Bleeding Wolf held a hand on Gene’s shoulder as the old man seethed.
“Vincent Masson, for your crimes against the Masson family, the people of the Crossroads, and the Riverlands, I sentence you to exile, unto the remit of the people of Holme. They will decide your fate, but should you ever return, you will face death.”
Well, Vince, Bleeding Wolf thought, there was your good news: That wasn’t going to happen.
It had been nearly a week of petitioning, sparring with Mayor Bergen, Atra, the people of the Crossroads–some victims of Masson’s arson, most just opinionated bystanders–but the momentum was more than Gene, Brill, and Bleeding Wolf could overcome. It didn’t help that Gene was the only one whose heart was really in it, but Bleeding Wolf had to admit this seemed cruel. It seemed cruel to call this exile, to give the kid hope when what was waiting in Holme was a ritual in which he would be slowly, excruciatingly pulped for mana. It was not a humane way to go, no matter how bountiful the harvest it guaranteed. The people of the Crossroads, Mayor Bergen included, surely did not know the extent of it. Bleeding Wolf was still working up the guts to tell Gene–and preparing to stop him from doing something stupid when he found out.
“The delegation gathered here today will convey you to Holme,” Mayor Bergen continued. “You will travel under restraint until…”
Bleeding Wolf scanned the crowd from his position in the delegation’s second row, noting with dismay the visible fervor in quite a few sets of eyes. There were scores that really wanted the kid dead. That wasn’t something he could quite begrudge, stray dog he was in this increasingly cannibal landscape, but he was less put off by the bloodthirst than the ceremony. Bergen’s tedious reading of the sentence, the procedures; the public assembly to punish this man who had already been convicted, condemned, saved, and then for all practical considerations forgotten about–who could fuckin’ say whether it was actually warranted? Maybe some of the folks gathered today had a personal grudge, but plenty seemed like they didn’t even live here, just traveling merchants stopping to watch the spectacle. The reading, the formal delegation–in which Bleeding Wolf and Gene both were now both entangled–the pomp built a shell about the furor that melded with its purpose. The undertone of a sacrifice had wrapped and supplanted the drive to punish this broken, malnourished criminal, and suddenly, this was about something way bigger. Creeping shadows on the roads and rivers, looming False Gods, the very real business with the Blaze that Bleeding Wolf had to assume had disseminated into rumor about town by now. The sacrifice would absolve the Crossroads of sin and debt and protect them all from the terrors.
Yeah, it was all fucked. This was not an exchange of utility, of material. It was an exchange of symbols, of people’s feelings, and fuck if Bleeding Wolf trusted people’s feelings. He wasn’t against symbols of spirituality, but the Way of Green had been about living as a creature of the land first and a creature of society second. The Riverlands had seen the way ancient Spar and Kol had twisted the feelings of men into monstrous specters. They’d had a good run since, he supposed, but the affordance for “never again” had finally run out. How long now, he wondered, before the Riverlands would see something even worse than Ka?
The mayor finished his speech, and the delegation–mostly Atra and the five militia soldiers she’d picked for the journey–seized Masson, lifting him onto the barred wagon with a gentleness that felt quite at odds with the crowd’s withering scorn, like repressed guilt of something. Kind of a weird, psychic too-little-too-late, Bleeding Wolf thought. They were still killing the kid, after all. As Masson disappeared into the tiny cell compartment they had allotted for him, Gene’s shoulders slumped, and he shook off Bleeding Wolf’s hand, proceeding to the fountain where his halberd was leaned over the satchel he’d packed for the trip, next to the rest of the delegation’s provisions.
As soon as he had gotten the tip from Brill that the mayor had made a decision regarding what to do about Holme’s “request”, Bleeding Wolf had all but sprinted to his residence to volunteer for the trip. He wasn’t sure where the plan would lead, but control seemed important. If he and Gene could get custody of Masson, well, they had more options. Not good options, mind. A spat with Holme was the last thing the Crossroads needed now, but Gene’s very first reaction the meeting with Holme’s clergy had been correct: This was wrong. If they could find a way to avoid selling a citizen to Holme, they should.
