The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files) (6 page)

I just nodded yes. I had a thousand questions, but from the way he started shaking and coughing, I knew asking even one was asking one too many.

The door behind me flew open. A trio of white-coated Avalante doctors barged in, all scowls and glares. One pushed a silver wheeled cart loaded with sharp pointy things and stoppered vials that glowed in every color of the rainbow.

“We were clear in our instructions,” said one physician.

“You are to have no visitors,” said another.

“Tsk, tsk,” added the third.

Jerle marched in behind them, saw me, and glanced pointedly at the cutting tools on the cart.

“Mr. Markhat seems to have lost his way,” he said. “Shall I show him
out,
Mr. Prestley?”

Evis, bless his motionless heart, lifted his finger. “No, Jerle, you most assuredly shall not. See that he gets a pair of the new rotary guns and a crate of grenades. Then see him gently home. Gently. Is that clear?”

“As you wish, sir.” Jerle moved to stand at my side. His smile was untouched by the least hint of murder. “If you will accompany me?”

I nodded amiably. Jerle wasn’t halfdead, but he probably had a dozen lethal gadgets hidden under his suit coat and that bland, unassuming smile.

I put out my hand to Evis.

“You can trust me,” I said. He nodded, took my hand, shook it.

The doctors hustled me out of there. Jerle stuck closer than my shadow.

I got my rotary guns, in long wooden crates that each weighed more than I did. And I got a box of two dozen grenades, which Jerle claimed would explode with sufficient force to take down walls or reduce me to tiny wet bits if I didn’t throw the thing at least forty feet after pulling the ornate silver pin.

But it wasn’t guns or grenades on my mind as I left Avalante.

It was the touch of Evis’s hand.

His skin had been warm. As warm as that of any normal man. Far warmer than the cold flesh of a halfdead should be, unless he was recently pulled from a fire, or burning with fever.

Was it possible, I wondered, for a halfdead to die twice?

I found Mrs. Ordwald at her hotel. She was seated in the lobby, her work-worn hands resting flat on a table, a glass of water untouched before her.

I’ve relayed news of a loved one’s death more times than I could be paid to count. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sons—everyone leaves someone behind. I’ve watched hope be born only to quickly die in a thousand pairs of eyes, and watching despair take root never gets any easier.

I took off my hat and sat across from her.

“He is dead, my Berthold?” she asked. Her voice didn’t falter. Her lips didn’t tremble.

“He is,” I said. Sometimes you try to sugar coat the news. This wasn’t such a time.

“You are sure.”

“I am sure. He died bravely.”

“He died a raging drunk,” she said. A tear crept out of her right eye and rolled slowly down her tanned cheek. “He was a good man, before all this. You should know that. Gentle. Kind. Not given to drink.”

I nodded. If she wanted to talk, I would listen.

“I tried to stop him from going,” she said. She sounded weary. I supposed she’d been sitting at that table staring at that glass all night and all day. “I tell him, fool, they will strike you down.” A second tear escaped. “This is what he wants, I believe. An end to it all. No more of the shame, could he withstand.”

“For what it’s worth, I believe he was correct,” I said. “I believe the carnival took your daughter. I don’t know how yet, or why, but I believe they did.”

“And now they have taken my Berthold too.” Her jaw clenched and she shook, but only for a moment.

“I have no more money,” she said.

“I’m not asking for any.”

“Widow I am,” she replied. “Beggar I am not.”

“Agreed. You’re not a beggar, and I’m not the kind of man who takes advantage of widows. Your husband died on my watch, Mrs. Ordwald. I don’t tolerate that. I owe him, not you, and I’m going to get your daughter out of there and see you safely home.” I raised my hand when she opened her mouth to protest. “I mean it. You paid me to work the case and work the case I will. How long is your room paid for?”

“A week,” she replied, in a near whisper.

I stacked coins on the table. “Don’t speak. Meals. Clothes. You can make travel arrangements when I’m done. We have a custom here, Mrs. Ordwald. You’ve heard of a widow’s urn?”

“I will take not a single copper.”

“When a man dies and leaves a widow behind, an urn is placed on his grave. The man’s friends come around and fill that urn, because learning to be a widow is hard enough without starving to death. Your Berthold won’t have a grave, won’t have an urn, but by the Angels you will take this, and not as charity, but as your due.”

She frowned, but her eyes lingered on the money. “This is not our way,” she said.

“You’re in Rannit now. This is our way. Take it, or leave it for the waiter as a tip. That would be a foolish thing to do, but I don’t think you’re a foolish woman. I think you’ve seen the cost of pride is never worth what you pay.”

