ARC: The Corpse-Rat King

by Lee Battersby

  “Hey there, Mischa,” he said softly, “It’s me.”

  The water flowed past, unheeding. Marius watched it, seeing patterns in the churn. He needed to get to the Minerva, but there was time enough for memories.

  She had been crossing the bridge from the offices of the dock manager towards the villas of the richer merchants when the fighting had welled up along the river, and she was caught at the foot of the Wizard Tower. Marius was already there, crouched against the bricks, trying to squeeze himself into the cracks.

  “What’s happening?” She threw herself to the ground as a volley of crossbow bolts flew over the wall from below. “What’s going on?”

  Marius had said nothing, just peered up at her from between his fingers. He was terrified. Even so, looking up at her, hair falling loose from its bun and framing her long, oval face, her large green eyes wide with alarm, he felt something shift inside him. Without thinking, he peeled himself off the wall and buried his face in her chest, hands gripping her arms with terrified strength.

  “Hey, hey.” She lowered herself down next to him, her back to the wall. Carefully, she prised him away and altered her stance so that they sat, huddled together, while combatants tangled about them.

  “What’s your name, lad?”

  “Marius,” he stuttered. “Marius dos Hellespont.”

  “Oh,” she looked surprised. “Raife’s son?”

  “You know my father?”

  She paused. “I’m aware of him. So what’s all this, Marius? What’s happening?”

  Marius pointed further along the wall. “It’s the other bridge, Miss.”

  “Call me Mischa.” She smiled, brushed his hair back from his face. “I don’t let just anybody call me that, you know.”

  Marius reddened at the sudden familiarity, but it did the trick. His fear forgotten for the moment, his words came out in an unbidden stream. “It’s the Tarem Mob, Mischa. They’re using the ice, skating across it. They can’t get on the bridge at the ends, so this is their chance, see?”

  “But why?” Two fighters stumbled against them. Mischa kicked out, and they wheeled away into the crowd.

  “Tarem Bridge and Magister. It’s like any other gang. They hate each other.”

  “But this? Crossbows? Machetes? People are getting hurt, Marius.”

  “I know.” Marius crouched lower. “I never thought this would happen.”

  Mischa noticed the red rag tied around his upper arm. “Tarem or Magister?”

  “Magister,” he replied, fumbling at the knot. “I only wanted a bit of fun.”

  “Don’t we all, lad? Don’t we all?”

  They hunkered down and watched the fighting. Mischa shook her head.

  “We can’t stay here, Marius. It’s only a matter of time before we’re noticed.” She made to stand. Marius pulled desperately at her arm.

  “Don’t. They’ll hurt you.”

  She stopped in mid-crouch, and placed her hand on his shoulder. “If we don’t move we definitely will get hurt. We have to get to the end of the bridge. It’s the only way to safety. Look.” She reached into her sleeve, and withdrew a small square of lacework, tucking it into his hand. “For protection,” she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. Marius inhaled, smelling the sweet smell of her perfume, feeling the smoothness of her cheek and lips against his skin. He closed his eyes. Something inside him woke up and cried for life.

  “Do you trust me?” she asked. Marius opened his eyes and looked straight into hers. He had never swum in a pool so beautiful. He gulped, and nodded.

  “Then come on,” she said, pulling him to his feet. Together they ran towards the end of the bridge, hand in hand, dodging combatants as they ran. Twice, someone loomed out of the chaos, and Mischa kicked out. Each time she hit their assailant in the groin, and he doubled over. She kicked them again in the face as she stepped past.

  “Steel toes,” she gasped as they ran on. “Every working girl should have them.”

  They almost made it. They were in sight of the lower gate house that marked the end of the bridge when the press of the crowd pushed them towards the edge of the walkway. Grappling hooks hung where Tarem combatants had climbed up from the ice below. Marius stumbled, and they fell, landing against the wall.

