ARC: The Corpse-Rat King (28 page)

“Littleboots?” Oh, my poor baby,” Nandus’ hand snuck into his chest and began to stroke the horse’s skull down the length of its forehead, between its eyes. “Daddy’s missed you, you brave Senator. Did you miss Daddy? Oh, I thought you did–”

“Yes, well…” Marius bit his lip. Oh, he though, I can’t believe I’m going to try this. If I’m not right about this… “Are you ready to mount, Your Majesty?”

“To your own mount be, sirrah.”

“Okay, then.” He laid one hand on Nandus’ bony shoulder, lodged his foot between two ribs, and hoisted himself up and onto his broad, bent back.

“Are you ready?” he shouted. Nandus brayed his assent.

Stifling a giggle, Marius reached back, and slapped the King on the haunch.

“Giddy up!”

EIGHTEEN

Nandus galloped across the ocean floor, elongated legs tirelessly chewing through the miles as Marius tucked his hands and feet around protruding bones and held on for dear life. Fish scattered before them, silver flashes of light zigzagging away in panic to return in a more stately fashion once they had passed. They crested an outcropping in a bound, dislodging a small cuttlefish and sending it tumbling across the floor. Marius glanced back at it as they passed, and laughed at how its waving tentacle appeared very much like an extended middle digit. With every step, fistfuls of barnacles fell from Nandus’ chest cavity and scattered across the ocean floor. The redistribution of wealth begins at the top, Marius thought, and stifled a giggle. Miraculously, with the thought implanted in him that they rode side by side, Nandus had not the slightest objection to Marius seating himself upon his back. He simply turned his elongated neck towards him as they spoke, and Marius steered him as he would a horse, at least, a horse made entirely of bones. He simply grabbed whichever collarbone corresponded to the desired direction and pulled until Nandus turned appropriately. Very quickly they left the hull in the distance, and were soon pushing into shallower waters. Marius noted the rise in the ocean floor, and slowed his mount. He did not want to reach landfall before he was certain as to where he was likely to land, although how he was going to do that from his current position he wasn’t sure. They proceeded at a walk through shoals of brightly coloured fish. Coral beds stretched away on either side. Life abounded here, unlike the colder depths through which they had been travelling. Clouds of tiny rainbow-coloured fish darted hither and thither, pursued by darker shapes as long as Marius’ arm. Serpentine heads slunk out of gaps in the reef and perused them as they passed, jaws dropping open to reveals rows of dagger-like teeth that made Marius wince as he imagined them tearing flesh away from his bones. An octopus slithered out of a hole in the rocks and moved like sentient liquid up the face of the coral bed, legs slipping out and back in hypnotic patterns as it stalked some tiny creature visible only to its eyes. Marius stopped to watch, fascinated by the alien movement. He was so absorbed that, when he first felt the bump against his upper arm, he waved it away without concentrating.

“In a minute,” he said absent-mindedly. “I want to watch.”

“Sorry?” Nandus neighed. “I didn’t say anything.”

Marius frowned down at the line of gold circling the rear of Nandus’ skull.

“Didn’t you just… didn’t you just bump me?”

“No.”

“Then what…?” Marius glanced around just as a sleek, finned shape swum up from behind and thumped against his back with its rough skin. Marius spun around in time to see a double row of triangular teeth pass inches from his face, followed by six feet of grey-white skin and a high, whip-like tail.

“Shark,” he muttered, and then, in a sudden explosion of fear he dove from Nandus’ back and squeezed himself into a gap where bottom row of coral left sand. Nandus looked down at him, his skull tilted in surprise.

“What are you doing?”

“Shark!” Marius pointed behind the King’s shoulder. “Shark!”

“And what is that, then?”

Marius stared up at the King for long seconds. Then he buried his face into the sand, counted to three, and tried again. “Big fish. Lots of teeth. Eats meat. Loves people.” Nandus shrugged. Marius stared at him despairingly. Quite slowly, he realised just how much of the ocean he could see through his compatriot. He could see the shark quite clearly, for example, closing in towards the King’s exposed back. This time, it was moving at speed. Marius knew that this was not just another pass. This was a proper attack.

