VIII: Revenant
The canals were frozen over, thin ice murky as old milk glass grown atop the waterways that cut between hulking crooked henges of weathered brownstones, looming half-visible behind the hanging haze of the frozen fog. The ferries were docked, the sluice gates frosted white, all commerce halted in the onslaught of the whiteout still churning in from off the western coast. The city was buried deep in snow when they rode into town just before dusk, haggard and fatigued from thirty-seven wintry furlongs on horseback with only a few minor stops since their rushed near-midnight departure.
Even with the weather, it was remarkably quiet for a city normally lively and loud with industry. This was the great maritime republic of Alenhaten, an architectural masterwork with its grand bridges and great basalt block causeways linking the coast to the cluster of islands the city stretched over, the central hub of the western Kiesalhiman economy, and it was as frozen and dead as any wasted tundra in Masmaturia. Absent was the perpetual off-meter music of the port off the Grand Canal, cloches opening to clanging entry bells, dock workers hefting boxes, the wail of ship horns. For as deserted as the square looked, devoid of its usual infection of merchants and the capitalist, proletariat bustle of the arterial line from the outer harbor, one would think the whole city had all packed up and left overnight, leaving nothing behind but locked storm shutters and a litter of footsteps for the snow to fill in.
All the snow, it reminded Cleo of finishing school. The exclusive Institute Gauloise just outside of Sun Lake, which, despite the name, spent the winter months cocooned in low clouds, stranding the student body inescapably indoors for the majority of the Winter term with only a break for the year-end holidays. Her last year at Gauloise, four years before, the holiday break approached just in time for her mother, and therefore everyone else, to have been away tending to her dealings, or what she had taken to calling Estate Business. It had to do with lawyers and trust accounts, investments in bullion and diversified capital, real estate plots, three hundred acres in far-flung locations where no one would build for fifty years. All of the Estate Business had been in at the forefront of her mother's interest since her father's sudden death the year before, which had brought to her attention that much of the Everlasting assets were liquid, stockpiled in banks and tied up in static resources on the expansive estate grounds: structures, land, fixtures. If something had ever happened to the manor, she'd said once in a loathing half-panic, the Everlastings would have nowhere to turn. Margrave Everlasting hadn't taken much care to ensure the longevity of his family's generations of accumulated affluence, instead having invested himself in the political playground of the Meverlenst Parliament, preferring the sport of power play to investing.
Tistiny had buried herself in it after his death. If she'd been bitter about being left so possibly maybe but probably not at the mercy of the ever-fluxing fiscal system, or had just welcomed the distraction, she'd thrown herself in with the same amount of enthusiasm and rigor she spent on everything worthwhile she set about arranging. Mountains of contractual paperwork and wire transfers, midnight conferences with gaggles of suited men that smelled of tobacco and a palpable voracity for their promised commission and even more of the unsavory goods it would afford them. Cleo remembered a particular bloodshot, opium eyed leer tracking her across the corridor one of the times she'd been home for one of her mother's investment meetings, and had proceeded to lock herself into her room during the remainder of their conference.
The final holiday break at Gauloise in Sun Lake, everyone had been away. It wasn't so much that they'd forgotten her as much as she'd misled them after receiving her mother's letter that the holiday would be spent travelling on business. Her mother had imagined, not without her encouragement, that she had planned to spend the holiday drinking cocoa in a massive A-framed ski lodge with open beam ceilings and elk heads mounted over massive stone fireplaces, laughing with her friends from school. Her mother assumed she'd had friends there. So when each girl had been carted off one by one in their arriving carriages, their dark-veneered barouches and cabriolets, she had watched from the third floor bay window of her dormitory, ensuring each curious party that had bothered to ask that her own driver would be along any time, to not worry about her. The student body, then the staff had all departed the school for their joyous, festive celebrations with their smiling families, garish paper-wrapped gifts and sparkling wine and Cleo Everlasting, patron saint of the aggrieved, had stayed behind for a strange, silent and frigid two weeks locked in the western residence, only venturing down to the dining hall periodically to forage in the half-bare pantries for apples and baked goods, stale madeleines, tea sachets and fig bars.
