Foreign Devils (35 page)

Yes, this
vanmer
, and Neruda himself, had the right of it. Wait, watch, and when the bottom drops from the bucket, take food and weapons and flee eastward, back to home.

Neruda’s messenger moved among the people, then, his oration over, and said kind words to people who grasped his hands. Soft words with platitude and no news of Neruda’s location. Eventually the crowd began to filter into the yard, and then slowly back down lanes and cobbles to Harbour Town. I marked the cloaked rider by the braying of his donkey and easily tailed him back to the domicile on Via Dolorosa.

After watching the man enter the building, I considered my aching feet and the soft bed at widow Malvenus’ house and turned to go. It was then that two shadows dropped from the roof and something smacked the back of my head. I pitched forward, reeling, my arms out, falling to the flagstones of Dolorosa Way. I barked my chin on the ground, hard enough that even with my bristly cushion of a beard, I felt my jaw giving way. But old habits are bred in the bone – and
dvergar
skulls are thick – and I executed a clumsy forward roll and felt something in my side, where the shoal stretchers bowled me over, give. I howled some then.

Black-eyed, grinning men came within my sight, flexing their hands.
Daemon
-gripped.

The larger of the two, a massive Brawley, drew back his meaty paw of a hand and brought it across my face, wiping my consciousness from me.

TWENTY-SIX

13 Kalends of Sextilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis

Rocking. Swaying. In a carriage. The clop of a horse’s hooves on flagstone, then dirt, then flagstone, rhythmic. A woman’s cooing. The sound of crying, incessant. I was on the floor, the smell of dirt and horseshit filling my nose. Gunnysack over my head.

‘Cease that child’s infernal squalling, woman, or I can replace you easily.’

Beleth’s voice.

‘Master, the child wants its mother.’

‘Give it your teat,’ Beleth said.

‘Yes, master.’

I stirred, trying to determine the extent of my injuries, my situation. I was bound. Trussed like a hog for the slaughter.

Something pressed on the gunnysack, mashing down hard on my nose and mouth.

My awareness, like a fading circle, diminished.

And I was gone.

‘He is bound, yes?’ Beleth said as I came awake.

There were hisses and grunts and I felt the cutting pressure on my wrists increasing to a point where I thought I might cry out. But I would not cry out.

A
daemonlight
lantern was unbanked and I became aware of my surroundings. My head throbbed something fierce where the big bastard had struck me. I was in a large space, with rough wooden floorboards. The gurgle and surge of waves on pilings, and the smell of salt and dead fish. A pier maybe, or a seaside warehouse. There were glass windows high above, where I could see the dark blue of the night sky filtering in. The cloud cover had passed and now the sky was strewn with stars and stained with the milk of moonlight.

Two black-eyed men watched me, grins like pools of oil on their faces. One had drool seeping from the corners of his mouth and his hands were brown with dried blood. None of it was mine. Yet.

And then Beleth stepped forward, into the light, wearing a nicely cut, brown tweed suit. He’d grown a beard and shaved his head – a small concession to being a fugitive – but the avaricious, hungry eyes remained the same.

‘Mister Ilys! How wonderful to see you again,’ Beleth said, cheerful. He walked away, taking the light, and picked up a small wooden crate with one hand, brought it back and flipped it over and sat down on it. ‘Would you like a smoke?’

I nodded. Tracers swam in my vision and my face felt like auroch liver. My chest hitched, too, where the stretcher I killed had cracked my ribs.

Beleth pulled a pack of Medieran machine-rolled smokes from his pocket, popped one out of the pack and took it into his mouth. He thumbed a match, drew heavily on the cigarette, and then, leaning toward where I sat, tied against what felt like a wooden column, reversed the cigarette and placed it in my lips.

I said around the cigarette, ‘Why don’t you get your puppets to do the job for you?’

He smiled, broadly. ‘Ah, my little soldiers,’ he said, crossing his legs and placing his hands on his knee, lightly. There was something about the way he said ‘little.’ ‘They are good at rough jobs. Sniffing out blood. Killing.’ The two
daemon
-gripped men watched me closely. One of them, the fellow who looked as if he were a riverboat man, panted like a large dog.

‘Little?’

‘The smaller the
daemon
, the easier to control,’ he said. He tapped his temple with a forefinger. ‘But they’ve got less going on up here, Shoestring.’ He paused. ‘May I call you Shoestring?’

‘Why don’t you take these ropes off me and you can call me whatever you want.’

He smiled. ‘Mister Ilys it is, then.’ He did a prissy little thing then with his lips, as if he was amused but was thinking about how to go about expressing it. ‘I trust you’ve been well since last we met?’

‘You’ve led us on a merry chase, that’s for sure. How was your departure from Passaseugo? Comfortable?’ I said.

