Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  There, crouched a full dozen feet higher than its neighbours, sat a townhouse of understated and elegant simplicity that couldn’t have been in poorer taste had there been a thirty foot-high sign screaming “Caravanserai Trash” jammed into its perfectly manicured front lawn. Sloping, elegant retaining walls of white stone girdled a slim, neutral frontage without so much as a single stone lion to announce its owner’s wealth. Simple doric columns supported a wide, airy second story patio, and unadorned front walls just existed. Not a single swooping gable or leering gargoyle drew the viewer’s eye upwards in appreciation of just how fucking tall the damn thing was, and just how little right a person had to even look at it, never mind think about ruining the walkway with their grubby little commoner feet. It was as if the owner hadn’t made any effort to spend any of their vast hidden wealth upon the place at all. It was gauche, it was insulting; it stood out from its neighbours like a hard-on in a nunnery. Whoever lived here was obviously a complete bastard. Marius looked up at it and felt something small inside of him keel over and die.

  “Yes,” he said. “Gone places is one way to put it.”

  TWELVE

  Marius’ father had been the fifth richest man in Borgho City when he arrived, which as far as the elite of V’Ellos were concerned – and they were all elite – was equivalent to being the fifth largest turd in the alleyway. But Ygram don Hellespont had a simple yet stunningly effective plan for climbing the social ladder: he lied. Being out of touch with the world around them wasn’t so much a fault for V’Ellosians as a badge of honour. Who, after all, would admit to knowing what the little people were doing? So Ygram simply lied, and took advantage of their ignorance of the world. His aim was simple: to sit at the biggest window in the drawing room of the largest townhouse on the highest hill of the richest city in the world, and look down upon everyone and everything and satisfy his hatred of them all.

  And he’d done it.

  V’Ellos was the place where the richest people in the world retired. They turned their backs on the constant rounds of balls and parties where the real politics of rulership were carried out, and instead settled back to enjoy the rounds of balls and parties that served for idle entertainment while, outside, the bally world could jolly well burn to the ground as long as the supply of Tallian truffles and ’67 Chateau du Clarioux remained uninterrupted. Marius’ father had also retired here to engage in his own form of entertainment: namely, gipping his neighbours out of as much dosh as he could while they were too busy swigging their stinky fungi and overpriced bubbly vinegar to notice. It was a hobby at which he was stunningly successful. He may have been only the fifth biggest turd in the alleyway when he arrived, but there was no bigger turd in the world than Ygram don Hellespont these days. Thief to thief, Marius could have loved his father for it, except that he already loved his mother. In Marius’ family, caring for one person meant no room for any other.

  Ygram loved money, which left no room for anybody, and he was obviously less than pleased to see his only son standing in the foyer of his domain. “What do you want?” he asked, standing on the top step of a marble staircase as he looked down at the motley crew of travellers. In truth, he would have looked down at them even had he been standing in their midst, but at least this way he had the physical advantage as well as the monetary. Marius rolled his shoulders backwards to relieve the tension that automatically clenched them upon entering the house, and stared back.

  “Twenty years, Father. Are they really going to be your first words to me in all that time?”

  Ygram raised an eyebrow, tilting his head back so he could view the assembled company from even further down his nose.

  “And in the company of dirt farmers. How appropriate.”

  “Excuse me! Pig farmer.” Gerd stepped forward. Marius laid a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Gerd, why don’t you take Granny down that hallway to the servants’ quarters, and freshen up?”

  “Excuse me? Is that what we are now? Did we step into some strange, alternative world when we came through that door, where you’re all of a sudden–”

  “Gerd.” What is the first rule?

  “Wha… oh.”

  There had been three months of instruction, when Marius first plucked Gerd from his pig farm high in the Spinal Ranges, on the rules and responsibilities of thievery. A long list, longer than Gerd was able to absorb, of the ways and means to easy prosperity, and if you can’t manage that, then at least how not to get spitted like a pig the first time you try to run a whoopsy-doodle scam on somebody with a sword and more muscles than you. At the end of which, Gerd had been spitted like a pig by a soldier as he looted a battlefield, so that was that as far as education went.

