Reaper moved through the streets clinging close to the long shadows cast far out of the alleyways of Great College, heading covertly down towards the river behind the tall backs of the flooding streetlamps. The rain was marring the sounds of his boots upon the pavement and the cobbles, but every few moments his cough would get the best of him, and he would cover his mouth with a palm and hack, sometimes flecking his skin with blood.
He hadn’t been followed--at least, the wards he had placed around himself weren’t drawing any of his attention to wandering eyes that might be lingering upon him from deeper shadows--and to his knowledge, when he had left the tube station at St. James’s Park, the platforms had only been populated by a few aimless Commoners, none of which had given him so much as a second glance. When one of the haggard bunch of scum who had been sitting on the stairs panhandling reached up and grabbed the edge of his cloak as he ascended, he had flung out two fingers with a flick of silver, freezing him solid as if he were made of ice. Totally paralyzed, he had toppled head-first down the grimey steps, his band of Common rats clamoring after him in a frenzy of curses and shouts to keep him upright. By the time they had caught him near the bottom of the steps, the man had been freed of his sudden onset of rigor, and he looked up glassy-eyed at the lip of the station stairs, but Reaper had slipped neatly beyond the edge and into the misty night air.
After ransacking the flat earlier that day and coming up empty-handed, Reaper and Fran had taken the liberty of sending an Orb missive to Larson, informing him that the flat had been empty on their arrival and they had meticulously turned over every last inch within it in vain. Lars had berated them both, chewing them out so thoroughly for accomplishing nothing that their ears had both rung long after he closed the Orb. Before he had dismissed them, though, he had snarled through the static of the weak connection from Brink that they were being assigned their next posts that evening--Fran was going to be briefed in the hideout in Brink, and Reaper was to head to the Known water’s edge in the piss-poor hours of the deep night in order to receive the information.
From there, he and Fran had watched from a nook on a nearby rooftop as the Seeker had flown down the sidewalk and returned to the flat, shortly followed by another younger member of the Guild.
“Should we just go kill them both now?” Fran had asked, cracking his bony knuckles against the brick wall they huddled beside to bar the wind. “They won’t be suspecting another intrusion.”
“No,” Reaper had eyed the young man as harshly as if he had made a particularly noxious joke. “We don’t make moves without orders.”
“But they’re right there.”
Morse grimaced. “As much as I’d like to wipe the Guild off the face of this God-awful world, it’d be a fool's errand to take two of them on at once.”
“You think we can’t handle two underbelly scrubs?” Fran seethed with the wounding of his ego. “It’s the perfect time to get this over with!”
“You’d be brain-dead before you got through the door, weakly equipped as you are,” Morse snapped at the boy. “A Seeker like Avery would destroy you from the inside out without a second’s hesitation. You want to show some real balls there, Fran? Practice warding. You are so feeble at even the basic skills that you are notably a breathing liability I’ve somehow ended up chained to by Lars.” Reaper had smacked the back of the young man’s head then, “now shut your trap and watch.”
He had pointed, and they watched the two Guild members depart the apartment, waving subtle hands over the door before moving quickly southeast away from St. James’s Garden. “Avery will have all of the Guild on alert by now. It’s no use trying to take them or any of their other maggots out today…we’ve already lost too much time.”
Since then, Reaper had discarded Fran near the hideout in Brink and had made his way through the city to Larson’s office in the looming high, gray brick industrial building near the Merchant Quarter. Lars had been given that office two years prior when Morse’s last right-hand, Quentin, had been Eclipsed by the Guild’s damned high leader during an altercation in Brink’s underground when the Syndicate had been attempting a raid on the Embassy during the Rite. Quentin’s brain had practically dripped from his ears and left a slick trail on the cobbles as Reaper and others from the Syndicate dragged him from the scene of the brawl.
When Morse saw his body, he hadn’t said a word, instead opting to wave a hand dismissively at what remained of his right-hand, sealing the finality of his seemingly unimportant death. Lars was sworn into the vacant position the following weekend.
