Blane was not a superstitious man. He had his faith, but he wasn't devout. There were some days he simply went about his business as always, and others, like when his wife had fallen ill with a childbed fever, where he prayed a little more than usual and paid a few more visits to the chapel. He thought his view was fairly balanced, in the grand scheme of things.
Until he had seen two siblings who were barely more than children fall through a gaping hole in the sky, that was.
He wasn't going to call it a breakdown, what he had had after seeing that. He was sure many others were just as shaken up by it as he was. But where their faith was strong enough to steady them in their shock, his had fallen from under him like rotten timber and he had had an altercation...with himself.
It was only a sorry coincidence that the sergeant had seen it happen.
He sighed and slipped up his visor, looking around him. It was almost dark, despite the daylight hours having barely begun. The streets he patrolled had a sad, faintly neglected air to them, though most of the houses were occupied, and by people who didn't mind gawping rudely out of their front windows as he marched past.
Kona was primarily a residential quarter, the closest it came to the slums of Shadow's Reach without actually being in the slums – which were, incidentally, just across the river in walking distance. It was not a promotion from the Merchants' Quarter, nor was it quieter or less stressful, no matter what the sergeant said. It was simply stressful in a different way, and mostly due to the gang of almost-useful idiots he was in charge of in the Kona guard post.
One of those idiots was trailing behind him, whistling and dragging his feet so that the metal sabatons screeched on the cobbles. No wonder people were staring.
"Do you have to whistle quite so loudly?" Blane asked, letting his visor slip back down again and glowering through the slits. "People will be reporting you to me for antisocial behaviour at this rate, boy."
His companion, a pimply young man whose name Blane had already forgotten – if he had ever known it – offered him a grin with a mocking edge.
"Yessir." He punched an arm across his chest.
"Yes what?" Blane asked, not recalling that he'd said anything requiring an affirmative, and then gave up.
"Quiet tonight, sir," his companion said, unperturbed. They had taken a turn into one of Kona's main streets, which followed the river all the way to the city's outer limits. The place was deserted; curfew had ended an hour ago, but people grew more uneasy the shorter the light hours were and stayed inside as often as possible. Kona was so close to the mountains that demon attacks were more frequent than elsewhere. Blane pretended he hadn't noticed the fact that he hadn't passed any Unspoken on his patrols today.
The curfew was little more than a formality, in practice. As the dark season approached, and it became harder to tell where one day ended and another began, the religious houses in each quarter would light their candles before the time where nightfall should have been, as a warning for people to get back behind the safety of their walls. The city guard didn't punish those who chose to stay out after curfew, but demons often did.
"Barely past curfew," he said, squashing a rising sense of unease. They should have passed at least one of the Hooded Men by now. He didn't like them much himself, but they represented safety, and there was precious little of that to be found in Nictaven. "People must be stopping in today."
The young guard didn't seem to have noticed anything amiss. His stride was as jaunty as ever.
"Don't blame them," he said, "Cold as balls today."
Blane chose not to grace this with a response. They had just passed the local Kelian shrine. It was a small thing – most of Kona's residents worshipped one of the heretical deities instead – and showed signs of neglect. The water that filled the fountain was murky and had bits of rubbish floating in it. The fountain itself no longer ran, only leaving a turquoise stain on the copper statue it had spouted from as evidence that it had ever run at all.
Blane paused, looking up into the copper-wrought face of Kiel – smiling, always smiling, Blane thought, a miracle in itself – and then fished in his pocket and pulled out three Flint.
"You know some local brat will hook those out as soon as you leave, sir," the young man said behind him.
"Maybe it will do them some good," Blane retorted, throwing in his first coin. "Kiel teaches charity, doesn't he?"
He closed his eyes. O Kiel, Lord of the Light, Saviour of the Kindred, Brother of all Men...what am I saying?
He opened his eyes again and frowned, flicking in another coin. If you're listening, sir...
He sighed and flicked in his last coin, wearily adding, I'd really like to stay alive tonight, your Holiness, if you have room in your schedule for it.
Feeling negligibly better, Blane turned away from the statue and its copper smile and continued on his way without waiting to see if his companion would catch up. He couldn't explain his unease, or his sudden compulsion to appeal to a god with whom he had always had a patchy relationship. Something just felt wrong tonight.
His unease wasn't improved any by the presence of a death priest coming towards them on the other side of the road.
Death priests weren't an uncommon sight in the fringe quarters, but Kona was a long way from the Nict house temple. It wasn't a particularly dedicated area of worshippers of the death god, either. Aside from the one Kelian shrine, all the shrines and churches he had passed were dedicated to the Heretical Orders, and the two Houses got on like oil and water. The only House that Nict had a worse relationship with was Kiel, and despite not being an ardent worshipper, Blane felt a bristle of disgust.
A member of a House which had a twenty-foot stone cadaver standing in front of their temple and was rumoured to have close connections with the Devils was generally considered unsavoury company.
