(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 28 minutes)

Meanwhile Beocroak was streets and alleys away, which was a problem. What he wanted was disorganized rock, not a bricklayer’s pattern or a mason’s mosaic anywhere to be seen. Gray ways hid the actual ground if he moved too swiftly. Twice he’d nearly planted a foot in nothing and fallen into a crevasse that, if it had a bottom, would’ve finished in Tauntalagmite’s gullet, as the queen of infested skulls, who bedded oldest thing on oldest rock, was also the swallower of darkness. Souls lost in lightless fall were the medicine she took in the morn she never saw.

After finding a gray spiral staircase that might have ringed a gargantuan stalactite he was made to follow it, every other path obscured behind spreading gray walls that only cracked to grow plaques and mortar. Up was his goal, not down. Forced to battle confusion he was, as his descent was coupled with the visible rise of Toeteld in the foggy distance.

A chasm underneath filled with piercing parapets and needle towers, rising faster than he fell, turning his downward spiral into a disorienting climb. He cast a callused yet attuned hand out into the gap to feel for wind. There was some, of the city. It twisted about the towers as they rose and rose and rose, into castles, fortresses, and hundreds of staircases like the one he was on now, which grew a metal rail that pushed him back as if trying to protect the bag of blood that could cause additional growth spurts in the fledgling civilization.

Grabblers were not without fear, though devoid of it in battle. Born cradled by Gaw Digi-Tally, directly or indirectly, fear did not motivate the actions that determined course. However, as mortal men and women they had fear. Beocroak was not afraid of heights, and so did not know what he feared when he saw the unmajesty of Toeteld shoot out of the depths, one tower close enough now to graze his flank as he clung to what he hoped was a stalactite under its gray skin. Something.

Do not die underground, they say. Perhaps it was that. It was the idea not of death, but of becoming trapped in Tauntalagmite’s capital when he had been plucked from Gaw’s orchard, at the height of its season no less. His heart was in his throat, not a good place for it to be. Another grabbler could’ve snatched it right out of his mouth. Beocroak forced himself away from the wall, to the edge, where the railing allowed him to grab it despite its gray iron.

The city had not become less threatening, less darkly grand. Guards marched atop walls carrying pikes. The pikes carried standards. Their helmets were nearly as sharp as their spears. No fatigue in their formations. All muscle was leather that did not tire. Crossbowmen leaned out of narrow windows, surveyed the land they would protect for the rest of time for the first time.

These fortresses and academies fed into each other, having nothing to protect but other protective walls. The stony weave obeyed no architectural laws of the living, zigging and zagging like a spider stringing its lines across death-defying leaps. There came the rushing roar of water released, from a drain in reality. Fast gray sludge filled one of the irregularly shaped gaps in the walls, forming a moat. The surface never settled, disturbed as it was by leaping shredder fish and the slithering plated tails of murkodiles. A juvenile murkodile he could grabble, not an adult, and definitely not a gray adult.

More scattered moats appeared, the largest one rising directly under him, consuming the stairs he’d planned to imminently use. Ghostly shredders would not have a single toe of his, forcing him to climb once more. The water slowed and stopped, allowing him to recuperate breath; his heaving chest pushed his eyes up, where they met one of those narrow windows across the way, the pupil of a snake, the gleam in its eye the trained aim of a skeletal crossbowman who had taken note of the distant fleshly aberration, the wingless fly crawling the wall of Toeteld.

An arrow he could catch. A bolt he could catch. Awareness was the only missing ingredient for such a catch when he’d been struck by the sling back in the densest portion of the battlefield. His hands were mummified mammoth mouths with molar grips fully capable of chewing gravel to powder. None of that could stop a gray bolt like the one that whistled toward him with a shriek that made the faceless bats envious.

It was hollowed and holey, turning the scream of its passage into an unholy chorus, a tied bundle of severed heads wailing as they were swung in a circle. Its tip wobbled, threatening to strike anywhere to his left or right. Down was water, razor fins, gnashing teeth. So he launched up on his powerful legs, not trained to jump but able to beat most men in the feat.

He latched onto a gray step that he knew to be solid to him, having crossed it once already. Every crossbowman, regardless of ears still attached, dangling, rat-nibbled, or entirely missing, would have and did hear the holey bolt’s intent cry. Beocroak assumed they were aiming, pulled himself horizontal with finger strength alone, then vertical upside down. A coordinated collapse put him back on the stairs. Across the deadly way strings gained audible tension. Any moment now the air would be rent by another demonic crescendo, both unified and staggered. Beocroak had nowhere to go.

Until another tower rose from the depths of the largest moat. A volley of bolts screamed their departure. Without space to get a running start, Beocroak shunted the necessary strength into just two steps: one on the stair and one on the rail. Then he joined the projectiles in flight. The grabbler had targeted the tower because it was solid, not because it was safe. Ceramic gray tiles broke his fall, and a rib, and themselves.

One wheezing inhale inflated his chest enough to force the bone back into place, with such skill that if he were opened and investigated by one of the razor-teethed fish below they would not see the seam. He held that pressure, breathed lower so as not to be distracted by pain. The fall was much more his concern as he began to slide down clacking tiles.

Behind him the bolts collided with the stalactite, bounced off and loudly clanged down the stairs if they didn’t plunge into the water like mangrove shoots. There was time now, while they reloaded, if they even cared to follow his new path. These gray watchmen had different uniforms, weapons, banners. Their concern might be limited to their line of sight, haphazardly cut as ownership of the webbed fortress seemed to be.

The slide down the tiles became the inevitable fall, but the grabbler landed on his feet, whipping around to see what new threats he might face. Three marching guards stalled at the sight of him, empty eyes growing darker and deeper, lipless mouths yawning open in hunger for combat.

“You there! Fleshcloak! Halt!” Beocroak would’ve disobeyed with a direct approach if these were living men, he would’ve broken their weapons over his knee and fed them back, but he suspected he could not so much as touch them, leaving only the disobedience of taking the narrow stone stair to his left. Rusty clanks told him they pursued.

His first step down felt wrong. Every new path in Toeteld, any that kept his foot off the natural rock, felt like the start of a doomed journey, the dead path on a forking road that should have been amputated with shovels and bandaged with signs warning travelers away. The way down was shadow. Left turns were ill omens, right a dire diagnosis from a swamp hag who had kept a frog alive for three centuries but fled at the sight of your rash.

Each lower step took more out of him, and more light from his eyes. Control over his breath slipped, and his rib smarted. Toeteld’s air was forming, the grabbler was breathing it in, and nothing in it conjured or fed the hope of blooded man. Only the bumbling guards following him convinced him to go on, to reach the cobblestone yet hilly street that might have existed just to define the height of the adjacent fortress walls.

Ghostly rats bounded along the bases already thick with collapsed carts and other refuse. Beocroak moved at half their speed, puffing his warmth away, almost halting after all when his mind stumbled over his circumstances. He had walked through the peasants’ walls with no effort, but gray stairs, roofs, and floors had held him. If this was consistent throughout Toeteld, then only tops and bottoms were barriers.

The guards caught up in time to see him hold his breath and charge through the alley wall, straight into the bottom of a moat. Flailing, Beocroak stumbled before recognizing the gray water did not have the properties of the real thing. It was but a memory manifested, a necrotic mirage sanctioned and indirectly cast by Tauntalagmite: devourer of dreams left in the brain meat upon departure to her lands.

Holding his breath was pointless, so he released it. These waters would be real to the ghosts, ending their pursuit. Except there were more ghosts than those, ones that did not wear armor and carried all their weapons rooted in their mouths. Above him the sinuous shape of a slithering murkodile glided through the gray. The beast was long dead, but if its spirit lingered so too would the only characteristic that ever made such bottom feeder dragons drag themselves off the banks: hunger.

Unsure if the animal could glance down and see through its own transparent eyelid, Beocroak carefully crept along in its shadow, swiveling to gain underwater bearings for the first time in his life. The moat’s surface was disturbed by the activities of the castle’s seemingly endless growth, preventing him from spotting any gray dead leaned over in search of him. Could he stay there for a time, until their attentions turned elsewhere?

No, because of the fish. They schooled. They flexed their jaws as they flapped their gills, adjusted glossy teeth like drifting shoals of siren scales. They ate and fought over what they ate and ate whoever lost the fight. They were shredder fish. Fin spines equally as sharp as the teeth.

They were bad targets for grabblers, in spite of fish, in their puffy-lipped and often toothless limblessness, being the first animals to ever suffer the developing art. This type’s diminutive size made them a danger in groups and worthless as weapons while their particular shape resulted in their long recurved teeth digging far too deep into the more delicate flesh around the wrist, too close to major rivers of blood.

A school of them came out of the background murk, every last individual spotting the man lurking on the bottom. They too hungered in spirit; they would never realize they had no flesh to sate, even after leaving his shredded, torn, and nearly emulsified remains spread across the moat bed.

Surging tail fins pushed the ball of them in his direction. Luckily he was not slowed by the water, and was able to lunge to the nearest stone wall. Beocroak landed on the other side and found it dry enough to be populated by ten more guards, five to each banner, perhaps in the middle of an argument over whose territory this crooked alleyway was.

One thing they could agree on was that anything pink or dusky of skin had only so many purposes in Toeteld, and three of the four were different kinds of wall hanging. They howled their purpose, communicating it to each other and to Beocroak. All at once they attempted to pile on, but at the sacrifice of the integrity of his rib seal the grabbler twisted underneath them and rolled away. This roll took him through the wall and back into the moat.

The shredder fish had the focus he’d hoped of the guards, and had gone rather than patrol a blank wall, but with no feeding necessary for the spectral aquatic guardians their phantom masters had dumped them in haphazard and copious. The shredders had been replaced by another murkodile, definitely a different individual than the one he had hidden under. That had been an adult, three men long tooth to tail; this was a juvenile.

