A fourth vampire appeared at my right elbow. Evis nodded at it.
“Go now, Mr. Markhat. Sara will take you to safety.”
I opened my mouth. The scratching grew louder. Was it coming from the floor?
“Sara!”
Sara reached out, put both cold hands on my waist and hefted me a foot off the floor.
She’d taken a single gliding step toward the door when the brick floor at our feet exploded and a long bubbling scream broke the silence.
A scream and a smell. A stench, really, louder in its way than any noise—rotting flesh, warm and wet, thrust suddenly up out of the earth.
A brick struck Sara in the side of her head, and she faltered, tripped and went down, and me with her.
I heard Evis shout something and felt whips of motion around me and in that instant before my dropped candle flicked out I caught sight of the thing that we’d raised. It leaped toward me, a thing of loose and rotted flesh, slapping Evis casually aside when he grasped its right arm. There was no face upon that head, which was itself only a dark, swollen mass that sent sprays of thick black fluid flying with every movement. It had no eyes, no ears, no lower jaw—but it saw me, somehow, and it raced toward me, arms outstretched, ruined belly burst open and trailing shriveled entrails as it came.
The candle went dark. I scrambled up, and I ran. Behind me, I heard a thud and a gurgle as Sara rose and grappled with the dead thing. Evis shouted again and a pair of crossbows threw,
thunk-whee, thunk-whee
.
I charged across the cobbles. I couldn’t see the door. I couldn’t see the wall. I couldn’t see the thing behind me, but I could hear it, hear Evis and his halfdead as they grappled, leaped and struck.
The ruined thing screamed again, so close I smelled its foul exhalation, felt cold spittle on my back.
I slammed face-first into a wall that might have needed new plaster and new paint but hadn’t suffered much loss in the way of structural integrity. The room spun. Blood spewed out of my nose.
It shrieked at the scent, maybe a dozen steps behind. I put the wall on my left and charged, arms groping for a door, any door.
More crossbows threw. A bolt buried itself in the wall a hand’s breadth from my head. I ducked and kept moving—had I turned the wrong way? Was the door behind me now?
Something hissed. Something cold and wet laid itself on the back of my neck. I bellowed for Evis, lashed out with a back kick that sank into something soft. The smell hit me anew. I whirled and kicked again and it screamed, wet and triumphant, nearly in my bloodied face.
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see at all, but I felt the air rush past me, heard the pair of grunts and thuds as a pair of vampires dived into the creature and pinned it to the wall. A thick, foul spray of fluid caught me square in the face when the halfdead hit, and I retched and stumbled away, pawing and spitting.
A cold hand gripped my shoulder. “This way,” said Evis, shoving me forward. “Go. Find the carriage. Tell Bertram and Floyd to wait with you.”
Behind me, I heard shrieks and blows—short wet shrieks punctuated with fast, hard blows. I assumed they had the dead thing pinned and when Evis let go, I moved.
I wasn’t followed. The gurgling shrieks behind me grew fainter and shorter. I heard the faint sound of steel slicing the air and, suddenly, all was silent.
I found the ruined door, cut my hand on the splintered doorframe, darted through it and was down the hall at a run. My footfalls were loud in the dark, and all the way out to the street my mind played tricks on me, hearing the sounds of pursuit behind me, hearing a faint growl that crept from a bloated, gurgling throat.
But I made it. I stumbled whole into the street, mopped blood from my nose, tried to pick out my rights and my lefts from the shadows and the warehouse fronts. That way, I decided. Right. Right for Evis’s carriage. Left to just skirt the whole mess and head for the country and raise a crop of sheep or do whatever it is they do out there.
I’d taken a single step that way when hands—gentle hands—fell on my shoulder. “That way,” said a voice, and I was turned around, and a clean white linen handkerchief was placed in my hand. “The carriage awaits.”
I mopped blood and blinked.
The street was full of halfdead.
Ten or more glided past, quiet as ghosts. My giver of handkerchiefs joined them, gliding toward the warehouse like a black-clad puff of wind.
