Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 15: A Matter of Security
He came home in the middle of the morning to look at the house with the eyes the royal cousin’s man had told him to use now — to walk it as a stranger might, a hostile stranger, and find the ways in, the weaknesses, the places a thing could leak. They had all been told to do it. The benefactor had been very clear: a plan was only as sound as the houses of the men who carried it, and the houses of soldiers were full of holes, full of servants and tradesmen and open doors, and a careless house could hang the lot of them. So Merko had come home to be hostile to his own walls, and he came already wound to the pitch he lived at now, because the thing was real.
It had been real for a while but it had got realer. It had a day to it now and an hour, the spring market three weeks off and then a fortnight less than that since the last counting, and it had his name written into it in a particular place: when the device went up in the square and the guard came running to the noise and the palace stood half emptied of its men, it was Merko who would go in at the head of a column and take the King. Not kill him. God, no — that was the part he held onto, the part that let him sleep such as he slept: they were not killing the King. They were going to put the King in a quiet room and lay the truth in front of him, the whole rotten truth about the war and the men spent on it for nothing, and the King — a reasonable man under it all, surely, a man who only wanted the right counsel — the King would come round. He would see it. He would thank them, in time. That was how Merko had it arranged in his head, and he kept it arranged that way with some effort, because there was another arrangement underneath it, the one with the crown prince dead on the market steps and a crowd dead around him and a king who agreed to things with the heir’s blood not dry, and Merko did not look at that arrangement. There was a meeting tonight to go through the device — how it would be carried, set, woken; the benefactor had a way of waking it that Merko did not understand and did not want to — and the thought of the meeting sat in him like something swallowed wrong. The device frightened him. He was a soldier; he had killed; he knew what a sword did and a sword did not frighten him. This was not a sword. It was the other kind of thing, a Weapon of Magical Destruction, the kind that was against every law there was for reasons even a fool could see, the kind that did not care who was a soldier and who was a child come to the fair. It terrified him, if he was honest, and he was less and less able not to be honest, and so he was frightened most of the time now, frightened in a low steady way that had got into his hands and his sleep, and he came home to check his security with all of that in him, looking for something to be wrong so he could put it right and feel, for a moment, that something was in his control.
The front room was empty. That was the first wrong thing — small, nothing, but his nerves were strung to catch at nothing. Where was the girl? He stood and listened to his own house and it was too quiet, and then it was not quiet: there were voices out the back, low, the girl’s and others’, men’s, strangers’ voices in his yard.
He went through fast and quiet the way he’d been taught and stopped in the kitchen doorway and saw it. The back gate stood open to the lane. There were two men in the yard, ragged, road-filthy, the kind that drift the lanes with their hands out — beggars, two of them — and the girl was at the gate with them, bare-armed in her home shift, holding out a dish in each hand, his own dishes, last night’s meat and the heel of the bread, holding it out to them over the threshold of his house while the gate stood open to the whole lane and anyone in it.
Something went through him that was mostly terror and came out as rage because rage was the door fear used.
“Get out,” he said to the beggars, and then louder, going at them, “Get out — get away from here — “ and they went, fast, the way that kind goes, through the gate and gone down the lane with his bread, and he slammed the gate and rounded on the girl.
“Who were they. What were you — they were in my yard, the gate stood open to the lane, anyone — what in God’s name were you doing?”
“Feeding them, master.” She had gone still and careful, the dishes still in her hands. “Only feeding them. The lady Vinda asked me to — to give what was left, of an evening, to whoever was wanting it. I’ve always —”
“Vinda’s dead.” It came out flat. “And it’s good food. That’s last night’s good meat you’re handing over the wall.”
“It’s my own, master.” Quiet. “It’s what’s left from my plate. The leftovers — what you have me eat. I don’t — it’s not the house’s food, it’s only mine, what I don’t finish, I give it them rather than —”
“Then make less,” he said, working it, “or — no. You’ve too much, then, if you’ve that to give away. I’ll see you’ve less to be so free with.”
“Master, I — “ and he saw her reach for something and not find it, saw the careful face open for half a second on something like despair, “the lady Vinda said I wasn’t to cook beyond the ration. I don’t make extra. I never — there’s only what’s on my own plate, and the rule is I’m not to make more, so it’s only ever my own, that’s the only —”
And there it was, and he did not even hear it for the trap it was, the two rules of the dead woman closing on the girl like a gin so that the only act left to her in the whole world was the one in front of him with the gate open behind it; he heard only that she had an answer for everything, the way the dangerous ones did, the way the benefactor’s warnings said they would. Watch your own houses. It is not the enemy at the gate you fear, it is the soft creature inside it who hears everything and means no harm and hands your life over the wall without knowing she’s done it. And he knew — this was the thing that turned the fear to something that needed a body to land on — he knew he had talked in this house. He had talked and talked, of an evening, with the girl in the room, the plan and the men and the names, all of it, because she was nothing, because she was furniture, and here was the furniture standing at an open gate handing his dinner to strangers off the lane and telling him in her reasonable voice that she’d a rule for it.
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