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He Who Dies with the Most Scars

Patrick M. Tracy


The city of Remnar will kill you. It’s killed me a few times already. I probably deserved it. Living in any great city is like riding in the fanged jaws of a behemoth. The concept sounds insane, and yet we come in our thousands and our millions, willing to pay our blood and take our chance.

Why? Because that’s where the action is.

The lie we all tell ourselves is that we have a handle on things. That the world is sensible. I found myself threading through the crowded streets of Remnar’s Underhalls, my arms filled with the makings for pastries. When you run a shop next to the Yellow Market, the Gnomish high holy days create an unquenchable demand for baked goods.

The howling emptiness of my kitchen shelves turned out to be the least of my troubles. I felt the too hard brush of a stranger’s body just before the pain started. A bit of a clumsy job, really. The assassin’s blade ground between two ribs and bit deep. That cold, strange ripping as the steel goes in. I’d felt it before, an old acquaintance I’d hoped not to see again soon. My legs folded up. A sack of flour burst against the dark cobbles. A bright flash under the eternal lights of the underground, soon splashed red. From my supine vantage, I saw a dwarf craftsman’s heavy boot smash my new-bought cinnamon jar into a puff of sweet dust.

“Corpse ash and coffin nails. What a day.” I put my hand against the hilt of the blade. Oh. The blood. So much blood. I held my crimson hand up to my face. Strangers stepped over my body. I caught the eye of the assassin, lingering a moment to make sure the strike had done its job.

“Look, they murdered that pastry chef,” I heard someone say.

“That guy? No, he’s a licensed necromancer,” a different voice put in.

“Well, whoever he is, they killed him.”

Killed me. I touched my thumb to the end of each finger of my left hand. “This will not do.”

The rushing power of the underworld thrummed, like a sound that all sane souls had learned not to hear. Every shadow bent toward the anonymous form of my assassin as he turned to flee the scene. Swooping down, a giant claw made of burning darkness struck. His head exploded like a dropped melon. He fell. Silver splinters flew in my vision. The scene had become disquieting enough that some of the foot traffic began to steer around it. It hurt quite a lot to crane my neck and see my killer’s corpse, but we do what we must.

“You there. Get up and make yourself useful.”

The corpse lurched upward and made its way to me. A few gasps arose from the crowd. Even jaded citizens of Remnar’s Underhalls can be surprised now and then. I do what I can.

“Drag me back to the shop.” My killer, now a zombie with an imploded head, did as ordered. Bleeding profusely, uttering a few choice words, I bumped across the paving stones and back to my little sweets shop.

By now, my voice didn’t project all that well, but the patrons seemed to understand that the store would be closing. Everything in my vision had devolved to shadows by the time the shop fell quiet. Sebastian, my loyal customer and sometimes cashier, knelt over me.

“You should tell me the truth about you,” I whispered. It was not what I expected to say.

“Let’s think about that when you don’t die,” he said. It’s possible there’s nothing at all that would put Sebastian off his game. His elfin face just kept a hint of a smile. I heard the sound of his jogging steps on the stairs up to the bonded agent’s office above the shop. I lay back, feeling everything slide.

My eyes fell closed and refused to open. A rough, big hand pushed down on my chest. The knife screeched against bone as it withdrew. I may have released a sound I’m not altogether proud of.

“Yeah, yeah, I used to be able to do this.” The voice echoed to me. Who was it? I had receded into a deep well.

Something crashed into me like fire.

I say that, but I’m utterly immune to fire.

Something rushed through me, right to bones and gristle. I didn’t die, but I . . . went away for a while.

✧ ✧ ✧

I had lost my shirt at some point in the shadowy interim. The bulky form of a hobgoblin squatted on a chair, watching me. His red face pensive, he crushed his stained hat between his hands.

“You can still do it, Lex,” I said quietly.

He blew air out of his nostrils. “Yeah. Yeah. When . . . when I heal someone, I see things. What they’re about. All the underneath of them. What’s in the background. That scared me, Orman. I saw his face.”

“The Emperor of the Underworld. I’m sorry, Lex. The only upside is that he’ll be familiar to you when you go on your last journey.”

“Not for me. We go to the dust. Our spirits burn but once,” Lex muttered, looking at his own worn boots.

“Hmm.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his core belief wasn’t true. You spare your friends certain things, especially when they’ve just dragged you back from the verge of death.

Lex slid behind the counter, grabbing most of the remaining pastries and a dark brew. “I’m not paying for these, by the way.”

“You never pay. I never ask.”

He sprawled into his favorite corner chair and set to the pastries like they’d insulted him, ignoring me.

Sebastian lent me a hand up and made an odd gesture in the air. All the blood on the floor and me dissipated in a flash of green fire. He smiled faintly. “One little secret, eh?”

“I’ll figure you out one day, my friend. And thanks to the both of you.”

“He wouldn’t have let you die. Not exactly,” Lex called out from amongst the spray of pastry crumbs. “The titan of death, I mean.”

“I don’t think any of us, or the city at large, wants to experience that iteration of things.” I went behind the counter, found the bottle of wyrmwood draught, and downed it in one go. Wild colors and phantom sounds suffused my senses for a long moment. I just held on. Wyrmwood is potent. Possibly fatal for people who aren’t . . . me.

