Colorful Dark

By Jake Nuttall

A young lieutenant of a peacekeeping force investigates the demonic origins beyond an attack that devastates her idyllic community in this dark fantasy inspired by arcade fighting games and shonen anime.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Amory vs. Tomusen
• Chapter 2: Vincent vs. Teri
• Chapter 3: Amory vs. the Aftermath

Chapter 1: Amory vs. Tomusen

1

The morning started out quiet, the day the bomb killed twenty-six people in the city of Dresdain.

In this silence, Amory Kilgore waited, looking around the palace observatory, troop report in hand, the morning sun breaking through the open shutters and glass panes to illuminate the kaleidoscope of mosaics decorating the walls. Lines of stained glass curled and broke in the cracks of gray stone, running and splitting in tributaries of a thousand fractured colors. They told the story of the world’s beginning, depicted in a shuffle of reds, amethysts, blues, yellows, and dripping greens that reminded her of the waters that flooded the irrigation ditches every year at the first turn of spring. Those colors spiraled and coalesced, coming together like all the baronies of this united confederation. People, places, buildings, cultures, landscapes—all jumbled up, shuffled, and strewn across a continent that had come to be called Santo Palandaes under the Palandic Creed.

Before that, there was no history. Just darkness and stories.

Amory Kilgore examined this black period in the representations of cut stone and glass, inlaid in the rock, a miniature palace of obsidian glass, blank and featureless. In the light of the afternoon, it glistened sharply at the edges. Amory saw her reflection there, too: her plain and frowning face; the close, unkempt crop of coppery hair; the sleeveless violet training tunic with the silver pin of the Justices emblazoned on the collar, a fox curled around weighing scales. What Amory saw most clearly, however, was the shadow of her own uncertainty, painted in stark lines below her eyes and in the hollow of her cheeks.

She wondered where she could turn to with the weight of that uncertainty. She wanted to reach out, to write to her sister about this doubt and loneliness, like a constant burden around her shoulders, a weight she shouldn’t have to carry now that she was where she was. The youngest lieutenant at twenty-three, a cadre of cadets under her supervision, the faith of her captain, if no one else…so why did it feel so fragile, as if at her slightest mistake, it would all go tumbling out from under her, a tower of playing cards?

“You see something you like in there, lieutenant?”

Amory spun, the blood rushing fast to her face.

The baroness of Dresdain stood in front of her, a young woman shrouded in cornsilk hair, glossy and smooth, her round face and pointed chin poking up at Amory beneath eyes as huge and blue as the second of the three moons that hung over the Palandaes. Amory met those eyes and tried not to feel stupid.

“I…was just now realizing what it depicts. I’m a little slow, I guess,” said Amory.

“I find new things to see in these walls every night, dancing patterns of starlight and nebula, a thousand futures we might have. On these walls, the patterns always feel new.”

Amory frowned, trying to work out a response.

“I…I brought the troop report,” she said, holding out the sealed scroll.

The baroness’s eyes got wider, somehow. Her delicate, snow-white hands pulled together, long fingers curling around the report.

“I saw something for you, once, Lieutenant Kilgore,” she said. “Want to know what it was?”

And how could Amory deny that look? Like a child at a Harvest Day banquet, all innocence and unquestioning wonderment. Amory sucked her breath into her cheeks.

“Sure,” she said.

“I saw you in front of two doors. Each one carried the weight of a great choice. You had a lifetime of information but only one made sense. I saw you burying a great evil. I saw you, back-broken and alone. I saw you madly, deliriously in love.”

The baroness’s eyes leveled beneath her pale brow. Her smile was knowing. She pointed it at Amory, her thick lips pursed.

Amory felt her face redden further and looked away into the color-strewn daylight streaming in from the mosaics. The domed room was a shifting, pulsing jumble of colors and light. Spend enough time in here, and you’d see anything, she supposed. A chill ran up her spine, despite the heat of First Summer baking in through the glass.

“Are you in love, Amory?” said the baroness.

“N-no,” said Amory.

“Me neither. Not yet, at least.”

Amory glanced at the young woman, but it was clear from the distant look in her eyes that Baroness Angeline Vox was already somewhere else. Amory could see her leaving through those big, absent eyes, like pools reflecting a cloudless sky. The baroness behind those eyes could have been anywhere, beyond the rolling, fertile hills of Dresdain Barony, a place of green and gold in geometric patchwork swathes, broken only by the occasional copse of pine upon the crests of the hills, all the way out to the borderland, then to neighboring Qitswitch and the sea. If Amory was lucky, maybe beyond even that.

After a long silence, the baroness spoke again.

“Have you ever been so afraid that even the thought of motion is terrible? A nightmare you can’t wake up from?”

Those huge blue eyes met Amory’s, then, and Amory could tell that whatever stammering, silly answer she offered her regent, it would be needless. The truth was there on Amory’s face. She could feel it, warm and rising.

Once she had been a little girl, too afraid to move, hunkered against her bedroom door while her mother pounded from the other side, screaming, deep in the throes of an episode’s delusions. Amory’s father tried to talk her down, tried so hard because they all knew what the people would think if they heard…. And Amory had been so deeply, desperately afraid that she couldn’t so much as move her arms—veined even then with wiry muscle from practicing in the yard—from their hold on her body.

Lieutenant Amory Kilgore looked into her baroness’s eyes and nodded.

“I feel that way sometimes,” said Angeline Vox. Amory forced her thoughts to turn towards the end of her shift. “Then I think of fairyflies.”

“Fairyflies?” said Amory.

“Aye. How delicate they are. How small. But even when the merchants’ cattle trod them down, they glow into the night and buzz away. I wish I was like that, sometimes.”

Amory looked at her long, that slight and strange girl who had inherited the rule of a barony. The somberness deflated as the baroness manifested a violet brush from the folds of her sleeves and began to run it through her hair, humming a familiar tune as she did so.

This tune followed her as Amory Kilgore charged down the palace steps, out the double doors of polished pine, and off down the golden hill to the Justice’s Keep, fringed with spurts of long grasses and framed in the swooping rainbow smear of the morning sky, where the three moons hung huge and knowingly infinite, pale shadows in blue and pink and silver hues.

2

The captain inhaled a tabac and koca leaf blend from the cigar at his lips. The rich, pulsating fume rolled over him, an odor like sawdust and wildfire. Nothing calmed him quite like this, and Saint knew he needed calming these days. As he aged, the less he tolerated the blithering horseshit tomfoolery of everyone around him, and these days, horseshit tomfoolery seemed to be all there was to go around.

Cast shook his head, exhaled, and looked out at the morning. Nebula cracked like egg yolk on the indigo west. The three moons roamed in waxing stages, reflecting only dimly colored light: blue and pink and silver. Those satellites faded into a blanket of cloudy haze that would not translate to rain. It took the color out of what might otherwise be a splendid summer morning. Still, Dresdain rolled out below, a town of low wooden shops and homes and towering farmhouses that dissipated into the northern hills and became a quilt of farmland, bristling and active with young summer. 

Cast looked out on all this, sucking at his cigar, and wondered what he had to be mad about? What really? Hadn’t he built a legacy in this place? In this towered keep and its plain courtyards? With its simple boys and fumbling girls?

Hadn’t he built a legacy in Amory Kilgore?

He released a thick cloud of tabac smoke, supposing they would never be enough, the things one left behind. He would feel forever like there was something he was supposed to do. Something he had to make up for.

Dresdain’s morning descended in a gray pall as the sun lifted higher and the moons dulled to their pale, daytime half-selves. From his rest on the fencing on Palace Hill’s eastern slope, Captain Tim Cast listened to his cadets in the yard behind him run their drills, interrupted intermittently by the soft commands of his lieutenant.

The captain turned with his back to the city below, facing them and the winged stone fortress that served as the Office of Justices in Dresdain city, known simply as the Keep, the home of the barony’s peace-keeping officers. In the yard were the nine cadets, their young bodies rising and bobbing, fit and lean and glistening.

And there was Amory Kilgore. Young thing. Short, lean as a whipcrack, bronzed from all her patrols, face dotted here and there with barely visible freckles. Her neck slouched forward into her pursed face, her too-wide mouth, her short chin. Her rowdy lock of hair was a flat, unkept blonde in this gray light. In direct sun, he often saw cuts of glinting red.

“Four…three…two…one…”

She counted off their drills. Her body pressed to the flat grass, tightly wrapped in a dark training tunic and leggings. She pushed up and down, her triceps bulging, breathing out the count.

She seemed to him then, as so often before, a warrior behind a shield. Fearful, defensive, and bristling with power. Perhaps she’d see it one day. Or perhaps she’d tarry forever in the shadow of others. He supposed it would only matter to his delusions of legacy.

Captain Cast watched his fellow Justices run their drills, Lieutenant Kilgore at their head, until they finished in a panting and sweat-dotted excess of grunts. They looked ridiculous, like rolling piglets as they stood, and Cast grinned, watching. They weren’t watching him, though. They had eyes only for the lieutenant, awaiting orders.

