Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  Gerd and Granny joined him. Marius set off with quick steps, forcing the others to jog after him.

  “I don’t understand,” Gerd said as they walked. “Why do something like that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No.” Marius rounded on him, pushing him against the rough earth wall. “It doesn’t. And I don’t care. I don’t have time for mysteries. I’m trying to get my lover back.”

  “I know.” Gerd took hold of Marius’ fists and peeled them away from his shirt. “I know. But that was disturbing. And if Drenthe took her this way…”

  “I’m trying not to think about that, all right?” Marius stepped back, and dropped his hands. “Sorry about the…” He indicated Gerd’s shirtfront.

  “It’s all right. Let’s push on, shall we?”

  Marius nodded. Gerd clapped him on the shoulder, and they continued their journey. They hadn’t walked for more than a minute when Gerd puffed out his cheeks.

  “Gods, it’s absolutely feral now. I can barely breathe.”

  “You don’t need to,” Granny replied from half a dozen feet in front of him.

  “You know what I mean. The smell. It’s overpowering.”

  “I know.” Granny was standing still, staring further down the corridor at something the others couldn’t see. The two men came up on either side of her, and followed her gaze.

  “Oh, good gods.”

  “No,” Granny replied. “I don’t think so.”

  Someone had dug a trench the width of the corridor, and perhaps three or four feet long. It was impossible to tell just how far down it went. The bodies obscured the view. They rested in messy abandon, discarded toys thrown away by a petulant god. Not one of them was complete: arms were piled up in one corner, heads in another, legs lay intertwined with each other like fossilised branches. There were no torsos amongst the victims, just extremity upon extremity, a patchwork of perhaps a hundred or more dismembered corpses with no hope of restitution. The three companions stared at it in growing horror.

  “Broken,” Marius finally croaked. “All of them. Look.” He pointed at the nearby legs. Each one was bent at several places. Some clearly showed the ragged ends of bones poking through the flesh. “They’ve all been smashed.”

  “This isn’t just an execution.” Gerd stepped back, hands over the bottom of his face. “This is…”

  “Genocide.” Granny was staring from face to smashed face. “This is genocide.” She looked up at Marius, confusion plain upon her features. “Is that what happens? Is this what you do when people arrive?”

  Marius shook his head. “No. This is… this is something else. Something wrong.” He tore his gaze from the devastation in the pit. “We were meant to see this. I was meant to see this.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Marius strode away from the pit, back up the tunnel towards their entry point. Gerd and Granny scrambled to keep up. “Drenthe knew I’d come for Keth. He kept her above ground just long enough so I would know where she’d been dragged and could find it. He killed me to get me to get me down here. He knew I’d pass this spot. We’ve been led here for a reason. Alno!” The cat came slinking out of the shadows and jumped up into his arms. “First we make this right, then I’m going to find Keth. Then I’m going to cut that fucker into little pieces while he tells me what his game is.”

  “How are we going to do all that?”

  They reached their entry point. Marius jerked his head at the roof above them. Gerd drew the earth open, so that they found themselves staring into the burning sun.

  “Fire,” Marius said. “We start with a fire.”

  THREE

  “I have wood piled up for the winter,” he explained as they crossed the field. “Gerd, you grab a decent armful or two. Granny, there’s tinder and kindling in the kitchen, and lucifers above the oven. Bring them all.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to set fire to the pit.” Marius stopped, facing his companions. “Those poor bastards deserve not to rot in pieces in that hole. And we can send a message to Drenthe at the same time.”

  “What message?”

  “We’re coming.”

  “Coming where?”

  “I don’t know.” He wheeled away and continued walking. “Do you have to ruin all my really good prophetic statements?”

  “Sorry.” Gerd looked shamefaced for a moment, then gazed past Marius and pointed. “What’s that?”

  A plume of black smoke rose a few hundred yards in front of them. Marius stared at it for a second, then began running.

  “No. No!”

  “What is it?”

  “The cottage. It’s the fucking cottage!”

