scrivespinster (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scrivespinster) wrote2020-08-17 11:05 am
scrivespinster) wrote2020-08-17 11:05 am
WIP: Valkyrie Bags a Legend, Chapter 3
Chapter 3
When I was a Fisher King, we chased the winds and sang the storm’s songs, and there was one who knew more of them than most – a boy with a stutter, who had lightning-strike scars branching fernlike along his arms and a birthmark splashed across his face like wine. Slivvy, his name was. Storm spoke to him, sometimes, and through him, and sometimes even answered when he spoke back. And sometimes he was just a child like the rest of us, with scraped-up knees and dirty cheeks, though almost too old when I spoke to him last to be an urchin still. I wonder what became of him as a man grown. They say he took to zee, but they also say he kept a sailing ship, and sang the storms down to speed his way. Hell, maybe it’s true. Some stories are, you know, even the beautiful ones.
That night, though, an urchin he was, and I met him on a rooftop in the Flit – near the top, in fact, where even slung-together platforms and rope bridges were far between. I pulled myself up the rickety ladder to sit beside him, and wordlessly handed over a sticky bundle of paper wrapped in a handkerchief. We’d cleared a nest of venomous things with too many legs from a bakery earlier, and the owner had paid us in treacle tarts. I’d saved my share for him.
When he saw the offering, his face lit up like it was a holiday feast, and he grabbed it from my hands like it might disappear if he left it too long unattended. Storm’s favored or not, he didn’t have any easier time finding a good meal than the rest of us, and treats were rarer still.
“Ain’t sayin’ I owe you,” he said, through a thick stutter and a mouthful of treacle, “but you did us a good turn with the Songbird, an’ I’ll tell you what I can.”
The us he meant was all of us, not just the Fisher Kings. It was more than one gang he spoke for, and he aligned himself with none... though spoke for isn’t quite right, I suppose. He was never a ruler and not quite a priest, just someone who knew how to listen to the city and the winds, and to the children who made their lives in the places where wind and city met. But that was what I needed now: somebody who heard the things that other people didn’t.
“What d’you know about the Vake?” I asked. “True things, I mean. True stories.”
“Not enough,” he said, licking crumbs off his fingers. “‘S old, though. Powerful. Seen more cities‘n this one. It kills those what hunt it – but you knew that already, I think.”
I nodded. I knew that too well, and it didn’t help me a bit.
“What is it?” I asked. “What does it want?”
“A monster in exile,” he said. “Can’t have the sky, so it hunts instead – or maybe it would have done that anyway. All I know for sure is that it’s hungry for what it can’t have, an’ it’s us that pays the price.”
“Can it be killed?”
For a long moment, the only sound was the wind singing through the chimney tops and steeples far below us. Slivvy closed his eyes, tilted his face up toward the distant roof of the ‘Neath, and as he breathed out, a change came over him – smoothed the tics and twitches from his hands, left him calm and inward-looking.
“Bone and claw and tooth,” he said, and the stutter faded as his voice took on a chanting rhythm. “Wind-song, storm-song, night’s black voice. Old gods don’t die by mortal steel. But gods do die.”
His eyes snapped open, and I could see the storm clouds in them. When he spoke, every word was clear and sharp as lightning.
“The last hero failed.”
I won’t, I wanted to say, but it seemed arrogant, even up there with only the wind to listen.
“He failed,” the urchin boy said in Storm’s voice, “but don’t forget him.”
And that, I could promise.
I won’t,” I whispered. Slivvy’s stare seemed to cut through me like a cold wind, leaving me laid open and judged before the force of Storm’s regard; it seemed forever that I stood there looking back at him, trying not to flinch. Then he shook himself all over like a dog shaking off water, blinked, and was himself again. But though I felt that I had said little enough to merit it, there was something in his eyes that I had never expected – the respect given not from teacher to student, but from equal to equal.
“I know you won’t,” he said. The stutter was back, and the will that had inhabited him was gone, leaving only a boy – wiser than most, more knowing, but human. The air still felt like lightning waiting, but it was only Slivvy who said, “We‘ll end it someday. Don’t know how yet, but – “
“If there’s a way,” I said, “we’ll find it.”
I wasn’t talking only about the Vake, and I didn’t think he was either. How much he knew or suspected of the Songbird’s boys, I wasn’t sure, but I spat on my palm and held it out to him, and we shook hands that night in an urchin’s pact. Then it seemed I only blinked and he was gone, back down the ladder and off into the darkness of the Flit, leaving me alone above the city with Storm’s words chasing around my mind.
.
Even after Slivvy left, I lingered, thinking over what I’d heard. There was a lot to think about. I had dreamed, not so long ago, of seeing the old stories with my own eyes: terrible legends that turned out to be true, bold heroes braving the underworld or ascending the heights in search of mystics who spoke with the ring of prophecy.... Now it felt like I was in one of those stories myself, with my sharpened-broom spear and my colander helmet. I hoped that meant I had it in me to be the hero, but it was harder to trust in that now than it had been when it was only blemmigans I faced. And that in turn left me thinking back to the one grownup I had ever met who sat on the roof and talked without talking down to me, who understood about heroes and believed in impossible tasks. I wondered about that, now – what did it take to drive a person Northward, and did I have that thing in me? And I wondered if maybe what I was doing would destroy me too. That was what London’s monster hunters believed, and I couldn’t blame them, when it had already destroyed too many of their own. But I couldn’t let myself think like that. This story would be a different one.