“I cannot argue that.”

“Stay here. I’ll be back with news. With Alfreda, if I can find her and free her.”

“Berthold’s body?”

“I’m afraid not.” I didn’t describe to her the bonfires. She didn’t need that haunting her.

“Very well.” She pulled the coins her way. “Thank you,” she said. “I have no other words.”

I stood. “Get some rest,” I said. “Send a runner to Mama Hog if you need anything.”

She rose and walked away, back straight, chin held high.

They make them tough, out in the wilderness. She’d only shed two tears.

Chapter Eight

A pale arc of the moon rode faint and high in the afternoon sky. I thought back to Evis’s claim that Stitches was up there.

Hell, I decided, she might be. Didn’t matter whether Evis was feverish or facetious, though—Stitches was away, and I’d have no sorcerous assistance when I returned to the carnival.

Aside from what Mama cooked up, of course. Mama does a mean hex, and that oak-handled cleaver she carries has felled at least two halfdead, but I wasn’t sure how much good any of that would do against giant spiders and airborne witch-women.

As my borrowed wagon rattled through busy streets, I weighed my options. We could charge in now, and hope to find the carnival folk napping.

Or we could sneak in with the first ferry of merrymakers, and hope to snatch Buttercup from her tent and head back across the river before anyone realized she was gone.

Both schemes had disadvantages. Going in before the carnival opened meant we’d have to announce our intentions or attempt to enter on a flimsy premise.

Sneaking in with the paying customers exposed the good citizens of Rannit to the possible wrath of the carnival folk, if we were caught trying to snatch Buttercup.

My new crates bumped and knocked as we rode. The rotary guns were fearsome, but were nearly as heavy as small cannons. Too, I’d never fired one. I’d been shown how—pull back the firing lever, release the magazine lock, turn the crank. Mayhem was sure to ensue.

I’d not seen a grenade in use, but while they sounded formidable, they were also indiscriminate.

I pictured Mama Hog, her burlap bag stuffed with grenades, cranking out a hail of deadly gunfire right down the carnival’s crowded midway.

I saw crossbow bolts flying again, only this time, it wasn’t Ordwald they were striking.

It was Darla. Or Gertriss. Or Mama, or her Hoogas.

I could lose them all, guns or no, in the space of a single heartbeat.

We passed a man in a bright red hat fussing over a rolling snack cart on a corner. Lunch was sizzling on his tiny grill, and the scent of roasting beef made my stomach grumble.

“Going to be hell to pay,” I muttered, with a smile.

My driver was an Avalante day man, a cheerful enough chap I’d known for months and even shared the odd beer with, now and then.

“Benny,” I said. “Think I could ask a favor?”

He grinned. “Figured you would. What do you need?”

“Nothing that’ll get you in hot water with the House. So if staying out all day will do that, say so. I can do this another way.”

He shrugged. “Mr. Prestley sent word. Whatever you need, as long as you need it.”

Evis,
I thought,
I owe you a beer. I just hope you’re well enough to drink it soon.

“Good,” I said. “Here’s what I need you to do.”

My rented wagon needed four new wheels. My temporary donkey wore an eye patch and exhibited flatulence of a frequency and potency sufficient to keep us both free of horse-flies and probably fleas too.

The clothes I’d bought from the wagon’s owner were rugged country work-clothes consisting of ragged burlap britches, a greasy rope for a belt, and a wool shirt caked with grime and filth. I estimated they’d been last laundered sometime around Yule, and even then the process had been approached with a shameful lack of determination.

Worst of all, though, were the boots. The only things that stank worse than my boots were being emitted in noisome blasts from beneath the donkey’s tail.

I was, in short, perfectly attired for an afternoon of shoveling mastodon shit.

My one-eyed donkey plodded along, fifth in a line of pitiful farm wagons headed down the wide path to the carnival grounds. Four more conveyances rattled along behind me and not a single suspicious glance had been directed my way.

I felt like whistling a cheerful tune. I didn’t, because we hardy frontier farmers are a taciturn lot, but I felt like it all the same.

The other wagons were filled with everything from baskets of fresh-baked bread to sides of salted pork or barrels of potent back-country beer.

My valiant steed and I presided over a wagon devoid of produce. All I carried was a shovel, a pair of big loose buckets, and a weather-beaten tarp.

