IV: Dies Irae

He was only halfway between down from the first stairwell, hastily dressed with half-laced boots and wet hair when the muffled tangle of voices began to separate out, become more clear. The first one he recognized was Bagup Lin, who came into view in the entryway of the tavern in his wrinkled sleeping gown and shearling slippers, his legs formed a sturdy shoulder-width apart that would serve him well if he had to fire the shotgun he held firmly in his big hands.

"—nothing about it here," Bagup was barking. Maybe he'd already fired once. He pumped the shotgun as punctuation, spitting out an empty shell casing onto the scuffed wooden floor with a dull, tumbling cling, like metal popcorn. Orphen stood back at the foot of the stairs, shrugging into a jacket, a standard issue black rawhide from the Tower he'd somehow ended up with during his time in their sanitarium. This was likely in no small part to be attributed to his theory that the Tower felt a continuing sense of responsibility or obligation toward him, and seemed to provide quite a lot upon his periodic visits. It was either that, or the fact that they'd been courting him to return ever since he'd semi-reconciled with them. That particular hatchet was about as buried as it was ever going to be, with Master Childman dead and Azalie, after all she'd done to ruin it, returned to their halls. The gods knew what he they would expect him to do there, but he was certain, without knowing any details, it would be something at least partially disagreeable.

Or he could have just swiped the jacket from Hartia, which would explain why it was a little snug across the shoulders.

"What do you call that scar eating up your arm, old man? This building is just as tainted as you are, it's got to come down!" A gawky kid in a longcoat was yelling in the doorway, the crowd behind him amplifying his confidence and rage to a fever pitch. They restlessly roiled behind him like storm clouds, a churning mob lit with kerosene lanterns, which was just a smidge short of torches and pitchforks in his estimation.

"I call it none of your damn business, son. The hell are you people doing?"

"None of…! You keeping this place open, covered in your infectious disease…that isn't any of our business?"

"He's been treated!" Majic finally rushed at the door, obviously picking up on the growing hostility in the doorway, all seemingly directed at Bagup. "He's not infectious to any of you, he never was! Leave us alone!"

"Never was? Look at this kid; he's some kind of expert." The guy snarled at Majic, his ignorant fear pumped up into overconfidence as was so easily achieved in such a young man. "That piece of shit doctor tell you all that?"

"Doctor Farrior treated my father, he said—"

"Doctor Farrior is a goddamn charlatan!" A bearded man half-shouted, cutting forward in the crowd somewhere behind the gawky kid. "Whatever you had to sell to pay for his so-called treatment is just the price of trusting that no-good Meverlenst swindler!"

"Three-thousand sockets for one vial and it didn't help Lindsey one bit! She only got worse!" A stricken looking woman cried out from behind what might have been her husband. "It's just snake oil!"

"You must have caught it too late!" Majic insisted ardently, pressing further forward. "That's not the doctor's fault! It's not our—"

Bagup was waving Majic down with one hand, "They won't hear it, Maj, save your breath." Somewhere beyond the door, there was the sound of glass breaking, more percussive shots. These people weren't the only restless group of mourning souls out tonight with this ill-advised motivation.

"Where's the doctor now? Eight more dead today alone, where's your doctor with his miracle treatment? He doesn't know any more than we do!" The lady, Lindsey's mother presumably, was in tears for probably the hundredth time that day from the sound of her ragged voice. A dozen agreed uproariously behind her. There was a gust of cold wind that shifted clothes and hair and the discordant, dull sounds of raised voices far down the open street.

"You people are exposing everyone who comes through here! Don't you feel any responsibility for the dead?"

Majic protested, but his words were swallowed up in the rancorous swell of concurrence and embellishments that rose up from the crowd.

"The only cure for the devil's plague is fire!"

Orphen bent his neck to one side, then the other, closing his eyes against his headache and the shouts flooding further into the gaslit tavern. Leaned against the bar, Hartia threw him a curious look that plainly questioned if he planned on involving himself, which, until now, he had been hoping he'd have a choice in. But, as with so many other things, he didn't.

"Fire?" he asked sharply, approaching the throng in the open doorway with a step that seemed to grow louder when a hush fell over the group at what he could only assume was his appearance. He'd never blended in well around Totokanta in any case. It was all agriculture, countryside and family owned shipping ports that dated a few hundred years back, all those blonde, blue-eyed, alabaster skinned western children passing down the farmland generation after generation. Even the sorcerer's guild in town, tiny as it was, was populated with nothing but these lily white westerners that looked nothing like he did: black haired, dark eyed. But Totokanta wasn't the boondocks, they saw their share of both sunbronzed easterners and sorcerers. But the looks these people gave, as usual, it wasn't the look of resentful awe reserved for the descendants of the Nornir. It was the fearful gaze used to look on a stabber. A killer.