As my eyes unfocused, I saw a shadow move on the roof below. I froze, grasping my spear and staring into the dark, trying to make out what it might have been – only to laugh in relief when I saw the grey cat again, slipping out from between two chimneys with her tail curled like a question mark. Of course it was nothing. Rumors of the Vake hunting its hunters had left me too jumpy, even though I knew I’d done little yet to catch the monster’s eye. When I started to descend the ladder, the cat darted out of sight, though I was sure she’d seen me there. I wondered if she’d been following me, and why, and what she would have to say about all of this. Perhaps to a cat, it was all just a matter of curiosity.
It did seem, as I made my way down from the high places, as if I could feel eyes on me, and I couldn’t shake the sense that if I only turned quick enough I would catch a flicker of something moving where nothing should be. But when I glanced back as I rounded a spire or dropped from a ledge, there was nothing there except, perhaps, the cat keeping pace with me on the way down. Not the Vake, certainly, for all my imagination seemed inclined to turn in that direction; if that death came, it would be from above and without warning. And oddly enough, I suspected my brother might be right about the Face’s agents leaving us alone. Maybe, I thought, I was only tired. Nothing took the opportunity to jump out at me, at least, and nothing had any reason to trouble me either, unless you counted footpads looking for what they thought was an easy target.
And I was tired, enough so that by the time I made it home, it was an effort to keep my eyes open. I muttered a greeting to the sentry without even seeing who it was, and stumbled to the corner where I made my bed in a sort of trance, like I was halfway to dreaming already. I barely had time to take my helmet off and lay my head down before I fell into an uneasy sleep.
.
When I dreamt that night, I dreamt I was walking through a desolate marshland, trackless and thick with fog. It reminded me of Bugsby’s Marshes, but wilder and colder, emptier somehow. The grey cat walked beside me, hopping delicately from one tussock of tangled grass to another while I struggled through the mud, cold water creeping further up my legs with every step.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Dreaming,” the cat said primly. “I’d ask how you got here, but it’s no business of mine, and no surprise with that thing you’ve been chasing.”
“Does the Vake have something to do with dreaming, then?”
The cat blinked at me slowly. I got the sense that I’d asked the wrong question, and that maybe I’d been asking the wrong questions from the outset, though I couldn’t think right then of what I might do differently.
“Not in particular,” she said. “It’s really more a matter of where this path might lead you. Mind the marsh-lights, by the way. They’re not safe.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less certain I was that I wanted to venture any further into this swamp with no idea of where I was going. I sat down on a stump and rested my chin in my hands, watching the will o’ wisps drift through the fog, and tried to think.
“Do you believe in prophecy?” I asked.
“Do you?”
That was a very catlike answer, and a more difficult question than it should have been, considering everything I had seen already. A simple yes was true, but too easy in a way that felt like a mistake.
“I believe in what I heard tonight,” I said at last. “I just don’t know what it means.”
“The fortune tellers of Mahogany Hall would tell you that divination is simply a matter of piecing together what is known, until you have enough to guess the shape of what isn’t. They’d be lying about that, of course, but some lies have their own wisdom. So, Valkyrie of the Flit. What do you know?”
“I know it took my brother,” I said, hearing and hating the useless anger in my voice. “I know it flies over the streets at night, and the Foreign Office worship it like a god, and I know it kills people. Hunters, it kills hunters. It killed the last person that tried to fight it, the one that Slivvy told me – ”
Not to forget.
I felt something like a a gust of wind brushing past me, there and gone, chilling my skin and leaving my head a little clearer.
Maybe, I thought, there had been something rather more practical in that piece of advice than I realized at first. I hadn’t been able to find out anything about the Vake. Perhaps I could learn more about the hunter – or their memory, or whatever else it was they had left behind.
Either way, I couldn’t stay where I was. It was growing colder, and something in the air of that place felt inhospitable. I knew I was lucky not to be there alone.
When I hopped off the stump, the cat looked at me once, with feline confidence, and sauntered off into the marshes, following a path that looked very much like any other. It wasn’t the way I had come, but I followed even so. The chill of the place receded as I walked, and the mist and mire fell away behind me, until at last that dream faded into another, less distinct.
The cat left me at a crossroads between two streets I knew, and there my memory ends. All I know is that I slept, and woke rested.
.
The next morning found me sharp and alert, free of clinging fog and dancing lights; the only trace of those dreams to linger was the resolve I had found there, and though I had the sense that I owed that cat much more than a few secrets, that resolve was worth it. I had more than a name now. I had a goal, and one that seemed more achievable than find the Vake, slay the Vake, save the Songbirds’ children. I even knew where to start: right back in Watchmaker’s Hill, just when I was starting to be certain there was nothing left there for me to learn.
The usual tricks for gathering information wouldn’t work for me; I couldn’t try to buy a round without getting laughed out of any tavern, and hunters weren’t the sort of men and women who could be bribed with treacle. Fortunately, there were other avenues for finding what I needed. Not the registrars, I thought, and not the papers; a lot of people died for good in the wilder areas of London, without their deaths ever making it into any sort of official record. But I knew who did keep track of these things, as a matter of professional interest.
