(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 56 minutes)

HAND

They couldn’t keep him, not on their long trek cutting the coasts of Welkmadat. On a farm he could become a member of the family, a reliable hand, a forager with a nose for food better than any hound’s or pig’s, but on a quest he was a burden, a worrisome pet.

This the nameless man knew, never voicing complaint as long as they tolerated him. She got better treatment despite being a similar sort of animal, the reason being plain. Her curse was not literal. It was not grown into the bones of her face and erupting out of her skin like new volcanic lands. When she opened her mouth, which she did not often do, just like her forebears and her guardian, actual words could come out, whereas the nameless man could only produce squawks, titters, whistles, shrieks, honks, quacks, and peeps. The sound was entirely dependent on which of its many forms the curse took at that moment. No matter what his utterances sounded like complaint, so he tried to not make them in the dignified and silent company he would get to keep all too briefly.

The heart of the jungle of Rooth Tugt was the pair’s ultimate goal. Therein was the cursed man’s purpose; he had been near there. If he hadn’t, his face would not have stood out in any crowd. Perhaps his arms, perhaps before they had withered, but not his dull eyes now gone sad or his nose that never sniffed out trouble early enough.

Most of the time, when the pair spoke, it was to ask him questions he could answer with a yes or no, nod or shake. Was the Rooth Tugt jungle as deadly as they say? Nod. Worse than dying underground? Shake. Was it populated by monstrous animals bearing human speech? Nod. Could such animals be grabbled? Shake. Why not? Squawk. Wrong sort of question.

He could not ask his own questions, like why they sought such a remote and legendary place. Reversing the context of their queries gave him some clue. She just did as she was told, since she already had more than she deserved. One of their people was her sworn guardian, which would have seemed impossible to those who knew the reputed ways of Lazuli Pawlm. Her claimed arm, the air beside she so habitually grabbed at, was almost as clear an indicator of her condition as the nameless man’s curse.

She was called Jeremiad. Not her name originally. They were all called Jeremiad once they had become less than whole. Her variation on that particular theme of outcast was the right arm, her former dominant, and that was part of the problem in and of itself. Grabblers were not supposed to have dominant arms, at least not obvious ones. All limbs were equals at grabbling.

One of hers had failed to live up to this, and so been bitten off by a creature she had attempted to grabble. A bad grip on the gut meant no control; it meant feeding the beast. It was tantamount to self-destruction. It was a fear that prevented becoming. When a person, consciously or unwittingly, removes their own ability to grabble, they are asking to be expelled from the sight of Gaw Digi-tally. The shame of her crystal-weeping eyes seeing that air beside the ribs was a black mark on them all.

Jeremiads were free to have any lesser life they wanted, as long as they did not enter Lazuli Pawlm again. Many people were missing limbs, especially in these recent days of fewer lizard miracles; a Jeremiad could be identified among them by the gnawed nature of their scar or by the other degenerated signs of grabbler heritage.

She, so lucky to have her guardian, was a clear example of one: slender of frame, more slender than grabbler women should be, but still as densely muscled as a shellfish medley, stoic in expression, and with a slimmer neck displaying the craning look not so visible on the others, the one that stared down burrows and dens all the way to what cowered in the back.

This Jeremiad was twenty-some years of age. Her charcoal hair was cropped to near-nothing. Gray-green eyes on slate whites betrayed almost none of her indignity. Full striated lips were the same color as the rest of her, a near-purple muddy shade not unlike the wet sandy lands of Welkmadat they currently walked. Her strong jaw was overly stiff from lack of conversation; she looked like she could chew up and down but not side to side. The nameless man still thought her far the luckier, as he could only peck and swallow.

Jeremiad wore more clothing than her guardian, yet little more than gray rags and a rumpled hood that never could make up its mind about hanging behind her head or under her chin. She kept the faith, and thus kept her feet bare. Her presence was unwelcoming, in a way that also made clear that was its softened state, after having been forgiven and taken under the intact wings of her guardian.

Rare was the Jeremiad able to, in any way, rejoin the grabblers, whether they kept the faith and craft or not. Her success indicated that her master must also be an exile, someone expelled from Lazuli Pawlm not for suffering a diminishing bite, but blaspheming: getting caught with a love of gold, or nepotism with a child directly in their line, or cowardice in refusing to grabble the venomous.

Yet he was no outcast. If he’d returned he would have been welcomed back, not lovingly mind you, but respectfully. He’d made a mercenary go, and in those years there was not enough atrocity to earn banishment, not that anyone knew.

He was not quite as dark as her, his scars the lightest parts, wrapping his shoulders like radiant halos of the flesh, like ropes carried for the hogtying of divine beasts. Muscle rolled like a calm ocean whenever he moved. A beard like a landslide in a black fir forest gave the weaklings of the world something to focus on when they couldn’t bare to look him in his resolute eyes.

He is called Beocroak.

Denied Gaw, and now her sister, Jeremiad would have been truly alone in the world without his kindness, which was partly extended to the cursed man as well. What made him so accommodating? Their least companion did not know, but hard nostrils smelled something on the man. It wasn’t visible, nor particularly pungent; familiarity convinced him. Beocroak was cursed. That was why he sought the heart of Rooth Tugt. The hoard of magic there could do much, break all the beads of curse on Death’s bangle, save the last, his specialty.

Getting there was not possible, not even for a grabbler, the least of them thought, not failing to realize his cynicism contributed to his own reduction. Nay-saying in the talk of mourning doves and surly crows was unavoidable; if his jaw wasn’t one it was the other.

Nightfall came, and quickly without the old hands to prolong it into gorgeous sweaty dusk. The trio found a culvert in weathered tidal rocks that hadn’t drunk the water in decades, thus filled with crumbling driftwood just good enough for their fire, ignited the grabbler way: two sticks, one pull across. What took a normal man at least minutes of twiddling and blowing was over in a flash, as if the wood was sharpened into flame. Beocroak planted it as the patriotic would their flags, then he plopped down into muddy sand dried into cake and warmed himself while Jeremiad swept in, laying a circle of smaller branches to feed it.

She too sat, opposite her master, both ignoring the accursed until he’d done his bird bill’s business, disregard he much appreciated over the scorn he’d experienced from others. At flame’s flickering edge he stalked, withered arms involuntarily hooked like a chicken’s, bent over as if to empty one end when he was actually trying to fill the other.

Time it was to feed, so his mask that could be any bird’s changed to a stork’s, ideal for plucking shelled things from the sand. Down his curved red spear went, and up came an unfortunate clam that had dug well out of the way of plunging human fingers. He placed it in the crook of his arm for safekeeping, giving the curse’s contortion a purpose, cleverness that had not escaped the lurking eye of Beocroak. Do not help those with nothing to live for, some say, often in the same breath they tell you not to die underground. He wasn’t just a bird with some skin left, not if he was being clever, effective.

His foraging was how he earned his keep, be it what he had already done to gather answers from the edge of Tugt or the basket worth of edibles he brought to the fire and tossed in to cook in their own shells. Dying blackening things spat jets of steaming water in all directions, the grabblers taking any spray nonchalantly. Only Jeremiad reacted to them, blinking when some came for her eyes.

When she opened them again she glanced at her guardian. Not looking. Not judging. The accursed bird had been out of Gaw’s gaze much longer, couldn’t recall if their people were expected to withstand blisters on the surface of the eye. What he did remember was what to do when blinded: grabble an eye-bearing animal. Its internal reactions would tell the grabbler’s arm what it saw, and from there they should know where to swing.

Only ocean sounds. Wood crumbled to black powder instead of crackling. Dying shellfish were done applauding their final moments. The accursed kept one hand wrapped around his beak to stop it squawking in protest, it not having been fed since the worms that afternoon. Even if he began to choke he would not let it open before his hosts had begun to eat.

Callus made most fires below the threshold of the forge harmless to a grabbler, as long as the exposure was short-lived. Beocroak casually dipped his hand into the pit, took up a smooth black shell like an obsidian knife, and crushed it to shards before it could sear him. He’d done it without obliterating the meat in the middle, so that when he opened his hand he could blow the shards away like dust and tuck in.

Jeremiad used her feet. Down an arm, she redeemed herself by adding versatility to those that remained. Her toes were nearly as dexterous as her fingers, and even more resistant to the flame, having marched the coals of all her campfires since becoming Jeremiad, and long before she knew Beocroak’s forgiveness and understanding. Supported on her arm, her legs folded and bent all the way to her face, pointer toes prying the shell apart. She ate it off the sole.

Hold your bird’s tongue one moment more, he warned himself. It couldn’t do words, but they might hear his jeering tone, and from it infer that he was mocking Jeremiad. Her mannered legs made no difference. All that mattered to Gaw was whether you lost what you’d been gifted. She’d let something steal a part and keep it.

If she’d managed to reclaim it a golden thread of Hexaclete or the waters of Tallybirth could unite the two once more. Take it under with you, hold your breath long enough, and when you emerged you would not only be whole, but the scar fusing the pieces together would show perfect stitching marks. A water needle. A tool of a dead god tolerated by the others because it was too small and thin to see most of the time, hidden in the water’s shimmer: the counterpart to the reaper’s rusty broad scythe. Death took the most, imprecisely, raggedly, while expert exacting life gave its all just to save what could only be saved by a clean and knowing needle.

What Jeremiad had instead of the darning love of Digi-Tally was a plug of bone jutting from the old wound. Not her own. It was placed there for the flesh to anchor as it healed, then carved all the way round in a depiction of tiny figures running free through the forest, leaping with the deer and off their antlers. Some other peoples must have done that for her. And still not kept her. Only an animal had kept her, until the savior of her soul who silently ate his crabs, cracking their legs into individual segments between his agile fingers and taking the meat one by one as if playing a culinary pipe flute.

Once the accursed had the jeering of the many birds taking turns with his face under control he allowed himself to crawl to the fire’s edge and pluck his own morsels. On every thrown-back swallow he missed chewing. Every bite was matched by a falling tear. He couldn’t help getting saddest when he ate. That was when he remembered that there was no hope anymore. Nobody could break his affliction, not under such a gray sky.

Some nights passed without question or comment. The accursed could only provide so much information, and was glad for their sparse questions, yet another kindness as they likely were. Each was another night he was permitted to stay in their company. Tonight would not be silent, but he would not have to spend one of his answer-rations either.

“Master,” Jeremiad addressed when the meal was mostly finished. The voice of a young serpentine dragon robbed of its hiss. “The city… what is there to grabble?” She glanced at the bird-cursed man. So that was it then. She as much as said they would be passing through the city, where he could not go. If he did he would be singled out immediately as one of the new evil creatures coming up from the earth now that no one was watching. It didn’t matter that that wasn’t what he was. His curse was of a more traditional sort, made mostly by men, none of its predominant elements having wriggled up from the underbelly at any point.

What she asked was what she said, and what she said was that he would have to leave them once the city was in sight. He held his beak to stifle complaint. It was more than fair. Beocroak had provided kindness, but he was on his own narrowing path; there was no reason to stay once the beak could not whittle that path further. The grabbler didn’t look comfortable with his kindness, so perhaps he provided it because he believed no one else could.

“Lots of old docks from when the tide used to go in that far,” her guardian answered, his voice lower than any nearby shellfish. What was left in the beach likely dug deeper when they heard it. “You know them, kin of mine. List.” She knew, even the accursed knew, and he had not grabbled anything stronger than a stone fruit since he was a child. Still there was a moment of hesitation, ingrained in her now, what cost her flesh, bone, and status.

“Daubslaps.” He didn’t give so much as a purse of the lips. “Duster crabs, sticky stars, wood bandits, gullyholes, storm sketrels… and estuary baskdragons.”

“Yes.”

“There’s… there’s more isn’t there?”

“You won’t be able to grabble them, since you don’t know they’re there to grabble. You can’t call them to you.” A flush and a fever were suddenly in her cheeks; they looked about to pop. Jeremiad was much more frightening to the accursed than her larger, stronger, two-handed master, because she was most of a grabbler on the outside while being a knotted rope of rage on the inside. She would kill over insults, only now she would not be given the berth or courtesy when doing so that a true grabbler would.

The only person she had to take it out on was the only person who accepted her. Genuinely for the best, the accursed thought, grabbing at his shrinking beak as it became a penguin’s to try and escape his hushing, that they soon part ways, for when she released that torrent of fury he would be the best target if she wanted to keep some life for after.

What twisted her most that night was what her two companions knew. She could still grabble, despite the caution she had to exercise, the fear she had to exorcise, but she could not roar well. No animal respected the experience in her call, the quiver only they could hear. Things she had grabbled before would answer, not their offspring, not their fellows. If she wanted to take up a weapon she had to prove her dominance first, down in the gut, with the one handed knot that took time, that made her slow to draw in battle. She grabbled like a farmer convincing a tortoise to pull their plow.

