It seems only days ago that Fragile the Sixbraid was living a quiet life in his people’s village, in the ancient and storied land named Goal. Without provocation, a group of soldiers from a hate-filled empire entered into it, killing his friends, his family, and all the keepers of their tradition. A Wandering Star, a lone warrior from a distant land, arrived just in time to save Fragile and the Sixbraids from complete annihilation. Finding pleasure in each other’s company, these two, a stronghoof, and an enigmatic presence named Bell now plumb the countryside for work and residence. Wander helps the people of Goal, and searches out a new home for her companion; in secret, she pursues her long-standing vendetta against a blind and destructive enemy.
A visit to the Goalish village of Withoutwind left Fragile comatose and dead before he experienced an apparently miraculous revival. As villainous forces close in, Wander and Fragile find themselves approaching a crossroads for both their relationship and their journey to the heart of the New Wild.
----------------------------------------
Wander stood over Fragile, gripping her short blade. He looked at her grip; her fingers did not squeeze, curl about, or choke the hilt of the weapon. They were still.
The curtained layers of Wander’s black shoulderskin swept in the wind, clinging to her neck by its plated scarlet thread, giving her an inky kind of plumage. Fragile hugged his coldover tight to his frame, its damp and dappled white blending with the snow and giving him chill. He was even smaller on the ground. His hair’s twin braids blew elsewhere, and the whole head had become frosted with ice.
Wander’s hesigns burned across her body with imperiled disease. The thick gloves around her hands stretched out, and she felt that if she did not keep calm, she would explode out of them. The long weight of the blaith on her back strained against her extended covering.
The Black Open of Goal was throwing off a storm. Clouds of snow tumbled over and flew past its pitchy soil with liberated delight. Grey mountains rolled into the horizon, blocking out the daylight stars and spanning all that stranger firmament, with roar and churning back North by heady and blustering tide, draping its quiet country with icy sheets and air that smacked and screamed. The sun’s golding coronal put a gaze on them. It glinted off Wander’s sword and shot a ray of warmth through Fragile’s eye. He looked up at Wander. The hair she had chosen to wear that morning was brown; it blew through the light and made her shine. The rim of her hat placed her eyes in shadow.
“If you don’t move, I’m going to cut you,” Wander said. “If you do move, I will not stop you. I will not pursue you.” She pointed out the way they had came. “We are still close to Changers. If you go back, you are like to encounter their kind again. You must avoid lots of them, or your pain might resume. They are marked hearts.”
Fragile didn’t move. His was shocked silence. His eyes were full of fear and he clung to fistfuls of snow.
Wander waited, gazing down at him as he bent his head and girded himself.
“If you stay, I will send you to your rulers,” she said. “Can you hear me?” She pressed the metal to his throat, letting it touch him. He inhaled. “I will send you. You are risen without breath. That is wrong. So this is a needed way. I am commanded to do it. Can you hear me?”
A long draft of wind whistled over the trees.
“I can hear you,” Fragile replied with a gulp. His voice hushed and wavered. He shut his eyes.
She waited a while longer, and he did not move, so she turned the edge on him, grazing his skin. Freezing sweat washed over Fragile’s body. His chest heaved and he shut his eyes.
Wander held her blaith to his neck, which his shivers jolted to and from the metal. A folding red liquid began to trickle out of it and create a stain.
She contemplated the blood’s color and consistency. After a lingering period, she drew back her weapon, put a finger to the stain, and inspected it.
She looked down at his face. His eyes were closed and his lip quivered and he continued to shiver. He was crying.
Her blaith stepped back into its sheath. Her legs started walking her back to shelter, so that her hands could retrieve the stronghoof. As they untied it from the rocks, she heard soft deformities shift about the snow behind her, skittering in her direction, and settling in to a creeping stumble that trailed the path she took as she lead it out into the light. The quiet feet followed her as she departed the exploded scope of the Black Open.
-
They sojourned further South, into vast and thinly grown rounds. Fragile hobbled along that way, trying to keep up. His body was seized and rattled by constant tremors. He and Wander stayed on opposite sides of the stronghoof.
Fragile would not draw close to Wander, whose heat could warm him, and she supposed he was now afraid. Once, shifted by an icy gale, he was jostled closer to her side than he had been, and his cheeks flushed. He retreated from it.
