Red Wishes Black Ink

Vitt Secondson-Salvado, Hunter of the 9th Renown, Kingdom of Infinzel, considering the price of the human body

Watts Stonework, Survivor of the 1st Renown, Soldier's Rest, punching out

Rivian Stonespirit, Sword Master of the 5th Renown, Soldier's Rest, from parts unknown

9 Blossum, 61 AW

The pyramidal city of Infinzel, North Continent

51 days until the next Granting

All Vitt's favorite brothels were in Soldier's Rest, but none of them would let him in.

Vitt knew this was the fault of Traveon Twiceblack. During the outer district strike, the mouthy bartender had been giving his little speeches in the streets, babbling about how Vitt had callously carved up the face of the working man sent to present the Rest's demands to the king. Well, Vitt hadn't known who the man was when he'd gouged him, had he? It was just an honest scuffle between two men. Shouldn't that have mattered?

Gods, but he should've tried to kill that bartender sooner. And, having failed at that, to see Traveon swaggering around atop Nortmost like it was his soapbox, alive and freshly Inked while Vitt forewent his own opportunity—the indignities of this year were relentless.

Vitt had hoped the gentle breeze of spring would carry forgiveness to Soldier's Rest, but he found himself still unwelcome in his old haunts. No women available for the foreseeable future, Secondson. We are fully booked. We are out of spirits. Excuses, excuses, smirking excuses. Hadn't these people gotten everything they wanted? They had no idea what Vitt himself had sacrificed over the years. Perhaps, if they did, they wouldn't be so hasty to turn him away.

Of course, he could've forced the issue, but he wouldn't give the people of Soldier's Rest another opportunity to play the victim. He moved on—from whorehouse to whorehouse—with the honor befitting the Secondson-Salvado.

There were always the courtesans of the pyramidal city's entertainment levels. Vitt couldn't stand them. He felt enclosed there, and not in the ways he wished to be. Too many of the women had attempted to turn down his payment, seeking instead a favor or his time, dinner and an introduction. Such encumbrances defeated the whole purpose of the exercise.

And so, it was a great relief to Vitt that he found the doors of Wanderlust open to him. The brothel was in the mercantile quarter of the outer districts which hadn't entirely fallen under the sway of Bel Guydemion, given that these wealthy Twicegolds and their foreign clients had just as much to lose as the nobles if the wheel of commerce ground to a halt. Wanderlust specialized in exotics—not something Vitt typically went in search of. Nonetheless, he had taken up residency on the brothel's third floor for the last week. He wondered if the gods would keep him from catching anything too nasty from the expatriates he sampled. Additionally, the food was decent.

On the seventh day of his residency at Wanderlust, Vitt found himself in the company of a young woman from Ruchet. She had the milky white skin and saucer-shaped eyes of a swamp woman, but not the sulfuric smell that Vitt had heard rumored. He hadn't enjoyed the bullfrog tattoo upon her neck—the gods were cruel with that choice—but there were simple solutions to such problems. Vitt would've been happier if nothing in his life ever proved more complex than whether or not to flip a woman onto her belly.

"Is this ethical?" Vitt heard himself ask.

The woman from Ruchet guffawed at the question, a noise which Vitt did not appreciate. He'd forgotten her name and, in that moment, decided he would refer to her as Toad. She stood at the basin with her back to Vitt, cleaning herself. Vitt, meanwhile, stretched across the bed, the gold-and-white cotton sheet tangled around his legs. He could not articulate where the question had come from exactly, only that it had bubbled up from precisely the annoying thoughts he had come here to drown.

"Did I say something funny, Toad?" Vitt asked.

The woman glanced over her shoulder and coyly raised an eyebrow, not reacting at all to the nickname. "I suppose not, master."

Vitt felt a stirring in his abdomen at the look, yet was still compelled to elaborate. "I've paid for your body's use, have I not? We've come to that agreement?"

Toad turned to face him fully, crossing her arms across her chest. "They said you had a tab open. Too late to haggle."

"Haggle, gah, no," Vitt replied. "I am only wondering about the… economics. You've come to an adequate arrangement with your employer, I assume. You're compensated fairly?"

The woman paused to consider this, then shrugged. "I've worked in worse places."

Vitt sat up. "And how did you arrive at your number? For the use of your flesh? How did you decide what was a fair rate for what you're giving up?"

"The madam decided," Toad said glumly, but she quickly perked up. "Oh, are you thinking about opening your own place, master?"

