I noticed a peculiar gap between two pages after I shut its covers. An earmark…

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Certain mystes attest1 the qualities of man are infinite and perfect; empyrean aspects whose pure forms reside in the great flaming sphere beyond the light of the farthest stars. A single man reflects them faintly and, unless the valence of greatness rests upon him, he serves as an exemplar for perhaps only one in a single life. To wit, I am a thorough bookkeeper. I am not gifted when it comes to lies and deceptions.

And so, several days after my dalliance with Thod, when the caravan stopped to rest on a high ridge quilted with red and gray lichen, I locked up the supply wagon tightly and simply walked over to snoop around the medical wagon where it was parked ahead of mine. I trusted my own ciphering as proof against there being a stowaway, but Thod had seemed so adamant, so certain he had seen someone. I wanted to see this thing bear out with my own eyes.

The healer’s wagon was of a similar shape to mine, but longer and with open floor space in its rear, so an injured man could lay down on his back while recovering from some medical work. It had no doors or locks or any reinforcing metal on it, as there were on my wagon. Soldiers and diplomats were less likely to pilfer foul-smelling herbs for making poultices than they were the salt-pork, rum, and tobacco that was under my charge, I imagined, as I approached the carriage’s rear.

The sun was rising just in front of me and as I came closer the various crates and glass jars I saw within the rear of the wagon almost blinded me with an awful radiance. There appeared to be no one inside. Shielding my eyes, I made a slow circle around the wagon, thinking to catch the healers’ attention, but the apothecary was nowhere in sight. Perhaps he was tending to an ailment one of the diplomats had developed, people had been getting sick more now that we were out in the wilderness. The next closest wagons were far ahead of me in the distance. I looked about a final time, to ensure I would not be seen, and then braced my feet against the wagon boot, and pulled myself up into the bed of the medical carriage.

Between the area meant for a sick man and the driver’s box, the wagon was a morass. There were haphazardly stacked cases of dried herbs; feverfew, gingko and goldenseal being the only ones I was familiar with. Next to these was a pile of glass bottles stored atop a great clump of straw. Their contents were all a tarry blackish color, even in the powerful morning light. Being curious, I pulled the stopper out of one of them, but quickly replaced it when the rancid odor inside made my eyes water. The arts-corporeal are truly revolting. There was only one crate big enough in here to hide even a small person: a large unmarked box that I pulled the lid off of… only to discover a great number of bolts of rolled gauze, enough to mummify the entire caravan several times over by the look of it. No girl.

Thod had been mistaken. No one stowed away, at east not here, for there was no free space amidst this mess. At the thought of him, I was conscious of the now fading ache he had left in my lower back. Beautiful, but foolish. Idly, I picked up another of the glass bottles from the straw that contained a particularly vicious, bubble-filled liquid and made a vain attempt to cipher out the illegible, winding cursive on its wax-paper label, when I saw the books.

A small empty crate had been turned on its side directly behind the driver’s bench. It held several bound codices. I had seen no book, no written matter of any kind, since we’d left Abdera. The apothecary’s wagon contained all manner of medical material, none of which I could cipher. Books on the other hand I could read, and they always reveal something of the character of their owners. I’d scarcely spoken with the healer thus far on our journey, and the tedium of the frontiers was starting to wear on me. Thod had said it best himself after our buggering: there was nothing much for the men of the caravan to do, but gossip and march onward. What harm really, could come of reading someone else’s books?

I had to push some small boxes out of my way that gave off unpleasant odors to get to the makeshift bookshelf shelf, and my eyes were watering from the stink as I tried to read their subjects on the spines. They were all badly faded and when I carefully began pulling one out a puff of dust accompanied it. It was a vademecum on corporeal-surgery. I flipped idly through it, bewildered and horrified at the drawings within.They showed the ligaments to cut and veins to be tied off for amputations of various body parts. “An order of glorified butchers” Baldwin called the apothecaries when they occasionally come through the Dogana, holding bills of lading for their odd shipments of plant matter from who-knows-where across the seas.

Repulsed, I put the butcher-book on the little shelf and grabbed another, thinner volume. This one was a primer to medicinal flora, with rich illustrations of plants and flowers (done in colored inks, no less). I rifled through it, impressed at the exhausting detail the artist had given to each image. What sort of lunatic, I wondered, enjoyed going around and sticking their nose in the dirt to render drawings of weeds and such? I was about to put this volume back on the shelf and leave, when I noticed a peculiar gap between two pages after I shut its covers. An earmark.

Opening to it, I saw a sketch on the verso page of an unremarkable looking shrub that grew small, bluish berries. An image of one of the berries, greatly blown up, took up the opposing page. The blue shading of this image had been done in a deep indigo dye.

“Only the very monied pay for true blue.” Words I had heard once, long ago from Baldwin. But no, it must have been my father who said it. My actual father. Dyes were his trade, I recalled just then. Regardless of who had told me, this particular image had clearly cost a great sum of money to render. Why spend so much silver for a drawing of this plant? I wondered idly.

I squinted at these pages a long while, but I could not make out the name of the shrub, for the writing in this codex used an even more elaborate script than those on the medicine bottles I’d found. In the margins next to the berry drawing, written in a precise hand different from the rest of the book (but still as illegible) someone had scrawled numerous lines of what looked to be notes. Some of these terminated in question marks, some in periods. Some were organized into little columns with minutely labeled groupings. I could decipher none of it.

I flipped briefly through the plant book once more, stopping for just a moment to scan each page. There were no written notes on any of them. Who is so fixated on a damned bush? And why? I wondered. My reverie was broken by the sound of footsteps in the distance.

I shoved the plant codex back on the shelf, and tried to quickly re-stack the boxes I had found in front of it. I glanced futilely around the wagon a final time as I ducked down into the rear. What had I moved around? Would he notice? Would he tell the others I have been snooping? The medical wagon seemed a mess, but maybe the healer had some personal system of organization I had disrupted. This nagged at me as I lowered myself slowly to the ground, and crouched down behind the rear left wheel. The footsteps grew louder and I now saw a set of stocky legs approaching me from the front right-side of the wagon.

As I said, I am not gifted with deception. Having no idea what else to do, I stood up and strode over to the right side of the wagon from the rear where I’d crouched, loudly calling out to the air: “Ello? Ello? Is the Apothecary here? Ello?” I could think of nothing else to do at that moment. Surely, I am found out.

“Ahoy there! I’m just coming back from the procurate,” the healer called out in an irritated, hurried voice. “One of his men had a gouty toe that needed mending.” he said. I stepped up to the front of the wagon, and hailed the man with as open and innocent a smile as I could muster. The healer was barely into his middle years, but already going to fat around the middle.

“Goodman! Thank goodness you have returned, I have the most unpleasant pain… in…”

“Oi sirrah! Give me a minute to put me things away and recover miself. I’ve been attending someone just now.” he interrupted me and indicated a leather satchel he wore over his shoulder. A strip of soiled gauze and the prongs of frightful-looking pliers peaked out of it.

He climbed, laboriously, up into the wagon and covered the area behind the drivers box with a cloth curtain that hung from one of the bows, so that I could not see him. I stood numb, waiting to be found out. What would the Polemarch do to me once the healer tells him? Would he order me flogged? If I beg the healer to show me mercy, or perhaps simply box my ears himself, would he agree to say not to tell the Polemarch? Could I perhaps bribe the healer with an extra ration of meat…

My mind echoed with this tired bargaining as I heard the sound of the very same barrels and boxes I had just examined, being hastily shifted about. My jaw grew tight as I awaited an accusatory cry of ‘now what’s this?’ The only noise from the wagon now was the gentle sound of water being poured into a bowl, and the man washing himself. Then, bellowing in a voice that turned my insides to water, the healer called out to me.

“It’s hard to tell from up on the wagons, but that damned commander is having us make four leagues each day now,” the healer called out. I hung on the tone of each of his words, trying to gauge if he recognized my treachery. I could feel a sheet of sweat running slowly down my lower back, soaking into my breeches.

“He…he told me to allot some extra pottage for the men… and oats for the horses… last week.” I called back, hoping chatter might distract him from noticing anything I’d misplaced. I had seen my step-father practically enchant his way out of trouble with imperial controllers in the dogana a time or two, by the sheer monotony of his endless yammering. I did not share the gift for small talk. “Men… who would march hard… must be… well fed” I added slowly, struggling to put the words together as my hands trembled. The healer did not respond to this and I struggled to find a distracting word to speak. “I…I…. believe he wants to push for longer distances now… while we can still rely on… the… maps,” I finally added to break the awful silence, suddenly taking a great dislike to the sound of my own voice.

“Indeed sirrah, the further we get into the frontier, the more I suppose things will tend to slow down. Even so! If he insists on driving us so hard each day the soldiers will all have bloody stumps for feet ‘ere we even get to Fort Vaid.” He responded as he flung the wagon flap open and emerged, still ruddy from his exertions, but scrubbed clean and smiling widely at me, his face neither set in anger nor accusation.

He glanced me up and down, taking in the whole undivided measure of me and as he did his face grew almost blank. Like a butcher sizing up a heap of steak. His eyes were bright and penetrating, and there was an intensity of his gaze seemed to hold me down where I stood, while the sweat continued to drip down my back. Perhaps I am found out after all. This is not a man whose eyes are inclined to miss much. I thought.

“Now then young master, tell of what ails thee?” he asked, as he stepped over to me. He was only slightly taller than me, but his presence was such that I felt utterly dwarfed by him.

“I… have a small pain in my lower back, I think from sitting astride my wagon so much.” I said. Astride other things as well last night. I thought.

“Agh! That would explain why you favor your left leg some when you stand. Another shame. Those who march grind down their feet, and we who drive from atop these awful benches ruin our spines. It seems everyone in our little company shall be broke down completely ‘ere we find those we are sent to rescue. Who will rescue us, I wonder?” he said, laughing at his own dark mirth as he lifted up the back of my tunic and wiped away the excess sweat with the sleeve of his garment. He poked several places in my lower back with his fingers. I still couldn’t shake the fear that he knew of my snooping.

“Ah, there it is, bit of a straing down in your buttock. A common afflication for those who ride upon a wagon all day” he said. “I have a balm I will give you, just rub it on the small of your back where it reaches your bum. Should help with the soreness.” he said flatly.

“Some relief would be most welcome” I said as he rummaged about in his satchel a moment, and handed me a small, cloudy glass vial with some whitish slime in it.

“It’s… Alister, yes?” he asked

“Ay sir” I said.

“A name I seldom hear. Do you hail from the outer provinces by chance?” he asked.

“I was…I am a servant of the Dogana. But I grew up on the grey coasts over the wide sea.”

“Blimey. I figured you was from far off by how you carry yourself, but I didn’t know we had a proper barbarian in our midst.” he said.

I grimaced at that. “I’ve been an Imperial citizen since I was five and ten. Will I ever escape that accursed word?

“Oh aye, I can hear the accent of the capital in your voice. You’ve got that refined way of talkin’ they do. I’ve been stationed in all the provinces at one time or another, met a few blokes from acrost the sea before, but never more than passing. Call me Ryzard.”

“With a name like that… I take it you are from the south?” I offered.

His eyes lit up a moment in recognition. “Originally yes. But as I said, the brotherhood has sent me all over the provinces since I was bonded. I’m a man of the world, much like yourself.” he said. He gestured broadly to the horizon of rolling hills behind us, cloudless and full of light.

“And here I am now, a man in no world of any kind at all.” he said, his voice was mocking but there was something else, a hard note of contempt.

“Are you displeased about being assigned to the mission?” I ventured.

“Ah no, far from it. Much like yourself, I am here of my own will.” he said.

“Oh. Did…di you also know someone from the embassy?” I asked, intrigued.

“Not at all. Let us say… I’m here for the sake of the brotherhood.” he said.

Medicaments, he went on to explain. The wastes were known for being barren, but in the harsh climate grew several useful flora that couldn’t be easily grown within the empire. They had to be plucked fresh, beyond the raw edges of the known world. That would explain the plant book he keeps in his wagon, I thought. He began lecturing me on the uses of certain flowers and stems… and my mind started to wander. What was I doing here, again? I vaguely recalled what Thod had said: a girl stowed away in his wagon. Which I had already disapproved. Now I was being harangued by this chatty man-butcher.

But at some point amidst all his blather he said “And of course, I also wish to see the Kingdom of the east, and to know something of how they practice the arts-corporeal there.” and my mind immediately snapped back to attention.

“What…what do you know of the kingdom to the east?” I asked him. When Veril and I first realized something had befallen Baldwin and the embassy, I’d sought out any word or whisper of that far-off land. The sailors I’d dallied with at the docks told me of many wonders. Of Strange bands of men inhabiting islands far to the south, who worshipped a great black fish they thought swam about inside a mountain that constantly belched liquid fire. Of creatures possessing vast size who lurked in deep crevices at the northern edges of the earth, their bodies covered with scales of jade and gold and who, it was avowed, had even been granted the powers of speech. But when I broached the eastern kingdom, even the most tenured old salts only shrugged at me, and confessed their ignorance. And so every part of me was rapt and silent as Ryzard went on.

“How pleasant it is to converse with another man of learning for a change. Your better company than the rest of this dull lot” he said, waving his hand to indicate the caravan before us. He glanced around us quickly then, as though he feared someone might approach, and lowered his voice, gesturing for me to stand close to him, which I did. The healer smelled faintly of sweat and something else, something medicinal, and sour. His voice went down to a murmuring whisper, and he told me the following:

Alister’s journey continues

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He was a tall boy, with sandy blonde hair and gray eyes…

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One of the soldiers finally approached me. It was weeks after we’d left Abdera, and we were driving across a wide, grassy steppe. He broke from the front of the caravan where the troops typically marched, and strolled at such a slow speed that the rest of the train overtook him, like a school of fish swimming past a little moat in a stream. The apothecary’s wagon preceded mine, and I could see the healer and him conversing a while, the healer gesturing wildly with his arms from the drivers box of his wagon, the soldier more reserved in his bearing where he walked next to the medical wagon. He kept turning round to glance back at me as the healer blathered.

My interactions with these troops were more frequent of late. They often retreated towards the end of the caravan one at a time, where the supply wagons lingered. At first I’d assumed this was simply to keep better guard over the rear carriages. Yet soon I realized the idleness that being out of sight of the Polemarch and the other infantry afforded a soldier. Their shoulders stooped more when they came back here. And the cold, iron discipline in their eyes gave way to the bemused expressions of boys far from home. As they took in the wilderness about us, their usual ramrod silence devolved into sighs, groans, even laughter at times. What a strange thing an army is! A band of young men, held together by the discipline and cruelty imposed by older men, who had themselves been young in their day.

Eventually the soldier waved to the healer and turned away from him, but instead of going forward to resume his position, he slowed down to a trot, falling behind the entire caravan, until he was parallel with the driving box of my wagon where I sat. He kept a wide distance for a while, looking over at me and smiling as he slowly closed the gap between us.

“Goodday sir, how fare you back here?”

“Well enough” I said curtly.

The Polemarch had warned me his men might try to beg food off of me, and that on no account should I indulge them. “Maintaining discipline is paramount, and I will tolerate no moral sloth on our mission” being how the man had put it to me. There was something dark in his tone when he’d told me that and it set my stomach to knots at the time; the hint of a threat. Would he beat me if I slipped this smiling boy some little morsel? What could he not do to me out here, if I provoked his displeasure?

“It’s a nice position you have here in the very back sir, peaceful-like. And you get to be up on a wagon all day. My feet are killin’ me just now” he said. Perhaps he simply wants someone to whine to, I thought. The sun was in my eyes and I could not quite make out his face.

“The Polemarch drives you men hard. It is a hard mission.” I said.

“Oh aye that he does sir. More than you know sir.” He said. A cloud passed over the sun just then, and I looked over at him properly for the first time. He was a tall boy, with sandy blonde hair and gray eyes. I could make out the powerful chest and arms beneath his tabard. My heart stirred, and I looked out at the wagon horses in a vain effort to calm myself.

“Forgive my boldness sir, but do you smoke much? I wanted to have a quick puff before goin’ back up to the front, but I didnt want t’ offend yer nose if yer not partial to it” he asked. I hated the smell of weed but I didn’t want to drive off this handsome boy so fast.

“My father was a smoker, but I never developed the habit for it.” I said.

“I’m a fiend for it miself” he said, pulling out a small clay pipe already stuffed for the occasion and lighting it. He took several deep puffs and indicated to me if I wanted some, which I refused. I watched as he pursed his lips and blew smoke out of them in great, forceful gouts, an expression which made him look especially handsome. I was not certain, but he may have been the same one who’d jested at me about returning from the brothel that bizarre night before we’d left Abdera. A shame I did not find this strapping boy working there. I thought.

“Your pa is why yer out here, aye? Your lookin for ‘im I heard.” he said.

“Yes I am. Did the Polemarch tell you that?” I asked, leaving out that Baldwin was in truth my step-father.

“Oh no sir, he don’t talk to us much like that. Heard it off one of them diplomats a ways back” he said, gesturing ahead to the wagon that carried the Imperial embassy itself.

