scrivespinster (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scrivespinster) wrote2020-08-17 10:59 am
scrivespinster) wrote2020-08-17 10:59 am
WIP: Valkyrie Bags a Legend, Chapter 2
Chapter 2
That morning, after a few hours of sleep to keep me on my feet, I made straight for Watchmaker’s Hill and the monster hunters’ dens there – or planned to, with all possible haste, but my journey was interrupted by the receipt of a letter.
It was one of the Songbirds’ boys who delivered it: a thin youth in a fine woolen coat, older than my brother but with the same sort of shadows hanging about him. He caught up to me just past the river – soft-booted footsteps from behind me, so quiet that if my hearing hadn’t been honed on other menaces, I would have been taken by surprise. I whirled, stepping back and leveling my spear in his direction, but he only laughed and sketched a bow, offering me a sealed envelope. His smile held more good humor than mockery; he knew as well as I did that I wouldn’t hurt him.
I’d learned by then that messages from the hands of hollow-eyed and hungry apparitions, no matter how sophisticated they seemed, weren’t likely good news. I grabbed the envelope all the same, sure of the sender without needing to ask. The boy from the Foreign Office wouldn’t wait for a reply; he told me none was needed, and slipped out of reach before I could so much as catch hold of his coat. A tip of his hat and a leap onto a passing carriage, and he was gone. I stared after him, holding the envelope too tightly, then tore it open and began to read.
The letter inside was written in flowing, elegant hand – something my brother had practiced, considering what his writing used to look like, but the traces of his old script were still there in the loops and emphatic slashes.
I’m safe, it said, and happy. Do not worry for me. Should you change your mind about joining us, the offer is still open, and will remain so indefinitely. If not, they’ll leave you and the Nobodies be, but you won’t find me again by climbing walls at midnight. I’ve changed rooms. It’s for the best, I promise you. Stay safe, please, and be well.
He’d signed it The Shieldmaiden – the last time he’d use that title, I suspected, and my heart ached anew. I read it again, looking for codes; I could see none that we’d agreed upon, nor any request for help written in implication. So far as I could tell, the letter was simply what it appeared, and he truly had made his decision.
I forced my fingers to unclench, smoothed out the creases I’d made in the paper, and slipped it into a pocket to keep. This was my failure, not his. I hadn’t given up yet on finding a way to fix it.
.
Watchmaker’s Hill wasn’t far from the place where the Face’s messenger interrupted me, and I was glad, because I was eager to be doing anything other than listening to my own thoughts repeating as I walked. Fifteen minutes, maybe fewer, and I turned a street corner to see the hill itself rising in the distance, a tangle of fungus and thicket crowned by the Observatory. I walked east along the Stolen River, past factories and foundries, until I came to less industrial streets; the main road here was lined with weapon shops and smoky pubs, and populated by mushroom sellers, rat-catchers, and the occasional lost marsh wolf. It was city edging into wilderness, and when the breeze blew from the east, as it did that day, the smoke and gunpowder scent of the place met air wafting from the marshes in a medley of mud and fungus.
I felt at home there, though a few among the toughs and bruisers lounging outside the Medusa’s Head clearly thought I shouldn’t. I held my head high as I walked past them, ignoring narrowed eyes and suspicious scowls – nobody likes an urchin where urchins shouldn’t be. I’d return later, if I couldn’t find what I was looking for elsewhere. Better to try a few of the quieter haunts first.
A cup of bitter black coffee purchased from a streetside stall near the Department steps bought me a place to sit, and an excuse to listen to the off-duty menace eradicators and freelance hunters who congregated outside to smoke and one-up each other. Eradicators won’t touch anything that flies, and anyone looking for such work has to find it elsewhere, but they still talk, and there’s often as much truth in their tall tales as falsehood. That day, though, the talk was mostly of rats and marsh vipers, and other simple beasts of natural origin. There were rumors of a dream-wolf black as night, but that was quickly laughed off as nonsense. The Eater or Chains was dead, a rotund man with a scar across his temple insisted, and it couldn’t have returned – monsters don’t come back across that river. But there was no mention that I could hear of anything silent and dark-winged that carried its own stars with it, and when I asked, the scarred man shooed me along, told me he’d hang my hide up for a trophy if I didn’t stop making up stories like that. I think he was exaggerating, though with hunters, it’s sometimes hard to tell.
