Steven Erikson
The Second Collected Tales of
BAUCHELAIN & KORBAL BROACH
THE WURMS OF BLEARMOUTH
‘BEHOLD!’ ARMS SPREAD wide and braced against the wind, Lord Fangatooth Claw the Render paused and glanced back at Scribe Coingood. ‘See how this bold perch incites me to declamation, Scribe?’ His narrow, hawkish features darkened. ‘Why are you not writing?’
Scribe Coingood wiped a drip from his nose, worked his numb fingers for a moment, and then scratched out the one word onto the tablet. Here atop the high tower, it was so cold that the wax on the tablet had chipped and flaked beneath the polished bone point of his scribe. He could barely make out the word he had just written, and the biting ice in his eyes didn’t help matters. Squinting against the buffeting wind, he hunched down, pulling tighter his furs, but that did nothing to ease his shivering.
He cursed his own madness that had brought him to West Elingarth’s Forgotten Holding. He also cursed this insane sorcerer for whom he now worked. He cursed this rotting keep and its swaying tower. He cursed the town below: Spendrugle of Blearmouth was a hovel, its population cowering under the tyranny of its new lord. He cursed the abominable weather of this jutting spur of land, thrashed by the wild ocean on three sides on most days, barring those times when the wind swung round to howl its way down from the north, cutting across the treeless blight that stretched inland all the way to yet another storm-wracked ocean, six days distant. He cursed his mother, and the time when he was seven and looked in on his sister’s room and saw things – oh, what was the point? There were plenty of reasons a man had to curse, and with infernal intimacy he knew most of them.
His dreams of wealth and privilege had suffered the fate of a lame hare on the Plain of Wolves, chewed up and torn to bits; and the wind had long since taken away those tattered remnants: the tufts of blood-matted fur, the wisps of white throat-down, and the well-gnawed splinters of bone. All of it gone, scattered across the blasted landscape of his future.
Chewing on the end of his graver, Coingood considered setting that description down in his secret diaries. A lame hare on the Plain of Wolves. Yes, that’s me all right … was that me or my dreams, that hare? Never mind, it’s not like there’s a difference. Not when he was huddled here atop the tower, miserably subject to his lord’s whim, and Hood knew, a manic, eye-gleaming whim it was.
‘Have you written it down now, Scribe? Gods below, if I’d known you were so slow I would never have hired you! Tell me, what did I say? I’ve forgotten. Read it back, damn you!’
‘M-m-master, y’said … er … “Behold!”’
‘Is that it? Didn’t I say anything more?’
‘S-s-something ’bout a bold p-p-perch, m-m-milord.’
Lord Fangatooth waved one long-fingered, skeletal hand. ‘Never mind that. I’ve told you about my asides. They’re just that. Asides. Where was I?’
‘“Behold!”’
The lord faced outward again, defiant against the roaring seas, and struck a pose looming ominously over the town. ‘Behold! Oh, and note my widespread arms as I face this wild, whore-whipped sea. Oh, and that wretched town directly below, and how it kneels quivering like an abject slave. Note, too, the grey skies, and that fierce colour of … grey. What else? Fill the scene, fool!’
Coingood started scratching furiously on the tablet.
Watching him, Fangatooth made circular, tumbling motions with one hand. ‘More! Details! We are in the throes of creativity here!’
‘I b-b-beg you, m-m-milord, I’m j-j-just a s-s-scribe, n-n-not a poet!’
‘Anyone who can write has all the qualifications necessary for artistic genius! Now, where was I? Oh, right. Behold!’ He fell silent, and after a long, quivering moment, he slowly lowered his arms. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That will do for now. Go below, Scribe, and stoke up the fires and the implements of torture. I feel in need of a visit to my beloved brother.’
Coingood hobbled his way to the trapdoor.
‘Next time I say “Behold!”,’ Fangatooth said behind him, ‘don’t interrupt!’
‘I w-w-won’t, m-m-milord. P-p-promise!’
‘There he was again!’ Felittle hissed through chattering teeth. ‘You seen him too, didn’t you? Say you did! It wasn’t just me! Up on that tower, arms out to the sides, like a … like a … like a mad sorcerer!’
Spilgit Purrble, deposed Factor of the Forgotten Holding yet still trapped in the town of Spendrugle of Blearmouth, at least until winter’s end, peered across at the young woman now struggling to close the door to his closet-sized office. Snow had melted and then refrozen across the threshold. He’d need to take a sword to that at least one more time, so that he could officially close up for the season and retreat back to the King’s Heel. As it was, his last day maintaining any kind of office for the backstabbing mob ruling the distant capital and, ostensibly, all of Elingarth, promised to be a cold one.
Even the arrival of Felittle, here in these crowded confines, with her soft red cheeks and the overdone carmine paint on her full lips, and those huge eyes so expansive in their blessed idiocy, could do little to defeat the insipid icy draught pouring in past her from around the mostly useless door. Spilgit sighed and reached for his tankard. ‘I’ve warmed rum in that kettle, mixed with some wine and crushed blackgem berries. Would you like some?’
‘Ooh!’ She edged forward, her quilted coat smelling of smoke, ale and her mother’s eye-watering perfume that Spilgit privately called Whore Sweat – not that he’d ever utter that out loud. Not if he wanted to get what he wanted from this blissful child in a woman’s body. And most certainly never to that vicious hag’s face. While Felittle’s mother already despised him, she’d not yet refused his coin and he needed to keep it that way for a few more months, assuming he could find a way of stretching his fast-diminishing resources. After that …
Felittle was breathing fast as Spilgit collected the kettle from its hook above the brazier and poured out a dollop into the cup she’d taken down from the shelf beside the door. He considered again the delicious absence of guilt that accompanied his thoughts of stealing Felittle away from her tyrant of a mother; away from this miserable village that stank of fish all summer and stank of the people eating that fish all winter; away from her mother’s whores and the sordid creatures that crawled into the King’s Heel every day eager for more of the old wick-dipping from that gaggle of girls only a blind man would find attractive, at least until the poor fool’s probing fingers broke through the powdery sludge hiding their pocked faces. Away, then, and away most of all, from that deranged sorcerer who’d usurped his own brother to carve out, in broken bones, spilled blood and the screaming of endless victims, his private version of paradise.
Oh, there was no end to the horrors of this place, but Lord Fangatooth Claw sat atop them all like a king on a throne. How Spilgit hated sorcerers!
‘You’re still shivering, darling,’ he said to Felittle. ‘Drink that down and have another, and come closer. Now, with only this one chair, well, sit on my lap again, will you. That’s surely one way to get warm.’
She giggled, swinging her not-ungenerous backside onto him and then leaning back with one arm snaking round the back of his neck. ‘If Mother saw this, she’d hack off your mast and roast it on a fire till it was burnt crisp!’
‘But my sweetheart, are we not dressed? Is this not entirely proper, given the cold and the cramped conditions of this office?’
‘Oh, and who else do you do this with?’
‘No one, of course, since you are the only person to ever visit me.’