Playing a Part – 15.z
Author: Wildbow

Playing a Part – 15.z | Pale

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I am someone’s errand runner, a messenger, a stalker.

The request came from far away, a frequency communicated from water to liquid.

Gilkey manifested.  He had to be careful when he relaxed, because relaxing meant no longer holding a form, and when he wasn’t holding a form, he was a dangerous presence.  He covered the walls, soaked into the furniture, and pooled on the ground, around a rusted-out barrel that had been dragged to the center of the room.  In the time he’d been resting, no less than nine rodents had died immediately on contact with the liquid, poison transmitted through flesh.  Seven of them had been stripped of hair and skin, while lipid layers had been left intact.  Translucent casings like that of an uncooked sausage, revealing crimson muscle and bone.  In one, unborn young had perished, visible in the belly.  One of the other two had collapsed on the inside, poison eating through veins and arteries and making it past the fatty layer, a little boneless mass, glossy, a deflated balloon in the shape of an animal, filled with rot.  The other had died too recently to be fully dissolved.

Shadow met moisture and sizzled like water droplets in hot oil.  He reached up out of the shadow and pulled the rodents down.  Fingers broke the shallow casing and the bodies of the rats quickly gave way, the poison running through the veins to flesh and organs.

He rose to a standing position, vague in form, and the darkness that had crept up to walls and ceiling pulled back like a trailing cloak following behind a walking figure.  It traveled from ceiling to the wall, down to the floor, then to him at the center of the room.  When it was done, he let his form settle.  Dark clothing, a hat, the apparent strands of hair.  The imprint of his Self was there, like the mouse in it lipid casing, the exterior appearance gone.  There was the shape of a head, of a body, the vague awareness of how to move, and a vague sense of the world.  He had an education but could remember no school, he knew how to talk but could remember no conversations, and he knew of practice, even if he didn’t know how he’d come to it.

His eyes opened.

He could keep no notes.  Anything he touched could be poison to another person, often mild, but that was the sort of business that could earn him enemies or disrupt things.  He could hold onto things to keep the poisoned material from finding its way to the hands of others, but eventually the toxins won out.  Even spirits could die, given enough exposure, and when that happened, the material would give out.

What use notes when they barely lasted fifteen minutes?

So he remembered.  He turned his mind toward codifying things.  A code for himself, mantras he repeated to keep his form solid or find his form more quickly.  Codes for behavior, routines so he’d make no mistakes.  Part of that was a system for where he could rest.  He limited himself to four hours at a time, unless it was an area he was certain humans wouldn’t reach, and he never returned to a location, out of concern that the alchemical poisons that ran through him might intensify.

A droplet of his being raced away from his foot, down to a vent in the corner of the floor, and from there it traveled along the outside of a pipe, across the street.  The outer details of his body were slowly pulled away as the poison continued to flow.

He only picked locations that were abandoned, scouted in advance to make sure nobody would show up without warning.  He would keep an eye on each space over the course of a week, and if there was any sign of activity in the time he was gone, he had to mentally cross it off his list.  Then he further limited it to places where there was graffiti and some tool he could use for drawing, or something he could use to make fire.

He’d set that fire in the barrel last night.  Now he reached inside, fluid arm extending down, at the same time the fluid continued to travel with pipes as a guide.  Burned wood worked for drawing.

The shape he drew on the ceiling was like a child’s drawing of a house, pointed roof, square body, but with an ‘x’ through it, a line stabbing down from the place the door would be, with two ‘teeth’ at the end.  Like a key.

If any space had the mark, he couldn’t rest there again.

It wasn’t sleep, so much as it was ceasing to make an effort.  The effort to hold together a body, the effort to stay alert, to navigate innocents, and to manage the tension that ran through him, with an incomplete identity.

He’d been called.  He shifted the mass at his center, feeling the Lord’s reaching power there, and she stirred that liquid again, creating a frequency.  It was as if she had her hand in his gut and she was signing, but there was no pain.

They were having a council meeting.  He was to call Avery, because the Lord couldn’t easily do so.

This was about Thea.  He was supposed to be ready to act if it came down to it.

He surged, his mass flowing along the trail he’d marked out.  A track of oily liquid left by a droplet that ran horizontally instead of vertically became a bulge of liquid, sometimes narrow enough to flow through gaps, other times nearly the mass of his full body.  He drew up the poison that was sinking into rock and material as he went, erasing the trail.

He only went seventy five percent of the way down the trail, before finding his way out, emerging.

His awareness of innocents let him weave and flow through spaces, emerging and opening his eyes only when nobody was in a position to look clearly at him.  But it cost, both in concentration and personal power.  Every person he evaded was a hundredth of a percent, but he had to dodge a large number of people.  The rodents he’d eaten had given him a burst of power, but that was spent in three minutes.  Rest didn’t recharge him, but it lowered the costs he had to pay to virtually nothing and let the karma of a Seal-respecting existence nourish him.  The four hours of rest were spent in another minute.

Deborah Cloutier had looked at him when he’d first come to Thunder Bay.  In ways, he resembled elementals, so her trained eye was good enough to get a general sense of him and where things stood with him.  He was a capital-S Self and an alchemically inseparable, unblended mass of poison and life that could fill that Self like water filling a jug.

The poisons were sufficient to poison spirits, elementals, echoes, people, and through these things, even objects.  Spirits of color would die and the object would be stained or bleached.  Spirits of form would perish and the hard would soften, the edges would become rounded.  Spirits of composition would give way, and what had been solid would crumble, with more surface area and lesser spirits divided among the chunks, dying far more easily.  It was a poison that could travel along connections and sicken those around the afflicted.  If practice was performed on him, his being would violently erupt, and there was a chance of that poison spreading along the connection between practice and the person behind it, sickening them in the same way.

More to the point, Deb had told him his Self was very resilient against poison but it wasn’t immune.  She’d guessed he had thirty years at the low end of the range and fifty years at the extreme end.  That had been two decades ago.

That was a small thing that wore at his reserves in an entirely different way.  He worked hard to exist in a fair way that wouldn’t make enemies or take lives, but that work gave him equilibrium, not progress.  Not legacy.

Only through this work he did would he possibly leave any sort of legacy.

People were out living lives.  A young dad with a thick beard and plaid shirt had two kids with him, one joyful and reaching for his beard, the other crying.  Gilkey watched the young man try to manage both, joking with the beard-puller.  His wife was sorting out the inside of the stroller.

He watched them for longer than necessary, watched the dad mock cry for the amusement of the beard puller, then turn to lay a hairy cheek on the crier’s head, bouncing the child.

The approaching attention of a man pushing a door open in the narrow alleyway made Gilkey move.  The man jumped at the shadow, but saw nothing else.

Gilkey, with the aid of a signal from the Lord, found Avery.  A shadow standing in the window of a vacant apartment, he watched.  His finger touched the base of the old windowframe and oozed out, and an ear formed in the ooze.

She was with a friend, who wore her hair in locs, with a black wool jacket that was heavier than the weather required, and a bag that was similarly massive, making her look smaller than she was.  Avery’s head turned his way as soon as he gave her his full attention, and it took her eyes only a second or two to find his location.

“What would you buy for yourself, and what would you buy for me?” Avery asked.  They were standing at the window of a thrift store.

“That I can see?”

Avery nodded.  “Sure.  Or anything that you could expect to see in the store.  We could go in after and see if we can find it.  Oh!  I like threes, so also, what would you buy someone you hate?  If they had to wear it?”

