(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 24 minutes)

It would have been the perfect time for the exterminator to arrive with his dog Plucker. The door was thrown open with a bang. In strode, with brilliant confidence, Crosscup the cleric. He’d invaded countless perfect times, never his own, and he mucked this one up worse than most. For he was recognized by Reyvathird, from the first moments of his gray reticence, and the man did not take kindly to his presence.

The sovereign stood, dropping his arms, and Bedlamoyne was curious about the invader too, making no show of their separation, nor slamming her hand on the table in victory. In their deadlock they’d both forgotten about the contest the rest of the mead hall had been cheering on. With its sudden deflation, almost heard like wet flatulence, the mass of gray groaned and protested.

Just like a struck hive, most everyone stood and started arguing over wagered totems of nick-tallied finger bones, which was quickly replacing pale air as the currency of Toeteld, and not by coincidence, the fingerless were becoming the beggars. Many opinions differed over how the contest had been resolved, and most definitions were murkily described as something like ‘mutual forfeit’ or ‘act of distracted god’.

In a rare stroke of luck for him, this did not immediately result in Crosscup getting targeted as the cause, as he held not a single finger bone except what he was born and died with, enabling him to wade into the crowd toward the sovereign and the matriarch largely unhindered, flanked by the two ghouls he would dismissively call his acolytes, who would refer to themselves as Mother and Father.

“Who’s that?” Bedlamoyne asked once they were gathered around the table that felt empty without their elbows digging into it. Their efforts had left two dents in the wood, in which spilled mead was already pooling. Father dipped his finger in and gave it a taste. It stirred zero memories of celebrating after a battle or monster slaying. None of the fur cloaks he ever checked had still been kicking.

“That is a buzzing fly, not good enough for the company of bees” Reyvathird said of Crosscup, already possessed of his sense of superiority again. The cleric could only maintain status over someone until they got their bearings, which were somehow always higher than Crosscup’s bearings. Born in debt. Handed over as payment. Much still owed. That was the cleric’s lot in life, unchanged in death.

“You all need to clear out,” he snapped at the rivals. A tap of his staff and a wave of his ichor bottle displayed all the authority he had, borrowed from Tauntalagmite. “This stretch of wooden buildings has been declared an abomination by Head Architect Radziweiller. Disperse, so that I may demolish it, and make way for buildings named after proper civil servants.”

“And how are you going to do that?” asked Bedlamoyne, who saw not crew or tool allied to the man, just two even lowlier creatures.

“Never you mind how, but I promise you don’t want to be inside when I get down to business!” He tried to roll up his sleeves, but they weren’t the rolling type. All he did was briefly reveal the sticks of his arms and the delicate fish-kiss nubs of his wrists.

“You can’t boss us around,” Reyvathird spat, smacking Bedlamoyne on the shoulder. As long as they were opposed to Crosscup they were the best of friends; he had that effect on people. “We know how it operates down here now. You aren’t as great in death as you are in life, but proportionally we are reduced! I am still as great compared to you as I’ve ever been. This city will rise with my name on this hall!”

“One of our names, yes,” Bedlamoyne contradicted, “soon as we hammer out the details.”

“There will be no hall!” Crosscup screamed, disturbing only the bees, who were now the most comfortable. Their stirring drew nervous glances from Mother and Father.

“Junior,” Mother said, tugging on his rumpled sleeve, “let’s go back to Mr. Holz’s office. There’s room and board for all three of us. We don’t need anything else.”

“Silence peon! Of course there’s board there! Board after board after board, piled high in wooden blasphemy. Be useful. Start pushing these pretenders out.” Father had already started, but he was only pushing a flagon across the table, trying to scoop as much mead as possible. “Of course… I can do it myself!”

Brandishing the symbols of his order like an ape banging sticks together, he moved to create space between the two warriors, only to have his throat grabbed by the matriarch, who lifted him off the floor. Reyvathird robbed him of his staff and his ichor.

“Urgh… Fmine!” he sputtered.

“Why should they be yours?” Reyvathird whispered, conversing less with the cleric and more with the skull topping the scepter, centipede segments crawling between the eye sockets. “What does Tauntalagmite value, hmm? Greed must be a Subtlerrannean virtue. There is so little to take down here. You can’t have anything at all without greed.” The segmented legs scuttled faster at his words. “Yes! I serve you, greatest of the terrors, Tauntalagmite.” The ichor shone with white necrotic light. “What was it you were doing, hmm?” he asked Crosscup without looking where he dangled. “Something like this…”

Sovereign Reyvathird wrapped both hands around the scepter and hoisted it high, prepared to drive it first into the floor, and then, with a step up, into his mead-filled divot in the table. He kicked a lapping Father off.

“Nngh! Doln’t!” the cleric pleaded. If he unblessed the place with the tools of the order Crosscup would never be rid of the building. Radziweiller and the others would know it was his materials that did it, him that got them taken. Then everyone would know how he had faked his way into the white robe, his one achievement, done so only after death.

The silence stopped Reyvathird. No strike yet. Everyone looked up at the bees, resting in the beams, coating them like a spice rub. No more buzzing. Only footsteps. Of man, of dog. So entered the exterminator, Plucker, and Radziweiller’s assistant who had not yet left their side. She wished to make a more thorough report of the start of his work, and would follow him at least until he picked up the trail.

“When this place is mine, there’ll be a guest list,” Bedlamoyne muttered, upset only by the constant interruptions, not the new arrival’s character. It was not difficult to see this was someone who belonged in a mead hall like that, yet also a man with not a drop of it on his tongue. He did not make merry. If anything, he made stillness where once something troubled.

“Which way went the grabbler?” the exterminator asked the entire hall. None but the strangled wriggler had an answer for him, currently caught low in his throat, prevented from exit by Bedlamoyne’s hand. The exterminator issued no order; it was only a gesture. His hand fluttered like a feather, and the matriarch understood. Savvy enough to trade with demons, suffer only the slightest sales tax of soul, she knew there was no benefit to interfering with this man, and thus dropped Crosscup.

The cleric scrambled to his feet, but instead of answering the exterminator he ripped his belongings back from Reyvathird, who was now more interested in the visitor as well. The cleric asserted the staff was his once more by pointing down the mead hall, to its back exit.

“The grabbler is that way! Every wooden building in this path has sprung up from his influence.”

“Thank you,” said the exterminator, already walking again. His dog followed with its nose low to the ground, sweeping for scents stuck in that of the mead. A patron got in their way, in a mostly friendly fashion, and asked if the exterminator wouldn’t join them, offering a flagon. “No, but I will borrow some of these.”

Hand bent into a claw, he raised his arm, more assertive than his previous gesture. Plucker barked. Like snow hung precariously over a struck roof, a large clump of the bees fell from the ceiling, only using their wings when they reached the exterminator. They made his arm like the beams above, though it matched them in strength already. Once his buzzing gauntlet was complete their wings stilled once more, and he again headed for the exit.

Some wondered if he was not a grabbler himself. That wasn’t exactly grabbling; no mouth was big enough for his arm to take. Still, those bugs respected and obeyed. Perhaps he had just killed that many bees back in the land of light and flowers. He was to them the grim specter of the reaper, who delivers his harvest to two customers only: Tauntalagmite and oblivion.

None dared speak until he was gone from their presence. More curious, it was not fear that quieted them. It was the discord between the airs they had adopted and the actions of a man who deserved them. Of course he did not take the mead. He must remain sober for his mission, whatever its contents.

What was theirs? What had earned them their spot in that hall? They feared what was true: all they had done was take stools. What they overheard lodged between their ears, made them what they were. It would slip away if they did not truly make something of themselves. Frantic Crosscup, who instead searched for some way to keep them from taking his vestments again, took note of their ruminations.

“What are you waiting for!?” he accosted them. Now it was his turn to step up onto the table. “You want to keep this hall forever? That man’s after the grabbler! The survivor! He is the one crack in Toeteld’s foundation. Whosoever takes his life takes the keys to the city. They are immortalized in Tauntalagmite’s eyes. They own wherever they sleep. But it can be only one of you!”

“My grabbler?” Bedlamoyne muttered, only just remembering there was one among her mercenaries in that final battle, which felt, and was, a lifetime ago.

“The only reason we fought to a standstill and died,” Reyvathird claimed, having overheard. “He was worth thirty men at least.”

“I died… that means I owe him nothing,” she reasoned, with it unclear if she had chosen to listen to the sovereign. “Can’t pay him for his own death. Some men would take that, not one of Gaw’s…”

“That’s where we differ Bedlam! I haven’t even considered paying him!” Reyvathird raised a sword he remembered, now higher than any flagon. “I’m just going to take it!” Off through the crowd he charged, toward the back, his war cry net dragging behind him, pulling would-be heroes to the cause.

“He’s still my man!” Bedlamoyne yelled after them. So she had heard. Seeing her rival’s sword made her remember her own hammer, and once it rested on her shoulder she too followed the exterminator’s path. In minutes the mead hall had emptied leaving only Crosscup, Mother, Father, and the bees.

“And we’ve still got to get rid of them!” the cleric complained, pointing at the dark masses on the ceiling. “Not to mention the whole building.” He paced back and forth while his ostensible sires helped themselves to flagons only three quarters empty. The silence of their son’s contemplation was interrupted by a long burbling slurp through holey gums; even with a draining lagoon of libation in his mouth Father couldn’t find much hope.

