Work The Slaves

Joshua woke just before the alarm, some animal part of him counting down the seconds until the shriek came. When it finally tore through the pit, a grinding, metallic wail that bounced off the packed dirt walls, he was already blinking his one eye open, already feeling the weight of the bodies pressed against him on every side.

He was buried near the bottom of a pile that had formed sometime in the night, the way piles always formed when there wasn’t room to lie flat and separate, when two hundred bodies had to fit into a pit meant for half that. An elbow dug into his ribs. A dwarf’s beard, matted and stiff with old sweat and unmentionable grime, was tangled against his cheek. He breathed through his mouth out of habit; the nose stopped working for smells like this years ago, though some mornings, when the wind was wrong, he could still catch it underneath everything else: the thick, cloying rot of whoever hadn’t been hauled out yet. The corner reserved for the dead usually held two or three bodies by the time the handlers finally sent someone down to drag them out, and in the meantime the pit did what pits do, it let the smell settle into every crack of skin and every strand of hair until a man forgot he’d ever smelled like anything else.

The urine and excrement smell was different, sharper, and never went away no matter how many people used the designated corner instead of squatting where they slept. There wasn’t a version of this pit that didn’t reek. Joshua had stopped noticing that too, mostly.

Around him the pile broke apart in slow, groaning pieces. Men mostly, elves with their moss-hair flattened and greasy, humans with the vacant stares of people who’d stopped having thoughts worth thinking, a scattering of fae curled into impossibly small balls in the gaps between larger bodies. The few women in the pit were all old, gray, sexless in the eyes of the handlers, the only kind spared from the breeding pits and sent here instead to rot out their last years doing hard manual labor. Nobody spoke much this early. Speaking took energy, and energy was currency down here, spent only when it bought something.

Joshua got his remaining arm under himself and pushed up, his empty eye socket, an old ruined pit of scar tissue, itching the way it always did in the cold morning air. He was a collection of scars stitched over more scars, some from the pits, some from the breeding years before that, some from things he no longer remembered the cause of. Dirt lived in the creases of his skin so permanently that he’d stopped being able to say what color he’d been born.

The handlers dropped the ladders over the lip of the pit, wooden things lashed together with rope gone black with grime, and the climb began, slow, wordless, everyone favoring one body part or another. Joshua climbed one-armed, which took longer than it used to, and hauled himself up over the edge into the gray light of another morning in the dark kingdom.

From up here he could see clear out past the last broken wall of the slums to where the land opened into the great plains, flat and endless and the color of an old bruise under the permanent haze that hung over everything Torvakul had touched. There were no walls holding him in. There never had been. Any morning he wanted, he could simply walk into that grassland and keep walking until the slums were a memory.

But the plains were where Torvakul walked, where the red raiders rode in his wake, burning and gutting and laughing while they did it. Joshua had heard what happened to the ones who ran. A dwarf, three pits over, had made it three days out there before he came stumbling back through the dark, shaking so hard he couldn’t hold a cup to his own mouth, begging the handlers on his knees to let him back inside the walls that didn’t exist, back into the pit that stank of feces and corpses, because whatever he’d seen out there was worse. They lashed him in the yard until he stopped being able to scream, and then a while after that, until he stopped being anything at all.

Joshua turned his back on the plains the way he did every morning and joined the line forming after the tops of the ladders.

The lines stretched long and uneven across the packed dirt yard, hundreds of bodies shuffling into rough columns, the strong helping the limping, the limping helping no one. Nobody spoke above a murmur. The handlers walked the edges of the lines with loose, contemptuous ease. They had never once feared the people they guarded.

They were orcs mostly, thick-armed and heavy-browed, wearing plate scavenged and hammered from a dozen different sets of golden kingdom armor, mismatched pieces bolted and strapped together so that no two handlers looked quite alike, one with a breastplate too small for his gut, another with pauldrons clearly meant for something twice his size. The metal was rust-streaked and dented, but it didn’t need to be pretty to do its job, and its job was reminding two hundred unarmed prisoners exactly how outmatched they were. Goblins moved between the orcs’ legs almost, smaller, quicker, wrinkled faces set in permanent sneers, their armor lighter, more like leather and scrap than plate, built for speed rather than standing toe to toe with anything. They carried whips coiled at their belts and short wicked blades, and they used both without much provocation, more for their own amusement than any real need for discipline.

One of the orc handlers, a scarred brute with a tusk broken off at the root, walked the length of Joshua’s line dragging the butt of a spear along the ground, letting it kick up dust into the faces of anyone slow enough to be walking beside it when it passed. Nobody flinched. Flinching invited attention, and attention here was never a gift.

The line lurched forward. Joshua fell into step, his bare feet finding the same ruts in the dirt they found every morning, his eye fixed on the back of the head in front of him.

The line spilled out of the yard and into the city proper, and the city opened around Joshua, vast and rotten and indifferent. This was the slums, the third and lowest of the dark kingdom’s great cities, a sprawl of black stone and scavenged timber thrown up in the ruins of whatever had stood here before the golden kingdom fell. The buildings leaned into each other like drunks, propped up on beams that didn’t match, roofed in rusted sheet metal or tar-soaked cloth, their walls streaked black with years of smoke and grime. Chains hung from posts on every corner, some empty, some not. The streets themselves were packed dirt gone to mud in the low places, churned constantly by thousands of shuffling feet, and open channels ran along the edges carrying waste toward the river, though most of it never made it that far and just sat, thickening, drawing flies the size of a man’s thumb.

