TIME AWASH WITH BLOOD-- Chapter Seventeen

Eells tongue was dry. He licked his lips and tasted acrid smoke. He did not breath through his nose, not down here. From underneath the eaves of a shuttered shop he studied the the soggy list of names in his hands. Rain pattered above him, on the cobblestone around him. It fell hard, splashing his boots and staining the hem of his robe dark. He licked his lips again, tasted sweat and smog. A passerby coughed into their gloved fist—a thick, ragged sound, like a faucet disgorging sewer water.

Eells drew his tongue back in over his teeth and resisted the uge to spit.

His eyes scanned the six names again. They were all women, and they were all in Celedin. Beyond that he knew nothing. The document provided their residential districts, but not specific addresses. The interworld hub didnt have the authority or manpower to log the locations of the millions that traveled here from other worlds, especially when considering the fact that most people had no permanent address. The poor and destitute moved as frequently as the tides, wordlessly obeying the gravitic whims of economics and disease. Two of the names on this list didn’t even have residential districts—they were simply listed as “itinerants.”

He bit his lip, and looked over the six names circled in red ink.

• Aratria Geddon, Rainslick Plaza
• Tori Kebbulut, The Dregs
• Elspeth Frume, Poroncio District
• Therazine Morlo, Itinerant
• Xian Xiozu, Marrock Hill
• Dramm Ofthezeg, Itinerant

No other information. All women. None of them were nobility or prominent businessfolk. All of them had come from Lormian. His target was one of the women here. Primio had made certain of this, as his last act in the Real. The two itinerants would be most difficult to track down. The others would not be simple in a city that was brimming with over a billion fermenting souls, but how many Tori Kebbuluts could there be in the Dregs? Or Xian Xiozus in Marrock Hill?

Eells grimaced. That last name felt sour every time he read it. That was not a Celedine name. He could practically see the pits of bubbling tar and black skies of whatever world this Xiozu woman hailed from. He imagined the pagan idols that she must have brought with her when she migrated to Celedin—skull charms, sickly glowing Aether bands, bound clusters of animal bones. Perhaps her home would be easier to identify than the others.

“Why you reading in the rain?”

He looked up and saw a woman standing in the street before him. A wet grey coat hung from her shoulders. Her knotted hair fell in fat clumps over her shoulders. Her trousers were far too tight across her bulging thighs. She wore makeup of some sort, a clear varnish over her lips that Eells did not know the name for. But she had applied it poorly—it glistened around the edges of her mouth like a new scar.

He narrowed his eyes and said nothing.

“Why you reading in the rain?” she repeated. Her brow was furrowed, and her sunken eyes were full of curiosity. She did not seem to recognize the X-shaped scar on Eells’ face. The way she stood there, watching him. It was late in the evening. Did she not have to hurry back home? No. From the way she stood, from the vacuous way she regarded him, Eells was certain that she did not have family depending on her somewhere. There was a wax wrapper crumpled in her left hand, the refuse from an unnecessary midnight sandwich; no doubt her fourth or fifth that day.

Eells felt his stomach turn and growl as he thought of food, and he felt a bloom of pride at the resiliency of his spirit to withstand the body’s incessant carnal craving for food. He briefly wondered what other vices this woman surrendered to, but the images that snuck into his mind made his skin crawl.

“What is your name?” he asked.

The woman blinked. She opened her mouth and her neck sagged with it.

“I’m Desi. Who are you?”

“Begone, wretch.”

The woman frowned, and walked off down the street. She called him some name as she vanished into the rain and crowd but Eells did not pay her any attention. His eyes had returned to his list.

Marrock Hill was far, on the opposite side of Mount Recep. Similarly the Dregs was a district adjacent to the docks, and thus on the coast seven miles to the west. But Rainslick Plaza was only the next district over from where he currently stood. On foot he could reach the center of the district in a few hours. He briefly entertained the idea of summon a coach or cab, but the thought of a Bereaver using such mundane forms of transportation disgusted him.

He would walk, and arrive precisely when he was meant to.

---

Rainslick Plaza itself surrounded a large open area of land that at one point had been a park, but now was six square blocks of single-story squat buildings and fields of tents. Two short conversations had led Eells to a sore-covered vagrant who had set up his home under an ancient dead tree near the edges of the plaza. The vagrant did not consider himself fortunate enough to own one of the ramshackle huts or even the stained tents, but before he could regale Eells with his tale of woe he was silenced. Eells explained to the man that he did not care, that his plight was unimportant, and that all that mattered was that this man provide the Bereaver with the information he needed. Some gleam in the vagrant’s eye suggested he had some former schooling with the Order of Prevalistics, and that he knew exactly what Eells’ title implied. He capitulated in a stammering, apologetic way.

The woman in question, Aratria Geddon, lived in a building just up the hill. The vagrant gave him her apartment number, and her usual morning routine, and the various colors of dress that she wore whenever the rain let up, and the types of men that she invited into her home, and a detailed description of her smile and the bounce of her hair, and the special trick that was needed to knock down the ladder to the her fire escape, and the fact that the blinds to her bedroom window were bent and if you showed up just after sunset then—

Eells silenced the man again and left. He found the building—a tall, black stone structure with a crown of acid-eaten gargoyles. The streets surrounding the building were empty this early in the morning, and there were only two amber lights on in the myriad windows that covered its dark surface. The door to the lobby was locked.

He circled the building twice before finding the fire escape. The vagrant’s instructions had been accurate—with a knock from his sheathed rapier the ladder came down with a cold rattling clang. Were it not for the driving rain, the sound might have awoken someone. He climbed four stories. His hands were slick and scratched from gripping the rusted railings. A four pane window stood ahead of him. The blinds were drawn; there were no lights within. He leaned in and cupped his hand over his eyes, finding a gap in the old brown blinds and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deep darkness within the apartment.

A cluttered room. Indistinguishable art on the walls. A figure bundled up on the bed.

Over the din of the rain, Eells heard the flap of wings. Talons clasped onto the railing of the fire escape. He turned, and saw a rotcrow perched there.

“Do I even need to say anything?” Silas said.

“Begone,” Eells said, looking back at the window. “You are not needed here.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m here anyway. So, how are you going to do it? Pry the window open quietly and slit her throat? Or just bust the glass and pick her up? Maybe declare your divinity as you toss her to her death?”

“Your words won’t change anything here, Silas. I am free of conflict.”

The rotcrow spread its wings and looked back and forth. “Apparently not. I’m not real, remember? I’m just in your mind?”

“I said begone.”

“Or maybe I am real. Have you considered that? Your poor dead brother has returned from the Aether to warn you about the consequences of your wicked ways. Pretty sure mother read us a story like that when we were younger.”

“Mother never read us anything.”

“Maybe not you. But then, I was always her favorite son.”

Eells turned sharply.

“Your words,” Silas said. “Not mine.”

“Why are even here? Why are you trying to stay my hand, when it was you who has led me down this path?”

“I didn’t lead you anywhere. This is all you. I’m just telling you what I know.”

“You were the one who told me that the source of the Schism was a woman, foul creature.”

“Just giving you the facts as I know them. It’s you who is making these decisions, not me.”

“So are you or are you not trying to stop me?”

“Is that doubt I sense in your voice, dear brother?”

Eells struck out at the rotcrow, but Silas flapped and jumped to perch on the ladder above him.

“Not so loud,” Silas said. “You’ll wake her.”

“Get out of here,” Eells whispered. “Get lost, and never come back. You do nothing but cloud my purpose.”

“Maybe that’s my purpose. Have you thought about that?”

Eells growled. “Tell me what you have come to say and then leave.”

The rotcrow chirped, and a feather fell from its neck.

“It’s not her.”

Eells ground his teeth. “You can’t know that.”

“Maybe not. But that’s what I came to tell you. This isn’t the one.”

Eells regarded the window again. The blackness within, and the still form that lay within that blackness. One of six. The woman he sought was one of six.

“Then which one is it?”

“Not this one,” Silas said, rocking on the ladder.

“That isn’t good enough.”

“That’s what I have to tell you. Nothing else.”

Eells just stared at the window. After a moment of silence, the rotcrow spread its wings and flew away into the rain.

Eells breathed in deep, tasted the smoke in the air. He smelled feces wafting up from the tent city in the center of the plaze, heard a dog growl in the alley below. There were five other names on the list. They begged his attention now. But he had come all the way here. He tried the window and found it locked. He was frustrated, but not surprised. For a few minutes he simply stood in the rain and thought. Then he hissed through his teeth and descended the ladders of the fire escape. He almost reached the bottom before he stopped.

