The Marching Dead Read online

  THE

  MARCHING

  DEAD

  LEE BATTERSBY

  To my Bonus Boys, Aiden and Blake

  as they prepare to set out across

  their own adult landscapes.

  Leap then look, boys.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  The day was perfect, as had been the day before, and the day before that. The sun rose early over the low-lying hills on the horizon, and the shutters on the cottage had been thrown open before breakfast to let the morning heat fill the white-painted rooms. Outside, bees buzzed happily through the waves of flowers that spilled out of the gardens and across the empty fields towards the hills, and migrating birds wheeled and floated in the updrafts above, painting the perfect blue sky with the sweep of their magnificent wings. The only sound that broke the serenity was the pitch-perfect singing of Keth, former dancing girl at the Hauled Keel Tavern as she ran out the kitchen door and into the perfect, perfect day, a wicker basket swinging below her arm as she waved and blew kisses towards the bedroom window. On the windowsill, a fat tortoise-shell tomcat named Alno yawned and stretched in the warmth, his sleek coat glowing in the sunlight. He swung a paw at an imaginary victim, enough so that it might have been mistaken for a wave goodbye, then settled back into sleep. Keth giggled and turned away from the perfect little cottage, running through the perfect fields of flowers towards the perfect line of the perfect hills, where she planned to spend the perfect morning picking perfect berries with which to make the perfect lunch. Everything was perfect. Just perfect.

  Marius don Hellespont was so bored he could shit.

  It had been three years, three interminable years since he had delivered on his promise and made things right with Keth. She had been living in a single room above the tavern in which she danced, and he had insulted it – insulted her – and everything she had fought and scratched and humiliated herself to acquire. It was a stupid moment, something he specialised in. She had responded by itemising every promise he ever made to her, and the one hundred per cent success rate in breaking them. It took losing her, not to mention losing his life for several months, before he realised what she meant to him, and how much he needed to win her back.

  And he had done it. Not with empty apologies and facile gestures, but by doing what he had always promised to do some day: settle down, leave behind a life of petty larceny and confidence tricks, make some honest money and give her the life of peace and tranquillity she deserved. He did it for her.

  And hated every bloody moment of it.

  It hardly seemed fair that he should hate the payoff as well. But there it was: surrounded by everything that made the love of his life happy, he couldn’t find a single damn thing to do. Marius was a creature of the city, or at least, of those parts of a city that represent the greatest thrill: the back streets; the illegal gaming rooms; the palace hallways. Anywhere a deal could be made, or a con was in play, or a margin for error could be exploited. That was his natural habitat. Even when he tried honest work – and for Keth’s sake he had tried, oh, how he had tried – he somehow ended up in the darkest corner of the workshop, running a penny ante game between shifts. No matter how she might like to believe it, cottages in the country weren’t bought by dockworkers. Not unless they were dockworkers like Marius, and could sniff out a game of Kingdom from a thousand yards, and a wide-eyed rube from even further.

  But here, in these wide-open spaces, there were no shadows, no corners, and no angles. Just flowers and berries for lunch and big, fat, stupid cats grinning at him from the windowsill. Marius scowled at it. Oh, for just one street market vendor short of meat and willing not to ask too many questions. He sighed, staring out the window at Keth’s perfect buttocks slowly disappearing through the flowers. When he couldn’t see them any longer, and had them firmly fixed in his memory, he leaned back in his chair, yawned, and stood. Maybe it was time to get dressed, at least. There was only so long a man could lounge around the house in his undershirt before the love of his life began to suspect he wasn’t quite as busy as he’d been making out. He ran a hand down Alno’s back.

  “Another day in fucking paradise,” he said, and pushed the cat out of the window. It landed between the stickprickle bushes he’d planted there specially to catch it, hissed at him, and darted away beneath them before he could find a boot to throw. He watched it cut a purposeful swathe through the flowers, and sighed again. It would spend all day hunting mice, he supposed. Gods. Even the cat had something to do. Maybe the Blind Pig had opened its doors. He smiled. The cottage was a mile or so outside the nameless village for which the Blind Pig was combination post office, law court, and – most importantly – boozer. Keth would be gone all morning.

  Marius held his hand in front of his face and concentrated. Slowly, his flesh lost its pink tones, drying out and shrivelling until it lay grey and tight across his bones. He glanced over at the brass mirror nailed next to the bed. His face, dead and pockmarked, stared back with blank white eyes. Dark skin faded to a dull grey, and teeth grinned at him through lips that lay black and peeling against them.

