The Mister Trophy (2 page)

“Somebody sicced a Troll army on me, Mama,” I said. “I’m betting it was you.” No one but Mama knew my haunts that well.

Mama Hog grinned. “The Walking Stone found you, did he?”

“He did,” I said. “And his friends.” Mama motioned me inside. I went, and she shut the door.

“Smells like you’re brewing up something special, Mama,” I said, while she settled her stooped old bones into a chair and motioned for me to be seated as well. “Wouldn’t be Troll after-shave, would it?”

“Might be a drought to shut smart mouths,” said Mama, brushing a tangle of matted grey hair out of her face. “Then where would you be, boy?”

“Out of work.” I shoved the owl aside and picked up a worn deck of fortune cards. “What’s in my future, Mama?” I asked. “Trolls? Gold? Angry vampire hordes?”

The old lady snorted. “The half-dead are no joke, boy,” she said. Her eyes might be old, but they’re sharp as knifepoints, and they glittered. “No joke.”

I plopped down a card. “Neither are Trolls, Mama,” I said. “This bunch might wind up losing their tempers. Soon.”

“They might,” said Mama Hog, her voice softening, losing some of the old-hag put-on rasp. “Certainly so, if they find that which they seek.”

I threw down another card. “So you know?”

“I know.”

“They tell you?”

“They told me.”

I shuffled, cut, tossed down a card. “So who else knows? Eddie? The Watch? Who?”

Mama Hog smiled and scooped up the three cards I’d tossed out. “No one else knows,” she said. “I told them to trust you, and only you.”

“You told them that? Mama, why in the Nine High Heavens did you tell them that?”

“Your fate and their task meet now, Finder,” she said, her eyes bright and hard in the candlelight. “Meet, and mingle, and merge.”

“Drop the carnival soothsayer act, Mama,” I said. “It won’t wash with me.”

She slammed a card—one of my three cards—down on the table, face up in the flickering light.

I could just make out the worn, faded image of a man running away, a sack slung over his shoulder. Coins dribbled out of a tear in the sack.

“Greed,” said Mama Hog. “Flight. Abandonment. How much can they pay you for your soul, Finder?”

“I don’t know, Mama,” I said. “How much do you charge for fate?”

The second card went down. Crossed daggers glinted against a half-full moon. “Vengeance,” hissed Mama Hog. “How many lives will you waste to avenge a single death?”

“Six,” I snapped. “Maybe five, if it’s wash day.”

The third card hit the table. On it a skeletal hand beckoned, bony forefinger crooked in invitation.

“Death,” I said, standing. “Even I know that one. Death, the Final Dancer, the Last Guy You’ll Ever See and Boy Will You Hope There’s Been a Mistake.”

Mama Hog stood as well. “Jest if you will, Finder,” she said. “But take care. You stand at a crossroads. One way leads to the dark.”

“How much do I owe you, Mama?”

Mama Hog went stiff. All four feet of her puffed up and for a moment I honest to gods thought she was going to slap me. Then she let out her breath in a whoosh and broke into chuckles.

“No charge to neighbors,” she said. “Even disrespectful unbelieving smart-mouthed jackanapes who don’t know their friends from their boot-heels.”

“My friends don’t usually send feuding Trolls to my door, Mama.”

“This one did,” she replied. “Now get out. I’ve got an appointment.”

I stomped blinking into the street, telling myself that Mama’s cards were just so much tattered pasteboard and third-rate flummery.

The street stank, and in the absence of my Troll friends, it bustled. Wagons creaked, carriage drivers cussed, horses snorted, and everywhere people rushed back and forth, hurrying against the daylight so the night people could have the city by night.

A man passed in front of me, a sack slung over his shoulder, just like on Mama’s card.

I fell in step behind him all the way to Haverlock.

“And you have no appointment, sir?”

“No. None. Nada.”

The doorman shook his head and doddered away. He’d already asked twice about my appointment; I’d told him twice I had none. He’d checked with the other doorman anyway; both had retreated to the far side of the foyer and were consulting a leather-bound appointment book amid a blizzard of hushed words and furtive glances.

