The Builders (6 page)

A hundred and fifty paces behind the barn a small, pink ball broke through the packed dust of the earth, rising half an inch and hovering for a moment before withdrawing. A few seconds passed and the tip of Gertrude’s nose was joined by the rest of her. She turned quickly and widened out the exit, allowing her much larger companion to join her aboveground.

Barley stretched to his full height, enjoying the feel of his spine snapping back into place. Then he reached into the hole and withdrew a large black trunk, quite the size of Gertrude herself and, to judge by the grunt the badger gave while lifting it, not filled with feathers.

Her task completed, Gertrude set to brushing off the grime and dirt that had accumulated during her sojourn beneath the soil. It was an impossible task, but it occupied her time. “I speak seven languages, did you know that?”

Barley undid the latch on his chest. “I’ll take your word for it.” He opened the trunk, pulled out a tarp, and laid it on the ground beside him. Then he began to remove any number of strange metallic bits, pipes and cylinders and gleaming silver cogs. He inspected each carefully before lining them up on the canvas.

“Seven languages,” Gertrude confirmed. “My knowledge of mathematics, literature, law, philosophy, poisons, explosives, and espionage are, I think I do myself no exaggerated kindness in saying, second to no one still living within the Gardens.”

“You’re very clever,” Barley agreed. Having ensured that his inventory was complete, he had turned toward its assembly, hands steady, movement swift. “Everyone thinks so.”

“And the first thing he has me do—the very first thing—is dig a hole.”

“What can you say?” he slammed the last piece into place and stood upright, revealing the engine of destruction he had spent the last few moments building. “It’s in our blood.”

The organ gun was eight wide barrels rotating around a self-feeding cartridge belt. During the War of the Two Brothers the Captain had purchased a handful of them from back east, but they had proved too heavy and unwieldy to be used effectively. Three animals were generally required to operate one gun, and even then it was hard to move, and likely to jam, and only any good for holding a position.

Barley lifted it up against his chest with a low grunt. He strapped the attached pack of ammo to his back.

“You still using that absurd contraption?” Gertrude asked, packing an ash-wood pipe with a tuft of fragrant tobacco.

“No.”

Gertrude rolled her blind eyes mockingly. “A figment of my imagination.”

Somewhere ahead of them, hidden by the barn itself, was the crack of a scattergun, followed by another series of shots. The barn door opened suddenly and a rat burst out of it, rifle in hand, a stream of comrades close on his heels.

Barley waited for the first wave to make it out the exit before he started on his hand crank. The years of inactivity had done nothing to diminish the gun’s efficacy, nor the gunner’s expertise. For a full half-minute nothing could be heard over the explosive roar of the cannon. Not the sound of the firing pin hammering home, nor the echo of the spent shells falling against the ground. Not the screams of the rats, tightly packed inside the barn in anticipation of their coming ambush, nor the muted shredding of solid shot passing through their flesh. Not even the groans of the barn itself, whose infrastructure was not built to absorb punishment of the kind it was suffering. Barley raked his fire across the building with the cool deliberateness of a professional, as if this was a routine errand, of no particular interest. The rat who had first broken cover spent a moment held upright by the sheer momentum of the tossed lead, jerking maniacally like a marionette, before collapsing into a torn heap of gristle. One of his comrades hidden in the loft inside managed to ring out a rifle shot, but before a second could be managed Barley compensated, sending a spray of metal through the upper story and silencing any further rejoinders.

Then it was over, the gun going still, a great mass of corpses left to rot in the noonday sun, or growing cool in the shade of the now ruined barn.

Gertrude tamped down her pipe. “I suppose they were imagining the same thing.”

Barley allowed himself a half-smile. “Buncha daydreamers.”

Barley had been right, that day when the Captain came to see him. There was no one who killed like he did.

After thirty seconds or so the artillery ended. The Captain pulled a cigar from his pocket, lit it, and took a few shallow draws. “You sure?”

A knock on the door was followed a moment later by Cinnabar’s snout. “Everything all right in here?”

“Fine,” the Captain said. “Just having a chat.”

Cinnabar nodded, then retreated back into the afternoon sun.

The Captain let the cigar smoke pool around his furred face. “Well?” he asked, after a while.

“Surely you don’t expect me to talk?”

“More than expect.”

“My rat did too good a job. I’ll be dead in five minutes, and if you try cutting at me I’m sure I’ll go sooner.”

“You’ve got too thick a hide to be trying torture in any circumstance,” the Captain said.

Zapata coughed up something that had more red in it than yellow. “Too kind.”

“But you’re going to talk to me anyway.”

“And why would I do that, Captain? Why would I think to help you?”

“Because you hate Mephetic every bit as much as you hate me. And it’ll do you good, heading off into the next world knowing that one of us is going to kill the other, sure as eggs is eggs.”

Zapata’s laugh shook his torso violently and unquestionably shortened his life. “Maybe you’ll both go together,” he said, “and I’ll watch you walk into hell arm in arm!”

