Hold The Dark: A Markhat story (19 page)

I felt a questioning, a probing, a subtle touch emerge from deep within the night.  I sidled away from it, watched it pass, chuckled at how easily I evaded being found.  Memories came rolling back to me—memories of other walks in the dark, of other battles of shadow on shadow, of the way magics sprang so easily from my lips.

There was more too.  I saw strange rooms, felt the heat of strange fires, heard screams, heard a women beg for mercy.  There was also laughter, and I recognized it as my own.

I saw the Serge, saw flames sweep across it, boiling over dune and rock, leaping from sage bush to stunted dessert tree.  Trolls fled, bounding, catching fire and screaming, too slow, too slow…

And music.  Music played on instruments I couldn’t name, formed of notes that sang of magic.  I saw a flower, plucked it, made it wither in my hand…

The huldra let slip the smallest hint of triumph.

I pictured Darla.  I remembered her laugh, her perfume, the way her skirt hugged her legs as she walked.

I took what I needed from the huldra, pushed the music and the screams aside, struggled for a moment to remember my secret name.  The huldra flashed hot in my hand.

“Show me what I need, and only what I need,” I said. 

It seemed to me that the huldra laughed, harsh and dry, with the sound of old papers rustling.

But it obeyed.

I saw a row of three houses, set deep into the Hill.  The windows were tall and wide and dark.  The doors were barred, and bound with iron like garrison gates.  The two outside houses leaned against the middle, as though exhausted, or asleep.

I tried, but could not pass my sight beyond them. 

Words came, not mine, not the huldra’s.

“Mark this place well,” they said.  “Some call it Oddling.  Few pass therein.”

I questioned the huldra.  It was silent, unhearing.

I sought Darla.

Shadows flew.  The scene changed.  I saw another warehouse, on the other side of the Brown.  This one slanted down toward the river.  Water ran from the back wall and across the floor and out the front.  The roof showed light in half a dozen places.

And there, beneath it, lay Darla.

I shouted.  Thunder broke.  I charged toward her, a sudden flurry of shingles and loose timbers in my wake.  She was alive, bound and struggling but alive, unless the huldra showed me a lie—

I slowed, demanded the truth from it.  It grudgingly and with some confusion confirmed what I saw.  Darla had not been killed.  The body I had held had been made to appear as if it were hers.  By whom, the huldra could not or would not say.

I went to her.  I diminished as I walked.  The huldra grew cooler, its words fainter, and I realized that as my hurt and rage lessened, so did the power of the thing I held.

I found myself across the Brown, alone, my boots sinking into mud and cowshit, the rain beating on me like it meant to not only kill me but wash away my corpse as well.  I squinted into the night, made out a few lanterns swinging on the wind, what might have been light from a few windows, what might have been a fire burning under a shed roof a stone’s throw away.

Before me was a leaning warehouse, probably used to store hides or hooves or who knows what for the tanners upstream.  And in there, somewhere, was Darla, alive and whole.

But surely not alone.

I had a wax-sealed tortoise-shell bent on devouring my soul.  I reached for my army knife, but it was gone, lost somewhere in the rain.  A smart man would have waited for Evis, would have gone for help.

There was no light in the warehouse.  It was just a blur in the beating rain.  I waited until lightning showed me the way to a door, and then I made for it, leaving my right boot behind, gripped fast by the greedy sucking mud.

I listened at the door.

The place was quiet, aide from the beat and roar of the rain and rolls of angry thunder echoing within.  I hoped the din of the storm had concealed my squelching one-booted march, then dismissed the thought entirely—what good was stealth to a man about to face vampires or sorcerers or hairy old Troll gods with nothing but a single faint hope and a boot full of rain?

I shrugged.

I knocked.

Sometimes simplicity is the best approach.

“I know you have Darla Tomas,” I said, in a shout.  “Maybe you know what I have.  Maybe you know what just happened to the boys downtown.  If it’s true that bad news travels fast, then this news should have been here for hours, because it’s about as bad as news can get—”

The door opened.

Helpful lightning flared.

Father Foon himself glared at me from inside.  Behind him, lanterns were hastily uncovered.