Because all she'd really wanted was to be alone.
Two weeks alone in complete, dialogue-free silence, the bizarre and unsettling liberty to go and do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. No questions to answer or appointments to keep, no prayers or signs of the cross. No mother to listen to haggling remorselessly with real estate brokers instead of sobbing into her pillows at night; Tistiny's avoidant adaptation of grief. She'd wanted to sit alone and avoid all of the light and glitter and brazen glamour of gifts and the holiday feast, everyone doing their utmost to smile gaily and pretend there wasn't someone missing from the celebration.
When she'd finally gotten home from the Institute, it was early summer. Her mother was buried in contracts and Mariabella had fallen in love with a vagabond who she'd observed skulking on the outskirts of the estate every day for nearly the past year that she'd been away, and it had only taken a few hours of home life to look back longingly to those two weeks of glorious, lonely freedom. Then, just like that, everything changed. Or maybe it already had. Maybe two weeks alone to stew in her anger and loss, preferring solitude to empty companionship had sunk deep in her bones. Looking back on it now, it might have been the original poison that had tainted her against everything. Against her mother's dreams of lifelong secure, blissful aristocratic boredom.
Sore and frozen through with a running nose and stinging eyes, she shifted in the saddle for the eight-thousandth time over the past hours, holding that same vagabond around his waist so she wouldn't fall right off Cyrano's back. The hefty palomino's name had finally come to her about three hours after the last glow of the burning Totokanta skyline had dwindled over the southern horizon, leaving them in the icy night with only the sound of hooves squeaking through new snow and Orphen's pain-labored breathing rushing like wind through a cavern as it funneled amplified into the ear she held pressed against his back. In the dark she'd held tight to him, her arms around his ribcage, check pressed against the groove of his spine. Periodically, she'd dozed, her head slipping forward and she'd feel the tug of his warm hands, pulling hers forward from where they would fall in his lap to place them on the saddle horn. Stay awake, he'd told her over and over, in the low rumble of his voice as heard through his back. It's not safe to sleep when it's this cold.
The horses moved northward through the dark at a brisk but unconcerned pace uncomplicated by anxiety or fear of the cold, their hurried gallop abandoned once they were out of Totokanta. They rode straight through the gray nonevent of the sunrise, past midday and into the darkening afternoon with only a few minor stops to adjust saddle straps, check bandages and rest their respective beasts of burden.
Bagup wasn't in the best way. He'd been morose, more silent than was normal for a man that had been fairly jovial even when he was milk sallow and coughing blood just a couple days after being bitten in the tavern, though he at least had improved vastly since then. There were periodic bouts of coughing from the old man, deep rattling coughs that he smothered into his furry mantle, his shoulders heaving with the effort.
He was doing just that, smothering a cough, when in front of their shuffling caravan, Hartia halted his horse suddenly, pulled his reins taut so quickly the buckskin tossed its head in protest at the sudden pressure on the bit. He reached out his hand toward the rest of the group, his palm out in a wordless but surprisingly authoritative order to stop.
Squinting against the glare of the gathered snow, even as the light dimmed with impending twilight, it was difficult to see much of anything. There was a shadow smudged in the middle distance ahead that, even through the snowblind, held an unnatural brightness of color that Cleo's tired eyes struggled to translate as clothing. A dress or cloak, colored bright red. But from the way Hartia backed his horse up, looking back at them all with his face twisted into an expression she didn't understand, the way Orphen reached back suddenly around her, catching her like she was falling off and wheeling the horse around; it didn't match up.
And then, just as quickly as she thought it didn't, it did. Because he didn't want her to see.
The red shadow in the snow, the more she squinted at it, it took on shape and edges. Limbs. There was a high whining sound in her ears, a grinding of vocal chords she could barely recognize as her own stricken shriek stifled in her cold palm.
