JADE 2.2: THE TWILIGHT BLADE

“It is a matter of resisting excess. Do not over-mix the batter, and do not use too much of it. Do not over-cover the surface of the oil, and do not let its temperature climb. Keep it steady and err on the side of caution. Lightness is everything. It is a dish easily overcomplicated. You should have already indulged your darkest culinary desires when you prepared of the radish sauces. Now it is time for restraint.”

– from the shrimp tempura advisory in ‘Too Hot to Handle’ Anthology

“Oh no, zat is horrible,” Em said, grimacing. “Put it back, eww!”

I grinned behind my scarf, setting it back down on the varnished oaken shelf. The mask I’d been showing her was a full-face covering, with yellowish, greenish protrusions next to the holes for the eyes, nostrils and mouth, like slugs or maggots pouring out of the wearer’s orifices. Probably not one a wormface-sufferer would choose to purchase. There was a little tag tied by some string to the strap on the back, bearing ‘114 – 8g5’ in cursive penmanship.

“You vont one vhich shows your smile, I think,” she suggested, taking me by the arm and tugging me down the aisle. The scarlet dress and gloves and the red cape were completed by black, soft-leather boots which, I could see when she moved, went high up her calves, perhaps even to her knees – I hadn’t noticed them in the glyphstone. “Covering ze upper part of your face vill suffice to hide your identity, and you have such a nice smile.”

I glanced at the assistant as Em mentioned my smile, and saw her flick another page of her book abruptly.

The assistant working in this Oldtown boutique was a bored-looking nineteen- or twenty-year-old with freckles just on her nose, and a petulant expression dissonant with the quality of her apparel: her brown hair was pulled back in a tight bob, a nice bit of jewellery decorating her ears and neck, and she wore a tunic and skirt, both black, professional. She sat behind the desk, trying to look as though she weren’t listening to us, idly leafing through a book that was open in front of her with the pace of someone who was only pretending to read.

It didn’t surprise me that she was bored; there wasn’t very much for her to do. There were three other people browsing the shelves, two gentlemen and a lady, and aside from the odd giggle from the lady as the gentleman accompanying her whispered something I couldn’t be bothered to listen-in on, the room was silent.

“Vhat about one of zese?” Em indicated a row of upper-face masks; there were five of them, and each had its own quirks.

I settled on my favourite instantly.

“Erm, excuse me?” I called.

The assistant’s hand froze in the middle of turning a page, as if taken aback at being directly addressed. But she recovered in an instant, turning her head to us and smiling.

She approached, keeping her eyes on my chest as if to deliberately reassure me she wasn’t trying to see through my current disguise. She didn’t look intimidated or disturbed, just pleased she had something to do at last. She’d probably seen her fair share of newbie champions.

“How can I help you, sir?”

“Feychilde will do, if you please.” I saw her eyes widen slightly in recognition of the name. “I just had a few questions about how all this works… Say I came in here without my face covered – like those guys,” I gestured in the vague direction of the other shoppers, “or if my friend here wanted to buy a mask – how do you ensure their privacy?”

“Of course, Mr. Feychilde –“

Mr. Feychilde? “Please, just F-”

“Of course.” She was flushing; perhaps she wasn’t so polished after all. “Feychilde – our policies only enforce the secrecy of your identity. Discretion is the very least we can promise our customers. When you find a mask that calls to you, head to the desk over there,” she turned and pointed to a small candlelit stand, where a bowl of what looked to be blank squares of paper was situated next to a quill and ink-pot, “write down the number, fold it up and post it through the hole here,” she pointed at the wall behind her desk, where there was a narrow slot cut through the thin wood. “Whoever’s working back there today – I don’t know them, we don’t even get to meet the people in the workshop – they pick out the box with the right number, take off the numbers and burn them, and post the box through there,” she indicated a bigger, flap-covered hole that fed directly onto another table, “where I can unlock it with my key before you check it and pay. If the box is empty, unfortunately we’re out of that style of mask for today; you can always try us again, though we recommend leaving it four weeks. We encourage our clientele to take a look at plenty of our products, so that no one in here with them at the time can guess which they’re going for.”

“But then who –“

“Only the owner puts the masks in the boxes and locks them, applying the numbers appropriately.” She was clearly used to these kinds of questions. “Which is something he does after we shut for the night, when he’s alone. Aaand no, he’s never here in the day – he turns up at closing-time. So really, we take every possible precaution this side of Hightown.”

Hightown. Where they’d probably have magical screening in the shop, to prevent all manner of intrusions that this Oldtown establishment just wasn’t equipped to deal with; the posher masks might themselves have anti-enchantment properties woven into their very materials… Here the masks were wood and leather, with maybe a bit of copper, iron and steel. Entirely non-magical.

Still, Em had been right. Unless I wanted to blow all my money on one item, I was going to have to settle for mid-tier quality. Even in Oldtown it was going to cost me nearly a plat for the mask and almost the same for the robe. It’d be at least five times that in Hightown, apparently, if not twenty times that. The opposite would’ve been true if we’d gone shopping in Sticktown or one of the Lowtowns – but you got what you paid for. A mask and a robe for a few silvers apiece would be fine – if I wanted the mask’s strap to come off every five minutes, if I wanted a robe that frayed at the edges at a moment’s notice…

“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll be choosing presently.”

The moment I dismissed her, the bored petulance swept straight back over the assistant’s face. She managed a cursory nod out of politeness, and returned to her desk to resume her non-reading.