Was Silas merely a manifestation of his psyche? A specter from his past? He knew that strange magic existed in the distant realms of the Real, and knew that the Aether could generate even more terrifying apparitions. But how was one to tell the difference between sorcery and the flickering morality of the human spirit? What part of him was reacting to his own sound judgment, and what part of him was being manipulated by the Pale Light to be thrown off his path?

He hung on to the last rung of the ladder, just above the alley.

Rambolt Eells was the Bereaver. He had been given that title because he had a gift, a sight. He could feel the fissures in reality whenever the Aether attempted to spill into his world. That was why the Council had entrusted him with his job. He could not trust his thought, but he could trust his instincts. His intuition was truth.

And right now, that truth told him that Silas was lying.

He climbed the fire escape again. His shoulders ached as he pulled himself over the fourth-story railing. Without pause he shattered the central window pane to Aratria’s black bedroom. The woman screamed, and continued to scream as he crashed into the safety of her home. The next few minutes were a blurry, adrenaline fueled haze of groping hands, banging knees, and warm sprays of arterial blood. In the panic and darkness he never drew his sword. But when the screaming stopped and he stood above her bed sweating and heaving he knew that his holy work had been done.

His eyes could not be trusted. In darkness he had prevailed. His thoughts could not be trusted. Only his intuition, his soul, would tell him the truth. One down. Five to go.

A Dirge for Life

“I have spent all of my life in an effort to live forever. I have drained the economies of entire colonies, reduced once bountiful worlds to ash and rock. Billions have died so that I may continue living. And I’d done it. I’d solved the problem of death. Through the power of suns I’ve discovered the path to immortality—at a cost so significant that for centuries I had to deny the reality of it not only to the public but to myself. But with each life that was consumed a little of that shame died. With each burned-out gas giant I hardened myself, until I was both unending and unstoppable. The human race has suffered immeasurably for my benefit. No. Do not try to tell me otherwise, Renfro. I am a monster, and I have accepted that. Were there a hell, the devil himself would have cleared a plot for me centuries ago in the deepest ice of the ninth circle. There is no punishment fitting enough for the horrors that I have committed upon my fellow man. I was certain that the sacrifice of my species was an acceptable cost for defying the very nature of the universe. What else was my eternal life, if not the mightiest rebellion against entropy?”

“But now, there is this. Behold Theia. Once a jewel of this galaxy. A world spared my vampiric annihilation because I found it beautiful. No where else in known space did humanity flourish as much as it did here. When I could walk I spent many nights walking the turquoise forests of the northern continent, listening to the songs of the insects and the howls of the nocturnal birds. Did you know that at its height it was home to more than eleven billion people? All thinking, feeling souls, living and breathing and dying in rhythm with the incorruptable serenity of this world. Ancient Earth could not have supported this many of us—it was far too small, its resources far too minimal. Mankind squandered what it had there. But on Theia, we had reached harmonic perfection with nature. Do you remember the crystaline skyscrapers of Gimultera? How they glistened. How they twinkled in the setting sun. But now Theia’s green and blue have faded. Animals, plants, man—they are all gone. No shelters could save them. No medicine, no relocation. They just began dying. First the sick and the elderly, but then the children. I have stopped receiving contact from Theia’s surface. Only the automated signals from the the weather installations feed to me now, and they all tell me the same thing: Theia is dead.”

“Learning that Theia was not alone was the first time I felt fear in three-hundred years. Global death is a horrible thing to witness, but when one’s vision spans across millions of worlds one does not sweat too much over such a trivial loss. I loved Theia. I did. It was my garden world. But Theia its slow death was no different to me than watching a favored painting fall from the wall in a gallery. Anger, perhaps. Regret and disappointment. But no fear. It was when the same fate befell Tormador that I felt terror break through the dikes of my psyche. I dispatched fleets of scientists to discover the cause—an abominable new disease, or a weapon; I was certain that it was a weapon used by some crafty resurgent enemy. I had frontier worlds incinerated in an effort to stamp out imagined insurrections. New Callisto, Chadrion, Benimm’s Star. Millions consumed in cyclonic fire to simply sooth my paranoia. I was convinced that a war was coming and that I was making preemptive strikes. Imagine my embarassment when the scientists returned and told me that nothing was killing Tormador. No viruses, no radiation. It was simply dying.”

“For the first time in generations I encountered something I did not understand. Surely the problem was in the trade lines—something being transported along the space lanes between Theia and Tormador. I watched the Nimutz Trade Route anxiously, expecting to see another world die along that same lane. But then Zimaku faded into grey and darkness along the Hyperion Spine, and Ceta Centauria a thousand lightyears further away. Then the Dynas Cluster screamed its last. Nothing connected these worlds. Nothing other than them being planets where man formerly thrived, planets that I claimed. I dispatched my researchers across the galaxy on a scientific crusade—return with answers, I told them. Or do not return at all.”

“Over the next century I experienced multiple crises of faith. As my worlds—as humanity’s worlds—continued to die without explanation, I blamed outside influence. I led a war into the Dendrenian systems. You look vexed. Yes, they don’t teach of the Dendrenians anymore. Aliens, Renfro. Sentient nonhumans who once owned much of this galaxy. They aren’t to be spoken of. Would you like to know why? It is because when I thrust the head of my spear into the heart of their empire, I found nothing but the corpses of civilizations. What remained of the Dendrenians were isolated pockets of their withering government, fastened in their ferrocrete sarcophogai and hoping to wait out whatever was happening to the universe. Do you understand what I’m teling you? What was happening to mankind had already happened to the Dendrenians. Whatever this was, it had hit them first. I watched the last of their leaders die behind a metallic faceplate. If they had eyes, I would have stared into them and seen the last remnants of a sophisticated race fading into the background like radio static. They were gone.”

“I realized after that fruitless campaign that I had been blaming myself. I was never able to place why, but part of me was convinced that my manipulation of human biology had upset the circuits of reality in some way, and that we were now suffering the fallout. I had even, for a time, believed that some divine being was punishing me for my unforgivable sins. But witnessing the fate of the Dendrenians absolved my spirit, though it did nothing to sate my fears.”

“In the centuries that followed I watched thousands more worlds die. I felt it. Not just the loss of my empire and my species, but in my physical body as well. Even amidst all of this death I continued to siphon stars and planet cores for life-giving radiance. I had conquered death—I would not take my foot off of its defeated body merely because my attentions had been drawn elsewhere. But even as I sucked the life out of entire star systems I could feel it happening to me. I had legs fifty years ago. I could walk. My skin was bright and soft, my body supple. This atrophy happened quickly. Like the countless worlds before me, I was shriveling. Even you had a body once, Renfro. You weren’t ugly, but you are not much worse off now. Take comfort in the fact that you are a mind within a machine—you might be just artificial enough to outlive me.”

He turned his head, his neck popping and creaking with the effort. Renfro’s face blinked green once. He watched, waiting the three seconds for the next blink to come and tell him that his servant was still there behind the screens and steel. It blinked green, and he turned back to the canopy and beheld Theia once more.

“I found it this morning. The report. From the flotilla of scientists that I sent out oh so many eons ago. They are long since ash, but their data survived. It floated silently and unharmed through centuries of cold space. But now I have it. And not a moment too soon, I believe. Do you know what it is they discovered?”

Renfro’s light blinked once.

“They discovered a well. A fountain at the center of the universe. Imperceptable on all instruments. They had to invent new technology to find this invisible source, and when they did they practically went mad from the revelation. It was the spring of life. Not on a world or even in space and time itself, but real all the same. It was a fountain from which life flowed. The unseen stream of fire that flowed across the universe and sparked amino acids into forming the living organisms. Life is a constantly renewing and replenishing energy source. When a thing is born it is fed by this invisible river—the structures that make up its cells are given light and heat. When a thing dies, the waters ebb out of it and return to the cosmic source. Life flows from this well and back into it for eternity. Or so it seemed.”

“Generations of my crusading scientists studied this fountain. To their horror, they discovered that it was running its course. The river was drying up.”

“They tried to come back to me. They flew through the immeasurable black gulfs to inform me of the fact that life was draining from all things at an ever increasing rate. They never made it. None of them did.”

Theia loomed, a brown husk bathed by a yellow star.

“I have not heard communication from any of my princes in decades.”

He breathed in once, felt warm air rasp the ragged edges of his lungs.

“I believe that we may be the last two living things, my old friend. My scout ships have not returned. And look—oh, look. The oceans of Theia were once deep blue. A rich, gem-like blue that one could stare at for hours. When the world died the oceans turned a sickly green. I remember recognizing that as rot, that microbes had consumed all of the rampant death. But rot results from life, you see. Even decay is a product of river of life. The algae of the oceans bloomed without any threat from predation of competition. And soon enough it died, too. And the waters returned to blue.

