Syd Tejin, Vicemaster of the Scarecrow Mercenary Guild was not a man built for paperwork. Even when he had been a little kid, the take-home work his teachers had sent with him typically ended up in a crumpled heap at the bottom of his rucksack, untouched and forgotten. For most of his adult years, Syd had spent entirely unbothered by paperwork. He’d gone from soldiering to mercenary work, in positions where bureaucracy was not his responsibility. He was a man of action, preferring, blood on his knuckles, the burn of spent muscles, and lungs that ached from sweet exertion. That was where he shone best. Not here, sitting hunched over a beer-stained booth, trying to make sense of the mess of papers scattered all around him. Had he known becoming Vicemaster involved this, he might not have taken the gig. To make things worse, he was working in the middle of the main hall. So, while he struggled over his papers, all around him was the noise of his mercs having a grand old time. To be fair the running and fighting was still eighty-eight percent of his job. But by his way of figuring, the other twelve percent was eleven percent too many.
Syd frowned out at the stained mess of papers scattered over the table. Lost and founds – what they in the business called recovery jobs. The listings mostly covered small things, missing pets and the like, so they typically got shunted down to Scarecrow’s recruits. It was good practice for the new ones and helped them get to know the folks around Osso. Locals were more forgiving of the occasional barfight if you helped them find their beloved cat before something nasty ate it. The reason that they were Syd’s problem today was that there were so fucking many. Over the past two weeks, the Scarecrows had received one hundred and twenty-three requests. Not many cats in this bunch. Ninety of the requests were for people.
Syd’s first mind went to slave-harvesters. But that wouldn’t be right. The trading of sentient chattel had been illegal in Osso since the Karvansai Empire was founded. Besides, a walled city in the middle of the mountains was a strange place to hunt for prey. Even though Osso boasted several thousand residents within its walls, it still had the hallmarks of smaller towns. Missing people were noticed quickly.
So how ninety people had up and vanished without public outcry was a mystery to him.
Syd leaned back into his booth, looking up from the lines of ink that were starting to bleed together in his vision and instead turned his attention towards the rowdy guildhall. Their base took up an entire warehouse block. The back half was exclusively for training space and weapons storage. The top floors were dormitory style rooms. The common room where he sat was made up of the first two floors of the main building. The floors between them had been smashed through so the space was large and open, hot from all the bodies inside and the giant hearth fire that sat in the middle of the floor. Long bench tables scattered the space. The far wall was covered with stratified job notices.
Two hundred years ago, Osso had been a barely stitched together collection of warring criminal factions. They had nothing in common aside from sharing the same foxhole. Back in those days, power changed hands bloodily and often.
Into this chaos, Wylma Kinuti started the Scarecrow Mercenary Guild. According to guild lore, the old lady had gotten tired of life on the road and had come up north for a change of scenery. Back then, mercs up here were constantly getting cheated out of jobs or dying in droves thanks to the general lethality of the Tolko region. Wylma – who had been on the account for a lifetime – took it upon herself to get the loose mercs together. And she was enough of her own monster that the powers that had been gave her a wide berth. The old lady had carved out a place for herself and her mercs in the roiling pot that Osso had been, and the fruits of her labor was the hall that seemed full to bursting every night.
These days, the Scarecrows offered combat training, vetted jobs, provided equipment and a safe place to stay for their members. Anyone who wanted to join had to be sponsored by a standing member and spend at least a year as a grunt being whipped into shape – that was also Syd’s job. Most did not make it. They were not the only mercs in town, but the Scarecrows had a reputation for good work and got paid very well as a result, so there was always a line of potential hopefuls whenever spots opened up.
There also were some that sidestepped that process. Strays, broken things that the old lady picked herself and pieced back together. Syd had been one of those. And in the years since, he had gone from a shell of himself to Second.
The guildhall doors opened wide, breaking Syd’s train of thought, letting in a burst of cold air and single person. He watched as Eko Sulio, mage for hire, shook the snow from her clothes, a weary scowl on her impish face.
