Skate looked to the sky, which was clear and vibrant orange in the sunset for the first time in weeks. The snow was thick on the ground, but the traffic had helped to melt it along the paved road. Above them, unseen, Rattle kept pace with their progress. They had agreed it was best for the creature not to be seen unless absolutely necessary, given its upsetting appearance.
It was thanks to its strange connection to the gem in the statue that they knew where they should go; as a test, they had tried touching it with the gemstone again, and Rattle had gone south. They shook it out of its strange trance and tried two more times with identical results. Wherever Belamy was, it was somewhere to the south of the city of Caribol. Skate had only a dim idea of the geography of the surrounding lands, but she was fairly sure there was some great untamed forest to the south. Did he put his soul tether there, away from everyone? It seemed dangerous, since wild animals roamed the woods, but it was possible he’d protected it with magic. It was equally possible that the tether wasn’t in the woods at all, and lay somewhere farther south, or that the woods functioned as a waypoint for the direction-giving magic in the statue (and by extension, Rattle), and they’d take off in an entirely new direction soon.
Skate wasn’t worried. They’d get to their destination in the end. And in the meantime, she would learn something precious, even more precious than words written plainly on a page. In her bag, she held a particular yellow book that Petre had suggested she take.
She smiled at the setting sun, relishing the cold wind that blew around her. It did not feel like an attack or an irritation. It felt like the promise of an adventure.
In Belamy’s absence, Petre had promised to teach her magic.
Epilogue
In which a mess is cleaned up, and a mess is made.
The sun, of course, was setting inside the city as well. A pair of Guardsmen was standing watch over a gaggle of Keepers cleaning up the shops and grounds around the small blasted courtyard in the Baron’s district. The fires started by the lightning barrage had not spread; the treated wood had done its work properly. Near the center of the courtyard, leaning against a sturdy tree, one of the Guardsmen, a portly fellow named Harald, was badgering his fellow about details of the events that had so scandalized the district earlier in the day.
“Come on, you were ’ere,” he said, with a languorous wave at nothing in particular. “Just about th’ only one, I’d wager.” He guffawed and slapped the other man on the back with a customary overabundance of enthusiasm.
The other man, a stringy chap named Aigel (Egg, to his friends), winced and shrugged off the hand. “Oy, watch it.” Egg winced again, and brought a hand up to his swollen jaw, purple from the blow he’d received earlier. “I already told you, there weren’t nothing to tell. I got knocked out before most anything happened, and I weren’t looking when the fires broke out. I was keeping people back from it all.”
“You’re telling me you got nothing to say abou’ tha’?” Harald pointed with a sausage-like digit toward the black crater near the center of the courtyard. “You managed to sleep through whatever did it?”
“It wasn’t sleep, was it? Ahhh…” Egg had clenched his jaw in irritation, and more pain shot through him. “I was hit. Hard, by one of the biggest blokes you ever saw. Weird, too. I was looking right at him, but I never seen him move before it was too late.” He idly rubbed his jaw. “Never seen a guy that size move that fast, neither.”
“Heh,” Harald said, hitching up the heavy belt that was sagging below his belly line, “you’d be surprised by what a large fella can do in a pinch. We’re a surprisin’ lot, eh?”
Egg rolled his eyes.
When Harald’s laughing died down, he cleared his throat. He tensed up a bit and lowered his tones. “So, you don’t know anythin’ about who’s in the pit?”
Egg shook his head and walked over to the crater. Harald followed with slow and heavy steps. The thinner man crouched at the edge of the crater, a place where the earth seemed to have been scooped away by a shallow but immense spoon. Within was nothing but charred black dirt and two skeletal sets of remains. One set—the one opposite from where Egg was crouched—was a crumpled mess of bones. It looked like someone had emptied the contents of an ossuary with all the care and respect one might have when emptying a chamber pot, and then set it on fire.
The closer set of remains was much more organized. Someone with his back to the center of the charred crater had been blasted outward. The dead man was lying on what had been his stomach, arms out wide like a bird taking flight. The skull was turned sideways, half-buried into the blackened dirt. The mouth was open in a silent scream, trying to swallow the earth closing in on its face.
“I don’t mind telling yeh, Egg, this is abou’ th’ worst thing I ever seen. Gruesome, it is.”
There was a patch on the man’s back where his skin had not burned, despite the fact that his back had borne the brunt of whatever fiery end he’d met. On this patch of skin between the shoulder blades was a tattoo; in the waning light and with their hesitation to get near the bodies, they hadn’t looked too closely at it. They knew, at least, that it was a feather design.
“Yeah. Gruesome and strange. The lieutenant is bringin’ in some snoop-for-hire to try to figure this out. Says the rich people got spooked by the craziness.”
“Hmph.” Harald crossed his arms and glowered at the pit. “Magic did this, no question. Far’s I’m concerned, we’d be a lot better off if they just outlawed wizards ’n’ such. Or hired more of ’em for the Guard. Or both.” He cleared his sinuses and spit heavily on the ground nearby. “Anythin’ that can do somethin’ like this is too dangerous, it is.”
“Not gonna happen, mate,” Egg said, standing up and grimacing as the rush of blood hit his head. He could feel one of his teeth grinding against its fellows. “Most of the ones we know about live right here in the big job; ain’t no way they’ll let the Baron outlaw magic. Augh, this toof!” In a desperate bid to rid himself of the pain, he’d reached into his mouth and found the offending molar. It wiggled freely at his touch. There was nothing much connecting it to anything anymore. He pulled, and out it came, though it split in two in his palm. “You think a priest’ll put this back in?” He spat—as he’d expected, the saliva was an upsetting shade of red—and turned the split tooth over in his palm.
“Yeah, if you’re gonna make a ‘donation’ to the poor box, I’m sure.” Harald looked around and leaned toward Egg. “Listen, let’s go see now? They don’t need us ’ere, and that’ll only get worse the longer yeh stay away from the healers.”
Egg dithered, but gave in when the throbbing in his head returned. “Yeah, let’s go.” The two Guards left their post.
If the Guards had stayed, they would have seen the tattoo on the dead man’s back turn a deep red and felt the pull of the wind toward the body. If Egg had paid attention to where his spit had flown, he’d have felt a pang of guilt: it had landed on the nearby dead man’s open mouth. Egg was not a very pious man, but he was superstitious. He would have considered the offense to the dead a great portent of ill luck. Further, if the light had been better and the two had been less skittish about approaching the body, they might have noticed something even more upsetting about the nearby corpse than his undamaged and once-again-dormant tattoo: an elongated incisor, from which a drop of Egg’s bloody saliva now hung.