With a moment of concentration, wisps of dark fire wreathed my left hand. I motioned toward the back door. The zombie staggered through the kitchen, then through the exterior door to the alley. A last wheezing groan arose as my erstwhile assassin fell to dust. I let the magic go. Every death-wound written across my skin scorched and twisted like burning wire.

“Are we day drinking?” Sebastian asked.

“We’re drinking, whatever time it is.” I dragged out two bottles and put them on the table amongst the wreckage of Lex’s pastries. We three were properly inebriated by the time the authorities arrived.

✧ ✧ ✧

I had paid good money to have an artisan paint “Orman’s Sweet Darkness” on the door to my shop. That door exploded inward in a dozen pieces. A muscular woman appeared in the doorway, taking in the scene. I heard her inhale. Her eyes slammed open, shining like an animal’s. Her face twisted, huge fangs appearing for just a moment before she controlled herself.

The woman’s blue-and-silver garb marked her as an Iron Hand guard out of the Seagate Quarter. She stood still for a moment, just looking around. “How many people just died in here?” she asked, her voice a bit sweeter than I expected.

I raised my hand. “Just me. The other one died outside.”

She blinked a few times. I could see the pulse flickering in her neck. “You’re Orman Orphesias?”

I nodded, then looked into the bottom of my cup. It had run empty, as had the two bottles. It occurred to me that I hadn’t evinced the glamor I usually keep, and that my hell-touched features were showing. Ah, well. At least I wasn’t the only one showing my real face.

“Who wants to tell me what happened?” she asked. The lambent glow faded from her eyes. Her hands relaxed. She’d never reached for the heavy single-edged blade at her waist. I got the impression she rarely needed anything more than what her muscle and blood would accomplish.

Sebastian stood easily, suddenly not drunk at all. Unflappable. Debonair. The sort of person who had a whole long story behind him. One you felt like you should know but didn’t. “An unknown person tried to kill our friend just outside. Things went badly for the attacker. He’s in the back alley, on the quick road to becoming potting soil, unless I miss my guess. We managed to patch young Orman up, and have been drinking to ease our minds ever since.”

She came closer now, hooking a chair with her toe and sitting down. “You didn’t know your attacker?”

The way the muscle moved on her arms made me think certain thoughts. They weren’t specifically related to getting stabbed. “I’d never seen him. May have been some old grudge, but this was a hired man. I like to think I don’t make enemies, but there’s a wide river between what I know and the truth on some days.”

Without being asked, Lex slapped his badge on the table. “Bonded agent. Office is upstairs. Only came into it after the fact. Guy tried to kill Orman. Turnabout’s fair. Clean kill.”

“I know who you are, Lex Custos.” She turned to Sebastian. “But not you.”

“I’m a simple craftsman, caught up in the melee during my hour of rest.”

She laughed. “Well, whoever you are, looks like the other two are vouching for you.” Up close, I could see that she carried the rank of commander. Far higher than any officer who would investigate a petty murder like my own. Not the type of officer you’d typically see outside her jurisdiction.

“I’m not dead. Some nameless assassin is. Tell us why you’re really here.” I wondered if I had a spare shirt somewhere in the back.

“I’m Commander Shelka Rei. As you say, I . . . ” She trailed off, seeing all the raised scars on my bare torso. “By the Lady of Faces, how are you alive?”

“It’s harder to kill a pastry chef than you might imagine.”

“I’m not drunk enough for any of this,” she mused, not really talking to anyone in particular.

✧ ✧ ✧

Commander Shelka put down her cup, rolled the last of the stout rum on her tongue. “You’re needed at the Seagate, Orphesias. Not for your cooking skills. I don’t much care who’s trying to kill you. That’s your own problem. See that it doesn’t interfere with the task at hand. And find yourself a damned shirt.” She gave me a “get along” gesture.

In the back, I found a decent shirt, washed up a bit, and cast a glamor that hid my horns. A wave of sickness passed through me, and I was suddenly on my knees, working hard not to throw up any rum. Blasts of color splashed against the inside of my eyelids. You let your guard down, and the past comes for you. From out of the dark, it has teeth and talons. I remembered a woman I lost. Someone I’d maybe been in love with. Gone forever. The feeling of scimitars skewering me from half a dozen angles. Both literal and figurative, I suppose.

I got up, squared up, and went back out front. We’re just constellations of scars. We walk until we crawl. We crawl until we die. I managed to smile somehow. “At your service, Commander.”

She walked through the wreckage of my front door without another word. I gave a shrug to my friends and followed. I’m no soothsayer, but my prediction was that there would be no more alcohol when I returned. And that was fine. I owed them both a great deal more than that.

As we moved out of the Yellow Market and skirted the corner of The Works, I could feel Shelka’s eyes on me. “Are you well enough to . . . do whatever it is that necros do?”

“I don’t even know what the job is yet. I usually go in, finesse a ghost out of some old building, and I’m on my way. No sweat, no trouble. Seeing you, though, maybe not. You want to tell me about it?”

Shelka clicked her teeth together. People are afraid of sanguivores, and for good reason. Of all the Fey, they’re the most likely to bite your throat out. Even if they don’t decide to drink your blood, they can easily punch a dent into your face.

I’ve enjoyed a long and storied career of making bad romantic decisions.

I watched her with more interest than necessary. “A ship came in. One survivor. Things went as bad as they could, from what I understand.” She flicked her eyes in every direction, taking in everyone that deserved attention and sliding over everyone who didn’t.

