Cascade

Chapter Three: Third Time Pays For All

Like all intelligent people, Amelia was immediately suspicious of street performers. They smiled all the time, and while the obvious explanation was that being cheerful drew an audience, she wondered often enough – when patrol duty required her to pass through that part of the city – if they weren't grinning at a joke that the rest of the populace hadn't caught on to yet, like the fact that they had a job that involved performing the sorts of stunts that usually got you locked up, sometimes in a padded room.

Down the street, someone was putting out the fire-eater for the sixth time that afternoon.

Nevertheless, the white glass mask had a certain tribal nobility to it, with a red emblem splashed across it like that, and fit her head comfortably enough, as it was warmer than glass tended to be. She couldn't see a thing through it, save for a general dark blur that was, she expected, the entire world. Amelia deduced this much from the general light blur above it that was almost definitely the sky.

The only evidence of the dancers was the constant drumming of their feet in a circle, rotating around her in what was no doubt a very artistically expressive ritual of primal release and acknowledgement of the ceremonies of Grado's ancestors. Or a bunch of people in kilts and tights shouting "Alilaialialailia!"

Maybe there's no difference, she thought, diplomatically.

Absolutely, agreed… Amelia. It's better than forgetting them entirely. After all, isn't that all that's left? Ruins and relics and things like this are the only things the ancient people of Grado left behind. We have to remember them somehow. Otherwise it would be as though they never existed. If you had a choice, would you want to be lost and forgotten forever, or at least have some fragments of your life remembered by those still to come?

…My, I'm philosophical today, Amelia noticed, mentally frowning.

Well, being forgotten is enough to make anyone philosophical. The only thing better than a legacy – however silly it might look – would be to live forever. It's not like that's an option. …But wouldn't it be nice?

No kidding, she muttered, and the world went black.

After a disorienting moment, Amelia realised that the glass in front of her eyes had gone opaque, and abruptly turned cold, shedding the peculiar warmth it originally held. Those two changes were curious, but not completely worrying – the way it suddenly tightened around her head, pressing so hard that there was no room to breathe, let alone speak, was rather more urgent. She was trapped in crushing, suffocating darkness in the middle of a bright street while fools danced around her.

It wasn't that Amelia didn't panic. It was that she had that gift of multitasking that let her scrabble at the smooth, immovable edges of the mask with all her might, doing her best to keep her heartbeat low so as to save oxygen, at the same time as her mind was shouting Oh, bloody hell, I'm going to be killed by a prop!

With no sight to fix her world on, the recruit lost her balance and fell to her knees. The jolt from that impact cut through the fire in her lungs and the ice on her face, and Amelia realised that she wasn't unarmed. She had a hammer the size of a street – the exact size, shape, and colour, in fact. Resigning herself to a killer headache at the least, Amelia bent over fully and struck the mask against the stones. Being the uncooperative type, it didn't fracture, let alone actually smash.

But a moment later hands grabbed Amelia's shoulders and forced her to look up. The cold was eradicated by a sudden, searing heat, and like any stone both frozen and immolated, the mask shattered and fell away. Only once she could see again did Amelia realise that her vision had been going red and black, but the first few desperate gasps cleared that away.

"Amelia! Are you all right?" Ewan asked in a rush, arcane fire still swirling around his left hand.

"Whoa… yeah, thanks," she groaned, raising a hand to her forehead as though that could soothe the terrible pounding in her head. Ice, heat, asphyxiation, and a good bash to the skull; she had developed the Perfect Headache.

"Should I give you mouth-to-mouth?" the mage asked, undeterred.

Amelia didn't even hear him; she was noticing the sticky redness that covered her fingers when she moved her hand from her head. "Oh, by the divine light…" she groaned. "How bad am I cut?"

"You aren't," he replied, looking closely.

"Ewan, it's everywhere and I know the smell. This is blood."

"Sure looks like it, but somehow you got through okay. Erlch," he added, touching her wet, crimson-stained hair. "You'll probably want a bath, though."

With the single-mindedness that tends to grip people in these cases, Amelia pressed on. "Look, if it's not mine, than where did it all come from? You blast someone with lightning?"

"Well… I tried," Ewan admitted. "I'm not that good with lightning yet, though. All the dancers took off, but I think they were as terrified as everyone else when that symbol started glowing."

"Symbol…" she muttered, still trying to clear the fog of near-death. Gingerly, Amelia picked up one of the larger shards of the broken mask, and saw immediately that the sigil painted on it was gone, leaving only shallow marks like acid-etching. "…Get a bag or something; we're taking those pieces back to the castle now."