“Does it have to be a specific someone?  I don’t think there’s a specific someone I hate.”

“Doesn’t have to be.  It’s just for fun.”

“Okay.  Do you have a specific someone you hate?”

Avery, peering into the window, nodded.  “Yes.  A few someones.”

“Huh.  Didn’t expect that.  Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s okay.  Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.”

“Got it.  I was asking questions because I was procrastinating.  Now I feel bad.”

“Nah,” Avery said, shrugging.  She leaned against the wall by the big display window with gold letters on it.  She looked at Gilkey, and her hand moved, pointing.

Gilkey nodded in response to the hand gesture.

“Hmmm.  Let me think… I’ll answer first.”  Avery turned to her friend.  “For you, I think you could rock a black leather jacket.”

“Aren’t you vegetarian?”

“Yeah.  But that’s because meat is ick.  Switch flipped in my head one day, after an incident.  I’m fifty-fifty on leather and stuff.  Like, on the one hand, nah, but it’s also great aesthetics.  If it means using all the parts of the animal that get used, and if someone’s going to care for it for a long time, then maybe it’s okay?”

“Okay.  I’d skip it, then.  Since I still plan on growing.”

“Then a big sweater, most unique one they’ve got,” Avery said.  “Down to mid-thigh.  Dark green or dark purple.”

Avery’s phone rang.  Avery fished it out of her pocket.

“I like that.  I really like that.”

“New winter jacket that goes with some of my favorite clothes, for me, gotta figure out a good style.  And for the guy I hate?  Some really ugly glasses that look uncomfortable or have scratches in them.”

“I’m trying to imagine what sort of person that is now.”

“Tell me after?  Hello?”

She met Gilkey’s eyes.

“Council,” Gilkey said, even though she couldn’t hear.  He motioned for her to come.

“Is it an emergency?”  Avery asked, pausing, phone at her ear.

Gilkey didn’t move.

“An in thirty minutes thing?”

He remained still.

“Five minutes?”

“Aw!”  Her friend exclaimed.

“Now?” Avery tried.

Gilkey nodded.

“Damn it.  Okay.  Be right with you.”

“You have to go?” her friend asked.

“Sorry.  I did say it might happen.  I’m bummed out.”

“For the record, um, there’s a creepy doll in there with a face that looks way too adult, I’d give that to someone I hate.  I’d buy a bunch of tees.  And for you, I’m cheating since you hinted you want a coat, I’m imagining something that’s like… shearling or wool, but dyed or stamped with images of branches or… something naturey.  It’d be the sort of thing you buy cheap and risk ruining but if it works out it’d be cool.  Maybe that’s too over the top.  I go over the top.  It wouldn’t be a lot, just at the bottom, or on one side.”

“I like it,” Avery said.  “I wonder if I could ask my friend back in Kennet to do it.  She’s great at that stuff.”

“I guess we can’t go inside and see what’s there?”

“I gotta go.  I guess I’ll… see you tomorrow?”

Her friend nodded with emphasis.

“I don’t know how to-” Avery said, pausing.  “I had a weird moment, you know those videos on the web?  They’re these kindergarten classes, and the teachers greet each kid in the morning with the option of a wave, handshake, a high five, hmmm, fist bump, or hug?”

“Or a wiggly dance together.”

“It felt weird to just walk away, then I wasn’t sure what to do, and all those options, except the wiggly dance and the handshake ran through my head.”

“Handshake or random wiggle dance would be weird,” Avery’s friend said.

“I still don’t know what the right answer would be, but I like… this.  I really wish we could hang out more.  Sorry I’m busy.”

“Let’s hang out more and if I’m lucky you don’t have to go, but it sounded like you had to go now so… go.  I’ll give you a wave, how’s that?”

The friend raised a hand and gave a small wave.

Avery responded to it with a wave, then a flash of a wide smile, before jogging to the crosswalk to cross the street.  She was still smiling at the crosswalk as she glanced back at her friend, bouncing lightly on the spot like she was still in jogging mode.

That would take a second.  Gilkey watched the scene as Avery waited, then crossed.  The moment she was out of sight, the other girl turned and knocked her forehead lightly against the window a couple times.

“Hug, Nora, oatmeal-for-brains, the answer was hug,” the girl, Nora, muttered, her forehead resting against the glass.  “Or all of the above.  That’d be safer.  And fun.”

She knocked her forehead into the glass again.  A person in the store turned to look at her, and she straightened up, used the sleeve of her coat to wipe the window where her forehead had touched it, then hurried off, opposite direction to Avery.

Gilkey was watching the scene in the same sort of way he’d watched the dad.

He forced himself to look away, then went to intercept Avery, catching her as she reached the entrance of the building, around the corner from the thrift shop.

“Heya,” Avery said.  “Sorry.  If it was an emergency I would’ve been a bit faster.”

“It’s fine.  I’m sorry to interrupt.  The Lord has requested your presence.  I think she didn’t want to signal you the usual way when others were around.  She sent me.”

“Okay.  Is this about Theodora?”

“It is.”

And the only way you’d know that is if you were involved or knew something.

And she wasn’t volunteering that she knew anything.

“Your… friend?  Nora.  She remarked something when you were gone.”

“Don’t tell me.  I don’t want to cheat with practice, using advice from cool guys lurking in the shadows or anything like that, knowing things I shouldn’t.  Input from Snowdrop excepted.  She’s stuck to me.”

Gilkey paused.  “Cool guys lurking in the shadows?”

“Sure?  You’ve been cool to me and my friends so far.”

He wasn’t sure how to respond.

“How are you doing, Gilkey?  You need anything?  My friends and I got into the habit of asking our local Others, it could be a good thing to keep doing.”

He paused, not sure how to respond to that.  His first instinct was that it was manipulative, seeking out a bribe or trying to win him over to her side, in council politics.  His second instinct was that she was too genuine for that.  Too inexpert at deception.

“I’m the same as I’ve been for years now.  I don’t think you can provide the things I need.”

“Okay, well, let me know.”

“I did want to ask.  The phone call.  How?”

“Oh, I gave Snowdrop the key to break into the house if nobody’s around.  She used the phone, made opossum noises.”

“That’s a good bond to a familiar, to communicate on that level at a distance.”

“Yeah.  She’s super.  She’ll meet us at the usual place, I guess?”

“As will I.  Traveling in daylight is tricky and exhausting.”

“See you there, then.”

He sank into a crack in the flooring.  A part of him lingered, taking longer to go away.

“Shit.  Shitshitshitshitshitshit,” Avery whispered to herself.  “Shit.  Why’d the Lord have to call me?”

Too inexpert at deception.  He trickled through the cracks.

I am a monitor, a listener.

Gilkey felt the liquids around him swirl, the walls of this carefully managed space swirling, sloshing, and pushing against the wall of water with incredible strength.  That same reach that let their Lord manipulate the water was pulling and tugging at the core of his being.  She wasn’t actively trying to pull him to pieces, but her power was on that level, unwitting.  It added to the slow accumulation of exhaustion.

He watched with care, studying expressions to see what the story was, behind the words being said.

“…Then what use is this council, if we won’t protect our own?” Thea asked.  She was upset her vault had been raided.  Apparently by witch hunters.

