Tag: fantasy

“The Apiarist”, Excerpt 6: A Thousand Cuts

My training took the better part of six years, in which time I enthusiastically apprehended the skills I would need as a soldier, as a mage, and as a de facto cleric of the Blood God.  I was good.  Far better than my recruiting class, better, even, than many of the Knights in full standing.  But it had turned out that despite these products of my hard work, my most interesting quality to chapterhouse leadership was actually my pedigree.  I was, of course, Piraean, but more uniquely, I was of the noble class–albeit its bourgeois fringe.  

As it was, the fight against the Atheists was angling more and more uphill with each passing year.  The Knights had little difficulty eliminating the radical elements who made themselves visible, but they were having a much more perilous time navigating the invisible gauntlet of small resistances the Atheists placed in their way.  Delayed responses from the Piraean Council, effectively tying the Knights’ hands in civil matters; the ubiquitous threat of petty theft and vandalism that compromised the movement of Blood Knight assets throughout the city; and the occasional assassination of Knights on patrol–retributed fiercely, but not fiercely enough to outweigh the attrition–all combined to ensure that the Knights’ existence in Piraeus remained decidedly hostile.  And where new Atheist aggressors seemed to spring up almost passively, owing to the unrest sowed by the noble families, new Knights…took six years to train.

It was, as the Knight Captain told me in a private meeting two weeks before my knighting ceremony, unsustainable.  Indeed, though I was not a Knight yet myself, I had felt the effects of the Atheists’ resistance keenly.  I had long since lost count of the meals I had skipped due to supply shortages, and just the previous month, Cassandra of Coralta–the Knight who had intervened on my father’s behalf at the city gates over a decade ago–had been killed when a group of Atheist riverwalkers pushed her from a pier in the harbor and held the water around her head until she asphyxiated.  She had been a mentor to me since I enlisted, and the rage that filled me when I heard the news has, to this day, only been equaled once.

It was for this reason especially that I was receptive to the assignment the Captain had for me in that meeting.  We could no longer ignore the Atheists’ inner workings, he said.  In all likelihood, they had an agent, an informant in the chapterhouse, and there was little we could do about it.  We simply could not afford to purge every Piraean from our ranks, and there was little else to go on.  The only sensible course of action was to manufacture a spy of our own.  I had the right characteristics, he said, and there was no one whose loyalty he trusted more.  It was a light blow to my pride that I would not have my knighthood recognized for some time–perhaps for years–but he knighted me there in his office.  Then, following a public and ignominious display of my expulsion from the chapterhouse for “disloyalty and heresy”, I was left on the streets of Piraeus to begin my mission.

Were the Atheists a centralized organization, I have little doubt that my chances of infiltration so soon after my exit from the chapterhouse would have been zero, pageantry or no.  But I knew they were not, and I knew the city guard had reason enough not to be suspicious of a new recruit.

If any faction had suffered worse attrition than the Knights in the Atheists’ protracted rebellion, it was Piraeus’ armed forces.  Since it was of the utmost importance that the Atheists did not establish anything resembling a fighting force, the guards and the navy had permanent places on the Knights’ list of usual suspects for any Atheist activity needing investigation.  Needless to say, damage to their ranks–both collateral and targeted–was substantial, and they were in constant need of new recruits to keep their numbers stable.  I had the martial skills they required, and they certainly did not have the luxury of investigating the unstated suspicions of the Piraean nobility.  They accepted my application without question, and within a few months, my history of allegiance to Piraeus’ “illegal occupiers” had been buried if not forgotten entirely.

The Peisistratan Myth

Sloppy and weird, but I kind of like it. A supplement to “The Apiarist”, borrowing from Thucydides via a particular frame.

It was a dark time for Piraeus after the fall of Kol.  Even though the oppressors were driven out, they left a vacuum behind, a vacuum filled all too readily by the greedy, the indolent, the tyrannical.  Many believed that in time, justice would win out, that the will of the people would once again reassert itself, but in fact, the opposite came to be.  

Eventually, a tyrant by the name of Thraseem Stratus seized power, and he was a terror the likes of which Piraeus had never seen.  He had the Council of Elders imprisoned or assassinated, stripping the people of their last vestiges of freedom and power.  His taxes broke the back of every citizen, from the wealthiest merchant to–far more frequently–the honest laborer.  And constantly, his spies skulked through the streets, listening at windows and stalls for words that might condemn–to slavery or death–anyone foolhardy enough to cry foul at this rape of their fair city.

But he had one weakness, and it was his lust that would be his undoing.  He took a man, a young winemaker named Modius, as his lover, and though his paranoia ran deep, Modius seemed to escape that suspicion.  And Modius did not hate Thraseem, but he saw what had become of Piraeus under his rule and knew it could not continue.  One night, Modius and his companion, named Alisto, snuck into Thraseem’s manor and stabbed him to death as he was dining.  Sadly, both Modius and Alisto were killed by Thraseem’s guards before they could escape, but their death was the spark that would set Piraeus ablaze.  The people rose up, they armed themselves, they imprisoned Thraseem’s guards and spies, and they convened a council of all citizens to ensure that no tyrant would ever grip the fortunes of their city again.  This was the new founding of Piraeus, the founding of democracy.

