Elephants and Corpses (3 page)

The third time he surfaced, he saw Tera clumsily treading water. Her face was haggard.

“It's all right,” Nev said, but of course it wasn't.

“How old are you, really?” Tera said. She choked on a mouthful of water, then spit.

He swam over to her. Looped an arm around her waist. He could last a bit longer, maybe. His body was stronger and fitter. Younger. “Old enough.”

“The face I see now is young and pretty, but you ain't twenty-five.”

“Body mercs have been known—”

“I know it's not your body. You spend more time admiring it than a War Minister's husband spends polishing her armor for her.”

“That's the trouble with the living. Everyone wants to know everything.” He had a memory of his first body, some stranger's life, now, playing at being a mercenary in the long tunic and trousers of a village girl. It was a long road from playing at it to living it, to dying at it.

“Only ever asked you two questions,” she said, sputtering. He kicked harder, trying to keep them both afloat. “I asked how long you been a body merc, and how much pay was.”

“This makes three.”

“Too many?”

“Three too many.”

“That's your problem, boy-child. Love the dead so much you stopped living. Man so afraid of death he doesn't live is no man at all.”

“I don't need people.”

“Yeah? How'd you do without a body manager, before me?”

He smelled a hot, barren field. Bloody trampled grain. He felt the terrible thirst of a man dying alone in a field without another body in sight, without a stash of his own. He had believed so strongly in his own immortality during the early days of the war that when he woke inside the corpse of a man in a ravine who would not stop bleeding no matter how much he willed it, it was the first time he ever truly contemplated death. He had prayed to three dozen gods while crawling out of the ravine, and when he saw nothing before him but more fields, and flies, and heat, he'd faced his own mortality and discovered he didn't like it at all. He was going to die alone. Alone and unloved, forgotten. A man whose real face had been ground to dust so long ago all he remembered was the cut of his women's trousers.

“I managed,” he said stiffly. His legs were numb.

Tera was growing limp in his arms. “When I die in here, don't jump into my body. Leave me dead. I want to go on in peace.”

“There's only darkness after—”

“Don't spray that elephant shit at me,” she said. “I know better, remember? I can … speak … to the dead now. You … leave me dead.”

“You're not going to die.” His legs and arms were already tired. He hoped for a second wind. It didn't come. He needed a new body for that.

Tera huffed more water. Eventually Tera would die. Probably in a few minutes. Another body manager dead. And he'd have nowhere to leap but her body. He gazed up at the lip of the cistern. But then what? Hope he could get out of here in Tera's body when he couldn't in his own, fitter one?

Tera's head dipped under the water. He yanked her up.

“Not yet,” he said. He hated drowning.
Hated
it.

But there was nowhere to go.

No other body …

“Shit,” he said. He pulled Tera close. “I'm going now, Tera. I'm coming back. A quarter hour. You can make it a quarter hour.”

“Nowhere … to … no … bodies. Oh.” He saw the realization on her face. “Shit.”

“Quarter hour,” he said, and released her. He didn't wait to see if she went under immediately. He dove deep and shed his tunic, his trousers. He swam deep, deeper still. He hated drowning.

He pushed down and down. The pressure began to weigh on him. He dove until his air ran out, until his lungs burned. He dove until his body rebelled, until it needed air so desperately he couldn't restrain his body's impulse to breathe. Then he took a breath. A long, deep breath of water: pure and sweet and deadly. He breathed water. Burning.

His body thrashed, seeking the surface. Scrambling for the sky.

Too late.

Then calm. He ceased swimming. Blackness filled his vision.

So peaceful, though, in the end. Euphoric.

*   *   *

Nev screamed. He sat bolt upright and vomited blood. Blackness filled his vision, and for one horrifying moment he feared he was back in the water. But no. The smell told him he was in the sewers. He patted at his new body, the plump priest they'd thrown down the latrine: the bald pate, the round features, the body he had touched and so could jump right back into. He gasped and vomited again; bile this time. He realized he was too fat to get up through the latrine, but wearing what he did made it possible to get in the front door.

He scrambled forward on sluggish limbs, trying to work new blood into stiff fingers. His second wind came as he slogged back up onto the street. He found a street fountain and drank deeply to replace the vital liquid he'd lost. Then he was running, running, back to the God's eye temple.

They let him in with minimal fuss, which disappointed him, because he wanted to murder them all now: fill them full of purple plumed arrows, yelling about fire and elephants and unnecessary death, but he could not stop, could not waver, because Tera was down there, Tera was drowning, Tera was not like him, and Tera would not wake up.

He got all the way across the courtyard before someone finally challenged him, a young man about fourteen, who curled his nose and said some godly-sounding greeting to him. Nev must not have replied correctly, because the snotty kid yelled after him, “Hey now! Who are you?”

Nev ran. His body was humming now, rushing with life, vitality. A red haze filled his vision, and when the next armed man stepped in front of him, he dispatched him neatly with a palm strike to the face. He took up the man's spear and long sword and forged ahead, following his memory of their descent to the cistern.

As he swung around the first flight he rushed headlong into two armed men escorting Corez up, still wearing Tera's sister's skin. Surprise was on his side, this time.

Nev ran the first man through the gut, and hit the second with the end of his spear.

