Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  He dragged Ygram over to the nearest book shelf, slammed his face into the leather spines, hauled him along the shelf then on to the next one, face thump thump thumping across the spines faster and faster while Marius growled.

  “The Campaigns of Scorbus. Green spine. Bronze lettering. Two inches thick. Where is it?” Thump, thump. “Where is it?” Thump, thump. “Where is it?”

  Until, finally, Ygram sputtered and grabbed weakly at Marius’ arm and begged him to stop. And Marius did, dropping the old man in a heap in the corner, where he scrabbled himself into a sitting position, gasping for breath that did not want to come. Marius squatted in front of him, no breath, no sweat, no sign of a single exertion. He tilted his head, like a lizard predator staring down at sweating mammalian prey. Ygram found some measure of air, wiped snot away with the back of his hand.

  “Storehouse,” he managed. “Down at the docks. Taupe frontage. Business name. On plaque. Across from yacht.”

  “Which yacht?”

  “You’ll know it.” Ygram slumped down, coughing. “All there. It’s there.”

  And Marius was gone, down the marble staircase to the front door, calling out for his companions as he went, leaving the crumpled husk of his father behind for the final time.

  They convened in the foyer. Gerd nodded back up the steps.

  “So that's your dad, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. No wonder you never argue when people call you a bastard.”

  “Yeah, well, I… Wait. Who calls me a bastard?”

  Granny and Gerd didn't hesitate. “Everyone!”

  Marius glanced towards the library door. He saw it twitch open half an inch, then stop.

  “That’s not as funny as you might think.”

  His friends exchanged glances, but said nothing.

  “Come on,” he said, and opened the front door.

  Arnobew was waiting for them when they emerged.

  “Oh, gods,” he said when he saw Marius’ face. “He’s sent you to the marina, hasn’t he? Wait here. Just…” He moved off, held up his hands in a “stay” motion. “Just wait. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He ran off down the street. The threesome watched him go. As he turned the corner, Marius glanced at Gerd.

  “What did you get?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What did you lift?”

  “Oh, right.” Gerd rummaged around in his pockets, and eventually presented Marius with a small pile of glittering gewgaws. “I found a dressing room on the top floor, at the back. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.”

  They knelt down and examined the pile. Three necklaces, a scattering of rings, all adorned with jewels that twinkled genuine in the afternoon sunlight. Two coins from the reign of Grejjiq, back in the days of the old Dynasties three thousand years ago. Alno meowed, stretching out a paw to play with the shining pile. Marius batted it away, and held a coin up to Gerd.

  “At least a thousand riner just for that. Swallow it.”

  Gerd did as he was told, jerking his throat back and forward like a bird to make up for his dead man’s inability to create spit. When it was down, Marius held up the second.

  “What you expecting him to do?” Granny asked as she watched him force the second coin down. “Shit tenpennies?”

  “First rule of thieving,” Gerd replied, wincing as the coin finished its journey. “Never steal anything you can’t swallow.”

  “When this is over,” Marius said, running his fingers through the rest of the booty, “there’s enough in those two coins to set you both up for the rest of your lives. Deaths. Whatever.” He shook his head. “Contingency fund. Whatever.”

  “Hmmph.” She eyed him speculatively. “That’s probably what you take for being nice. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What about the rest of it?”

  Marius looked down at the meagre collection of jewellery. “My mother’s.” He scooped them up and placed them in an inner pocket of his jacket. “I’ll give them back to her when I see her.”

  “Will you see her?”

  Marius glanced up towards the darkened windows of his father’s townhouse. “Oh, yes. How long do you think the room was unoccupied?”

  “Dunno.” Gerd shrugged. “Long enough for a lot of dust.”

  “Hmm.” Marius turned his attention to Granny. “And what about you? Did you get anything?”

  “Just this.” She reached under her skirts and withdrew a long, slim sword in a leather scabbard, its hilt glittering with inlaid jewels. “Want me to swallow it?”

  “Father’s rapier.” Marius’ smile was nasty. “I’ll have that.”

