Mraxinar Awakens

In his centuries of existence, Mraxinar had never been unconscious before. The physiology of a bone construct such as himself was not, really, anything like that of a human. His skull served as a focal point for conversation with others, a perspective from which he could see and hear, and, he supposed like humans, he had come to think of it as the seat of his consciousness.
And yet, there was no brain inside that skull – there had not been for a very long time, and he had never thought of that brain as belonging to himself. Certainly, some humans assumed that because the brain was the organ that processed information and output commands to the rest of the body that manifested in behavior that it must also be the seat of consciousness. This of course carried with it some dire implications regarding what happened when a brain was destroyed, or even when it was damaged. Where did the self go, exactly, when that seat of consciousness no longer existed?
Mraxinar had always been aware that his body was not indestructible. It did not age the same way that human bodies did, but it was physical matter that could wear over time and that could be threatened by any severe violent trauma.
And yet, in the Wastes, in the grand city of Spire, the notion that life could come to an end was far from anyone’s mind.
Even when the ship was destroyed shortly after they arrived in Port O’James, he had not quite processed what had happened. One guard had been killed – or destroyed, as the living humans had thought of it – but Mraxinar had not known that individual very well. It was an anomaly, and the event had been abstracted in his mind.
Mraxinar did not even sleep. He did not even have eyelids to blink.
And so, had he been conscious enough to evaluate his situation, he would have thought that the only reasonable explanation for his loss of sight and conscious thought was that he had died, been destroyed, and ceased to exist.
He had, in fact, been knocked unconscious, which was not something he had even been aware was possible.
When he came to, he was in a hospital bed, which was a very ironic thing because none of the equipment or instruments there were remotely suited to provide him with any help. The first sign that something was terribly wrong was that he seemed to fit on the bed.
There was a uniformed enforcement officer outside the door. When Mraxinar called out, his voice was weak.
What was this? He had no throat to be hoarse. His speech was a magical projection from his mouth, not the vibrations of vocal cords shaped by tongue, lips, or teeth.
He tried again, conjuring up the strength to say something, and he felt not just confused or frustrated by the effort it required but also terrified.
“I’m awake!” he cried out, the panic perhaps coloring the sound of his words.
This time the officer heard, and Mraxinar could hear as he called in a nurse and then began to radio in to his headquarters.
A doctor came in – Mraxinar was not certain, as much of his knowledge on human notions of gender were centuries old, but they appeared to be a nonbinary person in their early 30s – and seemed to approach with some trepidation.
“You are a caregiver, I understand?” he said.
“Yes. My name is Bailey,” they said. “Doctor Bailey Evans.”
“Why was I brought here? I don’t believe that any of the kind of medicine practiced in this facility is likely to do me any good.”
Bailey nodded. “You’re probably right about that, but it seemed the best option.” They began to jot down notes on a clipboard. “How are you feeling right now?”
Mraxinar considered it. “Mostly confused. I do not remember coming here. I experienced a period of unconsciousness.”
“Yes, you came in like that. Do you remember what happened before that?”
Mraxinar thought back. He remembered that he had been in the room with the other constructs, speaking about something. “Partially, perhaps. May I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” said Bailey.
“Is that darkness truly what sleep feels like?”
“Do you not sleep?”
“No, I’ve never slept before.”
Bailey put their clipboard away. “Sleep is… it depends. Sometimes you dream. You know about dreams?”
“I’m familiar with the concept on an intellectual level.”
“Well, usually if you dream it feels very real until you wake up from it. But sometimes, sleep is just sleep.”
“Nothingness?”
“Well, some might say that. Though I always feel as if there’s a sensation to it. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s a kind of low hum. It’s a good feeling, usually.”
Mraxinar considered that. There was not a sense of lost time – he did not feel as if he had been transported instantly to this bed – and yet he could not conjure up any memory of sensation while he was unconscious.
As if they had sensed his thoughts, Bailey said “You suffered a severe physical trauma. You were not just asleep.”
“I see.”
“Mraxinar, you were very close to the detonation of an explosive device. You have suffered from severe concussive trauma. Unfortunately, as you’ve noted, we are not experienced in treating a being of your nature here, and because of that, I am very sorry, Mraxinar, but we could not save your legs.”
Mraxinar had not considered that. He propped himself up on his hands, leaning forward as Dr. Evans assisted him. Indeed, there was only a trail of vertebrae that ended about a foot and a half beyond the ribs.
Mraxinar was suddenly aware of how small he was. He was accustomed to towering over others. Now, there was just this human skeleton that ended at the pelvis (with perhaps a few extra vertebrae, but not enough to look all that impressive.)
Immediately, a comforting thought came to him, which was that he could be repaired when he returned to the Wastes. They could outfit him with a new set of legs easily enough. Sure, the old ones had been with him since the moment of his creation. For centuries. The thought made him deeply sad.
“It is understandable.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No…” he said. Not physical pain at least.
“Mraxinar, Detective Inspector Harrick and Detective Sweeney are here to speak with you. Are you ready to speak with them?”
Mraxinar’s mood cheered for a moment at the mention of Sweeney’s name. “Oh, yes, certainly.”
“Right. I’ll be back when they’re gone so we can discuss long term goals here.”
That sounded ominous to Mraxinar, but he tried to dismiss it.
Dr. Evans exited the room, and the old man and the young undead woman walked in. “Mraxinar, how are you feeling?” asked Sweeney.
“Surreal, I think, would be the right word. How long was I unconscious?”
“Seven days,” said Harrick. He walked over to a chair in the room and sat down, resting his cane in a corner that a counter made with the wall. “What do you remember?”
Mraxinar thought back again. “There was… I was talking with my colleagues. We were… I had seen a man on the street that was wearing a very thin jacket despite the fact that it was well below freezing in the early morning. We were having a sort of intellectual conversation, I think? It’s remarkable how fuzzy the memory is.”
“Mraxinar,” said Sweeney. “We have to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
Harrick sighed. Sweeney looked to him, but he shrugged and gestured for her to continue. She stepped forward and placed a hand on Mraxinar’s wrist. “You were the only survivor. Gersic, Xirrik, Zyx, and Torithar… There were only fragments left.”
How self-centered he had been. Mraxinar stared forward at the blank ceiling. He had known Gersic for over three hundred years. They had had their differences in personality, to be sure, but he had been a friend.
“I am very sorry, Mraxinar, for your loss.”
“Thank you, Ana. Detective. I must confess that grief is not something I have a great deal of experience with. In these earliest moments of it, I find it very unpleasant.”
Harrick leaned forward in his chair. “The bomber killed your people as well as four humans, staying in rooms near yours. It took hours for firefighters to find you in the wreckage. I’m sorry about your legs.”
Mraxinar nodded. “Thank you for your condolences.”
“Mraxinar,” Harrick continued. “Do you remember what you were saying when the firefighters found you?”
“I was not aware I was saying anything.”
Harrick pulled out a notepad. “’We are one in the machine.’ What does that phrase mean to you?”
The conversation that he had had with his associates began to coalesce within his memory. “Gods, I…” He began to remember what they had discovered before the bomber arrived. “I think it was the subject of a conversation that was the very reason we would be targeted by the bomber.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sweeney.
“We were sent here to assist with your problems with the undead, because we are particularly well equipped to do so. And we had just discovered something over which was worth killing us.”
“And what was that?” asked Harrick.
“The Ice Lord is no longer in control of the draugar within the Forest of Dusk.”

