Your Vikar gives you a hard look.

  “That…Wotri…told you several things that either border on blasphemy, or sail right over the fucking line and then keep on going. Perhaps they’re true. Perhaps they’re lies, and you swallowed them because you were isolated and confused. I don’t know which, but what I do know is that too many people in this city are already convinced that crawling mountain out there is the void-dragon come to usher in the age of Eschaton.”

  He leans toward you.

  “In case you can’t figure it out, that is bad, Robin. We have thousands of refugees we need to find beds and food for, a bizarre threat just outside our walls, and a populace very much in panic. If they think the world is about to end, our ability to keep the peace is finished.”

  “I understand,” you say, and nod. “But I assume this is only a temporary decision? I will hold my tongue for now, but what I have seen and heard deserves to be discussed, even if to decide whether or not what Wotri says about dragons and such is to be rejected.”

  “I’ve been taking notes of what every Soulkeeper tells me,” Forrest confirms. “The other Vikars are doing the same. The mayor’s collecting rumors from the refugees, too. We’ll have a chat with Deakon Sevold soon enough, and decide what the church’s official opinion will be involving all this…madness.”

  It’s what you should have expected. Deakon Sevold is the highest ranking member of the Keeping Church in West Orismund. His word is law, and his decisions will be distributed by the three Vikars to the Soulkeepers, Mindkeepers, and Faithkeepers of their respective sacred divisions.

  “Fair enough,” you say, and stand. “Thanks for the drink, Vikar.”

  Forrest stands with you, and he opens his arms for another embrace.

  “Thank you for the tale, and for surviving to tell it,” he says. “Glad to have you back with us. We’re going to need all the help we can get in the coming days…and nights.”

  He steps back and thuds the back of his hand against your shoulder.

  “Starting tonight, actually. I’ve a job for you, Soulkeeper.”

  You try not to look disappointed. You have no home of your own in Londheim, and instead use the barracks in the Soulkeeper Sanctuary in the rare times you stay in the city. Right now, your bed is calling you with a voice loud enough to challenge the roar of the crawling mountain.

  “And that is?” you ask.

  “I’m assigning you a patrol,” your Vikar says. “A request from the Royal Overseer himself. With how crazy everything is, he’s flooding the streets with Lawkeepers, and requested Soulkeepers join their ranks. He thinks the people will feel safer that way.”

  Arguing would be pointless. Forrest is a stubborn man, as firm and straightforward as the enormous ax stashed behind him. If he’s already agreed to the request, then you are absolutely going to be spending the night patrolling the streets.

  “So be it,” you say, resigning yourself to a long night before you get a chance to sleep on a padded mattress with proper pillows and blankets. “Where am I going, and who with?”

  19

  For four nights, you patrol the dark streets of Londheim. Your assigned district, the Quiet District, is one of the wealthiest in the city, a walled off section where merchants, money lenders, and business owners have staked their claims. Normally it would be an easy patrol, for many of them employ their own guards, but the mood of the city is dire. Panic and hunger are potent forces, and several times you catch thieves attempting to break into homes.

  The cold and tedium wear on you, but you’ve learned to tolerate those as a Soulkeeper. What you’re not used to, however, is the partner assigned to you: a soulless Lawkeeper named Ansell.

  “You ready for another long and boring night?” you ask Ansell as you meet him at the entrance to Quiet District. He’s standing rigid in his cuirass and light chain. A club is strapped to his belt. His dark hair is cut short, simple and efficient without care for style. Across his throat, marking him as one of the soulless, is a line of interlocked chain tattoos. The man stares at you, his expression blank.

  “I am adequately prepared for my duties,” he says.

  “You always are,” you mutter. “Anything interesting happen before I arrived?”

  “I have seen nothing of note that I should act upon.”

  “Stellar.”

  The pair of you step through the gates into the district. Another Lawkeeper is there on the other side, and he waves at you before shutting the gates for the night. They rattle behind you with wood and metal as you begin your patrol. You walk in silence, wishing for conversation but knowing it will be fruitless.

