Thankful
The upper half of the University District, as Berend has taken to calling it, is more or less intact—surprising, considering the earth beneath it can’t be stable anymore. On the street leading up to Emryn Marner’s red-brick house, the cobbles are loose, sitting in hollows too large for them and shifting under Berend’s feet. He could be imagining things, but each house looks a little farther from its neighbors than he remembers.
A crack splits the steps leading up to the painted door. Berend places one foot on the first stair, lowering his weight slowly. It’s sturdy enough. He won’t have to be here long.
Sunlight streams through the trees overhead as they jut out over the district. It might be pretty if it wasn’t so strange, the sun shining from the base of the pines rather than down from above. At least it’s chased away some of the red gloom. No one has lit the street lamps since the dead woke up, and Berend’s eye is beginning to ache. Of course the end of the world has to come around now, when he’s a little over a year shy of forty, and not when he was twenty-two, had both eyes, and had never had so much as a hangover to slow him down.
He knocks three times, dislodging flecks of red paint that stick to his knuckles like dried blood. It occurs to him that Marner might not be home, and he’ll have walked all this way and climbed a rickety ladder nailed to an even more rickety ladder over a bottomless chasm for nothing.
Well, he’s here now. Marner, a scholar from his disheveled hair down to his mismatched socks, wouldn’t have taken Berend’s sword elsewhere, hoping to use it. If he has to, Berend can just break in.
The door opens. Standing between the lintels, bathed in red light, is none other than Herard Belisia, unfavored elder brother of the man who murdered Bessa Kyne. He’s no less the recently dried half-drowned puppy he looked when he visited Berend in the hospital, though he’s had a change of clothes since then. His shirt is clean and tucked in, and his shoes have seen polish sometime in the last week.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Berend says.
Herard blinks at him. “You’re alive.”
“Well, don’t sound too excited.” Berend shifts his weight back on one foot, giving Herard the once-over. “You seem to have made it through more or less unscathed.”
Herard’s haggard face animates for a brief moment with surprise. “Oh, no, I am glad to see you,” he says. “I just thought you might have still been at the hospital. I heard things were…difficult there.”
Difficult is certainly a way to describe it. Berend doesn’t find it strictly necessary to burden Herard with the explanation that he was, in fact, at the university hospital when the dead started walking. The man looks like any more bad news will knock him flat. “How’s the family?” he asks instead.
Herard shrugs. “I haven’t heard anything. The estate is outside the city, and it’s impossible to travel now. I haven’t looked for them, and so far, they’re not looking for me.”
“We can both be thankful for that,” Berend says.
“Right.” Herard rubs at his eyes with the back of one hand. “Look, I’m truly very sorry, but I’m not going to be able to pay you just now. I still don’t have access to my family’s accounts, and all I’ve got is pocket change. As soon as I figure something out, I’ll contact you, but I suppose you’re looking to leave the city today?”
It’s Berend’s turn to be surprised. “Oh, no, I’m not here for money. I was actually looking for your friend, Marner. I had to leave a few of my possessions here with him, and I was hoping to collect them.”
“Of course, yes,” Herard says. “He has them upstairs. He wasn’t sure if you were coming back.”
“And besides,” Berend continues, “gold isn’t worth much at the moment. If you have some coffee and maybe a meat pie to spare, I’d happily call our contract even, if you’ll forgive me for pursuing more pressing concerns than your brother’s guilt.”
Relief washes over Herard’s baggy eyes and drawn mouth. He takes a step back into the house and gestures to the stairs behind him. “Certainly. We have some food, though no meat pies, I’m afraid.”
“Coffee will be fine,” Berend says, ducking past him. “The Temple of Isra is offering bread and soup, if you happen to run out. Hopefully, by then, the engineers will have built a better bridge over the cliff.”
“The what?”
Evidently, Herard hasn’t left this house in a couple of days. He must have arrived shortly after Berend and Isabel had left. “It’s a couple of blocks west of you,” Berend says. “You really have to see it.”
“Right then,” Herard manages, his voice weak. Berend can already tell he won’t be venturing outside anytime soon.
The door at the top of the stairs is open, as are the curtains, allowing a little reddish light to stream in. Other than that, Emryn Marner’s familiar lumpy couch and stacks of books on every flat surface haven’t been touched by the chaos outside. Marner himself sits on the floor, half a dozen books open around him, scratching figures onto a folded piece of paper.
He glances up as Berend and Herard enter the room, pushing a pair of wire-framed lenses back up his nose. “Oh, look who it is,” he says with genuine, if distracted, enthusiasm.
“In the flesh,” says Berend. “You two seem to be more or less unharmed. Are you close to a breakthrough there?”
Emryn scowls at the paper, unfolds it, and turns it over. “Not really. I’m certain that one of Aermeln’s laws of gravitation can explain that—” he points to the window, where the forest stands stark and black, obscuring the view— “but I haven’t found which one yet. Where’s your lady friend? The Sentinel?”
