“It will all be gone by the time you return to your boat, dead man,” the voice cackled, as if reading his mind. “Do not bother yourself with such trifles. You have something for me?” A dark lump in the far corner stirred, and unfolded from between the piles of refuse. Two stick-like arms emerged from either side of a bundle of rags, dragging the mass into the centre of the room.
Disturbed air flowed over Marius, and despite the deadness of his sense of smell he gagged. The pile of rags scuttled forward like an angry insect, the sharpness of its movement making him stumble backwards until his shoulders hit the wall. The hut shook from the impact. Marius threw his arms out, absurdly afraid of burial underneath whatever constituted the outer surface of the roof. The creature reared up, gripping the material of his jacket, using the leverage to pull itself upwards until it stood on hind legs, pinning him against its dry, fetid body. Slowly, like some sort of predatory tortoise, a vague approximation of a head emerged. Marius tried to speak, to offer some protest, but his voice has deserted him – the beast was an old woman, old beyond belief. If the scarring of her wrinkled face could be counted an accurate witness, then there were rock formations at the base of fissures inside the Ageless Mountains that had fewer candles on their birthday cake. What Marius had taken to be an animal’s pelt was a thin blanket, which did nothing to lessen its filthy, bestial nature. A hand, more claw than flesh, waved about in short pecks, indicating a spot in the dirt by his feet.
Marius had never believed in witchcraft. Not really, at least, as much as an upbringing in a household with two Neopagan parents and an Old Godsman grandmother would allow. He had known too many wizards, and been a conjuror too many times himself, to count magic as anything more than a combination of herbalism, sleight of hand, and a need for money. But this was different, somehow. Marius was used to hungry conmen trying to ingratiate themselves with their chosen sucker. There was something wrong when a witch was properly creepy.
“Sit,” the old woman commanded. Marius lowered himself, imitating her cross-legged hunch. Halfway down he realised what he was doing and coughed. Great, he thought. Now I look and sound like her. The crone crooked a finger, beckoning him closer. Unable to choose between myriad misgivings, Marius complied.
“What does a dead man want with me?” she asked, her breath washing over Marius like the plague. Ignoring the burning sensation at the back of his eyes, Marius replied.
“Well, actually, I was following…”
The crone chuckled, and Marius stopped, aware of how ludicrous his unformed desire had been. Even alive, he’d have needed gold of some description to bed a woman such as the one he followed. In fact, only Keth had ever… he stopped that line of thought before it could progress.
“You have gold?” the witch asked, her voice suddenly sharp. Marius blinked in surprise.
“How did you know I…?”
“Ishga would not bring you unless you had something to trade. And I do not want your clothes.” She laughed again, a low, dirty sound that turned Marius’ lips downward in prudish disapproval. “Well? What have you got for me?”
Marius reached into his jerkin and removed the two wedding rings he had lifted in Borgho City. He held them out on his palm.
“Are these enough?”
She viewed them with a curt “tch”, and he lapsed into an embarrassed silence. This woman was nearly an animal. And here he was, a man of the world: sophisticated, educated – well, knowledgeable, at any rate – at home in any city in the civilized world, holding out trinkets like a child hoping for approval. He almost closed his hand and removed the offering. He couldn’t say why he didn’t.
“Well, what does she normally charge?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. The old woman tilted her head and glared out of the corners of her eyes at him, and he realised with sudden certainty that this transaction was no longer about buying the sex of an island stranger. There was something deeper being bargained for, and he was momentarily too afraid to continue the transaction. Before he could act on his fear, however, the old lady pointed an unreasonably long nail, and speared the rings, holding them up to her eye.
“What’s wrong with them?”
Marius stammered, and half-rose before finding his composure. Good God, he thought, what is wrong with me? This is simple market negotiation, nothing more. You’re acting like a naughty grandchild. The normal course, under these circumstances, was to imagine your adversary naked. It had the effect of removing the silver from their words, revealing them as the same sweaty, greedy lump of flesh as the rest of us. Imagining this woman naked was the last thing Marius wanted. He sniffed, and gathered his wits.
