Dreamreel
Into Sulky Wend went The Road of Graves, between hedges of dead bracken, and the wind which blew along the paved names carried with it Othelmedir, till he stooped beneath the lintel of The Hooded Pillow. The mancer stood tall as a redwood and thin as a reed, iron eyes set in a broad black face, cropped curls and salt-and-pepper beard. Othelmedir noted the smell that met him within the establishment: stale millet, and the close ferment of unbathed bodies. With his right hand he drew his cloak closer at the throat, letting the dead weight of his left arm settle against his ribs, hidden beneath the oxblood velvet folds. For a moment he only stood in the doorway and looked.
The room beyond the doorway lay slumped under its own low ceiling, the hearth a heap of orange coals giving more glow than warmth, the benches against the long wall populated by seven men and one woman who dozed upright. On the nearest bench a boy of perhaps fourteen sat with his head fallen back against the plaster, jaw slack, and Othelmedir, while letting his eyes pass across the company, marked this boy’s neck for its breadth, and the white evenness of the boy’s teeth where the lower lip had drawn aside.
And at the far end of the room the bedmeister of The Hooded Pillow, Noseman Under Eaves, stood at his plank counter beneath a short tally of iron-coloured beads strung on a nailed cord. He was speaking to a client - his voice carried thinly across the room.
“Show your coin. Nights?”
“Two.”
“Moldy knuckles?”
The client spread his clean hands, then shook his head. The beads on the tally clacked along the cord as the bedmeister thumbed them.
From the corner of the room, where Othelmedir had not yet looked, a frost radiated. He turned his gaze.
The frost surrounded a child of seven or eight, barefoot, in a grey shift of coarse wool, who stood between two of the benches with her eyes open and unfixed. This chill pricked the side of Othelmedir’s face. The girl drew breath and began to speak in a liturgical monotone.
“One. Lamp of the unlit hour.
“Two. Quiet for the broken oath.
“Three. Bread without the salt.”
The bedmeister, paying no attention to the girl, said, “Pallet? Bed? Straw or feather?”
“Four. Door without the name.
“Five. Hand without the ring.”
Othelmedir recognized this rite - The Little Mass of Failing Lamps - and the lifeless arm beneath his velvet seemed to weigh more heavily against his ribs.
The bedmeister looked up from his tally, noticed Othelmedir, and lifted a hand. “You. Bed or bench?”
Othelmedir threaded between the tables, passing the strong-necked boy and the untouched pewter cup sitting before him, the surface of which bore a thin olive-colored film, and came to stand at the plank counter. Upon the counter lay an open ledger. The book was bound in spidersilk, dulled and ridged at the spine where a hundred fingers had worn it, and its open page showed names entered in a meticulous hand, with all but the last few names struck through with one short line.
“You inquire, master bedmeister, whether I would take bed or bench,” said Othelmedir to Noseman. “Let it be a bed, if any chamber yet remains un-tenanted; and let it be the loftiest room you keep, for the quiet of an upper floor sits more kindly with a man whose labours are accomplished in the sidereal hours.”
The bedmeister’s thumb moved along the bead tally.
“How long’ve you been saddled up like this? Parable, not a poem.” The client to whom Noseman had first been speaking spoke now again, resuming now some prior conversation they had been engaged in before Othelmedir entered. He laid a sliver of fat-soap on the counter beside his mug, turned a hand over, examined the pale crescent of a nail, then stared at the bedmeister with a face half-indifferent.
“Three months, master Weirmoth. Maybe four,” said Noseman.
“Walk me through it. Slowly. I’m not a healer, I just kill the thing in front of me.”
“The living dream the dead. We dream how they died. Each night, anew.” The bedmeister exhaled through his nose. His eyes were lower-lidded with broken red lacework, the iris half-lost in a yellowed white.
“Which dead, exactly? Be specific. ‘The dead’ is a lot of people.”
“Old men. Strangers.”
“Behind the eyes, you said - like a headache that’s also a person? Great. Go on.”
“Like a worry, yes. It will not loosen. You try to think elsewhere. A barn. A wife. Three notes of a song you half remember. But the death returns. It crowds out the dream. We call it the Dreamreel.”
Over by the far wall, against the leg of a bench, the cold little girl had fallen asleep. Her mouth lay open, eyelids twitched, dancing with whatever ran behind them.
“Coin’s on the table, bedmeister.” The client, Weirmoth, rubbed the sliver of soap over his dry hands. “Name a number. I’ll pretend it’s fair.”
“Ride to the Tower. Burn the giver of dead dreams.”
