by Luke Arnold
Baxter pulled out a large, faded sheet of paper and draped it over the desk. Sure enough, south-east of the city, a few miles from the entrance to Fintack Forest, there was a lone structure marked with magical runes.
“That’s the church?” I asked.
“I believe so. Though I don’t see what this has to do with Lance Niles.”
“Good. You’ve had enough bad news for one day.”
I copied down the location of the church and thanked Baxter for their help. I didn’t want to imagine what was out there. The journey wouldn’t be easy and there might be nothing but a nightmare at the end. So, I set my thoughts on Rick Tippity. If a trek into the wilderness to find a Faery graveyard in the middle of winter brought me one step closer to catching that killer, then there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do.
11
There was no road to Fintack, just a path that peeled off from Maple Highway and rolled east over low hills. The sun had finally decided to show itself at the last minute of the day, like a date who acts coy all through dinner but blows you a kiss as they walk out the door.
I’d learned from my mistakes and stopped by a second-hand clothing store before I left the city. I was wearing four layers on top and some tights beneath my trousers. My socks were thick and the Chimera fur in my coat was still as dense as the day it was ripped from the beast’s back.
Without the old lights illuminating it, Sunder soon faded into darkness. The clouds thinned out to let the full moon shine through and give me an outline of the path to follow. I made good time, only stopping to piss or get food from the bag. Georgio had caught me on my way out the building and been kind enough to pack me a midnight snack: nuts, dried berries and slices of chewy sausage.
After two hours of walking, a colony of bats crossed the sky overhead, following the path towards the forest. There were more than fifty of them, screeching like hags and flapping their leathery wings.
Over the next half an hour, the tension dropped out of my body. First, it was the tight little muscles in my brow. Then my jaw and down my neck and shoulders. Knots untwisted around my spine. My arms swung at my sides and I breathed deep, letting the cool air into my lungs. I was alone. Not alone like in my office, where someone could knock on the door at any moment. Not alone in a bar, where I might be lonely but was still surrounded by strangers. Properly alone. No Humans. No ex-magic creatures either. Nothing with memories or opinions. Nobody to judge the things I’d done or the things I was about to do. Not the mistakes I’d made or the stupid, naïve things I’d said. I didn’t mean anything to anyone. I was just part of the scenery, shuffling along without a history or a future that mattered to anyone at all. The far-off stars couldn’t see me and they didn’t care. Nobody cared. I could lie down right there in the dirt until my breathing slowed and stopped and it wouldn’t matter to anyone.
It was beautiful.
At the edge of the forest, I found an old hunter’s cabin with nobody home but a family of spiders and a pink-nosed possum.
“Got room for one more?” I asked.
The residents didn’t object so I closed the door. It felt good to step out of the wind for a while. There was a canvas hammock in the corner that was dirty but intact. I slapped off the dust and hopped in. It wasn’t as comfortable as a bed and it didn’t exactly hold the heat but it got me off the ground and raised my legs to ease the pain that had crept inside them. The cabin was dark and quiet and it didn’t take me long to fall asleep.
Crunching. The rip of flesh and crack of bones.
Edmund. Albert. Rye.
I could hear him. His mouth full of broken teeth and bleeding gums, chewing the bones of young girls and sucking out the marrow. He’d wanted magic. Instead, he became a monster. A devourer of sweet creatures. A curse on himself and those he loved.
He was standing over me. Murder on his breath. Eyes full of oblivion. Laughing because he’d been freed from the burden of trying to put things right.
Then the darkness turned to red. Then gold. Sunrise. I remembered to open my eyes.
The possum was chewing on the biggest spider in the web. Little legs stuck out from her muzzle, giving her extra whiskers.
“Save some for me?”
The possum didn’t respond but I’d slept with my bag in my arms so it was easy to reach inside for a handful of berries and have my breakfast in bed. The possum and I shared our meal, then I wished her well and hit the path again.
The mist and trees were thick but the path was clear enough that I could keep a nice pace and get my blood pumping. I had to watch the ground, though. If I stared ahead, into the white, I lost my sense of reality. There were noises all around. More bats and possums, probably. Maybe wolves. I had a knife but not much else. Worried that predators might smell the meat, I ate the rest of the sausage, threw away the paper it was wrapped in, and washed my hands on a patch of wet grass.
There weren’t any leaves on the trees. Maybe because of the Coda. Maybe just because it was winter. I couldn’t tell. Branches reached out over the path like Witches’ fingers. I ducked under them, sometimes. Once, when I was looking down at my feet, a branch scratched a scab from one of the cuts on my forehead. I was just about to start swearing when I saw someone on the path, waiting in the mist.
They were right on the path, just ahead of me. I held my breath but my heart slammed against my ribs so loudly that I feared the figure in the shadows must be able to hear it.
He was looking right in my direction. Just a silhouette; gray against white. Shorter than I was. Not Tippity. A friend of his? A scout?
He hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t attacked. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed me. Or if he had, he wasn’t sure if I was friend or foe.
