Session 07 — The Thorn and the Tooth

They carried the head of Lord Oswin Crail out of the Fold in a sack, because a dead man can be made to talk and a living one would have lied. It told them where the families go. It told them the families live as long as they are useful. And then it told them, smiling, that the thing they had killed him for was pretty on a shelf. By nightfall they were standing at the foot of the last wall in the world, in a town that nails teeth over its doors, watching the people of that town walk north in the dark in chains.

I. Fire in the Window

He came up the stairs with men on either side of him, and they were waiting for him.

The rest of it would come back to them later in pieces, in no particular order. The door of his own gallery. The shock on a face that had never once walked into a room it did not own. Blades coming out. A cramped, savage fight among glass cases and rolling shelves, every one of them trying to kill quietly in a house that was already listening.

Then Lord Oswin Crail lifted his hand, and fire came out of it.

A retired inquisitor, in a city where magic is death, and he had been keeping it for himself the whole time. The bolt went wide and blew out through the open window into the night. Below, on the fine grass and the gravel and the street past the iron fence, people looked up at a fire-streak leaving a lord's house, and the crowd began.

They finished it anyway. Every man who had drawn a blade on them was on the floor. And Lord Crail was on the floor in two parts, the larger one opened up, the smaller one lifted by its salt-and-pepper hair and put into a sack.

They took what they could reach. The tablet. The records. A bundle of papers from a desk. The rings off his fingers. Then they went out the way they had come in, over the fence with voices gathering at the gate, into the alleys of the Fold with their heads on a swivel for silver ravens, running.

II. Three in the Morning

Mira Solbin's carriage came through Meranthas the way it had gone in, with the blinds down and nobody saying a word.

On the other side, in Ashmark, at three in the morning, she finally turned and looked at what she had been carrying.

They told her. Not all of it. Enough.

She shook her head slowly, the way people do when a number is too large to hold. Lords did not get assassinated. Not recently. Not in their own homes. How much trouble they were in, she said, depended on who had seen their faces. Beyond that, she did not know, because nobody knew. It had not happened in a long time.

Vivienne was unmoved. It would not be the first time, she said. They took what they needed. This was what they did.

In the corner of the carriage EMBR sat with his head turned toward Jorath's lap, where the tablet sat, and did not look away from it. The red light in his left eye no longer faded back to green between breaths. It stayed red now. It stayed red all the time.

Jorath took off his cloak and wrapped the artifact in it.

Valdren put a hand flat against the side of EMBR's face and pushed his head away. It came back. He pushed it again. It came back again, smooth and patient, like something on a spring.

Jorath looked up through the gap in the curtain at the stars.

He asked them whether it would go well to stay the night in Ashmark, a stone's throw from the checkpoint they had just come through, with a lord's body cooling on the other side of the wall. The cloud cover was thick, but a few stars burned through it hard and bright, and in them he saw the huntress drawing back her arrow.

We should make our way on from this town, he said. Over the hills.

He burned the last of his strength for a shape to wear. The horses they had ridden in on were fetched from where they had been left, Valdren called Argentus out of nothing, and they rode out of Ashmark in the black hours with their hoods up, watching every road for patrols that might or might not already have heard.

III. The Grove

They found trees in the middle of open country: a stand of them on the rolling grass plains, far enough off the road that nobody would ride past them by accident. They tied the horses and lay down.

EMBR does not sleep. He sat against a tree and passed his hand axes from palm to palm in the dark, and noticed that they felt lighter than they used to, and waited until the breathing around him was slow and even.

Then he got up.

Jorath had gone to sleep sitting against a trunk, and the cloak-wrapped bundle lay across his knees under his arms. EMBR crossed the grass without a sound. He crouched in front of the druid. He was close enough to touch it.

It's not a problem, said the arm. It was not a voice, not exactly. It was just knowledge that arrived in his head already agreed with. Slide it out. Just hold it for the night. Just hold it.

The longer he looked, the louder it got. That was the sickness of it. Every second of attention he paid made the pull stronger. Thinking about resisting was a way of thinking about the tablet, and thinking about the tablet was what fed the arm.

EMBR reached into his pouch with his right hand and took out five silver coins and set them down in Jorath's lap, as though that made it a purchase and not a theft. As though that made it his own decision.

And then he stood up and walked away.