Reaper entered the heavy iron door at the bottom floor of the building with a wave of his hand and a mutter of his Syndicate word. The door, having no handle, swung wide open with a heinous creak, and Reaper stalked into the stairway, glaring upwards. He hated climbing those blasted seven stories of stairs to the top floor of the building--Lars had seen to it that the building was warded from anyone being able to rift in or out besides himself or those he deemed trusted--and Reaper knew that Lars particularly reveled in watching Reaper sweat and catch his breath every time he was forced to make the lengthy climb upward.
It was a thorn in Reaper’s side that Morse had chosen Larson Crane to step into the role of his right-hand, especially since Lars was nothing short of a pompous prick with more power than his britches could handle. When they had been members of the Syndicate before Lars had been uprooted and placed above the lot, Reaper had distinctly hated the man--there was something too clean about him, too wealthy and holier-than-thou--he always seemed to give off the impression that he was enthused to be elbow-deep in the dirty work only if there were others doing it for him, and if there was considerable accreditation and ultimate pay off for himself.
Since his ascension in rank, Lars had seen to it that Reaper always was assigned to only the most abysmal of jobs, usually the ones requiring either romping in sewer filth in the name of “uncovering information” (which almost always led to a wild goose chase and all of Reaper’s trousers being thoroughly ruined), or more often the kinds of assignments that were bare bones boring and had little to no payout.
Lars claimed it was all in the name of Morse’s planning. But after two years of aimless, menial work that continually tested Reaper’s patience, he was admittedly beginning to wear rather thin. Morse hadn’t bothered to tell him anything to his face, either. Whenever Reaper would join the Syndicate for briefings, it was usually Lars heading the meetings, with Morse sending his regards.
Horse shit, Reaper had scowled to himself as he had turned the stairwell corner and entered the third set of steps. It’s all performative horse shit.
Lars, of course, hadn’t been in his office when Reaper reached the top floor. His sniveling secretary, one of the seedy Syndicate underlings that Reaper never bothered to introduce himself to, gave him a callous look and informed him that Lars had departed for the afternoon and wasn’t expected back until the following day.
Reaper had wanted to wring the wraithy boy by the neck for the defiant upturn of his nose as he said this, but he decided against it. Lars would go complaining to Morse before Reaper even had the leisure of a blink of time to close his fist around the lad’s throat, and Morse would favor his right-hand over a long-time, loyal Syndicate such as himself.
Before Reaper had made it through the threshold of the stairwell to descend, his mind turning wholly to procuring a hearty sandwich and an ale after his fruitless escapade in the Known, Lars’s secretary had violently waved a scrap of stationary at him and called out that Lars had left a message for him.
The note had been short--Lars expected to see him at the water’s edge in the Known that evening for a briefing on his next assignment. Reaper balled up the stationary and threw it behind him as he left the anteroom outside of the office, leaving the secretary scrub to huff and grunt in annoyance without so much a second glance backwards.
Rain pelted against Reaper’s hat as he crept up to the edge of the lawn surrounding Victoria Tower Gardens, avoiding a few late-night tourist drunks who were hobbling down the streets on the other side of the cobbles, wholly ignoring him. He crossed the garden under the cover of the misty night, following the gravel pathway cutting through it as he moved towards the faint glimmers of light he could see at a distance from where they reflected jubilantly off the surface of the approaching river. The gardens were quiet, save for a few Commoners dozing on benches beneath piles of coats or newspapers, but his wards still gave him no indication of stray gazes fixed solely upon him. The stairwell down to the water’s edge would undoubtedly be slick with rain, and he pulled his coat up around himself a bit more, swearing and flinching at the few frigid drops that crept down his collar in his shifting of the laden fabric.
