The Corpse-Rat King

by Lee Battersby

  The Parade Ground itself would be enough to take a man’s breath away. A massive clearing, gouged from the top of the cliff, flattened by the feet of ten thousand workmen. Cobbles the size of a man’s head had been quarried from walls of black granite in the heart of the Brooth Mountains to cover it. It lay between the balconies of the Royal Apartments and the Bone Cathedral like a vast stone lake, its open sides exposing the city two hundred feet below, inspiring a sudden vertigo in those who looked sideways after travelling up the crowded building-sided channel of the main boulevard. Nine thousand men had stood here, ranked in perfect squares, during the time of the Defence, when Trechyan nomads from the north had swept down out of the upper plains and threatened the city. Nine thousand soldiers had crowded the square, turning in perfect unison to hail the King as he stood on the balcony above them, wheeling off in utter synchronicity to march twelve abreast down the boulevard and out of the city gates, a thunderous cavalcade of boots on the stone streets, a mass of military might that had never before been seen within the city walls. Only after they had stormed out onto to the plains to confront the marauding nomads, and been slaughtered to a man, did the city learn: in open ground, nomads cannot be defeated. But it is impossible to conquer city walls twenty feet thick with a pony and a short bow. The nomads moved on, Scorby City wiped the defeat from its collective memory, and the Parade Ground never again held such a concentration of men. Now it served as a silent reminder to all who crossed it – bigger things than you move the world, bigger moments exist than your life. No matter where the boundaries of the Square were viewed, from Royal Apartments to cathedral or vice versa, the vast space held the same message: bow your head, show humility, remember that you are worthless.

  Marius looked around, and spat out the last of his Kessa Water.

  “Fuck me,” he said. “They could do with planting a tree or two, hey?” He ducked out of line, scurried to the front of the Royal Apartments, and looked over the edge of the cliff.

  “Gerd! Come and see this! You can see right down into the Red Quarter.” He waved, looked back over his shoulder. Gerd shook his head, and gazed down at his feet. Marius frowned, and ran back to grab his companion by the sleeve.

  “Come on, you’ve got to see this. You can see right onto the roof garden of the Cat Tails. They do business up there too, you know. All dressed up. You should see…”

  Gerd shook his head again.

  “What? What’s the matter? You’re not–”

  “I’m afraid of heights, okay?”

  Marius frowned, puzzled.

  “But… you live on the side of a mountain.”

  “It’s not the same.” Gerd waved his hand at their surroundings, his eyes firmly fixed on the ground. “This… it’s…” He drew a deep breath; sighed. “It’s closed in and open at the same time. Everything feels tall. And thin,” he added, risking a glance to either side. “I don’t like it.”

  Marius stared at him for several seconds, then laughed. “It’s a hundred feet wide, you great girl’s blouse. You couldn’t fall off of here in an earthquake.” He laughed again, then stopped at the look on Gerd’s face. “There hasn’t been an earthquake in Scorby in seven hundred years. You’re not going to fall from this extremely large and stable flat place because of an earthquake.” He sighed, and stepped back into line, casting a wistful glance over his shoulder at the hidden brothel roof. “So you’re really struggling with the sudden height, hey?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Well,” he reached an arm around Gerd’s shoulder and tugged him upright. “You’re really going to drop your lunch when you see this.”

  Across the square, at the very tip of the Radican, stood the Bone Cathedral.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Separated from its surroundings by the great square on one side and by cliffs on its others, it stood alone like a massive, yellowing judgment upon the city. Its size was impossible to gauge. There was no viewpoint from which it could be seen in comparison to any other structure. It stood in isolation, with only the sky and the sprawling, distant mass of the city roofs for backdrop, its immensity relegating both to mere details in the distance. Its sheer bulk swallowed the eye, leaving the viewer with no other sensation but that of the building itself. It was Scorby’s crown of thorns – terrible and agonising, but with the promise that history would remember the wearer, that the sacrifices would be worth it. Skulls leered out at visitors as they arrived, vast totem poles of the dead holding up cross beams made from countless femurs. Scapulas provided swooping curlicues underneath friezes picked out in the most delicate of phalanges and knuckles. Deformed gargoyles leaned out from ledges, twisted children pieced together by blind madmen staring down at passers by with hunger in their empty eye sockets. The cathedral was a shrine to war-like and vengeful Gods, and it fulfilled its purpose well.

  Other monuments inspired an industry of craftsmen, flooding the tourist centres of the city with plaster reproductions of Scorbus’ Tower and watercolours of The Vista, slivers of the One True Stake and genuine parchments from the Entombed Library, Guv, yours for only a riner seeing as you look like a connoisseur of true art to me. Not the Cathedral. It was the scary grandmother of the city: only acknowledged on special occasions, and even then, only with a kind of frightened reverence, as if somehow it could rise from its foundations and usurp the rule of law with a single choice phrase or sharply delivered backhander. Nobody ventured too close, nobody kept a picture on their mantelpiece. And people minded their bloody manners.