“Oceanus’ pet attack dog,” he gasped, reaching forward and pulling at Nandus’ leg. “If he sees us now, all will be lost. We must escape his surveillance. Get down!” He yanked as hard as he could. Nandus stumbled, then sat down on the sand as the shark sped across the spot where his neck had been, open mouth snapping on empty water. It spun impossibly fast, its elastic body bending in two as it kicked over and dove again. Marius reared up, threw his arms around Nandus’ neck, and sent them both crashing to the floor just as the shark’s body thudded against his shoulder. Marius tumbled away, fetching up hard against the razor-sharp coral. It scoured his back, and for a moment, he felt a thousand shards of glass rub across his nerves. Then he was face up on the sand, Nandus long, bony arm across his chest, his skull inches from his ear.

“Steady, man,” the King whispered. “Let not fear command you. The moment shall pass, and the dog be on his way, neigh.”

Above them, the shark circled, long slow flicks of its tail sending it back and forth across Marius’ field of vision as it searched them out. After several timeless minutes, he noticed that it took longer and longer for the shark to appear in his peripheral vision. Then, eventually, it moved away and did not return. Slowly he removed Nandus’ arm from across his chest, and raised his head to look about them. The ocean bed, which had grown still and silent during the shark’s attack, was slowly returning to life. He rose to his knees.

“I think we’re safe,” he said. “It’s moved on.”

Nandus stood, and reached up to adjust his crown where it had slipped down across his skull. “Let us not tarry. If Oceanus can track us so far from his centre of power, he must be fearful indeed of our escape.”

“Yes. That’ll be it.” Marius resisted the temptation to wipe sand from his knees. He peered around in sudden alarm. “Oh, hell.”

“What is it?”

“I’ve got turned around. During the fight… I don’t know which way we should be heading.”

“Have no fear.” Nandus clapped him on the shoulder and stepped away. “It is this way.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Nandus stared down at him from his lofty height. “I am King,” he said simply, as if this could explain everything. And for him, Marius thought, it probably can. With no better option, he stood at his shoulder.

“Well, then. I guess we should crack on, hey?”

Together, they stepped around the coral outcropping and out into an open part of the ocean bed. Marius could not help but notice a sudden lack of urgency in their pace, and a much greater interest in their surroundings than either man had shown previously. Well, he decided. Sometimes it’s nice to stop and smell the kelp. Nandus must have felt the same thing, because he waved a hand at their surroundings as they walked.

“It must be said,” his neck craned around so that his skull rotated through a full circle, “Some of Oceanus’ lands are quite extraordinary.”

“Yes. I was just thinking that. Extraordinary.” Marius peeked around a bed of seaweed, waving gently in the current. Pleased at how extraordinary the empty space beyond seemed, he stepped into it.

“It would be a shame, would it not, to spurn this opportunity to learn all one can about one’s enemy. Given this opportunity?”

“Oh, yes. A shame. Indeed.”

“Indeed.”

Side by side, the two escapees strolled across their enemy’s seabed, taking particular care to learn as much as possible about the distances between them and anything that might resemble a returning shark. Eventually, however, as it became increasingly clear that the shark had gone on its way, and would not be returning, they relaxed. With nothing else to do, and lulled by the sedate nature of their journey, they began to talk, not as King and perceived subject, or con artist and unwitting stooge, but simply as two travellers, marvelling at the unique nature of their surroundings. Marius even managed to forget the mutated state of the King’s anatomy, and accepted the occasional snort or neigh as no more than a slight peccadillo of speech, no more harmful or annoying than a stutter or reliance on a particularly favourite swear word. Twice, he was forced to stop and wait as Nandus gave in to the need to roll around in a particularly sandy part of the floor, bony rump twitching as an imaginary tail flicked sand over his flanks. And he quickly grew accustomed to watching with amusement as the King broke off mid-conversation to romp across the sea floor in pursuit of some brightly coloured fish that had strayed too close to his sphere of attention. He even picked up the crown when it spilled unnoticed onto the ground, and held on to it, not with the intent to spirit it away, but simply with the idea of returning it. The truth was, he realised, he was beginning to like the man. Sure, there was no denying that he was as insane as a spider-web salesman, and it was hard to ignore the fact that he had a couple of, well,
equine
habits. But once you looked past all that – and if he were honest with himself, Marius could list at least half a dozen perfectly sane and upstanding members of society with habits far more disturbing than the need to occasionally take a quick gallop around the nearby area – it became obvious that whatever garbled thought process might overcome Nandus’ attention span, and however disastrous results might have been in the past, it had invariably been done for what he had thought was the good of his people.

