Old Dark Things

  BEFORE THE VELD

  He pushed a pebble, cut with runes, across a filthy table. Back and forth.

  It was another inn. Another tavern. Another dink. But it was all so much the same. The search for Auxentios was going badly. No one wanted to talk about the sage, if the man even existed.

  There had been just one boy, a dirty skeleton of a lad, who'd told Kevldulf that he knew where to find someone who knew where to find the miracle-worker. Kveldulf paid the boy more silver than a merchant would demand for a pot of myrrh resin, and then he waited in the appointed tavern. It was a sign of his desperation and the level of exhaustion to which he had sunk that he was even half-hoping the child would not return.

  He just wanted to give in and walk away.

  Instead, he took a drink.

  His hands were clean but he checked them again. He looked at the mountains and valleys of his knuckles. It was a fear that was always with him now; a strange little idea that there was blood caked somewhere on his hands. Of course, he knew that it was the idea that he was somehow at fault for what she did in his wake.

  When the man sat down beside him, Kveldulf nearly got up and moved to another table. It wasn't the disease that bothered him, or the ruinous skin that could be seen between the rags that bound his hands. It was the smell. Kveldulf had a very powerful nose, even when he awake. Sometimes people were simply covered with too many sickly layers of smell for him bear. Kveldulf couldn't see much under the wool, rags and hood. Was he one of the afflicted? Plagued? A leper? It didn't matter. The diseased man would no doubt be chased off by the bar's owner soon enough. But then a minute passed, and then two, and nothing happened.

  There was a wheezing of breath. A cough that was wet and pained.

  "Auxientios," said the man. "I am told you ask for Auxentios."

  Kveldulf looked up, attentive. He nodded.

  "Then come with me."

  Slowly, frustratingly slowly, the man got up. Kveldulf had more than enough time to finish the rest of his drink. As he followed, he had to walk with small, measured steps. Worry fluttered in him as the ragged man took a path into the twisting and narrow guts of the city. Down bleak streets where washing hung on lines strung from house to house, past children playing in the dirt and around a drunken, fighting man and woman. They went into a piteous ruin of a place, down some stairs and then up again, emerging into a broken-roofed temple to some forgotten god that was filled with what must have been a thousand pigeons.

  Scattered everywhere that the pigeon were not, were books: hundreds of them, covered with feathers, dust and droppings. Kveldulf's ciphering was poor, but he recognised a few of the titles. They were invaluable works of mages and scholars, lying here, mouse-chewed, in piles. The only light came from holes in the roof and three grotesquely malformed candles that the ragman lit from a pot of coals. The smell that carried here was stomach-turning and the sound of wings was like a parody of the Day Queen's loyal host of spirits.

  The ragman took off his hooded coat and dropped it on the floor. He didn't seem to care at all about what it landed in.

  He should have been dead. Disease in every colour rode him. His eyes were a blind white haze, his mouth was rotted, his fingers were without nails and ended in bloodied stubs.

  "To utterly banish disease and ills," said the man, "that I cannot do. The miracles visited upon me, the powers for which I am the vessel, they do not give free and wondrous cures without payment. No. I can only take other people's sicknesses and curses upon me. That is all. So, knowing this, what, my friend, can do you seek of me?"