The Wurms of Blearmouth (2 page)

“You look like you peed yourself! Hah hah!”

He studied her for a moment, and then said, “We’re heading down, darling. To that wreck.”

“Really? But we’ll freeze!”

“I want to see it. You can come with me, Felittle, or you can run back to your ma.”

“I don’t know why you two hate each other. She only wants what’s best for me. But I want to do what her girls do, and why not? It’s a living, isn’t it?”

“You’re far too beautiful for that,” Spilgit said.

“That’s what she says!”

“And she’s right, on that we’re agreed. The thing we don’t agree on, is what your future is going to look like. You deserve better than this horrible little village, Felittle. She’d as much as chain you down if she thought she could get away with it. It’s all about her, what she’s wants you to do for her. Your ma’s getting old, right? Needing someone to take care of her, and she’ll make you a spinster if you let her.”

Her eyes were wide, her breaths coming fast. “Then you’ll do it?”

“What?”

“Steal me away!”

“I’m a man of my word. Come the spring, darling, we’ll swirl the sands, flatten the high grasses and flee like the wind.”

“Okay, I’ll go with you!”

“I know.”

“No, down to the wreck, silly!”

“Right, my little sea-sponge. Wait here, then. I need go back to the Heel and change … unless, you need to do the same?”

“No I’m fine! If I go back Ma will see me and find something for me to do. I’ll wait here. I wasn’t wearing knickers anyway.”

Well, that explains it, doesn’t it. Oh darling, you’re my kind of woman.

Except for the peeing bit, that is.

The hand gripping his cloak collar was hard as iron as he was dragged from the foaming, icy surf. Hacking, spitting out seawater and sand, Emancipor Reese opened his eyes to stare up at a grey, wintry sky. He heard gulls but couldn’t see them. He heard the war-drums of the waves pounding the rocks flanking this slip of a bay. He heard his own phlegmatic gasping, punctuated by the occasional groan as that hand continued dragging him up the beach, across heaps of shells, through snarled knots of seaweed, and over sodden lumps of half-frozen driftwood.

He flailed weakly, clawing at that hand and a moment later it released him. His head fell back with a thump and he found himself staring up at his master’s upside-down face.

“Will you recover, Mister Reese?”

“No, Master.”

“Very good. Now get up. We must take stock of our surroundings.”

“It’s made up of air, not water. That’s enough of the surroundings I need to know.”

“Nonsense, Mister Reese. We seem to have lost Korbal Broach, and I could use your assistance in finding him.”

At that, Emancipor Reese sat up, blinking the rime from his eyes. “Lost? Korbal’s lost? Really? He must be dead. Drowned—”

“No, nothing so dire, I’m sure,” Bauchelain replied, brushing sand from his cloak.

“Oh.” Emancipor found himself staring at the wreck of the ship. There wasn’t much left. Fragments were being tossed up to roll in the surf. “What is it about me and the sea?” he muttered. Amidst the flotsam were more than a few bodies, their only movement coming from the water that pushed and pulled at their limp forms. “It’s a miracle we survived that, Master.”

“Mister Reese? Oh, that. Not a miracle at all. Willpower and fortitude. Now, I believe I spied a settlement upon the headland, one that includes a rather substantial fortification.”

“No,” moaned Emancipor, “not another fortification.”

“Prone to draughts, I’m sure, but more suited to our habits. We shall have to introduce ourselves to the local lord or lady, I think, and gauge well the firmness of his or her footing. Command, Mister Reese, is a state of being to which I am not only accustomed, but one for which my impressive talents are well-suited. That said, and given our record thus far when assuming positions of authority, even I must acknowledge that trial and error remains an important component to our engagement with power.”

“Now here’s a miracle,” said Emancipor as he pulled out his pouch of rustleaf. “The hawker claimed it would be water-tight, and she was right.” He found his pipe, blew the wet and sand from it and began tamping the bowl. “Life’s looking up already, Master.”

“The lightening of your spirits is most welcome, Mister Reese.”

“Show me a man who can’t smoke and you’re looking at the end of civilization.”

“I’ll not argue with that assessment, Mister Reese.”

The crescent beach they’d found banked steeply above the waterline, and high ragged cliffs rose beyond, but Emancipor could make out a trail. “There’s a way up, Master.”

“So I see, and if I’m not mistaken, we will find our companion in yonder village.”

“He didn’t wait for us?”

“He elected wings to effect his escape from the sinking ship, Mister Reese. I would have done the same, if not for you.”

