I rubbed my eyes and pushed the thought of such things away. After a moment of hearing my own voice roar like nearby thunder, I came out of the shade and helped the driver round up the ponies while rich kids taunted and jeered.
We made it back to Avalante just in time for lunch.
I surprised myself by being hungry. After I had a word with Jerle, to let him know the driver hadn’t been drinking on the job, I helped myself to a plate of Avalante’s good roast beef and fresh-baked bread.
The man who walked with the huldra would have laughed at the thought of mere food.
I had two plates. And a beer. And another one to keep the first company.
My inclination was to have a dozen more. Anything to drown the memories that were drifting past. I saw treetops from above. Clouds from within. I heard murmurs of words that, if spoken, could bring forth terrors from shadows that moved along strange paths, always just out of sight.
But I knew I could make the Brown into beer and drink every drop and I’d still remember.
So I thanked the cook and picked up my hat and I headed for the door. They offered me another carriage, but I told them I wanted to walk.
I needed to feel the sun on my face. I needed to feel Rannit’s cobbles under my soles. I needed to walk until I was good and tired and keep walking after that, because I didn’t know how I’d face the night and the newly risen ghost of the huldra.
The Corpsemaster had promised it would sleep, with the sunrise. And maybe that was true.
Maybe what I was half-seeing and half-hearing, even in the daylight, wasn’t coming from the huldra.
Maybe it was coming from me. Maybe the darkness had taken root.
I thought of corpseflowers as I stepped into the bright warm sun.
They only bloom at night. Pale, limp blooms that smell of death.
I pushed back my hat and let the sun beam down on my face, and I walked away as fast as I could.
I don’t remember punching the first bridge clown. I’m told I laid his ass out, and his fellows let me pass unmolested after that.
I wound up downtown with blisters on both heels. The height of the sun and the crowds at the eateries signaled late afternoon. I waited until a mob of office functionaries flooded the street around Lethway’s office to make a pass by his building.
I wasn’t sure Pratt would be watching, but he was, because I’d not even made the block before a cab sailed to the curb and Pratt flung the door open.
“Get in,” he said. I leapt aboard and fell into the seat across from Pratt.
We regarded each other with eyes both wary and weary.
Pratt looked like Hell had thrown a party and named him the guest of honor. I doubted I was any too chipper myself.
“You sick, Markhat?”
“Never get sick, Mr. Pratt. Clean living, that’s the key. You?”
“Never better. I assume you came here to see me?”
“Just checking to see if your boss had made any plans.”
“Oh, he’s making them, all right. He’s rounded up two dozen goons. Six of them have instructions to see what your insides look like. The rest are to go after the kidnappers.”
“Only six?”
“Three of them are professionals, Markhat. They’re not local talent, either. He means to see you dead. Even if it means risking the noose himself.”
I nodded. I’d hoped my threat of a post-mortem reveal of his war crimes would be sufficient to keep him at bay for a few weeks, at least. But he’d decided to collect some heads and let the Angels of Fate work out the aftermath.
“They set a time and a place?”
“Two nights from now. An old mill just south of the South Wall. Supposed to be haunted. The locals call it Spook Timbers. No Watch, no foot traffic, nothing but a few dozen hired killers and a sackful of double-cross.”
“Informal dress, then.”
He barked quick laughter.
“As long as you’re prepared to be buried in it, yes.”
I pondered this. The cab bumped and rolled.
“Do you still plan to attend, Mr. Pratt?”
“I made her a promise, Markhat.” I didn’t have to ask who she was. “She’s been sober ever since.”
“Good to hear.” I remembered hearing Mrs. Lethway fall against her door. If she’d managed to sober up on her own, there might be hope for her yet.
“You know any of the details? Is the meet inside, outside, in any particular room?”
Pratt sighed and shook his head.
“The place. Who picked it? Lethway, or the others?”
“They did. Lethway wanted to do it in the middle of the Brown River Bridge. I think the old man’s getting senile.”
I wasn’t so sure. “Keep your ear to the keyhole. Find out what you can. I’ll swing back around this time tomorrow, see if you’ve heard anything that might help.”
“I’ll do what I can.” A brief cloud of worry crossed his big wide face. “I don’t think Lethway is on to me yet, Markhat. But he’s suspicious of something, even if he doesn’t know what or who yet. He’s playing this one close.”
“He knows his neck is on the line. Don’t be too pushy. We can manage without a script. I have friends of my own.”
“So I hear. Any of them going to show?”
I shrugged. “One never knows.”
Mr. Pratt grunted. He let the silence linger for a moment and then called for his driver to pull to the curb.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
I leaped out.
Spook Timbers. Never heard of it. Didn’t like the sound of it.
So naturally that’s where I headed.
South Rannit managed to avoid the post-War frenzy of renovation and gentrification that swept across the rest of the city in freshly polished, patent leather boots.
South Rannit houses the slaughterhouses and the cattle yards and the tanneries and the paper mills and all the other industries that produce the kind of noise and waste that ruin patent leather boots in a single pair of steps. The streets are pitted, winding affairs dotted with potholes. The potholes themselves are disguised with pools of filthy factory waste-water, which shows iridescent coatings of strange oils to the sun and feeds the hundreds of thousands of fat black flies that fill the stinking air with a buzzing, biting fog.
My cabby cussed and shouted at other drivers and sought to dodge each and every pothole, lest he break a wheel or injure his pony with a single unlucky guess. Twice he threatened to stop and put me out, and twice I offered him more coin to proceed.
I had on my good boots, and I wasn’t eager to soil them in that brackish, oily sludge a moment sooner than necessity demanded.
I lost track of streets and had to trust my cabman’s growled pronouncement that we had arrived. I bade him to keep driving a couple of blocks, just in case the hollow, pane-less eyes of the old mill concealed smaller but brighter eyes of their own.
He cussed me but obliged. Out of sight of the Spook Timbers, I handed out coins in sufficient quantity to still the cabman’s tongue and entice him to leave South Rannit by any way save the one he had come.
Then I set my doomed boots on the broken cobbles, put a mildly drunken wobble in my step, and made my way toward the nearest cattleman’s pub for a pint of piss-poor beer and an earful of local gossip.