Then the boy approached, the curly-headed cadet—Tomusen, Cast thought his name was—walking straight up to Kilgore and saluting her with a crisp bow.

“Lieutenant, I was hoping I could ask you to spar,” said Tomusen.

Amory looked up, eyes wide, her mouth floundering for a moment.

Cast’s grin faded, twitched back into place. The boy was making a big mistake.

But Amory smiled and nodded, as Cast knew she would, glad to do the one thing she seemed to feel inherently comfortable with—the dance of combat.

“Aye, absolutely, I can help you with that,” she said, and Cast watched the two Justices in their matching training wear step into the inner courtyard of the keep, a place of bare dirt along the stone walls, where a circle had been scraped out specifically for sparring matches like what was about to unfold.

This kid was gonna get his ass kicked.

Tomusen raised his fists. He scuffed his bare feet into the dirt, distributing his weight evenly over his crouched legs, defensive stance tight for approaching a perpetrator. Good, she was teaching them well. But he was still gonna get his ass kicked.

Amory Kilgore took her own narrow stance, shuffling backwards on the balls of her feet, bouncing, her speed and strength evident in the lightness and rhythm with which she moved.

The boy swung out with a fist. Amory caught it at the forearm, across her own chest, lifted it up and aside, and rolled under his arm. She landed a blow backwards into the middle of the cadet’s shoulders, and he rolled forward, gasping.

“See how I caught that?” said Amory. “You might just—”

She swiveled her torso away from Tomusen’s sneaking fist.

“—try leaving less of your chest open.”

“Try it again,” he panted, blocking two of Amory’s jabs at his midsection. He punched out fast and hard with his right arm. Amory twisted to catch it, but he exploded out with a twisting left hook at the same time.

She saw it coming a moment too late, rolling back, catching a bit of the first blow against her stomach but rotating entirely around the next hit.

Amory answered with a one-two combination of blows against the small of his back. Tomusen coughed and fell forward.

“Good,” she said. “That was really g—”

Tomusen spun around, and they met blow for blow, forearm to forearm, blocking and punching in a solid series of strikes.

Good, he was doing better than most of these useless cadets.

Then Amory went low, swiping out, ankle to ankle, pulling the cadet off balance. She went up with a spin, and her strike sent the cadet stumbling out of the circle, laughing with disbelief.

“I’m sorry; are you hurt?” she said. The concern on her frowning face was genuine.

“No,” said Tomusen. “Not too much.”

He swung out again, and Amory caught it. He followed up with a left hook. Amory ducked, pushed him forward. They exchanged a series of kicks and caught each other by the hands.

Then Amory bent one of his down and pushed his arm inward. He folded sideways.

“There are little things like that you can take advantage of,” Amory said, Tomusen dancing away, panting hard. “I can help you know where to look.”

Tomusen rotated into his kick, a powerful outward thrust that Amory caught at the abdomen, legs stretched wide to protect her balance. A whup sound erupted from her body.

“Good,” she gasped, “you just missed the follow-up. My shoulders were open—”

He tried for it now, realizing her point. But Amory was ready, spinning with the falling hand, turning him around with it till his arm swiveled behind his back. He winced, but it was clear the lieutenant wasn’t putting much pressure on his captive arm.

“Got it. Got it,” he said, tapping her arm in surrender. “Thank you, lieutenant.”

“Sorry,” said Amory. And she released him to shake her hand and follow the rest of the cadets inside.

The lieutenant dusted off her hands, picked a worn towel up off the ground, and rested it around her shoulders. She breathed a long outward breath and looked to the western horizon, where the barony of Dresdain stretched out from its capital city, a valley of hills and winding roads, scrubbed with the brush of pine and sage and wildflowers.

The captain watched the lieutenant take it all in, pushing her stray lock of colorless hair from over her left eye, squinting into the creasing hills. They rippled out like stones in a clear lake, broken here and there with the farmsteads and longhouses and the chimney smoke that danced slowly upward into the pale gray sky. The day was innocuously warm.

“Lieutenant,” Cast called, approaching her. “Watching out for marauders, are you?”

Amory Kilgore looked at him, her eyes nearly the same shade as the surrounding clouds.

“Couldn’t see them if I tried,” she said. “My distance vision is terrible; I can hardly see down to the river.”

Cast laughed. “Well, you see enough to give those cadets a good beating, and that’s all that matters.”

“Did I go too hard?” she said.

“No, not at all. In fact, send them to the infirmary, by all means. Sergeant Blackwood gets lonely up there.”

Cast began to move away in the direction of the office. He had a stack of paperwork to attend to, and the cigar had whittled down to stinging embers, anyway. He dropped the remains into the dirt and crushed it down with a bootheel.

“Captain,” said Amory, “is there anything else I should be doing?”

“Saint’s balls, Kilgore, of course not. Take the day; how about that? Enjoy yourself. Find something outside of work.”

She blushed deeply, and he almost regretted his words. But she could deal with her self-doubt and obsession with perfection on her own time. She’d have his position soon enough. Cast supposed that should make him feel more proud and less embittered. Instead, he felt as though he’d been cheated of something that was never his to begin with.

Captain Tim Cast retreated into his offices and dove headfirst into his day’s work, letting it push all else from his cluttered mind.

3

Vincent Gilyan kept a casual eye out the window of The Sand and Sun tavern, watching the passers-by flit down the narrow dusty streets beyond, heading no doubt for the bustle of the square with the market in flux. Yet he was stuck here, refilling cups of energizing koca tea for the farmhands and the errant teenagers, purveyors of lofty gossip all. Typically, he enjoyed listening. The stories were dramatic and self-important, and these were his favorite qualities in himself.

He slipped more steaming water into one woman’s tea and watched the gray daylight fall in broken patterns over the street. Vendors, farmers, traders, craftspeople, entertainers, all wound their way through the city towards Harmony Square for the bi-weekly market. A chance to trade and resupply and celebrate life in a dim, slow, rustic sort of fashion. Occasionally, Vincent’s troupe put on performances there, acted out the old plays in bits and scenes. Those were his favorite days. Pure escapism and the buzz of attention. He berated himself for enjoying it as much as he did, for loving it hopelessly and romantically. It made him feel heroic, and that was more than he could get out of any other moment of his life, a revolving thing made up of sleep and serving and the occasional raucous outing. For the rest of it, he just felt simple and useless and dull, and these were the qualities he despised most in himself.

The floorboards creaked beneath his broad feet. The patrons yammered, a constant murmur that had become white noise to him now, the falling of a waterfall, the buzzing of crickets. They looked at him, corner-eyed, distracted, some amiable, some horrible, and he loved and hated them in turns as the day passed and his unoccupied, restless mind turned down avenues of hopes and distant places, success, renown, anything….

“Vincent!”

It was Talis. He recognized the distinctively performative voice. A giddy sensation filled Vincent at the sound of it, and he turned to face her with a smile despite the vacancy in his head. He felt empty and tired.

“My lady!” he said. “What is someone of your caliber doing in a place like this?”

“Very funny,” she said. “I’m here for a spot and then we’re going to the square. Peter Trick is performing; it’s gonna be terrible!”

He met her brown eyes and broad smile, wishing he could free himself and go with them.

“Oh, and Dano’s here, too.”

Vincent looked through to the distant doorway at the tall, sandy-haired man. His wry smile and wayward eyes made him seem instantly, captively mischievous. But Dano was a decent fellow. High-spirited and insane, but decent.

“Aye, man, we have come for a drink before the delights to come, a festival of utter frivolity and talent, the masterpiece of one Peter Trick,” said Dano.

“Be nice,” said Vincent, wiping down a table. “He funds the damn troupe.”

“He’s a talentless sap,” said a voice in the vicinity of Vincent’s left elbow. He looked underneath it to find a girl with shabby bangs and a loose gray tunic. He threw her a grateful smile in apology for not noticing her.

“If I prostituted myself, do you think I could make enough to fund his deportation?” said Dano.

“It depends,” said Vincent. “Where would you send him?”

Talis laughed at that and gave Vincent a friendly punch on the shoulder, which nearly made him spill the ewer onto the girl with the bangs. He controlled the motion at the last moment, however, and she remained unharmed.

“I’d send him all the way to northernmost Umbra,” said Talis. She reconsidered. “Then again, we’d still probably hear his yodeling from there.”

“Not the yodeling,” said Dano.

“So that’ll be two teas, then?” said Vincent.

They found seats while he maneuvered himself up and down the saw-dusted aisles, the place dim with that gray light, the dark floorboards eating it all up, refracted in little shining bits from the shuffle of tin mugs and pocket watch chains, of sheathed short blades and farming implements. The citizens of Dresdain jabbered their white noise into the room, filling it up with that pleasant and empty hum.

Snippets of conversation caught and pulled at Vincent’s attention, farmers and day bosses trading weathered complaints.

“These taxes, I hear they are all to provoke a war,” said a voice, cutting through the buzz.

“A war? Why the Veil would they want that?” added another.

“So they have an excuse to seize Dresdain without paying rent. War would keep ‘em here. Let ‘em milk us dry.”