"What? No." Vitt sighed. "Finish cleaning up and then I think I'd like some din-"

The building shook. Wood snapped and glass shattered. It sounded to Vitt like a carriage had crashed into the brothel. Toad gasped and dropped her washcloth. Two floors below, men and women were screaming, and not in the way Vitt had learned to tone out.

Looping the sheet around his waist, Vitt hopped up from the bed. "Stay there," he told the woman.

Vitt opened the door to his room just as the client next door—a chubby merchant still in his silk shirt and britches—was doing the same. Exchanging a look, the two men approached the balustrade, peering down at a common room that had gone suddenly, suspiciously quiet.

Something pale and L-shaped sat in a dark puddle on the floorboards below. Vitt narrowed his eyes.

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"Champion?" the merchant said quietly. "Is that an arm?"

"Yes," Vitt replied.

Vitt spun back toward his room where Toad peeked out from behind the doorframe, her eyes somehow rounder and wider than before.

"Fetch my sword, would you?" Vitt said.

Toad nodded, turned toward the trunk where Vitt had stashed his weapons, and then the window exploded inward. At first, Vitt thought someone had fired a catapult at the brothel and crushed his whore with a boulder. But then, the rock that had landed atop her moved, ripping at the woman's throat with powerful jaws.

A gargoyle.

"Fuck me," Vitt said.

The beast saw Vitt, shrieked, and then galloped toward him. Vitt snapped the sheet from around his waist and spun to the side, draping the fabric across the gargoyle's head as it pounced through the space where Vitt had been. The gargoyle careened through the balustrade, splintering wood, and started to fall to the floor below. Its leathery wings snapped and flexed, and it wheeled about in the air, shaking free from the sheet.

"Patricia," Vitt said.

He used [Summon Nightstalker] and the sleek, muscular cat appeared at his side. Vitt flicked his fingers toward the gargoyle and the nightstalker responded with a skeptical tilt of her head. Then, she leapt for the gargoyle, landing on the creature's back and shredding the soft tissue of its wings with her claws.

Vitt glanced to his right. The merchant had run back into his room and locked the door. Bending down, Vitt collected two pieces of splintered wood from the shattered railing.

The gargoyle twisted in midair, tucked it wings in, and rolled onto the landing near Vitt. Patricia leapt clear at the last moment to avoid being crushed. Floorboards split as the gargoyle righted itself. Vitt backpedaled and used [Open Weak Point]. A fist-sized hole opened in the gargoyle's stone sternum, revealing the glowing arcane core within.

Vitt waited for the gargoyle to leap for him, then bent himself backward. He thrust one of the improvised stakes into the gargoyle's mouth, wedging it there vertically, to buy himself a moment when it wasn't snapping at him. Then, he plunged the other stake into the hole he'd made in the gargoyle's chest. The core exploded in an icy burst that chilled Vitt's skin. He twisted to the side to avoid being pinned beneath the now lifeless beast, stone scraping against flesh as he did.

Catching his breath, Vitt returned to his room. He knelt down next to Toad and put a hand on her chest. She was dead.

"Underpaid," Vitt muttered. "I'm sorry."

Watts Stonework mopped sweat off his brow, then shoved the handkerchief into his back pocket. He surveyed the empty pits that would become the Rest's mineral garden with a sense of satisfaction that didn't feel entirely deserved. How many nights had they spent in Guydemion's drinking their way toward bigger and bigger ideas? Carina, Traveon, Hellie—they had been the passionate ones. All their talk about making better lives for those stuck outside. Watts had always been more skeptical. Those others never had to put a drunk into a chokehold or wrestle a thief to the ground. They talked in theories and fantasies. Watts dealt with the physical reality of what men would do to get just a little bit more.

But now, here he stood, watching as the workers knocked off for dinner, the mineral garden a little closer to completion than the day before. In the past, he'd shoved some of those very men out of Guydemion's on their ass and now they smiled at him and wished him good night, like he was their honest foreman.

Which, Watts supposed, was true. A strange turn his life had taken.

Rivian Stonespirit reined her warhorse in beside him. Watts could feel the heat rolling off the beast's immaculate, tan hide. The horse's black eyes studied him with the same inscrutability as Rivian.

"Ahead of schedule," she said. "Good."

"Honest work finds eager hands," Watts said, a saying he'd gotten from his father.

"Yes," Rivian agreed.

Watts waited for her to say more and, when she didn't, he hooked his thumb toward the wall. "I got to collect Otis from Guydemion's and then we're having dinner with Henry, if you're hungry."

