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10
Erin the Endless
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ERIN WALKED OUT OF SUNSPINE CITY with little sense of relief. Viktor is alive, she was certain of that now, at least. She was not sure what the bastard was doing but he was sure taking his time.
Not that it wouldn’t be hard to find him anyhow. He was prone to making points, prone to hogging spotlights, prone to causing trouble wherever he went. Give it a few more months and whatever Viktor was stirring would pop out for everyone to see. All she needed to do was wait.
Like how she had been waiting for three hundred and thirty-four years. The only problem she could think of was if he tried to go to Amanila, or if he died. But he couldn’t have died, she made sure of that.
“At least have the bloody decency to look for me,” she complained to no one in particular as she walked out of Pureza’s plaza, straight toward Sunspine’s entrance. She lowered her straw hat as some Amanilan Inquisitors passed by the gate. Not that it’d do much for her anyhow, if any of these zealots knew how to smell Witchcraft they would have found her scent years ago.
Of course, she could always kill them, but she didn’t like the trouble, and she didn’t like cleaning up, that was Viktor’s job.
Besides, this new body was a problem. For one, she lost all of her grand status as the previous Head Inquisitor, so as far as everyone was aware she was simply a witch, and a witch was not welcome anywhere with their heads intact and their bodies unburned. Two, it was too small for her preference. She was used to looking down on people, not being looked down on.
At least she wasn’t a goblin.
Three, Viktor won’t recognize her. She already made solutions for that listed in her 133rd journal, and none of them was less troublesome than the other.
“It’s been a year since you were born, so you probably made an army,” she murmured to the wind, putting her hands inside her pockets. “You’ve always been predictable like that.”
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“And you became a Mancer,” Viktor would have said back, he would have. She could almost hear it, “what an absolutely unexpected choice you made there Erin, I definitely did not see that for miles away.”
She laughed a moment.
Then frowned. “I’m going insane,” she told herself. Without looking back, she exited the city walls and once again took steps towards The Land Beyond the Walls.
“Semos almighty, just do something already.”
She did her waiting. She left her clues. She studied the world. She had done her part. The rest was up to Viktor. She could only hope he’d find the hints she left. “You’re smart,” she said. “You’ll see it, right?”
The trees shook in avid disagreement, and the sun shines like a middle finger on her face.
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Sunspine City
[Entry from Erin the Endless’ 300th Journal, Year 300 After Viktor’s Death]
Sunspine was a city under a cliff, boasting its intricate, brutalist architecture of recycled junk and repurposed garbage. The houses towers from the ground into cliff ceiling, like malformed pillars made of rusted metal, blue neon bone, red mortar, treant-wood, and whatever piece of trash a resident found lying on the floor and used as a wall, as a floor, or as a ceiling. These jagged, wiry apartments cramped together were interconnected by a series of bridges (of the same rotten condition) that was as safe as skipping through magma, making up the clogged, grimy streets from above to below. All paths either dragged too long or stopped too short, often failing to connect or lead anywhere, but otherwise successful in presenting dead ends.
You couldn’t spit anywhere without hitting an adventurer, or a thief, or a thief catcher, a bounty hunter, a mancer, a disowned inquisitor, a poet with a sword instead of a pen, a fool, a smiles-dealer, a smiles-addict, a sell-sword—and the smarter men who’d rather profit of the bunch: armorers and alchemist, harlots and haruspices, dice boys and card girls. On every corner was a merchant selling bent swords or thrice-used-armor, an alchemist offering potions of water breathing, or limb-regeneration, or invisibility. If one would wish to wonder about the side-effects, one should only look at a normal Sunspine citizen: a man with an arm like a small baby’s, a woman with mushroom and blisters growing on her neck, a boy with a crocodile for a head— no one could tell if it was the Biomancers experimenting on citizens, or just citizens experimenting on themselves.
Daylight liked waving hello for two or three hours, before quickly fading above the cliff that covers the entire place in shadow. From afar, Sunspine looked like a sculpture of a crocodile the size of a mountain: a roaring cliff slanted towards the sky, opening into a mouth wide enough to swallow fifty ships at once. Its jagged teeth were carved with the sharpness of stalactites, met by the pointed city walls made from the spine of a spider-whale. The city was its tongue, tonsil, and abysmal throat, swelling in its wait to juice the first sorry fellow who happened to come in.