Hiding in Plain Sight

(Content warning: This story is dark in places and contains a depiction of hell that some readers may find disturbing.)

Prologue 1 : The Doorstep

It was an ordinary town-house, a house like any other, on a middling street in the city of Ribbon. Along its front were a line of drab, black railings that pointed like a sequence of accusations at a mournful sky. This house lay amongst a row of other, very ordinary houses, and nothing, almost nothing, marked it out in any way as peculiar.

I say almost, because as Inspector Stroup stood before the doorstep, readying herself, her attention settled on the nameplate just next to her. A modest unpolished rectangle of etched sandstone, pale, close in colour to the wall it formed part of. The kind of sign that an attentive citizen could walk past every day of their life without ever having to take its existence into account.

“Highnight”

The Inspector paused and allowed the flavour of the word to dissolve into the tributaries of her mind. As she had made the walk from her office to where she now stood, she had tasked her memory with the gathering of what she knew concerning this house’s occupant – a certain Marcellus Trugg. She had arranged facts alongside her own opinions. She had mapped a profile of what his character was when she knew him and what it might now be. But the house in front of her and this sign with its single word, hovering between portent and pretence… this impression stirred something in her that was older than intellect. She felt it draw forth from somewhere in her bones, like a forgotten warning. It did not emerge as image, or words, or emotion, but rather as a kind of dark stench. It spoke of risk and of pride and of the sheer edge of the hidden. Ah yes, Trugg had always been a vain one. “Highnight” indeed! Was it a decade before? She felt a wave crash then and withdraw – the towing current of memory. And she let herself be carried by it, her mind pulled away from the demands of the moment, away from the street she stood in, away from the city, and back to that afternoon; back to the enclosing murk of the Aula Nebulum. And to the congregation of the young and the old that had taken place there that year, all those years ago, in the Year of the Flail.

She remembered the movement of the air in the chamber of the Aula. A slow drift. As though herds of some benign spirit were rising and passing. The blushing fragrance of rosepetal and the gentle bite of something underneath, a nip of citrus that bore the need and promise of cleansing. Yes, she had had the questionable honour of being present at Marcellus Trugg’s initiation. And she visited it now as though she and that time were two shadows merging. She felt it form around her and through her – that evening that this man was to be entered as an adept to the Order of the Opal Talon.

She remembered the ceremony, the slow and exact attendance to the ornaments of ritual. The lighting of candles, the chant of the choir, and the burning of feathers which she understood to represent flight from the mundane world. Each in turn, each initiate had come forward to make oath and receive the marks of the sacred and the profane. Trugg had been last but one. He had paused upon the dais afterwards and he had wept and thanked his parents. The Inspector remembered the faces the eight Primes of the First Orbit; their frowns and silent sighs. Hadn’t she gotten a small personal twang of pleasure from their discomfort? All those haughty darts of concern.

Poor Trugg.

Yes, she had found it all quite amusing back then.

But that was then.

Because time and fortune are forever our wardens. And lives and fates are shifting, wriggling things, whether they be running from or clinging to the sticks of the past. And from the moment the Inspector’s eyes had rested on the almost featureless facade of the house named ‘Highnight’, her instincts had clenched around something that was much closer to warning. Much closer to the reservations of the elders of the Order of Opal Talon on that evening of initiation, all those years ago.

Inspector Stroup accounted that Mages are a secretive sort by what might even be considered an exorbitant scale of reason. It is true that they delight in the occasional public spectacle. Explosions of colourful pomp. Who would miss the wild parades of Summernight? The one below through the streets of Ribbon; the other above the city, cloud beasts lit with sprays of luminous jade, magenta and vermilion. It is true. But when they turn to each other, our mages, when they gather between themselves, well how quickly then they render obedience to that cold unseen silence that dwells in their halls and groves and towers. How tenderly they pay heed to the governance of what is yet to be attained. In this quiet library of soul and passions, those called to magic go to great lengths to obscure that most precious of resources: the inner self. It is not an easy thing to hide. For desire is ever made to give itself away; in our words and in our deeds. And even in our dreams. And while there are a myriad questionable wisdoms that a dousing in the occult can render instructive, one of the more fundamental and practical of these is that vanity is the worst kind of camouflage. Trugg’s lapse into sentimentality while he was in the throes of his initiation had the effect of tagging him with the bright mark of a self that, it was felt by his peers and betters, would have been better expressed in terms manifested with more subtlety and control.

The Inspector stood before Trugg’s house. She anchored herself to the grey light of this grey day, but allowed her memory to unwind further into what she knew of Marcellus Trugg’s history, arranging strands and islands of it before her with the neutrality and distance prized by her station.

She recalled that it was only a few months after the initiation, that Trugg had attached himself to the Order’s amateur production of Buddle’s tragi-comedy Gaspar Laufer. The hope grew amongst the more forgiving souls of the Opal Talon, that the swirling test of theatre might offer the young mage a platform to vex his emotions. And carried by this affordance, and by the horn of his own commitment, Trugg contested and was awarded the part of the Hierophant. It was a part that meant a mere few lines of spoken dialog – its substance instead being composed of a deep and moving aria, a confession and a caution to the once-fallen, now fragile, but rising Gaspar. The Hierophant’s Lament, when sang well, had the power to be wonderfully sad and touching. It could be an offer of soul to the soul. A celebration and an apology for a life given over to the spiritual path. It raised the spectre of the lure of salvation. It questioned the sacrifice and rough melancholy of the ascetic. It tried to hold and at the same time to critique the yearning for beauty that words cannot reach. It was a difficult piece, requiring a blend of technical strength and finesse. Reputations were won or lost in the attempt of it – especially in the powerful lift and hold to its poignant climax. A trained voice could make its attack to the fifth octave, but it was not unusual for amateur productions to compromise on the fourth.

Marcellus Trugg had insisted that he would push for the fifth.

Inspector Stroup’s mind hovered over this tapestry of memories. Shoals of moments gathered and shifted beneath her. She coaxed them along filaments of association. Time and personality and anticipation. She felt her way to the pool she sought. To the first few days of the rehearsals.

Early reports had emerged, but they had been difficult to classify. It was said that each time that Trugg had stepped to the front of the stage to begin his aria, something in the air, in the mood, in the accounting of the place changed. The Inspector remembered that Trugg had had his defenders and that in equal measure, he’d had his doubters. She had been told of how the young mage had found a well of feeling that he had poured into the Lament and she had been told of how hope had grown. And yet somehow, each time the steep wall of the Lament’s last verse grew closer – when the shadow of its peak had fallen across the stage and the eyes and ears that attended it – an edge would find its way into the world. In the hearts of the cast and of the director and of the assembled hands attending to props and costumes, anticipation rose to do battle with itself. Even old Brer Crane, the caretaker, when he had happened to be in attendance, would lift his eyes from the worn boards of the auditorium floor and lean his crooked frame over a broom and raise an ear and wait.

On the first evening of rehearsals, the rendition was deemed passable. On the second it was not. On the third, there was a general agreement that the performance was thought-provoking. But no one would speak of the fourth night.

And so, on it went, for six weeks.

Of course, everyone connected even vaguely to the web of magic that permeates the city of Ribbon has heard of the night that Trugg made it out. When it was exactly, during the six weeks of rehearsals, it seems no one cares to share. For a brief window, accounts were terse, almost frenzied. And then they closed upon themselves like the laughter of the fae. Everyone who witnessed those few minutes would look shy when asked. And still do. But it was said at the time that Trugg made a channel of himself somehow. It was said that he unlocked the beautiful thing we humans spend our lives groping for. ‘I tell you,” a wild-eyed stage-hand proclaimed to his drinking companions after the rehearsals that night, “He stormed the bastion of the divine!’ But the same stage-hand, when asked again the following day, would only smile softly and avert his eyes; and no chiding or coaxing could influence him to speak of it further.

On opening night, though the Inspector herself had arrived late, she knew that the auditorium had begun to fill from early in the evening. Figures, cloaked and robed, swathes of purple and scarlet and black in their ones and twos, had slid in steady and quietly and nested in shadows and corners. Everyone had wanted to be there, but no one had wanted to be seen arriving. Curls of pipesmoke and whisper gathered into shawls above the heads of the growing audience. As more bodies filed in, the whispers had rose to chatter. Shoulders had huddled together, bound by gentle laughter and coughing. And when, at last, the frown of time had spoken its uncomfortable silence, and eyes had begun to flash towards the stage, then all at once the curtains parted and the leading man strode onto the boards. He had peered out across the close packed heads of the audience as though searching for a landmark in the fog and delivered Gaspar’s first line: “Ah! So it is. I have wandered the better part of my life and know not yet where I am.” With these words the hidden spirit, the shared conspiracy of nerve that dwells in the magic of theatre had begun its nightly reincarnation.

The production had bounced its way along good-naturedly. The audience had mostly laughed where they were intended to. They had joined in for some of the better known choruses. And they had offered their silence to the vulnerable, when found in character or in actor.

The story is well known: Gaspar’s flight aloft the flames of love; his attendance at the court of the Emperor and his rise to the goad of success; the advances of the Countess Gudois and the Countess spurned; the curse and Gaspar’s fall and his scarring; and then his slow recovery; and the slow reawakening of love in his heart. It is not until the final act that the Hierophant’s Lament is sung. It is the second song, but last. And when Marcellus Trugg stepped out that night, it felt as though everyone in the room were leaning forward.

Inspector Stroup shivered on the doorstep of Highnight. She didn’t want to dwell long in the wound of what had happened on that night. But she knew she must touch it. She knew it was necessary to do so, in order to prepare her for what she now faced. And so, she willed her mind to remain in the well of that evening, all those years ago. She tipped the sour pail of the memory and felt it burn even as it began to pour.

It happened that Trugg had walked out onto the stage. Yes. That much could be said. He had started. But something… was missing. After the first few lines, it became devastatingly apparent that Trugg’s voice did not have the co-operation of his lungs. The song sounded forth instead from from a source that seemed to come from somewhere inside his throat. It emerged disturbingly, as a peculiar, whining kind of warble. The audience grew confused. Some grew frightened. Near the beginning of the second verse, Trugg’s voice touched home and he found his breath. He found the depth in his chest – but only for an instant. Eyes widened, as the packed room bore agonised witness to the struggle that was taking place on the stage before them.

Again, Trugg’s voice found its depth, but again, only briefly. And into the third verse there were indeed touches, momentary glimpses of something beyond, a thing that seemed beyond even belief itself. Trugg was striving to draw something from the void. A haunting thing, tantalising and alluring. It seemed almost to mock the audience in the promise of its reality – like a cosmic brag of splendour, high and cold and capricious. It was something much more than Trugg. And, sadly it was much more than he could hope to command. After the third verse, Trugg risked a haunted glance to the wings, where the director and his fellows, riven into stasis by their collective awe and horror, were only capable of looking on aghast. The director, who now understood the risk, sent a gesture to Trugg of four fingers. This had been intended as a signal to pull back. In that simple economy of sign, it said that the evening must be recognised as a loss. It counselled that that could be accepted. Meet the last verse in the fourth octave. Let’s regroup and try again.

But it was opening night, and youth is slow to bargain. Trugg’s eyes, terrified, but defiant, had spoken of the impossibility of retreat.

The goodwill of the audience had nothing left to turn to, but hope. Maybe. Maybe the brief flashes of control that Trugg had shown were the precursor for a profound breakthrough. Maybe he would make the leap and meet the heights of the climax like a brilliant sword meeting another in a blaze of light. Maybe they were about to witness all the glory of the life-struggle explode in a single shining moment of victory. The alternative to loss existed, after all. Couldn’t it be just as real?

As real, perhaps, but so much the rarer.

