Welcome to the New Age

[Krowe]

The huntress tore the last of her lacy disguise free and let the chill wind take it. She wore leather and skintight witchfiber underneath, but she was cold anyway. The handles of a half-dozen throwing knives peeked out from behind the myriad straps and belts she wore less for utility and more for the illogical sense of security they afforded her. She ran her fingers through short, stiff hair, slicking it back against her scalp, and sighed as she looked out over the city. She was pushing fifty and she felt like it – no amount of training and preparation could compensate for lost youth.

But no matter how old she got, she’d never be worse off than Radasanth – she swore that every morning. The jewel of Corone had died years ago, but it was limping on like it could ignore the sight of its own exposed bone and leaking heart’s-blood. She lifted one boot to rest on a cold and leaning smokestack, catching her breath after the precarious climb to the roof of a half-collapsed inn. This place had seen a thousand heroes come and go, and they were all dead – rotting husks every one, like the inn.

Radasanth was rows upon rows of tightly packed grey-blue buildings, punctuated with stout empty shops and tight, sprawling alleyways full of tents. The city wasn’t empty, but nobody lit fires at night anymore. The windows were dark except for where pale faces stared down at the streets, framed by tattered curtains flowing forlornly. It was the dead of winter and snow drifted endlessly down to the fog-blanketed cobblestone, mingling with ubiquitous flakes of ash, and it melted on landing.

There were frayed clotheslines hung over the cracked streets, still heavy with rotting laundry years-forgotten. The street was a black stretch of cobblestone, loose brick, and potholes full of fetid black water. It was hard to differentiate debris from bodies without a close look, and even then it was often impossible to tell the corpse of man from the corpse of beast. There would be disease, if there were enough people left alive to spread it.

Krowe looked north where the horizon was orange – where the riverside still burned for miles six years after the last mystic died there. She looked west, where The Citadel stood like a colossal black needle snapped in jagged half. And then she kicked herself upright off of the smokestack and turned on the shingled rooftop to look east, where Aleraran searchlights cut pillars into the sky, tracing the voluminous black storm clouds that never left the dead city’s sky.

“Stonehold,” she whispered.

She shouldered her bow and stepped off the roof, just another silent shadow, easy to overlook against the backdrop of a world’s end.

[Krowe]

Krowe could remember a time when the cities could be trusted, no matter how untrustworthy their inhabitants. The streets were kept straight and smooth because money mattered then, and the walls were patched because comfort was something people could afford. Now everything creaked and crumbled, and the only thing one could bank on is that every other handhold would fail.

She couldn’t pick the lock because the rusted mechanism would snap, so she entered through a second floor window and left her bow rested against the sill. She drew a single knife from its place at her right calf, and walked as tight to the outside wall as she was able. Her padded toes were like feathers on the floorboards, but the house sighed and shifted anyway, as if the displacement of air alone was enough to threaten its stability. Sometimes it felt like places in Radasanth wanted to collapse.

Someone had pulled an ornate, high-backed dining chair close to the fireplace in the main bedroom. Krowe crept in one long leg at a time, spiderlike, holding her knife by the blade until she was within four feet of the chair. Then she deftly flipped it around and caught it by the handle in one smooth motion, crossed the rest of the room in a silent bound, and struck.

The knife whipped around the chair and found a throat at full speed, and yet she stopped it before splitting a single white hair. The old man cringed, but did not sink away – the body clung to life, but the mind saw no reason to.

“You feel that?” Krowe whispered.

He opened his unseeing white eyes and gave the slightest nod. Behind the veil of matted, knotted hair and a face half-melted by age, she almost did not recognize him. In true life he’d been a Citadel monk and an ally of sorts, but the world wasn’t what it was. Most men were desperate islands now, eager for the smallest scrap, and the huntress had enemies.

“Odessa,” he wheezed.

“Anatoly,” she said, scanning his face. “You are ugly.”

“I haven’t eaten in weeks. I live on ashy rainwater and mold I lick off the walls. Press harder on your blade, woman, I care not a whit.”

Krowe grunted. “Try harder.”

“Why?” Anatoly said with a sneer.

She tried to think of a reason, and went on staring for a long time. She removed the blade from his throat and tucked it back into its place, and then came around the big chair and crouched in front of it, near the smoldering remains of the ex-monk’s fire. Nobody lit fires at night.

“I need directions,” she said.

Anatoly almost smiled. “And you come to me?”

Krowe stared up at him, and his milky eyes searched the empty air above her head.

“Give me food, and I will tell you where to go.”

“You’d just tell me to go to hell,” Krowe said. “Answer my questions, and I’ll give you food. Not before.”

“I may well starve before you get the answer you want, but that would be fine. Ask quickly, so I can get on with it either way.”

“I need into the old assembly.”

Anatoly wheezed. It might have been a snort from a whole man, or a derisive laugh, but this dusty skeleton only had sickness and exhaustion to express. “You have all the curses of this city between you and what you need, then. Every single one. Abandon your dreams and turn away, as we all should have fifteen years ago. Leave this dead city. Find some far away place, and find what good peace is left in this wretched world. Pray to the Sway or the remaining Thaynes, or find solace with the Kri, but do it far, far from here.”

