River of Thieves

by Clayton Snyder

  We approached the flat face of the rock, and Cord held the head up.

  "Okay, where's the door?"

  The head frowned. "It's right here."

  It swung forward until its nose bumped the rock, banging into a hidden switch. The rock slid to the side with a rumble, revealing a round portcullis of black iron, etched with runes.

  "And this?" Cord asked.

  The head frowned. "I have a name, you know."

  "Ah, sorry. And after I accused my friend of anti-deadism. What's your name, friend?"

  "Omen."

  "Oh, that's good," I muttered.

  "Shh," Cord replied.

  "Okay, Omen, how do we get this open?"

  "See those depressions on the sides?"

  "Yeah."

  "Fill them with blood."

  Cord looked at me.

  "Fuck you," I replied.

  He shrugged and sat the head down, cutting a shallow groove into his forearm, then letting the wound drip into the depressions. The gate slid to the side with a screech, and he picked the head back up, the cuts already healing. He bowed to me. I glared at him for a moment, then decided not in the rain was better than in the rain.

  "After you."

  I pulled my blades from their sheathes and stepped through the door.

  ***

  The interior of the tomb was lit. Well-lit, for that matter, a fact that surprised and annoyed me. We wouldn't be able to get away with hiding in the shadows. It also meant that even if someone wasn't waiting for us, they sure as hell had been busy. This tomb had none of the trappings of a typical mausoleum. The floors were swept, new torches stood in the sconces, fresh incense placed in small holders in the walls, and the cobwebs cleared away. Sarcophagi lined alcoves in the walls, their denizens sealed safely away. Where the walls hadn't been cut for the dead, lines of runes and glyphs marked the stone.

  A door at the far end of the antechamber waited, but Cord was busy holding Omen up to the writing on the stone.

  "What's it say?" he asked.

  Omen muttered to himself for a couple of seconds before replying. "I'll need some time."

  Cord nodded and placed the head on one of the incense shelves, then walked over to me.

  "You ever wonder why a god would be in a tomb?" I asked.

  "It's their prison," he said.

  "Yeah, but you know... god. They don't have to be anywhere they don't want."

  "That's a good point," he said. "That's a really good point. Shit, why didn't you bring this up earlier?"

  "Well, you seemed sure of yourself, and there was the whole thing with the sword..."

  Cord snorted. "Dyrk? I'm 90% sure he's full of shit."

  "Hey! That's really hurtful!" the sword chimed in.

  "What about the dead guy?" Cord asked.

  Omen interrupted him by screaming. "INTRUDERS! INTRUDERS!"

  "Ah. Fuck," Cord said. He strode over to the head and picked it up.

  Omen's mouth clamped shut, and Cord set him on the floor, to which the head responded by screaming an alarm again. Cord drew Dyrk, holding the blade point-down over the head.

  "I don't like this plan!" the sword shouted.

  Cord ignored it and impaled Omen through the top of the skull, the blade passing through the parchment skin and brittle bone with a crunch, embedding the steel in the floor. Omen's mouth shut with a clack of teeth, and even the sword seemed subdued. I walked over and knelt beside the skull, tipping a blade against its eye socket. The eye rolled frantically, as if trying to escape, and I rammed the knife home, letting the orb pop, thick vitreous fluid running down the skull's cheek. I stood and found Cord staring at me.

  "Sicko," he said.

  "I told you not to bring it."

  "But you're notoriously racist against the undead."

  "By whose standards?"

  He pointed to the impaled, blind skull. "His, to start."

  I rolled my eyes and shoved the door at the end of the room open.

  ***

  "This is more like it," I muttered.

  Cord blinked, and looked at me. "What's more like what?"

  I gestured at the tangle of veins and flesh blocking the hall. It spread from wall to wall, a spiderweb of gore, sheets of skin making drum-like patterns, veins feeding the flesh. In each square of meat sat a mouth, and they all seemed to be about their own thing—licking, yawning, coughing, and speaking words in a language I couldn't understand.

