Frank Tuttle - The Banshee's walk

Somebody found an intact shovel in the wreckage. Someone else found a steel pipe that would work as a pry-bar. I found my former bathtub, perched among the debris, undamaged, the towel I’d left folded on the rim still there.

I led everyone I could find toward the burned out cornfield, and we set about finding the hidden door while Milton drooled and stared.

We dug beneath a sky as nearly as blue as the alarkin’s. Crows circled warily overhead. If they came for a meal of corpses, they flapped away disappointed-not a single body lay anywhere. I imagined them all in the forest, shambling toward Rannit, eager to serve their dark new mistress, but I shoved that thought aside and put my back into turning up great spades of scorched earth.

We found them. Lady and Marlo and Lank and all, bruised and terrified and filthy, but alive, to the last.

It’s eight miles to the nearest other lonely House. The march took us the rest of the day and half the night. The Lady led her people in song until her voice gave out. Marlo can’t carry a tune and the man only knows one song, but by the Angels he finished the march.

And then we slept. Darla and I together, with Buttercup between us, Mama and Gertriss on the floor beside us.

I’ve never slept so soundly. If I dreamed at all, they were pleasant dreams, dreams I don’t remember.

Evis gets cigars shipped in from a place called Nash. They come stuffed in small, airtight wooden crates that are stuffed with bundles of damp moss that smell almost exactly like wet dog. Evis insists on unpacking them himself, and he always sends word to me so I can have one fresh out of the stinking grey-green moss.

Each crate holds fifty cigars and fifty pounds of moss. Unpacking is a nasty business. But the cigars themselves are pure rolls of Heaven.

We lit a pair, and Evis dimmed the lamps, and we watched the blue smoke circle around over Evis’s huge black desk.

Evis puffed and closed his eyes. “So. How did you know?”

“Know? Know what?”

“Know we’d survive down there with the alarkin. You did know, didn’t you? You didn’t open the door to some ancient bugaboo’s tomb on a guess. Tell me you didn’t.”

I shrugged. “They’d have just dug us out of the tunnels. Hisvin was losing. You know that.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

I thought about it. Mainly because I knew Darla would one day ask me the very same question.

“The paintings. That’s what decided it for me. You’ve seen them.” I took a long puff. “Nothing evil painted those. Nothing evil would even know how.”

“They’re brilliant. I agree on that. But they’re just paint. Could’ve been a ruse. What’s happened to you, Markhat? You used to be so marvelously cynical.”

“Still am. But look. If all it wanted was to get Buttercup down there, it could have done that without my help. It could have taken the Lady anytime it wanted.”

“It still could.”

“It won’t.”

Evis nodded, but didn’t open his eyes. “I hope you’re right. I really do. Learning there are things in this world scarier than the Corpsemaster is causing me to lose sleep.”

“Me too.”

“You haven’t asked once about the weapons that brought down Werewilk.” Evis leaned back in his chair and took in a long puff and let the smoke come hissing out between his mouthful of fangs.

“Wasn’t sure you wanted me to.” I don’t have fangs, despite what some will tell you, but I followed suit as best I could. “Still not sure I want to.”

Evis chuckled. “I’m going to tell you anyway.”

“Why? I’m not on the Avalante payroll.”

“The House wants the Corpsemaster to know exactly what nearly killed her,” said Evis. “And that’s when it gets complicated. They want her to know, but they don’t want to be the ones to tell her. Politics.”

My cigar was beginning to taste a bit harsh.

“So why not send a runner with a note?”

Evis grinned, all white eyes and fangs in the dark.

“She’s your lady friend, Finder. They figure it’s better coming from you.”

I nearly snubbed out my cigar and remembered pressing appointments elsewhere, but Evis cleverly stayed my hand by producing that specially brewed dark beer he won’t tell me the name of.

“The House has many interests,” said Evis as he poured. “Some financial. Some scientific. Some are even military.”

I accepted his glass and took a long draught.

“Military?”

Evis nodded. “During the War, Finder, efforts were made, in secret, to produce a weapon capable of inflicting great harm over long distances by purely mundane means.”

“No magic?”

“None. At any phase of the process. No sorcerous fuels, no ensorcelled objects, no magic whatsoever of any kind.”

“They’re usually called bows and arrows and swords,” I said. “Although catapults work nicely too, until someone like the Corpsemaster kicks them over with a couple of eldritch spells.”

Evis folded his hands. “I speak of a new kind of weapon entirely,” he said. “We were nearly complete with our work. We needed only to refine certain chemical processes, which I believe would have been done within a few months, had the War not ended.”

Realization dawned. “The things in the yard. The iron things. Someone else finished what your House started.”

“They did indeed. They are called cannon, Finder. They are merely thick iron tubes, closed at one end. When they are filled with a certain substance and a projectile, the substance is then ignited. This expels the projectile outward with such force that even the Corpsemaster’s sorceries failed to deflect them.”

I whistled. “You’re sure about that?”

“I am.” He poured more beer. “Each cannon required a crew of four. None of these men were sorcerers. The training took only weeks to complete. And they nearly brought down Encorla Hisvin, with half a dozen cannon.”

I employed one of the colorful words of which Darla does not approve. Evis merely nodded again.

“The House has re-initiated our own efforts to produce this explosive substance,” he said. “I am confident that, within a few weeks, we will begin testing our own cannon.”

“And you want me to tell the Corpsemaster that you’re building more of the same things that shot holes in her spells last week?”

“We do. In fact, we hope she will assist us financially, or perhaps encourage the Regency to invest in our efforts.”

I ogled. “The Regency?”

“The cannon we faced were from Prince. It would not do to find thousands of them suddenly circling Rannit’s walls. I believe we have just seen how easily such a tactic could defeat even Rannit’s most potent sorcerers.”

I drained my beer.

“So much for the peace.”

“I hope that is not so. But I see no other choice open to us.”

I didn’t either. I smoked and Evis smoked and we drank all the fancy beer and Evis had to send for more.

“Mama Hog?”

I didn’t need to ask the rest. I laughed and set down my glass.

“Still fuming. Gertriss is staying with me. I made her a junior member of the firm. She’s out dining alone at a place on Sickers right now, waiting for a rather careless but extremely married man to have dinner in public with his mistress.”

“Leaving you to revel in your sloth.”

“Mama’s exact words. But I enjoy sloth. It comes with beer and good cigars.”

“The Lady Werewilk was by yesterday,” said Evis. “She bought her own gallery, by the way. I imagine there are puffy red faces all over Mount Cloud.”

I raised my glass in salute to the Lady, and Evis did the same.

“I hope she runs them out of business.”