“But this has not yet become a story about the knife.“
–Three and Two and Two
“Godshell, I–I don’t even know what to say, Dog Boy. This is beyond the pale.”
“I don’t either, Gene,” Bleeding Wolf muttered, ducking in through the door to the jail. “It’s why I came here. To figure the details. Sort my thoughts.”
“That ain’t what I mean!” Gene retorted, loudly enough to catch Michel’s attention from behind the warden’s desk.
“Evening gentlemen,” he called. “What brings you, uh, here tonight?”
“Town business,” Bleeding Wolf replied.
“The shell it is, Dog Boy!” Gene interjected. “There shouldn’t be nothin’ to figure!”
“What sort of business?” Michel asked, frowning. “Incidentally, Anita and I did want to thank both of you for helping out as much as you have these last few days. It’s taken a load off both of our backs.”
“Don’t mention it.” Bleeding Wolf didn’t much care for effusive thanks, but he was happy to help. “This place is home for me, even if I’m given to spend time away. Anyway, Gene, if there’s nothing to figure, then who would you fork over to the whitefrocks?”
“No one! That ain’t our right!”
“That’s neither an option nor your call,” Bleeding Wolf growled.
“Uh, what’s all this then?” Michel asked, taking a nervous step back as the argument reerupted. Bleeding Wolf raked his claws through the stubble on his face.
“I’m sure word was gonna reach you soon enough,” he said. “Meetin’ with Holme went…meh. Sculptor wants a sacrifice in exchange for the Holmite lives lost.”
“But…didn’t they attack you?”
“Yep. John wants to keep ‘em happy, though.”
“They don’t get to demand our blood if it was their fault!” Gene objected.
“I mean, right,” Michel agreed. “They shouldn’t…well…”
“Well, what, son?” Gene spat. Bleeding Wolf put a hand on the old man’s shoulder as Michel frowned, nervous.
“There is the Masson boy,” he said. “He’s still here.” Bleeding Wolf raised an eyebrow as Gene’s face fell.
“Masson?” Bleeding Wolf asked. “What’d he do?”
“Vince Masson,” Michel clarified. “Young man set fire to his house a few years ago. His family was inside, and the fire spread too. Took out a whole district. Ten or so died, dozens more were hurt. Kid was sentenced to hang.”
“But he’s still here?” Bleeding Wolf asked. Michel shrugged.
“Mayor Bergen commuted all death sentences when he was elected. There was a vocal portion of the town that thought we were going too far, killing a sixteen-year-old. So Mayor Bergen changed the sentence to jail and mandatory labor.”
“For how long?”
“Rest of his life, which…” Michel glanced back toward the hallway which housed the jail cells. “Which isn’t great logistically. This place wasn’t made to have permanent tenants. We’ve had to hire temporary jail guards, put him fully in the care of the caravants he’s working for–not totally humane, those contracts. They treat him like an animal, and he’s come back a few times with serious injuries that Brill has had to treat. I’ve wondered a few times if it would’ve been kinder to just follow through in the first place.”
“An’ now it’s convenient to flip-flop, John’s doin’ it,” Gene muttered. It was a fair point. Though that didn’t mean it was the wrong answer in this instance.
“Politics, indeed,” Bleeding Wolf growled. He agreed with Michel, for what it was worth. It sounded like the kid did a bad thing, probably for bad reasons. If the town wanted to kill him, they were well within their rights, but this “leniency”, the process, the spectacle of it–bigger pieces of shit marched through the Crossroads every day, and the seriousness with which the mayor pretended at justice here felt like a mockery. It almost did feel kinder to hand the condemned man over to Holme. Except Bleeding Wolf knew what the Holmites did with their sacrifices, and he suspected Mayor Bergen did not.
“A town meetin’ in the gaol?” came the twisting syllables of Atra’s accent from the doorway. “I must’ve missed quite the development today. Michel, here to relieve ye.”