"What about the dancers?" the mage asked.

"If we need them, we'll find them," Amelia stated, forcing herself to her feet. Her gaze swept the plaza, and one by one everyone still nearby met it, uncertainly. "Just to be clear, none of you saw anything until I say you did, got it?"

"Yessir! …Ma'am! …Yes!" said most of them, with about that level of elegance.


Pressure points. Weak spots. Ultimately, that was what all combat came down to – finding the place where your opponent was weakest and hitting it with a hammer. That only worked if you had a hammer, of course, but sometimes the weak point was small enough that you didn't need much of a weapon at all. Sometimes a fingertip or two would do.

Ordinarily, locked against the wall with Rob's vice-grip around his throat and five spears of unspeakable agony digging into his chest, Franz could understand why his free hands didn't present much of a threat, but if last-chance outbursts weren't something extraordinary, they wouldn't be much use. He struck like a scorpion, two fingers extended, into Rob's windpipe, hooked into the nook of his collarbone and shoved down.

"Whhaaaatt…" Rob hissed, as his knees buckled. He kept his grip on Franz's neck, but the other, more excruciating one withdrew. It wasn't likely that he would get the chance to do that again, and it might have been a wasted effort, but Rob had missed an important detail. Franz was unarmed. He wasn't.

The next few moment were full of incident, mostly because Franz was reluctant to kill even the most evil of his subordinates. So when he yanked Rob's sword from its scabbard, rather than taking his head off from the start, he settled for a light slash to the forearm to weaken his grip before hammering his elbow with the pommel and dealing a pair of blows with the flat of the blade. Even unnatural strength has its limits, and after being slapped with steel for the third time, Rob spun senselessly with the force of the strike and collapsed to the floor.

Franz stayed with him, kneeling on the corporal's arms and bringing the sword down over his neck, point and hilt against the floor so that the blade hovered over him like a guillotine. Technically, Rob was free to move his neck, but only if he wasn't very attached to his head. He wouldn't have been for long, in any case.

"What do you… think you're doing…?" Rob wheezed, still coughing from the first blow to his windpipe.

"I could ask you the same question," Franz countered. "But after that 'enemy of death' bit, I get the feeling you're not really a kid with dreams of knighthood."

"I am trying… to help you," he said, his face contorting briefly into a snarl.

"When I want your help I'll ask for it," Franz snapped. "Now don't try struggling or you'll… oh, screw it, I don't have time to make witty threats. Just don't move, all right?"

"Not much time at all," Rob agreed. "You're losing blood fast, sergeant. How long do you think you can hold me down before you're too weak to put up a fight? Long enough for someone to come looking for you? We're in the recruit barracks in the middle of the day – no one heard you scream, even if it got through the walls."

"What kind of help do you think I need from you?" Franz demanded, ignoring the question. Rob didn't need to know that he was already feeling light-headed.

"The answer to every problem, the end of all fears!" Rob insisted.

"Great. Death really wasn't the answer I was looking for."

"I am the enemy of death!" he shouted.

"And what the hell does that mean?" Franz shouted back. A shifting muscle made him glance back, and he saw Rob flexing his hands in preparation for something. "Hey – you stop that right now. Not wanting to kill you and not killing you are two very different things."

"You don't scare me. Nothing scares me."

"Really? 'Cause you twitched the last time I said… death," Franz remarked. "Yup. There it is again."

"I am the enemy–"

"I can see this is going to be a bloody spectacular afternoon," the paladin muttered.


"Really, Amelia, I think you should wash up first," Ewan said again, having to put a skip in his run to match the recruit's determined pace.

"I trained under Sergeant Faval; trust me when I say I've been covered in much worse," she stated, pausing only briefly inside the castle's gates to wonder where Ephraim would be at this hour of the day.

"It's not that you're any less attractive – it's a bit more of a primal thing now, I admit – but you look like a butcher and you smell like a sausage factory," he explained, tactfully. "Why are you in such a rush?"

"Because yesterday a fire made threatening shadows at me and today a mask tried to kill me, and I've having a hard time with the idea that this is business as usual in Grado," she replied. "Come on, right after lunch I bet Ephraim's in the gardens; they're on the western wall." Personally, Ewan thought that Master Saleh would make a better advisor in this situation, but since the sage and king were likely to be in the same place, it made little difference.

They ploughed through the middle of the training grounds – "Sorry, sorry, 'scuse me, don't mind her, watch where you're pointing that!" – and around the perimeter of a courtyard filled with statuary and an ornamental pond – "See, look, you could just stop for a quick wash right there– oh, fine…" – before arriving in the Grado gardens, which were filled with such powerful aromas that Amelia's miasma of blood and evil was quickly trampled undernose.

