The Broken Bell (48 page)

The broken remnants of the window struck the floor with the sound of the earth breaking, showering us all with glass. No one was injured, though Mr. Tibbles was enraged beyond reason by the noise of it all.

Father Wickens shouted and bade the guards to open the doors. They did so, and the Father blessed us once again.

“Go in peace,” he concluded. “Heaven help us.”

Shattered saints and broken Angels crunched beneath our feet. Hand in hand, we left the Chamber. I didn’t follow Father Wickens toward the catacombs. I didn’t see the point.

Darla smiled at me. Flashes lit the windows beside us. Strange grumblings rattled doors, and echoed down the long cold halls.

“We might as well have a look outside, don’t you think?”

“I do indeed, husband,” she said as we passed under the last threshold.

“Then we shall, wife,” I replied. I opened the last door for her, as a gentleman should, and we stepped through it.

The skies lit up, and we watched the glow together.

Epilogue

And that was how we spent our wedding day.

Oh, there’s more, of course. We stole another horse, for instance. The new Mrs. Markhat clubbed a bridge clown unconscious with his own duck-headed walking stick. We got as far as the Brown before I realized the lights in the sky and the infant thunder weren’t cannon fire at all.

We reached the Brown River Bridge just as the
Regency
hove into view, firing her fireworks from every deck.

Evis still claims he intended the fireworks to be, and I’m quoting him here, a “…triumphant, regal celebration of Rannit’s victory over the forces of the North.”

Instead, he panicked the entire city, incited my new wife to horse-thievery and violence toward hapless clowns, and nearly did as much property damage as the invaders themselves had in mind.

But, as Evis is quick to point out, his fireworks display also sent people scurrying for shelter. And since the storm that followed practically on the
Regency’s
wheel was a sorcerer storm designed to kill, he might have a point about having saved thousands of lives.

The storm was the worst ever seen, even among the oldsters who swear everything that happened before the War was bigger, badder and meaner than anything born since. Whirlwinds rolled off the river, winding down streets with aim and clear purpose. Hailstones the size of hogsheads bashed roofs and left wagons smashed to splinters. Lightning fell and fell and fell, leaving fires and ruin in its wake, even as the whirlwinds raged.

The Sorcerer’s Storm, it’s being called. And so it was. Sent ahead to soften up Rannit’s defenses, and even though Evis left the barge fleet bottlenecked and impotent after blowing the pass, the storm had raced after the
Regency
, even as Evis pushed the churning vessel as hard as he dared.

I’m told we’re recovering portions of the barge fleet at the rate of two barges a day. The Corpsemaster is using some of the captured cannon on the walls and is melting the rest down. I gather she found their design rather crude and has far better uses for the raw metal.

The trio of wizards fell upon each other the moment they saw the blockage in the Brown. I’m told that clash reduced the size of their army considerably, and that those who survived took to the woods and fled north on foot.

Word is that only a few dozen survived the hike.

I don’t care to speculate on the fate of the rest, though I’m sure the Corpsemaster is pleased with her new soldiers.

Mama Hog returned yesterday. Her shop made it through the Sorcerer’s Storm with not a plank out of place. She was careful to spread the word among the neighbors that she had special protections against storms and the like, although she confided to me that she had no such thing and was amazed she still had a tin roof to sleep under.

She hasn’t quite forgiven me for marrying Darla in her absence. I doubt she ever will, as my doing so robbed her forever of a told you so moment she will never see again.

Buttercup and Gertriss are fine. Hell, even Three-leg Cat weathered the storm with no apparent injury. When I did pick my way through the rubble back to my office, he was sitting in the open doorway, glaring at me with his nearly perfected tomcat contempt.

Buttercup ruined his moment by hop skipping to appear directly behind him before scooping him up in a big tight hug.

Poor damned cat was so shocked he completely forgot to claw her eyes out.

So we’re back together, my little family and I. Even Evis, that brandy-loving devil, popped around last night with a proper wedding gift.

It’s a magical dingus that must have cost him a fortune, in the form of a head-sized glass globe that lights up if you shake it gently. Lights up, and shows a tiny
Regency
churning its way down a tiny Brown River, while fireworks and flashes light up a tiny sky.

Darla loves it. She claims she can see Evis on the
Regency’s
deck, waving to us.

I cannot. But I just smile and put my arm around her and we watch the thing together, while Buttercup plays with Three-leg Cat and Mama stomps and Gertriss makes up another excuse to go see Evis at Avalante.

There’s magic in Evis’s glass ball, all right.

And it’s not the only, or the most potent, magic in the room these days.

About the Author

Frank Tuttle is a seventy-foot long, snake-necked water creature who lurks beneath the icy waves of Scotland’s Loch Ness. When Frank isn’t dodging sonar equipped boats or teasing hopeful photographers, he writes fantasy, which he claims is “bloody hard to do with just these enormous flippers.” Frank would be thrilled from tail to gills if you would visit his website at
www.franktuttle.com
, and he loves getting email via
[email protected]
. He asks that if you send fish, please send halibut, as tuna gives him the vapors.

Look for these titles by Frank Tuttle

Now Available:

The Mister Trophy

The Cadaver Client

Dead Man's Rain

The Markhat Files

Hold the Dark

The Banshee's Walk

Coming Soon:

Brown River Queen

Demons in a feeding frenzy drive the world-weary Markhat to the brink…

Hold the Dark

© 2009 Frank Tuttle

A
Markhat
Story

Quiet, hard-working seamstresses aren’t the kind that normally go missing, even in a tough town like Rannit. Martha Hoobin’s disappearance, though, quickly draws Markhat into a deadly struggle between a halfdead blood cult and the infamous sorcerer known only as the Corpsemaster.

A powerful magical artifact may be both his only hope of survival—and the source of his own inescapable damnation.

Markat’s search leads him to the one thing that’s been missing in his life. But even love’s awesome power may not save him from the darkness that’s been unleashed inside his own soul.

Warning: This gritty, hard-boiled fantasy detective novel contains mild romance and interludes of suggestive handholding.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Hold the Dark:

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,
thunk-whee, thunk-whee
.

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 was turned around, and a clean white linen handkerchief was placed in my hand. “The carriage awaits.”

I mopped blood and blinked.

The street was full of halfdead.