Authors: John Hornor Jacobs
From the floor, Beleth yelled out, ‘Get the damned thing. Kān! Kān!’ He drew his thumb across his throat.
The
daemon
-possessed
vaettir
leapt forward but the other one – yes, for an instant it caught my eye in the gloom of the warehouse and the spark of recognition leapt between us: it was Gynth! – was already moving, dashing forward, hands out. Each long finger dagger-like. The
vaettir
moved like light. It moved as I thought an Indus tiger might – pure viciousness, strength, and intelligence married in incorruptible flesh. In the air, it snagged the
daemon
-gripped
vaettir
’s throat with its hand as it flew and, barrelling forward, wrapped its arms and legs around the other elf’s torso. The two things went tumbling off and away into the dark of the warehouse. The wall shuddered. There were indescribable vocalizations – either from the pits of the
daemon-
gripped’s gullet or my ally stretcher, my gynth – that made my skin ripple. The building shuddered with an impact as the two things fought in the dark, slamming against a wall or support piling, just out of sight.
There was a long moment of silence when all I could hear was Beleth’s panting and the creak and groan of massive creatures straining against each other in the dark.
There’s an old phrase out here in the territories: Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.
By my foot, a bit of shining silver. I put my heel on it and drew my leg back.
There was another jumble of movement in the darkness and then the two creatures were back in the flickering lantern light, streaked with blood and sheened with whatever might pass for sweat on such things. Hellish, their contortion; like some oiled nightmare. Difficult to tell where one creature left off and the other began. But as they struggled, and my eyes grew accustomed to the speed with which they moved, things became clear. The
daemon
-gripped
vaettir
, nude and tattooed with glyphs, held Gynth from behind, his massive arms snaked around and over the other’s face, his legs wrapped around its waist. They had inverted positions. Gynth twisted viciously and wormed a corded arm up through the hold the other had on him, and went into a flying roll, out of sight. Another great shudder in the building and an audible grunt, and one of the struts supporting the ceiling came down in a shower of dust and splinters and a great
clook
sound.
The metal under my heel seemed to be a surgical knife of some sort. I almost dislocated my leg to get it back to my hand.
Beleth had scrambled up, blood streaming from his nose and two long gashes streaked across his face, pouring blood. Gynth must’ve raked him during a lunge, or the
daemon
-gripped man Gynth had flung had. Regardless, Beleth’s odds of winning the next Hot Springs Belle of Beauty Award were approaching Zip City. He looked around wildly, then snatched up the silver dagger and wheeled to face me.
I was rising by then, the silver blade in my hand and the hemp cords that bound me unravelled at my back.
I crouched, hands out, sporting metal. This son-of-a-bitch would feel something from me.
‘Mister Ilys, I—’
‘Call me Shoestring,’ I said. ‘We’re about to get real cozy.’
I came forward, blade slashing. Beleth made a desperate sound in his throat, halfway between a yelp and a strangled utterance, turned and simply ran, with surprising speed. I began to tromp after him but my legs cramped from being bound – and I stumbled. Off in the darkness there was a huge bellow, two inhuman voices rising in unfathomable language, even, possibly, different languages.
The two
vaettir
, locked in mortal combat, careened into view. Gynth, still arrayed in stolen funerary garb, his face buried in the crook of the other stretcher’s neck, legs wrapped around its waist, while the other creature tore at him with big clawed hands. They crashed into a post, locked in furious combat, and the wooden post gave way under their mass and they tumbled in a heap on the floor. The whole building groaned, the air filled with falling dust, and a sharp cracking sounded all around, like trees being felled.
There was a moment then, when I had a choice. I could pursue Beleth with no clear assurance I would catch him, my physical conditioning at the moment suspect, or I could do what I might to assist Gynth and discover why such a creature as this
vaettir
would assist me. Thrice now. I chose to help the
vaettir
for, I was surprised to find, I did not want him to die.
It is a decision I have mulled for many, many years now. Had I the chance, I would not do things the same way.
The
daemon
-gripped stretcher made a keening sound deep in its throat as Gynth wormed his face back and forth – he had sunk his jagged teeth into the flesh and thrashed his head about. The other
vaettir
frantically shredded Gynth’s arms, shoulders, and back with his claws. The contest was becoming one of endurance, rather than frenetic leaping and lightning fast attacks. The two creatures strained against each other – I could almost hear their tendons stretching and creaking. The surgeon’s blade in my hand would never be enough. My eye fell on Beleth’s abandoned leather portfolio. I scrambled over as quickly as my cramped legs would allow. Flipping it open, I found a long silver dirk as thin as a leaf and light as a feather. I snatched it up and turned back to the stretchers, locked in a vicious embrace. All at once the black-eyed stretcher’s legs thrashed and suddenly they were inverted, Gynth on the bottom and the other on top. His back was to me now and there was no better time for me to make my move.