I shuddered, but I held the cloth tight to my nose and marched toward the carriage. More halfdead popped out of the shadows. Each and all ignored me, though I tottered and stank and dripped their favorite beverage liberally out onto the street.
There’s a metaphor there, somewhere. Something about bleeding profusely at a vampire parade. One day I’ll finish it and tell Mama it’s a Troll saying. But that night I just clamped the cloth to my nose and headed for Evis’s carriage.
I found it easily enough, though the coachmen had lit their lanterns. They were both on the street, and both bore crossbows and nervous frowns.
They backed up and wrinkled their noses at my approach.
“We’ll never get the smell out,” said one to the other.
“Just be glad you aren’t wearing it,” I said. The driver, bless him, produced a clean handkerchief and stepped close enough to hand it to me.
“The boss said you found a bad one,” he said, quietly.
I mopped and nodded, not asking how the Boss had communicated this to the driver. I figured House Avalante could afford the finest sorcerous long-talkers.
The driver’s friend opened the door. “Best get in. We’ll be leaving soon, and in a hurry.” He squinted at me in the lantern light. “It didn’t scratch you, did it?”
Hell. Had it?
I shook off my old Army jacket, kicked it into the gutter when I saw the thick black stain all down the back. I rolled up my sleeves, checked my arms and waist and legs.
All the fresh blood was from my nose or my right hand. All the other—well, it wasn’t mine.
“No,” I said. My voice shook, and I was getting weak at the knees, so I climbed into Evis’s fine carriage, leaving black stains as I went.
Bertram and Floyd—I never learned which was which—watched me go, then turned their frowns and their crossbows back out toward the night.
I sat and I panted and even with the door and window open I gagged at my smell. My heart still rushed, and memories of the thing’s bloated, eyeless face, I knew, would haunt my dreams for years.
“The boss said you found a bad one.”
That’s what the driver had said. A bad one. The flip side of Evis and his well-groomed friends. Halfdead in the raw—a hungry corpse, rotted and foul, still driven to a grim parody of life by a hunger that drove it from the grave.
I shuddered, couldn’t stop, did what I’d done when that happened during the war—shut my eyes, clasped my hands and counted my breaths. One, two, three, four. Over and over, until it was past.
I’d only gotten through it twice when I heard the driver mutter a curse and the carriage rocked as his friend scrambled up onto his seat. The ponies shuffled their hooves when he caught up the reins.
Evis and a pair of halfdead were just entering the yellow ring of lantern light. Evis’s clothes were torn and stained and ragged. His hat was gone, and his jacket hung in tatters. His pale skin, like that of his companions, was stained and spotted with the dark black blood of the thing from under the floor.
Evis and another halfdead supported a third between them. I squinted, recognized the limp, injured vampire as Sara, the one who’d tried to take me outside.
It was only in that light, with her jacket gone, that I realized Sara had once been a woman. She’d been halfdead so long it was hard to tell, since they all wear their hair short, and she’d perhaps been tall and thin before she changed. Now her head lolled, and her arms twitched spasmodically, and though she moved her feet she did little more than shuffle them across the cobbles while Evis and the other halfdead hauled her toward the carriage. Evis and his upright companion looked grim. Sara, too, was slathered in old black blood—but a wound in her chest, right over her heart, oozed and glistened with blood of her own.
I pushed myself back out of the way. Evis said something to the driver, and suddenly Sara and the other vampire scrambled inside.
Evis popped his head in the door.
“Bertram will take you home, Mr. Markhat,” he said. “You and I must speak tomorrow, the sooner the better.” He lifted his hand, cutting off my reply. “There is no time. You must not be seen here, and I must stay. Go. We talk tomorrow.”
He shut the door, and the carriage rolled on.
An awkward silence fell. Sara shifted and mumbled and pawed the air with her hands, as if caught in a deep and troubled sleep. Her companion held her close and tried to hold her hands and stroke her face and keep her from leaping out of her seat. He didn’t have enough hands, and even vampire-quick was nearly not quick enough, but he managed, somehow.
