Eeek!

Got my tickets for my next trip North in the post this morning, which was a relief as they should have gone in the post of Saturday, leading to delivery on Monday or Tuesday (my last set were ordered at 4:50PM on one day and arrived in the 11AM post the next) and I was starting to fret.

So I opened the end of the envelope to extract the folder they come in, and it wouldn't come out. I took another look, and that's when I went 'Eeek!', because the other end of the envelope had been resealed with sellotape, and was clearly less pristine than when it started - half open along the seal, slightly chewed around the actual end, and somewhat greasy.

A firmer tug got the folder out, and an anxious check confirmed all the tickets were there (two sets of three, plus a covering note). But they're all credit card-sized slips of thin card, easily lost if the end is open - now I understand why they come in that internal paper folder.

Best hypothesis I have is it got chewed up and potentially stuck inside the sorting machinery at the Royal Mail.

Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead - K J Parker

 Saevus Corax is quite clear up front, he's not a nice man, but what he's going to tell us is the truth.

These things are both true, he kills someone within the first half-dozen pages, and he does tell us the truth about it. 

He just doesn't always (ever) tell us the full truth.

Saevus Corax runs a company engaged in battlefield salvage, which in his world (the same one as in Parker's 16 Ways to Defend a Walled City and related books) means taking out a contract with the two sides in a war, giving you the responsibility for dealing with the dead, and the rights to whatever you can find on them.

So post-battle Corax, his half-dozen department heads cum friends and his 500 men arrive at the battlefield and start collecting the salvage - weapons, armour, clothes, shoes, and personal valuables (and in certain cases valuables that were persons), and finally collecting and burning the bodies, which is  the worst job and one Corax keeps for himself. Obviously they prefer a fresh battlefield.

It's not a job for people who want to be well liked or to have a settled home-life.

Corax and his people do have a base, somewhere to rest and refit between wars, and it's when they get home that the problems start.

Someone is setting Corax up, and they're doing a good job of it. Before we're a quarter of the way through the book, Corax is wanted by essentially the entire civilized world. And when the whole world is trying to turn you in for the reward(s), you need to think fast, have no qualms about the things you need to do, and have contacts everywhere.

So it's just as well he's Saevus Corax, not someone else.

Thoroughly recommended.

Just remember, he never tells you the entire truth. Even at the end.