“Still, I expect a substantial discount.”
“Anything for you, my love.” Mary sidled up, blushing and hesitant, and informed Darla in a whisper that a customer wished to speak to her personally.
Darla sighed. “Another cancelation, then.” She rose, brushed the wrinkles out of her pants, and smiled a sad little smile at me.
“I won’t see you again today, will I?”
“I’m afraid not, hon. Because I want you home behind locked doors as soon as you leave work.”
She just nodded. A grim-faced noblewoman wearing a hundred yards of grey marched up, her jaw set and her mouth puckered into a frown.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. I risked Scowling Woman’s ire by kissing Darla’s cheek. “Take care. Lock the windows too.”
I turned on my heel and departed.
We’ve got to find better ways of saying goodbye.
Finding Pratt was easy. I went back by my place, just to see if anyone interesting was sitting on my stoop, and damned if Pratt wasn’t there, pacing back and forth before my door.
I had the carriage slow to a halt, and then I opened the door and waved. Pratt saw and darted over and climbed right in.
“I’ve been waiting here for an hour,” he said. His face was red and oily. His suit was rumpled and redolent of too many fancy cigars. “Thought you said you’d look me up last night, after your talk with the Colonel.”
“Whoa there. I said I’d see you if I could. Turns out I couldn’t. Why the panic? Lethway catch wind of what you’re planning?”
“No panic.” He rubbed his grimy face with his hands. “Sorry. Been a long night. You lit a fire under the Colonel. I haven’t seen the man so mad since the War.”
I chuckled. “Good. He say anything to you about what his plans are?”
“He told me to be on the lookout for another letter from the kidnappers. Said he’d have a reply ready, this time. And he told me to start rounding up all I could about a certain finder named Markhat—where you live, who you know, where you can be found. Isn’t that comforting?”
I shrugged. “That’s something for another time, unless you think he plans to send for my head in the next couple of days.”
Pratt grunted. “No. He plans to have your head, Markhat, but he’s going to be sneaky about it. You’re safe right now. He told me to pick out five men we could trust to fight and keep their mouths shut. He said we’d need them in a day or two, after the reply is delivered.”
So. Lethway was planning to go along with the exchange, right up until Carris appeared.
And then what?
Set upon the kidnappers and anyone with them, I decided. Leave a couple alive, make them talk, find the rest, wipe them out.
I had no interest in the fates of the kidnappers, once Carris was safe. But since I planned to be at the swap myself, I’d make a fine target for Lethway and his men.
“What about you, Mr. Pratt? You going to be there when they meet for the swap?”
His face reddened a little more. “I haven’t been told. Which means I won’t be asked.”
“He doesn’t want the missus to find out if things go wrong, is that it?”
He nodded a silent yes.
“But you plan to be there anyway.”
“Damned right I do.”
“No talking you out of it.”
“No. You going to try?”
“Me? Perish the thought. In fact, I’m going to invite you to come with me. We both have the same goal in mind—bring Carris home. You don’t care what happens to Lethway and I don’t care what happens to the kidnappers.”
Pratt thought that over.
“You’ve got a reputation for being sneaky, Markhat.”
“Look. Lethway doesn’t care whether Carris comes home in a box or in a cab. The kidnappers are likely to kill Carris so he can’t go around pointing them out later. Hell, without us, it’s a toss-up whether his father or the villains kill him first. The kid needs somebody sneaky on his side.”
“What have you got planned?”
“Me? Nothing. It’s too early to make plans. I don’t know the wheres or whens. That’s your job, to let me know. I trust Lethway to tell me what he wants me to know, but I trust you to tell me the truth. Because he’s got to know I’ll be watching. And if Lethway can kill me and the kidnappers at the same time, well, that’s a good night’s work, isn’t it?”
“I’ll do it. Tell you, I mean. And we might as well go together. Wouldn’t want to stab you by accident.”
“A touching sentiment. I should have it engraved on a tea service. But stomping around in front of my office? That’s likely to get talked about, Mr. Pratt. Next time, just slip a note under my door, or better yet, pay a kid to do it for you. I can read, you know.”