Everyone had known it was a bad sign when Trugg launched into the last verse off-key. He faltered after the first line, then withdrew to a speaking voice for two lines. How? Could he lift from there? The cold vice of impossibility had closed around the hearts of the Aula Nebulum. And then all at once, like a cutpurse in a riot, hope had slipped away.

Trugg had closed his eyes and had drawn an immense breath. And everyone had waited.

The Hierophant stood frozen and silent upon the centre of the stage. His hands extended before him in the bold stance of immense preparation. But sadly, it was so that they stayed before him, his fingers softly quivering. It almost seemed as though this figure of power were trying to arrest the universe. But Time, would refuse to wait for Trugg. It rolled mercilessly on while somewhere in the depths of his spirit he clutched for something he could not find.

And so he had stood that way. He had stood while the hall grew cold. Each of his deep inward breaths built towards something, but each at last, surrendered itself to silence. When we are surrounded by the warmth and charm of those dear to us, a short length of time can feel like the briefest whisker. When we are lost and failing, it is an eternity.

At last, when it became unbearable, when innocence could no longer defend itself, Bertha Furr had torn off a strip of night sky and had rushed onto the stage swabbed in its black wrapping.

“Rrrrriiiiiiirrrrrriiiiii” she trilled as she danced out onto the boards. She circled Trugg’s Hierophant once, twice, and then closed on him, placing a raised finger across his lips. “Shush now, pious one,” she ordered, “Know that you are under my spell. Know! That you are now my slave.” Trugg had lowered his eyes and his arms. And his body had spoken of nothing beyond submission as Bertha had led him solemnly from the stage. Before exiting, the sorceress extempore had turned with loud determination and marked their departure with a last ad-lib: “Be warned,” Bertha Furr’s trembling voice craked, “Gaspar Laufer, where’er you may be,” she shook a fist at the ceiling, then the floor and then over the audience. “That virtue is no shield against the dark heart of life!”

The Inspector felt sorrow descend upon her. Her vocation often acquainted her with sorrow, and she recognised in it the brutal furrow that pain tears into the world. By accident, or by incident, this pain is housed in hearts and minds. Some are strong enough to bear it – to hold it away from those around them and near them. Some are.

Trugg had not seen for three months after the opening night of Gaspar Laufer. He had been absented from his duties at the Tower of Returns. One rumour ran that he had signed up as a crewman and was onboard a cog bound for Veek. Another story held that he had sworn a vow of silence and donned sackcloth and taken up residence in a remote cave in the Saw Mountains. Some even claimed that Trugg had become a Sleeper – a notion that sank like a splinter into the staunch hearts of all who held to the pearled words of promise and prophecy laid down in the Book of Chains.

Inspector Stroup remembered that the next time Trugg had showed his face in public, it was in the dark hours of winter in an establishment known as The Churn. The Churn is a dockside tavern of some repute as a haven for the rough and daring and a late-night and early morning favourite of the city’s young mages. It is a place where their pale and wavering joys are mostly tolerated. Trugg had appeared early in the night and was seemingly in high spirits. With hot cheeks he threw himself into the swell of banter and rumour that it was his more regular habit to pour scorn on. It was then, only on the occasion of his finishing the dregs of his fifth ale that he had taken it upon himself to step forward to defend the honour of a certain plump and winking Libby Roche, one of the tavern wenches. Now the virtues of a dockside wench extend far beyond what the finer ladies and gentlemen of our upper reaches would have us believe. Courage, generosity of spirit, and resilience, to name but a few. But honour: honour in the traditional sense – in the sense that the self-appointed guardians of our proprieties would urge us towards in their dreams of our betterment – well it must be admitted that this can be a fungible thing at the best of times. And were there a host of knights so plentiful as the stars in the sky, they would have been hard pressed if they should have been tasked with the mission of keeping some decorum in the salty bowels of The Churn, on a Gatherday night. Nonetheless, Trugg had stepped forth. “You must not dare, sir!” was the address he directed at ‘Shep’ Lambert, a local stevedore. Shep was a thick oak of a man who had earned his name from his habit of carrying sheep about, sometimes two at a time.

That Marcellus Trugg escaped with a broken nose, had been considered testament to the latent magical potential it was still believed he housed somewhere in the trap of his broken pride. He appeared the next day, at the rat races with his face swollen and bruised, and his broken lip quivering in the smile of a champion. It seems he had convinced himself overnight that this act of noble sacrifice on his part was sufficient to have won him the first of many wedges from a large wheel of redemption. When Trugg walked into the adepts’ refectory, two days later in the Tower of Returns, he walked with his head held high.

The Inspector recalled that it was not long after these events, that Trugg had been heard to preach, in the circles where he deigned to share his findings, of his burgeoning respect for “hiding in plain sight.” The tactic here being, of course, that any recourse to sentiment, any artistic disaster, or even the flagrancy of an ardent nobility – all these behaviours could be justified rather effectively, if one were to simply claim them as acts of volition. And pledging himself further to his new philosophy, Trugg would be heard to avow that the truly obscure would revel in a conscious and overt normality – that the truly profound would, in fact, be unable to withold their contempt for the thick and quizzical forms of ritual that define the lives of all those amongst us who practise magic.

An effective defence, perhaps… albeit a temporary one. The more flamboyant of the mages within the Opal Talon listened to his thesis with an amusement, which turned to patience, which turned to a thin and sour sort of toleration. They heard of Trugg’s burning of his robes; of how he returned the ornamented staff bestowed on him by the Greater Arc and began instead to carry a spyglass. They heard of his new habits of dress and of the wearing of his beard and moustaches in a strict accordance with the dictates of the latest fashions. Trugg had made no secret of preaching his newfound commitment to normality. And after a lifetime of striving for alterity and uniqueness, he had found to his horror and amazement, that within the sudden space of a year, he had, to all intents and purposes, turned himself into a quite normal person.

One of life’s darker and more beautiful mysteries is how eagerly our past failures will offer themselves as prey to the stalking wolf of the future. And so, at the same time that Trugg was managing to baffle himself with his own banality, a pressure was building inside of him. As it turned out, he was only able to bear this pressure for about two years. It may have been the delayed fruiting of his previous embarrassments. It may have been his penchant for setting himself to unattainable ideals. Whatever it was, his vanity could no longer take the quiet smirks, the barbed comments and sneers. This same vanity had given way like a goose before a snake. Many within the Tower of Returns and beyond felt that it was a mark of Marcellus Trugg’s character to flirt with travesty at any opportunity, and from those who felt this way, he had garnered little sympathy. The mockery of mages will be as cruel as it is accurate. It can be a powerful conduit of information, as all pain can. It is meant to test the will. It is meant to test pride. It is meant to test the humility that allows us to see ourselves as others see us and that allows us to find those sweet absurdities we are all somewhere in possession of. Instead, Trugg fought it. He bore the laughter as though it were something out of reach. He bore it with a confusion that turned quickly to frustration. And sunken by the weight of time and repetition, desperate for an outlet, for some, for any channel of expression, his frustration eventually built to where it could no longer be borne. It broke out and took the first form that presented itself.

It took the form of a need to punish.

One arm of Trugg’s subconscious, the vestigial tail of some kind of spiritual nobility, became attracted to the idea of punishment in the form of self punishment. He dabbled briefly in fasting and the stings of insects, before his well-developed aversion to pain announced itself and Trugg essayed a quick sidestep off the path of mortification. He fell instead to his knees before his own severity and this severity counselled him. It suggested that the punishment-that-must-be must be, but that perhaps, it would be better visited upon the world than upon himself.

A shiver ran across the Inspector’s shoulders as she felt the past inform her present. She felt the weave of time tear slightly and open, parting momentarily as a carriage jostled past on the rough cobble of the street. She felt the shadow of the history grow and summoned the innerspace that allowed her Qi, her being-energy, to flow and site itself in the reservoir of her lower abdomen.

She remembered that it was soon after that time that there developed the unfortunate relationship between Marcellus Trugg and his apprentice, one Barney Scallop. Barney had been a jolly ball of a man twice Trugg’s age, who had been entrusted into Trugg’s service and guidance. There was a possibility entertained amongst the more enlightened monitors of the Second Orbit that Barney Scallop could prove a positive influence on the wayward mage. The reality was that Marcellus Trugg felt crippled by this new source of buoyancy in his life. And with a hesitation that could not be called significant, he took ownership of what he saw as his duty and sincere calling to prune his new student’s expectations of what the life of a mage could amount to.

When Trugg’s initial, more subtle attempts at dissuasion, through sighs, coughing and much hmmming and if-you-feel-it’s-a-good-ideaing didn’t bear results, he began to be heard at mages’ fora to speak with narrow eyes of “the efficiency of pain” and the “honesty of cruelty”.

Things began to go wrong for Barney Scallop. At first, these were small things: like finding that the fresh milk he had added to his master’s tea had soured. Or that the moment that Barney stepped outside the door for his evening ramble, a fine day clouded, and he was greeted instead with thick drops of rain that fell with a barely veiled hostility. Or if Barney was part way through enjoying a book and pronounced it to his friends to be astounding, he would quickly find upon taking up the volume again, that the writing had become self-indulgent and terse and that each paragraph was now a struggle.

Unfortunately for Barney Scallop, he was not of the character to allow these minor, however unsettling, inconveniences to stifle his good spirits. But sadly this resolute attitude of his only served to force his master to further extremes. The Inspector remembered that it was not long before Barney began to have problems with his words. Small things at first. Some words simply went missing. Others appeared when they were least wanted. And there were certain words that insisted on a form of pronunciation that Barney seemed unable to escape from.

In the grey, bare rhythm of the afternoon, Inspector Stroup felt a sinking as her mind began to lose sight of Barney. She saw the bright flash of his smile fall under a cloud. And then she could see him no longer.

She could only see what came after.

And so, we must now leave the Inspector on the doorstep of “Highnight” for a while. It is necessary for our tale that the reader become a little more intimately acquainted with the recalcitrant mage and his apprentice. We must shift the scrying glass of our story to five years ago. Let us go inside the house. Let us visit Trugg and Barney in the arms of their morning. It happens it is just their breakfast time.

Prologue 2 : Trugg and Barney

The parlor is dank and poorly lit and bears the persistent scent of burned fish.

“I’d like some tea now. And perhaps the whites of two eggs.”

It was not unusual for Marcellus Trugg to make very specific demands.

“At once sir, I’ll put on the kaffle.” Barney wrung his hands.

“Excuse me, what?” Marcellus Trugg employed his less than considerable self-control in masking a smirk.

“The… ah…”

“The…?”

“The kaffle sir. I’ll put it on.” Barney Scallop squirmed and coughed into his fist, offering up the vaguest possibility that something may be caught in his throat.

“Very good,” said Trugg, trying to maintain a polite distance from the delight he was beginning to feel. “And the eggs…”

“Ogg,” emitted Barney. “There are still some cistern since man ying.” A bout of coughing cloaked a quick exit from his master’s study.

Barney found his condition was worsening.

In the following days and weeks, Trugg observed this deterioration as though it were a process in a laboratory experiment. Rather than a situation to be combatted, the mage saw it as an opportunity. He quickly formed the habit of peppering his and Barney’s discussions with sudden and searing demands for detail.

“And of course you know what the colour of a dryad’s heart is?”

Marcellus Trugg would wait, his eyebrows lifted ever-so-slightly, like a farmhand about to receive his weekly pay. Barney would squirm and repeat something like: “Cullis! Aye aye, the cullis. Oh aye.” In the bare silence that followed the apprentice would squint desperately at his master’s teacup in the hope that it might need an immediate refilling, (his fear of the kaffle left temporarily to one side). Or he would listen at the door for the possibility that an unexpected guest might liberate him with their arrival. But a guest would not arrive. And so, Marcellus Trugg would be forced to allow his expression of open expectation to sunder, and he would sink instead to some sneering and a little sighing and to some general manifestations of disappointment.

