A Wandering House is a kind of creature that a taxonomist would call a fabriforme, an unnatural construct. They were made by ancient mythspinners as temples of tales, with doors that could open in new cities and with a thousand gently-furred arms with which to beckon audiences in. They were beautiful, once. The first mythspinners were lovely and cheerful, from a people with small silken-furred bodies and large ears and loud voices that wanted only to tell great stories to as many people as they could get to. With the Wandering Houses, they could open doors to many cities in many places all at once, bring together audiences from nations that had never heard of one another, and give them all wonderful stories of a fantastic world to share.
Those original mythspinners were long dead, their art passed down imperfectly to other peoples, their truth all but forgotten. And their houses continued to wander. They continued to hunger. Like any living creature, they learned to survive. They learned to eat, to open their doors and beckon in weary travelers to feast upon. The houses learned to take on tenants if it suited them, to kill them when the deals ended. As they fell into myth, as they aged and forgot what they once were, and as they became too accustomed to eating and laying traps, they changed. Magic things always change.
Were one of those ancient, silky-furred creatures to enter a Wandering House now, it would not be recognized as anything except a potential meal. Not that those mythspinners would recognize what their houses had become. Behind the wall of the Wandering House, above the ceilings, beneath the floors, their great throats and many eyes dwelled in the inky sea between reality and nothing, and they had grown colder than all of it.
* * *
Sethian Skin took two steps to one side, shouting in offense as though a great rudeness had been done to him. His meat snapped back into place, shaped by his skeleton once more into a man. Dark skin closed around the iron bolt driven into his side. He reached for it, but when he touched it, he staggered and groaned. He left it in place. He couldn’t touch the iron, but it stayed stuck in him, and he leaned against a mannequin to keep from collapsing.
Amo saw this, and looked to see the spymaster on the floor. The man was a terrible sight; his mask thrown aside, the once-concealed half of his face was more than a scar. His skull was exposed, surrounded by black-burned flesh on his neck and along his hairline. The hollow of his eye socket was all shadowed scar tissue in the depths of his skull. But perhaps more terrible was the murder in the eye he did have, as it turned on Sgathaich and he loaded another bolt. Amo shouted, “Mom!” in warning.
Sgathatic turned quick, spotting the crossbow. She let go of Nymir and rushed to swing a taloned foot at the spymaster, sending the crossbow flying away. The spymaster retreated fast, but for only a moment, taking a dagger from a fallen soldier’s belt. He knew better than to keep it in his hand, flipping it in his fingers and throwing it at the tall woman’s head. Sgathaich’s reflexes had always been animal-quick, so she almost managed to duck the blade. It grazed off the side of her head, cutting rags so that feathers poured out along with copious red blood.
Freed of Sgathaich’s pinning foot, Nymir struggled to stand only for Amo’s knee to strike his face with shattering force. Putting their entire body into the blow, Amo all but accidentally managed to tear one wrist from the manacles, shouting in pain as the bones of their hand broke and their skin ripped through the manacle’s hinge. The pain was enough to daze Amo, and they staggered for a moment before they shook it off. Light-headed, they stared at their hands, one disfigured and dripping blood and the other still heavy with the manacle.
It was a nauseous sight, but with all the adrenaline and the sudden bloodloss, Amo couldn’t help but laugh. “I got it! Half of it.” The reached for the manacle still on their other wrist. “Just have to… Mom, help!”
A hand to the side of her bleeding head, Sgathaich warded the spymaster away with a raking talon through his arm. The man abandoned his attempt to fight her, grabbing his wounded arm and retreating back into the racks of clothes he’d been hiding in. Sgathatich followed his movement with her glare for a moment, then turned and cringed at the sight of Amo’s blood.
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One ugly, coarsely furred limb shoved its pointed tip all the way through Amo’s back and out the front of their gut. Then came two more, one through their shoulder, another through their thigh. The Maniaque took hold of Amo and lifted them from the floor. Amo didn’t writhe or struggle. They were rigid, stunned, their only sound a confused sort of groan. Sgathaich shouted and rushed beneath Amo, reaching up to catch them before they could get out of reach. Grabbing Amo’s arm with one hand and the dangling manacle with her other, Sgathaich did what she shouldn’t have hesitated to do in the first place: she tore the manacle ruthlessly from Amo’s hand, not caring about the bone or skin it destroyed.