He grunted. We were rounding the clock, coming up on a weathered red cab that bore the Lethway Mining crest on its side.
“Seriously?” I shook my head. “Next time, hire a couple of bridge clowns and a trumpeter or two.”
“All right, all right, I get your point.” My carriage slowed and Pratt opened the door, then closed it and stuck out his hand.
“I’m trusting you, Mr. Markhat.”
I shook his hand.
“And I’m trusting you, Mr. Pratt.”
He grinned. It was weary, but real.
“I’ll be seeing you.”
I watched him hop out, shout his driver awake, and clamber inside. His bulk set the cab shaking.
I wiped my hand on my pants and took a deep breath and gave the driver directions to a part of town I’d never visited, and never wanted to see.
Once, a long time ago, I saw the Corpsemaster’s house in something like a waking dream. It was the same night I walked with the huldra in my hand, the same night I thought my Darla was dead, slain by halfdead, left bloody and ravaged to die and grow cold and then rise again.
I’d been mad with grief. So when Mama showed me the thing she called a huldra, I’d taken it up. Worse, I’d told it my name.
Darla hadn’t been dead, of course. And in the end, I managed to break the huldra. But a shadow of it still dwells within me, somewhere deep and dark and well beyond the reach of Mama’s bitter teas or simple hexes.
The closer I got to the Corpsemaster’s house, the more the huldra stirred.
I can always feel it growing restless. I begin to see fleeting shadows and hear snatches of whispers in the air. The shapes and the words are too strange and brief to see or understand. But I’m always close to doing so—and I know that if I ever do comprehend what the huldra seeks to show me, I’ll be well and truly lost.
I was glad for the daylight. The huldra doesn’t like the sun. And even though it was beginning to wane, the day was bright enough to keep the worst of the darting phantoms at bay.
Rannit is an old, old place. Maybe the oldest from the former Kingdom. The Brown has changed course several times in Rannit’s long history, and though it bisects the city today, once, long ago, Rannit was built on the east bank of the Brown, and it was toward these aged, leaning structures I bade the driver go.
Commerce and the houses thereof simply give up and go home east of the old north-south road called Harken. The streets change from cobblestone to big old slabs of rutted granite. The Regent’s new sewers stop two blocks from Harken. Word is that the digging crews refuse to go any farther east because of the things they unearthed there. Stories vary, but one thing is certain—neither the Regent’s wrath nor his purse could persuade anyone to venture beneath those streets after an entire shovel crew vanished one day, leaving only tools behind.
The houses that line the streets are tall and cheerless. Even the Dark Houses try to keep up a pretense of vibrancy. But past Harken, the tiny windows are all dark, the shutters are drawn, and the black doors firmly shut.
The streets were deathly quiet. Quiet and sunlit and empty. For some reason, that made me uneasier than the docks after Curfew. Here, I could plainly see any halfdead sneaking about.
But some peculiar quality of the silence itself suggested halfdead would be the least of the horrors that lurked behind those doors.
I caught myself shivering and pinched hard at the bridge of my nose. I didn’t feel any telltale hexes slide off my back, but I felt better nonetheless.
I didn’t have an actual address. Just an image, in my mind, of a crooked, leaning house. I knew it stood at the bottom of a hill. I knew it was surrounded by blood-oaks so old they drooped and twisted and were all but fallen down.
And I knew that Hisven had killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, just to keep the location of her home a secret.
My driver was nervous. The ponies were one loud noise short of bolting. Hell, I was one loud noise short of bolting.
But on we went, the only sound about us the clip-clop of the ponies' hesitant hooves and the rattle and grind of the wheels in ruts older than all the history I’d ever learned.
Back and forth we went. I intended to perform an orderly search, but none of the narrow lanes were straight. It was, perhaps intentionally, a maze, and within moments we were lost.
House after house went past. Some were burnt, empty shells, timbers protruding from peeling shingled skins like the bones of monstrous slain beasts. Some were towering darkened spires, spires that should have been visible from all over Rannit, and yet I knew they were not. Some were squat stone keeps, hewn from gargantuan slabs of soot-blackened granite. I began to suspect, much to my discomfort, that the homes east of Harken occupied a plot of land far larger than the space between Harken and the old wall. Which meant magic had reshaped the earth itself.
