Mercy, and Other Costly Mistakes (nsfw)

[Gargulec]

Introduction and content warnings

The following story is going to get pornographic at places. I can't guarantee there will be much sexually explicit content (my track record with delivering that isn't stellar), but there will definitely be some. When it does make an appearance, it will feature kinks from the broad D/s and S/M spectrum, while also including situation which may edge towards breaches of consent and trust between partners. Those familiar with my previous story (a prison, a body) should find the overall level of potentially unethical sexual behaviour familiar.

Other than that, the story will include some gore, elements of the body horror aesthetic, emotional abuse, and fantasy versions of classism.

Finally, this story is probably going to be lower polish than some of my previous content, and less heavy in pseudo-philosophical meditations and/or self-pleasing literary allusions. There will, however, probably still be some kind of gender stuff going on.

 

[Gargulec]

1. Defeated

Shard of White Obsidian, the once-favoured daughter of the Lair-Mother, whom her countless victims had called a defiler, a despoiler, a demon, was intimately familiar with the art of cornering a prey. She had always enjoyed those moments of driving a victim into a trap from which there would be no escaping, while still allowing the allowing for the extended torture of waiting for the final blow to come, and leaving the false hope that perhaps it could be averted. It was a bliss to draw those moments out, to toy with those fully in her power, to watch them sink deeper and deeper into despair until finally they would beg for the tender caress of her rending claws.

It was a bitter consolation, then, to know that the man who had finally chased her into a corner of her own was not given to any of her cruelties and would do his best to resolve the matter quickly and decisively.

She hid in the rafters of the stinking warehouse, spider-still, her porcelain-like shell pressed into the slant of the roof, blank face trailing the motion of panicked vermin skittering through the rotting filth below. The din of fighting was getting close now; the gang she had hired, ashen-faced low-born brutes of the sort she'd once considered not worthy even of her contempt, was never going to hold against her enemy. But they were stupid enough to accept the promise of riches she dangled before them, irrelevant enough to not have heard about happened to her wealth. All they were ever going to do was to serve as bait, a way to lure the hero into her final ambush, for the one last stab at gutting him and regaining the Lair-Mother's favour.

"We surrender!" someone shouted, panic in their voice.

Shard could taste his fear; it made her mouth water. For once, the promise of violence tasted foul on her lips. If only she could stop her body from being primed for slaughter, from eagerly expecting the familiar rapture of killing, if only she could wish away the hope for pleasure which was not to come, if only she could tell her flesh what her mind knew: that this was not going to work. The cold certainly was a splinter in her thoughts, too painful to consider, and yet impossible to ignore. The ambush hadn't worked thrice before, back when she was at peak of her ability and the hero weak. To hope for better, then, was nothing but a delusion. But a delusion she clung to, consciously, painfully.

"She's inside!" one of her thugs cried. "Inside, I swear!"

"Go," another voice commanded, stern, but kind. Shard knew it well. "Run. I want to never see you again."

There was a pause, and muffled shuffling of feet. And then, the door from the front room opened, and a column of bright light cut into the warehouse's dark. Vermin flew in fear. Beneath her shell, Shard's muscles twisted, claws digging into the wood of the roof, steel wire about to unspool. She stared into the light, waiting for him to come, and quietly praying to all the gods of the depths that wouldn't.

It was a terrible thing to realize that she was afraid. Afraid, and thus weak.

Weak, and thus deserving of what was to follow.

"No," she uttered to herself, tensing for the one last struggle. "No."

She heard her own voice. It trembled, frail and taut. How many times has she heard those exact same words uttered into predatory dark? How many times has replied to them with a crippling cut? But her mouth was not hers to control, she couldn't help herself from repeating after them.

It can't end like that.

The hero entered into the filth carefully, but without concern. How different he looked from the first time she had seen him, sneering from behind a mask at the low-born's efforts to appear stately in court. He was there to plead with the city's patricians for the reprieve of his people, and she was there to ensure that it wouldn't be given. She thought him ungainly then, calloused hands and a simple, honest face. He was not the sort to survive among the mighty, he was not the sort to challenge the Lair-Mother's designs. A reputation for some minor achievement preceded him. He had beaten back some crime lord, averted some disaster. She remembered thinking him an enticing prey, entertaining the idea of seducing him to her side, or, failing that, to make an example out of him to all low-born scum daring to stand up to their betters. She remembered refusing to learn his name; it was beneath her notice. Never once had she considered that he was going to be the end of her.

The spear in his hand gave an easy, holy glow; wards against weakness and tokens of devotion marked his jacket. All the scars he had received from her over the years have faded, and left his face as beautiful as it was on the day their paths had first crossed. Or maybe more? He was mature now. Weathered, but unbroken.

"I know you're here, Shard," he announced into the dark ahead of him. "It's over."

Insults rushed to her mouth; bitter laughter to rebuke him. She bit on her tongue, sharp teeth holding back vile words. She had to stay hidden, she had to let him come closer, she had to get a drop. She had to fight back the knowledge that it was not going to be enough. She couldn't allow it. With all her strength, she focused on the hero, on his motion and words. There had to be an opening waiting for her.

He swept the room with his eyes; they moved past her hidden shape and saw nothing. He stepped deeper in, spear at the ready, looking away. Was he expecting her to hide in the piles of garbage? Was it what he thought he had her reduced to?

"I offered you surrender last time," he continued walking deeper in, spear-tip slicing through refuse, "I will do it again. But you are not walking away, Shard. You are not…"

He paused, frowned, leaned in as if having noticed something, presented his back to the roof and the monster in the rafters. Shard did not think; she acted.

"DIE!" she let off her hate in one shriek, lunging, claws slicing through the air.

There was a terrible sound, the shrill cry of metal shattering porcelain. Burning pain exploded in her chest as the golden blade pierced through her shell. He threw her body over his shoulder and onto the rotten ground, the weight of him driving the spear all the way through and pinning her down like a flailing insect.

"You really thought I didn't notice you lurk?" he asked with a warm smile, pressing down on the weapon in his hands; the shaft was now half-way buried in Shard's chest.

Even from the floor, she slashed at him, incoherent rage flying from her mouth; but he was too far for her claws to reach. They tore at the air in front of him, and he did not even blink.

"It's over, Shard," he repeated, and she knew he was right.

The pain was getting to her slowly, building up in the back of her mind, in the growing numbness of her body. The children of the Lair-Mother were hardly as fragile as mortals, but even for one such as her, the blow was fatal. It wouldn't be immediate though; it wouldn't even be quick.

She knew the play: cripple, and leave to slowly die. Enjoy the show of a life floating away. How many times had she inflicted that upon others? Was it really how she was going to end, too? An ugly laugh quit her mouth.

There really was justice in this broken world.

"I should have killed you... " she rasped, and for once abhorred the fact that the blank porcelain plate of her face couldn't convey all the hate she was feeling, and all the rage. "I should have killed you when I had the chance."

"Shard," he said, and if there was malice in his voice, she could not hear it. He kept her pinned still, and had eyes on her claws. "You could never have done that."

Once again, she swiped at him, her arm flailing in front of him. What else was she going to say?

"You are a parasite," he continued, "you feed on pain and misery. You couldn't have killed me, even when I lay defenseless before you, not without breaking me first. Not without making me admit you were right."

There were no words in the languages she knew to express the extent of her hate for him at that moment. She gargled incoherent fury, twisting herself around the pinion holding her down. He pressed onto it, the spear sinking deeper into the ground.

She let him live so that he could suffer more. She let him live so that one day he would beg her to end him. She let him live, because he was in her power and in the nature of the world there is the indisputable fact that the weak are to be devoured. She let him live, and now he was about to kill her.

She was wrong.

"I used to hate you," he whispered, "back when you were my enemy. But now…"

She thrashed. She felt her body strain; pain bloomed where the spear pierced her and spread like fire through her muscle. But she kept on thrashing, her limbs banging against the decayed floor, scattering damp garbage, throwing up puffs of stinking dust. It was not getting her any closer to striking him.

"...but now, I just pity you. A miserable end, to a miserable existence."

Miserable end. Her thoughts were a rancid stream now, shot through with ever-growing hurt, kept aloft only by the desperate refusal. She couldn't let him have that. She couldn't let him have the truth of her in the end. She was the once-favoured child of the Lair-Mother, she was going to take his head and be returned to her mother's graces. She was meant to be exalted above all, and feared by all, not to die in a rotten hovel, flailing pointlessly in inept rage at the inevitable. This was not supposed to be her!

She was afraid. She was in pain. Something swelled inside of her, like a parasitic larvae eating away at her mind before bursting out in all of its ugly splendour, and she couldn't not name that thing. The stream of insults died on her lips; drool mixed with blood pooled in the corner of her mouth, where the porcelain plate of her face retreated to reveal the flesh beneath. The only place on her that was open, and vulnerable.

Once only. Her hand touched where the spear broke through her. A dull, empty sound left her, repeating like a banging of a drum.

How terribly she didn't want to die like that.

"You're crying?" the hero asked, sounding so very surprised. So was she.

He leaned in, to make sure it was really what he was hearing. Or maybe it was just a reflex of a man unable to let hurt go unattended. In any case, it was also Shard's last chance. She swiped, once again. She couldn't reach for his face, or his throat, but he got close enough for the claws to rake in through his chest, shred the jacket and the flesh beneath. Holy wards burned with the stench of myrrah arresting the blow and the wound, but it was enough. A wave of pleasure shot through her at the feeling of his flesh parting, strong enough to dull the pain, if only for a second. With all her strength and rage, she twisted against the shaft holding her down, and felt it give, and crack. The spear broke, and before the agony of the wound she had given herself could catch up to her, she was already on her feet, and running, the red haze of the pain she had drawn from the hero propelling her forwards, out of the of the warhouse, past the front room where the blood-stains marked the fall of her hired hands, and away still, out into the streets and city's night.

She was bleeding, tar-like gore trailing from the gaping wound in her chest. High above, the moon shone silver-bright, and the stars gleamed mocking through the tangled roofs of the city's slums. Has it ever been that cold? She couldn't remember. Her feet stomped heavily on the dirt; she was sprinting, as far from the hero as she could get, no direction other than away.

The city was a blur, a monstrous amalgamation of corroded metal, rotten wood, cracked stone. It rose around her tower-high, tiny lights burning in the windows of stacked houses, doors shut to her. Shut, shut, shut - the slum stayed on guard, and knew her for what she was. The stuccatto of shutters closing and bars dropping behind doors followed her dash. How long until they would see how wounded she was, and thought themselves brave enough to take on a devil?

There were people around her screaming and shouting and all she could do was run and hope that there was still enough life left in her shell to carry her forwards. There were escape routes she could take, secret passages leading into the bowels of the earth and the domains of the Lair-Mother; it would be so easy to step into shadows and sink into the great below. But those ways were forbidden to her. Defeated once more, she would be wise to die before returning into her mother's embrace. She would be wise to die before her siblings got to her.

Was it not what she deserved? When she wore the Lair-Mother's splendour, she would teach them the burden of weakness; it was a great honour among her kin to be the implement of their mother's lessons on the price for inadequacy and weakness?

How many below still remembered, and been sharpening their claws for her return?

The ground under her feet grew hard; cobble, not dirt. She left the slum, and entered the city proper. Alchemical lights around her dimmed out the stars; it was going to be such a struggle to clean her blood from the white pavement.

She was going to die here? Her tongue dropped from mouth, a long slab of pointed meat, tasting at the air, grasping for some kind of a reprieve. And there it was! A whiff of healing magic, its unmistakable artificial tang. A healer worked nearby.

Shard's body burned. Strangely, without heat. She could feel the air rush into her shell, brush through the gaping wound the spear left. The world closed in on itself, into a flurry of white and black, and that single thread leading her through the city, towards that taste, towards that one, blasted hope.

She didn't want to die.

There was a door in her way, and she smashed into it and against it; wood turned to splinter, steel gave in under her claws. She fell into a room thick with the smell of sorcery, stumbling over her own legs, her muscles ice and fire in their last. In a case on the wall, there were phials arranged in a display, shining bright in the dark. She grasped at them as her legs gave up on her, and she clattered to the floor, the sound of breaking glassware accompanying her down.

There was no more strength left in her. Colour drained off the world. All was heavy, all was quiet. But someone's feet stomped above. Was it he, finally come to deliver the final blow?

No, the hero couldn't have gotten to her that fast. It couldn't be him. It had to be the healer, it had to be the hope. She opened her mouth to demand help, to threaten to rip them open like butcher-like if they did not immediately attend to her, to offer them endless riches of the world if they did, riches that haven't existed in years.

But her mouth couldn't make a sound; there was a void building up at the bottom of Shard to pull her in and finally swallow her, and it was the bitter, bitter knowledge that it was her fault, and her mistake, that was going to carry her into this quiet nothing.

And there was also a hand grasping at the back of her head and pulling it up, and someone's voice, coming from very close, but also from miles away, demanding that she stay. There was a different kind of warmth spreading through her body, and the unmistakable awful taste of restorative potion on her lips, and after that, sleep.

 

[Gargulec]

2. Risk Assessment

Ifi couldn't help but to feel like she was making a costly mistake. Or, to be precise, she knew that she was doing something costly for sure. The exact price was easy to name: she could read it from the growing pile of discarded glass now strewn across her shop's floor. She could start that accounting with the svelte phial of death's bane, now emptied, to be priced at seven days of her labour, and then seven more to make up for the price of ingredients. Then, she could add to it the bulbous, blue bottle clattering at her feet, up until very recently filled with a potent draught of mendlesh: ten and four days, respectively. So already a month of honest work, and that was just the start of it. There was also the tiny ampoule of liquid gold-based panaceum that she was currently trying to pour down the throat of the creature bleeding out on the floor of her shop: that would be three days to make, and ten to pay for the reagents. And finally, there was also that hematite charm she was holding tightly to where the creature's carapace became a gaping wound. The star-shaped trinket burned through its magic with a sharp sizzle and the acrid stench of a smithy, even as the seven cut amethysts set into it remained cold and dead. Of course there was no toxin to be purged, and she could have instead used any of the dozen cheap coagulation charms she had in her store, instead of feeling another fortnight of her labour sizzle away in her fingers.

So that was the tally, for now: two months, give or take. That much she knew. It was whether it counted as a mistake that remained to be seen.

At the very least, though, it wasn't looking to be a total total waste. As far as she could tell, the creature that had shredded through her reinforced door and made a terrible mess of her display case, was no longer dying. To be more exact, it was no longer presently dying. Ifi had no idea how its long-term prognosis looked; she wasn't a healer, but an alchemist. She could mix potions, sell them, and, in a pinch, force it down someone's throat, hoping against hope that they, along with a stack of protective charms, would be enough for a gaping hole in a chest.

The last of the amber liquid disappeared down the creature's mouth; Ifi held its head until she felt like it swallowed, then tossed the empty ampoule aside, into the pile of broken glass. The bleeding had stopped; there was no more viscous, black gore gushing all over her shop. Even better, the creature continued breathing. Sure, the sound it was making did remind her of a steam leak, but at least the chest did move, and the pace seemed steady enough for Ifi not to worry about it, not too much. There was no way to ask it about it, anyway: it was well and truly unconscious. After what she had fed into it, it was unlikely to wake before the next week. Then again, Ifi had no idea how that applied to the below-spawn.

She had seen them before, once or twice. Distantly, as those cloaked figures at the patrician's sides, veiled in rich fabrics, occult symbols carefully painted on their faceless heads. They struck memorable figures, if somewhat eerie. Mostly, though, she knew from the stories her clients would bring, where they would be cast as all kinds of monsters. She would hear how they drank pain like wine, schemed against the people of the city, served an unseen master to purposes unknown, but surely nefarious, how they were demons in the flesh, or worse still. She had no good reason to disbelieve in all that, but truth be told, to her, those creatures mostly seemed far away, scarcely even real.

And besides, the one on the floor looked nothing like those tall, white spectres in the Good Families' halls. Unadorned, its shell caked in crusted blood and dirt, looking like broken pottery pulled out of a pile of refuse. Ifi touched its side, brushing away some of the filth; it slid easily off the cold surface, revealing the clear white beneath. It was apparently a mark of quality porcelain that it cleaned up easily. It felt nothing like flesh, nothing like skin. Maybe that's why she didn't even feel all that scummy for staring at it, even though it was so obviously naked.

Would it mind? She bit her lip. She had to admit to herself: it's shape was easy on her eyes, even dirtied and chipped. Sleek and barely human in its sexlesness, it went well with the bed of shattered glass it lay on. It was all smooth lines and slight curves; Ifi bet that if she was to polish it, she could see herself reflected in its surface as if in a mirror. Even with its wound, it still reminded her more of golems her peers would sometimes make out of dumb stone and steel, than of anything living. But unlike those plodding constructs, this one radiated a predatory aura. Carefully, Ifi grabbed its hand and raised it to the light, watching the glow of the alchemical lamp catch on its long claws. They gleamed like crystal glass, the thin coat of fresh blood glistening on their edges.

Ifi tried to imagine it not as this wounded, half-broken doll, but as it was when it was hale, imperious, commanding. She swallowed loudly; it was a strange thought, a potent thought. She then thought of how much it was going to owe her for saving its life, and for ruining her shop, and of a few other things which were, frankly, stupid, but not altogther unpleasant to think.

She batted those ideas away; if there ever was going to be a time for them, it was not now. First, she had to figure out how to get the creature out from the front of her shop, and to a bed in the back. Maybe she could just pick it up? Hopefully it wouldn't be too heavy. To give it a try, she wrapped her arm around its chest and hoisted up. Much to her surprise, it didn't even take all that much strain, only the sound the creature's arms made as they clinked against the body was nerve-wracking, as if glass about to shatter...

"Has she bled out?"

It took all of her strength not to drop the creature back down on the floor. Slightly shaking, she put it back down and turned towards the broken door, and the voice.

A man stood there, a broken, golden-tipped spear in his hand. The night hasn't treated him kindly, Ifi could tell. His tan jacket was shredded over his chest, bloodied cloth and flesh still pink from mending magic showing beneath.

Ifi glanced back at the red sheen on the claws of the creature beneath. Her mouth abruptly went dry.

"Not for your lack of trying," she mouthed, inching away from the man in the door. She looked around, through the mess of her shop; she had a defense charm left under the counter, if only she could get over towards it. "Are you here to finish the job?"

"Please," he must have noticed the taut note in her voice. "Calm down," he said, putting down his spear. "I'm not here to hurt you, I promise."

He was no longer looking at the creature, but straight at her; she had seen his face somewhere before. Long, golden hair, tired blue eyes, old scars; all soft, and kind. And yet, something about him bothered her. Old instincts shouted to not trust him. She dropped onto the stool behind the counter, fingers finding the familiar cool shape behind it. She closed her hand around the charm, feeling the budding spark inside.

"My name is Villis," he continued, trying to sound soft. "You might have heard of me."

The name did come across as vaguely familiar, but something else definitely was: the ugly, half-hidden harsh inflection to his words, as if he was speaking through a mouthful of nails. This man was low-born and raised.

Ifi's grip on the charm tightened; she knew that there had to be something wrong with this Villis. His clothes and pleasant manner almost fooled her; but those meant nothing. She had heard enough about how high low-borns could get in the city nowadays.

"And what are you doing in my shop?" she growled. "It's the middle of the night. People sleep. If you want to buy a potion, come in the morning."

He blinked, throwing another look at the mess of wood and glass strewn across the floor, then back at her.

"That's none of your business," she added, before he could ask.

She was half-expecting him to do as the low-born brutes were wont to, and just rush her here and there, but surprisingly, he kept his cool.

"Please," he repeated. This effort he was making to sound soft and mask his nature wasn't paying out at all; the barely concealed accent was all the more suspicious. "I don't think you quite understand the danger you're in."

Ifi's grip on the charm didn't relax; she was now watching Villis with full focus, ready to let the sorcery out at the slightest provocation. She had him figured out: he was one of those upstarts her clients complained about, one of those people who climbed out of the low city and tried to play pretend at something they weren't supposed to be. And, clearly, he was also a murderer of some kind, now attempting to threaten her. Her palms were sweating; her heart felt as if about to rip free from her chest. This man was probably here to kill her, and that poor wounded creature next.

She couldn't let her fear show.

"All I want to do is to make sure that this monster doesn't hurt anyone again," he said, and she almost laughed.

"Monster?" she asked with all of her venom. She wasn't sure if that was the right way to act, but she couldn't help herself. But what if it was going to provoke her? There were too many thoughts in her head, too many scenarios of violent crime unfolding before her eyes.

"I know she doesn't look the part," Villis nodded; at least he wasn't trying to come closer. "I don't think anyone does when battered and blooded. But trust me, it's…"

"Trust you?" Ifi snapped. "You come into my shop in the middle of the night, weapon in hand, looking as if fresh out of a dockside brawl, and you ask me to trust you?"

Again, she regretted those words as soon as she spoke them. Yet, he still didn't rush. It was only the charge building up in the charm she held onto that kept her from begging him for her life. It buzzed in her hands, begging to be released.

"I am asking you to trust me," he attempted a conciliatory smile, "because I have…"

"You have violated my home," she snarled, "in the middle of the night. You ask me to give up my patient so that you can slaughter it…"

"Her."

"Her! Whatever! Who do you think I am?"

"I think you are panicked," he observed, "and unreasonable."

"And you are a low-born thug," she was sounding almost giddy now; she really wanted to stop, but her own words were getting away from her. "And if you don't get out right now, I will let my wards fry you like an insect."

The charm recognized her words; it throbbed in her fingers. Pale, blue sparks shot up; defensive runes lit up across the floor, and the mauled door-frame. Villis' bandit smile faded to nothing. For a moment, he looked almost sad.

"I see," he murmured, taking a step back. She was counting on getting fear out of him; it seemed more like some kind of disappointment. "I get it now. You will excuse me, then, for troubling your sleep.."

One final time, he surveyed the ruin of her shop. His eyes lingered for a time over the wounded creature, then over Ifi. She had to contend that he was concealing his aggression well. Against herself, she released the hold on the charm, then quickly strengthened it again. She was not going to get fooled at the end.

"My apologies for the disturbance, miss alchemist," the word came off his mouth like a slur, like a slap to the face.

"Are you trying to insult me?"

Once again, she bit her tongue a bit too late. But Villis merely raised his hands in an apology and shook his head, seemingly contrite.

"Who am I to insult a respectable craftswoman such as you," he said, clearly mocking her. "I will visit again. Hopefully Shard won't yet have gutted you by then."

He bowed politely, if somewhat stiffly, picked up his broken weapon, and turned to leave. Before she could figure out a way to respond to him, he had vanished into the dark.

With a deep sigh, she let go of the charm. The charge started to dissipate slowly, with a quiet, disappointed whine. She made a similar sound, resting her head on the counter for a moment.

