Authors: Ysabeau S. Wilce
“Be careful,” the Butcher warned, as I puffed my way up next to her. “Toby bites. At least he used to. Highstrung little fiker.”
Toby, I assumed, was the terrier. He did look highstrung; his lips were drawn back from his tiny teeth in a sort of sharklike grin, and his ears were flat against his skull. The Butcher reached out gingerly and poked at his side, and when he didn’t move a muscle, she grabbed him around his salamilike middle and offered him to me.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” I asked. His fur looked a little moth-eaten and his eyes glinted in a rather malicious way I didn’t like the look of those nubby sharp teeth.
“Just put him aside, there at the end of the plinth,” she instructed, and I did so, wiping my hands on my kilts. Toby’s fur was rough and greasy Yuck.
A tiny keyhole glinted just below the rim of the sarcophagus’s lid.
“Will the Key open it?”
The Butcher grinned. “Ayah, so. It sure is coming in mighty handy, eh?”
“What were you doing in Hardhands’s underwear drawer?”
“I was looking for stuff to kip. It drives Hardhands nuts, the way his things keep disappearing, but he thinks it is Paimon’s bad housekeeping. He doesn’t ever consider
me,
the nook!”
Her tone was scornful, but it suddenly flashed upon me that this scorn might just be a mask. When I was in sixth grade, there was a kid named Tiro Ram who was always pinching me and calling me names; once, he even threw an inky pen into my hair during Historical Inquiry class. I thought he hated me, but Mamma explained (after she came back from Sanctuary, where she’d been discussing with the Holy Mistress of Heaven why I had punched Tiro Ram right in the grape) that he really liked me but was just showing it in a stupid way because he was embarrassed. I had been skeptical, of course, but that spring Tiro Ram had asked me to the Spring Dance, so I guess Mamma had been right. (But I went to the Spring Dance with Udo, because Fyrdraacas neither forgive nor forget.) The Butcher’s attitude toward Hardhands was pretty negative, but perhaps that was hiding her true feelings, in which case I felt even more sorry for her. And I wish she’d stuck with him, and left Poppy alone.
“Now, look, Flora, I’ve been thinking,” the Butcher said, making no move to open the lock.
“Ayah?” I said warily. Whenever people say they’ve been thinking, they have never been thinking anything good.
“Maybe you never heard of me in the future, but surely you’ve heard of Hardhands. He’s a great hero. The Warlord’s Fist.”
“Hmmm?” I said evasively.
“Tell me what happens to him. I gotta know.”
“That wasn’t part of our deal.”
“It is now. Tell me, or you are on your own to finish that mission.”
“That’s not very rangery of you!” I said indignantly. “You can’t change a pinkie promise!” Now her true colors were coming out—trying to change a pinkie promise!
“I don’t care. I have got to know. Tell me. And the truth, too, don’t make anything up, like I can see you trying to do. Ranger’s honor. Please.”
“Nini Mo said it’s not good to know the future.”
“I don’t give a fike what Nini says,” the Butcher said fiercely “I want to know what
you
say. You said you never heard of me; does that mean Hardhands kills me?”
I didn’t know what to tell her. If I told her the truth, she’d be devastated. But if I lied, she’d go forward unprepared. She might grow up to be a traitor and a killer, but now she was going out on a limb for me, and didn’t that deserve something? “I don’t know...”
“Tell me: Is Hardhands dead?”
Surely that couldn’t hurt. “Ayah.”
“Well, that’s something. Does he die happily in his bed?”
“No.” My blood went cold as I realized that earlier I had told her that Hardhands was still alive—that he had refused to help Nini Mo. Pigface, what if she noticed my slip?
You gotta keep your lies straight,
Nini Mo said.
But the Butcher was so pleased at the thought of Hard-hands dead that she swallowed my lie without question. “Ah, that’s good news. Tell me how. Was it painful?”
“Very painful,” I said, desperate to get on with it. “Excruciating.”
“But how?” she persisted.
I cast about for the most painful, embarrassing thing I could think of “A rat crawled up the pot, bit him on the hinder, and the wound festered. Satisfied?”
“Oh yes,” she answered, clearly delighted with my lie.
The Butcher pressed her index finger, still encircled with the Bilskinir Key, against the tiny keyhole on the sarcophagus’s lip. The lock clicked as its tumblers turned over. The hasp popped open, and the Butcher flipped it up. She grinned at me, triumphantly. “Come on, put some back into it.”
