ONE:
There quite a few advantages to being self-employed. Not the least of which being Eko was perfectly allowed to call their client an idiot without worrying about getting a lecture from her higher-ups on the importance of decorum.
Considering who her client was, Eko wouldn’t – she liked breathing. But still, the freedom of knowing that she could was comforting. The mage scowled down at the cracked stone floor, surveying the scorch marks where her once pristine spell array used to be. “Explain to me how you managed to burn out a ward I drew for you not twelve hours ago?”
Dheka Kere lounged against the cache door, entirely unbothered by Eko’s irritation. Kerosene lamplight flickered about the space, illuminating rows and stacks of crates and pallets piled high enough to scrape the stone ceiling. Eko never asked what was inside, she knew better. Not that Dheka would tell her anyway. Osso’s most premier smuggler had built her reputation on secrecy – and violence. If there was a list of the bloodiest hands in the city, Eko would put Dheka at the top.
Dheka smiled, showing off both rows of her needle-like teeth, glittering white against her velvety brown skin. She plucked at one of her thousand delicate braids and sighed, “I caught a few kids trying to break in last night. I was in a merciful mood and decided to teach them a lesson rather than kill them outright.”
Eko swiped her finger through the smears of burnt blood and hair. As an alternative to death, getting bounced repeatedly into a doorway that spat fire every time you touched it could be counted as mercy. Technically. “How gracious of you.”
“I thought so too,” Dheka agreed brightly. She batted her lashes. “Could you make me another just like it? I have some ideas to try for the next time.”
“It’s supposed to be a deterrent,” Eko grumbled, swiping her fingers through the cold ashes. “Not a toy for you to torture punk thieves with. What did you do with them, anyway?”
“I had some people drop them on the door of the nearest infirmary.” Dheka’s bootheels clicked sharply against the floor as she came to peer over Eko’s shoulder. The smuggler slanted her cold green eyes Eko’s way. “I’m not a monster, you know.”
Rolling her eyes, Eko gave a non-committal grumble. In terms of legality, there was a razor thin line between supplying property defense and actively creating public safety hazards. As a matter of course, Eko liked to keep her activities to only slightly illegal. The Accords - laws that governed mages had very little grey area. Her first academy year, her instructors hammered the major tenants like religious gospel.
One: Mages are not to use their skills to harm civilian populations.
Two: Any and all work must not violate the Grand Balance.
Three: Mages must abide the laws of the land on which they currently reside.
Once she was no longer a student, Eko found that the upper ranks of mages viewed the Accords as malleable guidelines rather than doctrine. Tower mages kept their sins between them. But there was no Guild tower to protect her now. Eko was thoroughly on her own, and that meant she had to be careful. The last thing she needed was a bunch of Magehounds in her business.
Their order founded after the last Cataclysim, Magehounds were judge, jury, and executioner. They were beholden only to themselves. The judgments pronounced by Magehounds were too heavy for even nations to dispute. Having run afoul of them once already, Eko did not intend to risk a repeat performance.
Part of that was making sure her clients used her work responsibly. Eko took out her charcoal stick and got started on a new array. Boundary wards were simple things. Usually. Unfortunately, working magic in Osso City was anything but simple.
Eko’s home was convinently nestled at the very center of the Tolko mountain range. Tolko, being known for two things: Monsters out of a nightmare that prowled the timber, and a permeating haze of wild magic. Getting normal spells to work with such interference required layers of stabilization, and they burned out much that much faster. If Eko was feeling optimistic, she would say it meant job security for her. Not a lot of practicing mages this far north and none of them would stoop so low as to outfit a smuggler’s cache on the cheap. “I’m charging you extra, by the way.”
Well, maybe not so cheap.
Dheka clapped Eko on the shoulder. “Don’t be like that, Eko,” she drawled. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Friends don’t ruin friends’ hard work,” Eko grumbled, finishing the last of the array. Truthfully, redrawing the wards was not that much of an effort on her part. One did not get to be the youngest Tower Seat in the Jadcro Mage’s Guild without being able to draft a simple boundary in their sleep. But Eko had fallen far from her guild days, and dragging herself down to the dank subterranean ruins where Dheka did her business after having been here only yesterday was inconvenient enough to warrant her irritation. Not that it took a whole lot to annoy her, Eko’s resting state was nettled anyway. She stood and pinned Dheka with a glare. “I’m charging you the price of the ward, plus an extra mishandling fee. And since you clearly cannot be trusted with anything stronger, there is no rebound effect on this one, it will be just a simple barrier.”