  "This is more like it. You enter the lair of some sort of evil, and there should be a horror waiting for you. Not that ladies garden society travesty out front."

  Cord approached the monstrosity, and poked at various sections of it with his pinky.

  "You trying to lose that one, too?" I asked.

  He poked it again, and the structure shuddered.

  "Uh... Cord?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Okay." he backed away, until he stood behind me.

  A popping sound echoed down the hall, and the thing blocking our way quivered. It drew in on itself, the popping growing louder as it balled up, then reshaped its form. Slowly, it took the shape of a man, but for the mouths marking its body like freckles mark a redhead. It turned, and I saw it had two wobbling dicks for eyes.

  "Well, that's..." I started.

  "Really unsettling," Cord finished. He shuffled from side to side, then stopped beside me. "It's eerie. No matter where I stand, it's like they're following me."

  The golem shook its head, sending the dicks to bobbing like apples in water. It turned, and the voice that came from it was surprisingly melodious, if not melancholy.

  "Walk this way, please."

  It shuffled off down the hall, obviously expecting us to follow. I looked at Cord, who shrugged, and proceeded to imitate the golem’s shuffle, waggling his head back and forth.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “What he said.”

  “You know, every time I'm next to you, I get a fierce desire to be alone.”

  “You just hate fun.”

  “We might die. What about that is fun to you?”

  “The only thing dead here is your sense of humor. You are a fun assassin. An assassin of fun. A killer of mirth. An antijoyster.”

  “That’s not even a word.”

  “It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”

  I made a strangled sound, shook my head, and followed.

  ***

  The golem led us through a series of chambers filled with all sorts of things I'd rather forget. Most were unrecognizable clumps of flesh. Others were entire bodies—man, woman, and all manner of other creatures—splayed out and vivisected like insects. In one room, a man stood connected to another by a fleshy tube at the navel, and another stood in the corner playing a song on a broken fiddle while they danced. In the last room before we came to another open hallway, there was a goose. Bones littered the floor of the goose room. Even the golem gave it a wide berth as it softly honked in warning at us.

  "What's with the goose?" Cord asked.

  The golem shrugged. "He was already here. No one wants to fuck with him."

  We passed from the goose room into another long neat hall, finally arriving at an open arch. The golem ducked through, and we followed. The room beyond was wide and spacious, carved in a round dome. Space for a table had been made by pushing the sarcophagi into one corner of the room. Arcane tools and books covered the surface of the slab of wood. A figure stood behind the workbench, hooded and grim. The golem stepped to the side, and the man acknowledged him with a curt nod.

  "Thank you, Elvis."

  Cord jerked his head almost imperceptibly to one side, then stepped forward, drawing the figure's gaze. I sidestepped slowly, trying to circle around.

  "So, hey... come here often?" Cord asked.

  The figure stared at him, silent and grim.

  "What are you doing?" I hissed.

  "Rying oo educe eh reepy izard," he said out of the side of his mouth.

  He sidled up to the table
, leaning against it, then picked up a pencil. He dropped it, and with a wink at the wizard, bent over, wiggling his hips as he did.

  "I am so embarrassed for you," I whispered.

  "Cord!?" the figure said, and swept the hood back from his head.

  Cord shot up and spun around, and I took a breath.

  "Holy shit, the sword was right."

  This guy was hot. Not normal person hot, but like if a beautiful person had sex with the idea of a beautiful person. I forgot to move. Cord was gobsmacked.

  "Tug?" he said.

  "You two know each other?" I said.

  Cord laughed as they embraced. "Yeah, Tug and I went to the same school."

  "You went to school?"

  Cord looked hurt. "Of course I went to school. I'm not a complete lunk, Nenn."

  "Huh. I thought you were just the walking embodiment of a libido."

  "The walking embodiment of a libido who's read all of Heronocus' works," Tug corrected.

  "So, what're you up to these days?" Cord asked.