That said it still had the power to make a meal of him when he couldn’t defend himself, and it had already spotted him. Its speed was obscured by its silent swishing travel, opposite the screaming bolts. Beocroak recognized the glint of intent in its otherwise cloudy eye. Going back through the wall would just put him back in the untangling pile of guards, so he searched about the moat bed, found a nearby stairway that could only be used if the water was drained, or if you were alive in a dead world.

Checking over one’s shoulder while climbing stairs is almost as perilous as dying underground, but Beocroak felt he had no choice. The murkodile’s silent approach could be judged no other way. Ultimately it was the correct decision, as the tail flashed with lightning speed, launching the animal forward in what was, to Beocroak, nothing so much as an eagle’s deadly swoop. The grabbler raced up the last few steps, found a half-flooded drain at the moat’s surface with water escaping into a shallow sluice through three iron bars.

Almost as dangerous on land, he couldn’t ignore the murkodile just because he’d surfaced, not so much as a gray drop falling off him. The wall with the drain was atop the many steps, so it had to be at least one level separate form his pile of pursuers. He went through and groaned at finding yet another alley with little sign of a path out of the fortress. It had risen enough to earn a name, and it was shouted by the cluster of guards who rounded the corner at one end and saw him.

“There he is men! Go and claim the first prisoner of Castle Coffinnail! The hungry dungeon moans!” Some of them were from the pile, others the parapets, the latter wielding only the bolts without their bows. Clumsy and limping, their speed was still enough to make bolts whistle, more of an empty determined howl in the alley of creeping gray lichen and weeping bricks half as big as a man.

Beocroak had found nowhere to run, the passage behind him actually offering an ascent so squeezed and twisted and overgrown with nethercaps that it was invisible in the moment’s heat about his temples and collar. The grabbler was prepared to fight, but his enemies’ bodies weren’t; they wouldn’t recognize his living authority in Toeteld. He was sure to be run through with every gray point they had while his hands rent nothing but air where their jaws should have been.

To add to his woes, the juvenile murkodile had not relented either. It crawled out of the gray moat and found the drain, shoveling its maw through two of the drain bars and ramming them repeatedly to try and squeeze through. Turning on its side achieved this, and all at once it fell into the sluice with a slapping splash, between Beocroak and the charging guards.

They skidded to a halt, and Beocroak wondered what they could possibly fear from the phantom animal. As Mother had said, they couldn’t get any deader. Toeteld was to be their best effort at mimicking life however, especially in these early times, in the thrill of setting up shop and squabbling with other squatters. To waste that time with your head in a gray murkodile’s gut, conversing with its flatulence, was too akin to a second death and a lost opportunity at the same time.

For the moat dragon’s part it was briefly torn between prey, large flat head whipping back and forth, held wide open to display the thick fencing pegs that were its top and bottom teeth. That gave Beocroak time, which, like the tiniest yawn of any animal he might grabble, he would wrench open and fully exploit.

Dread had almost gotten him, but that was because he had forgotten his roots. Exiled as he was from Lazuli Pawlm, he could not be separated from the gifts Gaw Digi-Tally had given. In her death she could not deliver them personally, making them always available for the taking, as long as one could find the strength to reach and seize.

Reaching through faith, in Gaw, his people, and his own history, Beocroak found a means of fighting back. Not here and now, not quite yet. First he had to sing his own praises, blow the war horn of time and let it echo in the halls of his glory so that all beloved pets and cowering vermin alike would hear.

He took a breath as deep as the one he used to traverse the sharpened dust of demolished Wormskoll. The cracked rib was put back in place, then forced too far into new pain as his chest inflated. Sternum popped. Spine clicked in accommodation. Beocroak released it not as breath, but as a bottomed-out roar that brought every blue vein to the surface of his skin. He cast his voice out in waves of such incredible pressure that it nearly undid the dent in his head. Let Castle Coffinnail hear. Let Toeteld hear. Let all of Tauntalagmite’s Underbelly hear. None of them could make Beocroak perish away from the light. Even there he intended to drag them out of the dark wet earth and into the gaze of the gods, raised on his forearm as a hunting trophy.

The roar, the penetrating and spreading croak, moved through the gray and into the rock. He spoke not to the citizens, but to their livestock, their pests, their wildlife on the borders. In the pulsing notes he reminded them all who he was. Animals that had suffered the humiliation of being grabbled were supposed to always remember, fear left knotted in their guts, never digested, instead compacted into a gastrolith of respect.

The degree to which lineages passed this fear along was a testament to the grabbler’s skill. The best were not taking hold of individuals, but of something more primordial, something in the ground too old and feeble to join the surface-dwellers; they held the family tree in one hand. One advantage of leaving Lazuli Pawlm and selling his palm and shoulder was that Beocroak had spread his influence and reputation wide across Hexaclete’s Land, from the borders of the powdered and craggy Morningless Mountains in the north to the arid and salty southern shore.

Every fish and turtle that swam the river Plur knew his name without being able to pronounce it. There was not a treefisher or ambush wolver that would let him pass under their forests without descending and bowing its head in respect. Beocroak’s croak called them from the woodwork: those he had grabbled, those spawned from what he had grabbled, and those who had seen how their experienced fellows treated grabblers.

As with the faceless bat that had offered itself up, deference to his will was a form of animal wisdom. It was better for them and their kin in the long run, as his strength was true, not the kind forged in cruelty that tended to snap and shatter when least expected. To obey was to not sustain injury in the taking of what they could not deny.

In years properly lit his roar had summoned hundreds of weapons from his surroundings, from burrows, dens, nests, bubble nests, hives, pens, stables, holes in walls, under his feet, the surf, out of snowbanks, from stolen sea shells, out of rotten trees, out of the canopies of those still stood tall, out of carcasses so emptied their skin had become tent flaps, and even those choked by leashes ripped from his foes’ hands.

Here he attempted a new height at a new low, reaching with his voice not only across generations, but across the veil of death as well. The animals of the moat likely had offspring living above, and perhaps some of their knowledge, fear, and respect of Beocroak had trickled deep, briefly dripped onto the heads of their forebears. He could not touch the gray dead, but Mother had taken a drop of his blood, so they could touch him, if they deigned. This latest croak was a statement of strength, and an implied promise to treat any offspring of the gray wildlife later encountered with care. He swore to enliven their line, revivify long dead sensations, if only they would act as the living animals did in his presence.

Many ghosts heard, but he spoke primarily to the juvenile murkodile before him. The sound, so unlike an ordinary man, had spooked the gray guards most of all, so they waited, clutching their weapons like the tops of gates they couldn’t figure out how to close. The moat dragon stilled, kept its small eye fixed on Beocroak, the remnants of its tiny, slow, sludgy mind translating his call feeling by feeling.

It might need instruction, which would thin the barrier between him and its cooperation, so the grabbler held out his right arm, hand both open and closed in that distinct gesture where the palm was flat but the fingers curled tight on themselves. He was right to do so. To the murkodile it was no guess, this gesture, but a respectful invitation, even though it had died before reaching its mature size. The beast whipped its open maw toward him and scurried on its stubby legs out of the sluice. They met as friends, almost a handshake when Beocroak’s arm disappeared down its gullet, except it didn’t disappear, still visible through its incorporeal gray flesh as if seen through curtains of dusty cobweb.

What the ghosts could not see of his determination and ferocity in his face they could find in his expert grip on the murkodile’s gut. It should have served as sufficient warning, but those who have just watched a castle build itself out of hell, and walked its walls as it rose, suffer a most detrimental boost in confidence. The fools think they can rise in the same fashion.

“Turn him into a weather vane boys!” a guard at the forefront snarled, jabbing the air with his pronged pike. As one the blob of them pushed forward, spears lowering to grant it tusks. Beocroak braced his footing and leaned into them, allowing the murkodile’s tail to take most of his weight.

This was not a typical weapon, ghostly or not. Most animals served as sleeves or gauntlets, sometimes equipped with adjustable blades, whips, and the odd venomous stinger. What he now wielded was like directing a flexible log as big as himself. Where it could bear its own weight he would encourage it to. The maw was the hilt; teeth sunk in spongy scar acted as a bracer and were thus left out of the fight. The power was in the tail.

Striking would be slow, require his all with each swing, making timing imperative. There was just enough for a preliminary blow, before the first gray foot hit the sluice. Beocroak swished the dragon’s tail in the dust, never fully lifting it, then swept across the sluice, into its waters, spraying his attackers with a wave.

Wetting them would do very little, but they lacked the awareness of the animal kingdom that Beocroak often wore as crown. Curious shredder fish had followed the murkodile’s splashing, a few of them swimming the sluice, and the grabbler had batted them at his foes with his weapon’s tail.

Most of the guards had chests like sunken ships or worm-eaten casks, leaving knotholes in flesh that practically invited the shredders. Once inside they bit at anything dangling as they flailed, tearing at the guard’s integrity from within. Those who had unintentionally caught the fish broke away in panic, digging around inside themselves, trying to contort enough to see within, which they could not do even in their significantly decomposed states.

The blob had shed enough to shrink noticeably, which allowed Beocroak to better select his targets while adjusting the murkodile’s weight after the swing. Four gray dead were probably not able to counter his next plan, and that was what he had reduced the front half of the blob to. First he stepped forward, which a man outnumbered should not do, causing uncertain opponents to falter, jam up those behind.

Then he swung again, using the whole animal this time, stepping with the momentum of heaving it. The length of its tail and body smacked four ghouls, crushed them against the alley wall. One guard who had ignored the fish swallowed by his chest had suffered sufficient damage from both animals to have his rib cave in.