Fear and stress drained slowly, leaving behind sheer exhaustion. As much as she would love to, however, there was no time to sleep. Morning was approaching fast, and she couldn't let her clients see the shop the way it looked right now. The rest of the night would be spent with the broom, the mop, and whatever acids it would take to scrub the foul blood from the expensive tiles she laid the floor with.

There were times when she couldn't stand her own stinginess. If only she had listened to her mother and not shirked on having servants. She could go now, get them out of their beds, and have them sort disaster of broken wood and glass themselves. But no, she wanted to be independent. So sleeping was out of the picture.

Reluctantly, she reached for a small bottle she had stored under the corner, a bit of poison-green liquid sloshing at the bottom. It tasted as foul as ever, but as it burned down her throat, she could feel an unpleasant kind of energy spread through her.

There were still a few hours left before the first clients would come rushing in, seeking remedies for their hangovers, ulcers, and faithless husbands. She would get the shop at least borderline presentable for them. Hopefully, they wouldn't mind the missing door too much.

She rubbed her temples. What in all hells was she going to do with the door? She needed one, for when that thug would invariably come again. As much as she wanted to, she just couldn't afford to get too worried about that, right now. Maybe that carpenter who still owed her for love potions, maybe he could be pressured to work something out quickly? She would get him first thing in the morning. But that would mean leaving the shop unattended and… she would just get a runner. She only wished that getting a solid door done wasn't going to take him too much time.

It probably was.

She mumbled a few ugly swears, then put the rest of the alertness elixir down. The door would wait until morning. She just had to approach it all one thing at a time, starting with moving that patient of hers to a cot in the back. And, probably, finding a length of chain.

 

[Gargulec]

3. Rock Bottom

It was deceitfully difficult to crack through the shells that shrouded the flesh of the Lair-Mother's spawn. They appeared fragile, like fine porcelain that the slightest strike could shatter, and yet swords would bend on it. It meant that breaking her sibling was hard work, one that Shard of White Obsidian couldn't accomplish alone.

She had to work in a pair instead, another sibling of hers guiding the chisel for her to bring the sledge-hammer on, and watch the familiar spider-web of cracks open across the body below. She knew the blows that landed well by black blood welling in those fault lines of a body laboriously shattered, and she recognized the progress of her task by the familiar bursts of pleasure as the unfortunate failure screamed and wailed under the hammer.

"Me-rcy," it begged in a hoarse, pathetic voice, "mer-"

The chisel was in place; Shard brought the hammer down and turned its words into a modulated wail. Something finally broke, a crack across its stomach spreading all the way to the groin, a part of the porcelain plate peeling, dangled to the side, held to the flesh beneath only by slivers red of sinew. Steaming blood gushed to the stone floor, draining towards the pit ahead.

Shard shuddered; a quiet moan died between her lips.

Yet, the work was far from complete. The spawn of the Lair-Mother didn't die easily; they clung to life with fierce tenacity, even when they shouldn't want to, even when they were brought to the pit at the bottom of the world to there be shattered, and cast off to the slow agony of the putrefying flesh below, even when there was nothing more left to them than the chisel and the hammer.

It made the lessons all the more memorable.

"To ask for mercy," the Lair-Mother preached, red cloth draped over her tall frame, exposed mouth twisted into a cruel smile, "is to name yourself weak."

Shard's pair put the chisel up, to another crack slowly opening by the right shoulder. The plate there seemed sturdy still, and wouldn't be done away in a single blow.

"No…" the failure still, somehow had it in it to cry, "please…"

Shard raised the hammer, trying her best to not to think the name of her sibling on the floor.

"And weakness, as all things," her mother and patron continued her sermon, "is bound to its consequences."

It wasn't meant for her ears; no, the words were a gift to their family, assembled in the spiraling galleries above, looking down at the execution, and mouth of the pit. Against the black stone of the depths, they cut eerie figures, white, featureless, unadorned. In the world above, they would cloth themselves, and paint themselves, and make themselves unique. They would take on names and histories - but here, in their home, there was no room for such pretense. In the end, they were all the Lair-Mother's spawn, and that was all that they were.

Still, there was a lesson here meant for Shard alone, and she had every reason to try to make herself an apt student. The hammer swung, punching the chisel into the crack, the glassy sound of a shell snapping ringing a clear note. Shard's pair corrected the position, and gave her a nod.

This time, she really put her back into it. The sledge arced through the dark, and when it hit, the sound was a wet crack. The plate snapped cleanly, clattering to the side, briefling baring the red flesh beneath, before blood rushed all over it. Her failed sibling screamed again.

It was a thin sound, at the verge of snapping, and yet rising high, echoing off the galleries and all the way up through the secret passages and into the world above. It got into Shard, running down her spine as a warm jolt, before exploding in her stomach, swelling the joy to each note of hurt.

The hammer almost slipped from her hands; she struggled not to recoil. It felt so good, and she didn't want it. More than anything, she didn't want it. Not from those blows. Not from this pain. But her want meant nothing to what seized her. The sermon was to nourish others. For her, it was the lesson of the hammer, and the reminder that she could never be anything else than what she really was.

Above her, the Lair-Mother stared down, as inscrutable as ever. They had all learned to read her moods and desires from the tiniest shifts in her stance, from the slightest alterations in her tone. But not here, not among all of her progeny. There would be no gesture to indicate if she approved of how Shard handled herself. All that was left to her was to try to acquit herself well under her mother's tutelage, and render her lessons in the flesh of those who didn't.

So she tried her best to remember the moment, to etch her fear into memory, to let it burn into the matter of her soul so that every night she would be reminded of the consequences of failure, so that in her final moments she wouldn't show weakness.

With each blow of the hammer, she punched the memory deeper into her self. With each wave of pleasure undoing her grief, she sealed it in. Into the fading wails she spoke a promise that she would never, never, never become like that thing at her feet, that thing whose name she would not think again.

Even peeled from most of its shell, once-white plates hanging at odd angles from the damp mass of bleeding flesh, the failed sibling still held onto to life. It kept on moving its mouth without making a sound, trying to utter some pleas for mercy, or for an ending. But there was still time left for it; maybe an hour, maybe a day. All of her assembled family could watch its naked chest continue heaving even as Shard and her pair lifted the carcass off the ground, and tossed it down into the pit, with all the other refuse of Lair-Mother's scheme.

It made a wet, breaking sound when it hit the bottom, almost like a muffled cry. Shard made herself remember it would be the last time she would ever hear her failed sibling's voice. She couldn't allow herself to forget.

Although there were no more blows to strike, the pleasure clung to the inside of Shard's shell, sticky-sweet. It gave the world around her a golden tint, it left a delectable taste on her tongue. She could scrub her shell clean of blood-stains, she could become pristine as snow, and it would still remain, soot buried into her flesh. That, too, she promised herself to not ever forget.

Her pair knelt, knee sinking into a black pool of blood, the chisel rested in cupped hands, an offering to their mother. Shard followed suit, arms extended, waiting for the Lair-Mother to take the instrument of execution from her hands.

There were things growing inside of Shard, feelings like parasitic larvae eating at the body from the inside. She didn't want them. She didn't want to think of the chisel, and of the hammer. She didn't want to think of the shards of carapace floating in the blood at her knee. She didn't want to think of the body in the pit. She didn't want to think of her siblings, above and below. And, unlike the pleasure, she could resist those thoughts and squash them one by one, like killing flies between your fingers.

So she did. Prostrated before her mother, staring into a pool of blood she had shed, she made sure to kill every single one of those ideas, because they were what brought others into the pit, and she would never follow them there.

She would be better than that.

Many porcelain feet skittered; the sermon was over, the lesson taught. The family dispersed to its warrens and tasks. Finally, she felt a weight lifted from her hands. The Lair-Mother accepted the tribute.

When she looked up, the galleries were emptied; even her pair had left. Only the Lair-Mother herself stayed, finally granting Shard the audience she had so desperately needed.

"Well done, child," she said. She sat at the edge of the pit, legs dangled over the precipice, ever so often glancing into its depths. The very thought of doing the same twisted something weak in Shard, so she didn't; she averted her eyes. "Very well done."

For once, her mother was not hiding her feelings. The pride in her voice seemed genuine, as genuine as anything she had ever said.

"I seek only to please you," Shard replied, still bowing.

"We both know it is a lie," the Lair-Mother shrugged, but without scorn, then adjusted the coil of red fabric around her shoulder. She was so similar to her progeny; sometimes Shard wondered if stripped off her vestments, she would be recognizable as different from them at all. But maybe even then she would still tower, just because she could stare down at her work, and Shard could not. And that is why it was Shard who knelt.

"You," the Lair-Mother continued, voice treacherously tender, "only want to survive. Which may be a weakness."

Suddenly, every muscle in Shard's body was tense. But she couldn't make a move. She couldn't betray herself. Not after what she had just done.

"But then again, maybe not," her mother mused. She turned away from the pit, and reached out to where the execution took place. Her claws sifted through the pool of blood, picking a white shrapnel of a broken body from it. She held it between two fingers for a moment, "If, of course, you can pay the survival's price."

She tossed the bit away, down into the pit. It made a wet splash. Shard struggled not to recoil - and succeeded. Her mother's eyeless gaze weighed down on her, in silence. Was she trying to discern the truth of Shard? Discover all those ugly things hiding beneath the shell? A new kind of hate buzzed in her soul, fresh, warm, entirely turned inwards.

There was so much in her that she had to kill, if she was to survive. But she could do that.

"But I think can you," the Lair-Mother declared, voice almost amused. "I think you really can."

***

Shard slid from the familiar dream to the unexpected feeling of being still alive.

Her consciousness was fragmented and fragile; she drifted around wakefulness for a time, suspended in the numbness of a body subjected to too much restorative sorcery too quickly. It was an odd sort of discomfort, like being ever so slightly too cold, like feeling a bit sluggish. If only she could put herself in motion, it would quickly fade into the back of her mind, but for now all she could was languish in it, feeling it seep into her thoughts, spread across her body, become her in entirety.

There were flashes of more concrete awareness, brief at first. An alchemical lamp burning above her head: an unpleasant artificial light. The sound of a furnace and the thick smell of burnt herbs. Bursts of movement above her; someone's hand on her body. Those images were each a mosaic stone that Shard couldn't quite puzzle together into a full picture, but at least meant that not only was she still alive, but there was also someone tending to her.

As she inched her way close to waking, she found herself suspended amidst thick strands of fear braiding around her thoughts. She had not left many in the world that would care to save her, or at least not for the sake of her good. But there were faces she expected to see, and so dreaded the moment the sleep would finally break. But at some point, it had to.

"You can stop asking for your mother, she's not here."

The words were a bait, she expected, and yet her consciousness latched onto them and let them reel her out of the blurry shoals of her dreams, and then into the light.

The first thing she felt was a pang of relief that the concerned face above her was an unfamiliar one.

It belonged to a woman freshly out of the bloom of her youth. It was all sharp angles and straight lines, small, pointed chin, cheeks slightly sunken, lips thin enough to show only as two pink lines on a pale skin. The word Shard would use to describe her was feline, if not for her freshly shaven scalp, and absent brows. Still, she reminded her of a stray cat of some kind, or maybe of a reptile. A thick, leather coat reached all the way to her neck, mottled with singe marks. Shard turned her head to the side, already knowing what she should expect to see.

Sure enough, the rest of the room she was in was taken by a tangle of pipes and glass branching off the central, red-hot furnace. A large alembic sat on the fire, filled with dandelion-yellow bubbling liquid; Shard followed the curls of the condensator it was connected to all the way to a smaller flask, where something dark-red collected, one drip at a time. The air had weight here, its taste pungent sour on Shard's tongue.

An alchemist then. She remembered the mad dash through the night; so that was who saved her?

"You're moving?" the woman asked. "Are you awake?"

She frowned, fingers extended towards Shard's head, stopping just short of touching her. The Lair-Mother's child went still, and the woman stepped back, still frowning. She crouched by Shard's side, and twiddled with something; Shard followed her movement and saw thick coils of cattle chain wrapped around her waist and hands, running to a bolt in the floor. How didn't she feel it before, that metal weight? She was too numb still, too absent.

And still, her hands curled unbidden, the edges of her claws touching the inside of her palm, scratching out a quiet, sharp note. Who was even that woman to keep her chained like a slave, to treat her body like some prize?

The alchemist still didn't realize Shard was fully awake. She finished checking the restraints, those paltry bindings she hoped to keep Shard down with, and yet remained within the reach of her claws. How easy would it be to sink them into her stomach and gut her in one fluid motion...

Would there be a point to it?

"If you think," she rasped, "that those chains will hold me, human, you better…"

"You are awake!" the woman yelped, jumping back before smiling. "Finally! And no, I saw what you did to my door, below-spawn. That's why I have also dosed you with…" she picked up a phial half-filled with a milky fluid "...this."

Shard stopped, her head turned towards the bottle. Was that why she felt so slow? Had she really been subdued by some no-name alchemist? An ugly feeling swelled in her throat.

"I doubt you could make two steps without falling over," the woman continued. "Let alone swing with those nasty claws of yours."

Shard said nothing.

"So, let's start again," the woman continued smiling. She turned around and grabbed a stool from one of the work-benches, perching herself on it, looking down onto Shard. "I am Ifigenia Juno. People call me Ifi. I am an alchemist. Four days ago, you barged into my shop in the middle of the night, made a terrible mess out of it, and almost bled out in the middle of the floor. But I," her smile pursed to a thin and rather sharp line, "saved your life. At a great personal expense."

The alchemist was slightly built, her bulky leather overalls almost swallowing her whole. If Shard could stand, she would tower at least a head over her. If she could move, she probably wouldn't even need her claws to tear her limb from limb.

If.

She tried to close her hand over the chain-link; the steel should be so easy to snap, to cut through. But her fingers felt like wood, like dead stone, barely moving to the demands of her will.

The woman who snared her watched with curiosity and a hint of fear. She wasn't sure of her own actions, it seemed. It didn't matter. Ifigenia: it wasn't a name Shard could recognize. Certainly not one of the patrician alchemists that she used to frequent, back in the good days.

"You bound me," Shard replied. "You drugged me. You expect gratitude?"

Ifi shook her head.

"My apologies about that, really," she sounded sincere. "But you can't be too safe. There are stories about your kind, you know? You below-spawn don't have the best reputation."

Below-spawn: it wasn't a term that Shard heard often. There were different, more respectful names by which patricians would call the Lair-Mother's many children, and the low-borns tended to simply shriek "demon". This alchemist belonged to neither. She was born to the middle-heights, to herds of obedient governed. Of all the creatures in the world that could have mastered Shard, she fell into the hands of a nobody. Of not even an enemy. Of a sheep.

She relaxed, and allowed her hands to open. A year ago high masters of the city would press piles of jewels across to her to beg her to rid them of that meddling hero. A year ago the little son of the Master Glassmaker was her cup-bearer, and the sweet daughter of the First Architect washed her feet just so that her mother would be allowed an audience. She drank their humiliation like they drank the spoils of Lair-Mother's help.

Now, a craftswoman could walk up to her, pour poison into her mouth, and watch her foam the last of her life away, and there would be no one to witness, or even to cheer.

If only she could just shred her, and wipe this failure from her with Ifi's lifeblood. If only she could win.

Laboriously, she raised her hand and touched the place on her chest where the spear pierced through the shell; the opening was still there, its edges jagged and sharp. She could no longer feel the wound below, but when she touched the tip of the claw to the exposed flesh, a painful jolt shot through her entire body. It was still there, restored and so very tender. With a quiet sigh, she let her hand slump over the wound, covering it up. She didn't want Ifi to stare at it.

She didn't want to see it herself.

"What do you want from me, then?" she asked, still dreaming of skinning this bitch alive and swimming in her screams.

It would be so…

...meaningless?

The world seemed flat and the future empty. There was something wrong with her; the sedative, probably, dulling her mind.

"Well, to tell me how you feel, for start," Ifi shrugged. "I don't know how my medicine works on creatures like you. It did mend the flesh, but this… porcelain skin? It doesn't seem to be growing back. Should I be concerned?"

"Why do you want to know?" she snapped back, perhaps a bit too angrily. How much she hated that she had to consider not antagonizing this nothing.

"I want to know if you are going to die because of it."

"No. And it can't be fixed."

It wasn't the full truth. There were places where Shard could have her shell mended and restored, crafty artificers able to make good as new. All toiling under the Lair-Mother, in the depths below. But there was no returning there for her. Not like that. Maybe not ever.

"I'm sorry to hear," again, she somehow managed to sound genuine. "But at least you'll live, right? So, the other thing I want from you is…." she paused. "Answers, I suppose. Why was there some low-born thug trying to kill you? Was it a botched robbery?"

If Shard could blink, she would; her jaw went a little bit slack. Villis found her here, and didn't take her life? How?

"Why didn't he…" she started, so very confused all of the sudden. "Why am I still alive?"

"Well," Ifi, folding her arms on her chest. "I am not in the habit of letting some two-bit criminals murder my patients just because they say they are some kind of a 'monster'."

She wasn't even trying to hold her pride. She smiled triumphantly at Shard, and for several minutes, the child of the Lair-Mother went completely mute. The hero tracked her down, and the only reason he didn't finish their long dance here and there was an intervention by some nobody who thought him a robber?

A woman who apparently couldn't tell the hero of the Low City from a thug out to bash a few coins out of an unlucky craftsman was the reason why Shard yet lived?

Shard could no longer hold it in anymore. Her laugh, the terrible, dry sound of bones clattering to the floor, mirthless and sad, crawled out of her mouth, drawing fragile echoes from the tangled alchemical glass.

There was failure, and then there was this.

"You have no idea," she said finally, in a small, disbelieving voice. The sense of unreality was so very slow to fade. "None at all."

"Yes, hence me asking," Ifi replied, annoyed. "Was he a robber, or was this some political thing?"

Before there was time to respond, an acrid smell filled the air. Ifi uttered a quiet "shit" and jumped up from her stool, dashing into the forest of her workshop.

"Just a moment!" she yelped, frantically adjusting something at the furnace. Shard could see her behind glass, a distorted shape jumping from one bench to another, hands darting towards the row of tin boxes, banging through them, then sprinkling the right ingredient into some kind of a vat. The liquid inside bubbled loudly, throwing up puffs of colored smoke. At least the stench gave way to a just as potent, but less unpleasant spearmint smell.

Shard hung her head back. Stupid Villis and his bleeding heart, unable to go through another human. This is where his principles brought her. If he had the decency of viciousness, she would be at least spared from this comedy. And, probably, presently dying a terrible and not wholly undeserved death, but that was an entire thing entirely. Still, it meant that once again, he failed to put her down, and once again, she had a chance. Of course not in a straight fight, and probably not even in an ambush, not wounded as she was. But he had to be vulnerable; men who lived like him were nothing but weak spots.

She glanced at Ifi, still hard at work at stirring her latest batch. As cunning as this woman was - and Shard had to give her at least some of that - she seemed altogether clueless, and like all common craftsmen, likely prone to greed. There was a plan, there, to be had, a way to use her.

She would only spill her guts later, once she had outlived her utility.

"You are right," she said once the alchemist returned, trying to keep her words smooth and honeyed; the old voice didn't come easily to her lips, but she didn't fully forget it. "It was a matter of politics. The man chasing me is an enemy of the High Masters, and I am their most trusted servant."

This was true, for the most part. In some sense. Or in full, if the last month or two were to be ignored. But judging by how Ifi's eyes lit up at the mention of the patricians' best, she didn't know that. Shard suppressed the smile. Sedated as she was, she could still tell when her hooks were getting in.

"He promised he would be back in a week," Ifi remembered, clearly expectant.

"He is a threat to the city, a brute and a thug," this, Shard didn't believe. Not any more, at least, as much as she still hated Villis.

"Yeah," Ifi nodded.

"For those who stop him," Ifi continued, "there are vast rewards. Wealth, and more. They would be known all the way in the tallest towers as the great heroes of the city, and no door would be closed to them. High Masters themselves would receive them as a saviour."

"Are you suggesting that…"

"Yes," Shard reeled the prey back in, the frustration of defeat dispersing like yesterday's nightmare. She could still win. She could still be restored to favour. Debasing herself before some nobody was barely a price for that. "If you help, you will get your heart's desire. I will make sure of that personally."

Ifi's face was bright now, eyes shining with the sort of hunger Shard recognized well. And something else, familiar too, even if she didn't recognize it immediately.

"You, personally?"

"Yes."

The alchemist went quiet for a moment, looking away from Shard. When she turned to her again, her cheeks were flushed red.

"Is it true that you enjoy the pain of others?" she asked, a strange kind of desperation dripping from her voice.

 

[Gargulec]

4. Lies and a Confession

"And who do you want me to hurt?"

Even hours later, Ifi couldn't stop thinking of the below-spawn's answer, and the sting of disappointment it provoked. She lay in her bed, blanket pulled over her chin, and tried not to curse herself for her own stupidity. What else was she expecting? The creature - the creature apparently named Shard - was a sleek instrument of killing, and killing was apparently all it understood or was interested in. Why would Ifi be surprised it took her question that way, and didn't pick at the implication she desperately wanted her to seize on?

It was her own desperation, so palpable in all of this, that in its ineptness and inevitable futility left the bitterest taste. She just couldn't help to keep imagining it, in all the weightless vividity of a fantasy: the claws sinking into the small of her back, the porcelain hand closing around her throat, the chains in Shard's hands, not on them… Try as she might, she couldn't shove them aside, couldn't bury them alongside all the ones before. So she agreed to everything, to scheming and murder, just to ask "do you enjoy the pain of others" and be reminded that for everyone else but her, the answer to the question was "and who do you want me to hurt?"

And still, Ifi failed to do the smart thing and back off. And still, she pushed herself deeper into this mess, just for the sake of a chance she really shouldn't even be thinking of having, a chance with a creature who she had to dope full of slowmilk just to make sure she didn't get gutted for the kind act of saving a life.

"What the fuck is wrong with me?" she whispered into the dark of her bedchamber, listening back to the flat, empty tone of a voice well acquainted with defeat.

Nights like this, she really wanted to be different, and really couldn't help but to be her frustrating self. Waves of antipathy and disappointment slowly rocked her to sleep, and when she woke up, only idle dregs remained of that anger, like an awful aftertaste she couldn't quite wash away.

Or so she had hoped until she found herself standing over a beaker of restorative precursor, the sharp stench of rotten eggs and a filthy film at the pale-blue surface alerting her that she had just soured it. Sure enough, the flame under burned too pale, and too high. She set it that way herself, hoping to rush through the procedure: a mistake that a teenage apprentice could be excused for, but not a seasoned alchemist. And the first thing she did when she noticed was glance at the white figure sitting at her cot, worried that Shard saw her blunder.

"This can't go on like that," she mouthed, killing the flame. She was of half mind to just dump the soured batch, but she really couldn't afford to let the ingredients go to waste. Not with the recent expenses. So cleaning it up it was, a procedure as laborious as it was disgusting.

"You seem distressed."