“They’re already doing that. I lost half my sales cuz of them fees. The Yudans couldn’t pay up. Only wanted half. The rest I had to leave behind, rotting in some goose-shed now, I suppose. Such a waste.”

“No one else would buy?”

“Nah, the market’s saturated. All us producers’re in the same boat. We’re used to feeding both us and the southerners. Now there’s a lot that goes to waste.”

“Stupidest damned thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Me too,” said the patron.

Conspiracies and fearmongering were how the people of Dresdain kept themselves feeling important in their little corner of this big world. There had to be somebody plotting against Dresdain and its people, because if not, what did Dresdain matter? What did any of their toil really mean?

Nothing, that’s what. Cheap labor, fertile land, and absolutely nothing of consequence. That’s what Dresdain meant.

This place was full of people so devoutly pragmatic they would stick their own heads in the ground and plant themselves as seeds if the crops failed. Which they wouldn’t because they never had. This was Dresdain Barony after all, the fertile fields of the Valley of Voices and the sweeping planes of farmland to the north and east, the sovereign state of Yuda to the south. Everything grew here. Just not opportunity or culture.

The fiefdom farm-lords toiled the city with tireless tradition, and their farmhands scraped away their living on land they would never own, save in some dramatic circumstances. Such circumstances were the exception that proved the rule.

Vincent made his way back to his friends, who were debating something about the value of chaos in modern theatre, when he tipped his ewer into their still mostly full tins and slid onto the bench beside Talis.

“Take me with you,” he said.

“Just come,” said Talis. “Forget this place.”

“Except I need the job,” said Vincent.

“What does one need with a job in the flower of youth, Vincent?” said Dano. “Live your life free and true.”

“Easy for you to say when your rich aunt pays for your life.”

“Damn right,” said Dano. “It is easy to say. Easy to do, too.”

“Yell something encouraging to Peter for me,” said Vincent.

“Like what?” said Talis.

“Louder, faster, longer. That sort of thing.”

Dano and Talis erupted in sniveling laughter as Vincent moved on to toil into the morning, watching side-eyed as he took a rag to one particularly crumby table. Eventually, his friends left the tavern to fall back into that gray-white day, kicking up dust as they went west down the Merchant Street, which would wind them around three and a half blocks to the heart of Dresdain and Harmony Square.

There, they would die in fire and pain, along with twenty-four other Dresdainites, peddlers, and southern traders.

But Vincent couldn’t have known that.

4

For Amory, the day was already over.

Remaining drills would be taken over by Captain Davis’s lecture on proper report filing, and Amory’s next patrol wasn’t until the following evening. The morning half-shift Cast had given her meant she finally had time to travel out to her family’s manor in the northern hills, check up on the place outside the irregular hired help. It also meant she had ample time to fill with her thoughts, fears, and insecurities. Amory Kilgore did not like to be left with time.

Time, for Amory Kilgore, empowered her constant fear of doing and saying the wrong things, of proving herself the silver-spoon suckling leech that suspected she was. It was a fear she’d grown up with, set in the shadow of a father who had been the one to form the Office of Justice after the barony’s previous militia attempted a coup. 

Such a father alone might have been enough. Her mother, whose thin grip on reality slipped all too often, had imparted her with an additional layer of vigilant terror.

From a memory, Amory Kilgore looked into her mother’s huge gray eyes. They were glazed and far-seeing. They looked like two moons waxing in the candlelit night.

“Oh honey, they’re revolting,” she’d said. “They’re scratching at the walls and calling. Can’t you hear them? Don’t you know what they want to do to us? They want to get inside us, Amory, and play with us. There are too many of them; it’s like a Springtide Parade of nasty crawling, scuttling things, things that nip and bite. And you can’t say yes to them, Amory! You must never say yes! No, no, no, no, no. Say it. Say it with me. No, no, no, no, no.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” repeated the daughter. She had pulled the comforter up to her chin, little Amory Kilgore, and thought: What in the name of the Saint?

She had been aware, even at a young age, that this person who was supposed to be the parent had less of a grip on reality than herself, and because of this, Amory’s mother might have been taken away at any moment. If the neighbors had known during those dark years how hard Jule Kilgore fought against her own sanity, she might have been hauled away at any time to the Bails Asylum or a Disolidite convent.

Dresdain had no patience for strange, wicked talk. Such talk might invite the evils from the other side of the Veil, evils trapped there since the War of the Red God and the remaking of the world.

But those were only stories. Stories like her mother’s stories, and Amory Kilgore learned to hide and fear the truth.

She kept her mouth shut at primary school, at the Avon Academy, at the office. She learned to fear her words and what they revealed and concealed. She hid inside herself, and she bit down her feelings from coming out in large, dramatic bursts, the way they did for her mother.

Naturally, Amory clung to her father, resolute and comparatively stolid. Jarod Kilgore was a mountain-maker, a world-shaker, a force of nature that made himself a part of the history of the barony. He reformed a corrupt guard as the Office of Justice and earned himself a seat on the Palandic Confederation’s Grand Council, representing their little stretch of the continent. Amory lived under his wing and his shadow, pledging herself to the Office of Justices right after the academy, following in his footsteps. And her worst fears never came about.

Her mother got better, doctored by one of the Free Folk who wandered in from the north and brought with him promising chemicals and potions. Jule Kilgore stayed lucid more often, and Amory’s fears turned inward.

What if they realized she was mad, too? What if she should show the same madness? What if she wasn’t cut out for being a Justice? What would they do to her? Where would they take her?

The young lieutenant Justice lived in a mental swamp of questions. They buzzed around her, sticky and sick-smelling. They drove her up the wall crazy.

So she isolated herself and she gave her everything to her work. And so far it seemed alright. And aye, perhaps she writhed with unspent energies from the social to the sexual, practically starving with loneliness and unease, but she was climbing. That was good enough for now. Good enough as long as they couldn’t see through her. Good enough as long as they didn’t see her for the screaming shadow that she was underneath.

Amory Kilgore ran, the rolling green-gold forever of Dresdain swallowing her up. She liked that feeling, losing herself in the landscape. Too often, she was caught up in her own head, in her perception of herself, the questions railing on and on and on again like those mummers that recited down by the square. Saint, it could drive her crazy.

Did the cadets respect her? What did the other captains think of her? Did they wonder why she was in the position she was? Did they say nasty things about her?

Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

No, no, no, no, no.

On it went, a rhythm in her head. She tried to drown it out in the clap of her sandals, laced tight to her shins.

She passed the avenues of long markets, butcheries and clothiers, permanent installations of vendors whose families and acumen had grown with the city of Dresdain. Some vendors and traders were already passing through with their carts emptied for the day, even though it was still morning.

Veering into the heart of Dresdain, she made her way to a place that above all others stood out to her as being quintessentially Dresdain: Harmony Square.

The alcove of stone—otherwise pushed into the alleyways between bankers and bakers—was a thriving hub of gathered vendors and displayed goods. Awnings of red and burgundy draped the stalls here and there, between the columns, fanned out in the space between the milling patrons and central water feature, where a gaggle of children splashed at each other with high-pitched screams. The vendors gestured lookers-on to their displays of perfect, boisterous vegetables in browns and greens and yellows, shining with the gloss of the midday sun, hidden though it was behind a sheet of slate gray. A boy went back and forth between trash buckets, emptying them into his wheelbarrow.

Amory watched as she passed, slowing her jog into a brisk walk, weaving between all kinds of folk, breathing in the scent of the Yudan traders, as crisp and alkaline a smell as the desert from which they’d come. She pushed through milling farmers in their wide-brimmed hats, an idle dance troupe of young Dresdain girls, and a performer loudly and badly reciting a monologue from the step of a storefront.

Sounds and smells—the rolling of wagon wheels, the meaty sizzle of the churning spits—leapt out at her with every step. But she ignored them, passing through as she had a thousand market days before, her time off calling her with all its empty, expectant disappointments.

Amory Kilgore passed through the cobbled streets of downtown Dresdain, till the paving turned into a smooth brick tiling that wore less on her flat soles. She maneuvered west, turning down Rold Road, passing a series of little shops selling fabrics and imported textiles from Qitswitch and Brunsland, and made her way towards the river’s edge.

Where stone bridges and cramped lines of cottages did not lean, willows and cottonwoods descended hopelessly towards the riverbank. Amory breathed in the scent of this greenery, focusing on it above the less pleasant reek of city life. She followed the river by the paved side roads as they wound their way out of town.

It did not take her long before the streets became less densely packed with low wooden shops and houses. Here, the squat constructs spread out into the hills and tumbled into the countryside. Yellow-green grasses danced along the roads, the tops of the leaves turning a golden color from exposure to the warming sun of new summer. Her sandals clapped in the dirt, sending up sparse little clouds that dissipated just as they grew. 

Then, all at once, the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Her flesh prickled. A sensation like liquid heat poured over her spine.

Amory Kilgore turned to face the city in which she had lived her whole life, turned to see something happen there that she had never seen before, something she could never have imagined in her most active of daydreams. 

