The Corrupted

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  Kerr pretended to study the man’s wares as he felt the thief’s inexpert fumbling. He turned suddenly, as if interested in something that lay down the alleyway ahead. He didn’t need to glance back to know that the pickpocket was following him. He had played this game often enough in the past to know that he would be.

  The cries of the merchants faded as he stepped into the alleyway. Stone walls rose on either side of him, and the passageway twisted around a blind corner just a little way ahead.

  Kerr slowed his pace, and wondered if the pickpocket would be fool enough to practise his art in such an unpromising place.

  He was.

  Kerr had hardly reached the corner when he heard the almost inaudible patter of stealthy feet, and felt the weight of his purse being lifted. He waited until he felt the first tug of the knife against the leather straps, and then spun around, his own dagger pressing against the thief’s throat in a single, fluid motion.

  The thief looked up at him, his face a mask of horror. He looked about ten years old, although Kerr knew that he could have been any age. Rattenkinder grew up fast, if at all.

  “Good afternoon,” he told the boy, angling the blade of his dagger so that it rested neatly across his windpipe. “Drop that blade or I’ll cut you.”

  Without a second’s hesitation, the boy dropped the blade. The first tear rolled down his cheek.

  “No need for that,” Kerr said, grabbing a handful of the lad’s shirt before sheathing his dagger. “I just want a chat.”

  “A chat?” The boy rolled the word around his mouth as if he had never heard it before. “What about?”

  “About how you’ve managed to survive with such elephant feet and cow’s fingers. I felt you trying to take my purse back in the market. What were you trying to do, pull it free with your hands?”

  The boy shrugged, suddenly as embarrassed as he was afraid.

  “My knife isn’t very sharp,” he muttered, looking down to where it lay.

  “That’s no excuse,” Kerr scolded him. “Look, if I let you go will you let me show you how to sharpen it?”

  The boy goggled.

  “Well?”

  “Yes, all right.”

  Kerr released him and stooped to pick up the penknife. As he did so, the child tensed as if for flight, but curiosity held him.

  “Watch,” Kerr told him, finding a cobble and drawing the small blade across it. “Like this, see? Lots of little strokes, and always in the same direction. Now you try.”

  Glancing nervously from his captor to the blade, the boy took the proffered knife and stooped to copy Kerr’s example.

  “That’s it,” he encouraged. “It takes ages, but eventually you’ll be able to shave with it, let alone do a professional job.”

  “Don’t shave yet,” said the boy, dragging the knife across the cobble. Now and again, a spark flashed into life, and after a while, he tested the blade against the hem of his ragged coat.

  “See?” Kerr asked. “It cuts like butter.”

  “Thanks,” said the boy, cautiously folding the knife closed and returning it to his pocket. “I’m sorry I…”

  Kerr waved him into silence.

  “Never mind that. As it happens, I’m glad to have met you. I bet you know other children, don’t you? Other people who live on the streets?”

  The boy nodded uncertainly.

  “A few,” he admitted, “although I don’t know their names, or where they live, or anything like that.”

  Kerr laughed, the sound echoing down the narrow walls of the alleyway.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, slapping the lad on the shoulder. “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what they might have seen. What do you notice about the way I talk? My accent?”

  The boy frowned.

  “It sounds funny.”

  “Exactly. Well I’m looking for somebody else who talks funny like me, somebody old. He’s skinny, and he probably has a big beard. He’s tall, too. I want to find him, and if you help me find him…” Kerr paused and held up his hand. The copper coin he was holding shuffled back and forth between his fingers.

  The boy watched, mesmerised, until Kerr tossed it to him.

  “If you or your friends find him, I’ll give you six more like that.”

  “Twelve.”

  Kerr frowned.

  “You’re a hard man. All right, I’ll pay twelve, but only after I’ve checked that it’s the man I want.”

  The boy tried to keep the excitement off his face.

  “All right then,” he said. “Twelve each.”

  “No.”

