River of Thieves Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Epigraph

  Fuck, He's Dead Again

  Cat Shit and Violence

  That One Time a Horse Almost Fucked Me

  Let Us Never Speak of This Again

  Doesn't This Shitheap Go Any Faster

  I Kind of Miss the Dick Spiders

  Everything's Fine, Ignore the Corpses

  Storytime for Wayward Rogues

  Dolphin Orgy

  Stuff This In Your Keyhole

  Camor's Puckered Asshole Has A Nice Ring to It

  Bad Timing and Good Lovin'

  Does This Mean You Want Your Shirt Back

  Party Crashing and Insurrection for Fun and Profit

  You Really Shouldn't Drink That

  Nice Codpiece, Jareth

  That Guy's Not Gonna Shit Right for a Week

  Bandit Lettuce Tomato

  This is the Chapter About an Asshole

  PART TWO

  Epigraph

  Way to Go, Fuckbrain

  Pirates are Just Thieves With More Syphilis

  Opiate of the Assholes

  A Sadist Tells A Story

  Nailed, Screwed, I'm Still Stuck to A Fuckin' Tree

  So Long, and Thanks for All the Flesh

  This Asshole Again

  PART THREE

  Epigraph

  Cannibals, Pederasts, and Fuckmouth Sausage

  Excuse Me Waiter, I Didn't Order the Murder

  As Fun As A Genital Papercut

  In Which I Make Fun of Idiots

  That's A Filthy Joke, You Dickhead

  I Seem to be Bleeding from the Everywhere

  I Am Not Putting My Lips On That

  Acknowledgements

  River of Thieves

  Clayton Snyder

  Copyright © 2019 Clayton Snyder

  All rights reserved.

  To me. If not for my ego, this never would have happened.

  PART ONE

  Epigraph

  I said the joker is a wanted man,

  He makes his way all across the land,

  See him sifting through the sand,

  So I'll tell you all the story,

  About the joker and the thief of the night

  -Wolfmother, Joker and the Thief

  And everybody knows

  That the world is full of stupid people

  Well, I got the pistols, so I'll keep the Pesos

  Yeah, and that seems fair

  -The Refreshments, Banditos

  Fuck, He's Dead Again

  As corpses go, Cord proved a constant thorn in my side. Don't get me wrong. I liked the old thief, but dying merely inconvenienced him. Dealing with the mess after, however, dug into my ass like a persistent nettle. Given the choice of a nettle in your ass for years, or a small beetle that bores into your guts and then chews its way up your torso like a man slathered in horse shit runs to a bath, most people are going to choose the quicker, less annoying option. Fortunately, I am not most people. I might even be a saint. Or an idiot. I guess I'll find out when the gods hand out prizes at the end.

  I sank down against the wall, avoiding the still-glistening blood. I lit a cigar and watched curls of blue-white smoke drift off into the summer night. My brain drifted with them, wondering what a normal life might look like. House, field, two kids, husband. Dog? Probably a dog. I snorted. None of that fit me. Even if my family made the choice to keep me, the path of life veered like a bird caught in a high wind.

  I shook myself and looked down at Cord. After a minute, I poked a finger into his empty eye socket. It came away with a wet squelch and I wiped it on my trousers. Gross, sure. But caring about gross passed me by roughly eighteen months ago, and little in the way of squeamishness remained. I still don't know how he talked me into it the first time. I thought back to that first conversation.

  "Look, it's easy, one quick jab in the eye, and we're in the money," he said.

  "Why not the lung? Or the heart?"

  "Because it hurts." He rubbed his chest. "It really hurts," he muttered.

  "A knife in the eye doesn't?"

  He shrugged. "I mean, only for a minute, then it's into the brain, and plop, splat, I'm dead."

  "What if I only jiggle up your noodle?"

  "Then you'll be changing my trousers for a month."

  "Right, so the long knife."

  He raised an eyebrow, and I mimed jabbing a blade into his face.