Above it all, in the distance past the rooftops, the spires of the breeding pits rose black and jagged, and further still, barely visible through the permanent haze, the bloody throne itself sat enthroned over the whole ruined kingdom, a wound in the skyline that Joshua had trained himself never to look at directly. Smoke rose from it always. Nobody knew anymore whether that was cookfire smoke or something worse, and nobody asked.

The lines converged at the job selector’s post, a wide muddy square where an enormous troll sat on a stool that looked like it might collapse under him at any moment, his rhino horn scarred and chipped from decades of headbutting anyone who moved too slow. He didn’t speak much. He didn’t need to. He looked at each slave as they were shoved in front of him, made some private calculation behind small, bored eyes, and grunted a word or a direction, and the goblin handlers dragged the person off accordingly.

When Joshua’s turn came the troll’s eyes passed over him, the missing arm, the ruined eye, the general uselessness of a body that could no longer do heavy labor, and grunted a single word. Sorting.

It was almost a relief, in the specific, hollowed-out way relief existed down here. Joshua remembered the fields from before he’d lost the arm, remembered the sun beating down on his back until his vision swam, remembered the biting insects that left welts he’d scratch open and infect, remembered the fertilizer fumes that would sometimes drop a man where he stood, choking, unable to get a clean breath before the handlers dragged him off to die somewhere out of the way. He’d been sure, more than once, that the fields would be where he ended. Sorting was safer. Not safe. Just safer.

Usually his post was potatoes, a mountain of them dumped in front of him every morning, and his job was to work through them with his one hand and a short dull knife, cutting away the rot, separating what could still be salvaged from what couldn’t. Most of it couldn’t. The rotten cuts went to the brewery to be fermented into something the handlers drank themselves stupid on at night. What little was left, the good potatoes, got boiled down into the gray gruel that fed the slum workers, himself included.

Today the goblins marched him somewhere different, deeper into the sorting facility, to a section he’d only seen from a distance before. Fewer workers here, and far more guards, orcs standing at intervals with spears held loose but ready, watching everyone with a wariness they didn’t bother with over the potato piles.

This was where the good crops came through, what little of it the dying farms still managed to produce. Steaks cut from the last fattened cattle, meant for the priests up in the bloody throne. Fruit from the orchards, what remained of them, ripe and unblemished. Bread made from the best grain the farms could still coax out of poisoned soil. All of it precious now, rarer every season, and all of it arrived mixed in with the rot the same as everything else, dumped into piles of spoiled meat and rancid fruit and moldering grain that had to be picked through by hand.

Joshua’s new job was to find it. To dig through the stinking piles with his one hand and pull free the good cuts, the good fruit, the good bread, before the rest of it, the failures, the rot, the slop the upper class refused to eat, got shoveled off to feed the handlers instead.

The hours moved without markers, without mercy, one bucket of reeking slop after another dragged in front of him to be dug through. Joshua worked his hand through spoiled meat gone soft and gray, through fruit that collapsed into sour pulp at a touch, through grain sacks furred white and green with mold, and every so often his fingers would close around something firm, something whole, a steak still red and marbled, an apple with its skin unbroken, and he would set it in the clean crates under the eyes of the guards and go back in.

One of the orcs watched him closer than the rest. Joshua felt it the way he felt everything now, sideways, through the half of his vision that still worked, a heavy armored shape that never seemed to drift far from his station. Making sure he didn’t steal, Joshua figured. It was the obvious thing to watch a starving man for when the best food in the kingdom was passing through his one remaining hand. Joshua had no intention of stealing. He’d seen what happened to men who palmed even a chunk of rotten potato. Their punishment took days, and it was done in front of everyone.

The other workers were like him, he noticed. Broken in ways that ruled out the fields. A dwarf worked the pile two stations down, propped on a low wooden platform because both his legs ended above where his knees should have been, stumps wrapped in rag, his already short body made shorter, so that he had to lean his whole torso into the piles to reach anything. Across from him a fae picked through a mound of fruit with the few fingers they had left, three on one hand, two on the other, their wide eyes fixed downward, the lower half of their face wrapped in cloth that didn’t fully hide the wrongness underneath, the missing piece of jaw that made their breathing whistle faintly, constantly, like wind through a cracked door.

Nobody spoke. But nobody was screaming either, and that was the strange thing Joshua kept turning over as the hours ground past. In the potato sheds the whip came out on a rhythm, a few lashes before midday to set the pace, a few after to keep it, more for anyone who slowed, and a man learned to work through the sting the same way he learned to work through hunger. Here the guards just stood. Watched. The orc with his eyes on Joshua never once uncoiled a whip, never barked, never found a reason. By late day Joshua’s back felt almost naked without its fresh stripes, and the absence unsettled him more than the lash ever had. Kindness didn’t exist in the slums. When something looked like kindness, it was always the front half of something else.

