Matabar

Book II. Chapter 30 - The Long Night (Part 1)

When Din and Alexander stepped forward, Milar suddenly spoke up.

“Stop.” He turned and took out four pairs of sturdy work gloves from the trunk. The tough leather was of clearly anomalous origin, and along with the gloves, he handed them four blue cloaks of the same material. “Have you really been away from the Night Folk district for so long that you’ve forgotten all the protocols?”

Din and Alexander glanced at each other and shrugged in unison. It wasn’t so much that they’d forgotten and more that they’d decided to ignore them. Ardi, however, had no intention of brushing off recommendations for conducting operations within a society of vampires, werewolves, mutants, and Sleeping Spirits only knew what else.

Too many of the inhabitants here had claws, fangs, or even saliva that, if not outright deadly, could still inflict a host of truly unforgettable miseries upon someone. According to protocol, the most vulnerable zones had to be covered: hands, neck and back.

After tugging on the gloves, they spent a little while fussing with the fasteners of the heavy cloaks. These garments were incredibly dense and weighty, likely possessing the same properties as the far lighter (and thus incredibly expensive) suit Ardi had used on the airship at the start of the summer.

“Only the ones who are asleep won’t be able to see us coming now,” Din remarked, only half joking.

“The Night Folk hardly sleep at all,” Ardi promptly reminded him.

Three pairs of eyes turned toward him in clear disapproval. Ardi merely shrugged, then opened his grimoire to the needed page. If it came down to it, he intended to test the basic prototype of his Ice Dolls. When he’d used it at the testing grounds in the former “Aversky Stables,” this spell he’d invented had behaved in… curious ways.

Din and Alexander turned away and exchanged a few curt phrases. This was the kind of communication that only two veteran operatives who’d risked their lives together dozens of times in the most horrid and perilous situations—resulting in the kind of tales even drunk tavern goers wouldn’t dare whisper about—could possibly understand. Milar, meanwhile, cast a sidelong look toward Ardi’s grimoire.

“If you start smashing everything again, Magister, do try not to accidentally eliminate our potential informant,” Milar said. It was half-request, and half-order.

Ardan swept his gaze over the crooked shanties, each of which was propping up its neighbor with sagging, lopsided walls. Six months ago, he might have started pondering that old, philosophical but pointless question: how was it that most inhabitants of the Imperial capital’s outskirts ended up living in such squalor? Most of them surely hadn’t done anything to deserve this lot in life and were guilty of nothing except drawing an unlucky ticket when it came to fate. Perhaps they’d done so at birth, or perhaps later.

But right now… Ardan wanted to hurry up and finish their business here so he could go home—back to Tess, hot cocoa, his books on Star Magic, and his own research.

“All your soul-searching will fade away with the years. Trust me on that.” Arkar’s words rang out in his head.

Ardi couldn’t even argue with him. Not anymore. What did that say about Ardan? Probably nothing good, but… Those were thoughts for another day.

There were more pressing matters at hand.

“Do we even know who the informant is here?” Ardi asked.

“That’s exactly the point, Magister,” Milar answered, lifting his revolver and resting his saber against his leg. “We don’t. Which means that you shouldn’t start imitating Mshisty. At least not right away.”

“Maybe we ought to wear gloves when talking to him, too?”

Now it was Din’s turn to get doubtful looks from the others. He quickly clarified:

“Mshisty,” the Ralian tracker drawled. “What if he bit our mage here on that train a month ago?”

“Din,” Alexander said warningly.

“What, Alexander?”

“Shut up.”

“You’re always like this,” Din sulked, and despite being enormous by human standards, he suddenly looked as petulant as a child. He popped another hard candy into his mouth, sulking as he sucked on it.

They moved cautiously along the broken, makeshift sidewalks that were sometimes nothing more than fragments of warehouse pallets stuck straight into the wet ground, or bits of concrete and brick poking out here and there. The road itself had been sprinkled with gravel, but that did little to save it from the viscous mud and slush.

Ardi allowed himself a small smile at how Din, Alexander and Milar were awkwardly splashing and squelching around in their regulation boots as they made their way through the rising clods of wet, matted earth. As someone from Evergale and the Foothills Province, the young man was far more accustomed to such conditions than to the polished asphalt and clean cobblestones of the capital.

Every now and then, shutters banged overhead. The windows were often covered with rags or moth-eaten blankets in place of glass. Occasionally, somewhere in the distance, a particularly loud dog would start to howl. And there was also the smell—this place stank. Sometimes it reeked of food—mostly meat, and cheap cuts at that. He detected the scent of liver, heart, lungs, trimmings of all sorts. It was everything one would buy in Tendari to use for soup stock or ground meat. But here…

Here, people (and not-quite-people) did their best to survive and eke out some comfort. Even in a place this forlorn, folks tried to improve their lot, to make life a little more comfortable, just a touch more bearable. Not for themselves, but for those who would come after them.

Ardi noticed their footprints in the mud as well—small footprints with torn soles.

The young man sighed and shook his head.

Perhaps Arkar was right. Perhaps Ardan would finally stop pondering the way the world worked one day. But that was clearly not today.

“Milar, why is everything here so…?” Ardi trailed off, searching for the right word.

“Because, Magister, the Night Folk are no longer being exterminated,” Milar responded so swiftly that it was as if he’d been expecting that very question. “A mere eighty years ago, they were forbidden not just from living here—they were not allowed to live anywhere, period.”

Somewhere, a rusty door hinge creaked, and in an instant, three revolvers and the head of Ardi’s staff were all aimed at the face of a woman, or rather, someone who had once been a woman and was now a vampire. She was pale, with patches of skin that had peeled away to reveal yellow, broken teeth and fangs that were far from human and didn’t even resemble animal fangs. Instead of hair, clumps of something that looked like the threads of cheap fabric hung from her scalp. A roughspun robe made from a similar material—or perhaps stitched-together burlap sacks—covered her crooked body, which was marked by black, crusty sores.

She was a far cry from the groomed, doll-like appearance of Cassara or those newly-made vampires that the Spiders had employed. The dead, fish-like stare of her blood-red eyes showed not a glimmer of emotion—only the observer’s own imagination could project a hint of apathy onto them.

