The Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  “No.” He shifted slightly. Things rubbed against other things. “That makes you bad. The rest of it… just business, right?”

  Fellipan turned her head towards him and matched his gaze. She flexed her fingers, and he gasped. “Does that feel like business?” she asked innocently.

  “No?”

  She smiled, and disengaged herself from him. It took more than a few moments, especially as they kept stopping to experiment when a movement brought an unexpected sensation.

  “Not all business,” she eventually admitted, and gave him a long, deep kiss. “I might even like you.”

  “I… I have someone. Had someone. It’s complicated.” Or it wasn’t a small voice inside his head said. But it probably was. Fellipan straightened away from him, leaving a hand across his chest.

  “I have several someones. It’s not a problem.”

  “It is if you feel guilty.”

  “Guilty?” She laughed. “What for? There’s nothing wrong in it.” He arched an eyebrow at him in a perfectly lascivious way. “It’s not necrophilia if we’re both dead.”

  “No, I mean…” Fellipan slid from the bed and began to recover clothing. Marius took a few moments to admire the view. “Guilty because she’s… was… is someone special.”

  “Darling.” She flung his trousers towards him. “They’re all special.” She raised a hand before he could object. “Don’t worry, I know what you mean.” For a moment she looked almost sad, then recovered herself and began to fold herself into her outfit. “Someone you’ve promised yourself to, and who makes you view this as a lapse in good judgement instead of anything else.”

  “I–”

  “Don’t worry.” She busied herself in making a million minor adjustments to clothes that clung to her frame as if sprayed on, while Marius watched and felt as if his innards were twisting and writhing in response to emotions he tried very hard to ignore. “You can tell yourself you were forced to do this to discover just what nefarious plans I’m brewing. That I cunningly trapped you as part of my plan to get closer to Scorbus and grasp the nettle of power in my wicked fingers.”

  Marius attempted a smile. “Well, you do have wicked fingers.”

  Fellipan stared straight at him, her face an open statement. “Remember that.”

  Marius didn’t dare reply to the statement her body language was making. He turned away and began to dress.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  NINE

  The road north from Mish was deserted. This close to the middle of the day, any creature outside in the heat that layered the surrounding landscape in several layers of shimmer was either an animal too stupid to burrow beneath the nearest available source of shade, an animal already dead or a recent resident of Mish regretting the decision to bet their citizenship papers on that sure thing they’d been told about by that nice fellow at the bar last night. Or already dead. There was nothing to be had for almost ninety miles in any direction: no comfort, no relief, no water. The plains were at their plainest here, a featureless grassland with scrub so hard and unpalatable that even the herds of wisent that wandered disconsolately across the landscape couldn’t be bothered trying to chew any nourishment out of it. Millennia of human occupation had produced not a single monument until Mish had risen like a wooden boil.

  The track that had been scoured out of the grasslands by the passage of thousands of feet soon turned towards the coast out of sheer boredom and started to throw up boulders and the occasional tree just to relieve the monotony. Even the wind couldn’t be bothered, and was waiting until the day got a bit cooler. A hawk – obviously, at this time of day, a rather stupid hawk who hadn’t worked out why he was so damn hot and there was nothing around to hunt – could launch himself from the city wall and fly the length of the spear-straight road without seeing a single thing move the entire way.

  The black carriage that sat by the side of the road a dozen miles outside the city gate was as still as the unbreathing horses that had pulled it through the morning. They now stood before the carriage without a ripple of sweat, waiting for the next bite of the whip on their flanks.

  Four figures sat inside the carriage, alone in the gloom afforded by the thick black curtains drawn across the windows. Gerd, freshly washed free of goose grease, stared at Marius, a dreamy little half-smile plastered onto his features. Vonyvve gazed at Gerd and shifted from one bruised buttock to the other. Marius and Fellipan sat across from them, staring at anything but each other. Eventually, as the sun reached its apex and began the slow slide towards the horizon, Gerd finally regained the power of speech. “So…” he said, looking across at them.