“My spear’s done worse.” Weirmoth tipped his head toward the weapon leaned against the bench-end, its butt wrapped in oiled twine, a hairline split running the length of the haft. The sere funeral-shroud swatches of his cloak swayed perilously near a bowl-lamp as he shifted. “It once belonged to Saint Wakeful-Unto-Death - it whistles near sickness. True or not, it’s pointy.”
Othelmedir, who had been watching the sleeping girl, now turned toward the pair.
“If I may take up your subject, master bedmeister, I would observe that the ordinary cares - your ‘worries’ - of the daylight hour recede once the worrier sinks into sleep. Your Dreamreel, however, ceases nowise; and it is this, more than whatever dead faces crowd the shut eyelids, which lays thy township bare to ruin.”
The two men stared at the tall mancer.
“Othelmedir is the name I carry on these roads,” Othelmedir went on. “I am a humble practitioner of the dream-mancer’s discipline, and at your service. My art wants for license in these years, the last men who maintained a practice having perished and left no adepts to sustain it; yet the knowledge did not lapse. I accept no coin; my engagement is through barter and by oath.”
Weirmoth smirked. “A man after my own heart, which is to say cheap. I never dream myself. Too busy worrying.” He turned the fat-soap over once with a thumb, set it down, and his eyes went to Othelmedir’s cloak and the motionless hidden appendage. “My arm’s ready for this. Two horses, dawn. Sound fair?”
Noseman laid three square pieces of supple yellow electrum in front of Weirmoth, each stamped with the Widow-Star, but the bedmeister kept his stare upon Othelmedir. For an instant something other than sleeplessness stirred in his face. He turned his eyes down again. “First light. The horses, ready.”
Othelmedir stepped to the bench whose edge had been worn shiny by generations of sitters, and sat.
The bluff path twisted up and out of Sulky Wend in switchbacks, slate slabs clacking under the lead horse’s iron shoe, brittle grass laying flat where the slope tilted forward. Othelmedir rode at the front. His oxblood cloak was darkened with the morning’s wet, and his marble-white prosthetic arm hung limp across his thigh. Weirmoth came up behind. Below them the village had already vanished within mist that congealed among the pines.
They dismounted when they gained the foot of two stone steps hewn into the bluff-face. A little beyond these steps, the chrypt-door waited.
Oak-black was the door, crossed corner to corner with iron banding, and at the door’s center a brass seal hung in a circular bezel, its engraving worn so thin by weather that only the outermost rim still retained the old shape of letters. Othelmedir strode up before it in three brisk paces. His functional hand he pressed against the brass, palm-flat.
“You ride to a job like this without a weapon? On purpose?” Weirmoth asked.
“Weirmoth, though thy iron has its uses, not all beyond this door may be exorcised with such pedestrian implements.”
“Not even a knife in your boot. A man could die of nothing in particular.”
“I do not carry what I cannot use.”
“Your funeral, friend. I’ll keep the pointy iron.”
Othelmedir half-turned his black face. “Should we suffer what abides within to continue unchecked, the folk of the valley below will, ere the next bright-burning flight of the Cracked Comet is upon them, be no longer themselves; for the dead supplant the living from within, memory by memory. Two cabals contended within this tower once, the Red Pew and the Milkmoot. It is the Red Pew which dreams now in the beds of Sulky Wend.”
Weirmoth blinked several times, seeming not to understand. He shook his head and rubbed a hand down his face and sideburns. “Slept rough last night, and now look at me.”
“You professed to me that you never dreamed at all; that within your skull there stood a winter church whose doors were barred against all comers.”
“Mouth just goes sometimes. No driver.”
Othelmedir turned back to the door. He bent his head close to the brass. The whisper he gave was so small that Weirmoth, three paces off, heard it only as a ringing pressure behind his own jaw.
“Öltesoldzo sjhaj.” In common language: ‘With a sigh came loose the sutures.’
A seam parted along the door’s lower edge. From it came pouring a slow green-grey heaviness, gas with weight in it, that did not rise but went over the sill and down the steps in the manner of something poured slowly from a carafe. Behind the door a single grey cobweb began to quiver.
The two men withdrew up the steps and stood out of the path of the spill. Weirmoth sank onto a cold granite block, the damp coming up through his trousers. He fished from his cloak a canary dipped and stiffened in banshee-wax, one glass bead for an eye and the other socket empty. “Mister Ribbon,” he said to this canary, softly, “let’s hope this dingy hole’s worth the shiny squares I’ve added to my pocket.”
