The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files) (5 page)

We heard the newcomers well before we made out their furtive forms in the moonlight. A crowd of men, sixteen strong, huddled together and moving fast in the middle of the fresh-cleared road.

Clowns moved with them. Two before, four after. The clowns had swapped their brooms for studded oak clubs. The clowns weren’t capering. Weren’t shuffling.

The front clowns halted the parade right before the carnival ticket gates.

Thorkel stepped out of the dark, swinging his cane. I couldn’t hear what he said, could barely make out the dulcet tones of his voice. Whatever he said met approval with the crowd, because they hooted with glee and charged the gate, parting around Thorkel while he slowly turned to watch them go.

Thorkel said something to the clowns. They beat it for a tent just inside the gates. A few lights flared, here and there. The carousel organ began to toot and whistle as it lit up and began to turn.

Thorkel put his back to us and strolled inside his carnival, swinging his cane and whistling a tune I didn’t know.

Darla put her hand on my right shoulder and dug her fingers in. “You are not going in there alone.”

“How many women did you count, in that crowd?” I asked.

“We’ll stick to the shadows, boss,” said Gertriss.

“You’ll get us all killed, is what you’ll do,” I said. “No way can either of you pass for a man, and you know it. Anyway, I’m not convinced I’m going in. Let’s wait a bit. See what we can see.”

Darla loosened her grip, just a little.

It didn’t take long.

The first scream sounded five minutes after the crowd hit the gates. It was a man’s scream, short and gruff and cut off suddenly.

Laughter, high and shrill, sounded right after.

“That’s one,” whispered Gertriss.

The second scream came moments later. This one was long and interspersed with cries of “no, no, no.” There was a flash of light from inside the midway, briefly illuminating the rows of tents. The screaming man had time for one last wordless shout, and then he too fell silent.

“Two,” said Gertriss.

The riding wheel flared to life. A man climbed it, leaping from seat to seat, finding handholds in the rusty iron frame. If he cried out, we never heard it.

Something leaped onto the wheel below him. At first I thought it a man, but when it began to climb, it used too many legs. It scuttled up the wheel effortlessly, leaped on the climbing man’s back, and after a moment of stillness it flung his limp body to the ground and climbed down after it, moving like some monstrous eager spider.

“Three.”

“I’ve seen enough,” I whispered. “We’re leaving, and I’m not coming back without cannons and the Army.”

Darla’s face relaxed. “Oh,” she said. “How will we get back across the river?”

I shrugged. “What, you don’t have a boat in your purse, purely by accident?”

“Hell boss, we’ll swim if we have to,” said Gertriss. Wild cackling sounded from the midway, and a man cried out. I caught a brief glimpse of a squat form astride an honest-to-Angels flying broom, and then Vallata the swamp witch swooped down upon her prey. I’m guessing he didn’t fare any better than the snake we’d just watched her swallow whole. “That’s four.”

“Let’s go.”

The words were barely out of my mouth before I heard a shout behind us, and realized we weren’t alone.

A man charged down the path, bellowing and stumbling. He bore a sword in his right hand and a bottle in his left and he was on us and past before I recognized the tall, rangy figure and the booming, hoarse voice.

“Damn it,” I said. I stood and I raised my gun but it was over before I could act.

The first bolt took him in the gut. He dropped his bottle, fell and rolled. I saw the patch of new blood glisten in the moonlight.

He got up. He got up and took another step, but I heard crossbows throw, too many to count.

Bertold Ordwald went down to his knees, gurgled, and collapsed in a limp, dead heap.

Darla pulled me down. We waited, listening for the silky hiss of bolts flying past.

None came. In a moment, half a dozen clowns emerged from the shadows and converged on the corpse.

“Oh shit,” whispered Gertriss. She wasn’t looking at our former client, or the clowns. I followed her gaze.

Atop the empty riding wheel, a child-like figure glowed, dancing.

Buttercup.

Darla rose to a crouch, her hand over her mouth. Gertriss cussed again.