  Marius was there in under a minute. He stood and stared at the devastation while Granny shuffled her way behind him, Gerd holding her arm. The fire had almost done its work. The cottage was little more than a few blackened uprights, mounds of ash, and a pall of smoke that began to thin out and dissipate even as they watched. A neat circle of burned ground spread twenty feet around the remains of the walls. It was obvious the fire had been deliberately lit. It was too neat, too final to be anything else. Marius walked through the shin-deep cinders, disconsolately pushing them apart, hoping to find at least one small memento or memory still partially intact. Nothing remained. Everything had been destroyed down to its component dust.

  “Someone took their time over this,” Marius said as he shuffled through the destruction. “Someone took things out and put them back again to make sure they were all burned up.” He eyed the neat circle where the burning stopped. “Someone made sure it didn’t spread.”

  “Drenthe.”

  “Of course Drenthe.” He stood in the middle of his burned-out life and turned in a slow circle. “He’s leading me about like a dog on a chain. Rubbing my nose in my messes.”

  “But why?” Gerd stared at him over the blackened ground. Neither he nor Granny had set foot upon it. “It’s been four years since you’ve had anything to do with the dead. Why attack you now?”

  “You said it yourself.” Marius began to kick his way out of the circle, then stopped as his foot struck something solid. He crouched and began to dig into the hot ashes. “He’s cunning, ruthless, and he’s just about in charge. Whatever’s going on down there, he wants me out of it.”

  “Or wants you to know all about it.” Granny was staring at the ground outside the circle, her eyes firmly closed.

  “Yes, that’s a…” Marius pulled out the unharmed object and brushed residue away from it. It was a small picture frame, perhaps four inches by two, woven from dried reeds and painted in a simple blue that matched the colour of the distant hills. Someone had glued a pressed flower inside its border, a brittle and faded cousin to the countless yellow blooms that waved outside the circle of devastation. Marius stared at it for several long seconds, then held it up so the others could see it. “Keth made this for me in the first couple of days after we moved in. That’s the first flower we picked from the garden. There’s no way this could have survived the fire.” He tucked it inside his shirt; then thought again, and laid it gently on top of the nearest pile of ashes. “I was meant to find this. I was meant to understand why.” Standing, he wiped soot from his trouser legs. “We’ve been watched since the day we arrived, probably longer. They’ve been planning all of this for years.” He moved over to the other two and stood with his back to the burned cottage, staring out over the unharmed landscape. “You were right, Granny. They want me to know,” he said. “And now I do.”

  “Close your eyes,” Granny said. Marius did. He turned in a slow circle, stopping when he faced the same direction as the old woman.

  The ground was a mess of grey stripes, marks of deaths from battles long past. On the far side of the burned circle, five lines stood out from the rest. They glowed, a sign they had been recently used as entrance points for residents of the underworld. Three of them formed a straight line at ninety degrees to the blackened circle’s
edge. Two more intersected the line’s farthest point at opposing, acute angles. An arrow, visible only to someone with eyes accustomed to being dead, pointing towards something at the edge of vision.

  “The village,” Marius said. He glanced at the others.

  “Go.”

  Gerd had been looking from one to the other in confusion. Now, he stepped forward into the circle. “Wait.” Picking up the flower frame, he held it out to Marius. “Don’t you want this?”

  Marius eyed it. “That’s over,” he said in a dead, flat voice. “I’m never coming back.”

  “But Keth…”

  “Keth’s dead,” Marius called over his shoulder as he began to run.

  “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t need you,” Gerd called back. He held the frame out uselessly to Marius’ retreating back, then placed it inside his jerkin as Granny called out to him.

  “Come on,” she said as he took her hand. “Let’s get after him.”

