Call the guards

===80 Summer 1380==========

“Through here,” old Eiwan Fearcher told me and Curry, motioning us to follow as he shuffled slowly toward the alley on unsteady legs, stumping his cane ahead of him. “There’s a cat or a possum what must have got drowned in there,” he said, pointing from where we stood, to the rain barrel maybe thirty feet into the alley, positioned to catch runoff from the rooftop drain. “Tried to get some lads from down the way to come have a look but they never did turn up,” he told us, in a tone which clearly said those lads were now down with a black mark in his book. “Barrel belongs to number six but that house has sat empty for four months now since Mrs. Subramanian died and not a soul has come to do anything with it,” he added. “Smell getting into every place on the block since a couple days ago.”

“Sorry there’s been so much hassle on your street, Mr. Fearcher,” Curry said, since we'd figured out young as new patrol constables that to just agree with whatever he was annoyed about was the quickest way to get the old dwarf settled and out of the way of what needed done. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another, sure.”

Fearcher muttered his agreement.

The alley was one of the very narrow ones common in little town, so I went first, to save Curry the trouble of shouldering into the small space if it turned out to be an easy fix. But the wall of nearly corporeal putrescence hit me full on when I was barely ten feet in. I spun and retreated a couple of feet, gagging violently and fighting not to be ill right there in front of them both.

“Bersk?” Curry called, sounding a bit puzzled. “You all right?”

“I’m fine, need a second is all. It smells… really bad,” I called back from where I stood doubled over, then pressed my woolen uniform sleeve hard against my nose and mouth.

‘Really bad’ was an entirely inadequate representation of the miasma which awaited me down that alley, for I had never in all my life encountered anything approaching this degree of utter foulness. I had no idea how far gone this poor creature must be—and gods, for it to smell this vile, mustn’t it be a good deal larger than a cat? Only I wasn’t sure how a larger animal would even find its way into such a tall barrel.

Reluctantly I straightened back up, gulped the biggest breath I could hold in, and kept my sleeve pressed to my face as I started back down the alley. This seemed to afford almost no protection against this fetid **** of decomposition so strong it half convinced me I could see it hanging all about me in the air. I couldn’t imagine how bad it would be, without my face covered. I was out of breath, which seemed like a terrible thing, to actually inhale any of this rancid, poisonous air. I dragged in a breath, through my mouth, trying not to register any of the appalling taste-smell that came with it even shielded by my sleeve, because if I stopped here to throw up I might never actually get out of the alley.

I was maybe ten feet away when the smell intensified still further, and I realized that if I didn’t get over there quickly to have a look, whatever happened next wouldn’t be good. I **** myself to walk quicker, through the corruption that stank of mingled sewage and improperly disposed summertime butcher shop offal, with a faintly sweet, persistently miasmatic, vegetal odor underlying all of it.

At five feet there was no longer any doubt that in a few minutes, or sooner if I was unlucky, I would be sicking up all my guts, and a gruesome suspicion was taking form in my mind, because surely this was too rank to be the fault of any regular-sized animal’s corpse.

The barrel wasn’t quite as tall as me, so when I was near enough to see in, I didn’t have to stand on my tiptoes to see that it was maybe two-thirds full of rainwater, in which floated something so awful-looking that it was hard to grasp, even intellectually, that this appalling thing had once been a person. I whirled and began walking out of the alley, keeping my eyes squeezed tightly shut, because I had become suddenly afraid of what that physical presence of this funk hanging all about me would do if it got into my eyes. Surely, later I would have to burn everything I was wearing.

“Curry?” I called weakly, forcing myself to open my eyes again, when the smell had diminished enough that I didn’t think it would kill me outright to uncover my mouth. “Will you please see Mr. Fearcher back to his place and come right back?”

Curry did so immediately, without asking any questions, for which I was grateful, because if I had to speak more right now I would throw up sooner, and in front of them.

