Dusk had already fallen across the city’s streets by the time Eris stepped onto solid ground. The port district bustled with comers from all the world over and she found herself at once dispersed within a sea of pedestrians, carried off with the tide toward the Oldwalls and the city’s main avenues which led to the forums, the markets, and all those places she spent her most formative years.
The amoebic method of the crowd’s motion surprised her the most—the way so many people came together to writhe like a single body. Once upon a time that phenomenon was her greatest ally. While fleeing from the baker with a loaf of bread or darting past the mancatcher after stealing coins from a purse. She had learned to navigate crowds as a fish swims in a body of water.
But that was a long time ago. Now she was conscious of nothing but the hands that probed her bare skin, the fabric that brushed against her, the smell of so many people, and her paranoia that someone might try to grab the soulcharm hanging on her neck. Now she was in awe to see so many people all at once. She had forgotten what it was like.
But then even though her childhood began and ended in Katharos as an urchin, she spent little more than a year alone on its streets. That it seemed decades was just a trick of the memory. Still, it left its mark.
The crowd expelled her in a cough at the Oldwall subgate which separated the Dock Quarter from Regizar Avenue and from there granted access to the rest of the city. All Katharos was crisscrossed by Oldwall gates a hundred feet high. The city’s redundant defenses were impregnable: each district was its own fortress, with its own walls and its own gates, all leading up to the final line of the Spire and the Archon’s Palace. One had to wonder what threats the Old Kingdom thought they needed to protect against to protect themselves so.
The gates were not normal. They were Lightning Walls backed by slabs of million-ton steel, movable only by magic, all powered by mana drawn from that Spire.
Or they would have been, eons ago. The Spire had been off for an eternity. The gates were all opened. The defenses were all unpowered. There was no better reminder of that than the enormous panel of a Lightning Wall emitter tucked away at the side of the Dock Quarter’s gate.
Eris flinched away on instinct. Worried she might be disintegrated. Hesitant that it still pulled mana from the air, or that it could malfunction. But it was off. It had been for longer than most civilizations survive.
Like the port Regizar Avenue swarmed with people. Eris longed for them to all be banished so she might be left to explore this ancient place alone. The discomfort of being so swamped by others going about their business was almost enough to send her back to Rook.
Almost.
For now she pressed forward. As the sun’s light was extinguished, blue orbs ignited along the dark towers that lined the wide road for miles downward, casting pale, bright light onto the cobblestone streets. And the towers were tall. Black marble which extended even above the Oldwalls. Twenty storeys? Taller? She felt as if she were standing in a forest made by man. That she remembered, but what disturbed her was the disorientation of being robbed of a horizon. She had grown so used to glancing toward Thermopos and thus knowing which direction was which that she now felt like a compass which couldn’t find north.
She tightened her cloak and pressed forward. Following the lights ahead. She knew from her studies that these were ancient enchantments preserved by the Magisters at Pyrthos. They channeled mana into empty vessels every night to ensure brightness and security for all the city’s commercial quarters. Locals called them ‘fireflies,’ but these insects stopped short of Eris’ destination. Where she was going there would be no fireflies. The city would be dark.
She stepped between two fishmongers’ stalls and into a lonesome alley. For a moment she closed her eyes and took cover behind a pillar and felt the relief of solitude. A knot of anxiety unraveled in her heart. She hadn’t realized how accustomed she’d grown to nature. Kem-Karwene was a large city, but it never felt like this—so crowded, so enormous and labyrinthine. She knew how devious these people were whose shadows passed her by. At least goblins could be trusted to be violent and single-minded. But hungry orphans and lean dockworkers? Their depravity was entirely capricious.
Bad memories might not have troubled her. But she still did not like this place. It was good they were not staying long.
When she was certain she was out of sight, she used Arcane Semblance. Her skin tingled as she traced fingers about the chain on her neck, around the rings on her hands and her golden armlet, and finally across her own eyes. She hid everything. The jewelry was blended into her skin. She still felt its cold metal, but it became invisible—effectively. As for her eyes, she rendered them as they were when she left this place in a cage as a child: brown. That way no one would suspect her of being a magician.