Somehow, it didn't surprise Ifi that Shard had hearing good enough to pick at her frustrated groans even through the buzz of the workshop.

"Just distracted," she replied, looking at the below-spawn tapping its claws against the chains still anchoring her to the floor. She really ought to sedate her again.

A small smile opened on Shard's mouth; she flashed those sharp teeth of hers. Ifi liked the shape, and hated the idea of trying to force a potion down that mouth while the below-spawn was awake.

"You must be excited for what is to come," Shard suggested, leaning forward ever so slightly. Was she being sincere? Mocking? The fact she didn't have a face made it so much more difficult. It struck Ifi again just how little she understood what Shard even was.

"I would be more excited," she put the beaker aside, and shuffled to the ingredients cabinet. She would fix a new batch now, and leave the cleanup for the evening, "if I had any proof of your honesty."

"Is the fact that I am in your power," Shard leaned back, stroking the chain around her waist, "not enough? Why would I lie to someone who could snuff me out if she only wanted to?"

"To save yourself, for starters," Ifi grabbed a handful of delicate, lazuli crystals. Even with all the distractions going through her head, she still felt the familiar pang of sadness that she was about to ruin them in a mortar. "Desperate people tend to lie a lot."

She would know that. She poured the handful of crystals down the mortar, grabbed the pestle off the shelf, and sat down on her stool, not far from where Shard crouched.

"And besides," she added, crystals grinding with a low, brittle whine, "I think you have just lied."

"Oh?" again, what was it in Shard's voice? Curiosity? Frustration? Without eyes, how was Ifi supposed to tell what the curl of her mouth meant?

"If I wanted to sedate you more," she asked, "would you allow me to?"

"Of course," Shard said, this time clearly trying to sound amenable. There was a sort of relief in being able to catch her on that dishonesty. "I am in your power."

"Well," Ifi put the mortar away for a moment, and grabbed the bottle of slowmilk she had left on the bench the night before, "let's test that."

This time, reading Shard's body language was no challenge at all. The below-spawn pulled its shoulders back, pushed herself away from the alchemist, mouth shut, but clearly alert. It still kept one of its hands over where its wound was, but the other was no longer idly playing with the chain, but rather thrown to the side, as if to make room for a swipe. Ifi was right: she could see the effects of the sedative wearing off already.

She didn't come close. She put the bottle down within Shard's reach, and stepped back, watching her point her head towards it, clearly starting with whatever invisible organ she had instead of eyes.

"What happens if I order you to drink it now?" she asked, and for a moment, genuinely felt in power. Shard said nothing, and made no move. "Right."

She picked up the mortar again, and went back to pulverizing beautiful crystals into a wholly unappealing grey powder.

"I would rather not accidentally overdose myself," the below-spawn finally said, voice taut. Annoyance, maybe? Or some kind of frustration?

"And I would rather not risk it with your claws, or your teeth, or whatever else that you have that you are hiding from me," Ifi shrugged.

"You are smarter than I thought, mortal."

"You must've thought me really dumb then."

In response, Shard made a sound that Ifi could clearly identify: a sharp, short chuckle.

"So what will you do now?" she asked. "Sell me to Villis, while I remain bound and weak? I warn you: his patrons pay significantly worse than mine."

Were those really the terms this below-spawn thought in? That if Ifi realized she couldn't fully control her, then obviously she had to think about betraying her? Maybe what there was more merit than she knew to the tall-tales of the paranoia in the High City.

"What will you do if I unchain you?" she replied with a question, still crunching at the crystals. It was calming, after a fashion.

Shard took a longer while to consider; a good sign in Ifi's eyes.

"Take a look around," she finally said, "lounge. What else is for me to do, if his agents are watching?"

"Right," Ifi poured the contents of the mortar into a new flask, then returned to the ingredients cabinet. She was running low on morning vitriol, but there still should be some left. "And what then if I leave you alone in the shop?"

"Well," she replied after another lengthy silence, "I will first ask where you're going."

Ifi dropped a few chunks of the yellow vitriol into a flask of fire water, and started to stir; they dissolved quickly.

"You like being in control, it seems," she observed, words rich in double-meaning on her lips, double-meanings she was sure Shard wasn't going to pick up on. "I have some affairs I have to see that do not relate to you or your schemes."

"What affairs?" Shard demanded, clear urgency in her voice. "With who?"

Ifi picked up a new heating charm from the pile at the bench and put it under the bottle. When squeezed, it sparked, then shot up a gout of yellow flame.

"Look," she said, moving to prepare the third solution. At least she was still good on alchemists' salt. "If you are as trapped here as you say, then what choice do you have but to trust me? I'm sure there are many ways you can hurt me, but if I don't help you get to Villis, I don't think you're living past the end of the week, right? So you can demand what you want, but at the end of the day, I am your only option, am I not?"

The silence that followed was evidence enough that her words hit; she didn't even have to look at the below-spawn to know that.

"Do you still want me to drink that weakening poison?"

Miraculously, Ifi kept herself from ruining yet another mixture by letting too much salt in at Shard's voice. There was something in it, cutting through all the layers of harsh, dry tone, a brittle, sharp note that, for all the differences, sounded so intimately familiar. What the fuck is wrong with me?

She looked over to Shard, one hand on the slowmilk bottle, the other clutched where the spear went through her chest. She bit her lip. Somehow, it hurt to see.

"No, no need," she returned to her solution. "I'll unchain you once I'm done. But hush now. I really need to focus."

***

Obviously, Ifi lied. Sure enough, some of the business she had outside of the shop really had nothing to do with Shard and her plans. There was, in fact, a kind of comfort to be found for the alchemist in the quotidian. She spent half an hour arguing with the glassmakers' representative about replenishing her stock of glassware, and as usual left with empty pockets, but also a vague sense of satisfaction she at least managed to keep her coat. She made a few deliveries that were almost overdue, apologized profusely about the not-quite delays, and made sure that the local mineralist would restock her ahead of the Richt brothers, come next week. Finally, she also dropped a little gift at her carpenter's shop, to thank for the prompt service with her new door, and barely escaped from having to sample his own back-room moonshine alchemy. The rest of her business out in the city, however, was all about Shard. In Ifi's defense, she wasn't looking forward to it, either.

In fact, it was damn near close to the last thing she wanted to do, and unlikely to work at that.

Rain drizzled around her, buffeted around by bursts of wind; she hoped that her parasol would be enough to keep it from ruining her wig and face. If she only could, she would rather avoid showing up in the Low Towers with her face all smudged up; she was going to have enough to be ashamed of there without that.

She walked along an empty street, her only company the pink granite golems pulling wagons up the cobbled road. Sometimes, a runner or a courier would dart past her, rushing to secure the late-day trades and deals, but other than that all of her peers seemed to have moved on to the coffeehouse part of the working day. She could see them longuing on innumerable verandahs and terraces that made up the layers of the Middle City; she could feel their eyes on her, as if questioning what she was doing pushing on in a weather like this. Couldn't she have done like a respectable woman should, and delegated?

In the distance, obscured by the rain, the towers of the High City raised tall above, the canopy and crown so far detached from the concerns of the cobbled streets and stucco facades of the Middle City as if to stand for a different world in entirety. And were they not just that? The spires silver and red, hundreds of light charms burning day and night to remind everyone below of the undeniable difference between the families that lived on high, and the families that were irrelevant. To Ifi it came as less impressive and more of a sheer waste, but then again, as the people on the terraces would be quick to point out to her, in the breaks between their discussions of pork deliveries and golem production, she never aimed high enough.

Unlike the people living in the homes around her. The Low Towers appeared in every part as the obsessions of the upper edge of the Middle City rendered in brick and architectural posturing. They built their homes as tall as the people with no seat at the Table were allowed to, and not an inch shorter. Nothing in the permissed space could go unfilled, resulting in universally ungainly buildings, either squat even when tall, or, worse yet, knife-thin, as if some giant had taken a normal home into their fist and squeezed it out both ends, and all out of proportion.

That's what she liked to imagine was the origin story of the building she found herself in front of, barely wide enough for two men to stand shoulder-to-shoulder inside, and yet reaching just as high up into the sky as the over-built mansions it was squashed between.

She checked herself in a pocket-mirror one last time, and then took a deep breath and stepped towards the door. Honourable Alistar Juno the brass plate on them read, master merchant. She touched the weather metal, hearing the bell charms ring sharply on the other side. She didn't have to wait long. Thankfully, she didn't have to wait long.

"Young miss!" the servant at the door exclaimed in surprise, a broad smile on her old face. "What a joy! Please, come in!"

"Hello, Tilda," Ifi tried to return the smile, and squeeze past the portly woman, and inside her old home. "Where's father?"

"In the study," she reached for Ifi's coat. She allowed her to take it, the parasol in the rack.

"And how is he?" she asked.

"Old, miss," Tilda's smile shortened, then faded. "You should visit more often. He speaks of you often."

Ifi snorted. All those years, and Tilda couldn't stop lying. Her father wasn't known for gossiping with the help. But, she supposed, the family servant couldn't bear the hostility in her world. It was good to be reminded why she didn't want to come here. But of all the lies she had heard today, this one was strangely endearing.

"Mercy, Tilda," the smile she got out was quite genuine, "I don't know what we would have done without you. And I'm sure my father misses me so very sorely."

"He does," she said with an enthusiastic nod. "He really does, I'm certain of it. Are you hungry? Some tea perhaps? Such awful weather to be outside! You must be so very cold!"

Grudgingly, Ifi allowed herself to be serviced, struggling not to allow Tilda to squash her into the oaken wardrobes still inexplicably cluttering the hall. She managed to convince her that she wasn't hungry, weathered a storm of very concerned mentions of how slight she looked, the danger this was to her health, was forced into a blanket-like shawl to warm her up, and then finally allowed the arduous climb up to her father's beloved pigeon-hole of a spire.

By the time she made her way to the study, the spiral staircase had left her panting, clutching at the jewel holding her robe at the neck as if to tear it all away.

"I am not going to make a mess," she promised herself before knocking on a door that barely left any room for the house to its sides.

"Come in," a familiar voice beckoned.

The thick stench of tobacco surrounded her immediately, same as always. It seemed to saturate everything in the room, from the green carpet at her feet, through the stacked bookshelves to her sides, all the way to the narrow desk at the far window. His tobacco, her brother used to call it, the smell of home and hearth. Ifi could never imagine being so sentimental about something that odorous.

Then again, as her father's withering glare was quick to remind her, she has never been the best daughter.

She wasn't sure if it was the years that wore him down, or just the house stretching him into its own likeness, all too thin, all too long. The old dusty shirt hung loosely from his narrow shoulders, and where the skin showed, it was wrapped tautly enough around the bones for Ifi to pick out each individual vein pulsing beneath. As if with most of him, it reminded her of some kind of a wight or a mummy, although the frown on his face was too severe for any necromantic art to replicate.

"What an unexpected pleasure," he rasped, knocking ash off his pipe. "And here I was, thinking…"

"You needed your potions refilled," Ifi didn't let him finish.

"You didn't have to trouble yourself, my beloved daughter," he hissed, folding down the morning issue of The City Bell spread on his lap. "You could have sent a runner. Isn't that how you prefer to handle family?"

She tensed, shoulders pressed together, back straight. A dozen angry retortsformed in her brain, but she managed to catch all of them before they made it to her lips. Carefully poised, she pushed herself past his chair and placed her stachel between the stacks of books and correspondence cluttering the desk.

"Death's bane," she pulled the fist bottle out. "Should be good for ten doses. Green Lion, also ten. A phial of panacea."

"Silver?" he asked, picking it up, his hold on the dainty thing steadier than in years. A small sense of pride in her craft made Ifi relax a bit. Not for long, though. "So you are back to shirking on me?"

"I am all out of liquid gold," Ifi muttered. "It will have to do. I will get you some when I get the next delivery."

"Hopefully," he nodded, putting the phial back down. "It would be such bad luck for an old man to catch something severe while you are all out."

There was one more bottle in her sack, the elixir inside pitch-black. This one, she didn't have to name; she could hear her father gulping at the mere sight of it.

"The royal tar! So you do come bearing gifts," he whistled, for once in a softer tone. His long, skeletal fingers closed around the slender neck of the bottle. "What happened to it being a poison?"

"It still is," Ifi said, only a bit curtly. "And you shouldn't drink it. It's nothing but brimstone, asphalt and seven deadly venoms"

"But it gets the old blood pumping, does it not? Would you be so kind as to pour a round for your father?" he replied. "I'll accept it as an apology."

She found the crystal glass as its usual place under his desk, slammed it down, let a finger of the oily mixture pour down the side of it, leaving behind a viscous trail. For a moment, the tobacco stench gave way to the heady odour of rust. Her father didn't even wait for her to let go of the drink before seizing it.

"Ah," he said, sniffing at it in obvious satisfaction. "And to think that this is but the smallest of rewards of the Noble Art. If only you pursued it more."

She pretended not to hear that, and not to see her father save a week off his life in a single sip. Instead, she looked around, hoping to maybe find a spare chair. But of course, it couldn't fit inside. As expected, there were none. Maybe if the study was built less like a corridor, her father could have made room for others in it. But that was a childish dream she had long since given up on. She propped herself against a bookshelf instead.

The glass had her father's full focus for a minute or two, clicking his tongue at the drink as if it was the finest of wines and not a drug favoured by necromancers and people needing to clean copper piping.

"So how is your business," he asked, the royal tar's agitation already a ringing note in his voice. "Still making good money?"

"More than ever," she said. Truthfully, even, just as long as the part about her recent expenses was left out of the account.

"So glad to hear," he said, not glad at all. "For those of us not at the Table, money really is all that there is to life."

All those years, and she caught herself looking away at the mention. All those years, and she still felt her cheeks flush. His hooks slid under her flesh so effortlessly as if he wasn't even trying. But she knew him well enough to know that he definitely was.

"So," he took another sip; the batch must have been good, because even he couldn't keep the frown up. "Your unlikely appearance, the even more unlikely gift... You must want something. But clearly not money, since you are so very well off on that road to nowhere of yours?"

And there was the guilt, the shriveled spectre's favourite weapon. And she was doing so well, earlier today, getting Shard in line and business sorted out. Only to be reminded to whom it didn't matter.

"Don't make this face," he waved the glass at her, other hand picking at his beard in a masterful display of exasperated annoyance. "We both know you do not come seeking your father's advice!. So just say what it is that you want?"

"The books," Ifi muttered, bracing for the worst. "The alchemy books."

He paused his display, the glass freezing in the air. Then, in a comically exaggerated way, he raised an eyebrow, reminding Ifi that should have pursued comedy, not trade. He would be a better man for that."

"I need to make sure I understand correctly," he said, understanding perfectly. "You mean those books that I have brought to you from the High City, at a great personal expense?" he said, voice crackling with false confusion. "The books of secret alchemical knowledge?"

"Those very same books, father."

She knew where this was going. She grabbed the hem of her robe, reminding herself not to explode when it would arrive at the destination.

"The ones that you have returned to me," he pulled himself up in the chair, long neck stretching towards her, an ugly grin on his corpse-doll of a face, "because you prefer not to dabble in useless esoterica that a woman can't make an honest penny from? Those books? Are you sure?"

"Yes," she hissed, not sure if the bile in her throat was more guilt or anger. Probably some mixture of those.

"So," he still wasn't finished, "you want to look again into the books that I gave you so that you could earn your place at the Table, to which you preferred becoming a coin-counter?"

And just like that, Ifi's fervent wish to not make a scene came to an abrupt and unpleasant end.

"Oh, there you go!" she snapped, voice two pitches higher than she wanted it to. "You just can't bear that, can you? Your daughter wanting her own life instead of playing in your deranged plots!"

His face darkened, the illusion of good mood erased in an instant.

"Some of us," he heaved off, his voice like a vampire's death-rattle, "think about others. About the future their children can have. Some of us lay foundations, and others…"

"Don't!" Ifi jabbed a finger at the air, feeling her own face tighten into an ugly scowl. "Don't!"

"And others piss into their foundations because they are cowards!"

"Oh, f-" she managed to stop that one, even if he clearly realized what she was going to say. "Maybe I should just take it all away," she waved her arm towards the mixtures on the desk, "see how long it would take for you to come begging, you parody of a father!"

"You know," he smiled back. He had always had something of a viper in him, "every time you insult me, I just remind myself how much your life is an insult to you."

This took the wind off her. She wasn't even supposed to care. She hadn't cared in years. And yet, somehow, through the obscure sorcery of family, she was small again, and he was right. For a moment, she really believed her life was a mistake.

"You are not going to drag me there," she spat out finally. She was no longer fifteen. He wouldn't get her that easily.

"You need something from me," he reached for the glass again, this time not stopping to savour the mixture. "So I am going to drag you through wherever I want. We're not the Table. There is no need for courtesy here."

"What do you want from me?" she said instead of the far more reasonable and that's she left you or that's why Fer no longer writes. But she was way too deep into sunk costs to relent now.

"You know what," he shrugged. "To prepare the Work. Take the Challenge. Finally make all the effort I put into this family pay off. So yes," he glanced at the shelf above Ifi's head, "you can have the books. They are yours, after all. You're welcome."

She breathed out. As far as successes went, this one tasted particularly bitter.

"The Challenge is a sham," also, she just couldn't help herself. "You know that. The High Families don't want strangers at the Table! When will you accept that?"

"When your claims cause the Strenis and the Markios to disappear from the Table," he poured himself some more; Ifi wondered if the fumes of the royal tar didn't get to her too, "and when you fail the Challenge, instead of running away from it. But that would require you to be capable of taking risks, wouldn't it?"

And that was it. The words punched a hole in Ifi, and she deflated, hunched down. What was she even to say to that? What was she to say to the fact that her father, that wizened corpse of a parent, was right? If she had been made of braver stock, she wouldn't have to bend her head and listen to him. She wouldn't have a place at the Table, either - he was delusional to think that it was ever a possibility. But at least she would not have to ask him for help, or drink up his poison.

With an incoherent, sad grunt, she turned to the shelves instead, to wrap up her stupid plan. The rustle of paper behind her indicated that her father finally lost interest, and returned to his paper, and to the matters of the High City that concerned him so.

The book wasn't hard to find; its blood red spine stood out from the blacks and browns of the shelf. She picked it up, years of dust rubbing grey stains on her fingers. The Telluric Fragments the frontispiece announced in an elegant hand, above hand-drawn depiction of a lion and a spear-holder flanking a crumbling tower. As with all proper alchemy, the rest of the book was likewise written by hand, on fine, sturdy parchment. It felt inappropriate to hold in her hand; this small, useless thing was worth a month of Ifi's work, if not more.

Of course it wasn't really useless, just useless to her. She flicked to the half-remembered page, where a warm-orange tiger vanished between two tall trees, strands of writing hazing around the miniature. The Descent into the Depths of Solitude, and the Triumphant Return Into the Light of Truth. The fragment from the neo-telluric canon, teaching the alchemist the secret of producing the essence of attraction, which binds souls together and makes their love pure. One of the greatest achievements of the Noble Art.

But there was no recipe. Instead, Ifi read through a rambling poem about a man chasing after a tiger in a deep jungle, and there suffering many horrible indignations, avoiding each narrowly until finally finding the tiger's den and there wrestling it into submission. A few of the allusions, Ifi could still pick apart; the green-hearted serpent chasing the man through the canopies was probably some representation of a particular vitriol, and the constant mentions of the "rising morning mist" indicated repeated vacuum distillations. Maybe, if Ifi had the library entirely to herself and two weeks of time, she could decode the procedure fully. And then, of course, move onto trying to figure out the parts that were purposefully left out of the recipe, so that each aspirant on the path to the Noble Art could re-learn it by themselves, and in that process, master themselves. Or, failing that, succumb to a horrible, fast-acting poison punishing them for trying to rush through the Work.

She didn't know what else she was expecting, other than being reminded of the nature of the so-called respectable side of her craft. She closed the book, and let her head hang. Would it be too much to ask for a simple recipe for the truth-stone? Mix this and that at such and such flame, keep at a boil for an hour, cool down slowly? Then, she could dope that damn below-spawn with it and be done fearing it. She could ask it for everything she wanted, and receive all that, and more. But instead her reward was being reminded that she was not a real alchemist, and that real alchemists were all obscurantist pricks.

Knowing that, however, didn't help all that much, or at all. And she knew that already, anyway.

"I can't read this," she muttered, closing the book on the recipe, and all the other futures she had never pursued.

"You don't want to," her father corrected, and again truth be told, he wasn't even wrong. "It's still not too late, you know. It soon will be, but not yet."

He had worn her too raw, too tender. Without even wanting to, Ifi considered tossing all of her life's work aside, secluding herself for two years to prepare a Work, and then presenting it to a gaggle of geriatric men from the High Families, just so that they could toss her back into the Middle City with a reprimand for profaning the Noble Art. The idea made following up on her below-spawn's murder-plan far more appealing. And still, the warning lingered in her mind. She didn't put the book back on the shelf, and instead in her bag. The fact that her father nodded in approval was, probably, the worst part.

"Right," she grasped for the first excuse she could conjure. "Father, it was a pleasure seeing you again, but I have to go now and make sure the glassmakers don't deliver to the wrong shop again."

"Are you dealing with them now?" he looked up from the paper. "Bad choice."

"I'm not dealing with them," Ifi sighed. It was always about politics with him, and not even their politics. "I'm buying glass from them."

"Well, better go and buy it quick then," he frowned, nose buried in the broadsheet. "It looks like there are rough days ahead for them."

"Right. Until next time, father," she glanced at him and the black bottle one last time. "Don't drink it all in a week again, please."

And with that, she left him to his disappointments, and his politics.

***

The first thing Ifi wanted to do after coming back home was to lay down and nurse all of her raw places. Maybe cry it all out, or just stare at the ceiling for a moment. Her father barbs stuck into her thorn-like, and it would take her days to pick them out. And all of that, for nothing.

Shard, apparently, had a different plan.

The below-spawn was waiting on her in the front of the shop, perched on the counter like a porcelain raptor. In Ifi's absence, she clearly rummaged through her things. One of her black shawls was wrapped around Shard's chest like a sash, tied over the wound with an elaborate knot.

"You're back," she said, jumping down the floor; her feet barely made a sound as they touched the tiles. Ifi used to imagine that she would move like a puppet of sorts. And maybe she wasn't even wrong: there was something off. But nothing stilted or sudden: all sinuous, arachnid grace instead. "You've been gone for long."

The other suspicion proved far more correct; upright, the below-spawn towered over her, the top of her head barely reaching Shard's chin. And just as she had already suspected, it made an impression. She took a reflexive step back, almost tripping. She just didn't expect the impression to be that strong. And Shard saw that, and followed it up.

Her hand reached up to Ifi's head and for a split-second the alchemist thought that all of her doubts would be resolved in a single swipe. But the porcelain fingers merely brushed through the thick curls of her wig, holding a few strands to light.

