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Eons of biological evolution have shaped us to protect children. Their innocence, ignorance, and helplessness in the face of the world’s dangerous complexity call to our protective instincts. But the truth is that we’re all children in the grip of the callous indifference existence shows us.

Grimdark, Grimdarker, Grimdarkest , by Michael R. Baked

Evar

“Oldo’s an idiot, but I don’t think he’s kidnapping children,” Starval said.

“An idiot?” Evar had quite liked the landlord of the Stained Page.

Starval nodded. “A blowhard, a bit of a bully on occasion, a boaster, a fool, in short: an ass.”

“You got all that from him delivering two helpings of stew and two plates of ribs?”

“I listen, and I ask questions.” Starval shrugged. “While you were out hunting for the latrine, I was chatting with my boys Gothon and Abra.”

“Huh.” Evar blinked and followed Starval down the street. The mists had all but gone and it wouldn’t be long before dawn started to nudge the horizon. He supposed that Oldo, like many people, could present different faces to the world depending on who he thought his audience was. Whatever he’d got hidden in those barrels would reveal yet another face. “Kids? I told you about a sneeze. I didn’t say anything about kids.”

“You obviously don’t have a very good handle on how large humans are.” Starval snorted. “The ale barrels I’ve seen here haven’t been big enough for an adult, not even a small human one. If he’s transporting something that can sneeze in them, and it’s not some sort of animal, then it’s children. What his interest in children is…I couldn’t say. But if it’s the most common one in cases like this then I’ll stab him myself, no charge. And this time if the first blow doesn’t kill him, it really will be because I want to hurt him.”

The Stained Page looked very different, the lights within extinguished. The undercurrent of chatter no longer bubbled through its small windows. Its facade seemed like the face of a friend’s fresh corpse: very little changed from when life had animated it, but even so, you could instantly tell that something vital had gone missing.

“Curious,” Starval muttered as he led Evar beneath the hanging sign and on past the door they had entered by the previous day.

“What was?”

“Someone forced entry. You didn’t see the repairs?”

Evar hadn’t. He’d been too wrapped in his musings.

Starval circled around to the rear of the tavern, missing the next alley and taking a longer-than-necessary route down the street after it. When they reached the back wall, he vaulted over it in one fluid motion, finding a foothold halfway up where Evar saw none, and clearing the broken glass on top by a finger’s width.

“Come on!” Hissed from the far side.

Evar walked on several more strides, binding a strap of book-leather around his palm several times for protection. With more effort and less grace than his brother he too scrambled over, dropping in perilously close to the latrine huts, and in the other half of the yard to that which Starval had landed in.

Starval opened the door in the wall that separated the patrons’ toilet area from the unloading docks and leaned through. “Come on.” He beckoned. “Idiot.”

Evar hurried to join his brother and came to stand by what he took to be the hatch down which incoming carts unloaded their barrels. With only Attamast’s crescent and scattered starlight to illuminate the scene, the place was hard to make sense of. “Locked,” he whispered, taking hold of the padlock that secured the heavy chain binding the two handles of the hatch doors.

“It is.” Starval nodded. He’d squatted on his haunches, examining a pile of rags by the tavern wall.

“So pick it.” Evar’s irritation rose. Starval had defeated the lock on the door between the two sections of the yard so quickly that Evar half suspected it had been left open. “Let’s get down there and see what we can find.”

“Not much, I’m thinking,” Starval said. “This place has been raided. My guess is that any barrels we find down there are going to be empty, or full of ale.”

“Still worth trying!” Evar worked the largest of his picks from the pocket of his leathers, all made from metal fittings recovered from books. Unlike Starval, he’d never had the chance to practise in the Mechanism, only on locked books in the library. Still, nothing was more likely to motivate Starval to open the padlock than Evar’s inexpert fumbling.

“Or we could just ask Gothon here.” Starval slipped an arm under the pile of rags. “I don’t think he’s quite as dead as he’s pretending to be.”

The figure groaned as Starval lifted it into a sitting position, confirming the assassin’s diagnosis. Evar could make out the tangled mass of the canith’s hair now, still with the thicket of wooden pegs decorating the many individual locks.