It went on like this for some time.

Until.

“I have the solution,” claimed Trugg one morning. He and Barney had not spoken together before on the subject of the apprentice’s problem with words.

Barney indicated optimism with his eyebrows.

Marcellus Trugg produced a small glass vial from a breast pocket. It held a dark grey fluid with pretensions of silver. “Mercury,” he explained. “Ten drops, three times a day with meals. You’ll be right as rain in a month!” Barney’s face moved from wonder through disbelief towards hope.

But Barney Scallop’s words would still not consent to behave themselves. Furthermore, within the space of three weeks he began to lose his hair. Thick black-grey clumps were to be found strewn about the house. A decision was made to double the dosage. This was packaged as a bold, but necessary action. After six weeks had passed, Barney began to compose sonnets, in Ruhmish, of remarkable elegance. (A language he had never studied.)

Within seven weeks he was dead.

Chapter 1 : Situation

The Inspector did not know these details. She did not know of the day to day cruelties and malice that Trugg had steeped himself in. But she could guess at it. She could see Barney Scallop disappear. And she could still sense the timbre of the news of Barney’s death as it spread through the network of paragons, fixers and scoundrels that formed Ribbon’s community of magic practitioners. Even the more cynical of her peers had felt the loss a broken thing.

The Second Orbit didn’t deign to provision Marcellus Trugg with a replacement apprentice. And between one thing and another, he fell into reclusion and obscurity. It was maybe five years since he had any significant dealings with another member of his order. And then this morning, Inspector Stroup had received a note, hand delivered to her office.

“Situation. Come at once. Marcellus Trugg.”

Upon the front step of Highnight, the Inspector settled her eyes on the door before her and observed that it was ajar.

“Anyone home?” As she pushed in the door and crossed the threshold, her nostrils wrinkled, encountering a rising waft of sulphur, parcelled in threat and possibility. There was a curious silence in the place. Inspector Stroup progressed into the small reception space of the hallway and made note of the otherworldly cold that was emanating from somewhere further into the house.

Inauspicious, she determined.

She proceeded along the hallway and arrived before a solid door of ash. This door was different in design and decoration from the few others she had passed. She decided that it would no longer be wise to explain away the distinct sense of evil she could now feel. And her years of experience cautioned her that its source appeared to lie behind the door she faced.

“Ahoy there!” she tried.

There was no answer.

There was nothing but the smell.

She placed a finger on the handle of the door. She knew the touch. The odd cold not cold touch of what might not be. She gripped the handle and turned it.

The room was lavishly unkempt. The kind of deep, ruinous untidiness that cannot be fabricated, that can only accrue from years of neglect and abandon. Paint peeled from the walls and ceiling. Along those same walls, bookshelves sank and slanted, disgorging their cargo onto a floor littered with plates, cups, cutlery, the bones of chickens, spills of paper, apple cores, clumps of clothing, tools, paintbrushes, the remainders of lamb chops, broken furniture, crusts of bread, candles and candlesticks, string, sand, and burlap sacks. Clumps of weed grew from between the cracks in the wooden floorboards. The furniture that was still intact lay at variance with the shape and function of the study. For that was what it was. Or once was. A desk was angled obliquely from one wall. A solitary chair faced into a corner. A birdcage sat in the fireplace. And yet, despite the plethora of squalor the study exhibited, in the midst of all this, the Inspector’s attention was immediately and naturally arrested by the two figures occupying the centre of the room – those of Marcellus Trugg and the dæmon.

Trugg’s form lay motionless, reclining in a posture that was somewhere the other side of a sprawl across a small sofa that had been drawn up into the middle of the study. A thick, navy velvet dressing gown had been draped over his body. An unkempt growth of bark brown hair and beard swirled about his head. The Inspector observed that he was still breathing and she judged that the body might be capable of movement. But it was the dæmon that was the first to react.

It writhed around itself in that frigid moment of its noticing the new presence. And with a shudder it lurched into motion. It began by curling its way around the narrow borders of the binding circle that contained it. It swam against the invisible shield of its cell. In form, the thing loosely resembled an enormous insect. Four gangling arms extended from a midriff that was sparsely spiked with short thick black hairs. The thing held to the edge of the circle. And on each circuit, when it grew closest to the Inspector, it pawed against the barrier. At the end of each arm, where hands might be, she saw spindles of digits; wormlike probing extensions that ended each in small pale-lipped mouths.

The dæmon’s lower half was roughly the size of a human’s, but in shape, like an eel’s. Its head was without eyes. It held instead four earlike orifices, two above two, each housing a tongue. Four tongues that licked and tasted the air.

Each time the thing circled to where it was closest to Inspector Stroup, it slowed, and lifted its arms, letting its fingermouths kiss against the inside of its confines. At last it began to push itself against the shield, trying to get as close as possible to the new figure in the room.

Inspector Stroup stood very still. She breathed slowly and allowed her training to be her guide. She tuned her senses to the time and space she found herself in. The sick parade of smells – rotting food and mildew and stale urine. And across it all the egg mustard tang of sulphur. She felt the cold of the air and listened to the slurping torrent of tiny mouths, the thump of that thick tail against the floorboards. Alongside all of this, she began to make out the faint rising and falling wisp of Marcellus Trugg’s breath.

“Trugg,” she called gently. There was no movement from the figure splayed on the sofa. She stepped carefully sideways and placed a hand on his shoulder. It felt as though he were nothing but bone. “Trugg,” she repeated. After a few seconds, she began to hear a noise originate from the figure’s chest. It started as a hum. It rose in volume into a low moan, and grew. A bleak, dolorous cry that reminded the Inspector of snared animals, waiting in the dark, waiting for worse.

“oooooooooOooOOoooOOOOOOOOAOAAAGGGHHAAAGGHHH!”

Inspector Stroup stared down at a gaunt, pale face as the unearthly wail echoed off the walls of the study. This man had not eaten in days, maybe weeks.

Two eyelids shot open. Haunted red-rimmed eyes squinted against the light. The face seemed to hover for a moment on the fronds of consciousness, as though balancing the nightmare of his sleeping with that of his waking.

He buried his face in his arms. “Help meee,” he sobbed weakly.

The Inspector forced herself to remember who Trugg was. She sighed as she looked ahead towards the mountains he would have to climb. And would not be able to climb. She felt the promised relief of cynicism, the dark seduction of it. She drew a breath and sought the control she would need to prevent her from delivering the words that dangled themselves before her like ripe fruit:

“Oh? What could possibly be the problem?”

Instead, she said: “I’ll run a bath.”

Chapter 2 : The Hourglass

While Trugg sponged himself upstairs, Inspector Stroup began to clear some of the detritus that lay about the study. She found a pail by the back doorstep and went around the room collecting and dumping the rotting remains of half-eaten meals that clung to plates and seethed in bowls. The dæmon tracked her all the while within its binding circle, moving along the salted glyphs of its border, the cold of the room seeming to move with it. It persisted in enacting a strange series of beseeching twitches of its head, its tongues and fingerparts. She stared at it. It was trying to communicate. She was sure of it. She knew a little of the code of devils, but nothing of dæmonspeak. Inspector Vast might be able to help. But that would take time. And time was something she couldn’t afford.

The Inspector had just put her hand on the copy of Garamond’s, Treatise on the Properties of Malevolent Spirits, when the door opened and Marcellus Trugg stepped back into the study. He was dressed in a loose-fitting set of yellowing cotton pajamas. He saw the book on the desk and he saw her fingers resting on it. He met her eyes for a moment and sank his head, nodding sadly in answer to her unasked question.

“It’s full of holes, you know?” The Inspector jabbed a glance at the Garamond and returned to observe Trugg’s thin, sunken face.

“I… I can’t… I couldn’t…” He appeared to be resisting some terrible memory.

“Marcellus,” said the Inspector, with just an edge of command in her voice. He raised his eyes to her. “Why is it still here?” The Inspector inclined her head towards the binding circle.

Trugg’s face leapt to recognition. “The… the hourglass!” he announced. He gestured drunkenly at the bookshelves, and started towards them, stumbling past the mess of junk that caked the floor. Some of the shelves were missing from the bookcase, others sagging at angles, books, piles of books everywhere, lying haphazardly as though they had been shovelled towards the shelves and gravity was left to order them. He grasped an hourglass that lay on its side atop a tumbled seam of volumes that had congealed in a sloping angle of shelf. He bowed sheepishly and lifted it to the Inspector as though he were brandishing a twig against a storm. Inspector Stroup frowned.

“You see?” said Trugg. Twisting his wrist, he inverted the hourglass, then righted it. He repeated this process a few times. The Inspector observed that the sand within the glass refused to move.

“Frozen!” whispered Trugg dramatically, as though revealing a long-kept and terrible secret. Inspector Stroup held out her hand. “May I?” she asked. Trugg handed her the hourglass.

It was large, about the size of an alehouse tankard. The wooden housing was walnut, delicately carved with lines of bug-eyed satyrs, each figure with its arms clutching at the one in front of it, and looking in fright over its shoulder at the one chasing it. The sand was fine and the distinctive yellow of old paper. The Inspector tried shaking it. The sand did not move. It seemed to have set in place. She tapped the casing gently against the surface of the desk. Nothing.

“Oh, I was rougher!” claimed Trugg. “Until I became afraid that I might break it,” he added, in the quiet worry of a confession.

The Inspector fixed her pale blue eyes on him. “It was specified in the contract… ?” she suggested.

“Indeed,” said Trugg.

“I will see that now,” Inspector Stroup informed him.

Trugg’s eyes attempted to extricate themselves from their sockets and run for cover to a different part of his body. “There’s another problem,” he confessed.

“Well?”

Trugg fell onto all fours and crawled towards the Inspector. She grew concerned for a moment that this was some exercise in prostration; that she had exposed herself to some hideous episode of supplication on the part of Marcellus Trugg. To her relief, the bedraggled mage stopped at the sofa and, grunting unpleasantly, began to paw at something that was lodged underneath.

He withdrew a sheet of parchment and the Inspector caught a glimpse of what it contained – it crawled with the tight, untidy scrawl of what she assumed was Trugg’s handwriting. There was text between paragraphs, text sideways along margins. Up and down, across the page were scratched, sinuous crossings-out and corrections. At the bottom, the sheet ended in an uneven curve, where a stripe of it had burnt away. Trugg squirmed on the ground like a pile of beans as he presented the contract to the Inspector. She took it carefully and examined it. Her eyes quickly drawn to the specks of blood, the smears of ink and the puddled trails of candlewax. She released a slow sigh. Before she even attempted to decipher the text, she could feel time evaporate. She had hoped to visit her aunt in Gallavant the following day. There was a jar of apricot jam that she had been saving for the occasion. But the warren of words and symbols that ran across the parchment that she now stared down at was not given to admit of a world that contained jam.

The Inspector sighed a second time and turned her attention to the section that was burnt. She noted that the signatures, and what looked like several clauses of the summoning were missing, burnt away.

“May I look in your Garamond?” she asked.

“Of course, of course!” Trugg scrabbled about on the floor and drew himself to his feet. The copy of Garamond’s Treatise, bound in a dark, green leather, lay on the desk in front of him. He rocked his head from side to side, staring at it cautiously as though it were a stoat that had somehow found its way into his study. He glanced at Inspector Stroup to see if she was observing. She stood waiting, her eyes cold and expressionless. She was silently reciting a mantra that she practised for the cultivation of inner calm. Trugg employed a contortion of the muscles of his face that she assumed was meant to be a smile. He leant in closer to the desk. Screwing his face further, he reached forward with one quivering finger and poked the book.