His face darkened. ‘Ah, you mock my love of creature comforts.’ He grinned again. ‘Creature comforts!’ he exclaimed, nearly merry. ‘That phrase takes on a whole new meaning now.’

I drew on the cigarette, blew out smoke. One of his
daemon
-gripped men was working his jaw as if he had a piece of gristle in there or he’d taken too much cocoa leaf tea. Damnation, I hope I never encounter a
daemon
that’s got a jones for the cocoa leaf.

‘Don’t rightly get you. But who ever did?’ I said.

‘Indeed, Mister Ilys. Indeed.’ He picked an imaginary fleck of lint from his pants and then smoothed them. From above came a rattling sound and dust filtered into the circle of light thrown by the
daemon
lantern. Beleth looked up. ‘Hmm. Probably a rat or some miscreant feline stalking the same. However, we do not take chances. You,’ he said and then followed it with a word in Tchinee I didn’t understand but which sounded harsh and ugly. ‘Go, find whatever made the noise, kill it, and dispose of the body in the river. Indicate with a single word if you understand your orders.’

The drooling man turned to Beleth and worked his mouth as if it had turned traitor. ‘Yeeersssssshhh.’

The man stood and, with a great haste, trotted off into the shadows of the warehouse.

‘You see?’ He sniffed. ‘Dullards, these lesser
daemons
. But good hunters.’

‘Yes, good hunters.’

He smiled. ‘As you are yourself, so it seems. Twice you’ve bested my little leave-behinds, which, quite frankly, astounds me. You do not look so fierce.’

‘I had some help,’ I said, not feeling the levity I was trying to project into my voice. ‘What did you mean by creature comforts, since we’re all cozy?’ I shifted my weight, trying to get where blood could get back in my hands. Judging by the lack of hard spots on my body – I was shirtless, too – they’d stripped me of all my pointy things and blades.

‘Ah, questions, questions. You have some. I have many.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I do not have time for the Lingchi, Mister Ilys, nor the inclination. So I offer you this: I will answer your questions as long as you answer mine. If I feel that you’re being dishonest, I’ll simply cut off a part of you.’ He waved his hand. ‘The answers to your questions, the carrot. The slicing? The stick.’

He stood, took off his suit jacket and draped it over the crate he’d been sitting on. He rolled up his shirt-sleeves and walked out of view, returning quickly with a leather portfolio that had an ominous heft, judging by the way he held it. He set it down on his jacket, unbuckled the leather clasp, and withdrew a shining silver knife. He removed a whetstone, spat on it, and began honing the blade with a supremely practiced hand.

‘In the spirit of goodwill,’ Beleth said, placing the silver knife and whetstone down. ‘I will answer your question before I begin with mine.’ He barked another phrase in the language of Kithai and clapped his hands. I heard, from behind me, something move. Something large. Something heavy. I could feel the vibrations in the wood. ‘My creature comforts have taken a rather specific turn, Mister Ilys,’ he said, smiling, holding the knife. ‘I’ve been told I’m quite literal.’

The thing came into view. Half shrouded in shadow, at first I thought it was simply a large man, until it squatted down on its hams to leer at me. It was a big bull stretcher, nude, dick hanging down, its torso covered in runnels of blood from the intaglios of glyphs there, big clawed hands open at its sides.

And its face.

There was a terrible animation to it. Its eyes were fiercely black, like shiny obsidian; its lips bloodless except for the blood spattered on skin. Its smile, otherworldly. I had seen a smile like that once before, on Agrippina’s face. Yet, while hers was infused with a terrible malice and glee, this one was of hunger and greed. As I looked at the creature – the scent of dirt and waste and blood pouring off its incorruptible flesh – it curled back its lips to show me teeth.

A
daemon
-gripped
vaettir
. All the old gods and new, help me.

‘I see you understand what I have achieved here.’

‘I see that set of teeth on you sure ruined the perfect arsehole,’ I managed to get out. ‘I see what you are.’

He frowned and looked serious. ‘No, Mister Ilys, I do not think you do. And it will matter very little in a short while,’ he said. He came and stood near me, took my ear between index and thumb and pulled it away from my skull. ‘Where is the
daemon
hand, Mister Ilys?’

It took me a moment to recognize what he was talking about. I said, ‘Isabelle’s hand?’

‘The very one. The one with Belial stuffed inside it.’

‘Samantha has it. She keeps it locked away, she said,’ I answered as truthfully as I could. I am not a vain man, but a hat will sit funny on your head if you’ve only got one ear to prop it up there.

Beleth did not respond. The
daemon
-gripped
vaettir
panted and leered. His clawed hands flexed, as if he dreamed of shredding flesh, my flesh. The other
daemon
-gripped man edged away from the stretcher. Seems
daemons
have some sense, after all.

‘Where is she located?’

‘What, you don’t know where Sam is? That doesn’t seem like something you’d let slip your—’

He tugged on my ear. I felt cold steel at the point where pliable flesh met my cranium. ‘Remember, Mister Ilys. I want to know if
you
know.’