Maybe they couldn’t, though. Atra had announced she would be accompanying them as well. Bleeding Wolf wasn’t sure whether that was a reaction on her part or an inconvenient coincidence, but he was trying to stay optimistic: It meant she wouldn’t be here. It meant Brill would have space to convince Mayor Bergen of the danger they were in.
He glanced at the mayor, only to find the young man’s eyes already on him. Most of the delegation had followed Gene’s lead, grabbing their equipment and preparing to head out. Bleeding Wolf was at the rear of the line, but the mayor’s look did not seem to be a commentary on his reluctance to leave. It was quizzical. A tacit inquiry: What are you trying to do here, Dog Boy?
Well, Mayor Boy, that feeling was mutual.
***
Knuckles rapped against wood, and readily–almost too readily, Brill thought–the door opened.
“Brill,” Mayor Bergen said. “I figured you would be by sometime soon.” Brill frowned. They had not given much thought to making this visit a surprise, of course, but Bergen’s remarks still boded poorly. If you anticipated objections, you probably rebutted them already and all that.
“May I come in?” The mayor blinked.
“Of course.” He stepped back, motioning Brill inside, toward his study rather than the table he favored for larger meetings. “Coffee?” he called after, as Brill gravitated toward the upholstered chair near the study window.
“Please,” they replied wearily. Brill had advised mayors of the Crossroads for decades now. Their experience was useful, they were helpful and well-liked among the citizens; it was influence of a sort, and Brill considered it warily, reminded often how similar his relationship with power was to Marko’s, despite their wildly different states of public regard. But even so, they rarely had occasion to set foot in this room.
They were not sure how much of the bookshelves’ curation was Bergen’s handiwork–save for the familiar, weathered copy of Pendragon’s biography of Highlord Leon I, which Brill had gifted Mayor Bergen when he was first elected–but they found themself nodding approvingly at the histories, the collections of folklore, even some rare and vaguely taboo volumes of Revián esoterica like Polyon’s Order of the Wasp and a battered, informally transcribed copy of the Fable of the One-Eyed Crow. They had long held the view that knowledge, even the darker sort like Polyon’s fevered ramblings, helped scaffold the wisdom necessary for leadership. Much even, in their view, arose from fear, which in turn arose from uncertainty. Some time in a library, often as not, offered an antidote or a prophylactic against a rash decision.
Their eyes flicked back to the doorway as Mayor Bergen reappeared, two cups in hand. He set one on his desk.
“You know why I’ve come, then?” Brill asked. The mayor handed them the other cup.
“I have a good idea, yes.”
“What are you doing, John?” The mayor nodded, turning momentarily back to the desk to steal a sip of his coffee.
“I don’t suppose it would put you at ease if I said my sole aim was preventing us all from being killed?”
“Atra puts me ill at ease, John,” Brill said gently. “Your intentions can only do so much about that. Less, since you invited her in.”
“I have a pretty good idea of what I’m dealing with–”
“We’re dealing with, now,” Brill interjected. The mayor took a breath.
“What we’re dealing with, yes,” he said. “I believe she is a False God. Or a mage of an approaching caliber. The prospect does not excite me.”
“And yet she captains your militia.”
“Brill, the Crossroads has been attacked twice by False Gods in the space of a month. This is unprecedented!”
“Do you not have faith in the people of this town?” Brill asked.
“I have faith in very little right now,” Mayor Bergen hissed. He fell silent, looked away, as if embarrassed at the outburst. Brill wondered cynically how much of it was rhetoric. After a moment, he continued, softer: “I believe we may have made peace with the Witch of the Ironwood. But the Blaze has attacked Holme too, and unlike Holme, we have no guardian deity to ward off rivals.”
“So you found one?!” Brill asked. They realized belatedly they were shouting.
“Brill.” The mayor’s intonation was clipped, controlled, but Brill could tell he held back a sort of stress that bordered on fury. “Is the Crossroads now a scorched ruin? News from the caravans is that there is nothing but scorched ruins in the foothills of the Gravestones despite trade routes linking us to the villages there for generations.”