There was a certain familiar heaviness in the air that pushed in on Reaper from all sides as he strode closer to the Thames--the Known World tended to always weigh a bit more intrusively upon his shoulders and his emotions whenever he was skulking about within it--but tonight, there was a distinct difference in how it was swirling and roving about him, almost as if the rainswept breeze was pressing down upon the secret steady flame of power seated low in his chest. As he tramped through the dew-laden lawn, trodding upon flowers and small plants and crushing them beneath his boots, he brought a hand to his chest, just off-center of his sternum, and took a few intentionally full breaths.
The alien feeling lingered, but lessened. Indigestion, he thought with a roll of his eyes. Shouldn’t have eaten that much bread alongside the ale--damned gluten.
Once through the expanse of the lawn, Reaper’s boots hit the pavement of the long river walkway above the Thames. He stood close to the short stone wall that lined the outer rim of the path, and as he looked out over the river, he studied the way the lights of the Common buildings and scattered boats at their docks shone as breathing, dancing entities across the surface of the rippling body. The rain muddied the serenity of the water, but the chaos it left behind as it struck every inch of the river turned the water into something living--something primal and simmering--Reaper thought that he rather preferred the river when it was being accosted by rain and was flushed out of the thick throngs of blisteringly impudent Commoners it allowed nearby it day after exhausting day.
Reaper looked around, scanning both right and left of him down the long stretches of the walkway, and he could see no one nearby him. Lars was never late, and Reaper knew that the location scribbled at the bottom of his message at the office had been clear--this was the place. Reaper scoffed to himself as he straightened his spine, digging into his coat pocket for a stray cigarette he had stashed there, some Emissary indeed. Can’t even be on time to his own arrangements.
His wards clattered around him suddenly, and Reaper froze, cigarette dangling from his lips. Someone was watching him--someone close--and the uncomfortable singing of the air close to his flesh alerted him that his wards were picking up danger. Using great restraint, he glanced around him once more, but his wards did not point him in any determining direction, and he did not sense anyone in the shadows behind him. He balled up a fist, focusing his power, and a cold silver glow picked up between his fingers, readying itself.
Down here, a man’s abrupt voice, as loud as if he were breathing down Reaper’s bare neck, echoed out from within his own mind. Reaper lurched in surprise, and he looked around wildly, bringing his nose down to peer over the edge of the short stone wall.
At the bottom of the towering river levee on the shipman pathway nearly flush to the water’s lapping edge, Reaper could just barely make out the orange glow of a cigarette and a shadowy figure peering up at him. Reaper glared at the long drop, and he growled, his irritation gritting his teeth. This Known world and all its insistence upon being illusionary in its supposed safeguards and securities aggravated him to no end--useless Commoners needed staircases and ladders to get anywhere at all, and it drove him nearly mad with its patheticness.
In a single fluid motion, he stepped boldly forwards towards the short wall and neatly rifted through air, appearing casually on the other side of Larson as if there hadn’t been a formidable cascade before him at all. Lars turned to face him, the smolder off the end of his cigarette illuminating his face enough for Reaper to see the cynical smirk that was painted to his expression amid feline grace.
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“I don’t like it when you thought walk, Lars,” Reaper grunted, his own unlit cigarette jaunting between his lips as he leered at the Emissary. “I’d be obliged if you kept your prying fingers out of my mind.”
Lars chuckled, a cold snarl. “Then next time, I’d advise you not to be so thick as to think I’d meet you in such a public place as a garden.” An invisible roof was hovering just above Lars, keeping the rain away and leaving him dry and preened immaculately in his green woolen coat and linen trousers. He was a man on the shorter side, with slick brunette hair and daring green eyes that flickered in the orange of his draw. There was a brutal set of scars afflicting the left portion of his face--long track marks that came from a Syndicate brawl with a pair of Harbrungs back in the day--but to Reaper’s annoyance, they only proved to make the Emissary appear more like a rugged threat to his peers and his enemies than if he were left bare-faced. He was a frustratingly poised man, with a barrage of hateful pride burning so viciously at the front of his easy smile that it quite frankly made Reaper violently nauseous.