Eventually he would recover, more by the diabolical craftsman’s light granted to a cleric by Tauntalagmite than by healing, but hopefully Beocroak would have seen and passed through green grass by then.

Seeing one of their own collapse dashed the gray dead’s air of invincibility. The will to adhere and fight in formation fled, cowardly opportunism now desperately searching for openings to either strike or escape. In moments their dispersal would have him surrounded whether or not they intended it, forcing Beocroak to control the circumference defined by the tip of the murkodile’s tail. He spun, tripping those who were closest to encircling him. Once on the ground they were vulnerable to a hammer blow, so he made the dragon into a hammer. Beocroak, with intense hot fluidity like the working muscles of the horse that drew the sun across the sky, rolled power through his arm, then visibly through the serpentine back and tail of the murkodile. Both their weights brought down the tip of the tail on a skull, crushed it and scattered its teeth like stunned flies.

More power meant less speed. It meant he was more surrounded than at the start of the maneuver even with one threat eliminated. Assessing their progress was just more time gone when he could instead choose to trust his instincts. Ghosts moved slightly slower than their living counterparts, the speed tax of haunting being a retroactive occurrence. Their thought was slower too. Acting unexpectedly would grant the widest gap to reorient.

Beocroak leaned on his heels, rapidly shuffled backward through the sluice. His weapon followed his lead, swishing its tail against the ground to add to their collective haste. Gray dead stumbled over themselves and bent their heads around to unnatural degrees as they struggled to follow.

A grabbler is called such for good reason; it is their solution to most problems. Yet in times where a creature or object cannot be grabbled there are other skills they made sure to be practiced in, chief among them, guardian angel of the light traveler, was improvisation. As they passed through the sluice Beocroak reached down with his free hand and snatched the only part of two shredder fish that could be safely snatched: the tails.

It was but grabbling in reverse, carefully avoiding the mouth and spines. As if hurling knives he let one slip between his fingers; it traveled end over end right onto the face of a gray guard, snapping its jaws about the bridge of her flimsy nose. She dropped her weapons and retreated, clawing at the fish less effectively than it did her face. The only pain she felt was the knowledge that she would not look her best at the dawn of Toeteld, forever impeding any societal ascendance she might manage.

Barely a moment later Beocroak loosed his second fish dagger, which was caught with a pike held across the chest, the weapon losing its head as the fish bit the wood to splinters. A foe and a weapon was not bad for two tossed fish, but the Coffinnail coalition remained dead set on taking him down or in.

The grabbler was running out of ways to surprise them. Best then to let the murkodile do it. He squeezed its guts, telling it he maintained control of the situation, then relinquished his grip and slid out of the stretched pauldron of its mouth. The moat dragon swiveled, keeping balanced on its squat hind legs and tail, hissing and gurgling at the encroaching guards while its temporary master circled around to the tail and hoisted it.

A suggesting shove instructed the beast to fold and half-swallow the nearest ghoul, which it did, skeletal ankles dancing through the air on tiptoe. The grabbler ran his hand across the tail’s scutes; the beast slapped flat. Now his reach was extended by not just the murkodile, but the lower legs of what it kept locked in its jaws.

Beocroak twisted the tail, the instruction his weapon had hoped for the entire time. Heavily favored among the lower dragons of the mire, the death roll was a move as old as teeth, so sunken in the flesh of time you might find it fossilized on a flattened mineral stage. Beocroak and his beast spun, rolling like a log, knocking over guards and building such force that the swallowed specter’s feet popped off their ankles and sailed high into the crevice of the alley.

What passion a murkodile had would be inflamed by their favorite toy, freeing Beocroak to separate and take his leave. Silently he released the tail, got to his feet, leapt across the sluice, and weaved between the gray dead as if he were the ghost. At top speed he shot through the rest of the alley and finally found the hidden curled stair, reiterated by rubble. A deep breath found him more strength, but they would find less each time if he did not get food, water, and rest soon. He very much doubted Toeteld had much need of such things.

Prioritize, he warned himself. First, do not die in the canals of Castle Coffinnail. Second, do not die underground. Third, do not die until Gaw Digi-Tally or Hexaclete will it. While he ascended the murkodile fought their fight on its own, swallowing down skulls and flattening rib cages with its bulk. Nothing could ever sate its gray hunger, but this was as close as it would get, and it was thanks to the grabbler. Even down there, even if only spread in the dreaming grumbles of a gutter dragon, the animal knowledge of beneficial grabbler-trust would spread. It would even bear the name Beocroak, stamped on the memory for all times where life slithered or crawled or swam.

Those memories spread slowly, lurked in darkness well, moved like mold and moss, turning the fruiting of a mushroom into the dazzling detonation of a firework. Memories of man worked more swiftly, more intelligently, but rarely with more insight, fruiting high and rigid, but foolishly expecting to never come back down.

One such body was deemed a tremendous eyesore in what were supposed to be the slums of Toeteld, built next to the eventual sites of the oubliettes and the cesspools for their gray runoff. It would be an engineery river to dispose of the dead’s liquefying miseries, dumped into darkness blacker than that of the grave, in which only Tauntalagmite and her blindest demons could swim.

It was efficiently arranged, benefiting from the meticulous touch of infinite revision time, the unfinished business of a council of gray city planners. Chief among them, at least in the field as the city-weed grew, was the architect known as Radziweiller, out of the north, dead in the south, claimed by the raking sea and reclaimed by Tauntalagmite, now a true Subtlerrannean patriot, what little else remained of his soul hardened into caltrops that left no avenue wide of themselves.

He was the eye, the owner of the sore, suffering at the sight of a gray wood tower when it should not have been, exterior wall beams crisscrossed in hideous X patterns that did not match his vision for Toeteld: bumpy stonework that dissolved and blended into the natural formations of Wormskoll. Nothing was supposed to have an overtly wooden exterior, as Subtlerrannea was not a land of trees. If it was a forest the trunks were the invisible shafts where old water dripped, the roots the slow ripples in the rock.

Radziweiller let himself into the tower, which he was able to do because he traveled with two assistants and eight enforcers. He was such a meld of bureaucrat and taskmaster that he considered all ten of them assistants. They assisted him by smashing the tower’s lock with a hammer and holding the door open.

In he strode, instantly disgusted by the smell of someone else’s wooden memories: sawdust, fur, that extra-thick oil of the north that could be dumped from lamps into iron stoves when light became less necessary for survival than heat. Loose flesh draped over the bridge of his nose fluttered like disturbed curtains as he angrily inhaled more, like a bloodhound pinpointing a trail.

Whenever that flesh moved so too did two stretched bands of it across his forehead, tensing as extensions of his angry patchy eyebrows. Over his shoulders he wore the furry pelt of an animal, then the rubbery hide of a man, then another pelt. A hood he could barely get on his head hung behind it most of the time, lined with beast teeth, stolen jewelry sewn on, and then hollow ram horns with which he could blow an order to an assistant through ten walls.

The cloaks were laced up orderly in the front, terminating in heavy knots like a severed head so swollen with bruise that it must have been punched off the neck over the course of a day. Radziweiller was tall for a man so often bent over a drafting desk, and his teeth were grayer than those of other gray dead, almost charcoal, suggesting he could draw straight lines by biting a page and dragging it through.

After informing himself of the scent he let his beleaguered eyes have a go. The room was bad. Strangely childish quality for a room to have, he noted, as it was as plainly bad as a rotten berry or a dead cat. Half its character was what he had allotted these peasants, slumping slum walls, patchy floors, mouse holes almost as big as the doors. It was the other half that had gone off, shot into the upper classes, too much craftsmanship on the wood for gray mildew to know what to do with.

Perhaps it was on its way to becoming a coatroom. The racks were there, but only a few coats, which hopefully meant he only had to evict a handful of worms from the wood. An assistant was ordered to bar the doors from the inside, as the curious crowd outside was still growing. Then Architect Radziweiller and his nine associates stomped their way up the stairs, past empty floor after empty floor. Somehow he already knew his problems were at the very top of the splinter in his city’s sculpted footprint.

He didn’t bother to knock when they reached the highest closed door. Or, rather, he did, knocking with the shoulders of two of his assistants until it came down. There had been a plaque with the master’s name upon it, but the architect didn’t bother to read the name before the impacts knocked it loose, off, then tumbling down the steps. He would know soon enough.

“What’s the meaning of this!?” a well-dressed yet disheveled ghoul demanded as they came through. He was small, so he waved his arms and sleeves to appear larger. “Master Holz isn’t taking any appointments today! We’re very busy!”

“You’re busy!?” Radziweiller countered, stopping the smaller dead in his tracks. The worm might have crumpled and fallen over from the architect’s authoritative voice alone if he hadn’t been bolstered at the last second by his equally silly woman. Radziweiller could see right away they did not belong that high in any city; they were so lacking in individuality that, if they had children, they probably called themselves Mother and Father. “I’m the one running this business, got that? I am the architect! This duty is mine alone! Every last hut and squat in Toeteld is subject to my approval, and of this subject,” he gestured to the wooden walls, “I do not approve.”

“An official then?” another voice entered and boomed like a tossed pitch-bomb from the back of the room, which had a balcony overlooking the budding city. “In my godless lands they’re nothing but squawking birds, and we roast them for dinner, and we save their fat, since all they’re ever good for is greasing the wheels.”

“Don’t babble about godlessness to me,” Radziweiller riposted, tireless in life and death in argument. One never needed logic to win them if their lungs had greater stamina than their opponent’s. “I too come out of the north you falsely-erected, dung-hided, jabbering, error-baking, shame-soaking, frog-eyed, pebble-in-the-boot, improperly bandaged, rag-patching, sky-staining, pond-bottling, drunk-hiring piss vintner! I was godless between my mother’s legs! I was godless with building blocks in my wolf-riddled backyard when I started planning this city.