Every step was a fight, and he won every one of them. He crossed the whole camp to the far edge of the trees and put his back against a trunk there, and he sat, and he stared at the tall grass moving under the wind on the horizon, and he did not go back. The distance helped, a little. Not enough. All night, at intervals, it came back up to the front of his mind the way a craving does, and all night he put it down again.

In the morning Jorath woke up with five silver pieces in his lap and no memory of earning them.

IV. The Arithmetic of Leaving

They pooled everything they had in the grey light, and it was almost nothing.

Nineteen gold on Jorath. Three on Rookk. Two copper to EMBR's name. Valdren had nothing at all. There were Crail's rings, and a diamond they had been saving. There was one healing potion. There were the rations EMBR carried and did not need, because EMBR does not eat.

And there was the distance. Harland Ashworth had taken a handful of weeks to find Calthar, and Harland had not known what he was looking for. They had his journal and his star chart and his lens, and now the thing he had spent years trying to buy. It might go faster for them. It would not go fast.

Beyond the walls there was nothing to buy. No outposts. No villages. EMBR had woken up out there once, alone in a shack in the wilderness, and he had seen nothing on the long walk in. Whatever they needed, they would have to carry over the wall on their backs.

Rookk, turning it over, remembered a name. Farrow. A canton a few hours north, pressed right up against the foot of the outer wall, the kind of place travelers stopped to rest and resupply. He tried to remember more and the memory slipped away from him, the way things do early in the morning. But he knew the direction.

Jorath found a bird and whispered a message into it for Orvin. We are going beyond the walls. We hope to be back in a month. If you have not heard from us in a month, assume we are dead. He sent it off knowing there would be no reply.

Then they took the head out of the sack.

V. The Inquisitor at the Stump

It had been more than twelve hours. It had begun to smell.

They argued over the questions quietly, because they would get only a handful and because the dead man, once awake, would not be able to hear an argument without understanding it. Valdren's questions came first. There was nothing else Valdren wanted from this world, and no one at the stump pretended otherwise. Are they alive. Where would they be. And if he doesn't know where, who does.

Vivienne chose the face.

The illusion came down over her and she was not Vivienne anymore. She was a man: tall, hard, weathered into lines, with scars across the face of someone who had spent his life doing the kind of work that leaves scars. She looked like a man Crail might have served beside. She looked like a man who would have been in the house on the night Valdren's family was taken.

They set the head on a stump in the clearing with its face to her and the trees behind it, and the others went into those trees and held still.

She cast the spell.

The eyes in the grey face opened, and there was light in them where the pupils should have been, a pale luminous shine in the morning. They went left and right. The dead man took in the forest, the stump, the man in front of him, trying to find where he was and when. And then, because the face in front of him was one he understood, he settled.

My lord Inquisitor, Vivienne said, in a voice that was not hers. Before I killed one of the heretics, they cast some spell on you. It is by that spell that I can speak to you now. For the good of the king and the kingdom, I must know. Where are the families of the heretics kept?

The brows drew down. He thought about it with the unhurried gravity of a man who has never had to hurry for anyone.

Mmm, said Lord Crail. Those family members. Those heretics.

They are being kept at a facility. One that only we have access to.

ID Seven Correctional Annex. In the Fold.

The words left his dead mouth and hung in the air over the clearing. In the trees, a man who had spent twelve years looking for a door heard the name of the door.

Something in the corpse's regard sharpened. It began to look at her. Behind a trunk, out of its line of sight, Jorath cast his hand toward the sky and the omen of woe came down on the dead man's judgment like a thumb on the scale, and whatever doubt had started to form in that ruined mind did not finish forming.

Are they still alive, my lord?

Depends, said Lord Crail, on their usefulness.

A hand came around the tree and passed her the tablet, low, out of sight. Across the clearing EMBR watched it go from one set of hands to another the way a starving dog watches a bone. Vivienne lifted it up in front of the stump.

Where did you acquire this, my lord?

The dead eyes moved over it without much interest.

Some auction. Decades ago. Some travelers came in who wanted the safety of the walls. They traded all of their belongings to the garrison to be transported over. Their belongings got auctioned off at one of my friends' private events. A small shrug of a face with no shoulders. I liked the look of it. So I took it.

The travelers. What were they?

An assortment of mixed breeds. Couldn't tell you. And then, because it was true of everything he had ever been asked about the people beneath him: Not that it matters.

One question left.

What does this artifact do, my lord?

And the dead man smiled.