“Soooo…?” Em prodded me as we turned back to the five masks that she’d suggested a minute ago. “Is zere one you’d like to try?”

I tried each of them on in turn.

“I like number two… but I also like four.”

That was good news for me, because four was the one that’d most taken my fancy; ‘202 – 9g’. I took it around the corner, and used the mirror there to get a good look; it was perfect.

It was the upper-face of a boy, created from inlays of gleaming tin at the forehead, the bridge of the nose and cheeks. It had darker iron plates around the eyes and temples, and patches of dusky copper at the sides of the nose. The mask’s eyebrows were raised in a permanent expression of disbelief, so the slightly-larger-than-usual eyeholes afforded me a wide scope of vision without having to move my head. The cheeks were pinched upwards as if to accommodate a gigantic grin. Beneath the sculpted nose, at the very bottom of the mask, was the wide upper lip, complemented by a row of perfect steely teeth hanging below. They replaced my own upper teeth when I smiled, and made me look rather insolent even when I didn’t, like I was biting my lower lip. When I tried scowling it was suitably menacing.

Two little curved copper-pink horns protruding from the temples finished it off with an otherworldly aspect; the kind of curly horns you found on fey, like Flood Boy, not the straighter, jagged kind you found on binta-things and the other demons I’d seen.

Also, it just felt right when I wore it. The damn thing was the most comfortable of the lot I’d tried. The lining inside was a padded suede. The strap fit snugly around my head, the mask holding tightly to my face even when I tested it out, thrashing my head about a bit. I could only pray they had it in stock, and that the one they had felt as good as the display model – I wanted it.

I replaced it on the shelf, wrote out ‘202’ on a paper-square, then folded it up and popped it through the slot.

“What about this one for you?” I asked Em, picking up a mask that was shaped like a butterfly, such that her eyes would look through holes in its wings that swept up the sides of her face, with its little antennae poking up from the middle of her forehead. The tin was burnished almost to the hue of platinum.

She laughed. “Do you think I am some butterfly?” She picked up the one on the shelf directly above it – a similar style, but it was a phoenix’s wings bursting out from a bed of flame, a small sculpted beak raised towards the hairline, open in a caw of defiance.

“Okay, I bow before your superior taste,” I said. “That would really suit you.”

“But I,” she said, putting it back down again, “am not a champion.”

“If the money’s an issue, you know I would –“

“Oh no, it’s not ze money, it’s… I don’t vont to wear a mask.”

With a soft squeak of hinges, a box slid through the flap. The assistant went over to the table to retrieve it, then brought it over.

“It’s a nine-gold box,” she said. “Yours, I believe, Feychilde?”

I took it around the corner to put it on. It was exactly like the one on display but it was unworn till now – the strap felt even studier, tighter, and the mask in general felt fresher, cleaner… It felt mine.

I had nothing to hide – I’d come in with my face already covered, after all. I stepped back around the corner, my hood still up to hide my hair, so that the mask’s horns just poked out from under the lip.

The assistant was smiling appreciatively. “A perfect choice, champion.”

“Does it not bring out his eyes?” Em murmured conspiratorially.

“Quite right, ma’am.”

After dropping a platinum coin on her desk and getting a gold one in change, we bade farewell to ‘Manners’ Masks (For Sublime Occasions)’ and headed northwards from our current location, back in the direction of the Plain Road. The section of Oldtown we were in, Undernight, was filled with quaint little boutiques and eateries, their tall windows on the ground-floor filled with wares and topped with artistic signage. It was a hilly area though the ground was mostly cobbled or paved, and the route we followed wending around the various buildings and seating areas would slope up and down again all in the space of twenty paces, sometimes with a small set of half-crumbled steps in place that looked like they’d been built by an unpractised resident.

“So how does it feel?”

“What – the mask?”

Em nodded.

It was like her eyes couldn’t decide whether to watch my own, or watch my lips moving. “It feels great – really comfy, and, well – I can breathe properly, talk properly… It feels a million times better.”

She smiled, and linked my arm again like she had in the mask shop. Within a few seconds she was leaning her head against me as we strolled, our pace leisurely.

“So you were saying you don’t want to wear a mask?”

“Hm?”

“Never mind.”

“No, tell me.”

“You said you don’t want to wear a mask, earlier. I was just wondering why.”

She turned her head, looking up at me. “Vhy I vouldn’t vont to be a champion?”

I nodded. “I mean, you’re getting into dangerous situations already –“

“For one, ze darkmages don’t come after ze families of vatchmen, or magisters,” she answered. “Ve don’t need masks because criminals know if zey take our families ve von’t stop, ve can’t stop coming, and one hostage is as good as any other. But as a champion – you’re just one person, and ze people you love are going to be your veakness. Zat is vhy I think you should consider Henthae’s offer. For Jhaid and Jharoan.”

I chuckled dryly. “If you’d grown up where I grew up, you’d understand. Becoming an archmage is like getting a chance to deal with the highborn on an equal footing – there’s really no way I could justify deliberately working for them, taking orders from them, when I had other options. And anyway, don’t give me all this about not wanting to be a champion. I could see it on your face the first time we met – you like the idea, at least, even if not the practicalities.”

“Mmm,” her lips were pressed together, the noise non-committal, “zere might be something to vhat you say. But Mistress Henthae –”

“Do you think someone like Henthae would’ve given you the time of day, when you showed up in Mund, if it weren’t for your power?”

