Tag: books

One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 8: The Cat’s Away

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.

Temple Dogs, Chapter 1: The Sun Requires You

Building an implement upon which to hang the flesh of the world.

While histories over the ages have indisputably privileged the happenings of the southern kingdoms, of the Revián Federation and Spar, the absence of widespread accounts north of the Gravestone Mountains–indeed, called the Wall by the northerners–should not be taken as absence of activity.  Spar, ever the partisan of the written record–and of history as written by victors–saturated its lands, its neighbors, its far-flung trading partners, even the hinterlands of the northern Windwood with stories of its conquests, which is, of course, how Taamir Ra recognized the asymmetry.  But north of the Wall, Khet, the jewel of the Shrah, the great City of the Sun, had no shortage of history.  Neither the Sun Queen nor the hierarchs of the Temple favored the pamphlet, which meant that though Khet was not quite cut off from the south–lines of trade persisted via Khet’s vassal port of Saltstill and the occasional trans-Wall caravans–its glory was not well-known to the Diarchian historians.  But it was glorious, Taamir knew, and for the popular disfavor of the inscribed word, its influence flowed strong in different ways.  Taamir knew, and he partook, and he supposed that was why he was now bound for the Ziggurat.

As he emerged from the Spicegut onto the southwest corner of the Palace Plaza, he felt a conspicuous wave of observation–not unexpected by any means in a district where royals wandered unaccompanied–and a matching sense of relief that the scarabglow still showed on his forehead from his attendance at service yesterday in the seedy chapel on Carpet Street.  Temple service was not compulsory for Khettite citizens, but participation in social activity, even the unsavory genre that Taamir facilitated, did rely on a certain measure of ecclesiastical approval.  Heresy was a crime, and it was well known that the Temple’s agents tended to use the label for any sufficient accrual of influence beyond the clergy’s vision.  Even Taamir was not sure how a weekly Temple service accomplished adequate supervision on matter, but as any savvy Khettite knew, the hierarchs’ means were not to be questioned.  The Temple was the one thing no Khettite–save maybe the Queen herself–ought fuck with.

Taamir the Exile had been a savvy Khettite for nearly twenty years now.  He had been born here to merchant parents long before that, but except for a few years of barely conscious childhood, his youth had been spent in torturous near-solitude south of the Wall after his parents–and their whole caravan–were slaughtered by bandits.  He escaped the massacre–apparently alone among the fifty-odd men, women, and children traveling with them–and scraped by for a few years foraging at the outskirts of an insular fur trapping camp in the Windwood before he became fortuitously embroiled in a reputational feud between neighboring Diarchian governors, in which he acted as a go-between, trading favors advantageously until he was able to negotiate passage aboard an adventurer’s vessel from Calais to Saltstill, returning home finally after a decades-long absence.

He was acutely aware that his proclivities, his infectious friendliness, his talents for squirming into the graces of royal and cutthroat circles alike, arose from trauma, from the years of silence and loneliness he had endured after watching his parents’ murder, but he was still grateful enough that his narcotic relationship with conversational company was, on the whole, productive.  It had helped him become established upon his return, and he’d discovered that for one with his exceptional talent for ubiquity, a career as a rumor broker, a dealer in nothing at all but overheard phrases, of vibrations and broad strokes of social environments, was actually possible.  Within ten years, he had risen to prominence as one of the most useful sources of sensitive information in Khet.  As of today, he gathered with chagrin at the scroll delivered to his doorstep–the summons to the Ziggurat–he may have become the single most useful.

Assured that he looked presentable, if sheepish, amid the intense surveillance of the Plaza, he crossed quickly, turning from the western gate onto Brass Row, walking with broadcast intent toward the Temple District and the Ziggurat, the seat of the hierarchs’ power.

Taamir did not think he had anything to fear from the hierarchs regarding his own behavior.  He attended service, he did not blaspheme, he did not deal in rumors concerning the clergy–though he did encounter them, some even salacious.  But still, a summons to the Ziggurat for a denizen of Carpet Street…it was not friendly outreach.  Whatever this was about, it was surely serious, and his worry–that it would put him, one road or another, in harm’s way–was certainly legitimate.

Upon reaching the Ziggurat, pausing for a moment to appreciate the immense scale of the structure–the base occupied a larger area than some of Khet’s smaller districts–Taamir found one of the temple guards to convey him to Blessed Aten, the hierarch whose name adorned the summons he had received.  Blessed Aten was, Taamir knew, effectively first among the equals of the high clergy, and as such his hearing chamber was likely to be the one at the center of the Ziggurat’s first tier, just above street level.  It was an interesting contradiction that the highest ranking hierarchs were stationed lowest in the Ziggurat, farthest from the Scarab Who Lights the Way, but Taamir suspected it was a prosaic function of the interaction between old joints and the Ziggurat’s abundant stairs which drove the inversion.  In any case, even if he knew where to find Aten, he had little to gain and quite a lot to lose by flexing his information and showing up unescorted.  No.  In this instance, better to appear small.

The guard’s response to the summons was, in fact, perfectly reasonable, and ten minutes later, he was waiting in that central hearing chamber, a wide, rectangular room lit dimly–though cleverly, he had to admit–by beams of sunlight reflected on mirrored passages bored through to the Ziggurat’s outer walls.  Before Taamir, bathed in the majority of this glow, was an imposing stone chair, where the hierarch would presumably sit during formal hearings, and behind it, in the shadows, were two scribe tables, each adorned by a candle, for who could expect the Temple to use its painstakingly acquired sunlight productively?

Taamir took a deep breath.  Sarcasm, even unspoken, would not behoove him here.  Still, he was annoyed.  The chair and tables were unoccupied, and he had been left to wait in the sanctum alone.  His summons had implied the utmost urgency, but it seemed the urgency was for him specifically.  It was not so urgent for Blessed Aten.

He turned, hearing the curtains which served as a chamber door shift behind him.  He was prepared to bow before the hierarch, but the two women who entered were not the hierarch.  But now he was truly worried.

“Hello, my friend,” the first said.  She wore a fine dress and shawl, embroidered with gold thread, along with matching gold earrings, necklace, bangles, and a circlet on her forehead.  Below the circlet, the golden smudge of scarabglow shone, mirroring his own.  And though she eschewed the eye pain popular among the nobility, Taamir did note that she was pretty in the way a well-fed cobra was pretty.  Wary or no, it was a rare observation–he did not usually see her face when they met. 

The second woman, for her part astonishingly beautiful but dressed in the nondescript cuirass of a caravan guard, met his gaze but said nothing, pulling the curtain closed as she limped into the room.

For several years now, Taamir’s single highest volume client had been a fixer known as Naham, the Serpent, a masked underworld luminary whose influence over Khet’s criminal domains had grown explosively of late.  She had a rare touch, Taamir acknowledged, for subtle bribery, gentle coercion, encouragement of subversive loyalty that made the brutality of Khettite criminal business seem genteel, approachable.  

Nobles with more gold than sense lapped it up, and her business carried with it a nigh-inexhaustible demand for Taamir’s services.  It kept him financially very comfortable, but he would be remiss not to notice that the image she conveyed to her clients was in fact quite far from the truth.  He’d dug into her business exactly as much as a subcontractor ought, and the reality was clear enough: She was ruthless.  She was ambitious.  And her capacity to make–and often directly eliminate–enemies made him nervous.  A few years on, their relationship reached a point that he needed either more insurance or less liability, so with her implicit blessing, he dug deeper.

The veiled Serpent did, in fact, have a face she showed the public: Lady Bas’ahra, once scion of a cadet branch of the Halima royal family, now de facto head of the Halima clan in their dethroned afterlife.  Dynastic shifts were historically not uncommon in Khet.  The most recent was fifteen years ago, at the height of an escalating feud between the Queen and the Temple over a petty request from the clergy to modify the Brass Army officer’s uniform.  Amidst an outpouring of combative rhetoric from various royal functionaries, Queen Petra VII fell suddenly ill, died, and her next three heirs all declined the crown, “prompting” the hierarchs to intervene, elevating Merin, matriarch of the comparatively minor Neema clan, to the throne.  The skulduggery was barely hidden.  Taamir had been new to the information trade at the time, but it had been trivial to discern that Petra had been poisoned, her heirs had abdicated at the point of the Shining Guard’s spears, and the rest of the Halima clan, ejected into Khettite society with only a fraction of the resources they had relied upon for years, had been ousted, no two ways about it.

Bas’ahra, barely in the line of succession in the first place–barely of age, for that matter–apparently took her family’s looming poverty personally.  She founded a merchant company when she was seventeen, moderately successful, enough for survival, but she didn’t want survival.  She wanted her clan ascendant once more, which meant she needed to stem their financial bleeding as well as her own.  She began to buy up purveyors of vice, taverns, pimps, spurge, donning Naham’s name and veil to conduct business thus.  These earned decent enough returns to keep her family aristocratically relevant, which formed the basis for her noble connections.

Taamir had been able to get much of this from a series of tipsy conversations with Nasir, a prolific copper smuggler who had rebuffed Naham’s attempts to encroach on his business in those early days.  It was logical he had dirt–he was still alive after refusing her.  But while the link between Naham the Serpent and Bas’ahra of Halima was probably sufficient insurance–a complaint to the Temple of a former royal stirring up the city’s undesirables would serve as a fine scorcher of earth–it didn’t fully explain her.  The woman who Taamir knew had moved on from managing whores and spurge addicts.  The Spicegut’s money wasn’t enough for her.  Carpet Street’s money wasn’t enough for her.  She solved royal problems because she wanted royal money, royal influence again.

But now she was here with him at the Ziggurat.  What was the next step up from royal influence, then?