As a rule, Syd liked to stay as far away from mages as possible. His last run in with them had ripped his life apart. It was mages who picked his carcass off a battlefield, carved into bones, and made him a monster.
Eko wasn’t so bad though. True, she didn’t have patience for explaining herself or her work. She treated questions and the people who asked them like nagging flies. You were liable to get your head bitten off if you hovered too close while she was working. Like the old lady, Eko did not suffer fools lightly. Truthfully, Eko did not suffer anything lightly. Spirits help the soul who had broken an enchantment she’d made or lost an item while on a job. Syd had spent two decades as a mercenary and still some of Eko’s curses were enough to make his ears burn.
However, it was obvious to anyone who paid attention that she cared about people. No matter how many times something was lost or broken, Eko made sure it was replaced or put back in working order before the owner had to go out again. He knew her to ride out to the middle of nowhere to ward up loggers during fire season and spend a week wrangling a spell to find a kid’s lost cat. Eko was good people even if her attitude was shit.
That she was beautiful did not hurt matters.
Fat flakes of snow dusted her black hair that had been corralled beneath a cheery yellow kerchief and gathered into a burst of coils that flared out over her right shoulder. A thin ring of silver was threaded through her nose. Her coat was unbuttoned, revealing the baggy dress she always wore. Its color was a grey so dark it looked nearly black, with the front cut all the way down to her navel and nothing underneath but a strip of black cloth tied securely around her chest. Syd could see the soft curves that flowed from her shoulders to rounded hips and thick thighs. Kerosene lamplight danced over her warm, brown sugar skin.
But it was her eyes that always caught him up. Syd had never seen such eyes, black sclera with a pale grey iris. The first time he saw them, Syd had felt as if he’d been punched in the teeth. They seemed to drink in the light. Those eyes were currently narrowed and sweeping through the crowded guildhall, searching – Syd assumed – for an open spot.
She would be hard pressed to find one. This time of year, Scarecrow Hall was packed to the gills nearly every night. The season was winding down, meaning his people were getting ready to hole up in the Hall for winter or trying to find jobs that would send them out of Tolko until spring. In a few weeks, the roads would be impassable, and the river traffic would slow to a crawl. Not a lot of work for mercs up this way in the winter. As a result, every one of the open dormitory rooms was full and Niqui, their resident cook, had been in the mess nearly non-stop.
Syd whistled, the high noise cutting through the din of the crowd. When Eko’s head jerked his way, he grinned at her and pointed to the open booth opposite his.
She slid into the cracked leather seat with a weary groan.
Syd chuckled, pushing his papers aside. “Long day?”
“Long week,” she grumbled, propping her chin onto the scared table. This close, Syd’s sensitive nose picked up her trademark scent of pine needles and tea, with a smoky heaviness woven through that he had come to associate with her magic. She lifted those grey-black eyes to the young man approaching their table.
“Hey miss Eko,” Red said. Even though Osso was home to a wide range of Folks, people with pale skin were rare. Red was white as milk, with fiery copper hair – hence the nickname. Freshly eighteen with dreams of glory, he was one of the eight recruits the Scarecrows had taken on this year. It was Syd’s job to make a passable merc out of him, and the jury was still out on whether or not he would succeed. But Red was determined, enthusiastic, and didn’t mind putting up with the grunt work Syd gave him, so all hope wasn’t lost. “What can I get you?”
“Is the kitchen still open?”
“Yeah.”
Eko produced two copper tiles from her pocket and handed the coins over. “I want a double helping of whatever Niqui’s got cooking.”
They both watched him go, Eko arching an eyebrow at the spring in his step. “That boy is disgustingly energetic.” Her tone was bone-dry.
Syd laughed. It had taken him a while to get used to Eko’s caustic brand of speech. Her pensive expression never wavered, but the minute crinkle at the corners of her eyes meant she was joking. “I don’t know where he gets it,” Syd admitted. “No matter what I throw at him, he doesn’t seem to have any quit in him.”
Eko’s full lips spread in the ghost of a grin. “Sounds familiar,” she said.