The squirming red shape, it was a mess of limbs, writhing, twisting and wrenching. Men and women, tearing off mouthfuls of flesh from what was left of a half-dressed girl's body, lying bled out, marble white and gored in a frosted over lake of red snow. They were…eating her.
They were eating her.
And Cleo, she screamed again. She hid her face, burying her head against Orphen's back while the horse shied, rearing up under them both in response to the sound and the motion of Hartia's jerking retreat. Even from the distance of a few yards, the commotion didn't go unnoticed by the heap of ravenous infected. When they had gone from mindless and feverish, biting like rabid dogs to knelt over their unlucky victims, chewing and swallowing and going back for more?
Through the fog, the pack was staggering up to their knees, climbing to their feet in the sliding, unstable snow. They staggered, barely dressed, exposed flesh graying with impending frostbite from crawling in the ice for what might have been hours after being taken over by the fever, their movements stiff and mechanical and wholly stomach turning. With her head buried, breathing fast and hot with the steam of her breath and her ear pressed just below Orphen's shoulder blade, she could hear the rise in what she'd learned over the hours was usually a slow, steady heart rate.
She heard Hartia's voice, "Back up, back up!"
"Master!" Majic swung around, seeking guidance where he often sought it, even in the presence of his father.
"We can get to Stephanie's if we go up along Grand Canal, due north, that way, move!"
Hartia was already headed that way, his horse kicking up a spray of dirty ice behind him as he cantered back toward the plaza and abruptly reared back, spun around with the horse protesting, tossing its head against the pull of the reins. He shouted an incantation in the other direction before he yelled to them over the resulting roar. "No good!"
The fog was far too thick to see more than shadows, hobbling shadows headed toward them from the northern street. Their group was a beacon, the only source of sound in the graveyard silence of the frozen city. Hartia's attack had only hindered them, knocked them down. And now they were coming, congregating, their own flesh of a seemingly instinctive disinterest to each other. As though they already knew better than to desire a bite of diseased meat.
Behind them, there was a mechanical shucking sound, a rusty click-clack and an ear-splitting blast. The horses startled violently and Cleo swallowed another scream, one hand flying up on reflex to catch her palm against her ear through the draping, pelt lined hood of what was probably Iris Lin's best mantle.
"Dad!" Majic screeched, perched anxiously on little Seraphino, his free hand clutching at his own face.
Bagup pumped his short barreled shotgun again, letting another explosion fly into the shuffling crowd, a man's arm blew apart in a burst of red mist and scattering flesh. He staggered with the blow, and continued forward. Bagup pumped the gun, expelled the spent shell. "It's got to be done, Maj."
"Dad—"
Bagup blasted into the crowd again, his arm hooked around the reins, struggling with the frightened horse. He'd aimed for the head this time, and Majic cried out in breathless horror at the sight of the wet shatter of skull, stringing wet red snot and what looked like gray meatloaf.
Orphen swung the horse around again, swearing, his more functional arm still reached back around his passenger. He extended the other in front of him and barked out a strained command, "I construct thee, spire of the sun!"
Holding onto him, so unusually close the way they'd been in the manor while it had been burning and he'd been dragging her out, she felt the strange charge in the air around her, an electric bristle sweeping down the back of her neck and spine as though lightning were about to strike her. His muscles tensed at the release, the charge leaving him with a suffering grunt while the spell took its devastating explosive effect on the lumbering horde. Briefly it reminded her of a conversation years before after Orphen had nonchalantly let loose with a fiery bombshell of a spell with what seemed little empathy or regard for anyone's safety. She'd demanded Majic tell her why in the hell anyone would allow someone like him to be a sorcerer to begin with.
She'd be glad for it now if only he had the strength to be using sorcery at all, which according to Hartia, after his injury he wouldn't for days. Not safely. Hartia was already yelling his name over the thunder of the flames, and Orphen twisted in the saddle to half-face her, pulling back her hood to speak in her ear, the only way she'd hear him over the roar.