…

But do you believe that shit?

Do you believe that the noble people of this city were so swayed by Modius’ and Alisto’s sacrifice that they just…snapped out of it?  After tolerance for two generations of tyrants?

Do you believe that Thraseem was even a tyrant himself?  Do you wonder why histories of those years often mention that Thraseem had a brother–do you wonder how Erac Stratus factored into all of this?

Would you believe that Erac Stratus, son of Peren Stratus–who himself ousted the Blood Knights from Piraeus–was ruler of the city, with broad popular support?  Would you believe that Thraseem Stratus attempted to steal Modius from his lover, Alisto?  Would you believe that the two of them killed Thraseem for the cheap insult he delivered them after he was rejected?

Would you believe that Modius and Alisto were long in their graves when the tyranny of Erac Stratus, distraught after the death of his brother at the hands of those bickering mongrels, was at last inflicted upon Piraeus?

I’m sure you’re wondering why all of this should be hidden.  Why should a jilted lover be made into a villain?  Why should two weak men, willed to violence over the pettiest of disputes, be built into the heroes that “ushered in democracy”?

You’re asking the wrong question.  The real question is: What happened next?

Erac Stratus became a tyrant, yes, but he was not the intolerable yoke that Piraeus could not abide.  Not truly.  Eventually, tensions rose and his power waned, and circumstances conspired to remove him from power, but it was not Erac or his tyranny whose very memory would poison democracy, would doom this fantasy of self-governance before it escaped its infancy.  It was the circumstances.  It was the conspiracy.

You see, power in Piraeus has always been a product of alliance, and Erac knew this.  He knew which families to compromise, which relationships to dismantle.  He knew how to make his tyranny unassailable by the people of Piraeus alone.  The force behind the rebellion came from without, from a man banished from Piraeus since the fall of Kol.

Maybe you know who I’m describing.  Ezekiel Polyon.  The Blood Knight who helped Peren Stratus unify Piraeus under his rule, whom Peren betrayed when he slaughtered all the Kolai remaining in the city during the Dereliction.  The one now called Abbott Ezekiel of the Knights Ichneumonous.

Democracy had a goal, of course.  It was meant to ensure that never again would a tyrant grip the fortunes of Piraeus and its people.  But in order for it to succeed, a truth had to be buried, disavowed.  Because if history were recorded plainly, it would be plain to see: Even as Piraeus shouted to the world that it would not be denied its freedom, it sought out the oppression of Kol once again.

“The Apiarist”, Excerpt 5: The Right Side of History

I enlisted with the Blood Knights in the eighty-second year of the Blood God’s reign, when I was twenty years old.  This was somewhat older than most recruits, but my path in life had been dominated by other factors, and I had yet to seize any particular control over it.

The previous year, my father was stricken with a consumptive infection of the lungs and–mercifully, perhaps–passed quickly.  It wasn’t precisely the attack in Piraeus that had brought about his end: His injuries healed mostly, leaving him with a limp and limited function in his right eye.  But it had, in hindsight, been the beginning of a downward slide.

He, of course, did not return to the city from then on, for the very reasonable desire not to become a martyr or scapegoat to either side in the thinly-veiled conflict now ongoing between the Knights and Piraeus’ self-determinative Atheist faction.  But I suspected it was also deeper than that, a phobic unwillingness to face even the place, much less the people, which had subjected him to that trauma.  The result was that he was confined to our home and grounds, occupied by not busy, increasingly present and irritable to Mother, the servants, and myself.  That he was moving so much less than he had been, that even his limited mobility in that limited space was painful for him–it all meant that even before the infection set in, he had become little more than a cruel, vaporous reminder of his former self.  I found it striking that when he died, not even Mother truly mourned.

The legacy he left, though, was complicated for everyone.  Despite his many enemies, Father was still regarded as one of the most talented artisans in the region.  Our family’s honey fetched an outright exotic price as far away as Kol, and even despite our lifestyle of rural borderline-nobility, the business had been shockingly frugal.  It turned out Father had left behind a fortune in silver, valuable goods, and stock certificates in a number of successful merchant companies, each of which had been paying dividends for years.  The future of the apiary was, of course, uncertain, but it quickly became clear that Mother and I were in no danger of starvation.  What was less clear was whether either of us had any desire to carry on Father’s work.

Eventually we settled on a course.  Our head servant, Giuseppe, the very same servant who had sought help for Father the night of the attack, would take charge of the apiary, and when Mother passed, he would be the one to inherit it.  I, meanwhile, had taken my father’s rejection to heart and fully accepted I would have no future in beekeeping, truly assumed I had no aptitude for it.  And my mind had belatedly wandered to the political unrest in Piraeus, and tectonics of power I now saw shifting around us.  So it was with not insignificant enthusiasm that I renounced my inheritance and made my way to the city, determined to stand on the right side of history.

Despite my ardent opposition, I have little doubt that if the political skirmish I arrived in had taken place even twenty years later, the Atheists would have won handily.  Though the Knights were formidable warriors, anti-Kolai sentiment ran deeply through Piraeus, and they were outnumbered–possibly a hundred to one.  Their advantage was that the Uprising of the 79th was fresh in the collective memory of the Kolai dominion: Only three years earlier, the city of Cantabyz, the source of the majority of the Dominion’s iron, had declared open rebellion against the Magni Kolai.  The Blood God’s arrival at their gates–his first public appearance in a decade–claimed over 10,000 lives.

