The Builders (10 page)

A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica adjusted her sights.

Bonsoir did not die neatly.

He was not a large creature, but he had a heart that belied his size, as does every trueborn son of Gaul. “You ought to take great pride, silly little kitten-creature,” Bonsoir said. One hand pressed sharp against the hole in his stomach. The second pulled a crumpled cigarette from where it had rested behind his ear, set it in a mouth that was filling rapidly with blood, and lit it with a match. “For you have killed Bonsoir, the greatest assassin that Provence has ever produced.”

Puss cocked his head, looked over at the several rats that had come into the treasure room after him, looked back at Bonsoir. “Excuse me?”

“I said you have killed Bonsoir, cousin of death; Bonsoir, who strikes in the night; Bonsoir, who—”

“What is that absurd accent?”

Bonsoir coughed up smoke, then blood. “If you had not put me down from behind, like the dastard you are, Bonsoir would make you pay for the disrespect you show to his homeland.”

“Your homeland, is it?
Et
où
êtes-vous
,
vous
idiot
peu
hermine
?
Vous
stupide,
putois
merde
cerveau
?
Votre
purulente
,
imbécile
, faux chose?
”

Bonsoir didn’t answer.

“No? Nothing? It’s been so long since you’ve practiced your native tongue that you cannot even bother to recognize it?”

Still Bonsoir did not answer, though his eyes flashed with such hatred as one rarely sees apart from creatures who at one point loved one another.

“Are they such imbeciles in this country as not to have picked up on this mad deceit? How long have you been playing this absurd game? You’re no more French than I am Sultan of Turkey!”

Puss laughed uproariously and turned to the rats that he had brought as backup, who laughed as well, less because they got the joke and more because you laugh if the creature above you laughs—at least you do if you are a rat, who are creatures not unpracticed in obsequiousness. Puss giggled and guffawed, Puss chuckled and chortled, Puss cackled and tittered and howled, Puss all but ruptured his diaphragm in amusement.

It was a very loud laugh. It was not, however, the last one.

Perhaps, somewhere in the world, since the dawn of history, there was someone as fast as Cinnabar. The Gardens are vast, and time is long. Regardless, Brontë was not that creature. Before she had unholstered her weapon Cinnabar had released an entire chamber from the revolver on his right hip, fanning a cluster of shots that curdled the cream of the fox’s eye a cherry red. Brontë screamed and let off a shot that flew well to the left of the salamander, who by this point had dropped his empty revolver and repeated the trick with its full twin, sending another round of metal into the neck and scalp of the fox.

Brontë would never be as fast as Cinnabar, nowhere near, but she was a damn sight bigger. The dozen pricks of lead the Dragon had set into her flesh were insufficient to put her down, indeed barely enough to slow her. As the salamander dropped his empty weapon and moved to draw the one from his boot Brontë fired the second barrel on her blunderbuss.

Nothing is faster than a bullet, but Cinnabar was close. As Brontë’s hand cannon erupted Cinnabar dropped low to the ground and launched himself sideways. If the fox’s weapon fired solid shot he might even have made it, but as it was the outer edge of the cloud of shrapnel ripped into Cinnabar’s side, leaving bits of entrails peeking through his skin.

Her ammunition depleted, Brontë dove at Cinnabar, anxious to finish with claws and teeth what she had started with her pearl-handled shotgun. Off-balance from his wounds, the salamander still managed to dance aside, sending another wave of fire into her torso.

To little enough avail. Every shot Cinnabar had fired found purchase in the more sensitive portions of Brontë’s flesh, but each injury seemed only to enrage her further. She turned back around on the salamander, hissed madly, and charged a second time.

This time Cinnabar didn’t try to dodge. With an agility that belied the leaking corner of his intestine he unlimbered the half-rifle and steadied it at the coming behemoth. Cinnabar’s hands worked the lever, sent a flurry of lead into his enemy. Tufts of pink brain and white bone and red fur flew out of Brontë’s skull, but it did nothing to slow her momentum. She barreled forward with sufficient force to topple the Dragon, already unsteady from his wounds. They tumbled together, Brontë dead but not knowing it, Cinnabar dying and certain of the fact.

When it was done Cinnabar lay pinned beneath the aerated corpse of the fox, now finally still. Cinnabar’s hat, which had been knocked off in the struggle, was a few inches out of his reach. He strained with every fiber of the part of his body that still worked, grabbed the Stetson, and set it over his forehead.

Then he sighed, and stared up at the moon, and breathed once more, and allowed himself to die.

The Captain hurried toward the inner keep, sprinting along the high edge of the ramparts, alone so far as could be seen. Barley’s cannon went silent, finally, and the night returned to its stillness. And then that stillness—which was a false stillness, a stillness that is the preface to noise—was filled with a low shuddering, the sound of an unclean death.

Some creatures say that the rattlesnake is misunderstood, that he makes his telltale sound to warn of his danger and ward off misfortune for all parties. Some creatures are fools. No snake can be trusted, and the rattler least of all. He does not rattle to alert—he rattles to threaten, he rattles to mock. He rattles to let you know that he can bring you death, if he so chooses, and that doing so would be a joy for him, indeed would be his chief joy.