She didn’t reply, and put her head back against my arm, as if in thought.

“I know you’ve known her six months, and you’ve known me five minutes, but I’m really not trying to mislead you about my motives. Working with the Magisterium – that’s the prerogative of every champion. But working for the Magisterium? As you’ve found, that makes you a magister – their weapon, their shield, their tool. One of their strongest, no doubt – but, still, I’d say Henthae was using you if –“

“It’s more complicated zan zat.”

“– if I didn’t already think it was more complicated than that.”

“She isn’t all zat bad, Feychilde. Ze vork is as honest as a champion’s and it is safer.”

“Is that what you want? Safety?”

She didn’t reply at once, and then, in a low-enough voice I might’ve missed it if not for my fey enhancements, “You know I don’t.” She raised her voice. “But isn’t it vhat you vant?”

I felt a pinching behind my eyes suddenly, like I was about to tear up, but I had no idea why – not really.

“Safety?” I loosed a little “heh” laugh. “I don’t think it really exists. And what would I be, to think only of my family, my friends, when there’s others to protect?”

“So you vere thinking of others, when you chased down Termiax and Rissala?”

I smiled. “You’ve got me there. The Bone Ring – I defeated them because I was mad at them. Lord Obnoxious attacked me. I guess I haven’t really done something selfless yet.” I shrugged. “The Cannibal Six was pretty much purely for the money. But I knew they were all bad guys; I knew they’d hurt people before and would do it again. It’s not like I went around kicking puppies to earn my plat. And they wouldn’t reward champions if they didn’t want people doing it.”

“Hmm. I think zey vont you to feel torn between ze two choices – champion, or magister. If zere voz only magister, how many vould feel compelled to take ze third route?”

Darkmage. Yes, she was right, I could feel it. She was damn perceptive.

“I’ve lived here all my life, and hadn’t come up with that in sixteen years – you’ve been here six months, and you’ve got it all figured out!” I couldn’t have kept my admiration from my voice even if I’d tried. I chuckled again, and shook my head softly.

“Vhat?”

“Henthae.”

“Vhat about her?”

“I…” It was hard to put into words. “I do see what you like about her. I thought, you know – that I could never like a highborn… Belexor and his friends didn’t do much to dissuade me of my opinions, but you’re right. Henthae’s different. Scary, but different. Maybe she would’ve given you the time of day… maybe.” I couldn’t rule out being under an enchantment too subtle even for the likes of Zel to detect, but the arch-enchanter had seemed genuine, beneath the hardened, Magisterium-approved shell. She’d seemed like a human being, with her own introspection, a knowledge of her failures and an acceptance of them – traits I’d never thought to see in someone like her. “But that’s a side of her I never would’ve got to have seen, if I hadn’t been an archmage.”

“So you mean zat, viz your new perspective, you understand zat highborn are just people like you?”

“I guess… I might not’ve gone quite that far… But that’s the thing, they don’t show us that face when we’re just gutter-rats. Think of what Belexor did to me, just because he was incensed – well, incensed that you seemed to like me back, I guess… But incensed that I had the power, I had the right to be there and do the things I was doing, without ‘earning’ it. As if he earned it. As if mummy and daddy owning half a country meant nothing to his own successes.”

I still couldn’t quite wipe from my thoughts the image of him, sprawled and insensate, chained on the cold stone floor.

That moment had sealed it. He was just a human being too. Deserving of the same protections as anyone I loved. And I’d left him to them, like that. It still rankled.

She looked up at me. “Belexor voz a pain in my ass,” she said plainly. “I forgot to thank you for relieving me of ze burden.”

She slowed us down, and carefully raised two hands to my mask.

It wasn’t hard for her to lift it the required half-inch and kiss me.

Her arms around my neck, her slender waist in my hands…

She had taken me by the arm and I’d held her hand, but I hadn’t yet kissed her today, and the longer I’d waited the more anxious I was becoming – but the moment just hadn’t seemed right. She’d shown up on time but we’d left at least half an hour late thanks to Jaid and an endless-seeming series of questions (unrehearsed, apparently). We’d come to an unspoken agreement that we’d go by foot. We crossed the Blackrush at the Oldtown bridge then headed south towards the Greywater to find Undernight, due to its reputation for the kinds of crafted goods we were after, talking all the while. There was at no time any kind of return to the sort of perfect situation we’d been in before, soaring beneath the mountain and the cloudless night sky.

But now she’d taken the choice away from me, and made it a thousand times easier.

Once we resumed walking and I’d set my mask back in place, I commented, “If you’re going to be kissing me in public, we should get you a mask – you’re not even wearing your magister’s rune. I don’t want you to become a target. Champion or not.”

She gave another non-committal “Mmm”, so I continued: “Though if you wanted to blast some darkmages’ faces while you’re wearing it, you’d hardly hear me complaining. Unless I didn’t get an invite. Need that sweet reward money, you know.”

She laughed at that. “I vill have to… how do you say, take it under advisement?”

I grinned. “I think you understand the idiom very well, if what you really mean is ‘shut up, I’ve already made up my mind’.” I poked her in the ribs and she recoiled, still laughing. “But no, it’s fair enough, really. Your choice, and all that.”

“As it is your choice to vork viz ze Magisterium, or vork for zem. I agree. But I can’t pretend to be completely… unbiased in zis. I vould love to vork alongside you. Perhaps zey could be persuaded to put us in ze same band…”

I hadn’t even considered her real motives, and I definitely hadn’t thought about going to work with her. That would be… could be… amazing…

“I’ll… take it under advisement,” I said, trying to sound off-handed, but probably not doing half as well as I’d need to in order to fool her. She had to know she’d got to me with that last notion.

