Death's Collector

by Bill McCurry

  “Go away!” a man yelled at us from the dimness. “Stay away! Stay away!”

  “What do you think?” I asked Ella.

  She didn’t answer because a stone smacked her in the side of the head. She dropped to her knees.

  I had lumbered four steps toward the village with my sword drawn before I thought about it. In the past ten years, few men had attacked me without getting killed for it, and those few got badly hurt. Now a big man backlit by lanterns threw a rock at me, and I wanted to put my sword in his chest more than I wanted to sleep or eat. I wavered, providing the villagers an excellent target, and a stone whacked my shoulder hard.

  Six more steps and I stabbed him, at the last instant aiming for his rock-throwing shoulder instead of his heart. As he stumbled, I stepped toward the next man, who turned out to be a girl. She hurled a stone at my crotch and yelled, “Go away! Go away! Go away!”

  I ignored her and sidestepped, moving more easily now. I looked for the next man down the line, but instead I found a teenage boy. He backed away, threw a stone over my head, and fell on his butt. In the deep dusk, I made out no more than eight people total chucking rocks at me.

  If they were all children, some had mighty deep voices, but I didn’t want to murder a child by mistake in the dark. I ran back to Ella, who was just standing up with Stan’s help. More stones flew after me, accompanied by shouts. “Go away or die!”

  “I say that we go away and not die,” said Desh.

  A stone hit Ralt on the thumb, and he growled. “Greasy hell!”

  Stan and Ralt steadied Ella by her arms, and we all trotted across the trail away from the little village. People kept shouting, “Stay away!” until we were a hundred paces distant.

  Ella was weaving even after she stopped running. I checked her head while Stan steadied her. A small knot was rising, but she wasn’t bleeding.

  A little way off from us, Ralt said, “Hello there. Ain’t you the lucky one?” I joined Ralt beside a strong-looking steel cage in the high grass. It was six feet on each side, and a fat, bald, naked man sat in one corner with his knees pulled up.

  He said, “They don’t care for you fellows either, do they?”

  Seventeen

  Sorcerers get put in cages and cells fairly often, and we usually deserve it. We should know better than to do reckless things that will anger the wrong person—meaning a person with the kind of lackeys that can hunt, seize, and imprison a sorcerer.

  Other sorcerers are typically hired for such work. There is no professional courtesy between sorcerers, nor any kind of courtesy. Desh probably considered me his teacher and maybe his friend, but when bargaining with Harik, I had offered to thwart Desh’s dreams of sorcery as casually as I’d offer one of his old shoes. Desh should have been much warier of me. Of course, I wasn’t going to tell him that, proving that he should have been much warier of me.

  When you know that at any moment someone may trade away part of their past, their future, or themselves, and that you might be part of the deal, you can’t trust them. After all, they’re just like you, and you can’t be trusted. If, despite all that, you find another sorcerer you can trust, you have found friendship for a lifetime, which is just a few years since most of us die young.

  I wondered what the caged fat man had done to the wrong person in that village. Whatever it was, they must have thought we were about to do the same thing. The man pushed himself upright. By starlight, I saw that he wavered a little but pulled back his shoulders, and I heard a smile in his voice. “Good evening, gentlemen. I am Smat Bander, and it is my great honor to meet you. Welcome to my abode. It is the very definition of humble, as well as, I hope to the gods, temporary.”

  Even though the man was naked in a cage containing nothing more valuable than the empty bowl he’d just stumbled on, I got the impression he wanted me to buy something from him. “Hello, Smat. I’m Bib, and my shield maiden here is Ralt. How long have you been in there?”

  “Five relaxing days. The first four were meditative, but since my water ran out yesterday, my mind has wandered.”

  “I am sympathetic, but I hesitate to set you free. How do I know you don’t belong in there?”

  Smat sagged just a little. “I know my assurance doesn’t carry much weight since we just met, but I do assure you this is all a mistake.”

