JADE 2.7: MOURNING BELLS
“Shallow lie the dead
Whose hearts are turned from his grace
Restless and waiting
Remain with me, love
Your greatest sacrifice mine
Nothing left to fear”
– from ‘Gravensongs’
I was still keeping a lid on it. I’d let it out later, when no one was looking, where no one could hear. Where no one could burn to death.
It’d been so close. The idiot had nearly burned me; I almost killed him by protecting myself, and a part of me had just wanted to let him burn.
Telrose.
Morsus.
I clenched my fist as I strode out of the warehouse under the cloudy pre-dawn sky, Avaelar following closely behind me.
It was so obvious. I suspected when I gave him the plat that it’d be the death of him, and I did it anyway.
It was my fault.
“There was nothing you could’ve done differently, nothing you could’ve known in advance.”
She said for the twelfth time.
My advisor wisely didn’t bother replying again.
The girl was waiting for us in the alley, and then together the three of us walked past the pair of thugs that’d been on watch, now flopping about uselessly on the ground with just their mouths exposed – their faerie-parchment bindings would disappear the moment the sun hit them, which would be a few hours off yet.
We moved down the passage, skirting a vicious-looking pack of alley-cats, to turn onto the street. The girl was leading just a half a pace ahead of me – I made sure we were out of earshot before I spoke.
“How did he do that?” I asked in a rather grating voice. Zel hadn’t had a clue either, but the girl might know.
To her credit, she seemed to realise straight away what I was getting at. “He ate inkatra. It empowers the devourer, for a brief time.”
As we walked I looked her up and down, and not for the first time. She was a mess. Hair that was probably dark brown hanging in black-looking clumps, sodden with sweat; her plain smock was stained with what smelt like blood to my heightened senses (leaving aside the wine, which was technically my fault). She was probably five-seven, five-eight at a push, and would’ve been attractive with her oval face and button-nose if it weren’t for the addict’s fever in her eyes, the general dishevelled appearance. She had my colouration, my accent; she’d probably grown up around here, not ten minutes’ walk from Mud Lane, but I’d never seen her before.
“Is that what’s happened to you?” I asked. “Inkatra?”
“Not exactly,” she said, with a tinkling laugh. “I just became an arch-diviner.”
“Told you. That’s why it all changed.”
I didn’t doubt it, did I?
“An arch-diviner – that’s how you moved like that,” I said aloud. I couldn’t help recollecting my late-night visit from Duskdown, the way he sped up and slowed down seemingly at will. “What was that man to you? The one you beat halfway to death.”
She chuckled. “He had it coming, Feychilde, trust me.”
I cast her a sidelong glance. “It appears you have the better of me…?”
She glanced back at me, meeting my gaze, then moved her eyes across the street, pointedly staring at the various beggars and drunkards who were still awake, still moving, watching us. At least six of them, probably spurred on in their curiosity by the very unusual sylph following dutifully along behind us.
And she was staring at them for my benefit, to let me see them, let me understand why she spoke quietly when she said –
“Killstop.”
“Kill…” I repeated, mumbling. I paused – I almost forgot to keep pace with her.
I got the message immediately, but – seriously?
Eventually I tried a dubious, “Bless you?”
She flashed an intense grin at me that would’ve suited my mask.
“Killstop. It’s the number one job of a champion. That’s who I’m going to be.”
“You don’t think it’s a little on-the-nose?”
“It’s no Waterwizard, but I tried my best,” she replied with relish.
Waterwizard hadn’t lasted long; a rumour went around a couple of years back that he’d been specifically killed on account of the obnoxiousness of his chosen moniker.
I opened my mouth to give voice to this notion but she raised a hand, cutting me off before my tongue even started up.
“I know what you’re going to say, and there’s no simple way to put it… I’ve already seen glimpses of me going by other names, and they’re not half as fun. Why’d you think Everseer went all out on it?”
I caught myself almost smiling, then put down the emotion furiously.
My fist was still clenched.
Diviners… almost as bad as enchanters, I growled internally.
“Hey now, nothing’s as bad as –“
Not now, Zel… Look, take a trip to the otherworld, will you?
And I could tell that she was gone.
We walked on, into the thick blanket of smog lying over the street.
“Killstop… I can’t imagine the darkmages taking that very seriously.”
“Feychilde: I can’t imagine the darkmages taking that very seriously either,” she parroted back.
I gave her another look-over. Her skipping step. The distracted smile on her face.
I waved a hand behind myself, gesturing at the silent figure in my summon’s arms, his breast rising and falling gently in time with his shallow breathing. “And this guy my sylph’s hauling?”
“My boyfriend,” she said with a shrug.
“You’re not acting like your boyfriend just nearly died.”
“I’m not acting like my dad just died either,” she said in an observational tone.
Her dad just died?
There was so much death going around.
I felt my brows furrow behind my mask. Perhaps her behaviour made a little more sense to me now – she’d experienced a major bereavement, then got a bunch of mind-screwing powers right on top of that grief. She was probably absorbing herself into the past, or the future, or distant places… whatever exactly it was that diviners got up to when their minds drifted.
“That’s… true,” I said, then hedged; “is there anything you… you know… wanted to talk about?”
“I wish I’d done it years ago?” she replied, still with that trill of laughter in her voice.
“You did it?”
My brain instantly started grasping at straws again for a means to take on an arch-diviner in a fight, but I could tell she wasn’t hostile, wasn’t a killer. She was young and confused and probably suffering from some incredibly savage mental scarring. There were probably only a few years between us… she was probably the age I was when my own mum and dad died…
“Xaba did, I suppose,” she said. There was softness to her voice now, a sadness. “Or Father did it to himself. But it isn’t about placing blame.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t see you sending frantic messages to the watch about the criminals you just tied up.” The sorrow was already gone from her voice, her eyes lighting back up with that drug- or divination-inspired intensity.
“I… Yes. I guess you’re right.” I had the glyphstone – it’s not like it would’ve been difficult to get them arrested. It was hard to put into words; I settled on giving her the summarised version. “I don’t mean to throw drop on the watch – they do their best, I’m sure, and the work must truly suck. But they can lock up or hang as many criminals as they want – gods know, most of them deserve it – but there’ll just be more to fill the gaps tomorrow… And what’s worse, there’d be three times as many, all wanting a piece of the pie, killing each other in the alleys for the right to the territory… I don’t exactly approve of the present state of affairs, but it isn’t really my job, is it? Fiends made out of razors, check. Gigantic regenerating spiders, sure. But a gang of petty thieves and bullies? Beyond destroying their cache I don’t really know what else I can do. I might be wrong, and…”
I looked across at her. The girl’s eyes were shining as she stared over her shoulder at me, still walking ahead, stepping around obstacles and over puddles of gunk without even looking.
“Aaand… They’re going to have a hell of a time anyway. Those bindings are impenetrable to ordinary blades, and I very much doubt they’ve got a cutlery drawer full of magical weapons hanging around, so they’re only going to get out when they’re put under direct sunlight. I wonder how long it’ll take them to figure that out.”
