The Five Faces (The Markhat Files) Read online

  “Doris, over here,” said Stitches. She smiled, weary and somber, but it was a good smile, the first I’d seen on her. A little dog yapped.

  “I keep my promises,” said Stitches. “Let him loose, Doris. Come, Cornbread.”

  Cornbread came running, his leash trailing in his wake.

  He leaped up into Stitches’s lap and licked her face. A limping, halfdead corpse shambled into view and stood motionless beside our table.

  Stitches scratched Cornbread behind his ears.

  “You died before I could return him to you,” said Stitches. “So I kept him. He has endured wrack and ruin, the fall of Rannit, the rise of the death god.” She nuzzled him, face-to-face. “He chewed my last pair of slippers to bits as well, didn’t you, boy? Didn’t you?”

  Cornbread licked her chin and gave her a big, toothy doggy smile.

  Stitches put him gently on the floor. He sat on his haunches and looked up at me, ears lifted, tail wagging. I held out my hand, and he came forward and sniffed it and then we were friends. “I sent Doris for him as soon as I was convinced you were Markhat,” she said. “Now. The dead woman. What use is she to you?”

  “Bait,” I said. “I want to use her as bait. But you have to know this. What I’m about to ask will probably get you killed. And even if it works, I’m not sure you’ll live. This whole world could just go poof. Or not. I just don’t know.”

  She nodded. “You intend to step back in time.”

  “Can’t kill the death god now. Am I right about that?”

  “The giant, the man you knew as Vucik, is no more. The godlet rose within him, consuming him in the process. It is now a god, and as such is functionally invincible.”

  “So I go back. Back to when Vucik was an Ogre half-breed being worn by an infant godlet. It’s the only way.”

  Stitches shook her head. “You died, Markhat. Nothing can change that. I am sorry. But that is truth.”

  “I’m here. I left before I died.” I held up the fate god’s coin. “This lets me walk outside of time. The other me has one too. The death godlet doesn’t know about either.”

  “May I see it?”

  She held out her hand. I tried to place the coin in her palm, but it passed through her and landed in my lap.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Is that significant?” I asked.

  “The talisman is only for you,” she said. She thought for a moment, her brow furrowed in concentration. “You stepped outside of time before your death, you say.”

  “I did.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if you can change your destiny. I don’t know if the presence of two such coins will allow you to merge two paths of time. Frankly, I doubt even a godlet could craft such a talisman, given the energies involved.”

  “You were surprised to see me come strolling to your door,” I said. “Maybe I’m not done surprising you yet. If you’re willing, knowing you could die, or unravel the universe, or both.”

  Stitches was silent for a moment. Cornbread stirred and she idly rubbed his head. Then she shrugged. “It’s not much of a universe these days. If it unravels, so be it. Let the gods amuse themselves with an eternity of vacuum.” Her eyes took back their old steel. “What sort of a surprise do you have in mind, Captain?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Preparations took three days.

  It took Stitches and me and a dozen of her animated corpses an entire day to reach the dead woman’s burial site. A day just to get there, and half the night watching her skeletal servants dig.

  Stitches kept watch on the sky. She said the death god was vigilant, always sweeping his gaze across his dead domain.

  Finally, a shovel struck something solid. It took the dead a couple of hours to unearth a lead-lined box. Etched sigils and hex signs covered every portion of its surface.

  We waited for nightfall before setting out for Avalante with the box. Stitches said her spells would conceal us from the death god, but not the necromancer’s keen eyes, and she had no way of telling where the old witch might be lurking.

  We lost one of our dead on the way back. It simply collapsed, bones falling apart. Stitches stumbled, and I caught her arm, and her hood fell back just enough for me to get a glimpse of her face.

  She was pale and covered in a sheen of sweat.

  She shook off my arm and marched on.

  Cornbread greeted us with barks and a little dance back at Avalante. Stitches bent and hugged him, then hurried off with her prize to make ready for the night’s festivities.

