Location: Kaoz’s Villa, Outside Fubar
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
I have visited a great many houses of horror across the long, undignified span of my existence — I built a fair number of them myself, in fact, back in ages when my ambitions still required a proper stage to perform upon. Even so, I confess Kaoz’s little estate impressed me. There is a particular artistry to cruelty left unsupervised for months on end, and my former creation had clearly used his solitude well.
Barkla led them within sight of the place well before any of them were willing to approach it — down from the ridge, skirting wide of the main road, through two leagues of scrub and broken farmland gone to seed since the plague had emptied its tenant houses. He stopped them at the tree line a good three hundred paces out, and none of them argued the caution.
“We don’t know if he’s returned,” Nathily said quietly, studying the villa’s silhouette through the thinning trees — a once-elegant country house gone to ruin, ivy strangling a cracked and soot-stained façade. “He may have simply been out hunting when Barkla escaped. He may be inside that house right now.”
“Then we don’t walk up to the front door and knock,” Emcorae said.
They left Mossflower and Joanne well back among a stand of scrub oak, tethered loose enough to bolt if they needed to, and neither horse showed the slightest inclination to argue the arrangement — both mares had gone stiff-legged and wide-eyed the moment the villa’s low, persistent stench first reached them on the wind, and no amount of coaxing was going to carry either one a step closer to that house. Garf proved a far harder case. The wolfhound paced a tight, agitated circle at Barkla’s feet, hackles raised, growling low at the villa’s distant silhouette with an intensity that told Nathily he wanted nothing more than to charge straight through that fence line himself.
It was Barkla, of all of them, who refused to let him.
“No,” the dwarf said, low and firm, dropping to one knee to grip the wolfhound’s scruff when Garf tried to press past him toward the gate. “Not this time. Whatever’s in there, some of it was mine to bear, and none of it needs to be yours as well.” Garf whined and strained against his grip, ears flat, clearly unconvinced, and it took a long, stubborn minute — Barkla murmuring low in Nort, the wolfhound’s whole body trembling with the effort of obedience fighting instinct — before the great hound finally sank down onto his haunches at the tree line, still growling softly, still watching the villa with an unbroken, furious stare.
“Stay,” Barkla told him again, gentler now. “I’ll come back for you. I always do.”
It was Nathily who proposed the old Azora method, the one El-Janus had drilled into both of them years before either had ever imagined needing it against a shapeshifting monster’s lair — a wide, silent circuit in opposite directions, each of them reading the ground and the windows and the stillness of the place for anything that didn’t belong, meeting again on the far side to compare what they’d found before either set foot past the gate.
Emcorae went east, keeping low along a collapsed stone wall that had once marked a kitchen garden, counting windows, watching for any flicker of movement behind cracked glass, any hearth-smoke rising from a chimney that would mean a fire recently tended. He found none. What he did find, working his way around the villa’s rear, was a stable long since abandoned, its stalls empty and its floor thick with the kind of undisturbed dust that told him no horse had sheltered there in weeks.
Nathily took the western approach, moving through the overgrown hedge line with the particular silence Arbola had spent years teaching into her bones, and found what unsettled her more than any sign of occupation would have: nothing at all. No tracks fresh enough to read. No birds calling from the nearer trees, where birds ought by rights to have been calling. Only a heavy, listening quiet that pressed against her ears the closer she drew to the walls, as though the villa itself were holding its breath and daring her to do the same.
They met again at the appointed hollow, and neither had anything reassuring to offer the other.
“No fire. No fresh tracks. No horse in the stable,” Emcorae reported.
“And nothing living anywhere close to that fence line, that I could find,” Nathily said. “Which unsettles me more than if I’d found guards posted at every window.”
Barkla, crouched low beside them, empty-handed since the tunnel had claimed his last borrowed blade and NeckBiter still waited somewhere inside for him to reclaim it, grunted his own grim assessment — and looked, even weaponless, like a man entirely unbothered by the lack. “Kaoz doesn’t post guards. He doesn’t need them. If he were home, we’d know it long before we saw him.”