At his back were maybe two dozen men in red and black Church armor.  Their swords were bloody, and some of their old-fashioned breastplates sported big dents. I could see at least two pairs of armored feet laying toes-up and still on the wet floor. 

Father Foon stopped gritting his teeth long enough to speak.

“You,” he said.

“Me,” I agreed.  I pushed my way past him, smiled at the ranks of assorted gleaming blades that turned swiftly my way.  “Where is she?”’

“Where is who?”

The huldra stirred, and I felt a tingling creep up my spine. 

“The brunette.  Tall thin lady.  I imagine by now she’s used bad language, and has probably made numerous suggestions as to what you can do with your mask and your swords.”

Father Foon began to gobble out a denial, but the huldra whispered to me, and I parted the ranks of soldiers with a single quiet Word and brought my Darla, kicking and trying to scream around the gag in her mouth, up through the floor in a burst of warped, wet planks.

“Hello, darling,” I said, as I drew her to my side.  “Have these persons been less than polite to you?”

Father Foon was pale.  Pale as he watched Darla float and glide, pale as he saw the huldra in my hand, paler still as I let him see the light beginning to burn in my eyes.

“I threatened you with damnation earlier.” His voice was suddenly quiet.  “I did not expect to see it take you so soon.”

I laughed and made the gag fall away from Darla’s mouth, made the ropes at her wrists loosen and drop.  She touched me, wrapping her arms around my waist, but then she drew them back, as if stung.

“You did indeed,” I said.  “Not so very long before you went forth intent on committing murder.”

“This was not murder. We exterminated a nest of vampires.”

“You exterminated the wrong nest.” I met Darla’s gaze, and she frowned.  “The main party was downtown.  Practically in the shadow of your steeple.  How long have you known, Father?  Was it just not worth getting your hands dirty until Hisvin got involved?”

“We knew nothing until yesterday.”

“Nothing?  Nothing at all?  Why, Father, isn’t lying one of the sins you and your masked ilk are always babbling on about?”

“Believe what you will,” snapped the Father.  “We would not have borne such an abomination to continue, had we known of it.  They used the sacraments of the Church, they will pay, rest assured they will pay.”

I smiled.  “Oh, they have paid.  Priests and halfdead  alike.  By my hand, Father.  By my hand.”

Father Foon rocked on his feet, exchanged looks with a soldier, swallowed.

“And what of her?” I asked, motioning to Darla, who stood close but refused to touch me.  “Why was she not released from her bonds, after her captors were slain?  Seems an odd way to rescue someone, leaving them tied and gagged.  Unless, of course, you decided the best way to ensure her blessed and eternal silence was with a few swift blows from a churchman’s sword?”

Father Foon blustered.  The huldra whispered, showing me things, and I chuckled at the image of all his soldiers boiling in their armor.

Darla caught my arm. 

“Markhat,” she said.  “Look at me.”

She pulled me close, wincing, as though my touch caused her pain.  Later she would tell me it had, that my skin burned and moved under her hands, that as long as she touched me she heard strange echoes and snatches of odd words and long, lingering screams.

“You fool,” she said, and she reached up and stroked my cheek.  “Oh, you fool, what have you done?”

“What I had to do.”  My throat grew tight.  “Had to make them pay.”

“Pay?”

“You were dead,” I said.  “They killed you.  Hurt you.  I had to make them hurt.”

Darla regarded me with confusion for a long moment.  Father Foon looked on, uncertain, and I could see him weigh the worth of having his soldiers strike us down where we stood.

I heard a shout, from outside.  A shout and a flash of dim light.

Then there were torches.  Torches, and voices, and Evis, and his men, all his men, quiet halfdead and panting, soaked humans alike. 

“I am not dead,” said Darla.  She spoke slowly and carefully.  “They did not hurt me.” Evis moved to stand at her side, and then I heard Mama wheezing and slogging through the mud, heard her cry out Darla’s name.

“They took me.  Held me here.  But I am alive, Markhat.  Whatever that thing is in your hand, whatever you thought you had to have—you don’t need it anymore.  I’m alive.  You’re alive.  It’s over.  We can go home now.”

