by Ben Galley
He clanked and tapped his way to the wagon, an odd rhythm of claws, cane and boot. His long coat of gold thread and purple silk swished about him. Ole Jenk stayed by his horses, but the other men parted like woodcutters before a falling tree as Temsa roamed the night’s catch. They had been dumped in a rough line, lying on crude brushstrokes of blood.
Temsa’s olive eyes moved quickly, hawk-like. ‘Hmm. At least they’re travellers, fresher than what we usu—What the fuck is this mess?’ His cane stabbed at the stone floor again. ‘Look at his fucking neck, Ani!’
Ani leaned on the railing, picking at her dirty nails. She knew exactly which mess he was referring to without having to look.
‘Our new Kech got a little personal with that one, Boss. Wanted revenge for bootin’ him in the face, apparently.’
Bloody-faced Kech had frozen. No complaints of a broken nose now.
Ani watched as Temsa pondered, his eyes distant. Boran Temsa was a man of quick decisions. She could tell he’d already decided to kill the man. He only nodded like that when mulling over how to kill something.
He spoke as he walked, taking a meandering route between men and corpses. Kech was undoubtedly at the end of his path.
‘Forty silvers. That’s the average value of a cleanly killed shade in today’s market. Lowest it’s been in six months despite this Nyxwater shortage. Top price – and I’m talking poisoned or smothered – is fifty to fifty-five. Old or young, thirty-five. But with a slashed throat like this poor soul? That’s maybe twenty on the nose. Twenty-five with a bit of dust. Follow?’
The men nodded emphatically. Armour squeaked as heads bobbed.
‘Ten of you to get the bodies. Coin a piece per body, that’s sixty. Then I’ve got to pay the binders at six coins a body. That’s twenty-four. And another fifteen to the Nyxites for their Nyxwater. Can anybody tell me what that adds up to?’ Temsa came to a halt beside Kech. ‘Anybody?’
‘Ninety-nine,’ said Ani, after far too long a pause.
‘Well done, Miss Jexebel. So, saying I get even one hundred and fifty for this lot, that leaves me just over one body in profit. Fifty silvers. A razor-thin margin, so the traders say. Do you think I got into soultrading to make razor-thin profits, Mr Kech?’
‘No, Boss.’
The man was right to be shaking. Ani had seen men almost as big as her shake in Temsa’s proximity. He might have been small in stature, but he cast the shadow of a daemon. His olive eyes, though small and pinched in wrinkles, held nothing in the way of predictability. Just the hunger and rage of a starving wolf.
The cane struck Kech hard across the backs of his legs. Its hook dragged him onto his arse, and his skull smacked on the stone. Temsa raised his foot above the man’s torso, his four sharp talons hovering inches from his poorly-leathered tabard.
‘I’m sorry, Boss! I swear I’ll do better!’
‘I’ve no doubt. You’ll fetch a good price at the soulmarket, and what’s more, I no longer have to pay you. You’re doing better already.’
Temsa pressed down, driving the claws into the man’s gut. Kech curled around them like a speared woodlouse, his mouth open in a silent, gap-toothed scream.
The copper came away bloody, and left streaks in the dust as Temsa left Kech behind to writhe and die. ‘Load them up, gentlemen!’
Ani was waiting in the smaller of the alcoves. While the men went to work carting the bodies onto the other, wider platform, theirs fell in jerky increments and the ratatat of chainlink against pulleys. They descended into another domed room, this one twice as big. They stepped around two gangs of shades heaving on wheels and levers to crank the lift back up.
Ani had been pondering. ‘You don’t pay the binders six. You pay them four.’
‘I think you’re getting deafer and louder at the same time, m’dear.’ Temsa waggled a finger in his ear. ‘A little exaggeration is sometimes necessary.’
‘Sure your mind isn’t slipping? Forgetting your numbers?’
‘Not a chance.’ Temsa gave her a sly look.
The bodies floated down next, and the binders scurried forwards to unload them. Ani and Temsa followed the short train of corpses to an area lit by whale-oil lamps. There, the binders began their ritual, hands flitting about, sharp and quick. First, the hooded men picked the pockets and bags, digging for valuables before removing clothing. They piled belongings neatly at the heads of the bodies for later fencing.
