The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files) (11 page)

“Thank you,” said Darla. “We’ll be right along. A moment alone, if you please.”

“Whoah, am I invisible again?” I asked. “Thanks all the same, but I’m going home.”

Gertriss hustled Evis out without a word. Slim sauntered past, Alfreda in his arms. The halfdead filed out with all the fuss and bother of a distant passing cloud.

Darla wrapped her arms around me.

“I just want to go home,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Our house,” she said, before stopping. She buried her face against my chest, and I felt the sudden warmth of tears. “It’s gone. They burned it to the ground, the night you left.”

She began to shake, and I held her, and we didn’t turn each other loose until Slim knocked softly at the door and hooted my name.

“Cornbread?” I asked.

“Safe,” she said. “At Mama’s. They came near dawn. Flying things. The witch. A big snake with wings. They dropped fire.” She tried to go on but couldn’t.

I’d just put up a new picket fence. Fixed the sticky window in the parlor. Put shiny new brass latches on all the doors.

Middling Lane was home. Our home. I couldn’t bear to even imagine the sight of flames reducing it all to ashes and ruin.

“I’ll make them pay,” I said after a moment. “I’ll get Buttercup back and I’ll burn that damned carnival to the ground and when I’m done I’ll piss on the ashes. This I swear.” I swallowed hard, because my voice was going funny. “This I swear.”

“Just don’t get killed,” she said. “That’s all I ask. Don’t get killed.”

Darla wiped her tears, found a smile, and together we walked out into the harsh bright light of day.

Chapter Thirteen

Again, I dreamed, and walked in my dream.

My body lay sleeping beside Darla, deep below Avalante’s tilting slate roofs, far from the charred remains of our tidy little home on Middling Lane.

For a time, I dreamed of fire. I walked to the night and the hour my home was attacked. I watched as the witch dropped from the dark, leading the rest as they spiraled down and sought to force their way inside while Darla slept.

I heard Cornbread bark, saw a candle flare to life at our bedroom window. Saw the Witch cackle and hurl a handful of tangled shadows at the tiny flame.

Her shadows didn’t make it. Instead, they gathered around the lightning rods protruding here and there from my roof. After a moment, they coursed down the rods and down the copper lines and vanished into the ground.

The witch shrieked. Her companions, half a dozen flapping things I couldn’t begin to name, drew close about her.

The plain old fire they hurled quickly spread.

I watched Darla run away, Cornbread at her feet. She emptied her pistols into the sky.

My house caught fire, and the flames quickly rose.

I turned from it, pushing down the rage.

“Now is not the time,”
I thought, and yet I heard my words echo across Rannit, and it seemed that a peel of mad laughter from the east rose up in reply.

I walked. Night and day changed places. The sun hurtled across the sky, once, twice, slowing, stopping.

I crossed the river easily. The stench of smoke still filled my nostrils. I’d not realized how much I’d come to love that modest little box of a house.

I looked down, saw a scatter of rags at my feet, and then diminished until I recognized the carnival.

I walked among them, unseen.

Tents were being erected. The fires were out, save for a pair of big ones being fed with debris. Hammers fell. Ropes were stretched taut. A pair of mastodons trumpeted as they pulled the wreck of a balloon’s ornate gondola down the littered midway.

Clowns charged about, cussing and hauling and pushing and shoving.

It didn’t take long to see that the carnival folk weren’t breaking camp.

As I watched a new stage being built in front of Malus the Magnificent’s tent, I realized they were setting up for the night’s show.

I grew, until I was tall enough to tower over the mastodons.

I let loose my rage, and I kicked at the nearest tent.

My boot passed through it. I raised my heel and brought it down, wanting nothing more than to crush the carnival down into the dirt, tent by clown by tent.

I could feel the earth, but nothing above it was disturbed.

I cussed. I railed. I swatted at the riding wheel, tried to wrest the carousel from its mooring and hurl it into the Brown. I may have dislodged a flock of blackbirds from the trees, or I may not have, but I inflicted no vengeance on the carnival or its folk.

I walked on, fuming.

I knew Buttercup lay wrapped in a doll’s unyielding embrace, though I’d never found the black tent. I knew, in my heart, that I could return with Evis and the Army and a thousand guns, come nightfall, and we could burn every tent and smash every structure and in the morning Buttercup would still be gone.

I wandered, growing. Soon the forests at my feet gave way to vast plains of tall, windblown sage. I spied mountains in the distance, and soon snow glistened bright about their peaks, and still I roamed.

Killing Thorkel hadn’t opened the mirrors. I recalled feeling Thorkel go light in my hand, remembered his empty clothes and scrap of a wig falling from my grasp. Had he ever lived? Was the creature I’d walked with, conversed with, nothing but a pile of cast-off costumery animated by some grim sorcery?