Othelmedir crossed the threshold first. The gas swallowed his legs to the shins; his boot found the stair beneath. The aftertaste of the dissipated fume came at once into the back of his throat, spoiled meat. His tongue curled, yet he proceeded.
Weirmoth followed, spear levelled. “After you, my prince,” he said. “I’ll walk at your heel - under it, if you like, what’s the difference.”
The antechamber was hung in grey. The far wall, the lintel, the iron bracket and the oak bench wore a velvet of spider-silk thick enough to take the press of a thumb. Their footsteps left imprints in the webbed carpet, visible beneath the pale green gas, like dark bruises.
They discovered the first of the dead dreamers in the next corridor. It sat in a copper-backed chair, its gauntleted hands still folded over the haft of a billhook.
As Othelmedir passed, the dead man’s head rose. The mouth opened. It spoke a word, but the word made no sound. Othelmedir noted the lips, the jaw, how the soft tissues of the cheek had not sagged, how the gums had retained their connection to the teeth, how the thin membrane at the inner lid of the eye still wept a clear humour - all of it immaculately preserved by the same vapour that had taken breath from the chest.
“Stand away,” warned Weirmoth, and he stepped swiftly past Othelmedir. The mercenary brought his spear-butt down on the wrist that gripped the bill. The dead man dropped the weapon with a thump to the velvet floor. Before the foe might recover Weirmoth flourished. He thrust. His spear plunged through a gleaming eye-socket. The corpse slumped back into its copper chair. Its mouth moved, shaping the same three words, for a count of four seconds longer - the death-throes of a mancer already dead.
“Right,” said Weirmoth. “Right, Mister Ribbon. Told you. Simple weapon play.”
But now two other figures were already rising, from a bench a little farther down the passage. They came up at the knees first, then at the hips. Both still wore the thick leather of men on attack, and both bore short hooked swords. Othelmedir watched their lips and read the cadence and knew the words for what they were - the breaching-song of ‘Milkmoot’, the old call-and-answer of an attacking quorum. He could even shape the words, though still they made not a sound.
“For the dead? No! For the men? No! For the women? No! For the black mancers? No! No Quarter! No Quarter for they.”
Othelmedir distinguished on one of these two a certain harness also; and a brown-stained leather mask - with hornet-husks stitched into the cheekplate - still strapped to that harness, doffed before death. This was the mask of Milkmoot’s leader. Othelmedir knew the name that the dead man with the mask had been called by: Ostrobone the Rook.
Weirmoth set his front foot and met the nearer foe with the spear-point at the throat. The hooked sword came down on the haft and bit into the ash; Weirmoth grunted and twisted the spear free, leaving a curl of pale wood on the floor. The dead man pressed in, mouth still working its silent chant. The second was already coming around the column, blade low. Weirmoth stepped back. Stepped back again. His shoulder met the corridor wall and webbed silk powdered down across his ear. “Oh,” he said, “so it’s that way.” He took the spear in both hands and drove the butt up under the chin of the first, snapping the head back so far the hood fell. The body kept coming. The mouth kept moving. Weirmoth had to put the spear-point in twice more, once at the eye-pit and once down through the soft place where collarbone met breastbone, before the legs gave under it. By then the second was on him. The hook came across and tore his cloak open from hip to knee and he hissed and sidestepped and swung the spear flat. The haft caught the hornet-husk mask across the cheekplate, and the mask broke, and the husks scattered like split shells. Then Weirmoth reversed the spear and brought it up. He drove the tip in just above the jugular and forced it puncturing through the back of the skull. He levered the weapon; he was stepping over the body before it had quite finished folding.
“Stabbed clean,” said Weirmoth. He leaned on his spear, catching his breath. “My old father would call this swell work. Three down, not a drop of claret on the shirt.”
Othelmedir had already resumed the march. He passed the bench and the bodies. He strode by three lecterns, not turning his head to glance upon the three open books on display, the leaves cracked on all three, the title of each telegraphed by a scrip of paper in a crystal slot at the top of each lectern: On the Conduct of Sealed Houses, Compendium of Threshold Speech, and A Practitioner’s Almanac. Othelmedir passed these with conspicuous indifference, and he evinced a similar lack of interest as he rounded an oaken column, where upon one side a watch-ledger was nailed. The leather binding of this ledger sagged, but the text was preserved pristinely, just as the bodies. It displayed names listed beside duty-hours that had elapsed in that decades-ago Time.
Weirmoth, having caught his breath, now following, did stop at the ledger. “These fellows kept a tidy schedule,” he said. “Hours, routines, now nothing. Makes you wonder if being on time ever meant anything.”