The Department itself brought me nothing either, though I hadn’t truly expected it would. More rats, mostly. I’d always got on well enough with rats, and it didn’t seem right to hunt creatures with a civilization of their own – but if there was a time to get caught up in that, it wasn’t now, and the rats had always got on well enough without me, too. Let’s simply say that the eradicators’ records – or at least those accessible by dint of a little Spite-honed sneaking – held a great many beasts stranger than any I’d heard of, but none were the one that I meant to slay. And after that, and another hour or so of futile searching, my path brought me back around to the Medusa’s Head.
It seemed to have been been a quiet night so far, by which I mean no brawls and no murders. The pub’s patrons were occupied with their own business – dicing for jade and glim, mostly, or throwing darts, though I heard a howl from the corner as someone lost a needle wrestling match. Most of them ignored me, but a few turned to watch as I stepped through the door, possibly on the lookout for new sport.
The first to speak was a grizzled man in an eradicator’s uniform, who looked up from his drink only long enough to fix me with a dour frown and say, “What are you here for, then? This ain’t hardly a place for brats.”
“Looking for information,” I said, “on a quarry.”
“What, rats for the stewpot?”
“Or pence to nick, maybe,” a one-eyed woman in leather and canvas said, flipping a knife lazily and catching it without looking. “Watch yer pockets, boys.”
“I’m not a thief,” I said. “I’m here as a hunter, and I’m looking for leads. I can pay.”
I couldn’t pay much, but I would make my small store of rostygold stretch as far as it could, and even a little was better than none.
“You’re a child,” the woman said. “You couldn’t hunt a half-dead fungus column. A common sewer rat would eat you alive.”
More people were watching now. I could feel their eyes, and their judgment too, like a prickle between my shoulderblades; I wanted to flee, but instead I clenched my hand around the coins in my pocket and stood a little taller. Someone laughed roughly, and others joined him, the one-eyed woman included. When the laughter quieted I was still standing there, refusing to look away.
“I took on those Blemmigans that were troubling farmers,” I said, “and the scaly thing by the docks that was eating drunks. There’s people would tell you about it, if you asked. My crew killed a heart-taker in Veilgarden. And I saw – ”
“What?” a tattooed bruiser said, grinning. “Ghosts? Mirror-snakes? Marsh-wisps promising treasure?”
“Wings,” I said. “Like a void. Like someone cut a hole in the sky, and you could see through it to the night on the Surface.”
The laughter came like it had before, in a mocking chorus, but this time it faded quickly and left an uneasy hush behind. The one-eyed woman took a nervous swallow of ale, and glared at me over the rim of her tankard like I had just insulted her mother, her honor, and her prized racing slug, and she was deciding what to do about it. The bruiser looked, if anything, spooked. And in a lull of conversation that felt too much like the eye of a passing storm, I noticed a thin, cloaked figure of uncertain or simply irrelevant gender watching me from a corner table. One of the needle-wrestlers, I thought, and not the loser.
As soon as the stranger saw me looking at them, they unfolded themselves from their chair and walked towards me, moving with the peculiar rolling gait of anyone who spends more time at zee than on dry land. Beneath the cloak, they were dressed in Chelonate fashion, all strange leathers and bone jewelry, and their eyes were a deep, inky blue-black – peligin, is what I later learned it was called, the color of zee-beasts and the abyssal waters they swim in. You get eyes like that by eating monsters raw. I didn’t know that then, and might have found this stranger more unsettling if I did, but what they told me, I think, was kindly meant. They crouched down to my eye level, with their forearms resting on their knees, and said, “Child, you’re asking dangerous questions.”
I bristled at that – child I might have been, but I was a Valkyrie too, and I had faced perils of my own. But this was the first person I had found who was willing to tell me anything at all, and I couldn’t afford throw that away out of pride.