“Haunted submariner craft, then?”

“Could be cursed.”

“A boy can only dream.” I wasn’t thinking all that hard about whatever horrors had happened on that ship. Shelka caught me in my admiration. She hardened her jaw a little bit and looked forward.

The smell of dampness and slow rot filled my nose as we entered Dockman’s Row. Always a little chilly, often with a light ground mist creeping down the street, the row’s populace ran to rough submariners and longshoremen. The lights in the cavern ceiling were a vague blue. Electric mist and shadow danced between hunched and ramshackle buildings all around. People’s faces floated toward you like indistinct fish in shallow water.

The drunken sailors and odd characters from the Seagate gave us a wide berth. The few Iron Hand guards touched their shoulders as they saw Shelka pass. Whatever she was, she’d gained some respect, and that’s no easy feat in the rancid underbelly of an undying metropolis.

“You’re not going to ask any other questions?” Shelka flicked her glance at me for only a moment.

“When we get there, sure. I’m more interested in your story for now.”

She looked everywhere but into my eyes. “My story? Not much to tell.”

“Sanguivores don’t tend to flourish in . . . team atmospheres.”

Shelka let air out of her nose. “I was hoping you hadn’t seen that.”

“I didn’t need to see your fangs to know.”

She finally looked at me. “Oh, yeah. Dark magic and all.”

I looked at her from under my brows, smiling when I shouldn’t have. “Even orcs don’t carry their muscle so gracefully.”

Her eyes turned hard. Her jaw clenched.

“Easy, now. It’s just the truth. Anyone who knows what Blood Fey look like could tell. That’s all I’m saying.”

At that moment, she lashed out, her palms hitting me in the chest and knocking me flat. My shoulders slid across the slick, dirty pavement. So much for another shirt. I felt the seam rip and the viscous road grime grind into the fabric. Three crossbow bolts flashed overhead, slamming several inches deep into the nearby building. I traced the line from where I lay to where the shooter must have been. Those would have all taken me in the head and neck. Damn. Here I thought I was just getting roughed up for having a smart mouth.

Shelka swarmed over me, shielding against further shots. I felt the shock go through her body as a bolt hit her high on the shoulder. Another one shattered on a paving stone next to us. She hoisted me bodily and we careened into an alley. She could run faster with me held like a babe and a bolt lodged in her muscle than I could unladen.

She put me down and we sprinted down several blocks of trash-laden alleys, so narrow that the buildings seemed to nod toward each other above us. She hooked my arm, pulling into an entryway that led down two steps and to a nondescript door. Shelka produced a key and opened the lock, pushing me ahead of her.

“Safe house?”

She nodded, pain written on her face, her eyes burning like low embers. Heat cooked off her skin, palpable from a handspan away.

The door eased shut without a sound. A sparse and unkempt apartment surrounded us. The vaguest hint of indigo light slanted in through the high, small windows. Otherwise, darkness. Not that my eyes needed light. Being Helltouched has its perks. We waited for a hundred heartbeats. Two hundred. A thousand. No pursuit, no hint of people skulking around outside.

Shelka groaned, sagging to a plain, hard chair next to a table with a rotting apple at the far end and a rusty paring knife driven into its cheap wood. “That bolt was poisoned. Pull the damned thing out, would you?”

I braced and pulled. The sound of the broad, bladed tip grinding against bone and sinew arose as it came free. She suffered it without a sound. “You sure you don’t know who’s trying to kill you, Orphesias?”

“I really don’t.”

“Well, they’re becoming an impediment. I need your full attention. I need you intact. This thing at the Seagate is bad, Orman. You are not to get murdered until this is over. That’s an order.”

I ran a hand through my hair, using the smallest ebb of glamor to make my disheveled appearance improve. “No getting murdered. Professional behavior from here on out. I promise. Thanks for, well, saving me from getting shot in the face.”

She shrugged her injured shoulder and stood. The smell of her blood rode atop the musty, dry rot of the old sofa along the wall. You could almost see the life burning beneath her skin in the blue dimness. “Don’t make me regret it. Do you have any clever ideas of how to get to the Seagate intact?”

“There’s a way. Do you trust me?” I may have grinned more than I should have.

“Vaguely. Do your thing, necro.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Talons burst from the fingers of my left hand. The blood spilled onto the floor and the cold, familiar agony of the pure dark thundered up my arm, beyond the elbow. I can do many things with my magic. None of them are gentle. All of them hurt. To serve the Emperor of the Underworld is to have death written upon your bones. Every day, I spend my hours baking and selling sweets. Not just because I enjoy it. I need it. Like the weighted pommel of a sword, I need some small kindness to offset the whispers of doom.

“Lady of Faces,” Shelka whispered, reaching to touch a small amulet around her neck. Just a blank ivory mask, the sign of her Fey patron, the goddess of all shapechangers.

I reached out my blackened claw and ripped a hole in the surface of the shadow. Most of the sound fell out of the room. I dug into the flesh of the shadow realm and smeared myself with it. Only the faint, cloying whistle of wax-plugged ears remained. I spread a bleeding gob of shadow onto Shelka, rendering us both silent, only half real.

Her mouth moved but made no sound. I took her hand, and we stepped through the wall of the dwelling. We wafted through the streets of the Dockside, buildings like lumps of dust, people appearing as no more than the faint candles of their souls.

