Steven Erikson - The healthy dead

Imid recoiled slightly at the upward grasping hands. “Get away, you horrid creatures! Sick? No one’s sick! No one, I tell you!”

“What,” Elas Sil demanded, “are you all doing here?”

“We are being well!”

“Well what?”

A slightly older girl stepped forward. “We’re being protected. From the outer world, that horrible, dirty, sickly place!”

“Sickly?” Elas repeated bemusedly. “What do you mean?”

“There are foul things out there-things that will make us sick. Animals, to make us sick! Flies, birds, bats, mice, rats, all diseased and waiting to make us sick! And people! Coughing, sniveling, wiping themselves everywhere! There are wayward fumes, emanating from anuses and worse. And wagons that might run us over, stairs we might fall down, walls we might walk into. You must join us, here, where it’s safe!”

“And healthy,” another piped up.

“What’s it like?” a third child asked.

Elas Sil blinked. “What is what like?”

“The world?”

“Stop that, Chimly!” the first girl scolded. “You know that curiosity is deadly!”

Someone in the crowd coughed.

Everyone swung round, and the first girl hissed, “Who did that?”

“Now!” Imid shouted. And, thankfully, Elas Sil understood. In unison they turned and scrabbled at the door latch.

Behind them: “Look! They’re getting away!”

Then the door was open, and the two saints with their charge fled out into the corridor.

“Get them!”

They ran.

King Necrotus the Nihile was seeing things from a new angle. Sideways, slightly upside-down. He had tried locomotion by wiggling his ears, but the effect had been meager. Clearly, his facial and scalp muscles weren’t designed to aid in the physical transportation of his head. That’s what the body normally attached to it did. It had been a pathetic conceit.

A large polished boot stepped into his view.

“Hello?” Necrotus called up.

The boot shifted, then the heel drew upwards and a hand settled on the king’s head, tilting it to one side. Necrotus found himself looking up at a crouching Bauchelain.

“Abyss averted!” the king sighed in relief. “I am so glad you found me. Can you see my body? It’s the one without any arms-and no head, naturally. It can’t have gone far… can it?”

Bauchelain collected Necrotus in both hands and straightened. There was something oddly disturbing about the necromancer’s expression as he studied the king.

“Am I speaking only in my head?” Necrotus asked. “Uh, as it were. I mean, can you hear me?”

“I can hear you fine, King Necrotus,” Bauchelain replied after a moment, angling the head this way and that.

“Just a little off the top?” the king asked in a half-snarl.

“I have,” Bauchelain said, “a glass case that would fit you nicely.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Yes, a nice fit indeed. Well, this is a bonus, isn’t it?”

“That’s diabolical!”

“Why yes, thank you.”

Necrotus was tucked under Bauchelain’s left arm, affording him a jostling view of the street they now walked down. The king was furious, but there was little he could do about it. Oh, his kingdom for a body! “You’ll keep it wiped clean, won’t you?”

“Of course, King Necrotus,” Bauchelain replied. “Ah, I see the edges of a crowd. I believe we approach the Grand Temple.”

“And what are we going to do there?”

“Why, a grand unveiling to close this fell night.”

“It’s a tunnel of sorts,” Imid Factallo said.

“I can see that,” Elas Sil snapped.

“We’ve no choice. I can hear those terrifying little whelps.”

“I know I know! All right, I’ll lead, and close that panel behind us.”

They had stumbled on the secret passage only because someone had left the small door wide open. From somewhere up the corridor behind them came the dread, blood-curdling sounds of excited children.

Imid followed Elas into the tunnel’s narrow confines, then twisted about to tug the panel back in place. Sudden darkness.

“By the Lady’s never-sucked teats!”

“Elas Sil!”

“Oh shut up! I’m a woman, I can curse about things like that. Wait, it’s not as dark up ahead. Come on, and hasn’t that baby of yours been asleep a long time? You sure it’s not dead?”

“Well, it peed on me halfway down that last corridor, and last I looked it was smiling.”

“Huh. It ever amazes me women get talked into motherhood.”

“Talked into it? Don’t be ridiculous, Elas. They’re desperate for it!”

“Only once and that once is the first time.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care what you believe. You’re a man, after all. All I know is, I happen to value a full night’s sleep a lot more than flinging another urchin into this all-too-crowded city, then sagging everywhere as my only reward. No thanks. I intend to stay pert forever.”

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way,” Imid said.

“You’ve only your mother for comparison and she had you, didn’t she?”

“So how come you don’t get pregnant-I mean, what we did this afternoon-”

“Willpower. Look, it’s getting lighter-there’s some kind of room up ahead.”

“Hear all that noise above us? Something awful’s happening in the concourse, Elas Sil-and it seems we’re getting closer to it, or maybe it’s getting closer to us.”

“Abyss below, Imid, do you ever stop moaning?”

They clambered out into a strange circular room, the floor set with pavestones except in the middle, where rested a single slab of polished wood that shifted beneath them, as if unanchored. The domed ceiling was barely high enough for them to kneel anywhere but in the middle, and it turned out the extra room in the centre came from a square shaft leading straight up, as far as they could see. Off to one side sat a lantern, burning out the last of its oil. The room smelled of sweat.

“Now what?” Imid asked.

“Put that damned baby down,” Elas Sil said, oddly breathless.

Imid adjusted the blanket’s folds, then gently laid the baby to one side, onto the pavestones. It cooed, then rolled onto its side and spat up. Briefly. Once done, it settled onto its back once more, closed its eyes and was asleep. Imid backed away.

The lantern dimmed, then winked out.

Hot skin-arms, thighs-“Elas!” Imid gasped as he was pulled round. “Not in front of the baby!”

But she wasn’t listening.

The necromancer had that certain quality, Ineb Cough reflected, to clear a path before him, seemingly effortless and without a word spoken. Sounds died away, as if Bauchelain was a pebble of silence flung into a loud pond. A pond filled with loud fish, that is. Perhaps. In any case, Ineb marveled at the way things got quiet as Bauchelain, an extra head tucked under one arm, made his way to the temple steps and ascended to the platform, positioning himself to the left of the altar as he faced the now rapt crowd.

The necromancer cocked his head (his own, the one atop his shoulders) for a moment, and Ineb Cough felt a subtle outflow of sorcerous power-power of such terrible magnitude that the Demon felt his knees weaken beneath him. For all his confidence, and Nauseo Sloven’s, it was now clear that Ineb, Corpulence and Sloth were as babes before this man. “He could take us,” the Demon of Vice whimpered, a bottle of wine falling from his hand to crash on the cobbles. “He could bind us and not raise a single bead of sweat in the effort. Oh. Oh no.”

Bauchelain raised his right hand and a sudden hush descended upon the massed citizens in the concourse. Under his left arm, King Necrotus’s head faced outward as well, bizarre grimacing expressions writhing on its withered features. The necromancer spoke, “People of Quaint, hear me! You have, until this night, been the victims of a terrible deceit. Said deceit will be revealed to you here, and now.” That upraised hand then slowly closed into a fist.