Syd nodded. Red did not have a tithe on Syd when he had been eighteen, but they did have some similarities. Syd didn’t have a lot of quit in him either – even when it came to paperwork. But he was not above procrastinating, and talking to a Eko was a lot more fun anyway. So far as he could tell, her only job seemed to be drifting around town doing spellcraft for whoever would pay her. It put her in the path of Osso’s more interesting residents which tended to gave her good stories. When she felt like telling them. “Where are you coming from this late?”
“Dheka’s,” she yawned.
Syd frowned. Eko was a full grown, but something about her working for the Khere woman set him on edge. Dheka had amassed a small fortune bringing items into Osso that fell outside of the scrutiny of the city guard. Smuggling was a hard, ruthless business. Dheka was good at it because she was a hard, ruthless woman. Dangerous. Neither Syd nor his monster liked the idea of Eko all alone with a creature such as Dheka. “You need to be careful around her.”
All at once, the air shifted. Eko’s relaxed posture stiffened. She sat up, spine ramrod straight and fixed him with a scowl, those grey-black eyes sharp. “You know what I need, do you?” Eko asked lowly. “Tell me, Syd, when exactly, did I ask for your opinion?”
Syd would have had to be dense to miss the warning in her words. That look in her eye typically was followed by profanity. But Syd had faced worse things than a pissy mage. “I’m serious, she’s dangerous.”
Eko’s midnight gaze narrowed. “Dheka has been perfectly pleasant, and she pays extremely well,” she snapped. “And the exact same thing could be said about you lot. Or are you going to try to tell me that all the jobs y’all take are just for guarding estates and helping old ladies shop?”
Point to her.
Syd clenched his jaw. He had seen plenty of young mercs get killed over jobs because the money was good. Seeing the sheer amount of cash that could be gained on the account sometimes blinded people to the risks involved. But Eko was not some untried adventurer, and she would argue circles around him if Syd let her. He’d had two years of experience trying. So, Syd tried a different approach. He met her eye and spoke slowly. “Just watch yourself around her, please. Dheka’s loyal only to herself. She won’t hesitate to kill you to save her own skin, and we’d miss you around here.”
Despite her protests, Eko’s ass was in his bar at least once a week. She sat with his mercs without hesitation, kept them safe with the spells she supplied without ripping them off. As far as Syd was concerned, Eko was as much one of his as any of the other mercs in this place. And if a small, snarling voice in his head demanded more, well that was between Syd and his monster. But if he told her all that, Eko would probably turn him into a slug or something.
After he’d finished speaking, Eko’s expression was still just north of obstinate, but she did not look ready to do something about it anymore. She shifted her scowl to his abandoned papers. “What is this all about?”
That was Eko, far too stubborn to concede defeat, but Syd had said his piece, so he let her get away with changing the subject. “Too many recovery jobs coming in,” Syd explained. “People have been going missing around town.”
“Hmmm.”
Something in that sound made the beast that shared his soul sit up and pay attention. “What?”
Eko’s expression turned thoughtful. “Dheka warned me to be careful when I was leaving earlier,” she murmured, sifting through the looseleaf. “She said some of her people had been disappearing in the under tunnels.”
She sat up straighter and started to study the papers more intensely. Now, as far as Syd, knew, Eko had never done mercenary work. Missing person’s reports weren’t her avenue of expertise, but she was one of those people who just radiated competence. So, he let her shuffle his papers around. Watching her work was a strange sort of experience. Eko’s focus was a heavy thing. Her lips moved soundlessly as she worked out problems in her mind, nimble fingers moving all the papers around almost unseeingly.
