INTERLUDE 9G: THE WAR
“Apply yourself to the question. I assure you, it is meaningful, if only to me. Tell me. Without naming yourself or listing what you do, can you tell me who you are?”
– as spoken by the Recaller of Illodin
The spring rains had stopped, so she’d met him outside on the balcony. No use worrying her grandpa while he was having one of his bad days.
“There is no way – no way I’m doing it. You’re gonna have to find some other chump, Garet.”
“Stop talking,” Xastur insisted, glaring between the pair of them. “Stop talking.” His voice only grew louder and louder. “Stop talking! Stop talking! Stop –”
“We’ve stopped!” she cried.
Xantaire sighed, folding her arms across her chest. She hated the way he did this in front of strangers. There were only so many times a day you could speak over him, tell him how ridiculous it was to force people to stop talking and then to shut up yourself, leaving an awkward silence bubbling away like a cauldron of old meat. There were only so many times you could tell him off for it without losing track of what you were saying, leaving you floundering, looking like a complete prat if he caught you mid-argument.
Xas eyed them both contemptuously, then went back to his previous topic.
“Pick me up.”
“You’re too big to be picked up.”
“Pick me up.”
He always wanted to look over the rail and down into the lane, nowadays. He didn’t want to go down and play with the others in the muck, oh no. Nothing so independent. She’d always tried to look on the bright side with Xas’s lack of confidence – at least it meant he never strayed from her side. She always had a partner in crime, someone there to give her immediate feedback. Someone to share life with. After Morsus went away, her son had only become more important to her. He’d always been the focus of her existence since the first moment she felt the little warm weight of his life inside her, but the circle of that existence had shrunk recently. He was the centre of her being, more than ever before. But he’d become so demanding lately. Verbally. Where all the words suddenly came from she had no idea.
All those years, surrounded by Kas and the twins, nothing. Now they’ve gone…
Maybe he was just filling the silence.
Garet shifted uncomfortably, the balcony planks groaning slightly as he shifted his heavy booted feet. “Look,” the grunt grunted in his thick voice, “I don’t wanna make things difficult for yer…”
“Stop talking.”
“Is that a threat, meathead?” Xan spat.
“No, I mean – I don’t wanna make things difficult – what did I say?”
“Stop talking. Pick – me – up.”
“Well if you don’t want to make things difficult, turn around and sod off!”
“Stop talking!
“Exactly,” Xan added, and almost bent to pick Xas up in gratitude before catching herself. “Stop talking, Garet.”
“But there’s four of ’em, Xan, an’ Peltos, ‘e won’t do owt – says it’s my job, what was Wyre’s job, you know –”
“Pick. Me. Up.”
“I already have someone to look after.” She turned the last two words into a warning, leaning over and looking directly into her son’s face. “Two someones. I can’t just drop everything, to become some sort of – some kind of childminder.”
“Stop talking,” Xas said, pouting.
“They’re orphans,” Garet replied. “Like I was. An’ if no one took me in – fink ‘ow I might’er turned out. I can cover costs… rent…”
She was still looking in her son’s face, and she enjoyed the brief moment of silence that would endure for precisely as long as she kept her attention fully on him. She caught herself listening to the laughter of the children in the lane.
She remembered the screams, during the riots last week. The remains in the carts being wheeled off to the ministers of Mortiforn, blackened, twisted husks of human bodies.
Street urchins, caught in the crossfire of katra-heads and magisters.
Orphans.
And they’ll all turn out like him. Him, or dead. Their only choices.
She turned her face back to Garet, scowling up at his blunt-featured face.
Maybe Grandpa needs more kids around. Maybe it’ll help.
She knew the former Gentleman wouldn’t understand the reasons, so she didn’t even try. She kept it simple.
Xantaire almost grated the words.
“Show me.”
* * *
“It’s fine. They’re fine. I don’t know why you insist on checking up on me all the time like this…” Xan managed to pull Xas back away from the rail and then was forced to stay tensed, holding him away from it as he strained forwards. “I told you last time, they’ll do fine. I even got Thelly started on her letters, and Vade has an eye for numbers like I’ve never seen before! Give him two two-digit numbers to times together and he…”
She realised even as the words left her lips that she’d gone too far.
“Numbers?” the thug said suspiciously.
“Don’t even think it!”
“Wha?”
The way Garet stared at her, dumbfounded…
Am I reading too much into it?
“You’re going to get him all mixed up in your business, and I won’t stand for it – I shouldn’t have said anything!” Xan felt more angry at herself than at Garet. She shouldn’t have slipped up like this. “Vade is a very sensitive boy. Just because he’s good with numbers – Xastur you get back from there –”
“You don’t get it,” Garet hissed, his sudden intensity making her look up and lose her grip on her son. “We gotta keep it quiet. If Peltos finds out we got a brain ‘ere, ‘e’s gonna want me to bring ‘im in.”
She scrutinised the big brute’s face and couldn’t pick out a single trace of deceit in his stare, his concerned expression.
“Fine. Fine.”
“Stop talking,” Xas said in a revolted tone of voice. “Just stop talking. Pick me up!”
“I come over ’cause I ‘eard about Mephel… Menphle…”
“Menephlette” she finished for him smugly. She was still keeping secret the fact she’d had to practice the name until she could produce it on demand. The ten-year-old girl was very possessive of her name, and demanded it be pronounced correctly at every opportunity. Xan had thought it prudent to get the knack right from the outset and this first small victory had helped her get through the following weeks of trials and tribulations.
“How’d you always do that,” he grumbled. “Anyway, I ‘eard about her hand. What happened?”
“Stop talking!”
She ignored Xas, feeling herself blushing suddenly, right to the tips of her ears hidden by her curls.
“Oh, that.”
“A dog, they says? Who’s it own by?”
Xan was still trying to come to terms with what had happened. And what had happened afterwards.
“Stop! Just stop talking…”
“The dog’s dead,” she said bitterly. “It was a mad thing, up out of the mud pits, round past the Spannerwalk entry.” She waved a hand towards the bottom of the lane, in roughly the right direction. “Menephlette’s fine. It’s just a bite. She’ll heal.”
“Pick me up!”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Garet said darkly, and she regarded him in some surprise. “Wounds worsen, yer know. Get infected. You might as wanna take ‘er up ter the cleansin’. An’ let’s just ‘ope all it was was mad.”
“Let me go! Stop talking!”
“Yeah, ’cause traipsing up to Hightown is at the top of my agenda. They’re stripping the Sticktown girls just to check them for katra, you know.” Xan clawed an errant curl of her hair out of her eyes with her free hand. “Anyway, don’t even know if the next cleansing will be on, do we?”
