk told his story, speaking slowly and without embellishment. When he came to Broken Tooth, Reeve interrupted and took up the tale, and then Fisk finished it with the death of Banty and the vaettir bounding away with Isabelle.
When he was done, Fisk produced a sack, reached in gingerly, and withdrew a slightly desiccated, severed hand. It was grey and small and smelled of corruption. He placed it lightly on the table.
‘It’s Isabelle’s. Done in retribution for the stretcher out in the stateroom.’
There were gasps and choking sounds. But Beleth said, ‘And you are sure this is hers? And how do you know the creature hasn’t killed her and then dumped her body?’
Fisk was quiet for a while but his gaze, steady and grave, remained unblinking. ‘I don’t know that. Always a possibility, I reckon.’
Carnelia, looking wild around the eyes, leaned forward, peered at the hand, and began to cry. ‘It is hers.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Cornelius barked. ‘How?’
‘Just look at it. Think of her eating breakfast, or holding a glass, or writing. It’s hers!’
Cornelius cursed heavily. ‘You, Fisk. You are dismissed. We no longer require your services here. You are hereby ordered to return to Marcellus in New Damn—’
‘It occurs to me,’ interrupted Beleth, looking keenly at the severed hand, ‘that with a little help from our neighbours below,’ He put two fingers at either side of his head like horns before continuing, ‘Mr Fisk has provided us with the means of discovering Isabelle’s – or her corpse’s – whereabouts.’
Livia said, ‘Speak plain, engineer. What are you talking about?’
He sat back, a sly look spreading across his face like an oil-stain, and raised a finger. ‘There are three ways to summon and bind the infernal. One is to raise a daemon from Hell and bind it with wards to utilize its power. This is the simplest and safest. Relatively safest.’ He took the crystal decanter of port and poured himself a measure, grinning. ‘The second is to force a daemon into an object. Give the bound inferi a goal – in this case, locating Isabelle – before it can be released.’
‘The binding no longer holds the creature and it is free.’
‘Not banished back to Hell?’
‘Unfortunately, no.’
‘What about the bearer of the item?’ I asked.
Beleth tsked. ‘Depends. It’s possible to fend off a daemon. But the bearer is inextricably linked to the object until its goal is acheived. And the object must be part of the person or thing that must be found.’
‘Fend off?’ Livia asked. ‘How would you go about that?’
‘First, you’d need a full engineer to perform the necessary wardwork. You’d require some knowledge of how and when the object would be reunited with the infernal vestment. Both of which are unlikely. But it is possible.’
Fisk stood up. ‘How long does it take?’
‘A matter of a day or so.’
‘What do I need to do?’
Miss Livia placed her hand on his arm. ‘Is this necessary? Can we not suborn some rank soldier to this task?’
Cornelius looked at his daughter, frowning. ‘This man is willing. He wishes to atone for his failure to recover Isabelle.’
‘No,’ Livia said, and her face looked contorted, as though two emotions warred within her. ‘He failed once in reclaiming Isabelle. What’s to say he won’t fail again?’
Cornelius, Secundus, and Carnelia looked back and forth between Fisk and Livia. Carnelia’s eyes widened as she understood. Secundus’ gaze softened, and he smiled sadly and then glanced at me. I shrugged my shoulders. What the hell was I supposed to do?
Fisk looked at Livia, and damned if the man’s eyes didn’t soften too. But he straightened his back and took a deep breath. He stood as tall as he could, undaunted in front of the nobility.
‘My name is Hieronymous Cantalus Fiscelion Iulii. I will recover Isabelle or die trying.’
Silence then, until Cornelius began guffawing. He reached for a decanter.
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