by Deck Davis
“Southend docks? That’s eighty miles away.”
“Yep, and my feet are feeling it. I’ve been bedding down where I can.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Got laid off. It’s off-season for trade. Not much work going. Decided to head up north a little, at least until spring.”
“Then why’d you come through the Killeshi lands? There’s safer roads to take,” she said.
That stumped him, because she was right.
Not only that, but she knew it. Her glare pierced through him now, and he needed to touch the vagrant blade to keep his disguise working, but she was clearly suspicious. If he reached to his sheath, she was going to leap on him and pound him. He could see it in her eyes.
He could draw the blade and take his chances. Not kill anyone – nobody here deserved to die. He could at least fight his way to the body, see the rites, and then…
…no. That was ridiculous.
He counted the seconds down in his head. Only five more, by his reckoning.
His chest felt like someone was squeezing it now. His pulse was thudding.
Touch the blade and risk her pouncing on him, or just abandon the disguise and strike first? Maybe knock her unconscious and..
…three…two…
“Hilda!” shouted a voice across the hamlet.
The woman turned around.
Jakub touched the sword, held the hilt, and let out a relieved breath that trailed out as steam against the cold night.
“Frankie’s cut himself,” shouted someone. “It won’t stop bleeding. Can you make a poultice?”
The woman, Hilda, turned to Jakub. “The stupid bastard is half-blind and he still insists on cuttin’ his apples with a boning knife. Tell me, how is that a better way to eat an apple than biting it with your teeth, huh? It jus’ looks cooler, is all. I better go deal with this because apparently I’m the only person for eight thousand miles who can make a damn poultice. You jus’ go sit by the bonfire until the fellas get back, okay?”
Jakub laughed, finding himself liking Hilda even though her suspicion made him uncomfortable. “Good luck with the poultice.”
Hilda left him. That was too close for his liking, and it made him want to get the hell out of there. He just needed to know where they had stored the body, without being caught poking around. If he started creeping about the place he was sure to draw more stares.
First, he needed to stop looking like he was reaching for his sword every time he felt his vagrancy disguise failing.
There was a section of the hamlet on the far end, away from the food produce, with holes dug into the ground. Each hole was separated by a wooden screen. They must have been the latrines.
There were empty save the fourth stall down, where a man squatted over a hole. He had a book in one hand and a bottle in the other, and looked to have set up shop in there. Maybe the diet in the Killeshi lands didn’t lend itself to a smooth internal flow.
Jakub wasn’t worried; even with the man here, he still had enough privacy. The way the hill bobbled on the edges meant that when you squatted over a hole, the rest of the camp couldn’t see you.
Jakub went into one. He drew the vagrant blade and dropped his trousers. He tied his sheath around his leg so it touched bare skin, then put the blade in it.
Next, he ripped a hole in his right pocket of his trousers, and then put them back on. This way, he maneuvered the vagrant blade hilt so it stuck through the hole in his pocket.
“Done,” he said.
The man a few stalls down grunted. “You say somethin’?”
“Nothing. You need more fiber in your diet,” said Jakub.
He walked out of the stall with his hand in his pocket. Great – he could touch the sword without looking too suspicious. Now, it was time to find a dead soldier without looking like he was sneaking around.
CHAPTER 43
He approached the teenagers standing by the bonfire. It was hard to say if they were older than him or younger. People always said Jakub had a worn face, even though he was only eighteen. He guessed that seeing things you shouldn’t at an early age did that to you.
These lads were the same. Only, where Jakub had a slight build, save for where academy sword training had toned his muscles, these teens were big and had weathered skin. That was what a life growing up in Killeshi lands did to you.
“Nothing to beg for around here,” said one, eyeing him. “If you’re looking for handouts, fuck off back to the city.”
“I’m not looking for handouts,” said Jakub.
“Then what’re you looking for? Come to offer to suck one of us off? That’s how your kind make your living in the cities, ain’t it?”
“My kind?”
“Vagrants. Scum. Begging instead of working, bringing nothing to society but expecting the world to fall on your lap.”
“Every heard the saying ‘treat the unfortunate as you would expect if your own fortune faded’?”
The teen absently reached to his side, to a leather pouch. A knife, maybe?
“Ever heard the saying ‘I’m gonna gut you in your sleep unless you piss off?”
“No,” said Jakub, “but it’s catchy.”
He strode forward. He knew what he was dealing with now; the louder a person’s threats, the less weight they carried. It was the quiet people you watched out for; the ones who made no threats because a threat was a warning, and they liked to strike without warning. These boys were just posturing.
Jakub had barely finished the thought when something blunt crashed into the back of his head.
He reeled forward, then put his hands out as he hit the floor. Pain sprang in his wrists on impact, and his head buzzed.
He staggered to his feet, to a chorus of laughs.
A teen was standing behind him. He was rubbing his knuckles. “Damn, he has a skull like stone,” he said.