  He had learned the trick four years ago, during that period he tried only to think of as “back then”. Back then it had been forced upon him by the vengeful dead. They had mistaken him for their lost King, God’s representative on Earth, the voice they needed to remind Him that they existed and were waiting to be harvested and carried aloft on shafts of gold to their eternal reward blah blah blah bullshit. Then their mistake became clear to them, and they inflicted this withering half death upon him as the weregild he had to pay for not being the monarch they needed. Now, it was a useful trick and nothing more. A mile between the cottage and the tavern, for example, might take him six minutes to run, but as a living man he’d spend over an hour catching his breath every hundred yards, pulling up lame with a stitch or a twinge in his calf, or just plain vomiting. But the dead did not need to catch their breath, and they never vomited. Without his ability to switch between normal human frailty and the untiring muscles of the dead, there was no way he’d be sinking his first pint of the morning within seven minutes, and he’d never be back in time to pretend he’d been digging that visitor’s privy he’d been promising for two weeks. Leaning across, he took a final glance through the window, just to make sure Keth hadn’t forgotten anything and come back. And frowned.

  Cats don’t normally run in straight lines. If forced to run at all, they do so in short bursts – enough to show that they could escape you any time at all, and that it would be far better for all concerned if you just gave up purs
uit right now. Cats are bastards, and will never knowingly pass up an opportunity to taunt you. There is nothing more ludicrous than the sight of a fully grown human stumbling after an animal that saunters to a stop every six feet just to lick itself and make sure it’s still being chased, and the furry little shits know it. That’s why they do it. At least, Marius was pretty sure it was why Alno did it to him. Cats certainly never picked the shortest journey between A and anywhere else if they could help it.

  But Alno was doing just that. Marius could see the flower heads waving as he raced through them. The cat had left the house behind and was tearing at top speed across the open field beyond, straight towards the spot where Marius had watched Keth’s buttocks finally disappear, almost as if…

  Before Marius was even conscious of doing so, he had placed his foot on the desk and propelled himself through the window. His heel caught the edge of the windowsill and sent him tumbling into the stickprickle bush below, but he barely noticed. He rolled forward, made his feet, and was off at full pace, through the little gate that bounded their yard and out across the field at a flat run. He caught up to Alno in half a minute, scooping him up without breaking stride. Alno twisted around in his grip, swung a paw at his chest in annoyance, then stopped. Slowly, he stared up at Marius’ face, sheathed his claws, and curled back around so he lay more comfortably along the length of Marius’ arm.

  Marius cursed himself as he ran. Something was wrong. He should have noticed, he should have seen. No matter that he had only the cat’s behaviour to go on, or that outwardly the world remained as it had been all morning: shining sun, buzzing bees, gentle breeze. Something was wrong, and he should have known. He bent his head and put on a fresh burst of speed.

  Alno jumped from his arm and shot into the bushes ahead half a second before Marius heard the scream. There was no doubt it was Keth. Marius knew every intonation of her voice, had experienced every aspect of its range from sex-soaked whisper to raging cry. The terror, so close to the edge of madness that Marius could sense it, was something he had never heard, and for a moment he felt his veins collapse in panic. The scream went on and on, straight ahead of him, a long, piercing shriek interrupted only by broken imprecations. A bank of lickleaf plants loomed in front of him, and Marius burst through them in time to register the sound of Alno yowling, and to duck as the cat flew past his head. He skidded to a halt at the sight beyond.

  “Keth!”

  “Marius!”

  Something had dragged Keth across a dozen feet. Marius could see the path of broken flowers and scars where her fingers had gouged desperate runnels into the earth. He could see Keth, too; at least, her face was still visible, and one arm sticking up out of the ground. Of the rest of her there was no sign. As he watched, her head was jerked backwards. The ground rose to cover her eyes, leaving only her nose and mouth above. She screamed again. Marius dove forward, reaching for her free hand. He grabbed it, and winced as her nails dug deep into his flesh.

  “Hold on!”

  “I can’t!”

  “You can! You can! Hold on!”

  “Marius!”

  “No! Keth, no!”

  Something belowground pulled on her: hard; harder than he could contend with. They yelled once, in unison. Then, with a dry slithering sound, the ground swallowed Keth up. Marius dove forward once more, plunging his head into the hole.

  “Keth!”

  He could see only darkness. He tensed, preparing to scramble after her. Then strong hands grabbed his ankles and pulled him backwards out of the hole. He writhed against them as the hole closed up behind him.

  “You!”

  A dead man was standing above him. Marius saw the uniform first, the tattered mantle and tunic bearing the burgundy pattern of the King of Scorby. But it was the face he remembered most strongly: the ruined eye socket, the flap of grey withered flesh hanging down over the shattered cheekbone where an axe had ploughed into it, releasing the nameless soldier’s life. This was the man who had hauled Marius down to the underworld on that cursed day almost four years ago. He smiled, and dried soil dripped from between his jaws. His voice sounded inside Marius’ head, and he winced. He had not talked with another dead man for almost four years. He had forgotten how loud it was.

  “Surprise.”

