The Five Faces (The Markhat Files) (18 page)

Granny looked me in the eye and stuck out her tongue. “Drive, stew-pot,” she said. “Mind the corners. Mr. Pollman is new to bein’ dead and likely to fall out if you takes them too fast.”

“You’re kidding.”

An icy cold fingertip stroked the back of my neck.

“Somebody grab Mr. Pollman,” I said. “We’ll never find him if he falls out.”

I snapped my reins and pulled back into the road. “Mind telling me where we’re going?” I asked.

“Elfways,” said Granny. She slumped, and Mama caught her, and she managed to straighten back up. “Take me home and don’t spare the kidneys.”

Mindful of unsteady ghosts, I turned us east and headed for the narrow lanes and buckled roofs of Elfways.

I’m ashamed to admit that I made five trips from Elfways to the Pale and back again. Granny reports that we conveyed twenty-nine lost souls from the Pale’s chalky bulk to the nameless little cemetery by Granny’s shack. I can’t dispute the claim, mainly because I never saw a damned thing.

Only after we delivered the last load of the dead did Granny regain any of her usual animation.

“Tary whilst I close the gate,” she said, before remembering to append her statement with a long exposition concerning horses and their preferences where hats are concerned.

We tarried. Buttercup whispered to her doll, which was sometimes a skull. Darla sat close and the way her right hand kept slipping into her purse told me it was full of sleek, silver revolvers.

Mama shook her birds and muttered.

“I ain’t never seen Granny rattled before,” she said as Granny closed the cemetery gates to the street. “Better get set for bad news.”

Granny pulled out a strand of her own hair and wrapped it around the latch. “Mrs. Hog,” she called. “Attend us, if you will?”

Mama rose.

“Don’t step on any ghosts,” I said.

I swear something cold stroked the back of my neck.

Buttercup hissed, all the humor gone from her eyes. The touch of cold withdrew.

“So this is what you do all day,” said Darla. “Haul around ghosts. Watch Mama hex strangers.”

“I’m more heroic most times. You’re just seeing me in a slump.”

Granny and Mama spoke. Mama rummaged in her bag for just the right desiccated bird, produced a dried snake instead, and waved it over the gate.

Granny returned to the carriage and leaned against it while Mama worked.

“We are safe here,” she said. “Mrs. Markhat. I hope you won’t be insulted if I forgo the customary theatrics. I am weary, and we have little time.”

Darla just nodded.

“What just happened?” I asked. “Was all this part of the show, or was it real?”

“It is quite real. The souls we have transported were in genuine peril. They are safe now.” She held up her hand, as if for silence. “They wish to extend to you their thanks, Mr. Markhat.”

I felt damned foolish, but I nodded anyway. “They’re welcome. I hate to see dead people waste good shoe leather when a perfectly good carriage is handy. Granny, pretend I don’t know what the hell is going on and explain it, will you?”

“The rumors were correct. A necromancer is among us. The person you referred to as the witch-woman has been collecting weak souls and making off with them.”

Darla shivered by my side.

“How?”

“The mechanics aren’t important. This person has defiled a dozen cemeteries in the last few months. She selects a graveyard, installs a crypt, and abuses the spirits who wander the grounds.”

“I don’t suppose the dead folks can supply me with a name?” I asked.

“They are deceased, not stupid. Her name, or at least the consensus pronunciation thereof, is Szerzhenkap.”

“I take it she’s not from around here.”

“No. She last came from Prince. Before that, even the dead cannot say.”

“So this Szerzhenkap has Rannit’s ghosts in an uproar. What were they doing outside the Pale, anyway? Hell, the rent in that neighborhood is beyond my means, and I have a solid torso.”

“They fled,” said Granny. “But the world beyond the cemetery gates is no place for them. The dead no longer perceive the world as do you and I. They were lost, wandering, ripe for the taking.”

“And now they can just settle down here, raise a brood of poltergeists, maybe open a shop?”

“They are back on sacred ground. The dead may be at peace, until they are ready to move on,” said Granny. “As long as we prevent the necromancer from breaching the gate.”

“Can you do that?” asked Darla.

“I can,” said Granny. She paused and rolled her eyes. “I tell you I can,” she repeated. “Now go find a nice quiet place and rest.”

“We saw the witch-woman roll right through thicker chains than yours,” I said.

“I was not there to stop her,” said Granny. Her eyes flashed. “But she is not my main source of concern at the moment.”

“What’s worse than a mad necromancer?”

“The shade she has summoned,” said Granny. “The shade that the necromancer feeds with the souls she captures.”

Mama came stomping up.

“I hexed your gate good,” she reported. “But a half dozen Hoogas with them big Ogre clubs they favors might be a good idea too. Wants me to send word to Ogre-town?”

Granny shook her head. “Ogres will spill my tea!” she screeched. “No Ogres. Only hexes. Hexes and thistles, better than whistles!”

“Do tell,” muttered Mama. “Well, I expect you know best.”

Buttercup scampered off, giggling and skipping among the dingy, leaning gravewards.

“Any idea who this shade might have been in life?” I asked.

Granny shook her head no. I sighed but wasn’t surprised.

“I’ll work on finding out. Are we done here?” I asked. “Any spooks need a ride downtown?”

“May your badgers fill cupboards with mirth and waxed spoons,” said Granny.

“Same to you. Mama? Want a ride back to Cambrit?”

“Thankee, boy, but I reckon I’ll stay and visit a spell.”

“You ladies don’t stay out past Curfew.”

Both of them guffawed. Buttercup appeared to be holding an invisible hand and smiling up at an invisible face.

Maybe it was the sun in my eye, but when I turned to speak to Darla, I saw, just for an instant, what appeared to be a tall, thin figure wearing old-timey knee-britches and a puffed lace collar holding Buttercup’s hand.

