ARC: The Corpse-Rat King (7 page)

“But why…”

“Because you thought it would be true, didn’t you?”

There was a long pause. The rain walked up to the front of the cave and over. Marius felt the spray against his face, but made no move to wipe his eyes. Let it wet him. Let it see what it could wash away. When Gerd spoke again it was in a voice rich with guilt, and Marius shook his head.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“I choose to do what I do,” Marius said to the dark. “I chose the life I live. And I was good at it. I made a living, and the living was sometimes bad, but it was sometimes good. I consorted with whomever I wanted, and wandered where the will took me, and all in all, I was about as free as any man might hope to be, apart from some fear and some discomfort, and the occasional run for the coast. And then I met you.”

“But… you asked me…”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I? Wandering around your little village, with your granny and your pigs and no idea what a diamond even looked like. And I thought there’s a happy lad. There’s someone who knows what his place is.”

Gerd stayed silent, but the question hung between them.

“I couldn’t believe it, I really couldn’t,” Marius said, answering the silence. “Nobody could be that happy with pig shit and wanking in the bushes.”

“I don’t…”

“Yes you did. Every bloody village boy does. Anyway, you could have said no. You could have said ‘No thank you, I’m happy where I am. I don’t want to see the world and learn a trade and have adventures and be rich.’ But you didn’t, did you?”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly like you promised, was it?”

“Because I’m a
liar
, you idiot.” This time, Marius did slap the ground. “I lied to you, and you believed it, and then I had to actually try and teach you something and make us
both
rich and happy.” He squeezed his eyes shut, biting back the images in front of them. “And you still fucked it up.”

After that, there was nothing more to say. Marius closed his eyes and let the raindrops find their way down his face to the ground. They felt like little fingers across his skin, like Keth, the dancing girl at the
Hauled Keel
, a million tiny touches designed to simultaneously relax the skin and embolden the blood. Oh, the things that girl could do with her tiny, dancing fingers. If Marius concentrated, he could pretend….

“You could have just said you didn’t hate me and left it at that.” The sorrow in Gerd’s voice banished all thoughts of pleasure. Marius opened his eyes. He was in a wet cave, in the rain, and he was still dead.

“Yes, well, now you know.”

They lay on opposite sides of the fire, listening to the rain thunder against the rock shelf outside. Marius stared out the dimly-lit entrance, willing on a sleep he felt neither necessary nor welcome. Anything to avoid another conversation. Then Gerd spoke once more, and the hope was shattered.

“You know, this reminds me of home.”

“What?”

“This. It reminds me of being at home.”

Marius contemplated the hard rock beneath his hip, the wind and spray chilling him from outside.

“How? You grew up in a village.”

“Exactly.” Gerd shifted, scraping his bulk across the rock floor. “It’s like… winter, you know. You live your whole life with the village. You know everyone, they know you. You’re with each other every moment of every day. But then, at night, in winter, you’re lying in bed, and the rain is coming down, and there’s a wall of water between you and everybody else. And you just know that the whole village is like you, lying alone, wrapped up in a warm little bubble, with a wall of water between them and the world. And you’re all together and alone at the same time, and it’s comforting, you know? The sound of the rain, curving round you like a blanket. Really comforting.”

He lapsed into silence. Marius shook his head.

“You know, last year I spent six weeks sleeping under hedges, and probably about the same amount of time sleeping with whatever whore I could afford.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I’m just too polite to say fuck you and your homespun philosophies.” He clenched, and sent a fart towards the fire. “Now go to sleep before I set fire to your arse hairs.”

He experienced long seconds of happy silence before Gerd spoke again.

“You know we don’t need sleep.”

“For fuck’s sake.” Marius scrambled to his feet and stepped to the edge of the cave.

“Where are you going?”

“I need a shit.”

“We don’t need to…” But Marius was outside, the water battering against his head drowning out Gerd’s voice. He waited long enough to be sure that his young watch dog was still paying attention, then ran as hard as he could, down the hillside, into the night.