5

When the bomb burst in Harmony Square, it hit much like a lightning strike that starts a forest fire.

The air vibrated, trembled, opened. The hanging laughter and chattering voices that occupied the hazy air—the greetings and haggling and giggling and singing—were silenced at once by a sudden white light, burning hotter than a blacksmith’s forge or the summer sun that hung now, pale and white.

The flash burned for only a second, but it was enough to strip the flesh from the bones of the nearest townsfolk, Bob Rine and Kat Magree, demoting them to skeletons in the blink of an eye. Beyond them, the others were slower to die. Rinton Kell’s right arm burned away in a column of white flame; the searing pain climbed its way into his spine and obliterated his nervous system, exploding cosmic black patterns across his vision as he died. Tod Nort’s eyeballs evaporated in his head; Pegi Furo was laid flat and roasted by flame; Don Bixel simply went up, as if he’d dipped himself in warm oil before the event, just to make it quick and easy. Heat and flame licked out at the others with a lashing tongue, catching them by the extremities and pulling them to the earth with sheer force. All oxygen evacuated the square or was consumed. What was left were acrid fumes, smoke and smoking bone, burning flesh and hair. The damned choked on it as they died, writhing against the cobblestones where they had played and danced and feasted so often with the ones they loved.

The blast erupted through the courtyard, where vendors had carefully set out their wares in the welcome cool of the morning. Knots of cloth curled and vanished. Vegetables blackened and burst. Fourteen died before they could scream; twelve more burned and bled before they could run. The white heat leapt from the alley and ate the market, belching a black plume of fire and pain as it retreated into nothing, through the thinning Veil that stood between this world of the living and that other one. There, the demons perked up their noses as they walked the smoldering fields, the scent of blood and death like whiffs of cat grass to their otherworldly senses.

What was left of Harmony Square was a searing smear of vacant panic and terrible grief. Where there had been peace—laughably and utterly idyllic—now there was chaos and death the likes of which had not seen for a hundred years. Dresdain Barony—where the farmers ruled little fiefdoms of chicken wire and the people lounged in the luxury of providence and gossip—erupted into chaos.

Chapter 2: Vincent vs. Teri

1

A column of white heat erupted in the distance, some nine hundred yards across the city to the southwest, somewhere in the vicinity of Harmony Square. Amory watched in awe as the smoky pillar climbed, her pulse dotting out impossible patterns. There were no thoughts, no words, no images to compare it to. The ethereal glow lit the gray sky, drowning out the sun, casting the rest of the world into sharp, dark shadow. She blinked in that glare, wiping the blue-black afterimage of it from her eyelids. A sudden, vicious scent struck her, all sulfur and ash. It gagged her, striking her throat and sinuses with a sudden, violent force that drove all the breath from her body.

She gasped around the heat of it and began to run in the direction of the blast.

Around her, the aster and the sunflowers bloomed in the little no-man’s-land places between the fences and the beginning of the fields. Dresdain swallowed them up. The city sat, surreal in its normalcy, with the cloud of stink and smoke hanging on the air, with something else slipping, pressing, whispering at the fabric of the world. And what was she thinking? What could she possibly have to offer in this incomprehensible situation?

Nevertheless, she rounded the turn as it took her back south and west onto the Merchant’s Road, back onto the cobbles and the tightly packed residences and shops of urban Dresdain. Amory Kilgore ran, forgetting to breathe the toxic air, hearing the distant screams, the roars, the trundling thumps…

She saw another Justice. Sergeant Malthis, she thought it was, and he was running too, making his way for the plume of white smoke that now hung over Harmony Square like a grotesque decoration, a party balloon that had lost its luster, looming sickly and deflated.

She passed Grimbel Vaults with its series of turrets and leering stone gargoyles. She passed Renalt’s Wines and the café between the bookshop and the glassblowers. She passed a child with a lost and gaping stare. She passed a lone arodog, its leather wings kept close to its matted fur, tail tucked between its legs.  She passed a milling, staring crowd.

Time slowed to a crawl. Every detail stood out crisp and vivid and real. Dust and ash rained whitely. Fires burned in blue-green embers. The fallen columns betrayed the vendor stalls and the banners and the little games. Colored cloth caught like lettuce in the teeth of the broken stonework. Buxton’s Candies, which lay adjacent to the square, sported a gaping, black-mouthed hole in the back of it. Colored confections spilled over the insides, vibrant guts in that ruin of wood and stone.

Bodies lay here and there. Charred, crushed, bleeding. The stink of them, coppery and sulfuric, caught in her nose and burrowed downward, blocking her throat. She dry-heaved once, then got herself under control. People passed constantly around her.

Amory Kilgore coughed into her elbow, walking deeper into the ruins. A couple dragged a half-charred corpse out of the wreckage. The top half of that corpse was a lively young girl in her trouper’s attire, the remains of a violently crimson blouse. Her eyes stared blue into the chaos, catching Amory’s and staying there. She could not look away.

“Help! Help!”

The screaming snapped her out of the girl’s magnetic gaze, and Amory turned, breathless, to find a man trapped by a fallen spike of wood. The support pole from an awning snapped, rose, and found a new stake in his shoulder. He lay now beneath the fallen stall, pinned by it, begging for help.

Amory found herself at her side. The world moved around her, running, churning. She steadied herself with her hands on her knees, assessing the situation.

“Help,” he coughed.

He found her eyes. His glimmered with strange firelight, blue within black. The desperation there made Amory’s heart sink into her guts. Her courage, her prowess, whatever it was she might have had, were lost in the empty black scream that had replaced her thoughts.

She snapped off a segment of wood from the ruined pile and placed it in the man’s unpinned hand.

“Bite down on this,” she said.

He didn’t question her. Tears fell in the lines made by his gritted mouth.

Amory Kilgore bent down, getting her shoulders under the curve of the awning, supported at an odd angle now that it was staked in a man’s flesh. Amory pushed up with her calves. Gritted, muffled screaming sounded from below her.

The stall moved, lifted. Blood spurted up her leggings as the pole schlocked free of the man’s shoulder. He rolled out of the way of it, spitting out the splinter, gasping, laughing, sobbing.

Amory let the awning collapse behind her and pressed her palms into the man’s weeping wound.

He winced, but held her hand there, his eyes glittering, resolve and firelight.

“I got it, Lieutenant. I have some supplies.”

This voice belonged to the other Justice. Malthis. He held pads of woven cotton in his hands. Shining implements of medical aid glittered behind them, the kind they kept on hand at the Keep and at set intervals throughout the city.  She released the pulsing, overflowing shoulder—her hands gushing in the deep crimson spring beneath—to the waiting gauze of Sergeant Malthis.

The wounded man kept his eyes locked on hers.

“Thank you,” he said. The words became inaudible in his wincing screams, but she understood them all the same.

Amory felt cold, despite the unnatural heat of the square around her. She felt little more than that cold.

Around her, the denizens of Dresdain screamed and flailed and ran. The Justices poured in, along with a host from the physician’s college. The Justices stood tall and glimmering in the hazy light of marred morning, the smoke writhing in around them. The dead, white sunlight reflected off their silvered plate, all embossed with the scales and the vulpine tail of house Vox. They flooded into the square like a tide, but the damned were mostly gone by the time they arrived.

Amory looked around at the blackened bodies. Dimly, she was aware of the thudding of her heart in her chest.

One of the Justices approached her—she could not see his face in the glare of the sunlight, stilled though it was behind the clouds.

“Lieutenant, where are we taking the injured?” The words thumped like a drum in the thickening air, and she lost their meaning. Sitting back onto her bloodied hands, she pushed herself up and wiped them, absently, in the twill of her leggings. She stood, the breath coming fast and hard, and tried to read out what he was saying in the cracked pitch of his lips.

“I don’t…I don’t,” she stammered.

“Lieutenant, please, some of them won’t make it far and I don’t have the authorization to quarter them wherever I see fit.”

Amory looked around at the span of corpses once again, the bodies waiting to be dragged off on travois and makeshift hammocks towards some unknown destination.

The Keep and the Physician’s College. Those were the closest places that could host all the injured. If they could spare the resources. But both these locations were over a mile’s march, and the injured…

People could lose their lives because of what Amory said, right now. Her tongue seemed to swell and stick to the roof of her mouth.

The sergeant frowned at her, wondering how she had come to outrank him, imagining the worst, while people were dying…

Amory met his gaze and failed to speak, her tongue falling over itself in her mouth, her chest closing.

“Sergeant, the Disolidities are opening up their chapel to the wounded!” It was Captain Cast, his bullish voice breaking through the chaos and the babble. “Direct them there!”

Sergeant Danton nodded thankfully at his captain, and Amory was left with a sensation not unlike tumbling down a hill.

She assisted Malthis in hoisting the wounded man on one of the segments of cloth the incoming Justices brought with them.

She could process nothing beyond the knowledge that her hesitation, her ignorance, her idiocy, could have meant the deaths of real human beings. The idea consumed her, riding her, as the smoke began to dissipate in the gray Dresdain sky, broken now by fragments of blue and the great silvery slivers of the watching moons.

