Blood and Briar

Chapter 5: "When The Dark Things Come"

It started with the disappearances.

Not the kind that Thyrandor was used to. People vanished from this city all the time, debtors fleeing creditors, girls running from arrangements they had not agreed to, men who had said the wrong thing to the wrong soldier on the wrong evening. That kind of disappearing had a logic to it. A cause and effect that the city had learned to absorb without flinching.

This was different.

Zed brought the news to The Iron Sparrow just after sundown, appearing at Vesper's door with his usual complete disregard for the concept of knocking and his face wearing an expression she had not seen on it before. Not his usual sharp cheerful readiness. Something quieter. Something shaken.

He sat down without being invited and put both hands flat on the table and looked at her.

"Three families," he said. "Lower quarter. Gone since last night. Doors left open. Food still on the tables. No signs of struggle."

Vesper was very still.

"No bodies?" she asked.

"Nothing," Zed said. "Not even a drop of blood. Just empty houses and open doors and the neighbours too frightened to go inside and look."

He pulled a small object from his satchel and placed it on the table between them. It was a child's shoe. Small. Worn at the toe. The kind of shoe a child wears every single day until it falls apart because it is the only pair they have.

It had been found outside one of the empty houses.

Vesper looked at it for a long moment.

"How many people?" she said quietly.

"Across the three families?" Zed said. "Fourteen. Including five children."

The silence that followed was the kind that has weight.

Vesper stood and reached for her cloak.

"Take me there," she said.

The lower quarter at night was a different world from the market streets Vesper had walked in daylight. The buildings pressed closer together here, the alleys narrowing to barely a shoulder width, the lamplight thin and unreliable. The people who were still out moved quickly and kept to the middle of the streets, away from the shadows at the edges.

They already knew something was wrong.

Cities always know before they admit it.

Zed led her to the first house. The door was indeed open, swinging slightly in the night breeze as though someone had simply stepped out for a moment and would be back any second. Vesper stepped inside.

She smelled it immediately.

Not blood. Something older and colder than blood. The particular absence that Belphegor's creatures left behind when they fed on something deeper than flesh. Souls had a scent when they were taken violently. Most people could not detect it. It was something between extinguished candles and winter earth and the specific silence of a room where someone has just stopped breathing.

Vesper knew it well.

She had smelled it twice before, both times in the aftermath of Belphegor's raids on outlying villages near Crimsonpeak. Both times Draconius had sealed the reports and forbidden discussion.

She stood in the middle of the small empty room and looked at the table. A bowl of soup, cold now, a spoon still resting in it. A child's drawing on the floor near the hearth, half finished, a sun and a house and figures that were probably a family. She crouched and picked it up carefully.

"Vesper," Zed said quietly from the doorway.

His voice had a quality in it she had not heard before. Not fear exactly. Something just before fear. The moment when you realise the thing you suspected is real.

She turned.

He was pointing at the wall beside the door.

She had not seen it on the way in. It was low, almost at floor level, the height a person would be if they were crawling or dragged. Three lines, scored into the plaster deeply, evenly spaced. Not made by human fingers.

Vesper crouched beside it and looked without touching.

A marking. A claim. The same symbol she had seen carved into the stones outside two villages near Crimsonpeak that Draconius's soldiers had found emptied in the same way.

Belphegor's mark.

"What is that?" Zed said very quietly.

"A signature," Vesper said. "They mark what they take."

"Why?"

Vesper stood slowly. "Because they intend to come back for more."

Rue was waiting for them in the basement room when they returned. She was not alone. Seated around the table were four people Vesper had not met, a middle aged man with a healer's bag, a young woman with a crossbow across her knees, an older woman wrapped in a dark shawl who said nothing and watched everything, and a boy no older than fifteen who was trying very hard to look like he was not afraid and failing in the specific way that brave people fail at hiding fear.

Rue looked at Vesper's face when she walked in and read it immediately.

"It is them," Rue said. Not a question.

"Yes," Vesper said.

The room absorbed that in silence.

The young woman with the crossbow tightened her grip on it unconsciously. The healer put his bag on the table with a heaviness that had nothing to do with its weight. The older woman in the shawl closed her eyes briefly and opened them again and they were very steady.

The boy swallowed hard.

"What do they want?" the healer asked.

"Everything," Vesper said simply. "They do not raid for sport. They do not take for feeding alone. Belphegor's purpose is consumption. He does not want to simply terrorise the human world." She paused and looked around the table at each face in turn. "He wants to hollow it out entirely. City by city. Kingdom by kingdom. Until there is nothing left."

The silence that followed was absolute.

Then the older woman in the shawl spoke for the first time. Her voice was low and even and carried the particular authority of someone who has survived things that would have destroyed most people.

"And you?" she said, looking directly at Vesper. "What do you want?"

Every eye in the room turned to her.

Vesper held the old woman's gaze steadily.

"The same thing you do," she said.

"Which is?"

"For them to be stopped."

Another silence. The candles on the table flickered in a draft from somewhere and the shadows jumped and rearranged themselves along the walls.

"Can they be stopped?" Rue asked.

Vesper thought about her father sealed behind the gates of Crimsonpeak. She thought about the child's drawing still folded in her cloak pocket. She thought about Briar saying more than I have, so far with that door left slightly open.

She thought about what it would cost.

"Yes," she said quietly. "But not by any one of us alone."

Rue looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded once, slowly, the same decisive nod she had given on the first day. A judgement made and stood by.

"Then we plan," Rue said.

She spread a hand drawn map of Thyrandor across the table. The others leaned in. Zed uncapped a pen with his teeth and reached for the map.

Vesper looked at the marked exits. The gates. The alleys wide enough for carts.

She thought about fourteen people. Five children. An open door swinging in the night wind. A small worn shoe on an empty street.

She pulled her chair to the table.

And then the door at the top of the stairs opened.

Everyone froze.

Footsteps on the stairs. Slow. Deliberate. One at a time.

The young woman raised her crossbow. Rue's hand moved to the blade at her hip. Zed was absolutely still in a way that Vesper had not seen from him before, all the cheerful ease gone, replaced by something sharp and animal and ready.

The door at the bottom of the stairs opened.

Briar stood in the doorway.

Her dress was torn at the shoulder. There was blood on her collarbone, not much, a thin line of it, already drying. Her green eyes moved around the room quickly and settled on Vesper with an expression that was equal parts relief and something that looked very much like terror.

"She knows," Briar said. Her voice was steady but her hands were not. "Seraphina. She knows you are here." She looked at Vesper directly. "And she is not coming alone."

Nobody moved.

Nobody breathed.

Outside in the streets of Thyrandor something that was not wind moved through the dark.