Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  Somewhere, Marius could hear alarms so shrill and urgent that the nuns outside should have been screaming and throwing themselves from the nearest window into the sea below. The alarms were inside his head. Which did nothing to stop him wanting to jump from the nearest window. There couldn’t be a path worse than the one he was one right now, so he changed it.

  “Did you find them? The villagers?”

  Keth deflated, her pent-up anger disappearing as quickly as he said the words. “No,” she admitted. “They weren’t there.”

  “Fuck.” Marius rubbed his face. “They’re with Scorbus, then. Damn it!” He slammed a fist onto the table, then blinked as it drove straight through the wood, knocking a fist-sized chunk to the floor. Gerd looked at him askance.

  “That’s okay, though, isn’t it?” he asked. “It means we know where they are. We can find them when we get there.”

  Marius stared at him for long seconds. “Yes, of course that’s what it means,” he said. He glanced at Keth, saw understanding in her eyes. Once they were on the battlefield there would be no chance to separate the villagers from the melee. Anyone not with them already would be the enemy. Marius ran a hand through his hair.

  “Thank you both,” he said. “Keth, I’m sure you must be dying for a bath and a change of dress. Why don’t you tell my mother to get you both. Gerd…” he waved his hands in uncertain circles, “just… go somewhere for a while, okay?”

  Keth raised an eyebrow. Gerd muttered a surly “Good to see you again, too”. But they both stood and made their way through the door. They had hardly left when it swung open once again, and the strained bodice of Mistress Fellipan preceded herself into the room.

  “Monastery of Cistrion,” she purred, sashaying across the floor and pouring herself into a chair opposite Marius. “You are naughty.”

  “I needed you out of the way.” Marius was not looking. He was not. Fellipan leaned forward, and he was most definitely not looking, no sir.

  “And now you need me. In the way.”

  “You met my girlfriend.” Good. This was safe ground. This was good.

  “She seems lovely. We could get on… famously.”

  “Look.” Marius sat back, tapped the table’s edge with his fingertips. “Just drop the temptress act, okay? I’m not interested.”

  “I have a tub of goose grease and two hands that bet otherwise.”

  “Stop it. Now.”

  She sat back, eyed him speculatively. “So, it’s business then. Actual business business, not…” She arched an exquisite eyebrow, “pleasure business.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I have goose grease and two feet that bet you don’t.”

  “I’m not… Feet?”

  She smiled. “Hands aren’t the only things that grip.” Several angels on Marius’ shoulders turned up their toes and died. “I don’t share everything on first dates.”

  “That’s…” He stared into space for several seconds. “That’s as may be. But I still mean it.”

  She sighed. “Okay, so we’ll behave this time. Still,” she looked around them, “a nunnery. It’s been a while.” Suddenly she was nothing but serious, pinning Marius with a stare that had nothing of the sex mistress in it. “So why am I here?”

  “Because you’ve tied your flag to the wrong King.”

  “Oh, honey. I’ve tied my…” She stopped as Marius held up a finger. “Sorry, force of habit. Now, how about you explain to me why I’m doing such a thing?”

  So Marius leaned back in his chair and recounted to her everything he had learned about Scorbus, and the crown of Scorby, and of his own ascension to the throne of the underworld. Fellipan listened with her bone-white face displaying no emotion, until he stopped, laid his hands on the table, and waited for her to respond. She stared at him for long seconds. Her face and the tilt of her body betrayed nothing: the perfect politician, weighing up all angles in inscrutable silence. Finally she nodded, and met his gaze.

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “Your loyalty. And the three thousand bodies you’ve been collecting for Scorbus.”

  She smiled. “They’re in the lower hall. Your cute young friend took them down there for me as soon as we arrived. They’re already drilling.”

  Marius goggled. “Then what the hell was all this about?”

  “I just wanted to see you, darling. And let you know about the feet thing.”

