While [Narkissa] Slept

[Rance]

The Greatlady spoke such tales, such tales. Tales of Wishing Goats, of Wolves and Man, and Oracles whose lives were wasted on premonitions, of visions for the--

She wondered when she had forgotten about her fear. It had been some time ago. The leather handle had been stained like oil from her black sweat. It felt right in her hands, perfectly weighted, not a tool for killing, but for kitchen-work -- yet, it killed well enough. It did the trick.

She squatted over a man who lay half-broken in the gutter. Across her nose and mouth she wore a slash of fabric to keep the casustic stink of blood and shit out of her nostrils. Had she anymore hair, had it not fallen out piece by piece and turned into little slithering worms, she might have brushed it away.

"Wynsee," he said, one eye struck through with blood, his lips swollen with fat blisters and skin already crawling with flies.

By the time he said her last name, she'd already tucked the knife under his right ear and pushed until she felt the crunch of bone. The tip punched through skull and into the precious meat inside. Then, with a sigh, she grabbed one of his arms and dragged him across the gold-cobbled street. His hanging head dribbled blood down the hip of her patchwork skirts. She would burn them. They always knew to burn the clothes.

Trying to lift him into the dead cart with only one hand was a challenge, but she had girth to her. Weight. Thickness. Fat and muscle both.

She had given up her seamwork years ago, long after she realized that basting stitches were impossible without a second hand. She wiped black sweat from her forehead with the stump of her wrist, then looked up at the gilded gutters of the tallest buildings in Myrken Wood. Never before had so fine a city been constructed, and Wood seemed such a misnomer anymore, a falsification, a laugh at the town's old, old history. Its towers were studdied with bricks of the most polished, shining gold, visible from miles away to the wary eyes--

--were it not for the horsehead smoke, the black smoke, the greasy miasma that brought with it a plague, that -- like refugees from Dairy -- swept across the prosperous town Governor Burnie had all but constructed with his own hands brick by brick, nail by nail, so much blood like mortar between the cracks, pumping through veins that trailed like ivy up the latticework, and all this the work of a man who brought Myrken out of its violence and into a lasting peace.

There is nothing that troubles me more than when our good citizens are put in danger.

But that was years ago. And while the gold still shone in the sunlight, there were so many bodies in the streets, withered up like jerky and laughing in madness. One by one you killed them, and one by one you--

--you think of a story Elliot once told you, well before the Hawks came by the thousands from over the moutnains and perched, perched, perched, lingering like vultures but never picking the bones, just bringing their other Hawks with them, standing arrow-straight and proud on the golden gutters and grinning their Peregrine smiles.

They all die though, because the world isn't like stories, and he has to watch them die. He has to burn them so that their bodies aren't defiled.

When the dead cart was full, her heels crunched over the pebbles of broken teeth. She washed her hand and her knife over and over again in a trough filled with milk. She wiped her skin with the lumpy curds. Sow Mother Pig curds.

She stood, wiped her palm off on her skirt, and then said to the man on the other side of the dead cart: "I think we should be done for the afternoon, Cherny. The day will grow dim soon, and it is hard to work by the night.

"I will make us a hearty bit of broth. Join us, will you? That we might forget about today, and play a game of bones -- oh, and Soodsy, you know she loves you so dearly. Sometimes, just sometimes, I think she forgets I am her mother at all."

[Cherny]

Hunched over the cart of human carrion, Cherny looked up sharply at the sound of his own name, gaunt features hidden behind a beakish plague mask of soot-black leather. Peering at the once-seamstress through discs of soot-dimmed glass, his head turned as he inspected her first with one eye, then the other, before looking up to where the sun hung livid behind the mottled clouds. At length he shrugged, tattered patch-coat ruffled by the stinking wind, and bent once more to his work.

Bony hands clotted with old blood clasped a dead girl's features, nails become talons prying at her face; a mere moment's effort for such clever fingers that know just where to press, to hook, to scoop; a last quick tug rewarded with a wet snap, a glistening lump clutched in a spindly claw. A moment to inspect his prize, to peer past death-fogged lens to the pretty pictures within, before he slipped it into the bulging satchel with the rest and moved to the front of the cart.

He didn't speak so much, not any more, his words lost and scattered in the smoke; he still laughed, though, a hollow croaking behind his mask that mocked the city that Myrken had become - blood for mortar, bones for nails, each cobble the dome of a gilded skull.

He stooped to lift the cart's shafts, leaning into his burden for a time before it shifted, gained momentum, and began to creak and rattle its way along the echoing street, cargo flopping and lolling with each jolt of the wheels.

From foetid alleys and gaping doorways, skulking in the shadows of Glenn Burnie's perfect Myrken, the Hungry watched the cart trundle past with yellowed eyes and ragged teeth.