  Marius scrambled to his feet and launched himself at the dead man. His adversary braced himself, rolled his shoulders, and clipped Marius across the temple with a rock-hard fist to send him crashing into the base of the lickleaf plants. Marius rolled away, clambered upright once more, and found the soldier standing six feet away.

  “What’s the matter?” the dead man asked, head tilted in amusement. “Lose something?”

  Marius had no words with which to answer. All he had left in his lungs was a shriek of rage, so he let it loose and threw himself once more towards his assailant. The soldier braced himself, and raised his fists.

  A tortoiseshell cannonball shot out of the bushes and struck the soldier flush in the groin. Dead or not, there are some instincts that never leave a man. The soldier cried out, plucking frantically at the growling, snarling mess of claws and teeth as it tore strips of fabric, and then flesh, from his most precious area. At that moment Marius drove a shoulder into the pit of his stomach. Momentum carried the three combatants backwards. They rolled several feet into the bushes in a confusion of fists, teeth, and curses, before their motion threw them apart.

  The soldier finally managed to prise his fingers under Alno’s chest. He peeled the maddened cat away and sent him flying into the undergrowth. Marius took advantage of his momentary distraction to close in once more. The soldier was off-balance – he swung an elbow at Marius’ neck, but Marius easily evaded it by dropping to one knee. He lashed out, grabbing two hands full of flesh already dangling from Alno’s assault.

  “Fucker,” he shouted, and reared back, pulling his arms down with every inch of his strength. The skin resisted for a moment, then, with a dry ripping sound, the soldier’s groin came away from his body. Marius staggered back half a dozen steps. The two men stared at each other, and at the leathery band that hung between Marius’ arms. Halfway along it, a small nub of flesh dangled, pointing accusingly at the ground.

  “Is that my…”

  “Eww.” Marius dropped the flap of skin and ran his hands down his shirt in short, shaky wipes. The soldier smiled, the withered muscles of his jaw creaking open wider than a normal man’s. He placed his palms together, hunched his shoulders, and began to draw his hands wide apart. As he did so, two feet in front of him, a hole in the ground slowly opened in time with the movement. “Keep it,” he said, his words dry with spite. “I wasn’t using it anyway.” Still grinning, he sidled towards the hole.

  “Oh, no you don’t.” Marius hooked his foot under the edge of the discarded flesh and kicked forward. In his youth he’d spent a dozen years running with street gangs, where any stray gravel that crept up between the cobbles was a weapon. His kick was true. The giant skin flap wrapped around the dead man’s face with a vicious snap. He staggered back a step, and Marius leaped towards him.

  And stopped short, impaled upon the sword the soldier drew and thrust before him. Marius stared down at the rusted metal that had entered his chest just below the breastbone. He could feel the blade’s point pressing against his spine, feel every red hot inch of it drawing a line through his body, bisecting him into two distinct parts – that below, through which his strength was draining into the ground, and that above, where he could see the reason for his sudden weakness but could not quite comprehend what had happened. He tried to grab the blade, to pull it back out and make his body one whole, uninterrupted unit again, but his arms were too heavy and he couldn’t quite control them the way he wanted. It took all his concentration to rest his hands along the top of the rusting metal. He stared curiously at the tiny red flakes that peeled off as his hands slid away from the blade. He could see them pricking his flesh but there was no sense of feeling, no understanding. They m
ay as well have been the stars, turning red at the end of the sky. Marius watched them from a million miles away.

  The soldier removed the flap of skin from his face with his free hand, and waggled the sword to get Marius’ attention. Marius gasped as the line of heat inside him expanded with the sideways movement of the blade. Slowly, with infinite weariness, he raised his eyes to meet his assailant’s gaze. The soldier held up the strip of flesh and then, with great ceremony, he draped it over Marius’ unprotesting head, patting it down so that his former genitals hung down his victim’s forehead, just above the eyes. He patted Marius on the cheek: the insolent slap of the victor.

  “That’s twice I’ve killed you now,” he said. “It’s getting to be fun.”

  He pulled the sword out in one swift movement. Marius fell to his knees, hands still curled up against his chest. The soldier raised a foot against his shoulder, and gently pushed him over so he lay on his back. Marius watched through a descending wall of black as the dead man stepped over to the hole, and dropped through it without a backward glance. Then the blackness finished its descent, and he saw nothing else.

  TWO

  Something heavy was sitting on his chest. Marius couldn’t breathe. Was this what it was to be dead, then? Properly dead? This never-ending burden, dragging your life down, filling your insides with the weight of the universe, so that bodily functions were no more than memories, and all that remained was the pressure, making absolute the impossibility of breath?

  The weight meowed, and licked his chin.

  “I wouldn’t let him do that,” said a familiar voice. “You wouldn’t believe what we just caught him eating.”

  Marius peeled open eyelids encrusted with grit. A concerned face loomed over him, a florid, open, pig farmer face Marius had thought he’d seen the last of four years previously.

  “Gerd?”

  “Hi.”