Steven Erikson - The Wurms of Blearmouth

Bauchelain sighed. “Ah, Mister Reese, perhaps I only wish to see them shared out fairly among our hosts. It is, after all, the least we can do for their hospitality.”

“Master, they tried to kill us.”

Bauchelain snorted. “It is a kindness calling such crude efforts an attempt to kill us. Tell me, do you know how to make icing?”

Emancipor scratched at his whiskers, and then shrugged. “Seen the wife do it enough times, so, aye, I suppose.”

“Ah, your wife baked?”

“No, she just made icing. In a big bowl, and then ate it all herself, usually in one night. Once a month, every month. Who can fathom the mind of a woman, eh, Master? Or even a wife.”

“Not any man, surely. Or husband.”

Emancipor nodded. “That’s a fact, Master. Mind you, I doubt most women can fathom each other, either. They’re like cats that way. Or sharks. Or those river fish with all the sharp teeth. Or crocodiles, or snakes in a pit. Or wasps-”

“Mister Reese, do get on with that icing, will you? Korbal Broach so loves icing.”

“Sweet tooth, then.”

“I suppose it shows,” Bauchelain said in a tolerant murmur. “So like a child, is my companion.”

Emancipor thought about that, conjuring in his mind Korbal’s broad, round face, the flabby lips, the pallor and the small, shallow eyes. He then thought about children, envisaging a toddling Korbal Broach running in a pack of runts, big-toothed smile and a snippet of hair on that now bald head. He shuddered. The fools. They should’ve known. One look, and they should’ve known. Those kind you do away with, head in a bucket, left out in the snows overnight, accidentally mixed up with the dog food, don’t matter how, you just do away with them, and if the world trembles to your crime, relax, that was the rattle of relief. Aye, that boy running with his gang, a gang that kept getting smaller, with all those pale parents wondering where their children vanished to, and there stood young Korbal Broach, face empty and eyes emptier. They should’ve known. Priests can’t cure them, sages can’t unlearn them, jailers don’t want them.

Bundle him in a sack of lard and raw meat and dump the whole mess into a pit of starving dogs, aye. But who am I fooling? Children like Korbal never die. Only the nice ones die, and for that alone the world deserves every damned curse a decent soul could utter. “Master?”

“Mister Reese?”

“You done with that vanilla?”

“That’s right,” said Spilgit, “two shovels.”

Gravedigger looked up blearily from the heap of dead people’s clothes that he’d sewn together to make a mattress and pillow. “That’s my job,” he said, reaching for the clay jug, his arm snaking out like a withered root to tangle hairy fingers in the jug’s ear, then drag it across the floor back to his bed.

“You look settled in, friend,” said Spilgit. “I’ve been temporarily barred from the Heel, you see, and well, a man needing to stay warm has to work. Physical work, I mean.”

“You gonna use a shovel in each hand, then?”

“That’s a silly idea, isn’t it?”

“Right. So the other shovel, what’s that for? Taxes? You taxing my one shovel and claiming the other as payment?”

“I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink.”

“Too much and what you’re saying might make sense. Too bad for you, then, isn’t it?”

“Taxation doesn’t work that way.”

“Yes it does.” Gravedigger drank.

“All right, it does work that way. You keep one shovel and the tax collector takes the other one, and uses it to build you a nice level road.”

“Oh yeah? So how come it’s me building that road, breaking my back and using my own shovel to do it with? While you sit there doing nothing, but you got a key in your pocket, and that’s the key to a giant vault full of shovels. So tell me again, what good are you to anyone?”

“This is ridiculous,” Spilgit said. “People have different talents. You build roads, or in this case, dig graves, and I do the collecting, or in this case, er, dig the graves.”

“Exactly, so take one shovel and go to it.”

“But I’d like both shovels.”

“Once a tax collector, always a tax collector.”

“Listen, you drunk fool! Give me the shovels!”

“I ain’t got two shovels. I only got the one.”

Spilgit clutched his head. “Why didn’t you say so?”

The man tipped the jug again, swallowed, and wiped his mouth. “I just did.”

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“Your shovel.”

“You tax that shovel away from me and I ain’t got no more work, meaning I don’t earn nothing, meaning you can’t tax a man who don’t earn nothing, meaning you’re useless. But you know you’re useless, don’t you, and that’s why you want to take up grave digging, so you got yourself a real job, but what about me?”

“Are you going to loan me your shovel or not?”

“Loan now, is it? You gotta pay for that, mister.”

“Fine,” Spilgit sighed. “How much?”

“Well, seeing as I’m renting the shovel from Hallig the pig trencher, and he’s charging me a sliver a dig, for you it’ll have to be two slivers, or I don’t see any profit for my kindness.”

“Kindness means you don’t charge anything!”

“I’m a business man here, Tax Collector.”

“If you rent me that shovel, I’ll have to tax your earnings.”

“How much?”

“A sliver.”

“Then I make nothing.”

Spilgit shrugged. “I doubt anyone’d ever claim renting shovels was a profit-making enterprise.”

“Hallig does.”

“Listen, that damned shovel is leaning outside your front door. I could have come up here and just taken it and you’d never have known the difference.”

Gravedigger nodded. “That’s a fact.”

“But I thought to do this legitimately, as one neighbour to another.”

“More fool you.”

“I see that,” Spilgit snapped.

“Now what, then, Mister Tax Collector?”

“I’m taxing you that shovel.”

Gravedigger shrugged. “Go ahead, now it’s Hallig’s problem. Only the next time you need to bury somebody, don’t bother coming to me. I’m now unemployed.”

“I’ll loan you a shovel from the vault.”

“Right, and I suppose you want me to be grateful or something. Is it any wonder tax collectors are despised?”

Spilgit watched the man take another drink, and then he left the shack, collected up the shovel, and then, noticing another shovel beside it, he collected that one too, and headed off.

Red huddled in the wet cave with nothing but bones for company. Just below, down a slant of bedrock, the seas surged with foam and uprooted trees from some tumbled cliff-side; and with each thunderous wave Red’s refuge grew more precarious as water rolled up and over the rock.

Amidst the racket, the bones jumbled around the cat seemed to whisper, in flinty voices, and he could almost make out the words as he crouched, trembling with fury. The low susurrations filled his skull. He glared at the bones, and saw in the gloom skulls among them. The skulls of lizard cats. They rustled and shifted before his eyes, and the whispering grew more urgent.

Red could smell a whiff of power, old power, and a need gripped his soul like a clawed hand about a throat.

Ssss … sssembling!

Semble! Semble you fool!

Yowling, the cat shook with tremors, and the bones crowded close, and things suddenly blurred.

The sorcery made the sweat on the cave walls steam and spit. Stone fissured and fell, shattering. In the miasma surrounding Red, old bones pushed into the cat’s body. There was terrible pain, and then triumph.