I came forward, crouched, knife in front of me. Something – my breath, a footfall, some unknown
vaettir
sense of life – must’ve alerted the creature because as I came close enough to plunge the dagger in its back, it began to thrash again and leverage itself up, drawing Gynth with it, wheeling about. Its terrible eyes fixed on me.
Gynth, realizing the advantage, began whipping his head back and forth, driving it into the cheek of the other creature with meaty
smacks
. The
daemon
-gripped stretcher howled.
I stepped as close as I could and drove the dagger in. Blade flat, between the ribs. It was hard – only in plays and mummer’s farces do blades slip into flesh easily. All life wants to protect itself. The stretcher’s muscles clamped around the blade. His body turned, clenched, and ripped the knife from my hand.
But the damage was done. Blood burbled up from the wound and Gynth seemed to gain strength from the other creature’s injury. He slipped a gore-slick arm around the front of his enemy and brought his elbow across the temple of the
daemon
-gripped one with a resounding
crack!
In the instant of stunned inaction that followed, Gynth had snaked the hilt of the knife from the other’s side and began plunging it over and over into the creature’s chest like a robber in an alley. The sound that came from the mortally wounded
vaettir
’s throat was unlike anything I’d ever heard before – a rising and falling in pitch, all at once – and the sound carried a horrendous rage in the rising tone and an ineffable sadness in the descending one. Possibly it was the two creatures dying as one that gave its final vocalizations such a dual nature.
Gynth did not let it linger long. When his opponent had no more energy to fight, he plunged the knife in its eye and it shuddered once and then fell still.
And suddenly I was alone with dead bodies and a blood-drenched
vaettir
.
‘Well,’ I said to the thing. ‘You look like hammered shit.’
13 Kalends of Sextilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis
The surviving
vaettir
stood, glistening and bloody in the yellow lamplight. He dropped the silver dagger to the floor.
On his palm, strangely unbloodied, a growing welt like a burn where the silver had scorched him.
Gynth leaned back, his back cracking, and twisted his head to the side. It was such a
dvergar
gesture that I was surprised – a motion most men and some women will make after strenuous labour.
‘Ia damn,’ the
vaettir
said in what passed for it as
dvergar. Svringin doon.
Not stopping myself, I laughed.
Gynth looked at me. His face dripped with blood, his chin and neck slick with it, and only some of it was his. Mouth open, teeth like snarled standing stones, he seemed a creature of pure malice and fury. But his words.
‘Ia damn,’ he said.
‘No shit, partner. No shit.’
I bent to collect the knives, noticed my hand was sore, too, where the surgeon’s blade handle had touched me. Gynth lifted his hand, I lifted mine, and we looked at each other.
‘Don’t know why you’re helping me. Your kind always been keen on killin’ and deadly games.’
‘Gynth,’ he said.
We are kin
. He looked at the
daemon
-gripped
vaettir
he had killed. He said, ‘
Vordrull.’
The
dvergar
word for abomination. His bloody mouth curdled around the sound.
‘Beleth fled,’ I said, looking to the door. ‘If we hustle, we could find him. You know, you got the running and leaping stuff down.’ Gynth shifted then, flexing his clawed hands, dripping with blood. And for that moment, I was reminded what a thing he was. An elf. The most fearsome predator in Occidentalia. And here I was chatting to him as if he were some housecat.
From above, and the walls, something snapped – the sound of breaking wood – and a groaning sound filled the darkened warehouse.
I was shirtless, shoeless, clutching a portfolio of silver weapons.
Another
crack
and groan.
‘It’s time to go, hoss,’ I said to the
vaettir
who seemed to be collecting his wits, looking about with a dull expression. If he hadn’t been a stretcher, I would’ve thought it was shock and exhaustion.
From above, something gave and a large joist plummeted to the floor with a terrible percussive impact and a tremendous sound and the floor shuddered and gave way beneath it. I felt myself tossed away as the floorboard I stood on rose, buckling. The rafter punched a hole through the wooden floor and wooden splinters big enough to pierce my whole body were sent flying into the gurgling water below.
Gynth had thrown himself back – such a massive creature and wounded, but preternaturally fast – and from the edge of the lantern light, our eyes locked and there again was the frisson of recognition, acknowledgement. Connection. Somehow, when he called me gynth I had to believe him.
Like a racing snake in the hardscrabble, he whipped about and lashed away, up the far wall and back through the window by which he had entered earlier bearing the body of Beleth’s
daemon
-gripped guard. The warehouse’s ceiling groaned again from Gynth’s weight and another rafter fell, making the hole in the floor considerably wider. Salted air and the stink of fish and pitch filled the space. The roof – in an alarming lurch – shifted.
Time to go.