The day had already drawn up to its shady hours and they quit their path. The sky dimmed and a cavernous galaxy crest up and down the night’s dark, panoptic domenant, bearing down on everywhere in all directions with unmooring sprawl and memories of light.
They let the stronghoof rest in a warm alcove on high ground, bristling with snow-cradled thicktrees. The ice encrusting the wood and bush had begun to sweat. A gust of wind sailed past, tinged by fire, and Wander was alerted to the thaw it drew from, availed of the East and its more temperate currents.
“May I fill your waterskin?” asked Fragile.
She looked down to her hip and shook it. It sloshed. She untied it and handed it to him.
He kneaded the skin and shivered. “Is your over wanting?” asked Wander.
He hesitated. “I think it’s wet.”
She displaced the shoulderskin and stepped toward him, holding it with two hands and bringing it around his back. He averted his gaze and yanked in his shoulders as she wrapped him in it. He pulled it close, and shivered in relish of the warmth that Wander’s heat had imbued it with.
She stepped away and turned back toward the stronghoof. “Would you let me work your metal?” Fragile piped.
She looked back at him. “Fill the skin first,” she said. He cringed, bent his head and nodded.
Fragile went down to a dark, frozen pond they had settled by, of indeterminate size. He took out the small, rolling blade of his littlecane out from his hoofleather bag and hacked a hole in the ice. He dropped the skin’s tip inside, siphoning a drip of water. The light of the stars skittered apart on the silver surface, coloring it with winking freckles that shone and glowed. In the distance a high-pitched clicking emerged from the windripped reeds, weeds and sunsetters. It was followed by a song whose sound pitched and swayed and reminded Fragile of a howl’s call.
While he did it, Wander loaded an armful of stones into her fibrous bag and went through shaded glens and tightly packed bushes, her eyes bent up in search of flying creatures. She threw three times, and carried three wings back to camp. She cleaned them and cooked them over the fire, plucking out their feathers and pearlescent plumes and wrapping them up in a padded satchel on the stronghoof. After she was finished, she removed a blanket she had cut from the skin of a tusk, and placed it within reach of Fragile’s sleeping spot while he tended to her weapons. When he saw her do it, he visited his duties with a greater tenderness.
All was finished. Once the dry-heaving produced by their scent had subsided, Fragile sat alone by the fire spreading water onto the stains that he had given in to his leggings. He glanced up at Wander.
The warrior stood on the edges of their woodland keep, looking out across the pond, chewing her pipe unlit between her teeth, and wiping her knife’s dry metal with the sigil-stitched cloth she kept in her vest. Its fabric was so dirty and covered with entrails that it soiled the blade, but she took no notice. Fragile slid on his clothes and approached her.
He pushed together his fingers. “May… may I have something from you?”
She chewed on her pipe and did not move. “Maybe.”
Fragile rubbed his fingers. “Have I- have I done some wrong work? While my eyes were shut? Is that the cause for your frowning?”
“I’m not frowning.”
He looked away and her head tilted. “What can you remember?” she asked.
He took another step closer and stood beside her. “I remember the shell,” he said. “I remember that I was frightened. But I could see nothing. I could feel nothing. Otherwise, it is silent.”
“Tell me about your arm.”
His eyes went wide and the blood ran from his face. “My arm?”
She said nothing. He turned up the sleeve on the skin below his left hand, where a long red canal had been carved out in the flesh. “I… I drank my heartswater.”
“Why?”
Fragile’s brow creased. “The problem was within eating,” he said. “I hoped it might- let me know it. I hoped that might help.”
“It did. But you did not breath.”
“Do you want me to return to the Changers?” he asked. He hugged his chest.
Wander looked out into the darkness of the ice and brush, watching wings flap between the stars through the veining, rayless pores provided by the gappy treeline. Fragile could only discern what was flying by its bellowing song, which they beat out across the thicks and snowdrifts. He had heard it before. “You could do it, if you wished,” she said. “The kind that hurt them may be passed out of you, or it may finish its work if you should arrive. I don’t know.”
He said nothing. A little whispering came in from the dark over the water. Fragile could not tell if it was a voice, or a ripple of the wind.