"I almost didn't recognize you," Shard said, lips again curled into something that could be either a smile or a scowl and Ifi had no way of telling. All she knew is that she was feeling her heart hammer in her chest. "You're quite a chameleon."

The way she said that, and the way she held her did something to Ifi. She stopped, dumbstruck, and for a blissful moment, there was no more failure weighing on her with the full burden of the day. Did Shard like her that way? Did Shard like her? She wanted to ask, so very much.

"You seem relaxed," she said instead.

"I'm no longer in chains," Shard said, a bright note in her voice, finally removing the hand from Ifi's hair, a few cut strands trailing behind. She raised it up, touching one of the claws to her lips. "And my body is no longer slow. If I wanted to, I could splay you apart between the strikes of your heart, little alchemist."

Ifi breathed out. the words a cold shower on her head. Everything crashed again. She needed that. She took another step to the back, only to notice the tip of Shard's tongue peek from between the tips of her teeth. It seemed no less sharp than they were.

"You are afraid," she observed, and snorted.

"You have just threatened to kill me," Ifi replied, actually quite surprised that she wasn't afraid more. Maybe it was the fact that she knew Shard needed her alive. Maybe it was the fact that after the last few days she just didn't have all that much of an emotional range left. "After putting your claws near my face."

Shard pecked her head. Again, Ifi found herself wishing there was a face there to understand.

"Oh," she said, "haven't you said it yourself that I won't? And besides, you didn't send anyone in to drag me out while you were away. I trusted you not to, and I didn't."

"I see," Ifi nodded, making her way around Shard and towards the counter. She put her bag down, and started to fumble with the cloak. "So I can trust you not to gut me."

"Precisely," Shard said. "We have a great future ahead of us, you and I. But I must ask you a few questions first. I have taken a look around and-"

"Right," the alchemist cut in, her head a swirl of thoughts so conflicting that it took her a good minute to be finally done with the simple clasp on her neck. She exhaled again. "It can wait for a moment, can't it? I need to wash myself, and get changed."

To Shard's credit, she managed to not leave a trace of her rummaging. If not for the shawl absent from her chest, Ifi would have never figured out someone went through her things. But she was quite sure that someone did, and thoroughly at that. Thankfully, though, there was nothing there for Shard to find that she could easily use against her, and most of her clothes were the wrong size either. So as much as it should have bothered Ifi, it didn't make that much of an impression.

Unlike the lingering sensation of that porcelain hand so near her face. The alchemist found herself staring in the mirror, touching the side of her head as if hoping to find some kind of a cut, or other impression that would explain why she could still feel it. But there was nothing there, just another pang of old hunger.

She wanted for hands touching her.

Hesitantly, she washed away the make-up, then fought off the urge to put it on again. She didn't even know if Shard liked it. Did it matter if she did? A new, fresh kind of exhaustion started compounding itself in the turns of Ifi's thinking, the same arguments running around in circles minute by minute.

"You can't be serious," she said to her reflection, and heard her father's voice speak back from the mirror: It soon will be, but not yet.

No matter how imposing the below-spawn looked, no matter how dangerous she seemed, Ifi still had leverage on her. She could just ask. No, more than ask: she could demand. Name a price. Of course it was stupid. But could she forgive herself for not trying?

In a different life, she would have friends and peers waiting for her on the terraces of the Middle City, where with a glass of wine and an alchemical lamp above, she would confess to them her struggles, and her doubts. But she was never one for reaching out to others, and so all she had now was a prospering shop, a wounded below-spawn waiting for her on the counter, and an ache she struggled to name, but couldn't dull.

And she was hurt, and tired, and one bad word away from crying, and she needed something to make it stop. And she could either take the risk, or wallow in that misery until that low-born thug came back to rid her of the awful, beautiful killer she was hosting.

There was, of course, nothing fancy in her wardrobe. She could try putting on the dress she wore to formal gatherings of guilds and craftsmen, but it was respectable, not desirable. And the rest was night shirts and underwear and workshop overalls. She really should start selling more to tailors.

Disappointed in herself, she picked the plain lilac robe that seemed least baggy on her, tied it loosely with a braided, colourful belt she had received from a sailor client some years ago, and reached into the small silver chest she hasn't opened in months, if not years. There it was, a small teardrop of a brooch, lilac and silver, one of the three or four pieces of her youth that managed to survive the shortages of precious metals in her workshop. She pinned it where she thought it would be visible. She checked herself in the mirror again, once again decided not to put on make-up, immediately regretted the choice, reminded herself that the only kind of it she knew how to apply probably wouldn't work under the circumstances, regretted not trying anyway, and finally made her way back to the shop's front.

If Shard appreciated, or didn't appreciate her efforts, it didn't show.

"Do you want something to drink?" she tested the waters with a question. She probably should have asked that earlier.

"I don't think so," Shard shrugged. "The contents of your kitchen didn't impress. You should get a servant."

"I know," Ifi sighed, sitting behind the counter. She didn't quite realize how tired she was; she has been on her feet all day long.

"You clearly can afford it," Shard propped herself against the other side of it, looking around the room, at all the display cabinets that survived her arrival days before. "You do not seem to be hurting for money."

"The business is going well," Ifi reached below for one of her special drinks. She probably shouldn't be going for it again so soon, but the day has really wrung her out. "I have a good reputation."

"Deservedly so," Shard said, sending pinpricks of pride down Ifi's spine. "You run a wonderful shop."

She needed to hear that. She needed to have it said to her five years ago. That's why Shard was saying that in the first place, but for once Ifi just couldn't be bothered by the lie. Not after the day.

"But that actually makes me wonder," Shard continued, the wistful note slowly fading from voice, "you are clearly not as desperate as I thought you were. You didn't have to save, and you don't need my wealth to survive. But you risk a lot in helping me."

The elixir of wakefulness burned its way down Ifi's throat; it didn't make her thoughts any clearer, but it whet all of her needs. She probably should have eaten before.

"I have said that I do not wish to be known for letting my patients die," she said, tone as neutral as she could get; something in Shard's voice was grabbing her again.

"But you do not run a hospital. You run a business. You had to find a cot for me by your distillator. It wasn't the kindness of heart that made you do it, was it?"

If people could stop asking her questions she didn't have an answer to, Ifi would be very thankful to them. She made a vague sound, as if to indicate disagreement without actually stating it. Because there was a bit of that kindness at work those few nights ago?

Was there not?

"And for an alchemist intent on being recognized in the High City, you seem so strangely unconcerned with the finer side of the Noble Art," Shard let her hand trace a line across the display cabinets, and all the bulk potions inside. "The rewards I have promised you must have appeal even so, but I don't think they are enough for you to risk it all and not sell me out. So there must be something more that you want from me, is there not?"

This time the smile on her lips was clear and obvious. The brittle note of defeat, the voice of longing: no trace remained of them, as if Shard was again in power over Ifi. And in truth, was she not?

The alchemist nodded shortly, saying nothing. Her mouth was dry, and her heart still. The elixir buzzed in her veins; waves of hot and cold pushing through her blood. She shouldn't have taken it.

"So, tell me," Shard stretched each word with palpable delight, "what it is. Who do you want me to hurt?"

"Me."

The word escaped her throat before she could stop it, half-formed and weak. She immediately cursed herself, fear bit into her hard enough for the bottle to slip from her hands and into her lap. And for a split-second, the worst of her terrors came to pass. The smile vanished from Shard's face.

"Say it again," she demanded, harsh or maybe sweet: the sound made no sense to Ifi. But she had already taken the plunge, and she couldn't walk it back.

Could sh-

"Me," she repeated, this time louder and clearer.

A heavy silence sat around the two of them. Shard froze in place; Ifi opened her mouth again and again to apologize, and let out only an abject silence. It was going to hurt, and in all the wrong ways. She braced for the familiar, she braced for laughter.

She received it, but not in the way she feared.

"I do love the taste of your fear," Shard exclaimed, pushing herself away from the counter and into the open of the floor. "Stand up," she commanded, "come to me."

Ifi's legs carried her before her brain could ask them to stop; not that it wanted to.

"Kneel."

She bent her knees, head raised up, the porcelain beauty towering over her, a wide, wonderfully cruel smile on her face.

"Tell me how."

 

[Gargulec]

5. Spiderhawk

Unlike some of her siblings, Shard had never refined her taste in fear. Watching the alchemist try her hardest not to tremble, waiting for the answer to her litany of bizarre desires, she therefore couldn't tell if the delectable buzz in her stomach was coming from that dread, or just from simply the fact that the mortal girl was finally in her place: kneeling before Shard.

Either way, she hadn't felt that good in weeks. Not since she went on the run.

"And I want…," Ifi choked up, "I dream of…"

She kept staring at Shard, face pulled taut into a ridiculous mask of anticipation and desperate need. Her heart thrummed with worry intense enough to be almost tactile. Shard imagined it as a thread she twisted around her finger, the tip of the claw tracing a circle on Ifi's cheek. There was no rush to let the moment pass; in fact it was better to make it last.

The idea of a sharp "no" appealed. The quivering mass at her feet humiliated Shard, drugged her, kept her chained. Mortals shouldn't be allowed to get away with treating the children of the Lair-Mother that way, and for all that Shard needed the alchemist alive to get back at Villis, breaking her wouldn't kill her. At least not immediately.

The edge of her claw pushed closer to Ifi's cheek; a small flick of the wrist drew a thin red line. The cut was too shallow to register, for either of them, but the alchemist shivered at the touch in a disarmingly fragile way.

It wouldn't do to have the girl crumble and break under the weight of a single word. The spectacle would likely be widely joyous and vindicating, but in the end, it wouldn't be all that difficult from just rending her the old-fashioned way. Shard picked a drop of Ifi's blood onto the edge of her claw, and then shook it off. The cut bled barely more than that; Shard was still a master of her own hunger.

The alchemist's mouth twitched, stuck on an unspoken question, on a plea. Her hands clasped at her plain robe, crumpling the fabric in a death grip. Shard tried to imagine how the silence had to feel to her. To speak all of her heart's hidden desires, and be rewarded not even with a denial, but the torture of hoping for a yes? Yes, the buzz she was riding was definitely Ifi's fear.

And how Shard could still add to it! With a cool smile, she slipped her hand under the girl's chin, pulling her head up, and allowing one of her claws to casually brush against the exposed throat. She felt her gulp, she felt the bloom of a different bouquet of fear, of this animal reaction of a body in danger.

It was a heady hit, even for Shard. But staring into the girl's face, and seeing her eyes locked onto her porcelain shell as if she was the only thing in the world, Shard reminded herself that she didn't have to rush the big release. There would be time for it in the days to come. For now, she could just longue in the sense of having the alchemist firmly in her power.

"So that's what you want of me?" she asked, careful to keep her tone neutral, but for a hint of contempt. "To mistreat you," she repeated from the litany, "like a slave, like a dog?"

"Yes," the girl whispered, the word barely making it out through the clenched throat.

Under her hand, she felt her pulse, rabbit-rapid. Blood flushed into Ifi's cheeks, painting her bright pink. There was something more to the fear, a taste that Shard hadn't sampled much before: biting shame. She didn't remember it being that sweet before. She just couldn't help herself; she had to seize on it.

"A grown woman groveling for the belt?" she let her contempt show more, adorned it with a hint of bemusement. "Pathetic."

The word went in like a knife; she could feel it open something tender; she could feel the recoil inside. And then, sure as blood from a cut, fear followed insult. Ifi's eyes went as wide as they could, and reflected in them Shard saw the certainty of an impending rejection. Once more, she stretched out the silence, careful not to relax the grip on Ifi's head.

"Admit it," she ordered finally, voice loud and sharp, her hold tightening. "Loud!"

To Shard's visceral joy, the girl didn't hesitate even a second.

"It's pathetic!" she bawled out, her fear and need setting her voice bare and trembling. "I am pathetic!"

"Good," Shard commended her, letting a softer note into her voice, an approving one. "And don't you forget it."

She let Ifi's chin go and then, with a lazy swipe, slapped the girl's cheek with the back of her hand. She yelped and stumbled, losing her balance, falling face first, landing on her hands. It wasn't a strong blow; it barely registered as a pleasant jolt in Shard's arm. It wasn't even meant to bruise. Yet, Ifi was struggling to get up from her fours.

To be honest, Shard liked her there even more than on her knees.

"Stay there," Shard snapped at her, swiping at the air. Ifi froze, quietling panting. "Eyes on the floor."

Her arms buckling under her weight, the girl could no longer hide trembling. She was shaking, her shame sloughing off her in thick slices, each a fresh smear of sweetness between Shard's flesh and her shell. Sweat beaded on Ifi's head; Shard gathered some on her claws, letting them draw wide, red arcs across the alchemist's shaved scalp.

Shard's tongue snaked from her mouth, a thin braid of saliva dropping down to splash on the girl below. She tasted the sweat and found in it everything she expected: the fear, the humiliation, even some fading pain. And still, there was so much more she could get out of the moment. Because she missed it; she missed that sheer satisfaction of knowing that someone else is hers to hurt.

"Did you like it when I hit you?" she asked instead, still leaving that bemused edge in.

"Yes," Ifi whimpered.

"And do you like that you're not allowed to look at me?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Shard turned around and took a few steps back, towards the counter. It struck her that every time her feet clicked against the tiles, another tiny worried tremor went through Ifi. She made sure to step loudly.

"You really are a chameleon," she mused, leaning back and taking a look around the shop. "Hide among normal people, perfectly faded into their world. But that is just camouflage, is it not? But your true colors are different, are they not? Those of a slave," she lingered on the word, drew the disdain out, "of a dog."

She let her voice hang there, to get the last sampling of the fear before she dissipated it.

"I think they suit you well," she announced, smiling to the thought of the red of Ifi's shame, and Ifi's blood. "You will have what you want."

Shard wasn't built to taste relief; but she could tell the flood of it by the sudden absence of the buzz inside. And yet, not all pleasure was gone: the shame lingered, sticky-sweet.

"Thank you," Ifi whimpered out, continuing struggling to stay in position.

Shard held her there for a moment longer before waving her hand.

"Get up," she demanded, "come to me."

Much to her amusement, and slightly to her enjoyment, Ifi still held her head down as she approached. It wasn't anything particularly physical for Shard; she just appreciated the deference. The alchemist stopped close to her, her hands on the counter, resting her weight against it.

For a time, they were both quiet. All the kinds of hurt radiating from Ifi faded one by one, as did the pangs of Shard's hunger. Only the air in the shop continued to taste heavy, thick with the stink of sweat and something more. The impurities of mortal flesh, made apparent! Yet, as the silence stretched, Shard realized, to some surprise, that she didn't exactly know what to do next. There was clearly some expectation that Ifi had and wouldn't voice. Was she supposed to hit her again? To go down the list of things the alchemist asked for at the start? Or just stop? Maybe discuss Villis now, now that the girl was amenable and easy to manipulate? Maybe that was a good idea, and…

"May I touch you?"

Ifi's voice was still the same weak, small thing; she still hasn't raised her head. Yet, it scaught Shard off-guard. It was the kind of question she was used to. In fact, people tended to beg her not to touch them. She hesitated. Was it some sort of a ploy? Then she looked at the alchemist, barely holding herself up, and sounding meeker than a beggar, and realized that maybe she was worrying too much.

"Do as you wish," she said, not sure what to expect.

Ifi came a step closer, and wrapped her arm around Shard's chest, and pulled herself in. Shard felt her press herself to the shell, her warmth spreading across the porcelain surface, her head rested in the nook of her clavicle, her breath condensing on the shell. She could even hear the beat of the girls' heart, ragged at first, only to steady as she continued to hold on tight.

It wasn't that Shard didn't understand embraces. She was aware that they were gestures of intimacy and closeness. She just didn't quite understand this one. Just mere moments ago, this girl was begging to be hurt, and now she was holding onto her as if onto a lifeline? Something here was wrong; it was just plain odd to ask for tenderness from one's torturer. Hurting was hurting, caring was caring. So which way did the alchemist want it to go? Shard stayed still, neither turning Ifi away, nor returning the gesture. Not that the alchemist seemed to need that.

But as the embrace stretched on, the question continued to irk her, like a knot she couldn't untie.

"What is this?" she asked, perhaps a bit more annoyed than commanding. "What do you want?"

"I'm…" Ifi murmured something incoherent. "Can I ask you something?" and then, without waiting, still latched onto Shard: "Am I really pathetic?" There were all shades of hurt in her voice, but none of them fresh; each more like an old bruise or a scar. "Is it true?" she demanded.

"What?" Shard sputtered. If the hug confused her, the question baffled. "You've said it yourself," she said with a dismissive shrug.

"Because you've made me say it," it clearly didn't satisfy the alchemist. She was mumbling now, her words muffled and slightly slurred. "And I… It's just… But I don't want to…"

The surprise transformed into its close kin, annoyance. She reached behind her back, pried the alchemist's arm away from her waist, and pushed her away,

"You asked to be humiliated," she stated coldly. "I gave you exactly what you wanted."

"Yes, but…" Ifi looked to the side, still avoiding facing Shard directly. She picked at her brooch nervously. "I just… you know..."

"I don't! What's the problem all of the sudden?" Shard snapped. Could that damn woman stop manipulating her? "Do you want me to tell you it's not pathetic for a grown woman to beg to be treated," she tried to imitate Ifi's voice next, "like a slave, like a dog?"

Once more, a thin film of pleasure spread between Shard's shell and flesh. But it was different this time; sharper, more sour. Ifi turned red on the face and hunched.

"You ask for it," Shard continued, a vague sense of something being out of joint worming its way around her awareness, "I give it to you. It's your demand, and apparently your pleasure. What else do you want?"

She made a mistake, she realized. She had no idea what that mistake was, but she saw a shadow go through Ifi's face, leaving it hardened as it passed. The alchemist straightened, stepped away.

"You are right," she said with flat, dull anger. She wiped something from under her eye, hand sliding over the red spot left by Shard's slap, "You gave me what I've asked for."

The stare she gave Shard wasn't entirely hostile; mostly tired. But little remained in it of the deference and desperation. Of the power that Shard had over her. An ugly feeling bubbled inside of her.

"Is it my fault that those are your wants?" she hissed, knowing it was not going to help. "Would you rather have me lie…"

The alchemist reached behind the corner, for that green bottle she had stowed away there. She uncorked it and swallowed its content in one gulp. She seemed to neither listen, nor care for what Shard was saying.

"...and pretend?"

"I have work to do," she said, without looking or acknowledging Shard's rant. "I'll be at it all night. In the meantime, make yourself at home."

"But we need to talk about Villis," Shard protested; she didn't like how needy it made her sound. "We need to plan!"

"I need to clean up after my messes. And you need to not bother me until I'm done."

She stomped downstairs, locking the door, and leaving Shard alone with herself.

Solitude has never bothered her before. There has never been a good reason for her to tie herself to others. The world was vast and open, and hers to stalk through. Others in it were prey, were stepping stones; the first to be eaten, the second to be used. And what use were there in attachment to either?

It was therefore a novel experience to have loneliness creep up on her all out of the sudden. Novel, and thoroughly unpleasant.

What remained of her prowl was three empty rooms: a sparse bedchamber, a tiny kitchen, and a shopfront where the smell of Ifi's shame still hazed in the air, an intolerable reminder of what had slipped from Shard's hands mere moments before. And that was it.

And then, filling the crack between the loneliness and imprisonment, there was the sting of being turned away from the alchemist's workshop. How could it come to this? She used to hold the cream of the High Families crop in the palm of her hand! Her words carried the weight of the Lair-Mother's own decrees! She could show at the Table splattered in blood, and feel the mighty fear even looking at her wrong! And now, she couldn't stop thinking of a Middle City alchemist on all fours, struggling to keep with Shard's silly command. She was yearning after an absolute nobody's pathetic blush.

She climbed into the small chamber that was Ifi's bedroom, just to move. But ten steps up stairs couldn't carry her away from her thoughts, and the mounting disgust of powerlessness. The crack in her shell itched; it wasn't pain as much as a constant, idle unwellness. She kept touching the sides of the wound, expecting to find her hand stained with pus, but even when her hands kept coming off clean, the relief was at best momentary.

There was no luxury to distract her in the alchemist's room. The woman lived a sparse life, seemingly suspended between nights in her workshop, and unfulfilled, bizzare. The few books were all recipes and alchemical references, the wardrobe disappointingly. The only secret that Shard could find was the money, stashed away in a hidden compartment in the dresser. But she had no use for the gems or the papers. Just as she had no use for the time slowly passing, or for herself, or for anything at all.

Waiting had a crushing weight.

The more she dwelt on the disaster earlier - and try as she might, she couldn't help but to dwell - the more she found herself longing for the high-vaulted caverns she was born and made in. That too was a novel feeling; her kind tended to flee their home whenever it could, to be reeled back in only when the Lair-Mother demanded tribute. But it was a land of simple principles mercilessly upholded. Meanings and actions were set there, and simple to understand.

She missed clarity.

Ifi left her cosmetics case out on the dresser. The large, sandalwood box asked for attention, drawing an eye to its carved panels. They were so much richer than any of the alchemist's furniture. Nubile oreads danced across them through peaks and valleys, their feet barely touching the ground. She didn't check it earlier; now it gave her an idea. It opened smoothly, revealing half a dozen compartments, most of them empty. Two balding brushes stuck by their lonesome in an extensive rack, accompanied by a lone box each of cheap face powder and blush, and a kohl pencil. She grabbed it; the rest was just sorry to look at.

The pencil wasn't the tool she preferred, but she needed to do something with her time, and painting her head required both that, and focus. She grabbed a chair, sat down before the mirror, and went to work. She knew what pattern to try for: a tarantula hawk, its filament wings wrapping around the sides of her head, legs splayed wide. Predator insects were the favoured emblem of hers. "Spiderwasp" was what Villis used to call her before he learned her name, before he learned how to speak of her without fear. But the tarantula hawk, especially, was the sign of her triumphs. She wore it when Villis was in her hands, when the fortunes of Master Glassmaker were at their apex.

The line-work came easily, and for a time, she managed to lose herself in the art, carefully painting the pattern on, from the slender string to the alert eyes. It was her talent, and unlike everything else, it survived the year undiminished. With pride, she remembered adorning her sibling's face, before they were set to appear at the High Table for the first time: she as a hornet, and it as a horned dragon.

But different memories started to drag on the tarantula hawk as it emerged from the tangle of lines. The dangerous insect was her face at the moment when she brushed against triumph, and so also at the moment of her greatest failure.

Villis was supposed to break in her hands. But she struck him too fast, and too hard, and somehow instead of snapping him, she sharpened him, and then twice again. Because every time she came close to the top, every time the world was hers to hold, there always had to be a misstep, a mistake, and a stumble.

Used to be that she could fall far and still land high. But it repeated, over and over again. The arc of her life bent into a downward spiral.