“I thought you soldiers kept to yourselves, I hadn’t realize you gossiped with them” I said. I loathed the diplomats. They were lettered and educated men, like myself. But if the Polemarch called me a barbarian once a fortnight, the old procurate, who was their master, did so every day. Even out in this wasteland, they wanted nothing to do with me.

“Aint much out here to do sir ‘cept gossip and march, sir.” he said, and I smiled.

He is a bit clever. I thought

“Call me Alister, please” I said.

“I’m Thod” he said.

“I have never met a Thod before. Where do you hail from? ” I asked.

“In the south, little farming village. Thod’s just mi imperial name.”

“Your what?” I asked, puzzled.

“When we swear our oaths to the throne, we choose a formal name, s’what the officers call us.” he said.

“How did you come to choose Thod?” I asked. What an ugly name for someone so handsome.

“They give us a list an we’ sorta just pick one. I pointed mi finger at Thod. So Thod I am. He were one o’ them old emperors, someone told me once. S’easy to write out on parchment, I hear.” he said. Illiterate, alas. But Tall. And Handsome.

“And the name you were born with?” I asked.

The boy raised his eyebrows knowingly at me and laughed.

“Promise you won’t mock me if I tell ? We’re aint really ‘sposed to use ‘em when we’re on duty. But no one’s ‘ere he’ said, tossing his head to indicate the endless, empty grasslands around us as I nodded at him. Tell me something secret of yourself, sweet boy.

“It’s Razerial.” he said.

“What?” I said.

“RHU-ZEER-EE-AL. Bit much innit? I always gotta tell folks twice. Was mi fathers fathers fathers name. Call me Thod.” he said, looking almost apologetic.

“Do not be embarrassed, it is a beautiful name” I said, imagining how good it would taste to whisper it into his ear. To caress and whisper anything into his ears. Ah, perhaps I can offer him one thing.

I asked him if he wanted to join me on the driver’s box and he nodded and swiftly hopped up and sat next to me on the bench. Thod was a full head taller than me sitting down, and I could feel the heat radiating off of him. He had been marching for hours already and it wasn’t midday. As he took his boots off and rubbed his swollen feet, I saw a dense clot of wrinkles around his eyes, though he must have been ten years younger than I. I had not been with a man since that night in the brothel and now I was sitting alone with this big, affable one right next to me. Polemarch be damned, I will give this boy whatever he asks for…

“You must go through a good deal of tobacco if you smoke so much” I said, gesturing at the pipe he’d continued puffing at.

“Oh aye sir. We only get a small ration of it each week, and the commander doles it out to us himself.” he said.

“Yes I’ve observed this. Did you know he stores the tobacco in this very cart?” I asked, trying to sound as though I had just learned this information myself. The tobacco, I knew perfectly well, was always kept in my wagon, for I tallied its weight each night. He stared back at the wooden outer wall of the cart where it ran straight up from the rear of the drivers box behind us, and then he looked at me again, but said nothing. Ask it of me, you great hulking fool and I will give it to you. I will give all of me to you.

A silence sank over him for a while. He continued puffing away at his pipe a while, but he said nothing. The horses had slowed down suddenly, whinnying and flicking their heads in frustration. I stopped the cart and got down to feed them and pour some water from a skin into the hammered metal bowel that they drank from, for rivers and streams were scarce here. I had now fallen far behind the apothecaries wagon, and when I finally remarshalled the horses and got up on the box to mush us back forward, I realized that Thod had fallen asleep where he sat, his handsome curls blowing slightly in the breeze.

I waved my hand before his face, his eyes didn’t blink. I should never had allowed him up on the box with me. What if someone ahead of us sees him? What if word gets back to the Polemarch? There’s only one thing a solider would be doing back at the supply wagon in the afternoon, before the evening rations had been doled out: thieving or bribing. They will think I am his accomplice, how else would he have come to sit up here with me? Damn my lusts.

I was about to give him a kick in the shin to awaken him, when one of the carriage wheels passed over a dirt mound, rising and then crashing down with a great thump. Thod jolted awake next to me and without meaning to, and grabbed tightly onto my upper thigh to stabilize himself. “Just a clod of dirt” I said as the sudden touch made my blood and heart quicken. The iron grip of his hand on my thigh relaxed, but instead of letting go he began to slowly knead the meat of my leg with a slow, circular motion. “Beg yer pardon sir, I hope I didn’t startle you” he said. His perfect grey eyes now alert and clear, starred directly into the back of mine.

He leaned in closer to me so that his bulk was almost pressed up against my body, the jovial tone of his voice now deep and low. “Would you have any extra bit of tobacco I could trouble you for sir? I would be most obliged to ye” he said, as he pushed his hand up and squeezed the flesh at the root of my thigh. My field of view narrowed and shrank down to the depths of those perfect grey eyes that continued to bore into mine. Yes. His powerful body seemed to blot out all light, so that I was living purely in the shadow he cast. My eyes glanced once more over his figure, his great chest and arms. This must be a trick. I am imagining this.

“It…it is a crime to steal an imperial mission’s provisions.” I squeaked out, my eyes not daring to look away from him. He gave me an impish smile. “Aye, but it’s not stealing sir, if I’m offering something in exchange is it?” he whispered back, and how his hand moved, slowly and purposely up to grasp at my member under my trousers. Yes. I put my hand on top of his to better guide him to me. The need within me screamed as my entire body shuddered. And yet, I could not help but glance fearfully off into the distance for just a moment. Who else in the train might be watching? Could the apothecary observe us even now perhaps? Surely someone had noted Thod coming back here? It is midday. Too many bored men hungry for intrigue. But night could grant us more freedom from prying eyes. Yes, it needs to be at night.

I leaned in close, so that my hot breath blew into his ear. “Come to me when it is past dark, and we will both have what we want.” I said. I took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed his hand off of me, forcibly returning my attention to the horses and the barely worn wagon tracks in front of me.

I was not sure if he understood me at first, for he recoiled back from me, over to his side of the drivers box, and began pulling on and lacing his boots. As though nothing had passed between us at all. Had the heat simply gotten to me? Had I simply imagined all of that? Thod took several final puffs from his pipe, and checked his kit silently to make certain everything was in place. I sat there, blowing air in and out of my mouth as he prepared to depart, uncertain if I was not just in the throw of some fever.

He finally stood up on the box and looked over his shoulder at me. “Right you are sir, gimme a night or two.” he said casually. A moment later, he jumped down off the wagon box, and began swiftly trotting past my horses, reversing his course to go up past the medical and diplomatic wagons, to reunite with the other soldiers where they marched at the front of our formation. A cool breeze from the east blew the gold wisps of his hair back along his head as he walked away from me. My member pulsed of its own accord.

Our exchange, I realized later, had lasted no more than a minute or two. I’d expected only idle chatter, or even a bribe when he approached me. Thod had understood perfectly what my friendliness had meant, and what I wanted from him. And he had known the whole time what he wanted from me, of course. Is he truly a bugger, or just driven by his fiendish need for the pipe? I wondered. There is some cunning in him. I thought.

That night I relieved myself repeatedly in my tent, until I was spent and I had to air it out from the smell. My mind raced. A night or two from now…would he perhaps just bring me a sack of gold and offer me coin, after all that? Would he even show up? Perhaps he could haggle some weed from one of the other soldiers. Most of all, I found myself harkening back to the Polemarch’s implicit threat from weeks ago, that ominous phrase: moral sloth. What would the Polemarch do to him, or to me, if he found out we were buggering? I understood the threat of taking a bribe for extra supplies, or simply stealing them. But caught in love making with another man…how would I be punished for that?

It happened two nights hence. We were driving through an area dotted with towering mounds, remnants from some forgotten age, that bulged up like bumps on a basilisk’s armor. We encamped at the base of one that rose up like a grand hill, far higher than the others around it. The Polemarch and several of the soldiers hiked up to its crest before night fell to consult a map and take bearings with a small spyglass.

I had already measured out and tallied the amount of oats, salted pork and hardtack that was to be given out to the men and horses the next day. The Polemarch had instructed me to reduce rations by a decile since we left Abdera. “The discipline of it could soon prove to be life or death”, he’d warned.

I was nodding off by the small fire I had built next to my tent, when I heard a ‘ttscchk’ sound from somewhere in the darkness. I sat up and reached for my long knife, as I had oft been told to do when hearing queer sounds outside the limits of the empire at night. There it was again. Ttscchk Ttscchk.

I pulled the blade close, and braced against the ground in case whatever lurked out in the dark should rush at me. If I needed to, I’d have to flee to where the soldiers were bivouacked, on the other side of the great hill. I looked up at the mound itself. Would it be faster to try and run up and over its crown than to wind around the circumference? I tried to recall some old arithmetic principle, memorized long ago in my school days, about this. I was too jittery to remember it. Either way, I would have to run. In the pitch of night. Why had I chosen a spot so far from the other wagons? Men had met their doom from simpler mistakes than this in the frontiers.

“Oi, Oi, Isssme” Thod whispered. He wore nothing but a pair of cloth breaches as he stepped out of the inky night beyond the limits of my fire’s light. His breath showed in the frigid air. It was growing colder as we moved further east. I sat back with a great sigh, resheathed my knife and gestured for him to come sit in front of the fire.

“Aren’t you frozen?” I asked as he flopped down beside me.

“Frozen! this is nothin’ next to where we’re off to.” he said, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them. He would not have come here with half his clothes off in this cold, unless he planned on taking the other half off, I thought. The heat between my legs waxed. I leaned into him until his body supported my weight and whispered “Perhaps I can give you some extra warmth” into his great chest as I pushed my hand down to feel the girth in his loins.

“Where do you hail from? I never ‘eard of nobody named Alister before” he asked me afterwards in the tent, my head laying across his fluid–stained lap as he chewed on some weed leaf.

“I live… or did live, in the stevedores district of the capital, but I grew up in Grell”

“Somewhere up in the north is that?”

“Much further away. I was raised over the sea. In the free cities of the grey coast”

“Grey Coast…so… your… a barbarian?

“I’m a full citizen now,” I said defensively, “But… yes. I was raised across the great sea”.

“Shame more folk of yer talents don’t make it over” he said, reaching down and firmly squeezing my spent parts. “Ye’ must be used to long journeys such as these we’re on.”

“Hardly, I only came over the sea the one time” I said, whincing as he put a bit too much pressure on my bits.

“So you never go back home?” he asked.

“The Dogana is my home.” I said. Was.

“You still got kin back over the sea?” he asked.

“I…do not know, truly. Baldwin…my father, is my only family” I said, lying.

I had hardly left the Stevedores district in years, I told him. Only to petition to come on the mission to find Baldwin, and for a moment I thought back to that unspeakable day long ago when I had come face to face with the Margrave. Why had the great fishy man, or perhaps some even great fiend who commanded him, allowed me to join this mission? Did such monsters feel…pity for me? Or was there some other reason I had been granted an imperial commission, and allowed to join up?

“What was he like, yer pa?” Thod asked me.

I told him what I told everyone: he had been an envoy for the merchants guild, a position that sounded both important and dull. Most people didn’t bother asking more beyond that. Which is what I preferred.

“You must dote on him a great deal if you would come out here with us looking for him, after his being gone so long.” he said gently.

Looking for him. It was the first time I could recall mentioning Baldwin, and not being met with a funereal condolence, or just pity. People assumed he and all the others in the embassy were dead. The Empire would not say it. Not publicly. But the first thought on the mind of anyone familiar with ‘the embassy to the east’ could only be: doomed. Or dead. How could a mission the empire had sent out…how could a merchant they had handpicked for that mission…simply vanish into the air?

Now, amidst these strange mounds, and the eastern wind that grew colder day by day, what seemed so certain in the capital was thrown suddenly back into doubt. Perhaps somewhere in this endless wilderness, Baldwin and the others survived, somehow? The empire contained many strange things. Who could say what peculiar marvels attended the spaces beyond? The very spaces we were now intruding on. I glanced up at Thod. His eyes were bleary with sleep. He looked especially innocent now. I have shared enough with you, boy.

“I do love him, of course. But there is also a matter of… an inheritance” I said, speaking the last word quietly, as though I were ashamed of it.

“Ah! so that’s the rub o you bein out ‘ere, you need the family money” Thod whispered faintly.

“You are a clever one” I said, smirking as I sat up. I reached under my pillow and grabbed the small bag of tobacco I had carefully weighed out and prepared several days ago after our first meeting. Thod was instantly alert, jolting upright and taking it from my hand, as though it were full of rubies. He opened the drawstring and sniffed eagerly. Our tryst was over. Now we were just two men, transacting business. I almost asked him then if he was a true bugger, but I thought better of it. He had been too calm and assured in our embraces, I felt, for me to have been his very first. He need not know all of me. And I need not know all of him.

After a lengthy assay of the leaf, he nodded in satisfaction at his prize, cinched the pouch closed and put his breeches back on. I savored the image of his bare chest raising and falling several times as he crawled out of my tent, and stood up to leave. He turned around to look at me, but there was some odd look in his face.

“Well. I’m here cause soldiers go where we’re told. An’ yer here to get yer missin’ fief. But I wonder what that girl in the apothecary’s wagon is ‘ere for? Wonder what she’s lost?” he said, his face all confusion.

“Come again?” I asked as I followed him outside and began dousing my camp fire.

“There’s a girl in the apothecary’s wagon. I seen her peeking out at me from the back when I was walkin here.” he said.

“Don’t be daft. You probably just saw the healer. Maybe a dog he brought with him.”

“I might not have mi letters, but I knowd a dog’s face from a girl’s. T’was a girl I saw.” he said flatly.

“Nonsense. The apothecary asked for no extra rations, and nothing’s missing from my supplies. I do my tallies and check the weights every day. I’d have noticed if another mouth were being fed on the mission” I said. What fancies these unlettered folk get in their heads.

“I didn’t say she was thieven’ victuals, just that she were here with us. Maybe he splits his rations with her. Or maybe she brought her own.” he said.

The gentleness left my voice then. “You couldn’t carry enough supplies for an extra person from Abdera all this way. Not without it taking up some little space. I would have noticed a stowaway, or one of the other wagon drivers would have. It’s a simple question of weights and measures” I said as the final embers of the fire cracked in front of me.

“I know what I espied” Thod said firmly.

Why share this with me? I wondered.

“Shouldn’t you tell the Polemarch about it?” I asked.

“No more than I’ll tell him about this.” Thod smirked and wiggled his hand, indicating the tobacco pouch. “Maybe the apothecary will fill me with seed to keep his secrets too.” He laughed at the grimace I made.

“I’m just havin’ a joke o’ course. He probably don’t even know she’s there. Just some poor fool stowaway. Or he does know, and he’s a keen liar.” he said as he stepped away and began his silent trek back to the other side of the mound, where the soldiers had their camp.

As Thod’s figure vanished back into the night, I thought on what he’d said. A girl, hiding out here with no one noticing. After all these weeks? Impossible. A stowaway would have thrown off the balance of my figures. What could someone have been eating for weeks now that no one noticed going missing? These are just a bored soldier’s imaginings. The next morning, at first light, I pulled out my ledger book, and recalculated the values from the previous week three times. There was never a contradiction nor change from my original figures. There was no stowaway. The numbers proved it.

Alister’s journey continues here

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How was such a thing made? I wondered…

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All the way down the steps I thought I was on the verge of setting foot on flat ground. Surely the Hetaera exaggerated their depth or simply misremembered, as people recalling a story from their childhood are wont to, I reasoned. The world is fearfully large when one is young. Yet I counted at least a hundred of the stone stairs by the time I finally reached the bottom. The distance I descended would have been well above the weather vane atop the chapel’s campanile, had I walked skyward. As I sank deeper underground the air turned, not exactly clammy as the whores’ tale had claimed, but grew with some queer density. As though I were the first living thing to have ever stepped down that path. I could feel my breathing grow heavier as I went. Never in my life had I been in place so low. So entombed.

After what seemed a duration that lasted the remainder of the night, I came at last to the bottom of the decrepit steps, where a great passageway opened before me. I moved over to my right side with my hand held out, the candle flame barely extending more than a length or so beyond my reach, until my fingers brushed against a rough-hewn, unyielding stone wall. Here was one side. I side-stepped and repeated this with my other hand until I located the other wall. The Tunnel, while wide, was likely not wide enough to accommodate three horses marching down it side by side, as she had said. Though certainly there seemed room enough to let men march through here four or five abreast. Foolishly, I raised the candle high above me in an attempt to glimpse the ceiling, but I could not make out where above me it began. My light revealed nothing but more dark above me.

Slowly, I began walking forward. There was nothing of any kind about me, but the twisting shapes where some power had worked to carve away the raw stone of the tunnel shaft. What forces had done this? My boots scuffing across bits of loose rock and the sound of my breathing were the only noises to my ears. For what length or time I walked forward I could not say, for there is no way to grasp length or the passage of a night in this underground. The walls, I thought, seemed to gently curve and undulate at times, or perhaps I was only disoriented.

