Hold The Dark: A Markhat story by Frank Tuttle

worked out who it bore and dived clumsily into the sewer canal.
    “Miss what? The night?”
    Evis nodded.
    “It looks so different now. So…bright. There are shadows, to be sure, but light too. Silver light.” He shrugged. “I merely wondered if you ever missed just walking down a street, beneath a half-full moon.”
    The turgid water closed over the drunk. If he ever surfaced, I never saw it.
    “Oh, not much.” I felt it best not to advertise my recent spate of Curfew-breaking, lest his silent friends prick up their ears. “How about the sun? You ever miss that?”
    A streetlamp splashed faint light into the carriage, and I looked away from those eyes before I could stop myself.
    “Hardly at all.”
    The driver pulled back his reins and spoke, and the carriage slowed, pulled to a halt.
    “First stop,” said Evis. His companions stirred, exiting the carriage with all the sound and fuss of a dropped silk handkerchief. “Wait here with the driver, won’t you? My friends and I will see that the site is safe. We’ll call for you, when that is established.”
    I shrugged. “Sure. Bon appetite .”
    He smiled, moved and was gone.
    I slid over, peeped out the window. The halfdead were gone. Evis had left the carriage door open, so I climbed slowly out.
    We were parked at the corner of Gentry and Low. The stench of the canal, a block behind us, rode the night, thick and choking. Weathered brick buildings, two and three stories tall, formed a canyon that blotted out most of the sky.
    Rannit is packed with once thriving commercial districts that, for one reason or another, fell into decay. The streets zigzagging off Gentry are some of the oldest. What were once breweries and foundries are now warehouses, hulks and shells, home to rodents and pigeons and failing businesses making a doomed last stand against oblivion. No lights shone in the broken windows, no smoke rose from chimneys, no shapes moved behind the doors. Before the Truce and the Curfew, you’d also have found squatters lounging in the alleys and making their beds in the empty stoops. Now, though, the buildings are empty and still.
    “Cheerful, ain’t it?” asked the driver, in a whisper, from his perch atop the carriage.
    He held a glossy black crossbow, as did his grinning human companion. Crossbows are illegal inside the city limits. I eschewed to point this out.
    “Rent’s cheap, though,” I whispered back.
    “Shut up,” hissed the driver’s friend. “Boss said keep it quiet.”
    “You boys know what the Boss is up to?” I asked.
    They both chuckled. “Yeah, right,” said the driver’s friend, so faint I could barely hear. “We’re in on all the House policy meetings.”
    I shrugged, expecting as much.
    “They ain’t so bad,” said the driver. “Best job I ever had.”
    They fell silent, after that. After a few moments, the driver’s friend jerked and started, fumbled in his jacket pocket, pulled out something that looked like a pocket watch, fiddled with it briefly.
    “The boss says you can go and have a look,” said the driver, to me. “That way. You’ll be met.” He hooked a thumb in the direction the halfdead had vanished.
    I sauntered off as if it were noon, and I was going for lunch at Eddie’s.
    I’d gone maybe twenty feet when one of Evis’s halfdead companions glided out of the shadows and fell into step with me. “This way,” he said, in a voice that sent literal shivers down my spine. “It is not far.”
    I followed his lead. His face was cloaked in shadow, and I was heartily glad of it.
    Faint light flared ahead, outlining a door and the gaps between the planks of a boarded-up window. “There,” said my pale guide, halting. “I shall keep watch here.”
    I thanked him and went.
    The door was open. Someone had simply grasped the knob and pushed until door and frame tore free from the wall. I stepped past it, into a small room lit by a guttering candle standing in the middle of the floor.
    The room stank of rot