“No, nothing,” he sighed through the swallow that dribbled out of his throat and over his clothes. “This doesn’t bring anything back. Must not have a taste for the stuff.”

“I remember,” Mother squeaked, holding hers by the fingertips as if it was a dainty cup of tea. She sipped more elegantly than a hummingbird and still got it down the front of her, just as a single rivulet out of a puncture under her collarbone: an old knitting needle injury. “This taste tells me that Junior loved honeycomb when we were all up there, not too high, safely sandwiched between the underbelly and Mr. Holz. Do you remember Junior? It was your favorite treat.”

Crosscup stopped. Holz. Why was he thinking about Holz? That was just one more person to deal with before Radziweiller came to inspect. What was special about him? No, not him. His emissions.

“Holz… he wasn’t smoking was he?”

“What’s that Junior?”

“Holz! Holz! Before, did he have a pipe? He did not, yes? All that smoke was from him?”

“Burned on his own stakes,” Father lamented, shaking his head, forcefully enough to spray mead droplets from his fissures like a slobbering dog. Then he slammed his flagon on a table a few times. Up it went. “To Hodmim Holz! A man who grew a forest without any god’s help!” Mother raised hers slightly, not enough to break her dignified air.

While they drank and leaked Crosscup had corkscrewed his way into moist bitter machinations. Clever he was not, his hand rarely outsmarted the mosquito, but sometimes his natural intelligence, possessed by all men, tripped over a rock it should have noticed, and occasionally he was good at obsessing over the rock, sometimes to the point of comprehending its entire shape.

There were no workers to break this jagged splinter of an unauthorized neighborhood, not under his command. And a hammer in his hands wouldn’t level even one of them before the architect returned, so what could destroy them all, quickly, indiscriminate only until it reached gray stone?

Fire. He’d almost forgotten it entirely. Many of the gray dead had. Most things had their shadows in Subtlerrannea, but sometimes there wasn’t even the inadequate replacement. It was a loveless land; there was only commiseration. Gray food had an appearance, the dead could touch it, process it, but taste lived only in the mouths of bugs and moles before flourishing in the sunlight.

Fire too was extremely rare in its gray form. Heat was not produced domestically. Volcanic chambers were by divine law the property and nests of demonkind. But if the cleric could get his hands on a gray ember it might solve all of his problems, roast them into boons. In his hands it would act much like the gray water Beocroak had been able to walk beneath harmlessly. It would not burn the wood from the world above, but gray wood of memory would be subject to its cold licks. Its spread would be more reluctant than that of the surface, so it would need Crosscup’s focused rage to spur it on, a fuel he could not possibly run out of when these Mother and Father pests were still following him around.

Hodmim Holz was burned alive, and now he burned dead, retaining the method of execution in his gray form. Where there was gray smoke there was gray fire. Inside his chest was a perpetual coal of the stuff. Dropping him in a gray ocean, waiting a century, and dredging him back up would do nothing to extinguish it, for it was his eternal punishment, the toll of suffering he paid to justify a partial existence beyond his blood.

It was contraband, so said the cleric. No choice but to confiscate it and put it to work. But wait. What if it was just a smolder? Would anything catch at all? Memories. Those were always the key. If the man remembered the pain of death the flames would become as tall as they were at their height. They could eat him forever, and Crosscup could have his torch.

“Hang the honeycomb talk,” he ordered the demented old ghouls, forever his elders since they’d died with more age in their rickety bones. “We’re going back to Holz.”

“Junior, splendid!” They got up from their sticky table and put hands on him, squeezing his shoulders like they were fluffing the perch of a trained falcon. He allowed it, to keep them sufficiently buttered. They at least knew the man, and might be able to coax him out of his creaky tower.

Outside the mead hall he saw how his problems continued to worsen, not halting just because he’d rested indoors for a spell. Now many of the wooden buildings brazenly flew flags. Flags were claims, attempts to supersede the authority of his scepter strikes, which planted the necrotic magical might of the one and brutal and only and blighted Tauntalagmite.

All of it would come down, so that Crosscup’s world could go up, but his fury couldn’t do it now, not yet, so he had to stop himself from sputtering like a seizure-possessed child by looking elsewhere, at his bony feet for the duration of their hurried march back to Holz’s upright firewood.

“No entry you gutterweeds.”

“What do you mean ‘no entry’!?” Crosscup exploded. “We were just here, and as honored guests!”

“I don’t remember seeing you,” the freshly installed guard at the base of Holz’s establishment said. “Appointment hours are over. He’s not seeing anyone until tomorrow at least.” The guard crossed his arms and leaned against the door he protected.

“I’m the coat checker,” Father said, stepping forward and flashing a smile that could make spiders wrap themselves up like their prey.

“Be that as it may, there aren’t any coats to check on account of him not seeing anyone. There are no appointments.”

“You do not understand,” the cleric said in a fashion impossible for the living, given that his teeth were grinding so tightly that, were he of the flesh, air could not pass into his mouth, “Hodmim Holz… is on fire.”

“Just as I have nothing to say when my superior has thinning hair or a bite taken out of their ear, I have nothing to say about whether or not the master is ablaze,” the guard commented dutifully, losing not a degree of his leaned composure. “Come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is too late!”

“Then don’t come back.”

“Now you listen, and, and then you obey!” the cleric threatened experimentally as he brandished his scepter. He used it to bisect himself, replacing his weak face with the animated skull carving, the universal symbol of Tauntalagmite, which opened all underground doors, which could confiscate any treasure foolishly buried in an attempt to hide it.

Of course the ghoul could never win a fight with this guard. He could not win a fight with a mirror, even with a hammer in his hand, for he would be too frightened to act when he spotted the hammer wielded by his opponent. Perhaps his authority could blow this obstacle aside in his stead. Never mind that it was an abuse of his sanctioned power. Never ever mind that a stripped cleric would be marked by a gray centipede across his sockets for all time, blinded by it, a new injury in death only possible through a curse of the heinous mistress of miasmic and mired miseries herself.

His timing was poor because the threat was halfway done when it became unnecessary. There was a sound. Of bones bound in skin attempting to chip and fly off like startled robins. Of a rug beaten with a red hot poker. Of old bad air crushed out of a mummy. It came from the right. Crosscup, Mother, and Father looked while the guard stared straight ahead.

A smoking heap shuddered. On the fifth shudder it rose enough on its arms, for arms this heap had, for it to be recognized.

“Mr. Holz!” Father and Mother cried together, fretting toward him like crabs made to walk rather than scuttle sideways. Crosscup got there faster. First to reach the fallen man was the head of his scepter, swung with fierce might, knocking Hodmim’s head around several times. He collapsed again.

“Junior!” Mother wailed, so horrified that she wished she were insane, which would allow her to label this a hallucination. “He needs our help! We can’t be cozy under him if he’s not warm on top. Poor man fell…”

“I didn’t fall,” Holz insisted, to their surprise. His shriveled cheek remained flat against the street as he spoke. “I took the stairs I will eventually build.” Father and Mother looked at each other, but there was no insight to be found, two scarecrows turned to face.

“So you jumped,” Crosscup spat, poking at his prone form with the staff, looking for the best place to hold him down.

“It was the smart move,” the flattened man said, smoke rolling out of his mouth with every word. “My tower is made of wood. If I took the built stairs the whole place might have gone up.”

“It has gone up,” the cleric muttered, “what it needs is to come down. Your idea was had first by me. It’s mine; you can’t have it. All you can do, in the name of the queen of infested skulls, is participate!” He drove his scepter into the back of a Hodmim thigh, punching through. There was a dull flash of gray fire, an eel-flick of slimy flame. Holz didn’t react. Speech continued from the man, as if nothing had suddenly interrupted his flesh.

“Can’t even walk my own halls without destroying them. What has become of me? Where was I before my senses rose with this office?” The answer was the empty country. There he would have stayed if smears of grabbler blood had not excited the dignity of one link in Hodmim Holz’s whittled chain.

“You!” Crosscup said, immobilizing Father, who was his target. “Remember me something useful! We need to lash him to something we can move. Give me a wheelbarrow.”

“I checked coats,” Father protested meekly. “Coats go inside.”

“Cram it you old sod! I’m your son, aren’t I? Do you know what’s going to happen to me if I don’t raze these splinters to the ground!? I’m going to have my ichor emptied! I’ll be host to gray bugs that spend their eternities inventing tortures for gray flesh! Now think back to entering, to exiting, to getting thrown out of this dung pile! You must’ve seen a rusted, busted, weary but willing wheelbarrow!”

“I didn’t pay attention to the landscapers,” Father claimed. “They didn’t work inside. They’re beneath our station Junior. Beside is the actual place of it, but ben-“

“Junior, you’re hurting him,” Mother said, whimpering closer to the smoking heap, trembling hands outstretched. “He needs a cup of soup. Fetch me some butter root from the cellar and I’ll-“

“Back woman!” he shrieked, removing his scepter just long enough to swing it again and strike Mother across the mouth. She went down as if she had fallen the many floors of the Holz tower as well. The resulting caterwaul broke even the concentration of the guard, who did not seem to care his employer had leapt out of a tall building. As he slid down the door, staring at her writhing, Father was paralyzed, and the ghoul that sometimes let them call him Junior recoiled.