I only let go of the dark when we were within sight of the Seagate. The clawed, blackened hand returned to my own more mundane extremity, though the cold ache of the shadow lingered. My head swam, and I caught myself against Shelka’s uninjured shoulder. I took a breath, and it felt like the first one in a long time. Oh, I wasn’t strong. The troubles of the day weighed upon me.

“Are you going to throw up?”

I shook my head, holding my fist to my mouth. I lost the struggle, lurching a few steps away and releasing the acidic remainder of my stomach onto a stone building. I wiped my face. In the knee-deep fog, I couldn’t see what I’d coughed up. Small blessings.

I composed myself. “Not my favorite day. Shall we go?”

“Are you certain you’re strong enough to continue?”

“No. What’s the worst that can happen, someone tries to kill me?”

The Seagate warehouses loomed above us. The salt sea smell filled my nostrils. Faintly, the sound of lapping water muttered. The Seagate is no normal harbor. No sailing craft could reach it. One part of the massive cave system that Remnar’s Underhalls inhabit opens onto the sea, perhaps a hundred feet below the waves.

Even in a world of strange wonders, only a handful of races have mastered submariner crafts. Chief among those are the Squalo and the Octars. Squalo are sharklike humanoids from the earliest throes of the world’s creation. Without voices, they communicate in psychic images. They can only be above the water for a short time, so they are a rare sight even a few hundred yards inland. Strange enough, but no hazard, unless you stand between them and what they want.

And Octars? If you’re on the lookout for something to be afraid of, they suit that purpose well enough. In some shallow seas, a species of tiny, intelligent devilfish flourish. Unsatisfied with dominion over their tract of the ocean wastes, they developed the ability to crawl aboard ships, infiltrating the very brain cavities of sailors. From within, they take over all control, riding the poor, decerebrated sailor like a steed until it is damaged or decrepit. Thus, an Octar could be of any race, any gender. Few know if they have any preference, other than physical health and soundness. Whatever they were before, they develop the changeable camouflage skin of cuttlefish.

If an Octar’s method of locomotion on land were not enough, they have a kind of magical power that wizards and holy catechists have been unable to fully understand. Suffice it to say that the average person urinates down both legs at the thought of them. I’m happy enough that they don’t frequent my shop.

A heavy rope cordon stretched around one stone dock arm, several Iron Hand guards loitering nearby. Their confidence looked shaken, but the crawling ant colony of effort at the other occupied docks stood in grave contrast to the utter silence around the ghost ship.

Shelka made eye contact with one of the guards, a one-handed dwarf with a heavy single-edged sword. He motioned us to a break in the cordon and gave a sharp salute with the steel-capped forearm.

“You the necro?” He gave me a look up and down and didn’t seem very impressed. “You look too pretty.”

“I do my best to not get hit in the face.”

“Any change, Vellr?” Shelka asked.

He shrugged. “She woke up. Screamed to the tallest cavern. Took a whole bottle of rum to settle her down.” Vellr hooked his good thumb behind him. A medic sat with a slim figure, crumpled on a crate they’d fashioned into an ersatz bed.

“That’s the survivor?” I asked.

Nods from both guards.

“Is she fit to talk? I’d like to know what I’ll find in there.”

Vellr shrugged. “Maybe. Never seen an Octar lose grip on themselves, so it must have been . . . ” The dwarf shook his head, like the movement could dislodge whatever thought spiraled in the theater of his mind.

We went to her side, and the medic, a female orc, looked only too happy to withdraw and leave the witness to us. I looked to Shelka, who motioned for me to take the lead. I lowered myself carefully, sitting next to the slim figure, swathed in a dun-colored cloak. She faced away, curled in on herself. She could have been anyone. An elf or shifter Fey, maybe. Just another victim of the cruelty inherent in the process of living.

My hand hesitated just above that slim shoulder. Whatever else, this was an Octar. “Corpse ash and coffin nails. Dried blood and rust-bitten blades,” I whispered to myself. I touched her with gentle pressure.

She turned. Graceful horns rose from her head. Hints of blue pulsed inside the uncertain basalt dark of her skin. Her eyes, cut in half like a cat’s and just as molten gold, locked on mine. I felt as if a cold and snow-laden wind burned across me, and my glamor departed. The Octar, riding behind the most beautiful Helltouched face I’d seen in years, reached and touched my revealed horns, my oversharp angles.

“It killed everyone. Killing is all it can do. No amount of viscera will fill the screaming void inside its belly.”

The Octar curled her body around me, pressing her face into my chest. I didn’t know what else to do, so I stroked my palm against her shivering back as she cried.

✧ ✧ ✧

“She looked like she’d had a bucket of blood dumped on her when she burst from the hold,” Vellr said. “Scared the hell out of the longshoremen. You wouldn’t think it, but it took eight people to get a hold on her. They called the Hand, and by the time we got here, she’d calmed enough to at least speak a language anyone could understand. Best we can piece together, something in their cargo was alive. It killed everyone. Our survivor barricaded herself between the hold door and the dorsal hatch.”

The bow of the ghost ship loomed out of the fog. Unlike the broad beams and sweeping lines of a normal sailing ship, it was sleek and featureless as a shark. The Octar ships ran on magic, though only they knew the deep secrets of the process. From current circumstances, I supposed that the laying in of a course was done at the beginning of a journey, not requiring a helmsman or pilot afterward.