2

“Nah, the ‘Solidites will give me six harvests just for the gauze.”

“I could take it, in the name of the Baroness and Dresdain, I could take it for nothing, you greedy agut wrangler; I’m trying to do right by you.” Aguts were the wild squirrel-like rodent of the Palandaes. Cast’s uncle had been an agut wrangler, an abjectly unsuccessful and chaotic career.

“My wife wove this; you want me to tell her I sold it for a half-reap? You want me to insult my wife’s craftsmanship? What else you want me to tell her, huh, while I’m at it? That her figure ‘ent what it was when I married her?”

Cast inhaled sharply through his nose, the breath entering with a perceptible whistle. He relaxed his fists, which he’d noticed had tightened to the point that the leather of his gloves creaked, tiny sounds like the barks of the cane spiders that infested the koca fields. This man was not truly as vile and stupid as he seemed. Fear populated his dark eyes. To Cast, that fear appeared as black and deep as the well that had stood behind his childhood home. A nightmare brand of fear. A nightmare brand of darkness. This man had just witnessed part of his town explode, friends die, neighbors burn, all in the familiar milieu of the place he picked up his tomatoes on market day. And now his livelihood was being threatened in a much more immediate sense than the tariffs or Palandic excises, which Cast himself avoided asking questions about if he could avoid it. He’d enforce the Palandic laws, but he wasn’t keen on making himself an enemy of its people. He had a legacy to leave, after all.

He sighed, wishing the stink out of his nostrils. It was electric and fleshy, a burning stink, the last lingering remnants of the people who had died in this place.

“I’ll give ‘em to you, aye,” said the vendor. “This probably isn’t even happening anyway. Red God take this place.”

“Never say that,” Cast commanded, smiling sardonically as he pressed a wad of Palandic bills into the man’s palm. The man handed over a sack in return before disappearing into the meandering crowd of shocked and directionless people. Like the undead returned to the world, Cast thought. Hallah protect us. He made the sign of the Saint—a fist at his shoulder and one at his hip—to ward off the Red God. He did so without thinking and looked up embarrassed.

Cast glanced around the Merchant’s Road. This place was a precursor or a farewell to the trading and exhibitionism of downtown. Two tailor shops sandwiched a gentleman’s club, whose suggestive signage jutted out over the dirt byway. A brontus chuckled and whinnied form an alley, its broad-antlered cow’s head peering out, seeking an exit. Above the flat storefront roofs, he could still see the last of the flames burning out in the square, an eerie white like morning fog. Then from the crowd of scattered pedestrians, Amory Kilgore stepped with blood-streaked arms and a pale, open-mouthed expression, her jagged hair all but concealing her eyes.

“Amory, life of the Saint, you alive?”

Amory looked at him, mouth twisting.

“I froze back there. I didn’t know what to tell them. I didn’t…”

Her eyes were lost again, somewhere between her hair and the dirt road. He could barely hear her over passers-by, but he thought for one horrible moment she might start crying. He couldn’t bear that. He didn’t have the capacity. He felt something raw lash up in him in response, wanting to strike, to defend. He bit it down, smoothed it out.

“Listen, Amory, no one knows what to do. None of us know what we’re doing. All we can try to do, all we are doing, is helping. You’re part of that. You’re helping. It’s enough.”

“But I…”

“Amory. It’s enough. Look at me.”

Amory raised her head. Her eyes were shining but the liquid film remained unbroken. Despite her weakness, he saw a resolve in the set of her jaw, the sharpness of her look, that reminded him why he had given her the rank of lieutenant. Her need to do right was desperate, unshakeable. She was a Justice born in a way he could never pretend to have been, and he was envious from the depths of his thoughts to the tips of his toes. Amory Kilgore would have no trouble making a difference, leaving a legacy the people of Dresdain could point to for generations to come, revere, and forget whatever else had come before of bad seed and bad blood. He softened his speech.

“If you think you didn’t do good enough today, then be better next time. But there’s no use dwelling on it. I’ve watched your progress for years now, and I know when the time comes—when you need to make a choice at a moment’s notice and there’s no one else— you’ll do right. I have no doubt about that.”

“I do,” she said.

“Then get rid of that doubt or give up, Kilgore. But you and I both know you’re no quitter. C’mon. We have work to do.”

Amory followed him without another word back down the street and past the corner to the Disolidite Temple, where two acolytes stood with their half-shaved heads and two-tone robes, chanting their dichotomous prayers:

Father save the children, for you are the mother;

Mother save the father, for you are the child;

Child save the parents, for you are their sire;

Fire unto water; water unto fire.

Lion begat Dragon; Dragon begat shell.

Heaven unto Hell;

Suffering to desire.

3

They had taken the injured to the ballroom. The ones that would bear transport from the Chapel of the Disolidites. Amory never would have imagined the baroness’s eagerness to house all these writhing, moaning bodies in the splendor of Dresdain’s Palace. It was the barony’s masterwork, a marvel out of time and space, and House Vox had taken ownership and pride in its upkeep.

Amory brushed sweat from her brow. Rumor had it that the palace was heated from natural vents in the earth far underground, thermal emissions of warm gas that kept the place temperate and comfortable, even in the dead of winter. Was it that warmth she felt now in her cheeks and forehead as she went around to each cot, refilling their personal water dishes from a large bucket?

She looked over to the broad-shouldered, mostly bald figure of Captain Tim Cast as he hunched over Mara Waterson, a middle-aged florist who had her arm broken by a falling column. She was grinning as Cast gestured animatedly and placed a hand on her knee. He reminded her of her father in those gestures. Confident and intuitive. He didn’t stall when Dresdain needed him. Not even for a moment. Her father, were he here, wouldn’t have stalled.

“Thank you,” croaked a bandaged patient as Amory tipped water back into his saucer. She tried to smile at him, but her cheeks felt stiff and hot and she was afraid the gesture might have looked more like a frown. Could she be that intuitive? Could she make people laugh and feel better? She could make them hurt; that she knew. She could kick their asses twelve ways to Harvest Day if she needed to, but what did that matter? Had she done anything today that really mattered?

Even Baroness Angeline Vox was quick to act today. The normally ethereal, vapid girl who begged Amory to sit by her bedside and hold her hand when thunder roared had acted like a queen today.

Amory emptied the water bucket, nearly stumbling over the density of the injured and the ailing in this hall meant for frivolity and celebration. The waxed floors of northern pine shone where the scuffs of boots and cots did not mar them, where blood had not dripped in glinting, darkening puddles. She looked out at the many windows and saw herself reflected in the low evening light. She was slouched, haggard, hair unkempt and in her face. The sight disgusted her; she didn’t want that image to have anything to do with her. She wanted a bath and an hour to herself, and then she wanted to be out, looking for what caused this madness. She wasn’t good here. Hardly helpful. Probably more hindrance.

“Kilgore,” said Cast. He was beside her now, looking weary but active. “Take a ten.”

“No, sir,” she said.

“You questioning orders?” he said.

“No, sir, I am providing a recommendation for an alternative,” she said.

“And what’s the recommendation?”

“That instead of taking a ten, I take a five and then go assist with sweeping and investigating the square.”

“Amory, we’ve been down there. I’ve had Justices there all day; they’ll find whatever there is to be found.”

“I don’t feel useful here, sir. I’d feel better down there.” She felt stupid saying it. Useless. She wasn’t particularly needed anywhere and the helplessness exaggerated every worthless thought. “I think an extra set of eyes and ears could help.”

“Too bad yours are no good,” said Cast.

Amory frowned. It was one of several quirks the captain never failed to rib her about. 

“If we had any substantial leads, I’d be more on board, but as far as I can gather, no one has seen anything,” he said.

 “I saw something.” The voice sounded from nearby, low. It was a woman whose face was more bandage than skin, her eyes shining like starlight from their shadowed, gauzy prison.

Amory and Cast turned to her. The air turned to sharp static.

“I saw the demon,” the woman croaked.

“What?” said Cast. In a few short steps, both Justices were at her side.

“The demon,” she repeated. Her voice broke on the last syllable. She coughed, raised mangled and blackened fingers to the orange light of evening that drifted through the high glass windows of the ballroom. Outside, the black trees lined the distant hills, looking for all the world like armies of foreign soldiers invading. Like the harrier bands of the Lost Years, Amory thought. Like the hosts of the Red God before that, or so the stories said. She felt a chill crawl its way from the base of her spine, raising every hair on her body.

“I was at my baking,” she whispered. “I was just pulling my pie from the oven—apple and marionberry, just like Tomas likes it—and I saw them dart into the alley.”

“Who did you see?” said Cast. His voice was thin and hissed out the edges of his teeth. There was a softness to it, like trying to catch a butterfly on the tips of one’s fingers. It was as if he believed this one thin thread of a lead might wisp away on the wind at the slightest breath. And from the looks of the injured woman, a brown eye peering from a cocoon of bandages, maybe there was truth to that.

“Three of them, actually. Though two were one. The demon and the man. And the folkai.”

