The Incorruptibles (17 page)

‘Let me see that eagle again.’

Fisk withdrew it from his pocket and tossed it to Reeve. ‘Keep it until this is over. And if I’m not around to collect it, you can pack it off to Livia Cornelius, daughter of the Senator.’

Reeve had sense enough not to remark on that.

‘Ye believe it’ll get that bad?’

‘There’s stretchers about. It’s already that bad,’ Fisk said, and he disappeared out the window, leaving Reeve holding a still-warm silver eagle in his hand.

NINETEEN

The next day, Beleth had no questions at all for Agrippina. He had only a straight razor, a large, dark tome, a quill, and an oversized inkwell.

We breakfasted in the great room with the
vaettir
looking on. Fried fish, nuts and small brown limes, eggs and pickles, and crusty bread with butter, coffee, brandy. I must admit, I did not do the victuals honour. I couldn’t manage to eat while Agrippina watched from her cage.

‘You do not approve of me,’ Beleth said, popping a bit of fish into his mouth and chewing.

‘Wouldn’t say that, sir. Ain’t my place.’

‘Nevertheless, you do not approve.’

‘I ain’t one to approve or disapprove of anything, sir.’

‘Why do you not carry Hellfire, Mr Ilys?’

‘Don’t need it.’

‘Really? You’re a cavalryman in service to the Empire in a fierce, untamed land. And you carry no gun.’

‘Don’t mean I’m unarmed.’

Beleth smiled but it did not touch his eyes. ‘I find it peculiar that you don’t carry one. Is it due to some pacifistic philosophy?’

I chuckled. ‘Like them what the Autumn Lords massacred?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I’m half-
dvergar
, sir. We’re a peaceful people, but we’re fine with some bloodshed if there’s a reason to it. Defending our own. Protecting ourselves.’

‘I see. Then there must be something else.’ He cracked a boiled quail egg on the table and carefully peeled it, took a pinch from the salt-well and applied it liberally, and then placed the egg in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Swallowed. He had the mechanics of eating down, that’s for sure. ‘Is it a religious fastidiousness?’

I looked at my plate, and then back at Beleth. ‘I was born a
long
time ago, sir, before there was six-gun damnation everywhere. I’ve made it this far without one. Don’t see why I can’t live out the rest of my days without having one, either.’

‘Damnation? Interesting choice of words. So it
is
a religious fastidiousness. The usage of the infernal is sanctioned by the Emperor himself, as head of the church and high pontifex. As Ia uses the infernal to punish the wicked, so shall we harness its power to drive the interests of the Empire.’ He wiped his mouth and threw the napkin onto his plate. ‘Nevertheless. This is good. Religious beliefs are mutable and weak in the face of true adversity. Despite all the evidence of the infernal around them, there are non-believers, yet they pray when girded for war. Saints will forget their own teachings when confronted by fleshy temptation. Peaceful idealists will kill when their children are threatened.’

I had the feeling he might have forced those issues a few times in his life. He looked at me, and I’ll be damned – it was like I was a specimen to be collected, a butterfly to be pinned to a board or an insect to be judged and catalogued by some natural philosopher. I was less than nothing to this man, just a creature that he now knew more of.

He said, ‘So, in the end, you’ve just not been pushed far enough to take up a gun. A piece of damnation, as you say.’

I stayed quiet but held his gaze until he broke it by pushing away from the table and standing up.

‘Let’s hope you never are.’ He clapped his hands, all business. ‘I won’t need you much today, as it will be an afternoon of experimentation. However, please remain on hand to ask any question I might want to put to the thing.’ He looked at the legionaries guarding Agrippina. ‘Gentlemen?’

Once the legionaries had uncaged and bound the
vaettir
appropriately, Beleth approached her still-naked form.

‘Hmm. When we are done I will require, from now on, that the beast be washed each morning.’

I don’t know what was more frightening to me, the implication of his words – that this would be an ongoing ordeal for Agrippina and thus myself – or what followed.

‘This will be your job, Mr Ilys. Perhaps the intimacy with the thing will give you insight as to its nature.’

With that, he flicked open the straight razor, took a strop to it, and whisked it back and forth until it met with some fantastical ideal of sharpness that existed only in Beleth’s own mind.

‘Make sure it’s bound well, gentlemen. Today I get up close and personal with the beast.’

And that he did. But he started slow.