Mercs loved to gossip and over the past couple of years, they had managed to gather scant few bits about her. The reason that would make a world class, guild educated mage like Eko drop her cushy, lucrative life and pick up freelancing out in the mountains was something the Scarecrows loved to speculate about. Syd knew Eko lived with her family here in town and her father sat on Osso’s Council. She liked cinnamon-orange pastries and hated green vegetables. He knew that by the time she left the mage’s life, she had been Tower ranked and whatever had happened with her guild was bad enough that she had been soured on ever joining another one. He also knew that sometimes, when she thought no one was paying attention, Eko got this look in her eye that was so hollowed-out and despondent that it froze Syd’s blood. Being around Eko made Syd feel like he had found a book with half the pages missing, and for some reason he wasn’t quite ready to examine, he was anxious to find the rest.
By the time Red returned with Eko’s food, she had taken Syd’s mess of reports and laid each one carefully face up in line. “Here we are!”
Eko’s head snapped up, a violent sheen glazing over her eyes at the interruption. “WHAT?”
Red stopped short, his already pale features going porcelain. In a jerky motion, he thrust the bowl forward almost like he was making a sacrificial offering. A double serving meant that the bowl he held was comically large and filled to the brim. It teetered precariously in Red’s shaking hands, dangerously close to spilling its contents on the floor. What was on the menu today was venison sausage and seasoned rice along with roasted kale and collards. Syd had eaten some earlier and knew it would be a tragedy to waste. He jerked his chin to the open spot on the table, “Put it there,” he ordered. “Then go see if Urchret needs help behind the bar.”
Red, did as he was told, turned to flee, stopped on his heel, and twisted round again. He met Eko’s eye and winced. “Umm…I was instructed to tell you that the kale is non-negotiable,” he said cautiously. Eko shifted her scowl to the darker set of leafy greens sticking up out of the bowl. “If there are any left there will be and I quote ‘consequences’.”
And because everyone in the guild knew better than to test Niqui, Eko smothered her protests. Syd pushed the bowl closer to Eko’s hand. “Eat,” he instructed, hoping the momentary distraction would be enough for her to let him get away with giving her an order. He pointed to her work. “And then explain.”
“I’ve got them arranged by date,” she explained, taking up her fork.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
So she did. The few pets that were on the list had been the earliest to go, followed by the people. Laborers at first, folks who were assumed to have jumped their indenture. The categories broadened as the dates drew nearer. Husbands presumed to have up and left. People that had left for work for the day and never returned to their families. Kids that had never made it home from school.
Eko watched him take it all in, scooping a heaping helping of rice in her mouth. “There’s a clear sign of escalation,” she told him. “Small things, animals going first. Then people. Something is hunting.”
“Someone I’d wager,” Syd said gravely. “If there was an errant beast inside of the walls, we’d have heard about it long before now.” A darker thought tugged at Syd’s mind. “These are only the people reported missing,” he said slowly. “Folks with someone who cared enough to try and look for them. How many more haven’t been reported anywhere?”
Eko stabbed her fork his way. “There’s the winning question.”
Now what to do about it? If someone was picking people off around town, by all rights, Syd should go to the city guard about it. Then again, if folks were going missing, they were probably in the dark about it as well. Not to mention, Lily would bar him from looking into it further if he brought it to her outright. It looked like he would have to do some investigating of his own. The beast that shared his soul roused, excited at the prospect of hunting. Grim as it all was, Syd had to admit this was by far the most interesting thing that had hit his notice in a while.
“If there is someone preying on the citizens of Osso, things are only going to get worse,” Eko said, scraping the last bits of rice from her bowl. When she was done, she shrugged her coat back on and sighed. “I guess I should be going. House wards won’t lay themselves.”
Syd couldn’t help but chuckle. He was willing to bet that the Sulio family home would be the best defended building in Osso by sunup. He stood, snatching his own coat from the booth hook. “Let’s go then.”
Eko stopped short, tilting her head up to glare at him suspiciously. “What’s this ‘let’s’ about? I didn’t invite you anywhere.”
Syd didn’t even slow down. “I’m walking you home.”
“That is one hell of a presumption,” she snapped, stepping out into the blustering cold. “In case it has escaped your notice, Syd. I am more than capable of getting myself home without assistance.”
