Husk: A Maresman Tale (27 page)

“Your face, Jeb,” Marlec said. “Your hands, your—”

“Everywhere,” Jeb cried. “It’s everywhere!”

The burning seared deep into his bones, and all about his skin he could feel pustules forming and bursting. He looked at his palms; black veins were weaving their way up his forearms. He touched his fingertips to his face and gagged. All he felt was a soft, weeping mass.

He fell to his knees; they felt spongy against the ground, and ichor oozed from them. He shuddered and tried to scream again, but all that came out was a hacking cough followed by a succession of sobs.

“No!” he cried, and green mist spilled from his mouth.

He stopped dead still.

All around him there was hush.

Slowly, anxiously, he let out a breath, and there it was again: the green vapor, just like with Mortis.

He stared straight ahead, numb to everything but the implication. Was he dying? Had Mortis’s gore poisoned him?

The torment in his body stopped, and in its place Jeb felt a wave of euphoria crashing against the rock of his despair. Strength surged into his limbs, and his eyes came into focus on Mortis’s mask glaring up at him from the ground.

“He hasn’t killed me,” he breathed to no one in particular.

“Jeb?” the husk said.

He ignored her and instead reached for the mask.

“He’s cursed me.”

With shaking fingers, he put the mask over his face to disguise what he was, what he’d become.

The terrible realization crashed down upon him like a mountain: Jebediah Skayne, half husk, half-decent human—more than half-decent to most women. Horseman, hunter, gambler, lover… Everything he was… gone.

“Jeb, darling…”

Jebediah Skayne, son of a succubus.

Gone.

“Get out of here,” he said without looking at her.

“Jeb?” It was Marlec that spoke.

“You, too. Leave me.”

He was dimly aware of the crowd surrounding him, but no one else dared come any closer. He couldn’t blame them. He wouldn’t have done, either.

“I am still your mother,” the husk said. “You are my son, and you saved me. I won’t forget that.”

He turned his masked face toward her, eyed her insubstantial form up and down, saved a hard look of disdain for the demon-head. “Yeah, well it wasn’t out of love.”
There will be consequences
, Mortis had said.
If I have to do the job for you
. He’d come close, too. Jeb wouldn’t have liked to wager on the outcome.

The husk seemed to wilt under his gaze and faded back away.

“And you still killed my father,” Jeb said as he stood, slamming the door shut on the horror of what he’d become. He couldn’t think about it yet. Wouldn’t. “Last warning, bitch: go back to Qlippoth, and if you set foot this side of the Farfalls again, I
will
kill you.”

“Jeb,” she said in a shaky voice. In the next breath, though, the fire of defiance blazed in her eyes, and she yelled, “I am your
mother!
”

Jeb advanced a step and pulled his saber.

“You wouldn’t!” she said.

Green breath rolled from the mouth slit of his mask toward her, and in that instant her eyes flared crimson and she shot into the sky like a streak of red lightning. Swollen rain clouds were roiling overhead, and she lost herself among them as they scudded north.

Marlec went to clap him on the shoulder, thought better of it and coughed politely into his fist.

“They’ll come for you now,” he said. “The other Maresmen.”

“I know,” Jeb said.

Maybe it was time. Maybe this game of hunt or be hunted had gone on too long.

Marlec bent down to retrieve the flintlock and handed it back to Jeb. “So, what will you do now?”

Like this? Looking like this?

Jeb raised his eyes to the sky, followed the bank of cloud slowly drifting toward the Farfalls. After what felt an age, he shook his head, spun the flintlock. It stopped mid-spin, half-stuck to the gunge weeping from his finger. He grimaced and slammed it into its holster.

“Who’d have thought?” he said. “First time it fires right, and this happens.” He touched his fingertips to the mask. They squelched when he pulled them away again. “Pass me his gloves.”

Marlec hesitated, and Jeb let out a long, harsh sigh. By the time he’d done, his lungs were empty, and he felt as deflated as Mortis’s corpse. Not physically; but all the anguish had left him just as quickly as his mother drifting on the wind. Flat was how he felt. Resigned. Far as he was concerned, his life was finished; he was just too stubborn to keel over and drop dead right then and there.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get them.” He stooped over Mortis’s corpse and pulled the gloves off, revealing the pox-ridden hands beneath. “It’s not like I could catch anything worse.” When he’d tugged them on, he turned to Marlec and said, “That place you got Gilkrieth and Neumal cooped up: still got room for one more?”

