17 - The Spectacle

Sister Nadia had been stabbed in the neck trying to defend Byron from his attackers, and she lay there bleeding out as the crowd advanced on him. The mob was beyond reason and Byron had known that his words were meaningless even as he uttered them. He began to utter a weeping prayer. ‘Black Magic’, they cry. As if I am not in the process of saving their lives. Of showing them miracles. The stupid, ungrateful wretches. Father was right. These people cannot be trusted with matters of any real importance. They know only destruction and waste.

He slowly backed away from their angry, hateful faces, nowhere to go and convinced that the gods abandoned him to a terrible fate, when suddenly the atmosphere beneath the pavilion changed. All six of the heavy oak tables, as well as every other unliving besides not weighted down, began to rise into the air, slowly at first, then it all rushed upward to crash into the roof of the pavilion, the tables carrying with them shrieking groups of people as flailing bodies plummeted into the crowd.

The entirety of the structure shook with the crash of splintering wood. The sturdy oak tables stayed suspended up there for a moment, as if trying to leave the atmosphere altogether but being denied by the creaking and groaning beams and eaves of the pavilion. The sounds of the crowd’s collective gagging filled the air as they vomited and shat themselves, their minds no doubt scrambling to process the magic occurrence, and one by one the torches were snuffed until the hilltop was in near-total darkness, then the screaming had begun in earnest as everything fell back down- the tables and a dislodged center beam, pieces of the roof- a deadly rain that descended on the woefully panicked crowd with terrible muffled crashing, silenced screams and thudded earth.

Nothing but superficial debris and a cloud of dust hit Byron as the crowd violently dissipated around him. He stood by the side of the thing which had been Varnabas. Sister Nadia held her bleeding throat at his feet, covered in dust and somehow still alive.

The sound around him was a never-ending scream that cascaded down the hill in all directions, and the noises that lingered once the screams faded were terrible- the trampled and newly injured, he knew. He watched them scramble over and climb one another to flee the pavilion and hill, and he realized suddenly that all of his acolytes had gone with them.

“Stop,” he intoned, a weak voice, but they had already run for their lives. “Stop!” he shouted, a warbled scream.

Finally he turned to look upon Varnabas’ monstrous form with hate-filled eyes. The thing was disgusting. The velvety sack with its tiny wiggling legs that had become the old man’s back-end moved slightly. As Byron continued to think about how far he’d come, checking his math so to say, he could feel his rage building. When he could hold it no longer he let out a high-pitched, unintelligible string of half-words. “I’ve done everything right,” he cried to Sister Nadia,who stared up at him through her mask of dust and blood, her brown eyes terribly aware. Byron’s voice became a saccharine pleading. “I tried to tell them to stand back, didn’t I? My only crime was the neglect of their sheer stupidity. That moon man, Cossack, tricked me. The moon man tricked me!” he screamed. His eyes bugged out of his head, teeth clenched, and he erupted. “Where’s the rain?” he screamed at the body of Varnabas. “Where is the rain I was promised, you ugly fucking thing?”

He stomped, kicked at the monster, yelled himself hoarse at the old man on his weird organic pedestal. He grabbed Varnabas’ protruding leg by its ankle with both hands and pulled on it with all his might. It easily tore away from the hip of the corpse. Byron began to club the pulsing thorax with it in wild, furious overhead swings as the tiny white legs along its sides quivered madly.

“All you’ve done is scare everyone!” Byron screamed. He threw the pale leg out behind him, into the human wreckage. “And now you’ve made me become this! You’ve made me become this! You’re making me scare people! You’re making me scare people!” He glared down at Sister Nadia, still dying, as her terrified eyes met his. “Quit looking at me!” he screamed at her, and spit in her face. She flinched, her pale, trembling arm lifted to point behind him before it dropped for a final time and her head fell against it.

Byron spun around. The fleshy, bug-like thorax protruding from the corpse began to tremble and quake. Seamlessly, a long, shining and coiled tendril burst through the yawning and burnt mouth of the dead man’s face. It split the neck and tore through the dead husk of the torso, spilling out dry entrails as it climbed into the air. Varnabas' other leg plopped to the ground from the fleshy bulk of the thing. The black tendril rose at least twenty feet high, thicker at its base, and the remains of the corpse fell to the sides of the bulging abdomen with its wriggling, useless white legs, now wiggling in a wild frenzy.

Byron stared up at it, face ashen, and then he began to laugh, a not wholly sane sound. The neck that writhed in the air was jet black with spots like a salamander that were a deep blue. There was a mouth at the end of it and it opened like some predatory plant-life. It had no discernable eyes, but it yawned wide and Byron saw that the inside of its mouth was toothless, mottled pink and gray.