“We have come very far,” he said. “We are in a different place. Aren’t we?”
Wander replaced her cloth in her vest and her weapon in its sheath, and removed a bottle of residue from her belt. She uncorked it at the tip of her pipe, and the glowing white fluid jumped to the Hesign on its face, sending up a glow and orange sparks.
“Yes,” she said. She let out a trail of smoke. “We are.”
-
The morning came. Wander silently thumbed the handle of her short blade as gleaming mists wandered in and overran their possessions. She watched the scars on Fragile’s neck and wrist, and then watched him stretch and rise and scrub clean her cooking pot with placid enthuse. He applied a shining oil to her breastplate with a smile on his face that shook and teeth that grit when her eyes left him after some time. His hands would not stop shaking, until he nuzzled and kissed and caressed the stronghoof, and fed it as she smoked her pipe. She watched him shiver and expel clouds of drifting vapor that joined the mist when he covered up the fire and wrapped himself back up in his coldover. She took the lead of the stronghoof and watched him scramble up alongside with vigor and excitement. Every movement of his that was new and breathing entered her eye.
She turned away and they departed the Changers’ land.
They set out to intercept a road that worked toward the blotch on Wander’s guide. They found it harder and dug deeper than those in the more distant parts of the territory; in its survey, they came across trails tug towards streams and staked-out refuse pits, filled with urine and leavings.
There were omens too. No such facilities had been maintained, and the sigils of their construction were very old. They found a prolong white monolith dug into the ground that spoke of issuers and work-drivers whose contributions had been made a hundred years past, far beyond those who presently endured the firms of Larunkat. On their way over the final streams and frost meadows of East Goal, they moved through a muddy marsh where the ground clicked and cracked as they walked over it and the warming ice crystals were forced to give way.
A white fog fell over them, and it was only by keeping close to Wander’s side that Fragile did not lose her or the stronghoof in the field’s damp occlusions.
Suddenly, Wander came to a halt and looked to the distance. Fragile kept moving after Wander stopped. He was jerked back by her glove. “Wait,” she said.
He looked to the side, and saw that her eyes were wide.
“What is it?” he asked.
He looked forward, seeking to align his gaze with hers. He spotted it through the fog, which was still thickening and smelled of rain and sweet carrion.
“I think…” Fragile furrowed his brow, and then raised it. He began to walk forward again, but Wander’s grip held firm.
“Why would you go to him?” she asked.
“It’s a woman.”
They looked back at the fog.
“She is looking at us,” he said. “Why does she do it?”
“I’m not sure.” Wander narrowed her gaze.
It continued to look. The more it did, the warmer the air became. The sheets of mist that contained the two of them filled up their spot and bound their breath together in a hugging humid fire. The thicktrees’ acrid foliage and syrups joined their company and filled up their lungs, bringing to mind soil and rain and smoke in winter.
“We should find a way around,” Wander said. She pulled on Fragile gently.
He took one last look and exhaled. “Okay.”
She tugged on the stronghoof’s lead. As they departed, she glanced backward, watching the figure and its gaze until both had melted back beyond the territory.
-
Wander and Fragile followed the road until they began to see houses rise in the distance. They passed by fields that laborers would work when the warmth came, growing golden shoots of laq and the snaking kinsbreath crop in the moist, squirming dirt of the Black Open. In the cold the ground was hard and had cut apart the weeds, deserting their foreign expanse. The big houses which they served stood tall, shaped like stars, and they were accompanied by creaking wooden watchtowers that scoured the horizon. They gave place for shooters, waiting patiently in fur- and crop-woven vests.
More buildings stood past the growing complex. Most of the people past its limits, where the roads became shorter and along which personal hovels and stalls and stilted fabric shades had blossomed, were Laruns and Freemen. They sold their wares for parts, drove cattle, sharpened metal tools and fixtures, and exchanged quiet talk over grain and cups of milksit. Wander noted that she had not seen so many since she had departed Longfur.