Amory looked at Cast. The folkai were an urban legend. They were said to be a cursed race, damned to forbidden lands beneath the earth for their sins during the Holy War that ravaged the Old World. They were like elves or gremlins, mischievous and supernatural. Sightings of them were rehearsed with bravado in taverns and subsequently mocked. Amory’s heart sank; this thread had slipped away before it had even shown itself.

“What do you mean by this?” said Cast.

“The demon was riding the man’s shoulders, holding his face to his task. I could see his claws biting into the man’s back. Terribly painful, it looked. They were guiding the red man—the folkai. I think…I think they had captured him.”

“The man,” said Cast, “who was he? Did you know him?”

“Aye,” she said. Cast and Amory both leaned forward.

“I recognized him. Though I cannot say from where. A state man, I thought. A Cor Dorumn sort.”

Cast met Amory’s eyes.

A state man. A Cor Dorumn sort. A stranger? A recognizable stranger? Amory was never very good at riddles, but she’d tried to be. How often had her brother found her in her room with a book of riddles open—his book of riddles, that he loved so much and sorted out so fast—her face screwed up in deep, concentrated confusion?

“Where exactly did you see them?” she said.

From the golem of bandages, cracked lips parted, closed again. For a moment, the wounded woman made no sound. For a moment, Amory feared they had lost her, that whatever her demon had been, it had reached out from behind the Veil to silence her for good.

“The alley,” she said at last, gasping and shuddering. “The alley behind the eatery and the glassblower’s shop. Where the Merchant Road bleeds into the square. That’s where they were headed, last I saw them.”

Amory knew it immediately. Where the Merchant Road ran parallel to the river were a series of boarding houses, shops, and artisans. These bordered Harmony Square, interjoining in several alleys that came especially in useful every market day. The glassblower’s shop had been nearly leveled in the blast. It’s neighbor, the bakery—a local favorite—burned down to the last brick. They had found the owner’s remains propped against his ovens, his melted bones fused to them in death. Amory couldn’t help thinking that he might have appreciated that much at least, to have died as he lived: one with his art. The thought made her sick.

She looked to Cast.

“That area received the worst of it,” he said.

“The source of the explosion…” she said.

“Can’t be anything left,” he said.

“We have to look,” she said.

He searched her face. The hard, weary look that pulled at the crinkled corners of his mouth and softened his eyes made Amory blush. She could feel his reproach of her optimism, the ascription of her own naivety. She knew it was hopeless; she knew, but it was something at least, and she had to do something. She couldn’t just sit around thinking about how she was useless. How the greatest tragedy in the history of Dresdain had happened within a quarter mile of her, while she worried about letter writing, words that would never be said, people she would never say them to.

She knew the blush was rising, knew her eyes were watering despite her refusal to let them, but she met Cast’s look, defiant.

“Okay, Amory. We’ll search again. Tonight, and in the morning.”

“Search for what?” said the baroness.

She was standing over them, her hands folded in the sleeves of a long violet gown that appeared several sizes too big for her pale, bony frame. Her collarbones jutted from the neck of that gown, like the arms of the undead reaching out from the grave. At twenty and two, she still looked much like a girl. Amory thought this knowing she wasn’t much older—not even by a year—and still, the baroness Angeline Vox made it difficult to think of her as anything but a wide-eyed child. It was in every interaction with her. It was in her pouting, round face. It was in her curtain of hair like liquid gold. It was in her huge, blue eyes. Those eyes met Amory’s, and she looked away immediately, found it impossible not to.

“Our only lead in discovering who is responsible for this madness,” said Cast.

“And who is responsible for it, captain? I am responsible, surely, as I am responsible for the safety of the barony; where else would you look for leads?” she said. Her eyes were huge and darkly rimmed. They look…vacant, Amory thought.

“We’ve just heard from a witness who saw suspicious characters enter the alley between the Merchant Road and the glassblower’s place. We were unable to discover the source of the blast earlier. Gathering further evidence is unlikely, but we shall make sure no stone goes unturned in uncovering what happened here,” said Cast.

“When I was a child, I used to turn stones in the courtyard. Watch what came crawling out,” said the baroness. Her huge blue eyes fell heavy on Cast, who looked like for all the world as though he was ready to slink away, anywhere but here. Amory empathized, deeply. “It made me feel less alone, and I was always alone here as a child, surrounded by frowning adults. Turning stones is useful for that. Feeling less alone. You find all sorts of things were with you all along, only waiting on the other side.”

 “Yes, milady,” said Cast, after a pause.

“I will take my leave,” said the baroness. “I weary of this day.”

Don’t we all, thought Amory, dumbfounded.

4

I can’t breathe.

It was the first thought Vincent had as he woke, coming up in gasps and short, desperate bursts.

I can’t fucking breathe. I’m underground like they are.

He paused for a moment, trying to place who exactly he meant, seeing again the burning on the Merchant Road, debris spreading from the mouth of the square like sick from a drunk.

Talis, Dano, Peter…where were they? Underground? Had they buried the remains that quickly? Were there any remains left?

He wondered where they went. Where any of us went.

He looked around his little room slowly. His little cell, his little scrap of paradise. Dano Fitz had once called it a birdcage and then tried to kiss him. Now, Dano was missing an arm, the right side of his body coated in peeling red-pink skin like a discarded sausage casing.

What the Veil was that about?

Vincent stared long into the corner where the night before he could have sworn he saw something—felt something, maybe—moving. Watching him. Perhaps the only real audience he’d ever have, the one he made up. But here, in the failing light, he almost believed it again, could almost see the burning emerald embers of eyes past the floaters in his vision. His head ached. He wanted to sleep. He needed to shit. He wanted to rut, and all these desires horrified him, seemed to him like a betrayal of the friends who could no longer desire anything at all.

He thought of walking the market with Dano and Talis. The sun light golden on Talis’s teeth, that shark’s smile. Her, muttering over her koca, cursing her landlord. Breaking into song at the corner of woodcarver’s district. Running from the shouting man who’d named them demon-whisperers and idol rutters. Maybe he’d had it right. Maybe they’d damned themselves by wanting more than four brown walls and a life of servitude.

I need to get out of here, Vincent told himself. But where would he go? Where would he live? How would he live?

His father left. His father just up and left one day when he was a boy and that had been the end of that.

Then his mother left. Met a foul-tempered miner who didn’t last. Went to work hospitality for the mines up north in Dunrow. No one else seemed to have a problem leaving. Just Vincent, who wanted the world.

But he could almost feel Teri’s anger seeping up from the floorboards. She was probably seething already—Saint, what time was it? She’d be preparing for the morning now, shouting insults to the kitchen hands. Veil, said Vincent. The idea of passing around food and drinks, of looking at people, of existing, was a dead weight around his neck, a brace of nails pinning his shoulders to his bed.

I’d rather be dead, he thought, and he rose, nauseated at himself.

Vincent prepared himself in the long rectangle of his mirror, pausing for a time to examine his bloodshot eyes, the bags, the frazzled emergence of stubble on the cut of his jaw. He groaned inwardly, ran a salve through his hair, and made his way to the water closet.

Downstairs, Teri was already shouting.

“Where’s that dumb shit?! I needed him half an hour ago!”

“Ter’, I don’t know, he seemed real shook-up,” said Kara. Of course she was covering for him. She was too good for him.

“Aren’t we all. It’s no excuse,” said Teri.

“Is it not?” said Vincent.

He stood in the stairwell three stairs up, just off the kitchen door. This added height gave him a towering, shadowy presence above the women, one he only hoped was furthered by his bloodshot, baggy eyes. He wore loose trousers and a tight-fitting, low-collar shirt, making him look—or so he thought—like a wandering desert rabi fresh off a psychedelic spiritual journey. Casually, he wanted Teri to feel what he felt. More prominently, he was having a hard time giving a shit about anything. 

“Don’t do this, Vince. Don’t give me shit today,” said Teri.

Vincent slowly descended the final three steps, coming within inches of her. He towered above her. Attempting to give her a careless, intimidating scowl, his chin quivered, and tears pooled fast and unwanted into the wells of his eyes.

“Oh no, oh there,” said Teri.

Vincent held his hands to his face, not knowing what he was doing or feeling, only knowing that he was lost, alone, abandoned. That the world had opened its gaping black jaws once again and he could feel their shadow upon him.

Teri wrapped her arms around him and pulled Vincent’s face to the crook of her neck. His tear-streaked face touched her skin. She smelled of cloves and allspice, of bursting earthen flavors, baked like summer heat. She had never hugged him. Veil, if she’d ever touched him…but the feel of her was warm and calm and motherly, and he hated how much he needed it.

He cried, lost in her, while Kara looked on, horrified.

“Get it out, and move on,” said Teri. “That’s all we can do. That’s all we can ever do.”

He worked the rest of his shift until the final minute and met himself in the dark recesses of his room on the second floor of the tavern. He used to joke it was the tallest building in Dresdain, built in tight angular slats of stair. It could house over 75 if filled to capacity. It never was. Here in his room, there was only himself and the reflection staring back in the glass above the armoire.

