sonder (n.) the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.
The earlier he went for bread, the better; the Kivipaberkäärid bakery on Septītais Street always drew absolutely huge crowds after the sun had risen. The Kivi shop, as it was affectionately known in Aizsaule, was known for two things: the best olive bread that Bartolo had ever tasted, and the otherworldly beauty of the woman who baked it. Bartolo cared less about this detail, of course, than the fact that the widow could be trusted upon to slip an extra piece of kleicha into his bag when she thought that he looked tired. And Bartolo rarely was not tired, so it was a very good thing that he had such a strong sweet tooth.
As it turned out, he hadn't quite left early enough; as he ascended the cobbled hill which led to the rustic quarter in which the Kivi bakery was nestled, he found that the line snaking from the quaint green door which marked the threshold of the shop was a few dozen strong. It was a pretty wood-bracketed building, adjoined by a long pink wall concealing a private garden; it had a long, wide window making up most of the building's face, against whose surface Bartolo could remember pressing his face any number of times when the building had been occupied by an antique toy shop and the windows swallowed up by little bronze horses and tired woven teddy bears. Today, the window displayed a set of delicate pink-and-gold cupcakes, and a basket of baguettes and flûtes from which steam gently wafted; Bartolo could barely recognise as much, so thick the crowds around the door. So early! The day was only just beginning – was there going to be any bread left at all?
He slipped into line and then, noting a few of the gaps in the crowd ahead of him, slipped a little further up. Everyone was busy chattering about this-and-that; the draw for Prince Silas's Selection was due to be announced the next day, and even the old men and the spinsters who usually pretended to be above such matters had been tempted into lengthy arguments on the subject. With all of this clamour, it was simple enough for Bartolo to weave his way through the doorway and into the corner of the warmly lit and warmly heated bakery; he got a few dirty looks from old Pepijn, who had probably started queuing for his krentenbollen sometime around five in the morning, and from Willem-of-the-one-leg, who, despite his name, was more than capable of holding his own against the gentle push of humanity around him. Bartolo suspected that if he lingered too long within arm's length, he was likely to get a box about the ears for his cheekiness, so he just kept moving until the counter was almost close enough to touch.
If there was one thing that the people of Aizsaule appreciated, it was good food. They could weather any number of druj attacks, the saying usually went, as long as the survivors had enough good bread and better wine to adequately fête the fallen. It was this sentiment that kept the workers in the bakery so utterly flat-out during the daylight hours, and frequently outside of them. Today, the soft-spoken girl that the locals affectionately called Zuzu was running transactions so quickly that she barely had time to close the heavy till drawer before she was ringing it open once again, her hands a blur of gold and copper coins. Her boss was refreshing the stocks of bread upon the shelves, smiling sweetly at something a customer had said even as she tiredly brushed the flour from her apron.
The crowd wavered; Bartolo could slip forward far enough to plant a hand firmly upon the glass counter. Only a few transactions had passed before he could tell that the baker had caught notice of him; she barely raised her voice, but he could hear her clearly, as she called, "the usual, Bartolomeo?"
He was being tugged to-and-fro by the press of people. Everyone, it seemed, was desperate for the attention of the beautiful baker. "Yes," Bartolo managed to reply, "please!"
"Give the poor boy some room to breathe, for god's sake," someone said, from over Bartolo's head, and he was able to let out a huge breath as the pressure fell away. "It's the Sartore boy, it's Agostina's son – make some space, will you?"
It echoed back through the crowd: "back up, back up a bit, make some space – oh, Pepijn, get over yourself, it's only bread."
"Thank you," Bartolo shouted up at whoever had spoken, and was patted firmly on his head in a sort of response. The widow had slung his paper bag of pastries and bread onto the counter for him with her characteristic sweet smile – is that all, sweetheart? – and Zuzu reached over to take his damp handful of copper coins, rolling them through her fingers so that they were totally counted in the short amount of time it took her to ring open the till. Zuzu was so pretty, Bartolo thought dreamily – she was probably five or six years older than him, with long black hair and pretty dark eyes framed by delicate eyebrows that always made her look very serious next to her beauteous colleague. He wondered if she had applied for the Selection. She was probably sure to be chosen, if she had.
"Thank you," he said again, more shyly, and was rewarded by a quirked smile from the cashier, who tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Be safe," she said, her voice tinged with the same slight accent borne by the widow – a Mønt accent, Bartolo had learned by now, shared by many of the refugees from the fall of Wall Alliette. "And have a good day."