“Willow Jonsen and The Stain will be freed first, then,” she said brightly.
“The… Stain? If that’s what they’re called…”
“I’m afraid so. And here you were, worrying about ‘Killstop’!”
“You don’t think you’re going to attract darkmages with a name like that? I mean – Waterwizard –“
“Who says that isn’t exactly what I’m going for?”
She gave it a brazen, overconfident spin that fired off warning signals in my head yet again.
“Are you?”
“Of course not,” she said with a snort of disbelief. “But I’ll have my fair share of fights, trust me. Might even win a few.”
There would be no dissuading her.
But I might be able to help stop her getting killed.
“Fine… Killstop.”
It’d taken this long for me to twig onto the fact that the real reason she was disturbing me so much was that she was very similar to me. The way she used barbs to demonstrate her new status. Acting as though she didn’t care whether she lived or died. Throwing herself into the role of a champion with even less consideration than I’d used at first.
She almost looked manic. Was this how I’d looked a few weeks ago, to those around me? They hadn’t known the truth – only Zel had known, and whenever Xantaire or Orstrum or… Whenever they asked me what was up, I’d always diverted them with hastily-constructed excuses. I was off in my own world half the time, hardly any worse after my ‘awakening’ than I’d been before it – even at work I’d be busy thinking of ways to persuade Jaid and Jar to read the book I was reading, or just daydreaming about being one of the characters…
No. I rejected the idea. There was no way I’d ever looked like she did right now. She looked alive – she stank like a dead cat – a drunk dead cat – but she looked alive, in some intangible way that was quite simply beyond me.
Arch-diviners. Duskdown said something about going mad.
We crossed the street, her feet taking her off the boardwalk and onto the muck of the roadway a split-second before I would’ve done it. She certainly knew where she was going.
I supposed just about everyone would know where the Shrine of Wythyldwyn was located, deep in Cutter Crew country – it was impossible to miss. There would be the perpetual queue of beggars and supplicants stretching from the outer gates all the way to the corner. ‘Queue’ might’ve been too-nice a word for it – a squirming, flea-bitten morass of bodies and odours, arranged in a vague line down the side of the street. There was some semblance of order, but not out of any sense of fair-play – it was just that most of those in the crowd were simply too ill to claw their way to the front.
We were only five minutes away now, at most.
“What’s it like?” I asked at last. If I could get her to share, perhaps it’d help steer her away from the cliffs of insanity. “Arch-divination, I mean.”
“Like an unravelling bolt of cloth, only bigger than imagining,” she answered at once, a resolute smile on her face, “and it never stops unravelling, never stops growing, doubling, doubling, instant upon instant upon instant… Every tiny gap in the weave, every miniscule void you couldn’t even see never mind slip a hair into – every one of them is a place, a time, an event. A reflection. Pick one thread with your thimble, and watch as you slice half the cloth away in a huge, undulating wave, over and over again…”
Her voice had a certain dreamy quality, and I couldn’t help but imagine an immense, ocean-like sheet of silk, stretching off to the horizon, rippling in mountains and ravines under a fierce wind.
Every gap in the weave a place, a time, an event?
No wonder she was acting this way – no wonder diviners went strange. They had this to deal with on a moment-by-moment basis? They basically had what I’d always thought of as, well, godhood, just randomly thrust upon them by a cosmic twist of fate.
I shuddered.
A part of me noted her impressive vocabulary too. Did that come with the power?
“I don’t even know your name,” I said. “Your real name.”
“I don’t know yours,” she retorted.
“You don’t?”
“I… well, I didn’t, thanks for that.”
This time I couldn’t stop the brief burst of laughter from coming out of my lips.
Tears came too, but that was okay. The mask hid them.
Killstop looked at me.
I could pretend, at least.
When I stopped walking, shut my eyes and started sobbing, I felt her hands on my shoulders, pulling me into her embrace.
It was okay, wasn’t it? She was an arch-diviner. She already knew everything I’d ever done, everything I could ever do. She’d seen this, hadn’t she?
I clutched her soaking-wet smock and wept.
“Hush,” she murmured, patting me on the back gently, “hush now, Kas. My name is Tanra, and together we’re going to fix everything.”
* * *
As we walked on, I mentioned the little I knew about the Gathering of Champions. If Tanra was only half as serious about playing the role of champion as she seemed to be, she’d torture me if she found out later that I let her miss a meeting like that – though it felt strange to pass on the information without having actually ever been to such a meeting myself. She probably knew more about it, with her powers, than I did.
“So – what is a Gathering of Champions, really?” I asked her.
She returned a blank stare. “How am I supposed to know?”
“I thought you could –” I waved a hand in the air “– you know…”
She looked off at the (building-occluded) horizon, then back to me. She gave a single shake of her head.
She couldn’t intuit anything about other arch-diviners, but she could see what I was going to say next… It was curious, how it all worked.
“The foreknowledge of the others like me stops me seeing them – and stops them seeing me,” she replied, almost with a questioning tone there at the end.
“That’s what I reckon,” I responded cautiously.
She didn’t reply to that, but I could hear her muttering under her breath.
“… infinite regress… ‘What’s he going to do? Oh, I’ll do this…’ ‘So she’s going to do that? I’ll do this…’ So perfect prescience is impossible…”
I shuddered at her words, the opacity of their implications. I hadn’t even known how prescience was pronounced until she said it.
There wasn’t much farther to go. We crossed paths with a single truncheon-twirling watchman, who quickly abated his truncheon-twirling and crossed out of our path when he saw me and my eldritch. By the time we arrived at the shrine, only a few of the supplicants strewn about the street outside had awoken. A near-motionless swarm of snoring, sprawled-out unfortunates, mostly using sacks for sleeping-bags – the river of the sick and the wounded went stretching on up the road before us, along the high wooden fences that loomed over us all.
There were plenty with missing fingers and a few with missing limbs, but the majority were diseased. Swollen, splinterwinced legs. Gangrenous wounds, weeping sores like cradlecrib, and several afflicted with mournbud, the oozing rash of the face and scalp. Perhaps some were maladies the monthly cleansing wouldn’t affect, or the victims were simply too poorly to travel to Hightown to partake in the ritual, left alone, abandoned by mankind to the mercy of the goddess Wythyldwyn’s chosen representatives. I was pretty sure sleeping in the mud wasn’t doing them any favours.
Either way, they were here, a portion of them languishing upon the narrow strip of boardwalk running past the iron-wrought gates of the shrine – most of them were sleeping on the road itself. But the awake ones were staring at us, and in particular my sylph, Xaba still lying in repose across his toned bronze arms. Avaelar, for his part, had a disconsolate look slapped across his face – probably his reaction to the fact he was covered in muck to the shins.
“What’s the plan, exactly?” I asked Tanra as we stopped. The closed gate of the shrine was about a hundred feet away, but we’d gone as far as we could; now hundreds and hundreds of ragged-looking people blocked our passage.
“The plan?” She looked at me, nonplussed.
“I mean…” I gestured at Xaba.
“Oh. Put him down?”
“You’re going to – just leave him here?”
