Location: The Sewers and Royal Wing of Fubar Palace
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Summer
Pressed flat against the tunnel wall, Nathily had gone somewhere past fear, into that narrow, airless country where the body simply refuses to move and calls it discipline instead. The stone at her back was slick and cold through her cloak. Somewhere below her boots, the black channel murmured on, indifferent to whether they lived to see the hour out. She counted her own heartbeats to keep from counting anything worse.
Beside her, Emcorae had gone very still in the particular way that frightened her more than any amount of movement could have — not calm, never calm anymore, but coiled, every ounce of the grief and fury he’d carried since Monthaven compressed down into something small and hard and waiting for a target. She could feel the heat of him even through the dark, his katana already loosed in its sheath, his breathing measured with the deliberate, unnatural evenness of a man forcing his body to obey when every instinct in it screamed to move. Two months of graves had taught him patience of a sort. It was not a patience Nathily trusted.
The torchlight crept closer across the vaulted stone, and with it came the small, ordinary sounds of a man who believed himself entirely alone — the scuff of a boot in muck, the creak of a knee, a low, muttered curse at the smell. Whoever he was, he did not walk like a soldier. He walked like a man doing something he’d been ordered to do and hated every step of it. Some old, wary part of Nathily — the part that had kept them both breathing across a hundred leagues of Orkney’s hunting grounds — cautioned her that hatred of one’s own errand made a man dangerous in exactly the way fear did not.
Frightened men fled. Ashamed men sometimes did not think at all.
She glanced once at Emcorae. He did not glance back. His eyes were fixed on the light, and in them Nathily saw not a plan, not patience, but the first hungry flicker of a man who has been waiting two months for someone, anyone, to finally give him a reason.
The footsteps stopped close enough that Nathily could hear the man’s breathing — quick and shallow, the particular rhythm of someone who had trained himself to move quietly through places he’d rather not be. Torchlight wavered against the vaulted ceiling as the figure crept to the edge of the black channel, glanced once over his shoulder with the guilty haste of a thief checking for witnesses, and drew a bundle of rolled parchment from beneath his cloak.
He knelt at the water’s edge and, with the reluctant care of a man burying something he wished he could simply forget existed, fed the scrolls one at a time into the sluggish current. A wise method of disposal, if an unglamorous one — I’ve used worse myself, and been considerably less delicate about it.
Whoever this newcomer was and whatever the reason for his task, he never got the chance to finish. Before the last scroll slipped into the black water, Emcorae was moving — a silent, predatory surge from the shadows that had the little man pinned against the slick stone wall before he’d so much as drawn breath to scream, one gauntleted hand clamped over his mouth, the cold edge of a dagger pressed flat against his throat.
The man’s eyes went round as coins above Emcorae’s fingers. He made a muffled, desperate sound that was not quite a word.
“Not a sound,” Emcorae warned, low and lethal, pressing the black blade of The Grim harder against the man’s gullet, “or I paint this tunnel with whatever’s left of your throat.”
Nathily stepped into the torchlight beside him, falchia drawn but held low. “We’re going to remove my friend’s hand,” she said, quiet and even. “If you scream, he will use that blade. Nod if you understand.”
With the cold stone dagger sucking at his neck, the man nodded so rapidly it was a wonder his head didn’t detach.
Emcorae’s hand came away. What emerged was a wheezing, high-pitched litany of terror. “Please — please, I’ve done nothing, I’m only a servant, I was told to — I didn’t ask what was in them, I swear on the High Heavens I never read a word—”
“What’s your name.”
“H-Holms. Aldric Holms. I serve the court, I’m no soldier, I’ve got no weapon, please, whatever you’re here for, I can’t stop you—”
“What we’re here for,” Emcorae said, the Grim’s edge still hovering an inch from the man’s collarbone, “is King Diked. Where is he.”
Something in Holms’s face shifted — raw animal terror giving way, for just a moment, to a confusion so genuine it nearly made Nathily lower her guard. “Diked? You’re — you want Diked?” A short, disbelieving laugh escaped him before he could stop it, quickly strangled into a whimper as the blade pressed closer. “Forgive me, forgive me, I only mean — Diked hasn’t held the throne in near two months. He’s not King anymore. Hasn’t been since the coup.”
“Explain,” Nathily said, before Emcorae’s grip could tighten further around the man’s collar.
Holms swallowed, his throat working visibly against the flat of the blade. “The Steward. Ramssee. He’s — he’s Emperor now, or near enough. Calls himself that in private, though the decree hasn’t gone out to the provinces yet. Diked’s still alive, if that’s what you’re asking, but he’s a prisoner in his own palace. A puppet with the strings well and truly cut.” A short, bitter huff, almost a laugh, if laughter could curdle. “Doomed King they call him in the streets, when there’s anyone left in the streets to call him anything.”