  I decided I wasn’t going to unravel the fabric of reality without a nap, so I settled into a corner and slept. Cornbread curled up with me, just as Petey had done.

  We slept until a pair of skull-faced humans poked us awake.

  “It is done,” said Stitches. “Shall I prepare for us one last meal?”

  “Let’s call it an early victory feast instead,” I muttered, rising. Cornbread yawned and rolled over for a belly-rub.

  “As you wish. My larder is somewhat bare, but I believe I can manage. Ernst will lead you to a washroom, if you wish to make yourself presentable.”

  The closest of the desiccated corpses nodded and motioned for me to follow.

  “Come on, Cornbread,” I said. “Let’s go make ourselves handsome. We’re dining like gentlemen tonight.”

  The dog pricked up his ears and followed at my side.

  As was befitting the last supper before the destruction of the universe, we enjoyed a damned good bottle of wine.

  I was dressed for the occasion. My own clothes were tattered and soiled beyond any hope of laundered redemption. Stitches had her corpses lay out clothes by the armload, and I rooted through the stacks until I managed to clothe myself.

  Since this had been Avalante, my choices of garment colors ranged from black to black. I’d opted for black trousers, black belt, black button-front shirt with a conservative collar, and a long, black overcoat that had the heft and shine of silk but wasn’t. Stitches claimed the material would turn knives.

  I topped it all off with a sleek, black hat. I regarded myself in a mirror and imagined Darla’s touch for a moment, felt her adjusting my collar and the tilt of my hat.

  I left the dressing room quickly after that.

  “This was the crown jewel of Mr. Prestley’s collection,” reported Stitches as she poured the wine. “It took him a decade to procure. He planned to serve it at his wedding.” I still wasn’t quite accustomed to hearing her voice in the usual fashion. “I don’t believe he would begrudge you the pleasure of its company.”

  I raised my glass.

  “To Evis,” I said. “To Evis, and his wedding, and all the other days that never were.”

  “To those we lost,” she added. “May the death god choke on his own rotten tongue.”

  We drank. The wine was sour. I didn’t touch it again, after the toast.

  Stitches had done the best she could with what was left in Avalante’s deep larders. We had beef jerky, boiled potatoes, rock-hard biscuits, and the same dried beans the Army used to serve ten months out of every twelve. Cornbread had a bowl of his own and a corpse to tear his jerky into bite-sized bits. At least one of the three of us enjoyed the meal.

  Stitches just moved her food around. “You plan to leave tonight,” she said. She wasn’t asking.

  “I do.” I put down my fork. “Look. Maybe there’s some way I can take you with me.”

  She smiled at me.

  “You’d try, wouldn’t you? Hopeless as the effort would prove?”

  “Hell yes.”

  She shook her head. “Thank you. But no. I will remain here and carry out my task.”

  “That reminds me.” I reached into my fancy new jacket’s inner pocket and withdrew the silver cylinder Evis left for me. “Do you know what this is?”

  Stitches dropped her fork, went wide-eyed, knocked her chair over backwards when she stood.

  “Don’t move,” she said, her voice
barely more than a whisper. “For Heaven’s sake, don’t move.”

  “No offense, Your Sorceresness, but I’ve crawled, swum, fallen, and rolled across town and time with this in my pocket, and it’s never said boo. But I’ll put it down, if you want. Carefully.”

  I did so.

  “So you know what it is,” I said.

  “Where did you get such a thing?”

  “Evis. He left it for me, the day of the first big battle. His note said to throw it at trouble and run, but that’s all it said.”

  She picked up her chair, being careful not to bump the table when she sat.

  “All those years of searching for one, and Evis had it tucked away in a drawer.” She shook her head. “You say you’ve carried it? In a pocket?”

  “Yes. And here I am, intact. You were about to tell me what it is.”

  She eyed it as though it were a coiled serpent. “It has no name in Kingdom. A loose translation would be ‘wrath of Heaven,’ or perhaps ‘anger of the gods.’”

  “Powerful, then.”