The postings in this Larun place, filled by sellers of milk and cakes and brews, as well as workers who sewed and hit metal and cured skin were pointed in their forefathers’ way, all packed by sibling towers which jut about in reinforcing parapets that fought toward a celestial firm; to their cousins in the West, these would be low and shabby. Timber had fashioned them, and only the least quarried stone had been embraced round their frame and foundations to let them remain steady upon the sky. Wander supposed, from the rotted cuts, crackling wounds and gaps which she had assessed, that they had been assembled quickly, with speed and intent in mind.
Some Goals inhabited the mass as well. Most worked harder positions as servants or porters, but they often worked alongside Freemen, and they were not spat at even by the more partsfull Laruns. These, draped in extract scents and dyes sought out for their price and engrossment, would look past them, putting nothing of their sight inside. The Goals were not as wretched as those Fragile and Wander had observed in Eighty, and some of these were dressed in smooth buttoned coverings and itching gray waistties rather than rags or bloodstained overs. He could not observe a larger amount of shaking against the Goals or their type. One they passed by walking next to a tall and liq-robed Larun dropped a jar of oil and shattered it.
“Oh, feurkun,” his companion moaned.
There were nivmen present. Many of them looked bedraggled and worn, and more than one was missing limbs. The pole’s pallor was found in full view as they arrived at a long wooden building.
They stopped the stronghoof outside. The house of their interest was squat, pale, and some parts of it were charred. It was sandwiched between seller stalls and dour sleepries where nivmen milled. The building was dark grey covered with the white of snow and brewing smoke fell out from its viewlets and a number of round gaps in its webbed rooftop. In this place it was small, but it outsized most other works Fragile had seen outside those of Eighty. His eyes were drawn shut and his nose snatched tight by the smell of a familiar kind of meat, crisping somewhere nearby. “Is this a salin?” Fragile asked. “Like at the Couth? The Couth by the smiling place?”
Wander deposited the stronghoof with a waiting Freeman, gave him some coins and Sprak words and walked inside. The Freeman lead off the moaning animal as Fragile followed her.
-
They entered the Salon. The stench of sweat hit them immediately. The place was populated with a few road people, sitting on stools and drinking from bowls that sloshed with milky fermentation. These were mostly men, but there were a few women. The men were clad in unpolished metal armor and grey drapes, spun from liq and distant alloys like only could be produced in the Western country. The women dressed in breeches and thick brown coats, their hair and hands adorned with plucked feathers that had been washed, dipped in oil, and painted by workers. The whole place was populated by their kind.
A few women had took men up, and took to dancing in the middle of the room, twirling about on a central platform dressed with crushed up yellow dust that hitched itself to their boots, whirling words and patterns in its absence. The Salon’s corners were dark and hidden from the light of the burning logs that lit up its spots closer to the door; people sat there too, kept in chairs and tables of shaved coolwood, inhaling smoke from red rods whose bowls were flush with a flaky, acrid fabric.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Fragile gaped at the sights he saw peculiar, and Wander took note of the glances their entry earned, and gazes paid their way. Meetings were accepted in this Larun place, and without the sexless temper of the Freemen, she and he were seen. Hunger bled and bounced past the pores of their company, and all eyes drift about their bodies, touching what one could find a license for.
She spied a man pouring drinks stood at a chest of blown glass bottles, sorting them. She laid a hand on Fragile’s shoulder.
“I’m going to the salonier,” Wander said. “I’ll find you when I’m done. I don’t think we should talk to anyone.”
Fragile nodded.
The salonier Wander observed was another man, taller and younger than their previous host in the Couth. His stiff, angled features told he was a Larun, dressed up from chest to knee in a dangling white sweep, secured at the waist with a strip of skin. A cloak of liq, painted blue, wrapped around his shoulders. His hair was clipped short, and his nose had a slight mould around it to pronounce the edges. A flower nestled in to the space between his head and ear. He only had eyes for his work; he weaved together a shawl like the ones draping up his walls, showing clouds and large water-plains and big-eyed animals. His gaze set itself in weary lines that fixed tenderly on his needles and cloth. His hair pricked up when Wander approached; he paid it little mind. “A new friend,” he muttered. “Good day on the road?” He looked up at Wander, dressed in her blades and scars and signs, and the blood drained from his face.
“A good day, Firstpoint,” Wander said.
“A Seenblade?” he gasped. He threw down his tools and stood up before her. “What will you take, Goodpoint?”