When the blood was flowing well enough to collect, he unstoppered the inkwell. He filled the rest of it, catching the drops streaking down her arm and dripping from her fingers.

Replacing the lid, he held the bottle tight and shook it vigorously, mixing the blood with the ink. He turned to the massive black book, opened it, and removed some loose scraps of paper from between the pages.

He spent a good long while trimming his quill with a pocketknife. Looking at no one, he said, ‘It’s important to have an extra large reservoir cut into the quill when dealing with blood. Coagulation, you know. So, the ratio of blood to ink needs to be around one to two.’ He thumbed the quill’s nib and then blew on it. ‘That’ll do nicely, I think.’

He dipped it into the blood-ink mixture and scratched at a scrap of paper. ‘Yes, that will do quite nicely. Let’s see how well it works on flesh. Mr Ilys, if you’ll be so kind as to bring the
Opusculus Noctis
over here so I might view it as I work?’

I don’t know about being kind, but I did what he said, Ia save my soul. I did what he said.

He spent a long time that day painting glyphs on Agrippina’s skin. She remained as still as stone. At one point, she closed her eyes and I saw them move slightly under her lids, as though she were dreaming.

The wounds he’d made on her to get the blood had healed by the late afternoon, and her body was an intricate map of glyphs and indecipherable marks.

Beleth called for brandy, and when no one responded he looked at me and said, ‘Is your hearing deficient?’

I nearly lost my temper. I’m not too proud to admit it. But I kept my tongue. So I’m still breathing today.

I poured him a brandy, which he drank as he smoked.

‘I’ve worked through the Vesalian lexicon, each glyph, and none had any effect,’ he mused aloud. He sipped his brandy, puffed his cigar, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling of the stateroom. ‘I’m wondering if I should try to make some symbolic binding between the
primori orbis
and the body of the
vaettir
and then complete the glyph …’ He rubbed his chin, holding the cigar in his mouth. Then he waved his hand at no one. ‘No matter. We have all the time in the world for experimentation.’

Later, after he’d left, and we’d moved her back to the centre of the
orbis argenta
, I washed the blood and drawings from her body with warm soapy water and a rag. Around her forehead, throat, elbows, knees, and ankles were strong leather straps holding her tight against the wooden sluice-board, now soiled with black blood and the ink mixture. Two legionaries watched with troubled expressions.

I said, ‘Do you eat? Have they fed you?’

Agrippina kept her eyes closed. I cleaned her chest and moved down her arm. The blood was tacky in places and took some scrubbing to get off. They’re tall, the
vaettir
, and I imagine I’m the only living person in the world who’s ever been as close to a live one in the whole history of stretcher, man, and
dvergar
.

‘
Do
you eat?’

Her eyes shot open and fixed on me. In them I saw pain, hatred. Which only made sense. Would she ever capitulate?

She opened her mouth as though to speak, and I noticed how cracked her lips were. I went to the table and retrieved a pitcher of fresh water and poured her a glass. When I tipped the glass to her mouth, water spilled over her lips and down her chin, but she worked a thick tongue around in her mouth, moistening it. After a moment, she accepted some more, swallowing heavily and panting afterward like a massive dog.

‘Do you eat?’ I asked again, keeping my voice hushed.

I went back to the table and made a small plate of fish, bread, eggs. I poured two tumblers of brandy. Placing it all on a small tray, I brought it back to Agrippina, laid out flat on the sluiceway in the centre of the stateroom’s parquet flooring, at the exact centre of the
orbis argenta
burnt into the tiles.

I took a piece of bread, buttered it, and brought it to her lips, pushing it into her mouth.

She closed her lips, worked her jaws, and then spat the saliva-softened bread into my face.

The legionaries erupted into laughter, elbowing each other.

I had children once. You didn’t know that, did you? I spent thirty years raising a family: a boy, two daughters. I had a wife who loved me, but I was young and stupid and had the wanderlust. When our oldest was born, something went wrong and she was never whole. It was as though two children lived within the same skin. One was kind and loving, the other impulsive and mean-spirited. I’ve had food spat in my face before.

When you’re bound by love, you can work through it.

But this thing wasn’t my child. I wiped off the gobbet of moistened bread hanging in my whiskers. I knocked back first the brandy I had poured for her, and then the brandy I had poured for myself.

I dumped the bucket of bloody water on Agrippina, then left, looking for Cimbri and a boat to the eastern shore. I needed to ride.