She edged forward a little, just enough to display the iron muzzle that covered her from chin to nose, engraved with several intricate, miniature seals that had delayed actions built into them.

Milar shook his head and lowered his revolver. The operatives followed suit, holstering their own weapons. The vampire woman silently withdrew into the darkness, pulling the creaking door closed behind her.

“Think of this place as a warehouse full of discarded weapons,” Milar hissed through clenched teeth. “Or as shrapnel left over from the War of the Founding of the Empire, and from everything that happened when your great-grandfather and the Dark Lord rampaged across the country.”

They pressed on, going deeper into the tangle of narrow alleyways, each one a twin of the last. They all had the same mud, the same stale reek of offal and old blood—mostly pig’s blood. Conclave pamphlets often wryly noted the biological similarity between pigs and humans—the second favorite talking point of the radical Firstborn, right after the idea that the human race had descended from apes.

“Alright, I understand why there are vampires here,” Ardi conceded. “But werewolves… They simply inherited their curse. It’s not like they chose it.”

In total, there were three types of werewolves in the world. Natural werewolves, those whose ancestors had, long ago, been affected by the special influence of the Ley Lines and had then passed those traits down through blood. They could shift into animal form at will, retaining their reason and fully transforming their bodies. They lived in two worlds at once—the world of humans and that of beasts. There weren’t many of them, and they lived mostly in Armondo, Scaidavin and Urdavan. They tended to be a peaceful people who stuck to their packs and rarely interacted with the outside world.

Then there were the Cursed—those whose ancestors had been cursed by the Aean’Hane ages ago and infused with a bestial nature. They had no control over their transformations and were slaves to the lunar cycle. Their form wouldn’t change completely; they’d get stuck halfway between beast and humanoid. They possessed incredible strength and even greater aggression, and were almost completely devoid of conscience or any morality when transformed. Over the centuries, they’d spread across the world, passing the curse down with every new generation.

And the final type, which Ardan had only learned about at the Grand, were the products of Star Magic and Chimerization. During the war with Ectassus, human nations had attempted to recreate the Aean’Hane’s werewolf curse with their own magic, trying to make their werewolves more powerful, resistant to magic, and so on. It was said that they’d had some success, but the fortress where the experiments had taken place was reduced to dust by a group of Aean’Hane. The secret of creating Star-born werewolves was lost, and almost all of them perished in the war. The survivors and their families hid their existence so diligently that, over the centuries, they became little more than myth and legend.

And it was precisely a Star-born werewolf that he and Arkar had encountered half a year ago. It was highly unlikely that any such being lived here, in the Night Folk quarter, for the simple reason that they were virtually impossible to distinguish from ordinary humans, and none remained within the Empire, at least officially. So, that left only the Cursed kind.

“They do have a choice,” Milar said, tapping his saber against the iron heel of his boot every now and then, producing a distinctive, ringing clang with each step. “Same as the mutants. Either serve the Empire, or live here.”

For some reason, Ardi was reminded of the choice that had been given to Aror’s eleven disciples.

“Those who choose not to serve live here,” the captain continued. “It’s their own decision, Ard. And believe me—we have nothing better to offer them. They’re too dangerous. Too unpredictable. And it’s too easy for them to fall victim to their instincts, which usually results in innocent people ending up as someone’s breakfast.”

When yet another strange sound echoed somewhere in the distance, Ardan finally struck his staff against the ground. At once, the translucent discs of an Orlovsky’s Shield spell whirled into existence around him.

“What about Alla Tantov, Lieutenant Kornosskiy, or that mutant who works for the Ragman?” He asked, watching the oily lamplight bend and refract through the protective discs.

“For any rule, there are exceptions, Magister,” Milar answered evasively. Probably not because he was unwilling to share the truth, but because he himself didn’t know it. And what good would it do him anyway—he was an investigator by trade, one who used to deal with tracking down terrorists and serial killers. And no matter how black their souls or perverse their motives, those criminals were still ordinary humans or Firstborn. Not creations of the dark side of Star Magic or the art of the Aean’Hane.

“We’re here,” Alexander finally announced. Apparently, his colleagues did know where they were going after all.

They halted in front of what was, if not the largest “house” on the street, then certainly the sturdiest, though similar structures were visible farther down. Actual glass could be seen in the painted window frames—cloudy, perhaps, but still real—and the glow of old but well-kept oil lamps shone from within. Some spots were even covered with wallpaper in a whimsical daisy pattern. The porch was askew, yes, but it could still put to shame some of the other constructions in this strange and somewhat dreadful neighborhood. Only upon closer inspection did it become clear that the bricks in the walls were all mismatched, with different colors, textures, and even sizes. The gaps in between them were packed with a mix of tar, pitch, and hempen ship’s rope.

Someone had initially hung the front door backwards, which had left the handle on the hinge side. Instead of rehanging it, they’d simply made a hole with a saw and attached another handle on the correct side. And so it remained to this day—scuffed and made of the cheapest timber, the kind used for scaffolding and crates. It likely couldn’t keep out an unwanted guest, nor the weather. And considering where this house stood, bad weather probably visited more often and more viciously than any unwelcome person.

Before they could even climb the steps, the rusted hinges let out a screech that sounded like the voiceless, drunken wailing of a bar singer. The door swung open, and… the master of this colorful little domicile—colorful by local standards, anyway—appeared in the doorway.

He wore blue sailcloth pants and a white sailor’s shirt from the previous century. It was as long as a nightgown, with no buttons and left hanging open. The shirt was tucked into the pants, which were held up not by an ordinary belt, but by a broad, woven red sash dangling at his right hip. In the stranger’s hand was the cheapest whiskey one could possibly find on sale. Ardi was no expert, but living above a jazz bar had given him ample chance to learn… various things.

Ardi did not take long to figure out that this was a Cursed werewolf. Not only was the man five centimeters taller than even him, he was also much broader in the shoulders than Alexander. However, it wasn’t so much his towering build that gave him away, but his face, which possessed a bizarre, contradictory and unnatural fusion of features.