“I will take talk. And grain.”
He gulped and nodded.
The Salonier removed a gourdish shell filled with coins from behind one of his weavings that gleamed in the fireslight, and set out cups. His haggard mood subsided as she dropped parts into it.
He asked, “Are you new to the plant?”
“We are.”
He poured. “What have you found in it?”
“Cold,” she said, “and dark.”
He poured a cup for himself. “The tippers have shaded it so.”
Her head turned. “Tippers?”
“Yes,” he said. “The Dzhrymin, and his face eating friends. Haven’t you heard?”
She looked at him.
“He is a knot-wrapped fighter. Some other men follow him.” The salonier shivered. “They have come down from the hills twice in past sixty days. Each time, they have burned fields, and cut off the heads of a hundred men with papers. There has been no end to that noise.”
“The nivmen,” she said. He nodded.
“They must send some more,” he said. “The firm in Herdetopp, or another. They will come for us all, otherwise.”
“I had not heard,” she said. “And that was not what I spoke to.”
He looked up at her from his scrubbing, his brow raised.
She looked out the shutters into the street, where hoofs and wagons trenched the snow and mud. People of different kind – Goals, Laruns, Rootcliffs, and a man of stone waded by, carrying bags of spilling seed and sellwood and dragging along horned cattle. “This plant is known,” Wander said. “Known in its unknown. I think I was in one like it, once. But I no longer can make sense of its kind. It can only be a To-Dark place.”
“Its kind exposes kind,” the salonier said. He pushed the cup towards her. ‘The massing turns out sights.”
Now she raised an eyebrow at him. “Really?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “That is its aim. To be unseen, in a place where others are not. It is like the springs that way. Or that is what I measure.”
“You’ve measured this?”
He shrugged. “It is what we were made to do,” he chortled. He drank. “That is what I have found it does.”
She drank, and their gazes crossed over as they looked at the road.
Wander laid out her last few coins on the table. “I want a room,” she said, “and something else.”
The Salonier raised an eyebrow.
“The man in the corner,” she said. She closed her eyes. “...touching your windwheel. Do you see him?”
A clacking sounded as the windwheel spun.
“I can see him.”
“I want you to take him for at least two hundred days,” Wander said. “Work him, if he’s willing. He has no place else to stay. And I can’t keep him.”
“You make him sound like a child.”
“He’s not. But I can’t keep him.”
The Salonier nodded slowly. He looked down at her purse and parsed the parts with a finger. Air hissed past his teeth. “This is… it’s enough for a night. Five, maybe.”
“How much do you need?”
He looked at her swords and her frame and the words shining out from beneath her vest.
“I’m not a tipper,” she said. “I will not hit it from you.”
His brow eased. “Two hundred parts,” he said. “I’m sorry. You need me to take on a worker. I can do it, but I grow hungry.”
She picked up her coins and hitched the purse back on to her belt.
“If you get the parts, you can bring him back here,” the Salonier said. “I will take care of it. And you can grab a place this night. There’s room above us with covered openings. We do not stay there. Not until the warmth, when the dark will not cool it.”
“And what is its price?”
“The price I have taken,” he said. “The words of a foreigner are a part of their own.”
-
So they remained at the salon that night.
The sun went down. The fibrous buds of Partplant were lit, and their shine squeezed every iris tight and made its own warmth as it embraced them. The koropole’s paths and organs glistened in the darkness. Goalish, Larun and Freeman guards, stuffed toward same by the gray livery of the Otisrat, patrolled its borders in groups and aside gates and from the perch of towers, all their spots lantern-marked and blossomed in the darkness, throwing out shadows which stood higher than they.
Wander and Fragile sat a table in the Salon’s public room, which only became brighter and more crowded as the evening turned, swelling with the dust-soaked light and heat of the whole koropole. Fragile nibbled on a bowl of boilt river guts, and Wander nursed a pitcher of grain. She measured her drinks out into a cup, and her eyes grew dark as she sipped. Fragile’s grew wide.
“What?”
Fragile perked up. He realized that his gaze was fixed on Wander’s hands. He craned his head toward her eyes. “Are we close?” he asked. “To where you must go? This place seems like it.”
