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  "Thank you for the information," Isiem said. "We'll keep that in mind."

  The man grinned, touched the brim of his hat, and walked off. Oreseis watched him, shaking his head slightly. "What was that about?"

  "Entertainment. He probably knows one of the girls and is hoping we'll give her a good story to tell. Or perhaps he's just deeply concerned about our wellbeing after that long, depriving journey in the wilderness."

  Oreseis's mouth twisted wryly. "No doubt. Do you really think the girls use illusions?"

  "It's a simple spell for a good deal of profit. Why not?"

  "It's a disgusting use of magic." Oreseis said it without heat, but Isiem knew his companion was fully capable of leveling the Desert Rose and murdering every person inside for the perceived infraction. As if the unthinking forces of the arcane needed a Nidalese shadowcaller to defend their honor.

  He held his tongue and turned away. "We should go to our rooms."

  They were staying in the largest and soundest of the boarding houses. Erevullo had commandeered it, and no one in Crackspike dared defy a Hellknight's order. The Chelaxians took the lower rooms, with the Nidalese assigned to quarters above them. That way, Isiem knew, it was easier for the Hellknights to watch the shadowcallers' comings and goings.

  The townspeople seemed equally suspicious. Isiem caught them staring at him from the corners of their eyes and making superstitious gestures when they thought his back was turned. There were no children in Crackspike, as far as he could see, but he had no doubt that their mothers would have scooped them away from the Nidalese if there had been.

  "What's wrong with them?" Oreseis muttered, annoyed, as the two shadowcallers ascended the stairs to their rooms. The steps were the only part of the boarding house that didn't have irregular beads of sap oozing along the seams, and only because so much dust was trodden into the boards that they looked like baked clay. "You'd think we were worse than the strix."

  "To them, we might be," Isiem said. "They know the strix. Some might have seen them, fought them, even killed them. The black-winged ones might be dangerous, but they're familiar. We are not."

  "We're human."

  By our lights. But theirs? Isiem pushed open their door.

  Two coffins sat on the floor. There were no beds. Only the coffins, hammered together from uneven pine, each one filled halfway with coarse gravel and dirt.

  "Is that a threat?" Oreseis asked blankly from the doorway. He stepped inside, eyeing the coffins. "Are we meant to infer that these people mean to bury us?"

  Isiem shook his head. Realization dawned on him, and with it a wave of sudden hilarity. He sat on the floor, eyes watering with the effort it took not to laugh aloud.

  "No," he managed, waving off Oreseis's suspicious look. "It's not a threat. It's a courtesy." He sifted a handful of reddish gravel through his fingers. The rocks made little knocks as they bounced off the coffin's fresh-sawn boards. "This is meant to welcome us. They think we're vampires."

  "Vampires," Oreseis repeated. "Vampires." He sank down alongside Isiem, tapping his pale fingertips against the side of his own coffin. Then he laughed, helplessly, and Isiem joined him in shoulder-shaking, nearly silent mirth.

  "They did see us walking in the sun, didn't they?" the younger shadowcaller asked between gasps for breath.

  "Maybe they thought we had protection. Or were some different kind of vampire. Ancient. Shadowy. Blessed by Zon-Kuthon." Isiem shrugged. "Ask them what they thought, if it matters so much to you. But it's a common mistake. Even in Westcrown, many people thought all Nidalese were vampires."

  "I only hope their information about the strix is more accurate than their vampire lore." Oreseis regarded the coffins a moment longer with amused disgust, then splashed the road dust from his face with the water set out for them and wiped his muddy hands dry.

  When his companion was finished, Isiem did the same. The dust remained thick in his hair, dulling its ivory hues to beige, but a real bath would have to wait. "We'll soon find out."

  They left as soon as the armigers delivered their belongings to the room. Isiem had disguised himself as an orc-blooded porter, bull-necked and thick-armed, with enough scars on his mottled gray skin to suggest that he had his reasons for seeking refuge in western Cheliax—and that asking after those reasons would be distinctly unwise.