Before I set out that day, I pulled the Clean-Faced Trickster aside for a quiet word, out of earshot of the others.
“I know you never got rid of those kifers you found,” I said. Before he could protest his innocence too much, I added, “I need to borrow them.”
He looked at me in surprise. “You’re going thieving?”
“Looking for information,” I said. “I don’t intend to take anything I won’t return.”
The Trickster gave me a skeptical look, but before I could protest my innocence, he ran off to dig through his satchel of belongings until he found the set of tools. He dropped them into my hand with a grin, and wished me luck, knowing full well that I would need it.
“Don’t get into too much trouble,” he said, “‘less you plan to invite me along.”
I shook my head, said trouble was something I hoped to be avoiding, and made my escape, trying and failing not to feel like a hypocrite.
The truth is, the Trickster was right. I was going thieving.
.
The Department of Menace Eradication wasn’t a difficult place to break into, as these things went. Much of it was open to the public, though few people ever ventured in there except to collect or offer a bounty. The death records were closed, though, and I didn’t think the Eradicators would be amenable to my snooping through them in search of a monster that might or might not exist. Which is why, despite the slight, nagging guilt that had settled in the back of my mind, I had no intention of letting them know about it.
It’s often said that the trick to sneaking in anywhere is to look like you belong. That can be more difficult for urchins than most, but the big folk of the city did use us to run messages from time to time. If anyone asked, I had a delivery for the clerk on records duty, and a grim determination not to leave until I’d gotten my shilling in recompense. I walked up to the front door, and then to the front desk, where a rough-looking functionary told me to state my business.
“Records room?” I asked. “Gotta package. ‘S right heavy, ain’t it, and I hauled it all the way from bloody Spite too.”
“Just so long as it ain’t more rats again,” he said with a tobacco-stained grin, and pointed me down the hall. “Up the stairs and left, and mind the broken step.”
He flipped me a penny, and I grinned right back and slipped it into my pocket before hurrying on, deeper into the Department.
I’d been there before, in search of a bounty or a bit of information, and I knew where I was going, but there was something about those labyrinthine halls that seemed set apart from the world outside. The whole place had an air of... not disregard, but age and a strained budget, both taking their toll in peeling wallpaper and cracked tile. The atmosphere was hushed. The colors were muted, and tended toward beige and brown. Nearly the only sound was the creak of floorboards beneath my feet, though as I passed the trophy room, I could hear voices from inside rising and falling in conversation and laughter. I held my breath and tried not to sound like I was walking past too quickly. Turn left, then, down a long narrow hall and past an office where the clerk sat smoking a pipe and reading some conspiratorial broadsheet. He didn’t notice me as I walked past the open doorway and onward, to the closed door at the end of the hallway. Locked, when I tried it, but the coast was clear behind me. I worked the lock until it clicked, then slipped inside.
The room smelled of age, dust and binding glue, and the walls were lined with books enough to leave the Rough-Knuckled Poet weak in the knees, though these had titles like Allocation of Funding for Tools and Weaponry, Years 1880-1885. I eased the door shut behind me, and only then lifted the shutter on my little lamp and set it on the table, angled toward the books and away from the door.
I scanned the shelves as quickly as I could, glancing past account books, taking a closer look at personnel records, until I found what I was looking for: a plain, worn volume containing, among other things, a listing of casualties among Department members and contractors, and the manner in which they had met their deaths. With luck, what I needed to know would be between those covers.
I looked down at the book, and sweat stood out on my palms. Valkyries didn’t steal, and there I was, about to do something I knew was wrong in hopes that something good would come of it – but I’d made my decision already, and this was no time for dithering. Honor mattered, but this mattered more. I hid the book beneath my shirt, secured it with my belt, and left the same way I had come in. No one stopped me on the way out, though the grinning functionary at the desk did wave goodbye as I left, which didn’t make me any less guilty.
As soon as I was back to the city proper, I took to the roofs again, where I could hide myself away behind a spire and prop the book open on my knees.
It made for grim reading, but the kind that a hunter could learn a lot from, given more time than I had. The records detailed not only deaths but investigations into their causes, marked down in rough but careful hand: which signs pointed to one creature or another, notes on the progress of the hunt and whether it was resolved or ongoing. But as I flipped back through the pages, past Snuffer, apprehended in Veilgarden and frilled serpent, venomous, dispatched two streets west of the Blind Helmsman, I came to an entry where that wasn’t the case. Where the others were thorough and sometimes extensive, complete with notes and addenda, this was nothing more than a few short lines:
Date: Aug. 8, 1896. Body discovered north of Plenty’s Carnival, bordering Wastes. Injuries inflicted by claws, teeth. Partial consumption of flesh. Beast responsible unknown. Personal effects identified as belonging to the Steadfast Tracker.
That wasn’t the last of them, either. There were others scattered throughout that month’s entries and further back, all equally terse and unresolved. I bookmarked those I found with torn strips of newspaper, and marked their dates and locations on a scrap page of my own: some scattered throughout the city in no discernible pattern, but a notable number in Wilmot’s End or the Forgotten Quarter, and many more discovered on the edges of the Prickfinger Wastes, near the Carnival or northwest of it.
