Rated MA26+ | Horror Fantasy | Graphic Violence
The guard's name is Petyr Sohn and he has been with the Council investigations unit for eleven years and has, in those eleven years, seen most of the things that the Noble City produces when it is at its worst.
He has processed the aftermath of magical duels that left rooms looking like something had turned the interior temperature to the surface of a forge and then turned it back. He has documented curse removals that went wrong in the specific ways that curse removals go wrong when the curse is older than the mage attempting the removal. He has filed incident reports on three separate occasions involving entities that the Council's taxonomy of magical threats does not have satisfactory language for.
He has never filed a report like the one he files on the morning of the fourteenth, and when he finishes filing it he sits at his desk for a while and does not immediately begin the next thing.
Mildern reads it two hours later.
A warehouse in the lower port district. Legitimate front business, salt merchant, operating for seven years without incident. Inside: four people. Three of them were working late. One of them was there because he was the first name on Tane's list and Fenrath had gotten to him three days after the Selt Street meeting and whatever conversation happened between them resulted in the person deciding that the safest thing he could do was disappear, which meant gathering everything he had and moving it out of his apartment in the middle of the night and storing it temporarily in a place he trusted.
He had trusted the salt merchant's warehouse.
The structural damage to the building's eastern wall is consistent with the wall photographs from the previous incidents — the same handprint geometry, the same depth, except this time it is not a single print. There are nine of them across the eastern wall in a pattern that suggests the wall was used as a surface to move along rather than to break through, the prints evenly spaced at the stride distance of something very large moving at speed.
The three warehouse workers are alive. They are in the Council medical ward and none of them have spoken since they were found. The investigating physician's report uses the word dissociative and then uses it again in the next sentence, which Mildern has learned means the physician ran out of more specific language.
The fourth person — the first name on the list — is not alive. What remains of him is in the warehouse and the report describes it in the specific clinical language that investigators use when they are trying to put professional distance between themselves and what they are looking at, which is a technique Mildern recognizes because he uses it himself.
He reads the description once. He does not read it again. He puts the report on the desk and goes to the window and stands there for a while. He visits the warehouse alone.
He does this before he tells the Council, before he updates the investigation file, before he does any of the things that the institutional machinery of the Council requires him to do when new evidence enters the pattern. He visits it alone because he needs to understand what he is looking at without other people's reactions in the room with him, which is a working preference that Majiro has described as insubordinate and that Patrix has described as nothing, which is more useful.
The warehouse smells of salt and iron and something underneath those two things that is older and worse. The morning light comes through the high windows at angles that illuminate the dust in the air and the dust is thick because something disturbed a great deal of it and it has not fully settled yet.
He looks at the eastern wall first.
Nine handprints. Left side, right side, left side, alternating, the pattern of something moving laterally across the wall the way a person might run a hand along a railing except the prints are four inches deep and the stone between them has micro-fracture lines spreading outward from each compression point like something had been repeatedly struck with a siege hammer at precise intervals.
He measures the stride distance. Two meters and forty centimeters between each print, center to center. Consistent across all nine. Whatever made them was not varying its pace.
He looks at the center of the warehouse floor for a long time.
The report's clinical language had done a reasonable job. The reasonable job had not been enough. He stands there and makes himself look because looking is part of understanding and understanding is the only tool he has that is currently adequate to the situation, and after a while he crouches down and puts his hand flat on the cold stone floor beside the dark stain that spreads from the center of the room to the western wall, and he thinks about the first name on a list and about a person who thought disappearing was the safest option and chose the wrong place to disappear to.
He stays crouched there for a long time.
Then he stands up and goes back to the wall and looks at the nine handprints and looks at the core-amber color the light takes on when it comes through the high windows at the right angle, and he thinks about a being with a dead king's grief trapped inside it and an immortal engine at its heart, and about the specific patience required to track a person across a city in the dark and find him in a warehouse he chose at random on the night he decided to run.
He thinks about what kind of rage creates that patience. He thinks about his father's army marching into Garudore.
He goes back to the Council building and writes the update to the investigation file and his handwriting is neat and precise and gives nothing away, which is the only version of professional distance he currently has access to.
Saku is waiting in the suite when he gets back.
He is at the table with his Academy work spread in front of him and his pen in his hand and the particular quality of stillness that means he has been waiting and has been pretending not to wait for long enough that the pretending has become its own kind of effort.
He looks at Mildern when he comes through the door. Mildern takes off his coat and hangs it and goes to the desk and sits down. "You went to the warehouse," Saku says.
"Yes." "The report said four people." "Yes." Saku puts his pen down. "How many survived." "Three." Saku is quiet for a moment. "And the one who didn't."
"Was on the list," Mildern says. "The first name Tane gave him. He tried to run. It found him anyway." The suite is very quiet. Outside the window the city continues its afternoon, carts and voices and the distant bell of the Academy's third session, all of it going about its business with the complete indifference of a world that does not know what is moving through it.
"We have to find out who it is before it finds us," Saku says. "We know who it is," Mildern says. "We know the name. We know the history. What we don't know is what it wants beyond me."
"It wants you dead," Saku says. Flatly. Not cruelly. Just accurately, in the way he says accurate things when he has decided that accurate is more useful than careful. "It wants the last Yazukaze gone," Mildern says. "That's what Hanuto built it for. The question is why. Why now. Why this specific construction. Why an immortal core that can't be touched by anything we currently have."
"Because he wants it to succeed," Saku says.