As I progressed, I kept to one side of the tunnel, allowing my hand to stay lightly in touch with the wall to my right. I feared if I walked down the middle of the shaft I would get turned around and lost. For all the time I walked down it, I never came across any break nor a crossroads nor intersection. The tunnel was a single great shaft that extended indefinitely into the dark.

How was such a thing made? I wondered. I knew nothing of the works of sappers nor miners, but I imagined if someone set an army of workers with pick axes and shovels to beating out stone round the clock, it would have taken a decade or more to dig out the length of what I walked down then, and that was to say nothing of the great shaft of stairs which connected this place to the chapel.

After I’d come some great and unknowable distance, I stopped moving forward. I stood a while, listening to the sound of my breathing. What was in the surface world directly above me now? I realized that the occasional curving of the tunnel wall I had felt could in fact, have taken me anywhere, wound in any possible direction. One might fail to notice that one was being taken due west, or north, or perhaps some other direction not known on any compass at all. What mind had conceived this place? What power had commanded it to be built? And for what purpose? These questions echoed repeatedly through my mind, as my breaths came shallow and ragged in the musty air.

I had been pressing my hand so firmly into the wall to my right that I could feel small bits of rock dislodge from it and embed themselves in my palm. The touch of the cool stone to my skin was my only true guide, and I feared to lose contact with it for even a moment. I stopped walking for a time, and brought the taper in my left hand close to where my other hand met the wall so I might see it better. I stared intently at the stone, hoping the dead rock might heave up some secret to me. In the space around where my right hand pressed into the tunnel wall there were no scratches, no indentations, and no tool marks. Strange. As though the tunnel had not been dug out, but the rock simply subtracted from existence to form this place, whatever it might be.

I held my breath in for a minute, trying to hear for something, but no sound, not even the trickle of water, which I had heard in caves I’d played in as a boy, came to my ears. Where was the gentle thrum of rivulets running over stone? Where the pitter-patter of the wee feet of the tiny yellow lizards that make their home in the low places of the earth? Even the meager life of that wild, natural world had no presence here.

The tunnel suffered not just a lack of sound, but the lack of its possibility. I was in a world gone mute. I thought of the journey the caravan had taken as we had made our way into the outer provinces, towards Abdera. The further we travelled from the capitol, the more the lands emptied out of people. But even when we’d made our way through those blasted plains, I’d still hear the winds blowing across the hinterlands; a high desolate whistle that frightened me the first several times I’de heard it. I would have welcomed even those moaning drafts now, for the tunnel I walked through was silent in a deeper way, and I could feel the skin on my arms turn to gooseflesh. This place should not exist.

I thought back on the hetaera’s tale as my feet began walking forward once more. How easy, I thought, for the girl Jehanne to be curious about such a place, to sneak in here and then simply get turned around and disoriented, not realizing the way she thought would bring her to safety was in fact leading her further astray at every moment. She must have gone mad before she starved to death down here. Better to die out in the wastes, under open sun and sky, than to become fodder for this dark space.

My legs were starting to ache and I stopped walking. Carefully, I pulled my right hand away from the tunnel wall and, slowly, to make certain I was not mistaken, I turned my feet around and returned my hand to the stone wall. I have to be certain now. I bent down on my knees, and held the taper before me just above the floor of the tunnel. My eyes scanned the seamless stone I treaded on, and for several minutes I feared the worst, until I found it.

A small, pearly drop of white reflected faintly up at me from the cold stone of the tunnel floor. I reached down and pushed the end of my small finger into it. It was not much bigger than a cooked pea, and as it cracked under the pressure of my finger, a faint glob of wet heat engulfed it. When I pulled my hand back, I could see a white bit of goo hardening under my nail. I stood up and, pushing my body as close to the wall as I could, I took several small steps forward, and bent over once more to examine the floor. This time my eyes found the next pearly lump more quickly. This one, I noted as I probed it again with a finger, was a bit colder, and more hardened than the first one.

Here then was my assurance of my own safety, writ in the taper’s falling wax that had accompanied me here. I breathed out slowly, for I had not realized I had been holding in my breath from fear. I continued forward, reversing my course down the tunnel in this slow way, constantly assaying the floor carefully for the wax drippings I had left on my journey out. I must not make the mistake the girl did. The taper had less than a quarter of its length remaining when I felt a small but noticeable shift in the weight of the air itself. I stopped once more and held my breath, standing still to better gauge the air. There it was. A delicate caress that barely moved a few hairs on my forearm. The slightest trace of a draft.

I had left the door open in the undercroft, and the air from the above world must have slowly but surely worked its way down into the deadened miasmas of this space. The stairs could not be far. Nevertheless, I continued forward even more slowly now. Feeling the force of the draft increased very slightly as I proceeded. My eyes were still focusing on the trail of wax drops that led me back. I must be certain. I will not perish down here.

It was just as the candle flame itself started to quiver from the growing strength of the draft, that I saw something. At first I took it to be just another of the crumbs of wax I was following back, but the reflection was not coming from before me as I hugged the wall on my way back. It was something I glimpsed that sat out towards the middle of the tunnel itself. Where I had not been walking.

I held the taper out to the limit of my arm, but the dark revealed nothing but a faint light. It was different from the gentle, flickering reflections of the wax drops the taper had left. What was I seeing? I must be very close to the stairs now. The wax drops had led me this far, the growing draft was proof I was close to the only way out of this place. Whatever faint thing I saw at the corner of my eyes, it was only a few feet away from me now. I was regaining my bearings. I am safe now, am I not? Had I not in fact, been safe, been cautious the entire time since I had come down into the tunnel? I could let go of the wall for a moment, surely.

I pulled my hand back. My palm was dry and cracked from a thick layer of rock dust that had accreted as I’d kept it bound to the stone for so long. Slowly, I took two measured paces forward, so that I was now standing in the center of the tunnel. The candle flame still flickered back at me slightly. The stairs were still ahead of me. I squatted down then, and scanned the floor before me, looking for the peculiar flash I had seen at the edge of my sight.

In a moment, the taper’s light washed over something. It was long, thin, and rather like a stick. One end of it terminated in a sort of club-like foot. The other was topped by a rounded little nodule, covered with an odd pattern of small black circles. I reached my hand out then and, tensing myself for the sound, I grabbed this thing and pulled it over the tunnel floor, back to myself. A moment later I exhaled a great breath, for the thing had made no sound whatsoever as it had scrapped over the stony floor. No. Not black circles, I realized as I stared at the thing where it lay directly under me. More like indentations, tiny holes some hand had bored into the surface of it. I brought my hand back and there was a note suddenly in the air, something that smelled faintly of lavender…

…the aspergillum! The one the deacon had held in his hand and used to bless us that morning in the chapel! I reached down and picked up the silveshod femur bone and brought it close to my eyes. As the candle light played over its surface, I saw the silver was engraved with a dizzying variety of long, looping lines, which had been etched so deeply into the surface of the silver they appeared black. It was writing, some elaborate script which I couldn’t make out. The candle light seemed not to reflect but to flow over this crisp calligraphy in waves. The words, whatever they said, almost seemed to be moving, rather like quicksilver. I shook my head then and glanced back down to where I had found it, but I saw nothing but empty, bare floor. How on earth had it gotten here?

I stood back up and turned the femur over in my hands, my eyes roving over the sensuous curvature of the engraved word. I could not tell what language it was, but it was a glorious and costly piece of silversmithing…or so I thought, until I grasped the whole thing by the nodule end, and noticed some discolorations down at the base where the deacon had gripped it. I held the taper flame as close as I dared to the silver to better see the splotches, and after a moment I let out a wet gasp that echoed down the great tunnel and dissolved into nothing.

I had inspected fine silver goods in the Dogana many times. I knew well the muddy discolorations of tarnish that accompany silver that has been poorly stored for transport over the seas. The spots on the grip of the aspergillum were not the rust color of common tarnish. They were a deep shade of red. Crimson, in fact. No. Impossible. I need to get out of here. Now. The flickering of the taper’s flame, the disorienting tunnel, the sheer lateness of the hour…it as all playing tricks on my eyes. I needed to be above ground. Where the world made sense. Where I could find light. What I held in my hand couldn’t be…

With only a few more careful steps forward, I found the stairs I had come down. My heart raced as I launched myself back up them, eager to leave behind this awful, secretive tunnel. This place shouldn’t exist. My breathing grew ragged, but I did not stop until, huffing and clutching at a stitch in my side, I saw the vague outline of the lock-picked doorway before me, and at last I barged up into the undercroft. Human walls. Human spaces. Built for human scale. Thank mercy.

I turned back to close and re-latch the tunnel door, and returned the inferior lock I had pocketed back to its previous, secure position. As a final touch, I rubbed off all of the dust from it before I went back up the stairs. I wanted no sign of fingers having touched or intruded on this place, should the deacon, or anyone happen to inspect the door. Taking the femur, if it is what I fear it is, was a grave crime.

Treading carefully once more to mind the sound of my footfalls, and carefully holding the aspergillum flush against my inner arm with my palm so I would not instantly be found out if someone came upon me, I went back up to the sacristy. This room had only a single small window, blackened over with soot, but I was certain to bunch up several spare robes I found and stuff them carefully against the glass. I would risk no light escaping to prying eyes now.

There were several candelabras in the room, and I chose one whose candles were the most craggy and used up. I must leave no trace of my having been here. The long tapper I had brought with me into the tunnels, which I used to light the candles, had by then almost burned down to the nub. My eyes took several minutes to adjust to the brighter light, which after wandering underground felt like the midday sun. Anxious, I finally held the silver femur’s stained grip up to the light. The sacristy, the tunnel, the haetera’s story, Abdera, the caravan, everything seemed to fall away from me then, but what the candelabra’s light revealed.

The silver encasement, for it was an encasement and not silver all the way through, had begun to rub away where the femur had been gripped. Beneath it, the true color of the bone, a deep shade of crimson, shone through in patches from where hands had wielded it over countless centuries. For I grasped at once that the imperial reliquary I held, one of the sacred bones of the emperors of ancient times, was a thing far older than the chapel, or Abdera’s walls, or even the endless forsaken tunnel I had just left behind. ‘The crimson smiles of their ancestors’ I recalled the deacon’s voice, from what seemed another lifetime saying to me, though it had only been the previous morning.

The candelabra light scattered across the bone’s surface in strange ripples. It was not some trick caused by my being disoriented in the tunnel I realized then, but some intrinsic quality to the femur itself. The aspergillum seemed to almost bend the light around it, as though it did not fully participate in the laws of nature. I glanced swiftly round the sacristy, fearful that the deacon or some other official lurked somewhere here, and that any moment someone would jump out at me with an accusatory yelp, and bear witness against my…my what? Theft? Blasphemy? Treason? My hands even touching the femur would rise to the level of a grave crime were I in the capital.

I stared once more into the etched lines of the script that wound their way round its surface. The letters seemed to dance and pulse before my eyes, as though the bone was trying to speak to me, but I was unable to grasp its meaning. I had never gazed upon such a thing before.

What am I to do with it now? I can not simply leave it here…can I? No, to abandon something so valuable is wrong. But nor can I take it with me. It is not mine. It would not be right to take it, not here in Abdera, nor in the capital. But then we are leaving Abdera behind in a few short hours. And there is no right and wrong in the wastes. There is no empire, or rule, save what the Polemarch himself commands. What he commands. What he says. He word is my law as of tomorrow. Technically today I suppose, for it is well after midnight. I am under his rule now. What he says and what he knows is everything. And what he does not know of…what he is never told about… is as nothing. He need never know of this.

I snuffed out the candles and exited the chapel via the same back door I had come in through, breathing in great lungfuls of the night air as I went. It was still the peak of night and dawn, somehow, was a long way off yet. As though I had only just stepped foot into the chapel itself a moment ago.

I am not given to superstitions. Yet I was surprised as I stole back down the high street with the aspergillum now tucked down my trouser leg, that the great chapel itself did not shake and spew forth loose masonry in anger at my perfidy. Nor did any great quaking voice from deep within the earth scream out at the sleeping townsfolk to rise and avenge my crime. How was it such a trifle to take something so valuable?

My final act before I departed Abdera, I realized then, had been ordained by the Polemarch himself. Had he not accused me of being a thief earlier that day? For all I knew, whatever strange destiny had lead me to the thing I was stealing had already prophesied my thieving to him earlier that afternoon, when I had to pick the lock to his strongbox to pay for our supplies. Thus, a confirmed criminal, I made my way back to the great gates and the caravan outside. One of our soliders who was taking the night watch waved at me as I walked over to my tent. I gave him only a curt nod, hoping this would deter him from questioning me, but alas.

“Blimey, you’re coming in late. Had a swive with a girl have you?” he called out loudly at me. My heart froze at his voice but I kept on going toward my tent. Damned fool, does the entire caravan have to know my business? The campfire was low but I could tell that he was smiling at me in the dark. I mumbled a slur at him.

“Oi, where were you?” he asked, his tone no longer playful.

“I… wanted to get some fresh air before we left. That is all” I muttered, avoiding his eyes. I had to pass right by him to get to my tent. He was a powerful man, with broad shoulders and strong arms. He could have stopped me if he wanted. But he only cracked a wider grin.

“O aye? Right fresh the air is between some whores legs, I reckon.” he said, laughing at his own joke. He kept on giggling as I nodded once at him and returned to my tent with my strange prize and fell at last into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

Alister’s journey continues here

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My shallow breathing was the only sound I could hear…

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As I wended my way back from the vertiginous alley where I’d found the Roughshod Rose to the city’s better kept avenues, my arse dully aching from Vincent’s enthusiastic embraces, I struggled to dismiss the hetaera’s tale from my mind. Underground tunnels that stretched endlessly across the Empire, submerged right below our very feet. A hidden, shadow empire. It was something out of a fool’s imagining.

She had lied to me. A necessity of any whore’s trade. It must be a story told here at night to frighten small children, I thought as just then I was walking past some shuttered houses where such children surely slept. The night was dark, and a cold wind was blowing in faintly from the east, a tiding of the future that awaited me tomorrow. The streets were even emptier and darker now. Darker. I recalled again the words the Deacon had spoken to us in the chapel, earlier that day: ‘the darkness of the eastern lands’ Some few hours remained until dawn, when my journey into that darkness properly began.

‘Whatever life I have had is ended after this night’, I thought as my feet kicked up the odd bit of crumbled pavement. I wondered if I would ever see this city again. Would I see any city whatsoever, after tomorrow? How long would I be amidst the smells of animal dung and sweating men with parched skin, with nothing to talk of and nothing to see? Would we find them? Would I find Baldwin? Or would we only discover our own doom, out there in the wastes? These thoughts clouded my mind as I gazed at the shabby little houses along the lane I walked as I approached the high street. Entire lives lived inside each one.

Why had she spun that tale for me? She’d gained nothing from it. I had not been asked nor offered any silver beyond the fee I had paid Vincent for his pleasures.Perhaps it, or something very like it had happened, once I thought as I turned right and found myself upon the high street once again. None but I was about at this late hour. Children vanished all the time in the capitol, I knew. Why should it be any different out here in the provinces? Little Jehanne, whose fancy for the depths led to her demise. Why tell me that?

I glanced up and down the great street. Dawn was still a ways off, and some interval of night yet remained to me. I saw a man, bent over almost double from drink, stumbling between houses on the far side of the lane. I walked to the middle of the street, stepping gently to avoid loud footfalls, and turned around in a slow circle. I could see the houses and shops that lined both sides. As I faced south, the great gate I had come into the city from came to view, and of course the walls whose aspect was even grayer now in the night air.

My feet kept turning until I came to face north, where the chapel and its towering campanile stood. When we marched towards it that morning I had been too distracted staring at the locals to take in its scale. It was monstrously large at night, and veiled in shadow like a great smear of spilled ink. How could a building’s aspect change so much so quickly? I had been inside the thing mere hours ago, and it had seemed then like any other provincial church.

I glanced up and down the lane a moment and realized that Abdera did not have naphtha lamps to illuminate its streets as the capital did. It must be the dark of the eastern night that gave the chapel such a grim aspect. The great ebony bulk of it seemed to waver before me, as though it were not a thing of stone but of shadowy flame, writhing and alive. It almost seemed to be facing me specifically. Looking for me. Hailing at me. Waiting on me.

I should go back to the caravan. To sleep. I would need my rest for tomorrow when we set off. I turned once more back to the south, towards the city gates. My tent and my bedroll were right there, just beyond the portcullis and—

“Ueughghf”

I whirled around. The stumbling drunk I had just seen had collapsed down onto the ground. He was vomiting out a great deal of liquid onto the cobblestones under him. I looked back from him and up at the great chapel once more. It seemed to have grown a hundred feet taller, just then, for though I was farther from it, it looked to be coming closer to me. What queer city is this, where walls and buildings grow nearer and further of some strange volition? I thought, recalling the way the city walls had seemed to both loom closer and then recede from sight as I had hunted for the brothel down the dingy side streets I had just left behind.