It’s no easy thing, to run headlong through strange country in the dark. Roots leap from the ground to trip you. Branches reach out to grab your clothes and scratch at your eyes. Marius crashed through the undergrowth without care for stealth, snapping twigs and branches as he lurched from tree to tree. When he had run this way for a minute or so, he stopped, and leaned against a nearby trunk. Behind him, Gerd had finally realised what he was attempting. Marius smiled as he heard the sounds of pursuit. The youngster blundered about like a blind bear, cursing as he tripped over every obstacle before him, shouting Marius’ name with increasing despair. Headlong flight in the full dark of night-time was a necessary survival skill for a man of Marius’ profession. It was one of many skills he had not bothered to pass on to his dunderheaded apprentice. Gerd tripped and fell heavily, crashing through the underbrush for several seconds at a tangent to Marius’ location. Marius listened to him sobbing in frustration. Then, with perfect stealth, he crept silently away from the cave, down the hill at an angle, aiming unerringly for the track upon which they had started their journey.

Within an hour, he was striding down the road to Borgho City in the rain, whistling.

The Spinal Ranges were mountains, once, long before men appeared in the world, when giants and monsters made of rock and starlight and spirit wandered the world without fear of persecution or autopsy. When the world was young, and everything was proud, they jutted into the sky like a proclamation, a challenge made of rock and ice that dared the sun to leap over them, and promised impalement should it fail. But they had grown old, and the sun had not, and eventually they gave up trying to catch it every morning. They shrank, as the elderly do, and grew bow-backed and flaccid, and now they lay across the landscape like an invalided grandfather without the strength to get up and face the day. Where once they had split the land with impassable and implacable fury, now they lay supine under a web of trails and tracks, conquered by the uncaring need of humans. The track along which Marius strode was wide enough to accommodate a fully-laden city carriage, and flat enough to indicate regular traffic. To Marius it stood out against the night like a silver stream, pointed inexorably to freedom. Not even the steady rain could dilute his sudden joy: Borgho City was four days’ walk from the ranges, but that was four days for the living, who needed to rest and could not see silver streams in the night. Marius could be there in less than two days, so long as he kept up a steady pace and didn’t stop to chat. The clouds blotted out the stars, the steady drumming of the rain silenced the sounds of the surrounding forest, and Marius could imagine himself alone in the world. All else had gone, washed away by the endless deluge. Only he strode on, with the whole world to explore: the ruins of great cities, the vast plains, the great fields of ice along the Northern Walls, empty of man, the whole world washed clean and only he was left alive… Marius stopped and shook his head. Perhaps another daydream.

An hour into his journey the track rounded a great rock, jutting out from the hillside like a sealed-up plague house, and began a slow descent towards the first plateau on the journey to the great coastal plains. Marius stopped for a moment to enjoy the view. The rain was spectacular, a waving blanket that swept the low-lying hillside vegetation first one way then the other in a constant rhythm. For a moment he could almost believe himself underwater, adrift above a vast field of seaweed, alive with the sway of the tide above. All he needed was a cloud of some small, silver fish to dart out of the trees and the illusion would be complete. He could even see the light of a huntermouth, a strange fish he had seen once when working a con amongst the fishing vessels of the Scorby fleet, that hung a light above its saw-toothed mouth to lure fish towards it, then savaged them. Marius watched as the light bobbed towards him, shimmering in the dark rain, the sway and swerve of it entrancing and hypnotising, as if he were a whitefish and the huntermouth was closing in…

“Shit!” Marius threw himself off the track just as the cart began to climb towards his position. His headlong dive took him into the nearby brush. He landed face first in a stickleprick bush.

“Fuck!” He careened backwards, pulling stickers from his face and hands and flinging them away. His heel struck an exposed root and he tumbled back onto the track and across it in a mess of flailing arms and legs. His head struck the massive rock on the other side and he pitched forward, landing face first on the sandy track. He lay that way for perhaps half a minute, waiting for his eyes to catch up with the rest of him, then rolled over, expelling a spray of spit and sand into the air, and found himself staring into the barely-interested face of an underfed, aged mule. Marius scrambled out from under the animal’s gaze and stood, eyes darting to either side of the track in the search for the best escape route. When no sound was forthcoming from the mule he stopped panicking and let his gaze settle on the driver of the cart the beast was pulling.