TWENTY

While Fisk was sleeping, it had begun to snow. The cold had settled in and made brittle the mud of Broken Tooth’s main street. The wagon ruts and footprints had frozen in hard, treacherous dips and valleys and crunched underneath Fisk’s boots as he walked. Snowflakes drifted through the air like bits of eiderdown from a busted pillow, and his breath was crystalline in the early morning air.

Fisk scanned the rooftops and galleys and frozen opaline alleyways for the stretcher. Reeve hadn’t been specific, and there could be more than one. There can always be more than one stretcher.

He moved into the street. Other men might have tried to keep their back to a wall, get some cover, but not Fisk. He was as blunt and forward in gunplay as he was in everything else in life, except maybe women. He held the carbine loosely in his big, rawboned hands, and he composed himself, searching for the calm needed for killing.

From inside Ruby’s, he heard the first strains of “The White Rose of Cordova”, the sad lilting minor of the verse to major lift of the chorus. The sound of the Gallish piano player’s voice carried through the desperate wooden slats of the frontier saloon, out into the street, fraught with wood smoke, love, and blood.

‘The virgin bloom is on the white rose.

Dare I climb that garden wall …’

There came a clattering commotion from inside, and the doors flew open.

‘And when I pluck it at night’s close,

Into her breast I’ll fall, into her breast I’ll fall.’

From inside, someone yelled ‘Blazes!’ and cursed and two cloaked figures burst into the frigid night, the larger tugging the smaller along by the hand.

He let them get halfway across the street before Fisk called out, ‘Mr Bantam! I’ve come to get the girl.’

Banty hunched his shoulders as though he’d been shot and turned, still holding Isabelle’s hand. Banty pushed her behind him, and said, ‘Go. Go get the horses.’

She hesitated. Even from where he stood, thirty feet away, Fisk could see the confusion on her face, the doubt and the terror. Maybe the honeymoon wasn’t working out as either of them had planned.

‘Go!’

Reeve clomped out onto the wooden platform in front of Ruby’s, watched the girl flee toward the stables. He walked slowly down the wooden sidewalk, keeping his body facing Banty and his hand tight on the pearl grip of his six-gun until he was behind Banty and moving across the street to the stables.

Banty squared himself and threw his cloak over his shoulder, freeing his gun hand.

‘Don’t have to come to this, Mr Bantam,’ Fisk said, and was surprised to find himself meaning it. Now, when the moment was on him to shoot the boy, he found himself strangely reluctant to do so. ‘We take the girl back to the
Cornelian
, and I’m fine with letting you go on your own way. No harm done.’

Banty laughed – a hard, desperate sound. ‘You gonna plug me with that rifle when I turn to leave? Don’t look like you’d let me go.’

Fisk dropped the carbine and held up his hands. ‘You can just ride away, son,’ he said. ‘There’s too much at stake for us to let the girl run off with the likes of you.’

‘Ain’t your son, goatfucker.’ Banty spat each word.

Fisk tensed, and he eased his oilcoat behind him to better get at his six-gun.

‘Hold on. You don’t want to leave here in a box.’ Fisk’s tone was placating.

Banty laughed again, a little wild and jittery around the edges. ‘We’ll see about that. Ain’t like the Ia-damned Senator’s gonna let me wander wherever I want if I give her back. Prickly sonofabitch’ll send out bounty hunters.’ He swallowed. ‘And we’re lawful wed.’ He held up his left hand. A cut crossed his palm, angry and red. The girl, no doubt, would have a matching one.

Fisk nodded. ‘Figured as much. Sure you said the vows, took the oath, and gave each other the wedding wound before the
Cornelian
was out of sight. You bedded her soon after. If not before.’ He shifted his weight, hand near his six-gun. ‘Enough bickering. The girl. I’m taking her back, wedded or no. We ain’t going to war just because you played house with a noblewoman. You throw down your piece, I’ll let you get a horse and leave.’

Banty telegraphed everything. His shoulders went up, his face scrunched into an ugly, petulant grimace, and he drew. Fast as shit, Fisk told me later. Banty drew and fired.

Before Fisk’s hand slapped his pistol-grip, there was a great boom and the phantom image of a
daemon
ghosting the air as something tugged hard at Fisk’s shoulder and a piercing heat spread across his chest. Ignoring the pain, Fisk cleared his pistol from the holster, steadied himself, and let loose the Hellfire.

