Medicine for the Dead Read online

  ‘This author can really write. If you loved Stephen King’s Dark Tower series – or even if you’re a hardened Cormac McCarthy fan – you will find this book right inside your wheelhouse. Living, witty dialogue, and a familiar-yet-strange world inhabited by vivid characters. I loved it. And I don’t say that about a book very often.’

  Paul Kearney, author of The Ten Thousand

  First published 2015 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-901-6

  Copyright © 2015 Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson

  Cover art by Tomasz Jedruszek

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  For Mom and Dad

  Are we there yet?

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One: The Boy in the Box

  Two: The Sexton’s Daughter

  Three: Atleya

  Four: Hooves and Feet

  Five: Infected

  Six: I-Part

  Seven: The Artisan and the Amateur

  Eight: Food for the Living

  Nine: Master of the House

  Ten: The Queen of Dogs

  Eleven: Debts

  Twelve: Ladies and Gentlemen

  Thirteen: Thirst

  Fourteen: The City of Salt

  Fifteen: I-Whole

  Sixteen: Neither Gods Nor Men

  Seventeen: The Crow Knight

  Eighteen: Stove In

  Nineteen: The Drowning Song

  Twenty: Loves-Me

  Interim

  Glossary

  People and Places

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  ON AN ARID plain under a blistering bright sky, someone dressed as an Ara-Naure woman walked east towards the sun, carrying a fur-swaddled infant.

  And swearing at it.

  “Can’t you be still, you nasty little parasite,” she said over its tireless screams. “I’m thirsty as well, but you don’t see me having fits over it, do you?”

  The plume of black smoke behind them was now scarcely a wisp on the horizon. In the heat of the day, nothing else moved but one idle rat snake, its tongue flicking in tandem with the darting of the caretaker’s eyes as she clutched her disagreeable prize.

  Then she felt the front of her deerskin dress feebly accosted, and looked down in loathsome surprise. “What? Do you think there is anything there for you? Here, if it will shut you up, have your udder...”

  She pushed her false hair out of the child’s reach, put the tip of one gaunt finger to its mouth, and relished a few moments of desperately-suckling silence. Then it turned its face away and shrieked with fresh, frustrated outrage.

  She withdrew her hand, her cracked lips curling back over small, sharp teeth. “Well, scream all you want! You are a damned ungrateful child, you miserable ugly runt, and when we get to the river I will drown you and leave you for the fishmen!”

  But although the child carried on unabated, assuring their mutual misery, her hurried steps and hunted eyes suggested that she did not intend to surrender it to anyone.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE BOY IN THE BOX

  IT WAS SUNDAY, September 28th, and Elim was going to church.

  He’d missed the last sermon, what with being away at the fair and all, but that was all right. His hair was all soft and washed now, his dirty work clothes traded for his best blue button-up shirt, and soon his God-given insides would be as clean as the rest of him. He’d done a good job.

  Was he very much trouble? Nillie Halfwick asked from the wagon-bench behind him. A lock of blond hair peeped out from under her white lace bonnet, and he was hard-pressed to avoid noticing how she smelled of rose soap and oatmeal.

  No, not hardly, Elim gallantly lied. Her little brother Sil was a pistol, all right, but he’d earned his keep: he and Elim had gone and sold every last one of those yearling horses, filled the Calvert family coffers for another year, and now there was nothing to do but tidy their souls and fit themselves back into the happy, well-worn rut of life in Hell’s Acre.

  “¡TE-MUEVE!”

  The line tied around Elim’s rope-scorched wrists abruptly jerked him forward. He staggered on bare feet, his gaze meeting the pigtailed Sundowner’s dark scowl for half a second, but that was enough to yank him back to the real world.