I’d recognize these beam placements anywhere. You’re dead out of Pitheath, burned at the stake, stinking of your own chopped wood. And it’s part of my duty to inform you that you’re not godless now. You belong to Tauntalagmite, and if it takes her cradling you in her intestine and shitting you out for you to get the right manure in the empty bowl of your skull I’d be thrilled to escort you. She’ll be here for the ribbon-cutting in a few days. My city will be perfect by then, which means this tower will be torn down!”

At that threat its owner left the balcony and came inside, making it clear why he had preferred to stay out in the open. It was a feature Radziweiller had already spotted and incorporated into his medium-girth insult. As with Sovereign Reyvathird, the tower topper’s soul had been irate and insistent at the time of death, emerging from the body so quickly that his specter retained the appearance of blood that hadn’t yet ceased its flow entirely.

Mottled flesh smoked eternally, his gray fumes pooling on the ceiling. Hair, eyelids, and lips were all but burned away. Leather gloves fused to the hands. Wooden dentures still burned in his mouth, giving him an inverted mustache of silken flame that responded to every tilt of his head.

“You’ve planned this city,” the more-than-smoldering man said, every word drawing the two hostile men closer, but not physically. “Meanwhile I’ve already built this tower. I built it with my own two hands and my own two ax blades. Everything I see is a step I constructed and climbed. That’s what I did with godlessness, and no one can take it from me. Both myself and the floor upon which you so insolently stand and crow, are Hodmim Holz.”

“You did not build this tower,” Radziweiller doubted so very aloud. “There is no gray light to grow gray trees. Therefore you could not chop them down, saw them further, and stack them here. That is not how construction operates in Subtlerrannea, you imbecile, you embarrassment to our entire cardinal direction. I ought to skin you into boots and stomp the lesson into you along every street I’m raising the sensible way.

We’re building from approved memories, from plans never brought to fruition. So who recalled this blasphemously unapproved blemish?”

“That would be me,” Father volunteered, stepping forward, unable to straighten out his back to sufficiently display his pride. “In a nobler time I served Master Holz loyally.”

“So loyally that he’s loyal in his grave,” Mother added, clutching his shoulders to bolster him, yet dragging his posture down further.

“Yes, he’s remembering me as I was admirably,” Holz praised, not clapping his once and future subordinate on the shoulder to avoid igniting him. A pond of smoke crept lower, would soon overtake their eyes. It would be best to vent on the balcony for a while. “We need to jog his memory on the molding, but we’ll get there together.”

“And why, pray tell, couldn’t you recall your own office?” Radziweiller probed with ruthless efficiency, unshaken by the crimp in his timetable. “You who act as if you’re freshly buried, who seems not to know the ways of your own goddess?” The architect circled around the smoking column of a man, his stalking itself the cause of various repositionings: Holz’s guards jockeying for floor space against Radziweiller’s assistants, Holz turning to face the opposition, Father and Mother not knowing where to stand, and everyone trying to have their back to no one at all. “Could it be, yes it could, it definitely is, that you’ve been with us as long as anyone else… but all your wooden repute had burned up in your execution. You were so godless, so rooted in the material surface, that your identity fell with this tower. Until Toeteld you’ve been a shambling nothing, this place suddenly bringing it all back, and only because he brought it all back.” Radziweiller pointed at Father. “You’re under arrest.”

The assistants perked up at what seemed to be an order even though it was delivered to the hunched ghoul. They started to creep in, only to be interrupted by another gray dead who had chosen to disappear into the background of Holz’s crew until the right moment. Almost as hunched as Father, his posture was just to keep his face clear of the smoke. All of them were bent now.

“If I may, grand architect,” the newcomer who wasn’t new at all offered, “ultimately this is not the fault of Holz or his employees. Powerfully solid memories like these,” he stomped the wooden floor twice, “don’t spring up on their own.” Radziweiller dropped to one knee to get a better look at him through the haze. A cleric, staff and all. He should’ve been laying claims, to his own benefit; what could compel him to climb this far from his duty? An answer to the question he had indirectly posed, obviously. An opportunity for audience with an architect who liked the sound of ‘grand’ attached to the front of his title.

“That’s our Junior,” Mother squeaked, wiping an imaginary tear from a dusty duct.

“No it isn’t,” the cleric snapped at her. “Ignore them; they think I’m their long lost progeny. It’s all the more evidence they are not the stable minds that could raise so solid a foundation. My real name is Crosscup.”

“Who does the stable mind belong to?” Radziweiller demanded.

“The survivor.” Every eye, save Mother’s and Father’s, searched the others for what they had missed. None of them expected a survivor to enter this lifeless equation. A chaotic hot variable in their stone cold math. Every real heartbeat was a bomb that could bring down a building, or worse, lift one up.

“What survivor!?”

“A grabbler,” Crosscup elaborated. “A man who fell but rose again. These two claim they met him. It was he who spurred on their memories with his fresh blood. If he trails drops of it each one could be a spire in hours. We must work quickly to track him down… grand architect.” He had added the title at the last second, when Radziweiller did not immediately respond.

“Do I look like a hunter to you?” the architect posed.

“No,” Crosscup said, hoping a quick answer would make him appear smart enough to know where this line led.

“That’s right. A grabbler is nothing to me: a stag with musclebound arms for antlers. Someone’s trophy to hang on the wall. I put up the walls on which such trophies hang. I cannot be bothered with this now.” He turned to one of his assistants, the most administrative among them, meaning she carried the smallest and least blunt weapon on her belt, technically slight enough to open letters. “Fetch me the exterminator!”

She was away, fast and silent, dispatched better than most messenger birds. The others could only watch her feet disappear around the corner, oppressed as they were by the bank of smoke. Everyone dropped to their stomachs and chattered with their cheeks to the creaky floor. Radziweiller then ordered Holz to get his emissions back outside, the tower’s master refusing. Nobody ordered him about in his own home, nor in his office, now one and the same. If he could just remember if it was always that way he might find the guts to set his own staff against Radziweiller’s. Not yet. For now he stood there stubbornly, like a misplaced campfire.

“You,” the architect targeted, locking eyes with Crosscup. “I’m building Toeteld, from now until the lordess’s first step past our borders. I don’t want to see anymore unauthorized memories in my way or in the distance. You’re in charge of tearing them down before I get there.”

“Ba- what!?” the cleric scoffed, frantically searching his hierarchical records for any instance of a cleric outranking a city’s lead architect. None were found. This wouldn’t do. Getting that grabbler was as good as getting a juicy neighborhood claim. Paving the way for the work of others was nothing. There was no glory to be had. “I’m of the spiritual order, not anything municipal. It’s not my place.”

“Your place is wherever I place you,” Radziweiller said with finality. “I’m off. By the time I so much as glance over my shoulder this place had better be kindling.” His perpetually furrowed and stretched face disappeared into the smoke as he rose, assistants copying. Their lockstep feet marched their way out of Holz’s office and descended the many stairs. Only then did the former logger, only recently reminded of his lumber empire, deign to return to the balcony so the room could ventilate.

“Spectacular,” Crosscup grumbled, pacing back and forth, stabbing each board ahead of him with the butt of his scepter. “I had to be the one standing here when he needed a fresh grunt. Now I’m truly stuck. Fantastic. Sublime. Perfection. No one more unblessed than I.”

“Our son,” Father said, “in the employ of the grand architect of Toeteld.” The elder dead embraced him, nothing to bicker over when their family was complete, in a familiar place no less.

“I’m not your weed of a son!” the cleric snapped. “And I wouldn’t want to be, seeing as you can remember this giant toothpick better than you can his name.”

“Junior,” Mother pleaded, “don’t be short with us. It’s been so long. Don’t you remember your bassinet? We took the front piece and carved the name of our home in it, hung it up by the door. That way you’d never mistake your home for anything else.”

“For the last time,” Crosscup snarled, “my parents were called…” He couldn’t remember. They had died, that much he had. Died and not gone gray. Become an untroubled wind. “To a higher purpose! As am I. Toeteld is endangered, by you, and I must protect it!” He stormed off toward the stairs, both fawning ghouls following.

“Junior wait, we’ll go with you! Family must stay together!” Once they’d left Hodmim Holz dismissed his other servants, those who had remembered him once he had remembered himself. Alone on his balcony, never having silence thanks to the crackle of his own burning bones, the dry curl of his own burning ligaments, the lumberman contemplated.

Gray flame could surely burn gray wood. How was he to get back to the business of life if he couldn’t relax in his own home? One wrong move and he could bring it all down on top of himself. Perhaps remembering was a curse. The never-ending pyre in his breast was but his only memory before, and it lit his way as he trudged across the barrens of lower Subtlerrannea: a land like the seafloor without the sea.

Other gray came to him, joined his pilgrimage in search of the darkest nowhere, moths to the flame. He was a beacon, and he was as happy as one of the dead could be, which was not a form of happiness. Yet now, city rising before his very eyes like geysers of graveyard mist, the light he offered could not just be light. It had to take shape. That shape had to go indoors, unfold cleverly, put light where it would never go in nature.

It was a responsibility, an obligation for the wheels of his mind to turn without ceasing, and without the reward of fulfillment that belonged to the living. So for now he stood on his balcony, smoke billowing, torturing the conundrum in the hopes it would divulge an answer. What to light? What to light?

The nimble assistant with the paper thin dagger on her belt, glinting blade barely more than a cuttlefish pen, leapt from rooftop to rooftop where before she’d had to climb bare rock. Toeteld was progressing swiftly, and would no matter how many plans went awry. Men never stopped when the littler men begged for it. Industry consumed and transformed while sorrow begged fruitlessly from the roadside.