The other teens pointed at him. “You’re a moron, Rud. You don’t punch the back of the head, it’s the worst place.”
Jakub shook his head, trying to blast away the dizziness. The blow on his head had knocked his senses out of kilter, and he felt like he was trying to stand on legs made from rubber.
“Boys!” cried a voice from across the camp. “Leave that poor fella alone.”
“Yes, Mum.”
“Help him up, for Hell’s sake.”
“Okay.”
Hands reached under Jakub’s armpits, but he pushed them away. He badly wanted to teach the lads a lesson, and his hand seemed to be straining toward his pocket of its own accord.
He couldn’t draw his sword. The teens weren’t actually trying to kill him; it was horseplay. Rough horseplay, sure, but there probably wasn’t any other kind out here in the Killeshi lands.
As bitter as it tasted, he needed to swallow his feeling down.
“You boys know your way around here?” he said.
One boy gave a dismissive handwave, another took a last swig from a glass bottle and then put it in his pocket.
“Fuck off, tramp,” said another. “C’mon. I’ve got another quart of firespray stashed in my bag.”
“I’m afraid that’s a no,” said another teen. “We drank it last night, remember?”
“God damn it.”
Jakub saw the way life in the hamlet was now. It was the polar opposite of the academy. In the academy, students fought with knowledge, beating each other down with mental fists made from remembering what instructors told you.
Here, you proved your place in the hierarchy a different way. Things were accepted here, maybe even expected, that wouldn’t have been somewhere else.
“Lads,” said Jakub, as the teens walked away from the bonfire.
One turned around, the one who had hit Jakub.
“What?”
“I’ve got something for you,” said Jakub, reaching for his inventory bag.
He walked up to the teen, swung his hand away from his bag and connected with the lad’s nose. Cartilage crunched, the te
en stumbled backward and would have fallen into the fire if his friends hadn’t caught him.
Pain ached in Jakub’s fingers. Punching someone was more painful he’d realized. He bit his lip, riding out the agony while keeping his face a picture of tranquility.
“What the hells-” said the boy.
“Now that we’re on even terms,” said Jakub, “Come here.”
The boys gathered around him now, and he saw a different look in their eyes. By responding in the way that was expected in the hamlet, he’d established maybe not a place on their hierarchy, but a wariness.
This time when he reached to his inventory bag, he actually opened it. He showed the boys the bottles of Gremlin’s Lout Whiskey that he had looted.
The boy whose nose was now caked with blood eyed Jakub with a new respect.
It made sense; while you were fighting, you either hated your opponent, or you feared him. Either way, you wanted to put him on the ground as soon as you could. When the fight was over though, the strangest thing happened; you and he had a bond. There was something about pummeling the crap out of each other that brought you together.
“Go ahead, take it” said Jakub.
The teen took a bottle. His friends gathered behind him and each tried to snatch the bottle, but their ring leader shoved them away.
“This is good stuff. Hundred times better than the shit we have to drink around here.”
“There’s another bottle for you in payment,” said Jakub.
“Payment for what?” said the teen.
“The first bottle was for you to tell me if you know of a soldier being brought in. He’d most likely dead, but there’s a chance that he was resurrected, so he’d look in a bad state. The second bottle is for you to pretend I never asked you that question.”
“He’s talking about what the necro-guy brought the other night,” said the boy with the ponytail, and reached for the bottle.
The ring leader batted his hand away. He unscrewed the lid, smelled the whiskey, and winced. A smile spread across his face.
“You’re really giving us two bottles just to tell you where they keep the bodies?”
Two things leapt at Jakub then, both involving the word bodies.
The use of that word told him that a) the solider was still dead, and b) more than one corpse had been brought here.
Was Harry Helmund’s body here too? If so, no need to find the soldier. This could all be finished here and now.
He had to play it cool. If he acted like this was valuable information, the teens would likely try to extort him. Luckily, he’d already rehearsed an excuse for needing to see the body in his head. He’d planned on using it if he got caught snooping.
“The man was a friend of mine. We served in the Queen’s guard together, and then he got station in the Killeshi lands. There’s an outpost north east.”
“He’s your mate, huh?”
“When the outpost stopped answering letters, I promised his wife I’d come looking for him. He saved my life when we served together, so I owe it to him, and to his Mrs.”
The teen took a glug of the whiskey. It was premium stuff and must have been burning his throat, but he didn’t show it. “I’ll show you where we keep them,” said the boy. “They dug a tunnel underneath and into the hills. Full of dirt, but it stays cold down there. Come on.”
“Thank you,” said Jakub.
“Just one thing. If they already started to take from him, you might not like what you see.”
“Take from him?”
“You’ll see.”
CHAPTER 44
“It’s just down there,” said the teen, after guiding vagrant Jakub through the camp.
As he’d promised, there was a tunnel dug into the earth on the far-west side of camp, beyond the latrines. The entrance had been disguised by wooden crates.
“Just show me to where they keep the bodies, and then we’re done.”