“Ah. Appreciate that, Master. I really do.”

“My pleasure. Now—oh, we have company on the way.”

Emancipor saw, too, the three figures making their way down the trail, hunched over against the buffeting wind. “Are they armed, Master? This could be a wrecker’s coast.”

“Armed?”

“My eyes ain’t what they used to be, Master.”

“No, Mister Reese. Not excessively so. I assure you, to us they pose no danger.”

“Glad to hear it, Master.” Emancipor was starting to get cold, or, rather, he was starting to feel it. His dunk in the seas had numbed things up pretty fast. Glancing over at Bauchelain, he saw that the tall necromancer was not even wet. Mages, he concluded, were obnoxious in so many ways it was almost pointless listing them.

Now shivering, he studied the three strangers making their way down the trail.

Hordilo Stinq’s pirating days were behind him now. He liked the feel of solid ground under him, even as that terrible sea still held him close, within reach, stubborn as an ex-wife whose sole reason to breathe was the conviction that she was still owed something by the fool she’d tossed away, and it didn’t matter how many years had passed since he’d last wallowed in her icy arms. The watery witch never let him wander too far from her thrashing shores. These days, it was nothing to step outside to begin his daily patrol, and feel on the wind the wet spray of her bitter spite. Aye, an ex-wife, spitting like a cat and howling like a dog. A hoary, wild thing with venom under her long nails and dead spiders in her hair.

“You ain’t answered me, Stinq,” said Ackle, who sat across from him and was, thankfully, not looking Hordilo’s way, busy instead plucking clumps of old mud from his deadman’s cloak. “Ever been married?”

“No,” Hordilo replied. “Nor do I want to be, Ackle. Want no ex-wives chasing me down everywhere I go, throwing snotty runts at my feet I never seen before and sayin’ they’re mine. When they aren’t. I mean, if my seed produced anything as ugly as that—well, gods below, I’ve known plenty of women, if you know what I mean, and not one of them ever called me ugly.”

Ackle paused, examining a long root he’d pulled from the woolen cloak. “Heard you like Rimlee,” he said. “She can’t see past her nose.”

“Your point?”

“Nothing, friend. Just that she’s mostly blind. That’s all.”

Hordilo drained his tankard and glared out through the thick, pitted glass of the window. “Feloovil’s whores ain’t selected for how good they look—see, I mean. How good they see. But I bet you wish they wasn’t the smelling kind, don’t you?”

“If they smell I remain unaware of it,” Ackle replied.

“That’s not what I meant. They smell just fine, and that’s your problem, isn’t it?”

At that Ackle looked up—Hordilo could see the man’s face reflected blurrily, unevenly, in the window, but even this distorted view couldn’t hide Ackle’s horrible, lifeless eyes. “Is that my problem, Hordilo? Is that why I can’t get a woman to lie with me no matter how much I offer to pay? You think so? I mean, my smell turns them, does it? Are you sure about that?”

Hordilo scowled. Out on the street beyond he saw Grimled stump past, making the first circuit of the day. “You don’t smell too good, Ackle. Not that you could tell.”

“No, I couldn’t. I can’t. But you know, there’s plenty of men in here who don’t smell too good, but they get company in their beds upstairs anyway, every night if they can afford it.”

“Different kind of smell,” Hordilo insisted. “Living smell, if you know what I mean.”

“I would think,” said Ackle, straightening in his seat, “that my smell is the least of their concerns. I would think,” he went on, ‘that it’s more to do with my having been pronounced dead, stuck in a coffin for three days, and then buried for two more. Don’t you think it might be all that, Stinq? I don’t know, of course. I mean, I can’t be sure, but it seems plausible that these details have something to do with my lonely nights. At least, it’s a possibility worth considering, don’t you think?”

Hordilo shrugged. “You still smell.”

“What do I smell like?”

“Like a corpse in a graveyard.”

“And have I always smelled that way?”

Hordilo scowled. “How should I know? Probably not. But I can’t really say, can I? Since I never knew you before, did I? You washed up on shore, right? And I had a quota to fill and you were broke.”

“If you’d let me lead you to the buried chest you’d be rich now,” Ackle said, “and I wouldn’t have been strung up because your lord likes to see ’em dance. It could’ve gone another way, Hordilo, if you had any brains in that skull of yours.”

“Right. So why don’t you lead me to that damned chest you keep talkin’ about? It’s not like you need the coin anymore, is it? Anyway, the whole point you’re avoiding is that we hanged you good, and you was dead when we took you down. Dead people are supposed to stay in the ground. It’s a rule.”