I bent my knees and dropped the bag as quietly as possible. The figure didn’t react at all. I pulled the knife out of my belt, muffling the sound of metal against metal by keeping it under my coat. I tucked my right hand into my pocket and slipped my brass knuckles over my fingers, then I stood up and spoke deep, plain and clear.
“Hello.”
Nobody answered but the wind. It shook my clothes and whipped against my eardrums.
“You waiting for me?” I asked.
Still nothing.
I moved closer, tense as a tripwire.
“I’d rather talk than fight, if I have a say in the matter. But I’m prepared for both if I don’t.”
I squinted, searching for features, but something was wrong. The mist swirled around the stranger. Loose clothing moved in the wind but the thing beneath them was rigid. He had one hand on a cane and the other was outstretched. His thin fingers were spread open, but they were too motionless to be alive. It was a statue, dressed up in fine formal clothes, left out in the middle of the forest.
Still, I couldn’t make out its face.
I stepped closer again. He was even shorter than I’d first thought; only a few feet high. The outfit was tattered and rotten and insects had moved into the folds of cloth. I came through the mist, my knife at the ready, and realized why his face had been so hard to see.
He had no face. Not anymore. There were ears on either side and something that resembled a chin but everything in between had been peeled apart. It was a creature of the Fae. A poor fellow who had died when the Coda came, and then an unofficial autopsy had been committed on his body, just like the Faeries in the back of the pharmacy.
His cracked and open face was gruesome in a clean kind of way. There were no organs or blood, like there would be if a Human had been ripped to pieces. It looked more like someone had carved out an old tree stump. The flesh of the Fae’s head was firm, like petrified wood, but filled with tiny tunnels. Looking closer, I could see that his insides were marbled with silver; just the faint glimmer of something shiny, like spider’s web or starlight, threaded into his muscles and bone.
I felt sick, but also kind of grateful. When I’d returned to Sunder after the Coda, Amari had been waiting for me. She’d been safe inside the mansion, not lef
t alone, out in the wilderness, to be bug-eaten and butchered like this lost soul.
There was nothing to be done for him, of course. Nothing to be done for any of the creatures who lost their lives when the magic went away. Nothing to do but pat him on the shoulder and go further into the woods to see if he had any friends.
Then, I noticed that it wasn’t a cane he was leaning on. It was a signpost, but the marker on the top had been broken off. The post was positioned on the right side of the path, beside a gap through the trees that might have once been a walkway. I followed the direction through an overgrown archway and soon found two more tiny bodies. Imps, I think. They were holding each other, half covered in snow, just as frozen as the first one. One of their faces was split the same way, the other was missing her head completely. These were forest creatures. That meant that, unlike the creature on the signpost, their bodies were still growing. Little vines had crawled out from their shoulders and back, wrapped around their bodies, and tightened, crushing their limbs. Under the snow, the foliage must have spread out to reach the nearest trees because there were leaves there; little ones, born from the threads of vine that sprouted out from the creatures decomposing on the floor. It was all too familiar. All too sad.
I pushed my way through the woods to meet more death and more desecration. There were statues lying in the path and leaning against trees, all with no eyes. No faces. Just empty heads on rigid bodies frozen in pantomime gestures of pain. The path opened up and the mist thinned out so that as I came into a clearing, I could see the whole silhouette of the church.
It was forty feet tall without a straight line to be seen. The walls were braided branches, woven together in unimaginable patterns all the way from the ground to the tip of a pointed tower. It wasn’t just impressive for its size; it was a piece of art. There were shapes in the woodwork: faces, spirals, runes and words. All three-dimensional. All beautiful.
Forest Fae had power over plants. Usually, it was only used in small ways, like asking a flower to bloom early or ripening a piece of fruit. I had no idea what it would have taken to create this kind of miracle. Was it a group of skilled Wood Nymphs working in tandem or one particularly gifted architect with plenty of time on their hands? Birds had built their nests on the sills of the glassless windows and around the pointed spires that cornered the roof. Every inch was filled with minute, perfectly designed details. Past a certain height, I couldn’t tell which shapes were part of the architecture and which were Faery inhabitants frozen in place.
The garden around the church was full of huddled creatures and I was relieved to see that some still had their faces. Whoever was tearing them apart, they hadn’t yet finished the job. I stopped looking too closely and pushed myself forward, hoping that the bodies would all be whole after this point.
When I went inside, everything got worse.
12
More bodies. Hundreds more. Packed into the church like little sardines if someone left the lid off and they all dried up. Most were tiny, like children’s toys. Others, for their size, could have been Human. The same pained expressions were stuck on all their faces and their bodies were cracked and wrapped in vines.
I didn’t want to be there. The ones without faces filled me with hate for the man who broke them. The ones with faces made me hate myself instead. Some of them were screaming. Some of them were shattered into pieces. All of them were dead.
It looked like Baxter was right. The Fae must have sensed something. Somehow, they’d known about the Coda before it happened and decided to flee the city. But why? Why was it better to die out here in the middle of the forest rather than back in the city that had become their home?
