Steven Erikson - The Wurms of Blearmouth

“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-”