Husk: A Maresman Tale (24 page)

Lined up along the wall were people—the naked bodies of people, dead and stuffed like the hogs and the turkeys—in all manner of grotesque poses, some sexual, some violent, some in the extremes of agony. Men, young and old, women, even a few children. He started to count them, but Bones swung him back round.

“Don’t usually show folk. Gets them too excited. Tenses up the muscles and makes them harder to work with.”

“He’s joking,” Clovis said.

“I’m joking,” Bones confirmed. “In fact, in your case, I’d say it’s only right you get to see what’s coming. Reckon you deserve it.”

“Boss ain’t happy, none,” Clovis said.

Bones gave him a withering look and then studied his own reflection in the scalpel. “No. No, he’s not. What everyone wants to know, though… What Boss wants to know, and me and Clovis here…”

Clovis gripped Jeb’s shoulder so tight it hurt.

“Is how you escaped from Tanner.”

Jeb didn’t even try to speak through the gag. They’d get no such satisfaction from him. He wriggled his wrists about, seeking some give in the bindings. His skin burned where the rope chafed.

“He can’t speak,” Clovis said. “Remember?”

“Then take the gag off.”

“You’re the one that put it on,” Clovis said.

“So, I done my bit. Now you take it off. Just remember to put it back on when I start cutting.”

As Clovis leaned over and fumbled with the gag, Jeb worked away at his wrist bonds. All he got for his efforts was the skin tearing and a burning like someone had poured vinegar on the cut. The ropes hadn’t loosened any, and at the rate he was going, he’d likely bleed to death before he got his hands free.

“No biting,” Clovis said, as he felt about in Jeb’s mouth and pulled out the rag.

Jeb turned his head to one side, hawked and spat. Whatever the cloth had been used for before didn’t bear thinking about.

“So?” Bones said. He held the scalpel up before his eyes, twisted the blade this way and that.

“Where’s Boss?” Jeb said. “Why isn’t he here?”

Bones’s hand snaked out and caught Jeb by the throat. “I ask the questions. You answer them.”

“You want to know how I escaped, what happened to Tanner?” Jeb said.

Clovis’s slapped him upside of the face so hard, it knocked the chair over, and Jeb’s head cracked against the floor. With his arms tied behind him, his neck ended up twisted at an angle, and he couldn’t breathe.

“What you do that for?” Bones asked.

“You ask the questions,” Clovis said. “Not him.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he asked a question, didn’t he?”

Between the two of them, they yanked the chair upright, and Jeb gasped down a lungful of air.

“That’s a good point,” Bones said. “A technical one, but good nonetheless. You learned anything from it?” he asked Jeb.

Jeb shook his head, too dazed to even think. “What?”

Clovis raised his hand to strike again, but Bones stopped him with a gesture.

“We’ll give him that one, seeing as he’s befuddled, but it’s your last warning, Maresman. Way I see it, you done for Tanner, which is no great loss. What I want to know is, are you gonna confirm it?”

“What,” Jeb said, “so Boss gets to rule the roost and make you his second?”

Bones slashed with the scalpel, slicing a gash across Jeb’s thigh. The pain took a second or two to register, but when it did, Jeb bit down on his tongue and refused to cry out.

“Oh,” Jeb said. “Was that a question?”

Clovis grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, exposing his throat. Bones loomed over Jeb, clamped his fingers round his jaw and forced it open. He started to poke at Jeb’s teeth with the tip of his scalpel.

“Hmm, nasty,” Bones said. “Touch of the ol’ rot, I’d say. Still, nothing a bit of surgery can’t put right.”

He cut into a gum, and Jeb winced against the sting.

Bones prodded and poked some more, and then with resolve, he stabbed down into a root.

Jeb squealed, and tears burst from his eyes of their own accord. Every nerve in his body screamed, and he thrashed against his bonds.

“Got any more questions you’d like to ask?” Bones said, stepping back to admire his handiwork. “Because I’ve got a whole bunch of answers.” He patted the leather apron Jeb hadn’t even noticed he was wearing. From its front pocket, Bones drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle and opened it to reveal a selection of picks, knives, wrenches, and pliers.

Jeb caught his eye, held it as warm blood filled his mouth, trickled from his lips.

“One more question,” he said, mustering every last ounce of defiance. “Where’s my hat?”

Bones’s cheek twitched, and he covered it with a hand. Then his eyes darkened till they looked entirely black.