“I have watched this world for thirty-one years without moving. To me that feels eternal, but it all happened in an instant. Slowly watching this sphere turn, knowing that the ever-encroaching horizon will never show me anything new. I wrote it all down almost a decade ago, when I’d heard the last scream broadcasted across the galactic waves. I composed a history of mankind. I detailed my own life, my journey. I followed the histories of old earth, of the first colonies. The wars with the Dendrenians, and—more prominantly—the wars with our own people who had been separated from us by thousands of years of isolation. Who we were as a people. As lifeforms. I came to two conclusions during this writing. The first was that all of human history could be summarized, and that thought caused me to mourn. All of the tens of thousands of years of our records happened in a cosmic blink. Ponder this for a moment: there are two-hundred billion stars in this galaxy. So many that no sentient mind can even comprehend that number. At any given moment unfathomable numbers of those stars are dying and being reborn again as waves of light and blackholes. They erupt or collapse in such spectacular fashion that their deaths can be observed on the other side of the galaxy. This cycle happens eternally, continuously, without any direction. And humankind’s entire existence spanned less time than the life of even one star. Far less.

“My thoughts at this time flattened me. For as grand as I believed my accomplishments to be, none of it was measurable. I thought my eternal life to be a defiant act, but the universe didn’t care. Worse, it was incapable of caring. I am not ignored—my existence is simply so temporary and reality so vast that there was never a possibility of my being significant. It was beyond incomprehensible.

“My second conclusion followed swiftly: the accomplishments of life mattered only to life itself. Thus, my record was meaningless. The well of life is draining and soon there will be no minds anywhere in the universe, and there never will be again. Anything I write will simply be sequences of data sitting frozen in a machine that will never again be accessed. There are no eyes to appreciate art, no psyches to feel dread at my harrowing words. There is, quite frankly, no point to it.

“Even as I speak now I see the futility of every word. You will not remember this, Renfro, because you too will soon be nothing. There are no future generations to spread our stories to. Very soon all will be cold and inert, except for the blazing energy of the stars in their phoenix cycles.”

He let out another breath, and felt the tug on his chest that he had been experiencing for the last four months.

“Was anything I did ever truly evil? With no other human beings to ascribe morality to my actions, was I an evil man? Here I speak, pondering the rightness of my life, in a language that means nothing with no ears to hear it. Where do we travel, I wonder? I regret. But at the same time, I feel no remorse for anyhting I have done. It is all ash and fractal patterns. What should I do? What will be the last action of the only living thing in all the cosmos? Years ago I screamed defiantly into the darkness of space. I strode out onto the upper deck and howled like a beast…”

His heart thumped.

“There will never be beasts again. That word, like so many others, carries no meaning now, except for what goes on within the shell of my skull.”

Over thirty seconds he breathed only twice. He tried to move his arm, and felt only prickly numbness.

“Does pain exist?”

Outside, Theia turned.

He drew in one large breath.

“I open my ears, and the void says nothing.”

Quantification

It is difficult to say if I am truly a writer.

For five years I have done nothing but edit my first novel and start three more. Half a decade of editing Wages of Sin -- fully a sixth of my life. In that time I have gotten married, I've seen friends die, I've traveled to distant corners of the earth, and I've continued to work at a restaurant and living in relative poverty.

I write. I do. But I don't do enough of the rest of things that come with being a 'writer.' I don't network. I don't publish. I don't... try. I don't try at all. Every day I watch my shows and exercise and paint tiny army men. All maintenance. All distraction. I feel so exhausted all of the time. Is that reason enough not to write?

Five years in. Wages is currently out making the rounds with literary agents. I've received six rejections in half as many weeks. Waiting on four more. It is hard to not feel like a failure when the thing that I have championed as my life's work for five years is met with mediocre critique and form letters. Why write if no one reads any of it?

"A life lived for art is never a life wasted," Macklemore says. Said, I guess. I imagine he doesn't say that too much since he sang it on his 2013 album. An album that I listened to while I was first writing Wages. When my brother was still in college.

Five years. The beast has been ravenous.

I must write more. I must. It is all that keeps me sane, that keeps me believing that I truly am a writer. Every day that I spend two to four hours writing I feel accomplished and prideful, all the way until sunset. Those are quantifiably good days. But I don't do it every day. Should I? Or is that simply another form of distraction? Do I use writing as sublimation for my fear of Time and Death (my two greatest foes), as distraction from it? All I know is that writing feels good. That I--

Shit. I told my therapist I'd write about... something. About something that we talked about last week. What was it? God damn. Sublimation, Distraction, Isolation, Anchoring... I suppose it is immaterial at the moment. At 1:40 AM, in the middle of another night lying alone in bed and just watching the sands of entropy slip through the pinprick hole that joins the two chambers.

So much time has passed. I am hesitant to say,"what do I have to show for it?" because I think I have a lot. Friends and wonderful family (family who I don't spend time with these days).

Gah. There it is. The chain-clad specter that is Shame, crawling on his skeletal fingers across the bedspread and threatening to choke me. I need to sleep. Never was a productive thought birthed of fatigue and shame.

I will write a short story tomorrow.

TIME AWASH WITH BLOOD-- Chapter Sixteen

It took six hours, not counting sleep, for Therazine to learn Anton Carlaca’s address. He was a local gent, still living in West Celedin after most of the wealthy had moved out east. In nine hours she had found his work schedule, his favorite local pub, and the underground boxing ring where he kept himself fit and vented the animalistic aggression that society injected into all of its citizens. In twenty hours she found him.

Anton Carlaca had been a lieutenant with the West Celedin Constabulary until two years ago. He was 35, athletic, and had no red marks, so his swift departure from the WCC stuck out to Therazine. Brief contact and sweet lies to the local department revealed that Carlaca’s family were farmers up north, and that they had been killed in a rebel attack. Carlaca had quit the service “to grieve,” she had been told, and was given a pension that was to last him an entire year. Such munificence was unheard of in this city, which led Therazine to believe that Carlaca must have been an exceptional officer and that the Constabulary wanted to make sure he came back.

But he never did. The year passed and Carlaca’s income ceased. He retained his apartment near Presidium Park and continued to go to all of his local haunts. He still jogged, he still shopped down on Ivy Street. His habits remained the same. It took Therazine locating an ex-girlfriend of his to determine why exactly he hadn’t gone back to the force.

Therazine played the role of recently scorned lover when she contacted Vivian Moroa by telephone. She claimed that she wanted to get vengeance on Carlaca, and that she was hoping Vivian would have some dirt on him.

Vivian’s voice was sugary and almost obnoxiously high-pitched. Therazine could practically see her through the static of the phone lines: straight-backed and smooth-fingered, pale and gasping for breath through her corset, wearing a gown and a half a pound of makeup even at midday. But Vivian’s testimony was nothing but favorable. She seemed to still pine for Carlaca, and said that their breakup was understandable if not mutual. Anton’s family had been slaughtered by those horrendous insurgents the previous year—for him to wish to be alone to rediscover himself was perfectly human.

That was how Vivian described Carlaca. Perfectly human.

What Therazine did learn from the woman, however, was that he was a compassionate man who cared deeply for the plight of the people living in the underbelly of this city. During and after his time with the WCC he witnessed the atrocious conditions that most of the people of West Celedin were forced to live in. Once free of his commitment to the Constabulary, he supposedly split his free time between fitness, drinking, and volunteering at local shelters.  Shelters for wirehead and the homeless were few and far between—neither the government nor the Order of Prevalistics invested into institutions to house and feed the millions living on the streets of Celedin. To fight against poverty in this city was to spit into an oncoming tidal wave. But Carlaca sought to help where he could, and according to Vivian he made quite a dent in the suffering of local transients.

Therazine very much doubted this. Shortly after her talk with Vivian she discovered that Anton Carlaca had officially put in his bid to run for Deputy Administrator six months ago. He had the support of the Constabulary and many of the trade houses and docks along the shore. He ran on a platform of reform and hope—his slogan was, ‘For a Brighter Celedin.’ Therazine had no doubt that many of the merchants along Ivy Street would also have been lending Carlaca their votes if they weren’t squarely under the boot of the Kettle family.

As to his current whereabouts, Anton Carlaca was soon attending a fundraiser in his honor at a lodge down near the edge of the Dregs, hosted by the Fraternal Order of Ravens. It seemed to Therazine an obvious move, if a safe one. The FOR was a community service organization that consisted almost entirely of retired whalers and veterans, two groups who Administrator Threlin and Deputy Administrator Kettle had actively denied public assets to in the last decade. Four years prior, after the sewer plague had transformed the Dregs into a nearly uninhabitable swamp at the water’s edge, a whalers’ union had petitioned the government for aid. Quarantine tents, trained doctors, Prevalist priests, and guns were all necessary if the plague was to be contained. Magistrate Denvos had denied them. No deficit or alternative plan had been proposed. The denial had simply traveled down the rungs of the social ladder until it had reached the desperate ears of the whalers’ union. The plague ran its course. Hundreds died or were transformed into throbbing, hungering polyps, and the government of West Celedin didn’t even notice.

