Will

There was no one in the great hall other than a few collared slaves sweeping up, but what could almost be classified as a bonfire still raged in a firepit at the center of the room, adding to the summer warmth so that it became unbearably hot. Will hurried through before his sweat could start soaking through his clothes, headed for the private wing where he assumed he would run into Brimstone sooner or later.

Though he had obviously not been privy to it himself, he knew that the keep had served as the seat of some angel-appointed governor who had overseen Sheerhome in the Better Times. The cataclysmic world war following Era’s death had seen the keep reduced to a ruin, but Brimstone had still seen fit to take up in it. Personally, Will would probably have picked the old academy—larger, in much better shape, and with access to the city’s only decent library—but he supposed that a paranoid bastard like Brimstone liked the keep’s defensible hilltop position too much to let it go.

After wandering the keep’s winding hallways for a while with nothing but his own echoing footsteps for company, he entered out onto a large, sun-soaked patio. There was a shallow set of stairs at the other end that led into a walled-off garden of flowers and hedges and climbing vines.

Will found a woman kneeling by a long flower bed, inspecting the purple and pink hyacinths growing there. Lady-Consort Dawn, he knew by her goldspun hair and fine dress.

“They’re feeling sad today,” Dawn said, touching one of the flowers. It drooped under its own weight, and she tried to stand it back up, but it flopped over limp again as soon as she let it go. She only looked up when Will was standing a few steps to her left.

To her credit, she did not flinch.

“Oh!” she said, standing up and brushing dark soil from the front of her dress. Her laundress would not be pleased with those stains. “Master… Will, is it?”

“Quite right, lady-consort,” Will said with a small bow, hands folded before him. “I’m surprised you remember.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Most people seem to struggle. You wouldn’t think it would be that much of a hassle, it being four letters and all, but…” He spread his hands in a helpless gesture, then clasped them again. Directing his attention onto the flowers, he asked: “Are they giving you trouble, lady-consort?”

“You can call me Dawn. It’s all right.”

“I don’t think your husband would appreciate that.”

“Oh, he’s not so scary once you get to know him. He doesn’t like all the formality any more than I do.”

“If you say so.”

Dawn was a Level 7 Farmer. Attractive in a bland sort of way, she was so slim and delicate that she gave the impression of a fragile porcelain doll, something to be placed behind glass and never touched. Will suspected that Brimstone had married her in large part because she was low-leveled and harmless, meaning he did not need to worry quite so much about her putting something sharp in his back.

He felt bad for her, being essentially confined to this haunted old keep. She probably had not had all that much choice when it came to her marriage vows. He had met her a few times since she had moved in some six months ago, and to her credit it seemed as though she was shouldering her fate admirably.

Surely she did not actually love Brimstone. He did not see how anyone could fall in love with a man like that, and it had little to do with his looks.

“Those might be over-Nurtured, you know,” Will commented idly.

Dawn turned back to her flowers. “Oh, that didn’t cross my mind at all! You think so?”

“That's my guess. It looks to me like some parts have grown faster than the rest can keep up with. Try not Nurturing them for a few days and see if they perk up.”

“Thanks! I’ll do that. Do you know a lot about flowers?”

“Mostly the killing kind.”

The smile Dawn directed his way was apologetic. “Well, that’s—”

“My good Misfortune!” thundered a voice across the garden.

Resisting the urge to flinch took some effort, and he forced himself to turn slowly to face the man coming down the low steps.

Brimstone, a Level 23 Cook, chuckled at his own pun as he approached. He was clad in drab grays and browns that hung loosely on his tall frame, threadbare enough that, divorced from context, Will would sooner have believed the man was a pauper than a lord.

He might have been handsome once, but it was almost impossible to tell at this point, because every bit of exposed skin on him looked like melted candle wax, so badly matted with slick burn scars that Will could hardly make out any of the features beneath. His face was terrible to look upon; lips burned away to bare a permanent snarl, a sharp scrap of bone all that remained of his nose. He had only more scars where hair and eyebrows should have been, and his eyes were weepy and bloodshot.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“My lord,” Will said in a firm voice, refusing to divert his gaze.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Master One-Eye. I am in dire need of your talents.” His voice had a wet, thick quality, words bleeding together due to a lack of lips to enunciate with.

“Whatever you ask, it will be done.”

“And thank you for entertaining my wife, as well. I fear she gets lonely, caught up in my politicking as I am.”

Dawn stood to meet his embrace and kissed his disfigured cheek without any visible unease. Brimstone eventually broke the hug, but remained close enough to run red, livid fingers through her golden hair. “I would try to find her some friends, but there are so few people I can trust.”

“It’s a difficult thing,” Will hedged.

Another man had followed Brimstone into the garden, nearly invisible in the shadow of his master. He was called Handsome, and the name suited him—at least in a room with only the lord and himself. He had a face like a withered winter apple, a pair of tiny eyes set into its wrinkles. His thinning hair was combed neatly, and his clothes were somehow finer than Brimstone’s, shining silk trousers and a bright-green vest with puffy shoulders, an embroidered collar, and buttons made of pearl.