“God's eye, what—” Corez said, and stopped. She had retreated back down the stairs, stumbled, and her wig was aslant now.

“You take the scalps of your people, too?” Nev said. He hefted the spear.

“Now you think about this,” she said. “You don't know who I am. I can give you anything you like, you know. More bodies than you know what to do with. A workshop fit for the king of the body mercenaries. A thousand body managers better than any you've worked with. You've dabbled in a world you don't understand.”

“I understand well enough,” he said.

“Then, the body. I can give you this body. That's what she wanted, isn't it? I have others.”

“I don't care much for people,” Nev said. “That was your mistake. You thought I'd care about the bodies, or Tera, or her sister, or any of the rest. I don't. I'm doing this for my fucking
elephant
.”

He thrust the spear into her chest. She gagged. Coughed blood.

He did not kill her, but left her to bleed out, knowing that she could not jump into another form until she was on the edge of death.

Nev ran the rest of the way down into the basements. They had to have a way to fish the bodies out. He found a giant iron pipe leading away from the cistern, and a sluice. He opened up the big drain and watched the water pour out into an aqueduct below.

He scrambled down and down a long flight of steps next to the cistern and found a little sally port. How long until it drained? Fuck it. He opened the sally port door. A wave of water engulfed him.

He smacked hard against the opposite wall. A body washed out with the wave of water, and he realized it was his own, his beloved. He scrambled forward, only to see Tera's body tumble after it, propelled by the force of the water. For one horrible moment he was torn. He wanted to save his old body. Wanted to save it desperately.

But Tera only had one body.

He ran over to her and dragged her way from the cistern. She was limp.

Nev pounded on her back. “Tera!” he said. “Tera!” As if she would awaken at the sound of her name. He shook her, slapped her. She remained inert. But if she was dead, and yes, of course she was dead, she was not long dead. There was, he felt, something left. Something lingering. Tera would say it lingered in her bones.

He searched his long memory for some other way to rouse her. He turned her onto her side and pounded on her back again. Water dribbled from her mouth. He thought he felt her heave. Nev let her drop. He brought both his hands together, and thumped her chest. Once. Then again.

Tera choked. Her eyelids fluttered. She heaved. He rolled her over again, and pulled her into his arms.

Her eyes rolled up at him. He pressed his thumb and pinky together, pushed the other three fingers in parallel; the signal he used to tell it was him inhabiting a new body.

“Why you come for me?” Tera said.

He held her sodden, lumpy form in his own plump arms and thought for a long moment he might weep. Not over her or Falid or the rest, but over his life, a whole series of lives lost, and nothing to show for it but this: the ability to keep breathing when others perished. So many dead, one after the other. So many he let die, for no purpose but death.

“It was
necessary
,” he said.

*   *   *

They crawled out of the basement and retrieved Tera's sister from the stairwell. It hurt Nev's heart, because he knew they could only carry one of them. He had to leave his old form. The temple was stirring now. Shouting. They dragged her sister's body back the way they had come, through the latrines. Tera went first, insisting that she grab the corpse as it came down. Nev didn't argue. In a few more minutes the temple's guards would spill over them.

When he slipped down after her and dropped to the ground, he saw Tera standing over what was left of her sister, muttering to herself. She started bawling.

“What?” he said.

“The dead talk to me. I can hear them all now, Nev.”

A chill crawled up his spine. He wanted to say she was wrong, it was impossible, but he remembered holding her in his arms, and knowing she could be brought back. Knowing it wasn't quite the end, yet. Knowing hope. “What did she say?”

“It was for me and her. Forty years of bullshit. You wouldn't understand.”

He had to admit she was probably right.

They burned her sister, Mora, in a midden heap that night, while Tera cried and drank and Nev stared at the smoke flowing up and up and up, drawing her soul to heaven, to God's eye, like a body merc's soul to a three days' dead corpse.

*   *   *

Nev sat with Tera in a small tea shop across the way from the pawn office. The bits and bobs they'd collected going through people's trash weren't enough for a workshop, not even a couple bodies, but they had squatted in rundown places before. They could eat for a while longer. Tera carried a small box under her arm throughout the haggle with the pawn office. Now she pushed the box across the table to him.

Nev opened the box. A turtle as big as his fist sat inside, its little head peeking out from within the orange shell.

“What is this?” he asked.

“It's a fucking turtle.”

“I can see that.”

“Then why'd you ask?” she said. “I can't afford a fucking elephant, but living people need to care about things. Keeps you human. Keeps you alive. And that's my job, you know. Keeping you alive. Not just
living
.”

“I'm not sure I—”

“Just take the fucking turtle.”

He took the fucking turtle.

That night, while Tera slept in the ruined warehouse along the stinking pier, Nev rifled through the midden heaps for scraps and fed the turtle a moldered bit of apple. He pulled the turtle's box into his lap; the broad lap of a plump, balding, middle-aged man. Nondescript. Unimportant. Hardly worth a second look.

To him, though, the body was beautiful, because it was dead. The dead didn't kill your elephant or burn down your workshop. But the dead didn't give you turtles, either. Or haul your corpse around in case you needed it later. And unlike the guild said, some things, he knew now, were not as dead as they seemed. Not while those who loved them still breathed.

Tera farted in her sleep and turned over heavily, muttering.

Nev hugged the box to his chest.