She gave a half-shrug. “He’ll only be waiting twelve hours. A particularly zealous holy woman is going to notice that he hasn’t moved up with the others who’d been near him, and go over to inspect him. Don’t you think I’ve had a look ahead? He’ll be fine… mostly.”
I ignored the bait, failed to rise to it. I put my hand on her elbow and looked her right in the face – her eyes were still shining wetly, the dark, burnt-oak irises almost making her pupils look even more dilated.
I had to have another attempt at getting through to her.
“Look, I think some very bad things have just happened to you, okay? It sounds like you took a powerful drug, watched your dad die, watched your boyfriend nearly die, then nearly ended up dead yourself.” She was just staring at me. “You’ve detached yourself from your feelings. I should know, right? But it’s okay to feel the pain.”
She shook her head vehemently, a display of humanity that made my hopes soar.
“There must be a myriad of possibilities here. You said you want to be a champion? Well this is your first step! You should be saying, ‘Let’s just go over the fence!’ or something! You care about every innocent, never mind someone you know – someone you love?”
“But he isn’t innocent.” She stood very still now, and her voice held a new composure. “He’s a killer.”
I froze too.
“You said…” I started.
“I said he wasn’t one of them. And I wasn’t then what I am now. He never told me.” Her voice dropped even lower. “My father wasn’t his first.”
“You…” I took a deep breath. “You can see the whole of the past, just like that?”
“The whole of the past?” she scoffed, then, low-voiced again, continued: “No. Just… relevant bits. Parts of Xaba’s past. Intersections of time’s streets. Echoes resounding between realities. Stitches across stitches. He’s a killer.”
“You denied his innocence, but you didn’t deny that you love him,” I pointed out.
“I…” She looked across at his prone body. “I do love him.”
“Then –“
“But I’m a champion.” She looked back at me, and this time there was no denying the mystical hold of her words: “How many hours a day do you wear that thing?”
She looked pointedly at my mask, my curled horns.
I didn’t need to answer, or hear her next retort. I knew where she was going. I was shirking my duties, by having people I loved, people I wanted to protect? Was that really what she was getting at?
“It doesn’t suit you when you’re frowning,” she prodded.
I was frowning because of Morsus, not her, damn her –
Morsus.
I wanted to protect him.
Three years in his company had almost made him feel like, well, an uncle, I supposed.
He was gone. Forever. And what had I – what had the famous champion Feychilde – gone and done?
I went on a crusade, threatening half-a-dozen lowlife scum until I got Telrose’s name and his likely whereabouts, then used my overwhelming powers to completely wreck a warehouse full of gangers, almost killing one of them in the process.
‘It doesn’t suit you when you’re frowning.’ That’s what she said. She meant more than the mask. She means… everything. The champion.
Feychilde can’t do this; Feychilde can’t be an archmage going around using his magic to enact some personal vendetta.
But she was wrong about not caring. It wasn’t the caring that was to blame here. It was only the anger. I should’ve known better than to go out of the house fuelled by such a longing for retribution.
“I… understand,” I found myself murmuring.
I didn’t know if this was the lesson she meant to teach me or not, but I’d learned something either way.
I looked around me, as if suddenly realising where I was. Where I needed to be.
“I leave him in your care, then. Do as you will.” I turned to Avaelar, and a quick command later Xaba was lying face-up in the mud.
I couldn’t yet get my illusory black-out wall to completely surround me, but it was good enough to hide my rejoining with the sylph from the eyes of the few who were watching. It wasn’t widespread knowledge that sorcerers could put extra-planar entities inside their bodies, and I imagined there was probably a very good reason for that; I had no intention of shaking that lantern. Anti-sorcerer prejudice was bad enough already.
“You’re leaving,” she said.
I manifested my sylph-power, the blue translucency slowly extruding from my back, forming the shapes of six wings. I could sense the awe-filled eyes of the wounded and diseased supplicants on me and did my best to keep from meeting any of their gazes.
“You’re leaving too,” I replied blandly. “You thought I’d do otherwise? I’ve got somewhere to be, and, frankly, your words were pivotal to my realisation.”
“But – we could walk, and talk more?”
She tried a coquettish smile – it looked more than a little dangerous, with the shining eyes.
“I’m sorry to decline your offer, but I’m taken,” I said somewhat archly, flashing a grin in return.
I somehow felt more like myself again already.
I looked over my wings, flapped them gently, then more forcefully as I judged they were nearly complete – I sailed up into the air above her.
“Until we meet again, then,” she called up to me, turning away from Xaba and walking away, keeping her gaze on me hovering there thirty feet over her head.
It was disturbing to think that she probably had a pretty good idea of when that would be. “Till then,” I called back a bit dismissively, then turned away, propelling myself upwards with the otherworldly appendages, high enough for me to get my bearings and turn myself towards home.
She wasn’t getting my help – no more than I’d offer another champion, anyway. I wasn’t going to waste my time watching over her, caring what happened to her. She was capable of looking after herself, if she put in the effort. And if she didn’t, it’d be on her own head. I couldn’t hold myself responsible – by her own arguments, I should put aside my personal interests, and do my ‘job’ to the best of my ability.
I still felt she was wrong. Doing my job to the best of my ability meant caring. It meant doing my best such that I’d still want to do it again tomorrow, and I’d burn out in days if I just let everything go. Being Feychilde full-time, making Kas into the champion, would mean having no time to do normal things, no time to be a part of my family. I couldn’t lose my identity that way.
But I already wanted a separate place to live, didn’t I? So that I wouldn’t get them into a dangerous situation I couldn’t get them back out of, just like had happened with Duskdown?
I was already making the sacrifices she’d been speaking about.
I looked down on the slowly-waking streets of Sticktown as I soared over the buildings, and for the first time, I felt detachment. It had stolen over me while I distracted myself with getting platinum, with my new girlfriend, with my anger over Morsus – it was quieter than any night-time arch-diviner assassin, more corrupting than any raving giant-spider-making heretic.
It wasn’t the kind of detachment that came because I no longer felt like I was one of them – I did still feel that way. Every iota of my essence screamed at me that I was still the poor, skinny Mud Lane bookworm I’d always been. But the truth was that I wasn’t one of them anymore, no matter how much I wanted to be. My concerns had been destined to diverge from theirs the moment I put on the robe and mask.
For now, they weren’t so different. I just wanted some money – food, family, the roof over my head. Sure, I wanted to be liked. Was that so radical? Not much had yet been made of me being a sorcerer, from what I’d heard and read at least – probably because I wasn’t running around with hordes of creepy undead or demons. The careers of people like Dustbringer, even Redgate, were plagued with public standoffishness. My fey-use had let me come off as pretty normal, I hoped, in comparison with the competition.
Flying above them, though, I was forced to accept that after the Gathering my concerns would probably start to shift. Food, shelter – they wouldn’t be problems anymore. Sure, my priorities would still be the same – I couldn’t see me moving Jaid and Jaroan off the top of the list for anything – but I’d probably drop something else in the blink of an eye if it was going to help me do my job.