  Still, he could at least remember the first rule: never steal what you can’t swallow. It had been his efforts to remind Marius of it that had led to him being spitted in the first place. He stared at his mentor for perhaps half a minute, his hand idly running up and down the front of his jacket, just above the scar left by the soldier’s sword.

  “Ah.” Two and two were put together. Pennies dropped. The obvious stopped bleeding. He glanced down the hallway to the left of the staircase, and saw at least three richly appointed doors between him and the end of the corridor. “Right you are.”

  “Take Granny. Show her the way.”

  “Okey dokey.”

  “Father and I have to have a little talk.” He placed his foot on the first step of the staircase. His father glanced over at his companions.

  “Tell them to keep their hands off the fittings,” he said. “And bring tea when I call.”

  “You heard the man.” Marius stared hard at Gerd. “Don’t touch the fittings.”

  “Gotcha.” Gerd took Granny by the arm. “This way, Granny.” The old lady had said nothing. Now she glanced down at the cat in her arms, then the stairway, as if calculating how hard a throw it would take to land Alno on the rich man’s face. Gerd tugged gently. “Please.”

  Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be dragged to the side of the stairwell. They passed a portrait of Ygram, a delicate rendering in oils that was clearly the mark of a master artist. Reaching out, she ran her thumbnail across the surface, leaving a deep tear in the paintwork.

  “Whoops,” she said with complete lack of sincerity. Ygram and Marius watched them disappear behind the staircase.

  “You’ll pay for that,” Ygram said. “And anything that goes missing. That was a Dellotas.”

  “You can get him to do another one.” Marius made the top step. “And they’re poor people, not dishonest ones.”

  “Obviously.” Ygram sniffed, as if testing the air for the unwelcome smell of poverty. “In the library, if you will.”

  “Perfect.” Marius climbed past him and made his way to the golden-gilded door. “Just where I wanted to be.”

  THIRTEEN

  Marius had just turned eighteen. There was no celebration: there was no time for it, and besides, they were in V’Ellos now. In V’Ellos, you weren’t worth a thing unless you were worth everything. There wasn’t an eighteen year-old in the world with enough money to be worth celebrating. There had been an argument at dinner – something trivial, a small matter of etiquette or a money-making opportunity that slipped sideways at an inopportune moment, he really couldn’t remember – which had led to the drinking, which had led to more argument, which had led to his father drawing his hand across his chest in anticipation of marking his mother’s cheek with it. Marius had drawn his dinner knife like a dagger from the table and driven it into the priceless Barbantine wood table an inch from his father’s other wrist. Now Mother was packing, and Marius had retreated to the library, where he could recover some measure of safe emotion surrounded by the conflicts and mistakes of history.

  He could hear her, slamming doors and dragging her valise from under her bed. Separate bedrooms. The young Marius shook his head. There was his family, accounted for in a single image. Ten minutes from now she would appear in the
doorway, announce her inability to stay, and be off with a kiss on the cheek, an exhortation not to let his father do to him what he had done to her, and the smell of eau de parfum. It was a smell that would cause him to break down until he was well into his thirties. Until she appeared, he knew from long experience, they would stick to their separate tiny empires, a world war contained in twenty rooms. Give it a week, maybe two, and she’d be back. A truce would be declared. Battlegrounds would be left to grow fertile and would be spread with new loam of hurt and mistrust until ready for harvest. Give it a month, maybe two. Marius was used to the cycle. It had been a decade in the making. It had an infrastructure now, a validity. He traced the spines of books as he passed them, letting the feel of cold leather against his fingertips provide a focus. There, the bang of the bedroom door. Feet on the stairwell, the thump, thump, thump of the valise dragging behind. Comforting sounds, almost, the familiar rhythms of his family carrying out their appointed duties: self-judgement, self-sentencing, self-execution. He leant his head against a copy of Yintus’s Histories, let the objectivity flow from the pages into his brow, then turned towards the door.