Nothing happened.

The mage’s wild eyes flared wide. He reached forward again tentatively and then, as though he were capturing a chicken, he seized the book with both hands. Closing his eyes, he clutched it to his chest. Inspector Stroup waited within the cycle of her mantra and consoled herself, that if necessary, she could move her attention to some breathing exercises.

Marcellus Trugg stood before the Inspector for four full minutes with his eyes closed, Garamond’s Treatise still held like an infant to his chest.

“Marcellus…” prompted the Inspector. Trugg emitted a small whine. His eyes started open. “Of course, of course,” he said. He unfolded his arms and raised the book to eye level. He peered at the thick wall of its pages. Again, he raised the hesitant, quivering finger and stroked the edges of it.

“It’s fine.” The Inspector’s voice was soft, but firm. “I know where it is.” On hearing this, Trugg’s face became frozen in horror. In an elaborate sweep, he hid his eyes behind one arm and with the other, he thrust the book towards Inspector Stroup. She lifted it slowly away from his cloying grasp.

The Garamond was bookmarked with a thick, creased strip of what the Inspector identified as the tongue of a bubbletoad. She set this to one side and ran her eye over the text of the page. “497: Lesser Fiends of the Fourth Abyss.”

It was as she suspected. She read through the warnings.

“… dire consequences of error…”

“… never to be attempted without meticulous preparation and careful warding…”

“… ensured by the protection of a second …”

All the usual safeguards.

She set the parchment that described Trugg’s contract with the dæmon across the opened book and tuned her focus to the details there. She noted how the bounds of the house were specified as second order containment. And she examined the details of how the hourglass was bound to represent the duration of the summoning. Well, so much for that, she thought. She moved on to what she was most interested in – the ingredients.

The tears of an orphan.

The dying wish of one virtuous.

The heart of a wyvern.

Chapter 3 : The Tears of an Orphan

So now they were getting somewhere. She turned to address Trugg.

“The ingredients. They were all accounted for?” she asked.

Trugg withdrew his head from under his arm and looked baffled.

“The ingredients, Marcellus?”

Slowly, the mage’s head began to nod.

“Tell me,” said the Inspector. “Begin with the simplest. The tears. Tell me.”

Trugg looked forlornly around the chaos of the study. His eyes rested for a moment on an overturned chair. His shoulders sank and he slumped to the ground. He pulled his legs underneath him. A wave of sulphuric stink caught Inspector Stroup and she could hear the slow rhythmic thump of the dæmon’s tail against the floor. She stepped back carefully, in order that she could keep both Trugg and the summoning circle in her field of vision.

“The tears,” Trugg began quietly, distracted. “From the Servants of Belhennon. It was easy. I went up the hill. I waited two hours to speak to the Mawher. I explained that I was researching the composition of tears and how they might be used for healing. I said that I was looking to procure samples from children. She laughed. ‘If it’s tears you want,’ she told me, ‘You’ll not have to wait long’.

“It only took an hour. A fight broke out. Some nickname a boy didn’t like. Squeals. Servants arriving to administer discipline. And crying. Lots of crying. I soaked the tears on blotting paper and stored them in that bottle.” Trugg pointed absently to a small, empty brown bottle that lay on its side next to an alembic and a broken mirror.

Inspector Stroup mentally checked off the ingredient. “Hard to see complications there,” she permitted. “Next one then. The wish.”

Chapter 4 : The Dying Wish of One Virtuous

Trugg shook his head and waved his arms around as though trying to protect himself from a cloud of invisible wasps. “Please,” he begged. “Don’t make me say it.”

The Inspector frowned. “Excuse me?”

“You… you’ll laugh.” Trugg hid his face.

“I can assure you Master Trugg, that on the list of my possible reactions, laughter is pretty far down. I implore you – please tell me where you might find someone in the city of Ribbon that could lay a claim to being considered virtuous?”

Trugg’s eyes bulged. It was silent in the room, apart from the rise and fall of a hoarse wisping that reached them from out of the dæmon’s enclosure. Trugg looked to the floor in resignation. He closed his eyes and his lips started to move.

“The dying wish of one virtuous,” he recited.

“I began with the usual. With holy men. Predictable maybe. But… I identified three candidates. All shining examples of purity and devotion. And all ill.

“Or wasting away.

“I waited.”

Trugg’s throat tightened. His mouth fell into a sneer. And then in a rushed whisper he said: “Inspector, you cannot know the extent to which I despise holy men.”

Inspector Stroup’s eyebrows twitched. “Indeed?”

Trugg continued: “The way they look at you. The condescension. The pity. And these were men about to die! It was unbearable. It was useless. I could not stand to be in their presence, let alone collect their most ardent hopes.”

Trugg picked up a small figurine of a dancer from where he sat on the floor. It was carved from a dark marble and it seemed to radiate a weak shadow. He held it tenderly between thumb and forefinger. Then he lifted away his forefinger and allowed it to balance, twirling on his thumb.

He resumed his story. “I turned instead to public figures. I set my sights on the patricians and the justices. Here, I reasoned, were figures who had committed their lives to the public good. To maintaining order. To the functioning of our services – the watch, the warders, the builders of roads and bridges and even our sewers. Surely amongst these noble citizens, I would find someone whose last wish I could learn. Surely.”

The Inspector held Trugg under her gaze.

“But I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t make myself believe it. I couldn’t face them. I must apologise. Around that time, things started to change for me. I began to ask myself, to interrogate myself on the nature of virtue. Yes, yes, of course, the traditional values…” Trugg waved a hand dismissively. “We do not have to stray far before these are made clear to us. Abundantly clear. But… I could not fit the old values to my need. I felt compelled to find something new. What about freedom, I asked myself, Isn’t that a virtue? Even if it were a tragic freedom. Perhaps better even, if it were a tragic freedom.” He raised his eyes to the Inspector’s. She waited for him to continue. And so he did.

“I found a senior warder at the Old Castle who was, in a certain respect, pliable, and who was prepared to entertain certain propositions of mine. Once I had delivered the first payment, it was arranged. They admitted me to the prison after dark, through the servant’s gate. A room was made available to me. A dank, spiritless hole, but adequate for my needs. I started with thieves and I interviewed four of them. Yes. Four thieves.

“I won’t bore you with the details. I was looking for desperation. And I found it.”

“You found…?” enquired Inspector Stroup.

“Yes. Desperation. Thieves! Prone to the most dreadful lies. And stupid. It was enough… enough to unravel my interest. And again, I found myself facing a wall.

“I adapted. I kept going. I moved on to another inmate. I interviewed one Linus Murk. You may have heard of him?”

The Inspector’s expression did not suggest that she had.

“A daring and relentless confidence trickster. He is the person said to have swindled the Princess of Lagg of her soulstone. The man has a way with words, there’s no doubt. And he understands people. He seems to have a gift for reading the tell of desires. And that freedom? Well, Murk is someone who lived with more freedom than most even dream of. But the truth is, he made me feel cold. I felt like it was I who was being questioned. And from the moment that the guard escorted him into that cell, I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere he wasn’t. It was worse even, than the priests. I moved on.”

Trugg placed his hands palms down on the floor before him and pushed. He uncoiled his knees and somehow got his feet beneath him. He called up a cough from the dregs of his lungs and rattled it through his throat. He drew a deep breath.

“Then there was Thomas Yale…” Trugg’s face gathered itself together like a fist. “A slaver by trade. I knew him from the Order. He had hired our services at various times down through the years – rites of protection for his ships and such. Well, he was to be hung for murder. The story ran that there was a duel he didn’t have the stomach to fight. And so, Thomas Yale conceived the plan of breaking into his rival’s house in the thick of night and smothering him while he slept.

“Now, a man as powerful as Yale, his word counts for a lot. And there were several of his acquaintances who were willing to vouch for him. But. He was seen entering by a lamplighter. And he was seen leaving. And he hadn’t realised that while he choked the last breath from his adversary’s throat, his victim’s wife was crouched behind a screen in a corner of the bedroom.

“As we got to talking, he claimed that he was just plain unlucky, because he had hired an assassin for the job. ‘An experienced operator’, were Yale’s words. But the day before the path was to be cleared, as it were, the assassin fell sick. Bad sick. Yale didn’t know, but guessed poison.”

Trugg’s voice seemed to grow in pitch as he rushed on.

“Well, as he was on the wave of telling me his story, I don’t know if it was just the excitement or what it was, but he dropped this assassin’s name. He realised as soon as he said it of course. But he just laughed it off. ‘What are they going do,’ he said. ‘Execute me twice?’

“I told him that I thought it unlikely. I made my excuses and left.”

Trugg’s hand came to a mouth flecked with spittle and essayed a long wipe that ran to his arm.

“It took me two weeks of calling in favours and knocking on doors. But, at last I found the person whose name Yale had dropped. Still alive, but fading fast…

“Such pale, pale flesh.” Trugg shook his head in admiration. “Those eyes. Like shrunken black beads. It was like the body itself was merely a thin cloak over something missing… over an absence. We exchanged pleasantries.

“During the second visit, I was confronted. ‘What did I want?’ ‘Why was I here?’ There was no point pretending any further. I laid my cards out. ‘It’s you,’ I said. ‘I want to know. I want to ask you. Given the life you have led. Given the time you have left. Is there something. Anything. That I could do for you. If I were to grant you a wish, what would it be?’ The face connected to that broken body looked perplexed for an instant. Then those eyes fell on mine and… I can’t explain it, but in that moment I felt… nude. I felt as though there was no part of me that I could keep hidden. I just remember a smile and the faint voice: ‘What I would ask of you?’

“I bowed my head.

“‘I would ask you to find someone in your life that you can care about.’”

Trugg stared into the grime of the worn rug beneath him as though he were waiting for it to somehow contradict his account. The Inspector allowed him this moment of reflection. And when she felt the press of time, she said: “And… so…?” Trugg winced as if she had struck him. He looked almost embarrassed, almost guilty at finding himself in proximity to tenderness.

“You will consider me silly,” he said softly.

“Please, Marcellus…”

The mage lowered his eyes. “Caring?” His voice pitched into incredulity. “I am not a man given to forming attachments, Inspector. There are reasons of course. Reasons of character. These are my own. Reasons of what I look for in others. And do not find. Perhaps these might be shared. The path I have chosen is a solitary one. I have outgrown and grown apart from many people I would once have considered myself close to… would once have allowed myself to believe that I cared about. I would not feign to convince you that it is an entirely healthy mark of character. But it is where I am. And I would claim it is who I am.” He flashed a look of defiance at Inspector Stroup. She did not waver. She resisted the impulse to throw her eyes around the room. She stood waiting, her face still.

“There is only one living thing I can honestly say I care about,” spluttered Trugg. “And it is not human.” He lowered his gaze again to the stained carpet. “It is not even animal.” He waved a hand in the direction of the outer wall of the study. “The window, Inspector. I would ask you. If you would indulge me please to walk so far as the window.”

Inspector Stroup followed the movement of his hand. She could see that drapes were drawn at the other end of the room. Thick hanging folds, a mud grey, like an essay in doubt. She drew a breath and stepping across the floor’s rubble, she approached the curtains.

“Yes. Open them, please,” sighed Trugg. “It is a rear courtyard. There is no concern over our privacy.”

The Inspector gripped the heavy fabric of the curtains, one in each hand, and drew them apart. Light spilled into the study like a curious neighbour. The courtyard was small and cluttered. Slabs of stone sat within thick groutings of moss and weed. Shabby piles of old and broken furniture clung to the corners. She saw the legs of chairs, a bedframe and its springs, an old washtub, a rolled up carpet. And all around, high stone walls.