Othelmedir said, “Walk on, good Weirmoth. The chamber that lies beyond this one, and not this one, is where the work shall be begun.”
“You walk through this place like it owes you supper and a bed.”
“You owe unto yourself the next step, Weirmoth, and after that step the step which follows thereafter, and thus doth the work proceed, without the burden of further converse.”
The two cadavers they found in the next room - a censing hall - were not of the breach-party. These wore the long surplice of the tower itself, cloth so old it had gone the colour of a scab. They had no weapons. They had been slain at their post. The gas had preserved them, and now the seal had broken and they were standing again at their post and reaching empty-handed toward the Milkmoot invader already on the floor - toward the killing they had been killed in the middle of, and meant still to finish.
Now they came at Weirmoth with empty hands. He kept the spear long between him and his foes, but the corridor was narrow, and the first one was inside the spear’s reach in three steps. Its hands found his wrist. The grip was cold and stronger than three living men’s - the fingers ground his wristbones. He swore. He could not bring the spearpoint to bear. He drove his knee up into the surplice and felt nothing, no breath, no gasp. The dead man kept his grip. He came on. The second was reaching for the mercenary’s throat. Weirmoth let the spear clatter on the floor. He took the first man by the cloth at the shoulder and turned him into the second. The two became tangled. Weirmoth used the moment to whip a long iron skinning-knife from his belt, and went in for close work. He struck at the throat of the first, finding purchase, sawing through the surplice and the leather and the desiccated meat beneath, until the head sat at a wrong angle. Then nimbly he pulled back. He punched once. His knife slammed into the temple of the second. He buried it to its simple hilt in the porous bone and dead skin.
The two dead men lay completely still on the ground, half-concealed beneath the layer of gas. Their empty hands twitched for some time after.
Othelmedir bent at the body with the puncture temple. He put his fingers to the throat under the leather. From beneath the cuirass he drew a chain. At the end of the chain there hung a hammered tin pendant, flat as a tear, sigil of a lidded cauldron with a single ear worked into the lid. He tucked chain and pendant into an inner pocket of his cloak.
“Trophy?” asked Weirmoth.
“A token, borne of a quorum whereof I have read in divers ledgers. Let us tarry no longer, but proceed.”
The two passed now through a portal covered by an arras, thin and light and pale like milk foam. Behind this was a narrow, dark stair. It curved down and to the left in shallow stone steps. Weirmoth led now, holding forth a steady lantern to light their descent. The steps descended only a short way, before depositing the pair onto a landing which branched into three corridors in a T-intersection. Othelmedir directed them down the narrowest, rightmost corridor. The corridor bent slightly left, and seemed also a step above the other two, for the pooling gas in it was only ankle-deep.
They had gone this way for only a dozen steps when Weirmoth’s lantern revealed an end to the corridor. And Othelmedir stepped slowly past, and raised his good arm, and he laid his palm against the surface which faced them.
The wall was warm. It was a weave of wet pink fibers laid crosswise and lengthwise over the passage from floor to vault, thick as a man’s arm where the strands crossed, throbbing under his hand at a slower rhythm than a heart. Between the fibers the gas pressed faintly through and gave up its meat-smell on the near side. Othelmedir pushed. The wall pushed back, sluggish, alive.
Weirmoth came up beside Othelmedir with the spear half-raised, but he lowered it almost at once.
“From this side it shall not be opened, Weirmoth; not by any spear of yours, nor yet by any blade which I expect we shall espy within such a house as this.”
And as he spoke, the wall continued to contract and swell under Othelmedir’s living palm.
The corridor led into a room which opened onto greyness, not blackness. The false-sun globe suspended above this large chamber’s central gallery had long since emptied of whatever luminance it once held, yet its dead face cast a radiance that was not so much light as the negation of shadow, flat and without warmth or direction. Othelmedir’s boot found the first flagstone’s raised corner before his eyes had adjusted. He stumbled, yet straightened without comment and without breaking stride, his second foot already correcting for the terrain his first had not anticipated, not so much as glancing over the room’s nearby balcony.
Weirmoth marched behind Othelmedir. He ran one gloved hand along the handrail’s smooth stone - cold even through the leather, the drop to the dead garden below shifting in and out of view through flat pillars as he sidled along - while Othelmedir examined this second floor’s shelves. His hand moved from spine to spine, then stopped, the third shelf from the floor, second column from the corner. The spine yielded softly to his touch, like a tender bread crust, its cover having absorbed so many seasons of damp that it had become a texture rather than a structure. He drew it gingerly free of its neighbors. The volume was heavier than one would expect from its moldy cover. He opened it to a page at the middle; the ink, at least, had been preserved.