  “Keep an eye on the right,” you say as you keep to the center of the street. “I’ll watch left.”

  “I am capable of observing both sides of the street.”

  You grimace. One does not make small talk with the soulless.

  “I’m sure you are, bud.”

  You’ve never felt comfortable around soulless. Church records claim they first appeared in the year 1382. They were rare at first, once in a generation, but over the past decades they have grown far more numerous, until there are over a thousand in Londheim alone. They are men and women without a soul granted to them by Alma at the moment of their birth. At first the church had executed them, considering them strange or horrid aberrations, but that thankfully changed after only a few decades.

  Now, soulless are carefully trained and employed as servants, custodians, even Lawkeepers. Without a soul, they hold no desires of their own. They care little for inconveniences. If given orders, they obey, so long as they did not contradict already given orders. They are a strange, passive existence that unnerve you with their presence. Perhaps it is because the reason for their lack of souls has never been satisfyingly explained.

  Some claim it is a curse, though cannot give a reason why Alma would do so. Some, pointing to the growing difficulty of reaping rituals, claim the Sisters have abandoned the Cradle. Neither possibility is a pleasant one.

  “It seems like things have calmed down a bit,” you say as you continue your patrol.

  “We have yet to encounter anyone,” Ansell says.

  “I mean, compared to the last few nights. And in the city in general. People are settling in. They’re starting to believe the crawling mountain won’t kill us.”

  “Was there reason to believe it in the first place?”

  You chuckle. “A giant living mountain crawls to our doorstep, roars, and bathes half the land in black water that corrupts all its touches? Yes. I think it was a valid possibility.”

  Ansell’s head slowly swivels left to right, checking both sides of the street despite your request for each of you to focus on a particular side.

  “Then it is still a possibility,” he says. “You make assumptions based on inaction.”

  “Are you suddenly versed in the decisions of a mountain?” you ask, thinking surely you’ve got the soulless on that one.

  “I am not,” Ansell says. “Which is why my opinion is irrelevant.”

  “I’d like to think if it didn’t kill us when it arrived, then it has no intention of doing so now,” you argue.

  Ansell pauses a moment to peer at a nearby mansion.

  “Are you versed in the decisions of a mountain?” he asks you.

  You’re half tempted to lie, if only not to lose the argument.

  “No,” you grumble.

  “Then your opinion is irrelevant.” He snaps back to attention. “I thought I saw an intruder. It was just a cat. We resume.”

  You continue on, reminded yet again why no one holds small talk with soulless. No curiosity. No imagination. Try as you might, you can not even get Ansell to act surprised or intrigued by what the crawling mountain is, or what its arrival means. And should half the city drown in black water, Ansell would shed no tears. Grief? Sorrow? Robbed of them, like all else when Alma denied them their soul.

  “Sure, we resume,” you say, and your patrol continues.

  A shadow passes overhead, large and fast, but when you glance up you see nothing.

  “Did you see what that was?” you ask, scanning the stars.

  “That?”

  You gesture above you. “What caused that shadow.”

  He looks up, then back to the street. “No. Is a shadow relevant to our task?”

  For once, it’d be nice if the soulless’s basic questions didn’t leave you feeling like a fool.

  “Maybe,” you say, and continue. Not a moment later you hear the deep cry of an owl. It’s far from the hoots you’d tend to hear amid the pines out west, and much more like the screeches made when birds fight over territory with one another. You shudder at the sound. Ansell doesn’t even flinch.

  “Do you recognize that sound?” he asks.

  “I think it was an owl,” you say, glancing over your shoulder. It sounded like it was not too far away.

  “Then we continue. Owls do not pose a risk of thievery.”

  “Says you. With how the world’s gone crazy, maybe they do.”

  Ansell immediately halts in place and turns to face you. The sudden intensity has you take a step backwards.

  “Am I to look for owls now?” he asks.