We braced ourselves as best as we could—which wasn’t very good at all, with the ledge being so narrow—and grasped the edge of the sarcophagus. We heaved. And heaved. And heaved. Pushed and grunted, and grunted and pushed. All the blood rushed to my head in a dull pounding swell; my hands burned and my muscles screamed. The lid did not lift.
“Put yer back in it,” the Butcher said through gritted teeth. Under the smeared black, her face had turned tomato red.
“I am,” I gritted back. My hands slid off the marble, and I almost lost my balance. The Butcher grabbed me just as I began to fall, and I steadied myself in her grip.
“On the count of three,” she said.
“Maybe we need a lever?”
“I felt it move. Let’s try again. One, two, three.”
Again we heaved and strained, and this time I felt the marble move slightly. I closed my eyes, put my back into it, and felt another little movement. Another grunting push, and—the lid flew up so smoothly and easily that the Butcher and I both almost tumbled in. This time I recovered first, and grabbed her before she ended up flat on her face.
Inside the sarcophagus was a plain black wooden box, nailed shut. Green chalk marks were scrawled across the lid, but they were faded and impossible to read. A funeral prayer probably, or maybe a Protection Sigil. From somewhere on her person, the Butcher produced an extremely large knife and began to pry up nail heads. I dug my penknife out of my dispatch case and did the same. The air inside the sarcophagus was stale with old perfume and a musty, decaying smell, which was making me mighty uneasy I was beginning to get the strong feeling that Georgiana Segunda was not so fresh. But when I voiced that worry to the Butcher, she scoffed at my squeamishness and I let it go. If she could take the stench, so could I.
After several broken fingernails (me) and spurts of horrific swearing (the Butcher), we had all the nails out and the lid loosened.
“Ready?” the Butcher asked. It was hard to tell under the black paint, but I thought she did look a bit green about the edges. Ha!
“Ayah.”
But still we hesitated, staring at each other. Georgiana may be disgusting, I told myself, but she was dead. She couldn’t hurt us. The Butcher must have been thinking along the same lines, for she said, “‘Never flinch,’ Nini says,” and I think she was trying to persuade herself as much as me.
“Dare, win, or...,” I responded.
“Disappear!” we chorused together.
We heaved up and over. The lid flew right out of our hands, then hit the ground with an appalling thunder. If Paimon didn’t hear
that,
he was stone-cold deaf Or absolutely knackered from providing The Tygers of Wrath’s galvanic juice. I’d take either one, as long as it kept him away.
I looked down into the coffin. And there was Georgiana Haðraaða, covered with a thin funeral drape, lying on a bed of red springy stuff—her hair, which either had been extremely long or kept growing after she died. The hair spilled out from underneath the funeral drape, filling the coffin almost to overflowing.
The other Haðraaða dead had looked merely asleep, their flesh still firm, their clothes still bright, as though they were only waiting for the dinner bell to wake them. Georgiana Segunda’s funeral drape was almost transparent, and it could not hide the sunken cheeks, the livid, twisted mark around her neck, the deep sockets of her eyes. She wore the Pontifexa’s tiara, a thin band of silver from which sprang two blue-and-green enamel feathers, one on either side of her forehead, like antennae.
“Paimon should be punished for allowing Grandmamma to look so bad,” the Butcher said. “She wouldn’t be happy She was very carefUl to always look her best.”
“Gorgeousness ends at the grave,” I said, which is what Mamma said to Udo once, when he had told her that he was going to die young and leave an exquisite corpse.
“Not for Haðraaðas,” the Butcher said. “He killed her, you know, Hardhands, the fiking rat’s bane.”
“I thought Georgiana Segunda killed herself rather than submit to the Warlord,” I answered. The Butcher shot me a poisonous look.
“Who gave the City to Florian?
He
did. Hardhands. He gave her no choice. Better to kill yourself than to submit. There’s no honor in submission.”
“Better to retreat and regroup than to rout,” I said. “Didn’t Nini Mo say?”
Another poisonous look. “I never heard Nini say such a thing; I don’t think she ever would. Grandmamma hung herself from the Tree of Woe, with her dressing-gown sash, but it was Hardhands’s betrayal that made her do it. So he killed her. And he would kill me if he got a chance, but he’s not going to get it.”
Much as I hated to admit it, I was starting to feel a twinge of pity for the Butcher. No matter how annoying they were, I did have my family, and the dogs, and the horses, and my friends. Who did she have? A servitor nurse and a servitor plushy Pig. A murderous husband. And she was not going to live happily ever after.
The Butcher carefully drew back the funeral drape. Georgiana’s clawlike hands were folded on her chest, her spindly fingers wrapped around a small black book: her
Diario.
