82. Reviving a leftover partridge

I stumbled into the noisy Great Refectory and snuck up on Fishka, who was drinking with his friends, and whispered in his ear:

“The big one comes in at one o’clock, no change of street.”

This meant: the goods will be unloaded at one o’clock, upriver, in the same place as usual. It wasn’t easy to unload contraband in the city itself, so the free traders would have to take a whole load of equipment a few miles northwest, following the Estergat River upstream. Fishka nodded briefly and passed the message on to his comrades. I was already running away, in case they had the idea of calling me and asking me for a song, or worse, inviting me to drink their disgusting heavenly radrasia with them.

A lady had left a bag for me to take to a Cat named Yelskadur. I gave it to him and nabbed a small piece of bread from a table—no one protested—and then I hurried out of there.

The underground realms of Frashluc were complex. Many of them were not connected, and one had to go out on the surface, through alleys, across terraces, and up stairs to reach the entrance to other tunnels. In all, I ended up knowing about twenty of them. Some were simple shortcuts or emergency exits, old smelly sewers or, on the contrary, narrow tunnels with neat staircases that linked the lower part of the Cats with the upper part and continued up to the Harp. However, I was not yet allowed to go through the tunnel that went so high up into the Rock: I was lackey number two. Diver was number one.

I had been working as a full-time gwak of Frashluc for ten days. For the first five days, I had hardly been separated from Diver, who had been my guide. Now we were working alone. I continued to sleep with the gang, but Diver slept near Frashluc’s house, in a cellar connected to the underground tunnel. Lowen’s mother had taken a dislike to him, he said, and she forbade him to even look into the eyes of the nail-pinchers living in the house. That’s how they thanked him for the hours he spent cleaning the house! I prayed every night that I would never have to see Frashluc again. I was doing my job as a messenger, guarding the tunnels and scrubbing them to remove the moss: these were tiring tasks, but they didn’t upset my mind, they didn’t paralyze me with fear; it was rather the opposite: I felt safe, useful and even happy! I would not have changed my place for that of Diver, not even for eight hundred and forty siatos.

As for my cronies, I had at last found a Cat who was able and willing to teach them, so Manras and Dil spent two hours a day sitting at a table in the Great Refectory, listening attentively and drawing letters and numbers. I had insisted that other fellows should join them, but they were not so diligent as my cronies, for I had warned them that if they did not listen and take it seriously I would wring their ears off and they would be stupid for ever. Come on! I hadn’t nabbed the goldies in the clothing store to waste them! I wasn’t profiting by the lessons directly, but afterwards, in the dead end, the cronies would teach me what they had learned. And so, although I worked for hours and hours, I managed to wisen myself a little.

I hummed as I walked briskly down a deserted alley. I turned a corner, climbed a ladder, and came to a terrace full of hanging laundry. I saw the shadow behind a sheet, and walking silently, I passed behind the human girl and called out:

“Ayo, Ruki!”

The redhead girl gave a cry of surprise and, turning around, she pretended to smack me, but I was already out of reach. The girl smiled.

“Ayo, Draen.”

Ruki was the Albino’s sister, she was twelve years old, and although we had only known each other for ten days, we got on very well: she said that I was a bit like her saviour because, since she had been looking after the household and her sick aunt, she was bored out of her mind, and with me she was not bored.

“Do you have a moment?” I asked.

“As long as my aunt doesn’t call me,” Ruki snorted.

We smiled, and after helping her hang up the remaining laundry, I sat with her on some wooden crates, both of us hidden between two sheets.

“For once, I have news for you,” Ruki said, hugging her knees. “Last night, my brother came over with a friend. And I listened to them talk. You wouldn’t believe what I heard. If I tell you, you won’t get over it.”

“Well, don’t tell me then!” I joked. However, deep down, I was dying of curiosity. The Albino, after all, was Frashluc’s most intimate associate. “What did you hear?”

Ruki smiled broadly, put on an important face, and then, again, took an air of complicity.

“Apparently, the Black Daggers are trading with a city in the Underground, and one of them went there and came back in just three days. Can you believe it? They go through a tunnel from this very city! My brother says that Frashluc is in a black mood because the Black Daggers made deals with the nail-pinchers and not with him. Those guys are crazy. Getting Frashluc riled up is one of the worst things you can do.”

I nodded my head in agreement, pensive.

“On the other hand, he can’t do much against them either, can he?” I mused.

Ruki looked at me as if I had gone mad.

“He can’t do anything, you say? Frashluc? He can pop them all off if he wants!”

“Pshaw, the Black Daggers are a huge brotherhood,” I replied, skeptically. “They’re everywhere. Frashluc is not the king of the world.”

Ruki rolled her eyes and gently pushed me with her bare foot.