If Carlaca was running against Kettle, he certainly had the vote of the people of the Dregs. By speaking at the Ravens lodge he was assuring that all of those who had been discarded by the Deputy Administrator would know that he existed, and that he was fighting for them.

When he stepped up to deliver his first speech of the night he was met with resounding silence. The creek of the planks from old ships that made up the stage upon which he stood were louder than anything else in the lodge, save for the persistent humming of the dim orange sodium lamp that hung in one corner of the room. The audience was filled with old men in ragged military uniforms bearing polished brass badges and empty holsters, or else whalers and fishermen in oilskins. The room smelled of piss and salt, with the occasional waft of sour beer. Somewhere in the back room a cook was listening to indecipherable music on a tinny radio.

Carlaca received a tepid round of applause after his first speech. No doubt cooler than he had hoped, but the buzz across the room started immediately afterwards. Three or four uniformed men approached him and shook his hand, mumbling words about support and curiosity. You’ve got massive balls to run against that fat bull Kettle.

Therazine sat near the back. She had been careful not to take any of the seats along the back wall—as the only woman in the room she did not need to stand out any more than she already did. Women were forbidden from joining the lodge’s ranks. That alone made her a curiosity. Her hair was done up in a knot under a newsboy cap and she had a heavy black raincoat over her shoulders. Vexxer had decided that entering a small room full of disgruntled Javadoan War vets was not the wisest plan. Therazine had gone in alone. She had received a few inquiring glances upon first entering the lodge, but after Carlaca had taken the stage all eyes left her.

She sipped delicately from a cup of coffee. Carlaca took the stage once more. This time there was a small tremor of clapping. A sailor woofed like a dog. Carlaca smiled wide and waved into the shadowed crowd where the grunt had come from. It was a warm, genuine expression—or at least it appeared that way.

“Thank you,” Carlaca said. “Thank you, really. I was wondering if I’d get a second chance up here. Was worried I bored you all so much in the first round that I’d just be asked firmly to leave.”

A light chuckle in the crowd. Carlaca smiled again. He cleared his throat and smoothed back a strand of his oiled black hair. There wasn’t a hint of unease about him. He reminded Therazine of a bartender back in Nalak—a charming young man whom Kohl had once told to fuck off for speaking too kindly to her.

“Now. I’ve told you who I am and what I’m about. Why I’m running. Not just the office, but what I am running for. I’d be lying if I told you that the Dregs, or even the Wharf District, was my biggest concern. Now don’t get me wrong—your plight here is some of the most tragic that I’ve ever seen. But like many of you I’ve lived in this city my entire life, and what happens here happens everywhere across Celedin. Not just here, not just in West Celedin, but across the entire world. The Bureau of Realside Accounting tells us that easing the vast amount of suffering across our city is logistically impossible, that there are simply too many people to treat everyone fair and right. They tell us that resources are spread too thin as it is. They tell us that industry can only do so much, that there are only so many jobs, that there is only so much glit, so much medicine, so much clean water, so much basic human dignity.”

Carlaca said this last word with venom, and his tone shifted. He gripped both sides of the knotted podium and gritted his teeth.

“They tell us this at the same time that we occupy new worlds. They tell us this as we settle infinite frontiers. They say there is no food, and yet farmers on Erukesh grow enough to feed the Real three times over. Tell me, friends: what results do you see from the Commonwealth’s distribution of resources? Is it cleaner skies? Is it purified, uninfected roadways? Is it peace in North Celedin? Medical innovations? No. This city is the same as it was before the war. You fought and died to claim Javadoa for the Commonwealth and yet you see none of it. When you signed up to conquer in the name of the Holy Emperor, what did they promise you? Glory? Mere reprieve?”

An angered grumbling came from the crowd. A pair of gloved hands made a wet, languished clapping.

“I ask you,” Carlaca said, “what reprieve have you been awarded? Is your life any better since the war?”

“Fuck no,” two old men said at once.

“You have suffered. You have bled, you have watched friends die, and you have been given nothing in return. This city has discarded you, because they say that you are logistically impossible to help. There is no relief from this life, is what they are selling. Everyone suffers. Bear that in mind the next time you see Deputy Administrator Patrick Kettle step out of his chrome-plated Zephyr for a dinner reservation at the Spire Lounge, with his fat sons in tow.”

A howl of anger came from behind Therazine. Fists went up.

“Patrick Kettle won’t save the Dregs from plague,” Carlaca said. “He thinks he has power over you. Invulnerability. He thinks that he deserves everything he’s got. But ask him if he’s ever lost a friend to war or sickness. Yes. You.”

A man stood up in the crowd. His jagged, blotchy face was hidden beneath a tattered wool cap and an unkempt beard.

“What are you gonna do about it?” the man asked. “What makes you any better than those pigshits?”

Carlaca nodded. “A fair question. And I’ll tell you exactly what I’ll do—When I’m in Patrick Kettle’s place as Deputy Administrator, I will hold Magistrate Denvos personally responsible for every crime Kettle has ever committed.”

“Easy to say,” the bearded man spat out.

“Easy to say, yes. And easy to do, too. Kettle has held the position of DA for fifteen years now. On the force I saw exactly the kind of horrors he got away with every day. The prostitution, the smuggling, the extortion rackets—I’m not going to call what he peddles ‘protection,’ because who exactly is he protecting you from? His own boys? I saw firsthand the monstrous things that he and his Corbie Club do. By all that’s Real, I’ve felt what they do.”

Carlaca undid the top button of his vest and pulled down the collar of his shirt. On pale skin he exposed a pink and white scar about three inches in length at the base if his throat. Therazine recognized it as a scar from extreme blunt trauma—a crowbar, she imagined. Or perhaps a fire poker. She visualized his shattered collarbone; he likely had trouble raising his right arm these days. Whoever had inflicted that on Carlaca had been looking to kill him. An inch or so higher and they would’ve succeeded.

Therazine also noticed the edges of a tattoo on his right breast. The spokes of a stylized sun, and the corner of an eye.

So Carlaca was a good Prevalist boy, as well. Therazine was impressed that he hadn’t revealed that bit of information yet—these old war vets all had soft spots for the faithful. A result of the indoctrination that the Order used to convince these sorry bastards that their wars were worth fighting.

“They don’t like me,” Carlaca said, and that received a hoot. “Which is good. I don’t want them to like me. They know I’m gunning for them. They know that I can’t stomach the way they treat the people below them—because I am one of those people. I’ve been stepped on by Denvos and Kettle my entire life, and now I have the power to do something about it. With me biting at his heals, Denvos won’t have any choice but to tread the path of righteousness.”

There it was. The tiniest hint of scripture. Therazine remembered Kohl reading the Writ of Becoming to her one time early in their relationship. The Aether pulls at your hair — at your skin — at your tongue — Surrender not to its claws — do not gaze into its Pale eyes — keep thy feet straight — and tread only the path of righteousness.

The crowd cheered. Therazine was impressed. Carlaca had appealed to these people like an artist, using heavy obvious strokes but nonetheless painting the picture they’d wanted to see. Now they were prepared to pay him for his work. A few men stood to clap, but most were too old and fat and stayed seated. Nevertheless she saw how they stared at Anton Carlaca, their eyes glazed in a mix of hope and possible justice. Some actually looked like they believed this young hopeful could make a difference.

This was her moment. The Calm overcame her.

Everything slowed down. The hazy light from the sodium lamps became bright and sterile. The clapping became muffled, the distant kitchen music faded away entirely. She saw Carlaca breath in heavily, slowly, and smile. All eyes were on him.

Her plan executed itself perfectly in her mind. With her right boot already on the edge of a chair she lept up onto the neighboring table and threw open her long raincoat. In an instant she’d drawn a long-barreled pistol—a sliver and dull brown piece from Madeline Rhines’ own masterful hands. The hammer was drawn back, the seven-round harmonica clip already slid into position. She merely settled the glowing radium sights on Carlaca’s forehead and pulled the trigger. She felt the magnificent kick of the gun, saw the room light up white like the Aether had breached a hole into the Real. Carlaca’s skull cratered inward, and black and red matter exploded across the faded raven painted on the back wall. There was no time for anyone to stop her, no time for Carlaca to even stop smiling before his handsome face was obliterated.

She saw this all in her mind’s eye. Even felt the twitch in her right leg as she was about to jump up. But she didn’t move.

