Part 6 of the The World Can’t Wait series

Lichmyface thought about it often, on long walks with nothing else to occupy his head. It had happened years ago now, well before the coffin room, before the tea, before any of it had settled into the shape of a routine. He thought about it again on the walk down to the harbour, because there was a great deal of walking involved and nothing else to fill it with.

Lichmyface had come to collect a debt.

That was the whole job. A gnome, first name only, an accent for a description, and a cartel ledger that logged an unpaid service as theft the way cartel ledgers always did. He’d brought the Greener Pastures under one arm, the standard threat ready, the same approach that had worked on every doorstep before this one.

The door opened on a gnome who looked at him for a long moment, unbothered by an undead enforcer standing on his doorstep with cartel property tucked under one arm.

“You’re very quiet.”

Nothing.

“Tea?”

He never delivered the threat. He never took the Greener Pastures back out. UG talked the whole time, filling the room with plans and tangents, and none of it required an answer, so Lichmyface gave none, and sat there for an hour that felt like the first afternoon off he’d had in years.

Afterward UG showed him round the tower, talking the entire way, and they ended up in the dungeon among a run of empty coffins nobody had claimed. UG wandered off mid-sentence toward some other part of the tower and didn’t come back. Lichmyface picked a coffin. There was nobody left to ask, so he didn’t. By the time UG came looking for him, the coffin was his, and UG glanced in, said nothing, and moved on.

He took the room. Nobody had to give it to him.

The tea kept happening after that, regularly, sometimes UG popping down to Lichmyface’s own room with two cups, sometimes Lichmyface coming up to the main living area instead, where he never quite got used to the mess. UG knew well enough what it meant, poured two cups anyway, and never asked how the jaw had been lost. Lichmyface had no jaw to raise the subject with either, so it stayed unspoken between them, invitation after invitation, and that was the part that wore on him.

On the last visit, Lichmyface noticed the growth too, spreading in from somewhere near where they always sat for tea, thicker than it had any business being. Something was going on. Between that and the tea, he decided he needed a few days away.

That was years ago. Today, on the tunnel road down toward the harbour, none of it mattered except for what he knew and couldn’t say. None of which he could ever say, of course, having no jaw to say it with, which had shaped rather more of his life than most people around him ever noticed. He knew perfectly well what was in the barrels. Inert Blight Canisters, traded for Service Medals through Provisioner Mukra, down at the Port of Zandalar, in Dazar’alor, a proper quartermaster’s post tucked among the crates and the noise, kitted out for anyone who’d put in the work on the battlefields of Kul Tiras and Zandalar. Blight, the label had said, when he’d first read it. Inert. Contained. Perfectly safe for domestic display.

UG called it toxic waste, and had done since the first barrel started leaking, and Lichmyface had let him, not out of mischief, but because there was simply no version of events where he explained otherwise. He had considered, more than once, the unfairness of knowing something useful and having no way to say it. It was, he privately felt, the most persistent inconvenience of his condition, rather ahead of the not eating and the not sleeping and the general business of being dead.

The trouble, and Lichmyface had turned this over a good deal on the long, quiet trek down from Founder’s Point, through the tunnels under the Undercity and out toward the docks, was that inert was doing rather a lot of work in that label. Blight had never, in the whole of its unpleasant history, been interested in killing things cleanly. It corrupted. It twisted. It settled into land and drew the dead to it and rewrote whatever grew there into something stranger and hungrier than it had been. The old Scourge plague had turned people into shambling horrors rather than simply finishing them off, and the Forsaken’s own refined version had followed the same unpleasant logic, less an ending than a change of direction. Calling it inert, Lichmyface thought, was a bit like calling a sleeping direwolf harmless. Technically accurate. Not the whole picture.

So it did not surprise him that the Lightbloom, presented with something built to warp and hasten and empower whatever it touched, had simply taken the offering and thrived. UG had assumed poison. He had, in a manner of speaking, been half right. It was poison. It simply wasn’t the kind that stopped things growing.

He arrived in Dazar’alor with no gold to speak of and a firm sense that he wasn’t leaving without a canister. Service Medals were the currency here, and Service Medals were earned rather than found lying about, so Lichmyface set about earning some with the same unbothered efficiency he brought to everything else. He hauled supply crates along the terraces for a quartermaster who never asked why the hired help never spoke, only that he never complained either, which as far as the quartermaster was concerned made him the best worker he’d had all season. He stood guard outside a warehouse for the better part of a day, doing nothing but standing, which turned out to be exactly what was required, since the mere presence of a silent, motionless undead man in the doorway discouraged more casual thieving than any amount of shouting would have. He rode one of the great slow Brutosaurs on its caravan route twice round the city, simply because a merchant needed someone reliable aboard, and reliable, in Lichmyface’s case, mostly meant unlikely to fall asleep or start a conversation.

If he was honest with himself, which he generally was, having little else to occupy the silence, none of it was strictly necessary. He had a canister already, sitting in his dungeon room back at Founder’s Point, where UG had stashed it some time ago for reasons neither of them now remembered. He simply hadn’t fancied being at home. Another afternoon tea was coming, he could feel it the way some men feel rain, and he was tired of sitting through them with the same question still sitting between them, cup after cup, never asked and never answered. A trip to Zandalar, however unnecessary, was still a trip away from the tea tray.

By the end of it he had more than enough Service Medals anyway. He walked back to Provisioner Mukra’s post, laid his medals down without a word, and was handed a second Inert Blight Canister, sealed, labelled, and entirely his.

He looked at it for a moment, then thought of the one waiting at home. Blight was no kinder to the dead than the living, drawn to rot the way it was drawn to everything else, and a sealed canister of it sitting in his own dungeon room was a hazard he’d been quietly ignoring for longer than he cared to admit. He decided, on the walk back through the tunnels, that both canisters were going to UG. All of them, today, if UG was in.

He thought of UG fighting the wrong fire with the wrong theory, and felt something that in a man with the right muscles left in his face might have been the beginning of a smile.

He tucked the first canister under one arm, and started the long walk home to collect the second.

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