Marius was no great judge of age, but something
that
old should either be buried or a tree. Marius had once spent a torturous month impersonating the chief eunuch to the Caliphate of Taran’s second best harem, in a fruitless attempt to discover the location of the Caliphate’s second best buried treasure. In Taran they bred a special type of dog whose face, if it could be described as such, was nothing more than a mass of folds and wrinkles. The more wrinkles the dog possessed, the more highly it was prized. Marius had seen dogs that resembled mobile scrotums, pressed to the bosoms of cooing concubines as if the most precious possession on Earth, while his own scrotum sat alone, underappreciated and never once held to the bosom of anybody. But even the most scrotal of puppies would retreat to the nearest concubine’s cleavage in defeat when faced with the almost supernatural collection of wrinkles that stared at Marius now. The driver of the cart looked like a relief map of the Broken Lands after a major land battle had taken place. He crouched in his seat like a blind man’s drawing of a spider, a straw hat that looked like it might be hereditary crammed onto his head; arms and legs like knotted string poking out of a vague assemblage of clothing as if they’d been leant against them and forgotten. He stared at Marius, and Marius had the uneasy feeling that the old man had died of fright, and someone had better tell him before he forgot and drove off. He slowly raised a hand, and bent his fingers in a wave.

“Hello,” he said, praying the old man wouldn’t spook and drive over him. He was in luck. After an extended pause, in which Marius could imagine his single word searching across the wrinkled phizog in an attempt to distinguish his ear from the rest of him, the old man leant over to a lamp that hung from a pole at the side of the cart. He tilted it so the light swung directly into Marius’ face. Marius smiled, and waved again.

It is entirely possible that the descendants of the old cart driver still tell stories of the night he met Marius. Blinded as he was by the sudden flash of light, Marius didn’t see him leave the cart, but he did feel the breeze as he passed, moving across him at an angle towards the bushes at the track’s edge.

“Hey, watch out for the stickle…” But it was too late. The old man cleaved the stickleprick bush without stopping, stick arms waving like a pair of spindly black machetes, cutting a path through the bushes at a pace that would have impressed a charging elephant. Marius watched him disappear into the gloom of the forest. Within moments the man was out of sight, but the sound of breaking vegetation continued for several minutes. Marius listened to the crashes of destruction fade into the distance, then turned back to the mule. They stared at each other. Marius’ gaze slipped down to the sand at his feet. No footprints spoiled the ground between the cart and the forest.

“Well,” he said. “What do you make of that?”

The mule snorted, although whether in agreement or disdain, Marius couldn’t tell. As there seemed no chance of consensus, he glanced back down the track, then down the path the old man had taken, then back at the mule.

“Can’t leave you here, I guess,” he said. He climbed onto the cart and twitched the reins. “I doubt I need to rest my legs, either, but let’s not take the chance, hey?” He pulled on the reins, and slowly, with great reluctance, the mule wheeled about and began to pull the cart back down the track. Marius leaned back, and glanced at the seat beside him.

“Hey, what do you know?” he said, “The old chap left his hat behind.” He placed it on his head, twitched the reins once more for emphasis, and let his new pet figure out the rest for itself.

For the first time since his travails had begun, Marius relaxed. The mule plodded onwards like a surly automaton, one step after another without a single change of pace or demeanour, the rise and fall of its haunches hypnotic in the gently swaying light of the lantern. Marius quickly fell into the rhythm of the journey, letting his body swing along with the back-and-forth motion of the cart. Now he understood the old man’s posture – faced with the endless tiny adjustments necessary to maintain balance, his body quickly admitted defeat and slumped into the shape of least resistance. Without the presence of another person to remind him, Marius quickly forgot about the stickers poking into his face. It was only when he reached up to adjust his hat, to stop the incessant rain falling into his eyes, that he brushed against them and remembered to pull them out. He stared at the first of them, and frowned. He had felt nothing as he pulled it out, not even the slight tug as it loosed its hold upon his skin. Yet he remembered the pain of falling into the bush, and how much his head had rung in the moments after he struck the rock. Gerd had been adamant that the dead were beyond such mortal sensations, but Marius was not so removed from humanity that he could dismiss the things he had so recently felt. Something was not right. Some vital information was missing, some essential truth had been mislaid, or neglected. Marius had seen his reflection. It was not that of a living man. And yet he did not
feel
dead, which begged the question: was he alone in this, or was this deadening of skin and soul simply something that the dead were persuaded into believing, because nobody had the strength of purpose or character to deny the common belief? Or was it Gerd who did not feel things simply because he was Gerd? And if so… Marius stared at the prickle as if he might find the truth written upon it, like the foreign conjurers in the markets who claimed to write your name on a grain of rice. As if you’d even be able to read it if they did, Marius snorted, and flicked the prickle out of the cart. No, something was not right. Perhaps a few more hours of pondering while the mule strode gently onwards would reveal the missing link. What the heck, it was as good a plan as any.