And despite the terror, her face flushed with heat that owed nothing to the wall of flame he'd ignited with his words, but rather the sound of his words themselves that lit a different kind of fire. His voice low and urgent, the Holy Ghost whispering in her ear. The subtle idea that hearing one wrong thing can ruin you forever. Something innocent and utilitarian, instructions, but for just a short second, with a feeling of undeniable intimacy. It called up lurid images in her mind of his mouth on hers, breathless and sweat-damp in the dark with his hands hot and rough on her skin, slipping under her clothes, between her legs, making her forget everything else but him. Her name, the past, even how to breathe on her own. Everything. And how she wanted to forget everything if even for a few minutes.
She was exhausted; her emotions and reactions gone completely haywire and misplaced but nevertheless, she felt the absurd impulse to cross herself for thinking it at all.
He was swinging down from Cyrano a second later, and what he'd said finally took the form of language in her brain. "Take him north."
"Orphen!"
He didn't look back at her. Instead, he was drawing the long stiletto he always wore on his belt but rarely used in favor of the spectral one he was able to conjure. He approached the smoldering group of infected that were once again climbing to their feet, seemingly immune to any kind of pain in their inexplicable drive to continue forward. To bite. To consume. He pivoted forward with a liquid grace, in a single movement drawing his knife arm back and swinging it forward in an arc, carving into the nearest infected man's throat. While Cleo swallowed a protesting cry, still scrabbling for the dropped reins, he swung again, jamming the knife in his fist upward through the soft flesh under the man's chin, burying the lengthy blade in the soft mulch of his brain.
To empathize with these things that she'd just witnessed bent over a human body, snapping up mouthfuls of stiff, cooling flesh like a demon made little sense, but it was a gut reaction she couldn't reason her way out of. They were sick people, but people. Human beings that had needed Dr. Farrior's serum that hadn't received it, at least not in time, and now they were on the streets like ravenous wild animals, promoted to a horrific notch higher on the food chain though not without the cost of their humanity.
Cleo watched in dumbstruck, sick-stomached horror while Orphen dropped another two with his knife, dodging their hungry lunges while they closed in and Bagup unloaded another shell. The horse jumped under her and from the sharpness of the chill on her exposed face, there were more tears coming that she hadn't even noticed.
"Go!" She heard him yelling, and when she looked it was apparent it had been directed at her. Because she was supposed to be headed north. Because he was distracting them, risking himself so she could get through and she was just sitting there, watching. Crying. Hesitating.
"Go!" he snapped again before he wheeled around, addressing Hartia who had dismounted and continued with his fruitless attempts to dispatch them with sorcery. "Take them to Stephanie's!"
He swung and buried the blade in the flesh of a cold neck, then ripped it out, suddenly distracted, staring almost blankly at the weapon before the stabbed man's hands closed on him and he jerked back, face white, his boots losing grip on the snow. He went down hard, his head striking the icy flagstones with an audible knock and he lay, stunned and gasping while they bore down on him.
"I release thee, light's unsheathed blade!" Majic's voice was strident and afraid, but the spell at least divided the crowd enough that Cleo could see one of Orphen's legs whip up, his boot catching one of the lumbering ghouls under the jaw.
His voice blossomed out of the rift, twisted in a malicious perversion of its usual profane allure. "I confine thee, beast of the seventh circle!"
The crowd seemed to freeze before slumping, tumbling, split apart in what was not explosive, but rather like a block tower falling, piece by piece. Limbs, heads, torsos, unidentifiable viscera, slippery white piles of intestines tumbling to the floor of the plaza with a sliding, raw meat slap. In the center of the pile of butchery, Orphen knelt in the snow with a hand pressed to his head, muttering with his voice on the edge of panic. "What the fuck," he breathed. "What the fuck!"
Hartia was rushing forward, his face twisted in anger. "Jesus, Krylancelo! What were you thinking?"
He pulled himself to his feet with no assistance, glancing around the segmented bodies with his face bedsheet-pale and blood running out of his disheveled hair. He repeated another circuit of his anxious swearing, more to himself than to anyone.