I knew what she was saying.  I understood it.  But I also knew she had died, I remembered that too, remembered that her blood still flecked my desk, remembered telling the huldra my name, my secret birth name, that no one save my dead mother ever knew.

“Boy,” said Mama.  She had my missing boot, wrested from the mud, and I remember thinking what an odd thing it was for her to have.  She was bawling, hair slicked with rain, tiny Hog eyes sparkling and red in Evis’s torchlight.  “Boy, listen to her, she ain’t dead, never was.”

The huldra spoke again.  It showed me again my grief, my anger, my need to take the world by the throat and throttle it until every last bit of life fled it, my need to raise up a wall of flames and burn all that I hated to powder and ash.

Two worlds.  Darla dead, Darla alive.  One was a lie.  But I could see both, feel both, experience both—and the huldra, it knew my name.

I looked, and I saw Mama and my boot, Evis and his men, and Father Foon backed into a corner.  But there was no Darla. 

There never was
, whispered the huldra. 

She is dead.

Make them pay.

I felt myself begin to change again, felt myself begin to rise into the night, to join the shadows in that high cold place where words flocked and fled.

Darla stood on tip-toe, I am told, and took my face in her hands and despite the pain of my lips on hers, she kissed me.

She kissed me, and there was no lie in it. And in an instant all the dark magics and the rage and the lust for vengeance cowered, overshadowed by a much older magic that smelled of perfume and was warm and yielding in my arms.

I do remember crushing the huldra.  I do remember hearing it scream.

And then both worlds broke apart, truth and lies swept apart in a loud and rushing flood, and I tumbled along with both as the darkness closed swiftly over my head.

Chapter Fourteen

And now, it is summer.

Flowers bloom out of cracks in the sidewalks. Mama’s window box is a wild green shower of straggly looking herbs. It rains all the damned time, the days are hot and my back has been aching ever since that night I walked with the huldra.

I sat at my desk, nursing another cup of Mama’s foul black tea. I would pour the stuff out, back in the alley, but I must admit it does help with the dreams. If I skip a day of Mama’s tea, I walk Rannit in my dreams all that night. I walk with my head just below the clouds and a dry rustling voice whispering nonsense words singsong in the back of my mind.

Maybe the tea does other things too. For the longest time, Three-leg Cat arched his back and hissed when I came in the room. Now he’ll sit on my desk, purr and let me scratch his battle-scarred head, just like the old days.

A loaf of bread steamed on my desk, another gift from the grateful Hoobins. Bread and a pair of clean white long-sleeved shirts with fancy pearl buttons up the front and the button-down collar that Martha herself created. Elegance, as Martha named the dress-shop, was doing well. The pair of shirts she’d given me would cost fifty half-crowns, at any haberdasher’s on Bathways.

Martha had even smiled at me, for the very first time, when they’d dropped the bundles off earlier that day. Smiled, and said hello, and hadn’t rushed out of the room like I’d sprouted bright yellow fangs and big black bat wings.

Maybe it’s true, about Hoobin women and the Sight. And, if so, maybe she could see that the huldra was leaking slowly out of my soul.

I try not to think about the huldra, these days. I try not to entertain my suspicion that Mama didn’t get it from some nameless backstreet mojo man. I try not to ponder her mission that day we thought Darla had died, try not to weigh the likelihood that the name she had sworn never to share was that of Encorla Hisvin.

It made sense. Maybe I was still seeing things, in that strange sideways fashion the huldra showed me, that rainy night of the new moon. Because I could see how Encorla might find it amusing to toss such a powerful object in the midst of what must have been, from his perspective, such a petty squabble.

No, I decided, that wasn’t the only way I knew. I thought back to that night, back to the strange memories that had risen up like windblown dust before me. While I’d walked, I’d somehow become Encorla, or something equally monstrous. Or, more likely, he or it had nearly consumed me.

Had I not broken the huldra—had I embraced the dark—I believe it would have been Encorla Hisvin who would have walked out of that warehouse that night. He and he alone—Markhat just another whirlwind memory, just another anguished cry troubling Hisvin’s dark dreams.