A door. In the undercroft, the whore had said. That was where she and the girl who’d gotten lost had found it. Stairs that led down to a tunnel. What nonsense. Besides, it was the wee hours of the night. The chapel would be locked, would it not? I felt in my pocket, the small knife I carried with me, which I had used to pick the lock of the Polemarch’s strong box to pay the merchants earlier, was still with me. The main doors to the chapel would be bolted shut, sealed with a chain most likely, as they were in the capital at night. But I was in the outer provinces, perhaps such customs were more relaxed, or different here. I stared up at the stony campanile. I was standing directly in its shadow now. Still some time left to me here, I thought.

My feet began moving forward, though it took me some moments to notice. My legs, seemingly of its own mastery, were guiding me forward down the high street. To the campanielle, and the chapel. Its great black silhouette seemed to quiver more strongly as I began trotting towards it. What nonsense that whore had spun. It would only take a few minutes to discount her story, and then back I would come and be to bed. Abdera was empty tonight, and none save that sickly drunk saw the way I was heading. The eastern wind had stopped blowing, and the air grew calm and heavy as I walked. It was just a story told to frighten small children. I shall prove it.

I made a quick circle around the great chapel as I arrived at it via the same path the caravan had taken that morning. As I first suspected, the main doors were shut and bound by a great lock and chain. Yet this did not slake my curiosity, and as I walked around towards the rear part of the chapel, which I believe is properly called an apse, I espied several small doors, which were bound with no chain I could see.

My feet continued drawing me forth, up to one of these unassuming black portals. As I approached the chapel walls, I felt a heat coming from behind the wooden door that dissipated after a moment, and then returned soon after, then dissipated once again. This happened perhaps ten times before I recognized a kind of rhythm in it. If the chapel were a living thing, this could only be described as its breathing. And the unassuming black door guarded some kind of orifice, which linked the outside world where I lurked to…

But what nonsense I was conjuring! Buildings of stone do not breathe. I faced a plain wooden door, nothing more. I would prove it, as much to dismiss these fatigue-driven fancies as anything. Sodomy always softens my mind, and the hetaera’s liquor might still have had some small hold upon my judgement. Only this could explain my being drawn to a locked old building in the dead of night. I shook my head vigorously to dispel whatever peculiar humors within me had created this stupor, and then I walked up to the door and placed my hand on it and expected it to be barred from within… but instead it simply gave way and pushed inwards before me. It resisted me not at all.

Perhaps the deacon was indisposed after exerting himself so much with our ceremony that day and had forgotten to lock up properly? There are reasonable explanations for such lapses. Did he, or some other clerical person live on the site, as the clergy tended to in the capitol? I should locate the rectory and inform them of their mistake. Surely Abdera had the occasional thief? I reasoned all of these things to myself as my feet guided me over the threshold, and I carefully shut the great wooden door behind me.

I walked down a narrow hall whose dim illumination came only from the occasional square window allowing in the night, and then I came into a sacristy whose shelves overflowed with candles and heaps of incense. In one corner was a series of wall hooks that held the deacon’s soutines. So this is where the clown keeps his props. I wondered for a moment where the splendid silver femur I had seen at the service earlier was, but pushed the thought away. I was trespassing, in truth. Which I could perhaps find some way to explain, were I caught. Pilfering things in an imperial chapel however, especially this far from home, would end with me locked in a prison cell, at best.

Another door, to my right, led me into a chamber that must have been directly behind the ambulatory, where the deacon had given his sermon from that morning. I noticed a small flight of wooden stairs ahead of me that went downwards. There must be some way to the undercroft from there. I stepped down slowly on the first step, testing it for loud creaks, but none of the wooden slats made a sound from the weight of my passing. At the bottom of these stairs, I found a barren, open space. As my eyes adjusted to the lower light, I could make out in one corner a door, with a weathered old padlock clasped tightly to its bolt, barring any entrance.

Just like she had said. A wave of nausea crept up from my stomach. How could a woman whore who ran a stable of boy whores know that a random door deep in the basement of a church was kept locked? Had she heard of the door from someone who had seen it? For all I knew, the deacon himself had a taste for boys. Could he be one of her clients? She might know of it from him. Or someone else who had seen it? I thought myself into circles like this for a while as I stood before that locked door in the dark, trying to conjure up some way that that woman could have found this place, some fancy which would counter the simplest and most obvious answer: The hetaera had told me the truth.

If this door is real, might also what it guarded be…No. Surely this is just some closet. A place to store gilded trinkets the deacon uses for his ceremonies. All churches have such things. This can all be explained I thought as I tried to pull back on the door handle, slowly, so as not to risk shaking the squarish lock and making noise. But the door was held firmly shut. I bent closer to examine the lock in the meagre light this chamber offered. I saw rust all over its dented surface. It was worn with age; and my fingers left a handprint on it in a thick layer of dust. No one has touched this door in a long while, it seemed.

Unlike the massive, lavish lock I had seen bolting shut the chappel’s front doors, this padlock looked a common one. I turned it over as best I could from the short chain. It took a single key in a single slot, nothing more. The sort of padlock you purchase from a locksmith for a few pieces of silver. You use such a lock to keep something simple safe. To keep it forgotten. There was so much dust on the surface of the lock it had turned the palm of my hand almost black where I had grasped it. What here is in need of forgetting? I wondered.

I pulled out the small, thin knife I used on the Polemarch’s strongbox earlier that day and, carefully to avoid any loud scrapes, I shimmied the tip of it into the padlock’s hole. Gently, I began twisting it around, trying to gauge the location of the several wards which likely held the thing’s core shut.

It proved to be less complicated than the Polemarch’s strongbox, but the space between the wards was greater on the padlock, and my hands were shaking and damp with sweat after what felt like an hour of impossibly minute hand adjustments, as I moved between its metallic dead spaces, listening all the while for the meager sounds of the little iron teeth and the bolt’s tongue falling into place until at last I heard a dull, low clunk and the lock opened and I drew it off and gently removed and folded up the chain and placed it on the ground next to the door.

Then, at last, I pulled back the bolt that held the door shut. I stuffed the lock into a small pouch in my trousers and, slowly, pushed in the basement door, expecting to see nothing but a small closet, full of altar frontals.

Behind the door was a narrow archway. Beyond it, were stone stairs, cracked with impossible age. They led down and disappeared into a black void. Impossible. I pulled out my steel and flint, and lit a large taper that I had snagged from the sacristy above me when I’d first entered the chapel. My small flame barely pushed back the gloom. The dark before me seemed nearly woven into the musty air I now smelled wafting up from the stairs. What is down there?

No living soul knew I was here. The caravan would leave with the new day, with or without me. What perverse curiosity had drawn me hence? Surely I had not come to this place of my own volition…had I? I had no business being here and yet here I was. What was down there, in that stygian dark? It could be a crypt for burying the locals. A cellar for storing the deacon’s wine. An oubliette for prisoners. Or it could lead to tunnels. To the lost bones of the girl Jehanne. I took several steps back into the undercroft, turned around and glanced at the bare walls of the large chamber behind me. My shallow breathing was the only sound I could hear.

I turned back and looked down into a darkness that should have been nothing but a red-headed whore’s imagination.

When I received my commission to join the expedition as quarter master all those months ago, I had shown Veril the parchment, which was apostilled with the Margrave’s own seal, no less. He gave me a hurt, hateful look. “First Baldwin. Now you. How does one family have such a hunger to disappear from the face of the earth?” he’d said. Now there were two paths before me. The wastes out there. Or the craggy stairs which lay before me now. Is vanishing simply my destiny? I wondered. The lit taper I had brought into the undercroft with me was the length of my forearm. It burned through a quarter of its length before I put my foot onto the first step going down into the void, and began my descent.

Alister’s journey continues here.

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They cast some enchantment on her…

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“Everyone out ‘ere learns to read and write and sum as kids, us women folk too. Not like them dim ladies you’re used to back home. I know how it is with the girls in the capital thats in the trade. Their fathers start ‘em earning so young, most of ‘em can barely write their own names. Shameful for a girl to be used without knowin’ up from down. but sometimes being learnt don’t help either in life. When I was a wee girl an’ my mistress sent me to school, I learnt that Abdera is old. Not as old as the capital mind, but old enough to be from the times when things was unsettled, the empire always fightin somewheres. It’s why the walls was built so broad and so tall, or so we was told all that by our teachers. But the walls aint the only thing that’s big and old. There’s tunnels. Under the city. Been there since the first stones of the town was laid, maybe longer. The teachers didn’t tell us of ‘em, but everyone ‘ere knows. They go deep down into the ground. They’re off limits, and there’s only a few ways to get down to ‘em that aint been locked up. One of em’s right below the chapel you was in today, or it was when I was a girl. Young folk used to dare each other to run down into them and come back up, claiming they saw some demon or something, mostly t’ scare each other. When I was a girl, I knowd another girl that was lost down there. Jehanne she was called. She had the most lovely blonde hair you ever saw. She was a bit mousy looking, but her hair was so beautiful and flowing you scarcely noted her face, she had that sort of beauty where one perfect thing hides everything that’s less than perfect. We was friends since my mistress bought me. One day Jehanne asks me if I want to go down into the tunnels with her. Neither of us had done it before, but she’d learnt from some other girl about how to slip through a rotted plank on the locked door in the chapel’s ​​undercroft that leads down to em. So on a winter’s morning when it was cold and snowy out and the streets was most empty, we bundled up and snuck into the chapel. We found the door and pushed through the bad plank, bein real careful to be quiet in case that nasty old deacon should hear us. Behind the door we saw stairs. Not wood, but cut right from the stone walls. We went down. I was an absent minded girl and forgot to bring a candle, but Jehanne brought a pair of long tappers and even a flint and steel with her. She were cunning like that. More cunning than I was. So we walked down into the dark. The steps seemed to go down forever, like the earth were eatin us up. I don’t know how far down it was, but the air got damp and the stones were slimy with somethin’ when we got t’ the bottom. The tunnels is big, big enough for three men on horseback to walk through em side by side. Nothin in ‘em. Just cold walls of rock that go on forever and evermore. Some folks say they go all the way from Abdera to the capitol, and beyond, that all the provinces got somethin like ‘em. Underground roads that lets the army move about without bein’ seen, doing god knows what. I asked my mistress about em once an’ she told me they tried banning people from going into them when she were young, but that just made folk more curious, and eventually some folks get lost in em. Must have died, starving and mad in the dark. Jehanne and I didn’t stay long enough for our tappers to even burn halfway, and when we finally got back up to the stairs and into the chapel again I was shakin from fear. You can feel its size. It’s awful, the way the corridors go on forever, all cold rock, not a livin thing in sight. They shouldn’t be there. I was seeing double and felt sickly as we came back up. They feel wrong. But Jehanne weren’t bothered. The tunnels held some fancy on her. She loved being down there in the dark bowls o’ the world, I could see it on her face. She weren’t just not afraid, she were enthralled, her eyes were so big. Even wanted to go back down straight again, but I wouldn’t have it. I was scared, so we went home. The next week we was supposed to walk to the petty school together, but when I stopped by her pa’s garret, she weren’t there. Her pa said she’d been missing for a few days. He’d figured she’d been shacking up with some local boy, or maybe just run oft, some young folk will do that from time to time, try and make it to the capitol and usually end up losin their nerve once they get on the road and coming home and their folks will box their ears in and that’s the end of it. Jehanne never come back. Her pa went to the Jarl, begged him to find her after she were gone a fortnight. They looked through all the brothels, mostly its the same ones nowadays as it was back then. Probably searched this very room even. Sometimes a girl in her first flowering will be enticed into going straight into the trade without the parents signin no papers. A scandal, but it happens. Jehanne were beautiful, in her own way. But she were no Haetera. She were just a girl, just a blithe and gay little girl, and she vanished. She had no dark fancies, or obsessions with bugs, the way some girls do who aren’t right about their heads. Just a girl. Some folks started a rumor that she’d gone east, kidnapped and made the wife of some savage chieftain. But I knew the truth, or I did after a time. She weren’t to be found east or west or north or south, but down in the dark below. They cast some enchantment on her that one time we was down there, the tunnels did. She were my friend. I should have said something. She couldn’t stop asking me to go down again, couldn’t stop thinking about how much further she could go in ‘em. Told me she even dreamed about them, right before she disappeared. I never told no one what I suspected, never told a soul we’d been down there. I was afraid of what it would mean for my mistress and I, getting the law involved. It would have brought suspicion on us. The harvests in those seasons was bad and many folk was hard up. I feared the mistress would sell me off to some brute for his pleasure if I raised a ruckus about Jehanne. T’would have made nary a difference if I had told. They could have poured the whole of Abdera down those stairs, all yelling and calling out her name until the whole earth shook with it. They never would have found her. No one knows how deep the tunnels go. No one knows where they end. Her bones could be under our feet right now. That’s all that’ll be left of her, just some old bones somewhere deep and dark. She’s just a story now that none but I knows the truth of. Jehanne who were lost in the tunnels. I was afraid. Afraid of what the mistress would do to me if she knew’d I’d been down there too, of what the town would do to me if they thought I had something to do with her missing. The tunnels is forbidden. So I said nothin. It would have made no difference. Jehanne went back into em, and she lost her way and she died, she must have died. And so she were forgotten. Her pa moved to another town. I don’t know where. Some folk probably suspected it were foul play and he were involved. He left before they could run him out. But I know the truth. It weren’t her pa. She’s somewhere below, deeper than the deepest dug grave. She walked into her own tomb, walked back into it after she already saw it the first time, with me. She were drawn to the dark. I’m old enough to be her mother now twice over, but I still think of Jehanne as bein older than me. For she was then, and how she was then is how she still is in my head. Jehanne with the golden hair. Just a foolish, regular girl. She knewd better but she couldn’t fight the pull of it I s’pose, whatever it was down there. She were my first friend. And she’s been lost to me more then half my life now. I miss her something awful.”

“I believe Vincent is ready for your favors now, sir. The third door on the left, please, in the hall behind the desk. Fare ye’ well.” she said, as she turned back around to me, and bowed to me from where she stood before the fire.

Then she went over and unlocked the door I had walked into the lounge from. Opening it, she went down this hallway herself. I saw her open one of the many doors that I had come past as I’d entered the Roughshod Rose. She closed it behind her with a low, heavy thud. I saw nothing more of her.

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A woman of some high estate…

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At last, with our fresh supplies under lock and key, I asked the Polemarch if I might take leave for the evening. He nodded his approval and turned back to harangue one of his pikemen. I had proven myself diligent in carrying out my duties thus far, and the man must have known I would not lose my nerve and flee, that I was perhaps the only man on the mission who would not turn tail at this juncture. For I was the only one of us with something happy to look forward to when we reached the eastern Kingdom. If we reached it. Thus, I walked through the gates into Abdera as the sun set.

I followed directions I’d been given by a handsome book merchant with lovely green eyes I’d met the previous day at the city’s market, until I arrived at a dingy side street that, at first, seemed close to the city walls. Somewhere nearby, the brothels lurked. The streets in this part of Abdera were crooked and the air, by some glamour, caused all sound to be muted and echoed at once. I approached a small side alley tucked between two warehouses and glanced down its length. It would have been difficult for three men to walk down it a breast so narrow it was. I stepped down it and on the soot strained brick that formed the alley’s left wall, at eye level, I saw an image of a rose that someone had crudely etched into the brick. I was close.

As I proceeded down this slim corridor, I temporarily lost sight of the slate grey battlements that topped the city walls, and which were always visible from the other lanes I had traversed. At one moment the gray crenelations now appeared but a stone’s throw overhead from me, but then glanced from a few feet further down the same narrow way, they disappeared from sight, and it seemed the city walls were a furlong or more away. How could I be so near the walls yet so far in the course of walking down one ragged little vennel?

The book merchant had warned me there was only one establishment on this street that catered to our kind, and so my choice of houses was preordained as I approached a heavy, anonymous looking door. The signboard over the door named it The Roughshod Rose, and there were no windows on its facade. I glanced quickly down the lane in either direction. No other soul walked this route but myself tonight. Good. A full minute passed after I knocked on the door and I almost thought I might have the wrong place, until I heard a deep rumbling from somewhere within the building, as though my knocking had set some creaking old machine into motion. A terrible grating sound that I felt in my back teeth came from behind the door. There was an awful shriek, of metal being slid across metal, as a small witches eye slid back and a low, surly voice whispered out to me in the dimming twilight.

“State yer business.” it said.

“I am here to shoe the mare.” I responded. This was the pass phrase the book merchant had given me.

“And where is your iron sir? A smith is needful of his tools.” the voice rotely called back .

From the pouch in my tunic I pulled out a cold, grimy bronze coin whose details had entranced me the previous day when the book keeper had given it to me. One side featured an engraving of a boy facing forward, holding a rose in full bloom in his left hand. The image looked crude at first and yet when I had inspected it more closely, I observed that there were faint lines of something etched over the boy’s hand, rivulets of a liquid that seemed to run off and drip down, each falling drop a small impression on the bronze that only a very good metal smith could have rendered; blood from where the coin-boy held the rose’s thorny stem. What smith would take the time to add something so finely to such an image? I wondered. The other side of the coin was blank metal.