It was the real smile. It was the smile Lord Oswin Crail had worn in his gallery on quiet evenings, walking among his cases, among the hair pins and the wooden soldiers and the little plaques with names and ages. The smile of someone who had paid a great deal of money for a thing he did not understand and thought that made him superior to it.

It sits on a shelf, he said, and looks pretty.

Valdren came out of the trees.

He did not say a word. He did not need Crail to know his face or his name or whose mother's dress was in the case. He had turned his war pick in his hand so the blunt side led, and he walked up to the stump in the middle of that smile and brought it down.

The skull gave way with a wet crunch. Clotted blood burst out of every opening in the head, out of the eyes and the mouth and the stump of the neck where it sat on the wood. Vivienne got back just in time. The eyes bulged, and the light went out of them, and what was left was a mangled piece of meat with nothing in it at all.

Jorath whispered to the wind, and the wind turned, and the smell went away downwind across the grass.

VI. No Door Out

There are no gates in the outer wall.

They knew it and had never had to understand it. Caligo is a closed thing. Nothing was built to let people out, because no one was ever supposed to want out. People came in: through the black water under the walls, where more of them drowned than lived, or by walking up to the stone out of the wasteland and offering the garrison on top everything they owned, and praying the soldiers felt like hoisting them up. The lifts on the wall belonged to the garrison and no one else.

Jorath could fly now. Something in him had deepened with the new day, and there were winged shapes open to him that had not been open before. But he could not carry a horse, and in the wasteland the Ruined would be hunting at night.

They rode north.

The roads were wrong. Patrols were everywhere, more than any of them had seen on an ordinary day, riding hard and talking fast and looking at every traveler twice. News moves fast when a lord dies. They left the roads, came back to them, and left them again, and they had been doing this for years, and they got through.

And then the land ran out.

VII. Farrow

At first it looked like weather, a darker grey behind the grey of the sky. Then it did not look like anything but what it was.

The wall did not sit on the horizon. There was no horizon. The stone went up and up, beyond the reach of the eye, right and left forever, and it took up the whole of the world in front of them. It did not loom. It was simply there, total and unending, the way the sky is there.

At its feet, very small, sat Farrow.

Low houses of stone and old wood. Fields. People in clothes worn to rags, houses in disrepair, the tiredness of a place that farms land in a shadow that never lifts. There was a statue of King Rimalath in the square like in every square, and the townsfolk nodded to the riders as they passed, polite and brief, and went on about their business.

Valdren noticed the doors first.

Over about every other door in Farrow, nailed into the lintel, hung an iron disc as wide as a man's hand could span, chiselled with the same design. A wreath of thorns, twisting around and around the rim. And in the center, a tooth. Not a molar. A canine. Something that bit.

At the foot of the king's statue, among the little offerings the pious leave, lay smaller versions of the same disc. Valdren had seen gifts at Rimalath's feet in other towns. They had not looked like this. These looked like things laid on a grave.

VIII. Crane & Co.

The apothecary hit Vivienne in the face with a thousand smells the moment she opened the door.

Behind the counter stood a young woman, quiet and precise, with the kind of exhaustion that had gone past tired into something permanent. She pushed through it when the door opened and managed a greeting. Crane, she said. This was her shop.

Vivienne was still wearing the soldier. She leaned on the counter the way a soldier leans. Me and the boys, she said. A mate who kept losing fights. Something to put him back together.

Crane had just the thing. She even had a calming draught for when he got hot-headed, gentler on the body than the ales the garrison boys usually drank. He needs to learn his lesson, the soldier said, and Crane smiled and understood.

Her best was a thing she called a Surgeon's Reserve. She had exactly two. Vivienne set one of Lord Crail's rings on the counter, a jeweled gold band with no crest and no mark, and took both reserves and the draught for it.

You seem like one of the boys up on the wall, Crane said, wrapping them. But I haven't seen you down here before.

On rotation. Came in yesterday.

Then you've still got some things to learn. She hesitated. She was not one to push things on people, she said. But she reached behind her to a rack and took down a loop of rope with an iron disc hanging from it. Rough, hammered by hand. Thorns around the edge. A tooth in the middle.

She slid it across the counter.

Pretty good, she said, for warding off evil spirits. If you understand me.

Vivienne turned it over in her soldier's fingers and let her scholar's mind go over it. There was nothing in it. No working, no ward, no trace of any art at all. Just iron. And there was nothing in Crane's face either. No angle. No upsell. Only a sincere and slightly anxious kindness, the kind someone shows a young man who does not yet know the rules of the place he has come to.