In one corner of the courtyard, a single hawthorn tree clawed its way towards the sky.

“You have a dead bird,” the Inspector reported.

“The windowsill?” grunted Trugg.

“Yes. A wren.”

The frail beauty of a wren’s corpse lay outside on the deep sill of the window. One wing was draped over it’s body, as though it were still attempting to protect itself, even in death.

“It’s the tree,” said Trugg, matter-of-factly.

“How?” The Inspector was confused.

“Don’t mind the bird. It’s the tree.”

Inspector Stroup looked again at the patchy tumble of leaves that was the hawthorn. She saw how it reached, how it stretched from the wall’s shadow to where the light of the mid-morning sun caught it.

“I am at peace with it,” said Trugg. “I don’t know why. I simply never had to try.”

The Inspector placed one hand against the glass of the window, her fingers framing the hawthorn.

Trugg explained. “I don’t know when it started happening. But when I sit with it, I feel a connection. I am risking a lot telling you this. It’s something no one else in this world knows.”

Inspector Stroup turned back into the space of the study. “It’s okay,” she said.

“I went to it,” said Trugg. “I made my request known to it. I asked it, you see?”

“And…” said the Inspector.

“I cut a sprig from it. That was what I used as the ingredient.”

The Inspector contemplated for a second. “That’s okay,” she said. “That sounds fine.” She seemed pleased somehow. She made her way towards the centre of the study and leant back carefully against the overturned desk. Looking around, she could see the dilapidated study more clearly where the morning now reached it. She saw the faded colours on the thick weave of the Bezzen rug. She noted the selective weight of Trugg’s taste. The rich ornamentation of the desk. The velvet mustard padding of the chairs, stained here and there with blotches of red wine. These things were once fine, the Inspector allowed. And yes, the “Highnight” vanity still divested itself in the stern prevailing tones, the blacks and greys and blues. These were the colours of a lost battle. But yet, they spoke to her of the urge of every person to tailor their being. To build a small piece of one’s life that was a statement of who’s life that was. Or maybe, in some cases… a reminder.

The Inspector felt a guarding impulse. It told her that this was not the time or the place to allow sentiment to get a hold on reason. She drew a breath and held it. Then she drew another and continued.

“So then. The last question that remains… for now…” she began.

Trugg’s eyes fell closed.

“Is where did you find a wyvern?”

Chapter 5 : The Heart of a Wyvern

The Inspector sounded genuinely curious. She went on: “I have met very few wyvern in all my journeying across these lands. And I don’t recall any of them that were looking to offload a heart…”

“Bah!” sneered Trugg. “Impossible!”

He pushed himself back onto his feet. “An expedition to Cahl Brunn? The cost was beyond me. Of course I looked into imports. I was told it could take a year. I was told it might take two. And the cost…” He shook his head. “I had all but given up. And then…”

The Inspector raised her eyebrows.

Trugg continued. “Coincidence is the greatest trick of magic, Inspector. Looking back, I should have known better. ‘The world must be wrought according to your will,’ is what I told myself. And there is truth in that of course…”

Trugg’s breath cut short. He seemed to withdraw from the room, as though the space his body occupied were shrinking. The small light in his eyes faded.

“Marcellus. I don’t know that I follow…”

The spindly mage in the pajamas twisted, his body stiffening. The livid red of anger flushed into his face. “Valevander Aesop Wyvern,” he spat and turning he slouched to the wall next to the bookcase and leant himself into the shadow of it.

“Valevander Wyvern… yes, I’ve heard of him. He… he founded the Sanatorium for the Common Man, didn’t he? And he…” The Inspector closed her mouth and allowed it the time it needed to find the neutrality she was trained and practised in. “I fear I see where this is going now…”

“After he died… well the gravedigger only wanted a pittance compared to what my other options were.” The mage’s words sounded as though they desperately needed to be worth something. “It was just… it was perfect. It was like it was meant to be. I heard it on the street. It was night, I was passing an alehouse. There were two drunkards barely propping each other up, words spilling out of them like vomit. As I walked by, all I heard was exactly what I needed to hear: ‘Nothing’s gonna change just cos ol’ Wyvern’s goin in the ground.’

“And it was like a door had opened up. I knew then. I knew. It was meant to be!”

“It was a trap,” said the Inspector with certainty. “You know that now. You knew that it was then. I’m disappointed Marcellus. I expected more from you. Where is the heart?”

Trugg’s defiance wilted. He gestured to the corner of the study behind the binding circle. The Inspector kept her eyes on the mage as she moved past the dæmon. Again, it tracked her as she rounded the space of its confinement, making unsettling beckoning motions with its long worm-like fingers. Lying at a slant on top of a pile of empty bottles and jars, Inspector Stroup saw a blackened platter. Kneeling to examine it, she noted the burnished pewter edges and in the centre, the charred remains of what she assumed was once the heart of Valevander Wyvern. “You burnt it,” she said, allowing the heat of accusation into her voice.

“No. I… It combusted. After I’d finished reciting the incantation. It leapt into flame. I knew then that it was working…”

“Working?” The Inspector turned on Trugg. She swept an arm to take in the binding circle, the jumbled chaos of the study, and Trugg himself within it. “You call this working?”

“No. I…” He found he was unable to form further words under the cold, pale blue glare of Inspector Stroup’s eyes. She caught her breath. She shook her head and turned away from him. With one hand, she opened the clasp of her satchel and from the section nearest the back, she picked out a single sheet of paper. The edges of the paper shone faintly with an indigo light.

“I apologise,” she said in a calm voice. “You did the right thing. Sending for me. We all make mistakes. And it can’t have been easy.” Trugg covered his face in his hands. The morning light, effortless and hazed with dust, fell around them in the room.

Chapter 6 : Appraisal

Time stepped out of the space of the study and a new and delinquent future seemed to appear like a young man about to try his luck at a fairground attraction.

The Inspector consciously untightened her jaw and said, “The first thing you need to know is that the summoning can be annulled. Hourglass, or no hourglass.” Trugg looked up in amazement. His eyebrows commenced a movement that was reminiscent of the wriggling of drunken caterpillars. “The second thing you need to know,” she continued, “is that this process will be. Expensive.” The hope that had begun to seep across Trugg’s face was replaced by a dark presence. The Inspector went on: “Beyond your personal resources, I suspect. The Registry will submit a report, along with a list of the relevant costs to the First Orbit. The energies involved are considerable. The Core will need to be informed. Marcellus, I don’t want to be impolitic, or rude, but neither do I wish to place you under false hope. It is very possible that this will mean your expulsion.”

She paused, for his reaction.

“You had some inclination that this might be the case?” she suggested.

Trugg took a sharp breath and nodded. “I knew before I sent the message to you. I pretended… I pretended too much.”

“You would be advised to speak to Gannon Bede before he hears through the official channels. I can delay the process. Give you a day. You are on speaking terms with Bede?” The Inspector sounded concerned.

“Yes, yes, of course,” muttered Trugg.

Inspector Stroup’s sigh suggested that she knew the world’s problems were larger than just those currently arranged within Trugg’s study, but that it required a measure of her reserve to continue to convince herself of this. She took a breath and returned to her appraisal. “Concerning the heart… The sleight of hand itself could pass quite easily. The denizens of the Fourth Abyss are not devoid of a sense of humour, after all. My fear is just that the laughter would be at your expense, rather than at your… shall we call it ‘creativity’?”

The Inspector brandished the sheet of paper with the indigo glow that she had taken from her satchel. “This is the order for the annulment. I will need your signature to proceed,” she said. She handed Trugg the form. “Read through it. Take the time you need.” She took some steps away from the weary-eyed mage and stood where she could observe both his body and the dæmon’s.

“Oh, and there’s one other thing…” she said.

“Hmm?” Trugg’s eyes were buried in the terms of the annulment.

“There is a third thing you need to know. But of course you don’t need to be told this.”

“Mm hmm?” The mage frowned as he scanned the lines on the page.

“I know that you are not Marcellus Trugg,” said the Inspector.

The air seemed as though it did not know what to do with these words.

In that instance there was a brief rippling of space around both the figure of the mage, and the being within the binding circle. And inside of that circle, through the warbling of the real, Inspector Stroup saw the drawn and wicked features of Marcellus Trugg appear. At the same time, she saw the form of the mage in front of her bleed into a being with a face containing four mouths and a body like that of a dark, thick eel. A moment passed, there was a peculiar slurping sensation that reminded the Inspector of a sea anemone pulling its mouth closed. And the illusion was drawn back into place.

The two figures in the study held each other’s stares across the room; the Inspector and the dæmon that inhabited the body of Marcellus Trugg.

“You might be able to get past me and get to the door,” stated the Inspector. “Yes, I understand. You are maybe trying to work out the odds of your being able to kill me. And trying to work out the odds of you surviving if you do. I’ll leave it to you decide if I am accurate when I offer you my opinion that the answer to both these questions is: Flimsy.” The Inspector appeared quite relaxed as she added, “Considerably flimsy.”

The dæmon broke eye contact. The Inspector believed she could hear a faint cry from it.

She pressed. “Trugg’s body is limited. You may not know how to care for a human host. I expect that this form of possession is not meant to ever last, what has it been? Three days?”

The dæmon did not respond. A cold hate radiated from it, masking its embarrassment, its failure, its weakness.

“So you were discovered,” said the Inspector. “Your hope was misjudged. But perhaps you have misjudged further. Perhaps this situation… this dynamic. Is not the dynamic of the Fourth Abyss. And yet. Perhaps there are more similarities here than what you think.”

“What I think?” The smell of sulphur grew thick.

“Yes. What you think. What you believe. What do you believe?”

Chapter 7 : Truth?

The dæmon in Trugg’s body seemed to be finding it difficult to maintain a consistent expression. The face under its control twitched and began to cycle between frustration, worry and fury.

“I know you will send me back!” it barked.

The Inspector frowned. “You were hoping that I would close the circle and send Trugg off to your homeland. That was the plan, was it not?” She casually folded her arms, as though she were waiting in the rain for a friend. “That I would undo the summoning and that I would also undo the seals that were placed around the house.”

The dæmon looked hurt, but a brittleness invaded the sensation of intense cold that surrounded it. “I found your name in Trugg’s journal. What other choice did I have?”

“You do understand completely what would have happened to you if I had closed the circle? And if by this time next week you had not learned to keep Trugg’s body alive?” asked the Inspector.

“I know. Yes. I know,” huffed the dæmon churlishly.

“This side of the barrier, you are mortal. And yet… you felt it was worth that risk?”

The Trugg voice barked: “When it happened, it happened in an instant. There was a lacuna. There was a chance. I saw the two futures side by side: the one where I leapt and the one where I didn’t. I saw two of myself. Each one laughing at the other. There was only an instant. A lapse. There was no time to calculate. I acted on instinct.

“It was done before I knew.”

The Inspector waited, listening. But the dæmon had finished speaking.

“How did it happen?” asked the Inspector. “And before you answer, I must make my position clear.” As she spoke these words, a strange light seemed to bathe Inspector Stroup – a distinct silvered aura. “I need to make a decision on what to do here. I have not yet decided. I am, as things stand, not enormously upset by the possibility of Trugg receiving a taste – a taste of what many years of indulgence and carelessness have earned him.”

The Inspector cast a glance towards the circle and to the crumpled dæmon-form that was Marcellus Trugg. Although her higher self fought it, a fleeting ray of contempt tightened one corner of her mouth.

“What this means for your situation is not yet clear. There may be more than one option for you. But, this means dialogue. It means me asking you questions and you answering with as much truth as your nature allows. I understand that truth may be a dirty word for you. But my actions will be based on the things that you tell me. If you lie to me or mislead me, I will not be able to help you.”