  "So it goes deeper. Might need to scrape the back of the skull to be sure," I said.

  "That's the spirit. The disturbing, way too eager spirit," he said, and went about packing our gear.

  Wind rustling paper under the bridge snapped my attention back to the present. I looked up at the poster of King Mane plastered to the brick and shot it a sneer. The royal propagandist's work impressed me as an example of sweetening horseshit to make fudge. The royal twit appeared on the poster sporting a bulging chest and suspiciously well-endowed codpiece. The art depicted the king handing out gold coins to waifs in rags. They held shining faces uplifted and beaming in thankfulness.

  I suspected the reason Cord chose this spot to die sprouted from a tree of simple spite. He hated Mane with a passion that bordered on obsession. His favorite epithet for the king remained The Royal Shit, despite his ever-rotating vocabulary of disdain. I didn't blame him. Even a short tour of the kingdom gave you an idea of just how much bullshit those posters peddled. Still, some of the king's policies proved useful. Opposite the lie of his largesse stood the truth of his paranoia. As a result, Mane employed a great many mercenaries to patrol even small cities and roads. Rumors abounded that he saw enemies around every corner.

  Which brought me to my next task - calling the guards. Our take sat on a boat about 300 yards away, along with my bloody clothes. I didn't have a scratch on me. Cord did the dirty work - well, maybe the painful work. If you think stabbing a guy in the eye doesn't make for some interesting dreams, I'd like to speak to you about the definition of disturbing. But I didn't envy Cord's part--committing the robbery and ensuring someone spotted him so I could point out his corpse. After, constables being what they are in the backwaters of the Veldt, they'd mark it as a bad deal and close the case. We'd even leave a bit of gold around Cord's body to let them think he'd been the victim of a double-cross in the end. Lay low for a bit and repeat every couple hundred miles.

  I tossed the cigar into the canal. I mussed my hair, then knuckled my fingers into my eyes until the whites went red. I ran for the local guard shack just up the road, sniffling. Once I let them calm me down―weeping women make even big guys with pointy swords uncomfortable―they followed me to the body. Over time, I've perfected my role as distraught citizen to the point I expected them to melt down Gunter Horvath’s awards and recast the shiny gold in honor of my performance.

  Once they left the guard station, I slipped away and hid in the shadows until they passed from sight, carting Cord’s body off like flotsam washed up in their clean little hamlet. No littering. Mind the dung. Thanks for visiting. I hopped in the boat and rowed out of the berth, the water sending a chill froth over the bow in the night air. A clear dark night with a bright moon hung before me, lighting the river.

  ***

  The mortuary stood at the edge of town. I beached the boat just up the river, and crept out, tugging it into the reeds. They'd eventually find it, but by then, then we'd be long gone. Once done, I straightened, wiped my face clean, and checked my clothing. Rough, but passable. I strode into the building. A teen sat behind the counter, idly twirling a pencil. I gave him a bright smile, and he glowered back and rolled his eyes.

  "What?" he asked.

  He clearly poss
essed dickish tendencies. Not the most charming trait. Or maybe just stupidity. In which case, I pitied him a little. We'd all been there. I thought of Cord’s advice: never attribute evil to dumb. So I smiled through teeth I wanted to use to bite him in the face.

  "I'm here to pick up a body."

  "Look, I can't do anything without my boss's say-so," the kid said.

  "Sure, sure."

  "I'm not even supposed to be here today. You think I want to spend the night with a dead guy?"

  I shook my head and let the smile drop. "Look at it this way - I sign the paperwork, take the dead guy off your hands, and we're both on our merry way. Your boss can't bitch about that, right? I mean, he'll have my signature, and you’ll be short one corpse."

  The kid's eyes shifted to the steel door behind him, uncertainty twisting his lips. He shuffled his feet and let out a huff of air.

  "Fine. Your signature and a fiver."

  The smile slid back to my face. "Sure, sure."

