As a member of the Shadow's Reach city guard, Blane had seen a great many things; things that were disturbing, things that were surprising, and things that were downright horrifying.
Things like the shrieking old man currently running amok through the market square, naked as the day he was born and fresh from squatting in someone's gutter filth. His arms were laden with stolen goods.
Things like that. Things that happened far too often for him to even bat an eyelid anymore.
Jase and Arun, who were newer recruits to the ranks, hadn't worked this out yet. The clanking of their armour and their enraged yells joined in with the relic's garbled hollering as they ducked and weaved in the throng, tripping over each other and making an equal nuisance of themselves. Blane sighed and waited.
People passed him looks as they made a quick exit, ranging from the baffled to the furious, and he offered small, polite nods in return. When the old man shot free of the crowd like a pebble from a sling, Blane reached out and grabbed him neatly by the ends of his grizzled beard. His momentum carried him forward for just a few seconds more before he came to stop with a howl and the plinking of hairs being torn out.
Blane turned a bored stare onto his recruits as they too were spat out of the edge of the crowd, tripping over their own feet and falling with twin clangs onto the cobbles. He had the gutter tramp by the skinny arm, and dragged him forward a few paces as he moved to loom over the idiots on the ground.
"If I ever see a shameful performance like that again, boys, I'll feed you to the first demon I see," he growled.
Arun craned up his neck to offer a sheepish glance, right before his visor slipped down with a clatter. Blane rolled his eyes and turned his attention to the old man who was swearing at him in Tochk. Blane had never learned much of the language in the fleeting years he had attended school, but an insult to one's mother was universally recognisable regardless of language. With a sharp crack and another howl, the man's nose broke.
"Take him in," Blane said, handing over the old man to his subordinates, who had found their way to their feet, "Confiscate all of this and return it if appropriate. You know what to do."
"Aye, sir."
He watched them go, and then began winding his way through the aisles of the market. It was mostly packed up; the Light Fayre had ended several days ago and what was left were those merchants who didn't have so far to travel. It was the blissful end of Blane's least favourite time of year, too; the light season represented no days' leave, many arrests, too much paperwork, too many patrols to organise and a city full to the brim with people of all kinds, even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. Just two days before he had had to forcefully remove a harem Lord from Klinort who had commandeered the entire upper floor of an inn and was in the business of purchasing 'milk women.'
Precisely what a 'milk woman' was Blane had thought it imprudent to ask. He could guess, and his guesses were enough to keep him from prying further.
The market was still a blaze of colour in the usually-drab city despite its depleted size, and without the pressure of so much to do it was pleasant to browse for once. He even managed to squeeze in a midday meal while on shift, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd been able to do that. With the remains of a hastily gobbled down meat pie sitting comfortably in his belly, Blane was almost tempted to call it a good day.
Almost.
At first, the approaching garbled shrieks just made him groan, assuming the twin idiots he had sent off with the tramp had slipped and let him go. He began to move towards the far end of the market in the direction of the noise, picking up the pace when he realised that it didn't at all sound like the shrieking of the man he had just arrested. He began to make out words; they were not speaking in Tochk, but in terrified Common, and the crowd was beginning to move as one like an uneasy farm beast.
A woman was running towards the market down the Threadneedle, a broad avenue of open-fronted shops and temporary stalls which was usually filled with shoppers browsing, amblers, beggars, and craftsmen. Today it was filled with confused civilians milling about with unease and giving the woman a wide berth.
The woman didn't register that Blane had stepped in front of her until she almost charged headfirst into his chest plate. He grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her, and her eyes rolled in her head for a moment before widening in dim recognition. Blane offered a grim smile in response as the meat pie tightened into a stitch in his side.
"If there is a problem, madam, you should report to a city guard post instead of..."
"I did!" she cut him off in a shrill voice, "I did! They just laughed at me!"
Oh, here we go.
"I'm sorry about that, madam," he said, and got into the 'responsible listening pose' which every guard had to deal with civilians, even though this woman seemed too past her wits to care if he was listening or not.
"I said to them, I said," she gibbered, eyes popping as they darted to the sky and to him and then back again. "The sky is going to fall! And they just laughed!"
"Do you have...evidence, madam?"
"That looks like some dark-damned evidence to me!" she shrieked, and pointed into the distance over the roof of a low-slung building. Blane looked. The peak of Mount Sude winked dim green on the horizon, like it had for the last few months.
"Madam, I'm not sure...."
And then he saw what she meant. Behind the peak, where the East Moon would normally have been hanging at this time, was a thin shaft of brilliant light, splitting the cloud cover to fall onto the plains beyond the mountains. In any normal circumstance a shaft of light like this indicated the swirling vortex of a forming dust storm, which in itself would be odd for the time of year. Dust storms also produced a pale, muddy smudge on the horizon; not a brilliant yellow beam as if Kiel Himself had reached down and rent the sky open.
Whether or not one believed the sky was falling, or that a deity was about to descend into the mortal realm, the spectacle was decidedly alarming.
"Get inside, madam," he said, and the woman looked both relieved and terrified, as if she'd been half-hoping she was raving mad, after all. "Lock doors and windows." He paused at a thought. "Where did you spot this from?"