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2019)

Next Steps

When Freya came back, she was accompanied by a woman with auburn hair – possibly Arizi, though Tessa couldn’t tell. They came out of the desert to the east.
Freya had been missing for a day, and a couple of search parties had gone out in trucks in every direction once they had determined she wasn’t just elsewhere in the village. The sietches were deceptively large, and the search would have been harder had it not been for the fact that Freya, as a blonde-haired and fair-skinned human, stood out rather prominently in a village full of blue-skinned djinn.
Azjar had been in a panic for most of the day. Jack, oddly, had been distracted, seeming to stare off in space. So Tessa had done her best to make herself useful as best as she could.
Tall Man was dead, and she hesitated to reach out to Mr. Flow while he was in the hospital. She did not understand djinn physiology very well – she had previously just assumed that things worked more or less the same on the inside – but even with his wounds cauterized, Mr. Flow, or “Soka” as they called him here, had not been released from the doctors’ care.
There was a strange… mood to the desert. They had been there only a few days, and yet it felt as if they had been there much longer. Tessa’s academic work felt far removed from the recent events, with blood and destruction, and now hiding out in this very friendly but very alien village.
Mr. Flow had pulled a ripcord of some sort, perhaps. He had gone home. It hadn’t ever really occurred to Tessa that she could go home. After all, what was home if not the House?
She had once been a little girl out in the Redlands, and the House had saved her from her abusive stepfather. She had processed that. She had recognized that her mother had failed to protect her, but Tessa had forgiven her for that. People take risks when inaction is unsustainable. Her mother had found a man that could provide for them, unaware that there was a monster within him. It was not a unique story. And if it had not been for the House, the story would have, again, not been terribly unique. But her own story would have ended a lot earlier. Tessa never doubted that – that her stepfather would have ultimately killed her too, maybe “accidentally” as he had her mother, or maybe not.
But the House had made sure that he was dead, and they had given her Ellie, had given her Tom, and had even given her the name she now used.
She did not think herself naïve. The House was not just some network of friendly people. But she had never hurt anyone working for them, and she had worked for them since she was a child.
And so it was terrifying to see one’s family falling apart.
The woman with the auburn hair did not speak a great deal, but she also didn’t drive away immediately. Jenda Marada, the village elder, had come out to speak with her, and had apparently invited her into the sietch.
Freya had sunburns, but all in all she did not seem to be too badly hurt. Once the fuss had died down about getting her back, and when the four humans were back down in their rooms, Freya downed a massive bottle of water before speaking to Jack.
“I met someone out there in the desert, Jack.”
“That woman?”
“No. I mean, obviously yes. That’s Sar. She works for him. There’s a bunch of them out there.”
“Who are they?” asked Jack.
“The guy in charge, they just call him ‘Boss Man.’ And he said something really strange. He said you were Jack Milton, not Jack Cart. Is that true?”
Jack looked to Tessa, and she silently groaned at his lack of subtlety. “Yes, it is.”
“So… uh, why?”
To his credit, Jack did not make eye contact with Tessa again. “That is a long story, but… I guess, given everything that’s going on…”
Azjar took a step back. “Tessa, is he really your boyfriend?”
She had not expected to be called upon like that, and she hesitated to respond, so Jack spoke. “No, I’m not. I’m actually a cop.” Tessa wondered for an instant if the others would take this non-sequitur and not follow up on the whole “boyfriend” question, but already she could feel a jolt of panic beginning to build up within her like the static electricity that leads to a lightning bolt.
“A cop?” asked Freya. “Wait, what?”
“Narcian National Enforcement. But… ok, let’s see if I can break it down.” And then he proceeded to tell a story that even Tessa had not heard – of a strange woman in a deep cell, of someone he called the “Shabby Man,” of the Diplomat and the faceless man. Of the land of day and the land of night, and then… of meeting Tessa, at which point the story became less detailed.
By the time he had finished, Azjar had taken a seat to process what he had heard. Freya had been sitting in bed, but got up to take another bottle of water. “Well,” she said before gulping down nearly half the bottle. “I guess this would explain why he wants to talk to you.”
Tessa spoke: “What does this ‘Boss Man’” look like?
Freya shrugged. “He’s white, mostly, I think. Sandy blond hair, scruffy beard. Wears a tan duster. Kind of hot, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
Tessa wracked her brain to see if that sounded familiar. But she had been a traditionalist. Aside from Ellie and Tom, she had only ever really interacted with a few other House Agents.
“What does he want? Why hasn’t he just come here?”
“I don’t know,” said Freya. “It’s sketchy as fuck.”
Jack nodded.
“What are we going to do?” asked Azjar.
They looked to him.
“I mean, a couple days ago, a bunch of people tried to murder us, and then the telescope fell down. So… do we just go home? Are we safe?”
Jack shrugged. “I wish I could tell you that we were. Or that you were, at least. I don’t really know what my part in all of this is. I’d tell you that if you went home we couldn’t guarantee your safety, but…” Jack sat down. “You know, before all of this, I was a pretty respected law enforcement officer. And yeah, I dealt with arcanists and sometimes even magical creatures. But this… these faceless men… I have no idea what to expect from them. I don’t understand how they work. And before that night when the telescope fell, I didn’t think we could do anything about them.”
Tessa frowned, and now spoke: “What do you mean?”
“There was one of them there. I think… I think it was leading the people who attacked us. Or, if not leading, it was… guiding them? Controlling them?”
“I didn’t see anything like that,” she said.
“You can’t. It’s… the first time I saw them, I needed to drink that weird ‘coffee’ the Diplomat gave me. But later, after I’d puked it all up, it was like I didn’t need it anymore. It felt like I’d been looking at it all along, but only now was my brain registering that it was there.”
“And it was there?”
“Yes. And then I… tore it in half. And it was gone.”
Azjar nodded. “And that’s why this guy wants to talk to you.”
Jack cocked his head to the side, as if he had not thought of that. “I guess that would make sense.”
“But we don’t know what he wants to do with you,” said Freya.
“No. But then, he’s not the first person to want me because of this,” he said.
Azjar now looked to Tessa, and the question she had been dreading formed on his lips. “Tessa, how do you know Jack?”
She ran through several scenarios in her head. She had practiced for nearly a month before she met Jack Milton all the contingency plans, but now, she realized, it had all fallen away. She had gotten comfortable with the charade that they were simply a couple and for some reason had never felt like Jack would contradict the story. It was foolish, but now she hesitated.
“She had orders to recruit me,” said Jack.
Tessa felt her stomach lurch. She looked at the confusion on her friends’ faces – friends she had known for over a year, with whom she had built a rapport and had lived with, side-by-side. She looked to Jack, his face betraying no sense of guilt, no remorse for exposing her. Instead, there was what looked to her to be a calculated curiosity.
She had believed the story, just enough for her to trust that Jack was already on board, already concealing the secret. And in the worst possible way, she realized in this moment that she had grown to like the fiction that they were a couple. Never before had she dissociated so much internally between her cover story and the truth of her life as an Agent of the House. For an instant, she felt hot with rage at Jack. But that would not accomplish anything. It was not clear what would. And so, at a loss, she turned around and walked out the door.
She did not know where to go, and so she marched across the sietch to a public bathroom. She went into a stall, sat down, and buried her head in her hands. Tears streamed down her face as she contemplated all the errors she had made in these past months.
“Hey,” said a female voice. The accent was Narcian, perhaps. She could see the woman’s feet outside the stall. “You ok, there?”
It must have been the woman who had brought Freya back. “It’s just…” but she couldn’t come up with another word, so she repeated “just.”
“My name is Sar – short for Sarah. My boss sent me here to bring your friend back. Is she doing ok?”
“Oh yeah, she’s doing great,” said Tessa, too loudly.
“That’s good to hear.” The woman’s feet shuffled a bit to the side. “So, listen,” she said. “I’ve got to take Jack to see him. And I know that might not be what you had planned, but I assure you he’s going to be perfectly safe with us. And we aren’t going to keep him for long.”
“Um…” said Tessa. Unless Mr. Flow made an appearance, she was cut off from her Chain, and so she had no idea what she was supposed to do. “Why are you asking me?”
The woman said. “Unfortunately, I’m not asking. And also, there’s another thing: he’s going to want to talk to you too, Agent Dust.”