The sound got louder and louder, and then it was joined by scale slithering along stone, and finally by the sight of the snake’s flesh, pale as an exsanguinated corpse.

“Captain,” the Quaker said, the last word elongated over his forked tongue. “How long it’s been, and how much I have missed you, you and all my old companions.”

When last the Captain had seen the Quaker he had been young and bright green and filled three-deep with creatures he had swallowed during that last horrible evening, creatures who had thought themselves friends to the beast, who were foolish enough to imagine that a serpent has a heart in any but the most literal sense.

The Captain didn’t move, his hands in the pockets of his duster, a scowl on his face. “Did you now? All of us?”

“Alas for Gertrude, amiable as fair death! I take it that was Barley making so much noise earlier. But there is no noise any longer, is there, and I suppose we can guess what that means. Bonsoir always preferred silence; one way or the other I won’t be seeing him. And I know that Brontë had a special surprise prepared for Cinnabar, though I doubt things will work out quite the way the fox planned.”

“And?”

“Boudica? But she won’t be anywhere nearby.”

“And?” the Captain asked. “And? And?”

Quaker looked at the Captain a long while. Then he looked all about himself, into the deep dark stillness of the night. Then he smiled.

Elf shot from one of the crevices that the evening reserves for itself, shrieking her shriek that was the last thing so many creatures had heard, squirrels and mice and rats and bats and polecats and skunks. Where had she been? Not so small a bird, if not so large either, and she couldn’t fly anymore, hobbled by the
click-click-click
of her talons. But that night she had moved as stealthily as Bonsoir, or a shadow, which was to say the same thing.

They moved with a speed that was impossible to follow, feinting and striking, each attack shading imperceptibly into the next such that determining individual movements was impossible. The Quaker snapped and twisted, hoping to wrap himself around his old lover in one final, deadly embrace. Elf avoided this kindness, offering her own with a beak that shone bright in the moonlight, and talons that she’d kept sharp as her hate. She should have been easy prey for the snake, old and mottled and flightless as she was. But this proved not to be the case, for after a full forty-five seconds—which is an eternity in mortal combat, which is longer than perhaps any other creature in the Gardens would have lasted with either—the contest remained undecided.

Furious at this difficulty, the Quaker turned smoothly from Elf and launched himself at the Captain, as swiftly as a ball from a cannon, with no doubt the same effect had he reached the mouse. But in the instant before he would have struck, Elf intercepted the Quaker’s movement with one of her own, just as potent and fierce; with a flap of her wings she cast herself forward into the rattler, claws finding the soft tissue around his eyes. The Quaker did not scream: not when the blood began to come swiftly down his face, not when the force of Elf’s attack carried both of them tumbling out over the walls and down into the ether, the desperate and hoped-for outcome, a fatal embrace descending, together forever, into the darkness.

“Imagine,” Puss continued, gesturing widely to his soldiers. “Years affecting this mad conceit, and no one ever bothered to call him on it! What strange, pathetic creatures you breed on this side of the pond! This sad little ermine has spent the entirety of his life pretending to be something he is not, as if massacring his vowels offered some patina of class. What is that sound?”

What
was
that sound? It was something like sand leaking through an hourglass, or silk running across a lady’s hand. It wasn’t either of these things, of course, though it had more in common with the first.

What it was, in fact, as Puss realized after he had turned around, was the thin little string attached to the end of Bonsoir’s last stick of dynamite rapidly being eaten away by flame.

“I am not an ermine!” Bonsoir said, blood bubbling up past his smile.

Puss’s eyes went very wide. He prepared to do something, though what that something would have been never did become clear.

Puss was cultured, Puss was clever, Puss was fast and cruel and deadly—but Puss was not wise. For, if Bonsoir was no Frenchman, he was, most certainly, a stoat. And if a Frenchman is many things, at the end of the day, a stoat is only one—a killer.

And now the fuse was a fingernail, and now a hair’s breadth.

“Bonsoir!” Bonsoir said.

The Captain entered the inner keep as alone in reality as he had always been in spirit. He skirted from shadow to shadow, eyes wary, one hand on the shotgun strapped to his back—but there arrived no excuse for using it, and he passed into the throne room without incident.

It had been used to crown the Lords and Ladies of the Gardens for untold generations, it was gold and silver; it was cool stone and buffed ivory; it was soft samite and thick Oriental silk. From the stained-glass windows above, the Toads’ forebears observed the proceedings with regal disinterest. The throne was large enough to have accommodated a wolfhound, and Mephetic, lounging on the lip, seemed lost amid its grandeur. He had one hand on a box detonator, a coil of string leading off into the darkness. He had the other around a bottle of brown liquor.

“You might not believe this, but I’m about to do you a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely. Being in charge of the Gardens is not all it’s cracked up to be. Monetary policy, tax revenue, the bureaucracy . . . Trust me, it’s mostly hassle. Taking it was the only part I really liked.”

“Where’s the Younger?”

“Struggling with an opium suppository, if I had to guess. The Lord is not one to let a little thing like revolution get in the way of pleasure. Anyway, who cares? He was never the point of the thing.”