Smoke and brimstone covered the men, each in his own little cloud of damnation, until the winter wind whipped down the street and ripped the smoke away.

Both men remained standing, but Banty’s gun was at his feet and he held his gut in an unmistakable pose. Like some supplicant come before the Emperor, he slowly sank to his knees and looked at the blood on his hands.

Fisk holstered his pistol and approached Banty, who by now had begun to cry, making a high painful keening sound like a coyote in a trap. It held all sorts of pain: the physical agony of the gut shot, the realization that nothing had worked out the way he’d planned, the desperate sting of the loss of the girl, the loss of the world that held her.

Fisk grabbed Banty and eased him into a supine position. The boy’s legs weren’t working right, and his arms and hands had tremors running through them like an axe-struck tree.

‘Oh my,’ the boy said, staring. ‘Oh my.’

‘Shhh, now, Mr Bantam. Shh.’ Fisk held the boy’s head but turned to the door of the saloon. ‘Doctor! We need a doctor out here!’ Strange – there were no faces at the door of the saloon watching the gunfight.

A commotion sounded from inside Ruby’s, the shuffle of feet, a yell, breaking pots and glassware, the clatter of a chair falling to the floor, the tumble of a body. The doors remained shut but shadows played across the window-front. A man bellowed, another screamed.

Banty hissed in pain, and Fisk turned his attention back to the boy.

‘Mam. I want …’ Banty was having trouble breathing then. He spoke in gasps, like a child in his pain. ‘I want my mam …’

‘We’re gonna patch you up, Mr Bantam.’

‘I got you, though,’ the boy said, looking at Fisk’s shoulder.

‘Yep. You sure did. Hold on, now.’

Another scream came from the saloon. There was a bright flash in the small leaded windows, then something heavy slammed into the wall with a thud, and then a terrible screech and more thumps. Another blast of Hellfire.

Silence then except for Banty’s crying. It came in short gasps now, his weeping.

‘Mam … I want …’

‘Reeve! Get over here!’ Fisk screamed, looking at the stables.

‘I want …’

His words failed. He scrabbled at Fisk’s chest with numb, uncoordinated fingers, trying to find something to hold on to, to tether him to life.

The blood was coming hard and fast, pooling in the wound and steaming in the cold air. Snow fell onto the boy’s upturned face and quickly melted into the gut wound. Banty’s tremors stopped and his arms sagged, losing strength.

He looked up into Fisk’s face and Fisk looked back, watching the boy’s eyes widen – as though suddenly seeing new plains and vistas open up before him as he topped a rise, sun at his back, on a spring mare. His soul, whatever taint it might have on it, had begun its passage through the shadowlands to await judgement by the Pater Dis – that he be seated in the hall of Ia at his feasting table. Or to be cast into the fiery abyss.

For the boy’s sake, I hope Dis held his finger on the scales pointing toward Ia.

Banty exhaled. He didn’t draw breath again.

Head bowed, Fisk sat in the centre of the main street for a long while, holding the boy’s body. Fisk brought two bloody fingers to Banty’s face and closed his eyes.

‘Ia-dammit,’ he spat.

Dazed, Reeve stumbled across the opening of the main street to where Fisk sat. Reeve bled from a deep, furious gash on his forehead. Blood streamed down the man’s face and clotted in black bolls in his tawny beard.

‘Came outta nowhere.’

‘The stretcher?’

‘Aye. Whipped above me like a bat or something, with big pale arms. Snatched at my hair and cut me. Took the girl. I couldn’t stop it.’ The blood ran into his eyes.

‘Ain’t this all gone to shit,’ Fisk said. He narrowed his eyes, looking at Reeve who was touching his scalp, tentatively. ‘Be thankful you still have a head of hair.’ He paused. ‘Or a head to grow it on.’

Fisk freed himself from Banty’s corpse, pushing the body away and unfolding each leg as though the joints were hinges, creaky and frozen stiff with the cold.

‘Help me pull the boy out of the street. I won’t leave him like this.’

Each man took an arm and began dragging Banty’s body to the plank sidewalk that lined the street. When they were through, they arrayed the boy’s limbs as best they could and Fisk removed Banty’s gunbelt, slinging it over his shoulder.

‘After he and the girl came out of Ruby’s, there was a commotion inside. Gunshots.’

