It was well, four bells before dawn.
Pyna had descended from the Spire of Clioh, without further impediment or entanglement.
Now shrouded in voluminous garments of concealing coal-dark, an inky wimple binding her wheaty mane, and a veil masking all, but for her strange, vitreous gaze.
She contemplated another destination, with no little distaste, as she swished and drifted with the modest, very human, ease of any nighttime vagabond.
Well accustomed to the mazy, circuitous lanes of the Opal Quarter, this her old, old home.
Her mute and bare footfalls, untroubled by the rough cobble and rotting stones.
To herself, she sang softly.
A cadence of nonsensical rhymes. Snatches of stories and tatters of poetry.
As she leisurely navigated perilous rookeries and nighted plazas.
The rare passersby at this hour were, by and large, wary of any fellow wanderers.
One might perhaps think her to be a small courtesan moving between custom, or a servant upon errand, were it not for the odd sight of her naked, snow-wan toes…
Evoking the old quarter-stories of the diminutive, ghostly girl-child, who swallowed up unwary lovers and their straying beaus.
Within the unkinder precincts of the Opal Quarter through which she padded, any who might consider her simple prey, were swiftly dissuaded from foolishness by the weird glister of her nitid, opaline eyes.
It took Pyna nearly a bell in order to wend at her unhurried pace, from the Northern precincts towards the old heart of the quarter.
Ere long arose the ancient stink of near imperceptible wood and stone char, an astringent creosote, borne upon the clement morning breeze.
Likely indiscernible by any common nose. However to her it came carrying the reek of curdled and unsweet memories.
Much of the ancient pleasure concourse that had been razed and ruined over a century past - through the ire of the Burning Houses - had long been rewrought into other configurations, only to once again fall into decrepitude.
Such was the eternal ebb and flow of the Opal Quarter’s architectural tides.
Rising and falling in the plodding manner of mountainscapes.
Pyna soon moved off the wider lane that had brought her near to her intended destination.
Then down a frighteningly narrow and foul alley. The structures above askew and pressing against, like drunken revelers.
Through cimmerian folds of lightlessness, she followed this winding way for a short while, well beyond the peeking illumination of any lantern.
At last she paused, before an indistinct-seeming wall in the midst of the stygian path.
The pressing of a stone and a simply woven Cant of Opening, unveils a narrow and clandestine way, into which she slips with preternatural haste, unremarked upon.
With the portal shut behind, she lingered in the soothingly reticent black for a few breaths. Before, like a soundless obsidian spectre, descending a narrow and sharply twisting screw of a stair.
Around and down, three turns then four.
Before she at last alighted upon a narrow landing, coldly brightened by a single fulgent frost-light, set into a short and narrow alcove, hard by a black-timbered and stocky door.
From out a secret fold in her enrobing clothes, Pyna plucked a tiny, copper key.
With a twist and a gentle nudge, the door swings smoothly open.
A distant tide of sound and fumes - along with the palpitations of several congregating hearts - pleasantly muted and savory, washes over Pyna as she emerges into a modest hallway of smoothly dressed sandstone, awash in a honey-amber candle-glow.
She pauses with inhuman placidity, breathing in the pulse and labour; the enterprise of the nearby commons.
While she stilled a burgeoning sense of loathing, and a rusty tang of ancient fear.
The lingering impurities - from a time of unkindness - that yet mottled her Heart.
But that time was long gone.
And that place, although here, was no longer.
Only a remembrance of ash and tar.
In the space between a heartbeat, she stood at the end of the hallway, which opened into an expansively dark commons, punctuated by chiaroscuro points of amicable lantern-fire.
The Prurient Crone.
A subterranean feast-hall and pleasure house, by and large the demesne of Guildsmen, and their traffic and custom.
Through this place flowed a languorous vein of dark, unspeakable wealth between the Upper, and Lower Houses.
Here poisoners and homicides, commingled convivially with the Great City’s courtesans, parishioners and peers.
It was but one of the innumerable middle spaces that played interlocutor, between the Gate of Candles and the Upper Opaline Court.
She studied the scattered patrons, engaged in gaming, soft speech, drink and idle laughter.
The air is close and leathery.
Redolent with aniseed tobaccos and the bouquet of warm, wormwood liqueurs.
She can feel all their heart’s blood, rushing in a torrent of torpid heat and desire.
Soon, her diminutive, apparitional form is drifting soundlessly across the adumbral landscape of the chamber.
Few pay her any manner of heed in her quiet progress.
She arrives at last at a richly blue and argent curtained, somewhat secreted, corner at the deep end of the commons.
Pausing a moment to sniff at the air, her nose wrinkling in distaste, she pulls the heavy arras to the side, without preamble.
“Ash and Bones! I-”
An angry exclamation, abruptly abbreviated, answers her entry.