  “Come on,” Mischa said, pushing against the wall to regain her footing. Marius rose, and pulled at her hand. She gathered her legs beneath her, and at that moment, something heavy and dark reared over the wall and dug itself into her shoulder.

  Mischa screamed as the two-pronged grappling hook bit deep. She reared up, scrabbling at the wound, letting go of Marius in the process. He leaped towards her, but in that instant, the combatants below them pulled on their rope. Mischa lurched backwards, hit the edge of the wall, and before either of them could do anything, was hauled up and over. Marius slammed into the brickwork, hardly feeling the impact against his nose and cheek. He pulled himself up on rubber legs, and hung over the top, oblivious to the fighting around him, and the snapping retorts of shot and crossbow bolts flying past.

  It was thirty feet to the ice. Mischa had struck three of her assailants as she landed. They lay on the ice, broken bodies bent at angles they could not have achieved in life. She had landed on her back, facing upwards, her neck twisted impossibly far. Her eyes were open, and they stared up at him, large and green and beautiful, and quite, quite empty. The rest of her hair had shaken loose from its bun and lay like a halo around her head, stuck tight where the spreading pool of blood glued it to the surface.

  “Mischa!” Marius screamed at her, battering his body against the unforgiving bricks. “Mischa!” She did not respond, did not move, simply lay like a discarded marionette. Marius leaned further, gauging the distance, preparing himself to jump down, looking for a safe landing, no idea in his head about what he would do other than that he had to be with her, to touch her one more time, and cradle her head into his chest the way she had done for him.

  Then a body hit the wall next to him and tumbled past, and the spell was broken. Marius turned and ran, and fought his way out of the battle.

  Somehow he found his way home, avoiding the pockets of fighting that had yet to be quelled by the guard. His father found him in the front courtyard: filthy; bleeding from half a dozen wounds; clutching a lady’s kerchief to his eyes and sobbing a single name into it over and over. He had carried his weeping son into the house and ordered his wife to run a bath. Later, after Marius had bathed and had his wounds dressed, his father persuaded him to remove the scrap of fabric from his clenched fist so that his hand could be wrapped in a fresh bandage. Then he sat before Marius in his study’s deep leather armchair and requested an explanation. His mother came in from the parlour, and settled herself on the couch, her needlework lined up on the cushion next to her. She folded her hands into her lap, waiting. Marius stood before them, twisting the kerchief round and round his fingers, and slowly, hesitantly, told his story.

  His mother had berated him for a thug and a visitor to whores. She had risen in a fury and snatched the kerchief from his grasp, throwing into the fire that roared in the hearth. His father had said nothing, merely shaking his head in disappointment. Marius had been banished from their presence, sent to his room to consider the behaviour, and the company, expected of the only son of an ambitious merchant. Marius had dried his tears and left them. It was not until he threw himself onto his bed that he gave his emotions full reign once more, promising unutterable things to the dark and to the memory of Mischa’s fall.

  His mother had come to him, later, after the evening meal, to apologise. Fear born of worry, and anger born of fear, and she had not meant the things she had said. He was her son, her good boy, and she knew he would have nothing to do with that type of person. She was just glad that he had escaped harm. She had kissed him, and held him in her arms, and left him to his sleep.

  But harm had been done to him, and his mother was never again the hearth of his home.

  The dead lay on the
ice wherever they fell, and nobody made any move to collect the corpses and see them to a burial. After the dogs had eaten their fill, and the birds, and the lizards that crawled out of the sewers in search of easy meat, the spring had come. The iced had thawed, and the bodies slipped beneath the surface of the swollen river, to tumble out into the harbour and provide a bounty for any fish that had survived the winter. But Marius was already gone, apprenticed to a Tallian court scribe recruiting entertainments for the Emir’s summer palace. As soon as it was safe to escape the scribes’ clumsy attempts at seduction he had done so. Later, upon his first return to the city, he had asked around, and found out the truth about Mischa.

