“Maniaque, you’re getting snow on the clothes.” Sethian Skin’s complaints went unheard. The building around didn’t care. Sethian Skin paced through the main showfloor, snow eddying around his feet as he stepped over the bloodstains where Amo had died. Following the wind, Sethian Skin pushed a rack of clothes aside and found the hall that the snow and ice and frigid wind blew out of. He shivered. This was a kind of cold that no one in Gray Watch ever felt.
He already had a pretty good idea of what was going on.
Halfway down the hall, Sethian Skin stopped in front of an open door that hadn’t been there before. He stepped through it and was outside, but not in Gray Watch. Here, everything was white with ice, the sky a mask of blowing shards, large buildings of white stone and white wood covered in silvery icicles and thumb-thick sheets of ice. The kind of ice that never melts. In an alleyway between two three-story buildings, Sethian Skin eyed the door he’d come through: unassuming wood, no sign, but singing quietly with old magic. It had been a long, long time since he’d been summoned like this, but where was the summoner?
He paced out of the hall into an open square and glanced carefully around. Once, this square had been surrounded by glass-faced buildings looking toward its center like a circle of monks, but now four of the seven were in some state of ruin. Broken stone, splintered wood, gleaming glass shards among the ice spread through the square. Looking left and right, looking forward, Sethian Skin picked out clues to say where he’d been brought to.
The clues were these: electric lights humming in defiance of the stone; chimneys exhaling the steam of radiators, which meant heating machinery inside of every building; pipes jittering on the sides of buildings, free of ice and hissing as machines pushed hot water through them; on either side of the city, endless avalanches poured out of enormous ancient gates, their origins all but forgotten to history; at the front of the city, overlooking a great precipice, soldiers with blue tabards over gleaming silver armor hefted heavy shells into metal cannons. The cannons overlooked a great precipice over cloud cover. This city was so high in the mountains that it was above the clouds.
The armored men shouted to one another in the language of the southlands. The cannons fired. In the unseen distance beneath the clouds, eruptions thundered, and a great host of men shouted in menace. That would be the northland army, intent on sieging the most defensible place in the world.
“So this is where Amo’s from.” Sethian Skin muttered to himself. This was Pharaul, the seat of power for the unified southlands, thousand-year nemesis of Gray Watch.
As Sethian Skin watched, yellow light pierced the blowing ice above the city, like the sun winning against an overcast sky. But this was no sun. This was magic, shivering and flickering and singing an old, low sound that made the ground shake. The soldiers of Pharaul shouted warning to one another, some turned their cannon to fire into the light. That made Sethian Skin chuckle; southlanders really didn’t know a damn thing about magic, did they? Too much time with engines and radiators, not enough with tale and song.
The light overhead added some grumbling to its song, and some of the cannons and soldiers began to luminesce like heated metal. Screaming briefly, seven soldiers burst into dust, vaporized along with their cannons and their shells. The light swept through the city, reducing parts of buildings to dust, chasing after thickly coated people who fled into the streets. The light made them into gleaming, golden dust. People, objects, all the same, a lovely shine blowing out over the precipice. Compromised buildings collapsed. Soldiers ran to the buildings, shouting over the screams of people crushed inside. Then the light came back, turning the shouts and the screams to more dust.
“That’s the magical weapon Amo was talking about,” Sethian Skin said. “Horrifying indeed. Well, relatively so, to people unaccustomed to such magic. I can see why Amo is intent on stealing it.”
A dire-voiced woman snapped, “And who the fuck are you?”
Children gasped.
Sethian Skin turned and pulled his hat down to keep his face hidden, noticing first the five children huddled beneath a woman’s coat, all looking up at her in shock. One of them whispered, “She cussed,” and the other children made shushing sounds. Sethian Skin laughed at that.
Then a strange, long, pale arm swept down and pushed the children further back, the dire woman saying, “Back now. Get ready to run when I say. Remember where to go. Like we practiced.”
The children nodded and looked very serious.
The woman straightened, angry again. “I asked you a question, creature.”
Sethian Skin leaned slightly back to look up at the tall, so very tall woman. “My, my, my. A descendent of the vedrfol? Now, here’s an impossibility. How interesting!”
“What I am is not your concern.” She was more than twice Sethian Skin’s height, easily double the size of any normal person. Rod thin and long-armed, she’d wrapped herself carefully in white cloth beneath her coat, fully shrouded except for the blue gleam of her eyes. But her face was strange, the lump beneath her eyes a poorly disguised hawk-like beak that she kept tucked into her collar. And her hair, escaping from coat and cloth, blew aside to reveal a layer of soft white feathers beneath it. More than anything, her feet gave her away, large and taloned in a way that couldn’t be concealed.
“Oh, but I choose what concerns me,” Sethian Skin said. “I’ve been around long enough to know what you are. The vedrfol have been extinct for more than a thousand years. You should not exist. Ah, wait, I understand!” Sethian Skin brought his hands together. The snow didn’t stick to him, not melting, but sliding off as an unwelcome thing. With all this ice blowing around, he should’ve been gray with frost by then, but he remained midnight black. “You’re the one who summoned me. A sorcerer of some kind? No, no, mythspinner. Tale-teller. Summoner. Now how old must you be, how ancient? Or young but magic-born. Just my kind of person. We could be friends. We could.”
“Don’t push my patience with your yammering, spirit. I sensed death weighing upon my dear Amo and summoned that which would do them harm. If that is you, then I’ll have you pay for whatever you’ve done to them.”
“Folly. I saved Amo’s life. It was the dancer Norgash who sought to kill them, and the Maniaque that would’ve feasted on their steel-adorned body. It’s the Maniaque you summoned, not me. I just went through the door.”
“I’ll not believe anything you tell me, spirit of bargains and deceit.” She lifted her lofty head proudly. “Yes, I know what you are. Mythspinner, yes, I am, and I know your Myth, Sethian Skin. It’s a tale I’ve told to scare children, though it’s no one’s favorite.”
"Oh, my story, on the lips of a mythspinner! What an honor!" Sethian Skin briefly put his hands to his face, gasping as though he were overcome with flattery. But then he let his arms fall, sighed, and shrugged. "But I'm not some myth-born being, nor am I like whatever summoned thralls you happen to have. Your stories can neither create nor empower me. Not unless your powers have outgrown your own legends, and I don't think that's how it works, is it?"
The singing light above the city flared again, and its song swept toward the square.
“Your pomposity condemns you,” the woman hissed. “Children, go!” Like a warren of rabbits, the children burst from underneath the lofty woman’s coat and fled into the city. They held onto one another’s coats the way that adults teach children to do, the oldest and fastest dragging the youngest behind as they fled toward whatever safehouse they’d practiced running to.
Knowing what probably came next, Sethian Skin took a step back.
“I will tell you a story of power that strikes like a snake out of the air.” At her words, there was a crackle in the air and a snap of razor-sharp haze that snapped out of nowhere at Sethian Skin’s head.
But he spun away as soon as he sensed it. “A snake? Not the right story if you want to kill me, I’m afraid. Now, lest you try anything else.” Sethian Skin pivoted and ran back the way he’d come, into the alleyway. Behind him, he sensed the song of the northlands’ weapon chewing through buildings and soldiers.
And he sensed the tall woman pursuing him. She said, “I will tell you a story of an eagle’s speedy dive and outstretched claws.”
Now, that was a bit more scary. Sethian Skin dove through the open door into the Maniaque and kept going, amused by the idea that she might choose to chase him even here.