  “Oh, Gods,” Gerd said, gazing up at the dome, “I’m going to be sick.”

  “You can’t be,” Marius smiled. “The dead don’t puke.”

  “You did!”

  “I’m special. I’m a King.” He frowned. “Sort of. You’re just a walking corpse.”

  “Oh yeah? Just watch me.” Gerd staggered several steps away and bent over with his hands on his knees. His back bucked: once, twice, then after a short pause, several times in quick succession. After a minute or so, he lurched back and leant his forehead on Marius’ upper arm.

  “That,” he said, between gulps for air, “is just fucking cruel.”

  “Never mind.” Marius patted him on the shoulder and pointed ahead. “We’re nearly there now.”

  The line of visitants disappeared into the gloom of the building’s mouth. Marius and Gerd followed along, eyes wide. Marius had seen the cathedral a hundred times, inside and out, but there was no preparation for each viewing. No previous history could dim the sense of awe, the sheer sense of horror at approaching the yellowing structure. Two guards stood at either side of the entrance, fully armed and armoured. Marius nodded at them as they approached.

  “Look,” he said. “They’re not comfortable.”

  The guards fidgeted. Proximity to the cathedral did that. No man likes to be reminded of his mortality, especially a soldier. To have that transience turned into a mere tool of architecture was a thought that nobody needed. The soldiers looked anywhere but their immediate surroundings, and shifted from foot to foot. They would need no encouragement once their watch was over – would be down the Radican and into a tavern in record time. The line wound through the massive doorway and up to a smaller door, recessed into a wall a dozen feet behind the ornate entrance way.

  “The actual entrance,” Marius said. “The outside walls are just for show.”

  “They work,” Gerd replied. As they stepped up he reached out, and ran a hand down a thigh bone set at shoulder height into the doorframe. “Gods, it’s so…”

  “Smooth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Umpteen years of being rubbed by gaping tourists will do that,” Gerd’s smile was grim. “Nobody quite believes, until they’ve had that first touch.”

  “It’s… it’s just…”

  “Yes.” Marius stared around them, trying to calculate just how many bones per square feet, how many square feet per wall, how many walls, and arches, and sconces, and architraves. “Isn’t it just?�
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  The queue proceeded through half a dozen galleries into the central chamber, a vaulted hall thirty feet wide that stretched upwards into the dome itself. Marius pointed out items of interest as they passed: the crypt of Polimis, the fabled Unknown Hero of Scorby; the hall of artists, where the great poets and philosophers of the realm found their rest; Traitor’s Hole, where the mummified bodies of great turncoats were displayed so all could see the wages of treason.

  “No building material there,” Marius said as they passed. “There’s not a single bone left whole in the lot of them.”

  Gerd shuddered and remained silent.

  Their journey was lit by a trail of sconces set at head height, throwing out a smoky, yellow light that only added to the sense of gloom.

  There was plenty of time to view the King as they approached. Once through the antechamber, the massive interior of the cathedral was revealed, a vast empty, tiled space underneath the vaulted curve of the cathedral’s dome: thousands upon thousands of bones curving overhead in the single largest unsupported roof in the Scorban empire. Marius always glanced up as he entered, and always returned his gaze to the horizontal just as quickly. It made him queasy to contemplate the curves of the dome’s interior, to calculate just how much it must weigh, and how it would shatter should the bones come loose and plummet towards him. Much easier to ignore it. Much better for his sense of equilibrium to contemplate the dead man in the centre of the chamber.

  He lay upon a golden bier, raised so that he faced out above the heads of his subjects. His eyes were closed, and in his gloved hands he held his sword and the Scorban Book of Passing, that tome of rituals and passwords once believed to be indispensable in aiding one’s passage into the Kingdom of the Dead. Marius snorted as he spied it.

  “Well we know that’s a load of bollocks.”

  “Oh, you never know,” Gerd replied, smiling ferally, “Maybe they have an executive wing.”

  They laughed, and quickly stifled their sounds as those around them glanced at them in annoyance. From up ahead, they could hear the sound of someone murmuring.

  Who is that?” Gerd asked. “A priest?”

  Marius frowned. “Could be. The rites should have been finished days ago, but you never know. Maybe they keep one going for the tourists, sort of adding to the value of the experience or something. Still,” he craned his neck, staring past the shoulders of those in front of him. “I can’t see anybody.” They stepped closer. They were only ten or twenty minutes, fifty steps or so, from standing directly in front of the King. “Maybe he’s kneeling at the back corner of the display or something.”

  Two guards stood to either side of the bier, resplendent in golden mail. One of them glanced at the talkative couple and frowned. Marius took note, and bent his head.

