“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.