“I know that,” I said, and left the I’m not stupid unspoken. “I wouldn’t be, if I didn’t have to.”
“Ate someone you cared about, did it?” The monster hunter shook their head. “Believe me, you’d do better to let this go. I’d be putting the harpoon in your hands myself, if you had any chance at all, but you can’t get vengeance on the Vake.”
The words it can’t be the Vake dried up and died in my throat.
“You’re sure that’s what it is?” I asked.
“No such thing as sure down here,” they replied, “but I’ve heard of wings like that before, from one of the best hunters I ever met. Damned idiot claimed he was on the trail of a legend, then a few days later they found him on the border of the Prickfinger Wastes, too dead for returning. Well. They found most of him.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“For scaring the piss out of you? Convincing you to try something safer, like juggling Cantigaster venom?”
I shook my head. “For giving me somewhere to start.”
And it was true – at now least I had an name for what it was. But with that name, the gulf between knowing the thing and putting an end to it seemed greater even than it had before, and too much of what I knew about the Vake could be summed up in how much I didn’t truly know at all.
The stories that they tell about it are... incredible, in the most literal sense of the word. You’ve probably heard them: the spawn of a zee-monster and a deposed prince of Hell, a cryptozoologist’s experiment gone wrong, a dragon older than time and born among the stars or a revenge-mad nobleman. A myth made up to scare children. All of that’s wrong, of course, by a little or a lot, and most of it‘s obvious nonsense. But the Vake did scare children, and grown folk, and, it seemed, leather-clad hunters from the Chelonate who had slain monsters that I had only ever seen in nightmares.
And yet – a name, a place to start, these weren’t small things, and they were more than I’d had that morning. It did frighten me, I won’t pretend otherwise. That didn’t mean I had to give up.
As for the hunter, they looked at me like I’d gone mad, then clapped me on the arm with a laugh entirely different than those I’d been greeted with before.
“I hope you get your mark,” they said, favoring me with a crooked grin. “But if you ask me, you‘d do well to start with something a little smaller.”
.
The Vake will devour you.
That’s what I heard, over and over; no one I spoke to was ever willing to say more, and that’s when they took me seriously at all. And the truth is, they were weren’t wrong, those hunters I spoke to, whether they laughed or muttered and shook their heads. I was a child. But I wouldn’t remain so, and I needed to know more. If I knew, I could plan; if I could plan, maybe I could find a way, someday, to win.
That was my thought – my only thought, in those next few days, aside from catching what sleep I could and eating when I could no longer avoid it. Before, with the Shieldmaiden at my side and an entire city of people in need of defending, I had felt guided. Now I was driven. I was thrown out of dockside taverns, gently and less than gently, chased by constables running off loiterers, accused of thieving. I didn’t find a scrap of what I needed on Watchmaker’s Hill or Wolfstack, and I wasn’t willing to quit.
It was the Rowdy Wolfhide who woke me from that walking dream – angrily, as he did everything worth doing.
“What’s wrong?” he said, one night while I was busy spooning porridge into my mouth and looking at nothing at all.
“What d’you mean?” I said.
“What I mean is you’re not here,” he said, slamming his fist into the table. “You’re somewhere else, all the time. You’re looking as bad as you did when we had Mister Songbird haunting us.”
At the sound of that name, the chatter around the rest of the table went quiet enough that I could hear my spoon drop back in my bowl. The others had turned to watch us now, looking worried – about me? I hoped not, but I’d been unfair to them, losing myself in my mission and telling them nothing. Time to make that right.
“I’m hunting something,” I said, “or I mean to one day. It’s hurt a lot of people, and it’s not going to stop, but no one I talk to will tell me a thing about it, and that’s if they even admit it exists.”
“What are you hunting?” the Rough-Knuckled Poet asked.
“You’re going to laugh,” I said. To her credit, when I told her, she didn’t.
“Are you sure it’s real?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I saw it, when – when I went to check on the Shieldmaiden. Only learned what it was later, but I’m sure of that too.”