[Rance]

On the side of the street stood a man who hadn’t been born with eyes, but he watched the two pass by. He wore a shirt and no trousers. He drank tea from a thick mug. It poured back out of a hole in his stomach, splashing into the gutter where a deformed little girl tried to lap it up. She looked like a hairless dog. Adorable little thing.

With the knife making dramatic motions in the air, as if she were leading an orchestra of dulcimers, the once-seamstress said, "Now, now, Cherny. Do not accept the invitation too graciously, else I would fear Soodsy and I would eat alone." She said it with a smile, but by then all her teeth were missing, missing, and she had fashioned the finest pair of wooden replacements her single hand could manage.

It was always this way, every day. They, with their cart stained in old, brown blood, shuffling along the streets. Doing their tasks for Myrken Wood. Doing their fine, fine duties. She would ask about stopping; he would grab the cart and push it along.

The yellow eyes watching from beyond never blinked.

"What did you see in that one, Cherny," she said, swaying closer to him, her wooden clogs bending underneath her as she almost tumbled into a puddle of tea and blood. With one finger curled, she tried to bend back the lip of his satchel and peer to the moist prizes inside. "Was it a wonderful thing you saw in it," she asked, as if they were children again. "Was it a pretty thing?"

A Hawk dove down from the oil-fog sky, darting like an arrow shot. It perched upon a dying man’s knee. With her skirts held in one hand, the seamstress kicked her clogs in a delightful dance, even twirling once, twice, almost losing balance. She belted out a song, not a Good Song or a Slave Song, but a song she had shouted out again and again from these very same streets, with the very same company:

"Driven deep in his heart, the righteous’est blade
and like a dog, like a lamb, the goov’nah was slayed.
A traitor to men! Raise your mug, make a toast!
To the good soul that killed him, who he trusted the most!"

She plucked a slithering maggot out of Cherny’s hair, and then gave him a kiss on the temple. The girl squeezed the larvae between her fingers, then crushed it between her false teeth. They had been carved out of the remnants of the Broken Dagger’s floorboards, so they were used to maggots and blood. The grub was surely good luck, for Cherny, he was a good man.

"Do you want to sing, Cherny? You should sing with me, oh—" her eyes rolled in their sockets over to where the Hawk had landed, "—there, Cherny, look. Another to be Killed."

She Killed; he Gathered. That was their job. That was their job. So, with excitement, she motioned the cart closer with her pale stump, closer to the mud-splattered figure seated in the gutter, her song fading against the golden awnings, the gilded doors, and the shaded back alleys.

”’For the good of our town,’ he would say, he would write,
’For what must always be done will not always be right!’
She gave a lop to his neck, though, and cut off his head,
and like a traitor should be, Glenn Burnie is dead, is dead is—“

"Gl-…Gloria?"

The Hawk had perched on the fallen man, and now he spoke, and his hair was fire – not as red as fire, as it had been (he was such a handsome boy!), but like smoldering embers blistering in his scalp. The seamstress squatted next to him.

"Hello, Tennant," she said, voice softer than it had ever been.

"You are beautiful,” he said in an Old Voice, like the first time.

"I have to kill you now, Tennant. It is the kindest thing for us all."

"You are beautiful," he said in an Old Voice, like the first time since the first time.

"It will be quick; I just give a good push, it is nothing like a stab at all. Do you understand?

"I must, Tennant. We must. Cherny and I. Good Citizens, like the Catch-Catch-Catch told us always to be. We are the newly-appointed Marshalls of Myrken Wood. You see?" She angled the blade forward, trying to dry-shave some of the stubble on Tennant’s cheek as the Hawk perched on his shoulder picked like a hungry crow at a thread on his bloody shirt. "Do you remember that time we danced?

"I remember," she said, cradling his burning head, tucking the blade with its fish-stinking blood-groove just underneath his jaw, rocking back and forth. "But now I do not dance anymore. That is for little girls, like Soodsy. You remember Soodsy."

Her voice lowered to a whisper, like she and the weakened, maddened Tennant were sharing a secret.

"I Kill. Cherny Gathers. Every single day. We find our friends and burn them so they cannot be eaten. It would be the worst fate. Now take a deep breath. There will be no Wolves to scare you where you are going, sweet boy."

A tightly-wrapped fist around rawhide-hard leather.

The point of the dulled blade found the place where the jawbone hinged, pushed between it, and she wrenched up, up—

Hole-Stomach kept gurgling, drinking, and the little girl at his feet was just laughing away, so very happy.

Gloria never closed her eyes.

And neither, with the yellow glowing inside of them, creeping like shadows ever-closer, did the Hungry.