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2019)

Reunited at Last

            The moment Jim’s words left Clara’s lips, Richard realized that in the end, he had been outplayed. He had chosen this particular demon because Richard believed that he would not be too powerful to control, but he would be powerful enough to be of some use. The most important factor was that Jim was of a class that Richard felt confident he could maintain control. The demon’s magical abilities were broad, but not so deep that Richard could not undermine them and bend them to his will.

            But such calculations were assuming a vacuum – two adversaries facing off on a featureless plane. Jim was thousands if not millions of years old, and though Richard felt Jim had bought in to his own demonic clichés a little too much, Richard was also prone to overestimating his own brilliance and underestimating his foes’.

            Richard was far better at burning bridges than building them, and so whatever network of old friends and allies he had mobilized against Thall had been a very small one. Certainly, the government and the RAS were hard at work hunting for the killer, but their strategy was very much a bottom-up approach, and Richard felt strongly that the only way to stop the killings would be to kill good old Henry.

            He had been so fixated on Henry Thall that he had grown complacent in his treatment of Whispering Jim, this ancient evil that was spoken of in legend and that Richard had employed in a manner not too dissimilar to a personal bodyguard.

            The moment Clara spoke with Jim’s voice, it became apparent what had happened. Jim had possessed her. As a demon, he could simply make another person’s body his own. Clara was trapped within, helplessly made a puppet by Jim’s will. Admittedly, after her veiled threat against his daughter (or so he felt her visit to his home to be,) Richard did not care very much about any strain she might be under due to the possession. But there was, of course, a shred of humanity remaining within his mind, and so even if Clara were a true villain, he felt a swifter and less ignoble end would have been more appropriate.

            But Jim had been clever. Some might object to an arcanist of his kind treating with demonic entities, but few would object to his dominance of such a creature specifically out of respect for the demon’s rights. To those who knew such a thing to be possible, a demon certainly had fewer rights than a pet rat – the demon may be more intelligent, but liberty for a demon is a far more dangerous thing than liberty for a rodent.

            There were no true laws on the books regarding the keeping of a familiar – demonic or otherwise. But the RAS did have some rather complex guidelines, none of which afforded a demonic familiar any sort of rights or privileges, and so the government was unlikely to object to the mistreatment of a demonic entity if the RAS was happy to look the other way.

            But Jim was no longer just a demon. Everywhere he went from now on (Richard knew possession was possible, but exorcism was another matter – typically exorcisms to his knowledge ended with the victim dead, and Richard even hypothesized that the practice itself merely killed the host in order to force the possessing spirit out) he would also be a human woman with all the rights afforded to her as a subject of the crown.

            And forced servitude was not something you could legally do to a human woman.

            Thus, the trap. Jim could easily portray their relationship as one of a deranged libertine, corrupting his daughter by keeping a former prostitute imprisoned within his basement. It would certainly fit with the narrative of his family. Yet another Airbright involved in some horrific depravity.

            And had it not been Jim’s idea in the first place to go and torment her with visions of terror? In a fit of paternal rage, he had agreed to a plan that Jim had provided. How foolish he had been, and now, here the demon had returned, a being of pure smug contempt, grinning at him with a stolen face.

            Jim had never been happier to see Richard. In the face of the unexplainable faceless men, Jim was certain that some true oblivion awaited him, and only through the gracious cooperation of this woman – who was perhaps less afraid only because she did not recognize how truly alien the faceless men were – had he been able to make his escape.

            Richard would know something. He would find a way to fight back, to protect them against the faceless men. They weren’t safe, exactly, but they would be safe once Richard had figured it all out.

             Admittedly, the expression on Richard’s face was a puzzling one – some place between fear, anger, and odd bemusement. Jim could not exactly understand what had brought it on, and he was usually so good at reading mortals.

            He would have to explain everything – the trap, Thall’s horrific abilities, and of course to explain everything he could about the horrific faceless men.

            Jim had seen terrifying things in his past. In the previous world, during the Great Cosmic War, there were those on his side of the conflict who had fallen to some force outside of what was ordinary, even for a group of spirits that identified as demons and monsters.

            Eternal beings did not have “beginnings,” just as they did not anticipate endings. It put every event on a continuum, and so Jim could certainly not say what his “earliest” memories were. Sometimes, to be sure, he would have flashes of a time before he and his brethren had committed to their dark incarnations. But these were formless and of such an alien psychology that even he could not recall exactly what the experience had been like.

            So aside from these odd flashes, his earliest memory was a vision of home – a vast cosmic expanse in which his brethren – spirits that took the form of streaks of energy or vapor, all dark browns and blues and blacks – circled around a sphere of infinite blackness. It was lazy, it was cold, and it was comfortable.

            Then, they became aware of the Spirits of Energy, those beings who would eventually take on the forms of gods and fairies and mythical creatures of all sorts, though only after they had encountered the human minds that thought them up in the first place, and the Great Cosmic War began.

            Jim had fought in that conflict. He wanted to see a dark world, a stable and slow and, well, dead world that mirrored his comfortable home reality. The cruelty and vindictiveness had really been an aesthetic choice in his pursuit of that goal.

            But something had come out of that dark sphere at the center of it all. The orb of infinite blackness had not been an object worth worshipping. It had been a hole. Into what? He could not say. No one could. It was a hole that cut out of his own universe into something that was not. And it was out of that hole that the strange and terrible presence leaked and transformed many of his kinsmen.

            They had lost the Great Cosmic War. And Jim, proud warrior though he had been, was glad of it.