Carlaca’s grin was filled with teeth more perfect than she had ever seen. But his expression was not one of victory, not one of accomplishment. He smiled at the ugly old men who approached him in earnest thanks and encouragement. He smiled to them, and for them. And they ate it up. She remembered Chestin Kettle smiling at her the day before, when he thought that he had her and Vexxer at a disadvantage. That had been the vacuous grin of a viper, of a predator circling its prey. This was different. Carlaca gave the smile of a friend.

Therazine’s moment passed without her doing anything, and veterans and sailors piled around Carlaca to clap him on the back and shake his hand.They chanted encouragement and exaltation, shouted for the destruction of Patrick Kettle and Magistrate Denzos. One signaled for the bartender to pour drinks, and shortly beer and shots were being passed around the room.

The Calm fled from Therazine as quickly as it had come, and she suddenly felt ice in her blood. She hadn’t done it. She hadn’t pulled the gun out, let alone pulled the trigger. She felt immediate shame at her hesitation, but she circled that and put it down. No. She had not failed. The Calm had given her clarity. If she desired it, Carlaca would be dead now. No one here could have stopped that.

She had actively decided not to kill him. This revelation hit her like a crashing wave, and threatened to pull her out into the raging seas of her self-doubt. She clawed at the shores and kept herself there, telling herself that she had done this on purpose. In that moment she had juxtaposed Anton Carlaca and the men who had told her to kill him, and she had made the choice to disobey.

This was not weakness, she told herself. This was—

Time slipped by. Seconds, minutes. Everyone was drinking, singing. Carlaca was smiling and making merry along with the rest of them, his slick black hair dangling into his face again. Carlaca, who had almost been brutally murdered and didn’t even realize it.

She stood up, clattered her chair back. An old man behind her grunted in anger. She strode forward, pushed through the crowd. Faces turned as she slid through the bodies. Beards mottled with milky foam pulled away from their pints to gawk at the woman pushing past them. She shoved aside a hunched man in a a grey oilskin and found herself face to face with the ex-lieutenant.

“Anton Carlaca,” she said, pulse pounding.

Voices around her went quiet. No one had expected to hear a woman speak in the lodge. Carlaca chuckled at some joke, and turned to her. He skillfully masked his surprise—his eyebrows stayed firm, his smile stayed fixed. But she saw the gleam in his eyes and the horripilation on his neck when she approached.

“I need to speak to you,” she said.

“Who let you in here?” came a slurred voice from her right. Someone stepped closer.

Carlaca’s eyes flitted around him. “Of course,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve met. Who am I addressing?”

“I need to speak to you in private,” Therazine said.

A laugh somewhere behind her. Then a whistle. “Who hired the blonde?” someone shouted.

Carlaca ignored them. His eyebrows lowered and he held Therazine’s gaze. He looked as if he was about to speak, and then simply nodded.

“Of course,” he said. He handed his beer to the nearest sailor, said that he’d return shortly. “The next round is on me.” Another cheer went up. Glasses clinked. Then he stepped up to Therazine.

She turned and led him through the crowd. Carlaca received a few more claps on the back and hoots from various drunken old men. Another whistled. A hand came out toward Therazine, fingers spread wide and lecherous. She avoided the assault with ease and only resisted breaking the hand through sheer will. She had no time to punish some drunk idiot. She pushed faster through the crowd and to the front door.

They stepped out into a cold mist. A rot crow flapped its oily wings and flew away into the dark, cawing in a watery, angry voice as it abandoned its putrid meal by the steps of the lodge. A foghorn blared. Carlaca closed the door behind them, entombing them in the sludgy darkness of the Wharf District at night.

Therazine breathed in deep of the caustic mist. Her heart raced.

“Alright,” Carlaca said. He stepped away from the lodge and stood beside her. They gazed out into the fog.

She looked at him. He was tall, like Kohl. Two wrinkles furrowed his brow, but otherwise he looked unconcerned. His hands were thrust into his pockets and the top button of his vest was still undone.

“Who are you?”

She swallowed. “That’s not important.”

“Okay. So what is important?”

“I was sent here to kill you.”

She expected him to run at that. To shout, or fight her. But his hands remained in his pockets. One of his eyebrows went up.

“That’s not surprising. You don’t look like one of Kettle’s boys. Where did he hire you from?”

“You expected this.”

“From the moment you walked in carrying that cannon under your arm. I’m still a constable at heart, ma’am. But I’m thinking you meant to kill me inside and not out here, yeah?”

Therazine blinked. This was not a conversation she had ever had before. For over ten years she had killed men for money. Never once had she chosen to talk to them instead. Oh, sometimes they would grovel. Threaten her, try to bribe her. But those were never conversations.

“You’re in Kettle’s sights.”

“I know that.”

She frowned. “Then why are you doing this?”

“Why am I doing what?”

She gestured to the lodge. “This. Why provoke him? Why so publicly, when you know who he is and what he will do to you?”

Carlaca smiled. By all that’s Real, was he handsome.

“No problems have ever been fixed by running from them, ma’am.”

Therazine felt her gut tighten.

Footsteps in the darkness. Carlaca’s eyes widened, and Therazine turned to see Vexxer Roz standing in the gloom. He towered over both of them, draped in black leathers and climbing gear. A glistening cloak hung from his shoulders—it was slick with rainwater, and camouflaged perfectly to the general grey and brown of the Dregs. His Darnull hung openly at his side. A scoped rifle was strapped across his back.

“What’s going on here?”

Carlaca breathed in heavily and looked Vexxer up and down.

“You people are professionals,” he said. “Kettle went all out. Are you Bloodletters?”

Vexxer ignored the man and stared at Therazine. “What is this? What happened?”

Therazine licked her dry lips. She shook her head. “He’s… we can’t follow through on this one.”

Vexxer grimaced. “What?”

“This isn’t happening,” she said. “We… we can’t.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“No,” Therazine said quietly. That shame bloomed within her again, and she swallowed hard to beat it back down. “No, I didn’t.”

“What went wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong. Everything’s wrong.”

Vexxer was silent. Therazine looked back and forth between him and Carlaca. The ex-constable’s hands were out of his pockets now, rain tracing down his fists.

“Thera, you didn’t follow through.”

“Names,” Therazine said.

“It’s alright,” Carlaca said. “I won’t repeat anything I hear.”

Vexxer glanced at Carlaca briefly, without emotion, and then back to Therazine.

“Thera, what is happening here?”

“We can’t do this one. It’s not right.”

Vexxer bit his lip. “That’s not what we are.”

“It is now—”

“No,” Vexxer said. His voice deepened. “You’re feeling the Quandary. You’re not seeing straight. I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true. You’ve been out for a long time, which I understand has shifted your persepctive. But we are not arbitrators or constables. We are not in the business of morality. We are—”

“I’m not feeling the Quandary,” Therazine said sharply. But was that true?

“You are. No one ever notices it when they feel it, but you are. Which is understandable. You’ve been out for a long—”

“Vex, I am not feeling the Quandary. The people we were hired by, the bastards who want Carlaca dead… they’re bad people.”

“Doesn’t change anything. That’s not our—”

“It does. It does, damn you. This isn’t just a… just a political killing. This man is actually trying to help people.”

“Thera.”

“Did you see Maddy’s face the other day? The bruise on her eye? That was Kettle’s thugs. I’d put glit on it being Chestin Kettle himself. We can’t help them.”

“Thera, that is not our call to make. Do you remember your training at all?”

She took a step towards him. “Don’t you dare question my abilities. This is not me feeling sentimental. This is right and wrong.”

Vexxer bit his lip again. He turned away briefly before responding to her.

“Thera,” he said, voice low, “you have a reputation to uphold. As do I. We have—we had—a perfect record. I’ve maintained that throughout all the years since you left.”

“I don’t give a shit about records. They don’t matter.”

“Thera.”

“No,” she said. She looked at Carlaca. His eyes were wide, but his fists had uncurled. He listened intently, rivulets of acid rain streaking down his cheekbones.

“Listen,” she said to Carlaca. “Kettle hired us to kill you.”

“I picked up on that.”

“You have to run. Once they realize we aren’t going to finish the job, he will send someone else. You have to leave West Celedin—leave the world, in fact. They will find you.”

Carlaca shook his head. “As I said, no problem was ever fixed by running from it. I can’t do that.”

Therazine ground her teeth. “Obstinance won’t protect you from a stranglewire in a back alley. You have to trust me, and you have to run.”

“Thera,” Vexxer said.

“Stop calling me that.”

“Therazine,” Vexxer said with a growl.

She paused and looked at him.

“You have forgotten yourself,” Vexxer said. “Jobs do not go unfinished. It is not our way. We do not judge, we do not falter. We finish what we started. If you remember anything from your training with the Society—”

“I am no longer a Bloodletter,” Therazine shouted.

“I am,” Vexxer said. In one motion he drew his Darnull, cocked the hammer, and shot Carlaca in the head.