Gilkey turned his attention to Avery and little Snowdrop, who were sitting on and beside a rock.  Avery sat on the rock, toes of her shoes were digging into the moist sand bed that was their ‘floor’ here.  Snowdrop sat on her bag, leaning into her.  Both remained calm, no sign of the emotion that had driven Avery’s earlier outburst.  Avery even maintained an expression of casual interest.

He had to mentally revise his stance on her.  If this really was a good poker face, then she wasn’t inexpert, she was untapped.

He wondered if she was using any tricks to maintain that straight a face.  He couldn’t, because he didn’t really have a face.

“Odis.”  Thea turned, frustration clear on her face.  “You’re my teacher.”

The tidy old man shook his head.  “We’ve talked about this.  I said I wouldn’t bar you from bringing your issue to the council, but my own stance hasn’t changed.  You wanted to be on the council representing your own business and practice.  You stand for yourself, without my help.”

“Thea, dear,” Ann said, sounding as if Thea was a child, not in her late twenties.  Ann stank of darker realms to Gilkey, even if ‘stank’ wasn’t the right word.  Ann was a destroyer and condemned people and things to the Abyss or Ruins, whichever was more appropriate.  He sensed those realms with a sense humans lacked- he had to hold himself together and the metaphysical tug from realms that wanted poison and were resisting his hold made the sources clear enough.  More than usual.  Ann had been busy, furiously preparing herself or preparing something.  “It was only a few days ago we admonished Nicole Scobie.”

“Let’s not talk ill of those who aren’t present,” Florin told her.

“I only mean to illustrate a point.  I’m fond of you, Thea.  I like how you hold yourself, I like your work ethic, I think if I had an apprentice as fine as you, I’d feel comfortable with the legacy of my practice.”

“She says, when she plans to awaken the more able of her two children,” Florin joked.  “Don’t think much of them, do you?”

“An apprenticeship and an heir are entirely different things,” Ann told him, dismissive.  She turned back to Thea.  “Thea, I mean no malice, but this is a lesson so many of us must learn.  That practice has a price, and sometimes that price is that what we build and accomplish can be taken from us.  We told Nicole there is an element of personal responsibility in what each of us do.  I imagine Odis told you something similar.”

“I bought a vault door of the sort used by banks, had it delivered at great cost, made an alcazar of it, entered it, and set up wards in the interior to seal it.  I endured having my apartment in shambles for the months it took to lay the steel for the walls.  Steel with lines and runes I inscribed in the steel with power tools.  The interior of the vault had aggressive warding protected by other wards.  Four liters of my own blood, extracted across four sessions, went into securing my claim to the vault’s construction and the security.  Dare to tell me there was some failing in my personal responsibility.”

“That determination is part of why I like you,” Ann said.  “But responsibility doesn’t stop at precautions.  Your wardings were primarily aimed at penetration from outside?  Theft?”

“I had protections against those who might escape.  Measures I employ to stun and bind anyone inside before I enter, so I can’t be ambushed.  Other things I won’t mention here.”

“There’s a human element to this,” Tomas Whitt told her.  The man was restless, looking very much like he wished he had a rock to sit on or a wall to lean against.  He kept checking to see if one had appeared when he wasn’t looking.  His skin was mottled with acne and the scars of acne past, and his hair was falling from whatever it had been molded into before.  With the restlessness, had the demeanor of a late-stage addict.  With the lived-in suit he wore, maybe one waiting for his turn at court.  “A security system is only as strong as the weakest person with the keys.”

Thea looked like she wanted to kill him for saying that.

“Thea isn’t weak,” Deb told Tomas.  “What we do is an ever-evolving learning process.”

“Even you and Ann are being condescending,” Thea said.  “And you two want things from me.”

It was getting more heated.  It felt more like Gilkey was watching a scene than a part of it.  Little of this would touch him, they’d develop their rivalries, they’d form alliances, and he’d be on the sidelines.  He studied, keeping track of only the most extreme things that might concern him, Thunder Bay, or his work for Thunder Bay.

Some of it was a learning exercise.  Seeing the permutations, what bubbled up, what eroded.  Who mixed, who didn’t.  Watching this unfold, then applying it to another story he was working on piecing together.

“If I may?” Gilkey spoke up.

“You may,” Ann said, unnecessarily, with an even more unnecessary tone that suggested him joining the conversation was a mild inconvenience.

How to phrase this without leading trouble to one of their new practitioner’s feet?

“You suggested it was Witch Hunters, at first.  Now we’re fairly certain they got past wards.  You don’t seem as certain.”

“It was a theory.  Details changed.”

“An animal,” Odis told Gilkey.  “A familiar.  There were claw marks on the bottom of the frame of the door between worlds.  We think it lunged for the doorway, jumped through.  The doorway had been positioned so the access point was small and out of reach for those within.  We think the claw marks are from the animal form hanging off the edge.  It was carried into the vault, climbed back through.  They used practice to cover their tracks.”

“The human vulnerability,” Tomas remarked, sounding pleased with himself.

“To some degree,” Odis agreed.

Thea looked betrayed by Odis letting that information out to the council.  An angry sort of betrayal.

“They should know all the details,” Odis remarked, airy in his calm, not even looking at her.

Gilkey took advantage of a pause in the conversation, “Can you tell us what you know?  Regardless of whether or not this was your error-”

“This council deserves to be broken and wiped out by enemy agents if this is how we approach this!”  Thea almost spat the words.  “Assigning unfair blame, then dwelling on it?”

“-Regardless,” Gilkey said.  “Let’s put that aside.  What is the sequence of events?  What were you doing?  Who was involved?”

Thea composed herself a bit.  More calm, she told him, “I gave some children a flying lesson, there were two coincidences in short order- the children were in possession of an item that would have disrupted my practice.  I saw more than one.  A mere bauble, but I’m sure Ann can imagine how she’d react if people in her vicinity started carrying around cleansing pearls.  Or how Tomas might react if people were supplying his targets with the means of warding off emotional manipulation.  The second coincidence was that two new individuals showed up.  I pegged them as Montreal Witch Hunters, in the older range for teenagers or the younger range for twenty-somethings, and I captured them in the painting.  I brought the painting back, sealed the Vault.”

“You didn’t monitor proceedings within the vault?” Florin asked.

“I was injured.  And alarmed.  I tended my leg, made a call with one hand while using the other to drag a mop across the trail of blood I’d left between my car and my apartment.”

“Who did you call?” Ann asked.

“Odis, to explain what happened.  Then other contacts to see if they could help me figure out why I’d been attacked.”

“And we only find out about this today?  A day later?” Ann asked.

“I thought Odis could tell you.  He deals with you more than I do.”

“Understandable, if frustrating,” Ann replied.  “Please communicate better in the future.  Especially now that we’re in a time of crisis, territories around us being seized?”

No.  It’s not understandable.  Both you and I have dealt with Odis enough to know he’s more taciturn than that.  He could tell the council but he wouldn’t, Gilkey thought.

He could see that Odis was meeting Thea’s eyes.  A lot was being communicated that Gilkey wasn’t privy to.  They knew each other, they had their dynamics.  She’d thrown Odis under the bus, so to speak, and he wasn’t pushing back.  Gilkey wanted to hear the conversation they had after this meeting, but Odis would be too careful about that.

A part of him wanted that kind of dynamic.  No, wanting was the wrong word.  He yearned for it, as if it was something he’d had but lost.  Except he’d never had it that he could remember.

“If you have dangerous captives, I’d think you’d pay more mind to them,” Tomas remarked, tone conversational.  “You learned under Odis.”

