Not all of Myrkentown's residents were born to the territory. Consider Bea Kanaya, for instance -- who was born Beatriz Ramón many years ago, in the far western reaches of Amasynia. Who, as some immigrants do, adopted the more conventional Beatrice for her name, Ramón giving way to Prestcote on the eve of her first marriage, and Godefroy upon the second, for she'd buried two husbands before she was much more than thirty. Drue Kanaya was the third, who fell two years ago at the hands of the Baie, one of many savaged as the beast tore through an angry mob on its way towards Alexander Kanashia. That had been quite enough for Bea Kanaya, who kept the dead man's name for her own, and cursed the Captain's with each day's dawn.
On the topic of names, it's noteworthy that hers doesn't appear on either of the lists supplied to Ariane Emory. But this has troubled the swowdswoman very little, for Roschen has good reason to make such an omission, and perhaps even drow Jirai can be misled by a kindhearted exterior. For Bea Kanaya is a pious adherent to the One Faith, although she doesn't much care for St. Iona's chapel, not since the Fletcher's boy flung himself from its roof. She is a well-respected member of Myrkentown's burgeoning middle class. Her ginger biscuits are a matter of legend amongst its children.
None of these facts have kept Ariane from her doorstep, this morning.
Beatrice works alone in the mornings; there's help that comes to clean the small bakery later in the day, but that girl's busy in other businesses at this early hour. Unlike those who've fallen before her, Kanaya is not so engrossed in her work or her company that she doesn't hear the swordswoman's approach; perhaps the bell that jangles when the forward door opens is some help. Or perhaps Ariane has paid very little attention to stealth. But whatever the case, it's a pleasantly plump face which is turned to greet the dead Governor's guard, one with considerable surprise in its blue eyes.
"Have you ever seen its like?", the swordswoman asks without preamble, an item of some delicacy presented for Kanaya's inspection. A porcelain mask, this is, daintily feminine in its contours. A man might have found its ruddy lips ripe, inviting; Beatrice, however, is nothing but bewildered.
"Why, I never -- ", she begins. A swing of the mask slaps the rest of the words from her lips, and breaks one of them open, too.
"Lies," hisses the swordswoman, advancing to match Bea's stumbling retreat.
"I saw you standing beside the rest of them. What do you know of its maker?" A shake of the head earns the woman a sweep of the mask that splits the skin over her cheekbone, and the pain stings so that Beatrice scarcely hears the question that follows it.
"What do you know of Truth? Of Belief?" And Beatrice, deafened by her own fear, simply holds out a trembling hand.
As if to halt the inevitable. As if to comfort her murderer, for Bea Kanaya knows children very well.
"Oh, child," she weeps, as much sorrow as fear filling her voice, and that's when the sword comes out to pierce the old woman's lungs. And the fist, to silence her monstrous lies for true, and the other to beat her until she'll
stay silenced, and when Bea's desperate, clutching hands finally find purchase on Ariane's shoulders, the two women collapse against the bakery shelves with such force that hessian bags burst and flour explodes into the air.
The swordswoman is straddling her prey then, as they choke on the powdery clouds, knees pinning Kanaya's arms to the cold floor beneath her back. The knife she brandishes hasn't the cruel curve of the dagger Dhrin prefers for his sacrifices, but she has it pressed to the edge of Bea's left eye all the same. First, though, she must brandish that mask one last time; must raise it beside her own face in a brief demonstration. Ruddy at the lips, the delicate thing, lustrous in its contours; eyeless, mere indents in the porcelain marking their place beneath the delicate arch of its black-inked brows. It stares blindly down at the bloodied woman, mute and implacable, and:
"Don't you see the resemblance?" whispers the swordswoman at last, pressing the mask onto her own features, as the last breaths bubble from between Kanaya's lips. The knife finds its home in the older woman's flesh, but Bea by this time is far beyond pain; her heart beats its last when the knife falls for the second time, and Ariane's world of a sudden riots about her. It hits her like a pickaxe to the brain:
She is murderer and murdered. She is carving the eyes from Kanaya's face, and lying helpless beneath the knife.
Here is Beatriz Ramón, born to deprivation and slaving away her childhood by a baker's oven; by the age of fourteen she's aquired a hatred for the stink of yeast, and coin enough to make the journey to Myrken Wood. You can build a life there, they say. People don't ask questions there, they say. Here is Beatrice Prestcote, wed four years shy of her twentieth birthday, to a man who's never known poverty and can't imagine why his wife shies from his family's excess. Here is Beatrice Godefroy, wrapped in a husband's arms, back in the days when she'd worn her hair long, and as dark as Ariane's own. It is the most precious time of her life. They'd smiled together, she and Godefroy; oh, how they'd laughed, how she'd wept at his grave. When it comes time to bury Kanaya by him, there are no more tears left, and that lovely hair's gone to grey now, and she bakes biscuits for children because she prefers them to adults now; unlike their elders, they have whole lives ahead of them. Bea Kanay, this is, who weekly makes the long trek to Myrkentown's less popular chapel, who'd wept for Hugh Fletcher's son, and the children who'd been his friends. Canny Bea, who'd seen the word scrawled upon Iona's side that day, and hated it ever since; 'BELIEVE', it had said, and she Believes, alright. Believes that the boy died for a reason she cannot understand, but which would surely prove as foul as the Baie which had murdered her husband.
Bea Kanay, who'd loathed those cultists as much as any other sane woman, and more than most.
It's a reeling woman who pushes herself away from Beatrice's body as the flood of memory comes to its end, the sight of her own masked face burned into her vision; it had been the last thing that dying Bea had seen, and thus the last to be communicated to her murderer. It is a horror; so is what follows when she tries to lower the mask from her face, for the attempt is doomed and even the most desperate clawing of her fingers can't tear the porcelain from her skin. Silver floods about the edges of the mask, as she finds her feet and staggers for the bakery's rear doors; it riots like bile in the back of her throat, trapped between her lips, as she blindly carves at the back wall. And when she finally flees, it's with a sobbing gasp for her voice, and a single word left behind her -- for this time she speaks to a man who is no cultist at all:
BELIEF?
"On the fifth day," they will murmur,
"a woman died with her eyes gouged out. Perhaps she'd seen the face of God."