Dead of Veridon Read Free Page B

well. The Fehn freak me out. I had done business with them before, even counted a friend among them. Wright Morgan, though I hadn't seen him in a while. Perhaps he had passed from the ranks of the individual Fehn and joined the shambling choir of those who had lost their personalities and minds to the group consciousness of the Fehn hive. I suppressed a shudder as I surveyed my audience, their eyes loose in their heads, mouths open to the cold water of the river.
    "Are we so foul?" a voice asked from behind me. I turned to see one of the Fehn rising from a ladderway in the floor. His clothes were mostly dry, and his eyes still held the spark of sentience. He crossed the floor and held out his hands in supplication. "Is our presence so awful, Jacob Burn?"
    "Well," I said, glancing at the crowded windows around us. "It can be a little unnerving. For a man in my position."
    "Mm." He drew a steel cylinder from his belt and unscrewed it, then took a long drink. Water splashed around his mouth and ran down his cheek. "A man in your position. As in, a man trapped in a small room, underwater, surrounded by the dead of Veridon."
    "Yes, well. Something like that."
    He nodded and drank again, then crossed to the nearest window and looked out at the tableau of slack faces and loose limbs waving like grass in the breeze.
    "Do you know any of them, Jacob? Are any of your friends here? A man like you must have lost a fair number of friends to our beloved river?"
    And that was the trick, the thing that made the Fehn so unsettling. They were our dead. Anyone who died in the river, drowned or dumped from some harbor back alley, any body that slipped beneath the Reine's dark waters became their property. Their citizenry. The Fehn were a symbiotic race, their mother-form hidden away in the depths of the river, but they infected the bodies of the drowned. For a while those bodies maintained their personalities, their minds, as with my friend Morgan. Sometimes they were able to last for months, or years... maybe decades. I never knew Morgan's age, but had the feeling he had been around for even longer than that. Something about the symbiote kept the bodies fresh. But eventually their minds would go, and they would become one of the numberless, mindless creatures even now floating outside this window.
    "None of these, no. Most of my friends die on land."
    "Fortunate," he said, turning to me. He drank a long pull of water. "For you, at least. Less fortunate for us."
    "Yeah, well." I bent to the iron man and unfolded the package. "I'm kind of on a schedule here."
    "Really? A busy man, are you?"
    "Sure," I said.
    "I've heard different. I've heard that times haven't been too good to Jacob Burn." He leaned idly against the glass of the window. Behind him the silent choir raised their hands and stroked the glass, as if to touch his shoulder. "Ever since you pissed off your man Valentine, and the Council, and the Church... I've heard that business is a little light."
    I stood up, holding the dull metal box I had been hired to deliver. "I get by. I'm working now, aren't I?"
    "Sure. But this is a shitty job, Jacob. It doesn't pay well, and no one wants to do it. Times must be bad, for a man of your stature to serve as delivery boy for the river."
    Something about the way he said it, something in his voice or his face. Something sinister.
    "Do I know you?" I asked. The river had blunted his features, but I didn't think the guy looked familiar.
    "Not really. Not anymore. I was one of your father's servants, a while ago." He raised one bloated hand and held it out. "Anthony Flowers."
    "The Beggar's Feast barge," I said, pointedly ignoring the proffered hand. "You and your family drowned, along with most of the kitchen staff. I'm so sorry."
    "We've gotten over it." He grimaced and lowered his hand, clenched it into a fist a couple of times, then tossed his head towards the window. "My kids, my wife, they're out there somewhere. I don't see them anymore. Don't