She was too good at her craft to let that stop her hand, but each line she drew on her head made it that much easier to realize that she was wrong about herself. What she was seeing reflected in the mirror was not a banner of her victories, but the mark of defeats.

How did the shells of the Lair-Mother's children break, under the chisel and the hammer? She knew: very slowly, and then all at once.

So did she.

 

[Gargulec]

6. Lucky Break

The precipitate started to fall out of the solution, tiny flakes dancing suspended in the murky blue of the mixture. Ifi breathed out in relief. She would still have to leave the flask in the warm bath for an hour or two more, and then filter the precursor thoroughly, but with the reaction started; the tricky part was behind her.

She made sure that the mask fit snugly around her face, and returned to check on the distillation still. There, too, the process seemed to be going well. The honey of philosophers wasn't boiling too vigorously, and the first droplets of the final product were starting to collect in the receiving flask. Even though she had gone through with this procedure at least a dozen times before, it still left her satisfied to see it work, and more than a little bit proud. The flask, once filled, would make up for what she had wasted on Shard, if not more.

It also pleased to note that the accomplishment was in a violation of the Noble Art's principles; instead of refining the honey of philosophers into the liquid wisdom of the Work, she was decomposing it into a base vinegar and a potent poison which, once diluted, made for a reliable and safe abortifacient. Turns out that to do on purpose what great Zesan the Easterner considered a complete butchery of a process paid extremely well. Certainly better than reuniting her spirit with the Truth would.

Ifi allowed herself a moment longer to admire her work; she needed to feel good about something tonight. The product in the flask was viscous and clear, not a trace of impurity - a good batch, she could tell at a glance. Any idiot with a still could probably make some quantity of it, and anyone with a skillet could definitely whip out crude honey of philosophers, no matter how lofty its name sounded. But what she was making was clean and concentrated. That's why she was never short on clients, or on orders. And what then of the fact that her approach didn't please the tastes of the self-obsessed masters of the Noble Art? Why should she care about it?

It was hers, and the demand it met was all the validation it needed. She had reasons to be proud, and she had reasons to spit on those who would command her to shame.

The elixir of wakefulness buzzed in her veins, stretching a fragile veil between her and the crashing exhaustion of the day. How much longer it was going to hold, she could not say. The alchemical lamps above shone sharp enough to cut; the burner under the still crackled with a metallic echo. Vertigo accompanied each step she made, the workshop blurring and stretching out of proportion. She needed to sleep, and she dreaded sleeping. She was intimately familiar with the kind of a hangover she was going to wake up to; but also to sleep meant to stop, and to stop meant to let the day catch up to her.

Her eyes darted across the workshop, looking for something to put her hands to. There would be no avoiding the devastation in the morning, but there was a delaying action to fight, and she was going to fight it to the last.

This was the real alchemy, she concurred, grabbing jars of eastern salts from the ingredient cabinet. Work by which all the pain and worry could be pushed to the back of the head, reduced to a gnawing, but inept tension. When she was younger, it made for a refuge from her father; when she grew, it made for a home in her loneliness. Now, in the mixing of salts, in the burner flames, in the bubbling of mixtures and air so heavy it clung to her shoulders like a second coat, she sought shelter from that porcelain demon she accepted into her home. Or, perhaps, from her own thoughts, from her own shame, from the filthy slag of desire crusting over in the pit of her stomach.

But holes riddled the walls of this hideaway, letting the wind blow through and the rain leak in. No matter what she turned herself to, the shadow of Shard followed after her. If only there hadn't been a moment of pleasure before the rejection, if only for a moment Ifi hadn't felt hope before having it dashed, if only her hope didn't come from being hit on the face and told to stay on her fours…

But the wish for it to be different left her just the same, now certain of what she has already suspected: that to chase after what she wanted was a mistake. Others might have wanted her alchemy, but no one desired after her desire.

And it hurt. No matter what she did, it hurt, and it would keep on hurting until she would manage again to force it into the recesses of her thought, to make it once more the domain of half-formed dreams she didn't even believe in. Then, at last, it could scab over and leave her if not happier, then calmer, and maybe even at some kind of empty peace.

That was the loneliness she knew, the one she grew into, and one she would never leave behind. This absurd deal she had concocted with Shard was not going to save her from it, no more than its failure could cure her of her wants. They would drag on her until the end of her days.

Bubbles were starting to form in the main flask, sending golden droplets splashing. Ifi grabbed a pair of tongs and removed one of the heating charms from underneath, the small glass cube glowing cherry red; she put it back on a tray to let it cool down. As bitter as it was to acknowledge, the wise thing to do was to cut the false hopes out of her life; she didn't wish for the rest of it to be made from circles of anxious excitement followed by heartbreaking disappointments. Twice enough. Making sure that the mixture wouldn't start boiling too much again, she resolved to let Shard know that they were through.

Tomorrow, though. Until then, there was work, and getting her body worn down so that she couldn't stand upright. When she finally went to sleep, she did it on Shard's cot, so exhausted that she didn't even think much about it. For the small blessing, she could only be thankful.

***

Dry heaving into a bucket wasn't Ifi's preferred way of starting a morning, but it was also not unexpected. The wakefulness elixir was a mix of three different potent venoms, and in higher concentrations it was reputed to eat through steel. She deserved it, really.

If there were words to describe the subtle ways her body ached, they were known only to the true poets of the gutter. For women like Ifi, inchoate, stilted groans would have to do. But it was not all bad; the feeling was so encompassingly wretched, that she could hardly move on from it to relieving yesterday's failures.

In the kitchen, she managed to force some stale bread into herself, and follow it up with pungent herbal tea; neither helped much with general misery, but at least they put a stop to wanting to throw her insides out, which meant that she was on the right track for getting ready for work. Thankfully, she didn't have a mirror at hand to see reflected in her face; she had to look little better than a freshly buried corpse. Shard was absent from both the kitchen and the front of the shop, which meant she was probably still in Ifi's bedroom; on one hand it allowed the alchemist to avoid facing her. On the other, it meant she couldn't go and get herself a fresh change of clothes.

Her clients would have to deal with her disheveled, she decided. No doubt that would lead to rumours and jokes spreading around the terraces later, but she would rather deal with a stain on her reputation rather than with the below-spawn. Which, in all likelihood, suggested that she was in no mental state for either. Then again, as she had learned over the years, the kind of people who rushed into her shop in the mornings tended not to be overly discerning, either.

It was difficult not to think of Shard while servicing them. She haggled no more than it was absolutely necessary and responded to the small chat with spaced-out nods; much to her chagrin, the progress of the day didn't bring any clarity. The cutting-off she promised herself she would make seemed obvious and straightforward in the night, but she had to remember that Shard was clearly desperate, and her claws were sharp indeed.

It was a mistake to think about the claws. She touched her cheek; her heart fluttered. Was the thin red line still there?

"Excuse me?" the woman in front of the counter demanded. "Are you listening?"

"Oh," Ifi mumbled, hand dropping down like a stone. "I'm sorry. Can you repeat the last thing?"

"As I was saying, I need…"

What if she just went through with Shard's scheme anyway? Money and prestige were good, for sure, but it was hard not to be suspicious whether the below-spawn could actually deliver them, instead of only promising them. And that was all assuming that this lowborn thug wasn't going to get the best of the both of them. It was not like Ifi was an expert assassin. What sort of help did Shard even expect, her to brew up a really strong poison and ask Villis nicely to drink it all up? The entire idea reeked of powerless desperation; she could tell, given how familiar she was with that feeling.

"Are you sure this is my order?"

Ifi blinked, then looked more closely at the fat bottle she put in front of the familiar tailor. Then with a half-panicked apology, she skipped down to the workshop, returning moments later with another, much smaller flask, this time actually filled with medicine, not incendiary slime.

"I'm so sorry," she smiled, or at least tried. "Should be good now."

"Rough night?" the tailor asked, pocketing it. "I found that nothing helps as much as…"

She made an honest attempt at not thinking about how much more simple it all would be if she had only allowed the below-spawn to bleed out on her floor. But such was the truth and perhaps the big lesson of all that: neither kindness, nor sticking her fingers into the affairs of others, was likely to pay well. Still, none of that hard-won knowledge was bringing Ifi any closer to figuring a way of telling Shard no without risking ending up bleeding out of the floor herself.

"Miss alchemist?"

The shrill voice didn't belong to any of her usual clients, but rather to a young girl in a loosely fitting runner's tunic.

"A message to you!" she announced from the door, waving a piece of paper excitedly in her hand. "From the High City!"

Judging by how alight with pride her round face was, it seemed that it was the first time she was delivering something from that high up. And fair: it was also the first time Ifi was receiving missives from there, either.

"What?" she blurted out, momentarily distracted from all of her torturous thoughts. "What's going on? Give it to me!"

The girl skipped closer, putting the message down on the counter, but not releasing it from her hand just yet. Ifi looked at the somewhat crumpled envelope - definitely not how Ifi imagined the High Families to conduct their correspondence - then into the girl's expectant eyes.

"Right," she looked from a coin, then tossed it to the youth.

The runner grabbed it gracefully without letting go of the envelope. She brought it up to light, letting the day shine through the glass shilling.

"It's from the High City, miss alchemist!" she repeated, slightly insistent.

Ifi frowned; it took her a moment to figure out what the girl meant. She gritted her teeth, but also was in no mood to argue. Another shilling landed in the runner's hand.

"So kind!" she beamed and rushed off, wasting not a second longer in the shop.

Ifi held the letter in her fingers, curious. Cheap, brown paper, without any seal or an emblem. It was hard to believe it really came from someone at the Table. Chances were she was just conned by an enterprising youth, like a complete rube. But she opened it anyway, read the short note inside, then locked the door to her shop and went to find Shard.

It was about time for her to get a lucky break.

***

As expected, the below-spawn was still in her bed-chamber. Somewhat less expectantly, Ifi found Shard perched on the windowsill, hands and feet holding tightly onto the frame, looking like one of those ancient gargoyles. The sound of Ifi entering didn't get her attention; she remained fully focused on the view of the lowest strata of the Middle City opening ahead of her, or maybe on the silhouettes of the monolithic towers beyond.

"Hey," Ifi tried, as neutrally as she could. "We need to talk."

At first, she got no reaction, the below-spawn still as a statue.

"You there?" she asked again.

This time, Shard reacted. Without a word, she hopped down from the window, her feet barely making a sound as they touched the floor. Something clenched in Ifi's throat; it was always a pleasure to watch the fluidity of her motions. And then, she noticed that Shard painted herself a face.

Or a kind of one, at least.

A tangle of black lines roped around the blank slate of Shard's head, once skillfully woven together into an image of a slender insect. But it was ruined now, half-erased at places, the outlines of the wasp blurred into long, ugly smears. Not all was uniformly destroyed: the tip of the sting needle-sharp, gossamer wings that looked so fine as if about to peel off the porcelain surface and wisp away in the wind. The few surviving details marked the loss of the whole even more apparent. The tips of Shard's fingers were stained black.

Feelings, conflicting and cacophonous, flurried down Ifi's mind. She took a deep breath to reign them in.

"I'll wait in the front," she said, "if you need to clean yourself up."

Shard nodded; Ifi rushed back downstairs.

She didn't have to wait long; Shard followed her moments later, her head mostly cleaned but for a few stranded stains. Ifi did her best to ignore them; she motioned at the below-spawn to come closer to the counter she sat behind.

"Villis sent me a message," she announced. Maybe she should have started with some kind of small talk, but more than anything, she just wanted to be done with this, while she was still holding onto her own wits. "I think, at least. It's a bit suspicious; it looks like something a low-born would write, but it came from the High City, so..."

"It's him," Shard said, in a dull, almost uninterested voice. "He is not without allies there."

Ifi blinked in surprise. A low-born, with friends at the Table? That made very little sense. Maybe Shard was lying? But really, did it matter? All she needed her to do was to trust the message.

"Right," she said, then took the piece of paper and started to read from it aloud. "Dear craftswoman," it said, "I hope this message finds you alive, and not yet gutted by Shard. I must apologize to you: I have hoped to visit you and provide help, but another matter now has to take the full of my attention. I will not be able to assist you until it is resolved, in one way or another."

She looked up from the letter to see Shard with her head bowed low. And still, the below-spawn kept her quiet.

"Until then, I can only advise you," she continued reading, "to encourage your 'patient' go. I have little doubt she will love the opportunity to disappear from my sight, which means that hopefully, she will trouble you no longer."

Ifi paused. There was more in the letter, but there was no need to let it out loud.

"Have you heard that, Shard?" she asked. "He is not coming back. He is not hunting you now."

Again, she said nothing, just standing before her, silent and still. A few pinpricks of worry skittered down Ifi's back. Just to make sure, her hand found the familiar nub for the warding charm below the counter, and felt it buzz to life under her fingers.

"So," she added, straining herself into a light tone, "I won't be able to help you get to him. But also you are free to go. We don't need each other anymore."

"It may be a trap," Shard said.

"If it is, there is nothing I can do to help you with it, other than keep you here forever," Ifi forced an idle shrug. "Would you rather have that?"

With her arms dropped loosely to her sides, head bent, Shard appeared strangely fragile. It hurt to see, Ifi had to admit, so she tried not to look. It was just like lancing a boil; she had to go through it and go through with it fast, before self-doubt would get her to make some costly mistake.

She knew this was never going to work. She had to know that, and in her heart too.

"You are right," Shard hissed out finally, the sound like air wheezing from a broken bellows. "I would rather go free than suffer your whims. I will leave."

The feeling that shot through Ifi's chest definitely wasn't relief, even if it was some kind of a release. Perhaps it was just that boil draining. It was all going to be over soon.

"You can keep the shawl," Ifi added. She bit her tongue, but what else was she going to do with that cloth the below-spawn fashioned into a bandage for herself?, "I never liked it much."

And it would remind me of you too much. But she didn't say that part out loud.

Another protracted silence followed. Ifi started to drum her fingers against the old wood of the counter, more to do something with her hands than out of any tangible sense of impatience. As always, Shard's blank face was impossible to read, but her posture alone said enough. If only it could all be over quicker.

"It is funny," Shard shook her head, turning towards the door, "to think. No one has ever drugged me, chained me, refused me, and made it out with as few scars as you did."

In any other tone, perhaps the words would have come out as threatening. But in Shard's mouth, they were just ash. It hurt to hear; Ifi just wanted it over. The difficult part was behind her, was it not?

"You should be proud," the below-spawn added. "Or maybe I should be ashamed."

"Is this your way of thanking me for saving your life?" Ifi snapped back; her voice came out like a whip-crack, impatient and cruel. She just wanted this to end. She had to end it.

"I think so, yes," Shard said. "I hope you find a way to soothe your pain."

She lingered for a while longer, half-way between Ifi and the door, and then walked away, into the day and into the streets, and she was in Ifi's shop no longer. The alchemist waited out a moment, then locked the door behind her. Hopefully, dreadfully, for good.

And if she promised you anything, the final few lines of VIllis' message read, know that she has nothing left to give, and no allies to call on. Have mercy on yourself and don't let her drag you into the end she deserves.

She wondered who taught that low-born write that well; and maybe she would have preferred the missive to be riddled with mistakes and slurs, to make it seem less trustworthy. Not that she trusted it, but it did make sense. It really was a mercy on herself to make Shard leave, even if it was a cruel one. And there was no doubt it was good for Shard too. Probably. Probably. In any case, the matter was over, and resolved, and Ifi could return her life to its usual rails.

It didn't even hurt that badly. She would wash now, and get some sleep, and then in the evening, she could put on her best dress, and walk up to one of the terraces where her peers congregated. She promised herself that she would do that, finally start behaving like she was meant to. Maybe among her fellows, all those merchants and guildsmen, she could find some antidote for herself? That was the best she could hope for. Wisdom, it seemed, was coming to terms with the fact that it was all she could ask for.

It wasn't exactly comforting. Just true. And there was no point in crying over it, no matter how much she wanted to.

 

[Gargulec]

7. Hunger

Nothing remained of the run-down warehouse where Shard made her last den. Where it once stood, now remained a bed of damp ash, burned so thoroughly that not even a charred skeleton remained. Thoroughly, and precisely too: the neighbouring buildings, just as ramshackle and crooked as her nest used to be, stood barely marked by fire. Shepherding and guiding the blaze so that one plot was reduced to foundations, without torching the rest of the street couldn't have been an easy task. Many must have worked on it, from the first spark to the last ember. Even then, it had to have been a calculated risk. Timber, thatch, and straw made the Low City, and those who made its home have all learned to respect fire, and to dread it. Shard remembered watching entire quadrants of this vast slum go up in smoke, the march of the red and gold sea against the filth, a beautiful sight to behold from the heights of the patricians' towers. It wasn't unheard for the fires to rage for days, before the kindness of rain finally put them down.

It said much, then, that it was with fire that the lowborn decided to purge what remained of her.

The street around her, and the houses behind her, seemed abandoned at a glance. But they weren't. The idle, familiar fear surrounded her on all sides, ebbing and flowing like waves of a warm sea. None dared to approach, none dared to make themselves seen. They cowered instead, sought shelter or escape routes, and with each moment she remained transfixed by the ruin they made of her home, their dread only grew. With each swell, it lapped at the edges of her awareness, leisurely sanding away at the edges of what she came here to face.

The small, sweet taste helped, however little, to cushion the blow of coming face to face with another home of hers reduced to nothing. Memories of fire filled her thoughts, of black smoke seeping from the windows of her suite in the High City, the opulence and luxury she had so enjoyed being swallowed by the hungry, empty sky. Against herself, she wondered who received that ruin after she had to flee the patrician towers. For all of their wastefulness, none of the High Families would allow a full two floors of one of their towers to lay ruined. Someone successful and wealthy received it in reward, she was sure, and now lived there like a prince, unaware of why the previous owner had to put a torch to her own home.

Her feet were sinking into the mud; the cool drizzle mottled her shell with streaks of water; her wound ached with its dry pain. A part of her wanted to try to pick through the rubble before her and see if there was anything left. But it was a stupid hope, she could tell at a glance, and there was barely anything there to lose in the first place. If they found her clothes, or her face-paints, they stole them or fed them to the blaze. And that was all that she had carried with her into exile in the Lower City. That, and a handful of glass money, long spent on the failed trap for Villis.

It was one thing facing herself in the mirror and realizing just how low she had fallen. Staring into the nothingness that remained of her work was another.

Even the lowborn could allow themselves to strike at her, to steal from her, to destroy what was hers. She, who once made the High Table hush when she spoke at it, her words carrying the weight of the Lair-Mother's own authority. A bitter, nauseating thought rose in her: what if that pathetic alchemist begging her for hurting would end up the last time anyone ever begged her, looked up to her, respected her?

Maybe she shouldn't have left her.

But what was she supposed to do? Entertain that girl's bizarre desires, just to feed on crumbs and scraps of mortal fear and pain? No, that would be the worst fall of all, worse even than the bed of ash and the crack in her shell. What she hungered for she could just take; she was a child of the Lair-Mother and the world was hers to feed from. She wasn't lost, or defeated, just hungry.

She just needed to gorge herself.

With a slow, deliberate motion, she turned from the ashes to face the shut doors and boarded-up windows behind which the lowborn cowered. She imagined them holding their breaths, huddled together, struggling desperately not to make a sound. Their homes were wretched even by the standards of the Lower City, half-sunken into the mud, thatched roofs cheaply patched, moss eating into the wooden walls where dry rot wouldn't. If the Great Below swallowed the street whole, no one would care and no one would mind; that was the very reason why Shard had first picked it as her hideout.

"Did you think me dead?" she asked, her voice cracked and cracking.

The response was immediate: a burst of dozen fears, maybe more. The sheer sweetness of the taste took Shard by surprise; her tongue dropped out of her mouth, its long point lapping at the air. Yes, that was precisely what she needed; she sampled it for a moment, whetting her appetite.

"How brave must the vermin feel," she continued after a moment, rolling each word with a smile, and receiving a sweet reward each time, "when it thinks the predator a carcass. And how dearly must it pay when it is mistaken."

The sweet taste sharpened, deepened. It wasn't fear anymore, but panic, the terror of the condemned. Each breath filled Shard with a diffuse, golden glow. And that was just the opener; the real joy still awaited her. The absurdity of thinking she would ever settle for less struck her, and she laughed in a shrill voice, mocking the doubts that mere moments ago clouded her soul.

The lowborn took it for their cue, and she kept laughing at the music of their panic. Here, the flurry of terrified whispers, there, weeping. Someone was begging behind the door straight in front of her, asking someone else to leave, to run. They had to know what was coming, and each moment in wait had to weigh so heavily on them. Shard let the moment last, even if that meant letting some escape. It didn't matter one bit. She would still have plenty left to feast on.

"For what you have taken from me," she boomed, "I should take everything from you. I should tear each and every one of you from your hovels, drag you into the mud that spawned you, and slaughter you so that your screams would shake the High City itself. In your blood, I should write a warning for all not to wrong my kind. But I am not without mercy."

Her hunger was now as sharp as her claws; a golden haze rose before her eyes, gilding the wretched street with the promise of what was to follow.

"Give me one of yours," she demanded, "and I will spare the rest. You have until the count of five. One."

This was what she was created for. This was her purpose. This was the promise of pure joy.

"Two."

Their voices, kept low, were so ragged. They couldn't communicate. They didn't have the time to. It was all their fear, and all their desperate hope that someone else will pay for their shared transgression. How could she have ever thought anything else would sate her?

"Three."

A door opened. A woman, wrapped in a tattered, cowled cape stumbled forward. A voice rolled behind her, pleading, desperate; she waved it off and started to walk towards Shard, barely holding herself upright even as tears rolled down her face, too ruined by the lowborn life to read an age from it.

Shard's first instinct was to lunge, sink her hands into that woman's chest to the elbows, split her apart and drench herself in steaming blood. But she wasn't an animal, and her tastes were more refined than that. She stopped counting and waited patiently for the sacrifice to approach,

Her claws extended without her even thinking much of them, gently slicing through air. The fear around her twinned; one was now a dull wave, lapping on the shores of her mind from all directions, mixed in equal measures with the sticky, thick shame. And, there was that woman in front; Shard only regretted she had never worked on her palate for fear, so that she could unbraid all the different flavours of terror springing forth from her.

"Closer," Shard commanded. Her voice was once again what it was supposed to be: cool, composed, powerful. She was back. She didn't have to doubt. All that fear and all that despair that settled in her bones, all that certainty of loss, all of it dissolved into thin air.

The woman made a few more steps, then stumbled again, falling on her knees in front of the Lair-Mother's daughter. She had been pretty once, Shard had no doubts, before time and hardship ate it all away. Only her eyes remained startling, deep, sky-blue. Shard promised herself to start with them.

This was what real pleasure looked like; this was the taste of real power. Shard smiled with vicious hate, thinking back to the alchemist kneeling before her. Did she really think that this pale imitation could ever sustain her? No, it was just a lie she made up when she was desperate and weak, but she didn't have to be either. She would rip out of this old wretch what she should have taken from Ifi. And then, she would never have to think of leaving her again.