“Lady Bas’ahra,” he greeted her with a polite bow, much shallower than the one he’d held in reserve for Blessed Aten.  “Saph,” he added with a nod to her bodyguard.  Saph turned up the side of her mouth with a practiced, flirtaceous–though, Taamir knew, entirely artificial–smile before returning to her stone-faced stare.  His use of Bas’ahra’s name, of course, was not an aggression.  She had come without the veil, to say nothing of the foolhardiness of arriving at the Ziggurat in the guise of an underworld broker–but she smirked at his greeting anyway, as if her own name was an in-joke.

“Aren’t we a curious pair, two children of the Scarab, barely acquainted, yet chosen together for this honor.  Why do you imagine we are here, Taamir?”

Taamir limited his response to a nervous smile.  He was just as curious, but he wasn’t comfortable with the goading, the insolence.  He didn’t like it.  There was nothing good that the hierarchs could be asking of him in the depths of the Ziggurat, and Bas’ahra being here as well meant the Temple was not merely aware of his dealings with this former royal–those dealings were at the top of mind.  Taamir was growing more and more concerned that what came through the door next was going to be violent.  But then–the glimmer of hope–why bring them here just to dispose of them?

It was less than a minute before the curtains moved again, but the white-robed, wizened man and single, gold-clad guard who came through did not portend violence.  This was not to say their entrance was humble: The Shining Guard were invariably armored ostentatiously and…reflectively, chosen from the largest, most physically capable specimens in the Brass Army.  This one was no exception.  And the cleric–Blessed Aten, presumably–was simply-dressed but literally luminescent, shining undulations wavering across his skin as if bending through rippling water, rendering him simultaneously resplendent and, if Taamir was honest, quite difficult to look at.

Bas’ahra and Saph bowed adroitly, and, stunned for only a moment, Taamir followed.  At first, Aten did not speak.  He stood, one hand upon the chair, studying them with either suspicion or disdain, though Taamir could not tell which.  The effect of the guard remaining at the door–armor reflecting the hierarch’s oppressive glow upon them from two sides–was not lost on him either.  It felt like being grasped, held up and considered, as if for nutritional value by something very large indeed.  Then:

“Do you know why you are here?” Aten asked.  His voice was thin, but it reverberated, ethereal, larger than he was.

“The Sun requires us,” Bas’ahra replied with almost convincing humility.

“Well chosen words.  Empty,” Aten said, practically spitting.  “You will be forthright to me, and your forthright answer is ‘no’.  We require substance of you, not rhetoric.”

Taamir caught Bas’ahra’s vanishing eyebrow raise and chose to preempt her:

“What is it you need us to accomplish?”

Aten’s gaze shifted to Taamir.  He paced in front of the chair, nodding slowly.

“You are both familiar with the difficulties Khet has with its leadership,” he said, prompting Taamir to steal another glance at Bas’ahra.  “And you are aware by now that the Queen’s health is degrading swiftly.  Matters thought to be solvable by more civilized means will, I think, require more severe measures.”

“You think that current plans for succession are a little too…gray?” Bas’ahra interjected, smirk returning.  

The scorn in Aten’s gaze was plain but telling.  Taamir was following now as well: Khettite law was clear that the office of monarch was strictly matriarchal, and Queen Neeth’s only child was a son.  There was a clear heir–Princess Persephone, the Queen’s granddaughter–but Aten’s problem surely lay with the other side of the family.  Prince Djoser, prior to his mother taking the throne, had married Helen of the Elea clan–the Gray tribe, as they were called, for their pale skin–a move that had surprised Taamir at the time for a host of reasons, all coming to a head now, it seemed.  The cultural divide between the Gray tribe and the rest of Khet was complicated, longstanding, and, Taamir suspected, an increasing risk for the Temple, which had painted their people as spiritual pariahs for perhaps a generation longer than was wise.  In any case, Bas’ahra’s pun was adequately descriptive: Aten would prefer that Persephone not become Queen.

Taamir opened his mouth to voice the obvious objection: Why would they ask a rumormonger to manipulate the royal line of succession?  But he swallowed the thought.  No, he wasn’t stupid.  This wasn’t a request for him.  The request was for Bas’ahra–Aten merely knew that she would engage his services.  His presence here, being brought into the fold, was merely to ensure he would not poke into the matter on his own and, perhaps more importantly, that he would not spread word of its occurrence.

“Well, that is a serious concern,” Bas’ahra continued, taking Aten’s protracted glare as answer enough.  “When all settles, how would you like the situation to look?”

“The heir brought to us,” Aten replied, syllables clipped.  “Alone, of course.  Her parents removed from Khet permanently.  The Queen would surely object, but she is of course infirm–and under the regrettable influence of parties for whom Khet’s welfare is secondary.  It would be wise to obfuscate any deliberate intention behind your results.”

Regrettable influences, Taamir noticed, did seem to be a relative thing, but he was relieved to see Aten shed his intense air of derision as they moved onto the business at hand.

“I imagine you will hear no more of the details,” Bas’ahra said.  “They are assuredly beneath the dignity of the Sun.  But the gravity of the request…”

“Is it beyond your capabilities, Lady Bas’ahra?”

Her smile was genteel and certainly venomous.

“I shouldn’t think so,” she replied.  “I merely refer to the price.”

“The price is consideration that even you will find valuable.”  Bas’ahra’s smile waned, but Aten did not elaborate.  He only held her gaze.

“…your Radiance?” Taamir spoke up, drawing attention from both of them.  “When the heir is brought to you, do you imagine she will be convinced of an…agreeable future–in the absence of these regrettable influences?”

Taamir was calculating prices as well.  He knew that one of his many costs of doing business was the knowledge that what he sold would be used on occasion to hurt people.  It eased the burden that many of them had it coming, but many, of course, did not.  He was not Bas’ahra.  He was not infinitely hungry for wealth of influence.  He wanted to survive, to not have to be alone the way he had been down south.  It did not seem like refusal was an option at the moment, but there were still lines.  There were outcomes he would not aid.  Aten’s expression remained aloof as he replied:

“If the Sun wills it.”

Forever ago, now, Taamir had been a child deprived of his parents by this same grim sort of taking, and he was not eager to pay that forward to the princess.  He would, though, if it came to it.  It would hurt him, but it wouldn’t be the field he died on.  What occupied his thoughts in this moment was what happened after the attack.  He had searched the wreckage, the smashed wagons, the overturned barrels, the…corpses.  His parents.  Their partners and contractors.  There was a body missing that day.  Taamir had a brother before the attack, and after…he never saw him again, after.  For close to twenty years, he had tried to make it back to Khet in case his brother had too.

For twenty-odd years, he remained there, disheartened, clinging to that futile rationalization that there was nowhere else he was likely to find him.

Yes, if he had to, he would deprive the girl of her parents.  But he could not help but see the same thread in her impending tragedy.  If she didn’t make it out alive–if she didn’t make it out alive because of him–what business did he have hoping he would one day find his brother?  That was the line, it seemed.  So it was indeed important that the hierarchs’ intentions were to influence the girl.  Reeducate her.  Compel her to abdicate, the way they did with Bas’ahra’s cousins.  But Taamir would not deliver Persephone to her death.

Taamir remained silent as Bas’ahra and Blessed Aten exchanged the concluding formalities, established the choking pact.  They turned to leave, and Taamir caught a significant glance from Saph.  The bodyguard had a way, he had realized, of noticing people’s cracks, though she refrained from commenting, at least publicly.  Even so, he consciously reinforced his expression.  He must not appear uneasy, lest either Bas’ahra or the Temple judge him a loose end.

Still.  If the Sun wills it.  Saph’s pointed stare had rendered his own conclusion quite conscious.  He did not trust Aten’s intentions for the princess at all.

One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 7: The Lords of the Sky

It truly was an extraordinary quality, Lan al’Ver had to admit.  Orphelia had vexed him now, twice in a matter of weeks.  This was, of course, exceedingly rare: His last vexation had occurred nearly two millennia ago, and while there remained sparks of interest in the portent of his duties–his debt to the Alchemist, for example–this was different.  It was a ghost, haunting him.  He had a notion, actually, that it might be the same ghost as back then.

Orphelia was now part of this “Gyre”, that much was clear, and whatever she was doing–wittingly or no–was prompting resurgences.  Daniel Patch.  Sand-Masked Fox.  Lan was familiar with their circumstances, with the arrangement that held them in its sway.  It all went back to Harmony.  To Arman LaSein.  To Lan’s sin.  But Orphelia’s stuffed animal–the plain cause of all this business–was not a connection to Harmony, to Patch or Fox or any of them.  It was a connection to Romesse of Khet, war historian and…the man who killed Daniel Patch.  Pointedly, a man who should not remain in the fold after his death–but here he was, in stuffed animals and books, teaching Orphelia to use magic in ways a teenager really ought not consider.  His influence over the girl was worrying.  But that was not what now vexed Lan.

When Orphelia emerged from the inn last night, there was a presence beside her, and that presence was not Rom.  In the brief moment Lan had been able to converse with his spectre at the Chateau de Marquains, Rom had mentioned a “Smile”, a sobriquet which was to Lan a void, a strange and alarming lapse in memory.

He knew he had places to be.  He had already informed Bleeding Wolf that he would be accompanying the Crossroads’ caravan to Holme, but that rendezvous would have to be delayed.  He needed to know how to alter the course.  He needed to know what truly afflicted the poor girl.  He needed a brief detour.

Amusingly, the trail started with Naples, though the scholar likely did not realize it.  His magical training was also more sophisticated than mere Grayskin talent, though the resemblance of both to the power Orphelia wielded–or which wielded her–suggested a source worth investigating.  Naples, an orphan, had been raised by a commune in the Bloodwood, outside but ever at the fringe of Lan’s domain.  Once again, he found himself bound for the marches of his kingdom, but unlike the incident with Bilgames, this was not merely business–it was very well his right to get to the bottom of these games.  He had a region and a name: “Master Jabez Faisal”.  For a lesser navigator, this would of course be insufficient, especially in an environment as hostile as the Bloodwood.  But Lan was, as ever, up for a challenge.