“That one for reading, or for show?” Weirmoth had halted at the rail, observing his companion.
“It is a treatise, master Weirmoth,” Othelmedir rejoined. He closed the book. “Which is to say that it repays study, and nowise the cursory perusal of the idle eye. This treatise in particular - Potions and Poisons of Eleven Reagents - would repay more study, I deem, than the forty-odd volumes which have kept it company upon the shelf. We shall have need of it.”
“The gas,” said Weirmoth. “You were going to tell me how it works. I’d like to not breathe it wrong.”
“The cauldron within this tower remains stoppered, and yet its elements do seep regardless; and these elements, dispersing outward into the air, are that which does engender the Dreamreel. The deaths which the villagers have dreamed are not visions, master Weirmoth, but residue.”
Othelmedir moved to a short spiral stair. Weirmoth followed a few steps behind. They descended to the library’s lower floor. Othelmedir turned, and strode across the open central space. Weirmoth, uncertain of their direction at first, eventually perceived a door on this lowest level, half-hidden behind a shelf.
Then a low, sustained note reached them from beyond the door - the sound of a single great lung drawing breath after protracted stillness, coming through the chestnut planks.
Othelmedir did not move at once. He stood holding the treatise. Weirmoth stood a little farther back, in the center of the open central space below the dead sun, among the garden plots: nine small humped islands of pale, grassless soil amidst the ankle-deep sea of gas, with each island marking where the cabal had interred one of its mancers.
Othelmedir tucked the treatise under his arm and regarded Weirmoth with an inscrutable expression. He said, “This, I deem, is your métier.”
Weirmoth surged through the door, coming in low with his thrust. The spear took the dead-dreamer waiting beyond under the floating rib, a pristine upward stab meant for the heart; but the thing did not buckle, only writhed on the haft and clouted him across the temple with the flat of its forearm. Weirmoth reeled. The corpse stepped through the swing, and its other hand closed about the mercenary’s throat. He fell back against the slate worktop that lined the chamber’s inner wall. A wax-sealed jar of widowwine rattled. The spear was pinned between their bodies, otiose.
Then Weirmoth let the haft drop. He slipped one shoulder. He jerked a poniard from his sleeve, and drove it three times into the supple place above the collarbone. The grip on his throat went slack. He recovered the spear, then planted a stark, terminal thrust through the hollow of the jaw.
Othelmedir now stepped into the chamber as well. It was a smaller room than the library they had just come from. He laid the treatise open on a clean square of slate and weighted its pages with two iron weights shaped like sleeping hounds. He took down a copper alembic from its tripod and bled a vague liquid off through a side-cock until the bowl was empty.
Then he began.
Widowwine first, two thumbs deep, the colour of bruised plums. Priest’s quicklime ground fresh on a side-stone; a crumb of grit caught beneath his thumbnail and stayed there as he worked. Honey from a sealed crock, pale as a milkmaid’s freshly-laundered linens. He fed the iron shavings into the honey in a slow trickle, and they hissed and turned the viscous gold to graphite at the contact. Green bled from a fistful of grass-blades crushed against the slate. Black lye. Glasswort. Dandelion root, scraped to a pulp with the edge of his thumb. He touched the crystalwort to the tip of his tongue before adding it; briny, faintly metallic, the correct salt. Last went a minute, flawless cube of nine-day-gnats suspended in amber.
Across the still-room by the wall Weirmoth had seated himself on a warped oak bench. He threaded a bone needle through the long tear in his shroud-cloth. His fingers were immaculately clean - he had scrubbed them with his soap immediately post-battle. He drew the stitches small and even, watching Othelmedir over the rise and fall of his hand.
Othelmedir paced down the line of shelves. He took down a jar marked in a fading script, weighed it, replaced it. He took down another, broke its wax, and tipped a measure of cinerous crystals into the inner pocket of his cloak. He did this with three further jars. He returned to the cauldron and stirred.
“The crystals,” said Weirmoth. “What’s in your pocket now, and what’s it worth?”
“The crystals,” said Othelmedir, “purchase nothing wherein your interest lies, master Weirmoth. The brew that stands before us is the article of our covenant. That which travels in my coat is but severance laid against the long road home. Your coin, I assure you, is no scantier for it.”
Weirmoth bit the thread off against his teeth. “Funny how a mancer’s pockets get deep when nobody’s counting.”