  It took Marius exactly five minutes to reach the village, but he could see what had happened much earlier. The buildings were surrounded by a ring of light grey lines at varying distances: the sites of farming accidents, a roadside robbery or two, and one spot where old Ratek had had a heart attack one night on the way home from the tavern but everybody had just thought he was pissed and mucking about. Inside that ring of old deaths, there was nothing but rubble. Nobody had set any fires this time. Nobody had needed to. There were perhaps twenty buildings in the village. Homes, mostly; modest dwellings cobbled together from any material available within walking distance, but kept clean and decorated in whatever meagre way the villagers could manage. It was one of the things that had attracted Keth to the place. It had reminded her of her room above the Hauled Keel, reminded her of her own attempts to create some sort of haven, and the order and sense of belonging she had carved out of the ugliest parts of her life. If Marius was honest, which he was careful to be only on very rare occasions, he saw just another set of lopsided and obsessively-swept dwellings, no better than any of a thousand other villages scattered about the unwanted fringes of the country. Just over a dozen or so homes, alongside the tavern, a communal stables, a smithy that was more tinker’s repair shop than anything else, and a watering station.

  But now it was gone. An angry giant had swung a scythe, felling the entire village with a sweep of his arm. Not a single stone remained whole. Not a single stick was unbroken. Twenty buildings lay in cruel disarray, architectural skeletons in a mass grave. Marius walked into what had been, for want of a better word, the town square and picked his way through the rubble, turning over the occasional piece of detritus with his toe. The entire square was a puddle of broken edges, dusted with the powdered remains of the dried grasses that had served the villagers as thatching, firestarters, and food when times grew tough. The simple well had caved in, and pots lay smashed around it. All that was missing were the battered faces of familiar corpses. Not a single body lay in sight.

  He knelt down amongst a spray of old cobbles that Missus Belcher had brought with her from a trip to the big city thirty years ago, when she was young and had a nice set of hips and caught the right worker’s eye when they were breaking up old Pudding Alley. Marius picked up a jagged shard and pieced it together with another. He worked quickly, scrabbling amongst the dirt for the right pieces, discarding the wrong ones, concentrating on putting together one stone, on making just one thing right again. Underneath his concentration, thoughts were turned over and assembled in the same way, drawing him closer to one conclusion, one perfectly rounded course of action.

  “Executed,” he said as Gerd and Granny arrived and picked their way across the rubble. “Just like our friends in the tunnel.” He held up the finished cobblestone. Gerd took it from him and gently cleared a space to place it. “The entire village.”

  “The villagers?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Granny did as she was commanded. After a while she opened them again. “They’re not here.”

  “How do you do that?” Gerd watched them both. “Seriously, I’ve been dead longer than both of you–”

  “Sound.” Marius placed his index finger against his lip. “Stop yapping and actually listen.”

  Gerd fell silent. “It’s quiet.”

  Granny nodded, and Marius indicated the air around them. “Even on a battlefield, the dead make a noise. The wind flaps their clothing, birds call to each other as they peck out the soft bits, metal scratches against rock, there’s always something. Close your eyes and listen.”

  Gerd did so. “Nothing. There’s no sound at all.”

  “Finally. Dead for four years and you actually manage to show me something.”

  Gerd sneered.”So where are they?”

  Marius watched his fingers scrabble through the dirt, searching out the beginnings of another cobblestone. “Taken. And no, I don’t know where. Just not here, obviously.”

  “Why?”

  Marius said nothing until a second stone lay next to the first. “These people were my neighbours.” He pulled a stick from the rubble, tied it to another with some shredded thatch. “My neighbours.” He pieced together a second branch, and a third, letting the anger flow now, giving everything he’d suppressed until this moment full rein. “They didn’t do a damn thing to anybody. This was all they had, all they fucking had.” He swung around, his outflung arms encompassing the whole site. “Shitty lives in a shitty little middle-of-nowhere toilet bowl of a town with sixteen hours a day in the fields just so they could spend a couple of hours once a week sitting in a tavern drinking pissy scrumpy and throwing darts at a board in the corner.” He picked up a jagged rock and threw it across the square. “There were seven children in this village, you bastard!”