  There. His father, on schedule. The library door would crash open. The front door would crash closed. His father would be an outline in the doorway, bottle hanging loosely from his hand, hair askew, the reek of fifty year-old Tallian brandy rolling towards Marius in waves.

  Except: not this time. There was the bang of the front door, as it should be. But the library door swung open on oiled hinges, kissed the wall with the faintest of knocks. And there was his father, but not the raging drunkard that family tradition demanded. He stood a moment in the doorway, calm as a hunting cat, and pinned Marius against the bookcase with steel-sober eyes. He wore his best suit, pressed and cleaned for the occasion. His hair was pomaded back into a slick, grey skullcap. While his wife was racing towards her temporary freedom he was shaving, splashing spiced oil across his jaw line, trimming his moustache with military precision. Man as predator, man as knife: sharp, clean, gleaming and deadly. He let his son absorb the sacrilege for a long moment. Marius stepped away from the bookcase. Ygram stalked into the room, sat in the vast leather easy chair that was his personal throne, and raised his eyes to his young son. Marius stared back, suddenly bereft of certainty.

  “Get out,” he said, and there was no misunderstanding between them. His father did not mean just the library, just his presence. Marius had been banished, perfectly and forever. He would spend twenty years telling the world he ran away, sick of his father’s corruption and the stink of rotten money. But in that moment, alone without the cushion of familial civility, father and son forged a moment of perfect clarity.

  Marius ran.

  Now, twenty years later, Marius stood in a different library in a different house and sought out the Yintus on the crowded shelves. He found it, and let his fingers rest against the cracked spine as his father entered behind him. Ygram crossed to an armchair next to a small table, and sat. A brandy snifter sat aside a crystal decanter. He poured himself a generous measure, then raised the glass to view the amber liquid rolling around inside, ignoring Marius’ presence. Marius took the opportunity to give the room a proper viewing, and shook his head. Row after row of leather-bound books circled the room, housed in rare, white-wooded shelves. Deep burgundy rugs hid the floorboards. The fittings were newer, the accoutrements of a better quality, the chair a more luxurious leather, the panelling an altogether deeper shade of wood. But in its layout and number of appointments it was an exact copy of the library of his late youth, which had been an exact copy of the library of his childhood, back in the days of the Borgho docks and business conducted at midnight. He shook his head again. He could walk around this house with his eyes closed. The kitchen would be as it had always been, the dining room, the bedrooms, all would be exact copies of exact copies of exact copies. He caught his father’s eye for a moment. Except for my bedroom, he amended himself. I bet my bedroom no longer exists.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, running a finger along a shelf. “Mindwood shelving and everything. I was part of the crew that cut down the last mindwood grove in Flemg, did you know that?”

  “What do you want?”

  Marius crossed the floor and picked up the brandy decanter.

  “No second glass?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. Raising it to his lips, he took a deep draught, and coughed.

  “Fuck me, that’s good stuff.”

  His father sighed and lowered his glass.

  “What do you want?”

  Marius looked down at him. “I’ve been away for twenty years, Father. Don’t you at least want to know what I’ve done in all that time, where I’ve been?”

  Ygram was the very essence of stillness. He kept his head averted from his son’s gaze, staring at the partially parted curtains across the room and the vista of V’Ellos beyond.

  “Your mother used to open the packages you had delivered, the posters that said you were an actor.” He might have been saying child molester. “Even a fool could see they were fakes.”

  “Did she like them?”

  “She was a fool.”

  Marius nodded. She had chosen to believe. He tilted his head, noticing for the first time the utter silence that surrounded them.

  “Where is Mother?”