Woe is me
Not a spot
Or clot of
Pomander
You reek of
Ur-saffron,
Findlecrop…
She casts her distempering doll-lipped smile at the man seated across a broad, polished blackwood table.
Findlecrop has the mien of a scholar.
Thin lips and long features are framed by a well manicured silver-tainted, copper mustache.
His hair is cropped and of the same discolouration.
The irises of his eyes are marked by a few dust-mote flecks of cerulean, as though he were of tepid Innulian stock.
The aftereffects of a modest Ur-saffron addiction.
His sockets are also, to the very brows, deliberately darkened round with a copious brush of kohl. One might say in excess.
An odd, and recent fashion amongst Guildsmen thinks Pyna, as she peers sidelong at him like a hawk considering a morsel.
The expansive blackwood table in front of Findlecrop is piled with ledgers and untidy librams.
Sacks of coins, boxes and bills and bristling with pens and inkwells. All the conventional counting-house paraphernalia.
“Pyna! You are, unexpected…”
No I am not
Findlecrop
He frowns, and clears his throat with a touch of mild consternation.
“As you say! So, you’ve acquired what was agreed upon, then?”
A furrowing of his brows, as Pyna produces a tiny, oily-glass ampoule from the billow of her raven-hued sleeve.
A rubious droplet in its minikin embrace, gleaming silky and viscid.
“Ahh! The Jewel in the Cradle, indeed!”
Findlecrop’s kohl-banded eyes crinkle and glister as he reaches out to claim it, but pauses as Pyna makes no effort to pass it along.
Her smiling expression, unchanging as something painted onto a pale puppet.
First my
Box
Then
What of the
Little one
Findlecrop clears his throat and settles back, his lips pursed.
“The little one? Of little moment!”
He scoffs, narrowing his eyes.
The bands of kohl rounding his sockets, ever so slightly streaking below beads of emergent perspiration.
Pyna simply watches him, with disquietingly marmoreal placidity.
Findlecrop at last clears his throat again, and flutters his fingers dismissively.
“Nothing! It is no more than a common Cant of Listening. The child’s lips will be our ears in the intimate corners of House Joon…
Perhaps we should have bartered for an eye!”
Then
You would
Have received
Nothing
Findlecrop
Do not
Make me
Be unkind
Pyna murmurs with the perilous sweetness of poisoned honey.
Findlecrop shrugs and settles back, his gaze shrewd.
“Very well Pyna, your box…”
He reaches beneath the blackwood table, and draws out a small handsbreadth span of a receptacle.
The box’s darkly varnished veneer is webbed with a thread-thin craquelure, but is otherwise seemingly seamless. Bereft of hinge, lock or any visible joint.
Findlecrop gently pushes the object across the table.
“Now, as agreed…”
Pyna lays the ampoule down gingerly, and plucks up the box with equal fastidiousness, secreting it away within the ample billows of her robe.
Farwell
Findlecrop
Not awaiting any rejoinder from him, she curtsies and draws the arras shut.
Drifting then, a black ghost, smoothly back across the commons.
Soon, she emerges again into the lightless alleyway, out the selfsame secret way that she entered.
As she begins to move into the aphotic, winding vein of the alley, and towards the burgeoning link-light of the main way, an abrupt and fearful sense of unsoundness to the air, stops her still in her progress.
She sniffs like a hackled beast at the narrow way’s rancid draft. The stink of something ineffably other, grows cloying.
Of a thing, Ill-Woven…
A panicked shout from somewhere shortly ahead and without.
Pyna very deliberately draws her Innulian blade. Its cool, horror-forged keenness, sighing with a tender rapaciousness between her fingers. Her uncanny senses aflame.
There is a ponderous and sickening sensation of grating, as the darkness shifts odiously ahead of her.
Something flaccid and repugnant, soon plops wetly at her feet.
It might once have been the limb of something vital and alive.
It's now bloody, copper sweetness suffuses the air and fills her nose.
“Oooohhhhhh…”
Bubbling, with an iron-filing rasp of jocularity, the repugnantly approaching obscenity grinds its distended, and osseously aciculate jaw.
The sockets of its allagrugous skull are tumescent and puckered, bleeding a ghostly, brumous mist.
As its handsbreadth long talons of black iron, stitched to wide, bony flanges, click and shrill against the alley-stones.
The coldness then that seizes Pyna’s breast, is as preternatural as her own bloodlessness.
Bone-eater
You should
Not be…
“Neither should you! Little blood-worm…
How did you outlive, my furnace?”
The voice reverberates as though from out of a depth of great, and indefinite distance.
Brim-full of mockery and grinning.
“I think, you will not like this puppet…”
I remember
That tongue
And thee…
The papery-fleshed, desiccate vulgarity suddenly springs with supernal ferocity.
Pyna moves with equally inhuman haste, though not quite nimbly enough to avoid the one talon that catches and gouges a deep rivulet across and down her thigh.
