One wall of the hallway was hot—so hot that if Benno wasn’t Benno it would likely have melted the skin from his hand as he ran his palm along it.

The hallway was dark and very long. Up ahead, a flickering orange light beckoned—or cautioned. Benno was reminded of the corridor beneath the Everson Family’s mansion, with its enclosures and its dim, flickering torches. It makes sense, he thought, though then wasn’t sure what, exactly, made sense, and needed to abandon the thought as he emerged from the hallway.

A cavernous room—a chamber—black stone floors, black stone walls, a black stone ceiling yawning overhead maybe hundreds of feet. Torches burned along the walls, casting frightened shadows. It reminded Benno of how he imagined the interior of an Egyptian tomb might feel—and with that thought came a cascade of additional thoughts, confusions and realizations, that fluttered and bled through his mind and refused to still or reveal themselves.

There was a single doorway carved from the wall on the room’s opposite side. Standing on either side of it were two people. They were, of course, tall, and clad in black robes. They stood perfectly still, staring straight ahead from dark eyes.

Benno walked across the chamber, his wet sneakers scrrrching. The two guards were both women. Each wore her hair braided in thick pleats down opposite shoulders. Each also wore similar dark makeup to the woman he’d spoken to on the boulevard. They stared ahead, ignoring Benno even as he slowed to a stop mere feet away.

“Hey,” he said, his voice echoing off the chamber’s dry walls.

The guards did not react.

Benno cleared his throat. “I’m looking for…” He trailed off. He was looking for Onus, that much he knew. But the last person he’d mentioned that to had laughed at him. And why, exactly, was he looking for Onus? Well because Edda had told him to. But what happened when, or if, he found him? Was Benno’s work over? Or was it, as he feared, just beginning?

“I have business with the Eyes of Horus,” he said, borrowing the phrasing.

The guards—who were both, Benno decided, easily eleven feet tall—continued to stare straight ahead, though each extended her respective arm nearest the doorway, clasping the other’s hand across it.

“No,” said one.

“You do not,” said the other.

Benno took a slow breath. Was this worth it? Was Onus even here? He didn’t know, but, without any obvious recourse, he decided he had to see it through.

“I do,” he said, reaching into the neck of his raincoat and tucking Holes down toward his chest. “And I will not leave until I’ve had an audience.”

Now the guards’ eyes lowered toward him.

“Leave, shrunken wittol,” said one.

“Or we will split you in half,” said the other.

Benno held their gazes. “I do not want to hurt you,” he said, surprising himself with the rush of confidence the statement stirred in him.

Holes tucked itself lower, its threads clinging to Benno’s shirt.

The guard to Benno’s right—still holding the other’s hand—raised her other arm. In her fist, a long scythe, black like everything else. In an instant it was raised high, its blade glinting in the firelight, and then descended, whistling through the dry air.

Benno raised his hand, as one might to hail a cab.

The blade collided with his palm. There was a wink of sparks, and the scythe exploded into fragments like glass beneath a thrown brick.

The guards released one another’s hands. The one to Benno’s left now drew her own scythe, pivoted to Benno’s side, and swung horizontally. The blade struck Benno in his lower back—right around his kidneys—and it too shattered to pieces.

For a moment the two guards stood, their stances poised, their dark eyes wide. Then four more blades appeared, short blades, one in each hand, and blurs of black metal danced toward Benno. He had two options: in one, he could stand and await the onslaught, allow the guards to tire themselves out and attempt to reason with them once they were exhausted; in the other, he could subdue them, hasten this whole process, and save them their embarrassment.

Holes nestled tightly against his chest inside the raincoat, trembling. The clangs of the breaking scythes and the sense of dangerous movement must be terrifying to the little flower. Though he barely knew Holes—whatever there was to know—he felt an undeniable commitment to protect the creature. And though Benno could afford to withstand blows from the guard’s blades, one bad strike to his chest was all it would take to crush the delicate flower into dust.

A blade struck Benno’s neck. He felt the metal bend under the blow, and a violent reverberation ring forth, which sent one of the guards staggering. The second guard had repositioned herself behind Benno, and thrust forward at the back of his head.

Benno spun. The blade skirted his cheek, grinding, and the guard continued forward with her own momentum, her long arm nearly all the way past Benno. He hooked his own arm around hers, over her elbow, and he squeezed.

