Tallah

I’m lost. It wasn’t a comfortable thought and an even worse realisation. Some of the narrower paths he’d followed coming in had snowed up as the storm churned and swirled above, seemingly gaining strength as morning approached. Going through the narrow chocked gaps proved foolhardy.

He could try—and didn’t relish the thought of—returning to Master Ludwig to wait out the weather. Admitting defeat was better than freezing to death.

Tallah’s words were absurd. ‘Go there, come back, don’t faff about.’ Bloody damn easy for her to decree, inhuman as she bloody was.

Valen had trapped him in the Alchemists’ Quarter and kept him trudging in circles. When a path proved blocked, he backtracked, then tried to go around. The whole thing repeated a few too many times and, with so little light, his headware had lost track of his turns and couldn’t offer anything beyond vague solutions for guidance.

Staring at an intersection of narrow alleys, the tracks behind him filling back up, he wasn’t certain he could find Ludwig’s hovel again.

I should wait for dawn. But where? Knock on a random door?

But there were no lit lights, no opened gates, no inviting doors. There was life, yes, by the muffled sound of work getting done, but heavy shutters had been drawn to keep Winter and stray fools out.

It was getting harder to think. It was getting hard to breathe. An iron fist made up of night and cold squeezed him as he still tried to move forward. He’d already drank Sil’s concoction and it did absolutely shit-all to help.

And the thing on the back of his head stung. It broke through the chill and kept him on edge, always aware of the heat behind his ears. Was he straying too far from the Meadow? Would it really kill him as horribly as Sil promised?

Of course it would. Tallah wouldn’t have lied just to keep him scared. Her wonderful personality managed that job expertly.

“Where am I?” he groaned as he started down another alley and immediately hit a dead end in a narrow slit between buildings. Snow rose up to his hips and it was soaking through his trousers and into his boots.

He sighed, turned back, took the left path instead of the right, and fell. He stepped onto empty space and went arse over tip down a steep, frozen incline of stairs. This is how I die, he thought as he groped for a rail too far out of reach. He hit the twist in the drop and the flat of the first landing with a bone-crunching thud. Air went out of him in a painful gasp as he scrambled to grab hold of the thin, invisible balustrade, momentum trying to skid him forward and out into the black.

It took a ridiculously long time to haul himself up. Something inside his chest felt tender. He’d fallen quite a distance and was saved by the turn in the stairs, where they’d been built to hug the wall. He would have met Spring dead, frozen, and buried somewhere in the Agora below, shattered like porcelain if not for the wrought-iron rail.

There were all sorts of smaller ways to travel between the layers of Valen aside from the lifts. Some were safer than others. Most were closed off in Winter for good reason but not sealed off against idiots stumbling through.

“How lucky I am.” Pushing the words out hurt. Drawing in the next gasping, frigid breath stabbed into his chest.

Below the night brightened and stray wisps of light punctured the dark. He wasn’t sure he was seeing spots or if it was the Agora, but going down seemed like a better idea than up. All he needed to do was make sure he didn’t slip.

He slipped.

A few meters still off solid ground his gloved hand caught a patch of ice glass on the balustrade, lost its grip, and he fell again. This time there was enough snow at the bottom to cushion the drop. Barely enough.

Vergil considered lying where he fell. It was soft. He could sleep in the crater he’d made and everything would be all right come morning. Or Spring. Whichever.

Why even bother getting back? Snow was comfier than the gibbet had been and he’d been perfectly content to wait to die in the cave. He was starting to feel wonderfully numb and cosy, even warm, in the encasing embrace of the storm.

Seek shelter immediately!

Danger!

Hypothermia onset: Imminent danger to limb and life!

Red, bold letters scrolled over the gathering dark on the edges of his vision. They made no sense.

Tallah could hang. His mission could hang too. She didn’t care if he came back or—

Someone grabbed and hauled him up by the scruff of the neck. A swift, vicious kick in the arse shot him moving forward again, stumbling through the snow. He spun around, but there was nobody there, only the gash he’d cut through the banks.

He was pushed again, forward to the light, as if an invisible hand had lost patience with him.

Move, ye dryshite milksop sprig. Yer legs still work.

Danger!

Hypothermia onset: Imminent danger to limb and life!

Sil’s tonic bubbled in his stomach and filled him with renewed strength. What was he thinking?! No, he wasn’t going to die on a walk from one part of the city to the other. The idea of it was mental. If Tallah heard she’d laugh her arse off.

Though… had Argia just insulted him? He tried to scroll back but the text garbled up. It kept repeating the danger warning over and over again, the letters rearranging and disappearing.

“What the Hell’s going on?” he gasped out, feeling like he was losing bits of his mind.

Nothing in his life had been quite as wonderful as that sight of the Agora in the predawn gloom, lit sparsely by sprite lights. Stalls were closed and buried under thick, white blankets, barely even resembling their function. But he knew where he was. He had woken up on the first day exactly two alleyways from where he stood just then.

“The Pitcher’s just ahead.” Ahead, unfortunately, meant all the way across the great plaza. Vergil doubted the dregs of strength he was drawing on.

But to the right of him, just a short jaunt away, was Merg’s. It occurred to him that Mertle had gone into the night just a short time before he did and less dressed for it too. He liked her a lot, from the little she’d talked to him when coming and going together with Sil.

Sil, who to his absolute surprise, was actually human. It made her a lot easier to approach and talk to. The aelir persona made him sweat and stutter and stumble over words that should have been easy.

He pushed on Merg’s door and it swung inwards easily, unlocked, helped by the eager wind.