            And though time meant different things in different universes, it was in this universe that he had spent… a million? A billion years? And he watched as this universe had developed its own human beings, its own cities and civilizations. Though perhaps not beset with quite as many systemic and institutional problems than the civilization of the previous world, its people were flawed enough to be corrupted. It was a playground for him.

            Until he saw those faceless men.

            He had never seen anything like them before, but it was as if there were a smell to them, or a vibration coming off of them.

            Or rather a lack thereof.

            Because Jim was certain that the faceless men had come from that same place that the hole in his universe had led to.

            As these thoughts raced through Jim’s head, Clara felt them as well. Because it was also Clara’s head.

            “I suppose I’ll speak first, if the two of you are just going to stare at each other.” She realized that it was an odd thing to say when it was her eyes that were staring at Richard Airbright.

            Neither responded, though she got the sense that they had heard her.

            “I have seen enough of Thall to want out of my arrangement with him,” she continued. “I do not want to go back to that house. I do not want to see those faceless men ever again.”

            “Faceless men?” asked Richard. To both Clara and Jim’s shock, there was a note of recognition in his words. “What do you mean, faceless men?” There, the veil was brought back over his expression. But Clara had seen it.

            “Thall is not working for his own benefit. He has an employer,” she said. “The killings and the rituals involving the bodies were all performed by hired hands. My job was to give out assignments. But these horrible men without faces would appear in the house and Thall seemed to communicate with them, though I never heard them speak.”

            “I do wish you would stop using her voice, Jim,” said Richard.

            “You misunderstand, Mr. Airbright. I am speaking of my own volition.”

            Richard glared at her – or perhaps more accurately, at Jim. Then he said “Nar’shastakala’xin, I hereby command you to stop speaking with this woman’s voice.”

            “And I am telling you, Mr. Airbright, that this is not Jim speaking right now. He shares my body now, but I am here as well.”

            Richard did not speak for several seconds, and Clara could see him contemplate what she had said. Whether he ultimately decided he could believe or not, he responded by saying “That complicates matters.”

            “I want to help you. I know I don’t deserve your trust, but you still remain in control of this demon, and he seems to have a direct view of my own mind, so if you do not trust my words or intentions, I invite you to ask him.”

            It was at this moment that Clara realized that Airbright’s teenaged daughter was peering at her from the top of the stairs. Clara fought the urge to make eye contact with her and potentially divert Richard’s attention from the matter at hand.

            “Jim?”

            “It’s true, Master. I think we have a legitimate defector.”

            “You think?”

            “Figure of speech. I know.”

            Richard straightened up, relaxing a bit. “Have a seat, Clara.” He gestured to a sofa in the living room. She stepped carefully toward it, carefully resisting the profound strength of her demonically-enhanced legs, which only moments earlier had seen her bounding from rooftop to rooftop, and sat.

            “Exorcisms generally kill the host. Do you know that?”

            Clara sought out Jim’s presence within her mind to refute this notion, though Jim was sheepishly silent.

            “I have a theory that exorcism is just a euphemism for killing the host, which winds up forcing the demon out. Despite its historical tradition within a religious context, the scholarship on the true arcane science of exorcism is practically non-existent.”

            He called behind his shoulder: “Isabelle, go to bed.”

            Clara heard the girl’s hasty footsteps and the closing of her door. “Clara, you have been an accessory to many heinous and brutal murders, all in the service of some dark purpose I have yet to unravel. You are currently possessed by my demonic familiar. Tell me, is there a good reason I should not attempt an exorcism upon you right now?”

            She tried to stand up and run, but the other person within her prevented her from moving a muscle. “Jim,” she thought to him. “Please!”

            But Jim was silent, that sheepish silence of a broken animal obeying its master.

            Richard held up his hand, and with a deft gesture, a golden knife appeared within it. “What is your value, Clara?”

            “Please, sir,” she started.

            “No, don’t play on human sympathy. You showed none to the people who died on your orders.”

            “They weren’t my orders, sir. They… I had to do what…”

            “You can always say no. You said yes.”

            Clara closed her eyes, but she could see the blade coming toward her in her mind’s eye. “I don’t want to die, sir,” she said. It came out flatter than she expected. There was a part of her that felt that none of this could be happening, as if she were dreaming or watching it all happening from far away. A small, logical voice in her head said “there’s no way he would kill you in his own living room. He wants something from you.”

            She suppressed a smile, even though she was still terrified. “I want to make this right.”

            When she opened her eyes, Richard had caused the knife to vanish. He even had the faint hint of a satisfied smile.

            “How can you help me, Clara?”

            “I can tell you what I saw. I can tell you names. Hired killers, targets, anything I can remember.”

            “Give me an example,” said Richard.

            She tried to think of something. That killer, Mr. Ford? Maybe the last person Thall had designated for a hit? She wanted something juicier. Then she thought of it.”

            “He thinks you’re jealous of him,” she said. “That you might have even chosen to help him if not for your sore ego.”

            Richard cocked his head at this. “My sore ego?”

            “Yes, I… don’t really know what he meant, but I gathered that you had known each other for a long time. I assume it is his power that you envied. He is clearly no longer human, though I would guess he was at one point.”
            “He was. We were friends at university.”

            “And is that when he changed?”

            “Yes.”

            “He seems to think that you envied him his transformation. That you worked to undermine him because of the power he had attained.”

            Richard let out a single puff of laughter. “Did he not know?” It seemed more a question to himself.

            “Know what?” asked Clara.

            “That the faceless men came to me first.”

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2018)

Life, Resumed

            Nascine had not been there when they took Tarson to Hexley Prison. She was fine with that. Once she and Tartin had gotten the Rookery to come and retrieve him, she was glad not to see his face again. After a long debriefing over the course of several days, Tartin informed her that the higher-ups were satisfied with her statements and would simply need her to eventually confirm them at an eventual criminal trial – something that could be years away.

            The most surreal moment was when she was invited to the palace. The Royal Palace was a familiar sight – it stood across the square from the Rookery, after all – but she had never been inside before. She supposed the mystery and majesty of it ought to have faded since she met the queen in her own flat at the beginning of all of this madness, but for whatever reason, looking upon it filled her with a kind of anxiety.

            This was no public ceremony, and indeed there had been some constraints placed on the press to protect Nascine’s privacy. (Retrein did not have total freedom of the press, but the government generally exercised its ability to intervene only to protect the reputations of its noble houses.) Still, the story itself could not avoid breaking out. Once the Wolfsmouth Record used the term “The House,” the existence of the organization very suddenly transformed from the scoff-worthy purview of tabloids to a topic of serious and genuine public discourse.

            Nascine arrived at the palace two weeks after she had captured the House agent. She was dressed in ceremonial uniform – soft black shoes, black pants, a leather jerkin (naturally dyed black), a pair of silver daggers sheathed on her belt, a black mask covering her mouth and nose, and most ostentatiously, a cloak sewn of raven feathers. She had spent nearly half an hour staring at herself in the mirror before she entered the palace, awed by the figure she saw within it and thoroughly convinced it was someone else who was looking back at her.

            Tartin was dressed similarly, though in addition to his daggers he had a golden skeleton key sewn into his chestpiece, to denote his rank.