“Silence you bat!” Crosscup tried. For now there was no mind left in her. In gray death the cobwebs of old age can shatter. Flailing, howling, Mother fought nothing on her back as if a snake had invaded her innards and wound its way up her spine. Nothing but dark rock stared back at her desperation from the distant craggy ceiling. Underground. Where the hatchlings that fell from the nest could never be helped back. Where kindness was the segmented queen pulling you deeper and darker in your grave to smother your distress. Where no Goodly god could see or reach.

“Fine!” Crosscup yipped, driven mad in his own pedantic way from her panicked gibbering. “A fine family you are! A fine city this is, providing an upstanding citizen such as myself nothing but headaches! I’ll do it! I’ll remember, since not a soul can commiserate with me when I need it!”

Then the cleric, who could not be one for long if the rules meant anything, and they usually meant death, made the worst decision of the echo of his life by unstoppering his bottle of whitish-pewter ichor with his teeth.

A word on the origins of the unholy ichor, for desecration, for unblessing, for trapping starlight in cold jelly so the reaper may write his letters in that ink and throw them down his well which draws from the pure abyss at the center of the world.

An extra curse is deserved here, for while this book is protected, the ichor is a secret treasured recipe of the Ghastly Tauntalagmite, known only to her and what she beds on oldest rock. What this book knows is not all of it, but enough for overlapping methods of damnation. So be warned. May every raindrop break your back if you speak of this to another soul. May a splinter cocoon inside the meat of your tongue.

What Goodly Gaw did from her palm was the ultimate act of a god: the raw creation of new life with no predecessor. The Sculpt. The vision in the Voidclay. This Tauntalagmite, confined to the after of under, where nothing animated more than shadow, could not do. No hatred in the world was stronger than the Ghastly hatred of the Goodly, primarily because of this disparity of talent.

Whereas the Goodly could create life, they could not control it. For them the greatest sorrow, the worst doom, was to watch those gifted with life walk it down dark paths of violence, chaos, and destruction. To smite them in prevention was to not be Goodly, destructive in itself to these gods of comfortable light and breathable air.

Tauntalagmite, unable to birth, was free to distort, manipulate, twist, coerce, pervert, hybridize, torture, and torment until someone else’s life was clay once more in her raking claws. Demons she made from the men before men. Gray dead the men of now, the men of script on page instead of stone.

The oldest thing on oldest rock is the most subject to her torsion and revision. It is said that once it was Goodly, so Goodly that it could even fall in love with the Ghastly, heart so broken by pity it would rather bow to the whims of evil, and grant it the most ethereal and carnal pleasures, just to make its existence more tolerable.

Every advantage Tauntalagmite took. Every rule she broke, because it allowed her to. This beast with two backs cracked the plates, lost Hexaclete’s Land large islands that drifted elsewhere with no Goodly or Ghastly stowaways. It became her plaything once she took its sense of self, extracted it like water from the coconut.

Some she drank. The rest she gave to her infestation, which are formless vermin-bugs, segments numbering only what is feared most, usually thirteen. Out of a swarm of them, once it has spotted you, a miserable living thing so full of the heat of misused Goodly gifts, will emerge, the exact combination of legs, wings, and pincers recalled from your worst nightmares.

That is the outer infestation: the great writhing ball that sits beside Tritabite on a hill. Always it threatened to deform and to break, to wash down into the city as a tide and kill all the living men with their poisons and venoms and toxins while the demons were but bathed by them. If you could withstand the sight of it, that mottled scuttling ball of nasty gnashing instinct, treat it as sun and moon alike even without rise or fall, you could survive life in Tritabite.

Inside are the bugs of an eviller caste still, to which were fed oldest thing’s identity. All they could ever know was how to sully it. Their bodies pulp it, foul it, ferment it. Then it is regurgitated so another might do the same. Eternally it will last, as it is of a god. When all light is extinguished and nothing but the refuse heap of their efforts survives, pale sopping globs of the oldest thing will remain mixed in.

What the inner infestation of the terrible orb excretes is the white-pewter ichor. It goes in the bottles. It goes to the gray clerics. With it they manipulate some shred of godly power. Cleric Crosscup smeared it across his forehead to greatly enhance his own memory of life above ground.

The oldest thing had lived up there, and lived yet, and would live as long as things could live, even if it died, as Gaw Digi-Tally had. It had true life, the truest, as it was eternal in its natural state, making it so much more powerful than a stain of grabbler blood. Crosscup was right to do what he did, assuming the entire world was just the solving of this one minor problem of recollection.

It all came rushing back to him, a cloud of mingling memories, bolts of clarity separating mixed elements and showing him things exactly as they were with a level of detail and accuracy he hadn’t known when living it. Never had he ever remembered anything so well, so vividly. It made him wonder if a memory could be so strong it could transform him into what he recalled, a thought that came perilously close to understanding the gods’ power of creation. Any further and his gray skull would’ve cracked like pottery, the pieces irrecoverable, unable to ever stop shattering to smaller and smaller sherds.

“Now I remember… that wheelbarrow!” his voice cracked like a whip. Recollection was cast as a crackling spell, out of his eyes and into existence beside the defeated smoking pile of Hodmim Holz. Mother and Father, still horrified at their potential son’s sullying of moral authority, were nonetheless tantalized by his restoration. The wheelbarrow was somehow crisp, like an apple plucked from a branch that sprung back. No artist could paint it, because no brush could draw such fine lines.

“I remember rope, no, they were chains,” Crosscup continued, another bolt out of his mind producing them. They clattered into the wheelbarrow. “And a sturdy post, like the prow of a dinghy! And a donkey to pull! And a harness upon it!” Father had the chains in his hands, feeling them link by link as one does prayer beads. “Don’t just stand there, you dunce. Hang him up like a coat!”

What the grabbler had cascadingly caused could be seen from Toeteld’s highest points as a trail, if the wildly different elements could be linked. His snaking line to the surface started with the bare patch in the battlefield, wove its way up the wicker of wooden avenues, slumped into pooling patrols in the young annals of Castle Coffinnail, leapt up the flooded but retentive Odger building, and now connected with the lines of others, cast up a steep incline alongside rays of genuine daylight.

Many hours of climbing still separated him from the world above; Wormskoll was mighty among caves, known also as the throat which vomits potion. These new lines and lights brought him true hope regardless. The man needed nothing more than to shake this dogged feeling, so much worse than it had ever been.

In Lazuli Pawlm, where rotted his sense of home, made cold and damp by the efforts of Dignidog and his like, there was no peace to be had. It stood to his simple stoic reason that distance would create that peace, and he had earned that distance over years now. The middle continent was so far gone from his experience that he hardly remembered what he’d done to get to Wormskoll. But he did remember his payment for entering this throat of rock. He’d used it already; it would be without effect until he bathed in the salty sea on the leftern shore of Hexaclete’s Land.

Those gray lines leading him up were undoubtedly from spelunkers. A much less steep entrance, long ago carved into a winding stair with pillars that could aggressively halt a tumbling fall, existed as the tilted rock sheet’s neighbor. Beocroak could not seek it, as he could see Toeteld’s structures had already overtaken it.

Nor had he sought it the first time. Sliding down the sheet, without rope to slow, would take several minutes. No sane man would ever try such a descent without equipment, unless he were a grabbler. To enter Wormskoll Beocroak had separated from the recruiter who wished to bring him to Matriarch Bedlamoyne, who took the stair themselves, and chose instead the experience of the slide in his humble clothing and upon his bare feet.

Chalked with dust, the slide was not as fast as it would first seem, but it became dangerous after the initial lulling minute that led you to believe you could nap in transit and wake up curled in the dirt of destination. Crags erupted, sometimes after drops, and it was up to Beocroak’s experience to discern a hopping path down, never breaking momentum enough to break his ankles alongside.

As he’d slid the slab he’d kept his eye sharp, taking note of animal tracks in the chalk dust. This told him, in part, what Wormskoll offered him for grabbling, and also what exercises he should subtly perform with his grip to ready his hands for specific stomachs, crops, and tracts: the smack and slide of doomed suckling bats, the deceptively legless slither of the sea-striped Goliath skink, hoof tiptoes of balancing burrowgoats, and others less promising but nonetheless within his ability.

Marks of men were mixed in: the scratches of climbing anchors, the desperate stabs of falling axes, and shreds of spent materials jammed into crevices. That side of Wormskoll was a challenge for cavers, who thought themselves daring as the devils, not a one comprehending that the journey could be made with only gravity and a body trained to use it the way it used a spade or a sword.

Their equipment couldn’t save them from being a tenth the man of Beocroak. Many had heard strains and snaps, then slid to their deaths. Bones cushioned Beocroak’s landing when he succeeded where they had failed. Seeking the thrill of exploration, the only purpose they achieved was informing the grabbler of further armory options with the footprints and tail drags of the scavengers that knew to come and periodically pick at their folly.

Now as he looked at the slide from the bottom he saw not just the nervous pecks of their axes and anchors in the rock, but the ropes too. The real things had rotted away, if they hadn’t been chewed by nesting cudshrews. What sat spiderwebbed across the vast chalked sheet was gray memory.