“It is not yet, John,” Brill conceded warily.
“Does the Crossroads live under the bootheel of tyranny as does the Reach?”
“Not yet.” Brill chose not to object on the grounds of the sentencing earlier today. Like Gene, they did not agree with the mayor’s decision, but not because it was tyrannical–rather, it bowed to Holme in a way that Brill very much did not want to see continued.
“And has the Crossroads been overrun by cultish idealogues as, it seems, has occurred in the Ironwood?” Brill sighed.
“It has not. John, please. There are no crowds here, and false choices are beneath you.”
“These are not false choices, Brill!” Mayor Bergen raised an arm, waving almost frantically at the window. “This is the state to which practically all the Riverlands has regressed! We have done well for a long time on the merits of economics and reason, but look at the horizon! Only one economy matters anymore, and so many of those who would harm us cannot be reasoned with. Atra, at least for now, can be.”
Brill peered at him, daring to take a sip of their own coffee. Exasperatingly, he seemed sincere.
“Do you truly believe that she will protect us?” they asked, attempting to match that sincerity.
“In a sense,” the mayor said. “I believe that she believes she needs us. She will protect what she needs, even if it is not in our best interests.”
“Then what are we to do when protection from her becomes more pressing than protection from the Blaze?” Brill asked. Mayor Bergen smiled, the expression harried and uncharacteristically desperate.
“You know that here is not a safe place to discuss contingencies,” he replied.
“You’re aware of her spy, then?”
“Dimly, up to now. I had a conversation with her prior to her departure. I requested clarity regarding the creature’s activities here while she is away. Apparently, his name is Cirque, and she has instructed him to remain out of the way and well-behaved.”
***
Orphelia had been hounded for days now by a peculiar kind of stress, unusually clear-headed, unusually frantic despite the comfortable lodgings, food security, Devlin’s safety, all of the amenities Brill, Naples, and Captain al’Ver had arranged for her–in short, the absence of the vast majority of things that bothered her since the Bad Stuff. Since…her parents had been killed. Wasn’t much use pretending it was a dream or whatever anymore, right?
Oh, but she could always be a better liar.
Yeah, that was the rub. It wasn’t that confusing: The stress came on easily when she kept having thoughts that weren’t hers. There were the intrusive thoughts, the sense that there was someone standing there, watching her and smiling in dark rooms and shadowed corners. And there was the knife, heavy there in her pocket, constantly reminding her of its presence–and that one else could know of it yet.
Sometimes, when it was quiet, she thought she could hear laughter, pealing, maniacal but muffled by walls and distance, as if from the back of the tavern across the street or some distant corner of town.
Despite this strange, psychic malaise, she was actually having no trouble sleeping, which turned out to be its own contributor to the unease since Devlin, according to Dog Boy, had taken up sleepwalking. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop him. For days now, in the back of the infirmary, she’d stayed up, forcing her mind to stay conscious, enduring the eerie laughter and the chills it gave her, but eventually, each night, fatigue overcame her, and she would wake in the morning to find her brother slumped, haphazard over his cot, feet scraped and stained with dirt.
One might wonder what he’s looking for out in the night…
Shut up. Devlin was sick, and his mind was wandering. It wasn’t his fault. She just needed to be there to usher him back to bed. So he could get better. So he could just be Devlin again. At least he was sleeping during the day. Between that and present circumstances making solitude especially queasy, she had taken to spending her days in the infirmary, forcing herself to read from Brill’s modest collection of books. They weren’t especially exciting, but they were distracting enough. Brill, for their part, had noticed Orphelia’s emotional downturn, had expressed well-meaning concern, but they were busy with town stuff, with Marko and Monk, with this Atra lady they seemed nervous about. And Orphelia suspected they were also just glad she was staying out of trouble.
Today, though, in addition to Devlin, she was sharing the infirmary with two others: a stablehand–she thought she had seen him before near the stables at the back of the tavern–and his young son. The man had a delirious fever, and his son had all but dragged him in, though Brill only had time to give them an abbreviated treatment of a tincture and a sedative before rushing off to what Orphelia thought she heard was an appointment with the mayor.
