The Wurms of Blearmouth (8 page)

Spilgit leaned away from the wall. “She yelled something,” he whispered. “And then started berating him. Something about thinking he was a man of the world, only he isn’t. And then there were footsteps and someone trying to get out of the room.”

“Only Ma’s locked it,” Felittle said. “He can’t get out.”

Spilgit frowned across at her. “She’s done this before? What’s she doing to him? She locks men in her room? Why do they want to get out? Well, I mean, I would, but then I’d never go into her room in the first place. But he did, so he knew what was coming, more or less, didn’t he? But I swear I heard him gag, or something. It sounded like a gag—wait, is she strangling him or something? Does she kill them, Felittle? Is your mother a mass murderer?”

“How should I know?” she demanded from where she sat on the bed, her lizard cat sprawled across her thighs, the creature watching Spilgit with unblinking, yellow eyes. “Maybe I’ve seen her bury a body or two, out back. But that happens. It’s an inn, after all, with people in beds and old men trying to die smiling, and all that.”

“She’s buried people out back?”

“Well, dead ones, of course. Not like Ackle.”

“Ackle wasn’t dead.”

“Yes he was.”

“Not a chance. The noose strangled him bad, that’s true, and probably killed bits of his brain, which was why he looked dead to everyone. But he wasn’t, and that’s why he came back. Gods below, I can’t believe the superstitions you have here in this wretched backwater. No, you’ve not treated him well since then, have you? It’s a disgrace.”

Felittle blinked at him. “Backwater? Are you calling Spendrugle, where I was born, a backwater? So what am I, then? A backwaterian? Is that what I am to you, Mister Big Smelly City?”

Spilgit hurried over, recoiling at the last moment to Red’s savage hiss and raised hackles. “Darling, of course not. Every dung heap has a hidden gem, and you’re it. I mean, if I didn’t find you lovely and all, would I offer to help you escape? And,” he went on, still trying to get closer but Red was now on its feet, dorsal spines arching and ears flattened and mouth opened wide, “if you didn’t think this was a backwater you wouldn’t want to get away, would you?”

“Who says I want to get away?”

“You do! Don’t you remember, my sweet?”

“It was you who wanted to steal me away, and I listened and all, and so you convinced me. But maybe I like it here, and once Ma lets me start working with the other girls, I’ll—”

“But she won’t, Felittle,” Spilgit said, looking for something he could use as a weapon on the cat. “That’s just it. She’ll never let you do that. She’ll see you stay a virgin, a spinster, all your life. You know it, too.” He found a brass candlestick on the dresser and collected it up.

“But then you said you weren’t going to let me have lots of men in the city, so what’s the point of me going with you anywhere? You’ll end up just like Ma, chaining me in some cellar! What are you doing with that?”

He advanced on her, hefting the candlestick. “Is that how you really want it? You want me to hire you out for the night, to whoever’s got the coin?”

“Oh, will you? Yes, please! What are you doing with that candlestick?” she backed up on the bed. “How many bodies have you buried behind the tax office, that’s what I’m wondering now!”

“Don’t be silly. Tax collectors want people to live forever, of course. Getting older and older, so we can strip from them every single hard-won coin.”

“Put that thing down!”

“Oh, I’ll put something down all right. Count on it.” He raised the candlestick.

Red leapt at his face.

He swung with all his strength.

Emancipor Reese clawed fruitlessly at the lock on the door. Behind him, Feloovil laughed a deep, throaty laugh. “It’s no use, Mancy, we’ve got you for the night, and when I say we’re going to cover your body in kisses, I do mean it, don’t I? Kisses and bites and nips and—”

“Open this damned door!” Emancipor snarled, spinning round and reaching for his sword.

But Feloovil had raised one hand. “Shh! Listen! I hear voices in my daughter’s room! Voices! Gods below, it’s Spilgit!” She collected up her tunic from the floor and began pulling it on. “That’s it, he’s a dead man for this. And I’m calling in his tab, too. Can’t pay, can’t leave, ever. Can’t pay, it’s the back yard for you!”

Edging away from the door as Feloovil produced a key from somewhere beneath her tunic, Emancipor drew his shortsword. “Good, open it, aye. Before things get ugly here.”