In the wake of this event, Piraeus’ cooler heads overwhelmingly opted to lie low, leavin the Knights to contend only with the Atheist’s firebrands.  My allegiances were unconflicted.  I had no grievance against the Kolai’s taxes, and the only meddling I had seen from the Knights had been clearly on the side of justice.  It did not matter that when I arrived at the chapterhouse, the squire on duty in the hall urged me to consider that I would very likely not become a Knight without any magical talent I knew about.  And it did not matter that my enthusiasm was met by a bemused chuckle from the only Knight in the hall at the time.  I had existed too long in a state of terror at the unbelonging I had felt from my father, from the apiary, from the indolent, insular people of Piraeus.  I knew that the Blood Knights–even simple service to the Blood Knights–was something greater that I would be glad to be part of.  The Knight Captain’s speculative nod, when it came time to provide him my reason for enlisting, was tepid vindication.  But it was enough.

“The Apiarist”, Excerpt 4: The Blood Knights of Piraeus

My first contact with the Blood Knights was when I was eleven years old.  Against my father’s wishes, I was made to accompany him into the city on a delivery to the Hospitality Quarter, as the servant who normally helped him with those trips had fallen ill.  It was a fraught journey, but I was familiar enough with the work that I no longer roused his anger, so long as I stayed quiet.

Some years later, I would become acquainted with a common template of a man: the type who charmes, who is a socialite to all except those with whom he lives–to them he is a terror.  As that template is well understood by many, I wish to emphasize that my father was very certainly not this type of man.  He was not merely irritable and angry to his family–he was irritable and angry to everyone, and, as I discovered on this trip, these qualities had earned him enemies in Piraeus.

At the gates of the city, we were stopped by a guard who requested, smirking lasciviously, that my father produce his licensure.  Rather than showing documents, my father handed over a large parcel of his goods before continuing through the gates.  He did not offer me any explanation, and I did not ask, but I found the interaction decidedly tense.  And I was not the only one–I distinctly recall the skeptical glance of the woman in armor on the other side of the checkpoint.

As we were finishing our third delivery, that same woman approached us, carrying the parcel Father had given the guard.

“Piraeus has no licensure requirements for apiarists,” she said.  “I guess you knew that, but extortion is also prohibited.  If it happens again, you can let us know at the chapterhouse.”

Father accepted the parcel, eyes down and jaw set with an emotion that seemed perturbed but otherwise lacked definition.  When we passed back through the gates on our way home, the guard we had spoken with was no longer there, and the one who had taken his place fixed us with a look of such hatred that I could not bear to hold his gaze.

I was at the time too young, too sheltered to understand the political implications of what occurred that day, but as my role facilitating Father’s deliveries expanded, the situation grew clearer:

In those days, Piraeus was ruled by a council of elders who nominally commanded the loyalty of the city’s entrenched aristocracy.  It had been this way for as long as most citizens could remember, but where, a century ago, Piraeus had taken pride in being the last stronghold of Riverlander rule unswayed by the machinations of Spar, the city had finally surrendered rather than face ruin at the hands of the Blood God.  Even now, there were many Piraeans who resented this obeisance, who refused to recognize the Blood Knights’ authority to oversee and overrule the city’s various administrative functions.  That the Knights were largely hands-off and demonstrably less corrupt than their local counterparts–a notion for which the incident at the gate was, to me, irrefutable evidence–was beside the point.  Nor did it matter that the Blood Knights in Piraeus were a majority ethnically-Piraean: The Kolai were outsiders, and those that bent the knee were, behind certain doors, traitors.

Of course, when those criticisms emerged publicly, the repercussions were severe.  A month after that first incident, a group of guards, displeased with the Blood Knights intervening on his behalf, ambushed my father in the midst of his deliveries.  They destroyed his goods and beat him so severely that his servant had to fetch me and a separate wagon in order to bring him back home.  And though, to my knowledge, Father never reported the incident, the Knights seemingly discovered the incident on their own.  They massacred the city’s peacekeeping force, assuming their duties for the better part of a year, and the guards’ flayed and exsanguinated corpses were hung from the city walls for months after the altercation.

Father never set foot in Piraeus again.  I never learned whether he had a stance of his own on the Blood Knights’ rule.  He certainly did not seek their aid–I discovered from his ledgers that he had been paying bribes to the guards for over a decade.  But that was a stable arrangement: He was paying for his ill repute among the citizens.  It had nothing to do with the Blood Knights, and it was not by his will that his business became a battleground in their fight over who would control their hive.

“The Apiarist” Excerpt 3: A Lesson on Free Magic

“I do so hate these commencement speeches, but our mission can get so muddled in all the regimens and pageantry and Sacristi; especially out here, so far from Kol…”

It was customary, the Knight Captain had explained, that each new class of recruits receive its first training in Kol’s sacred art from the visiting Magnia that year.  It was a great honor, and exposure to the Magni was otherwise highly limited.  Command of the Blood Knights mixed only tepidly with the ranks of the Migni Kolai, the World City’s administrators and functionaries, and promotion to civilian office from the Blood Knight rank and file was vanishingly rare.  And it was almost unheard of that any of these should join the company of the Magni, the Blood God’s high priests.  Kol’s leaders, for the most part, were born rather than made.  So to be close to a Magnia, to have her attention, was not to be squandered.