It wasn’t much of an inconvenience to her in any case. The stablehand’s shallow, raspy breathing was quiet enough, and his son just sat in the corner, staring into the distance. She couldn’t help but notice that they smelled pretty bad, though. Not like a stable. Or livestock. The was a must to it, a dry sort of rot, an accretion of grime. Like spoiled grain. No, that was it–it was like grain that had been infested with mice. Or rats.
***
Jolting to a new, heightened state of awake, Naples shot out a hand to stabilize his cup of water as Marko slammed a grimoire the size of his torso onto the table.
“Oh?” he said, suppressing his alarm, noting the way Monk’s gaze shifted smoothly to the grimoire without so much as a twitch in the rest of his mechanical body.
“Found a collection of the Alchemist’s shit,” Marko said, muttering–as he seemed to do often–through his teeth. “Was expensive. Hopin’ it least gets us started.”
“Is that the Ignigoetia?” Naples asked, excitement sparking in his stomach as he recognized the runes embossed on the cover. “I believe Masters Jabez and Khepri both spoke to Excelsis as he was working on it. I’d always hoped to find a copy.” He reached for the book only to swiftly withdraw his hand as Marko swatted it.
“Paws to yourself! This ain’t playtime!”
Naples held his hand back tentatively, implicitly querying how exactly Marko was imagining he was going to help. Marko was not oblivious. His scowl deepened as he glanced between Naples and Monk, both seated awkwardly on empty crates around the table they had dragged to the theater floor.
Now that he had the opportunity to see the veritably ancient Mud Road Theater for himself, Naples was both fascinated–at the new life the structure had taken on, a place of novel importance in an unprecedented age–and a little…outraged. Marko’s proprietorship seemed a perversion of the artistic center’s original purpose, apt but slimy in a way that could not quite disregard but still disavowed the–
“Fuck it, fine,” Marko said, breaking the protracted silence and Naples’ train of thought, as if intentionally. “You know this book, then? Got an idea of what we can start looking for?” He slid a piece of parchment onto the table, presumably for notes.
“Why…yes,” Naples replied, gingerly relocating his hand to the tabletop. “You might be aware that the Alchemist was one of the most skilled metamages in recorded history and that his most notable scholarly inquiry was an attempt at a unified theory of mana and magic. This is easy enough for mages who are just people–we sense enough of our own stuff in each other’s work that we can sort of recognize that mana is mana. But it gets weird when you start factoring in the theory that the gods were themselves mages, since theirs is a wide variety of very different, incommensurable, and, frankly, often unbelievable practices.
“The Ignigoetia was supposed to be a foundation to build the theory on. It was an aggregation of the folklore around the Old Gods, an analysis of their relationship with magic, and a history of their disappearance from popular worship, which–contrary to conventional wisdom which places the sunset of Old God worship at the tail end of the Diarchy of Spar, Excelsis, I believe, argued it actually occurred much earlier, with the defeat of the Revián Federation by Selenus Ignigoet, whose name is the basis…” Naples paused, noticing that Marko’s eyes had taken on an unencouraging, glassy quality.
“I think it appropriate that you review my creator’s research on the Old Gods,” Monk said. “The Night Sky himself may be included among them, and his relationship with our world was no doubt mediated closely by the others.”
“No doubt, huh,” Marko muttered, yawning. “Okay, so no offence, Naple, but focusing in here, your ‘munculus is tryin’ to do somethin’ with a fire, yeah?”
“Yes,” Monk replied. “I must bring the Great Fire into confluence with–”
“Right, yeah, and that’s the fuckin’ Blaze, you say. Sure. So does this book have anything about the Night Sky and fire? Any context?”
“Well,” Naples said, reaching for the grimoire. This time, Marko did not stop him. He gently lifted the cover and began skimming as he continued: “The ‘ending’ is obviously big on fire. Ignigoet famously set fire to the Great Turtle at Thago, but…wait! Fire that wards off the Night…” He began flipping pages with purpose. “What if we’re referring to the sun?”