“Mertle…” His voice came out in a ragged, croaking whisper.

Closing the door was almost too difficult to manage. The gale put up a fight. With a creak, and taking everything he had left, he managed to push back the heavy wooden door.

Vergil blinked and immediately regretted it. Bright, intensely hot light blinded him. He blinked again and squinted against the sun flare. For a moment he feared he was still in Ludwig’s door, fainted at the sight of the fireball.

He tried to move.

Something heavy weighed him down. Heat swaddled him. For a split moment he panicked, remembering the cage and the cook fire and…

No!

This wasn’t that cage. This wasn’t the cave. He’d survived them. He’d been rescued. His heart threatened to burst out of him as he tried to work his arms free of whatever bonded him.

The room resolved in his blurry vision. Straight ahead there was the coal-burning heart of a forge. Sweltering heat came out through a grate by the side. To his right there were tools arranged on neat racks on a wall, together with blades of all shapes and sizes. Some looked to have been well used.

“Gave me the scare of my life, Vergil,” a voice said from his left. He swung his gaze around and was startled to look into Mertle’s face leaning in too close for his own comfort.

“What happened?” he whispered. She brought a cup of water to his lips and he drank greedily, only now aware of how thirsty he was.

Mertle disappeared from his side and came back a moment later with a refilled cup. He drank it too.

“What happened?” he asked again, stronger now. Blankets were heaped on top of him as he lay on a narrow cot. The smell of dry hay and weapon grease hit a moment later. He’d never smelled anything more wonderful in his life.

“Our door slammed is what happened. We heard it all the way back here,” Mertle said as she pried some of the blankets off him, making it easier to breathe. “When we rushed out we found it wide open and you collapsed against the wall. Looks like it hit you in the face.”

It had?

Vergil worked his arm out from the blankets and pressed a hand to his cheek. He recoiled. His entire right side was tender and throbbing with a sharp, cutting pain.

He’d slipped when trying to close the blasted thing. It had swung back at him and here he was.

“No wonder Tallah wants armour for you,” Tummy’s voice sounded from behind. His approach was marked by the room trembling with his heavy steps. “You lost a scrape with our door. I’m honestly ashamed of training you.” The smith stopped in front of him and grinned, fists on his hips. “Feeling better, twig?”

“Yeah. Thank you. I didn’t know where else to go.”

“Glad to hear it. Happy to be of service. Now then…”

Tummy grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him up one handed, neatly extracting him from the blankets. His feet dangled above the floor.

“Mind explaining that to us?” he asked and inclined his head towards Mertle.

She held out a flask. It was the one the Storm Guard woman had given him, shining in the light. Mertle caressed the emblazoned mark on the smooth surface.

“Why do you have this, Vergil?” she asked with the same sweetness she had always afforded him, but the smile on her lips did not reach all the way up to her eyes. The way she looked at him unnerved him even worse than the sorceress.

Looking from her to Tummy it dawned on him that he’d gravely misunderstood who these two were. If they had truck with Tallah then there was more to them than he’d been led to believe. The smith held a short sword, as wide as his thick arm. Its blade caught the forge light with a malicious glint.

He told them of his night as fast as his mind could recall and arrange events. He told them of the two he’d met in the storm, of Ludwig and his answer for Tallah, of wandering and falling. And he got as far as the door, in all detail, before Tummy decided to set him back on the cot.

Mertle regarded him thoughtfully, spinning the flask in her slender hands. Tummy waited by her side, sword still at the ready, an unreadable expression on his face. After some time she looked up and gave him the tiniest nod.

“Guess something’s really spooked Tallah if she’s got you running errands in this weather,” she said when Tummy turned around and went to his work. Her smile was back and genuine now. There was real concern in her voice.

Tension bled out of the room and Vergil as she headed to a bucket and emptied the flask in it. She threw the empty container to Tummy, who tossed it into his crucible.

“I think you shouldn’t tell Tallah about your little run-in,” Mertle said as she searched for something in cupboards. “If she’s got thistles in her trousers then this is going to make her insufferable. You don’t want Tallah getting jumpier than her normal.”

“If I were involved with the Storm Guard, wouldn’t it have been stupid to threaten me?” Vergil immediately regretted his words. Out of anything he could have said to fill the silence, he chose to voice the stupidest question he thought of.

But it struck him as so odd. If he were in league with the peace keepers, who’d threaten him so out of hand?!

Mertle laughed softly. Tummy laughed a lot harder.

“Twiggy, you came in from the storm at an ungodly hour. It wouldn’t be much trouble putting you back out in it with your head screwed on backward.” He slammed the hammer on his anvil with earth shaking force, as if to give credence to the words. “Thaw’s still a long way away.”

“Point taken,” Vergil said, swallowing a lump.

“Sil said you have a good head on your shoulders,” Mertle said as she handed him a glass of a clear liquid that smelled pungent. It came from a dusty, unlabelled bottle that she dug out from behind the forge. “She also mentioned you’re sometimes dumber than one of Tummy’s hammers. I think you’re sweet for worrying about me when you had bigger things on your mind.”

He felt his cheeks burn and looked away from her smile.

She wore leather trousers and a battered apron, like the first day he’d walked into their shop. Her back and shoulders were bare, and he could see the dense cluster of tattoos crowding her skin.

One of them bore more than an uncanny resemblance to Sil. There were other faces, smaller, with names and dates written. The text was too small for him to read at a glance.

Without thinking, and to stop himself staring, he threw back the drink. He only caught a glimpse of Mertle’s horrified expression before the world rotated ninety degrees sideways and all went black.