There was a damp crunch. The blade in the guard’s hand clattered to the stone floor, and as Benno released her she staggered backward, collapsing onto her knees. She stared up, her dark eyes tearing, her whole body shaking, cradling her shattered arm in the other. Small, pained noises rose up from her throat.

Benno turned to the other guard, who’d retreated against the wall. For a moment she looked back at him, still clutching her blades, then dropped them to the floor.

“I have business with the eyes of Horus,” Benno restated. “I will not leave until I’ve had an audience.” Then, his heart breaking from the noises of the injured guard, he turned back to her. “Goddammit,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

#

After exiting a stone elevator illuminated only by a single torch on the elevator’s wall—and which had churned him up a dark stone shaft for minutes and minutes—Benno found himself in a room markedly different than the chamber downstairs.

There was a long gray table near the far wall with nothing on it but a hunk of polished onyx on a pedestal; a pair of chairs, upholstered in black leather, on one side of the table, and a larger chair, its high back adorned with dark red inlay, on the other; a shelf against the wall lined with additional dark sculptures and a short row of leather-bound books; a lamp—not firelight—standing in one corner, casting the space in a yellow glow. The floor was smooth, black wood. The walls were papered in black. A single doorless doorway stood open onto darkness on the wall opposite the elevator.

And then there were the windows. The entire length of the wall behind the table was lined with them—six in total. Benno was just tall enough to stand on his tiptoes and look out.

Below, a carpet of reddish mist. Through it, the spires of buildings rose, tapering into points, their exteriors littered with windows, high into the clear, starry sky. From Benno’s vantage, he guessed he was in the tallest building in the city, and near the top. He looked to the left, where the towers of the suspension bridge he’d walked over breached the mist, and beyond it, the shorter spires of the buildings lining the boulevard—and hundreds of other buildings beyond those. Those spires were dark points, illuminated only by the starlight. But on this side of the city, atop the buildings surrounding the one from which Benno looked out, the spires were adorned with neon signs—all the bleeding lights he’d seen through the mist—in every array of color, some flashing, some glowing continuously, all of them—scores—depictions of the same image:

A pair of eyes.

Benno could not see them from the window, given they were directly overhead, but he could sense the real eyes—the Eyes of Horus—staring, lidless, down at the city and its neon mimicries.

“What is this called?” Holes asked, perched on the shoulder of Benno’s raincoat, gazing out from wide petals at the strange cityscape below.

“It’s a city,” said Benno. “I don’t know its name.”

“Can we call it Holes?”

“No. Holes is taken.”

After several minutes, Benno grew dizzy from the view, and shuffled his way to the shelf. He was told—by the guard whose arm he hadn’t snapped to pieces—to wait, and that someone would be there to speak with him shortly. That someone had yet to appear, and though it had only been a few minutes, Benno couldn’t help but wonder if they were biding their time trying to figure out what to do with him. For their sakes, he hoped that wasn’t the case.

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Hanging over the shelf, suspended from the high ceiling on a thin chain, was a bronze statue of a man. He stood with one leg lifted, and his arms outstretched. From his raised foot and hands, bells dangled. His face was downturned, his brow furrowed in grief, grimacing at his enormous, barbed penis—a third the size of his entire body—which stood erect before him. There was an engraving along the penis, and Benno turned his head sideways to read it. A Tintinnabulum…

“A Tintinnabulum Depicting a Man Struggling with his Phallus and his Nature as a Raping Beast.”

Benno turned.

A woman stood at the doorway. Her white hair hung nearly to the floor. Her skin was ashen, and her eyes shadowed in gold. Her clothes were gray, fitted, and adorned with gold buttons. She strode across the room slowly, her pale eyes scanning the length of Benno’s beard, then leaned against the table, folded her arms over her chest, and stared at him in silence.

Behind her, two more guards emerged from the doorway and took up positions on either side. These two—again both women—wore similar gray clothes to the white-haired woman, and featureless gray masks with attenuated eye holes, not unlike the one Edda used to wear. Each guard carried an enormous black sword—two-thirds the length of her body—held vertically upside-down by the handle so the blades’ points hovered an inch from the floor. These guards, Benno conceded, appeared far more formidable than the ones downstairs, and though he knew it made no difference to his personal safety, he decided—for reasons he couldn’t exactly put his finger on—it might benefit him, for now, to pretend that it did.

He shifted his weight, managing to shrink under the white-haired woman’s gaze. “That guard downstairs,” he said. “Is her arm okay?”