The mountains stretched away, their snowy crags and frigid shoulders barely reaching my knees. I cast my gaze about, and finally found the moon, just risen over a darkening peak.

Stitches,
I thought.
She knows the things I must.

Go to her,
came a whisper at my ear. The voice was that of the she-Elf I’d consumed in the woods.
Go to her. You know how. It’s easy. So easy…

I pondered the insanity in her words. I knew of no sorcery, no sorcerer, which ever claimed such a feat.

The moon hung in place, pale and silver against the white-blue sky, eternal and distant and cold. Unreachable. Impossible. Forbidden.

I stretched forth my hand, and grew as never before, and as I held the moon in my right palm I brought it close so that I might better see its secrets. I considered its darkened plains, its pockmarked gray wastes, its bright peaks and impenetrable shadows. I turned it to and fro, until I found the miniscule stirrings of light I sought.

I let go of the moon. I grew, and it was, after all, just one small step away.

When I found Stitches, she was hard at work.

She stood in the midst of a vast circular chamber. The whole of Rannit could be fit inside that cavern. The floors were worked with intricate symbols, like the walls and the distant, domed ceiling.

Lights ran and pulsed and collided and parted on every part of every marking, lighting the room with a continual shimmering glow, as if the room were packed with lightning. Strange sounds echoed in the room’s stale air. Some were voices, raised in chant or song. Some were shouts. Some were howls or groans or cries, none of which were born from any human throat.

Stitches stood in the center of the storm, her arms upraised. She wielded a staff above her head, moving the head of it in time with silent flashes of light. When she spoke, it was not a tongue I knew.

Her back was to me. I diminished and approached, wary and silent. I’d watched Stitches take down Hag Mary and a pair of giants with less effort than I expend making pancakes. Dream or no dream, caution seemed prudent.

I drew close without incident. Close enough to see that Stitches was wearing a tattered white bathrobe which bore the House Avalante seal embroidered on the back. Her feet were enclosed in equally worn fuzzy house shoes.

I considered my next words carefully.

“Hey diddle diddle,” I said. “The cat and the fiddle—”

She lowered her staff, spoke a pair of harsh ugly words, and turned to face me.

“Who dares intrude?” she said, her gaze passing over me as she looked about.

“The cow jumped over the moon,” I finished.

I took another step forward. Her eyes locked on me. Her staff suddenly crawled with lightning, and she filled her free hand with wobbling blue fire.

“It’s me,” I said. “Hold off on the fireworks. Nice slippers, by the way. Darla has a pair just like them.”

She hurled her blue fire. It sailed through me, leaving only a mild sensation of cold in its wake.

“I tell you it’s me, Markhat,” I said. I raised my hands in surrender. “There’s trouble at home. I could use some advice. Sorry to pop in uninvited. Please stop that.”

She’d loosed the lighting from her staff. Bolts worried the air about me, but could find no purchase. I felt nothing as arc after arc of fire lashed the air where I stood.

After a time, she lowered the staff and called back her thunder.

“You cannot be Markhat,” she said, glaring. “We are on the moon.”

“Oh, but I am,” I replied. “I’m dreaming. Getting here was interesting, but not that difficult. It’s just a dream, after all.”

“I am most certainly not dreaming,” said Stitches.

“Oh. I didn’t think of that,” I said. “But still, here we are. Nice place. What is it?”

“If you are indeed Markhat, you know my other name,” said Stitches. “Speak it.”

“Corpsemaster,” I said. “Among others. Does Evis know you have that bathrobe? I’ve tried to get one for months, but he says they’re only for visiting dignitaries.”

“How are you here?”

I shrugged. “I walked. Like I said, there’s a situation down there. I need some advice. It’ll take ten minutes.”

As I spoke, a gargantuan, mad-eyed face appeared on the ceiling. It was faint, its outlines formed of silver tracings of light, but its eyes shone red and I didn’t like the way they turned to fix on me.

The mouth moved, though I heard no words. Stitches spat a string of nonsense words, apparently in reply, and dismissed the face with a wave of her staff.

“The landlord?” I asked.

“The guardian of this place,” she replied, scowling. When her eyes aren’t sewn shut, they’re a pretty shade of light brown. “I must assume you are in fact real. The guardian reports a subtle disturbance in a number of ward spells. That would be consistent with your claim.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Don’t be. You have no idea what you’ve done.” She shook her head. “I’ll give you your ten minutes. But not here. Follow. Touch nothing. Speak nothing.”

“I will walk in silent awe of your house-shoes.”

She rolled her eyes, and away we went.