Bleeding Wolf turned to regard the woman sweeping into the room. He knew that at this point, Commander Atra enjoyed quite a bit of the Crossroads’ respect, and he could see why. By all outward appearances, she was a reassuring protector. Even-tempered, muscled, battle scarred, yet still clearly in her prime. Bleeding Wolf trusted her about as little as it was possible to trust an ally–and less than many enemies. When they met, he had caught a glimpse of the magical power she was somehow keeping hidden. He was certain that she had not accumulated that much death from even-tempered protecting, but what she had told him of her goals–forthrightly, honestly, that she wished to meet the Blaze in battle–made no fucking sense. And he had a feeling that she was dragging the Crossroads into the fire more than she was shielding it.
“Thank you, Commander,” Michel said with a respectful salute. “Have a good evening, gentlemen–I’m sure that you and the mayor will come to a reasonable solution.” Bleeding Wolf waved him a halfhearted goodbye and faced Atra.
“What ‘reasonable solution’ are ye debatin’ then?” she asked.
“You want me to believe you don’t already know?” he growled back. Her calm smile somehow made him feel both remorse for the sudden aggression and even more anger for the accusation’s little visible effect.
“I’m runnin’ a militia here, Bleeding Wolf, not a spy network.”
“And yet.”
Atra shrugged, walking past them to the warden’s desk. She lifted a piece of parchment with a convincing veneer of assiduousness.
“Mr. Jens spent his 24 hours here,” she muttered. “Best be lettin’ him out tonight.” She looked up. “Yer deliberation’ on whom to send to Holme, then?”
“You have been spyin’!” Gene snapped, almost shouting. “And we ain’t sendin’ nobody!”
“Well, Bleeding Wolf’s right, and there’s no point hidin’ it: I do keep informed. But ye’ll forgive me for takin’ a turn at disbelief, seein’ as the decision of whom to send isn’t yers to make.”
Gene’s face slowly reddened as he grasped the meaning of Atra’s roundabout phrase.
“It isn’t mine, either,” she added, lifting a keyring from a hook behind the desk. “So there’s little warrant for the blame yer bringin’ to me, Gene.”
And yet. Bleeding Wolf didn’t need to say it again–the thought hung in the air obviously enough without additional vocalization. He couldn’t tell if his intuition was being clouded by what he had discovered of Atra’s prowess–by how incredibly intimidated he realized he was–but he couldn’t shake the notion that the particulars of the arrangement with Holme were material to her interests. It was obvious that she would want an arrangement with the Sculptor’s military, of course, but what made no sense–and yet seemed inexplicably evident–was that an offering of one of the Crossroads’ own to those horrifying statues was exactly how she wanted it to go down.
If she was concerned by Bleeding Wolf’s anxious calculus, though, Atra did not show it. She simply returned his pensive glare with a pleasant smile and left the room, proceeding down the jail hallway, keyring jingling as she walked.
“I’m startin’ to get damned tired of everyone tellin’ me my opinion don’t matter,” Gene muttered quietly. Bleeding Wolf listened as the metallic jingle receded to the far end of the hallway.
“It’s a distraction to think of it as an insult, Gene,” he replied in a similarly low voice, though he doubted there was anything they could do to prevent Atra from eavesdropping at this range–even Bleeding Wolf’s magic was capable of augmenting his hearing enough to catch isolated whispers fifty feet away. “If you look at the big picture right now, you’ll notice that no one’s opinion matters that much. I don’t know if you realize how much political fuckery it takes to engineer a situation that everyone disagrees with but no one can gainsay.”
Gene raised an eyebrow, evidently rattled, though he didn’t have time to respond.
“Gentlemen!” a voice boomed as the jail door slammed violently open. “I have need to interject upon your arrangement with Holme!” Bleeding Wolf whirled, annoyed at what was becoming a stream of interruptions, as Lan al’Ver glided through the doorway, brandishing his umbrella like a showman.
“Where the hell have you been?” Bleeding Wolf spat.
“The Chateau de Marquains, Mr. Wolf, retrieving our dear Orphelia and more–”
“What?!”
“Pay attention! You are to travel to Holme, and we shall join your caravan.” Bleeding Wolf blinked.
“To…Holme?” he asked, winded.