There was a table in the middle of the room. High, like a podium. A few of the larger Fae were leaning over it. Others had collapsed against the base. It was covered in sheets of yellowed paper. Being a church, I thought they might be some kind of spiritual text. No. They were letters, orders and lists. The Fae hadn’t just been hiding out here. They were preparing themselves for something important.
A small map sat at the center of their focus. As Baxter had explained, Fae language wouldn’t be easily decipherable to an uneducated lug like me. They have their own ideas about space and distance and their sentences look more like snowflakes than speech. I flipped through the rest of the pages, trying not to tear the frail paper.
Everything was indecipherable until I turned over a letter that was different than the others. It was the same message written over and over again, translated into every language imaginable: Elvish, Dwarvish, Gnomish. Most shockingly, the handwriting was familiar. I blew away the dust and held the parchment up to the light.
To Every Creature of Magic. Every Defender of light. Every Ally to the natural world.
The Humans have attacked Agotsu, killing the Echoes and claiming the mountain as their own. We call on the assistance of every able body. Every creature connected to the source. We must take back the mountain, protect the river, and defeat the villains who have committed this crime.
Ready your forces. Prepare yourselves. Meet us at the mountain.
High Chancellor Eliah Hendricks
The Opus
The letter fluttered in my shaking hand.
I was the one that had led the forces to the mountain. But when the fighting started, I’d fled from the battle and been captured by the Opus who threw me in prison till the magic of the world drained away.
We’d learned to think of the Coda as a single moment but, of course, there had been a battle beforehand. Or at least the preparations for one.
The Fae community of Sunder City had got word of the attack and come to the church to prepare their forces before heading off. But the end had come too soon. Whatever the Humans did on the mountain, they didn’t waste any time.
There are some questions you try not to ask yourself. Even if you spend every second trying to push them away, they never quite leave. They sit in the shadows with sharpened teeth, waiting for a chance to bite down on the most tender little pieces of your brain. I’d found Hendricks’ handwriting while my guard was down, and all those hungry questions scurried in.
Some part of me had secretly hoped that he’d never found out what I’d done. That the Coda took him out before he heard the news. But he was High Chancellor of the Opus. When the Human Army invaded Agotsu, he would have been notified first, and known in an instant that I was the one who’d shown them the way.
Was he still planning his response when the Coda happened? Or had he already marched off to the mountain, hoping to take it back? Maybe the battle had already begun. Perhaps he died in a skirmish before the great sadness stripped the world of its beauty. Maybe it would have been better that way.
Hendricks was three hundred years old. I knew younger Elves who didn’t survive the first week. Hopefully that meant it happened fast. Nobody could dance to life’s tune like Eliah Hendricks. The worst death I could imagine for a man like that would be to lie down by the side of the road and watch every beautiful thing fade from existence without saying goodbye.
At least the letter explained one thing that had been bugging me. Baxter had said that all the Fae left the city, but Amari was still there. If all the Faeries had sensed that something was wrong, then why was she the only one left behind? It turns out that it was all my fault, again.
It was no secret that “Hendricks’ pet Human” had left the Opus and defected to the Human Army. But he wasn’t the only one whose reputation I’d compromised. The magical population of Sunder City had seen me standing at Amari’s side too many times.
As a precaution, I can understand why the rest of the Fae wouldn’t have told her their plans. Maybe they thought we were still in contact. If so, bringing her to the church could have tipped me off to the incoming attack.
So, they left her alone, in an abandoned mansion, because she’d committed the crime of trusting me.
Just like every shitty thing that had happened in the last six years, these creature
s were here because they’d hoped to stop the disaster that I’d started. They were dead because they hadn’t done it in time. Their bodies were being ripped apart because… Why? That was the piece I still didn’t understand. The one terrible thing that I still had a chance to stop.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The sound came from all around the church, like every little creature was clicking their tongue in disapproval. Then it got louder. Faster.
Rain landed on the snow outside and the roof above. I waited for it to leak into the church but the walls were made of a million intricately wound branches and the architects had sealed them tight. The church stayed dry and almost warm. If I tried walking back to Sunder now, I’d end up like that frozen Warlock, trapped in a block of ice by the side of the road. Besides, it might just pay to wait.
If Rick Tippity was using Faery bodies for his experiments, he’d left them all behind when he fled from the pharmacy. He’d need to restock. He’d need to come out here.
And I’d be waiting.
13
I should have brought more food. I should have kept that crossbow. I should have joined the circus when I was a fifteen, fallen off the trapeze, and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
I sat at the back of the house of horrors, blending in with the frozen Fae and doubting myself. Maybe the broken faces had nothing to do with the Warlock. Maybe it was some kind of animal. Perhaps there was something in the Faery heads that was tasty to a hungry woodland creature and they cracked open the faces like the shell of a nut to nibble at whatever was inside.
Maybe Tippity just came across a few discarded corpses and picked them up to mix into his potions. Just another strange ingredient in his collection of experimental odds and ends, same as the tarix sap and Clayfields.