It was Odis who replied.  “She did, but for the Blackforest Trapping, having to leave your victims in the snare is a natural consequence of the practice.  If you wanted to have a domain to keep people in, but never leave, keeping an eagle eye on them, you’d do something else.  Meals must be eaten, wounds tended, and you must sleep.  You ward, you take measures, much as Thea did.  In this, she wasn’t wrong.”

“Right,” Tomas said.

“I’d like to hear more of what Gilkey wanted to say,” Avery joined in.  Human-form Snowdrop nodded vigorously.

Eyes turned to her.  Gilkey’s included.  She met his eyes for a fraction longer than she needed to.

He had strong reason to suspect she’d been the one to rob Thea, he had a sense about why, and he was fairly sure he knew what Avery wanted.  He was surprised others hadn’t turned their attention to her already.  She had the animal familiar.

“Gilkey?” Ann asked.  She was asking Avery, not prompting Gilkey to speak.

“He raised a line of questions and we’re getting sidetracked by pettiness,” Avery said.  “I don’t have much to add, I’m still learning how the council works and occasionally running errands or filling in some info, so if we’re taking turns or if all of us are chiming in now and again, I’d like to give my turn to Gilkey.  Or ask that he can finish his, so we can get on this.  And maybe not spend all afternoon here?”

“I thought Gilkey was done,” Ann said.

“No,” Gilkey replied.  “Not done.”

“Do you have anything pertinent to add?”

“What I was saying, and please don’t interrupt, Thea, whether or not there is blame to lay at Thea’s feet, it remains an attack on a resident of Thunder Bay.  We should consider the implications.”

“One of us has a brain in their head,” Thea said.  “I was driving at that.”

Gilkey dipped his head in a nod.  Fluid ripped from the brim of his hat.  “Was it Musser?”

The people in the room glanced at one another, the Lord of Thunder Bay excepted.

Almost half the people in this room are suspected of being in Musser’s camp, or otherwise supporting him.  Florin, Tomas, and Thea.  Ann and Deb have their biases, Avery dislikes the man, Odis is slowing down too much to elect to do something on this scale, and that leaves me.  The Lord as well, I suppose, but we know where she stands.

“Musser pulling a robbery would be brazen,” Ann said.  “In the domain of a Lord?”

“Musser is brazen,” Avery said.  “He acts like he’s invincible.  He’s taking territories.”

“We know full well that he’s taking territories,” Ann replied.

“So it fits, doesn’t it?”

“Is it possible?” Gilkey asked Thea.

You’ll have to choose words carefully if you’re involved.

“It is.  Except I’d have to ask, why me?  There are other, stronger practitioners with far more power and things to steal than anything I have.”

Tomas snorted.

“What?” Thea asked him.

“If I wanted to steal power, you’re a good target.  Not a perfect target, you’re not a moron, but you’re in the right place.”

“Clarify?” she asked him, tone more dangerous now.

“A few years in, just far enough along to have amassed power and things worth having.  But still new to this.  Still capable of making mistakes.”

“We’re back to this again?”

“It gives us clues about who the culprits were, and what their motivations might have been,” Florin told Thea.

“Were there any others in the vault?” Gilkey asked.

“What?”

“Other individuals?”

“I can only assume the animal and two individuals who escaped the painting were in the vault.”

“But were any others?” Gilkey pressed.

“Yes,” Thea replied, eyes narrowing slightly.  “Do you know something?”

“I know things, but nothing beyond than what’s been outlined here.  I do have suspicions-” he avoided looking at Avery “-one of which is that you might have had captives.  I know how your sorts of practices tend to work.”

“I had to capture the children,” Thea said.  “They were Aware or close to it.  I would have managed that Awareness, drained some power, and let them go.  Bodies are inconvenient.”

“Geez,” Avery said.  “Like, putting everything about capturing kids aside, hmm, how would you manage Awareness?   It’s kind of relevant.  I know some Aware in Winnipeg.”

“There are ways.  If they’re developed into their patterns, it’s not so possible,” Thea said.

“Are we to understand, then, that there are multiple young people who are Aware, presumably who know where you live, out in Thunder Bay?” Ann asked.

“Four.”

“That changes things, you know,” Ann said.  “We don’t bear too many compunctions for… let’s call them morally dubious practices…”

“Shouldn’t we though?” Avery asked.  “Bearing compunctions?  Whatever that means?”

“Let’s go all-in on darkness, sin, murder, kidnapping!” Snowdrop crowed.

“Drawing lines on these fronts has historically been a minefield of vague definitions, justifications, and circular debates,” Ann said.  “You’re young, I don’t expect you to know.”

“So we just give up trying to question awful practices altogether?” Avery asked.

“We’ll leave it to karma,” Ann told Avery, with a firm tone as if she expected it to be law thereafter.  “Such practices bite the hand that wrought them more often than so-called ‘good’ practices do.  Which may be the case here.  I know if Nicole was here, she’d remind us we had her pay sanctions for her sloppiness and dealings in questionable methods.”

“Let’s not go that far,” Odis murmured.  “It’s a difference of behavior.  Nicole Scobie is perpetually reckless and the abyssal cow she bought is a continuation of that.  Theodora Knight took precautions.  It just so happens that her enemy was crafty, prepared, and seized on an opportunity.  She could have watched her back better.  I think the price of this lesson is steep enough she’ll double check for company before risking letting something into a protected space.”

“It could have happened to any of you,” Thea hissed the words.  “A surgical strike.”

“A little less likely, but yes, it could have,” Ann said.  “And we would have had to pay the costs.”

“At the very least, we should task you with handling the Aware,” Florin told her.

“I’m already on the task.  I don’t want to get blindsided by anything karmic.”

Ann adopted a soothing tone that had to be as comforting as sandpaper to Thea.  “Dealing with Aware means risks, as much as it can give an advantage or a greater prize.  One of those risks is karmic.  Things go against you if you threaten someone with innocence, and that doesn’t change much if they only have a fraction of the usual amount.”

“If you really wanted to build alliances, you’d offer to help me get my realm battery back,” Thea told her.  “I could give you a share of the power.”

“You do the legwork, Thea,” Odis told her.  “It’s your responsibility.  Call in favors, make payments, I’m sure some in this council will help you.  But you have to find it first, before you can ask that sort of thing.  Then you can make that kind of request, asking for goodwill and furthering alliances as part of the deal, offering payment conditional on a successful job.  But when you stand where you do now?  Those sorts of alliances don’t stretch that far.”

Thea looked like she was near the boiling point.

“Oh, it’s like moving.  You shouldn’t ask someone to help you move and then when they show up you don’t have anything packed,” Avery said, voice bright.

“Yes,” Odis replied.  “Like moving.”

“I helped my family pack a couple weeks before I moved to follow them and my sister was like that.”

Thea now looked like she was at the boiling point.

It would be good to get her out of here.  So Gilkey provided another nudge.  “Dealing with the sorts of forces we wield, we have to be careful about mistakes.”

“What do you know?” she asked, wheeling on him.

“I’m fairly certain I am a mistake,” Gilkey told her.  “I simply don’t know by who.”

She looked ready to go storming away, marching for the wall of water, when she glanced across the room.

At Avery and Snowdrop.

“What animal does that familiar become?” Thea asked.

“If you’re implying what I think you’re implying, I’m going to tell you Snowdrop has her strengths, but she’s not very fast.  I have to carry her a lot of the time because she can’t keep up.”