            When she approached the throne, she knelt. Queen Elona then stepped forth and bade her to rise. Here, the surreal quality of the event was compounded. Last Nascine had seen Elona, the queen was in a simple hooded sweatshirt and sneakers. She had looked young then, perhaps even younger than Nascine. Now, Elona stepped forward in her slate-grey robes and gown, a veil over her face and her iron crown – so thin that a foreigner might mistake it for a circlet, except for the subtle crenellations patterned with wolves, ravens, and trees that rose above its rim.

            Nascine had felt a chill run down her spine when in the presence of the queen. The woman had been alive for thousands of years, and now, with all the symbols of her sovereignty around her, Nascine could not help but feel a sense of awe. She supposed that was the point.

            And that night, she was back in her own bed, sipping a cup of tea and reading a thrilling and well-written but not terribly provocative novel. She attempted to watch television, but before she had even turned the set on, she lost interest.

            The next week, she decided to move.

            So, three weeks after she captured the agent they were now calling “James Tarson” for lack of a better name, Emily settled into her new flat in Hagabie Lane. It took nearly another month for her to get to a point where she could imagine the flat without any moving boxes still sitting there, unopened or only partially unpacked. She had been using one box with numerous books she doubted she would ever read as something of a nightstand, but now, in a burst of inspired productivity, she had emptied it and with a good, purposeful march, had taken the flattened cardboard out to the recycling bin that stood by the street.

            Her flat was in a reasonably nice part of Ravenfort, a neighborhood called Dalton, which was down the cliffs from Exbrooke. At first that had seemed too close to the safehouse where she had caught the man they were informally calling James Tarson, but after a week she had gotten used to it. Cities were odd that way – so dense as to make two miles seem like a vast expanse of distance.

            And she had been seeing someone. Actually, this was attempt number two at that whole “dating” thing. The first had been a man named Chris, a perfectly pleasant bloke whom she had met at the local pub’s weekly quiz night. She had liked him well enough, but every time she said his name it reminded her of Chris Thatch, and the paranoia crept back in.

            Thievery was a strange profession. She had gone into the business for adventure, and indeed her early years largely involved delving into uninhabited ruins and meeting people across the world, but now everything had transformed into this miasma of cloaks and daggers. Every new person she met now, and frankly even the people she had already known, she now realized she would have to surreptitiously vet. Chris (not Thatch, but rather Brennings) had not tripped any alarms, but in a weaker moment she had actually walked halfway to his office to surveil him before considering that, technically, that might just be stalking.

            After two dates, she had called it off – for his sake, she told herself.

            Officially, Tartin was assisting the investigation, though he told her that what this seemed to amount to was the periodic office visit from one of the actual investigators to ask him a few yes/no questions to clarify the narrative they had been able to construct. He was spending most of his time instead doing his typical work, and was more excited about a group of new Rookery thieves preparing for an expedition into Sardok to hunt for relics like a good thief ought to. The investigation was fairly compartmentalized, and so Tartin was happy not to have to spend too much of his time reliving the events.

            Nascine was practically on vacation. She only had to check in at the Rookery about once a week, and spent much of her time reading prospective reports on new acquisitions targets – none of them, thankfully, people. She felt particularly odd about her medal after what had happened with Jaroka.

            She had not yet come up with a place to put it. It seemed odd to display it. Most intelligence officers did not display medals, nor were they even typically allowed to keep them. But Nascine’s position was a somewhat blurry territory, and certainly some of Retrein’s great thieves had lived lives of baroque extravagance following their famous scores, with the full encouragement of the culture as a whole.

            Nascine did not feel she ranked that high. The medal was strange. Yes, she had done something unprecedented, capturing an enemy agent and exposing a major threat to the nation’s security. On paper, she could not be anything but a hero.

            But Nascine felt she had simply bumbled into it. She hadn’t gone to the safehouse looking for anything other than a place to escape the House and think about her next moves. It had been luck that put them all there at the same time. If medals were awarded for luck, she didn’t know what they represented.

            For now, at least until the trial, her role in the affair was over, and that was a cause for relief. Tartin didn’t seem too troubled by it either, not that they had spoken much about it.

            They had not had many opportunities to speak. Adult friendships, even with co-workers, were sporadic in nature. When they did speak, Tartin affected a chipper attitude, claiming to be happy to focus on bright new thieves, though Nascine had known him long enough that she could tell he was anxious to see the investigation into the House reach some conclusions. At least they had Tarson in custody over at Hexley Prison. That meant he wasn’t going anywhere.

            So Nascine attempted to just live as if things were normal. She tried to relax, and so far, there was nothing for her to complain about.

            And there was the new guy. Moses Sanborn. He was Narcian, though he’d moved to Retrein when he was still a child. They had been on three dates now, and while he had been in the apartment already, she now felt like he might be able to stay for a more formal visit.

            It had been warm, lately, but any real Ravenforter would know to wear a light jacket at least and bring an umbrella even when there was a clear blue sky. Like clockwork, as Nascine left her building to go to the local grocer’s, there was a pitter patter of rain – not much more than a drizzle, but it paid to be cautious.

            Nascine walked three blocks to the grocer’s, passing over a small bridge under which the little stream called the Cheldley, which fed into the much larger Lockey, began to swell at the mild precipitation.

            She smiled as she saw a young couple guiding their daughter along the sidewalk. The girl looked as if she had only been walking a few months, and was clearly finding it rather difficult to circumnavigate the puddles that had begun to form (or more likely were left over from the previous night’s storm.)

            She wondered if House Agents had children.

            She supposed some must. She wondered who “James Tarson” truly was. Surely under all of those lies and false identities there had been a boy who was born and grew through all of his adolescent years to become the adult man. The cute girl on the sidewalk was the very image of innocence, and yet twenty, thirty years from now she would be an adult, not entitled to that special adoration that strangers give freely.

            This girl would become some woman. She might be nice and friendly and kind, or perhaps she would be cruel and arrogant and abusive. Every monster was once a little child.

            She had liked Tarson well enough when they were working with one another. He wasn’t all that much younger than she was, but she felt as if she could have mentored him. But that person had never existed. It was dissonant – her memories of this person who could have become an old friend in a few years’ time, even a boyfriend or husband, contrasted with her new knowledge that he had been lying to her from the moment she first saw him.

            When she walked into the store she realized she had not thought of what she wanted to purchase. There were her usual staples – cod for grilling, some ready-made meals for when she was feeling lazy, salad-fixings, and a bit of chocolate as a treat. Moses had told her he was going to teach her how to make Tibs, a traditional southern Narcian dish, so she was careful not to purchase too many things.

            When she reached for a little package of chocolate (the kind with orange jelly at the center) a woman bumped into her.

            “I’m so sorry, I must be blind,” said the woman, who was now bending down to gather her dropped groceries. A carton of milk had burst and was now spilling out onto the floor. “Shit, sorry, watch your shoes.”

            Nascine bent down, nearly bumping her head into the shelf as she did so, and began to help the woman gather her things. The woman looked Arizi, perhaps of mixed descent, and she had a rather conventional Retron accent. She seemed perhaps a little older than Nascine, though she could not tell quite how much.

