Friday, November 22nd

Indirk snarled, “You’d better have a damned good reason for this, Nymir.”

“I do,” Nymir said, scratching at his beard. The man stank to flaming heavens, but he’d probably come straight from a pile of dead fish or something, so could one hold it against him? He paced unhappily on the quay, looking around like he expected to be caught, “I’ve got a lead on the weapons.”

“I’m supposed to be at work right now,” Indirk huffed. She’d taken an early lunch to chase the man away from the building when she’d spotted him.

“I wanted you to be the first to know.”

“Why?” Hands in fists, Indirk resisted the urge to push Nymir off the quay and onto the beach below. She was slowly realizing that Amo had never told Nymir about her betrayal. Amo had probably explained her absence away somehow. She didn’t understand what that made her so angry, made her grind her blunt knuckles together, but she didn’t resist the anger.

“Because I can’t tell Amo,” Nymir said, “They might be in on it.”

“You think Amo is in on it? On, what, hiding Gray Watch’s magic?” That made Indirk shake her head like she’d gotten something in her eyes. “That’s fucking dumb.”

“My lead on the weapons. It’s the crone. The bird woman. She’s the lead.”

“The…” Indirk rubbed at her temples. He could not be talking about… “You do not mean Amo’s mom, right?”

“I’ve been watching the Lighthouse.” Nymir pointed across the bay with one grimy hand. “No light during the day, only on at night, obviously. But you watch it close enough at dawn, when it’s going out, and the light doesn’t extinguish. It moves down, inside the Lighthouse. It descends.”

“That’s normal. You idiot, that’s normal.” Indirk grumbled. “The lamp is a mirror assembly. It’s on a lift.”

“And it comes down into the room behind that nest of balconies just under the apex.”

“Which is where the lighthouse keepers extinguish it.”

“And then sometimes the glowing woman comes out.”

“The… what?” Indirk eyed Nymir as though the man had just started talking about flying narwhals and pixie dusk.

Nymir held up a spyglass. “I’m not making this up out of whole cloth, Indirk. She’s there. The magic sticks to her like dew in the mornings, fading. She’s three times taller than any anthral I’ve ever seen and skinny as hell, and her face is concealed by these bands across that damn beak on the front of her head. She’s dressed fancy here, not in rags, but it’s the same person. The creepy goddamned crone of the Boneblessed Cathedral is in that Lighthouse. I promise you.”

Indirk wrinkled her nose in disgust. The building that Amo’s mother used as an orphanage had been built by Redfall cultists. They had named it Boneblessed, but nobody had called it that since all the cultists had been killed off. Nobody except Nymir, apparently. Indirk huffed at him, “I don’t believe you. If you were sure of that, you’d tell Amo and they’d explain it.”

“I’m not wrong. I know what I saw.”

“If anything, you saw a person who’s just the same kind of thing that Sgathaich is.”

“Same kind of thing? There are no other things like the crone.”

“Nobody’s the only thing like them. There’s millions of anthrals. There’s got to be at least two of whatever Sgathaich is. Just tell Amo what you saw. Better yet, send a message back to Pharaul and have someone ask Sgathaich about it. She’d probably know something.”

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“No. Never.” Nymir shook his head, gesturing firmly with both hands. “Don’t trust the crone. She’s not just creepy. She’s menacing. She’s up to something, I always thought, and now I see this? And I know you and Amo go back, however far back doesn’t matter, but do you really think Amo would take it well if I asked them about this? You think they’d be honest?”

“Yes.” Indirk crossed her arms. “I do.”

“You think Amo would choose you over the crone, if they had to choose?”

Indirk frowned at that, narrowing her eyes at Nymir. “That is not a fair question.”

“Take it.” Nymir tossed the spyglass at Indirk and she caught it on instinct. “Get up at dawn and look for yourself. If you’re so sure it’s not the crone, then you tell Amo and see how it goes. Damn your deep cover. We’ve got a mission.” He turned his back on her.