Sometimes that’d mean getting paid, and maybe sometimes not, but I’d be fine with that. Firenight Square had put a lot of things into perspective, and the words of Duskdown still haunted me. ‘The ones you really need to be chasing don’t have bounties out on them.’ And I’d refused to swallow the consequences, the changes it’d make to my life if I did.
The change in me.
Perhaps the seeress saw that more clearly. Who was I to contradict an arch-diviner?
The sun was coming up. I’d been out all night. The tenements of Helbert’s Bend came into view. The boundaries were indiscernible even when you were down there with your feet in the excrement, never mind from up here – but I knew this place like the back of my hand. The traders were trickling into Knuckle Market to set up their stalls, off on my right, but I didn’t need the clattering of their wagons and crates to orient myself. This morning I felt as though I knew every building, every scrap of scaffolding. I was coming up over Giblet, not far from Lossen; I would be approaching Mud Lane in seconds, and from there to Bagger’s Alley would only be a matter of a heartbeat –
A cry caught my attention, and as I focussed the exact source of the sound came into my consciousness.
The sheer desperation of the whimpering thrust aside any sigh that might’ve escaped my lips, any impetus to rush back to Morsus.
I descended into the alleyway, azure wings in full view, and the three watchmen let their truncheon arms fall slowly this time, the weapons going slack in their hands to mirror their lower jaws. The boy, coiled in the drop between them with a damaged arm haltingly raised to protect his face – even he quietened.
I didn’t do anything consciously to augment my voice, but my frustration carried the words from my tongue.
“I really don’t need this right now.”
One of the trio lost his boot in the muck as he fled, and upon realising this seemed almost to hesitate mid-sprint, nearly falling when he twisted to look over his shoulder –
“Leave it.”
And the three bullies were gone, around the corner and into the street.
I looked down at the kid. A fair-haired, scruffy-looking slime-dweller just like me. Well, like I’d been four or five years back. He was on his side, now cradling his tender arm. Some of his fingers were broken, and, from the way he was holding it, his elbow had been struck hard.
“What did you do?” I asked.
He met my eyes through the mask.
“Nothin’!” he gasped.
I did my little trick, and within moments Avaelar was tending his injuries.
I gave him time to get over his astonishment, let him wipe his eyes, then answered his several questions by repeating my own:
“What did you do, really?”
“Nothin’! I swear, sir. I… I looked at ‘im funny.”
I considered his sincerity. Either he was a far better liar than I was used to encountering, or he was telling the truth.
Sticktown kids had plenty of reason to mistrust the watch. But, frankly, the watch had plenty of reason to mistrust us. They had the power, and they abused it, for sure. There wasn’t a single law enforcement organisation in a single book I’d ever read that didn’t.
Deception. In the end, that was the only weapon with which we could fight back. And it was courage, to lie to a mage. The kind of courage I admired.
I smiled at the kid, feeling a bit better about myself all of a sudden. If I hadn’t fled, if I hadn’t gone in search of Morsus’s killer… this little mirror of myself might’ve ended up with worse than a busted hand.
I helped him stand, and even walked him part-way home, but I knew what I had to do. Where I had to be.
The kid waved me farewell with his non-numb arm as I soared up and away into the morning gloom. I didn’t want to give any indication as to my destination, so I flew westwards before circling back around. My wings were far too visible, even through the smog-clouds.
It was with more than a little trepidation that I entered my home about ten minutes later, dressed as Kas. But I was myself once more.
The door was unlocked. Orstrum was the only one present, still sitting by his son’s corpse, still awake, if just barely.
She isn’t here, I thought in relief. Out with the kids?
No, I could hear them breathing, three troubled little sets of snoring coming from my room. The twins had let the little boy sleep with them for tonight.
“Orstrum,” I said, my voice twanging.
Rheumy eyes gleamed in my direction from the crevasses in his leathery skin.
“Kas…” he said hoarsely, then coughed, a grinding, phlegmy sound. “Did you find what you sought?”
“I… I don’t know, honestly,” I replied, seating myself opposite him.
I looked down into my friend’s peaceful face. He’d been washed – by his sister, I was sure – and his ripped clothing had been replaced; his hair was towel-dry but still visibly damp, his shirt free from any blood stains. He almost looked like he was sleeping.
Almost. I couldn’t escape the fact he was dead and that I could sense him. Couldn’t escape the fact I’d done what I’d done before I’d fled into the night.
“What did my daughter say to make you leave? I heard her, but I couldn’t make out the words.”
That was a lie. The walls wouldn’t keep out the squeaks of a mouse – as I knew from repeated personal experience – and Xantaire hadn’t been trying to keep her voice down.
No, he just wanted to check he had it right, before speaking his mind.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” I said, shuddering, throat feeling almost too thick for me to talk. “I don’t – I can’t –”
A gnarled old hand reached out across Morsus’s unmoving chest and clasped my own, quelling its trembling.
“It’s okay, lad,” he husked. “I know you’d never do that. Not deliberately.”
I couldn’t imagine Xantaire’s horror, her brother’s body jerking around like that under my unconscious direction.
“I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop it and every moment I tried and failed it got worse. If I stayed just a few seconds longer he – he might’ve, I don’t know, got up or something…” I looked down at my feet.
“And you didn’t find who killed him.”
“That was me. I killed him. I killed him with a platinum coin!”
I felt Orstrum’s eyes burning into the top of my head while I stared at the tips of my shoes – then, at last –
“I see.”
There was no anger, no challenge in the old man’s voice. Only resignation and bitterness.
He understood his children. He knew what I’d meant, I was pretty sure – and there would be plenty of opportunity once Xantaire got home for me to explain in as much detail as they wanted.
I did have the name.
But for now, we sat in silence, waiting for Xantaire to return, or for the kids to wake up, or anything at all to happen. For now, it didn’t matter.
I held the old man’s hand. It helped me. I could only hope it helped him too.
* * *
At about seven o’clock in the morning two tall, quiet-voiced men arrived, disturbingly-similar in appearance with their dark, neat hair and brown robes. They’d come from the Ministry of Mortiforn to arrange the details. Xantaire must’ve set it up, I realised. She’d been out doing the real work of dealing with the realities of the situation, like she always did, while I’d gone off on some stupid misadventure.
I paid the two gold it cost to obtain a plot of land at the shrine of Yune – anything to shut them up. The way they were going on about it, it sounded very much as if they suspected we were about to donate the body to necromantic research. Were so many people swayed by the dividends of selling the corpses of their loved ones? So many that even the priests of Mortiforn were terrified we were about to do it? It was easier to just cut them off. Where else was I going to let him be buried, anyway? I hushed Orstrum when he threatened my tranquillity by trying to thank me for my ‘generosity’.
I felt better when I was blaming myself for Morsus’s death and his grandfather’s gratitude undercut that, as if I didn’t already have enough to repay. If I wasn’t blaming myself I would be blaming this Orven, whoever he was, and that would lead back to furious Feychilde. I didn’t want to have to go there again.
The undertakers cast their plain black shroud over Morsus’s body and carried him together from the apartment.
