Mildew and Misdeeds

Synopsis

The company came out of Vigil with an answer nobody had asked for plainly. Koa had prayed at Vëné’s grave, and a disc of yellow-white flame the width of a wagon wheel had spoken inside his skull and named itself an Iophanite, sent by the Martyr. It told him three things: alchemy is the key to the souls drowned under Haudh-Gwenn; the Martyr and her brother Nancáro are themselves caught in the curse, and she will stand with the company when it falls; and Gwenivere Velmont’s sickness is a nightmare of her own making. Aldo and Mikhail were skeptical, most of it being confirmation of what they suspected already. What they conceded was that Koa could not have invented the word Iophanite, and that the last part was new. Then they went three ways for five weeks, with Ridh as the meeting place and Wraithblade Keep as what came after.

Mikhail stayed for the library, where a complete Mól Encyclopædia sits beside shelves of untranslated Taal and Venessa Hasek gave him the run of both. The Wraithblade’s curse is not an aura over a room. It hunts appetite, fastening on the hungriest man present and seeding outward along everyone beholden to him, which is why the goblins who once held the keep fought as one body. The blade leaves only hand to hand, through bloodshed, and always comes back. It was broken once (a hundred men, a hundred hammers, a hundred days, and the hammering killed them), and it is not broken now. Curses resurge, and they resurge at the keep. The Twisted Grove’s was broken unevenly three times, yielding a year of unnatural green and twice a rot through the forest, from which Mikhail drew the rule that a boundary between planes must be severed level or the recoil swings wild. Beneath all of it sat the sacrilege: the Mól held that a soul joins the inner planes at death, and an old text names as blasphemy the forcing of one there early (into fire, that is, or into goo). The clan that forced it was Saytar, the emperor’s own, rulers and alchemists both, opposed across every clan line by a religious order that named it heresy. Find the Saytar laboratories and you find the next step.

Aldo went into Haudh-Gwenn wearing another man’s face, ate Dwayne’s second breakfast to hold the joke together, pulled in Casper, and spent four weeks reading the ring around Beltran. The bait-tavern’s hidden passage has one regular user, a mild-featured half-orc whose face Aldo now knows well enough to wear. Tazrih keeps Ashtara Walnut’s old house and the city’s thieves in one hand. Zarif, a Hobbin brought in by Beltran himself, runs a quiet martial law over the guard and is the only one with clear eyes: a servant, not a believer, and therefore purchasable. The clerk Davi Solt is too frightened to leave and too complicit to stay clean; Rainan works blackmail through proxies and is worse hollowed than Whent ever was. Six carry the sunken eyes; Boras and Beltran do not. Beltran himself, seen close: barely past thirty, hunter-green officer’s coat, hair slicked back, the flat gaze of a man who has never wanted anything he could not take, the Khopesh never off him.

Koa reached The Crack half-dead from the road and found Arthur Freym already there, come south on their letter to keep the company’s books and carrying news out of Loshev: armored hobgoblins with silver-sheened weapons had swept the town chasing the Birdman rumor and claiming Mól relics as their birthright, put Kurvroc on the ground, and stared down Tariq without a blow struck. Then Koa told Gwen what the Iophanite had said of her, and she heard only that she was to blame for the disease that killed her mother and unmade her father, and withdrew. Days later Ashanti could not find the sample of the ooze Mikhail had left. Koa searched the camp with Leon’s blessing and turned up nothing until the empty vial surfaced among Gwen’s belongings in his own room, with specific compounds (not reagents, compounds) gone from her kit. She denied it, and he believed her, which was the puzzle. Wearing the Crown of Echoing Steel for the clarity it lends, he read the prophecy again and found two sentences in it rather than one: the sickness is not her fault, and it cannot be cured until a nightmare of her own making is undone. She had been eating the ooze, and for long enough that it may be the only reason her Magiauredo has not killed her yet. He apologized for the first truth, held to the second, and talked her into staying at The Crack for a supervised withdrawal rather than going back to a river thick with the stuff. She agreed, and called herself chained there by circumstance.