Tithe to Tartarus Page 13

  He said, “You will remove whatever mark or rune you placed on my cloak, hatcheck girl, ere you return it to me in my hand. Your heart’s desire will be returned to you when mine is to me.”

  “Whole and unharmed!”

  “Whole, unharmed, unmolested, in her right wits, unenchanted, well and happy and alive. Yes. You have the oath of an oathbreaker.” He scooped her up in one strong arm and, bowing at the waist, lowered her from the saddle.

  Her tiptoes were touching the pavement, but he had not yet released his arm from around her, when a hideous scream of terror echoed from overhead, louder than the bellowing of bullhorns, the scream of sirens, the roar of flames. Yumiko looked up.

  She recognized Licho by his dark suit and fluttering tie, the dark glasses whose fragments spun off his face into the night air. He was flung off the roof and went plunging down and down, shrieking as he fell, legs kicking in midair. Two arrows, one from either eyesocket, protruded from his skull, and two streamers of blood, like red ribbons, followed after him in the air.

  There was a line of Peach Cobbler Girls in top hats, corsets, and silk stockings, quailing and hugging each other, between Yumiko and the spot of pavement Licho struck, so while Yumiko heard the shrill screams of those who saw the grisly impact, she did not see it herself. One of the girls, Anjana, pointed upward and cried, “It’s him!”

  There, atop the roof, silhouetted against the flames, his cloak of black feathers streaming in the rushing heat, his elongated mask like that of a plague doctor, or like the beak of a carrion-eating raven, loomed a black and sinister figure.

  He had a violin in hand and was playing a wild, mad tune she recognized: the Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens. He was using the back of a short, curved blade as his fiddlestick, with the catgut stretched between the tip and the hilt.

  Death at Midnight plays a dance-tune,

  Zig, zig, zag on his violin…

  The firelight caught a glint of this goggles as he turned his mask, looked down, and met Yumiko’s gaze. There she stood, still on tip-toe, still with her shapely hands on the broad shoulders of Sir Garlot, who still had one arm about her.

  Three wolf-shaped monsters on the roof came leaping out of the flames toward the dark figure. The dark figure calmly slung his violin behind him and took his Japanese longbow from his shoulder. Vast black wings opened, and the flames reared back from him, and he was carried smoothly upward into the billowing clouds of ash and smoke, bringing one of his attackers with him. A moment later, whining pathetically, a wolf fell from the cloud, blood gushing from its jaws, struck the corner of the building, and toppled downward, leaving long red streaks against the stones. The other wolves yowled, biting insanely at the arrows now protruding from neck and spine and flanks.

  Then, her view of the building roof was blocked, for Garlot had raised his shield overhead with the arm not encircling her. She looked at him. Garlot was smiling down at her. It was the gloating smile of a man who likes having his arm around a pretty girl. Fretfully, she extracted herself from Garlot’s arm and stood on the pavement.

  Garlot straightened in the saddle and displayed toward her his shield. A red arrow was protruding from it. “Meant for me, I hope. I would hate to think your famous partnership had been fractured. Now see to your business. If my cloak burns, I will burn your little friend.”

  “Are we back to that?” She scowled. “What of mercy? What of thankfulness?”

  “What of idle fancies? What of all airy, unreal things? The world is marred! Blame not me, but the ill will of the Maker who foresees all evils and prevents none, slothful in omnipotence! Will you stand idly, doing nothing, like him in whose likeness you boast you are made?”

  And from his saddlebag, he drew out a small cylinder of blue glass. In it was Elfine Moth, half crumpled in a ball, dazed or half asleep. The volume was too small to allow her either to sit down or to stand erect. When her prison bottle moved, Elfine stirred and straightened, straining against the glass walls confining her. Seeing Yumiko, her face brightened, and her wings lit up. She pounded against the glass with her little fists. “Ami! I’ve been elf-napped! Save me!”

  Garlot drew back his arm as if he were about to cast the bottle into the hottest part of the burning building. “Not all the floors seem lit yet,” he said mildly. “Which is it to be? For you are going into the fire either way, either to retrieve my treasure or yours.”

  Instead of answering him, she said to Elfine, “I am coming back for you!” Yumiko shot her wirepoon toward an upper window and was yanked swiftly upward and away.