“Mancer’s pockets get deep when no one is counting; just so, and well said. Count, then.” Othelmedir did not turn. “When the cauldron is split asunder, you may search me to the very lining of my coat. Yet for the present, attend. There is an eleventh reagent which the treatise names: Respiration from a Silver Dream. This last is a breath drawn forth from a sleeper who has perished within the sleep itself. The gas of this hall has preserved such a breath; for the first death it took, that of one nameless trespasser, hangs yet upon the air. To fetch it I must enter into the dream which holds it - yet that I cannot do. Now look here, and behold this second decoction which I have drawn from the store. This is the witness-draught. A practitioner habituated unto necromancy who drinks of the witness-draught burns at the nerves, and is rendered unto ash. An unhabituated man passes through it, and wakes.”
Weirmoth set the needle down.
“Drink, master Weirmoth,” said Othelmedir, holding out the cup as he strode up to the seated mercenary. “You shall return, and with no ill savour lingering upon your lips. Then together we shall go down unto the cauldron, through the wall, by means of my poison rendered from the eleventh reagent.”
Weirmoth took the cup. He held it at the level of his chin.
“I’m not as clever as you keep insisting, friend.” Weirmoth shrugged. “Stop flattering me into a worse deal.”
Then he raised the cup to his lips.
The cup came down empty against the bench. Weirmoth set it down himself; and then the sellsword’s head pitched against his own shoulder. He toppled sideways onto the bench, knocking the cup to the ground with a clatter that the now-dreaming mercenary did not hear.
Othelmedir watched. Under his breath the sleeping man had begun a slurred recital. They were names. Sourbell. Liddick. A roll-call in a wrong voice.
Othelmedir set his good palm against the slate table.
The sleeper saw the gate. Othelmedir saw it with him. He had stood at it. The gate had been sturdy, hinged and banded in a pitch-colored iron from the abandoned mine a mile out of Sulky Wend. There had been the noise of a man coming through that gate, and Ostrobone the Rook had shouldered it agape, and the long hall had filled with the tissue-makings of the Milkmoot and their crawl-things, their thin and patient dead.
Before the gate had finished swinging, the Red Pew had answered the attack. Fellow Alder the Lank had answered with his signature Cope of Blue Wasps. Fellow Sourbell had answered, his necromancies bass and potent. The hall had filled and filled with discordant black song.
Within the still-room, a draft stirred under the sealed door behind Othelmedir’s back. It came up out of the chrypt above and conveyed a peculiar smell, old plaster, the smell of that long ago night.
And there had been the lever.
And the instruction. The Pew had conferred, and had rendered its verdict in the one voice of nine. The instruction had been given to the Hand Which Must Attend the Lever; and it had so happened that the hand chosen belonged to the Fellow then called Liddick, who had been young. The verdict had been brief. The verdict had been understood. A young hand, the ready hand, the only hand, had been asked to do a small thing, in the secret room near the top of the tower, in a great hurry.
The lever had been pulled. The lid above the brass cauldron, in that deep central chamber, had risen. The gas had risen, pale, slow, and green, and the breathing of all parties in the hall, friend and stranger, had dwindled. The long uninterrupted sleep. The hall had quieted. Fellow Liddick had stepped back from the lever then. He alone, farthest from the rising fume, had left.
The alembic now ticked as it cooled.
Beside the larger cauldron, now swollen with all eleven of the necessary reagents, Othelmedir had set a second smaller vessel boiling while the sellsword slept. The black oil inside this cauldron bubbled without sound, a greased and patient silence.
Weirmoth’s breath caught, then quickened. The mercenary’s eyes moved beneath their lids, and the lids rose. He sat up on the oaken bench.
“Friend Weirmoth,” Othelmedir said. “You have slept the heavy sleep. It would profit us both that you now impart to me the substance of what visions came in that reverie.”
Othelmedir set the vial of the poison against the muscle-wall. He spoke a word of deadspeech, and a taste rolled over the back of his tongue. Aniseed.
The wall came apart in slow rivulets, sinew unbraiding strand by strand down the doorframe.
“Friend Weirmoth,” said Othelmedir, “the way, that has stood sealed against us, shall stand open within the moment. Thereafter we must descend down to the cauldron chamber. You must go before me and ward this body of mine against whatsoever waits.”
Weirmoth used the haft of his spear to rise from a half crouch. He stepped up to the disintegrating wall.
The last strand parted with a wet snap, and the pale-green gas that had been pent in the lower passages came forward in a slow wave, parting around their boots and closing behind each step. Weirmoth went through first. Othelmedir followed at his right shoulder.
They came into the upper dining hall. The long oak table stood turned on its trestles, a desiccated capon still pinned to the boards by an iron skewer. Plums lay scattered beneath the gas-layer, shriveled to a knucklebone. Seven high-backed chairs had been thrown wide. The iron sconce stood flameless, the room lay dark.