“The food comes after the answers,” Krowe said evenly.

“Then it never comes. I don’t have the answers you want to hear.”

“Then tell me what I don’t want to hear.”

“You’ll die tonight.”

“Maybe, but I have something to do first. Tell me how I get into the assembly.”

“I cannot tell you how, for there is no way. The Coven and its creatures haunt those buildings, and they brook no trespass, and their hounds can hunt even you. But to even reach the assembly you must pass through Charnel Town where they say the devils dance and no man goes there. And to pass through Charnel Town you must pass through the Bloody Narrows. And to pass through the Bloody Narrows you must pass through The Glaive.”

Krowe frowned. “There must be a way around The Glaive. I saw Anarchist marks on either side of Market Square, so they must have a way.”

“Why ask me? I’m no Chaosman, go ask them.”

Krowe stared at the blind man for a long moment. “What about Stonehold?”

“What about it? It’s the wrong way, and it is also death.”

“So they’ve been crossing Saw Bridge again?”

“Aye,” Anatoly sighed, “stirring up the wrath of the King of the Streets.”

“So the tyrant is there.”

The once-monk shook his head. “Not for months. The rumors say that the dragon-kind have been pushing in on Salvar from the east, and that occupies the tyrant these days. No, it is more likely to be one of his lieutenants holding Stonehold, or perhaps an ambitious general trying to curry favor like a fool. Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Krowe said. She dropped an apple into Anatoly’s lap, and he winced. After a moment of pawing at it, he frowned deeply.

“I’ve no teeth left for this,” he complained.

“Try harder,” Krowe said, and then she was gone.

[Krowe]

“I don’t know anything you just said. It was just blah blah blah, Brown Road, White Street, Black Dog, Blue Sheet.”

“You know who the tyrant is,” Krowe sighed.

“Okay,” Sabine said with a shrug. “But that’s about it. Why the hell are we even here?”

“You know why we’re here.”

“I know why you say we’re here.”

Krowe pursed her lips and looked down at the girl. It was like looking into a mirror that stripped away the years and it broke the huntress’s heart every single time. She crouched down on the rooftop and tucked a single loose strand of black hair in behind Sabine’s ear, and then pressed their foreheads together. “You just have to trust me,” she whispered. “What I’m doing, I’m doing for you.”

“I know that,” Sabine muttered, looking down.

“Look, come here. I’ll show you.”

Krowe stood up straight and stepped away toward where the roof sloped down from the center point. Sabine hopped off the edge of the chimney she’d been perched upon and followed with easy grace, one hand never far from her holstered pistol. Krowe had warned her never to fire it here unless she absolutely had to, but it still worried her. Sabine was not one for restraint, and she’d been born after the end. She’d never known a life where death was out of mind.

Odessa pointed north, where the horizon was forever crimson. “They call that Charnel Town. It’s where the warehouses and the docks and the shipyards used to be. A long time ago the Kri tried to invade from the sea, but the city guard and what was left of the mystics fought them off. The Kri tried to punish them with taptek weapons, and the mystics tried to counter them with magic. There was a chain reaction, and the whole river has been burning since.”

“Like Ixian Castle,” Sabine said.

Krowe nodded. “Exactly like Ixian Castle. When they saw what happened when you mix taptek with mystic magic, they put a bomb in Sei’s catacombs.”

Sabine sighed. “Fucking idiots.”

Krowe grinned and motioned slightly to the east of Charnel Town, where an impenetrable cloud of fog was settling over the distant rooftops. “That’s the Bloody Narrows. It used to be Radasanth’s uptown and there were still people living there until a few years ago, but then it went silent.”

“Maybe they evacuated because of the fires?”

Krowe shook her head. “Nobody saw them leave, and a flight like that would have been gradual. This was sudden. I’ve never heard of anybody going in there since it happened.”

“Great. Okay, what’s that place?”

“That’s The Citadel, or what’s left of it. They call that section of the city The Glaive now. The Enders have a church there.”

“Okay, so we’re not going through there.”

“No.”

“Okay, so why don’t we go the long way around the outside of the city?” Sabine pointed west.

“Normally we would, but it would take a long time and the Doja hold that territory. We’d have to stop and rest at some point, and you remember how hard it is to hide from the Doja. That way is a death sentence.”

“But you said the Anarchists hold the way to the east,” Sabine said. “Crazy fucking cannibal rapist arsonists to the right, Akashiman death cult to the left. I don’t see how you can pick one over the other.”

Krowe nodded. “Normally yes, but in some places the tyrant’s people and the Anarchists get along, at least in short spurts.” She pointed southeast, and Sabine turned to regard the distant searchlights – the one spot of searing white light in the whole black city. “So the only way forward is to go back.”

“Um…you’ve been trying to kill him. A lot. I don’t think he’s going to jump at the chance to help us,” Sabine said.

“You don’t know until you try,” Krowe said.