“You’re not going to make it.” Starval moved Gothon’s hair clear of his face. “Best to meet your maker without secrets weighing you down, no?”

A dark patch on Gothon’s side bubbled as he coughed and sucked at the air as he tried to breathe. “Go to hell.”

“Honestly.” Starval shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe us if I told you where we’d come from, but you can believe that we’ve got no skin in this game. My brother is just incurably curious. He heard a barrel sneeze. What can you tell us about that? Before you die would be good, because, like I say, you haven’t got long. I mean, it’s sad and all that, but you’re pretty old anyway. And this way you dodge the bugs.”

“Fuc…Fuck. You.”

Evar pulled Starval back and crouched beside the old man. “I’m sorry about my brother. I’m actually here trying to teach him that people matter. A work in progress, as you can see.” Evar tried to pull up his leathers and turn his side towards Gothon. “I was also stabbed in an attempted murder tonight…you should—ouch—be able to see the wound? Anyway, I’m sorry this happened to you.” Evar met Gothon’s eyes. “I can’t make any promises. I really have no idea what’s going on here. I just heard a barrel sneeze. But I can say that where my brother goes, people have a habit of dying. If you point us towards the person who gave you this injury, there’s a good chance they’ll be dead before the day’s out.” He reached for Gothon’s hand and held it tight. If Evar were dying, he would want someone with him. Someone who saw him. Less than a day ago they had been sharing ales around a table, talking of the future. Whatever this was, it wasn’t right. And the strongest emotion he felt was sorrow.

“Oldo…” Gothon laboured for breath. “Hiding Amacar…children in the cellar…part…of a network…I was helping—”

“Bullshit.” Starval pushed his way back into the man’s view. “You hate Amacar…” He trailed off.

“Not so sharp…as you thought…you was.” Gothon’s laugh dissolved into painful coughing. Blood ran black from his mouth. Eyes that glittered in the starlight looked from Starval to Evar.

“Why would he do that?” Evar asked, Starval’s assessment of the landlord still fresh in his mind: a bully, a braggart, a blowhard.

Gothon tried to shrug but abandoned the effort with a gasp of pain. “Bloody-minded…he is…that one. He’d tell you…all sorts of…honourable…reasons.” He panted for breath, trying not to cough again. “Me…I think he…just wanted to thumb…his nose at the potentate.” His voice fell to a whisper. “…to start with at least…Took a shine to some of…them kids…took risks he didn’t have to…got…them.” He trailed off, eyes glassy. Evar turned to meet Starval’s gaze. “Got them away.” Gothon surprised them both by not being dead. But that, it seemed, was his last gasp, and he slumped against the wall.

Starval stood, wiping his hands on his leathers. “Well. There you are. A heart of gold behind a rough exterior…or something. Can we go now?”

Evar released Gothon’s hand, setting it across his lap. He stood slowly, burdened with mixed emotions. “?‘Heart of gold’ seems to be pushing it.” He felt that the truer assessment would be, like the man in question, complicated. “People can do the right thing for the wrong reasons.”

“And the wrong thing for the right reasons.” Starval magicked a coin into his hands. “That’s why I decided upon a simpler, transactional morality. But you’ve stolen that from me, brother. You and Mayland.” The coin vanished. “So, now we find this girl of yours?”

“Where do you think they’ve taken him?”

“Oldo? No idea. Some dungeon where they can cut pieces off him, most likely.”

“Oldo and the children.”

“They send the kids to an island. They don’t come back. Worked to death, from what I’ve heard.”

Evar frowned. He wasn’t here for this. There were probably atrocities being carried out in the world he’d left behind. There would be murder and mayhem in each of the maybes they had climbed through to reach this one. He felt small and helpless and unworthy of any love that Livira might have had for him. “King Oldo. That’s what he said to call him.”

“Unless you were his friend.”

“And Gothon thought he started this to spite the potentate. A distant heir to the old dynasty, fighting the potentate’s core policy.” Evar walked towards the street gate. “That sounds like the sort of man who might warrant a public execution. That sort of man might even get taken before the potentate himself, for judgement?”