Temsa always liked to poke, to see what extra treasures he could glean. Every so often, he found something he liked and saved it from the fence’s piles. Ani pointed at the body whose throat Kech had slashed; the one whose belly sported four gaping holes.
‘Why’s this one got no stuff?’ she asked. ‘Who comes off a ship with no luggage?’
Judging by his dark skin and bright emerald eyes, the corpse was from the east. His hair was a few shades from black. Short, but shaggy and unkempt. Dried blood matted it over one pierced ear. He had the beginnings of a beard on his chubby cheeks. The man had no jewellery on his person, and nothing with him besides a smart grey coat, a folded document and a plain metal flask still sloshing with liquid. Palmshine, by the smell of it. She snatched up the papyrus, reading slowly.
‘Mr Basalt. Krassman, I wager. Summons to the Piercer for a job, no less! Must be important. The name’s all bloodied, but there’s a wax seal on it.’
‘Give it here.’ The name was obscured by a dark smear. Something like Etan or Eran. Temsa thumbed the seal, a design of desert roses with thorns like daggers. He did not seem to recognise it. There were so many nobles in this city it was impossible to keep track.
Temsa snapped the seal from the papyrus and slid it into a pocket. There were so many nobles in this city it was impossible to keep track. He said something, but Ani’s deaf ears didn’t catch it over the shuffling of the binders.
‘What?’
‘I said a smith, by his trews and shirt.’
‘You sure? What smith doesn’t carry tools with him?’
Temsa felt around the lining of the coat, teasing a dozen small pieces of metal and springs out of the fabric. They looked like the shattered parts of some simple device.
‘How peculiar.’ He pieced a few of them together, making a small cross. One piece looked like a file. ‘I’ll have to see what Tor Busk makes of these.’
‘That old fucktart? Prick gave me some bad advice on an axe.’
‘No, he gave you good advice. You just didn’t take it.’
The binders began to strip the undergarments with shears. They didn’t bother to tend the darkening wounds. Instead, they wedged open the corpses’ jaws with blocks of wood, then fetched a basket of copper coins bearing the royal seal of a spiked crown. Each coin was chiselled down the centre, and the binders snapped each one in two, placing one half in the open mouth of the dead while holding the other firmly betwixt finger and thumb.
With the blocks removed, the naked, bloody bodies were dragged towards a covered well at the edge of the room. The boards were moved aside and a pool of grey water revealed. Its ripples moved languidly, more like oil rather than water, but it had no sheen to it. No depth, either. The waters were too inky to see the bottom of the stone pool. Ani knew it was barely three feet deep. That was all the Nyx needed.
A body at a time, they were surrendered to the wet with a hiss, like virgin blades being quenched. It was not a matter of hot and cold; it was the sizzling of the magic in the coins as the bind set.
The Krassman’s corpse was last, and once he’d slid into the waters, still with that gawping look on his face, the binders took their places around the stone rim. In silence they donned their copper-thread gloves and hovered, ready.
It took a moment for the shades to appear. First in, first out. Always the way. The shades always retched, too, as if they thought themselves revived, not yet realising their new state of being. Copper hands hauled their naked, vaporous forms from the ashen water and dumped them on the stone, where it shone with their blue
colour. The shades wheezed and winced like newborns until realisation made them thrash. Their vapours, although bound to the shape and moment of their death, flowed and billowed as they struggled. The binders’ gloves taught them stillness. Wherever they touched seemed to scald the blue vapour. The shades slumped to the stone, quivering.
Six had come out, including Kech, but the seventh was proving stubborn and taking his time. The Krassman. Some liked to hold on once they had glimpsed the gates of the afterlife. Ani snorted. The binding always dragged them back to the world of the living. Magic always outweighed will.
And yet, the moment stretched out. The binders’ hands danced impatiently over the sloshing waters. Concerned glances darted under cowls. Ani looked to Temsa. His eyes were growing narrower, his good foot tapping with impatience.
