I glared around at the walls. “At least wait until I’ve had my damn breakfast!” It was a feeble plea since I couldn’t face breakfast these days.
When my sword was clean, I stripped off beside the bucket, washed, and donned some fresh garments. The rain had eased, and I poked my head out the window to assess the time of day. A slight smell of baking bread eased across the town. The smith’s hammer was still clanking, so that blubbery old hulk wasn’t eating his first lunch yet.
A fair amount of time remained before my midday event at the town square. I decided right that moment I’d do something to astound the townsfolk, and by “astound,” I meant horrify them so they’d start turning white whenever I looked at them hard. Daily murders had not proven sufficiently intimidating.
I smiled as I pulled the big bedroom door off its hinges, laid it on two boxes, and began sanding off untold years of grime and mold. Maybe painting the door some repulsive color would annoy the ghost, not that I could really bear to make the place so ugly.
My wife had hated this house through all our years together, if you took her fierce complaints and chill silences as evidence. Well, Lin hadn’t really given a damn about the house. She hated that I never improved it, although every couple of months I promised her I would soon. She didn’t mind that I ran off to enforce the will of harsh men who were wealthy enough to hire sorcerers. She never complained about the days I spent helping ungrateful sick people and encouraging their crops to flourish. She fed and tended my rough companions, some of them as wild as baboons. She weathered all of that with kindness, or at least minimal aggravation.
But Lin chewed my ass about replacing the roof and replastering the walls and repairing the old chimney. She wouldn’t have minded having a new floor. The front step was likely to collapse and kill somebody. Every goddamn door in the house creaked and stuck.
I promised to handle it all, but something else always claimed my time. I offered to hire it done, but you would have thought I had offered to pay somebody to lie with her at night. The house caused us more hard words and callous behavior than anything else in our life together. I once considered waiting until she and Bett were away sometime and then burning the damn thing down, but Lin would have known exactly what I’d done.
The house remained unimproved on the day Bett, my first daughter, nearly died, and I saved her by promising to murder people for the God of Death. A week later, the house still looked like hell when Bett tripped over a tree root and broke her neck. Lin stopped bothering me about the house then. She slept a lot and gave me hard looks when she thought I couldn’t see her. I still hadn’t repaired a single stick of that house a year later when she died behind the bedroom door I was now sanding.
I sure as sheep shanks hadn’t come to Bindle intending to rebuild this house. I had planned to rest my horse a few days and spend some unenjoyable time in the tavern. Ever since I stopped drinking, evenings had become boring as hell, so the first night, I walked over to see the old house. I found it more run-down than ever and haunted to holy hell.
The ghost was a vexing and destructive entity, so I never believed it might be Lin or Bett. But I conceived the idea that this ghost, whoever it was, might entice their ghosts to come back here. I thought it possible. I had recently spent some time chatting with the deceased, so I figured it could be done. Maybe Lin would forgive me and come home.
That was the theory, admittedly weak, and I had no single clue what I’d do if it worked. I resolved to test it anyway. I had no specific business in the Empire, other than searching for men who deserved killing, which would prevent Harik, the back-assed, bile-soaked God of Death, from pestering me about loafing around.
I sanded the door smooth and the other bedroom door as well, leaving not much time before my midday summons at the town square. I peered into the yard through the front doorway and dreaded getting locked out for the rest of the day by that malicious haunt. I felt sweaty and gritty, and I could have bathed had I not sanded that second door. I knew a pretty spot upstream from the falls, even though the water was cold enough to cut like knives.
I reached for my cloak at the door, glanced back, and stopped with the cloak still hanging. The lumber pile was stacked as straight as glass. The tools and boxes lay lining two walls, running by size from the smallest nail at one corner to the big mallet across the way.
The urge to burn down the house seized me, but I slapped it away. “You did the same fool thing last week!” I stomped toward the front door. “If you’ve got to be a pain in my ass, you could at least show a little creativity!”
Outside, I halted with one foot on the front step. A tall, broad-shouldered woman younger than me stood thirty feet away, about where I had killed Conor. She appeared unarmed, dressed in tough traveling clothes. Her hair and skin were deep black, and her face would have been lovely if it didn’t look like she’d eaten half a dozen fried rocks for breakfast.
