Death's Collector

by Bill McCurry

  “Get out of here!” I hissed. “Go, and don’t come back!”

  “Missed you too, Bib.” I didn’t recognize the man’s voice. I peered through the grate, and the speaker had scooted back far enough to show he was wearing a guard’s uniform.

  “Filth-cracking son of a bitch!” I said. “Brain-damaged, inbred, scabby turd!”

  “Fantastic. Limnad told me I don’t curse enough to be a sorcerer.” The man showed me his wrist, and a nasty-looking length of woven cloth was tied around it. “Fingit showed me how to make this. Lets me look like anybody I’ve seen.”

  “Desh! Is Limnad here?”

  “No, she refuses to go anyplace where so many stones are joined with other stones.”

  “All right.” I got a grip on my thoughts. “How long will that bracelet last? Do you know?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Another day, at least.”

  “How’s Ella?”

  “It was bad. Pres thought she’d die. But she can walk a little now with help, if no one cares how fast she moves. And she can use her right arm fairly well. I think she’ll be mostly recovered in three months, maybe four. King Moris imprisoned those guards.”

  “Good. I was worried about Ella. Tell her I was worried. And when I get those guards away from here… I’m not good at torture, but I know somebody who has mastered the intricacies. I’ll just hire him.”

  “I know that will make her feel snug.”

  I wondered what kind of trading Desh had been doing with the gods. He seemed calmer and more confident, but also kind of cold. I didn’t have time for that chatter, though. “What’s the plan?”

  “Simple. I know you like simple. I’m a guard, so I’ll take the key and let you out. I’ll escort you downstairs. Ella and Pres will be waiting in the castle yard. We’ll meet them, and then all go out through the sally port into the arms of Pres’s father.”

  “The sally port will be guarded.”

  “I have three more bracelets.”

  “What about those three damned-to-Lutigan’s-asshole guards? I want to take them with us. I have plans.”

  “Think, Bib. Calculate the amount of complexity that would add. We might as well all kill each other before we begin. We’ll come back for them another time, with our power concentrated.”

  “Unless Moris executes the bloody skags first.”

  “Unless that.”

  “All right, this… sounds like a good plan.”

  “Why, Bib, did you doubt me? I’m a sorcerer, you know. And a careful one.”

  “I see that you are. Hell, you’re probably better than me. Hey, do you still go around saying magic is a beautiful thing?”

  He paused. “I haven’t thought about that. No, I don’t say that anymore. Be ready tomorrow night.”

  The next day, with no warning, the Glass army gave up, packed up, and relinquished the field. By sunset, neither a soldier nor a tent remained. That shouldn’t have changed the escape plan much, though. Armies travel slowly, and we could catch them. We’d just have to hike farther and stop to rest less. I’d be stealing the first horse I saw for Ella.

  The decision about whether to invite my cellmates along for the escape burdened me. They had worked hard on all our inadequate plans, so maybe they deserved to come along. On the other hand, they would cripple our chance of success, especially since Desh hadn’t brought disguise bracelets for them too. I told them to take a holiday from escape planning, and I considered the problem throughout the day. In the end, I decided not to take them, since Ella, Desh, and Pres had no chance to express their opinion on the matter. I’d just leave the door unlocked and wish them luck.

  After sunset, the lock turned and the door screeched open. A visitor at this time of day was an unprecedented event. Six soldiers rushed into the room, followed by Vintan. Two of them brushed back my cellmates, and four came to grab me. I didn’t grab easily, and when the scuffle ended, one was bent over gagging and another had what I surely hoped was a shattered knee. Myself, I gained a few bruises and a stupor-making knot rising on my forehead. The soldiers who could still fight seized me and snapped a sack over my head.

  They pulled me out of the room and crashed the door shut. Then they shoved and kicked me through hallways and down stairs, sometimes pulling me over so that my bare feet dragged along the chilly stone floor. I couldn’t see a damn thing and lost track of time. The whole journey overwhelmed my sense of surroundings. When they jerked me to a halt, I had no grasp of where I was. I could have been at the keep’s front door, standing over the king’s bed, or back in the room with Glek and Tobbart.