Chapter 3
Crowd Mentality
The Tenets of the Bound Dead were a parting gift from the dead gods. A last act of the god of chaos Sesh, almost a thousand years ago. He gave humanity the methods of binding before our old deities slipped from existence, and left us the afterlife, or duat in old Arctian. I mention the Arc only because it was they who pounced upon the opportunities binding presented. It was they who bolstered the Tenets with their Code of Indenturement. It was they who turned this world into a vale of the dead.
From ‘A Reach History’ by Gaervin Jubb
Death was a crowded place.
It had been cold and quiet at first. Nothing but an empty darkness. Although the stories of glowing cornfields and mountains haloed with cloud had been immediately proven to be yak shit, it was peaceful for a time.
Then the voices came. Just one at first, whimpering the same word over and over. Then another, angry, far too foreign to understand. As each voice broke out, a shadow of its owner appeared, outlines glowing softly against the blackness. I looked down, and all I saw were the faint edges of my own body. No wounds, just edges drawn in shadow and light, as if I was made of the purest glass.
The voices grew in volume and number until their clamour sketched a vast and crowded landscape. There were no trees, no constructions of man. There was nothing but intermittent angles of black rock, glasslike and shiny from a constant trickling of water. Sharp shale lay underfoot. Standing upon it in their thousands, nay, in their millions upon millions, were the dead. Endless ghosts, etched in shadow and lost memory.
The boundless crowd stretched down into a black valley so wide its fringes were lost in mist, so long its beginning was a smear of grey on a foreign horizon. The sky above was of the darkest night. I would have assumed I stood beneath a limitless abyss had it not been for the stalactites. They hung like upside-down mountains, breaking the blackness here and there, jagged and ominous. In the distance, a ring of five stars glinted, with a brighter star at their centre. I knew then I could have walked for a hundred years and never reached them.
I still trembled from my death, the memory of it so vivid behind my eyes. But it wasn’t that particular injustice, nor the harsh reality of this so-called afterlife that disturbed me. It was the volume of the voices and the press of ghostly bodies. While I’d stood there all agape, countless newcomers had crowded in behind, their faint feet splashing in the puddles of inky water. As they pushed forwards against me, they too began to wail into my ear. Shouts for loved ones. Animal cries of pain. The constant, racking sobbing. The mumblings of hysteria or old age. It was unbearable.
I tried to push back, but it was like paddling through water. When I didn’t move, the press carried me forward, inches at a time. I protested, but my feet slid anyway through the wet shale, unbidden. I was trapped in a nightmare that wasn’t my own, and I will admit, in that moment, it drove me to madness. Clamping my hands to my ears, I gave in to screaming.
‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!’
I felt the jolt of the ghosts around me. They stopped dead, pardon the pun. My shout faded on my lips. No echo returned to me. The silence was even more interminable than the voices. Without opening my eyes I could feel the weight of their gazes upon me. When I did, I saw a hundred ghostly faces staring at me. Somehow I knew countless more in the vast crowd did the same. Perhaps the whole damn ocean of deceased was staring at me. There was no emotion nor blame in those eyes. They were as impassive as glass marbles.
As any good Krassman would, I started to work on an apology. Before I could stammer anything of use, or inform them I was new to the area, they began to speak again. Not all, just one at a time. The first was distant, mumbling something about hunger. The second was closer, but unintelligible. The third was close behind, breath cold on my ghostly nape. This one, I heard.
‘We call upon the locksmith. The harbinger of change.’
‘The what?’ I tried to turn around, but the press didn’t permit me. I felt something akin to a cat weaving between my legs. Do animals have an afterlife, too? ‘The who?’
A ghost in front of me spoke over his shoulder. His broken jaw hung loose, and yet his voice was somehow clear.
‘Chaos shall not have his time.’
Another spoke next to him. ‘The flood must not claim the world.’
‘I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talk—’
‘You will go back,’ boomed a voice, deep in the crowd. ‘With our gift.’
I tried to jump but I was held fast. ‘Back! Yes, I want to go back. I was murdered, you see, and—’
A ghost beside me glowed green as it spoke. ‘You will seek out the servants of chaos. Stop them.’
The last ghost to speak had wolf eyes, burning bright gold. ‘Stop them. Save us. Save yourself.’
