Hare was still trying to get to his feet, but his legs buckled beneath him and he went down. He lifted himself up on his hands and leered at Quire.
“What does that matter?” the beast laughed. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Quire grunted. “Future’s full of surprises, I’ve found. Best not to concern yourself overmuch with it. Concentrate on the present.”
He looked at his right hand. There was a fine layer of gunpowder dusted across it now. He wiped it clean on his trousers.
“Are you not the Devil, then?” he asked.
Hare laughed.
“No, Mr. Quire, I’m not your Devil. But think of me that way, if it makes you happy. I’ll not mind. Just stop with all your questions. You’d as well ask what the wind is, or the water, or the earth, as what I am.”
“They’ll have answers to all that, likely as not, the way the scientists and the philosophers and such are getting so busy these days,” Quire said as he raised the musket to his shoulder.
“Never to me,” Hare shouted, “never to me.”
To Quire’s amazement, he hauled himself to his feet yet again, bone crackling in his knees as he did so, his legs twisting and bending unnaturally. He took a long, sinking pace towards Quire, his face contorted into a mask of such pure hatred that it rendered it almost inhuman. More beast than man.
“Never to you,” Quire muttered, “Aye, you might be right about that.”
And he shot Hare for the fourth and last time, in the heart, and knocked him down with the force of it.
Quire set the Brown Bess aside then, leaving it safely out of reach of the still writhing figure in the heather. He drew his sabre as a flock of ravens went croaking overhead, rolling about. He glanced up at them, and saw for the first time that the sky was blue now; a pristine field of azure, from horizon to horizon.
He looked at Hare. He was lying face down. The violence of his movements was diminishing. Quire trod on one of the man’s outstretched arms and pinned it down. He hacked at the wrist with the sabre. It took a few blows to separate hand from arm, and it came away without much in the way of blood or gore. The spirit inhabiting Hare did not seem to notice.
Quire peeled the glove off the hand, and looked impassively at the crude writing and symbols scrawled across the skin. None of it he could understand; there was no meaning to it for him. But Durand had said to clear the writing from the hand, and Quire thought that taking the hand from the body should serve just as well.
He cut the other hand away more easily. He rolled Hare on to his back. There was no movement in the limbs now, but the eyes still darted from side to side. They found Quire’s face, and held on to his gaze. The lips trembled, trying to recall the shape of a sneer.
Quire trotted over to his backpack and tipped it out. He gathered up the flasks of lamp oil and carried them to Hare’s corpse. He poured most of the oil over the body, and then set about the business of gathering as much dry, old heather as he could, slashing at it with the sword. It would dull the blade, but he hoped to have no further use for the thing. He heaped the loose, leggy clumps of heather over Hare’s prostrate form.
He meant, as well, to have no further use for the cartridges in his belt pouches, so he tore them all open and made a little mound of the powder close by the pyre. He soaked some more heather in the last of the oil, and laid that over the pyramid of gunpowder. And then, at last, he knelt, and held the musket low down, and sent sparks from the flintlock scattering out into the powder and the oil-soaked heather.
He sat on a low rock, perhaps thirty yards away, and watched Hare burn. Great yellow flames licked up into the sky, and thick, stinking black smoke that made coils of itself as it rose.
Quire felt a good deal more calm and content than he had expected to. There was, he realised as the flames consumed the corpse, a remarkable lightness about his life now. It contained almost nothing, had almost no weight to it. Blegg, and Ruthven, and everything that went with them were gone; so was his place on the city police. No wage, none of that purpose that his work had put into his life. Nothing left to him of it. All burned away, just as Hare was now, out on the moors.
There was Cath, though. He thought of her as he sat, looking out over the vast silver expanse of the Solway Firth that the bright day had discovered, far to the south, and freed from the shackles of darkness. The sun sent a thousand rippling, glittering shards of light racing over the surface of the sea.
Quire reached down and plucked a sprig of heather from beside his hard seat. He would take that back to Cath, he thought. For luck.
Acknowledgments
This book makes liberal use of real history to tell its tale, and this time I am therefore indebted not only to the usual and indispensible support network without which no writer could function, but also to a not inconsiderable number of people who one way or another made my distorting of historical truth possible:
The staff at the National Library of Scotland and at the Edinburgh City Archives, who were unfailingly helpful and efficient.
Jim McGowan, who has never heard of me, but whose unpublished thesis on Edinburgh’s police force in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was utterly fascinating and tremendously helpful.
Ewen, for the very timely provision of some audio drama recordings that really hit the spot, inspiration-wise.
Thanks, as ever, to the fine Orbit crew, as helpful a bunch of publishing folk as a writer could wish to be working with. In particular, thanks to Tim Holman for his support and assistance not just with this book—which were considerable—but all the way back to the beginning.