“Was on last month.”
“But not in Ismethara. If they cut it once…”
“Yeah. Yeah, yer right,” he grunted. “I can lend yer a cart, an’ a driver, if it’s on, though. If yer wanna.”
She longed to just say it: “Nightfell brought the medicine.” But there was no way she could betray Killstop like that, and Nightfell was Killstop, no matter how much she denied it.
“What do you mean, ‘let’s hope all it was was mad’?” she said instead.
“Pick me up…”
Garet frowned. “Men… Menny’s dad, he was first-killer in the Cutter Crew. If someone…”
His eyes met hers, then his mouth closed on the following words.
She knew. He knew she knew.
“Pleaseeeeeee…”
Garet bent and, without saying anything, swept Xastur up to his chest.
The man was tall. The boy was afforded the best view over the rail he’d ever had, and he instantly fell silent, gazing down into Mud Lane, drinking in the groups of people, the animals, the different bridges spanning the roadway below.
Xan caught herself just breathing, breathing for a moment. She’d quite forgotten what it was to have both peace and quiet. If she picked Xas up herself, he was right there in her face, still demanding things of her constantly. She straightened and stretched, then placed her own hands on the rail.
It took her a moment to remember where she was up to, trying not to allow the ex-Gentleman’s gentlemanly gesture to disarm her.
So… so maybe Menephlette was targeted.
She couldn’t see any magisters down there in the mud, but a pair of watchmen were permanently stationed at the entrance to the lane. She could make one of them out even from here. A persistent reminder of what what was happening behind the scenes.
“How’s the war going?” she asked quietly.
When Garet didn’t reply at once, she turned her head to glance over her shoulder at him. He was watching Xastur, his focus on checking the boy’s position, clearly unused to holding a kid up high.
She thought perhaps he hadn’t heard her question, and opened her mouth to repeat herself, but then his eyes slashed to meet hers and she saw the measured cunning in him exposed for just an instant, the criminal, murderous element that made him so unassumingly dangerous.
The response was simple, as simple as she’d come to expect from him… and as accurate:
“It’s going.”
* * *
The day the underworld feud came to Mud Lane, it was like an Incursion, only worse.
In an Incursion you could at least rest assured that, mind-control and accident aside, the magisters and champions weren’t just going to open fire indiscriminately on the crowd once the demons were dealt with. But now, during these skirmishes, the true enemy wasn’t the demon – it was the deranged demon-summoner.
What made it all so much worse was the variety of spells available to the druggies. The last time she’d seen something happen was three weeks ago over on Brown Avenue, where a gang managed to get the drop on a pair of magisters just walking up the roadway, bursting out of a first-floor door and splashing fire down at the two officials. It wasn’t the gouts of archmage-flame that shocked her, or even the screams and smells of the two women as their robes ignited, as their flesh was consumed. She’d seen enough flashy magic to last a lifetime.
No, it was the way they knew the magisters were coming. The ease of it all. She’d spent time thinking it through, and the truth was plain: the gangs weren’t just out-fighting the magisters; they were out-scrying them. She knew from Garet that the drug was stronger now than it had ever been, the strain bred in Rivertown lasting almost twice as long as it had when it first appeared on the scene. And maybe, just maybe, the Magisterium was weaker.
Whether it was weaker or not, the Magisterium wasn’t going to take challenges to its authority. Its response wouldn’t be some half-measure, for all that it was half-baked. When she went to walk down Brown Avenue a couple of days later, Xan found one side of the street almost completely levelled. Thirty dwellings, that’d probably housed more like sixty families than thirty. The sides of the roadway were choked with debris, and the ramshackle dwellings that some of the homeless had crafted from the remains of their former abodes. It turned out, Xan discovered by chatting with a resident of the houses opposite, that there’d only been one house occupied by the katra-heads. Just one. But as a matter of policy, the magisters on the scene had insisted on full-scale destruction when they attacked.
Not all those who perished at their hands had been guilty of crimes. A fact excused by the magisters by reference to the deaths of their innocent colleagues just days earlier. Xan didn’t quite see things that way, and she strongly suspected the resident didn’t either, given the way these snippets of information were being delivered: in almost-incoherent sobs. Xan was forced to interpret spite-filled growls, distracted moans, hoarse whispers.
Why did the news-sheets say nothing about the riots? Why did the town-criers never mention the inkatra epidemic? At most such topics got a line at the end, and it was always couched in careful language, listing only the ‘successes’ the magisters had enjoyed in ‘policing the unrest’. She knew the answer, of course – it was hardly in the interests of the rulers for the people to know the truth. But everyone knew already. Was it really worth being so obviously corrupt, just to save a few more pairs of already-deaf ears from hearing about the reality unfolding beyond their window-panes?
It all started innocently enough, an afternoon like any other. The day was hot as hell and everyone was outdoors, making the most of the fresh, fitful breeze coming down from the mountains. The heat was so oppressive even the odours of the lane had faded to a dull background aroma. All of the kids save for her own were gathered on the dried-out roadway, skipping, kicking balls, chasing each other.
“… Peltos says they’s gonna recover. Fifteen of ’em, what got the same poison. Stumped his katra-boys for days an’ –”
“Over there!” Xastur cried, pointing down at a ring of pre-teens throwing a leather hat to each other; Garet dutifully turned, letting the boy in his arms get a better view without missing a beat.
“… when they finally gets it right and cures it, they all says the same thing: it’s been too long as to fix ’em proper. Gonna be days. Maybe weeks.”
“How many more?” she said in a resigned tone of voice.
“Three. Just three, the rest we got somewhere for. An’ it won’t be for ages. Just till their mums and dads –”
“I get it.” Xan sighed. “That’ll make nine, Garet. I can’t – look, the apartment’s too small. You can’t expect me to…”
Her voice trailed off as she spotted a shifty-looking fellow slink up behind Garet.
Xan’s eyes gave him warning, and Garet whipped about, switching arms with Xas to keep the thick trunk of his torso between the boy and any potential attacker.
Xas giggled, and within seconds Xan realised the stranger was just one of Garet’s lackeys; the shifty fellow assumed a deferential posture, his eyes on the planks and his voice even lower as he mumbled quietly to his boss.
Xan was close enough to eavesdrop if she wanted to, but there was a madman in the lane suddenly drawing her attention, along with the attention of most of the lane’s current occupants.
“Everseer is coming!” the unwashed, black-bearded man in the street was yelling. “She’s coming! We should have fled with the others!”