The human features melded with the animalistic ones. Fur that had replaced his hair, or was perhaps functioning as his hair, ran down from the top of this person’s head, along his temples, and then merged into splayed sideburns that flared out into a shaggy beard. Above that beard, sharp fangs glinted like steel in a jaw locked in a permanent, snarling grin. Broad ears, resembling a lynx’s tufted ears, or perhaps a bat’s, jutted out to the sides. And the eyes—yellow, inhuman eyes—were slightly sunken in their angular sockets, topped by eyebrows that hung in tufts reminiscent of a lynx’s once more.

This was definitely a Cursed werewolf. The closer the full moon got, the more their bestial features would manifest. And it wasn’t only their appearance—as the Eye of the Spirit of the Night burned ever brighter in the sky, the werewolf’s very nature underwent a profound transformation as well.

“Cloaks,” a dry, creaking voice noted. It was as rusty as the hinges, and just as unfriendly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Without waiting for an answer, the werewolf brought the bottle to his lips, his fangs clinking unpleasantly against the glass. A viscous liquid—resembling anything but actual alcohol—trickled down his beard. It was no wonder that Arkar had warned Ardi about how drinking such swill was a sure path to blindness and worse.

“Gostomor Klavishev,” Milar announced, stepping forward. He was holding his revolver and saber at the ready, positioned so he could shoot or slash at a moment’s notice. Alexander and Din moved the same way, muscles taut, weapons poised.

The air reeked not only of spirits, but also tension. Judging by the twitch of the werewolf’s nostrils, Ardi wasn’t the only one who’d sensed it.

“I’d ask for your name, boy,” the werewolf rasped, “but I don’t really give a fuck.” He took another swig of his brew and then, shoving off the doorframe, turned and wandered back into the house without a backward glance.

He didn’t close the door behind him.

Milar gave a terse nod, indicating that they should follow him into what barely passed for a living room. It was a small room with scuffed reed mats covering the floor. Various skulls and horns from anomalous beasts hung on the walls. In a makeshift hearth, a pigeon was roasting on a spit—not a wild wood pigeon, but a plain city pigeon, the kind with more parasites and worms than meat on it.

None of the Cloaks, Ardi included, was fazed in the slightest. They had seen worse than this.

Gostomor plopped himself into the only armchair, a piece of furniture that looked like it had survived a trash heap, the Fatian Massacre, and several Emperors’ reigns. His bare, filthy feet—half-paws, really—he propped up conspicuously on a stool, leaving no other place in the room to sit that wouldn’t make them risk contracting an entire bouquet of hygiene-related illnesses.

“Spit it out, then,” the werewolf snarled, practically an order.

As all the books had noted, in the last week of the lunar cycle, these creatures lost all sense of morality, self-preservation, and shame, with all of it becoming as completely alien to them as traffic laws were to a fish.

Ardi had once heard that colorful analogy from Milar, and he’d rather liked it.

“We’re looking for one of the Crimson Lady’s workers,” Milar said, pulling a small, crumpled photograph from his breast pocket. “Astasya. She ended up here with your folk not long ago.”

The werewolf’s yellow eyes flicked disinterestedly over the photo, and he took another swig from his bottle.

“‘With your folk’—who’s that supposed to be, boy?” He sneered. “As you can see, I’ve got no woman here. My dick’s as dry as my throat, if you catch my drift.” Gostomor wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then gathered phlegm in his throat and spat straight into the fire.

The coals hissed, belching up plumes of acrid smoke around the pigeon.

“Gives it a better flavor,” Gostomor chuckled wolfishly.

“Klavishev…” Milar sighed and pressed the muzzle of his revolver to the werewolf’s knee. “We know you’re the elected elder of the Night Folk community here. Nothing happens in this quarter without your knowledge and approval. So, just tell us where Astasya is, and we’ll leave you to enjoy your”—the captain glanced toward the hearth and curled his lip—“dinner. And your balls, while you still have them.”

The gun barrel was lifted from Gostomor’s knee and aimed pointedly at the werewolf’s crotch.

“They’d grow back, Cloak,” Gostomor rasped out—it was hard to tell if that was a laugh or a cough.

“These bullets aren’t the usual kind, Gostomor. How’d you like to join the eunuch choir?” Milar shot back.

“You bluffing?” Gostomor narrowed his eyes at the captain. He locked stares with Milar for a few heartbeats. Finally conceding the contest of wills, the werewolf raised his half-empty bottle in a mock toast. “Fine, you’ve convinced me. I won’t risk it. I figure you’re all so grumpy because they tested how well these bullets can geld someone on you first…”

Now it was Milar’s turn to scowl.

“Inga brought her to us right after the full moon,” Gostomor continued in that same, flat tone that was laden with mockery and self-assurance. “During those days, our heads are still a bit addled, you know? So after the young cubs spent all day visiting her once-tight orifices, the whore got eaten. Not on purpose, of course. But her meat was young, fresh… It made their brains ring. And since it was free-”

He never got to finish that sentence. Alexander moved like a shadow, and in less time than it took to blink—faster than even an Alcade hunter’s reflexes could match—he landed a single, brutal blow that tore the lower jaw clean off the werewolf.

Sharp fangs clattered to the floor. A crimson cloud of blood spurted toward the ceiling. Splintered bone dropped in a shapeless sack of fur and beard.

But there was no scream, no cry of pain—only a guttural cackle and a sickening crunch. The crunch of joints snapping back into place; the wet rip of torn gums as, before their very eyes, new fangs sprouted from Gostomor’s mangled maw; then the unpleasant crackle of bones knitting back together.

In less than half a minute, Gostomor’s completely destroyed jaw reformed itself, good as new. He clicked it experimentally and smiled.

“An Armondo pit fighter, are you?” The werewolf whistled, chuckling as he swished whiskey around in his mouth. “How’d you like their tea? Tasty?”

Alexander raised his fist for another strike, but Din laid a hand on his shoulder. The two partners silently stepped back.