The witch’s broom rose from the tents, arcing toward Buttercup.

The scuttling spider-thing leaped back onto the frame and began creeping toward her.

“They can’t hurt her,” I said. “She’s a banshee.”

“Buttercup, come
here,
” said Darla, in a loud whisper. “Come here at once.”

The tiny banshee leaped and twirled. The spider-thing was halfway up the wheel, climbing the underside of the frame, out of Buttercup’s sight. The witch circled her, cackling and spiraling closer.

A veritable cloud of small flying things rose up like the shadow of a whirlwind from amid the tents. Bats, they were, but flocking like blackbirds.

Down along the midway, the sixth man screamed and died.

Buttercup went still. I was too far away to see, but I imagined her face turning somber, the glowing nimbus about her intensifying.

She howled.

The witch veered off, diving for the tents. The spider-thing spasmed and fell, legs clutching and twitching all the way down.

The bats, or whatever they were, formed a funnel cloud with Buttercup at its center.

Her scream rose up and up. The mastodons bellowed. They reared up and waved their front legs and brought them down with cracks of dull earthy thunder. Lights winked out along the midway. The carousel darkened and went still.

Still, Buttercup howled.

Pine limbs broke a stone’s throw away. Leaves crunched. We turned, the three of us, in time to see a nightmare come reeling out of the woods, passing not ten feet from our hiding place.

It was twenty feet tall. More. It walked on two fur-covered ape legs, had cloven hooves for feet. Its torso was a scaled monstrosity that gleamed oily and black in the moonlight.

It had arms. Human arms, scaled up, but human. The head was a ram’s, with enormous, wide antlers like the ones of the snow-beasts up north.

Its hands were clamped over its ears. It ran and stumbled and bleated in agony, bouncing off some trees, toppling others. Its mad goat eyes met mine briefly, and blazed with hatred as it snapped a jaw full of fangs at us.

Another moment, and it would have been upon us, and we wouldn’t have stood a chance.

I grabbed Darla. Gertriss was already up.

“We’re going,” I said. “Right now.”

The monster fell, tearing at its head and howling.

We ran. I looked back once, saw Buttercup still dancing atop the riding wheel, amid the cloud of flying things. They were so many and so thick we could barely see her light.

“Dammit, Buttercup,” I said.

We ran all the way back to the river.

We found a tiny two-man fishing boat pulled up on the bank. The three empty bottles of cheap whiskey inside suggested Ordwald was the boat’s previous occupant.

We set across the Brown in a dead man’s boat. We all hoped to see Buttercup’s faint glow bobbing across the water in our wake.

But all we saw was darkness, and all we heard, until the gurgle and slap of oars and water drowned it out, was the faint music from the carnival’s carousel, and the occasional screech of Vallata the swamp witch’s mad laughter sounding high above the barren hills.

Chapter Seven

We set up watch in Mama’s tiny card-and-potion shop.

Mama surprised me by failing to lecture or preach. She made us tea. She treated the half dozen injuries we’d suffered between us in our mad dash away from the carnival, and then she moved a chair to face her door and she sat in it, smoking a pipe.

I put my butt on the floor and my back to Mama’s wall. Darla and Gertriss took the other two chairs. Buttercup’s favorite toy, a diminutive human skull still inhabited by a restless ghost, sat on its shelf and whispered all night long.

My client was dead. I’d watched him fall, and hadn’t done a damned thing to save him. Knowing there was nothing I could have done wasn’t any comfort to me, and wouldn’t be any to his widow.

Maybe it was time, said a soft little voice in the back of my mind, to take the finder’s eye off my door and take up gardening instead.

I saw Bertold Ordwald take a bolt to the neck. Part of me wanted to reach down deep inside, see if I could grasp any of the dark magic that sometimes led me to walk with the slilth in my dreams.

What if I could do more than dream?

What if the huldra lived on inside me, hidden away somewhere, awaiting that fateful whisper that would set it free?

The sun touched Mama’s only window with a pale golden glow.