“What would you know.”

I shrugged my shoulders and put my cap on, looking at the girl with a smart gwak smile, as if to say: I know everything. Then Ruki took my hand and said:

“The one in charge here is Frashluc, not the Black Daggers. If you think he’s not, you’re a scaluftard.”

I didn’t think he wasn’t: my attention was now focused on the hand that held mine. It wasn’t the first time she did so, but this time… I had squeezed it a little. And it was as if all my blood had rushed to my head. I was a copper from the Valley: I couldn’t blush. The young redhead, on the other hand, was as red as the Candle. Her blue eyes sparkled.

“I bet you don’t dare kiss me?”

I straightened up at the challenge.

“I don’t dare, you say?” I replied. “Well, natural I dare. And you?”

We looked at each other defiantly. And I was thinking to myself, “Courage and bravery, Mor-eldal,” when suddenly there was a:

“Ruki! Who are you talking to? Come here immediately!”

The redhead jumped up.

“Oh, no—my aunt,” she whispered with an apologetic pout. “Come back tomorrow, does it run?”

I stood up and nodded, nervous and excited at the same time. I stammered:

“It runs. Ayo.”

I disappeared like a squirrel towards the entrance of the tunnel, which was not far away. I passed the man guarding the door and went into the depths of the Rock. I had to fill one tunnel with rat poison and take the dead rats out of another: I did my job. And as I did so I kept thinking of Zenira. It was strange, wasn’t it? I’d been about to kiss Ruki, and then, bam, I started thinking about Korther’s daughter. It didn’t make sense. But, as my nakrus master used to say, necromancers weren’t usually the most reasonable people in the world.

I shook my head, and carrying a bucket full of dead rats, I made my way to the other exit, through the secret door, and arrived at the Star Court House, the cradle of merchandise and serious business. That day it was full of Frashluc men. The sun, which was already breaking through the layer of ash in the sky, was gently illuminating the place. I was walking down a corridor towards the hallway when I came upon a group of colossuses, and I hurriedly backed away. They pushed me anyway, as they passed, but I did not drop my bucket of rats. It would have been a very bad idea to drop it. Perhaps sensing my attachment to the bucket, one of the big fellows said:

“Gwak, how many rats do you have?”

I frowned in bewilderment.

“I didn’t count them.”

His three companions laughed. The fact was that “having rats” also meant “having guts” in slang—no idea where that expression came from, though.

“You didn’t count them, you say?” The big guy clicked his tongue and grabbed me by the collar of my ragged shirt. “Can’t you count?”

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The big guy’s outburst did not surprise me: some people just jumped at any opportunity to fill their long idle hours. I nodded my head.

“I can, sir. I can count.”

“Then count. Now,” the big guy ordered.

As he and his companions looked on, I put down the bucket, knelt down, and counted the rats. Finally, I said:

“Eight. There’re eight.”

The Cats had watched me with great amusement as I rummaged through the corpses. The big guy replied:

“Are you sure?”

They were laughing. I sighed and nodded.

“As ragingly sure as two times four is eight and so is four plus four. All right?”

I was about to leave when the big guy’s hand grasped me again. His expression made me shudder. I knew instinctively that this fellow was not a free trader, nor a swindler, nor a thief. He was a henchman through and through.

“Hey, gwak, don’t be a smartass, huh?”

“No, sir,” I stammered.

Then the front door opened, and I saw the thin figure of Diver. He looked at each of us in turn before deciding that nothing serious was happening, and he intervened:

“Sharpy. Come. There’s work to do.”

The big guy held on to me for two more seconds before letting go. I picked up the bucket and went outside with Diver. As soon as I stepped out into the open, I breathed more easily. When we were a little way from the Star Court, Diver commented cheerfully:

“Looks like I came at the right time. Throw those rats away and follow me. Frashluc wants to see you.”

My heart froze. Frashluc wanted to see me? Me? Oh, good mother. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.

I emptied the bucket on a mountain of rubbish a little way off and followed Diver to The Yellow Dragon. We entered through the back door, without needing to go through the tavern, and proceeded into the tunnel. The guards at the gate knew us and let us pass without a word. Instead of heading for the great underground meeting hall, where I had spent two whole days cleaning the floor, we took another tunnel and went up the stairs. I shivered.

“Are we going to his house?”

“Yep,” Diver confirmed. And he gave me a curious look. “Don’t worry. He’s not mad at you.”

I shrugged. That’s all I needed, for Frashluc to be pissed off at me. The situation was terrifying enough as it was. Then the Diver added:

“At least I don’t think so. Why would he be mad at you?”

I gave him an alarmed look.

“What do I know.”