“And why – ” The Sniffing Tracker paused to wipe her nose on her sleeve. “Why are you hunting something that everyone knows can’t be killed?”
“Because no one else will,” I said, “and the ones it preys on are – ” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, unwilling to say nothing at all. “Are innocent.”
“And the hunters won’t tell you nothin’?” the Clean-Faced Trickster asked.
I nodded. “They’re scared, I think.”
“Then maybe you should forget them,” he said. “If they’re no use, you just have to look somewhere else.”
“Right,” the Poet said. “And if I was hunting a thing that isn’t supposed to exist, it’s legends I’d look to.”
“Cause everything that matters can be found in a book?” the Wolfhide said, but this time it sounded less like anger than friendly taunting, and she retaliated by sticking her tongue out at him and flicking a crumb at his face.
“Some things can,” she said, “but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
I nodded. “Not all legends are book legends. And she’s right, too – I should have thought of it sooner.”
And would have, maybe, if I hadn’t been so caught in what I had to do that I couldn’t see another way. As I said, Vake stories are mostly nonsense, and I’d spent too much time already sifting through them in hopes of finding some fragment of truth. But there are more stories in this city than the ones told by grownups and ground-dwellers who wouldn’t know what the wind was telling them if it was screaming in their ears. We urchins had our tales too. And if I was looking for a storyteller, I knew where to find him.
“What can we do?” the Unbending Bodyguard asked, as quiet and serious as he had been since the Shieldmaiden left. I wonder now if he might have realized – not all the truth, but a sense, perhaps, that something wasn’t right. My hunt had started, after all, the night I came back from the Foreign Office alone.
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” I said. “You hear anything, no matter what, you tell me.”
The Ringbreakers met that with a round of aye ayes and yessirs, only half-serious, and the Poet even raised a glass to toast the start of a new adventure. The Trickster grinned at me, and I felt myself grinning back, not falsely for once but with easy, unforced happiness.
This fight wasn’t theirs to lose, and I knew that loss was far more likely than victory; I couldn’t let them give their lives for it, and I wouldn’t. But even if they heard nothing and saw nothing, it was good to be less alone.
Chapter 1 here.
Chapter 3 here.
Index page here.
That morning, after a few hours of sleep to keep me on my feet, I made straight for Watchmaker’s Hill and the monster hunters’ dens there – or planned to, with all possible haste, but my journey was interrupted by the receipt of a letter.
It was one of the Songbirds’ boys who delivered it: a thin youth in a fine woolen coat, older than my brother but with the same sort of shadows hanging about him. He caught up to me just past the river – soft-booted footsteps from behind me, so quiet that if my hearing hadn’t been honed on other menaces, I would have been taken by surprise. I whirled, stepping back and leveling my spear in his direction, but he only laughed and sketched a bow, offering me a sealed envelope. His smile held more good humor than mockery; he knew as well as I did that I wouldn’t hurt him.
I’d learned by then that messages from the hands of hollow-eyed and hungry apparitions, no matter how sophisticated they seemed, weren’t likely good news. I grabbed the envelope all the same, sure of the sender without needing to ask. The boy from the Foreign Office wouldn’t wait for a reply; he told me none was needed, and slipped out of reach before I could so much as catch hold of his coat. A tip of his hat and a leap onto a passing carriage, and he was gone. I stared after him, holding the envelope too tightly, then tore it open and began to read.
The letter inside was written in flowing, elegant hand – something my brother had practiced, considering what his writing used to look like, but the traces of his old script were still there in the loops and emphatic slashes.
I’m safe, it said, and happy. Do not worry for me. Should you change your mind about joining us, the offer is still open, and will remain so indefinitely. If not, they’ll leave you and the Nobodies be, but you won’t find me again by climbing walls at midnight. I’ve changed rooms. It’s for the best, I promise you. Stay safe, please, and be well.
He’d signed it The Shieldmaiden – the last time he’d use that title, I suspected, and my heart ached anew. I read it again, looking for codes; I could see none that we’d agreed upon, nor any request for help written in implication. So far as I could tell, the letter was simply what it appeared, and he truly had made his decision.