“This is not Herdetopp,” she said. “And it is to Herdetopp I must go.”
“Will you stay there?” He squeezed and released one of the table’s legs. “I mean, will you go away?”
Wander rolled around her drink and sipped it. “My work is until the cold. Next cold. Then I will leave.”
“Where will you go?”
“Where I am commanded,” she said. “It is my Family’s choice. Not mine.”
They were silent. Fragile felt a pressure building in his gut.
“Star,” he said, “I will leave here tonight.”
She looked at him curiously. Her head tilted.
“I-” he sputtered. “I will go out. I will find somewhere here to be. We’ve found a good place, now.”
She studied him. “You are afraid, because I cut you.”
His face turned red. “N-no!”
“Then why would you do this?”
He looked away. “I just – we have found a place. Wasn’t that why you helped me? I need not burden you any longer.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. She poured herself a new cup from the jug. “The room is paid for. You wouldn’t have anywhere to stay.”
“I know,” he said. “But I could find somewhere. It’s very warm out. And there is food everywhere. It’s a very good place. You have… it’s a very good place.”
“There are bites in the hills. It isn’t safe.”
“There are many everywhere, aren’t there?” he pleaded. “And there are walls here. So many walls.”
She drank dry her cup and turned to him. He could not read her expression.
“You can go if you want,” she said. She placed down her cup, whose rim displayed light indentation.
She took out her pipe and got up, ascending the stairs to the rooms. Fragile was left alone.
Some time after Wander had departed, a crowd of squat nivmen burst through the Salon’s carved threshhold, firm with meat and mud and laughter. Many of their voices lilted and cracked as they fetched an array of drinks from the Salon’s stores, undeterred by the Salonier or the road people. Fragile looked past their brysts then, and he realized that the whole association was younger than him.
The last of the boys poured in. They were followed by a man, whose height was great enough that he had to crouch to fit through the passage. He wore a bryst too, a smile, and hair that flowed, cascading through three-pointed webs that spun and twisted. A golden necklace was tied close to his skin, weighed down by a dull black lump adorned by jewels. The remains of scratches and a gash faded beneath his eye.
A high-pitched, windy note blew throughout the Salon. Fragile looked around and saw a swaddled guest sitting in darkness, blowing into a tube filled with holes. His song was blown softly, like a whisper meted out in chords. It inclined Fragile to a smile and to memories of youth. The figure’s silhouette shivered and his song slowed. Fragile stepped over to the player.
When he came close enough to see their features, he grew wary. The player was swept from scalp to sole in a thick maroon robe. Much of its flourish was scratched and torn. Their shape shook violently, and this did not stop for a moment. Their music shook with them.
The player’s noted feature was the mask they wore, the appearance of which ran up the hair on Fragile’s neck. Lines ran up and down the face of it, and the fireslight washing over all found no purchase there, so flickering black edges were rent instead at the dives in its skin. It was roughly textured dark red wood. The brows carved above its eyes were relaxed, and the whole face was without clear feeling.
A piece of the covering, where the stranger’s mouth would been concealed, had been snapped off, revealing their skin as awash in many unusual colors - shifting in texture from moment to moment, blossoming in reds and pinks and purple spots that compressed and conjoined as easily as they breathed. Their lips adjoined to a piped device and two of their fingers pressed on its stem, producing a high, rueful note. Fragile’s ears pricked up at the odd quality of the noise.
The figure beckoned him with two fingers. They gestured their fingers over Fragile’s shoulder and grunted in Sprak.
Fragile grasped his instrument, unlooped its strap from his shoulder and brought it forward where they could see. They extended their hand, which shook so violently that Fragile thought it might come apart, to an adjacent seat.
He sat down and plucked at the three-string. The Salon shivered as their trilling fell out from the darkness. He turned to the stranger, who nodded, and blew.
The Salon’s inhabitants pricked up their ears at the noise. Fragile and the stranger’s melody was stumbling and sometimes dissonant, but it was earnestly devised, as the sound of each rotated around the other and sought a way in to the harmonies they desired.
One of those sitting, a knife-wrapped catcher rapt by the tune, began to sing along.