The journey so far had been, if not a challenge, at least interesting.  On the river, the notion of asking for directions was laughable.  There were denizens of the waterways there for over a generation who did not know their home as well as Lan–but here, between the towering oaks, upon paths barely visible amid the brush, his intuition was merely very good.  It kept him on the path, or at least equivocated functionally between things that were like paths, steering not upon any Grayskin commune but at least toward the wood’s conception of places of import.

The first of those was a camp of beastmen, where he politely asked after his quarry.  They responded with bared fangs and a lunge for the throat, which Lan found terribly uncivilized, but when in Kol…

A few broken noses and teeth later, the pack was marginally more helpful, bidding him scornfully in a vague, 30-degree bearing toward a “burning grove”, the mention of which filled Lan with a strange dread, in turn dulling his desire to admonish their etiquette further.  Instead, he set off to the northwest, within the boundaries of the beastmen’s suggestion, to a span of deep forest in which he was beginning to suspect he would find no commune.  Accustomed as well to the Riverlands’ access to the sky, Lan was also put off by the way the canopy here choked out the light, lending an almost candlelit ambience to the broad daylight of early afternoon.

Ultimately, he felt a notion of what he was looking for before he saw it, though conventional sensory recognition would not be far behind.  There was a spray from the stream, a burning behind the eyes, a twinge of nausea as the world folded wrong upon itself.  And then a twig snapped behind him, intentionally, he presumed.  The one responsible was perfectly capable of traversing this space silently.

“Perhaps you can tell me where I might find Jabez Faisal, then,” Lan declared, turning to face the towering figure behind him.

The visage that stared from the gloam was eyeless, impassive, a blank, pallid mask that seemed to loom in the air with a salience that rendered the colossal, graphite-black body behind it almost invisible.  All around them, the birds and insects had gone quiet.

“What are you doing here?”  The Masked Alpha’s question rumbled with such force as to make the air buzz, though no part of his face seemed to move.

“Hmph,” Lan scoffed.  “What makes you think–”

As Lan formed his rebuke, he felt the stream warp again and instinctively jerked to the left to avoid the projectile of teeth and claws that had integrated into reality behind him.  As those implements instead caught upon the bark of a tree before him, Lan recognized a certain boy without a name, flesh rippling with the mutations of bestial magic.  Face contorted into a canine snarl, he leapt from the tree, hurtling toward Lan once again.

Lan swatted the child out of the air with his umbrella, eliciting a yelp of pain and sending the ephebic projectile skidding to the forest floor.  Gently but firmly, the Alpha placed a hand over the boy, both shielding him and holding him in place.

“It is our domain,” the Alpha rumbled, stifling the boy’s attempt to squirm from his grip, “and we both sense your guilt, though the boy’s sense of doom has become uncoupled from his own death.  Why are you here?”

“Did my first question not suffice?” Lan snapped.  “I’m looking for Jabez Faisal, you brute!”

There was a protracted hush, punctuated by the boy’s struggles, as the Alpha slowly cocked his head.  Then he looked down and released the boy, nudging him away from Lan.  The child glared at Lan, face wet with fury and terror, but he did not lunge again.  Returning his attention to Lan, the Alpha spoke:

“Do you imagine you will find absolution in the ways the old man’s gift has been used?”

“This isn’t about me,” Lan replied dismissively.  “I am fulfilling an oath.”  Was that true?  Was Orphelia material to the service he’d sworn the Alchemist?  Or was this a different drive?

“Do you realize it will cost you?”

Lan stared into the mask, very nearly rolling his eyes.

“You would extract a toll from me?”

The Masked Alpha did not reply.  Instead he turned, his bulk seeming to undulate through the brush such that he barely touched the trees and undergrowth, and his steps–which should have been thunderous, were all but silent.  With a slight gesture, his forefinger morphing smoothly into a wicked claw, he bid the child turn with him.

“The toll is not mine,” the Alpha said, beginning to walk as Lan moved at a brisk stride to catch up.  “The grove where Jabez Faisal resides is the very place we disbanded the Greencircle, centuries ago, and it bears the mark of our final rite.  I believe you may find horror in that mark.  She did.”

Lan contemplated the prospect silently, declining to respond to the insult that the great Lan al’Ver should experience the indignity of fear–the Alpha did not seem to notice his persona, and Lan was not oblivious to that.  But the notion was as fascinating as it was concerning: He was intimately familiar with the Way of the Green–the Greencircle’s garbled downstream philosophy–which had dominated Revián culture for centuries, but he was only dimly aware of the actual Greencircle’s particulars, removed as they were from his sphere of influence.  He knew in passing its seminal figures: Bilgames, the Hunter of Beasts; the Masked Alpha; the Arborist and the Botanist; and the Strange Bird, of whom he banished thoughts to his subconscious.  And he knew with a sort of distant remove that the Greencircle’s purpose had not been solely cultural, that the Hunter of Beasts had a particular beast that needed hunting once upon a time.  But the thought of such a beast even now prompted a feeling of deep unease that left Lan to wonder if the horror the Alpha alluded to might be better founded than he thought possible.

“I have a question for you, if you will permit,” the Alpha said after nearly twenty minutes in silence.  Lan noticed that at some point the buzzing of insects had returned, as if it was the Alpha’s intent rather than his presence that set the forest on edge.

“Hmm?” Lan murmured, feigning disinterest.

“You were an observer for a very, very long time,” the Alpha said, his neck extending eerily to angle the mask over his shoulder at Lan.  “What brought you to act once again?”

Lan wondered whether he should feel shame at the truth, but he relayed it nonetheless:

“Being seen.”

***

Deep within the Bloodwood, it seemed, there was a place surrounded by great rocks and growth so thick that no animal larger than a rodent could navigate it, where the canopy seemed solid, and even birds would not or could not reach it from above.  The coordinates of this place were frustratingly indeterminate, for though Lan al’Ver’s sense of space was very good, he was not a master of that domain.  And something was not right.  It was as if not merely this place, but the very concept of place was warped here.

The Alpha and the boy without a name led him to the base of a boulder where an unobtrusive burrow widened to a cave beneath, which in turn led to a passage, unornamented but nonetheless built and maintained by clear intention.  Unsurprisingly, Lan felt their presence wane at the mouth of that passage, and by the time he reached its end, it was as if they had never been in the stream beside him at all.  But they had, of course, and Lan considered what he might gather from the implication that Harmony’s cabal wanted him to find this place.

What a place it was, though.

The Alpha and the beastmen had described it as a “grove”, but it was closer to a large clearing, save for the two colossal trees at its center, the species of which Lan could not identify, as both were engulfed entirely in flames.  For both obvious and more subtle reasons, he immediately recognized the burning as magical.  There were signs he could see with his eyes, the uniformity of the blaze from root to branch; the way that patches of the trees split and smoldered, seeming to regrow swiftly where they disintegrated into ash; and then there were signs evident to his magical sense, though most of them hardly demanded those sense be trained.

The whole clearing was awash in mana, almost effervescent, rising up in waves as heat rolled off the trees.  It did not require much additional precision to note the tightly bounded but voluminous flux of mana about the blaze itself: The fire was not merely set magically–it was being magically maintained even now.  The prospect was confusing, though, because though Lan could sense the mana coming from these anomalous, regenerating trees, it was as if all the magic came from somewhere just outside of them.  The trees did not glow as mages and magical objects generally did.  They did not resonate.  They seemed inert.  But they…couldn’t be.  

The fire, of course…the fire had to be coming from somewhere, and there was something else.  Like a voice: the sibilants of whispers between the crackling of disintegrating wood.  Lan approached.  He approached the twin blazes that were beginning more and more to resemble obelisks of pitch black, the darkness which came before the Night wrapped it in stars and dreams, a joyful, horrible gibbering in the distance, sunken eyes and distended jaws, strings of flesh tearing between teeth–

“I would keep distance.”  The voice was muffled and mercifully jarring.  Lan was then, again–still–in a great clearing surrounded by rocks and undergrowth in which stood the tall, burning trees.  At one end Lan now saw the uneven walls of what must once have been a grand building in an architectural style that fell into disuse over eight centuries ago, now dilapidated by age and the forest’s overgrowth.  And behind him there was a human in a dark habit, face obscured by a mask comprised of leather and silver, with two medallions of glass for eyeholes.

“I have little doubt it would harm even you, even in this state,” the figure added.  Their voice lacked any discernible identifier of masculinity or femininity, and Lan sensed the obfuscation thereof was intentional, an ambiguity similar to Brill’s in the Crossroads, though arising from darker, older roots.

“Are you Jabez Faisal, then?” Lan asked, finding it strangely difficult to maintain his bluster here.

“Yes.  I suspect you’ve been looking for me.  There are safer places close by to confer, if you will follow?”

Beckoning politely, the figure Lan now recognized from the vision Naples had conjured–back in the Crossroads, when he drank the dragonling’s flames outside Brill’s shop–led him toward the anomalously Kolai building at the clearing’s edge, up what once had certainly been a grand staircase, into a cavernous room that had been downsized–only slightly inconveniently, it seemed–by a caving in of the ceiling at one corner.  Inside were a number of furnishings: bedrolls, chairs, several tables, and even a desk, in total sufficient to support ten people, perhaps more.  At present, Jabez was the only other denizen Lan could perceive, though he was finding his perception strangely unreliable.

Jabez made their way with small, constant steps toward the ceilingless corner, where a cooking fire had been set up, and hung a kettle over the flames.

“My apologies for the humble state of our abode,” they intoned.  “This place was perhaps fit for gods once, but no more.”  Lan did not miss the apology’s dangling implication, but he put it aside.

“You are far older than even a mage should be.  But I do not believe you have any pact with Harmony.”