The white-haired woman frowned and grinned at once. “You should know that were the Sowers on station—let alone the Chieftain—you would be in two halves. But the First Twins of the Scattered King are overseeing the front lines in Albeddon. You bested a secondary guard. So do not be prideful. And do not attempt the same with my personal security if you ever want to leave this room.” She gestured to the two gray guards at the door.

Benno nodded slowly, grasping at what hints he could parse. Twins. The First Twins of the Scattered King. Mother had called Edda the Thirty-third Daughter of the Scattered King. She’d also called her the Heart of Horus.

“Are you… the Eyes of Horus?” he asked.

The woman’s frown deepened, and her grin faltered. “As I said, the First Twins of the Scattered King—the Eyes of Horus—are away. I am Langley Galatin, the Tears of the Eyes of Horus. And until their return, I am the closest thing to an audience you will receive from them. And you are lucky even for this.”

Benno nodded again. “And is Onus one of those twins?”

Langley’s grin disappeared completely, and she uncrossed her arms. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Benno Haim—”

“And I’m Holes!”

“—I’m… friends with Edda.”

Now it was Langley’s turn to nod, her eyes scanning the floor briefly and the grin returning to her lips. “So the prodigal runt, banished from Luridia under the threat of death, sends a member of her ridiculous club, a shrunken wittol no less—and a stupid and grievously ill-informed one at that—in her stead to say or do what, exactly?”

Benno outspread his hands. “People keep calling me that. Shrunken wittol. What does it mean?”

Langley’s nose wrinkled. “Wittols are men who embrace their wives’ disloyalty. All men are wittols. All men but the Scattered King. You are shrunken because you are small.”

Benno shrugged. “I haven’t seen a lot of men here,” he said. “In fact, I haven’t seen any.”

“The Scattered King has only one son. The rest of us are his daughters.”

“You’re all his daughters?”

Langley peered at Benno.

“Even them?” Benno pointed to the guards.

“Only those born from conjugality enjoy the rights of heirdom.” Langley exhaled. “But consider now that you are wasting my time. You injured a federal employee, and it is not our custom to reward terrorism. I am willing to extend some patience for the fact that you displayed an initial aversion to violence, and because my curiosity as to your arrival here has perhaps gotten the better of me. But my patience is not unlimited.”

“I’m here because Edda asked me to find her brother, Onus,” Benno said. “It was the last thing she said… before she died.”

A moment passed, Langley’s long, gold-tipped fingers tracing the corner of the table, her gaze somewhere off in the corner of the room. Her jaw clenched with thought.

“When?” she asked, finally.

“Seven years ago.”

“It took you seven years to arrive here?”

Benno ran his hand through his beard. “It’s a long story.”

“How did she die?”

Benno weighed how much to disclose to Langley about Edda’s death. At this stage, he figured, it was pointless to obfuscate. Either she was going to help lead him to Onus or she wasn’t. “She was killed,” he said. “By the Everson Family.”

Langley stood from the edge of the table and took several slow paces across the room.

“And you’re right,” Benno went on. “I am ill-informed. In fact, I only knew Edda for three days before she died. I’d never heard of Onus, or the First Twins of the Scattered King or about this Realm or anything having to do with any of it. All Edda talked about up until then was her search for the Gard—”

“Be quiet!” Langley hissed, turning toward Benno in a swift movement, her white hair fanning and her pale eyes coruscating with dark light. “Do not speak of Edda’s activities in this place, or any other.”

Benno raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

Langley crossed the entirety of the room in just two strides, and towered over Benno. It occurred to him that everyone he’d met in this Realm was taller than Edda by at least two feet, and the idea that Edda was considered a runt by these women’s standards was a tough perspective-shift to swallow.

“You are naive and you are reckless,” Langley half-whispered, stooping over Benno. “Your friend was an anarchist and a blasphemer. She and the Lonely Son plotted against the Nation of Luridia and against our Scattered King, from whom everything they had and ever would have was given. It is not only unsurprising that she earned the scorn of the Everson Family, but undoubtedly deserved.”

Benno studied Langley’s face. Behind her furious brow, her dark eyes, the crook of her lips, there was something leaking through. Something undeniable.

“You were friends,” Benno said.

Langley’s scowl disintegrated into surprise, but only for a moment. Then she straightened up, pushed the curtain of long white locks aside—which immediately fell back in front of her face—and shook her head gravely. “Before she made her choices, maybe.”

“I get it,” Benno said. “I didn’t really like her, either. She was… pompous.”

Langley scoffed.