“Nothing,” he said, deepening his voice and speaking slower. An old trick: control the pace of the conversation, increase the gravitas of your words. “I inherited them from an aunt, a spinster who died before she had the chance to wear them in commitment to a man.”
“Hmm.” The crone lifted them from his hand, cupped them in her palm, and closed her eyes. “An interesting man, your aunt. The beard suits him. Not easy, affording a suit on a butcher’s wages.” She opened her eyes, look straight at Marius. “She turned him down, when he could not present her with a ring. A lonely, broken man, your poor aunt.”
The rings disappeared into her rags and she leaned forward, until their faces were separated by less than a foot. Her smoke-yellowed eyes captured his with a glare so piercing he glanced away in case she read something he didn’t want revealed.
“Why are you here, dead man?”
“I…” Marius peered around the hut and wondered why himself, just for a moment. “The girl, the one that brought me here…”
She laughed at that, a raw cackle that took an eternity to dissolve into coughing. She hawked, and spat a gob of phlegm past his ear.
“Been that long, has it, boy? Can’t get a girl from the village, not looking like you. Maybe even they have taste, eh?” She sniggered, and Marius felt the life leave his face. “No, it is not that. You know that yourself. If you had simply wanted her, you could have rolled her on the sand. You allowed yourself to be led here. Your soul recognises the purpose, even if your mind does not.”
Marius closed his eyes and let her words sink into his skin. Finally, “No, you’re right. Not that.” His shoulders slumped. He had hoped to get through this without admitting his fear aloud. It seemed he had no choice. Whatever this old woman was, she knew his mind better than he did. No hope of escape, then, without the penalty of disclosure.
“Where I come from…” he waved a hand in the vague direction of “away”. “They’ve charged me… this… this task. I can’t do it. It’s impossible, a ridiculous thing. And I don’t think… I don’t think I can escape. I need to know…”
He straightened himself again. Do this properly. Negotiate from strength, and if you don’t have strength, fake it.
“I need to see my future. I need to know what path to take. I have to escape. But I need to know: can I get it back?”
The island woman stared at him for ageless seconds, her hand sneaking out of its wrap to juggle the rings between her fingers. Marius stilled himself, lest the noise of his fidgeting influence her decision. Finally she nodded once, and rose, bones popping. She scampered over, drew him to his feet by the simple expedient of grabbing his jaw with one claw and pulling him upwards. He loomed over her, his jaw several inches above the top of her head. Still, she didn’t let go. She examined him, running an experienced eye along his height. He had the unpleasant sensation of being measured up for a pot.
“Undress.”
“What?”
“Get out of your clothes.”
“Hang on a tick…” For no reason he could think of, Marius was terrified at the idea of standing before her, naked and exposed to her judgement. “Is that really necessary? There’s a time and a place, you know.”
“Oh yes,” the old crone laughed, “Any time and any place, as long as you can dive between our young girls’
legs.” She waved a claw at his clothes. “Clothes cover your true nature, dead man. Pretend to be what you are not, or learn what you really are. Your choice.” She nodded toward the world outside, and he understood the implication. Either lose his modesty, and undress, or make his way back to the ship with questions unanswered. He drew himself up, and refusing to meet her gaze, began to remove the clasp of his cape.
She waited with arms crossed, eyeing him as he disrobed. He saw the speculation in her stare and turned away, ignoring the queasiness in the pit of his gut. She made no comment at the sight of his hairless chest, the thinness of his legs, the length of his manhood. Marius had never been at ease with his weaknesses. Without money, or beer, or any of the thousand other shields he could place between him and scorn, he was as exposed as he had ever been in front of a woman, and he did not like the sensation. He folded each piece of clothing as he removed it, laying it in a pile on the ground behind him. When he was finished he stood with arms crossed over his chest, shivering despite the oppressive heat. The crone nodded in approval.
“Now you look like a man, and not a shrouded corpse, hmm?”
He ignored the remark, staring past her at a cat-o-nine-tails folded like a sleeping snake against a far corner of the hut. The witch clucked her tongue, then shot out a hand and grabbed his testicles in a grip like old hardwood.