“Glad you could make it, seeing as you had so much free time following your failure today,” Lars continued, his lilting voice practically grating flesh from Reaper’s ears. “I’d thought for sure you’d be too busy coming up with excuses as to why you brought forth nothing of importance to bother showing up at all.”
“The flat was empty and you knew it would be,” Reaper’s temper was rising in his chest, that deep flame of magic biting harshly at his insides. “You sent that brat Fran and I there to overturn some tables and what--look for information? You think they’d leave Guild secrets lying about on their nightstands, eh?”
“I sent you there to make a statement,” Lars’s eyes narrowed as he blew a stream of white smoke from his nose. “Though I did hope you’d bring back at least one useful thing. I suppose I thought the best of you; shame on me, really.”
“Statement?” Reaper was flushed with anger, his hands balled into fists. “Turn over a couple chairs and we’ve got Avery right wetting himself, is that what you believe happened today?”
Lars smiled, something wicked in his eye. “I think it just might’ve.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it out into the Thames where it was devoured by the rippling water. “But I didn’t task you to come here tonight to discuss your shortcomings, as delightful as that would be. No, you’re here because Morse has asked me to assign you to an important piece of work--one that I do not think suits you, honestly, but perhaps you’ll rise to the occasion.”
Reaper stiffened at the mention of Morse. “I didn’t know Morse still cared to bother with us lowly Syndicates, seeing how wrapped up he’s been of late with his grandiose acts. Seems as if he only chats with the members that he knows he can dispose of if they get caught blowing up bridges.”
“What a vendetta, Reaper,” Lars purred. “Getting jealous of other Syndicates?”
“What do you want, Lars?” Reaper spat. “I’m getting tired of these midnight meetings in this Known shit hole. Especially if they’re going to always be for assignments that bore me to tears.”
“Morse was impressed with your capture of the little Guild mouse a few weeks past,” Lars pulled a shadow in close, drifting another cigarette from his pocket as he reached for his lighter tucked away at his breast. “Although I heard that capture was merely a stroke of good luck for you, seeing as she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, however, it would seem that he wants you to go after another target.”
Reaper blinked, rain dripping thick as honey from the rim of his hat and onto the front of his coat. Capturing that little tramp from her flat the month prior had been a coincidence--while he was tearing her home apart searching for documents on her movements in the Known during her investigation, she had returned to her flat, her palms blazing with rabid blue fury. It had taken Reaper a while to overtake her, and once he had the shades around her throat and had squeezed her flesh into unconsciousness, it had been a trepidatious rift to the tube station and an even more dangerous Crossing with her over his shoulder the whole Way Through. Once at the hideout, he had sent an Orb to contact Morse, chaining the waif in shadow and awaiting orders.
She had awoken a few moments before Morse had rifted in. Reaper admittedly still had a ghostly headache from all her screaming when the interrogation began.
“She ended up proving to be useless to us, as you know,” Lars continued, lighting his second cigarette. “Whatever ward the Guild leader placed on her during her work made her mind impenetrable. It didn’t stop us from trying, however. We dragged it out for some long, deliciously interrupted hours before Morse finally ended it. He busied himself with figuring out the complexity of whatever ward held her mind from us…but now, something else has arisen that has taken precedence over simply gathering information.”
“So am I going after another Guild member, then?” Reaper was already imagining how he’d accomplish it. He’d prove to Morse that he was capable of more than Lars squandered his talent to be--if he went after another Guild member and brought them to Morse, he might be able to impress him enough to get out from under Lars’s tyrannical thumb and start taking on some real jobs for the Syndicate. Perhaps he’d even get trained to Harvest, just as Morse had done.
“Better,” Lars interrupted his thoughts, bringing him back to the smell of ash and brackish that swirled around them as the rain pressed down a bit fiercer. “You’re going after a Giver.”