“That’s meant to comfort us?” Emcorae asked.
“No,” Barkla said. “It’s meant to keep you cautious. Come. Slowly, and quiet, and if I raise a hand, you stop moving entirely.”
They approached the outer gate at a crouch, weapons bare, pausing twice more to listen for anything beneath the wind’s own restless movement through the overgrown garden. Nothing answered them but silence, thick and unbroken, and it was that very absence of any threat at all that kept every one of them wound tight as a bowstring by the time they finally reached the fence line proper.
The fence told its own story before they’d gone another step. What should have been ornamental iron pickets now bore a grim collection of trophies — bones bleached pale by weather, scraps of leather and cloth too weathered to name their original owners, and worse things Nathily made herself stop cataloguing after the third one. The air carried a low, persistent stench of old blood gone into the ground, mingled with something sweeter and more rotten that none of them cared to investigate too closely.
“Gods,” Emcorae breathed, staring at the fence, katana still raised though nothing living had yet shown itself to threaten them. “How long was he left alone out here?”
“Long enough,” Barkla said grimly, “for a creature like that to stop pretending he needed anyone’s permission.”
They cleared the gate one at a time, Barkla first, then Nathily, Emcorae covering their backs — the old, careful discipline of soldiers breaching enemy ground, not the relieved shuffle of travelers arriving somewhere safe. Every doorway got checked before anyone crossed its threshold. Every silence got tested by a held breath and a long count before any of them trusted it enough to move again.
The interior proved worse than the fence had promised. What had likely once been a conservatory stood gutted, expensive furniture reduced to kindling, walls scarred by claw-marks and stains no amount of scrubbing would ever fully lift. Room after room told the same story — a monster’s solitary boredom made manifest in wreckage, some spaces given over entirely to what could only be called a butcher’s larder, open to the air and buzzing with flies despite the season having long since turned the worst of it to leather and bone. Nathily found she could not make herself relax even after the fourth empty room, the fifth, the sixth — some old instinct insisting that a house this thoroughly steeped in cruelty could not possibly be as abandoned as it appeared, that Kaoz might yet be coiled somewhere in its shadows, patient and amused, waiting to see how close they’d come before he showed himself.
“I’ll admit,” she said quietly, one hand pressed to her mouth, falchia never lowering, “I did not think anything could unsettle me more than the Ninth Ward.”
“The Ninth Ward had order to it, at least,” Barkla said, his own voice carrying none of its usual bravado here, sharp eyes cutting to every doorway they passed. “Guards, wardens, cells. This is just a beast’s den, and a beast answers to no rule at all — not even the rule that says he ought to be gone when we believe him to be.”
They moved deeper only once each room had been cleared to Barkla’s grim satisfaction, and even then no one sheathed a blade. He led them at last with purpose toward what had once been a grand hall, some old certainty guiding his steps past the wreckage, though even Barkla paused at its threshold a moment longer than strictly necessary before committing himself to cross it.
There, arranged with an almost reverent care that stood in grotesque contrast to the chaos surrounding it, they found what they’d come for.
What Was Owed
Barkla’s armor hung displayed across a broken mantel like a conquering general’s spoils — a hauberk of dark, close-linked rings that seemed, even in the dim light filtering through a shattered window, to carry a faint and troubling warmth to their color, as though the metal itself remembered blood. Beside it rested a helm whose facemask alone made Nathily’s stomach turn — a snarling, godlike visage wrought in black iron, ancient beyond any craft she recognized. And leaning against the mantel’s edge, its double-bladed head catching what little light the room allowed, stood an axe that seemed, even at rest, to promise violence.
But it was what lay beside Barkla’s own reclaimed treasures that stopped the dwarf cold before he’d taken more than a single step toward them.