She said she had nothing worth trading for it.

If you're one of the boys watching the wall, said Crane, consider it a gift. Thank you for your service. We really appreciate what you do. Keeping those beasts on the other side.

IX. Thompson

Valdren turned a corner looking for a scratched signal on a doorframe, some mark of the Resistance, anything. He walked into an old man.

A big man, not frail, stooped by age and weight. One eye was scarred shut into a milky, glassy white. Tunic, trousers. And around his neck, on a cord, the thorn and the tooth.

Nice to meet you, the old man said. My name's Thompson.

He was glad to see a new face. Farrow needed new blood, he said, or it would dry up and blow away. Had Valdren found a room? He should try the Last Lamp. His good eye went to the war pick on Valdren's hip, and he reached out and rapped his knuckles on Valdren's armor so it rang.

Fighting's in your blood.

I fight because I have to.

I can see it, said Thompson. Not because you have to. Because you want to. He smiled and hobbled on.

Valdren called him back and asked about the necklace.

Wards off evil spirits. A lot of people here wore them. Some of them didn't even believe. He would get one, if he were staying. And when Valdren asked what the spirits were, whether this was only a problem here, the old man came close. Very close. And his voice dropped.

It is a problem everywhere. A lot of people pretend it's not. But it fucking is.

People sat at home, he said. Worked in the fields. Ate with their families. Pretended everything was fine. And it was not fine, and it was hard, and it was work to keep these things at bay.

And the ones who don't wear them?

Disappearances.

What happens to them?

Don't know. He tapped a fingernail against the iron disc on his chest. Tink. Not gonna find out neither.

The king? The king was a god. The king protected them. The king had given them the walls. But a lot of people overestimate him, said Thompson. There's devils at our doorstep. He's doing a fine job keeping them back. But we're helping.

He looked Valdren up and down once more with that one living eye.

We could use another one. One way or another.

X. Hollis & Ren

The general store had everything. Rope and rations, waterskins and bedrolls, tinderboxes, torches, lamp oil, climbing kits, hooded lanterns. And on the counter, a rack of about twenty iron discs on rope, a copper apiece.

Bram Hollis was polite and slow and in no hurry at all, and he sold Jorath three bundles of rations, five days apiece, for six gold. Then he stood with his hands on the bundles and did not push them across.

Traveling around the edge, are you?

The old circuit, EMBR offered, and Jorath's lie held.

It was unusual, Hollis allowed, to lay in that much food just to go around the edge. But he did not make a habit of questioning people who paid. And then, almost to himself: Well. If you're on your way out, you won't be needing one of those.

The talismans. They were for people who stayed.

Against evil spirits, he said. Devils. He drew his own out of his collar to show them. Farrow was haunted, but not by ghosts. No, the party would not be in danger staying the night. They would be helping. They would spend money. They would enrich the community. And those who stayed kept the spirits away, and an enriched community could do the job better.

What did the job look like?

It is not glamorous. It is not exciting. It is not even something anyone wants to do. It is a tax upon the people. Chipping away at us, day in, day out, to protect what we know and love.

He had never laid eyes on the thing. I imagine it comes in many forms. It was not a medical question, when Jorath pressed him as one healer to another. It's one of will. All the old towns had the same trouble. Farrow was only the one that saw it. And the king helped plenty, Hollis said. The walls are the children of the king. That was more help than anyone had ever given anyone.

But we are the first line of defense. And seemingly the last.

EMBR offered their help, if help was needed. Constantly, said Hollis. Constantly we need more help. But not from people passing through.

EMBR paid his last two copper for two of the iron discs, and Hollis handed them over with a small, satisfied look and recommended the Last Lamp for the night. Jorath pulled back his hood to thank him, letting a few wisps of white hair show, and started to say something warm about how rarely he was treated so kindly.

Hollis did not hear him.

Hollis was staring at EMBR's left arm. At the chitin. At the thing that was not metal. And he had gone perfectly still, the color gone out of his face, as though his body had forgotten how to move.

XI. The Last Lamp

Rookk found the inn alone, and it was the only warm thing in Farrow.

A bear rug in front of a roaring hearth. Deep upholstered chairs. Clean windows letting in what little light Caligo ever gets. And behind the bar an older man, weathered and quick, forever wiping down a counter that was already clean. He took one look at the way Rookk stood and made him for garrison.

Lost a step, Rookk said. New work. Pays better.