Two of the Milkmoot stood waiting under the lintel of an inner door. They had been waiting, by Othelmedir’s reckoning, for long decades.
“Yonder, upon the right,” Othelmedir said, and stepped left. Weirmoth went right.
The first invader carried a broken halberd. Weirmoth caught the descending halberd-haft against his spear and lunged. His speartip slid beneath the chin of his foe. That dead dreamer crumbled with the blow, dry as bark.
The second came through Weirmoth’s guard while he recovered. A late parry - the spearblade caught his forearm as he turned it, opening the skin to the bone. Weirmoth staggered a half step into the table. The invader pressed, jabbing high. Weirmoth let him, took the blow on his shoulder, dropped his weight, and drove his speartip through the dead man’s chest. The invader went down into the gas with his hands still reaching.
“Friend Weirmoth,” said Othelmedir, “the door that follows - pass within it warily, and keep close along the wall once you are through. A ritual circle lies beyond, scored in chalk. On no account must you tread upon it.”
“You know the floor monstrous well for a man who never slept down here.”
Past the door the floorboards opened into a capacious round chamber, and there, scored deep into the planks beneath the gas, was the chalked ritual circle of the Red Pew. The chalk had gone violet with age and damp.
A third Milkmoot cabalist, a woman with her jaw bound shut by wire, sprinted across it.
A blast of death-cold suffused the chamber.
Weirmoth, taking the brunt of the blast, halted in his tracks. He shuddered. The Milkmoot cabalist with the wire jaw had been annihilated. The frost crept over Othelmedir’s skin a beat behind, somewhat abated by the interfering barrier of Weirmoth.
Following behind the frost came the croak of a voice.
“Liddick.”
But Othelmedir apprehended that the voice came not from the ritual circle, but from the boards beneath their feet. The voice deepened, turning bassy, and the gas-saturated boards resonated like a rotted ribcage.
“Liddick.”
Othelmedir scanned the space.
“Fellow Liddick. Liddick, whose Hand Must Attend the Lever.”
A second voice, thinner, came from the chamber’s far side. A figure stood there amidst a necromancy Othelmedir knew. The Cope of Blue Wasps. Dried wasp husks were pinned in triangular patterns across the figure’s shoulders, each one shifting when he breathed.
Alder the Lank now rose to his full height from behind the upended table.
“Fellow Liddick walked out,” continued the cavernous voice from below. “Fellow Liddick pulled the lever and left us in our sleep.”
Weirmoth did not look at Othelmedir. He stepped between him and the dream-dead, wasp-armored Alder.
“Fellow Sourbell,” said Othelmedir, directing his voice at the floor, “you speak in error. The lever was the order rendered. You gave it, and that order, being given, was obeyed.”
“He names us still,” said Alder, glowering from across the room. The dream-wakened corpse lifted both hands. The gas around his fingers began to braid. The wasp husk stirred.
“Unmake that one ere he rouses his wasps,” said Othelmedir. “His hands you must unmake before all else.”
Weirmoth ran at the dead mancer. He lunged low. Alder turned his hip, and the speartip carved a long furrow down his thigh. Preserved flesh gave under the long speartip. Bloodless. Only powder. One wasp buzzed from the shoulder, aloft on ash flake wings. Alder brought a braided hand down. Weirmoth caught the blow on the spear-haft, and the wood split lengthwise. The mercenary dropped the broken half, drew his short knife with his off hand, and opened Alder’s wrist along the tendon.
Othelmedir meanwhile knelt and laid his palm flat upon the boards. Beneath the planking the bass note of Sourbell rolled on, naming Liddick, naming the lever. Othelmedir spoke into the wood the inverse of that name.
“Kciddil, Kciddil, Kciddil.”
The voice below stumbled. The boards buckled. The bass note climbed, doubled in the narrow space beneath the floor. Something cracked wetly. The boards cracked, and then were still.
Alder heard the crackling board and turned to look. Weirmoth stepped inside the lifted hand. He ducked a darting wasp and drove the short blade up under the mandible.
Alder resumed his death, now dreamless forever.
Silence was summoned and came at once. The way down lay through a door behind the table, half-open, past the corpse of Alder the Lank.
Othelmedir rose from his knees. The taste of aniseed was gone from his tongue. “Friend Weirmoth. The way lies below.”
Weirmoth wiped the short knife on the sere robes of the dead mancer. He set his off hand to his shoulder and rolled it, testing where the late parry had rung his bones. “Hips and shoulders still moving - that’s something. Fellow Liddick.”