“No hint as to what caused the carnage?” I felt how damp my palms were. I told myself it was the humid nearness of the water.

Vellr shook his head. “One sailor said something darted away into the ratling tunnels during the initial chaos, but it could have been someone just running for cover.”

“Running unarmed into the tunnels is a great way to meet my boss.”

The dwarf took a moment to think about what I’d said. “Oh. Yeah. People get stupid when you scare them, though.”

I turned to Shelka. “I guess we won’t learn any more out here.” I motioned to the dorsal hatch.

The commander’s eyes grew a little. “This is your gig, Orphesias.”

“I do it better when unknown creatures who can frighten an Octar aren’t attacking me. I’ll have better morale knowing those pretty muscles have my back.” I thought for a moment that she might actually rough me up, but Shelka just gave me glare that would melt silver, and loosened her sword in its sheath.

The hatch stood open, and I could see remnants of bloody footprints blurred across the deck. All the competing smells of death wafted up. Shelka reacted to the proximity of the ripening flesh like she’d been hit across the face with a board. I waited for her. My stomach roiled, though the smell was the least of my concerns.

“I’m all right,” she forced out in a pained whisper.

Down the stairs, then. The blood was ankle deep, turning to jelly now. The door into the hold had been broken to kindling from within. The fetid gloom rustled, alive and malign. Something rushed out of the darkness at me, screaming out in a horrific, multitone voice. I flinched, a burning purple ray leaping from my hand. The ray impacted the creature, throwing it back through the door into the cargo area. The sound of it rattled me, causing my vision to double, triple, then snap back to one. The terrible sound of flesh tearing shook the air. Not like a predator feeding on the haunch of its quarry. No, like many giant things ripping whole bodies asunder with main strength.

“It’s about to get bad,” I told Shelka. My voice sounded strange and hollow, like my ears were full of wax.

She dropped down into the blood beside me. The noise of many feet sloshing through the morass of gore approached.

Misshapen. Demonic. Born from the tomb of another’s flesh. No bigger than gnomes, they were all mouth on the front, their skin the bubbled pale of overcooked eggs.

They clamored over one another to get to us. Shelka’s sword cut deep into the first of them. Black blood splashed against the walls. Two followers paused to tear at their brother. I shot screaming purple rays into their faces. A tumble of teeth and claws and ear-bleeding screams filled the place. And these were just babies. Every one of them a seed of devastation.

“It’s Ravagers! Get back!” I shouted.

Shelka leapt backwards to the stairs, agile as a cat.

My left hand screamed with darkness, and a whip of a thousand barbed coils appeared. I shot it forward as a new surge of Ravagers swarmed forward. In the tongue of the underworld, I felt the blood in my throat as I shouted. “Feel the scourge of the misbegotten!”

The whip came down. Flesh tore. Vicious, soulless little lives ripped apart. Bones hit the ceiling. Teeth flew like shards of broken glass in a tornado. I fell face first into the gore, my consciousness imploding.

✧ ✧ ✧

Shelka held me across her knees on the deck of the submariner ship. My shirt was gone again. Everything stank of old blood. She gently wiped at my face with a cloth wet with seawater. “Did the scourge get them all?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know necros could do . . . whatever that was.”

I tried to give a saucy grin. I don’t believe I pulled it off. “I’m not like the other necros.”

“Can you get up?”

I tried and found that I could. I swayed a little on my feet, but consciousness held. I patted myself down, finding the Box of Ravening in my side pocket. I limped back down the stairs and into the ship again. Opening the nondescript metal box, a swarm of beetles poured out of it. And kept pouring out, until there were countless thousands of them, all feasting upon the viscera and coagulated blood on the floor. I had never shown them a feast of this magnitude. I sat on the top step and closed my eyes.

“That sound they made. I don’t know if I’ll be able to drink that off my mind,” Shelka said. She paced idly as we waited for the hungry insects to do their work.

“You’d better have a few squads of the Hand check that ratling tunnel. Ravagers multiply explosively. If one really got out, it could . . . well, we’d hate for every person in the city to die.”

Shelka waited for a moment. “I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

“I really am.”

“Motherless dogs.” The commander walked away with a purpose. I wondered if I could get up from my seat on the stairs. “They don’t pay me enough,” I said to the haunted boat below me.

No matter the amount of death I unleash the beetles on, they always take about the same amount of time. No sense in spending too long thinking about such things, I suppose. Magic has its ways. As I saw them trundling back into the box, I forced myself up. The last insect crept home. I closed the box and picked it up. As ever, it felt empty. All but the cloying scent of death and the rusty stain of blood on the boards was gone, into the bottomless stomach of the swarm.

In the center of the ship, I swept the detritus of exploded crates, discarded ribcages, and empty sailor’s boots. “You can come out. They’re gone,” I called.

From the shadowy corners, perhaps twenty ghosts appeared. A big crew. Dead Squalo, hobgoblins, orcs, even a few more Octars. They flickered and ebbed like candles in a drafty room.

“I’m sorry this happened to you. Ravagers are a hard way to go. No one deserves that. It’s just a moment in time, and the time of this world is done with you. Whatever you were, whatever you believed, you go to your next adventure through this door I open for you.”

I knelt and used the graveland chalk to draw a door in the floor of the hold. The index finger of my left hand spasmed and grew a blackened claw, releasing a few droplets of blood upon the sigil.