She noticed that Garet’s employee was withdrawing, so she turned back to him and her son.
“Why do you even come here, do this?” she asked, indicating the retreating back of Garet’s minion with her eyes. “You’ve got underlings. You’re busier than you let on. Why don’t you just send one of them to twist my arm into helping?”
“Would that work?” he said, smiling.
“Probably not.”
“Well, then…” His smile broadened. “I guess I just kinda… got used to comin’ down here. See how little Xassy’s grown. Yer know.”
“Shurrup, peckerless!” someone cried from the balcony opposite. Xan found a group of young women leaning over the fourth-storey rail, aiming their insults down at the prophet of doom in the roadway. “Some of us ‘ave got some proper drop to talk about, not this horse-drop.”
What the youngster said didn’t quite make sense, Xan supposed, unless you were from Sticktown, in which case the meaning was perfectly clear. Whether he was brought up around here or not, her words did little to quiet him down, falling on not deaf ears, but ears already overflowing with the sounds coming from his own lips.
“The nonsense they fill you with!” Blackbeard boomed. “Stay indoors and lock them! Doors won’t stop her. Doors don’t stop any of them! She’ll kill every last one of us.”
“Shirrup!” rained down, echoed by a dozen others now, from other balconies.
“Dragons? None but the blind see dragons! The only thing is her! She is our ending! The lies have blinded her to the truth and now it is she, they who wish to be our saviour who shall encompass our utter destruction! No! Flee! Flee for your lives, the lives of your children!”
No one was taking any advice from a guy who was clearly drugged, or was working off a come-down… especially one who didn’t keep his clothes and skin clean, mandatory actions for those who wanted to be in the good books of the decent gods.
“If you don’t shut it soon it’ll get shut for yer, mark my words!” an old man shrieked.
But Xan noticed that the kids had stopped playing their games. Some were pointing, staring. And if Xan was worried they were being sucked in by the doom and gloom, she was quickly corrected.
One of the older kids threw a stick. Not much more than a twig, really. It barely had the weight to carry the twenty-foot distance, slipping out of view beneath an intervening bridge and then emerging on the other side, striking Blackbeard in the chest.
He didn’t even notice.
“What are you still doing here, listening to me?” he demanded, his powerful, ragged voice resounding down the lane, rippling across the apartment-blocks. “You should begone. Gone, do you hear me? These are the avenues of death, and you will all be put to the blade, your blood drained into the dirt and your bodies scorched to dust, to slake a mad woman’s thirst for death! Death and glory! How can death be glory, how can the gods watch over us, if this is all we are?”
Oh dear. This is where it strays into heresy.
The moment he started to denounce Mortiforn, started to sing Yane’s praises or some such drop – she’d have to bring the kids indoors.
Ironic.
More sticks hit him, including a heavier one that struck his elbow before kicking up drop-dust where it fell. The drug-addled prophet rubbed his arm absent-mindedly as he continued to spew nonsense into the air.
“Cattle! Pigs! Not to feed dragons, oh no. There have never been any dragons! That’s it – you were right about Lovebright. We were all right. The stories you heard, that’s all they were. Stories! She was going to reveal the truth to us all. They killed her, to stop her! You know it to be true! You already know, you already know how they lie! Don’t lie down to die. Don’t listen to them! Hear me – heed me!”
The distance between Blackbeard and the group of adolescents wasn’t significant. If he went berserk, and sprang at them to attack them – if he had any sort of weapon…
Though, with the way things were turning out, it seemed at least as likely that she’d end up intervening on his behalf, to protect the idiot from a lynch-mob. She just couldn’t get out of the over-protective mode, even if they weren’t really her kids.
Xan tried yelling down, to get them to stop – Bradon had joined the group of older children, laughing along with them at the wannabe-seer, and he was probably going to end up picking up a stick soon. Vade had come to idolise Bradon, and even now she could imagine the younger boy somewhere down there out of her line of sight, watching with bated breath as his role-model led him away from a life of brightness and very large numbers, into a spiralling underworld of increasingly-thoughtless acts.
She tried, but they didn’t hear – or they did, and the tension she thought she could sense in them even at this distance had something to do with them resisting the compulsion they felt to turn, look up at her, meet her eyes and acknowledge her pleas. Yet the kids in her care pointedly kept their backs to her.
“And when she comes to kill you, when you’re cowering in your beds, that’s when you’ll know! That’s when you’ll listen! Hear! Heed me! And you’ll think, ‘Why! Why did we not flee when we had feet on which to run! Why did we not open the doors when we still had fingers to grasp the handles!’ And as the blood finally drains into your mattresses and you go into the shadowland, there’ll be no smiling face of Mortiforn to greet you! There’ll be nothing but the guilt, the knowledge you were wrong, that you were told and did nothing, nothing!”
Blackbeard was squealing in impotent rage by this point, and while Xan felt she’d heard enough, that the time had come to bring this to an end and get everyone inside… she couldn’t deny the persuasive pull of his words. Despite the fact he was howling now, his voice held just the right amount of frustration, the candid air of someone speaking facts, facts of which he was certain. Even to sceptics like Xantaire, there was something about him begging her to lend him credence, think just for a moment about the possibility –
What if he is right…?
Then three magisters were next to him in the roadway, appearing in the blink of an eye.
What…
The way Xan understood it, they had to have been approaching invisibly, unless the diviner in the group was an archmage, and a very powerful one at that. They had to have paced quietly down the lane, avoiding the traffic, avoiding making much noise…
They had to have heard everything he said. That meant he was going in for heresy, if not quite Heresy.
Garet, standing next to her, sucked in his breath.
“Get indoors,” he grunted, leaning at Xan so that she instinctively put up her hands to catch her son.
She didn’t quite follow what was happening – is he mad, if something’s gone wrong I need to get the others up here, not just run inside and hide! – but then he loped for the stairwell and she understood.
He’s going down for the kids.
Her eyes refocussed on the magisters in the lane.
Something’s gone wrong.
The tall magister taking the lead looked from here like an old crone with a hooked nose, her long robe cut akin to a gown in shimmering azure silks. It was her whose hand was placed directly on the prophet’s head, her whose lips moved in incantation. Her whose magic glittering dust clouded about his face and settled on his shoulders.
Blackbeard fell silent, and lowered his head.
It was scary, eerie, how swiftly a spell could rob a person of their freedom.
“We are removing this man from the vicinity.” This was a male magister in red with a tidy but bushy brown beard, his Westerman accent almost masked by the precision of his speech. “Do not attempt to interfere, lest you share equally in this madman’s fate.”
