The Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  “Well, Scorby City, of course. I don’t see–”

  “Exactly. Straight at the biggest city on the continent, where he can form up all his troops in nice straight lines and nice square blocks and meet his enemy on the field of combat like a good old-fashioned king. And then everyone can look his opponent in the eye, and men on horses can ride up and down giving stirring speeches, and it will all be nice and honourable and formal, and he can rely on human nature to cock everything up so he can wait at the back and pick up the spoils after all the real fighters have killed each other and come over to his side.”

  “Just like before.”

  “Just like every bloody battle ever fought by a living army fighting another living army.”

  “But–”

  “Drenthe.”

  “Yes?”

  “How would you get into Scorby City?”

  Drenthe shrugged. “Travel the tunnels, come up in a back alley somewhere near where I was headed.”

  “So why didn’t you tell Scorbus to do it when you were weaselling your way up his chain of command?”

  “Well…” The dead man looked around at the faces that were suddenly looking at him in intense interest. “I only wanted to find out what he was planning. I don’t want him to win.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…” He looked back at Marius. “Helles, you know why.”

  “Actually, I think I do.” Drenthe looked relieved by this, as Marius continued: “So, the question remains. Why do it your way not Scorbus’?”

  “Well, it’s the easiest way, isn’t it?”

  “Because you’re dead.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Ohhh,” Gerd gasped, and pressed his fists against his temples.

  “Yes?”

  “His whole army is dead.”

  “Yes!” Marius threw his hands up. “Now you get it!”

  “A dead army shouldn’t have to fight a battle.” Gerd leaned forward, hands shaking as the implications of his reasoning struck home. “It should be able to run straight to the place it wants to be, then just come up and take it.”

  “More than that.” Marius rolled his hands around each other, expanding the thought. “He shouldn’t even need an army.”

  “Well… no… he’d have to… okay, I’m not seeing that.”

  “Kill the King, what happens?”

  “You have a dead king?”

  “No.” It was Keth who matched Marius stare for stare. “Kill the King, and he becomes your ally. Kill the parliament, and you own the laws. Kill the generals, and you own the army. The army kills the people, and you have the kingdom. The kingdom kills its neighbours, and you own the world.”

  “Spot on.”

  “You don’t need to have an army. You don’t need to march anywhere. You don’t need to kill everybody. Just one person. Kill the right person, and people will do all your work for you.”

  Marius smiled. “That’s how a dead person thinks.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “All well and good,” Brys folded her arms, and stared around the group, “but who do we need to kill?”

  Marius smiled. “Nobody. All the right people are dead already. We just have to collect them. Brys.” He turned to the smuggler. “Your tubmen. Where do you get them from?”

  She shrugged. “Here and there. Ports, mostly.”

  “Underneath the ports, yes?”

  “Yeah. They drag a body out every now and then.”

  “Good. Take your tubmen. Send them under the water. Get them recruiting. I want the nastiest pieces of shit you can find, and I want them armed.” His attention switched to Drenthe. “Now you. Whatever deal you cut with my father, change it. I want hammers, maces, flails, coshes, truncheons, knobkerries, bits of pipe, chair legs, thigh bones… whatever you can buy that crushes and breaks. Cutting instruments are no good. I want ten thousand of them, and I want to be holding one inside a week.”

  “And what are we supposed to pay with?”

  Marius turned towards his mother. “That’s where you come in.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The room was full of bones. A thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand; it was impossible to tell. But they were all the same. Finger bones, each one an inch or so long, white and grey and a dirty sort of brown, piled on one another like a mountain of discarded quill stubs. The group stood at the door and stared in mute shock while Marius bent and scooped up a handful, letting them trickle clackingly down upon their comrades.

  “Why don’t you tell them what you do with them, Mother?”

  She looked at him, then away.

  “Indulgences.”

  “What?” Four heads swivelled towards her.

  “Indulgences,” she repeated, sighing as she picked a bone up and peered at it. “The dead die so sinful, so full of regret. No matter how noble they are in life, how many times they make the right observances, or attend the masses, nobody dies in a state of grace. They all wish to repent something.”

  “And the gods keep changing, don’t they, Mother?”

  Halla said nothing, so Marius pressed home his advantage. “Imagine dying three hundred years ago, knowing in your holy heart of hearts that you’re about to take your place in the dining halls of Gnisbrid the Mighty. Imagine when you discover that Gnisbrid is a false god, and the only true gods are the Spinning Sisters. Or the Ultimate Zzif. Or… What are we worshipping this decade, Mother?”

  “We have to survive.” She looked up from the finger bone, glanced at the roof above. “We’ve adapted so many times over the years. We’re too small and isolated not to take notice of the world outside.”

  “No matter the consequences, eh?” Marius kicked at the bones, sending a spray of disconnected fingers across the room. “How long have the dead been coming to your door, Mother? How many have you sent away with these trinkets?”

  “They believe.” She spat the words out: at Marius, at his companions, at the walls. “At least they believe.”