We were constantly climbing, now, heading back up towards central Oldtown and the Plain Road, so we linked arms again and stopped talking, saving our breath for the toil. The street was very steep, broken up only by the plateaus at the end of each stretch of the zig-zagging, winding road. I was in pretty good shape – our diet should’ve been worse than it was, but with my latest job netting me no small amount of stolen potatoes and carrots we’d been able to put food money solely into meat and bread, and for the last few months we’d been eating pretty well.

As such I’d been comfortable despite the sheer hill streets we were forced to traverse, and whenever I’d looked at Em I saw she was quite at ease too. But now it was becoming a bit of an exertion. I hadn’t really paid much attention on the way down to the fact that I’d soon be needing to go back up. I was going to start perspiring soon despite the autumn day’s relative mildness.

“You are in great shape for someone who can fly,” I commented when we stopped for a breather on one of the plateaus. “If I could fly, I’d never get any exercise ever again.”

She raised an eyebrow. “If you could fly, you could breathe undervater. Svimming is ze best exercise. And anyvay,” she grinned, “I eat like a horse. It is just – how do you say? My metablomism?”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Metabolism, yeah.” I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry – I was used to subsisting on small amounts, and I still had the Knuckle Market ‘meat’ in my belly – but I wanted to take a break. “Hey, should we find somewhere to eat soon? And a drink, gods I need a drink. My treat.”

“Zat vould be lovely.” And then within five seconds, “Oh look – Onsolorian tempura!”

She recognised the script on the sign, which was evidently in her own language. Half of the restaurant’s seating was outside the building proper, overlooking the drop down the hill, with a wooden fence to keep kids from falling off, and a canvas roof above the tables and chairs. The place was only about a quarter-full at the moment, and it was run by an apron-clad man and his apron-clad daughter, both of whom were keen to chat with Em in their own tongue.

I stood by her side at the counter, a friendly, confused smile slapped on my face, while the conversation went back and forth for a minute.

“And you!” the tempura-cook said in Mundic, turning to me all of a sudden, studying my new mask. “A champion? Zis is a fortunate day! Vhat is your name, sir?”

“Feychilde.”

His smile was replaced with a look of shock, and he reeled off a breathless sentence in Onsoloric.

Em murmured, “It seems he knows of ze Cannibal Six.”

The man stammered. “I am sorry, champion. I forget myself.” I could see the tension entering his face, the bead of sweat on his close-cropped hairline. “Ze cannibals,” a scowl twisted his lips, “took a man, woman and child from a house just one street over.” He nodded the way we’d come. “I did not know zem, but ze scene – so close – my daughter…”

He’d already raised his arm to pull his daughter close to him. She must’ve been thirteen or fourteen, but she’d gone silent since her father started speaking to me, staring at the tiled floor as if seeing clear through it.

I raised a hand. “Say no more. I can imagine. I’m just glad to have helped, even if in the smallest way possible.” I waved at the restaurant. “You have a lovely place here.”

I was offering him an out, a way to bring the tone back to lighter things, but his face only darkened.

“If you,” he swallowed, “if zere is a way – Duskdown –“

I felt my blood run a little colder just on hearing the name.

Em interjected, speaking in Onsoloric once more, this time her tone not so friendly.

“It’s okay, Em,” I said clearly, and she halted, looking at me uncertainly.

I returned my attention to the man. “What is Duskdown to you?”

Other than the city’s most notorious arch-diviner.

“He is ze reason her mother is not viz us!”

His hand about his daughter’s shoulder shook to punctuate his words, and there were tears in his eyes.

“Zere voz a celebration – nine years ago…”

I knew what he was about to relate.

Everyone knew about the Firenight Square Massacre, when Duskdown had taken the lives of over a hundred people in less than sixty seconds. Personally. As in, he slew them with the weapons in his own hands. It was the event that had made his name. The watch had given a full report but the once-mundane phrase ‘he came down at dusk’ had stuck, repeated by virtually every town-crier and every news bulletin posted at the Shrines of Locus until it sounded like a mantra. And that was that.

And here was a man asking me to take that on.

“– she was an innocent, she voz ze love of my life…”

The man was stretching for things to say, now, so I quietly interrupted, “Wait, say no more – I wish I could do something –“

“Do not even say zat,” Em growled softly, taking me by the hand.

She then proceeded to spit so many words in Onsoloric it didn’t even sound like speech, and I watched as the man behind the counter paled.

“I understand, I am sorry,” he apologised, wiping his eyes on a clean patch of his apron-front. “Please, do not go. Sit; I vill bring you our specials. Ze food is on ze house – come as often as you like, your money is no good here, champion. On account of ze Cannibal Six.”

I didn’t quite know how to respond. I reached out to shake his hand, recognising that I had to do something, but aware of the fact that any more words I uttered would only serve to worsen the situation; he returned the brief clasp readily, then I turned aside, following Em towards the tables.