“Oh yeah, that simplifies things,” Marko said, putting his feet up on the table. “Just gotta bring out our extra sun. That’ll…keep the big guy…asleep?”
“I understand the sarcasm,” Naples replied. “But that might very well be how it works.”
“What…?”
“Look here: There’s an old folk tale that after the creation of the world, as humans grew industrious, the Fox at the Forest’s Edge created fire and gave it to humanity so they could have light when the stars faded. When the Night Sky next came upon it, he found that it dulled the moon and the stars in humans’ eyes, and he could scarcely reach them. In a rage, he threw the fire into the void and broke the Fox’s nose, which leads Excelsis to suggest that the Fox may in fact be the same deity worshipped in Hazan as the ‘Barabadoon’.”
“Neat.”
“The point, Marko,” Naples attempted to clarify, “is that there is a clear notion in the folklore that fire does in some way ward off the Night Sky should he actually wake up. Also! Also, the fire he threw in the void in this story became the sun, which then shone when he was no longer there to block it out.
“And that means something to you?”
“It means that wherever the Night Sky is sleeping isn’t somewhere you can see the sun? And where he’s sleeping is probably where he’ll wake up?”
“Kid, I hear those question marks,” Marko said. “This all sounds like bullshit.” Naples sighed, running a hand through his hair a moment before returning to flipping pages.
“It…does, doesn’t it? Well, the passage goes on to compare that story with the Khettite tradition, which held that the sun was actually a deific scarab which worked in tandem with the Moon Lily god to lure the Night Sky into a slumber so that the world could coalesce from ephemeral dream into concrete reality.”
“Great, deploy the sun along with a flower, that’s the ticket.”
“Look,” Naples said. “This is an analysis of folklore. We can’t take it at face value. It requires–”
“Brill,” Marko said, tapping the blank parchment.
“What?”
Marko stifled another yawn, peering at the parchment. Naples opened his mouth to berate him, only to pause as he saw lines of ink begin to appear on the page, forming a sketch–upside-down from his perspective–of a figure proceeding toward the viewpoint, through a doorway. As a sort of caption–words in a messy scrawl–materialized at the far end of the page, Marko’s expression flipped from abject boredom to borderline panic.
“We need to get to Brill’s,” he said, suddenly frantic, rising, sending the stack of crates he was using as a chair toppling to the floor.
“Should Monk come t–”
“Kid,” Marko growled, sprinting to the door. “I do not give a fuck.”
Rising somewhat more decorously, Naples turned the parchment, hoping to glean what had set Marko off. He recognized the figure–it was Brill, he realized–as well as a smaller, rougher rendition of the Crossroads’ mayor in the background. But the alarming part was not the picture. It was the caption:
Negotiations concluded, if unsatisfactorily, Brill made to return to their shop, unaware of the danger which awaited them.
At their shop? But wasn’t Orphelia there…now?
“Wait here,” he said to Monk, sprinting after Marko as fast as he could manage.
***
Something was not right with the stablehand, Orphelia thought, growing more certain by the minute. His exhalations were becoming irregular and more violent, and he was beginning to sweat. And there was…something rising off of him that felt a like the force Mr. Ruffles–Rom, she corrected herself–and Naples and Ty had taught her about, though it felt different. Less like strands that could be woven, more like an erratic cloud: dense, almost fluffy like moss but at the same time relentless, hungry like a swarm of gnats. The force seemed to be waning, as if there wasn’t enough in the stablehand’s body to sustain it–or maybe it was being pushed out?
Either way, good that it wasn’t getting worse, Orphelia supposed. But why was it here in the first place? She leaned over the man, wondering if proximity might reveal anything else to her.
“Your hackles are up over that?” the boy in the corner spat, the sound so unexpected she nearly jumped. “Your little brother over there’s just spewing out hemorrhagic fever and blight. Word is a few weeks ago he made a piece of metal sick, but you’re only just now noticing there’s something off about this idiot’s case of the sniffles.” The boy climbed to his feet, a part of him seeming to shrink away, even as his wide, fish-like eyes radiated scorn.
