by Alexey Pehov
The pointed nose, high forehead, slight stubble on the cheeks, cunning eyes and smile were equally suitable for an old man made wise by experience, or a mischievous boy.
I had seen this man before. And even paid a gold coin for his absurd advice.
Sitting before me was the beggar from the empty pedestal at the cathedral.
I had heard several legends from the brothers of the night about Sagot supposedly liking to wander the earth occasionally and talk to those who appealed to him at difficult moments: to help them, advise them, punish them, or play jokes on them. But I’d never thought that anything like that would ever happen to me.
“You see, I am carrying out the Commission,” I said, addressing the statue. “But I still don’t understand your advice about Selena. Keep laughing—you bamboozled me out of a whole gold piece.”
But the god said nothing and merely continued to look down mockingly. Why should he bother to reply to the cheeky comments of some little insect by the name of Harold? I sighed. Sagot had protected me from the irilla, but it was time to be moving on.
“Good-bye, Sagot.” I controlled my insolence and bowed. “I’ll try to get that Horn.”
I turned round and walked toward the Street of the Sleepy Cat, sunk deep in the darkness of night, and left the statue of the god behind me. After spending just a little while beside it, I had a confident, calm feeling. I was going to complete this Commission.
I felt as if I had just been granted the god’s approval, although he hadn’t said a single word to me.
The street was as endless as the hatred between elves and orcs. I had already been walking along it for twenty minutes. I wanted to get the job over and done with and get out of this place.
But clearly that was not to be just yet.
First I caught that smell that cannot possibly be confused with anything else. That stench can drive a hungry gkhol insane—the stink of decomposing corpses. I started breathing through my mouth, trying to ignore the unbearable aroma.
A couple of moments later I heard the crackling and chomping—sounds very familiar to those who engage in robbing ancient graves. They were what always gave the vile creatures away.
Dead men, brought back to life by the shamanism left behind by the ogres, which had still not disappeared from the world of Siala after thousands of years. That was who it was.
The magic that brings corpses back to life hinders the process of decay, and the dead men can quite easily exist for several decades before time takes pity on them and kills their flesh. Like many other creatures of the darkness, they cannot bear sunlight. It makes their bodies evaporate, like a lump of sugar in hot tea. And so these zombies mostly live in abandoned caves, mine shafts, earthworks, the basements of old buildings, and, of course, burial chambers. They only come out of their refuges at night, in search of prey.
In principle, a good swordsman can deal with any ordinary returnee from the grave. “Fresh meat” is agile and nimble, while the half-rotten remains can barely move about, owing to the absence of most of the muscles and tendons, or even the bones. The most important thing is not to end up in the grappling-hook embrace of their arms, or things will go badly for you. These guys sink their teeth into their prey as securely as any imperial dogs.
The one thing I couldn’t understand was how the zombies happened to be there. It was quite a long way to Graveyard Street. What kind of dead men could hold out for two hundred years? In that time any decent corpse who had come back to life ought to have fallen to pieces, whether he wanted to or not.
I held the meat that I had brought in my left hand and my knife in my right. If necessary, the silver border on the blade would give me temporary protection.
No, silver doesn’t kill zombies, it just makes them clumsier and very lazy. Sometimes one of the creatures that has received a silver arrow in the chest won’t even take any notice of a person walking by.
I could hear wheezing coming from round the corner of the next brick building. The windows of this building were closed off with massive steel shutters, and the heavy steel door would have withstood a direct hit by a ball from one of the gnomes’ cannon. Written in huge letters on the façade was the following:
HIRGZ . . . N & S . . . NS B. . . NK.
Even to a Doralissian it would have been obvious what was meant: “Hirgzan and Sons Bank.” A very well-known and rich gnome family.
So this was the gnomes’ bank. For had got as far as this point, but had failed to get inside and turned back. I cautiously peeped round the corner, trying not to make any noise. My nose was assailed by the overwhelming stench of rotting flesh and my gaze encountered a dead man peeping round the corner in exactly the same way from the other side.
The dumb scene that followed was worthy of the very finest dramatic production on Market Square. Finding myself nose-to-nose with a living corpse, I behaved like a small, defenseless animal when it runs into a predator in the forest—I froze on the spot.
The creature was not exactly fresh. One arm was completely absent, the ribs on the right were exposed and gleamed a dull white in the misty moonlight. The skin was a dirty gray-green color and one eyeball was missing. The lips had rotted off long ago and the sparse teeth, coated in fresh blood, were exposed in the vacant grin of a village idiot. There was another horrible brute standing there with its back to me.
I had an excellent view of his decayed body and the white spots of his vertebrae protruding through the black flesh. The zombie farther away from me had not yet finished dining and was wheezing loudly as he enthusiastically stuffed lumps of flesh into his mouth after tearing them off the human body stretched out in the alleyway.
There was absolutely no doubt that only that morning this flesh had still been alive.
Brrr! To be eaten alive by creatures like that . . . Not a pleasant way to go!