What had been nothing was now the slum of Faceless Roost, where the ceiling was low, where the living bats hung halfway through the roofs without acknowledging the gray dead at all. This was south and below Castle Coffinnail, directly between it and the passage formerly called the demon gates.

The assistant was resourceful, Radziweiller had no particular use of her otherwise, and when he gave an order it was her job to figure out how to follow it and do so in the same time it took an ordinary ghoul to scratch their head and ask the architect to repeat the question. This time the question was how to find the exterminator.

She had spoken to him before, but those were the dark trails, the empty country, the Subtlerrannean farmlands where, season after season, they made sure that nothing grew. Those who were new to death took ages to learn it was all one squished irregular circle. You walked it not to find an afterlife, but as your afterlife. The lines of Tauntalagmite’s palms were incestuous circles, reiterating what would otherwise dissolve into the universe, where Goodly palm lines were rivers, each beginning birth leading to an ending death.

Toeteld was not the only city of the underbelly, but it would be the first for the gray dead to run themselves, allotted mostly by the luck of the incursion’s location. Elsewhere demons reigned, crafting bargains and punishments in forges of pure rust, weaving lies through fused lockjaw. Elsewhere still stood what would hopefully become the previous capital: Tritabite. It was shallow. Live man lived there, most revered of fools and fighters, choosing to hand themselves over to Tauntalagmite before they’d even used all the light of day Hexaclete gifted them.

The exterminator had joined the empty country from the Tritabite tunnel. It didn’t mean he’d lived there, but it did mean he’d passed through. If she had to guess, and she was an educated guesser, a guesser any better would have avoided the dangling throat spider that eventually bit and closed her throat with swelling, the exterminator had gotten his dog in Tritabite.

It walked with him in the empty country when there were no other animals, gray or otherwise, to be found. It was as dead as he, sad eyes like tadpoles not broken out of their membranes yet. A mongrel garbage-eater, only a breed if eking out a southern existence by dragging half-dead wash-ups out of the surf to chew on counted as breeding, it showed none of the fear common to its kind, present whenever something alive enough to kick saw them. That dog tracked, she supposed. There was nothing in the empty country for it to fear.

She remembered his dog so well because he’d given it a name, without ever naming himself. The garbage-eater was called Plucker. On whatever doorstep Plucker rested she would find the exterminator inside, but there was already too much borough to Faceless Roost. A better sign was needed than that.

Once she’d guessed her best, and rightly so, that he would’ve followed the flow of foot traffic from the broken loop of the empty country through the powdered gates, into Faceless Roost, and put his feet up to at least try it out, she sharpened her eyes for that better sign.

There it was; the gray woman flashed a smile so like her little weapon. Droves of the bats hung upside down from the low ceiling, like bear belly fur. A patch was bald. Clearly the gray dead who lived there was of consequence to vermin. The assistant slowed to a stop at the edge of the next roof over, looked beneath the batless bald and found Plucker lounging, head on his paws, eyes already looking at her as if he too was a good enough guesser to see her coming.

“Is your master in?” she croaked to the dog, throat always almost closed thanks to the spider who didn’t appreciate her hospitality. The dog responded by standing, turning, scratching at the door. It opened and let him in, only to quickly close again. She waited, perched at the roof corner like a gargoyle. Radziweiller was impatient, but his penalties would always veer societal in the underbelly. The exterminator was a man who could find a way to make you hurt anywhere. That too she had learned walking with him, loop after loop, under their starless night.

“The spider made the error, not you,” he had explained when she had described her death. “It is their way to descend into the snoring throat undetected, all the way down to the stomach, where they use silk to fish out morsels of your food and steal it for themselves. You woke up in the middle of it, so the spider failed.

Then, rather than admit its mistake and accept the consequence of being swallowed, it bit your throat as if you were the aggressor, and the swelling from the venom killed you both. The only power of the weak is to take the strong along when they destroy themselves.”

That made her feel less the fool, so she chose to believe it. There were other reasons too. He likely wasn’t saying it to be kind, as the gray dead had little use for kindness. Memories of joy were similar to memories of everything else felt in full blood, useful to those in the afterlife as the strands of a net, weaving a finer mesh, helping them filter feed any sort of experience from the black stagnant aether congealing away from the sun.

No, the exterminator said that sort of thing to remind himself who he was. He knew the small animals, those cunning, venomous, and vanishing. Which bright warning color connected to which toxin. Which legs had been removed and grown back. How a disease could get from a rat and into you. The gray exterminator knew all that. She understood now, perched on the roof, why Radziweiller wanted to recruit him. It wasn’t difficult to guess, but she’d put all her effort into finding him first.

Close he was, to a grabbler, close as any of the underbelly were likely to be. Those people didn’t become ghosts. If any would, their mysterious survivor was the best candidate, having strayed far from Lazuli Pawlm and likely taken coin to war underground. She doubted grabblers ever forgot how to grabble, even the children of what they grabbled didn’t forget it, but, given time and distance, they might stray from what a grabbler was supposed to be. After all, people from other continents were godless, and simply because the gods weren’t there. Without a watchful eye man strayed, from order, from sanity, and from the heart.

The door opened again; this time the man stepped out. The lithe assistant leapt down to speak with him. His face was mostly covered by his hood, his chin climbing a cliff face of shadow, the only face she had ever known on him. Most gray dead did not hide. Rotten and skeletal faces were common. Yet he did, even with the skin on that chin showing little sign of decay, stretched like a tent staked too widely. She told him of Radziweiller’s task for him.

“Another spider climbs the throat,” the exterminator said. “He has been sensed, yet refuses to die. I can correct this.”

“Have you ever fought a grabbler?”

“I have fought what they fight with. As has Plucker.” The dog ambled up alongside his master, received several scratches behind the ear. “Sometimes they wield what I am tasked to kill. I’ve killed giant rats with arms inside, and I’m sure those attached to the arms never forgot. Tell me, where is this pest?”

Where he was was not yet the business of those plotting to capture or kill him. All of Castle Coffinnail was on patrol for him, but he had escaped, only to find that beyond the now-filled chasm of that domain, where there should have been a solid plateau of bare rock, there was a village of huts, populated not just by gray people, but by the wheelbarrows, gray mules, and carts of their commerce.

Beocroak could not pass through unnoticed, opting instead for speed. Running showed fear, would draw the most attention. So he walked, at the pace of a man who knew where he was going, who would walk off a cliff before stopping to ask for directions. The cliff was most efficient for that anyway, not only telling you to go down but offering you a ride as well. The grabbler refused to look any of them in the eye, powering through the streets, respecting their presence only enough to avoid passing through their homes.

Everything was fresh to these long gone people, he reasoned in the privacy of his mind, betrayed only by the slightest scowl, excusable as the default expression of a grumpy grabbler, who were sometimes said to grind their teeth so much that their molars became millstones. He hoped that the little time in which they observed him, just the panning of their heads, wouldn’t compel them to meddle.

But then he was stopped by one of the few things that could halt a grabbler: a gigantic wall of rock thicker than their reach. Either his passage through the castle had taken him astray or some other massive brick of Wormskoll had shifted during Toeteld’s founding shock wave of magic. Or both.

Turning around wasn’t an option. What hadn’t drawn comment from the gray dead the first time around surely would the second; he would no longer be dismissed as a trick of the mind. His flat hand explored the wall. Insufficiently craggy. It couldn’t be climbed, which was truly rotten luck for a grabbler, whose finger strength was such that the wet tube of a well was not normally considered a challenge.

Some kinds of gecko could climb it, including one large enough to grabble, but they could not carry his weight, and they did not live in Wormskoll. A snail perhaps? Beocroak glanced about, looking for the glisten of a slime trail. Nothing. Nothing except dark expressions growing curious, peeking out from over their gardening, which consisted of planting dead memories and hoping for a sprout.

The living man kept his core tight as he stared at the wall. Hunger rumbled in his stomach, which he couldn’t allow them to hear. Faceless bats and other edible things were no doubt about, but a grabbler had to exercise caution when it came to eating what he wielded. Instilled respect was undone with such betrayal; it was hardly in his weapons’ best interest to be killed and consumed. No, best to eat lines he had not grabbled, shrinking the pool of life that didn’t already privilege him.

There were bodies. Almost four thousand of them. Some thought grabblers were cannibals, eaters of those less blessed by the sisters. These same some justified it by thinking of grabblers as a different sort of human. Stronger. Closer to gods because of how they touched life. In truth Lazuli Pawlm was mostly anti-cannibals, meaning that they restored human flesh that had been consumed, reaching into man-eater beasts and reclaiming limbs bitten off, which could be reattached if a cleric had the golden thread of Hexaclete, woven from her hamp fields in the east.

The memory almost brought a tear to his eye. More than one person was about now, up there, golden stitches on their thigh or shoulder, functional in full because Beocroak had grabbled that part of them back from the bowels. It wasn’t his thread, and he was further from being a cleric than a murkodile, but he never forgot the way the threads shimmered as they were guided in and out by silver needle. There was hardly any blood.

He missed the light. Why had he gone so deep? He could reach the deep, draw it out, grabble the cowardly and gross impulses into the dehydrating sun of scrutiny. Descending was for the foolish.

More memories told him why, against his will. Down into Wormskoll because there was nowhere left to go without turning back. The cave was near the western shore, long after Plur veered south, far from Lazuli Pawlm in the east, furthest place on the continent from Hexaclete’s Favor, where everything grew golden. Those lands could not be inhabited for long, too pure for man. There the food tasted like liquid glass and couldn’t be kept down. Reflections in ponds, or in clouds even, were bright enough to blind. It taught the lesson that man only deserved so much. He was not compatible with the best, and he should stick to his own. Goodly gods would share what could be shared, in their infinite pity and affection for the novelty of wretchedness.