Even at the time, though, I was under little illusion as to how practical the instruction would be.  The chapterhouse’s senior squires had already put us through remedial arms training, and I was well familiar with how foundational any introduction to a martial art would have to be.  And of course, we had little time: Magnia Livia was important, and we, plainly, were not.

This impression proved only partially correct.  I did not learn to call the Blood that day–that would be a process of slow growth over decades, as it was for nearly every recruit–but the pith she did dispense was more impactful than all the tutelage I would soon receive from lesser teachers.  She began with a demonstration:

“As I’m sure you all know,” she said, unsheathing a razor, “the armament our God wields is blood, and the strength by which he wields it is violence.”  She cut a deep line from her elbow to her wrist and turned her palm upward.  Solid, sharp tendrils of blood erupted from the wound.  She continued:

“Both violence and blood exist within all of us which is both blah blah blah and blegh blegh blegh…”

Rolling her eyes, she shook her arm, and the writhing tendrils collapsed in a wet cascade, which seeped back up into her arm as she turned to us.

“You will learn how to do that with a lot of practice, and you’ll learn the apologetics and justifications–probably with a bit less practice.  But all of that–the weapons and discipline–is what we use to maintain our strength.  None of it is, by itself, going to tell you what it’s for, and the lot of you are going to be damned miserable excuses for knights if you can’t grasp why the Blood God sent us out here in the first place!

“To that point,” she said, “consider a bit of heresy.”

Once again, she drew her razor from her elbow to her wrist, but this time, instead of a roiling scourge of blood, a blast of flame surged from the wound, engulfing her arm and prompting more than one of us to stagger backward at the sudden wave of heat.  And then, just as suddenly, the flame extinguished, and her flesh knit itself back together.

“The Blood God decreed Free Magic, so we mustn’t forget that the arts of the pyromancer, the Greyskin, the beastman–all are like to ours.  Free Magic means that never again shall a tyrant claim control over the potential that lies within us.  That is the legacy the Blood Knights are meant to protect.  We do not cultivate strength for its own sake, we don’t imitate our God out of vanity, and we certainly don’t become strong so we can bully the weak.  You are protectors, and it will serve you to learn a thing or two about what you aim to protect!”

“The Apiarist” Excerpt 2: Fear of Bees

My father kept bees, and it terrified me.  Perhaps it was some shameful regard I had for him manifesting in how I saw the creatures.  He did not care for me, and he showed me little more than disdain throughout my childhood.  He barely spoke to me, though the harsh glares and the terse dismissals hurt far more keenly than the sting of the switch when he had the servants discipline me for indolence or insolence or whichever transgression he decided must have brought me into the room with him in that moment.  It was my being there, I now understand, which was my true sin.  The wound still aches occasionally.  I still think it cruel that a father should so resent his son’s presence, though I’ve come to understand his reasons better.

In any event, my terror at his diminutive livestock was certainly not empirical.  I never earned their ire, and they never stung me, but I maintain it was quite rational.

“Stay away from the hives,” Mother would warn me when I ventured into the yard while Father was away.  “If you bother them, they will sting you.”
She frequently mentioned the servant who, when I was very young, toppled a hive by accident and perished thereafter in agony.  I worried that if the creatures were as irritable as Father, even catching sight of those ominous, thrumming boxes would put me in danger.  But I know there was something more.  I would encounter lone bees and wasps hovering about the flowers in front of our house, and though I took the same care with these solitary specimens, I felt none of the visceral fear in approaching them that I did in the apiary.  A bee was just a creature to me.  Like me, in a way, with needs and fears and priorities.  But the buzz–the swarm–was something else.  All of those needs, all of those fears, all of those bodies.  It was chaos.  It was too much.

“The Apiarist” Excerpt 1: Magnia Livia

I’ve begun writing a long story/short novella in the Piraeus-headspace (like the Halia and Dreamfish pieces, except way longer and way more tangential), and I’ll be posting the mostly-unedited segments here. Highly unfinished and likely not at all in the order they’ll be for the finished product, but hopefully good reading.

The one who visited the chapterhouse that season was named Livia–Magnia Livia, the Knight Captain enforced, for failure to address the Magni by their proper title was punishable by Sacristi.  She arrived in Piraeus, as was traditional for Kolai dignitaries, in a palanquin suspended on barbed handles carried by chanting acolytes–the Order of the Blades of Kol, temporarily bereft of their deific wielder–steps perfectly synchronized, immaculate, precise control belied by mania stitched in bloodshot eyes.  I remember finding it at once appropriate and deeply unnatural.  I saw in it a reflection of the rules and ritual of the chapterhouse–though perhaps I was merely part of the mirror image–in turn a careful mold to the deliberate equities and geometries of Piraeus itself, though this was an irony I would not realize until much later.  