As soon as they were gone I knelt just outside the alley and finally let myself be sick. I was still doing this a few minutes later, when Curry returned, his growing alarm evident in his posture and quickened pace. “Is it—” he began, then left off once he realized I couldn’t very well answer him in the midst of such violent retching. Instead he crouched by my side and began to smooth his hand over my back. I wanted to tell him he shouldn’t touch me, because I could still feel that viscid stench clinging to every inch of me and it would be better to spare him that, but he’d already gone and done it. I let him, and tried not to think about how the filth was now spread to him too.

When I was done vomiting I straightened up a bit and spat several times onto the cobblestones, my eyes watering and my mouth tasting foully of bile. “We have to send for the **** guards,” I said, and Curry nodded, then handed me the little water flask he kept on his belt. I took it gratefully and rinsed my mouth out, then swallowed a bit, not even minding the faint metallic taste I usually rather disliked. It was a welcome contrast to the recall of how certain it had felt that inhaling any little bit of the noxious air in that alley meant that my mouth and nose and lungs were now full of that former person’s atomized **** particulate.

“I’d say we ought to start by securing the scene and blocking both ends of the alley,” Curry said, taking the flask back from me, “except if this is what it did to you, I can’t picture anyone else wandering in there voluntarily.”

“We still ought to. When they're here they’ll expect us to have done,” I said, and he nodded and gave me a hand up.

“One of us stay and do that, then?” he suggested. “And one of us go to the nearest sender kiosk?”

“I’ll stay,” I said, even though I didn’t really want to. But I was already tainted by the thing, and he was less so, and I felt a certain allegiance to him that he should be permitted to dwell a little longer with the illusion that the both of us were cut out for **** work and that dealing with dead bodies was an unpleasant but substantially tolerable part of that job.

“Are you sure?” he asked, looking a bit doubtful. “You’re really all right?”

“Yeah,” I lied, getting into the pouch on my belt where I kept the enchanted ward strips used by the watch to mark the boundaries of an incident scene so non-watch persons knew to keep clear of the area, and to mark any comings and goings so that improper entry to the site was discouraged, at best, or committed to magical record, at worst. I placed one of these at the entry to the alley, and tapped the end with my foot to wake it up. A glowing projection of the watch insignia, nearly as tall as me, sprang up immediately. I nudged it closer to the alley entrance so it wouldn’t interfere with any passersby on the walk, then looked at Curry.

“I’ll be back quick then to help you,” he said, and turned to go.

I went around the block, since I was not about to enter that alley again, and placed another activated ward strip at the other end of the passage. It occurred to me briefly to wonder if any of the residences on either side of the alley might have a door that opened into it, but I couldn’t imagine any living person opening up their back door, smelling something that foul, and opting to investigate. I decided it would only create general alarm if I went house to house telling people not to open their alley doors, and since Mr. Fearcher already likely understood he hadn’t been escorted away because of a dead animal, I might as well not call further attention to things.

There were three ladders on this block, which led up to the roofs. In case anybody had some bright idea to get a good front seat to what the guards were doing, or in case there was anything significant up there, such as something suggesting the person in the barrel had been dropped in from above, I placed a ward strip in front of each.

Once I was finished placing all my wards, I made a note of how many I had used in my little guard paper pad, and then did my best to draw a little diagram of the alley and the buildings for the detectives, marking where I had placed wards, and indicating the location of the rain barrel.

Then I stood there waiting where Curry had left me, knowing he must be hurrying back, and wishing he would hurry more, so I could have some distraction from that stench I still couldn’t seem to shake off. It had leached into my clothes, I was sure of it, and maybe even my hair. I very much hoped I could get it out of my hair later, because I had just recently gotten the knack of what to do for my hair at this length, and Nan had taught me how to make it wavy by taking a bath after supper and then wrapping sections around a bit of rag and tying that up to dry before bedtime. If I had to cut off a lot of it, I wouldn’t be able to do that rag trick anymore and my hair would go back to its old limp and boring self.