by John Ruch
Back at the wagons, it was decreed that the bosses would sally forth whilst the decanus and the drivers stayed behind. Fine with him. Lain was already sick of sitting out in the weather, smelling the bosses’ shit hit the pavement every time they used the latrine. Circling the wagons within spitting distance of the tavern sounded plenty good.
But first he found out he had yet another dirty job—cleaning a litterbox. After Arrowmask hopped on a chair, shouting about spotting a rat, Mieux caught the thing in her arms and revealed it to be a surly cat she’d rescued from a Thousand Leagues wagon.
“Do not worry, it has only one head!” she says. “It is named Mister Pudgymouth!”
When Arrowmask dared question the monicker, she held out the growling, wriggling beast. “Its mouth is pudgy where the whiskers come out! Look at it! Look at how pudgy it is!”
Her reasons for bringing a potentially rabid enemy cat on board made less sense, but Arrowmask gave up after calling her “Miss Pudgycheeks.”
Then came the Voidiva’s ritual shaking of her keychain to remind them to be good, with Trath joking how she should make sure not to lose them, and her cracking how she never loses. Then Steeleye doing some flexing to show who’s captain of the ship. Hardly necessary after they’d seen her dismantle and salvage the ruined Thousand League wagons with her one un-stitched arm.
When the bosses were gone, they all watched the cat sit there, with its ass right on the common dining table. Lain liked cats. They were easy to stomp to death and leave on the doorstep of someone you hated. This one, though, he didn’t mind keeping alive. You could tell it was a bastard like everyone else on board. But there was something to its eyes. It had eyes like Vitulus. Eyes that made you want to stare back. Eyes deep as a trip to the underworld.
Before they clambered aboard the Traline longboat and crammed into a hold so low they had to lay shoulder-to-shoulder within, Alfie squinted again at the blue flashes across the water. Like a forecaster of calamitous weather, he prayed fervently to Night that he was wrong about their nature, even as he thrilled to witnessing them.
He had known they were magica the moment he clapped peepers upon them. But exactly what kind eluded him—perhaps due to the “great forgetting” Arrowmask warned of—until he consulted the caravan library of magical tomes. There he found a sketch of identical geometry: a blue torus contracting with poloidal rotation.
It was the hallmark of a biddening.
Biddening was the ability to call forth human or beast, monster or demon, to aid one’s endeavors. It took tremendous power of a kind seen since the days of Triplegate only upon the stage or in the pages of low-grade novels. Stupendous enough that someone here could produce such an effect, but the real puzzler was what they were biddening and why no one was speaking of it. It raised the rather unsettling possibility that this “Leveling” displacing the populace was not a plague, but rather an invasion.
Still, plenty of other possibilities. Perhaps they were bringing in exotic animals with medicinal horns and hooves, or simply cats to munch on plague-bearing rats. Night taught the foolishness of speculating too blindly about a secret, and sharing these more positive potentials with his companions kept their nerves calmer.
All the same, something else about biddening niggled at him like a stray moustache hair that wouldn’t lie flat. Something he couldn’t quite remember as a diagram or a phrase of lore, but only as an unnerving emotion buzzing like a bee in his bonnet. And so he also looked up a couple of ancient anchoring wards and kept them on the tip of his tongue. Night only knew if they’d be effective at transfixing a bidden creature. He cheered himself by conceiving it as an adventuresome experiment rather than a quasi-random self-defense measure.
He silently repeated the formulae of the wards to avoid losing them to the boat’s abundant distractions. Within the tiny, cottage-like aftcastle, their friendly Traline pilots displayed an adorable flying squirrel that domiciled in their shirt pockets. Oddly, Mieux ignored the beastie, preferring instead to become fascinated with a clove of garlic hanging on a string from the ceiling, cryptically shifting her examining gaze between it and her standard obessession, Rinka. Alfie did his best to let all such antics slide off him like jam upon an overenthusiastically buttered scone until it was time for them to go below.