Sgathaich held the manacles for a moment, drenched now in blood and heavy with shreds of Amo’s skin. Then she dropped it, grabbing Amo, pulling down as the Maniaque drew Amo away. As though one could simply wrestle a Wandering House to surrender. She shouted, “Let them go! They’ve no more metal! Isn’t that the deal you made with the Sethian Skin? Obey your bargain!” But the house still pulled, intent on the meal it had captured.
“The deal says it can eat anyone who breaks the rules,” Sethian Skin said weakly. He’d dropped to one knee, leaning against a mannequin dressed in fine purple. He had one arm to his chest, heaving for breath, ill from the iron in his side. “The Maniaque isn’t an easy thing to argue with.”
“You will give them to me!” Sgathaich demanded. She made a strange, guttural sound deep in her chest, as though she contained a great hollow that she could scream inside. She lifted her gaze to the place the Manaique’s limbs emerged from, the dark recesses behind concealing red silks high on the walls. “I will tell you a tale of a spy from the southlands. Not born of those lands but in love with the Rhyqir Valley and its peoples, ready to die for them.”
Sethian Skin chuckled. “Your magic won’t work here, mythspinner. The Maniaque won’t allow it. And it’s a lot stronger than you are.”
It took effort, but Sgathaich managed to release one of the hands she held Amo with. She needed her fingers free to weave the magic, to write the words on the air. Maybe if she were one of the ancient mythspinners the Wandering House had known in antiquity, this would’ve been easier, but her imperfect sorcery was all she had. So she spoke, “I will tell you a tale of a child alone in the snow, rescued by Pharaul, who we raised with a love of stories and warmth,” and wrote the words on the air. Even when she didn’t feel the magic, she kept on.
Above her, Amo made the quiet sounds that dying people make, the sickly groan and the slow sigh. Half-aware, they muttered, “Mom, that’s embarrassing. Nobody wants to hear about me.”
Beneath Sgathaich’s bloody rags, her beak shifted and clicked. Her eyes watched Amo without blinking. “Their heart was light when they were young, and all they ever wanted was a warm drink and a nap and another story. But we argued when they got older, because they wanted to fight, and I didn’t want them to get hurt. But their warmth had turned to fire, to greatness I can’t understand. A great soldier, a great spy. I will tell you this story: they travel to Gray Watch, where they dare danger, but they do not die.”
The Maniaque groaned, a large earthen sound high above the ceiling. Sethian Skin lifted the brim of his hat curiously, staring carefully at Sgathaich’s conjuring hand. There came the slightest sound of song.
“They do not die in Gray Watch,” Sgathaich insisted. “The spy endures! Darkness touches them but fails to ensnare them. Death watches them but cannot reach them. Though hungry claws take hold of them, the claws will release. The only hands that are able to hold the spy are hands that hold them with care!”
Rumbling in disagreement, the Maniaque pulled against Sgathaich, but there was music encircling its limbs. Music sung in the air in a language the Maniaque hadn’t heard in so long that it didn’t remember its meaning, but it was familiar. And the Maniaque’s limbs shifted in discomfort, not liking that familiarity. It touched some memory it could no longer tolerate, something that made it sick. Suddenly, its limbs wilted weakly, and it withdrew.
And Amo fell. Impaling spikes tearing free of Amo’s body, they dropped suddenly down against Sgathatich, who caught Amo and encircled them in her long arms. Her tone shifted to a desperate breath, “And they were okay. I’ll tell you a tale of Amo, who isn’t greatly wounded, who doesn’t bleed very much, who heals so quickly. They heal so quickly!”
Sethian Skin strained to push himself upright. Groaning from the effort, cringing against the nausea of the iron in his side, he got himself up. “How did you…? But the Maniaque never lets anyone…”
Nymir squirmed on the floor. In consolation to itself, the Maniaque drove one long limb through the man’s neck. Neither Sgathaich nor Sethian Skin noticed the man quietly lifted to the mandibles above, so intently watching Amo’s pale, bleeding body.