“Always,” Marlec said with a sad smile.

“Even…” Jeb held up his gloved hands, indicated Mortis’s mask on his face.

“For the Lord—” Marlec began.

“—I know,” Jeb said. “All things are possible.”

He didn’t believe it, but what choice did he have? And if the rumors about the Wayists were true, who knows, maybe they’d be able to find a cure, or perhaps pray one up for him.

“Well, wouldn’t that be a happy ending?” Boss said. “A Maresman and a Wayist shacking up together.” He blew out a cloud of weedstick smoke in Marlec’s face, held up a box of matches as if to say he’d found it. “Can’t say it surprises me none, what with you and that husk bitch getting a room together.”

Jeb pushed Marlec behind him and glared at Boss. “Keep on talking, fat man.”

“I fully intend to. At the trial.” Boss gestured with his finger, and a group of rogues moved in, hard eyes daring Jeb to make a move.

“What trial?” Marlec said from behind Jeb. “You can’t seriously—”

“Justice calls,” Boss said, with a wave of his weedstick. “For Tharn.”

A chorus of grunts went up from the rogues.

“For the men on my land.”

Some grumbles of agreement.

“For Sheriff Tanner!”

Silence.

Boss’s cheeks reddened. His chest rose as he drew in a big gulp of air. “For Portis!”

A tentative cheer started to build, but it was cut short by Terabin Sweet’s fist crunching into Boss’s jaw and sending him spinning to the ground.

“For shog’s sake,” Sweet growled, and the cheering that followed was full and hearty.

Even Marlec joined in, though when Jeb caught his eye, he dried up. All the confidence seemed to seep from him.

They’d both lost something, Jeb knew, and from that point on, each breath, each word spoken or heard, each encounter with another, each touch would be a foray into a strange new land.

“We should leave before Boss comes to,” Marlec said.

Jeb nodded numbly. “Only wish I had coin left for a horse.”

“Well, we’ve a lot to talk about,” Marlec said. “And in any case, walking’s good for the soul.”

“Unless it’s the kind on the underside of your boot.”

Marlec chuckled, but there was little humor in his eyes.

They said their goodbyes to Sweet, shook hands with Buttershy, though Jeb wasn’t really sure why. Probably it was on account of the tear tracks on his cheeks, and the way he kept glancing back at what was left of Farly. Then they walked together across town in silence until they hit the road to New Jerusalem.

“It was on a journey such as this,” Marlec suddenly struck up, “that Our Lord—”

“Marlec!”

“No, hear me out. I’m not proselytizing, I swear.”

“And I’m not listening.”

“Then it won’t hurt if I continue. Our Lord—”

Jeb drew the flintlock and cocked it.

“Not loaded,” Marlec said.

“You sure about that?”

“As sure as Our Lord was when…” Marlec left the sentence hanging and gave an impish grin.

Jeb shook his head and started to put the flintlock away. Then suddenly he remembered how many times it had failed him, what it had cost him the one time it worked correctly, and he slung it as far from him as he could. He was a hunted man now, of that you could be sure, so he was going to need a better weapon. “Wait here. No, keep walking; I’ll catch you up.”

“What? Why?”

“Mortis’s gun.”

“But… the safe house. Gilkrieth and Neumal. I thought—”

“That I was going to hide away? Might as well bury me alive. Or did you think I was going holy?”

Jeb started to run back into Portis. His breathing came easier than any time he could remember. For all the disease he’d inherited from Mortis, he sure felt a darned sight better than he had in ages.

“Maybe when the killing’s over, Marlec,” he called back over his shoulder. Maybe when the rest of the Maresmen were back to the mud, along with their puppetmasters in the senate. “But I’m making no promises.”

EPILOGUE

“T
HOUGHT YOU WERE
the wagonmaster,” Tizzy Graybank said. She spat a wad of tobacco in the bucket, then remembered she’d already packed it away. With a quick look to make sure she wasn’t seen, she rubbed the brown sludge into the floorboards till you could barely notice it. Weren’t perfect, but what the heck was these days? “Be with you in a minute.”

“Take your time,” the woman said. She looked around the shop, took in the stacked crates, the chairs upturned on top of tables, the painted sign bearing Tizzy’s name now leaning up against a wall. Eventually, she settled herself atop a crate. “Closing down?”

