The man moved through Aethelberg's back streets like a shadow that had forgotten it was supposed to be silent.
His boots found the gaps between cobblestones, the patches of dirt where no sound would echo. His coat was dark, his hood pulled low, his breath measured and shallow. In his arms, wrapped in oilcloth and pressed against his chest, was the box.
'Three blocks, he thought.
'Three blocks and I'm clear.'
A shout cut through the night.
He pressed himself into a doorway. Two men, maybe three, their boots heavy on the stone, their voices low.
Enforcers.
They'd been on him since before he'd crossed into the city. He waited. The footsteps passed.
He counted to thirty and moved again.
He reached the cemetery wall. It was low, crumbling, the stones worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. He vaulted it without thinking, his body moving through the motion even as his lungs burned and his side screamed.
'When did I—'
He looked down. A shard of metal, like a throwing knife, jutted from his ribs just below his left arm. He didn't remember taking the hit.
Deciding to ignore the wound for the time being he entered into the embrace of the place where the dead slept. Tonight was especially cold and fog hung between the headstones like something alive, curling around the monuments, pooling in the hollows where the ground had settled unevenly. The man moved through it by instinct, his hand pressed to his side, his breathing a thin rasp that he tried and failed to quiet.
Ahead, he heard the rhythmic scrape of a shovel.
He stopped.
Through the fog, he could make out a figure. Tall. Broad. Standing in a pit that was already waist-deep, the mound of earth beside it growing with each slow, deliberate movement. The man wore a large hood that covered his head and a heavy robe that hung loose on his frame.
He was digging a grave.
'One grave,' the man thought.
'Big enough for two. I wonder who, a couple maybe?'
With a grunt, he pulled the spike from his side.
The pain was white, then red, then nothing. He tossed the shard aside and stepped forward.
"You the one I'm supposed to meet?"
The robed figure did not stop digging. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic, each breath matched to the swing of the shovel. The man waited. The fog swirled. The shovel rose and fell. Then he heard footsteps behind him.
Two peolpe emerged from the fog like things that had always been there, waiting for the mist to let them be seen.
The first was a shape within the shape, his features obscured, his form wavering at the edges as if the fog had claimed him and was reluctant to let him go. Some trick of the light. Or some trick of a Trait. Or an artifact. It didn't matter. The man couldn't see the face, couldn't read the eyes, couldn't tell if the person in the mist was looking at him or through him.
The second was smaller. Crooked. His left leg was shorter than his right, forcing him into a rolling, lurching gait. His face was swollen on one side, the skin stretched tight over the bone beneath. His mouth was twisted into a grin that showed teeth that did not match—some yellowed, some blackening, some broken, all of them wrong. The hunchback's grin widened as he approached.
"Oh, seems like our courier was succesful." He cackled with a voice reminiscent of something thick ubbling to the surface of whatever drain.
The man did not move.
The shrouded figure spoke. His voice was not one voice—it was many, layered over each other, a dismembered chorus that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"Who are you."
The man hesitated. Then he spoke the words he had been given a month ago as the agreed password.
The shrouded figure inclined his head. The hunchback's grin did not waver.
"You have the item?"
The man's hand tightened on the box.
"I have it."
He paused.
"But why didn't you let me go straight to Nordhelm? I've taken strange requests before, but this—passing through checkpoints across the entire northern continent to te middle of the fucking ocean outside the eastern shores of Kemet? That's not a delivery route. That's a maze."
The shrouded figure's voices folded over each other.
"Both we and our... partners... prefer not to be traced. Your journey was designed to confuse any who might be watching."
The man's jaw tightened. "And if I was captured or killed the trail would'nt lead to any of you?"
There was no response. The hunchback shuffled forward.
"Where is it? Where's the box?"
The man pulled it from beneath his coat.
It was made of skin.
He had known this, of course—he had been there when it was made and had it literally strapped to his chest on the return journey. He had tried not to look at it or think about what it was made of. But in the fog, in the cemetery, he could not avoid seeing it for what it was. Tufts of black hair sprouted from its surface here and there. Fingers—actual fingers, with teeth instead of fingernails—formed the locking mechanism. And at the top, a bloodshot eye rolled around in its socket, staring first at the courier then at the recepients.
