Lee Battersby - The Corpse-Rat King

“Open them,” Marius muttered, “Get your hand into them. Pull the bottom up, for God’s sake.” The oldest trick in the book – hide a small bag of rotten produce in the middle of the sack as you fill it, then remove the smaller bag as you reach the top, just before you tie up. Everything round the edges feels like good stock. It’s only if you plunge your hand into the middle that you discover the softness, the rot that will overtake the rest of your purchase. Nobody in a city would buy a sack of food without giving it a good stir. These villagers probably just accepted the fact that a certain proportion of their hard-won goods would be spoiled. Sure enough, the young man simply hefted the sacks on to his back, nodded his thanks to the merchant, and turned back up the track. Marius realised he was gripping his thighs with suppressed fury, and frowned in surprise. The smart take advantage of the naive. It was the way of his world, the code by which he’d made his living for twenty years. Why should he be surprised to see it in action here, never mind angry? He let go the ground, flexed his fingers. He knew why. He was not the same Marius who had made his living that way. Death changes a man. He raised his eyes once more to the merchant as he threw the first armful of hides into the back of his cart. He could do something. But what?

In the end, he did nothing. The merchant loaded the last of the hides, climbed up behind his oxen, and cracked the reins against their rumps, while Marius lay behind his bush and watched. Only when the cart had disappeared around a bend did he rise and step out into the ruts before him, staring after the merchant with his hands on his hips, a frown creasing his features. Like it or not, and Marius didn’t, the fellow was only making his living. Marius couldn’t bring himself to deny him that. He’d already done that once, he realised. The old man on the mountain track, just after he had escaped from Gerd. He’d taken his cart, his mule, even his hat, and not thought twice about the old man’s fate. He stared at the empty road. As soon as he was free of this curse, he decided. As soon as he was human again. He would come back to this village, and show them the true value of their labours. Next trade, or the one after, would be more fair. It was a childish dream, but it was the best he could offer. He turned his back on them, and strode down the road towards distant Scorby.

Within a few hundred feet he found himself breaking into a trot, and then the slow lope he had learned while in the Emir’s armies. The Emir’s soldiers could cover fifteen miles a day utilising the long, energy-saving rhythm, and still be in a condition to fight at the end of the journey. Marius had been a fitter man in his youth, but dead muscles do not fatigue, and dead men do not need to stop and rest just because it is night, or because they need to eat, drink or shit. The miles disappeared as he ran onwards. Day slowed towards evening, and fell into the dark. Marius did not stop. He planned as he ran, mind turned inwards to circle his task, picking at it like a crow at a dead man’s body. The road upon which he ran met another; then another; widening, smoothing out, becoming more formalised until, eventually, his feet left compacted dirt and stepped onto the cobbled surface of the highway between Borgho and Frems, the capital of Bollus, the tiny nation to the north. He crossed the highway without pausing, plunged into the fields beyond, and kept running. Few travellers would be abroad at night. Those who had not found rest in a tavern or lodge would be pulled over to the side of the road, tucked into the backs of carts or curled up beneath a tree with a cloak wrapped around them for warmth. Still, Marius was not prepared to take the chance of an unexpected greeting. He could travel faster in a straight line, and avoid confrontation by sticking to the wilderness. Borgho was two hundred miles to his left, and he had another hundred beyond that to get to Scorby City. Even covering fifteen miles between dawns, it was a long way. He ran on, as the sky lightened and became day, as the sun rose and fell, as night reclaimed the world, across the open fields along the highway’s edge, into the woods beyond, up and down the spider-web of animal tracks and clearings, keeping the hulking presence of the Spinal Ranges to his right.

After two days he began to angle left, away from the mountains. He burst out of the trees and entered the massive plains that swept across the central area of Scorby. A pride of leitts kept pace with him for a while, snapping at his heels in the hope of bringing him down, but he maintained his pace, outstripping the heavy-legged predators. They wheeled away, went back to the long grasses to wait for slower, more easily ambushed prey.

By the evening of the third day the land began to rise. The isolated trees began to bunch together. The going became heavier, the ground more uneven. Marius slogged his way up the rise, turning with the hills as they swung round to a more southerly aspect. From here they would swing down to pass thirty miles east of Scorby City, providing the city’s natural defences with their high passes and deep ravines. Here the hills were more gradual: lower; rubbed down by time and, depending on how many legends you were prepared to believe, the arcane sexual practices of giants. Marius changed his stride, swapping the distance-eating lope of the army for a combination of climbing and sheer graft. It took him a further day to crest the hills, and only then, when he was at their peak, did he stop and take stock of his surroundings.

He sat on a high, flat rock and stared down at the valleys below, mouth pursed in disappointment at the knowledge that five days of solid running had left him without the need to draw a single breath, or wipe even a lone bead of sweat from his forehead. He knew this place. He had been here before, seen the world from this angle. He blanked his mind, took in the view: the massive bluffs falling down in helter-skelter order to the green floor below; the few wide-winged hunting birds hanging on the breezes above; the broken rocks scattered across the landscape like the rotting bones of long dead Gods. Something important had happened here, if he could only remember what. Somehow, he knew that knowledge was crucial to what was to come. Further down the slope, beyond the next peak, something was tucked into the long, flat valley floor. Marius stared along the broken path that led from his seat to the next high point along the range, as if by some dint of concentration he could stare through the body of the mountain to what lay beyond. He conjured up a vision of the valley, populated it from memory and, at last, raised a hand to his forehead in surprise.

“Good Gods.”

Just over the rise, and down the split valley on the other side, lay a few acres of relatively flat and rock-free land. A thin mud track bisected the huddle of half a dozen huts providing the miserable farming village with its only connection to the wider world. Three mangy dogs, owned by nobody and everybody at once, ran between those huts, chased by the few children owned by exactly the same people, or not, as the dogs. The fields held squash and other wizened, barely-identifiable marrows, and if the summer were particularly dry and followed by a particularly temperate autumn, cabbages sprang up without anyone’s attempt to tend them. At the far end of the village someone had erected a loose collection of wood walls that served as sty, barn and shelter for the motley collection of pigs and the single horse the village owned. And several feet behind that, on the path down to the plain beyond, wherein the single most important battle of the last twenty years had taken the life of Scorby’s King only a few weeks ago, was the spot where a stupid young swineherd had persuaded Marius that he really did, after all, need an apprentice to help him in his endeavours. Marius rose from his perch and took a few slow steps towards the nearby peak. If there was a spot on this Earth more accursed in his life, it certainly wasn’t closer than this one. And even if this miserable stain of a village was the only place on Earth he could find what he needed, well, he was still going to look everywhere else first. He wouldn’t step foot in that village for a king’s fortune, for all the concubines in Tal, hell, if it meant the restoration of his life itself.