Perhaps she could chop herbs. Maleagant closed her eyes a moment, but she was greeted only with a star-pricked blackness. No, this girl was not even good for herb chopping. Maleagant released her arm, and the girl stumbled backward, her bare feet stirring the dust of the dirt floor.
“May I go now?” she mumbled. “Please?”
“Go,” Maleagant said. “Please.”
The girl staggered out of her hut as if she had suffered a blow to her head and also was being chased by wolves. Maleagant sighed. She leaned back in her wicker chair and stared up at the thatched ceiling of scratchy yellow hay.Another failure,she thought bitterly.Another girl who will not rise to take my place.The closest she had come was thatpretty little maiden Ninian; her mismatched eyes had given Maleagant cause for hope. But she had been as insipid as the rest. And then she was gone. To the castle, where she scrubbed chamber pots and serviced the princess in the manner of a back-hall slattern. Maleagant saw it all, in the vaporous landscape of her dreams.
Yet she must keep trying. The Outer Wall needed a wise woman. Not so much for what she knew of the future, but for what she knew of the past. Maleagant alone was able to recall Drepane before the conquest. Such knowledge was more precious than all of Adele-Blanche’s gold. Another dead noblewoman, Maleagant thought idly, whose grandchildren had given up mourning her. For all her cruelty and her wiles, she was expired, extinct, forever gone, her body desecrated, her spirit too weak to even visit Maleagant in her sleep. What an undignified end for a woman who had once fancied herself the sole sovereign of death.
Maleagant might have sat there a long while, hearing the hot breeze rustle among the thatched roof yet feeling none of it through the hard clay walls of her hut—yet suddenly there was a wincing pain in her hip bone. Someone was coming.
Someone from the castle, which she knew even before the leech’s shadow darkened her doorway. His sepia robes were finer than those of any leech who lived in the Outer Wall, his posture straight and proud. He was quite tall. He kept his hood up as he entered, though as Maleagant waved him forward, his features came into view: a ponderous brow and keen but steady eyes, in fitting with his scholar’s nature. Here was a leech of great esteem. Here was the leech kept by Prince Liuprand the Just himself.
“Good morning,” the leech, whose name was Pliny, said.
“Good morning,” Maleagant said. She leaned slightly forward in her chair but did not rise.
“I have need of your services.”
Maleagant did not tell him that she already knew why he had come here; why deprive herself of a bit of amusement—some color to daub upon her dull gray days? Serenely, she answered, “And what services are those, Your Scrupulousness?”
Pliny regarded her in slight indignation, as though he was aware he was the subject of some secret jest. “I know what arts you perform here,” he said. “What ancient, mystic powers to which you lay claim…that is of no import to me. I have come with a far more mundane purpose.”
“Well,” Maleagant said with a soft smile, “do not leave me to guess.”
“I need an individual of a very particular nature. Someone whose absence will not be accounted for among the people of the Outer Wall, whose presence will not be missed. Someone who is clever enough to follow orders yet not wise enough to question them. Someone who will do hard work for simple pleasures in return. And someone whose words will never be taken as more than mad ramblings, should they find an ear to listen.”
Maleagant’s left eye twitched. Her afternoon was getting off to a rather thrilling start indeed. Very slowly, and with the audible creaking of her ancient bones, she rose. “Yes,” she said, “I have just the creature for you.”
He made his home in the gutter outside the butcher’s shop, though when it rained, he sought shelter inside an overturned barrel, where he could hunch and fit himself tight, like a blood clot in a vein. The summer air was thick with flies and a heavy, hazy heat, so Offal-Eater was slumped against the side of the shop, wearing a stained and tattered loincloth that exposed more than it kept hidden. His gaze lifted as they approached.
Pliny did not speak to the creature in the gutter. Instead, as he regarded him with a curling lip, he said to Maleagant, “Who is he?”
“Offal-Eater,” she replied.
She jerked her chin and the man scrambled to his feet, scratching what lay beneath the too-small loincloth.
“Madame Sosostris,” he said, in his thin, cracking voice, “have you come for meat?”
It was all he would ever call her, Offal-Eater, though Maleagant reminded him of her real name every time they had the occasion to meet. This time, however, she did not bother: This meeting would be their last.
“No,” she said, “I’ve come for you, who would make a rather paltry meal.”
“Basket of bones, the butcher says. When I am in my barrel. He says he will slit my throat and sell me to the little man-boy-lord of Abysswatch.”
The butcher meant Lord Amycus, Master of Bones, though it was impossible that Offal-Eater would know that. He stood there, trembling even in the still, hot air, a skeleton wrapped in sallow flesh. His eyes were a bleary, nondescript color, always bloodshot, and the skin of his cheeks sagged like the jowls of an old house cat. His hair had been pulled out in clumps, leaving only odd tufts, and all along his emaciated limbs he bore the tiny, raised red marks of rat bites, picked and then scabbed and then picked over again.
Pliny was observing Offal-Eater with undisguised revulsion. The leech’s nostrils pinched and flared. “He smells rather strongly.”
“He will improve with a bath. You may wash him down in the stables, like a horse.”
“I told you I need a creature who can perform hard labor,” Pliny said. “I doubt seriously that this man is up to the task.”
“His appearance belies his strength,” Maleagant said. “He is named Offal-Eater because he fights with the dogs for the butcher’s scraps. He fights so viciously that, indeed, most of the dogs now retreat when they see him, tails between their legs. He slit open a mutt’s belly once with only his teeth.”
“Fond of dogmeat,” Offal-Eater said. “But pigs taste better, and snakes taste best, and then comes the forbidden meat, the condemned and detested feast—”
“Can he be silent?” Pliny cut in. “If not, my master might take his tongue for it.”
