Part 3 of the The World Can’t Wait series

The gold arrived, with a letter close behind it, tied to the leg of a courier bat that looked deeply unhappy about the arrangement.

UG,

I want to be extremely clear about my position before I say anything else: buying more of a substance you yourself have described as toxic waste, to pour on a fungus that has already survived two separate applications of the same substance, is not what I would call a sound plan. I have gone through your letter looking for the part where this makes sense. I have not found it.

And yet.

You remain, against all reasonable expectation, still my problem, and a Lightbloom eating its way through Founder’s Point is a worse problem than the one I currently have, which is you fishing off Zul’Aman doing sod all. So the gold is coming. Consider it a loan, with interest, to be repaid in full once you’ve either solved this or burned the house down trying. I don’t much fancy finding out which.

Separately — Alonsus Faol has been asking after you. I don’t pretend to know what that’s about. I only know that when the dead start taking a personal interest in the living, it is usually worth finding out why before they lose patience and come and ask in person.

— Nobbybanks

UG folded the letter away, satisfied, and did what he always did with anything that sounded like it required careful reflection: he set it aside and thought about something easier instead. Lichmyface. Hadn’t seen him in a little while, actually. Terrible, that, given the man practically lived downstairs. Probably still owed him a proper thank-you, too, for whatever quiet word he’d apparently put in with Alonsus Faol’s people — Lichmyface did a fair bit of business for the old priest, sourcing this and that, and if word had travelled, it had almost certainly travelled through him. UG made a mental note to ask about it sometime, filed the note somewhere it would never be found again, and got on with laying out the tea.

By the following afternoon there was a full spread on the kitchen table, sandwiches cut into careful triangles, a stand of scones, a pot of tea steaming under a knitted cosy UG was quite proud of, all of it set out within arm’s reach of the worst of the Lightbloom, which had crept along the shelf behind the teapot as if it meant to be included. The Toucan circled twice overhead and settled on a beam to watch. It was tea for two. UG had made sure of that, personally, and had even found a second cup.

Lichmyface came up from the cellar the way he always did, unhurried, the stairs creaking under him exactly as much as they creaked under nobody else in the house. He grunted something that might have been a greeting, and lowered himself into the one chair at the table that was always left for him — heavy stone, a red cushion nobody remembered choosing, a skull worked into the headrest. Nobody else sat in it. Nobody had ever needed telling not to.

“Sit, sit, glad you could make it,” UG said, to a man who was already sitting. “Tea?”

He poured before Lichmyface could answer, which was just as well, because Lichmyface did not answer. Lichmyface never answered. He had, UG understood in the vague way one understands a fact without ever quite processing it, no jaw to speak of, and had not had one for some considerable time. This did not stop UG addressing him as though he were the single best-listened correspondent Founder’s Point had ever produced.

“Right, so,” UG said, settling in with a scone he immediately began gesturing with rather than eating, waving it toward the shelf behind the teapot where the Lightbloom sat, thick and smug and entirely too close for comfort. “Here’s where I’ve got to. Two applications. Both of them, and I want you to really sit with this, both of them made it worse. Not a bit worse. Considerably worse. Thriving, practically preening, right there behind the pot as we speak.”

Lichmyface’s head tilted very slightly, the way it did sometimes.

“I knew you’d get it,” UG said, delighted. “See, everyone else hears that and thinks, well, that’s a failure, isn’t it. But you’re not everyone else. You’re thinking what I’m thinking. It’s not the stuff that’s wrong, it’s the strength of it. Maybe it wants more, all at once, rather than a slow drip. Maybe it wants less, spread thinner. Older stock instead of fresh. Colder. Hotter. Something in the dose, has to be.”

Silence, complete and familiar, the kind only Lichmyface could produce.

“Exactly,” UG said. “Exactly my thinking.”

He topped up a cup of tea that had not moved. He noticed, distantly, that the scones hadn’t moved either, and frowned at them with real concern.

“You’ve hardly touched a thing,” he said. “Are you not yourself today? You do seem a bit quiet. Quieter than usual, I mean.” He pushed the plate an inch closer, as though proximity might solve it. “Go on. Have a scone. You look like you could use one.”

Lichmyface did not have a scone. Lichmyface did not have the apparatus for a scone, nor, strictly, the biological requirement for one, being some considerable years dead and disinclined to eat regardless of what was offered. None of this occurred to UG, who had known the man, if man was still the word, for long enough that the fact had simply worn a groove of assumption into his brain and stayed there.

“Anyway,” UG went on, undeterred, “I’ve written to Nobbybanks. Funding’s coming through for more barrels, and I’m going to run a proper test this time. Controlled conditions. Different doses, side by side, see what actually shifts it.” He paused, struck by something. “Oh, that reminds me. Your little friend. The one I’ve seen scurrying about the place, small, bony sort of thing, moves like it’s in an awful hurry to be somewhere. Necromancer’s work, is it? Yours?”

For the first time all afternoon, Lichmyface moved with something like purpose. He reached into whatever passed for a coat pocket on a man who had been dead long enough to stop needing pockets, and produced a small folded slip, which he held out.

UG took it and unfolded it. It was, unmistakably, a receipt.

UNDYING ARMY REPUTATION EXCHANGE — MALDRAXXUS QUARTERMASTER Item issued: one (1) Necrolord familiar, Micromancer-class Payment received: Exalted standing, Undying Army Issued to: bearer No refunds. No exceptions. No exceptions to the no-exceptions clause.

UG read it, nodded slowly, and said, “Thought as much,” in the tone of a man who had thought nothing of the sort until roughly four seconds ago.

He folded the note away and clapped his hands together. “Right. Well. Glad we’ve talked it through properly. Feels good to get another opinion on these things, you know? You’ve been very helpful.”

Lichmyface said nothing, which UG took, by this point in the afternoon, as roughly the highest compliment the man had it in him to pay.

“One more thing, while I’ve got you,” UG said. “The barrels. I don’t suppose you’d be able to get hold of a few more? You always seem to know where things can be found.” He said this the way one might ask a favour of an old friend, with no particular weight attached, as though it were the most ordinary request in the world.

Lichmyface considered this, or did whatever it was he did instead of considering things, for a long moment. Then he gave a single slow nod, and settled back into his chair, perfectly still, perfectly polite, waiting with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be for possibly another century, for UG to be the one to leave first.

UG, for his part, talked himself all the way to the bottom of the pot and every last crumb on the plate, satisfied with how the afternoon had gone. “Right, well, I’d best get on,” he said eventually, standing and brushing crumbs from his front, “but this has been lovely, hasn’t it. Good spread, good chat.” He beamed at the empty plates and the empty cup and the general wreckage of a tea that had, in fact, been eaten entirely by one person. “Glad you enjoyed it.”

Lichmyface said nothing, watched him go, and did not move from the chair until UG was well out of sight.

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More in the The World Can’t Wait series

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