Orstrum went to Xantaire’s room, dragging his feet, shoulders slumped. He was going to sleep in a real bed, at least, assuming he managed to win the battle with his troubled thoughts and actually get some rest.
I just sat there in the main room, going over it all in my head.
It had happened the same way as at my parents’ graves. The sensation, of cool flesh animated, obeying an unspoken command, an unformed thought. And I’d run away for fear of making it worse, when I should’ve stayed, should’ve faced my failure there and then. Now I had to wait, and the waiting was the worst part. If she were here now, I could just spill it all – but I had to keep thinking, churning the details over and over in my head. For all I knew I could’ve misremembered everything, maybe it was worse than I remembered it, maybe she was even more offended than I could imagine –
Then, not ten minutes after Orstrum had retired, she appeared in the doorway.
Upon looking at her, the tension melted out of me. There was no offence in her eyes, no scorn on her face.
The moment she’d seen me she stopped, one hand on either side of the door-frame, and stared back at me.
“Kas. You’re back.”
“Xan.”
I held out my arms and walked towards her – within a second we were bear-hugging, her fierce grip tight around my chest.
I returned the grip, returned the emotion.
We didn’t part, but we relaxed the embrace, until our heads were lolling upon one another’s shoulder. I felt her tears running down into the neckline of my tunic.
“They – took – him,” she murmured.
“He’ll be at the Shrine of Yune later. We’ll see him again tomorrow.”
She nodded into my shoulder, still clasping me.
“And did you… Did you find out?”
“Xan –“
“It’s okay, you don’t have to – to say. It was the last thing you said before you left. I just thought –“
“I found out who killed him.”
I loosed a long breath, and released her. We went to the benches, and sat down.
I explained the story as I’d patched it together from Telrose and the other sources – my part in her brother’s death, and the parts of the criminals he gambled against – the part Orven played in delivering the killing-stroke.
I gave her no names.
She’d taken my hand in both of hers before I was half-done, and her eyes gave me the forgiveness I needed so badly before she ever opened her mouth to reply.
“You didn’t kill him,” she said at last. “Don’t think it for a second, Kas – how could you? After everything you’ve done for him, for us, you go and blame yourself? It’s unhealthy, Kas, really it is. You’ve got to realise… how much he owed you. How much we all owe you. You don’t owe us anything, yet you go around giving us platinum, and I only take it because I know I’ll hurt you worse by refusing. Honestly, young man –“
“I do owe you,” I interrupted her quietly, staring off into space.
She didn’t see it the way I did – how could she? She’d never really noticed the ways in which the four of them were integral to my life.
“For what?” she asked, her tone overly-gentle, completely uncharacteristic of her.
“For being my family,” I replied, returning my eyes to hers. “You’re… my, like, big sister, right, Xan?”
Her eyes welled up with tears again. “Of course I am, you daft sod,” she blurted, flinging her arms around me again.
Holding onto her, I whispered. “You have no idea how much I needed you guys. I could never have done it on my own. The last three years…”
“I understand.”
A little time passed.
“I’m thinking of moving out.”
She stiffened, then drew her arms away from me quickly, moving so she could look me in the face again.
“What, Kas?”
“Not now – not soon, maybe. But sometime. I need more money, to do it properly, but I –“
“What are you even talking about?”
There was panic in her voice, a real anxiety.
This was the wrong time, I chided myself, you drop-brained fool.
Her voice was raised, strangled with what sounded like disgust. “So now you’re a champion, you’re just up and leaving us? With my brother dead, you’re what – just going to take the twins and -”
“No, Xan! Stop,” I pleaded, my hands raised palms outward; “please listen to me, Xan. I mean to stop anything like this happening again. It’s being close to me that gets people in trouble.”
“It wasn’t being ‘close’ to you that got my brother ki-”
“There was an arch-diviner in my bedroom two nights ago, a darkmage right there with a knife, threatening to kill the twins.” This I said in a sharp whisper, hoping she’d match my volume if she replied. “I need a… a base. Somewhere I can go that I’m not putting anyone in danger.”
Her gaze was blank; she was still a bit behind. “A darkmage – was – here?” She waved a hand in the direction of my room, from which faint snoring still emanated.
I nodded. “And I didn’t fight. I couldn’t. He had me, if he wanted me. No, I got lucky. It was one of the less-bad ones.”
Her brow furrowed. “Which?”
I hesitated on the word, but I couldn’t lie, and I knew I’d sacrifice what goodwill I’d earned if I started trying to put her off.
“Duskdown.”
“One of the… less-bad…?”
Xantaire’s stare was no less blank, her confusion only slowly giving way to the inevitable debilitating terror.
Then she whip-snapped up to her feet, making her way to the door to apply the various locks, as if driven to do so by pure impulse.
“Someone had left the window open,” I offered to the back of her head, by way of explanation. “I think…”
“Someone…” She let go of the chain she’d been lifting into place, and it swung loosely back across, like a pendulum – then, the moment over, she caught it again and continued working on the locks.
She thinks it was Morsus.
“It doesn’t matter who did it, he would’ve found a way anyhow. Nothing any of us could’ve done. I’m pretty sure guys like him can just jump through glass and land perfectly on their feet, all that stuff. So don’t sweat a window being left unlocked. Just saying.”
She resumed her seat opposite me.
“So you’d be leaving the twins with me,” she said.
“If – if that’s okay?” I ventured. “It’s not like I’d be staying out every night, I’d be able to come back whenever I wanted, whenever you or the twins needed – it’s just, if I think I’m being followed, or if I need to meet other champions – this place can’t do that, you know?”
“Of course it’s okay!” she said, suddenly bunching up a fist and staring down at it. “I’d die if you just took them away now, it’s – you, and Jaid and Jar, you’re my family too.” She looked up at me, seeing me through a sheen of tears. “But why – why did Mor- Mor have to go and –“
The dam in her broke, then, and she wept – really wept, like I’d wept on Tanra’s shoulder.
I put my arms around her, and held her tight. After a while the kids came out and joined in, and it quickly became a group-hug, a great mingling of grief that, despite everything, let me find the joy in the sharing – the melancholy happiness which came of knowing that, although we lived in a world filled with death and darkness and misery, there would always be people there who loved me, who would support me, and whom I could help in kind.
They would always be there for me, and I for them, and together we could conquer anything life threw at us.
* * *
“Are you certain zat you’re up to zis?” Em asked, stopping me and holding both my hands, looking up into my face. “Ve can call it off – I can come viz you, vherever you vont to go. Zey vill understand –“
“Em, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. Trust me.”
If there was one thing I knew right now, it was the value of family.
I’d told Em that what Zel had almost foreseen was Morsus’s death, when the fairy interrupted our date last night with her funny-tasting-future story. I even explained my overreaction, my near-miss with Telrose, and about the strange new champion that was Killstop. I held off giving Tanra’s real name, just because that would feel wrong, breaking her confidence like that – but Em understood, and seemed fine with it.
