The Builders (9 page)

Bonsoir slipped a claw into the outer door of the citadel, just before it banged shut. He waited a few seconds to make sure Gertrude had taken care of her end, then tailed afterward. Two dead rats testified to the mole’s competence, not that Bonsoir had been foolish enough to doubt it. There was a reason everyone feared the Underground Man. Her reputation did not rest on sand.

Nor was Bonsoir’s. He picked the lock on the next door and scampered ahead, as confident in the reinforcements as he had been in the advance force. Gertrude had marked the trail—it was Bonsoir’s job to bust it wide open.

Though, in truth, it was a task unworthy of an animal of Bonsoir’s talent. The mole had left most of the guards she’d passed dead or rapidly dying, purple-faced or with thick trails of blood leaking from their canines, victims of the seemingly endless packets of poison Gertrude carried on her person. All Bonsoir had to do was take care of the stragglers and make sure all the doors were unlocked, and he had trouble with neither. It didn’t hurt that he had lived and worked in the palace for years, knew it like the back of his own black-furred hand.

Bonsoir stopped just short of the antechamber leading into what had been the Captain’s office some years earlier. Two guards still waited outside; for some reason Gertrude hadn’t managed to find a way to kill either of them. The mole is slipping, Bonsoir thought to himself, though he did not really believe it. The first rat had a knife in his throat all of a sudden, collapsing to the ground so swiftly and so quietly that at first his counterpart seemed to think he had fainted, was bent over trying to revive him when another of Bonsoir’s daggers opened a hole in his esophagus through which you could see his spine.

Bonsoir made sure to avoid the blood his handiwork had sent splattering onto the wall. He was a professional, after all.

His task completed, Bonsoir slipped off into the surrounding corridors, knives on his belt and dynamite in his pack, anxious to see what mischief his expertise might wreak.

A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica waited.

Bonsoir had taken care of the guards outside the throne room but he hadn’t done anything about the door itself. The Captain was a competent lock pick himself, as was Cinnabar, but it was easier just to have Barley break it down, which was what they did, the badger rushing against the door and then rushing right back out again, retching up the eggs he’d eaten for breakfast and the whiskey he’d drunk for lunch. With the door open, Mephetic’s emanations came billowing out, and rather than join Barley’s example Cinnabar and the Captain retreated back down the corridor. The badger followed as soon as he was able, and they let the stink filter out awhile before returning.

Gertrude had died hard. A full blast of Mephetic’s reek and still she had struggled, crawling facedown toward the door, her blood streaking against the marble floor. But she had managed to right herself before expiring, leaning against a wall, slump-shouldered, her face mute with the agony of her final moments. The stench that came off her corpse was uncanny, unbearable though Cinnabar bore it, kneeling down beside her, holding his hat to his chest.

“Rough way to die,” Barley said, but this was as far as his sympathies went. He had never liked the Underground Man, particularly, and anyway, none of them were very likely to survive till morning.

“Let’s go,” the Captain said.

But Cinnabar didn’t answer.

“Cinnabar.”

“One moment.”

“We don’t have the time.”

Everyone knows, of course, that salamanders are a breed apart. Their blood is cold, their humours bitter; they know neither sympathy nor passion. They take no lovers, only mates, and they don’t have friends, only allies, and even then only so long as they’re convenient. Everyone knows that. Everyone.

“There’s time if I say there’s time,” Cinnabar said.

The Captain stared at him for a long moment but in the end it seemed he agreed, or at least he did not move onward. Cinnabar looked back down at Gertrude and said nothing further. Somewhere below there was the sound of an explosion and the floor rocked uneasily. Something screamed, and then stopped screaming. Gertrude’s eyes were wide and red veined and despairing. Cinnabar closed them and stood. “All right,” he said.

Bonsoir was having a grand time.

The Captain had been right, that first night when he had come recruiting. Bonsoir had been wasting his time in dusty border towns, amid rundown bars—and more than his time, he had been wasting his genius.

Everything had a purpose, that was the way Bonsoir saw it. Bees make honey, songbirds trill, pretty females strut down the sidewalk on sunny afternoons and pretend they do not know you are looking at them. The rest of the crew, Barley and Cinnabar and so on, they were kick-down-the-door types, guns-blazing types, die-in-the-spotlight-with-blood-on-their-grin types. Not Bonsoir. Bonsoir scuttled down darkened corridors and brought sleep with him—not even death, death was too strong a word for what he brought, for the silence that descended when he came. That was Bonsoir’s purpose, that was why Bonsoir existed. And what is more joyous than to act according to our innermost nature?