The muzzle of the revolver flared like dynamite. Carlaca’s jaw exploded in teeth and meat, and the back of his skull burst in a show of brain matter. His arms went up briefly before his whole body toppled into the sticky mud on the street corner.

Therazine shouted like an animal. No words, simply a gutteral rejection. Her feet quivered as her nerves fought between thelping Carlaca or attacking Vexxer. But Carlaca was a bleeding corpse and Vexxer was already moving. He holstered his Darnull and picked up Carlaca’s body. He threw it over his shoulder, ragged pieces of jawbone and a distended tongue slapping on his slick cloak. Vexxer marched the few steps to the lodge and hurled Carlaca through the oily window.

There were screams as the glass shattered inward over the bartop. Therazine caught a brief glimpse of Carlaca’s mangled body splattered over a table and knocking over an old man before Vexxer turned and blocked her view.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Therazine stood transfixed. Her cap was soaked with rain, he hair poking out and obscuring her sight. Shouts and more screams from within the lodge. She heard the door open behind Vexxer.

He placed a hand on her shoulder, gently. She shook her head, looked up at him.

“We need to leave,” he said.

Her heart pounded against her ribs. Rain stained her vision as she looked up at him. She wanted to scream, to fight. Instead she just nodded and the two of them disappeared into the fog.

TIME AWASH WITH BLOOD-- Chapter Fifteen, Part Two

“Do you think he called the constabulary?” Vexxer said.

They stood under a tin shelter along the side of the road. Thick rain pounded down, sounding like bullets into the armored sides of a tank. The late evening stragglers had all but vanished off the streets. Most lights in the towers around them had gone dark.

“No,” Therazine said.

“Yeah, I don’t think so either.” Vexxer adjusted his coat over his shoulders. “That was kind of nice.”

Therazine glanced up at him. He frowned.

“Wasn’t it?” he said.

“No,” Therazine said. “It was just business. That’s all.”

Vexxer nodded and looked away. A grey mist had begun to creep across the far side of the street, as if overflowing from the gutters. No cars, carriages, or pedestrians had passed by in the fifteen minutes since they had stepped out into the dank night. No feet had tread on the pavement across the street. The only movement was the driving rain, and the stillness had signaled to the things below that it was safe to surface. A murky shape wriggled in the thickness of the mist—something crawling out of a storm drain. It flopped and splashed, spilling upwards out of the gutter like a mudslide in defiance of gravity. Strands of it reached out. Hairy, thin limbs that groped blindly at the sidewalk in an mindless attempt to find purchase. Or to find food.

Therazine watched the thing emerge. She stood still as a statue, watching the shapeless mass form itself on the street.

Vexxer let out a bark. No words, simply a gutteral exclamation. The writhing bulk across the street shuddered at the noise and then drained back into the gutter. In a moment it had disappeared, and the rain regained returned as the only motion in sight.

Therazine reflected on their meeting with Patrick Kettle’s son. Her past experience had come back in an instant. Her confidence and her strategies—none of it had ever truly been gone. Part of her had worried that she would fumble the negotiations, that it had been too long since she had talked to a potential client. But that part of her was still there inside of her. It had never died, it had only been sleeping.

Now it was awake again. Her fears and concerns remained, but her mind was focused. She had a job.

“What now?” Vexxer said.

Therazine stared across the street at the storm drain. She waited a few minutes, watching for misshapen legs to start probing the night air once again.

“We get to work.”

TIME AWASH WITH BLOOD-- Chapter Fifteen, Part One

A hoarse scream came from outside. It was short, and muffled by the driving rain against the window. But close enough that it caught Therazine’s attention.

“Mr. Kettle will see you now,” the woman behind the desk said. She was thin and wore a dark checkered suit coat. Her straw-like hair was done up behind her head unevenly, falling across her sunken eyes in careless strands. She kept her face down and feigned focus on her calendars. But her eyes kept shifting up to the hulking Javadoan in front of her desk.

“Thank you,” Vexxer said with a nod.

Therazine frowned. Mr. Kettle. Maddy had set them up a meeting with the Deputy Administrator, or so she had believed. But a man like Patrick Kettle wouldn’t allow his secretary to refer to him by anything other than his coveted title. They were meeting with somebody else. She followed Vexxer through the door and into a dingy little room.

The office was well-furnished, and well-worn. A black steel desk dominated the center of the room, accompanied by two satelite chairs with their backs to the door. A single lamp with a blue shade illuminated the place. Three arched windows occupied the east wall of the room. The blinds were drawn on all but one, filtering out the hazy brown glow from the streetlights and casting striped shadows across the floor.

A man stood at the window whose blinds weren’t pulled. He was wide-shouldered, pudgy. Young but with features that would look at place on an aged man. His cheekbones and chin were well-defined, his mouth framed by a thin goatee. His hair looked wet—Therazine’s eye immediately picked out the small green jar of pomade resting on one of the bookshelves.

Smoke rose in a thin column from the cigar between the man’s fingers. He didn’t look up as Vexxer shut the door to the office. He stood there in silence and watched the thick rain fall on the glass. Then he took a long drag and turned to them.

“The Stiletto,” he said. He smiled. It was ugly despite his perfect teeth. He gestured and ash fell from the cigar’s tip. “Please. Sit.”

Therazine lowered herself into one of the iron frame chairs. Vexxer followed beside her. The man took another drag before moving around the desk to sit in the high-backed leather chair across from them.

Therazine’s eyes flitted around the room. Portraits of men with similar phenotypes hung on the wall behind the desk amidst plaques commemorating athletic achievement or civil service. The west wall was lined with filing cabinets and shelves of academic texts with dark covers—Finer Accounting, Atlas of Kalastra, Veinkov’s Tribunes, etc. The light from the undrawn window illuminated a statue of a busty woman holding an apple on a pedestal in the corner. A goddess of another culture, no doubt made of some alien stone.

Such obvious proved Therazine’s suspicions. This man was nobody. She let out a short laugh.

The man frowned. “Something funny?”

Therazine locked her eye on him. The man leaned forward on his elbows with his fingers steepled, almost mimicking perfectly one of the portraits behind him.

“Where’s your father?” she said.

“Excuse me? Who—”

“You’re not him. I asked for a meeting Patrick Kettle, not his son.”

The man leaned back. “You haven’t earned talking to the Deputy Administrator. He is too busy for someone like you. You get to talk to me.”

Therazine’s eyebrows went up. Someone like you? Didn’t he know who she was? Didn’t his family ask for her specifically?

“My name is Chestin Kettle,” the man said, his grin returning. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and knocked its ash onto the desk. “First son of Deputy Administrator Kettle and President of the Corbie Club. It was I who called you here, and I who you shall speak to. Now, tell me. Are you the Therazine? The Archblade?”

“I only speak with clients. Unless your father is here, our conversation is over.”

“Wasn’t my father that contacted you.”

“Wasn’t you that contacted me.”

Chestin smirked. “True. We have a mutual acquaintance. I am the man that Miss Madeline sent you to. This is my father’s business, but I am who you will be working with. Do you understand, blondie?”

Therazine breathed in deep through her nose. “You speak for your father. And execute his will?”

“I can’t share with you the specifics. The Kettle’s business is complicated, honey. Can’t risk you—”

“Just tell me yes.”

Chestin twirled the cigar once in his fingers, and then replaced it between his teeth. “On this matter, yes. Yes, I do.”

Therazine sighed. “Alright, then. Let’s talk business. You have a problem and you need it taken care of.”

“Ah! Shh, shh!” Chestin stood upright waving his hands. He continued to make shushing noises until he was sure that Therazine would no longer speak. He looked around the room, into the dark corners and back and forth to the windows. He swallowed, held his breath. A single clock ticked away on one of the shelves. Quietly he walked over to the windows and peered out of them. The rain beat hard on the glass, obscuring anything he could possibly see outside. He stood there for a moment, just staring at nothing and listening to the seconds tick by. Then he ran his finger along the black slime that had accumulated on the windowsill and lifted it to his face.

“Arna!” he shouted.

Within a heartbeat the secretary was in the doorway. She stood pencil straight, holding a ledger under one arm.

“Yes, Mr. Kettle?”

“The window’s leaking again, honey. Run out to Brabjur’s and pick up some sealant.”

“Brabjur’s?”

“Yes, Arna. Brabjur’s.”

“But, Mr. Kettle. That’s on the other side of the wharf. It’ll take me hours to get a cab there and back.”

Chestin nodded. “Brabjur’s is the only place that sells the strong stuff. It’s worth the journey.”

“Sir, shouldn’t I—”

“Sweetie,” Chestin said, his gaze going hard and his voice dropping. “Get going.”