"The woman I met," the man said, his voice strange to his own ears.
"She was... unsettling. She already had a box like this. But she transferred the contents and kept the other box. 'For sentimental reasons', or so she said."
The shrouded figure took a step forward.
The man took a step back.
"Not yet," he said.
"I want to know what's so important that my comrade had to be used as a casing for it."
The shrouded figure's voices did not change.
"oh? Are you sad about that? About your comrade being used as a living package for our item?"
The man shook his head.
"No. I don't care that he's dead. What I care about is that this request was too well-planned. Too well-executed. And above all too...bizzare. What are you going to do with whatever's in this box?"
The hunchback's face twisted.
"Stop asking questions! Hand it over!"
The man stepped back further, raising his other arm. In his hand and at the tip of a silver wand—an artifact, sleek and gleaming—a small ball of energy began to form, pulsing with light that cut through the fog.
"The Enforcers chasing me aren't far," the man said.
"I can signal them. End whatever this is, right now."
He was about to ask another question—he could feel it forming on his lips, a demand for more pay—when the hooded figure moved.
It had been standing at the grave's edge, the old shovel rising and falling, unnoticed, unremarkable. Now it rose to its full height.
It stood at about six feet. It had a wrongness about it, like the way its shoulders did not move as it walked.
It grabbed his raised arm from behind and raised him off the ground. The man tried to break free , but his attempts were about as succesful as a toddler trying to escape a grown man's grip. The thing's other hand was already closing around the box—around his other arm. It pulled and...
...The arm came free.
The man did not hear himself scream. He was on the ground, the thing kneeling on his chest, and he could not breathe, could not think, could not do anything but watch as the creature presented the box—and the arm still attached to it—to the shrouded figure.
The shrouded figure's hands came together. He waved once, a gesture that was almost gentle.
The box opened.
Inside, nestled in darkness that seemed to drink the light, were two hands facing down. They pointed at opposite directions, connected to a heart that pulsed between them, pumping blood through tubes and veins to keep them alive.
The man on the ground understood, struggled and grabbed the things robe in an attempt to get him off. Instead, the robe tore off and creature's hood fell away.
The person beneath was not a person.
It was a patchwork of different kinds of flesh, joined together by stitches, and steel, tubes and pipes and the whirring of clockwork that ticked and turned with every movement. It had no eyes—only smooth skin where eyes should have been. Its nose had been cut away, leaving a large, gaping hole that was the source of the heavy breathing.
The shrouded figure's voices spoke over the man's screaming.
"The hands of the Grand Maker. Sigmund Kilgowe."
A pause.
"They are ready to advance our plan."
The hunchback giggled. He closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and began to shuffle away.
The man tried to rise. The creature's weight was immense, crushing, absolute. He could not move. He could not breathe. He could only watch as the two figures disappeared into the fog.
Then the hunchback's voice, high and pleased:
"Giggles. Kill him."
The man's blood ran cold.
'So that's what that grave was for...'
He summoned the last of his strength and lashed out. Energy formed around the tip of the wand as a whip and caught the creature across the chest,scoring a line across its patchwork flesh. It did not react. It simply raised its fist and brought it down.
The man's hand rose instinctively to block.
Bones shattered. The wand—his wand, his only weapon—drove through his palm, through his wrist, through the meat of his forearm, until it stopped against his heart.
The creature lifted him.
He dangled there, impaled, his feet swinging uselessly beneath him. The fog was closing in. The cemetery was silent. The two figures were gone, and the box was gone, and all that was left was the thing that had been made to kill him.
His last thought, before the creature tore him apart like paper, was a promise.
'I-I'll get you for this. I-I'll—'
He did not finish as his body was torn apart as if he was a piece of paper being torn to shreds.
The creature worked in silence.
It gathered the pieces and dropped them into the pit. It found the shovel and began to cover the hole, each movement mechanical, precise, without feeling. The fog thickened around it, swallowing the cemetery, swallowing the city, swallowing everything.
For a while, the only sound was the heavy rhythm of its breathing.
Then that too receded.
And the cemetery was silent once more.