"King Ephraim!"

"Master Saleh!"

The lord and sage were startled out of their discussion by the oncoming miniature warriors; Amelia in particular vaulted two hedges and a bench before coming to attention before the king and saluting with manic energy. "Vital information to the safety of the city, milord!" she declared, and thrust the sack out to him.

"By the Light, sergeant, how are you still standing?" Ephraim exclaimed.

"Not my blood, milord!"

"She's gone into some kind of adrenaline rush filtered through the Dutiful Knight mindset," Ewan explained. "…Your Majesty," he added, after a pause to see if Saleh would prompt him.

"Sir, I believe Grado is in danger, potentially from a troupe of street performers allied with powerful pyromaniacal shadow spirits. And if mimes are involved, I don't think anyone will be surprised," said Amelia, still proffering the sack full of shards.

Ephraim sighed and tilted his head slightly toward Saleh. "Knight-Sergeant, I understand that you've already encountered the sage today?" Amelia nodded. "And I've been talking with him for the past two hours. Consider very carefully how much more crazy you want to add to my day."

The recruit deflated slightly and lowered the sack. "Yes sir. But the symbol that was on this mask is definitely something out of the ordinary."

"…Symbol?" Ephraim and Saleh repeated in unison.

"That's right," Amelia said. "It was painted on the mask – with something's blood, I think – and it looked sort of–"

"Like this," Ephraim finished, producing the copied sketch of the sigil.

There was a silent pause.

"Well, someone has been keeping their vital intelligence all to themselves," Ewan remarked.

"Not at all," the king insisted. "Hasn't Franz told you about the case, yet? I gave it to him before lunch."

"We haven't talked since this morning," Amelia said. "What else do–"

"What, seriously?" Ephraim asked.

"Yes," the recruit insisted, giving the king a hassled look. "Is there some kind of law I don't know about? Your entire half of humanity is acting weird just because we're not shackled together or something. Milord."

"I'll ignore that," the king said graciously. "I was just expecting to have heard from him again by now, and I assumed the delay was, ah…"

"My fault," Amelia finished, somewhat sarcastically. "Oh, thank you. Well, if you already knew something arcane was going on, that explains what Saleh is here for, even in his condition. Master Saleh?"

"Great Light, where did you come from?" Saleh yelped, leaping back a step from Amelia.

"I've… uh, I've been here this whole time," she told him. "I just wanted to know if you've figured anything out yet."

"Nothing definitive," Saleh admitted. "This is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, lightly toasted on one side and served with a fresh medley of–"

"Well, I'm sure you're doing your best," Ephraim said, cutting him off. "Let's pool everything we know. Ewan, go get Franz while Amelia fills me in on what happened."

"I saw more of it; she was blinded and choking," said Ewan.

"Yes, but he can count on you to bring Franz right back, whereas I have a much higher chance of dragging him off to a secluded corner, et cetera, et cetera," Amelia explained dryly. "His Highness only gets to talk like this when Queen Tana isn't about."

"Look, one of you go right now, by the Warrior King!" Ephraim commanded them. He turned to Saleh. "I hate working with teenagers. If only they weren't so blasted competent."

"Generally, I find it best to work with those several hundred years older than yourself," Saleh advised him. "Ewan, get going."


Franz was trying to keep himself calm. The calmer he was, the slower his heart would beat, and the slower he would lose blood. Who knew you could gouge like that with ordinary fingers? Rob's nails, under their current coating of dry, browning blood, were quite ordinary, not sharpened into points like some of the more insane bandits were known to do.

"You haven't changed any of what I said," Rob remarked, apparently without a care for the sword edge over his throat. "You haven't even challenged it. You know that I'm right. All of this will end. Everything will end. Even you. Even Amelia."

"You're really getting on my nerves," Franz said, slurring the words more than he would have liked. How much had he lost? "I mean, for the first hour, it was kind of menacing. Now you're jush… just as boring as the duty roster I should be drawing up right now."

"If you had the choice," Rob asked, "who would you rather die first? Yourself, leaving her alone but with the longer life, or Amelia, letting you be with her for as long as anyone could be, but having to survive with her absence afterwards? It's a hideous choice, isn't it?"

"Y'know, I could always just wound you," Franz told him. "Not fatally. Just enough to make sure you pass out first, if you're going to insist on this waiting game."

"Don't you wish that you could both just live forever?" Rob suggested.