Eko struck out onto the sidewalk, her stride swift and sure. She wasn’t a short woman. Just a little under average height for most humans. But Syd was half Tongré on his father’s side, meaning along with having notched ears and denser bones, he topped out at just under seven feet. So, no matter how fast Eko walked, long as he was, Syd had no problem catching up and keeping pace. “I noticed,” he said, trying to hide his grin at the murderous glare she threw him. “But did we or did we not just establish that someone is going around, snatching up people off the street. And wouldn’t you out on your own just make for a perfect target? If there’s two of us, they might think twice.”
Eko rolled her eyes. “If someone attacked me, I could kill them and be done with it,” she argued. “Problem solved.”
Syd was used to the casual mention of murder around the guild hall but hearing it from Eko stopped him short. There was no bravado in her tone, either. She had said it straight out, as a statement of fact. “Have you ever killed anybody?”
“What kind of question is that, of course I have,” she said, as if that was a completely normal thing to admit. Which, considering his line of work, Syd guessed it was. “Keep following me and I’ll add one more to the tally.”
XXX
Irritable, Eko wandered through Osso’s darkened streets. Behind her, Syd loped along like some obnoxiously tall shadow. No one would ever call him pretty. His face was too sharp for that, not gaunt, but the harsh angles gave it an unshakable severity. It was only made worse by a trio of old scars that split his lip, twisting across his sharp cheek, and ending over a nose that had been broken and reset a few too many times to ever sit straight again. His long black hair had been corralled away from his face with a twist of leather, only to flare out in all directions once it broke free of the tail.
He caught her staring and grinned. Eko scowled harder. “You would think,” she grumbled. “That the Second seat in a mercenary guild would have something better to do than to trail me home on a random weeknight.”
Syd shrugged, smiling wider. “Just doing a friend a favor,” he said. “Seems like that would be pretty important.”
“Bold of you to assume we’re friends,” she shot back.
Syd’s smile refused to dim. “We’re a few blocks in and you haven’t killed me yet,” he teased. “I have to assume we’re something.”
“So, you do this for all your friends then?”
Syd shrugged, turning his nose up at the falling snow. The cold air tinged the usually copper tone of his skin red. “Only the ones who need it.”
“Walking me home is unnecessary.”
“That’s your opinion.”
Ready to tell Syd exactly where he could shove his opinions, Eko’s head snapped up, but a shuffle in the alley caught her ear.
It shot out of the dark, so fast that Eko didn’t have time to react before broken fingernails dug into her arm and blunt teeth sunk themselves into the exposed part of her shoulder. The bite was deep enough that Eko could feel his eyeteeth scrape against her collarbone. Strong hands gripped her arms hard enough to bruise and shoved her to the flagstones. Sharp joints dug into her back as it clamped down harder, jerking back and forth to try and rip her flesh free. Eko screamed in pain, bucking against the flagstones to shake herself loose. The creature was heavy, though, its hands on her squeezing hard enough to bruise her bones. The stench of rotted flesh and sewage stuffed her nose.
Just as fast as she fell, the weight on her back was ripped away. Eko took a breath of crisp, fresh air and gagged. A different pair of hands hauled her upright and shoved her backward. Syd’s dark eyes were wide with worry as he craned his neck to look at her. “You good?”
“No,” Eko huffed, heartbeat at a gallop. “I just got chewed on.”
Her neck was on fire and trying to get a look at it only made things worse. She blinked against the black spots in her vision.
They watched as whatever had attacked Eko picked itself up from where Syd had tossed it. The merc had put enough force behind his throw that the brick wall it landed on was had formed a fractured crater where the creature’s body made impact. The force of Syd’s throw should have been enough to break someone’s skull. But as Eko leaned around Syd’s back to get a better look, she realized how much trouble they were actually in. “Shit.”
The creature was human, or at least it used to be. All of the parts were the same. The shape was right at least. But Eko took in the sallow skin, shuffling gait, and the reek of rot and read it as wrong. “Ghoul,” she wheezed. Her neck burned. “Don’t let it bite you.”