“Indeed,” al’Ver continued dismissively. “To secure the iron you promised the Doctor’s ward. Have you forgotten your own priorities in this crisis?”
“Crisis? How do you…?” Bleeding Wolf sputtered. He shook himself, rapidly reacclimating to al’Ver’s infuriating gift for putting him off balance. “We aren’t going to Holme!” Al’Ver rolled his eyes.
“Of course you are,” he said. “There is no one here you trust to take charge of that exchange. You will be going there, and as momentous events await beyond that bend, I will be accompanying you.” There was a moment of silence.
“Did you say Orphelia was at the Chateau de Marquains?” Gene finally asked.
“Now yer to go straight home. No stops at the tavern–ye worried yer family bad with this last stunt, so don’t ye go worryin’ them more.” Atra’s voice preceded her entrance from the hallway, escorting a gaunt, disheveled man whom Bleeding Wolf did not recognize but assumed was the “Mr. Jens” mentioned earlier. “Ah,” she said, looking to the three of them. “Captain al’Ver, welcome back.”
Al’Ver was silent for about a second longer than the greeting warranted. Bleeding Wolf glanced back at him and noted that–for perhaps the first time in his memory–Lan al’Ver seemed surprised.
“Atra, my lady,” al’Ver said belatedly, though with recovered composure. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”
“You’ve met?” Gene grunted.
“Had the good fortune of meetin’ the Captain on the way here,” she replied with a smirk. “As I understand many do.”
“Indeed,” al’Ver corroborated disinterestedly. “But once again, you have me at a peculiar disadvantage: I did not expect to find you here, and so I am unsure what to make of it. –”
“The mayor here issued a call for fightin’ folk to train a militia while ye were on yer latest voyage, Captain…”
Bleeding Wolf stared at Atra as she explained the situation, Bergen’s nominal concerns, progress in the Blaze’s advance in the weeks al’Ver had been gone, all of it logical and intuitive. Al’Ver nodded politely, adding his stupid, self-important quips and affirmations as he would, but Bleeding Wolf had heard it: the jolt at the end of his expression of confusion, as Atra offered her explanation just slightly too quickly. It was impeccably smooth, but she had interrupted him. Why?
“If you don’t mind,” Bleeding Wolf said, reentering the conversation amidst a somewhat off-topic discussion of Holmite idiosyncrasies, “I would like to hear the end of al’Ver’s question.” He looked at Atra. “The one you cut off.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Captain! Did I interrupt ye?”
“It is Captain al’Ver, Mr. Wolf,” al’Ver rebuked. “And there is no need to be rude. The commander’s explanation was perfectly sufficient.
Bleeding Wolf scowled but did not reply. He was going to have to pry less directly if al’Ver was going to be a pill about it.
“In any case,” al’Ver continued, “this has been a serendipitous reunion, surely, but my work lies elsewhere. We have our objective, Mr. Wolf! Now I must determine where Orphelia has gotten to.”
“Oh no,” Gene mumbled.
“Orphelia?” Atra asked. “I recall mention of the name from Brill when I arrived. Is the girl prone to trouble, perhaps?”
***
Orphelia had not intended any trouble to come from her visit to the tavern. She really only wanted some mulled wine by the fire–and to spend the two pieces of silver she had pickpocketed from Mr. Naples before he realized it was gone. But now that she was there, it was getting difficult to resist.
Part of it was boredom, yes. She knew it was. The last several days on the water had not been mentally stimulating, in spite of the cool cave Captain al’Ver had found with Ty and the weird metal man who had joined them. And she was starting to appreciate that her reactions to boredom were perhaps more of a burden than she really wanted to inflict on herself or others. Listening to Mr. Ruffles that day she had left the Crossroads had put her and Devlin in danger–far more danger than she had even realized until Ty and Naples’ explained what the Chateau de Marquains was–and she wasn’t eager to do that again. But she was still bored.
The other part was that the happenings at the tavern tonight were making her really curious.