“Yes.”  The response was blank.  Matter of fact.  “A consolation granted to a handful of my companions as well, though I know not by what.  A residual trace of the Cloudman’s salvation, a part of the Smile’s curse.  Perhaps something older from Khet that never quite let go of us.

“An odd introduction, though, Great Turtle.  Surely you haven’t come all this way to interrogate this poor creature’s age?”

Never quite let go…

The words were cold and hideous and demanded attention that Lan was not inclined to grant.  He shut them out, fixating distastefully upon the present.

“I have become acquainted of late with a traveler called Naples,” he said, noting the attentive tilt of Jabez’ mask.

“Is the boy well?”

“He is hardly a boy anymore, but yes, as well as one might be, approaching a time of true unrest.”

“Of course not,” Jabez replied. “But we raised him, and I don’t intend to shed the particulars of that connection.  True unrest, then?”

Lan frowned, taking care to translate the wavering of the stream for an audience who might actually appreciate the detail.

“Something is coming over the Riverlands,” Lan began.  “Shortly after we met, Naples wove a vision–somewhat unintentionally–which I believe may be instrumental to this cataclysm.  Perhaps we may begin at the periphery: What can you tell me of the Lords of the Sky?”

Jabez’ chuckle was faint through the mask, though Lan caught the mirth and pain of it all the same.

“Naples and the other children did so enjoy that name for our little club,” they said.  “Romesse originally took the phrase from one of the Cloudman’s speeches.  I think at the time his feelings were innocent, much like the pride the children felt at being ‘Lords of the Sky’.  All the more remarkable considering that unlike young Naples, Romesse–like most of us really–had already had his heart wrung out by the war.”

“The Wars Fought Under Shadow,” Lan confirmed.

“A conflict I can only imagine you felt to be Spar’s just deserts.”

Again he was seen.  Lan could not help but grin, though the torrent of emotion Jabez’ comment beckoned was far more complex–and far more painful–than simple vindication.

“As if the great Lan al’Ver would stoop to such pettiness.”

Jabez met his gaze impassively, lenses glinting as they rubbed with a cloth at a smudge on the table where they sat.  They rose, walked back to the kettle, and poured a cup of tea, setting it in front of Lan.

“When we found ourselves back on earth,” they continued, “Khepri and Utari found a grim humor in the name.  Every century or so, one of us brings home a stray or two, and for a time our cursed tribe becomes an orphanage.  Those two will then let their little ironic title slip out in front of the children, and of course the kids don’t let it go.”  They chuckled again.  “I suspect I will never escape it.”

“You say, ‘when you found yourselves back on earth’,” Lan prodded, confusion rolling unnaturally over his thoughts.  Jabez fell abruptly still.  Then, after a moment:

“You mean to say you do not know?  You do not know of the Heaven’s Fondest Smile?”

“I…do not,” Lan admitted, an eerie guilt beginning to bleed through him.

“Naples has found himself within the Gyre, then.”  Lan shook his head, taking the cup Jabez had placed before him.  He did not drink.

“Not Naples,” he said.  “There is a girl in the Crossroads.  Romesse has appeared to her.  And to me.”

“Romesse?” Jabez asked, leaning toward Lan, worry now plain in their voice.  “But not the Smile?”

Lan tilted the cub, considering the way the ripples caught against its sides.  He felt as if he stood on a precipice, a jetty thrust amid mists concealing something grim indeed.

“Who is this Smile?” he asked.  Jabez’ reflective visage gazed into him a moment before the reply came:

“Are you ready to learn what your gift has wrought?”

Selected Chimera Footnote: Mulholland Drive

Rough but fun. I am intending for the Chimera to be a weird piece, combining fiction and nonfiction. I’m discovering how to write it as I write it, so bear with me, and don’t worry about what this is a footnote to.

Wow, what a coincidence, wonder what it means.  A plausible answer is forthcoming; perhaps there is no meaning at all, but I would direct the amateur critics on X/Twitter/Insta/methamphetamine/TikTok toward the age-old discourse on the connections between Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s experiences as a soldier, full of wrinkled noses and invectives usually employing the term “blunt allegory”.  

Alternatively, David Lynch has a zinger: “It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted, or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening.”

Alt-alternatively: Eat shit.  You want to know what Mulholland Drive means?  Tell me what your breakfast means.  I’d chance it means little to you, but that doesn’t seem to stop you swallowing it.

But fine, here you go: Betty is a delusion confabulated by Rita after she survives the hit Diane paid for, and otherwise (aided by the wild unreliability of the film’s primary camera angle) you can probably just consider the chronology of events to be scrambled.  I wouldn’t bother trying to put them in the right order–you have a concussion, and some of the puzzle pieces are now from the next box over.

“No, obviously Rita is being imagined by Betty!”  Kind of a weird take, considering Betty doesn’t exist.  “But Rita doesn’t exist either!”  ‘Rita’, again, has a concussion.  She may have access to her–Camilla’s–distorted memories, she may be a hypothetical imagined by Diane–but in that case Betty is neither an image of Diane nor her memory but a fantasy, brought forward in time, that Diane imagines working with Camilla to solve her attempted murder and Diane’s suicide.  And the vision of that Ourobouros is so revolting that upon beholding it, all Diane can do is flail for the exit, which takes the convenient form of the pistol in her bedside table.  You know what?  Nevermind, that slaps.

“Wait, so you don’t know what it means?”

Why would I know what it means to you?  There you go, querying Legion again, as you breeze past at least three examples of what Mulholland Drive is really about.

It’s actually almost magical how effectively Sadly, Porn’s opening question repels readers despite being excellently written and frankly fascinating.  “Who decides what porn is?”  Note that this is a separate question from what it is.  You use it to not act, yes, but why not throw in another interrogative: Why does it work?

If the fantasies you’re masturbating to were your own, that would prompt action or change, hence all the Freudian repression hoodoo.  They aren’t.  They are someone else’s dream, and dreams as wish fulfillment doesn’t really work if neither is yours.  Changing your dream is a matter of changing your wish–of changing your self.  Not easy by any means, for some that’s a line of life and death, perhaps that is the case for Diane.  But changing someone else’s dream is impossible.  It is there in the world, and however you came upon it, you have no power over it.  Consider how many times the film depicts this lesson being taught: Adam learns it, Diane learns it twice over, and in the end/beginning, Camilla learns it too.

In some ways it’s obvious–it’s a movie about movies and moviestars, both of which are dreams wholly unowned by their participants–but since you don’t have dreams of your own, you disavow the inevitable conclusion.  Inevitable for Camilla, inevitable for Adam (count the cowboys), and of course, inevitable for Diane.

It’s precisely for this disavowal that everyone’s pick for most inscrutable scene in the film is the one at the beginning at Winkie’s diner, where a man recounts his dream of sitting in the diner (NB: where Diane later sits to pay for her lover’s assassination), only to step outside and find a fucking orc, which he then finds in real life too.

“So is he in Diane’s dream, or is she in his?”  What’s your encounter rate on phantasmal orcs behind dumpsters?  Mine’s pretty low, and the diner guy does seem rather surprised as well.  “So he’s in hers?”  ‘He’ being ‘Dan’?  The guy who doesn’t appear in the film after that scene?  If I were trying to help you, I’d ask you what that would imply–the void has a way of focusing the flailing–but you don’t have the time, and I don’t believe in it.  The answer is neither.  They’re both in someone else’s dream, and while I’m sure you’re curious as to whose, I want you to know it really, really doesn’t matter.  Hollywood is a slurry of nameless aspirations, and the rest of your society isn’t much different.  The only way out is to wake up.  

Alternatively, Deleuze has a zinger: “If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”

The Chimera, Chapter 2: The Fortress

A continuation from the Maze in the Mists.

It is yet ambiguous whether your course is chosen or not, but you proceed.  I leave you and your companions to finish your broth and wine, and you waste little time.  The lure of opportunity feels akin to the hanging sword.  It drives you out into the mists again and, for the first time in a long time, off the road.  It is not clear to you whether the frenzy smothers your fear or if they are one feeling, the stag’s panicked flight and its hunger overlaid upon a single annulus, an undivided will to survive.

The first step into the mist immerses you in chill breath.  The second is like being swallowed, and from there, your path is painstaking, carefully chosen from my map between the rocks, shrubs, untrodden muck, and, eventually, trees, themselves a concept which you had all but forgotten.  The continuity of the road before had offered you a predictable notion of your location, not with respect to the places the road connects but simply that you were on the road.  My map offers you no such assurances, for it does not truly identify the path–merely the unimportant landmarks that suggest it.  The mist offers scarcely more than ten feet of visibility in any direction, and the way it wavers is unsettlingly regular.  Like lungs.  Corridors of shapeless, breathing bodies, opening esophageal as you venture forward.  I do not mislead you, though, and you execute admirably.

After hours or days, you and your companions arrive at a set of ruined gates, dilapidated and sunk into the forest floor, giving the impression of a cave, comprised uncannily of uneven masonry and shielded by great doors of rotting wood.  You stand before it in a sort of prescient horror, though you cannot say what about the fortress so moves you.  One of your companions, though, undaunted, jaunts to the doors and heaves one up and open.  The irreverence shocks you, even more so as you spot the shape of his smirk through the gloam, but you have to relent: He is right.  You have found your quarry.  Now you must find your prize.

You approach the doors, pushing against the deep foreboding you feel in spite of your companion’s nonchalance, resisting the urge to pause again as you notice something truly strange: At the darkened boundary of the fortress gates, the mist ends.  There is no reason that should be impossible, of course, but you do not recall a time or place that the mist ever did end.  It shrouded the road, every rest stop, every inn, stable, tavern, or village, indoors or out.  The mist was the whole world, and here, somehow, the world ends.  There is no reason that should matter, you tell yourself, no reason it should stop you.  Encouraging.  And so, as the door slams shut behind you–you are unsure whether your companion closed it or if the presence of this place is reacting to you–you find yourself out of the mists and in a pitch black tunnel of hard stone.

