REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

35

STAVE 13

Mulia looked out on the magnificent plaza of gazebos and boat-studded canals and ignored the signs that this was merely a dream of better days forever gone. The faces of departed loved ones had been returned to life—her cherished father and mother, once ripped away by knife and nature, now here again in radiant flesh and fine clothes. Fate had blessed the young couple Donric and Mulia and their wedding guests with a clear and beautiful sky. They were now in the customary phase of the ceremony in which the groom was to search for his hidden bride before he could forever claim her with kiss and oath and blood. Donric went from door to door in the event complex, unable to find his fiancée in any of the dwellings or shops. Mulia smiled as she watched her betrothed scratch his jaw and scan the crowd of friends and family as they laughed at his perplexity. Finally Donric's gaze landed on the canals that had been populated with great white swans of cursive necks and startling golden eyes. His sharp eye leapt along the graceful gondolas whose drivers wore wide-brimmed hats that blocked the glaring sun until his stare settled on a lovely woman who wore one of those covers rung with gentle bells on its brim, her face disguised in its plentiful shade. Donric finally saw through the disguise, that wide jangling hat and loose red robes and long oar in her hands. He smiled and went toward her. Mulia had been masqueraded as one of the boatsmen, he now realized. Donric stepped from the canal edge onto her boat and pulled her hat back to reveal her face to her lover and future husband. He took Mulia in his strong arms and they kissed for a long while as the guests applauded and cheered. Then came the screams.

Arrows and spears whistled through the air. Donric's head blossomed into a red rose before Mulia's deathstruck eyes and he fell splashing into the waters. A cloud of blood snaked through its dark eddies as he sank below the surface to finish his life at the bottom of the murk. Mulia looked up and witnessed nightmares on the backs of nightmares. Scores of hobgoblin savages poured into the plaza and slaughtered everyone in sight with relish, ordained by their god to visit suffering and woe on all. She watched as relatives and friends were cut down, everyone she held dear, their red juices stark against the white tablecloths. Blood and wine admixed and indistinguishable. Mulia's boat shifted and threatened to capsize. Someone had landed on its planks behind her. She turned to see the howling and painted face of a sandman, bones and teeth jutting from its contorted face, black eyes shot with monstrous lust. It raised its bonesword high.

— • —

All was stopped by a sudden and distant boom. Mulia awoke in her manor bedroom. Dust lingered in the air like dazed sprites. Voices shouted from the other rooms, the agitated staff commenting on the sudden commotion. Dogs barked and howled outside and birds cackled in shrill alarm. Something had roused the entire ward.

Mulia's door flew open and Astrid and Amelie rushed to her bed, fear-stricken. "What happened, mother?" said Astrid as the girls climbed under her covers. "Is it the Black Dawn?" Mulia held her daughters tight and comforted them and assured them the world was not coming to its promised end and hoped it true. Could one of the countless doomsayers that preached from every corner of Camshire have been right, after all? Had Qali and her horde come to collect her ancient promise to reclaim the living world? Was there truth to the Wandering Shepherd's grim prophecies? Had the thousand-bodied gods decided to once again wipe clean the world for yet another shaping? Or were the Anarch insurrectionists to blame? A more mundane explanation, perhaps, but no less world-ending to their unlucky victims than a comet crashing from the sky. Dead was dead.

— • —

It was into that black-canvassed wagon again for Varga Skinner. Valen and his men ferried their captive man, perhaps the arrest of their careers, across cobblestones and through streets of mud on another damnable ride through the unruly city. Skinner's possessors presumably meant to carry him back full circle to Fetterstone. The scapegoat lamented his shameful naiveté. The signs had all been there—to include Church's stern warnings to stay away from his apartment, where his framers had planted the bones of those murdered kids. Skinner had found it odd that Hotch had chosen him from the start. The etching was all right there in the stones. Fitting that he never became a Reaper. His world had again turned upside down and he'd done nothing to avoid it. Perhaps the promise of freedom had blinded him. Well, that was a fantasy and always was. Skinner now wished for nothing more than to be brought before that firing line. He couldn't take seeing the walls of that cell again or another like it. It would undo what remained of his mind.