James Enge - The Red Worm's Way

Morlock was sober when the coin winked at him, but that wasn't his fault. Towns were scattered thinly through the masterless lands east of the Narrow Sea, and he'd been walking and sleeping in the open air for weeks since he'd had his last drink. The town he finally arrived at looked promising. All the shops were shut down; all the people were in the streets wearing wreaths; the whole town seemed to be gearing up for a party. If you can't get a drink in a place like that, Morlock reasoned keenly with himself, why the hell not?

It was what he was still asking himself more than an hour after hitting town. If there were any taverns in the place they were locked up, the same as the rest of the shops. He ended up wandering after a crowd singing various slightly discordant songs; he followed them out to a large field at the edge of the town which seemed to serve as a sort of fairground. Here Morlock hoped he would find some agreeable person with a cask, selling or giving away strong drink of some type wine, or beer, or hard cider at least.

But there wasn't. There were a number of more or less amateur performances; there were clowns and jugglers and singers; there were farm animals of various remarkable sizes or abilities; there were vendors selling a surprising variety of foodstuffs conveniently impaled on sticks. But Morlock, wandering among the singing, laughing crowd, concluded that, whatever was elevating their spirits, it wasn't liquor of any sort he could recognize.

"What good are you, then?" he muttered to the town as a whole, and made his way through the field with the intention of getting as far away as he could just as fast as he was able. A town with no drinking was no town for him.

"Sir!" a woman cried as he shouldered past. "You are a stranger here!"

"Yes," he said, and would have gone on, but she grabbed him by the arm.

"You can help me!" she said urgently.

"Maybe," he conceded gruffly. "I probably won't, though."

"My husband has just died."

Morlock turned to look at her for the first time. She wore a wreath, like her fellow-townspeople, but it was black and trailed widow's weeds. Her face was stained with fresh tears and the tracks of old ones. Morlock had recently lost his own wife, although not by any process as benign and peaceful as death, which was one of many reasons he currently preferred drinking to thinking. This widow's apparent grief at the loss of her husband angered him obscurely. But it also caught his attention.

"So?" he said.

"There is no one to sit the wake with him tonight. Our town Loukios, as you see, is on holiday. If you could"

"Sit it yourself. Or cremate him: that way you won't have to worry about burying him alive."

"Please, sir. Please. He is dead. That is not in doubt. And I cannot sit the wake, or I surely would. His body must lie one night in state before it is buried, and someone must sit with it to protect it from . . . someone must sit with it."

"To protect it from Strigae?" Morlock said coolly "You've a cult of corpse-eating witches hereabouts is that it? In that case, if I were you, I'd get the body underground before dark."

"Our laws don't permit that."

"Change them. Or break them."

"Please," she said desperately. "Please. I can pay you! I can pay you with gold, with good solid gold!" And she held out a fistful of gold coins.

Morlock's interest in gold was slight indeed; he made it by the boxful whenever he needed some, which was not often. But, as a maker of things, he had once had some interest in coins. He glanced instinctively at the discs in her hands.

They were of a type new to him. Each design was different, and some were horrible he could see headless corpses and hanged men on a few of the gold cartwheels she held out to him. The coins might be solid and perhaps they were gold, but he doubted they were good in any generally accepted meaning of the word. They stank of evil magic.

He was about to say as much when one of the coins, showing what appeared to be a crow or raven wearing a crown, winked at him. It could have been a trick of the light, but he didn't think so.

"What will you take for that one?" he asked, pointing at the crow-coin.

Guile entered the eyes of the grieving woman. "That is an especially valuable one, sir. They say the Crow King will do any service for the person who holds this coin."

Morlock grunted skeptically and said, "How much for it?"

"I am not selling these coins, sir. I'm offering them to pay for a service. You cannot buy this coin; you may earn it."

"By keeping the Strigae from chewing up your husband's corpse tonight."

"Please do not speak so disrespectfully of the Sisters of the Red Worm (I summon them not!). But that's the general idea."

Morlock thought idly about knocking her down, taking the coin and running away with it. But his conversation with the woman had drawn a crowd of interested listeners; he doubted he would get away clean. Besides, stealing magical gold often had unintended consequences. On the other hand, he could just say No and walk away. But it occurred to him that he wasn't going to do that.

"All right," he said. "Keep the others; I just want that coin with the crow."

"I'll give it to you tomorrow morning."

"If I keep your husband's corpse intact."

"Oh no. Not at all. If you stay on watch through the night I'll give you the coin, even if the Unnamed Ones violate poor Thelyphron. But . . ."

"But?"

"Our law says that whatever parts are missing from a dead body after a vigil must be made up by the watcher."

"So that if poor Thelyphron's nose is missing in the morning, he will be buried with mine? Likewise liver, testicles etc.?"

"Yes. That's only fair, wouldn't you say?"

Morlock considered the question briefly. "No. Where do I stand, or sit, this wake?"

There was a brief patter of applause as those who had been watching with disinterested interest turned away. Morlock felt almost as if this he had been performing in a playlet for the entertainment of the fairgoers. He hoped the feeling was mistaken. The widow led him through the crowd to a little hut set in the field a little distance away from the fairgrounds. There were still plenty of people around, though, laughing and singing.

"How late does your festival last?" Morlock asked.

"Oh, all night. Until noon tomorrow, in fact."

Morlock felt relieved, and it must have shown, because the widow said earnestly, "You must not think that."

"What?"

"That the Sisters of the Red Worm would be . . . repelled by . . . by the festival." Some of the nearby townspeople turned to look at them with obvious and not obviously friendly interest. "Quick, let us go in," she said and hurried through the low door into the corpse-house.

Inside the corpse-house there was, of course, a corpse, lying in fine garments atop a stone table.

"The dearly departed Thelyphron, I guess?" Morlock said.

"Yes," the widow replied gently, averting her eyes.

Morlock glanced at her and said, a little less roughly, "I am sorry. To me this is a different sort of problem, but I will try not to offend your grief."

She nodded, her face still averted. "I am glad to treat this as a... problem. Something that needs, and has, a solution."

As opposed to grief and death, Morlock supposed, which had none. He nodded.

"I was going to say..."

"About the Strigae," he prompted.

"About the Blessed Sisterhood (I name them not!). They... There are many of them among the townspeople."

"Oh?"

"Yes. In the day, they walk even as we do. In the night . . . They will surely come tonight, in some numbers. The people nearby"