Look at you. Everything about you has the word stabber written all over it.

Krylancelo, you never could kill anybody.

"Now, that sounds a little bit like a threat to me," he continued with a smile that bordered on unkind, hands buried neutrally in the pockets of the Tower jacket, ignoring the taunt of voices from the past that bubbled up in his aching, brandy-marinated brain. Throwing a look over at the bar, where Majic was radiating palpable apprehension and Hartia, ever the spectator, smirked from the sidelines. As squeamish as he'd been about trouble when they were children, in the last couple years he'd really developed a morbid taste for the amusement generated via the misfortune of those who crossed his old friend's path. "But maybe I'm jumping to conclusions."

The young man at the front of the rabble, ungainly and surly in his poorly tailored topcoat was predictably the first to reply in a shrill voice that did little to disguise his nervous furor. "It's not a threat, it's a promise."

"Oh, a promise. A promise to burn down an old man and his son's home and livelihood. Yes, my mistake, so much more noble than a threat." He kept walking, passing Bagup with his shotgun and stopping in the doorframe, pulling his hands from his jacket pockets to brace himself on either side, the jacket front opening like a theatre curtain. The kid's eyes dipped down at the flash of metal revealed there, a winged dragon curled possessively around a dagger: the distinctive adornment only worn by a scholar of the Tower of Kiba. After a moment, that generated the same kind of expression he was used to seeing in a loudmouthed boy's eyes upon seeing it. Not that he was really a boy. For all he knew, they could have been the same age. Could have been born on the same damn day, but in comparison, just in the amount of life; ugly, cold, misfortunate life that had been lived between the two of them, he was just a boy. A child who didn't know the gut twisting pain of a five day hunger strike or the splintering depression of renouncing every ounce of personal morality in exchange for a chance at surviving just another week or two. The startling bottom-barrel price of a broken soul.

"Listen," the boy said, as evenly as he could muster, his voice strained with anxiety and resentment. "I…I don't know what somebody like you is doing in this place, but this concerns our people's safety. It's nothing to do with you."

Orphen made sure to get just a little too close. Close enough he could see the dirty seawater color of the kid's eyes and smirk at the way he tried in vain to lean back to a more comfortable distance.

"'Fraid it does have to do with me. Unfortunately for you, quite a lot, in fact." He moved his eyes up over the boy's grey-blonde head to the group behind him with their lanterns swinging overhead. More than a few faces had traded in their anger for recognition. After all, he'd spent nearly a year periodically drinking in the tavern between teaching Majic and his lookouts on the southern hillock facing the Everlasting house, watching for the Polkano's signals as had been the agreement: their cooperation for a fair reduction off their substantial loan note.

They still owed him at least a couple thousand sockets. The little shits. Hadn't seen them in months.

Regardless, it was inevitable that there might be a few locals who had run across him during that time. He just so happened to know he wasn't that easily forgettable, at least in comparison with the common folk one happened upon in Southern Totokanta.

"Lucky for you, boy, it looks like some of your friends aren't quite as bad-mannered as you are."

"B…?" A few others, other long armed graceless youths had wrestled up through the crowd and were pulling at him, murmuring at him. Calling him Levi. Mentioning 'the Lin kid' under their breath, filling him in. He also heard a smothered word that sounded like Everlasting, which edged his irritation up a notch.

"And?" Levi wheezed with the kind of petulant embarrassment unique to young men. "What's he going to do? If that's true, maybe these bastards should be more concerned with the Manor, huh? Instead of guarding some pathetic old moonshiner and his flophouse—"

In a breath, he had the kid by the neck and swung him to the floor, the back of his head thudding as solid and heavy on the floor panels as a wooden block while part of the crowd pulled back and the boys surged forward to defend Levi, who was coughing on the floorboards under Orphen's half-laced boot. With one arm extended, palm out, he spat out an invocation while Majic tugged his father away from the door jamb. "I tear thee, Heaven's wall."