Jeb struggled against the ropes again, but still to no avail. He shut his eyes as Bones took his time selecting a new implement from his pack. Jeb’s heart was thundering, and blood burned through his veins. He wasn’t going to get out of this one. He knew that for sure; and no one was coming to help. Shog, how he wished he’d led a better life. Maybe then he’d have something to look forward to after death, other than the torments of the Abyss. He only had himself to blame. Only had—

“Aha,” Bones said.

Jeb couldn’t help but look. Bones held up a tiny hammer and a chisel.

Clovis let go Jeb’s hair and wrapped an arm around his neck, causing him to choke. “Oh, goody. My favorite,” he said.

“Mine too,” Bones said.

Jeb fled within himself like a child frightened of the dark. Like the child he’d been: terrified of the emptiness night brought, the sense of oblivion. He tensed every muscle in anticipation of whatever Bones was going to do to him. His mind threw up dreams and fears: the giant encased in ice, the sheriff bleeding out between his hands, the Outlanders torn to shreds with their manhoods shoved down their throats. And he saw first Maisie, then his mother—he wanted to call her his real mother—the one he remembered from childhood. Maisie—his mother—Maisie—his mother, over and over and over; the wench with the auburn hair; the blonde angel who’d raised him. Then the two merged into one and came closer and closer.

He heard Bones take a step toward him, and at the same time, the hybrid face dissolved, and in its place was a snarling visage with burning coals for eyes and ram’s horns curling back from its head. He would have screamed, had the horror from outside his head not been even worse; instead, he embraced the demon, threw himself headlong into its jagged maw.

Rage exploded from somewhere deep within, flooded his limbs. He surged upright, and the ropes holding him snapped. He threw his head back, hit something pulpy and heard Clovis cry out. Quicker than lightning, he caught Bones’s wrist and flung him against the wall.

Then he was moving, running without wheezing, faster than a man, faster even than Tubal. The locked door didn’t stop him; he smashed right through it with strength he’d never known. Behind him, Bones was cursing and Clovis was groaning.

He stopped a second. There, on the floor by the remains of the door—his hat. Stooping to pick it up, Jeb turned in time to see Bones climb to his feet and draw a couple of knives. Clovis cocked his head to one side and grinned, like this was all part of the game for him, but then Jeb was off up the stairs like a cloud in a gale. When he reached the top, though, he doubled over with exhaustion. The rage left him; left him empty and deflated, and he wanted nothing so much as to curl up and die.

The tramp of feet below rousted him, and he staggered along a corridor and through another door. A dozen pairs of eyes looked in his direction, and spoons clattered against bowls.

The Crawfish. He was in the Crawfish.

A quick look behind showed him Bones was almost within arm’s reach. Jeb surged across the room, knocking into tables, catching a frown from Madam Sadie as he passed the bar. Even as he made it out onto the street, he knew he couldn’t go on. The wheeze was back, and warm blood trickled down his leg from where Bones had cut him; but worse than that, whatever had just happened in the basement had left him spent, utterly spent.

He stumbled on a few more steps, and turned back as Bones and Clovis followed him outside. Bones glided toward him, Clovis a looming shadow in his wake. Jeb’s knees buckled and he started to fall. At the same time, he reached for the flintlock, snagged it and almost fumbled it to the ground. Steadying it with his other hand, he took aim and fired. There was a deafening crack, a fizzle of sparks, and a cloud of soot that blew back in his face.

Bones cursed, and Clovis screamed. Jeb saw them scrabble back inside the Crawfish as the soot cloud cleared.

Not waiting to see what happened next, he hobbled along the high street, using the walls of buildings to steady himself. He needed to get somewhere safe before they got their nerve back. But where? Where could he go?

And then he remembered the keys he’d taken from the cell door and patted his coat pocket to make sure they were still there.

27

J
EB PAUSED AS
he went to put the key in the lock. There was no lock. Not anymore. Just a splintered hole where it used to be, charred around the edges. He checked behind to make sure Bones and Clovis weren’t on his tail, drew his saber, and inched the door open just enough to slip inside.

Flies were buzzing around the sheriff’s office in clouds so thick, Jeb couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead; and there was a stench. At first, he thought it was coming from the trapdoor, but no—there, over by the sheriff’s desk. The wall of flies blocked his view, but he could smell it right enough: rot; the stink of putrescence and death; a smell he’d grown all too familiar with since that first fateful meeting.