Tizzy’s knees creaked as she stood from the last of the crates she was packing with dried herbs and spices, all sealed in their own hessian sacks. “Brink’s where the future is, they say.”

“That a fact?”

Tizzy gave the woman the once over. There was something familiar about the face, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Few too many crow’s feet round the eyes, few too many streaks of gray in the once black hair. She was dressed like a fishwife in an ankle-length skirt and off-white blouse that laced up at the front. Not local, though, that’s for sure. Tizzy would have known her, if she was.

“Can’t offer you much, I’m afraid. All packed up and ready to go. Wagon should be here any minute.”

“That’s a pity,” the woman said. “I heard you made a decent haddock pie.”

“Best there is,” Tizzy said. For a moment, she had to fight back the tears. Donkey’s years she’d been in Portis, and everybody who was anybody came to her shop. She’d be leaving some old friends behind, that’s for sure. Bunch of folk she’d not waste spit on, too, if she was honest. “Times change, though, luv. People move on.”

“True enough,” the woman said. She lifted a finger to wipe beneath her eye.

They were strange eyes. Greenest Tizzy had ever seen. She did her best not to look too close; that would’ve been rude. But it was the eyes that tugged at her memories; them that she recognized, coupled with the hair.

“Do I know you, luv?” she asked.

The woman drummed her fingers on her knees, gave a half-smile. “Doubt that, but I know you.”

Well, everybody knew Tizzy; least everyone in Portis. But this woman wasn’t from Portis, was she? “How’s that, then?” Tizzy asked.

Suddenly, the woman looked up, a new intensity in her eyes. “Heard there was a spate of killings not so long ago.”

A rock of ice formed in Tizzy’s guts. Happened every time she thought about what she’d heard, what she’d seen. Truth be told, it’s why she had to move. Too many memories; and she was sick of jumping at her own shadow.

“That there was, luv. And to my way of thinking, it’s only gonna get worse.”

“Really?”

“Mark my words, since they found poor Sheriff Tanner’s body down in the basement of his office, there’s been no law and order in town. Place is run by crooks, if you ask me, and the biggest crook of all is him in charge.”

“Bernid Cawlison?”

“Ah, so you know him?” Tizzy did her best to keep an even tone. It was getting harder to tell who was with Boss and who was against him.

“Know of him. I’ve been poking around, trying to find out what happened… to someone I knew.”

“Oh?” Tizzy said. “And who’s that, then?”

“Davy Fana.”

Tizzy lowered herself onto the crate opposite. “Oh, luv, young Davy’s…” The image of the masked man pointing that thing at him and Davy’s head exploding still gave her nightmares.

“I know,” the woman said, leaning over to rest her hand on Tizzy’s knee. “I know he’s dead. What I want to know is, who did it?”

Tizzy filled her in on what she’d seen through the window. She reckoned she gave a pretty good description of the man in the mask. She mentioned that Maresman had been there, too—Jebediah Skayne, they called him—but she was quick to mention he didn’t do it. She was about to mention the masked man had got his comeuppance when the woman suddenly stood up to leave.

“Oh, you off, then?” Tizzy said. “I was gonna say—”

“You’ve said more than I’d hoped. Thank you.”

“But—”

The woman pressed a finger to Tizzy’s lips. “I’ll find him.”

Tizzy wanted to put her straight, but the look in the woman’s eyes gave her pause. She was dangerous, this one. Last thing Tizzy needed was any more trouble, especially when she was just leaving town.

“What, you gonna hire someone to, you know, pop him off?” She knew how things worked; knew there were men who did such jobs for the price of a good meal.

“No,” the woman said.

As she reached the doorway, the air about her face grew hazy for an instant, and a change came over her. She looked younger, somehow: no more gray in her hair; it was glistening black and fell halfway down her back. The crease lines were gone from her eyes, too, and her jaw had grown more angular. Then Tizzy noticed: her clothes had changed as well. Gone was the fishwife attire, and in its place she now wore a black leather bodice and britches, knee-length boots, and there was a sword sheathed at one hip, a dagger at the other. “I do my own dirty work.”

Her green eyes sparkled like emeralds as Tizzy stood there and gawped.

“I do know you!” Tizzy said. “Ilesa! Ilesa Fana. You’re Davy’s sister.”

“Glad someone remembers.”

Ilesa’s eyes darkened with resolve. She pulled the door open and headed out into the street.