The dæmon writhed inside Trugg’s face. Its spirit thrashed wildly as it attempted to interpret what the Inspector might mean. “Are you saying…”

“I am saying that I am going to ask you some questions.” The Inspector directed a finger at the dæmon. “And your future may well depend on whether you can find a way to reach past your nature and answer in honesty. And I will begin with this: How did it happen? How did you inact this exchange of bodies?”

The dæmon covered Trugg’s face with Trugg’s hands. “I’m sorry,” it said. “I do not know if I can tell you this.” It looked up to gauge the Inspector’s reaction and registered the faintest disappointment in her face.

“Amongst our kind, as I believe you know, barter is one of the few things that keeps us from cannibalism. We… we do not understand your human concept of trust.”

The Inspector raised an eyebrow. The dæmon continued.

“If, to begin… if you could tell me a little something…” The dæmon attempted to sound seductive. “If you could first answer a question of mine?”

“What is it?” asked the Inspector, sternly.

The dæmon that possessed Trugg’s body still held the sheet of paper that was the contract. It raised it and covered its face with it.

“Please tell me,” it whispered. “Tell me how you knew I was not Trugg?”

Inspector Stroup frowned.

“Two things,” she said without hesitation. “The first was the stench of sulphur. I realise it is everywhere in this room. But I noticed after a while, that rather than it coming from the circle, it seemed to be coming from you. Not a proof, given the situation, but a signifier.”

She put her hands on her hips and went on.

“The second is Gannon Bede. Gannon Bede is a name known to all who pass inside the Second Orbit. A kind of in-joke. It is the name of the Orbit’s mascot. A cassowary.”

“Cassowary?” The dæmon seemed confused.

“An animal,” replied the Inspector. “A large flightless bird.”

The dæmon looked as though it had been stricken a sickening blow to the stomach. It piloted Trugg’s body to a scattered carpet of spilled papers and slumped into a human shaped heap.

Inspector Stroup felt it best to attend from where she stood. She would need to allow time for the dæmon to adjust to the nature of deception from this new perspective. While she waited, she turned towards the summoning circle, running her eye over the glyphs and symbols there. They were marked on the floor of the chamber in salt, ash and chalk. The work was in stark contrast to the disrepair of the rest of the room. There was no sloppiness, no slack. The circle’s border ran in a tight and regular curving. The glyphs were ornate, but legible. Here was The Tower – for fortitude, for containment, for order. Opposite it, she picked out The Fall, denoting loss and desire. At each of the four cardinal points were black puddles of candlewax on sky blue saucers.

“It was the bird.” The Inspector heard the croak of voice behind her. The dæmon in Trugg’s body was still slouched on the floor. She raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me?” she said.

“The bird on the windowsill,” intoned the dæmon. The Inspector was almost ambushed by the possibility that this might be a hint of submission. She set that to one side. Prejudice here of any kind, positive, or negative was certain to invite trouble.

“The bird? The wren?” prompted Inspector Stroup.

“It was the timing! The timing of the thing. I could not not… You must understand. It collided… at the exact moment… At the exact moment!” The dæmon flayed two human fists against the ground. “It happened just as Trugg was reciting the incantation of abeyance.” The fists covered a pair of bulging eyes and a hush of amazement touched its voice. “And yes… he rode it well, Trugg did. He barely suffered the distraction. Except for that moment. The instant of contact. But. It was all I needed. I was able to conceal an arm of my will from him. I was worried he would respect the omen of the bird. That he would read the sign. That he would not continue. But he paid no further heed. And by the time he had finished, it was too late. He believed I must obey.”

The dæmon moved Trugg’s arm in a trunklike motion towards the contract. “Look closely. I added an amendment. A reversal of condition. After the naming of the principals. Yes. There beside the blotting.”

The Inspector studied the parchment. The smooth calm of her brow rippled as she saw where the small, but tidy clause had been inserted, in writing almost indistinguishable from Trugg’s own.

“But his initials are next to… ah, I see… the blotting was also your doing…”

The dæmon retracted all expression and movement. The Inspector interpreted this as an indication of some pride.

“I see here. Yes. The blot obscured this clause… which meant that Trugg had to rewrite it…” The Inspector felt her mind spurred by the sting of the dæmon’s intelligence.

“It was I who insisted he add his initials…” smiled the dæmon in Trugg’s voice.

“Which also validated the clause you had inserted…”

Inspector Stroup’s eyes shot a glare at the mewling figure within the binding circle.

“Yes, I almost imagine he began to find me tedious.” The voice was sulky and teasing. The Inspector noted the modulation of the words, sinking and lifting. She observed that the dæmon was by now likely to be exploring the possibilities latent in aural communication. She had learned the importance of vigilance when dealing with these beings. She suppressed the rising bubbles of interest, and of amusement.

“I feel I can guess the answer, but I must ask. Had Trugg ever attempted to summon you prior to this occasion?” The Inspector directed this last at the dæmon in a procedural manner. A bouquet of expressions cascaded through the face that was once Marcellus Trugg’s. None of these looked to indicate a positive answer to her question.

“That’s okay. I’ll take that as a No,” said the Inspector. She walked to the binding circle and stood at its edge looking down at the twitching form, curled now into a tight ball at its centre. Tongues flicked from the mouths, tasting the air in a kind of jaded repetition.

“It… He. Looks so pitiful. It is easy to forget that he was a weak and wicked man. Is. I should say: Is. A weak and wicked man.” The Inspector turned her clear eyes again towards the other being in the room. “I am to only a certain extent conscious of how far into his mind you can reach; of what access to his thoughts and memories you have. It is my understanding that you only know your summoner through your ‘arrangement’. Through the ingredients: their traces across the space and time of the material plane, their significance to the summoner and the manner of their acquisition… these things act as a form of grip for you, is it not so? A form of connection between the physical world and and world of spirit?” The Inspector gave a wave of the parchment to sweep in the rest of the room and she raised her eyebrows. But the dæmon in Trugg’s body lowered its eyes in a gesture that suggested it was not prepared to engage in dialogue on this subject.

“No matter,” said the Inspector. “At any rate, Trugg’s ‘strivings’ towards your being called here are hardly a commendation. And I can reveal to you that his conduct outside of the curtain of your summoning, is even less encouraging. I tell you this, so that you can understand the basis upon with I must proceed.”

“Oh now, we all make mistakes.” The dæmon had discovered how to lend a singsong quality to Trugg’s voice.

Inspector Stroup sighed. “You’ve touched at the truth of what comes next.”

The dæmon in Trugg’s body looked startled. “That would be very rude of me. You have my sincere apologies,” it said.

“Accepted,” said the Inspector. Her eyebrows lowered. “This ‘personality’ you affect. I cannot honestly say that I know Trugg well enough to claim it is a laudable simulacrum. But know this. Master Trugg has for several years now, been courting damnation. It hasn’t been one mistake, or even a few mistakes. It may have started as a habit. But it soon became a commitment. A vocation even. And it seems that he has now, after all, found the embrace that he has sought for a large portion of his life.”

Inspector Stroup became contemplative for a moment.

“I do not know if I should be so arrogant as to tear him from it,” she proclaimed, and her voice was as cold stone.

The dæmon in Trugg’s body shrank. The Inspector could feel it withdraw tendrils of spirit. Cautious now. Waiting.

The Inspector glanced around the room once more. She could feel her will curling around towards a decision. Towards resolution and judgement. She approached it slowly and cautiously, testing and tasting the variables involved. The dangers to herself. The pain that attended when severity was chosen over mercy. The hardness she felt she must allow to grow inside her. The sacrifice of innocence. The dangers to others. The practicalities of allowing a denizen of the Fourth Abyss to remain on the material plane. The care and duty she would need to draw on to maintain it.

She breathed and she weighed these in her mind. And still, she felt her resolve move closer to the idea. Where there was no good choice, the best choice must suffice.

Chapter 8 : Conditions

“If… we are to proceed down this path… It would mean the exchange would be made permanent. Or, at least, permanent for a term.” The Inspector levelled her eyes onto the human-shaped heap slumped loosely on the floor. Trugg’s body remained still and silent. “But in order to do this,” she said. “In order to make this happen… and this includes the ordinance of the bird as much as anything.” She raised a finger as though dismissing an objection. “There will be conditions. You will not have to concern yourself with consent or approval. If you want to stay on this side of the veil, you will follow the conditions that I lay down. If the conditions are not followed, the term will end. You will return to the Fourth Abyss. This is not a negotiation.”

The Inspector walked to the window and looked down again at the frail broken body of the wren.

“Eleven years,” she said. “This is scope of what this creature has granted you. I have read the terms of the contract. I know you are of the family of dæmon who call themselves the Tann’eesh. The Eaters of Pain. I know that your natural diet is agony.” She turned towards the dæmon. “Am I wrong?”

Nothing. Silence.

The Inspector continued. “Amongst the Tann’eesh, the creation, the farming of pain is valued as an art form, is it not? It is a craft treated with a respect akin to that which we humans pay, in the preparation of food, to our best chefs; and in the cultivation of our food, to our farmers and market gardeners.

“Now. I would ask you to attend for a moment to the significance of the distinction between these two things. Because the farming of pain – the sourcing, the sowing, the growing and nourishing of pain for your eventual consumption… this aspect of your culture will be forbidden to you on this plane. If. You choose to enter into the terms of this new agreement.”

The Inspector heard a strange scuffle of movement from where Trugg’s body sat cast on the floor. The body’s arms and legs had begun to shudder, shaking in random directions, against the floor and against each other. Inspector Stroup broke away suddenly and walked to the door of the study and opened it and stepped into the hall.

In the still of the room, the dæmon was now attempting to make a kind of chittering sound, pushing small packets of air through Trugg’s sinuses. Its degree of success was questionable and the result emerged more as a stuttering whine. However, its activities quite occupied it until the Inspector returned bearing a small cup and a jug. She placed the cup next to the dæmon and poured water into it from the jug and said, “When animal bodies are deprived of water, they become more difficult to coordinate. More than a day or two without fluids can be perilous to health. Do you know how to drink?”

The hand belonging to Trugg’s body seemed to gain control of itself as it clasped the cup and raised it to a pair of dry, broken lips. Water spilled from the sides of the mouth as it tipped some of the liquid onto a shrivelled tongue. “Now you swallow,” said the Inspector. “Don’t worry, the body retains a certain intelligence. It will get the fluid to where it needs to go.” The dæmon swallowed, coughed and sputtered, water dribbling onto the floor. “Mostly,” said the Inspector. She refilled the glass. “Practice,” she said.

While the dæmon occupied itself with the water, the Inspector explained: “I understand that you will need food to survive. And I will arrange for you to be provided with both kinds. The pain that your dæmon-self will need for your sustenance. And the organic stuff that Trugg’s body requires. I can only assume that for the last few days you have been relying on your summoner for the former. And for the latter… well I may be wrong, but you seem to have neglected that entirely. Another day and it may have been too late.”

The sounds of sipping and slurping rose from Trugg’s mouth as the dæmon continued to grapple with the practicalities of getting water from the glass it held into its mouth and down Trugg’s throat.

“There is a woman. Nan Wattle. A charwoman who lives nearby. She will arrive tomorrow morning, and every morning after that, excepting Sunsday. She will bring food, meals, which you will learn to eat, you understand. She will also look after the place here. She’ll be able to begin to put it in some kind of order. And afterwards, she will keep it in order for you. And well… it will be slow.

“It will take time.

“Where things are heavy, you will need to help with lifting. Because Nan Wattle suffers from a twisted back. She lives every day in pain. She lies awake every night in pain.”

The dæmon lowered the glass from Trugg’s lips, eyes sparking with excitement at these words.