I forced my fingers to unclench, smoothed out the creases I’d made in the paper, and slipped it into a pocket to keep. This was my failure, not his. I hadn’t given up yet on finding a way to fix it.
.
Watchmaker’s Hill wasn’t far from the place where the Face’s messenger interrupted me, and I was glad, because I was eager to be doing anything other than listening to my own thoughts repeating as I walked. Fifteen minutes, maybe fewer, and I turned a street corner to see the hill itself rising in the distance, a tangle of fungus and thicket crowned by the Observatory. I walked east along the Stolen River, past factories and foundries, until I came to less industrial streets; the main road here was lined with weapon shops and smoky pubs, and populated by mushroom sellers, rat-catchers, and the occasional lost marsh wolf. It was city edging into wilderness, and when the breeze blew from the east, as it did that day, the smoke and gunpowder scent of the place met air wafting from the marshes in a medley of mud and fungus.
I felt at home there, though a few among the toughs and bruisers lounging outside the Medusa’s Head clearly thought I shouldn’t. I held my head high as I walked past them, ignoring narrowed eyes and suspicious scowls – nobody likes an urchin where urchins shouldn’t be. I’d return later, if I couldn’t find what I was looking for elsewhere. Better to try a few of the quieter haunts first.
A cup of bitter black coffee purchased from a streetside stall near the Department steps bought me a place to sit, and an excuse to listen to the off-duty menace eradicators and freelance hunters who congregated outside to smoke and one-up each other. Eradicators won’t touch anything that flies, and anyone looking for such work has to find it elsewhere, but they still talk, and there’s often as much truth in their tall tales as falsehood. That day, though, the talk was mostly of rats and marsh vipers, and other simple beasts of natural origin. There were rumors of a dream-wolf black as night, but that was quickly laughed off as nonsense. The Eater or Chains was dead, a rotund man with a scar across his temple insisted, and it couldn’t have returned – monsters don’t come back across that river. But there was no mention that I could hear of anything silent and dark-winged that carried its own stars with it, and when I asked, the scarred man shooed me along, told me he’d hang my hide up for a trophy if I didn’t stop making up stories like that. I think he was exaggerating, though with hunters, it’s sometimes hard to tell.
The Department itself brought me nothing either, though I hadn’t truly expected it would. More rats, mostly. I’d always got on well enough with rats, and it didn’t seem right to hunt creatures with a civilization of their own – but if there was a time to get caught up in that, it wasn’t now, and the rats had always got on well enough without me, too. Let’s simply say that the eradicators’ records – or at least those accessible by dint of a little Spite-honed sneaking – held a great many beasts stranger than any I’d heard of, but none were the one that I meant to slay. And after that, and another hour or so of futile searching, my path brought me back around to the Medusa’s Head.
It seemed to have been been a quiet night so far, by which I mean no brawls and no murders. The pub’s patrons were occupied with their own business – dicing for jade and glim, mostly, or throwing darts, though I heard a howl from the corner as someone lost a needle wrestling match. Most of them ignored me, but a few turned to watch as I stepped through the door, possibly on the lookout for new sport.
The first to speak was a grizzled man in an eradicator’s uniform, who looked up from his drink only long enough to fix me with a dour frown and say, “What are you here for, then? This ain’t hardly a place for brats.”
“Looking for information,” I said, “on a quarry.”
“What, rats for the stewpot?”
“Or pence to nick, maybe,” a one-eyed woman in leather and canvas said, flipping a knife lazily and catching it without looking. “Watch yer pockets, boys.”
“I’m not a thief,” I said. “I’m here as a hunter, and I’m looking for leads. I can pay.”
I couldn’t pay much, but I would make my small store of rostygold stretch as far as it could, and even a little was better than none.
“You’re a child,” the woman said. “You couldn’t hunt a half-dead fungus column. A common sewer rat would eat you alive.”
More people were watching now. I could feel their eyes, and their judgment too, like a prickle between my shoulderblades; I wanted to flee, but instead I clenched my hand around the coins in my pocket and stood a little taller. Someone laughed roughly, and others joined him, the one-eyed woman included. When the laughter quieted I was still standing there, refusing to look away.
