Hart & Boot & Other Stories Read online

  Pearl had a job all lined up as a traveling lecturer. A lady outlaw with risqué stories could really pack a room, and it wouldn’t be nearly so strenuous as sharpshooting in a Wild West show. She wasn’t much good with a gun anyway.

  She waved to the reporters as she boarded the train. They only knew she’d been pardoned, not why. They shouted questions, but she didn’t pay much attention. Her mind was on other things.

  One question got through to her. “Pearl!” the reporter shouted. “Are you going to meet up with John Boot?”

  They still thought she needed a man, after all this time. Would that ever change? “You’re a stupid bastard,” she replied mildly, and followed the porter to her compartment.

  Life in Stone

  After ascending seventy-two flights of iron stairs, creeping past tentacled sentinels lurking in pools filled with black water, and silently dispatching wizened old warriors armed with glaives and morningstars that proved a close match for his pistols and poisoned glass knives, Mr. Zealand at last stumbled into the uppermost room of Archibald Grace’s invisible tower. All Zealand’s earlier murders were mere journeyman work compared to this final assassination, the murder of a man who’d lived for untold centuries, who’d come to America and enslaved Buffalo spirits, who’d built this tower of ice and iron on the far side of the Rockies as a sanctuary and stronghold for his own precious life.

  Zealand rested for a moment, catching his breath. He got winded so much more easily now than he had as a young man, and he didn’t sleep well anymore, which made him jangly all day, most days. He leaned against a filigreed pillar of white ivory, a tusk or bone cut from some prehistoric—possibly even ahistorical—leviathan. Archibald Grace had doubtless slain whatever monster this ivory came from. He was a killer of such stature that even Zealand found himself humbled. Grace had murdered monsters, while Zealand had seldom killed anything but men. He ran his hand along the spiraled carving on the pillar, one of a dozen in the round tower room, and then he walked to the arched, open window. He looked down from the tower’s lunatic height onto the small town of Cincaguas, just another little place in the valley, whose inhabitants were unaware of the magical edifice rising on the outskirts of town, an invisible spire so high that Zealand could look down on a slowly gliding California condor.

  Having regained his breath, Zealand turned to face the center of the room. He unzipped his black canvas shoulder pack and reached inside to touch the haft of a stone-headed axe, an ancient implement fitted onto an unbreakable carbon-steel handle. Zealand approached the center of the room, passing the pillars, and saw what he’d been led to expect—a square box, two feet to a side, resting on an ivory pedestal. The box was a simple thing, made of aged wood worn so smooth that the grain was nearly invisible. Zealand drew one of his remaining knives, this one made of ceramic, and used the blade to pry open and lift the lid.

  The box was empty. Zealand stared at the space inside for a long time, going so far as to probe the inner edges with his knife, looking for a false bottom, but there was no such concealment. The stone simply wasn’t there. Despite all the effort he’d spent making his way to the top of this edifice, there would be no reward. He’d learned long ago that mere effort didn’t guarantee success, but this was an especially bitter reminder of that fact.

  Zealand sank to the floor, sitting cross-legged, resting his head in his hands. He was too old for this by at least a dozen years. In his younger, hungrier days, such a setback would only have infuriated and energized him, given him an adrenal surge and a slow-burning determination to soldier on, but he’d long since grown out of such dedication to his work for its own sake. For many years he’d crafted an image of himself as an implacable nightstalker, relentless avatar of death, and he’d seen his work as a sort of nightmarish inversion of a holy mission.

  But he’d just turned forty-five, he suffered chronic lower back pain, he found it increasingly embarrassing to sleep with prostitutes less than half his age, and he’d spent the past dozen birthdays and New Year’s Eves alone in his home amid the redwoods above Santa Cruz, California. He’d lost all illusions about his career. He was neither avenging angel nor cinematic assassin; he was simply a man who’d spent a lot of years killing people for money. This job was more of the same, despite certain baroque complications and supernatural curlicues.

  Though there was the promise of something more than money as payment if he succeeded in taking Archibald Grace’s life.