But in their hymns and mutilations I could sense a current connecting them, focusing them in burning passion toward horrifyingly singular end.  I did not know why the feeling was familiar to me, nor why I found it so perverse, but I was possessed of many misconceptions back then.  So was the Knight Captain, it turned out.

Prior to the Magnia’s arrival, the Knights had sorted us according to their impressions of our magical aptitude, toward vocations of knight, servant, or squire as our capabilities allowed, but even then, in the “Era of Free Magic”, certain forms of mana were repellant enough that cultural awareness of them all but vanished with distance from the World City.  The Blood Knight chapterhouse in Piraeus thus had minimal record of the mana currents that existed in the microsensory networks of swarms, they did not look for those currents in their recruits, and they had little ability to find them even if they were so inclined.  But this was part of the reason the Magni supervised the recruiting process.

I was surprised to find that Magnia Livia showed little regard to the stiff sort of ritual espoused by the Blood God’s other faithful.  Far from the Knight Captain’s stone-faced severity–an attitude I had come to understand as the invariable face of the Kolai–Livia was warm, mirthful, middle-aged and slightly overweight, but effusively energetic.  Upon her first tour of the chapterhouse, she loudly bemoaned the asceticism of the squires’ quarters, the kitchens’ stores of spices, the frequency with which Sacristi was exacted from the servants:

“‘It is not suffering for which we care,’” she said, quoting Kolai scripture.  “Stop this at once, Captain.”

I found it odd at the time that the Knight Captain was willing to suffer such admonishment from a bureaucrat, but I was naive.  I later learned that Livia could have eviscerated him with a gesture were she truly displeased–a prowess I saw for myself in the Dereliction when she slaughtered a militia of over 300 before the Lady of the Flies overwhelmed her.  And it proved I would owe far more of my fate to Livia than the Knight Captain.  It seemed I had potential of which I was unaware, and she recognized it immediately.
“You’ve misjudged these ones,” she remarked to him, patting me and two other would-be squires on the head.  And with that single gesture she altered my destiny.  No longer was I to be a foot soldier to an institution that bound the world by code, by a paradigm of sense to match its chaos.  I was to be a leader of that institution, and I was to discover all the degrees of deeply unsustainable freedom it allowed itself.

One Wing, One Eye, Chapter 4: Unwelcome Participants

“What the fuck is this?” Marko snapped, lifting his hood as he scuttled into Brill’s backroom infirmary.  He started as the Homunculus turned to face him.

“It may be more efficient,” the Homunculus said to Brill in its unnaturally even, unnervingly human tone, “if you were to gather all of the appropriate audience prior to further discussion.  It will save time on repeated explanations.”

Brill shook their head, beckoning Marko closer and stepping past him to draw the curtain that divided the infirmary from the rest of their shop.

“Now was that sarcasm?” they asked.  The Homunculus looked back to them, moving only its head and neck.  While seated, the construct remained almost perfectly still, save for the limited gestures it used to facilitate its stilted communication.

“Monk’s great at sarcasm,” Naples added.  “Gave us some real zingers on the way here.”

“Fucking wh–”

“Your name is ‘Monk’, then?” Brill asked, cutting off Marko’s outburst.

“I was designated the title ‘Homunculus’,” the construct replied.  “You may call me whatever you find serviceable.  This one has elected the moniker ‘Monk’.”

“Quick-witted as ever, Mr. Naples.”

“Isn’t this the guy you threw out of here two weeks ago?” Marko interjected.

“I did, yes,” Brill sighed.  “But when he arrived with my erstwhile charges, themselves safe from what al’Ver concurs as a harrowing journey to the Reach, I thought it perhaps worth our time to entertain some discussion as to how this discovery relates to the Crossroads.  As to why I sent for you, Marko, I trust you can see what is in plain sight?”

“Quit with the fuckin’ riddles and get to the fuckin’…” Marko trailed off as he scanned the room, his eyes focusing on the parting of Monk’s cloak.  “Motherfucker.  That’s the Keystone, ain’t it?”

“Indeed,” Monk confirmed.

“Ah…” Marko exhaled, somehow giving the impression of smiling and scowling at the same time.  “I don’t suppose you also brought Ehsam back with you, Naple man?”

“It’s, um, it’s Naples, thank you.  And no.  Ty Ehsam is–”

“Skulking about somewhere but not dumb enough to show his face, got it.”

Naples frowned momentarily before he realized the expression only served to confirm Marko’s cold read.

“Calm, Mr. Naples,” Brill said, noting the shape curled on the bed in the back of the infirmary, stirring.  “We are not in a position to turn Mr. Ehsam over to the Blaze at present, as much as we all would like to be rid of that threat.  And I imagine Commander Atra might try to sabotage such an exchange, from what Bleeding Wolf has told us of her goals.”

“So…?” Naples prodded.

“So it’s still best he’s in hiding,” Marko said.  “Us knowin’ about him’s the least of your concerns.  That still don’t answer my first question–” he gestured at Monk, “–the fuck are you?”

“Please explain again…Monk,” Brill added.  “The only person left who ought to hear is Bleeding Wolf, and I cannot say when he will be joining us.”