“I heard that, in order to make a man into a pit fighter, the Armondians force-feed you a special tea for months,” Gostomor went on, sounding far more interested in the topic he’d chosen than in the Second Chancery’s visit, or even the fact that they’d killed Astasya and he’d admitted to it. “The pain is unbearable. So bad that most lose their minds. Those who don’t are thrown into a pit with various beasts to fight to the death. And when the slaves are exhausted to the point of senselessness, their chiefs and lieutenants rape them—bugger them raw, which is supposedly a delicacy. I never understood that Armondian fetish for male asses. Though, given how ugly their women are, I suppose-”

Milar’s saber flashed, and whiskey gushed across the floorboards. Gostomor’s severed hand tumbled away, but the werewolf immediately stepped on it. Then he picked up the hand, pressed it to the bleeding stump of his wrist, and, right before Ardi’s very eyes, the fibers of muscle, the bones, the veins, and the arteries began to fuse back together, followed by the skin. In mere moments, the fingers twitched…

Sleeping Spirits.

Ardi really didn’t want to imagine what the war between Ectassus and Gales had been like if its mere echoes were this horrifying.

“You know what my tattoos mean, fleabag?” Alexander spoke up, his voice low.

“I do,” Gostomor nodded. “You’ve sent quite a few of my brothers and sisters down the trails of the Sleeping Spirits, Alexander the Bearpaw. I’m just curious how many Armondians have visited your cave and how deep it is now.”

“The moment you become useless to us, you can ask the ones who tried—if you meet them when we send you to the Eternal Angels,” Alexander replied in a tone that was like the rumbling of a volcano about to erupt.

Gostomor let out that strange sound again—a mix of laughter, a growl, and a cough. It was as if something utterly alien to this world was trying to claw its way out from inside him, but was still unable to tear free of its cocoon of human flesh.

Stolen from NovelBin, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Ardi realized that he’d been wrong to think he knew Alexander’s story. Apparently, he wasn’t familiar with even a fraction of his colleague’s past. The one thing Ardi grew more certain of with each passing month he worked there was that the Second Chancery’s ranks were filled with men and Firstborn who carried far from simple destinies. Which probably explained why he himself was in the Black House as well.

“Ard,” Milar said slowly.

The werewolf’s ears twitched slightly, but not a single muscle moved on his face.

“Yes?”

“Is he lying?” The captain pointed his saber at Gostomor, who was flexing the hand that had just reattached itself.

Ardi listened closely to the werewolf’s heartbeat and found that he could barely hear it at all. Gostomor’s heart was beating so steadily and slowly it was almost surreal. The creature didn’t care. Nor did he feel any fear—not of the Second Chancery, nor of anything else. The scientific literature hadn’t lied…

“I can’t tell, Milar,” Ardan admitted honestly. “His heartbeat is giving me nothing, and-”

“The Matabar half-blood,” Gostomor suddenly interjected, his tone almost curious. “I’ve heard about you. They say you blew up a warehouse. And that you made a right mess out of a baron first, and then a Great Prince. Yes… that’s right. Ard Egobar, great-grandson of Aror, may his name be forgotten,” he spat on the floor with a wet smack. “The street’s already whispering about you.”

“And if you don’t want the street to whisper,” Milar said, raising his revolver again, “that Gostomor Klavishev died tonight, after a very long and painful torture session, then you’re going to tell us everything you know.”

“But I have told you all I know, Cloak,” the werewolf replied, never taking his eyes off Ardi. “I can even give you the names of those young fools. I warned them that they could screw her all they wanted, but not to eat her. They didn’t listen. Well, let them die now. I don’t give a shit. Do you want their names?”

Without lowering the barrel of his gun that was pressed to Gostomor’s groin, Milar jerked his chin at Din. Din pulled a notebook and pencil out of his pocket and held them out to Gostomor.

“Write them down.”

“Write them down?” Gostomor echoed with that same mocking smile. “I could take a dump instead. Maybe I should do it in your notebook, or in your cupped hands, if you prefer. I was just about to answer nature’s call when you lot showed up. It’s so lucky that you-”

He was cut off by the click of teeth on steel—the revolver’s muzzle had been shoved abruptly down his throat. Gostomor recoiled and wiped his mouth.

“I’m not literate, boy,” the werewolf growled in a tone colored with something like malice. “You see, Cursed ones aren’t allowed in school. Or given a chance to work. During the Mercenary War, I could still hop around ship masts. But that was ages ago.”

Werewolves, like mutants, lived much longer than ordinary humans. They lived almost as long as most Firstborn races, apart from the elves, who were in a league of their own.

Milar looked at Ardan again, but Ardi only gave him another helpless shrug. Gostomor’s face was devoid of any readable expression, he smelled of nothing but cheap booze, and his heartbeat never wavered. Ardan simply couldn’t determine whether he was lying or telling the truth.

“Look me in the eyes already, Egobar,” Gostomor all but pleaded. “You’ll understand everything the moment you do.”

Ardan leveled his staff at the creature seated before him. “I have no interest in acquiring your curse, Mr. Klavishev.”

For the first time, the werewolf showed a hint of true emotion. There was deep disappointment, regret, and… hatred. Searing, terrible hatred. But, as was so often the case, it was not directed at his visitors personally, but at the uniform they wore.

“What are you on about, Magister?” Milar asked.

“In the Galessian Kingdom, Star Mages worked on reverse-engineering the Aean’Hane curse,” Ardi explained. “They captured some werewolves—with great difficulty—and experimented on them. In the process, they created a trap for the Aean’Hane. If a Witch’s Gaze is used on a Cursed werewolf, the Aean’Hane who peers into that werewolf’s mind will acquire certain traits of the curse. From then on, the phases of the moon will influence how well that Aean’Hane can control their own emotions and instincts.”

“Do you see it, Cloak?” Gostomor spread his hands out. “We live worse than swine here, and all because Gales did the same thing to their own brothers and sisters that the Firstborn had done. And yet we—the descendants of those unfortunate people—are the ones to blame. Isn’t it ironic?”

“A philosophizing werewolf?” Milar retorted dryly.

“When you’re roasting pigeons and drinking foul water that reeks of piss and shit, you do start to wonder what you ever did to deserve such treatment from fate,” the werewolf snapped—he quite literally snapped his fangs in the air, causing everyone to jerk their weapons up again.