I put my body into movement, heading in the direction that Beleth had fled. Finding a door, I exited into the street, half-naked and not knowing where I was or truly any other thing than simply being lucky to be alive.
The vigiles found me by
daemon
-light in the early morning under the Pons Milletus and laughed when I told them to take me to Mistress Balvenus’. But something about my demeanour stilled that derisive noise, and I was glad for that. Maybe it was the blood upon me. Maybe it was the strange leather portfolio full of silver instruments. Maybe it was me. I don’t know.
Mistress Balvenus, her great bosom heaving, greeted us at the door in a nightgown. The sky was lightening, and she ushered me in and tended to my wounds herself, binding what was left of my ear and dressing my cheek where I’d been both struck and stabbed, and wrapping my hand in gauze and salve. She was not giddy, or foolish, or wanton – she simply saw what my body needed, and gave that succour. There was no whiskey but she had strong port wine and brandy and I was occupying my sore mouth with a glass of it when I saw Fisk entering the room.
‘Ia’s blood, Shoe. What happened here?’ Fisk exclaimed, rushing forward in alarm.
‘There’s some cacique in my room. If you fetch it, I’ll be happy to tell you the details,’ I said. He looked alarmed, but went to get the maguey juice and handed me the container. I took a long pull – my whole face felt afire – and after Fisk asked for some privacy and closed the door to the side parlour where Mistress Balvenus had been tending me, I told him the story, the whole story, from the point I woke in Porto Caldo until then.
He interrupted me in points and looked sick when I told him of Gynth.
‘You’re telling me that some damned stretcher saved you? Three times? Followed you into town?’
‘Seems like. The only explanation.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘It doesn’t really matter. There’s a dead stretcher all marked up with those engineer’s glyphs sitting in a half-collapsed warehouse near the Pons Milletus. Send some vigiles down there to retrieve it and take it to Sam. She’ll be able to verify I’m not lying about the
daemon
-gripped bastard.’
Fisk whistled. ‘I believe you, Shoe. I do. But it goes against—’
‘Everything?’
He nodded.
I drank some more cacique. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I asked. ‘And where’s Winfried?’
‘She’s been wounded and is in the care of a medico near
Dvergar.
She has money and Buquo and will re-join us here when she is well.’
‘What happened?’
‘We were out near the
Dvergar
spur. Small scouting expedition and had rumour that Beleth was out that way.’
‘Looking after Cornelius’ silver interest, were you?’
‘A man in Panem, an important man, a man with a Quotidian linked to one of Tamberlaine’s spies, told me that a child with black eyes held a knife at his throat and questioned him about a group of
dvergar
calling themselves
vaettir
, and making a home out east on the far edge of the Hardscrabble.’
I thought about it, putting myself in his position. ‘That makes sense. How’d the man live through it?’
‘He’s got a twitchy son toting Hellfire.’
‘Ah.’
‘Beleth would be as interested in silver – and who controls it, should some
dvergar
guerrillas take control – as anyone.’
‘Point taken,’ I said.
I rubbed my face, testing the extent of the damage there. All things considered, it wasn’t too bad, but the cacique was talking to me now. ‘I meant to tell you earlier, Fisk,’ I said, recalling the meeting with the gathered folk of Hardscrabble descent in the Plaza Monstruó. ‘But I didn’t think it was much of your concern at the time.’
His jaw hardened and he looked at me closely but said nothing. He was in the weathered blue uniform of the fifth, neat but had seen some travel, with his legatus badge prominent on his chest and both six-guns at his hips.
After a moment, he stopped eyeing me and with an infinitesimal shrug, seemed to banish whatever thoughts he’d been having. His brow furrowed.
‘Shoe, what did you say about crying? “I woke to an infant crying”, you said.’
‘That’s right. We were in a carriage, and they were taking me wherever they were taking me.’
‘Why on Ia’s green earth would Beleth be in the company of an infant?’ Fisk said, rubbing his stubbled jaw.
Many ideas came to me then, and none of them pleasant.
Fisk hopped up, straightened his gunbelt. ‘I need to get the vigiles and Sam.’
I pushed myself straight, despite the cacique I’d drank.
He tried to push me back down, but I was forceful.
‘I don’t need you, Shoe, if you’ve gone dissolute on me,’ Fisk said.
‘Cacique? Mother’s milk.’
‘I’d hate to meet your mother.’
‘Let me get some clothes and a knife or two.’
‘You lost your guns.’
I shrugged. ‘We’ll get them back from Beleth momentarily.’
He blinked, drew one of his, and handed it to me. ‘I’ll get my carbine.’
In moments we were on the street outside Mistress Balvenus’. I wore my itchy second shirt and unpatched old boots, my trousers tied with twine and the Hellfire pistol tucked inside a weathered satchel.
‘You look like a panhandling dwarf, Shoe,’ Fisk said, sucking his teeth.