As Monk recounted its purpose–its scenario, the Alchemist’s plan to avert some prophesied end of the world–Brill idly wondered how credulous they ought to be at it all.  Though popular legend made Excelsis out to be a sort of magical genius–and Monk’s presence in their shop was perhaps even proof of that–they one thing they had never heard of magic having any success with was prophecy.  The histories they had read were dotted with accounts of charlatans who attempted to parlay spurious–though difficult to disprove–half-predictions into political influence.  But these histories all culminated in situations where those regimes with supposed access to magical foresight found ruin by pointedly unforeseen circumstances.

The Bloodfish’s rise completely obliterated the Highlord’s unsuspecting hegemony.  All the Sun Priests of Khet could not, apparently, predict the ascendancy of the Dead Queen.  And even the vaunted prophecy said to have fueled the reign of the Iron Queen of Spar–the sourceless and vaguely-worded “magic will destroy the world”–seemed, in the scope of history, to be little more than post-hoc justification for the Right-Hand Diarch’s consolidation of power.

And putting the conceptual issues with prophecy aside , the particulars of this one invited skepticism.  The Night Sky?  The Old Gods?  They weren’t real.  Sure, there was historical evidence of their worship, but people might worship any old thing.  The forces of Harmony believed Matze Matsua was an incarnation of some godlike spirit, but he died like any other man when he was gored by a roach.  Before the War, the followers of Le Marquains reportedly worshipped bulimia.  Hell, Bleeding Wolf still counted himself part of a cult that worshipped the color green!

The shape on the bed had sat upright, and Brill caught Devlin’s face, shaded by the boy’s tattered hood, staring, lidded with exhaustion but nonetheless fascinated by the construct’s locutions.

“And thus it is of paramount importance that the site of the Night Sky’s awakening be located expediently,” Monk concluded.  “It was Captain al’Ver’s belief that we might investigate that question here.  And Brill recommended we consult you, as you have expertise in creations such as myself.”

Brill nodded in agreement.

“What do you make of it, Marko?” they asked.  Marko shrugged, grimacing.

“What do I make of it?  I don’t sell abominations anymore,” he spat.  “Though…I’ve a few clients who–”

“Abomination?!” Naples exclaimed.

“Technical term,” Marko replied, distractedly calculating what Brill could only assume was a sales offer on their guest.  “Any artifact that seems to be alive.  Messy fuckin’ business, but–”

“Regardless, Monk is not for sale!”

“Indeed, Marko,” Brill interjected.  “My query for you was not regarding commerce.”

“Well then what the fuck was it regarding?  I don’t know shit about the Keystone–and I woulda bet you no one’s interest in it was more’n speculative in the first place.  And if you want my opinion on the end of the world story, it’s horseshit.  If the tinker toy here ain’t a commercial opportunity, I can’t fuckin’ fathom why you want my opinion.”

Brill glanced at Monk, but if the construct was alarmed or offended at Marko’s outburst, it did not show it.

“I was hoping, my friend, that you might consider this development from a different angle.”

“Talk straight or I’m leavin’,” Marko growled.  Brill sighed.

“Self-preservation, Marko,” they said.

“Eh?”

“The Blaze’s momentum toward us is being used to justify meddling in your business that you don’t much appreciate, yes?”

Marko held their gaze for a moment before nodding slowly.

“An’ you think that whatever prophetic interaction this thing has prepped can be used as leverage.”

“I have no idea whether such a thing is feasible, of course,” Brill added.  “But if it is, I would consider you best equipped to determine it.  Ideally before Atra does.”

Brill glanced again at Devlin, still staring from afar, half his face concealed by his hood.  The boy seemed different since his return, they realized.  He was still quite ill, of course, but beneath his labored breathing and evident weakness, a sort of grim determination had overcome his catatonia.  Brill could not imagine Devlin held any stake in the intrigue to which he was listening so intently.  They could only wonder where all that determination was aimed.

“So…who is this ‘Atra’, anyway?” Naples asked.  Before anyone could answer, the creak of Brill’s shop door wheezed from beyond the infirmary curtain, along with the sound of voices.  Brill motioned to Naples, who readily intuited the alarm in the gesture.  He quietly escorted Monk to the corner of the infirmary and draped the construct in a bulky canvas sheet.

“Now you must promise to rest, my dear,” came Lan al’Ver’s voice from the next room, followed by the trudge of approaching footsteps.  “Your journey has been arduous, and it is no weakness to admit it!”

“It seems there was no cause for concern after all, Captain…” Atra’s voice was fainter, trailing off as the door creaked shut again.  Then Orphelia drew the infirmary curtain aside, only to freeze as she beheld the veritable crowd within.

“Mr. Marko…” she said.  It was an almost-gasp, as if she lacked the energy to be properly surprised.  Brill noted with some concern that the aura of mischief she’d had in her brief visit to the shop a few hours ago had given way to a demeanor that seemed practically haunted.

Marko looked from her to Brill.

“Gonna go,” he muttered uncomfortably.  

He slipped past Orphelia and made his way out as Brill approached the girl, wary that she seemed somewhat far from alright.  Like Devlin, she seemed different as well.  Older, they decided.  By several years.  They could have sworn that she was a child when they took her in a few weeks ago, but now she seemed nearly old enough to be married.  That could not have been a lapse in attention, they thought.  There had to be something more…complex affecting the girl.