“Doorstop lobsters.” Thus the conversation ended.

Five days’ walk to the city, estimated the flightless bird.

Approaching it from another angle, roughly the same distance away, were the twenty-six survivors of the shipwreck Thumbscale. Rags used to wipe the deck, never dry again, were wrapped around their foreheads to serve as uniform, to mark them as the crew of their captain: Roddery Graychild.

To the south was the sea. And to the south of that, another land. Whose land? No one’s. No god ruled there or found it enticing enough to migrate. The south of the world was dark, and not the sort of dark that creeps up when the sun retires. It was the dark of being dipped in the low universe. All worlds bobbed in immaterial waters to suspend them as they traveled about god-hung baubles like the sun and the distant lilac moon that only flirtatiously visited these skies.

Below the Half-Bite, what the compass-artists in the north call the equator, everything is immersed in that dim. Lower beings notice it little, but for gods it is like trying to go about your day submerged. It slows them, and no matter how solid their craftsmanship, their works seem to just drift away, yawned off, perhaps to eventually be savored by a foreign world.

People live on No God’s Land. Ships infrequently cross, and when they do they bring stories, of the bounties of having a god watching over you. Thumbscale was a ship loaded with those stories as cargo, nourishing the souls of those men and women just as surely as their white raisins prevented scurvy. It sailed for Hexaclete’s Land, made it within arm’s reach, and then was struck down by her.

Still in No God’s Land, the survivors accepted. Faith could be kept in the captain, and only him among so many foreign cultures that ate on wildlife seeming to use the wrong palette of colors. Captain Graychild could always be counted on to have a heading; all it took to get one was a conversation with a local net fisherman who was nowhere near the water.

“It wasn’t that kind of net,” Roddery told his crew as he led them through the silky mud sands of Welkmadat toward the city he now knew to be called Beerbet. “It’s all chains. He just drags it through the mud and gets all sorts of treats.” He nodded to his first mate, called Xeams. The man fell back and disappeared. Nobody paid attention to where he went, as Roddery turned and walked backward, continuing to lecture them spiritedly on all he had learned in five exchanged lines.

As he spoke it was easy to take account of him. A black beard salted white climbed both sides of his face to frame his round eyes, wide nose, and teeth whitened with a fibrous root that left the gums permanently irritated to inflamed red. Purple notches of fatigue fluttered in the corners of his expressive eyes: tiny moths disturbed by his volatile outbursts.

On his hip sat an iron rod that was the core of a steel sword. In No God’s Land they named weapons, even though they did not truly live as grabbler weapons did. Breakwater was the rod-sword’s name. If it had one eye to open Xeams would have been the second mate instead. Thumbscale had no helm, only a plate into which Breakwater would slot for Roddery to steer with. Why, his crew often wondered, did he even take them along when he could fill every role himself?

“The place is called Beerbet crew, which tells a lot. It tells of double vision, which we already knew, but I don’t want to see any of you doubling yours. Don’t you touch a drop or place a wager without my explicit order. We’re going up against the dandruff of a leper god, and I need your wits about you. We’ll have that eye before any of them learn we’re dunked southerly.”

“And we’ll get our hand back,” one of the women added.

“That we will Odebtte. Nobody kills a cousin of mine and gets away with it. We’ve already narrowed it down to this continent. And that bastard won’t be leaving it, no sir, not with the chance there’ll be a new lad using these clouds as doormat soon.”

Xeams returned, weaving through the crew like a krait through kelp. Somehow he managed to do it silently even as he held a net of rusty chains. Once clear he tossed it, the item exploding into jangling as if it had only just begun existing. Roddery caught it, swung it around once, and tossed it to someone else.

“Drag that behind and rustle us up something to eat Badcards,” he instructed the man. Soon they would have a fire and a boil, same as several other parties aiming for Beerbet, peppering the city’s outskirts with orange fireflies by night, catching sight of not just the overturned and emptied moon, but the new orb in the sky, much closer, watered by wreathing clouds: the paranoid eye of Escaboulnté.

On another later night, closer to Beerbet, the orange firefly belonging to Beocroak, Jeremiad, and the accursed bird-mouth changed color to green. If they hadn’t finished their supper yet they would not have eaten any crabs, prawns, or shells remaining in the pit after the flame’s shift to that brighter yet putrescent hue. She might’ve done something to them.

For a fire turning green meant only one thing. Nearby there was a witch. Most magics on Hexaclete’s Land had their home pastures. Goodly powers were kept above the clouds, sprinkled down as need be. The Ghastly churned below. The ones called Rationce and Engineery, which weren’t really magic at all, thrived in the cold and neglected north. Conjury, ramshackle tricks badly learned by bits and bobs that washed ashore from distant lands, was common across the southwestern shores of Welkmadat that stretched up into the barrens before the stark green line where the jungles of Rooth Tugt quietly exploded.

Not witchcraft. That could be found anywhere, cobbled together from dregs of Good and Ghast, twisted, passed down in bloodlines, tattoos, and the pollen of pressed flowers. Witchcraft, or Natury, was a nomadic trade, or an infesting one, sometimes to be trusted and sometimes not. A good rule of thumb was to not trust it when it was sold.

Grabblers had less to fear, all but impossible as it was to sell to them. Still, the trio around their green flame stared at it in concern. If not for those crowding fireflies, they would’ve considered themselves in the middle of nowhere. Logic surmised she was headed the same way. And it would be a she, most likely. Male witches, warbolocks, for reasons unknown, were much more like hermit crabs, stealing isolated watchtowers and turning them into other barely-functioning worlds on the inside.

“Why is it green?” Jeremiad asked. It was better to learn from her master by observation of the example he set, but his travels outside Lazuli Pawlm had made him far more knowledgeable than he appeared. She saw no other way to follow in his footsteps but to ride his heel annoyingly. The accursed squawked weakly; he knew the answer and could not supply it. Like the mussels they’d been eating he had such wonders to disgorge, but they would spoil on contact with the air.

“She changed it,” Beocroak answered after several silent seconds contemplating the exact shade of green. “People not so Goodly as they claimed used to burn witches. Ash has a hard time resurrecting. The witches came together and made a new spell. Now when they’re near fire it changes to witchfire, which can’t burn those who practice natury.”

“But now we know when she’s close.”

“If she’s any good at being a witch that’s not a concern of hers.” There the conversation died. After the fire went too the coals stayed a cloudy emerald. Witches traveled by night. She should’ve passed them by, unless, Jeremiad noted, she wasn’t looking for Beerbet.

It was the next morning she found them, when they were seemingly out of the salty mud, surrounded by reeds and marsh grasses that liked to tap on the shoulder. By the sounds of their bare feet one would learn they weren’t quite out of the wetlands yet. The accursed was catching frogs now as he stalked along in the back, silencing their peeping calls one by one until something did it all at once.

Beocroak and company halted. Among them not a single bag was carried. No item of clothing had not also been used as a rag. Money was old scab to grabblers, peeled off and discarded as soon as possible. There was nothing for bandits to steal.

Her ambush could not have appeared more innocent as her head poked out of the fen just ahead of them. Awkward and ungainly, she rose to her feet and stretched her back, hands on her hips, drawing full attention to her advanced gravidity. The babe, if it belonged to her and not to some demon she had made pact with, would come along any time she chose, so long as it was this month.

Hair like a shrub overtaken by vines and then spring rain, her soft yet knowing expression cascaded with it down into the rest of her so that she could not be seen as any one feature. She was less with child and more with the swamp, head and body wrapped in a shawl net that transitioned into the grass as if grown from it. It was her only clothing, leaving exposed so many diamonds of bronze skin, some around her midsection striped with stretching, yet no more intimate feature revealed.

The weaving silent stare between Beocroak and the witch, coupled with her smile, drove Jeremiad to take the initiative. A lump of blistered brown stirred near her feet, so she stomped to startle it. Up popped a striped toad of enormous girth, yellow mouth opened in shock. Jeremiad’s fist thrust into it, forcing the animal to bite down toothlessly. She gripped it correctly, particular inner valve pinched between ring and little finger. Its reaction was to produce thick milky globs of toxin from permanent pustules on its back. The girl took a fighting stance.

“You are a weary traveler,” the witch said, not sparing a glance for the posturing of the girl behind him, nor for the accursed cowering further back, who hid his face out of habit, as her natury would know of his ailment before she saw them. Her voice was out of a conch, out of the long throat of a loon. If her words did not perceive the truth they caressed it to match.

Beocroak lifted one hand, then slowly lowered it to order Jeremiad to stand down. The girl obeyed, saving face by smearing some of the toad’s toxin on her chest as she released it back to the mire. This was lotion to grabblers, reinforcing tolerance and immunity to what they had experienced many times.

“What do you want?” he asked their road block.

“You,” answered her inviting lips, heavy, almost dripping, with desire. Her dark eyes suffered the fog of rolling clouds, though the actual sky was clear. Out of this haze came perception. “I have had no real man in some time Beocroak.” She stroked her stomach. “Her sire is dead. I would like to be together today, not alone, and she is not here to help me yet. Please, offer me the kindness.”

“Master, Beerbet fills by the day. We do want to be alone, and its streets won’t offer that if we delay.”

“She’s right,” the elder grabbler said to his apprentice, “we are weary travelers. We have no designs on the eye’s perch. We will be afforded our moment regardless of the line’s length, for we are grabblers… and so is she.”

Jeremiad looked again. The net-shawl broke her up, turned her into diamonds of eggshell-textured skin and vines of raven hair, making it difficult to see the defined muscle of her arms and legs as well as the plowshare rigidity of her straightened shoulders. Now that the girl tried to see it, she could make out that most particular sign of someone who had practiced in grabbling for many years: limbs that belonged on a slightly larger torso.

But she wasn’t practicing, Jeremiad noted, silent and bitter. Once could not serve two masters unless one of them was a god. No grabblers were in witchcraft, no witches in the grace of Gaw Digi-Tally. She did not cry her brittle tears for they who went afield and foraged for other ways of life. What were the odds they would cross paths with two formerly of Lazuli Pawlm? It had taken years to meet just Beocroak. Something was afoot.

Perhaps her good luck had been used up on her master, and now it was time for the bad. These people were reflections in a filthy mirror, lapsed grabblers come to leech off one of the greatest in the hopes that something other than hardest work and grandest labors would redeem them in the stone eyes of Gaw. Their presence was a statement that Jeremiad did the same.

“Jeremiad,” Beocroak addressed, breaking her taut tangling anger. “Guard our friend while he hunts dinner. Practice finding burrows with your feet. I must have a few hours.”

“Master I-“

“Have never seen me with a woman,” he reminded. “I do need their company now and again.” It was almost a laugh, which was as shocking as a laugh, since she had never seen him in full mirth either. “It quiets the soul.”

“Yes Master.” She turned and joined their poor bird-mouth, the two wandering off together in search of meals and the holes they lived inside. When Beocroak wanted them back he could roar, which Jeremiad would feel through the muck. It wouldn’t surprise her if he could make it ripple across the entire fen.

The other couple, forming easily, as if sharing an idea of a nest that needed to be built somewhere, walked a ways and found the perfect site for it under a bending bog tree and its bluish shade that sapped the strength out of the thick grass, leaving it soft and bent where elsewhere it was splintering and itchy.

“Names are not necessary in passing,” the witch said as Beocroak helped her to sit down against the trunk, “but yours has already come to me, so I will give you mine.”

Gilgalunge

“I am happy to join with you,” he said as he eased down by her side. “I have met none of us on the road who are living their lives well. Only gray, cursed, and shunned. But one day Jeremiad will return, and they will have to take her back, so mighty will be her remaining limbs. I’m going to do that for her, and that is how I live well.”

“Your kindness to her is apparent,” Gilgalunge said, voice starkly void of approval or disapproval. “But you are burdened by the other one; you can do nothing for him.” She shrugged the shawl off her shoulders, allowing Beocroak to take it down further, but once it was bunched against her back she let it stay there. Her lean pressed their shoulder skin together, put her hair under his nose, and he smelled the smoke used to dry poisonous petals and buds. Intoxicated by it, each sense that got a hold of the witch quivered in the most relevant organ. Now his body heat did quarrel with the cooling shade, cloaking them both in choppy anticipating air.

“His curse is strong,” Beocroak confirmed. “He has been our companion for a while now, but he speaks only bird calls. Your natury knew more of him immediately. Can you tell me anything?”

“I cannot break it,” she said, cutting straight to the point, her answer the only thing about her not flowing, not luxuriating in the moment. One of his large hands slid across her gravid swell, hefted the weight of her future from underneath. From this a grabbler could assess as much about the child as a witch could a fate from rolling bones or seam-drying tea leaves. “It isn’t our craft. A warbolock I think, but working with fresher magics, ones still Goodly or Ghastly, not yet strained and purified through the cloth of generations.”