[Cherny]

He bore his burden patiently, and for the most part in silence; this was their role, their place, and it was better than many could claim. A purpose, grim and gore-stained as it might be.

She asked what he saw, as she always did; he shook his head silently, as he always did, talon-fingers curling about her wrist to lift her hand gently away from the satchel. Secrets entrusted to him, to be Gathered and kept safe.

His head tilted into that touch as she picked at his hair, sleeked back with sweat and oil and worse; a crooning sigh crept from his throat as she kissed his brow, a convulsive shiver rattling through his thin bones, smoked-glass eyes staring at her as she drew away, first one, then the other. She sang, but he would not join her, could not join her, instead trudging on as she danced down the street. He watched as she crouched beside the flame-haired man, dark gaze ever watchful, ever moving from one thing to the next; the nacreous sky above rooftops of tarnished gilt; crystal-glass windows fogged from within by smoke-grease and filthy handprints; hollow doorways and alleys reeking of corruption and decay. And behind them, slinking and stalking with soft-padded steps, the scarecrow figures of the Hungry drew ever closer to the cart, snuffing and slavering like starveling curs as they crowded the street from side to side.

Too close, too close; Cherny knew this, and yet could not interrupt Gloria in her duties, her sacred rites. She killed, she culled, she granted a final kindness to the gutters of Myrken. Taking food off the streets, keeping the Hungry weak so that they might not swarm up from the gutters to drag down and defile everything Glenn Burnie had built.

The flat scrape of steel echoed from the empty shopfronts, a heavy blade drawn from beneath the Gatherer's coat; well-worn, well-used, sharpened and chipped and sharpened and notched and sharpened again. It'd been a fine gift for a boy, once, a weapon, but now it was merely a tool for the parting of meat and bone.

His laughter was harsh, discordant, defiance and warning and challenge at once, and he shifted from foot to foot as the Hungry closed in with grasping hands and champing jaws.

[catch]

Better than being eaten, eaten, eaten - the Hungry came as they did, and they moaned, and moaned, and were not dead like Baie-beasts. They simply hungered, tattered remnants of humanity that they were, hungered for warmth and prosperity and all the things that Glenn Burnie had promised, and that had been taken away, so that this hunger for Well-lived lives became a physical hunger, painful and cruel. They hobbled ever-closer to Cherny and Gloria, and they shone all the brighter in the flickering lightning of oily dimness overhead. They would tear, would consume, would look desperately for the Light that had infected them, infested them, so they could take that Light into themselves.

There was a Culling.

As they pressed ever-closer, there came sudden and silent to them a great, slinking Hound, a skulking beast that strode on two-paws, and held in his stubby mockery of blunt-clawed hands the rusty remains of Agnie's grand sword, the worms within it writhing and spattering like hot, copper blood over his mock-fingers, and with him he bore his army, a Grand Army of Mykren's beasts, twisted and ruined into man-forms that bore, in their hands, the iron tools and cruel goads that had forced them, hurt them, murdered them and enslaved their children. Even now, over the dull Song that was a constant companion they made no noise, but fell upon the Hungry, as they always did; silently they slaughtered, they beat, they drove back the crowd to allow the Two Who Remained to complete their silent tasks.

Over and Over, this thing happened. Blood hung suspended in the air, a red mist, and through this red mist the eyes of Many-Fights watched as his army did their work, full of yearning, of longing. To be, once more, at the side of Cherny-beast, to ponder Meaning in the flickering of flames, to feel soft boy-hands stroking his ears. To know that it could, now, never be.

Their work done, the Army left, in the quick, quiet way of the beasts they were. The Hungry were broken, but they would creep back, ever-forward. They would come again. Many-Fights lingered, his sloped shoulders sagging, his worm-sword dragged on the ground in weariness. But he could not stop, any more than Cherny or Gloria could. Into the Red Mist, he disappeared, as lightning and thunder-song rumbled overhead, the lewd flicker of all-color tendrils, just hidden by oily skies.

[Rance]

A gypsy woman up the street had a tankard of bitterbitter in her hand. She was naked. Her body was a half-thing, as if she had been split down from skull to perineum with a sharp and singing axe. Half-guts and half-bones were like the layers of a velvety cake inside her. She grinned her half-smile and stood sentinel on a single leg. In her only hand, she clutched a tankard frothing with fat, gray ticks, each as thick as an unsavory mole.

Her fingers let go. The stoneware shattered on the street and splattered the blood the parasites had been feasting on.

The Hawk perched on Tennant’s body alighted to the sky with the noise, crying out. It had not beat its great, shadowy wings more than twice before it popped and became just a thousand brown feathers swaying to the ground, strewn like a jester’s colorful confetti.

