I’d gone maybe twenty feet when one of Evis’s halfdead companions glided out of the shadows and fell into step with me. “This way,” he said, in a voice that sent literal shivers down my spine. “It is not far.”
I followed his lead. His face was cloaked in shadow, and I was heartily glad of it.
Faint light flared ahead, outlining a door and the gaps between the planks of a boarded-up window. “There,” said my pale guide, halting. “I shall keep watch here.”
I thanked him and went.
The door was open. Someone had simply grasped the knob and pushed until door and frame tore free from the wall. I stepped past it, into a small room lit by a guttering candle standing in the middle of the floor.
The room stank of rot and rat. I shut my mouth and looked around-bare cracked plaster walls, a single window and the wood floor curling and warped and stained from the leaks that had ravaged the ceiling.
A single door was set in the far side. It, too, had been forced open, struck with such force that most of the doorframe was hanging splintered beside the wall.
Evis stepped through the opening. “There is more. We are too late-but there is more to see.”
He donned his dark glasses, nodded at the candle, turned and vanished back through the broken door.
I picked up the candle and followed.
The door wound down a long dark hall. Walls, floors and ceiling all bore water damage, but the warped pine wood floor had been repaired in two places. Recently, too, the nail-heads shone of new-beaten iron in the light, which meant they hadn’t had time to rust.
The hall abruptly ended. I stepped down, nearly stumbled, onto a cobble-brick floor, and my candlelight lost sight of any ceiling, and all the walls. It did illuminate the backs of four black-clad halfdead, who stood in a small circle a dozen steps away.
Evis and his dark glasses turned to face me.
“They are friends. They do not see you.”
“Wonderful.” My mouth was so dry I spoke in a ragged whisper. My new friends didn’t turn, didn’t leap, so I licked my lips and took a step toward them. “What is it we’re seeing?”
I wasn’t seeing a thing, aside from vampires and a flickering ring of shadows and floor-bricks.
“Blood was spilled here. Spilled in such quantity that it rushed onto the floor.” He indicated the area, which the halfdead surrounded. They pulled back a few steps, and Evis motioned me forward. I took my guttering candle and went.
All I saw were bricks, just like all the others-black and smooth and rounded over with age and wear. Half the old buildings in Rannit were built over even older roads, just like this one. The builders merely scraped the dirt off the cobbles and called it a floor.
I knelt down, put my nose near the cold baked clay. If there was any blood there, it was too old and too faint for human eyes and a stub of a candle to see.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, rising.
“Do,” said Evis. “You see no trace because soon after the blood was spilled, the floor was cleaned. I suspect they used a mop and tanner’s bleach. My associates and I can still smell the traces though. Some must have run between the cobbles.”
“Rannit’s got more blood-stains than pot holes,” I said. “What makes this one special? What does it have to do with Martha Hoobin?”
Evis sighed.
Then he frowned.
“Mavis. Torno, Glee, come here.”
Three new vampires appeared and glided near, their ghost-white faces turned down, their dirty marble eyes turned away from my light.
“What the-”
Evis raised a hand and the halfdead stopped still, faces down, beside me. I shut up.
A moment passed. I strained my ears, since my eyes were proving useless. I heard nothing at first-then, faintly, I made out scratching, like a mouse in a wall, chewing away. I held my breath but couldn’t locate the source.
Evis put his dark glasses away. “Dear God,” he said, in a whisper. “Dear God.”
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,
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
