The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) Read Free Page B

you don’t mind,” the death man said, and his voice changed, all the business going out of it. “If you don’t mind I’d like to know his story.”
    Sam raised an eyebrow.
    “I work with the dead,” the death man said. “I see so many of them. It helps if I know how they came to it. Do you know his name?”
    It was odd that such a man would want this. Sam had assumed that he was inured to it, walled against sorrow and misery, for he must see it every day. He saw no reason to deny the man the little he had.
    “We have no name,” he said. “He was killed last night, over in Gulltown. We think he was strangled and thrown off the dock. We don’t know why. Nobody has claimed him.”
    The death man put his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes for a moment. It was an odd gesture. When he opened them again he looked directly at Sam.
    “You are wrong,” he said.
    “What?”
    “The boy was killed at least two days ago, and he wasn’t strangled.”
    Sam stared for a moment before he found his voice again. “What do you know of this?” he demanded.
    “Only what I see,” the death man said. “Look here.” He lifted the boy’s arm and dropped it again. “Limp as boiled cabbage,” he said. “A body stiffens after death, and after a while it relaxes again. In this one the stiffness has been and gone. Two days.”
    “He was in the river,” Sam argued. “He was below the high water mark. He would have been washed away. You think the river carried him there? I saw no sign of it.”
    “There was none. His hair was clean. Drowned people have grit among their hair. The marks on him suggest restraint rather than murder. When a person is strangled there is bleeding in the eyes, it shows as red spots.” He lifted one of the boy’s eyelids and Sam saw the eyes were clear.
    “Then how did he die?”
    “Here, look.” The death man parted the boy’s hair with a comb. “See.”
    Sam saw. There was a puncture wound in the scalp, hidden in the thick hair. It looked no more than an eighth of an inch across.
    “You think this killed him?”
    “It goes right through the skull. It may not have been fatal, but it seems the boy died in great pain. Did you see the fingers?”
    “Of course.”
    “His hands were bound by something rigid. There was a strap across his throat. He struggled mightily to free himself.”
    “He did that to his own hands?”
    “Yes. One of the fingers was broken. I would say he died in very great pain. It may even have killed him. Sometimes the heart fails.”
    Sam looked at the body again, but with new eyes. He had thought this a simple crime, a common piece of Gulltown brutality, but if what the death man said was true then it was an altogether more sinister offence.
    “Anything else?” he asked.
    “Yes. The boy died in an upright position. When people die their blood pools at the lowest point, and here it’s the feet. He died restrained, standing, tortured. He was left that way for at least a day.”
    Sam bent over the body again. He looked at the puncture wound. There was no trace of blood beyond the reddish colouration of the puncture itself. He looked at both eyes, flexed the dead fingers with his own.
    “How do you know all this, these signs and meanings?” he asked.
    “Stories. I always ask. People will tell a death man, you know. They will tell me almost anything. There’s more, but it doesn’t apply here.”
    This was important. Someone like this death man was almost as good as a Shan. He could tell them things that common eyes missed.
    “Will you work for me?” he asked.
    “A silver coin to lay out a body,” the man said.
    “No. Will you come here and work for me, teach other people what you know, how to see the signs?”
    The death man shook his head. “I have a business,” he said. “I work the same streets my father worked, and my son will work them after me.”
    “Then will you come when I ask it? Will you show others what you do, how you see?”
    “I see no