  Zealand got to his feet. No use mourning the moment of failure. Better to push himself, weary or not, onward to the possibility of success. He reloaded his pistols and redistributed his knives. Now he had to make his way back down to the foot of the tower. Maybe the guards wouldn’t harry him so, if he was only trying to leave. He could hope for that much.

  ***

  The next day Zealand met his client, the thus-far-immortal Archibald Grace himself. They shared their usual booth at their usual Italian restaurant, Grace drinking cheap house wine, Zealand sticking to water.

  “Damn,” Grace said. “I thought for sure I’d left it there.” Grace looked like a young man, with a neat black beard and eyes the clear blue of synthetic sapphires.

  “You were sure you’d left it in Mammoth Caves, too,” Zealand said with practiced patience. “Sure you’d left it in the Great Sequoia Forest, certain it was in your old summer palace at the bottom of Lake Champlain, and positive it was hidden behind Niagara Falls. I am beginning to suspect you need a tutorial in the proper meaning of the words ‘sure,’ ‘certain,’ and ‘positive.’”

  “I am sorry,” Grace said, looking into his wine. “You can have ownership of the tower, of course, as usual.”

  “Oh, good,” Zealand said. “It will go nicely with the mud-slimed cave full of ghosts behind Niagara, and the sinkhole decorated with obscene pictographs in Mammoth Caves. Though I admit the palace in Champlain is nice. If it weren’t also the den of an aquatic monster, I might even go back there. I’d like the tower better if it weren’t full of homicidal beasts and your wizened homunculi.”

  “There’s a phrase, to stop them from attacking you,” Grace said, making a familiar grasping motion with his left hand. “But I’ve forgotten it. I’ve forgotten so many things.” He still stared into his wine, as if he might find his missing memories at the bottom of the glass.

  Zealand, who was not a man given to casual gestures of physical affection, reached across to touch Grace’s hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll find your life, and I will crush it. You will die.”

  “I’m sure it’s in North America,” Grace said. “I moved everything with me when I came here. I came with the....” He made the grasping motion again.

  “The Vikings,” Zealand said, sitting back. “On the longboats. You’ve told me.”

  “I brought my life, my soul, hidden in a stone. Or, perhaps, an egg.” Grace cupped his hands around a half-remembered roundness. “All the wizards and witches and giants and monsters knew the trick, to put your life somewhere safe, so your body couldn’t be killed. So long as your life is safe, you live. We used to hide our souls in tree trunks, until the witch hunters began putting whole forests to the torch. As the trees burned, the souls burned, and sorcerers screamed across the continent.” He clucked his tongue. “Then, for a time, it was fashionable to hide your life in the head of a toad, but toads are stupid, and often get eaten, or die. I was always smart. I hid my life well.”

  “I know,” Zealand said.

  “But I’ve forgotten where I put it.” Grace looked up from his wine, into Zealand’s face, and for a moment it was clear he’d forgotten who Zealand was. “I’ve forgotten so many things. It’s hard to know which things are worth remembering, when you don’t have a soul.”

  “I know,” Zealand said again.

  “I used to be a giant.” Grace looked wistful. “Before I was a man. I broke the spines of mammoths in my hands. But I’ve forgotten how to be a giant, and I don’t want to be a man. I only want to die.”<
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  “I know,” Zealand said, for the third time. Three times was usually enough to make Grace stop going over the usual elusive reminiscences again. “Where should I look next, do you think?”

  “Look for what?” Grace said, blinking his beautiful eyes.

  “Come, then,” Zealand said. “I’ll take you home.”

  ***

  Some weeks later, after another pair of fruitless searches for Grace’s life, Zealand crunched through the snow-covered sand on the shore of Lake Tahoe. The water was still and blue, and though there was no wind, the cold was bitter and penetrating, making the inside of Zealand’s nose burn with every breath. A woman stood on the edge of the water, a long black scarf hanging motionless down her back, her thick down coat the red of arterial spurt.

  “Are you Hannah?” Zealand asked.