Getting across the Brown and finding a farmer’s wagon and talking him out of his prize donkey and best clothes had taken most of the afternoon. The beams of sunlight that shone through the trees were slanting by the moment, and I had to resist the urge to pull out of the line of wagons and hurry on ahead.

I’d been right about one thing, back in Rannit. Thorkel and his band might be any sort of sorcerers, but unless they knew the secret of turning moss into meat they’d need to buy provisions from the locals.

That was my way in. So far, it was working. The surly trio of clowns that greeted each cabbage wagon hadn’t even listened to my carefully-prepared offer of ten coppers per bushel of mastodon manure. They’d just grunted and waved me into line with the rest of the sturdy country folk.

They didn’t search the wagons, didn’t find the grenades or my revolvers hidden beneath a loose plank in my wagon’s bed. Didn’t find my Army knife, stuck in my boot. Or Buttercup’s favorite whispering skull, which I’d silenced by packing it in dirt at the bottom of a bucket.

The ride couldn’t have been more than two miles, but it felt like hours.

Tent-tops peeked through the timbers. We rolled on, and just as the carnival came into view the line of wagons was shouted to a stop, and clowns began to fan out on either side of the path, speaking to the drivers.

I forced myself to relax. I adopted an attitude of surly impatience and waited my turn while my donkey strained to reach a savory clump of leaves.

“Ain’t nothing in your wagon,” observed a wary-eyed clown, crossing his arms over his barrel chest. “Don’t waste my time.”

I spat. I’d seen the other drivers do it, and while I saw neither the need nor felt any particular urge to do so, I decided local customs must be observed.

“Like I told them others,” I said. “Ain’t here to sell. Here to buy.”

The clown’s eyes narrowed. “I said don’t waste my time.”

“I pay ten coppers a bushel for mastodon shit,” I said. “Old woman Cooney claims it brings up her sweet corn two weeks early with thrice as many ears.”

“Don’t give two shits about any old woman Cooney,” said the clown.

“Me neither. But she pays good. I reckon I could spare twenty coppers, paid to you right now,” I observed. “If you give two shits about coin.”

“Thirty now,” he said. He uncrossed his arms and rested his right hand on the cudgel hanging from his belt. “Right now.”

I cussed but nodded and fumbled with a sack of dirty coins. My donkey turned his head toward us, closed his good eye in apparent concentration, and defiled the forest with an odor so vile the clown grabbed the coins from my hand and waddled off without counting them.

After a while, the line of wagons rolled on. I aimed my windy donkey at the mastodons outside the carnival proper and hoped the various beasts didn’t decide to engage in a duel of stinks.

It’s a life of glamor and derring-do for the finder,
I mused as I shoveled steaming heaps of mastodon dung into my buckets.

Inside the carnival, the farmers unloaded their wares without outcry or mayhem. Somewhere a fiddle played. Somewhere a drunk woman sang, badly, while others clapped, out of time.

The homey smells of food cooking wafted up from the midway now and then.

If I hadn’t heard men die, hadn’t seen deadly things take to the air in the dark, I’d swear Dark’s Diverse Delights was nothing but the traveling carnival it claimed to be.

I shoveled manure and watched the carnies and the clowns and when I decided no one was paying any attention to the shit-shoveling hayseed, I retrieved my revolvers, filled my sack with grenades, and I joined a mob of farmers who walked me right through the carnival’s ticket gates.

I stank. I wobbled a bit as I walked. Mumbled now and then. Kept my battered hat pulled down over my dirty face.

Cover a man in manure and give him a filthy sack to hold, and no one gives him a second look.

My first discovery occurred early in my search. A stack of new flyers sat on a rude table, held in place by a rock. I came to a dead halt when I recognized the figure depicted on the paper.

SEE THE MYSTERIOUS RADIANT GIRL, read the garish print. SHE FLOATS! SHE GLOWS! SHE SINGS!

A poor rendition of Buttercup, her arms upraised, was drawn below the words.

I remembered to stumble ahead. My bag of grenades was heavy.

If they’ve hurt you, Buttercup
, I thought,
I’ll lighten my load real soon.

I trudged this way, trudged that. Poked here, pried there.

The sun kept sinking. I found Vallata the swamp witch wringing out her wet hair behind her tent. She shrieked for a towel and a carny threw her one and she thanked him with an unkind remark about his heritage. She didn’t eat him, or take to the skies. I ambled on.

Malus the Magnificent was being noisily sick in a privy. His vanishing lady stood outside, banging on the door, shrieking about her pay.

One by one, I found each and every midway act, but saw no sign of Buttercup.