If he had chosen to speak on the subject Beocroak might have described what he felt of her welcoming shape as the cloth of generations. Her child twitched, and he knew which limbs moved and their tenor in doing so. It was little known that grabblers were the best medicine folk for women in waiting, exclusive as the skill usually was to Lazuli Pawlm, and little needed there anyway with such ready access to Tallybirth and its font palm. Placing a woman in its waters during labor ensured neither party would perish, and if she could climb into the palm on her own the child was blessed, as Dignidog had been. This was, crucially, not the making of a tallyweed. Those had no craftsmen but the softer sister.

“Tell me of her,” the witch said, fully aware what his discerning hand was doing. Insight of her own was plentiful, but he was an outside perspective. His opinion might change the course of their encounter, and an entire life. Five fingertips pressed a little deeper into her skin, eliciting a sharp gasp of delight.

“She is quick… and light on her feet. No one will see or hear her coming. This means she has choices. All circumstances are by her design, because she chooses when and where to enter them. This is a child who will live in a world of doors, who will memorize secret knocks from hearing them once.”

“I want to know more,” she said hungrily. “I demand more Beocroak.” She turned and moved onto him, forcing his back against the roots if he was not to compress her child dangerously between them. Grabbing, Gilgalunge took both his hands from him and placed them on her stomach as she straddled his hips.

In her eyes he saw more than a crossing barely arranged by a witch’s know-how. There was a degree of destiny to the black, also sharpened onto her bared bottom teeth that had curled the bark from countless willows. What future he felt she could mold. Like a bellows she breathed, in all directions, stirring up her child into greater motion, helping him learn much more.

“She can escape,” he said, matching her exhale without the inhale. The grabbler allowed his vision to blur into daylight yellow and bark brown ecstasy so he might better see with his hands. “She escapes to higher ground, always. When she is threatened she only moves closer to the divine. And deliberately.”

“From your lips…” she moaned, “to mine.” In her current state it should have been impossible for her to bend down and kiss him. It happened anyway, though he did not see how, happy to let his eyes drift into colors of their own make, into an interpretation of the rays sneaking through the tree’s shifting canopy.

Her shawl moved across his cheeks, and through one of its empty diamonds came her kiss, framed in strands. On her tongue he tasted the tips of a thousand licked spoons that had swirled in dainty cups of potion. There was freshly dug and chewed root, the commonest snacks of trekking grabblers, kicked out of the ground without slowing down, picked up by the top of the foot the way the hand takes a bucket by its handle.

Far from their minds they connected. He was in her the way she was in his mouth. Her first thrust crashed over him, the wave breaking his weariness. One of her palms pushed his forehead down, planting the back of his skull in the soil the tree had sucked dry. The strength and determination of her lower body watered him, and before pleasure could take over he wondered what she was trying to make grow out of this.

Then it became impossible to wonder. Her rhythmic panting obscured the sound of his larger lungs. Shadows of raining hair passed over his vision, drizzling and tickling until a tipping deluge over his collarbone. There were women, and then there were grabbler women. And aside from those, there were witches too.

He’d never had all three at once. Was it natury that subdued him, or just the last few lacking years? In her pounce, decidedly not their embrace, he worried the heretofore unheard-of concept of a sexual Jeremiad was his fate. Gilgalunge worked him like dough on a floured table; in her frenzied processing recipe it might be difficult to notice if she broke an ingredient prematurely or recklessly.

A lack of pain made that no real concern. What he feared was the sudden loss of limb-sense, not dissimilar from the demon of sleep seizing his astral form, pinching hands and feet together over the small of his back, making the seam between his gut muscles involuntarily inviting and vulnerable to splitting blade.

Beocroak couldn’t help but grunt as she pushed him further into the dirt. Spirit erupted out of him, into her, spending a stockpile that he did not think could be emptied in a single encounter. The typical limp sensation was nowhere to be found; instead he felt all the more rooted, planted like glass lightning, like gnarled corkscrew roots.

It was to immobilize him. The knife was to keep him that way. Its edge against his throat did not speed the return of his other senses, further evidence she was using magics on him. Confusion, rather than fear, was what dispelled some of her bewitching haze. She comported too much like a grabbler, even without practice, and killing him with a blade after such mutual passion was not the sort of evil to expect.

“Stay,” she ordered him, the word pressing between his eyes like an ice pick. “My hand does not take life; it gives it. Move with a man’s impudence and you’ll perish of your own ego.” Beocroak was silent, finding plenty more to listen to in her face, as her eyes could not have been more open if she was an owl. Heated breath was almost visible: the air over an opening volcanic fissure. Her hair seemed to grow, fluff, and curl across her cheeks, ready to explode into a newborn forest. “Watch as my hand gives.”

The grabbler made no attempt to move, weighed down by blade, body, and curiosity alike. What could she possibly want? A witness? To this aberrant display of unwieldy fertility, of attempted dignity in birth’s spillage? Watered again by the witch, this time he recognized what flowed over both his thighs and into the loose ground as the floodwaters of labor.

Timing it alone must have taken incredible skill. Distant moon goddess was not there to assist her, and could not see her through the bright blue fog of day. Cast adrift so long ago, frightened as she was of the immersing south, her powers were felt mostly in cyclical tugs, the increments of which could never be altered. Gilgalunge must have parlayed with something else, something that allowed her to reach into her own body and make adjustments.

Lifting off of him, without relinquishing her thighs’ grip on his, without the blade so much as trembling, as if her arm could stretch from its socket to keep it steady, the witch positioned her free hand far underneath her swell. Blood joined the waters, rushed in a narrow stream to Beocroak’s navel, where the tiny pool quickly overflowed. A violent storm rolled over her face, finally closing her eyes, opening her mouth in silent agony in turn. Pain, yes, but not painful. It was there, inside her, that arcane internal power having grappled with the pain and come away wielding it as a twisted staff. Its adjudicating bash against her pelvic cradle freed a new life.

Falling head reclined into scooping palm. In one impossible motion Gilgalunge slid her gasping daughter into the crook of her arm and held her to her breast. Not a cry escaped her, mostly lost in womb-dream as she was, not anticipating birth for days yet. Aside from her pant, the witch fell into awed silence, eyes once again at their eclipsing zenith.

“Your first?” Beocroak asked, actually using the words to gauge the consistency of the blade’s pressure on his shifting throat skin.

“My only. A child that tows an entire line must have the strength to tow it.” He guessed whatever she had bargained with had made it so, all her potential concentrated into one vessel. Out of respect for her bold decision, he remained still.

“Congratulations. Why am I part of this?” Her eyes flicked to him, solid and sharp; the glance was more of a threat than the knife.

“You too give life with your hand,” she claimed.

“We grabblers take and release. We do not give.”

“You cannot lie to me anymore than you could hide your name Beocroak. I have chosen you to bless my daughter. Do so of free will, in order to not do it under mine.” No objection was voiced. “Raise your hand.” He lifted his right. “No, the other.”

“It is the weird hand. Most say it is not fit for blessings.”

“Most wouldn’t know a needle from a stinger. Your left Beocroak.” Reluctantly he obeyed. Emptied Gilgalunge shuffled forward up his waist and leaned closer. The babe’s red-splotched face was strangely placid, little mouth already open in a wordless question. It seemed a shame to burden her with anything yet, even the slightest press of his five digits. But her mother insisted by leaning further.

His fingertips touched, splashing ripples of heat emanating from both sides of the interaction. Where they met the blood was cleared away in perfect circles, making way for golden warmth of flesh.

“With this hand,” the new and finished mother encouraged.

“With this hand,” he repeated.

“I bless this child.”

“I bless this child.” Nothing seemed to happen, and that nothing satisfied the witch. After leaning back the knife, blue and glinting with incredible speed, struck the umbilicus at both ends to sever it. As it collapsed onto his stomach Beocroak was aware of the blade’s sensation, still against his throat, even with the actual edge clearly visible in her hand.

She lifted one side of her netting shawl. A seemingly random hole expanded, into which she stowed the blade, some tucking space between airs that had likely produced it in the first place. It shrank once the weapon was gone, only for another diamond nearby to open and produce from nowhere a coil far more grotesque than the severed cord, plated orange, peppered with purple bumps, bearing countless legs and a head, or perhaps rear, collared with webbed and barbed mandibles.

Still Beocroak remained. Whatever harm the witch meant, it was not now, and not toward him. The thing produced crawled up his side, its touch doubly confirming it was no animal, but a pestilent demon that would not have coincidentally bore the colors of Tauntalagmite on its hide. He tried to hate it, but he could not. Hate against even the sanctioned agents of a god was effort wasted, fuel spent on futile opposition. From them you could only run and plead, and between the vice of her thighs he had not the room to run. Any pleas in his head were already read by Gilgalunge’s practiced and refined craft.

The scuttling thing had no interest in him, instead wrapping itself around the severed cord so that every other pair of legs held it in place against the underbelly. A payment, or an ingredient for some future use. From what little he knew of natury he expected it to return to her shawl, vanishing along with its weight, but the verminous demon crawled off into the tallest nearby grasses and disappeared.

“We are finished,” Gilgalunge sighed, staring at her child once again. A brush of wet wispy hair became a flicking gesture that freed his neck from the knifing sensation. “You are a good man Beocroak, but you know you are not suited to this.”

“It is a curse,” he said, propping himself up on his elbows, an adjustment made impotent by the witch rising smoothly to her feet, aura so tall he expected her to brush the tree’s leaves. “You cannot break his, but can you do nothing for mine?”

“It is no curse,” she corrected. “A grabbler should not seek to break his own hand just because he does not like what its efforts produce. Do not fear strength.”

“I do not fear it.” Something seethed, but could only take the form of a hot tear streaking down one eye. “I hate it.”

“Then why did you take her hand?”

“She was saving me.”

“And the only way for her act to continue is for you to save as she did. Who, grabbler, who will you be saving?” Away he looked, to where his senses told him his dear Jeremiad was wandering, probably irritated but quiet beside the accursed’s nauseating foraging. Then he felt the need to make an excuse, for the upcoming split as they entered the grounds of Beerbet. The first words of it were on his tongue when he turned back, to find that Gilgalunge and her silent babe were gone, leaving behind no rustling grass and no footprints.

For a while he sat under the tree, donning what little dress he had, trying to drink the shade like a man willingly drowned. She did not know every curse under the sun, or buoyed with it. Greater magic than hers existed at the heart of the peninsula. There it could be broken. Where exactly? The legends were unhelpful on that front, too amazed at details of rain leopards, talking monkeys, and enchanted suits of armor.

What they did tell of was a clearing, too deep to spot by any watchtower of man, but well within the gazing reach of the eye of Escaboulnté. Nested in the city it was, and not for long, as many of the closing-in cinders would happily take a hot poker to it to prevent its use by any other party.

Jeremiad was right about the rush, and when he finally understood that, in the clarity of having woman as lord for an all too brief duration, he returned to where they had separated, humming his roar so that she would feel it in her soles and swiftly return. As they did they found him with dried blood splashed out of his loins and up his navel.

“What happened to you?” his Jeremiad asked with a grimace.

“A brush with motherhood. I’m not up to it. Let us continue.” That night there wasn’t so much as a green flicker to their fire. One did happen, alongside a mild gust, where the Thumbscale crew camped, close enough to see Beerbet as a gray-brown stump on the horizon, the eye floating over it, cloaked in indigo cloud that negated any need to blink, beneficial for the owner, who did not also acquire the lids.

“Captain Rod, what was that?” one of his many hands asked, having been the only one awake enough to see the spectral green flash by. He was the look-in, awake to watch everyone else sleep, while Xeams the lookout watched for threats beyond. Graychild was also awake, lying on the ground, propped up by his pack with his arms crossed over his chest. He too watched the fire, digits rolling along muscle through his fingerless mittens.

“Can’t say as I know Gadby,” he said casually, volume perfect for being heard without waking the others. “But remember, this is the land of gods and magic, where the lighter is brighter, and not by the hand that invented it. If you see something strange, then a wizard of one stripe or another is afoot.”

The one called Gadby nodded, now wondering less about the green flame and more about whether or not he’d seen the captain ever sleep fitfully or flag with fatigue. Roddery was always either alert or dead to the world. Probably it was because he had experienced death at the moment of birth, as many did on lands beneath the Half-Bite. Not many recovered.

Stillborn yet still kicking, Roddery had been resuscitated by his mother and father, the latter giving the breath of life to a vessel too small to house it and the former compressing a chest that could not withstand it. Under the brutal assault of their furious despairing love he was dragged into life properly, the warmth of it invigorating his skin, turning him from blue and gray to brown and yellow.