The stranger let out a hoarse cry. As soon as the first syllable of Sprak left the patron’s lips, the stranger sprang up from their chair, grabbed the nearest blunt object – a stool – and hurled it at the interloper’s head. It went past him, into the wall, where it disintegrated. Fragile’s hands clenched the three-string and he stumbled away in fear, knocking over his seat.
The interloper fell back into his chair, and the stranger sat down. Without further pronouncement, their posture sank, a little more strained and off-kilter. They righted Fragile’s stool and waved their hands at it, and brought the pipe back to their lips.
The melody grew twisted, simmering between speeds that Fragile struggled to complement. He sweat, and his brow squeezed itself together. His hands spun over the three-string, drumming out air that swept and sang and delivered good tidings. It jousted around the fluttering condemnations of the stranger, whose mask tilted in Fragile’s direction. They began to shift their tune.
Fragile’s cheeks grew heated as he gripped the wood and cut his hands on the wiry threads that they employed. When the stranger picked up his melody, he knew it in the back of his mind, but his expression could not be changed. Their tunes wrapped and threw themselves together, snapping out peaks in turn that spun the heads of those nearby. The stranger’s shaking had nearly abated, and the air near Fragile was freezing, taking in the fire that his expenditure had produced.
The orchestra keyed together, and fell away from them both. The salon was quiet. The roadpeople, the salonier, and the nivmen gazed at them.
Fragile released his three-string and looked over at the stranger, whose gaze was shifting away. As soon as it did, their shivering crept back in. Fragile looked down at his fingers, which also shivered, and bore the throbbing red notes he had earned by his ministry.
“Quiet Feet.”
Fragile flinched and looked up, where Wander and the world had come back into being. The stranger slipped their device back into their robe and brought out their mouthpiece, snapping it into place.
A thumping chest squared up behind Wander herself, and she turned. The tall Larun stood there, meeting her just below eye-level. He still wore his smile, which grew wider as their sight began to grapple. He was accompanied by a pair of nivmen, and the others bashed and threw the remaining roadpeople from the public room, leaving them alone.
-
“First,” the Larun said, “may we see your sign?”
Wander sat in silence, her hat obscuring her eyes. Fragile sat at her side; Wander’s slouch put him only a few inches below her.
The young nivmen hung around the empty salon, drinking and keeping their sideeyes on their table, where Fragile and Wander had been invited to oppose themselves. The masked player’s cane rapped and rattled next to the Larun, who folded his hands on the flattop. They were smooth.
“I have inspect your words, friend Seenblade,” he continued. His head tilted and his long, thick hair moved more loosely than it should’ve. Wander could smell rot beneath his perfume. “But to see a sign is something done. Something for a friend – for us to learn who the other is.”
Wander took her cloth out from a vest pocket and placed it on the table. He picked it up with two fingers and his nose inhaled its rancid scent. He squinted at it.
“Haaa,” he exclaimed. “You are Firstpoint Coster’s.” He tried to show it to the player, but they would not lift their gaze from Wander’s.
“That explains some things,” the Larun said. “That shows us some things.”
She said nothing.
“Have you spent many days in Shamarkat?” he asked.
“I was produced there.”
“A destroyed country.” He held his chest. “Hegrantar-Hegrantar-Hegrantar, I am struck still that our own kontor emerged from it.” He pushed her sign back over, leaving a trail of dirt, ash, blood and sweat. “Were you affected?”
“By his destruction?”
She watched him knit a frown over his smile. “Yes. That towering work.”
“He met a good end,” Wander replied. “The firm will appreciate him.”
He twisted his necklace. “It could not do otherwise... what is it brings you so far past his face, friend Seenblade?”
“I am ordered to Herdetopp,” she said. “The new Coster has work that way. I will speak with the kontor of those squares.”
“A precious kind.” The Larun scratched at the table. “That is a command of our own.”
Wander tilted her hat upward.
“I will speak.” He cleared his throat. “We have heard of your work, and your name, friend Hill-Measure. You have made men who think these weighty. They’ve produced a sign of some size, in the Couth you passed. They have spoken for you, in more ways than one.”
The Salonier brought cups of milksit to their table and Wander took her drink. “Who has heard of me?” she asked.