Nandus had been four years old when soldiers had burst into the sleeping quarters of the unpopular King, his father, and brutally murdered him while the young prince watched from his bed in the corner of the room. There had been no such thing as a consort or guardian in Scorban law. Nandus was proclaimed King, and whilst still not yet old enough to sleep through the night without wetting, became the focal point of a government reeling from years of tyranny and abuse. His word was inviolate law, and if his word was that today was Pirate Day, then so be it. Any wonder, then, that he grew up with no concept of the complexities that came with living in the adult world? He had declared war on the ocean, yes, but it was his response to a year of bad fishing crops, and fleet losses that had cost the lives of over a hundred of his subjects. And Marius remembered the summer of hopping, when Nandus responded to an illness that decimated cows around the local countryside by ordering everyone to wear only one shoe at a time. It made sense, damn it, but you had to be exposed to Nandus in too personal a way in order to understand his reasoning. Marius watched the former King frolic across the ocean floor, and felt a sudden weight of sadness settle about him.

Then he remembered the autumn of his tenth year, when Nandus had ordered that the forests along the Borghan peninsula be set on fire so the squirrels wouldn’t get cold, and seven thousand peasants had died in the winter snows. A slow, rolling rage spread outwards from his throat, not at Nandus but towards those men who knew the childish insensibility of his commands and slavishly followed them anyway. The men of power, with access to money, and lands and all that Borgho could provide, and who put into place whatever demand the King made with no care for others as long as it increased their money, or power, or both. Men like my father, he thought, and then checked the thought. No, he corrected himself, recalling all the times he had stood before such men, all the schemes and illusions and confidence tricks. Men like me. Something swirled in the pit of his stomach, and he swallowed to rid himself of the feeling of sickness.

Marius was standing on a light rise while Nandus ran back and forth below him, chasing a cloud of tiny bright-red fish, all the while telling Marius about his relationship with a stuffed toy called Trade Minister Tipsy in a voice more disturbing for its reasonable tone. Marius turned the crown through his fingers as he gazed down at the bizarre creature the King had become. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps there was a way to give this man what he had never been allowed to possess – give him back a kingdom, yes, and get Marius off the meat hook, but give him the chance to rule as a
man
, and not just an uninhibited child god. If anyone could do it, perhaps it was Marius. After all, he thought, rubbing his thumb across the tarnished filigree, what use is twenty years of travelling, of seeing every court and every one-tap tavern the civilised world has to offer, if not to guide this man towards genuine nobility. After all, what did he really think he could offer Keth, apart from a friendly face when she did, finally, grow old and die? Time, perhaps, to give himself over to something bigger than the selfish desires of Marius don Hellespont. He raised the crown, and waved it at Nandus.

“Your Majesty,” he called. “You dropped your…”

Nandus turned towards the sound of his voice. He raised his hand in acknowledgement, then froze, just as something long, and dark, and impossibly fast brushed past Marius and swept down the incline towards him. Marius went to ground, the crown slipping from his grasp and rolling down the slope. He landed on his chest, and barely raised his head to shout before the shark was on top of Nandus.

If Nandus had reacted as a human, he could have thrown himself to the seabed and survived. The shark’s eyes were located towards the top of its wedge-shaped head, and it could not see beneath itself. It had saved them, last time. He had had Marius to think of, then, and the good side of his child-like nature had come to the fore. This time, he was on his own, and no matter his nature, it was the part of him that was Littleboots that reacted faster. He ran, generations of instinct driving him towards flight. Marius heard his terrified whinny, saw him jink and turn as his fear drove him across the open sand. Then the shark struck him at the meeting point of neck and shoulder blades. Four hundred pounds of muscle, travelling at twenty-five miles per hour, it hit him and burst through him in an instant. Nandus exploded in a fountain of bones, and Marius was up and running towards him as quickly as he could through the water, the King’s scream of terror and pain going on and on inside his head. With no thought for his own safety, or the return of the monster, he fell to his knees and scrambled amongst the bones, pinning them together and sobbing as they fell apart. A voice was saying “No, no, no” over and over, and it
had
to be his, because he could still hear Nandus crying out. Then his hand pulled a bone towards him and it was smooth, and round, and he looked down and it was Nandus’ skull. Marius knelt on the sand, and cradled it in his lap, and it was mad to say it, he
knew
it was mad, but he could see the King staring up at him in pain and confusion, and all Marius could think to say was “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”