The Captain shrugged. Theology was not his strong point. “Maybe.”

“Give me a shot of whiskey.”

The Captain got up from his chair, grabbed the jug from off the floor, and laid it beside the soon-to-be corpse. Despite his injury Zapata managed to uncork it and raise it to his lips. Liquor spilled out his belly, along with blood.

“They’ve got him on a train circling around Santa Theresa, back and forth through no-man’s-land. Had him there ever since they gave him shelter back in aught-six. My people assumed that way the Younger couldn’t make an issue of it, but they still had him on hand in case he ever proved useful. Wait around until you see a train that looks like it shouldn’t be there. That’ll be the one to hit.”

“All right,” the Captain said simply, standing.

“You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?” Zapata said, taking a final drink. “I think maybe I hope Mephetic gets you after all.”

The Captain didn’t wait to watch him die, didn’t pay him another thought, just opened the door and walked smoothly into the light.

They were sitting around the fire when Elf came scuttling into view, awkward gait made more so by the corpse she held in one talon. The assembled party, expecting her arrival, managed to react with less shock than at her first appearance, though with no greater warmth. Most of them had hoped she would catch a bullet at some point during the day’s events.

Hoped, but not expected. It didn’t do to bet against the Elf.

She shuffled her way into the light, her one functioning wing speeding her ascent up the hill. When she reached the apex she dropped the dead rat against the sand and began to preen.

“Howdy, Elf,” the Captain said after a long moment.

Elf’s sharp beak darted up from her feathers, and she stared at the Captain as if just then recognizing him. “Hello, Captain.” Her pupils, ebony pearls offset in yellow, swiveled across the unfriendly row of faces. “Hello, friends.”

Cordiality dispensed with, Elf went back to cleaning herself.

The Captain broke the silence a second time. “Elf.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“What’s with the corpse?”

Elf looked down at her feet and bobbled her head in a sort of half-nod. “Oh. Yes. He was trying to escape. There was another one, but I decided not to bring it.”

“What possessed you to bring this one?” Bonsoir piped up.

Elf didn’t respond, though after another moment she looked back up and asked, “Did you receive satisfactory answers?”

The Captain nodded. “We’re off to Santa Theresa in the morning.”

“Well and good. I think I’ll take the evening air, before slumber calls me to her bosom.”

No one said anything for a while. Then the Captain said, “You go ahead and do that.”

After she had disappeared from the firelight, though likely well before she had left earshot, Bonsoir snorted from his perch. “If I carried every corpse I ever made, I’d be one myself from the weight.”

“Get rid of it,” the Captain said, turning back to his drink.

Bonsoir thought about grumbling, but it didn’t do to argue with the Captain. He carried the dead rat a few dozen yards beyond their campsite. They’d be gone before it started to rot.

“Coulda been the Dragon,” Barley said. It was him and Boudica and the stoat, and they were drinking quietly a little way out of the firelight.

“Wasn’t the Dragon,” Boudica answered with some degree of certainty.

“Why not? I know he goes back a ways with the Captain, but then . . .”

“What do you remember about that day?”

“What’s there to remember?” Bonsoir asked. “We’d won, or almost. Just a bit of cleanup left, then it was a long retirement, rolls of gold coin and fetching females. We were in the main room of the keep, drinking like we did every night, and then—”

“And then our old friends started killing us,” Barley cut in, and you might almost have believed him bitter about it.

“Where were you when that started to happen?” Boudica asked.

“Leaking liquor,” Barley said.

Bonsoir shrugged. “Underneath a table, I suppose. I was so drunk I can barely remember.”

“If you’d been there”—Boudica pointed at Barley—“and if you’d been sober”—she shifted her finger over to the stoat—“you wouldn’t need to ask.”

“But I was drunk,” Bonsoir responded, “so you’ll have to tell me.”

Boudica cocked her head back at the fire, and at the salamander quietly sitting there. “You ever notice, however much he drinks, he never gets drunk? When they came through the door he was the only one sober enough to do anything about it. Put down Alphonze the hedgehog, both of the Squirrel twins. Put them down like they was nothing. If it wasn’t for the Dragon, the Captain would be dead, and I’d be dead, and you’d probably be dead too.”

They chewed that over for a while. Then Bonsoir spat it back out. “That proves nothing. The cold-bloods, they aren’t like us. They kill just for the fun of it.”

“You kill for fun,” Barley responded.

“Not like he does.”

“Wasn’t Cinnabar,” Boudica said again, though this time she seemed less certain.

Barley and Bonsoir were standing a ways out from the main campsite, pissing with the wind.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me,” Bonsoir said.

Barley laughed, but he wasn’t.

“I figure it wasn’t the Captain,” Boudica said. “And if it was Gertrude we’d all be dead.”

“Coulda been Elf,” Bonsoir said.

“It wasn’t Elf.”

“No,” Bonsoir agreed. “It wasn’t Elf.”

