by Scott Hale
“Maybe. But how did Penance figure it out? And why not the other myths? The Bloodless would’ve made more sense. It could’ve drained the city dry over the span of one night. They chose the Crossbreed for a reason. Maybe everyone is still alive.”
Serra grunted: Controlling someone can be far worse than killing them.
Vrana nodded and then went stiff. Footsteps. Yes, she had heard footsteps: slow, deliberate footsteps in the rolling fog from someone who didn’t wish to be heard. She twisted her body, straining her muscles as she fixed an arrow in the bow and let it fly into the murk. A hiss of pain and a stumbling shape told Vrana she’d met her mark, while Serra’s sudden grunt and grip on her wrist told her that she shouldn’t have.
“What are you doing?” Vrana cried, ripping free of his grasp and losing some skin in the process.
“That was my fault,” the shape or, rather, Lucan said (Damn him, Vrana thought), as he stepped into view. He winced as he rubbed at the bloody tear in his forearm. “Can’t say I wished your aim was better.”
“Didn’t want something taking me out while I was taking it all in,” she said. “I wouldn’t make a habit of sneaking up on people.”
“Far too late for that,” the Beetle said, chuckling. “After all, that’s how I met my wife. A witty remark and a slip into the shadows, and she thought she’d escaped me. Ten years begs to differ, I say.” His stomach rumbled with discontent. “Apologies, drinks were drunk that were not meant to be. Am I not cheerier for it, though?” The sarcasm was almost as heavy as the alcohol on his breath.
Vrana stepped aside, and Lucan filled the gap between her and Serra. “I didn’t know you were an alcoholic.” Careful, she quickly thought, he’s not Bjørn.
“Well, you don’t know very much about me at all, do you?” He picked up a smock and shredded it with the pincers of his mask, making of it a bandage for his dripping wound.
“Where’s Deimos?” Vrana looked behind him, at Serra, who shrugged.
“Waiting impatiently up ahead.” Lucan tightened the poor excuse for a bandage. “We found something, and by the looks of it, you two have, too.”
Vrana and Serra nodded in unison.
“Are you glad you came?” Lucan asked, his question directed at Vrana.
She nodded. “I keep hoping we’ll find Geharra and Alluvia, but if we do, then that means we’ll find Penance, too.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.” The Beetle rubbed his pincers. “If we run into any trouble, I’m sure your Witch will lend us a helping hand.”
Twenty minutes later into the mist, Vrana, Serra, and Lucan wandered into the appropriately named Fountain Square. It was a cobblestoned plot and meeting point wedged between the market and the Eastern District. Rising from the fountain’s center was an abstract sculpture depicting Corrupted overcoming the amorphous threat to which each figure was connected. Deimos sat on the edge of the construct, peering into the dirty, leaf-choked waters that covered the bottom of its six-foot pool.
“Deimos,” Vrana began. She proceeded to tell him and Lucan about the Crossbreed far below the city’s streets. Serra grunted and nodded his head to confirm the Raven’s tale. “If they were able to get the Crossbreed into enough people’s systems, they could’ve easily taken the city over the course of a week or two.”
“Envoys from Penance arrived in the city months ago. They bore gifts and apologies. They wanted to end the ‘petty rivalry’ between the cities,” Deimos said. He waved the scroll clutched in his filthy hands. “They brought forty men and more food and drink and fineries than even Geharra could refuse. Fortunately for us, the council of Geharra documents everything.” Deimos unrolled the scroll, removed a rectangular piece of paper from inside, and held it out for Vrana to take.
“You don’t seem surprised by the Crossbreed,” Vrana said. She took the piece of paper.
“Not at all,” Lucan added.
The Bat rose up from the fountain and looked at his companions. “Very few things surprise me anymore.”
