Steven Erikson - Blood follows

At that moment something white and the size of a fat cat darted from the shattered barrow. Spying it, Bauchelain murmured, “Oh, I like the look of that.” He gestured once more.

An ethereal demon rose hulking and massive in the white rat’s path. A taloned hand snapped down. The rat- Whitemane, Guld realized, it must be — had time for a single piteous squeal before it vanished into the demon’s fanged maw.

“Get that out of your mouth right now!” Bauchelain roared, stepping forward.

The towering demon flinched, shoulders hunching.

“Spit!”

The demon spat out a mangled, red-smeared lump of fur that bounced once on the cobbles then lay still.

“Korbal, examine the unfortunate Soletaken, if you please.”

The eunuch sniffed in the rat’s direction, then shrugged. “It will live.”

“Excellent.” Bauchelain addressed the demon once more, “Fortunate for you, Kenyll’rah. Now, gather up the hapless thing and return to my trunk-”

“Not tho fatht!” a voice cried from one side.

Guld managed to turn his head and saw Blather Roe and Birklas Punth standing on the other side of the fountain, their hats pulled low. Both held their long-shafted rat-stickers leaning over a shoulder.

“And who might you two be?” Bauchelain inquired.

“Kill them,” Korbal Broach whined. “I don’t like them. They make me nervous.”

“Remain calm, my friend,” Bauchelain cautioned. “While I share your unease, I am certain some amiable arrangement can be achieved.”

Guld stared at the two floppy-hatted men. They’re just rat-hunters-why all this anxiety?

Birklas was eyeing the Kenyll’rah demon with distaste. “Dreadful apparition, begone!”

The demon wilted, wavered, then vanished.

On the cobbles Whitemane suddenly lifted its head, glanced about, then scurried for the shadows.

“That was unkind of you,” Bauchelain complained. “I dislike having my servants dismissed by anyone other than myself.”

Birklas shrugged. “Moll may indeed be a modest city, Wizard, but only in outward appearance. It has its games, and its players, and we like things the way they are. You and your necromantic friend have… upset things.”

“Thingth,” Blather added, “that don’t like being upthet.”

“They smell of a barrow,” Korbal Broach said.

Bauchelain slowly nodded. “Indeed, they do. Yet this city’s barrows are so… insignificant, I cannot imagine…”

“Wards are not eternal,” Birklas murmured. “Although, I will grant you, it took us some time to find our way out of the Knoll. Only to find we had been preceded by almost every efficacious spirit and being once interred alongside us in the lesser barrows. They used the rats, you see. Blather and I, however, did not. In any case, enough of all this. Consider yourselves expelled from Lamentable Moll.”

Bauchelain shrugged. “Acceptable. We were just leaving in any case.”

“Good,” Blather smiled.

Slowly recovering, Guld leaned against a wall and pushed himself to his feet. “Damn you, Bauchelain-”

The sorceror turned in surprise. “Whatever for, Sergeant?”

“My men. That’s earned my own blood-vow-”

“Nonsense. They are not slain. They wander confused. Nothing more. This I swear.”

“If you lie, Mage, you’d best kill me now, for I-”

“I do not, Sergeant. And proof of that is found in my letting you live.”

“He speaks true,” Birklas said to Guld. “As I intimated earlier, we will tolerate only so much.”

Bauchelain laid a hand on Korbal Broach’s shoulder. “Let’s be on, friend. We can join our able manservant at the docks.”

Waves of pain half-blinding him, Guld watched the two men stride off.

Princess Sharn seemed to shake herself awake. Her face white as the moon, she stared after them as well. Then she hissed in outrage, “He meant to kill me!”

“He’s a damned eunuch,” Guld rasped. “What charms would you have offered him? He doesn’t even need to shave.”

Steck Marynd groaned, then slumped to the cobbles, his crossbow clattering but not discharging. Guld glanced down to see the man unconscious, a slightly stupid smile on his features.

Birklas Punth and Blather Roe offered Guld elegant tips of their hats, then sauntered off.

The sergeant took a step away from the wall, tottered, but managed to stay upright. Blood flowed down around his neck. He heard distant shouts. His men were finally on the way. Guld sighed, his eyes falling on the handmaiden. Her body lay in a spreading pool. He watched a mongrel dog trot purposefully in her direction. The sergeant’s stomach lurched. “Madness,” he whispered. “All madness!”

A hacking hiss sounded from the shadows further down the alley, then a rasping voice sang out, “See what comes of a life of vice?”

Emancipor Reese awoke groggily, and found himself staring at the four travel trunks strapped to the wall in front of him. Creaking sounds inundated him, and the cot he laid on pitched and rolled under him.

The Suncurl. I remember now. Hood, what an awful night!

He slowly sat up. The ship climbed and fell-they were in the Troughs, beyond Moll Bay and in the Tithe Strait. The air was hot and damp in the close cabin. Barely time to send her word. She’ll manage, might even be relieved once she’s calmed down some. He looked around. The other two berths were empty.

Emancipor glared at the trunks. Damn, but they’d been heavy. Come close to breaking the cart’s axle. Of course, Bauchelain’s second trunk had held a huge wrapped piece of slate-the man had taken it out, and set it on the floor. On its flat surface was an intricate scribed pattern. He blinked down at it, then frowned. There had been a sound, he suddenly recalled, a sound odd enough to awaken him. Something was slapping around in one of Korbal Broach’s trunks. Something had come loose.

Emancipor climbed to his feet. He unstrapped the retainers, examined the lock. The key was in it. He unlocked the latch and pulled back the trunk’s heavy lid.

There were no words to describe the horror of what he saw within. Gagging, Emancipor slammed the lid back, then, his hands fumbling, he reattached the retaining straps.

The cabin was suddenly too small. He needed air. He needed… to get away.

Emancipor staggered to the door, then out into the aisle and up the weathered, salt-bleached steps. He found himself amidships. Bauchelain stood near the prow, seemingly unaffected by the Suncurl’s pitching and yawning. Crewmen scrambled around both the necromancer and Reese-you sweated blood in the Troughs.

Gaping like a beached fish, Emancipor worked his way to Bauchelain’s side.

“You seem peaked, Mister Reese,” the mage observed. “I have some efficacious tinctures…”

Emancipor shook his head, gasping as he leaned on the rail.

“I’d have thought,” Bauchelain continued, “that you’d not be inclined toward seasickness, Mister Reese.”

“The, uh, the first day, master. My legs will find me soon enough.”

“Ahh, I see. Did you peruse my handiwork?”

Emancipor blanched.

“The slate, Mister Reese.”

“Oh, yes Master.”

“I indulge Korbal’s ceaseless efforts to beget,” Bauchelain said. “And so devise… platforms, if you will. The inscribed circle preserves and, if need be, provides sustenance. It never fails that, in such endeavours, I learn something new. And so we are all rewarded. Are you all right, Mister Reese?”

But Emancipor did not answer. He stared unseeing at the swelling grey waves that kept rising like a wall toward him with each plummet of the bow, and trembled without feeling the thundering repercussion through the ship’s hull. Begetting? Oh, the gods forgive! What lay within the trunk, heaped and throbbing and twitching, sewn one organ to another, each alive and no doubt retaining souls in a torturous prison from which escape was impossible-what lived there in Korbal Broach’s trunk… only to a mind twisted beyond sanity could such a… a monstrosity be deemed a child. The eunuch’s dreams of begetting yielded only nightmares.