‘At this point,’ I said, ‘I
am
a panhandling dwarf, pard.’
‘Come on, friend,’ Fisk said, trotting across the street toward the garrison stables.
Mounted on Bess, it was a quick ride to the nearest vigile barracks and Fisk, brandishing his legatus badge, corralled a team of the bright boys to head to Pons Milletus and recover the bodies there and bring them to Samantha’s workshop, providing them the address.
‘How will we know the building, sir? You haven’t given us an address.’ The vigile, an alert, rat-faced little man with an olive complexion, seemed bright enough, but a stickler.
‘Look for the half-collapsed warehouse,’ I said. They gave me some strange looks – I did appear derelict – but rounded up a wagon and jogged off.
We trotted through the streets of Harbour Town, heading toward the western wharf district and Via Victrix. Fisk, riding his new horse – a lovely mare, piebald, with clean lines and a fine alert demeanour – had the opportunity to consider me.
‘What’s with the
vaettir
, Shoe?’
‘The big ones or the little ones?’
‘The ones that sent a century to their graves.’
‘A half a century, or so Andrae says,’ I responded.
He waved a hand. ‘Don’t matter. You know of them. You been—’
‘Compromised?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded gravely. ‘Yeah, compromised.’
‘I’ve spent my whole life compromised, Fisk.’ I looked at him, hard. ‘Always on the outside looking in.’
‘Bring me a small lyre,’ he said, ‘So that I might play you a sad song.’
‘You can be cruel when you’re of a mind,’ I said.
‘How deep are you in with them?’
‘Not at all. In Passaseugo, I found myself in the middle of some sort of rally. Neruda spoke. He’s a man of the Hardscrabble, Fisk, and I think you’d like him.’
‘How so?’
‘From what I could tell, his idea is – other than disliking the Ruman boot – that our Hardscrabble Territories have created a breed of man that should truly be independent.’
‘So he’s a revolutionary?’
‘Struck me as more of a philosopher.’
‘You’re taken with sophists now, Shoe? Fuck me with a rake.’
I laughed. Shook my head and after a moment he laughed too but it was short and died quickly. ‘It’s not like that, pard. You’d understand his position. He’s a likeable man.’
‘I don’t doubt that, Shoe. I’m sure Tamberlaine likes many men he’s crucified.’
‘That right? And now you’re his legate. So, who’s been compromised, then?’
‘I believe you still get your bread buttered from the gold of the fifth.’
‘Lay off, Fisk. You’re looking for something in me that isn’t there.’
He cursed then, under his breath. This tension between us had never existed before – we’d always had an understanding. He had his cracks, and I had mine, and we didn’t go shoving wedges into the other’s. From a pocket, he drew out a tabac pouch and a paper, rolled a cigarette in one hand, a trick I’d never learned, not for lack of trying and being a hundred years older than Fisk. He thumbed a match and cupped the flame against the wind and drew the smoke deep into his lungs and looked for a moment like he’d hand me the smoke, as he so often had in the past. But he didn’t.
‘Come on,’ he said, kicking his horse forward and not looking back. ‘Let’s see what Samantha has to say.’
We arrived at Sam’s and had to wait before her Hellfire-toting bullyboys could bring us into her workroom. Sam was indisposed, they said. By the time they’d let us in, the air was warming and I’d begun to sweat and the ache of all of the previous night’s indignities had sunk in. Sam greeted us with wine and warm words – though she winced looking at my battered face.
She embraced Fisk as an old friend – we’d all been through Hellish events together and that tends to create bonds that remain after most others fail – and beckoned us to sit and tell her what had transpired.
I ran over events quickly, skipping what I didn’t think necessary. She stopped me and questioned me intensely regarding the
daemon
-gripped
vaettir
.
‘Did you see the markings on it?’
‘He was marked up pretty good. We’ve sent vigiles to retrieve the body.’
‘Good,’ she said. She hopped up and trotted over to the wall full of cabinets and drawers and grabbed some papers and came back. She was wearing a white cotton robe, cinched at the waist with a leather belt that held a dagger, some tools, pouches full of unknown things – maybe cotton bolls or ink or silver shavings. Behind her ear was a stylus – forgotten, of course – and she wore oculars on her nose, absentmindedly. She placed the parchment in front of me and said, ‘Does any of this look familiar?’
The drawings were very similar to those she had showed me before, but this time were of the full torso of a
vaettir
, done in an almost flawless hand. It was as if Winfried had used the infernograph to take the image, it was so accurate. However, it was signed at the bottom in an illegible scrawl indicating it was done by a man or woman’s hand.
The renderings captured perfectly the fierce aspect of the
vaettir
and, even sized to fit on the parchment, the scale of the creatures. Whoever had drawn this image included a bowl, a dagger, and book in the image, showing how greatly the elf dwarfed the items.