The sun did not touch the cobblestones of the Weeping Stacks. High above, the Spire of Ildaren drank the light. Its white marble flanks caught the afternoon brilliance and hoarded it like a jealous god while the lower districts were left to rot in a perpetual, bruising twilight.
Kallum Vire trudged through the sludge of the alley. The mud sucking at his boots smelled of sulfur and human waste. He kept his head low and his hood pulled tight. The damp air clung to his skin like a fever sweat.
He had returned from the depths of the world only hours ago. The grave dirt still coated his cloak. Yet the city felt more like a tomb than the crypts he had fled.
A sharp, rhythmic agony spiked beneath the heavy linen wrappings on his left forearm. It was not the heat of an infection. It was a freezing, vibration. The brand carved into his flesh was reacting to the misery of the Gloom. It pulsed in time with the coughing of the sick and the dripping of the condensation from the leaning tenements above.
He gritted his teeth against the nausea. He forced one foot in front of the other. He had to reach the chapel. He had to find Father Solen before the city swallowed him whole.
Kallum turned into Market Row. The narrow thoroughfare was a choked vein of grey bodies. Laborers with hollow cheeks pushed carts of ash-dusted grain. Beggars sat in the gutters and stared at nothing with milky, vacant eyes.
Then the sound hit him.
It was not a noise that entered through the ears. It was a psychic pressure that scraped against the back of the skull. In the wilds, the song of the Abyss was a shriek that shattered bone. Here in the city, the stone walls fractured the song into a million jagged whispers.
...she put the poison in the well...
...the eyes in the wall are blinking...
...skin them before they wake up...
A woman near a vegetable stall clawed at her own neck. Her fingernails dug red furrows into her skin as she muttered a frantic, breathless prayer to the Order. A merchant across the way watched her. He did not look at her with sympathy. He gripped a paring knife with white-knuckled intensity. He looked at her as if she were a rabid dog that needed to be put down.
The locals called it the Whispering Sickness. The priests called it a test of faith. Kallum felt the scar on his arm tighten like a constrictor snake. He knew the truth. It was the sound of the world unraveling.
He stepped into the recess of a boarded-up storefront. He needed to disappear. If they found him now with the stolen obsidian artifact in his satchel and the heretical mark on his arm, death would be a mercy. They would drag him back to the laboratories beneath the Spire. They would strap him back onto the black altar.
A silence slammed into the market.
It was sudden and absolute. The muttering ceased. The haggling stopped. The silence spread outward from the northern archway like frost flashing across a pond.
Kallum stopped breathing. He pressed his spine against the rotting wood of the doorframe.
The crowd parted. They did not run. They dissolved. Men and women shrank against the walls and averted their gazes to the muck. They made themselves small. They made themselves nothing.
Two figures glided down the center of the mud-slicked street.
They wore tunics of slate-grey wool that bore no insignia. They carried no weapons. Their faces were terrifyingly smooth and devoid of any memorable feature. They looked like unformed clay waiting for a sculptor. They moved in perfect, fluid unison. Their boots made no sound on the stones.
Watchers.
They were the eyes of the Vigilants. They were the shepherds of the Order's flock.
Kallum willed his heart to stop hammering against his ribs. He willed the cold fire in his arm to sleep. The obsidian shard in his bag felt heavy. It felt like a dense, dead star pulling him down.
The Watchers stopped ten feet away. One of them turned his head toward a tenement doorway. The movement was mechanical. He raised a pale hand and pointed a single finger.
Two Wall Sentinels erupted from the shadows of the building. They were mountains of blackened steel plate. They dragged a man between them. He was a baker Kallum recognized from his youth. He was a kind man who used to sneak sweet buns to the acolytes.
The baker was not kind now. He was a portrait of primal terror.
He thrashed against the iron grip of the knights. A gag of rough cloth was stuffed into his mouth. His eyes bulged from their sockets. Veins corded on his forehead as he tried to scream. The only sound was a wet, muffled choking.
The Watcher nodded.
The Sentinels did not drag the baker toward the prison wagons. They dragged him toward a narrow side alley that sloped sharply downward. They were taking him to the sewer grates. They were taking him to the Undercity.
The crowd watched. A mother turned her child's face into her skirts. A laborer stared intently at a crate of rotting cabbage. No one moved. No one spoke. To witness the culling was to invite it.
A surge of black, freezing rage detonated in Kallum's chest.
It was not the hot rush of adrenaline. It was the cold, crystalline sensation of judgment. The scar on his arm flared to life beneath the bandages. Umber light bled through the fabric. The veins in his hand turned black.
The power demanded release. It screamed at him to strike. It urged him to shatter the Watchers into dust and balance the scales of this injustice. The air around his fist dropped in temperature until frost formed on his knuckles.
No.
Kallum forced the breath from his lungs. He visualized a heavy iron door slamming shut in his mind. He wrestled the cold power back into the cage of his bones. The effort left him trembling. Sweat turned to ice on his brow.
Not here. Not yet.
The Watchers turned and melted into the fog. The Sentinels vanished into the dark with their prize. The baker was gone. He had been erased from the ledger of the living.
The market exhaled. The noise returned. It was a nervous, skittering sound. The people went back to their business with desperate, terrifying normalcy.
Kallum pushed himself off the wall. His legs felt like lead. He cut through a narrow, refuse-choked alleyway to escape the main road.
He moved deeper into the labyrinth of the lower wards. The architecture here was skeletal. The wooden beams of the buildings poked through the crumbling plaster like the ribs of a starving animal. He was heading for a place the Order had forgotten.
It was a small chapel tucked between a tannery and a collapsed warehouse. The facade was stained black with decades of industrial soot.
This was where Father Solen used to bring him. It had been their sanctuary away from the rigid eyes of the academy. Solen had called it a place of quiet reflection. Kallum now knew it for what it really was. It was a blind spot. It was a place where the Order's mask slipped.
He reached the door. It hung slightly ajar on rusted hinges. A draft of cold, stale air breathed out from the darkness within. It smelled of dried blood and sweet, cloying incense.
Kallum reached into his satchel. His fingers brushed the vibrating surface of the artifact. It hummed against his skin. It was a hungry, silent note that promised the end of all things.
He pushed the door open. The shadows swallowed him whole.