2012-07-Misery's Mirror Read Free Page A

healed long ago, but the stitches remained, red and inflamed with infection. The man stumbled into a doorless shack and vanished from view, although Isiem could still hear him mumbling deliriously to his invisible friends or foes. “Does his tale ring true?”
    “That he was plucked from the Hovels by my aunt? Perhaps. It isn’t a story I’d brag about, but perhaps he wanted to deflect our suspicions.”
    “Do you suspect him?” Isiem asked.
    “Maybe.” Scowling, Ascaros stepped over an insensible woman lying sprawled across the alley. A cracked board served as her bed, or bier—Isiem wasn’t sure which. She had no legs. The empty cloth of her skirts had been trampled into the mud so deeply that the garments were barely more than ripples in the puddled filth. The stench of wine-sweat fogged the air around her.
    Forty yards past the legless woman, the Hovels opened to the sky. Spell-driven firestorms had blasted away the buildings. The mud around them was black and gritty with the coarser leavings of the flames: chunks of charred wood, a knot of melted pins embedded in a clump of burned hair, a few fragments of scorched bone. Nothing larger survived.
    At the edges of the ruins, the Hovels were beginning to creep back, like vines stretching out after a forest fire. A mound of garbage here, a tangle of laundry lines there. Some of the rooms that had been cracked in half like gourds were patched up again. But no people.
    “So this is where my aunt died,” Ascaros said, surveying the desolation. “Useless. There’s nothing here to examine.”
    “Witnesses don’t seem likely either,” Isiem said, “although I suppose we could knock on doors and see who answers. If they answer.”
    “They’ll answer,” Ascaros said grimly. Raising his silver-capped staff, he started for the nearest shack.
    The fourth door they tried yielded a person with functional eyes and a mouth. He was another of the Morbidium’s cast-offs; his fingers were reduced to three on each hand, and those three were unnaturally extended with stitched-in joints from the missing digits. Craters the size of cherries pocked his skull, collecting rain in little pools.
    But he could see, and he could talk to them, and that made him better than the other creatures they’d found.
    “What did you see when the fires came?” Ascaros demanded.
    The wretch blinked at them from his doorway. Rain trickled down his dented scalp and ran down the sides of his nose, dripping into his slack toothless mouth. Behind him, a handful of children huddled in the dark. Isiem wondered if it was for their sake that this man had sold himself to the Morbidium—and what they must think if he had. What was a father like this worth?
    “Fires,” he managed at last.
    “Yes,” Ascaros said impatiently. “Fires. What happened? Who was here?”
    “Many. Many in robes. With the fires.”
    “Was there a woman? One who looked like me?” Ascaros lifted his bad arm in its sling. “With an arm like this?”
    The broken man nodded slowly. His fingers twitched strangely, as if the movement originated somehow in the sewn-on middle joints. “She was here.”
    “What happened to her?”
    “The fires came down, and she walked into a house. Struggling. The fires ate her.”
    “Struggling?” Isiem repeated. He wondered if the man was confused. Those dents in his skull were very deep. “Against what?”
    “Death.” The broken man nodded emphatically. He drew his fingers across his throat. They wriggled spastically, like the convulsing legs of a crushed ant. “Fighting against death. She walked into the fires and they ate her.”
    “Thank you,” Isiem said. He took Ascaros’s sleeve gently and pulled his friend away from the door. The other shadowcaller’s face had twisted into a scowl that suggested he was about to explode with rage, and Isiem didn’t think that would help them here.
    “Worthless,” Ascaros fumed, stabbing his staff into the stinking ground. He seemed