"Were you bit?"
He shook his head, gone silent. He put his hands on his knees to catch his breath, still studying the mess with intense interest.
Majic scrambled down from his mount, forehead buckled with fearful anxiety. "Master, are you alright?"
Orphen didn't respond another long moment before his eyes came up, jumping around to each of his compatriots before he nodded again, swallowing convulsively against what might have been a rise of bile. "They don't bleed."
"Well, you do," Hartia snapped reproachfully. "What were you thinking?"
"Hartia, they don't bleed."
Looking down at the mess with obvious revulsion, Hartia curled a lip. "The hell do you mean they don't bleed? Of course they bleed, look at all this."
"No. No, I cut the jugular and...nothing. Nothing. Everywhere I…" he puffed out a breath before restarting. "Everywhere I put that knife…when I noticed it, I just…"
"Krylancelo, you're delirious. You know what it does to you! You know! And after what happened to you last night, I can't believe you'd be so reckless! You could've killed yourself."
Orphen sneered silently, ignoring Hartia's reprimand and stooping down to pick up a vile section of severed arm from the ground, the snow around them stomped flat and repulsive with the slow crawl of thick, burgundy blood. He wove the cut end at Hartia, who stepped back with disgust at the sight of the cross section of muscle and bone; the syrupy, dark putrid mess that oozed in place of bright, screaming red artery blood that should have been steaming hot in the frozen air. "That seem right to you?"
Hartia's lips moved a little, but nothing came out.
"The blood is coming out, yeah, but they don't bleed. You cut them, blow them up, shoot them; they just keep coming. You've seen it. They don't feel anything and they don't fucking bleed."
Hartia pulled in a breath and let it out in a cloud of silvery smoke.
Orphen just stared at the ground around them. He dropped the section of arm. "We've got to move."
"God's blood," Bagup wheezed, pulling up close alongside the horrific pile and craning over to look down. "This what you saw in the mansion?"
"I'm starting to wonder what it is exactly that I saw," Orphen said, tugging off a glove to touch his palm to his head and wincing at the contact.
"Master, why wouldn't they bleed?"
Still astride the big palomino's back, Cleo watched the stream of blood from Orphen's head finally drop down over his eyebrow while he hesitated to answer Majic. From the way Hartia was watching him, like he expected him to drop any second, it made her heart jump. But she wasn't clear on why. Something about the spell he'd used. Certainly she'd never heard it before.
"Because you need a heartbeat to bleed," he finally said, taking a labored breath. "These people…were dead before we got here."
Voice raw, she heard herself speak almost as though watching from afar, all her internal organs feeling knotted cold and twisting inside her, everything turned to stone. "That's not possible."
Hartia pried his eyes off Orphen to send a nervous glance her way, "Not entirely. It's not to say I've seen it before, but…revenants can theoretically be…risen with a certain kind of sorcery."
"Revenants?" Majic's voice practically vibrated, either from fear or the cold that was turning ever more severe the further the sun sunk behind the horizon.
"The dead, animated as though alive," Hartia supplied. "I'm sure you've heard stories like that. They're referred to in holy writings, folklore, that kind of stuff but actually it's…possible. Technically speaking, through Necromancy. High Sorcery, absolutely forbidden. It manipulates death and…the dead themselves. Usually it's used for communication with the dead, you know, for divination purposes. But in Nornir grimoires, they speak of skilled necromancers who can bodily raise the dead. Obviously something like that…" Hartia shook his head numbly, climbing back up on his horse and blowing hot breath into his cupped hands. "It's not taught, period. It's illegal, any knowledge of it is strictly restricted from any kind of study, even just for academic reasons. Practice of it, if it could be proven…"
"Why are we talking about this now? What about the fever?" Bagup interjected, sounding almost angry, or as angry as someone so weak, harassed and weary could reasonably be expected to sound under the circumstances. "I've seen people go from sitting there, all normal and quiet one minute, the next like animals. Now you're saying it's sorcery 'cos if it's something you understand it makes you feel better about what just happened? Don't make any sense, son."
