By morning, the Welling Post had been picked up by three other papers, and the wording had gotten worse with each repetition.
UNKNOWN GROUP BREACHES CENTRAL DISTRICT. TWO PALACE STAFF DEAD, FOURTEEN ATTACKERS KILLED. MP AND RMO FAIL TO HOLD INNER WARD. PALACE'S DIVINITY CALLED INTO QUESTION.
The original article had only said "sources from the Palace report a disturbance in the residential corridor last night." That had been enough. The other papers had finished the sentence in the worst possible directions, and the city — already nervous about New Thalassia, already nervous about everything — had finished the sentence past that.
In a small bookkeeping office near the eastern central market, two women shared a pot of tea over the morning's papers.
"But the business last night really was a disgrace, wasn't it."
"The breaking in, yes. But this nonsense?" The second woman flicked the corner of one paper with her thumbnail. One rumor that some shadowy figure made Her Majesty bleed and suddenly it's a front-page question whether she's a real goddess at all. No proof. No source. Nothing."
"A fabricated divinity. A puppet. A fraud. Have you ever heard such filth in your life?"
They sighed in unison.
"And apparently there's some bigger announcement coming tomorrow. From the same paper."
"Lady Flaure could never be a fraud!" Eva snapped, more sharply than she had meant to. She set her cup down with a small definitive sound. "I've worked in that Palace for thirty-one years. I know her. She is the kindest woman this city has ever stood under."
"I know, I know. She's good to us, no one is arguing that." The second woman softened, the way you soften with someone whose certainty is dear and a little fragile. "Even if she does go cold sometimes."
Eva did not answer.
The rain at the window had not let up since before dawn.
---
Several hours earlier. The outer wall of the eastern district. The rain was very loud.
A small patrol of officers moved along the curve of the city wall in long oilskins, lanterns lifted, the rain hammering the brims of their hats into a steady percussive blur. Twenty of them. Most MP. A handful of RMO, on loan from the central district reassignments. One of them is Captain Renfield.
"This is not fair," muttered the officer beside Rafael. "Three shifts in a row. Three."
"Most of the office got pulled off to guard the central district and the gates," Rafael said, the way you state an unpleasant fact you have already accepted. "There's no one else left to do it."
"What are we actually checking for, Senior?"
"The news came down on us this morning," Rafael said. He was at the front, lantern lower than the others, watching the ground more than the wall. "Word is there might be hidden passages along the wall line. So here we are."
"My head's gone soft from the cold..."
"Right, well." Rafael half-turned and clapped Emil on the shoulder, with a glance back toward the trailing officers. "Don't show that to the new ones, eh, Emil. Don't let our fellow junior there get the idea that the MP are the runts of the litter."
"Whatever, senior."
"Try to take it seriously, gentlemen." Rafael said to the junior following
"Yes, sir," chorused down the line.
The patrol moved on.
The rain hammered.
---
Emil's boot came down on something that did not behave the way ground was supposed to behave.
He felt the give before he heard it. A soft, wet yielding — as though the earth beneath his heel had a small amount of air trapped under it and had decided to release that air on his weight. He drew his foot back fast, frowning, and looked down.
The patch under his boot was darker than the surrounding soil.
Look corrupted.
The ground further on looked the same. And the next.
"...sir."
Rafael had stopped. He was looking at his own feet.
So were the others, one by one. The whole patrol.
The ground for several yards in every direction was soft and abnormally dark.
Not muddy. Soft in the specific, wrong way that earth is soft like fresh cover up of something wrong.
A small puddle near Emil's left foot did not behave like a puddle. It bulged slightly. It settled.
It bulged again.
"Lanterns," Rafael said quietly. "All of them. Now."
A dozen lanterns lifted at once.
The light spread, wet and cold, across a patch of churned earth perhaps thirty yards across — and across the points along that patch where, very slowly, the mud was beginning to push up.
A single eye broke the surface, three feet from Emil's right boot.
It was not the eye of a buried man. It was an eye that had no human business existing on land. Dark all the way through. No iris. No white. The wet membrane of it twitched, blinked once, shuddered — and stayed open, fixed on Emil's lantern, the small wet sound of its blinking lost in the rain.
Emil did not move.