She smiled, and I kissed her. It felt good, abnormal, to be here without my mask and robe – just plain old Kas out kissing my girlfriend. I could almost forget the undigested weight of guilt and sorrow sitting like a lump in my stomach. I could almost be someone else, someone far from the misery and the darkness.
Though if I were to say I wasn’t feeling nervous on top of everything else, I’d have been lying – I’d never gotten to the meeting-the-parents stage with any of my previous forays into courting someone, never mind after just a few days… These had been some intense days, though.
I didn’t think that the reason it was different this time was just that Em was a beautiful arch-wizard with an exotic accent – it was because she was her. She had a bit of a twisted sense of humour, and she was clever and curious, intensely loyal… and powerful. Her power almost scared me and I liked that; it made me less afraid of my own power, somehow. And I liked being part of her world and her being part of mine, as we strode into our futures, archmages side-by-side.
So yes, I was nervous. I really wanted to make a good impression – I’d been out shopping with the family (except Orstrum, whom we’d let sleep through the afternoon), venturing into Oldtown where I picked up, amongst other things, some new clothes. They were terrible to look at, as far as I was concerned, but the assistant had assured me I looked “simply divine”. I was wearing a crimson-and-gold doublet and a (height-of-fashion) black leather kilt with matching boots. The trip was a good distraction for the kids – for all of us, probably. I hadn’t slept since pretty early on Twoday morning, but I’d kept myself going all Waneday, and now I half-suspected I wouldn’t even sleep tonight, the way I was feeling.
Perhaps the extreme neatness of the clothes I was wearing would distract them from what must’ve been my haggard face, bleary eyes. Em was decidedly dressed-down when compared with her usual choice of garment, with a simple shawl over a long-sleeved blue top, loose black trousers covering her legs. There was a distinct chance I’d gone a little overboard, but oh well.
Em had stopped me as we’d arrived outside their house, the house she’d managed to secure using her magister’s income. It was, remarkably, a single dwelling-place – sure, it was a terrace with other houses on either side, but the whole internal property belonged to her. For so long as she kept making the rent, of course. This area was far from the Greywater, and was instead near to the very westernmost part of Mund, where Rivertown Gate was situated. The streets around here were huddled almost directly underneath the great white wall itself; if I cast my gaze upwards I could see the white battlements rearing up above the buildings, atop an impenetrable, seamless fortification that occluded a good chunk of the dusk-dim sky.
That said, it was quite picturesque. There were even trees lining the street.
“Breathe, Kas,” she said in a serious tone, lying her hand against my chest. “I trust you, but –“
“Then let’s go in,” I said. “Come on, you’re not getting cold feet about me are you?”
I gave her my cheekiest eyebrow-raise, which at least elicited another tight-looking smile from her.
“My feet don’t get cold,” she relented, and led me to the door.
She probably had a key for the lock, but just as at mine there were likely chains or bars to deal with too, so she knocked. It would be better for me to be introduced on the threshold as well, I guessed.
Or maybe it was just that she’d been right about the low crime rate around here. Was it being so far from everything else, stuck out on the very edge of the city? There were none of the chain-rattlings or bolt-slammings I’d expected to hear, as the handle turned and the door creaked open.
Em’s mother, ‘Atarvet’, was standing there beaming at me. She wore a stained apron over her grey woollen dress. Atarvet was shorter than her daughter, but despite the wrinkles afforded her by age she had the same dimpled cheeks, same almost cleft-chin, same platinum waterfall of hair as her daughter.
After a momentary glance at me, her eyes went to Em’s face expectantly.
“Mazan, zis is Kas Mortenn,” she said straightforwardly, seizing my arm suddenly with both her hands, moving herself close to me.
“Mrs. Reyd, it’s lovely to meet you,” I managed.
She was still just smiling at me.
In a single flash I sorted through the options to fill the awkward silence.
The weather? Don’t be an idiot.
Compliments? Yes!
‘I love your dress, did you make it yourself?’
What, am I doing my best to imply they’re poor? Besides, have you seen that dress? It’d sound like a backhanded compliment at best.
‘Your home is lovely.’
They didn’t buy it themselves, you clod. Do you want to rub her face in the fact she relies on her daughter’s income?
‘I see where your daughter gets her looks.’
Rein it in, this is the first time you’re meeting her! Twelve Hells!
‘The food sm-’
“Is that our dinner I can smell already cooking?” I murmured, doing my best to sound awe-struck. “It smells lovely – I don’t know much about Onsolorian cuisine, but your daughter’s taken me to one restaurant, and it didn’t smell half as good.”
I’d said too much, wittered on for too long –
No, she was still smiling, greenish eyes sparkling, studying me.
Then she spoke.
“Lovely to meet you too, Kas.” Her accent was thicker than Em’s, but she still spoke in a quick, easy manner – she might’ve been foreign, but Mundic was Mundic and she’d probably been speaking it for most of her life. “Von’t you call me Atar? And please, come in, both of you.”
She stepped inside and we followed; she locked the door, a single, basic lock any number of people in Sticktown would pick open for a cut of the profits.
Crossing the bare-wood interior hallway, she led us through another doorway into a back-room, talking over her shoulder as she went. “You’re quite right, young man, I am preparing one of my great-grammazan’s recipes. You are in for quite ze treat tonight!”
I surreptitiously dropped my satchel in a corner of the hall near some cases with papers inside; hopefully no one would go poking around in my things.
Within moments we were in the kitchen, implements and utensils all over the walls and cluttered sideboards. A cloud of steam and smoke was streaming out through the open window; there was a huge black pot over the stove, simmering with what looked like dozens of different vegetables.
A barrage of extremely-sweet scents assaulted my nostrils, but it was the novel way in which the smells assaulted my eyes that really got me.
Blinking back near-instantaneous tears, I gave an enthusiastic ‘woah!’ and dashed my hand across my face to wipe them away.
“Ha-ha, you’re going to enjoy zis I see,” Atar commented with something of a grin, then she turned to her daughter. “Em, ve vill prepare some of ze saltdough for him; it might help to take ze edge off.”
Em had already been washing her hands; she turned to one of the work-surfaces and opened a small bin of flour, then fetched a bowl.
Atar took me by the elbow gently. “Come, I vill take you to Linn. Von’t you have some beer? Ve have a cellar, you know zis?”
She was already gently but insistently leading me out of the kitchen.
“I’m more than prepared to help…”
“Don’t be silly!”
Her ruthless smile never faded one bit, and I found, looking over my shoulder, that Em wasn’t even facing my direction – I wasn’t going to get any help from her.
Linn would be Linnard Reyd, Em’s father.
Within seconds I’d been whisked into what I’d have to call a sun-room – over half of one wall was comprised of windows, and a big section of the ceiling too.
They have houses like this in Rivertown? I thought with something of an inward gasp.
Sitting in a cushioned chair before the open glass door leading onto a garden – a garden! – was Em’s dad. I’d have recognised him anywhere – he had the same steely stare, the same hawkish nose and the same, well, bearing as his daughter. Close-cropped black-grey hair and a day’s growth of beard framed his slightly-sunken cheeks, slightly-lined brow. He wore a faded green short-sleeved vest, leaving his knotted arms exposed and barely covering his muscled chest.