  Marius and Fellipan exchanged glances, and looked away. Marius sighed and rubbed his eyes.

  “Scorbus is gathering an army.”

  Gerd frowned. “Has he got Keth?”

  Fellipan found something on the nearest curtain-hem of life-altering interest. Marius rubbed his eyes harder, and replied: “No. Maybe. I’m not sure.” Letting his hands fall into his lap, he blinked. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter? But how…”

  Marius glanced at Fellipan. She was staring at the fascinating curtain, her face utterly neutral. He examined her eyes for a flicker, and found nothing.

  “If he’s gathering an army it means he’s going to war. And there’s only one place he can be thinking of going to war with.”

  “Scorby?”

  Marius shook his head. “The upper world.” Now Fellipan noticed his existence. They stared at each other, giving nothing away, making no acknowledgement.

  “Why?”

  Marius sucked at his upper lip. “Heaven,” he said slowly. The others looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to work through all the angles, to clue them in. Marius stared past them, at the velvet lining of the coach’s rear wall. “He’s promised them Heaven,” he said eventually. “He’s promised them…” And suddenly, there it was. The explanation, clear and simple, and oh, so understandable. “He’s promised them Heaven.”

  “So you said.”

  “Yes, but don’t you see?” he turned wide eyes on them all. “If he wants to remain King, and gods knows he’ll want to, he’s lain in a box not being King for a thousand years, he has to give them what he promises. He needs a Heaven to give them.”

  “But where?” Gerd was frowning now, as realisation slowly tiptoed towards him with an innocent smile and a large cosh hidden behind its back.

  “How many worlds have you experienced, boy?”

  Gerd stared at Marius, then down at the ground beneath the floor of the coach, then out the window at the world outside. Then back at Marius, as realisation whipped the cosh from its hiding place and fetched him a good one upside his head.

  “Two,” he said. “Just two.”

  “Yep.” Marius pointed to their feet. “Underworld.” Out the window. “Heaven.”

  “You mean he’s…”

  “He’s going to invade. He’s going to invade the world.”

  “But… they won’t believe that, will they? I mean… they’ve been here.”

  “And what seems more like Heaven to you? Down there, or up here, where you used to be happy?”

  “But…” Gerd twitched from side to side, his lips fluttering as he tried to work it out, to calculate a million imponderables he was incapable of considering. Finally, he fell back upon the one thing he could know with utter certainty. “We’ve got to stop him.”

  Marius nodded, and saw Fellipan do the same. “Yeah,” he said, although whether it was to Gerd or the silent understanding he was reaching with Fellipan he wasn’t sure. “We have to.”

  Gerd glanced between the two of them for several seconds as his own understanding dawned. “But what about Keth, then?” he asked, hesitantly.

  “Keth will have to wait.”

  “Ah.”

  Marius turned his gaze upon Gerd, just for a second, but long enough to shut the younger man up. Gerd sat back and held Vonyvve’s h
and, while Marius returned his attention to Fellipan.

  “We’re going to leave now,” he said. “There’s someone I need to visit.” Fellipan was watching him as if from a great distance as he spoke clearly, with great care. “Mistress Fellipan has kindly offered to bring us here to enable us to continue our journey. She herself will be taking her recruits to the hills overlooking the ruins of the old Post-Necrotic Monastery at Cistrion. Scorbus will muster there to drill his troops before he approaches Scorby City.”

  “How do you know?”

  Marius smiled a tight, humourless smile. “I’ve been in three armies that tried to invade Scorby. They all did it.”

  “Ah.”

  Marius held Fellipan’s gaze. “Tell him that I request he changes his mind. Tell him that I say to remember the portrait in the hallway.” They had stood beneath it, during their rescue of the King four years ago – a single portrait of Scorbus in his prime, hanging alone in the hallway outside the royal balcony – the last thing any monarch saw before they addressed their subjects, a reminder of what a king should be to his people. “Tell him it still hangs. He won’t change his mind, but he’ll know I know. And it will make you his friend.”