The end of day alarm finally sounded, that long grinding wail rolling out over the city, and Joshua’s body responded before his mind did, straightening, turning toward the door, already bracing for the shuffle back to the pits, the gruel flung down over the edge in slopping bucketfuls, the nightly scramble of two hundred starving bodies fighting for their share, then the pile, then sleep, then the alarm again.

He’d made it two steps when the orc moved.

The axe came up, not swinging, just raised, its edge catching the lamplight, and the orc’s voice came out low and graveled through his broken-tusked mouth.

“Back to work.”

Joshua stood a moment, one eye moving from the axe to the orc’s face and finding nothing there to read. Around him the dwarf was already being helped down off his platform by a goblin, the fae was shuffling toward the door with the others, guards and workers alike filing out into the evening, and none of them looked back at him. Not one. Looking back at another man’s misfortune was a habit the slums beat out of people early.

He turned back to his station.

The doors closed. The facility went quiet in a way Joshua had never heard it, no shuffle of other workers, no guards muttering to each other, just his own breathing and the wet sounds of his hand moving through the rot, and the orc, somewhere behind him, standing silent watch.

He worked. The lamps burned low. His hand cramped and he shook it out and kept going, sorting by touch as much as sight now, firm from soft, whole from ruined. Exhaustion crept up through him the way cold water fills a boot, slow and total. He’d worked hungry before, worked hurt before, but the body kept its own ledger, and his had been running a debt for years, and somewhere in the small hours the ledger came due.

He was hauling another bucket to the rot pile, arm trembling, when the floor tilted. He felt the bucket leave his hand, heard it hit and spill somewhere far away, much farther away than the floor should have been, and then the darkness that was always waiting behind his missing eye simply spread over the rest of him. He went down into it, and was gone before his body finished falling.

He came to standing, which was the first strange thing that greeted him.

The ground beneath his bare feet was black, perfectly flat, without texture or temperature, stretching away in every direction until it met a sky that was gray, dim, even, and sourceless, no sun, no haze, no smoke. The horizon was just a line, clean as a knife cut, running in an unbroken circle all around him. There was nothing else. No piles, no lamps, no walls, no smell. That was the second strange thing, the absence of smell, after years of the pit living in his nose.

The third strange thing he noticed when he raised his hands to his face.

Hands. Both of them.

His left arm was back, whole from shoulder to fingertip, unscarred, the skin cleaner than he could ever remember his skin being. He turned it over slowly, watching the tendons shift under the surface, flexing fingers that had been gone for years. And his vision, he realized, had depth again. He closed one eye, then the other, testing. Both worked. Both were his.

“Hello?”

The word left him small and cracked, and the horizon shivered. All of it, the whole clean circle of it, wobbled at the sound of his voice like the surface of water touched by a fingertip, and then stilled again.

He should have been afraid. Some distant part of him noted that, filed it away. Fear was the water Joshua swam in, had been for as long as memory served, and here, in this flat black nowhere, it was simply absent, drained out of him along with the smell and the ache and the hunger. He felt comfortable. That was the strangest thing of all.

He stretched the arm out full length, fingers spread, and the sensation of it moved through him like a word in a language he’d forgotten he spoke. Strange and natural at once. The muscles remembered. He blinked his eyes, both eyes, and the doubled world was the same, foreign and familiar, a thing returned that fit perfectly into the hole its absence had left.

Then the horizon began to wobble again, and this time he hadn’t spoken.

A note came with it, low, so low he felt it in his breastbone before his ears caught up, a single sustained tone like the largest bell in the world heard from the bottom of a well. The clean line of the horizon blurred as he stared at it, the knife cut softening, black bleeding upward into gray, gray bleeding down into black, until all around him the edge of the world was a gradient, a smear, a transition going soft at its borders.

And under the note, woven through it, a voice.

“Do not be afraid.”

A woman’s voice. But more than that, layered and resonant in a way no throat he’d ever heard could produce, each word carrying its own faint chord, its own echo that arrived somehow before the word itself. He had never heard an angel speak. He knew all the same, the way a man knows heat from across a room, that this was what he was hearing.

“Avadryn has a plan for you, Joshua.”

The gradient moved. All along the circle of the world the blurred edge lifted away from the background, peeling free of sky and ground both, gathering thickness and motion until it hung in the air as a vast ring of slow-churning smoke, black and gray twisting through each other without mixing. It began to contract. Not fast. Patient, even, closing in from every direction at once, the way night closes on a field, and the note swelled with it, and the voice moved inside the note like a current inside a river.

Joshua turned in a slow circle, watching it come. Still no fear. The smoke drew inward until it filled the whole of his restored vision, until the black ground and gray sky were gone and there was only the churning wall of it, close enough to touch, and then closer than that.

He breathed in.

The smoke poured into him, cold and dry, filling his throat and chest, and the note and the voice and the flat black world collapsed into a single point somewhere behind his sternum. Joshua came awake on the floor of the sorting facility with his lungs convulsing, coughing so hard his whole body curled around itself, one eye streaming, one arm scrabbling at wet stone. The orc was crouched over him with the axe edge laid cold against his throat.

“Up,” the orc growled. “Now.”

The orc hauled him up by his collar and shoved him toward the doors.