  I signed his parchment with a name that meant something like Bearded Taint in Gentian and plopped a crown worth at least five lesser gold on the table. The privilege of screwing with people in charge paid for itself. When you're handling dead guys and dealing with bureaucracy, you have fun when you can. He pulled the sheet back without looking at it. I felt a pang of disappointment at his inattention as he turned and unlocked the door, but squashed it. Some battles you won after you left the battlefield. One of Cord's sayings. Like most of his little nuggets of wisdom, it carried the double edge of horseshit and truth.

  A chill rippled across the room. Low mist clung to the floor, carrying the mingled scents of dried blood and slow rot. We toted Cord's body out of the building and onto a small cart waiting in the yard. We dropped the dead man with a shared grunt. He probably wouldn’t wake up with a headache. When we finished, the kid leaned against the wall and reached into a pocket, pulling out a tobacco twist and setting light to it with a small striker.

  "Your guy's all fucked up. Chiurgeon said it looked like someone was playing with his eye after they stabbed him."

  "Gross."

  "Yeah. Sick. What's wrong with people?"

  I shrugged. "Lotta weirdos out there."

  "Yeah."

  I wheeled Cord around the building, and chucked the bag of gold down beside him. Then I headed down the street, keeping to the shadows, the soft squeak of the cart’s wheels keeping me company.

  ***

  The first time you cart a body down the road in the middle of the night, and the dead guy farts, you scream a little. And pee. About the eighteenth time, you sigh and keep downwind. The walk back to the rented cottage wound through town, and I spent a lot of it humming under my breath. Something nonsensical--Dead Hon and the Elephant Boys, or Sketchy Gan.

  I crested the slope of a hill, the roof of the rented cottage showing. I managed to drag Cord's body through the front door, and after a bit of flopping about and grunting, propped him up on the divan, then sat down to wait. He used to come back quick. After this many deaths in a row though, his resurrections crept forward in increasing increments.

  The first time Cord woke up in a mortuary, the damn chiurgeon tried to drive a stake through his heart. Nothing like rearranging a guy's organs a second time to delay his flight back to the real world. On the upside, it allowed me time to retrieve the body and avoid nastiness like that. On the down, I wondered if the slow return marked a decline in his overall health.

  I'd made it halfway through an article in the local one-sheet about the proliferation of morons in government. (Granted, the editor probably wouldn't have let them print those exact words, mostly because they would have ended their career at the end of a rope.) They'd somehow managed to transfer the monthly farm subsidies to a fund meant for young debutantes. Now the crop yield flagged, but the would-be princesses wore diamonds the size of their skulls. Leave it to the rich to fuck the country over with an impressive tidal wave of shit and still come out smelling like roses.

  Cord sat bolt upright, screamed once, and vomited up a lump of purple flesh, interrupting my train of thought. The thing squirmed against the rug, smearing crimson on the cream-colored wool, and stubby limbs sprouted from its sides. I smashed it with the hammer beside me. Cord coughed, blood spattering the floor, and vomited again. This time only vomit, no creepy living organ.

  His chest heaved, and he made a sound like a sick dog. I waited for a minute. This passed for normalcy these days - the resurrections grew worse, each one taking something out of him. The first death I'd witnessed had only been his third death. He'd come back so easily then. Now we'd reached fifteen or so. A life of running and robbing sucked the sense out of the days. Nailing the exact number down felt like more than I wanted to trouble myself with. Especially when what I really wanted was a warm bed and a night of sleep. Cord sucked in one more breath and sat back, his face pale. He reached shaking fingers for the mug of water on the table beside him and took a long swallow, then finished with a small cough and a wan smile.

  "How long?"

  "Three days."

  "Gods."

  "Yeah." I set the paper down. "Look, we gotta take a break. If you die for real, the gravy train's over."

  He nodded and waved a hand, tipping the mug up again, draining the dregs. He set it down and leaned forward.

  "I've got a plan."

  "I hope so. That looks like your spleen on the carpet. But your spleen had legs. I don't think I've ever seen a spleen with legs."