As they laid side-by-side as if abed in a dockside flophouse where a single mound of straw served all travelers, he found that Arrowmask was quite the fidgeter. Mieux all the moreso; only Rinka lay supine in deathlike stillness. Couldn’t begrudge them some wiggling, though. Truth be told, Alfie’s generous belly caused him to take up a bit more than his share of space, with those three squeezed into what remained to his right. To his left, a musty and tar-seamed wall behind which small waves slapped, giving one the unpleasant simulacrum of a burial at sea.
Fidget as they wished, however, they were compelled to silence as they slipped downstream. Noise of any sort would carry across water, and despite the massive evacuation, Calisia was far from empty. Random neighborhoods had been spared the Leveling, the Trals divulged, including the fortified home of the “dominus urbi,” or lord mayor, who governed the city. And guards patrolled the docks and bridge to stave off looters—such as the Trals, and probably Arrowmask with his famously wayward fingers. The river nomads thus avoided the city, as they either came back empty-handed, or didn’t come back at all—whether taken by the Leveling or the guards. Despite the many superstitions—some traditional, some bespoke—the Trals applied to the haunted city, they found anyone daring enough to chance its dangers sufficiently amusing to assist.
The bristles of a rush-frond broom tapped his shoulder—a wordless alert from their pilots that they had arrived beneath the great bridge known as the Porta Cynrica. A brief scamper later, and they perched atop the narrow deck, with the Atelrush lapping at the waterline only a few inches below their feet. With the bridge arching dark above them and water dripping slowly from stalactite-style decorative points, they might have been riding subterranean river within a cavern. Quite tickled the fancy of the Stone Master in him, but in the necessary darkness, his attempts to study the nature of the stonework were foiled. Oh, Night, you coy mistress!
Moonlight transmitted on a thin river mist was their sole light source as they followed the Tral guides from the deck to the base of a bridge pier. He could just make out the moss-pocked, iron-barred mouth of a drain in its wall. One could fairly sense the pressure as the massive pier bore its share of a bridge a mile long and wide enough for two wagons to ride abreast in either direction. In years past, it had more than paid for itself carrying caravans of lumber and amber from post-invasion points north. Today, it seemed, it served as more gate than gateway, standing against whatever now lurked in the Shrouded Vast. And now, against the spread of the Leveling.
The promised secret passage proved to be a cunningly contrived door in the pier. The Trals had chiseled away the mortar from a section of stones, then created a door by affixing them to a metal plate and a hinge. Within the pier, they had tunneled upward alongside the storm drainpipe and installed rungs to provide a climb to the top, where a similarly concealed door provided outlet.
Alfie had developed a comfort level with tight spots in his newfound hobby of spelunking. But the Trals already had advised that his generous frame would prohibit his successful ascension of this particular passage. Thus his companions would have to pull him up by rope. The only sound as they climbed the secret ladder was the patting of palms on the rungs and the clicking of Rinka’s armor. Then that, too was gone, and so were the Trals and their boat.
The climb, Alfie was not anticipating with glee. He was a man of plants and stones, roots and bedrock, and he did not care for heights. Still, when the looped end of the rope slapped the stone at his feet, he did not hesitate to bind it about the waist and give a tug. If one boo-hooed over every frightening bit of an adventure, why, one would never get ahead in the Temple of Night. Or off a bridge pier, more pressingly. As he rose, he employed concen
tration as the best distraction, repeating the anchoring ward to himself. Identify the tertiary axis and align the cotangent space to its manifold coordinates…
After he had been ably dragged over the wall atop the bridge, and the rope secreted within the hidden passage, the others crouched around him and gathered their breath. Fortunately, the walkway was hedged by safety walls along both the water and the roadway, giving them cover from any passing guards or traffic, as long as they crouched. Unfortunately, it also meant they had nowhere to hide if a guard appeared on the walkway.
But there was no sign of anyone, save scattered lights in the towers guarding the northern end. Perhaps the guards were too few to guard the bridge, or perhaps they simply couldn’t imagine anyone going to such pains to break into a “plague”-bound city.