In any good theatrical production, the silences should not be overdone. The creature that had seen me swung back his half-rotted arm and struck at the spot where I had just been standing. Naturally, I was long gone. I had already skipped out into the middle of the Street of the Sleepy Cat, feverishly unwrapping the drokr to take out the meat.
The corpse moved in my direction quite nimbly, holding out his one arm and hissing menacingly. The other one left his dessert and hurried to his brother’s assistance, still stuffing flesh into his jaws as he came.
Dead men aren’t jolly weepers—when dealing with them, you need to remain calm, keep a cool head, and use just a little bit of dexterity. And then you have every chance of surviving the encounter.
“We’ll think of this as a brief training session for Hrad Spein,” I mumbled.
The creatures came closer, and I ran another ten yards away, luring them out of the dark alley. I waited for the right moment and threw the meat into the face of the one-armed zombie. For a while the creature lost all interest in me and started ripping furiously at this prize that had come his way completely out of the blue.
Everybody knows that the risen dead are insatiable, and the fact that the creature had dined just recently did nothing to blunt his appetite. I pulled the magical elfin cobweb-rope out from under my belt. By using that I could overcome almost any obstacle. It didn’t require any three-pointed grappling iron on its free end and naturally adhered to any surface so tightly that you couldn’t pull it off. And its magical ability to pull its owner up of its own accord only served to make it even more popular among those who were fond of overcoming unexpected obstacles. People like me, for instance.
Of course, this item was expensive. It’s no easy thing to get hold of the rope that’s used by the dark elves’ spies.
I swung the cobweb and the free end went flying off toward the roof of the gnomes’ bank, as if there were a heavy weight tied to it. Holding the other end in my hand, I waited for the miracle of elfin magic to attach itself somewhere up above and lift me well away from the ravenous creatures. The first zombie was already finishing the meat, and I regretted that I had taken so
little with me. The second had drawn level with the first, but he didn’t stop to join in the feast, he continued stubbornly moving in my direction. He walked like a drunk in the Port City—as if he was about to fall over at any moment. But the dead man didn’t fall, he kept coming toward me with the persistence of a gnome delving into the body of the earth.
I felt a sharp jerk, and the magic rope began pulling me upward.
Breathing heavily, I threw one leg over the granite cornice that ran the full length of the bank just below the roof and pulled myself up onto it with an abrupt movement. I turned over onto my back to examine the night sky. There were just over two hours left until dawn, and the stars had already paled in anticipation of the morning that had not yet awoken but was very close.
The Archer was already sinking behind the horizon, the Stone had lost its magical brilliance, Svinopas had moved close to the moon. There were still constellations in the night sky, but they were gradually growing dimmer, advising me to make haste.
I stood up and detached the rope, which had taken a grip on the roof like a hungry leech from the Crystal Dream River. Then I rolled the rope into a tight coil and attached it to my belt. I put away the knife, which had not been needed, and looked around.
The moon was flooding the entire world with its magical silvery light. The roofs of the houses lay exposed to my gaze. There was nothing up here to cast any shadows, and a silver glow enveloped everything around me, transforming the roofs into a fairy-tale plain of tiles, rusty chimneys, and broken weather vanes. The houses were set very close to each other; the distance between them was so tiny that even a cripple could probably have jumped from one to another without falling and breaking his bones.
I was about to move on, when I spotted a really large hole in the roof, about twelve yards from the spot where I was standing.
So time had done what all the thieves of Avendoom had been unable to do. It had created a breach in the bank’s reliable defenses. And I was immediately tempted to go down into the bank and discover if the Hirgzan clan was as rich as the rumors claimed it was.
But just at that moment money would only have been a hindrance to me, and I didn’t really feel like climbing into the black mouth of that hole, especially as the roof beside it was probably no thicker than a moth’s wings and could collapse under me at any moment, dispatching unfortunate Harold into dark oblivion.
“Well then, the next brave soul who decides to pay a visit to the bank will be very lucky,” I muttered, and continued on my way.
Time was the most precious thing I had now.
I took a run and leapt onto the next building. Took a run and leapt. Took a run and leapt again. After two blocks I was breathing like an excited wild boar.
Once some poorly secured tiles slipped out from under my feet, but by some miracle I managed to grab hold of the cornice and hang there with my hands. Sagot be praised, I managed to scramble up.
Another time the sloping roof of one of the houses began crumbling under my very feet. I put on a burst of speed as I felt everything shifting and heard the rumble of the roof collapsing behind me. I pushed off hard and jumped across onto the next building, my boots knocking out several longish, bright tiles that had not darkened with age.
I made it.
I watched rather gloomily as the ancient dust rose up from the site of the house I had just been standing on. Swirling feebly in the moonlight, it began taking on the form of a gigantic skull, and I decided not to wait to see how all this would end, but hurried on to the Street of the Magicians, which was already close at hand now.
On my travels I caught a few more glimpses of zombies strolling lethargically along the Street of the Sleepy Cat. Fortunately the vile creatures didn’t raise their heads to admire the full moon, and so they didn’t see me.