You couldn’t just plan to take out an arch-diviner – everyone who’d read the stories knew that much. I had no idea how much my shields could take – it wasn’t something you’d really want to test – but they were Rings of Protection, not Rings of Invincibility. Ill-will was a wonky concept all on its own. It certainly wouldn’t stop me from walking into a trap that had been laid with malicious intent, and it wouldn’t protect anyone or anything outside the shield. Who better to lay such a trap than someone who could predict my movements, and who better to know whom to take hostage than someone who could scry-in on my most intimate moments? I was limited. Sure, I could protect myself, but if Duskdown moved the confrontation to a place with civilians, there’d be nothing I’d be able to do to stop him murdering them by the dozen. And there were always going to be edge cases, powers or entities that could circumvent or outright destroy my shields. An arch-diviner who saw you as a potential threat could easily make it their business to find those edge cases, leverage them to your downfall.

So I understood Em’s anger at even the suggestion being made out loud, but I understood the tempura-cook’s anguish too. Nine years, and I could see the hurt writ in his eyes as if the pain were as fresh as it had been the moment his wife was taken from him. Here was a champion in front of him, one of those rare, maybe even once-in-a-lifetime occasions on which he already had the ear of someone who might, just maybe, be able to seek justice on his behalf, take his revenge to the darkmage.

I shook my head. I was on a date. I could think about all this later – this wasn’t a problem that I was going to solve overnight anyway.

“Well, that was something,” I murmured once we were seated, beneath the canvas next to the rail, overlooking Undernight’s streets winding down the hill. “You weren’t too harsh on him, were you?”

“Zat voz vhat you call a big ask,” she replied heavily. “Duskdown. He is number one most-vonted diviner.”

I nodded sombrely. “The biggest ask. Thanks, for having my back like that.”

She smiled, and I sensed some of the tension leaving her. “Alvays.”

I reached across the table and took one of her hands, and smiled back at her.

“So tell me about Onsolorian tempura; what’ve I let myself in for here?”

“I hope you like fish?”

All I’d been able to smell for the past five minutes was fish. She was playing her cards close to the chest on this one.

“What’s not to like about fish?” I replied with a grin.

I saw her eyes raise slightly, looking over my shoulder at the person I’d heard moving closer to my back. The rustle of an apron, the light footfalls – it was the owner’s daughter.

I turned my head slightly, so I could see her. She looked nervous.

“You okay?”

The youngster shuffled a little closer and cleared her throat. “I’ve come to take your drinks orders, if you know what you’re wanting?”

She’d almost entirely lost her accent now she was speaking in Mundic.

I smiled gently at her, doing my best to make her relax, though perhaps the mask didn’t help with that very much. She was doing her best to keep from looking at my face, her gaze lowered.

“Whatever you’ve got that’s coldest, for me,” I said.

“Ze same,” Em added, with her own gentle smile on her face, then continued, “I’m sorry, for vhat I said to your paza.”

The girl shook her head, still not meeting our eyes. “It’s okay. I’m sorry for what he asked you. He’s…” She looked back towards the restaurant’s interior, the counter where her dad was preparing our meal. “He’s better, these days. It was hard, for a long time, and those cannibals brought it all back to him, you know? Thanks, for – well, everything.”

I inclined my head.

She cleared her throat again. “As for the coldest, that’d be the fruit juice or the beer.”

“Juice, for me, please,” I said, and Em copied me again.

The girl headed back inside, and I looked after her thoughtfully.

“Don’t even tell me zat you’re considering it.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t. Not really. It was more…

“No, but they’re hurt. Still hurting, even after nine years.”

She didn’t respond in words, only held my hand more tightly.

She understands.

I turned my head, looking down into Undernight again.

“Well, I still need a robe,” I mentioned. “We can go through the,” I paused, checking with my augmented hearing – no, the proprietor and his daughter were busy preparing food and drinks, they wouldn’t hear me, “the Square, and up onto Tailor Crescent, along the Hill Road. If you like?”

“Ve can stop for a drink in ze Square,” she replied quietly with a mischievous smile, looking again over my shoulder.

They were both approaching the table.

“My apologies for ze vait, champion,” the man said, setting down a great platter of what looked like little fingers on a bed of cooked leaves, onions and carrots. Battered, fried fingers – pinkish things, a few inches long, round like sausages but tapering, fatter at one end than the other – curled fingers, with pointy fingernails…

“Uh,” I clutched for words, “that’s – that looks interesting –“

But Em was squealing in delight. She used her hands, diving straight in, hoisting one of the things by its ‘fingernail’ and dipping it into one of the two little dishes of sauce that occupied opposed positions on the platter. She chose the green sauce, so thin as to almost look like pond-water. She only gave more signs of pleasure as she took a bite out of it.

I could tell from the very aromas just how hot the sauces were. She was doing her best to hide it, but I noted the flush of colour rising across her chest above the bodice of her dress, framed by the draped cloth of the cape across her shoulders on either side. She’d soon be red all over.

As her father backed away the girl set down her tray, depositing two wooden cups and a huge jug of orange-juice. Em very carefully didn’t look at it, swallowing her mouthful.

“It looks delicious; thank you both, so much,” I said in a polite voice, trusting Em would recognise the sardonic undertone.

I saw the smirk on the wizard’s lips before she hid it.

The young girl excused herself, and I leaned forward.

“Fish?”

Em tittered, then clamped down on it. “Fish,” she said in a serious voice.

“Fish… fingers?”

“Zey are just young shrimp,” she said, “but you must eat zem viz one of ze sauces.” She dipped the second half of the shrimp she’d picked up into the red, slightly thicker sauce this time, then took a big bite out of it. “Zey are both hot, but one is hotter zan ze other,” she said around her food.