"Give me your name," she ordered, placing a hand in her hair, claws sinking into the grey locks, into the skin below; she could feel the warm tingle of someone else's hurt build up in them already.

Blood joined the tears on the woman's face in thin, red streaks.

"Amaifena," the woman whimpered, and Shard almost sunk her hand into her brain here and there, as joy shuddered through her bones.

"Beg for your life," she said instead, taking a deep breath to steady herself, "Amaifena."

For a moment, the woman hesitated; she looked at Shard as if to ask if this was genuine. But she had to realize it wasn't.

"Just…," her voice was like a vibrating string; Shard could taste the effort that went into taking each word out of her throat. "Just don't…"

Shard's grip tightened, skin parting under her claws like paper. She could feel the skull now, the hard shell under her trembling hand. Maybe she wouldn't draw it out.

"Beg!" she demanded again.

But Amaifena couldn't. Fear, and pain, choked her. Whatever came out of her mouth was not words, but some incoherent gargle, barely human. The fear of others swirled in and out of her view; the woman's terror seized, so close to sublime. Pain laced it all together, a fine thread holding together a tapestry. This was stronger than yesterday, deeper, better! This was real, and overwhelming. That was what Shard was made for.

She released her hold, and swung. The back of her hand connected with the side of the woman's head; something crunched under the strike, and broke, and sent a fiery jolt all the way up Shard's shoulder. She moaned with pleasure, and Amaifena crumpled to the mud, her head bleeding profusely. However painful the wounds were, they wouldn't kill her. Maybe she was going to draw it out.

"I ordered you to beg" she snarled, spitting at the filthy heap at her feet, "Why do you provoke me? Do you want me to make it last?"

The question was a petty cruelty, of the sort that she would throw down without thinking. Amaifena didn't respond; with a broken jaw, she probably physically couldn't. Incoherent, pleading noises seeped from her, a broken vessel leaking life. Shard exhaled again, letting the pleasure spread evenly through the whole of her. She missed that so much. She missed that sheer satisfaction of knowing that someone else is hers to hurt.

And in a moment, she would bring that woman up for all of her vermin friends to see, and then maybe drive her claws like spikes through those beautiful blue eyes, and scream in joy as she felt the joy of a life ending thunder through her entire body.

And then what?

The thought sliced through the knot of her pleasure like a cold knife. Shard stopped, her smile shortening; fading. Blood dripped from her hand, a steady, measured sound. Of course the pleasure overwhelmed; of course the fear and pain tasted gold and buzzed through her like the finest wine. That was what she was made for. Of course it hit stronger than holding that pathetic alchemist's face in between her claws.

Why didn't she just gut Amaifena with the first swipe, why didn't she just go for the sharpest, swiftest release? What was she even doing here? She, Shard of White Obsidian, the once-favoured daughter of the Lair-Mother, whom her countless victims had called a defiler, a despoiler, a demon, who had once made the High Table hush? She was tearing apart some wretched woman whose death would go unremarked, and feeling as if it made her powerful again?

And then what?

Was she really going to make this her future? Live the rest of her days on the prowl through human waste, sinking her claws into the city's rejects, a bottom-feeder, not an apex predator, living from one thrill to another in the filth and rot of her fall? Waiting for that day when Villis would find her again, and put her out of her misery, because there was no way out, and no way up, not even swimming up a river of blood?

Then, the image of Ifi clambering up from the floor, face painted half in shame and half in desire, flashed between Shard's eyes. She remembered the touch of the needy hands on her shell, and she remembered thinking it meant nothing.

She howled like a wounded animal, her voice exploding over the street like a glass bell, shattering. The fear that surrounded her swelled and swallowed her, and she just could not bear its weight anymore.

"Enough!" she shouted, fragile and weak.

She had to leave. She had to throw this suffocating wave off her, she had to free herself. From the mud, the wounded woman looked at her, waiting, groaning in pain. The entire street bated its breath, praying to be left alone.

"Enough," Shard repeated, taking a stumbling step back. "That's enough. You're not worth killing. You're not…"

Her own voice scared her; it sounded as if belonging to some wounded animal, something ruled by panic and instinct. Who was she trying to convince? She didn't want to hear it. She didn't want to face this street. She didn't want this blood, or this fear, or this pleasure, or herself.

She had to run.

So she ran. Less for distance, or for escape, and more to tire herself, to replace the lingering aftertaste of Amafina's pain with burning, numbing exhaustion. She didn't know what else was there to do. She didn't know anything. A cacophony of thoughts filled her head, conflicting and vicious, and if she could rip herself open to let them out, she would.

And…

And for a time, she managed to lose herself in this noise and worry, and smother her consciousness with their garbled noise. There was some peace in this, even if it couldn't last.

She didn't recognize the part of the city she found herself in, and couldn't recall the path she took. The houses here looked sturdier, roofed with shingles and tiles, not thatch, wooden walls painted in dull greens and reds. They built them taller here, two or even three floors; she had to be far away from the shore of the Middle City for the lowborn to be so brazen about ignoring the height laws. And true enough, when she looked over the slanted roofs, she could barely pick out the shapes of the High City towering in the distance. Her legs carried her far.

The streets, too, were cleaner around, dirt well beaten, walkways laid over where they turned into pools of mud. Only the onlookers stared at her with the same, familiar fear. She was a demon in their eyes, a demon in frenzy. The street emptied around her, people rushing back inside to the sound of doors being boarded. Probably had much to do with the blood still on her hand. And with what she was, too. But she couldn't change that.

Even if she couldn't stay, either. The run didn't help; it just moved her somewhere else. She couldn't escape from herself, either.

Couldn't, couldn't, couldn't. The repetition was a hammer banging against the inside of her head, beating all other thoughts into a mounting, desperate sense of powerlessness. She couldn't.

"Shard?"

The young man standing in front of her didn't look like he belonged. Though he wore a lowborn's cowl, Shard could notice a tailored waistcoat peeking from beneath, glinting silver. She knew him; she didn't expect to find him here.

"You look terrible!" Andronikos Zaam, the wastrel grandson of Master Glassmaker exclaimed, before laughing loudly. "What happened to you, my favourite little demon?"

When was the last time she had seen him? Half a year ago, maybe? Yes, when his father forbade him from attending the Table, and kicked him out into the Middle City. He hasn't changed much then; still wore the same pointed, blonde beard and the same rakish smile. His favourite cane was in his hand too, solid oak topped by a silver wolf's head, a striking charm clasped in its wide-open jaw.

"Seriously!" he continued, patting her. "Shard! Shard, what the fuck are you doing in this dump?"

"Andronikos?" she managed to mutter in response, trying to somehow dig through the haze clouding her mind.

"Actually," he looked around, "you know what? Let's not talk here in the open where all those lowborns can see us. Come, come! Shit, I missed having you around…"

She followed him sheepishly as he climbed to one of the nearby buildings, the word "Passiflora" painted over the sturdy door, and knocked on it with the head of the cane.

"You know, after they kicked me out, I thought I'd never see you again," he said, beaming. "Such luck."

The door opened, letting out a puff of warmth and perfume, and revealing a muscle-bound woman with a nasty-looking club in her hands, and a short, bald man in a colourful vest with a pointed goatee.

"Mister Zaam, what a pleasure!" the man exclaimed with a false courtesy. "And with…" his eyes trailed to Shard; the forced smile faded from his face, "...company?"

"What are you gawking at, you old pimp?" Andronikos chuckled, squeezing past the man, dragging Shard with him. "This little monster here is my gramps right hand!"

He didn't know, Shard realized following him into the steaming-hot inside. They had completely cut him off from the family business.

"No, no…" the man muttered, pointing at the bouncer to close the door. "It's just that…"

They entered a brightly-lit lobby, thick with the scent of booze and perfume. A handful of young women lounged about on cushioned sofas by low coffee-tables, their satins and velvets shimmering in the light; two of them attended to an absent-looking older man in a city watch's uniform. Above him, more unclothed women adorned the walls, white paint on dark wood. They preened and smiled, spreading their legs and offering their buttocks, their proportions comically exaggerated.

A bar ran the length of the room, two more men sitting by and sipping their drinks, one engaged deeply in a chat with the older woman, a harsh-faced woman behind it. It was a clean place, cleaner than what Shard would expect from lowborns.

"You see, sir…"

The sounds of conversation died down. A single glass clattered to the floor, spilling vodka over a lush, red carpet. The woman behind the bar dove down, looking for something below. The uniformed man pushed one of his shoulder-ladies away, head turning towards a rack where his heavy coat hung, studded with battle-charms. Andronikos sighed, exasperated.

"What is this nonsense?" he groaned. "I am here with my friend, a valued servant of the Glassmaker Guild, and…"

"Why isn't it leashed?" the watch officer grunted, standing up. He was shaking, very slightly.

"Why aren't you, you old goat?" Andronikos spat back.

"There is blood on its hands! Do you know what those things are capable of?"

"Which means she isn't hungry anymore," the youth replied, patting Shard on the shoulder. "Are you, my sweet little demon?"

"No," Shard muttered; again, fear surrounded her. Weaker, but it made its way into the cracks of her and she just wanted to be rid of it. The world swirled around her, blurring into long strands and ribbons of color. "I'm not…"

"See?" Andronikos cut in. "Nothing to worry about. Go back to your ladies, or whatever. Pimp, we need a room. And a drink. And…" he looked at Shard again, "do you need anything?"

"Water?" she muttered. "Clothes?"

"You've heard of her. And after that, send me Clara in," he paused, frowned, "an hour? Yeah, send Clara in an hour."

"But…"

With an exaggerated gentleness, Andronikos raised his cane, touching the tip of it to the older man's bare head. The charm atop emitted a quiet whine; the woman behind tensed, hand tightening around her own club.

"No buts," he smiled very softly, "please. Only service."

***

Blood came easily off her shell; she wiped her hand with a damp cloth for the last time, leaving behind pristine, sharp white. Only the water in the bowl kept a ruddy, dirty color. A bit calmer, she reached down and began to clean her legs.

"Can you believe those people?" Andronikos said from the bed, sprawled on the rich covers; only his hand raised above, drawing patterns in the air with a half-emptied glass of wine. "Don't they know who I am? Who my family is? They should be on their knees, not giving me shit."

Shard kept quiet. She felt tired, and would love nothing more but to lay down and rest, and let this wretched day end. She's been feeling that way a lot, lately. But this day, in particular.

"So," the boy murmured after a moment, "how is Dad doing? Still mad at me?"

Again, she didn't respond; this, apparently, suited Andronikos just fine.

"You know, this entire thing was so unfair! Grandfather sends you to kill how many people, and everyone at the Table claps, and I, I beat one parasite up a bit, and it is suddenly wrong?"

The pauper woman, Shard recalled, one of those licensed by the Beggar King to go asking around the High City. Her death caused a riot that Shard would have to suppress, and made it all so much easier for Villis and his supporters to denounce Master Glassmaker, when the High Table decided against letting Andronikos hang. Shard wondered if the boy knew how close he had been to death there.

"I envy your types, sometimes, you know that, Shard?" he asked.

She finished with her left foot and went to scrub the other. It felt good to be clean again, all things considered.

"You just don't have to deal with all the bullshit we get. You get to live free, like, really free," he sipped from glass, "and not in those stupid prisons we built for ourselves, you know? Actually, wait, I have a thought!"

Shard waited; it wasn't like she had any other idea on what else to do. She felt empty inside, as if there was something missing.

"I think it's ironic, actually, that we insist on putting leashes on you, you know?"

That particular observation has actually occurred to Shard.

"I think it's, like, pretending. We act like you're bound to us, but in fact it is us who just keep making all those stupid rules for ourselves. We end up just way more chained in the end."

For Shard, it was more that the High Families loved to show how much they controlled her kind, because deep inside, they knew they didn't. She wrung the clot into the basin, and hung it on the side.

"You're being awfully quiet, Shard. Did something happen? I mean, if it is some Grandfather's business, you probably can't tell me anyway. This is stupid, too. Cutting me off like that, like they don't know that I'm going to inherit it all eventually, anyway."

What Shard knew, and Andronikos didn't, was that the papers disinheriting him from the High Table had already been drafted; it was one of the ways Master Glassmaker was caving in to the pressure. One of Villis' many wins.

"Bullshit, all bullshit," he decided. "Actually, you cleaned up? Put on that dress," he pointed at a narrow, black gown that one of the prostitutes brought in along with the wine. "This rag on you looks positively filthy."

He wasn't wrong about that. The makeshift shawl she took from the alchemist's wardrobe barely held together after a day in the Lower City. But the wound was still there, behind it, and the thought of him seeing it made her shiver.

"Look away," she asked, grabbing the dress.

"Away from what?" he laughed, making a point to gawk. "Shard, sweet, who taught you modesty? And for what? It's not like you have anything there to ogle!"

She put the dress back down again. The boy laughed once more, clearly annoyed this time.

"Fine, fine," he grunted, letting his head hang back onto a pillow. "Whatever you want."

It felt good on her shell, even if the fit was hardly perfect, meant for someone shorter and slimmer, and with a chest to display, even as it hobbled the legs together, as was the recent fashion. She turned herself around in a mirror; she probably should ask for something to pain her face too. Maybe that would help.

She thought of what it did to her the last time she tried, and decided against it.

"You look like a mannequin," Andronikos observed. "And what's with that hole in you?"

Very briefly, she considered putting his eyes out of his skull. It was not like anyone would mourn. And maybe on any other day, she would have gone through with that; today, the thought felt unpleasant. She remembered Amaifena, and shuddered again.

"I asked you not to look," she said instead in a dull, tired voice.

"Yeah," he nodded. "You did. Actually, it's interesting, but I've had another thought. Since you're being all quiet and that. Maybe when Clara comes, then you could stay and..."

Someone knocked on the door, sharply. Andronikos rolled his eyes, and with a pained sigh dragged himself up from the bed.

"I've said 'in an hour!'" he shouted, shuffling to open. "Seriously, I couldn't have been clearer about that? Shard you have no idea just how stupid those people can..."

A porcelain hand, closing around his throat and lifting him off the floor, turned the rest of the complaint into a gurgling noise.

"Who is this?" Shard's sibling asked, shaking the boy like a rag doll. It wasn't even looking at him; the black wedge painted across its head was turned directly towards its sister.

She knew it. She knew that wedge, and the black ribbons artfully tied across the polished shell, criss-crossing it in dazzling patterns. Something very cold started to open in her at this recognition.

"No one important," she replied, slowly, truthfully.

Very briefly, her sibling Eight Quick Cuts, who never cared much for politics, or for family, turned to face the man it was choking, wondering what to do with him.

"I see," it said and then tossed him out, the body landing on the carpeted corridor with a dull thud. "Well then, mortal. Out."

Andronikos wheezed, desperately trying to draw in a deeper breath; he stared at Shard for a moment, expecting her to jump to his defense, like she used to when she was his minder. But those days were long over, and it wasn't he who was in danger here.

"Run," Cuts repeated, its voice sharp and disinterested.

He scrambled up, and broke into a sprint. Cuts stepped inside and closed the door behind it, taking a good look around. Its claws were pointedly extended, longer than Shard's, crooked and polished.

"So this is where I finally find you, sister," the word came out of its mouth like an insult. It made another step closer; Shard took another back. "I've heard you have fallen, but to see it with my own eyes?"

"What do you want?" Shard asked, just for certainity's sake.

"Me?" Cuts shook its head. "Nothing, really. But oh sister, those who pay me, they have such unfinished business with you."

 

[Gargulec]

8. Torture Dress

Long before Ifi's father moved out of his old home to the knife-wide mansion in the Lower Heights, a print used to hang above his desk, depicting the Middle City as if it was a living body. Trade, of course, was its blood, and so the streets its veins. Guilds, of all kinds, made the rest: the Honourable Society of Merchants the heart, the Lower Lodge of Animated Clay the bones, the Laborious League of Printers the tongue – and so on, and so on. He was greatly fond of it; Ifi remembered sitting on his lap and hearing him ask, hand ruffling her hair, "and where do you think the soul is, my little sweet?"

When she struggled to come up with an answer, he would smile knowingly and say: "it's the terraces that house it". Because it wasn't on the streets that the wheels of commerce were put into motion, and it wasn't the guildhalls where the pen signed the contract that deals were made. Daily labours of trade and common occurrences of ordinary work, no matter how key, could only ever be a sad facade if not backed by the camaraderie of the coffee-cup and the wine-glass, drawn over leisurely evening hours of conversations, gossiping, and negotiating. High above the streets and their banal demands, in the company of their peers, the real Middle City folk found their sanctuary and true workshop. In the end, it did not matter if one's occupation was an alchemist or a merchant, a golem-mason or a dress-maker; becoming known was the real trade, and it was on the terraces that it could be plied. And besides, even absent the matters of business, who wouldn't enjoy the freshness of the open sky, the comfort of good service, and the friendship of their like?

More than his lessons, she remembered the sincerity and love with which he spoke of them. When his age and health finally took their toll, and took away from him those evening gatherings, he mourned and pushed Ifi to attend them in his stead. But as with many other things, Ifi failed to see eye to eye on this matter. Unlike him, she could never convince herself that she belonged.

It was the fashion, she decided, lingering at the top of the stairwell leading from the shop below to the open roof. White, beige, cream: those were the colours that her putative peers wore, only modestly specked with hints of blue and gold. Few traces remained of the taste for lace trims and embroidered patterns that seemed to have been the order of the night the last time Ifi had paid them a visit; simplicity now ruled. The alchemist spent a moment searching for words to describe what she was looking at: straight-cut? Tight? Men and women alike showed little skin, but instead let the fabrics cling closer to their bodies and draw out their shapes. There had to be some name for this trend, but Ifi's lexicon had never been well-equipped for dealing with fashion.

But she didn't have to describe the style in detail to know that she wasn't it; not remotely. With the familiar anxiety already building up in her stomach, she picked at the edge of her robe the spacious, complicated mark of her position as a master in the Subtle Fellowship of Brewers. As far as she could see, she was alone on the terrace to show up wearing her guild insignia like that, clearly more fit for a ceremony than a friendly coffee.

The urge to turn back and leave hit with all of its familiar intensity. She wanted to feel normal for once and not…

"Ifigenia!"

A black-haired, long-faced woman exclaimed from a nearby table; as quickly as her dress would allow her, she scrambled up and approached Ifi; her smile was warm, if somewhat surprised.

"Ciara?" she mumbled, momentarily torn from the familiar train of thought. "Oh, I haven't seen you in so long!"

"Must have been two years now?" Ciara Antonika, who used to be a frequent customer at Ifi's shop before a very well-arranged marriage put an end to her needs, leaned in to kiss her cheeks. "Come, sit with us!"

Tiny sapphires glinted before Ifi's eyes and she awkwardly kissed the air by Ciara's face; set into pale gold earrings, they suited the other woman beautifully, drawing out the deep blue of her eyes and the carmine of her lips. It didn't take much to make Ciara a sight to behold, Ifi decided, especially not with how well the current fashion worked for her figure.

"You look spectacular," she mumbled, admiring the dress. She was wrong before; there was still some embroidery there, if that was the word she was supposed to use the silver thread carefully woven into the fabric, so that it shimmered like moonlight on water. Ifi felt small.

"Thank you," Ciara smiled, extending a chair. "You look very tired. This," she indicated the crow-faced gentleman that Ifi had completely missed before, "is Makarios, my husband. Makarios, this is Ifigenia. She is an alchemist."

"I can see that," he smiled too, extending a hand. Ifi shook it, perhaps a bit too firmly. "It is a pleasure to meet you."

She settled into the cushioned chair; within seconds, a waiter appeared silently at her side.

"What will you have?" Ciara asked politely.

"Coffee?" Ifi muttered; suddenly, it occurred to her that she may not even have a tab open here anymore. Anxiety climbed a few inches up her throat before she shoved it back down again. "No. Not coffee. Uh…"

"Herbal tea, for relaxation?" the server suggested, stone-faced.

"Yes, thank you!" she blurted out, genuinely grateful. "That."

He disappeared as quietly as he approached, the idle rustle of an evening in progress masking whatever sounds he would otherwise make; Ifi sunk a bit deeper into the cushions. Ciara wasn't wrong. The nap she took in the afternoon wasn't nearly enough to make up for the last night, and the potions she took to keep herself going were starting to take their expected toll. Her body felt stiff, barely responsive.

The chair, at least, was comfortable; maybe she should get one like that for her shop? Her clients would probably appreciate it. She shook the thought away; she didn't come here to think about work, but to make herself back at home among her peers. And they were all here, sitting by the tables ringed by the terrace's lattice-work balustrades. The next table over, Kleon the carpenter was going over some papers with a young woman who had to be his apprentice Mea; behind them Ifi recognized the familiar, broad frame of Mereos, the dressmaker. He was a frequent customer, ordering dyes in bulk and hangover cures by the bottle. She should ask him to fill out her wardrobe; he would know how. Then, further back, she could hear the booming voice of Kassandra the golem-mason. Between the tables, she even caught a glimpse of her, towering in high heels, even more than usual. It was the first time Ifi saw her in a dress, anthracite curls held together with an ornate silver pin. Her muscle showed clearly under the fabric but – Ifi turned her head to get a better look – she no longer had that rough-hewn look she used to associate with her. She would usually see Kassandra sweat-drenched and foul-mouthed, demanding a quick delivery of solvents, but here? Here she was every inch a lady, moving with easy grace, specks of metallic dust shining from her cheeks.

Didn't she try that once? She ended up looking as if she had splashed her cheeks with silver paint. A thoroughly unpleasant shudder went through her; she remembered a friend looking at her and saying, with that genuine pity in her voice, but this really isn't difficult, here, let me show you…

She looked away from Kassandra, quickly. Who was that at the next table, that…

"Ifigenia!" Ciara's voice was high, almost amused. "Your tea is here."

The alchemist snapped to attention, her head swinging wildly back to the table she was at. Her tea was, in fact, waiting in front of her, steaming from a dainty porcelain cup.

"Uh, thank you?" she aid, hunching slightly.

"Is she alright?" Makarios asked his wife, looking at Ifi with a frown.

"Oh, she's just like that," Ciara replied with a slight shrug. "That's our Ifigenia."

There wasn't a hint of malice in those words, Ifi could tell. But it really didn't have to be there to remind her just what she was like. She exhaled, trying not to let the budding something out of her chest. Because whatever it was, she didn't want to vent it before her peers, or ever.

"I was just telling my husband," Ciara continued after a moment, "how you are among the youngest masters in your guild."

"You must be really talented," he nodded.

That was actually nice to hear. Ifi gave a pale smile, leaned back somewhat. The tea smelled comforting, too. Cistus and lemon balm, a dash of honey, and just a hint of mint, probably to mask the unpleasant odour of the salts of the resting moon. It could actually help her with her nerves.

"Thank you," she repeated.