I thanked Sagot once again that I had decided to cover the rest of the distance over the roofs and not along the street—if I’d run into that many of the walking dead, I would have been hard put to get away from them.
One final high leap, and I was on the roof of a building with a façade overlooking the Street of the Magicians. The goal of my nocturnal expedition was already close at hand. But the problem now was that there were no more houses anywhere nearby. It was as if some gigantic tongue had licked them clean out of this world. Empty black squares where there ought to have been buildings.
And that was all.
I leaned against an old chimney that had turned dark with age. I had two options for making further progress. The first was to go down and risk my skin by running the rest of the way to the Tower of the Order. The second was to risk my neck by trying to jump to the building standing on the opposite side of the street.
Despite the risk involved, I found the second option more to my liking. I was already certain that it was much safer to stay up high—running through those dark streets was like dancing the djanga on thin ice.
To reassure myself, I tugged on the cobweb rope several times to check its strength. Now all I had to do was commit one of those acts of insanity that were already a habit with me. To be precise, jump off a building, go flying through the air, and end up on the house opposite. I had done something of the kind a couple of times in my life, but that had been when I was a lot more stupid.
A step off into the void . . . The surface of the street came leaping up toward me, and then I was flying above it, holding on tight with both hands to the rope, which suddenly seemed too thin and insecure.
The wall of the building with the dark holes in it was approaching with catastrophic speed, threatening to flatten me into a pancake. I instinctively put my feet out in an attempt to soften the blow, but the cobweb thread stiffened and was suddenly, incomprehensibly transformed from a flexible, pliable rope into something completely opposite.
The straight, stiff rod hung there in the air with me holding on to it, and then began slowly swinging toward the building. But the moment my feet touched the gray wall, the rope’s stiffness disappeared; it became its usual self again and pulled me gently upward.
“That’s over, then,” I said, examining the palms of my hands.
The one without a glove had come off worse—there was a ragged red line running across it. Okay. It’s nothing. I’ll survive.
The houses on the Street of the Magicians had been built more recently. Or at least the coverings of the roofs didn’t groan under my weight in weary old age, threatening to collapse suddenly at any moment. I moved on, making haste—morning was very close now.
Winding and weaving like a drunken snake, the Street of the Magicians was nothing like the ideally straight Street of the Sleepy Cat, Street of Men, and Graveyard Street, which the dwarves might have laid out with a ruler.
And although this wasn’t the most prestigious area of town, the little houses looked far richer. There were elegant weather vanes in the form of various magical creatures standing on every second roof. On a couple of façades I even spotted statues decorating the walls. But of course, I didn’t look too closely at them; all my attention was focused on not falling off the sloping roof I happened to be on at the time.
Up. Down. Leap. Land. Up. Down. Leap. Land. I moved along like I was controlled by one of the dwarves’ mechanisms—precisely, accurately, expending no excess energy. I jumped in the absolute certainty that nothing untoward was going to happen now.
That certainty was my undoing. As I landed one more time, I stopped to catch my breath and look up at the stars. I’m running out of time!
And then there was a mournful creaking sound under my feet. The kind of creak old doors make in abandoned houses. The roof started to shift under me, I flung my arms out, trying to keep my balance and not go tumbling down from the third floor onto the stone surface of the street, and at the same time I tried to jump away from the collapsing section of roof.
But I was too late.
The support fell away from under my feet, and I went flying down after it. There were glimpses of walls, dust rising from the
collapsing roof, the starry sky.
And then there was darkness.
12
IN THE DARK
I don’t think I lay there unconscious for very long. When I opened my eyes and looked up at the sky, the stars had hardly moved at all and the moon was still bright, not yet pale in anticipation of morning.
I groaned and tried to sit up. Surprisingly enough, none of my bones seemed to be broken. Naturally, I was highly delighted. If I’d broken my leg or—Sagot forbid—my back, I’d have been lying there waiting for the dawn to come.
I hadn’t fallen very far. The ceiling was very close—if I just stood up, reached out my hand, and jumped, I could reach it with my fingers. I seemed to be in some room on the third floor. The floor was supporting both me and the collapsed section of the roof, on the rubble of which I had made such a successful landing. If I’d gone on down through all the floors to the ground, the king would have been unlikely ever to see me again.
I got to my feet and cautiously moved my arms, still not believing that I wasn’t hurt. I had to get out of there; that child’s crying was having a bad effect on my nerves.
Stop!
What crying?
It felt like I was suddenly fastened to the floor with a single gigantic nail. I started feverishly trying to understand where the thought about a child’s cry had come from.
Yes, there was something there. Something on the very borderline of my consciousness as I was falling into the darkness. Something that had woken me, called me back from oblivion.
Crying. That familiar child’s crying.
As if in reply, and in confirmation of all the laws of universal beastliness and my own anxious fears, I heard a quiet sobbing in the dark corner of the room. Feeling rather far from my best, I nervously took out the magical trinket and held it out in front of me at arm’s length.
The old room had walls with peeling wallpaper, a scraped and battered wooden floor, and a little girl standing in the far corner, gazing at me with her green eyes.