“No,” the Captain agreed. “Just want to make sure it all gets wrapped up.”

“I’ve rigged enough dynamite to send the entire inner keep to the moon,” Mephetic said, laughing. “Don’t worry. We’ll be taking the Lord with us.” Mephetic took a long, slow slug of whiskey, making sure to keep an eye on the Captain while he did so. When he was done, he put the top on the bottle and tossed it to the mouse. “One last nip before we meet the devil?”

The Captain caught it with one hand, uncorked it, and took a swig. The other hand he raised above his head.

A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica fired.

There was the sound of a window breaking, and then Mephetic’s head disappeared.

Not disappeared, so much as redistributed itself, on the ground and the wall and the throne itself. The Captain waved again, unnecessarily. Boudica had seen well enough to make the shot; of course she could see well enough to know she hadn’t missed. Not that Boudica ever missed.

The Captain drank what was left in the bottle with one protracted gulp. Then he let it shatter against the floor and moved on, swiftly but not hurrying, into the hallway that lay beyond the throne room.

The corridor stank terribly, and it stank worse the farther he went, and the Captain knew he was close. At the end of the passageway was a door, and beyond that door was a room, and inside that room was evidence that no creature should have all its desires fulfilled. The chamber was as foul as any abattoir, cut-rate whorehouse, or public toilet. The Captain had not seen the creature that breathed at the center of it for ten years, since before the start of the War of the Two Brothers, and in the interim he had gotten fatter and nastier but not fundamentally different in any other way.

The Lord was larger than any toad you’d ever expect to see, nearly as big as Barley was, or had been, or whatever. Though of course the badger’s size had been mostly muscle, whereas the Lord was so grotesquely obese that he couldn’t walk unaided, could only lift his arms with difficulty. The collection of warts, humps, swollen bulges, and goiters would have done credit to a colony of lepers. His eyes were as dim as a miner’s candle, and it took him a long time to react to this new development.

“You,” the Lord said. Somewhere in the dim recesses of his amphibious brain, a brain that had long been subject to the degrading effects of every vice and narcotic that had ever been invented or distilled, a connection was made. “I remember you. You were . . . you were my brother’s, weren’t you?”

“He was mine, would be a better way of putting it.”

The Lord looked at the Captain slyly for a moment, and asked, “Are you real?”

“Real as anything.”

“Then those sounds I was hearing, all that gunfire and screaming—that was real too? Not just inside my mind?”

The Captain nodded.

The Lord took a few long seconds to work through the arithmetic. “Then that means you’re here to kill me.”

“You weren’t first on the list,” the Captain informed him. “But you are the last one left.”

The Lord did not say anything for a long time. He was working very hard to piece the puzzle together, though it was no easy thing for a creature who had been required to do nothing more difficult than light his hash pipe for the better part of a decade.

But he managed it, and in doing so he received a sudden and unexpected burst of energy, one that propelled him into monologue. “Well? Where is he? Where is my elder brother, who has so long been absent from my bosom? Let me show him all the deference due one whose birth was a full five minutes before my own.” The toad’s face, unlovely under the best of circumstances, was further marred with the molasses-thick swell of fraternal hatred. It had been so long since the toad had been required to perform any physical act more tiring than evacuating waste or receiving pleasure that even this short oration left him exhausted and out of breath, his warty hide rising and falling, rising and falling.

The Captain didn’t say anything for a while, just watched the Lord try to breathe. He was carrying a small burden on his back, and he removed it and rolled it out onto the floor.

The Lord’s eyes throbbed out from his skull. His mouth hung open; his tongue uncoiled itself until it nearly touched the fat of his belly.

Laid against the bed of the now-unraveled satchel was a collection of bones picked clean by time. Amid these remnants was a jet-white skull, a skull that was unquestionably that of a toad.

“I know he was alive when he reached the Kingdom to the South,” the Captain said. “So he must have died some time afterward. It might have been natural. Or it might not have been. I suppose down there they figured he kept his value as a potential threat, so long as Mephetic never found out.”

“But . . . then . . .” The Lord’s great bulbous jaw jiggled inanely. “What was the point?”

The last Lord of the Gardens died miserably and without fanfare, the Captain offering both barrels, shrapnel spreading putrescent green rot against the wall. The toad was so corpulent that at first it seemed the loss of a half his body weight wouldn’t be enough to kill him, and the Captain started to reload his weapon. But then the Lord let out a loud, wet fart, near as foul as Mephetic’s stink, and he slunk down into his chair.

When the Captain got back to the throne room he found an ancient vole in faded livery, looking out the window at the ruined keep below, and the city beyond it which would soon see nothing but chaos, and the country past that which would know the same. “So much death,” he said. “So much death.”

The Captain stopped in front of him and shrugged, as if he had seen more.

“What happens now?” the servant asked, too old to be frightened. “The keep is in ruins, the country devastated. All this slaughter, and what will come of it? Who will rule the Gardens now? Who will rebuild?”

The Captain pulled out a cigar from beneath his coat. The Captain cut the tip off. The Captain put it to his mouth. The Captain lit the end. The Captain breathed in deep, and exhaled a river of smoke.

“We don’t build.”