  Then, just as soon as it was released, the anger left him. He stood, shoulders slumped, and let his fists clench and unclench of their own accord. The echo of his voice died away, and the world was silent again.

  “You’ve changed,” Gerd said, when it seemed safe to speak. Marius closed his eyes, and tilted his head back to face the sky.

  “I’m dead now.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.” He spun back towards his handiwork and picked up the repaired branches. “I’ve been stuck in this shitty little backwater for three years. Keth loved it. All the nature and fresh air and good honest toil and all that utter bollocks.” He snapped a branch, glanced down at it, then bent to repair it once more. “Three years. I haven’t been in one place for that long since I got shot of my parents.”

  “It was your home.”

  “Keth was my home.” He inhaled, and placed the sticks down on the restored cobbles. “But these people were her home. And I’m going to destroy whoever did this to them.”

  “We know who did this to them,” Gerd said. “Don’t we?”

  Marius stood up, staring across the ruins to the single track that exited the village. Behind them it meandered past his former cottage and onwards up into the hills. Somewhere there it might intersect a valley, split into a thousand different possibilities, adventures, and lands he had never seen. Ahead it fetched up against Mish, the nearest thing to civilisation that existed on this part of the plains. Beyond that lay the roads to the great cities, and the past he had given up for Keth.

  “It takes an army to destroy a village,” he said. “Even this one.”

  Gerd looked around them. “Wouldn’t there be some evidence? Like some signs that an army had been here?”

  Marius brandished a stone, threw it hard into the ruins around them.

  “Is this not enough of a fucking clue for you?”

  “Well, I kind of meant… footprints or something.” Gerd shuffled from foot to foot, avoiding Marius’ gaze. Marius stared at him, his temper suddenly cooling towards ice.

  “If I say an army destroyed the homes of the only friends and neighbours I’ve allowed myself to get to know in the last twenty years, then it was an army. Is that clear?�
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  Gerd nodded at his feet. They stood in silence for several moments, then Gerd found the courage to squint up at his friend.

  “So what do we do?”

  Marius looked down at his handiwork. Two round cobble stones, with two bent and patched sticks jammed between them. Two circular shields, bisected by paired sword and quill or, at least, as close as he could manage. The crest of the family don Hellespont: merchants; King’s Men; and, the last time he bothered to check, seventh-richest family in Scorby City. He smiled, a thin disfigurement of his mouth that, just for a moment, revealed something nasty lurking behind his eyes. “First, I think it’s time I regained my heritage. Then I’m going to buy the cruellest, most brutal mercenaries the docks have to offer. Then I’m going to find these villagers, get Keth back, and see how many pieces I can cut Drenthe into before he dies for good. Want to come?”

  “I thought you said Keth was dead.”

  Marius shot Gerd a look of stunning anger. “Has that stopped us?”

  “No, I just… I thought you meant, you know.” Gerd shuffled uncomfortably. “Dead dead.”

  Marius spoke carefully, enunciating his words in single bites. “Then I’ll recover her bones. Is that all right with you?”

  “Fuck it.” Granny hauled herself to her feet and nodded at him. “I’ve got nothing planned.”

  Gerd looked between them. “Me neither,” he said. “I thought that went without saying.”

  FOUR

  Philosophers will tell you that money cannot buy happiness. Philosophers often live in discarded wine barrels and have trouble distinguishing between a timeless aphorism and a load of bollocks. They also rarely spend time in a town like Mish.

  If money is the root of all evil, then towns like Mish were the truffles of evil: pungent and hard to find, but if you’d acquired the taste for them then very nearly an addiction. Mish was built upon one very simple philosophy: people end up in soil-poor floodplains because they are either stupid, powerless, or hiding a secret – preferably all three. Humanity had made an art form of sending its least worthy out into the wilderness to die. Mish made an art form of feeding from the carcasses. Part trading post, part street party; part gambling den, whorehouse, and fighting pit; the owners of Mish created it to fill one side of a timeless equation: other people had money, and they wanted it.