”Settle down, princess,” the half-there Khalika rattled, her Old Voice slurring, her tongue waggling like a dying snake amid her teeth. “Settle down, princess.”

There was always such noise in Myrken Wood anymore, where its lost and bedraggled trundled about, mimicking their old ways but never truly remembering how they should be done. Somewhere else in the distance, two men squabbled, dragging each other about by their overlong hair, one shouting, “That face belongs to me; that little bitch’s face belongs to me,” while the other — his wings were just racks of bone, anymore, and he reeked of fake gold — screamed back, “How will I be beautiful? You have chewed off my nose. You have chewed off my nose!"

But these things did not draw the attention of the Killer. Not yet. Around the dead cart — surging out of the refuse-ridden alleyways and out of the molding gutters — slinked the shadows of Hungry. Those vaguely-human eyes dripped over with the colors of jaundice and hunger. Cherny had gone for his longtooth of a falchion, rusted but trustworthy; the once-seamstress wiped Tennant’s blood off against her cheek and poised the butcher-blade protectively in front of her.

”Why do you laugh like that, Cherny,” she asked her friend. “Why, in these moments when we are—“

A second tide surged against the Hungry, its perfect opposite springing forth from around them. A battalion of the small and large that suddenly clogged the blood-stained streets around them, wrenching the Hungry down to the ground, dashing their skulls against stones or crushing the needless air from their throats.

Myrken’s beasts had the strategy of a well-designed machine, crashing into the swarming Hungry like a collective fist against a soft wall of dirt. The Hungry scattered and fell as mangled, maimed creatures both minute and massive thundered around the Killer and the Gatherer, around the cart of moldering corpses. And when it was done — when there were splatters of Hungry-blood strewn in wild arcs across the walls and clumps of hair left fluttering on the ground — Many-Fights was all that remained, with the derelict sword and the longing lining his wild shoulders.

”Do you want to play your hand at a game of bones,” Khalika trilled up the avenue, hopping like a gearworker’s lonely spring, up and down, up and down. “Just settle down, now, we’re all used to cutting our wrists wide open on the future, and—“

The bald-headed seamstress ran one of her fingers along the knuckles of an arm dangling out of the cart. Whose hand was it — whose hand…

”Your friend is a very good boy,” she said to Cherny, a habit she had never broken: calling Many-Fights a good boy like you would the simplest, most obedient dog.

And as the two men kept fighting and flailing at one another up the road – they would pass by them soon enough – the girl clacked her teeth together once, twice, matching the rhythm of the thunder, and said to her silent t’oddah, “The Regent should know of this, Cherny. Shall we go to her,” she said. “Shall we?”

Beacuse in Glenn Burnie's golden Myrken Wood, silver nails kept it all from crumbling.

[Cherny]

Some few of the Hungry strayed too close to the Gatherer and paid with split skulls and sheared limbs, the heavy falchion wielded with the economical motions of a man shovelling dirt or splitting wood. The rest knew well enough to keep their distance, to circle round out of reach of Eater's edge.

No matter, for the Hound's arrival drove them all back in fear, dry-throated hisses and whispers of alarm punctuating the splintering of bones beneath rods and cudgels, the wet tearing of beast-teeth upon withered flesh.

A rout, a massacre, one repeated endlessly upon Myrken's streets, leaving emaciated bodies strewn and scattered like driftwood and the rooftops lined with attentive crows. Cherny stands still amid it all, sword-tip touching the befouled cobbles, narrow chest heaving with each breath of gore-fogged air - moist stickiness on the skin, harsh salt in the throat - and the glassy eyes of his plague-mask followed the Hound as he faded into the haze.

At Gloria's praising words his head dropped, bony shoulder slumped within his rag-coat, shaking convulsively with stifled coughs or sobs; a spasm of helpless rage followed as hooked fingers raked at his clotted hair, clawed uselessly at his mask, tugged at his filthy shirt front. As if to distract himself he set to his work, dragging the fallen Hungry only to find them cumbersome, an awkward tangle of scrawny limbs. His voice rose in a frustrated shout, hoarse and wordless, and he brought his blade into play once more, hacking wildly through bone and sinew as he laughed his loss and heartbreak and bitter fury to the defiled skies.

Eventually his fit passed, as it always did, and the cart creaked under the weight of its newly-grown burden of limbs and trunks, piled high and precarious. Heads left where they fell, nothing of worth in them - scant meat for the Hungry, no treasures in their yellowed gaze. In ones and twos the crows descended from the rooftops to squabble over eyes and tongues, and Cherny stooped between the cart's shafts again, nodding listlessly at the Killer's suggestion.

To the Regent, yes. The Regent must know.