Proud of themselves, proud of him, he would then bear a new surname for the family in reference to their harrowing ordeal. Most such changes were not accepted in mid to high society, as it took true acts of courage to earn the right to bind a branch of history so it grows in a new orientation.

Now they were on a continent that did not use surnames at all. Everyone was of their god, and if they did not have one they were not out of luck, as luck was all they had. Gadby was glad to have his captain, who always sounded like he was giving a satisfying answer even when he said he didn’t know. You couldn’t fear a green flame if it didn’t even make the curious Captain Roddery sit up.

“Could you put me at ease Captain? How are we to get that eye? Never sleeps it seems. It’ll be watching us enter, watching us on approach. I sense no opportunity. That’s why I’m no officer, so I was hoping an officer could cut it down to size for me.”

“It’d be my delight. This is precisely why we didn’t pursue fresh off the beach. The very sand didn’t feel right between your toes, did it? Because it’s all different. People here even walk funny, like they’re not watching where they’re stepping. Surprised we haven’t seen them blundering right into big holes. Never go underground without a lantern, as they say, so all these strangers should be carrying them like their children.” Gadby chuckled, keeping it low so his captain could continue.

“Anyway we stayed where we landed, despite the bad memories cresting high and low, to get our bearings. I’ve got mine anyway, and that’s all the rest of you need. The details aren’t there, but I’ve got the feel for it now, the instinct. I know how these gods operate, all thanks to native chitter and chatter as they walked by to go fishing and foraging without knowing they were turning ignorant savages into masters of the realm, into their own replacements.

This Escaboulnté, which I’d bet used to be a surname by the by, meaning he’s likely not but three generations removed from wash-ups like you or I, has gotten hold of a god’s peephole. With it comes the power… but it’s just an eye. Everything else is still just a man.

Without a god’s knowledge he won’t find us particularly suspicious, and without one’s focus he won’t be able to single us out of the other incoming masses. The best way to counter the eye is to ignore it. Don’t look up and give him your clear face. His unwise disinterest in scalps will get us close. Then we listen and learn, a little quicker this time, and then we move in, like that time in the hill fort.”

Gadby nodded, remembering the incident well. When they reached the checkpoint of Beerbet’s flooded gates in the morning it would actually proceed much like the hill fort, where half of the current crew had thrown in with Graychild. That was because it was a good solid plan, reliable, repeatable, and contingent upon human weaknesses that did not vary continent to continent.

Step one was to enter under affable false pretenses. The hill fort was having a well-fishing competition, so Roddery and company had entered, their leader brazenly signaling his intent by angling with nothing but string tied to Breakwater, baited with a fresh earlobe from an undisclosed source.

Smile your way through it, he had told his underlings; they won’t care if you carry an entire severed head as long as your smile is bigger than its. The man who smiles is not threatened, and is not a threat. Mirth cannot be cornered and made to lash out, which is why you never hear the laughter of cats and rats.

Their smiles were even better camouflage at Beerbet, as almost everyone came wearing one. It was the height of fashion right then, inexpensive and simple to produce given that the city’s bounty was plainly visible in the pale orb nestled in the clouds above. Formerly a den of debauchery, where dice rolled more than eggs, it was now a transparent den of debauchery, all the odds of wagers vigilantly watched by one of their own, a king of hand and eye long before he got a hold of the gigantic presence, a proprietor of a fair yet unbeatable shell game who was named Escaboulnté.

Captain Rod told the same joke he did when they entered the hill fort as they passed through the tall open gates of Beerbet’s outer clay walls, guard perches sat empty to project the awareness of the great salvaged eye. The Half-Biters understood his signal and laughed, with other travelers helping them out, as a bad joke was bad camouflage. Luckily the humor translated across cultures, as mothers of the groom were universally understood to be that way.

Nothing about Beerbet, aside from the eye, amazed Graychild’s crew. The people were too numerous, finding their seats on wall juts meant to serve as shelves, making decorations of themselves. Their teeming smelled of ocean sweat, shucked shells, the citrus juice that helped make their contents safe to eat, and the bone powder generated by chipped dice and tokens.

Oiled hands attempted to pick many a pocket and came away starving, as only the drunk forgot to tie their belongings shut, and they had already spent their last on what could be swallowed and stored safely. Beerbet respected the drunken vagrant, who flagrantly displayed his wealth vulnerable and lax in the alley, utterly untouchable by the thief who could find nothing to gain.

Posted on the walls at all sizes, worshiped on bent knees on the larger end, was the primary claim that had drawn many of the newcomers. Roddery looked up only enough to read it once:

The eye of Escaboulnté sees all, yet sees one only: the cheat. Play your games and wagers fair and you will see nothing but dispassion in the eye starting back. Goodly is the game in Beerbet. All other acts are your own, and will know no divine judgment.

“He must be making a killing,” Roddery said out of the side of his mouth to Xeams, who was the worst at smiling given that he did it constantly, like a corpse caught off guard, even while he slept, and never accompanied by a laugh. His first mate’s eyes glinted with slight alarm. “Relax, he hasn’t got a giant ear up there. Who knows where those meteors landed… and they were probably deafened by the sound of their own impact, ha!” Anyone else he would’ve nudged in the ribs with his elbow’s camaraderie; you couldn’t do that with Xeams. His pieces were never where they were supposed to be, slipperier than a catfish sneeze.

Graychild was thus reminded that the eye wasn’t where it was supposed to be either. Yes, it was the city’s chandelier, but that was the power, not what projected it. That was in the skull of Escaboulnté, whom they would need an audience with if they were to take it for themselves. And they only had so many days, if the scuttlebutt was to be believed, which it was, given Roddery’s ability to use it like the halls of academia.

This land wasn’t the only big island above the bite. At least one more was set across the sea, even further than the Thumbscale’s route. Not many tales made it across, and fewer ships, but the broad strokes of their Goodly lord were known. Twice removed from the line of Hexaclete, tossed away like a lout from a bar anywhere other than Beerbet, was the boisterous Norncanaan and his ramshackle court built of mortal heroes he’d given Goodly gifts and eighth-blood offshoots he bought and rescued from the Ghastly slaver Enochort: half-brother and ex-lover of Tauntalagmite, he who had sold her the oldest thing, served up on platter of oldest rock.

Norncanaan was not so attentive, and his outbursts were legend. A return to this land after being twice banished would not be received well by the upper halls that correctly thought themselves above ever seeing the mortal filth, ever stepping in the cosmic mud beneath the equator. Some of the Norn’s court however, they had the blood in them, and great deeds could magnify it to a proper Goodly title.

Among them the best candidates were called the cavalier cousins. Word was that several of them might race across the sea, questing for the stewardship of what was no longer Hexaclete’s Land. Agile monkey of mind and scheme was Captain Rod, including a total awareness that those skills could not compete with any of these Goodly relations. He needed at least the eye before any of them came if he was to be the voice of his land and people shouting over the weaker natives. And if he could get his hand back, that would really clinch it.

Things just slipped away more up here, he was noticing, not an aspect of magic he was fond of. If that intangible slime didn’t float on the waters at the Half-Bite, if they penetrated to his home, then his parents might not have found purchase on his sinking soul and been able to claw him back up. Down there you could count on the worst happening and build it into your plan. Up here you could only count on the worst happening at the worst time.

Step two at the hill fort, and now in Beerbet, had been winning the competition. In fishing that well he’d baited his rod with man flesh, and answered questions as to its source in such an expert fashion that no further questions were asked. Down there all animals liked the taste of man, so the biggest fish was a guarantee.

Ten bricks that lake eel weighed, long enough to stretch all the way across the banquet table he was then invited to, sat two places away from the fort’s commander. To his expert ear that was no worse than being her neighbor. When they were all finished, flag pulled down, shredded, burned, and replaced, he would remember to thank the fort’s cook, who had softened the eel expertly in the roasting despite its girth, allowing everyone to savor it slowly.

More savoring meant more time spent calm and lax, leaking information without realizing it: the jangle of the jailer’s keys as he leaned back to give his stomach room to breathe, a joke about the barrels of gunpowder finally being moved to the cellar, the celebrated turning in early of the guards who would be on duty the next morning. Taking it was like following a map after that.

To learn in Beerbet would instead be a smorgasbord of games. They had not any local tender, until Xeams was dispatched into the sea of scoundrels. Upon his return all they had to do was wipe the blood off. More knowledgeable regarding the specific skills of his men than the men were themselves, Graychild knew who to hand off the meager stake to and which street games to put them in initially.

While they were winning the crowd would start to circle, just another feast table bent into an even more convenient shape, allowing him to catch gossip clear on the other side. Reading lips was second nature to him, deaf as he was until six years of age: lingering swimmer’s ear from treading the charcoal waters of death.

Houses of chance were even more common down south, where there were no gods to tip the odds. No such thing as a blessed or cursed man down there, the only stink on him the cumulative musk of victory and defeat. His crew knew just as he did that this initial lesson, provided so kindly free of charge, was not their primary schooling on the run of Beerbet.

No, that would come after the attitude started to sour in the streets, after they’d won a little too much. A winning streak’s suspicions always grew in tandem with its fortune. The reservoir of information would dry up, replaced by grousing, some whittling on the idea that perhaps the master of the city couldn’t prevent cheating after all.

Like any other house of chance the highest authority would swoop in and discreetly escort the lucky winners away, to the inner circle where they could be cajoled or threatened into discontinuing, lest they have that luck tested at the end of a noose, which was the snare most adept at catching the stuff.

Once taken away from the commoners Captain Rod would undertake his own charm offensive until they were enjoying the company of Escaboulnte, who would surely be delighted by the mariner’s extensive knowledge of surnames that could trace the eye-bearer’s family back five generations to the Age of Dark Dives.

Down south it was played with three shells and a marble, up here five and a skipping stone. Graychild himself would be best at solving it, but he wanted to focus on listening, so he put it in Odebtte’s hands. She knew the trick: watch the wrists instead of the shells. Her winnings began to mount, as did the Thumbscale’s cargo hold of information.

Ah, Escaboulnté was a fencer, made his money on duels before the eye, probably by throwing the right ones, which Roddery gathered despite it not being said. He rarely left his hall now, so much so that it was called the Socket of Escaboulnté and not the Wheat Street Brothel as it was before. The old courthouse was empty, used as a repository for the sleeping poor who hadn’t sold their last metals yet.

The man was in his fourth decade, still spry, vulnerable to drink but not made less capable with the sword by it. Now he wore an eye patch. Symbolic? Obfuscating? An actual injury? That the throngs of Beerbet did not know.

A feeling came over the captain. One glance confirmed it was more than that, as he saw the alert in a lurking Xeams’s eyes, sparking like a sharpening wheel. Roddery knew the touch of death, and thus the frigid air surrounding the overgrown nail on its pointing finger. That chill was even more ingrained in Xeams. Something wasn’t right. It didn’t mean they were about to be killed, but it might mean the murder of their plan, as Graychild felt his ideas as extensions of his body that shared his blood supply. Lash one and the other would spill.

He used his eyebrows to signal for Xeams to investigate, as a hand gesture might be caught by their target’s godly eye above. While his second searched there was little he could do but expedite their in-progress strategy, so he pulled aside another of his deckhands, bearded Miths, and told him to take another street and another game and-

“No,” Roddery said, grabbing the man by the shirt to bring him back. “We’ll go even faster. You’re from here Miths, you understand? You saw us cheating at shells. Use your accents, and slur so they think you’re tanked. Spent it all they have, the nippersippers hereabouts. Their word is common-law because they’ve nothing to lose.” Miths nodded, his captain spinning him back around and sending him off with a compliment and a hearty shoulder slap.

Undercutting the signs everywhere would get them an audience even faster, at the risk of volatility in the initial interactions, but Graychild didn’t like the smell of the place anymore. Now, as he looked out at the crowd of tan hoods meant to catch pleasant ocean air and keep it near the nose, the city looked full to bursting. The people were a fluid steadily heated by the games, kept from boiling out of the pot by the cool power of the adjudicating eye. If they succeeded it would more than blink, the Beerbetters more than gawp. And it would be worse if anybody else put their designs on Escaboulnté’s throat before the southerners.

It was somewhat difficult to keep his hand off Breakwater. To distract himself he mentally emptied the bucket of the city, saw only the buildings, and mined as much information from its apparent history as he could.

Down the way, barely visible, which was the reason for the spot they’d chosen, could be seen the Socket, but, crucially, far enough away that no one could accuse them of loitering in a threatening manner.