“Should we try to take Buttercup?” asked Darla.

“I think not,” I said. “She’s making new friends.”

I got us moving before she could ask.

Chapter Fourteen

I left a none-too-pleased Darla back at the hotel. Then I ran a few errands before heading to Avalante.

Evis was waiting. He’d dressed himself in a new kind of armor his subterranean geniuses had concocted. It was black and tight and gave him a somewhat beetle-ish appearance, but he claimed it would turn everything short of a bullet, leaving nothing worse than a bruise.

“No thanks. I’ll make sure to button my coat up all the way,” I said when he offered to fetch me one of the outlandish get-ups.

“You should reconsider,” he said. His pale eyes were owlish in the dark of his office. “This is no ordinary man we may encounter.”

According to the waybills, a street chemist named Ray-ray was due to die at ten o’clock sharp. The drawing depicted his head missing in a neat line right above his jaw. Evis claimed his people had identified the location of the murder as an alley not far from the docks.

Evis keeps a dozen timepieces of one kind or another in his office. I’d stopped looking at them an hour ago, because they kept indicating conflicting times. Not by much. A minute here, half a minute there. But I knew damned well Evis wouldn’t allow his clocks to be anything save accurate.

The coin remained in my right-hand pocket. I’d considered dropping it in a privy just out of spite, but realized it would only make its way back to my pants, probably without any magical cleaning in the process.

“You should reconsider,” said Evis.

“This is no ordinary man we may encounter,” I said before he got the words out.

The dapper vampire frowned. “All the more reason to protect yourself as best you can,” he said.

“Maybe next time.” I drained my beer. “Where is Stitches? I figured she’d be helping you pace and wring your hands.”

“I do not wring my hands.” He crossed behind his desk, sat, and produced a pair of cigars. “She is making preparations of her own.”

“Good. Maybe she’ll get lucky and reduce You Know Who to ash and we can be done with all this. Isn’t that get-up hot? Looks like you’d be baking inside it.”

“My metabolism differs.” He blew a perfect smoke ring. “I believe her emphasis tonight is on gathering intelligence, although she did mention use of some obscure artifact as a measure of last resort.”

I puffed on my cigar and nodded. I’d been on the deck of the
Queen
when the Corpsemaster dropped a rock from the sky on Hag Mary and her doomed playmates. The impact had forced the Brown River to run backwards for three entire days and left a crater so large it’s a full day’s boat-ride across. Evis didn’t know Stitches was really the Corpsemaster, and in that moment I envied him. When a wand-waver of that standing talks measures of last resort, big deep holes are the inevitable result.

A knock sounded at the door. Evis bade them enter, and a halfdead clad in the same black gear poked his head inside the room.

“We are ready,” he said. “The sorceress and team are assembling outside.”

“We’ll be there in five,” said Evis. The halfdead withdrew.

“Time to go,” he said. “We’ll need to conceal ourselves and prepare Stitches’s implements.”

I rose. Another knock sounded, one I recognized, and as I hurried to get out of the room Gertriss came inside.

She wore the same expression I’d last seen on Darla. It was a mixture of hurt and apprehension at being left behind.

“Boss,” she said, without a smile or any hint of banter in her tone.

“We’re neither one of us popular tonight,” I said. “Blame it on our patriarchal society and upbringing.”

“Go,” said Evis, to me. “I’ll meet you topside.”

I went as fast as my reluctant feet could carry me.

“I take it that went well,” I said as Evis took his seat across from me.

“Don’t ask,” he said. The carriage door slammed shut, and after a few moments of terse exchanges by drivers and soldiers, we headed out into the night.

I’d gotten only the briefest glimpse of Stitches, and not even that of her goodies. Whatever she was bringing had been covered with black tarps. I counted half a dozen trunk-sized forms under the tarps before I was shooed into a shiny, black carriage and told in no uncertain terms to wait quietly.

Stitches was wearing the same odd armor as Evis and all the rest. My long, tan coat, black pants, and white shirt left me feeling overdressed.

Evis guessed my thoughts. “Too late now,” he said, allowing himself a toothy grin. “But don’t worry. The plan is to stay well away from the action. We’ll have plenty more chances to engage before our turns come up. We just want to see what we’re up against.”

I bit back a comment about gods and fate. No sense in both of us harboring a sense of inescapable doom.

“So what’s in the crates? More of those repeating rifles?”

“Something much more amusing,” he said. “Just in case the festivities get out of hand.”

I didn’t like the way he kept on grinning after he spoke.

“Thought tonight was just a bit of spying.”

“You know me. I like to come prepared.”

He wouldn’t say more than that the whole ride across town, so I contented myself to peeking out the tiny carriage window.

Rannit was, for the most part, going to bed. Reluctantly, and with a lot of cussing and fuming, but streets were clearing and shutters were closing and locking, and even the drunks were stumbling toward home with an air of clumsy urgency.

A couple of times I thought I saw something agile and blonde leap across rooftops, but I was never quite sure if I’d actually seen Buttercup or if the coin was showing me shafts of moonlight from a few moments hence or a few moments ago.

Finally, I settled back into the cushioned seat and closed my eyes altogether.
Hah,
I thought to the coin.
Show me things now.

“One of our special guests managed to sneak away,” said Evis. “The dog-thieving gambler. Rorshot.”

“What?” I sat up straight. “When did that happen?”

“When did what happen?”

“You just said Rorshot flew the coop.”

Evis lifted an eyebrow. “I said nothing at all. Certainly nothing about Rorshot. Were you dreaming?”

“Must have been,” I said.
Damn you,
I added silently, in case my money was listening.

“We have an excellent medical staff,” said Evis. “If your hallucinations persist.”