I’ll admit no small satisfaction in this particular turn — I’ve watched a great many kings discover, always too late, that the men whispering counsel in their ear were never quite so loyal as their flattery suggested. Diked hadn’t the wit to see the snake coiled at his own right hand. A shame. Then again, I’ve known gods guilty of the same blindness, so perhaps I oughtn’t judge the young king too harshly.
Emcorae’s jaw worked, some private calculation flickering behind his eyes — two months of hard riding, of graves and grief and one burning name, and now that name meant nothing at all. “Where is he. Diked. Now.”
“I don’t know exactly, my lord, I swear it. Somewhere in the guest wing, under watch. He’s not permitted visitors, not permitted much of anything anymore, he just—” Holms hesitated, a new and different fear crossing his face, one that had nothing to do with the blade at his throat. “Wait a moment. Could it be that you’re not here for Diked? Is it really the dwarf you’re after?”
Nathily and Emcorae exchanged a glance sharp enough to cut glass.
“What dwarf?” Nathily said.
“The prisoner. In the Ninth Ward.” Holms’s voice dropped, as though the stones themselves might report him for saying it aloud. “Word in the kitchens is he’s kin to some warband still out past the Parkway — led by a berserker, they say, all hunting for him. I assumed—” A small, hysterical shrug, as much as the dagger allowed. “Well. I assumed you were his rescue party. Come to spring him before the berserker’s army tears the palace down looking for his friend.”
There was no berserker’s army hunting these halls, of course — only the lone dwarf himself, stuck in Fubar’s dungeons and not yet awakened to what he’d become, currently still shackled and broken in the dark below. Someho the frightened little man Holms had conjured a second monster entirely out of rumor. Was Holm’s monster really Kaoz? Was it something else? For now all that matter is this singular truth – mortals do so love frightening themselves with ghosts of their own invention, don’t they?
Meanwhile Emcorae’s grip on the man’s collar didn’t loosen, but something in his expression sharpened. “You’re going to take us to Diked,” he said. “And you’re going to do it quietly, or I promise you, whatever this usurper Ramssee has planned for that dwarf prisoner will seem like mercy compared to what I’ll do to you.”
Holms’s whole body sagged. “Yes. Yes, my lord. Anything. Just — please, put the blade away. I’ll take you. I’ll take you both.”
Into the Palace
Led out of the sewers by the man Holms, the Azoras emerged through a service door hidden behind a moldering tapestry — one of a dozen such passages Holms had learned in his years shuffling papers no one else wanted to touch. Nathily kept her blade sheathed but her hand never strayed far from its hilt, and Emcorae walked close enough behind Holms that the man surely felt the Grim’s presence like a second shadow at his back.
The palace told its own story the moment they crossed its threshold. Grand corridors that should have thrummed with courtiers stood instead in a hush broken only by their own footsteps — tapestries hanging limp and dust-furred, once-polished floors gone dull, the whole place carrying itself with the brittle, held-breath quiet of somewhere waiting to die. A kingdom in its death throes always smells faintly of neglect before it smells of anything worse. I’ve walked through enough of them to know the scent well.
“This way,” Holms murmured, ducking them through a servants’ passage rather than the main hall. “The plague we call The Husk has done half our work for us, truth be told. No one lingers who doesn’t have to. No one looks too closely at a stranger’s face, either — better not to know who might be carrying it.”
As if summoned by the mention, the sound of marching boots rose from a connecting corridor ahead. Holms went white and flattened himself into an alcove behind a rotted curtain, Emcorae and Nathily crowding in on either side, breath held. The soldiers passed close enough that Nathily could have counted the rivets on their armor. None so much as glanced their way. Fubar’s own dread had become her intruders’ finest camouflage.
“See?” Holms whispered once the footsteps had faded, his voice thin with something that might have been relief or might have been despair — with a man like Holms, the two were difficult to tell apart. “Nobody wants to catch it from a stranger’s breath. Shame it’s killed everyone else. Funny thing is that those sewers are one of the safest places to be – nobody dares go there and by the time the bodies are disposed of those husks are empty sacs and no longer dangerous, just foul, why I’ve half–“
“Shut up and keep moving.” Emcorae forced the man forward.
Holms quickened his pace – the Grim ever at his back – and they pressed on through servants’ halls and forgotten stairwells until the man brought them to a small, dust-heavy reading room tucked behind the royal wing’s outer gallery.
“The King’s chambers are just beyond,” he whispered, nodding toward a heavy door at the gallery’s end. “Two guards, usually. Sometimes more.”
“Sometimes more is not what I wanted to hear,” Nathily murmured, as she locked the door they came through.
For his part Emcorae was already unwinding rope from his pack. “You’re staying here,” he told Holms, steering him toward a sturdy chair with rather less gentleness than the man’s cooperation had earned him. “Try to shout, and it won’t matter how many guards come running — you’ll be dead before the first one arrives.”