“You will satisfy yourself with her pain,” said the Inspector. She raised a finger. “She is not to know. And. Her condition is not to deteriorate. In fact, quite the opposite will be the case. You may feed upon what pain she brings. But you will also be required to mend the source of her injury.”

Trugg’s eyes bulged in horror as the dæmon attempted to comprehend this concept.

“But…” it began.

Inspector Stroup swiped the air with the palm of her hand. “Ah, ah,” she admonished. “Listen. Please listen. I understand. It will be hard. It will seem impossible. It will require you doing something that must seem very alien to you. It will require you to trust. To act without guarantee. Because the only contract you will have in this is my word.”

“Your… word?”

“It should take between nine months to a year, by my reckoning. The last two weeks will be the most difficult for you. By then her pain will be almost gone.” The Inspector levelled a stern look to indicate that this was not up for discussion. “And when… when Nan Wattle sleeps a full night without being woken from her pain. Well then. A new position will become available to her. And when that happens, you will be attended by a new helper. I do not know who this will be yet. But, I can guarantee you this…

“It will be a person who lives in great pain.”

Trugg’s face shifted into something like a gentle confusion, as the dæmon felt the mechanics of the Inspector’s proposition sliding into place. It found, to its surprise, that its inner condition seemed to be moving from an abject hopelessness to one of curiosity. It considered this a good sign. Questions began to form. But the Inspector hadn’t finished.

“You will be bound to this house. For now. We will look on this as a precaution. You may consider it a probation if you prefer that term. Your meals will be prepared by Nan Wattle. And you will learn to eat and to care for Trugg’s body.” She sighed and lowered her eyes to the floor. “I do not know the likelihood… but we must allow the possibility to remain open that in eleven years, the spirit of Marcellus Trugg will be capable of returning from the unwholesome comforts of the Fourth Abyss.” Inspector Stroup pitched a glance at the dæmon-form in the circle. It had squirmed its way to the edge nearest to them. It seemed to be trying, with great intensity, to listen to all that she said.

“You will learn to bathe in the salts I will send – to reduce that magnificent stench of sulphur you are intent on producing. I expect your scent might signal all kinds of interesting messages to your counterparts amongst the Tann’eesh, but on this plane, it would only serve to raise unhelpful suspicions.”

The Inspector walked across the littered floor to the window. She waited there, looking out. She squinted towards the sky, at the collaboration of clouds there that held against sparse, rebellious cells of azure. Then she turned and approached the remains of the bookshelves and cast an eye over the tumble of books that still clung to it. “Explore,” she said. “I understand your kind have a fascination with signs and letters and words. These bookshelves are narrow, but not insignificant. I will find some texts for you on more practical matters. History. Culture. People and places. That kind of thing. This may help you later on, to hold things that we call ‘conversations’.”

She bent to the floor and picked up a copy of Marriot’s Magic of Seasons, sheaves of its pages falling loose from the spine. “Yes,” she said, “I am. Of course. Being facetious.” She packed the pages together as best she could.

“If our experiment goes well, your bounds may be extended. It will not be this turning, nor hardly the next, but it’s something to aim for. A reason to try.”

The Inspector took the book she held to the bookshelves. Only one of the shelves, one shelf near the top, had remained without collapsing. Upon it, she recognised a battery of short, stubby volumes – the collected Histories of Qoto. A husk of dust over a line of faded maroon covers. She settled the Marriot flat across their tops and said:

“And when you feel, and you will: that it’s too severe; that the terms are too strict; that there must be another way, a shortcut that I didn’t cover, a trick that I’ll never notice. Try to remember this moment. Try to remember what you would be doing if you hadn’t made it through to this plane. What you would be feeling. Who you would be answering to. Some part of you, something deep in you didn’t want that. Or you would not have done what you did. Remember that fate has conspired to grant you this chance. Try to remember that.”

Trugg’s body had hardly moved while Inspector Stroup’s words flowed through the room. The particles of air parted as they moved into it, gathering around each syllable like a host of children viewing a parade of strange machines. In the following silence, the dæmon seemed to retreat. It seemed to withdraw its light from Trugg’s eyes. It was as though it feared that, in the jaws of opportunity, any clumsy word or movement might upset the balance and spill the fragile beginnings of this slim but precious sprouting of fate. The Inspector took the silence as a sign that the dæmon had at least heard and understood her terms.

It did not take long. She felt a brush, a tingle along her spine that she interpreted as a signal that time was making itself available. She felt the invitation to push. And she did not hesitate.

Chapter 9 : Judgement

“And now however, we must close,” she said, “This breach has already been left open for far too long.”

There was still no further sign of recognition from where Trugg’s body sat heaped. “Take this last moment. Consider if what I am proposing is unsuitable to you.”

And despite the rising pull of action, despite that soft coaxing tickle to be finished, the Inspector waited.

For a while there was quiet. Then a gentle hum began to emanate from Trugg’s chest. A low steady bass that rose in the room, like a fog. Growing in volume, the sound began to shift slowly in tone towards a low drone. The Inspector could not have said that it was a warmth she felt. But there was a sensation she identified as a withdrawal of cold. She waited as the drone reached its loudest. And then gradually, it fell away again towards a hum. And at last, the silence returned.

“Indeed,” said the Inspector. “I am interpreting this non-vocal as endorsement. I suggest that you indicate to me now if you are in disagreement.”

She waited for a count of ten. She drew a deep breath of air into her lungs.

“Then I begin,” she said.

Her hand went to her sword in a movement that spoke the swift and smooth language of efficient action. She drew the blade from its scabbard in a flashing arc and stepped towards the binding circle.

Inspector Stroup looked down at the prone dæmon-form curled below her. She saw its hide glistening with a slick sheen. She saw the probing digits that were its fingers, and how they were clutched in on themselves like feeble fists.

“Marcellus Trugg!” the Inspector’s voice rose as she proclaimed the name.

“You have moved beyond my hope.

“You have moved beyond our help.

“By your own will, have you condemned yourself.”

Her voice grew from her chest like a storm. “Eleven turnings,” she pronounced. “As time is marked upon this plane. You are to reside within the Fourth Abyss!”

She raised the sword before her, with the blade directed downwards.

As she drew in the spirit requisite for the severing, she felt a push on the cowl of her being. A demanding heat that pulsed and dug at her. It bore the distinctive taste of rot. She knew it as the sick bouquet of the Fourth Abyss. She tried to remain present. To remain focused. To hold the strength. But too soon, she felt something give. Something like a strut of her will elbowing out under that terrible heat and weight and…

Hunger of Soul unbent itself in her mind’s eye. It announced its presence in a wet flood of images. Nightmares issuing forth, borne upon her own fears and insecurities. She felt the inky snare of a deep and hideous cold. She saw the cavernous, hopeless eyes of the lost, like wasted children, staring lifelessly into the void of their own misery. She saw their lives behind them, trailing them like chains. Their weaknesses and mistakes, the hurt they bore, and the hurt they gave. Her inner eye was opened to the abuse of liberty. And she heard the sad pining for opportunities untaken. She felt all this, she felt it as many things. But mostly she felt it as a weight. A weight we must carry alone, in the alien absence of care.

The claw of a thing that delighted in her horror scratched its way towards her. She recoiled from its welcoming touch. A thing that congratulated her on her every indecision, on her every doubt. A thing that promised there was a place for her, here, too.

She saw cragged lightless spaces. She heard the black threat of the cold, chasing wind. And heard laughter at all suffering. And somewhere distant, somewhere that was above, but that was below, she sensed like an unwanted memory, the smug, potent malice of the beings known as the Drivers of Herds. And yes, among them, the Tann’eesh: the Eaters of Pain.

Every Inspector of the Registry is made to visit the Abyssal realms in the stage of their progression known as the Sixth Chamber. The experience is meant as a mere dipping. Like a dousing upside-down a putrid, gelid stream. It only lasts a mere few minutes, though it feels an aeon.

And yet, it is enough.

What would eleven years of that do to a human spirit? The Inspector’s mind reeled and then broke back into the space of the room. She stared down again at the sad coiled mass within the circle.

Oh, how well she knew the dangers of pity. She knew to fight it. Knew to watch it as it writhed and squirmed for attention. A memory fired. And she found her mind rolling back through time…

To the bare limestone expanse of the Halls of the Registry. To the hard grey of the walls and the marble of the columns and to the almost colourless grey of the floors. To the faint, ever-present remainder of soap and turpentine. And across the floors, a map of paths, each carrying the shine of centuries of footfall; paths leading from the high-valuted entrance hall to the corridors and stairs that thread the ancient building like veins. She can hear the shuffle of feet as a tour is ushered through. The voice of the guide. Sounding out the well-rehearsed stations of an orientation. A small puddle of alert and eager faces are lifting eyes to the proud arcs of the domed ceiling. They are opening their ears to the Registry’s histories, to the rising and falling refrain of mastery through austerity. She is drawn in, netted by the guide. And here is one of our Inspectors now… And wouldn’t she have some advice? Wouldn’t she be so kind as to offer the wisdom of her experience to those who are just setting out on their journey? Well, of course, she would be honoured. It is not the first time. And it is her favourite lecture. On the importance of preparation in the art of decision making. She can hear herself preach: “To believe that all the situations you find yourself in, where a choice needs to be made, will be familiar ones. To believe that you will always have the luxury of following known patterns. To assume your training will prepare you for every eventuality. This is to fool yourself. It is to make your life more difficult.”

She listens to the echo of her own advice: “The world. Life. Magic. It seeks what is new. You must meet it new. You must always be ready.” She remembers the faces of those initiates, fresh and ashen. Shouldering the weight of their new understanding. Their excitement finding temper. Their scepticism finding uncertainty.

In the stink ruin of Marcellus Trugg’s study, Inspector Stroup stood at the edge of the charged space of the binding circle. She grasped with the fist of her mind for resolve. For the confidence in her own judgement. For the strength to do what she must. Where was it? The purpose? The clarity she had come to rely on? Of course she knew that it was something graced to her, something given. She never had pretensions of deserving it. Or even of having earned it, though she strived to. In the beginning you simply learned to work and to wait. When it was there, it was there. Maybe it was fleeting. Maybe it was enough. You channelled and judged and acted. And if your will was true you knew. Because the world knew.

It was a long time since she had to remind herself of this. She felt a tightness in her chest and heard herself say: “And so I find I cannot.”

The Inspector turned and strode to the window and stared out. Her head angled slightly as she gazed through the grubby glass. She let go of her intent. Closing her eyes, she felt the mute wall of time; the numb, near threat of botchery. Of a current too strong. Of water too deep.

And still, she let go.

She heard the voices of old, old lessons.

– When one way is blocked, you try another.

– What always works never always works.

– Seek. Test. Experiment. Improvise.

She had just begun to feel a curious tingle in the pit of her stomach, when she realised in a flash of heat, that she had dropped the mental guard she had set on the dæmon. Her inner calm spasmed and fell away. Stupid, STUPID!

She whipped around.

Trugg’s slumped body had not moved or changed its posture. But she could see that something was changing. An aura. A peculiar shade, a distinctive shade of yellow had begun to paint an outline around the body. That yellow. She knew that yellow. A tint that reminded the Inspector of the colour of old paper.

It teased her… she knew it. But how? As her mind began to coalesce and harden again, the memory reached her like a tap on the shoulder.

Yes.

It was the sand in the hourglass.

She was halted despite herself, absorbing this subtle touch of the dæmon’s politic. It was telling her something. Something that concerned the world of its origin.

It was gone too long.

It was being missed.

Time was closing.

And again, the Inspector felt the strange, warm itch at the pit of her stomach. It did not feel not unfriendly, this itch. She gave her care to it. Gave her focus to the nexus of energy where it nested in her lower abdomen. And allowed herself to be guided by it. She felt it as a series of winding paths; linking, connecting and joining. Climbing and reaching. All of them reaching towards a promise. And yet away from a promise?