  She turned, the lower half of her face covered by the scarf. “Mr. Zed?” she said, her accent British and precise. Her eyes were the color of the water, almost the color of Archibald Grace’s own, which made sense, as Hannah claimed to be Grace’s daughter. When she’d first contacted him, Zealand had been suspicious, partly because Grace’s apparent sexual preference made the presence of offspring rather unlikely, but upon further consideration it was understandable that someone as old as Grace would have tried various partners and sexual permutations, probably many times over. Hannah had known things about Grace that Grace barely remembered about himself, and Zealand was reasonably certain her claim was true.

  “You told me you know the whereabouts of your father’s life,” Zealand said. He was still fascinated by her eyes, so like Grace’s.

  “I do. I’ll take you there, but you have to do something for me first.”

  “I’m not prepared to wait,” Zealand said. His tone was polite, but the menace was implicit.

  She laughed, harsh and hyena-like, quite unlike her urbane voice. “Father has lived for epochs. Another day or two won’t matter.”

  “Nevertheless, I want you to tell me now.”

  She pulled the scarf down. Below the eyes, her face was inhuman, with two holes covered by membranous flaps where her nose should have been. Her mouth was lipless, filled by a score of two-inch-long interlocking incisors. She resembled nothing so much as a deep-sea fish, one of those horrors fishermen occasionally pulled up in their nets, and Zealand recalled Grace’s claim to have spent years living beneath the sea. When Hannah spoke again, her mouth did not open, and Zealand realized that her human voice was a magical contrivance, not something born of her own vocal cords at all. “My father is almost a god, and my mother was the mistress of black oceanic caves. I will decide where we go, and when.”

  Zealand drew a pistol and fired a shot, blowing off Hannah’s right knee. She screamed, this time opening her mouth, and it was an inhuman, gurgling sound. She fell to the sand, throwing her head back into the snow, her monstrous teeth spreading apart, her long tongue lolling out as she shrieked. She had a bioluminescent bulb on the end of her tongue, glowing a sick yellow.

  Zealand put his gun away, wondering if he’d made his point sufficiently. Hannah had stopped screaming, so perhaps not. Feeling himself cloaked in a kind of prevailing numbness, what he had long thought of as his “working state,” Zealand put one heavy boot down on Hannah’s right thigh, just above her destroyed knee, then bent over to grasp her ankle in both hands. He wrenched her leg upward, grunting and twisting, pulling on her ankle while pressing down on the thigh with his foot, until her lower leg came free with a sickening pop. Hannah lashed and flailed at him, but the pain made her imprecise. Zealand noted with interest that she didn’t bleed, though the wound seeped clear water. He hurled her lower leg into the lake, then stepped away from her thrashing limbs. “I hope you’re part starfish, or that leg might be gone forever. You’ll tell me where to find your father’s life now.”

  Tears ran from Hannah’s eyes. Her screams had subsided to whimpers, and the whimpering didn’t stop when she spoke in her magical human voice—both sounds emerged simultaneously. “I only wanted to see my father again. I wanted you to take me to him. I’ve hated him for too long, hated him for his essential nature, and I wanted him to know that I forgave him, if he would forgive me.” Despite her obvious agony, her voice remained clear and barely modulated.

  “Your father has something like Alzheimer’s, but more profound. He doesn’t even remember your existence.” Zealand had asked Grace if he knew anyone named Hannah, and Grace had given him that blank, desperate look and grasped at the air, but that was all. He’d been quiet and morose for hours after Zealand asked him, though, and Zealand suspected that Hannah’s name had set up unpleasant resonances deep inside Grace, below his conscious mind. “But since he doesn’t remember you, it means he doesn’t hold a grudge for whatever drove the two of you apart, if that’s any comfort.”

  “His mind is gone?”

  “Not entirely, but it is degrading more every day. I think it comes from having lived so long without his soul.”

  “You intend to restore his soul to him?”

  Zealand shook his head.

  Hannah stared up at him, her monstrous jaw clenched. “Then you will kill him, destroy his life?”