The room was silent. Even the clock had run down an hour or more ago, and Franz had been rather too occupied to wind it up again.

"That's what you're offering, is it?" Franz asked at last, his breath rasping. "Call me sceptical, but I've heard magic can't do that."

"So short-sighted," Rob said, apparently to himself. "You all just take the first answer you're handed and move on, instead of thinking, instead of trying again."

"You can shut the hell up any time," Franz offered. "You know. In case you were wondering."

Rob began another cool-yet-intent tirade on the subject of mortality, but he was interrupted halfway through the second sentence by a knock at the door. "Hey, Franz? Are you in there?" He knew the voice instantly, of course – Ewan. He really was in the city, then. Inside his own head, the paladin slapped himself for that being his first thought, recalling what Archi said about Amelia, rather than 'I'm saved at last'.

Franz and Rob stared at each other in silence, each daring the other to speak first. They both knew, as Franz and Forde taught all their charges, that it took a warrior's mind a fraction of a second to transition between speaking and fighting. Neither one was giving up that advantage. It was down to the crunch now, and the first syllable out of someone's mouth would be a declaration of war.

"If you're getting dressed or something, you can just say so," said Ewan. "Hello-ooo?" The doorknob rattled, but it would do no good; the lock had fused itself just before Rob's attack. Franz intended to get to the bottom of that one immediately, assuming he survived the next few minutes.

"Look, I'll give you five seconds, and then I'm coming in," the mage went on. "One…"

Rob convulsed like a fish given an electric shock, shaking Franz from his seat, yanked one arm free, and shoved Franz's arm up and to the left, putting the blade as far from useful placement as possible. "Two…" Franz leapt back and rolled quickly from his knees to his feet, but the sudden increase in height spread his already-low blood too thinly, and he staggered with light-headedness as everything wavered black.

"Thr– Fire!" The lock flashed red in the door for a moment before exploding across the room and leaving blackened fractures in the far wall. Understandably, Rob was startled by the sudden blast, giving Franz a moment to go into a full spin, leading with the pommel of his sword to the younger knight's temple. Rob's head snapped back, directly into a supporting beam in the wall, and he crumpled to the floor.

"…Whoa," said Ewan.

"That looks like a fantastic idea," Franz said, staring blankly at his unconscious enemy, and passed out.


And the next thing he knew, he was falling off a bed in a random full-body twitch, the sort that usually sneaks up on a person on the verge of drifting off to sleep whether they want to or not. Fortunately, before he was fully over the edge, a strong hand gripped his shoulder and forced Franz back the other way.

"Whoa!" he yelped, half-sitting up before another wave of dizziness dropped him flat again. "It's good, it's good, I'm fine," he assured them, waving his hands to ward off help.

"Actually, you are," agreed Ephraim, standing over him. He nodded toward Saleh, standing on the other side of him and holding a Recover staff the wrong way around. "I didn't know you could lose that much blood without deflating, but apparently it's all back where it's supposed to be, thanks to Saleh. …And Ewan, who apparently noticed the part when he almost filled your veins with syrup."

"It was an honest mistake," Ewan added, leaning in.

"Actually, its higher viscosity would have strengthened your heart–" Saleh began.

"And he'd be dead," the little mage pointed out.

"On the off chance that there's some kind of magical infection that will undo a staff's healing, I'm going to have you bandaged, but I wondered if you could explain this first," said Ephraim, opening the paladin's shirt.

"Ohh, that is ugly," Ewan said, cringing at the sight of the scars left from the attack.

"It was more gruesome earlier," Saleh remarked.

"Wow," said Amelia. Slowly, all the others turned to look at her. "…What?"

"Why do I suspect that you aren't paying attention to the scars?" Ephraim asked, rhetorically.

Amelia looked from king to sage and back again. "Uh, I'll be…" She pointed to the door. "I'll just wait out there for a minute."

"Now," said Ephraim, when she had gone, "I can't help but notice that these aren't blade wounds, and Rob – he's in a secure dungeon cell, by the way, and still unconscious – had unusually bloody hands when we found you. No matter how I look at it, I put two and two together and come up with disgusting."

"Sounds like your math is right, sir," Franz confirmed.

"Blech. …Call me paranoid, but am I the only one who thinks those marks look familiar?" asked Ephraim. With that, he produced a sketch from his cloak and unrolled it over the prone paladin.

"The mark that was on the mask?" Ewan observed. "What's that got to do with it?"

