Free Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith Page B

another miserable, shivering hour, but the slaves and their cart had finally gone, and the soldier with them. Now it was just him, alone in a field of bodies, kneeling over a fresh grave in the dark of night. As he dug, Balthazar told himself to breathe. Relax. Superstition was for the weak-minded, right? Of course it was. He told himself to think of the spoils. All the gold and silver waiting under this loose dir—
    Was that something moving?
    He could’ve sworn something had brushed against his finger beneath the dirt…
    No, it wasn’t “something moving.” There’s nothing “moving” out here because dead things don’t m—
    A hand burst through the dirt and grabbed Balthazar by the throat. Then another—unnaturally strong, squeezing his windpipe. It pulled him toward the loose dirt. Pulled him down into the gra—
    No, it didn’t. Stop being a baby…
    But he had felt something.
    It was the familiar shape of a hand, a hand unlike any he’d ever touched. A hand no warmer than the dirt it was buried in, its skin rigid and leathery. Balthazar suddenly realized something. Something he really wished he’d considered earlier: he’d never touched a dead body.
    He’d seen them, sure. You couldn’t get to be twelve years old in the slums of Antioch without seeing a dead body. But when it came to dead bodies, seeing and touching were oceans apart. Still, he took a breath and brushed the last of the dirt aside…
    Here was a man—barely twenty, from the looks of him. Judging by the dark red line around his neck and the unnatural angle of his head, he’d been hung. For what, Balthazar would never know. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the pendant around that neck. A gold pendant on a leather string.
    All I have to do is reach out and take it.
    No matter what tricks his young imagination played on him—no matter how real it seemed when the man’s bloodshot eyes snapped open and his hands reached for Balthazar’s throat, it wouldn’t be. People didn’t come back to life. There was no God to fear, no sins to commit. There were nothing but superstitions and the rants of long-ago prophets.
    All he had to do was reach out and take it…

    Balthazar returned home that night filthy beyond comprehension, and rich beyond his wildest imagination. He promptly informed his mother that they were moving to a better neighborhood.
    It had been a bigger haul than he’d ever dreamed. In one night, he’d raided nine bodies. And from those nine bodies, he’d netted a total of six rings (four gold, two silver) and four pendants (three gold, one silver). All told, it had taken less than three hours. Three hours! Balthazar would have been lucky to pick one pocket in the same amount of time. And with pickpocketing there were the risks, the payoffs, the kickbacks. No, this was the answer. This was the way. He had the whole west bank of the Orontes to himself. And the best part was, there was no end in sight. As long as the Romans kept putting men to death, Balthazar would keep finding uses for their unused valuables.
    The next morning, he took Abdi into the city, and the two of them ate cinnamon dates until they were nearly sick. And when they rested beneath their favorite tree on the Orontes—the one with the scar down its side, not far from where Balthazar had entered the water the night before—he presented his brother a little present from his first plunder of the dead. A keepsake. It was a gold pendant on a leather string, a thin, coin-shaped wafer bearing the likeness of the god Plutus on one side.
    “The god of wealth,” said Balthazar as he hung it around Abdi’s neck.
    The only god worth worshipping.
    The pendant flittered in the afternoon sun, spinning round and round as Abdi jumped and laughed along the riverbank, proud of his gift—but more proud of the fact that his big brother had given it to him. Balthazar watched from the shade of the scarred tree, smiling from ear to ear, a gold disk of reflected light