A shield, its seven layers of interlocking silver plate scarred but unbroken, propped against the mantel’s far end. A war-hammer, its head far too large for any mortal hand but a Drokka’s, resting where some careless soldier had simply tossed it after the fighting was done. A plain half-helm, dented but whole. And a long-knife, its edge gone dull with disuse, laid almost carelessly atop the pile — Brega’s effects, kept not out of any respect for the dead prince but simply because trophies, once collected, are rarely thrown away.
Barkla made a sound Nathily had never heard from him before — something between a sob and a growl, raw and unguarded — and crossed the ruined hall in three long strides, though it was Brega’s shield his hands found first, not his own hauberk. He lifted it with a care that bordered on reverence, turning the silver plates over in the dim light as though searching for some fresh wound that hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen it slung across his brother’s back.
“He carried this at the ford, and at Rasburg, and every league between here and the Rhokki Pass,” Barkla said, very quietly, “and Kaoz let it rot in a pile with the rest of his plunder, as though it were worth no more than a peasant’s kitchen pot.” He set it aside at last, with the same careful tenderness, and only then did he turn to his own hauberk, pressing it briefly to his chest before he began, with shaking fingers, to work it on over his head. Even in that unguarded moment, Nathily noticed, neither she nor Emcorae lowered their own blades for even the handful of heartbeats his reunion required — this house had earned that much wariness, and none of them were prepared to forget it just because grief had, for a moment, claimed the room’s attention instead of dread.
Once the last buckle was fastened and his helm settled once more over his scarred scalp, Barkla gathered his brother’s shield, hammer, helm, and knife into a careful bundle of his own, wrapping them in a length of torn curtain rather than leave them exposed to the same dust and neglect that had already claimed them once. “These go home with me,” he said, to no one in particular, “or they go into a cairn built with my own two hands, whichever comes first. But they do not stay in this house a moment longer than they have to.”
“He kept them,” the dwarf said, voice thick. “The bastard kept them like trophies of his own courage, when all he did was drag two shackled prisoners half-dead to his door.”
“They’re beautiful,” Emcorae said quietly, watching him settle the armor into place, watching something in Barkla’s whole bearing straighten and harden the moment the rings closed over his chest.
“They’re mine,” Barkla said, and lifted the helm reverently before setting it, at last, upon his own bare and scarred scalp. Even Nathily, who had seen the dwarf tear a corridor of soldiers apart with his bare hands and a stolen sword, found herself taking an involuntary step back at the sight of that terrible black facemask settling into place. Something ancient and furious looked out at her from behind it now, and she understood, in that instant, precisely what Ramssee’s men must have felt in their final heartbeats in the Ninth Ward.
Barkla hefted the axe last, testing its balance with the easy familiarity of a limb regrown. “NeckBiter,” he said, almost tenderly. “I thought I’d never hold you again.” Then, quieter, harder: “Kaoz will regret leaving you so close to reach.”
The Forgotten One
It was a sound from beneath their feet that stopped them from leaving — a faint, rhythmic scraping, more animal than human, rising through a grate set into the hall’s stone floor.
Nathily knelt beside it, torch lowered, and found herself looking down into a cellar hole barely large enough for a man to lie flat in, where a shape huddled in filth and shadow flinched violently from the sudden light.
“There’s someone down here,” she said, already working at the grate’s rusted latch. “Alive.”
What they hauled up into the ruined hall a few minutes later was barely recognizable as a man at all — starved to the bone, fever-bright eyes rolling in a face gone gaunt and grey, fingernails torn from clawing at stone that had never once given way. He flinched from every touch, muttering half-formed words in a voice gone hoarse from disuse or screaming, likely both.
“Easy,” Nathily murmured, offering water from her skin with a gentleness that seemed, for a moment, to reach past whatever fog had claimed his mind. “You’re safe. We won’t hurt you.”
It took time — more than any of them were comfortable spending so close to Kaoz’s abandoned lair — before the man’s eyes finally focused on something resembling awareness. “You’re not—” he rasped, flinching again. “Not his. Not the grey one’s—”
“No,” Emcorae said gently. “We’re not with Kaoz. What’s your name?”