  You clench your jaw. The Lawkeeper has been taught to accept orders from Soulkeepers, so long as they do not contradict a few core tenants. You cannot tell him to harm himself unless someone else’s life is at risk. You cannot force him into deviant or sexual behavior. Most importantly of all, you cannot order him to kill.

  Soulless who kill are executed, no matter the reason.

  “No,” you say. “I’m nervous, that’s all. Forget it.”

  “I cannot voluntarily forget, but I shall disregard.”

  You wince. “Right.”

  The sound of breaking glass interrupts what counts as a conversation between you two. Both of you turn in search of the source. A dark home, protected by a fence of iron bars. Its gate is locked, the owners fled when the crawling mountain arrived. The noise came from within, one of the windows, you suspect.

  “Follow me,” you say, and jog to the locked fence. You could try to climb over, but the sharpened tips give you pause. When you stare at the place, near identical to its neighbors in size and style with sharp edges, slanted ceilings, and more stone than wood, you fail to see the cause of the broken glass.

  “Are you certain the sound came from here?” Ansell asks.

  “I thought so.”

  The Lawkeeper immediately departs from the locked gate and circles the fence. You shrug and follow. It’s just a broken window, and you’re not in the greatest of hurry to discover the cause. The fence turns sharply at the property edge and leads toward one of the tall stone walls that surrounds Quiet District. Ansell pauses halfway for you to catch up.

  “That window,” he says, and points. Sure enough, you see it, a side window of the house is broken. It’s fully shattered, too, not just cracked or with a hole from a thrown rock. The implication to you is clear. This wasn’t simple vandalism. Someone wanted to climb through.

  The question was, how did they get over the fence?

  You continue toward the stone wall, and it is there you find your answer. The construction of the fence appears to have been done quite some time ago, and it looks like it was never built properly flush with the wall. The final two poles are pushed inward and away from the wall to create a gap, not much, but you could see how someone of smaller stature might squeeze through.

  A fully grown Soulkeeper and a Lawkeeper in armor? Not likely.

  “I do not believe I can fit through there,” Ansell says, as if reading your thoughts.

  “Not even if you suck in your gut a little?” you ask.

  You turn to grin at the Lawkeeper. A blank stare is your reward.

  “No,” he says. “Holding my breath or changing my posture will not affect the size of my cuirass.”

  You rap the cuirass with your knuckles so it produces a dull thud of metal.

  “Never change, Ansell. Now give me a hand.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m going over.”

  With the way the fence is leaning, its not quite so tall, and the slant makes it so you’ll be able to brace your weight near the top without impaling yourself on the spikes. You lift a foot, and Ansell realizes what you want, squats low, and offers his hand. You step onto it, and with surprising strength, he vaults you upward. Your heel catches the cross bar, and rather than risking worse injury on the fence, you hop forward to continue your momentum.

  The landing hurts, but not as much as it could have. The grass is soft and neatly trimmed. The owners should have paid whoever maintained their yard to also maintain the fence.

  “I do not know how to follow you,” Ansell says from the other side.

  “Just wait at the front,” you say, and cross the grass to the broken window. Already you can hear soft movements from within the house. Footsteps. You’re careful not to make any noise as you eye the broken glass. Whoever climbed through made sure to break all of it along the bottom, presumably as to not cut themselves when climbing in. You appreciate it as you follow through. Your coat snags once on one of the upper pieces, but you twist your shoulder a bit to undo it.

  The twisting, however, leads you to losing your balance, and you tumble ungracefully to the cold floor of the mansion. You clamor back your feet and hold your breath in the sudden silence.

  You still hear noise farther in, a clang of wood and rattle of metal. Someone’s looting the place. They do not appear to have heard your entrance.

  You have no choice, you tell yourself as you draw your sword. You’re not exactly keen on protecting the valuables of some wealthy merchant who fled the city days ago, but this is the task your Vikar assigned you. Weapon ready, you skulk through the halls. Bright spots on the walls mark where paintings have been removed. You see indents on carpet where furniture used to be. You suspect whoever was here has no intention of returning.