The building’s inner walls were dock posts, still bearing marks from the barnacle-burdened days, roped together like rafts and turned into foundation. That core had been expanded vertically and horizontally with clay, including small stages for dancers to show off the wares. Its purpose had changed, but the dancers were still there, clad in silk that would be invisible if it wasn’t dyed. Escaboulnté apparently believed keeping them important to the local color, that or he did so for his own pleasure.

Other surrounding structures were in line with that design philosophy. Wood and clay everywhere. Sandbags as weights and temporary walls. Minimal metals rusted near to oblivion, making for knives that would bite more than cut and anvils that could be used as planters.

It had, for a long time, been city-sized without being a city proper. That close to the shore they should’ve had waste canals and gravity-powered basins. He very much doubted Hexaclete had been carting giant handfuls of their shit a trade wind away. Yet it was reasonably clean. People must have been doing it, professionally, and to get yourself ranks of career shit-shovels you had to first excrete weighty funds.

Escaboulnté wasn’t just making money, nor was he but a combat washout parlaying theatrical swordplay into free drinks. There was proper ambition in his patched eye. Beerbet wasn’t growing, and likely wouldn’t. Its hovering crown jewel made it flashy enough. Graychild recognized that it was being swept, the dust of humanity blown out stroke by stroke, the heavier metals from their pockets unmoved and kept.

Its status would rise without it ever being considered a threat, as an eye could not strike, and the place never crept further. Slowly its interior would swap out structures and items with finer materials, the designs of imported craftsmen, until only wagers of gold were being made, until people who lost their shirts had hundreds more back in their home palaces.

None of it would come to pass of course. Just having the eye was courting crooks and chaos. The Thumbscale, hailing from foreign lands, paid no heed to laws that weren’t good enough to apply to them or to chaos that was just the natural state without Goodly oversight or even Ghastly regimented punishment. Xeams reappeared, a greased shadow; he spoke.

“He’s here. There’s a one-armed girl with him, has the same look to her.” Roddery’s thought dipped to its lowest trough in the whole plan and the plan it mimicked.

“Xeams… have you seen any animal past the city walls? Anything bigger and livelier than the dead fish in the market?”

“No livestock, no dogs, a few wet slappers kept fresh and for sale.”

“He’s unarmed then. Let’s-” Just then four more people inserted themselves into the tightly knit conversation, smoothly enough to make clear their practice with the maneuver. Only those as well-versed in rocking boats as Graychild would recognize them as enforcers, armor replaced with leather bindings under the clothes, layered to soften blows and catch knives.

“Beg pardon,” one of them said, the statement polished so polite that it broke into rude shards, “but you and your party seem to belong among the high rollers, not the dirty dice of the alleys. His masterfulness Escaboulnté would like to extend an invitation to his gaming hall. He takes special care to recognize and reward the skilled.”

A smile for the nice gentlemen and ladies of the house, of course, but Graychild bit his inner cheek. As expected, the worst thing at the worst time. Now if he wanted to do anything about the handkiller he would have to split his focus, as it was unwise to make the lord of Beerbet wait a single moment in accommodation of the people stealing from his streets. Beerbet was supposed to be the only thief.

“So prompt!” he gushed disingenuously. “The eye of Escaboulnté truly sees all. My party is many, so tell me, how many invitations can I pass out and take credit for?” His first sentences were already a hitch in their routine. A stumble played out across the lead enforcer’s face. Clearly they’d missed an accurate count of his crew, and now for all they knew it was an army that had slipped past their master’s gaze.

“Erhm… three.”

“Oh, that really whittles it down to some hard decisions, but pretending it’s a roll of the dice makes it easier, doesn’t it?” He covered his eyes with a hand and tallied the air with a finger, counting just over his breath. “Alright then, Odebtte and… Duhast. Congratulations you two.” His crew members popped up with grins, pocketing their winnings. Taking the one who had won the most would lull the enforcers back to complacency, make this little interception look more effective. Duhast was for something else. The rest still needed orders.

“Xeams,” Roddery addressed in a trifling tone, “I don’t want the others to be too disappointed that they missed out, so rustle up a few handfuls for them to eat will you.”

“Of course. Good luck in there.”

“And to you out here my friend. Alright fellows, which way is it? Down there? Oh, this way? What are the odds?” And so the crew of the Thumbscale was slightly split, the separation feeling much more violent because the enforcers took the head of the snake. Xeams knew his orders from that single word however, and while the crew wouldn’t respect him the way they did the captain they would never dream of disobedience.

The first mate had spotted their other target in the market, making conversation with his eyes and furrowed brows. What their plan was he couldn’t guess, since there didn’t seem to be a decent con between them. Their goal had to be the eye, as it was the goal of anyone in Beerbet who had half a brain that was less than half submerged in grog.

Attacking them with everyone was ill-advised, the streets too crowded for that. A brawl would become a riot, and any fighting was already inevitable discovery by the eye. The approach would have to be slow, give the captain time to sidle up beside the contents of the Socket. If both parties timed their efforts correctly one could provide the distraction for the other to strike.

Now how many for that approach? What was the number of participants just under the threshold for a brawl, still safely in the category of scuffle? Six was Xeams’s answer, leaving him to select three for the task, assuming that any animals brought into the affair would not be counted amongst the involved parties.

Three wouldn’t be enough. Four, with the fourth being himself? Perhaps. He’d seen the handkiller fight, briefly, aboard the floundering Thumbscale. There he’d clearly been out of his natural element, yet had thrown off five men armed with nothing but a shipworm sleeve ripped from the mast. It was further testament to Captain Graychild’s command that so many of them made it to shore when their firsthand opportunity to learn of Hexaclete’s Land was an encounter with a grabbler. None of them were prepared for that sight.

The ones most prepared to see it this time? His best assessment, not half as good as Graychild’s, was Miths, Vitrivo, and Pladeau. All had been on deck for the shipworm incident and were on the larger and stronger side of the crew, but with blade skills too, which seemed more effective against a man who used the contents of the butcher shop window as his weapon of choice.

Of the most concern was the girl. That variable would fight, that he knew from her expression alone, but how well? It was hard to imagine her his equal with half the size and half the arms, but garb, scars, and demeanor put them in the same tribe. Halfway through discreetly gathering his three men he decided to take her out first, leaving the one they knew better, whose remains they would need time and space to be more delicate with. Since the captain couldn’t participate he would want plenty of the man left for examination and salvage.

Some time would be taken for observation at a distance, the trap sprung if the pair blundered into an isolated area under cover. Both conditions would be difficult to achieve, considering the city’s crowding and that most canopies had been taken down to prevent anyone hiding a shady trick from the eye of Escaboulnté.

While the observation was underway, Beocroak and Jeremiad made plans of their own in the fish market. Its long streets provided the longest stretch largely free of game and drink as well as the greatest supply of grabblerable material, though the pickings were extremely slim. This wasn’t Toeteld, where the meat was gray for reasons other than rot, and Beocroak could coax it back to half-life with the fire in his blood and the stories in his pulse. Here the dead were dead.

What was kept alive for freshness in troughs and barrels was smooth and silver-sided, not a poisonous spine or sandpaper fin to be found. A grabbler could get a good slap out of them, detach a brain stem or two, but at the cost of damaging so much tissue that the fish would die in two or three blows. Such reckless use of weapons did not ingratiate a grabbler down the line, made for fewer friends who could be summoned with a roar.

The pair couldn’t help but look out of place, carrying no cloaks to hide the glory of Gaw, harboring no desire to sneak, and not even in need of the wares, as Jeremiad had a drawstring bag taken from low tide and filled with the farewell gifts of the accursed, to whom they had said their goodbyes well outside Beerbet to save him any scrutiny from the eye above and the eyes level.

Every question they could think to ask him about his journeys had been asked, and all the knowledge that he could transmit with nods and hand gestures had been so. His indecisive bird beak was a product of the dangerous powers the two grabblers sought, it was deep within the jungles of Rooth Tugt, and yes, if you wanted to find that legendary place you would need a bird’s eye view. No maps made it out, eaten by beasts that liked to keep their dens secret. So if they wanted a heading they needed to at least consult the eye of Escaboulnté.

Jeremiad kept her arm busy, as she often did to make up for the other. With it she spun the bag about her wrist, slowing it at the apex just enough for two oysters to fall out. Then she caught one and used it to hit the other over to Beocroak. Both grabblers squeezed, crushing the shells to shards. One flex of the palm made them all fall perfectly away, leaving only the meaty muscle to snack on.

“Master, how are we to use the eye? We have nothing to offer.”

“There is always the offer of a respectful request.”

“Master! In this town? These people would have to win respect to have any, and it would quickly be spent again. All we can really offer is our service, and you-“

“No longer sell such things,” Beocroak reaffirmed. “As my ward you will not sell yourself either. You have the wisdom of Wormskoll, and you are lucky you did not have to endure its earning.”

“Yes Master, but the eye.”

“Cannot be guarded by many. Look around. These are not fighters, not even cutthroats. Scavengers at best. Most will flee at the first sign of trouble. We will learn which door has the eye behind it and knock. If there is no answer we will break it down. From there you should trust your grabbler instincts.”

This plan did not particularly disturb her, but it did Xeams, who walked the roof beside and above their lane, listening in with his three men. Canopies for the many fishing stands were pleated and tied back, never opened in the age of the eye, and now they served to hide the half-biters from view. Shortly the lane would end, there would be no more cover, and, it seemed, the handkiller would head straight for the Socket and surely interrupt Roddery’s efforts.

Here then, while he could make some cover. Xeams checked the eye in the sky, judged it to be looking elsewhere, then held out a hand behind his back to get Pladeau to hand over his knife. Once he had the blade he leaned over the roof and threw with a powerful spin. Impact lodged it in the top of a stand and cut the rope holding the canopy closed.

What had been a fishing net but was now thickened by dried kelp and ten thousand layers of ballooning spider silk fell open with a racket. Shade was cast over the grabblers, who were only bothered enough to look around for the source. Sources, as it turned out, four of them, dropping in from the slot behind the canopy one by one, dirtying mounds of half-butchered groupers and skates with their boot prints. Pladeau was last, grabbing the stand long enough to reclaim his knife before swinging down to the dirt.

“My fish! You dirty animals! Look at my fish!” the monger howled. Vitrivo silenced him with a tossed coin they’d won from the games. As Captain Graychild often said, ‘the less you know something, the easier it is to lose.’

“Hello again,” Xeams said to Beocroak. His flicking chin told the others to encircle the grabblers, which they did with cautious sidesteps, unwilling to take their eyes off the man who had, on their last encounter, streaked out of the sky like Goodly cannon fire.

“What do you want?” the grabbler returned. Jeremiad’s eyes darted at his dead tone. He’d warned her of this party. A shipwrecked band. Submerged southerners. Something about a dead hand, and wanting them back. Beocroak had made clear he couldn’t return them; he’d only managed to resurrect himself from Wormskoll Cave.

“You’ve stolen from our captain,” Miths said, white teeth spitting through his dark mustache.

“And before we even took our first steps,” Xeams added. His pacing, two steps one way and two steps back, did something to Jeremiad. There was a lurch in her stomach, as if her eyes had been turned upside down. What trickery was this? “Give yourself over. You do not have to die. Captain Graychild is merciful, more so than myself.”

“Or me,” said Miths.

“Or me,” said Pladeau.

“Or me,” said Vitrivo. The voices made a net around their prey.

“You could call him our better nature,” Xeams elaborated, “painfully missed at this time. You’re outnumbered, you haven’t got any worms now, and the eye isn’t watching. Be smart. Let us bind your arms.” Three knives flashed, jumping hand to hand. Xeams had nothing, yet Jeremiad wouldn’t say he was without weapon. Watching him continued to sicken her with disorientation. Words might help her keep her gorge from rising, might stoke the will to fight even without animals nearby.

“You’ve made a foreigner’s mistake,” she claimed, the tendons in her neck like switches against granite columns.

“And what would that be?” Xeams humored. She would not answer, instead angling to look at the fishmonger, whose back was against a wall, presumably along with most of his blood, as his face had gone white.

“You know it,” she said to him. “Tell them what even a merchant on the opposite shore of Lazuli Pawlm knows.” The man’s teeth chattered, his lips quivered, but when the adage emerged it was without stammer:

“Never wear a mustache around a grabbler.” Beocroak’s arm struck with the speed of a mantis. Between his knuckles he grabbed the hairs of Miths’s upper lip, compressing them together so tightly it sounded like the straw of a broom severing in a closing door. The sunken southerners just did not know that a human being could have such strength. Beocroak pulled down.

Miths’s upper lip was ripped off his face. The nose came loose, sat like a hat lightly donned at a tilt. Blood poured from cheeks opened like the turning of a page. Force bent the man in half, slammed his wound, too fresh to respond like one yet, into the dirt where gravel was embedded deeper than teeth.