In his hands, he held a short-bladed carving knife and a small block of wood – he was shifting the wood over and over, expertly strimming lengths away with the blade and letting them fall into a pile gathering in a box between his feet.
“Linn, this is Kas, Em’s friend.” Atar gave me a small but firm push between the shoulder-blades.
“I, erm – I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Reyd.” I held out my hand, then half-dropped it again, realising he was busy with his own hands.
A whisper of sound, and then a click, told me that Atar had just exited the room behind me.
He gave me a look that said ‘I hope this is worth the interruption’ as he very deliberately, slowly laid aside his knife, wiped his palm on his trousers, then reached out to shake my hand.
It was a grip like a tightly-wound iron vice, crunching slightly into the wood – except the vice was just his human hand, and the wood was my bones.
I tried not to let it show on my face but I must’ve started gritting my teeth as I did my best to smile.
“Kas,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft. “Pleased to meet you.”
He went back to his carving almost immediately, leaving me adrift.
I wasn’t really one for social pressures. I tended to retreat from situations like this. I found it hard to make small-talk when I had no in, no insight into a person. I didn’t want to talk about wood-carving. Why didn’t I ask Em for more information? I shrilled at myself, but it was futile now. An enchanter could do their stuff and have everything go exactly as they wished, I was sure… a diviner could plot the futures that would lead to a successful interaction and follow the path without a hitch, couldn’t they? It wasn’t fair…
I was used to being the one preparing dinner. In countries like Onsolor, things were still so primitive. Men toiled in the fields and hunted in the woods and journeyed to the marketplaces; women were kept protected in the home, raising children, performing tasks deemed less perilous. Access to magery was restricted by wealth, so that there were but a handful of mages in each city. Archmages would be almost unheard-of outside dangerous darkmages and the odd itinerant hero-mage. The existence of magic hadn’t much changed the affairs of state and the military-styled feudal systems present in most countries, and the farther from Mund, the less the change.
So it was that Linn, the man of the household, was left to his own devices while Atar and Em went around busying themselves with the meal.
So it was that I, the newcomer to the household, was left to stand there mute like a gormless fool in front of the man of the household.
“I – what are you carving?” I asked, after what must’ve been at least ten seconds of awful silence.
Steely eyes flashed up at me. “You carve?”
The eyes didn’t stay on me longer than a moment, returning at once to the block of wood, the knife’s edge. More and more strips joined the pile in the box on the floor.
I was tempted to lie, but I knew even exaggeration could get me into an embarrassing situation. Better to err on the side of self-deprecation, right?
“Truthfully, I haven’t done it in years.” Not since Dad died. “I miss it, though, sometimes.”
That bit wasn’t exactly true. In all honesty the memories themselves were painful, and I had exactly zero desire to revisit my wood-carving hobbies of the ancient past with Linn Reyd.
Linn grunted, still looking down at his work. “I voz surprised, vhen ve arrived in Mund, to find zere vere ozzers viz my passion. I had thought it an Onsolorian… how do you say… a custom, yes?”
I took that as rhetorical, and walked to the nearest chair, leaning gently on its back so that I could get a closer look at what he was carving.
“You’re using a walnut?” I asked, injecting a soft note of incredulity into my voice. It was one of the hardest woods, and it wasn’t cheap either. I’d never gotten past butternut, as far as I could remember.
He glanced up at me, and met my eyes for a little longer this time before going back to his hands, the ghost of a smile crossing his lips.
“Black walnut. Tougher zan terreline, keeps its shape longer.” Linn named a wood I’d never heard of, I was pretty sure. “Viz a sharp-enough edge, it is no harder.”
He took a deep breath, then fixed his eyes on me, halting his knife-hand. “Sit. Take some vood. You vill show me vot you can do.”
Great.
This wasn’t an invitation; it was a command.
I crossed to the front of the chair, sitting down near him. A minute later I had one of his spare knives, a little block of lumber of a pale hue, and a wooden box between my feet that matched his – probably home-made, I now realised.
The knife was as sharp as I’d ever seen, and the pale wood was soft – he was going easy on me. A part of me might’ve felt insulted, but quite honestly I was just glad he hadn’t given me some of the black walnut as a ‘test’.
I spent at least half my focus on not cutting myself; while Zel’s regeneration would probably stem the flow in short order, I’d seen even the smallest cuts with blades as honed as this one squirt an embarrassing amount of blood.
We went about three more minutes in silence, with me desperately clutching for the answers to my two burning questions: firstly, something to say that wouldn’t distract me, and secondly – quite possibly of damning importance – something to actually carve. I was just building up a pretty pile of shavings at this point.
But then he broke the silence, only to say: “I respect a man who respects quiet.”
I flicked my eyes to him, but he hadn’t even looked at me.
Would it be seem sarcastic to him if I didn’t reply?
Stop overthinking things, I thought.
No. I would focus.
What do I carve?
I looked at his carving, but all I could make out was a vague humanoid shape, slowly taking form under his careful ministrations.
No – I couldn’t take a cue from him. Stealing his ideas would probably get us off on the wrong foot entirely.
They came from the woodlands, Em had said; Linn was a woodsman at heart. A hunter? No, what had she said?
When it came back to me, I cursed my foolishness.
Of course he would have an affinity for carving wood – he was a woodcutter back home – a lumberjack.
How had I not seen all this coming? I could’ve, well, practised at home, or something… I hadn’t carved a thing since I’d made my fortify set, and the game-pieces I’d done with as little attention-to-detail as I could manage whilst still making them distinct.
I didn’t want to carve.
I set upon a few ideas, then went for the simple-seeming option, the one which would look the best even if I didn’t get to finish it, add in all the little refinements.
What seemed a few minutes later, Atar came in with beer. A little after that she came in refilling the mugs and lighting more lanterns and candles. She reminded us that food would be ready in half an hour.
How long had it been since I’d seen Em? Since I’d last looked up for something more than my beer? More time had passed while we carved together in silence than I could’ve imagined, and I now held a somewhat chunky-looking miniature tree in my left hand, my right working almost unconsciously, shaping leaves into the canopy, tracing cracks in the bark down the trunk, fashioning little trails at the base to give the suggestion of roots.
“Vell,” Linn said at last, loosing a pent-up sigh of fatigue and setting down his knife, “you aren’t completely vizzout skill, friend of my daughter.”
There was the ghost of a smile again on his lips.
I looked down at his hands, and gasped.
There, in a smooth texture of grainless black, was a figurine of his wife, upper body already rendered in near-perfect detail. She was holding something between her hands that was as yet unfinished but, still, it was going to be beautiful.
“That…” I swallowed. “Mr. Reyd – that’s…”
“Vhat?”
I struggled; I couldn’t actually say ‘beautiful’ out loud. “Erm, it’s awesome?”
He shrugged. “It is ze fifth one I have made her since ve arrived in Mund. Come, shall ve show ze ladies vhat ve have accomplished?”
I caught Em’s little sigh of relief when she saw that me and her father had clearly been getting along okay.