Thanks to Tina, my agent, for her help and support.
Thanks to my parents, for their encouragement from the first time I ever tried to write.
And to Fleur, for everything.
extras
meet the author
Brian Ruckley
BRIAN RUCKLEY was born and brought up in Scotland. After studying at Edinburgh and Stirling Universities, he worked for a series of organizations dealing with environmental, nature conservation, and youth development issues. Having had short stories published in Interzone and The Third Alternative in the 1990s, Brian started working as a freelance consultant on environmental projects in 2003 in order to concentrate seriously on his writing, which now takes up almost all of his time. He lives in Edinburgh. Find out more about the author at www.brianruckley.com.
interview
Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?
From a very young age, writing fiction felt like a reasonable and natural thing to be doing. Crucially, nobody ever disabused me of that notion, so although I had plenty of other interests that I was quite happy to pursue professionally, writing was always there, in my head, as an option.
Did the idea for The Edinburgh Dead come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?
I had one very specific, pretty simple starting point. I was thinking about Burke and Hare, two of Edinburgh’s most famous historical inhabitants, naughty chaps who murdered lots of innocents in order to supply the city’s anatomy schools with corpses. A straightforward question occurred to me: what if the teachers of anatomy weren’t the only people who wanted to get their hands on some corpses back then? The whole book flowed from that one thought.
What is it about Edinburgh that made you want to set your book there?
Two things: familiarity—since I was born and brought up here, and know the place and its history far better than anywhere else in the world—and the richness and strangeness of that history. For a relatively brief period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was at the very forefront of global scientific and philosophical thought, and at the same time there were some seriously dark and dodgy things going on here. It’s just a very tempting mixture to go and play around with.
Did you have to carry out extensive historical research before you began writing?<
br />
I already had some idea about Edinburgh’s history, but did a lot of reading to fill in the details, on things like the police force and the medical establishment. That was the most fun bit of writing the book, to be honest: any excuse to spend hours digging into the contents of a good library. Much more enjoyable than actually trying to turn words into sentences and paragraphs.
Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?
It can be difficult to trace specific influences, but my sense of what speculative fiction is and can be has certainly been shaped by any number of writers I admire (or should that be envy?) greatly. People like Guy Gavriel Kay, Dan Simmons, George R. R. Martin.
What advantages and disadvantages do you see in using fantasy as the vehicle for your stories?
That’s a big question. One advantage is that it comes naturally to me: I’m a long-time reader of fantastic fiction, and the alternative—of writing mainstream, “realistic” stories—just doesn’t feel as instinctive. And, of course, fantasy allows the author to play around with themes and subjects in a vivid, exciting context that plugs right into the reader’s imagination. Disadvantages… well, it deters some readers, but then it potentially attracts rather a large number, too.
Do you have a set writing routine and, if so, what is it?
In a lot of ways I wish I had more of a routine than I do, really. In general terms, I actually write best (and fastest) in evenings and at night, but sadly the demands of real life don’t conform to my selfish preferences, so I end up doing most of my writing in the morning.
Some authors talk of their characters “surprising” them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you?
Not much. I like to think I’m the boss, on the whole. What does sometimes happen, though, is that I will change my ideas about what a character should do, or what fate should befall them, as I write a book. It’s not so much a case of me being surprised, as that I just have second thoughts about some particular plan. Once or twice, I’ve liked characters more than I expected to, and ended up saving them from nasty fates I originally had in mind for them, because I thought they deserved a rather happier outcome. Does that make me soft?
Do you chat about your books with other authors as you’re writing them, or do you prefer to keep them in your own head until the first draft is complete?
I talk to almost no one—author or otherwise—about what I’m writing until it’s basically complete, at least in draft form. Any conversations about the story are only in the vaguest and briefest of outline form until I’ve got enough text to be reasonably sure there’s something worth talking about there. Even then, I’m absolutely lousy at talking about my own work. Can hardly ever think of anything much to say.
If you have to live for one month as a character in a novel, which novel and which character would you choose?
Too many possible answers to this, so I’ll just pick one of the dozens that leap to mind: Dr. Watson, in pretty much any of the Sherlock Holmes stories, just to explore that world, and get to watch Holmes doing his thing. (And no, I wouldn’t really want to be Holmes himself—too manic depressive for my taste.)
If The Edinburgh Dead was ever filmed, who would you like to see directing and starring in the movie?
Directing would probably be Christopher Nolan, since I can’t remember any film he’s touched being less than interesting and distinctive. Starring… that’s harder. How about Daniel Craig? He’d be a pretty good fit for my lead character, Adam Quire, I think.
What would you do if you weren’t a writer?