He stood looking up from balcony to balcony with his arms folded across his muscular chest. The mage would’ve been fearsome enough, even without the two wands on his hips.
The feeling of foreboding rose within her. Xan’s feet were unconsciously moving her closer to the apartment door in response to Garet’s last words, her arms instinctively bearing Xas’s weight as though he were a natural part of her body rather than a burden.
The grey-robed magister, a dark-skinned mouse of a man, seemed to say something furtively to the others, leaning in as the enchantress took the mind-soothed Blackbeard by the elbow.
Red-robe unfolded his arms and raised pulled the wand from the left side of his belt just in time. A line of lightning split the scene in two, a white border dividing the lane in Xantaire’s vision just for an instant, reaching down from an upper storey to incinerate the magisters.
A blue dome was visible for the briefest moment, appearing over the trio and their prisoner in the lane as the shield absorbed the force of the attack.
Thunder rattled a thousand shutters, and the air was alive, crawling with discharged energies, the hairs all over Xan’s body reacting violently.
Then Red-robe flicked up the other wand, directing it straight back to point along the attack’s path.
Lightning answered lightning, and all her other concerns melted away. She had Xas in her arms. The other children mattered, of course they did, but he was her flesh and blood. Reflex more than anything else was what propelled her, sending her bolting back to the apartment, slamming the door shut, running to the bedroom and covering herself and her son in the quilts.
She went straight past Orstrum in his chair. He’d been saying for weeks he’d die in it. It looked like he might just get his wish.
There was nothing. Even as she performed these meagre actions, she understood them to be futile. The walls shook as, outside, elemental forces were unleashed that paid no heed to obstructions made of timber, or flesh and blood…
For all that he’d been sacrilegious, he’d also been right. ‘Get indoors,’ Garet had said, falling prey to the same idiot instincts that had her running for cover.
Doors don’t stop any of them.
* * *
Two hours. They fought… for two hours.
It felt more like twelve.
There came a point when, after the destruction of most of the third and fourth storeys, the obliteration of the apartment and everything she’d known and loved for the last four years… after a thousand explosions, a thousand winces thinking this is the time, this is it, this is how my son dies, this is how I die… she was crouching amidst the tumbled beams with her group of battered survivors, Xassy pressed tight to her chest, and she moved past it.
She moved past the fact the last time she looked for her grandpa there’d only been a hole in the planks – she moved past the incoherency of it all. Vade’s hand grasping Bradon’s even in death, from beneath the mountain of planks that was the landslide of the upper floors. She had to move past it because she had so long to relive it, her eyes staring unseeing at the shifting groundless ground all about her, ears closed to the whimpers of those in her care, those neighbours crammed into this wooden ribcage coffin with them.
The hole in the floor, where he disappeared –
Half the ceiling and most of the contents of the floor above had been strewn across the room, or had followed Grandpa down to the floor below…
He could still be alive. He would still be alive. He was tougher than he looked. Even if he wasn’t quite himself anymore – even if she couldn’t trust him to look after himself, he would do this much for her. He’d claw himself free of the wreckage.
He wouldn’t leave her alone.
She’d led the kids back out of the apartment, the very kids Garet and his fools had managed to return to her, to ‘safety’, just half an hour earlier… and that last glimpse of the place stained her mind.
It was just like the night Peltos and his boys came, when Emrelet summoned the storm – just like the night Garet’s life and her own became entwined. The books, the Mortenns’ collection of random novels that was huge, almost unheard-of by Sticktown standards – those texts had shook free of the shelves and were lying scattered about the room, pages trembling fitfully, incapable of resisting as their doom descended upon them. The leaves of paper from which they were constructed were hardly the best quality to begin with. Not one book, one word, one scratch of ink would remain after this.
I’m sorry, Kas, she thought. She would’ve smiled, the surviving Mortenns suddenly brought to the forefront of her mind, but a cloud of smoke seeped into their hiding place. She was forced to press her face into her shoulder, cover Xas’s face with her sleeve, praying for a breeze, praying for the spell of a magister or champion to come along and free them all from this choking nightmare, this precariously-perched prison.
At any moment, this whole thing could collapse down around us, she would think every few minutes. Wherever Telior is, Kas… I should’ve come with you. It can’t be this bad.
Orovon, send a wind, please! Xan fought for breath. Xas was going limp in her arms. Joran, save us. Yune… Yune…
The name of the Goddess of Hope died on her mind’s lips. The great deity, the one who really inspired the people – one of the few deities whose purview was untarnished by the slightest shred of negativity… The beautiful face of the divine slipped from her mind’s eye, her imagination failing her.
It’s like it’s all a joke to you, she prayed, her tongue a bitter, dead creature in her mouth, a lizard with its scaly head buried in her throat. A joke. Pieces traded in a game of fortify…
Small wonder it was that so many openly eschewed all the gods’ laws, when those allegedly of light did nothing to protect you from the darkness. Powerlessness was no excuse. She’d heard plenty about the gods’ powers, and those of their followers. They could’ve done something. But they didn’t. They just watched from behind the sky, their personal shimmering shield, keeping them at arm’s reach from the world.
Breathing hurt. Xas’s head was slumped forwards, heavy against her hand.
Unconscious.
She couldn’t muster the wherewithal to interpret the sensations in her body beyond their pain factor. She was drifting away, her chest trying to cough and failing.
Die. Die a heretic. Die hating them.
Be a shadow forever.
It was better. A shadow couldn’t hurt. A shadow couldn’t sweat. It would be cool, in the shadowland, swept up in the darkling breezes, but not cold – oh no, never –
“You’re killing him,” a voice told her, and she opened her eyes to behold a tiny blue condor-bird, stepping on miniature yellow feet towards her.
The bird’s words took on meaning in her mind and she became aware of her hand on Xas’s mouth; she hurled the offending arm aside as if it could be detached, and gasped for breath.
What happened after that was a blur – a blur for which she was thankful. There was a sensation of motion, of weightlessness conjoined with transit that made it seem as though she stayed in place, suspended in space and time while all the worlds moved on, spinning about her.
Xantaire’s next complete memory was of being on her back, wondering how it was still daytime, how the sky had hardly changed in all this time…
Then she was rising – getting her elbows into the ground beneath her, lifting the back of her head off the crust of dry muck and trying to yell.
“Xas!” she croaked. “Xas!”
The last thing she’d observed had been a bird with a woman’s voice; now here she was, a woman cawing like a bird.
