Glen Cook - Old Tin Sorrows

I looked at the cord. It wasn't just a piece of rope.

Morley said, "The master assassin makes his own cords. Making your own is the final rite of passage to master status. Look. The knot is like a hangman's knot, except the noose is round so it can be drawn with the hands pulling apart. These knots in the cord aren't really knots, they're braided over cork cones. They work like barbs on an arrowhead. The cord can be pulled through the knot in only one direction."

It only took a second to see how that worked—with an example right there. I felt one of the tapered bulges in the cord. Morley said, "The cork crushes down going through the knot, expands again on the other side."

"How do you get your cord off?"

"They don't. They use it only once, then it's tainted. I've only ever seen one before. Cut off his own throat by a man I knew years ago. Excepting you, he was the luckiest guy I've ever known."

I looked around, less interested in Snake than he was. If our killer wasn't good he was lucky. There wasn't a spot of physical evidence. "Kind of sad," I said.

"Death usually is." Which was a surprise, considering the source. But Morley has been full of surprises as long as I've known him.

"I mean the way he lived." I gestured at our surroundings. He'd lived like his horses. He'd slept on straw. His only piece of furniture was a paint-stained table. "This was a professional soldier. Twenty years in, mostly spent in the Cantard. Combat pay. Prize money. A man careful enough to stay alive that long would be careful about his money. But he lived in a barn, like an animal. Didn't even have a change of clothes."

Morley grunted. "Happens. Want to bet he came out of the worst slum? Or off a dirt farm where they never saw two coppers the same month?"

"No bet." I'd seen it. Raised poor, they can get pathological about squirreling it away for a rainy day—and death comes before the deluge. Sad way to live. I touched Snake's shoulder. His muscles were still knotted. He hadn't relaxed when he'd died. Curious.

I recalled what Cook had told me about him. "Put it on his tombstone, he was a good Marine." I rolled him over in case there was something under him. There wasn't, that I could see.

"Morley. It takes a guy awhile to strangle. Maybe whoever killed him tried that first, then stuck him. Instead of the other way around."

He glanced around at the damage, which wasn't all that obvious, considering the state of the place. "Could be."

"You ever try to strangle somebody?"

He gave me a look. He didn't answer questions like that.

"Sorry. I have. I was supposed to take out this sentry during a raid. I practiced before we went in."

"That doesn't sound like you."

"That was me then. I don't like killing and I didn't like it then, but I figured if I had to do it and wanted to get out, I'd better do it right."

He grunted again. He was giving Snake's former downside the once-over.

"I did it by the book. The guy was half-asleep when I got him. But I blew it. He threw me around like a ragdoll. He beat the shit out of me. And all the time I was hanging onto that damned rope. Only good I did was keep him from yelling till somebody could stick a knife in him."

"The point?"

"If you don't snap a guy's neck, he's going to fight you. And if he breaks loose, even with that Kef sidhe thing around his neck, he sees you and you got to make sure of him any way you can."

"What you're sneaking up on is this Snake guy was stronger than whoever hit him. Like that Venageti soldier."

I hadn't said the Venageti was stronger than me, but it was true. "Yes."

"Somebody in the house probably has bumps and bruises. If someone from the house did this."

"Maybe. Damn! Why couldn't I have had some luck this once?"

"What do you mean?" He thinks my luck is outrageously good.

"Why couldn't the killer leave something? A scrap of cloth. A tuft of hair. Anything."

"Why not just wish for a confession?" Morley shook his head. "You're so slick, you slide right past yourself. He left you a dagger and a Kef sidhe strangler's cord. How exotic do you want to get? I told you how rare the cord is. How many daggers have you seen like this one?"

It had a fourteen-inch polished steel blade, which was unusual, but the hilt made it especially interesting. It was black jade, plain except for being jade. But at its widest point, where the middle finger of the hand would rest, there was a small silver medallion struck with a two-headed Venageti military eagle.

"A war souvenir?" Morley suggested.

"An unusual one. Venageti. Nobody lower than a light Colonel would carry it. A battalion commander in their elite forces or a regimental commander or his second in the regulars."

"Couldn't be a lot of those around, could there?"

"True." It was a lead. Tenuous, but a lead. I looked down at Snake. "Man, why didn't you blurt it out when you had the chance?"

"Garrett."

I knew that tone. Morley's special cautionary tone he saves for when he suspects I'm getting involved. Getting unprofessional, he'd call it. Getting bullheaded and careless, too.

"I have it under control. I just feel for the guy. I know what his life was like. It shouldn't have ended like this."

"It's time to go, Garrett."

"Yes."

It was time. Before I got more involved emotionally.

I walked away thinking the old saw, There but for the grace of the gods... Over and over.

Morley wanted a crack at tracking whomever we'd heard fleeing. I gave him his head. He didn't accomplish anything.

"It's not right, Garrett."

"What?"

"I'm getting a bad feeling. Not quite an intuition. Something beyond that. Like an unfounded conviction that things are going to turn real bad."

Just so I couldn't ever call him a liar, somebody screamed inside the house. It wasn't a scream of pain and not quite one of fear, though there was fear in it. It sent those dread chills stampeding around my back. It sounded like a woman, but I couldn't be sure. I'd heard men scream like that in the islands.

"Stay out of sight," I told Morley, and took off.

The screams went on and on. I blew inside. They came from the west-side, third-floor balcony. I hit the stair running. Two flights up I slowed down. I didn't want to charge into something.

The stairsteps were spotted with water drops and green stuff in bits and gobs. Under one lamp lay what looked like a dead slug. I poked it. It wiggled and I recognized it. It was a leech. I'd become closely acquainted with its relatives on that one swampy island.

There was an awful smell in the air. I knew it from that island, too.

What the hell?

There was all kinds of racket up there now. Men yelled. Peters shouted, "Get one of those spears and shove it back down."

Dellwood, with a squeak higher than the screaming, asked, "What the hell is it?"

I moved upward carefully. I saw men against the head of the stairs, a couple with spears jabbing at something heaving on the stairs. There wasn't enough light to show it clearly.

I had a suspicion.

Draug.

I got a lamp.

I didn't want to see what I saw. That thing on the stair was something nobody ever wants to see, and whoever made it least of all.

It was a corpse. One that had been immersed in a swamp. What folklore called a draug, a murdered man who could not rest in death while his killer went unpunished. There are a million stories about draugs' vengeance but I'd never expected to be a player in such a tale. They're apochryphal, not concrete. Nobody ever really saw one.

Funny how the mind works. The thoughts you'd expect didn't come to me. All I could think was: why me? This shot hell out of my simple case.

Peters yelled, "What do we do, Garrett?"