“What’s wrong, Orphelia?” they asked, setting aside their suspicions for now.  She shook her head, looking up at them vacuously.

“Nothing…” she said.  “You aren’t smiling.  And that’s…good.  Probably.”

***

This wasn’t good, Atra thought, reentering the jail.  She stood over the desk, shuffling parchment absentmindedly.  The girl.  Something was not right about the girl.  She could not tell what, and that by itself was perhaps cause for alarm.

Orphelia was indeed a mage, that was certain.  Bleeding Wolf had said as much–though he had deliberately omitted detail–but it was more than that.  Not a concrete observation, not a characteristic Atra could see, but a feeling: like a paranoid delusion that something was just over her shoulder, just out of sight, but only when she was near Orphelia.  That feeling was magic she had never seen before, and she had seen quite a bit.  

Never mind the shock of it, though.  She had researched the deep lore of the Riverlands extensively, and though the complication Orphelia presented was outside her expertise, it was unlikely to be outside her knowledge entirely.

A different angle, then: The girl had been traveling with al’Ver, “retrieved” from the Chateau de Marquains, as he had relayed to Bleeding Wolf.  This meant the girl had made a journey south…a week’s journey to the Reach, a week’s journey back with al’Ver.  The captain had been gone about two weeks, yes.  But so had the girl, according to a conversation Cirque had overheard from Brill.  Had he…chased her down to the Reach?  That was impossible.  No one could elude al’Ver on a river for a whole week.  His “experience” as a boatman aside, the magical forces involved in that proposition made the certainty of him catching her almost categorical.

Which meant he wasn’t chasing her.  He knew she would be at the Reach.  And if he meant to retrieve a teenage girl from the Chateau de Marquains of all places , she had to imagine his hurry would supersede his preference for conventional travel.

Which meant she wasn’t there in the intervening week.  She was merely going to be there at the end of it.

She had left the stream.

And the Chateau de Marquains…the Saraa Sa’een.  Fucking shit.

It was all Atra could do to keep from punching through a corner of the jailer’s desk.  It wasn’t a certainty, no, but if the girl was a locus of the Gyre, it would dwarf every other cause for concern she and Cirque had yet found.  Marko’s scrying attempts, Brill’s political feints, even al’Ver–an incarnate primal storm, albeit one she was pretty sure she could sidestep–all of these were minor distractions compared to the prospect of being warped into the circular story, the Smiling Lie and the Promised Vengeance.  Al’Ver could be convinced to stay out of things.  The Gyre, though, existed almost exclusively to meddle.

Her ears perked up at the telltale sound of skittering in the jail hallway.  Odd.  Cirque was early tonight.  She looked over her shoulder to see him stalk into the room, frustration more apparent than usual on his face.

“Weird stuff going on at the apothecary,” he said.  His tone was quiet but still cuttingly clear.  “Al’Ver came back with a talking construct that’s trying to find the ‘place where the Night Sky will awaken’.  Marko’s trying to use it to keep the mayor away from his toys, and it gets worse.”

“We might be in the Gyre right now,” Atra replied grimly.  Cirque stared at her, his frustration visibly giving way to worry as he slouched back against the wall.

“No shit.”  He paused.  “You sure?  You see the old man or something?”

“No.  Not yet.  But I’m fairly certain there’s a locus in this town.”

“So we might not be in it yet?”

“Right,” she said.  “But I’m not sure we have the luxury of keeping to the background right now.  An’ I hate to run.”  Cirque snarled at nothing in particular.

“Worthless town,” he muttered.  “Rotten scheme.  Can the Gyre be counteracted magically?”

“Hard to say.  Only information we’ve got is that’s ensnared many a powerful mage.  Catherine of Greypass was said to be one of the greatest Blood Knights of Kol.  Jin Gaenyan was supposedly formidable enough to have the Barabadoon on ‘is tail even before he became a monster.  An’ Feathermen records suggest even the bloody Masked Alpha got pulled in before the War.  But there’s ambiguity.”

“Ambiguity?”

“Did they get pulled in?  Or did they enter of their own accord?”

Cirque scowled.

“That’s a greedy fucking question.”

“‘Tis.  But we may never get a chance like this again.  The whole damn horizon’s dyin’, an’ a barren waste just won’t burn.  No fire for me, no feast for ye.”

“I hate this argument.”

“Come now.  Isn’t it exciting there’s a player in this game that might best us?”

“Two,” Cirque spat.  Atra raised an eyebrow.

“Pardon?”

“Two players.  The boy al’Ver brought to town–”

“Not the girl?”

“No, not the girl.  The fucking boy.  He reeks of feathers.”

“…feathers?”

“Feathers, you arrogant musclehead.  Like the Feathermen and the Sadist.  Like Ka’s palace.  Like her.”

Dreamfish

Another flash-story in the same setting as The Praetor “From Thazan”.

You’ve never seen a dreamfish.  You think you can say whether they exist or not?  Shut your idiot mouth.  You can barely feel the mana you’re huffin’ on a good day–doubt you’ll even comprehend what the dreamfish are swimmin’ in.  Yeah. You gotta comprehend before you can see it–it’s backwards that way.