I chuckled inwardly. Talking with her gob full – she was definitely no highborn.

I leaned forwards, and picked up one of these ‘shrimp’. I’d heard of them, of course, and I was pretty sure I’d seen one once – alive, like a weird water-spider covered in legs or spines or something. I’d always shunned food that looked like, well, demons.

I met Em’s eyes.

Slowly, inexorably, I moved my shrimp to the red sauce, the thick one, and dipped it in.

Her fortify-face was good. She was still finishing her mouthful but her gaze stayed on me, unfaltering.

I took my bite.

Fire seeped into my mouth like an oil, first covering the exposed surfaces before igniting, instantly inflaming every fibre of tissue, gums, tongue, oh, tongue, even my teeth singing with the fierce acid that was coating them with every instinct-driven chew…

She couldn’t hold back her grin any longer, and while I fought with the stacked cups to separate them, almost knocking them over in my haste to get one free to drink from, she went and got herself another shrimp.

I drank probably over a quarter of the jug before I could talk again. I couldn’t taste, couldn’t even smell the orange-juice. It could’ve been a jug of yellow air as far as I was concerned.

“Woo-oow,” I uttered in an oozy, broken croak. “Tell me that was the hot one.”

“Zat was ze hot one.”

That damn fortify-face again.

“Oh, you…”

She stuck her tongue out. “Have a go on ze green. Cool off.” She even dipped it for me.

The pond-water was, I estimated afterwards – when my death-throes had elapsed and I could think about something other than the combustion of my innards – about three times as hot as the red paste.

“I see what you meant about stopping for another drink,” I said, eyeing the contents of the jug after I poured us both drinks and drained mine with a single tip at my lips.

She was looking at me strangely as she smiled. “Once I have got you trained up, you vill be able to manage a mouthful of my mazan’s.”

So that was it.

This was some kind of test?

I was just glad I’d apparently passed, if not with a perfect score.

I grinned. I double-dipped my next abominable finger, first red, then green.

That got a reaction, a pursing of the lips, a slight narrowing of the eyes.

I almost lasted ten seconds this time before my clenched fists went for the drink again, and Em burst into uproarious laughter.

* * *

Sunset – decidedly drab and unromantic – found us in Firenight Square. At least it wasn’t raining. We’d made our way from tailor to tailor, looking at the robes on offer. I’d have to wait for something made to fit, and so I’d been measured-up at ‘Sailor’s Tailors’, apparently named for its proprietor Madame Sailor, rather than any connection to, well, sailors, which seemed like a weird marketing decision to me – but I supposed it was none of my business. Madame Sailor had been unwilling to measure me up without me first removing my robe, and while it felt odd wearing the mask without the mage-robe, it would be a worthwhile sacrifice. She’d wanted two weeks, but I’d haggled her down to seven days with a twenty-percent sweetener… I had a Gathering to attend on the third of Illost, after all. I wanted to look the part if I was going to have someone like Dustbringer take me under their wing.

So we’d circled around, back to the Square, where we’d stopped only briefly earlier.

It was a single space of ridiculous proportions, easily half a mile on a side, all paved and flagged in grey – empty, it would’ve been a miserable expanse, but it was never empty here. Most of the attractions were open eighteen hours of the day, and even for the other six there’d be thousands of stragglers lounging around the benches outside the open-air all-night bars.

Now it was filled with a hundred sights and sounds. Stalls featuring games of skill and chance covered most of it, but there were a few general rules for the visitor to bear in mind, in order to not get lost. The routes between the various areas were lined in braziers, but the local land-owners paid a share of their profits to teams of wizards to ensure the area was kept clear of smoke, and you could easily follow the ‘x’-shaped cross that was the intersection of Plain Road and Hill Road, to mark out four zones.

The big, circular arena, where you could watch the gladiators fight and chariots race, stood in the northern zone – the crowds near its gate were all chanting ‘Ovax! Ovax!’ and teeming around some burly-looking, scantily-clad guy. The majority of the jesters’ tents occupied the eastern zone, with the Pavilion of Illusions in the centre standing seventy or eighty feet high, gaudy in pink and yellow. The beastmasters and their curious menageries of creatures were to the south, where the great rusted-iron chains, driven deep into the heart of Mund, were located; none could say for what purpose the chains were originally intended, but nowadays they were used to anchor monsters.

The majority of the bards and refreshments-stalls were over on the west, so we headed back over there first, picking up a huge lemon slushy in a wooden bowl and sharing it as we walked. We meandered through the place, tasting exotic teas and spiced cakes, sugared fruits and unheard-of nuts. By the time we finished the slushy we were cold, so we got a mug of mulled wine each, and, having tossed a silver into one of the open lyre cases, we found two adjacent empty chairs next to a family of gnomes and sat to listen to a performance as night settled in.

There were two musicians, one male and one female; it was hard to tell if it was one or both of them that were enchanters. Their performance was too good to be mundane, though, I suspected. The studs on the bases of their volume-enhanced stringed instruments were lodged in cracks in the ground, and they sat on stools, hugging their instruments from behind as they played. The pair were almost certainly of Northman origin. The man was red-haired and -bearded, wearing a wide, flat-brimmed hat and a sombre expression; the woman, who might’ve been his sister given her shoulder-length red hair, had a simple coronet of woven flowers upon her head, and a demeanour to match his. His instrument was the barbitos, taller and with a deep, low pitch to the twangs it emitted; her barbiton was smaller and softer in tone, seeming almost to sing alongside the performers. In contrast, his voice was high and warbling, passionate, while hers was sonorous and slow, methodical and powerful, like waves crashing on a shore. At times they traded lines and at times they shared them, or sometimes she echoed his words.