Vrana screwed up her face at Deimos as Lucan mumbled, “What the fuck?” beneath his breath. She looked down at the piece of paper and instantly recognized that it had been torn out of a personal journal. It began with a review of the items presented by Penance to the council, as though they intended to return them if need be. Toward the bottom of the note, the scrawl became slanted, less formal, warped by worry and fear:
The Eastern Gate is shut; what little trading was being done has now ceased. No one is willing to answer my questions. Penance is here—the last to jaunt through now milling about outside—and they have brought gifts. Six crates, each an herbalist’s boon. My happiness was surpassed only by my trepidation as I discovered amongst the jars curious ingredients— Wormwood, Malaise, Black Fey, Grave Soil—the presence of which was highly questionable among the other, more medicinal materials. I remember a legend brought to fruition in brief moments of madness and dreams. But what I’ve catalogued would not bring to life this Crossbreed. No, something is missing—a seventh box perhaps.
These people of Penance have taken an interest in our sewers of late, claiming to bring to our systems their refinements. They move in the disguise of good will through our very chambers. The rest of the council balks at my suspicions. Perhaps I shall do the same—move in disguise, that is—tattoos and all, like a proper priest from the Holy Order of Penance.
I am a tolerant man, but I cannot tolerate their preaching any longer. Already, they shout from the street corners, and already do our people gather to graze on their lies. Something foul has found its way into Geharra. I must root it out.
“The corpse in the tunnels,” Vrana whispered in realization. “Who wrote this?” She handed the note back to Deimos.
“Geharra’s master apothecary Ezra Miller. He sat on the council, too,” Lucan grumbled. “We went to the council’s chambers and also the chapels. Before Penance arrived, several smaller and already established groups of the Holy Order became very active. They knew they were coming, and so they paved the way.” Lucan spat and let the cold wind wash over him. “Schemes upon schemes, made in secret, based on what could be if such and such…” He growled. “If you learn anything from this miscarriage of duty—” he looked at Deimos, “—let it be this: None are more dangerous than the entitled who feel they have nothing to lose.”
Vrana thought back to the dying missionary in the bloodstained field. “What is this?” She leaned over the fountain’s edge and pointed to clusters of vermillion veins spreading like fractures across the sculpture’s base. “That’s not the Crossbreed.” She stood and threw her hands up in frustration. “Deimos, what the hell is going on? Those veins, they can’t be here.”
The vermillion veins to which Vrana referred couldn’t be there, because the place to which they belonged was weeks away, on the eastern reaches, where it festered and fed on fear and rumor, seemingly sustaining itself on the violence and depravity committed by those it had called to fill its hellish corridors. While its origins varied and were seldom agreed upon, the name of the location itself was unchanging. They called it the Nameless Forest; for, like the Black Hour, it had no definable or constant features. But unlike the Black Hour, the Nameless Forest was not bound to time. It was everything that the Black Hour could be and worse; it was a physical manifestation of madness, a tumorous mass of the natural and unnatural twisted together and left to rot like a corpse upon the land. To the outside world, the Forest was innocuous and inviting—a sea of green leaves swaying in a forever breeze—but to those who’d entered and managed to return, the Forest was a place of infinite space and possibilities.
The vermillion veins, which were known to grow only out of the trees of the Nameless Forest, had once been of great interest to those early settlers who’d happened upon its infernal borders. Curious and careless, the settlers drank from the vermillion veins their vibrant drink, and saw through fevered hallucinations god and its machinations. Their addiction led to their own destruction, ho
wever: The settlers turned on one another, dismembering friend and family until only one remained, a young child just as nameless as the Forest itself. It was said the boy emerged from the border town, gathered up every piece of every body, placed them at the Forest’s edge, and then sank into the pile of hundreds of severed limbs, never to be seen again.
“The Nameless Forest is near Penance,” Vrana said. She could feel her mind overworking itself to make a connection between the two. “Some say the Nameless Forest is ruled by five sons who were born of rape from their mother, a maiden from the frozen North. What if... what if— is it possible they found a way in? If there’s a place the Crossbreed came from, it could be there!”
Deimos shook his head, dismissing her theory. “I’ve heard stories of this before, Vrana. This isn’t the first time the vermillion veins have been recorded outside the Forest. Cultural strain… when something truly awful has happened… they’ve been known to appear, like chalk marking a crime scene.”