The door opened, and I could feel the pull of the underworld, dragging every ghost within a hundred yards inexorably toward it. A few of them tried to resist. A few always do. One, a strange outline of an elf with a second spirit within it. The Octar. I didn’t know what it meant for either party, but the road is the road. The door is one everyone walks through. You can go easy, or with the very last dregs of the cup. In the end, it doesn’t much matter.

I put my hand on one of the few intact shipping crates and somehow got to my feet again. Everything hurt. You don’t really appreciate the easy days until a hard one comes around.

Shelka had come in at some point in the process. She waited at the shattered door. “Whatever is in the ratling tunnels, my men came back running. Tough-hearted guards, and I couldn’t get a single one of them to go back in.”

I gestured around. “This is not something anyone signed on for. Not even me.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Shelka moderated to my pace. I’d developed a limp somewhere down the line. My trousers were in a sorry state, and some of the blood on them seemed to be coming from inside. After her “all clear,” the cordons were coming down, and the swarming industry of the docks resumed. Longshoremen entered the ghost ship, looking for any undamaged cargo. Individuals may have a use for such things as remorse, but cities are machines. The moment an impediment is removed from their gears, they churn forward at speed.

The sole survivor sat up now, blinking at us as we approached. I sat next to her, gathering my thoughts for a moment before I said anything. The Octar looked at the map of scars written across my bare torso. I couldn’t read her expression.

“You . . . finished things?” the Octar asked.

I pushed my lips together. “On the ship? Yes. But one escaped. Our day is not done. I need to ask you some questions.” I looked over to Shelka, but she hung back. It seemed I was running things until the work returned to more familiar territory.

People keep imagining that I’m some kind of investigator. They don’t believe me when I say I’m not.

The Octar, wearing the face of one of my own kind, had yet to regain her unknowable mystique. She yet remained a frightened creature whose understanding of the world had been shaken. Maybe she would tell me the truth.

“What should I call you? That’s first.”

“Gloomtalon Heth, captain of the Arcdepth.” She gestured vaguely toward the ghost ship.

“Will Heth suffice for now?”

She gently touched my arm. Her fingers were as cool as ocean water. Their touch felt as much like satin as skin. “For however long. A debt is owed.”

“All right, Heth. The hard questions start now. How did you come to have an Abysmal Ravager on your ship?”

It took her a long beat to answer. Her molten gold gaze touched mine. I felt transfixed as she looked deep into me. “Is that what . . . turned the Arcdepth into a screaming tomb?”

I cleared my throat, looking away. “You didn’t know, then. Where did your cargo come from?”

“I didn’t know. I promise to you that I didn’t. We . . . they were my friends. Their faces are painted in my mind.” She shivered. “The crew retained the ’depth to cross many seas. They were a treasure-hunting band. They put ashore and returned with artifacts, wealth, enchanted things. I would get them back to Remnar to sell the spoils in the markets. This last time . . . we were in Lost Falmoth. Swiftrazor Izla said they’d gone through a portal of some kind, but there were always wild exploits to brag on when they returned. I didn’t think much about it then. They’d never endangered the ship with their cargo before.”

I’m sure my face told a tale. “Lost Falmoth, though. You have to be a special kind of crazy to gamble your life on that frigid ruin. A force that can snuff out volcanoes like midnight lamps is not to be trifled with. There’s a reason the Fey have never retaken the haunted continent.”

Heth’s eyes focused on the ground. “None of us are immune to hubris.”

“Only the dead.” I stood, running what I hoped was a comforting hand across Heth’s shoulder. “That’s our task the remainder of the day. We see if we can avoid joining them.”

We left Heth behind, making for the nearest entrance to the ratling tunnels. Ratlings are vaguely humanoid rodents who run in vast warrens beneath the Underhalls. The prevailing opinion is that the raw magic of the city’s denizens has slowly mutated what were once only huge and horrid rats into the semblance of a sentient race. Maybe some wizard or demon prince in the ancient days created them. In the end, they’re both an annoyance and a boon. Anything even vaguely edible can just be deposited into the tunnels. The ratlings will eat it. This goes for everything from kitchen scraps to the annoying dead body. They keep the creeping squalor of the huge city at bay. Then again, you don’t always have to be altogether dead to end up a meal for them. Ratlings will eat the sick, the old, and the drunken loners.

Through the years, the city has put some effort toward curbing the ratling population, but those initiatives have been grandly unsuccessful. Those interested in such arithmetic have theorized that there are two ratlings for every counted citizen of the Underhalls. The idea of a Ravager among such numbers made for unsettling thoughts. As we left the dockside behind and went into the labyrinth of warehouses, I kept an eye out for some telltale opening. It had to be close. The Ravager would have gone to ground as quickly as possible.

“Tell me about the creatures,” Shelka demanded, stopping my abject shuffling toward our goal. “These Ravagers.”

I looked around to make sure no one was in close earshot. “They don’t belong on a natural world. A world of mortals. They kill. They eat. They implant a seed in the corpse. Within a day, that seed grows to what you saw on the ship. They can eat their weight in flesh in a few hours. With enough meat, they can grow to full size in days. At full size, they can kill and implant. At most, hundreds of seeds in a day. Ratlings wouldn’t stand a chance. They are your worst case. We have to kill it today. In a week, things could be so far gone that they’d have to seal the Underhalls and let the damned things eat themselves to death for a few centuries.”