There were sensible explanations for that, ones that didn’t have anything to do with a living myth. The Wastes were a proving ground for hunters, rife with the kind of dangerous beasts that made their homes in even more dangerous terrain, and several of London’s criminals were not above making it look as though their rivals in business had been devoured by monsters, in hopes that no further questions would be asked. Rumors persisted that some among the city’s powerful were prone to doing the same. But to me, that pattern – same area, same injuries, bodies that seemed intended not to be hidden but to be found – pointed to a hunting ground. And that record, with its oddly cursory notes and no further action, pointed to the Menace Eradicators knowing something and doing nothing – out of fear? Because they knew they couldn’t?
I didn’t think the reason mattered to the dead, but then, wherever they’d gone on to, they probably didn’t care about much any longer. And at least, I thought, the casualties seemed more likely to be hunters than ordinary folk – not all of them, but certainly the ones I recognized. Some were legends in their own right, which was a troubling thought, but interesting, too. Your typical beast doesn’t want to fight, just to live, and that means it goes for easy prey, unless it’s desperate. Something that chooses the toughest adversaries, the most heavily armed and experienced, isn’t mindless or instinct-driven. It’s intelligent.
Or, I thought, all those hunters were seeking it out, and losing anyway.
Or both, I reminded myself. It didn’t have to be one or the other, and either way, there was too much I didn’t know. For all the hope I had pinned on this book, I couldn’t even be sure I wasn’t on the wrong trail entirely. Except –
I had more than hope, I realized. I had evidence. There was one place I was certain the monster had been: Wilmot’s End, the night I went to see my brother. I flipped forward again, searching for anyone who had died on that date, near that place, until I found it: a young woman, perhaps a spy or only a foreign diplomat who wandered too far unwisely, discovered not even a day after I had hidden beneath the arch and waited for the monster to pass. Not there, but close, and in the direction the Vake had been flying.
I felt cold. I had found my mark, not a whisper or a myth but a trail to follow, all the way to whatever end it brought me. There could be no pretending any longer that this wasn’t real – and I hadn’t ever planned on that, but reading through that list of casualties, with everything it said and didn’t say, had left the hunt feeling so much closer than it had before.
I closed the book and stood, rolling my shoulders to ease the tension in my muscles and the ache behind my eyes. I’d been sitting still and squinting at cramped letters for too long, and it was time to get moving – first home, and then back to business. I had a fairly good guess at who the most recent Vake hunter must be: the Steadfast Tracker, discovered by the Carnival, perhaps even the fallen friend the Chelonate hunter had spoken of. He had been good, if all the stories I’d heard of his hunts were accurate, or even only half of them. More than that, he had been well-known enough about the Hill and the docks for for a curious urchin gang to find out where he had lived.
.
As it turned out, the answer to that question, relayed to me by the Sniffing Tracker with a proud grin, was a cottage in the Marshes, off to the south of Watchmaker’s Hill.
It was a path I knew, though I’d never followed it all the way to the blind men’s observatory at the end. I’d tracked a sorrow-spider infestation to a burrow in the area once; the Shieldmaiden and I had burned it out together and gone home singing pieces of the tale we imagined they’d one day tell of our fight in the dark. This time I went further, past the hill and around it to a little cottage half-hidden by a thicket of fungus already growing wild. There was no light shining from beneath the door, and the shutter of one window hung ajar, though the glass was still intact. I moved closer, warily, listening for anything dangerous that might have taken up residence. Nothing. I nudged the door open with my spear, cast my lantern about to see only a few beetles scuttling away from the light, then finally stepped inside.
The house was empty, and painfully quiet. The walls were lined with weapons – rifles antique and modern, a sword, a rack of sharp throwing knives – but what I noticed most were the traces of a life interrupted: an unmade bed, an open newspaper sporting a ring of coffee, half of what had been a loaf of bread on the counter slowly growing its own empire of mold. A dusty bottle with a trace of dark, viscous liquid remaining had fallen and rolled against one of the baseboards beside the desk. Black Wings Absinthe, the label said. It had clearly been there for a long time.
I picked my way carefully across the floor, shining my lantern into corners, trying to disturb as little as possible. It felt like tomb-robbing, and I suppose that’s what it was, though I meant no harm by it. Perhaps if the Tracker’s ghost was real, it would be glad to be avenged. In any case, my search was quick, though every second in that abiding silence seemed to stretch. The man’s possessions were few enough, if well-cared for; I sorted through the tools and trophies of a hunter’s trade, blades and ropes and poisons, a handful of curiosities and even a small store of rostygold and glim. I hesitated over that, then decided it would be more useful in Flowerdene than gathering dust in the Marshes. The weapons, I left alone. They might be useful, but it didn’t seem right. And at last, in a drawer in his bedside table, I found it a battered journal. Its cover was stained by mud and marsh-water and worse, its pages marked by dog-eared corners, and it held a hunter’s notes scratched out in sprawling hand. When I turned to the end, I saw that the last entry was dated to the night before the Steadfast Tracker’s death.
The Carnival, it said, tomorrow. The path is mine, the preparations made, and all that’s left... the easy part, right? I hope I can add that to the lies I’ll tell my grandchildren one day, but I do know better. All that’s left is the crucible. May god and luck be with me.
I closed the journal, thinking of the Steadfast Tracker’s last words with a shiver; either God and luck had been absent, or they hadn’t been enough. And now there was nothing left of him but the record in my hands, and with it, perhaps, his hopes for victory. I resolved to hold on to both, and stepped out again, from one darkness into another.