… They taught us that we were wrong

Broken down, unstrong

We wanted more for less

And less for naught and

We should have shut our hands

Pulled our hands out…

It was hard not to feel the plight of the Northman, still in many ways a poor, barbaric people when compared with the dwellers in some of the more temperate regions – Mund was no paradise, but it was better than endless miles of dead tundra. They had keen minds, however, and their second- or third-generation descendants clearly had trouble reconciling their urban existence with their wild-land roots.

It was the same with all the immigrants, I supposed. Em had related her farmland upbringing, where the town centre was fewer than a hundred buildings, not thousands all stacked on top of one another.

… Can we find a place to belong?

A place to sing our song?

We could have had it all

And found our place but

We just shut our mouths

Swallowed down the shout…

It was loud here, with their lyres spellbound with some magic – wizardry? enchantment? – that increased both their voices and their music tenfold; what with us being outdoors, surrounded by droves of other musicians and playing kids and the like. So it took some time for the screaming to come through.

I was the first to notice it, it seemed; I looked sharply at Em but she didn’t seem to be hearing anything.

I set my mug down on the ground, training my ear.

It was getting louder. Coming from my right, from the south – the monsters…

I got to my feet, drawing a glance from Em, but she returned her gaze to the musicians almost immediately.

I couldn’t see anything due to the intervening crowds and obstacles.

Zel?

“Morn… evening?” There was a brief pause. “You’re on a date?”

I’ll fill you in later. What am I listening to?

“I think they call it a Song of Fascination, but I’m shaky – oh, wait –“

Now you’re getting it.

“People dying.”

The thoughts flickered through my mind: how to respond, how to react. It took less than a second for my suspicious nature to come to forefront. And even if this Song of Fascination had no connection to whatever was going on over at the southern end of the Square, it was a distraction which would cause any number of people to be sitting here on their backsides when they should’ve been running already.

Therefore I sprang out in front of the performers, and flung my arm up dramatically, pointing north.

“Flee!” I cried, turning my head back towards the south – nothing yet – turning my head back – no one moving, everyone staring – “Your lives depend on it, fools!”

At first the musicians had simply continued playing and singing, but after I said this they halted abruptly and the woman grated in a Northman accent, “Look, mate, I don’t know –“

But as soon as they’d halted, everyone could hear it. Screams, wails, bestial roars. I saw the spell lose its hold on Em as she snapped to attention, actually rising out of her seat with her flying ability before her muscles got the command to stand up.

The audience turned, getting to their feet, looking south, to see people heading our way. Lots of people.

That did it – everyone ran, the musicians slamming shut their instrument cases and dashing off with everyone else.

The Square around us was clearing, and Em was ascending, hopefully to get a better view.

I hadn’t lifted my feet from the ground, but I could feel the tension under their soles, a gentle pressure, reminding me of its presence.

It was Em. Not dragging me up with her, but giving me the ability to join her if I wished.

I eagerly leapt into the air and barrelled after her.

“It looks unusual, but it’s not a fey variant, or demonic, or undead… I know the fey ones, it’s nothing like them, and there’s none of the traces of infernal energy, or signs of undeath… I’d have to say this is a Materium thing, no eldritch. A straight-up monster.”

I could see it. And it was horrifying.

There were bodies, men and women but no children – bodies and blood, more than I’d ever seen. Thankfully all those who could flee had already gotten out of the immediate area – I spotted some clutching life-changing wounds, others limping with the help of their friends and family members. Already I could see about a dozen watchmen on the scene – they were a constant presence on the Square. They had their swords drawn, trying to form a loose, moving ring around the… thing. I could only imagine their panic.

It was killing a cerberus, that much was for sure.

It looked like a spider, brown-black and spiny, scuttling all over the cerberus’s heads, inflicting wounds with its huge pincer-like mandibles over and over again. But it wasn’t any ordinary spider.

Its legs were of different lengths, thicknesses, hues. The longest were five feet long when extended, but it was using them to wrap and curl itself around the big hound’s triplicate necks, always moving, always attacking, crunching right through fur and flesh and bone with each strike of its jaws.

The whining three-headed dog was ten feet tall at the shoulder, its slavering mouths each big enough to eat a man’s head whole, covered in black fur. It was tied down at the triple-collar with chains as thick as my arm, fastened in turn to the links of the massive black chain lying like boulders, that stretched off to the centre of the beastmasters’ area.

Other beasts were near: a griffon; an elephant; a fat, thirty-foot-long green worm. But their attachments to their own boulder-like chains didn’t afford them the range of movement they’d need in order to escape – the griffon was flapping and shrieking shrilly, the elephant was backing off. I instinctively understood the reason why; on top of the cerberus’s helpless cries, the smell of the scene was sickening, and my senses in that department probably came closer to theirs than most people would ever get to experience. Of the three close-by, only the worm wasn’t reacting much – just curling and knotting itself in place.

Their handlers were nowhere to be seen. Probably wise. I could still hear the screaming echoing from the distant crowds.

So the watchmen were trying to encircle the embattled monsters without approaching close enough for the cerberus to swipe them accidentally with its paws as it pushed its chins against the pavement and tried to scrape the giant spider off its own heads, almost scalping itself in the process – matters weren’t improved by the fact it was constantly backing away the whole time with its hind legs, constantly twisting and reorienting itself.