“Mind you, I couldn’t care less about you lot, just as the Empire couldn’t care less about us. And the moon’s still a ways off, so relax,” Gostomor added, raising his palms in a gesture of mock placation. “I know you’ll kill me if I try anything. And I’ve no interest in dying over a handful of young idiots.”

“Instead of their names, tell us where to find them,” Milar demanded.

“In the same cesspit as that whore of yours,” Gostomor answered, patting his belly. “Right after you let me step out back for a shit. I’m telling you—I gotta go. Who knows, maybe you’ll sift a couple of witnesses out of my crap.”

The Cloaks all leaned forward in unison, anger flaring.

“They disobeyed my orders,” Gostomor said with sudden steel in his voice, every word slow and forceful. “If I’d done nothing, by next month, someone else would be sitting in this chair, and I’d be the one getting fished out of the cesspit.”

“How can you live like this…” Milar breathed, lowering his revolver.

“You think we have a choice, boy?” Gostomor barked, bitterness dripping from each syllable. “You think any of us want to live like this? Like filth. Like human-shaped vermin—no, worse. Vermin at least had a choice whether to become vermin or not. We were born this way. Can you see the difference? We were born cursed, dammit! No one asked us!” For a split second, something human glinted in the werewolf’s eyes, but it quickly gave way to the feral gleam of the beast. “Although… during the three days of the full moon, it ain’t all bad. Actually feels pretty good. You wanna know what human flesh tastes like? The finest meat in the world. And you cum like a stallion. It’s a great life.”

Ard got the distinct impression that they were talking to a madman. But perhaps this was exactly what the gradual replacement of a person’s mind with the warped, broken consciousness of a cursed beast looked like.

“Then you’ll show us where they lived,” Milar ground out. “Maybe there are witnesses left.”

“Maybe there are,” the werewolf agreed, rising from his armchair.

Only something here didn’t add up.

Alexander pressed the barrels of his revolvers to Gostomor’s back, shoving him toward the door. The werewolf didn’t exactly resist, but he dragged his feet and made a show of sabotaging their attempts to lead him outside.

If Gostomor had devoured the disobedient members of his “pack” even before the Second Chancery operatives had arrived, then why offer their names at all? And once he’d realized that mere names wouldn’t satisfy them, why volunteer—personally—to point out where they had lived? He was eager to do it, in fact, because even a beast ought to have had enough sense not to mention the sudden deaths of his underlings in the first place.

No, Gostomor’s mind might’ve been shackled by the chains of an ancient blood curse, but that didn’t make him an idiot. Idiots wouldn’t last long as elders of the vampires, werewolves, and mutants. In fact, as Ardi now knew, idiots wouldn’t last long living here at all.

So what was he up to?

And most importantly—what was the point of the pigeon on the spit if Gostomor had already gorged on several much larger “meals?”

Ardi lifted his nose and sniffed. The room smelled of cheap whiskey and that scrawny pigeon charring over the fire. And of nothing else. Nothing at all. There was no trace of cigarette smoke, even though the ashes on the windowsill and table suggested that someone had smoked here. There was no hint of cooking coming from the tiny kitchen alcove hidden behind a thin reed curtain, nor of anyone sleeping in the uncurtained alcove that led to a bedroom.

It was as if the area had been staged so that any visitor could take in the entire room at a single glance.

Ardi might not have been very skilled at understanding people, their habits, and their ways of life, but one thing he did grasp was how beasts hunted, especially pack hunters. Those were the ones he’d had to be wary of in the forests whenever he’d descend from the mountains.

This was not Gostomor’s lair at all—it was his hunting ground. No one slept or ate here. This place was meant to hide something.

“Wait,” Ardi said.

They all froze.

In the doorway, the werewolf halted mid-step. Half turning and baring his fangs in a grin, he joked, “Hungry for a bite, mountain hunter?”

Leaning on his staff, Ardan knelt. No one had intended to eat the wormy pigeon; it served the same purpose as the half-spilled whiskey on the floor. That bottle, which Gostomor clearly didn’t care about, had simply been part of the show.

Ardi ran his fingers over the old straw mats strewn across the floor. At first glance, they were nothing unusual, just scuffed, dirty rugs, though the room itself was relatively tidy (tidy by the standards of the Night Folk quarter, at least).

All of this was fine, except for the fact that the local shacks had been built without foundations—not even on stilts—but right on the ground. They’d level the dirt, pour some sand over it, then lay planks down on top. That was their only barrier against the damp earth and crawling pests.

Ardi shoved aside a few mats and pressed a palm to the floorboards. They were too smooth. Too even. And the pattern of grime on them was uneven.

Without waiting for the werewolf’s reaction, Ardi struck the butt of his staff against the floor. A moment later, just as he’d suspected it would, the Misty Helper was etching ghostly marks onto the page of his grimoire.

“I’ve got a stash of Angel’s Dust down there,” Gostomor blurted hastily. “We use it during the full moon—it works like a sleeping draught on us.”

But no one paid Gostomor’s words any mind. Alexander drove a boot into the back of his knee, forcing the werewolf to collapse onto the floorboards. Din pressed his knives to Gostomor’s throat in a practiced hold that made it impossible for him to move a muscle.

Having obtained the complete schematic of the hidden shield’s seal, Ardi looked up at Milar and gave him a short nod. The captain instantly pressed his revolver to the werewolf’s forehead.

“Talk,” he ordered, his voice ringing with the same steel as his saber. “When did they contact you? I want names. Who you deal with. Spill everything you know.”

But the werewolf only grinned, baring his teeth.

“Tit for tat, Cloak,” he whispered, the words rasping out despite the fact that his throat was pressed against Din’s blades. Gostomor’s eyes still gleamed with that insolent confidence even now. “Help me with the dryness in my loins, and I’ll answer all your questions.”