"So what are you doing with this," Makarios gave her a curious look. "Do you have any apprentices?"

"Well…" the question made her wince. She turned the cup a few times in the saucer, eyes away. "No, not really," she said, trying not to let the guilt show.

"Really?" he lifted an eyebrow. "I must say that this is quite surprising. I can see that you're proud of your work," he looked at her robe as if to underscore the point, "and if what my wife tells me, then clearly you have the means to. It's really a shame to hoard one's talents. I hope you will find someone to pass your knowledge to, and soon."

"Uh, I just..." she bit her lip, feeling her fingers close on the hem of her robe again. "I'm not sure," she decided to try honesty. "I don't think I would make a good teacher," she tried.

"Hmm," Makarios paused, scratching his chin. "So, what then? Marriage?"

Ciara giggled at the mention, too late to cover her mouth with a hand; Ifi felt a terrible tightness in her chest.

"I'm sorry," the other woman whispered dramatically, "it's just, I think that Ifigenia isn't really a marrying type."

Makarios frowned. His wife looked to the side, where Kassandra's deep laugh rose above the gathering, clear in its sound, strong and comforting.

"Well, not in the old-fashioned sense," Ciara added.

"Oh," her husband nodded, still frowning, "I see."

An unpleasant, sticky silence fell over the table. Shame, the other part of anxiety, crawled from its pit in the back of Ifi's head. Nights like these, it seemed like the expectations of others existed for her only to stumble over; her cheeks flushed red.

"Oh, it's nothing. It doesn't speak poorly of you" Ciara smiled softly in response; there was something disarming in the gesture, and Ifi almost believed her. "Let's talk about something else."

"Maybe she could tell us about her recent work? Alchemy is fascinating," Makarios suggested.

Ifi perked up, momentarily knocked off her spiral of annoyance and disappointment. Before that below-spawn took a week out of her life, she was hard at work to master some rather interesting processes and…

"Oh, no, anything but that!" Ciara interrupted again; Ifi deflated instantly. "The last time someone asked her about that, she spent an hour lecturing poor Kleon about salts!"

That was true. It was yet another of the things Ifi was supposed to be ashamed of, and a prominent point on the list of reasons for why she stopped attending the terraces in the first place. Another sharp urge stabbed at her, demanding that she just stand up and walk away and end up looking like a freak again. She did her best to quash it. No. Ciara was right, she couldn't be trusted to speak about alchemy without boring everyone at the table.

She really felt small, and irrelevant.

"Kleon?" her husband asked. "Kleon Kleoros? Funny how you mention him. You know, me and his brother had our apprenticeship under the same master, old Tokas, the one who..."

Ifi tried her best to follow the story, to keep her attention through the long and complicated network of connections, patronages, and friendships that made the world of credit-letters that Makarios lived in. But she was too tired to hold track of who was who, and soon enough old Tokas and young Tokas, and the deplorable cousin Klepht blended together in her ears, dissolving into the overall chatter that ruled the terrace. She started to look around again; there was something that almost drew her attention the last time.

When she found it, she could only berate herself for not looking sooner.

At a table at the opposite end of the terrace, right by the balustrade's edge, with a wide view of the city's sprawl below, two women sat. Sat – and stood out, immediately and sharply. Again, it was the fashion. The taller of the two – a broad-shouldered hulk of a woman that could easily pass for a man if not for her cascading black hair, and her clothes – especially so, and not just because she wore lustrous black. If the fashion of tonight's was tight, the manner of her dress was openly restraining. Her skirt bound her legs together so closely that Ifi could scarcely imagine walking in it. Higher up, a tall corset cinched her waist and chest cruelly small; she sat stiffly, her back ruler-straight, probably unable to actually bend. In fact, judging by how the collar of her dress extended up her neck, all the way up to a mask of sorts covering her jaw, Ifi wasn't sure if the woman could still turn her head. Even her arms appeared completely still; as Ifi watched her, she couldn't see move them once, from where they were folded together on her lap, hands hidden in long, flared sleeves. A large, metal ring rested attached on her jugular, polished steel gleaming in the terrace's lights; crossing stitches ornamenting the fabric of her gown, pulling it closer together, as if ropes wound across the whole body.

For a moment, Ifi lost herself in gawking. No matter how strong the woman appeared, her dress had to be stronger, nothing like the sheer fabrics others wore. No, it was firm, sturdy, holding her frozen in place. It had to feel like a prison in there, barely able to move or to breathe, each little motion of the body a calculated struggle against this restraint. Unthinkingly, the alchemist felt her cheek, brushing her fingers against the fading cut. It didn't really matter that the woman in black could hardly be called beautiful, that her features seemed rough and body contorted. Looking at her, Ifi could only put herself in her place, her mind serving her an image after image of herself being locked and looked at in this absurd, no longer able to even run away, no matter how much shame built up in her. Staring at the woman, Ifi tasted a kind of envy at the edge of hunger. She looked, and looked, and kept on daydreaming.

But there had to be a bitter note in all that. There was another woman at a table, shorter, with an unruly mess of golden hair crowning her head. She too flaunted fashion in a way, boyishly slender in her two-piece suit. As Ifi watched, she looped her finger around the ring on the taller woman's neck, and lifted herself up to whisper something into her ear, a sly smile on her pale pink lips. There was a confidence in this gesture, a possessive note not unlike the moment that below-spawn held Ifi's head between her claws.

She came to the terrace to wipe her mind clean of the aftertaste of her own depravity; what she found instead was yet more reason to yearn.

"Who are they?" she asked, giving up on pretending she didn't care. It was enough of a struggle to look away from the quick kiss that followed the whisper.

"And then, Kleph says… excuse me?" Makarios blinked.

"Those women," Ifi indicated the direction. "I don't recognize them."

"Oh," the merchant sighed, openly annoyed. "Them."

"They are from the High City," Ciara explained, shooting Ifi a frustrated look. "Showed up a few days ago. Mostly kept to themselves since. Judging by the way they look or act, they must be some errant patrician kids..." she pinched the bridge of her nose, a deep scowl on her face. "I know how they look, but Ifigenia, please" she stressed the name, "please. At least pretend to listen."

Another pang of guilt, followed by one more hit of shame went through Ifi. But that didn't really seem right – the women did not really look like the young, bored children of the High Families that would sometimes descend down from their towers to look for trouble.

"Sorry," she mumbled anyway, lowering her head in shame.

"They're clearly looking to scandalize with that torture dress," Ciara shrugged, "so the best we can do is pretend they're not there."

"It keeps on happening," Makarios added, now himself staring at the two women. "We keep bending our knee before the High Table, and that's how they pay their respects back. Don't they know where they are?"

"They probably do," his wife shook her head, just as annoyed. "We may only hope that the big one faints and they have to cut her from that dress with a knife."

Ifi kept herself turned away, cheeks burning red. Of course the "torture dress" was highly inappropriate; she knew that already. Of course it was one of the High City provocations; that's why they could do it, and not Ifi. But knowing it was wrong did not help to make the longing go away.

"So, where was I?" Makarios said after a pause, turning back to his table.

"Kleph's fifth wife," Ciara helped.

"Ah, yes! So, everyone says he poisoned her, but I don't think he had it in him, and besides it wouldn't be worth it, considering the prenups. This time, anyway. However, he's told me that..."

"Excuse me, sirs?"

"What is it this time?" Makarios grunted. This time, there was not even an attempt at hiding the frustration there.

A waiter, the same as before, appeared at the table, carrying a tray with a single glass of an amber-colored liquor Ifi didn't recognize.

"My apologies, but I've been asked to serve this to miss alchemist here," he said with a polite bow, placing the glass before confused Ifi. There was a piece of paper folded underneath.

"Oh my," Ciara was the first to notice; she covered her mouth with her hand in an exaggerated gesture. "Ifigenia, you've got yourself a secret admirer!"

Almost panicked, the alchemist's head darted around, trying to see who it was.

"Well," Ciara continued, a hint of cruelty in her words, "it looks like some gentleman is going to be disappointed tonight."

Ifi looked back at her, and there had to be something desperate enough in her face that even Ciara's annoyance couldn't hold. Her expression softened; she chuckled again.

"There, there," she said, as if to a child; honestly, at the moment Ifi felt the part. "I'm just teasing you. So…," she looked expectantly at the glass.

The alchemist hesitated for a while; she wasn't even sure what she was afraid of. Wasn't this exactly the reason why she wanted to start attending the terraces again? But she didn't expect the courtship to begin that fast. If it was courtship, of course, and not just business; honestly, she would have preferred business.

To her side, Makarios dropped his story altogether; he ordered himself another drink, and then leaned back, chatting up a passing merchant about some mutual deals. Ciara and Ifi remained alone for a moment, both waiting. Slowly, Ifi lifted the glass to her lips and sipped; the drink was stronger than what she was used to, burning down her throat. She coughed.

"Just go for the note," Ciara urged her on, annoyance fully flushed from her voice by the sheer power of curiosity. "I feel like it's going to be good."

"Right," Ifi nodded, and picked up the card. The handwriting was all sharp edges and pointed columns.

I'm bored out of my mind, and you don't seem like you're having any fun over there either. If you would rather go on a walk instead, meet us downstairs in fifteen minutes.
-the wife of the woman you've been ogling​

Ifi looked up from the note and at the two women; the shorter one raised a glass to her in a salute, visibly amused. The racing of her thoughts paused for, and for a time her head was filled with nothing but confused buzz.

"So..." Ciara asked, her voice thick with morbid curiosity. "What is it? Are you alright there?"

The alchemist kept reading the note over and over again, her heart racing, and cheeks completely flushed. But when she looked up, she was smiling, even if with terror. She passed the note to Ciara, who gave it one look, before an expression of utter shock seized her face.

"Well," she giggled nervously, pushing it back to Ifi, "well, well."

"Do you think…" Ifi started, but the woman just waved her hand at her to shut up.

"I think," she declared, "that one should never miss an opportunity to mingle with patricians, don't you think? And, well," where cruelty laced her voice, now there was an almost manic edge, "you must promise me you will tell me everything later," she leaned in, nearly grabbing Ifi by the lapels of her robe. "Everything."

***

There was a horrifying moment when Ifi waited in the street, the rustle of the terrace reaching down to her as distant, indistinct noise, already sure that was going to get stood up, that the note was a joke to which she was supposed to play the punchline. Scenarios of abandonment played out in her head in gruesome series, each more grotesque than the last. People filled past her, her peers passing her with concerned looks on their faces, and all that was left for her to do was smile nervously and swore to herself that she wouldn't allow herself to be fooled like that ever again. Just like she promised she wouldn't think of that below-spawn again, and of all the disappointments she had brought.

Mercifully, before the engines of her fear could fully rev up and reduce her to a babbling wreck sobbing her disappointments out on Ciara's shoulders, the door inside opened, letting the High City women out, the golden-haired one guiding her wife with an arm firmly wound around her cinched waist.

"There you are, my little ogler!" she exclaimed, approaching. With a sudden tightness in her stomach, Ifi noticed that she wasn't wrong about the dress: the wife's steps were hobbled, tiny.

"Thank you for the honour of your invitation," the alchemist blurted out in response, throat clenched, rapidly trying to remember the proper form of address. "It gladdens the laborious heart to be noticed by the exalted family. I am Ifigenia Juno, master in the Subtle Fellowship of Brewers, ever your humble and dedicated..."

"None of that," the woman rolled her eyes. "We are not here on a guild business, no matter how much you may look the part. We are here to go on a walk, to a park. Know any parks nearby?"

Ifi's brain stumbled; for a moment, the layout of the streets around, ones that she should know like the back of her head, could only appear to her as a confused tangle. She breathed out, trying to clear her mind. She knew this. At least she could know this much.

"The Charmcutters' Gardens are near," she remembered finally. "But they will be closed for the night, I'm afraid."

"Oh, they'll open for us, I'm sure," the woman replied. "Lead on, miss alchemist. I'm Eusi, and this is my bodyguard and wife Prunikos. I would ask if you like what you see on her, but I think you've made it abundantly clear by now."

The night hid Ifi's shame, or so she hoped. The crisp, cool air also helped; for the first time in the evening, Ifi was glad to be in her robe. The thick wool kept the cold at bay. Behind her, the High City women seemed concerned. Eusi draped a thin coat over shoulders, and Prunikos stayed just as she was above, hands still folded over stomach.

The park wasn't far – a mere street away – but it still took them a long time to get there. They walked in silence, and slowly, Eusi never once leaving her wife's side, guiding her every step. Ifi kept glancing back, taking in the sight of the tall woman, head locked forwards, each movement a small struggle. The tightness in the alchemist's stomach only increased; but she said nothing, even as Eusi smiled to her hungry stares.

The streets around were emptying, even as the terraces above shone bright and loud. Those were the golden hours of the night, before the big quiet of sleep, before the per-morning rush when golems would swarm out with their wagons to stock up the city for the day. Alchemical lamps burned on their posts, sharp white light drawing long shadows, and painting the streets in monochrome.

"So," Ifi asked half-way through, the silence wearing down on her, "how long have you been here?"

It was hard not to append an honorific at the end, but she managed.

"Three days," Eusi replied, "but we will be staying longer. Until the situation back home breaks one way or another."

Ifi remembered her father's advice at the end of their meeting.

"It's that glassmakers business, isn't it?" she said, trying to seem informed.

"It is," a shadow went through her face. "But let's not talk about politics. We'll have more than enough of those soon enough, I'm sure."

The park emerged from the criss-crossing of streets, bounded by a tall, wrought-iron fence. There was a guard at a gate; he lifted his eyebrow at Eusi, but she flashed him a signet ring, and he didn't ask any questions. With a flowery bow, he opened the gates inside, and let all three in, promising all manner of assistance, if needed.

It was dark inside; the lights of the city didn't reach this far. Gravel crunched under their feet; night birds played in the canopies of the old ash trees. Through the twisting branches, the night's sky appeared a patchwork of midnight and silver; water rustled nearby. The deeper they went, at their little pace, the deeper the silence that surrounded them, and fuller the sky. It was calming, in a way, and in the dark Ifi could almost forget the captivating sight behind her, and let all the worries and the stresses of the evening flow away. The air was damp here, and heavy with earthy, woodland smells. It was easy to imagine getting lost if they were to stray from the path.

But they didn't, walking the wide alley between the ash trees all the way to the edge of a pond; the wind roughed up its mirror of a surface, so that it reflected nothing, but a flittering summer. It was a benefit of the dark that it obscured all those hideous statues that the Charmcutters' put out around; Ifi had never been here after dark, but it felt better at this hour. Prettier. They found a bench overlooking the water and sat down.

"A charming little spot you've found for us," Eusi noted, finally releasing the hold on her wife. Though Ifi sat some a polite distance apart from them, she could still smell their perfume and notice when night's light caught in their jewelry. She liked it, too, those two half-hidden figures, so unreal, and so close. It let her imagination fill in the details, and that it did, generously so.

"I'm glad I could help," she said, wondering if that was it, if the two invited her over just to have a guide through an unfamiliar part of the city. "It's an honour to..."

"You keep this formal thing up as if I can't see the eyes you give my wife," Eusi snorted, "and your blush, too. Relax a bit, girl, I wouldn't have asked for you if I minded."

That seemed like a tall order to Ifi, but she tried, and failed; but she could now feel Eusi's eyes on her. Prunikos, for her part, turned towards her only briefly; the alchemist seemed to be in the blind spot of her dress. Again, that grip on the insides: to think that one could wear a dress with blind spots, where she couldn't even turn her head fully around to look at someone nearby. Ifi bit her lip.

"I'm sorry," she muttered.

"You look sorry," Eusi laughed. She had a sweet voice, and a well-practiced one. The sound was clear, clean. "Up there on this terrace of yours, I couldn't tell you from a rabbit in a snare."

Prunikos chortled at a mention, a muffled, guttural sound; the first one she's made all night. Ifi didn't know what to say, or what to make of the mix of emotions bubbling inside of her. Shame, of course, and longing, and- annoyance, apparently? Yet another woman telling her how sorry she looked, how much she didn't fit. She sighed. There was something ugly brewing inside of her.

"So you took pity?" she asked, with a barb.

"So I took pity," the woman admitted freely. "I tend to like adorable animals, and all manners of freaks."

"Freaks?" it was the annoyance that started to rise up through the thick mixture of her feelings, floating to the top. Annoyance, or more – something thick, sour on the tongue: maybe anger. Ifi spoke with a bitter note now. "Is that what I am now?"

Eusi raised an eyebrow, but did not respond.

"Or maybe you think I don't know?" and then, just like that, completely unexpectedly, and yet absolutely unsurprisingly, whatever it was that kept on bubbling inside of her came to a sudden boil. Bile rushed up the apparatus of her body, and the dams she had built, already cracked by the hellish week, gave up, finally letting the mess outside. "That I have to be actively reminded?"

She has had enough of that for this night, of this feeling like nothing, like a child let by mistake into the adult's room. Hasn't she earned more? Days ago, she stood her ground against a lowborn brute and wrangled a murderous creature into submission, and now what? A few side glances and veiled insults, and she was already breaking down? She didn't have to take it. She didn't want to take it.

And what exactly that "it" was didn't, exactly, matter. The dams were down, the vitriol spill long overdue.

"So what am I to you? Some kind of joke, no?" she heard herself say, or rather wheeze through clenched teeth. She was on her feet now, standing above Eusi, the heat of the rising tantrum beating back the cold of the night. "That clueless girl in an ugly robe, looking oh so very sorry, like she's about to start apologizing for even daring to breathe. Makes one's heart bleed, doesn't it?"

The two women listened to her quietly. A silver cigarette case flashed in Eusi's hand; she popped the engraved cover open and drew one from inside; an ember charm flickered between her hands. In the dark of the park, Ifi felt like an actor, like reciting an old litany. Or maybe she just felt pissed. Or maybe both.

"So that's the deal I'm offered? I settle for your pity, and then what," no, it wasn't either. Not even anger. It was just bitterness, flat and dry. "I can have a thing or two? A stolen glance, a loving slap to the face? Just as long I never get to forget what it makes: a pathetic freak. So thank you for letting me gawk at your wife, the dress is really nice!"

The lit cigarette drew a half-circle through the dark. Ifi turned away, leaned, picked a pebble from the gravel, skipped it across the surface of the pond.

"You know what is the problem with you?" Eusi said, her voice cool. "And no, I don't mean you specifically, miss alchemist, I'm talking about this place as a whole."

Ifi shrugged petulantly, but listened.

"You don't know how it is to have nothing but dirt under your feet, or nothing but the open sky above your heads," she explained, the words well rehearsed, delivered with reserved certainty. "You live here as if suspended, each step up an exercise in not falling down. But mostly you just end up walking in circles."

"And what does it have to do with anything?" one more stone went across the water, skipping once, twice, thrice, before disappearing beneath.

"I grew up with everything to lose," Eusi took a drag from her cigarette, lingered on the words and smoke. "My wife with nothing. And hunger, too. It was absurd of her to propose to me, and unheard of me to accept."

"If you have everything to lose," Ifi said slowly, the breadth of the scandal clear even to her, "it's not that hard to pay most of it."

"You aren't even wrong. But the way I see it, there is a different moral here. That the world," she punctuated the cold words with a jab of her cigarette, "doesn't stop for fucked up status games."

Ifi didn't like that; bile rose back up her throat.

"Easy wisdom," she snapped, "from someone who doesn't have to play them."

"As if you care about them," Eusi threw a harsh laugh in her face. "Girl, I may be new here, but I am not a moron. That woman you've sat with, the one with a horse's face, you know what she asked me when I arrived? She pointed at Pris here, and said 'Is this a provocation?'. Bitch, my home may well go down in flames within a week, and all I want is to have some fun with my wife. It's not about you, or those idiotic little gatherings you call your world. And it's not about you either, Ifigenia Juno."

She smothered the cigarette against the gravel and then pulled her wife closer, resting her head on her chest.

"But you know what's different about you, you exactly? Unlike everyone else up there, you at least didn't, or couldn't, pretend to glare with disgust. I saw the way you looked at this," she tapped the side of Prunikos' corset, drawing a dry, hard sound off it, "this close to actually drooling all over the floor. And you clearly weren't having fun with your dreadful friend over there, so..."

She left her voice hang. Ifi crouched some distance away from the bench, looking at the pool, calm now after the ripples. The acid that rushed through her moments ago withdrew, remaining only as a dull, sour aftertaste, and an acute awareness of just how tired she was. And shame. That, apparently, wasn't going to wash off in one petty outburst.

"It's a really nice dress," she muttered. "I love the way it looks on her. It must feel wonderful to wear."

Again, Prunikos reacted with that strange, muffled laughter of hers. It made Ifi feel some way.

"She loves it too," Eusi said, with pride. "And it makes me so happy to see. It was a gift, you know? For our anniversary."

And there it was again, Ifi's longing. Longing that she could now name, with absolute precision: those two women sitting close together, one in the other's hand, bound by care and trust. She skipped another stone, just to keep her hands busy. All her mind could provide now were countless arguments for why she would never have that. They hurt, but mostly just exhausted her.

"I was told it's pathetic. To want that."

"Maybe it is," Eusi shrugged. "Mind, this outfit is based on sketches by sad perverts, itself based on a fashion that rightly went into the landfill of history."

Hazily, Ifi recalled hearing about that once; those times when the High City's women quietly revolted against what they were told to wear. It was supposed to be old history now. Yet another reason to add to the long list of her shame.

"But even if it is, then so what?" she added; there was now a warmer note to her words, an almost caring quality to them. Or maybe not almost? Maybe it just was caring after all. "Tell me so, what if it is?"

"Then it's wrong. Then I shouldn't want it."

"So you would rather live play-acting something you're not, just so that others mistake you for not yourself?" Eusia shook her head, hand tenderly stroking her wife's side. "You can go far on pretending, but mostly to an unhappy grave. If Pris could talk right now, she'd tell you a thing or two about it."

The last point made Ifi pause. She turned around on suspicion, but in the dark it was difficult to tell, especially with the taller woman's neck being completely covered. Still, the hunch made a lot of sense, between her rough features and masculine frame. She exhaled, calming her nerves a bit; it was worth the risk. Being right about things made her feel big.

"If it is her voice," she said, trying to keep her own level, "I've worked with elixir women before. There are some little-known formulas that will work even on such larynxes," it was always a dangerous ground, talking about those things. Hopefully, she wouldn't trip any traps like that. "They should easily make her sound feminine, and with barely any side-effects. I could mix you up an elixir like that, and..."

In the dim light, she saw Eusi smile, for the first time in the evening more awkwardly than confidently.

"First of all," she said, voice at the edge of a giggle, constantly glancing at her stoically-still wife, "no, she can't talk not because she is that conscious of her 'unfeminized' voice, but because there is a gag stuffed all the way to her throat."

Ifi gulped, the mental image was almost too much to handle.