“Lies.  I’m speedy. Schwoo,” Snowdrop murmured.

“Not very agile either,” Avery said.

“I’m practically a Fae, I’m so graceful,” Snowdrop told her.  “Can’t you tell?”

Thea glanced back at Odis.

“I mentioned her in passing.  Peculiar rule of discourse,” Odis said.

“I will always tell the truth, even when I don’t mean to,” Snowdrop declared.

“She’s a laugh, at least,” Florin said.  “That first meeting still brings a smile to my face.”

“I’m not laughing,” Thea told the man.  “Nor am I smiling.”

“They’re children, Thea,” Ann said.

“You’ve never sounded as much like an idiot as you have trying to tell me what a child is capable of.”

Ann sighed a little.  “Let’s not burn bridges, Thea.  I like you.”

Avery laid her hands on Snowdrop’s shoulders.  “For the record, this child is a friend to goblins, a snack obsessed goofball.”

“I’m actually planning to hibernate,” Snowdrop declared, patting her belly.

“What’s your practice?” Thea asked Avery.

“Path runner and Finder.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It would serve you well to attend more meetings and do more broad research outside your immediate projects,” Odis told Thea.  “You’re too disconnected.”

“Because this is such a joy.”

“You seem so very paranoid and hostile now,” Tomas told her.  “It’s embarrassing to watch.”

“I don’t know why I bothered coming to you all.  You know where I am,” Thea told them.  She looked at Avery.  “I suppose I’ll find out who you are.”

“Okay,” Avery said, shrugging.

Thea marched through the wall of water.

“That was entertaining,” Florin said.  “She’s so colorful.”

“She’s so terribly young,” Ann said.  “No offense intended, Odis.  We all come to the practice at different ages and stages.”

“It takes time to acclimatize,” Deb said.

“She is young.  For the time being, I’ll bear some of any costs you expect her to pay, for the trouble,” Odis told the council.  He looked up at their Lord.  “Don’t tell her I’m doing so.”

“I don’t think that would be necessary,” Ann said.

Florin shook his head.  “Let’s at least see how she handles the situation with the potential Aware.  With four, I’d expect at least one, maybe two to become truly Aware.  Humans have a remarkable ability to escape reality.”

“And you,” Ann told Avery.  “It would behoove you to learn some politics and make nice.”

“With the woman who apparently abducts kids?”

“Yes.  With all manner of practitioners.”

“We’ll see, I guess.”

“Speaking of making nice,” Florin said.  “If we’re done with Thea’s plea for assistance, shall we move on to other council business?  We’re a few days into October, and Halloween is at the end of this month…”

I am a tool for a greater power, an instrument for her to act through.

The water washed Avery and Snowdrop back into the clearing.

“Geez,” Avery whispered.  “So that was a thing.”

“It was,” Gilkey said.  It was just Avery, Snowdrop, Gilkey, and the Lord of Thunder Bay in the pit with walls of water, now.  The sun shone down at an angle, illuminating the froth, while the deeper water was dark.

“Thanks.  I think.  I got the impression you were trying to steer and manage the conversation.”

“I was.  It’s hard when they don’t give me much time to speak before they start talking over me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shook his head.

The Lord moved a hand.

“Oh,” Avery said.  “Yeah.  I can speak freely?  With names?”

The Lord nodded.

“Thea isn’t one hundred percent working with Musser, but he made an offer and she’s seriously considering it.  It sounded like she needed him to prove his group had clout.  She asked him to check with the Witch Hunters.  I guess before she and Odis found the claw marks and other little details.”

“It’s interesting that Tomas was as antagonistic to her as he was,” Gilkey remarked.

“We’ve got a lot of eyes on them now,” Avery said  “The Others I called in are helping.”

The feeling the water gave off and the mirrored feeling produced inside Gilkey changed.

“It’s good,” he told Avery.  “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Kind of sucks I got pulled away from a hang-out for this.  I don’t feel like I contributed much, and now she’s sort of suspicious of me.”

That sort of nuance of empathy isn’t something our Lord is strong with.  It’s the drawback of having a Lord like her.  She’ll use us.  She has the ability to sense through water and keep track of many things, including an inconsistent awareness of who is where and of major happenings in her realm, but even that relates to the drawback.  Who wants a superior who can find them at a moment’s notice?

“I think you’ll be able to count on protection and help from the Lord if it comes to that,” Gilkey told her.  “It’s only fair.”

The stirring in him shifted.

It wasn’t a definitive statement.  More like a consideration in progress.

The Lord nodded.

“Not sure what that’d look like, but okay.  Thanks,” Avery told them.  “That was terrifying, by the way.”

“You did well.  The calm approach, the line of questions, even pushing for things to move along.”

“Faerie reinforcement of my best self, maybe.  I don’t think the me from the start of this year would recognize the me here and now.”

“Hopefully that’s a good thing.”

“Can I go?” Avery asked.

The Lord nodded.

Snowdrop became animal size, and Avery put her in her bag.  Then she skipped through the wall of water.

The Lord turned her attention to Gilkey.  She didn’t speak, and instead leaned on the frequences of vibration.  Signing with a large slender hand in the midst of his being.

This was tiring, and the realization that there was a job for him… it only multiplied that exhaustion.  She wouldn’t truly understand the calculation of minor costs, of avoiding innocents…

He parsed the message.

Not so many innocents with this job.

“I’ll take a detour for my own business while I’m out,” he told her.  “Stopping at the house.  I think they only meet at night, regardless.”

She didn’t truly understand.  But he was dealing with a superior who was vast, powerful, unsleeping, and, in essence, heartless.  Much as he’d done with Avery, offering protection, being prepared to defend and argue for it with this inhuman intelligence, he asked for the detour.

He wasn’t even sure he wanted to make the detour, but if he didn’t ask then he wasn’t sure what he could demand or ask for.  And he had to do something to mark out his own will and be more than a tool.

“I’ll be at the market tomorrow night, don’t worry.”

She accepted.

She gave him a cup.  It had been underwater for an untold length of time.

A gift to give to an informant.

The waters changed, and this time, it was to provide a corridor.  A channel.

To carry him a great distance through connected bodies of water.  To get where he needed to be, he had to first circumvent the swathe of territories where Musser’s group held sway, and he then had to enter another realm.

But first… the house.

I am the result of a terrible, terrible mistake that someone made.

The house.  One side of the roof sagged.  Much of the property looked like it had been in a fire, but only at first glance.  The longer someone looked, the longer they might notice the details.  That glass had melted, turning into candle-wax dribbles running down from where it had decorated doors or sat in walls.  That paint, too, had dribbled away as it had blackened.

He had to adjust wards as he passed them.  Good wards.  Three rings enclosed the property.  The grass and trees had died about fifty feet past the third set of wards.

There was a story here and he’d resigned himself to never getting the full story.  The evidence had been scoured away.

He let himself in.  The door wasn’t heavy, but the hinges had partially dissolved.  Material ground against material, coming away in clay-like clumps.

Many things in this place had blackened, or bleached, or liquefied.  Photos mounted on the wall in frames were now smears of chemical color only vaguely hinting at what they had been, once.  This one a person, this one a pair of people with a sunset-like background.  If the colors hadn’t changed in the process of melting.

He checked the garage workshop.  The epicenter of all of this.  Wards on the walls had been intended to keep any disasters contained, but it had been like trying to stop a flood with roadblocks ten feet apart.  The effects had flowed out and past, consuming the property.