“If I was dead I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, would I? Ever clawed your way up out of the ground? If that coffin lid wasn’t just cheap driftwood, and if your ground wasn’t so hard and if your gravediggers weren’t so damned lazy, why, I would never have made it back. So, if there’s anyone to blame for me being here, it’s all of you in this lousy village.”

“I didn’t dig the grave though, did I? Anyway, there ain’t no buried chest. If there was, you’d have gone back to it by now. Instead, you sleep under the table, and that only because her dogs like rolling on you to disguise their scent. Feloovil thinks you’re funny, besides.”

“She laughs at my dead eyes, you mean.”

Hordilo glanced into the tavern’s main room, but Feloovil was still sitting behind the bar, her head barely visible, her eyes closed. The woman stayed up till dawn most nights, so it was no surprise she slept most of the day every day. He’d watched that useless Factor, Spilgit Purrble, slink past her a while earlier, and she’d not raised a lid, not even when the man returned from his upstairs room only moments later, and wearing a change of clothes. There’d been a suspicious look on the Factor’s face that was still nagging Hordilo, but for the moment he didn’t feel like moving, and besides, with Feloovil asleep it was no difficult thing to draw the taps for a flagon or two, on the house as it were. “Lucky you,” he finally said, “that she’s got an uncanny streak in her. Unlucky for you that her girls don’t share it, hah.”

“With what they must see in a man’s eyes every night,” said Ackle, “you’d think they’d welcome mine.”

“Lust ain’t so bad t’look at,” Hordilo said.

“Oh indeed. Why, it charms a woman right out of her clothes, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s just like love, isn’t it? Love with all the dreamy veils torn aside.”

“What veils? Her girls don’t wear veils, you fool. The point is, Ackle, what they see every night is what they’re used to, and they’re fine with that. Dead eyes, well, that’s different. It puts a shiver on the soul, it does.”

“And does my reflection in the window keep you warm, Stinq?”

“If I had an ex-wife, she’d probably have your eyes.”

“No doubt.”

“But I don’t need reminding of what I’ve been lucky enough to avoid all these years. Well, sometimes, but not all the time. I got a limit to what I can stomach, if you get my meaning.”

“I get your meaning, Stinq. Well, sometimes, but not all the time, as you’re such a subtle man.”

Hordilo grunted, and then frowned. Grimled should have been by already, second time around. It was a small village, and doing the circuit was what Grimled did, and did well, since he didn’t know how to do it otherwise. “Something funny,” he said.

“What?”

“Fangatooth’s golem, Grimled.”

“What about it?”

“Not ‘it.’ ‘Him.’ Anyway, he showed up as usual—”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“The rounds, right? Only, he ain’t come back.”

Ackle shrugged. “Might be sorting something out.”

“Grimled don’t sort things out,” Hordilo replied, squinting and wiping at the steamy glass. “To sort things out, all he has to do is show up. You don’t argue with a giant lump of angry iron. Especially one carrying a two-handed axe.”

“It’s the bucket head that I don’t like,” said Ackle. “You can’t talk to a bucket, can you? Not face to face, I mean. There is no face. But that bucket’s not iron, Stinq.”

“Yes it is.”

“Got to be tin, or pewter.”

“No, it’s iron,” said Hordilo. “You don’t work with Grimled the way I do.”

“Work with it? You salute it when you pass it by. It’s not like you’re its friend, Stinq.”

“I’m the lord’s executioner, Ackle. Grimled and his brothers do the policing. It’s all organized, right? We work for the Lord of Wurms. It’s like the golems are milord’s right hands, and I’m the left.”

“Right hands? How many does he have?”

“Count it up, fool. Six right hands.”

“What about his own right hand?”

“All right. Seven right hands.”

“And two left?”

“That’s right. I guess even the dead can count, after all.”

“Oh, I can count, friend, but that doesn’t mean it all adds up, if you understand my meaning.”

“No,” Hordilo said, glaring at the reflection, “I don’t.”

“So the bucket’s iron. Fine, whatever you say. Grimled’s gone missing and even I will admit: that’s passing strange. So, as executioner and constable or whatever it is you say you do, officially, I mean, and let’s face it, you chirp something different every second day. So, as whatever you are, why are you still sitting here, when Grimled’s gone missing. It’s cold out there. Maybe it rusted up. Or frozen solid. Go get yourself a tub of grease. It’s what a real friend would do, under the circumstances.”