Beocroak tested one that coiled at his feet, and found it would bear his weight. To a climber rope was floor and ceiling in one, so to the grabbler it was solid. He wondered what arcane invisible creature made such decisions. Was it following him at all hours, bent over a curl of paperwork, deciding what luck of solidity he should be allotted?

So galling was this thought that he looked over his shoulder, finding himself thankfully alone. Not for long though, his sense reminded him. Toeteld crept up behind, balconies growing absurdly wide and round, shelves of fungus on proudly dead trees hollowing into their own upright coffins. Glass spread into the windows like lake ice. Eerie green light rose in them, and shadowy silhouettes within, and shining eyes within those.

Did the gray dead look to him, or to the light? No matter. Both were sought. Only his blood could be taken. The grabbler began his climb, feet flat on the slab, hands undoing gravity on the rope one after the other. The long slide down was impossible to most non-grabblers because of pitfalls, the inverse because of stamina. No human could climb it without many stops to rest, unless one of those stops had come long before, taken place in Lazuli Pawlm, and resulted in the training that never left their dense muscles and lumber wrists.

His pace was that of a brisk walk, a speed so foreign to climbing men that sight of it might make their dropped jaws tumble all the way down to the rest of the bones. One such bone did fall, passing straight through Beocroak, who did not slow. Within seconds he overtook its owner, a gray spelunker, affixed to the slide in an anchored hammock.

“I’ve never seen anything like you,” she tried to say, flirtatious tone lost along with the structure of the words thanks to the absence of her mandible. Beocroak acknowledged her with a nod to dissuade her from any kind of pursuit and continued on. Shocking as the sight of him was, what really puzzled the experienced spelunker, who had learned her final lesson, was the purpose of the octopus tentacles ringing his wrist, suctioned onto his upper arm. The technique must have changed since her time, and for the better, given his pace.

The gray octopus’s purpose was almost entirely served. Only three tentacles remained, attached to a chewed ring of flesh around his wrist. The head was gone, devoured, so that he might keep the utility of the tentacles longer and free his hand for the climb.

Of the eight he had eaten two. Those missing three had been for bartering with the gray dead, and all he earned was passage through the bustling neighborhood he had rolled into after Odger. His fastest route to the slide, which he could spy through many gray walls after the first streets were behind him, cut across a market more alive than anything he’d seen from Toeteld thus far.

Ghosts with skull sliced flat, killed to have their brains stolen by demons that read knowledge off them like scrolls, carried goods on their flattened heads. Gray women huddled in corners collected inert gray infants, heaping them in their swaddling arms, trading them back and forth to figure out which had been theirs in life, or at least theirs enough to help them beg. Servants dulled by routine beat gray rugs hung on lines over and over again, never catching on that the dust they stirred came from the nearby slide and would not be going anywhere.

Rich ghosts carrying sacks of finger bones shook them to draw the attention of merchants and mongers, creating slow hurricanes of bodies that floated through the market streets like crusts of bread tossed into a stream.

Just as many names were being floated for the market, which would come to serve the dirty bakers around Odger and the lower fiefdom surrounding the mixed and marrying royal family of Castle Coffinnail. The names had the slide in mind, as it was the closest and most prominent feature. In the early minutes of Beocroak’s wading through the crowds he overheard ‘Sliding Market’, ‘Tumble Town’, and ‘Bonecushion’. The last was in reference to landing at the base of the slab, in the remains of your predecessors; that one was the grabbler’s favorite, to be used here from now on.

There were many names he would’ve preferred to hear, as long as they weren’t his own. It hadn’t reached this neighborhood yet, but at one discerning glance they would all know him as grabbler. He could no more hide it than a prize hog could its ungelt sack. The slide had only just revealed itself when he was offered a bucket of finger bones in exchange for a cup of blood.

Polite refusals got him one street further. Chatter rose like floodwaters. Concentrated throngs of marketgoers were impossible to slip through without some of them passing into his body absentmindedly, as they only collided when they intended to. Doing so gave them a good look at his blood, a good earful of heart, stopping them dead with life. Then the hounding began.

Beocroak picked up the pace, using any walls to his advantage, crossing through where the gray could not. Right into a private pantry. There exotic things lurked, but all were doubly dead, gutted, and strung up, so they were no threat to the grabbler. It was the owner, in the midst of counting his wares, who wished to count one man more among them, who was irate.

Gray or not, the grabbler was not physically threatened by market wildlife. Most were skittish as geese frightened of ripples. More like bees, the shoppers were not individual creatures. It was the hive, and here the crowd, that was the true animal. It could crush him, wield a thousand cuts, if it was roused from its scattered activity.

Once he was a ways up the slide none would pursue, his analysis said, so he quietly offered the owner three tentacles from his octopus in exchange for quiet passage. No such fare was present, that man had never seen an ocean, thus he accepted. And so Beocroak had passed through Bonecushion with as little disruption as possible, and was now a greater distance than most men could believe up the rope. He dared to think he was free before he felt one of Hexaclete’s breezes.

But Toeteld didn’t see a slide. It saw more arable land. Radziweiller saw it, built it into his plans. You could build on a tilt; he’d done it before. Having a tilted wall, at the best degree, was considered a boon to some, as sliding down it was easier and faster than descending stairs. Additionally, Toeteld’s architecture wasn’t limited by the need to build from the bottom.

When they put their gray matter to it they could decide the foundation was far within the slide, phasing into the rock and building up until they surfaced. Beocroak thought he had solitude on his climb, but all the while a construction force, hundreds of gray carpenters, stonemasons, and general laborers, worked its way vertically to his position, overtaking him with yet another neighborhood of Toeteld.

The din of their work was trapped in the rock, making the first sign that something was amiss the arc of a gray pickax. As it swung Beocroak spied it, like the back of a snake curling at the lake’s surface, beginning a dive. Twice more this pendulum swung. Then it rose enough for him to recognize the tool’s head, as well as the threat its rise posed to the gray rope bearing his entire weight.

His growl didn’t scare it off; it could no more penetrate the slide than the strike of the pick itself. Perhaps his roar could go deep enough to spook the worker, with the much worse consequence of alerting every undead thing babbling in Bonecushion. The pick swung again, plucked his rope like a lute string, six pulls out of his reach.

Beocroak’s head twisted to check his position. He’d come far, still with far to go. Should the rope snap he could twist and take the slide as he had before without much danger, except he would be dropped right back into Bonecushion, perhaps into a basket of items already heavily discounted.

Not keen on a bargain being made of his blood, the grabbler was forced to flit about on the wall like a nervous fly, a raw humiliation for someone of such sure feet. Grabbling was primarily a technique of hand and arm, of shoulder beyond that, but it would be nothing without a solid stance. That was what kept them from being dragged into burrows when they mistook wyrms for worms, what allowed them to wrench snail and crab from shells they were attached to.

Forced to dance and shuffle in the manner of smaller, nimbler, daintier things, Beocroak swung his rope back and forth, hoping to make it to the next strand over, which did not have an oblivious ax picking its single tooth with his lifeline. On his fourth swing he recognized the creaking stretch between his hands. It would snap. He had to go now. Chalk dust was his saving grace. Only with it caked to his soles could he find the grip to briefly sprint at such a harsh angle without losing ground to gravity.

His attachment to the new rope was not clean, shoulders battered on the slide as he rolled. A non-grabbler would’ve suffered tremendous rope burn in their palms, but grabbler calluses could hold a frying egg and let it finish.

Snap. Not his old rope, gravity’s sudden swallow told him. In his plunging rush he glimpsed another pickax, and the skeletal arms swinging it. He heard them now too. Not just the pair, but a flock of them pecking. Saws chewed through wood. Hammers bludgeoned posts. Construction turned his fall into a tunnel of noise, almost enough to make him miss the lower rope his ankle incidentally found.

Again his palms were tested as he arrested momentum, remaining as granite as the hands of sculpted law. Bonecushion was too close. Had it risen as he fell? It had to be outclimbed, which was barely slower than outrunning it, if the grabbler was true to the skills of his tribe. Beocroak tensed and pushed his every muscle. Now he was a lodestone, attracted to the mouth of the cave. That was the iron taste in his mouth, not blood condensating on the softer tissues of the body.

Driven both by frenzied craftsmanship and the crack of the gray whip, the builders matched his devotion. Backs bubbled up out of the slide. Scaffolding emerged. Columns took off like enchanted shoots. Suddenly the slide was a trellis of industrial civilization, a line maintaining its barren tilt barely visible, already containing a grabbler rampaging through the very idea of motion.

He moved like nothing else in Hexaclete’s Land. If his own had seen him they would barest think him a man, more an undiscovered beast that had never been grabbled, eluding every arm with its indecipherable locomotion. Only one hand pulled the rope at a time, and each yank had the power to propel him upward. The only men who had ever clung to walls so steadfastly were carved into them. Whichever hand was free smacked the chalked wall, grabbed only dust, yet snagged, dragged, lifted. Beocroak ran up his angled rope the way a wolf pursued across a pasture. It boggled the eye, confounded the brain, defied reason so boldly that the witnessing head might fall off, as some gray ones in Bonecushion did, caught off guard by the speed at which they had to lean back to watch the grabbler’s progress.

If they kept their heads they couldn’t watch for long, as the new development closed off their view. It took Beocroak’s rope as well, put it on an incidental hook, on the end of a yardarm. The item implied a ship, further implying it was moored in water, and finally that, lurking in the rock, there was already a large canal and the thoroughfare it would feed as the veins do the animal.