“Ugly?” She barked a laugh. “You’re about to see ugly, Mancy, like no ugly you’ve ever seen in that miserable, sheltered existence you call a life.” She unlocked the door.

They were startled by a loud thump on the wall, followed by broken plaster striking the floor beside Feloovil’s bed.

Something had come through the wall, halfway to the ceiling. As the dust cloud cleared, Emancipor saw a lizard cat’s head, its nose draining blood, its eyes blinking but not synchronously. It seemed to be winking at them.

With Feloovil standing motionless, staring at the cat’s head, Emancipor made his move, pushing hard to get past her and into the corridor. Without a look back, he rushed for the stairs. Behind him he heard Feloovil bellow, and someone else was now screaming. Reaching the stairs, Emancipor plunged downward—and coming fast behind him was another set of footsteps. Growling a curse, Emancipor looked back over one shoulder. But it was Spilgit who was on his way down, with Feloovil thundering after him.

Reaching the ground floor, Emancipor ran down the length of the bar to the door.

It opened then, revealing Hordilo, who pointed a finger at Emancipor and said, “You!”

Despite the bitter cold, the half-frozen sand Whuffine turned over with his shovel stank of urine. He’d already excavated a decent hole, and had begun to wonder if his memory had failed him, when his shovel struck something hard. Redoubling his efforts, he quickly worked the object loose, and lifted into view a pitted and suitably stained stone idol. Grunting, he heaved it out of the pit and set it down on the sand for a closer look.

It had been a few years since he’d buried the thing beneath his piss trench, but the chisel work now looked centuries old. Come the spring, after the winter’s hard weathering, he could load it onto his cart and take it into the village. If anything, this one was better than the last effort, and hadn’t Witch Hurl paid a bagful of silver coins for that one? For all he knew, Fangatooth might be just as happy to kneel in worship before an idol from the Ancient Times.

The creation of true art had a way of serendipity, and if he hadn’t snapped off a nipple on the final touches with the last one, he’d never have found the need to rework it into a mouth instead, and then do the same to the other nipple, inventing a whole new goddess of earth, sex, milk and whatever. This time, he had elaborated on the theme, adding a third mouth, down below.

Hearing more voices from the beach, he climbed out of the stinking pit and brushed gritty sand from his hands.

The boat was back, and this time the three sailors were piling out to scrabble their way up towards the trail, the bandaged one limping and already falling behind the others.

Collecting his shovel, Whuffine awaited them.

“Come to your senses, did you? No wonder. There’s another blow coming in…”

But the three simply swept past, gasping, moaning and whimpering as they hurried up the trail. Whuffine stared after them, frowning. “I’ve got warm broth!” he shouted, to no effect. Shrugging, he set down the shovel again and collected up the idol. He’d walk it down to the water, off to the left of the sands where the rocks made ragged spines reaching out into the bay. Lodged amidst those rocks, the idol would sit, gnawed by salt and cold and hard waves day and night for the next few months.

Whuffine was halfway to the spines when he saw the other boat, coming in fast.

Gasping in pain, Spilgit limped up the street. If Feloovil hadn’t stumbled at the last moment, that knife would have found his back instead of his right calf. Shivering with shock, he approached his office. It took a strange person to decide to become a tax collector, and over the past month he had come to the conclusion that maybe he wasn’t cut out for it.

He thought back to his days in Elin, when he was first apprenticed to the trade. Taxation in a city ruled by pirates was a bold notion, to be sure, and its practice was a vicious affair. They’d all trained in weapons and the detection of poison, and a few of his fellow apprentices had indeed plunged into the grey arts. On one day each year, the day that taxes were due, not even the Enclave bodyguards attached to each and every collector could be trusted. Spilgit’s final year in the city had seen almost sixty percent losses in the Guild, and more than one chest of tax revenue disappeared in the chaos.

He’d thought this distant posting would be a welcome escape from the horrors of Elin’s Day of Blood and Taxes. He’d displayed few of the necessary talents to imagine a long and prosperous life in Elin as a tax collector. He wasn’t coldhearted enough. He lacked the essential knot of cruelty in his soul, the small-minded descent into arbitrary necessities upon which collectors founded their arguments justifying blatant theft and the bullying and threats essential to successful extortion. Instead, he had revealed a soft ear for sob stories, for terrible tragedies and sudden house-fires and mysterious burglaries and missing coin. He wept for the limping man tottering on his stick, for the snotty runts clinging to a destitute mother smelling of wine and sour milk, for the wealthy landowner swearing that he had not a single coin in his purse.