            “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” said the woman. “My fault entirely.”

            “Not at all,” said Nascine, and picked up two cans of chicken broth and began to hand the cans to her when she saw the woman’s hand dart into her purse.

            Nascine reeled back, rolling back across the floor and jumping up into a standing position, readying to kick at the woman’s hand before it could grab the gun in the bag.

            And then the woman froze, her hand clasped around her wallet. The other shoppers receded suddenly, one of them audibly gasping. The Arizi woman slowly put her hands up, and Nascine felt every nerve in her body jangling with energy.

            “Is… are you… is everything?” the woman sputtered.

            Nascine looked around. No, this was not some ambush by the House in retribution for her actions. This was a random woman who probably just wanted to make sure that her wallet had not fallen out of her purse after dropping her groceries.

            Nascine’s muscles had yet to relax, and she felt very much like the moment after a nightmare in which the awakened must gradually remember which elements of their dream had been real and which had been imagined.

            Real: she was in a grocery store, and she had seen the woman’s hand dart into her bag.

            Imagined: the deadly weapon in that bag that could have spelled sudden death.

            After what felt like an hour standing perfectly still in the aisle, Nascine finally felt she could move. She walked out of the store, dimly aware of the gawking stares of the other shoppers. It would only occur to her once she had gotten home that she had left the food she had meant to purchase in her basket on the floor.

            She could barely get the key into its hole when she got back to her flat. The tight lock of her muscles had given way to uncontrollable shakes. The adrenaline was draining out of her system.

            So she sat in the comfortable chair in her living room and sat staring at the wall while she attempted to recover from the experience in the least productive way imaginable, namely playing it over and over in her mind, trying and failing to justify that she had acted perfectly rationally.

            She knew that people could get treatment for this. Indeed, she knew that this was probably some form of post-traumatic stress condition, though that felt odd. She knew of people that had really experienced true stress – soldiers and victims of catastrophic accidents and that sort of thing. All she had been through was…

            A clandestine organization with agents across the world had tried to kill her, then tried to manipulate her, then had once again tried to kill her right after she had discovered the frozen and disfigured corpse of a fellow thief.

            When she thought of it this way, it did not seem so absurd to say she might benefit from some professional help.

            The phone rang. Nascine considered very seriously not answering it. She eventually overcame this urge and picked up.

            “Emily.” It was Tartin.

            “Gil, how are you?” She wondered how well she was affecting the sort of calm nonchalance that any normal person would have after going to the grocery store.

            “We’ve got a really big problem.”

            She knew things had not been going smoothly, but that had to be normal when investigating the House.

            “Emily, I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear right now, but I have a special order to bring you onto the Tarson investigation. You’re the one who knows him best.”

            She had hoped never to see him again. It was easiest to think of him as never having existed. She felt her heart begin to race. She was sure he was a tough nut to crack, and surely the Rookery wanted every potential angle to get into his mind. She began to think of how she might approach Tarson: was she a friend? A rival? A lifeline? She was not very experienced in interrogation, but maybe she would have some luck.

            It would mean cancelling with Moses.

            “All right. So Hexley tomorrow morning?” Gods, what a long slog that’ll be bright and early.

            “No,” said Tartin. The word felt like a brick wall she had just run into. “Not Hexley.”

            “Why, where is he being held now?”

            “Mm. I can’t say. On the phone.”

            She heard the period in his voice. He couldn’t say. Tarson was missing.

The Castle of Dusk Revisited

         Mraxinar did not sleep. For the comfort of the people of Port O’James, he confined himself, along with the surviving members of his entourage, to a hotel room. He knew that mortals had a deep and instinctive aversion to skeletal forms, not to mention a rather practical (from an evolutionary perspective) tendency to experience fear at a greater intensity at night. Death was something to be kept warded away, secluded in cemeteries, where bodies were buried or burned to hide them from the living. There was, of course, the terror at seeing loved ones reduced from animate, living beings to shriveled ruins or unrecognizable ash – an emotional threat. But there was, of course, also the practical threat – a dead body could no longer defend itself as microorganisms consumed it, bacteria multiplying and producing not only unpleasant olfactory phenomena but also genuine danger in the form of infection.

         The sun would not rise for several hours, but this far north, the glow of the pre-dawn twilight was already beginning to illuminate the streets, dimming the stars by comparison. Mraxinar noted that even this early there were people moving about – there was a man on the street below walking briskly in a jacket that seemed too thin for what was sure to be below-freezing temperatures outside. The man was holding his arms around his chest. Mraxinar pitied him, theorizing that the man was a vagrant – not something he believed common in the North East Colony, but he had heard of such people in some human countries.

         Magic required imagination to take form. Undeath, the state of once-living material brought back to an animate state, was presumably born from nightmare – that these things that were dead could become an active and deliberate threat rather than simply an object that needed to be dealt with.

         And now he followed, with fascination, the story of Ana Sweeney, a woman who had only recently discovered herself to be undead, as she navigated the delicate challenges of reintegrating herself into the society to which she had previously belonged. Yet Ana was far from the kind of rotting corpse the humans feared. Her body was mostly still functional, still capable of fighting off disease and infection. Hers was not a shambling gait, and her odors were rather ordinary for a living human woman of roughly a quarter century in age. Her brain was the only thing one could call lifeless, but the magic that had reanimated her body had allowed her spirit – the ethereal and fundamentally mysterious mechanism of experience – to assume direct control over her functions. That mind, Mraxinar speculated, might one day grow beyond the limits that had been imposed on it by the physical structure of her brain, but such a development, if it ever happened, was likely not to occur for a great long time, and for now, the mind that had taken the form of a human brain would continue to function very much like one, even in its maturation past the death of the physical brain, calling into question the very abnormality of this woman’s nature. She certainly looked and acted normal.

         Mraxinar had never looked like an ordinary human being. Presumably the previous owner of his skull had, at one time. A thousand years earlier, there was, evidently, a man roughly in his forties who died and left bones behind. And later, the Bone King, in his vast and broad power, would make use of these remains and others to construct a being called Mraxinar. This individual, this bone construct, felt only a distant connection to that man. In truth, the way he saw it was that he and that long-dead man shared as much as a human who ate a piece of beef shared with the cow, or even the other humans whose bodies had fed the grass that had fed the cow that had, in turn, fed the beef-eating human. It was the same physical matter, but not the individuality. Having no illusions of being some human soul placed in a different body, Mraxinar saw himself as kin to the golems of the Redlands – beings of stone and metal and glass who had, long ago, been imbued with minds and animation and set about on their journeys.

         The man who had been walking down the street stopped not far from the hotel. Mraxinar gazed down, vaguely concerned that he might give the poor fellow a fright if the vagrant were to look up at the window and see a skull with deep blue flames for eyes staring back at him from above. Mraxinar decided it would be best to step away from the window just in case.