“You are no fun at all.” But when Eko rattled off the price, Dheka paid. Her red lacquered fingernails plucked eighty gold tiles from a hidden pocket in her coat.
“I am tons of fun.” Which was why she was in this mess to begin with. Eko tucked the coins away. The cash was a mere fraction of the monthly stipend she used to make and spend like it was water. Today, it would go into her sluggishly growing savings. What was she saving for? Saints only knew. It wasn’t like Eko had to pay rent; living with her family meant she did not have any real expenses. Truthfully, the freelance jobs she took were more of a way to stave off boredom than anything else. What else could she do? Eko had spent so long pursuing a mage’s life that she had made herself useless for anything else. Even if she had wanted to go back – which she absolutely did not – Eko had burnt too many bridges to ever be welcome in any legitimate mage’s guild again. Pathetic. Eko packed up her supplies. “The spell should last you the month if you treat it nice.”
“Be careful on the way home,” Dheka said seriously as Eko moved to pass her. Eko was not short, but Dheka cleared her by at least half a foot. The smuggler’s sharp green eyes caught the lamplight as she stared down at Eko making her feel uncomfortably like prey. “The tunnels have become dangerous as of late. I’ve lost some people down here over the last week or so.”
Eko paused, partially held up by the casual way Dheka referred to her dead employees as if they were just keys she had misplaced. She frowned out at the darkened passageway. “Killed?”
“Unclear,” Dheka admitted. “They got sent out on runs and never returned.”
“And you are certain they just did not go home?” Eko had only the barest toe dipped into criminality, but smuggling seemed like a line of work where folks just sort of drifted in and out anyway.
There was no humor in the Dheka’s laugh. “Not without collecting their pay, they wouldn’t,” she said. “Watch yourself, little mage, I would hate for you to vanish.”
“Is that concern I hear?”
This time, the smuggler’s smile was genuine. “Why miss Eko, I haven’t lost a stitch of inventory since I started your services. To replace you now would be quite costly, and I’m not sure I could go back. You’ve spoiled me.” With a flippant wave, Dheka stepped back inside the room.“Until next time.”
The cache door closed with a muffled thump, leaving Eko alone in the tunnel. All around her was stillness and silence as she started walking. No matter the time of day, Osso’s lower reaches were only ever dark. No respectable person had a reason to be this far underground, and so the normal city things – specifically lamplight and clear walkways – were not to be found. But the dark had never held any fears Eko. When she was a little girl, her granny would tell her stories about the night. How at the beginning of the world, the Creator had made Night and Sea. A yawning void and roiling chaos – they had been the first twins, meant to hold everything that had would come after. Eko had been born at night. Darkness was her birthright; how could she ever be afraid?
The dark was no problem, but there were no maps for this part of the city. Navigating down here was a matter of knowing the exact route to one’s destination. A route that was subject to change due to cave-ins or flooding when the Yzangrei River swelled. Elsewise, one was liable to wander until they starved – or were killed by the creatures that crawled up from the bowels of the mountain.
Osso was not a new city. It had already been a ruin when the Grand Cataclysm hit three- thousand years ago. Rumors of it being haunted made sure the city sat empty for ages after the world had broken apart. And so it stayed that way until someone realized that curiously, the monsters that prowled the woods of Tolko would not touch the place. Then, it became the perfect hideaway for cutthroats and bandits, and all manner of unsavory folks. It was known as a place where people went to become ghosts. These days, Osso had grown into something of a respectable city. The only real city in Tolko – if you didn’t count Pinebreak, which was more of a company town anyway. However, no matter how many people moved in, or shiny new shops opened up, Osso still could not cast off the crassness of its founders. And nobody forgot that they had built all of it on the bones of folk far greater.
