Out of Character:
The streets of Knife’s Edge never seemed to end. You could walk all night in that icy city and never see the same track twice. You could walk all day and never see a friendly face. The civil war hadn’t just separated church from state; it tore families apart at the seams. Everywhere I looked lay broken houses, broken hearts, and broken lives. I never really stopped to think about it before. How many husbands and wives differ in faith? Start a religious riot outside their window and you’ll find out. Each time I heard a front door swinging loose on its hinges or saw a bar boarded up, I wondered. Where had the inhabitants gone? Were the yawning cupboards and bare shelves emptied by opportunistic looters, or rampant pillagers? Shards of furniture littered the frozen roads in neighbourhoods that resembled tiny ghost towns. And then I turned a corner and bathed in the pale lamplight of a wealthy locale with their Watch Patrols on the quarter hour. The city’s high walls and fortified defences became obsolete as it ate itself from the inside out.
I felt like a rat in a mad scientist’s maze. For all my training and advanced senses, each new turn I took made me feel a little more lost. I had given up on the idea of spending more than one night at any inn. Half the time I couldn’t find my way back to the last place I stayed. The other half I worried the rioters would ransack my belongings if I left anything behind. What began as a meticulous, methodical womanhunt devolved into feverish pacing through anonymous districts. Stress balled in the back of my neck and the arctic air kept my muscles strung tighter than a sitar. I couldn’t meditate. Meditation required focus, and calm breathing. Each inhale stabbed my lungs like an icemold spike, the ensuing exhale a puff of steam that wreathed my face. I had my head stuck in the damn clouds.
Tinker’s instructions had seemed so simple. Travel to Knife’s Edge, find his daughter. Not as easy as it sounds. Just getting into the city gave me a headache when I had to convince the guards I wasn’t a zealot terrorist come to stir up more mobs of ethereal sheep. But the real problem arose when I found the charity Tinker told me she worked at. The old crone who ran the place barely spared enough time to tell me Kristina Rythadine had quit when the war started. No idea where she lived, no idea where she went, no sir I can’t help you now if you don’t need a bowl of soup, please step outside. The idea of Kristina alone amidst the insanity didn’t sit well with me. The more I searched the more the possibility occurred to me that she had either left the city or died in it. But I couldn’t stop. The memory of Tinker’s pleading eyes and the portrait of Kristina that hung over his fireplace haunted my conscience. The old alchemist had made me a pair of enchanted boots when we first met, tools to help me stop his son from releasing untold evil upon Salvar. And he cried tears of joy when I told him I hadn’t killed Geoffrey Rythadine. The poor hermit loved his children too much.
My sole consolation was that if I couldn’t find Kristina, no way in hell had Geoff located her. That twisted bastard planned to hold his own sister hostage to force their father into making weapons of war. Weapons that could turn the tide in favour of the Ethereal Sway. Until I arrived in Knife’s Edge I didn’t really care who won. Civil war always had its reasons, and they didn’t interest me much. But the church’s urban guerrilla tactics made it clear that the Crown needed to emerge victorious, and soon. Riots ripped through the city’s less fortunate districts on a daily basis, leaving a trail of murdered men and raped women. Every time I saw a caved in roof my steps snapped a little faster. I had to find Kristina before she fell afoul of the zealots.
Frost crackled beneath the breaker boots. The street had gone from square stones to frozen mud in the space of a single step. As if the masons had run out of bricks, or flipped a coin and moved off to a new location. I hated walking on those unfinished roads. No matter how I worked for silence, the steady crunching announced my presence like a delegation of tiny heralds. Here comes the dumbass who can’t find a needle in a haystack. Tinker you old bastard, why didn’t you give me more information?
The sound of splintering wood rent the night air like a small explosion.
“No, please! Stay away! James, quick, they’re coming in the door!”
The woman’s panicked screams stopped. As if someone had switched the channel from one radio drama to the next, her husband’s voice replaced it.
“Sons of whores, come any closer and you’ll taste my pike! Sharon, get behind me!”
My head whipped towards the noise like a flag when the wind changes. I sprinted, squinting through the murky darkness. Moving shapes were all I could see at first, shapes that got sharper by the second. A group of men in rough coats and patched caps wielding rusted weapons. Rabble recruited by the Sway, they stormed the front door of the only house on the block still occupied. They hovered just shy of the shattered door, kept at bay by a long bladed spear that thrust outwards again and again. Bottlenecked in the thin opening, James fought valiantly but didn’t last long. A sword slashed through the haft of the pike that looked old as the city itself. Selane screamed again as the ruffians poured into her house. I ran like a cheetah, arms and legs a blur, focused on the flickering light in the doorway where screams of terror had turned to pain.
I couldn’t find Kristina. No way in hell would I let these innocent people die.
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