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.
Eviclass="underline" the way it flows out from the deed, the way it spreads its stain of injustice. Eviclass="underline" 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.”
“I wasn’t aware of any smell,” Ackle said.
“Did they kill it?”
“No, it got away, but Feloovil swore she’d skewer it if it ever tried to come back, which made Felittle burst into tears again, and that got all the girls going, especially when the customers started demanding their money back, or at least compensation for wounded members and such.”