The Folly of the World (6 page)

“Get the fuck away from me,” Sander whispered, his tone hard for its softness. He rolled up onto the balls of his feet and twisted around to face the voice in the blackness. Glory’s End was at the bottom of the goddamn canal, but the eel bites, while stinging like the devil’s own kisses, had nowhere near incapacitated the arms and legs of a man who had recently killed a lippy Frisian barkeep using only his forehead and a running start.

“All grite,” said the voice, and a flopping wet sound punctuated the retreat. “Shrudn’t ruin tit, ish all.”

“Who’re you?” Sander wondered what sick fucking jerk-off hid under buildings, tactfully forgetting the many occasions where he had been obliged to do the same. “Where am I?”

“Bell-djrin.” It was more of a croak than anything else, come to think it. “Arm Bell-djrin. Grue Bell-djrin.”

“
Belgium?
No,
Belgian?
Your name’s Belgian? Or we’re
in
Belgian? What the fuck does it mean, Belgian? Where. Am. I?”

“Yarsh!” said the voice. “Bell-djrins in Bell-jic-an!”

“Listen here, Belgian, we’re under Sneek, yeah?”

“Yarsh, sneak. Sneak undrer Bell-jic-an.”

“Fuck. Me.” Sander gritted his teeth. Whatever passed for speech with this Belgian made Frisian seem like a coherent, lyrical language. Even if Belgian wasn’t a stiffhead working for whoever the mastermind was that had been hiring men to watch Sander and set him up and try to kill him all those times and everything else, well, even then this cunt was taxing Sander’s patience.

“Shrow mush,” said Belgian. “To trell, to shrow, shrow—”

“Light,” said Sander. “Windows, a trapdoor, a goddamn spark on a godloved flinty—light. Understand, Belgian?”

“Grite, grite,” Belgian said. “Un momen.”

There was the sound of metal scraping on glass, and a faint glow began to emerge in the darkness, a hovering marshlight that blinded Sander as it grew brighter and brighter. He turned away, shielding his eyes with his palm, and as the shadows were shoved back across the softly lapping water, he saw there were dozens of corpses floating before him, windblown leaves on the surface of a well. Beyond the dead men, the far wall of whatever cavern or tunnel he was in rose up into deeper blackness. His eyes were streaming and he rubbed them hard, too hard, milling his muddy palms into the sockets. What in the name of the devil’s favorite whore was going on?

There was another flopping noise in the mud behind Sander and, taking a breath, he clenched his fists and turned to Belgian. His host held up the lantern, which, try to puzzle
that
out, looked to be a small glass jug filled with glowing liquid and writhing eels. It was blinding to look at straight on, but the man’s webbed fingers partially blocked out the light, and besides, Sander’s attention was focused far more on Belgian than on his mysterious eel lamp. Belgian was naked, and rather knobby and bent-looking, but that wasn’t what captured Sander’s attention—it was Belgian’s face.

The man was all chin, the wrinkly, mustard-colored prominence jutting straight out past the rest of his features, which fell progressively farther back as they went up, like a face set in the side of a triangle. Sander immediately realized the word
man
was out of order given the circumstances. Lips that looked like overcooked sausages bursting from their skins stretched around to where Belgian’s ears should have been but weren’t, and then it smiled. This revealed a dozen twig-thin teeth seemingly placed at random in the nightmare maw, with two fangs the width of Sander’s thumbs at the forefront. Above its horrid mouth were two little black slits, and just below where the lumpy forehead arrested the backward slide of its face were a pair of bulbous eyes. They looked like cracked hard-boiled eggs webbed in pond scum.

It took him a moment, but Sander realized with deepening horror that he was looking at whatever it was he’d always supposed was under him in the well. It was even worse than he’d imagined.

“Grite!” said Belgian, holding up a long, crooked piece of serrated bone or shell in one hand and waving the lamp with the other. “All grite?”