  Fellipan tilted her head – the merest nod of thanks. Marius nodded back, and leaned forward to open the door. He jumped out, and stuck his head back through to glare at Gerd.

  “Come on.”

  Gerd gained his feet, and bowed awkwardly to Vonyvve and Fellipan in the cramped space.

  “I… um…” He looked at Vonyvve, bowed again, convulsively, and tried to back out of the door at the same time.

  “Gerd.”

  Gerd looked up at Fellipan and immediately banged his head. Vonyvve giggled, and he bit his lip.

  “Gerd,” Fellipan repeated.

  “Yes?”

  “Tell Marius thank you. And tell him…” She paused, and stared straight at Marius, glowering up at her from under his brow. “Tell him to be careful.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you be careful, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She smiled at him, a gentle, knowing tilt of her lips.

  “Best be going.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Marius stepped back and let Gerd negotiated the door successfully this time. The door closed. They watched as the coach wheeled around and headed back towards the town.

  “She said–”

  “I heard.”

  “Oh.” They coach become a plume of dust, and then disappeared. Gerd looked sidelong at his companion.

  “So. The Post-Necrotic Monastery at Cistrion, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “That would be the Cistrion at the westernmost tip of the Spinal Ranges, would it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Thirty days march away from all the major cities of the plains. A thousand feet up a mountain, perched on an isolated outcrop, room for maybe forty or fifty monks as long as they walk in single file and don’t all jump up and down at once.”

  Marius shrugged.

  “That the monastery you mean?”

  Finally, Marius hung his head and allowed himself a wry smile.

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  They stared in the direction of the invisible coach.

  “Scorbus is amassing an army,” Marius said. “Now there’s at least one brigade who’ll be moved off the board before the fighting begins.”

  “Uh huh.” Gerd kept his gaze fixed upon on the horizon. “So you like her, then.”

  Marius said nothing. Gerd absolutely did not smile in the slightest.

  “So,” he said. “What now?”

  Marius inhaled, held the breath, and released it in a deep sigh. Not needing to breathe was one thing, he found. Needing to sigh was quite another.

  “Now we wait.”

  “What for?”

  As if in answer, a tiny drift of dust appeared several hundred metres down the road. They watched it approach, painfully slowly, as a figure resolved out of the heat haze. Something small detached itself and ran towards them – a fat tortoise-shelled cannonball that sped past Marius and launched itself into Gerd’s arms. While they renewed their acquaintance, Marius kept his eyes on the blind, shuffling figure that walked towards them.

  “Granny,” he said, as she finally reached them.

  “You bastard.” She aimed a kick at him that he evaded with ease. “You saw us standing there, don’t tell me you didn’t.”

  “What?” Gerd looked up from Alno and frowned at them in turn.

  “Don’t you lie. I saw you looking out the window.” She turned to her grandson. “He looked right at me. Three miles in this heat.”

  Marius said nothing. Gerd rolled his eyes.

  “Marius?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The only thing I saw on the way out here was a withered-up old snapping turtle. I thought it best to park out of its reach. For safety’s sake.”

  “I’ll give you safety.” She aimed another kick at his legs, and again he sidestepped it. Gerd and Alno shared a glance.

  “If I might intrude,” Gerd said in a tone of voice that made it clear intruding was all he would do until the others grew up and behaved. “Do we have a plan now, or was this little side trip just for the fun of it?”

  Marius turned towards him. Granny took her chance, and landed a full-blooded kick on the edge of his shin.

  “Ow! For fuck’s–”

  “Granny!”

  “What?” She backed away, holding her hands up in innocence. “Must have been a snapping turtle. Don’t look at me.”

  Marius did look at her, a look with a million unpleasant murders within it. She smiled back, promising a million and one in return.