The scrape of flint against steel behind you makes you shiver, even as you draw comfort from the distant familiarity of the sound.  You turn, witnessing the orange bloom as another companion presses a torch into your hand.  It occurs to you that you have grown used to being unable to clearly discern your companions’ faces, and this one’s–obscured by a cloth mask and heavy goggles in spite of the darkness–nearly takes you by surprise.  You know them, of course.  This one has been loathe to abandon their supplies and effects despite their limited use in the mists, but you must admit that now seems fortunate.  That reluctance now means you can see.

All of you can see, in fact, waiting there in the umbra, taking stock of the stone hallway, hesitating, momentarily dazed–all except for your insolent companion who previously opened the door, though he has always been…unique.  With a grating chuckle, he takes the lead, refusing the torch your companion offers him.

An old place–but it should have plenty of secrets, I’d told you.  It is as if the questions seep from between the stones:  How old?  What was this place?  How did it come to ruin?  Why is the mist gone?  Need I continue to iterate the obvious?  The lethargy of your mental cogs allows you to vacillate, and eventually you will have to realize that is on purpose.

Walk.

The hallway continues onward for an improbable distance without any doors, branches, or turns–save for a rightward bend where it is clear the stonework has become warped, as if some landslide managed to torque the entire structure.

After five minutes and change, your companion in the lead saunters past a damp, wooden doorframe that smells like a forest after rain, and you cautiously follow onto a landing with a half-broken balcony overlooking a flat, open room with a bar tucked into one corner.  Both the landing and the room below are scattered with planks of wood and shattered furniture, all similarly fragrant, some even with visible fungal growth.  And while you are struck with bewilderment as to why this darkened fortress would have a tavern in any state of repair, your concerns are preempted by the bodies strewn about the place.

They look withered.  Perhaps mummified.  But despite the disorder of the scene, the bodies’ postures do not reflect any obviously violent end.  One lies alone on the floor.  Others are slumped over the bar or against the walls.  One sits, head down at the only unbroken table and chair combination remaining.  In all, there are five.  The same as your number.  

You freeze, but your companions hurry down the stairs from the landing for–you have little doubt–a variety of reasons, ranging from moral concern (though these corpses ought be long dead) to alarm at this sign of danger (though any violent threat ought be long gone) to bald-face greed, a drive which rises within you as well, even as recognition of it stings with guilt.

You are not sure what gives you pause, though it is not as if you feel any need to preempt your companions’ instinctual investigations.  Perhaps it is the sense that the scene before you is uncanny (it is) or that you feel you are being observed (you are, though that is hardly hidden–this is all in the second person, after all).  Whatever the reason, your inaction does allow you a strange observation: The construction of this room is different from the hallway which led you to it.

Everything you had seen of the fortress up to now had been stone.  This “tavern” appeared to be a kind of mud brick, and the subtleties of the architecture–in which you of course have no particular expertise–nonetheless evoke a removal of great physical and cultural distance.

Whatever the reason for this sudden change in decor, you find yourself with little time to contemplate it, as your masked companion below lets out a muffled yelp of surprise.  You rush down the stairs to find that the desiccated figure slouched at the lone table–which you had thought a corpse–had lurched from his seat and grabbed your companion by the shoulders.

“Why did we do it?” the figure’s guttural rasp fills the space, distorted by coughed dust from mummified lungs but somehow both perfectly audible and completely comprehensible.  “WHY?!”

Your companion, dependably present as the rest of you stand paralyzed, wondering at how you all are allowed to respond, places their hands on the figure’s arms and calmly responds:

“What did you do?  Who are you?”

The figure breathes, his grip loosening on your companion.

“What…I…” he begins.  “I was…we were called Taamir Ra…”

And that, of course, is when you begin to remember.

One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 6: The Circus

Ka the Mudfish was known to the people of Mudhull to be a revolting creature.  Indeed, this was reflected in his wider reputation: Fishmongers, merchants, tax collectors visiting his marshy domain found him rude.  Lords and soldiers of neighboring fiefs harbored deep skepticism as to his administrative competence.  Emissaries of the Verdant Tower found him simpering, obsequious, and prone to empty promises.  Highlord Michel IV gave him the same attention as the handful of other unsavory strongmen who tended to the periphery of his domain: He did not think about Ka at all.  

The fishers of Mudhull, long broken by the Mudfish’s crushing taxes and his enforcers’ brazen thievery, found him a brutal tyrant.  And his servants, not permitted residence in his manor and thus compelled to walk between it and their squalid hovels each morning and evening, on roads invariably capped by four inches of oozing muck, somehow found him the most grotesque of all the indignities their serfdom imposed upon them.

Those who respected him were vanishingly few, and there may not have been a single individual alive who liked him.

In this void of regard, then, it was the talk of the village–conducted, of course, in frightened muttering with only the thinnest capacity for interest–when a strange dignitary arrived at the mud-slick steps of Ka’s manor.  Some said he was a great general, though perhaps this was rationalized after the fact.  Some assumed he was a merchant, though his retinue of stalking, black-clad guards bore no goods.  Those who noticed such inconsistencies speculated that he was a traveling scholar, which might not have been wrong, but it was useless, like all the other gossip.

What was clear enough was the man himself: He was tall and thin.  His gait was regal and disconcertingly quick.  The pall cast by his attention, by his blue-eyed gaze, was frigid, the sort that prompted, as he turned away, the realization that one had been holding their breath the entire time that eye had been upon them.  And most salient of all: his other eye, missing, socket uncovered and scarred by a multitude of tiny gouges.  Not one of the villagers ever learned his name, so that missing eye served to construct a moniker.

The One-Eyed man entered Lord Ka’s manor that day and spoke with him for hours.  Then he and his retinue left.  They returned the next day and the day after.  That third day, Ka, not given in any sense to generosity, made arrangements that the One-Eyed man, his guards, and the hobbled old woman who traveled with them should stay at the manor.  The fifth day, a servant was called into the room where they carried out their mysterious deliberations.  The other servants did not see him again, and from then on, turnover at the manor grew unsettlingly high.

The villagers watched Mudhull’s quiet transformation.  Fishers were called from their nets to construct thick wooden ramparts around the village–and long buildings within, laid out like slaughterhouses, though with space far in excess of that demanded by the livestock the villagers kept.  Mudhull’s guards donned black armor like that worn by the One-Eyed man’s retinue, now festooned with pewter catfish iconography.  The guards’ ranks tripled, with new recruits coming apparently from outlying villages and traveling mercenary companies.  And as the quiet transformation swelled into a frantic churn, it was secondary to the villagers when the fishers’ huts began to go empty.  In the eyes of history, it is not entirely clear whether their concern even mattered.  At that point, it was likely already too late.

It was one day in this rush, this brief window between when Mudhull became inescapable and when the horrors–the roaches and the teeth and the tongues–became clear, that a servant boy was pushed aside in the hall of Lord Ka’s manor by a laughing guard.  The boy stumbled, striking his head against the wall as the guard guffawed and continued on his way.  The boy remained on the floor a moment, trying to regain his senses, dimly aware that he was bleeding.  He wanted to cry out from the shooting pain, but he didn’t dare, for fear the guard would turn around and find his pain interesting.

The boy was ten years old.  He had just joined the manor staff, but the few senior servants had exhorted him in no uncertain terms: Keep your head down.

Slowly, the boy became aware of someone looming over him.  Shrinking, he peered upward to see a surprisingly short figure, clad in rags.

“Are you scared, child?”

It was an old woman, the one–the boy assumed–the other servants had said arrived with the One-Eyed man.  She reached out a gnarled, four-fingered hand and helped the boy to his feet.  Her fingernails dug painfully into his skin.

“The fear is a gift,” she said.  Half of her face was obscured by her cowl, made darker by the long shadows of Ka’s manor, dim even at midday.  Her one visible eye was the color of ice.  “Build wings of it and fly away from here.”

She smiled as she spoke, but there was something missing from her tone.  Hollowed.  Severed.

“Else,” she added, “what else have you to do but abandon hope?”

***

Cirque d’Baton’s attention flickered back to the present as the sun rose over the Crossroads.  He saw pale pink creep over the horizon from where he squatted beside a haybale in the alley off Market Street.  He heard the telltale birdsong on the other side of the inn’s leaky roof from where he reclined precariously on a shadowed rafter in the storeroom.  He heard and saw the town’s complacent denizens greet the dawn across miles, though hundreds of eyes and ears, the more remote accounts–and those he could not be bothered to collate personally–regaled to him in the chittering whispers of the underground.  Most of it was uninteresting.  Some of it–the townsfolk’s reactionarily privileged obliviousness to their crumbling way of life, for instance–was uninteresting and insulting.  But such was reconnaissance.  Salience buried in the banal, tactical context within a trash heap of the day-to-day–it was his to sort, and based on the fight Atra had picked, they were going to need any advantage he could pull from it all.

The night had been full of deep breaths and massaged temples.  He was irritated with the snags in Atra’s plan, though not so much with her as with the state of the Riverlands.  With the fact that there really wasn’t any lower hanging fruit on offer.

The two of them had long since surrendered to the pull of the mana they channeled–him during Mudhull’s grisly transformation before the War, her much earlier–perhaps centuries ago–though Cirque was no historical detective, and Atra never shared that detail.  It was magic’s dirty secret, that at some point, inevitably, one would transcend reliance on the power mana conferred: the ability to project death upon the world.  Eventually, the profusion of death, the need for mana would become an end in itself.  Amateur mages tended to notice the effect, the way that simply being a magical conduit carried a euphoria akin to an owlweed addict getting their fix; but it wasn’t until a mage attempted to really warp the world that the yen of it changed flavor from an easily-resisted chemical suggestion to a gnawing, omnipresent sense of imminent starvation.

