Free The Outcast Blade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page A

in digging them up again.
    “This one,” the sexton’s cousin said.
    “You’re sure?” His half-brother glanced between moonlit pits.Both had roots trapped in their recently turned soil. A sprinkling of grass covered the tops.
    “That one’s smallpox.”
    The words silenced his helper.
    A wave of smallpox had swept the Orseolo hospital. As ever, most of the patients died within ten days and their bodies had needed dousing with quicklime before burial. Smallpox meant the graves couldn’t be used again.
    “Besides,” the sexton’s cousin admitted, “I left Giorgio’s spade as a marker.” An old spade jutted from one of the mounds on the grave island, its cracked blade and splintery handle making it barely worth stealing. “Dig.”
    “You dig. I dug last time.”
    The half-brother headed for a small boat pulled up on the mud flats. It was a fishing boat but then he’d trained as a fisherman. It was just that stealing corpses produced more profit. Pulling free a wicker sledge, he dragged it up the slight hill.
    The sexton’s cousin had found a corpse. The grave pit was old, had been in use for years and was already overfull. There was barely a skin of baked earth over the hand he uncovered.
    “Too rotted,” his half-brother said.
    Their employer didn’t accept old or rotten. He demanded young, fresh and recent. What he really wanted was for these two to cream off the best of the bodies before they were buried. So far they’d resisted his threats and bribes.
    Tonight’s moon was half full, and half hidden by cloud, which made conditions just about perfect. Any fisherman on the lagoon who noticed two shadows moving across Pauper Island would cross himself, mutter a hasty
Ave Maria
and row in the opposite direction.
    Sinking his spade into the mound, the sexton’s cousin started again. He had to dig for a full minute before hitting something.
    “Careful…”
    “You do it then.”
    His half-brother shook his head.
    Both men were married, both in their thirties and both about to become grandfathers. They’d apprenticed as fishermen under the same uncle and begun to dig graves in their spare time ten years before. Both had been happy to discover there was more money to be made digging up corpses than burying them.
    Dropping to his knees, the sexton’s cousin put down his spade and reached into the hole, brushing damp earth from a face. “This one looks good.”
    She came up slowly, the earth releasing her with a soft sucking sound. Everywhere in Venice was near water. Few understood that as well as its gravediggers. As she came free, the hole she’d been pulled from began to fill with foul liquid. Thorn bushes and wild roses blossomed richly around them. It wasn’t hard to work out why.
    “Check her then.”
    Turning her head, his half-brother made sure her ears hadn’t been cropped for thievery and opened her mouth to check she hadn’t lost her tongue to treason, then lifted each eyelid in turn. She’d lived and died without seeing something she shouldn’t.
    “And the rest…”
    Arms unbroken, legs the same. Skin surprisingly unmottled for someone buried three days; although neither could remember this one. She had to be from the last batch given how near the surface she was.
    “Told you they’d be all right.”
    His half-brother had only wanted to wait two days. The sexton’s cousin had insisted on three. Since he owned the boat he got his way. Pulling up the corpse’s mud-soiled shift, his half-brother grunted in annoyance.
    “What?
    “Stabbed…”
    A dagger wound to the heart. Worse still, a half-healed gash ran from her left shoulder, between slight breasts to her right hip.
    “What do you think?”
    “So what… She still looks good to me.”
    Dr Crow complained if the corpses were too thin, too sickly before death to be really useful, too battered by life to fit his standards. He only paid his top price for healthy corpses. No missing limbs, no missing organs, no rot…
    Venice’s