  “One such object sent an entire continent sinking beneath the Sea.”

  “Evis did say to get behind something sturdy.”

  “The entire Kingdom might not be sufficient to shield you from the blast.”

  “I’ll be sure and plug my ears with my fingers too, then.”

  “Markhat. This is no matter for jest. That artifact is older than Buttercup. And far more dangerous.”

  “Dangerous enough to kill the godlet, if I use it in my time?”

  She pondered it.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. But the collateral damage—”

  “Can it get any worse than this?”

  She lifted her glass. “I will concede that point.”

  “Anyway, maybe the old stories are all wrong. I’ve bounced it from the past to the future and all points in between, and it never misbehaved.”

  Silence.

  “Have you got anything better stashed away?”

  “No.” She glared at the thing and then looked away. “No, I do not. May I ask how you plan to employ the Wrath of Heaven?”

  “I’m going to distract Vucik. Cause a conflict between the godlet riding him and the man inside. If I can get them to struggle, even for an instant, get the godlet to loosen its grip—if I kill Vucik then, won’t that leave the godlet with no body to act through?”

  She gave me an are-you-kidding look.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Doris,” called the sorceress. “Bring more wine. Hell’s bells. Bring it all.”

  While Buttercup and Cornbread played chase beneath our table, Stitches and I drank all the wine left in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was midnight, and the dead city lay underfoot.

  I set out, wobbling a bit. Buttercup skipped at my side, emitting just enough light for Cornbread and I to pick our way through the rubble.

  I hadn’t planned on taking Cornbread, but Stitches was insistent.

  The little dog licked her face as she held him and said goodbye. Licked her face and wagged his tail.

  She’d put him down and turned away and vanished into shadow. I wondered how many other times she’d said goodbye.

  Must be hell to live forever while all those you know turn to dust.

  Not that I had any such concerns. I was alone and exposed, the last living man walking literally on the bones of a slain city. A death god was waiting to watch me die, and I was hurrying toward the appointed time and place.

  All in all, my prospects seemed dim.

  Buttercup skipped and hummed, all smiles. Cornbread scrambled amid the debris, his stubby tail wagging furiously, as though we were out for an afternoon stroll in Rannit’s once-green Park.

  I shifted Cornbread’s leash to my left hand and fished in my pocket for the fate god’s coin. I didn’t take hold of it yet. I wanted to walk for a bit.

  The moon was still in hiding. The stars wheeled past above, untouched and unchanged by the devastation below. The Churches hold that our Angels fell from those stars, once upon.

  I doubt that now more than ever.

  The slilth ambled past, south of town, blotting out the pinpoint stars as it walked. It seemed to be carrying something, a vast shape huge beyond my reckoning, though what it bore cradled in its many legs I could not say.

  The death god, if he stirred at all, did so invisibly.

  Bones crunched beneath my feet.

  Stitches had been right.

  It wasn’t much of a universe these days.

  I took out the fate god’s coin, said a rude word, and flipped it high into the silent dark.

  I blinked at the light of a full, bright moon.

  The air smelled of smoke. Shots and screams rode the wind. Fires burned all about me, distant but raging.

  Cornbread pressed close to my calf and whimpered. Buttercup stopped skipping, and her dolly became a skull in the moonlight.

  I heard the death god cry out, heard a thousand screams join the echo of his voice.

  “Not far enough,” I said, and I flipped the coin as I took another step.

  Smoke, thick and choking, enveloped me. People screamed and ran past, so close I felt the wind of their passage. “Harold! Harold!” cried a woman.

  I flipped the coin, kept walking.

  Daylight, more screams. Cannon fire in the distance.

  Flip.

  Night. The death god laughed. The ground shook with the thunder of his tread.

  Flip.

  Smoke, cannons, screams.

  Flip.

  I kept walking. Kept flipping the coin. I had a destination in mind, and I wasn’t willing to compromise. “You know where I need to go,” I said. “Enough. Take me there.”

  And just like that, I arrived.