  “Fear and desperation. That’s your belief.” Marius turned to the others. “But it’s desperation we can use.”

  “How?”

  “What are the dead following Scorbus for? Absolution. God’s attention. Entry to Heaven. With these,” he snatched the bone from his mother’s grasp and brandished it, “we can give it to them.” He turned back to Halla. “Show me where you store the carved ones.”

  The world is full of sin. More sins than any holy book can list. More than any church can point a disapproving relic at. More than any poverty-stricken yokel out in some forgotten corner of the kingdom can avoid without a travelling priest coming around every couple of years to point out all the ways sin has crept into their tired, misbegotten lives. Because the last thing the church needs is for its subjects to find some small measure of happiness in a life that began, continued, and will undoubtedly end in the shit. It takes a lot of infrastructure to support that amount of sin, more than any church can afford without a lot of gold coming in. But what to do when the majority of followers are exactly those miserable, dirt-grubbing innocents in the forgotten corners? How to persuade them to part with whatever meagre crop of pennies they’ve dredged up from the dry and unforgiving earth?

  Thus: indulgences.

  You are a sinner. You can’t help but be a sinner. And you’ll die in sin. Everyone does. How much worse, then, to die when the priest is at the other end of the forest reminding some other poor bastard of all the ways in which he is sinning?

  But there is a way you can guard against such a circumstance. A scrap of paper, signed by the Holy Father/Mother/Triumvirate/take your pick. Words of absolution. Words of forgiveness. A once in a lifetime, cure-all-ills, one hundred per cent guarantee of divine entry into the afterlife of your choice, backed by the biggest muckity-muck in the denomination of your choice, sin-free and soul as pearly white as the teeth you lost before adolescence, friend. And all it costs you is your belief. And soul. And whatever funds you might have stash
ed in the back of your hovel beneath the pallet on which you and the missus and all your kids sleep together.

  The priest takes a cut. The bishop takes a cut. The church takes a cut. And you get a scrap of parchment guaranteeing you a sinless death. Everybody’s happy. Unless, of course, you don’t do the decent thing and stay dead.

  Then what do you do?

  “They’ve been coming here for two hundred years,” Halla said as they climbed the stairs to the main level.

  “Two hundred?” Marius frowned. “That can’t be right.”

  His mother glanced at him. “And why is that?”

  “Because…” Scorbus has only been King for four, he was about to say. But that was absurd, he realised. The dead had already been waiting for a King long before they dragged Marius down beneath the ground. Some had been waiting for centuries. Of course they wouldn’t all stay still. Of course some would seek answers. “And they came to you.”

  “In dribs and drabs, mostly. One or two a year, wanting to know why God won’t take them, why they’ve been denied their eternal peace.”

  “And you fob them off.”

  “What else can we do?” She stopped, turning upon her son. “They were dead, Marius. Walking dead people, begging us to end their suffering. Think what you want of us but we are still nuns. We still believe in God–”

  “Any god.”

  “Whichever god seems most right. And we still care about those who believe, even after death.”

  “So what do you do?” Granny’s voice: respectful, and with so much belief and need it made Marius wince.

  “In the beginning the sisters made them comfortable.” They continued climbing. “They were ministered to, helped along the way to redemption. Some of them found a sort of peace. Many didn’t.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They left. Went back into the world. Others…”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do.”

  Halla made no reply. Instead, she led them along a corridor to a locked door. “In the last three years they’ve been coming in numbers we’d never dreamed of, all of them seeking absolution. All of them talking about a king who promised them Heaven, and telling them it was where they had wasted their lives all along. And all they want is some way of coming back, something they can hold onto that lets them know it’s okay to be here, that they deserve to be in the world.”

  “So you con them.”

  “We give them a token, Marius. We give them something to hold onto.”

  “And what does it cost them, Mother? What do you take from them?”

  “They’re dead. What more could we take?”

  She swung the door open and ushered them inside.

  The room beyond was not large, but the bustle of activity made it seem even smaller than it was. Twenty nuns sat amongst five benches, with an empty barrel to their left and one the tubmen had delivered to her right. As the group watched, a nearby nun dropped a bone into the left barrel then dipped her hand into the right and removed a clean bone. She placed it in a small vice before her, rolled her shoulders a few times to loosen them up, then picked up a small scratch awl. She leaned forward, frowned in concentration, and began to carve.

  “We work six-hour shifts,” Halla said, leading the group amongst the tables. “The indulgences are general in nature. We can’t get too specific. The range of requests is too great.”

  “What do they say?” Granny asked, awe in her voice.

  “That they are loved by God, that they have the right to walk in his fields, that to die is not a sin but a right.” She stopped, bending past a nun to remove a bone just as it was finished. “Would you like one?”

  “I…” Granny glanced at Marius. He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Yes please.”

  “Here. Take it, with my blessing.” Granny accepted the trinket with reverence, then looked defiantly at Marius as she secreted it about herself.