  The home, while nice, is not particularly large, and it isn’t long before you find the source of the noise in the kitchen. You carefully peek around the corner, wanting a better idea of what you’re dealing with before you barge in with sword at ready.

  Every drawer has been pulled out and dumped to the floor. Half the shelves are open. A scrawny kid moves through the kitchen like a whirlwind, grabbing silverware and dropping it into a growing pile he’s formed using his shirt to carry. At best guess, he’s ten years old, perhaps younger. You lean back around the corner and sigh.

  This just got both easier, and harder.

  “Hey,” you say, and step around the corner.

  The kid spins, and upon seeing you, freezes in place like a rabbit spotting a predator. He’s got a ragged look to him. Not one of the refugees, you suspect, but someone who’s lived in Londheim for a while. Someone who has not had a decent meal in weeks. A bit of silverware clatters to the floor, spilling out from the pocket he’s made of his shirt.

  “I…I live here,” he says.

  You don’t bother to acknowledge such a terrible lie. Instead, you sheathe your sword and hold your hands out to either side in an attempt to calm him.

  “You’re not in too much trouble yet,” you say. “Let’s put all that stuff back and find out where you live, all right?”

  The boy’s eyes widen slightly, and you see him glance past you. A floorboard creaks. You have a single heartbeat’s worth of time to realize your error before something heavy slams into your back. You gasp at the pain as you tumble forward, struggling to catch your balance. You slam into the side of a counter, roll across it, and spin about to face your assailant.

  A man with a club stares at you from the entryway to the kitchen, his own pockets bulging from ill-gotten gains. He looks torn with indecision, you suspect between fleeing and attacking you further.

  “Run, Hesh,” he tells the kid, and then his mind made, he lifts his club and attacks. You reach for your sword, attempting to draw it, but he’s too close. His club slams hard against your arm, and you bite back a scream as your elbow twists in ways it was not meant to. He rears back for another swing, and you abandon drawing the sword, especially with your sword arm half-numb from the hit.

  Should never have sheathed it, you think as you brace yourself. When he swings, you twist your body so the blow strikes along your braced arm, lessening the impact. The second you feel the pain, you lunge out of your defensive posture, your fist striking his throat. The hit staggers him, and he coughs roughly when he attempts to breathe. Two more punches to the face leave him squinting and swinging his club blindly. It hits your arm, but not nearly as hard as before.

  You flung your entire weight against him in retaliation. He’s emaciated, that much is obvious by his wiry frame and the way his dirty clothes hang off his body. When you two collide, you easily flung him backwards. He stumbles, trips on a collapsed shelf, and then loses his balance. His head smacks the counter top on the way down, and you wince at the meaty sound it makes.

  When he lands, blood pools beneath him. The man does not move.

  A scream steals your attention. The child, Hesh. He’s standing in the doorway. No words, no real thoughts, just horror at the sight before him. You meet his gaze, and a thousand empty, pointless words come to you. You didn’t mean it. It was an accident. The pair should never have been robbing the home in the first place.

  All of them pale against the anguish in this young boy’s eyes.

  “Enough,” you say. It’s the only word that comes to you.

  Hesh releases his shirt. The silverware clatters to the floor. Amid its rattle, he sprints away. You glance once more at the body, wince, and then chase after. You need to identify the deceased man and report what happened to your Vikar. That boy is your best bet at finding out a name and a family. You doubt the kid will even be punished, not with the state the city is currently in. But it is entirely possible you just turned him into an orphan, and by the Sisters, at least you can ensure he won’t starve.

  You sprint after him, expecting him to return to the window. Your guess is correct, and he’s able to wiggle through much faster than you given his size. He tumbles onto the grass, you right behind him as his shadow. You smash a bit more of the glass with your elbow and then climb after. He rushes the gap between the fence and the district wall, and you grimace. Ansell isn’t there. You told him to await you at the front.