The green eyes glared back at him, bloodshot lines submerging beneath the white and breaking the surface again, partitioning his eyeballs like aspen roots breaking up a barren clearing. He looked as wrong as he felt; a deviant nobility sat on his brow, mad half-grin. The sight of him had frightened Teri, he knew, and she was an aging bird that did not scare easily.

He laid back on his cot, closing his eyes until the drone of voices down below died into a subtle murmur, and then a quiet whisper, and then a subdued shuffling of furniture. Vincent closed his eyes until the closest thing to silence manageable in this establishment overcame the night. The moonlight clung in hazy blues, barest pinks, and hesitant gray, creating multicolored shadows where Vince’s lamp had died to a slow ember. Colorful dark intruded, knocked upon his eyelids, the long fluttering black of his eyelashes…and someone was there, watching him, slowly stroking the soft skin of his cheek, running a delicate finger over his eyelid.

Vincent Gilyan was not alone in the dark.

His eyes shot open. Sweat broke out on his long, bare arms.

There was nothing in the room. Nothing but watchful shadows, dilating with his pupils. For the briefest of moments, the arrangement of darkness upon his door took the shape of a slender, horned man. He thought the silhouette gestured to him, hand out, beckoning.

He blinked and it was gone. Nothing but velvety black whispering against moonlight.

His fear was ice against his heart, a choking, pounding stranglehold on his brain. Alone. He had not been alone.

Vincent pulled his thin blanket over his broad body and shivered into the quiet night.

Chapter 3: Amory vs. the Aftermath

1

They were on the Palace Road, descending back towards town when Cast spoke again.

“What in the Veil was that about?”

“What? What did I do?” said Amory.

“No, the baroness. All that turning stones shit. Saint’s balls.”

“She was a lonely kid.”

“Clearly,” said Cast.

The Justices walked beneath the waning daylight. The moons were out, Rosea a full pink-hued coin overhead, the other two moons waning into portions of pale blue and a sliver of silver. Amory saw starlight, cloudy and aural, about them, and as the sun diminished full at their backs, she could make out one or two clusters of bleary stardust. Below, the city competed with its tubes of buzzing gas. They made lines of smooth, humming magenta in the shallow night.

Amory adjusted her shawl, waving off mosquitoes, as they rounded the final descending curve into the town proper. A brontus whinnied low and mournful. They passed scavengers and street sweepers clearing the remnants of rubble from the Merchant Road. Cast tsked at the more predatory efforts, muttering something about “rutting opportunists.” The creeping, icy sensation of being observed lifted the hair on the back of Amory’s neck, but she saw nothing amiss among the loitering gawkers and the eager collectors, busy in their work. Her heart beat hard and heavy but unhurried. She prayed anything might be left of the square worth finding. They’d posted Justices to guard the area and roped it off from much of the public, but someone could still slip through. They’d be easy to miss.

The stink still clung heavy to the air. Burned flesh and hair, acrid and biting. Amory tried not to breathe through her nose but wanted that scent out of her mouth even more. She didn’t want to taste it.

They came to the Justices—two patrollers Amory hardly knew by name—and the roped-off opening that had been a throughfare of life in Dresdain. Now, it lay beneath the darkening sky, a fragmented shell turned inside out, the shadows rolling off the hunched shoulders of fallen stone, making gargoyles out of rubble. Cast acknowledged the other Justices, and he and Amory ducked beneath the makeshift barricade, stepping fully into the desecrated marketplace.

The night held its breath. Dresdain was as quiet as Amory had ever known it. The ruined, lightless square showed only shadow and stone.

Then something moved in that silent dark. Amory saw the silhouette for only a moment. A shadow, a suggestion like a broad-shouldered man, a hulking presence, and then nothing.

Only a shadow.

She squinted, wishing—as she’d wished a million, million times before—that she’d been born with better eyes.

“Did you see that?” said Amory.

“Aye,” said Cast quietly. He stepped forward.

“Come out! In the name of the Baroness of Dresdain and the Justice of the Palandaes!” He shouted into the darkness, using the edge of his voice like a weapon.

With hardly a thought, the weight of the steel batons all Justices carried was in Amory’s hands. They were simple weapons, studded and balanced, deadly enough to incapacitate. After the attempted coup that her father had stopped, the guard traded their swords for these blunt instruments, a symbolic gesture that the weapons of the Justices would never be turned on the people of Dresdain with murderous intent. The batons felt like extensions of her arms at this point, but they weren’t the weapons she wanted. No, that blade—her father’s blade, the one she’d spent countless hours training with as girl—was back at the Kilgore Manor, collecting dust.

Cast drew his own batons, stepping forward into the rubble.

Amory inhaled sharply and nearly choked on the egg-stink of sulfur and ash. She stepped close beside Cast, eyes tearing across every alcove, every shadowed crevice in the rubble. They walked the length of the alley, her heart a steady, throbbing drum, her senses wired, her nerves buzzing. She was ready for a fight. For all her many insecurities, combat was never one of them: Amory Kilgore was always ready for a fight.

They peered around the edges as the alley opened up on the other side to Merchant Road; Cast left, Amory right. Nothing. No shadows. No slight shift in the buzzing pink lamplight or the indigo shadow of the moving moons.

“Nothing,” said Cast. “Jumping at shadows.”

“You think so?” said Amory.

“I don’t know. None of this makes any sense.”

Cast traded his batons for a long, scarlet candle and piece of flint from his belt. The latter, he scraped against a bit of brick wall that had not been damaged. Beyond it, shattered glass reflected the sparks, like a million glowing eyes peering out from the velvet dark. Amory shivered in spite of herself.  Cast lit the candle, and white sparks showered from the wick, painting the alley in a harsh, revealing glow. The shadows that were not destroyed by this light were lengthened, sharpened, made more jutting and angular. Amory thought of spiders. Eyes in the dark. Crawling, hungry things.

In that harsh white light, it was easy to see where all this started. The ground was black, black as tar, black as midnight, in a perfect rectangle along the west wall of what had been the bakery. The cobbles there had been blasted, fused, smoothed into a perfect glassy substance. Nothing in a three-yard radius around this mark had survived. It had all been pushed away as if by the cupped hand of a giant, clearing crumbs from a table. Stones were melted or moved. Walls gaped like missing teeth in a codger’s mouth. Columns blackened and fell.

Cast held the flare high, letting the sharp light penetrate as far as it could reach. Blood and shadows. Rubble and chaos. Amory wanted to vomit. She wanted a warm bath, her feet up on the footboard of her bed, her mind reeling through a daydream. She wanted away from this…and she wanted answers for this.

Whatever had caused this destruction would not be allowed to do so again. That she swore. She would stop it, or what was she worth to this place? What had all her work been for?

Amory and Cast paced the length of the alley, looking in every crack, under every fallen stone, illuminating every shadow. She had no idea what they were looking for and thought Cast didn’t either. There was no protocol for something like this, not really. The night deepened. Rosea’s pale-pink glare was overshadowed by the crisp blue of larger Azure. Amory couldn’t believe how quiet the city was, how dead the gas-lamps and the hushed chatter.

The white circle of Cast’s light was beginning to fade when he found the pin.

It lay near the opening of the alley, towards the market, beside the remains of some shattered crates. In Cast’s white light, it looked pristine. Coppery and coin-shaped, the little signet shone with the Tower of Cor Dorumn, the scales of the Tax and Trade Commission emblazoned over it. This was the official badge of the Palandic Confederation’s tax collectors, and Amory had seen it only days before.

A man had stopped by the Keep to audit the wage ledgers. Pinned to his chest had been the same sigil. What the Veil was it doing here?

Then she remembered the words of the injured woman in the ballroom.

A state man, I thought. A Cor Dorumn sort.

Amory ran through the list of the dead in her head, the blackened and ruined bodies collected from the ruins.

“Who is the tax and excise agent for this district?” she whispered. A face came to her, sour and self-important, but not the name.

“Ah shit,” Cast answered. “Ames. Rian Ames. Same one who checks the books at the Keep.”

“Have you seen him around lately?”

“No, and now that you got me thinking about it, Davis did mention something about him not showing up today. Expected him.”

Rian Ames. Amory rolled the name and every paltry memory of him around in her head, asking that mental effigy what he had to do with all this.

2

They took the bodies of the dead to the northwest quarter the following day, where the city broke away into the long patchwork fields and tumble-down fences, the only place large enough for the procession now that the square lay in ruins. Thousands, tens of thousands, gathered in these fields and streets, raising candles to the falling evening as the three moons—Rosea, Azure, and Nikket—waned against the coming dark. The day was crisp and clear, and the faces of the people were as grim and panicked as their frantic, desperate motions suggested.

Talis would have hated the crowds. She would have become jittery and onerous, and Vincent missed her like crazy.

Ironic that these crowds had come to pay their respects to her, in part, among all the rest of Dresdain’s dead. Her and Dano and Peter and a half-dozen other names to which Vincent could put a face. They were to be taken to a designated spot atop the hill, a place where the city of Dresdain could light them up in a human bonfire to challenge the moonlight. It was dark, he knew, morbid that he should think of them that way. But that’s what it was, a cookout send-off for Dresdain’s dead, while pinions and awnings of black cloth flapped and wavered in the gentle breeze.