I replayed in my mind everything I had done in the last ten days and found only some minor reprehensible things, like secretly putting a dead rat under the pallet of Swashbuckler, that isturbag… I had also tried to revive a rat’s bones, all alone, in a tunnel, without anyone seeing me. And, well, a few more little things, but nothing that could reach Frashluc’s ears, that I know of. The Big Mole, the tunnel supervisor, had yet to find a reason to beat me up once. Which was quite a feat, according to Diver.

This tunnel, unlike the others, was well fashioned and even had niches with impressive statues of quadrupedal animals and sajits. Diver said that, according to what the Great Mole had told him, they represented the ancestors of the Goddess of the Rock, at the time when Estergat had been occupied by the Tassians. Finally, we reached the cellar where my friend slept every night, and we stopped before a door and knocked. Someone came and opened the peephole to look in, and Diver raised his hand.

“Ayo!” he said. “I bring the gwak.”

“Wait a moment,” was the reply from the other side.

And we waited. We waited so long that when the door opened the Albino caught us sitting on the pallet playing a game of morra. The pale human rolled his eyes.

“Come on, boy. Come in.”

I stood up, looking at the Albino’s expression out of the corner of my eye. He looked calm. I followed him up the stairs, into Frashluc’s house. I hadn’t paid much attention to this one the first time around, but I remembered that it had seemed to me like a perfect nail-pincher’s house, and I confirmed that as I climbed the shiny wooden stairs. Once upstairs, the Albino knocked on a door, and we heard:

“Come on in.”

Frashluc’s voice made me feel even more tense. The Albino opened the door, waved me in, and I crossed the threshold.

It was the same living room as the last time, except that it had been refurnished: there was a large red and gold carpet, sideboards, shelves, and an imposing sofa where the old nail-pincher was sitting, a blanket on his knees. A great fire was glowing in the huge fireplace. I stood by the door, but the Albino pushed me forward. Frashluc clicked his tongue.

“Devils. No, no, no!” he growled. “You’re dirtying my carpet, you filthy gwak! Back, back. He stinks.”

“Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that,” the Albino admitted, embarrassed.

Frashluc glared at him. Unlike the other times I had seen him, he was in a bad mood that day. Blasthell. I stood by the wall, off the carpet, stupidly fighting back tears, because if I was filthy, it was precisely because I was doing my job. Blasthell.

Frashluc coughed, and I looked up again, startled. Now that I saw him like that on the sofa… he looked like he was sick. The kap, sick! It was hard to believe.

When his coughing stopped, he accepted a glass of water from a young servant. When he had emptied it, Frashluc shooed her away, and as she bent down to adjust his blanket, he barked:

“Out!”

The girl walked out quietly, but not without giving me a half-curious, half-compassionate look. I returned her gaze. After a silence, the Albino cleared his throat.

“Should I send him to the bathroom or something?”

Frashluc coughed and grunted:

“No. Do it later. Right now, I want him to answer my questions. Let him answer from there: I don’t need to cough in his face. Kid,” he called to me then, “Answer. That little kid you took to Coldpalm’s—he was sick and you nursed him back to health, didn’t you?”

The question caught me so off guard that I just stared at him, my eyes wide. How did he know that…? The Albino grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.

“Answer, gwak.”

I swallowed and nodded.

“Yes.”

Frashluc was now looking at me with hawk-like eyes.

“Coldpalm left that kid to you, and not to Le Bor. Because you’re a magician and you can heal. Because… you are like Coldpalm.” He paused and whispered, “Am I right, little necromancer?”

This killed me. I had been working for Frashluc for ten days, I had betrayed the Black Daggers because of him twice, that devil had been toying with my life, and now it turned out that he wanted to continue tormenting me! I broke down and tears rolled silently down my cheeks.

“Korther knows, no doubt. Maybe he has taught you something himself. Rumors say that that elfocan has… an obsession with forbidden books. Including necromancy.”

I frowned. Korther? Nonsense; like he was going to teach me necromancy when he was a demon… Oh. But of course Frashluc didn’t know he was a demon. Did he?

“How well do you know the necromantic arts?” Frashluc asked. “Can you raise the dead? Just curious.”

“Answer,” the Albino insisted.

I gritted my teeth and, after staring at the kap, nodded.

“A little.”

Frashluc’s eyes sparkled.

“For real? Show me! Jarvik, get the leftover partridge from the kitchen. Make sure it doesn’t miss a bone.”

The Albino gave Frashluc an incredulous look.

“Sir. Are you sure that…?”

“Go get them!” Frashluc shouted.

The Albino left, but not without giving me a warning look beforehand, as if to say: you’d better not go near the kap. I didn’t move an inch. Frashluc was examining me with renewed attention, and that frightened me.