By the time he had fought his way back out of the bakery, past the dense lines and through the press of humanity gathered around the doorway, the sky was warming into the promise of a lovely day. The cobbles were stained golden with light; the shutters on the other shops were beginning to flutter open, like the unfolding of a butterfly's wings. It happened like a wave down the street, as though each business was being awoken by another. A few houses away, just where Septītais Street melded into Astotais Street, Mr Czarnecki was standing in his doorway, arms folded, as he took in the sunrise. He seemed in no rush to get his day started; the carpenter gave Bartolo a short wave as he saw him – "they look busy, don't they?"
The boy smiled. "Yeah, it's absolutely packed."
"I reckon I'll leave it til noon, then. A late breakfast might suit me better, now that I think about it."
Bartolo paused. The bread was warm in his hands, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. "Did - did you manage to repair that music box, sir?"
Mr Czarnecki smiled broadly. He was probably the same age as Bartolo's brother, maybe even a little bit younger, but something about the way he held himself always made the young boy mistaken him for a man much older. "I did. Would you like to see it? Your bread might get cold."
"It'll be cold by the time I get home anyway."
He laughed. "You got me there. Let me grab it."
"Please take your time," Bartolo said, but the carpenter had already disappeared back into his house.
It was a thin, tall building with grey walls, bracketed on either side by a seamstress and a florist. Mr Czarnecki had spent many months repairing it with great care and caution. Aizsaule District, sheltered far behind Wall Alliette and only barely neighbouring Tiamat, had not seen much druj destruction in the last decade or five, but there had still been noš shortage of derelict or abandoned buildings in which the refugees from Mønt District could make their new homes. Many of the survivors of the last attack were still living in temporary accomodations in Vanth, sheltering on farms or lumberyards while trying to piece together the existence they had lost to the claws and teeth of the invading druj.
Bartolo had cried when he had heard about the fall of Mønt, even though he couldn't quite name why; he hadn't known anyone in that district – if it had been Obušek, maybe, or Miecz, his reaction might have made more sense – and yet he had sobbed himself to sleep that night. It was not any familiarity that had aroused such sorrow, but the sense that everything that had seemed so far away – the walls and the monsters outside them – had drawn closer to him in the space of a single day. He had never heard the cannons on Wall Szymanski fire before, but since the fall of Mønt, they were roused into life on what felt like a daily basis. It was probably, in all truth, only weekly – but even that, in itself, was scary.
At night, Bartolo dreamt about the druj. He had never done so before; he wasn't even sure if the shadowy creatures in his dreams, all long dark tentacles and big white teeth, were what druj actually looked like. But they scared him; he was rarely able to sleep the night through anymore.
And there they were again, even as he thought about it – the cannons on the wall, roaring into life with a sound like thunder clapping over the walls. The watchers must have gone deaf by now, surely. Even this far away, the sound of the artillery was nearly deafening.
Mr Czarnecki winced slightly as he emerged from the doorway again. "So early?"
"Do druj sleep?" Bartolo asked, his voice slightly wondering.
"I'm not sure. I always imagined they would be more active at night – but I don't know much about them, I'm afraid."
He crouched; Bartolo moved over towards him, slowly, his eyes fixed upon the little wooden box he was turning over in his hands. It was a mahoghany box with ornate decorations filleted into its surface; as Mr Czarnecki handed it to him gently, Bartolo could bring it up to his eye and see that, within the structure, there were a row of neatly arranged tin bells within, oriented around a wooden cylinder that made up the support column of the box. When Bartolo tilted it in his hands, the bells rang sweetly; Mr Czarnecki was holding a lid that probably fit back over it, its exterior intricately painted with delicate vines and flowers.
"It's fixed?"
"It is – you just put this key in, here, and wind it up… carefully, now. The ones I saw when I was a young boy usually had metal cogs inside it, but these one is entirely wood, so it's very delicate."
The sound which emitted was not a sophisticated tune; it was halting and soft, the merest suggestion of song. It reminded Bartolo of the kinds of lullabies that his mother would hum to him, when he was young, and the bustle of the tavern below their apartment would keep awake into the little hours. It was sweet, Bartolo decided, sweet and melancholy at the same time. It sounded like a very old memory, trapped within this music box.
"Are you going to sell it?"
Mr Czarnecki shook his head. There was a kind of sadness in his eyes that Bartolo could not name. "I don't think I will. Why, are you a fan?"
"It's nice," Bartolo said. "It's pretty."
"I can make one for you, little Sartore. Just as soon as I'm finished the job on the wall in Kass."
"Really?" His eyes shone. "Would that be expensive?"