  “Vicious old crone.”

  “Whoremonger.”

  “Granny!”

  The old woman swung sightless eyes towards her offended grandson.

  “I’m not lying, though, am I? Him with a recently dead wife and all–”

  “Lover. Not wife”

  “You didn’t object to the dead bit, though, did you?” She eyed them both balefully. “I saw that pair of tits with a mouth attached sitting next to you. Don’t tell me you didn’t give in and bounce around on her like a bad donkey ride the moment she had her back turned, or her front, or whatever angle you come at it from, you dick-thinking miscreant–”

  “Granny, please.”

  “And as for you,” She pinned Gerd to the desert floor with a glare. “I hope you had better sense than to follow his example. I didn’t raise you to…” She stopped, leaned in closer, her grey-filmed eyes growing wide. “You did, didn’t you? You had one.”

  “Granny–”

  “You filthy, disgusting…” She began to beat Gerd around the shoulders with an open palm, her skinny arm rising and falling in rhythm to her words. “Horrible little reprobate, disgusting, awful, to think of all the years I spent… raising you… disgusting…”

  “Granny. Stop it.” Gerd flinched away from every blow. “Stop it.”

  “Consorting with hoors and trulls–”

  “Granny.”

  “Lying with strumpets–”

  Marius coughed.

  “What?”

  “You forgot ‘rutting with disease-ridden witches’.”

  “Right. Thank you. Rutting with… Don’t you get smart, whoremonger. I’m blaming you for this.”

  “Don’t look at me.” Marius placed his hand over his useless heart. “I didn’t oil him up and play hide-the-piglet all night.”

  The dead can’t blush. Nevertheless, the only thing Gerd didn’t do at that point was turn beet-red from hair to foot. He certainly managed to give every indication of a man who was trying his best to curl up and die on the spot. Again. Granny stalked over to Marius like a bird and stretched her neck out, standing on tiptoes to get as near his ear as she could.

  “If you weren’t already a dead man,” she muttered, “you would be for that.”
<
br />   “Death is full of little disappointments.” Marius winked. “I can be yours.” He swung his attention away from her, and back to his friend. “Can we get back to business now?”

  Gerd looked up from his intense examination of his toes.

  “Gods, please, yes.”

  “Right.” Marius bit his lip in concentration, then stopped when he realised he could taste no salt, no sweat, despite standing out in the heat of the sun. “If Scorbus is recruiting an army it’s because he means to invade, yes?”

  “Sure.”

  “But why does he need to?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why does he need to?” Marius spread his arms. “Think about it. If all he wants is control of the living world then surely there are simpler ways?”

  “Like Mistress Fellipan.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Whore.”

  Marius rolled his eyes. “Maybe, but an ambitious whore, as we’ve discovered. And she didn’t start killing people until after she’d assumed power, and then only to provide herself with a specific type of troops.”

  “That’s your apology for her, is it?”

  “Shut up. I’m serious. If Scorbus thought like her then all he’d need to do is insinuate himself into the right meeting rooms in the right capitals, and start putting words in the mouths of the right people. He wouldn’t need to create a dead army. He could just wait until they came to him. No.” He shook his head. “He doesn’t think like that.”

  “Who does he think like, then?”

  Marius saw the portrait in the royal apartments in Scorby: a monster of a man, heavy as a mountain, brooding, covered in furs. “Scorbus the Great. Conqueror. He thinks like himself.” He nodded to himself, then set off up the road away from Mish. “Come on.”

  Gerd and Granny scurried to catch up.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the library. Specifically, my father’s library.”

  “What for?”

  “Scorbus is thinking like Scorbus, the man who invaded and subjugated his kingdom a thousand years ago. Five gets you ten he’ll use the same tactics now as he did then. And my father has a history of the Scorban campaign in his library. So that’s where we’re going.” He laughed. “We’re going to read about our war before it even happens.”