The quartet nonetheless maintained precautionary silence—even Mieux, in what must have been a superhuman compression of urgent questions and observations. They moved utterly unchallenged down the bridge, with its unlit street lamps, and through an open city gate at its southern end.
A semicircular courtyard spread before them, weeds protruding between the cobbles, their stems and flowers gray in the moonlight. There were no stacks of plague-victim corpses, nor regiments of bidden invaders. There was only an eerie vacancy.
Not a single light burned in any of the warehouses and shops fronting on the courtyard, nor in the jettied apartments above them. Doors and windows were boarded over or begrimed with dust. With a habitual criminality, Arrowmask tried a few knobs and ducked his head into those portals left unlocked. His search turned up nothing more than a bottle of wine that he returned under the withering stare of Mieux.
Their goal, such as it was, consisted of locating the dominus urbi in hopes of drumming up his goodwill. Like all cities crammed within limiting walls, Calisia was all narrow streets and looming townhouses, the brick-and-mortar equivalent of thick fog, virtually impossible to navigate without a map. However, from the courtyard’s center, they espied a towering mansion to the southeast, certainly luxurious enough to house a dominus. Alfie thought he could see smoke trailing from its chimneys. By silent nods and gestures, they agreed to make it their destination.
At that moment, a scrawny dog darted through the courtyard from one cobbled street and disappeared down another. Blue light swelled over the rooftops of that street, accompanied by intermixed sounds akin to frying chips and wind groaning down a flue.
Instinctively, they ran to the mouth of that street and peered down its crooked grade to see—nothing. No magimaths, no soldiers, and no dog.
As they pondered, the crackling blueness reappeared, this time between Rinka and himself. It expanded rapidly like a pearlescent gas cloud, surrounding them as it took on the shape of a thick torus rotating into its own center. Rinka whipped the sword off her back, and Alfie immediately called forth the anchoring ward, a spear of silvery light that nearly burnt his palms before it compacted into a gleaming disc on the cobbles.
But the ward had nothing to anchor. No beastie stepped through the curtains of blue billows. The magical gas merely continued to churn over them with a queer skin-numbing sensation and an increasing howl. And, far too late, Alfie finally remembered that crucial piece of lore.
Biddening was not merely a lost art, but a banned one. For the stupendous feat of summoning forth a warrior or beast could be accomplished only by the ruthless act of abducting it from elsewhere—spiriting it away, without its knowledge and against its will, from its home in the forests or the mountains. Or the streets of a great river city.
As Rinka belatedly grabbed his lapel in an unsuccessful struggle to free them both; as the the courtyard and townhouses and their other companions faded away with a terrible falling sensation, replaced by twisted trees silhouetted against smokey fires; Alfie recalled another bit of biddening trivia.
The biddening process was said to drive those summoned quite profoundly insane.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ashton vaulted over a firewall and continued running across the rooftop, as Mieux’s slippered feet patted the slates hot on his heels. He had preemptively declared Alfie and Rinka’s disappearance to be “totally crazy” so that Mieux would not waste a moment in joining his running away. He had added a “fucking” between “totally” and “crazy” for spice.
Good old Alfie obviously had made the right call that the “Leveling” was actually a biddening. Unfortunately, it turned out Calisia was not on the “summoned to” side, but rather the far less convenient “summoned from.” But summoned where? By whom?
Surely someone in this freaked-out city of assholes had some ideas, and Ashton was in the mood to stick a dagger up their nostril until they brought him up to speed.
But first there was the matter of running away. Ashton was not interested in learning the hard way where Rinka and Alfie had gone—or worse still, getting his ass biddened to someplace completely different. Thus he had quickly convinced Mieux to get off the streets and head across the rooftops to the reportedly Leveling-free neighborhood of the dominus’s palace.
Funny how the rich always manage to stay unleveled. His thoughts wandered to Nalia, then sprang from there with ease to dash through the litany of people he’d driven away or lost. Impulsively, he imagined Alfie and Rinka crumpled like Littalia, brains and teeth dropping from ruined faces.
