Rated MA26+ | Horror Fantasy | Graphic Violence
The second name on the list is a person named Joret who sells enchanted lamp oil out of a shop on the Crescent Street market and has been, for the past two years, providing storage facilities for restricted material shipments moving through the lower port. She is forty-one. She has two daughters. She keeps a ledger in a false-bottomed drawer beneath the shop counter that contains, among other things, the names of everyone she has done secondary business with and the dates and quantities of each transaction.
She burns the ledger on the morning of the fifteenth. She does this in the alley behind the shop in a clay pot she uses for garden waste, feeding the pages in one at a time, making sure each one catches fully before adding the next. She is thorough about it. She has been in this business long enough to know that the only ledger that can't be used against you is ash.
She goes back inside and opens the shop and sells lamp oil to seven customers across the morning and is in the middle of explaining the difference between standard enchanted oil and the extended-burn variety to an elderly gramps who cannot decide when the door opens.
She looks up.
Lord Fenrath stands in the doorway of the lamp oil shop the way he stands everywhere — with the specific quality of a thing that has decided to be present and made no other concessions to the space. White coat. Grey eyes moving across the shop with the comprehensive sweep of someone cataloguing exits and contents simultaneously before they've said a word.
The elderly gramps looks at Fenrath. He looks at Joret. He puts down the sample bottle he was holding and leaves without buying anything. People do this around Lord Fenrath. They do it before they understand why.
Joret puts both hands flat on the counter. "I burned it," she says. "This morning. Everything. There's nothing here."
"I know," Fenrath says. He steps inside and the door closes behind him, which it does without him touching it, which is the first indication to the two remaining customers in the shop that they should leave, and they do, quickly, in the way that bodies move when minds haven't caught up yet but are about to.
The shop is empty except for the two of them and the smell of enchanted oil and the faint residual smell of ash that Joret has been trying not to notice on her own hands since this morning.
"I haven't told anyone," she says. "Whatever Tane said to you about me I haven't passed anything on. I have daughters. I don't take risks that come home."
"I believe you," Fenrath says. He walks to the counter and looks at the display of oil varieties with the same flat attention he gives everything. He picks up a bottle of the extended-burn variety and reads the label.
"Then what do you want," Joret says.
"To confirm it," he says. "The same reason I spoke to Cress. The same reason I'll speak to the others." He sets the bottle down precisely where he picked it up from. "I want to hear it said. People answer differently when they think the conversation is optional."
"And if the answer is wrong." He looks at her across the counter. "The answer isn't wrong." She holds his gaze for three full seconds, which is longer than most people manage. "Then we're done," she says. "You confirmed it. You can leave."
Something shifts in the quality of the stillness he produces. Not movement. Not expression. Something in the grey eyes that is not threat and is not warmth and is not anything she has a name for — the look of something assessing whether the conversation has genuinely reached its end or whether there is one more piece of it.
"You burned the ledger this morning," he says. "Yes." "Before you heard from Tane. Before you had any specific reason to." "I had general reasons," she says. "I always have general reasons. This is a general-reasons business."
A pause. "Yes," he says. "We're done."
He walks to the door and opens it and steps back out into Crescent Street and the door closes behind him and Joret stands at her counter with her hands still flat on the surface and breathes in the careful specific way of someone waiting to be certain the worst thing is finished before she lets herself feel any of it.
She is alive. She is going to stay alive. She decides on the spot that she is also going to stay out of secondary business for the rest of however long she has, which looking at the morning she has just survived appears to be a significant and valuable amount of time.
She opens the shop back up. The elderly gramps comes back twenty minutes later for the extended-burn oil. She sells it to him at a discount she cannot fully explain and spends the rest of the afternoon being extremely kind to everyone who comes through the door.
The third name does not go the same way.
His name is Bretto. He is thirty-six, and he has been in the restricted materials business since he was nineteen, and in seventeen years he has developed the specific overconfidence of someone who has survived long enough to believe that survival is a skill rather than a variable. He received word from Tane four days ago. He received word from the second-hand account of Cress's canal bridge encounter two days ago. He has spent those four days not burning his ledger and not leaving the city and not doing any of the things that the evidence available to him suggests he should do.
What he has done instead is hire four people.
He has hired them specifically and expensively, from a contact who provides this kind of service to people in exactly his situation, and he has put them in the building he operates from and told them what they are looking for and told them not to hesitate when they find it.
This decision reflects a failure to understand the situation he is in that is so complete it is almost architectural.
Mildern finds out about Bretto on the morning of the seventeenth from an investigator's field report that is filed at the sixth bell and reaches his desk at the seventh and which he reads standing up because he reads urgent things standing up, a habit he has never examined.