There was a ship, mast and deck now visible, along with two of its crew admiring the slack-mouthed gray hippo salmon strung up on the yardarm’s hook through its tail fin. Nearly two men long. An exceptional catch for the first drag of the net through untested waters. Neither cared that their ship was afloat on the outpouring from the well beside the Odger Building, that the speed of their construction was entirely fueled by one red smear of grabbler on sterile stone.

They cared only that the hippo salmon was theirs, and its flesh could buy a little shack to share. The rope dangling behind its open mouth jiggled. Both crew cocked their heads curiously. Taut. Jiggle. Taut. Could it still be gray-alive? No, nothing alive made a rope move like that, as if a storm spiraled up it while a tiger tried to rip it off a tree branch with its teeth.

Both refused to believe it when they saw an unacceptably vertical man vaulting up a single strand of Toeteld without breaking it. Fathomed or not, Beocroak did reach the salmon, clamber up its side, and turn it into a ladder with four finger holes in its silvery sides, punctuating it three times until it was summited.

So gobsmacked as to not perceive the three servings of meat and finger bones just gouged out of their catch, the pair of fisherfolk watched as this skittering man creature, foaming pink at the mouth, bridle tendons in the neck straining, descended the mast and tore it up in equal measure, landing on their deck with two feet instead of the expected and entirely reasonable four.

The impact rocked the boat, surprising the grabbler, who hadn’t expected a ship at all. He too had failed to notice something: the last part of his ascent had been a big fish. All that mattered in a mind fueled by lungs burning like kilns was that he was higher than he was seconds ago.

His landing sent the small vessel bumping up against the side of the canal, prompted him to leap to the narrow street, where he put his hand through the nearest gray wall and felt the incline. Still there. More to go. A familiar sigh grounded his sanity; he turned to see a gray body bobbing in the energetic current.

“Don’t walk against fair winds lad, that’s what she taught me,” the hanged sailor from Odger said, saluting Beocroak as he disappeared under the arch of a bridge. “Ahh my love, kiss your old salty goat. Bllbrbrrbrrll.”

False hope returned to the hippo salmon, thanks to the body heat pressed into its flesh by Beocroak, not unlike his interactions with the shreds of octopus still clung to his arm. It thrashed on the hook, and at its size it would’ve capsized the whole boat if there wasn’t a canal wall to stop it from tipping too far.

Continued writhing hammered the mast on the wall, drew every eye and ear that had emerged from the slide, and many of those below in Bonecushion. Beocroak had to move on, swiftly. Already aware that the rock was just past the gray wall in front of him, he hopped through and scrambled up bare-handed, forcing the chalk dust to be as good as the rope. Here his remaining tentacles were of no use, as the dust interfered with the suction cups’ seal.

He didn’t make it far, but not because his efforts were insufficient. There was a ceiling and a floor above him, which he could not pass through. Entire streets had come out of the slide now, conveyed out of the side of a mountain, and the grabbler was losing his orientation. Mentally he locked the direction he faced, all but planting a compass needle between the lobes of his brain. No matter what artifice formed around him, that was the way. That way, not a soul died underground. That way, it was as if none of this had happened. Some fools, not the man going that way, had thrown their lives down a hole, and some degenerate spirits of the shadow had snatched them: newts dressing up in ballgowns.

Beocroak was not the most versed in the tales of Lazuli Pawlm, or those of Gaw Digi-Tally. A defense, he’d quietly reasoned, against the shove of Dignidog and a few others, those that tried to trick him onto a stage. The less he knew the less wisdom he had, at least the wisdom of history, that of which is needed most by leaders.

But now the ignorance made him vulnerable, angrier. For he knew not if any grabbler had ever died underground. Their names were not his to play like abacus beads. No stock could be taken of his prospects, luck, shame. All he could be certain of was the possibility that he would be the first, and thus the worst.

Once he had left he was sure Dignidog told nothing but lies. They would’ve been half-truths, perhaps even truths of clear blown glass flecked with a single impurity of falsehood, which were the same as the filthiest fabrications to the grabblers, who did not wield language as weapon. If you wielded what could not speak you had so much more at your disposal. If Lazuli Pawlm still thought of him at all, it was as a tallyweed.

The only story that could be threaded together with two beads of incongruous color was that the most blessed of all mortal beings, a spiritual dew squeezed from the voidclay by the very and soft hand of Gaw Digi-Tally, had committed the worst disrespect and waste imaginable, throwing the gift of himself unto the dirt and dying there. Letting Tauntalagmite lick his bare back.

Too long he had told himself he was just a wanderer. Convincing himself of it had granted unearned peace. No wanderer had been driven out of Pawlm. That man had left with a mission. Some would call it the opposite of one, but that reaction was half the purpose. The idea was forged in total opposition of Dignidog’s pursuits… and his pursuit.

Was there even a pursuit? Something told Beocroak there was. A feeling in his neck hair. A start in his sleep. The relish with which the demon of sleep toyed with related images after paralyzing him. A shadow in the Goodly light behind him, a dark trail being cut that always seemed to turn toward him no matter how much he zigged, zagged, or looped.

An entire month was spent on a zag, an elite zag, a zag to lord over all the others. Beocroak had been sequestered in an abandoned dungeon overrun with wolverines, the foul variety that tried to grabble back and stank so badly they couldn’t be eaten. Nothing but thorns grew there. Water was stagnant and green until it belched up foulness to the air.

Who would believe that was where he’d gone and hidden himself? Tantamount to suicide. Yet the feeling returned, itched more every day, as if what he feared drew closer. And what he feared was that Dignidog himself was not far behind, be it alone, or with grabblers loyal to his cause, or with a pack of wolves and garbage eaters loyal to him.

At the time Beocroak thought of fighting one of his own to the death as a fate worse than dying underground. If it was true, if that shadow at his back was that very man, it meant he had no hopes of raising a grabbler empire separate from Beocroak. It had to be him. Certainty became obsession, mayhaps.

He couldn’t allow it to draw any closer, so Beocroak departed from his darkest zag and continued on toward the leftern shore of Hexaclete’s Land. That was where he could truly be made safe from any pursuit not of a god.

For on that final shore was a withered finger of land, extending up into the north, separated from it only by a strand of hot sea. Underneath the water, underneath the seabed, was an edge of Subtlerrannea that was not matched by Hexaclete’s Land above. There lived colonies of demons, the hot kind, as the wolverines he’d integrated with were the pungent kind. From their lava reservoirs came the bubbling of that trickle of sea, and a leftern wind blew it to the peninsula, heating it to tropical temperatures, sparing it the endless frigid weather of the north so poorly visited by the mother of the land.

That stretch of jungled land was Rooth Tugt, and its waters were hot on both sides, saltiest on the left. Heat, scouring salt, and a potion of demon acridity. These were the three ingredients for an effect of legend, a small thing which did not interest many.

Together this recipe produced a complete elimination of scent, effective for a time. A man coated in such a potion who bathed in those broiling salty waters off Rooth Tugt was a man who smelled like absolutely nothing, to the human nose, shark nose, buzzard nose, and hound nose alike. As if smote from the land, he could not be tracked at all without sight or sound of him.

If Dignidog pursued it would be with the nose of one dog or another as his primary means. He grabbled little else when he had the choice, and he preferred the obedience of dogs often present once freed of the arm. As long as Beocroak made no name for himself, existed as nothing but a grabbler for evening hire, scent was Dignidog’s only lead.

So to be rid of it, then go to the quiet north for a score of at least five years, was Beocroak’s secret mission. To erase himself from leadership’s map of conquest. He had been following this plan, but without thought, lost in his travels in a haze of distance from most living things, his heart having left a dock and found curious tranquility in the absence of ripples.

When he left his entrenched zag the feeling of pursuit had retreated and left him largely relieved, free, and so brashly confident that he had taken a string of bad jobs because he could not foresee any possibility of failure. Nobody could beat grabblers, not to a man, and that was reinforced every time he was offered coin and took food or lodging instead.

The dark prickle was gone, but what reason was there not to follow through when he was close? Bedlamoyne had the potion, and cause to employ him. From that victory it was just a leisurely jaunt to the edge of Rooth Tugt, the center was not for men, where he could have his cleansing bath.

“Have my bath,” Beocroak growled to no one. It was a warning to the very force of opposition, which had invisibly brought him that prickle he had never missed, of pursuit so dogged that his foes ran while he slept, guided to his heat as if by a red star. Gray material blocked his upward progress, but, to a grabbler in his right and sound mind, this was bad news for the material.

Punches that could collapse rib cages had little more trouble with floorboards; it required only that they repeat themselves. Twice he thrust his palm with Pawlm strength, rewarded with a crack, then a splintering crash. Up and through he pulled himself to find new gray footing. On this next floor development was still sparse enough to see the incline, though the gaps were populating and closing fast.

He moved to resume the climb when the largest shifting piece yet erupted from the rock beside and swung toward him. Its intimidating motion, like an ocean surge changing course, could only be explained by stonework rising in layers underneath it, each one twisting a little more. Face to face they came, more like mouth to mouth, as this new thing was a tunnel opening, an arch used to store and transport shadows.