I shuddered, yanked my thoughts back to the present and nibbled at the warm bread and sipped the bitter tea.

Mama would be back soon, with a fresh batch of the foul stuff. I knew she’d linger, hovering over me, fussing and griping and bossing, but watching with those piercing Hog eyes all the while.

Watching to see if the darkness had truly left me. Watching to see if I’d been tainted beyond the reach of tea and herbs and whatever simple magics she was slipping past my door.

Evis stops by too, doing much the same thing, though he brings middling good beer and sets Mama to fretting because we sit up and smoke expensive cigars and watch the dark get thicker. Mama thinks he’s a bad influence. Like we’ll set out at any minute to steal apples off market-stands and taunt passing ogres by dropping our pants and shouting out rude words.

I laughed out loud at the thought of it. Evis has no evil in his soul, save the same tired old evils all men bear. He’d met the huldra’s gaze dead on and not flinched. He even tells a good joke, when none of the lads are around.

Evis did, on occasion, keep me informed as to the progress of Miss Cant, the sobbing halfdead we’d rescued from the warehouse. The Avalante physicians, and I was still trying to become accustomed to the idea of halfdead doctors, were actually doing her good. She was talking again. She could speak a few words, and she no longer tore off the clothes in which they dressed her. Some days she seemed to remember who she’d been.

We’d made a toast, to that.

Remembrance, for the good and the bad.

Darla doesn’t like to talk about the men who had snatched her from her home, or the halfdead who had toyed with her. She does know they had been instructed to kill her, not hold her. The halfdead, never ones for unquestioning obedience of authority, had decided instead to keep her alive and on the warehouse menu when another of the captives died the day of the new moon.

I had no proof, would never have proof, but I was sure I already knew who had given the order to kidnap Darla and slaughter her.

I was sure of the who, but still unsure of the why. To drive me to take the huldra, which conveniently turned up in Mama’s possession right after Darla appeared to be dead? To make damned sure I drove headlong into that nest of halfdead, no matter the consequences?

Because it spiced up an otherwise dreary Thursday?

I never put a name to the corpse hurled at my door.

She might have been a poor soul who had died at the hands of her halfdead captors and thus indirectly saved Darla. She might have been a maid or a streetwalker, caught out after Curfew once too often. Or she might have been an acquaintance of Hisvin, who had, like so many others, eventually failed to amuse. That tattoo on her back, though, had convinced me the dead body was Darla—to me that smacked more of a creature known as the Corpsemaster than of a gaggle of blood-mad halfdead. Such attention to fine detail seemed a bit beyond their ken.

There had been no survivors among the priests or the halfdead. And the one other person who might have the answers is not the kind of person you ask them of.

Mama banged on my door and barged through, more hot tea emitting steam from the pot in her rag-shielded hands. 

“Brung you some more.”

“Thanks. I was just wishing I had something to dip Three-Leg in, his fleas are back.”

Mama thunked the pot down and scowled.  “You need to be drinkin’ all this.  Today.  My sageroot came in and this is full of it.”

I grimaced.  “Sageroot?  Isn’t that poisonous?”

“Nah, not if’n it’s dried before it’s boiled.”  Mama sniffed.  “Best drink it hot too.”

I sighed.  “You really think this is helping, Mama?”

“I reckon it is,” she said.  She sat heavily in my client’s chair.  “Cat don’t run from you.  Miss Darla don’t see them things in your eyes.  Mostly, though, you’re nearly as big a smart-ass as you was before that night.”

I nodded. 

“I see that Halfdead friend of yours was around last night.”

“We had a couple of beers.”

Mama frowned.  “He ever say how that poor woman is?”

I told Mama what I knew about Miss Cant.  She seemed pleased, though not pleased enough to credit Evis with even faint praise.

Someone called Mama’s name from the street, and Mama bade me goodbye with a final stern admonition to drink the pot dry.

I drained the cup, started to pour a new one, heard Mama’s door shut and thought the better of it.  The tea needed to cool anyway, and the sun was bright outside, and I decided a walk in the light would do me good—especially if it happened to lead to Darla’s fresh painted door.