[Rance]

They had once spoken about how dangerous blades were; now, though, it didn't matter anymore. They were an essential element of existence, a necessary evil for doing necessary good. She watched as the Gatherer did his work -- work she could not do, because she had only one hand, and because it was his task -- and said nothing as he tangled and struggled about with the Hungry's cartonnage bodies. His laughter was full of disdain, the kind that only Cherny could express: a silent anger, a hatred for what Myrken had become, the dashing-apart of his positive, wise innocence for this.

Only when he was done with his laughing, his hacking, chopping, only when the falchion was put away and the routing of the Hungry was just another old memory did he walk again. He took up the cart and it rattled across the broken teeth and slivers of bone that cobbled the streets. Without words, she reached out to touch underneath his elbow, a comfort, a reminder that she was right there.

They passed on down the street toward the Meetinghouse. The two arguing men became more visible. They were clawing at each other, yanking between them the slivered-off face of some dusky young woman, its skin stretched like sun-bleached leather.

"No, Zilliah! That skin is mine; that face belongs to me," Altias Bromn snarled, his wild clothes strewn with mud and offal.

"Get away, Altias. I found her face. I cut it away from her skull! I will wear it, and you will be jealous, and my masquerade will be so much finer than yours."

Altias went for him, but neither of them could see -- their eyesockets were just gaping, leaking holes, their faces skinless, showing the pink dermis and muscle beneath, clogged with dirt and ash. The former governor's body crashed into the fae's, and they went sprawling into the streets.

The dead cart clattered by, and the Killer thought of diving in upon them, butting them in the noses with her bald skull as Catch-Catch-Catch had once shown her, to stagger them enough for her blade -- but they would kill each other soon enough, fighting as they did over a face that would not fit. Instead, she walked until their arguments were nothing more than buzzing memories in her ears, and the Meetinghouse became more visible before them, yawning at the end of a bloody Myrkentown street.

Its wood had been replaced with shafts of gold, its shutters had been dipped in liquid platinum. More than any other building, the soft, mealy metals that comprised it had been hammered together by nails of the most mesmerizing silver, almost reflective, blinding as the foggy sun struck them. Outside the meetinghouse, a line of bedraggled Myrkeners wrapped around it, their dirty bodies and plague-ridden skin reeking of blood and unwash. They were the soured artifacts of Glenn Burnie's great town, vomiting in the streets, begging for hand-outs, demanding that the new Regent show its face, give them something -- shillings, bread, hope.

"Push through them and to the door, Cherny," the once-seamstress instructed. "They should see what happens when they stay in the streets for the Hungry."

Better to give the Regent the bodies for accounting before the flames; better to give the Hungry nothing to feast on.

She grabbed a thin, bony girl by the pale hair and pushed her out of the way. The girl was missing two eyes, the holes burnt and black, but had a third glimmering in the middle of her forehead. The Killer snarled to the others, "Clear the way -- business for the Regent, business for the Regent, you foul bastards. Dead coming through. A reaping for the Regent!"

[catch]

He stood before the platinum-doors, the Footman, the Gateman, Guard, all of these and none of these, for he stood aloof from gaudiness and decay alike. Around his neck was a golden collar, silver-link chains draped over over his face, a mockery of a horse-halter, jewels dripping from nets in his curled hair, diamonds that shimmered like stars, and rusted, tin star-shapes. From the silver-chain halter to the duty, rotting ground, a single, iron stake kept him at this post, yet he would not have moved even if he was allowed his freedom.

The creature known as Catch did not go, until his task had been done.

His brow shone, high and unblemished; the all of him shimmered, cltohed in fine frills and unstained silk, somehow making the drab surroundings even drabber, until even the grand building behind him could hang it's head in shame, bowing it's eves to the ground in abasement. He was here to guard the door, and as every new, rotten petitioner sought the Regent, they would gaze on him for a heartbeat of moments, gaze at the brilliance of him, and their tongues forgot, and their bellies forgot, and they turned away in shame; and this pattern repeated, endless, for as soon as they came away they would grow angry again, and shuffle resolutely back into line. Each rotten body told themselves that, this time, they would not be caught by those eyes, be the straight, ethereal tallness of him. Each one failed.

As the Song howled in thunder overhead, and oily tendrils licked suggestively, just out of sight in the roiling clouds, the whole-made Catch made a movement; he reached, his fingers crooking, and the crowd both loathed and yearned for such a touch, scuttling back away from it, some turning and tearing at their fellows in their desperation to get away, to keep some morsel of their minds and free-wills. Catch held his hand out, for Gloria and Cherny; wordlessly, he made the path, and though Iron Shoes had once punished him for such a thing, Catch was whole enough to weep, as he always did, when he saw them, silent and sane.

