REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

7

A cold morning light bled across Camshire's jigsaw rooftops and chimneys. Trees were planted on the sidewalks, fountains splashed, the speech was refined in this high ward. The district was a place of judges and advocates and senators and generals and confidence men of the highest caliber. Carts and beasts hauled goods from the tanneries and rustworks to be distributed among the bickering merchants who readied their stalls for the coming day. The season was wet and so the Diluvian guards at the gates ordered all creatures put to such burdensome purpose washed of their mud before entering the domain of the societal elite. Newsmen barked from the street corners with printed reams in their arms as they sang headlines of war on the frontier and unrest at home.

Servants and housekeepers worked to clear the alleys and avenues and windows and doorways of the webs that had been woven by spindle-rats over the course of the dripping night. The vermin themselves had by that early hour already claimed and cocooned and ferried their prey deep into the stinking reaches beneath Camshire's cobblestones where they could gorge undisturbed by the stirring metropolis. A Purist street preacher lent his voice to the babble until a throng of Diluvian shieldsmen scooped him up and dragged him to a ward where his proclamations would be better tolerated—after perhaps a bout of rehabilitation at their bronzed knuckles in some tucked-away cell. Traders traded. Children played. Bureaucrats conspired. The city hummed and groaned.

The anarch pushed through all this bustle and walked into the door of a crowded public house. His ears were met with a din of competing chatter and clinking ware. The embroiled aromas of coffee and baked pastries and perfumes tinctured the atmosphere. Downtowners crammed the establishment. The eatery had seen praise from Camshire's prophetic tastemakers and so business was brisk. The bakehouse was near the Julian Wall and thus rife with aristocrats and officers alike in their fulsome silks and feathered hats and gilt scabbards. These men commuted daily from homes in the surrounding neighborhoods to the fortified complex to do their work for the Nation and its people, but above all themselves. The anarch was no such man as those favored sons. A stranger to this ward. His compatriots kept to haunts far from these lanterned throughways, away from the bridges and minarets and canals of Camshire's richer districts. The revolutionaries were forced to lurk beneath the noses of the elite in secret places, dark smoky rooms of forbidden song and unwashed beasts and men. The anarch did not come to this far destination to taste sweet delicacies or to conduct mundane business. He came to spill blood. He came to burn.

Before venturing out prior to dawn, the insurrectionist had removed the metal from his piercings and covered his runic tattoos in a sleeved and hooded robe like those worn by the scholars and dignitaries whom he now moved among. The stolen attire had been peeled from the back of one such statesman as he lay dying in the street, his blood mingling with the mud, struck down by the anarch and his fellow conspirators during the noble's clandestine outing to a ghetto sinhouse. The disguise would not serve the anarch well if he were to fall to any real scrutiny and so he was prepared to act quickly if trouble came. It did not. The crowd was busy with itself and gave no attention to the thin pale man who walked the throng. He came to the center of the room and surveyed those whom he would soon unmake and was pleased at the looking. Soon he would be a martyr. History would know his discontent. His gaunt breast surged with power, a feeling he'd never known until that moment. Today he would steal from his enemies their most precious thing. He would be their god. Reaper of their souls.

He drew a blade from his waist and pulled his robe open to reveal a chest like a bird's, hollow and frail. Etched into his pallid skin was a spiraling and intricate network of tangled scarifications. This action caught the notice of only a few and there was no time for them to do much more than register the oddness of it. One silver-haired officer gasped and rose and stretched out his arm and even gained purchase of the anarch's sleeve but it was by then too late. The rebel mage put his blade to the unfinished rune carved into his own flesh and etched the final vector that would complete its solution. In this fatal act he triggered the awesome kinetic force locked within that intricate geometry and unleashed a spectacular and irreversible doom.