The boy shook his head. “I never go down there.”
“Not even after a quarter bottle of Gremlin whiskey? You’ve gulped that down, kid. You must been half-cut by now. If that doesn’t make you brave, nothing will.”
“I’m not going down there. I’ll keep quiet like you asked, but I ain’t going down there.”
This was a completely different boy to the one that Jakub had first met when he’d gone to the bonfire. His hostility was gone and its absence, combined with the tension the whiskey had set in him, made him look nervous.
“Is there anything down there I need to worry about? Anything that can hurt me?”
“No. Nothing like that. Just, like I said; they might have done things to your friend.”
He said this with genuine concern, and Jakub wondered if he’d been wrong about the boy. He felt sorry for punching him now, even if it had been justified at the time.
“You go and get back to your pals,” said Jakub. “I’ll be fine now. Just go easy on the whiskey. You’ll get a hell of a hangover from it.”
“It looks dark down there,” said the boy, “but there are torches at the bottom, and they’re always lit. They dug this place so you wouldn’t see the light until you were down there.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
The boy touched his hand with his forehead and then tipped it in a half-salute, before leaving.
Jakub started down into the entrance cut into the hill floor, knowing that he was walking into the depths of the earth, into claustrophobic tunnels, for the second time in a few days.
At least he wouldn’t get attacked this time. He just wished he could summon Ludwig to guide him. He wished he knew why his friend wasn’t answering his summons.
No. Don’t think about it. Shut it out, and deal with this now, and Ludwig later.
With that, Jakub descended into the darkness. He reached the bottom and saw the mud walls lit by torchlight, and he followed this along one passageway, took a right, and then followed a second, until he reached an open room.
The temperature plummeted when he stepped into it. A faint mist rose from the ground and hovered at waist-height. It must have been a spell.
There were wooden shelves by the walls either side of him, each big enough to hold a body. Jakub counted five bodies in total, with one shelf left empty. The mist in the room was cold enough to keep the corpses fresh, so there wasn’t a smell of death in the air.
Jakub looked at each body to find the soldier’s. The bodies were of different ages, genders, even races. He saw two dead Killeshi, a small girl, an adult man who looked like he was from the Red Eye Queendom, and then finally, the soldier.
As he looked deeper and really took in the detail of the bodies, a chill of dread seeped through him.
The bodies had parts missing.
He saw even more detail now, picked up on things that began to add together to make a horrible kind of sense.
Chunks missing from each body. A faint smell of spent mana, not just from the spell that kept the corpses cold, but something else.
A spell wrought over the bodies themselves.
He’d seen something like this before. He’d seen a room full of corpses with spells wrought on their skin, and not in academy training.
He’d seen a room similar to this one in his nightmares, and before that, in the source of his nightmares – from his childhood.
It was hard to hold the nightmares back even at the academy, miles and miles away from something like this. Standing here now made it impossible to shut them out.
Jakub had been in a place like this before.
CHAPTER 45
He’d lived in a commune like this one. Not in a hamlet cut into a hill, but in tents and under canopies that they’d pack up when they had stayed in one place too long.
He, his parents, and the other half-dozen families travelled through the edges of the continent of the Red Eye Queendom. They were outliers of society, mainly because they travelled instead of settling down, and because they earned their keep hunting pelts and poaching on private l
ands and rarely paid taxes. This made them enemies not just of private landowners, but the Queendom, too.
If anyone found out what Jakub’s parents did, they would have made enemies of everyone else in the land, too.
Jakub’s parents were victims of a religion older than the oldest settlement in the land. A primal religion, one born long before the Red Eye lands were settled, and one that would exist long after the last breath was taken on it.
Or so they said, but they wouldn’t have used the word ‘victims’. Jakub added that himself.
Worship of said religion involved rooms such as this; rooms kept cold by magical means or otherwise, and filled with corpses.
The cold was the key to it; the corpses had to be kept fresh.
“You wouldn’t want to eat rotten flesh, would you?” his father had said to him.
“No,” said Jakub.
“It will be your Time of Rites one day,” said his father.
Jakub remembered dreading that day, living in fear of turning eight years old, when his parents had told him they would force him to take his first taste of flesh.
That was their way; his family ate from the bodies of the dead in the belief that some of the deceased’s strengths would transfer to them.
It had always terrified Jakub. It wasn’t the dead bodies that they had to cart around with them, usually hidden under bundles of sheets in their wagons. The bodies never moved, and looked like they were sleeping. They didn’t worry him.
It was more the way his parents and the other adults acted after eating flesh. He didn’t know what it was in their ritual that did this, but it changed them.
The words they chanted, the potions they drank, the flesh they ate.
Evenings after ‘partaking’, as they called it, were a festival of music and intoxication, then orgies and violence.
Jakub and the other kids used to climb into their sleeping bags and get as deep as they could and try to shut out the sights and sounds of their parents under the sway of dead flesh, and try to tune out the bestial grunts of lust and hate.
