The Darker Carnival (The Markhat Files) Read online

  Come one, come all! Step right up to the terrors that stalk the midway.

  The Markhat Files, Book 9

  When Dark’s Diverse Delights arrives by night to set up shows and rides that promise fun and excitement for one and all, the outskirts of Rannit begin to look disturbingly like the nightmares that plague Markhat’s sleep.

  Mama Hog has sent him a new client, a cattle rancher with a missing daughter. Markhat’s search reveals genuine terrors lurking amidst the carnival’s tawdry sideshows, where Death itself takes the main stage every evening, just past midnight.

  The orchestrator of the murderous, monstrous mayhem is the mysterious carnival master, Ubel Thorkel. And after Buttercup the Banshee is threatened, Markhat is in a race against time to find the carnival’s dark heart and strike it down once and for all—or die trying.

  Warning: Left unattended, this book is prone to rotate corn crops, eschew oral hygiene, engage in long-distance artillery exchanges with remaindered copies of C.S Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia”, and provide unwelcome commentary during rush-hour traffic. Readers are advised to exercise extreme caution during vertical take-off and landing of Harrier fighter jets, because that’s just basic common sense. At no point should this book be considered a substitute for professional medical advice or paprika. Especially paprika.

  The Darker Carnival

  Frank Tuttle

  Dedication

  To everyone who keeps buying Markhat books, keeping the series alive. I thank you, Markhat thanks you, Darla and Mama and Evis and Gertriss thank you!

  Chapter One

  My body lay sleeping, snug in my bed, but I walked the woods far away.

  Once upon a time, I’d have called my walk a dream. Called it a dream and dismissed it with a laugh, if I acknowledged it at all.

  Once upon a time, I’d been a damned fool.

  I’ve grown far too intimate with magic. First I told the huldra my name, let it sneak into my heart when I thought Darla dead, when rage drove me to throw away my soul for a whispered promise of vengeance. Then I’d walked with the huldra, cloaked in its dark sorceries, spilled blood while it rode me and took root.

  I’ve dreamed with the Corpsemaster. Danced with things Hag Mary dredged up from some timeless deep. Stepped out of time itself, seeing this tired old world through a banshee’s ageless eyes. I’ve brushed up against so many dark and deadly powers even the Corpsemaster and her kin can no longer see beneath the stains the old magics have left.

  So when I found myself striding through the night, with the mightiest and oldest of the forest oaks brushing my knees, I knew it was no mere dream.

  I was outside Rannit’s walls, well south of the city. The Brown River lay like a silver ribbon in the moonlight on my left. The low hills the Regent recently clear-cut to make ties for his new railroad shone bare and ravaged at my feet.

  I walked, three hundred feet tall, now and then, but I did not walk alone.

  The slilth ambled along at my side, its flexible clockwork legs coiling and curving in the moonlight, each limb a narrow shaft of quicksilver glinting in the night. It made no noise as it walked, not so much as a whisper, its legs slipping between bough and branch as deftly as a dancer’s, and as light.

  The slilth has no face, no body, no head. It is merely a gaggle of long appendages which hold aloft a smooth, featureless ovoid lacking eyes, ears, or any visible orifices.

  Stitches claims the slilth to be an ancient construct of immense and irresistible power.

  It dipped its ovoid head at me, as if in silent recognition, and together we crossed the river, one step, two steps, three.

  The barren hills lay below us, scraps of bare timber and freshly wounded earth all that remained of the ancient forests.

  The slilth paused, turning its eyeless face this way and that across the midnight sky. Then it diminished in stature, until its silver not-face barely peeked above the closest hill.

  I followed suit, shrinking myself, fixing my eyes on the spot I judged the slilth to be watching. We waited together in silence.

  An hour passed. The slilth raised a delicate silver tendril toward the east, and it was then I saw the first balloon.

  The first, and the next, and the next, sailing in line as if tethered. They floated out of the night, soaring high, but dropping until I saw the lanterns that hung like yellow-gold jewels on the cables that held them together.