My heart sank faster than the coward sun. I’d hoped to locate and free Buttercup well before nightfall.

But as the shadows of the tents merged into a single plane of darkness, I realized I’d run out of time.

The farmers were leaving, trickling out in twos and threes, their wagons and carts empty and hurrying toward home. I’d pushed my cart into the trees and left the donkey chewing his rope. If I didn’t get back soon, he’d be heading home too.

“Dammit,” I muttered. Clowns began to rush about, preparing the midway for the night.

I stuck to the darkest shadows and when I reached Gogor’s cage I sidled around it and found the door.

It was not only unlocked, but ajar.

I listened. Hiding in a Troll cage was one thing. Startling a drunken Troll was quite another.

I heard nothing from the mound of straw. Outside the cage, though, a pair of clowns neared, stomping and cussing. I couldn’t be sure the darkness alone would hide me.

I buried myself under the filthy straw. The clowns passed without pausing.

“Whiskey?”

I damned near leaped to my feet. The Troll was so close I felt his breath, hot and moist and stinking of liquor, on my ear.

I heard him sit up, felt hay fall off him and onto me. I didn’t move.

“Later,” I whispered. “Soon.”

The Troll made gurgling noises it took me a moment to recognize as vomiting. He at least had the courtesy to avoid depositing any spent liquor on my head.

“Man should not be here,” he said, after a second bout of noisome exertions. “Bad things happen here.”

“I know,” I whispered. “I won’t stay long. Just until it’s hard dark. Just until the people come.”

“Bad things,” mumbled the Troll. “Whiskey?”

“Soon,” I said. “My name is Markhat. What’s yours?” The posters all named the carnival’s Troll Gogor, but I knew enough Troll to know that was a lie.

“No name,” said the Troll. “No clan. When whiskey?”

I cursed myself for not slipping a flask in my hip pocket.

“Not long,” I said. “Never met a Troll without a name. Can I call you Slim?”

“Slim,” said the Troll, rolling the word around in its toothy mouth. “Slim. A small word. What does it mean, Slim?”

My mind raced. I’d been so desperate to turn the topic of conversation away from whiskey and my lack thereof I’d veered straight into an area of Troll etiquette I knew nothing about.

“It means valor in battle,” I said. “Strength of spirit.”

The Troll fell silent, either pondering the significance of my definition or deciding where my head lay before he brought down his furry Troll fist.

“Slim,” said the Troll. “Whiskey for Slim.”

“Not to preach, Slim, but have you ever considered not drinking quite so much?”

“Man hides in dirt, stinks of dung.”

“Point taken. Slim. I’ll bring you whiskey. I brought it before, remember? I keep my word.”

“I remember.” The Troll belched. “Bad things. Soon.”

“I know.” I poked my face out of the hay, judged the dark to be nearly total inside Slim’s filthy cage, and sat up to face him. “I need help. I’m looking for my friends. One they called the Living Dead Girl. The other was taken last night. She’s about waist-high and she glows like the moon.”

I could barely discern Slim’s head-shake in the dark. His big Troll eyes hardly shone.

“Too late,” he said. “Taken. Too late for dead girl, too late for child of light.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder and I couldn’t fight back shivering at his touch. “Slim hurts for you.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

His hand laid heavy on me.

“Tall man. Master. Takes them. Soon they are bad things. Come out, slay, eat.” He squeezed my shoulder, removed his hand when he saw me wince. “Man should run. Run far away.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m not leaving without them.”

“Then man is dead,” said the Troll. His eyes went dull. “No whiskey.”

“I keep my word,” I said. “I have powerful magics. Clever plans. A hidden army of thousands.”

The Troll chuckled. “Big mouth,” he said, as he pushed me down. After a moment of panic I realized he’d sensed carnies passing by. When he let me up, they were gone.

“Thanks,” I said. The darkness was complete. I heard voices in the distance. Happy voices, women and children among them, and I knew the carnival would be filled with visitors in moments. “Time for me to go,” I said. “I thank you, Walking Stone, for your hospitality. Good is the guesting in your house.”

The Troll blinked, surprised, I suppose, that I had a few Troll manners after all.

“Go in peace and plenty,” he said. “Die well.”

I rose. “Not tonight. Say. You said the bad things come out. Come out of where? Can you tell me that?”

Lanterns flared, crisscrossing the sky. The riding wheel lit up, and the carousel, and music began to sound as it turned.

A dim radiance fell on Slim’s shaggy face. I’d never seen a Troll that color, never seen one so gaunt and drawn and diminished.