Thus she set out toward the slums.
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She had a vivid recollection of the city’s back alleys and sidestreets. A precise map in her mind. She saw it clearly, even a decade later. It was with this map that she navigated. She recognized the landmarks, too, one after another. The knight’s estate with a wall in the shape of a V. The crumbled section of Oldwall. The statue of Archon Antillos II. One right here, two lefts there, a familiar streetname, then the approach toward a crumbling tower…
And a dead-end. She doubled back, confused, so certain she was on the right path. Soon enough she was back on track. Until…
A dead-end.
It was then that Eris learned even an excellent memory can be a tricky thing. At no point did she find herself surrounded by the unfamiliar. At no point was she ever ‘lost,’ in the sense of not knowing in some general sense where she was. But everything was wrong. Every detail in her mental map was out of order. She knew the statue of Archon Antillos was one block before the street which led to the Slum Quarter, yet in fact, and she saw it before her eyes now, they were miles apart. Had it been moved? She remembered walking between them in seconds. It must have been taken from its original place.
But it hadn’t, and soon she realized. The same happened time and time again. Her individual impressions of the landmarks were accurate, but the connections between each were terribly wrong.
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By the time she finally stumbled through the Oldwall gate into the darkest, poorest, most dangerous part of town, it was so late that even Katharos was asleep.
There were no fireflies here. Not even streetlamps or torches or candles through windows. She used the Embering Eyes of the Lynx to make certain her vision would be clear. So she saw the Slum Quarter as clearly as she might in daylight.
And what was there to see? Urine pooling in the street. Shit smeared across the sidewalk. Dead animals abandoned where they fell. She spotted a wild pig eating of a midden some distance off; as she approached it paid her no attention. No one slept on the streets here—for one it would be too noxious to survive, but also there was no lack of housing in Katharos. Ancient buildings were everywhere to be squatted in. The rest of the city had been no portrait of health, but she hadn’t given it thought until now, perhaps because only now she found herself relatively alone. That was not to say the Slum Quarter was completely deserted; a few urchins, beggars, thugs and low-lives clung to the streets, and they watched as she passed them by. They did nothing—yet.
In this her memory had not been mistaken.
She began to wonder why she came. Curiosity, perhaps, but above all vengeance. There were those who wronged her as a child. Guards and matrons and boys and many others whose names she kept on a list in the back of her mind. But whatever wrongdoings they committed against her led directly or indirectly to her ascension to Pyrthos, to her Manasearing and to who she had become. Had she been treated well she might still be rotting away with the carrion in these streets, shitting in buckets and choking on fumes day-in and day-out. No doubt on her fourth child. Working in a brothel or, even worse, married.
Her desire to right past wrongs waned in the face of this revelation.
There was only one building she cared to visit. She covered her mouth with her cloak and went directly, and here her mental map proved correct. Presently she stopped outside the dark windows (no glass) of a partially-collapsed two storey apartment. A long time ago she knew the man who lived here. As a little girl she had sworn to come back and turn him into ash, along with so many others, when the power to do so was hers.
Yet now she peered in through the empty frame of the windows and saw a crowded den devoid of furniture, lined with fabric. Inside were piled countless wretched, heaving figures on the ground: countless children, a bearded man, a woman.
Every house was the same. Families too large. Rotten clothes. She had expected to find a thuggish young man living here, but then that was many years ago. He would not be so young anymore. Was that bearded creature him? Or was he someplace else? Was he still alive?
She hadn’t decided what to do when a boy accosted her from across the street.
“Please, lady!” he said. He tried to grab her arm, but she pulled away. “Just a drachma! I can’t feed myself!”
She regarded him as if she had stepped in a puddle of human waste. “Do not touch me,” she said, too disgusted to be angry.
“Just one, please!”
“I would sooner throw my coinpurse into the wharf.” She kicked him away. “Lay another hand on me and you no longer will need to feed yourself, do you understand?”