The Larun drained his cup with two hands and set it down. He placed five fingers around his heart. “What I am,” he said, “is Joyborn. Partless Joyborn. Do you know Lowcliff?”
“I have friends there.”
“They are mine,” he said. “Lowcliff is mine. Its call is the call of me.”
He turned his head to the nivmen scattered around the Salon. “These ones are my Seeds,” he said. “I have given much to them since they were small. I have produced them. They are friends of mine, when they sit beneath me.”
He gripped the shoulder of the shaking player. “I am enjoyed too, to sit beneath this man. Perhaps you know his call.”
She looked at him. The sight of the player made her nauseous, but she did not.
Joyborn’s smiled prepared to widen as he searched for some straining confusion in her eyes. It shrunk into a pout when, despite her silence, he found none. “The Goallandish do have a call for you, don’t they kontor? Do you wish to port it?”
The player raised his head. Out from his mask he looked at the two of them, watching Wander’s disaffected gaze and Fragile’s avoidant one.
His voice emerged. “C-Cane,” he said. His voice was a gravelled, bubbling well of spit and choking. “T-they c-call me C-Cane.”
He gulped. “B-but I - am-m De.”
Wander did not know what to think. She turned inward.
Tell me, Wander told the Bell, looking at Partless Joyborn.
He does not know you, the Bell said. But he would hurt you anyway.
Why?
To prove he can.
The mask of “De” was illegible. And him?
Him I cannot see.
Wander paused. You can’t.
No. Be careful, joyous one.
Wander couldn’t throw off a pressure that locked up her chest as she looked at him. Her fist clenched beneath the table. Fragile glanced down at it.
Joyborn addressed Wander. “We are looking for someone. The tipper who follows and now hurts this breathy mass. From your path, we expect you have been following him, and we do not know why. Would you hand out those parts to us?”
Wander raised her eyebrow. “Tell me what they give to you.”
Joyborn stroked his chin. “The Dzhrymin.”
Wander looked into his eyes. She sat up.
“I am inclined, too, to pursue that one,” she said. “The Dzhrymin has pleased the Goals. He has destroyed many of a more knowing kind.”
Joyborn smiled. “Then our purposes are aligned,” he said. “I suppose that is your use for this feurkun. My friend has found it on him. The tipper should be a Shamar too, or it would not be there so much. Perhaps you two are of one firm.”
Wander did not explore the notion. She switched her eyes to Quiet Feet, who quivered. “It has seen the tipper’s face,” Wander said. “It has given the face to me. I collected it on the first day of our meet.” She looked back at Joyborn. “When the path was ended, it will give it one more time.”
“Is that right?” Joyborn brushed the hair from his face. “Just how is it you got their little one, Seen?”
“An unlearned thing tied him out, and made up to break him.” Wander drank. “You ventured To-Silaif?”
Joyborn nodded.
“You have seen his works. This one tells me secrets. I am happy to give it service, and receive them.”
Joyborn itched his hands, which were clean and displayed no marks. His cheeks burned and his hair unsettled. “Then there is one more point we should speak about.”
Wander said nothing.
“The firm has offered parts for this tipper,” Joyborn said. “Its order is posted on tables and firmhouses here and in other points. Whoever retrieved a quarter of that bunch would be well-equipped, and would not want for any shine or delight in the meanwhile. Another hand will catch this tipper quicker, and more surely, and if you come with us, your feurkun can do his pointing; then, we could hand it out among ourselves.”
Wander’s gaze fixed on the two men. Joyborn grinned and she could not make out De’s eyes behind his mask. He continued to shiver and shake, and his head tilted downwards, as though he were sleeping or lost in thought. Her mind turned it over.
“The feurkun should stay,” she said. Joyborn’s eyes lit up. “It can be placed here. If its breath is taken, there will be none who can see the man.”
“If it is taken, Seen?” Joyborn laughed. “From we three Blades, and this gathering of He? He follows.”
Wander glowered at him. Her hand twitched toward her short blade.
“He follows!” Fragile squeaked in Sprak.
Joyborn smiled.
“He follows,” Fragile repeated. “He… he pass? He smile. He follows.”
She turned to look at him. His gaze was wretched and would not meet hers.
She looked back at Joyborn and stood up. “He follows.”