“I took on those Blemmigans that were troubling farmers,” I said, “and the scaly thing by the docks that was eating drunks. There’s people would tell you about it, if you asked. My crew killed a heart-taker in Veilgarden. And I saw – ”
“What?” a tattooed bruiser said, grinning. “Ghosts? Mirror-snakes? Marsh-wisps promising treasure?”
“Wings,” I said. “Like a void. Like someone cut a hole in the sky, and you could see through it to the night on the Surface.”
The laughter came like it had before, in a mocking chorus, but this time it faded quickly and left an uneasy hush behind. The one-eyed woman took a nervous swallow of ale, and glared at me over the rim of her tankard like I had just insulted her mother, her honor, and her prized racing slug, and she was deciding what to do about it. The bruiser looked, if anything, spooked. And in a lull of conversation that felt too much like the eye of a passing storm, I noticed a thin, cloaked figure of uncertain or simply irrelevant gender watching me from a corner table. One of the needle-wrestlers, I thought, and not the loser.
As soon as the stranger saw me looking at them, they unfolded themselves from their chair and walked towards me, moving with the peculiar rolling gait of anyone who spends more time at zee than on dry land. Beneath the cloak, they were dressed in Chelonate fashion, all strange leathers and bone jewelry, and their eyes were a deep, inky blue-black – peligin, is what I later learned it was called, the color of zee-beasts and the abyssal waters they swim in. You get eyes like that by eating monsters raw. I didn’t know that then, and might have found this stranger more unsettling if I did, but what they told me, I think, was kindly meant. They crouched down to my eye level, with their forearms resting on their knees, and said, “Child, you’re asking dangerous questions.”
I bristled at that – child I might have been, but I was a Valkyrie too, and I had faced perils of my own. But this was the first person I had found who was willing to tell me anything at all, and I couldn’t afford throw that away out of pride.
“I know that,” I said, and left the I’m not stupid unspoken. “I wouldn’t be, if I didn’t have to.”
“Ate someone you cared about, did it?” The monster hunter shook their head. “Believe me, you’d do better to let this go. I’d be putting the harpoon in your hands myself, if you had any chance at all, but you can’t get vengeance on the Vake.”
The words it can’t be the Vake dried up and died in my throat.
“You’re sure that’s what it is?” I asked.
“No such thing as sure down here,” they replied, “but I’ve heard of wings like that before, from one of the best hunters I ever met. Damned idiot claimed he was on the trail of a legend, then a few days later they found him on the border of the Prickfinger Wastes, too dead for returning. Well. They found most of him.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“For scaring the piss out of you? Convincing you to try something safer, like juggling Cantigaster venom?”
I shook my head. “For giving me somewhere to start.”
And it was true – at now least I had an name for what it was. But with that name, the gulf between knowing the thing and putting an end to it seemed greater even than it had before, and too much of what I knew about the Vake could be summed up in how much I didn’t truly know at all.
The stories that they tell about it are... incredible, in the most literal sense of the word. You’ve probably heard them: the spawn of a zee-monster and a deposed prince of Hell, a cryptozoologist’s experiment gone wrong, a dragon older than time and born among the stars or a revenge-mad nobleman. A myth made up to scare children. All of that’s wrong, of course, by a little or a lot, and most of it‘s obvious nonsense. But the Vake did scare children, and grown folk, and, it seemed, leather-clad hunters from the Chelonate who had slain monsters that I had only ever seen in nightmares.
And yet – a name, a place to start, these weren’t small things, and they were more than I’d had that morning. It did frighten me, I won’t pretend otherwise. That didn’t mean I had to give up.
As for the hunter, they looked at me like I’d gone mad, then clapped me on the arm with a laugh entirely different than those I’d been greeted with before.
“I hope you get your mark,” they said, favoring me with a crooked grin. “But if you ask me, you‘d do well to start with something a little smaller.”
.
The Vake will devour you.