Chapter 2 here.
Chapter 4 here.
Index page here.
When I was a Fisher King, we chased the winds and sang the storm’s songs, and there was one who knew more of them than most – a boy with a stutter, who had lightning-strike scars branching fernlike along his arms and a birthmark splashed across his face like wine. Slivvy, his name was. Storm spoke to him, sometimes, and through him, and sometimes even answered when he spoke back. And sometimes he was just a child like the rest of us, with scraped-up knees and dirty cheeks, though almost too old when I spoke to him last to be an urchin still. I wonder what became of him as a man grown. They say he took to zee, but they also say he kept a sailing ship, and sang the storms down to speed his way. Hell, maybe it’s true. Some stories are, you know, even the beautiful ones.
That night, though, an urchin he was, and I met him on a rooftop in the Flit – near the top, in fact, where even slung-together platforms and rope bridges were far between. I pulled myself up the rickety ladder to sit beside him, and wordlessly handed over a sticky bundle of paper wrapped in a handkerchief. We’d cleared a nest of venomous things with too many legs from a bakery earlier, and the owner had paid us in treacle tarts. I’d saved my share for him.
When he saw the offering, his face lit up like it was a holiday feast, and he grabbed it from my hands like it might disappear if he left it too long unattended. Storm’s favored or not, he didn’t have any easier time finding a good meal than the rest of us, and treats were rarer still.
“Ain’t sayin’ I owe you,” he said, through a thick stutter and a mouthful of treacle, “but you did us a good turn with the Songbird, an’ I’ll tell you what I can.”
The us he meant was all of us, not just the Fisher Kings. It was more than one gang he spoke for, and he aligned himself with none... though spoke for isn’t quite right, I suppose. He was never a ruler and not quite a priest, just someone who knew how to listen to the city and the winds, and to the children who made their lives in the places where wind and city met. But that was what I needed now: somebody who heard the things that other people didn’t.
“What d’you know about the Vake?” I asked. “True things, I mean. True stories.”
“Not enough,” he said, licking crumbs off his fingers. “‘S old, though. Powerful. Seen more cities‘n this one. It kills those what hunt it – but you knew that already, I think.”
I nodded. I knew that too well, and it didn’t help me a bit.
“What is it?” I asked. “What does it want?”
“A monster in exile,” he said. “Can’t have the sky, so it hunts instead – or maybe it would have done that anyway. All I know for sure is that it’s hungry for what it can’t have, an’ it’s us that pays the price.”
“Can it be killed?”
For a long moment, the only sound was the wind singing through the chimney tops and steeples far below us. Slivvy closed his eyes, tilted his face up toward the distant roof of the ‘Neath, and as he breathed out, a change came over him – smoothed the tics and twitches from his hands, left him calm and inward-looking.
“Bone and claw and tooth,” he said, and the stutter faded as his voice took on a chanting rhythm. “Wind-song, storm-song, night’s black voice. Old gods don’t die by mortal steel. But gods do die.”
His eyes snapped open, and I could see the storm clouds in them. When he spoke, every word was clear and sharp as lightning.
“The last hero failed.”
I won’t, I wanted to say, but it seemed arrogant, even up there with only the wind to listen.
“He failed,” the urchin boy said in Storm’s voice, “but don’t forget him.”
And that, I could promise.
I won’t,” I whispered. Slivvy’s stare seemed to cut through me like a cold wind, leaving me laid open and judged before the force of Storm’s regard; it seemed forever that I stood there looking back at him, trying not to flinch. Then he shook himself all over like a dog shaking off water, blinked, and was himself again. But though I felt that I had said little enough to merit it, there was something in his eyes that I had never expected – the respect given not from teacher to student, but from equal to equal.
“I know you won’t,” he said. The stutter was back, and the will that had inhabited him was gone, leaving only a boy – wiser than most, more knowing, but human. The air still felt like lightning waiting, but it was only Slivvy who said, “We‘ll end it someday. Don’t know how yet, but – “
“If there’s a way,” I said, “we’ll find it.”
I wasn’t talking only about the Vake, and I didn’t think he was either. How much he knew or suspected of the Songbird’s boys, I wasn’t sure, but I spat on my palm and held it out to him, and we shook hands that night in an urchin’s pact. Then it seemed I only blinked and he was gone, back down the ladder and off into the darkness of the Flit, leaving me alone above the city with Storm’s words chasing around my mind.
.
Even after Slivvy left, I lingered, thinking over what I’d heard. There was a lot to think about. I had dreamed, not so long ago, of seeing the old stories with my own eyes: terrible legends that turned out to be true, bold heroes braving the underworld or ascending the heights in search of mystics who spoke with the ring of prophecy.... Now it felt like I was in one of those stories myself, with my sharpened-broom spear and my colander helmet. I hoped that meant I had it in me to be the hero, but it was harder to trust in that now than it had been when it was only blemmigans I faced. And that in turn left me thinking back to the one grownup I had ever met who sat on the roof and talked without talking down to me, who understood about heroes and believed in impossible tasks. I wondered about that, now – what did it take to drive a person Northward, and did I have that thing in me? And I wondered if maybe what I was doing would destroy me too. That was what London’s monster hunters believed, and I couldn’t blame them, when it had already destroyed too many of their own. But I couldn’t let myself think like that. This story would be a different one.