Beocroak did not feel far enough from his homeland, even now. Perhaps he had set an unrealistic goal in his pursuit of a land where the people could not identify him as a member of his tribe. This meant grabblers were known the continent over, and possibly a continent over. There was no escape from his silhouette, which was obvious, when thought that way.

If the talk of grabblers could catch up to him then so too could the talk of tallyweeds, of birth from the palm, from the wellspring of fate lines. That was the talk that always struck like an order, no matter if it was delivered by general or general moron. They, whoever they might be, dared order him. No escape. He was the only one in the entire world who did not recognize his future on sight, and from that there was no escape. That twisted his guts worse than any grabbler.

Dignidog had been at fault. The man did not push for Beocroak’s exile, but the opposite. His ascendancy. A leader was needed, he claimed, in a leader’s voice, pained to have his hands gesticulate away from himself and to those he suspected of being dropped into Tallybirth. It didn’t sit right with Beocroak, it sat fat and jagged on his head, that there would be a grabbler who was good at convincing with something other than his grip. Someone who could reach with words. That meant you could be grabbled by the ear, any time of day. If rhetoric was a weapon then the market was a battlefield.

The noise had gotten into Beocroak’s head and nested there. Other heads fared no better. There had been talk, a great big invisible block of talk, suddenly sitting in the middle of Lazuli Pawlm, like a plague body bobbing in the reservoir, like a hail stone that had crushed a child to death. Peaceful lives were now full of wondering, sick with it, dreams twisted by ambition into exhausting nightmare climbs up the bone pile of power.

And it was all justified… if it was duty.

Really there was nothing left to do but leave. Exile was the most powerful form of leaving, so he took it, though he had to take it for himself. No one would do Beocroak the favor of banishing him. He’d asked everyone, then regretted it, as they all then knew exactly what happened when he was gone. He’d banished himself. The grabblers could not be led by one who made himself stranger, who sold his noble service for table scraps of its worth.

It was functional for a time, taking him all the way to this wall. Then the memories fully caught up. No wind to quell their stink. It pooled about him, grew, and gray noses got a whiff. He could hear the ghouls gathering behind him, none yet brave enough to ask who he was, how he had wound up so alive in the world’s largest grave.

Did he even have another fight in him without recovery? His mind moved too fast, approached panic, reined in by breath and the muscles in his limbs that refused to twitch. Let the flies bite. They sip at the strength they cannot guzzle. Deserving of death was the aurockin bull that felt buzzing pests and threw itself into a pit to escape them.

This did not have to be a fight at all. Mother and Father had not been hostile. Desirous of his blood they were, not as parasites, not as drafting commanders, as humble shadows. They needed a living being to be their roof, to shelter their wispy remnants until something could solidify and be used to stake their claim in Toeteld.

It was a city, Beocroak recognized. He knew of no cities where the least fortunate were not eventually pushed out. Some of the gray dead would have to leave, return to their endless trek around the empty country.

So why fight? A charitable act could transform this impassable wall into a vertical passage. The grabbler turned, gently settled his back on the cool rock. The gathered dead recoiled, drifting forward again like kelp in a gentle tide. Offer, he told himself. Offer before they can take.

“Who was it who lived here?” he asked them authoritatively, eyes searching for the culprit he was going to construct.

“Come again?” a gray woman asked, clutching her clothes to her shoulder to keep them together. Someone must have been trying to rip them away when she died. Other similar qualities jumped out at him: knives in the back, rocks now without weight crushing parts of the body with incorrect orientations, a limb that was naught but its fluids in roughly the correct shape. These dead had been flocking together, of a feather caught off guard.

“Right here.” Beocroak pointed down. “The wealthiest among you lived right here. I can see where their palace left an impression.”

“I don’t see anything,” a man with a slash across his chest, like a cut pear, said.

“Then it wasn’t you,” the grabbler reasoned, striking with his words. They struck back. His tongue felt like a traitor. Actions spoke louder. To let the tongue sleep was to cage the danger without it even knowing. Wisdom was never harsh on the wise ear. “Only the wealthiest will see it, at least at first, because they will remember it most strongly.”

“Oh… yes… I think I see it,” another woman said, stepping forward. Her head whipped back and forth. If she saw it, she was having an underworld of a time describing it. Since her mouth had such difficulty her hand shot out, dragging her gaze with it, to a spot next to Beocroak but probably not inside the same invisible building. “There was a well right there.”

The gray watched the spot like what they’d planted. Nothing sprouted, only because Beocroak had not watered it yet. Without calling attention to himself he reached behind his head and pressed, opening the wound again by pushing through crackling scab. The amount was precise, nothing more than a pink skin on his fingertip.

Then he moved to where the woman pointed, let them barely glimpse the timidest color of blood, and traced a large circle on the ground. He asked her if it was there, if she was sure, and she snapped yes both times. When he completed the circle fog emanated from its interior. To gray shape. To gray brick. Filling up its own form, like the waters that would soon do the same. A simple well and its hanging bucket grew to maturity, spoke through its open throat the words of dripping water and stranded toads.

“Ahha! See!” she shouted, hopping up and down. “Just as I remembered.”

“That’s only a well,” another specter argued. “Every town’s got a well. Doesn’t mean it belongs to you!”

“If they don’t remember now, a reminder should help,” Beocroak claimed, voice so full the dead couldn’t ignore it. That was tantamount to ignoring an earthquake. Pinking his finger again, he took his best guess at the size of the biggest building any of these dead could have ever lived in. They didn’t actually have to own it when they were alive; hubris would cross from residence to mastery all on its own.

“An outer wall here,” he fabricated, drawing upon the rock, dragging this wall out to an impressive length, all the way up against the barrier blocking his way. Better to avoid creating a gap; that way he wouldn’t have to jump. That assumed the building would be tall enough of course. “And it reached high into the evening sky, the sun caught behind it, a speared orange, slowly running down on trails of juice.” He told himself to stop. Hearing his hunger might break their illusion.

“The Odger Building!” a ghoul blurted. “That’s the side of the Odger Building if I’ve ever seen it… and I have! The inside too!” Shambling forward on a leg gone irrecoverably lame only halfway through life, they put themselves right outside the wall that was still invisible to all but them. Jaw slack, any thoughts present drooling out, Beocroak was forced to coax them a little further.

“It’s there. You can touch it.”

“Because… because it’s mine! I’m Odger! I must be!” The grabbler very much doubted this. Odger sounded like a surname, stakes of identity mostly found in the north, for everyone below the snow line was free to share in the surname Hexakin. Pushing through their inhibitions, the growling undead splayed their fingers and slapped, rewarded with the sound of flesh on wood.

“I see it now,” gray voices passed to each other in slight variations. “I can see more than a wall. Seems I’m an Odger. Could a non-Odger know there was a brazier right there? No sir.” Everything they sensed appeared, in the creeping blue of a frozen corpse, in the gray of graveyard mist. The boards were seeded and watered along the pink line Beocroak had made, growing there first.

He took a step back and watched them as their heads tilted toward the stalactites. Now they handled the recollection and reconstruction on their own like he wasn’t even there, the chimeric Odger building slowly swallowing him up like a clam. For his part he stood still as furniture, quiet as a hiding spot.

The stiff gray curtain was raised between him and the dead. Floorboards stretched under his feet, so he stepped up onto them when the moment came: the first step of his ascent. Where were the rest? Only five more existed, as he saw when he turned, but the exterior reminiscence added one after the other after the other. It likely kept going, whether or not the staircase turned when blocked by the ceiling that was now halfway to being the second floor.

For once he found himself hoping a man was insecure, a showoff. Every weakness in character that this ‘Odger’ had suffered would equal one more floor he had built into his tower as compensation. Only in the underworld could such a failure of a man be the means to salvation. Ten floors would get him higher than the shelf, he estimated, assuming they were all roughly the same size.

The farmers of memory he had trained would be slow to follow. He ascended as it was built, so it seemed unlikely any of them would test the front doors until after the building was capped, and only after something rang a bell enough to actually ring the bell placed as roof.

Stairs would have to reach Hexaclete’s halls before they could tire the legs of a grabbler. It was too bad Beocroak had to take them pre-fatigued. Sleep seeped from his head wound into the surrounding tissues, prickling into numb down the sides of his neck, stabbing experimentally at his cheek muscles. An unshakable will meant his eyelids refused to droop, and that he remained entirely coherent, but his body’s demands would manifest just as aggressively in other ways until he succumbed to its restorative demands: loss of the power to stay upright, a leaden tongue, and the symptom called invisible neck, where it felt as if the head floated separate from the body, the distance between the two growing constantly.

He considered the ideal height for the Odger building to cease growing. Roof even with the rock lip, he reasoned. The gray dead would not have any cause to climb out the window, ascend to a slanted roof, and step out onto the rock. Only he would. Perhaps that would finally give him the time and space needed to rest.

The second floor was completely different from the first. In all likelihood it belonged to a separate building entirely, remembered by someone other than the ghoul who managed to produce the name Odger, an effort that took so much of them that it replaced their sense of self entirely.

Nothing but clutter, this second place. Boxes stacked with coats stacked with cobwebs. Hunting trophies with their noses buried in the floor as if they’d been misbehaving, poking antlers lodging them in place. Beocroak was able to wade through them, finding it was still mostly the floors and ceilings solid enough to hold him.

Third. Part of a fish market? Subtlerrannea could not reproduce the particular foulness of fish going off to a hell of their own, but it had a substitute, an odor equal parts salt, sole, and sulfur. Gray octopus and squid, doubly dead, dangled from the ceiling on hooks as fleshy chandeliers. As he passed through them Beocroak accidentally pulled one down. Somehow its suction cups had responded to his touch and latched on.