"Second," Eusi continued, "it's really rude to point it out like that, unprompted. And third," she added quickly, before the alchemist could apologize, "yes, I think we'll take you on that offer. What do you think, Pris?"

The tall woman leaned forward, giving her wife a nod with her entire upper body. Ifi breathed out, a little bit relieved. She stood up from the gravel, to sit back down on the bench. Cool or not, it was a pleasant night after all.

Up until the flame opened the sky, and the looming shadow of the High City above was wreathed in a corona red flame.

"Ah," Eusie whispered with terrifying softness as the bells of the city rang the alarm. "There it goes."

 

[Gargulec]

9. Prisoner

The cane erupted with all the striking charm's stored power; the brothel's window exploded into a burst of glass and splinters, Cuts thrown tumbling out, its porcelain body tumbling down to the street below.

Tongue hungrily out, Shard didn't hesitate. Swimming through the ecstasy of inflicted pain, she followed instantly, lunging after her sibling and landing astride it, a downwards blow of her hands bouncing its head against the street curb, ringing it like a bell. And there, again, before it could recover: both hands, down like a hammer, against the blurred paint on Cuts' head.

Shard howled with pleasure; the blow struck through. There it was: her sibling's jaw, going slack, yielding an opening into the tender flesh behind the shell. Shard thrust, jamming her hand into Cuts' mouth, its teeth grinding an ear-splitting whine against the surface of her arm. It choked, opening up wider, and Shard raised her other hand, claws gleaming, read to plunge it through the soft tissue, straight into the brain, straight for the kill.

There was a touch of something sharp on her chest. She looked down to see Cuts' own claws slipped past the torn-apart dress, and under the crack of Shard's shell, their needle-point tips touching poised to plunge into the exposed flesh, and up, towards the heart.

In the wordless understanding of what happened, they both froze. Half-buried into mud, they became a tableaux of a monstrous embrace, buffeted from all sides by a swelling sea of fear. But whatever it was that surrounded them - the street, the panicked shouts, the cries of alarm - couldn't find purchase in Shard's attention. The world, with all of its concerns, faded away. All she could think of was the steel-splittingly sharp death, resting inches from her heart. Time slowed down to a crawl.

There was no way for her to strike Cuts dead without Cuts getting a chance to slip its own deathblow in. But neither could it hope to kill her before Shard would rip its brain to shreds. And so all that remained for them was this guarded stillness, waiting for the other one to stumble, to show a lapse of attention, a weakening of the killing intent, any kind of an opening. So there was the calculus: no way to win without dying, no way to retreat without letting your guard down. They were both trapped, and they both knew it, imprisoned in their mutual death-grasp. What were the ways out? Hoping that the other would tire first, or that maybe the strangers around would overcome their fear and come with clubs and picks and hammers and provide a distraction? If neither of them was going to make a move - and neither of them could - it would come down to a chance, to the coin flipped by fate to decide which of them, if any, was to live.

The elation of the fight drained away; the brief, corporeal pleasure of blows stricken and weathered fading fast. Where it left Shard, the by-now familiar sense of sheel exhaustion came back in. It was only the animal fear of death, the cold presence of three claws pushing into her flesh, that held Shard from collapsing. Cuts gurgled, choking on her hand; the slight pinpricks of blissful warmth that coiled in the muscle of her arm seemed almost like belonging to a foreign body.

The scope and span of the world she inhabited collapsed down to its sibling below Shard, and the halo of packed dirt around its head. There was no way to take any of her attention from it; if the lowborns were going to come over and end this for them, she probably wouldn't know it until the first blow of the hammer to the back of her skull. There was no divining of their movement from swirls of their fear; there was only the pointless wait, for nothing.

Again.

Cuts' teeth gnashed; its tongue wrapped around Shard's wrist, its claws drawing a fraction of an inch closer to Shard's heart. She was choking it; she had to relent, or it would retaliate. She released some of the pressure, leaned slightly back, and felt the excited tension in her muscles spread out as her sibling sucked a breath in past her arm. For all of her exhaustion, her body never failed to ache for the kill, for the torture of this flesh below. Cuts had to feel the same. But this hunger was not their ally now, and with the weight of the day on her shoulders, and the taste of failure now a familiar friend, Shard to wonder if it had ever been one.

"This is pointless," she said, even though she couldn't let Cuts respond. "We are both going to die."

The wedge painted on Cuts' face was now little more than an ugly black smear, as if someone had spilled ink over the surface of its head. It offered no hint to what her sibling was thinking, or feeling. The children of the Lair-Mother read each other from their motions, from their gestures, from the voice. Without any of that, Shard could only try to think how she would feel in Cuts' place, and what kind of an offer she would then accept for their mutual survival. But that was not the kind of a calculation that she was used to considering.

"And I don't want to. Do you?" she attempted..

Cuts, for its part, gurgled something that could have been a laugh, an agreement, or a bitter snarl. But it wanted to live, too? Surely, it had to value its own survival more than Shard's death. They were the children of the same laboratory, of the same vat. They were born first to survive, and second to serve. Not for this vengeful spite of mortals throwing themselves at naked blades, just to hurt their enemies with one final lashing out. So maybe there was a chance to convince Cuts to step back together, to make sure they were both going to live through this encounter. But there was no way to broker. No way to argue for it. So what was left to her? Make the move, and trust that Cuts wouldn't take the opportunity afforded by the one-sided withdrawal? A suicidal move, certainly, but all the other paths that she could imagine all terminated in a pair of corpses, and that way, maybe one of them would get to live. And that, maybe, mattered for something.

"I'll count to three, and then pull back," she announced, surprised at how easy it was to say, and Cuts tensed under her touch. "I hope you do the same."

Was this suicide? Was she just asking Cuts to kill her, and end this cavalcade of failures? Was she just too tired to carry on, and offering what was left of her to be torn apart by a fellow monster?

"One."

Maybe. But the kind of living that was the alternative was kind of a death, too.

"Two."

The space between seconds yawed; her entire body became registered to her in a new way, every little detail of its continuing existence screaming for her attention. Between the fall of two and three, she could name every strained muscle, every lingering hint of the fight's exhilaration, every bit of hurt and every bit of pleasure that she was made of. Her consciousness contracted, and sharpened, enclosing her like a second shell of a skin, impervious to everything but the tumble of the word that was to follow.

"Three."

She yanked her hand back; she looked down, and saw Cuts' hand still holding onto the strike. She breathed in, fully expecting to never get to exhale.

"Something really broke in you, dear sister," her sibling rasped, its finger making half a turn between the shell and the flesh. A trickle of warm, black blood ran down its hand; a scratch, not a deathblow. It, too, withdrew.

Stunned, Shard stumbled back; without thinking, she put her hand to the crack in her shell, covering it. She lived. The ice cracked; time, no longer held back, flurried forwards. There were, again, screams surrounding them. Rush of feet, of panic. As before; as always; she missed the High City, where she could be without that. This yearning, however, was just another shade of living; and in front of her, its sibling lived as well.

"Why?" Shard asked, part Cuts, part herself.

"Look behind you," Cuts replied, rising from the ground and wiping mud from the surface of its head.

Shard stepped in half-circle, not turning away from her sibling, not until she was standing with Cuts in front of her. Above, the rising mountain that was the city opened in its panorama; and far in the distance, fire tinted the sky red. Through the dark of the night, Shard could tell the outline of the Glassmakers' tower. A fiery wreath surrounded it, black smoke billowing into the night; a cloud above the devastation. And still, the charms adorning the High City gleamed and glowed; Shard imagined their filigree glass bodies catching and refracting the burning red and gold, the fine ash of workshops, libraries, and dwellings settling onto them in a thin layer of filthy varnish.

"In the end, they didn't wait for me to drag your severed head in," Cuts shrugged, its entire stance relaxing, claws fading into its fingers. "Why bother, then?"

Wind carried the far-away, muted wail of bells tolling in alarm. But this far below the Table, the towers were a foreign country; the eyes of the street were on Shard and Cuts, and not on the devastation in the height. The matter of two demons abruptly pausing their mortal struggle had to appear far more pressing and distressing than some distant war among the mighty of the world.

Images of fire filled Shard's mind.

This was not supposed to happen. Master Glassmaker was always quick to brandish the scars he carried from the last time his guild decided, in a spasm of magic and violence, to decide on its leadership and its future. All he had ever worked towards was for there being no more flame, no more war, and no more rain of ash upon the white streets in the Middle City to follow the struggle. There was no price he was not ready to pay, no atrocity he was not ready to commit, no monster was not ready to strike a deal with, if only to arrest the possibility of the story of his ascent repeating.

Years ago, Shard had knelt before her mother, and listened to her commands: that she should go and prostrate herself before Master Glassmaker, as a token of the alliance between the high and low, and that she should serve as his dagger and claw, and that she should let the world drown in blood before letting a challenge to him stand. Now, fire swallowed the towers, and she could only imagine the bitter struggle, knives and charms tearing the family apart. She could only wonder which member of the family was a traitor, who would fight to the last, who would sense the wind turning and change ranks. She could only watch, and wait to see which face the coin landed on.

"I thought," Shard muttered, not certain what it was that she was thinking. "That.."

"I am not going to get myself killed," Cuts said, staring at the far-away conflargation, "if I don't even know if there will be anyone left to pay me tomorrow."

Shard almost asked who it was who put the price on her head. But did that matter at all? Her lucky break was the crimson light painted across the night's sky, announcing the war to the whole city. That alone saved her life, and that was all she could hope for here. Even if Master Glassmaker was to survive the challenge; even if come morning the corpses of traitors were to be dangled from the charred walls of the High City, she would still have failed. Because her purpose was to not let the flames come, or to stand in their path and beat them back. Her sibling's claw spared her only because her death was no longer relevant, which meant that so was her life.

Beneath the sea of flame which filled her mind, she could hear the sound of the chisel and the hammer. The crack in her shell hurt with its dull, phantom pain.

"I have a den nearby," Cuts offered, as if it hadn't tried to kill Shard mere moments ago. "Let's not play scarecrows in the middle of a street."

***

Cuts made its roost underneath a tidy little temple in the guts of the lower city. A sole nun greeted them inside, with her best effort at not noticing the pair of Lair-Mother's children entering. She kept herself to cleaning the little-used altar-piece, her blindness well-practiced. As was her deafness, when Cuts found the trap-door, leading down into the cozy cellar below.

It was warm inside, the air heavy and stale; it made Shard think of her kind's home at the bottom of the world. But if the winding passages of the depths she was born and raised were bare rock and cold light, hostile and unwelcoming, Cuts den was anything but. Rich, if tattered tapestries covered the walls in mesmerizing patterns of shape and color. Thick blankets brought from overseas cushioned the floor, weaving around scavenged chairs, tables, dressers. A hint of mould laced the air, and another of blood. Under the powerful, alchemical lamp shining above, Shard could make the claw-marks, and blood-stains marking the old wood. Back in the High City, back when she had a home, she kept her trophies in a small case; Cuts' display was more overt.

Shard moved in slowly, minding the floor below for snares, and making sure to keep her sibling in front of her. But Cuts' stance was relaxed now; she stepped lightly between the mess of her den, and towards a side-room, where a blue piece of glass, likely worth more than the entire temple, sat stuffed into a crack in the walls. A haze of water erupted from it as Cuts approached, shrouding its entire figure in warm vapour. Filth washed easily off porcelain, running down the gutters of the floor, and down to an unseen sewer.

Too exhausted to do much else, Shard crawled onto a rickety, rocking chair perched precariously atop piled fabrics, curling atop of it. It swayed with her weight, the motion strangely soothing. Of course it was a possibility that Cuts had lured her here only to finish what it couldn't accomplish in the streets, but what did it matter? It was difficult to not think of the magnitude of the disaster unfolding in the High City, and of the depths of her failure; but thoughts themselves came to Shard's head only sluggishly, as if some kind of fog filled her mind instead.

"You look so miserable, dear sister," her sibling announced, wiping its clean shell with a drab washing rag. "Then again you are fucked, aren't you?"

It sat by a dresser in the corner of its hideout, reaching for a brush and a pot of black paint. The fact that the mirror in front of it was shattered and gone did not seem to inconvenience it all too much.

The chair creaked under Shard, the wicker seat bending under her weight as if about to snap. Mortals rarely made furniture with the thought of accomodating for the Lair-Mother's children; after all, the world they were building was not meant for them. She turned the thought around a few times in the slowness of her mind, wallowing in the sense of solitude.

"Can't say I'm not happy to see this, though," Cuts added, filling in the outline of its signature black wedge. "I think it may even be better than seeing you dead. You know, it's a funny thing, but did you know that Mother has sanctioned that challenge?"

Of course she did. It made too much sense. If Cuts was allowed to hunt Shard down, it meant that whoever raised a hand against Master Glassmaker did it with at least tacit permission of the Lair-Mother. There had to be some kind of a deal brokered, some trade; the specifics of it were, however, ultimately irrelevant in the face of her mother's pragmatic calculations. Master Glassmaker ruled his guild with her consent; but others could too. The implications made Shard's stomach twist; she wrapped her arms around her knees, trying her best not to hear the sound of the chisel and the hammer.

"Hurts to realize, doesn't it?" Cuts snorted, clearly amused. "I forgot how good of a sport twisting the knife could be."

"Did Mother send you?" Shard managed to ask, in a trembling voice.

"Oh, no," Cuts replied, still working at its face. "No, no. I wouldn't be letting you go if it was her command. It was some mortal's ploy, and apparently not a very crucial one. Not worth risking my neck for. They'll always need me here, anyway. No, I'm not the one who will execute our Mother's displeasure with you, dear sister."

It sounded happy, maybe even giddy. Finally, Shard stopped fearing for her life. She wasn't going to die here; Cuts wasn't intending on killing her anymore. No, the torture wasn't supposed to end so soon. Shard knew this game, and knew the role that she had landed in it.

"It will be a great show, I think," it continued, shooting her a tooth-filled smile. "Mother will figure out something special for you. I hope I will get a chance to see it."

The words hurt, in a way Shard was not accustomed to at all - as if her shell was nothing, and her entire flesh exposed and tender. Cuts laughed; its sibling was providing a filling meal indeed.

"Do you have any idea how much I hate you?" it said in a tone of light amusement, putting the brush down and staring straight at Shard, black wedge on pristine white. "How much we all do? And it feels so good to tell you that. Come on, squirm a little more for me, dear sister. You look so miserable."

The chair rocked forwards and back; Shard listened on, learning about the kinds of pain she had never considered much.

"The favoured Shard," Cuts continued, "Mother's right hand. We watched you lick her feet and have rewards heaped on you. She allowed you gender, my dear sister. And you," its voice trembled now, a smile as wide as the crescent moon, pleasure dripping from each syllable, "fucked it all up! It made such news down below when that mortal bested you. And then," it clasped its hands, "again!"

It stood up, stepping lightly around Shard and her rocking chair, feet barely making a sound on the thick blankets.

"Food and vermin you called them," it savoured every pang of shame and guilt it could evoke. "Food and vermin ate you. Your shell is cracked, dear sister. Someone broke you. And what did you say about broken things? What did you call the broken things you've helped Mother dispose of? Useless filth, better to be forgotten."

Didn't Cuts know it was all a play Shard put on so that their mother would see she had learned well from her lessons? Did it really believe Shard wanted to brag? But she did, didn't she? She stood at the lip of the pit, and bragged, so very glad to be in the Lair-Mother's graces. Would she not feel the same way, if she was in Cuts' place? There was something revolting about that idea, as if opening a door inside her she had gone to great lengths to secure; but whatever it was that she had pushed behind it had to wait.

Cuts approached, looming over Shard; its finger touched the open pit on Shard's stomach, where the hero's spear broke her. It pressed into the flesh, gathering a single drop of blood on its tip. It raised its hand to its mouth, allowing its long tongue to sample the taste.

"I could kill you right now," it said, the power over its sibling's life so very sweet on its lips. "No risk to it anymore. But I really think I like it better the way you are right now. I hope she finds something sweeter for you than the pit. Maybe she will lop off your arms and legs, and hang you from her altar, so she always has a puppet for her to demonstrate her lessons?"

Its finger traced the imaginary cuts across Shard's shoulders and hips, the claw slicing through what remained of the dress Andronikos put Shard in.

"I hope you suffer," it whispered into the side of Shard's head, "like I wish we had not."

"All I have ever wanted," Shard whispered back, unsure what it was that she was feeling, peeking from under all that solitude and hurt, "was to survive. One more day, every day."

Was that not the full truth? She had never acted out of anything else; she just wanted to be safe, to know that there was a tomorrow waiting for her. And if that meant being her mother's favoured, what was the harm in it? In the great below her kind was born to, there could be no alternative. It was wrong of Cuts to resent her for what Cuts would itself do, if given a chance. Shard knew that, as clearly as she could know anything in her addled state. And yet, somehow, there was no comfort and sustenance in that knowledge, only more that dull novel, numbing anguish roiling in her. Everywhere she turned, she was met with screams, with fear, or with hatred. How could she deserve it?

Cuts petted her across the head; there was no care in the gesture, only mockery. It walked away, wiped its palm with a rag. Shard was still caked in filth.

"You can stay here for as long as you want, dear sister," it offered, "you are a pleasure to have around."

A dull and empty sound left Shard, like a banging of a drum.

"You're crying?" Cuts mocked, leaning in to watch. "Even better. I should drag you like that before Mother, when she sends for you. Shard of White Obsidian, now bawling on the floor."

It really was a spiral, and no matter how much Shard tried to break away, it kept dragging her back, down and down. Everything she has ever done culminated in this point, in her sibling leering and drinking her pain, because it could, and because even if Shard was to summon all of her rage, she wasn't sure if she had it in her to do more than push herself off the chair, and onto the blanketed floor. And besides, even if by some miracle she could smash Cuts to smithereens, what next? It was right; her mother would call for her, and come for her, and there was no one in the world who had ever managed to defy her will.

With one exception.

There was a kind of clarity to her despair, slicing cleanly through the haze of her exhaustion. There was a man who had managed to make a stand against the Lair-Mother's will, and emerge victorious, time after time. And there was hope to her despair too, in itself as wild and impossible as hope could only get. But she had not lied when she said that all she wanted to do was to survive. The idea hatched in her head with the wild desperation of someone too unready to let go, of someone unable to accept that she had lost. It was impossible; she had herself made sure that the one man who could help her never would. But Cuts was right: Shard knew what the alternative to this stupid hope was. The impossible could be hoped for, but not her Mother's mercy. So impossible had to be the choice - nothing else was there.

"Can I leave?" she asked, raising her head from between her knees.

"Hmmm," Cuts' pondered, scraping its claw at the side of its head. "You know, I do owe you for not killing us both earlier. So yes, maybe I could let you go."

Its tone was light, amused; Shard breathed in, waiting for the knife to be twisted. Cuts didn't leave her hanging for too long.

"If you beg nicely enough," it smiled.

Shard nodded, understanding. She didn't want to waste a moment of this apparent lucky break; she slipped from the chair, landing on her fours on the floor. A memory from a day before guided her as she crawled towards Cuts, head kept low. When was the last time she had knelt like that before anyone but their mother? She wondered how her humiliation tasted to her sibling? Probably little; there was not much room left in her for shame. Cuts stood above her, arms folded behind its back.

"Please," Shard whispered, "let me go."

With an ugly grinding sound, Cuts' feet landed on her neck, knocking her down onto her stomach and pressing her head into the blanketed floor.

"On a second thought," it leered, "why should I? You're too much fun."

"Please," she repeated, her voice quaking in fear. Cuts had to notice.

"Maybe I could get Mother to gift you to me, once she is done with you?" it said, twisting its feet, the weight crushing on Shard's neck. "Actually, what do you think? Wouldn't you prefer to be my toy, forever? I could keep you here, all mine. Mother would never get you."

The words were light like summer, happy. Shard shivered; such things have happened. Such things have been offered to her; it was only that she had always been too hungry for such extended pleasures.

"I would only have to defang you," Cuts continued to wonder, squashing Shard below its foot. "Maybe also take your tongue. You were never much of a talker, anyway. Imagine that, dear sister. No feet, no hands, no tongue… you would lounge all day, pampered until I would finally get bored with you. Wouldn't you prefer that to Mother's mercies?"

She could imagine it; against her will, she did. Cuts' pushed on her neck. There were feelings in her chest that she couldn't quite describe, ugly, piercing, so very fragile.

"Answer me. Wouldn't you prefer it?" it commanded, colder now.

So that was how it felt to be fully within someone's power. Not like with the hero, where it was life or death - no, it was like with that woman before, that low-born that Shard singled out for her amusement. And what was that feeling? Knowing what you had to do, and knowing how little it would matter. No matter what she said next, it was Cuts to decide if she was to ever leave this basement. And yet, she had to say something.

"Yes," she cried out, "I would."

"Then why not get started on it right now?" Cuts laughed. But then, it lifted its feet; Shard breathed in sharply. "But I think I'm not ready for the commitment. Scurry, now."

The wretched wave of relief washed over Shard; she was going to live. She began to rise from the floor; and the reward was a kick straight into her exposed flesh, and an explosion of pain like a searing light knocking the air out of her. She fell to the floor again, thankful for the blankets to cushion her.

"I said scurry," Cuts spat. "Not walk."

So she climbed to her fours, and started to crawl, through the room, and towards the stairs. Cuts walked slowly behind her, cheerfully clapping its hands.

"I want you to remember, my dear survivor sister," she offered as Shard started to slowly make her way up the stairs, worn to slippery smoothness in years of use, "that you would rather live as a torture puppet, than face the consequences of your failure. I want you to imagine yourself as mine, all the way up to the day when Mother finally takes her toll from you."

The trapdoor to above was almost within reach; Shard extended her arm to open it, only to be rewarded by another kick. She clattered down the stairs, her shell creaking under the strain. It didn't even hurt that much.

"Will you?" it asked, standing atop her crumpled frame.

"Yes," she begged.

"Up again."

Once more, she began to crawl up the stairs, waiting for the third blow to come in.

"I hope," Cuts sneered, the leisurely note all but gone from its voice, "that when she drags you before us all to make an example out of your failure, you will regret that I didn't decide to keep you. But you know that there is no escaping our Mother's will."

There were no more kicks, and no more words. Slowly, Shard made it all the way up to the top; Cuts opened the door, and let her out, onto the dusty floor of the temple, to where the nun did not see and did not hear.

"Go now," Cuts said, its voice fading into its den as it left. "We will be seeing each other again soon enough, all the way at the bottom of the world."

In the silence that followed, Shard couldn't bring herself to stand up. She knelt, and quaked, fragile, incorporeal, and alone. Everything Cuts had said about her was true, and now that her life was no longer in danger, and now that she could walk away, the weight of shame came crashing down onto her, piercing through all the other fears.

As she clambered up on shaking legs, physically sound and shattered in spirit, she longed for someone to hold her close and tell her that that things would be all right. And in that, she finally realized, far too late, just how badly did she misunderstand the alchemist named Ifi.