“Preoccupied, I’m afraid,” says Berend. “I just stopped by to pick up our things. And some coffee, if you have any to spare.”
“Sure. Help yourself.” Emryn gestures vaguely to the kitchen with a charcoal pencil before scratching several digits in a column on the paper’s left side.
The kitchen already smells of coffee. Half a pot of cooling, blackish sludge sits on the stove. It looks disgusting, and also like exactly what Berend is going to need to get through the rest of the day. He lights the stove and tilts the pot back and forth once as a pretension of stirring it.
His good cloak lies over the side of the round metal tub taking up most of the kitchen, his hat balanced on top. Isabel’s hat and coat hang beside them, and his sword stands against the wall nearby. He picks these up, and after a moment’s consideration, picks up the filthy and wrinkled clothing underneath. He won’t stay here long enough to wash them, but maybe he’ll get the chance at the temple of Isra, or in Vernay. Really, anywhere with a wash basin would do. He folds up the clothing, giving the tub a series of wistful glances. A bath seems like the height of luxury. A little hot water would do wonders to fix the ache in his back that he acquired sleeping on the floor in the temple. Once more, he wonders why all this couldn’t have happened ten or fifteen years ago, when he could sleep on the wet ground without so much as catching cold, and the Sons of Galaser were ready to build bridges, clear roads, and defend the walls from many-eyed things and opportunistic bandits alike.
There haven’t been any of the latter—not that Berend has noticed in his brief jaunt around the city, at least. Either they’re in hiding, or they’ve realized that they’re just as bad off as the rest. He hopes that the rest of the Belisia family is similarly motivated.
Berend isn’t going to get any money out of Herard. He won’t press the lad; he’s not some greedy monster, preying on a newly impoverished nobleman’s dire straits. If there comes a time when he can walk into a shop and spend coins on a pie or a new hat, he’ll regret it then. And if that time comes, he’ll head back out to the Belisia estate and dig up any evidence they’ve missed that can show a judge that Hybrook Belisia murdered a maidservant in his own house. He might send Herard a letter then, just as a friendly reminder of their contract.
No. What Bessa Kyne needs now isn’t for her murderer to be punished. It might not even be what she would ask for, if she were in any state to do so. She had liked the bastard at least a little before he’d strangled her in a fit of rage, though probably not as much as Hybrook himself might have thought. Berend needs to fix what happened to her ghost, and to Mikhail’s, and to all the people he can’t name gathered outside the Temple of Ondir. He’ll go to Vernay, where all the Sentinels come from, and one of them will tell him what to do, and he’ll do his damnedest to do it. He might get devoured himself in the process, but he’ll go to his unmarked grave knowing he did what he could. Now that the Belisias have made themselves scarce, and he’s not likely to be knifed instead, he might actually make it to Vernay.
Berend pours the bitter, muddy coffee into a stained mug left on the edge of the stove and drinks it in three gulps. It’s disgusting, and it makes him feel much better, like he might have a future that lasts more than a day or two.
When he emerges from the kitchen, his and Isabel’s clothing folded up and tucked under one arm, Emryn has started another page of figures and is talking his way through them with sharp gestures of the charcoal pencil. Herard sits behind him on the couch, nodding sagely as though he understands any of it.
“Are you leaving?” he says. He’s made a genteel effort to hide it, but Berend can tell that Herard wants him and his news of newly-formed cliffs and more chaos he can’t see from the window gone.
“Back to the Temple District,” Berend says. “I’m meeting Miss Rainier, and I don’t want to keep her waiting.”
“All right, then,” says Herard. “Good luck. You seem a good sort, and I’m glad you made it out of the hospital.”
“Likewise.” Berend touches a hand to his forehead, out of respect to Herard’s irrelevant nobility, and heads down the stairs.
It’s almost normal daylight when he arrives at street level, except for the looming forest, now lit up with afternoon sun. More people have gathered at the edge of the cliff, but the one ladder is still the only bridge down to the lower half of the district. Berend straps on his sword belt and puts his hat on, but it still leaves him carrying too much to climb down backwards. He’ll have to find another way.
The forest separates him from the Orchard District, but maybe he can go around it. That would take him to the city center, currently blocked off by what’s left of the watch, who won’t take kindly to him going about armed. He’ll have to go all the way north, then, to the upper edge of what’s left of the city, and make his way through the fog.
He might as well get the lay of the land. He has his sword now, and he’s starting to feel a bit of his long-lost youthful invincibility, though that might just be the horrible coffee talking. He hadn’t realized how heavily the Belisias’ threat weighed on his mind until it was gone. He might still fall off a cliff or get eaten before he reaches the Temple of Isra, but at least he feels better about it.
Where did August go? So, full disclosure, I’m only about 20-25% through the rewrite. This isn’t a good rate, BUT I do have my meds again, thanks to a pharmacist giving me a discount code and my husband hunting down his first paycheck. Now that I can sleep, stringing sentences together will get a lot easier. Thanks for reading!
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