Hold The Dark: A Markhat story

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

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 hand-holding.

Prologue

Rain fell like an ocean upended. A frigid ice-rimed polar ocean, full of ghostly white whales and blue-veined icebergs; I pulled my raincoat tight at my neck and put my chin down on my chest and offered up a pair of unkind words to the cold gushing sky.

Beyond my narrow trash-strewn alley, out on Regent Street, nothing moved. Or, more precisely, if it moved I couldn’t see it through the whipping sheets of rain. The lone pair of streetlamps had been extinguished by the storm an hour ago, and I’d been reduced to watching the three candlelit street-side windows of Innigot’s Alehouse to see if anyone walked in front of them.

No one had. The halfdead, the Curfew and the Watch combined can’t clear Rannit’s streets after dark, most nights. But let a spring storm blow in from the south and sprout a few tornados and suddenly everyone stays tucked in bed and indoors ’til sunrise.

“Nobody out here but ogres and Markhats,” I muttered.

Thunder grumbled distant reply. I pulled my hat down lower against the spray and the splash, jammed my hands deep in my pockets and pondered just going home. The man I was looking for could stroll past wearing a clown-suit and banging a drum, and I might see him, and I might not.

All you’re doing is getting wet
, said a snide little voice in my head. Getting wet for nothing. Darla Tomas, she of the soft brown eyes and jet black hair and the quick easy smile, is laid out on a slab at the crematorium, dead or worse than dead. Martha Hoobin is still missing. And the best you can do, said the voice, is hide in this alley and drip with rain.

In my right-hand raincoat pocket, the huldra stirred, brushed my fingertips. I yanked my hand away, pulled it out of my pocket entirely when the huldra jerked as if to follow.

At that moment, a shape darted past the first of Innigot’s three windows. A single shadow, one hand holding down its hat, tall but hunkered down against the gale.

I froze. Sheets of rain twisted.

The shadow crossed in front of the second window. I started counting. Innigot’s door was between the second and third windows. If the silhouette passed before the third window, I’d merely seen a vampire or a lunatic or any other of a dozen unsavory types, heading for trouble out in the rain. But, if someone went into Innigot’s…

There, in the dark, a door-sized slice of weak yellow light appeared, widened, vanished.

“Got you,” I said. I watched the street for a moment longer. No one moved. No shadow crossed Innigot’s third window. No other shadows followed in his wake. My mystery man had taken the bait, braved the storm and made his entrance.

I stepped out of my hiding place against the alley wall. Rain beat down on me so hard the spray went in my mouth, and I tasted Rannit’s sky—sooty, bitter and foul. I spit it out, shut my mouth and started walking.

At the end of the alley, I stopped, reached into my right-hand raincoat pocket, and found the wax-sealed terrapin shell Mama called a huldra. It was warm in my hand, and it quivered, as if it were packed tight with angry hornets. Crumpled below it was Mama’s hex. I pulled the hex out, took it in both hands and ripped the paper in half.

The paper screamed a tiny scream as it tore.

Now Mama knew I’d found our tall thin man. I had promised Mama Hog I’d wait. I’d promised her I would tear the hex and watch Innigot’s and wait for the lads from the Narrows.

There’d be fifty or more of them, all armed, all ready to back me up when I faced down the man who’d killed Darla, taken Martha, taken who knew how many others. Fifty strong, silent Hoobins and Olafs and Benks and Rowheins. A vengeful, furious army, well fit for the night’s dark work.

I’d promised Mama I would wait. I’d promised Darla I would keep her safe.

Promises. Such fragile things.

I dropped Mama’s spent hex, let the whimpering scraps wash away spinning into a flooded rushing gutter.

I reached again into my pocket and closed my bare hand tight about the huldra and marched out into the empty street. The huldra shook, went hot in my hand. Mama had warned me never, ever to touch the thing with bare skin.

I gripped the huldra tighter, heard mad laughter in the sky.

“Martha Hoobin,” I said. “It’s time to come home.”

Chapter One

I hadn’t known Martha Hoobin’s name, the day I returned to Rannit after a long kidney-bruising stage ride from the south. No, that day had been sunny and bright, even if the last feeble ghost of winter still managed to breathe a hint of chill in the air.