It was most certainly not. Sander was far faster than the demon, and before Belgian could use the weapon, Sander had closed the distance and sent his right fist into that giant goddamn chin. The horrid thing started to shriek even before Sander had beaten it to the ground, and as he punched it again and again in the face and throat, he heard its call returned from the darkness. Even with his light-burned eyes watering to the point of blindness Sander could not deny the monstrousness of his foe, the sharp bones too close to the surface of Belgian’s cold, clammy skin. He, no,
it
, had gone down hard in the mud, Sander riding it all the way, intending to sit on its chest, pin its arms with his knees, and pound its face until it stopped moving… But like a lazing souse dunked in a rain trough, Belgian suddenly began to thrash and fight back.

The thing was fucking stronger than it looked, and fast, and
its backward-jointed, froglike legs were evidently suited to propelling itself out of the mud; before he could stop the tables from turning, Sander was the one on his back in the muck, Belgian chirping and spitting atop him. It reared back, its jagged weapon held in both hands, and there came a desperate moment where it paused, blathering unintelligibly at him. Sander used that moment to gamble on monsters having genitals.

Aided by the slick mud, Sander jerked his lower body toward his chest, his knees popping out from under the squat Belgian, and then he sent both feet hammering into the shadowy gap between its half-folded legs. A ridge of bone or spine caught between the toes of his right foot, cutting deep, but his left connected with something dangly and soft. Belgian gave a strangled gasp and collapsed in the mud, dropping the bone knife. The weapon was in Sander’s hand before he was even on his feet, and he would have ended the monster right there if he hadn’t put his weight on his gashed foot. Sander toppled back in the mud beside Belgian, cursing along with the wet noises his incapacitated opponent was making.

Sander rose again, more carefully this time, and, favoring his good leg, leaned over the crying demon and cut its throat. The handle of the knife-thing was flat bone, and slippery for it, and the serrated teeth of the blade caught on something halfway across, but it did the job, and monster or no, Belgian evidently wasn’t shrugging off a sliced gullet. It made sloppy hiccupping noises as it bled out, and Sander realized the light was dying, too—in the struggle the luminous jug-lamp had fallen and tipped over in the muck. The glowing liquid faded as it mixed with the filth, the luminescent elvers leaving shiny trails on the shore as they abandoned the vessel and squirmed back into the water.

Before the light dissipated, Sander saw that in addition to the very wrong legs and head Belgian had a stumpy, finned tail, the sight of which made Sander want to throw up all over again. This was what had been in the well, this was what had harried
him all his life, the villain orchestrating the whole let’s-get-Sander scheme that just about every cunt he’d ever met was somehow in on, from his father all the way down to the judges of Sneek, this was it: Belgian.

Probably. Sander knew he wasn’t thinking straight, and time would learn him if this was indeed his hereto-unidentified nemesis or just some godforsaken monster or demon looking to do him in, but for now he had to find his way out.

Tearing himself away from the bested fiend, he saw a small table fashioned of rock or coral, its surface cluttered with strange bone instruments. Before he could give the gear a proper going over, something large splashed behind him, and he wheeled around. Squinting into the quickly deepening darkness, Sander saw that rather than a bank proper he had come ashore on a tiny island of muck, black water stretching in all directions, water that winked and blinked and shone with countless stars.

Eyes, he realized as the light failed entirely, not stars—eyes.

The darkness took Sander, as it takes us all, whether we like it or not. He settled into a crouch, planting the heel of his wounded foot as best he could as they squawked and splashed at each other, at him. He may be in hell, but at least he knew where he was, and when you’re at the bottom you know there’s nothing beneath you.

“Right, then, you Belgian plaguebitches,” Sander called into the busy darkness. “Let’s fucking do this!”

T
he day after Jan bought Jolanda, the girl kicked him in the balls and stole his horse. It was not the sort of blow that one can easily shake off; she knew her business well and connected with the tip of her foot, her toes curled slightly back, rather than the kind of amateur ball-kicking where the top of the foot hits the scrotum, spoiling the thrust of the attack. She had bided her time, not attempting her assault when his codpiece was merely unhinged for a piss but instead waiting until their second night together, when the armament was entirely down to facilitate his dropping a deuce.

She must have been watching him, which was downright foul, but at least affirmed her dedication to a task, once she had set her mind to it. He was still squatting when she ambushed him out of the blackthorn, and before he could straighten up she’d taken the fatal step forward that set her foot and grounded her for the kick. It was one of the worst assaults he had ever suffered. At least he didn’t land in his shit when his mind decided that he didn’t really need to be conscious of the sensation in his loins.