Its terrible, unliving fortitude hurling her like a twiggy marionette against a nearby stony facade.
She gasps, recalling the terror of tumbling. Of burning and shattered bones.
The anguish is an eyeless tide, swallowing Pyna up even as her unnatural life’s blood begins its uncanny work of knitting her back together.
The bubbling, grinding abomination twists then, and hurls itself at her again.
This time she rolls and cuts beneath its grasping and is heartened by the sensation of her Innulian blade parting sorcerous sinews, depriving it of velocity and a single long, clattering, metallic nail.
It rolls and careens into a wall, shattering masonry.
Pyna is up and then crouching with the blade outstretched before her.
The ache in her thigh, already growing cool and distant.
Nimbelthorne’s patient tutelage in bladecraft, swiftly returning to her.
The horror scrambles, clattering and groaning, and then hurls itself with what seems unthinking heedlessness, towards her.
She dances across its path, and past its grasping iron nails, drawing the blade down its flank. Opening a wide, bloodless wound that sifts salt and putrid particulate.
The thing twists like a crushed worm and cracks into the opposing wall, roaring and loosening a hail of brickwork.
To any common observer, the two foes moved with such unlikely swiftness, as to appear as nothing other than two struggling, adumbral shreds and patches.
Entangling, then disengaging, leaving a shambles in their wake.
The dry obscenity once again rights itself.
The familiar voice, mocking and distant, reverberating from its proximity.
“I have not the hours to sport with you, little blood-worm…”
The air bends then with the sound of something being woven.
As the alleyway brightens in a breath, with the incandescence of a thousand, abruptly flaring candle-wicks.
A lashing tongue of pure daylight twisting outwards like a flag in a raging windstorm.
A Sun Ribbon.
Withering heat buffets Pyna’s skin as she struggles to avoid its mad, sinuous whipsaw.
Her Innulian blade, proof against any flame or brightness, natural or otherwise, draws a blinding shower of searing forge-furnace sparks with every strike and curl of the gleaming scourge.
At one juncture, the Sun Ribbon sneaks under her guard and burns across her thighs and belly.
The searing agony of the raw Day-Star is unspeakable.
Pyna screams, and with inhuman ardor born of anguish, lashes out at the ribbon, forcing a hail of distracting spark-fall into the withered eyes of the abomination, shortly enough to allow her to leap with all her uncanny haste, under its briefly blind guard.
Pyna cuts up into where its breast-bone might be, splitting its torso in twain and still farther, until its skull parts into a rain of papery noxiousness.
Old Night descends once again, with blessed immediacy, consuming the hastily dying Sun Ribbon’s false day-shine.
Wheezing and writhing repulsively, the bubbling remains attempt to form words.
It fails, and rasps insensibly, then collapses into a still and ashy putrescence.
Pyna falls quaking, to her knees.
Her fingers trembling, wrapped tightly about her precious Innulian blade.
The torment against her belly and thighs pulses with an angry incandescence.
She reaches down to explore the searing wound, her fingers coming away clotted with charred blood and fine ash.
Home.
Home…
She is spent, but can feel the needle-edge of Dawn pricking inevitably against the imperceptibly lightening canopy of fading stars above.
With a blindingly painful effort, she moves like a tattered wraith through the alleys and ways, towards Nimblethorne’s high house, his manor and their home.
A number of times in her painful and hasty progress, she flags and falls.
Her thirst a bestial thing now, demanding in its need to stitch and mend her ruin.
In an abutting alcove, she happens upon a slumbering beggar, curled in a sheltering doorway.
With a savagery uncommon to her, she leaves behind only a hollowed out husk of tangled limbs.
The hapless soul’s every drop, every incarnadine bead, is enough to provide her the small strength necessary to navigate the hidden ways, leading her home.
She reaches out, then.
But is not able to touch Nimblethorne. A not uncommon thing, as he is oft a secret and willfully hidden presence, even from her.
Nimblethorne…
Pyna woefully drifts through the quiet, thickly curtained halls, coming at last to the solarium and its reflecting mirror-pool, dawn beginning to lend a veiled sheen to its mercurial surface.
Here, upon the lintel abreast her once-upon-a-time palette, she finds a slip of assiduously folded paper.
Upon it, words in the dark, subtle strokes of Nimblethorne’s own hand.
It is our way to drift into and out of the tales of others.
Even our very own at times.
Such an hour has come. The manor and all its sundry artifacts I leave to you, my dear Pyna.
Find Elshad. Tame him if you are able.
Perhaps, our paths will entangle once again.
Farewell my Heart.
May the Dawn Never Find You.
Ever your servant.
Nimblethorne.
Pyna’s face is a hollow and lifeless effigy, as the paper flutters, a leaf forgotten, from her fingers.
She crawls then, and nestles into her dark clandestine place, unheeding of the filth and blood tainting her tattered finery, sleep and sorrow at last drawing her under.