“You sure it wasn’t Boudica?” Bonsoir began.

“Not really,” Barley said.

“I know who it was.” Neither Bonsoir nor Barley had any idea the owl was there in the moment before she spoke, so perfectly did her feathers blend in with the night, and so utterly silent were her movements. Elf raked them back and forth with eyes that were like talons. “I do,” she said, before hobbling back off into the darkness.

Bonsoir turned back to the badger. “I believe her.”

“Me too.”

It was just the two of them, as it often was lately, as it had been in the past. The fire had burned down to its embers, and the night had overtaken everything. Cinnabar lit a cigarette and handed it off to Gertrude, then started rolling another. “Were you surprised?”

“When they betrayed us?”

“Yes.”

“I was.”

“That surprises me.”

“No one is as smart as they think I am. No one is as anything as they think anyone is.”

“No, I suppose they aren’t.”

“Except you. You’re exactly as fast as they say.”

A match sparked. Two dots of light bobbed in the dark. “Why did they do it?” Cinnabar asked.

“Why do you think they did it?”

“I’m not as smart as you.”

“Still.”

“The usual reasons,” Cinnabar suggested. “Greed, lust, revenge, power, boredom. The Captain is unlovable.”

The one light was all by its lonesome. “Yes.”

“If they’d bothered to ask me—”

“Let’s not go down that road.”

“No. I was surprised at the Quaker, though. If ever two things loved each other . . .”

“What is love against instinct? We’re all animals, after all. How long can a thing go against its nature?”

It was completely dark. “And what is our nature?”

But the question was too obvious to need an answer.

Mephetic did not get angry when word came that Zapata had failed. He had figured Zapata would fail. The armadillo was loud, and the armadillo was hard, and the armadillo was even mean, so far as that went. But the armadillo was no match for the Captain. Still, it had been worth a try. Even the toughest bastard can catch a bullet in the back of the spine.

He had tripped up the last time, hadn’t he? Five years they’d gone back and forth, tearing apart the kingdom during the War of Two Brothers. An inaccurate name, one he wouldn’t have chosen. The Toads, Elder and Younger, had taken no part in the conflict—hell, Mephetic’s pawn had been trashed on opium so much of the time he couldn’t tell his head from his trunk. Really it had always been between him and the Captain, half a decade of red hands and black deeds. And the Captain would have come out the better of it, if Mephetic hadn’t managed to turn half his company and even one in his inner circle. Many were the Captain’s virtues—if being a bloodthirsty, iron-hearted, grim-eyed bastard can be considered laudatory—but he wasn’t an easy animal to work for, and there had been plenty happy to do him wrong, especially with the promise of gold waiting at the end of their betrayal. In the event, the Captain had ended up killing most of them, so Mephetic hadn’t even had to pay.

Not that Mephetic doubted his own forces would be any slower to knife his back, should the circumstances call for it, or even allow. They were deep in the heart of the inner keep, and Puss and Brontë were playing a game of pinochle. It seemed as though Puss was winning, though both participants were cheating so egregiously it was hard to say for certain.

Mephetic took the missive he’d been reading and tossed it into the fire.

“I take it they escaped your little trap?” Puss asked. Puss rarely missed the chance to revel in the misfortune of another, though the Captain’s survival little benefited him either.

“This one.”

“They must be awful tough”—Puss paused a moment to lick down a piece of fur—“if they managed to put the armadillo in the ground.”

“I doubt they bothered to bury him.”

“What about this Dragon?” Brontë asked, slipping a card surreptitiously, or what she imagined to be surreptitiously, from the fold of her dress. “Is he as fast as they say?”

“He’s fast.”

“How fast?”

“Slower than a bolt of lightning. Somewhat quicker than a hummingbird’s wing.”

Puss laughed. Brontë realized she’d just been made fun of, thought about getting angry, then remembered who Mephetic was and laughed also. There were upsides to being the boss, Mephetic often thought. It had been worth it, all the blood he’d needed to spill to get here. Wasn’t his blood, anyway.

“And my bird?” the Quaker interrupted, the words stretched across the thing’s forked tongue. “What about my bird? What about my sweet, lost bird?”

Puss stopped laughing. Brontë had already stopped laughing, but she looked a bit less jovial all the same.

“She’s there,” Mephetic said, making sure not to look away.

“You’re sure?”

“Our spy says so.”

The Quaker tucked his head back into his coils, but didn’t say anything else. He seemed happy, to the degree that such a quality could be attributed to a rattlesnake.

“Far be it for me to play spoiler”—though in fact there was nothing Puss enjoyed more—“but I can’t help but observe that, thus far, the Captain’s hardly playing according to plan.”

“Zapata wasn’t my plan. I’ve got a man on the inside.”

“The one who betrayed them the last time? If this . . . mouse”—the last word spat out with the sort of contempt one would expect from an ancestral predator—“is all you say, I’d be wary of relying on the same gag twice.”

“It’s not the same gag. And it’s not the same traitor.”