016

Frank closed his eyes to blot out the sight of the beast beneath the waves (“it is not under the waves,” Thune had warned, “it is the waves”), and when he opened them again the street had returned to normal. He felt the soft mud beneath his sandaled feet, the tug of the salty breeze on his cloak, and the weight of all those pointed stares, hungry for violence.

“So, what’s it gonna be?” the bandit leader shouted. “The silver or the sword?”

He thinks you’re weak, marine. Why aren’t you stomping him flatter than piss on a plate?

The bandit leader’s shorn ears and pockmarked skin were a painful sight, but Frank told himself the face was just a distraction.

Look past it, forget the deformities and focus on the eyes. That’s where his weakness would be hiding, same as everyone else.

The sudden urge to dive into those eyes gnawed at Frank now, stronger than any craving he’d ever experienced, worse than cigarettes or booze or even cocaine. Fear was buried under those pupils, ripe for the picking, the ultimate force multiplier. It wouldn’t take much to get to it either. Just a little nudge of the Allflesh, a small nip of pain at his navel, a tiny offering.

Nothing in life is free.

Psionic Reserve: 85/100

But standing in the middle of the street, under a green Argosian sky, with twenty armed men ready to kill him, Frank did something he hadn’t been able to do in years.

He told himself no.

It was a simple act but a difficult one.

It was for his own good. The Allflesh was a stalking predator, if Thune was to be believed, waiting in the shadows for its prey to grow weak and careless. It wanted nothing so much as for him to use his powers. And that was exactly why he couldn’t.

No, he’d just have to do this the hard way, with brute strength and raw speed.

It wasn’t like he was completely powerless. Each kill would still put fear into the hearts of his enemies; that was a technique that didn’t cost him anything. They would break and run then, some at least, and Kelmar would be there to help him mop up the rest. It wouldn’t be an easy fight, but then, was anything on Argos ever easy?

He reached down to the brass key tucked into his belt, giving it a quick rub for luck. The moment he touched it though, something shifted. Not in the world, but in his mind. A memory that didn’t belong to him surfaced, too sharp, too sudden, like brain freeze.

A back alley. A cold night. The smell of blisterfruit and pitch smoke. A firelit tavern. Faces around a table, dice and drinks, laughter bubbling like stream water over rocks.

And one of those faces – older now, but unmistakable – stood before him.

“I know you,” Frank said calmly. “You're Darric. From the Free Company of Ywixe.”

“What did you say?” The bandit captain froze, his bronze dagger half-raised, caught between threat and uncertainty.

“You did time in the Salt Cells under Spawnport.” Frank took a step forward, speaking slowly, as if discovering each word for the first time, just as it passed his lips. “Three months in pitch-dark with the rest of the Company after that mercenary job for that fat raja went tits up.”

The bandit captain started to speak but then stopped, his face slack and uncomprehending.

“You made your first kill with a copper-handled knife. Told me you gave it a name. Not a woman’s name, though. You named it after your brother, Davik. You’re still carrying it now, aren’t you?”

“How did you know that? You must be reading my mind.”

“We both know that’s not possible.” Frank pointed to a burned-out building in the middle distance, where a legless beggar was crouched by the blacked remnants of a mudbrick wall. “Lightfoot Lem there has a touch of the weird, don’t he? Sure, he’s no master, but he’s good enough to keep people from a taking a look-see inside his boss’s head. Good for negotiations, you always used to say. Worth his weight in goose livers.”

Lem scurried around the wall to hide, running on his arms faster than some men ran on their legs.

“Do you remember that night at the Hollow?” Frank continued. “You wore a wolfksin coat. Said you’d bet your soul you could outdrink Old Sedge. And you did. Barely.” Frank flashed a faraway smile. “You lost a ring that night too. Gold, set with a bit of coral. You dropped it down the jakes and cursed the gods for an hour, saying they cheated you.”

Darric’s mouth worked soundlessly. “I don’t –”

“You remember, don’t you?” Frank said. “Tell me, is your shoulder still stiff when it rains? You broke it falling off that balcony trying to impress the twins. I carried you over to that sawbones on Ferryman’s Hill, after everyone else had left you for dead. He never did set it right, did he?”

Darric rolled his shoulder reflexively, all the while staring at Frank. Around him, the others had stopped advancing. The bowmen at their windows held still, suddenly uncertain.

“It can’t be you.”

“Who else?” Frank said.

“You’re dead,” Darric whispered. “You left for the scrublands. Said you had a map to a dungeon, was filled with treasure. You just had to make it past the Copper Men tribes to find it. You never came back.”

“Maybe,” Frank said softly. “Or maybe I came back different.”

“No, I don’t believe it.” Darric looked like he was about to vomit.

“And you,” Frank nodded to the man with the scarred leg. “Fabbrus. That's your name, right? You ran with a gang of pickpockets out of Low Dyrak. Your girl was Helja. Fat ass, pretty smile, a laugh like she’d swallowed quicksilver. You used to sneak her down to the old vinegar works. Thought no one knew. She was sleeping with Brannick, too. Your second. Hell, she used to wear both your rings."