“It’s very nice,” she said in an overly-fascinated voice as she turned my tree over in her hand, eyeing and stroking its contours.
I could hardly give voice to it but in my defence, I’d been trying to carve something to impress her dad, not her… which in retrospect might’ve been a bit daft of me, but I was willing to give myself a pass on this one. At least I’d avoided nicking an artery and bleeding all over the sun-room floors.
Atar gave Linn a kiss on the cheek as she accepted her husband’s gift; seemingly-emboldened, Em leaned towards me and (rather noisily) kissed me on the cheek – then just smiled winsomely at her parents as they turned to stare at her.
Possibly not doing me any favours, but I thought I understood it. She was making a gesture to clarify our relationship for them? I had no idea where to look, and hoped the smiles I thought I saw out of the corners of my eyes really were smiles, not grimaces.
Our miniature masterpieces went in the centre of the table as we dined. The sauces were indeed even more explosive than the restaurant’s, coming in what were described to me as pear and cherry flavours that at least managed to sound appetising – but the saltdough, a lump of soft, gooey warm bread, counteracted their heat in a way that ten jugs of ice-water never could. Within just a few seconds of popping a pinch of the dough in my mouth I was actually able to gasp out my gratitude. (Almost intelligibly, too, Em would later advise me.)
And it wasn’t all about sauces or even suspicious fish-finger-things – there was a tray of venison and nicely-burnt quartered potatoes. With two more mugs of beer, I was feeling fuller than I could remember… but I hadn’t accounted for a dessert of fruit-filled buns. When they arrived I promised Atar I’d only eat one no matter how many times she asked me if I wanted another, which had already become a thing due to my apparent addiction to her burnt potatoes.
Three and a half buns later, I waddled over to the cushioned benches in their main room, following them into the small and tidy space. The walls were painted a pale grey, and there were long red curtains drawn over the windows; the candles scattered around the room on shelves and stands reflected warmly from the scarlet drapes.
Atar was fixing together what looked like a wind instrument, some kind of flute that required a lot of assembly and looked to form a sort of ‘z’ shape… when Linn sat next to me.
As if the meal itself had all been part of some ruse to put me at my ease, he now interrogated me over my status, my potential. Was I highborn? Was I rich? Did I own property? By this point I was half-tipsy, sleep-deprived, emotionally-drained – and my belly was fit to burst. With a bunch of helpful interjections from Em I somehow clawed my way into a position where it was clear I worked with the Magisterium without giving away anything about my exact role; we strongly implied that I was still starting out, hence being able to afford finery but not a house – yet…
This seemed to be enough to mollify him, and when Atar began to play he moved to the other end of the bench – Em quickly settled between us, leaning against me.
I hesitantly put my arm around her shoulders, and listened to the music.
Atar was a gifted flautist, or whatever a player of this instrument would be called. She sat on a stool in the centre of the room, her hair swaying as she moved her hands across the various holes covering the flute’s surface. The sounds that oozed from that interaction of wood and breath and pressure coalesced into a lapping wave that pushed me away then pulled me back in deeper than before, breath after breath, pushing and pulling me deeper – a crooning, lost sound, something that keened for times and faces and people and places left behind.
Leaves fallen so far that they tumbled into the river and the water carried them away; all they had left was the memory of trees.
The memory of Morsus lying there dead – now he was gone, carried away beneath dark waters that flowed fast despite the stillness of the surface.
Tomorrow we would visit him at the shrine and that would be the last time we would look upon his face.
I cannot help but imagine it.
And I am there. I can see him standing at the end of the hallway. He wants to chase us but he doesn’t know how so I give him the knowledge and now Xantaire is screaming. We are through the door but he knows how to open it because I know, because I am him and he is me, we are dead, I am dead and that’s okay because it’s the living that’s painful, the death is just a stupid, horrible goodbye but once it’s over it’s over and you can rest, rest – until you’re plucked from the grave again, forced to dance like a puppet on a magician’s strings –
“Kas!”
Fingers poked in my ribs.
It was Em prodding me, shouting at me.
At the back of my mind I was hearing it already, but it was like an echo of Xantaire’s screaming in my nightmare, and I didn’t realise straight away.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered in a sleep-choked voice, looking up at Em through a fog that was for my half-asleep eyes only. I coughed, staring around. “Fell asleep. Long day.”
“Listen!”
I focussed, seeing Linn and Atar both standing near the door to the hallway, their faces drawn, their eyes on their daughter.
I focussed, and the moment I did I woke up for real.
One hundred percent awake, I reassured myself. I’m at the top of my game. I’m going to do this.
I could hear it now. I could hear the ringing, the magical pealing sounds that maintained their volume over the many miles between here and there. We were the farthest from Hightown we could get without being outside the walls of Mund, but it wasn’t quiet.
Gong! Gong! Gong!
The Mourning Bells.
And this time I wasn’t going to be one of the ones running for cover. This time, I was going to help bring the fight to them.
I looked up at Em and she looked back down at me.
“You saw the last Incursion? You know what to expect?” I asked.
She nodded. Her face was pale but her cobalt eyes were burning with anticipation.
“I helped,” she said.
That was good. She’d have some idea of what we had to actually do. I’d spent the last Incursion – all the previous Incursions – cowering with the twins and the others.
I wouldn’t be there for them tonight – tonight, of all nights. This was going to be bad for them.
I stood up, and Em’s parents moved their eyes to me. I could see the fear in the both of them, the near-paralysis to which the Bells alone had brought them.
I felt sorry for them in the moment; they’d come to Mund to escape their own horrors, perhaps even hoping that the stories about the demonic invasions were just tall tales. Had they seen something terrifying during the last one? Had they failed to heed the warnings, stayed out on the streets too late?
“Mr. and Mrs. Reyd – thank you for the wonderful evening, but I’m afraid I have to take my leave now.”
“You’re going out zere?” Atar asked in an almost-squeak.
“We both are, mazan,” Em said gently.
“So you are zis Feychilde.” Linn had a grim look on his face now, his hands on his hips.
I opened and closed my mouth, looked at Em and back to him –
“It didn’t take too much to put it togezzer,” he said, shrugging nonchalantly while wearing the ghost of a smile on his face again. “You – take care of her, friend of my daughter. You make sure she returns to us safe.”
“Paza!” Em chided him. “You can’t just put zat on –“
“It’s okay, Em,” I cut in. “I’ll make sure she’s safe, Mr. Reyd.” I turned back to the glowering arch-wizard. “Look, I’ll get my bag; get your robe on? We need to leave, now.”
A brief stop in the wash-room later, I was outside, waiting for Em while hovering above the house. My mask and robe in place, I sliced the air with my fey wings to stay afloat as a hot storm-wind rolled down from the north-east.
I could see flashes in the distance, hear detonations on the gusts of heated air – it was coming from across the Greywater. The far side of Rivertown, or perhaps into Oldtown.
Not far – not for us.
Moments later Em was with me, augmenting my flight with her own magic, and without a word we plunged through the sky, heading towards the heart of hell.
Gong! Gong! Gong!
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