Shelka blinked at me. “Is there anyone we can get to help us? This is . . . bigger than we’re ready for.”

“There are others, sure. But it would take us hours, even days to rouse them and make them believe us. By the time we got the great and grand up there on Skystone to resolve themselves to action, we’d all be screaming as we died.”

“You’re hanging by a thread, Orman.”

“I’m aware. Maybe today’s the day the thread breaks. I don’t care about all that many things, but I love this big, wicked city. It’s my home. I’m going to try and save it. Are you with me?”

Shelka let air out her nose. “Pastry chef, my ass.”

✧ ✧ ✧

The dead-end alley led to the entrance to the tunnels. The darkness rustled, and a figure appeared, momentarily wreathed in magic energy. A hand burst out from the cloaked figure, and Shelka flew backward some fifteen feet. I watched it, my body not quite responding, my brain faltering.

The figure reached out. Forceful magic grabbed at the detritus and flotsam along the sides of the alley. Decrepit packing crates and the remainders of broken horse carts slammed and shattered, all flying to construct a wall of trash between me and the commander. I saw the glimmering hint of her bared teeth before the magic-wrought barrier sealed the distance.

The wizard turned to me, a hint of smile cutting the darkness as he reached out for me with his crushing magic. Just another normal-looking person. Someone I could have passed on the street without a second thought. Someone about to pulverize every bone in my body.

But he looked down to his own chest as success turned to failure. My transfigured left hand, now a monstrous claw piercing him at the sternum, stole the spell he had been about to cast. Stole all the arcane whispers that make a wizard’s incantations. More than that, it drank deep from his life, his vital energy. His eyes occluded with the smoky tendrils of funeral pyres. Black moths coughed from his mouth.

“I am where the bright road ends. I am the one who beckons from the darkened trees,” I whispered.

The wizard tumbled back to the cobbles, his hair now shot through with white on his temples. Crow’s feet scratched at the corners of his eyes. His clothes hung lax upon a body ravaged by the sudden onset of age.

“You might have succeeded, but you came alone.” I shrugged my shoulders, all the fatigue and damage of the day erased by the energy I’d stolen from the assassin. “Now tell me what I want to know, or I will wrench your soul from you and devour it. You will be removed from the very orders and rhythms of the universe.”

The wizard looked at his wrinkled hands, now liver spotted and feeble. He believed me.

“What did you do to me?” His voice was raspy, weak, and shaking.

“I took years from you. Maybe twenty. Maybe more.”

He began to weep. I’m generally a friendly sort of person, but attempting to kill me is a thing I take rather personally.

“I hold your life in my hand, to do with as I please.” I showed him my transfigured hand.

“What do you want?” the wizard asked after a few moments of abject blubbering.

“I want to know why people are trying to murder me. I want to know who ordered it.”

“I . . . because when you kill a necro, all the banished ghosts come back, all at once.”

I squinted, momentarily flummoxed. “That must be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Necromancy doesn’t work that way.”

He stopped, crestfallen. “But . . . ” His desiccated hands flapped uselessly in the air before him.

“Assuming that ghosts did somehow escape their manifold paths through the Underworld and beyond, what would that accomplish?”

“The boss said that, with a whole swarm of ghosts, it’d be easy pickings. We could steal everything that wasn’t red hot or nailed down while the Iron Hand figured it out.” The wizard appeared to fully apprehend how idiotic the plan was as he told it to me. I didn’t feel it was necessary to pile on.

“Listen. I’m going to let you live. Go and tell your boss to hire someone to help him make plans. He should be ashamed of this one. It’s been a terrible inconvenience to me while I was trying to do honest work. Oh, and tell him to read a book from time to time. It helps. If anyone else tries to kill me, I’ll make a bird cage from his bones. Understand?”

At that moment, Shelka smashed bodily through the wall of junk and appeared, rampant in her lion-toothed savagery. She loomed over the wizard on the ground. If it had been possible for him to be further intimidated, I’m sure that she would have done so.

“It’s taken care of,” I said. “Much as it might be fun to watch you tear his arms off, we don’t really have time.”

Shelka’s hot-ember eyes bored into the foiled assassin. He dragged himself away and tried to get up. I turned away. I’d need every dram of vitality I’d siphoned from him. Just maybe, we stood a chance of getting out of this alive.

✧ ✧ ✧

Dead ratlings. Some of them had simply been torn in two. Others were half eaten. A few were unrecognizable remnants of furry hide. The first warren told its tale. It contained nothing but dozens of carcasses, all too damaged to serve as hosts.

Shelka’s nostrils flared, and she held hard against my shoulder. Blood. Everywhere, blood. Shivers went through her. I had to admire her control. The Blood Fey I’d known up to then could not have quelled their predatory drive so many times. The aftermath of the massacre in that room would have driven them berserk.

“They fought as hard as they could here. They couldn’t . . . couldn’t hurt it, and so they scattered. They ran, pissing as they went.” Shelka’s grip on my shoulder, painful as it was, seemed to ground her, keep her mind from devolving into a red mist.

“Can you track it?”

She nodded, bolting forward. Every muscle in her flexed, taut as a lute string. I jogged after her, barely keeping up. In half a minute, all sense of direction left me. The ratling tunnels blurred, choked with indistinct remainders of endless generations. Hip-deep refuse I didn’t care to examine. More bones than any graveyard. Now and then, the shining eyes on us from side tunnels.