What?  Ain’t satisfied?  Tough shit.  I didn’t tell you that to convince you it was true.  I told you because it is true, and I hoped you’d hear it and then go the fuck away.  This is a sizeable establishment.  Go find some other corner to infest. 

But. 

You’re still here.  You’ll have to pardon me–it’s difficult to tell the difference between curiosity and envy these days, and no, I will not elaborate.  But you haven’t fucked off yet, and I’m thinkin’ you may have a mind to act on this, so fine.  I’ll share more.  Ain’t like it’s gonna hurt me.

So you ever met a Sunsinger?  Like one of those sleazy storyteller types with the “gather round! Gather round!” who’ll sit against the wall like that’un there and slur out some half-baked folklore while picking your pocket for ale?  Or maybe you just know the generic variety?  Whatever–bardic tradition is dying like everything else.  Even the generics are liable to break out the creation story, though.  You know: Night Sky dreams the world and three animals–three Old Gods–wheedle their way into its stewardship.  But then there are other stories–sometimes with the same gods, sometimes new ones.  Like the one where the Night Sky breaks the Fox’s nose.  Were they fighting–as the Diarchians told it–over the campfire he built or over the scarab he mentored in the Khettite myth?  Particularly: Were there Old Gods besides the three?

Short answer’s yes.

Longer answer, well, you get that the Blood God was just a mage, right?  A fucking strong one, yeah, you don’t just jump from drip-drinking mana to leveling cities, but he wasn’t the first one to brush up against the metaphysical.  What?  Does it seem so unbelievable that animals can learn magic?  That the world’s first super-mage was a fucking fox?  Keep your shoes on.  It gets weirder still.

History’s hard, and I’ll spare you the details, but it’s likely the Old God pantheon was way bigger than the old Kolai orthodoxy taught.  All the spirits and “gods” you heard about in the stories, the Scarab, the Moon Lily, the Wendigo: They were all probably rolling with capital G’s.

You…don’t get it?  Fucking godshell, kid.  If you take nothing else from this conversation, you ought to learn to read.

Anyway, obvious assumption: The world’s finite.  Where’d that come from?  Shut the fuck up and pay attention.  The world’s a dream, right, and a dream has a beginning, an end, and boundaries: limits in psychic time and space.  The substance of the world is mana, death, not an especially great outlook, but that ain’t my point.  My point is: What happens at the end of the world?  Is there mana and then, just, nothing?  Don’t give me that “no one’s ever seen the end of the world” crap.  It’s a fucking embarrassment.

Kid, we’re in Piraeus.  If you wanna see the edge of the world, go outside and just look west.  It’d be one thing if no one who sailed over that horizon ever returned, but I challenge you to name one person who ever tried.  You can’t, right?  You think maybe someone has to have had this idea before because it’s so damn obvious, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: Lots of people have sailed west before.  You don’t remember them because they aren’t in the dream anymore.  Oh, they’re dead too–that ain’t ambiguous, but we’re getting to it.

So engrave this in your memory: I’ve gone there.  It don’t look like much, not to your eyes, just open water and clear-ish sky, but if you’re attuned to it, the mana out there is strange.  It’s not nothing, but there’s a gradient, a blurry, gradual frontier where the death loses its structure.  It stops making things, stops enforcing causal relationships.  And it’s hard to perceive, even if you can channel mana, because more than likely it’s taking all the focus you’ve got to keep your mind from unraveling.  Buf if you somehow get that down, all you gotta do to see them is look up.

They’re everywhere out there.  Dreamfish.  These swirling loci of that proto-mana, maybe just eddies in the entropy that laps at the border of the Night Sky’s mind–but they’re stable enough to persist for awhile.  And make no mistake, they’re fucking dangerous.  They’ve got these tentacles dragging from ‘em, and if they touch you, they’ll spiralize your soul, take your essence and slurp it like chowder in a whirlwind.  The fuck is that metaphor?  It’s messy and ugly, just like the process.  Should watch it sometime.

So that’s why you can’t see ‘em.  But that ain’t why you’re asking, is it?  This ain’t about me and my crazy talk.  You’re bothering me because you heard about dreamfish out there, and you heard about dreamfish out there because of Legion.  The Cult’s schism has blown this whole business public, and now crazy Edward’s crazy stories aren’t so crazy anymore.  Fuck you all, it was easier when you thought I was crazy, because now you think I’m important, but you still aren’t going to listen.  You think that the problem is that Legion’ll swarm the Hospitality Quarter again or some other nonsense, because you can’t bear another look into the infinity mirror of the society you chose.  You can’t stand knowing that you’re all the same.

No, the problem is the Cult.  The problem is Glaucus.  The problem is the Old God we found out here at the edge of the world eating dreamfish–the Old God who we couldn’t just leave alone.  The problem is that half this city is high on a kraken’s dandruff and can’t give up the notion that their psychoplasmic degradation must mean something.  You can take it or leave it, but the truth is it ain’t worth shit.  You’ve been offered the Terminal Man’s product by now, yeah?  My advice is you fucking decline.  Only thing down that way is suffering and an eventual cessation of existence.

Oh, what is that sneer?  A tepid fucking thing, like you wanna fight with an “or flight” in parentheses.  Had a taste, have you?  Carry the fuck on, then.  I know where you’ll end up eventually.  It is inevitable.