Holms didn’t protest. He sank into the chair and offered his wrists for the binding with the weary compliance of a man who had long since stopped expecting his life to go any way he’d choose for it.
The Serpent’s Bed
The two guards outside the royal chambers never saw the arrows that killed them. Nathily’s first shaft took the nearer man through the throat before he’d finished his sentence to his companion; her second found the other’s eye before he’d registered the first man’s fall. Both went down in near-silence.
“We should move the bodies,” she whispered, already scanning for a shadowed alcove. “If anyone passes—”
But Emcorae was already past her. Kicking the mens’ bodies aside, he had one hand on the ornate door to the king’s room, his patience for anything but an end to this madness, entirely spent. Nathily had just enough time to hiss his name — Emcorae, wait — before Emcorae pushed the door open and strode into the chamber beyond, katana raised, ready to end the life of the man who had cost him everything.
Yet whatever Emcorae had expected, what he found was far different.
The room was warm, thick with sweet incense smoke, lit by a bank of guttering candles around an enormous canopied bed. Two figures lay tangled in its silk sheets — a dark-haired woman scrambling upright, and beside her, a man whose face turned toward the intruders with an expression of such immediate, calculating alarm that it told Emcorae everything before a word was spoken.
To the Azora’s frustration, the man was not Diked.
“Where is he?” Emcorae snarled, closing the distance in three furious strides, katana leveled at the stranger’s throat. “Where is Diked!”
The man — lean, sharp-featured, his skin catching the candlelight with a faint, unnatural shimmer — did not answer with words. Instead, his form…folded, flesh sliding into scale, limbs collapsing into coils with a wet, sinuous rush too fast even for Emcorae’s honed reflexes. Where a startled courtier had lain an instant before, a serpent now poured itself off the bed. In a flash it was across the floor, briefly struck the far wall with a forceful thud, urgently found some seam in the palace’s ancient bones, and then suddenly was gone.
Through the chaos the woman on the bed screamed — a raw, furious sound that tore through the incense-thick air and rang off stone in every direction. “RAMSSEE! You coward!“
It was, without question, the worst possible thing she could have done.
Even before the echo faded, an answering shout rose somewhere beyond the chamber walls — a guard, or a servant, or both, alerted by a woman’s scream from the Emperor’s own bedchamber, was moving fast toward its source.
Nathily’s blood went cold. “That’s torn it. Emcorae, we need to move, now—”
“Where is Diked?” Emcorae demanded again, dragging the naked woman half out of the bed by her wrist, his voice no longer merely furious but frayed, raw at the edges, a man watching his life collapse into smoke and scales and empty answers.
“Emcorae, there’s no time—”
“WHERE IS HE!”
“He isn’t HERE!” the woman screamed back, wrenching against his grip, more fury than fear in her now. “He’s a broken, sniveling wretch Ramssee keeps around to remind himself what a real king looks like when he’s lost everything. But what my so-called lover doesn’t even know is that Diked fled three nights ago, and if you don’t let go of my arm I will make certain every guard in this wing knows exactly where to find you both!”
For one terrible instant, Emcorae’s blade drifted toward her throat — not a calculated threat this time, but something closer to blind rage looking for anywhere at all to land. Nathily’s hand closed hard around his wrist, forcing the katana down and away.
“No.” One word, but it carried the full weight of every argument they’d had since the grate, since the ravine, since Monthaven. “She’s the only lead we have left. You kill her, we have nothing. We came this far for nothing.”
“We already have nothing!” Emcorae rounded on her, and for the first time in this entire cursed campaign, the anger in his eyes wasn’t aimed at some distant king or faceless guard — it was aimed squarely at her. “Diked’s gone. The trail’s gone. Everything I’ve bled for since Monthaven just slithered out a wall, Nathily, and you want me to stand here and be careful?”
“I want you to stay alive—” Boots, many of them, pounding closer down the gallery outside, cutting the argument off cold. Shouted orders. A door somewhere slamming open.
“They’re coming,” Nathily hissed, already hauling the half-dressed, still-cursing woman toward the door by main force. “Gag her. Now. We are not dying in a bedroom because you couldn’t let this go.”
Emcorae didn’t answer — there wasn’t time to, and some small, buried part of him seemed to know she was right, however little he wanted to hear it. He tore a length of silk from the bed hangings and forced it between the woman’s teeth while she thrashed and clawed, her muffled fury doing nothing to slow the boots closing in from two directions at once.
They half-dragged, half-carried her back through the door as the first soldiers rounded the far end of the gallery — swords already drawn, torchlight throwing their shadows huge and jagged across the walls, close enough now that Nathily could hear one of them shouting for the alarm bell to be rung.
The only path that didn’t lead straight through the quickly approaching soldiers’ line of sight was to retreat to the reading room. They scurried back towards it, knowing full they were likely closing a trap upon themselves.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 