Arna stood in the doorway for a moment longer. Then she nodded and closed the door to the office. Chestin watched the dark door silently. He waited until he heard the sound of the elevator down the hall chiming, and then he returned to his desk.

“Okay,” he said, picking up the cigar he had dropped. “Now. Where were we?”

“Trouble with trusting your staff?”

Chestin grunted. “Like I said. You don’t understand how business works, blondie. Just keep the talk to the topic at hand and don’t hurt yourself trying to think about me and my staff.”

Therazine blinked, breathed in again. She looked at Vexxer. He sat with his arms crossed, his face impassive. He was at her side like a gun ready to be drawn.

She returned her gaze to the fat man behind the desk. “You need to kill someone for you. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Chestin said. “An indelicate way to put it, but yes. She tell you who?”

“Anton Carlaca. Former lieutenant with the Constabulary. Commuinty organizer. Competition for your father’s seat.”

“Alright. Yes. Yes, okay. You do understand. Good.”

They stared at each other for a moment, the clock filling the time between.

“Is that something that… you can do?”

“Yes,” Therazine said.

“Good. Excellent. I have to say, it’s been some years since I’ve heard rumors of your handiwork on the streets. A long time. There are no more horror stories. It’s all aged into legend. You’re still as… efficient, as you used to be?”

Therazine frowned. This piece of shit was going to try and haggle with her.

“Let’s discuss my fee.”

“Hold on,” Chestin said. “I want to… gauge what I’d be paying for. Educate me, darling. How much of those old horror stories is truth, and how much is simply what mothers whisper to their kids to keep them straight?”

Therazine closed her eyes and tried to induce the Calm. Vexxer made a noise next to her. She opened her eyes to see his head swiveling as he took in the room.

“The decor’s different,” he said. “From when we here last, I mean.”

Chestin cocked his head. “What?”

“I liked what Trenton Kettle had done with the place better. Less clutter, more art.” He motioned behind Chestin. “The same portraits, of course, but less of a focus on them. Had them spread across the room.”

“What are you talking about?” Chestin took out his cigar and set it on the table. “You’ve never been in here before.”

“Been a while,” Vexxer said. “Eleven years, or so. He had the place looking nicer. Don’t you agree, Thera?”

Therazine looked around. “Yeah. I think he actually read some of those books, too. He was an intellectual, that man.”

“Uncle Trent never dealed with assassins,” Chestin said. “He was clean. Kept his fingers out of the dirtier side of the business, Aether spare his soul.”

“He was clean,” Therazine said. “Very kind man. Very cordial. He kept a yellow cat. It slept in that corner, under a fern.”

Chestin’s gaze followed where she was pointing—into the corner with the statue of the goddess with the apple. When he returned to her his eyes were wide and his mouth hung slightly open. Therazine lifted her right hand and flexed her fingers, feeling the leather stretch and groan.

“Are you familiar with the Zanzonech sump toad?” she said.

Chestin said nothing.

“It’s a small, ugly animal. Lives in the grave bogs of Nekrisfaira. It sweats a compound called veloximorticine. To everything but the sump toad it is instantly lethal. Just a milliliter  is enough to induce immediate cardiac arrest in an adult man. And then it just disolves into the blood. Indistinguishable from a heart attack.”

Chestin blinked slowly. His lips parted a few times before speaking. “You…”

Therazine met his eyes. “Listen, Mr. Kettle. You are a waste of my time. My purpose is so far beyond you that even being in this room for any reason other than to kill you is an insult to me. You are nothing but a barely perceptable obstacle on my path. The moment I am done here I will forget your face forever. I have killed kings and heroes. The fact that I am willing to do your petty wetwork is such an astronomical privelage, and you don’t even recognize it. Your mere existence disgusts me.”

Chestin blabbered something unintelligible, and then vomited out his trump card.

“There’s… there’s a price on your head. I could just—”

“If I thought for a moment that you would turn me in you’d have been dead before I entered the room. Shut yourself up and listen to my price, then agree to it.”

Chestin sat still. He bit his lip, and then nodded.

“I do not want money from you. I don’t want land, or drugs, or anything else that you might deem important. I want an audience with the Magistrate of West Celedin. Alone, and secluded. Private. He cannot have any bodyguards or attaches with him. The meeting will be at a place of my choosing, at a time of my choosing.”

“What? Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. That is my fee.”

“You can’t—I can’t set the Magistrate up with an assassin.”

“I won’t kill him. If I was going to, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

“The Magistrate won’t go for this.”

“He will if your father cashes in the favors that the Magistrate owes him.”

Chestin sat upright. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If you agree to this, Anton Carlaca will be dead within 48 hours.”

Chestin rapped his knuckles on the desk. He breathed in and out of his nose, staring at Therazine. She waited.

“Let’s say I agree to this,” Chestin said. “You can guarantee that Carlaca’s death will be… newsworthy?”

“I do.”

“I mean like big headlines. With pictures they can’t show on the front page.”

“Whatever you need it to be.”

“And it can’t be traced back to the Corbie Club. My father can’t be tied up in this.”

“Mr. Kettle, if you insult me again I will see to it that Wallace MonDozer is not the only man who has a contract on me for butchering his son.”

Another scream outside, muffled by the rain. Chestin Kettle jumped. When he looked back at Therazine he was breathing heavily.

“We don’t have all day,” Vexxer said.

“Alright,” Chestin said. He nodded rapidly before sitting back down. “Okay. You have a deal, Stiletto.”

“Do not call me that.”

Chestin swallowed. “You have deal, then. Therazine.”

“Good,” Therazine stood up, and Chestin leaned back. “Contact Madeline Rhines when you hear of Carlaca’s passing. She’ll tell you where to send the Magistrate.”

TIME AWASH WITH BLOOD-- Chapter Fourteen

“Good morning, Elder Scribe.”

Primio looked up from his desk. His neck chastised him for the sudden motion. Beside him stood a fat monk in the traditional Prevalistic blue robes, holding a plastic tray. Primio hadn’t heard the door to the basement open, nor the footsteps as the monk approached. His focus had been absolute.

“Good morning, Brother Andus.” Primio’s voice was a cracking whisper. He cleared his throat and licked his dry lips.

The monk smiled. “Breakfast for you. Brother Kellin found hedgeboar at the market, and so Medra made bacon.”

Primio grinned. “I’m not sure I’ve the fortitude for bacon these days, brother. But I appreciate the gesture.”

Brother Andus chuckled and went to set the tray down on the desk. In the candlelight he saw that the desk was covered in sheets of paper. Conscious of the importance of the Elder Scribe’s archiving, he gently picked up a few of the water-damaged sheets to make room for the tray.

“Leave that be, please,” Primio said.

The monk blinked, and looked at the papers in his hand.

“Department of Translocation transcripts?”

Primio nodded, and extended his hand. Brother Andus returned the pages.

“Rector Eagen said you were archiving Frimmian-era works.”

“I am.”

“How do these transcripts relate?”

“They do not. Thank you for breakfast, Brother Andus. I’ll return my dirties to the kitchen once I’m finished.”

Brother Andus blinked, and then smiled again. “No, Elder Scribe. Just leave them beside your desk. I’ll be back to pick them up in an hour or so.”

“Thank you, brother. But give me three hours—I am lost in research.”

“Of course. But I would suggest that you try the bacon before it gets cold. Trust me on that.”

“I will do my best. Good day, Brother Andus.”

The monk bowed, and turned to leave.

Something heavy clapped the stone floor in the darkness of the shelves beyond the light of the candle.

“What was that?” Brother Andus asked.

“It sounded like an old book falling. Pay it no mind, brother. I’ll recover it when I stand up to stretch.”

“Nonsense. I’ll go and get it.”

“It is just a book. Do not worry yourself.”

“Never have I heard a scribe so cavalier about the preservation of the abbey’s tomes.” Brother Andus grinned and shook his head. “You must be quite lost in your work, indeed.” He stepped away from the desk.

Primio shot out a hand and grabbed the monk’s robe with his skeletal fingers.

“Leave it be, Brother Andus.”

“Elder Scribe, what are you—”

“Leave it be.” Primio’s voice was quiet, almost pleading. “Just return to your duties. Please.”

Brother Andus frowned. He stared into the old man’s eyes for a moment, as if wondering to challenge him or not. Primio did not release his frail grip on the monk’s robes.

“Is everything alright, Elder Scribe?”

“Yes. Just, please. Leave me to my work. I do not wish to lose focus, and every second that you are hear drags me further from the light of discovery.”

“If you insist.”

“I do.”

“As you wish, Elder Scribe. I’ll return in three hours.”

Primo let go. Brother Andus straightened his robes and stood still for a moment before turning towards the stairs. In thirty seconds he had ascended and shut the door to the basement behind him.

Primio leaned back, feeling his spine crack. His heart was beating wildly. He breathed in deep, closed his eyes, attempting to calm himself down and let his fear run its course.