  A squeaky lock turned, and a squeakier door opened. Someone yanked the sack off my head just as Vintan said, “The Crows, indeed. I bring His Majesty a fearsome gift, and he places it in a pleasant cage. At least he may count me as his protector, eh?”

  We stood in a hallway. Two of the soldiers carried lanterns, and the hallway melted into blackness in both directions. The door I had heard stood open in front of me, and the light showed just a bit of stone floor through it.

  “Bib, I admire you. What a terrible creature you have been. The stories. Rather than allow you to stumble into an ignoble or embarrassing death that would mar your reputation, I’ve arranged for you to remain here in oblivion. Not forever. Just until you die.” Vintan giggled, and the back of my neck quavered. He nodded toward the door, and the soldiers shoved me through it. Before I got upright, they pushed the door closed and turned the lock.

  I screamed, “Vintan, you deceitful, depraved slime-licker! You baby-killing bucket of shit! You can’t keep me here! I’ll heap tortures on you that would make the demons of the underworld look like the baby chicks of the barnyard!” I kept calling him names and threatening him, and I think I made less and less sense as I went on.

  About the time I called Vintan a squinty little shit on a flying pike, the lantern light diminished to nothing. My cell was as dark as the inside of any farm animal you might name. Right away, the darkness started squeezing me like a fist. I began breathing fast, and sweat slid down my face.

  I forced three deep breaths and pushed out some words. “Well, this is a hell of a note. I got myself into this. I was doing just fine cutting up deserters, but… shit! What an incompetent ass-dragger.” Hearing myself talk helped a little, at least for the time being.

  Twenty-Eight

  A baby doesn’t pass out from terror if a skunk-bite crazy man comes running at him with a club. It doesn’t know to be afraid. Flames look magical to a tiny child, as much fun as folded clothes, or a pile of dog shit. But sticking your hand in a fire teaches you to be afraid of touching fire. We know that’s true because dozens of pompous individuals have made up nearly identical sayings about it.

  My teachers explained fear to me because sorcery is scary. It’s horrifying to stand motionless while a god shouts at you in a voice like all the volcanoes at the end of time, demanding that you give up the thing you love most, or be destroyed forever. It’s acknowledged to be more profoundly, fundamentally terrifying than the mere prospect of drowning or getting your head cut off.

  Therefore, my teachers scared the hell out of me, a lot, and for my own good. They took fear apart and illustrated it for me, and I guess they were experts since they wore awfully nice robes and everybody did what they said. They taught me that all fears but three are learned. Man is born afraid of falling, of loud noises, and of being eaten.

  I suffered through dozens of cruel and often unnecessary trials to master my fears. For example, to overcome my fear of close spaces, my teachers made me crawl and wriggle through a narrow, near lightless cave by the sea. I suspected they went off drinking and whoring whenever they left me behind to overcome some fearsome challenge, but that may have just been pettiness on my part.

  The sea cave trial was ridiculous because back then, you could stuff me in a box and I’d be happy. I did it anyway, and partway through the cave, I got stuck. My belt hung on something, and I couldn’t go either direction. B
efore long, the water started rising, and I became afraid. Then I heard sounds—hundreds of click-clack noises—and I became terrified. I saw a chittering carpet of crabs flowing toward me, and I became paralyzed. The mass smothered me, crabs skitter-stepped all over me, inside my clothes, plastered across my face, pushing into my ears and nose. I could feel their legs like knife points dragging and pricking everywhere. I felt them biting me all over, trying to eat me, and I became hysterical. A little later, I became whatever comes after hysterical.

  My teachers dragged me out, patched my dozens of tiny bites, and put me to bed for a week. I recovered just fine. But no encouragement, admonishment, force, or threat of death could convince me to crawl back into that cave. They finally gave up, and we all sort of pretended it never happened.

  I came away from that experience with an aversion to tight spaces. Along with it came a roiling terror of being eaten.