  The boy was unabashed.

  “Just twelve then,” he said, and tried to frown.

  “Good.” Kerr paused as somebody else entered the alleyway. The man paused, unbuttoned his breeches, and urinated against the wall. Kerr ignored him. “Do you know the Slayer’s Axe? All right, you can find me there. Ask for Kerr, Menheer Kerr.”

  “Right you are, your lordship.” The boy lifted his ragged cap and watched Kerr slip away. Then he turned and followed the drunk, who had staggered back out into the marketplace.

  The newly sharpened knife felt warm in his pocket.

  The sun was already dipping below the city walls when Kerr entered the Grahizhna. Although he’d never set foot in the place before, it was as familiar as the face of an old friend. There was a quarter like it in every city. In Altdorf it sprawled around the docks, a wilderness of lawless enterprises where vice was celebrated and excess was king.

  Or at least, Kerr thought as he drifted past a gang of thugs, the purveyors of excess were the kings.

  He slipped past a dozen courtesans, their cheap fur coats opened to reveal the warmth beneath, and slowed his pace to listen to the fluting of some musical instrument. The air was already alive with screams and laughter, and the occasional smash of breaking ceramics.

  Kerr followed his nose through a dozen desperate joys. He was looking for a cook shop, although not any one would do. He passed one that was full of men so richly dressed that they might have been aristocrats. Another he dismissed on the grounds that it had seemed devoid of flies.

  Finally, he found what he was looking for. The scrubbed wooden tables were unadorned, the floor was nothing but matted reeds, and the ragged customers were eating from thick clay bowls.

  “Pork or beef?” a woman asked as he sat down. She had arms thicker than Kerr’s own, and her face had the hard edged look of a born mercenary.

  “What’s best?” Kerr smiled, but his attempt to be charming fell on stony ground.

  “Neither,” she said, and crossed her meaty arms.

  “I’ll have bread and soup.”

  The woman scowled belligerently.

  “You can either have pork,” she explained, “or beef. Now which is it to be? I’m too busy to bandy words with the likes of you.”

  Kerr resisted the temptation to look around at the three other customers. Instead, he ordered pork.

  The woman stomped away and returned a moment later with a bowl of grey sludge and a hunk of bread.

  “Ah, you found some soup after all.” Kerr smiled and looked at the mess.

  The woman glared at him with an expression of sheer disgust.

  “It’s pork,” she said, and banged the bread down on the table.

  “So it is,” Kerr soothed. “I hope you’ll excuse my stupidity. I’m from the south, the Empire.”

  Was the woman’s glare becoming slightly less murderous? Kerr couldn’t tell.

  “We don’t have such a beautiful language as you do in Praag. It makes us easily confused.”

  “Obviously.” The woman sneered and turned to go.

  Kerr watched her return to the safety of the serving counter, and ate the stewed mess. Whether it was pork or not he had no idea, but he mopped the last of it up with his bread and patted his stomach.

  When the serving wench returned, he chanced another smile.

  “How much do I owe you?”

 
“A copper,” she said, taking his bowl and holding out a meaty hand. For a moment, Kerr considered offering to read the future in the grimy creases of her palm. With somebody else he might have tried it on, but not with this old battle axe. Whatever else she might be, she wasn’t a sucker.

  “Here’s a copper.” Kerr pressed a coin into her palm, “And here’s another one.”

  Her jaw fell open and her eyes widened. For the first time since he had seen her, there was something on her face other than irritation. The copper might have been a diamond, or some fabulous beast.

  Her hand snapped shut at the same time as her mouth.

  “What’s that for?”

  “It’s a tip, and there’ll be plenty more if you can help me. I’m looking for another man from the south, a big bony one, probably with a beard.”

  The woman’s face worked unhappily.

  “If any of your customers see him, or hear about him, come and tell me at the Slayer’s Axe. I’ll pay you well.”

  “How well?” she demanded.