  Oreseis wore a woman's face, and made his illusionary identity as unobtrusive as Isiem's was memorable. He took the role of a wife turned widow on a hard road: sandy hair the same color as the dry desert grass, a once-pretty squarish face scored by wind and sun and weariness, gray-blue eyes that had seen love and lost it and looked on the world without hope of seeing it again.

  "It's a masterpiece," Isiem said, awed by the depth of feeling in his companion's illusion.

  "It's a memory," Oreseis replied. "I took her from the shadowgarms in Westcrown. She was grateful to have been rescued ...for the first day. Then she realized that she wasn't going home." He plucked at a lock of illusory hair. "I like to remember her, now and again."

  "Of course," Isiem said neutrally. He removed a tiny effigy of a pulley from one of his bags, cupping it in his palm for the moment and concentrating to add another simple spell to his illusion. When he felt the overloaded pack on his shoulders lighten to a feather's weight, he dropped the pulley back into his luggage and headed for the door. "Good luck."

  Outside the sunlight was blinding and the bustle undiminished. No one raised an eyebrow at Isiem's disguise; to him it felt outlandish, but there were much stranger refugees in western Cheliax. When anyone paid him any notice, it was to sweep him with a calculating eye and call out an offer of work.

  One of those offers seemed promising: unloading lumber from a logger's cart and reloading it onto the wagons of the mine overseer who had purchased the timbers. Most of the other laborers were the miners themselves, and their talk was full of rumors and dire predictions about the strix.

  Isiem accepted the job immediately, although the pay—a scant handful of copper for an afternoon's hard labor—was insultingly low. He kept his head down, his mouth shut, and his ears open, hoping that the locals shared the usual prejudice against half-orcs' intelligence. Whether they thought he was a savage or a dullard, they surely wouldn't think he was a spy.

  And they didn't. The miners spoke as freely as if he'd been just another log. They talked about Posie's girls, sweethearts back home, the wide-ranging deficiencies of their camp cook...but no matter where their conversation ranged, it always circled back to the strix.

  "It needs answering, what they did to Chastain and her girl," one of the men muttered, hoisting another timber down from the stack. His name was Orwyn, and while he held no supervisory rank as far as Isiem could tell, the others listened when he spoke. "One thing to kill a man who can defend himself. Even the way those bastards do it—always slow, never a clean death. But what they did to those helpless women and children..."

  "You can't kill children," the stolid, slow-moving man next to him agreed.

  "It needs answering," Orwyn repeated.

  "Who's Chastain?" Isiem asked. "I'm new."

  "Not that new," Orwyn said, "or you didn't come from the east. Otherwise you'd know what we meant already."

  "West," Isiem said. Improvising, and taking a gamble on his audience's sympathies, he added: "Pezzack."

  That turned their puzzled looks to slow nods and tightened mouths. Pezzack was a hotbed of dissent and sedition in tightly controlled Imperial Cheliax. Rebels and malcontents gravitated to that chaotic outpost in the west—but, owing to the years-long blockade of its port and the military checkpoints on its roads, few reached it. Fewer left.

  Openly expressing solidarity with a Pezzacki was stupid to the point of suicide, particularly with a company of Hellknights in town, but judging from the way the men around him relaxed, Isiem believed he had guessed their sympathies correctly. Crackspike attracted a certain type: men who were unafraid of danger and hard work, but on whom the yoke of
civilization sat uneasy. Especially diabolists' civilization. They might not say it, but most of these men felt they shared some common ground with the people of Pezzack.

  "Chastain's from Whisper Creek," Orwyn said, punctuating his story with grunts as he heaved timbers down from the wagon. "Halfway between here and Blackridge. Not much of a town, but gentler than this. Posie sent for her to work at the Desert Rose. She brought her daughter—just four years old, sweet as a peach, most darling thing you ever saw. Posie told her that Crackspike was no place for the girl, but no mother likes to be parted from her child, and Chastain insisted.