Outside, the city lay in the dead of night, and Joshua had never seen it like this. The streets that churned with bodies all day stood empty, lit at long intervals by guttering torches, and the silence between them was thick enough that his own footsteps sounded like trespass. The orc walked behind him, close, the axe resting over one armored shoulder, and steered him with grunts and shoves, left, straight, left again, not toward the sleeping pits but deeper into the city than Joshua had ever been taken.

They passed labor stations he knew and labor stations he didn’t. The smelting yards, banked for the night but still breathing heat and a dull orange glow through their slatted walls. The tanneries with their vats of reeking chemicals. And other stations, ones with no product Joshua could name, just rows of posts and frames and hanging chains, stations whose only output was screaming, built for slaves who needed breaking rather than using. Those stood silent now too. Even misery kept hours here.

The buildings changed as they walked. Less scavenged timber, more of the old city’s original stone, walls that had survived the apocalypse and been patched rather than replaced. Then came the handler blocks, long low barracks with shuttered windows, and through the gaps in the shutters Joshua caught lamplight and heard the layered snoring of goblins and orcs packed into bunks, dozens to a room, sleeping the fat sleep of the ones who held the whips.

Past the barracks the ruins rose higher, and small rooms had been built into them, individual quarters, walled off with real doors. Supervisor quarters. The orc stopped him at one of these, rapped twice on the door with a knuckle, and pushed it open without waiting.

The room inside was small and close and lit by a single oil lamp. A goblin woman stood at a table in its center, and she turned when they entered.

She was old, older than any goblin Joshua had ever seen up close, her wrinkled skin gone from green to a pale gray-yellow like old parchment, hanging loose at her throat and gathered in deep folds around eyes that were small and black and quick. Her long ears drooped at the tips, one of them notched with old piercings, a row of little bone rings running up its edge. She wore no armor, just layered dark robes with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and her forearms were tattooed dense with markings Joshua couldn’t read, script or symbols in faded red ink that seemed to crawl slightly when he looked at them too long. Her fingers were what held his eye, long even for a goblin, the nails filed to points and stained dark at the tips, the fingers of something that did delicate work on unwilling material.

“This is the one,” the orc said.

The goblin woman looked at Joshua, and the orc left without another word, pulling the door shut behind him.

She circled him slowly, unhurried, her black eyes traveling him top to bottom, the ruined socket, the missing arm, the scars layered on scars, the filth. She made a small sound in her throat that could have meant anything.

“Did Sarah speak to you?” she asked. Her voice was dry and cracked.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“The angel.”

Joshua’s head bowed before he decided to bow it. “Yes.”

“What was said?”

“Just that Avadryn has plans for me.”

The goblin woman went still, and then she spat something under her breath, a curse with Kortul’s name buried in it. “Should have killed Sarah long ago. I told her. I told her that thing was worth more dead than kept.” She shook her head, folds of skin swaying at her throat. “Plans. Plans.”

The fear arrived in Joshua’s belly like something being born there, small at first and growing, and after its strange absence in the black dream-place it came back doubled, cold and heavy and climbing toward his chest. The goblin woman’s eyes found his face and read it in an instant, the way handlers always could.

“Good,” she said. “You should be afraid. I’m going to dive into your soul, human, all the way down, and snuff out whatever thread that creature tied to you before it costs us all.” She raised one long finger and pointed at the corner behind him. “Sit.”

The chair was heavy dark wood, bolted to the floor, leather straps hanging open at the arms, the legs, the chest. Joshua looked at it, and looked at her, and did the only thing a slave’s body knew how to do. He sat. He laid his one arm on the armrest and let her cinch the straps down, wrist, elbow, both ankles, a wide band across his chest, another across his forehead pulling his skull back against the wood. She worked quickly, humming something tuneless.

Then she went to the table and began laying out her tools, and Joshua’s terror climbed with each one. Knives, short and long, curved and straight. A bone saw with fine teeth. Needles the length of his fingers, some hollow, some hooked. She arranged them with the care of a woman setting a dinner table.

And underneath the terror, deep in the back of his mind, in the place the smoke had poured into, a voice.

‘Stay calm, Joshua.’

Sarah’s voice, quiet as breath, layered with that faint impossible chord.

‘Stay calm.’

The goblin woman picked up one of the curved knives and stepped around behind the chair, out of his sight, and her long fingers gathered his filthy hair close to the scalp.

“This will not be quick,” she said, her giddyness apparent in her voice.

The knife went in at his hairline and she scalped him, working the blade in long pulling strokes, and Joshua felt his skin come away from his skull, felt it in a way that had no comparison in all his years of lashings and losses, the wet tearing separation, the cold air on bone that had never felt air. He screamed. He screamed until his voice broke and screamed through the breaking, thrashing against straps that gave nothing, and behind him the goblin woman chuckled low and steady, a sound of genuine warm amusement, as if his agony were a fire she was toasting herself beside.

“There he is,” she murmured. “There’s the fear. It opens the soul right up.”

She set down the knife and took the saw.

The teeth bit into the top of his skull and began to grind, and Joshua felt every stroke as vibration before pain, the buzzing rasp traveling down through the bone into his jaw, his teeth, the sockets of his eyes, the ruined one and the whole one both, and the pain came riding in behind the vibration in waves that whited out the room, the lamp, the world. His screaming stopped being screaming. It became something continuous and shapeless, the sound of his sanity being unmade. The agony climbed and climbed toward some peak beyond which nothing could exist.