  “Well enough for you to start selling pork from a pig,” he winked, and slipped away before she could confess what she had just served him.

  Illusions, he decided as he merged back into the crowd, were sometimes as valuable as coin.

  As Kerr continued to spin a network of informants from the ragged underclass of Praag, so Titus was exercising his own art. He sat alone in his bolted room, straight backed and still. Despite the bustling of the inn’s other customers, and despite the cries from the street below, he had slipped into a trance with the practiced ease of an otter slipping into a river.

  Even as his pulse slowed to an impossible stillness, Titus’ form left the comfort of his flesh and lifted up towards the ceiling. There was a brush of grey as his ethereal form drifted past the slates of the roof, and then he was free, hovering over one of the most ancient cities on the planet.

  It was an incredible sight. Even to the unschooled eye, Praag was impressive. The grey stone of its construction rose high above the streets, and the intricacies of the buildings meant that the masonry had often evolved into grotesque shapes.

  However, this was nothing compared to the seething tides of magical energy that flowed around the structures. Every shade of the spectrum was here, from verdant green to sickly blackness, and above this seething mass floated a galaxy of distinct sparks, the tiny shapes flickering like fireflies on a summer’s night.

  Titus allowed himself to float towards the nearest of them. It was a little more than a pinprick of red light. As he drew nearer to it, he could hear the words that pulsed from it.

  “That swine, Radovitch, is always stealing my customers. I wish he would just…”

  Titus smiled in spite of himself. Listening to the thoughts of a city’s teeming masses always filled him with pleasure, no matter how petty they were.

  Another bauble drifted past, another thought born from the world below.

  “…beautiful, so beautiful. I wonder if I should try to hold her hand. Or maybe I should write a poem…”

  Titus let the words drift past, and gazed at the other thoughts that floated up from the city. They lit the sky like embers from a roaring bonfire, and for a while Titus could only gaze upon them, enraptured.

  Eventually, he managed to tear himself away and turned his attention to another marvel. He hadn’t noticed it at first. Compared to the rainbow hues of the city below, the dark energy that sheered up from the city walls seemed little more than background.

  Yet, as Titus drifted over to study the slabs of energy, he realised that they were more than background. It was difficult to see where the dead stone ended and the living magic of the walls began, but it was also impossible to see where it ended. The blinding sheets of grey rose up towards the heavens, and for a moment Titus felt an absurd twinge of claustrophobia.

  Scolding himself, he drifted close enough to the magical walls to touch the energy. He pressed one ghostly fingertip into the darkness.

  The pain was intense and immediate. He snatched his hand away, and saw that the ether of his fingertip was glowing as orange as molten iron. Titus took a moment to compose himself, but when the pain failed to recede, he turned and followed the pull of his fleshly body.

  A moment later, he was blinking in the pale sunlight of his chamber, sweat slicking his brows. He leant forward, waiting for the pain in his fingertip to stop. When it didn’t, he held it up and looked at it.

  To his horror, it looked like a well cooked sausage. The skin had blistered at the tip, and the flesh up to the first knuckle was white with burn damage.

  “Well, well, well,” Titus said to himself, fascination warring with pain. He had never seen anything like this before, and his mind was already turning on ways to copy the spell.

  A sudden shadow fell across the room, and Titus looked up with an unaccustomed nervousness. When he saw that it was only the sun setting behind the walls, he smeared his burnt finger with some lotion, sat back down, and tried again.

  “Something wrong with it?” the proprietor asked, his fists resting on his meaty hips. Kerr had been studying the cook-shop, the seventh he had been in today. Tables and chairs filled the cramped room, and a constant stream of ragged customers came in and out of the door.

  Kerr looked from the owner to his bowl of gruel. He shook his head. “No, nothing wrong with it,” he said, “just making it last.”

  “Well don’t make it last too long. There are others waiting for the bowl.”

  Kerr forced himself to spoon the last of the slop down his throat, and handed the bowl back to the cook. He turned it over, spat into it, and wiped it with a rag, ready for the next customer.

