by Jim C. Hines
“What if it poisons him?” asked Leech. “Blue could’ve lied.”
Rook thought—he hoped—the redcap had been too frightened to lie. But if not … “Then Tipple’s no worse off than he is now.”
He put one hand behind Tipple’s neck and helped him sit up. It was like lifting a fully loaded wagon.
Tipple sighed. “Bottoms up!”
Rook only let him drink one swallow. If it was poison, he’d have a better chance of fighting off a smaller dose.
“Now can we get rid of these blasted ropes?” Tipple held up his bound wrists.
“Not until we know you’re cured.” He shoved the stopper back into the vial, returned it to the chest, and hoisted the whole thing onto one shoulder.
“Well, let’s get to it then.” Tipple gestured towards his legs. “It’s not like I can walk back to Brightlodge.”
Both Rook and Leech turned to look at Inga.
“Oh, hell.” With a resigned sigh, she laid Bulwark on the ground beside Tipple and set about converting the shield into a makeshift sled.
CHAPTER 11
LEECH
Look at this jawbone.” Leech held the L-shaped shard of bone in front of Tipple and poked at one of the large, yellowed teeth protruding from the groove along the top. “There’s a clean break along the centre where Inga hit it with her sword, but you can see it’s too long to be human.”
He placed it next to Tipple’s cheek to demonstrate where the jaw would connect to the rest of the skull. The end of the bone protruded a good two inches beyond his chin. The teeth were unusually large as well, and the bone was thicker than human jaws. Not large enough to be a balverine, though. An immature balverine might have a jawbone this size, but the teeth would be sharper, and there would be more of them. These teeth were worn smooth with age. Some kind of redcap, perhaps? He set it down and moved on to a curved fragment of skull.
Leech had gathered every broken piece of bone he could find from the site of Yog’s home. The intact bones had traipsed off with her walking hut, but they seemed to lose their magic when damaged. Bones covered the entirety of Leech’s primary dissection table, sorted according to function and size.
Tipple was laid out on the other table, which groaned and creaked every time he shifted position. Leather straps secured his limbs, with additional ropes pulled tight to keep him from escaping. Tipple didn’t seem to be getting worse, but Leech refused to take chances.
“This place is … well, it suits you,” Tipple commented.
“Thanks.” Leech had rented the one-room home shortly after he arrived in Brightlodge. Officially, he lodged at Wendleglass Hall with the rest of the Heroes, but people could get so worked up when they barged in and found you dissecting a goodfellow on the floor. Besides, he liked having a place he could go for quiet and solitude.
Carefully labelled specimens covered the shelves on the walls, from bones to hides to jars containing preserved organs. A stuffed shrew peered down at them from the topmost shelf. Leech had set a tiny black hat on the shrew’s head a few days back, when he was feeling whimsical. It gave the place a sense of fun.
The shutters were open, providing additional light and ventilation. The tools of his trade—saws, knives, pliers, and drills—were arranged on a narrow countertop. On the opposite side of the room, a pile of blankets were neatly folded against the wall, beside the hearth. Everything in its proper place.
“My legs still hurt,” Tipple said.
“That’s ’cause I didn’t fully heal them.” Leech had removed the crossbow bolts and given Tipple a healing potion to seal the worst of the wounds but had deliberately watered down the potion. The torn, swollen tissue would slow Tipple down if he somehow broke free and tried to attack Leech or run off.
“Can’t say I blame you.” He stared up at the ceiling. “I’d be dead if not for you lot.”
“Aw, not necessarily. You’d probably just be a greencap, or maybe still walking about as Yog’s slave.”
“And you, working t’fix me up again. I love you guys.” He belched quietly. “How long before I piss the rest of Yog’s ale out of my system?”
Leech picked up another piece of skull. “Don’t worry. By the time Rook and Inga get done helping to round up any remaining greencaps, you’ll be good as new. If not, we can always try another round of leeches to speed things along.”
Tipple grimaced. “What are you looking for with those bones?”