  He removed his belt and slid the scabbard onto it, buckling back up just as Arnobew raced back up to them.

  “Ready!” he announced, skidding to a halt three feet from the group. They eyed him up and down as one, various levels of disbelief on their faces.

  Arnobew was wearing armour. A full suit, from the pointed toes of his boots through greaves, gauntlets, skirt, chest plate, right up to the plumed top of his helm, every inch bedecked with curlicues and fleur de lis, vine leaves and regalia. The suits of armour displayed in Scorby City’s Museum of Kings would hide their faces in shame at being so shabbily decorated in comparison. A coat of arms emerged from the centre of his breastplate by a full three inches, the motto “Humility before honour” picked out in script across the curve of his belly. It was a work of art of the most baroque extravagance, all the more impressive because the entire ensemble was so clearly made of cardboard. From his left hand dangled the twin chains of a cardboard flail, and in his right he held that most fearsome of melee weapons, a cardboard mace.

  “Arnobew!”

  “Arnobew no more!” he roared back. “I am Warbone!”

  Alno stalked over and sniffed at the cardboard warrior’s leg, then rubbed against him, a furred figure-eight going in and out and around his legs like a Moebius strip.

  “Right.” Marius bit his lip. “Right. Warbone.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Got you.”

  “Sir!”

  The three travellers avoided each other’s gazes. Marius stared over the rooftops of the nearby, lower houses.

  “So…” he began, stopped, and tried again. “The marina…”

  “Yes, sir! This way, sir!”

  Warbone marched back down the road. A cross street slid down the hill towards the bay that Marius could see twinkling between the surrounding houses. Alno skipped along next to him, one mad warrior in synch with another.

  “Come on,” Marius said, and the little group set off after them. They walked slowly through the streets, boots echoing on the perfectly aligned cobbles. Around them, the cleanest houses in the world sneered down at them in perfect symmetry.

  “Weird,” Marius said, eyeing shuttered windows as they passed. “I don’t remember V’Ellos being a hive of activity, but this…”

  “Deserted.”

  “Feels like it, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe there’s a festival or something?”

  Marius sucked at his teeth. “The rich don’t do festivals. That sort of stuff is to keep the peasants distracted while they raise taxes.”

  “Cynic.”

  “I’m my father’s son.”

  Gerd cast him a sidelong glance but kept his own counsel. Up forward, Arnobew began to sing a jaunty marching song that Marius recognised from his time in the Tallian mercenaries.

  “Joined cause I was out of luck–”

  “Arnobew?”

  “Tell me who I have to fuck–”

  “Arnobew!”

  “To get my chest free of this badge–”

  “Damn it, Arnobew!”

  Granny chuckled and took up the refrain: “I’ll even eat the queen’s old vadge.”

  “Warbone!”

  “Granny!”

  Two fiercely smiling faces turned towards Marius and Gerd.

  “Yes, sir?�
��

  “Lot of soldiers come through the mountains, boy. Wasn’t born in a nunnery.”

  Marius did his best to ignore Gerd’s embarrassed splutter, never mind Granny’s chuckle, like the sound of a young farm girl’s skirts being hiked over her hips. He pointed down the hill towards the marina, clinging artfully to the sweep of the town’s small harbour below them.

  “My father’s warehouse is down there somewhere,” he said. “Do you know it?”

  Warbone stared down at the profusion of brightly coloured buildings. “Aye,” he ventured cautiously. “I know the one he means.”

  “Why would he need a warehouse, Warbone? He stopped being a merchant when we moved here. Didn’t he?”

  “Oh,” the big man ran cardboard-gauntleted fingers through the hedgerow of his beard. “I reckon as how he did some running, here and there. Likes to keep his hand in, your Da. Likes to deal.”

  Marius eyed him. “There something you’re not telling me, Warbone?”

  “No, no.” Arnobew shook his head, fooling nobody. “There’d be no secrets he’d be trusting to a working man like me, now would there?”