Turns out a life on the moon is a life of luxury.

Stitches’s chamber, as she called it, lay at the end of a gently curving corridor lit by a line of radiant gems set into the ceiling. Her door opened as we approached, and closed silently behind us.

The chamber was huge. The ceiling was thirty feet high. The walls were smooth gray stone, shot through with veins of silver. The corners were rounded, the floors inlaid with a series of complex spirals that spun and turned slowly in the light.

There were chairs, cushioned and comfy. Tables and desks. A whole wall of shelves and books.

And every chair, settee, sofa, or table was built with someone twelve feet tall in mind.

Stitches kicked off her fuzzy slippers. I took that as a sign the prohibition against speech was lifted.

“Interesting decor,” I said. I leaned against a chair-leg. My shoulders stood level with the chair’s seat. “I think your furniture maker needs a new ruler, though.”

“The scale was appropriate for the creators of this place,” she said. She led me to a corner where a Stitches-sized cot and plain wooden chair sat on a new brown rug. “Sit. This advice you seek. What does it concern?”

I perched on the edge of her cot. She sank wearily into her chair. I dived right in, starting with my hire by the unfortunate Ordwalds and ending with Evis falling off his stool at
The Cat and Fiddle
.

Stitches rested her chin on her fist and listened silently until I was done.

“And that’s all of it?” she asked when I fell silent.

“I may have skipped my lunch menu, and I didn’t specify the color of my socks, but I didn’t leave out anything important,” I said.

“Liar.” Stitches yawned. “Nevertheless. You have examined the Ordwald girl?”

“Enough to know she doesn’t have a heartbeat, and doesn’t exhale,” I said. “She can speak, with some difficulty. Can think. I’ve seen her cry. “

“Necromancy is a foul practice,” she said. I must have raised an eyebrow, knowing as I did her own expertise at reanimating the dead in great numbers as the Corpsemaster.

“I took control of vacant bodies,” she said. “I rarely troubled their spirits. It appears your necromancer killed the girl, animated her remains, and then bound her spirit to her own corpse.” She frowned. “Monstrous, but hardly atypical behavior.”

“Is it reversible?” I asked.

“Death seldom is,” said Stitches. “Destroying the reanimated body with fire would probably negate the binding, and free her spirit. Pumping the body full of certain compounds would slow or even halt decay. Those are the only two options I can offer, I’m afraid. Neither is optimal for the girl or her family.”

I’d feared as much. “Buttercup, then. How do I get her out of that glass?”

She lifted her chin off her fist and stretched. “Without a detailed arcane inspection of the mirror, I cannot say what forces create the space inside the reflection, much less offer you a way to reverse them.”

“I was afraid of that. Any chance you might be coming home soon?”

She shook her head no. “I cannot leave until my work here is done. I mean that quite literally. The guardian you saw earlier? I defeated its geas to annihilate all visitors, only to discover it is also determined to keep intruders here, should they survive entry. I lack the means to defeat the guardian a second time.”

“So you’re stuck here? Forever?”

“For the moment.” She smiled a tired smile. “I appreciate your concern. Be glad it is misplaced. Once I gain entry to the vaults below, defeating the guardian will be a simple matter. I will return to Avalante within the month. Two at the most. But return I will.”

“You came all the way to the moon to rob a vault?” I whistled. “Must be something special in there.”

“Oh, indeed there is,” she said. She rose and began to pace. I kept my seat. “When the last magical summer was ending, and the lords of the earth felt winter’s chill, they stored the most powerful of their arcane implements here,” she said. “They believed their treasures would be safe. Until they wake and need them again.”

I shivered. I’d seen a few trinkets from the days of high magic Stitches referred to as the magical summers. The huldra was one, and it had nearly eaten my soul on a whim. I’d slain a mad god with a silver cylinder Stitches called the Wrath of Heaven, and I gathered both objects were mere firecrackers compared to the real thing.

And the vault below my dream-feet apparently held enough such terrors to hold the world in thrall.

“Anything down there strong enough to blow up a carnival?” I asked.

“You could break the world in two with the least of the items,” she replied. “Which is precisely why no one should have them.”

“No one but you,” I said before wisdom prevailed.

Stitches turned and sighed. “Do you truly think so little of me, Captain? I have walked beside fierce powers for longer than your city has stood. I understand the corrupting nature of power.” She moved to her chair and dragged it over to face me before sitting. “You, on the other hand, know nothing of that struggle.”

“I may know a little,” I said, remembering the huldra’s whispered promises of magic, if only I would yield. “And look. I’m here with you, on the moon.”

“Yes. For better or worse, you have set foot upon this path, and for you there is no turning back. I am partly to blame for that. I am sorry.”