"Not at all." Mr Czarnecki smiled. He looked younger when he smiled – closer to Alcide's age again, only a young man in the prime of his life. "Tell you what. You can pick up my żymła for me when you're getting your mama's bread in the mornings – it'll save me the walk."
"Are you sure?" Bartolo couldn't keep the thrill out of his voice. "I would really like that."
"No worries at all. I usually pay Mrs Hämäläinen monthly, so just tell her you're getting it for me and she shouldn't charge you – unless I've annoyed her, of course."
Bartolo set the music box carefully back into the man's hands, and worried the edge of the paper bag between his fingers. "Do you know each other from Mønt?"
"Tiamat," Mr Czarnecki replied, "but we lived close enough to the border that we got caught up in the attack." He gave a nod and a wave to the woman who had opened the upstairs shutters on the building opposite. "Good morning, Mrs Zariņš!"
"Morning, Czarnecki, how's the work treating you?"
"Could be worse. And you?"
Bartolo, sensing that the conversation was about to take a turn for the boring and adult, straightened up and hefted his bread in his arms. It was still warm; he might make it home before it cooled after all. The cannons had started up again with a fresh fervor; it set his teeth on edge to hear it. "Thank you, Mr Czarnecki. Goodbye, Mrs Zariņš."
"Don't mention it at all, Bartolo. Get home safe, okay?"
"And give your love to my mother," Mrs Zariņš called, "won't you?"
Bartolo nodded. "Of course."
He had to retrace his path to go home, retreating back onto Septītais Street and back past the Kivi bakery. The crowd had thinned somewhat, but the line was still long; it snaked a short length down the hill. There were younger people in the group now, clearly children Bartolo's age who had been dispatched for breakfast before they had to get ready for school. He waved to Madelief and Sanne as he passed them, but did not stop to talk.
He was on the cusp of the hill when the bells above the city started to ring. It was a great clanging ring, like axes against steel; it echoed across the cobbles, and down into the quiet neighbourhood which nestled beneath the hill, seeming to almost reflect off the leaves of the greenery which shrouded the quaint houses leading down towards the river. It was a shriek over the city; it was a call to arms; it was a warning that always, always, came too late.
The effect the sound had upon the assembled people was eerie in its uniformity. They all turned their eyes towards the wall, whose shadow had only just retreated from the street, and seemed to note, at precisely the same moment as the person next to them, that the pinprick red dots of the watchers had moved into a frenzy of action along the perimeter of the wall. The bells kept tolling; the sound had been picked up by the clocktower on Ceturtais Street, only a few blocks away, so that it felt more immediate, closer. The sound went to Bartolo's bones; it shook his teeth.
The last two such alerts had turned out to be false alarms; he knew that it was likely this was the same, but nonetheless he found his heart thudding a little harder as he hesitated on the edge of the hill. They were meant to take shelter within ten minutes, he knew, that was what Princess Asenath had told them when she had visited their precinct last year, and he was at least twenty minutes from home – the crowd around him was dispersing rapidly, murmurs suggesting that everyone agreed it was likely this was just an overabundance of caution on the part of the tagma. Maybe fifteen minutes if he ran, he thought – or twelve.
He was overthinking this. He would have been partway home by now if he had already started back…
"Hey, Bartolo." Zuzu was leaning out of the gate which led to the walled garden concealed behind the bakery. She had undone her hair; despite the scream of the bells overheard, she seemed relaxed. "The old lady says you can jump in here with us, if you want."
From behind her, there was the murmured sound of displeasure from her boss. "Old?"
"Are you sure?"
Her voice was wry and level. "Well, I might change my mind if you keep dawdling, kid. You too, Zor."
All the shutters were fluttering shut once again, as people battened down their hatches. An evacuation was unlikely; the watchers had set off no coloured flares on the wall to indicate the next course of action, and he was likely to get into trouble with any stray paqūdu or guardsman across whose path he stumbled if he tried to head home now. So he nodded, hugged the bag of bread to his chest, and followed Zuzu through the gate and into the little courtyard which adjoined the bakery to an old granary, now converted into a small attic apartment for an out-of-work seamstress. There was a figure moving behind the window, seeming quite unconcerned about the sirens overhead; they drew the curtains, and were lost to the gloom.