  Five balloons, then ten, then another and another and another. Thirteen in all, each larger than the last, all lit by cautious lanterns.

  I didn’t hear the mastodons until they came charging over the crest of the nearest hill. A line of the brutes three strong appeared, and the tread of their furry tree-trunk feet shook the ground beneath me.

  The beasts wore enormous yokes, from which ropes rose up, vanishing into the night.

  “So that’s how they do it,” I said to my silent silver friend.

  The slilth made no acknowledgement. The mastodons thundered down the hill, shouldering aside the few bent saplings the lumberjacks had spared.

  A trumpet blew, and the furry beasts came to a halt. They stood swaying, tusks worrying the ground, snuffling and stomping and head-butting, but remaining more or less in place.

  The stink of them washed over me, dream-state or not. I pushed it aside with a casual tug at the shadows that hid me.

  The balloons bobbed into sight above us. Trumpets sounded in the sky, were answered by ones on the ground. Ropes fell. Men shouted. More horns blew.

  The slilth dipped a silver tendril down and scribbled in the mud left by the lumber-jacks and their wagons. The pattern the slilth traced out was foreign, alien, a thing that wasn’t quite letters and wasn’t quite a drawing and wasn’t quite a warning, but something in the sweep and swoop of the lines it drew in the moonlight sent shivers up and down my fifty-foot spine.

  The first two balloons touched down. Men leapt from the boat-shaped baskets, swarming about like ants, driving stakes and casting lines and making them fast.

  A mastodon raised its trunk and trumpeted. Soon, its fellows joined it in a primal, ancient roar.

  The slilth never made a sound. But the tone of its silence changed, in some subtle sense my slow poisoning by magic allowed me to discern.

  The slilth’s not-words, had they been spoken, would have been something very much akin to ‘here we go again.’

  I cussed.

  The slilth’s scribblings flared, as if each furrow was filled with oil and set suddenly alight. Just as I was about to make out the meaning of the spiraling lines, my fool body woke and my wandering spirit fell headlong into it as the slilth absently waved goodbye.

  Chapter Two

  I woke early, not rested and aching.

  I heard Buttercup’s tiny bare banshee feet scamper across my roof. She giggled, and then she was gone.

  Darla slumbered at my side. Her hair, black and soft as crow feathers, hung across her face. I brushed it away from her eyes and laid a kiss on her cheek and then slipped out of bed. Cornbread, the shaggy mutt that shares our home, settled into the warm spot I just vacated and wagged his tail once in thanks before snoring off into doggy dreamland.

  I dressed in the dark. I tiptoed across the red Balptist rug in the living room with my shoes in my hands, got the door open and shut and locked without making a sound. I know which of the porch floorboards creak, since I loosened the nails myself, so I stepped over them and made it all the way to our waist-high iron gate before pausing to put on my shoes.

  I watched my bedroom wind
ow. No match flared, no candle came quickly to life. Cornbread obliged me by not barking or scratching at my door.

  Buttercup slipped her cold banshee hand into mine. I’m so used to having her sneak up on me I no longer jerk or start.

  “Good morning, sweetie,” I whispered. “You’re glowing. Let’s play the hiding game, right now.”

  The golden radiance that flowed from her died. She giggled and raised a finger to her lips, as I did the same.

  I glanced about at my neighbors’ windows. None were lit.

  And even if they had seen, what would they say?

  Buttercup tugged at me, pulling in the direction of Cambrit Street, whence lay my office and, I suspected, a plate of Mama Hog’s biscuits and sorghum molasses.

  The sun was more than an hour from rising. Curfew was still in effect across Rannit, which meant anyone a peckish halfdead caught outside was fair game for breakfast, and I was standing in the street with both my shoes untied.

  But I had a vampire revolver in my right pocket and a ten thousand year-old banshee holding my left hand and I’d walked with the slilth not so long ago.

  Boot soles scraped cobbles. My hand found the butt of my revolver.

  Buttercup giggled and pointed down the street before vanishing.