As my eyes unfocused, I saw a shadow move on the roof below. I froze, grasping my spear and staring into the dark, trying to make out what it might have been – only to laugh in relief when I saw the grey cat again, slipping out from between two chimneys with her tail curled like a question mark. Of course it was nothing. Rumors of the Vake hunting its hunters had left me too jumpy, even though I knew I’d done little yet to catch the monster’s eye. When I started to descend the ladder, the cat darted out of sight, though I was sure she’d seen me there. I wondered if she’d been following me, and why, and what she would have to say about all of this. Perhaps to a cat, it was all just a matter of curiosity.
It did seem, as I made my way down from the high places, as if I could feel eyes on me, and I couldn’t shake the sense that if I only turned quick enough I would catch a flicker of something moving where nothing should be. But when I glanced back as I rounded a spire or dropped from a ledge, there was nothing there except, perhaps, the cat keeping pace with me on the way down. Not the Vake, certainly, for all my imagination seemed inclined to turn in that direction; if that death came, it would be from above and without warning. And oddly enough, I suspected my brother might be right about the Face’s agents leaving us alone. Maybe, I thought, I was only tired. Nothing took the opportunity to jump out at me, at least, and nothing had any reason to trouble me either, unless you counted footpads looking for what they thought was an easy target.
And I was tired, enough so that by the time I made it home, it was an effort to keep my eyes open. I muttered a greeting to the sentry without even seeing who it was, and stumbled to the corner where I made my bed in a sort of trance, like I was halfway to dreaming already. I barely had time to take my helmet off and lay my head down before I fell into an uneasy sleep.
.
When I dreamt that night, I dreamt I was walking through a desolate marshland, trackless and thick with fog. It reminded me of Bugsby’s Marshes, but wilder and colder, emptier somehow. The grey cat walked beside me, hopping delicately from one tussock of tangled grass to another while I struggled through the mud, cold water creeping further up my legs with every step.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Dreaming,” the cat said primly. “I’d ask how you got here, but it’s no business of mine, and no surprise with that thing you’ve been chasing.”
“Does the Vake have something to do with dreaming, then?”
The cat blinked at me slowly. I got the sense that I’d asked the wrong question, and that maybe I’d been asking the wrong questions from the outset, though I couldn’t think right then of what I might do differently.
“Not in particular,” she said. “It’s really more a matter of where this path might lead you. Mind the marsh-lights, by the way. They’re not safe.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less certain I was that I wanted to venture any further into this swamp with no idea of where I was going. I sat down on a stump and rested my chin in my hands, watching the will o’ wisps drift through the fog, and tried to think.
“Do you believe in prophecy?” I asked.
“Do you?”
That was a very catlike answer, and a more difficult question than it should have been, considering everything I had seen already. A simple yes was true, but too easy in a way that felt like a mistake.
“I believe in what I heard tonight,” I said at last. “I just don’t know what it means.”
“The fortune tellers of Mahogany Hall would tell you that divination is simply a matter of piecing together what is known, until you have enough to guess the shape of what isn’t. They’d be lying about that, of course, but some lies have their own wisdom. So, Valkyrie of the Flit. What do you know?”
“I know it took my brother,” I said, hearing and hating the useless anger in my voice. “I know it flies over the streets at night, and the Foreign Office worship it like a god, and I know it kills people. Hunters, it kills hunters. It killed the last person that tried to fight it, the one that Slivvy told me – ”
Not to forget.
I felt something like a a gust of wind brushing past me, there and gone, chilling my skin and leaving my head a little clearer.
Maybe, I thought, there had been something rather more practical in that piece of advice than I realized at first. I hadn’t been able to find out anything about the Vake. Perhaps I could learn more about the hunter – or their memory, or whatever else it was they had left behind.
Either way, I couldn’t stay where I was. It was growing colder, and something in the air of that place felt inhospitable. I knew I was lucky not to be there alone.
When I hopped off the stump, the cat looked at me once, with feline confidence, and sauntered off into the marshes, following a path that looked very much like any other. It wasn’t the way I had come, but I followed even so. The chill of the place receded as I walked, and the mist and mire fell away behind me, until at last that dream faded into another, less distinct.
The cat left me at a crossroads between two streets I knew, and there my memory ends. All I know is that I slept, and woke rested.
.
The next morning found me sharp and alert, free of clinging fog and dancing lights; the only trace of those dreams to linger was the resolve I had found there, and though I had the sense that I owed that cat much more than a few secrets, that resolve was worth it. I had more than a name now. I had a goal, and one that seemed more achievable than find the Vake, slay the Vake, save the Songbirds’ children. I even knew where to start: right back in Watchmaker’s Hill, just when I was starting to be certain there was nothing left there for me to learn.
The usual tricks for gathering information wouldn’t work for me; I couldn’t try to buy a round without getting laughed out of any tavern, and hunters weren’t the sort of men and women who could be bribed with treacle. Fortunately, there were other avenues for finding what I needed. Not the registrars, I thought, and not the papers; a lot of people died for good in the wilder areas of London, without their deaths ever making it into any sort of official record. But I knew who did keep track of these things, as a matter of professional interest.
Before I set out that day, I pulled the Clean-Faced Trickster aside for a quiet word, out of earshot of the others.