  2. Iach and Iohanna

  Yumiko twisted her ring to return her weight just before her boot heels struck the window. She crashed in through the glass. Her supersuit went momentarily stiff and tough to deflect the razor sharp shards, and her foot hit the exact spot in the wooden panels beyond to spring the latch. She fell into the room awkwardly, did a shoulder roll, and came to her feet in time to fetch up against the desk, strike the edge with her belly, and fold in half with a dazed gushing, elongated grunt of air from her mouth.

  The room was as she remembered it: red carpeted, wedge shaped, with the two walls receding from each other as they ran from door to desk coated with full-length mirrors. The difference was that it was dark, the room was filled with smoke, the electricity was out, and the only light was a line of fluttering red glowing around the threshold and jambs of the door. The paint on the door was blistering and peeling from the heat.

  Light also came from the small man, dressed like a miniature caveman, trapped inside a whiskey bottle lying on its side on the desk. He was floating motionless in the fluid.

  A touch of cold traveled down her spine. A voice spoke in her ear. Open the door. I am so alone.

  She straightened up in shock. “Who is there?”

  Save her.

  At the same moment, the little man inside the bottle stirred, and his eyes opened. He saw her and screamed, “Don’t hurt me! He forced me to do it! I would surely have done anyway ’cause it was right funny, but that doesn’t count! I was temporarily insane by reason of permanent drunkenness! You deserved it anyway!”

  Yumiko saw shadows break the line of light gleaming under the closed office door. Someone was standing there. She heard the pounding of little fists on the door, a sob, and a voice cursing. Then, “Open this door!”

  It was Joan Lantern. She had not made it out of the building.

  The little caveman shouted. “Don’t open! She’s insane! Never open doors during a house fire!”

  Yumiko saw the button on the desk which unlocked the door. She pushed it. The door swung open. A red glare of leaping flames jumped into the room, and a roar like a beast as oxygen from the room gushed into the anteroom and stoked the flames there.

  A woman was staggering in the doorway. She started to fall, but, strangely, impossibly, something unseen caught her and pulled her in. A gust of wind pushed the door shut with a sudden slam. Darkness and smoke were within. Joan took another step, staggered, and fell.

  Yumiko leaped over the desk, caught Joan in her arms, and lowered her to the carpet. In the dark, her lenses could not deliver a clear picture of how severe Joan’s burns were. Thinking quickly, Yumiko pushed back her mask (which made the room dark to her), turned up the oxygen gain in her suit, knelt, and put her throat on the nose and mouth of the other woman. Fresh air rushing from the suit played over Joan’s face.

  Another tremor seized Yumiko. She shivered with cold.

  A voice spoke. Wake! Wake, lest ye die!

  The little man cried out, “Don’t let her near me!”

  The band of red light from the door threshold was falling across Joan’s face. Joan’s eyes fluttered open. “Jack? Is that you?”

  Yumiko said, “Sorry. It’s Sorry Yunomi. Don’t stand up. There is smoke in the room.”

  Joan said, “Find the hob! I am so alone. Save him.”

  The house hob, at that moment, was gyrating madly inside his bottle so that the sideways whis
key bottle began to roll across the desk. Yumiko, without moving, shot her wirepoon, flicked her wrist, caught the bottle in a loop of the wire, and yanked it to her hand.

  “This house hob? Him? Is this who you want to save?” Yumiko asked. “Let’s get you out of here–”

  A sudden memory came to her. Sly Jack Crookshank had said he had selected Yumiko to save him because the other girls would have demanded things presumably less to his liking: Joan would have me free her husband.

  Yumiko pushed the bottle into Joan’s hands. “Here he is. Make him free your husband.”

  With surprising strength, Joan reared up and slammed the bottle into the carpet, smashing it and cutting her hands on the glass. “Free him!”

  Yumiko tossed back her head to lower her mask. In her lenses, she could see the little man lying in a puddle of broken glass and rich-smelling whiskey. He coughed in the smoke. But the little man said, “Fie on thee! Queen once, now thrall! Speak to me my own true name! Or else devil a foot I stir at all!”

  Yumiko said, “Bakemono is his true name. I know. I named him.”