  Vintan trapped me in that smothering dark cell that smelled of slime and rot, collected his unhinged, arrogant ass, and marched away, leaving my fears to entertain me. Was I entombed a thousand feet under the castle? Well, in my situation, a thousand feet was no worse than ten inches, so I’d just think of it as ten inches. Had I been abandoned, miles away from any other human being? Maybe, but I doubted I’d like anyone I met down there anyway. Would the ceiling and walls collapse and trap me while I got eaten by spiteful underworld bugs? This last possibility… that was of course the most likely threat, the one I really needed to concentrate on.

  I spent my first hours in the cell sweating a lot, thinking through the situation, and screaming once in a while. I kept banging into walls, which forced me to figure out the limits of my new universe.

  I could lie down with my toes against one wall and my stumps against the opposite wall. The damp, wooden door felt smooth, rubbed by my predecessors’ hands as they tried to shift it. I stumbled into a hole in one corner and nearly broke my leg. From the fetid scent of bowel, I’d be using it for my privy. Some well-wisher had scattered clumps of stale-smelling hay in another corner. I could touch the rough-cut ceiling without straightening my arms.

  Most of the things I touched were damp. Everything else was soggy.

  Fatigue beat me down at last, and I kicked the nasty hay into a pile and lay on it. My body began to unknot just a bit, and then the feet of some mighty bugs began pricking my legs as they investigated me. A long period of jumping around, hollering, and smacking into walls followed, but at last, I lay down on the bare floor in the other corner and slept.

  When you’re trapped alone in an empty, lightless stone box, a surprising number of tasks sure would be easier if you had hands. For example, I woke up when an iron grate in the bottom of the door screeched open. Metal then scraped across the stone floor. Later, I would know this was my food and water, but then I found that out by crawling through the darkness and flipping over the unseen food bowl with my elbow. I stuck my left stump into the water bowl. I slowed down, forced my face into the water, and sucked it in. I chose not to lick the gruel off the floor. In later times, I thought back on that and marveled at how wasteful I had been.

  I could describe other physical challenges, such as taking down and pulling up my trousers, but I’ll hold back such details for now. I did achieve marvelous dexterity with my toes.

  After I woke up from my first sleep, I thought more about this shit-stew I was in. I started muttering and growling and yelling at Vintan, calling him everything from rancid maggot puke to the most repulsive unidentified wad ever found in a dead drunkard’s crotch. When that didn’t blow the cell door down, I examined the biggest opening into the room. The privy-hole was repugnant, but crawling through it seemed a little better than a drawn-out, monotonous death.

  I didn’t fit. I pulled, squeezed, twisted, and sucked in air, but the hole was smaller than me, and no amount of pounding and screaming would change that. I caught my breath and pretended to stare at the hole while I thought. If I pulled out one of the stones around the hole, or even pulled it loose, I might force myself through. Selecting the most vulnerable stone, I stomped on it until it hurt too much to stand. I sat near it and grabbed on with the bottoms of my feet and my toes, then I twisted, wiggled, and pulled at the thing. I tore my shirt in half and wrapped my stumps so I could push with them to get a better angle. I shouted at the stone and spat on it, but that didn’t work, either.

  I decided that scraping mortar out of the joints around the stone would weaken it. If I could flatten one of the bowls enough, it would form a scraping edge. I felt around for the food bowl and kicked it almost two feet toward the hole before it was yanked back. A chain tethered the bowl to something on the other side of the grate. I grabbed the chain with my left toes and pressed my right foot against the door, and I hauled. It was like trying to heave a warship out to sea with my toes. I returned to my former strategy of shouting, spitting, and cursing, but it didn’t work any better than the first time.

  The cell must have incarcerated dozens or maybe hundreds of prisoners before me. I expect that many of them tried to escape. The jailers must have improved things over the years to prevent every type of escape that had ever been attempted. I realized I would have to be cleverer than the most enterprising of all the people who had preceded me.

  Well, to hell with them and their mothers and their barnyard animals too. I had that thought four or five times while trying to forget about those bugs that hadn’t devoured my flesh yet but would soon, as sure as guts are slippery.

