Watcher of the Dead

by J. V. Jones

  Angus waited in a doorway across the street and watched for someone to enter or leave. When the better part of an hour had passed and the house remained undisturbed, he crossed over and rapped on the door. A small viewing window slid back in the door’s upper panel, revealing a pair of youthful but bloodshot eyes.

  “I’m here to see the surgeon.”

  “He’s not here. You’ll have to come back.”

  Angus made a calculation. “You’re his apprentice. Maybe you can help.”

  The young man who the eyes belonged to shook his head. “Can’t do it.”

  Angus shook his new purse. “It will only take a minute and I’ll pay well. No questions asked.”

  Thinking took place behind the eyes.

  Angus said, “If the surgeon comes back before we’re finished I’ll just tell him you and I are old friends, and you can keep the money.”

  No man or woman should ever agree to collude with a perfect stranger, yet to Angus’ constant amazement they did.

  A bolt was drawn and the door swung open to reveal a short and burly youth with twice his share of facial hair. “Be quick.”

  Angus obliged. The boy looked strong and he had a nice weapon fastened with correct tension at his waist. He was standing in a square hallway with two doors leading into the house’s interior. The boy glanced nervously from door to door.

  “What say we go into the kitchen?” Angus suggested. “That way we won’t disturb His Highness’s domain. Hurry, now, I’m hurting up a storm.”

  The boy acquiesced, turning to open the door at his back. Angus followed. The boy hadn’t asked for his money yet. He was making a lifetime’s worth of mistakes.

  Angus was led into a narrow kitchen with a door and two windows at the back that opened onto a tiny walled courtyard. The adjoining wall was lined with heavy shelving. At the corner of the room, a flight of stairs led belowground to what appeared to be, judging by smell alone, a root cellar. A chopping block laid with fresh green herbs and a wet knife told exactly what the boy had been doing before he was disturbed.

  The boy cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice was lower and more formal, possibly mimicking his master. “What appears to be the problem?”

  Angus moved to the chopping block, pushed back the left sleeves of his coat and undershirt, exposing the entire length of his forearm, and rested his knuckles on the table.

  The boy’s mouth fell open.

  “It burns,” Angus said, looking the boy straight in the eye. “I need something for it.”

  Nodding absently, the boy regarded the foot-long scar that ran from an inch above Angus’ wrist to the tender inside skin of his elbow joint. Proud flesh had formed two thick ridges along the original wound and the scar was hard and raised and shiny. “Looks old,” the boy said, tentatively touching Angus’s arm—but not the scar—with his index finger. “It healed clean.”

  Angus pushed down his sleeve. “If you could give me something for it.”

  The boy’s face changed as he finally understood the request. It was possible a shade of disappointment slid across his eyes.

  Angus moved so that the coins in the purse clinked.

  “Blood of the poppy?”

  Angus nodded softly. “Whatever you have.”

  “Two silver pieces.”

  The boy was finally thinking. Angus laid the cloth purse on the table and pulled apart the drawstring. Dozens of small silver coins streamed onto the chopping surface. Looking carefully at the boy, Angus pushed three coins his way. It was probably more than he earned in six months.

  “I’ll get the poppy.” The boy moved around the kitchen, pulling a set of wooden steps from the corner by the stairs and setting them under the heavily laden shelves that lined the kitchen’s east wall.

  “What’s your name?” Angus asked as the boy climbed the steps and sorted through various pots and glass vials.

  “Jeddiah.”

  The boy was busy and did not think to ask the question in return, and Angus Lok never volunteered information. “Is your master tending anyone with badly burned hands? A woman.”

  Jeddiah’s head shook. “No.” He’d pulled down a jar, uncorked the stopper and sniffed. Satisfied with the contents, he descended the steps.

  “Have you got something for a sore gut while you’re there.” Angus sent him up again. He liked his subjects distracted. While the boy considered the appropriate remedy, Angus said, “Do you know most of the surgeons on the street?” The boy nodded as he reached for a jar. “And I bet you talk with the other apprentices?”

  Locating what he needed, the boy jumped down. “I see them, yes. What’s it to you?”