And neither Cirque nor Atra had been sated in over a decade.  The way that mana became accessible varied for each mage according to their training, their predilections, their memories and traumas–to the ways in which they perceived death.  Sometimes, the way Atra explained it, this manifestation was quite straightforward.  The fire mage saw death, predictably, in burning.  The beastman found it in predation.  The sandstalkers of Hazan found it in burial.  Other disciplines drew strength from more complex abstractions, like the Grayskins, Khettite diaspora who saw death in the mental unmooring of insanity.  Cirque and Atra were both in this latter category.

Cirque was a swarmcaller, a vermin mage, a specialty Atra said had been historically common, though exclusively as self-taught hedge magic–which meant that powerful practitioners were exceedingly rare.  In a pinch, Cirque could draw mana in acceptable quantities by simply eating people like a beastman, but it was easier for him to derive death from the slower, more widespread, instinctual depredations of the rats to which he was connected.

Atra, meanwhile, professed to be able to perceive death in war, a theoretically unremarkable claim–except that she said it with respect to the aspects of war distinct from violence: the rage, the distrust, the breakdown of social structure, whatever that meant.  The way she told it, this practice was unique in the whole of magical history, which he wasn’t sure he believed, even if he’d seen no counterexample in the fifty odd years they had been traveling together.

In terms of feeding their respective addictions, their partnership had been very effective.  Atra’s plans tended to be artful, much more so than the bog-standard False God routine of Show Up, Extort, Slaughter, and Cirque had to admit that he ate better as a town was slowly tearing itself apart than he did in the brief period of gorging after it might counterfactually have been violently pillaged.  In return and in service to her social engineering, he lent his capacity as a verminous panopticon.  Much easier to play on a place’s internal frictions if you knew what they were saying, everywhere, all the time.

But to that point, the Crossroads was proving an infuriatingly difficult lock to crack.  Putting aside the variety of False Gods in its orbit and the three–three!–true gods who were very possibly there too, the town’s cadre of personalities was itself far more capable of resistance than most.  It wasn’t the most hostile setup they’d seen: Their run-in with the Hunter of Beasts years ago had handed them their first failure–and Atra her first stinging defeat in combat.  But if they pulled this off, it would still be the most impressive feat they had ever accomplished. 

The mayor, the actual least of their problems, was far more politically savvy, far more perceptive to intrigue than any of the the yokels they’d had to puppeteer in the past, but if it were just him, Cirque would be sitting back and letting Atra flex her social prowess.  However good he was, she was better.  But then there were Gene and Brill, old, venerable, level headed and trustworthy, and frustratingly aware of his and Atra’s movements–though their means were not entirely their own merit.  Brill in particular was clever, very nearly as savvy as the mayor and much less willing to play their game.  Recognized–correctly, Cirque had to admit–that no good would come of it.

And, of course, Marko, fresh off the muttered communications last night about “plans”.  His intuition regarding Cirque’s surveillance was, Cirque gathered, most likely a lucky guess.  Cirque had been trying to listen in on that theater for over a week now.  Sometimes he got snippets, sometimes all the rats could hear through the walls was incoherent murmuring.  It wasn’t great, and Marko’s notice was probably just the coincidental accuracy of a broken clock.  But the man was a piece of work.

He had cobbled together an admittedly impressive operation on a foundation of paranoia and an altogether bizarre sort of greed that left Cirque puzzled as to why and how the loon had failed to become a False God in his own right.  By all accounts, he had the arsenal and the access for it, but he seemed to have a love of money–or of some more abstract form of capital wealth–that held short of maturation into a lust for material power.  The result was frustrating.  The paranoia made him difficult to assassinate.  The absence of menace and the mercantile largesse he brought to town made it difficult to impeach him in the public’s opinion.  And his hoard of artifacts then served to undermine Cirque and Atra’s progress, forcing their communication to take place covertly or out of town, tracking him–the Crossroads was the first town to ever notice Cirque’s role in its undoing–and cordoning off spaces like the theater that neither he nor Atra could access.

Those three–Gene, Brill, and Marko–were good sentinels, though with a glaring weakness in their magical know-how that Marko’s wares couldn’t quite make up for, which was what made it feel like such a cruel joke that they were now temporarily accompanied by this bizarre clique of mages.  Bleeding Wolf.  Naples.  Ty Ehsam.  And the two god-infected children.

Ty smelled suspicious in a way that likely had nothing to do with his Grayskin-traditional garb.  Foul, sickly, bloodsickly, specifically.  Cirque had only been to the Westwood once since the Battle of the Ouroboros, but it was a scent that stuck with you.  He didn’t like it, even if he wasn’t sure what it implied.

Meanwhile, Naples and Orphelia both seemed practiced in that Grayskin magic that made you unable to trust your senses, though thankfully, Naples seemed to use it more judiciously than the girl, who just last night seemed to plunge the whole tavern into a bout of phantasmagoria by accident.  

Bleeding Wolf was probably the most magically attuned of the bunch, and by the way Atra was slavering, he was probably real dangerous in a fight, which made their first-line option for dealing with problematic factors in town that much more fraught.

And Devlin…just…fuck.  The smell brought nauseous shivers up from Cirque’s gut.  He almost wanted to cut and run, leave Atra to it and just starve or go insane.  Hell, part of him was considering suicide before facing the One-Eyed Crow again.

But–deep breath–in truth, every single one of them was a damned problem, and most, if not all of them, understood that they were in some existentially threatening shit, though maybe they didn’t yet recognize that Atra’s plan was existentially threatening itself.  For problems like this, the usual solution was pruning, getting rid of individual issues in order to make the rest of the town suitably manipulable.  Bluntly: murder.  

But as much as Cirque wanted to settle his anxieties, wanted a clear path to the ultimate feast, Atra’s assessment–that the situation was too delicate–was correct.  There were too many powerful forces here, and while Cirque and Atra certainly posed no threat to them, escalating violence could very quickly bring the screaming consequences back home.  Lan al’Ver would certainly notice a hit on one of his current fixations.  This “Ben Gan Shui” had made a deal with the town, and Cirque had the impression she held her trading partners to an exacting standard.  He doubted that the Crow or whichever slithering influence had adhered itself to Ty Ehsam would react calmly to attacks against their hosts.  And if Atra was right and Orphelia was truly a locus of the Gyre, it was possible that killing her wouldn’t even cause her to die–but would invite retribution nonetheless.

It was maddening.  He was multitudes.  He was untouchable, inexorable, and omnipresent.  Cirque had transcended the humanity that imprisoned him in Mudhull to become what was practically a demigod to these insects, and he still felt helpless.
Atra thought she still had this, confident she could steer this happy, “rebuilding” hub of trade into a well-armed but ragged and duplicitous alliance with Holme, all in service to a last stand against the Blaze.  The Crossroads would be decimated, Holme would be destroyed.  The Blaze’s army of mutants would be slaughtered.  Atra still somehow saw the path this great conflagration, snatching the flocks of two False Gods right out from under them, and all Cirque could do was hope she was right–and continue to make sure she knew everything about the way these animals danced.

One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 5: Here’s the Plan

Realized it’s been 10 months since the last chapter of this story. Man, time really does fly, fun or no.

There was something that needed to be done.  Devlin felt it, powerfully, desperately.  Except for rescuing Orphelia, he was certain it was the most important task he had ever faced.  And yet, somehow, despite the burning sense of urgency practically holding his eyes open as he rolled fitfully on his bunk in Brill’s infirmary, he had no idea what it was he had to do.

At least he could see now.

Since the Chateau de Marquains, the birds had returned in force.  They were on and around him, rustling, flapping their dirty wings as he choked on the miasma that wafted off them.  They would perch on his bare skin, place their beaks against his eyes and utter a hollow, rattling croak.  It felt like encouragement.  It felt like a threat.  He wasn’t sure to what end.  Their presence still stifled, anxiety like heavy mist.  But unlike before, he could see.  The feathers from their wingbeats fell beside him rather than clouding his vision.  And unlike before, he could move.  Rather than harry and hinder him, it was as if the birds attempted to lift him when he walked.  He felt like he was floating, sometimes, each step not weightless but ineffably light.

He was still worried about Orphelia.  Always worried about Orphelia.  She came home concerned.  Not concerned.  Distressed.  Not home.  Brill’s infirmary–what was home, anymore?  What could home ever be?  None of that was important.  It would all be okay if he could just complete this last task.

Devlin clutched his temples as he felt a wave of pinpricks in a line down the side of his skull.  Slowly, the pain receded. […]  For a moment, the birds were quiet.

Orphelia was safe, though, right?  It wasn’t like Les Marquains could chase her all the way here.  It seemed absurd that he would even want to.

No, Devlin thought, strangely assured of the notion: Les Marquains had no reason to pursue Orphelia.  And the False God would have to be distracted: As they fled, the Saraa Sa’een had burst through the magically-reinforced walls of his chateau.  Was Les Marquains even still alive?  It was a useless question.  It had nothing to do with Orphelia, with determining what it was that found her here.  Whatever it was that scared her.  The birds quietly muttered their approval.  They knew he was right.  They would help him protect Orphelia.  But he would need to get up.  He would need to go out and see what lurked in the Crossroads’ alleys.  No, it was okay, he realized.  The thing that kept him awake, the thing he needed to do: This would be the first step.

The birds fluttered up around him, lifting him from the cot, holding him steady as he crept to the curtain, across the apothecary shop floor.  He lifted the deadbolt and slipped out the front door.

The birds hadn’t yet seen much of this Crossroads, Devlin thought, confined as he had been previously to Brill’s infirmary–and the alley across the street before that.  This little patch of squandered potential sprung up in the ruins of Ulrich’s Bend, itself barely an outpost of the arrogant, long-ruined Kol.  So close to what had once been the Blackwood–now open marsh at the outskirts of the Windwood.  Though one had to admit the Bloodwood was a better name for it.  A name befitting a substrate for the loathsome fungus of human tenacity, never bothered to pull its way upward, yet nigh unstoppable in its stubborn push forward.