He stared up at her. She knew this operation well—distract the out-of-place with pleas while grabbing at their valuables. She pulled herself away from him and turned and walked away. After only a dozen steps she looked over her shoulder to see the boy had fled to a group of mean-looking young men some distance away. They might have been cloaked by darkness if her vision was unaided, but with her spell she saw them conversing clearly in the shadows far-off. They were all dressed in rags. Their beards scraggly but unshaved, hair long and unkempt.
She picked up her pace.
They pursued her to the district’s Oldwall gate, but where the fireflies started again they desisted. Thugs rarely left their own turf.
She might have taught them all a lesson easily enough, but the confrontation with the urchin left her with a strange feeling—a sort of hollowness that bloomed from her impulse for vengeance. What fate was worse: to live in a place like that, waiting for prey to rob for spare coins at the latest hours of night, inhaling the miasma of rotting carcasses mixed with human excrement; or to be incinerated by a burst of mana?
Such a question did not need serious consideration. Eris would prefer death than the indignity of a life lived in such squalor. So there was no reason to meet out vengeance. Her vengeance was fulfilled already by leaving the slums behind. There was no worse fate for her antagonists than being left there to rot.
Still, certain of her conclusion as she was, she was left to return to the docks unhappy and unsatisfied. Giving in to her childish fantasies of homicide would have been so much more fun. But it wouldn’t have been better. It wouldn’t have been the more spiteful thing to do. A triumphant return? To Pyrthos, perhaps. But there was nothing to prove to slumdog wastrels. They were too far beneath her. She needed nothing from them.
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She spent all night walking without a minute of sleep. She reconvened with the party at the waterfront, exhausted and ready to collapse and still unhappy at the outcome of her expedition across Katharos. There she spotted Rook far-off, then Robur, then another man. He had dark hair and dark eyes and he wore the robes of a scribe. Eris was not impressed by his physique.
His eyes went wide when he saw her.
“That’s Eris?” he said.
She folded her arms. “I see you have heard stories.”
“I—” he stammered. “You’re—I just meant that, uh…Your eyes. They’re—normal?”
She rolled her eyes, although she rather liked provoking this reaction, and snapped her fingers. With that she dispelled the last effects of Arcane Semblance. She had been practicing better control of her own sustained spells since her powers returned, and with that simple act of will her eyes melted back to gold.
The man shuddered. “Creepy. I’m Jason, by the way.”
“So you are.” He gave her one last, long look. “Be careful where your gaze lingers, Jason.”
He glanced away. “Uh. Right.”
She smirked. Rook, who looked to be in immense discomfort, glanced at her disapprovingly, but he shook his head with a knowing smile. His voice was weak when he spoke, “Jason has been researching Lord Arqa. You and him will prepare the ritual of banishment together.”
“That may be hard, when he cannot look me in the eyes,” Eris said.
“What do I need to look you in the eyes for? Don’t worry, you do the magic, my head will be buried in my notes,” Jason said.
“Fair enough,” Eris said. “You are coming with us, then?”
“Believe me, I didn’t want to,” he said. “But there’s too much, and there’s only two of us who’ve met Lord Arqa before. It didn’t feel right sitting it out.”
“How positively virtuous.”
“Plus—no one can read my handwriting. So I’m coming.”
“We had a long conversation last night,” Rook said.
“It was very fascinating to hear—” Robur started.
“Who are you again?” Jason said.
Robur stared at him. “Robur,” he said, almost like he was surprised at the answer.
“Great. More magicians. Look, I have some things to pack. I just wanted to…” He looked at Eris again, and now he did look her in the eye. “How good are you?”
She frowned. “I have never let loose a plague of the undead on an unsuspecting valley, if that is what you ask.”
“No. I mean—can you do it? Because this thing, it’s not like that crystal-worm Rook was telling me about last night. It’s ancient and it’s evil and it wants to eat us alive, literally, and if we’re going to pull this off, we’re going to need someone really—and I mean really—good at what they do. I mean powerful. And if that’s not you—then we might as well give up now and sail to Skane instead, because we’re not going to win.”
She stared him down. This mission was idiotic and she couldn’t have cared less about Darom. But that was a challenge she couldn’t resist. “If it is not me,” she said, “then it is no one.”
Jason hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll get my things.”