  The metal grate had four straight edges that would scratch mortar from a joint, if only I could pull it loose. I grabbed the grate with my toes and pushed against the door with the other foot, then I rocked and twisted the grate with both feet over and over. When my toes hurt too much, I banged against the grate and its hinges with one heel and then with the other, cursing with every blow. Then I started over with my toes. I went back and forth like this until I could feel blood from my toe tips halfway up my foot. I quit then, but I laughed because I had felt the damn thing give, just a little. I was almost certain it had.

  By this time, the concept of days and hours was becoming meaningless. Soon, only three measures of time mattered: pretty soon, a long time, and the next meal. I slept, rested my feet until the next meal, and went after the grate again, yanking and banging for as long as I could stand it. Then I rested some more.

  I continued to attack that grate until I had eaten eighty-nine times. I kept a close count. I tried to forget about flesh-eating bugs, but that was the longest period of time my sphincters stayed puckered in my life.

  During that time, along about the twentieth meal, I realized that my head had begun hurting, just a bit. It was a type of headache known to me, where pain runs from my right eye straight to the back of my skull. It didn’t surprise me, but it did motivate me. Whenever I waited too many days to kill someone for Harik, he reminded me with a little headache. After some more days, it became a bigger headache, and it kept getting bigger until I finally got off my ass and killed somebody.

  By the time that eighty-ninth meal came along, my headache was damn annoying. I just sat and thought over everything that had happened so far. Then I crawled to the grate and examined it as thoroughly and objectively as I could with my toes. I had not shifted it at all, nor even marred it.

  That’s when I realized I’d been wasting my effort. Desh was going to save me. I just needed to be patient. He was a smart boy and a fine sorcerer, and he had come to rescue me when I was trapped with the Crows. If I gave him time, he would come find me here and I could rest on my backside until then. My feet hurt worse than Aunt Salli’s frog stew on a raw throat.

  I waited twenty meals, then forty, then sixty, eating every smidge of gruel and working to stay strong. By then, my headache throbbed up to the top of my skull and dug into my upper teeth. After a hundred meals, I became peeved with Desh. After 120, I began perfecting the sarcastic comments I would say to him when he arrived. At odd times, the headache felt like a kni
fe stabbing me through the eye. My arms and face had begun itching at meal eighty-nine, and pretty soon that had spread to my chest and back. I intended to make Desh feel bad about that too.

  I licked 139 bowls of gruel clean while I waited for Desh. After the 139th bowl, I wiped my nose and chin so I could lick the last of the sticky stuff off my bare, nasty forearm. Right away, I started anticipating the next meal. It would be 140, an auspicious number. It would also be 229 meals since I entered the cell, a prime number, which was even better. I ought to do something to celebrate.

  I paused for a long moment before I said it out loud. “I ought to do something to celebrate.” I chuckled at that, and then I cried until I fell asleep.

  I woke up before meal 140 and admitted, just a little, that Desh wasn’t coming. Since the day Vintan had chucked me into the cell, I had called to the gods hundreds of times, and they had slapped me down every time. I had quit trying them after meal 181 of my imprisonment. I decided to try again now, and I lifted myself to challenge Harik to a trade. The pain and itching evaporated.

  “Murderer, I receive you out of my incomprehensible sense of courtesy, despite the many discourtesies you have dared to show me.”

  I hadn’t expected Harik to accept, and I almost apologized to the bastard by reflex. “Mighty Harik, whenever we’ve spoken, I have devoted considerable effort to crafting my words. It saddens me that you found them unseemly, you great tub of inarticulate fish heads.”

  Harik laughed. He almost never laughed. When he laughed, it was never good. “Very well, Murderer, proceed. Ask.”

  “Although I find myself temporarily disadvantaged, I expect to recover before long.” Of course, that was an embarrassingly huge lie. He knew it too, but I had to proclaim that I had balls, even if they were fictitious. “I want to trade for some power. I am pleased to invite you to join in negotiations and to make the first offer.”