  "They traveled with a party of miners and dealers in dry goods. Flour, beans, dried meat. Always a need for food in this camp. I don't believe any of them were trained knights or the like, but they were good strong men and there were near thirty of them, not counting Chastain or her girl, so we didn't think the swoops would trouble them. They're cowardly, those vultures. They strike by night and kill the unwary. They don't risk attacking anyone who might fight back."

  "They didn't this time, either," the stolid man muttered.

  "No, they didn't." Orwyn spat off the side of the wagon. "Treachery and cowardice, that's all they know. Treachery and cowardice and cruelty."

  "What did they do?" Isiem asked.

  "First they poisoned the oxen. They'd sown crimson devilgrass all along the trails from Whisper Creek to Crackspike. There's rarely room to carry enough fodder on the wagons, so the animals have to graze as best they can. The strix knew that. The oxen ate their devilgrass and died. In agony, kicking over their traces and goring anyone foolish enough to come near. Two men died with them—one crushed under his wagon, the other struck with a horn wound that festered."

  "They had no healer?" Isiem asked.

  Orwyn gave him a sour look. "They didn't want an Asmodean, and there was no other to be had. You might not have heard, but Her Infernal Majestrix has taken a personal interest in our silver mines. The devil-priests don't take kindly to competition, so oftentimes it's a choice between their prayers or no one's. Chastain's party decided they'd take the gamble. So there was no one to heal their oxen, and no one to heal them.

  "Next the strix shot their guide. It was an assassination. They murdered him when he wandered off the road to take a piss. No one saw them do it; there wasn't any chance to take revenge. And without their guide to read the rocks and riverbeds, the rest of the party was lost. Soon they were stranded. They didn't have enough oxen to move all the wagons, and they didn't have any way of knowing where to go. They wandered around in circles. Backed down canyons, chased after dead ends. The sun beat on them, and the heat. Shade's hard to find, for all the high rocks out there.

  "Their food and water held out for a while, but in the end the desert won. And in their last extremity, when they were dying of sunstroke and thirst, the strix showed them no mercy. They swept down and butchered men too weak to fight back—and Chastain, and her child. They defiled the bodies and threw them back on the trail for the next group of travelers to find."

  "It needs answering," the slow man said into the silence that followed.

  "It does," Orwyn said.

  "How would you answer it?" Isiem asked.

  "The same way they dealt it," Orwyn replied. "Without mercy."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Reprisals

  The whooping woke him.

  It had been the better part of a week since Isiem had talked to Orwyn and the others around the timber wagons. Both he and Oreseis had spent the intervening days asking questions under a succession of guises. Mostly Isiem chose illusionary identities whose mysterious disappearances, like the Pezzacki half-orc's, could easily be laid at the Hellknights' door; when such people vanished, it burnished their knights' reputation for ruthlessness and raised few questions about where they had gone. Sometimes, so that people would not wonder why the Nidalese never showed their faces, he went undisguised.

  But whatever face he chose, and whomever he approached, Isiem learned little about the strix. Wild rumors and speculation abounded, but accurate observations seemed scarcer than waterfalls in the desert.

  Some said the strix were winged devils in more than name—that the diabolists of House Thrune had deliberately summoned them from Hell and set them loose on the people of western Cheliax so that they could offer protection from the threat they themselves had created. Some said the mine overseers had struck a secret bargain with the strix, allowing them to feast on lazy and unruly workers in exchange for leaving the others unmolested. A few claimed—never when they knew Isiem was listening—that the strix were not living creatures at all, but rather Nidalese thralls who had escaped from the shadowcallers' control and hid in the deep recesses of Devil's Perch because no light could reach them there.

  The only sure thing anyone knew was that the strix had murdered Chastain, her daughter, and everyone accompanying them—and that the outrage demanded retribution.

  That thought leaped to the fore of Isiem's mind when he heard the whoops that morning. Pushing off his blankets, he went to the window and pulled the curtain to the side.

  The street below was crowded with cheering men gathered around four sweat-stained riders on lathered horses. A dark-winged figure staggered on foot between the riders, and two more broken, winged forms dragged in the dust behind them. The ropes that bound the corpses were not tied around their ankles, but threaded through gashes in their calves.