  He looked down and grimaced, then back at me. "One more job. Then we can break."

  I nodded. My gut knew better. One more job is never just one more job for people like Cord. Or worse, it really is the last job, ever. Retirement looked like death or prison. I didn't know which held the greater likelihood. If death continued to avoid Cord, he'd find himself vying with stone walls in a contest to see which rotted first. On the other hand, if the slowing rate of his resurrection indicated anything, true death loomed nearer than either of us expected. Neither of those things mattered much. The question that hung over both of us, like a sword suspended by a hair, was how many more deaths did he have left?

  ***

  “The Gentleman Bastards,” Cord said.

  “What?” We'd been quietly preparing for the next job, and Cord's statement took me by surprise.

  “Our name,” he said.

  “I’m a woman. Also, I think that’s taken.”

  Cord looked up from lacing his boot. “Oh.”

  “What’s the plan here?”

  “I go in, take the gold from the safe, and we live out the next few months someplace sunny. You know, nice beaches, pretty women.”

  I shook my head. “Not what I meant.”

  The question reared its head before, but Cord dodged it the way you dodge a bit of snot someone’s spat on the walk.

  “Why do we need all this gold?” I asked. 100 pieces provided a modest, but comfortable retirement. 1000 might buy a small castle and servants. 10,000, a duchy. We probably had enough for a few duchies by now.

  He frowned and straightened, boots laced tight to his ankles. “I don’t understand.”

  “This is more money than you can spend in one lifetime.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “Ah.”

  “Ah, what?”

  “Well, who here has a bit more than one lifetime?”

  “That it? Planning well into your low thousands?”

  “Well…”

  “What?”

  “Rich people piss me off.”

  “Why?”

  “All that money. What do they do with it?”

  I thought about. “Well, there’s upkeep for their properties, pay for the staff, food, ponies, weapons, armor, maybe a wizard―“

  “Think about that. They have a wizard on retainer. How many of the guys in the Dripping Bucket could say that?”

  “To be fair, if those guys had a wizard, they’d just use it to make an endless beer fountain.”

>   “Would they? Fet would have paid the guy to keep his crops growing. Al, his children healthy. Yellyn – she would have made sure everyone in her parish had books. But these guys – ‘ooh, my sword’s on fire’ – does that sound all that bloody useful?”

  “What about the staff? They’ve got to have jobs.”

  “Jobs they wouldn’t need if their high and mighty lord of the taint hadn’t annexed their land and used it for his personal sewer.”

  “Are you proposing a redistribution of wealth?”

  “In a way,” he hedged.

  “There really should be a word for that.”

  “There is. It’s called justice.”

  “No… look – what do you get out of this?” He’d led the conversation in a circle, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that this felt urgent, though I didn’t know why.

  He looked up at me, then at the moon, hanging in the sky like a weight, and promptly changed the subject.

  “Time to go.”

  ***

  The robbery went the way they always do. That is to say, a combination of chaos and blood and short moments of terror. Cord grabbed the money, let them see his face, let them give chase, and slipped his pursuers before the second turn. We left behind an obvious trail. We happened upon one of the rare hamlets without a constable station, and needed to make our path clear enough to follow. Without Cord's body and evidence of a robbery, the possibility of endless pursuit became more likely.

  We stepped into a glade not far from the main track, sweat dripping from the strain of carrying the gold. We broke branches and stomped prints into the dirt as we went, leaving a path easy enough for a blind bear to track. Cord set the bag down and leaned against a tree, wiping a palm across his forehead.

  "Okay, that shoul-"

  An arrow sprouted from his eye mid-sentence and he collapsed. Men in dark leather appeared as if from nowhere and filled the clearing. They bristled with weapons, potential violence, and some sort of perfume. A man with a pinched face and a hungry look in his eye stepped toward me. He held a naked blade in his hand, the heavy edge glinting in the moonlight. His eyes gleamed with menace. His codpiece hung limp.