“Anything they can tell me about Yog and her power.” He brought the shard of bone to Tipple. “This came from a redcap. You can see where the nail went in.” The skull had split along that nail hole, leaving only a triangular gouge in the bone.
Tipple stared, his red-veined eyes blinking blearily. “How d’you know it’s not a human skull someone put a nail through?”
“Look at the edge of the bone. See how it’s thickened and rounded around the nail hole? That’s where the bone knitted together. Healed right around the nail. This hole was there for years before the creature died.” He waved a hand at the other bones. “But there are skulls here that look human, as well as balverines, ogres, goodfellows, and some I don’t recognise.”
“And that tells you what, exactly?”
“Yog’s just scavenging for bones, not using any particular creature. However she controlled ’em, that power came entirely from her, not from the bones themselves.”
“You have the creepiest hobbies.”
“Nothing creepy about it.” Leech set the fragment back in the skull section of the table and picked up a femur. “We’re all made up of the same basic bits and bobs. Once you know how the parts work, you can take down a man twice your size.”
He grabbed a fibula and a tibia, held them together in his other hand, and showed where the two lower bones would join with the femur at the knee. “Ever tried to break a man’s thigh? You’re probably strong enough, but it’s one of the toughest bones in the body. Much easier to take out the knee instead.” He bent the bones at the joint to demonstrate, then set the femur down.
“These two connect the knee to the ankle. The tibia’s pretty tough, but land one good kick to the fibula …” He returned the larger bone to the table, took the fibula with both hands, and snapped it in two. “Doesn’t matter how strong you are. Dislocate the right bones, and you’re not going anywhere.”
He reached out to brush a splinter of bone off Tipple’s face. “Joints and organs are even better. Have you ever looked at an elbow or a knee beneath all that skin and blood? They’re just bands of muscle and cartilage holding things together. Much easier to tear and destroy. I once measured how much weight it took to dislocate a human elbow. Go on, guess.”
Tipple’s complexion had turned slightly pale.
“Still nauseated?” Leech asked cheerfully. “I can loosen the rope around your neck if you need to vomit again. Let me grab another bucket. I can compare this to your earlier mess. There might be a way to measure whether the bloody ale in your gut is decreasing.”
He waited, but Tipple didn’t answer.
“Thirteen pounds,” Leech said. “To dislocate the elbow, I mean. A lot depends on the angle. But with the right training and a little luck, even a child could do it.”
Tipple shifted his chin towards a bandage knotted around Leech’s forearm. “What happened t’ you? I thought you stayed back from the fighting.”
Leech glanced at his arm. “I drained some of my blood. I wanted to compare it to the blood of a greencap. And to yours. Don’t worry, I learned how to stitch myself up one-handed years ago.” He set the broken fibula in the leg-bone pile. “How are you feeling? Any strange urges to kill me or nail a cap to your head?”
“Feels like someone already did.” Tipple groaned. “Do those bones tell you how to kill that witch?”
“Not yet. But I can tell you she’s travelled all over Albion.” Leech scooped up a flattened skull with large eye sockets and pointed teeth. “This looks like a seal or a sea lion. You don’t see those until you
get up near the Divide.”
He grabbed another bone, a vertebra larger than his fist. “And you know what this is?”
“A bone?”
“Yes, yes. But what kind of bone?”
“Oh hell, Leech. I don’t know.”
“Neither do I!” Leech grinned and turned the bone over in his hands. “The closest I’ve seen came from a horse, but this is longer and heavier. Not thick enough to be an ogre vertebra, though.”
“You’re a peculiar man,” Tipple said. “Smartest fellow I’ve ever met, but peculiar.”
Leech nodded. People had said far worse to him. It didn’t matter. And Tipple’s teasing was never edged with cruelty. That was just how he acted with people he considered friends.
Leech had tried to reciprocate once, but his attempt at friendly teasing had fallen flat. Apparently, calling someone an ugly drunk who smelled like the inside of a goat’s arse was an insult no matter how cheerfully you said it.