  Sil hadn’t sold the horses like he was supposed to. He’d run away to Sixes – what the heathen locals called Island Town. And somewhere along the way, Elim’s good and wholesome intention to find Sil and bring him home alive had ended here, with that wrongly-shaped coffin in the wagon-bed ahead of him: a Sundowner boy, no older than Sil, who’d somehow gotten himself on the wrong end of Elim’s rifle. And there was that terrible little sack, the one hanging by the buckboard and still dripping from the bottom, whose contents they’d pulled out and showed him by a fistful of fine blond hair.

  The world had been wrenched out of its rut. There had to be a way to reseat it somehow, jigger it back into its groove. If he could just picture things the way they were supposed to be, imagine them hard enough to pop them back into place, Elim was sure he’d find himself back home again. He tried again to put himself back in the driver’s seat, the reins light and loose in his hands, with Nillie’s sweet voice at his ear and Sil sitting choleric and sulky beside her, taking for granted his head’s natural and continuing attachment to his neck.

  But Elim’s hair was all stiff with grease and salt, his pants as filthy as his soul, and he had nothing else to clothe him but his own sun-blistered hide. And all the while, every westward step was taking him further from Hell’s Acre, closer to the unthinkable.

  It was Sunday, September 28th, and Elim was going to his death.

  “Move!” VUCHAK JERKED the rope, forcing the half-man to stagger forward, and was gratified to see his gaze snap back to the present.

  “Stop it!” Weisei admonished him with a rough swat to the arm. “He’s already walking – what else can you want?”

  “I want his attention,” Vuchak replied, and lifted his chin at the coffin in the wagon-bed behind them. “I want him to take every step with his eyes on the box and his mind on the one inside of it.” And really, why should this murderous bastard two-blood get to rest his thoughts elsewhere? Why should he be afforded any comfort at all?

  Vuchak might as well have said it out loud. From beside him on the bench, Weisei clicked his tongue in disapproval. “I don’t think he’s in any danger of enjoying himself, Vichi. Anyway, let’s stop for awhile. The sun’s already climbing.”

  “No,” Vuchak said, quickly, before Weisei could pull the reins. “I mean – I meant to say to you earlier, that really we should travel only by daylight this time. It’s not like it was when we came to Island Town. Even the road isn’t safe anymore.” The desert morning was maiden-lovely just now, a rumpled sea of rich sandstone reds and oranges growing splendid with the sunrise. But it had been corrupted as surely as a seed-rotted pumpkin, and would spill out its hidden sickness at the slightest ignorant pressure.

  Weisei’s frown deepened. “By day? ALL day? Vichi, it’s already too hot, and too bright, and we’ve been going since before dawn without any stop. We can still rest for a few hours, just through the worst of the afternoon. Can’t we?”

&n
bsp; Vuchak’s gaze crept back to the half-man again, drawn to him like a tongue to a mouth-sore. He was a dangerous creature, monstrous and ugly, with brown and white flesh marbled together like oil-tainted water. Unnatural. Incompatible. And already proven violent.

  No, they had to keep going. The half had to be walked until he was sapped of his strength, wrung out until he was too tired to smash anyone’s head in and run off, or to get very far if he did.

  But Vuchak knew better than to let Weisei glimpse his reasoning. He dropped his gaze to the coffin, and made it a grim camouflage for his thoughts. “And have it understood that we cared more for our comfort than your nephew’s unsleeping bones? Really, Weisei, what would be said of you?”

  This was not manipulation – not really. Weisei was foolish, silly, almost fatally sentimental. Vuchak had long since given up trying to make him anything else. No, the best thing was to point his excess of feeling in the correct direction, channel his unbecoming behavior to some useful purpose. Back in Island Town, where drink and distractions poured from every conceivable source, Vuchak managed it easily.

  But this was not Island Town. There was nothing pleasant here, and Weisei was perfectly, damnably sober. He fixed Vuchak with a hard glower, and pulled the horse to a halt.

  “Wait,” Vuchak said, struggling to stifle his frustration, “what are you —”

  “Hey, Hakai!” Weisei called ahead.

