His shimmering astral body was unmistakable. It even had its own dog collar. “Don’t you ‘Hello, Barry’ me. What did you do to these townspeople?”
I shrugged. I was too tired to be confrontational. “Pillaged them. Burnt their houses. Stole things. Dunno what to tell you.”
“Have you any idea how inconvenienced I am right now? I was the only resurrectionist for miles! I’m going to have to float all the way to Bumbleston. Emmett is never going to let me hear the end of this.”
I stood up and resolved to ignore him. The fire seemed to be going out and Deleters were starting to notice me, so I resignedly began to make my way back towards my body. I noticed Drylda the Syndrome-afflicted warrior, mechanically performing the same sequence of thrusting and slicing over and over again. Then I looked again, and I couldn’t stop looking.
There were two shimmery semi-transparent wings emerging from Drylda’s back like a bad angel costume. They definitely hadn’t been there in the living world. I floated closer.
No doubt about it. Little white wings. Far too small and non-corporeal to be of any use for flight, but there they were. Curious, I reached out and poked one of them. I was fairly certain she wouldn’t react even had we not been on different planes of existence, which is why it came as such a surprise when she did.
Her whole body flinched, causing me to do likewise and fall onto my astral arse. She stopped fighting, stiffened, then toppled over backwards with perfect comic timing, eyes glazed and mouth still fixed in mild disdain. Her attacker, a leathery thatcher, accepted this as a victory and moved on.
When her body lay still, a curious astral sheen appeared over her head, like a veil of fairy dust. Then a shimmering white oval rose up from inside her face, emerging from between her nose and mouth. I felt my astral stomach turning in protest, but I still watched, paralyzed with horror. The little white shape moved a little further out to reveal that it sat upon a pair of sparkling shoulders, and the sudden shock of recognition allowed me to find a voice.
“Deleter!” I shrieked. “There’s a Deleter inside her!”
“I am not listening to you!” called Barry.
The Deleter looked surprised, insofar as one can with a featureless face. Then it started shaking spasmodically, almost as if it were trying to pull itself free. Drylda’s body shook similarly, like a disobedient horse trying to throw off its jockey, before both gave one particularly violent lurch and fell back down, still. The Deleter sank back inside her, apparently in defeat.
I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, and jumped with shock a second time when I saw that the entire street was absolutely swarming with Deleters. There were far more than the usual committee that routinely hustled me back to my body. They were like a crowd gathering at a road accident.
“I didn’t touch your friend!” I said automatically, putting my hands up. Then I thought about it for a little longer. “Actually, I did! Very inappropriately! You’d better delete me before I do it again!”
I was talking to myself. They weren’t the slightest bit interested in me. In fact, every single one of them was standing with their rigid, blank faces angled towards Barry the vicar.
He realized it at the same time I did, with a terrified flinch. Being wordlessly judged by hundreds of shimmering celestial beings would be enough to strike religious dread into the staunchest atheist, so I could only imagine how petrifying it must have been for a career godbotherer.
“Er . . . it’s OK,” he was saying. “I was just on my way to find a church . . .”
He tried to back away, but they had surrounded him, blocking every escape route.
“I’ll walk faster!” came his final, desperate cry, as he disappeared from view behind a wall of shimmering white wings. I heard a few distorted screams and a glimpse of a thrashing limb, then both disappeared completely beneath the mass of white bodies. They formed themselves into a vaguely ball-shaped mass and flew off into the sky, vanishing from sight.
Barry the vicar was gone. I stood frozen in place, pondering my next move, before a handful of the remaining Deleters turned their attention to me. They pointed dismissively in the direction of my corpse.
“Oh, come on,” I said, as I felt myself being pulled back. “What makes him so special?!”
THREE
The battle had been decisively concluded by the time I came back to life. The victorious peasants had repaired to one of the inns to finish off the last few barrels of ale in preparation for its grand reopening as a family eatery. Only the merry apple-cheeked children remained on the battlefield, kneeling on the chests of the dead adventurers to force potatoes into their mouths and punch them in the face.