  But Joan said, “Seanglic Coscam, Sly Jack Crookshank, is thy name! Damn your eyes, my boon I claim! My love release from ward and debt! All that he owes this house, forget!”

  The little man shrieked like a steam whistle and clutched his face. “Not my eyes! Not my eyes! I grant it! Be free! Jack! Thou art clear and clean of me!”

  Yumiko said, “Wait. What is going on? The real Crookshank is gone. You are a copy!”

  The smoke in the room suddenly drew back, and frost gathered on all the mirrors. In the middle of a building on fire, the mirrors were turning pale with cold.

  Yumiko twisted her ring. She saw a headless body of heroic proportions, painted blue with woad, with designs of owl, lions, and jackals in colored inks painted on his chest, belly, and thighs. A rude loincloth of buckskin hid his loins. In one hand were two javelins with heads of napped flint. But he held his own severed head in the other hand, long of locks and long of mustache. The empty eyes were dripping tears, the neck stump dripping blood. Above the shoulders, where no head was, burned two pearls of luminous fire, and the jagged grin of a disembodied mouth. The links of broken fetters fell from his wrists and ankles. He replaced the head on his neck stump, and now the eerie flares of light shined from the holes of his eyes and from beneath the mustache.

  Joan could see this apparition in the mirrors. She rose to her knees. “Iach! Iach Lochrann! My love! Your Joan has not forgotten you! I have been true! A thousand years are gone, and your lady has not wavered!”

  He answered nothing. Joan raised her hands. “Beloved! Tell me, O, tell me wither you go! If to Heaven, I will run to the cathedral, break my wand and all my dark oaths, and be baptized! If to Hell, I will curse the Holy Spirit and fling myself from yonder window and be buried at the crossroads as a suicide!”

  Now he turned the terrible pale lights of his eyes toward her. “I cursed Heaven and was accursed of Heaven. Now in woe I wander the earth to expunge my evils but also to work thy good. For look! Here is the handmaiden of Saint Barbara, who brings the host to those who die unshriven and unrepentant, or suddenly from thunderbolts, and whose mercy steps into the moment between when the heart stops and the soul flees the body.”

  There came a flash of lighting and a thunderclap as loud as a field gun when the ghost spoke the name of Barbara. Crookshank, scrambling along the damp, glass-strewn carpet, screamed and tripped and fainted away.

  The shade continued speaking. “When this handmaiden presents the destined cup, be contrite ye then. Forswear the Dark Lord and all his trumperies and hollow pomp. His promises are lies. Seek me no more by the unlawful ways of necromancy, nor sell yourself again as slave to a magician. He will be here soon.”

  “Tell me what to do!”

  “As yet, you have no soul to save. That, and all other ills, will be undone and mended. Aid the handmaiden once she has her mother’s cup, and by her repentant prayers and yours, gain you the grace of kindly Heaven. I linger in this formless limbo of unlife to speak these words of hope. The living waters that issue in a flood from the foot of the throne of the Kingdom of Light rise and rise to welcome you. You have forgotten how to thirst for them.”

  Joan said, “For me? For me alone? Or for us both?”

  The ghost said, “It is not for you to know what Heaven wills but to rejoice in it.”

  “If not for us both, then I curse Heaven! Your embrace I want, not some pale Nazarene! Your wife am I, not his!”

  “Wife of mine no longer: greater joy awaits than connubial.”

  Crookshank stirred and came awake, croaking, “The living should not heed the words of the dead! Ignore him! Seek your good only in yourself!”

  “Seek ye the greater joy and gain all, and more than you dared ask. Foreswear to seek lesser joy, lest ye lose all.” The ghost grew in size and filled the room. The inaudible voice was like a trumpet inside their skulls. “Rare indeed is granted the gift to speak from the beyond to one’s living love, albeit we all crave this with our dusty hearts. Will you not hear what I have said? Will you not save the soul I love more than mine own, my dear Iohanna?”

  The ghost vanished. The heat returned, and the smoke closed in. At that same moment, the beam from a spotlight shined through the window Yumiko had broken open and splashed across the ceiling, blindingly bright. Joan saw Yumiko in the mirror, saw the black, bat-winged suit and ginning fox mask, and screamed in terror.