A Level 16 Trader, he ostensibly served as Brimstone’s advisor and treasurer. Will guessed that there was something more hidden behind those tiny shrewd eyes—indeed, his level alone made him someone to be watchful of. An SP crystal swirling with amber light sat on his arm, just as it did on the lord’s.

“Would you run along now, dear?” Brimstone asked, disentangling his fingers from her hair to pat her softly on the head. “I would like to speak with my man alone.”

“Of course,” Dawn replied lightly, and touched his arm. “Don’t take too long. Tonight, remember? You promised.”

Brimstone gave a rasping chuckle. “Of course. I’ll be there. Handsome, will you accompany my wife to her rooms?”

The advisor inclined his head in a small bow. “Of course, lord.”

If Lady-Consort Dawn had any reservations at being shooed off like a dog, she did not show it.

Left alone in the garden with his liege lord, Will was starkly reminded of the impermanence and fragility of all the living things around him. How greedily the flames would swallow all this greenery if Brimstone decided he was having a bad day.

But Brimstone looked unusually serene, his intense gaze wandering and perhaps even taking in some of the beauty on display. Getting married might have been good for him, after all.

Will shifted the rifle case uncomfortably, its strap digging into his shoulder. “Might I ask what you would like of me, my lord?” he prodded when it became clear that the man’s attention would not return anytime soon.

Brimstone’s gaze swiveled onto Will, irises like cold ice nestled in fine webs of agitated blood vessels, and he almost wished he hadn’t spoken.

“There’s a man I’d like you to kill,” Brimstone said. “He goes by the name Philly Upnorth. Do you know of him?”

Will shook his head.

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. He is a Trader from the northeast—a merchant, ostensibly—sent as an envoy from Lady Winter to treat with me and establish a permanent trade embassy here. He arrived from Stormfront just a few days ago.”

It was not surprising that Lady Winter had sent someone. If the rumors could be believed, Brimstone was planning to cut off his support to Stormfront. Without regular supply shipments from the coastal cities, the inland fortress would surely wither and die.

Though he knew it was not healthy to pry too much, Will could not resist asking: “What has this man done to displease you, my lord?”

“He plots my murder, Master One-Eye,” Brimstone hissed, and his eyes that had been placid a moment ago were suddenly alive with an unwholesome intensity, rheumy and wide as cups. “Lady Winter has sent him here to kill me. Once she has dispensed with those of the Lords’ Council who will not kneel to her, she would make herself queen of the Sixth Octant. I know it.”

Will had enough self-preservation instinct to swallow the obvious follow-up question—how had he learned this information, exactly? Brimstone had a famously tenuous relationship with reality. Maybe he had seen his fellow regent’s murderous intent in a dream, or the flames had whispered it to him, or he had simply made it up. Then again, it could just as easily be true. None of the lords of Octant Six were known to be particularly fast friends.

“I’m sorry, my lord, but won’t killing her envoy cause open hostilities with Stormfront?”

“Yes—I fear that it will.” The lord seemed to shrink in on himself, becoming smaller. He did not wear a crown, but his head certainly looked as though it suffered the wearying weight of one. “There is no other choice. She has forced the matter now. I can’t continue to ignore the witch.”

Again, Will feared to state the obvious. Sheerhome could not afford open conflict with Stormfront any more than the reverse—Lord Brimstone, the most powerful man in his domain, was Level 23.

Winter was Level 30—the highest possible under the Concord system—which made her one of the most powerful people not just in the Sixth Octant, but the entire Frontier. Brimstone had a militia of maybe a thousand Laborers. Winter commanded an army at least ten times that size, and had the power to raise the dead; if the stories were to be believed, anyway.

Her fortress was the only thing standing between burgeoning monster hordes and the—relatively speaking—defenseless coastal cities of the Sixth Octant.

One way or another, Brimstone was signing away the lives of everyone under his rule by courting war with Stormfront.

The lord watched him expectantly.

Will bit back his protests. He had no choice.

“Of course, my lord,” he said. “I will kill this Upnorth for you.”

Brimstone nodded his approval. “Good man. I want you to make it messy—no poisons this time, understand?”

Will ground his teeth in silence, any thoughts he’d had of setting up a killing that looked like an accident instantly evaporating. “Yes, my lord. I will need a day or two to plan my approach.”

“Very well, but don’t dawdle. I don’t want to give the killer time to organize the agents that the witch has embedded in my city.”

“I understand.”

Will felt a strange numbness coupled with a sense of impending doom as he dragged himself out of the lord’s keep, ignoring Captain Griff’s jeering on the way out.

There was no way to get out of this. The pieces he needed to kill Brimstone were still not in place. He had no reliable way of actually killing the man, and he had no one to put in the lord's chair once the ass of its current occupant was no longer warming it.

His timeline had just been accelerated. If he couldn’t avert a conflict with Stormfront, he at least had to rid Sheerhome of Lord Brimstone before he caused even more irreparable damage.

This is bad. Really, really bad.

Will turned his steps toward Joe Crag’s tavern; to get information, to plan a murder, and to have a fucking drink.