  Tug shrugged. "Mancin'. Necromancin'. Makin' with the dead guys."

  "Why?"

  "Got bored with the whole making flaming swords for minor lords thing. Turns out terrorizing the countryside pays better."

  "So you're the one responsible for that army of the dead up north?"

  "Yeah. Have you been? Those priests are total dicks. Figured I'd just raze the village and maybe open a nice little B&B."

  "You? An innkeeper?"

  "Guy's got to diversify. Stealing dead peoples' shit doesn't pay as well as you'd think."

  "Oh no, I'm familiar."

  "Tell him about the sword," I said.

  "What sword?" Tug asked.

  "It was a magic sword," Cord said.

  "Oh?"

  "Useless," I interjected.

  "That's unfortunate."

  I cleared my throat.

  "Ah, yeah, okay," Cord said. "Soo... here's the thing. I kind of need you to not destroy the entire village."

  "I'm gonna need a reason."

  "Friendship?" Cord asked.

  "I love you, Cord. And I really love your ass, but we haven't talked in fifteen years. If you're going to cut into my profit margins, I need a compelling reason."

  "What about morality?"

  "What about free will versus determinism?"

  "Are you telling me it's your destiny to murder these people?"

  Tug shrugged. "Maybe it's their destiny to be murdered, and I'm just fulfilling my own predetermined path as a tool of the gods. Think of me as a hammer, and these people the squishy melon that needs to be mulched so that beautiful flowers can grow."

  "The only thing that's gonna grow from that bullshit are weeds. What about their own right to live, to pursue happiness?"

  "They kind of gave that up when they threw in with the cult."

  "You don't think people have a right to survive?"Cord asked.

  "It's not enough to survive, it has to be fulfilling. Just surviving makes us less than animals, Cord. Even animals play and fuck and have a sense of family."

  "I seem to remember you making a similar argument not that long ago, Cord," I interjected. He shot me a look that could have melted good steel. "I'm just saying, what you did in Midian—you left those people to just survive."

  "I left them to live. How they do it is up to them. But I didn't just murder them," he growled.

  "Do I get a say in this?" Elvis asked.

  Cord and Tug both responded. "NO."

  "Irony is dead," Elvis muttered.

  Cord whirled on Tug. "If everything is predetermined, why do we even bother then? If we have no control over our own lives, why not just let the world come to us, and let things happen as they may? If everything is already written, then nothing matters, and if nothing matters, life isn't worth living, or even surviving, anyway."

  Tug blinked, and fell silent for a few minutes. Finally, he heaved a sigh and spoke. "Well... shit. If I don't kill everyone, what do I do with this army I raised?"

  Cord walked around the table and put an arm around Tug. "Don't think of it as an undead army. Think of it as a fun-dead- army."

  Cord picked up a pencil and began to write on an empty sheet of paper.

  ***

  We left the temple a few hours later, Elvis escorting us out. He bobbled his eyes at us as we left, passing the now-silent sword and Omen on the way out. Cord was quiet for a long stretch while we walked. On the upside, the rain had stopped. Not one to shy away from a confrontation, I finally broke the silence.

  "Pissed?" I asked.

  He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Yeah, but not at you. Midian's weighed on me for a while now. There's righteous rage, then there's self-righteous rage, and I may have been too caught up in the latter to realize that what I needed was the former. If we ever run into that sort of situation again, we'll be more cautious."

  "Again?" I asked in mock horror, though it was only a little mock.

  "Well, we've got a reputation to build. We are the Misfits, after all."

  He looked at me with one eyebrow raised, a half-smirk curling the corner of his lip. I returned the eyebrow raise.

  "Not entirely shitty," I said.

  "I aim to please."

  We walked until the stars showed in the pale dusk.

  "Wanna hear a story?" he asked.

  "Is it about that thing in Pied?"

  "The donkey thing? No. It's about how Camor lost their eye."

  I lit a cigar. "Sure."