He turned back to his work. Sorting and identifying the various bone fragments was an interesting distraction, but what he really wanted to figure out was how Yog had brought the bones back to life. Traces of Yog’s power remained, but in most cases, too little for him to work with. He had set aside several pieces that felt promising. He picked up the largest, a mostly intact thighbone, and carried it over to Tipple.
“What now?” he asked.
“Shut up and let me concentrate.” Yog hadn’t been present to command each individual bone. Even if she had, Leech doubted anyone could directly control so many flying minions against multiple opponents. It would be like a general giving orders to every individual soldier. More likely, Yog had simply animated the bones and sent them forth with a general set of commands.
Leech wrapped one hand around the bone. Cold seeped into his blood, like shadows worming through his veins, seeking his heart. It was a familiar sensation but disconcerting nonetheless. He wondered idly what would happen the day those shadows finally reached their target.
While some tendrils worked their way inwards, others stretched from his body deep into the bone, tugging at the faint embers of life trapped within. He touched his other hand to the scabbed wound on Tipple’s right thigh. The redness faded slightly.
“Not bad, hey?” Leech pulled free, allowing the bone to clatter to the floor. “It wouldn’t fix more than a scraped knee, but that’s not the point. Plenty of living opponents to use for healing. But the next time Yog throws her bones our way, I should be able to drain ’em in midair. Probably.”
Someone pounded on the door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. Leech wandered over and opened the door a crack, then turned to Tipple. “Have you felt anything weird since we left the Boggins? Anything tugging you towards other greencaps, maybe?”
“My britches’ve been riding up something awful, but that’s about it. Why?”
“Just curious.” Leech peeked out again at the cloaked figures, hunched and giggling on the street in front of his house. They had a dog on a leash who was cloaked as well, but the dog had shaken off the hood to reveal a lopsided green cap. “Either they were drawn here by your presence or else they just decided my home looked like a good place for mischief.”
He picked up a scalpel from the table and donned the leather apron he used when working with hazardous substances and specimens. It should serve as makeshift armour.
“What’s out there?” Tipple asked. “Let me up, and I can—”
“No need.” Leech opened the door. “There’s only five of them.”
Leech returned a short time later and dropped the scalpel into an open jar of diluted alcohol. The clink sounded louder than usual in the otherwise-silent house.
He untied his leather apron and sighed. One of the greencaps had cut a gash along the front. Two others had bled all over him. The leather was treated to repel fluids, but getting the blood out of the mask and his favourite hat was another matter.
Certain venoms were particularly effective at dissolving bloodstains. In living victims, the venom turned the blood watery and prevented it from clotting. Sea-serpent venom worked the best. Deadly, but great for laundry. He’d have to see about picking some up.
He set his hat on the table and went to drag one of the bodies inside. Tipple watched him intently, hardly even blinking. His intensity was enough to make Leech reach for another scalpel. Once armed, he visually inspected Tipple’s bonds. “What is it?”
Tipple jerked his chin towards the door. “You just took apart a pack of greencaps with a blade the size of my little finger.”
“I only killed two,” said Leech. “The rest ran away. Including the dog.”
In truth, Leech had allowed the dog to escape. He preferred dogs to most people. They were so much more honest. If the dog liked you, it wagged its tail. If not, it growled and tried to bite you.
At the same time, it would have been fascinating to dissect a dog who had been transformed into a greencap. To the best of Leech’s knowledge, redcap blood only turned humanoids. What had Yog done to her mixture to make it affect dogs, too? And what was a dog doing drinking tainted ale in the first place?
“You ought to think about cutting me loose,” said Tipple. “Anything gets inside, there’s not much I can do to protect myself like this.”
“That’s why I didn’t let them in.”
Tipple laughed. “You’re not intimidated by anything, are you?”
“Should I be?” He returned to the door to fetch the fallen greencap.
“You’re hurt.”
Leech glanced at his side, where blood soaked his shirt and the top of his trousers. “One of the greencaps caught me with a cleaver.” In the heat of the fight, he’d barely felt it. He touched the cut, and pain flared through his side. He pressed a hand over it to slow the bleeding.