I sat on an upturned donkey cart, cradling my chin in one hand while a slightly singed Meryl filled the hole in my head with spackle. “Then they just whisked him away,” I concluded. “Nothing left. I don’t know what to make of it.”
Meryl was smoothing off the spackle job with a small trowel. “Maybe they deleted him for the same reason they did it to Dreadgrave?”
I frowned. “But they didn’t delete him. Not the same way. And besides, they deleted Dreadgrave because he was messing around with the new life and death rules. That Barry guy was just a bit of a prick.” I turned to look at her. “How did we get out of the cage, by the way?”
“Well, after the bars got hot enough, we were able to bend . . .”
“I am once again saved by the guiding hand of the LORD,” barked the priest, sitting nearby. His arms had been dislocated when the cage had turned over, and he was waiting for Meryl to reset them so he could get back to pointing accusing fingers in my face. “Praise His name for your good fortune, unbeliever.”
“Did you hear that? He’s down to calling us unbelievers, not the courtesans of hellspawn or whatever,” said Meryl. “I think he’s really starting to loosen up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe after a few more months he’ll be merely rude. Listen, about the Deleters. They’re not just deleting things. They’re doing things to adventurers. One of them had one inside her. I saw it. It was horrible.”
“Yeesh,” said Meryl with disinterested concern.
“They’ve got to be doing it all for a reason, right? The deleting and the Syndrome. But why?”
“I don’t know why you think you need to get so involved,” said Meryl through a sigh.
“Forget it,” I muttered, deliberately avoiding her point. I lapsed into glum silence, waiting for her to finish.
A few minutes later I saw Mrs. Bindlegob and Anthony coming towards us, carefully picking their way around the recent resurrectees busily looting their own corpses. “Hello, dears,” said Mrs. Bindlegob. “How are the patients?”
Meryl patted the back of my head fondly. “All plugged up and ready for action,” she said cheerfully, before turning her attention to the priest.
“Shame about young Dreadgrave,” said Anthony, shaking his head. “If there’s anything we can do to help you back on your feet, just ask.”
“We’re not staying,” I said quickly, as Meryl opened her mouth. “A few things we have to take care of elsewhere. But I would like to borrow a wheelbarrow.”
“Least we can do,” said Mrs. Bindlegob, fidgeting and stirring the bloodstained dirt with her foot. “It’s just . . . we were talking, and we know Dreadgrave’s gone and everything, but we wondered if you loves would be kind enough to pillage us every now and again, for old times’ sake?”
“We’d pay you by the hour,” added Anthony, as the silence dragged on.
“Why don’t you just . . . pillage each other?” I said.
Everyone fell silent. Somewhere, a bird called. The wind whistled through the trees. A dying adventurer spat out potatoes. And Anthony and Mrs. Bindlegob slowly, slowly turned to look at each other.
—
We were afforded a spectacular view of Applewheat as we made our way up the road out of Greydoom Valley. It was evening now, and the burning houses added a picturesque column o
f smoke to the pinkish sunset. When we were far enough away that the dancing peasants were no more than specks in the village square, Meryl finally spoke.
“Why are you bringing her with us?”
I stopped to shift my grip on the wheelbarrow handles and tuck Drylda’s legs back in. “Would you believe I feel a little guilty for her being like this?”
“Well . . . no, actually, I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re undead and completely without empathy? You used to throw people to be eaten to death by rats?”
“They didn’t die permanently . . .”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that.”
“Will your tongue ever cease to twist foul lies, heathen?” spat the priest, who had been walking ahead, but now turned and joined the conversation as it moved to the subject of my shortcomings.
“All right, fine. She’s got the Syndrome and the Syndrome is something to do with Deleters. That’s about the size of it.”
“That’s still not a good reason to lump her around.”