He paused to feel them. There was sensation, very light. An indecisive wasp dragging its stinger in circles across his skin. A little spirit must have remained; it wanted to draw life out of him the way the human gray did from his blood. Even a live octopus’s suction would be no match for a grabbler; their fingers can slide into the seal with the precision of whittler’s wedge. Eight arms are easily undone by two that have been perfected.

Beocroak thought better of discarding it outright however. An octopus could be grabbled, depending on the variety. The trick was their hidden beak, among the sharpest blades forged in the animal domain. Typically a grabbler relied upon the touch-blind spots in a creature’s anatomy, the spots they couldn’t strike or scratch, the tunnel of free movement between the saber teeth of giant cats and sloths. Those of the tentacle were infinitely flexible, and had no such spots.

An additional difficulty was that most of the devilfish could only be grabbled up to the elbow, their head, body, and digestion all packed into the same cavity. Inner elbow skin was the most delicate; it did not scar well. Without that armor an octobeak could strike a vital crimson tributary and spill across the ground the entire ocean of the person who foolishly tried to master it.

The solution was to cork both ends of the beak with something before grabbling. But this one was doubly dead, hung up in a ghost’s meat market. Showing it respect was pointless if it couldn’t absorb the gesture. Beocroak ripped the beak out and cast it aside, forcing it to absorb the much more assertive gesture of his grabble.

What shreds remained of its soul responded, moving its latching to surround his arm, to cover one side of his chest in waving tentacles, painting the tendrils of a miasma across his pectoral canvas. Then the two settled onto each other, came to the mutual understanding of Beocroak’s adjustable clockwork pulse.

It could not live again, not even grayly. Proximity to Beocroak could earn it only sensation, the warm damp in which life existentially swam. This would have to be enough for it, and it was. The grabbler did not hope to gain a weapon, but a meal.

A grabbled octopus could only use its tentacles in combat, and a squid wasn’t much better, for though it had an arrow-shaped head the only blade within that gelatinous mantle was the pen, something between feather and bone, brittle and so poor in a fight that once thrust through the flesh a grabbler could usually only fell three men with it. But all his order from the fish market had to do was be, as much as possible. The longer it was on his arm the closer it came to solid life. It was his hope that in a few hours it would be solid enough to eat.

Fourth. Broken glass. Bones. Bodies wrapped in sheets and tied with cords as if they might wriggle free. Smell of loam. This was no high office; it could only be a cellar. One of the gray dead had a brain backward, twisted, upside down, or disorganized. They remembered a cellar, but not where you put them.

No fluid had seeped through and stained the bags, so he guessed it was not the mass grave of an open-sore plague. Nor were they arranged in neat respect, instead piled like empty bottles. A trap-stop cellar then. Beocroak knew talk of them, but he had not visited the borderlands between Hexaclete’s sunlit south and her overlooked overcast north. Trap-stops were cabins, built by former highwaymen, nestled in mountain passes in cozy mimicry of the sorts of houses stick-witches could convince fallen trees to build for them.

When the desperate knocked on the door in the hopes of cauldron stew and cats as pillows they would be pulled inside, their blood pulled outside, via a slit throat, and once drained of it and valuables they were thrown in the cellars until the trap-stoppers found something useful to do with all the bones.

Was the trap-stopper remembering the cellar? Or was it one of their victims? It likely did not matter. If it was a victim it would behoove them to remember themselves as the killer, the powerful one, shedding the muddy footprints and bed impressions of real joy for gray privilege. Beocroak moved on.

Fifth. Somehow he wasn’t the first to reach this floor, despite looking up and seeing the continuing creep of construction. In this humble bedroom there hung a body, stripped of all clothing, unless one assessed the noose as necklace. This victim, possibly of himself, was but a skeleton wrapped in the notion of skin. Shadows lurked in his chest like burrowing leeches, like necrotic infections that refused to cease with the rest of the body. Sadness lurked timidly in cavernous eye sockets.

Beocroak saw him as nothing but another chandelier. His interest was much stronger past the man, through his framing legs. A bed. A raised bed. At one point there had been enough coin thrown around to lift that mattress not one, but four separate times. Across nearly the whole of the continent’s belt Beocroak had slept on a raised bed only thrice, and those had but two legs elevating the head. With four he dared to dream the mattress was full of down rather than straw.

It felt like a trap. If this room was as comfortable as it appeared, why had this man killed himself? There was also the question of where he’d come from. The shifting darkness caged in his translucent ribs indicated some activity remained. Always here, somewhere, Beocroak guessed, and likely summoned from beyond Toeteld and into it by these memories, trawled out by the net he had cast.

Still, the bed was even more intriguing. His body very much needed its flat surface to count as a floor, so he might rest upon it and regain his strength. After a few hours of sleep he could wake and have his octopus breakfast, which would be equally restored.

With his first step toward it he knew he had to disregard the risk of the gray dead climbing what they’d built in that time. His need was too great. Instinct was welcome to remain vigilant, but the rest of him had to sleep, if the bed would take him. As he passed by, the hanging man spoke.

“Rock me lad.” Beocroak looked at his face, which had twisted his way. It appeared to be the only motion his gray body could still produce. “Please. Like I’m on the deck of me ship once more. Why did I ever go north? Please lad, rock me.”

“May I use this bed?”

“Rock me and she’s yours. I sleep here now.” His right hand was the malleable bulb of an octopus, so Beocroak used his left to touch the man’s ankle and start him gently swinging side to side. “Ahh, the sea. Hello darling.”

The creak of the rope proved an adequate lullaby after the grabbler successfully rolled himself onto the bed without falling through. Four legs. Five floors. It was like he slept in the sky, a taste of escape from the annexed darkness of Wormskoll. And it was down, not straw. Cloudy purple sleep flooded in from the rims of his eyes. The void pulled him low into himself, promised to keep him longer than he wanted to be kept. In those arms he could do nothing but offer respect, for he was of a line dominated by such intangible forces.

The demon of sleep was not a subject of Tauntalagmite’s. They were a product of man’s unconscious estuary. Possessive and cruel, growing crueler age by age as they absorbed more of mankind’s intellectual discoveries, thus learning new ways in which they could not kill their possessions, the demon punished those who tried to put off their rendezvous with torturous nightmares.

Powers of the dream realm warred within the grabbler for the right to color his visions Goodly or Ghastly. His position underground favored the demon of sleep. A raised bed of down fought on the other side. To a standstill they came, so that his dreams were glassy water and air, a sky and a lake only different enough to separate, not identify which was which.

Everything obscuring the winding path he’d taken from Lazuli Pawlm and into a west with salt on its air was gone. An object clearly approached across the lake, or across the sky, toward him. Nowhere to run. No ability to run. The demon of sleep held him suspended between the two fluids. His grabbler control left him with but one ability, drying out his own mouth and swallowing the resulting grit.

Light without source reflected and doubled off its quicksilver surface. It blinded, but he wasn’t looking with true eyes. Dream eyes had to take it in, white light and all. A vessel. A statue. Both. A crew cast in liquid metal, the stuff of angelic swords drawn only to make a point. Captain and hands leaned forward in their small boat and sailed straight for their destination: the floating island of Beocroak.

The demon of sleep had put the grabbler’s fear into a drawstring pouch, with the rest of his clay marbles, every clack between them someone distant waking with a start. Beocroak could not fear, only passively accept the vessel’s approach, only await recognition of the captain. The face came into relief, and provided none.

Dignidog. The man’s likeness reached out with the grabbler’s weapon, the open hand. Once again he demanded Beocroak take it, so that they might switch places. So that he might captain the vessel. Behind him his crew was nothing but dogs of lolling tongue. The animals nearly spilled out on either side they leaned so far to get a good look at the man they’d come so far to get back.

Hounds and mutts and watchdogs with barks so deep they were heard in the feet all howled together, replacing the vacuous wind of the dream space. A pleading demand. A mournful lament. A threat to turn all those feelings to rage, as soon as they arrived, as soon as they connected.

Beocroak braced himself for their arrival. The welcoming hand of the figurehead made contact, and quicksilver broke, and all Dignidog’s efforts flowed over and around the vital tallyweed. Beocroak could not be made to do anything, not by his fellow men. He could be compelled only by gods, only by demons that had snuck into his body and mind before he was born.

He was unbreakable, unreachable. Forever distant from the rest of man and his world. Perhaps a gift from Gaw. Or a backslide from life. A defining misstep. No one would ever get to know, not even Beocroak. For his god and his mother were dead.

“Ahh darling, you’re back.” It echoed from outside the sleep demon’s realm. Beocroak was not indestructible everywhere. Upright he bolted, the octopus sharing in his life powers doing the same even faster, shooting out tentacles that wrapped around the shaft of a shovel to hold back its plunge into the loam of the grabbler’s chest.

The man vaulted out of bed, roaring, with a living shock wave that pushed his would-be assailants back and apart. Behind them the hanged sailor swayed. If the intruders hadn’t brushed him on the way in Beocroak might not have heard their approach. As a matter of course he assessed his latest foes, with little to gain, for the context of their hostility could have come from any point in any of their lives, Odger or not. One memory could be staffed by dozens who had never been there, ghosts fabricating participation like casting themselves in a play right from the audience.

Whatever the case, there were six of them, all men, all wielding shovels and trowels. One of them in the back crushed a dark crumbling glob in his hand, what had been a slice of decadent soil cake.