“Osric.” The word came out cracked, disbelieving, as though he’d forgotten he still owned one. “Steward’s under-groom. He took me for — for nothing, for looking at him wrong in the yard, I don’t even — he forgot me, I think. Left me down there and forgot.”
“How long?” Nathily asked softly.
“I don’t know. Weeks. I lost the count.” His hands trembled around the waterskin. “I heard him talking, though. Before he left the last time. Through the floor. He doesn’t think anyone can hear him down there, but sound carries strange in that hole.”
Emcorae crouched close. “Talking to whom?”
“The king. Diked.” Osric’s eyes darted between them, some old survival instinct warring with the desperate need to finally tell someone. “He said — he said he was taking ‘the prize’ to the queen. That’s the word he used. The prize. And the queen. I don’t know what that means, only that he sounded pleased with himself when he said it, and Kaoz is never pleased about anything unless it’s blood.”
Nathily and Emcorae exchanged a long look over the man’s head.
“Which queen,” Emcorae asked, though he suspected, from the sudden weight settling in his own chest, that he already knew part of the answer.
Osric only shook his head. “That’s all I heard. I swear it. That’s all.”
They gave him what food they could spare and pointed him toward the nearest untouched farmstead, watching him stumble off across the fields with the particular unsteady gait of a man who still didn’t quite believe his own freedom. Nathily’s chest ached watching him go — one more soul Fubar had chewed up and nearly forgotten, saved only by chance and a scraping sound none of them had been meant to hear.
They quit the villa grounds themselves not long after, and none of them looked back at the fence line as they went. Garf was on his feet the instant they came back into sight, straining so hard against nothing at all that Nathily half expected him to bowl Barkla over entirely — and when the dwarf finally reached him, the wolfhound pressed against his legs and whined long and low, sniffing at his armor and his hands with an anxious, searching thoroughness, as though he needed to confirm for himself that his friend had truly returned whole. Mossflower and Joanne greeted the whole party’s return with the particular relieved nickering of creatures who’d spent every moment of that wait dreading the worst. Nathily found herself breathing easier the moment the horses’ warm, ordinary scent replaced the rot still clinging to the back of her throat.
Memories
They made camp that evening in a hollow well clear of the villa’s reach, the fire kept low, and it was there, prompted by Osric’s fragment of overheard truth, that Barkla finally spoke at length of the man who’d overseen his captivity.
“I never saw Kaoz again, after the villa,” the dwarf said, turning NeckBiter’s haft slowly in his hands. “Nor Diked, not once, in all my months in that hole. It was always Ramssee who came. Sometimes with his weasel of a clerk in tow — the same one who led you through the palace, I’d wager, from what you’ve told me of him.”
“Holms,” Nathily murmured.
“That one.” Barkla’s mouth twisted. “Ramssee lied to me constantly, and worse, I don’t think he much cared whether I believed him. First he told me Akka was cursed, plague-ridden since some ancient outbreak, and that he couldn’t risk me returning there to loose it again upon the world. Noble words, for a man holding me in chains.” A humorless huff. “I asked him, if no one had set foot in Akka in so long, why his own city was dying of that very plague even as he spoke. He had no answer for that. He stormed out, and the torture began properly not long after.”
“And after that?” Emcorae asked.
“His story changed, as it always did. Now the plague was real, ravaging his people, and he claimed not to know its cause — though I’ve come to understand since that this too was a lie, dressed up prettier than the last. He begged me, in the middle of his own men putting hot iron to my skin, to simply go home quietly. As though home still existed for me to return to.” Barkla’s grip on the axe tightened. “But it was what he said when he thought no one but a broken dwarf was listening that told me the most.”
“What do you mean?” Nathily asked.