Finally! A hopeful, triumphant feeling washed over me. There was the object of all my efforts, within my grasp. With Nini Mo’s help, I would return to Lord Axacaya—
Lo, the Conquering Hero Comes
!—and he would be proud of me, and together we would save the City.
Suddenly, jarringly, the Pontifexa’s thick black lashes fluttered open, and her hands trembled. Her eyes shone like glassy marbles, and their whites were not white at all, but a muddy brown. Her throat spasmed, and she gasped as though she were choking, then swallowed hard.
“Tiny Doom,” Georgiana Segunda said thickly. Her tongue protruded wormlike from her bloody lips. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, as though to make sure that her jaw still worked.
The Butcher and I were transfixed on our precarious perch, hardly able to move for horror. Or at least, I was hardly able to move. The Butcher looked less horrified, more strangely joyful.
“Grandmamma!” she cried.
“Help me up, my darling,” Georgiana Segunda croaked.
The Butcher gingerly reached out and took the Pontifexa’s arms. The Pontifexa’s eyes rolled wildly, and then they stared straight ahead. As she sat up, the
Diario
slid toward me. I grabbed it and slid it inside my dispatch case. Neither Georgiana Segunda nor the Butcher noticed.
Georgiana Segunda turned her head slowly in my direction, and the diamonds on her tiara jiggled. The enamel feathers now looked black, insectile, like the antennae of a cockroach. Mold crept down her cheeks, like greenish blush, and beneath it, her skin was mottled black and gray. But the Butcher didn’t seem to mind. She hugged the Pontifexa, her hands leaving red marks on Georgiana’s bare shoulders. Georgiana Segunda tried to raise her arms, but they wiggled, bonelessly, and fell away.
“Grandmamma, he stole my House from me!” the Butcher complained.
The Pontifexa answered slowly, “Who stole it, darling?”
“Hardhands! He stole my House.”
“Shame on you for letting him.”
The Butcher looked taken aback; I guess she expected sympathy. “But I was only a kid. How could I stop him?”
The Pontifexa coughed, gratingly, and a little trickle of white oozed out of her mouth—a fat wiggly worm. It fell onto her neck and then disappeared into her cleavage. I swallowed hard.
“A Haðraaða doesn’t make excuses,” the Pontifexa slurred.
“But—”
“Kiss me, darling girl, I’m feeling slippery again. Can I see you?”
The Butcher leaned forward, but her grandmother flapped a limp hand at her. “Not you, Tiny Doom. The other girl, the last one. Kiss me, darling girl.”
I did not want to touch those dead lips, puffy and black. “Uh—”
“Kiss her, Flora,” the Butcher said urgently. “She needs our strength.”
Indeed, the Pontifexa was already looking more wobbly, as though her bones were dissolving and she would soon collapse into a puddle of empty skin. But I did not want to kiss her—now that I had the
Diario
I just wanted to scarper.
Then, at a sudden bright pulse of pain, I jerked back. As fast as a striking snake, the Pontifexa had bitten my arm. I jumped down, landing on the marble floor with a heavy bone-jarring jolt. That was nothing compared to the throbbing in my arm; the Pontifexa’s sharp teeth had sheared through two layers of clothing to reach flesh.
“Grandmamma!” the Butcher protested. “That was mean.”
The Pontifexa grinned at her, a trickle of blood—
my
blood—dripping from the corner of her mouth. Her wormy tongue licked her lips, and she closed her eyes, savoring my blood. When the Pontifexa opened her eyes, they had changed to red—even the sclera—and when she spoke, her voice was much clearer. “I’m so glad that you came to see me, darlings. So glad you thought to let me out. I’ve been trapped for so long.”
“What do you mean, Grandmamma? Are you stuck in the Abyss?” the Butcher asked. She was still up on the plinth, awfully close to the Pontifexa’s sharp teeth. Too close.
“No, my darling. My flesh is my tomb. And this box has been my trap. But now you have let me out, my bungalow baby-doll. And I am hungry”
The Butcher was slow on the uptake, but I immediately realized what that meant. Georgiana Segunda was a ghoul. Her Anima remained trapped in her corpse, in a kind of living death. I couldn’t imagine a worse fate. Your body decaying while your mind stayed active. Lying like that for years, stuck in a coffin, while the worms nibbled at you and your entrails congealed into goo—it made me sick just thinking about it. Unlike zombies, ghouls have Will and Aptitude; they are not mindless animated corpses. They know what is happening to them. And they are ravenously hungry, always craving human flesh.