  She rose from the chair in one liquid motion and left him staring at the perfect white flesh of her back as she exited. Marius counted to a thousand, very slowly, before he dared stand and follow her.

  Then there was nothing left to do but to bring his troops together and lead them up through the carved corridors of the nunnery to the ossuary. The nuns disappeared into doorways as they stomped past: seven thousand dead souls of the most ragged type, in a procession that took more than an hour to wend its way to the top floor. Marius called a halt at the ossuary doors. They were closed, and a single figure in white stood before them.

  “Mother.”

  “Marius.” She raised her chin, one small woman in a final act of defiance before an entire army. “Is this how you plan to leave?”

  Marius looked about him. “Am I missing someone?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He shook his head. “What would you like me to say? That I’ll be careful? That I’ll come back when this is all over? That I love you and wish none of this had ever happened?”

  For a moment she looked pierced by his words, but she recovered her composure just as quickly.

  “I don’t need you to say anything,” she said. “I think you’ve said quite enough. But you are setting off to start a war from here, here of all places. And you take people whose eternal rest you interrupted with no thought for the consequence to their souls. I want to know that you understand what you are doing to them, Marius. I want to know that you understand what you are taking from them.”

  Marius stared at her in disbelief. “And you still maintain this charade,” he said in wonder. “You still…” He turned to Keth. She stood beside him. Somehow Alno had reappeared from the depths of the nunnery, and now lay asleep in her arms. “We’re travelling underground the whole way,” he said to her.

  “I know.”

  “A battlefield is no place for a cat.” Even a bastard cat like that one.

  Her glance went from him, to Alno, to his mother, and back. He held her stare.

  “I know what I’m asking,” he whispered. “I know what it means.”

  She passed over the cat silently.

  “Thank you.” He turned back to his mother. “Here,” he said, and gave the cat to her. Alno hissed lazily and swatted at him with as much lethargy as he could manage, leaving him a final, farewell line of white on his forearm. “You want to care about someone’s soul, waste it on something living.” She took Alno in her arms, and looked past Marius to Keth.

  “Are you sure?”

  Keth glanced at her lover. “I hate it so much, but he’s right,” she said. “I will come back, to see him. And you.”

  Halla smiled a tight, sad smile. “Thank you. And please, look after him.” Her eyes lit on Marius for a moment.

  “No,” Keth replied. “Not anymore.” And she turned away. Halla stepped aside, and gestured towards the doors.

  “Be on your way.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  An army marched to war. Or rather, it lurched, shuffled, and elbowed about as it tried to push past itself into the cramped confines of an underground corridor to war. Marius strode in front, with Gerd at his side. Behind him, Fellipan and Keth jockeyed side-by-side on twin palanquins dredged up from gods knew where in the nunnery, each refusing to look at the other as their dead mounts tried vainly to fit the into the corridor without jostling each other. Behind them came Fellipan’s army: the bedraggled jetsam of Mish, gathered up and forced towards Scorbus, now repatriated under the flag of another king. Then Arnobew, leading his nuns like a card
board colossus, voice echoing down the tunnel as he sang the dirtiest marching songs he could remember. Any potential objections were quelled, if not by the sight of the skeletons who ringed him with drawn weapons and menace in their every movement, but by the sound, equally raucous, of Granny’s laughter as she joined in and urged him on to ever more obscene heights. The nuns kept close to him, finding excuses to run a skeletal finger across his shoulders or bounce a bony hip bone against his, and every now and again the singing would cease as he disappeared from the ranks of marchers with one or more of his loving disciples. Nothing Marius could imagine happening could be anything other than extraordinarily awkward, and just simply damned painful. Yet somehow, the sound of Granny’s laughter was still worse. The rest of the army obviously shared his thoughts. To a man they decided early, silently and in unison, to pretend none of it was happening.