The report is brief. The building on Ash Canal where Bretto operates. All four of the hired people. Bretto himself. The structural damage to the building's interior is described in four lines and the description is the kind that gets shorter when the writer runs out of adequate language rather than when there is less to describe.
Mildern stands at his desk for a moment. Saku comes out of his room already suited, boots on, and reads Mildern's face. "How many," Saku says. "Five," Mildern says. Saku is quiet. "He tried to fight it."
"He hired people to fight it," Mildern says. "Which is different." "Why different."
"Because the people he hired didn't know what they were walking into," Mildern says. "He knew. He made a calculation and it cost four people who made a different calculation that was based on wrong information."
Saku sits down at the table slowly. He puts his hands flat on the surface the way Mildern does when he is steadying himself against something. "What does the building look like," Saku says.
Mildern looks at him for a moment. Then he sits down across from him. "The report describes the eastern wall as having collapsed inward. Not outward. Inward, which means the force came from outside the building moving in. The four hired people were positioned inside. The collapse caught three of them." He pauses. "The fourth one tried to run. The report found him in the stairwell on the second floor."
"Found him how," Saku says. Mildern doesn't answer that. "Mildern," Saku says. "Not intact," Mildern says. "That's all I'll say."
Saku looks at the table. He is eleven and he has crossed between worlds on the worst night of his life and survived three years of things that would have ended most people, and Mildern watches him process this with the specific precision of a person who has learned that the world is capable of producing information that takes time to absorb and that absorbing it correctly is more useful than absorbing it quickly.
"Bretto," Saku says.
"Found in the center of the ground floor," Mildern says. "The report uses the word unrecognizable." He looks at his hands. "He had seventeen years in this business. He survived seventeen years by being smart enough. He stopped being smart enough on the day he decided that hired people could stop something that left handprints four inches into stone."
"Did it say anything," Saku says. "Like the warehouse."
"The report has one survivor," Mildern says. "A person who was in the building for unrelated reasons. Legitimate tenant. Second floor." He picks up the report and reads the relevant line. "She states that the entity spoke once while it was in the building. She couldn't make out most of it. She identified one word." He sets the report down. "Raito."
Saku looks at him. "Again." "Again," Mildern says.
They sit there in the quiet of the suite for a while. The city outside is going about the morning, the bells and carts and voices of a place that does not know what moved through one of its canal-side buildings in the dark, and the distance between that ordinary noise and the information sitting on Mildern's desk feels, this morning, much smaller than it usually does.
He visits the building on Ash Canal.
He does it again alone. He does it again before the Council update, before the file notation, before the institutional machinery that will eventually process this as evidence and data and investigation points. He stands in the wreckage of the ground floor and looks at the inward-collapsed eastern wall and the things the report described in its four lines of adequate language and he makes himself look at all of it, the way he made himself look at the warehouse, because looking is part of understanding.
He stands in the stairwell on the second floor for a long time.
He thinks about what it means that the name being said is always Raito. He thinks about a king who was killed believing a friend had ordered it. He thinks about the specific shape of a grief that has been sustained for over a decade inside a frame of dark alloy with an immortal engine at its center, and about what that grief does to a person — what it does to the thing a person becomes when the grief is never allowed to find its true origin.
He thinks about his own kingdom. About his father's face. About the night the fires started and the things he has carried since then that belong to him through bloodline and not through choice.
He walks back down the stairs and out through the building's ruined entrance and onto Ash Canal and stands in the morning air. The canal is doing what canals do — moving, indifferent, carrying the city's water and the city's waste and the city's reflection without distinction.
He stands there for a while. Then he walks back to the suite. He is at his desk at the second bell of the night when the knock comes. Three times. Measured. Unhurried. The knock of something that has decided to announce itself as a courtesy rather than a requirement.
Mildern is standing before the echo of the third knock finishes. He looks at Saku's door — closed, no light under it. He looks at the front door. He looks at the distance between the two and makes a calculation.
He opens the door himself.
Lord Fenrath stands in the corridor of the fourth floor of a residential building in the Noble City and looks at Mildern with grey eyes that give nothing back and his hands at his sides and his white coat, which is slightly worse for wear than it was three weeks ago, the embroidery at the right shoulder seam pulled loose, the fabric carrying a tension at the stomach that has nothing to do with how it was tailored.
They look at each other.
"Prince Yazukaze," Fenrath says. His voice is the same temperature it always is. Ambient. The temperature of air that hasn't been breathed in a while. "You've been looking for me. I thought this would be more efficient."
Mildern stands in the doorway with his hand on the frame and his feet on the threshold and he does not step back because stepping back is the first thing you do when you are afraid and he has decided that he is not going to do the first thing tonight.
"You're not here to kill me," Mildern says. "If you were you'd have come through the wall." The smallest shift at the corner of Fenrath's mouth. Not a smile. An acknowledgment. "No," he says. "Not tonight."