  Kerr paid, recited his offer of coin for information about Grendel, and then made his way out. His fellow diners, vagabonds to a man, carried their bundled possessions with them. A couple had even stretched out to sleep on the dirty floor.

  Kerr thought about that as he strolled through the gathering dusk. It was good of the cook to let them doss down there. He had never seen such generosity in his own city.

  Yes, Praag was certainly an unusual place. Even as the shadows lengthened, the city seemed to be slowing down. In Altdorf’s docklands, the coming of darkness was like fuel thrown onto the fire. Here, everybody was heading off home.

  Kerr watched as all around him people scurried along the emptying streets. It suddenly occurred to him that he was the only one not in a hurry. Perhaps it was because nobody was lighting any torches or lanterns along the road. Instead, the merchants were busy closing their doors and boarding their windows. Funny customs foreigners have, he thought. Well, no matter. He had always felt at home in the dark.

  A tingle of unease shivered down his spine, and he licked his lips. A couple of figures brushed past him, and he dropped a hand to check that his satchel was intact. Then he squinted after them as they hurried down the broad, unlit thoroughfare. When they had gone, he found himself completely alone.

  He looked up at the sky, and saw that the blue was already fading to black. As he watched, the first star appeared and, as if in response, the city’s bells started ringing. They clanged from every direction, a terrible cacophony of tuneless metal that bounced and echoed off the granite walls.

  When the final peal had died away the world seemed deafeningly quiet. Kerr shivered and turned back towards his inn. Darkness wrapped itself around him. That was alright, though. He was used to darkness.

  What he wasn’t used to was to find such stillness in the midst of a city, or to see such emptiness on the streets. He was reminded of the tales he had heard of cities in the southern deserts, sun bleached ruins that were as silent as gravestones.

  “Foreigners are crazy,” Kerr told himself, but neither the thought nor the lonely sound of his voice was particularly comforting, so he shut up and hurried on home.

  He was just leaving the Grazhino when he heard the first voice. It whispered from out of the darkness ahead of him, a sibilant hiss that sounded bar
ely human. Kerr jumped, and then cursed himself for a fool. So, somebody was in the streets after all, so what?

  He loosened his dagger and pressed on.

  The voice grew louder as he approached, and when he drew level with the speaker, he squinted out of the corner of his eye. There was nothing there except for the blank face of a granite wall.

  The muttering continued nonetheless, and Kerr hurried past the whispering voice. When it was behind him, he felt a rush of relief. It was almost as if the speaker had been invisible.

  He forced himself to smile at the ridiculous idea. He was still grimacing when he heard the scream.

  It came from directly above him, an accelerating howl of terror that sent him rolling to one side. He sprang back to his feet, the steel of his dagger a spark in the darkness, and glanced fearfully around. There was nobody there.

  “Hello?” he whispered, his voice sounding horribly loud.

  No answer.

  After a moment, Kerr dragged a sleeve across the dampness of his brow and continued on his way. He could hear other voices. They echoed all around him, but although they were everywhere, Kerr couldn’t hear a single word amongst them. They seemed to be no more than animal whimperings of misery, or terrible screams of pain. Sometimes there was laughter, although it had a broken, hysterical edge to it.

  Wide eyed in the darkness, Kerr felt the first twist of panic within his chest. Realising that he was grinding his teeth together, he stopped, took a deep breath, and wiped his palms on his breeches.

  “Just voices,” he told himself, and was surprised at how confident he sounded. He forced himself to stand still for a count of three before carrying on along the street.

  From the cobbles beneath his feet, there came groans of agony, as if the stones could feel themselves being trodden upon. Kerr ignored them. The walls moaned with a miserable insistence, but he paid them no heed, and when he heard the weeping, he hardened his heart and marched straight on.

  So what if he could hear ghosts? He had never bothered them. Why should they bother him?

  Then again, whispered a treacherous thought, why shouldn’t they bother you?