As Eko passed through the shadowed tunnels, she could not help but wonder about those people who came before. Whoever they had been, there was no record of them aside from the blocky lettered runes they had left behind. It seemed that every third stone in the city was carved with them. Ossoglyphs, they were called even though technically, the same runes were present on all of the ancient structures scattered through the continent of Roa’s forgotten corners, not only Osso. The runes were all over the city, quietly humming their curious arcane tune. They had captured her attention as a little girl, so much so that when Eko had joined a mage’s guild she’d made ancient spellcraft her focus of study. There had been no one in Jadcro who knew more about pre-cataclysm runework than she, which meant that Eko only understood about three out of every ten runes she passed. What they did, Spirits only knew, but Eko suspected it had something to do with the reason monsters avoided Osso like the plague.
It had been early evening when Eko had descended. Now, as she stepped out into the surface, stars winked down at her and the moon shone bright and full. A little clock in a shop window claimed the time was two tolls before midnight. Despite the late hour, there were still plenty of folks milling about the lamplit streets. They strolled up the cobbled walkways, drifting in and out of shops, restaurants, and juke houses. A Giragul man lumbered past her. Tall enough to block the streetlight, his large tusks were capped with silver, grey skin appearing like craggy slate. A Ku’uda couple sailed by. Obviously coming from a night on the town, they were dressed to the nines in silks and minks. The moonlight shone off their bluish-green skin and the delicate webbing between their fingers seemed almost gossamer as one of them pointed at a dress in a shop window.
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In other parts of the continent, small magics were used to heat houses and keep streetlights burning. But magic was much more volatile in Tolko. It was safer not to use it at all. Up here, creature comforts ran on coal and kerosene. This time of year smoke from a thousand chimneys sat like a cloud over the city, flavoring the air and making Eko’s nose burn.
The late autumn snow had melted and crusted into slush beneath the waves of booted feet. When she was growing up, snow had been the biggest constant in Eko’s life. To live in Osso was to be subject to it for the bear’s share of the year. Walking blankets and coats around here were made of thick fur and good flannel, boots had to cover your shins, and layers were paramount. Why anyone would choose to live here was a subject for massive debate.
Why Eko had decided to move back, a bigger mystery.
Even at her big age of twenty-seven, the prospect of explaining to her mother why she was so late coming home gave Eko pause. Most households in their part of the world tended to be multi-generational, but Eko had spent over a decade working as a mage in Garyu CIty. After leaving the guild dormitories, she’d had a nice cushy flat all to herself with no one to answer to but her own whims. Moving back in with her parents, younger brother, uncle, and his children had been an adjustment to say the least.
She stepped onto one of the three bridges that connected the western half of the city to the eastern half. Between the two, a narrow stretch of the Yzangrei flowed like ink. Eko stopped halfway across the bridge, pausing to glare at her reflection in the dark water. Three years of spinning in circles had taken its toll. Once upon a time when she looked into the mirror, Eko’s reflection had been haughty and cold. The face of the impenetrable, indominable Night Witch of Jadcro. Now, she just looked tired and lost. Now, the infamous Night Witch was simply Eko Sulio, The Failure.
The scent of hot food tugged at Eko’s nostrils. She looked out at the velvet night sky. She was already going home late; she did not have to go home late and hungry.
XXX
The first time Memphis Bass met Death, he had been eight years old. It had been his grandfather’s homegoing. Memphis had been too young to realize what was going on. All he knew was that his mourning whites were itchy, and he couldn’t eat any of the food laid out until the service was over. Priestesses from the Hyaena Society had prepared the body. Everybody said they had done a good job, but the man in the grave had looked like Memphis’ grandfa. That person seemed small, diminished. Grandfa was a man who took up space simply by breathing. It seemed wrong that Death would make such a man shrink at the very end.
The year after, he met Death again when a pox took both his parents and his older brother. They were among the many in his village who had succumbed to the sickness. That time, there was no large dinner, and the Priestesses had been made so busy that the bodies were shrouded instead of properly prepared. That time, instead of music and laughter, Death had been met with wailing and the acrid smell of smoke from too many bodies on the pyre.
Since then, Memphis had met Death several times more. He had seen Xir many faces. Somehow, horribly, Death still managed to find new ways to surprise him. Memphis assumed he would grow accustomed to it. One day, when Death had managed to scour away the last bits of his soul.
As the Magehound stood among the wreckage of the once neatly organized morgue, Memphis felt exhaustion tug at his shoulders. Idly, he wondered who he had pissed off back at headquarters to get this mess dropped on his desk. Could be anyone, even after eighteen years on the job, Memphis’ grasp of workplace politics was not any firmer than it had been when he had started at seventeen. Now, after two months on the road, he was paying for it.