[Cherny]

He trudged on, thin frame straining against the weight of the cart, plague-mask turned to the golden cobbles that shivered and sweated beneath his tread. Out of love for his sister he did not flinch at her touch, simply nodding in acknowledgement.

Strenuous breaths clouded the dark lenses of his eyes and he welcomed it, sinking instead into a dull mist that hid the worst of Glenn Burnie's Myrken. He walked through fog of his own choice, the face-hunters reduced to a shrill squabbling in his ears, Gloria a reassuring shadow at his elbow, the cart creaking and thumping at his back.

It was only as they approached the Meetinghouse that inner lids flicked across the glass, and he looked up - as he always did - to marvel at the sight of it, a feast of gleaming metals fit to send a man blind. The crowd parted and the dead-wagon rolled on, towards the resplendent gatekeeper. Cherny knew his power, knew his peril, and kept his face averted as Killer and Gatherer approached the great doors; but for a moment, a span of weakness in which he glanced sly and sidelong, yearning fingers stretching for the hem of Catch's coat-tails, desperate to touch jewel-bright silk and gold brocade. A hand snatched back an instant after, burned by his own presumption, by the thought that he might have defiled such wonder with his blood-soiled touch. Head bowed, shoulders hunched, he hauled his lifeless burden through the gates as his chest heaved with coughing sobs.

[Rance]

She knew he would be there, the Catch-Catch-Catch, three-named because he must be, three-named because in her mind -- innately Jernoan, hobbled with conservatism and old ways -- he was so much greater than other men, other creatures.

He served his purpose well. He drove aside the ragged masses begging for their grains, their ashy farmland, their drink, never letting them too near the Regent's Meetinghouse. But every time the links of his chains tugged against that iron stake, she ground together her teeth and looked away. At the filthy crowd. At Cherny. At her own shaking hands.

He was so much greater than other men.

But while Cherny ushered in the cart and reached in vain for a touch of Catch's clothing, an emaciated little figure staggered out from the masses, her bony legs scarcely holding her upright, her grimy, gripping hands latching for the sleeves of the once-millworker's coat. Her pointed ears had lost their elven beauty -- one had been almost entirely cut away, leaving a half-chewed lump of skin.

"I saved you, boy, that's worth something, isn't it? Those years back, when they--" her spindly fingers tried to prod at his chest, "--shot you with an arrow. You would have died if it weren't for me. That's worth something. Saving you, that's worth something."

The once-seamstress thought, for a fleeting moment, of breaking her stride, of ridding her t'oddah of the nagging elf, but no, no, it was not her domain. She was not harnessed to a rusted peg; she was not staked like a guarding dog outside the Meetinghouse doors. She could push them back, spit on them all she liked, kick them in their guts, but nothing more.

That job was Cherny's, for it was his clothes the elf tugged -- and if not Cherny's, then his.

Her bald head glistened with tarsweat as she turned her eyes up finally to the Catch-Catch-Catch, her wooden teeth clacking together. They nearly slipped out of her mouth as her browned gums showed him a smile. Nervous. Remote. A synthetic bliss. Not that he had ever done anything to deserve the Killer's coldness. Quite the opposite. Even given the rot and ruin of Glenn Burnie's Myrken Wood, with its gold-encursted streets, its wretched thunder, its slums of the plague-ridden and shadows full of the Hungry, she had always looked upon him with praise and love, blind to Black Smoke.

She said one thing to him, only:

"Soodsy keeps asking about you. Every day."

It was all she could manage to say before she turned her shoulder and made for the gates. The labyrinthine Meetinghouse halls, lined with their thousands of bloody arrowheads, had become all too familiar. The building's dripping, silver nails. Its countless halls, its libraries full of books without words. Its internal architecture lined with the suspended bodies of old dissenters. The Regent's work. Proud work. Everyone had work.

They needed but deliver their day's reaping and then they could be done. They could pick the worms from their cornmeal, Cherny could deposit his gathered treasures, and she could scrub his cheeks with trough-milk to wipe the tears away. Poor boy. Always her brother. And Catch. The Catch-Catch-Catch. Poor man. Always her--

"Come, Cherny," she said, voice barely greater than a whisper. "We will be quick through here."

[Carnath-Emory]

Of all the doors within this labyrinthine anatomy, only these two will part willingly before the approach of Killer and Gatherer, these twin structures alike in the tortured warp of their heavy iron and the groan with which they strain against their hinges. All else is forbidden: small rooms, tiny antechambers, fastened doors beneath which a shadow might sometimes come to stir; through which some sound might chance to emerge, dim and oddly-modulated. Eyes Ahead, the breathless supplicant might whisper to himself in such moments; Eyes Ahead and hurry quick upon his way -

These things are forbidden to Myrken's fine, fine Marshalls, but the gallery which is the prelude to the Regent's chamber is ever a welcoming embrace.