Reeve’s face remained blank. But he said, ‘There’s a darkness on ye, centurion. It follows ye.’

‘Might be, sheriff,’ Fisk said. He pulled his pistol, turned the chamber, pulled bullets from his own belt, and thumbed the fresh
imp
rounds into the cylinder.

‘Let’s check out the damage,’ said Fisk, and he chucked his head at the saloon doors.

They turned to go in, but there came a great screech and then a rising sound that was pitched higher than the wind, higher than the thrum and surge of their own heartbeats.

The two men looked up.

Upon the apex of the saloon stood a
vaettir
, long red hair unfurled in the wind.

It made a harsh barking sound, the likes of which neither the Northman nor Fisk had ever heard before. Over its shoulder was slung a dark object. Cloak-wrapped and delicate.

Fisk had his pistol drawn in an instant and took a bead before Reeve even had time to react. But the stretcher leaped, lancing through the air in a blur, landing on a nearby roof and leaping again skyward, not in the least hindered by the bundle on his shoulder. Fisk tracked the creature with his pistol, but did not fire for fear of hitting what, or who, was wrapped in the cloak.

The
vaettir
plunged toward the stable, hit the weathered wooden shingles and rolled, coming to his feet, his teeth blazing in the early morning darkness, sharp and bright.

Snow flurried around him. He hefted the bundle easily. In the wind, the wrappings of what the
vaettir
held came undone, revealing dark hair, an olive-toned cheek.

It was indeed Isabelle.

The stretcher laughed again, that same barking sound they’d heard before. The
vaettir
thrust an arm upward in a fierce, defiant gesture. Victorious and savage, mean and full of mirth, but a familiar gesture all the same.

At first it was hard to tell what the creature held aloft, it was so dwarfed by his massive hand. But when Fisk saw, his stomach sank in his belly and he cursed. He cursed both himself and the gigantic, terrifying
thing
perched on the stable’s roof.

The
vaettir
held a severed hand. White as alabaster and bloody at the wrist.

The stretcher flung the hand at the men in the street below, winging it at them as if tossing a bone to a pack of dogs. Then he erupted into the air with a great leap, his garments ruffling with the speed of his passage. He barked his laughter, bounding from rooftop to rooftop down the main street westward, taking the girl with him.

‘Ho-lee shit,’ Reeve said, blood pouring down his face, into his beard. ‘Yonder son of a bitch wants killing. Truly.’

‘
Damnation
.’ Fisk turned and picked up the severed white hand. ‘Help me find a bag for this.’

It was a slaughterhouse, walls painted red, blood splashed across the bar, the bottles, the tables, the rough slats of floor.

While Fisk was slipping out, Berith was slipping in.

The
vaettir
had come in through the rear of the building, using a door facing the scrub and shale and bramblewrack of Broken Tooth, into the relative warmth of Broken Tooth’s saloon.

He’d had a blade on him. A big blade, flat steel. There was no way all the heads could have been severed otherwise.

Everyone. The fat man and his companion, the
dvergar
bartender, the whores, the men playing trumps in the corner, the Gallish piano player, the field hands and labourers.

All dead.

They built a pyre. The frontier-chapped, ruddy-faced women came out of their mud-spackled huts to help Fisk and Reeve pile the bodies and their parts in a great heap behind the row of main street buildings.

The few children old enough to understand what had occurred, grieved. The others latched onto their mothers, dazed and scarcely comprehending the news that their fathers and brothers and uncles would never return home.

Fisk found a bucket of pitch in the stable and drenched the planks and wood beneath the bodies.

Reeve chanted words of blessing in a strange northern tongue, holding his hands up to the gunmetal sky and beseeching the old gods, the prodigal ones, for the souls of the dead’s protection and their forgiveness.

When it was all done, and the pyre as high as a cottonwood was aflame, Fisk brought Reeve a bottle from the blood-spattered interior of Ruby’s, uncorked it, and handed it to the sheriff.

‘My new friend, ye carry damnation with ye.’ Reeve took a long drink from the bottle. ‘What we do in life dictates out afterlife. It’s a slow corruption of the soul, this Hellfire we carry. Ye will regret it. And so will I.’

‘You sound like my partner.’ Fisk took the bottle and drank, staring into the fire. ‘You tell me some other way to protect myself without corrupting my soul.’

‘I carry it as well, centurion. I don’t fault you.’