And then it was gone.

All of it, gone between one heartbeat and the next, the fire on his skull, the grinding in the bone, gone so completely that the absence itself was a kind of vertigo. What remained was something else. Something in his lungs. A wrongness, thick and clinging, like cold liquid painted across his insides, coating every breath, and his body revolted against it all at once.

He coughed. Violently, helplessly, his whole frame heaving against the chest strap, deep wet wracking coughs that tore up out of him one after another with no space to breathe between.

Behind him the saw clattered to the floor.

The goblin woman came around the chair, and her face, when he saw it through his streaming eye, had lost every trace of its amusement. Her black eyes were wide, her loose throat working, and she backed away from him, one long-fingered hand rising to cover her mouth.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

She turned and tore the door open and fled into the night, and her cracked voice went with her, rising to a shriek that carried down the whole sleeping supervisor block.

“Plague! He has the plague! The human has the plague!”

‘Stand.’

Sarah’s voice, no longer at the back of his mind but filling it. With the word came something else, a light that entered his chest and bloomed there, fleeting, a single pulse of a heartbeat borrowed from something far greater, and warmth poured out from it through every limb.

The straps loosened, the buckles slipping their tongues one by one, the leather going slack around his wrist, his ankles, his chest, his head.

Joshua stood.

‘Run.’

He ran. Out the open door into the dark, blood sheeting down his face, and for ten steps, then twenty, the borrowed light carried him, his bare feet slapping stone, the cold night air screaming against the top of his head where no air should ever touch. But then the light faded, spent, and his body remembered what it was; a starved, mutilated thing that had worked from alarm to collapse, and the run broke apart into stumbling. His knees buckled. He caught himself against a ruined wall with his one arm. Behind him, distantly, the goblin woman’s shrieking was multiplying, other voices picking it up, spreading through the supervisor block.

He made it another dozen lurching steps and went down.

The ground hit him and he lay there, cheek in the cold mud, and Sarah’s voice rang in his skull, louder now, louder than any voice had a right to be parading itself as a thought.

‘Run. Run now. Get up now and run.’

His head swam. He could feel the blood running down both cheeks, pooling under his jaw, dripping hot down the back of his neck. He could feel, with terrible clarity, the wind moving across the exposed surface of his brain, a sensation so alien and intimate that his mind kept sliding off it, unable to hold it. His arm trembled and would not lift him. And as his consciousness was gutted, a memory rose up through the dark and took him whole.

The quarry.

Years ago, both arms then, both eyes. Breaking stone in the white glare of the sun, the hammer in his blistered hands, the whip finding his back on its rhythm, and his body failing him piece by piece through the day until, in the pit of the afternoon, his legs simply stopped. He fell among the broken stones. The orc handlers came, two of them, whips already loose in their fists.

“Stand up, human. Stand up or die here.”

He couldn’t. He had nothing left to stand with. The whips came down, hard, again and again, lines of fire across his back, his shoulders, his ribs, before a strange gentleness entered the world as the pain began to fade. His sight dimmed at its edges, and Joshua understood he was dying. He found, to his exhausted wonder, that he could make peace with it. Death was rest. Death was his soul returning to Avadryn, back into the light, the way the old stories promised. He let go.

That was when he saw the face.

It filled the darkness behind his fading sight the way a storm fills a sky, vast beyond vastness, horned and burning, twisting in impossible ways, eyes of twin voids that drank the light of his dying. It was waiting for him. Patient. Pleased. There was no Avadryn on the other side of death. There was no light to return to. She was gone, banished, unmade, and everything that died in Gyra now flowed down into one god alone.

I CANT WAIT TO SHOW YOU WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE TRULY UNMADE. THE AGONY OF YOUR LIFE WAS SWEET, GENTLE, AND KIND. I AM NOT.

The fear that took Joshua then was beyond the body, beyond the whips, a terror of the soul itself, and it did what no strength could have done. It forced him up. It hauled him to his feet on the broken stone with the handlers staring, whips gone slack, and he stood swaying with his blood running down his back, alive, because the only thing on the other side of death was Torvakul. Better to live in any suffering the slums could invent. Better a thousand years of the whip than one moment of descent.

Joshua surfaced from the memory.

He was standing. In the dark alley, in the mud, blood painting his face and neck. He was on his feet but did not remember rising, and the voice in his head was wrong, had been wrong, had gone deep and vast and pressurized at its edges, and then between one word and the next it changed, folded back into itself, became layered, chordal, and hers again.

‘Run, Joshua. Please’

Sarah. Only Sarah, as if it had never been anything else.

Down the alleyways behind him, torches were catching, one, three, a dozen, bobbing points of orange spreading through the dark. Voices carried over the rooftops, orc voices, goblin voices, barking orders, the words find him and plague and burn it out rising above the rest. The whole handler district was waking around him like a kicked nest.

The pain of his ruined head returned all at once and in full, the scalping, the sawed bone, the screaming rawness of it, a pain that should have dropped him where he stood.

It didn’t matter.

Joshua turned from the torches, and ran. As he did, the city blurred around him.