  Ella walked up beside me and put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself. Smat peered at her, jerked, and then covered his privates with both hands. “Good evening, miss. I’m Smat Bander. Awkward circumstances, but I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Ella asked me, “How quickly can you demolish the door?”

  “Bless you, miss,” said Smat.

  I said, “An hour. Maybe more.”

  “Leave him then.”

  Smat grabbed the bars, all modesty flown. “Please, miss! Consider my plight! Consider my children!”

  Ella walked to the cage and placed her hand over Smat’s. “It truly distresses me to leave you here, but we are attempting to save a child—a prince—and cannot delay.”

  “That’s noble, I’m sure, but at least leave me some water!”

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Everybody stop! I’m going to start crying and will have to write a poem about this.” I turned to Smat. “Who put you in here and why?”

  “My daughter confined me here. Everyone wanted to kill me, but she begged that I be caged here instead. They want to kill me because they’re afraid of Northmen fever.”

  “How bad is it?” I asked, thinking of the stacked corpses.

  “Twenty-three dead when they put me in here.”

  Ella swayed, and Stan caught her. “Excuse me, miss,” he said with a jackal’s grin.

  I pointed at Ella. “You go lie down and rest your head. You’ll be making awful decisions just now, and I don’t want you to get me killed. We’ll rest here until the moon comes up.”

  I pointed at Desh. “You keep watch. Limnad, would you please help him?”

  Limnad appeared next to Desh, glowing brighter than the starlight. Smat took a step back and stumbled. “I will. How do you feel, Bib?”

  “The same, thank you, but we can weep over me later.” I pointed at Ralt and Stan. “You get the hammer and knock the door off this cage. Smat, get on the other side of the cage, and try not to step in your own excrement on the way. All right, go!”

  I glared at them all until they went. The glare was just to make me feel good, since in the dark they could have been facing away from me and I wouldn’t have known it. I dug the cloak from my pack and passed it through the bars to Smat.

  “I appreciate your kindness,” he said, pulling it around him.

  “Answer my questions now, and don’t embellish. Don’t try to tell me stories, either. Stories annoy me. I promise not to kill you, but if you aren’t succinct, I won’t set you free and I might leave some water behind just out of your reach.”

  “As you wish, sir.” He said it like a well-trained cart horse that could talk.

  “Why does a man of the north like you have a daughter in a Denz village?”

  “I have a daughter, two sons, a wife, two sisters-in-law, and three nieces. And I support them all.”

  “Damn. That doesn’t tell me why, though.”

  “Oh! When I was young, a lamentable accident forced me to flee the northern kingdoms and never return. It’s a long story… that I won’t tell at this time. I turned my hand to trading in these lands, and I have prospered. I fell in love, was blessed with beautiful children, and inherited somewhat less beautiful relatives.”

  “You don’t really appreciate how much I despise stories, do you?”

  “Apologies. I now spend most of the year traveling, engaged in commerce, and as I was preparing my next journey, the Northmen fever arrived.”

  “I’m familiar with a lot of maladies, but not that one. What is it?”

  “Apart from the eponymous fever, the victim coughs and sneezes, vomits prodigiously, loses all balance, and suffers pain
in the head and joints. About half of those who catch it die in the first two days. Those who survive are as worthless as a beached halibut for a week or two.”

  It sounded like plagues I’d seen, but deadlier. “Why Northmen fever?”

  “It never touches Northmen, so by Denzmen logic, all Northmen must cause it.”

  I looked toward the village lights. Several people were probably busy dying there. Some unknown number would catch fever in the next weeks. For a moment, I imagined this disease having an open-ended debt with Harik, like me.

  “Hurry up, Stan.” I smacked one of the bars with my palm. “I could have knocked off five hinges by now.”

  He answered without slowing his hammer strikes. “Almost there, even if it’s dark as perdition and I did scrape my knuckles hard, but nobody cares about that, do they?”

  I knelt by Ella, and I pressed her shoulder back down when she tried to sit up. “The villagers are sick. I think I’ll take a walk back there and see whether I can help them. Smat will come with me.”