Mrs Hämäläinen was pulling some wicker chairs from the bakery's back door and setting them in the sunshine; a few of her customers, old Pepijn among them, had lingered to shelter here rather than risk heading home and incurring the wrath of the paqūdus, or guardsmen, for being out on the street during an alarm. As he looked around, Bartolo found his heart slowing as he realised how cavalierly the adults were treating the current crisis; it was soothing to see Jasmijn from the florist shop offering to make tea, and Mr Czarnecki critiquing the widow's potted plants with the air of someone who knows very little about a subject and intends to make that everyone else's problem. It was a pretty garden, neatly kept; the pink walls that lined the courtyard seemed newly painted, and the steps that led to the granary apartment were lined with orchids and twining ivy.
The cannons were still pounding; the bells were still pealing. The widow Hämäläinen caught the look in Bartolo's eye and smiled warmly. "The basement is reinforced. We'll be fine, even if they fire the flares – but they won't."
Jasmijn was being loudly derisive of the whole matter. "I swear, they set those bells clanging for any little thing."
"You can't blame them for being careful," Mr Balodis was saying darkly, "after what happened in the west – "
"They still haven't buried all of the bodies," Pepijn added. "They're still finding pieces of the excubitors..."
"And that was Wall Alliette – when was the last time Wall Szymanski actually had to contend with a druj?"
"Hey, now, they repelled that golem from Mønt, didn't they?"
"Did they? I heard it vanished into thin air..."
"Don't be an idiot, druj don't just vanish."
"I'm just saying what I heard, Balodis, I'm not saying it's true!"
Bartolo wasn't able to pay much more attention to the conversation – he didn't think most of the things they were saying were true, and if they were, then they would only panic him, just as the bells – still tolling – did. He reached into his bag and pulled out the piece of kleicha that the baker had slipped in there, as he had expected her to. Pulling that apart settled his heart slightly. It gave him something to do with his hands. If it really was nothing, then Alcide would come and pick him up in an hour or so; it would be fine. Everything would be fine.
And then the cannons fell silent. The bells still shrilled, but the cannons were silent on the wall – and then, slowly, the bells stilled and quieted as well. Zuzu glanced up at the sky, looking surprised. "That was quick," she began to say, and then there was a slow shriek overhead as a flare trailing red smoke soared over the city and burst into a scarlet cloud that carved open the sky like an open wound.
Everyone assembled in the courtyard stared up at the sky, quite silently. Eyes wide, they took in this new red cloud with a stillness that frightened Bartolo more than any of the noise and panic of the moments that had preceded it. There was a serenity to the way that Mr Czarnecki sat back on his heels, stared at the sky, and said, "we should move, don't you think?"
Red smoke meant druj. Red smoke meant druj in the city. Red smoke meant druj had got past the walls.
Oh, god, Bartolo didn't even have the mental acumen to be as afraid as he knew he ought to be.
And yet, beside him, Zuzu was totally calm. "Basement, then," she said, and jumped to her feet.
Mrs Hämäläinen nodded. "There'll be huge crowds trying to evacuate. Better to hide out here and –"
And then Jasmijn shrieked. It was a sound that rended the heart; it almost made Bartolo clap his hands over his ears. It was a scream of absolute, pure terror – as though one's nightmares had been made flesh right before her.
That was as good of a characterisation as he could aim for, for indeed there was an enormous clawed hand gripping the top of the pink wall that ran along the length of the courtyard. Old Pepijn knocked over his chair in an effort to get away from the beast, struggling back towards the door of the bakery as the druj struggled over the boundary. It was an enormous scaled thing, Bartolo saw, like a wingless dragon, with six thick, strong limbs ending in dagger-sharp claws. It didn't have anything that Bartolo could identify as a head; maybe a scaled spider was a better comparison, given the twitches that roiled across the calloused skin of the druj.
It was a clumsy thing; it fell, more than climbed, over the wall. It was smaller than the druj from Bartolo's dreams, only slightly larger than an ox, but the dripping black liquid that ran off its skin without obvious source and the knife-sharp tips of its talons could have been drawn from the very depths of his nightmares.
It didn't have a face; it didn't have a head. It only had those great claws, and those scaled limbs, and the great lump it might have called a torso, from which that black blood dripped and dripped and dripped.
Jasmijn shrieked again, and sprinted for the back door of the bakery. Bartolo wondered if she would be fast enough. This thing could probably knock in the wall of the bakery, couldn't it? It would be easy – like caving in cardboard.
Mrs Hämäläinen had stepped in front of him and was murmuring something softly under her breath. Bartolo would have done anything to be able to stumble backwards as Willem had. But instead – he was here, frozen in place, trying to will strength into his legs and failing utterly. The bread was still warm in his arms. Mr Czarnecki turned towards him, reached for him, said something he could not hear –
And then, quite abruptly, a silver blade burst through the front of the thing, what made have been a face on any other kind of creature.