That’s what I heard, over and over; no one I spoke to was ever willing to say more, and that’s when they took me seriously at all. And the truth is, they were weren’t wrong, those hunters I spoke to, whether they laughed or muttered and shook their heads. I was a child. But I wouldn’t remain so, and I needed to know more. If I knew, I could plan; if I could plan, maybe I could find a way, someday, to win.
That was my thought – my only thought, in those next few days, aside from catching what sleep I could and eating when I could no longer avoid it. Before, with the Shieldmaiden at my side and an entire city of people in need of defending, I had felt guided. Now I was driven. I was thrown out of dockside taverns, gently and less than gently, chased by constables running off loiterers, accused of thieving. I didn’t find a scrap of what I needed on Watchmaker’s Hill or Wolfstack, and I wasn’t willing to quit.
It was the Rowdy Wolfhide who woke me from that walking dream – angrily, as he did everything worth doing.
“What’s wrong?” he said, one night while I was busy spooning porridge into my mouth and looking at nothing at all.
“What d’you mean?” I said.
“What I mean is you’re not here,” he said, slamming his fist into the table. “You’re somewhere else, all the time. You’re looking as bad as you did when we had Mister Songbird haunting us.”
At the sound of that name, the chatter around the rest of the table went quiet enough that I could hear my spoon drop back in my bowl. The others had turned to watch us now, looking worried – about me? I hoped not, but I’d been unfair to them, losing myself in my mission and telling them nothing. Time to make that right.
“I’m hunting something,” I said, “or I mean to one day. It’s hurt a lot of people, and it’s not going to stop, but no one I talk to will tell me a thing about it, and that’s if they even admit it exists.”
“What are you hunting?” the Rough-Knuckled Poet asked.
“You’re going to laugh,” I said. To her credit, when I told her, she didn’t.
“Are you sure it’s real?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I saw it, when – when I went to check on the Shieldmaiden. Only learned what it was later, but I’m sure of that too.”
“And why – ” The Sniffing Tracker paused to wipe her nose on her sleeve. “Why are you hunting something that everyone knows can’t be killed?”
“Because no one else will,” I said, “and the ones it preys on are – ” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, unwilling to say nothing at all. “Are innocent.”
“And the hunters won’t tell you nothin’?” the Clean-Faced Trickster asked.
I nodded. “They’re scared, I think.”
“Then maybe you should forget them,” he said. “If they’re no use, you just have to look somewhere else.”
“Right,” the Poet said. “And if I was hunting a thing that isn’t supposed to exist, it’s legends I’d look to.”
“Cause everything that matters can be found in a book?” the Wolfhide said, but this time it sounded less like anger than friendly taunting, and she retaliated by sticking her tongue out at him and flicking a crumb at his face.
“Some things can,” she said, “but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
I nodded. “Not all legends are book legends. And she’s right, too – I should have thought of it sooner.”
And would have, maybe, if I hadn’t been so caught in what I had to do that I couldn’t see another way. As I said, Vake stories are mostly nonsense, and I’d spent too much time already sifting through them in hopes of finding some fragment of truth. But there are more stories in this city than the ones told by grownups and ground-dwellers who wouldn’t know what the wind was telling them if it was screaming in their ears. We urchins had our tales too. And if I was looking for a storyteller, I knew where to find him.
“What can we do?” the Unbending Bodyguard asked, as quiet and serious as he had been since the Shieldmaiden left. I wonder now if he might have realized – not all the truth, but a sense, perhaps, that something wasn’t right. My hunt had started, after all, the night I came back from the Foreign Office alone.
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” I said. “You hear anything, no matter what, you tell me.”
The Ringbreakers met that with a round of aye ayes and yessirs, only half-serious, and the Poet even raised a glass to toast the start of a new adventure. The Trickster grinned at me, and I felt myself grinning back, not falsely for once but with easy, unforced happiness.
This fight wasn’t theirs to lose, and I knew that loss was far more likely than victory; I couldn’t let them give their lives for it, and I wouldn’t. But even if they heard nothing and saw nothing, it was good to be less alone.
Chapter 1 here.
Chapter 3 here.
Index page here.