“Look, it’s not that complicated! Something weird happened when I touched her in the dead world and I want to figure out what. Why are you being so yappy about it?”
“I am not yappy!”
I stopped, and eyed her for a second. “Are you . . . are you jealous?”
Embarrassment and immediate denial said volumes in these situations. So it was rather disheartening when Meryl seemed genuinely bemused by the question. “Nooo . . . Why would you think that?”
I attempted to make a gesture that encapsulated her, me and our close proximity. “You’ve been following me around since the moment we met.”
“So you thought that I was . . .” She tried to repeat the gesture. “ . . . With you? No. God, no. We don’t have glands. How would that even work?”
I took up the wheelbarrow again. “No, right. We’re going to stop talking now. This conversation is heading for ugly places.”
“The bonds of marriage are the scalding hot chains of the fornicator,” muttered the priest, apparently lacking a more appropriate verse.
We rounded the top of the hill. The forests of the valley had given way to the grass of the plains. For a couple of hours we proceeded through a picturesque vista of rolling yellow fields broken up by green hedges and the occasional brown-and-white rank of snoozing cows. After that the sun went down, so we followed the path in pitch darkness for a while before reaching a crossroads. A three-way directional sign was erected in the middle, illuminated by a standard lightbearing sprite.
I inspected the signs. Going back into Goodsoil via Applewheat was out of the question, at least until they rebuilt it again, which narrowed the options to Yawnbore and New Pillock.
“Slippery John said he was going to Yawnbore,” I recalled.
“So?”
“Still some things I want to clarify with that thieving prick. And Yawnbore’s on the coast. We can get on a boat to Lolede from there.”
“Why do you want to go to Lolede?”
“Den of iniquity!” contributed the priest.
“To find the Magic Resistance. That’s what I want to talk to Slippery John about. He said they’re trying to find a way to restart normal life and death, so they might know more about the Deleters. And they can help figure out what I did to Drylda and what it means. Is that enough reasons?”
“But we have to go to Borrigarde,” said Meryl.
I looked at her. Up until that point, I had thought I was on the verge of understanding Meryl’s motivation; she happily went along with whatever I was doing like an eager puppy who knew how to sew, and could occasionally be relied upon to hurl herself between me and danger. Now it seemed something had excited some kind of independent thought inside her skull and she was going on about . . . what?
“There is no Borrigarde,” I said, slowly and carefully. “There is only New Pillock.”
“It’s always Borrigarde in spirit,” she said, her voice becoming unexpectedly testy, but after a deep breath she was all smiles again. “Come on, after fifty years dead there’s got to be some part of you wants to see the green, green grass of home.”
“If there was, I coughed it up ages ago. Are you sure you’re not thinking of somewhere else? The only green I remember was the local beef.”
“What about your family?”
“Why do you think I died so far away? I was at mage college because it was either that or work my arse off at home, sharing a bed with Granddad and both his wives. I’m not what you’d call attached.”
Her lower lip was definitely quivering. “But . . . it’s Borrigarde!” she stammered. “Your country is lying crushed beneath the heel of Pillock oppression! We’re probably the last pureblood Borrigardians in the world and it’s up to us—”
“What did you say?”
“I said . . .”
“Pureblood?” A number of previous conversations with Meryl lined up in my memory, and her use of the word suddenly knocked them over like a row of dominos. “Oh god. I get it now.”
She was avoiding my gaze and toying with her fingers. “What do you ‘get’, lapdog of the Damned?” asked the priest.
“She’s a Binny. The Borrigardian Nationalists. The most pathetic bunch of rural xenophobes to ever declare themselves the master race.”
That did the trick. Meryl’s bottled-up rage burst out of her in a single blast, along with some unidentifiable gray liquid from her nostrils. “We are not pathetic! And we did not declare any master races! It was just about having pride in your country!”