"How could an infection have any effect on something that's not alive? If laws of biology were being followed here, all these people could've done nothing but lay and rot."
"So then, you're saying there's more than one kind of sicko going around biting people to death? You want to call it something different because these ones were eating the bodies?" Bagup shook his head with that challenge, bringing the shotgun up to lean against his shoulder.
"No…" Orphen told him, reaching up for Cyrano's bridle and steering him, and Cleo with him, away from the heap of gore with a cough. He led him northward, remaining on foot with his sticky knife still drawn, only glancing back briefly. "Let's just get where we're going. Alright? I'm sure Stephanie will have a lot to say about all this as it is. If we can make it there in one fucking piece."
ooo…ooo…ooo
It wasn't fifteen minutes before they'd reached Stephanie's doorstep, that time hopelessly silent with hypervigilant paranoia at every moan of wind and shifting shadow. The twilight deepened around the and soaked black into the frozen fog that hung like fine lace between the buildings, obscuring everything beyond a stone's throw, the great statuary of the Canal Plaza and the avenue's looming architecture swallowed in the cold gloom. With the horses tied to the fencing out front, Orphen knocked on the door for a third time with a growing air of restless impatience.
"Steph!" He knocked again, hammering the door with the heel of his hand. There was a ringing in his head now to go along with his day-long headache and the wracking ache thundering down his bones. "Stephanie!"
There was a clatter on the other side of the door; locks turning and shifting. The turn of a deadbolt before the door creaked open and Stephanie Brickwell appeared in that space, looking out warily with the chain bolts still latched on the door.
"Oh…!" She slammed the door and there was a rattle of metal before it swung back open, nearly crashing back on its hinges while she waved them inside, "Good gods, get in here! I didn't expect you until at least tomorrow night…"
"We didn't much have the luxury of waiting," Orphen told her, accepting her customary embrace awkwardly before she pulled back to look at the mess in front of her: his shirt stiff and dark from the previous evening's injury, the bandages peeking out under his collar, the fresh line of blood running from his hair and the mess on his hands. She glanced around at them with their drawn faces and the remnants of panic hanging in the air as through the fog had followed them in.
She surveyed the others for similar damage, herding them into the grand walnut-paneled sitting room with its blissfully bright fire. Stephanie's gaze hung on Cleo a long moment before speaking. "Well, I can see you've been doing what you do best, troublemaker. What's happened to you? Here, look at me."
"A lot," he said, twisting his head to the side while she reached up to hold it in place, holding her other arm up in front of his face.
"What time does my wristwatch read?"
"Huh?…I don't know; it's dark in here."
"Take a shot at it. What does my watch say?"
With a scowl, he blinked at the small timepiece. Squinted through the fire lit blear and the haze of skull-cracking pain.
"I didn't think you looked right. Your eyes are all funny; unfocused. You smack your head on something?"
"That's not what it is," Hartia hissed.
"Yes," Orphen interrupted him, throwing him a look. "I hit it on the goddamn ground while I was trying like hell not to get eaten alive."
When he said it, there was a beat of silence where it seemed everybody had forgotten to breathe. Then Stephanie stumbled backward a step, her eyes blinking rapidly behind her heavy framed glasses with what was an obvious, petrified understanding of what he'd meant by that cryptic comment. "Eaten…" she whispered. "Oh God. Where?"
"In the plaza. We would have gone around if we'd known what we were looking at, but…the fog…" he trailed off, turning to clear his throat with a half-cough into his fist.
"Oh no. Oh God. What did you see?"
"It's debatable, apparently." Hartia told her, tugging off his cloak jerkily. "You seem familiar with the problem. We came across them while they were picking on some human carrion."
Stephanie pulled in a breath, knees buckling and dropping her onto the sofa, her hands clutched into fists inside the long knit sleeves of her pullover. "So quickly," she said. "How has it happened so quickly?"