He wasn’t out long, but even after he returned to his senses, he couldn’t stand, his legs shaking uncontrollably, and he had to lie very still for quite some time, teetering on nausea’s edge. Finally he was able to squirm around and stretch his legs out, confirming that, yes, indeed, his balls were in an incredible amount of pain, and on top of that she had stolen both his purse and his sword from his belt. By the time he had gotten back into his hose—and unhooked the codpiece, which was now uncomfortably tight—he was in a black mood.

The whole point of going so far away to relieve himself was to give her ample time to steal the horse, whereupon he would catch her again, straighten her out, and they would establish the pecking order once and for all. The only real surprise was that she hadn’t tried the trick the night before, when they had slept for a few hours on the beach after leaving her father’s house. Well, that and the whole ball-kicking, which was wholly unwarranted, and showed a cruel streak in young Jolanda that Jan found distressing.

Limping out of the sloe, he saw that while she had taken his camping pack, his blankets and rucksack remained. This only relieved him until he caught the vinegary whiff of piss emanating from them. With a sigh, he rooted through the wet pack until he found a small length of iron, the bar perhaps two fingers wide and half an ell long. He knew from experience that hurling it into a running person’s back or legs had a way of flooring the runner without the risk a knife brought to things. Leaving the rest of his gear, he followed the tracks back the way they had come from the bole in the dunes, the setting sun in his eyes.

Mackerel, his horse, was exactly where Jan expected he would be—munching the patch of marram grass they had passed at the edge of the dunes. He hadn’t fed the stallion precisely to ensure that Mackerel’s stubbornness was even further exacerbated, and wasn’t surprised that an equine-ignorant child hadn’t been able to move him once he locked his head down and set to eating. What did surprise Jan was that instead of a young woman’s footprints leading off he found the young woman herself, sitting halfway up a dune, watching man and horse. His sword was unsheathed and buried in the sand beside her, which restored a good deal of the animosity Jan had lost upon seeing he wouldn’t have to spend all night chasing her after all.

“You’re hurting the blade, doing that,” he called, the metal bar in his right hand tucked back behind his forearm.

“What you want, stiffhead?” Jolanda answered, not moving. She was clever, sure enough—she had climbed the dune and
then strafed over to where it was even steeper, meaning he would exhaust himself before he reached her if he made a charge.

“With you?” said Jan.

“What else I care about?”

“You’re going to help me with something.”

“Tell me what, then,” Jolanda said, standing up. “Could’ve cleaned you while you were crying in your turds back there, so fess up what you want—could’ve killed you shell-dead and taken it all, aye? Still can, you lip me.”

“Come down here so we don’t have to shout,” said Jan, which earned him a laugh. “All right then, stay up there. What I want is a good swimmer to retrieve something for me. I know where it is, but it’s at the bottom of a lake and I can’t swim. You come with me and I’ll feed you, see that you’re taken care of, and if you dive down and bring it up for me, I’ll give you a hefty reward, as well as your freedom. Fair?”

“Freedom I got, and this purse of yours seems a hefty reward already,” said Jolanda, and Jan hoped his disgust wasn’t writ as plainly across his face as it was his heart. He had bought the little bitch instead of trying to kidnap her from the beach on the hope that she would relent to his authority that much easier, but apparently her father was correct—a collar and leash might be the sounder plan. Still, from her current vantage it couldn’t hurt to try scratching her behind her ears a little more, and Jan sighed.

“The coins aren’t real,” he said. “Counterfeit. And rest assured that my offer is limited by my patience—if you don’t do as I say, you’ll find the only metal of worth is buried in your heart. I’m prepared to let this whole incident go with only the mildest of repercussions if you come back down here and give me your oath to not try this kind of shit again, and then we can make supper.”

“Big talk for a stiffhead with a sore sack!”

“Jolanda,” said Jan evenly. “I am a man of means, and you’re a girl with nothing but what you have stolen from me. Even if you were to evade me tonight and sneak away into the dunes,
where would you go? I would be back here with men and dogs in short order, and on horses we would find you, and then we would kill you. If you inconvenience me by forcing such a route, then I will do everything in my power to make your death as—”