Which brings us back to: Bonsoir was having a grand time.

Though it must be said, Bonsoir’s mind was not occupied solely with pleasure. It had occurred to Bonsoir—if he was to be absolutely honest, which he wouldn’t have been—it had occurred to Bonsoir some days earlier that he could still remember the location of the treasure vault, hidden deep within the subterranean layers of the inner keep. And it had also occurred to Bonsoir that this vault, which under normal circumstances would have been so thickly guarded that even Bonsoir couldn’t have had much hope of breaking into it, would, under these current conditions, likely be denuded of its normal compliment of soldiers. Worth looking into, at least. It was all well and good to enjoy your business, but Bonsoir was a professional, as has been mentioned, and a professional does not work for free.

There were some rats guarding the treasure chamber, though not nearly as many as usual. To get through them Bonsoir had to act with less subtlety than he preferred, tossing one of his few remaining sticks of dynamite, then coming in hard and fast with his knives in the second after it exploded. One of the rats got a shot off, but it went wide, and he didn’t get a second. When the smoke cleared there were Bonsoir and three dead rats and a multicolored collage on the wall that Bonsoir assumed were the remains of a fourth.

It took nearly half an hour for Bonsoir to pick the lock, and he did not think he was being unduly arrogant—though Bonsoir was, admittedly, titanic in his self-regard—in saying that there was not another creature alive who could have managed it in twice the time. Still, it was longer than he liked to spend out in the open, with his back turned, and he felt his heart trill when the lock
snick
ed open, and he could slip inside.

Awaiting him was a clear blue spring to a creature dying of thirst; awaiting him were a mother’s arms to a weeping babe; awaiting him was that final moment of release for which all living things secretly long. Even in these late days, after five years of misrule by Mephetic and five before that of civil war, the Gardens were a prosperous place, and the tax collectors ever busy. There were walls of scrip of all sorts, scrip from every one of the major banks and most of the kingdoms back east. But what is scrip, when compared with hard gold, heavy octagonal coins in thick cloth sacks, bars laid crossways? And what is gold compared to the innumerable glittering treasures, sterling jewelry and fat gemstones, emeralds and rubies and diamonds and things for which Bonsoir did not know the name?

It was the most beautiful sight that Bonsoir had ever seen, and he could not be blamed, or at least he could not have been blamed much, for the moment of shock that followed, for dropping his guard and staring in wonder at the wealth better than love that was now his.

But blame him or not, he paid for it.

“What a fascinating development,” a voice said from behind him.

Bonsoir snarled and turned to throw one of his knives and felt something explode in the center of his torso. At first it was more a sensation of force than pain, but the pain came quickly on its heels, and the pain was worse than anything he had felt in a long life of misery. Then he was on the ground, and above him stood the handsomest little white cat you could ever want to see, grinning from ear to ear and watching Bonsoir bleed.

“By Cromwell’s ghost,” Puss said, “I hope they’re not all in the bag so easy.”

They were running through one of the many courtyards, heading toward the inner keep, Cinnabar in front, then the Captain, then Barley. They had given up being quiet but they were still trying to be quick, and so far they’d had no trouble, Cinnabar’s hands making a handful of rats into a handful of corpses.

They had just passed the main guardhouse when the alarm bells began to ring. The Captain looked at Barley but didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything; Barley had already unlimbered his cannon from off of his back, was checking on each of the little spinning bits and smiling brightly. The Captain continued on the way he was going, toward the heart of the castle. Cinnabar bothered with a good-bye, an uncharacteristic bit of sentimentality for the Dragon—and an unnecessary one.

Because Barley wasn’t paying any attention; his eyes were huge and they were fixed on the guardhouse, and he wore a smile that was more of a leer, and after a quick moment, a very quick moment, Cinnabar followed the Captain, sprinting toward the inner keep. Barley gave the barrel of his gun one last spin, heard its familiar
clickety
-clack
, and smiled wider. He began to walk backward slowly, till his great mass was blocking the path that the Captain had escaped down. He counted the seconds. He was as happy as a pup on Christmas morning, as a maid on her wedding night, as a wolf before his bloody red supper.