Her lungs felt fine and yet, despite the lack of pain, she could tell from the metallic taste of her own saliva that there was still some raggedness in her throat. She stopped trying to talk and coughed to clear her airway.
She cast about, turning, taking in the fact that she was one of hundreds teeming here at the top of the lane next to the Griffin. Several teams of magisters were on the scene, each going about their work in a telepath’s silence, but most of the crowd were ordinary people, clasping each other and looking down at the conflagration of what had been their homes. She saw some of the faces she knew, faces she needed to see, but she only had eyes for –
“Mummy!”
Xas. Xassy, covered in soot in Garet’s arms, just a few feet away. One look was enough to tell her the boy was healthy, happy even.
“Yer made it,” Garet said, and the curiously-strangled tone of his voice almost stopped her punching him.
Almost.
She took Xas from him first, of course, settling her son awkwardly on her right hip as she dealt the thug a cracking uppercut.
Garet groaned and stepped back, but as she advanced his open hand snatched out blindly, catching her follow-up blow in a massive, vice-like grip.
“Xan – wha?”
“You!” she snarled, her voice lost in the sea of noise, no one around even finding their feud interesting. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? Was it yours? Your boys, that attacked? Your boy, who came up to whisper to you – was that it? He tell you to get ready, did he?” Her voice was starting to tremble uncontrollably, but she was talking faster and faster, fighting to wrest her hand free to strike him again. “What was I? Were we all bait? Did you think you could just use us? You – I – Grandpa –”
She lost the flow of her anger, thrust out of the furious current to languish in the dead zone once more.
Grandpa…
When Garet replied, the disgust in his voice answered all her questions.
“You really fink I could do that.” His face had turned a blotchy red in response to her accusations. “No way you droppin’ believe that.”
He released her wrist, not roughly, but not gently either. He stepped back, tears suddenly in his eyes.
This wasn’t what she’d expected.
“Garet –”
“You fink I knew… knew this…”
“I don’t know what t-to…”
She shuddered to a stop, and saw by the softening of his expression that he understood. He forgave her already.
He gestured with some force, as if trying to cover for his show of emotion, waving down at the chaos. “Word is it’s Bagger Boys work – they got half the katra trade in the Bend now, yer know… Attack o’ opportunity. Droppin’ idiot Clun… I ‘aspect ‘e’s Zandrina’s, now. Me man – he come to tell me I was in danger, an’ says I should leave. I… I stayed ’cause I was worried. ‘Ow was I to know that… I mean, ‘e was a seer, a P. H. prophet. No one shoulda seen this coming, not proper, like, an’ –”
She flung herself against him, pressing her body to his massive chest, and she felt his hesitation become awkward acceptance. His tree-trunk of an arm settled timidly about her – followed moments later by the other, folding both of them into his gentle giant’s embrace.
From her crushed-in, scrunched-up position, she could barely make out Xas’s face, no less squished against Garet’s burly chest than her own. But she could make out his contented smile.
She burst into tears and sobbed straight into the big man’s sweaty, sooty vest.
There were other tasks that required her attention. She had to find out what state the children were in. Who was okay, or hurt, or missing. She had to find out what’d become of the apartment… her home…
She had to find Orstrum’s body.
But for a moment, just one moment that refused to extend in time no matter how hard she tried, she could forget the mayhem, forget the slaughter.
Just forget.
* * *
She was busy changing a soiled baby, splashing the six-month-old’s behind with warm water and using a cloth to wipe him dry, but none of it seemed to faze the pair of emissaries she was meeting with. They glided over to watch her work as she’d moved from the play pit, as she liked to think of it, to the rather pungent changing stations in the back room. They manoeuvred their shiny robes with aplomb, never getting in Xan’s way or the way of her staff as they observed the goings-on.
She hated them – their smily faces, their too-white teeth. The pair of teenagers from the Shrine of the First Breath were obnoxious in their prettiness – the ministers of Enye had sent both a female and male envoy, but the lad wasn’t ‘handsome’. If anything, he was ‘prettier’ than the girl. His long, golden hair was as bright as hers was dark, and was far showier than his female counterpart’s, tied in a series of intricate knots to form an overall look Kas never could’ve pulled off despite having the same long locks. But it wasn’t just the ruby-studded earrings, the floral scents wafting from the folds of their fancy metallic clothes… It was the tapering chins. It was the smooth texture of the boy’s milky brows and angular arc of the girl’s chestnut cheeks. The appealing angles to their eyes, the lips that were simultaneously thin but full…
They were elfy, that was what it was that was bothering her. They certainly didn’t fit in around here, that was for sure.
She focussed on pinning the nappy of wadded linens in place, swallowing her resentment.
Why couldn’t they just send some normal folks to do the assessment? she wondered internally.
“Why don’t they just come along already knowing how to use a potty?” she wondered aloud, saying what had to be the hundredth stupid thing she’d said in their presence, trying to fill the lingering silences with something, anything to reduce the tension. “There we go, little man.” She popped his blankets back around him. “Let’s go find Salli. Get you back with the others and see where Yordi has got to with that darned mop.”
Before she even had the baby in her arms she was second-guessing herself.
Does that count as swearing? Will they do something to me? Lock me up?
She almost got the door open, preparing herself for the wall of noise about to hit her ears, when the tongue started up again.
“I, ah… I don’t usually swear around the children, but he’s been so long with that damn mop and I –”
I’m doing it again!
“Miss Tarent, I do hope you understand the reason for our visit today.” The smile of the gorgeous boy never slipped, but he sounded troubled. “We are here to observe on behalf of the Maid’s Orphans charity. Please… feel free to go about your business as usual. If you feel a need to swear, don’t stifle yourself on our account. You don’t need to be nervous.”
She released the doorknob and turned to face him.
“Is it that obvious?” she almost whispered.
The beautiful young woman shifted her feet, a motion that would’ve been a sign of discomfort were it not for the beaming expression on her face. “Miss Tarent, our reports on your operation already paint a worthy picture. You have been deemed worthy of a grant, and a monthly stipend to support your cause. We are merely here to understand the limits you encounter in your day-to-day activities. If this wasn’t made clear to you in our letter…”
It hadn’t been. She doubted even Kas would’ve been able to decipher the flowery language it’d been written in.
“… we can only apologise. Would you like to talk us through any obstacles you’ve run into? We’d like to know how we can help.”
“Help?” Garet asked her afterwards, while he personally brought up the last two buckets of hot water for her midnight bath, the orphanage’s floorboards creaking with every one of his steps. He set the steaming containers down in her bedroom doorway and closed the door behind him, regarding her brazenly as she stripped out of her thin summer dress.