It didn’t matter that some regions of the north were so food-sparse that those who worked the land worked it directly into batter. Nor did it matter that they had grown accustomed to and learned to cherish the taste, to the point of identifying the flavor of each village’s underfoot ingredients. And it didn’t matter that some anonymous ghoul saw the Odger Building as a telltale sign not of prestige, but of the bounty it was built upon. It didn’t matter that they thought there was a whole city to dig up, empty out, and bake, or that the Odger Building’s basement was the best place to begin their tunnel network, or that the man sleeping in this luxuriously raised bed was clearly the owner who had to be taken out first.

None of it mattered because they were already fighting. Beocroak had his every tentacle tightly wound around the shovel that had nearly claimed the title of grabbler-slayer. A devilfish’s true strength came out in its curls; the shovel snapped in half. Splinters couldn’t fly, nor could the damage be seen, so enclosed in the tentacles and the membrane between them it was, along with its wielder’s hands.

Both parties locked in this embrace growled and shouted at each other. Had Beocroak known he was battling a mere baker he might’ve commended the man for his resolve. As it stood he used his superior weight and stance to swing the baker around, twice, thrice, releasing him at the right moment to send him crashing through a glass window and falling, not five stories as when the grabbler had gone down, but seven now.

Five was now only the number of remaining opponents, who were keenly aware of their reduced ranks, swarming him with all they had left while the advantage was still theirs. A thrust of his arm spread his eight borrowed arms wide, transforming them into a shield that could, at any extremity, target a specific weapon.

One of the baker-miners saw through this deployment and recognized the bulbous hub of the shield to be its weakest point. He thrust his trowel straight into the gray flesh, slicing with a deceptively sharp edge all the way to Beocroak’s knuckle, where skin broke and blood did flow.

Not what its wielder wanted, but exactly what the octopus wanted, insofar as its nearly double-dead self could desire. Grabbler’s pulse, grabbler’s sweat, were sweet reliable reminiscence, but the blood now dripping into its main cavity was all the more rich. With that it could pretend it was alive as well as anything freshly fished out, dance with every tentacle, seize with every suction cup.

The slimy thing’s skin flushed with patterns of new gray so vibrant compared to the old that they appeared to be an entire rainbow to the gray dead. Dazzled to paralysis by it, Beocroak lunged into them, battering them back swipe by swipe. When they did not respond sufficiently he would have the octopus grab them with suction, throttle them, and then throw them to the floor so the advancing grabbler could reach the stairs.

First they reached the sailor. A miner-baker bumped him into a freewheeling swing.

“Rough seas!” he cackled through the crushed narrow of the strangling rope. “She’s sore at me again boys! Bluster my way my love! It heartens me! Stiffens the mast!” As he swung back his legs saddled a set of dirt-baker shoulders, causing him to instinctively wrap them around and lift the man off the floor. “She loves her tasty sacrifices, yes she does boys! Time for you to walk the plank!”

In touching someone only on their first death rather than his double, the sailor recalled a scene from the height of his passions, and equally high seas. The floorboards beneath the dangling contracted forms, worms on a hook owing each other money, broke open and fell away to reveal a rising churning pool of gray seawater.

Outside the Odger Building the well erupted into a sustained geyser. Then its windows filled up and broke, the water flowing out of them much more slowly than it should have, localized to the sailor’s recollection. Now all the attention of the village at the tower’s foot, having advanced by a hundred years’ wealth just since the grabbler went down for sleep, was turned his way.

But like his attackers’ storied history of mud-licking and sucking on vanilla-seasoned pebbles, it mattered not. The flooded column would prevent further entry and pursuit. All he had to do now was get rid of the last of the soil eaters and reach the next shelf of rock. The one the sailor choked with his crossed legs was released, stumbling backward on the lone board that extended over the climbing waters. Arms pinwheeling, a tap on his chest from the sailor’s swung toe tossed him in. Three were still in fighting, or shoveling, shape.

Together the trio attempted an admirable charge, only for a wave to explode out of the hole behind them and wash them into Beocroak, ruining their form. Knocking them into the waters rapidly swirling behind the pillar of his body, Beocroak turned to face them, urging the octopus to transform from inflated glove to jetting parasol. Its tentacles flapped, grabbing and pushing water, propelling the grabbler into his foes once more.

From his clash in the trenches of Castle Coffinnail he knew the best way to defeat the gray dead in the short term was to dismember them or crush the head, injuries which were temporary but took the longest time for them to recover sense and capability. Gray water they dealt with, so they weren’t alerted to his intention to dive, especially since he did not need to swallow a breath; the grabbler’s head silently disappeared under the surface.

Pulsing forward by octopus power, Beocroak reached the first one struggling to avoid the suction of the broken window. He had the tentacles grab separate portions of the body, to be pulled in different directions. Once in twain both halves gave up and were slurped away by Wormskoll.

The others had to drop their shovels to swim, thus equally vulnerable to the same tactic. Beocroak dispatched them, and together with his octopus they marched and swam through the climbing current, past the sailor now buoyed flat against the ceiling, kissing it, nuzzling it, and onto the next floor. He paid no attention to the decor tossed about in the tide. No room’s character mattered if the hanged man could remember the entire southern sea, which he could, having been born in a floating shipwreck and having died in the rigging, setting his sails one last time with the dropping sand bag of his weight.

The next time a window broke it was intentional, before the waters could put sufficient pressure on it. Having thrust through it with both flat soles, the grabbler caught himself on the edge of the Odger Building’s roof as the last of the square waterfalls joined its brethren. He looked up.

Not enough floors. There was still a distance too great to jump. Beocroak did not despair. No grabbler did until they checked their surroundings, until they probed them for camouflaged or burrowed boons with thrumming roars. Instead of another grabblable animal, a turn of his head revealed the geyser from the well, higher still, raining on him and part of the village as a clear dome. Sufficient.

Beocroak hopped off the side of the building he clung to, channeling both bullfrog and gecko, launching himself into the pressure of the geyser’s column. It shot him up to the lip of the rock thanks to another pulse from his octopus. He grabbed the ledge not with his hand, but with a hundred suction cups, where his weapon also did most of the work of pulling him up and over, onto his back, where he could take a moment to rest.

The creep of Toeteld had fully overtaken him now. Toward the distant light of day, carried that deep by posts of refracting quartz alone, ghostly structures could be seen rising on every outcropping. Farming villages, sequestered dungeons, and every other ragged edge of civilization, what he had passed through thus far, had now been pushed out from the center, to the walls of the cavernous tunnel. For as long as he progressed now, it would be through a thriving metropolis, busy with the bureaucracy of the gray dead, strung-along stressed citizens addicted to his blood before so much as smelling it.

If he was to feed them and still escape he needed to feed himself. The last thirty seconds had taught him the value of his octopus in a world of climbing, making it foolish to devour the whole thing, though he could have easily done so; his stomach felt the rival of Wormskoll itself. Each lost tentacle was lost effectiveness, so he resolved to consume only one at a time.

Experimentally he had the creature curl a tentacle up to his mouth, where he grabbed it and bit off the tip. Pliant. Torn. Chewy. Luck was on his side; his blood and heat had proven reinvigorating to the octopus’s gray body. Now it was less a ghost, and more echoing flesh. The flavor was poor: seawater, cave chalk dust, inky bile. Yet he tasted underneath that the value to his ailing body. Yes, this would stoke the furnaces, and it was all lean muscle, clean strength transferred from animal to himself, as refined as the grabbling technique gifted from Goodly Gaw.

He ate. Head to stone. Eyes to ceiling poor in glitter. It was all he could look at in peace, for any sign of the city disturbed him. Sleep had him once in the cave, twice if he counted the missile to the back of his skull, and it would not have him again, whether or not he failed to escape.

Back down the throat of Wormskoll, in a swath of wooden longhouses never planned for construction, splinters in Radziweiller’s side, all of which were arranged according to the path taken by he blood-dripping survivor of the consecrating battle, there now stood a mead hall packed with patrons, most of whom remembered themselves as heroes and monster slayers, with only a few being pearls of truth, and the rest being clinging muck.

At a center table the battle played out again in miniature: an arm wrestling match between the gray ghosts of Sovereign Reyvathird and Matriarch Bedlamoyne. The crowd bayed like dogs, slamming their flagons on counter and table alike, spilling sticky mead froth everywhere.

The gray bees that had made the gray honey, from dead flowers pressed dry in books, were much confused by the move of their belongings from hive to human equivalent, and had followed it every step of the way. A cloud of them milled about under a skin of them that clung to the ceiling beams like pepper on a gummy meat ration. The bugs sipped at the lips of the flagons as much as the patrons, and were swallowed down without a care. Stings in the throat were just added flavor; their venom could do nothing to the mummified mist that was their flesh.

Under the constant buzz, suffering a rain of crumpled bee bodies whenever they decided to be dead for a while, the two competitors gritted their teeth, redoubled their efforts. Fatigue was more foreign to them now, the furnaces that provided the burn in their muscles forever cold, putting this contest in its third uninterrupted hour. At some point it had become an argument as well, since their mouths needed more to do than grit. After that it became a discussion, with only the background buzzing and chanting keeping up the illusion of two rams locked horn to horn.

“I already told you; you can have the gates,” Bedlamoyne said.

“What is there to have woman? I’m told the gates are dissolved. You would have me guard a passage where no demon is required to stop?”

“It’s the only exit and entrance available to the gray. Everyone will pass through. If you don’t know what to do with that opportunity I have nothing to say. What did you want the gates for in the first place?”

“Potions! What good is a potion now when I’ll pour it straight through my groin and paint the floor? Let’s stick to the initial wager. If I win I get this hall. I’ve already picked out where my chair will go.”

“You can’t put it where I’ll have my bed,” she taunted.

“As if anyone could get any sleep with all this buzzing.”

“That we agree on; there’s an exterminator to call on I’m sure.”

Continued in Part Three