I held this up to the witches eye for only a moment and the door shrieked once more as the grate was swiftly pushed shut. Nothing else happened. Had I made some mistake in the ritual? Had the book keeper forgotten to tell me something. Or perhaps even just lied to me? I glanced once more down the empty lane. I could not risk standing here much longer, surely someone will come along and see me. I can’t be the only man awake in the city tonight.

I was about to turn around and run down the lane and make my way back to the caravan, when I finally heard the unmistakable sound of a key turning deeply in some great lock in front of me, and a low steady groan as the great door swung inward. A man, a different one I think from the one who spoke to me through the witches eye, held forth a small candle and bade me enter.

As I stepped over the threshold I could see from the light of his flame that the outside of the door was covered in knife scars. Some hand had crudely carved words into the wood that were obscured by the thick iron bands that crisscrossed the ancient-looking oaken panels. The door, I noted as I stepped into the Roughshod Rose, was as thick as the width of my hand, and my ears popped slightly as the attendant, leaning his whole weight into it, heaved the great thing back into place and locked it behind me.“Down the hallway and to the right” he said, flicking his taper forward to indicate the way.

I walked down a small corridor with nothing but a series of closed doors on either side of me and came to a small, well-appointed lounge with a lit fireplace and several weathered couches. At a large desk that took up most of the room’s free space, sat the most voluptuous woman I had ever seen. She had a great mane of red hair, a coloring I had seldom seen in the capitol, and her heaving bosom seemed almost on the verge of spilling out of the emerald gown that was cinched tightly about her waist with a long, gold chain. She remained seated, bowing deeply to me from her chair, as though she were a woman of some high estate.

“Good evening sir. Please, do take a seat. What is your pleasure on this night?” she asked me in a deep, refined voice.

“Forgive me, I…believe I am in the wrong place. May I speak with the procuror here?” I stammered. Had the bookkeeper lied to me afterall? Sent me to some regular place? What was this woman-harlot doing here? Her face took on a gentle, knowing smile.

“Be at ease sir. I promise you have arrived at what you seek. Men do not enter the Roughshod Rose by mistake. I am the procuror here” she said, and she sat up, proud and erect, her figure straining even more against her gown. “Now, are you here for a stallion, or a gelding?” she asked.

I looked dumbly at the lady in front of me. The only sound in the room was the crackling of the fire. What queer customs this place has.

‘A… gelding, if you please’ I mumbled.

‘Of course sir’ she said, and she palmed a small handbell from somewhere in her gown sleeve and rang it gently three times.

“You look a bit parched sir, do have a drink. It is on the house.” She said as she rose and poured a draught of some sweet smelling brandy for me from a bottle she kept at the desk into a pewter mug. She had not seemed to pick these things up but, like the bell, she seemed to have got hold of them by some palmer’s trick.

“Y…yes. I… have been working our way here from the capital for some months now. It has been tedious work” I said, absently as I accepted the cup from her. A drink would help.

“Ah! The capital. You must be here on important business to have come all the way to Abdera.” Her voice was all sweetness but there was a note beneath it I sensed as I swallowed some of the brandy. Inquiring. Seeking. She’s probably never set foot outside of the walls of this place, probably thinks anyone from outside of this town is rolling in silver. I glanced down at the cup and realized I was still wearing the fine woad tunic from the ceremony earlier that day. I should have put my regular clothes back on damnit. She will think I am wealthy, and charge me more.

“I am nothing but a jumped up porter on a baggage train, madam” I said, for I did not know what else to call such a woman. I looked towards the doorway from whence I had entered. What is all of this going to cost me? I had a small pile of coins in my pouch, and I thought back on what th Polemarch had said earlier when I had picked the lock of his strong box: ‘Even gold is as good as dust out there.’ Out there. Out where we are going.

“Ah! You are with the imperial delegation, unless I am mistaken.” she stated more than asked, I noticed she lingered for a moment on the word delegation, as though savoring the taste of it. Though she was all gentle smiles and mincing courtesy, she was plainly assaying me, like a butcher would a prized side of beef. What might the weight of this one be? Damn my foolishness. I should have said nothing at all I realized, for I was not raised to waste money.

“It is only a rescue mission I serve on” I said but she may not have heard, for at that moment the boys, seemingly out of the air, materialized in the room amidst us. They stretched themselves out on the sofas and chairs before me, their lean bodies more gracefully neutral than ‘come-hither’. None of them paid me more than the slightest look, their eyes were all locked on her.

She rose from her chair once more and came round the desk. Seeing her standing amongst her stable, I realized that she was at least a full head taller than any of her lads. My eyes swept over her harem, for I had come to the right place after all. I could feel the heat radiating off of them all in the small lounge, but my eyes never wandered far from the great woman as I appraised my choices. A lady even being seen in a house like this, much less running one, was scandalous. There was something about this busty giantess that left me ill at ease. She was calm and practiced as she introduced her lads to me, each by name. They each turned and offered me a pleasant smile and a slight, deferential bow as they were called out; a queer formality for a whores den.

There were twelve of them, I think. The grog was starting to got to my head, and I was too busy eyeing them over and weighing their virtues one at a time to count. Two of them were a head taller than myself, three were more broad of shoulder than I. Four of them were less, and two of these appeared scarcely out of boyhood. They would not do. None of them was more than five and twenty years, I wagered. All had faces that were more pleasant than handsome, though this commonness appealed to me.

There was something in all their manners, a certain reservation that gave them a sort of unity. As though they were each distant relatives of the same blood line, and not boys gifted with yielding parts, supple flesh and the perverse willingness to cater to appetites like mine. Aside from their gentle bows, they did nothing to demonstrate any interest with me, as boys in the capital brothels did. Even stranger to my eyes, they were all dressed in common tunics. As though the haetera had grabbed them off the streets and informed them of their new lives as buggers only that evening.

Where had they come from? I wondered about this in every fleshpot I’d ever patronized. What bizarre misfortune had led them to this line of work? None of them had that air of weariness that orphan boys, raised on the brutal life of the streets, usually possess. Two of them I noticed (“Vincent” and “Silas”), briefly clasped the woman’s manicured hand where she set it on their shoulders as she walked amidst them. They each brought it to their mouths and kissed her middle finger. Whatever this gesture was, it seemed meant not for me, but for some queer intimacy they shared with her.

After these introductions were made I sat there a while, in an embarrassed stupor. None of them came up to whisper something to me or to offer me a kiss as a sign of favor, as boys in the capital were trained to do, and so I was uncertain once the woman had completed introductions and returned to sit at her desk, of who I wanted, or how to indicate it. A rumble of anxiety was starting somewhere down low in my gut as I weighed my options.

I ended up selecting one of the two boys who had kissed her finger. Vincent. He bowed to me when, at last, I pointed and asked for him. The woman was back at her desk and opened a great flat book she kept there.

“Do grant me a few small minutes to prepare, mi lord” Vincent said in a lovely Baritone and before I had even nodded he retreated from my sight , seemingly vanishing with all of the other boys back into the walls of the Roughshod Rose From whence they had come forth How do all whores know these damned glamors? I wondered.

“Do please enjoy another drink. It is on the house, of course” The woman said, for she had somehow taken and refilled the pewter mug I held without my noticing while I still sat on the weathered old cushion. She poured something different this time for the spirits smelled stronger, less of spice and brandy and more of pure liquor. Fine, let her ply me with grog. I could do with some loosening up.

She returned to her chair behind the desk and, incredibly, began writing something down in one of her books. Not a signature, but a great winding entry of some kind. A woman who knows how to write. This place is truly strange. The haze of the stronger drink worked quickly up from my stomach into my head. These were my last hours in civilization: drunk, besotted with the need for a boy, in the presence of a strange woman who managed a troop of such boys in a grimy building in a city at the edge of the world. A normal man would have been in a frenzy to possess her, but I found myself weary of her continued company. I had never been in the presence of such a self-possessed woman before. Her posture, I noticed, was ramrod straight. Only the Polemarch carried himself with the same power and authority as this sensuous brothel owner. Who is she, really? I wondered as I took another swig of the strong drink, whose pungent aroma made me cough.

“Are you alright sir, is the drink to your liking?” she asked, her great eyes staring coldly into mine from where she sat. I’m about to sodomize one of your lads and disappear into a freezing wasteland tomorrow in search of my step father whose been missing for three years now, you jumped up whore. Of course nothing is alright I thought.

“Ye…yes madam. I have simply not seen someone with your coloring before. We do not get many of red hair in the capital.” I said. She gave me a polite, but icy smile. Surely she is used to receiving numerous compliments from men.

“It is not so common in these parts either.” she said flatly and returned to whatever she wrote in her ledger. The drink was going very badly to my head, for had I been sober I would not have had the gall to say what I did next, and which would cause me so much confusion and grief in the times to come.

“You are…from without. I think” I said.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” she said, the gentle smile receded from her lips. The iciness remained.

“From without…from outside… of the empire.” I said. Her eyes went wide then, and she dropped her quill from her writing hand. Though I was drunk, I could see the ink from its tip soaking into the ledger page where it had fallen, making a great black spot.

“I…don’t know what you are talking about sir. I have lived here my entire life.” she said, and as she spoke she sounded very far away. I could see her bosom straining against the fabric of her green gown, for she was breathing in and out very heavily now. I should have simply asked for Vincent’s room then, and gone in for my swive, or even gotten up and left the Roughshod Rose entire. Instead, I did something foolish.

“I meant no offense madam. I will have you know that I too am a barba…am from without.” I mumbled.

“This..this place is… my home, sir” she said, and though she stood as upright as some great queen, her voice now wavered. I thought that she had perhaps not heard what I had told her about my also being an outsider and I was about to repeat myself when she suddenly leaned forward in her gilt chair.

“Y…You…are…from… where?” she said, for she was still breathing heavily, and her hands were clenched tightly to the arm rests of her chair. I could have denied it, or told her I had misspoke. I should have. Perhaps it was the strangeness of this whole place, or my fear of what would happen after tomorrow, or simply the heat from the strong liquor that was maing my tongue lose and reckless.

“I…I also grew up in the realms without. Across…across the gray sea. I was raised in the free villages.” I said.

She sat there a while, looking at me, seeming not to comprehend. Bloody hell, why can’t I keep my mouth shut? And to this brothel woman no less?

“I was raised in the free–” I repeated but she suddenly put a finger up to her lips and loudly shushed me. I clamped my mouth closed and said nothing further for a time. She reached back down and picked up her pen again and started to continue with her writing, but as soon as she started, her pen tip screeched over the page and she threw the pen down again and stood up. She came round the desk and I flinched, for I thought that she mighty strike me and she seemed like a person of no small strength. Instead she ran over to close the door to the hallway I had entered the building from. I could hear a metallic clacking sound as she locked it behind her.

“Madam I–” I said

“Be Silent! Please… one never knows who may be listening.” she said. I looked around the lounge once more. There were no windows, only two doors leading anywhere, one of which she had just sealed.

“But no one else is here” I blurted out but she hushed me once more with a hiss. As she sat down on the settee opposite of me.

“Who are you with? The Jarl? One of his retainers? I’ve already paid my debt back to Ducain…did, did he tell you to say this to me?” she asked and she spat out the name Ducain as though it were a curse within her blood.

“I am with the rescue mission, from the capital. I am ssssorry madam, I meant no harm, I only meant to say I came from across the sssseaa mysssself” I said, slurring my words.

We sat facing each other like that for some time. In silence. Her face seemed to relax a somewhat, though she kept on staring at me, as though she expected me to start breathing flames at any moment.The grog made it hard for me to know how much time passed but at some point, she seemed to make up her mind about something and leaning forward towards me.

“From from where did you say you come?” she asked, as she rubbed the links at one end of the gold chain that she wore around her waist.

“From…Grell. I came over cross the gray…sssea when I had ten and six years.” I said. I flinched then for she leaned forward to me from across the settee and I thought that perhaps she was going to lunge out and strike me, but she only whispered something. Some words in a harsh old tongue but it was not the speech of the imperial liturgy the deacon had used earlier at the chapel. The tongue she spoke was gentler, and the words seemed to flow all together and from the boozy stupor I was caught in I remembered something, a phrase or two I had been made to learn by rote by Mr. Rolfe who had been my teacher at the little school when I was a boy living across the sea. What had he made us memorize? It started with…

…I mumbled a phrase back at the woman that I had not spoken in nearly twenty years.

Her face went slack then and she sat back up in silence for a while. The only sound in the room was the gentle crackling of the fire in its hearth, and the pounding of my heart within my temples. The madam eyes looked toward me, but not at me, somehow. She almost seemed to be looking past me, or through me. As though I were not a man but only a shadow that the hearthfire had cast upon her wall. Her eyes darted around the room, for she seemed to be taking in everything, the settees, the desk, the wallpaper, the fireplace…all of it as though she were just now seeing it for the first time.

“You have come here seeking a boy’s companionship. What more would you ask of me, man from across the sea?” she asked, for of course I had not told her my name.

We…I make for the eastern lands tomorrow. For the freezing wastes. We…I… I am afraid, madam. We may never return. We…I may die out there.” I said, as my eyes began to blur, whether from the booze or my own tears I could not tell. These worries had plagued me greatly the past weeks. And here I was, foolishly blubbering it out to this woman as though she were my own mother and I a small child who needed succor

“You may. Many who have tried that way have met their demise.” she said as her shoulders relaxed a bit and she fidgeted with a small silver ring she wore on her little finger. When she next looked up at me her eyes had something, some gentleness in them I had not seen even when I first came in.

“But dark things lurk in these lands too. Even under our very feet now.” she said, tapping her foot on the floor under her and staring straight down with such a heavy look that she seemed trying to unveil the center of the earth itself. She continued without lifting her head up

“If you will indulge me, man from across the sea, I shall tell you of something. But I warn thee: it is not some fancy of comfort. It is a true thing. It happened here once, long ago. I have kept this with myself all these years.” she said and as she spoke these words something, some cast in her face seemed to loosen and unfold, and a second face, a face both older and younger than her own that was still hers, seemed to take over her visage.

“I suppose now is as good a time as naught to let down mine burden. Perhaps we are both outsiders. Or perhaps only you are. Either way, even if someone did put you up to all of this, there’s naught I’ll tell you that can bring more suspicion upon me than what I have already faced in this life.” she said.

The strong liquor she had given me was beginning to recede some. My mind felt suspended then in that degree of inebriation where one grasps the principle of time, but it oft seems arrested. That peculiar degree of mind where anything a person says seems shot through with a secret wisdom. I nodded at her.

“Tell me.” I said.

She stood up again and walked over to stand before the fire braisier, so that all the light in the room seemed to bend around her ample figure. Her shoulders slumped forward, and she let out a deep sigh. Strange to see one so beautiful rendered so sad, so swiftly.

“You are afeard of what may happen to you out in the wastes. I do not blame you. I should be too were I you, man-from-afar. Perhaps what I will reveal will help you to see that this realm is also sunk in a great darkness. The wastes are dangerous. But so too is this land beneath our feet, and she tapped the floor under her as she had previously. What in the devil does she mean? I wondered and just then a sound, what I later realized was Vincent ringing some chime from his chamber, indicating he was ready for me, pierced the air. It was a delicate trill of some small bell, but the silence in the lounge had grown so strong, it felt to me like a blast from a canon.

She held her hand up for me to wait.

“Tarry with me for a moment now, man-from-afar. The scrap of truth I offer ‘ye will not be long in telling.” she said, and the tender sounds of her voice now frayed and broke into a commoner’s street accent, a world away from the honeyed tones she had used only a moment before.

She told me the following:

Alister’s journey continues here

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The Way Opens…

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On the first day of the month, we marched into Abdera and down the clean cobblestone pavement of the high street to the holy chapel for our ritus profectus. I asked the Polemarch the previous night if I might skip the service. He had refused me.

“Don’t tell me you’ve turned heathen on us already?” he asked while polishing his best boots by the fading bivouac fire. I smiled, for I’d grown used to the man’s dry humor.

“I am uncomfortable in large crowds mi lord. The noise makes me dizzy.” I said.

“That is unfortunate but alas, all must attend. They don’t often get high Imperials out here, and we must project an image of unity and strength to the Jarl and his retainers” he said in that official tone I knew could brook no argument.

By the dimming embers of the flames, I made out the silhouettes of several soldiers of our caravan, who were also engaged in burnishing the ceremonial wears their kit included. The Polemarch ordered full rations since we’d encamped here, and the men now had the placid looks of well fed animals. Why the caravan could not simply pack up and depart for the frontiers the next morning, why we had to play-act for some jumped up mayor, why I had to, was beyond me. Were we not wasting the warm season by tarrying here? I wondered.

“If you have a decent tunic laid by somewhere, I would ask you to wear it tomorrow. The deacon wishes us to all look presentable” the Polemarch said.

“Yes mi lord” I replied dully.

“And fear not, once we are free of the city and its provincial officialdom, the world of crowds and trite ceremonies will all but vanish” he said with a smirk.

Just like we will vanish, I almost shot back.

“If I were you” he continued, “I would relish these final hours here. Once we leave this backwater, we are all but in the wastes already” he said as he flicked a glob of beeswax from his boots into the fire where it hissed away.