Byron’s laughter quickly turned to gasping sobs. “Oh, thank you, oh great Hyne. The true god! The true god!” He cleared his throat to address the few fleeing people as tears streamed from his face. “Look upon this, my people! Look upon what I have summoned! I am ambassador to the Earth Go-”

The cloak of his robe was snatched by a powerful hand and he was yanked backward and close to a tall man in chainmail as a stream of sizzling blue-black liquid fell onto the ground where he’d just been standing. He would have screamed if he hadn't immediately choked and gasped for breath from its fumes. Smoke rose from where it splashed on his robes, and he saw the fabric burn away. He did scream when it grazed the skin of his leg. Still, he wrenched free of the man’s grip and tried to run back to the creature only to be yanked backward again mid-run by the hood of his robe. He flew backward and was roughly dragged down the hill by the cursing man. Byron gazed up in awe as the grass and rocks passed along his sliding back and he tugged at the taught collar of his robes. He could still see the creature, the rain wyrm, begin to spit the acidic substance into the crippled bodies around it that still remained. Up in the air like a fountain of destruction. The screams were sparse and awful, but Byron’s own tortured wail was deafening as he was dragged down the hill.

“Shut up, you moron.” A gruff voice from the man, familiar. Halfway down the hill Byron was lifted and his head turned with a painful grip on the back of his neck. It was Lynt, his father’s guardsman. “Was that your rain, you creepy little shit?” he asked Byron through gritted teeth.

“Unhand me, lowborn!”

The grip tightened and Lynt growled, “You summoned a devil. An actual devil. I’ve always known you were evil, but gods, Byron. They’ll burn you for this.”

“How dare you! Father shall hear.”

“Go and tell him. I swear to all the gods that this is the last thing I ever do for that cold-hearted bastard. Now, are you going to come with me, or are you going to make me beat the shit out of you?”

Byron’s protests became a muffled whine as they quickly descended the remainder of the hill. At the bottom, another cloaked man met them. “Is that him? W-what happened? I saw something strange.”

“Father! I must see this to fruition! Please!” Byron whined.

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“We need to go,” Lynt told them, and pulled Byron’s arm as they joined the remnants of the mob fleeing the parkland. Byron protested weakly, casting glances back at the hill until it was out of sight. When they made it back to the path of stepping stones in the dark woods between still-flickering stone fish, the safe glow of the torches from their mouths illuminating their way, Byron had stopped resisting. He walked willingly with them. By the time they passed through the iron gates across the street from the tenements, his crying had reduced to sniffles. Though everything had suddenly taken a disastrous turn, he was glad for it all to be over. “What an accomplishment,” he sighed between hiccups. “Did you see what I summoned? Real magic, father.”

Oxsar Levant could not answer or look at him. He was in a state of disbelief, or shock, his grasp on his field of study and his entire worldview teetering on collapse.

“Father, did you see that creature?” Byron asked him.

Quietly, gently, Oxsar Levant answered him. “Yes, son. I saw.”

Around the next corner were the waiting regimens of Yarthanguard. Byron’s eyes widened and he turned to flee, but Lynt sent him toppling over beside the path with a simple placement of his foot, and leaned down and grabbed him.

“Damn you all,” Byron said, his face in the grass and the guardsman’s knee in his back, but it was weak, half-hearted.

***

The cannons at the south gate sounded off, followed by those on the west gate and then the east, which were the loudest to Alma who had never heard used the calamity signals before. It meant martial law, that there was an uprising, and the Yarthanguard were to take any measure possible to contain it. She’d learned the protocol for it as a young soldier. It was to be a last ditch effort, a measure put into place after the license revolts twenty years past, to shock the factions into submission.

She got pieces of what had occurred that night as she made her way back from Drifter’s Row. The looting had begun at Trapper's Wharf in the lower west quarter of Yartha, and the mobs made their ways north, more or less sticking to Current Street along the river, but also branching out here or there to raid a storehouse or cellar. On her side of Yartha it happened as well, as evidenced by sounds of fighting she’d heard in Ironworks.

There had been speculation about an uprising for over a year among the commoners, but Alma never believed that it would actually come to pass. The gangs were nothing compared to the guard, still a militaristic force from the time of the tyrant king. It came to her then, the truce between the gangs of East Yartha and its significance. She thought it likely that there had been corroboration among the various groups, thieves, some less organized or serious than others. She wondered what they were trying to do.

An exasperated and exhausted city guard had also come out that night, many of them roused from their sleep to bring order to the ensuing chaos. Rumor was that they’d found themselves overwhelmed on Glass Avenue and in the dockyards. Common folk had turned on them. There had been a full blown battle down on the landing there. They’d found out firsthand that the recent city-wide weapons ban had done little to keep swords and spears out of the hands of citizens, and there had been crossbows, scimitars, battle axes, and throwing knives in the melee, or so she was told. It had been the news at Crow’s.

She learned that at the dockyards the Yarthanguard had simply given up and allowed them to take it at the behest of their commanders, and the rioters seized and unloaded an entire fleet of barges filled with food and goods from the southern kingdoms that were destined for the markets, and they’d began to give it all away to the masses. All of this was news from various frantic and muddle-headed sources, however, and she took it all with a grain of salt.