  “No.” Marius loosened the scabbard’s hold on his sword a fraction. “I expect not.” They continued to walk forward, false cheer dispensed with as the grim set of Marius’ face affected the others’ mood.

  “Where is everyone, Warbone?”

  “I’m not sure I understand, sir?”

  “I’m asking you where everyone is, soldier.” Marius saw him stiffen. “That’s a direct request.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  The townhouse stopped at the bottom of the hill, and the smooth stones of the street widened out into a long boulevard that rang along the edge of a sparkling marina. To their right, the bunched masts of small pleasure craft dipped and swayed in the gentle swell of the harbour, their massed ranks moving in synch like drunken fence posts. Hulls of shining wood sat in quiet order, one to a berth, gleaming in the afternoon sun. Brass accessories added a million reflections. The names on the nearest boats reflected the general view that here, on the water where the poor could not reach them, the super-rich could find freedom from the irritating press of lesser humans. There were perhaps three hundred boats docked here, not one more than thirty feet long, all single-masted, with little more than a couple of seats and a set of oar brackets behind the tiny cabins. The big yachts, the ones with a crew and hot-and-cold-running virgins, would be reached via these little skiffs. Those boats were berthed around an island further out in the bay that had been constructed purely for the purpose. These smaller boats were for when a man wanted to be alone, with only the sea for company, where he could enjoy his champagne and cigars without interruption from anyone but the gods of wind and water. They were used a lot more often that the big ones.

  To the left rose a line of warehouses, blank facades thirty feet high with great wooden gates, distinguishable only by the change in colour from one frontage to the next. Small brass plaques were set into the front wall, next to modest entrance doors. In the daylight they presented a profusion of colours, rainbow splashes like tropical birds, announcing “Here is my money, here is my endeavour, here is where I keep my stock and nobody else gains entry unless I wish it.” To Marius’ deadened senses they blended into one another. He brought the little party to a halt, and turned to face Arnobew directly.

  “I’m waiting for an answer, Warbone,” he said, hand hovering a half-inch from the handle of his sword. Arnobew slammed to attention, his gaze pinned to an invisible horizon.

  “They’re here, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.” He glanced down at Marius, then back up again. “Every last one of them, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not the one to ask, sir.”

  Marius frowned. His fingertips brushed the sword handle. “Who is?”

  “Who is what, sir?”

  Behind him, Marius and Granny had bunched together, heads turning from side to side, drawn quiet by the feeling that something had suddenly gone very wrong. Alno dragged a paw down the leg of Gerd’s pants. After a moment Gerd bent down and scooped the cat up into his arms, where Alno lay still, large eyes staring down the dock.

  “Who is the one to ask, Warbone?”

  “I think, sir, that it might be him.”

  He pointed beyond Marius, along the dock. Marius heard Gerd mutter “Bloody hell,” before he turned and saw the object of Arnobew’s attention.

  Halfway down the dock stood a taupe-coloured warehouse significantly larger than those around it, fully eighty feet to a side, with a gently angled roof that threw slab-like shadows across the fascias of its neighbours. The massive sliding doors on its frontage appeared to be drawn back. At this angle Marius could see a thin band of light against the base of the cavernous entrance, the edge of the door a full dozen feet above his own, but nothing beyond. It didn’t matter, because three feet out from the open entrance stood a figure they all recognised.

  “Drenthe.”

  Marius had drawn his sword and was already a dozen steps away from the group and running before he was aware of his actions. Behind him he heard Granny curse, and Gerd yell at him to stop, but they were dull sounds on the edge of hearing, barely discernible over the drum of hatred in his skull. Then even that was drowned by the war scream rising ragged from his throat. The point of his sword was aimed unerringly at his enemy’s one good eye. And his enemy was laughing now, raising a hand towards the cavern beyond the warehouse doors. The vast overhang above the doors plunged the depths of the building into shadow, but even so, he could see a platoon of the dead standing motionless inside, two hundred or more silent corpses lined up and waiting for the signal Drenthe now gave them.