That can’t be so, I thought, for I recalled the great imperial navigation chart I’d often glimpsed that hung from a wall in Baldwin’s chambers in the Dogana. Its contour lines rendered the shape of the world in radiant color, the dyes used by the imperial cartographers having been derived from esoteric sources in the regions the inks denoted. A double map: of the shape of the world, and of the riches contained therein. At the rightmost margin of the vellum was a thick, ominously flowing line, laid down in the darkest atramentum. For it was there, not here at Abdera, that the empire ended, and our mission began.

“Pardon, mi lord, I understand we are still weeks from the edge of the frontier.” I said politely, not wanting to openly contradict him while his troops were in earshot. Veril had warned me before we’d set out about the importance of being agreeable, had told me not to call up every little detail and technicality, as is my prerogative in the Dogana. Or rather had been, months ago. Months that like years now. Or has it been years? Our time trekking from the capital to the outer provinces all bled together in my mind now. A new era was starting for us tomorrow.

The Polemarch gazed into the glowing remnants of the fire and blew out a slow breath, his long hair looking sleek in the dying light. He was passingly handsome in profile, but otherwise unremarkable to look at. His was a face men might admire, were it struck upon a gold coin; it spoke of some authority, a feeling of power one was only vaguely aware of. But there was an unsettled look in his eye just then and I bowed my head, ready to apologize for my impertinence, when he continued:

“As far as myself and others are concerned, Abdera is the end of civilization. They built those walls stout and tall there for a reason” he said, pointing skyward at the great stone ramparts that jutted into the air right before us. I cocked my head up. From this close I could barely make out the edges of the embrasures many ells overheard, each one winking with its own firelight. Did their men tend those fires all night? Are they up there even now, glancing down at us? Are we being espied at this very moment? I wondered. “I know these walls have never been breached, mi lord” I said. Which was the only fact of any kind I knew of this city.

“Aye. And yet no stone is strong enough to mask that damned scent. Their stink accosts me even from here” he said, gesturing broadly at the air before him. I was uncertain if he referred to all those who lived within the city itself, or merely those in the lands beyond which was our destination. Or both. Or perhaps some other element entirely that I was ignorant of, for I knew little of these regions of the earth. From where I sat I could only smell fire smoke and horse dung. The normal odors of our caravan.

“You would do well to pay attention tomorrow, Alister. Mind the eyes of the folk here, and you will not fail to regard it in them.” he said, his face was flush with anger.

“What is that, mi lord?” I asked gently. I hoped he would not strike me again. My jaw still smarted sometimes from the last time.

“The savage blood. You can see the foul stain of it in their very faces.” he said, the contempt in his voice like a knife blade. “They are part of the Empire of course, but they are not of it as we are. We must set them a high example tomorrow. This place has the stench of the old heresies about it.” he said, and with that he got up, spat into the fire and carried his boots back toward his tent.

I sat by the fire a while longer, staring up at the city walls. The Polemarch knew I myself was born and raised far across the western sea, where the empire was little but a rumor. Yet he always excluded me from these bouts of spleen about foreigners he often gave vent to. If being reared in proximity to imperial power was the best judge of one’s humanity, then was I not far more inhuman, far more animal than any of the timid folk tucked away safely behind these walls, much less who or whatever we might find beyond? Does he speak of me as a beast to the diplomats, or even his own troops? I wondered.

The next morning I put on my sole piece of finery, a linen tunic dyed a deep shade of woad that almost matched true indigo, as we marched through the streets of Abdera, trailing the Polemarch on his steed at a healthy distance to avoid the occasional pats of dung the creature left in its wake.

I kept tugging at the shirt, for it was rather tight in the sleeves, for I had never worn it before. It was not even mine, but something the Dogana confiscated from an inbound ship years ago that hailed from a port no man had heard of. The crew spoke no tongue anyone at the docks could understand, and no person ever arrived to claim the cargo, and so after much confusion the ship had been sealed and impounded, under the watch of the imperial port guard. In a matter of weeks its cargo was swiftly cannibalized by greedy stevedores, brazen sailors, and probably by the very guards themselves. Baldwin had given me the tunic one day and shrugged when I asked where he purchased it from, and I had known. I caught a glimpse of myself as we marched past a store window. I looked like any minor servant one might see running errands for the high born.

Abdera is a sizable city despite its remoteness, and I assumed that a caravan from the Capital would not cause people to line the roads, staring at us in wide-eyed bewilderment.

Yet there were many locals who stopped to gape at us as we marched down the high street and past the rows of well-appointed houses and the finer shops. Some of them must have known of our coming in advance, for the gathering crowd occasionally tossed us cuttings of sage; the old gesture of good will to travelers, which I could not help but find touching.

Most of the onlookers, I noted, kept their eyes wearily on our detail of soldiers as they marched double file down the echoing cobblestones, their swords tied across their backs with leather straps that were polished to a high sheen. Imperial forces are often transferred through the cities, but I could see from the wide-eyed glances of the crowd that they must only be used to seeing their shabby local militia men in uniform, who are pale imitations of true soldiery.

Few sights are more intimidating than the Imperial infantry in full kit, marching in lockstep. When I had first set foot onto the docks after crossing the sea years ago, I’d boggled at the sight of the troops stationed at the port; powerful men in shining armor. The reality of seeing their proud silhouettes outpaced rather than diminished the secret fantasy I had carried of them as a boy. It was like finding that my imagination was a real thing, clawed out into the world of the living. They were the first symbol of real force I ever saw. Some of the townsfolk I espied as we marched through Abdera must have felt that same ecstasy just then. Power is real.

At last, we entered the narthex of the imperial chapel, a great stoney heap with a tall campanile that dominated the local horizon, and quietly strode forth into the nave to take our places in the first rows of pews, which were set aside for us. Mercifully, the chapel was only half full, its ancient walls thrummed with a hymn sung for us by a choir of bored-looking children.

Whatever savage blood the Polemarch claimed afflicted these folk the previous night, I could not make out, for the dull morning light that came through the lancet windows was not bright enough to illumine their faces. Some perverse notion took hold of me then, for I imagined these respectably dressed men and goodwives we sat before, bearing sharp knives clasped behind their backs, waiting for a horrid signal so they might leap up, and perpetrate some gruesome atrocity against us that climaxed with them devouring our entrails before the great altar, the splatter of our blood smearing the imperial reliquaries so their gilt exteriors matched the crimson finger bones and skull fragments within.

Instead, we were all merely tortured by the local deacon for over two hours as he chanted an endless sermon that invoked every member of the imperial pantheon. He must have regarded our mission passing through here as a special opportunity, for the deluge of pieties and prostrations that spewed forth from him echoed above all our heads like a blooming, endless storm cloud. I glanced around the pews towards the end of the ceremony and noticed a good number of the town folk had passed out where they sat. The sight of their torpor would have sent me into sleep as well, but a shadow flicked at the corner of my sight just then, and I turned back to find the Deacon’s grey eyes boring into mine as he pointed a withered old finger directly at me from behind his oaken ambo. “Oh beneficence of the thrones! Grant these men the fortitude and strength they need to traverse the darkness of the eastern lands, and save our dearly departed brethren whom you tasked with bringing the Empire’s glory, even unto the foul heathens of the icy planes and beyond.” he said.

A shiver ran through me then, and as the deacon paused to glance down at his sermon and prepare another salvo of his divine fury for us, I looked over to the Polemarch, who sat several seats down from me in the first row. His head was bent down sleepily into the collar of his shirt, but his eyes were open and even from the side I could make out the piercing focus radiating from them. What thoughts he was lost in? I had come to hate the man in the last several months as the Caravan made its way into the outer provinces. And yet seeing him here in the chapel, just a man who must shoulder the sole and terrible responsibility of leading us after today, strange to tell, but I pitied him.

At last, the deacon concluded his preaching, descended from the platform and walked slowly down the nave. In his hand he wielded a great aspergillum the size and shape of a grown man’s femur, wrought in what looked to be fine silver. As he flicked the symbolic imperial blood upon us for our protection, I watched the waving movements of the femur, entranced. Some of the drops that flew from the thing landed on the hem of my tunic, leaving a streak of dark spots. I rubbed at one of these, hoping the shirt would not be permanently soiled. When I brought my hand up, there was a slight scent of lavender on it.

I glanced up at the man as he walked behind where we sat and began blessing the local folk who had come, and tried to gauge from the way he hefted the femur how much it might weigh, and from there to cipher out what the silver’s value could be at a high level of purity. I landed on a figure that made me feel faint. Do you even know the fortune you hold in your hand, you superstitious old fool? Following this final blessing, we recessed back to the entrance of the Chapel and returned down the high street to our bivouac outside the city gates.

The ceremony had left me restless and thin of mind as we returned to our wagons, and so I was caught off guard when I found several merchants I had made agreements with to supply us the previous day, glaring at us aside the city walls. They were all in a state of great annoyance at having been made to stand about for hours as the rite had dragged on. I swiftly set to work, receiving the foodstuffs I had agreed to purchase from them on the previous day in the town market. The afternoon was a flurry of settling our accounts with money from a small strong box the Polemarch had entrusted to me for the occasion, and which, alas, he had lost the key to.

Thankfully this presented no obstacle. As I explained to our commander, the Dogana inspected private cargo at times to ensure proper levies, and often employed a locksmith to help open the strong boxes from the wealthier vessels (which we were forbidden from crudely bashing open, as we would a cheaper box). When I had worked there, I’d witnessed this man pick open coffer locks of great sophistication when no key was available, and had both watched and queried him a number of times on this peculiar art. While I had no great skill for it, I had learned from him to pick a simple lock with a small knife I carried on my person.

“I didn’t realize I had such a skilled thief at my disposal” The Polemarch remarked after watching me for several minutes as I struggled to feel for the little push of the lock tumblers with my knife tip, and eventually got the thing to snap open.

“I am not gifted enough at these arts to be of much use as a thief, milord”, I said, mincing and deferential as ever.

The Polemarch shrugged. “I suppose it will make no difference after tomorrow morning. There is nowhere to spend whatever money you have thieved out in the wastes. Even gold is as good as dust out there. Do carry on.” he said, turning swiftly and walking away. First he calls me a Barbarian, and now a thief to boot. How am I to be led by a man who keeps finding new ways to label me an enemy? Next he will be accusing me of sodomy and regicide.

I had been loath to deal with last minute haggling when I’d negotiated the prices at market yesterday, which I hoped were generous enough to forestall last minute disputes. Luckily, the Deacon’s endless sermon proved to be a blessing, for the food mongers were all impatient to receive their silver and leave, having been made to spend half their day with the transportation of foodstuffs, and waiting for us moreover. “Move faster you trash! And a curse on that fucking priest!” a ruddy faced tobacco seller screamed as the brawny porters transferred our provisions into the supply wagon.

Around me, the Caravan was all hubbub. Soldiers packed up their kits and tents, as the polemarch inspected his men and barked out his orders. The diplomats who accompanied us said their final goodbyes to some local officials who had come out to the walls to see them off, and who offered them the very last morsels of gossip and intrigues they would receive until we returned from the east. If we returned. Several of our men were apostilling parchments with their signet rings, which they promptly handed off to an imperial courier, who was arranged for just this occasion, and already astride his painted steed.

I confess here, the site of those parchments bundled up, their wax seals gleaming and fresh, stirred me more than anything had that day. Tomorrow, we would be beyond the farthest node of the Imperial mail service. Our best link to home, severed. Only the wastes awaited us. I recalled the words the Deacon had spoken earlier as he’d glared at me: the darkness of the eastern lands. I wrapped my cloak tightly around me, for I felt a chill once more at the thought of it. Our time at Abdera waned.

Alister’s journey continues here

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A man is come to ask a favor…

New here? Read the blurb

The Embassy of the Wastes is a dark, slow-burning fantasy novel about the strangeness of empire, and what happens when you try to rescue someone from lands where no map can help you.

The story begins in a courtroom. With a man who has come to beg for a strange favor.

What he finds at court proves... stranger.

New chapters every Thursday.

Chapter 1 is here

…THWACK

…THWACK

…THWACK

Through the greasy burlap swathing my head, I could almost taste the metallic echoes of the High Chamberlain’s bronze staff where it hit the bare stone of the regnant dais. There was a pause and thrice more the staff struck the stone, breaking my concentration:

…THWACK

…THWACK

…THWACK

By old convention, the under-chamberlain had ordered me to avert my gaze to the ground upon entering the court. His hand rudely tugging the sleeve of my shift was my only guide, and my eyes saw nothing upon passing through the petitioner’s gate, save the encaustic slate tiles of the chamber floor. I could feel the heat and pressure of many bodies around me, and through the density of my cowl I made out the muted rustling of the fine tabards and silken dolmans of the ducal auxiliaries and petitioners-royal jostling about me.

But beneath that luxurious clangor was an ever-present rumbling, the boundless murmur of their voices. Each person here hungered. This one for a dispensation, that one for a writ of approval, those two for an adjudication, or some other minor fiat, I imagined. There were wheezes and sighs of grand frustration to my left, and a drizzle of titters verging on full laughter, echoing somewhere off behind me. I was being ingested by a great beast with a hundred mouths, each of them grasping and gawping for some morsel. I too was one of them, the least among these but still, a mouth. One more thing with an appetite only the empire’s courts could sate.

I felt the tugging on my shift sleeve now bidding me to move sharply to my left as, following the under-chamberlains silent guidance, I was led through a standing area I guessed was somewhere behind the galleries. This space was even denser with people, for I now caught glimpses of foot leathers just beyond the narrow cone to which the cowl reduced my sight. I saw boots of exquisite tooling, more lavish than anything I had glimpsed even from the wealthiest merchants that passed through the Dogana. My own feet were, of course, bare.

Like a packhorse blinkered to move across a high bridge, I was a crude creature here, to be marshaled to my place, and of no further account. I could hear curses and epithets being hissed at me by the finer personages unfortunate enough to be in our path as they jostled and shoved to make way for the under-chamberlain and I. Neither the well off nor their retainers would degrade themselves by rubbing up against the symbol of lowliness I was reduced to; the sackcloth I wore reeked of old onions. My mind wandered of its own accord,knocked back into the present only by my instinctive counting of the grouted lines between the tiles beneath my bare toes (47 so far… or was it 49?) and the occasional scraps of conversation I gleaned from those around me as I was goaded towards the commoners gallery:

“...hopefully have her married off after the southern harvest…”

“...whole village in the northeast lost in that flood, imagine the smell…”

“...such ridiculous charges, I ought to go straight to the outer chamber…”

“...heard he fucked the daughter AND the son afterwards…”

“There is a step up here, mendicant” my guide said in a sharp tone, the pressure of his hand on my sleeve had changed, and was coming from somewhere slightly above me now. I lifted my foot up onto a wooden step and then another, worn impossibly smooth with long use. We continued forward, my downcast gaze drawn to the number and variety of ancient knots visible in the oak floor below me. After what felt like several more minutes of being mutely led down what seemed a long chain of stairs, the pressure on my sleeve let up, and I stood still. I heard my guide’s footsteps moving around to the back of me. This must be the commoners gallery.

“Stay here until you are summoned. You may loosen your cowl, but do not remove it until your writ is called for.” The under-chamberlain called out to me from somewhere a great distance behind me. “I damn well know the proper forms!” I yelled back toward him, but the sound of his footsteps behind me had already faded to nothing. I took a step back and attempted to turn around and look for the man, but my hand only grazed over a wooden wall I had not realized was there. My stomach grumbled and my vision started to rock, and so, at long last, I uncinched my hood, and took in the dim view that bloomed out about me. The wooden wall to my back, I now saw, shot up high overheard. It separated the space I stood in from what I imagined to be the seats in the higher galleries, far above me, where the monied sat. I recalled that Veril had told me to expect something like this. “They will keep you down low, directly before the dais. The harvests are just beginning so with any luck there will not be many other low folk there today to prostrate” he’d said.

My back tensed up when I recalled the words ‘low folk’. Other people are here. About me. Even now. My cowl was stitched directly into the coarse shift, and so turning my head to glance at the others whom I shared this space with required moving my entire body to the left and the right to look around properly, like a gouty old man. Yet whatever embarrassment this caused me was moot: for there was not another soul around me as I turned my body to glance around the commoners gallery that morning. The wooden wall to my back, and the base of the great stone dais which I could now see before me, extended several lengths overhead; a wall of gray slate. My eyes traced up, searching for its edge. The docket, which I realized was to be purely my docket today, must be up there, somewhere. Alas, my view was blocked, for an ell above me, jutting out from a deep gouge that had been carved into the regnant dais itself, was a massive grate that extended back, to the same height on the wooden wall, behind me. I glanced down the length of the gallery as far as the cowl would permit me to see. The grate covered the gallery entire, its thick iron slats cast the space around me into a crosshatch of shadow and light.

‘Commoners gallery’ indeed, I am a rat locked within a gutter here I thought. I heard something then, a faint rumbling far off to my right and when I turned to look there, in what little light I had, I could just make out the base of a set of weathered stairs. I walked towards them slowly, my bare feet shuffling over mildewed straw, and crunching down on old nut shells that had been discarded here. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light that came down into the gallery, I glimpsed several discolored patches of wood flooring that gave off the ammoniacal whiff of old urine, I reached up and clamped my fingers down on my nostrils.This was a foul place. A space of untold waitings. As I came to the stairs, the steady rumbling of the folk above me became louder. Aside from this and my mouth breathing, a faint drip drip sound of water seeping in somewhere was the only other sound I recognized. I was alone.