"What has?"
She looked up at Hartia gravely, shifting on the davenport, restlessly winding her arms around her abdomen. "What do I even call it? Rhinehold? The epidemic was further out in the country, as far as what I'd read, but so far there were no cases in the city that had been reported. But at the dig site…only hours after we opened up the rectory…after I sent the telegram. Oh! Did you get the telegram?"
"Yes, I got it. You didn't say anything was wrong."
"It wasn't…then, it was. Just like that. The whole team was down with it. Just in a few hours, they were all…I can't…I can't explain it. Neither could any doctors." Stephanie tugged on her hair a little, gathering it in her hands and letting it free again. "The hospital was overrun and…they couldn't take any more. They said the infected were biting people, spreading the germs in their saliva to the bloodstream and it was spreading. The chemist ran out of the treatment by the evening, People were leaving in droves, getting out of the city. I guess maybe headed where there was treatment available. In the plaza, there were those protestors, you know the ones…"
"The Dragon Believers? From the Bazilkok site?"
"They had a congregation in the square, stirring people up even worse than they already were. They were standing up on the rise of fountain, preaching. Doomsday stuff. People were fighting outside the apothecaries and sundry shops, they were breaking into houses. I had to come home and lock the doors…"
Orphen coughed again. For hours it had felt like he was still trying to breathe through smoke, and sucking in the thin cold air all day had only exacerbated the problem. With a restrained cringe, he undid the clasp of his mantle, valiantly ignoring the renewed electric throb in his wounded shoulder.
"The Dragon Believers have always relied on sensationalism to rally support for their radical belief system, it's nothing new. Does anybody want some tea?"
"You don't look too well yourself, Steph."
"I guess not," she agreed, gathering her long hair at the nape of her neck again, smoothing it in her hands. "Tim went out a few hours ago to help at the chemist's and…I guess I'm a wreck sitting here waiting for him to come back when I know…I know how badly things have deteriorated out there. But Wayne is a friend of ours, and he was so short handed…I couldn't ask Tim not to…and with the rioters… There's not a lot they have that can help, you know, and the Rhinehold treatment…"
"It's expensive. We've been over this. Bagup was bitten a few weeks ago but was treated quickly. How you feeling, old man?"
In an armchair, still in his pelt-lined hat, Bagup slapped his own thigh. "Takes more than a few nasty germs to put me down. My rear end might be a little worse for wear after that excursion, though, I tell you what."
"He was treated?" Stephanie's eyes held the inevitable question that obviously the Lins weren't the type that could easily afford the serum, but Orphen would have preferred to postpone that particular part of the explanation for later when no one else was listening, though it was likely too much to ask to be free of Hartia's hawk-stare for that long.
"He finished the regimen. You said tea? I'll take anything at this point."
"Oh, of course. Did you ride straight through the night? I can't imagine how else you could have arrived so quickly. You only left yesterday afternoon…" She was up and headed toward the kitchen and he followed, his redheaded shadow close behind.
Sitting at the kitchen table in the bright, terracotta tiled galley, Orphen waited for her to fill the kettle and light the samovar before continuing. "How long as Tim been gone?"
Stephanie, still facing the iron stovetop, hesitated before replying quietly. "Too long." She turned to them, pulling out one of the wooden chairs methodically and dropping into it, pulling in a slow, breath. "Since late last night. I've been locked up here since, just…waiting. I don't want to…" She swallowed mid-sentence before continuing. "I don't want to consider the possibility that he…might not be alright. I think he's staying with Wayne. You saw yourself what it's like out there. And apparently things aren't much better in Totokanta if you're here."
"No, it's the same." With effort, Orphen kept his voice low, folding his arms on the table to steady himself enough to explain. "Riots. Fires. Fatalities in huge numbers, even with the treatment. The Lin Lodge was burning when we left. And Cleo's house. Her family… everybody's dead."