But I wasn’t bothered. I’d found a mother’s son, found him alive and well and running a hotel in Weeson, halfway to the sea. He—and about six thousand others—had been left there when the War ended, with nothing but their boots and a cheerful admonition that Rannit was a two-hundred-and-fifty day walk north, and good luck.

The son had, wisely, looked for work instead. And he’d been lucky and found it, and he’d been smart and kept it. Now he was running the place.

He’d been sending letters home, too, he said, confused that a finder all the way from Rannit had sought him out. Hadn’t Mother received his letters?

Hadn’t Mother gotten the money he’d been sending, on the first day of each month?

I assured him that while Mother had not, someone certainly had.

You’d think that surviving the War would teach a man certain things—don’t volunteer, don’t go first, don’t put wads of cash in paper envelopes and ask a mob of strangers to take it cross-country—but you’d be wrong.

I shook my head, and counted out the coins on my desk. The kid had paid me, and then some, so I’d been able to let his mother keep her meager stack. And while I hadn’t enjoyed the long stage ride to Weeson and back, it was, surprisingly, good to be home.

Three-leg Cat rubbed against my calf and purred from under the desk. He was fat and midnight glossy. Mama Hog had spoiled him in my absence.

I opened a drawer, hid the money and leaned back in my chair and at that very moment someone came a-knocking at my door.

It wasn’t Mama Hog’s knock, which is always accompanied by a gruff yell of “Boy, you in there?” and a turn of the latch. No, this was a man’s slow knock—one-two-three-four—that came from three-quarters of the way up the door.

I swung my feet off my desk and rose. No rest for the wicked.

“Come on in,” I said, shooing Three-leg Cat into the room behind my office. “We’re open.”

My door opened and in came the Brothers Hoobin.

I nearly bolted.

The Hoobins, to a man, are large men. The least of the brothers, young Borod, stood a full head, and then some, over me, and I’m not a dwarf. Add to that their well-fed foundry-toned musculature, their silent, direct gazes, and by the time the fourth and largest Hoobin piled wordlessly into my tiny ten-by-ten office, I had decided someone had purchased, just for me, a first-class beating.

Then I smelled the bread. Saw it, too, wrapped in a clean white cloth and gripped tight in the calloused sooty fingers of the largest of the giants.

I relaxed. I know scores of people who might send me a thrashing, but none who’d bake bread just to celebrate the event.

I nodded at the largest, who sidled between his siblings—I’d decided they were brothers from the shape of their wide-set blue eyes and the identical widow’s peaks in their short-cropped ink-black hair—coughed nervously, and spoke.

“I hight Ethel,” he said, his voice a bass profundo that sounded more Troll than human. He pronounced his name et-hell. “These be my brothers. Lowrel. Disel. Borod.”

As he spoke the names, each brother nodded, once and quickly.

Then he was silent.

“I am Markhat. I’m a finder by trade. I assume that’s why you’ve come to see me.”

Lowrel poked Ethel in the side, and the bigger man placed the bread carefully down on my desk.

“Missus Hog said you could help us.” He rummaged in his pocket, withdrew a black cloth bag that bulged with coin. “Missus Hog said to tell you our need is great.”

I sighed. Mama Hog would say that all right.

“Then let’s talk.” I motioned toward the single chair that sat before my desk. “Sit, if you will. Ask your brothers to make themselves comfortable too. Sorry there aren’t seats for you all.”

Ethel sat. His brothers lined themselves up against my walls and crossed their hands in front of their waists. I could almost see their mama teaching them their manners.

I sat and met Ethel’s sky-blue gaze. His eyes looked out of a face that, despite a thorough rag-wash, still bore signs of coal soot and a dozen tiny round burns. His enormous hands were calloused, his fingernails stained black with burnt coal at the ends and the edges. Even his clothes, I realized, showed evidence of tiny burns, all over. That and the ox-size muscles—a foundry, I decided. He works down on Iron Row, hammering out boiler plates, pulley-wheels and bridge-bolts ten hours a day, two jerks an hour.

The loaf of bread between us gave off heat and a heavenly scent, but I pushed it gently aside.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

Ethel nodded, and began to speak.