         In his idle times, such as these window-gazing times, he contemplated the crimes his creator had committed in order to build the nation called the Wastes. In a thousand years the Bone King had not extended that destruction elsewhere, and as an envoy of his sovereign creator, Mraxinar was convinced of the Bone King’s earnest good intention. But he also knew that the mortals had every reason to distrust. A nation had died to create the material for Mraxinar and his kin to exist. Mraxinar had not taken part in that monstrous deed, but he owed to it his existence. It was a question of philosophy to what degree that made him complicit, though Mraxinar had long ago concluded that whatever guilt he might share, there was no action he could take to make up for it, except to do what he could to assist humanity in whatever capacity he possessed.

         Now he found himself here in northern Elderland, the very place that the Bone King, when he was a mortal man known initially as Natano Gordenni, the respected doctor, and later as Mogra Thesh, the reviled necromancer, had gone to learn his arts. Gordenni had, of course, learned of this land by studying the autobiography of Paul Airbright, who had briefly been allowed to publish from prison only for his books to be seized in an extremely rare case of Narcian censorship. Gordenni had been forced to twist some arms and bribe some law enforcement officers in order to secure a copy, succeeding presumably only because Narcia was in the midst of its tragic Brothers’ War at the time the “good doctor” had decided to pursue this line of research.

         “Mogra Thesh” had come to these lands before there was a Northeast Colony. The colony was founded by Sardok exiles during the fascist period, which came hundreds of years later. So when he landed on the shores, most likely in the Northwest, across the continent from the future site of the Colony, there were only abandoned villages from some long-since vanished civilization. The mountains formed a barrier that protected the nation of Fealdoraga to the south, and so the man who would eventually come to be known as the Bone King must have seen no one but perhaps the occasional Redlander or Feal fisherman before pressing into a forest populated solely by the undead.

         There was a power in the forest. They called it the Dusk Forest because the light never seemed to shine bright there. After weeks of travel through dense foliage, one came to the Thanatos Trees. Hard as rock and seemingly lifeless, the Thanatos Trees were grey and menacing. And mortals who strayed beyond them were almost never heard from again.

         But Mogra Thesh was heard from. And that was because he had done his research. He knew of the one who held sway over those forests. A being called Hazhed-Funir. The Ice Lord.

         The Castle of Dusk:

         Mogra Thesh was forced to walk into the Dusk Forest – the horses refused to enter the woods, and he could see why. The trees grew extremely close to each other, sometimes forcing him to step up and squeeze between them. Even though it was noon, the sky was dark, almost as night, and a low, painful, howling wind blew. The trees were either dead, or they had learned to feign death lest someone notice them.

         There seemed to be no color in the forest except for the patterns in his thick traveling robe or the horse blood on his hands. He had slit the horses’ throats when they refused to enter, and smeared the blood in sweeping glyphs on the Thanatos Trees – those eerie sentinels that marked the beginning of the Dusk Forest.

         An offering was required to enter the forest, but it was only the first toll of many. As soon as he had passed into the forest, he felt the eyes around him. He feared a torch would give the lord of the castle offense, and so he walked in the dark. Yet he was a learned man of Spire, and darkness was easily remedied. He cast a spell on his own eyes, and now they glowed green. The world around him had been monochrome before, and that it remained, but everything seemed illuminated once again. The dark figures that he had thought were only barely near enough to see now appeared immediately on his left and right, mere feet away.

         Thesh kept his pace, terrified but also excited. He gripped his staff, using it to steady himself as he climbed over another enormous root - or perhaps it was a rock. His hand began to ache, and he realized he had been gripping the staff so tightly that he had cut off much of the circulation.

         The dead eyes surveyed him, the bones now audibly clicking with each step. How quiet they had been! Yet now, knowing they were there, he felt as if there was a cacophony of bending sinew and grinding bone as the dead walked around him. He could not deny his fear now, but still he pressed on.

         It may have been night when he arrived at the castle, but it had been so dark during the day that he hardly noticed a difference. The castle seemed more like a ruin than a stronghold, half-buried, with a deep slope leading down toward the small iron gate that led within. He had studied every reference to it he could find in Spire’s libraries. Much of the castle was beneath the rocky hill that rose beside it. A nearly frozen stream flowed by the castle, hardly two feet across. The trees seemed to fall away, averting their gazes.

         Thesh might have felt disappointed had he not done his research. This was no dark tower, rising into the heavens, projecting terror across the land. Yet altogether it was more sinister than that. Truly, the castle was dead, as was the forest, and the very earth itself.

         As he approached, the gates creaked open, the dark and cavernous pit allowing him entry. He walked down into the castle, taking care not to allow his thoughts to linger on the bones that crunched under foot. He allowed the spell to fade from his eyes, for there was not a speck of light to amplify. He was blind.

         And yet, ahead, after several minutes walking very slowly through the tunnel, he finally spotted an orange flame. A torch – the Ice Lord had allowed him a torch! This boded well, but still, Thesh would not allow himself to feel relieved. The Ice Lord had him in his grasp, and this gift of light was no guarantee of safety.

         He climbed a spiral staircase. He was inside the hill now, of that he was sure. When he emerged in the castle court, what would have been an open yard in an ordinary castle but here had a ceiling of stone, he saw a hundred sets of glowing blue eyes staring back at him. As he approached, the dead receded from the light of the torch. In front of him, the double-door into the Great Hall opened. Here, he saw that two torches burned, and at the end of the table the Ice Lord sat.

         As Mogra Thesh walked in, he glanced behind him. He could see two enormous dead servants closing the door through which he had passed. They did not like the light, it seemed.

         The Ice Lord sat at his table. A dish of rare, delicious looking venison and a golden goblet full of wine sat at the place next to him. A chair had been placed there as well.

         “Sit, Bone King,” said the Ice Lord. Thesh did not think the Ice Lord could be referring to anyone else, so he sat. “Eat. Know that this meat is the flesh of the dead. So do you eat it and so you are dead as well. Drink. Know that alcohol is poison. So do you drink it and so your blood runs with poison.”

         The Ice Lord was ancient, a pale human-like form, gaunt and severe. Yet he sat upright, clad in ceremonial armor, all patterned to appear as if it were bone. Ice coated the armor. Before him, on the table, sat his helmet – a great steel skull, also covered in rime. To his side was an enormous executioner’s axe.

         “What is it you called me?” asked Mogra Thesh.

         “I called you by your true name. For when time has washed away all memory of Mogra Thesh, only bones will remain.” Thesh clung to each word like scripture. He looked into the Ice Lord’s eyes. They were grey and clouded, yet he was sure the being before him could see.

         “I have commanded you to eat, Bone King. This is my lesson.” Thesh did. As he bit into the meat, its juices running down his throat, it dawned on him that he had not eaten since before he had crossed the Thanatos Trees. He tore at it with his teeth, ripping it from the bone. When the meat was gone, he lapped at his plate like a dog, and he drained the goblet in one go.

         “You gave me blood to enter my house, Bone King, for blood is what you had. Look now, do you see blood?” Thesh looked down. No, he had licked all the blood clean.

         “Blood is fickle, and blood magic is fleeting. The rains wash the blood away, and the blood dries and flakes and scatters like so much dust. Blood will desert you when the fire comes.”

         These last words sent a jolt to Thesh’s heart. He shuddered and coughed slightly. The Ice Lord pointed to Thesh’s plate. “See what is left, what your hunger has left to time.”