He might’ve been dead, because he did not scream. If he was unconscious it was the concussion against the ground that did it, not the wet flap dropping out of Beocroak’s hand onto the back of its previous owner’s skull.

“Hailshits!” Pladeau swore, leaping back. Vitrivo grabbed his shirt and pulled him in so he wouldn’t step out of the shade. “Miths!? Miths!? His face Xeams, his face!”

“Accost us no further,” Jeremiad warned. She didn’t want to perform that move herself. The severed lip had an unpleasant texture in the hand. She tried to reserve it for whiskered men who thought they could steal a kiss if they approached from her bad side.

“How could you do that to his face!?” Pladeau went on, having not yet blinked. “Captain’s… Captain’s going to pike your head for this!”

“Not if we do it first men!” Xeams snarled, lunging. Beocroak met him hand to hand. It should’ve been over as quickly as Miths’s shave, a foolish nobody against a grabbler on the grumpier side of Gaw. Yet the first hit was Xeams’s, whose fingers raked bloody gashes in a spiral up Beocroak’s forearm despite his blocking stance. Jeremiad cocked her head, confused by what she’d just seen in the moment before she was attacked by the other two. How did this Xeams get past her master’s guard? His age had not slowed him yet; no flaw in his technique was discernible to her. Out of time to analyze, she chalked it up to magic.

Her opponents did not have any, only knives. Treating them as a single animal with separable fangs, she dodged a strike from each with swiveling shoulders, then turned the second crumple into a slide away from them that put her back against the fishmonger’s wares. Carcasses could be grabbled, but were often useless without armor or poisons that could emit well after death. Shielding her arm in nearly gelatinous fish flesh would do no good against their filleting power.

Still, she took one by the tail and whipped it at Pladeau, the more frightened of the two. He took the bait, stabbing right where she wanted in an effort to get it out of his line of sight. The blade lodged in the spine, the only part hard enough to neutralize his weapon until he took the time to free it.

While he did so Vitrivo had to move in alone. Jeremiad used her surroundings once more by rolling her back onto the fish, bringing her muscular legs into the air and level with her enemy’s collar. The knife swung, and so did the bag containing the grabblers’ shellfish meal. Through it the blade clinked uselessly off a mussel. Her thighs found purchase on either side of his neck. Compression. Blood vessels popping. Face as purple as crushed berries. The grabbler girl pushed off the table and put herself atop Vitrivo’s stumbling. A war grunt was the only warning for him to give up; he lacked the presence of mind to do so. His only thought was to try and weakly swing the knife again.

Jeremiad swung her body around by the waist in response, collapsing the tower of two onto the monger’s table, the sound of the impact and the fish piles collapsing to the ground hiding the gritty crack of Vitrivo’s vertebrae.

“Do you wish to gut it or shall I?” she asked the petrified monger, now flat enough against the backing wall that a pallet knife would be needed to scrape him loose. Her sole arm had no trouble lifting Vitrivo’s dangling legs and flipping them onto the table. That cleared the arena some and allowed her to turn her attention back to Pladeau just as the fish she’d used to forcibly sheath his blade slipped off and plopped wetly into the crimson velvet mud created by Miths and the gap now present between him and his lip.

Surprisingly, Pladeau still found the courage to jab threateningly and inch forward. Such a display could not scare Jeremiad; she knew she had enough time to check over her shoulder and make sure Beocroak had dispatched that clawing cat Xeams. What she saw did scare her, as that fight was far from over. Her master appeared to be losing.

The scratches on his arms had spread like a rash to the rest of him, face included. Only his scars were too thick to rupture, and where they encircled his shoulders and elbow joints he resembled a butcher’s diagram of how to break down a hog for sale. Xeams was somehow always at his back, clinging to it no matter which way Beocroak turned.

She witnessed her master attack twice. Once was a hit that should have missed, buying time and space for the second, which was a miss that should have hit. Jeremiad blinked to dispel what had to be a hallucination, but nothing vanished, if something did it was the bottom of her stomach. The more she looked at Xeams the more her vision tilted, as if the world tried to toss her overboard and sink her below the Half-Bite.

The magic of Xeams worked on her at a distance, without his sights being on her at all. That was how her master struggled. Being his opponent must have been five times worse. Her foolish lingering eye cost her the advantage in her own fight, for Pladeau was upon her, painting a slash across her ribs before she managed to step back.

His assault continued. Her honed instincts had her hand in position to grab his wrist and stop every stab, even after the item leapt between hands, but at the last she was stricken with bolting doubt, forced to see Xeams jabbing her master in the side with an elbow that couldn’t possibly have been there. Her hand faltered, deflected with her knuckles rather than grabbing and snapping Pladeau’s wrist.

A grabbler uses everything at their disposal, so long as it is not forged for the purpose of combat. A Jeremiad doubly so, given the lacking arsenal of their maimed default. Her nausea, inflicted by Xeams, could be a gift. She constricted her abdominal muscles, loading her throat as one would a cannon. Shot composed of chewed shellfish morsels and stomach acid blasted out most unexpectedly, blinding a horrified Pladeau, who screamed.

An uppercut quieted him in addition to launching him higher than he’d ever jumped. His head poked through the netting of the monger’s canopy and stuck there. Jeremiad had planned on grabbing his face on the descent and driving it into the ground so that the back of his skull became upturned shards skewering brain meat, but when he stuck and began to twitch she recognized the impromptu hanging as sufficient. The knife dropped out of his hand, landed upright in the thrown fish once again, freeing his fingers to grab at life that slipped away nonetheless.

Much as she now dreaded it, she had to twist and watch her master’s duel again, perhaps even join in if his situation had gotten worse. Luckily the latest scratches were few, and Xeams looked the more distracted, head darting to watch Pladeau flail. She doubted it was out of concern; the man’s head was poked through, thus visible to the eye of Escaboulnté.

Getting spotted was not desirable for either party, as they had hoped to gain Beerbet’s attention more gracefully. Beocroak gave the orders however, and his apprentice guessed what he would request any moment now based on the intensity with which Xeams eyed the twitching legs of his underling. Xeams cared more about hiding. Grabblers did just fine in crowds, people tending to break around them like rapids around rocks.

“Jeremiad!” There was the order. She spun on one foot, putting full force into the other for a kick that splintered one of the canopy’s supporting rods so intensely that it made the squeal and pop of a giant wooden bubble bursting. She lunged and rolled out of the shade just as the canopy collapsed, trusting Beocroak to do the same.

He had, managing to take Xeams with him by closing the vice of his massive arms around all the places the smaller man could’ve been. All three scrambled to their feet and looked around, to find that now everyone in eyeshot was staring back. In the stillness they were convinced to look up.

The eye of Escaboulnté was not excluded; its pupil hung over them, a pendulum eclipse. Its iris was green-gold, its patina a labyrinth of stretching strands displaying Goodly godly depths. Was it her color? Or the old fencer’s? Fingers of cloud crept up its spherical sides in spirals. The more it was used, the more it focused, the more the weather around it was disturbed. Lightning crackled through the fluffed tendrils, the sky otherwise bone dry.

The grabblers expected to be scolded by the loudest voice they’d ever heard. Bracing for it, nothing came. If it was spoken it was inside somewhere, limited by ordinary vocal cords, eaten by walls. He only had the eye, not the lungs, not the mouth, and not the pronouncing tongue that could lash the greatest birds out of the sky.

It appeared nothing could draw its gaze away. If they’d been inside the Socket they would’ve known otherwise. Roddery Graychild was excellent at drawing eyes when he wanted to, and so was Breakwater.

“Good eye,” the captain had praised the man sat upon the throne, “and I don’t mean the Goodly one. Most people have to be told this sword is magic before they claim they can see it.”

“Oh you’ve got to know in my line of play,” Escaboulnté chuckled, sweeping various tokens off the table between them to make room for Breakwater. With an air of trust Graychild set it down, didn’t so much as wince when the city master’s experienced fingertips caressed the length of its embedded rod. “People love to cheat in duels more than anywhere else. The scenario is too controlled for their tastes. Outside such an agreement there’s always acts of god to consider, sporadic bursts of luck good and bad. In a duel they bring only themselves, and realize it is wanting.

But! I’m no conjure monkey, so I can’t tell what this magic is, just that it’s there.”

“Were we to duel it would be of little concern,” Roddery assured him. “This sword is for leading. It builds kinship on currents, washed up to me in fact, born somewhere north of the Half-Bite. Plunging it into any raw material turns those materials into something seaworthy that can carry as many men as can climb aboard. It controls the craft as the wind takes the sail. We might not have reached this land of yours without it.”

“Really?” the old fencer mused, a hint more saliva in his voice. “You know we have high stakes games here in the Socket, not two rooms beneath us there’s a fleet being wagered against a valley’s worth of sprouting grain. This blade could easily buy your way in.”

“I’m afraid I could never part with it.”

“You’d be surprised what you think you can’t lose.” The man stroked the edge of his eye patch. “Losing it can make room for something better.”

“I wanted to ask you about th…” The captain trailed off, as he saw his mark doing the same in thought. Escaboulnté’s face drifted toward the wall. In turn, Graychild’s hand drifted to Breakwater’s hilt without lifting it off the table. He might be sheathing it once more, or he might give it a swing. His spider’s stillness gave each tactic deniability.

“Marbz!” the city master shouted, trusting his most immediate underling to hear from beyond. “There’s a fight in the market, go break it up. There’s… Mark my mud, if that’s not a pair of grabblers.”

“Grabblers,” Roddery repeated, stepping closer around the table, “I’ve heard of these people, wearing animals as gauntlets in battle. Is that true? It sounded so absurd to my waterlogged ears.”

“It’s true alright. I’ve seen one of them pull an ocean pickle inside out and strangle a man with the guts! Can’t imagine what they’re doing here, seeing as they carry nothing but the scars on their- Who’s this now!?”

“More of them?” Graychild asked in the city master’s extremely mortal ear.

“No, that’s something else… They’re fighting a-” Breakwater leapt off the table, while another blade shot out from under it. The southerner’s sword was heavier, the slower to Escaboulnté’s rapier. Even if the older man was the superior swordsman, Roddery knew he wouldn’t get a better opportunity now that the hand thief had blown their mutual obscurity away like a tablecloth bearing all the glassware in Beerbet.

This ‘Marbz’ was probably on their way out of the Socket already, taking guards with them, leaving their boss to fend for himself. The same street scuffle would distract his mark while they fought, one eye on Roddery and the miraculous other on Xeams. His first mate had to be the one he was about to identify. As they’d hoped, the godly eye had glossed over him when he was just a scalp in a crowd, but under scrutiny its perceptive powers had pierced his natural veil.

“Thought you’d pull one over on me?” Escaboulnté growled as presented sword clashed with secret counterpart.

“No, I thought I’d pull one out of you,” Graychild answered. His free hand struck like a woodpecker, attempting to pluck what was hidden under the eye patch. Integrating it into his own crew would likely take time, and he surely wouldn’t risk one of his own eyes as they experimented. For now it would do to disable its powers. His men had already been warned that it might fall out of the sky at any moment and bowl them flat, given the fleshy meteor they’d already seen streak from the clouds and cleave the Thumbscale.

The old fencer’s head ducked away from his strike, came back with spirited grit. His lither sword slunk out from under Breakwater and fought back, putting Graychild against the table. The wielder of the eye had not lost as many steps as hoped in his ascent to a cushioned throne. Time would be short as well, his crew unable to fend off an entire city as it figured out their angle and coalesced against them. He had no doubt of Xeams’s loyalty, only his ability to best the grabblers.

That test was already well underway. The first mate and Beocroak had split, the former retreating just far enough to join several other arriving members of his crew who did not need orders once they saw the fallen bodies of their fellows. Arriving at the same time was Marbz and part of the city guard, who would attack anyone fighting out of their uniform but prioritized the grabblers who stood alone in emptied aura circles like islands fending off the waters.

“Too much panic for a good roar,” Beocroak said, spitting out blood as he backed into earshot of his apprentice. “We need some good teeth.”

“City life is small and timid master.”

“I saw a hole in the wall a ways back. Something good lives there, but I’ll have to coax it out. You must hold them off.”

“All of them!? With what?”

“A meat market is never wholly dead,” Beocroak said, recalling the boons of the octopus and the hippo salmon in Toeteld, “especially one by the sea. Make due.”

“To then make you proud,” she resolved.

“Prouder.”

Splitting up, the elder rushed back the way they came, toward a gap in an outer Beerbet wall where belonged a big stone. It would have been replaced quickly, unless something with a nasty temper and flesh not worth a damn had taken up residence. If it lived near the coast, and in the shadows of rocks, and couldn’t be made into a decent meal regardless of cut or preparation, it had to be either a fouled shore bandit or a bouncing urchin.