  Cord's grin widened, and he began.

  ***

  In the beginning, there were the fox, and the raven, and the spider, and they all lived together, though not always in harmony. In those days, the spider had eight eyes already, but wanted more, because spider had always been wroth and greedy. So it went to the raven first, for they were closer in nature.

  "Sister Gren," it said. "Though I have seven eyes, I only see so well, as some see here and some see there, but none see far. You however, see near and far, much further than is necessary. Would you lend me one of your eyes? Surely you do not need both with their strength."

  And while Gren understood his plight, she was not willing to part with it. She let him down gently, explaining that seeing far didn't mean just distance, but the future as well, and she needed to see the death of all things so she might shepherd souls when that time came.

  "Unless you would like to shepherd those souls?" she asked.

  Spider declined, as he would rather feast than shepherd, and they parted ways amicably, notwithstanding spider's disappointment.

  Time passed, and he watched. He watched Camor, the bright eyes of the fox, the way they picked out the slightest tremor of the grass, the way they caught the furtive movement of prey.

  Finally, he went to Camor, and as kindly as he was able, asked the same question.

  "Brother fox, surely you could spare an eye. Yours are so strong, and mine so weak I need many."

  Camor, always wary for the next deal, the next advantage, squinted at him.

  "And brother spider, what will you give me in return?"

  The spider thought for a while. What could he give Camor? Web strong enough to bind any prey? Venom to paralyze his foes? An extra leg, to make the fox faster? None of these things seemed sufficient. Finally, he fell upon it. He would share the dark with Camor.

  For the spider, the dark was always there. It whispered secrets, it showed him the things others did when they thought no one was watching. There were hands in the dark, voices. For spider, it was an easy trade.

  "I will give you secrets," he said.

  "And what do you get?"

  "I can see prey ever so easy then, I can see riches to build my homes from spun silver and gold."

  Camor thought for some time on it, but finally agreed. Spider plucked an eye from his head, placing it into his own, then from his own mind spun a strand of pure black, and filled the hole with it. Thus, it's said that Camor knows every da
rk thing you've done. They are the Watcher in the Dark and the Saint of the Unlighted Path.

  And that is how Camor came to have only one eye.

  ***

  "So, how did spider lose the eye?" I asked.

  Cord shrugged. "I suspect one of the other gods plucked it out. Or it just got tired of him. Gods and parts of gods are fickle things."

  We walked until the light went out, then made camp one more time. The sense of urgency was behind us, though with Cord you never really knew if it existed in the first place. We lit a fire and ate in silence, enjoying the simple company of one another. It'd been a while since we'd been on our own, and while I loved our extended family, Cord had been my first, and best friend.

  When we finished, he dug a pipe from his pack, and we passed it back and forth. The smoke was good—clean tobacco and slipweed, and it took the edge off the past few weeks. We'd been sparing with the drug, as outside the cities it was fairly hard to find, so to have it now was a simple pleasure.

  One moment, only Cord and I occupied the fire, the next a third figure sat with us. I blinked. I knew Cord's slipweed was strong, but this was a new level of oh shit. Robes the color of sand wrapped them, and what little I could see of their skin was pale. They radiated cold, and when they turned their face my way, each eye was black, from edge to edge. They regarded me for a moment, and I felt my soul weighed. Finally, they turned to regard Cord.

  "A proposal," they said without preamble. Mist escaped their lips as they spoke. "Stand aside. Allow my work to finish. Surely you cannot hold love for the remains of a long-dead empire?"

  "And what's in it for me?" Cord asked.

  Oros gestured, and the sand at our feet stirred, whirling into life. It formed thin spirals that joined one another in a grainy tapestry. We saw Cord, perched on a raised throne. At his feet, a thousand adoring fans. Scattered around the base, gold and treasures unheard of. The scene blurred, showing fields verdant with life. Another shift, and the inside of a home, a happy family feasting. The visions faded, the sand drifting to simple motes.