It wasn’t an especially busy night. Multiple large caravans had apparently just departed, and the room was spotted with empty tables. But one patron, a tall, bulky, middle-aged man in ill-fitting clothes, had gotten sloppy drunk and was proclaiming loudly to anyone who would listen that during the War, he had become known as the “Taker of Skulls” for his combat prowess–or his roach body part collection, or just a habit of decapitating any corpse he came upon as an offering to the Blood God. It wasn’t really clear to Orphelia, but as far as she could tell, it also wasn’t clear to him. The man seemed confused, and his fit of bravado likely would have guttered quickly had Orphelia not sat down beside him and–to the barkeep’s chagrin–began requesting elaborations on his various boasts.
“I killed a hundred men at Bloodhull!” he roared at one point.
“Oh, so you were fighting for the bad guys?” Orphelia asked.
“What?! Of course not! I fought for Harmony! Matze Matsua was right next to me, he was!”
“Then why’d you kill all those people? Weren’t the bad guys mostly roaches and those tongue things?”
“Well…”
Orphelia didn’t know whether she was asking after real historical details or simply playing along with this weirdo’s delusions of grandeur–the stories her father had told her about the War of the Roaches always did seem rather fanciful. But either way, it didn’t seem like this guy would know. He didn’t look old enough to have actually seen the war, and he seemed too stupid to be a mage like Dog Boy.
Or like her, she supposed.
She was still processing what had happened at the Chateau de Marquains, Mr. Ruffles’ task, what he had said about her abilities. Could she still call him Mr. Ruffles? She wanted to, but there was a part of him now that she couldn’t force back into the stuffed animal her father had given her. The spectral man who had guided her to the Saraa Sa’een. Romesse of Khet. Rom, he had called himself.
Captain al’Ver didn’t seem to trust him, but it didn’t seem like Rom had lied: She was able to do magic. Mr. Ruffles didn’t talk to her the entire trip back, didn’t give her any instructions, but she had tried to do the things he had helped her do before, pushing away Naples’, Ty’s, and the metal Homunculus’ notice while she skulked around the raft, stealing things which she usually gave back. It worked. Sort of. For a while.
It didn’t work on Captain al’Ver at all–he seemed to have an eye on her whenever she was near, whether she was attempting to “channel mana” or not. And then, after a time or two, Naples caught her trying to lift his notebook.
“When you do that,” he said, gently taking the book from her hands, “people around you can sense the mana that you’re pushing at them. The reason it works most of the time is because they aren’t paying that much attention–not unless they know someone’s close. Or trying to steal their stuff.
“But once they’re actively looking for you, it takes a lot more effort to keep them from finding you. Heck, that’s why Master Faisal taught us to look for shadow-walkers before teaching us to shadow-walk ourselves.”
It turned out that both Naples and Ty knew how to do some of the things Rom had guided her through. It was a rare school of magic which, Naples explained, originated with a “separatist sect”–or something like that–from the city of Khet.
“Where is Khet, Mr. Naples?” she asked.
“Oh, nowhere anymore. It used to be way north, in the desert past the Gravestone mountains, but it was destroyed centuries ago by the Blood God.”
“The who?” Naples laughed at this.
“Do you actually want to learn some history, Orphelia?”
She did not, though she did think that the “Blood God” sounded like a cool name. Now, though, as the “Taker of Skulls” kept going on about how the powers of the Blood God strengthened him or whatever, she slightly regretted not asking about it when the opportunity was there.
“I even got some proof I was there,” the strange man grunted eventually. “Ya see, I was in the vanguard at the assault on Roachheart after Bloodhull fell too. Was the first one in the room where Ka done killed ‘imself. Stodgy bastards wouldn’t let me take his head, but I did get this!”
The “Taker of Skulls” drew a small knife from a sheath at his belt and embedded it into the bar with a loud THUNK.
“The very knife he cut ‘is throat with!” he proclaimed.
Orphelia wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be impressed with. The knife was visibly rusting, and the blade appeared to be loosely joined to the handle with twine. The barkeep was even more unimpressed.
“Alright, I think you’ve had plenty,” she said, glaring at the new notch in her bar. “Time to go!”