The guards had no idea what to do, and the cerberus’s motions were beginning to slow.

I can test it?

“Of course.”

I waved my hand, feeling for that little pulse, the intuition that I was able to… grab it, make it mine. I’d only need its attention, and it would be my minion.

And there was nothing. She was right. This giant spider was a natural creature, however magical its essence.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t want the cerberus to die and the spider to start killing the watch – it was that I didn’t want the cerberus to die, damn it. Its three-throated yelping was frustrating, reminding me that I wasn’t already doing something to help it.

I stopped near Em, and called, “Ice?”

She nodded to me.

While she raised her arms, pointing her gloved fingers at the monster-brawl, I raised mine to open a fissure in reality down near the ground, on the other side of the wrestling creatures.

Olbru emerged, looking up with interest.

“Flood Boy! Freeze ‘em up, avoid the guards!”

Within a second Em was lit in a blue-white radiance, funnelling a huge beam of blindingly-cold energy right at the cerberus’s huge padded feet; Olbru did the same from the flank, though his contribution was understandably somewhat lesser.

The wizard and faun quickly built up a ring of icy pillars, blocking every movement the cerberus tried to make, shoring up gaps, making pillars into walls –

The guards backed off, looking at one another uncertainly.

And the second that the giant spider leapt clear of the frozen circle, abandoning its prey and aiming itself in Flood Boy’s direction, Em’s frost-beam caught it in mid-air. She swiftly ascended, so that her beam angled almost straight down at it, pummelling it into the pavement.

It stopped moving.

The guards lowered their swords, a few of them even cheering. The cerberus slumped down, safe inside what was now more a defensive structure than anything else, clearly exhausted. I was pretty sure a druid would be able to get it back on its feet again.

The moment Em turned off the beam, descending once more to my level, the giant spider shuddered.

“It’s still alive.”

“Not quite dead yet,” I reported.

“That’s not exactly what I meant…”

Em drew a breath to reply, and it turned into a gasp.

Shuddering became shivering – and a bigger, whitish spider emerged from the dead, black-brown husk, frenziedly bursting free, a whirl of legs scampering right at my faun –

I waved him away before he could be injured, and the giant arachnid’s mandibles closed on empty air; he stepped back through the next fissure, a good fifty feet away, over near the great worm, his pipes and goblet already raised.

The spider was rapidly darkening in hue again, greying, blackening, its hairs regrowing on its limbs – limbs that were now seven feet at their longest, rather than five. Its mandibles glinted as it leapt high into the air.

Flood Boy aimed up at the monster, then threw a wall of wine into the air and thruuuuuuuuuuuumed at it.

I was looking at my faun, concerned for his safety, but when Em ascended again and started to call her lightning I knew because I could sense and hear it, thunder pealing out somewhere far off, high in the clouds.

The giant spider contorted in its leap, twisting to evade the column-like spout of wine that gushed up at it – the thing had already reached the summit of its jump, and it was going to land on him.

In a single leap.

Fifty feet.

Yune’s fingers.

“There’s more. Listen.”

Not now, I snapped. I was concentrating.

I had to ensure that my faun remained the spider’s best target. I couldn’t dismiss and re-summon watchmen, and they’d become something of a problem, being potential victims and making for little more than a useless audience at this point. This situation was way above their pay-grade.

But I couldn’t bring Olbru back this way very easily; if I moved him too quickly, the watch, the worm, and even me and Em in the air could all become the spider’s next targets.

Instead, I teleported him just far enough to avoid the spider’s new position in his old one, keep him close to it, lead it northwards even just a few hundred feet, get it in the open and away from the other, more-placid monsters.

It didn’t prove necessary.

The giant arachnid landed exactly where Flood Boy had been, its longer legs looking more like weapons in and of themselves than they had a minute earlier. Then it swivelled, orienting itself at him; he was just thirty feet from its rows of beady eyes now.

It raised those lethal-looking legs to scuttle in his direction –

The scene before my eyes flashed as a lightning bolt streaked down, white and blue, ripping into the spider.

It didn’t explode, as I might’ve expected. It just charred, going from brownish to solid black in an instant.

Then the wave of thunder shook me as Em directed a shattering stream of force down at the electrified monster, sending me reeling back and up into the sky from the mere reflection of the air Em was channelling.

I saw as it went from a petrified lump of solid-black-spider to a swirling cloud of dust.

Dead now, I thought triumphantly.

“Kas…”

The thunder-wave had been loud, but my hearing was unaffected, and as I’d gained some distance and height I suddenly realised that I’d been wrong to brush Zel off like I’d done a few seconds ago. My ramped-up perception afforded me the luxury of viewing the Square in perfect clarity.

Oh no.

“I’m sorry. Your command…”

The people running away from the southern part of the Square had fled in all directions, but those who’d gone deeper into the Square rather than leaving it hadn’t got to the northern part. Those at the back simply met the crowd of screaming people who’d been at the front, returning from the north – the east, the west…

There were at least three, maybe four thousand people, some with wagons and horses, all milling around in a huge blob in the very centre of Mund, encompassing the crossing of Hill Road and Plain Road at the heart of Firenight Square, trampling one another in the chaos.

And on the edges of the chaos, slowly, methodically working their way inwards: spindly shapes, differing in size but all possessed of the same number of appendages.

Giant spiders.

Dozens and dozens of them.