It was good bread. No, it was excellent bread, better than I’d tasted in years. Just like Mom used to bake, I told Ethel, and I meant every word.

The Hoobins were gone, and Three-leg Cat and I were left to nibble at crumbs and ponder their tale.

I’d placed the Hoobins not long after Ethel began to speak. They were New People, dubbed so by the Regent, just after the War. Shining, bold examples of the prosperous times to come, the first of an endless wave of farmers, shepherds and trappers come to the cities to find wealth and a new way of life.

Truth is, of course, that during the War the Regency flooded the farmlands south of Rannit to build a reservoir. These New People, then, had come home from fighting Trolls to find their homes beneath a lake, and their families huddled in miserable shanty-towns downwind of the stockyards.

The War had very nearly resumed,
sans
Trolls.

The Regent, panicked, had given the New People a half dozen streets right in the heart of Rannit. From Newkeep to Drestle and all the way over to the Old Marches, became the property of the flooded veterans.

I’d not come home yet. I hear the New People took one look at the tumbledown wrecks the Regent had cleared for them and threatened to take up their arms against the High House.

Threatened, that is. In the end they’d put down their swords and set about making a life for themselves, and I hadn’t heard much about them since.

But now I’d met the brothers Hoobin. I knew a few things. I knew the Hoobins owned an entire building, halfway down Newkeep, on the north side. I knew their father was dead, their mother was elf-struck and bedridden, and that Ethel was in charge.

And I knew about their sister. Martha—pronounced Mart-ha—had left for work a week ago that day, and never returned home.

Three-leg Cat leapt from my desk to my lap and began to knead his claws against my leg. He purred, and I scratched his ugly head.

I’d run through the usual questions. Martha had no gentlemen friend, hadn’t given any gentlemen friend the boot recently, hadn’t ever expressed the slightest interest in leaving the house on Newkeep. She was entirely devoted to her mother and family, preferring to cook and clean and change Mama Hoobin’s bed over all lesser forms of amusement.

The interview produced only a single nasty shock, and it’s probably a good thing I was addled and sore from the stagecoach ride. I was a few words behind Ethel, so when he told me where Martha worked I failed to lift my right eyebrow and produce a sly grin.

“She sews at the Velvet,” said Ethel. “Sews, she does. For good wage.”

The Velvet is, of course, south-side Rannit’s premier house of negotiable affection. Fancy place. Columns at the door. Ogres on the stoop. Doesn’t allow the likes of me inside unless it’s to collect the trash-bins.

“She sews,” I repeated, keeping a careful eye on the massive, suddenly clenched fists of the brothers Hoobin.

“She sews,” repeated Ethel. “Martha a master seamstress. One day she open her own shop, sew for ladies of distinction.” He waited for me to say anything less than complimentary.

Mama Markhat didn’t raise any fools. I let the moment pass. Maybe Martha really was a seamstress.

I hear the Velvet is full of seamstresses.

“She is the daughter of our mother, of our father,” said Ethel, as if that would explain the unimpeachable purity of Martha’s soul. “She sews. She does not leave home, without word, without warning. Martha does not do this thing.”

I might have asked a smaller man about the diameter and luminous intensity of his sister’s halo. But I considered the restrained rural nature of the Hoobin sense of humor and merely nodded.

“Martha did not go, of her own will and wish,” intoned Ethel. His brothers nodded in solemn unison. “She is not that person.”

You get that a lot, as a finder. The people you’re asked to find, according to those who’ve lost them, would never ever have just run away. Why would they? They love us here at home.

And yet, half the time, that’s just what I find.

I didn’t tell the Hoobins that. I took a handful of coin as a retainer against expenses. I sent them home with an assurance I would start a search, and nothing more.

I shooed Three-leg out of my lap, stood and stretched. The week-long stagecoach ride was taking its toll. I needed to walk, there was still plenty of daylight before Curfew and the coins hidden in my desk meant I had a client who deserved a bit of attention.

“Time to go downtown,” I said to Three-leg, who merely arched his back and gave me a hurt look. “Got to earn my pay. I am my father’s daughter, after all.”

Three-leg turned his gaze upon my door and glided airily away.