The “Taker of Skulls” slammed his fist against the bar and roared something back, but Orphelia was only dimly aware of it. She realized with equal parts fascination and concern that despite the knife’s innocuous appearance, she couldn’t take her eyes from it. And the sounds around her had faded. It was as if the substantial din of the tavern–of the argument ongoing right beside her–had become background, replaced not by different noise, but by intrusive thought:
Take it, her instinct told her.
Take it. Take it.
Take it.
TAKE IT.
The part of her that was concerned was now, of course, alarmed, but she had no other reason not to take the knife. So she did.
The silence and stillness fell so immediately that she felt she had been struck. But nothing had touched her. She pried the knife from the bar, considered it, noting that it was indeed a shoddy, unremarkable piece of work. But then she noticed that the tavern around her had not merely stilled. It had changed.
The barkeep was staring at her. No. No, everyone, the whole tavern was starting at her, but for some reason, as she glanced, panicked, back and forth, she couldn’t seem to focus on their eyes. All of their faces were…the same. And every single one of them was smiling, teeth bared. At the back tables, some of them began to laugh, quiet peals of high-pitched cackling echoing across the room’s high ceiling. And then a whisper, chime-like, consonants clicking, inches from her ear:
“Awake from your dream, child?”
She sat bolt-upright, suppressing a shiver, and whirled. No one was there. Rather, the tavern was there, its warmth and noise suddenly returned, and not a single person was looking at her. No one was smiling. At least no one was smiling like that.
Next to her, the barstool where the “Take of Skulls” had been sitting was empty. The barkeep looked up from the cask of ale she had just finished tapping.
“You alright, sweetheart?” she asked. “Need more wine?”
Orphelia shook her head, dazed. Then she looked down at her hands. She was still holding the knife, and, despite its dubious construction, it felt light and comfortable in her palm. She glanced at the notch in the bar where the man had plunged the knife moments before.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” she said to the barkeep, gesturing to the empty stool. “Do you know where the man who was sitting here went?” The barkeep frowned.
“You sure you’re okay, hun? That seat’s been empty all night.”
Orphelia stared at her, feeling a pit in her stomach. She nodded slowly, tucked the knife into a pocket inside her dress, and slid down from her stool. Saying nothing to the barkeep, she placed Naples’ two pieces of silver on the bar and made her way to the door as quickly as she could without sprinting.
The air was cool and wet outside. Calming. Traffic was light, but the street was far from empty, which was good: What happened in the tavern had left her unsettled, somehow, by both crowds and solitude. She took a deep, nervous breath.
What was that? Did it have to do with that weird Skull guy? With the knife? And where did he go? And why did she keep the knife? Ooh. She had no answer she could frame in words, but even the thought of discarding the knife struck her with overpowering dread. The voice…the knife, for some reason it was all settling, familiar, in her mind. She didn’t like that. She knew it wasn’t familiar. She knew she had never seen it before.
“Orphelia, my dear!”
The voice calling from the busy end of the street was familiar too. But it was the right kind of familiar.
“Captain al’Ver…?” she muttered, turning, dazed, toward its source.
“Orphelia, what’s the matter?” Captain al’Ver asked, drawing closer. Behind him, she saw old Gene and Dog Boy approaching as well, along with a tall woman she had never seen before.
Orphelia didn’t reply. She just shook her head, the air in her lungs feeling fuzzy amidst the comedown from the panic. Gene exchanged a glance with Bleeding Wolf, who ducked quickly through the tavern door, only to reemerge a few seconds later with a shrug.
“Seems normal in there,” he said. “What’s gotcha spooked, girl?” Once again, Orphelia had no words. What could she say? How would she even begin to describe it? Captain al’Ver frowned, looking down at her empty hands.
“Where is your stuffed bear, Orphelia?” he asked quietly.
“Left him at Brill’s,” she replied. The world’s resolution was coming back. She could breathe normally again.
Still, she thought, better not tell Captain al’Ver about the knife. Better to save it for a surprise.
Oh no.
That thought had not been hers, but try as she could to contradict it, she could not.
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