“Got it.” Syd nodded. Instead of grabbing for the swords that he always kept strapped to his back, he raised his hand. Pale blue sparks shot arced between his fingers. There was a crack of thunder, a flash of blinding light that seared her eyes, followed by the acrid smell of ozone and burnt flesh. Now, where the ghoul once stood there was only smoking gristle.
“That’s a neat trick,” Eko said, eyeing the merc. Syd was no mage, but it was not unheard of for some people to be blessed with magical affinities from time to time. Usually those gifts ran through bloodlines – her shadows for instance. Most of her father’s family had some touch of night. She had never seen it manifest as lightning before. However, seeing Syd render a ghoul to grease with a snap of his fingers, she had to admit, it seemed incredibly efficient.
Syd had stopped smiling now, she watched as he paced around the blackened flagstones, toeing chunks of gristle with his boot. When he was satisfied, he jogged back to where she slumped against a wall. “We need to get you to an infirmary.”
Eko shook her head. “They won’t be able to help with this,” she said. Now that the initial threat was gone, her mind was spinning. Like trying to snatch a single fish from a school, it was hard for her to latch on to a single thought. Why were ghouls in Osso? That shouldn’t have been possible. The wards around the city were still functioning that well at least. Or they should have been. If the ghoul had not come in from outside, someone must have brought it in. Then, the question became why. The pain in her neck mounted, drawing her priorities back down to the emergency at hand. “I need a kitchen; we have to go back to the guildhall.”
She only managed to take a single step forward before her vision started to swim and her knees buckled. Damn venom. Before she could hit the stones again, Syd snatched her up and set her body over his shoulder, like a heaping sack of rice. Instead of turning back around, he sprinted farther up the street.
She squirmed against his shoulder but Syd’s vice grip on her waist did not ease. “I said we need to go back.”
“I heard you,” Syd said, his normally craggy voice sounded even rougher. “My place is closer.”
But he was right, in a fraction of the time that it would have taken to go back to the guild, they were at Syd’s rowhouse. Eko did her best to focus on breathing. Her neck felt as if there were shards of glass wedged into her skin. Nausea mounted in her gut, made all the worse by Syd’s running. Inside the house was dark, and Eko could barely make out the small heaps of weaponry and books scattered around as he made a beeline for the kitchen.
Syd set her down directly on the table. The second she was free, Eko peeled off her coat. Her dress was a simple thing of downy fleece. Overly large, nearly shapeless, not all that fashionable really – but it was unrestrictive and soft enough not to bother Eko on the days where even the slightest pull of fabric was enough to make her want to peel her skin off. Right now, she was grateful that the front opening was deep enough that she could just slide it down to free her bitten shoulder.
The pain should have been a warning, but Eko hissed as she finally got a good look at the damage in the lamplight. Syd swore. Already, the wound was putrid. Her usually smooth brown skin was mottled and purpling, with sickly black veins squirming out from the bite. Even accounting for her sensitivity to magic, this ghoul’s venom moved fast.
Pushing down her mounting panic, Eko got to work. There was too much to do, and no time to fall to pieces. “I need, mushrooms, salt, and grain alcohol,” she ordered.
To his credit, Syd didn’t ask any questions. Instead, he went straight to pilfering his cabinets.
In what seemed like an instant, came back with a sack of her materials and an unmarked jar of crystal-clear liquid. At her quirked eyebrow, he grinned, showing off a sharklike set of teeth. “Figured you could use the strong stuff. A friend of mine’s got a still out in the pines,” he said, passing her the materials.
At the sight of his bloody hands, Eko felt a prick of guilt. She started arranging the items in the order she would need them. Given enough time, she could have probably come up with a proper counter spell. But judging from the way her arm was already going numb, time was a luxury she could not afford. So, in the absence of formal spellcraft, Eko fell back on her granny’s teachings. “Sorry to bleed all over you.”
Syd looked down at himself, like he was just now noticing Eko’s blood smeared all over himself. He shrugged and pulled the ruined shirt over his head. “No worries.”