The boys, even Bagup and Majic, staggered from the concussive force; some dropped with their hands up to their throats. That reaction was always interesting, how the human body's reflexes brought their hands up as though they were being choked when he'd merely removed the air they were trying to breathe. Already it was rushing back with a sucking sound, refilling the unnatural vacuum, but they were still reeling with the breath robbed from their lungs, down on their knees and elbows, wheezing and curled on their sides like puppies.

Kneeling, he put his weight on the ball of his foot where it rested on Levi's collarbone. Others rushed to pull the boys up under their arms and drag them out like ragdolls and apoplectic children holding their breath. He didn't bother taunting the boy much, he was already seething and he'd already had rather enough of him.

"Maybe I didn't hear you. What was all that you said again?"

Levi glared and panted, grinding his white teeth without reply. He wouldn't be reasoned with. With his boot, Orphen applied more pressure until the boy groaned.

"To hell with you! People like you are the reason this is all happening, why can't you leave good people alone?"

"People like me, huh?"

"Yes, like you," he kid accused hotly. "God damned warlocks. You're all abominations, and now your people have gone and dug up the Heavenly One's temple and let out the plague that killed all of them so it can kill all of us! Nothing's ever enough for any of you!"

Levi bucked under him, pushing up with his legs before Orphen forced him back down, dropping his knee hard into the boy's gut but ignoring the derogatory slur. He'd been called worse. "Somebody's been pumping your head full of bullshit. You're putting sorcerers on the hook for an outbreak? You country people will believe anything."

Majic was recovering from the hit with fringe energy, slumped on a barstool and trembling with a glass of water and eyeing his Master's interrogation with an anxious distaste while Bagup, remarkably resilient for what he'd been through, was back in the doorway chasing the stragglers back, and he shouted back into the tavern over his shoulder before firing a thunderous shell up into the air outside, sending the remains of the crowd scattering.

"Maj! Get up! Majic!"

Holding the kid down—hell, looking at him he might have been as young as seventeen or eighteen—Orphen watched his apprentice, roughly the same age as Levi here, shamble to the doorway with his half-full tumbler of water and woozy expression only for the glass to plummet to the ground with a small wet explosion when he looked outside to where his father was calling his attention, which immediately spun back into the tavern. "Master! Cleo's…!"

From the ground, Levi gave a wheezing laugh that sounded like something leaking. "I told you, you dumb bastards—you should have been more concerned with your friends the Everlastings. And your good doctor."

With a handful of his collar, Orphen casually pulled up Levi's head and whipped it down against the floorboards with a resounding knock, snarling down at him with every trace of his marginal good humor frosted over in a familiar murderous chill. "What the fuck did you people do?"

The kid blinked up, staggered by the blow, all his hard-forced courage knocked out of him and his lips working fruitlessly. Orphen pulled his head up again and slammed it harder, then leaned close to hiss in the idiot kid's face, "What did you do?"

"Krylancelo…" Hartia's shoes had appeared in his vision, standing above them. He was telling him it was enough. He didn't have to say it out loud. Just saying that name was enough, as if this kind of knee-jerk brutality didn't prove over and over again that there was no more Krylancelo. That he could never be Krylancelo again.

Krylancelo didn't buckle under the weight of his rage. Krylancelo didn't have any rage. Only cold skill and calm determination, a need to excel. To impress. To belong.

Orphen let go of the boy remorselessly, leaving him stunned and prostrate without another word. At the doorway, his stomach twisted before it dropped through the floor. It wasn't really any wonder Majic couldn't get the truth of the situation out of his mouth. Just visible on the horizon above the downtown rooftops already diamond dusted with a rind of frost from the cold evening fog, along with much of the north end of the city the Everlasting mansion was radiant through the milky haze, what looked like its east wing inundated in brilliant flames burning a bright hole in the wintry night.

Just for a moment, he stared at it dumbly before he stormed back indoors to snap up his cloak from the barstool where he'd dropped it. "Bagup! You got enough shells to keep this place from burning?"

The old man patted the leather satchel he had slung around his neck proudly, the gun still braced on his hip. "More than enough."

"Majic…stay with your Dad."

"Master!" The boy lurched forward in objection, following him to the doorway with a face pinched with an obvious and crushing fear. "I can't just—!"

Orphen was out the door already behind Hartia, shouting back in, securing his heavy mantle at the throat with a fierce glare. "You can't just what? Help your old man keep this place standing. We need someplace to come back to for fuck's sake."