Jeremiad had to buy him time to fish whichever one it was out, which she could not do without a weapon of her own. She too had to retreat some, back into the thicket of barrels, baskets, and nets full of fishy and briny stench. Enemies with glinting eyes were closing, and with the accursed gone from their party she now had no one lower on the ladder to delegate the danger to.

Immediately accessible were plenty of living fish in pocketed waters, but all chosen for palatability and thus devoid of helpful toxins and spines. She needed something else, deciding out of desperation to use her own roar. Living animals would hear her in her immediate ring, that was not the problem. It was her missing arm. The tale of its taking would have traveled from creature to creature, up and down the generations, just as the stories of grabbler dominance did to enhance the recruiting power of a roar. Her own was greatly lessened.

Worse yet, it had been a sea creature, an eel, that had taken her limb. It had surprised her in the river Plur, a monstrous fish meant for saltwater, grown fat and arrogant enough to swim up fresh. Swimming at the time herself, she had no way to ground her stance, and tried to meet its hungry mouth with a grabble.

Still, anything that clung to life in the market would sense its own doom, hopefully understanding that Jeremiad’s remaining limbs were their greatest chance of conveyance to a second life.

The young grabbler roared: a blast of heat and anger higher in the air than her master’s resonant quake. It still had the defiant flare of a protective child of Gaw, the authoritative snap that could knock a gull out of the air. Weakling fish leapt out of their puddle prisons with a start. Only one color caught her eye through their following cascade. A luscious fruity red. Faded only by its pull from the surf. Immediately she knew the animal.

Pincepouncers were not strong as far as crabs went, with the notable exception of their rabid rage when confined close to their own cannibalistic kind. In nature they were solitary sand bar predators leaping on unsuspecting prey. Men in turn preyed upon them and could not be bothered to hunt them individually, instead baiting wire buckets in such a way that when they pounced a lid closed behind them, turning them into yet more bait.

Jeremiad leapt toward the glimpse of their color and found one of these buckets, rocking back and forth in response to her summons. It was stuffed to the gills, festooned with a crown of angry curling legs and wrapped in clacking claws of vengeful character. Free us, they all but screamed, and we will be yours, united in trust that you will separate us.

Her roar was punctuated with a grunt as she struck down, smashing through the woven wire lid. The entire bucket retracted with her arm as the captives scuttled free, not to abandon her, but to keep their furious frothing word by equipping her as effectively as possible. Some stayed around her fist poking claws forward through the wire to act as her shears and vices. Others scurried beneath her feet, ready to pounce as miniature segmented attack dogs. Still more clung to her body, ready to seek out vulnerable flanks and hunker down to shield her with their carapace.

Now she did not feel so outnumbered.

“Daaht!” she barked repeatedly, brief roars, an obedient crab launching itself at an attacker for each one. Their approach was halted as they pried pincepouncers off their faces, but she knew none of them were Xeams despite their red masks. He wouldn’t be slowed by such a basic attack. The crab would’ve missed, surely, since not even her master seemed able to land a blow without landing it on his surroundings as well.

A sideways glance showed her the man, or the thing pretending to be a man, ignoring her completely to instead chase down Beocroak, who was half-disarmed with his hand in a hole and stationary. Two tables neaarby suddenly smashed together, pushed by assailants to help build a trap around her. They’d already succeeded, she realized, as she could not realistically escape them to battle Xeams. Sending crabs after him would only deplete her weaponry.

All her attention was required in the fishmonger arena, as a swung sword landed on her shoulder. If a pincepouncer had not been dutifully acting as her outer shoulder she might’ve lost her other arm. The shell was tough enough to withstand; the blade stuck. As the attacker pulled back the crab became a boarding party of one.

Its fellow fugitives of appetite thrust along with their temporary master, perforating another enemy tens of times in the process of bashing them back with the butt of the bucket. Taps on her shoulder. A warning. Without looking Jeremiad leapt into the air and spun, turning her thighs into a vice her weapons would be envious of. Her pelvic aim was bafflingly perfect, catching a foe by the neck, burdening him with her weight so suddenly that he pitched over.

Somehow she held a fighting stance with his head squeezed between her legs. The pressure turned his face into a tomato as he went limp. A crab avalanche fell down Jeremiad’s back like a cape to reach his bent back so they could begin aerating it.

Her temporary army served well, and they were restoring order by adjusting her enemies’ fear response to a more appropriate level, but something else had to distract Xeams, and it had to come from somewhere else too.

The sky. The dark rumbling nest wreathing the eye of Escaboulnté looked too tightly woven to penetrate, yet something did stretch and pierce, great enough to stall all the madness in the streets, to glue Xeams’s feet down, and to turn the giant eye. A hand Goodly and godly. Bronze and gold, nails moonlit, gestures as fluid as the caressing wind that dries a single tear. Beerbet did not know the name of its new master, so it was still the hand of Hexaclete.

Even the pincepouncers were stopped by awe, collapsing like poorly staked tents. Another part of her. Had two been seen together yet? It was inevitable, as it was in the nature of powers to converge. The real question had been if enough pieces could join and stand, wave like a puppet, and ward off the approach of a cavalier cousin looking to take her place.

Escaboulnté’s eye and the hand’s new owner were not in accord, that much was clear when the hand wrapped its fingers around the eye and turned it away from the city. Did its wielder not want the city master to see the rest of the fight?

Least distracted was Beocroak, who finally got a bite on the arm he’d jammed deep in the wall. From its gnaw he knew it was a shore bandit. All their ferocity was on the outside, so one good tug on its guts extracted it into dimmed daylight, claws scrabbling against the walls of the tunnel the whole way.

Like a stretched raccoon the size of a dog, the bandit was a scrappy shoreline scavenger with a wrinkled puffy hide fouled by a coating of ocean life. This one bristled with barnacles, hopping stinging sand fleas, rasped starfish, and little anemones bright as flower petals. So friendly it was with other defensive denizens of Welkmadat that it made Beocroak correct a second time regarding the hole in the wall.

A five-part mouth of triangular teeth erupted from the same darkness and snapped, trying to protect its burrow mate. A bouncing urchin. Partnerships between animals were not unheard of, and these two had been patrolling nearby beaches together long enough to insist they always participate in the other’s affairs.

Compassionate Beocroak would not deny them; he thrust his free hand back in to claim the urchin. As it emerged its bent needles, striped purple and yellow, sprang back to full mast, providing him with a deadly mace to match his dog-raccoon club. Only then did he look skyward for more than an instant, where the eye still struggled against the twisting grip of the hand.

Neither was an immediate threat to him, and better yet, Xeams had halted nearby, looking much more apprehensive regarding the new heavenly body part. Beocroak pushed the advantage. The southerner did not let himself fall to slack-jawed gawping, clashing with the grabbler once more. The noise finally overpowered the wind-battered tarp sound of the forcibly averted eye, reigniting the other fights of grabbler, sailor, and Beerbet guards.

Longest distracted, and worst off, was Escaboulnté himself. Captain Rod was still at him, and they’d crossed swords across the room, to the precipice of a lower rowdier chamber filled with dancing, games, and food so fanciful parts of it had been folded. The city master was bent against the half-wall over it, enough knives and ice picks present to risk death in falling. Yet something else drew comment from him.

“What do you want out there?” he grumbled at no one. “There’s nothing but accursed jungle!”

“Who are you talking to?” Graychild asked in a casual tone befitting neither of them.

“Get off me and I’ll tell you.”

“You know… I don’t think it interests me much. Now down there. That looks like quite the party!” He stomped to reassert his weight. Escaboulnté called his bluff by grabbing his wrist and leaning over the side. Both men paid the price as they fell down to the next floor and landed in the depression of a wooden gaming table, tokens of wager pressing into the city master’s spine.

The crowd gasped and backed away, surprised less by the altercation and more by the quality of table the old fencer had sprung for, as the impact had not knocked it off its legs. It remained stable enough for Graychild to raise Breakwater in an attempt to drive it through his mark far enough to give the table a fifth leg.

However the rapier had not been lost in the transition; it was trapped between Escaboulnté’s waist and Roddery’s legs. Beerbet’s master wriggled his wrist back and forth, slicing into the sailor’s pant leg. The captain’s stance upon his knees was then widened enough for him to slip free and roll off the table just as Breakwater came down.

“You’re stuck!” Escaboulnté shouted, poised sword undercut by the other hand stuck near his eye patch, trying to peel off fingers he could feel but not touch.

“Caught by the eye!” one of his guests cheered, encouraging others to join in. A round of applause encircled the Half-Biter. To him it sounded like one of the ocean’s weaker threats; his grip on the helm-hilt tightened. None of them knew how much he controlled the situation. To be vastly outnumbered by revelers is to not be outnumbered at all. Odebtte was in another chamber, distracting the guards who could be distracted by games, while Duhast would’ve heard the commotion and positioned himself at the busiest entrance to the chamber his captain currently occupied, denying any others entrance at swordpoint.

“Do you remember the magic of this sword?” he taunted Escaboulnté.

“It makes rafts,” the city master said. “I’m afraid I don’t keep any waters for you to sail here. You’d have to wait for next month’s delivery of ambrosia!” His guests cheered again, raising their bubbling glasses of last month’s delivery.

“Don’t you?” Graychild challenged. He jerked Breakwater forward. The game table bucked, inching forward. Glasses fell like the retracting eyes of snails. “You can scare up some waters.” Jerk. Buck. Gasps. Someone fell over and wasn’t helped up. “People lose their minds in crowds like these.” Jerk. Screams. Suddenly there wasn’t room to turn around. Hands slapped for walls, searching for doors they’d misplaced. “And they move like the frightened sea!”

“Hold still you fools!” Escaboulnté shouted at them, their jostling preventing him from striking anything other than the table’s lip with his sword. Roddery pushed Breakwater again, and the next buck finally broke the table off its legs and sent it forward into the crowd. Had they not been there to catch its fall the captain would’ve been helpless, but it smashed dozens of fingers on its way down, as well as flattening the old fencer against the cowrie mosaic floor.

“Those who need gods become waters!” Graychild all but chanted. “Waters I sail!” A leftward yank of Breakwater turned the table, its nose magically elevated to continue toppling the trapped gamblers. Any of them might try to stop him, or take the eye first, so he vowed to make as many trips around the chamber as necessary to suppress them.

Bodies splashed against the wall as the table rode a wave of piled people, reorienting the raft for its return trip. Escaboulnté was scrambling for his feet, jabbing at any hindquarters or torsos in his way, and he almost had them when Roddery pushed the sword forward to a point of creaking, granting speed enough to smash the old fencer and carry him across his subjects. The Half-Biter hoped to bite him in half against the nearest wall, but activity underneath his levitating raft prevented it.

“Ahh, that’s a good girl Lassender!” Escaboulnté laugh-sputtered. “Dance darling! Dance under my eye!” She wasn’t dancing for him. Older than she looked, immaculately dry-aged by windborne sea salt, Lassender had danced there long before it was called the Socket. A market of flesh it used to be, livelier than the stalls of the fishmongers, and the residents were expected to make themselves available. If you didn’t want to take someone upstairs, or feed the dark appetites downstairs, you could dance for the entertainment of those still in wait.

Eventually you would tire, and have to retire, and have your rest while the customer had their way. Not Lassender. She was almost magic in her commitment to going untouched; no one else could dance ten hours without collapsing. Six hours into one such expression of her core flame a bottle had been broken over her head and drenched her in stinging glass cuts, the sensation as if she was tossed into wet hay and hornets, but she continued on into an hour so early the men couldn’t stand and neither could their means of enjoying the brothel.

Escaboulnté’s praise fell on deaf ears. The trance of the dance was its own animal, and she wriggled in its jaws to avoid being swallowed by fatigue. In dance she escaped groping hands, pecking hooded men, shrieked politics of Beerbet, and even her standing appointment with the demon of sleep.

Her aloft arms waved, kelp in hot air, evading notes of music that no longer played. Experience and sultry tenacity created a vortex between her wrists that was in itself like the fluid of panicked breath roiling over the crowd. It caused the gaming table to stall above her and slowly spin in her entranced torrent. Escaboulnté was able to crawl up onto this fresh arena and stand, having never lost his sword.

Now Roddery was stuck, for if he withdrew Breakwater his raft would fall, crushing Lassender and leaving him exposed to people on all sides. The old fencer assessed the same, striking at the southerner’s fingers since they could be nowhere else but the sword. Moving one hand at a time, lower, higher, kept the magic alive, but the city master was a quick study. His rapier reoriented, prepared to drop like a guillotine along the length of Breakwater and claim at least a few fingers.