“Look, gents,” I said. “I really don’t have an appointment. I wouldn’t even know who to have an appointment with, unless you’ve got a man in charge of antiquities, decorations and ornamental taxidermy.”

The doormen exchanged suspicious glances. “Taxidermy? Are you a tradesman, sir?”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s right. I’m Wiggle, of Wiggle, Stiff and Waxed, Taxidermists. I’m here to polish the eyes of the Troll head His Honor Haverlock hung in the trophy room right after the War—”

The younger doorman snorted and stalked off, but I wasn’t watching him. My eyes were all for the older man, whose expression had gone from bored indifference to full-blown terror at the mere mention of the Troll’s head.

He shut his jaw and took a breath, but he couldn’t hide the sudden flush on his face or the sweat popping out on his brow.

“Relax,” I said. “I’m joking. My name is Markhat. I run a Finder’s outfit down on Cambrit. I’m here to inquire about the Troll’s head, that’s all.”

He licked his lips. His eyes darted right and left. I could see he had things to tell, and reasons not to tell them, and he was weighing the “what ifs” against the “if thens”.

“I’m not here to start any trouble,” I said, softly. I put on the same kind of smile I’d flash at a fussy baby and hoped I had better luck than I usually did. “I’ve been hired to find out if a Troll’s head is here. That’s all. Yes or no.”

I widened my smile. “My clients will of course be happy to pay for information,” I said. “I believe they’d be most generous.”

He was about to speak. He knew better, but something that looked like an uneven combination of guilt and greed had tipped the scales, just like I’d hoped it would.

The doors on the far side of the foyer suddenly banged open and a small, well-dressed army of cooks, gardeners and coachmen marched inside, a tall cadaverous butler at the fore. “Get out,” he said, addressing me with the boldness that comes with knowing you’ve got the other guy hopelessly outnumbered. “Leave this House at once.”

The doorman with things to tell joined his comrades, his eyes downcast, his jaw set and grim. Whatever he’d wanted to say was gone, and I doubted I’d ever tempt it forth again.

But I didn’t need specifics to know I’d found at least part of what I’d come for.

I fixed the skinny butler in a steely glare. “Your shoes could use a shine, Reeves,” I told him. “I won’t have you besmirching the House with your sloth again.”

Then I hung my nose in the air and beat it out of there. I was sure they’d throw me out anyway—I just wasn’t sure they’d open the door first.

I put the tall dark houses and the big green lawns to my back and set a brisk pace. The wind in my face was off the Brown River; it stank of dead fish and cattle-barges and, always, something burning, but I sucked down lungfuls of it anyway. House Haverlock had smelled of undertaker’s flowers, and mortuary perfumes, but even the combination of both couldn’t quite erase the odor of death that rode the air in every ornate hall or well-appointed room.

But I’d stomped on a memory in the old doorman, and that caused me to remember something as well—stories about a big dust-up in the Heights about ten years back. Half-dead in-fighting is hardly unusual—they kill each other much more often than they kill us day folk—but this clash had been unusual in that most of a five-House common hall was demolished and half-dead were actually spotted fleeing the scene, cloaks flapping, shiny shoes a blur.

What if Mister Smith wasn’t the first Troll to come calling in the Heights?

Somebody bumped into me and cussed because I’d stopped dead in my tracks. I muttered an apology and took off.

Even Trolls, it seems, like to edit their truths.

Chapter Two

I sat in my office and watched the sun sink. Nine bells rang and curfew fell across Rannit like the ragged cloak it is, which meant that the brave, the foolish and the felonious were still very much out and about. The Watch would stop a few curfew-breakers, send a few home and make “Well, what do you expect?” faces at missing persons reports tomorrow.

I stowed the Trolls out of sight but in easy reach. Mister Smith was in my room behind the office. Mister Jones was in Mama Hog’s, next door. Mister Chin was squeezed in the alley two Troll-strides down the street.