Before Majic could voice another protest, his Master was running down the chaotic roadway with Hartia close behind, and in a bend of light, they vanished into the thickening fog.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

He'd overshot the landing by running, resurfacing in the dark rose arbor on the vast mansion's west side and careening into a hedge behind Hartia, who was already sprawled on the cobblestones with a busted lip, spitting blood and climbing back up to his hands while Orphen dodged him, sliding hard into the garden wall before tearing up the stone steps to the second floor balcony only to find the double doors locked and the chamber beyond dark, seemingly unoccupied. Swallowing back the temptation to knock on the window and call out her name like an idiot, he hauled back a leg and drove his heel into the left door, sending it slamming back on its hinges with a jarring crash.

Inside, it was dark and expansive, an oil lamp burning at a low orange smolder beside a great mahogany canopy bed swathed in pale gauzy drapes, the dim lamplight only enough to see that the bed was vacant, still made and piled with useless throw pillows covered in stiff decorative fabric and stupid gold tassels. He was squinting around testily when Hartia finally made it through the door behind him.

"This Cleo's room?"

"Must be."

"You don't know?"

"Never been inside it. Do you see the fucking door anywhere?"

Hartia was casting him a doubtful look. "You've never—"

"I create thee, small spirit." The resulting bright burst lit the massive bedchamber, everything done in draping scarlet velvet like a giant jewelry box, carved dark wood molding and golden brocade wallpaper. Near the massive door, a familiar set of luggage was packed and leaned against the wall, waiting. A pair of chandelier earrings were dropped on the bedside table by the lamp, and they held his attention hostage for a moment, forcing his memory to see one of them pendulant from Cleo's earlobe as she threw her arms around his neck in the rose garden, only a few hours before when everything was normal, if not all right in her estimation.

She had better goddamned be all right. Swallowing past a tight knot rising in his throat, he held the light in stasis with a clenched fist, swinging around to head through the door with Hartia close behind with that inquisitive air huddled thick around him.

There was an acrid haze of smoke gathering in the abandoned hallway. Holding a fold of his cloak over his mouth, Hartia half-shouted through the handful of wool, "You've never been inside this house?"

Orphen glared in the dark, stalking down the highly-wrought passage filled with crystal light sconces and heavy framed paintings, flinging open doors and glancing inside with his lingering light spirit following his hand and replying in a muffled rush. "I've been in the house. In the entry, downstairs. The sitting parlor. Not up here. I don't know where anything is. Place is goddamn enormous. Maybe we should split up."

"Maybe everybody's already evacuated. I think the last place we should be is upstairs."

"Probably, but…"

After a few minutes more of empty, smoke filled corridors and dark rooms, the main stairwell was gaslit and as thick with eye-stinging smoke as the fog outside. Crumpled at the top of the stairs, a man was laying dead in his tailored jacket and evening vest, his flat black eyes staring half-lidded at the ornate chandelier above the stairwell, his throat a mangled pile of viscera, the starched collar below soaked through with bright wet crimson. The wound was still bleeding.

"Jesus," Hartia coughed, pushing his handful of cloak closer to his face. He hurried the last few steps to the stairs before reeling back a bit when the others became visible. There were others. Two more, a woman and another man, stretched down the stairs where they'd fallen. Collapsed with still-bleeding injuries, much the same as the well dressed man: vicious, still-seeping neck wounds. The woman had another on her bare bicep, a gaping chunk of flesh and stringy muscle ripped off at the bone, all the blood staining her pink satin ensemble and the carpet below, and Hartia backed up while Orphen crept closer, peering through the thickening smoke, his heart galloping in his chest, breathing as evenly and slowly as he could stand despite the ticking clock and the scene in front of him and the implications that went along with it. It wasn't that Hartia couldn't see. It was just that he hadn't said it out loud when he'd noticed it.

"They're fucking teeth-marks. Bites."

Hartia just looked at him, still holding the handful of his cloak over his mouth. After a long moment of presumed mental analysis, Hartia's voice came, decisive and sharp even through the muffle of fabric. "Krylancelo, we're getting the hell out of here."

"Yeah, well…" He leapt down a few of the steps with his gloved hands gripping the carved cherrywood banister, dodging the bodies on the stairway and a litter of them in the downstairs main corridor, where the smoke was less intense for the moment. With the fire in the opposite wing, the smoke was rising, and it seemed they weren't the only people taking advantage of that law of physics. In the first floor landing, a slowly shuffling man with an armful of what looked like fine linens sneered with a set of shining, bloody teeth and did something he hadn't seemed capable of at first look: he ran at them.

