Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

III

Mullion Galdarsson has sifted bone before. Dead bone, certainly, but also not-quite-dead bone, more often than he’d like. This stuff, with the animating witchery freshly knocked out of it, hasn’t entirely settled yet. He slaps at a few clutching fingers, knocks a yellow-white hand away from his ankle like a grim, dry kitten. Legs, ribs, hands, hands, more legs, a spine, a skull-that worries him for a moment, but it gives him no trouble. No light in the eye sockets, no bite left in the teeth. No precious metal fillings, either.

Mullion sighs. The current mess might not prove a very lucrative one. Behind him, his sister Arna and his sometimes-friend Tylo the Sulk are crouched on shattered and parted bones as well, muttering and slapping defensively, moving occasional items of interest into the pouches and wicker baskets that hang on them all like ornaments on festival trees.

Somewhere ahead, the lunatics are plying their trade, thoroughly enjoying bloody combat with whatever fresh horror Mullion and his little crew of gleaners will be sorting in about twenty minutes. Lunatics, the successful ones at least, don’t have time to scour the trash of their own passage. That would cut into valuable combat time. Once the traps are disarmed and the monsters are beaten down, locals like Mullion and Arna and Tylo slink in behind them to sort and count and store all the wretched, dirty little scraps that might be sold or reused.

Jeweled necklaces? Gold bars? Oh, of course not. The lunatics always manage to spare a moment to snatch that sort of thing for themselves. Gleaners fetch up the bent and rusty coins of baser metals, the dusty weapons half-rotted in ancient racks, the glowing mushrooms and bile-yellow fungi that might be of interest to the alchemists (or just as often might not). Scraping walls, shaking junk, prodding crevices with wooden poles, sneezing in clouds of dust that mostly don’t kill anyone later (cousin Halvar had been the strongest of them, worth three Tylos, but when the remnants of his lungs had come up through his nose, they’d looked like tomato jelly)-that’s the work of gleaners. And the damnable thing is, even allowing for dust and darkness and the occasional dead cousin, the pay is considerably better than working the mills or fields back home.

Mullion, in his career, has pulled fangs from giant spiders and scooped the steaming rinds of carnivorous slimes and shaken tiny treasures out of enough crap-crusted goblin clothing to outfit a battalion of the little bastards. Every year when the warm months roll in, the lunatics insist upon making circuits of all the fanes and labyrinths and ruins they can find, often delving deeper into old explorations, or reopening places that have fresh infestations of horrors. Sometimes the lunatics don’t come back from their “adventuring,” and sometimes their gleaning crews are lost along with them. It’s foolish, Mullion supposes. These dark and haunted places really ought to be burned out and exorcised for good. But wherever you have dungeons, you get parties of lunatics with their boundless enthusiasm, and the lunatics employ gleaners, and they visit the taverns and stables and smiths, and the countryside needs all the coin it can get. Mullion has two children and an aging mother to account for, and many would say he bears a light burden.

As he sets a useless skull aside, Mullion is surprised to feel a sudden chill in the stones beneath his fingers. Curiously, gingerly, he tests the clammy patch with a fingertip. Oh yes, a distinct sensation of coldness. Ill circumstance, that. Not for the likes of him to poke at. He rises on creaking knees and takes a step back-