Frank Tuttle: Dead Man's rain

“You doubt my word?”

“I believe you believe, but that doesn’t make it the truth,” I said. “Have you seen your husband, Lady Markhat? Really seen him?”

She shuddered, and went corpse-pale underneath the powder. “Once,” she said in a whisper. “The second time. I’d moved upstairs, kept the windows shuttered and bolted. But I heard the dogs barking and Harl, the footman, shouting and I peeked outside and there he was, standing there, looking up at me.” She shivered all over, fought it off. “It was him, goodman Markhat. Two years in the grave-but it was Ebed.”

She hesitated. And then she lowered the hanky and looked me in the eye. “Please,” she said, and the word stuck in her throat, so she repeated it. “Please.”

“All right, Lady,” I said. “All right.” I opened my desk, pulled out a pad of ragged pulp-paper and a pair of brass dipping-pens. “I’ll do this much. I’ll try to find out who or what you saw,” I said. “Give it three days. If I come up empty, you only owe me for two.”

“I saw my husband,” said the widow. “I saw him, and others have seen him, and I’ll pay you sixty-five crowns a day to find out why he has returned, and how I can put him to rest.”

I sighed. “I need to know a few things, Lady Merlat,” I said. “Names, dates, addresses. And the location of your husband’s tomb.”

She found a fresh hanky and took a big breath.

Revenants and funerals and aching in the head.

Happy birthday to me.

Rannit awoke around me. Ogres huffed and puffed as they passed, their dray-carts empty but not for long. Bakers and butchers and tailors yawned, pulled back their shutters, propped open their doors. Blue-suited Watchmen worked the alleys in pairs, kicking and poking and pulling at bits of garbage to see if the bodies beneath were sleeping off cheap wine or going stiff and still.

I passed a parked undertaker’s wagon, giving the tarp-covered, black bed of it wide berth. Those lumps under the tarp would be Curfew breakers, bound for the tall grey cinder-brick smokestacks of the crematoriums down by the river. The Watch is careful to find the bodies before dark, before they rise again.

The only vampires we tolerate in Rannit have tailor-made cloaks and big houses on the Hill.

The undertaker grinned and tipped his crooked stovepipe hat as I walked past. I crossed the street in a hurry, risked a trampling by the hurried ogres, took a shortcut through the Carnival just to watch the yawning clowns cuss and smoke and stomp around in their big red shoes.

I passed the ragged tents of the Carnival, kept walking. The streets began to slope down, toward the river. The air went thick with the stench of the slaughterhouses and the leather tanneries and the paper mills. Big sixteen-horse lumber wagons thundered past, their wheels striking sparks on the broken, rutted cobblestones.

There, in the shadow of the crematorium smokestacks, one of the widow’s coins bought me a rickshaw to Market Street, a cab to the good side of the Riverfront district, and a full-blown brass-and-velvet carriage with glass in the windows and cushions on the seats for the ride across the Brown River and onto the Hill.

My carriage clattered on to the New Bridge, nearly ran down the slowest of the traditional trio of clowns who capered and danced at each end. They scattered, cursing, as the driver snapped his reigns and the team’s hooves clop-clopped sharply on the fresh cobbles. The bridge arched up and Brown River fell away below, until we rose over the water so high it actually sparkled and the stench of the cattle-barges was lost in the wind.

I grinned and waved at strangers. Carriages and coins, like the song says-I was having wild fantasies about new shoes, and a haircut.

I wasn’t fooling the carriage driver, though. He kept his lips pinched and his shaggy grey eyebrows curled in a scowl and when he called me “Sir,” he let me know he’d rather be using more colorful honorifics. He had me made for a burglar or a pimp or a blackmailer, out for a lark in the Heights, pockets full of ill-gotten gain.

“Sir,” he said, using his special tone again. “Will you be entering the grounds of the Merlat estate, or should I pull to the tradesman’s entrance at the rear?”

“You are an amusing wight,” I said with a small laugh. “Tradesman’s entrance, indeed. Haw-haw. ” I let him stew.

“Just drive past, won’t you?” I said. “I need a good look at the grounds. Especially things like doors, gates, dog kennels. A man in my line has to know these things before he goes to work.”

He shut up and drove.

Massive oaks lined the streets, wide green lawns flanked the sidewalks and huge old pre-War mansions loomed up like slate-roofed mountains against the cool blue sky. The air smelled of cut grass and honeysuckle. No potholes in the cobblestone streets, no filth choking the gutters, no bodies, sleeping or otherwise, sprawled on the sidewalks-my, what a gulf the Brown River spans.

I checked street-side ward-posts for brass-wrought house numbers. Three-forty-four was a four-storied behemoth with gingerbread trim and arrowhead turrets.

Three-forty-five looked like a wedding cake with doors.

Three-forty-six, three-forty-seven-and there it was, three-forty-eight.

House Merlat. I whistled and gawked.

The front lawn was ten acres, every inch of it lush and verdant. Flowerbeds and walking gardens lined the yard and the paved carriage track. Blue spallow and red highland roses and white ardenia waved in the breeze-all the colors of Rannit’s flag.

Lurking here and there amidst the shrubs and flowers was an assortment of pigeon-spotted ornamental statuary-knights of old with swords uplifted, ruined columns surrounding pools filled with water-lilies, the odd sad angel in flowing Old Kingdom robes. A squirrel fussed at me from atop a knight’s armored head.

A dozen blood-oaks and a lone gnarled madbark tree shaded the angels and the flowers. And though someone had mowed the lawn recently, oak leaves lay where they fell. Between the unraked leaves and the early signs of shagginess in the untrimmed hedges and the walking corpses in the yard after dark, I imagined that the widow’s neighbors were waxing quite peevish.

Above the flowers and the shrubs and the oaks, though, loomed House Merlat itself.

Five stories. Four towers. Doors the size of garrison gates, windows of leaded glass, again worked with the form of Rannit’s standard and a shield-and-gryphon design that I took to be the sigil of House Merlat. The gutters and roofs were copper, green with age; the walls soot-stained granite behind a growth of unkempt ivy.

I made a quick count, found twenty-two windows on the street-face of the bottom floor alone. Twenty-two windows, and all but one of them shuttered and barred.

“Cheerful little hut,” I said. My driver grunted.

We passed it by. I had the driver turn and pass again, ignoring his subtle commentary about prisons and the Watch.

“Well, well,” I muttered. “Look at that.”

Ward-walls. I’d missed both of them the first time, too bedazzled by visions of the good life to see the telltale signs of spiked iron behind the fireflowers that bordered the Merlat lawn. I squinted, counted spikes and saw that every fifth fence-spike sported a fist-sized ball of smoky glass. The glass would glow faintly after dark-and anyone walking too close would be treated to a fatal bolt of rich man’s lightning.

The ward-walls were new, I judged. The Merlat’s rows of fireflowers, obviously planted to hide the ranks of ugly iron spikes, were all white and blue, with none of the red petals that show up after the second season.

We were only barely past when a flat, open delivery wagon, its bed filled with thick wrought-iron door and window bars worked in intricate oak-leaf patterns, pulled into the drive of the Merlat’s southern neighbors. A gang of carpenters emerged from a hedge-maze, all wiping their hands on their pants and grabbing up their tools.