Buttercup didn’t come home.

I pulled out my pistol, checked the cylinder for the fiftieth time.

“You best put that away, boy,” said Mama. “Ain’t gonna do Buttercup no good if’n you charge into that accursed place and get kilt.”

“She’s stayed out all night plenty of times,” said Gertriss. Her eyes were puffy and I didn’t like the way she kept her arms crossed over her chest. She’d taken a bad fall in the dark, and I was sure she had a cracked rib, or worse. “Anyway, she’s a banshee. They can’t hurt her.” She took in a breath and forgot to hide her wince. “Can they?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I remembered the spider-thing scurrying up the riding wheel. Remembered a witch riding a broom through the air. “But even if they can’t hurt her, they might be able to hold her.”

It had taken Mama quite a while, but she’d figured out a way to bind Buttercup by using a rope made from the tiny banshee’s own hair.

If there was one way to immobilize a banshee, I thought, might there be others?

Mama took the corncob pipe from between her teeth.

“She ain’t dead,” she said. “That much I know.”

I didn’t argue or ask.

“So we go get her.”

“I reckon we do,” said Mama. “You said there was a woman flyin’ about on a broomstick?”

“Called herself Vallata the swamp witch. Saw her eat a live snake. Does that tell you anything about her?”

“Tells me she ain’t got good sense,” said Mama. “But she wasn’t doing any flying until after the carnival closed?”

“All we saw before that were second-rate carnival acts,” said Darla. “But something changed, once the show closed down.”

“How many ogres did you count, boy?” asked Mama.

“Half a dozen. And one drunk runt Troll.”

“I can round up twice that many Hoogas,” said Mama. Hoogas are a local Ogre clan. Mama is practically one of them, to hear her tell it, and for all I know maybe she is. “You reckon you can ask your fancy friend from Avalante for some help?”

Gertriss piped up. “His name is Evis, and he’ll help. This isn’t a House matter, but he’ll help just the same. You know he will.”

Mama pretended not to hear. She might have softened a bit toward Evis personally, but her hard line against her niece walking out with a halfdead hadn’t changed.

I rose, joints cracking like kindling-wood. “All right. Here’s how this goes. I’m heading for Avalante, with a stop at the Watch on the way.”

Mama snorted. “You know damn well the Watch ain’t going to be any help, boy.”

“I know that. But people are going to start turning up missing today. Those weren’t weeders or beggars in that crowd last night. Maybe somebody with enough pull to be a nuisance isn’t coming home this morning.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Gertriss, wincing as she prepared to rise.

“Like hell you will. I mean it, Miss. You’re staying put right here and watching for Buttercup. The three of you will sleep in shifts. I’m not arguing.”

Miracle of miracles. No one argued.

“So when you reckon we’re leaving?” asked Mama. She lit her pipe and sucked at it. “Sooner the better, I reckons.”

“Depends on how long it takes at Avalante. Get the Hoogas together.” The skull on the shelf caught my eye. “Mama, you still got that hair rope?”

“She took to cutting it with a paring knife she keeps hid, but I still got most of it.”

“Got a bag for that skull?”

Mama nodded, beady little Hog eyes gleaming with the promise of mayhem.

“Reckon I do,” she said, blowing smoke.

Darla rose and hugged me at the door. She smelled of pine needles, and her eyes were swollen and red.

“There’s no way we can do this peacefully, is there?” she whispered, as we embraced.

I didn’t bother answering. The last man who’d tried to retrieve his daughter by stealth and sheriffs died in the carnival’s shadow.

“Love you,” I said, and then I stepped blinking out into the sun.

My first stop was the new Watch house on Copper Street.

I asked for Captain Holder, who more or less runs the Watch these days. He’d twice threatened to see me decapitated and my still-twitching remains fed to sewer rats, which still ranks as the nicest thing a Watch officer has ever said to me.

Captain Holder was out. A bored Watchman not yet past pimples took my statement, and while he lacked a proper beard he had the customary Watchman’s expression of utter indifference down perfectly. He didn’t even blink when I added flying witches and giant spiders to the report.