         All that remained on the plate was a flat piece of bone.

         “Bone,” said Mogra Thesh.

         “Bone,” said the Ice Lord.

         Thus began the education of Mogra Thesh, Bone King of the Wastes.

         The memory of his first meeting with Hazhed-Funir was one that the Bone King had shared with Mraxinar before the envoy was sent to this town. There were other envoys, one sent to Port Sang and others sent to each of the major cities of the N.E.C.

         The Bone King had always been honest with them about what he had done in life. Even after living far longer than a human would, Mraxinar had never been able to determine if the Bone King’s honesty was his way of expressing regret. The Bone King had, of course, once been a human being, unlike Mraxinar or his kin. Mraxinar wondered if death and the expansion of his mind to encompass an entire nation had given the Bone King the perspective to see how heinous his actions had been.

         But as he contemplated his current position, Mraxinar now wondered if perhaps the Bone King had given them only what information would be needed to deal with the threat.

         He had not been authorized to tell the humans the nature of the god that inhabited the central forests of the continent, or that he knew the way in. Yet as Mraxinar played the memories over in his head – not mere information, but a perceived experience that Mraxinar could recall as if it were his own memory – he began to wonder if perhaps the story given to him by the Bone King was itself a call to action.

         He had been sent with the explicit directive to help the humans of Port O’James defend themselves against the undead menace, and that seemed straightforward enough at the time. But as Mraxinar had discovered the truth about Ana Sweeney, shocked just as much as any of the living to find out (well, except perhaps he was not as shocked as Ana herself,) it sparked a new concern – that perhaps everyone had had it wrong. Perhaps he had been given that memory merely to show how far things had changed from their natural state.

         Xirrik, one of his entourage, was pieced together to look more like a conventional human skeleton, though the bones had been warped and stretched to be larger than they had been in life, reinforced with metal, and placed within a suit of armor. He stood motionless, as did Gersic, the one built from primarily bovine bones. They did not breath, nor did they have blood to pulse through them, and so involuntary movement was far subtler amongst their kind.

         “What are you thinking about, Mraxinar?” asked Gersic.

         “The Ice Lord.”

         Gersic’s two bull skulls nodded. “He occupies a unique position in the humans’ culture. They barely remember him, but the shadow over the forests to the west looms large in the collective unconscious of their society.” Mraxinar wondered if Gersic’s lack of human bones made him a less threatening presence for the humans. He had spoken with many within the community during their time there.

         “He presses them with these incursions. They are worried about a sudden invasion,” said Xirrik, who, being a guard, always seemed to think in terms of combat.

         “An observation,” offered Mraxinar. “We all hear the voice of the Bone King – the rhythm that binds us to him.”

         Indeed, they all paused for a moment, and the soothing voice throbbed through their thoughts:

         I am with you. I am with you.

         The thought had been a constant for each of them since they were first created, the Bone King’s silent voice chanting this mantra of stability.

         “The Ice Lord was the one who taught our sovereign the great secrets of necromancy. The Rhythm of Will is one of those secrets. We know that the Ice Lord had his own.”

         “’To him,’ as I recall,” said Gersic. “Simple and effective, but one could hardly expect less from a god.”

         “Listen for it – the Ice Lord’s,” said Mraxinar. And once again they all grew quiet. If any had had eyelids, they surely would have closed them.

         “Nothing,” said Gersic, his voice betraying his astonishment. “Perhaps it does not reach this far?”

         Mraxinar shook his head. “Our own sovereign reaches us here. I would be shocked if Hazhed-Funir’s Rhythm does not reach every point on this planet.”

         “Then we are not attuned to it. We already have our sovereign’s Rhythm. Perhaps that is why we are unable to hear…”

         “What was that?” asked Xirrik. “I think I heard it. Or… no…”

         “You hear the Ice Lord?” asked Mraxinar.

         “No. It’s the wrong Rhythm,” he replied.

         “What do you hear?”

         “’We are one…’ but it’s strange. I think there’s more to it, but it doesn’t sound like words. It is hard to explain.”

         Mraxinar listened. He could not pick up anything. He glanced out the window. The vagrant he had seen down below was no longer there. It was a detail that in retrospect, he would regret having ignored.

         “’We are one’ is a perfectly decent phrase for a Rhythm. A bit hive-mindish if you ask me,” said Gersic. “But I suspect the Ice Lord has never quite shared our sovereign’s respect for individuality.”

         “It’s not just ‘We are one,’ though,” said Xirrik. “And it’s… it’s very odd.”

         “Odd?” said Gersic.

         “Disturbing, actually, like the words don’t even form properly. It is like the idea of an idea, without any word or voice to communicate it.”

         Gersic gave a gesture, rocking his heads back and forth, which Mraxinar had long ago come to associate with a kind of frustrated dismissal. Indeed, Gersic had always dismissed what he deemed Xirrik’s paranoia. What had been a fun intellectual exercise had now been dragged into dour threat analysis.

         Xirrik held up a hand. “Wait, I… I think I can hear more of it. Like it’s getting louder.”

         “Why would it be getting louder?” asked Gersic, though Mraxinar could tell from his tone of voice that Gersic was now interested in moving onto a different subject.

         Mraxinar took a step toward Xirrik. It was highly unlikely that hearing some other necromancer’s Rhythm could override their sovereign’s, but the Ice Lord was not your typical necromancer. Mraxinar began to wonder if it would be best if they stopped all this experimentation.

         “It is getting louder. ‘We are one… in…’ Ok, let me see if I’ve got it. ‘We are one in the… machine?’ ‘We are one in the machine,’ isn’t that what those odd mortals from that Machinist sect are always chanting?”

         There was a knock at the door. Mraxinar surprised himself with how relieved he was to see Xirrik distracted from this subject. Xirrik looked up. “Yes, who is it?”

         There was no answer, except that there was soon another knock. Xirrik looked up to Mraxinar, questioningly.

         “How can I help you?” asked Xirrik, not yet moving to open the door. The entourage had not experienced any direct violence after the bombing of their ship shortly after they had arrived. But that event had encouraged caution.

         “Mayor’s office. You’ll want to come with me,” said the voice on the other side of the door. It was an odd voice, low and… Mraxinar detected something that almost sounded like gurgling.

         “Bit early for that,” said Gersic. “But I suppose duty calls. Very well, Xirrik, if you’d get the door?”

         Mraxinar listened again. He heard the Rhythm. It was coming loudly from just behind the door.

         (We are one in the machine.)

         Mraxinar put up a hand. “Wait, Xirrik, don’t-“ but Xirrik had already opened the door.

         Mraxinar immediately recognized the man standing there. It had been the one in the thin jacket down on the street. Now he looked at him – the man’s skin had grown a sickly grey, and dark fluid dripped from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The fluid looked something like petroleum oil, a substance the Bone King had produced to fuel the industries of the Waste.

         And the man had a vest rigged with explosives.

         There was no time to react. Xirrik stared at the man in confusion, and Gersic was still cheerfully trotting toward the door when the man detonated his vest.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2018)