"My house is on Kiel's Mount," she replied.
"Take me there."
It was a test of his patience to walk with the woman, who was flagging already from her mad dash from Kiel's Mount to Threadneedle. He kept his eyes on the East Moon as they walked, wondering if he imagined that the light was expanding and forcing his face to stay stoic.
Kiel's Mount sounded a lot more impressive than it actually was; more of a large knoll than a mount, and one of the grottier parts of the inner city. If the deity used it for anything, it was to wipe His feet on before going into the city proper, but it at least provided a better vantage point than down on the street. He looked out in the direction of Mount Sude over the lights of the city. The hole in the sky was still there, still beaming down light. He couldn't kid himself that it wasn't expanding.
"Nict's rotten balls," he growled, and then realised the woman was still there. He cleared his throat. "I'll handle this, madam. Get inside."
Quite how anyone was going to handle it, let alone the Captain of a small patrol garrison, he had no idea.
They turned, him mapping out the route to the nearest guard post in his mind and her setting off further up the street, when a loud rumble echoed across the city. Shuttered windows rattled up and down the road and muted screams reached them from the city below as the ground shook, as if Nictaven had taken a great breath and expelled it.
Blane stumbled and tottered towards a cottage wall, gauntlets screeching down the dried daub as the ground launched into another assault. He looked up from his feet and gasped; the whole city was illuminated by the yawning hole in the sky. Civilians running past on the road behind him also came to a stop and stared in horror. Blane heard whispered prayers to Kiel at his shoulder and glanced at the woman who had appeared at his shoulder.
"Do you believe in the divine?" she gasped, eyes glittering as she stared out over the view. Blane didn't respond.
He had to admit that the view was nothing short of extraordinary; light so bright and pure that he had only heard stories of it, and those all stories of other worlds beyond doorways long shut. In all his forty years he had never seen anything more illuminating than a lit fire and the jade luminescence of the Reach mountains, but this...
This had flying people.
He squinted, but he was not seeing things. The hole had opened over the city now, and within its swirling beams were two figures, human looking, and another which looked oddly like a demon. The woman beside him gasped and pointed, breathing something about seraphs, but Blane was watching closer, and realised he was wrong about one thing.
They were not flying. They were falling.
At speed.
Despite the continuing tremors of Nictaven heaving beneath his feet, he took off running back towards the city centre. The lord of the Reach had to be very deep in his cups not to notice something of this scale, but there was one thing about Lord Harkenn that one could always rely on – and that was that the man would never fail to surprise you given the opportunity.The foundations of that forsaken fortress were probably buried ten feet lower than they needed to be; the Lord might simply assume that someone had dropped something in another room. If someone didn't think to raise the alarm at the castle, there would be a lot of officers swinging from the scaffold by the end of the week.
The run back to the castle from Kiel's Mount seemed twice as arduous as it had the first time, and Blane was gasping by the time he reached the gates. He slowed to catch his breath, signalling to the watchtower to let him in, and then suppressed a groan as a figure swept out of a side street in front of him. The newcomer wore a cloak that reached the ground and a hood so deep no face was visible.
If there was one more thing that one could always rely on, it was that the lord's favourite demon catcher would always be first on the scene in a bad situation.
"Well met, Blane," the catcher grunted, looking over his shoulder as Blane approached. "Funny weather we're having, eh?"
Blane scowled. "Yessir."
"You've never seen a portal before, have you?"
Blane snorted as the gates swung wide to admit them. "That's not a portal." He paused. "It can't be."
"It can be," Yddris replied tartly. "What else is it going to be, a strange cloud?"
Blane bit down on his retort. Staying silent gave him the opportunity to lag behind and avoid standing in the crackling air around the Catcher. They'd always unnerved him, their kind. He'd seen many criminals in his time, and the ones that hid their faces were always the guilty ones. It was impossible to trust a man you couldn't look in the eye.
But he supposed they were used to that.
"Did you see them?" he called forward. Yddris slowed, forcing Blane to do the same to avoid catching up.
"Who's 'them'?" The Catcher turned. While the city was bathed in so much light, the darkness inside his cowl was all the more unnerving.
It was unprofessional to feel as smug as he did that he had found something out that Yddris didn't know yet, so he made a half-hearted attempt to squish it.
"There were figures," he said, gesturing at the sky, "Falling from up there. Three, though one looked ugly enough to be a demon."
"You mean people came through that portal?" Yddris said. Blane twitched.
"Well," Blane muttered, thinking of the spectacle again. No ordinary person would arrive that way, he was sure of it. "I don't know about people..."
"I suppose the winning theory is that the light is shining out of Kiel's arse, is it?" Yddris snapped, setting off again at a pace that forced Blane to run. "I suppose some of you night-addled Kelians think a couple of guardian spirits just dropped out of his anus."
Blane winced but said nothing.
"Things are already going badly," Yddris continued. "His Lordship is going to burst a vein when he hears this. And whoever it was that fell," he glanced back over his shoulder, and despite not being able to see a face Blane was sure the man was grinning, "is fucked."