I couldn’t help laughing bitterly. “Pride? In Borrigarde? Home of the King Derek the Third Memorial Compost Heap? And besides, you do know that all the kingdoms in Garethy descended from the same tribe? Every country is the same! And Pillock even has a nice lake district. What possible reason is there to go back to Borrigarde now?”
“We can end the occupation!” she cried, a revolutionary gleam in her glowing eyes. “The time is right! All they need is a push, and that’s us! The vengeful spirits of the dead, returning to take back our nation’s glory! The people have lived under Pillock oppression for long enough! Stop sniggering!”
“I can’t help it! You’re like a little revolutionary piglet! You want to know what life is like under Pillock oppression? It’s exactly the same as it always is: brown and full of livestock. Only difference is Derek the Fourth has to piss off and live in his beach house.”
“Don’t talk about His Divinely Appointed Majesty like that! Can’t you see what’s at stake? We could be heroes!”
“Heroes,” I repeated, sneering.
“Isn’t that what all this chasing Deleters is about? Saving the world?”
“It’s about finding a way to die.”
She put one hands on her hip and made a sweeping gesture in Drylda’s direction. “Don’t give me that. No-one goes to all this trouble just for suicide. You died defending your school from invaders. You told me. You died a hero.”
I stopped sniggering. My grin faded. “Die a hero, die a coward,” I said, bitterly. “Same grave either way.”
“Come off it. Why were you even going to magic school if you didn’t want to be a hero?”
I glanced at the priest, who was watching us silently with wide, disapproving eyes. Then I looked at Drylda, curled up in the wheelbarrow and pouting alluringly at a tree.
“You want to know why I was studying magic?” I said. My voice sounded strange and distant.
She frowned. “To be a hero?”
“I was going to open a shop. My very own little magic shop in a nice gullible town somewhere. With velvet blue curtains on the ceiling and shelves covered in weird-shaped jars full of colored liquid and body parts. That’s what kind of people we are, Meryl. We’re shopkeepers. Passers-by. Undead minion numbers thirty-two and thirty-three. We’re not the heroes.
“But . . .”
“Heroes are the kinds of people we used to torture. Those dicks who lit us on fir
e this afternoon, they’re heroes. They swagger into a village, sort out any problem that can be solved by whacking it a few times, make out with the blacksmith’s daughter, then bugger off long enough for the problems to come back. They load themselves down with armor and weapons and treasure because inside they’re very empty, sad little people. In the long run they’ve never achieved anything, ever.”
“I’m talking about being heroes to the people of Borrigarde,” she said, tapping her foot.
“And I’m telling you that it wouldn’t matter even if your plan wasn’t retarded! Your brilliant plan—to barge into a country you haven’t even seen in decades to try and talk some pig farmers you don’t even know into beating up another bunch of pig farmers so that life can stay exactly the same!”
“And you’re seriously saying you’d prefer being dead? I don’t get what you saw in that! I’ve been dead too, you know! It was just boring!”
The fog of rage faded from me. The rush of angry blood that had rushed to my head began to gooily slide back down my neck. Somehow Meryl and I had found ourselves yelling nose-to-nose. I took two careful steps back.
“This world,” I said, “is stagnating. Every inch of it. The timbers are rotten and the plumbing’s full of frogs. Even the bloody heroes are broken.” I kicked the wheelbarrow. “I don’t give a toss about what comes after anymore. All I know is that it’s got to be better than this.”
“So that’s all you care about? Dying for good?” Her voice was quavering. “Not thinking anymore? Not remembering?”
“It’s overrated. Grandad’s hands used to wander in his sleep and I’ve been trying to stop remembering it for sixty-five years. Point is, if you think I’m going to spend the rest of my li—” I paused for thought, then threw up my hands. “I’m just going to call it ‘life’ from now on, all right? If you think I’m going to spend the rest of whatever it is dithering about in this poor excuse for a world, you’re obviously as stupid as you look, sound, act and are. I’m going to Lolede and I’m going to find the one thing that apparently has the power to pack all this in.”
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