“Wise,” came Rambolt’s voice in the dark.

Primio placed a hand on his chest, waited for his heart to slow down before speaking. “You would have killed him.”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t have hesitated.”

“No. I can’t be found here.”

Primio pressed his teeth together and looked at the platter that Brother Andus had left on his desk. The bacon still steamed. He had no appetite. He briefly thought about asking Rambolt if he planned on killing him once he was finished with the work, but he was certain that that was already decided. Knowing wouldn’t change that eventuality.

“What have you found?”

Primio felt the wrinkled edges of the pages in his hands.

“I need more information. Older transcripts, from years past.”

“You have what you need.”

“This is a single data point. A week’s worth of names. I have no way of determining when these people last passed through the aperture. I need more information.”

“Those names are all that you need. One of them is the source of the Schism, and you will discover who.”

“If you are implying that I should feel which one is your culprit, then I apologize, Bereaver. I do not possess the divine insight that you do.”

Primio heard a single footstep, and then silence. He waited and wondered how Rambolt would process that last remark. He did not turn around, but he braced himself for the feeling of cold steel sliding through his neck. It never came.

Primio sighed, and his stomach rumbled. Eleven hours had passed since Rambolt had shattered the sanctuary of his research. He had gone through the transcript innumerable times, eliminated impossibilities and highlighted unlikely candidates. Prominent families, licensed Celedinian interworld transporters, itinerant preachers, employees of the hub itself…

“What have you found?”

“Nothing.”

Another footstep.

“Brother Rambolt, if this is truly something that I must accomplish, then I need more information. The volumes held here only help us so much. Most everything here is from pre-expansion, anyway. I am a historian.”

“No, you are a recalcitrant old man who is refusing to assist a Bereaver. I’m sure you understand the consequences for heresy such as this.”

At that Primio turned around. Rambolt was in the darkness, just beyond the orange globe of light. The blue of his robes was faintly visible—his pale, shadowed face like that of a ghost.

“Brother Rambolt, you are fumbling in the dark.”

“Excuse me?”

“I know you—”

“No, you do not.”

“I know who you were, and you were no detective. You’ve always had a penchant for moving about unseen and being where you shouldn’t be, but never have you tackled anything like this. You do not know how to find a person that you do not know. You are desperately grasping at anything. This transcript will not show you who you seek.”

Rambolt stepped forward, his eyes wide.

“That name is on there, Primio. You will find it.”

“I can’t. This is as much as I can do.”

“No.”

“It is. With the information I have, I can find no more. The sooner you accept that, the sooner—”

“No.” Rambolt marched forward and grabbed Primio’s shoulder. His face was taught in a grimace. “That name is there. She is there, and you will find her.”

Primio grunted. “It might be there, but I have no way of knowing.”

“Then what is all this?” Rambolt ripped the pages from his hand. “These scribbles? These marks?”

“I’ve narrowed it, but not—”

“How many?”

“What?”

“How many are left?”

“Six.” Primio swallowed. His throat was dry, and stung him like a scorpion. “Six women. But I cannot narrow it further without—”

“This is enough.” Rambolt let go of Primio and held the sheets in two hands. He stood there, studying the remaining names, flipping through the pages again and again.

Primio adjusted himself in his seat. His shoulder hurt. His back hurt. He watched Rambolt devour the names with an unblinking eagerness.

“I need to narrow it down.”

“This is enough,” Rambolt repeated.

“But you don’t know which of these women—”

“I don’t need to.”

Primio felt his stomach drop. “Brother Rambolt, only one of those people is… guilty.”

“Yes,” Rambolt said. “One of them threatens the very fabric of the Real. I have no time to waste.”

“I need to refine the list. You need to get me more information. The others have done nothing wrong.”

Rambolt looked up, disgust twisting his features. “Everyone has done wrong, Scribe.”

“Brother—”

“You have been shut up in this abbey for far too long.” Rambolt crushed the pages into a ball, stuffed them into the pocket of his robe. “This whole city is festering with sin. There isn’t a single soul here that is free of guilt.”

“No. You cannot be serious. What you are talking about is murder.”

“I am efficient. I am purifying. And I have what I need.”

Primio pushed his chair out, but his hunger and fatigue wouldn’t let him stand. He straightened himself as much as he could, heard his spine pop.

“Brother Rambolt, I can’t let you do this.”

Rambolt cocked his head. “No. But you won’t be able to stop me. Not at your age. Maybe when I was younger, when you were spry enough to bend those whores you admired so much over the cabinets in the great hall.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You always sweet-talked them. Even though you were paying them, even though they prbably hated your saggy, groping paws. You loved to whisper lewd things to them as you befouled this institution. Don’t you look at me that way, like I speak lies. Did you ever wonder why I avoided that desk in the front row during your lectures? I saw what you did to that red-headed one. Hiked up her skirt caked in gutter slime and—”

“Stop!” Primio shouted. His voice rattled, burned. “You don’t know what you’re—”

“Oh, but I do.” Rambolt turned fully to the Elder Scribe. “You sure did love to sweet talk them. That voice of yours. That syrupy, gossiping, damning voice of yours.”

Rambolt shot out a hand and grabbed Primio by the jaw. He slid two fingers into the old man’s mouth and hooked his teeth, pulling the jaw open. Primio grunted in surprise and bit down. Rambolt swore. With his other hand he grabbed hold of Primio’s upper jaw. He flattened his palm against the old man’s nose and yanked upwards. Primio screamed spittle across Rambolt’s face. He clawed at Rambolt’s arms with weak, twig-like fingers. Rambolt growled and struggled to hold the jaws apart. He let go for a moment and reached into Primio’s mouth, only to have the Elder Scribe clamp his teeth shut on Rambolt’s fingers. Rambolt swore again, let go briefly, and punched Primio in the face. The old man’s head swung back like a buoy on rough seas, and his screams devolved into a harsh moan. Rambolt spat, and then grabbed hold of the jaw again.

He yanked open Primio’s mouth. Something popped in the back of his throat, and the old man took up his screaming again. Every time Rambolt pried open the jaw and reached his fingers in to grab hold of the tongue, Primio would snap his teeth on his fingers again. Rambolt snarled, smacked Primio in the face twice with his open hand. The Elder Scribe spun and wheezed. Rambolt grabbed him by what little hair was left on his scalp and smashed his head into the desk.

Primio went silent except for his rapid, caustic breathing. Each breath was wet, like he was sick. Sewer plague? Rambolt grabbed the man’s jaw again and turned his face upward. There was no resistance this time as he pried open the man’s jaw and grabbed hold of his tongue with three fingers. He placed a hand on Primio’s face to gain leverage and yanked.

The Elder Scribe awakened and screamed again, but the tongue did not come free. The wet speech organ wriggled out of his grasp and Primio’s teeth claimed a fingernail. Rambolt howled and retreated his hand. Primio was leaning back over the desk, groaning and gargling, with the Bereaver’s blood in his mouth.

Again Rambolt slammed Primio’s head onto the desk. This time he placed his whole hand across the Elder Scribe’s eyes and forced the head down. Then he drew his rapier. He swatted back the one arm that Primio was weakly trying to resist him with, and hovered the tip of the sword above the gasping mouth. The blade was three feet long—Rambolt had to extend his arm wholly to get it in the right spot. With two fingers he pried open Primio’s mouth. He moved the sword forward just slightly and split open the Elder Scribe’s top lip. Rambolt cursed in a throaty roar, and then Primio jerked his head. The tip of the blade dug into the gums and ripped three teeth free from their roots. Primio’s screams became wet and gargled as his mouth filled with blood. Rambolt smashed his head back again to try and silence him, to stop the screaming, to give him a moment’s peace so he could just cleaning remove the bastard’s tongue. But pain and fear were overwhelming Primio rapidly and he began gnashing his remaining blood-soaked teeth on the blade, ripping apart his own cheeks and turning Rambolt’s slick fingers into hamburger.

Rambolt pulled back again, removed the sword. Then he went back in and tried to pry open the mouth only to have the old man crush his fingers again. Rambolt howled once more, and then put weight into his rapier and ran it through Primio’s skull.

The blade dug into the wood of the desk and Primio went still.

Rambolt Eells stared, heaving and leaning over the desk. Primio was dead, with his tongue still firmly in his head. Rambolt’s lip trembled. He grasped Primio’s neck and pulled his sword free, a motion that was accompanied by a spurt of blood and the sound of sucking water. He stepped back and Primio’s body slid off down into the darkness below the light of the desk.

Rambolt stood there in silence. With shaking fingers he patted his pocket, felt the bulge where the crumpled papers waited. Everyone has done wrong, Scribe. He sheathed his glistening rapier and marched for the stairs.