Chapter Nine

Injustice, Watching, Revenge

I woke up to total darkness and unfamiliar voices asking me to be still and lie down. My head was aching with a sharp, incisive bolt of pain, as if a rod-long needle were plunged into my skull and jutting out of the side of my neck. I groaned. The voices grew louder, and sounded more and more concerned.

“Delmar, brother,” I moaned in confusion and pain. “The tower…it’s not safe.”

“Keep still, young College Lance,” the voice urged me. “You’re in a lot of pain. You need to rest and keep still so you can heal.”

I struggled, squirming and writhing in complete darkness, wholly devoid of my eyesight. I could feel now that my face was covered with rolls of gauze. My hands were wrapped tightly with bandages, right around my knuckles. My ears had began to ring, further blurring the voices that were hoping to coax and calm me down. “Kazador…he sabotaged your project…:”

“We’ve given you different herbs, young Lance, and you might notice a slight nausea. Your vision might be a bit strange now.”

I felt someone’s hands now on my face. I winced in pain. They were unwrapping the gauze from my face, and I could feel skin and dried blood sticking and peeling and tearing off along with the bandages.

I could see again…but the world did seem strange. My vision was lopsided. Was it the concoctions and herbs they had given me while I was knocked out?

No.

I simply could not see out my right eye.

“What happened to me?” I groaned, panicked.

“You were hurt in the Wallwright’s Yard when Delmar’s project had failed and collapsed.” I saw her now, the source of the voice, a sicksister from the college’s infirmary. “An unsupported iron beam swung out and lashed into the side of your face. Your eye, I’m afraid, was unrecoverable, but please understand that you are simply lucky to be alive.”

Lucky to be alive. The words weighed heavy on me. Objectively, some luck was on my side, after all. The past few years’ flight from home in Dalintaya, to Listerborough, to Fleur d’Lain, to Avengard had been a perilous one, and anyone could see that some fortune had been on my side in surviving that journey.

“And what of Delmar?” I asked, urgently. “How is he?”

The sicksister dropped her gaze to the floor. That was all the answer that I had needed. Strangely, yet again, the smell of sulphur seemed to tinge my nose, though this time, I paid it no mind.

And so I wept. I felt hot tears mixed with blood start to slowly trickle down my cheeks. This worried the sicksister some, but she knew better than to ask me to do otherwise. Instead, she simply picked off a fresh piece of cotton from a tray, and began to dab at my face, with special care around where my right eye had once been.

After I had wept, she explained to me how to care for my injuries. She explained to me take a simple herbal concoction of celandine, blue myrtle, and sunflower oil, so as dull the splitting headaches that I could expect from now on. She had also stressed how unusual it was that I was able to live at all, or even be awake and speaking to her. As if I had some otherworldly being watching over me - something I most definitely doubted.

The sicksister gave me an eyepatch to wear, once the wounds from my eye had dried enough to wear one. It was a boiled brown leather patch, with the college’s insignia printed on it in a subtle bronze - simply a small icon of a cannon in front of a beam compass. It would have to do.

Ceecee and Maren visited, thankfully, and kept me company the following morning after a restless, nightmare-fueled night, once they had heard that I had awaken. Once they expressed their relief to see me alive and shared their grief with me in mourning for Delmar, I asked them if they had seen Kazador recently.

I explained further, “…Once I had broken into his chest, I found his journal, you see. Inside, he confessed to the most insane, the most vile behaviour I had ever seen with my own eyes.” Ceecee very visibly suppressed a sharp quip. I pressed on, “Delmar himself had trusted Kazador with his tower. With his life. And Kazador, that dwarf had betrayed him. Killed him. Sabotaged his tower with his calculations. That’s why his tower had collapsed!”

Ceecee’s eyes grew wide, but Maren seemed slightly more skeptical.

“I don’t know, Scipio, that’s an awfully large finger you’re pointing over at Kazador there,” she muttered under her breath. “Did you take the journal maybe? Something you could use as proof?”