“And condescending. But she was also passionate, in her own way. I mean yeah, she was a murderer, but who isn’t? She also gave some of us a purpose…” Benno startled himself as his throat tightened. “…For the first time in a long time. It was vague and it was fraught, but it was something. Hermann, he was a sweet old shrunken wittol. He would’ve followed Edda to Hell, and ultimately did. Helen—you might’ve liked her—she was a hoot. A really good hang. Isaac was a nice kid doing the best he could with a tough hand, so to speak. Dante just wanted to make Edda proud. And there was a girl. I don’t know who she was but…” Benno lowered his face. “They’re all gone. Now, it’s not just my fault—I’m done doing that to myself—but I had a part to play. And I have a part to play now. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know it’s mine. Whatever I thought I needed—to go back or undo something—I was wrong. I need to go forward. It’s all anyone can do, after all. We’re all here. Here we all are.”

Langley blinked slowly, and for a moment Benno thought she might nod, stoically, in understanding. Instead she shrugged her eyebrows. “Those names mean nothing to me.”

Benno tsked. “So are you gonna tell me how to find Onus?”

“I will not abet Edda’s—or your—pursuit of discord.”

Benno thought for a moment. “Well I guess in that case… You said the Twins were in—what was it?—Albeddon? I could just head there and ask them directly. I’m sure they’ll understand that you couldn’t deal with it on your end. You must have a lot going on.”

Langley scowled out from the columns of her white hair, her shoulders rising and falling. “I will have you ripped to pieces.”

Benno shook his head slowly.

“What are you?” Langley asked, her eyes narrow.

Benno chewed the inside of his lip, trying, sincerely, to produce a suitable answer. “I don’t know,” he said.

A moment unfurled, the only sound the dry breath entering and exiting Langley’s nostrils. “Onus is a criminal and a disgrace,” she said finally. “He is facing agony for his crimes.”

“Where?”

“I promise you do not want to go there.”

“Where?”

“…The Lonely Son of the Scattered King is serving out his six-hundred-thousand year sentence in the Bathhouse.”

“The Bathhouse? Is that somewhere here? In Luridia?”

“It is a disparate Realm overseen by a being whose appetites are conducive to captivity and torment.” Langley’s nose wrinkled again. “Both of which Onus deserves. If you do manage somehow to find him there, you will not like how you find him.”

Benno reflected on how hit or miss Gemma was when it came to Realm travel. The Bathhouse felt vague enough that he was confident Gemma would come back at him with an ERROR INTERFERENCE NUMBER…

“You wouldn’t happen to have the Realm code, would you?”

#

Benno decided to exit the building and walk back out into the misty square before using the Gemstoke. It had nothing to do with wanting to keep Gemma a secret from Langley—he assumed Langley was aware of Gemma, and it was obvious that Luridia had its own means of Realm travel—but rather that for some reason he’d come to think of Realm hopping—the crush of whirring darkness—as a private endeavor.

He walked along the train tracks. Around him, the obscured lights of the window displays bled in the mist. Holes sat atop his head, its petals outstretched toward the sky, drinking the rain.

“I’m so thirsty,” it said between gulps. “The air in that place was dry.”

Benno stopped near the middle of the square and looked back up the length of the tower from which he’d just emerged.

From the break in the clouds, the two eyeballs stared down at him from orange irises.

“I’m going to offer again,” Benno said, lifting Holes from his head and holding him in his palms at eye-level. “I can return you to the Inn. You can watch a movie—there’s one I think you might really like, it’s called Little Shop of Horrors. And you’ll be safe there.”

“I was safe here,” Holes said.

“Yes, but… There was a hairy moment. And this place, I think, is very safe relative to where we’re going next.”

Holes chewed this over, its anthers glistening with rainwater in the pit of its face. “I’d like you to stop asking me,” it said.

“Stop asking you what?”

“If I want to return to the Inn. I don’t. I want to go with you. I want to see things, even if they’re dry or dangerous. And then, when we’re done, we can watch movies together.”

Benno sighed and nodded. “Fair enough.” He placed Holes on his shoulder and took one more look around at the square. The white light of an approaching train cut through the mist, speeding toward the square from the bridge. Benno pulled the yellow hood of his raincoat over his head and raised Gemma to his lips. The train’s horn blared as it raced forward, and then hurdled past where he’d been, black smoke seething from its stack, and plunged into the flames of the mantle at the base of the tower, spiriting its solemn cargo wherever it led.