Karl Edward Wagner - Undertow

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 71.42KB 45 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

eBook Version: 2.1

Undertow

Karl Edward Wagner

Prologue

"She was brought in not long past dark," wheezed the

custodian, scuttling crab-like along the rows of silent, shrouded

slabs. "The city guard found her, carried her in. Sounds like the

one you're asking about."

He paused beside one of the waist-high stone tables and lifted

its filthy sheet. A girl's contorted face turned sightlessly

upward—painted and rouged, a ghastly strumpet's mask against

the pallor of her skin. Clots of congealed blood hung like a

necklace of dark rubies along the gash across her throat.

The cloaked man shook his head curtly within the shadow of

his hood, and the moon-faced custodian let the sheet drop back.

"Not the one I was thinking of," he murmured apologetically.

"It gets confusing sometimes, you know, what with so many, and

them coming and going all the while." Sniffling in the cool air, be

pushed his rotund bulk between the narrow aisles, careful to

avoid the stained and filthy shrouds. Looming over his guide, the

cloaked figure followed in silence.

Low-flamed lamps cast dismal light across the necrotorium, of

Carsultyal. Smouldering braziers spewed fitful, heavy fumed

clouds of clinging incense that merged with the darkness and the

stones and the decay—its cloying sweetness more nauseating

than the stench of death it embraced. Through the thick gloom

echoed the monotonous drip-drip-drip of melting ice, at times

chorused suggestively by some heavier splash. The municipal

morgue was crowded tonight—as always. Only a few of its

hundred or more slate beds stood dark and bare; the others all

displayed anonymous shapes bulging beneath blotched

sheets—some protruding at curious angles, as if these restless

dead struggled to burst free of the coarse folds. Night now hung

over Carsultyal, but within this windowless subterranean

chamber it was always night. In shadow pierced only by the

sickly flame of funereal lamps, the nameless dead of Carsultyal

lay unmourned—waited the required interval of time for

someone to claim them, else to be carted off to some unmarked

communal grave beyond the city walls.

"Here, I believe," announced the custodian. "Yes. I'll just get a

lamp."

"Show me," demanded a voice from within the hood.

The portly official glanced at the other uneasily. There was an

aura of power, of blighted majesty about the cloaked figure that

boded ill in arrogant Carsultyal, whose clustered, star-reaching

towers were whispered to be overawed by cellars whose depths

plunged farther still. "Light's poor back here," he protested,

drawing back the tattered shroud.

The visitor cursed low in his throat—an inhuman sound

touched less by grief than feral rage.

The face that stared at them with too wide eyes had been

beautiful in life; in death it was purpled, bloated, contorted in

pain. Dark blood stained the tip of her protruding tongue, and her

neck seemed bent at an unnatural angle. A gown of light-colored

silk was stained and disordered. She lay supine, hands clenched

into tight fists at her side.

"The city guard found her?" repeated the visitor in a harsh

voice.

"Yes, just after nightfall. In the park overlooking the harbor.

She was hanging from a branch—there in the grove with all the

white flowers every spring. Must have just happened—said her

body was warm as life, though there's a chill to the sea breeze

tonight. Looks like she done it herself—climbed out on the

branch, tied the noose, and jumped off. Wonder why they do

it—her as pretty a young thing as I've seen brought in, and took

well care of, too."

The stranger stood in rigid silence, staring at the strangled girl.

"Will you come back in the morning to claim her, or do you

want to wait upstairs?" suggested the custodian.

"I'll take her now."

The plump attendant fingered the gold coin his visitor had

tossed him a short time before. His lips tightened in calculation.

Often there appeared at the necrotorium those who wished to

remove bodies clandestinely for strange and secret reasons—a

circumstance which made lucrative this disagreeable office.

"Can't allow that," he argued. "There's laws and forms—you

shouldn't even be here at this hour. They'll be wanting their

questions answered. And there's fees..."

With a snarl of inexpressible fury, the stranger turned on him.

The sudden movement flung back his hood.

The caretaker for the first time saw his visitor's eyes. He had

breath for a short bleat of terror, before the dirk he did not see

smashed through his heart.

Workers the next day, puzzling over the custodian's

disappearance, were shocked to discover, on examining the

night's new tenants for the necrotorium, that he had not

disappeared after all.

Seekers in the Night

There—he heard the sound again.

Mavrsal left off his disgruntled contemplation of the

near-empty wine bottle and stealthily came to his feet. The

captain of the Tuab was alone in his cabin, and the hour was late.

For hours the only sounds close at hand had been the slap of

waves on the barnacled bull, the creak of cordage, and the dull

thud of the caravel's aged timbers against the quay. Then had

come a soft footfall, a muffled fumbling among the deck gear

outside his half-open door. Too loud for rats—a thief, then?

Grimly Mavrsal unsheathed his heavy cutlass and caught up a

lantern. He catfooted onto the deck, reflecting bitterly over his

worthless crew. From cook to first mate, they had deserted his

ship a few days before, angered over wages months unpaid. An

unseasonable squall had forced them to jettison most of their

cargo of copper ingots, and the Tuab had limped into the harbor

of Carsultyal with shredded sails, a cracked mainmast, a dozen

new leaks from wrenched timbers, and the rest of her worn

fittings in no better shape. Instead of the expected wealth, the

decimated cargo had brought in barely enough capital to cover

the expense of refitting. Mavrsal argued that until refitted, the

Tuab was unseaworthy, and that once repairs were complete,

another cargo could be found (somehow), and then wages long in

arrears could be paid—with a bonus for patient loyalty. The crew

cared neither for his logic nor his promises and defected amidst

stormy threats.

Had one of them returned to carry out...? Mavrsal hunched

his thick shoulders truculently and hefted the cutlass. The master

of the Tuab had never run from a brawl, much less a sneak thief

or slinking assassin.

Night skies of autumn were bright over Carsultyal, making the

lantern almost unneeded. Mavrsal surveyed the soft shadows of

the caravel's deck, his brown eyes narrowed and alert beneath

shaggy brows. But he heard the low sobbing almost at once, so

there was no need to prowl about the deck.

He strode quickly to the mound of torn sail and rigging at the

far rail. "All right, come out of that!" he rumbled, beckoning with

the tip of his blade to the half-seen figure crouched against the

rail. The sobbing choked into silence. Mavrsal prodded the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Karl Edward Wagner - Undertow.pdf

共45页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Karl Edward Wagner - Undertow

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: