JADE 2.4: SHADOW-CASTER

“I attend the sweetest of songs. The melodies of six generations long in the tooth. Draem! I can hear your laughter, O glorious Draem! But I cannot snare the Great Ones. I have not your gift; in the attempt would I be undone. When your daughter comes I will snare the lesser instead, two of them, and between their second-sights build the unassailable fortress of which your kinsman foretold. The Crucible will be known to them. The future is already writ, in ink of blood. I have only to force them to turn the page.”

– from the Secret Diary of Astra Venefich

Everyone else was asleep. Xantaire and Xastur. Orstrum and Morsus. The twins. Even Zel – well, to her ‘asleep’ merely meant she was off doing whatever she got up to on her home plane, while I got some privacy.

I sat in bed, unable to even get to the first bit of luxurious drowsiness despite feeling weary. After an hour of pointlessly hammering my pillows with my fists, pointlessly shutting my eyes, I got my sorcerous volume out from beneath my mattress and resolved to study until I fell asleep.

I didn’t have to read it in the dark anymore, I supposed, but I hadn’t let the twins see the text, wouldn’t let them see it, and, besides, there was something right about reading it like this. I guessed the Magisterium-trained sorcerers were used to going over their spells in the bright daylight, right there in a massive, airy library on the Maginox grounds. But for me my first experience, my first learning of sorcery would always be indelibly associated with night-time, with the slumberous creaking of wood and the whispering of a dark autumn wind.

I’d given myself the excuse of checking over what I’d done with the diamond-shaped, imprisoning barrier, but really I just flicked through the pages as my mind carried on sorting through the events of the day, arranging its own contents. I supposed I wouldn’t be able to sleep till it was done.

We’d finished off a couple more giant spiders, rescuing a stranded pair of magisters on the south-western edge of the Square. Em had flown off to gather healers while I got the wounded ordered, and then we checked our glyphstones – as Winterprince had intuited, the crises were over in the space of twenty minutes, a ‘textbook case of Magisterium-champion cooperation’, and so on… The only difference in the messages we each received from the bald, grey-moustached magister was that Em was required to return for debriefing, despite being off-duty.

I’d kept the flight spell to make my way home – Em reassured me it’d give me at least an hour from the last time she refreshed its effect on me – and I turned off an unusually sombre-sounding Zel, heading for some distinctly non-magical company and an early night.

It started to rain just as I was getting home, mask and robe carefully stowed.

The whole time I was still recoiling from what had happened. I kept coming back to the same experiences, over and over again. The way it’d felt to know the twelfth shield failed, to know how many I’d let die through my weakness. The way the crowd had whispered my name. The way I’d disappointed the tempura-cook and his daughter, the unavenged victims of a callous act just like the one I witnessed today. And especially the way I’d watched helplessly as Winterprince brought his jagged ice-weapon down on a teenager’s neck.

‘Even the children?’

‘Especially the children.’

It was her voice, the surety, contrasted with the youth of the face, revealed by the edge of the arch-wizard’s sword, a face birthed in my mind out of a puddle of blood, oozing from the clean-cut severed neck…

So many children had already died. Was killing one more child the answer? It was a question with no solution. One person would say one thing, and another would say the other, with perfectly-inverted reasoning. Or even the same person, taken in different moods, or different times of their life, would give conflicting responses.

So I couldn’t entirely blame myself for not knowing the answer to my own question. To take up an answer would be to set myself in one category, prevent me from seeing the opposite opinion.

And I needed to be able to see it – if I was going to be able to continue working with Emrelet, with the Magisterium, with my own damn spellbound fairy – Yune’s fingers, if I was going to be able to continue working alongside myself, I needed to see both sides. I couldn’t even imagine the Kas who would’ve plunged down from the sky, weapon aloft, to behead a thirteen-year-old – not without feeling sick, not without instantly banishing the imagining in revulsion. Yet I couldn’t imagine the Kas who would’ve let the heretic go free. Wasn’t there a way to take them captive, without running the risk of… ‘infection’?

I had to admit, there’d been a – terrible, yes; abhorrent, of course – but nevertheless enticing sense of mystery about the heretic’s words.

‘Look at us.’ Emphasis on the us.

It was ambiguous and the ambiguity exposed a lacuna in my mind, a whirlpool I kept rotating around, coming back to the same notions.

If she meant ‘us’ as in ‘heretics’ then what she said was purely self-critical.

The same for ‘us’ meaning ‘arch-druids’.

I came around to it again: ‘us’ being ‘archmages’, ‘us’ being ‘you and me, Feychilde’.

And – how had she put it?

‘Beware the crowning year. Thin the herd before the snakes in wolves’ clothing come among the sheep for the slaughter.’

It had the idiom of a religious catechism, like one of the sermons from the ministers of Chraunator down at Cutterwells. Not that this religious aspect was altogether surprising, given their denotation as heretics. In common parlance the word ‘heretics’ meant those who rejected the Gods of Light, those whose souls were lost to the night. She hadn’t exactly seemed rational while voicing her delusions of slaughter, after all. Was she a twisted cultist of Mekesta, devoted to Chaos itself, to the Queen of Darkness and Terror? Perhaps a cold-hearted follower of Yane, the Blade-Lord, Prince of Murder and Cruelty? Or maybe just a lunatic pledged to Ool, the Ravenous One, the Lord of Strife and Frenzy? Every creed had a dozen apocalypses planned, it seemed, each with their own version of the End Times – and at least ten percent of the apocalypses were supposed to happen on the millennium, of course. Surely this was what was meant by the ‘crowning year’.

But she’d spoken of sacrifice, and Mortiforn, the quite-rational God of Sacrifice, would surely never countenance the dark druid’s actions. He might well have been a shady god but he had rules. One of those was an equal trade – and the heretic’s actions had saved zero lives, improved nothing.

‘Do you not know? – that Mund is as a sacrifice?’

Again, the strange phrasing. Again, the shiver running through my body upon recollecting the words in their cold, harsh reality.

The scorn in her voice had made it sound as though she detested the thought that it was a sacrifice. That she would’ve changed it if she could.

But she had been the one killing people!

And would Mortiforn sanction this? A city as a sacrifice? To what? For what?

I considered how best to pray to him, recalling his titles and forms of address.

The existence of the gods was more than just a certainty – it was something any kid could and would prove to themselves, even making a game of it. Kultemeren, God of Truth, the Ultimate Judge, existed. If someone said they saw Kultemeren you’d take it very seriously, because you could only write or speak or even think the truth of him. He was the lynchpin of the worship of all the gods, really, because the miracles the priests provided were functionally indistinguishable from magery – while being inherently far less reliable, their divine magic contingent upon receipt of divine approval. As little as was known for certain, it was common knowledge that ministers didn’t command their own powers, they begged for them – and sometimes the gods simply said no.

But Kultemeren provided a really easy way to prove the potency of the divine entities outright. Everyone – well, everyone growing up around here, anyway – had tried to finish the sentence Kultmeren isn’t realllllly keen on these games on the ‘real’ bit, but you inevitably ended the thought in some unerringly-truthful way.

The implications of how you’d end those thoughts were sometimes mildly terrifying.

The implications of depictions of Kultemeren were worse.

You couldn’t just put his name to any image in such a way as to denote it as his representation – you could try, but your pen would run dry, your paint would congeal, your ink would smear, your chalk would snap. There was a rumour back when I was about eight years old that one kid had broken his arm trying to write ‘Kultemeren’ above some stupid stick figure on a wall. If you were old enough to be able to spell Kultemeren’s name, you were old enough to know better.

No, not just any image. But you could put it to scarily-broad range of images. They didn’t even need to be good – they just had to have the right intention behind them.

Kultemeren was a lion. Kultemeren was a dragon. Kultemeren was a phoenix.

But that was the mild, vaguely-sensible stuff.

Kultemeren was a clock. Kultemeren was a gavel. Kultemeren was an almost-closed mouth.

The nearest shrine of his to Mud Lane was south-east of the Plain Road, near North Lowtown. I’d never seen the tapestries with my own eyes, reportedly woven by the shrine’s blind neophytes, but my dad had explained what they were like. The god was a judge, an arbiter, a historian and a hermit.

It was because of him we knew the answers to certain essential questions about the universe. You couldn’t use his name to invoke circumstantial, boring truths. Kultemeren thought potatoes were good for you, and Kultemeren thought potatoes were bad for you. Kultemeren knew I’d been a good boy this year, and Kultemeren knew I’d been naughty. Kultemeren knew I was twelve years old, and Kultemeren knew I was twelve thousand.

Kultemeren didn’t care. But he cared about people trying to say he wasn’t re…

Kultemeren dwelt in Celestium. Kultemeren was one of the twenty-seven gods. Not twenty-eight. Not twenty-six. Twenty-seven. He was the God of Truth, but not Time or Oaths or Precision or Law or so many other related concepts. The Ultimate Judge stood above such things.

These mysteries were, the parables went, discovered through experimentation, giving us a clue into the pursuit of truth itself, leading in the end to the distillation of magery and the world in which we now lived. Doubtless the other races had their own parables, but the truths never changed – even Kultemeren’s name was the same, in every language the Mundic expansionists had ever encountered. I hadn’t tried getting a goblin or demon to say it for fear of making their heads explode, but I expected even they’d pronounce it the same way too.

And Kultemeren sired Mortiforn.

The harsh son of Kultemeren. An everlasting reminder, so the tales went, that even suffering is necessary, permitting us the transformation of sacrifice, the punishment needed for us to grow as human beings…

It sounded an awful lot like desperate people doing their damnedest to justify a sucky state-of-affairs, but what did I know?

We Mundians prayed to the gods all the time, but the rate of reply was probably something like one in a million. My mum had testified to religious experiences, and Orstrum said it was after a visitation from an angel that he’d made the decision to come to Mund in the first place… But I’d seen him drinking, and couldn’t rule out a more mundane explanation for his visions.

It was therefore something of a shock to my system that, when I closed my eyes and angled my thoughts at Mortiforn, Mortiforn the Naked Blade, Mortiforn, he from whom each wound Is Made, something started happening.

Within ten seconds a sense of lifting came over my flesh, like a coverlet of silk stretched by a cool wind against every miniscule parcel of my skin beneath my clothes, raising me up from the sheets. I felt the sensation as though it were rippling down my neck, about my waist, between my toes beneath the quilt as I sat there cross-legged. I almost sensed a breath blowing in my hair – as if I were under a spell similar to Em’s flight but one that touched only the soul, detaching me from this world. It worked on inner perceptions, stirring shapes before my closed eyes, like the rainbow-hued fragments of droplets you saw when you screwed your eyes shut for too long.

Rainbow hues that led inexorably towards the deep end of the spectrum; the darker recesses of the mind; the purple shade.

I heard myself speaking, as if from a distance.

Mortiforn, Lord Suffering, I would ask you a question.

A scene unfolded before my shuttered vision, a strange, greyish environment peeling away from the purple darkness which was all I could see with my mortal eyes.

Do I dream?

No. Not dreaming. I was awake, and yet I was seated on one side of a desk in a small room of three blank grey walls, like a cell, like a room in the Maginox. The desk was black, opaque, featureless, a void in space – I couldn’t make out the angles, the edges. As if I were looking through a glyphstone, I could tell that I was still there in my bed, and while I couldn’t turn my head or look down I still felt sure that I could stop it all by just opening my eyes.

So I wasn’t too disturbed by my visitor.

I couldn’t see his chair, but, all the same, seated upon the other side of the black-hole table was the only source of colour in the whole place. A gaunt, unblinking, unsmiling man whose youthful face and hands and exquisite clothing were the exact same shade of grey-purple, like a washed-out lavender hue – the whites of his lavender-irised eyes stood out vividly, radiant and pearly. What appeared to be a doublet of velvet covered his torso, embroidered with dark, snarling patterns around its seams, tailored to fit his nail-thin frame perfectly.

“Thou didst seek audience. I have come to hear thee caw, kestrel; Kastyr Mortenn.”

The voice was not loud or threatening, not intimidating; quite the opposite. The man spoke in a fragile, gentle, almost brittle tone, as if he wished to move his lips as little as possible.

Even still I saw the glint, the sharp whiteness hiding in his mouth.

Stolen story; please report.

I saw him anew, the tallness of him, the stretched-out look, skin tight over high cheekbones. The purplish hair pulled back from a high, clear, purplish brow.

He looked young, but this undead creature was anything but youthful.

You are a vampire.

“I am.” He still didn’t seem to want to open his mouth much, still didn’t move his eyes.

What is this place?

“This is but a room of audience.”

I’m dreaming.

I still knew I wasn’t, really; I could pick out every one of the twins’ separate soft breaths with Zel’s borrowed senses. I was awake. I could choose the thoughts that emanated from my dream-form’s lips almost as freely as at any other time.

“Thy word is incorrect, yet is sufficient.”

Incorrect… Then where am I?

“I am given to believe thou hast most-oft heard it named the shadowland. Nethernum.”

The floaty sensation that was tingling my inner senses suddenly elicited chills, spreading up my spine, making the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

What’s… what’s happening?

“Thy soul hath been lightened of its burdens and brought into the shadows. My Lord wishes us to receive all in whose veins run the blood and investment of the Summoner.”

The blood… Litenwelt’s… in my veins?

“Of course.”

And you are?

At last, he smiled, a brief display of his fangs.

“In my time I hath taken more names than thou hast taken years, Kastyr Mortenn. In the Forest of the Fourth World was I born, ere Chaos came; ere the Three Seas broke the land.”

I kept my silence, regarding him.

“Mr. Owl,” he acquiesced finally, in the same gentle voice, “a seneschal in the service of the Great Lord Suffering. Thou hadst in thy heart a query designed for the ear of my Lord?”

Mr. Owl… I steeled myself. Today I have heard something which has disturbed me.

“Heresy.”

Yes.

“And thou wouldst ask if the Srol operate at our behest? They are the enemies of Mund, of life, of being. They seek only after death.”

That isn’t an answer.

“Is it not?” He displayed the fangs again, just as briefly. “Death is to us no evil, save the death which brings nearer the Death of the World.”

Death… with no life in return.

“And every scale imbalanced; yes, Kastyr Mortenn.”

Is Mund a sacrifice?

His face remained very still. “Thou speakst a second question.”

It was my first question, really, but I think you just answered it. I laughed softly to a quiet bedroom. The heretic girl was right! What is Mund being sacrificed for? Why are they killing its people indiscriminately?

I looked at the vampire’s face and I knew before he spoke that I wasn’t going to get a straight answer.

Perhaps the magisters had it all wrong. Could it be that the Magisterium or the highborn were the ones sacrificing Mund, somehow, symbolically? That the Srol were actually, in their own crazy way, trying to stop them?

Em might’ve been resolved on her decision to keep the steady wage and relative safety of her magister position, yet there was more to the question of Heresy than met the eye. Would I need to rescue her from the moral bankruptcy of the highborn like Henthae?

But there was more to my vampiric interlocutor than any inner-eye could perceive.

“Thy concerns outstretch thy reach, make no mistake,” the vampire chided me in the same soft, glassy voice, “and thine impertinence shall unmake thee as it doth unmake every man. Yet I might deign to let such words as these fall unhindered from my tongue, lest I spurn thee, and sour thee on my Divine Lord’s wisdom: my Lord moves none to take or give lives whose souls are not so moved without his counsel. By the heretics’ deeds thou shalt rise the stronger, as shall those in thy likeness; by the strength ye show shall the sacrifice made in vain be remade in glory. We watch and we wait – we do not interfere.”

You… you, I licked my lips which were dry as I sat there cross-legged on the bed, you mean that Mortiforn accepts this Heresy because it makes champions better at fighting?

I couldn’t keep the disbelief from my mind-voice. What a paltry excuse…

“If I spoke on I would be much remiss,” Mr. Owl demurred. “Think not that thou hast no room in which to grow, and farewell. I will tell thee in parting: he will say unto thee that thou art in no danger, and threaten rather those thou lovest – but this is untrue. Thine own life alone rests on the scythe’s edge. We know this, as it is given for us to know.”

Who are you talking about now?

“The reaper’s hand shaping a blade of untempered time. The unsoothsayer.”

I stared, more confused than ever.

“He who loiters behind thee.”

I took a fatal near-second, just drawing a breath, opening my eyes in shock –

Just enough useless time spent not drawing out a shield to watch the knife enter the field of my vision, flashing towards my face –

Only to lie flat on my upper cheek near my scar, the cold tip of the blade digging into the soft flesh beneath my eye, not quite enough pressure to pierce the skin.

“No shield,” he murmured, the voice quiet, self-assured, sinister. I could feel his breath, hot on my ear and the side of my face in the chill night air, coming across my face from over my shoulder. His arm was about me from behind.

Zel, I psychically whispered, Zel if I ever needed you it’s now.

I’d heard nothing, sensed nothing, as he’d approached. How had he got in here? Through the front door? Orstrum and Morsus, were they…?

“Don’t move your fingers. Don’t even twitch. I don’t want to have to hurt your brother and sister, do I?”

He held up his other hand, keeping the pressure of the dagger-blade by my eye steady. I saw two strands of golden hair caught between his fingers.

“Y-you’re having a right day of it, Kas. Everyone else is okay. Sleeping.”

“I will let you talk, but you have to be quiet. If they wake, I kill them. If you shout, I kill them. If – well, you’re a smart chap; I think you get the picture.”

Untraceable accent – not highborn.

“I – I get it,” I said.

A shield would cast him towards the twins, but the agent of Mortiforn had told me they weren’t in danger, only me –

“I don’t care what you think you’ve seen, do not try a shield! I can see this knife killing you Kas – oh, so many times – his chronomancy’s off the charts –“

I swallowed.

“Yes,” he whispered – in answer to what, I was unsure. “They call me Duskdown. Pleased to meet you, Feychilde.” His voice lost some of its sinister edge – he used my champion’s name, though he surely knew my real one. “I’d shake your hand…”

“If you weren’t holding a blade to my face, yeah, I still get it.”

“Oh no – I could quite happily –“

Even as he whispered an unbroken sentence he moved, and I realised why I hadn’t noticed his approach during my extra-planar conversation, even with the fey senses of my body quite capable of informing me of noises in my vicinity –

He didn’t move like a normal person, or even like the diviner with the Lowtown accent and scruffy appearance who’d evaded the giant spider in Firenight Square –

He moved like an eel in a rushing river, a soundless blur of soft red-pink-purple robes.

“– shake your hand –“

The knife on my face flipped then rotated as he effortlessly whirled his body around mine, somehow getting from behind me to in front of me without the blade either leaving or piercing the skin under my eye –

Then he was sitting before me, hooded, upper-face masked with a curved, horizontal oval of interlocking discs and semicircles of burnished steel – “if it came to it, but I don’t want to let you move your hands. I know how that goes, and I’d rather end this tonight, if it’s all the same with you?” He gave me no space to respond before continuing, “I thought so – good. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to sit very still, and listen to me for what feels like seven minutes. When those seven minutes are up, I will leave. You and yours will never see me again. Unless you choose otherwise.”

“You’ve certainly given this some thought,” I managed to say.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had this chat with a champion, or the fifth. It didn’t go so well the first few times, but I’ve refined my approach. Hear me out.”

And he just plunged right ahead.

“In about twenty minutes from now, if I didn’t interrupt, you’d begin planning a way to take me down. Unlike one of the heretics, you don’t have to kill me, just bring me in for a trip to Magicrux Zyger. By this time tomorrow you’d have six ideas on how to do it. One would even come close, but none would work. And you would die, every time.”

His voice was the flat voice of certitude.

“So I’ll tell you who I am, why I did what I did. Maybe it’ll change your mind on me. Maybe it won’t. I’ve seen it go both ways. For your sake, I hope it’s the former, and if it’s the latter, I’ll try to make it as quick and painless for you as I can. Do you understand? Good.”

I swallowed again.

“The day I – the day I became Duskdown, that was the worst day of my life.” There was a plain sincerity to his voice I hadn’t thought to hear; it had the character of someone admitting something personal, something painful. “I got my abilities when my daughter died. I was still a young man. She was just four months old… And as if to spite me the gods granted me the gift of foresight, just minutes too late for me to save her.”

“How –“

His masked face turned towards me instantly and I froze, until he raised a hand, motioning me to continue:

“How did she die?”

“Times were pretty desperate, but we were making do… We went looking for work, and for food. We left her in the care of a relative who shook her too hard when she was crying. A simple accident, I thought, and that was that.”

My mouth was so dry, I felt like I was going to cough – I closed my lips and tried to clamp down on the tightness in my throat. I couldn’t cough, couldn’t make a loud noise, couldn’t wake the twins. Had to balance on the scythe’s edge.

Is this true or –

“I can tell you he’s not being deliberately deceptive, Kas.”

“An accident… or so I thought. Divination is a curse, you must understand that. Or at least, for the arch-diviner, one who is not deliberately seeking to cast spells. At the start the visions come upon us unbidden, past flowing through us and then splintering into a myriad of futures, each one more-or-less clear, more-or-less likely to come to pass. Time and space converge inside our minds. It is hard not to be driven mad, right in the beginning.

“So I saw it. Saw the way my uncle shook her. Saw the way my beloved aunt egged him on.”

I heard the little click of his throat as he whispered, the emotion, but the knife-tip beneath my eye never strayed, never wavered even a hundredth of an inch.

“It ate away at me every day, and every day I saw a little more. Each interaction with them was a living nightmare, a plunge into the atrocities of their past, the truths of their hidden, sick little lives washing over me in tides of vision after vision. They were people of little patience, revellers in the small cruelties that would pass unnoticed, meek and timid on the surface but blacker than pitch inside. And with each passing moment my patience with them grew thinner and thinner. I spent more and more time away from my home. I couldn’t see them, couldn’t see my own mother and father, couldn’t see my wife – their faces haunted me, reminded me of my loss. I thought at first that being among other people would cure me. Open me up to the big picture, put everything into perspective…”

He loosed a short, bitter ‘hah’ of self-mocking laughter. “All I found was that everyone else was the same. Or worse. There were creatures dressed in skins of men, talking and walking like men, but which were worse than your demons within the shell, things that would sooner kick a baby than shake it. And yet I could see the trails of their futures, their darkest deeds – I could see those who were about to commit murder; I could see those who were about to enact vicious deeds that would condemn scores of human beings to lifetimes of misery and enslavement.

“That night, in Firenight Square; that was merely the night I snapped.”

He paused for a moment, as if to collect himself.

“So the people you killed –“

“There were so many of them gathered there, and I knew, I knew the future would be better, cleaner if I acted. So, so much cleaner… I finished the evening with my aunt and uncle, buried them right there with my daughter, so they could spend their last hours with the one they’d taken from me; and by the anguish of her killers, be her soul lightened in its burden, to fly free and find Celestium.”

Buried them alive.

“Cleaner?” I choked. “The man I spoke to today said you killed his wife. The mother of his daughter!”

“Yes, the Onsolorian. That little girl would have died at her own mother’s hand, not one year after I did what I did.”

There was a pause as I tried to comprehend these words, then he continued, “She was not a kindly woman, Feychilde. Nor is this man you met a kindly man, but he did not really know his wife, and at least he is not hurting his daughter. I do not kill the unkind. Only those I have to. She was a worshipper of Yane in the dark watches of the night. She had to be stopped before she killed those she loved.”

I shuddered despite myself. You weren’t supposed to say Yane’s name, the true name of any dark god, out-loud.

Someone like him… his powers, his mind… he could justify the killing of anyone. If he really had the courage of his convictions –

“Couldn’t you…” But I stopped. I knew.

“Bring her, bring all of them to the watch’s attention? Go to the Magisterium with what I’d seen? Or expose them in private, seek to change the quality of their souls? I looked at those futures. More chaos. Far, far more heinous deeds committed by the accused. Oh no, I did what I did, do what I do, out of necessity. If you are to doubt me, Feychilde, doubt only my effectiveness. Ask me not why I kill, but why there are still murderers walking our streets, why there are still people being bought and sold like livestock in the warehouses of Rivertown!”

He removed the knife, slid off the bed to his feet and turned to face me – a unified, blurring whip-snap of silent movement, resolving itself entirely inside a single instant with some time left over to spare.

“I have said my piece, and you aren’t going to fight me,” he murmured. “But you wouldn’t shake my hand right now, would you?”

I slowly shook my head. I still didn’t trust myself to move my hands – I couldn’t create a shield before he could move back in and stab me in the brain.

“It’s fine. I understand. I get it.” I could hear bitterness in his voice but no surprise, as if he’d hoped for me to prove him wrong, offer him my hand. “The ones you really need to be chasing don’t have bounties out on them, though. They don’t fight – they hide when you challenge them, they protect each other, always finding new ways to make money off the plight of innocents, never coming out to see the light of day.”

“He’s going to leave. You’re going to be okay.”

“I will… try to take on board… what you’ve said tonight.” I forced the trite words out haltingly. Anything to cause no offence. Anything to get him gone from where he stood, within striking-distance of my brother and sister…

“Good. I wish you well in your endeavours, Feychilde. Don’t think I’m against the kind of thing you did today. Most people never think to ask why I killed those people in the crowd. Even the survivors; they look on themselves as merely lucky, never seeing their own virtue…” He sighed heavily. “I’m going to keep your knife. You’ve slept by it; it’ll help me keep an eye on you.”

He nodded to me –

I went to nod back – it seemed the thing to do – but he was gone. I could only see his after-image, a streak of shadow lingering in the air where he crossed the room to the door, opening and closing it silently in the lifespan of a glimpse –

It wasn’t until I’d scurried to the front door between Morsus and Orstrum’s sleeping forms and realised the window was unlocked but shut-to that I started to relax. How it’d gotten unlocked in the first place I didn’t know, didn’t care. He’d have capitalised on some other weakness, found some other way to intercede in my plans if this way wouldn’t have worked.

I locked the window, quietly got myself a cup of water, and returned to my room. A quick check under the mattress confirmed it – he’d taken the knife Clun had thrown at my back on Fullday night.

“What’re you thinking, Kas? Your thoughts are moving too fast.”

I seated myself once more, beneath the covers, feeling like I was being watched as I sipped my drink.

“Talk to me, I can help you.”

I had a mass-murderer in my room. Here, with Jaid and Jaroan.

“I kind of noticed.”

But a… well-intentioned mass-murderer? It could’ve been an act.

“An impressive act, if it was. There were none of the small betrayals you’d normally see.”

So there are good darkmages.

“Good? Kas, I think you’re suddenly forgetting the ‘mass-murderer’ part.” She didn’t sound sarcastic, exactly, but she somehow didn’t sound entirely genuine either, as though she were challenging me just for the sake of it –

Don’t be coy – you know precisely what I mean. Good, for a certain value of good. He was doing what he saw as the right thing, ironing out injustices that would’ve gone unpunished, or gotten worse if he hadn’t acted. I’m not saying he was right to kill, he wasn’t, but he wasn’t acting out of malevolence, was he?

“His child died.”

His child died. I felt some of the chill of his presence diminish, some of the nightmarish creeping feeling prickling my skin begin to recede. I will stop him if I see him trying to kill people, but I won’t hunt him down, Zel.

“That sounds reasonable to me.”

But I’d better have one hell of an endgame ready if I’m even going to stop him killing people. He’ll see it coming otherwise.

“Then don’t plan anything. He already let slip that out of six ideas, none would work.”

Unless that was a misdirect. I smiled to myself. You know, would he really have a reason to come seek me out, if none of them worked? He says it’s due to his concern over killing me and I want to believe him, but if he’s lying about one thing, this could be it. Perhaps I’d seize on the right solution, put him in chains.

“If it’s either that, or he’s telling the truth and you’re getting yourself killed, then I’d rather we simply didn’t play the game. Stay out of his way.”

She moved my eyes for me, flickering my gaze towards the twins.

I know what you mean. But that leads me onto part two.

“Part two?”

I’ve realised a few things I need to do. I’ve got to work on keeping a shield up when I’m sleeping, for one thing – this book can’t teach me that, I don’t think – and I need some more money so I can get somewhere else to sleep. A place for Feychilde to lay his head. It’s perilous for all of them, just me being here, and I can’t just stop doing what I’m doing, not after today. I’ve got to take it more seriously.

“Okay… so you want me to scout out your next bounty, is that what you mean?”

Not yet. I know what I’m lacking, after today, and I have to apologise to you. You were right all along. What I’m missing is firepower.

“You mean –“

Yes. I want you to take me shopping for pets.

“When?” She could barely conceal her eagerness.

The life of a champion was so dangerous, it was hard to realise that of everything that’d happened in the last few days, this was possibly the closest to dying I’d been. Right here. In bed. The suddenness of life-or-death situations was becoming something of an issue – an issue the right eldritches would’ve solved.

I knocked back the rest of the water and reached down to fish out my mask and robe.

Now, Zel. Right now.