Reaper nearly choked on his own spit as the words left Lars’s tongue, causing him to cough violently, his mouth filling with metallic tang. He fished a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his mouth, ridding his lungs of the blood that bubbled up.
When he finally could manage to speak once more, his voice was hoarse and tight in his throat. “A Giver? You’re shitting me, Larson. That’s nothing but myths and fairy tales.”
“I’ll admit, I had my doubts at first as well,” Lars studied him with an intense stare, and Reaper shuddered at the lack of humor that had befallen the Emissary’s features, instead being replaced by sudden shadowed gravity. “But I can assure you, this is no myth.” He took another long draw from his cigarette, and Reaper felt the rain lessen, the steady breeze suddenly tapering. “Morse has sensed a shift in the Known. He told me that it occurred a few months ago--some change in the air here that set his power alight--but he couldn’t nail down what it was when it was first happening. He merely thought it to be some maturing of his own magic, as he was perfecting Harvesting around that time, but after conferring with whoever he meets when he leaves Vale for those long stretches of time, he came back enlightened with the information that a Giver has come to London.”
“How is that possible?” Reaper felt a prick of doubt in his stomach. “I thought they all died off millenia ago when the Priory got greedy for their magic.”
“Morse has informed me that it is not for our understanding why a Giver has been located. He believes that perhaps some magic has been lying dormant for all this time and is just now waking up…though whatever for, we cannot be certain yet. Rumors have been spreading in Brink--in the underbelly of the Embassy, mostly--and Morse knows it’s only a matter of time before others will go hunting after such great magic unless he nabs it for the Syndicate first.”
Reaper swallowed, his mouth still tasting faintly of blood. Lars was weaving a story so unbelievable that it was taking all of Reaper’s strength not to laugh in his face and to tell him to piss off--but if Morse was really after something as royally fantastical as a Giver, and if he himself believed whatever sources of information he had learned that from…the capture of a Giver would be something of legend, should he succeed. All his life, Reaper had heard of the stories of those gifted with the power of Giving, each of them different in their own way depending on what their magic gave them lord over, but all held the same rare, entrancing ability to do the unthinkable: to give power to any soul of their choosing.
In that way, Givers had been sought after by all those in power in the Unseen for as long as history could recall. They had been used in the ancient halls of the Priory to give unspeakable abilities to the royals through the ages, and they had also been tracked by Austeres when the rebellions had occurred two millennia ago, forcing the Givers to instill the shadow-wielders with strength that had single-handedly torn down the walls surrounding the Priory and allowed their dark magic to infiltrate the continent.
But they had all since faded into legend and into old, threadbare tomes that hadn’t seen the light of day for centuries. It was known throughout the Unseen that Givers and their lineages had long since perished under the weight of a world that only wanted them for themselves.
“Morse tracked a thread of magic he sensed with the help of a particularly potent bit of shadow work. I’m not sure where he garnered that from,” Lars rubbed at his clean-shaven chin, “it led him to a suburb, and while he was there, the thread faded--dispersing in an instant. Since then, he’s felt it faintly in the streets, but he always seems to lose it after following it for a bit of time. He’s decided that he wants to entrust you to this bit of reconnaissance work while he’s left the Vale for…his own business.”
“How can I do it without his senses?” Reaper muttered. “I have no nose for threads.”
Lars reached into his coat pocket with a particularly cold smile. “He asked me to entrust you with this to aid in your continuation of his search.”
Lars held out a small black box, about the size of something you’d imagine a proposal ring to be encapsulated in. It had no hinges, and no seam to indicate that it could be opened, but Reaper took a step back from it as Lars casually cradled it in his fingers, his eyes widening at the Emissary in shock.
“He’s tethering me?” Reaper gasped. Lars’s eyes, a starling green that cut through the glow of his cigarette, flashed with something deeply unsettling.