Ardan tuned out whatever was happening by the door. Having cracked the simple but well-made seal, he ran his hand across the trapdoor’s surface. The ward wasn’t only a standard protection array—there was an illusion woven in, too. Not a fraction as skilled as what the Sidhe of the Burning Dawn might have crafted, but enough to mask what it needed to. Gostomor had been forced to rely on cheap tricks to hide the reek seeping up from below. The reek of ammonia, of encrusted sweat and unwashed clothes… and of pine needles. There was also the scent of a swift river running through mountain plateaus and forests, and of moss after morning dew. The smell of flowery meadows shaking off the snowy slumber of a harsh mountain winter.

Ardi knew these scents. They were his scents. He had been used to them since childhood. All his memories—of his family home on the bend of a mountain stream, and of the forest flows and snowy peaks—were inextricably tied to those smells.

Sliding the bolt aside, Ardi dropped down through the trapdoor. For an instant, he thought the play of light and shadow was tricking him, because what he was seeing simply could not exist. It couldn’t be real, couldn’t be the uncompromising truth.

In the cramped cellar, where even Tess, petite as she was, would not have been able to stand upright, an old woman sat bound to the support beams by a yellowed, filthy, torn bedsheet. To her left was a bucket serving as her latrine, and to her right a basket from which wafted the stench of… rotten pigeon meat.

Ardi had been slightly mistaken. The pigeon in the fireplace hadn’t been part of the deception at all.

The old woman’s silver-gray hair, disheveled by the gust of air from when Ardi had opened the hatch, fell in matted wisps around her face. She was dressed in utter rags: a shirt missing its sleeves (she had torn them off to fashion bandages for herself), and a blue skirt that had been tied up so she could wear it like pants.

But none of that mattered.

Ardi couldn’t take his eyes off her bronze-colored skin, which was covered in countless tattoos. The designs were so familiar to the young man that the mere sight of them made his chest tighten. Her entire body was covered in stories he remembered from his childhood—designs he had seen every time he’d visited Atta’nha on Memory Mountain.

Across the old woman’s skin flew mountain swallows racing through clouds and away from predatory falcons. Elsewhere, eagles waited for the right moment to knock a mountain goat off a ledge. And over there, rivers wound like threaded webs around hills and forest glades, amid countless grasses, trees, animals, and meadows beyond count.

The old woman’s skin was a living mural of the Matabar people—the kind of sacred storytelling art Ardi had never imagined he’d get to see again in his life. He’d thought it had been lost to time forever.

So why was an elderly, emaciated woman, one who’d been locked up in a cellar in some forsaken corner of the Metropolis, wearing the stories of his father’s people on her skin? Because that was what the Elder Mothers of the Matabar looked like. They were the keepers of the old wisdom, who passed these stories down to their daughters, who passed them down to their daughters, generation after generation, preserving their traditions, customs and heritage.

Ardi’s throat went dry.

He reached out toward her with trembling hands, but grasped only empty air. He couldn’t quite bring himself to touch her, not once he noticed the tiny marks that dotted her arms from wrist to shoulder—the telltale pricks of medical needles.

“What’s down there, Magister?” Milar’s concerned voice came from above. It seemed like the Cloaks didn’t want to abandon their watch on Gostomor.

Upon hearing his voice, the old woman roused from the stupor brought on by constant hunger, thirst and blood loss.

Sleeping Spirits, she looked even more frail than Ardi’s great-grandfather had at the end of his days. Her nose was reddened and her cheeks were so deeply wrinkled and cracked that they resembled tree bark. Her earlobes drooped, and her eyebrows had almost entirely fallen out, like autumn leaves.

Only the dim, nearly-unseeing gaze of her golden eyes, and her labored, wheezing breaths suggested that a spark of life still flickered within this aged Elder Mother of the Matabar. It was a miracle that she had survived at all… and clearly, she was the last of her kind. The very last one.

She looked at Ardi the same way the dying gazed into emptiness: with blind, clouded eyes that beheld not reality, but a mixture of memories and dreams (and perhaps memories of dreams).

“Has my time come?” She asked in a voice as thin and brittle as dry twigs. Her lips barely moved, cracking with each word.

They had torn out not only her fangs, but nearly all her teeth as well. And her claws had been ripped from her fingers.

Ardi flinched upon hearing the Matabar language. It was so pure and melodious, sounding exactly the same as when his great-grandfather had spoken it.

“Have you come to take me along the trails of the Sleeping Spirits, little messenger?”

She leaned forward as if to hug him, but then collapsed weakly, with no strength left in her limbs. Ardi barely managed to catch her.

“No… you smell like a human,” she wheezed, and was then seized by a dry cough. Raising a trembling hand, she ran her fingers along his cheek. She was clearly delirious, words pouring out in a rapid, quavering stream as if trying to outrace the end of a dream. “And also like a snow leopard hiding in storms… and like a wise squirrel speaking the language of memory… like a bear wrapped in a starry blanket… like an ibex sailing across flowery meadows… like a lynx running in the shadows… like an eagle soaring amongst unseen paths… and like a she-wolf warming our cradles with her breath. You smell like a human and also our Guardian Spirits. You smell like a legend… not yet fully told.”

“You and I, Elder Mother-” Ardi began, barely above a whisper.

But she still heard him. It was as though she had been waiting to hear those very words in her mother tongue—waiting for so long that it had become the sole reason she still lived. To hear him.

“What is your name, child of two bloods?”

“Strong Roots,” Ardan replied.

She closed her eyes and smiled faintly, the expression smoothing out some of her wrinkles.

“A good name,” she sighed, still caressing his cheek with a touch so light Ardi could scarcely feel it. “It smells of oak and song.”

“Don’t speak, Elder Mother,” Ardi urged gently. “Hold on just a little longer. I’ll take you somewhere safe, where it will be easier for you. They’ll help you there. You and I, Elder Mother. We-”

“There is no more ‘you and I,’ Strong Roots,” the old woman interrupted him softly. “No more. The stories on my skin will be the last stories of our packs. And your name the last name. I waited for you. And you came. That is how the Dream of the Sleeping Spirits goes.”

“Please don’t say that, Elder Mother. There is a place where the Spirit of the Day’s journey ends,” Ardi urged, stroking her hair which gleamed like lunar silver. “There is a lair there. My mother and my brother are there—my pack. I will take you to them. You can tell us your stories, and we will carry them to the Mountain of Memory, as our ancestors decreed.”