My breath came roughly, a stitch in my side as I limped further through the endless purgatory. Ahead, Shelka’s breathing had turned to a ripsaw growl. With every step, the chances of her losing herself in the blood rage increased.

But the tunnels weren’t endless, and we broke out into a large cavern. Overhead, the ceiling vaulted to some fifty feet up. The far wall stretched further than my eyes could pierce. Shelka skidded to a halt. I lost velocity with far inferior grace, my hands on my knees, gulping air.

In the near distance, the Ravager hoisted up a ratling, biting out its throat in a welter of blood. Perhaps three days old, it stood almost eight feet tall now, its skin carrying the gross, blistered aspect of a burnt pudding. Stupid, tiny eyes gleamed a sick yellow beneath squashed brows. A wide mouth split its head in half, filled with teeth like sharp shards of flint.

“It’s . . . about to implant,” I managed.

“How does it . . . ” Shelka began to ask. “Oh. I’ll hope to forget that someday.”

I called the magic to me, everything I could grab. Screaming, I released a skull of purple fire, nearly the size of my torso. The Ravager threw itself to the floor. My spell sailed over it, missing altogether. The skull exploded against the far end of the cavern, lighting stone on fire for a moment. Glorious and totally wasted.

Shelka burst forward, confronting the hellish creature with claw and sword and tooth. For all the unending vitality of the Ravager, she matched it with quickness, with ferocity, with skill. I’d never seen better, but it wasn’t enough. The Ravager put its huge talons on her, hurling her backward.

Right at me.

As if rooted to the ground, I watched the commander hurtling closer. Between the two bodies, mine was the frailest. The sound of both my legs breaking came before the pain burst upon me, sending my entire vision to white, to gray, almost to black. We rolled and tumbled across the rough cavern floor, coming to rest near the tunnel we’d emerged from.

Both my legs hung at strange angles. One of my feet was pointing altogether the wrong way. I may have made a piteous sound. I didn’t have time for it, though. Shelka lay dazed against me, and the Ravager paced closer, confident in two easy kills.

I flexed my hand. “Eat the pain and spit back fire. Come on, Orphesias,” I whispered to myself.

I summoned the Emperor’s Rush. Burning darkness poured from my clawed talon. Every fiber strained and screamed, my muscle and sinew on fire as the spell burst from me and into being. A claw ten feet across hovered in the air. I’d lost all vision in one eye, and my consciousness began to falter. I closed my clawed fist and dug my talons in until blood bloomed. The claw of ebony leapt forward, grasping the Ravager. It hoisted the fiend and slammed down, pinning it to the ground. It struggled, but I held the spell, even as my body tried to succumb to its injuries. I couldn’t do it alone.

Shelka lay against me, insensate. “Wake up,” was all I could manage.

Dragged down and down into a deep well, I gritted my teeth and eked out another few seconds, a few more. When I had all but given in, Shelka finally twitched, coming back around.

“Strike it. Strike . . . I can’t hold,” I whispered.

As if watching from paces away, I saw her rise, scoop up her heavy sword, and swing a mighty stroke down against the Ravager’s neck. And another, and . . . then I was gone again.

✧ ✧ ✧

“Yes, yes. With fire and salt and iron. All of them. If there’s even half a chance.”

I didn’t recognize the voice. I did recognize the alley. Where I’d been nearly killed the time before last. Every possible thing hurt. Things that were altogether ephemeral parts of me hurt. My legs seemed to be going in the right direction, though. That was something.

“Did we win?” I asked to a lot of knees and ankles standing closer to the tunnel mouth.

Shelka broke away and squatted on her haunches next to me. “Would have been my choice to have that big purple skull do the work, but we did.”

“Sometimes, they dodge.” My mouth twisted. “Sometimes, I just miss.”

She put a hand on my shoulder, gentle. “You’re all right, Orphesias.”

“You should see me on a good day.”

She stood. “I only show up on bad days. Anyway, the Octar was the one who seemed to take a shine to you.”

“I . . . I’m not going to think about that right now. Sounds like you have a crew making sure no Ravagers come to term.”

“Wizards, clerics. The works.”

“Good. Should I try to stand up?”

“It’s that or sleep the night here, Orman. Your choice.”

I got up. No one has ever looked as old as I felt. I discovered that they’d slit my trousers up the side to reset my leg bones before the healing. New scars where my bones had ripped through and into the air decorated my skin, new cartographic symbols written on my map of almost dying. No one watched me go as I limped toward home. Shirtless, bloody, bent around all the things that magic cannot mend. I slipped through the streets, and Remnar did not care.

Lex, my upstairs neighbor, sat at the corner table with multiple empty liquor bottles standing before him. He’d tipped his hat over his eyes and seemed asleep, but the moment I stepped over the broken remnants of the door, he pushed the hat back.

“What the hell happened to you?”

I slumped into the chair opposite him. “An Octar might like me. Romantically.”

“Okay. Fate worse than death. I’ve got another bottle upstairs.” Lex jumped up, quicker on his feet than most would imagine.

“Another bottle. Sure.” I knew I couldn’t drink the day off my mind. Those scars would be a long time knitting, but I was alive. I had a few friends, a business, and the investiture of the Emperor of the Underworld. Remnar kept ticking along for one more night.

It was enough.


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Framed