  Angus let his gaze drift to the table. The purse was still open, its contents glittering in the dim kitchen light. “You can have it all if you find me the woman with burned hands. A doctor in this city will be seeing her. She needs stitches and skin flaps removed. Burn care. Ointments. The hands are in a bad way. Talk to the other apprentices, find out who’s tending them.”

  The boy placed two jars, one glass, one made from glazed brown pottery, on the table. He was eighteen or nineteen and if Angus Lok had to guess he’d say the boy’s master was working him too hard. The swollen veins in his eyes were from lack of sleep.

  “Why do you want to find her?”

  Angus knew the boy was his then. “She’s my sister. She’s led a less than perfect life . . .” Angus let the sentence trail off, letting the boy write his own end to it. Prostitution, thievery, stupidity: whatever appealed the most. “With the burning it’s gone too far. My father and I are trying to find her, bring her home.”

  The boy’s glance moved from the coins to the glass jar containing the blood of poppy. Angus could almost hear what he was thinking: This man and his family are deranged. “What’s her name?”

  Angus made a seesaw motion with his head. “Magdalena Crouch, though you understand she may use other names.”

  The boy wasn’t about to admit he didn’t understand. He nodded curtly, with force.

  “Maggie Sea. Delayna Stoop. She usually picks names that have some relation to her real one.”

  “Like Magda Kneel?”

  Angus smiled. “Just like that.”

  The boy’s glow was touchingly girlish. A noise from the front of the house halted it midblush.

  Angus scooped up the purse and the coins spilling from it, slid them inside his coat and moved to the back door. “In three days I’ll walk down this street at noon. If you have an answer come out and meet me.”

  The front door creaked open and a voice rang out. “Boy!”

  The boy rushed to the table, pocketed the remaining three coins, and then picked up the two jars and thrust them at Angus’ chest. Angus accepted them, though in truth they had slipped his mind. He opened the back door.

  “What does she look like?” the boy whispered.

  Angus slid outside. “Why me, of course.”

  The boy looked surprised. Perhaps he wasn’t so foolish after all.

  “Three days,” Angus reminded him in parting.

  Clouds were closing in from the north as Angus scrambled over the courtyard’s back wall and into the alleyway behind the house. The jar containing the sore gut remedy had cracked as he crested the wall and he emptied out the powder as he walked. It was, fortunately enough, the color of dirt. He set the empty jar on the ground against a nearby wall and transferred the second jar containing the blood of poppy to the interior of his coat. Reaching the end of the alleyway he turned south. He needed to find a place to stay. Somewhere in the maze of the Crater would do.

  Angus Lok ghosted through Morning Star as the day turned cold and gray, not sparing a thought for the dangers that either Magdalena Crouch or the Phage could visit on the boy.

  CHAPTER 23

  This Old Heart

  BIG BORRO WAS dead. Midge Pool dead. Wullam Rudge. Quingo Faa, who had been some convoluted cousin of Hammie’s. Thirteen Bluddsmen dead in all, and a couple not likely to ma
ke it. The numbers kept mounting and Vaylo wondered what had happened to his jaw. Right now he could not think as a Bludd chief should think: I’ll get the bastards who did this.

  The enemy was a phantom. You could not kill what was already dead. There was no glory to be claimed on this field, no satisfaction in bettering the foe. Just horror and uncertainty, and no sense that the battle was won. How many had attacked in the Deadwoods? Four? Five? Against forty men. The Dog Lord did not understand odds like that. When Bluddsmen outnumbered their foe they won.

  Vaylo began a circuit of the camp. It was one of those bleak spring days where the wind whipped at ground level and the rain turned into that persecutor of spirits: sleet. They were just northwest of the Bluddhouse, tactfully camped on the edge of Quarro’s sights on the slope of a west-facing hill. Four hours ago at dawn Odwin Two Bear and Hammie Faa had left on a mission to parley with Quarro, and Vaylo was awaiting their return.

  On the whole he didn’t hold out much hope.

  Nan was sitting by the campfire doing something with her hair. As soon as she caught sight of his face she stood. Vaylo waved her down. Her comforts would not work on him now. Idly, without thinking, he whistled for his dogs. Together he and the three animals headed up-slope to look at the house they’d once called home.

