The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 6: A Dead Rat in Tanner's Row

There is no shortage of dead things in a slum, but most of them belong to somebody.

The knacker on Hide Street wanted two locks for a drowned dog, on account of the glue. The dead-house by the chapel he did not so much as look at. That left the midden behind the tannery, where the ratcatcher tipped his cages on a Fourthday, and where the only price was the smell.

He found one near the top of the heap. It was flat and dry and a week gone.

Ravel crouched over it with his sleeves rolled. He had handled worse. He had handled men who had been three days in a Tanglewold summer. He put one bare fingertip on the stiff grey fur and reached for the skill exactly as he would once have reached for [Steady].

Nothing.

It did not even feel like failing. It was like setting his shoulder to a door and finding it painted on a wall. He checked the line. Soul Energy 12/12.

"Too old," he said aloud.

How old was too old? He turned it over in his head, and something came up that he had never thought to question. The Church wanted its Rite said within three days. A retriever's contract paid for three days and not an hour longer; after that the kin were told to stop hoping. Everything to do with the dead ran out on the third day, and in fourteen years he had not once asked why.

So. Something fresh.

Behind the tenement where the Ashlocks had their two rooms there was a coal-hole, shared among four households and big enough to stand in. His mother kept a wire trap there, baited with rind. He let himself in and pulled the door to.

The trap had been sprung.

It was a big buck rat, caught across the back. The wire had not killed it. It lay on its side with its flanks fluttering and its one visible eye fixed on nothing, and it had clearly been lying like that for a good while.

The decent thing was plain enough. He knew how to end an animal in pain.

But the cold part of him, the part that had counted steps with a hole in his chest, asked a question first. Does it have to be dead? Or only near it?

He had ten hours and one life. He needed to know.

He laid his palm on the heaving side.

This time the skill answered.

Cold ran down the inside of his arm like water down a pipe and out through his fingers. And struck something. Something small and hot and furious that was very much still in there, and that shoved back.

It was like putting his full weight on a stair that did not exist.

Blood burst from his nose. And for half a breath he was not in a coal-hole at all. He was low to the ground in the dark, with a line of fire across his spine, and the whole world was the stink of a huge thing bending over him.

Then he was himself, on his knees, with his face wet.

[Raise Husk: failed.]

He dragged the page up with a shaking mind.

Soul Energy 8/12. And, on the line where it had said only Underfed, a new word. Bleed, 2%.

He did not know what Bleed was. He could make a fair guess at what had done the bleeding.

Two lessons, then, and dearly bought. What has died meant what it said. And the Writ charged the same for a failure as for anything else. A third of everything he had was gone, and nothing had stood up.

The rat was still watching nothing.

"Sorry," Ravel told it. It seemed owed. Then he took it out of the wire and did the decent thing, quickly, and looking, the way he had done it for pack-mules with broken legs.

He had taken off the good shirt before he began. It lay folded on the cleanest lump of coal in Lowlock, and he was passionately grateful to his earlier self; Edda Ashlock in the matter of bloodstains was more to be feared than any drain. He mopped his lip with the rag from the trap, thought of fleas, and picked the limp body up in the same rag.

He reached.

Nothing. The painted door again. 8/12.

He looked at the rag. He looked at his hand.

Touch what has died.

"A clerk," he muttered. "You're a clerk. You mean every word, and not one more." He threw the rag in the corner, and laid his bare palm on the fur, which was still warm.

The cold went down his arm. This time nothing shoved back.

It simply went in, the way water goes into dry ground. Something breathed out between his fingers as it went: a thread of smoke, violet-black, that did not rise as smoke should. It sank. It poured over the rat's flank like a heavy liquid and into the coal dust, and was gone.

The rat's legs drew under it.

It stood up.

[Husk raised.]

Soul Energy 4/12.

Ravel sat back on his heels, and his gorge rose.

He had not expected that. He had washed two hundred and eleven corpses and eaten his supper after. But they had lain still. This did not. It stood four-square on the coal dust with its head canted at the angle he had left it. It was not breathing. It did not sniff, or groom, or look at him. Its eyes were as dull as dried peas. It stood the way a thing stands when it has been put on a shelf.

Every instinct of his trade told him to fold its paws and cover it up.

He breathed through his mouth until the sickness passed. Then the porter in him, who had no time for such things and never had, looked the object over and asked the only question a porter cares about.

Right. What can you carry?

"Come here," he said.

It came. In a dead straight line, across the floor, into the toe of his boot. It did not stop. It went on walking against the leather, legs working, getting nowhere, with a terrible small patience.

"Stop."

It stopped with one paw in the air.