“I know you never got rid of those kifers you found,” I said. Before he could protest his innocence too much, I added, “I need to borrow them.”
He looked at me in surprise. “You’re going thieving?”
“Looking for information,” I said. “I don’t intend to take anything I won’t return.”
The Trickster gave me a skeptical look, but before I could protest my innocence, he ran off to dig through his satchel of belongings until he found the set of tools. He dropped them into my hand with a grin, and wished me luck, knowing full well that I would need it.
“Don’t get into too much trouble,” he said, “‘less you plan to invite me along.”
I shook my head, said trouble was something I hoped to be avoiding, and made my escape, trying and failing not to feel like a hypocrite.
The truth is, the Trickster was right. I was going thieving.
.
The Department of Menace Eradication wasn’t a difficult place to break into, as these things went. Much of it was open to the public, though few people ever ventured in there except to collect or offer a bounty. The death records were closed, though, and I didn’t think the Eradicators would be amenable to my snooping through them in search of a monster that might or might not exist. Which is why, despite the slight, nagging guilt that had settled in the back of my mind, I had no intention of letting them know about it.
It’s often said that the trick to sneaking in anywhere is to look like you belong. That can be more difficult for urchins than most, but the big folk of the city did use us to run messages from time to time. If anyone asked, I had a delivery for the clerk on records duty, and a grim determination not to leave until I’d gotten my shilling in recompense. I walked up to the front door, and then to the front desk, where a rough-looking functionary told me to state my business.
“Records room?” I asked. “Gotta package. ‘S right heavy, ain’t it, and I hauled it all the way from bloody Spite too.”
“Just so long as it ain’t more rats again,” he said with a tobacco-stained grin, and pointed me down the hall. “Up the stairs and left, and mind the broken step.”
He flipped me a penny, and I grinned right back and slipped it into my pocket before hurrying on, deeper into the Department.
I’d been there before, in search of a bounty or a bit of information, and I knew where I was going, but there was something about those labyrinthine halls that seemed set apart from the world outside. The whole place had an air of... not disregard, but age and a strained budget, both taking their toll in peeling wallpaper and cracked tile. The atmosphere was hushed. The colors were muted, and tended toward beige and brown. Nearly the only sound was the creak of floorboards beneath my feet, though as I passed the trophy room, I could hear voices from inside rising and falling in conversation and laughter. I held my breath and tried not to sound like I was walking past too quickly. Turn left, then, down a long narrow hall and past an office where the clerk sat smoking a pipe and reading some conspiratorial broadsheet. He didn’t notice me as I walked past the open doorway and onward, to the closed door at the end of the hallway. Locked, when I tried it, but the coast was clear behind me. I worked the lock until it clicked, then slipped inside.
The room smelled of age, dust and binding glue, and the walls were lined with books enough to leave the Rough-Knuckled Poet weak in the knees, though these had titles like Allocation of Funding for Tools and Weaponry, Years 1880-1885. I eased the door shut behind me, and only then lifted the shutter on my little lamp and set it on the table, angled toward the books and away from the door.
I scanned the shelves as quickly as I could, glancing past account books, taking a closer look at personnel records, until I found what I was looking for: a plain, worn volume containing, among other things, a listing of casualties among Department members and contractors, and the manner in which they had met their deaths. With luck, what I needed to know would be between those covers.
I looked down at the book, and sweat stood out on my palms. Valkyries didn’t steal, and there I was, about to do something I knew was wrong in hopes that something good would come of it – but I’d made my decision already, and this was no time for dithering. Honor mattered, but this mattered more. I hid the book beneath my shirt, secured it with my belt, and left the same way I had come in. No one stopped me on the way out, though the grinning functionary at the desk did wave goodbye as I left, which didn’t make me any less guilty.
As soon as I was back to the city proper, I took to the roofs again, where I could hide myself away behind a spire and prop the book open on my knees.
It made for grim reading, but the kind that a hunter could learn a lot from, given more time than I had. The records detailed not only deaths but investigations into their causes, marked down in rough but careful hand: which signs pointed to one creature or another, notes on the progress of the hunt and whether it was resolved or ongoing. But as I flipped back through the pages, past Snuffer, apprehended in Veilgarden and frilled serpent, venomous, dispatched two streets west of the Blind Helmsman, I came to an entry where that wasn’t the case. Where the others were thorough and sometimes extensive, complete with notes and addenda, this was nothing more than a few short lines:
Date: Aug. 8, 1896. Body discovered north of Plenty’s Carnival, bordering Wastes. Injuries inflicted by claws, teeth. Partial consumption of flesh. Beast responsible unknown. Personal effects identified as belonging to the Steadfast Tracker.
That wasn’t the last of them, either. There were others scattered throughout that month’s entries and further back, all equally terse and unresolved. I bookmarked those I found with torn strips of newspaper, and marked their dates and locations on a scrap page of my own: some scattered throughout the city in no discernible pattern, but a notable number in Wilmot’s End or the Forgotten Quarter, and many more discovered on the edges of the Prickfinger Wastes, near the Carnival or northwest of it.