Through the ruins he went, weaving between fallen columns and walls that ended in jagged nothing, ducking under collapsed archways, his feet finding purchase on stone slick with night dampness. Behind him the torches multiplied and spread, flowing through the streets in ordered lines, but Sarah’s voice threaded through his skull ahead of every turn.

‘Left here. Through the gap. Down. Stay low.’

He obeyed. There was nothing left in him but obedience and terror and the machinery of running. Something was happening inside his head, inside his chest, a building heat, and when he passed through a shaft of torchlight he saw it in his own flickering shadow on the wall, thin gray smoke curling up off his silhouette. It was pouring from his ears. It was seeping from the corner of his good eye and out of the ruined socket, trailing behind him as he ran like the tail of something falling. Whatever the goblin woman had loosed in him, whatever Sarah had planted in that flat black dream, it was no longer content to stay inside.

His body should have stopped a hundred strides ago. His body had nothing to say about it anymore. The fear was driving now, the old fear, the deepest one, the face waiting at the bottom of every death in Gyra, and against that face exhaustion was a small voice easily shouted down. Better to run until the flesh came apart than to lie down and descend.

‘Almost there,’ Sarah said. ‘Almost, Joshua.’

He broke from between two ruined granaries and the ground opened ahead of him, and he saw it.

The sleeping pits. Rows of them stretching away in the dark, great black mouths in the earth, and from each one rose the sounds he had slept inside for years, the coughing, the moaning, the shifting of hundreds of bodies packed in piles on cold dirt. His pit. His people. Humans and elves, dwarves and fae, all the broken property of the dark kingdom, breathing each other’s air at the bottom of holes.

Joshua understood.

The understanding arrived whole, the way the memory had, not built from pieces but simply present, as if it had been waiting in him since the smoke first poured down his throat. The plague was not his death. It was his cargo. The goblin woman had screamed the truth without knowing its shape. He was carrying something, and it wanted to spread, and there was no better soil in all of Gyra than a pit where two hundred bodies slept skin to skin.

This was the plan. This was what Avadryn had for him.

Behind him the torches rounded the granaries. Voices roared. Something hissed past his shoulder, a crossbow bolt, then another, sparking off stone.

‘Go,’ Sarah said. Her voice was gentle, yet it was enormous.

Joshua crossed the last stretch of open ground at a dead sprint, smoke streaming from his eyes and ears, blood flying from his ruined head, and launched himself over the lip of the nearest pit into the dark.

He fell through cold air and hit the pile.

Bodies broke his fall as he broke their sleep, the pit coming awake beneath him in a single convulsion, a hundred sleepers jolting up into darkness and confusion, hands shoving, voices crying out. Then someone got a look at him, at the scalped skull and the smoke pouring off him in the dark, and a scream went up. Panic took the pit.

“Plague! It’s plague! Get away, get it away!”

But there was no away. That was the whole architecture of the pit, that was its cruelty and now its purpose, two hundred bodies in a space for half that, walls too high to climb, ladders drawn up for the night. The pile churned around him, over him, everyone clawing away from him and into each other, and Joshua went down under them. The feet came, knees and elbows and heels, bodies surging back and forth across him in blind terror, every panicked breath they took drew his smoke deeper into them, every hand that shoved him off carried something away on its palm.

He felt his ribs go. He felt the trampling grow distant, the screaming grow soft, the cold dirt under his back grow warm.

It was done. He had carried the plague where it needed to go. Joshua let himself hope. Maybe now the light would take him. Maybe he had earned back the old promise, the one from before the apocalypse, a soul returning to its maker. Maybe Avadryn was waiting after all, somewhere behind the dark, ready to gather him in the way the stories said, and he could finally, finally rest.

He let go, the dark opened, and he fell through it.

The face filled everything.

I TOLD YOU WE WOULD MEET AGAIN, FOR NO SOUL CAN ESCAPE ME.

–

The room had been a storage cellar once, back when the city above it had a different name, and the troll’s head nearly brushed its vaulted ceiling even seated. He sat on a stone block worn smooth by years of his own weight while two orcs and three goblins arranged themselves around the long table. Nobody in that room was drinking, and nobody was happy.

“Fourth pit this week,” one of the orcs was saying. He had a face drenched in dismay and a bandage wrapped around one forearm that everyone at the table was carefully not looking at. “Went in at dawn to run the count. Half of them didn’t stand for the alarm. Just lying there, smoking from the eyes. Now that whole pit had to be burned, cause we can’t risk trying to check to see if any of the remaining are clean or not. My other pits are refusing to eat though none of the bastards show any signs of plague.”

“Then whip them till they eat,” said a goblin.

“Whipped ones die faster,” the orc said flatly. “Something in them’s already half gone. Its like the plague has removed the fear of Torvakul from them.”

One of the other goblins made a warding sign, an old orcish gesture, thumb across the palm. “It’s not natural. Plagues take the weak first, the old, the crippled. This one doesn’t care. Takes a strong hauler same as a gruel-thin fae. Takes them in less than a day.”

“And it doesn’t take us,” the first goblin said quietly, and that sat over the table like a lid, because it was the thing they all knew and none of them wanted to hold. The plague was ripping through the pits, through the sorting stations, through the field crews, moving faster than the corpse-wagons could, and not one orc, not one goblin, not one troll had so much as coughed.