Once it stopped, without swallowing him up, Beocroak turned to ignore it, only for it to produce two gray dead walking with some urgency, halted a moment after their exit once they spied Beocroak. The echoes of their argument splashed against their backs without the strength to push them forward.

“That’s him!” Sovereign Reyvathird said, jabbing at Beocroak with a finger, one nearly as sharp as the sword in his hand. “I’ll never forget that face as long as I’m dead.”

“Master grabbler,” Matriarch Bedlamoyne added more graciously, “it’s good to see you again, especially since you never turned traitor on me like those other purse string pythons. We should negotiate once more. I’m very interested in securing most of your blood.”

Normally Beocroak would have one to three select words for them. ‘Leave me be’ perhaps. ‘Go away’. ‘Nothing for you’. ‘Depart or die’. ‘Not interested’. The exertion had him short on supply however, and this refers not to the climb, but to the fraying of a rope much more mental. Toeteld was a puzzle and a city in one, and he was a man who enjoyed neither. All the pair of rivals got from him was a turn in their direction and a fighting stance.

“You’re going to get me a wall of my own and then I’m going to hang your head on it,” Reyvathird promised, raising his blade with both hands, holding it much the same way a scorpion would its stinger. Bedlamoyne hefted her hammer, as happy to use it as the means of negotiation as she was any of the five tongues she knew, two of which only existed underground, one of which could not even be heard in sunlight.

They charged. Beocroak charged. Then, out of the black tunnel that had disgorged gray already, they charged: the many patrons of the mead hall. Huffing fumes of confabulated adventure and conquest all through the confined passage, all the way back to their sticky bottomless flagons, this horde was drunk on vicious avarice. Their raised gray weapons had the strength of their falsified reputations, even if they could not wield them as the objects deserved.

Beocroak was large and heavy; he hadn’t the time to turn and flee. All he could do was embrace his existing momentum in the hope of breaking up the initial attack. If enough of them fell those rushing in from behind would trip, creating a momentary blockade of bodies. Then he could change his mind about taking on an entire army of singular names. Initially he had thought himself clever in his reserving of tentacles for their utility in commerce and battle, but as the sovereign and the matriarch started the assault with some skill he realized he had preserved far too little of his only means of physically interacting with his numerous foes.

One tentacle coiled to absorb the force of Bedlamoyne’s hammer, and another tried to deflect Reyvathird’s sword, with the second slipping and failing thanks to chalk dust preventing it from cupping the flat of the blade. The sovereign cut straight through, forcing Beocroak to drop to his knees to get enough room to evade.

Concentrated fully on keeping himself intact, he failed to perceive several incoming attacks that weren’t going to collide with him but were going to hit the remnants of the octopus. By the time he rose, safe for the briefest duration behind the closed gate of the matriarch’s dropped hammer, there was nothing left but a bracelet of quivering flesh around his wrist.

A patron tripped on the hammer’s shaft, planted their face mid war cry. One body wasn’t enough to snowball, it would just get trampled, so this quarter-moment was the only chance for retreat. He took it.

There wasn’t far to go. Back to the hole he’d gouged in the floor and climbed through. Walls that hadn’t been there moments before blocked the other direction. Market noise bubbled up from beneath. Was Bonecushion rising? Swinging about, half in the stone and half out, like a bolas, as the tunnel had? Was his fixed direction still fixed?

It struck him with a wet slap that these were the wrong questions. Get a hold of yourself, he gravely warned, and thus get a hold of everything else. He did not need an escape route. A grabbler did not need to flee. They only needed a better weapon to step up and swallow down. To call that weapon was his only task.

He had already armed it. The strung-up hippo salmon was doubly dead, but not after he’d driven his fingers deep into the down of its mummy-notion flesh. Now it was sitting below him, woefully underutilized, thrashing on the line. And it was better than the octopus.

His smartest challengers, who had briefly known him when all parties had blood of their own, were fresh enough out of the grave to sidestep the hole, not so for one of those directly behind. They plunged through, howling, making an even louder thunk on the layer below, which gave the patrons pause, providing Beocroak the last of the opportunity-luck he would hopefully need. It was time enough to roar.

As he had to convince the murkodile of his power and predator’s sculpting influence on the animal dominion, Beocroak took a barrel of a breath, compressed it into a hailstone in his chest, and then unleashed it into the air and foundations so that everywhere that could see the stony slant could hear it just as well.

His vibrating croak shook the floor; the patrons danced as if it was hot. Below, gray eyes and sockets turned toward this declaration as if they heard a proclamation from a Goodly god. Ghouls such as them had no idea what to do with it, how to please this deity made flesh. Only the hippo salmon knew.

Its uncoordinated flail, a tantrum thrown by a single shred of life, became a purposeful swing, back and forth, until the hook in its tail started to tear through the flesh. The fishers begged it to stop, to return to being a gloriously still bounty, but it obeyed a higher authority. Two levels higher to be precise.

Desire to obey, to grow knees and kneel, was the whole of its spirit, for it had no gray life to occupy and distract it until it had known the piercing touch of Beocroak. Born from his palm as surely as a tallyweed. Its final swing aimed its head up the slide and ripped it free. There were fish that could climb waterfalls with the desire to spawn. All the hippo salmon had was balconies and windows freshly sprouted from the bedrock, and the amplified tail power of a fish its colossal size. Crashing and bashing and thrashing, somehow it climbed, toward its master, who must have had a good reason for not unsheathing it himself.

Its progressive rampage, which smacked several ghouls come to see the ruckus off their balconies and sent them bouncing down roof after roof until they landed somewhere where they might buy their breakfast, was loud, but not as loud as the clamoring crowd of impatient bloodthirsty patrons.

Beocroak knew he had succeeded, that his armament would soon deliver itself, not from its noise, from confidence in the grabbler ways alone. He had to hold out until its arrival, and not just that. A portal was needed as well; the salmon was much too large to wriggle through the hole he’d made for himself.

As his roar performance tapered off he bent down and grabbed one of the jagged boards at the edge of the opening, peeling it up with the ease of an orange rind. The broken board could be used as a weapon, which Beocroak would do if there was no other choice. A blunt object was only marginally better than an expertly forged sword in disrespecting the grabbler way, the way of the natural weapon, which can always be foraged like a berry, if it is not growing on one’s own body already.

Bedlamoyne and Reyvathird attempted a pincer, leaping to each side of the hole and closing in. She struck first, with Beocroak bending the peeling board to block before it snapped off the floor. He saw that Reyvathird hugged the tilted wall, walked on a thin ledge. There was no room for the sovereign to turn and block; by the time he realized his vulnerability the board was already thrown his way. It flattened him against the wall.

Then Beocroak threw himself. Without the threat of the sword, and were they of the same flesh, the grabbler would’ve hammered the sovereign into a griddlecake, genuinely smeared him, with torso alone. As it stood he was forced to exercise a more creative counterattack. His feet plunged through the gray wood holding the ghoul up.

Both fell and were forced to grab each side of the hole. Beocroak had the strength to get back up in a single finger, so with both hands it was as if he leapt back onto the battlefield. The patrons were stuck reckoning with how to cross the gap the grabbler grew; that left only Bedlamoyne for the moment, and her closer hammer.

She did him a favor by missing, punching another hole in the floor. He followed her lead, drilling with his heel, here, there, making gopher holes. Intelligent as she was, she couldn’t discern that his motive was to create vulnerability, since there wasn’t time to make the opening large enough before the fish delivery.

The hippo salmon had lucked into a bend of the canal after rolling down a roof, allowing it to sail through much of its journey. Yearning blazed frozen within it, a frostbite of unmet desire, so it abandoned the gray water at the right moment, leaping out of the canal and toward a ceiling with many fresh eyes.

And through it. And onto the arm of Beocroak while horrors gaped in horror. Reyvathird was only halfway through pulling himself up when the vaulting fish pushed him the rest of the way. He rolled across the floor and was stopped by patron shins, at a good angle to see the grabbler somehow lift a fish triple his own size and swing it. Bedlamoyne was batted by its silvery flank, marked by shed scales in her gray folds. The force would have sent her so far into the air that her fall would put her near the bottom of the slide, but a wall had grown behind her coincidentally and caught her in a window, like a thread collapsing in exhaustion after finally put through the needle’s eye.

The salmon’s weight certainly sounded like a hippo when Beocroak let it rest on a section of intact floor. The man was almost never out of breath, one breath could call the name of every animal in the region remember, but he couldn’t force his muscles past certain limits. Non-grabblers could nonetheless see that their target lacked the strength to wield the animal continuously. He had struggled to be effective with the murkodile, and the salmon was twice its size, with no legs of its own to help bear the burden.

Obviously the man with his arm down its throat understood this as well, thus deciding he held not a sword, but a canoe. He grunted and threw himself onto his back, breaking the floor again, dragging the salmon back down to the lower level, where the canal was still expanding. Patrons pursued, one too successfully, launched by the arcing salmon tail and striking a fresh ceiling in an unluckier version of what had just knocked the stale wind out of Bedlamoyne.

The rest, carrying a cursing Reyvathird along, tumbled down into the canal like a dumped bucket of dead spiders. Weak swimmers all, the gray dead were always better at bobbing like bloated corpses, the current would help them keep up with Beocroak. The grabbler imagined there was precious little time to build his head start, so with his speaking grip he urged his salmon to pump its tail with all its might, and then some more, as there was no need to worry about pulled muscles in its doubly dead world.