Then he put a coin on the counter and told the truth, or the part of it that would do. He was guarding a party that meant to study the Ruined beyond the wall, without the garrison's permission.

The barkeep's hands stopped moving. You know that's a crime.

Rookk knew.

There are many ways over the wall, I hear. Always people coming in, he said. He had never once in his life heard of anyone wanting to go out. But there was an old maintenance lift not far from here. Officially broken. Rookk ought to see for himself.

He wanted more coin for the rest, and he lowered his voice to get it.

I wouldn't use that lift at night.

He knew what that meant: going up by day, in full view of the garrison. Don't shoot the messenger. It's the lesser of two evils.

Rookk paid him. The man said what conversation, and then he looked at Rookk a long while and told him that anyone brave enough to go out and get even a tail's length of those Ruined was brave and good-hearted, and was probably going to die doing it. Before Rookk could blink there was a tankard in front of him.

If you're gonna do it, said the barkeep, do it drunk.

North road, toward the wall, where it veers east. Not the obvious way. Rookk would see.

And one thing more. A woman lived out along that road. A hermit, alone in a shack, who took poor care of herself. No threat to anyone. The barkeep went into the kitchen and came back with a basket of dried meat, a bottle of spirits, and fresh fruit. Take it to her, he said, and there would be a room upstairs tonight, free.

Rookk took the basket.

XII. What the Hawk Saw

Jorath asked the stars again, in their room, over Harland's chart. If we stay the night here.

The answer came back as nothing. Not weal. Not woe. The stars had no opinion about Farrow.

So he called a hawk out of the green of himself, and he and EMBR walked it out to the edge of town while the light went, past townsfolk who smiled and waved and passed on. At the edge of Farrow the wall stood so close that it no longer looked like a wall at all, only a direction, the direction up. They set the hawk in a hedge and waited for dusk. Then Jorath told it, silently, what a lift would look like, a branch that went nowhere and rose and fell, and sent it up the stone into the clouds.

He thought it would not come back.

A little after seven, back in the inn, it tapped on the glass.

What it showed him was an army. Two soldiers every ten feet along the top of the wall, as far as it had flown. A bell every twenty feet, like a dinner bell, waiting to be rung. Cannons on rails, more than it had words for, all aimed outward into fog. Great ballistae and banks of crossbows angled at the sky, because some of the things out there fly. And walking among the ranks, bigger men, harder men, officers with flare guns on their hips and long rifles across their backs.

Rookk heard it and nodded. It was quantity, he said. It had always been quantity. The weapons faced out, at the Ruined. But there was not a man on that wall who would not kill a trespasser.

They decided to sleep. In the morning they would go north, see the lift, find the hermit, and choose.

Valdren slept in his armor with the war pick in his fist, and made sure he knew the way to Argentus's stall. The hawk perched on the head of Jorath's bed to keep anyone from getting at his organs. And EMBR, who does not sleep, stood with his back flat against the door, a wall of iron with a red light burning in one eye, facing into the dark room.

XIII. The Procession

There was no moon.

Farrow went black the way country towns go black, completely, the dark pressing right up to the glass. EMBR stood in it for hours and watched the window.

Then the buildings across the street began to glow.

Small lights. Too small for torches. Candles, maybe, moving along the fronts of the houses, throwing soft shadows up the walls. One would swell brighter as it came closer to a facade and then fade, and the next would swell, and fade, and the whole street seemed to breathe with it, in and out, in and out.

EMBR left the door and crossed the room toward the window as quietly as a body of iron can cross a wooden floor.

His foot caught.

He went down, and his metal palm hit the glass with a crack that rang out into the street.

And he saw them.

A line of people walking down the middle of the road, heading north. Twenty of them, perhaps. Each wore a tunic of ash-grey sackcloth. Each carried, burned into the flesh of the chest, a brand: twisted roses, thorned, around a single sharp tooth. Some carried candles cupped in their hands, and it was their slow walking past the houses that made the street breathe.

Some of them did not carry candles.

Some of them walked in shackles. Walked the way prisoners walk, hemmed in on both sides. And under the silence of Farrow, faintly, with every step, the chains rang.

North. All of them, toward the wall.

The sound of his hand on the glass went out over the street.

Several of the figures below stopped walking.

They turned around.

And in the candlelight, with the thorn and the tooth burned into their chests, they looked up at the window of the Last Lamp, and met the two glowing eyes of the thing that was watching them.

End of Session 07.