“He is offering you the opportunity of your sorry lifetime: the chance to bring the Syndicate a Giver. This tether is merely a liaison to achieving that cause.” Lars gave him an appraising look. “If I were you, I’d suggest you be honored, and take it.”
Reaper’s eyes fixed on the box, and he felt his flame of magic quiver within him, sending a chill down his spine. It didn’t want him to--it was abhorring sharing the very air with such a thing as a tether--but he felt the allure of the power ruminating from it calling to him, promising him all that it could share with him. He cringed, knowing that Lars was studying his every motion, waiting for him to show an ounce of disloyalty. Waiting for a reason to tell Morse that Reaper wasn’t up to snuff for such a task as this.
“I am honored,” Reaper finally relented, and he pushed back against the anxious tide inside of him as he extended a hand towards the box. “I accept the tether.”
As soon as the flesh of his fingers brushed the box, tendrils of black shadow as deep as pitch bloomed from the corners of it and began to encircle his palm, a great sizzling heat burning at his skin and searing him with sharp pain. The tendrils continued to climb up his arm beneath his coat, feeling as if they were tearing away at his flesh with hungry, flaming incalescence, a thousand shards of boiling glass spreading across his limb as it traveled upward. He gritted his teeth, bearing the brunt of it, determined not to show any weakness before Lars.
The calefaction ended at his shoulder, and he watched the tendrils from the box fade around his hand, leaving a purple burn that festered with blisters which he knew would be running up the entire length of his arm, certain to scar. He had never had a tether before--not a real one, anyway--and he had heard tales of its tendency to scald and melt flesh away from its host. This one had been surprisingly tame, albeit contorting his body with licks of pain as the fabric of his coat rubbed on every inch of the affliction.
But through the pain, Reaper focused his mind on something that had appeared quietly in the depths; just in his periphery. He turned his head both left and right, trying to view the black smoke that was wavering in either corner of his eyes, but it moved with him, almost as if those tendrils had taken up space in his vision, content to sit just out of his sight, watching both him and the world through him.
The smoke wavered, compelling him upward, over the levee. Beckoning him towards…something. Something it wanted him to follow.
“You’ll be feeling it by now, I imagine,” Lars said calmly, closing his hand around the box, but not before Reaper could see that it had turned white and rather shriveled. “Morse selected it personally for you, and he has the tether on the trail of whatever threads he was chasing himself. I hope you’ll make quick work of it, seeing as you’ve been handed such an extravagant gift of fortune to aid you.”
“Tell Morse I’ll get the job done,” Reaper croaked, shaking his head side to side, trying to acclimate himself to his new set of eyes and the faint headache it was giving him in its urgency for him to get moving on whatever scent it had picked up on.
“He’s giving you three weeks,” Lars smiled, tossing his second cigarette into the water and practically beaming at Reaper. “He will return to Brink and expect the Giver to be at the hideout waiting for him. I have full faith in you,” his voice was sharp with mockery. “And I do encourage you to hop to it, before the Guild catches word. Otherwise you’ll have them to worry about as well, not just what Morse will do to you when you fail.”
Reaper lurched with anger, his face twisting in a scowl, “you better watch your-”
He was constricted suddenly by an overwhelming vise grip around his throat, and he choked on air, his hands scrambling around the flesh of his neck, trying to rid himself of whatever invisible fists had clenched themselves around it. Lars watched him lazily, his hands neatly tucked into his pockets.
That’ll be your new resident, Lars’s voice rang sour in Reaper’s ears as he thought walked into his consciousness. Morse ensured that it would keep you obedient.
The vise relaxed, and Reaper bent forward, gasping for air, his hands clutching his neck. Lars peered down at him, a smirk playing across his face. “Three weeks,” he crooned aloud. “I’ll check in with your efforts soon.”
In a whirl of shadow, Lars rifted away, leaving Reaper wheezing on the seawall, blood speckling the rain-slicked cobbles below his chin.