The troll spoke for the first time. His voice came up out of him like something being dragged over gravel.

“Do any of you understand what happens next?”

Nobody answered.

“The quotas don’t move,” the troll said. “The bloody throne doesn’t care that the stock is dying. The priests want their grain and their sacrifices and their pretty fruit, and the queen wants her suffering, and when the wagons go north light, they will not blame the plague. They will blame us.” He leaned forward, and the stone block creaked. “Labor is dropping by the day. So here is what happens now. Handlers work. Every handler not holding a whip picks up a shovel, a hammer, a sack. Yours included. Mine included, if it comes to it.”

The orcs stiffened. One of the goblins actually laughed, a short scandalized bark, then swallowed it when the troll’s eyes found him.

“Handlers working slave lines,” the bandaged orc said. “They’ll gut us for the insult.”

“They’ll gut us faster for empty wagons,” the troll said. “You can be insulted and alive or proud and hanging from the throne walls with your skin off. Choose by morning. Go.”

Chairs scraped. The handlers filed out, muttering, and at the door the troll’s voice stopped the last goblin.

“You. Fetch me Krinde.”

The goblin bobbed his head and vanished up the stairs.

The troll sat alone for a while in the lamplight, enormous and still, one thick finger tracing a crack in the old table. It took some time. Then footsteps on the stairs, light and quick, and Krinde came in, old parchment-colored skin folded deep around her small black eyes, bone rings marching up one notched ear, her tattooed forearms bare below rolled sleeves, red script faded into the wrinkles.

“You sent for me,” she said, in her dryvoice.

“Sit.”

She sat across from him, small as a child in the chair, entirely composed. The troll studied her.

“How did it start, Krinde?”

She didn’t ask what he meant. “The human. The one-armed sorter. I had him brought to me the night it began.”

“Why him?”

“Because his soul sparked.” Her long stained fingers laced together on the table. “I keep lackeys in every station in the slums. They’ve watched for it for two years now, on my instruction, my own coin. Slaves whose souls show a spark. Signs of angelic interference. A light where there should be nothing.”

The troll’s brow came down slowly. “Angelic. There is one angel left in this kingdom, and she hangs in the queen’s court like a pretty lamp.”

“Yes. Kortul’s plaything.” Krinde’s voice went thinner, harder. “Broken, they say. Leashed, they say. I say Sarah has been working through the leash for years, and I’ve been building the proof of it. Little sparks, little touched ones, here and there, always snuffed before they came to anything. Then this human. I opened his skull to snuff the thread out and something came up out of his lungs instead.” She paused. “I will say the rest plainly, since you asked plainly. I do not believe this plague is Torvakul’s work. It kills only the stock, spares every demonic race, moves like it has a purpose. Had I known I wouldn’t have been affected, I could have killed the human in my room and spared us from the smoke spreading. Because of this, I have suspicions it comes from the other side. From what’s left of her.”

The troll had gone very still, and something moved in his small eyes that might have been read, by an old goblin flushed with the nearness of vindication, as intrigue.

“That,” he said slowly, “is a remarkable thing to suspect.”

“It is a remarkable thing to prove,” Krinde said. “And I am close.”

“Who else knows of your findings? Your lackeys?”

“They know to watch for sparks. They don’t know why. None of them can read the whole shape of it.” A pride crept into the cracked voice. “I kept it whole in one place only. I was waiting until the evidence was beyond question, and then I intended to carry it before Kortul myself. Can you imagine? A slum goblin, granted audience at the bloody throne, laying the angel’s treachery at the queen’s feet.”

“So no one,” the troll said. “No one else has been told. Not one soul.”

“Not one. Why share the credit before…”

“Good,” said the troll.

He came across the table faster than anything that size had a right to move. Krinde got half out of the chair, quick even at her age, quick enough that against an orc she might have made the door, but his hands were simply too large and the room was simply too small, and one gray palm closed around her before her feet touched the floor. He lifted her the way a farmer lifts a hen. Her long fingers raked at his wrist, her mouth opened around the beginning of a word, a curse or a bargain or Kortul’s name.

The troll placed his other palm against the side of her head, and brought his hands together. Her head popped like a festering pimple.

He held the small robed body a moment longer, then let it drop to the cellar floor, and stood looking down at it. Then he wiped his palms on his thighs, one and then the other, climbed the stairs, and called for someone to bring a corpse-wagon around.

The troll began walking through his kingdom.

He was a supervisor of supervisors. He went where he pleased, when he pleased, and the handlers at the district posts only nodded as he passed. The guards along the slum’s ragged edge, where the last buildings crumbled away into open ground, did not so much as turn their heads. If the great troll wanted a night walk, that was the great troll’s business. He passed the last torch, passed the last sentry, and went out alone into the great plains.

The dark out there was total, the city dark never was. The bruise-colored grass hissed around his shins. He walked until the slum was a smear of orange behind him, until there was nothing in any direction but flat black land, flat black sky. There he stopped, and began, in a low grinding voice, to chant.

The words were old demonic, older than the dark kingdom, syllables shaped for throats deeper than his, and every phrase carried the god’s name through it like a spine. Torvakul. Torvakul. He raised both arms to the empty sky, palms open, fingers spread.