“He might.” Starval shrugged.

“Ever assassinated a potentate?” Evar dug for the silver he’d taken from Starval. He dug deeper, fingers finding only space. “You stole—” But no, Starval had left him a single coin. Evar held it out to him.

“Emperor, prince, king, sultan, and sultana, magister, queen, overlord…satrap…” Starval counted them off on his fingers. “But no.” He took the coin from Evar’s grasp. “I don’t believe I’ve ever ended a potency.”

Evar lifted the gate bar. “Potency? Is that what they call it? Really?” He pushed the gates open.

“Fucked if I know.” Starval walked through. “Maybe we can ask him.”

To sneak into a palace was, Starval explained, an extremely difficult thing to do. The methods employed to stop exactly that thing had been evolved over very many years of trial and error, each failure underlined by a dead monarch of some description. To sneak into a palace that one had not observed at length was suicide. Preferably, the assassin would have visited the building in a friendly guise, checking out the interior organisation in a leisurely manner. Ideally, they would possess plans for the structure—ones that included secret passages, hidden doors, and concealed defences.

“You’re saying you can’t do it?” Evar asked.

“I’m saying that we’re going to end up leaving a lot more bodies behind us than just this potentate of yours. I’m saying that the alarm is probably going to be raised, and that you’ll be called on to use everything our sister taught you. And that if we’re not quick, then the potentate—who could well be this human king we’re looking for and have this book we want—will just be bundled off by his guards to somewhere even more difficult to get at. I’m saying that the sensible thing to do would be to observe the place for a week, to find a way to get inside officially, and to plan ahead for as many eventualities as we can think of.”

“I’m not waiting. Oldo will be dead or tortured within a day. You said so yourself. And those children—”

“Children you have never even laid eyes on, brother. Children who are part of a stream flowing to this murder island. A place where they’ve been dying for several years now.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going—”

“And if I told you there were babies being murdered in another land across a wide ocean? Would we set sail as soon as we’re done here? You can’t save everyone, Evar. When we stepped through that chamber door, the world grew so much bigger. You have to learn when to let go.”

“And you have to learn when to take hold.” Evar shaded his eyes against the day’s sunshine. The city, whose existence he had half doubted in the enfolding fog, now shone before him, its palace a magnificent thing, too huge to find a single man in. “So. How do we start?”

They started with a fire. Starval had used the last of his stolen money to buy supplies on the way up to the palace early that morning. The process had proved difficult as both brothers were finding it hard to understand the locals, and vice versa. Starval speculated that the Exchange’s translation effects, which Mayland had used his knowledge to try to extend, were wearing off.

Their distraction required a distraction. Evar had drawn forth a handful of his blood—a painful and unpleasant process—and fashioned from it a black monster, a miniature cratalac that he set chasing people in the street beside the wall of the palace gardens. The screams and panic drew the eyes of guards in two watchtowers with overview of the road.

Starval took the opportunity to toss a ball of rags over the wall into a place where the green-clad branches of several trees waved above the surrounding masonry. A few minutes later the alchemical wonder he’d buried within the rags ignited, and the device began to emit copious amounts of smoke that billowed out from the tight-packed foliage.

Evar and Starval climbed quickly and dropped into bushes.

“Well, that shouldn’t have worked.” Starval confirmed that the shrubbery now concealing them was not their first bit of luck.

Evar frowned in concentration, focusing his will until his blood-golem joined them. He gave it the form of a horse now, finding that far less disturbing than a cratalac’s nightmare shape. He picked it up and put it in a pocket, unwilling to return the stuff to his veins. “We should have done this earlier, when it was still dark,” he muttered.

“There’s an entire literature on that, brother. Darkness conceals, but a rich man’s house turns in on itself in the witching hours, sealing its points of entry. The palace is expecting visitors. Its doors are as open as they ever get.”

And with that Starval began their covert approach through the statue-dotted greenery of the potentate’s gardens towards the palace and the invitations of its hundred windows.

“And that was too easy as well.” Starval closed the shutters over the window he’d forced and looked around the empty chamber.