The worst of it was, he had actually believed that the taxes he collected went to answering worthy needs, and all the necessities of governance and the maintenance of law and order, when in truth most of it filled the war-chests of gouty nobles whose only talent was hoarding.

No, this journey into the empty wastelands out here in the realm’s dubious borderlands had taught him much, about himself, and about the world in general. Feloovil’s attempted murder would go unpunished. She offered too essential a service in Spendrugle. He, Spilgit, was the unwanted man.

Pushing open the door to his office, he staggered inside and made his way to the lone chair. The woodstove still emanated remnants of heat and he fed more scraps of driftwood onto the coals.
But that was all before today. I’m not the same man I used to be. I’m not soft anymore. I am now capable of murder, and when I return to Elin, with that idiotic lovely cow in tow, why, I will sell her and feel not a single qualm, since she’ll be blissfully happy.

And I will be a tax collector. With iron for eyes, a mouth thinned to a dagger’s edge, straight and disinclined to warp into anything resembling a genuine smile. No, this upturn of this here mouth, it signals the delightful pleasure of evil.

Evil: the way it flows out from the deed, the way it spreads its stain of injustice. Evil: smelling of sweet lies and bitter truths. We own the tax laws. We know every way around them, meaning we never pay up a single sliver of tin, but you do, oh yes, you do.

He struggled to wrap a cloth around his wounded calf, cursing his numbed fingers. At least, he consoled himself, he had killed the cat. There was no way it could have survived, despite its twitching body, or the way it sank its claws into the wall, spread-eagled as it tried to pull its head free, tail curling like a wood shaving to the flicker of flame. Oh, who was he kidding? The damned thing still lived.

And if the roads fall into ruin, and the city guards starve without their bribes; and people live on the streets and need to sell their children to make ends meet. And if the judges are all bought off and the jailers sport gold rings, and everything that was once free now costs, why, that’s just how it is, and which side of the wall do I want to be standing on?

He understood things now. He saw with utter clarity. The world was falling into ruin, but then it was always falling into ruin. Once that was comprehended, why, the evil of every moment—this entire endless realm of
now
—made perfect sense. He would join the others, all those bloated greed merchants, and ride the venal present, and to Hood with the future, and to Hood with the past. The Lord of Death awaited them all in the end anyway.

The door scraped open and Spilgit bleated, reaching for his knife.

“It’s just me,” said Ackle, peering in.

“Gods below!”

“Can I join you? I brought some wood.”

Spilgit waved him in. “Try and close that behind you. Funny you should drop by, Ackle. It occurs to me that we have something in common.”

“Aye, we’re both dead men.”

Spilgit sighed, and then rubbed at his face. “If we stay in Spendrugle all winter, we are.”

“Well, I could stay around. Unless I freeze solid. Then Hordilo will burn me in a pyre and I saw the look in his eyes when he said that. It’s all down to Feloovil being nice to me, and that’s why I’m here, in fact.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, all is forgiven. And if that’s not enough, why, Feloovil has decided to wipe clean your tab. And you still have your room.”

Spilgit studied the man levelly. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Ackle.”

“The dead are beyond shame, Spilgit. That said, I admit to some qualms, but like I said, I need somewhere warm for the winter.”

“She actually expects me to go back to the Heel with you? Arm in arm?”

“Well, it’s hard to say, honestly. She is a bit beside herself at the moment. Poor Felittle is distraught, with what you did to her.”

“I didn’t do anything to her! The cat attacked me and I defended myself.”

“Then it went and attacked Feloovil, too, once it got its head out of the wall. And then the damned thing attacked just about everybody else—all the customers and half the girls, and down in the bar, well, it was chaos. The place is a shambles. Two dead dogs, too, their throats ripped out. I take that bit hard, by the way.”

Slipgit licked his lips, and then pointed a finger at Ackle. “Didn’t I warn them? Didn’t I? Lizard cats can’t be domesticated! They’re vicious, treacherous, foul-tempered and they smell like moulted snakeskin.”