13 - SCREAMS

It’s difficult to describe the chaos that followed.

The screaming came so suddenly, so loudly, and all at once, so that even I, who had orchestrated it, who was expecting it, found myself temporarily shocked and rooted in place.

People started running. When the teeming throng of men and women, all trying to get away, to move in the opposite direction, inevitably bottlenecked and choked, trapped by its own frantic and teeming mass, individuals resorted to shoving each other, even to dragging others down, and I saw more than one person lost beneath the boots of others. Later that day, I would find myself wondering how many had been injured—or perhaps even killed—by the panic I had caused.

But in the moment, there was no time to worry about such a thing.

I went in the opposite direction of the crowd, toward the dripping red skeleton that stood where, mere moments before, had been a woman. That woman was no more—her skin and organs lay in a shredded mess in the middle of the street, blood pooling. Many organs, however, remained trapped by the skeleton—I could, for instance, see the woman’s brain still contained within her skull, and I was left wondering how many moments of consciousness she’d been allowed—or cursed with—after I’d wrought my magic. Perhaps she was still conscious, in a limited and awful way.

The skeleton took several unsteady steps forward, intestines finally freeing themselves from the now entirely exposed abdominal cavity and slapping wetly against the ground.

It was not—even for me, accustomed to necromancy and thus the macabre—a particularly

pleasant sight.

I swallowed bile and I ran.

I ran until I could no longer run.

Until I realized that I’d gotten away, that I was elsewhere, in another alley, this time alone, in another district of the city, where no one was screaming, where there were no Terarch Guard squads rushing about. I thought I could still hear commotion from far away, but perhaps that was simply the wailing of ghosts.

I placed my back against a dirty brick wall and slid down to the ground. I sat there in the shadows for a long moment, face buried in my hands, sucking in one deep lungful of air after another, until enough time had passed and something resembling composure had returned. I staggered back to my feet. My hands were trembling. I’d never felt so tired in my life. I was drained. Leaden. Every step took a supreme act of will. Slowly, painfully, I dragged myself back to the inn.

Justinia was waiting for me outside, a few feet from the door, arms crossed, her eyes narrowed.

Her gaze traveled up and down my body. She said, “What did you do?”

By that point, I’d calmed down enough that when I spoke, my voice sounded relatively normal—although I didn’t feel normal. Far from it.

“How do you know I did anything?”

“Firstly, you’ve been gone for hours. Secondly, there’s blood on both of your sleeves and a little on your cheek. Also, you look pale. Disheveled. You can barely walk in a straight line. My deduction: you fucked up, nearly got yourself killed.” Her eyes narrowed further, became little more than slits. “Tell me how close I am.”

I took a deep breath. “Maybe…we should go inside first?”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

In the room we’d rented, I sat on the edge of the bed and explained to Justinia what had happened. When it came to retelling exactly what I’d done to the captain of the Guard, I found myself unable or simply unwilling to use any real detail, deciding to simply say that I used my magic to make a distraction. I was unsure how she might view what I’d done—how it might change things.

Justinia listened in silence. She stood a few feet away, completely still, as though, at some point during the account, she’d turned into a statue.

When I was finished, she began to pace the length of the room.

“Didn’t meant for any of it to happen,” I was saying, “I just wanted to help that old man—”

Justinia held up a hand. I fell silent, and remained that way until she decided to speak.

“You’re a fool,” she said sharply. “I tell you not to draw any attention and…well. I don’t need to say much more about that. You know.” She turned to face me. “You realize, I hope, that we are both now in great danger. The Order of the Seeking Hand will have already heard of what happened, and now they’ll be searching for someone matching your description.”

“I didn’t even do anything wrong,” I said, more whiny than I intended—it was hard in the moment not to feel a little sorry for myself. The day had started well. I’d been excited to explore the city with what money I’d been given—and then everything had gone to shit.

All in all, it was not a particularly good start to my time away from the Withered Isles.

“Don’t be such a child,” Justinia said, and as soon as those words emerged from her mouth, heat rose to my cheeks and an amount of anger flooded my body that resulted in the purification of my mental state—I was, in a way, indeed acting like a child. What had happened had happened.

Now it was time to deal with the consequences.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” she said. “Probably we need to get you out of the city as soon as possible—but not too soon, because more than anywhere else, they’ll be keeping a close eye on every possible way in and out of this place.”

“And about the Thorns…were you successful?”

Justinia shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She looked far more tired than she had earlier that morning, deep lines etched into her face, shadows collecting beneath her eyes. I felt grateful, then, to have her by my side—to not have to do this alone.

“I was,” she said, more than a little grudgingly. “They want to meet you, of course. No chance they’d ever pass you up. They’re bound to see you as their big chance. Assuming they don’t realize that what happened today was because of you—if they get the sense that the Order has a lock on you, that they’re hunting you, not even the Thorns will want to be anywhere near you. Too risky. But,” she worked her jaw, shrugged, then met my eye. “Like I said. As it stands, they want to see you, and as soon as possible.”

“When you say they…who are these people, exactly? Who did you speak to?”

“There’s a man named Camillan,” Justinia said neutrally. “He’s the closest thing they got to an actual leader right now. In Tymora, anyway.”

“You mean they operate elsewhere?”

“All across the continent, in one way or another. But to be clear, they operate as splinter cells—each group is separate from the next. Unconnected limbs of a greater organism or something; that’s what they like to say. Here, it’s Camillan who runs things, and it’s him who wants to talk to you.”

I nodded slowly. There, at least, was good news to soothe the pains of the day. If the Thorns were established enough that they had power and influence all throughout the Autarchy, and if one of their leaders wanted to work with me…well, it was more progress than I could’ve ever hoped to make in such a span of time. There was admittedly no way of telling just where this might all bring me, but without any other guidance, it seemed like the best way forward.

Assuming, of course, that the Order weren’t hunting me.

And that I didn’t wake up to a lochagos slitting my throat in the middle of the night—a prospect that I couldn’t get out of my head.

“I want to speak to him,” I said, “and as soon as possible. How do we make it happen?”

Justinia grimaced. “I knew you’d want to, and I knew you’d be an impatient little shit about it. That’s why I already set it up.”

At that, I brightened. She was right: I was impatient. “When?”

She grimaced again. Seemed like I’d aged her a year in the space of a week.

“Tonight,” she said.