“Help,” she replied enigmatically, dipping her toe into the cool water and enjoying its chill against the air’s oppressive heat. The windows were open but the curtains were drawn to preserve her bath-time modesty, and little of the night’s breeze was getting into the room.
“Yer… mean… money?”
His mind wasn’t on his wallet, precisely, she figured, watching his eyes as she stepped into the tub.
“I mean help me.” She did her best to preserve her posture as she lowered her body under the surface.
He dutifully bent to pick up the bucket-handles.
“No, no… We’ll top it up later. Come over here, now. Help me… I hope you’re not afraid to get a bit wet.”
She held out the scrubber and leaned forwards. There were spots she couldn’t reach… and spots she could reach, but were better-reached by someone else.
He didn’t need to be asked twice. He started cleaning her back and talking business, so she stopped him with a long, lingering kiss. The bath wasn’t big enough for the two of them, but she wasn’t going to let something like that get in her way. Once he was submerged she made room, sitting astride him.
It’d been too long since she’d had this kind of companionship. She intended to make the most of it, while it lasted.
Settled in his arms an hour later, the sweat of their bodies joining them deliciously, she listened to his breathing, feeling her own chest rising and falling in time with his own. Every one of his exhalations tickled the back of her neck in the same exact way, but it wasn’t an irritating kind of tickle. It was nice. A predictable pleasure.
I’ve missed this.
How glad she was now, that she hadn’t followed the Mortenns across the sea…
It was an awful, disrespectful way for her to feel – and yet that was how she felt. They couldn’t recover more of Grandpa than a spadeful of ashes, boxed with the assurances of a diviner and buried at the shrine of Yune, done, dealt with, forgotten. The loss of the children who’d perished had hurt her far worse; she admitted it freely, to herself at least. She had work. She had her son. She had her life. Was it wrong for her to turn her back on Illodin in this way? Wasn’t that the whole point of burying them in grounds blessed by the servants of hope? Hope, not just for the souls of the dead, but for those of the living too?
While Garet snored at her back, Xantaire felt a single tear burning in the corner of each of her eyes.
I am glad, and if that means I’m Infernum-bound, so be it, and curse the rule-maker who made it so! I deserve some happiness… I deserve it…
There was probably only a slice of life left to her now. She was a realist, and she was not stupid. She knew things were different this year. Whether the world would end in dragon-fire or the streets would run red with the aftermath of Everseer’s madness – something bad was going to happen. But now more than ever, there wasn’t anywhere she’d rather be than right here, and right now, in this moment.
I’m going to be happy.
As much as she told herself, commanded herself to give up the morbid thoughts, sleep still didn’t come. She had to get up early, but every passing minute made slumber seem increasingly impossible, the notion farcical. Garet aside, how could someone be expected to sleep in heat like this? Thoughts criss-crossed the ocean of possibility, moving like oarless boats upon the still, endless surface, slowly paddled by hand from shore to restless shore.
She wondered just exactly how much those two repellently-attractive youngsters would recommend the ministry pay her – and there was going to be a lump-sum too… She wondered why Xassy had taken so quickly to the other kids here, just what it was that changed in his environment to make him react so amiably to those around him here… She wondered whether Kas had sent the imp again, whether he had news of the destruction of his parents’ home yet…
Sunlight was bright at the edges of the curtains, and the heat had receded. It was blessedly cool. She must’ve fallen asleep, because the frantic knocking at the door woke her up with a start.
“Boss!” someone cried. “Boss! Zandrina’s lot’s in Knuckle Market! She’s there! It’s happenin’!”
“Wha?” came Garet’s muffled reply from the pillow. “Buh it’s mornin’!”
“Boss.” The pleading tone of the man’s voice made Xantaire’s skin crawl; it was like he was beseeching his god. “Boss, please… It’s happenin’.”
* * *
“Here, Gram! Here, Garet!” the mad woman cried, her thin, reedy voice reverberating across the broken square. “I’ve seen it! This is where they agree it ends!”
“Your end, Zandrina!” came Ginnel Gram’s scream from his hiding spot somewhere to Xan’s left. “Yours, not ours!”
There were a series of detonations, and, then, the reply –
“No! Sticktown will be mine!”
Hiding behind a toppled wooden stall, Xantaire breathed deep. The frostbolts were raining down all around her, hurtling through the air twice as fast as arrows, whistling as they went. Icicles as long and thick as her arm, as hard as stone and as sharp as spears. After thirty seconds one must’ve struck the solid oaken planks of the table behind which she was crouching; the thud and splintering screech were heart-stopping, and the whole stall slid twelve inches, hammering into her shoulder. She scrambled and sprawled, keeping down, clutching the wand tightly in her hand until her knuckles turned white, waiting, waiting for the moment to lunge out, aim and fire.
And risk her head exploding.
At a cat, she muttered silently. At a cat.
How had it come to this?
She’d gone with them. She didn’t know why; only that she had to. She’d walked ahead of Garet, striding purposefully out the front door of the makeshift orphanage and waiting for him to join her, then heading with him up the roadway, over a dozen of his crew milling about behind them. He gave her only a single side-long glance, then resigned the argument, knowing full-well that once her mind was made up nothing was going to stop her. She smiled softly to herself, and kept her silence, floating forward on a wave of excited chatter, the enthusiasm of the gang-bangers brought to boiling-point by the prospect of imminent violence.
She couldn’t help but fall into introspection when she followed Garet around a parked wagon, passing close by a group of kids who lowered their bats and balls as the Bertie Boys strolled past. Xastur rose up in the back of her mind. The other children she cared for, too. What was she doing? Why was she going to this confrontation? She was leaving so much behind, sprinting blindly on into a future that was only going to offer her injury or death.
It wasn’t any one thing. She hardly laboured under the impression Garet and his band of fighters and thieves were like the white knights out of Kas’s books. She knew they were the bad guys. But she had their backs all the same. They were Helbert Bend’s bad guys. Zandrina’s lot… It was just like how the kids used to leave the Mud Lane rat population alone whenever the big river-rats pushed west, choosing to lob their rocks and sticks at the invading vermin – it always lasted only a few weeks, just until the intruders retreated back to the water-ways. But the idea at the heart of it, the temporary truce with the unwanted natives… it was the same thing.
She wasn’t alone in feeling that way, it seemed. They stopped at a crossroads for barely sixty seconds, waiting for reinforcements and for Ginnel Gram’s katra-heads to message Garet’s back, but word spread like stickfire. Before they headed out again, almost twenty likely-lads from the surrounding streets had swelled the force’s numbers.