He touched the stool.  He noted the tracks on the floor, where flesh had sloughed off and blackened.  The concrete was stained in rings and waves, capturing the effects.

And there… a man had died.  His body had melted like the rats in pools of corrosive poison, and the Self had remained.  The poison had filled that Self.

Twenty years ago, there had been a group of alchemist enclaves working together in this area of Ontario.  They’d heralded themselves as more rational, more clever, their practice one of the ones closer to science.  They had shared goals more often than others.  So they’d work together.

Then the backstabbing, the warfare, the stolen ideas, the individuals who crossed lines.  Creating alchemical constructs that preyed on innocents, chimeric life, augmenting themselves as Hydes, only to spiral like most Hydes did.

In their hubris, they’d been more prone to destroying themselves and each other.  Sabotage became a kind of cold war.  Most fell, others withdrew or fled the area, and too many scattered, ill-fated projects and mistakes were left in the area.

Gilkey didn’t know if the man he’d been had been dosed with a vicious poison by a rival, then come here, where he hoped to counter the poisoning, where he knew there were wards.  If he had, that had been a terrible mistake.  The wards hadn’t held.

Perhaps he’d tried to make a poison.  A reckless and horrible weapon, that could cascade out, relentless, leaving a place poisoned for years.  If he had, he’d made an error in the calculations, or he’d dosed himself, and it had caught him first.

The way this poison worked, it poisoned spirits, it soaked into everything, and given time, it transmuted the waste into something else.  Something that would be met with more poison, be it gaseous or liquid, and then proliferate.

A matter of seven or eight hours after bringing everyone low, the vapors would start meeting that transmuted flesh, catalysis would occur, and then it was like a blast, hard and heavy in every direction.  Something that could poison spirit, poison connection.

What had been contained to this garage workshop had consumed the house and surrounding area.

Bearing this had its own cost.  A man had been born, lived long enough to buy a house, and then something had gone wrong.  A mistake had to have happened.  The man was gone, and Gilkey had been born from that, an eroded Self at his core that had no real attachment to the man, aside from the fact that the man’s last moments had been some of Gilkey’s first.  Gilkey remembered the grief, the desperate setup of the wards before his brain had turned into gelatin in his skull.  Wards to keep people away and keep the poison contained.

Now things had settled.  The house would be death to anyone who entered, but the poison wasn’t likely to proliferate.  What could be transmuted had been, and everything else seemed to have settled like his Self had.  It wouldn’t last forever against the poison, but it had crystallized, or glazed over.

He left the garage and walked down the hall.  He stopped by a gelatinous mass.  Faint white shapes in the gelatin spelled out the skeleton of the dog it had once been.  It lay on its side, and it breathed unevenly, without rhythm.  The blob of crimson jelly with crisp, black edges where it met and melted into carpet moved in response to him.  At the tail area.

He stepped over it.

In the bedroom, two skeletons in their own gelatin, the line between body and what had once been sheets impossible to discern.  Both were translucent, both melted like candle wax over the mattress and the wood that had framed it.  One skeleton was a woman.  The other was the child she’d held to her chest as the poison had made them too weak.  It had been slow, a gradual process.  Getting weaker.  Until one night they’d lay down like this and they hadn’t gotten back up.

If there was a story or a sequence of events, then he imagined it had included shouted warnings through the door.  Not to leave, not to risk further proliferation.  To stay in the house.

She didn’t move like the dog had, except to draw in tighter, chest at the child’s back, legs curled under the child’s rear end.

Her neck was injured, the gelatin mottled.  In his first hours of existence, Gilkey had thought they were alive like he was.  He’d brought-

He saw it.  The shelf, lying on the ground.  Handprints marked where he’d held it with the poison still fresh and fierce in his system.  He’d brought down over and over again.

Now he knew they were only animated here and there by echoes.

He left them behind.

Past the bathroom, past the kitchen, where things were sagging badly enough the ceiling might collapse by his next visit, or during this one.

To the living room.  He couldn’t take the already occupied bed, the other beds were too small.

In the living room, a child turned their head to look at him with holes in a gelatinous head, two for the eyes, one for the mouth.  The flesh had dissolved and blended into the half-ring of toys around them.  They’d sat in front of the television, which was wrapped in plastic, perhaps to prolong the life of the set and keep the children happy, toys around them.

The head tracked him as he walked around to the couch.  The child was a blob in vague child shape and proportions, much like the rats had been earlier.  Lipid layers kept the organs in place, but the lines and definition blurred.  The bones were there as vague white shapes, the skull had softened, the organs were a slurry of darker reds and paler colors in the vague right positions.

He didn’t know what his name had been.  Too many of the alchemists who he might have associated with were dead, and the ones who were alive were far away, or they were dangerous and vicious, more than willing to capture him and use him.

It wasn’t worth it.

So he’d taken his name from his best guess from the running ink on the back of a picture that was sagging out of its frame.

He wasn’t sure what his responsibility was, to this.  Some he’d learned from word of mouth, about how horrible some of the alchemists had been.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to learn that he’d been one of them.

Or that he’d been such a naive man who would risk exposing his family to this kind of fate.

He had no memories, no ties.  But he sometimes saw things or people that struck something in his Self.  A dad with kids.  Two girls figuring out if what they had was friendship or more.  Much like he was educated but didn’t remember the lessons, or that the faint label of scientist and alchemist were imprinted on his Self, even if he’d never done a proper experiment, he remembered no romance or marriage, but felt like if he were to find one, somehow, it wouldn’t be his first.  He remembered no long companionship, where two people could communicate so easily with a look, but he was familiar with the idea and vaguely missed it.

He knew he’d made a mistake.  That was ingrained on his Self, one of the last things to be etched into an alchemist’s being.  But he didn’t know what he should feel so guilty for.

And here, as he reclined on the couch, allowing himself to relax his form, in a slowly dissolving monument to something terrible, he could rest.  The wards were set, there would be no intrusion.  Proliferation was no longer possible.

He didn’t have a brain, but his mind grew so tired, and each four hour stint of not thinking, not having to worry, it had to be bought with other struggle.  He had no body, but he had to hold a shape together to do most of what was required of him.

Here and only here could he take more than four hours to himself.  No need to mark something on the walls to tell himself he couldn’t risk sleeping there again or he’d risk doing untold damage.

His body dissolved to nothing, staining the surroundings.  He touched the child who sat with the toys.  When there was nothing discernible left of him, the child in the middle of the living room stopped staring at him, and looked forward, at a melted television set.

He rested.  He would continue the task tomorrow.

I am out of place, wherever I go.  I do not relish going to the places where this is less the case.

There were places that were often called crossroads.  The realms frequently overlapped Earth, or overlaid it, in layers visible to only those who could see the right frequency, with the right Sight, or from the right angles, coming from one place to another.  The Ruins overlaid things with a lean toward the immaterial and symbolic.  Emotion, symbol, incarnations, and some spirits.  It was only in the places where those forces held the most sway that someone could step through.  The Abyss was similar, but heavier, keeping to the places with more visceral weight.  The Spirit World was more easily accessed from places that formed natural beauty, like a hidden spot in the woods where the trees formed a near-perfect circle, or the less natural places that were manufactured for the spirit- shrines and such.

And, of course, realms themselves could overlap.  Abyss crossed Ruin in places.  Warren overlapped Faewild.  Digital Aether intersected Demiurgic domains.