They will navigate its interior beneath the sullen glow of dim candlelight - for there are no windows here but only shallow recesses long-since robbed of their glass - mindful all the while of the artistry which lines these vaulted ceilings, a masterpiece in flesh and iron that serves as painstakingly abraded testament to the worth of recusancy. They will navigate with strict care, for the gallery floors are a cascade of countless shifting tiles, an intricate mosaic trapped in a state of perpetual revelation. Each design folds ceaselessly into the next, and to gaze upon their complexities for too long is to imagine that isolated patterns begin to resolve into a stunning, elaborate whole -

"It is fifteen of the second hour," intones one of the dead-eyed things which flank the door at their backs. "Mind how you go,"

- but at the very edge of harmony comes a crushing collapse into formless anarchy. Killer and Gatherer, wise to such lures, will keep to the slender lane which bisects this strange tapestry, even when its tiles are a blackened oil-slick and almost too narrow to traverse. It is The Straight and Narrow Path which leads to the Regent's chamber, a room of indeterminate architecture and unyielding sterility, and a doctrine of strict and rigid focus which will carry them safely upon their way.

[Cherny]

Little attention paid to grasping hands and quavering pleas, the Gatherer having learned to be deaf, to be blind as well as mute, when he needed to. He turned his plague-mask face aside, glass lenses dull and unseeing, plodding onward with rag-wrapped feet as he pulled the heavy-laden cart. It was only when she tried to press, to touch that he responded, turning with abrupt ferocity, gnarled knuckles swiped backhand for the elfling's face; a silent rebuke, a lunge that offered more of the same before he looked back to the gates ahead and pressed on.

Saved him for what - for this?

The bitter wonders of the Regent's gallery were not for him, restless eyes having long since learned the cost of curiosity; he watched his trudging feet and the tiles beneath, head bent and bowed in nameless dread, gazing neither to the right nor to the left. The Killer walked first, the Killer always went first, and the Gatherer followed dolefully in her wake.

The cart travelled more smoothly across these tiles than over the cobbles outside, now creaking and sighing like a lost ship left to drift.

[Carnath-Emory]

The bloody heart of the Meetinghouse is a room of indeterminate architecture and unyielding sterility. It is a whisper upon the eyes, its whitewashed walls polished as smooth as the floors, and neither will admit a speck of grime; no guilty footprints to follow them in here, no place for dust, lint, soot, smut, sillage -

It's so quiet in here. So still.

As if the Regent had dedicated this chamber to the concept of inertia: one pale surface folds seamlessly into another, each step drags reluctantly behind the one before. The wall's sole feature ticks away the passage of one moment into the identical next: this clockwork masterpiece, a chaotic sprawl of interlocking gears and crooked cogs, wrought in bronze and emerald glass and cracked obsidian. Of all the wonders wrought for her by a man uncommonly generous with his gifts, this was surely the most intricate; its design was the only demand she'd ever made of him, except for the very last -

What sits the iron throne is itself a stale, held breath, strict in its angles and thinly-wrought. At its elbow, a single page awaits this Regent's hand, an unanswered question in want of fulfillment - and here they've come to supply it: Killer and Gatherer, petitioners to the throne, their approach witnessed in the Perfect silence of eyes like glass.

In the midst of a quiet that seemed to last forever, there came a little burst of light, incongruousness that did not fit in the midst of this contained expanse. "You do such good work." It presented itself first aurally, a voice spry and easy, the only sound that either Gloria or Cherny had heard that day which had any joy in it, any life, any sunshine. Why then, must he come from the shadow? Even in darkness, he lit up the room, a stark, jarring contrast to the enthroned woman he walked out to flank. His clothes were fine, the darkest of blacks with the most beautiful silver and gold embroidery. A seamstress would weep at the sight of it and a once-seamstress might weep at the sight of him, had she any tears remaining.

There again with the voice, though now there was a face to go along with it. "I'm proud. The Master Regent is as well. Just told me so the other day, she did. Good citizens, she said. Good, good citizens." He was beautiful. They had all aged in brittle, terrible ways, but there he was, shining. Preserved. His skin was pale, marred, yes, but by choice. The tattoos pulsed upon his face and arms with an energy arcane. It just made his smile all the more appealing. His hair had become black somewhere along the way, his eyes darkened to match. It just made them all the more beguiling. "Her favorites and mine."