They had trailed Jeriko Sheby from Heron to Osso. A nearly five-thousand mile journey, over the course of which Memphis had been thrown off of a train, nearly drowned, stabbed twice, and set on fire. On two separate occasions, they had come close to catching Jeriko. Each time he’d managed to slip away and go to ground. The only saving grace was that Jeriko seemed to be making his way steadily north and so re-finding him had been a mostly straightforward task.
After losing him this last time right past the Tolko border, Memphis had taken a gamble on heading straight for Osso – the only real city for thousands of miles.
He hated being right.
When Memphis and Anujak arrived in town earlier this evening, they had been met with the news that eight of the West Willow Infirmary staff had been killed when four deceased sewage workers broke out of their shrouds and started chewing on people.
Memphis sighed as the sharpness of tobacco smoke pushed away the thick stench of blood and rot, and tried to ignore the guilt that followed the heels of his relief. He had been trying to quit ever since Khadi had come home from school one day complaining to him about other kids teasing that her clothes smelled of smoke. There was not much Memphis wouldn’t do for his daughter, but this task was proving to be harder than he’d expected. And honestly, quitting a twenty-year long habit cold turkey was a little too much to ask.
He wanted his bed. He wanted his husband. He missed his daughter.
On his left, Guard Captain Lily Niyv observed the carnage with weary eyes. She was a striking woman, nearly as tall as himself, with smooth bronze skin and black hair tied into a punishing looking braid. She stood ramrod straight, her green-grey officer’s kaftan still crisp despite the late hour, but Memphis could see weariness in her dark eyes. “Well,” she asked in accented Kravansai. “Is it him?”
“This style of necromancy fits Jeriko’s habit,” Memphis admitted. He squatted to get a better look at one of the bodies. Kneeling was out of the question, with all the gore on the tile floor. Not for the first time, Memphis was thankful that he had thought to bring his good boots with him on this trip.
The girl who died could not have been more than twenty. An apprentice most likely. Her throat had been torn open, the ragged skin around the wound suggesting it was made with blunt teeth. “When were the sewage workers brought in?”
“Yesterday morning, right after dawn,” the Captain said.
He stood. “And the attack?”
“Just after noon today.”
Just about a day and a half. Memphis grumbled around his cigarette. According to Mausoleum’s records, Jeriko’s typical timeline for raising the dead had been three days. Ever since Memphis had started chasing him, that had remained true. The speed was concerning, to say the least.
What he could not fguess was why Jeriko had decided to stop here. Ever since had escaped Mausoleum Prison all those weeks ago, Jeriko had barely slowed down. According to Memphis’ figuring, Jeriko would have made it to Osso nearly two weeks before they had. Before now, he had never stayed in one town longer than the time it took to find transportation elsewhere – a week at most. Between walking, train hopping, and even stowing away on a steamship, Jeriko had been on the move like – well, like Magehounds were on his tail. So, what was special about Osso?
The shuffle of heavy boots on the tile pulled Memphis from his thoughts. His partner for this job, Anujak, strode through the doorway. A pensive frown pulled at his young face. “Everybody seems pretty shook up,” he said, glumly. “And they were all too busy running for their lives to notice where the ghouls went.” Anujak’s eyes landed on the body at Memphis’s feet and his cacao skin went ashen.
Poor kid, Memphis thought. Anujak had only been in the Magehound’s service for a year. It had been a pretty quiet one before this incident. The most action Anujak had seen was a wayward mage’s cache of contraband.
With the Accords to govern them, magic users had become pretty good at self-managing over the last few centuries. However, the ones that slipped through the cracks were, exceptional to put it lightly. When magi got out of hand, they went all out. Ghouls were only the tip of a very bloody iceberg. If Anujak stayed in the service, he would see much worse in very short order. Memphis recalled an earlier job that saw him standing in a warehouse full of caged chimera. The perpetrators on that case had been using children as the human base for their creatures with the intent on selling their creations to the highest bidder. Memphis recalled their whimpers of pain and the stench of acid and bile as clearly as if he had been there yesterday.
He turned back to the Captain. “These bodies will have to be burned immediately.”
“What about their families?” She looked stricken. “Shouldn’t we give them a chance to say goodbye? The dignity of proper rites at least?”