  Some said it was the ugliest roundhouse in the clanholds; Vaylo reckoned they might be right. He’d certainly ruled his fair share of them. Dhoone was like an ice palace, cool and blue, built to impress. Ganmiddich looked like something out of a fairy tale, with its tower and green walls and beach upon the Wolf. Bludd was a steaming mound. Ockish used to call it the Dunghouse, but he’d beat you senseless if you agreed with him. Vaylo had always thought the woods surrounding it were pretty. He found them beautiful today.

  They used to say that if you wanted to make friends with a Bludd chief gift him with the seeds of a rare red tree. The saying appealed to something in Vaylo, though he suspected it had never been true. There were some nice trees in the woods and a couple of them you wouldn’t see anywhere else in the North, fancy things with leaves like red lace and others with bark like rusted metal, but you could have given the rarest tree in the world to Gullit or his father Choddo and you would have got a smack in the teeth for your trouble.

  Abruptly Vaylo turned away. He had spotted Odwin and Hammie riding back on the hill trail and he did not think it was a good sign that they brought no one with them.

  “Tell Quarro I come in peace. The chiefship is his and I make no claim upon it. Allow me entry so that together we may defend our house against all threats.”

  That was the message Vaylo had bid Odwin and Hammie deliver to his oldest son, Quarro Bludd. Odwin had got it straight away but Hammie had to repeat it a few times to make it stick. A second, no lesser, appeal concerned the Dog Lord’s injured men. Allow them entry or send out Wendolyn Salt. Wendolyn was Bludd’s healer now that her father Cawdo was gone.

  Vaylo tried not to worry but failed. He had begun to feel his age, not in his bones or weakening eyes or loose teeth, but in his heart. The mistakes he had made lived there, pressing against the walls. Make any more, he suspected, and there’d be no room for his blood.

  To bide time before Odwin’s and Hammie’s arrival, he made another circuit of the camp. They were still burning some of the strange Sull fuel on the campfire. It was smokeless and released long, amethyst-colored flames. Of course, Bluddsmen had thrown wood in there too so the smokelessness was currently disguised, but the flames were unmistakable; slender swords of purple amid the choppy red fire.

  The Sull had left in the night. The camp had awakened to find them gone. No one, not even the dogs had heard them depart. They left a gift of fuel and fresh meat—a night-killed fox with an arrow point still in its heart. Vaylo had not known what he felt about their withdrawal. He had walked the earth their tents and horses had occupied only hours earlier, staring at the flattened grass and dirt, waiting to feel what? Relief?

  He had not felt it. The Sull had stayed with them for two days and nights, setting their tents across the fire from Bludd tents, fetching water from the stream, hunting, butchering, caring for their horses, doing all the small and large things it took to survive in the wild, yet even seeing them eat and work at simple chores Vaylo still felt no closer to them. They were Sull. They were made of something different.

  So why had he not felt relief when they left?

  If any clan had reason to fear the Sull it was Bludd. Bludd shared the longest and most aggressively defended border with the Sull. Vaylo himself, as a new-minted chief, had learned a lesson in Sull might when he and a small force had penetrated the Sull border at Cedarlode. To this day Vaylo could not figure out the swiftness of the Sull response. Cedarlode was in the back of nowhere, a Trenchlander logging town in the middle of a burn zone. How had two hundred armed and mounted Sull managed to respond so quickly? The conclusion Vaylo had drawn over the years was that they had been watching him, waiting for the opportunity to warn the new Bludd chief against testing their borders. To this day, though, he still wasn’t sure. For all he knew the Sull might have forces stationed at every league along the border.

  That was the thing with the Sull. No one had any intelligence on them. Their numbers, movements and tactics were a mystery. Sull territory was the Great Want for scouts: they entered and never came back. Absence of information caused fear. Every clansman in the east had Sull stories but none of them had hard facts.

  It should have been stranger to sit around the campfire with them. But then again perhaps there was nothing like a battle with the Unmade to level men. Sull, clansmen: it had been the living against the dead. The silent and formal camaraderie that had formed around the campfire later had been hard fought for and hard won.