The Fae liked to establish bases of operation at crossroads.  Even small ones.  The Spring courts liked to mark out a space of prominence.  The Summer courts might establish outposts, to guard the Fae realms, wild and otherwise, against incursion from the Abyss or Warrens.  And the Fall courts… markets.

Here, some ancient, important lineage had tried to establish a place in the New World.  They’d put servants and workers to the task of creating a massive structure that had all the trappings and style of a castle in England.  Their belief and hope had been that if they built something truly grand, then settlement would spread out around them

No expense had been spared, except for common sense- that, they’d been miserly in.  They hadn’t expected winter to be as brutal as it was.  They’d probably been warned, but they’d been proud.

Heroes and Names of note, the practice called them.  Part echo, part vestige, part animus.  The patterns mapped by their lineage was supposed to make them great.  Now they existed in this castle of logs, stone, echo-stuff and glamour that filled in the gaps.  They hosted the market, and were paid for the hosting with things that indirectly helped to support the walls and turn fevered dreams and hopes about what this place would be into a phantasmal reality.  Some of those segments of wall or balcony glowed with their own faint light in the evening.

Monstrous, gnarled, and odd Fae milled around, alongside those who were almost human, almost Other, but neither or both.  The Names and Heroes watched and managed, or they thought they did.  The Fae were the true managers.

Stalls were open, booths in place.  Buildings had been decorated with glamour, eerie red lights glowing from within, more red lights above the door.  A man walked into the embrace of a Fae with so many horns growing out of her flesh that there was more space devoted to being the roots of those horns than there was skin.  Together, they stepped inside.  A slender man lounged on a bench, scantily clad, and as still and relaxed as he was, it was clear that whatever was beneath his loincloth was animated and vicious.  He opened his mouth and a glimpse of something halfway between a sea urchin and a scorpion -his tongue- hinted at what was beneath the loincloth, in greater numbers and scale.   A slender young lady looked more half-Fae than Fae, who wore a gauzy wrap around her looked out of place until she met Gilkey’s eyes.  Her smile traveled so wide it went behind her head, reached up to cross in the midst of the short black hair at the back of her head, and around to touch the corners of her eyes.  The eyeballs retreated.

Some here were cursed.  Cursed humans would sometimes retreat to the Dark Fall court.  Here at least, they were among monstrous company, and the company of those who struggled.

Those, he supposed, he sympathized with the most.  They’d be the company he’d keep, if he stayed.

Which he wouldn’t.  He didn’t like this place.  It was his first time here, and it gave succor to every part of him that struggled in the city, while giving discomfort to every other part of him.

He found the vendor of teeth and bones.  The creature managing the booth was Fae-adjacent, or cursed Fae.  The line was blurry.  He was nine feet tall, skinny, with the head of a wolf, eyes bandaged and blindfolded.  The fur was three or four feet long in places, snow white, except where it had been stained with blood or by dragging on the ground.

Two girls who might have been bearing curses or cursed items were handling the merchandise, one coughing constantly, bringing a kerchief to her mouth to discreetly remove whatever it was she was coughing up to a disposal bin, where it plopped into liquid.  The other wore a dress akin to a traditional maid’s, but with constantly blooming frills, decoration, and elaboration that she had to tear at here and there, or step away to hack at, before it climbed up her neck, extended past her hands, or made walking impossible.  A masked young man stood by an ornate chair of arms and cushions that was apparently rigged to hold any number of shapes.  A tray with pliers, hammers, chisels, and etching tools was beside him.

The bestial Fae lounged behind them, periodically poking one with a claw-tipped finger to prod them back to work or draw their attention to something.  Around him milled various sprites of the Dark Fall variety.  Some wore dresses, some carried tools like the ones on the tray, others were naked but for strings of teeth and fangs.  Here and there, some would stop in or be called over to speak briefly to the bestial Fae, then they’d flit off on their missions.

The bestial Fae swatted a sprite, a backhand strike against the table of various teeth, fangs, and etched bones, breaking most of the sprite’s bones.  He picked her up, and tossed her into a bin of waste, then picked up the teeth she’d brought, before tossing them aside as well.  The girl with the coughing fit scrubbed at the bloodstain with a cloth, other hand holding the handkerchief to her mouth.  The bestial Fae turned his attention to Gilkey, then pushed the girl with the blooming dress aside.  The Fae slithered like a snake more than anything else as he approached the booth, sitting where the girl had.

The bestial Fae smiled, teeth reaching too far back on either side of the wolf-like face, showing off an impossible number of teeth.  Gilkey’s glance at the girl might have drawn the Fae’s attention, because he spoke in a smooth voice with a purr to it, “she shoplifted.  Now she wears the dress.  I’ve offered to kill it for her, but only for a few years of service.  You’re the one I’ve been expecting?”

Gilkey pulled the old goblet from deep in his body.  “A gift, from my Lord.  Be careful.  It’s poisoned from its contact with me.”

The Fae took it as if he didn’t care about poison.  “Do you want a set of teeth?  Ones that won’t dissolve?  Ones that will let you bite someone and wound something other than flesh?”

“I only want to do what I came here for.  You had information?”

“She’ll crop up now and again,” the bestial Fae purred.  “She quickly outstays her welcome, but there are those who have a fondness for those naturally born to Dark Fall.  There are so few.  These loyalists support her, entertain her, ignoring the trouble she brings.”

“Trouble?”

A little tooth fairy emptied about five hundred children’s teeth onto a tray.  The coughing girl began to sort them, poking at them with a finger.  She tossed a chunk of tongue into the disposal bin.

The bestial Vendor leaned over the display of fangs and teeth.  “A fellow vendor and I were talking about her after a rival of ours was destroyed.  We calculated she had few refuges remaining to her.  There are only so many corners of this world she’s comfortable navigating, that would have her.  Her options are narrowing, Winter’s Wild Hunt turned its attention to her, and enemies she’s made now dog her.  We worked out that she had to come here.  Other options too far away, or not available at certain times.  Tonight.  And so it is.”

“She’s here?  The Faerie that helped enact the Carmine Plot?”

“Shopping,” the Vendor told Gilkey.

The bestial Fae merchant extended a long limb over the bench, past Gilkey’s head, and pointed.

A woman wrapped in draping moth wings and nothing else, accompanied by two other Fae who fawned over her, showing her things.

The Vendor’s hand withdrew, clawed fingertips grabbing at the hair of the girl with the growing outfit.  He tore, viciously, pulling out strands of hair and about twenty ribbons that had been working their way up into her hair.  The fierce movement threw her to one side, cheek meeting table, making little teeth skitter from where they’d been poised.

The torn-out ribbons curled up like the legs of a dead spider, angular and twitching.  The Vendor disposed of them.  “It’ll stop for a time.”

“Thank you sir,” the girl said, straightening.

“Use the time to pack up.  We’re done, we’ll leave before disaster strikes.  Boy, the chair.  Touette, help pack and collapse the stall.”

Touette, the coughing girl, nodded, but distracted with the first motions of packing up, coughing, and paying attention to the Vendor, she failed to catch whatever it was she’d coughed up in her handkerchief.  Stark terror crossed her face as it hit ground and darted under the stall.

Gilkey stepped on it.  He didn’t get a good glimpse of it, and the poison rendered it unrecognizable by the time he removed his foot.

Touette looked so relieved she nearly lost her balance.  The Vendor batted her lightly across the side of the head with a backhand swat.  “Be mindful.”