“That is a name I wear no longer.”
“Heard it twice. Bass and treble.” Weirmoth stepped carefully around the chalk circle. “I was a boy once in Doomsower, picking pockets at the hamlet fairs. Never heard my real name from a corpse though. That’s a first for the journal.”
“Yet a name spoken by a corpse is no momentous matter in the practice of necromancy. Friend Weirmoth, keep what journal you will, and enter therein what entries please you. For the present, there remains to us business yet unfinished within this tower.”
The half-open door gave onto a short flight of twelve steps, and the flight gave onto the cauldron chamber. The stair was wide; the pair went down it together. The stone under their boots was gritted with old salt.
The cauldron squatted on its dais at the room’s center, wan copper bloomed to verdigris along the rivets, its lip blackened, its body sweating.
Weirmoth hissed as with one fist clamping his sleeve around his lacerated arm. He said, “I won’t interfere. Do your work, mancer. I’ll stand here being uninvolved.”
Othelmedir drew his secret third bottle - The Lidd Decoction, the potion he had brewed in the cauldron of black oil - from the inner pocket of the oxblood cloak. Thumbing away the wax seal he had placed upon it, he stepped to the dais. He tipped the bottle’s mouth over the cauldron’s lip and poured.
As the decoction met the seething gas it hissed, a protracted flat hiss like wet steel thrust into a glowing forge.
Othelmedir set the empty bottle on the dais. He bent his head over the cauldron, which no longer belched its heavy gas, and began a spell of deadspeech. This was Ülledéék’s Closure-Song.
“Ülledéék zárréenk. Ülledéék zárréenk.”
He let a breath fall between each syllable, every guttural sound like a tiny iron hammer upon a sheet of brass. The pale-green vapor about his knees fell back from the cauldron in soft retreating shelves. Something turned inside the copper cauldron. He heard the wet thud of a semi-solid sediment thunking against the bottom.
The liquid had congealed into mundane muck.
Othelmedir raised his head.
Weirmoth stood three paces off. The tipped end of his broken spear was in his hand, levered now toward Othelmedir. His other arm hung limp as Othelmedir’s own prosthetic, the cut sleeve dark to the elbow and the dark of it crusting now along the seam. But Othelmedir carried no weapon at all.
“Friend Weirmoth,” Othelmedir said. He let the silence sit a moment, that the sellsword might choose whether to lower the spear or not. He did not. “You have had a name out of two dead mouths this night, and you stand now with iron set betwixt us; and therefore I will lay the matter before you plainly, and lay it but once. The cabal of mancers that wrought this cauldron wrought no execrable deed. The gas lay bound within the vessel against the appointed hour of its opening, and the breaching of vessel and of hour alike was the doing of a rival house, and of no other. The dolorous plight that came upon the townfolk of Sulky Wend followed from that breach, and from no design of mine, nor any design of my Fellows. The silence I kept, I kept because this country - and many a country besides, it may be - has no patience for the finer turns of such a tale, and a man accused unjustly is oftentimes a man unjustly hanged. To the cowardice of that silence I confess, friend Weirmoth. I confess to naught beyond it, and the fruits of that cowardice I have, in this hour and within this chamber, redressed.”
Weirmoth cocked his head to one side, squinting. At last he said, “Fine words, Liddick. Othelmedir. Mancer. Pick one, keep them all.” The mercenary lowered his broken spear, but did not set it back in his belt. He held out his other, palm up, displaying that the wound upon his upper arm, though deep, was not disabling. “The ingredients you lifted from the still-room - every last one. Set them on the dais where I can count them.”
Othelmedir’s black brow furrowed. They had struck no set bargain, no agreed terms of the arrangement. Now the mercenary set his condition plainly, after the work had been accomplished. It was the mancer’s own customary method.
Othelmedir inclined his head once. “It shall be as you ask, master Weirmoth.”
Othelmedir laid the reagents on the dais one at a time: a stoppered horn first, then a twist of waxed paper, then a small leather purse of cinerous crystals that spilled a little at one torn corner. Weirmoth’s eye moved over each as it was set down.
Othelmedir straightened. “Master Weirmoth,” he said, “you drive your bargain from, I may venture, too parsimonious a perspective.”
Weirmoth gathered the reagents into the crook of his good arm. “My legs remember the way up better than the way down,” said the mercenary, ignoring the comment. “Let’s use them while they still agree with me.”
As they ascended, Othelmedir pressed one hand briefly to his chest. There the unremembered pendant of hammered tin lay flat against his sternum.