  A man walked out of the night and into the dim, wobbling glow of a street-lamp.

  I relaxed my grip on the revolver, but didn’t pull my hand away. I could tell at once my fellow Curfew-breaker was no halfdead. He shuffled, for one thing, walking slowly while dragging a noisy burden on a wheeled contrivance behind him.

  Like any breed of the rich, halfdead seldom roam the streets dragging their own carts. Too, this man’s hat was a shapeless, baggy lump, not one of Breed Street’s crisp starched offerings.

  The man saw me, halted, waved.

  “Good morning to you, friend,” he said. He pitched his voice carefully, so that it just reached my ears, but wouldn’t carry much further. “Might I inquire as to whether you live hereabouts?”

  I wasn’t sure he could see a head-shake, so I took a half dozen steps ahead and spoke.

  “Nope,” I replied. “I’m just a man out for a stroll.”

  He nodded, smiling. “Well, count your lucky stars, man out for a stroll. They call me Shango. Shango the storm-sniffer. I’ve walked all night, following a stink. And it leads right to yonder door.”

  He pointed out the door. Naturally, he pointed out my door.

  The spear-ends of shiny steel rods poked through the tarp on his cart, here and there. Some were worked into the shapes of angels. Some as devils. One worked in the shape of a half-moon turned in the dim lamp-light.

  I sighed.

  “I’m guessing you sell lightning rods,” I said. The Church tried and failed to outlaw lighting rods inside Rannit a few weeks ago, apparently on the basis that the long steel sticks committed the cardinal sin of actually preventing lightning strikes. “Thwarting the will of the Heavens,” cried the priests. “I’ll take two,” cried the homeowners. Now the streets were lousy with lightning rod salesmen.

  He shot out of his slouch. “Indeed I do,” he said. “But not ordinary lightning rods. No, friend. I sell the kind of lightning rods even the rich cannot buy.”

  “Good for you,” I said. I started walking, hoping he didn’t notice my damned traitor shoe-laces flopping at my heels. “Now if you don’t mind, I always take my breakfast with the Regent.”

  He laughed, but he kept the sound low. “Won’t you at least have a look, Mr. Markhat? Won’t you at least have a look?”

  I produced my pistol and let him see it.

  “I didn’t tell you my name.”

  “But I told you mine,” he said. If the thick black bulk of my vampire-built revolver gave him pause, his dirty face didn’t show it. “Shango. I smell storms. I can’t hold back the wind, friend, but I can damn sure turn the lightning.” He nodded back at his cart. “No man should lack protection from the fickle wrath of Heaven.”

  “I’ve got all the protection I need.”

  “No,” he said. His eyes, which I still hadn’t seen beneath the bill of his pork-pie hat, glittered just for an instant as the moon briefly peeked out from the clouds. “I tell you plain, Mr. Markhat, that you do not.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “I’m not what’s in your way, friend,” he said. He stepped aside, sniffing at the air. “I’ll be working these parts for a while, I will. Ask for Shango, should you change your mind. Ask for Shango.”

  I put my gun back in my jacket pocket.

  About the time the squeak of his cart’s wheels bit into the silence, Buttercup took my hand again.

  “Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said, and with Buttercup skipping beside me I walked all the way to Cambrit, without a lightning rod of any kind to guard me from the fickle wrath of Heaven.

  Mama Hog shuffled about her tiny kitchen, muttering and snuffling under her breath at a volume designed to deliver the most relevant portions of her commentary right to my ungrateful, careless ears.

  “Wandering the streets after Curfew with nare but a slip of a child” was her theme of the moment. She’d exhausted “trifling with dark powers what you don’t understand” and the ever-popular “leading my flesh and blood right down the road to Perdition.”

  The last was, of course, a reference to my junior partner Gertriss, who is also Mama’s great-niece, many times removed. I think.

  They do things differently, down in Pot Lockney, Mama’s ancestral stomping grounds.