"Well met," Blane grunted, keeping his sigh to himself when the death priest showed signs of wanting to stop and talk. He was not a large man, and looked like a reanimated corpse himself. His dark hair stuck up in such a way that it looked as though his head was playing host to a very elderly shadeling.
"Well met," the priest replied, voice solemn. "Quiet night."
Blane offered a tight smile. "It is indeed. Seen anything on your travels today, sir?"
"Actually, yes." The death priest sniffed as if it was of no great consequence. "A rather large sack hanging outside an ironmonger's forge on the West Way."
Blane balked. "A body, you think?"
There were several named criminals that Blane knew who liked to leave their kills in sacks and hang them somewhere prominent, and none of them had ever been caught. The genius of the Devils' strategy; everybody knew them well enough to know who it was safe to report and who to pretend they had never seen. The Devils' revenge on tattlers was fast and terrible.
"A possibility," the priest said, still looking unconcerned. Blane had never seen a death priest look happy; he supposed it came with organising the entirety of your life around the end of it. "I thought I would mention it, in any event."
And he moved on without another word, shambling down the street in the semi-gloom until he turned the corner and disappeared. Blane's young companion stared after him with his mouth slightly open.
Blane flipped up his visor, rubbed his eyes, and slipped it back down again. Less stressful station, my arse. No one hangs corpses in sacks in the Merchants' Quarter.
"Well, it's not on our rounds, sir..." The young man trailed off at Blane's fierce look, shrinking into his armour.
"You'd rather leave whoever it is hanging there?" Blane demanded, "For anyone to find or do what they like with?"
"No, sir."
"It was reported to us," Blane continued, "Which makes it our responsibility. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir."
Blane looked around, trying to get his bearings, and then struck off in the direction of the West Way. It was a broad trade road cutting through Kona and the steel district up to the West Gate, and was easy enough to find; the West Moon was still visible and hung directly above it. As the dark season grew closer it would vanish and it would be hard to locate the road without knowing where it was already, but nobody with any sense travelled in the open space of a trade road while demons were abroad anyway.
Speaking of demons, Blane still hadn't seen any Unspoken, and it was getting more than unnerving.
His companion looked frightened enough by the prospect of having to deal with a body, so Blane kept those worries to himself. He could easily have passed one several times and not noticed. Those cloaks hid them extremely well, and they weren't the noisiest of travellers.
The West Way was deserted, and though Blane was surprised that there weren't at least a couple of wagons or a few stragglers around, he brushed it off as a symptom of the approaching dark season. The thin columns of smoke were already visible over the steel district, and before long, the thick smell of hot metal assaulted them.
It didn't take long to find the body.
It was a body; Blane could see that long before they reached it. The shape was unmistakable. The sack was taut over the dome of a head and tied around the corpse's ankles, which were in turn lashed to a hanging lantern bracket on the side of the warehouse. All the other lanterns in the vicinity were lit; someone had put this one out.
Blane opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again with a long-suffering sigh as he heard someone being violently sick several paces behind him. The soldier was just as useless in a critical situation as Blane had suspected he would be, and while Blane had spent a comfortable few years patrolling the Merchants' Quarter where most of the crime was of a petty nature, he had seen worse. He had been on the battlefields of Caelum, for Kiel's sake. Once a man had seen the destruction wrought by the Angels of the annexe, he could stomach anything else life might throw at him.
He pulled his short-sword from his belt and cut the rope around the body's ankles. It fell to the floor with a soft whumph.
"Can you hold your stomach in for long enough to help out, boy, or not?" he called, without looking up. The feet that had come into view as the sacking loosened were blackened with cold and blood loss. It had not yet been long enough for the corpse to smell, which was a strange sort of blessing, but dark stains had appeared on the sack in places.
The young guard – why couldn't he remember the boy's name – stumbled up to him and made a nasty sound in the back of his throat. To his credit, he managed to hold it.
"I'll hold the feet, you pull the sack off," Blane said brusquely. "We need to know who to take this to."
The boy just nodded, looking pale.
Blane sheathed his sword again and squatted, taking hold of the corpse's ankles. He was wearing gauntlets, which he was grateful for. It was easy to pretend he was holding something else when he couldn't feel it in any detail.
"Pull," he said. The sacking came off with some difficulty, but as it piled up at the young soldier's feet, dropped in horror, Blane too let go of the body and jumped back. "Kiel's teeth."
It was a man; that much was obvious. He was naked, and had something that resembled a pair of stockings shoved into his mouth, forcing it into a rictus grin. His hands were bound and a long gash, dark with congealed blood, carved a valley in the man's torso.
Blane had seen bodies in worse condition, but he had never seen one so thoroughly covered in swirling marks, several shades darker than the corpse's skin. Speechless, he gestured for the sack. Up close, the stains were revealed to be scorch marks.
"Kiel's teeth," he repeated, whispering.
"It's a Whisperer," the young soldier squeaked. "Someone's killed a dark-damned Unspoken."
Blane looked at him, mirroring the horror in the youth's face. Then they both looked down at the first Unspoken murder in over a century.