  And last, in the back, keeping to the shadows: Brys, her tubmen, and the scum. And nobody looked at them. Nobody but Marius, who took great pleasure in presenting each and every one of his followers with a new uniform, brought fresh from V’Ellos by a scowling Drenthe: the crest of the family don Hellespont, clean and white on every murderous unbreathing breast under his command. His army. His followers. Marching to war under his banner. Marius occasionally wished he wasn’t a small, petty man. But not while he watched Drenthe walk up and down the serried ranks, po-facedly handing out the clothes to be wrapped around the putrid and tattered dead.

  Marius marched them for three days, following winding tunnels dug deep through the earth, with only his eyesight and sense of dead reckoning to guide him. He had walked almost every inch of Scorby above ground, whether it was through towns that welcomed or hounded him; ditches that sheltered him; mountain ranges that offered him a thousand escape routes. He could close his eyes and map out a route to anywhere in the kingdom, avoiding danger as if he possessed the senses of a woodland creature. Now he ignored his surroundings and let twenty years of travel guide him. Where tunnels did not exist he called forth minions to make them, watching the dirt disappear backwards along the army’s serpentine trail to be deposited, grain by grain, onto the floor across more than a dozen miles, trampled into rock-smoothness by ten thousand tramping feet.

  They progressed in this fashion across nearly a hundred miles: a vast caravanserai of the dead travelling towards Scorby City in a straight line with no need to detour around natural formations. At what might have passed for the morning of the fourth day, Drenthe made his way forward and pulled Marius aside.

  “Helles–”

  “Your Majesty. Say ‘Your Majesty’.”

  “Your Majesty.”

  “Yes, Drenthe?” Marius’ voice was as sweet as sunshine. “May I help you?”

  He hid his pleasure as Drenthe performed a slow burn, then refocussed.

  “Your Majesty,” he said with perfect control. “I need to recommend a diversion in our current course.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  Behind him Marius could feel the army grow restless. They had become used to the march, to the rhythm of movement towards the enemy. They were eager to advance, chafing at this unscheduled interruption. Marius focussed on the corpse before him. “And why is that?”

  Drenthe pointed to the tunnel. “A mile down there we will come to a cross tunnel. If we travel east we move away from our destination; west and we run towards the Bight of Sharks. I assume we do not wish to break through into that particular body of water, Your Majesty?”

  Marius considered for a moment, turning his head to follow the invisible map of the land above him. Drenthe was right, but there was something more, something that nagged at Marius but which he couldn’t quite nail down.

  “We’ve been following this tunnel for a while, Drenthe. The bight has been to our left for miles, and I have no intention of moving farther from our quarry than necessary.”

  “I realise that, Majesty. However–”

  “However?”

  Drenthe paused, looked down for a moment, then stepped closer. “Look, Helles,” he murmured. “I understand that you don’t like me, and I understand that you don’t want to examine why I had to manipulate you into this. But at least do me the favour of allowing that I might have the best interests of my fellow dead at heart, and that getting you to this battle in the best shape to conduct it is in their interest, will you?”

  They matched gazes for long moments, until Marius, unable to read anything from the other man’s ravaged features, nodded slowly.

  “Okay,” he said. “So explain to me why we don’t just plough straight through and make a passageway of our own, why don’t you?”

  Drenthe glanced down the tunnel, then seemed to come to a decision.

  “There’s nothing to be gained from it,” he replied. “If we go east for twenty miles we cross a series of corridors that will bring us to the battlefield from a different direction, without the need to work our troops–”

  “Our troops?”

  “Your troops, Hel… Your Majesty.” He paused, then continued: “Without the need to work them any harder than we need to.”

  Marius considered the proposal. It made sense, when presented in that way. Even so, something in Drenthe’s attachment to the east chimed wrong. He shook his head.

  “Nice try,” he said. “But I’m going to stick with my original plan.”

  “What’s that?”

  Marius looked him in his ruined eye. “Listen to what Drenthe says and then ignore it.” He turned away and signalled to the waiting troops. “Straight ahead,” he projected. “Clear me a path.”