“No. I had thrown it back into his personal chest. The only thing that was on my mind was warning Delmar, getting him off that tower. But that shouldn’t matter,” I snarled. “Everyone knows Kazador’s been out for Delmar. Everyone knows that dwarf was on the lookout for any chance of ending his life. Or any of our lives! With his damned story about who should or shouldn’t be an engineer…”

Maren persisted, “Scip, that’s why you have to be careful. If you start trouble for Kazador, nothing will happen to him, but he might get started on you. Or us.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Start trouble? Maren, have you lost your heart? He murdered Delmar - our friend! - and you’re more worried about what might become of us?”

“Delmar probably would have made a mistake with that tower anyway,” she commented without thinking, and I screamed at her to leave. I yelled at her at the top of my lungs, with enough passion that my throat began to swell and my head began to ache. Maren did not retract her words, nor did she apologize for what she said, and so she left.

“You didn’t have to s-scream at her like that, you know,” Ceecee bit her lip as she spoke softly, as if she were wary that I might scream at her as I did to Maren. She couldn’t meet my gaze, and gave the walls a sidewards glance as she spoke instead.

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“I know,” I told her in as reassuring a tone as I could muster. “But it’s not right. Delmar woke as hard as anyone building that tower, sketching up those plans. It was Kazador that brought that tower down, not Delmar.”

“I b-believe you, Scip. But Maren also made a good a-argument. Kazador can’t be t-touched. He’s too good of a m-mason for the college not to send him to the lines. He’d come after us instead,” she murmured.

“Injustice,” I said, and that was all I could think to say.

“I know,” she whispered. “In my f-family, Scipio, well…we littlings have a strong s-sense of that. Of seeing when something is right and when something is wrong. We see it, and everytime it happens, it b-burns a hole in our hearts. But at the end of the day, there’s not much we can do. But we learn to live with it. Keep the injustice in a little b-box locked away. And maybe one day we’ll get to open that box and do something about it. But until then, we live on…”

There was nothing else we could do. Their reasoning was sound. We bid our goodbyes, and Ceecee left me so that I could rest on that infirmary bed and recover. Her words stewed and simmered relentlessly in my mind. A little box? Locked away?

Soon enough, evening came, and as the rest of the college descended into sleep, I laid there steadfast, wide awake. My mind whirred with possibilities, with options. I considered what would happen if I had told the Professor, if I had told the Watch at Kreuzhain, if I broke into Kazador’s chest again to retrieve evidence, if I sent a letter detailing the situation back to his clan…

All so very minuscule courses of action to take to avenge the death of a friend. All worthless and senseless in the long run. Futile in the face of a dwarf whose power and influence reached parts of the world I couldn’t even fathom…

…And soon enough, I had lulled into a gentle slumber.

Or was it?

I felt as if I were still there, still in the magelight torch-lit of the infirmary. My body felt firmly grounded in that stiff straw bed. I could feel the bandages still wrapped tightly around my knuckles. The ache of my back from not having stood up for three days then.

But I opened my eye, and I could see it. Her. The spirit. That strange wisp-like form floating above my infirmary bed, with two glowing beads of a dark blue light hanging on it like eyes, watching me.

The air grew colder, like a deep chill, like a deep and dark cellar in the wintertime. The magelight seemed to flicker unnaturally from the sides of my vision, but I could not turn my head to look. I could not move at all.

My brain told me that I should have been alarmed, that I should have been scared. My brain told me to get up and run and flee and call for help.

My body refused to move. My heart remained calm. Tranquil.

And more than anything, more than what I could see of that strange ethereal form hanging over me, I could smell sulphur. It was the smell of burnt torches and expended brimstone. Of weapons of war being crafted in a forge. Of Ignisclaw breathing fire down on the ruins of Avengard.

And then a voice. Not one heard with the ears, but one felt deep in the bones, in my skull. It was a feminine voice, soft, like a delicate silk laid over a fresh corpse.

“It is time,” the spirit said, wisps of translucent black color melting in and out of existence from the contours of its silhouette as it spoke. A visage of a feminine figure, fading in and out of existence.

“Who are you?” I attempted to ask it, but I could not move my mouth.