“Please see that Holder gets that,” I said, as I turned to leave.

“The Captain a friend of yours?” asked the kid. He didn’t bother hiding his sarcasm.

“Hell no. Holder hates me. Swears he’ll see me hung the next time we meet. Something about his sister. Don’t mention her. The baby isn’t due for a month.”

I sauntered out, whistling, and caught a cab for Avalante.

I wasn’t expecting anything out of the Watch. The Dark Carnival was camped well outside Rannit’s walls, and as long as the carnies restricted their predations to the woods, they could slaughter whole villages and fry up babies by the dozen, for all the Rannit City Watch cared.

Holder was a different story. He was neither stupid nor corrupt, and if he came across a missing person who hadn’t wound up in the dead wagons as a Curfew-breaker he might remember my report and decide Dark’s Diverse Delights was a danger to Rannites after all.

Would he break tradition and poke around beyond Rannit’s walls?

Maybe. I didn’t know. But by filing a report I’d completed my civic duty. I’d also handed Holder information he wouldn’t otherwise have, and though I didn’t expect any lavish show of gratitude I might have stored up a crumb of goodwill I could nibble on later.

If, of course, I had a later. As the cab rattled through Rannit’s busy morning streets, I pondered Ordwald’s death, and dreaded my meeting with his plain-spoken widow.

Ordwald had tried threats. He’d tried sheriffs and finders and even men at arms.

He’d failed to bring his daughter home, and then he’d died.

I pulled my hat down to the bridge of my nose and tried to nap. The sight of Ordwald falling wouldn’t let me sleep.

He’d done everything right, I decided. Everything right, but all of it wrong.

He’d reacted. He’d demanded. He’d coerced.

I thought back to my meeting with Thorkel. All those masks and wigs and prop limbs hanging in his tent. Macabre, yes, but aside from run-of-the-mill greed and a penchant for being overly dramatic, the man hadn’t struck me as being anything more than a carnival master.

So what changed, after the crowds left the carnival midway?

What transformed second-rate side-show acts into things out of nightmares?

“Sorcery,” I muttered.

And now sorcery held not only Ordwald’s daughter, but Buttercup.

Buttercup isn’t a child. Certainly isn’t my child. But child or not, she’s certainly slipped into that role. Darla bakes her cookies and sews her new dresses. I play dolls with her and she goes to sleep on my knee.

And now the carnival has her,
I thought,
and I’m about to charge their tents just as Ordwald did, except I’ll be doing it stone cold sober.

It was a long ride up the Hill to Avalante.

House Avalante is not the biggest of the Dark Houses. The estates on either side of it dwarf Avalante by two and three stories, respectively.

Whereas the other houses opt for building up and out, Avalante chose to hide their expansions deep underground. I’ve enjoyed the illusion of freedom within Avalante for years now, and even so I have no idea how deep or how wide their subterranean chambers reach.

Evis maintains a cherry-walled office four floors beneath the street. Jerle, Avalante’s unflappable day man, greeted me at the door to the second underground level.

“I’m afraid Mr. Prestley is unavailable today,” said Jerle with the smallest sympathetic tilt of his graying head. “I shall tell him you called. Good day, Mr. Markhat.”

Give me some credit for being a fast thinker. I didn’t hesitate, didn’t falter, didn’t fumble, even under Jerle’s unblinking gaze.

“I’d appreciate that, Jerle. I was just passing through to say hello. On my way to the firing range. Lost a bet with Evis, and if I don’t work on my aim pretty soon he’ll start charging me for cigars.”

“We cannot have that, sir. Good shooting.”

I smiled and trotted down the stairs, rubbing elbows with silent, black-clad vampires who didn’t give me a second glance.

I headed for the range. Borrowed a long gun. Fired off two hundred rounds and earned myself a reluctant grunt from the range master.

Then I tiptoed back up the stairs. Jerle was gone. The halfdead idling in his place nodded when I passed, but failed to tear my throat out.