There’s a street-lamp right across from my door, and every shadow it cast at my office was that of a half-dead, slinking my way with murder on its lips and mayhem on its mind. I got out my old Army field knife and laid into the long steel blade with a whetstone, pausing to admire its edge only when a shadow bobbed toward my door.

Two hours after Curfew, he came.

I never saw a shadow.

I looked up and my door was opening and there it was, tall and thin and pale. Filmy eyes that looked like dirty marbles met mine.

I put down the knife.

Blue lips pulled back from wet white teeth. “You are the finder Markhat?”

I nodded. The Trolls might as well have been a million miles away.

“I am Liam. I come on behalf of Haverlock.”

I found my voice. “Nice to meet you. Pull up a chair. I’ll have the butler bring us drinks.”

Liam sat, dead eyes boring into mine like he could see secret things written on my bones. “No wise-cracks, Finder,” he said. “I was sent here to kill you. Rip you apart, specifically. I’m trying to do this another way. You aren’t helping. So again I ask—why did you come to Haverlock today?”

I gave up trying to keep up with his unblinking half-dead stare. “I came on behalf of a client,” I said. “A Troll client. He wants to know if a dead relative wound up decorating your master’s trophy room. I came to Haverlock to see. I believe I explained all that to your domestic staff, before they cited a dress code and showed me to the curb.”

“What did you see,” it said, leaning a hair’s breadth closer. “And what did you tell?”

“I told my Troll friend I was tossed out,” I said, adding a little emphasis to the word “friend”. “I told him I saw no Troll heads. I also told him I think it’s there, somewhere.”

It lifted a pale eyebrow. “You told the Troll that?”

“I did.” I forced my eyes back toward his. “And I was right. It’s there, or you’d be out grabbing breakfast instead of sitting here making spooky eyes at me.”

It grinned. Just for a heartbeat, but it grinned a crooked grin and I saw the ghost of the man it once was.

“You got a mouth, Markhat,” it said. “Reminds me of me, once upon.”

I guess I ogled. It shook its head. “Surprised I’m still human?” it asked. “I’m full of surprises tonight. First, I’m not going to kill you, so that Troll next door can put down his axe and relax.”

“He likes holding his axe,” I said. “Keeps him from getting fidgety.”

Liam grinned again. “We wouldn’t want that. In fact, we don’t want any trouble at all. So what if—and this is just a what if—what if I gave you a certain Troll artifact that may have mistakenly wound up here after the War? What if I apologized, and handed it over, and walked away? What then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is this you talking, or old man Haverlock?”

“Doesn’t matter to you. Answer the question.”

“It does matter, and you answer mine. You or Haverlock?”

He ground his teeth. “Do you know what happens to us when we get old?”

“Fancy dentures?”

His fist hit my desk, and the mask of humanity fell away. “Some go insane. Haverlock is insane. He wants you dead and your Troll friend dead and he’ll risk the whole House over a moth-eaten curio nobody has seen for ten years. Some of us don’t share his mania. Now answer my question.”

I shrugged. “I just don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the Troll will walk. I doubt it—Trolls don’t work that way. The honor of the clan has been besmirched. One of their cousins spent twenty years wandering around the Happy Hunting Ground without a head to whistle with.”

“What about wereguild? We could pay.”

“Trolls don’t want your money.”

It ground its teeth again. “I’ll ask my Troll,” I said. “But not with you sitting here. You’re a Haverlock—he’s honor-bound to start the War again if you two wind up in the same room.”

“I’ll be back.” Liam rose, and a man with a proper skeleton never moved like that. “I hope you have good news.”

“Sit back down,” I said. “You’ve left out a few things.”

He kept standing, but cocked an eyebrow and stood still.

“You haven’t told me how I stay alive after I wave goodbye to my Troll pal, if he takes your offer,” I said. “Say Haverlock goes to cuddle his favorite War trophy, finds it gone. Say Haverlock finds out that the finder Markhat is still walking around with his head and all his limbs attached. Won’t the Haverlock fly into a snit and send less contemplative boys back around my door, late one night?”