His control over the estuary beast was only precise with his arm immersed, so he could not reorient and ride it with a grip on its upper lip. This left him facing opposite the direction they traveled, forced to watch the gray slurry of tangled limbs and dropped weapons nearly keep pace. Also of note was the last gray dead to leap down, Bedlamoyne, who managed to do it skillfully enough that she landed on her feet, using the blob of weak competitors as a raft.

No, more than a raft, as was made clear by her first steps across them and toward the grabbler. If she was to lead a gray shadow of a life then she would only accept leading it in full, as she had her people and her operation. That meant the queen of potions could not let his crimson concoction go lightly.

As she neared the mass’s bubbling edge a particular arm shot out and wrapped about her leg. Rather than argue with it she took it and pulled the man Reyvathird out of the rabble and to his feet. Wordlessly they stalked toward their prey together, united in plot regardless of their severe disagreement on the subject of its vessel.

A flattening of the palm coupled with a subtle tug told the salmon to submerge, which it could barely do in the shallow canal. This fact defeated Beocroak’s purpose: to check for avenues where those not half-swallowed by a mammoth fish couldn’t follow.

Instead he tried to perceive more esoteric information. Where did that fixed direction he’d planted point him? What was their speed? He couldn’t judge it by the flow of the water across his skin, because he couldn’t feel it at all. Gravity was still on him, and if he wasn’t clung to the salmon he would be sprinting across the canal bed.

Something scratched at his sense of orientation. Something good. He felt that they were still climbing, despite water typically flowing downhill. It could be attributed to the structure itself rising as more city came in underneath it. For a moment he entertained staying in the canal as long as possible.

But the engineered river wasn’t permitted to be lazy. It was meant to fill up with as many tools and barriers as the city surrounding it. Gates, grates, goods, and guards would manifest there as surely as animals at the watering hole. First to do so in Beocroak’s path was a gate, too thick to smash through. The salmon’s vision was blocked by the body on its hooked snout; the grabbler alerted it to breach and leap to avoid smashing him against the structure. As the gray water broke and cleared his eyes he saw that he’d been swallowed by a large open building, busy with no workers thus far but plenty of clacking sloshing mechanisms of fluid distribution.

Here water had its motion transferred to other things. Great paddle wheels lapped at the canal, exactly as wide, leaving no gap for drifting debris. That was the purpose of the gate after all. Long avoidant of the indoors of the north, Beocroak couldn’t help but marvel at mechanisms so advanced out of necessity in a godless land. Buckets that could scoop horses dropped on thick clunking chains frosted white with splashing minerals. Waterfall walls created temporary chambers whenever a hinge turned. The ceiling dripped once the churning mist realized there was nowhere left to rise, dappling the sluices and bucket puddles with endless ripples.

The grabbler considered it absurd, like a boat in reverse. Rather than take wood to the water and ride its natural strength they poured water into wood, vivisecting it, searching for power, which was then transferred to an inadequate body that couldn’t do much with it for long. Rivers could move eternally. A waterwheel moved only as long as the river did. A tipped cup stopped immediately.

Absurd, yes, but undeniably his only avenue of escape, becoming clear as soon as he saw the devices that received the lion’s share of what the waterwheels reaped. A set of those thick chains traveled diagonally near the ceiling, one coming through a high opening and the other going. Hooked on them were board-hulled gondolas big enough to carry men and livestock, which was no doubt their purpose. These baskets would cart Toeteld’s curious to and from the mouth of Wormskoll, the absolute edge of what they were physically permitted to witness.

Beocroak would be the first passenger. To achieve this he had to leave the canal, something soon to be forced anyway by the approaching bites, swallows, and backwash of the biggest waterwheel he’d ever seen. Following will expressed in grip, his spectral salmon curled and hurled itself out of the canal onto the creaky floor of what the grabbler called a water factory.

From this higher vantage he saw the mound of gray dead reach the gate, pile up, and spill over it. Reyvathird and Bedlamoyne never lost their footing, descending as it first collapsed over the barrier, walking straight into sharing a floor with him. He would have to fight, but only as long as they were within range, and that could be heavily mitigated by climbing.

As his two most committed pursuers picked up speed Beocroak treated his surroundings as a rock wall in an attempt to see the shadows of the overall mechanisms as hand and footholds. Plenty of them were moving, and some of them ascended. The one he chose was out of reach, but not for his extended arm tipped with a muscular fin.

Swinging the entire salmon in an arc, he hammered a paddle that shuddered, momentarily overcome by his power that conflicted with water coming from the opposite direction. Water won out, and the man was pulled into the air along with his weapon. A quarter turn later he realized he was trapped, as he had insufficient footing on the slippery shifting wood to pull the massive salmon from between the slats. The only way to free himself was to abandon his weapon, or wait until after the apex and slip out with gravity.

His foes were not so encumbered, and could climb the paddles to catch up. Both of them arced into view, weapons poised to strike. Beocroak had his feet free, and could kick powerfully enough to turn the wheel himself, a power he instead concentrated on a cracked section of one paddle, upon which Reyvathird stood.

The impact splintered it. The sovereign fell. Beocroak could have killed him in ten ways with his foot, two ways per toe, except three for the biggest and one for the littlest. That assumed a living man as his target. For this gray fellow there was but one way. An intermediary object was needed, something gray he could touch. A flat piece of the paddle had been launched upward when he broke it, and now it fell back down, between his extended sole and Reyvathird’s rage-wrinkled forehead.

Timed perfectly, this second spear-kick crushed the sovereign’s head against the paddle while the rest of his body flailed like a tea party of the timid interrupted by ten thousand fire ants, or as a grabbler would call them, lava cestuses.

Bedlamoyne shifted to take his place. By then they’d passed the wheel’s apex, allowing Beocroak to lean back, free his fish, and get his feet back on the floor. The matriarch disembarked as fluidly as she had at the gate, must have been all that practice making entrances to trade negotiations, while the stunned sovereign had to take another go on the churning wheel to recover.

Beocroak was saved from her by the second floor upon the first, the deep skin of water that suddenly flooded in up to their ankles. His fingers curled into the fish’s most forward gill, aiming it the way one might an open book about to explosively divulge knowledge. With surging tail the salmon both propelled him backward and sprayed a distraction in Bedlamoyne’s face.

Directing the gill flap turned the fish, took them both around the corner of another wheel, now almost directly under the gondolas. The skin of water ceased flowing, robbed them of their propulsive power. Beocroak’s thoughts flooded with the same urgency, calculating whether or not the full strength of the salmon’s tail could throw him high enough to grab a gondola’s edge. There was also the math of board thickness, vital to his fingers stabbing through and giving him purchase, but his plans were interrupted by the rabble.

A portion of the canal had branched, been fed into a chewing wheel, and was now heading backward. In it scrambled more than a dozen of the patrons, throwing their weapons out onto the floor before climbing up. A few were crawling, legs crushed by the wheel, and an arm here or there was now a lodged toothpick. Regardless, their numbers and focus were a threat, if not to his life then to his time, giving the matriarch and the sovereign a chance to catch up.

His solution was to the right, climbing into sight all on its own. One of the giant chained buckets. He could ride it. No, the bucket quickly scolded him, using a clunk instead of a word as it came to a halt. Its sway suggested emptiness. The grabbler followed its gently dancing chain with his eyes, to the ceiling, through a metal wheel, and back down to another bucket. If the first was full it would fall and the other would rise. Its future cargo was right in front of him, gibbering and swinging short swords.

This would be the end for his weapon. Once separated it would sunset back toward double death. Its weight would be too great for the bucket, thus making this its final stand upon Beocroak’s legs. This respectful ultimatum came down through his digits and buried itself in the salmon’s gut. Its great body tensed, which only a grabbler would know wasn’t fearful paralysis. This fish was brave. To the last beyond its final. Until an animal god blinked it out of existence fully, smote it as all dust has been smote.

The grabbler helped it make the most of its power, spinning his whole body to swing it around. The tail skipped across the wood to avoid drag, granting enough speed that the patrons misjudged their approach. Five were caught on its silver side and nearly had their heads knocked from their shoulders, which crumpled to meet each other via compressed innards.

The sound of them hitting the bottom of the big bucket was like crab cakes hurled at a dartboard, and it was pleasing to man and dead fish alike. More was required, as the bucket hardly shuddered. More offered themselves. Beocroak swung the titan of the rivers a final time, swept the patrons into their pit of shame. Then he released the proud animal back into the canal, so that it might aid him to the last, battling any clumps still forced to swim.

And so it did, back and forth across the descending sluice into the depths of the water factory, which it now had, and which were already filled with patrons who couldn’t fight the flow or separate up from down. Any confused and drowning found themselves doubly so when squarely rammed by the thick head of the hippo salmon. Soon its aim would flag, it could already feel Beocroak’s life draining from its gray tissues, causing it to make the most of its immediate trajectory by swallowing three phantoms whole.