“Then they’re all dead,” Vrana said, lowering her voice and her head. “Then they’re all dead,” she repeated. Now it seemed the only logical conclusion, but why hadn’t she considered it sooner? Geharra and Alluvia had vanished without a trace. Where else do so many go so quickly if not to death?
“Who else was watching the city?” Lucan sounded heated, as though he meant to strike Deimos down. His hand rested on the hilt of his sword. “The elders were fools to trust you, but they were not foolish enough to trust only you to keep watch.”
“There were five,” Deimos muttered, his cold composure quickly warming to his companion’s anger. “Two from Caldera, myself included, and three from Alluvia.” The Bat spoke to Vrana now: He meant to teach her something. “Geharra requires little intervention. They manage themselves well enough and call upon us when they cannot. It’s not unreasonable to think the other watchers were gone as well when Penance arrived.”
“Then where are they?” Lucan countered.
Deimos stepped towards the Beetle, until both were close enough to kill the other before anyone else could stop them. “Is it not obvious what happened to them, to all of them?”
“We need to talk before I do something to you that I’m going to regret.” Lucan backed away from the Bat and removed his hand from his sword’s hilt. “Vrana, Serra.” He held the arm Vrana had nicked. “We will eat here, in one of these houses. Where we’re going—” He paused, swallowing the pain in his voice, and then didn’t finish his sentence.
Vrana readied herself, checking her daggers and shifting the weight of her bags. She held out her ax, blocking Lucan’s path should he try to move past. “And just where are we going?”
“The Northern Gate,” Deimos spoke up, “where Geharra puts all its dead things.”
Vrana couldn’t taste the food, nor did she feel filled by it, but she ate it all the same. They occupied a crooked house with a black pointed roof, which loomed over the neighborhood like a hooded figure. The air inside the house was stale, as though it had been trapped there for years. It was a place of innumerable hallways and rooms, and each was marked and marred by holes and craters in the floors and framework. The companions searched the place, and convinced there was no one to be found, they separated once more—Deimos with Lucan, Vrana with Serra. The Piranha, apparently not used to the company of others, quickly abandoned the Raven for an empty room at the corner of the house and told her in three grunts to watch her step.
In her lonely wanderings, with fistfuls of food in her hand, Vrana stumbled upon a portrait yet to be completed, pools of dried paint still in the palette. The picture was of a mother and her young daughter, their right arms exposed, uncorrupted. Vrana’s thoughts turned to Nora, and she wondered if those in the painting were distant relatives of the mayor. Of course they’re not, she thought. It’s a mark of shame, of embarrassment. I’d leave it out, too.
“I’ve tried, but I can’t do it anymore.” Vrana heard Lucan’s voice nearby, and when she crossed into the room beside the portrait, she found it coming through the gaps in the floorboards.
She took off her mask and brought it to the ground with her. Deimos and Lucan were on the first level of the house and she the second. The material in between the two was incredibly thin and perfect for eavesdropping. Acutely aware of her surroundings, she looked up and scanned the room for evidence of its previous occupant’s personality. The room was tilted, sunken in at the center, and clearly had not been cleaned in several years. She stretched across the floor toward one of several towers of journals. Removing one off the top, she found its pages covered in overly detailed accounts and observations of all the goings-on in the house. She saw that the other journals were the same in content, put back the one she held, and then brought her ear and eye to the ground, taking up the previous occupant’s favorite pastime.
“Come here,” Lucan said. He grabbed Deimos by the neck and threw him across the living room. “I understand why you did what you did, but look what you let happen!” He grabbed the Bat and knocked off his mask.
Deimos shuddered as the skull rolled down his back and hit the ground.
Vrana’s eyes widened. She tried to call out and put an end to the conflict, but the sight of Deimos’ face stopped her. He was bald, heavily scarred; one eye was bright blue, the other cloudy and white. There was a hint of a beard on his cheeks and chin, but it was too often interrupted by disfigurement to grow.
“Get your anger out now, Lucan,” Deimos said, picking up his mask and putting it back over his head. “We’ll talk when you’re done proving to the rest of us how much of a man you are.”