  Yumiko twisted the ring to make herself visible. “Joan! I am a friend!” Of course, once the dark figure materialized just next to her, Joan screamed yet again.

  A loud voice, amplified through a bullhorn, called up. Joan, moving more swiftly than any woman of the Day World, dove over the desk and out the window. Yumiko leaped after her, snatching at her legs. Her fingers closed on nothing. Yumiko grabbed the jambs of the broken window lest her momentum carry her out into midair.

  Looking down, she saw Joan, bewildered, land in the net the firemen were holding.

  Crookshank was standing on Yumiko’s shoulder, leaning casually against her ear. “Faith! An odd thing, that. Certain death to leap from so high a window, save in one and one hour only: when the building is all afire. That is an irony, eh?”

  3. The Rule of Debts

  Yumiko snatched him up into her hand.

  “Not this again!” he groaned. “By the eyeball of Balor, woman, you do have lively reflexes, don’t you? Are you part rattlesnake? ’Twould explain much.”

  Yumiko said, “Why are you back here?”

  “I live here. This is the house I mind. Just because you lit it afire don’t mean I leave my post. We are not all like you, after all. By the bye, where is that grail you are supposed to be looking after? Shouldn’t you have taken up your mommy’s work by now?”

  Yumiko shook him until his teeth rattled. “Why are you back here?”

  “Ah! Agh! I never left, you stupid bint. Willy knew you from the moment you walked in, wiggling your hot hips like a slattern! The Captain, he wanted to torture you straight off, but Willy, he likes tricks and sleights and subtleties. That is the way magic is. It never works on you until you have been told. That is why the elfs tell the magicians so much of the dark lore, and the magicians in Hollywood and New York put these things in stories and books. The vampire bite can’t bite unless you hear about them as a child. Why else would we not use the Black Spell to sponge all memory of us away? Why would we let anyone remember the name of Jack o’ Lantern? He is as old as the Picts, older than Caesar.” Crookshank shivered and looked around nervously. “Don’t mind me! Go back to what you were doing!”

  She narrowed her eyes and shook him again. “So you told me how it works. Because you had to.”

  “Don’t you wish you had a memory like an elf? Now, can you bring to mind the exact wording I said? No, no, you cannot. Poor thing.”

  He put his little hands on her finger and thumb and pushed them open. She strained, but in v
ain.

  The tiny creature, less than nine inches tall, now twisted her thumb so painfully, she was forced down to one knee, wincing. He threw back his head and laughed. “Girly, did you think to overmaster me? I let you grab me. I wanted it. Your hands are soft and fair, and feeling you caress my body lights up my love-lamp. And when I anger you, how brightly you blush! How your bosom heaves! Your eyes, how they flash! Every time you changed clothes, I watched you! Do you really, truly think a half-blood Daughter of Eve can outsmart a true-blood Son of Air and Old Night? Pshew and Pshaw! I let you start this fire because I mean to build this house back bigger and finer than before after Wilcolac returns from the Tithing Ground with all the bounty the devils will pay for the soul of your Poor Tom Moth. He thought he could outwit Rotwang, poor Tom, who had him outwitted nine ways from Saturday! Heh, heh. Get it? That is sort of a joke.”

  “I did not light this fire.”

  “You or your master. What does it matter? He has only stopped the last shipment of wolves from going out. There are nine hundred in the City of Corpses! Numbers enough to raise havoc even if the Black Spell will not be broken. It will warp and weaken, and then men will still go mad! And then your boy goes to the Tithing Ground!”

  “Where is that?”

  Crookshank released her thumb and hopped up onto the broken window jamb, looking down at her. “Hah! Hah! If I knew, I would tell you, for then you’d be damned certain to be certain damned. None can find that dark soil save he who walks through the Devil’s own door!”

  Yumiko rose to her feet, scowling, troubled.

  He cawed. “And now are you here to steal back what Willy has rightfully stolen? The Cloak of Mists is hidden, and in my house, as long as I am here, I ordain that you will not find it. You will never find it!”

  Just at that moment, the signal from the tracer hidden in the cloak stopped. On another channel the two tracers hidden in the crates downstairs also stopped. It was not hard to guess why. The electronics were not designed to pass through a furnace level of heat unharmed.