I would no doubt be doing what I was before the writing thing took off: working in the environmental or nature conservation field, probably in the charity sector. I enjoyed that work and, much as I like writing, I miss my day-to-day involvement in it, so it’d be no hardship to be living that life again.
introducing
If you enjoyed
THE EDINBURGH DEAD,
look out for
WINTERBIRTH
The Godless World: Book One
by Brian Ruckley
An uneasy truce exists between the thanes of the True Bloods. Now, as another winter approaches, the armies of the Black Road march south, from their exile beyond the Vale of Stones.
For some, war will bring a swift and violent death. Others will not hear the clash of swords or see the corpses strewn over the fields. Instead, they will see an opportunity to advance their own ambitions.
But soon, all will fall under the shadow that is descending. For while the storm of battle rages, one man is following a path that will awaken a terrible power in him—and his legacy will be written in blood.
The Third Age: Year 942
The solitude of the wild goats that made their home on the rock faces above the Vale of Stones was seldom interrupted. The Vale might be the only pass through the high Tan Dihrin, but it was a route that led nowhere: the bleak and icy shores of the north were home only to savage tribes. There was nothing there to draw traders or conquerors up from the lands of the Kilkry Bloods to the south.
When a sudden river of humanity began to flow up and over the Vale of Stones, it therefore sent unease darting through the herds of goats on their precipitous territories overhead. Bucks stamped their feet; does called for their kids. Soon, the cliffs were deserted and only the mute rock was left to witness the extraordinary scenes below, as ten thousand people marched into a cold exile.
The great column was led by a hundred or more mounted warriors. Many bore wounds, still fresh from the lost battle on the fields by Kan Avor; all bore, in their red-rimmed eyes and wan skin, the marks of exhaustion. Behind them came the multitude: women, children and men, though fewest of the last. Thousands of widows had been made that year.
It was a punishing exodus. Their way was paved with hard rock and sharp stones that cut feet and turned ankles. There could be no pause. Any who fell were seized by those who came behind, hauled upright with shouts of encouragement, as if noise alone could put strength back into their legs. If they could not rise, they were left. There were already dozens of buzzards and ravens drifting lazily above the column. Some had followed it all the way up the Glas valley from the south; others were residents of the mountains, drawn from their lofty perches by the promise of carrion.
A few of those fleeing through the Stone Vale had been wealthy—merchants and landowners from Kan Avor or Glasbridge. What little of their wealth they had managed to salvage in the panic of flight was now slipping through their fingers. Mules were stumbling and falling beneath overladen panniers, defeated by the desperate whips of their handlers or the weight of their loads; the wheels and axles of carts were splintering amidst the rocks, cargoes spilling to the ground. Servants cajoled or threatened into carrying their masters’ goods were casting them aside, exhaustion overcoming their fear. Fortunes that had taken lifetimes to accumulate lay scattered and ignored along the length of the Vale, like flakes of skin scoured off the crowd’s body by the rock walls of the pass.
Avann oc Gyre, Thane of the Gyre Blood and self-proclaimed protector of the creed of the Black Road, rode amongst the common folk. His Shield, the men sworn to guard him day and night, had long since abandoned their efforts to keep the people from straying too close to their lord. The Thane himself ignored the masses jostling all about him. His head hung low and he made no effort to guide his horse. It followed where the flow carried it.
There was a crust of blood upon the Thane’s cheek. He had been in the thick of the fighting outside Kan Avor, his beloved city, and survived only because his own Shield had disregarded his commands and dragged him from the field. The wound on his cheek was little more than a scratch, though. Hidden beneath his robes, and beneath blood-heavy bandaging, other injuries were eating away at his strength. The lance of a Kilkry horseman had pierced the Thane through from front to back, breaking as it did so and leaving splinters of wood along the tunnel it drove through his flesh. He had a fine company o
f healers, and if there had been time to set his tent, to rest and tend to his wounds, they might even have been able to save his life. Avann had forbidden such a delay, and refused to leave his horse for a litter.
What was left of the Thane’s armies came behind. Two years ago the warriors of Gyre had been one of the finest bodies of fighting men in all the lands of the Kilkry Bloods, but the unremitting carnage since then had consumed their strength as surely as a fire loosed upon a drought-struck forest. In the end virtually every able-bodied man—and many of the women—of the Black Road had taken to the field at Kan Avor, drawn not just from Gyre but from every Blood: still they had been outnumbered by more than three to one. Now barely fifteen hundred men remained, a battered rearguard for the flight of the Black Road into the north.
The man who rode up to join his Thane was as bruised and weary as all the rest. His helm was dented, the ring mail on his chest stained with blood, his round shield notched and half split where an axe had found a lucky angle. Still, this man bore himself well and his eyes retained a glint of vigor. He nudged his horse through the crowds and leaned close to Avann.
“Lord,” he said softly, “it is Tegric.”
Avann stirred, but did not raise his head or open his eyes.
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