Read Online The Builders by Daniel Polansky - Free Book Online Page A

have chosen. The Toads, Elder and Younger, had taken no part in the conflict—hell, Mephetic’s pawn had been trashed on opium so much of the time he couldn’t tell his head from his trunk. Really it had always been between him and the Captain, half a decade of red hands and black deeds. And the Captain would have come out the better of it, if Mephetic hadn’t managed to turn half his company and even one in his inner circle. Many were the Captain’s virtues—if being a bloodthirsty, iron-hearted, grim-eyed bastard can be considered laudatory—but he wasn’t an easy animal to work for, and there had been plenty happy to do him wrong, especially with the promise of gold waiting at the end of their betrayal. In the event, the Captain had ended up killing most of them, so Mephetic hadn’t even had to pay.
    Not that Mephetic doubted his own forces would be any slower to knife his back, should the circumstances call for it, or even allow. They were deep in the heart of the inner keep, and Puss and Brontë were playing a game of pinochle. It seemed as though Puss was winning, though both participants were cheating so egregiously it was hard to say for certain.
    Mephetic took the missive he’d been reading and tossed it into the fire.
    “I take it they escaped your little trap?” Puss asked. Puss rarely missed the chance to revel in the misfortune of another, though the Captain’s survival little benefited him either.
    “This one.”
    “They must be awful tough”—Puss paused a moment to lick down a piece of fur—“if they managed to put the armadillo in the ground.”
    “I doubt they bothered to bury him.”
    “What about this Dragon?” Brontë asked, slipping a card surreptitiously, or what she imagined to be surreptitiously, from the fold of her dress. “Is he as fast as they say?”
    “He’s fast.”
    “How fast?”
    “Slower than a bolt of lightning. Somewhat quicker than a hummingbird’s wing.”
    Puss laughed. Brontë realized she’d just been made fun of, thought about getting angry, then remembered who Mephetic was and laughed also. There were upsides to being the boss, Mephetic often thought. It had been worth it, all the blood he’d needed to spill to get here. Wasn’t his blood, anyway.
    “And my bird?” the Quaker interrupted, the words stretched across the thing’s forked tongue. “What about my bird? What about my sweet, lost bird?”
    Puss stopped laughing. Brontë had already stopped laughing, but she looked a bit less jovial all the same.
    “She’s there,” Mephetic said, making sure not to look away.
    “You’re sure?”
    “Our spy says so.”
    The Quaker tucked his head back into his coils, but didn’t say anything else. He seemed happy, to the degree that such a quality could be attributed to a rattlesnake.
    “Far be it for me to play spoiler”—though in fact there was nothing Puss enjoyed more—“but I can’t help but observe that, thus far, the Captain’s hardly playing according to plan.”
    “Zapata wasn’t my plan. I’ve got a man on the inside.”
    “The one who betrayed them the last time? If this . . . mouse”—the last word spat out with the sort of contempt one would expect from an ancestral predator—“is all you say, I’d be wary of relying on the same gag twice.”
    “It’s not the same gag. And it’s not the same traitor.”

Part the Third

Chapter 32: The Soul of a Shrew
    The conductor was the sort of shrew who took his job very seriously. He had joined the company as a pup, just after the last track was laid. He been first in line at the office in fact, hat in hand, hopeful, desperate even, for employment. Not as an engineer, of course, nor as one of the brutes shoveling coal. It was not the trains that interested him really; their whistles were too noisy and their smokestacks too dirty. Rather, it was something about the idea of the railroad itself—a steel web crisscrossing the territories, strangling the land, operating according to