Suddenly, Eko’s mouth felt very dry. Conceptually, Eko knew Syd was built. He was a mercenary, after all. Seeing it, however, was an entirely different situation. He didn’t have the blocky, carefully curated musculature made for show. Syd was sinewy. All long lines and rawboned cordage carved from a lifetime of use and abuse. Every bit of his coppery brown skin was covered in scars. Eko’s fingers itched to touch them. Unfortunately, she was currently dying.
She took a swig from Syd’s mystery jar. The liquor hit her tongue like a fist to the nose. Her sinuses burned, her eyes watered, and for half a second Eko swore she could hear colors. “Shit.”
When she could see again, she reached for the salt. In folk-workings, salt was known as a purifier. She took a handful and dusted it around the edge of the where the black veins stopped. It would serve as a barrier line to stop the spread. Mushrooms, creatures who feasted on the dead, to consume what had already festered. She scooped out the black spores and rubbed them into the bite. Now, a touch of wild magic to wake everything. She reassessed the wound and sighed. There was no helping it, she dropped her human seeming.
XXX
Syd landed in one of his rickety chairs and watched Eko work. His hands shook with energy unspent. He had seen a lot of carnage in his years. Truthfully, a simple ghoul bite didn’t break the top ten of wounds he had witnessed. But it had all happened so fast. He should have been paying more attention. He should have heard that ghoul long before it attacked them. He had been careless, and now his mage was bleeding all over his table.
The ratcheting of magic in the room shook Syd from his spiraling thoughts. He looked up to find Eko, prodding at her bite. Syd’s senses prickled. Something was off.
For a moment it looked like she had put on gloves. But that wasn’t right. The tips of her fingers – nails and all – were covered in the darkest black that faded to grey just above her elbows before returning to their usual soft brown. The shadows around Eko had condensed between them almost like they were coming from her. Her strange eyes had grown even more so, her iris having shrunk to barely a sliver of silver in a sea of black.
Eko’s magic rose like heavy mist crawling along his skin, intangible but insistent. He had experienced it before, whenever she worked at the guild. Here, now, it was more potent than Syd had ever felt from her. It made his eyes water and set his nerves alight. Alarm bells rang in his mind as both Syd and his monster considered this New Eko seated before them.
The lamplight in his kitchen dimmed, almost as if the little flames were afraid to shine. He watched as the fungi on her shoulder sprouted and spread. Little whisps of hyphae snaked out from Eko’s wounds, twisting around each other to form fat caps. Eko’s eyes had fallen to half mast, and her lips moved in a near silent mumble. It was bewitching to witness, almost hypnotic. It didn’t look like any spell craft he had seen before. Wild magic, his monster supplied.
By the time Eko’s stopped chanting, half of her body and his kitchen table were covered in mushrooms. Eko groaned and stretched beneath the pile before pulling herself free. The rotting stench in the room was gone. The shadows around them were still thick and twisting, and Syd thought he caught glimpses of eyes blinking in the inky dark. She was still bleeding, but now her blood ran clean. That was something he could help with. Syd went to get his med-kit.
When he returned, Eko was in the same place he had left her in. She held up her weight with her good arm, eyes watching the twisting shadows.
“Alright, let’s have a look at that,” he said. His ruined voice was loud even to his ears. He dropped the kit on the table, the sound loud enough to make Eko jump. She turned dazed black eyes on him and smiled.
“Mercenary, bartender, and nursemaid,” she said slowly, watching him rifle through the kit.. “You wear a lot of hats, Syd.”
“Got to learn how to stitch yourself up when you get as bloody as I do,” he said, forcing a chuckle. His monster warned him that the danger wasn’t over. Not ghouls this time, but the mage before him. She wouldn’t hurt him; Syd was almost certain. The depth of magic rolling away from her, though, that was another story. Wild Magic was unpredictable, undistilled chaos. Right now, it seemed contained to the shadows, but that could change at any time.
He looked at the wound carefully. The skin around the bite was too shredded to hold a suture well. He reached for the little tin at the bottom of his kit.
Eko’s eyes widened. “Healing salve?”