  Now his father turned his head, and stared directly into his son’s eyes. A smile distorted his lower face, the type you see on alley thugs’ faces just before the knife in their hands becomes the blade between your ribs. He took time to sip his brandy, then held it up so that his eyes peered at Marius over the lip of the glass.

  “Why do you think I used past tense?” he asked, with all the mocking pleasure in his soul.

  Marius didn’t scream. He didn’t break down in tears, or stagger back, hand clutched to his heart in sudden tragedy. Instead, he matched his father’s stare for several seconds, then very carefully lowered the decanter so it sat safe and neat in the centre of the little table. He retrieved the volume of Yintus from its shelf and stood with his back to Ygram as he slowly and methodically ripped every page out, letting each individual sheet fall to the floor. Whilst his father watched, he made a slow circuit of the library, head tilted to the side, reading titles as he went. It took him half an hour to scour every shelf, Ygram sipping from his brandy all the while.

  Marius finished his destruction and walked to the door, exiting without a backward glance. His father said nothing, did nothing to stop him. He climbed the stairs to his father’s bedroom, situated upon the top floor at the front of the house as it always had been, and examined the bookshelves there, ignoring the opulence of the fittings, ignoring the way it mirrored the bedroom he remembered from earlier days. When his search came up empty he descended to the ground floor, to the space behind the reception room his mother had sequestered for her sleeping quarters thirty years before in a different city. He slipped inside in respectful silence, closing the door behind him before he could remember the way she looked first thing in the morning, when the child Marius could still run in and snuggle under her blankets before the day really started. He stood with his back against the door and surveyed the room for near on three full minutes. It was exactly as he recalled; a confectionery of creams and lace, with tiny bottles crowding every available surface, each glittering with a quarter inch of perfumed liquid. An oval mirror sat above a dressing table adorned with countless arcane female implements. He crossed over to it. The table bore a thin layer of dust. Marius ran a finger through it, then turned, eyeing the bed for long moments. Slowly, he knelt down and looked under it, nodding to himself. The valise was missing. Silently, he left the room and returned to the library. Ygram sat where Marius had left him, the decanter a full two inches emptier than when he had departed. The remains of Yintus’s Histories were gone.

  “You said she was dead.”

  “You may have thought that.”

  “You bastard!” This time Mari
us did rage. He threw himself about the room, hurling books from their shelves, bouncing volume after volume onto the floor near the armchair. The decanter was an early casualty. Ygram’s glass survived only until the next volume. Books rebounded from the arms of the chair, the back, the overstuffed head. The table was overturned, the top smashed. Ygram sat perfectly still. Not a single page struck him. Finally, Marius’ fury ran down. He stood over Ygram, one hand on either arm of the chair, and leaned into his father’s impassive gaze.

  “Where is she?”

  “One hundred and eighteen thousand riner, eight tenpenny, sixpence.”

  “What?”

  “The value of your destruction. Not counting the Dellotas your dirt farmer woman destroyed. Someone like you could never afford that.”

  “She’s a pig farmer, you arrogant fuck.”

  His father shrugged.

  “Where is she?” Marius leaned in further, slid his hands up the arm of the chair until his hands circled Ygram’s biceps, pinning him.

  “Where do you think?”

  Of course. The sound of slamming bedroom doors. The sound of suitcases being dragged towards the front door. Memories twenty years old, twenty-five, thirty. Marius blinked, staring at his father in sudden shock. Ygram stared back, disdain clear upon his face.

  “You stupid, worthless, bastard child.”

  Then there was no option but violence. Marius’ hand was under Ygram’s jaw before he could formalise a thought. He lifted his father up the back of the chair so the older man was bent over, the back of the chair digging into his spine and all of Marius’ weight pressing down upon his upper body. Marius pushed his face into Ygram’s, squeezing his fingers together so the older man choked and struggled for breath.

  “You call me stupid?” Marius hissed. “Take a good gander at me, did you? You notice I’m not breathing? You notice what I look like?” He shook his father from side to side. “You think I have the patience for your fucking games anymore?”