It withdrew, almost as quickly, and burst through again, splattering black innards all across Mrs Hämäläinen's carefully tended garden. The blade was withdrawn a second time, and for a third time burst through the thinner skin of the beast's abdomen. The silver sword flashed a fourth and fifth time as two of those enormous scaled limbs were severed from the body of the beast – not entirely, but enough that it could not hold itself up, enough that its extremities were held on by skin and scale alone. Black ichor dripped and dripped and dripped; the druj wavered, as though considering another step forward, and then fell – it keeled, like a dead spider might, its remaining limbs curling up beneath it; the silver sword flashed a final time, a final slice through the thing's legs and the thing, quite silently, went still.
Bartolo could only stare.
His first druj, and it was dead already. Perhaps – perhaps it wasn't so bad?
The dark-skinned man who leapt down from its back was handsome and weather-worn, dressed in the familiar pale green of the excubitor-in-training; he had his harness worn in a distinctive manner, focusing on free movement of his arms rather than stability in the air. He had a very white smile that he wielded with recklessness as he extended a hand to the widow. "You should have called me sooner, Nanna." There was a low tone of reproach in his voice, but it was affectionate, the way that Bartolo's brother had always spoken to him when he returned home with holes worn in the knee of his breeches.
The widow's voice was soft and sweet. "Didn't want to take you away from more important work."
"There is no work more important than protecting you." Their dark-haired saviour paused, and his smile broadened again. "The people of Illéa."
Zuzu had ventured forth and placed a boot firmly into the side of the scaled beast; it did not move. Dead, then, very dead indeed. Bartolo wanted to tell her to stay back, just in case it could come back to life, just in case it was merely pretending, merely fallen rather than dead – but Zuzu kicked it again, and turned, and shrugged, and said, "it's small, isn't it? So much smaller than the others."
"Only a few small druj made it over the walls." The tagma-in-training sheathed his sword at his hip; its sister hung, clean and silver, on the other side. "We don't expect many casualties."
Mr Czarnecki, said, quietly, "dare I ask where your comrade might be?"
"Having," their dark-haired saviour said, rather wearily, "the time of her life."
And to Bartolo's shock, the widow Hämäläinen laughed, very softly, almost as though the sound had been startled from her. "Oh, yes – I imagined as much."
There was the sound of footsteps on the roof above them; Bartolo glanced up to see that a tagma cadet, similarly garbed in pale green, had skidded across the shingles of the bakery and come to a stop at the lip of the roof, her balance impeccable on the uneven tiles. Another trainee in the tagma corps? She had short, ragged hair and a black eyepatch that covered her right eye; she carried a blade in either hand, both stained a deep black. Her hands and face and sleeves were coloured similarly; unlike the neat man before them, this soldier looked like she had thrown herself bodily into the maw of a beast. "Ghjuseppu. Hijikata expects us on the southern wall." Her voice was curt; she was retreating back across the roof almost before she had finished speaking.
Their saviour nodded curtly. "On my way." He glanced at the motley group assembled before him. Bartolo could only stare at him. This was an excubitor in action – not even an excubitor, merely someone aspiring to be such. And yet he had carved up the druj like it was nothing at all... "Call me if you need me, yeah?"
"Be safe," Mr Czarnecki said softly.
"Trust me," the man, Ghjuseppu, replied wearily. "There's nothing to stress about. We're just… stretching our legs."
"That sounds like famous last words to me, Ghju."
He paused. "Well," he said finally. "If that's the case, give Lore my love… and all of my stuff."
Hiss. He fired his hooks, and rappelled himself onto the roof next to his ichor-stained companion. She turned and gave a short gesture with one sword that might have been a wave, or might have been something more rude, and then they were gone, sprinting across the rooftops towards the south.
"He looks well," the widow said, "doesn't he? He was looking so skinny last month."
Mr Czarnecki said, slightly darkly, "she's being reckless."
Jasmijn had returned from the bakery, looking sheepish at the way that she had abandoned them all in her abject panic. Old Pepijn was helping Willem up from where he had fallen, and Bartolo – Bartolo was still staring at the dead monsteron the ground in front of him, and thinking about his nightmares, and thinking about whether his mother would be angry that he was late home with the bread. And still, he could not help but stare at the dead druj.
And Zuzu, still standing beside it with one boot braced against its scales as she surveyed the damage done to her petunias, said, sounding slightly dejectedly, "please – please – tell me we're not leaving this here."