  Vaylo threw a stick for the dogs, sending them scampering downslope into the tough yew and alder brush. He did not like to think about what would have happened in the Deadwoods if the Sull hadn’t arrived. Bludd had been failing. He, the Dog Lord, had been failing. The Unmade were viciously fast. They had surprise on their side. Their weaponry was better suited to the close combat of the bush. And their night vision was vastly superior.

  To clansmen, the Dog Lord amended. Not Sull.

  Those arrows, their trajectories, had been things of perfect beauty. A man could die happy having seen a Sull arrow find a heart. It was a revelation of God.

  The big black-and-range bitch had returned with the stick, so he hunkered on his knees and wrestled her for it. She was getting thick around the waist and he wondered if she was growing pups. Releasing the stick, he clicked his teeth for her and she plonked herself across his lap. Her furiously wagging tail was a magnet for the sleet.

  No doubt about it, the Sull had saved their lives. Bluddsmen were not equipped to fight in the dark at close quarters. The Sull were. Vaylo had to admit that afterwards the Sull were quiet about it. Sober. That was the word he would use to describe that first meeting. There had been formal introductions, swiftly followed by the necessities of tending the injured, the dying, the dead. There too the Sull had proven invaluable. Stretchers and splints were quickly fashioned, tourniquets expertly placed to stanch bleeding, fires were built, torches lit, and then the Sull, with a discretion that Vaylo had come to believe came from centuries worth of experience, withdrew to let Bluddsmen rest their dead.

  Nan and the bairns washed the bodies. Dawn broke as Vaylo closed the circle of powdered guidestone around his lost men. He hoped the fact that they had fallen on Bludd land would bring comfort to their kin.

  Later, as the sun rose in a cloudless sky, the Sull had led them to one of their campsites—in woods ruled by Bludd. Vaylo wondered if his limit for amazement would ever be reached. Here, within a day’s travel of the Bluddhouse, the Sull had established a camp. Naturally, Vaylo had ordered Odwin to keep his eyes lively, keeping track of the route and distance. Vaylo suspected the Sull had outwitted him even in this as the path they took seemed . . . circuitous and Odwin said later
there were points on the journey they appeared to pass twice.

  Within their campsite, the Sull were more at ease. Food was laid on the fire, water boiled for broth. There were four of them, three male and one female. The one who spoke for them was named Thane Foebreaker, and by silent and mutual agreement he and Vaylo waited until nightfall to speak.

  “This Sull grieves for your losses.” The sky had remained clear and the moon and stars lit the Sull—the Bludd—grove. Bats were in flight above the canopy, whirling and dipping as they fed on the wing.

  Vaylo looked at Thane Foebreaker. He was small for a Sull, and no longer young. Perhaps that’s what made it easier to speak with him. “I am sorry for your losses too.”

  The Foebreaker lowered his head. No Sull losses had occurred during the skirmish in the Deadwoods, but he accepted the larger meaning of the sympathy.

  It was a good start.

  “We have spilled blood.”

  Vaylo heard a world of truth in those words.

  Only when the Foebreaker turned his wrist to the light, did Vaylo understand their specific meaning. A fresh wound cut crosswise against the veins of the Sull’s wrist.

  For my men. Vaylo thanked him. He knew then that he would not question the Sull’s residency on his land, their secret network of trails and camps. How could he? Its smallness would only shame him.

  Thane Foebreaker’s night-dark eyes regarded Vaylo, seeing much that wasn’t said. Wind stirred the trees. “The shadows rise and your house is not safe.”

  Gods, do not speak this. Fear squeezed Vaylo’s chest.

  “You should return home and secure it.”

  So much in so few words. Never in his life had Vaylo experienced a conversation so profoundly condensed. The part that came later, the offer and the tiny starling in its tiny cage, were secondary. Even now, three days on, Vaylo was still discovering new meanings in the Foebreaker’s words. One thing that was clear was the fact the Sull knew all about Vaylo Bludd and his intention to take the Bluddhouse from his son. It boggled a man’s mind.