Inspector Stroup took the time to note the absence of the dæmonic in this flow of energy. This was a very different flavour of sensation. This was the itch of life. Yes! The promise of something old and familiar. And organic. It was the promise of a convergence that resided in her. And that she resided in. A thing vulnerable, but determined.

And she felt the fringe of this presence push into the floor of her mind. Thin green streams of energy. And then she knew. Because it allowed her to know. And she felt the surge of its strength.

It was of the ground. And it was as old as life itself.

It was the spirit of Root.

The Inspector allowed time to tune her mind to the pulsing cadences of this new song of will. She welcomed it and awaited it. If allowed, it would manifest and it would give its guidance.

When it entered her, she felt it as a descending capsule of light offering its energy to the earth. She understood. She issued a quick series of nods.

“I must speak with the tree,” she announced calmly and surely.

The Inspector left the study and disappeared into the hallway. The echo of her footsteps drummed from down the corridor. These were followed by the measured thump of the back door.

In the dank of the study all that could be heard was the occasional soft pad of a thick tail against the floor. There were muted clicks and whines of unease. Trugg’s chest rose and fell erratically, but the breath entering and leaving was faint and quiet.

Outside in passing sheets of late morning sun, Inspector Stroup paced within the small courtyard. From time to time, she would pause to offer her complete attention to the twisted old hawthorn that grew from the shadows.

Chapter 10 : Mandel’s Alphabet

After about a quarter of a station had passed, the latch on the back door clacked and footsteps could be heard again in the hall. The door to the study opened and a frowning Inspector stepped into the room.

She approached the two figures. Trugg’s eyelids opened and she knew the dæmon inside was tracking her. Waiting. Within the binding circle, the wretched form that held the soul of Marcellus Trugg rolled as though moving through a thick soup. It raised the upper half of its body.

“I have explained our predicament to the hawthorn. And the tree has agreed to help us.” The Inspector spoke distantly. The head of Trugg’s body turned to better see and hear her. She went on: “It is a complexity I would much prefer to avoid. But I find that I cannot banish this man. Though even the most merciful amongst the Fates seem to call for punishment severe… Still I cannot. Earlier. When I elected to sever his link to this plane… I had chosen. It was not the ideal choice… But, I could not see another way forward.”

Inspector Stroup asserted further control over herself. She allowed for several breaths before continuing. “I spoke to the hawthorn.” She sighed. It was a resigned sigh. “The tree has offered itself to be sent in Trugg’s place. I do not know exactly… it seems that whatever bond that existed between them…”

But the Inspector didn’t get to finish her sentence.

Within the circle, the body of the dæmon was breaking berserk. It lifted onto its tail and thrust itself head first towards the barrier that held it. A hoarse wailing rasped from out of its four throats as its face crashed into the shield with a sickening thump. Pulling back from the invisible wall, it paused a moment. Then the head smashed into the barrier again. All the while, it beat frantic, helpless hands against the limits of the circle.

The Inspector looked on in amazement. “Well, it seems that’s gotten his attention,” she said.

She winced in confusion as the head crashed into the wall a third time.

“He needs to tell us something,” she muttered. She turned to the dæmon in Trugg’s body. “He’s trying to communicate.”

Trugg’s body unfolded as the creature within the circle continued to thrash itself against the binding shield. “A mirror,” hissed the dæmon in Trugg’s body. “And salt.”

Inspector Stroup recognised the method. Mandel’s Alphabet.

“It has worked,” croaked the dæmon.

The Inspector rushed to the kitchen and grabbed a large salt cellar. On the wall of a filthy upstairs bathroom she found a mirror. She gripped its oval frame, coated in a bronze paint, chipped and flaking and wrung it from the wall.

Back in the study she handed the salt and mirror to the dæmon in Trugg’s body. They both stood before the circle where the insectile form continued to pummel itself against the walls of its prison.

“CEASE!” commanded the dæmon, through Trugg’s own voice.

There was a short convulsion and then a moment of stillness. The thing within the circle poised, as though barely held upright by unseen strings. The dæmon in Trugg’s body held the mirror, like a plate, out towards the circle. With clumsy hands it emptied the contents of the salt cellar onto the reflective surface. The white grains spilled out across it in a line of small hills. The dæmon in Trugg’s body gave the mirror some gentle winnowing shakes and the salt moved, spreading out into an even coat.

The Inspector stood waiting, unmoving.

The dæmon in Trugg’s body looked into the summoning circle. It looked down at the body it had been born into. It allowed an eye of its mind to turn to the wretched man now in possession of it.

“Now,” it commanded. “Focus. And send your message.”

The creature in the circle collapsed in a fit of trembling. The spindling arms hugged around the body as a rhythm of quivering began to pass through it. It jerked in a rhythm of spasms and a queer harmony of gurgling began to issue from its throats. On the surface of the mirror, the salt began to tremble. Slowly at first, small scatters of crystals vibrating and sliding across the smooth of the glass. Then the Inspector saw gaps opening. And she saw small islands begin to appear. She saw these grow and breed and morph and soon it was evident that letters were being formed.

The forms thickened and grew more defined until there were just two words.

Clear and unequivocal.

“SEND ME”

The figure within the circle sagged to the floor.

Inspector Stroup felt a sting that was sadness as much as it was relief. She turned and met the eyes that once belonged to Marcellus Trugg. She knew that a cold and patient intelligence waited behind those eyes. One that belonged to a being that did not experience care, or guilt, or love. But maybe. Maybe there was something there that a human might identify as hope.

“And who knows, but there may be some hope too, for old Trugg,” the Inspector said. “Perhaps that rugged strip of hawthorn he carries with him can help him find the grit he will need to bear the suffering his choices have drawn for him.”

In the thick sulphur-laden air of Marcellus Trugg’s study, a calm arose. It seemed to filter in on strands of æther, like a breeze that did not care about walls or floors or waiting. It tugged at the connections between the three figures. Connections that were warped by duty and desperation. It took something away. And it left something behind. And it reminded them of those most precious things that they always knew, but had somehow found a way to forget.

Epilogue : Jam

The woman who opened the door might have been sixty. She might have been eighty. She was not a big woman. In her hand she held what appeared to be the handle of a white porcelain vase. Apart from the handle, further evidence of the vase itself was not to be found. Her face was an extraordinary conspiracy of lines and wrinkles. They marshalled themselves quickly as she squinted up at the tall silvered figure silhouetted on her doorstep. The sun was warm and yellow in the evening.

“Can I help you ma’am?”

“Mrs. Scallop?” asked the Inspector.

The old lady seemed to take a moment to check. And after a short pause, she gave a light nod of her head to assent that yes, she was indeed this person.

“Do I know you?” Her voice was soft, gentle – like a cover that was placed over something kept for special occasions.

“My name is Ethel Stroup,” said the Inspector. “I am here because of your son. Because of Barney.”

A warmth rose in Mrs. Scallop’s eyes. It lasted briefly, before another shadow of memory fell and her face became clouded by the trouble of a frown. She looked stranded. Like someone who had gone walking and been caught in a terrible downpour and had to choose between waiting for hours in shelter or facing into a soaking.

“Because of Barney?” There was a feeble uncertainty in her voice.

“I have recently come of learn of your son. Through the Order of the Opal Talon.” The Inspector had warned herself that she must try not to sound overly formal.

“Ohhhh.” Mrs. Scallop grew solemn. “The Opal Tal’n? Them are the powerful ones. Them are the ones tha’ make the sun show in the morning and spin the moon through the sky at night.” She spoke with an edge in her voice, as though she were defying the Inspector to deny all this.

The Inspector smiled in a way that she hoped passed for polite indifference. “For the equinox this spring, they are holding a memorial ceremony for friends of the Order who were lost,” she said. She focused on diction, on neutrality.

“Who were lost, did you say?” Mrs. Scallop looked concerned for a moment that there may be some hint here of an accusation directed at her.

“I brought jam,” blurted the Inspector. And she fumbled in her satchel for the jar of apricot jam. (She never had made it out to that Aunt in Gallavant.)

She brandished the jar before her like a key to an unknown lock.

Mrs. Scallop thought for a moment. “Well, if you brung jam, you better come in,” she said, and stood back to allow the Inspector into the hallway.

A half loaf of bread was produced, wrapped in a tea-towel sporting a pattern that could only be described as a failed tartan. And after the tea was made and the two women were seated at the worn pine table, in the small, low-ceilinged kitchen, Mrs. Scallop allowed herself to speak of Barney.

“He was a good lad, our Barney,” she said. She smiled the way mothers smile when they remember what was best. “He used visit here every Sunsday.” She glanced into a corner. “Most nearly every,” she said. “Easy to have around you know. I don’t know can I ever remember him cross. Even as a lad. He was like that. There were times, every so now and then, when some of the louts around here would pick on him. But he never took it to heart. Laughed it off. Or made some joke of it. And it din’ never seem to last so long. He just got on with folk.”

The Inspector uncrossed her arms, which she hoped would represent increasing trust and openness. She essayed a lithe grab of her teacup and drank down a mouthful of milky, unsweetened tea.

“Nice jam,” said Mrs. Scallop. She seconded her approval with a bite of bread smeared with sugared apricot.

Inspector Stroup’s expression suggested that sometimes people smile at moments like these.

“I was hoping…” the Inspector began.

“Mnnn?” prompted Mrs. Scallop. Her mouth was engaged in the slow moulding of bread and jam into a sweet wheaten mush.

“I wanted ask you,” continued the Inspector, “if you mightn’t have something of Barney’s for the memorial we are holding. You are of course very welcome to attend. We would be honoured. But… a keepsake of his, perhaps? There’s going to be a small collection of items prepared and…”

Mrs. Scallop nodded slowly and gulped. “Oh, I expect there might be some old toys, or something of that nature. He had always a thing for wizards, don’t you know. But…” Mrs. Scallop’s face grew sad. “But, I ‘spect you know a little more about all that.” She looked down, shy and reluctant at the surface of the table.

The Inspector looked toward the kitchen window. She could see a window box, and growing from it, streams of yellow flowers and beyond, the puddled greens of a tree and beyond that again, the bruised blue freedom of the evening sky. She felt the nostalgia of a younger self – one that opened and felt the absence of a limit to all kindness. But as the sensation faded and as she focused on converting her emotion back into spirit, her attention was caught by a flutter outside the glass. She glanced at Mrs. Scallop. But the old woman’s eyes remained lowered in a cloud of her own brooding.

The Inspector rose slowly from her seat and approached the window. This was enough to stir Mrs. Scallop.

“Where are my manners,” she said. “Let me make some fresh tea. And then I’ll see if I can find something for you in Barney’s old room.”

“You have a wren!” Inspector Stroup swung around with a new light in her eyes.

The older woman took a moment to evaluate this shift in the conversation and decided that she approved.

“Oh aye,” she said. “That little one likes the back garden.”

The Inspector turned again to watch the darting movements of the bird through the window.

“A great favourite of Barney’s, did you know?” asked Mrs. Scallop.

Something like a weight fell away from Inspector Stroup. “I didn’t know that,” she admitted. Her eyes lit again. “They’re a plucky creature!”

“Aye. They are that. And even fierce when they need to be. I sometimes wonder at how fast their tiny hearts must race. Something so small and delicate. Nature has the craft. No doubt of it.”

“Perhaps, Mrs. Scallop… there is a little of the wren in all of us.”

“Aye, maybe,” said Mrs. Scallop. “That, and a little of every beast. Aye. A little of every beast.”

Hiding in Plain Sight © 2024 Fergus Deffely