“He would send his guards away, sometimes, and stand outside my cage alone — not close enough for me to reach, mind, he wasn’t a fool, whatever else he was — and talk. Not to me. To himself, mostly, though he pretended otherwise. He complained endlessly of Kaoz. Said the Myz wanted to leave and he couldn’t decide whether to help him go or find some way to be rid of him for good. He said Diked was mad, useless, a puppet he was forced to keep propped up for reasons of his own. He called himself the only man clear-headed enough to save Orkney from both of them.” Barkla shook his head slowly. “I do not think, in the end, that Ramssee was even speaking to a prisoner. I think he simply had no one else left he trusted enough to talk to at all — and a chained dwarf he assumed would soon be dead told no tales to anyone.”
The fire popped and settled. Nathily stared into it, turning the fragments over in her mind — Osric’s overheard scrap, Barkla’s account of a man scheming against his own allies, the sense, growing steadily heavier in her chest, that Ramssee might be a far more useful enemy than either Diked or Kaoz had ever been.
“We need more than fragments,” she said finally. “A queen. A prize. It isn’t enough to chase blind.”
“Then we get more,” Emcorae said, and something in his voice had gone flat and decided in a way that made Nathily uneasy even before he finished the thought. “Whatever it takes.”
The Road
What it took, as it turned out, was considerably more risk than any of them were entirely comfortable with.
They found their opportunity two days later, on a lesser road threading south from Fubar’s outer farms — a small mounted patrol, four soldiers riding at an unhurried pace, clearly part of the wider search still combing the countryside for three fugitives who’d humiliated an empire in its own dungeon. Barkla, now fully armored and fearsome enough that even Emcorae found himself unsettled by the sight of his own ally in full battle dress, insisted on taking them alive.
“Dead men answer no questions,” he said simply, and proved, in the ambush that followed, disturbingly skilled at ensuring exactly that outcome — a swift, brutal application of NeckBiter’s flat rather than its edge, four soldiers unhorsed and groaning in the roadside grass before any of them had drawn a weapon in earnest defense.
The interrogation that followed yielded less than any of them had hoped. The soldiers, sweating and terrified beneath Emcorae’s blade and Barkla’s looming presence, knew only rumor — that the Steward’s household had suffered some great embarrassment in the dungeons, that a bounty had been raised on three escaped criminals, that soldiers of every rank were being pulled from their usual postings to comb every road within a day’s ride of the capital. None of them knew where Diked or his Myz bodyguard had gone, or when, or by what road. Common soldiers, it seemed, were told only enough to obey, never enough to understand.
“Bind them and leave them,” Nathily said at last, some old discomfort in her at threatening men who plainly knew nothing worth the risk they’d taken to ask. “This road was a waste.”
“Not entirely,” Emcorae said grimly, watching the soldiers struggle uselessly against their bonds. “It confirms Ramssee still wants us found badly enough to strip his own patrols thin looking. That tells us something about how much this still matters to him.”
They walked on in heavy silence after that, the day’s risk weighing on all three of them, no closer to Diked’s trail than they’d been at the villa’s ruined gate.
It was Nathily, eventually, who gave voice to the thought none of them had wanted to speak aloud first.
“There is one man in this entire kingdom who knows exactly where Diked and Kaoz have gone,” she said. “And exactly who this ‘queen’ might be.”
Emcorae’s jaw tightened. “Ramssee.”
“We nearly died the last time we stood in a room with him,” Nathily said. “And he can simply become a snake and slip through our fingers whenever he pleases.”
“I am aware,” Emcorae said. “I still don’t see another road open to us.”
Barkla, silent through most of this, finally spoke, his voice carrying an edge none of them had heard from him since the Ninth Ward. “Then we go back,” he said. “And this time, I will make certain that whatever shape he wears, he does not leave that conversation unscarred.”
Nathily looked between the two of them — Emcorae’s grim resolve, Barkla’s cold and simmering fury — and felt the last of her own hesitation give way to the same hard necessity.
“Then we go back,” she agreed. “Into the belly of the beast, one more time.”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 