“No, Strong Roots,” she said, her toothless smile widening, and a look of peace settling in her golden eyes. “My time in the Dream of the Sleeping Spirits is almost over. I know it. And you know it, too. I’m only glad I lasted long enough.”

Ardi realized that his father’s kinswoman was delirious, and he began to lift her in his arms to carry her out.

“Don’t… please,” she moaned as Ardi’s awkward movements broke several of her brittle bones. Sleeping Spirits! What had they done to her?! “Remember my name, Strong Roots. Weave it into your Great Song so that our people are remembered—so that our legends and stories are remembered until they turn into myths, and those myths into old customs, which will one day seem like mere quaint costumes.”

Ardi shut his eyes and gently laid his hand on her hair.

“I will remember, Elder Mother.”

“My name is Returned Swallow,” Aviaerada said. “Daughter of Shimmering Drop and Yesterday’s Care. I have walked the trails of Lenos’ children, and now I return to the Sleeping Spirits.”

“May your path always lead you home, Returned Swallow,” Ardi choked out.

“We will meet again, Strong Roots, on the trails of the Sleeping Spirits, where…”

The hand that had been stroking his cheek trembled one last time, then fell limp. She no longer smelled of forests and mountains—only stone. The same kind of stones that stood on the far bank of the stream back home, beneath which slept his ancestors on his father’s side. And now she was sleeping as well. And with her died a part of the Matabar people’s history, tales that would never be told in this world again.

Never… What a strange and terrible word.

Never.

“You and I shall be kin,” Ardan finished the words of the farewell rite.

With his free hand, he tossed his staff up through the hatch and into the living room, then gently scooped the Elder Mother’s lifeless body into his arms and leapt out of the cellar. He landed lightly and placed the remains reverently on the floor. Straightening up, staff in hand, he stood tall.

Gostomor was baring his teeth in a mirthless grin, while Milar and the others were casting wide-eyed looks at the old woman’s corpse, then at Ardi, and then back again.

“That what I think it is, Ard?” The captain asked in a hollow voice.

“Look at her eyes,” Ardan said, indicating the dead Elder Mother’s golden gaze. Then he placed his hand on Gostomor’s head. “Now look at his.”

Alexander seized the werewolf by the hair and wrenched his head back. Staring back at them were eyes of exactly the same bright gold…

“Alright, alright,” Gostomor growled between bouts of unhinged laughter. “I lied about the Dust. But her blood really did help us. Think of it like medicine. Granted, over time, it started to spoil… but no matter! We endured.”

And he began to laugh. It was an utterly mad belly laugh.

Ard walked over to the fireplace and pulled out a charred bit of wood. He turned to Milar. “You’re not going to stop me, are you?” Ardan asked.

“Do you expect me to say that we need to take her to the Black House,” Milar replied, voice bitter, “where your kinswoman… or your half-kin… or whatever, would be autopsied, dissected, measured, and catalogued? No, Ard. My heart may have grown callous doing this job, but not that callous. Besides, it’s all clear enough even without an autopsy…”

Ardan glanced at Alexander and Din. They only nodded silently, almost in unison.

The young man raised the blackened log to his lips and listened to the faint crackle of embers still alive inside the dry wood. In their eternally merry, unquenchably feisty dance, he caught the distant echo of a Name. Ardan exhaled his will into that faint echo, fanning it into a blaze, and caught the tiny fragment he needed in its scorching roar. The word slipped from his lips, and with it came a calm, orange flame. The fire engulfed the Elder Mother’s body like a funerary shroud.

There was no smoke, no smell of burning flesh. Only a spray of sparks that, for a moment, took the shape of a body, then fluttered out the window and into the street, drifting upwards and dispersing halfway toward the sky.

On the floor, only a few scraps of cloth remained, unburnt.

“Well then, Cloaks, shall we head to the shitho-”

Alexander’s fist, covered in brass knuckles, came down in a single crushing blow that snapped Gostomor’s neck at the base. The werewolf’s head flopped backwards, the top of it touching his spine. He fell prone, face-down. Judging by the furious twitching of his eyes, he was still alive. This wasn’t all that surprising—Cursed werewolves had been designed to endure, to slaughter human armies as efficiently as possible.

And humans, in response, had used Star Mages to create killers as efficient as possible at slaughtering the Aean’Hane…

“He’s somewhere nearby, Milar,” Ardan said, gripping his staff tightly as he peered into the night outside. “He’s here.”

Milar sighed, ignoring Alexander and Din’s silent, baffled stares.

“You think so, Ard, or you’re certain?”

Ardan flared his nostrils, inhaling deeply. He felt his fangs ache as they tried to lengthen, his nails threatening to sharpen into claws. With an exertion of will, he forced the mountain hunter within him down once again, lulling it back to sleep with unspoken words.

“I can smell him, Milar,” Ardan said, stepping out onto the porch.

Milar followed him, stepping over Gostomor’s jerking body, which Alexander and Din were swiftly binding with thick rope—ordinary rope wouldn’t hold a werewolf, of course, but these were clearly not ordinary bindings. The captain stood beside Ardan on the creaking wooden steps, both of them staring out into the gray haze of a summer night in the Metropolis.

“I suspect that he didn’t originally work for the Puppeteers, Ard,” Milar said, keeping his revolver and saber at the ready. Those wouldn’t help him much against a Chimerologist Mage, admittedly, but doing nothing would’ve felt odd.

And there was the answer to how Lea Morimer had acquired all those anomaly parts, and why there had been vampires and a Star-born werewolf among her Spiders.

“Yes,” Ardi agreed.

“He’s one of the Spiders, too,” Milar continued, pressing his back to the shack’s wall. “Most likely a researcher mage who survived along with Lea Morimer on that island.”

“Yes,” Ardan repeated.

“And it was he who did all of those horrid things to Lusha.”

“Yes,” Ardan said for a third time.

“Damn it, Magister, we need to call in Mshisty and his hounds!” Milar swore.