‘Thirty-two Victrix Way. Huge warehouse, warded to the nines. Guarded by engineer goons toting Hellfire. You’re gonna need more than even this big bastard to get to her, sorry to say.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘You nabbed me and brought me to this dump.’

There was a burning sensation and pain and suddenly Beleth held something in front of my swimming eyes.

‘A sliver of you, my little friend.’ It was the top part of my ear, a little half-moon of it. ‘But, since you’re such a stickler for precise thoughts, let me rephrase. Why are you in Harbour Town?’

No need to pause on this one. And the ear, what was left of it, I wanted to keep. ‘Hunting you.’

Beleth chuckled. ‘On your own recognizance?’

‘’Course not,’ I said. ‘Cornelius wants you.’ More than likely my life would be forfeit if I told him Tamberlaine’s interest in the matter. If Beleth was in bed with the Medierans, that information wouldn’t be sensitive, but it would be a bloody nose to the face of Rume and the Medierans would no doubt bandy it about. They probably would anyway, but at least my name wouldn’t be attached to the information. ‘The governor took you burning down his boat kinda hard.’

Beleth’s face grew stern. Like Samantha, he’d lost some weight in the last months. Neither looked better for it. He had an angry tautness to him when he ceased forcing himself to be jovial.

‘From what my sources tell me, you were with Cornelius until recently. That is so?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re bosom friends with his mongrel son-in-law, the one that bedded Livia?’

‘He ain’t a mongrel,’ I said.

‘Surely they kept you nearby for their counsels?’

I said nothing. He jabbed with the knife, and it sunk into my cheek. There’s the surprise of having a knife sticking in your face and then there’s the pain of it. Hard to tell which is worse. I would die here, I knew. But I am old and that knowledge was like a child’s clap in a large hall. I’d seen this man work his deadly game with bound creatures before – the
vaettir
Agrippina – and surely he thought of me as even lower than her. Of the indigenous people of Occidentalia, stretchers are at least accorded fear. We
dvergar
get only contempt.

‘Surely they kept you nearby,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘What are the intended dispositions of the legions?’

‘I don’t know.’

He withdrew the knife from my cheek. The sensation of a knife-point exiting a wound is one of inversion – increasing pain and increasing relief. He squatted, slowly, keeping the blooded blade in front of my face. When level with me, his brown eyes considered me coolly. There was no anger, no mirth animating his face. There was nothing.

‘Mister Ilys. Shoestring. I must insist. You know the stakes. For me. For you.’

‘The fifth stays in New Damnation.’

‘And?’

I looked at him. ‘Does it really matter? I tell you, I’ll be crucified if I survive. But I doubt you’ll let me live, so what’s the point?’

‘Pain.’ He sniffed. ‘Whole landscapes of pain for us to explore together with no easy death at the end.’

‘Yeah, I figured that much,’ I said. ‘You ever seen a crucifixion?’

He laughed. ‘I like you, Shoestring, despite myself. And the exigencies our situation demands. Had I time, I would try to convince you of joining—’

‘You?’ I shook my head. ‘You have to believe in
something
to convince folks to follow you. Sad, but true.’

His face once more became a mask.

‘All right, then. Pain it is.’ He walked over to his leather portfolio and began running his fingers over the instruments there. Lovingly.

From overhead, there was a scuffle and thump. The bull
vaettir
stirred and worked his mouth full of jagged sharp teeth, craning his massive neck to look up at the ceiling. ‘What was that, Mister Ilys? Were you with someone at your congregation of dwarves? An accomplice?’

‘No. I was al—’

Still holding the silver knife, he took three steps toward me and brought the pommel across my jaw, hard. My head twisted violently to the side and my mouth filled with blood. ‘Quiet,’ he said, shushing me. ‘I want to hear.’

Another thump and dust floated down into the lantern light.

‘Something’s not right—’

There came the sound of breaking glass, shards fell around us. And then a sucking wet meaty sound as the body of the drooling
daemon
-gripped man fell to the floor of the warehouse. Blood and streamers of bodily fluids streaked away from the point of impact.

‘Ia’s blood—’ Beleth breathed and then craned his head toward the ceiling where the building’s windows stood. A shadow moved into the rafters of the warehouse, far above. There was a hissing sound, and a cough. And suddenly a hulking figure dropped to the floor on tree-trunk legs, arms spread and claws out, and with one great hand snatched up the other
daemon
-gripped man and wrenched his head around so that the face was turned backwards, facing me. It held the man like a child, an infant. With a twist, he slung the man at the
daemon
-possessed stretcher, who fell back with the blow, crowing like some furiously basso bird of prey, stumbling into Beleth, sending both sprawling, the leather portfolio tumbling. Various bladed and pointed things rang as they scattered over the wooden flooring.