Another tail slap sent a spray of would-be warriors out of the canal and into long splattering falls. Only the salmon made it safely to the waterfall drain underneath the factory; it was dumped into a perfect view of Toeteld’s grim grandeur: silver-pearl spires forested far back into the black, fogged glass windows dewy with moon milk, gray and living faceless bats tamed with gray hoods and cuffs and made to deliver scrolls from height to height, wrought bridges high off the rock and bustling with mercantile folk moving only from building’s waist to building’s waist, and a river of smoke with clouds of embers jumping underneath, nipping at it to keep aloft.

The waterfall thinned to air, and the hippo salmon had nothing left. The development emerging from the slide pushed out a little further, and suddenly the creature was stopped, caught by the lip on a large hook. On rocking deck the gray fishers, who couldn’t believe their luck, embraced in celebration. Their catch had returned; the kind grabbler had thrown it back with minimal meat missing.

In the time it took the fish to fight its final battle and return to its then comforting grave, Beocroak had ridden the tethered partner of the weighted bucket into the upper reaches of the water factory, where spit-brained finches flitted about and were not gray. Living birds. The mouth of Wormskoll was so close he could taste it. First he had to leap, down from the lip of the bucket to the next rising gondola.

His landing sent it rocking, made the cable turbulent. A momentary flash of seasickness got in his gut, as he’d barely ever been on a boat, and never one that sailed the air. It didn’t dare stay, since a grabbler might reach down his own throat and extract any trespassers. The relief of its passing was undone by the arrival of two more stowaways, who had climbed emerging stairs, sprung from them, and latched onto the bottom of Beocroak’s bucket while he, unawares, rode it more comfortably.

Bedlamoyne landed to his left. Reyvathird to the right. They no longer had their weapons, both hands needed to hang from the bucket, but they were doubly armed compared to Beocroak, who could not touch them without a cooperating animal or object intermediary. Their pincer was finally complete, and had taken hold at a height no man could survive falling from, in a brittle wooden basket hanging from what felt like, to a grabbler’s hand, a single thread.

“Nowhere to go but negotiation,” the matriarch warned him, approaching with the side of her feet, a snake slithering without lowering its strike. “Let’s talk. You can have any privileges you desire, as long as it’s under my roof, and as long as I can take the day’s blood.”

“Typical woman!” the sovereign scoffed from the other side. “Best use for a man is slowly bleeding him dry. Why not just marry the bastard? No grabbler, that’s not your fate. I know what a danger you are. Rather than keeping my guard up eternally, waiting for your disemboweling escape attempt, I will auction you off right away to the highest bidder, and use that seed money to invest in a much stabler, less hazardous business.” His head jerked to the side to ensure Bedlamoyne could see his face past their shared quarry. “That’s the smartest move.”

“For a coward!” she fired back. “You’ll never get anything better down here than a well of red blood. Drop for drop it’s better than rubies. He must be farmed for the rest of his life, put out to pasture as an emptied skin and broomstick bones. That’s the savviest and smartest of moves! What say you grabbler? Body sold or heart milked?”

No words were needed to express his smartest move. Beocroak threw himself backward, flipping over the gondola’s side, to much panic from his hopeful exploiters. The two gray dead collided with each other as they rushed to see him fall. It turned into a slap fight, each contact hopefully powerful enough to drown out the sound of four fingers firing like writing desk cannons, punching through gray wood and holding tight.

The grabbler had grabbed the bottom, much as they had discreetly ridden his bucket, but the gondola had no edges. Every swinging move he attempted would have to include fresh holes in its side, and too many of those would see them all fall through its crumbling floor. Ah, Beocroak realized. That’s the way. Brachiating as the apes do, but with obligatory attacks on the sustaining branch, he swung underneath the gondola, punching holes as he went, attempting to encircle the bickering phantoms.

“Wait, wait, what’s that?” Reyvathird faltered, suffering one last slap before they both searched for the source of the sound, quickly spotting the ram-worms of Beocroak’s bombastically sprouting fingertips.

“He’s breaking the floor! Stop him you imbecile.”

“How you daft banshee!? If we kick him and he falls we lose everything.” Reyvathird hopped to avoid a penetration near his foot, despite Beocroak’s inability to injure him.

“He doesn’t need all his fingers either way,” Bedlamoyne pointed out, “so take away his climbing gear!” She dropped to her hands and knees, bit at the nearest appearing fingers. Skin nearly broke, the man barely pulling his digits back in time. Only half of them could be safe at any moment, forcing him to stay on the move.

It quickly became apparent he could not win, not with them aware. Their bobbing gray teeth were catching him with each strike, and he was bleeding again. The blood made everything slippery when he could least afford it. In order to survive he needed to get back inside the craft, and solve the problem of his foes only after that.

He made for the nearest side. Clambered up it. Mantled. Back on his feet, he had successfully returned to his hopeless situation, with the specters closing in, taking care to not plunge their feet into any of the weaknesses he’d created. Holey boards were the only change to the gondola. If he could use anything, it was the newly introduced element.

With a twist Beocroak ripped the side he’d just climbed and tore a chunk of it loose, his finger holes acting as perforation that eased the process. He would’ve much rather had any part of an animal, even the similar dimensions of a turtle plastron, but this flimsy plank would have to do. If he was true to his skill, it would only have to work once.

Suddenly, he perceived that many things lined up in his favor, like fog filling a keyhole and freezing. Reyvathird’s head was behind Bedlamoyne’s. Behind both of them, framing them, were seams in the gondola’s opposite side: a gate that had escaped their notice. This being a transport, there actually was a proper way to board and disembark. Beocroak would make them use it.

He put the siding between the gray dead and himself, centered it with angry aim, and then delivered a swift kick to the middle, strong as he could without splitting it. The woman, and then the man behind, took it to the chest, both bodies stumbling backward and hitting the gate with enough force to bust its latch and swing it open.

They had no choice but to grab on as it swung to its fullest and dangled them over the chasm of candlelit windows bubbling up from slanted rock, at pace with their own progress. Beocroak barreled forward and saw his next step: an iron spike the size of his arm that held the gate’s hinge together.

His nostrils swallowed breath like dragons slurping burning rope. Focus, air, strength, fingertips, all were concentrated on the head of the nail, a thing that could not be extracted by any living thing but a grabbler, too flush with its surface for a beast’s teeth, too metallic for any claws, and too stubborn for any single swing of human tool.

Down went his arms, fingers gouging the wood, chips exploding in all directions. The spear point of his grip found the nail head’s lip. Lock. Pull. Every part of the hinge squealed in protest, the sound alerting the hanging ghosts to the possibility that Beocroak could actually do what he appeared to attempt.

“No, wait wait wait!” Reyvathird babbled as he tried to climb Bedlamoyne, who was only halfway done climbing the swinging gate herself.

“See reason!” she implored. “Was I not true to my word before?” He did not answer with anything but further extraction. Against its will the gray nail rose from its resting place. Across the way of the open gate’s pointing, the return gondola began to pass. Reyvathird saw it, recognizing it as nothing more than a consolation prize. If he fell it would take time to put himself back together, especially if some gray vermin ran off with a popped-out eyeball or pilfered organ. At least on the other gondola he could find another use for the valuable time of Toeteld’s founding.

In clambering and coiling for his launch, against Bedlamoyne’s side, she read his intent and had to make a similar decision for herself. The leech’s weight was on her, she wasn’t close enough to grab at Beocroak, and the nail was all but freed. Her teeth gnashed. She balled herself up, turned and launched off the gate before it could plummet. Both specters flew the short distance and were dumped into the descending gondola, where they proceeded to roll back and forth, taking turns throttling each other’s throats.

Beocroak fell as the gate did, onto the sturdiest portion of floor. He let the nail go about its business, rolling away and tipping down one of the holes he’d dug with a single strike. That was a pin all of Toeteld could hear drop. It clattered down the side until it found roofs, gutters, and pipes, falling even further than the hippo salmon had. Eventually it would come to rest in Bonecushion, and, much later, be sold as one of the artifacts of the day: the nail that opened the coffin and freed the sole survivor of Toeteld. Some confusion would arise, and many ghosts would think it the signature item of Castle Coffinnail. After it was shipped there, displayed in a glass case, those circling gawkers would lean in and see the eight places around its head where Beocroak’s fingertips had deformed the gray metal.

The muscle burn they implied lived in his hands as he rested on his back. His very finger bones felt bent, possibly making them useless as legal tender in the expanding empire of the dead. Most of the energy he’d farmed and eaten out of the octopus was spent, leading him to regret not taking several bites out of the hippo salmon’s side before letting it off the leash. His stomach growled; it took rolling onto his flank to silence it, with the side effect of pouring his gaze down one of the many holes in the floor.

The slide flowed by. Sprouting windowpanes caught up and overtook so that he was looking at cultivated rows of weak gray light, the undead orchard of the Toeteld people, freed from the amnesiac drudgery of the endless country, bound in the doldrums of employment and economy that their pathetic souls misunderstood as the point, hearth, and edge of life.

Somewhere above, the gondola had a final stop. Toeteld had already beaten him to the mouth of Wormskoll. When he landed he would face the ultimate challenge to his survival, his freedom, and the life he knew would concern itself even less with the affairs of the purse stitchers and the gold counters. To the sea beside Rooth Tugt, if he made it. Into the cleansing waters that would make sure nothing could follow him. Then north, to forge a solitary world out of a man, a silent nomad of peace, wandering as the planets do, untroubled by the expectant looks of any neighbor suffering need.

(Continued in Part Four)