Amidst these miasmas, a realization struck and grew within me, of the fullness of my good fortune this day. A giggle, the first sound that had left my lips since early that morning, escaped from me and dissolved as it hit the metal lattice above. Veril had been right to bribe the Castellan for my writ to be this day. Mendicant petitioners, I knew, were always heard first. And lo, I was the only one here, Veril would be elated, for he’d had harsh words for everything when we had left the Castellen’s chamber days ago.

“Always pure fucking simony with these buggers! Now, be certain you are amongst the first in the que when you are at court. I shan’t be paying these villains again. Do what you must to get their attentions whilst they are fresh. These are not clever men, boy. Their heads will run to pottage swiftly as the pleas accrue. Especially given the… odd nature of your request.’ he’d said to me, fuming as we left the Castellen’s chamber days ago. I tried guessing then how much I would have to pay him back for the ‘gift to the thrones’ the Castellan had ominously suggested he offer for me to become a ‘low personage’ but my thoughts were scrambled once more by another prodigious trio of:

THWACK

THWACK

THWACK

A great shiver ran up my back and terminated in my lower jaw at the sound. This close to the dais, the pounding of the Chamberlain’s staff resonated through my body like the piercing of a great bell, and I hoped I wouldn’t develop another toothache. The ‘odd odd odd’ in Veril’s words echoed in my mind as above me the High Chamberlain, in a rich and throaty tone, boomed out:

“THE CHAMBER WILL NOW BE IN ORDER. HIS EMINENCE, THE MARGRAVE OF X, OFFERS ALL PRESENT HIS BENEDICTION, AND THE BLESSINGS OF THE IMPERIAL FAMILY. MAY THE CRIMSON SMILES OF THEIR ANCESTORS SHINE DOWN UPON US ALL IN WISDOM AND CHARITY. AS A TOKEN OF SUCH CHARITY, THE COURT SHALL NOW HEAR THOSE WHO HATH A WRIT OF PETITION.

As the man trilled over the ‘r’ in ‘Writ’, I felt a yanking pressure somewhere right below my stomach. As though a great metal hook had suddenly lodged within my innards, and was determinedly drawing me forth. My feet shuffled limply to the foot of the withered staircase before me, as I glanced up it, I now saw that it lead up through a narrow opening in the grate just large enough for a lone person to pass, and to what must be the mendicants docket above me where, as the Castellan had explained to Veril and I, I was to make my plea. A deep booming sound came from overhead, and the metal grate shook and vibrated for a moment in its fixed position. Some opening ritual, not meant for a commoner’s eyes, was playing out on the dais above me. What could cause a great heap of iron to tremble like that? I wondered. I could make out then a prayer from some catechism that was being read aloud, for I recognized the harsh sounds of the old imperial tongue, echoing down to me in the gallery. A long silence followed then, until I heard the Chamberlain’s rich voice once again call out:

IF ANY MENDICANT PERSONS PRESENT HATH SUCH A WRIT, THEY SHALL COME TO THE DOCKET NOW.

Here was my time.

From the base of the stairs where I stood, my eyes rose up through the man-sized hole in the grate to catch those of the high chamberlain, whom I could not clearly see but knew was above me somewhere. But the hood of my loosened cowl took this opportunity now to fall so far down over my face that I could make out nothing above or even around me for a moment, and though I reached up to yank it back down, the dense burlap was now stuck in place, some fibre’s must have caught in my hair. Fearing now that my silence would cause them to pass me over and immediately move directly to the petitions of the higher folk, who plead from a separate docket somewhere far above, I loudly cleared my throat and attempted to make a respectful bow while also fighting with the cowl to pull it back behind my head, but not so far back just yet as to risk a breach which might result in my being ejected from the chamber.

Truly, if the shift had allowed me better freedom of movement, I would have lifted my arms above my head and flailed about like a madman. ‘Imperial decorum be damned, I must not miss my chance’ I thought. Only much later did I realize that from his station on the dais, the Chamberlain could see everything under the grate below him where I struggled with my cowl, and my attempts to get his attention were exactly the sort of uncouth, common behavior I hoped to avoid.

“MENDICANT, REVEAL THYSELF AND TARRY NOT. THOU SHALL RISE AND APPROACHETH THE COURT. ” The Chamberlain called out at me. At last! Curse these bloody rules. I finally managed to pull the wretched cowl fully back behind my head at last, and ascended the stairs. The wooden steps from the commoners gallery up to the petitioner’s docket were ancient and withered, yet they made not a creak as I rose through the opening cut into the metal grating, and emerged up to finally breath the cleaner air of the court, finally able to breathe through my nose without retching. I took the stairs slowly, so that I would not trip on the shift where it fell down at my bare toes. At the final step, I found myself, at long last, upon the docket, little more than a bare platform. The wooden panels under my feet were worn perfectly smooth from where countless folk had stood before me over the ages.

Standing there after the revolting commoners gallery was not so much a change in stature as a change in worlds entirely. With my head now bare, I was suddenly bathed in the unfiltered buzz of courtly muttering. I felt dizzy as this loud droning, like an invisible wall of force, buffeted me from all sides. There was something else I felt then, a scent in the air, the odors of myrrh and benzoin creeping into my nose. Do they burn incense during the opening prayer? I wondered as I kept my gaze strictly before me. I stepped forward to the edge of the docket and, grabbing the thin iron hand rails I found jutting up on either side of me for assistance, I went down on my knees and stretched my body forward towards the floor, in a low bow. I mouthed the words of my request once more to myself, as I had countless times in the days before.

“THE COURT RECOGNIZES THEE MENDICANT, STAND AND MAKE THYSELF KNOWN TO US.”

As swiftly as the starchy shift allowed me, I used the iron bars to pull myself upright once more and returned to my naked feet, my left knee cracking angrily as I rose. The floor of the regnant dais was just slightly above the level of my head, the row of conical naphtha lamps flickering at its edges gave me the impression that I stood before the open maw of some nightmarish eel from the ocean depths. In the dusky light they provided, I saw that the booming voice of the Chamberlain came from a tall man, his face a mask of apathy, who stood at the edge of the dais directly before me. His high brodequins, made of sumptuous red leather, were just above the level of my eyes. As the Castellan had warned me to, I dared not look up into this man’s face. I kept my gaze locked on the golden eyelets that guided the silken laces from his foot up to his shins, as I called out my full name.

“Mi Lord, if it pleases thee and the court, I am Alister Cor’’dell”.

On the dais behind the Chamberlain, I could dimly make out the hems of what looked to be black robes on a score of other men. They were seated on stools at what looked like a long chancery: imperial assessors and notaries, scribbling away at their notes. Bookkeepers, much like myself. One of them must be jotting down my name that very moment, on some imperial ledger. One more mouth.

“AND WHAT IS THY STATION IN OUR MAJESTIES MUNIFICENT AND PERFECT KINGDOM, MENDICANT?” The high Chamberlain asked with practiced disinterest, his boots shimmering in the naphtha light like an ancient treasure.

“Mi Lord, if it pleases thee and the court, I serve as an abakos of the third imperial Dogana in his majesty’s port, under the care of Veril Lorentine.” There was another longer pause, as this too was recorded by one of the black robed men seated behind the Chamberlain. Several of the assessors took up a whispered conversation at once, their faint voices sounding like dried leaves rubbing together from where I stood on the dais. In the naphtha light, I could just make out several of these men pushing aside bits of parchment on the chancery and then, unmistakable to my ears, the dry sound of large codices being cracked open, their pages being riffled through. As I worked in the port, they likely expected me to ask for a favor on some dull shipping matter. Wanting to be rid of me as quickly as possible, they were already thumbing through the tables of the maritime laws, hoping to locate some precedent in advance to dispense with my plea quickly. I bowed my head down into my chin then, so no one would see me giggle to myself.

You lot wont be that lucky today. I recall thinking those exact words, for they were the last thought I was to have that day. Before the things that filled me with a cold fear, occurred.

I stood waiting on the docket. Nothing obtained. For a great silence had fallen across the dais.

Before me, the legs of the Chamberlain and the assessors I could see at their work… grew perfectly still. Even the men at the chancery who must be the imperial scribes, whose black robes constantly shifted back and forth about their legs with the frenetic energy of their writing, were now motionless. I dared not raise my eyes and commit the solecism of looking any of these men in the face, but from what I could see at my lowly vantage, all the persons on the regnant dais appeared not merely still…but frozen in place. As though they were locked in the intermedio of a pantomime’s pageant, before the musicians strike up their instruments and what appeared as stone is rendered back into flesh. “Why does no one move?” I wondered, the Castellan had mentioned nothing about this to us.

As I pondered this there was something else, some quality in the air around me felt wrong. I realized then that the buzzing of the higher classes behind me had halted, without fading. It was not a silence, but the sounds of a single moment, being dragged out at great length, an interminable insect-like droning that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. I could make out no voice at all, just an awful buzzing all around me. I could not see how full or empty the galleries above and behind me were from where I stood exposed on the little dais, but I did not even hear the sound of anyone other than myself drawing breath. The chamber had been a hotbed of chattering coughing and throat clearing only a moment ago. Without the thrum of so many voices, the court suddenly felt large, too large. And I, smaller than I already was.

Something…something is wrong.

The previous week, Veril had barged into my chamber with an old imperial conduct book in hand, insisting that I rehearse the forms for my plea. “You had best mind that imperial politesse, boy. Those damned sodomites live or die by it. They can hold things up for months…years even, if they take a dislike of your manners” he’d said, but in spite of his spleen his eyes grew watery for a moment. “And he’s already been lost for so long now.” He said, his voice cracking. Even after these past few years, his heart was also heavy from the loss of Baldwin. What else could I have done? I worked through the book’s catechism of the ritual etiquette until I could recall it from memory.

But nowhere in that book, nor in Veril’s own knowledge of how to play these foolish, courtly games, was there any of anything like what I experienced then.

Standing at the precipice of the plea docket, with nothing but the duskily illumined dais before me, I felt as though I was suspended in the air itself. The awful droning all about me was making me queasy, and my knees chaffed badly from where they had been forced into the coarse fibres of the shift when I had kneeled down on them to prostrate before the court. The prickling shifts, Veril had told me, were not worn to humble the low of station, but to irritate and distract from the theatrics of courtly ritual. Men being juggled about in chairs and old artifacts of state being paraded about would elicit scorn from the uncouth classes. So I was made to want to scratch myself profusely, as a painful distraction.

Yet the mystery I felt about me now raised more than just a prickling in my legs. The air within the court felt queer. Not empty exactly, but emptying. As though some great force were draining it out, like the chain pumps on a waterlogged ship will send its spillage back into the sea. A tingle ran across all my body then, something deeper than what the roughest cloth can elicit. It was as though I was standing before a great tempest that was about to break and thunder within the court chamber itself. My breathing grew ragged and my stomach grumbled.

“What is happening, mi lord?” I asked aloud, or tried to, for my mouth had become very dry and I struggled to form words just then. Behind the Chamberlain and the assessors, in the dark that attended the backmost part of the dais where the light did not reach, the air itself seemed to ripple, as from some great heat. Had I caught on ague just then? “What delirium attends me here?” I wondered.

Suddenly, the tooth-like naphtha lamps on the dais dimmed all at once. My ears made a painful popping sound, as though the whole court were traversing up into the air to some catastrophic height. I wanted to cast my eyes backward to the higher galleries above and behind me. Were the petitioners-royales also seeing this? I wondered whether that noisesome crowd of well-heeled folk was even behind me anymore, for I seemed to be…somewhere else. In a place that was the petitioner’s court, but also not. Yet whatever I wished to do, I could on no account glance back. The Castellan, Veril’s little book and even Veril himself had all warned me on this point: “Once the Chamberlain recognizes you, do not on any account turn your back on the dais. It is a terrible affront. Would I be jailed, or perhaps simply killed to set an example, if I looked behind me now? There was only one course of action for me, but I dreaded this even less than these strange sensations that lashed my body in that unearthly silence. I cleared my throat of its strange dryness, and spoke out to the dais in a voice I hoped was not too loud:

“Mi lord, I entreat thy forgiveness. Wh…where…where am I?” I croaked out in a pained voice, for halfway through those words, some impossible weight grabbed hold of the shift and pressed it down heavily upon my flesh, the wretched burlap chafing across the whole of my body. I let out a stifled moan that I prayed no one heard, and struggled to stay upright, for the shift now felt terribly heavy, as though the burlap cloth had suddenly transmuted to lead.

I became aware of a hot, fluid warmth on my shoulders, and from the corner of my eyes I could see dark stains blooming out on them. The fabric was pressing down and abraiding me with such force, it caused my skin to rupture and bleed. I hissed out for the bruising and tearing burned with the heat of a flame. It felt as though the shift were trying to supplant and replace my very skin. My whole body felt crushed under a fathomless pressure, like the remains of the great beasts of ancient times, their megalithic bones locked in the deep places of the earth, whiling away eons until some imperial sapper arrives and accidentally blasts them back into the orienting reckonings of space, time, and air. At last, I could take no more, and with my teeth gritting in pain, a deep cry escaped my lips. It is over. I will be expelled from the chamber. My plea to join the expedition would never even be heard. I have failed. Veril wasted his silver on me, for nothing.

My feet were still rooted in place on the docket as tears welled up in my eyes. My vision of the dais before me grew blurry. No voice called out to me, either to reprimand me or to merely eject me from the chamber for my outburst. My arms were too heavy to wipe the tears from my eyes and all I could do was continue squinting between the legs of the Chamberlain, into a great, yawning space at the back of the dais. As the tears leaked out of my eyes and streaked down my face, I could begin to make out something, some shape, beyond the stations of the court officialdom. In spite of my pain, I craned my neck forward, attempting to penetrate the flickering shades that danced and winked obliquely at the limits of my sight. What thing is this that stands behind these men, in the deep shadow at the back of the dais?

What I beheld next was a nameless thing.

I seemed to be glancing into the heart of a great fire. But this pyre was not made of any worldly flame I had seen, for its coloring was all of differing shades of black. It seemed a flame composed of shadows, though it writhed about and through itself in a manner like no fire I had ever seen. In spite of the intensity of this great pyre, the air around me had grown immensely cold, and I could see my breath fogging before me, which does not happen when one stands before flames. No fire creates cold.

The longer I stared at this great pyre un-flame, it seemed to flicker before my eyes, growing soft and blurry to my sight one monet, and then its spikey tongues of flame suddenly snapping into the starkest relief the next. As this strange flickering continued, I felt the space between myself and it start to diminish. It was growing, waxing larger and larger. In a matter of moments, it had filled my entire view, and was slowly, unrelentingly working its flickering shadows towards me. The heat had utterly vanished from the air about me, and I felt something, a hardness at the edges of my eyes and when I reached up my hands to wipe them, small crystalline bits came away. My eyes’ humor had started to free over. The outermost edges of the tongues could not have been but a few yards from me then, when I smelled an odor, not the smoky tar that ordinarily accompanies a fire, but a sharp, acrid scent that stung the sensitive bits within my nose. I tried stepping back, away from this foul odor, for the terrible pressure of the shift that had bloodied my shoulders earlier was gone. Indeed my garment seemed to have last all its substance, for it now billowed about me in this queer emptiness I shared with this gloaming penumbra of dark that crept towards me. The things unholy light continued to pulse and redouble. I could not move. I could not run. I would be consumed. The Black flames were no more than an arms width from me now. I raised my arm up to shield my face and as I did, the very edge of one of the outmost tongues of this ghastly conflagration brushed up to the tip of my fingers...

…and then as if on command, the tongues of flame lept backwards as though buffeted by a great wind that came from somewhere behind me. The shadow fire paused before me for a moment and though it was not a living thing, it seemed uncertain somehow, for its outmost edges oscillated forwards and back very slightly, as though the whole thing were vibrating with an awful uncertainty of whether to go back or move forwards, and consume me entire, when I felt more than heard a great booming note, that shook me down into my guts.

The whole of the great flame wavered for a moment, and then began shrinking down, pulling back away from me. Within what seemed only moments the entire blaze had shrunk back deep within itself, for its shadowy light pulsed now at me from a great distance, rather like the largest stars in the sky do. From somewhere within that far off and fell lambency, something called out to me thus:

“HAIL TO THEE, OUR LEAL SERVANT. THOU WHO HAST MADE THYSELF KNOWN ARE IN OUR PRESENCE. WHAT IS THY PETITION THAT OUR WILL SHOULD BRING COGENCY AND PRUDENCE TO BEAR UPON?”