I knocked softly at Evis’s door, got no response.

“Dammit, Evis, I know you’re in there,” I said. “We need to talk. There’s been an incident.” I cussed silently, knowing what I had to do but hating it anyway. “Gertriss is hurt.”

That did it.

I heard movement behind the door. Rustlings and thumpings. A chair creaked. Footfalls, light and fast, raced toward me.

Locks clicked, and Evis flung the door open, stepping back out of the light it let in.

“How bad?” he asked, motioning me inside.

“She’ll live. Broken rib, most likely. You, on the other hand—damn, Evis, what’s the matter with you?”

He slammed the door and staggered back to his desk.

Evis is a halfdead. On a good day he looks like a freshly exhumed corpse. His skin is pasty white. His eyes are cloudy soft orbs, no irises, just big black pupils. Wherever his skin is stretched thin, over the knuckles for instance, it darkens to the sickly hue of an old bruise.

All that I’m accustomed to seeing.

I’d never seen Evis a light shade of blue before. Never seen mottled patches of dark green beneath his eyes. Never seen thick black goo ooze from the corners of his eyes, his nose, his lips.

He’d lost that famous vampire glide too. He stumbled as he walked, had to catch himself on his desk. His gait was slow and pained.

He sneezed. Black goo flew.

“Pardon me,” he muttered, dabbing at his face with a monogrammed silk hanky.

“Angels and Devils,” I said, following him to his desk. “Are you sick?”

He fell into his chair, stooped, and came up with a thick wool blanket, which he wrapped around himself.

Hell, the man was shivering. I expected his fangs to start rattling any second.

“What? I can’t get sick? Hell yes, I’m sick. What happened to Gertriss?”

I laid it all out for him. The Ordwalds, the carnival, Ordwald dying, Buttercup being taken. He sneezed and coughed the whole time.

I’d never heard of a halfdead falling ill. Hell, they hadn’t suffered during the yellow fever epidemics during the War, or the wet lung plagues after it.

“So Gertriss. She’ll be all right?” he asked.

“Sure. Unless she dies of a broken heart. I hear you’ve been dodging her the last few weeks.”

He glared at me as he wiped at his nose.

“Not the time or the place,” he said.

“When would be a good time? Thursday? Next May? Never?”

“How did you get in here, anyway?”

“I am an expert in the ways of stealth and concealment,” I said. “I hid under a doily. Fine, you don’t want to talk about Gertriss, that’s your right. I thought you’d want to know what we’re mixed up in. Say, is Stitches around? She might know a way to swat pesky flying witches out of the sky.”

Stitches is House Avalante’s up-and-coming sorcerer. Only I know that Stitches was most recently known as the Corpsemaster, and that as the Corpsemaster she faked her own death. Such knowledge doesn’t lend itself to peace of mind or easy slumber.

“She’s on the moon,” said Evis.

“The moon.” I rose. “Sorry to have interrupted your busy day.”

“Sit down,” he said. “Dammit. Wait.”

He flew into a fit of coughing that intensified into a full-blown doubled-over retching session.

“Damn, Evis, should I fetch a doctor? A mortician?” I sat. “That’s not sick. That’s gravely ill.”

“Dead already,” he gasped when it was over. “Look. Don’t want Gertriss. To see me. Like this.”

“She’s not some fainting socialite,” I said. “She’s seen a lot worse.”

He shook his head. “Going to get a lot worse. Fast.” He paused to let another epic choking coughing fit pass. “Trust me,” he said. His skin flushed a darker blue, veins pulsing just beneath the surface. “Don’t tell her. Any. Of this.”

I didn’t like his eyes. His pupils expanded and contracted, but not in time together. The black ooze ran thicker and faster.

“Have I ever asked you for anything, Markhat?”

“No,” I said. “Are you asking now?”

He nodded. His jaw was clenched tight.

“Tell her anything,” he said. “But not the truth. None of this. Can I trust you?”