His fingers began to break.

One at a time, then in pairs, the bones snapping backward at the knuckles with sounds like green wood, bending in directions fingers do not bend, and the troll’s chant thickened with the pain but did not stop. This was the toll. The god did not answer polite prayers. Suffering was the only voice loud enough to carry to him, and so the troll gave his own, chanting through gritted teeth while his hands ruined themselves against nothing, ten fingers becoming ten wrong angles under the black sky.

The edges of his vision crowded with darkness. The darkness poured inward. The plains dropped away beneath his feet, and then there was no wind and no grass and no sky, only the void. In the void, filling it the way a fire fills a hearth, the face.

Horned, vast, burning. The twin hollows of its eyes came to rest on the troll, and the pressure of its attention alone nearly folded him.

MY CHOSEN, YOU COME TO ME, AND YET THE CRIES FROM YOUR PENS HAVE GROWN QUIET. THE WEAKLINGS UNDER YOUR WHIP DO NOT SUFFER AS THEY SHOULD. YOU HAVE GROWN GENTLE. WEAK.

“No, great one, never gentle, forgive me.” The troll’s voice came out of him cracked and small, a mountain of a creature reduced to a child before the hearth-fire face. “The pens will scream again, I swear it to you, the moment I return I will see to it myself, I will open new stations, I will…” He caught his breath. “But I did not come for that. Forgive me. I need… I must speak with Rendul.”

The face changed. The burn of it banked and darkened, and the frown that formed across those vast features was an apocalypse in its own right, a slow rolling front of displeasure.

The troll’s skin began to boil.

It started at his raised, ruined hands and rolled down his arms, his shoulders, his back, the gray hide blistering and lifting and sloughing in patches, and the agony of it was beyond the fingers, beyond anything, a burning that reached down under the skin into the meat of him. He could not scream properly. Even his scream was taken from him and rationed back as thin, whistling breaths.

WHY.

“Sarah…” One word per breath, each breath a labor of its own. “Plague…” His knees would not hold; nothing of him would hold, but the void gave him nothing to fall onto. “Ava…” The name itself fought him, his boiling lips shaping it in pieces. “…dryn.”

The agony stopped at the last syllable.

It was simply revoked, and the troll collapsed onto solid nothing, hands and knees. He began to vomit, his whole enormous frame heaving, his ruined fingers splayed useless beneath him.

The void around the face caught fire.

THE ANGEL.

The words came down like burning oil, worming their way into the troll’s ears.

KORTUL KEEPS THAT CREATURE AS A LEASHED PET. THAT WAS THE PRICE OF MY PATIENCE. SHE KNEELS IN HER STOLEN CATHEDRAL AND SWEARS TO ME THE LAST FEATHER OF THE LIGHT IS BROKEN, AND NOW MY CHOSEN CRAWLS INTO THE DARK BETWEEN WORLDS TO SPEAK THE DEAD MOTHER’S NAME TO ME.

“Plague,” the troll managed again, and vomited again, thinner this time. “The plague, great one… it takes only the stock… it spares your children… I do not think it is yours…”

THE PLAGUE IS NOTHING.

The fire around the face rolled and settled, and something entered the god’s voice that was worse than the fury; a vast, patient amusement.

LET IT EAT EVERY SLAVE IN THE THE SLUMS. EVERY SOUL IT REAPS FALLS DOWN TO ME, THE SAME AS EVERY SOUL TAKEN BY WHIP OR KNIFE OR YEARS. THE DEAD MOTHER COULD BURN HER OWN NAME INTO THE SICKNESS AND STILL EVERY CHILD IT KILLS WOULD COME HOME TO MY HANDS. THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE FOR THEM TO GO. THERE HAS NOT BEEN FOR A LONG TIME.

The troll stayed down, shaking, saying nothing.

I WILL SEND RENDUL TO YOU IN DUE TIME. THE ELDER ONE WILL HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE FOUND AND PULL IT APART THREAD FROM THREAD. UNTIL THEN, YOU HAVE ONE TASK, MY CHOSEN.

The face leaned nearer, and the void bent with it.

GO TO THE BLOODY THRONE. STAND BEFORE THE QUEEN. AND SEE THAT SHE LEASHES HER ANGEL, TRULY LEASHES HER, OR I WILL COME AND DO THE LEASHING MYSELF, AND I WILL NOT BE CAREFUL WHOSE THROAT THE COLLAR CLOSES ON.

The burning eyes narrowed to furnace slits.

KORTUL BELIEVES SHE HOLDS THE CHAIN. SHE OPENED THE DOOR AND I WALKED THROUGH IT, AND FOR THAT SHE THINKS HERSELF MY PARTNER. MY EQUAL. SHE HAS BUILT HER LITTLE KINGDOM IN MY SHADOW AND FORGOTTEN WHAT CASTS IT. SHE HAS FORGOTTEN HER GOD, AS WELL AS HIS TRUE POWER. REMIND HER, CHOSEN. AND IF SHE WILL NOT BE REMINDED, I WILL REMIND HER MYSELF, AND ALL THREE CITIES WILL LEARN THE LESSON WITH HER.

Credit: Grant Howard

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