Evening the Fourth — The Shells That Would Not Die

Rain in Sepermeru, and you know what that means: every dry throat in the city crowds the Broken Tusk, and Hjalti One-Eye finds his bench taken by a fat spice-merchant. Get up. Yes, you. That seat has heard three nights of the Cimmerian's saga and it will hear a fourth — the smith found his name again two tellings past, and the strangler of the riverlands went down the night after that, and if you missed those, buy the man beside you a cup and he'll weep them to you later. Tonight is new meat.

Pour. Good. Now hear what the fourteenth dawn brought him.

He had gone far into the south and west of that broken land, where the river spreads its fingers and the ground sucks at a man's boots like a beggar at a sleeve. The air down there sits on the chest, thick as wet wool. And out of the reeds came laughter — not a man's. You've heard a hyena, some of you, out past the walls at night. Now hear a spotted one the size of a pony trot out of the mist with its shoulders higher than its haunches, grinning the way only a thing that eats the dead can grin. Strabo had never beheld its like. He did what Cimmerians do with new things. He introduced it to iron. But that was the small joke of the day, friends. The big joke waited in the water.

Picture it: a shape in the shallows like a moss-grown boulder, shell broad as a shield-wall, a beak that could shear a spear-haft — and no life in it. None. The thing had died, whatever it was, some turtle-fiend of the old drowned world, and something had forgotten to tell its body. It came up out of the murk with river-slime sliding off bone, and the smell — Crom, the smell, like a fish-market left three days in Set's own sun. The Cimmerian's gorge rose before his sword did. Then the sword rose too. He cracked that shell like a nut on a stone. And the reeds parted, and a second one came. He broke that. And the water heaved, and a third dragged itself up the bank, beak clacking, empty as a robbed grave.

Three of them, one after the next, in that stinking fen. What raises the shelled dead and sends them walking, and why there? He asked the reeds. The reeds kept their counsel. Mark it — that gap is not closed yet, and I'll say no more tonight.

While he stood ankle-deep in broken shell, catching his wind, the laughter came back. Not the pony-sized grin from before — its mother, or its god. A hyena grown monstrous, spine like a drawn bow, jaws that crush a thigh-bone the way you crack a knuckle. It hit him low, the way its kind do, going for the hamstring, and he felt the teeth score his boot-leather before his elbow found its skull. They rolled in the muck, man and beast, and when the muck went still it was the man who stood up out of it. Grinning, they say. He'd caught it from the hyena, maybe.

Bleeding, reeking of fen-rot, he turned north — toward the Sentinels. You've not seen them? Three figures of stone tall as hills, older than any name we keep, standing watch over the river with faces the wind has half eaten. Under their gaze two more horrors waited, as if the old stones collect them the way a corpse collects flies.

The first: another of the shell-fiends, but this one alive, and red — red as a slaughter-yard, red as the inside of a scream, hunched in the shallows with eyes like wet coals. Strange, no? He'd met the dead ones first and the living one after, as if the land told its tale backwards. The red thing was faster than its dead cousins, snapping, hissing steam off the water. It marked him — one line of fire along the ribs — before he put his blade down through the join of neck and shell where the armor of such things forgets its duty.

The second needed no strangeness to be terrible. A crocodile. You river-men know crocodiles. Unknow them. This one was to a crocodile what the Sentinels are to a standing stone — a back like a war-galley's hull, a mouth you could bed down in if you never wished to wake. It took the bank in one surge, faster than anything that big has a right to move, and the Cimmerian learned in one heartbeat what every beast of that land learns eventually: run at the thing, not from it. He went in over the snout, and the fight was ugly, and short, and I will spare the squeamish among you the sound the eye made. When it lay still, the shadow of the middle Sentinel lay across them both like a shroud. He looked up at that stone face a long moment, blood dripping off his knuckles into the river. The stone looked back. Neither blinked first. He walked away and called it a draw.

The fifteenth dawn was quieter, and quiet, for this man, means work. Back at his hold above the river he stood at the anvil half the day — eight works came off it before dusk, and I could not tell you each one, only that a man who shapes eight things in a day is either building toward something or hammering a thought flat. Knowing him, both.

And on the road below the hold he found one more of the rope-line — a wanderer, a fighter of the exiled folk, staked out with irons on her wrists and a slaver's mark fresh on the post beside her. You know by now what he does. He has worn the rope; he does not pass it by. Two blows of a hand-axe and the irons rang on the stones, and he turned to go, and the wanderer — a fighter, mind, no stranger to choosing her own road — picked up a dead man's blade and fell in at his shoulder. He didn't ask. She didn't explain. That is how his war-band grows, friends: not bought, not broken. Chosen. They come off the stake and they look at the grey-eyed man who freed them, and they decide the safest place in that whole cursed land is one sword-length to his left.

So he stands tonight: fen-stink scrubbed off, ribs seamed with one more scar, a fighter of the exiles at his fire, and eight new works cooling in the dark of his hold. And somewhere south, in the reeds, whatever raises dead shells to walking is still awake, still working, still unnamed.

I mean to name it for you. But naming costs, and my cup — look at that. Empty as a dead kappa's heart. Mend the one, and next night I'll mend the other.