  Ella sat up regardless of my hand. “No! It’s reckless and unnecessary. You might be killed. You might contract their plague. You will waste magical power we may require later. It will without doubt cause us further delay.”

  “Excellent points.” I patted her arm. “I won’t be long.”

  “I forbid you to go!” She grabbed for my arm but missed.

  I grinned at her in the darkness. “Hell, I’m going for certain now.”

  Smat led the way, calling out as he went, telling his neighbors not to kill him because he was bringing help. He whispered to me, “You do qualify as help, correct? You can do something?”

  “I can. It might even be something useful.”

  Several rocks zipped past us in the darkness, but they didn’t seem to be thrown with fury and terror like the ones before. We reached the trail, and Smat told me to wait while he entered the village. A few minutes later, I heard shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  At last, Smat ambled out of the village. “I assure you, they experienced consternation upon seeing I had escaped the cage, but I can often help people find reasonable thoughts if given the merest chance. I explained the arrival of the clever and benevolent strangers. And I smashed a jug over my brother-in-law’s head. So satisfying. They are willing to accept help. I imagine they are willing to accept an armed occupation if they get to live. There are some conditions, however.”

  “Really? They’re watching their children die, and they want to negotiate?”

  “They are a stiff people. You may not enter the village.”

  “They’ll come out here?”

  “No, you may not touch anyone from the village. And before you ask, no, they won’t allow you to see them or speak to them, either.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I should just pitch a handful of berries over there and go get a beer. If there was any beer.”

  Smat fell to his knees and leaned toward me. “Please don’t abandon us, Bib. Both my sons have caught it, and both are suffering greatly.”

  “Do you have any beer in your village?”

  “Wine.”

  “Even better. Go get it. Get a really big jug.”

  I walked back up the trail to the stacked corpses, pulled open the sheet on one of them, and put my palm against the dead woman’s neck. With the other hand, I pulled a green wisp out of the air and sent it into the corpse. I used up three more wisps before I figured I knew enough to wipe this disease out of somebody.

  Smat was waiting for me on the trail, holding an enormous clay jug full of wine.

  “Set it on the ground.” I reached out with one hand, pulled green strands out of nothing, and fed them into the open jug, stirring the strands into the wine with my other hand. “They won’t cry or come out here and kill me if they drink something I touched, will they?”

  “Not if I never tell them.” Smat rubbed his hands together. “I don’t want to offend, but am I correct in surmising that you are engaged in sorcery? I apologize… I fear it may be an impolite question, and I prefer not to be… in any event, I don’t believe you would just kill me out of hand.”

  I managed not to laugh in his face.

  Smat talked faster as his story got rolling. “I knew a sorcerer once. I grieve to tell you, but she was prettier than you. Perhaps you know her? Latta? From the Reed Kingdom? Hair as black as, well, it was so black it’s hard to describe. Black as a very black thing. Much prettier than you.”

  Once I would have challenged that statement and argued that the sorcerer had thrown a charm to fool Smat’s eyes, since I was acknowledged to be the most beautiful living sorcerer. However, that night, my boldness was too shriveled to say ridiculous things for fun. I just said, “Yes, sorcery. Look well. This is about as exciting as it gets. All right, take it. Everyone gets a sip, and tomorrow they’ll be tearing things up and fornicating with each other’s spouses as zealously as they ever did.”

  When Smat picked up the jug, I said, “If you drop it, I’ll have to torture you to death. You don’t know what it cost me.”

  “A marvelous incentive to exercise care. I will not insult you by asking whether it will work. Won’t you wait, however? My neighbors will forget their fears and thank you for saving them.”

  “You haven’t been to as many of these events as I, Smat. They never thank you. If you’re doing these things to get their thanks, you’ll be frustrated forever. Be a blacksmith instead. Everybody appreciates horseshoes. Give me my damn cloak.”

