Chapter 26: What Came Up

Chapter 26

What Came Up

Roen tried to go to bed but made it only to the stairs.

He exhaled a slow, deep breath, turned back and sat at the bar in the dark after Sera went upstairs, with his hands flat on the cherry wood, and listened. The lower hum was still there. Just present, as it was earlier. It sat under the floorboards like a second heartbeat, steady now, no longer rising in pulses.

He could feel, beneath his palms, that whatever had awakened Milo earlier, whatever had torn the deep scream out of the boy, had not gone back down.

Roen slid his hands off the wood while standing up, walked through the dark common room to the front door, opened it, stepped onto the threshold and listened. What he heard or didn’t, to be exact, was the empty market square. The lanterns at the corners had gone out for the night, and the sky over Millhaven was the deep blue of the hours before dawn. South of the square, past the rooftops, past the road that ran to a farm that was no longer a farm, the horizon had a shadow, visible even in the dark, that hadn’t been there yesterday.

The sky was clear, so it wasn’t a cloud. A thickness sat low against the treeline, a dark stain that refused to behave like air. He could not see colour in it because there was no light to colour it by. He could feel its shape, though.

He looked at it for a minute, went back inside and closed the door. He walked back to the bar and sat down facing south. He stayed there until morning.

• • •

Sera came down at six and didn’t feel the need to ask how long he had been awake. She put the kettle on, made some frostmint tea, brought him a cup, and set it in front of him.

“Milo?” he asked.

“Sleeping. Nyx is on his chest. He didn’t remember the scream.”

“That’s a kindness.”

“I’ll tell him after breakfast. He needs to know that something is happening.”

She sat down at the bar beside him. They had done it this way last night, and now they were doing it again.

“Kael went south,” Roen said, slowly and with a certain tiredness and raspiness in his voice.

“When?”

“About…an hour ago, a bit before dawn. I warned him not to go alone, but of course he said “Silver-rank”, and that it was guild work and he wasn’t going to be the one who let this town face whatever was south alone, and that I need to keep an eye on Milo.”

Sera looked at him, held his eyes without saying anything for a long moment.

“And you let him go?”

“I did. I should have stopped him, but he was right that I needed to stay near Milo. He was wrong that he could handle whatever’s down there alone.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“I think he knows enough; he has been around the Dusklands before. He is not stupid.”

Sera turned her cup in her hands. She didn’t look toward the south window, because not looking there now was a small act of will she was performing for both of them.

“How long until he comes back?”

“A few hours, three maybe, if it goes well. Five if it goes badly. More than five…”

He did not finish the sentence as it finished itself in Sera’s mind. They drank tea while the inn lightened around them and the haze on the southern horizon, when Roen finally let himself look again, sat exactly where it had been at three in the morning, unmoved.

• • •

Milo came down at half past nine.

He looked tired but ordinary, the dark circles were there, but not deeper than yesterday. He went to his stool, half asleep, muttering something about toast with butter. He then looked at her face, and his expression flattened and awakened. He had read something there he did not yet have words for.

“Did something happen last night?” he asked. “Why were you in my room?”

Sera told him without softening it. She gave him the facts in her clean professional voice, the way she gave a merchant a quote: a tremor, the sound from his throat that was not his sound, Nyx, Roen, the silence after. She did not tell him what Roen had said at the end. She did not tell him about the haze on the horizon. She told him what his body had done while he had not been there to govern it, and she let him sit with that.

Milo took it without speaking. His toast went uneaten. Nyx jumped onto his shoulder, pressed her face against his neck and stayed there.

“I don’t remember,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“Will it happen again?”

Sera looked at Roen. Roen looked back.

“We don’t know yet.”

Milo nodded slowly. He had already used up most of his fear on the things that had happened before this one, and he did not have a lot of new fear left to spend. He sat at his stool and picked up his toast, which Roen had already served. He bit into it, opened his ledger and started adding columns.

He did not ask about the south road.

He did not look out the window.

• • •

Kael came back at noon.

He did not ride into the square. He walked his horse in by the reins, his right leg dragging with every step. Each time it did, his jaw tightened, but he kept walking.

The leather of his right trouser leg from the knee down was black. Not damp but pure black, the deep colour of blood that had soaked through cloth, dried at the edges, kept seeping at the centre. His sword was clean as he wiped it before he started home, as any self-respecting warrior would do, which told Roen more about Kael’s discipline than any conversation they had ever had.

He stopped at the door of the Compass and looked straight at Roen.

“It’s down,” he said. “I think.”

Then he sat down on the threshold.

Roen was quick to get him inside and help him to the nearest table.

Sera took one look at the leg and went behind the bar.

She came back with the kit. Bandages, clean cloth, needle, thread, salve, the small iron from the kitchen stove. All laid in order.

Of course, she had prepared it.

As they got Kael onto a chair, Sera cut the trouser leg open with the knife she used for opening crates. The wound underneath was a long ragged tear running from mid-thigh to just above the knee, deep through the meat of the muscle, the edges of the cut darker than the surrounding flesh. Not normal blood-darkness. The thin grey-black of something that had touched corruption and started to think about staying.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“We have to burn it out,” Roen said quietly to Sera.

She started heating the iron on the stove. She knew how to handle a wound, having learned it somewhere on the road, where healers and doctors were as rare as towns and inns.

Kael endured the touch of the iron without sound, only his jaw flinching and his knuckles going white on the chair’s arms.

“Tell me what happened,” Roen said when Sera was done, when the wound was sealed, and Roen was binding it with clean strips. “Slowly. Everything.”

Kael drank the ale Roen put in his hand, then gestured for a second before speaking.

“I reached the dead patch around six. It’s bigger, the whole field is white now, not just the centre and…the farmhouse is gone.”

“Gone?” Roen asked.

“Sunk, completely. The ground opened up underneath it. There’s a hole where it used to be, maybe thirty feet across. I didn’t go close to the edge.” His voice was flat. A warrior reporting. “Past the patch, in the treeline, I found something. A shape, or a mass, a bit hard to describe. Shoulders, a head with a pulsing core, one distorted limb. The rest was still buried, or growing, or being pulled up from underneath. Its lower body was just dark root-things sunk into the dead ground.

“It had an eye. Constantly open… just watching.” Kael drank. “I should have ridden away. I knew I should. But I thought…if it’s stuck, if it’s not finished, I can put it down before it stands up. I can save the town a fight.”

He looked at Roen. There was something in his face Roen did not want to read but did anyway. It was not pride or anything like regret, but the look of a young man who had measured himself against a thing and discovered he was not as ready as he had told himself he was.

“I went in close. And I cut, aiming at its head, at the core, before it could move properly. But its arm had headed my way by then. It came across in a swing I didn’t see it. It was fast, faster than anything that should have been still half-buried. Caught my leg.” He drew a slow breath. “I finished it after. It dissolved, so I don’t think it’s coming back up. But…I think there might be more Roen, I think there were others.”

“How many?”

“I saw two more outlines. Past the first one, deeper in the trees. Just shapes. They were not as far along as the one I killed.” His jaw was tight. “There might be more I didn’t see. They’re growing in a line almost like seedlings in a row.”

Garren had come in while Kael was talking. He was standing at the door with his cane and his coat still on. He had heard the last part.

Roen put his hand on Kael’s shoulder. Gripped once. Let go.

“You did well,” he said.

“I got hit by a stationary target.”

“You got hit by a stationary target that was pulling itself out of a corruption field. Most Silver-ranks wouldn’t have got within twenty feet of it and lived. You killed it and walked home.”