  From away to Vuchak’s left, the blindfolded slave stopped. The baggage-laden mule he led did likewise.

  “Take the horse as well,” Weisei said, and swung himself nimbly around into the wagon-bed.

  “Yes, sir.” Hakai reached up to take the horse under its mouth, and held both animals in readiness for his masters’ next wishes.

  “Weisei, be sensible,” Vuchak snapped. “You know very well why we –”

  “I know why YOU want to keep going, yes.” Weisei paused to touch the coffin and make the sign of a sorrowing god. Then he was digging through the baggage. “We could just as easily stop and rest for a day and a night, or half the day and then again at night, but then you wouldn’t get your share of suffering, would you? Better we all make ourselves miserable than allow this wretched fellow a minute’s ease, isn’t it?” He reached for something stuffed beside the water-cask. “Well, we’ll have our share of misery, then, but I won’t let you make meanness out of it. There’s been enough of that already.”

  By then, Weisei had his knife in one hand and a piece of rawhide in the other, and Vuchak understood what he meant to do. “Weisei, don’t –”

  “Don’t speak to me about diseases, Vichi – I won’t hear you!”

  That wouldn’t stop it from being true, though. Half-men were carriers, and everyone knew it. They hid the poxes that sickened their white fathers, and killed their native mothers, and if they themselves couldn’t know what kind of vileness they had pocketed in their travels, then what right did an idiot like Weisei have to declare this one clean and Vuchak stupid for worrying about it?

  Not that it mattered now. Weisei had already made up his mind. So there was nothing to do but watch in stomach-clenching dread as Vuchak’s soft-hearted, child-minded prince climbed down to put himself within breathing-distance of that pestilential brute at the end of the rope.

  Vuchak sighed, reluctantly obedient. “Yes, marka.”

  SO ELIM STOOD still and watched his tied hands, doing his level best to ignore the aches and pains awakening all through him. They got louder when he stopped moving.

  “Hallo!”

  Elim looked up, just in time to see the thinnest of the three Sundowners coming at him with a knife.

  He startled, flinching back until he’d yanked the rope taut and there was nowhere else to go – and was jerked forward again just as quickly.

  “¡Alto!” The pigtailed one swore at him from the wagon bench, threatening another hard pull of the rope.

  “Veh’ne eihei, vichi!” the thin one scolded him. And then, turning back to Elim with a look of utmost perplexity: “Oi, ¿ké pasa? Daño te-aser no voy. ¿Par-ké miedo tienes?”

  Then he followed Elim’s gaze to the knife, and clucked in amazement. “¡Nan, nan!” He set the knife down on the ground, produced a sizeable piece of rawhide from under his arm, and came at him again with empty hands and honest eyes. “¿No te muevas, eh?”

  And then, before Elim’s tired mind could even try to understand, the slight fellow dropped down to one knee at Elim’s feet – prompting a peculiar pained hiss from his friend in the wagon – and began pushing the edge of the material at the arch of Elim’s foot.

  Elim obediently lifted his foot, and was sorry to put its dirty sole back down on such a nice clean hide.

  But this seemed to be exactly what the Sundowner wanted: with a reassuring pat of Elim’s foot and a gaze that clearly commanded him to stay put, he reached out to pick up the knife again. And then, with an extra measure of slowness apparently designed to prevent Elim’s concern from corralling itself back into panic, he brought it close and set about scoring little marks in the hide, leaving an even inch-wide perimeter all around. When he’d finished with that, he looked from the brownness of Elim’s left foot to the whiteness of his right, and up at Elim’s face with an expression that seemed to say, how in hell did you manage to do that?

  That seemed to inspire him to take the measure of the other one too. He guided Elim’s right foot onto the hide with a gentle touch, and resuming marking the pattern.

  Elim had met his share of Sundowners in the last three days – more than he’d ever wanted to see in a lifetime. But this was certainly the first one with a notion to make him a pair of shoes.