  Rannit smelled like Rannit. Horses and smokestacks. Sewers and cooking. The sounds were right too. People talking, laughing, shouting, grumbling.

  I led Cornbread under the shade of an awning and slipped the coin back in my pocket. Buttercup was nowhere to be seen.

  “Ho there,” I said as a trio of wary-eyed young toughs strutted past. “The date and the time, if you please. There’s a copper in it for each of you.”

  Bewildered, they spat it out.

  I’d arrived at what I figured to be the day after my death.

  Just in time for my funeral.

  I handed out coins. The toughs eyed me, probably weighing up their chances of taking me down for the contents of my pockets against the likelihood a wealthy madman might manage to land a blow.

  “Too late, gents, I’m already dead,” I said.

  I let them see Toadsticker, and off they went.

  Stitches had revealed the location of my funeral, so I didn’t have to take a tour of Rannit’s better undertakers. Instead, I marched right to the tall, black doors of Simfeld and Sons, Morticians, May We Serve You in Your Hour of Greatest Need.

  I did pause at the door. I considered hiring a lad to precede me, to explain that Mr. Markhat’s death, while quite real, was also perhaps premature.

  Then I played out such an attempt in my mind, and I flung open the doors and pushed past Mr. Simfeld and at least two of his sons, and I moved to stand in the pew behind Darla while a red-masked priest droned on and on in prayer.

  “…I implore thee, oh Angels, to bear this good man to rest, and see him safe to Heaven, where he shall one day be reunited with his loved ones beneath a clear and untroubled sky…”

  Darla bawled. She wasn’t crying. She was racked with great, hoarse sobs, her hands clenched over her face, her body shaking with each gut-wrenching exhalation. She was held up by Gertriss on her left and Evis on her right.

  I put my hand on Darla’s shoulder, leaned into her ear.

  “Don’t cry, hon. Please don’t cry. I’m not dead. I’m right here. Turn around.”

  She turned. She slapped me, good and hard, and then she looked down at her hand and fainted dead away.
/>   Gertriss cussed and aimed a gun at my gut. Evis whirled, dead eyes flashing, and I never saw the keen steel blade he laid at my neck.

  “Glad to see you too,” I said, moving nothing but my lips. “Nice turnout. Hope they’re serving snacks.”

  People turned. Eyes widened. More weapons were drawn. A ring of silent halfdead, all clad in Avalante black, closed in.

  Mama Hog pushed her way through the vampires, saw me, and squawked.

  “I knowed it! Damn, boy, I knowed it!” She trundled ahead, batted Evis’s knife away, buried her face in my gut as she hugged me. “I told them you wasn’t dead.”

  “Not quite yet,” I said. Evis dropped his knife but found a gun.

  “Who and what are you?” he said. “My friend is in that box.” I saw the coffin at the front of the room. I couldn’t see my face, just the knuckles of my folded hands. “Some damned trick of that witch-woman?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. Cornbread barked from down around my ankles. Buttercup appeared briefly atop my coffin, giggled, and vanished.

  “Boss, is it really you?” asked Gertriss.

  “Hell yes, it’s him,” gruffed Mama. She glared hard at Gertriss, who lowered her revolver. “Now give the man some room, and fetch me a beer.” She grinned up at me. “We’s got some things to discuss.”

  My side of the story took half an hour to explain.

  Theirs took a little longer, because Darla kept being sick as they told it.

  She’d seen me die the night before. Watched Vucik beat me to death. I’d not managed to throw the Wrath of Heaven. He’d broken my arms first.

  She’d lived only because Evis had hauled her out of there. She emptied both her pistols first, right into the giant’s chest.

  She said he hadn’t even stumbled.

  The first battle between Avalante and the death god had gone no better. Avalante’s best weapons had wreaked havoc on the old wall and two blocks of shops, but hadn’t scratched the giant.

  I told them of my time with Stitches, how I’d seen Rannit ravaged and destroyed. Evis didn’t seem surprised.