"Go to the door." It went to the door and stood with its nose on the wood.

"Climb the coal." It climbed, and the heap slid, and it climbed, and the heap slid, and it would plainly have gone on climbing until the canals ran dry.

"Stop. Bite the rag."

It bit the rag. He took hold of the other end and lifted, and the rat came off the floor and hung there, turning slowly, jaws locked. He counted to a hundred. It did not tire. It did not know how.

So. It did exactly what it was told. It did nothing it was not told. It had no more sense than a mill-wheel, and it would never, ever let go.

He could think of uses for that.

He eased the door open on the wash-yard. Empty; every line was full of sheets. He said, "Follow," and walked backward across the cobbles, counting paces.

At twenty-four, the rat stopped mid-stride, like a clockwork toy run down.

He took one step toward it. It finished its stride. One step back. It froze.

Twenty-four paces. He paced it out three times, because he did not trust numbers he had not carried twice, and it was twenty-four each time. He had no idea why.

He was carrying the thing back to the coal-hole by its tail when the last lesson arrived. He happened to be looking at the line when it changed.

Soul Energy 3/12.

Nothing had happened. He had cast nothing. He stood in the wash-yard with the sheets flapping round him and did the sum, and went cold.

It was eating him. Slowly, a point an hour or thereabouts, just for being on its feet. And the line was filling again far slower than it drained. By the time the drain opened at second bell of the night, he would have a single point of soul left to his name.

Let it drop, then, and raise another at dusk? That was four points. He would not have four.

So he kept it. That was all the choice there was. One rat, held up all day on a slow leak, because he could not afford to put it down.

A hundredweight of grain, he thought, and a carter who can only pay for the mule by selling the grain. Every trade he had ever known came down to that in the end.

"Rav!"

The coal-hole door rattled. He had got it shut behind him with half a breath to spare.

"Rav, are you in the coal? Mam says you never came home, and Brann says you got Summoner, and you never even... why's it stuck?"

He had the pail off its hook and over the rat before he knew he had moved.

"It's swollen," he said. "Give it a kick."

The door banged open. Pim stood in the light with her fists on her hips.

From under the pail came a busy tin scrabbling. His last order had been follow. It was following.

"What's that?"

"Rat."

"In Mam's trap?"

"It was."

"Is it dead?"

"Yes," said Ravel, with perfect truth.

"Ugh." She wrinkled her nose at the pail and forgot it. "Summoner, though! What can you summon?"

"Nothing yet. It's unverified."

"That's a rubbish class."

"It's unverified."

"It's rubbish." But she was grinning so hard that the gap showed. "Mam's bought an egg. A whole one. It's for you, and I'm not to look at it. You've to bring coal and come and be made a fuss of."

An egg. Out of a jar that held four locks.

"I'll come," he said, when he could. "Go on. Tell her I'm coming."

She went. He stood for a while with his hand on the upturned pail and the small relentless scratching going on beneath it.

He went and ate the egg. He let himself be made a fuss of, and it was the hardest thing he did all day.

Afterwards he walked to the foot of the Row and looked at the place where it would happen. The old drain was a brick arch at the waterline, as wide as a cart, with an iron grating across it. Half the bars had rusted through in the flood of '09, and nobody had ever paid to mend them. An iron flap could be dropped over the mouth from above; the wheel that worked it stood in the gate-pit of the Ninth Lock. He climbed down and put his whole weight on a spoke.

It did not so much as creak. That wheel was two men's work, or one strong man's. He was neither.

The light was going amber over the tannery roofs when he came back. Soul Energy 2/12. He had brought the kitchen knife. He lifted the pail, said, "Stop," and sat down on the coal with his back to the wall to think about a drain.

The rat stood where he had stopped it. It had been told nothing else.

It was a long while before he noticed that it had moved.

Not far. Not its feet. Only the broken head, which had been canted toward him, and now was not. It had turned, with no word from him, toward the foot of Tanner's Row. Toward the canal. It held there, steady as a compass needle.

"Stop," Ravel whispered.

It did not turn back.

Then he felt it too. Under the pale line on his breastbone, faint as a finger laid on a string: a pull. Something beneath the street was dying. Not one thing. A great many small things, all at once.

Outside, somebody shrieked, and then laughed, and then stopped laughing.

He got the door open.

They were coming up out of the old drain at the foot of the Row. Rats, living ones, in their hundreds, a brown tide pouring between the doorsteps and over people's feet, and every one of them running uphill, away from the water.

Every living thing on Tanner's Row was fleeing the canal. Behind him, in the dark of the coal-hole, the dead one was still facing it, quite still, the way a dog faces a door when it hears its master on the stair.