“Hey!” The reaction to pull away was automatic, and he immediately regretted it. Her hand did not move, and the pain forced his knees to lock together, lest he fall to the ground and be suspended from her hand by his balls.
“Stand still, boy,” she whispered, her mouth at ear level as he curled over in pain. “Where else do you think your future springs from?”
She tightened her grip. With the other hand, she reached out to enfold his member. Despite her age, the warmth of her grip did the job. He felt his member rise.
“Oh, for the Gods’–”
“Shush.”
“I was kind of hoping that Ishga…”
“I said shush.” She squeezed, and Marius shushed. In less than a minute he spurted up her arm. Marius kept his eyes closed, hating himself for wanting more of her knowing fingers. When finally he was able to trust himself to speak, his question was less sarcastic, and more pleading, than he hoped.
“Are you finished?”
“Almost.”
She shifted her grip on his testicles. While Marius did his best not to whimper she drew a razor-sharp nail across the skin of his scrotum. Blood dripped, and she caught it in the palm of her hand. Just as Marius was deciding whether or not to faint she let go, and he slumped to both knees, head bowed, fighting the rise of bile. The witch slid her hand down her other arm, depositing his ejaculation onto the blood. She moved around the hut, rummaging amongst the detritus, pulling out earthenware jars and sniffing the contents. One by one she dropped a pinch of their contents into the mixture on her palm. Marius slowly cupped his ruined genitals in his hand.
“Why now?” he silently asked the Gods. “All this time with no sensation at all, and you decide now is a good time to give it all back? What have I ever done to you?”
The crone crossed the room to squat in front of him. Her free hand grabbed his jaw. Marius lacked the strength to resist. She raised his head and wiped a finger across his wet cheek, transferring the tears of his pain into the goo.
“Good.” She clapped her hands together, crushing the contents into a thick globe, kneading it in her palms until it became a round, muddy parcel no bigger than a sheep turd. Once she was finished she placed it in her mouth, and swallowed.
“Well?” Marius managed to croak.
“Wait.”
She folded back into her blanket. It wrapped around her as if of its own volition. Within seconds she was once again the anonymous lump he had first seen. Marius knelt before her, uncertain, unwilling to move lest it should break whatever spell she had commenced. The ache in his balls intensified, and he swallowed, trying to keep down the sourness that threatened to fill his mouth. One dose of the old woman’s special kind of love had been enough. He had no desire to repeat the dose.
The old woman remained still. Marius turned his head slowly, waiting for some sign to emerge from the gloom. An itch began between his shoulder blades. He ignored it. I am dead, he told himself. The dead don’t itch.
The dead don’t come either, a voice answered. He ignored that, too.
After an eternity of waiting, the witch raised her head. Marius opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, and simply stared. The old woman was looking through him, and her brow wrinkled in response to sights he could not hope to see. Her eyes had changed colour, he realised with a burst of fear. Where the outsides of her eyes had been a dully milky yellow, borne of years of malnutrition, now they flashed more intensely than the flowers adorning the island hills, and her irises had brightened, moving from dull brown to iridescent red. When she spoke, her voice was deep, and resonant. No longer the whisper of an ancient crone, it filled the hut with the lilt of the young island men who lay on the hillside above the beach each day, taunting the Scorbish sailors as they loaded the boats.
“Death,” she said. “A wave of the dead, never ending. They are angry, and you stand at their head. And never peace, never to know the rest that does not end. Never to embrace that which you hold most dear.”
“But…” Despite his uncertainty, Marius leaned forward, willing the crone to talk. “My family? My… my mother?” A thought struck him, and he was shocked at the pain it brought with it. “What about Keth?”
“You shall not see them again. And what you will become… it will be a mercy for them. Their memories will be of a man. You are dead to them, as you are to us all.”
“But…”
“No more.” She shook her head. Her eyes cleared, brown and white bleeding into the iridescent colours. Within seconds they viewed Marius with normal light, and terror.