  Mama tricked me into taking Gertriss on as an assistant when Gertriss first came to town. Mama’s plan was for Gertriss to learn the ways of city folk and then take over Mama’s card-and-potion business. But Gertriss had decided finding was better suited to her than telling fortunes, and naturally, that’s my fault somehow.

  “I’m just surprised you didn’t have Gertriss running out ahead of your fool self, playin’ a fanfare on a trumpet so’s any halfdead hereabouts could get up a good running start,” said Mama, perhaps aware my attention was drifting. “Damn-fool city boy.”

  Buttercup giggled through a mouthful of Mama’s molasses-covered biscuits.

  “That’s actually not a bad idea,” I said, winking at Buttercup. “Don’t you have a trumpet around here somewhere?”

  I stabbed the last hunk of biscuit off my plate as Mama snatched it away.

  “You oughtn’t to talk foolishness with your mouth full of my victuals,” she said.

  “We both know Buttercup here could probably eat half a dozen vampires for breakfast,” I said. “Hell, she probably does that every morning. Isn’t that right, sweetie?”

  Buttercup responded with a perfectly-executed Army salute.

  Mama cussed and stomped away.

  “Thanks for the biscuits,” I said. “And the coffee.”

  “Pour yourself another cup. Buttercup, go dirty your face and put your wings on. I needs to have a word with this here uppity Finder.”

  Buttercup, her plate empty but her jaws still working, scampered for her room in the back of Mama’s sooth-sayer’s shop. Mama keeps a pair of ratty lace and cornhusk wings strapped to Buttercup’s back during the day. Nobody believes Buttercup is really a friendly wood sprite, of course, but as long as the neighbors chuckle to themselves behind their hands about the simple-minded street kid in the false Fae wings, no one sees the ageless banshee living next door.

  Mama plopped a pair of coffee mugs down on her table and shoved one toward me.

  “You stink,” she said, as she sat.

  “I do no such thing.” I sipped at my coffee. “I bathe regularly, every Yule.”

  “Ha. You stink of troll-horses, boy, and don’t deny it. Mama is old, but she ain’t blind.”

  Troll-horse is a country name for mastodon.

  I was surprised, and
it showed, and Mama crowed in triumph.

  “I knowed it! Don’t you sit there and lie to my face, boy. You was there when them troll-horses hauled them flying devils to the far bank of the Brown. You and that silver walking engine, what do the papers call it, the stilts?”

  “The slilth,” I said. Suspicion reared its ugly head. “So were you out hiking last night, or did you just see an early paper?”

  Mama slapped her hand down hard on the table, and her bright eyes looked hard at me through her wild tangle of gray hair.

  “I was there, boy. Ain’t no paper-writer seen what I saw. What we saw. I seen you, I seen the walking engine, I seen the troll-horses and the flying boats.” She took in a breath. “I seen, and I sent Buttercup to fetch you, ’cause we has business now.”

  “Business?”

  Mama nodded. “I can pay, if need be. But I hope you’ll hear me out, and take a stranger’s coin instead. He’s keen to pay, if he can find an ear to listen.”

  I bought some time by sipping at my coffee.

  Mama has sent more than one desperate soul to my door over the years. I’m a finder. If you’ve lost someone, or something, and you can seek out the finder’s eye on my door, I’ll try and bring home whatever or whomever you’ve lost.

  It’s a living, as long as it doesn’t get you killed. Which it nearly has, more times than I can count. That’s just part of the business.

  What has never been a part of the business is Mama asking me my thoughts on the matter before sending a client my way. She’s always just showed them my door, after promising I can work miracles. Which I can’t.

  “Mama, are you asking me for help? Without pretense, contrivance, or machination?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Damn. It’s too early to find a notary, and get this properly recorded.”

  “Is you or ain’t you going to help?”

  “I is. If I can. But Mama. You know as well as I do there are times and people that can’t be helped. People I can’t bring home.”

  “I know, boy. I reckon this is one of them times. I reckon ain’t you nor nobody else can bring these people peace. But if they can’t have peace, maybe they can get some justice. I reckon that might have to do.”