The first group of guards came out of the entrance, guns drawn and eyes wide with excitement, or perhaps terror. For certain it was terror in the next moment, the darkness of the courtyard lit by the muzzle-flash of the organ gun, a muzzle-flash that was blinding bright, a muzzle-flash that brought death with such speed and in such numbers that it seemed scarcely conceivable. Soon there was nothing left in the guardhouse—nothing left alive, I mean—and then and only then did Barley’s gun go silent.

But it started up again a few minutes later, when reinforcements arrived, as loud as before and to the same effect. It took the rats a long time to realize they were better off not sprinting straight into the courtyard—rats are not known for their tactical sense. Really rats aren’t known for much, except for being numerous and dying easily.

Or at least they died easily that day, even after they started taking cover in the surrounding buildings and trying to snipe at Barley. He was well positioned in the dark, and at this point the mounds of corpses he had made acted as cover. It took twenty minutes for one of the cleverer rodents to remember the heavy artillery, and another twenty to wheel one out from its position on the battlements. They wasted a lot of ammo finding the proper range, though they did a good job of destroying large sections of the castle.

And in the meantime Barley continued his work,
rat-tat-tat,
rat
-tat-tat.
And to find an equal to his tally, to do that bloody arithmetic—if one was inclined to do so, if one’s mind ran in that sort of direction—one would have needed to compare him against disease, and time, and heartbreak.

Barley’s body was never found. Of course, it wouldn’t have been found even if it was there, not buried under all that rubble. Maybe, after the thing was over, after all of the killing was done, he shouldered up his cannon and disappeared again, this time making sure he buried himself so deep that no one, not even the Captain, could find him again. Or maybe the rats caught him with a shot from the howitzer, one of those shells goes off nearby and there’s no need to worry about burial, not for a badger or a St. Bernard or a blue whale.

All that can be said with certainty is that when Barley did shuffle into the darkness, as all of us must, he had company waiting to meet him.

Cinnabar was winding his way through the courtyard, the Captain in tow. The night echoed with Barley’s covering fire, even a long way distant, drowning out the usual evening sounds. But all of a sudden, just the same, Cinnabar stopped, and the Captain stopped after him.

“What’s going on?” the Captain asked, wise enough to know Cinnabar didn’t do anything pointlessly.

“You go on ahead,” Cinnabar said simply. “I’ve got business.”

“You need any help?”

“No.”

For a moment it seemed the Captain would say something. Cinnabar was his oldest friend, if the Captain could be said to have those. But perhaps he couldn’t, because in the end he just scowled a little harder and hurried off.

When Brontë slipped from the shadows it was impossible to imagine she could have remained hidden for so long, given her size. But Brontë wasn’t just big; Brontë was quick, and Brontë was agile, and if it hadn’t been for Cinnabar’s strangely keen perception Brontë might never have been noticed at all.

“I could have killed you both, just then,” Brontë said, tapping the handle of the blunderbuss at her hip.

“You could have tried,” Cinnabar said, rolling a cigarette.

Brontë was no stranger to the act itself, but never in her life had she seen it performed with such rapid precision, as if the salamander had willed the thing into existence. Maybe this made her nervous, and maybe that was why she started to talk.

“All the stories about you, I admit I’d expected more. The deadliest creature in the Gardens, the greatest gunslinger ever to slap iron. Mephetic still talks about you, about how many of his soldiers you killed. About some shoot-out near Black Fork where you put an entire family of rabbits into the ground in one go. And here you are, a mottled cold-blood in an old hat. But then I suppose that’s the way of legends, to grow over-large in the telling.”

Cinnabar sighed. How many times had he heard this line, how many dozens, maybe hundreds? Some mean-looking animal on the other end, trying to convince themselves that Cinnabar wasn’t the most dangerous thing the gods had ever made. It had gotten so damn tiring, being the Dragon. If he had it to do again, Cinnabar sometimes thought, he wouldn’t have become it.

Cinnabar lit his cigarette, took a long, slow drag on it, then let it fall to the ground and stamped it out with his heel. “I guess I should be easy killing, then.”

Brontë’s smile was mostly fang. “Deserved or not, you’ve got a big name. And when you die, I’ll have a bigger one. Dragonslayer.” Brontë let her palm stray down to her double-barreled cannon. “Dragonslayer. I like it.”

Cinnabar didn’t bother to respond, nor even to move his hands closer to his weapons. His eyes might have been taking in Brontë’s movements, or they might have been staring at the moon that had risen, full and bright and beautiful, above the turrets of the inner keep.

Brontë went for her gun.