Fabbrus didn’t answer, but the tension in his body shifted, just a degree.

“And you there,” Frank pointed up the street to the man holding the kopis, a crook backed old-timer with arms thick as a girl’s waist, “you lost a son in the spill at Rustgate. Folks down at the Slaughtered Lamb spent a week helping you look for the body. You spread his ashes on the racing field, right at the first bloom of Spring.”

“Who are you really?” Darric said.

Frank turned to meet his gaze. “Just someone who remembers.”

Another silence. Darric turned to his men and nodded curtly. The tension in the air snapped like a bowstring.

“No toll today,” he muttered. “Let them pass.”

Frank pulled his cloak tight and made his way up the street, Kelmar at his heels.

“You know these guys?” he whispered.

Frank shook his head. “Never met them before.”

“How’d you know all that stuff about them?”

“I was there when it happened.”

***

“Who is this Iliquith?” Frank said. “A sorcerer?”

They had passed from the deep slums into the Drowned City, a sunken arcade of collapsing porticos and vine-choked colonnades that might once have formed a civic quarter, before the earth had tried to reclaim it. The buildings here were ancient but not abandoned. Stained with rust and smoke, repainted and resettled and repurposed so many times they bore no single identity.

“You shouldn’t accuse someone of being a sorcerer in public, you might get them killed,” Kelmar held his cloak as he waded through a coppery puddle, splashing water that rainbowed like oil in the light of the afternoon sun. “And to answer your question, he’s a scholar, an expert in dead languages.”

The trek to Iliquith’s manor was as tense as the standoff. Frank’s interaction with the bandits had clearly disturbed Kelmar. His rhythm seemed off, his bouncing gate just a bit slower, more cautious. And where he’d been happy to lead before, now he cast frequent glances over his shoulder, watching Frank closely.

Kelmar was nothing if not a professional though. They had a job to do, and he was going to see it done.

“The princess keeps strange company,” Frank said.

Kelmar snorted, something whistling behind his fake nose. “Talking about yourself?”

“I guess.”

“The princess figures if anyone can read this book, it’s got to be Iliquith. If he can decipher the ritual, and what kind of offering needs to be made, nothing will keep us out of the spire.”

At the end of the lane, the street widened into a round plaza built around a dry fountain. The fountain’s centerpiece was a bronze statue of a man shedding his skin like a cloak, revealing a luminous skeleton beneath. The skeletal parts seemed to be made of real bone, set directly into the bronze and coated with a shimmering glaze. A gull had built its nest in the statue’s clavicle, and someone had hung prayer ribbons from its ribs.

Beyond the fountain rose the manor itself, half-buried in a copse of ancient parasol pines, their bark the color of dried blood and twisted like arthritic fingers. At first glance, it bore the tranquil symmetry of a classical Roman villa, columned porticos, a red-tiled roof green with lichen, and a central peristyle garden open to the sky. Pale stone gleamed with the quiet dignity of forgotten marble, and frescoes, flaking with age, traced scenes from histories no one remembered.

But the longer Frank looked, the more that symmetry betrayed itself. The columns were not all of the same order; some fluted, others smooth, one carved with a spiraling script that shifted when unobserved. A bronze sundial in the garden cast no shadow at all, though the sun hung high and bright.

The air within the atrium carried the faint tang of ozone, like the smell of a lightning strike, and vines crawled the walls, their leaves glossy and unnaturally still, as though held in place by something more than roots.

“He lives here by himself?” Frank asked.

“Solitude is necessary for his kind of work,” Kelmar said. “Or so he told me once. The guy’s a bit touched. But not dangerous. Smarter than anyone you’ll ever meet. Used to be an advisor to the chief haruspex until some scandal about the proper use of corpses nearly got him hanged.”

“Is that a joke?”

Kelmar didn’t answer.

The entry hall was open, its massive wooden doors carved with an anatomical relief of different men flayed into layers: skin, muscle, tendon, nerve. Eyes peered out from the carved sockets, real ones it seemed, preserved in amber. Frank noticed the first image was of a Copper Man, stopped and simian. He recognized the distinct eyes of the Brass Men next. He could only guess at the others.

“Iliquith,” Kelmar called out. “I bring word from Princess Sazhra.”

No answer.

They found him in the study, slumped over his desk, a rangy man tanned and handsome with two thumbs on each hand. His robes were soaked with blood, which had pooled on the floor in a wide arc and dried like a sunburst. His throat had been slit cleanly, the wound almost surgical.

“This is bad,” Kelmar said.

“It usually is when a guy gets his throat opened up.”

“No, I mean the blade.”

The desk was cluttered with scrolls and parchment, scattered pages of vellum and diagrams drawn in colored inks. At the center of it all was a knife, a slender thing with an ivory handle carved in the shape of a twin-headed gorgon. It had four tiny coins for eyes, each coin polished to a shine and red as a risen sun.

“That’s guild steel,” Kelmar said. “This is Red Coin business.”

“What do you think they came for?” Frank said, glancing down at the blood-stained papers.

Kelmar shook his head. “They left the knife. That means this wasn’t a robbery. This was a warning.”