She cried out, high and airy, and he began to speak to her, soothing and soft. And only then did it dawn on me—Sara and her companion were married.
Had to be. Mister and Missus Halfdead. Death had done them, but they had yet to part. I’d missed the mannerisms before because I never imagined such pale cold creatures would bother with wives or sires.
She cried out again, flailed the air with her hands. Three of the fingers on her right hand were broken, bent back double, touching the back of her palm.
“Will she heal?”
Sara’s husband—had to be—turned his eyes briefly upon me.
He spoke. His accent wasn’t Rannish, and it was so thick it took me a moment to work out his words.
“What do you care?”
Sara’s broken fingers began to move, drawing themselves slowly back into their normal places. I could hear, faint over the rattle and clack of the carriage, the faint scraping and popping of small bones.
“She saved my life. She fought for me.” I shrugged. “So did you. It matters.”
He held her good hand while the broken fingers twitched and jerked.
“She will recover,” he said, when it was done. Sara sagged like a rag doll, and her husband looked back toward her. “We fought for the House. Not for you.”
“Then I thank the House,” I said.
Sara expelled a final whimper, doubled her hands over the wound in her breast and nestled close to her mate.
Light from a rare lit streetlamp washed through the open windows of the carriage. I saw a wetness in the male vampire’s yellow eyes, and I looked quickly away.
After a while, Sara began to mumble again. She shared her husband’s accent, and she wasn’t speaking Kingdom, but the older tongue of the Church. I know maybe a dozen words of Church, so I wasn’t keeping up too well. But I didn’t need a priest-book to know halfdead Sara was mumbling ragged prayers.
“Mercy, mercy, spare me, mercy.” Over and over again. And while she prayed, her fingers moved, reflexively rubbing a prayer coin that wasn’t there, wouldn’t ever be there again.
Mercy, mercy. I wondered what old Father Molo would say, on hearing vampire prayers. I could almost see his red mask shaking, hear the fury and outrage in his tremulous old voice. Blasphemy, he’d shout. Blasphemy, and damnation quick to follow.
Still, Sara prayed. She’d grappled fully with the thing we’d disturbed. She touched its flesh, perhaps tasted its blood. Was that the mercy for which she prayed? Was that the fate from which she begged to be spared?
Life ends in death—perhaps half-life ends with the thing from the floor.
So she prayed. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. For the first time since before the War, I mouthed Sara’s name and prayed for her too, all the long way back to Cambrit.
I shucked my clothes right there in the street. I managed to salvage my socks and my shoes, but everything else went into a trash bin—even my old Army dress pants, which had withstood assaults of time and moths and weather and war, but wasn’t ever going to recover from a couple quarts of old dead blood and smeared-on bits of rot.
Naked at my door. If the neighbors were watching I’d never hear the end of it. But I wasn’t done yet. Inside, I gathered my just filled washing urn, a cake of Mama’s flesh-eating lye soap and a rag destined to keep my britches company in the bin.
Then, still nude, I stepped back outside and lathered up Mama’s soap and took the longest, most disgusting bath of my long and sordid life.
I got lye soap in one eye and provided high amusement for a pair of passing ogres. I’ll probably go bald any day now from the caustic soap, but when I was done I was shivering and shaking and absolutely squeaky clean.
Only then did I dress. Only then did I lock the door, open a warm bottle of Bottit’s and sit down to see if I’d shake.
I didn’t. I didn’t sleep, not until nearly sunrise, but I didn’t have the shakes again.
I even did some thinking. Came to some conclusions. Conclusions about Evis and Houses and why Avalante wanted Martha Hoobin home and safe and sound before anyone but finder Markhat discovered a mad, rotted halfdead napping in a shallow grave downtown.
Three-leg Cat poked his head in the office but refused to come near me. I finally dozed off, still at my desk, to the sound of half a dozen dogs outside snarling and tearing at my blood-fouled clothes.