By the time they actually met up with Ginnel Gram’s forces, they were over a hundred strong and the wave of nervous, thrilling anticipation became almost unbearable as they split and spilled through the side-roads to keep together. She truly felt she was being propelled, carried forward like Killstop’s arm was around her shoulders. She couldn’t feel her legs. She couldn’t feel herself breathing. The sense of elation in her stomach overrode everything else.
Yes, she’d left Xassy, and for that the gods would damn her should she meet death on this venture. But he wouldn’t be the only orphan. He had good company, good carers, and maybe if she was gone – who was to know? – he would develop into a stronger man by her absence…
He would have to. She was going, and she wasn’t just going to observe. The line had to be drawn somewhere. If this was it – the battle for the survival of the city-streets she’d lived in all her life – she would go down fighting in defence of them. She wasn’t the only one without a pecker between the legs to take up arms, either. Whether they’d been bolstered by the sight of Xantaire there amidst the ranks of the Bertie Boys, she was unsure, but at least four or five other women had joined the army on their march to war.
It all came back to Zandrina. It was all on her, all of it. If she hadn’t brought the inkatra into the city in the first place – nothing would’ve happened. Mud Lane would still be standing, and a dozen other places too. All the pointless deaths… all those orphans… all for what? One woman’s greed? One person’s desire for ultimate control?
It had to end.
When they’d arrived in Lord’s Knuckle, she’d copied Garet and his hand-picked group of elite gangers. Crouching in the mouth of a refuse-choked alleyway, looking out onto Knuckle Market, she was suddenly forced to reassess her former determination. The messenger who’d woken them just ten or fifteen minutes ago hadn’t been lying. It was happening alright.
None of the cloak and dagger stuff – this was dagger-only. Zandrina’s agents were sauntering about brazenly like they owned the place, openly pointing their blades in the faces of vendors, simple stall-workers, shouting at and beating them. Demons were torturing people and her gangers were just standing by, pointing and laughing. At least one unit of watchmen were among the dead, and it was apparent from the lack of response that the magisters were going to hold back this time. Now, when it mattered, when the people really needed them – this would be when they’d keep their cards close to their chest. The Magisterium had sacrificed enough of their own already. Doubtless they’d sweep in to mop up the mess once the hard work, the real fight, was over. If it’d been a naysayer prophet countering their own propaganda, they’d have moved in like a pack of wolves, consequences be damned – but this? A true riot against the peace, an uprising beyond their ability to neatly package… They’d let it play out, let their enemies destroy each other. Watch and smile from the sidelines. For all Xan knew, they were already here, observing silently from behind the screens of invisibility spells and protective wards.
Maybe they even knew. Maybe they planned this.
It was hard to stop the thoughts from whirling about the landscape of her mind. There came a point, somewhere between Garet pressing the wand into her hand and the first time she used it, that she actually thought she saw a magister standing in one of the dozens of alleys feeding into the marketplace. A slim man in a red robe, arms folded across his chest, his unseen gaze shadowed by the folds of his cowl.
Then the chaos of the battle swept across her brain. It was like nothing she’d seen or heard of before. There wasn’t an archmage in sight, and she could tell. Uncontrolled blasts of wizardry lit the spaces between the combatants. Imps flew like flocks of birds, hurling their own destructive spells, descending upon the unwary to rend them to pieces. An illusion of a fleeing family had been revealed as a group of enemies when it was almost too late, and a whole section of the market was now cut off by a wall of yellowish fog – the way Garet had been heading the last time she’d seen him. Healing spells were fewer and further between than they needed to be. Piteous moans were ripped from scores of throats, grievous wounds being inflicted on every side she turned. At one point she saw someone finish their dying friend with a quick blow to the back of the head – an act of mercy, she assumed foolishly, until she saw the slobbering addict behind them raise the dead man as a zombie, sending him stumbling back into the fray.
At a cat, she mumbled again mentally, staring at the wand-tip. The thing was barely more than a twig, the runes scrawled into its many imperfect surfaces looking haphazard, scratched with the impatience of a kid… or an addict craving their next hit. How they’d come up with such an idiotic activation-word, she had no idea. She knew only that it worked.
An imp came around the top corner of her stall, dropping down into view not two feet from her. The thing was barely eighteen inches in height, each of its four spindly limbs looking no stronger than the ensorcelled twig in her fist. Its egg-shaped head was the same size as its pudgy belly, the whole of its body covered in tiny scarlet scales. This one was wingless. The end of its long tail rang like a pouch full of copper, and as it came curling into view Xantaire saw the many hideous black hooks gathered there at the tip of the snake-like appendage, like a nest of metallic thorns, ringing as they contacted each other, constantly snaring and loosing –
She shuffled back, squeaking involuntarily; the imp instantly swung about and she saw its horrid little leer as it spotted her.
Saw its leer transform to dismay as it noticed the wand she was now gripping in both hands, aimed dead-centre at its chest.
“Ahtaqat!” she snarled.
There was no obvious spell-effect, no big light-show. That was okay; she’d quickly learned that the weapon she’d been given wasn’t one of those. That didn’t make it any less powerful. The results of its activation had been far more pronounced when used on the human victims whose lives she’d claimed, despite the point-blank range. Instead of the dark druid-magic punching a hole clean through the demon, it merely blackened the creature’s skin and produced a sudden scent like vomit, only stronger – bubbling, boiling vomit.
It clutched its chest, looking down with a stupefied expression at the swiftly-spreading discolouration of its flesh, and keeled over backwards. The tail twitched, then was still.
She didn’t dare look out of her safe-spot. She kept her eyes trained on the demonoid, hoping, praying it was dead.
The wands were limited both in supply and charges; she’d been told hers had at least seventeen uses left, but how many of those she’d expended already she had no notion. Many of the gang-members were armed with nothing more than their knives and nail-studded clubs. It was the katra-heads who were doing the biggest share of the fighting. Garet and Gram seemed to have dozens of them – they possessed more living weapons than they had wands. But Zandrina had more. So many more.
After a few moments the dead demon’s tail twitched once more, and she prepared herself to release another blast at the hellspawn; but the infernal corpse only started to shed its little black hooks, and beneath the rumble of the war she heard the little blades tinkle against each other like keys as they fell.
She breathed a sigh of relief, sat back –
Thud!
Another bolt struck the stall, this time at the top, sending it flipping over, rolling away from her like a wheel –
She was unharmed, but suddenly found herself sitting exposed, without cover, far from the edge of the battlefield.