Ephraim's finger hopped back and forth between scars and sigil. "This part matches the curve here, and this lines up with this crossed bit, and here again, and here…"

"That is the single most hideous thing I have ever seen one person try to do to another," said Saleh. "Mind you, in Caer Pelyn, monsters or not, I've had a relatively sheltered life."

"You're saying," Franz realised, "that Rob was trying to carve some arcane symbol into my chest with his fingers?"

"Succinct," said Ephraim. "Since you are, apparently, in as perfect health as can be expected, I want you and Amelia to go find everything we can about these disappearances and anything else odd happening. And since I can see you're preparing to ask me what the two have in common, just let Saleh bandage you while I explain what wasn't in those reports I gave you earlier."


"Creepy," Amelia decided, as Franz wrapped up the explanation again. They were standing outside the home of the first reported disappearance, which was even more closed up than the cold, damp weather warranted. "I wouldn't have thought Rob would get mixed up in something like that, either."

"He was talking like a fanatic," said Franz. "I can't imagine what must have happened to him. Maybe Saleh will have answers after some research – all he knows for now is that it's a good thing Rob didn't get to finish his little art project in my flesh."

"I could have told you that much. …So… do we knock again?" asked Amelia. They had been waiting for several minutes since the first knock, and so far there was no hint that anyone was inside.

"I don't think so," said Franz. With the edge of his blade, he pried open the window shutters – nailed down, which seemed excessive even for the previous night's storm – and found that the glass on the inside was, conveniently, already broken. A few moment's work had all the shards out of their way, and the two knights clambered inside without injury.

The room was large, or at least felt like it; in the darkness it was impossible to tell. All the windows were sealed and blocked, except the one they had just come through, which cast only a faint splash of light across the floor. As Franz's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw the shapes of tables, bookshelves, and an upholstered rocking chair, which was almost never the centerpiece of an evil lair.

"Matches," he muttered. "There are never matches when you need them."

"I've always got some," said Amelia, beginning to rummage in her pockets.

"Pyro."

"Don't you have malignant magical loci to find?"

The paladin made his way carefully into the darkness, wondering what an arcane locus looked like. Most of the furniture looked nearly unused, except for one desk, which was covered in papers – he held one up to the light, and found that it was a journal entry. "I suppose it's too much to hope that the victim was taken in the middle of writing about their day?"

"Wouldn't do any good unless the last thing they wrote was 'Oh, and here's Edward from next door to talk about our next unholy ritual'," Amelia remarked. She finally got a match struck without burning her fingers, and a yellowish flare lit the wall. "Oh… not good."

"What's up?" asked Franz, not looking away from the journal pages. "Hey, this looks important – the stuff this guy wrote sounds a lot like the ranting Rob was doing all afternoon."

"All things end," said Amelia.

"Yeah, pretty much," Franz agreed. "How did you know?"

"It's written on the wall over here in… something that looks a lot like blood."

Progress will be slow at first, Franz read, but I have faith in the people to recognise a great work for its truth, and quickly come to my same conclusion, that this will be the finest revolution in the history of our people. The early work will go piece by piece, as I work on individuals, but in time the symbol will gain strength and spread on its own into a great cascade... Resistance will be rare and unsuccessful; if the chosen individual is unaware of its presence and meaning, they should have no defence, and will quickly… He reached the end of the page, and they were so mixed that he couldn't tell which the next one was.

"And over here it says 'They must be made to understand'… This one is 'There can be no end but the end of the end'…" Amelia recited, grabbing a lamp off the shelf as her match threatened to scorch her fingers. "Any of these sounds familiar?" She lit the wick and a warm glow filled the room.

"…Yeah," said Franz, his mouth suddenly very dry. "A bit." Amelia turned at the odd tone in his voice, and followed his gaze to the ceiling, where was written in giant, glistening letters: I AM THE ENEMY OF DEATH.


"Anything else with your tea, milady?" the maid asked Tana, curtseying again.

"It's bad enough having to spend so much time in this part of the castle; if I need anything, I'm sure I can manage the journey to the nearest servant without too much trouble," Tana said, feeling mummified in blankets. "Honestly, it's not even that cold, and I feel fine."

"Well, it's the king's orders, milady, we've got to take special care of you," said the maid, pouring the queen a cup and passing it to her.

"It's about time he and I had words about all this. And if that doesn't work, I shall throttle him," said Tana, cheerfully. "…Are these new cups?"

"Aye, just came in from Rausten, milady."

"Strange pattern," she muttered, inspecting the bright red design splashed across its side. "Well, go on, then. I mean, really, what could happen?" Tana asked, raising the cup to drink.