  Smat turned so I could take the cloak off his shoulders, and now he didn’t seem embarrassed that all creation could inspect his manhood. “Farewell, Bib. I, at least, thank you with profound sincerity.”

  I walked back to my companions, careful in the near darkness. When I found Ella, she seized my shirt by the front and then yanked me toward her. She hissed in my face, “The moon is up! It’s already up.” She pushed me away and said to everyone, “We’ll depart now. Finally. Everyone, keep pace!”

  “No, Limnad, please don’t kill her,” I whispered.

  The river spirit sighed.

  I stepped quick to keep Ella’s outline in sight. I hadn’t healed those people to get Ella’s good opinion any more than to get the villagers’ thanks. I had done something good, and I hadn’t killed that rock-throwing turd. Things were improving. I felt optimistic about the prospects of killing lots of Denzmen soon.

  Killing lots of Denzmen. I hadn’t meant to think it, and I felt kind of sick about how much fun it sounded.

  I stopped short when I realized how stupid I’d been. “Ella, wait!”

  “I will not!” She pushed past a branch and let it snap back at me.

  I pushed the branch out of my face. “If you’re ever going to trust me, now’s a good time.”

  She walked back to me. “What do you wish to do now? Has a baby bird dropped from its nest? Does some child require a bedtime story?”

  I bent over and vomited.

  “I pray you did not stop to show me that.”

  I vomited again, waited a moment, and stood straight. Nausea twisted my insides, and sweat ran down my face. The cure must have been working. “No, I want to go back to the village and buy some horses.”

  Ella paused, and then walked straight past me toward the village.

  Smat sold us five saddle horses, and he explained how honored he was to do it. He allowed us to buy the best mounts he owned because of the great debt his village owed me. Of course, they were his only saddle horses, so by definition, they were the finest. Also, the debt he owed me was balanced out by Ella paying him twice what the creatures were worth. Sadly, he owned just four saddles, but Ella was pleased to get the horses, and I was pleased she had stopped acting as if she planned to cut out my heart when I wasn’t looking.

  I was the only one of us who had much experience riding bareback, so everyone else began saddling their horses. I puked a couple of times instead. Just as I was about to pull myself up onto my mount, Ella stopped me.


  “Bib, I apologize that I spoke sharply to you.”

  “You almost tore my shirt too.”

  She sighed. “Yes, I apologize for that as well. But we’re falling farther behind every hour. We cannot indulge ourselves in frivolous delays. Do you understand?”

  “I understand. We don’t stop to save people’s lives.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant! We must judge each delay severely as to whether it justifies the time lost.”

  I started to say something sarcastic, but she cut me off. “Bib, if we don’t hurry, I’ll lose him.”

  I wanted to keep arguing with her, but she was making too much sense. That has always been my downfall when arguing with women. They generally make more sense than I do. I struggled up onto my nag. “Follow me then and hang on!” I kicked the gelding into a gallop.

  Throughout the rest of the night and all the next day, I pushed the pace as hard as our horses could bear. They weren’t magnificent beasts, or even reasonably good ones, but they carried us faster than our feet would have.

  During this time, Limnad came to me twice and guided us along big detours off the trail. She claimed she was avoiding bands of Denzmen, and I didn’t doubt her. Ella, however, called Limnad some salty names at the first detour. At the second detour, she drew her sword, and I had to work hard to soothe both of them so that Ella didn’t end up with her head and limbs torn off and each moved one spot clockwise around her torso.

  Ella admired one of Limnad’s contributions, though. Limnad always had a good sense of where Vintan was, so we always knew whether we were closing with him. When we had reached the village, we were nine hours behind him. By sunset the next day, we were only three hours behind. Vintan had evidently halted to rest, so he probably thought we were all defeated, damaged, or destroyed.

  We ourselves halted at sunset. The moon wouldn’t rise until well after midnight, and it would be a tiny slice of light, just a day away from the new moon. Ella decreed one hour of rest before we continued the pursuit.

  “Three hours.” I rubbed my face. It felt like it was dragging past my neck.