In distraction, he misplaced a step and went sliding down mist-slick roof tiles. But Mieux was right there, catching his arm in her iron grip and yanking him back to his feet without breaking her stride. Her huge eyes gleamed with fear and anger, but her brow and mouth were set with determination. I’ll probably break my neck doing something stupid before I rescue anyone. But I wouldn’t want to be the poor son of a bitch standing between Mieux and Rinka. As he regained his pace, he found himself laughing tightly.
The tower-like mansion loomed larger, its bridge-decorated flags now recognizable, as they reached the end of the rooftop. It terminated high above a ten-foot-wide alley and overlooked a fenced-topped wall beyond which gleamed the fully lit, populated streets of the un-Leveled area. Without so much as a pause, Mieux leaped off the gable and executed an insane series of twirls before clearing the wall. She landed on the street in a neat roll, hopped up, and stared up at him expectantly.
Ashton sighed and threw himself in Mieux’s general direction. He managed to avoid spearing himself on the pointy fence, instead slamming into the wall and grabbing the curtain of ivy hanging there. A swath of it tore loose, dropping him another half-dozen feet before he found equilibrium. It took him a good five minutes to scale the wall and join Mieux. Ashton surveyed the area as best he could from the perspecting of bending over with his hands on his knees, gathering his breath.
The streets were a parade of marble-columned mansions and shop windows full of silk dresses, pies filled with out-of-season fruits, and custom-tooled leather jackets that lined them. They weren’t exactly lively, but they seemed Leveling-free. Compared to the courtyard area, they looked like the bleachers at the Spectaculum during a matinee tiger show. A few people strolled the tree-lined sidewalk with no sign of running for cover. A chimney sweep’s wagon passed, apparently making its normal house-calls.
A woman in evening dress walked a gray rabbit on a bejeweled velvet harness. As she passed beneath the deeper darkness of a street tree’s moonlight shadow, Ashton saw an opportunity for interrogation. Darting around the trunk, he seized the rabbit and cuddled it in the crook of an arm.
“Tell me what happens to people who disappear in the Leveling or I’ll kill this bunny!” he demanded.
Her blonde pompadour wiggled in shock. “Everyone knows the dominus is attempting to discover that secret!” she gasped.
Mieux appeared by her side. The rabbit and Mieux both looked up at him, their faces side by side, their huge eyes blinking, their small nostrils flaring.
“Don’t injure the helpless animal!” Mieux cried.
“Oh, for Night’s sake, I wasn’t actu
ally going to kill the rabbit,” Ashton grumbled, setting the pet down gingerly. “I apologize, madame, to you and your hare,” he continued amiably, waving his hand at the pet in a gentleman’s flourish. “I seem to have lost my head. Two of my friends have been taken in the Leveling.”
He paused for a microsecond to judge her reaction, and noted well the remaining traces of panic and the urge to call a guard.
“And some of the brutish rabble robbed my family’s warehouse of sacred objects and urns containing the ashes of several prestigious ancestors. I have only my valet here to comfort me. I am sure you can conceive of my anguish.”
She tutted with a trace of sympathy and let him get away with only some waspish comments about how he should go home and sleep it off. When she had moved on, he looked down at his palm and briefly admired the diamonds he had plucked from the rabbit’s harness before dumping them into a pocket.
“Even more than ever, we must go see the domino!” Mieux cried. She gripped the hem of his cloak and marched ahead, half-dragging him along.
She was probably stretching his cloak to ruination, and his shoulder hurt from hitting that wall, and tree roots had buckled the fieldstone pavers into ankle-twisters—but for once he did not obsess over such mundane annoyances. He was focused on the task of meeting this dominus—and on the sinking feeling he acquired when the woman told them he has no idea what’s going on, either.
And now I’m going to be calling him “domino,” too, dammit, he thought, looking down at Mieux’s bobbing head.
Up close, the dominus’s palace looked the way Ashton had come to expect from a city’s eminent personages. It was a tottering pile of columns and gargoyles bedecked with obvious bridge-and-river flags conveying the quality of the guy’s imagination, and hidden behind a forty-foot-high wall of wood and iron illustrating how beloved he was by the little people.