Still, the spirit answered the question, as if it had read my own mind, “I am She Who Takes. I consume the world, and I wait beyond the very veil of grief and mourning. The Lady of Nightshade, of the Eternal Evening.”

Still, my heart remained tranquil. The hairs on my skin, on the back of my neck, on my arms, began to raise. The room grew ever colder with a chill that reached my bones.

“Injustice,” the spirit said simply, echoing my own words from earlier that day.

“Watching.”

“Revenge.”

I groaned suddenly, as if a crashing wave of emotion and energy filled my soul, and I could move freely. The dull throb in my head was gone. The pain in my knuckles was gone. The stiffness in my back, gone. I could move again. I felt as if I could move better, quicker, faster than I ever could have in my whole life.

I looked up towards the spirit and it was not there, but the smell of sulphur remained. The deep chill remained. My injuries, however, were nowhere to be found.

A sense of rage and righteous fury enveloped me, and I got up to my feet. My eyes met a mirror, and I could see myself for the first time since that fateful day. I removed the bandages wrapped around my head, and underneath, I got my first look of the eyepatch that I was wearing, my new face for the rest of my life.

But stranger than anything else, I could see now that my eye that did remain had lost all of its color. It was jet black, opaque like a starless night, and from it emanated a faint glow, similar to the smoke-like wisps that had surrounded the spirit. The manifestation, I had reasoned, of the Lady of Loss.

I found no inhibitions keeping me from associating with her, despite what I had been taught again and again as a child. Despite her status as an Exiled One, a forbidden god, worshiped only by the deranged and the few.

And her words echoed and pounded in my heart.

Injustice.

Watching.

Revenge.

I did not want to merely watch. I wanted revenge. I would exact my revenge on Kazador, the dwarf that had murdered my brother. That had looked on me as less than human, that had belittled my potential, my ambition. My power to create.

I will end him.

“Give me Kazador,” I whispered to myself with a bloodthirst that I had never heard myself speak with. I walked out of the infirmary with swift but deliberate steps, the look on my face determined and unmoving as I did.

I entered the Tinkerer’s Workshop. It was unlocked.

Then, I got to work.

I do not recall, how much time I spent in that workshop. Hours passed by without my notice, and I worked on as swiftly in the fifth hour as I did in the first. I did not tire. I did not relent.

I do not recall, also, what was flowing through the confines of my mind as I worked. I do not remember what reasonings I had for which components I chose, nor which compounds I mixed with other alloys. My hands blended with the hammer and with the forge. And even in the heat of the roaring hearth, still, my skin felt cold and chilled to the touch.

And with the forge as with the anvil, I crafted a metal barrel, born out of divine inspiration, and strong enough to contain the explosive force and outward pressures of blackpowder interacting with flame.

And I continued to work, stopping for no food nor drink nor rest. With incredible dexterity and nimbleness that would have rivaled Ceecee herself, I crafted an intricate firing mechanism that utilized the Flintstrike Gloves I had procured from Kazador’s personal chest. Whilst wearing the gloves, with my thumb on the base of the barrel, I could pull at a trigger with my other finger, causing a pin to strike against the enchanted gloves and direct a small flame towards the blackpowder pot that would create the controlled explosion propelling iron shot towards the target.

And with the barrel and with the trigger, I had solved the majority of the problems I had encountered in testing with Ceecee - except one. The volatility of the blackpowder itself.

And, through no rhetoric nor means of rational thought, and by pure intuition, I pulled an alchemist’s kit from one of the workshop drawers, and I started mixing blackpowder with saltpeter, as had been done before by different engineers, smiths, and artillerists before me, but I added one new compound to the solution.

Sulphur.

Once I had mixed enough of the powder to my liking, I poured a fair amount into the hand cannon’s blackpowder pot, and the rest into a small leather pouch that I kept by my belt.

Then I drew the cannon, and pulled the trigger, and the shot was true, and the apple that we had kept on the stool for testing splattered onto the wall behind it.

I loaded another bearing of iron shot into the hand cannon, and slipped it into my cloak.

It was time to go hunting.

I would have Kazador’s soul delivered to the Lady of Loss.