We kept going. Black house, tall house, burned house, shattered house. Then change the order, and repeat.
The sun withered and failed. The light between the pools of shadow grew silver and dim. I watched the Moon appear in the gap between two monstrous blood oaks and then saw it vanish in the next opening.
After that, I took my eyes away from the fickle sky.
Give my driver, an Avalante man named Jennings, credit. He sat atop the carriage and kept the ponies moving. He saw the same things I did, and he never once said a word of complaint.
Finally, after turns and turns and turns, we rolled down a hill, and passed beneath a trio of spreading blood-oaks, and there it was.
A dark and crooked house. Two tall structures, leaning toward one another, bowed with age and a weight I could nearly feel.
I called for the driver to halt. He did. The ponies stamped their feet and whickered to each other.
The sun was all but gone. I’d counted on having a good eight hours of sun. It felt like we’d seen three, maybe less.
The dark house beckoned. There were windows, but no light. There was a door, but no knocker, no handle, no knob.
I suppose that in itself was a message of sorts.
But I’d come too far to turn back now.
“If I’m not back in half an hour, go home,” I said.
He just nodded.
I went.
There was no fence, no gate. The stones of the street gave way to grass. It was withered and brown and it crunched beneath my boots.
There was a porch. The darkness beneath it was nearly that of midnight. I stepped up on it, my footfalls so loud in the silence I cursed each step.
And then I was at the door.
I lifted my hand and knocked, three times.
The door swung inward. Within was shadow.
I waited a moment, decided no other invitation was forthcoming, and stepped into the Corpsemaster’s dark house.
I was sitting in a chair.
It was a middling comfy chair. The seat was cushioned. The back was high and padded and angled just so. The arms were covered in dark red velvet just a few years shy of being dubbed threadbare.
It was just a chair.
But I had no recollection whatsoever of being seated upon it.
The room was dark. There was a single small window, set in the middle of the wall that I faced, but the sturdy wooden shutters and the thick, dusty drapes kept all but a few weary beams from creeping inside.
I remembered where I was, and why I’d come. I was instantly relieved to feel my own heartbeat, and to take in a great big breath of stale, musty air.
There were dim shapes lined up against all the walls. One moved, stepped away from the window, came toward me on cold stiff legs.
The dim light touched its dusty face. I looked away.
“Welcome, Captain,” it spoke. The word came in a harsh whisper. It could have been male or female, young or old.
I found my voice.
“I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. I have news. It may involve the people from Prince.”
There was a moment of silence. Another dusty shape detached from the wall and took a few uneasy steps.
There was no stench. No buzzing of flies. Even so, I was not comforted.
“Follow. You are safe in my home. Please have no fear.”
The pair of corpses turned. An open door appeared. They stepped through it.
I rose and followed.
We emerged into a cavernous hallway. The walls were stone. The ceiling was too high to see. Candles on sconces flared to life as we neared and were snuffed out by unseen hands as we passed.
The corpses fell into step on either side of me.
Both were cloaked and hooded. One might have been a woman. One was burned. Both bore years if not centuries of dust.
“I wondered when you would first seek out my door.”
Shapes moved up ahead. I got the impression bodies were being moved out of my sight.
“Maybe it’s nothing. But—”
Both corpses brought fingers to their lips, signing for silence. The burned body’s fingers were nothing but blackened bone.
“Nice place you have here.”
“It serves me well.” We came to an enormous iron door flanked with magelights and glowing sigils worked into the walls. The burned corpse stepped forward and pushed at the door with bony hands.
It swung inward.
The smell and sound of bacon frying came out. And light.
The dead woman touched my elbow and gently led me inside.
I entered a kitchen. The corpses at my sides took a single step in, then backed out, leaving me behind. The door closed firmly behind me.
There was an enormous stove, and a long stone-topped bar, and ranks and ranks of cabinets along the walls. A huge oak table stood to one side. A single chair was parked beneath it.