  They stepped forward as one. The rich of V’Ellos, wearing liveries that had coloured Marius’ teen years, and which he had taken special delight in stealing from as an adult: Garl Skeni, the textile merchant, who had parlayed a thousand tonnes of wobbly tartan into a craze for lopsided fezzes that had lasted a dozen years and as many different shades; Sond man Sip, the northern arms merchant who introduced hundred-folded steel to the King’s armies; Ghag man Rep, his second in command – embezzler, fraudster, multi-millionaire, forgiven friend; and all the rest – two hundred splashes of colour stepping out into the sun in perfect unison, standing behind their master, dead eyes staring at Marius and his friends in pure, undistilled contempt, the matching white scars at their jugulars filling his vision.

  “Where is she?”

  Drenthe parried Marius’ first blow almost without looking, his sword flickering past the first lunge to nick at his shoulder. Marius parried wildly, swung his fist at Drenthe’s face and caught him a glancing blow on the chin. The sheer momentum of Marius’ lunge rocked his opponent a step backwards. He recovered his balance. His sword flicked out again, steel against steel, blocking Marius’ charge.

  “Where is who?” He smiled, and Marius doubled his assault.

  “Tell me, you son of a bitch. Tell me where she is!”

  “Which one?” Drenthe pushed Marius off for half a moment, using the space to step away and face his enemy. “The long-legged, lithe and lovely, lascivious whore you seem to like so much? Or the whore you started with?”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  “Really?” Drenthe laughed. “Won’t that be something different?”

  Marius’ reply was little more than an incoherent scream. He threw himself forward, sword crashing down against Drenthe’s blocking blade, no more technique or style now, just vicious, battering overhead blow after overhead blow. Drenthe skipped backwards, raising his arm so that Marius’ assault careened off metal, slowly dancing out of reach as Marius continued his advance.

  “You do know,” he said as he led him towards the open doors of the warehouse, “that we can keep this up all day, don’t you? I mean, I’m not getting tired. Are you?”

  Marius said nothing, simply maintained his unthinkin
g rain of blows. Drenthe retreated before him, sword across his body, blocking everything that rained down upon him. Somewhere behind Marius, Gerd was screaming his name. Marius no longer cared. All that remained within him was the need to smash through Drenthe’s defence, to see his blade cave in that smug, smiling face, to stand above his fallen foe and smash his sword down again and again until Drenthe’s skull was nothing more than a broken pot leaking mush onto the floor and his mocking voice faded forever from the inside of his mind.

  “You should listen to them,” Drenthe said, as if on cue, clear and mocking. “They can see what’s happening.”

  Marius slowed.

  “That’s right,” Drenthe said. “Look around you, boy. Look at what you’ve walked into.”

  He lunged forward as Marius’ arm lost its energy, and gave him a hard shove to the chest. Marius stumbled backwards, thrown off balance. His arm swung down onto thin air, and fell to his side. Marius realised where he was, finally, and looked around.

  The dead had closed in behind him as he had raced forward after Drenthe, blocking him off from his companions. Now they ringed him, a solid wall of dead faces. But he barely saw them. It was what he saw beyond them that made Marius cease his furious assault.

  A thousand dead stood in ranks inside his father’s warehouse, shoulder to shoulder, pressed into the space like logs waiting to be carried outside and burned. The servants of V’Ellos, each one wore the livery of his father’s house. Each dead body was clothed in the colours of the don Hellespont merchant firm with the family crest borne over their unbeating hearts. They stared at Marius with blank dispassion. Even in the dark he could see the clear white scars that bisected their throats. He faltered, then. His arm lost its strength. His father’s sword fell to the floor.

  “Oh,” Drenthe said. “You understand now.”

  “He…”

  “He? He?” Drenthe turned the question into a laugh. “Your father, sonny. Your very own Master of V’Ellos. Supplier of arms, recruiter of troops.” Drenthe stepped close, thrust his face into Marius’. “Chooser of sides.”

  Marius stared past him, at the army of sacrifices his father had created.