  She’d been in her late thirties, at least as old as his mother, as far as anyone could tell. In the capital they’d have called her a courtesan, and confined her to the richest end of town so that she’d never have to sully her perfect white feet with the dirt of the common quarters. In Borgho she was known by a more prosaic title, and she worked where the most money resided, among the ambitious merchants and those who fancied themselves so important, that a drab late thirtyish wife was no proper accompaniment when being seen among other ambitious merchants. Marius understood, then, exactly why his father’s name had been so familiar. He did not think badly of her for it. People made worse compromises every day. He never discussed it with his father. No matter how often he had returned to Borgho in the intervening years, he had crossed the river by other bridges.

  Marius would have cursed his subconscious for bringing him back to the spot, but in truth, it fit his mood perfectly. The tossing water mirrored his thoughts, and he stared at it as if it could provide some sort of answer. But the water was just water, and his thoughts remained turbulent, and no beautiful green eyes stared back for him to dive into, and in the end, all he could do was turn his back on the water, and take the ninety-first step across the bridge.

  The wharfs on the north bank were a mirror to those on the south, although the overall impression was of, somehow, a better class of dockyard. It was cleaner; more orderly. The ships seemed in better condition, and the wharfies and navvies who bustled about wore the livery of whatever stock supply company they represented, rather than the dusty, careworn leathers favoured by their brothers over the bridge. Clear lines of progress could be seen through the crowds, as each individual ship was served by its own orderly queue of human worker ants. Marius threaded his way through, an object of complete indifference to those around him. On the south bank he guarded his hidden money pouches with a combination of secret pockets, attitude, and careful scrutiny of his surrounds. Here he felt at ease enough to stride through the mass of bodies with his concentration solely devoted to identifying the ships he passed. It wasn’t difficult – even from a distance, the Minerva stood out against the backdrop of hulls and masts, a hulking monster looming over its surroundings.

  Marius had been no more than a child when Mad King Nandus had received possession of his flagship, the Nancy Tulip. The north side docks had been created to cope with the construction, and they maintained the gloss that comes with living under a monarch’s auspices, even an insane one who built his castle on an ancient, crumbling bridge, and commissioned a five hundred-tonne clinker-built warship for the sole purpose of waging war on the Gods of the ocean. Marius remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders at wharf-side, as the ship slowly made its way from its berth a mile away on the opposite shore to the Magister Bridge, where it pulled alongside the single door and balcony built onto the palace’s outer side. As soon as it had pulled up, Nandus appeared and gave a great speech about liberty, equality, and the need for giant clam slaves, then stepped directly from the balcony to the poop deck of the great ship, thirty feet above the water. The Nancy Tulip and its four hundred-strong crew of sailors, soldiers, and gunners, as well as Littleboots, the horse he had appointed to the Borghan Senate – which had surprised most citizens, who weren’t aware Borgho had a senate – wobbled its way down the river and out onto the open sea, where the horizon swallowed it for all time.

  The Nancy Tulip had been a massive ship. No clinker-built vessel had been commissioned that even approached its measurements. Marius had heard estimates of one hundred and forty feet in length, and its height was part of folklore. It had been so large that available technology had been unable to complete the task. New ways of manufacture had been invented: the nails were eight times as large as previously necessary, necessitating a whole new way of manufacture; hull planks were longer, wider, heavier, needing new methods of harvesting and cutting; the sails alone weighed as much as some small ships, and hoisting them by traditional methods would have broken any normal winch. Marius remembered gazing up at the side of the ship as it had passed by on its way downriver, seeing a nail head the size of his father’s fist go by a few feet from his face, feeling a sudden chill as the sheer bulk of the ship blocked out the sun and a wall of shade engulfed the wharf. In all his years of travel he had never felt so overwhelmed by a structure as that day, when the Nancy Tulip seemed like the biggest object in the entire world, and its movement made him sick with vertigo.

  The Minerva was bigger.