  “Better be quiet,” he whispered. “Show respect and all that.”

  Gerd nodded, and they concentrated on staring at the display before them. Apart from the two guards, the only adornments to the chamber were two large torches in golden braziers at either side of the bier. Marius was not surprised. Compared to the walls around him, any great show would seem gaudy and kitsch. Better to keep things simple, and let the cathedral itself do the work of inspiring the necessary awe.

  The King himself had been laid out in his coronation robes, with his ceremonial crown perched upon his head.

  “Helps to hide the wounds,” Marius observed, indicating the gold and velvet cap. Gerd nodded, and nodded towards the voluminous silk gown. “Can’t see the killing stroke.” They stepped forward. “How are we going to do this?”

  Marius let his gaze drift to the guards and beyond them towards the exit at the opposite side of the chamber. The hall was well-lit, the soldiers attentive. Behind them stood the twinned entrances to the Hall of Kings, where King Tanspar’s predecessors lay within their marble crypts. Long velvet ropes blocked the entrances. The only other possible escape route lay back along the line of supplicants, or across another fifty feet of open floor to the far exit. Three dozen or more grieving subjects lay between them and either door. Marius eyed the guards – tall, athletic, the swords at their hips appearing superbly functional despite the gaudiness of their ceremonial costumes – then looked back to the King in his heavy, swirling robes, hemmed tightly into his resting place by cushions, and now that he paid attention, wires surreptitiously looped around ankles and wrists and tucked down behind the fabric. He bit his lip.

  “Ah, hell.” He ran a hand across his eyes. “We can’t.”

  “But…”

  “We can’t.” He waved a finger at the various facets of the diorama. “It’s impossible. We can’t even get close enough to touch him, never mind get him out. And even if we could, even if we could distract the guards, and untie him, and get him down, all without being noticed, what do you think this lot would do to us, hey?” He nodded towards those ahead of them in the line. As they passed his resting place, the King’s subjects gave in to grief. There was crying, and wailing, and oaths of revenge. Gerd stared.

  “They’d tear us apart.”

  “At the least.”

  They listened to the emotion running through the room. Marius frowned.

  “Can you hear that?”

  Underneath the expectant murmurs behind them, underneath the echoing sounds of grief ahead, a voice. Singular, uncertain, verging upon panic.

  “Hello?” it said. “Please, hello? Is there anybody there? Hello? Help? Help. Please, I can’t see. Help. I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t move. Can anybody hear me?”

  “I hear it,” Gerd whispered. “But where? It sounds like… I can’t pinpoint it.”

  “I know that voice.” Marius replied. “It’s… it sounds like it’s coming from…”

  They stepped forward, almost directly in front of the King.

  “Please?” said the voice. “Please, can anyone hear me?”

  As one, they turned towards the dead man.

  “Oh, God,” Gerd whispered.

  Marius stared at the immobile figure. “They’ve embalmed him,” he said.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Embalmed… you mean…?”

  Marius nodded. “I’ve seen them do this. They soak him in a solution, then they open him up… stuff him with… oh God. He’s still in there?”

  “Hello? Can anyone hear me? I demand… I need to know what’s going on.”

  “Should we… can we…?”

  “I don’t know.” Marius stared helplessly at the unmoving King, while the voice questioned and pleaded inside their heads. “I just… I don’t know.”

  “Hey!”

  They jumped at the sound of the guard’s voice. The guard waved a hand at the line behind them.

  “Move along please, citizens. Let someone else pay their respects.”

  “But…” Gerd took a step towards Tanspar. Marius grabbed his arm.

  “Yes, sir. Of course. Thank you.” He moved away, dragging his protesting companion with him. The guard turned his attention back to the line, and Marius quickly dragged him to the shadows at the entrance to the Hall of Kings.

  “What are you doing?” Gerd tore his arm free of Marius’ grip. “We’ve got to help him.”

  “How?” Marius swung him around to stare back at the snaking line and the pool of light in which the King rested. “Tell me, go on.”

  “I don’t know. You’re the… the… thief!”

  “Shhh.” Marius gave him a gentle shake, just enough to rattle his teeth. “Keep it down, for Gods’ sake. Look.” He let go, sank back against a pole and slid down until sitting. “Let’s say we do it, okay? We somehow manage to distract the guards, liberate our man, and evade every loyal mourner between here and the City walls. What then?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Look at him.” Marius waved a hand at the tableau. “I mean, really look. And think. He’s as stiff as a board. He can’t see, or hear. What are we going to do, lean him against a wall and tell everyone th
at begging for help is a sign from God? How long do you think that’ll satisfy them?” He shook his head. “That’s after we get him all the way through the city, out the north wall to the burial fields, with every single soldier and citizen of the entire city baying after us. Too hard. It’s too hard. There are just too many wrong elements.”