  “Feel better, do you?” Marius asked.

  “Yes, actually. So stick that in your pipe and go fuck yourself.”

  Halla blinked. “Yes, well, we aim for perhaps a more forgiving view of those who wrong us.”

  “Forgive yourself first.” Marius brushed past her. “At least she’s honest.”

  “We are honest. We’re just…”

  “Adaptable?”

  “I can see where he gets it from.” Keth giggled, and elbowed Gerd. Marius turned. His companions were staring at him, grinning. He frowned.

  “You wanted to know what to pay your dead with?” he asked Drenthe and Brys, gesturing at the buckets of carved finger bones. “Gather them up.” He faced his mother. “Now,” he said, with the nastiest of smiles. “Show me what you do with your dead.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Marius walked through an arch made up of angelic messengers from a dozen different and largely contradictory gods, and emerged onto a balcony that stood open to the sea. Above him a beatific face stretched twenty feet across the cliff in every direction. Fifty feet below, waves crashed onto rocks like shark’s teeth, spitting spray into the air in angry spirals. Wind whipped across the balcony, momentarily staggering him as he stepped out of the shelter of the corridor.

  “We give them every honour and respect,” Halla shouted over the roar of the waves. “We line the floors with leaves from the plants we grow, and hang tapestries that have been in our possession for hundreds of years. We sing songs that tell of our sister’s humility and works, and those of us who have worked with her recount stories of the example she has provided to us all.”

  “And then you fling her over the edge.”

  “We send her to her sisters, to rejoin the waters which surround each unborn child within their mother’s womb.”

  “You dump them in the ocean to be bashed to smithereens by the waves.” He risked a glance over the edge and stepped back, queasy. “Useless to me. Absolutely useless.”

  “And what are we supposed to do? Bury them?”

  “There are options. There are other ways…” He stopped, looked sidelong at his mother’s profile. “Where is your ossuary?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No. You don’t get to see that. That is sacred space.”

  “Show me.” He stalked towards her, one hand holding his flying hair back from his forehead, the other pointed towards her like the business end of a rapier. “I knew you’d have one, just knew it. Some place you can store your highest and mightiest, somewhere you can stop kidding yourself that we’re all equal under the eyes of your little gods, so you can run your fingers through someone’s rib bones and send up a little prayer: ‘Please, my merciful and wonderful father figure, let little old me be good enough and strong enough–’”

  Her slap came out of nowhere, an instinctive movement that caught them both by surprise.

  “You don’t,” she said, “get to say that.”

  Marius raised a hand to his cheek. The blow hadn’t hurt. He was far too dead for that. But in that moment, a hundred memories had spun to the surface, shaken loose by the impact. A hundred moments where he had provoked a similar sting: never physical, never an actual strike, because the wives of ambitious merchants did not stoop so low as to hit their child. But a hundred withering glares; a hundred carefully chosen phrases that belittled or cried disappointment at behaviours he should have known better than to try, but which he had tried anyway just to get the reaction he craved; a hundred dismissals with the knowledge that he was an unworthy child, a failure with no redemption. A hundred times he had set out to disappoint, to upset, to hurt. A hundred successes. And now he was no longer a child, and she was no longer the proper lady wife of a ruthless trader, and there were no more conventions to hide behind.

  “You don’t get to say that,” she repeated. “Those women died doing something noble, not fighting over some grubby back-alley whore or bilking good, honest, hard-working people–”

  “Rich people.”

  “–honest
people out of their earnings, like a filthy, common thief. Every woman in here gives themselves over to something higher.”

  “Every woman?” Marius threw back his head and laughed. “Every woman!” And then his voice was a vicious hiss that left no space for argument. “Not every woman. Not the spoiled wife of a money-hungry, hate-filled bastard, not when she had this… priest’s hole to duck her head back into any time she couldn’t buy herself off with another necklace.” He dug into his pockets, emerged with the handful of jewellery he had lifted from his father’s house. “There you go. Now you can have both.”

  She took them from him, eyed them a moment, then whipped her arm outwards and flung them over the edge into the ocean. Marius stared at her.

  “Do you know what I had to do to get those for you?”

  She laughed. “Oh, so like your father.”

  “Don’t act like you know me.”

  She pointed to where the baubles had arced out over the water. “You know nothing about me.”

  “I know enough.”

  “Oh? You know how I met your father?”

  “Do I care?”

  “My papa was a merchant.”

  “So, what? You saw a younger version of Daddy?”

  “No, it wasn’t that.” She raised a hand to her hair, tried unsuccessfully to smooth it out. “When I was little, he taught me how to play Kingdom. Penny hands, just for fun, he said. I was terrible at it, always was. We used to joke about how bad I was, how I couldn’t see the runs, couldn’t pick the balance of play. It was our together time, our daddy-daughter hobby whenever he got a few moments away from the pressure of his life. By the time I was sixteen I was down eighteen thousand riner.”