Lucan screamed and punched the Bat in the stomach; then he closed in and held him. “I don’t give a shit what happened to the Corrupted here, but you let our own people down. I know it’s a strange concept to you, but there were ones that I loved in Alluvia!”
After catching his breath, Deimos looked up and wrapped his hands around the Beetle’s neck. “You think I don’t know about love and loss? You think I don’t know?” he asked as he slowly choked the life out of his friend. “I made a mistake but, if it would bring him back to me, I’d gladly let the lot of Geharra and Alluvia die again. Don’t act as though you wouldn’t do the same for your wife, for your daughter.”
Lucan gasped for air as Deimos released him. He held his neck, which looked red and sore, found the nearest chair, and sat in it, a cloud of dust rising over him as he fell into the cushion. “My daughter is in the backyard, no heavier than the stones that mark her grave. Nothing is bringing her back.” He sighed, took off his mask, and set it on his lap, revealing his sweaty, splotchy face. “I don’t have my medicine.”
“I know,” Deimos said, sitting beside him but leaving his mask on. “I like to think this would’ve gone differently if you had.”
“The mood swings are getting worse.” He shook his head to show he didn’t wish to talk about the issue any longer.
Vrana jumped and stifled a scream as Blix sank his claws into her back. She wagged a finger at him, and then returned to the loose floorboards.
“Did you bring Vrana here because you thought she’d do well, or because she was a liability staying in Caldera?” Lucan looked up at the place through which Vrana peered.
Vrana scooted back, her heart pounding in her chest. What is he talking about?
“Both,” Deimos said. “If I didn’t take her, the elders would’ve found something else for her to do to keep her away from Caldera until it was deemed safe she returned.”
“I don’t believe Adelyn would agree to any of that,” Lucan said.
“Adelyn would agree to anything to keep her daughter safe, even if it meant putting her in harm’s way.”
“Even if it meant lying about the North and the Corrupted cities.”
“She wasn’t the only parent. The elders are constantly testing the waters. When we were young, they sent us to live with the Corrupted.”
Lucan put his mask on. “The elders don’t know what they a
re doing.”
Deimos stood up, outstretched his hand, and helped the Beetle to his feet. “The elders know all too well what they are doing. They just know too much to get anything done. They’ll set the map back to as it should be and tell the students the truth.”
“I needed someone to blame,” Lucan said, still holding his friend’s hand. “Everyone else will, too.” He sighed. “You have to tell her what happened.”
Deimos nodded: He would.
“Is she a liability being here?” Again, Lucan looked to the ceiling.
“What is she putting at risk? There’s nothing left.” Deimos shook his head. “No, she’s not a liability. Her Witch saved us outside Nora that night.”
Vrana’s eyes darted back and forth as Deimos and Lucan left the room. She went to her knees and saw Serra standing behind her.
He grunted as Blix landed atop his shoulder: Get up, time to go.
CHAPTER XVII
Four creatures stood in the shadow of decadence, but only one was moved past the feeling of indifference. The Raven, with her sharp eyes and even sharper mind, put words to the images from the books she’d read and that she now saw before her. Rippled marble, scalloped stone, ornate arches, godly homes; aristocratic hideaways and idiosyncratic retreats modeled after postmodern gothic monstrosities. Here stood a testament to the Corrupted’s ingenuity and craft, and yet the council of Geharra had made of its masterpieces mere symbols to be feared and forgotten.
Perhaps the Corrupted and Vrana’s people were not so different after all.
“Wipe the stars from your eyes,” Lucan said as he nudged Vrana. “All things are rotten on the inside.”
They went through three small gates and checkpoints that guarded the Northern District, and once in the grand promenade they kept to the right, following a trail of sea-green paint long dried upon the ground. Large holes in the street marred the magnificence of the scene, while alleyways beside them plummeted into dark chasms. They passed a building brimming with golden flourishes, but through the windows Vrana saw it was bisected, its expensive innards having fallen into a glinting gulf than ran beside it.