  The army swung into action, relieved to be once more on the move. They covered the remaining mile of tunnel in less than five minutes and barely paused before the first rank of troops began to dig their hands into the earth and claw huge handfuls of it away. They swung their limbs like a row of bone scythes, carving out an indentation that grew to more than a man’s height, wide enough for the troops to enter without breaking stride. The army inched forward, those in front passing the excised earth behind. Dribbles of dirt fell with each movement, and were pounded into the floor by the passage of thousands of pairs of feet. Those at the rear were left with little more than a handful, and that was sprinkled back behind them, adding almost nothing to the space. The tunnel floor remained rock hard. Only the tiniest dusting of soil marked their passage as they pushed their way through the unresisting underworld. Marius stared at Drenthe as the first rows began to work. The soldier matched him for several seconds, then smiled and sketched a short bow. Marius turned away from him and followed his soldiers into the breach.

  They had proceeded perhaps another mile when the front row suddenly halted. Gerd was with them, and Marius felt his urgent call. He pushed through tightly-packed bodies until he was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with his young friend.

  “What is it? Why have we stopped?”

  Gerd pointed to the wall. Marius could make out a small break in the flat plane of earth, the slightest variation in the dull grey of the underworld. He sidled in-between two of the diggers, and poked at the wall. His finger met no resistance.

  “It’s a hole.”

  “I know. I figured that one out myself.”

  “Then why call me? It’s a cross tunnel.”

  Gerd leaned forward, and whispered in Marius ear.

  “I thought Drenthe said there wasn’t anything for miles.”

  Marius shook his head. “No, he said twenty miles east.” He poked again in disgust, widening the hole by a finger length. “Typical of him. Send us that far out of our way to come back a hundred steps later.” He kicked the wall, then spent half a minute struggling to drag his foot out of the tiny landslide it caused. “Break us through, then we’ll call our friend Drenthe forward and let him lead us for a while where we can watch him.”

  “Right you are.” Gerd tapped the nearest soldier on the shoulder, and as one they smashed through the few remaining inches of earth.
>
  And emerged into the chamber.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The chamber was enormous. Two hundred feet in diameter, roughly circular, with a ceiling that arched thirty feet above them, every surface as smooth as if pounded into place by a multitude of stone hammers, it dwarfed the ragged army that now flowed into the space like an invading virus. A massive stone block had been placed in the exact centre, carved round with geometric designs Marius had not seen since a visit to the Museum of Borgho when he was a child. He stared at it in astonishment.

  “What is it?” Gerd was at his shoulder, looking from Marius to the stone and back.

  “Gelders.”

  “What?”

  Marius stalked forward and ran his hands across the carvings. “That’s what the museum called them, anyway. They’re a lost tribe. There are almost no artefacts left, just a couple of funerary mounds and a bunch of cromlechs scattered around some of the more untouched corners of the plains. There’s some evidence that they engaged in human sacrifice, from memory. Pots with burned bones inside, some skeletons with cut marks around the hips and upper thighs, as if…”

  “They’d been gelded.”

  “Right.”

  Gerd frowned. “So why is this here?”

  “I don’t know.” Marius glanced at the ceiling. “We’re not near any sites, as far as I can tell.”

  “No, I mean, why is it here?” Gerd gestured around them. “Underground. With us.”

  Marius turned in a circle. Members of his army were wandering the space to stare in wonder. He tilted his head and frowned momentarily. His followers were beginning to group together, exclaiming while they gestured at points around the circumference of the chamber. He strode towards the nearest one, elbowed his way through the milling crowd, and pulled up short as he saw what they were staring at. Recessed into the dirt wall, with only one face pointing out from the dirt, was a stone column. It reared above him, three feet across and twenty feet tall, its visible face covered in the same geometric carvings as the sacrificial stone in the chamber’s centre..