There were sensible explanations for that, ones that didn’t have anything to do with a living myth. The Wastes were a proving ground for hunters, rife with the kind of dangerous beasts that made their homes in even more dangerous terrain, and several of London’s criminals were not above making it look as though their rivals in business had been devoured by monsters, in hopes that no further questions would be asked. Rumors persisted that some among the city’s powerful were prone to doing the same. But to me, that pattern – same area, same injuries, bodies that seemed intended not to be hidden but to be found – pointed to a hunting ground. And that record, with its oddly cursory notes and no further action, pointed to the Menace Eradicators knowing something and doing nothing – out of fear? Because they knew they couldn’t?
I didn’t think the reason mattered to the dead, but then, wherever they’d gone on to, they probably didn’t care about much any longer. And at least, I thought, the casualties seemed more likely to be hunters than ordinary folk – not all of them, but certainly the ones I recognized. Some were legends in their own right, which was a troubling thought, but interesting, too. Your typical beast doesn’t want to fight, just to live, and that means it goes for easy prey, unless it’s desperate. Something that chooses the toughest adversaries, the most heavily armed and experienced, isn’t mindless or instinct-driven. It’s intelligent.
Or, I thought, all those hunters were seeking it out, and losing anyway.
Or both, I reminded myself. It didn’t have to be one or the other, and either way, there was too much I didn’t know. For all the hope I had pinned on this book, I couldn’t even be sure I wasn’t on the wrong trail entirely. Except –
I had more than hope, I realized. I had evidence. There was one place I was certain the monster had been: Wilmot’s End, the night I went to see my brother. I flipped forward again, searching for anyone who had died on that date, near that place, until I found it: a young woman, perhaps a spy or only a foreign diplomat who wandered too far unwisely, discovered not even a day after I had hidden beneath the arch and waited for the monster to pass. Not there, but close, and in the direction the Vake had been flying.
I felt cold. I had found my mark, not a whisper or a myth but a trail to follow, all the way to whatever end it brought me. There could be no pretending any longer that this wasn’t real – and I hadn’t ever planned on that, but reading through that list of casualties, with everything it said and didn’t say, had left the hunt feeling so much closer than it had before.
I closed the book and stood, rolling my shoulders to ease the tension in my muscles and the ache behind my eyes. I’d been sitting still and squinting at cramped letters for too long, and it was time to get moving – first home, and then back to business. I had a fairly good guess at who the most recent Vake hunter must be: the Steadfast Tracker, discovered by the Carnival, perhaps even the fallen friend the Chelonate hunter had spoken of. He had been good, if all the stories I’d heard of his hunts were accurate, or even only half of them. More than that, he had been well-known enough about the Hill and the docks for for a curious urchin gang to find out where he had lived.
.
As it turned out, the answer to that question, relayed to me by the Sniffing Tracker with a proud grin, was a cottage in the Marshes, off to the south of Watchmaker’s Hill.
It was a path I knew, though I’d never followed it all the way to the blind men’s observatory at the end. I’d tracked a sorrow-spider infestation to a burrow in the area once; the Shieldmaiden and I had burned it out together and gone home singing pieces of the tale we imagined they’d one day tell of our fight in the dark. This time I went further, past the hill and around it to a little cottage half-hidden by a thicket of fungus already growing wild. There was no light shining from beneath the door, and the shutter of one window hung ajar, though the glass was still intact. I moved closer, warily, listening for anything dangerous that might have taken up residence. Nothing. I nudged the door open with my spear, cast my lantern about to see only a few beetles scuttling away from the light, then finally stepped inside.
The house was empty, and painfully quiet. The walls were lined with weapons – rifles antique and modern, a sword, a rack of sharp throwing knives – but what I noticed most were the traces of a life interrupted: an unmade bed, an open newspaper sporting a ring of coffee, half of what had been a loaf of bread on the counter slowly growing its own empire of mold. A dusty bottle with a trace of dark, viscous liquid remaining had fallen and rolled against one of the baseboards beside the desk. Black Wings Absinthe, the label said. It had clearly been there for a long time.
I picked my way carefully across the floor, shining my lantern into corners, trying to disturb as little as possible. It felt like tomb-robbing, and I suppose that’s what it was, though I meant no harm by it. Perhaps if the Tracker’s ghost was real, it would be glad to be avenged. In any case, my search was quick, though every second in that abiding silence seemed to stretch. The man’s possessions were few enough, if well-cared for; I sorted through the tools and trophies of a hunter’s trade, blades and ropes and poisons, a handful of curiosities and even a small store of rostygold and glim. I hesitated over that, then decided it would be more useful in Flowerdene than gathering dust in the Marshes. The weapons, I left alone. They might be useful, but it didn’t seem right. And at last, in a drawer in his bedside table, I found it a battered journal. Its cover was stained by mud and marsh-water and worse, its pages marked by dog-eared corners, and it held a hunter’s notes scratched out in sprawling hand. When I turned to the end, I saw that the last entry was dated to the night before the Steadfast Tracker’s death.
The Carnival, it said, tomorrow. The path is mine, the preparations made, and all that’s left... the easy part, right? I hope I can add that to the lies I’ll tell my grandchildren one day, but I do know better. All that’s left is the crucible. May god and luck be with me.
I closed the journal, thinking of the Steadfast Tracker’s last words with a shiver; either God and luck had been absent, or they hadn’t been enough. And now there was nothing left of him but the record in my hands, and with it, perhaps, his hopes for victory. I resolved to hold on to both, and stepped out again, from one darkness into another.
Chapter 2 here.
Chapter 4 here.
Index page here.