“Mortis,” he whispered.

A silvery blade slashed through the flies, parted them like a curtain, and then, with a waggle of his fingers, Mortis sent them swarming outside. He sat with his boots on the desktop, sword now resting across his thighs, hilt of a second sword poking up over his shoulder. He watched Jeb with eyes like bloody puncture marks in his two-toned mask: one side red, the other black. Beside the chair, head down and shoulders slumped, stood Davy Fana.

“Very diligent, your henchman,” Mortis said. Greenish mist rolled from his mouth slit when he spoke. He cuffed Davy on the side of the head. The boy staggered and righted himself, but other than that he didn’t react. “Observed me crossing the bridge, then tried to make a run for it, presumably to warn you. Anyone else, I might not have noticed. See, he was hidden real good, but I have a nose for the unnatural.”

“You’ve no business with the boy, Mortis,” Jeb said. “Leave him out of it.”

“Oh, but I do. I have every business with the boy, as do you. Or are you telling me you were going to let this one go, like you did the other?”

Jeb’s hand was shaking as he pointed his saber at the mask. “I’ve let no one go. There were complications, is all; and besides, I’ve already bagged one husk in this shithole. All I need’s a bit more time.” He was pushing it; he knew that. But weakness was like blood in the water to Mortis, and he’d finish you off just as surely as the former owner of those shark jaws in the back room of the Crawfish.

Mortis studied him for a long moment, let his eyes pause on the bloodstain soaked into Jeb’s britches. The wound from Bones’s scalpel stung like the Abyss, but at least it seemed to have stopped bleeding.

As if he’d come to a decision, Mortis swung his feet down. “So, you know where she is, then?”

He came round the desk, at the same time returning his sword to its scabbard on his back, alongside its twin.

Jeb fought the impulse to gag as Mortis loomed over him. The odor of decay was suffocating.

“Not exactly.”

“Thought as much.” Mortis reached out and thrust his gloved hand in Jeb’s coat pocket. He withdrew it, clutching the amulet.

“Stygian,” he said, studying the necklace and handing it back to Jeb. It was winking with a dim blue light. “That the husk you got?”

“Killed it, which is what landed me here, in a roundabout way.”

“But you escaped?”

Jeb didn’t know what to say. If he told Mortis his mother had freed him, he was as good as dead.

“I found the sheriff and another man in the basement,” Mortis said, before Jeb could think of an answer. “So, the flies weren’t all mine.”

Jeb’s mind skipped in a dozen directions as he sought to keep the conversation moving away from his encounter with the husk he was supposed to have killed. When nothing better presented itself, he settled on, “How did you know to look for me here?”

“Even hunters leave a blood trail, Jebediah. You know that, and yours formed something of a puddle here. Well, back there in the cell, to be precise. It’s not usual for local lawmen to get in our way. You been stepping on someone’s toes?”

Jeb gave a grim smile. “You’re right there. Local big fish was harboring the stygian I took the amulet from. Let’s just say he wasn’t too happy about me cutting its head off. Course, it wasn’t just the husk…”

“Collateral?” Mortis said. He casually swung away from Jeb and switched his focus to Davy.

The lad stiffened and flicked a look at Jeb. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed, and he was trembling.

“Just a bit,” Jeb said.

“Happens,” Mortis said. “So, one husk down, two to go.”

“Two?”

Mortis drew his gun and pulled the trigger. Thunder cracked, and Jeb instinctively put his hands to his ears. Gore sprayed from Davy’s forehead, then he pitched to the floor with a dull thud.

“Sorry, one,” Mortis said, spinning the gun on his finger and holstering it.

Outside, a woman screamed.

Mortis snapped his head toward the window, but Jeb was closer. He peeked through the slats in the shutters. It was Tizzy Graybank, running from the sheriff’s office like all the hounds of the Abyss were snapping at her heels. Her abandoned basket lay just outside the door, an array of pastries scattered over the pavers.

“Sheriff’s lunch delivery,” he said, and started to turn away from the window when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye.

Bones and Clovis barreled past Tizzy Graybank, almost bowling her over. They were armed to the teeth: belts crammed with knives and hatchets, and each carried a heavy bronze shield that looked like it had been stolen from the Ancient Earth Museum in New Jerusalem.