“I can hear a bell.” As Evar mentioned it, the distant noise stopped. The room they were in was bigger than some of the houses they’d passed on the way. Large portraits, darkened by age, and bright displays of polished weapons, decorated the walls. More colour and plaster mouldings made a wonder of the ceiling, and the artistry lavished on the furniture dropped Evar’s jaw. “Why is no one here?”

“That’s palaces for you.” Starval moved to the door opposite the window. “More rooms than they know what to do with.” He oiled the handle. “I believe that bell was an alarm of some sort. Which might explain why we’re getting away with this. Someone else is providing a distraction for us.”

“That seems…unlikely.” Evar joined him.

“As unlikely as meeting Oldo on the day he’s taken prisoner?”

Evar opened his mouth to say Yes, even more so , but closed it again, realising that Starval’s point wasn’t to quibble over odds, but to remind him that the Exchange had delivered them with a sense of purpose and timing. Though what that purpose might be, Evar had no idea.

The pair of them made staccato progress, covering entire corridors in a swift advance, sheltering in a doorway for long minutes. Wherever the emergency was it seemed that the problem lay in some distant part of the palace, and was drawing guards from their posts.

“It’s here,” Evar said. “The book.” He looked around as if it might have been carelessly abandoned on a windowsill.

“You can feel it?”

“It’s here. Maybe not close.”

Evar followed Starval, trying to exercise whatever part of him had shivered with recognition. He hadn’t written the book, but he was in it. He had literally travelled within its pages, and somehow those pages reached out for him even now. They reached in some ephemeral way, wound so closely around simple hope, that in the next moment he could convince himself that hope was all it had ever been. But no. It was there.

He wondered if the book had played a role in what had happened to them all, and what now enveloped them. Oanold had fallen, clutching the book. They had all followed through a broken space still churning with the disrupting currents of its passage.

Livira had written her book in innocence, a compendium of her hopes and fears, loves, losses, an account of her life, an aspiration of life to come. But Mayland, and Starval—he had to admit Starval’s hand in this—both his brothers, guided by Jaspeth, had fashioned Livira’s work into a weapon that could destroy the indestructible library.

Was a weapon all it was now? A burning fault-line running through worlds? Or was it still a book too? Books, in Evar’s experience, were always trying to show you something. They might shout it into your face, the author’s spittle practically flying from the page, or they might make you work to tease it from a story that seemingly ran in the opposite direction. But whatever their approach, books would, if given the opportunity, lead you to some window in a high tower, or crack open a door you had passed a thousand times and never truly seen, or venture up a mountainside to a rocky shoulder from where an unsuspected vista opened out before you. They would show the reader something, and there, on the edge of some new understanding, small or great, invite another step.

But here, hunting evil, deep in the heart of the potentate’s power, what lesson could be learned? Oanold had taken the book, fallen into another life, and here he was, inflicting new terrors on new people. Was that what the book had wanted to show them—that Oanold was somehow the worm at the centre of any rot? That his malignance spanned worlds, time, and possibility? Had Clovis’s instinct for revenge been right all along?

“Focus!” Starval yanked on Evar’s mane. “This is difficult enough without your mind wandering. Be here. Now. Not off with your girl.”

Twice, servants happened across them, but as Starval had moved in for the kill Evar had deflected him. Instead, he’d dazed them with a few blows, then left them bound and gagged behind furniture in rooms that he guessed would receive few visitors.

Starval tutted and shook his head but accepted the added danger as part of whatever lesson Evar was attempting to teach him. It was a lesson that Evar was far from sure of himself. He wanted Starval to share his own instinct for mercy. Softness, Starval would call it. Weakness. And Evar, perhaps agreeing, but convinced there was more to it as well, could, despite all his reading, find no convincing form of words that might change his brother’s heart. It seemed to be a thing you just knew or didn’t know. Evar couldn’t leave it at that though. Perhaps Livira would know a better way. Or Yute, or Kerrol, though he had never sought to change Starval’s mind, merely to observe it.

The second servant had been a canith, and in his uniform Evar led Starval through new corridors and up a flight of stairs. One guard, with a long gun at his side, remained at post on the stairs while somewhere below them muffled gunfire could be heard. Some combination of his distraction, combined with the supreme confidence with which Starval followed his “guide,” allowed the brothers past without challenge.