Brown laughed and it was a dark, sour thing, one that tasted like honey to him and like the bitterest of poison to all others. There was no room for affection in those eyes, no room for compassion. This was Glenn Burnie's golden Myrken and here one could rise so far. All it cost was everything. The assassin wore that cost, a mantle of the finest fur. He stepped forth, his left hand patting the Gatherer's cheek. Upon it was an amulet, fused to his hand, melted upon it, jewelry made one with flesh, glowing as brightly as a star. His right hand pet at the Killer's bald head. Jewelry was fused to it as well, a dark triangle of onyx blended in, the skin around it turned black as night. His palm was rough and contained no succor, just a pleasant, patronizing show of acknowledgement. It spoke: You are here. I see you. I feel you. I've long since stopped caring. Gloria remembered what his eyes looked like before they became black, before she failed him because of her own arrogance, before his part in guiding the wise man of the desert into darkness, out from the darkness, before his betrayal and all the betrayals that followed.

His laughter returned as he stepped back, the tone airy but hardly mocking. One had to care to mock and Brown did not. His hand had risen, the light of the amulet becoming fire, a blistering warmth flickering up and down his arm unnaturally. Once she had claimed to know a secret merit within him. Now she just knew the flame that danced without. Within there were only ashes. He stared at his perfectly manicured nails, increasingly uninterested. "Good citizens, but are you good Myrkeners? Truly? There is something to be done but here you are, squawking at us instead of acting. Squawking. Squawking."

[Rance]

"We are as good as you allow us to be. You see? We have done what we must; we have done what is our place."

She knelt before the Regent, turning away her dull eyes, her bald head dipped to accept the assassin's delicate praise. Her eyes were meant only for the wheels of the dead cart. She measured each one of their spokes. A distraction. The walk down the hall had seemed endless -- leaving Catch-Catch-Catch there, staked, alone, her guts like burning slag for what she had done to him, for how she had used him--

In Jernoah, they said that some men weren't meant to be fathers.

She urged Cherny to bow, a quick motion of her hand, the way a sister watched out for her brother. Her only remaining hand shivered as she reached over and gently drew one of the Gatherer's hands to his side, pushed it there against his pouch to cover it. An idle motion, one unintended to draw attention. His precious eye-jewels were his and his alone; the Regent and Brown need not know about how he pilfered them, collected them, tried to see the truth in them. An innocent thing just for him.

"We are good Myrkeners," she said, tilting her chin up to the fur-wrapped rogue, the pulsing power in his palms like a blinding moon and sun all on their own, the polar opposites of one another. "Today, we killed Tennant. We -- we saw the pretty men, the fae and the Bad Governor. The Hungry will not get the people who made this place what it is. That is our task.

"Isn't it, Cherny," she said, looking to her dearest friend and his beak-nosed plaguemask, wondering how long it had been since he'd breathed the air on his own -- she could not remember, could not recall. "Isn't it?"

But she could recall other things.

Working the wrong stitches on the scarred girl. A gaping wound that spilled out maggots and sour milk, a gurgling hole in her chest that spewed worms and bad thoughts. The spear had become a copperhead snake with a gold tongue. "I can stitch her up," the once-seamstress said, her hair still black and ash, both hands still hers.

"You damn well better. You damn well better do it right, you moron, or else." Elliot tried to reach out for Niall, but the Jerno girl pushed him away.

"You touch her," Gloria said, "and you will take -- you will take that power out of her. With your touch. That will kill her for sure. You see? Let me stitch her up. Trust me, Elliot. Trust me for this."

Glenn Burnie's golden Myrken Wood was still proud and clean, except for Niall's blood on the fool's gold flagstones. Elliot stood idly by, watching Niall flinch as Gloria shakily threaded a needle, pinched it through the lips of wounded flesh, and tried to close the grievous hole in the spearwielder's chest.

She yanked the thread through the skin-holes, the string gummy with clumps of drying blood. The seamstress was two stitches in before the breathing stopped. Everything about Niall stopped.

Stitches couldn't help everything.

That betrayal was alive in her, twisting in her veins, a bad blood that she remembered only when she saw Brown and the shadow-figure of a Regent behind him. Her free hand tightened around the hilt of the killing-knife at her side, and she watched Cherny for a few more moments before she crawled to her feet, and said, "Brown," with firmness. "Squawking or not, we have done as we were supposed to. We are Marshalls. We have done what we should do.

"Yet, I cannot do what you asked me," she said, clenching the bloody knife against her breasts, never once looking at Brown as she referenced her Higher Task, a true Marshall's duty: to protect the Regent at all costs. An oath sworn in spilled milk and blood. "But if you wish to know if he is infected -- Regent, Brown -- you will have to take off his mask on your own."

The Killer looked to the Gatherer, clenching her mossy, wooden teeth, hoping he would understand.

A day like any other. It was just that she'd never be able to toss his body on the dead cart with one arm. She didn't need to. Not when he could walk perfectly fine on his own.