Ardan simply held up his activated signal medallion. The alert had already been sent.

“Then we can dig in here and-”

“Milar,” Ardan snarled, his voice barely human for a moment. He could hear the mountain hunter pacing and howling inside his soul, straining to burst out. “I can’t handle this, Milar. I mean it…”

The captain stood there, next to his partner, amid the play of light and shadow, and maybe that was why he imagined that he could see dark shapes slowly crawling toward them.

What a cursed night…

“They ate her!” Ardan went on, his voice low and raw. “They were just… eating her. And she never chose to be a Matabar. As much as they didn’t choose their curse… But they didn’t care… And now…” Ardi’s words tangled with his own thoughts. “And the worst part, Milar, is that it doesn’t even hurt as much as I’d expect it to. Not at all. I just feel… angry. Not for myself. For my father. And great-grandfather. And the Memory Mountain.”

Milar stayed silent. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t possibly understand what his partner was feeling, having never been in his place. So, he just stayed quiet.

“And that damned Conclave… and the Tavsers… and those idiotic newspaper headlines,” Ardan added, stepping down from the porch. “Maybe there are others out there still. Maybe I should go find them, Milar. But you know what’s funny? Even among them, I’d still be neither fully Matabar, nor fully human.”

“You’re an Imperial officer, partner. All the rest is just labels.”

“I know,” Ardan replied, nodding. “And most days, that’s enough for me. But… I might not be one of the Matabar people, and yet, right now, that doesn’t matter…” The young man clenched a fist over his heart. “If I don’t see this through, Milar, I’m going to lose it. At someone. Someday. Over something stupid and small.”

Milar remained by the door, breathing heavily—Ardi could hear it.

“We can’t help you in a fight against a mage, not here in the middle of this damned Night Folk quarter where we’re already in danger.”

“I know.”

“And you still intend to-”

Ardan turned sharply to face him.

In the gloom, the captain met Ardan’s eyes, which were glowing like embers. Milar wondered if this was what Aror’s eyes had looked like when he’d set out to do those things that had become two centuries’ worth of nightmare fuel?

“If I don’t kill him, Captain, it’ll be like with the chief of the Shanti’Ra,” Ardan said, his tone rough with conviction, “and I can’t bear a second weight like that on my soul.”

Milar knew Ardan to be a warm, kind, naïve—sometimes even comical—youth. He was comical in his clumsiness, his inability to fathom human minds and hearts, and in that he was always sincere, even when his sincerity hurt him.

He was being sincere now as well.

And while Milar couldn’t truly grasp the dual nature of Ardan’s heritage, these words he could understand.

Ardan locked eyes with the captain, awaiting his answer. He didn’t know what he’d do if Milar refused this unspoken request—that would likely lead to Mshisty having to hunt not a Chimerologist pawn of the Puppeteers, but Ardan Egobar himself.

“Can you get any information out of him before you send him to the Eternal Angels?” Milar asked at last.

“I’ll try,” Ardan said after a short pause. “But I’m not promising anything.”

Milar cursed under his breath and scratched his temple with the barrel of his revolver.

“Sometimes, a little deceit is acceptable, Ard… Fine. But note this—if you get yourself killed, then-”

“I won’t get killed, Milar,” Ardan interrupted him. With that, he whirled around and started off down the street.

Behind him, the captain swore again and slipped back into the house, where Alexander was in the process of breaking Gostomor’s neck for the second time as the werewolf’s ghastly cackling rang out.

Milar and Ardan hadn’t been wrong to assume that the Puppeteers always kept a backup plan nested inside another backup plan. But the more complex a scheme, the more moving parts it would have. And one of those moving parts had turned out to be Inga, the Crimson Lady. Her greed had provided an unexpected boon, though not for herself, but for people she’d never even thought about.

The Puppeteers hadn’t stopped their experiments at all. They’d simply moved them off the ship and onto dry land, splitting them up among multiple “laboratories.” And Ardi was now walking through one of them.

“How many of them did you destroy?” Ardan asked the darkness.

Silence answered him.

“I know you can hear me. How many Matabar have you people killed over the decades?” Ardan’s voice was eerily calm. He could hardly hear his own words over the roaring in his ears—the roar of Kelly Brian’s words in his memory:

“There are enemies you’ll want to kill—tear them apart and subject them to such horrors that the Angels themselves would weep at the sight. There will only be a few such enemies, big guy. There are others you’ll respect, even understand, and whose deaths you might even regret. Maybe you’ll feel a little nostalgic about them; those are even rarer. Rarer still are those you’ll come to truly hate. But both of them—the ones you respect and the ones you hate—will be very few.”

Out of the shadows stepped a figure wearing the same black, hooded cloak that Lea Mortimer had worn when she’d nearly blown up half the capital.

The last Spider.

He was a crippled man of about forty, his face crisscrossed with scars. Ardan did not look closely. He knew that if he truly looked at this mage who had emerged under the sickly lamplight, if he hesitated for even a moment, he might start thinking. And if he started thinking, he might realize something—perhaps that they should wait for Mshisty, capture this man, attempt to circumvent the brain-melting curse and learn something from him.

That would certainly be the right thing to do.

But not tonight. Tonight, Ardi needed to hate someone. He needed to smell the scent of someone’s blood in place of the stale stench of that cramped cellar. Otherwise, he would not be able to cope. Otherwise, he would lose himself, and by morning, he’d be on a horse, riding out to the steppe in search of the Shanti’Ra clan.

“I have a message for you from Aean’Rahne-” the man began to say.

“You can deliver it to the Eternal Angels,” Ardan snarled, not even letting him finish speaking. He struck his staff against the ground.

The Ice Dolls seal activated with a burst of snow and ice swirling around his staff. Deep blue patterns of frost spread out, crackling across the walls of the shacks and houses. The ground splintered as it iced over, and a wind howled down the alley, whipping up a cloud of razor-sharp ice crystals.

From Ardi’s left hand and from the head of his staff, two streams of what might have been icy mist or powdered snow poured forth. Twisting together, they formed into a not-quite-solid, beastly shape that looked equally like a ferocious fish and a lynx.