“Only if you can get a priest here in the next hour,” Memphis said. His voice sounded cold, even to his own ears. But keeping Jeriko from getting away a third time meant that Memphis was taking no chances. He stubbed his cigarette beneath his boot and lit another. “We can’t afford to stand on sentiment, Captain. These ghouls seem to be manifesting faster than usual. I’m not taking any chances of making more. As for their relatives, the names and ashes of the deceased will have to be enough.”
The Captain nodded, the grim reality of their situation seeming to settle on her like a heavy cloak. “What am I supposed to tell their next of kin?”
Memphis sighed. “Tell them the bodies were in too poor of condition to be recovered properly,” he said. “But say nothing about the undead. The last thing we need in this city is a panic.”
That would only make their job harder. The fewer people that were involved, the more freedom Memphis and Anujak would have to move unimpeded, and the fewer chances Jeriko would have of using the confusion to make a getaway. Memphis stared out at the open doorway. “I trust you will make sure your people keep this to themselves?”
Lily nodded. “Leave it to me.”
With nothing left to be done for the bodies, Memphis and Anujak made plans to meet the Captain at the City Guard house the next morning and left the building.
Memphis swore as the wind cut through his jacket with barely any resistance. Back in Garyu, mid-autumn was an unpleasant mix of cold rain and sea spray. Here in Osso, the weather felt nearly disrespectful. Fat flakes of snow drifted lazily down from the night sky, dusting the street around them in a haze of white. The cold had a weight to it, a warning of worse to come as the season would wear on. With any luck, Memphis and Anujak would not be here to witness it.
The trek back to their hotel was a short one. Although fewer in number, Osso surprisingly possessed hotels and pleasure houses of a caliber that would rival any metropolitan city down south. Unfortunately, the Magehound’s Association only sent along enough of a stipend to ensure their agents did not have sleep on the street. General comfort was not a priority. So, Memphis and Anujak were staying at a shady looking inn called the Eight Cats Hotel. The rooms were small, the walls thin, and Memphis had to make a conscious effort not to question the stains on his mattress. However, the most egregious part of it was that there was no scrying mirror.
They had been so focused on getting information when they had first arrived, that Memphis and Anujak had barely paid for their rooms before they went to go see the Captain. Now that they had some time to kill, Memphis wanted to see his family. Let them know he’d gotten here safely at least.
Memphis’ husband was a pretty easygoing person. Des worried about the dangerous parts of Memphis’ job but did not stop him from going. I’m not going to stop you from doing what you’re good at, Des had said at the beginning of their relationship. But do me a favor and let me know you’re alive every now and again so I don’t go out of my mind worrying over you. So that was what Memphis did. Every time he reached a new town, Memphis would check in. The last time he had scryed home had been two weeks ago – right before they’d lost Jeriko again.
The innkeeper, a tired looking Nhedi woman, did not seem at all bothered by Memphis’s inconvenience. She sat cross-legged on her stool, conveniently placed so that she could see over the more human- sized counter, not looking up from the battered novel she was reading. “Scrying don’t work up here.”
“Messenger hawk?”
“Don’t got those either,” she said, turning the page. “If you want to send a letter, the mail barge leaves once a week on Tenthday.”
“Seriously?” It was Secondday. With that timeline, Memphis would make it home before his letter would. Des was going to kill him. “Nevermind,” he grumbled.
He climbed the stairs to their room and collapsed on the bed. What kind of place had they come to? No scrying, the air too hostile for a carrier bird to be reliable. He leaned over to glance at his kit, the long rifle inside polished inside and waiting. It had seen quite a lot of use as of late. No doubt, this leg of the trip would put it to the test as well. Memphis had possessed the good sense to stock up on cursed ammunition before they crossed into Tolko, but he had a sneaking suspicion that getting more up here would not be possible. He would have to be careful.
The door groaned as Anujak stepped inside. Memphis did not bother rolling over; he was too busy tallying up all of the problems with this case in his head.
“We’ll get him this time,” Anujak said stoutly.
Memphis did not bother trying to keep the weariness from his voice. “You sound optimistic for somebody who’s been on the same case for this long.”
“It’s not really optimism, Memphis. Just logic,” Anujak countered. “He made us chase him to the middle of nowhere. Where else could he go?”