She didn’t know if the gangs had taken advantage of the chaos supplied by whatever was happening at Hundred Trees, or if it was only coincidence, but it had made for a lively early morning awakening. She’d woke from a drunken sleep with the acceptance that there was most likely nothing she could do for Varnabas at that point, forced to wait for whatever was to happen to him. From the sounds of the people’s chatter, though, it had happened or was happening at Hundred Trees, and the parkland was where she’d decided to go after finding nothing but signs of a fight at the bazaar where she’d sent Pox and Syatt.

She’d found signs of fighting and a lot of blood there. It weighed heavy on her mind. Of course there was no way of telling whose blood it was, but the thought that it could be either of them angered her. She would not be able to forgive herself. Crow’s wasn’t far, and she’d decided to make sure it was still standing and to let him know she was going before setting off.

Once back in Ironworks across the street from Crow’s she stood looking at the smoke rising from across the river when she heard the sound of a fist pounding on a door. Her door, she realized, the one leading to her cellar home beneath the tavern. She took her long sword from its sheath and left her position at the back of the old mill. In her hands she held a steel sword her father made for her before she’d gone to Yartha. He’d given it to her on her sixteenth birthday and she would never part with it; it was her most prized possession. She’d never become used to the city’s scimitars when she’d been a soldier of the Yarthanguard. She wore chainmail, and her left arm was a leather shield in a defensive stance. She moved quietly around to the side of the stairwell. "Oh no you don't," she said grimly. "You done picked the wrong tavern."

"Alma," Crow sighed in relief, unaware that he had come close to being killed. He was thin, a middle-aged man of average height. He wore a long, thin tunic with boots, and his sleep-tousled dark hair curled out wildly. Alma believed she'd only ever seen it slicked back, not a hair misplaced. "I've been looking all over for you," he said to her, voice shaky. "Where were you?"

"Take it easy, string-bean. The bar's fine, right? I checked 'fore I left, but you wasn't up there.”

“That’s because I was looking for you,” he said, exasperated.

“I don’t know what to tell you. We must have missed each other. I went up north to check on some friends," She sheathed her sword. "They weren't there, but something surely happened." Alma’s forehead creased with worry over Syatt and Pox. "There was enough blood in the street to make you think murder," she told him. "You ain't seen two boys? Barely teenagers. One of em's tall. Got lazy eye. They ain't been by here?"

"No," Crow answered. He ran a hand through his disheveled hair. "I don't think so, at least. It's been a confusing couple hours, Alma, but listen to me-" His normally dark complexion was ashen as he seemed to choose his words. "At Hundred Trees, right now, people are going to see the hair-eater,” he said with disgust. “Going to see Varnabas. Our Varnabas. Something is happening there. Something other than this, I mean," he gestured at the barely contained chaos around them, the billows of black smoke rising to the north and west. "It's a ritual or something. Oh, gods, what is going on, Alma?"

"Alright," she said. She scrunched her face up, looked up at the sky and then took him by the shoulders. "I'll be back, hopefully with old Varn in tow, okay?" She turned to go.

"Wait, wait, what?" he said, taking her arm. "Surely the Yarthanguard knows by now. They'll do something about it, right? Let them. What about the tavern? These looters?"

Alma gave his arm a reassuring pat. "Don't worry. You got that little sword I gave you. Just remember what I told you and you'll be fine. What makes you think anyone wants to rob this old dump, anyway? Is Wallace up there?"

Crow rubbed his temples. "He's shit-faced, Alma."

"I don't believe that for a second," she said, and chuckled. "That don't matter. He can still fight. I've seen it. You'll be fine. Don’t let the city guard see you with that sword.”

“How in the hell are we supposed to defend ourselves?”

“Nobody's going to bother you. Stay inside. Don’t argue with the guard. Not tonight. Tonight, whatever they say, goes. They got the right to kill you tonight and get away with it if they take a liking. No questions asked. That’s what those cannon blasts meant. That's what they really meant.”

“Good gods, Alma.”

She turned and began a brisk march north up Locust Street. "Careful!" Crow called after her. "Don't do anything stupid."

"Alright," she said without looking back. Her footsteps sounded loud in her ears. There was no use worrying about the boys. Any number of things could've happened, she thought, and they aren't all bad, but I still might be able to help old Varn. Time to put an end to this foolishness. She reached into a pouch on her belt and pulled out a glass decanter as big as her hand filled with whiskey. She downed half of its contents with a grimace and a wipe of her mouth with the back of her forearm, and placed it back in the pouch. She exhaled the heat of it. Just enough to keep me from the shakes, she told herself. Shakes and swordplay do not mix. She cleared her throat and when she spoke her voice took on a reverent lilt. "Oh, wise Slybbon of the Godswyne River, grant us all safe passage through this dangerous night. Let us wake up tomorrow and start the whole damn thing all over again if it ain’t too much trouble."

She continued, short prayers to a variety of gods and goddesses as she marched up Locust Street. Minutes later she came across a row of wooden apartments that were burning to the ground. Members of the cities' ramshackle fire brigades, sweaty and panicked, had relegated to watching it, helpless as it spread to the neighboring buildings. Alma had to go around to Blotter Street because of the intense heat. When she heard the screaming from Hundred Trees from at least ten blocks away, she quickened her pace toward the sounds.