“Yes sir.”

“A curse,” the Vendor told Gilkey.  “From a Dark Spring Fae who thought it would be amusing.  I’m not strong enough.  But she applied, she does good work.  I pay.  I help her on occasion.  Perhaps she’ll earn enough to find a way.  So long as you survive, all things are possible.”

“You offered this information expecting something more than a gift,” Gilkey told the Vendor.  “Did you want a certain result?  Removing her to… avert some disaster?  Helping you to survive?”

“Do what you will.  If you destroy her, it’s some currency with the people she’s left so devastated in her wake.”

“Could I destroy her?  Are there guards here?  Would anyone get upset?”

“Very few would and the ones who would don’t matter.  If you help her, I get cachet with them.  The traditionalists.  That cachet does matter, even if they don’t.”

“Win-win?” Gilkey asked.

“If we leave in time.  Hurry, the three of you.  It’s fine if you make a small mess, so long as you can sort the teeth later.  Better to be gone soon.  It’s a good thing our guest arrived on time.”

“What comes that you’re so worried about?  The Wild Hunt of Winter?”

“I’d rather deal with them,” the Vendor purred, showing all those teeth again.  Then he began helping the two girls with the teeth, each in a kerchief-like bundle, stacked side by side.  “They have nothing on me, yet.  There are other things that don’t care one way or the other.”

Gilkey wasted no time.  If the Fae hurried, so would he.

He kept track of the Faerie, who passed glass baubles over the table and collected items.

He reached for her back.

“No traps, no deception, no Fae games,” she said.  “I’m tired.”

“What?”

“I’ll give you what you want.  I’ll guarantee you won’t regret what you get.  No games, no Fae schemes.  All I need is for you to kill my pursuer.”

“It seems to me that what you do after could be a problem for people I-”

How are you doing Gilkey?  Do you need anything?

“-don’t dislike.”

“I barely have enough to sustain myself.  My glamour runs thin.  I don’t sleep more than four hours at a time.  Usually it’s more like two.  Exhaustion runs past my flesh to the bone.  In the wilderness, the beast stalks me.  In the city, the Wild Hunt of Winter has agents.  What I spend, I have a hard time regaining.  And I spent on you.  The tooth vendor glanced at me and it was a glance that hinted he was expecting me, you went right to him, so I had questions answered.  I now know you only feel as attached as you do to the few who are nice to you because you have so few options.  Your Lord treats you as a tool, others dismiss you.  One red haired young lady smiles at you and asks you about your day… of course you’d be fond.”

“So?  What of it?  Does that change anything?”

“If you take what I offer you, then you can fill your life with such people.  This will all be like a bad dream.  A dream of poison and killing, and exhausting yourself trying to be safe.  You can do what I need you to do.  You’ll save lives in the process, of people here.  You’ll change, and you’ll no longer be a danger to lives around you.”

“Why should I help you?”

“Besides an antivenom to make it so you’ll never kill again, after you destroy my pursuer, and flesh to go with your Self?  Life?  A life?”

“I expected better manipulation from a Fae,” Gilkey told her.  “The blatant reference to four hours of rest.”

“Actually an honest reference.  No manipulation intended, unless you think you’re manipulating an acquaintance when you relate to them.”

“I don’t really relate to anyone.”

“You could here, you know.  You don’t realize it, but you’re among kin of sorts.  Not everyone, but enough.  Now that I’m here, however, that’s in jeopardy.”

She moved her wing and hand.

There was a rumble, a crash.  Fae that could fly took flight.  Some raised their voices.  Some began to run.

“My pursuer.  Bound as it is, insofar as these things can be bound, it avoids killing.  But it still ends lives, destroying possessions when those possessions might be the difference between life and death.  Moreover, it will kill in the future.  Kill it, save those lives.”

“I’d free you.”

“Yes.  And in the doing, you’d earn what I promise.  I’ve pledged it, I pledge good results.  I’ll free you.”

The ‘castle’ was large and this Other emerged from the ground, of roughly equal proportion.  Flesh churned like water, brown-black fur bristling, folding, sprouting.  Five eyes on one side of its head blinked, and when they opened again there were four.  All four focused on the Faerie.  Maricica.

It didn’t run forward.  It flowed.  Clawed limbs manifested, touched ground, propelled it forward, then disappeared into the larger mass.  The smell of peat bog, wet fur and old woods blasted out in front of it.

It avoided stepping on any Faerie or other local who was in its path, but it trampled stalls and scattered goods.

No small wonder she’s not welcome back at any place she’s been.

He lunged for Maricica.  Removing her would just as surely destroy the threat as anything, and it would mean no Faerie plotting similar things to the Carmine Exile.

She stepped back, dodging, but she was tired.  There was a little less grace than there should be.  He reached for the wing.

She lapsed into another shape.  A second skin she had.  Insectile, terrible- more capable of moving the moth-like wings back out of the way.

He still grazed one.  The silken wing blackened, rotting, and fell away, eaten by spreading poison.

A full third of the wing was dissolved before she was able to hack it off of herself.

“What a dream flying is,” she said.

The beast of shifting form charged into and through a wall of stone and wood, bowling it over.  It flattened three stalls.  Whatever wasn’t destroyed in the collapse was crushed when the beast stepped onto the fallen wall, prowling closer.

It howled, shaking stones free of positions sunken into earth where they’d been for a hundred years.  More walls fell in the roar.  Gilkey had to work to hold his form together.

“Flying?” he asked.

The howl had brought other things.  Creatures of this nature, beasts from a time before beasts had defined form or scale, they tended to splinter more than they gave birth.  Great power was never destroyed outright, it took other forms.  And a fragment of claw broken off on the ground, hairs, shed skin, they manifested in smaller versions.

Elephantine birds of shifting form scattering in the sky above.

“So many love the idea of flying.  As they should.  Leaving the world behind, escaping.  You’ve taken my wing.  I’m not in a position to get another, or to heal it.  I may never fly again.  I’m now at your mercy.”

He could touch her and take her life now.

“So are they.”

The Vendor hadn’t been fast enough to pack up.  He had many of his things, and carried the materials of the stall and its canopy, and he moved quickly, but the others struggled.

The Vendor abandoned the stall and the contents of it.  Scooping up two cursed girls and a masked boy.

The beast would step on the stall.  The splinters of the great, ancient pre-beast were descending here and there, picking over stalls and searching for food with serrated beaks.

Touette screamed, a strangled sound with her hand a claw at her mouth, to keep the contents from escaping.  Her free hand reached for the stall.

Her livelihood.  Her path to escaping the curse.

Maricia was now out of reach.  He might not catch her even if he turned back.

He didn’t care, as he moved forward, gaining height, the long coat he wore becoming a trailing cloak, then a column of poisonous mass.

If he did a good thing at the same time he did a selfish thing, to no longer be a tool to an entity neither benign nor malign, if he risked rippling consequence by freeing a Faerie… how much did that resemble the mistake that had birthed him?

He reached out to poison Maricica’s pursuer.  Which would free her of the ongoing chase that had exhausted her and hobbled plots and schemes.

I may no longer be messenger, monitor, stalker, or listener.

What I am is poison.  I am alchemy.  I am a person unshelled.

I worry every moment about how I might be a catalyst for terrible kinds of damage.

I am a tool, a terrible mistake.

Never more so any of those things than in this moment he reached out and his hand made contact.

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