Syd nodded, smoothing the jelly across the open wound. He felt her muscles relax almost immediately. “Costs more than a house but useful in a pinch,” he told her. “It’ll speed things along, but you’ll still scar.”
He had gotten it from a monastery out in Sumer. The nuns there were protective of their special mixture. They sat on their product jealously and he’d lucked into getting the tin the first time. He watched Eko’s skin slowly start to knit together under his hand. Worth every bit of blood.
Once the initial wound was out of the way, Syd started on the bandages. He was a far cry from a healer, but he’d had a lot of practice with battlefield triage. It would be a patch job, but passable until they got her to a real infirmary. The Scarecrows had one in residence – Benya. Xe hadn’t been at the guildhall tonight, but Syd knew where xir house was. He would drag Benya out of bed if he had to.
“Enough, mama hen,” Eko groaned as he tightened the gauze. That far off look she had was gone now. She was bright and alert. That would be thanks to the healing salve; it burned like hell but that’s how you knew it was working. “Do you fuss over all of your mercs like this?”
“Quiet,” Syd ordered, double checking his work. It was the safest response because the short answer was yes, Syd fussed over his mercs. But the truthful answer was that once their injuries were squared away, it was business as usual. The sick chill of fear sitting under his skin was new, so were the jolts of rage the wound inspired in him. The ghoul was dead, but Syd and his monster both still wanted to go back and rend the stones where it stood for daring to touch her at all.
“So,” Syd he said in an attempt to change the subject. “Ghouls?”
Eko reached out to pluck a mushroom cap. The fungi was wilting as they talked. She pocketed a few of the largest ones away in her bag and frowned. “They’re not supposed to be in Osso.”
“How do you mean?”
Over the past few months, Syd had started trying to catalogue Eko’s collection of frowns. The scowl she shot him now was one of her most frequent; the ‘stop talking and let me work’ frown. He half-suspected the reason she got so snappy when she had to explain things because it was hard to organize the information floating in her head into coherent words that other people could understand. But Syd liked to think of himself as smart. He’d learned, through watching his guildmates’ grisly trial and error, that asking her one leading question and waiting went further with Eko than asking a bunch of questions all at once. That usually ended in transmutation.
Before long, she started up again. “Revenants, the risen dead, crop up from time to time in Tolko thanks to strange pulses of wild magic. They are made utterly by chance. They are hollow shells filled with wild magic, running on their base impulses until that well of power is used up. Culturally, a lot of the people who live in this part of the world burn their dead, and that’s part of the reason why. This was different.”
She chewed her lip, thinking. “They can’t self propogate. Once a revenant burns out, that is the end of it until another one is made. Ghouls are different. They are made by mages, risen through necromancy.”
He watched as she slid off the table. Eko shifted from side to side, almost like she didn’t trust her legs to hold her. Then, she started to pace. “There was a sickness spreading from where it bit me. It was necrotic, like I was rotting from the inside out. Corrosion is of hallmark of necromancy. It would have eaten me up, and left me a shambling, hungry corpse.”
“So Osso City has a necromage.”
“Osso city has a necromage,” Eko agreed, she stopped pacing to turn expectant eyes on him. “And people are missing.”
Syd thought about what she said, horror growing. “What are the odds that those two things are unrelated?”
“I’m not a betting woman,” Eko said. “But if I had to choose, I’d say those problems are one in the same.” She reached for her coat. “The rule of roaches applies here. When it comes to ghouls, always assume there are more than just the one you see.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“It means we have a problem,” she sighed “I should go home.”
“I’ll walk you.” It was bad enough when he thought there was just a killer on the loose. He’d be damned if he let her go off by herself now that there was undead in the mix. Syd had half a mind to insist she stay here; she looked ready to topple over. His monster agreed. Internally, he braced for another argument.
Instead of a biting remark, Eko just chuckled. She pointed one blackened finger to the darkest part of the room. “No more walking tonight,” she told him. “This time, I’ll be taking the shortcut.”
She stepped into the shadows and was gone.