Indirk snarled and lifted the spyglass like she was going to throw it at the back of Nymir’s head, but she kept it. She frowned toward the Lighthouse. Memories she’d put behind her surfaced, things she’d seen in files that she hadn’t been cleared to read, strange expenses directed toward the Lighthouse and the Embassy, information that had led her into a flaming dungeon and a rattling trauma. Putting the spyglass in one of her green coat’s big pockets, Indirk muttered, “No,” to herself as she walked back to work. “No, no, no.”

* * *

Early the next morning, before dawn, Indirk awoke. She’d taken to sleeping under the covers now, that little gesture seeming strangely significant. She slept with her clothes strewn across the floor, Mardo’s heat all around her, sometimes inside her, his fur stuck to her body. That night, she found herself suddenly alone in the bed, looking around, seeing nothing but Avie’s little black eyes shining at her in the dark. Frowning at the otherwise empty room, she said, “Avie, where’d Mardo go?”

The tiny creature, of course, did not answer.

For just an instant, concern washed through Indirk, and she began to wonder and fret. But she cut that off with a shake of her head. “Fuck it. He doesn’t owe me his secrets. And while we’re at it…” She got up, put on her pants and her green coat, took the spyglass, and went out the door.

Kneeling on the quay, Indirk turned the spyglass on the lighthouse and waited for dawn. The horizon turned pink. The haze in the air descended toward the surface of the bay, making the top of the lighthouse look like a tower rising from the clouds. Indirk watched the beacon descend into the lighthouse, just as she’d expected it to. Briefly, it lit up a room beyond the balconies Nymir had described, the strange flickering of mirrored flame in the fog. It moved oddly, now that she was watching closely, as though the great lamp were swinging about the room beyond, but that on its own didn’t mean anything.

Then it dimmed, almost to darkness, and emerged onto the balcony.

Indirk exhaled a rough, “Damn that bastard. He wasn’t lying.”

“I’ve observed it as well.”

Indirk would have flinched at the new voice if she didn’t recognize it right away, instead saying, “You haven’t followed up on it?”

The Writhewife sat down next to Indirk, dangling her legs over the side of the quay. She didn’t answer, just looking down and watching her bare feet, gray with the street’s dirt and mud, swaying in the open air.

Glancing at the silent Writhewife, Indirk looked through the glass again. The light had faded the way that music fades, magic losing power. The tall woman who stood on the balcony wasn’t glowing, but the magic had clung to her as she emerged, and now that it was gone Indirk could see her clearly. Indirk had known Sgathaich for years; not well, but casually. Sgathaich had always had a strangeness to her, but it had never seemed, to Indirk, to be an air of menace of subterfuge. Just oddness. Otherness. A preoccupation with things that a person like Indirk would not understand.

This woman, whoever she was, affected the exact same aura. She wore long, long red robes, wrapped closely by cloth bands that concealed her completely, even wrapping her oddly shaped head except for her large eyes. If Indirk had seen this woman in Pharaul, she would’ve known right away it was Sgathaich. It had to be. There was no one else who it could be.

Except it couldn’t be. Sgathaich was in Pharaul taking care of orphans, living strangely but humbly and honestly.

“Sjeze.” Indirk looked to the side. “Sjeze-ze-ezje-freth.”

“Don’t say my name,” the Writhewife responded impatiently, gaze still on her feet. “I have spoken in many voices, and Gray Watch has responded in many voices, and none have anything to say to me about the woman in the lighthouse.”

“Have any of those voices you’ve talked to been the Commodore’s?”

“Yes.”

“And you just accepted that? Just accepted that they don’t know?”

“I did not, but I also did not press.” The Writhewife named Sjeze flexed her toes, seeming curious about the movement. “I don’t need to start a fight about it. Time and patience are the greatest tools to resolve these things.”

“Sounds like your marriage has a communication problem.” Indirk pocketed the spyglass and stood up. “We need to work harder. We need to figure this out before Pharaul makes some move and does something that hurts all of us.”

“I’ll ask again,” the Writhewife said. “In more voices, of more voices, still with love but also, if you insist, with less patience.”

When Indirk got back to Mardo’s house, he was still absent. Exhausted, she threw her coat across the bed, dropped down face-first on top of it, and fell asleep.