‘I don’t understand. Speak plainly! I—’
Words were stolen from me. The ground beneath me shook once before giving way. I tumbled into the hole that opened for me. Shale scraped at me. Water cascaded with me. The endless crowd vanished, giving way to black walls of rock rushing past, and then pitch-like darkness. I fell through that void until falling felt like flying, and just as I was imagining an eternity spent soaring, icy water filled my mouth, clogged my eyes and ears.
I exploded from the surface of the black water like a dolphin dancing in a ship’s wake. Feeling half-drowned, I retched and coughed, dribbling the foul liquid from my cold lips. Weakness racked me. I felt numb from top to toe, and cold. Dreadfully cold. Rough hands hauled me up. I felt a pain in my arms, and for a blissful moment I thought it had all been a horrid dream. The ship must have sunk on its way to port, or I’d been pushed overboard by that old hag for shitting in her lockbox.
This is my rescue.
A stone floor suggested otherwise. I had expected wooden decking, perhaps sand. There was no pain, no thwack of meat on a butcher’s counter. Just the deadened knowledge of something beneath me. I tried to open my eyes, but the light was piercing, setting my skull alight.
‘Finally!’ cried a voice in a burbling Arctian accent, though speaking the Commontongue. ‘He reveals himself. Get him up. I want to see the damage.’
The hands came at me again, burning hot this time. I tried to cry out but only managed a wordless curse. The scalding hands held me upright and marched me forwards. I opened my eyes a crack to see who was holding me and where I was being marched to. Pain flooded me once more, and all I saw was a blur of blue.
I was shaken roughly until I could stand to bear the light. Somebody thrust my chin up. Before me, I saw a group of figures with dark robes and thick gloves, and a short gargoyle of a man with a golden leg shaped like an eagle’s claw. He had a sharp beard on his chin and an ornamental cane in his hand. His sun-dark face was punctured with small olive eyes and shrewd lips. Gold-capped teeth glinted between them. His clothes were formal, fancy even: tight northern-style trews with a red silk shirt and a gold coat that brushed the stone.
He hummed at me, gaze roving over my body. ‘Well, m’dear, he’s not the trimmest, is he?’
I was about to complain when the hot hands released me, leaving me to kneel, body trembling, before the short
man.
‘And dust won’t help that ghastly neck wound much, but we can try.’
I flinched at the mention of the neck wound. The dream shattered in an instant, and I remembered the cold steel jerking through the gristle of my throat. My hands flew up to check, but all I felt was cold and numbness. I looked down to find myself naked, my features and curves drawn in nothing but swirling blue smoke.
I was dead after all. Well and truly dead.
It was natural to try and scream, and so I did. I screamed at the top of my lungs, and yet all that came was a pitiful croak. I lashed out instead, but strong arms shoved me to the wet floor. I settled for pitiful mumbling, willing it all to be a nightmare, repeating a poor facsimile of the word, ‘No!’ over and over. It was almost as if the flesh I had worn throughout the years had dampened the soul’s emotions, like cloth clamped over ears. Now I was bare, raw, deafened by terror and despair.
‘He’s a quick one, Boss,’ hollered the woman standing behind the man: the hulking shape from the alley. Now I could see her better, I wondered if I had been lucky having my oaf of a killer instead of her. No doubt I would be lacking a limb or two by now if she’d been the one to bring me down.
Two axes hung from her belt, and another was slung over her shoulders, which were draped in a patchwork of leather armour. Her hair was tightly braided in three tails, pulling some of the wrinkles out of her weathered, scarred face. Angular swirls were tattooed across her neck, cheek and shoulder. Despite how much she looked like a barbarian of my own lands, her skin’s lighter hue spoke of northern descent. Scatter Isles by her accent. That’s a hard one to shrug off.
Her boss came forward, his metal foot clinking on the stone beside my head. ‘You’re too fresh to speak, shade. Takes a few days or so. Why do you think it is we bind you so quickly, hmm? So we get some peace and quiet while you accept your new fate. But where are my manners? A warm welcome to Araxes, the City of Countless Souls. Diamond of the Arc, city of cities, mountain of man’s making!’