It was the sound of two great ships, smashing into one another on the high seas, their hulls buckling and groaning as they rent each other apart. The strange miasma about me seemed to split and crack at the sheer force of it, for I could hear peals of thunder, as from a storm cloud, that echoed somewhere off in the distance. I felt a great jolt through my whole body, as though my insides had been turned to water and violently sloshed about. My mouth filled with Saliva and I broke into a terrible sweat as a wave of nausea rolled over me. I bent over then, feeling my gorge rising in my throat as my stomach heaved up and…

…my vomit splashed down on the wooden panels of the dais below me. The wooden floor below me… for the dais was below me, once more or… had it not always been? I tried to reach my arm up to wipe the foul juices from my mouth, but my hand would not move, indeed my entire arm was shaking in the most appalling manner. I glanced over to my right. I was holding onto one of the iron handrails of the docket platform, in a grip so deathly my arm looked racked with tremors. I flexed my hand, and it relented its hold and fell away from the rail and, my palm was scorching and covered in sweat where I had held it. Somewhere before me, a man cleared his throat.

I looked up at the Chamberlains boots once more, and as my eyes retraced the silken Iaces I felt something thick and dull, starting to run down my face. My tongue flicked out and amidst the acidic bile taste on my lips from where I had just thrown up, there was a new note, of something metallic that flooded my mouth. I spit whatever this was out of my mouth, and it landed with a liquid plop on the dais at my bare feet. There, next to the awful splattering of my upchuck, was a small blooming circle of blood. I reached up then, and wiped my face with the sleeve of my shift, for my nose I realized had started bleeding. A loud and disinterested voice, which I’d heard before, cleared its throat again, and then and spoke to me in an irritated hiss: “Speak your business now, ye cur.” it said.

My…my business…I…what... A dull moan escaped my lips.

“Your plea, boy! What is your plea?” the voice glowered at me.

P…plea…my…plea…my plea…yes…yes…my plea Baldwin…I… must ask…I must ask for…

Somehow, a chamber of my mind that had been closed, opened right then. My plea. The favor I have come to ask. The forms… I must speak now, I must remember the forms. What Is the next part of the form…I…get…down and…

I sank down on my knees again, just aside the puke stain I had left on the dais. I brought my head down to the floor once more, this time bowing so low that my forehead rested on the docket’s wood panels for several seconds. Then I used the rails to raise myself up yet again, holding my breath the whole time, to keep the scent of my vomit at bay where it lay just next to me.

“On your feet now, dog! Do not tarry and waste the courts time” the voice, which I now realized was coming from somewhere on the dais before me, demanded. I pulled myself up to my feet and as I did something, perhaps the smell of my vomit or the aftertaste of the blood that had seeped past my lips had caused it, some chamber in my mind that had been occluded suddenly opened up. For I remembered just then the favor I had come here to ask.

“Oh great and august eminence!” I called out at the Chamberlain. “As a boy my late father left me in the care of a Lower Commissioner in his majesty’s house of change. He raised me as his ward, and I cherish him dearly. I ask your Eminence, in mercy and in charity, to grant me permission to find him.” I said.

A loud titter of laughter erupted from somewhere behind me, from the expensive sections of the gallery. The naphtha flames, I realized, had returned to their normal light, for they reflected clearly off of the Chamberlain’s still-bored face, (it had been he who hissed at me just then) The interminable scratching of the imperial scribes still carried on behind him, taking down what I had said. Why had the air caused my shift to grind down onto and macerate my skin? Where had that queer fire gone to?

There was a faint tink and the dull scratch of one of the black robed men as he pushed his stool back from the chancery. He stood up and exited the dais by some path I could not observe, the sound of his footfalls fading into nothing. From the royal galleries high above, a man’s voice now called down. I think he was heckling me, but I could not make the words out, but there was a sudden wave of polite laughter that I took to be in the same region of the court he occupied. Every sound and sight in the chamber, the laughter behind me, the bored looking officials before me, each sensation buffeted me with confusion. I was back in the world. Back in the petitioners court. But what, or where had I just been?

And where was that terrible, booming voice? That massive force I could still feel vibrating somewhere deep in my skull. “Do not on any account turn your eyes from the dais” I reminded myself. The muttering and laughter from in the galleries above me slowly fell down to a trickle. And the only sound left was the occasional shifting of the Chamberlains feet, and the sounds of the assessors writing down god knows what. Had the Chamberlain and the assessors even heard me?

I was about to call out to the Chamberlain and repeat my request, when I heard something, a deep note that rumbled beneath and dwarfed the din of the folk before me. And there it was again, a deep cavernous, wheezing sound. It was almost as though something were breathing. What on earth is that noise? It is almost like– but I had no time to finish this thought. Straight ahead of me, the chamberlain, at last, addressed me for the whole chamber to hear. The irritation in his voice was palpable:

“TELL US CHURL, WHO IS THY FATHER THAT IS SO LOST AS TO NEED OUR INTERCESSION?”

Another swell of laughter, this one much louder, came down at me from the higher born folk above me. “Careful mi lord, he looks fit to lose his stomach again and soak you proper this time!” Some brazen voice called down to the Chamberlin. They are laughing at me, I realized, and for a moment, the shadowy flame I had just seen fled from my mind, and my face started to burn. I am in the petitioners court. I have come here to beg for a favor. As is my right. And they are laughing at me.

Veril, I realized, had advised me far better than I knew, for several days ago he had shared his mind with me about a moment such as the one I was now enduring: “Many interests in the world captivate men’s minds, boy. That nagging wretch they call curiosity, is not the least of them, for he is a cousin of the imp of the perverse, and oft he comes ‘round when lust and coin grow tedious. If they dismiss you out of hand, it is all for naught. But, if in their curiosity they should ask you ‘who’ your father is… well. A path may still be open to ye.” He’d said.

My father. A path. A way forward. To find him. A path that I might follow that would take me to…

…for in that moment his name, which had muddled in my head since the Chamberlain’s staff had struck the stone, came back to me and eager not to squander this, I reached out to either side and squeezed the dockets handrails tightly, and the final words I had memorized for this very moment, at last, croaked out of me, and straight into the ears of the Chamberlain, the assessors, and those high born fiends in the galleries above who were just then enjoying my humiliation:

“If it pleases your eminence, my father is Baldwin Ferth. Merchant-Envoy for the Embassy to the Kingdom beyond the eastern plains. I, his son, petition for imperial assent to join the expedition that their majesties, in their wisdom and generosity, have prepared to find and return him and the rest of the delegation from beyond the eastern frontier.”

It is a potent thing to hold sway at the center of the world. In the moments after I spoke, I felt a great crackling, rushing sound in the air about me that, mercifully, was from no darkened shadow realm but our own. The laughter and chortles from the galleries above tore apart into a heaving cacophony of gasps, yells and swearing. It was like the eye of a great storm settling directly over the court, and the petitioners-royal, the Chamberlain, the black robed assessors, all were suddenly battered away as the spectre of something foul loomed down over us. In that tumult, I think none noticed that I had wiped the half-dried blood off of my face with the back of my hand. Were I still a boy back in the village I came from, I would have flicked some of the drops down at my naked feet, as a benediction to the old gods. But heathen ways had left me long ago.

Behind me, the exclamations of the people of quality had turned into a deafening, anxious roar. They are afraid. I realized. I was buffeted fully by a tempest of rumors and scandals writhing about me. I could hear feminine voices, doubtless some well-heeled women, muttering oaths and prayers to their various gods, amidst the stern timbre of cursing men.

“Who the devil is he?” I thought I heard one voice call out. Who indeed? I was a mendicant, the lowest of the low here. But I or rather the request I had made, now commandeered all thoughts in this place. A long, deep hiss of breath escaped my lips. I was emptied out.

THWACK

THWACK

THWACK

“WE WILL HAVE SILENCE!” The high Chamberlin cried out.

It took several minutes of beating the staff against the dais for the sounds from the gallery to dim down to their faint whispers again. Behind the Chamberlain’s exasperated face, I could make out other, more bureaucratic workings. The black robed assessors were frantically conferring with each other, as they paged through old tomes on diplomatic and military rulings. Searching for something, any possible precedent, to guide their thinking.

Yet behind their ministerial anxiety, behind everything in the court, was that deep, wheezing breathing that emanated from the back of the dais. I could hear it more clearly now, for it seemed to be growing gradually louder. It was this sound alone to which I turned my thoughts, for I was certain it had been the same sound I had heard when the flame of shadow, which had caused my tears to become ice, had approached me. Something breathed from the back of the dais, where the light of the naphtha lamps did not penetrate.

As if responding to some invisible signal, I suddenly heard the ‘wump’ of expelling air, as the assessors closed and set down their great works of law all at once. I was not cerain if this was a positive sign in my favor or not, but the ragged wheezing from the back of the dais had continued to grow, and immediately upon shutting up their books, a strange, animal sounding voice took a deep breath and spoke out:

“CHAMBERLIN. ALLOW HIM… TO LOOK UPON US.” it boomed out. The very stone of the dais seemed to shudder under the force of its speech, though it was greatly diminished from the whatever awful power it had in that awful, shadowy void I had encountered it in. “As you command, Margrave” the Chamberlain said as his red boots clicked against each other in obedience, and he stepped aside. My view of the back of the dais was unobstructed now. The darkness I had seen there from between the Chamberlain’s legs seemed to waver a moment, and then to dissolve. As though a fine silken curtain had been pulled aside, allowing me to finally see what lurked in that odd space.

Across the back of the dais, I could make out the base of a great baldachin. Before it, a pair of feet wearing gilt slippers was planted on a small stool. My eyes followed up the feet and the legs, which extended back to a great wooden chair that sat under the canopy.

“RAISE THINE EYES TO OURS, OH SERVANT.”

I looked up then, and as my eyes adjusted to the additional shade provided by the tattered canopy, I understood why the front of the dais was provided with illumination, but why all behind where the Chamberlain and assessors were stationed was kept in greater darkness.

What I gazed upon now was more than human. It had a head that was like a man’s, but overgrown to terrible proportions. The skull alone must have been as large as a man itself, were he curled up like a cat at rest. There was a mouth that was wide and flat, like that of a fish. A great tongue flicked in and out of bulbous lips at intervals, running over large, perfectly square teeth that were stained the deepest red. It was crowned with a large, bejeweled zucchetto, whose twinkling matched its great, violet colored eyes. Green robes clothed whatever unknowable body supported the Margraves’ terrible visage.

The black robed assessors and scribes, the imperial staff, I could also see more clearly now. They were seated at two long wooden desks on either side of the Margrave’s great chair, forming a great horseshoe shape upon the dais. A ridiculous thought came to me: are they so busy with their damned jotting that they simply fail to reckon the prodigy-monster in their midst? I wondered, for though they had put their codices down, they all were still at work, writing or sorting through the numerous stacks of parchment that lay before them.

Standing on either side of the great chair, and so obscure that I still had to squint to see them at all stood two men in black armor. Imperial guards in their fulsome regalia, Each one clutched a great stone mace in their hands. My eyes had adjusted to the dimness under the canopy and their expressions I noticed, while wolfish, were utterly indifferent. I could hear the leather of their gloves straining as they idly flexed their hands on the grips of their weapons. They looked positively bored by everything that was happening here.

There is an old children’s song which avers that our world is hollow like a drinking gourd, and that under its rind lies a land of monstrous chimeras, which is the very opposite to our own. Its verses tell of a kingdom of behemoth emperors, ghoul servants, and goblin common folk. Surely, the doomed feeling of unreality I’d had as the shadow, freezing flame had crept near me in my vision, and which now overwhelmed me as I stared at the thing under the canopy, and the human servitors who seemed unbothered by its presence…surely this was simply the vertigo of me falling down a deep well, and landing in the very midst of that same daemonic court which mothers threaten their misbehaving children with at night?

Is this…thing… truly the one who holds court in this place? Has there been some terrible tragedy and has…this… deformity perhaps eaten the true Margrave? Or have I simply gone mad? I felt an acid nauseousness in my stomach as my mind tried to regain its footing. The heavy breathing from the great chair under the canopy deepend once more. As the Margrave, or whatever this creature might be, spoke to me once again.

“SERVANT, THY PLEA INTRIGUES US.” The thing responded, its wide mouth breaking into something a flounder would call a smile. Those great purple eyes locked into mine as the jewels embedded in its zucchetto glinted in the low light, they seemed like distant stars, winking some mysterious signal to each other. My knees began to shake under me. What hell have eyes like that come from? A thick yellow secretion I saw, was flowing out of its great flat nose, some unspeakable humor. My gorge rose in my throat, though my stomach was perfectly empty now. Is this what I have come here for? To catch the fancy of this…freakish thing?

The Margrave’s robes stirred and it raised up something that I suppose was its arm, for it was impossible to look at anything other than its monstrous, distended head. The men at the chancery on either side of him ceased their petty scribbles, and fell utterly still. I had not realized, but the shouting from the higher galleries had utterly ceased. The only sound in the entire petitioner’s court seemed to come from the wheezing breathing of the monster before me.

Why had no one told me?I had thought the Margrave would be anything…a lesser noble, some spoilt looking child from the gentry..anything but this…thing that sat before me now.

Why had Veril said nothing to me of this? Did he lie to me? Did he… not know? I thought back to years ago, to my mother and my father in Grell, across the wide sea: what would they think if they could see me now? I wondered as I gazed at that vile countenance. The boy they had spoiled with a good education in a free city. Now a grown man kowtowing to this distended abomination? The nausea in my stomach continued to gnaw at me. I should not have come, I thought. Poor Baldwin had surely known the risks, had understood that there was every chance he would fall off the face of the world and be lost…hadn’t he? Dark thoughts like these had come to me at times over the past three years, but always in the melancholy of a solitary night. Never in the company of others, and certainly not here in this place, so bewildering and yet so deadly real where, I thought, or rather I had thought, I might be able to do something about it.

There was another sharp inhalation from the fish-like mouth. It was about to speak again. Before it did, in a swift gesture that no one beyond the dais but myself could have noticed, the Margrave extended his arm out to his right. I could see it was shriveled in some way, like that of a prisoner bound in a cell for years, the muscles and grayish skin all wasted away.

A scribe sitting at the chancery suddenly came to life, and began writing down something long on a parchment before him, with a swiftness that seemed more than human. He sanded and rolled the missive up, rose to his feet and walked directly to the side of the Margraves chair. He deftly pushed past the black armored guard on that side, and placed the note into the Margrave’s proffered hand. The scribe bowed deeply and, without turning away from the Margrave, backed away slowly, and returned to his station at the chancery.

“SERVANT, THY PlEA WILL BE TAKEN… UNDER ADVISEMENT” The hulking head rumbled out at me. It carefully tucked the parchment into some little pocket amongst its robes, and then the Margrave gave a signal, little more than a blink from one its enormous violet eyes, and the Chamberlain now reappeared before me, as though from thin air, and struck his staff against the dais thrice more.

THWACK

THWACK

THWACK

“MENDICANT THY PETITION IS RECEIVED. THOU MAY DEPART. THOSE WHO–”

I heard not what else the man said, for after I bowed my body low a third and final time I descended the stairs from the dais down into the gallery in reverse order, being mindful in each step not to trip on the shifts dragging hemm. Once I was down below the iron grate and back in the gallery shadows, I took several dizzy steps, and heaved what was left of my stomach on the floor amidst the straw and urine stains and nutshells. Perhaps some other mendicant petitioner will wonder at the stain I am leaving now, tomorrow. In the crosshatched light and shadow within the commoners gallery, I began retracing what I could remember of my steps, to find a way out.

As I made my way from the court back to the docks that day, I imagined the parchment the wretched Margrave had stuck into his robes going on its own journey. I saw the paper being buffeted between imperial advisors, men who, for all l knew, were just as inhuman as the one who now carried my plea. My hope had been that the request was such a bizarre thing that it would gall and flummox every official it came across. That would be kept going by virtue of the sheer confusion and irritation it caused, until it vaulted into the crimson gloves of one of the lords of the outer chamber, who might take pity on my case. This was the story I had told myself, of how I might join the expedition to find my father.

I could not grasp now, just who, or what had the power or the will to even consider my plea, much less decide whether to grant or deny it. Perhaps at that very moment, the Margrave was casting the parchment into the shadowy flame of that awful void I had witnessed, and which, I only realized much later, must have been an auger for his coming.

My father himself had, years before he had gone missing, stood where I had just stood in the court, to make his own petition. When I had asked him about it upon his return, he’d looked straight through me and said: ‘Deathless are the mazes of the powerful and the indifferent.’

He’d retired to his chambers then, and didn’t come out for several days. I never asked him about it again. I thought he had been making some kind of sly comment about the bureaucracy, whom of course everyone detests. But as I came back to the docks, to the sounds of the tide hitting the pilings and the smell of sea air, I realized that he had perhaps meant the phrase literally. What were those infernal things I had seen that day at court?

When I returned, I tossed the burlap petitioner’s shift onto a waste fire I found, down along the quay aside the dogana. I vowed under the starlight to never ask the empire for anything again. To never give service again, should my plea be denied. I even mumbled out a half remembered prayer in the heavy, half-forgotten tongue of my childhood. This other plea mixed in with the scent of the shift’s immolating fibers, and wafted up into the heavens.

I no longer knew what might or might not lurk up there, watching.

Alister’s journey continues in chapter 1

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