“If you can’t get it to move, boy,” he told me, “I’ll cut your tongue out for lying to me.”

I felt with redoubled consciousness my tongue, which was becoming pasty in my mouth. And I thought: without a tongue, ayo the songs, ayo the chatter, ayo the cheerful blabbering with the comrades… I could still learn to speak using the harmonies as skillfully as my master, it runs, but it would never be the same… I clenched my trembling left hand. After a silence, the kap asked:

“I offered you the opportunity to stay safe, out of reach of the Black Daggers. Are you satisfied with your job?”

I regained my speech and uttered:

“Yes, sir.”

A mocking glint shone in Frashluc’s eyes.

“That master in the mountains,” he resumed. “Is he a necromancer?”

I sighed.

“Yes, sir. But he’s not in the mountains anymore.”

“Oh, no? And where is he?”

I perceived in his question a keen interest which alarmed me. I told the truth:

“Dunno. Very far away. He’s gone.”

Frashluc’s eyebrows were furrowed.

“Do you know any other necromancers?” I shook my head, and he added sharply, “No one lies to Frashluc!”

“I ain’t lying, sir,” I gasped. “I ain’t seen no other nakrus. I swear.”

Frashluc’s eyes opened wide. He had a coughing fit. When he calmed down, he croaked:

“Nakrus. Your master was a nakrus.”

This time it was I who widened my eyes. Blasthell. I’d been confusing necromancers with nakrus for so long, I’d ended up blundering. Frashluc was deep in thought. Finally, he asked:

“How old was he?”

I stood still and silent. The door opened, and the Albino returned with a tray full of bones and the expression of one who thinks he is doing something bestially ridiculous…

“How old!” Frashluc demanded to know.

The Albino placed the tray with the gnawed bones on the edge of the carpet without daring to interrupt the interrogation. My lips trembled. Finally I stammered:

“T-three thousand. I think.”

Frashluc was looking at me with a crazy look in his eyes.

“Three thousand years,” he repeated.

He was in shock, and the silence continued. I thought to myself: I betrayed the Black Daggers, but I’m not betraying my master now, am I? I tried to think I wasn’t, because after all, my master was already far, far away from the Republic of Arkolda.

The fire crackled in the silence of the living room. Then Frashluc breathed in and said:

“Show me.”

He meant the partridge bones. Breathing heavily, I knelt down by the tray and looked at the bones, but at that moment, I was more aware of the two pairs of eyes that followed my movements. Could I put this partridge together again? More or less, perhaps. Without saying a word, I began the arduous task of recognizing the bones and joining them together with mortic energy. Sometimes, I made mistakes and had to remove several bones. Frashluc’s coughing distracted me, and the Albino’s rather dismayed look didn’t help, but eventually, I got the bird back together. I made sure they were both paying attention, and then, with effort, I moved one leg. Then the other. And again. The bone bird moved around the tray. Suddenly, the Albino said in a muffled voice:

“This is the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen.”

My concentration fell apart, and the partridge with it. I felt groggy, because I had used so much energy. I still wasn’t very good at not wasting mortic energy on these spells—it was also true that I didn’t have much practice: it wasn’t the same to move a skeleton from a distance as to move a hand stuck to your own body.

I was rubbing my eyes when I felt a draft and looked up to see that Frashluc had abandoned his sofa and was leaning over me. His eyes were blazing. He reached out with both hands and grabbed my head—my being filthy didn’t seem to matter to him anymore.

“You’re going to teach me,” he affirmed in a whisper. “And you’re going to help me transform.”

Trapped between his two warm hands, I looked at him, frozen, stunned. Teach him? Transform? But transform into… what? Into a nakrus, obviously. Into a nakrus. Frashluc wanted me to turn him into a nakrus!

He coughed in my face and let go. And, overcome by a nameless fear, I stammered:

“I don’t know how to do that.”

But Frashluc’s coughing covered my stuttered words. And when he recovered, he did not ask me what I had said. He only insisted:

“You’re going to turn me into a nakrus because, if you don’t, I’ll cut your head off.”

Any expert necromancer who heard this would have burst out laughing. Turning him into a nakrus? That was a good one! It took years and years to transform, and no one had ever turned into a nakrus without being a necromancer himself, and a good one. Even Coldpalm hadn’t managed to transform properly. And now he was asking me, an eleven-year-old gwak, to turn him into a nakrus!

Frashluc stood up and ordered:

“Send him to wash, Jarvik. And give him some clothes. From now on, the little magician stays here.”

The nail-pincher looked at me, smiled to himself, and went back to his sofa. And the Albino, without daring to touch me, said:

“Come on, boy.”

I stood up shakily on my two legs and followed Jarvik out of the living room, more dead than alive.