Somewhere, secondarily, Devlin wondered how he knew these things, why he made these judgments.  He didn’t remember learning any of it, but it had been some time since he had felt awake.

The streets were empty now, of course.  The inn where Orphelia had been had locked its doors, all of the Crossroads’ late-night wanderers had settled for the night, at the inn, their homes, the posts at the thoroughfare intersections–in the case of the militia volunteers playing the role of night watchmen–and, for those vagrants too poor or too cheap for more sensible lodging, squirreled away in secluded alleys about the town, much as Devlin and Orphelia had been when they first came here.

But despite the quietude, the birds saw things, now that they were awake, now that they were helping.  They fluttered about Captain al’Ver’s boat-wagon, tied outside Brill’s shop.  They dared not land upon it.  It was not theirs.  But this place, this Crossroads, was no one’s.  Between their domains.  It was not her right to meddle here–which was why the birds merely watched–but it was not his either.  Captain al’Ver gave up long ago.  They all did.  Why this sudden regret?

A wave of dissonance washed over Devlin, and the pinpricks in his temples flared again.  Orphelia.  Captain al’Ver was watching Orphelia.  Because of his mistake.  His own poison gift.  The birds croaked menacingly, and somehow Devlin understood the implication: It was upon that observation that he became watched.  And because he understood that connection, he was not afraid when he turned and saw the watcher, seated in the shadows beside the door of the inn.  Beneath a wide-brimmed hat, eyes glinted orange in the light of the brazier down the street.

The old man rested a hand on the stock of a crossbow laid across his lap.  He sat, but he was not inert, the weathered lines on his face showing no trace of fatigue.  The scowl, the stare, the mechanical poise of his fingers–he saw through Devlin, and he judged.  Devlin did not know what to say, but the birds spoke through him:

“I was betrayed first.  What right do you have to intervene in my retribution?”

The corner of the old man’s mouth creased, and his knuckles whitened around the crossbow, but Devlin did not wait for his assent.  He turned and walked away, toward the north end of town.  The nature of Orphelia’s predicament was growing clearer, but there were other winds blowing about this place.  The merchant of bespoke blights–this Marko–he would shortly have designs upon the Homunculus abomination.  How could he not?  But the birds could not guess what those designs would be, so maybe Devlin could find out?

The story the silver man–the abomination, the Homunculus– had told in the infirmary was not alarming to Devlin.  It sounded foreboding, ominous.  The awakening of the Night Sky sounded like a Very Important Change.  Scary, in a far off sort of way–but also exciting?  Hopeful?  Like a promise of eventual relief.  It was a strange way to feel about what Captain al’Ver said would be the end of the world, but Devlin had been in this haze, so tired for so long.  He wanted it to end.  He wanted it all to be what it had been before.  But ending…the sickness, the transience, the sleeping through raspy coughs on boats, in alleys, on infirmary cots–ending that was the first step, right?

The birds’ startled croaks wrenched his thoughts away from that confusion, drawing his gaze upwards.  Devlin’s eye caught Ty Ehsam, perched on the roof of Gene’s smithy.

Rogue, the birds croaked.  Wayward child.  Did the crawling worm not grasp the opportunity before them?

For just a moment, Devlin wondered how it was that the birds’ tittering placed these thoughts into his mind.  As if they were his.

But he had a task he had to complete.  Time was of the essence.  He continued on toward Marko’s.

***

Ty shivered as Devlin looked up suddenly, directly at him, one eye obscured by his ragged hood, the other clearly–almost ethereally–illuminated, piercing, frozen grey in the faint torchlight.  It was by no means alarming that Devlin noticed him, of course.  They had come to town together.  To the extent that the boy had been paying attention, he would have known that Ty was keeping to the rooftops in this general area of town.  Still, the interaction had been uncanny.

“Well, I would say we’ve been clocked.”

The whisper came from Ty’s mouth, but the words were certainly not his, prompted instead by scarcely detectable pulses of mana running through the threads sewn into his head and neck.

“What do you mean?” Ty asked under his breath.  “The boy knew we were here.”

“The boy?” the Dragon replied in Ty’s voice.  “You gods forsaken idiot, you think that what just saw us–and I mean us–was a boy?”

Ty did not respond.  The Dragon’s abuse was more or less a constant when the False God spoke to him, and he saw little point in engaging with it.  He followed Devlin as the boy–or whatever the Dragon thought he was–continued up the street, stumbling and meandering in much the same way he had ever since leaving the Chateau de Marquains.

“I can forgive a simpleton like you for not sensing the mana.  It’s a subtle flavor, and his sister is much, much louder with her magical pollution.  But have you really not noticed the way he hides his hand from al’Ver?”

Ty had not.  He considered it for a moment.

“Is he hiding his ring?” he asked.

“A lovely guess.  It is better to be stupid than stupid and blind, I suppose.  What can you tell me about this ring?”  Ty shrugged.

“Cheap,” he said.  “Looks like dirty iron.  Grooves cut into the flat on one side.  Are those supposed to mean something?”

“It shocks me that you’re even intelligible, let alone literate,” the Dragon sneered.  “Grooves?  Mean ‘something’?  That is a bird’s footprint, you dunce.”

“You say that as if it’s a crest I should know.”

“Only because it is.  That is the crest of the Strange Bird.”

Ty glanced again at the street.  Devlin had disappeared into the shadows, and all was once again silent and empty.

“Never heard of them,” he said, leaning back against Gene’s chimney.  “Another new False God?”

“My disgust can scarcely be vocalized,” came the Dragon’s surprisingly calm reply.  “They’re almost childlike, your priors.  Raised in a world of bad replicas, you are unable to recognize the real thing.  Even when you run right into two of them.  But I suppose the Feathermen disbanded decades before you were born, and why would you have learned their master’s sobriquet?  It was buried on purpose, precisely so that fools like you would forget it.”

“Well, sorry for the foolishness, but I don’t follow,” Ty whispered.  “The ring is magic, I assume?  And it’s linked to this Strange Bird–so what?”

“So she saw us.  And you’re just going to let him dance off to his business in the dead of night?  Get up and follow him, you idiot!”

Ty sighed, carefully creeping to the edge of Gene’s roof.  He leaped over the small alley between the smithy and the potter’s workshop next door, proceeding to make his way after Devlin as stealthily as he could.

“She saw us?” he asked between measured exhalations.  “Who is she, exactly?”

“The Strange Bird,” the Dragon replied.  “The One-Eyed Crow, the Lark in the Burning Tree, et cetera.  And the kid’s been traveling with you all this time: She’s seen everything there is to see about you.  I am more vexed that she saw me.”

Ty frowned, annoyed as much by the Dragon’s vagaries as the thinning of available rooftop routes.  He carefully lowered himself to the street beside a vegetable garden wedged randomly amidst the tradesman’s corridor and took to the street, beginning to push out a field of mana, a subtle, vacuous delusion, the technique Naples called “shadow walking”.

“So what does it mean?” he muttered, quickening his pace as Devlin swayed toward the square up ahead.

“I shan’t waste any more pearls on you,” came the flat reply.  “Find a codex if you’re curious.  Suffice it to say that we should underestimate neither the number of parties interested in our Homunculus, nor their level of interest.  Now keep following the damn boy.  The more I can learn about her angle, the better.”

Ty’s motivation to carry out the Dragon’s reconnaissance was waning, but he really did not like the notion the False God seemed to be reading from the boy’s behavior.  A fourteen-year-old boy being controlled by a mage–let alone one that could intimidate a mass-murderer like the Dragon?  It was just…grim.  Both Devlin and his sister had had a truly rough go of it, and though Ty had his frustrations with Orphelia’s relentless troublemaking, he couldn’t help but pity them.  And he was left to wonder whether the boy’s ring was a problem he might be able to address.  The Dragon didn’t seem to think there was any such opportunity, but Ty was also fairly certain the Dragon didn’t give a damn about the boy’s welfare.

For a moment, Devlin disappeared from view, rounding the corner onto the north square.  Ty lingered there, peering out at the surprisingly well-lit space.  To his surprise, Devlin had stopped scarcely fifteen feet beyond the turn, staring straight ahead.  The benches, fountain, and walkways at the center of the square fell well within the torchlight, but Ty couldn’t make out anything there that might have given Devlin pause.  He noticed it only because Devlin’s attention prompted him to keep looking, but there, under an awning at the opposite end of the square, Ty caught movement.  Smoke.  No–vapor.

The shadows behind the trail of steam stood and approached the boy.

“Devlin?” Bleeding Wolf rumbled, stepping into the light, pensively balancing a steaming wooden cup between his fingers.  “What are you doing out at this hour?”

“Uhm…”

Ty could not understand Devlin’s response, barely a murmur as the boy swayed, hands balled up inside his sleeves.  Apparently, Bleeding Wolf didn’t catch it either.  The concern on the beastman’s face deepened.

“Let’s get you back to Brill’s.  Maybe they’ll have somethin’ for the sleepwalkin’.”

Ty ducked quickly back around the corner, into an alley where he used a barrel as a makeshift step ladder back to the rooftops.  He waited there for the next few minutes as Bleeding Wolf ushered Devlin past, back to bed, seemingly oblivious to the eldritch presence Ty had seen behind the boy’s eyes only moments ago.

“Did you see it?” the Dragon whispered once the two were out of sight.  “He hid the ring from the beastman as well.  Al’Ver is obvious, but why would she consider your ‘Bleeding Wolf’ a threat?”  Ty paused.

“A threat to what?” he asked.

“Finally.  A pertinent question.  Alas, the boy retreated, so I don’t imagine we can be sure.  Still, he was approaching…Marko’s office, was he not?”