“I have seen the devil,” she breathed, and he was scared more by the way she shrank away from him than by anything he had experienced since he ascended the path to the hovel. “I have seen the ruin of the world.” She extended a shaking finger towards the hole through which he had entered. “Leave. Leave me be.”
Marius leaned forward, trying to pin her eyes with his own. She slid away, scuttling back into the darkness and raising her hands to cover her face.
“What?” he cried. “What was it? Please, what will I do? What did you see?” He reached out a hand towards her, but she screamed a little girl’s scream and batted him away with outstretched claws. He fell back, clutching at where she had caught his wrist. Blood seeped between his fingers, turning sticky beneath his touch as it reached the air. Marius stared down at it. There should not be a flow, could not be.
For a moment he almost screamed as well.
Then he lurched to his feet and stumbled backwards towards the entrance. Eyes still fixed upon the screaming witch he leaned down, and reached to where he had placed his neatly folded clothes. His fingers closed on air. Marius swept his hand across the floor, but all his despairing fingertips met was dirt. He tore his eyes from the crone and looked down. Nothing. He slung his gaze further, slapping the floor in disbelief. His clothes were gone: his cape; his breeches; his jerkin; the multitude of coins he had hidden amongst them; everything gone, as if they had never been, stranding him naked in this hole in the ground with a terrified old woman.
“Where are they?” He turned back to her, but the old woman had disappeared as completely as his clothes. Marius leaped across the hut. Then he saw it – a flap, half the size of a normal door, tucked behind a mound of mouldering cow hides. Marius dove over the hides, sliding face first through the open door and onto the rough ground beyond. He scrambled to his feet, and looked about him.
The hillside was empty. No matter which way he turned, only the copse of trees surrounded him. No evidence of human passage greeted his sight. Marius stepped back, and surveyed the witch’s hovel. Well, he thought; that explain
ed the magical transformation. From this side, he could see it was just a normal village hut, built onto the rear of a tree of massive girth. The sheer weight of scrub surrounding the tree’s base hid it from casual view, but from this side, it was clear. Strangely, Marius found it a comfort – another instance of “magic” that turned out to be nothing more than sleight of hand and need for money. All of a sudden, free of the oppressive atmosphere inside and the heady mixture of lust and fear, he could slot the old woman into his pantheon of con artists. The normal world reasserted itself around him. He re-entered the hut, and gathered the uppermost cow hide around him like a blanket. Apparently, curing was a skill that had not yet made it to the Dog Crap Archipelago. He, swiped a cloud of nipping fleas from his face, and fought his way round to the front of the tree. Then, methodically, and with great care, he kicked the hovel’s camouflaging until it was no more than broken twigs underfoot, exposing the hole cut into the hut’s wall. With any luck, it would rain before the old bitch could repair the damage.
His task accomplished, Marius strode with as much dignity as he could manage back down the hillside and into the village. No villagers lingered outside as he passed. No smiles greeted him, waiting for a reaction from the foreign visitor. Marius frowned. He had heard about this sort of island’s funeral ceremonies. They went on for ages, each new round of gorging followed by another, the feast broken only by pauses to drink whatever noxious alcoholic brew the islanders had managed to ferment from their fruit. Women would dance between courses, men would fight; there would be some sort of manhood ritual involving beds of coal and people’s feet. If you were lucky enough to find yourself on the right sort of island, the chances of bedding a nubile, intoxicated virgin girl got higher with every course you survived. At the very least, these things tended to rumble on for three or four days, until everyone was either too sick, too tired, or too shocked at finding themselves married to a teenage girl whose name they could barely remember to continue. The village should be a repository for drunks, asleep in whatever corner they crawled to before consciousness deserted them. The sounds of coupling should echo from within huts. The words of filthy sailor songs about the King, the Lord of The Stool and a randomly agreed upon number of foreign princesses ought to ring out. There should be impromptu wrestling matches. Weird, foreign islander chants should weave through the night. Drinking, carousing, vomiting, fucking, fighting and eating – where was it all? Not a sound greeted Marius. There was only the wind blowing against the thatches of the huts as he passed. The village was silent, deserted. Something was very, very wrong.
ARC: The Corpse-Rat King Page 18