  Fastening his shadowcaller's robe as he went, Isiem hurried down the stairs.

  Every citizen in Crackspike seemed to have mobbed the street. He glimpsed the Hellknights pushing forward through the fray, Posie's girls leaning bare-shouldered on their balcony, and miners and laborers who had come fresh from their work, wearing clothes sweated through and caked with dust so many times that the men seemed made of mud.

  The creature who had attracted all their notice seemed oblivious to the crowd. The strix hobbled between the riders with his head lowered between his enormous, bedraggled black wings, unresponsive to the curses hurled his way or the occasional gob spat on him by a spectator. The riders and their horses, spattered with similar missiles, were less restrained; they answered with imprecations fiery enough to burn a Hellknight's ears, or—if the spitter was foolish enough to be identifiable, and in reach—vicious blows from their quirts.

  Isiem ignored them, along with the occasional shrieks from the bystanders they struck. It was the strix that interested him.

  This one was a juvenile, he guessed, and male. Head to toe, it was the color of coal. Its eyes were enormous and eerily luminous, reflecting a green-violet iridescence in the bright hot sun. There were no whites or pupils that Isiem could see, although it was difficult to be sure with the creature's head bowed. Its ears were thin and sharp, lying flat against its skull. It went barefoot, its toes and fingers alike tipped with short translucent talons, and its clumsy pigeon-like gait suggested that it did not often find reason to walk upon the ground.

  Above all, however, it was the strix's wings that commanded attention. Bent and broken, they still towered over the men on horseback. The feathers were a glossy, oily black, touched with a peacock shimmer like the plumage on a loon's throat. There was an undeniable grandeur to those wings, even as the creature who bore them tottered crippled and diminished on the earth.

  "How did you catch him?" one of the whores called down.

  "Hunting," the lead rider shouted back. "This one"—he jerked the strix's rope as if the creature were a balky dog on a leash"—thought he'd catch a few of our mules for dinner. That was his mistake. The other two came to free him. That was theirs. They didn't care to be taken alive, so I thought it only right to oblige them."

  "Are there any others?" Paralictor Erevullo asked.

  The rider hesitated, winding and unwinding the reins around his hand several times before answering. "I can't be sure," he admitted, "but I don't think so. These two rushed in blind, they were so upset we'd caught their friend. Any others woul
d've done the same, if they were out there. Anyway, we didn't see no more."

  Erevullo nodded curtly. He gestured with a gauntleted hand to the battered strix. "We will take that one. In the name of Her Imperial Majestrix Abrogail II."

  The rider opened his mouth to protest, then closed it, returning the Hellknight's nod even more brusquely. "What about the others?"

  "Sell them to your tavern to stuff as a showpiece. Cut them apart and sell the pieces as keepsakes. Or just throw them by the roadside and let dogs feast on the corpses." Erevullo shrugged. "They are of no use to us. Do as you will." The paralictor turned his flinty eyes on Isiem. "It is said that the Kuthites of Nidal are unrivaled in extracting information from their charges. I trust this reputation is well founded."

  "It is," Isiem answered.

  "They don't speak no civilized tongue," the rider interjected. "Just screeches and devil squawks. We couldn't get nothing sensible out of none of them."

  "Language is no obstacle," Isiem said. He turned to Erevullo. "Is there somewhere we might work without interruption?"

  The paralictor waited for the rider to untie the strix's rope from his saddle horn. Upon receiving it, Erevullo tossed the mudstained hemp to Isiem. "One of the alehouses has a cellar. They were using it as a dungeon of sorts. It's yours." He motioned to one of the other Hellknights, a signifer whose clean-shaven scalp was tattooed with spiked swirls of red and black. "Odarro. Show the shadowcallers where they will work."

  "This way." The bald signifer turned on his heel, leaving the riders and the crowd to look on in confusion that soon turned to abuse of the two remaining strix. Whether their victims were alive or not, the people of Crackspike seemed all too happy to beat them and spit on their feathered remains.