***

“Here’s the plan,” Marko announced to his empty theater, no-nonsense, motivational-like, the type of confidence that ought to inject some energy into his thinking.  Except he didn’t have the plan.  He sighed, grumbling a half-hearted string of curses.

The pieces, then.  Atra wanted to fight the Blaze, for whatever shell-forsaken reason.  The Blaze wanted the Keystone.  Unclear if he wanted the construct.  He would if he weren’t an idiot, but…  And the construct, this “Monk”, wants to…bring the Blaze to the site of the Night Sky’s awakening?  What?

Marko glanced out at the torchlit shadows beyond the stage where he stood.  He fiddled with his crossbow, concerned that he might not be alone but self aware enough to know that he was always thus concerned, that there was no signal whatsoever in his worry.  He jumped down from the stage, landing hard, his knees just no flexing with the impact the way they used to, and he checked his wards and traps:

The unobtrusive strip of strange metal at the doorway–the same metal as one of the seven rings he wore–which dissuaded anyone from entering without his approval, still in place and undamaged, unlike the rest of his doorframe; the elongated stone brazier at the edge of the stage–a creation of Holme’s Sculptor–which burned without fuel and grew much brighter in the presence of violent intent, still alight with its normal, orange hue; the windows, all completely ordinarily shuttered but affixed with small parchment tags fastening the shutters to the sill such that they would tear if a window were opened–and which would instantly reduce the temperature in the vicinity dangerously below freezing upon tearing; and, of course, the trap door beneath the rug on the stage, locked both conventionally and with a magical device operated by his pendant which would, by default, redirect any harm done to the device, the door, or the room beneath it back at whoever was attempting to smash their way in.  Everything was still in place, in working order, and crucially, only Marko knew how it all worked.

Back in the old days, it was once every couple years a scav would try him.  Now no one had bothered him in a decade, excepting the Ben Gan Shui’s centipedal envoy smashing through his door the other week.  But he tried not to let that affect his paranoia.  This was a dangerous fuckin’ line of work, and being on the backlines of the scav trade really wasn’t any safer.  His little stronghold wasn’t impregnable, though even the envoy probably wouldn’t have made it past the lock–and none of this shit seemed to work on Lan al’Ver, but it was still better protected than the vast majority of scav marks.

Marko heaved himself back onto the stage, his checks, his thrice-daily ritual completed.  The pieces again: 

If Monk wanted to get someplace else and bring the Blaze there, that gave Atra her stupid battlefield, right?  So she could get herself killed, the Blaze would get his Keystone, and the threat to the Crossroads would be gone.  With the threat–and Atra–gone, the militia would go, and Marko could find some means to wrench his mercantile autonomy back from the mayor.

What about that loose end, then?  Mayor Bergen probably wouldn’t care about Monk’s prophecy, and who knew how much he cared about Atra’s death wish?  He would probably want to ship Monk and Ehsam up north.  Marko had to admit the simplicity was appealing, but Atra would certainly meddle.  In the end, he neither trusted her, nor was he willing to put his neck on the line to give the mayor an unmitigated win–the mayor was his enemy too, after all.

“Here’s the plan,” he said again.  “We got the research angle, see if I can dig up any scraps of wisdom I might’ve picked up from the Alchemist’s fanboys over the last few decades.  Need to figure out where Monk needs to go.  Hell, maybe the clockwork piece of shit will help me.

“Then the action.  Gotta–”  He stopped cold as the stone brazier flared up.

It was for just an instant that the flames sputtered higher, just a quick flash of light that brushed the dark corners of the stage before dying back to dim candlelight.  Could’ve been a fluke.  Something outside, whatever malice woke it up either phantom or just gone now.  Or maybe Atra’s little spy tripped one of his wires.

“Don’t fuckin’ worry,” Marko muttered.  “You’ll be in on it.  Now fuck off.”

It was the truth, sort of.  If everything worked out, Atra would get what she wanted, far away from here, at maximal cost to the Bergen boy’s stupid militia.  But she couldn’t know in advance.  He needed her to react hastily, to be taken by surprise.  He needed to be driving this cart.

But whether or not his invective had been received, there was, of course, no response.

Living the Dream

In spite/because of my vaguely barren posting schedule, I did want to wish all of you a happy new year (and belated holidays, whichever you celebrate), with the exception of the decidedly persistent scammer who keeps emailing me from Nigeria with an AI-generated profile pic and email pitch. My holiday message for you is more complex:

  • I do not want to purchase access to your botnet, no matter how many fake reviews it will generate for me.
  • I am perfectly capable of Googling the various generically American names you have emailed me under (and finding thereof that no one with that name is in this line of work).
  • Your messages are now routing to my spam folder. Please move on. If you are given to self-reflection, please consider a career in which you commit less fraud.

For everyone else, despite appearances, my December has actually been rather productive, and once I figure out how to collate my output, it will start appearing here again (I had a professional engagement that ate up most of my October/November). I hope you all have been well, and I will see you soon, under a new calendrical quantum.

Journey to the Center of Society, Possible Prologue: Trade Offer

“It’s weird how few people pay attention to how many religions are essentially contractual.”

-samzdat

It was an artfully complex transaction.

The opening was typical of the diplomatic speculation that pervaded China’s Warlord Era.  So many sides, so little to agree on–supremacy is an inherently zero-sum prize and all that.

The context: Cao Kun of the Zhili had beaten back the Fengtian and consolidated power over Beijing.  Wu Peifu, Cao’s right hand, was thus mired, from the administrative discomfort of his temporary office in the capital, in the effort of helping him keep it.  This meeting was one of many seeds cast, little investments with little expectation but–Wu hoped–incredible potential.  Cao had already secured the blessing of interests from the Western nations that would soon agglomerate into “Britannia”, but today’s talk promised a more bespoke advantage.  A private citizen with an interesting personal history.  Perhaps a charismatic figurehead, a cunning informant, a diplomatic shield if it came to it.  Wu had little idea of what this man wanted, but that was not unusual.  These meetings were, by their nature, exploratory.

At this point, the prospective exchange was simple: a little of my attention for a little of yours.

He entered Wu’s office with a small retinue: a manservant and a bodyguard, putatively, themselves flanked by eight of Wu’s own soldiers.  Wu gathered that the manservant would be interpreting when the unassuming man spoke first, in accented but otherwise inoffensive Mandarin:

“Thank you for meeting with us, General.”

This was in incorrect apprehension, but Wu did not yet have reason to realize it.

The man, Richard Sterling, a Western celebrity of whom even Wu was aware, had a surprisingly direct proposal: He and Wu had a mutual interest in the eradication of the Fengtian to the north, and he claimed to have the means to execute this goal bloodlessly.  But to do this, he needed two things: He needed men and materiél to bring him close to the enemy’s seat of power unscathed, and more peculiarly, he required that a more subtle operation be completed first.

There was a soldier, he explained, under the command of the Fengtian general Feng Zongchang, known as “Tianyi”.  Tianyi was to be captured, deprogrammed, and extracted from China without Sterling’s involvement.  Wu was, of course, aware of Tianyi–the name, along with numerous revolting accounts of his crimes–had spread through the provinces bordering Manchuria.  His capture would not be a trivial task, but that didn’t much matter.  Wu’s part in the transaction had ended nearly thirty minutes prior.

It was strange, in hindsight, that all of these negotiations had proceeded–between Sterling’s English and Wu’s Mandarin–without any further need for an interpreter.  Strange for Wu, that is, but not for the meeting’s singular outside observer.

For Em, Architect of Exchange, aware by nature of every passed coin, every promissory note, every clicking bead on even the most abstractly conceptual abacus, this context had become quite common of late among the planet’s most valuable transactions.  A little of my attention for a little of yours.  No one realized that all the King in Yellow needed was your attention.  After that, he had all of you.

What was beautiful about this transaction, though, was that what was nominally being asked of Wu Peifu by the King in Yellow was in fact being asked of the King in Yellow by Dick Sterling.  It was beautiful for its intricacy.  It was beautiful for its mystery: Why would one of the King’s agents ask another agent for a favor he cannot refuse?  Why would the King grant a personal request from his thrall so clearly at odds with his agenda?  And most delightfully maddening: Why would the King expend these resources to keep Tianyi–to keep Lamont Sterling–deliberately out of his control?

Em had learned a great deal of the gods of his existence, his own creators, gods that admittedly played dice but who made up for it with a command of mathematics that seemed impenetrable–even to the economy.  He had learned more of them even than the other Architects, he was sure, which would be an unpleasant surprise for See eventually.

But the devils–the Elder–were new.  Deities much more like the ones humans fantasized.  Deities who wanted worship, even in this petty, token sense, because that’s what this was, this bargain between Dick Sterling and the King in Yellow.  Because when a god exists, worship is a transaction.  

And so it was there, in that office in Beijing, that Em first caught a glimpse of that black mirror in which, he realized, he was the reflection.

Praise for $20,000 Under the Sea

This is a little bit of a thank you and a little bit of an ad heads-up, but while my own efforts to promote $20,000 Under the Sea have been proceeding anemically, the book has received some positive critical reception that I’m grateful for. I wanted to highlight some of it:

  • Self-Publishing Review: “An exceptional high-stakes drama on the high seas that brims with encroaching horror, $20,000 Under the Sea by Sam Locrian is a timely historical commentary and a masterclass in psychological suspense”
  • Indie Reader: “a fun, action-packed addition to the corpus of transformative works in the Lovecraft mythos”
  • The Hemlock Journal: “a mix of thrill and fantasy”

Thank you to these reviewers as well as others who have taken the time to read and review the book.

Additionally, this last month, I was able to have my first in-person event in quite awhile. Thank you to PH Coffee, my favorite writing spot in the Kansas City area, for hosting me for a book signing on August 9th! For others in the Kansas City area, perhaps I will see you at a future event!

Top Image: The Mask