  “It’s what he wants. It’s why he hired me.” Zealand gestured with a gloved hand. “You’ve exhausted my patience once already. Are you trying to do so again? Direct me to your father’s life.”

  “I have to show you.”

  Zealand sighed. He trudged up the shore to his car and returned with his tool bag. He withdrew a pair of bolt cutters and snapped off Hannah’s teeth, one at a time. Then he flipped her over onto her stomach and bound her hands behind her with thick plastic loops that tightened with a tug. He picked her up over his shoulder and carried her, his knees creaking under the combined weight of Hannah and his tool bag; at least she didn’t thrash. He was breathing hard by the time they reached his car, an SUV rented under a false name. He put her in the passenger seat, and, after a moment’s thought, pulled the scarf back up over the lower half of her face. Looking at her broken teeth and glowing tongue made him feel uncomfortable, and a little guilty, the latter an emotion that had plagued him more and more in recent years. His “working state” was already fading, and the emotions that replaced it were not welcome.

  After he got into the driver’s seat, Zealand said, “Guide me.”

  ***

  Zealand crouched on the edge of a creek in a wilderness area in the mountains above the lake. Hannah lay on her side in the snow nearby. Zealand was exhausted. He’d carried her nearly two miles from the trailhead, most of that well off the path, falling twice when the treacherous snow and ice gave way beneath his footsteps. His knees ached, and his feet were numb inside his boots, but he’d made it. Hannah had led him to a pretty place of tall pines, cracked gray rock faces, and a rushing mountain stream.

  “It’s filled with rocks,” Zealand said, staring down at the bottom of the wide, swiftly flowing stream.

  “It’s white, speckled with red, egg-shaped, almost as big as your fist,” Hannah said.

  Zealand saw the stone, half-buried among water-smoothed rocks. He pulled off his glove, pushed up his sleeve, and plunged his hand into the water. It was deeper than it seemed, and he had to submerge his arm past the elbow before he could reach the stone. He grasped it and pulled it out of the water. Zealand’s whole arm was numbed by cold, and he thought briefly how nice it would be to feel that way all over, inside and out, just cold and aching nothingness, the way he felt on a job, but forever. He couldn’t even feel the texture of the stone in his hand, just the weight, which was greater than he would have expected.

  He held Archibald Grace’s life in his hand.

  Dropping the stone into his coat pocket, he walked to where Hannah lay in the snow. “Thank you,” he said. “Would you like me to kill you now? I can be quick.”

  “No!” Hannah shouted, her eyes wide.

  “Your wounds are grievous,” Zealand said.

  “I’ll he
al.”

  Zealand looked down at her for a moment, then nodded. He thought she probably would. She was Grace’s daughter. He squatted on his heels in the snow. “Tell me, before I decide what to do with you, how did you find Grace’s life?”

  “It was in his tower, at Cincaguas. I used to play there, as a child—there’s a room that opens onto the ocean, onto the caves where I was born, so I could travel freely between them. I went to the tower last year, and Father hadn’t changed the pass phrase, so the guards let me through. I thought I could make my father talk to me if I had his life, that I could use the stone as leverage. But I couldn’t even find him. Then I heard you were working for Father, that you’d been seen around his old haunts, searching for his life. I didn’t know he’d hired you to kill him, so I contacted you.”

  “I suppose you regret that now.”

  “I only regret not being able to talk to my father. I’d gladly give up a leg for that chance.”

  “Life is disappointment,” Zealand said, and he’d never meant any three words so completely. He pondered the possibility of mercy. “I can throw you into the stream,” he said, “or I can leave you for the coyotes.”

  “Stream,” she said, without hesitation.

  “And if I let you live today, will you come for me later, and try to kill me?”

  “Never.”

  “Liar,” Zealand said, almost appreciatively. He picked her up by her one good leg and the straps that bound her wrists, swung her a few times, and tossed her into the stream. He stood in the snow long enough to watch her wriggle away, eel-like, and disappear over the falls, flowing back down toward the lake.

  ***

  Zealand kissed Grace just behind his left ear, and Grace moaned and moved his body back against him.