  Ship-building technology had advanced in the last thirty years. Clinker ships were a thing of the past – the Nancy Tulip, ironically, had seen to that. Ships could not be built big enough or stable enough for modern needs using the old methods. Cog built ships like the Minerva were the order of the day – smooth-hulled, wider at the keel, safer and more stable in heavy seas and high winds. Ships were bigger, as a rule. Rarely as big as the Nancy Tulip, but on average, the cog-built ship was the way forward.

  Even by the standards of the new technology, the Minerva was huge. Marius stood to one side as a stream of navvies climbed the steep gangway. A dozen barrels rolled their way upwards to disappear behind the gunwales, as did a constant stream of wrapped bales. Chickens in wicker cages were carried past. A navvie staggered under the weight of a dozen crossbows. As quickly as the labourers entered the ship they returned, jogging down to disappear inside a massive warehouse twenty yards further down the wharf. Marius stepped back into the shade of the building and admired the industry with which the navvies climbed the sheer face of the walkway. The deck of the Minerva towered at least forty feet above the wharf, and the hull was a good one hundred and sixty five feet from prow to stern, if Marius was any judge of size. Where the Nancy Tulip, for all its master’s lunacy, had been a fully-functioning warship, weighed down with cannon and armouries, the Minerva was built for trade. Marius swept his gaze across the vast expanse of wood, estimating how much of the ship’s innards might be given over to empty holds. He whistled. With the kind of load the Minerva was capable of carrying, it was likely to be headed out on a long, long voyage. Exactly what Marius was seeking. He stepped out of the shade and made his way to the foot of the gangway.

  “Hold your horses, pal.” A massive, anvil-jawed man in shirtsleeves sat on a barrel at the walkway’s base, ticking items off a sheaf of paper as they passed. Without looking up from his task he tilted his head in dismissal. “Unless you’re carrying supplies you’re in my way, so piss off.”

  Marius stared past him towards the deck of the ship. “I’m to speak to the captain.”

  “Captain’s already seen the dock master. Papers are all in order. Now you’re in my way and you’re getting up my nose.” The sailor stood, laying his sheaf on the barrel. The passing navvies immediately stopped, and laid down their burdens. “I hope you know how to fly, laddie.”

  “My name’s Helles,” Marius said, as the sailor raised fists the size of a small child’s head. “My… friend saw him last night, regarding passage.”

  “The lady?” The sailor lowered his hands, looked Marius up and down in something approaching surprise. “Red-haired lass, built like a long night in the tropics?”

  “Her name’s Keth.” Marius said, feeling a disconcerting stab of jealousy.

  “Bloody hell, son.” The big man stepped back, and nodded toward
s the top. “If you can keep her to yourself you’re more energetic than you look.” Marius stepped on to the gangway, and the sailor returned to his seat. “Captain’s in his cabin at the rear castle. Tell him Spone passed you through.” He glanced up at the resting workers, dismissing Marius from his attention. “Right, you horrible lot of lazy old whores, sleep time’s over. Shift your arses!”

  Marius scurried up the gangway ahead of the belaboured navvies. He turned sternward at the top, away from the stream of labourers, and made his way past teams of labouring sailors as they made their way to various holds arrayed across the deck. Everywhere was industry, energy, and organised panic as the crew made the ship seaworthy. A set of steps led upwards to a poop deck above his head, dominated by an enormous wheel that looked over all the terrestrial endeavours below it like a god’s unblinking eye. Marius stared up at it for a moment, wondering at the size and strength of the man who could turn that massive wooden circle. The space between decks was closed off by a pair of doors. Two stained glass windows faced out onto the deck – Marius would need to pass multi-coloured impressions of the Old Gods Oceanus and Aequoris in order to speak to the captain. He drew no comfort from the knowledge that the man responsible for his safe escape was so superstitious. He tugged the brim of his hood further down over his face and knocked upon Oceanus’ blood-red nose.