Stephanie's mouth opened, her brow buckling. "Oh," she whispered tearfully. "Oh. No. God. I thought…I knew something was... Oh, the poor…"
"These...things. The infected people. They were there, in her house. It's a long story, but they were there. We didn't get too close, but… Now we're seeing them here, eating fucking bodies, lurching around like they don't know what they are or what they're doing. Typical invocations don't deter them at all, they don't seem to feel pain. They don't bleed."
She was pulling off her glasses to wipe at the tears underneath with her sweater sleeves. "What do you mean they don't bleed?"
"Just that. They don't bleed when you cut them."
"And here's shit-for-brains Krylancelo using a blood hex to bring them down after he almost bled to death last night and shouldn't be even unlocking doors on his own."
"Way to change the fucking subject, Shrimp Man."
Stephanie turned a horrified look on him. "Orphen. What were you thinking? You want to end up like me?"
"Jesus, let it go. I'm fine. It was either that or get chewed up."
"You don't exactly look fine," she scolded. "You want to end up bled dry? Or dead? And what the hell happened last night?"
"Cleo stabbed him."
At Stephanie's mystified gape, Orphen wove his hand. "It was a mistake. Can we focus on these revenants?"
"Revenants? You mean the infected? You think...what?"
"Dead. They're stone dead. Whatever is keeping them moving, I can't even…"
"Wait, okay? Just," she put her hands up. With her glasses off, eyelashes wet with tears for what likely wasn't the first time that day, she looked a lot more like Stephan than Orphen had seen in a long time. Like the pretty-faced, long-suffering young boy she had once been. "Just give me a minute, okay? There's too much. With everything that's happened already, and now you all. And poor Cleo. And now you're telling me you've been fighting off infected people? I heard they were biting and had to be restrained. Now you're telling me that they're attacking."
"They—"
She held up her hand. "You're telling me they're attacking. They're out there eating bodies like vultures. And they aren't put down with anything but something as extreme as a blood hex? They don't bleed? God. God! What…what are you saying?"
They exchanged looks at her rapidly mounting hysteria before Orphen answered, suddenly feeling the pull of exhaustion more than ever, barely pushing the words out strongly enough for her to hear. "I don't know, Steph. I don't know what to say about any of it."
Stephanie hid her face in her hands a moment, pulling her fingers down her cheeks with her brow creased, her eyes intent on the table top for a long, silent minute before she looked up and spoke in an wooden, almost sepulchral tone. "Gris Cygnus."
"…What?"
Slowly, she shook her head. "I can't believe I'm saying this."
"Saying what?"
"'It will sweep through like wind and blood will run black in their veins," she recited mechanically, letting out another one of those long, controlled breaths. "Those fallen will rise up again to do the ravenous bidding of the voidborn hunger until none among the treacherous breed draw breath in the land of the impure.' From the Book of Epiphany. It's about the coming of Gris Cygnus, the disaster that destroyed the Nornir."
"Disaster?" Hartia whispered, then jumped when Orphen stood suddenly, his chair clattering to the floor behind him a little more dramatically than he'd have preferred.
"Blood will run black?"
"That's—"
Already he was pulling on Stephanie, towing her up and out of her chair. "Get up," he insisted, leading her by her arm back into the sitting room despite her perplexed semi-protest, her hands pushing her glasses back onto her face.
"Bagup," he was calling while they pushed through the swinging kitchen door. "Your arm. Would you mind showing Stephanie where you were bitten?"
Blinking, the old man compiled quietly while Majic and Cleo looked on. He rolled up his shirtsleeve, carefully unfastening the bandage with his big fingers and unwinding it to reveal the wound; the branching dark scarring that climbed his arm, a deep green-black like something festering and necrotic that tracked along his veins. Orphen had been disturbed by it before. Now, he was almost shaking.
"Everything alright?" Bagup asked while Stephanie gaped at his arm, her breathing coming fast and labored. In the charged silence, Orphen thought he could almost hear the rolling thunder of her heartbeat.
Instead, in the kitchen, the tea kettle was beginning to scream.
…ooo…ooo…ooo…
To be continued…