"He wanted the Hollow Prince to succeed too," Mildern says. "The Hollow Prince failed. Hanuto watched his brother get chained in that courtroom and he went away and he spent three years building something that couldn't be stopped the same way." He looks at his hands on the desk. "He's not angry. He's methodical. There's a difference. Angry people make mistakes. Methodical people make plans."
Saku looks at him for a long moment. "Are you going to be able to fight it," Saku says. "When it comes." Mildern looks up. "What makes you think it's coming here."
"Because it's already been everywhere else," Saku says. "It's working through the list. The list ends somewhere. Everything that ends somewhere ends here eventually."
Mildern looks at him — at this eleven-year-old who crossed between worlds on the worst night of his life and has spent three years getting smarter and more specific about the world's capacity for danger. Who puts his boots on before anything else in the morning. Who asked him once if he was afraid and accepted yes as the complete answer.
"Yes," Mildern says. "I'll be able to fight it."
"Good," Saku says, and picks up his pen and goes back to his Academy work, which is the Saku version of saying: I believe you, and also I'm scared, and also that's everything I needed to know.
The Council medical ward has three beds occupied and three patients who are not speaking.
Mildern sits beside the nearest one for forty minutes. The persons name is Harron. He is one of the three warehouse workers, and the physician's notes describe him as physically uninjured, which is a category of intact that is doing a significant amount of work in this context. His hands are folded in his lap and his eyes are open and he looks at the middle distance with the expression of someone watching something that isn't in the room.
"You don't have to say anything," Mildern says. "I'm not here for a report." Harron doesn't look at him.
"I've seen things that put that look on people's faces," Mildern says. "Not the same thing. But the same look." He pauses. "It gets smaller. Not gone. Smaller. That's the honest version."
Harron's hands move slightly in his lap. Not toward Mildern. Just moving, the small restless motion of a body that is trying to process something the mind is refusing to touch directly.
"It walked through the wall," Harron says. His voice has the flat quality of someone describing something they watched happen to someone else. "Not broke through. Walked through. Like the wall was something it decided to not be stopped by. And then it was just in the room and the room was—" He stops. "The room was wrong after that. The air was wrong. The light was wrong. Everything was wrong in the way that things are wrong when something that shouldn't exist is standing in them."
"I know," Mildern says.
Harron looks at him for the first time. "It talked," he says. "While it was—" He stops again. Starts again. "It talked in a lot of voices at once. And under all of them there was one that sounded like a person. Not a monster. A person. Someone who used to talk to people. Someone who—" He looks back at the middle distance. "Someone who was very tired."
Mildern sits with that for a moment. "Did it say anything," he says. "Specifically."
"It said a name," Harron says. "At the end. Before it left. Just once. Just the one voice, not all of them. The one that sounded like a person." He looks at his hands. "It said Raito."
Mildern sits in the Council archive for three hours that evening with the Garudore historical file open on the table in front of him.
Raito Hazuki. Eldest son of Gamatose Hazuki, First King of Garudore. Twenty-two years old at the time of the invasion. Three weeks from his wedding selection ceremony. Named in six separate historical records from the pre-invasion period as the crown prince in waiting, described consistently across those records as capable, well-regarded, his father's closest confident.
Killed in the siege. Confirmed dead by three separate survivor accounts. Died in the throne room alongside his father. Mildern looks at the name for a long time.
He thinks about a dead king in a warehouse in the dark. He thinks about an immortal core pulsing in the stomach of something that hunts people through cities and presses handprints four inches deep into stone walls and walks through barriers as a decision rather than an effort. He thinks about what it would mean to carry a son's name inside all of that. To say it once, quietly, in the single voice that used to be a person's, in the wreckage of a room where a person who ran out of options chose the wrong place to hide.
He thinks about his father's army marching into Garudore on orders built from forged paper. He closes the file.
He sits in the archive for a while longer with his hands flat on the table and the specific weight of a history that belongs to him through bloodline and not through choice, and thinks about what it means to be the last of a name that a dead king was told destroyed everything he loved.
He thinks about Rin Hazuki. The daughter. The survivor. Somewhere in this city under a different name, twenty-four years old, asking a question that has never had a true answer.
He thinks about that question getting an answer.
He sits there until the archive lamps dim for the evening and then he gets up and puts the file back and walks out through the corridor and into the night air and stands outside the Council building for a moment looking up at the towers.
The wards on the upper floors pulse faintly. The city is dark and going about itself. Somewhere in it something with a dead king's name and an immortal engine in its stomach is moving through streets it has been moving through for weeks, working through a list, arriving at the end of the list, getting closer.
He walks back to the suite. The light is on in the window. Saku is still awake, which is not a surprise. He comes through the door and Saku looks up from the table.
"Raito," Mildern says. "That's the name the survivor heard it say. Raito was the king's eldest son. He died in the siege." Saku is quiet for a moment. "It still remembers them," Saku says. Not a question.
"Yes," Mildern says. "Then it's not just a weapon," Saku says. "It's a person inside a weapon." "Yes," Mildern says. Saku looks at him. "That changes things." "I know," Mildern says.
He sits down across from Saku and they stay there in the quiet of the suite with the lamp between them and the city dark outside and the weight of a dead king's grief somewhere in it, carrying a son's name in the one voice that still sounds like a person, getting closer.
TO BE CONTINUED — EPISODE FIVE: "Lord Fenrath Makes a House Call" - NATION OF GAMATOSE ARC | Volume II | Rated MA26+