What a mummer’s farce. What a joke that they should be dead, and he, Vincent, alive, a bystander shoved into a crowd of sweating, stinking farmhands with dirt and tear-streamed faces. The hushed comments and nervous giggles of the crowd broke in through the sound of barking arodogs and the lowing of a brontus, anything but a reverent silence.

“I can’t fuggin see anything.”

“You wanna see?”

“Aye, they bringin the bodies through. I wanted to know if I could see Jena.”

“They got ‘em covered, you ass-wipe.”

“Ah.”

The chatter was louder than the flutes and bagpipes playing on the far side, across the sea of people from where Vincent stood. He wished the music would drown them out. Wished he wasn’t here at all. Wished he were back in bed, shit, wished he was serving some asshole a cup of koca. Anything but this. Anything but seeing what had become of his friends.

And as the farmhand indicated they would, the procession of Justices, Hallah priests, and gentlefolk in full regalia traversed the sea of mourners. A pair of Justice captains in their glimmering breastplates carried the first litter. Their violet shawls had been traded for black ones. The body was covered under a black sheet, and Vincent wondered where they’d found all this black, wondered how much Dresdain’s dyers had extorted the barony for these frantic jobs done in the course of the last day and a half.

Vincent closed his eyes hard and swallowed down his tears. They tasted sour and metallic at the back of his throat. Nearby, a woman began to wail. A chorus answered here. They sounded like wolves, lost and starving.

As it reached the rise of the fallow hill on which the pyre had been built, the bodies raised between them, the procession slowed, and a prominent Dresdain nobleman—Vincent recognized him but could not think of his name—lifted a scroll to the crowd, reading off it in a hoarse and feeble shout.

“Marta Abelman.”

A wave of sobs rolled out among the crowd in response. They took Marta’s corpse up the hill and placed her reverently at the end of the long wooden latticework.

“Tenway Bek,” said the nobleman, and another body was brought.

Vincent squinted beyond the haze of candle smoke at the moving procession, wondering where his friends were. As the names were read, one after another, he watched through increasingly clouded eyes, his vision becoming fuzzy and washed out. Bodies passed by beneath the tarps, tightly wrapped.

Motion beneath one of those black tarps drew his gaze. Vincent watched a brown hand fall free from a lax tie, palm up, fingers stiffly curled. That hand was small and female and familiar, and he didn’t need to hear the name of Talis Frit to know to whom it belonged. The sight of it wrenched his insides up through his throat and his eyeballs, and he sobbed, shaking, unseeing, unhearing, as the procession continued.

He thought he heard them read Dano’s name, and Peter’s, but he couldn’t be sure. By the time he’d collected himself and could see once again through the sheen of tears, the sun was fully down and the stars had come out to answer the candlelight.

The baroness of Dresdain stood beside the unlit pyre, where the bodies were spread. From his distance in the crowd, she looked like a scarecrow of pale branches in an oversized black cloak. A long black hennin made a cone of her head.

“People of Dresdain,” she said, her small voice cracking against her attempts to magnify it. “What we have experienced today was a terrible, hideous tragedy. Could it have been avoided? Could anything have been done? Could we have prevented it? These are questions perhaps only time and history will be able to answer. There will always be questions, even as our Office of Justice works diligently to investigate the cause of this tragedy.

“For the friends and family of those lost today, I know these words are of no comfort. I have no comfort to give you, for I take none for myself. I feel your pain in me, as strongly as I felt it on the day my father, your late baron, passed through the Veil. Death comes for us all, and no one can mark the day….” The baroness trailed off, her voice lost in a sea of sniffles and hard silences, like an edge, like pressure.

“But I remain comforted…when I think of the fairyflies,” she muttered. The crowd stilled further, holding its breath collectively to hear the words of its baroness. “How often do you watch the merchants’ carts run them down, and still they float off again into the sky above, to be one with everything? I can only imagine the same is true of those beloved lost we mourn today. They go, like the fairyflies into the ether…and I envy them, in a way. They’re safe now. Nothing else can ever harm them.”

Another long silence gestated in the baroness and the gathered crowd, broken only by scattered coughs, cleared throats, wiped tears. When Angeline Vox spoke again, a new edge entered her voice, replacing the usual float.

“I will never stop working until you’re all safe,” she asserted. “Dresdain will know peace again, as we oft have. It’s written in these stars above me. Can’t you feel it? Even as these fine folk go from the physical bodies we knew to their places in the stars.”

Then, so quiet Vincent could barely make it out: “At least they’re not alone now.”

A long silence followed, and finally a nod from the baroness to the Justice at her side. The large, uniformed man walked with his torch to the center of the pyre, and slowly, meticulously, lowered it beneath the prepared latticework of kindling and dried planks. It took only moments for the wood to go up, and Dresdain filled with the meaty, porcine scent of cooking flesh and the sounds of mourners’ cries.

3

Isaak Polk entered Dresdain by night, from the northern road that was the Cor Dorumn Road and became the Merchant’s Road through the heart of Dresdain. But he hadn’t come from the Confederation’s seat of power. No, he’d been wandering in the wilderness for some time, like old Tilus for those 40 days and nights, as it said in the Book of the Lion. Only this was wilderness no longer.

Around him, the city lights buzzed, flaming tubes and glass bobbles of gas, blood-red and bright violet. They framed signs and windows, doors and patios. Passers-by walked unhurried and confident in the sharp and colorful arcs cast by those lamps, servants counting tips in coins, farmhands wandering idly, vagrants clutching at their drinks. Between the gaps in the flat roofs of the Dresdaini shops and houses, he could see the three moons caught in their constant revolutions around the heavens. Only Nikket, the small silver one, was close to full. The night busied itself with lazy tasks, the drone of it contented and electrifying.

Polk stood in the low patterns of lights, squinting his eyes and shaking the mud from the bottom of his cloak. He was only on the outskirts of the city and the road was still dirt. He wondered why the city didn’t attempt to fill it in. They had the money, no doubt, and stone came cheap from the Yudans to the south. But then, even old Polk had heard the rumors: tariffs and export taxes placed on southern trade, putting a real damper on business. Maybe Dresdain was having trouble funding some of their little projects as a result.

Polk didn’t know and didn’t particularly care. The affairs of mortal men were like the drifting snows of early spring, settling for but a moment and gone again. All that mattered in this moment were the buzzing lights and empty streets, the call of something from deep within, that low, low voice he’d always associated with God. It pointed him down an alley. He turned.

An antlered cow’s head emerged from above a face post, a narrow enclosure between buildings. The brontus lowed at him, stretching out its muzzle. Polk placed a hand against its damp surface.

“Hail, friend.  Have you been forgotten here?” he said.

The beast whimpered in answer.

“I see. My heart hurts for you, friend. The natural things with gentle spirits do not belong in confinement. It is not the Lion’s way. And yet, we each must play our parts. These people depend on you. On your milk. On your presence. On your warm soul. You are their friend and their family, though it is wrong for them to contain you so. Be at peace, my friend. And in the meantime—” Polk reached into the satchel at his waist, rummaging for a moment, and removed a large carrot, broken and dangling at the tip. “Have this little treat.”

The brontus opened its muzzle and greedily took the carrot in its broad yellow teeth. It moaned pleasurably as it chewed, and Polk felt satisfied in his work. He moved on down the alley, the voice pulsing somewhere in the vicinity of his navel, pulling him along.

Unnatural union, unnatural bond. Dark things came here, caused great harm, sought to open the doors…

He wound through narrow, dirty alleyways, passing the occasional brontus or horse or staked arodogs stretching idle, fuzzy wings. These lonely beasts watched him with large and gloomy eyes. Polk avoided them and found himself on a main road, paved with brick and lined with dark storefronts. He turned to his left. The pulsing voice continued.

On on on…

But he lost the thread of it somewhere along the way, as the cobbles sprung up out of the dirt and Dresdain became denser and narrower of path. Polk hit his toe against a broken brick. It lay discarded in the street, charred at the edges, strange, and pulsing with something stranger. He examined it for a long time before allowing his eyes to drift up to the partitioned-off segment of street that lay ahead.

Harmony Square, the heart of Dresdaini trade, lay gutted before him in the dark. Two hastily installed gas-lamps shone narrow perimeters of red light, but the rubble-strewn square remained shadowed and ominous. Polk could sense the hands pressed against the other side of the Veil, claws and hooves and tentacles scraping against the fabric, their tongues and fangs and split lips whispering:

Let us in let us in let us in let us in….

Polk pressed his hands to his ears. Shut his eyes tight.

“I deny you,” he said. “By all the powers of the Lion God, I deny you. You shall find no purchase in this world.”

The voices went silent. He listened for a time, finally finding the one voice he wanted to hear. It led him north and east, back onto unpaved alleyways of dirt and rubbish, the image of a boy in a tavern blinking unbidden through his mind.