“What are the odds?” Evar muttered. “Someone else is invading the palace just when we break in?”

“Long,” Starval said. “Astronomical if the events are not connected.”

“It’s got to be the others, right? Mayland’s found an army somewhere?”

Starval shrugged. “We should keep to the mission. Play this to our advantage.” He turned another corner into another luxurious stretch of corridor, adorned with paintings, tapestries, and niches in which stood painted vases, marble busts, ornate clocks. “This room.” Starval pulled up short before a small, unimpressive door.

“Why that one?”

“It’s something functional. We need to get behind the scenes.” Starval knelt to pick the lock. The whole time he fiddled, Evar glanced nervously back and forth along the corridor with its many, grander, doors. With each passing moment the risk of interruption grew. Evar would fight, but he didn’t want to. His mind’s eye saw the walls sprayed with blood, the carpet darkened, and he shuddered.

“There.” Starval pushed through.

The chamber beyond was small, smelled musty, and contained only baskets of furniture sheets, and a chute to some level far below where less favoured servants would presumably launder whatever needed laundering.

“Well, that was a waste of time.” Evar turned to go.

“You’ll notice that someone left a lit lantern hanging in here.” Starval made no move to leave. “That lock was a work of art. And the carpet outside is more worn than any other place we’ve seen. A light, an expensive lock, and a stream of visitors to a laundry chute in this particular part of the palace. None of that makes a great deal of sense.”

He went to the wall and began to walk slowly around the perimeter, pushing baskets from his path with his feet while his fingers trailed the stonework.

“A secret door? Really?” Evar looked around. “Here?”

“ Here to be precise.” Starval thumped the wall and a panel swung noiselessly open. “Follow me. Be very quiet.”

Evar followed into the tight spaces within the walls. Starval chose not to take the lantern, and its light did not follow them far. Evar fought a newly discovered fear of confinement and squeezed through after his brother.

Quite how Starval navigated in the blackness, Evar had no idea. The space smelled dusty and sour. Things crawled in the dark and scurried there. Starval found a flight of stairs so narrow in places that Evar had to turn sideways to negotiate them, then banged his head, and lacking space to bend, had to lean painfully forward. It would have been uncomfortable even without a fresh knife wound in his side.

Eventually Starval stopped. Evar swallowed the need to ask why. He stood for a long moment with his hand to the assassin’s back, listening. The faint hints of a voice reached him.

Noiselessly a long vertical crack of light appeared. It grew no wider than a finger’s width. Starval crouched, allowing Evar to lean over him for a look. The sliver of vision revealed a small gallery. A soldier knelt by the balustrade, training his gun down into the space below. Through the shaped columns of the balustrade a throne could be seen, its high back adorned with golden turrets. The attention of the bewigged figure seated there lay upon two large cages, each big enough for a human on horseback. In one, several figures lay sprawled, dead or dying. In the other Oldo stood by himself, gripping the bars, and by the tone of his voice, giving the potentate a piece of his mind.

Behind Evar the sound of boots on stone steps rang out. Many boots. The size of a force that doesn’t care about stealth or surprise.

“They’ve found us.” Evar turned with a sinking heart and drew his knife. Better for the confined space, as long as he could avoid the first thrust of sword or spear. Of course, if the guards chose to open fire, then all his skill would count for little.

“I’ll take out the man on the throne.” Starval pushed the door to the balcony wider. “A good day to die, brother.”

“A good day to die.” Until Evar said the words, he had stood at the centre of a tug-of-war between faint chances and unlikely options. Now all of that went away. He wanted to live, of course he did, but perhaps it was easier this way, the unresolvable dispute resolved. The looming conflict with Mayland set aside. The library’s problems handed back to the library.

The light of a swinging lantern reached up the stairs, soldiers crowding behind it, rushing forward, their cries mixing with the shouts of alarm from the balcony as Starval did what Starval did best.

“Livira.” Evar spoke the name he wanted to be last on his tongue. And with that, he threw himself at the enemy.