Hartia, his anxiety visible, threw his hands out, his voice stained with his truncated incantation, "Darkness!"

The man dropped his load, wailing with a bestial sound of agony, clawing at his face as though it would clear his sudden blindness. He'd only just torn into his flesh, drawing blood, scratching at his screwed shut eyes with his fingernails when they ran past him, only to find the scream had brought an influx of others. Two more men and a woman, a house maid with a blood spotted apron. She shouted wordlessly, running at them with an almost mindless enthusiasm with the men right behind, her heels snagging on the rise of the corridor rug and staggering. Orphen watched with a swiftly mounting horror while one man took hold of her arm to bring her back up, and in the same motion, sunk his teeth into the fleshy rise between her shoulder and neck. Now she screamed.

The other man cried out, dropping a box of gleaming silver cutlery and prying wildly at the biter as he tore in again while the maid wailed. He screamed and called for the woman by name, Babette. Babette screamed, tried to kick.

"Johnny, no! Stop! Stop!" The man's voice was breaking up while he screamed, pulling at his friend while he clamped his jaws down like a rabid dog.

They all knew each other. One second they'd been a group, the three of them. Raiding the place, it looked like. But one look at Johnny's bandaged-up arm showed he'd been bitten already, who knew how long before and now suddenly he was tearing into Babette enough that she wouldn't survive to share the same fate. The man, his face wet with tears or sweat, ripped a hunting knife from his belt and impaled it between Johnny's shoulder blades once, tore it out and sunk it in again before Johnny let the girl drop and cried out himself with his mouth full of blood and meat.

Down on all fours, he went down with the blade sunk into the back of his neck. The man, his friend, let out a mournful kind of sound and Orphen took a handful of Hartia's cloak, cursing, pulling him hard in the other direction. Somewhere upstairs, there was another distant, gravelly scream that shrank to a sobering and deceptive silence. They ran, pushed open doors. Found nothing. Nothing but splintered wood, overturned chairs and bleeding corpses; some in diamonds and some in worn street clothes.

The entrance hall was a mess of bodies. Those bitten, others plainly murdered for biting with their smeared bloody jaws open and drooling wet. Saliva and blood on the carpet and smoke in the air, the smell of burning wood and copper, twitching shadows thrown on the walls from the bright gaslight. The main entry doors, once all elaborate wood and cut glass, were shattered and shifted on their massive hinges, seemingly rammed in by the same kind of wild mob as had reached the Lin Tavern, though with a unmistakably more violent agenda and clearly, with more than a few of the badly infected come for…

Come for the doctor or come to steal the treatment themselves. One or maybe both.

Now the house was burning the same as the clinic they'd told him about, the clinic who had turned patients away. The ill who could not afford the serum they needed to survive. In the rush of adrenaline following the chaos of the home invasion, somehow the afflicted had turned in masse, sinking their contaminated teeth into horrified party goers and their own comrades. In its own way, it made a horrible kind of sense, because right now, nothing else did.

Coughing, running, they rounded the corner into the parlor, its wide open space lit by a roaring fire in the great stone hearth, gas chandeliers still burning happily for all the guests that had scattered out like cockroaches in the light. But there were a few stragglers, those who hadn't made it out, in both high priced aristocratic finery and dirty rags: invaders and those invaded upon. Visible from the doorway in a limp pile beside the grand piano, decorated highly with its gleaming framed daguerreotypes and lit candelabras, there was a small crumpled body that drew Orphen's watering eyes, made his stomach wring dangerously from the bright blood soaked down the front of her evening gown and the visible, still wet wounds. The snapped up, torn out mouthfuls of missing flesh.

The gaping wounds, the copious blood on the cream colored gown and the undone cascade of pale blonde hair pooled around her head on the stained floor.

Her name jumped to his mouth, but he couldn't move, couldn't speak. His knees were locked, his hand clenched white-knuckled on the doorframe. A swift invasion of cold, withering nausea held him in its thrall while he stared at the beautiful, bloody little blonde body and felt, for one solid moment, like he was fifteen years old and shouldering open the door into Azalie's Tower bedroom with his pile of books to find her doubled over and gasping with the relic sword impaled through her, begging him not to see what she'd done.

Don't look! Krylancelo, don't look!

But he had to look. Now, the same as then, he had to see the scene that would burn itself into his mind and poison everything, slowly ruin him from the inside out all over again.

…ooo…ooo…ooo…

To be continued…