He had been inviting Rivian to supper with them for a week now, ever since they'd come back from the north. The sword master always declined. She kept to herself and Watts wasn't the type to push. Cortland had it right to wonder about her, though. Watts did, too. She hadn't been in the dreamy conversations at Guydemion's, but was somehow part of the old man's inner circle, appearing with the broken wall tattoo as if she'd spent her whole life in Soldier's Rest, though Watts couldn't ever recall seeing her. Bel hadn't been any more forthcoming with Rivian's origin, acting as if she'd always been around and Watts just hadn't noticed. To Watts, it felt a bit like Bel had himself a secret family that he'd never told any of them about, stashed away in some other district. Well, someone would tell Watts the truth, eventually, if he ever needed to know it. That's how things went. He wasn't like Carina—he didn't feel entitled to the truth at all times. His father was a worker, and so was he, even if the duties were bigger than he'd ever imagined.

As usual, Rivian shook her head. "I want to ride a bit more," she replied. "He likes the sunsets."

"Suit yourself," Watts said. "I'll…" He adjusted his eyepiece. "What is that?"

There was something crawling across the top of one of the stone blocks their team had moved into place that afternoon. For a moment, Watts thought it was a lion, although he'd only seen one of those when a circus came through the districts. The creature looked like it was sniffing across the stone, rubbing its muzzle against the rough surface. Then, wings unfurled from the thing's back and Watts knew.

A gargoyle.

"Do you see…?" Watts whispered, though he knew by the whispery sound of Rivian drawing her sashblades that she had.

The workers who had left the dig site were shouting and scattering. There were more gargoyles, rising up from across the ring-wall like sentries and diving down into the people like birds upon breadcrumbs. Watts counted two, three, four—

A shifting in the light above, like a cloud moving in, was their only warning. Rivian's warhorse shied and whinnied, bumping Watts to the side with its rear end, which was all that saved him from getting crushed by the gargoyle that plummeted down on them.

The gargoyle stood with tufts of grass poking out from the edges of its stone joints. The creature raked its claws down the warhorse's flanks and Rivian's mount responded by driving one of its back hooves into the gargoyle's face. The blow flattened the creature's sculpted features and snapped its jaw off, but it nonetheless bulled forward, trying to knock the horse over. Rivian swung around side-saddle as the gargoyle raised one of its paws for another attack, and she tapped the creature's limb with one of her sashblades. The gargoyle's arm crumbled. She had used [Disarmer], an ability meant to destroy weapons—Rivian had used it with some success against the stone walkers on Nortmost, who were otherwise unaffected by her edged weapons.

Unbalanced on three limbs, the gargoyle slumped forward. Rivian's warhorse reared up and came down with all its weight, smashing through the stone carapace until the glowing center that had appeared through the gargoyle's cracks was extinguished.

From the pyramidal city, bells tolled. They had never rung in Watts' lifetime, but he knew what they meant. They were the bells of siege.

Rivian looked down at him. "You need a weapon."

Watts pointed toward the workers—the ones who hadn't yet been pinned and killed. "Go! Help them!"

Without another word, Rivian tapped her heel against her warhorse's side and took off at a gallop. Watts knew he would only slow her down.

His wife was back in Soldier's Rest, probably with Henry. His son was with Bel Guydemion, at the tavern. They would need his help.

Watts spotted a shovel sticking up from a pile of dirt at the edge of the pit. It would have to do. He scrambled across the loose dirt, grabbed for the tool—and then he was flying.

Bewilderment came first, and then the sharp pain in his shoulders where the gargoyle's talons had dug in. Watts thrashed, his shirt and flesh ripping, and for a moment he thought he had the monster's grip loosened—that he was falling—but only because the gargoyle meant to dash him into the earth, down, down into the pit that Watts had watched dug.

The wind left him and Watts felt his ribs splinter as the gargoyle crushed him down into the pit. His eyepiece bounced loose from his face and—stupidly, instinctively—Watts groped for it. Otis had made him that. He liked it. Even if he groused about the delicacy of the frame, Watts liked it.

The gargoyle was on his back. Perhaps it was better that Watts couldn't see it coming, that his focus was on the eyepiece, that his thoughts were of his son. The creature's beak came down on the back of Watts' skull like a blow from an axe, fracturing it, opening his head. Then, not yet satisfied, the gargoyle's pincer-mouth found the side of Watts' neck and ripped loose the artery there. Only then, when the dirt turned to mud beneath Watts' throat, did the gargoyle move on in search of the next warm body. This one had gone cold.