Three more eyes opened, in a ragged line across the patch. Then five. Then a dozen.
The earth was waking up.
"Holy—"
"Oh my—"
"God, what is that—"
"Hye don't move, don't move, don't—" Said out of desperation.
"What are those — what are those things, their eyes, what is wrongwith their—"
Someone — Emil could not see who — broke discipline and fired.
The pistol's bark was extraordinarily loud in the rain.
A wet thing screamed under the mud. The patch erupted — soil and water and dark shapes lifting up out of the ground all at once, twisting, wrong, far more of them than anyone had counted eyes for, their bodies still half-formed under their hides where the rain had not yet given them away. They were the shape of dogs and the shape of pigs and the shape of nothing at all. Their eyes did not stop twitching.
The noise of gun firing only stirred more of them to wake.
"WHAT IDIOT FIRED—"
"THESE DUMBASS MP—"
"FALL BACK, FALL BACK, FALL BACK—"
The first one moved before anyone finished saying fall back.
It came at the line of lanterns low and very fast, faster than a thing that size should have been able to move from a standing start in wet mud, and the man closest to Emil — a young MP officer did not have time to lift his rifle. The thing hit him at the chest. He went over. He did not get up.
Then everything was happening at once.
Renfield and three other greycoat — had their catalysts out before Emil had registered them moving. Wind burst against those beast in front of the patrol; one of the eyeless things took it full in the face and reeled and screamed and kept coming, its body smoking, its eyes still twitching, still tracking, until a second blast from a different catalyst pulped its skull and finally put it down. It took two RMO officers in coordination to kill one.
There were thirty of the things at least.
There were Twenty patrol officers, four of whom had catalysts.
"RUN!" someone screamed from the back of the line. "GET OUT, GET OUT, OFFICERS, RUN—"
Emil was firing his pistol. He did not entirely remember drawing it. He was firing into a body that was crossing the gap between him and Rafael and the bullets were going into it and the body was not stopping, and somewhere in the part of his brain that was not currently shrieking at him to live he was thinking, with a strange detached clarity:
A hand grabbed his collar.
"EMIL, MOVE!"
Rafael, dragging him bodily backward. Emil's pistol hand went up reflexively and put two more rounds into the dark and one of them hit something because a thing screamed and the others did not.
"That Captain is covering — RUN, WHILE WE CAN—"
Emil ran.
Behind them, the Greycoats and Renfield — were standing in a tight ring with their catalysts glowing, throwing wind and ice and concussive blasts in alternating bursts to give the rest of the patrol the chance to clear the path. Renfield's voice cut through the rain, sharp, professional, terrified.
"FALL BACK"
A scream from somewhere in the dark behind Emil. Cut short.
He did not turn to see whose.
The patrol that had walked out from the wall as Twenty made it back to the inner gate as twelve.
All in shock and shivering.
The rain washed the mud off their boots in the lamplight, and none of them looked at each other directly as if they feared if they looked well enough they might not find their friend there anymore.
---
Far to the south, the rain at Thalassia had stopped some time before dawn, and the port was glassy and still.
A figure with hair color of autumm leaf sat alone at the end of a long stone pier.
The harbor stretched out in front of her, dark and calm. The sea did not move very much. Behind her, somewhere up in the streets, the city she had built was beginning to wake — voices, shutters opening, a dog barking once and then deciding against it.
A small herd of animals had collected around her on the pier. Two cats. A spotted dog. A kitten the color of cream, blinking up at her with the trustful stupidity of a thing that had not yet learned that the world contained reasons not to trust.
She bent and picked the kitten up.
It went limp in her hand in the way kittens do when they have decided a person is safe. She held it against her shoulder.
"...someone's housecat, hm."
She rested her cheek against its head.
"Aren't you sweet."
The water in front of her was very still. She could see her own reflection on it — the dark hair, the broken halo, the pale face, the cream kitten against her shoulder.
"Are we right, do you think," she said quietly. The kitten did not answer. "To have done all this. Ordinary people are bleeding for our hands."
A pause.
"How pathetic I am. Half-divine, and yet.."
She closed her eyes.
The kitten purred against her collar.
"Why would I made deal with that witch for my mere safety.."
"Why, Seir.."
"Why, kitty.."
A single drop slid down her cheek and broke on the pier.