  He was a strange young man, most memorable for the shining black hair that spilled loose and lady-like all down his back. The rest of him was tall, by Sundowner standards, and the kind of thin that said less about his eating than his especially delicate bones. He was colored like a dark bay horse – him and his pigtailed friend both – and aside from his yellow beaded moccasins, wrapped shins, and knee-length sand-colored shirt, he didn’t suffer any excess of clothing.

  Well, that made two of them. Elim glanced back at the rising sun, his back already warm. The sunburn he’d gotten yesterday – or was it the day before? – had raised welts on his white parts, leaving them red and screaming hot enough to cook griddle-cakes. He didn’t want to think about what a second day’s roasting was going to do to him.

  “Tu píe levantar podrías, por favor.” The Sundowner pressed his palms to Elim’s shins, which was pleasant and perplexing... until it occurred to Elim’s tired mind that maybe this meant that they were done now.

  He stepped back off the hide, and tried to remember the Marín word for ‘thank you’. “Graces,” Elim said.

  The Sundowner got to his feet, his brows furrowed, and his tone bordering on hopeful. “... ¿Grése?”

  That was the one. “Ai,” Elim said, and nodded at the leather. “Grése.” For whatever it’s worth.

  Apparently that changed everything. “¡Ay, mucho gusto!” the thin fellow said, positively beaming. “Ahora civil séamos, y en la manera correkta nos conosemos. Weisei,” he said, and indicated himself with a rapid patting of his chest.

  Elim didn’t know more than twenty words of Marín on his best day, and this was as far from it as he’d ever been. But that last part might have been a name... and its owner certainly was aiming to be neighborly.

  “Way-Say?” Elim repeated.

  “Ai, Weisei!” the Sundowner said, with a second round of chest-patting. Then he turned and lifted his chin at the fellow holding the horses. “Y ese ‘Hakai’ es.”

  The blindfolded fellow turned at the sound of his name. It was hard to tell much about him from this distance, but he was certainly a lighter shade than the other two, almost like that dun gelding that the Crackstone boys had won at cards last winter.

  “Hawkeye,” Elim repeated, and tried not to think about where this winter would find him.

  Way-
Say nodded, and likewise indicated his pigtailed partner in the wagon. “Vuchak.”

  He was a mean one, his face colored by an unmissable naked hate. He was dark like Way-Say, a little shorter and stronger in his build... and although Way-Say happened to be holding the knife right then, Elim had no doubt that his partner was the one who knew how to use it.

  “Bootjack,” Elim said, careful not to look him in the eye.

  “Nan,” the pigtailed one snapped, twisting sharply around to glare at him. “MAESTRO Vuchak. SINSIR Vuchak. ATODAK Vuchak. Pero nunka hamás ‘Vuchak’.”

  Way-Say rolled his eyes and made a peculiar hand-sign. “Sinsir Vuchak,” he amended.

  Elim nodded, unable to name his mistake, and declined to try again.

  It didn’t seem to matter. Way-Say turned and beckoned at his partner, and with a sound like heavy pants made when they hit the wash-pile, he caught the blanket Bootjack tossed to him and shook the dust out.

  Except it wasn’t a blanket, as Elim belatedly realized, but one of those big peculiar draping things with a neck-hole cut through the middle, which folks back home called a poncho. This one was big and mostly brown, with a maze of sandy white lines and angles woven all through it. Just the sight of those dizzying patterns tired him out.

  “¿Y tú?” Way-Say said, with a funny little gesture as if he were pulling an invisible string from Elim’s mouth. “Alem? Ilam?”

  It took Elim a weary minute to realize that he was being asked for his own name... and a good bit more to decide whether to give it to them. These Sundowner people were heathens, sorcerers, cavorters-with-spirits – whatever the reverend had meant by that – and there was no telling what they might be able to do with his true Penitent name.