Amidst the rubbish behind the Palace of Earthy Delights, his rummaging hands touched and closed on an object. A large bottle of fired clay, the base chipped and the neck broken off, but otherwise… perfect. The demon drew it into view. Yes, it had once held liquor.
Ineb could not help the broadening smile that split his pocked, grubby face, as he lifted the bottle to his nose and breathed deep its stale aroma. Years old, likely, back when the Palace had been an altogether different kind of establishment, when within its confines something other than green leaves had been on offer.
His flabby lips reached out to caress the cold glaze, to nibble at the smooth pattern of the maker’s seal. Red-tipped tongue flitted out along the neck’s sharp edge. He sniffed, snorted, stroked with his fingers, and crouched down in the rubbish. Just as there were tiny eaters of flesh, so too were there tiny, unseen creatures that clung to the memories of flavour, of smell. It would take him half the night before the bottle yielded the last morsel.
“Have you ever wondered what happened to Lust?”
Nauseo Sloven’s miniscule eyes thinned amidst the flaccid folds of fat, but the only reply he made was a loud, bilious exudence of gas from somewhere below. He reached out one oily, smeared hand and plucked up a fat grub from the heap of rotting vegetables, and carefully set it down on his protruding tongue, which then snapped inward. A brief crunch, then a smack of lips.
“You’d think,” Senker Later continued, stifling a yawn, “that of us all, she’d be the most… persistent.”
“Maybe,” Nauseo wheezed, “that is why we never see her.” He waved a hand about. “This alley evinces our poor lot these days, abandoned as it is to underfed rats, squealing maggots, and diffident memories of past glory. Not to mention our pathetic brother, Ineb Cough.”
“Your memories, not mine,” Senker Later said, wrinkling her small button nose. “Your glories existed in excess, all of which was far too frantic for my tastes. No, this alley and its modest pace suits me just fine.” She stretched her less than clean bared legs out and settled deeper amidst the rubbish. “I see no reason to leave, and even less to complain.”
“I applaud your consistency,” Nauseo said, “and your aplomb, even as you lie here night after night witnessing my diminishment. Look at me. I am nothing but folds of skin. Even the smell about my person has gone from foul to musty to earthy, as if I was no more than a rotting tree stump in some sunlit glade. And, might I point out with apologies for my seeming indelicacy, you are far less than you once were, my dear. Who has succumbed to your charms of late?”
“No one. But I admit I can’t be bothered to worry much about it.”
“And so you will while away into extinction, Senker Later.”
She sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Something should be done.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, I’ll think about it later. Look, there’s a nice fat grub, crawling out-there!”
“I see it. Too far away, alas.”
Senker Later smiled at him sweetly. “That was nice, thank you.”
Thechest was filled with coins.Sunset gold and piss-bleached silver, a glitter of poison to Emancipor Reese’s jaded eyes. Nothing good ever came of riches, nothing, nothing at all.
“We’re Saints of Glorious Labour,” the one named Imid Factallo said.
“This seems a worthy title,” Bauchelain observed as he stood before the two Quaint citizens with hands clasped behind his back.
Nearby, Emancipor had started a small cook fire and was now preparing mulled wine against the growing chill. Modest, mundane tasks had a way of accompanying egregious, enormous evils. It had always been so, he believed. Especially in the company of his masters. And he sensed that something truly ignoble was in the offing.
“A worthy title, you say,” Imid replied, looking like he had just swallowed a mouthful of ashes. “So you’d think!”
“So I do,” Bauchelain replied, brows lifting, “and have just stated it.”
“Well, it’s a misery, I tell you,” Imid said, a twitch rippling along his left cheek. “I’m out of work. Now I spend all day praying with a thousand other saints. Saints! The only thing we all have in common is clumsy stupidity or rotten luck, or both.”
“You are too harsh on yourself, sir,” Bauchelain said. “To have earned such a noble title-”
“One must nearly die whilst working,” the woman cut in, her voice harsh. “Mistakes, accidents, blind chance-these are what makes saints in Quaint!”
Bauchelain had frowned at the interruption, and now the frown deepened. He drew his long, silk-lined cloak tighter about himself. “If I am to understand you, the proclamation of sainthood depends upon injuries sustained in public service?”
“You have it precisely,” Imid Factallo said. “Let me explain about Quaint. It all began with the sudden death of the previous king, Necrotus the Nihile. Your usual kind of ruler. Petty, vicious and corrupt. We liked him just fine. But then he died and his little known brother assumed the throne. And that’s when everything started to unravel.”
The woman beside Imid said, “King Macrotus, the Overwhelmingly Considerate, and there’s no love in that title.”
“And your name is?”
“Saint Elas Sil, sir. I had a fellow worker trip into me with a knitting needle. Stabbed me in the neck, the idiot. I bled all over the wool, and it turns out that’s a debt even being a saint doesn’t forgive. Only, how can I make restitution? I’m not permitted to work!”
“A newly invoked law by your new king, then.”
Emancipor stirred the mulling wine. The smell was making him lightheaded in a pleasant, dreamy manner. He leaned back on his haunches and began stoking his clay pipe with rustleaf and durhang. His actions had snared the attentions of the two saints, and Emancipor saw Elas lick her lips.
“It is the Will of Wellness,” Imid Factallo said, nodding up at Bauchelain. “Macrotus has elevated the cult of the Lady of Beneficence. It now stands as the city’s official-and only legal-religion.”
Emancipor narrowed his gaze as he met the woman’s eyes. She would have been attractive, he mused, had she been born someone else. As it was, Elas Sil, the saint with the puckered neck, might or might not have been the victim of an accident. The servant set burning ember to his pipe. He recalled, vaguely, that some old hag in his home city of Lamentable Moll had lived by similar notions of wellness. Perhaps the trend was spreading, like some kind of horrific plague.
Imid Factallo continued, “The new Prohibitions are filling volumes. The list of That Which Kills grows daily and the healers are frantically searching for yet more.”
“And all that kills,” Elas Sil said, “is forbidden. The king wants his people to be healthy, and since most people won’t do what’s necessary for themselves, Macrotus will do it on their behalf.”
“If you want the Lady’s Blessings in the afterlife,” Imid said, “then die healthily.”
“Die un healthily,” Elas said, “and there’s no burial. Your corpse is hung upside-down on the outer wall.”
“Well,” Bauchelain said, “how is it that we may help you? Clearly, you cannot be unmade saints. Nor, as you see, are we simple travelers in possession of an army.”
Though there’s one chasing us. But Emancipor kept that addendum to himself.
Imid Factallo and Elas Sil exchanged looks, then the former ducked his head and leaned slightly forward. “It’s not the traders’ season, but word travels anyway. Fishing boats and such.” He tapped his misshapen nose. “I got a friend with a good sight on this road, starting at the top of Hurba’s Hill, so word came in plenty of time.”
“You’re the ones,” Elas Sil said in a low voice, her eyes still fixed on Emancipor as he stirred the wine. A flicker towards Bauchelain. “Two, but three in all. Half of the last city you visited is nothing but ashes-”