Graychild resigned himself to the loss. Recalling the ice of death, eyes and lungs paralyzed in it, body stuck dangling in the watery and still below, he would feel no pain from the amputations. Then he could wield the spray of blood to blind Beerbet’s mortal eye.

It never came to that, as Roddery was aided by the astounding skill of the grabblers, who dispensed Goodly Gaw’s grandeur with all the creatures of the world. Jeremiad’s pincepouncer patrol had established an arena of their own, wide around Beocroak in a semicircle, where he did battle with Xeams the suspiciously inhuman.

“Daaht!” she ordered, roar always perfectly aimed at the individual crab she wanted to leap and latch onto an oncoming assailant. Its general disuse, she preferred to sneak up on her weapons, meant that when she did use it she needed precision, to fire it as one would a stone from a sling. Anything that couldn’t be handled by her launching utterances was deemed worthy of the bucket, which she aimed at hands to get them caught inside, slipping free only when the claws had removed what had stuck in the first place.

While she kept the riffraff of battle at bay, Beocroak sought best use of his own pair of weapons. The unlikely pair was bonded. Normally noncompliant animals could not be released from the grabbler grip in the middle of the fight, as they would flee, but these would not leave their friend in his knuckled thrall, and had the sense to continue the duel to better their own odds of escaping together and alive. Once fully intuited, Beocroak moved them in disjointed mastery, as grandmasters of the game board move their pieces from opposite corners in a single tactical pincer.

He cast the bouncing urchin at the ground and released it so it might use his gifted force to hop repeatedly. In theory it was an ideal weapon against Xeams, as its stiff pikes covered a wide area at many angles and without intermission. To combat its coverage the Half-Biter lieutenant moved in, to where it wouldn’t dare risk landing one of its many lances in the grabbler’s buffalo shoulders.

Xeams contended with the fouled bandit at that range, ducking and weaving around its back claws and the patches bearing stinging anemones. Beocroak wasn’t fast enough to stop the approach, and the bandit was slower still. He was left open, feeling his enemy’s breath; all he could do was tense his flesh to mildly armor it against the blow he’d failed to prevent.

Sensing his distress, Jeremiad glanced over her shoulder and saw the impossible once more, but this time it was plainer, nastier, and outright disagreeable. To her it appeared Xeams’s neck stretched unnaturally in a python’s lunge, its underside suddenly ribbed and ballooning in sections like crowded water skins strung on a bowing stick. She watched him bite Beocroak’s neck with teeth that grew to glistening, drooping, conical sickles only as they neared her master’s skin.

Every drop of their penetration was felt, and they went farther than Beocroak had ever endured, into a lung at their most tapered extreme. The bite stopped before it could reach across the organ’s gap of air. Only then could he counter with the mastery of flesh that allowed grabblers to staunch their own bleeding and splint their own bones.

Breathing through the pain, encapsulating it, rejecting it, Beocroak flexed his all. The squeeze forced Xeams’s needle teeth out the way they came, and once they cleared their entry points his human countenance had returned, no sign of blood upon his lips, only in his satisfied expression.

The many needle punctures in his lung that would require constant effort to keep shut convinced the grabbler he had lost the fight for dominance, instantly transitioning into the one for survival. This coincided with a great happening in the darkened sky above, where the sound of the eye straining against the mysterious hand’s grip ceased. Those who looked up saw the orb released and the hand retreat into the swelling blanket of clouds, seeming to disappear entirely.

Now that the eye was free it was in play, as far as the grabbler was concerned. Only one element could reach it and make it of use: the bouncing urchin. The opportunity would be brief, as Xeams only needed a slightly different angle to approach for another bite on a leakier organ like the bladder or tripe.

Beocroak released the fouled shore bandit from his internal grasp, spinning it by the jaw on his way out so it could take up a dog’s threatening crouch against Xeams. The animal would be little danger to him on its own, but little was far from none when you’re covered in jagged barnacles and toxic tendrils. The southerner would be forced to take half a moment to calculate around the animal’s pounce.

In that half moment the grabbler caught the urchin on the descent and took one spine in both hands. Rising to his heels, he spun. The first pass generated a wind powerful enough to knock Jeremiad’s pincepouncers onto their faces. She wasn’t made vulnerable because the second pass nearly blasted the clothing off the other attackers, who chose to retreat before they could experience the third pass.

Jeremiad moved to protect her weapons, stomping to their positions so they could cling to the side of her leg facing away from Beocroak’s belligerent breeze. Most of them climbed behind her to cower as she stood her ground, trying to watch Xeams without blinking, difficult as it was when her master’s building force dried her eyes.

The villainous Half-Biter didn’t know what to think of this new strategy, making him uncomfortable enough to idle. By the sixth spin Beocroak had achieved maximum strength; with a single drop of Goodly blood in him he would have already generated a market-ravaging cyclone. The force in its entirety was gifted to the urchin. Now it could fly.

Beocroak needed a more horizontal angle for release. Few ever saw an action that brought into relief how agile a grabbler was, overshadowed as acrobatics often were by the horse-stopping power of their arms. He shot off his heels, compacting the ground with them once more, creating a brick-breaking sound against soft sandy soil that should never have been capable of it. It brought him to the city wall, which his heels spun upward against briefly, granting him his angle.

Release. His missile struck as reverse lightning. The magnificent height it attained erased it from every eye save one. To that eye it only grew, to threatening size. Contact. Minuscule compared to what it attacked, the urchin nonetheless caused extreme pain, as a man’s eye is often tortured by a single speck of dust with conviction against eviction.

“Aaaahhh!” Escaboulnté screamed, grabbing at his eye patch. Roddery Graychild’s digits were saved, expressing their relief by pushing Breakwater into a tilt created by Lassender’s latest string of seductive vexations. The table-raft broke free of her invisible whirlpool and finally found the square wooden column he had planned to trap the old fencer against.

The city master reeled at the impact, smacked his back on the post, losing his breath and gaining Roddery’s against his cheek. Like Xeams he aimed high and did not hold back, grabbing Escaboulnté’s eye patch and everything he could underneath it. Then twisting. Then yanking. Goodly shocks and pops of magic arced away from the old fencer’s face, casting it in ten different lights and colors that Graychild had never seen.

Dead or struck dumb, the empty socket in the Socket collapsed against the post and wilted over the side of the game table, where he was caught by no one and struck the floor unceremoniously.

In Roddery’s hand, cradled in the black of the patch, was a phosphor orb of dawn gold and clarified blood red. Absent of connection to a mind the eye of Hexaclete, briefly of Escaboulnté, was without pupil. All its divinity was in its fizzing radiating color until it was returned to a suitable vessel.

Graychild wasn’t greedy. He thirsted for power, and there was a difference. His taste of death meant no water sated him. Only life did. The only evidence of life was influence. A greedy man was a stupid man, soul turning inside out and becoming a void of desire at first sign of what might be gained. All reason and principle was lost. The greedy were empty monsters whose humanity was either lit or black, nothing between, and never able to understand their own transition from state to state.

A full monster was just a god without the power. It was their way to seek it, to demonstrate their identity and validity in the same way the ice moves through the ages: retreating wordlessly, overtaking without pity. This wicked wisdom, this blade of knowledge that cleaved hearts at a distance, allowed Graychild to resist smashing Hexaclete’s eye against his own in an effort to claim it.

Anything might happen. If it were to overwhelm him at all he would be at the mercy of all the people around him, many of whom would no doubt try to claim the eye as they had just seen him do. And by the look of it, removing it from Escaboulnté had destroyed his original eye as well, assuming he hadn’t been missing one in the first place.

He would try it on Xeams, whose constitution was better suited to playing with magic. First the two had to be reunited. Without knowing it, the captain of the lost Thumbscale had already set this in motion.

The skies over Beerbet were still darkening, though the clouds had thinned. The eye took their place as it ominously sank. Its pace was slow, but at that size it was not slow enough to prevent panic. All of Beerbet was screaming, fleeing, running in circles, all except the reliable drunks slumped in the corners, staring back at it with one eye closed. That city had survived worse, without rupturing the hiccuped bubbles of revelry always about their heads.

The bouncing urchin must have dislodged and fallen, for its companion the shore bandit took off running. The incredible plummet would not destroy it, only give it the highest bounces of its life across the greatest distances. Suffering more would be the bandit as it tried to catch up. Should they reunite they would find themselves more agreeable toward grabblers, as the urchin now bore a Goodly ichor of ocular juice upon some of its spines, which would draw in prey and scour their surroundings of the sorts of filth they didn’t like to wallow in.

Beocroak had attacked the eye in the hope of either drawing its attention further or bringing it down. Either way he figured his odds were better with it bearing upon the fight, and in this he was correct. Xeams did not like the Goodly gaze upon him, and it was only growing larger, threatening to flatten them all.

However, in its descent the first mate saw something else: victory. But only a chance of it, he realized. If it was coming down then the city master was master no more, and that meant Captain Rod had taken the eye. They’d planned at length; he wouldn’t use it on himself. The Socket. Xeams had to get there, where his commander had most likely fought, before the disappointed man was forced to use the eye on someone else and press-gang them into the crew.

The grabblers flinched in surprise as the man-thing turned tail and fled with speed that quickly overtook the shore bandit. Other members of his crew scattered under the eye’s encroaching shadow, as did the city guard. Jeremiad kept an admirably calm pace as she approached. Trust meant she did not need to run, since Beocroak did not see the need.

“Master?” she asked, their grabbler kinship turning the single word into the five most relevant questions.

“We must go,” he told her, rubbing the injured side of his neck as he rolled it to measure which energies needed to be kept occupied pinching his lung shut to prevent it from leaking air into his chest cavity.

“But we didn’t use the eye.”

“It no longer matters. I spoke with that shore bandit. It happened to know the way. I can now get us into Rooth Tugt… and to the lake of lights.” Jeremiad said nothing. Her silence suggested. Her master did not mean he had literally spoken to the mongrel, an animal two steps beneath the intellect of a garbage-eating dog. The only animals that could be spoken to were parrots, witch ravens, and hybrids of the two, with most conversations consisting of requests for fruit and orders for acts of thievery.

No, when a grabbler gathered information from an animal it was discerned from myriad factors like the response of its gut to their grip, their various calls, and their behavior both before and after being grabbled. There must have been a treasure trove of clues inside the bandit’s stomach for it to have informed Beocroak of the best route through the deadly jungle of Rooth Tugt and to their ultimate goal, for which he had enlisted her and agreed to be her guardian during as well as forever after. For her master was cursed, and there in the lake of lights he claimed there was a cure. She would aid him so that he could cure her in turn, of the miserable disease of being an improper grabbler who could not look upon the gem tears of Gaw’s stone face whenever she pleased.

She did not doubt. In fact, she wanted him capable of making a mental trail out of identifying every bone shard and egg shell in the bandit’s gut. That meant he could pass the knowledge to her one day.

Another one of her silent questions revolved around the colossal eye bearing down on them, which was answered when her master began to run, presumably toward the nearest exit as attested to by a gnawed leather strap the bandit had swallowed. His expression was stoic, but he was running, so she joined him.

As to the subtle question of what to do with her weapon, she already had his leading example with the unlikely couple. If her roar was to grow into something more formidable and informative, her weapons had to live to tell the tale, had to benefit by their submission to her power over the animal domain.

“Daaht!” Mimicking his move that released the urchin into the clouds, Jeremiad spun alongside her master’s run, shocking the packed sand with one ball heel. If the pincepouncers didn’t hurry back into the basket the force of rotation would rip them off her body and they would miss their chance to escape any boiling pots that weren’t flattened by the falling eye of Escaboulnté.

Once all the crabs were safely squeezed beneath constraining wire she loosed her grip from the bucket’s center and swung it off in a mighty arc that sailed over Beerbet’s outer wall. The angle was low enough that upon landing the basket would roll rather than crash so her weapons’ guts wouldn’t be liquefied on impact and burst from broken shells. It stopped near the water, where they were finally free to radiate out and all go their separate ways, to bubble out tales of a Jeremiad that should not be named such along every tide from Rooth Tugt to the southern tip of Welkmadat.

Incredible, the young grabbler felt more than thought, a balloon in her heart giving her a floating stride as they ran. All she had done was accompany Beocroak, serve under him, and now an animal more respectable than most spiders and scorpions was, by the tens, singing her praises. She dared see a future where she reappeared at the border of Lazuli Pawlm, facing a fence of disapproving grabblers, locking arms to bar her in a gesture stronger than chain mail. One roar would summon every animal around to testify. Then elbows would unlock and allow her through.

She looked at her master with wet eyes, with fierce pride, with anger at not having found each other sooner. He would know all her feelings by simply looking back, but his gaze was locked far ahead, on the dark jungles that would be so much more dangerous than a hole in the sand full of gambling. If she survived what she learned there…

(Continued in Part Six)