“What…” Orphelia said, less asking a question than processing aloud that her current circumstances were radically different from what she’d thought them a moment ago.
“Are you really smart, really stupid, or are the gods fighting over you and your shitling brother doing something to keep you oblivious?” Gritting his teeth, the boy stalked toward Orphelia.
She noticed now that his smell and ragged clothes were far from the only offputting things about him. His skin was marked by irregular tufts of dark fur, and large patches in between were crusted over as if with mange. His teeth, especially the incisors, were strangely elongated, and amidst the dirt that seemed permanently encrusted on his hands, short, pointed claws were visible at his fingertips. And all of this shared anxious attention with the movement Orphelia was beginning to notice at the periphery of the room: little scurrying bodies, an intensifying wave of stench. In her time at Brill’s, she had found the space immaculately clean. The Crossroads had plenty of rats, to be sure, but this many coming in from outside all of a sudden was not coincidental. Who was this boy?
“What…do you want with us?” Orphelia asked, momentarily swallowing both fear and revulsion to focus on the business at hand. The boy continued to approach, and the rats began to abandon the safety of the room’s edges, darting out chaotically in front of him. She took an abrupt step back, pulling her foot out of the way of a bulky, hissing specimen that disappeared beneath Devlin’s cot.
“What an interesting question,” the boy replied, communicating something closer to vexation than interest. “I came here with my little diversion–” he jerked his shoulder in the stablehand’s direction, “–to talk to Brill. See if they knew what I look like for one. I guess they don’t.”
“Well Brill left,” Orphelia said, tension clipping her words and betraying more of her unease than she intended. “You saw it. Go find them.” The boy cocked his head, mouth hanging slightly open, eyes flat and dull.
“They’ll be back,” he said. “And the cat’s away, so I’m gonna be a little more persuasive than I’ve been these past few weeks. And I figured Devlin would be here…” The boy’s slack expression tightened into something that was either a grin or a rictus. “A chance to face my fears.”
“Who the heck are you?”
The boy seemed to deflate, re-tensing almost immediately.
“Get out of here,” he snarled. “If it’s all the same to you, gone is better for you than dead.”
“If it’s–” Orphelia stopped herself, reeling. She saw that the boy’s focus was not on her. It was on Devlin. Devlin was making him mad. “Are you going to hurt him?” The boy’s stare snapped back to her, and the rats scurrying on the floor seemed to intensify into a roil.
“If I get my way, there’ll be nothing left of the little worm,” he hissed. “And that stupid ring of hers’ll get melted to slag, and I’ll never have to smell feathers again!”
Instinctively, Orphelia lashed out magically, hastily weaving a notion that the room was empty, that she and Devlin had long since left. She whipped it at the boy like a net, gasping as it disintegrated, stopping in space halfway between her and him and melting as the stench of the rats gusted through her. In the same moment, the scurrying horde at their feet began to run up his legs, engulfing him in seconds, collapsing–as he vanished into the swarm–and surging forward, over and through her.
And it was not, as she might have hoped, merely an unsettling sensation of the countless vile bodies crawling over her. Where the rats found flesh, they bit down. A wave of sudden, painful stabs shot up from her feet to her legs, her stomach, her neck–
Then human fingers gripped her hair, and something sharp and searing dragged across her throat. The pain, the shock overwhelmed her, deafened her senses. Her throat gurgled. She collapsed. She tasted iron as blood bubbled out of her mouth, and the world began to roll, slowly, coming to a halt sideways, the boy standing over Devlin’s cot, her own body–detached?–at his feet, rats swarming over it. Somewhere, through the walls of the infirmary, she heard the creak of metal on metal.
“Dev…lin…” she attempted to speak, but it came out a whisper of wet, unintelligible gibberish. But even so, the boy twitched with alarm. He whirled, staring with horror at her severed head.
“I cut your throat,” the boy said quietly. “I did not decapitate you…”
Behind her, Orphelia heard the infirmary curtain lift and that same metal sound, here now. She realized: It sounded like armor.
“Fucking hell,” the boy swore.
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