“Why didn’t you just heal it?”
“I am.” He dug through one of the cabinets until he found a healing potion. He pulled the cork loose with his teeth, spat it onto the floor, and downed the contents.
“I meant that thing you do. Like when you stopped my knee from bleeding all over the place.”
Leech tugged the shirt away from his side. The skin was pink and tender, but the bleeding had stopped. “It doesn’t work on me.”
Tipple pursed his lips. “Where’d you learn how to do that, anyway? I’ve met Will users before, but never one who could steal the life out of his enemies.”
Leech used a knife to cut away his shirt and used it to wipe up the worst of the blood from his side. “I used to be a barber.”
That elicited a barking laugh though Leech hadn’t intended it as a joke. “Like that fellow down by the Port who keeps trying to talk me into colouring my hair ginger?”
“That’s right. I’d cut hair, pull teeth, stitch wounds, lance boils, splint bones, apply leeches, and more. I learned how to amputate limbs and cut people open. Most of ’em even survived. Once you’ve seen people from the inside, you realise we’re all pretty much the same. Humans, hobbes, balverines, redcaps … I could lay out the spleens of a dozen different species, and aside from a little variation in size and colour, you’d never guess which one came from which.”
“That doesn’t explain the power,” said Tipple. “Don’t tell me they teach tricks like that in the Barbers’ Guild.”
Leech pulled on a clean shirt, then finished arranging the greencap on a tarp. “Nope. Though they did teach the importance of a razor-sharp blade. The rest came along after an encounter with a shadowblight.”
Tipple whistled. “What happened?”
“I killed it, obviously.” If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been here. “I’m sure I’ve told you this before.”
“I get the occasional gap in my memory these days.”
Leech wasn’t surprised. Between the drinking and the fighting, Tipple’s body had taken a lot of abuse over the years. “I was living in Whitehollow at the time. I’d been out working in the graveyard—”
“Working?”
/> “Collecting samples,” Leech explained. “The shadowblight surprised me in the woods on the way home.”
The sun had been setting, turning the sky a darkening shade of red. He remembered the shadowblight swooping towards him like a strip of midnight torn from the blackest sky, with eyes like red flame. It moved quickly, circling Leech and cutting off his escape. Deep in the woods with nobody else around, armed only with the tools of his trade, Leech had expected to die. “I think the body parts I’d harvested confused it, scattering its power like a crystal to sunlight. I sliced its neck with a bone saw and stabbed it in the shoulder with a pair of scissors.”
“Ha! Good on you, Leech. Everything’s a weapon when you’re desperate.”
“It wasn’t enough.” The shadowblight had fought viciously, shrugging off its wounds and biting and clawing at Leech’s flesh. At the same time, the creature had continued its efforts to reach into Leech’s soul, ripping the heat and life from his body. He remembered hearing his weapons fall away, and the forest whirling around him. He must have fallen, but he didn’t recall hitting the ground. Only the darkness, blotting out the sky, the trees, the feel of the air, the smell of the leaves.
In the silence that followed, nothing existed but the shadowblight tearing at his soul like a carrion bird.
“We were connected,” Leech said. “I should’ve died. But while it was busy ripping the life from my body, I reached out and did the same to it.”
Few people saw a shadowblight and lived. Leech knew of none who had fallen into the shadowblight’s darkness and escaped.
“You’re walking around with part of a bloody shadowblight inside you, and you’ve got me tied up for drinking a little poisoned ale.”
Leech grabbed a knife and carefully used the tip to clean the blood from the thin white crescents of his nails. “It’s certainly given me a useful skill set. Fixing you lot, draining our enemies. And then there’s this.”
Leech wiped the knife on his sleeve, then set it aside. Through the lenses of his mask, he peered not at Tipple’s flesh, but at the life pulsing within. Smaller flickers of life glowed like dying embers from the bones arranged through the house. Shadows reached out, but instead of drawing on those lives, he simply wrapped the darkness around himself like a blanket. He felt himself becoming thinner, while at the same time growing beyond the bounds of his human body.