"Then what."
"I want you to know that I'm here," Fenrath says. "I want you to know what is coming. I want you to have time to understand what it means before it arrives." He holds Mildern's gaze with those flat grey eyes. "A person I knew once told me that the worst thing you can do to an enemy is make them wait. He was right about most things."
"Who told you that," Mildern says.
Something moves in the grey eyes. Just for a moment. Something underneath the ambient temperature of them, something that is warmer and older and belongs to a different person than the one standing in the corridor. "Someone who is dead," Fenrath says.
"Most of the people connected to this are dead," Mildern says. "That's the pattern."
"Yes," Fenrath says. "It is." A pause. The corridor is quiet. The building around them has the specific nighttime silence of people asleep in rooms on either side of a hallway where something is happening that they are not aware of.
"You killed five people on Ash Canal," Mildern says.
"Four of them chose to be there," Fenrath says. "They were paid to choose it. The fifth chose wrong associations and didn't choose fast enough when the associations became dangerous."
"That's not a justification." "It's not meant to be one," Fenrath says. "It's a description." He tilts his head a fraction. "I don't offer justifications. I explain calculations."
"And the calculation that brings you to my door tonight," Mildern says.
"Is that you are the last of the Yazukaze name," Fenrath says. "And the end of the Yazukaze name is what has been owed for a long time. I want you to know it's coming. I want you to know that you can't stop it. Not the way you stopped other things." Something shifts in the quality of the stillness he creates. The ambient temperature of him drops. "Whatever you did to the one before. Whatever chains and tricks and clever choices. Those don't apply to this."
"Tell me something," Mildern says. Fenrath waits. "In the warehouse. In the building on Ash Canal. You said a name." Mildern holds his gaze. "Raito." The corridor goes very quiet.
The fracture lines begin at Fenrath's hands without the rest of him moving at all. Just the hands. Just the seams parting along the familiar amber-orange lines, the light burning inward, the surface showing what is underneath it. His grey eyes go amber. He does not move. He stands in the corridor with the fracture lines spreading slowly up his wrists and his eyes going amber and his face doing nothing at all.
"Don't say that name," he says. His voice carries one other voice beneath it. Just one. Low, carrying, the voice of a person who used to speak and have rooms go quiet.
"Raito Hazuki," Mildern says. "Your son." The amber eyes go white.
The fractures spread across his face and his hands and the corridor light shifts with it, the ordinary residential hallway going wrong-lit, orange-white and deep, and Mildern stands in the doorway and does not step back.
The multiple voices come then, all of them at once, the person saying a name she doesn't finish and the young person saying in short sharp syllables asking to be let go and the elderly dignified voice and underneath all of them the king's, and what they say together is not a word. It is a sound. The sound of something that has been carrying a weight for a very long time in a heart that was built to carry it and is carrying it still.
Then it stops. The fractures seal. The eyes go grey. The corridor is ordinary again. Fenrath stands in it and breathes in the specific careful way of something that has just been somewhere it did not intend to go.
"Tell the child," he says, quietly, without looking away, "to stay out of marketplaces."
He turns and walks to the end of the corridor and turns the corner and is gone. His footsteps are measured and quiet. They stop being audible before he reaches the stairs.
Mildern stands in the doorway for a moment. Then he closes it. From the other room, Saku's voice. Completely awake. "I heard all of that." "I know," Mildern says. "He knew my name."
"He knows everything about this building," Mildern says. "He's been watching for weeks." He leans his back against the door. "Come out here."
Saku comes out. He looks at Mildern. Mildern looks at him. The lamp between them throws the same ordinary light it always throws and the suite is the same suite it always is and the city is dark and quiet outside the window and none of that makes the weight of the last ten minutes any lighter.
"When I said Raito's name," Mildern says. "It almost changed. In the corridor. Without deciding to." "What does that mean," Saku says. "It means the grief is still in there," Mildern says. "Underneath everything Hanuto built around it. The king is still in there."
Saku looks at him for a long moment. "We're not running," Saku says. Not a question. "No," Mildern says. "We're not running."
Saku nods once. He goes back to his room. The door closes. Mildern stays leaning against the front door for a while in the quiet, thinking about a dead king in a corridor who said his son's name once in the voice that used to be a person's and then sealed it back up behind grey eyes and walked away, and about the distance between a weapon aimed at him and a person trapped inside it, and about whether those two things can ever, at this distance and this late, be separated from each other.
He doesn't know yet. He sits down at his desk and picks up his pen and starts writing, which is what he does when he needs to think and thinking alone isn't enough.
TO BE CONTINUED — EPISODE SIX: "The King's Grief" - NATION OF GAMATOSE ARC | Volume II | Rated MA26+