A field of bonfires and blood, the cadaver-soil fertile for animation. Shadows moved over the earth, dimming the light of the sky. Peering through the shifting mists, she thought she caught a single glimpse of Zandrina, the wild-eyed woman in a coat of pink fur standing in the midst of the katra-heads on the far side of the ruined marketplace. Even as Xan stared, a ray of lightning stretched out to bathe the Rivertown crime-lord in its white fire, only to deflect off the shields surrounding her and strike a fallen crate of apples. Those of her followers outside the magic wards were forced to raise their hands over their heads as the hard fruits came raining down on top of them with what looked like considerable force.
Xan didn’t hang about to observe the results. She couldn’t see them in the fog to her right but she could hear more zombies, hear imps shrieking. A stray fire-bolt ripped an orange-red line through the air, not twenty feet from her face, exploding against another fallen stall. Her shock at the table being torn away from her was starting to dissipate and she flung herself after it, retreating, aiming to throw herself over it – it was sort of facing the wrong way now, its busted legs pointing out towards the enemy-lines, but she didn’t care, it was better than nothing –
Still several yards from the stall she wanted to hide behind, someone died to her right. She heard no scream – just a loud, moaning sigh, and the gush of internal fluids as they splashed across the ground.
She was just a few feet from the table; she put her hands out in preparation, getting ready to grip the edge of the thing to help her vault over it – damn her hurt shoulder –
Crack!
She froze, mid-step. She felt a wind strike her back, sending her hair streaming, and the darkness about her deepened while she stood there, paralysed in the open.
Dread washed over her. She no longer feared the magic of men. Her soul responded, every fibre of her being tingling with an electricity subtler than the lightning of wizards.
Morning had fallen away straight into a weird half-night, and all hope in her had died with the daylight. Something had changed. She’d never felt so vulnerable. Her back was turned to it – she couldn’t see it, but that only made it worse… An entity was behind her with a power like the one Kas had described all those months ago. It was behind her. Behind her.
She couldn’t even move her eyes, never mind her head.
“I told you that they would let us in.” Its horrid, feminine voice wasn’t loud in the typical sense one might expect of a demon-lord, but in the silence following its arrival in Mund, its words were the only sound. It didn’t sound posh, exactly, but the casual superiority in its voice was like that of a highborn taken to an extreme, dismissive of everything and everyone it considered beneath it – which was everything and everyone on this whole entire plane. “The Daughter of the Sinphalamax is never wrong… Indeed, sister. This shall be the ending of the New Era, the close of the Silver Age. Is it not glorious, as I foretold? Do you see? It is to the glory of the Sinphalamax. Between us, we shall usher in an aeon of blissful Nightmare. Yes! Let us begin. First we must hunt down those who dared challenge our kin.”
When the paralysis released her, Xan’s previous momentum seemed to partially return and she tripped. Legs and arms swinging wildly, she fell forward into the upright side of the stall, bashing her temple against the edge and slumping down against it, still vulnerable, still out in the open, exposed.
Through suddenly-watery eyes, trying to ignore the ringing between her ears, she looked back over her shoulder at the centre of Knuckle Market.
It made so much more sense. She hadn’t been talking to herself. What she’d just heard had been a conversation between demons with identical voices.
Not one of the naked tiger-women, purple- and black-furred with white triangular faces. Not one of the arch-fiends with the flesh-coated whips it’d taken Kas and his whole entourage of champions to kill.
Four of them, loitering there on the muddy market grounds, leaning against the marble pillars in their midst while they chatted.
Marble… pillars…
Her eyes flicked up and she took it in. Two marble pillars completed the scene, each of them forty feet or so in height, carved in the likenesses of angels. They stood back to back, mirroring one another perfectly, the tips of their massive feathery wings almost touching; one of them was facing away towards the Giltergrove, while the other statue was displaying itself to Xantaire almost full-on. Its visage was off-putting, somehow. Its eyes were closed, its smile just a little bit too tranquil.
The burning chains clasped in the fists of the serene statues – surely that alone would be enough to make them daunting. Their arrival, here, now, like this, in such esteemed evil company… She doubted anyone who beheld them would be deceived. These columns were not dedicated to the gods of light, for all their majesty, for all the care with which they’d been crafted.
“Yea, hunt and flense,” came a hollow, resonating voice. The words were loud but distorted, the inflections covered with a layer of crackling and snapping like dry wood on a firepit. “Break every well. Yet it shall be to me to extract the magic.”
Xantaire looked back down at the ground, surprised to find a lithe little figure in red standing right in the middle, stepping out from between the two grotesquely beautiful columns. Somehow she received the impression the huge marble objects were just its carriage, its gateway between worlds.
No, not lithe – skeletal. It resembled the animated skeleton of a child, clad in a formal, long-sleeved gown woven of bright, strawberry-coloured cloth. White hair extended up off the very crown of its skull in a single heavy braid at least five yards long, sticking up a few feet into the air before arcing down behind it, trailing like a tail.
Xan had absorbed enough demonology to recognise there was no way this was a mere skeleton – not even a lich. It wasn’t from the shadowland at all, but it was something way beyond her lore – maybe beyond Kas’s.
The white-haired skeleton in red had an imperious, presumptive air about it as it waved at the bigger arch-fiends.
“Return to me with all thou hast to offer,” it continued, moving its arm to point to a tiger-woman. “The time nears, as well ye knowest.” The red-sleeved arm waved again, encapsulating Lord’s Knuckle with a single lazy gesture. “I shall endeavour to harvest a tribute, such as is demanded by our need. We meet anon at the Fountains.”
As one, the four tigresses knelt, their sickening triangular faces lowered to the detritus-clogged ground, their feline backs dipping down like those of cats stretching after a nap.
These peaceful, slumberous months – they were over. This had been a pre-dinner nap all along…
“Mother,” they said, a single blended sound.
The respect in their voices. They were the children.
And as Xan looked on, in unison the two statues – in unison the two statues –
The… statues…
She snapped.
It wasn’t just that they were so immense. She could’ve seen a big demon without losing it, of course she could.
But the marble angels had been standing right there in her field of vision for so long without moving, she hadn’t realised they weren’t just objects.
She ran, screaming, unable to remove the sight from her head, unable to unsee what she had seen, unable to conceive an existence that was anything but this, this flight, to run, to run and not think –
She saw them, the statues suddenly turning – bowing…
And that was what it took to finally break Xantaire Tarent’s mind in two.
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