Albion

City by the winedark sea: Albion. Markfeet smokes cigarettes and curses the dead; the magicians ride past laughing on their way to class. Hoopla passes through on the way to stranger climes; the trains run south past Oast and Ontogeny-Among-the-Lilies to the nameless waste where the necromancers speak to the dead of Empire. Port town, college town; Albion drinks too much, smokes like a chimney, smears the white chalk of the cliffs black with disregard.

The City Has Grown To Cover The Graves

The Empress has been given a pass by the Court of the Dead to return to the land of the living. There are people she must see, warnings she must give; typical portent business, but she has been granted a handful of days for herself to see how things are getting on.

Her empire, when she ruled it, was wracked with plague, choked with the dead. The wealthy fled to the hills to die, and the poor boarded themselves in their homes to die; the skies were thick with corpse ash, until even the tenders to the dead sickened and died. She has not been dead so long, but it is only the ghosts that still bear witness to that lost generation.

Near evening of her final day, she finds a small plague, set in the sidewalk. “Here,” it reads, “lie the remains of over 40,000 unknown plague victims, buried in haste in a great pit.” The street, bright with new stores, is so thickly crowded with the unsettled dead that she can hardly move for their pleading hands. “I would help you, if I could,” she apologizes, no more powerful in death than she was in life.

Take This Cup From Me

Jillian was at the top of the Tower when she found out about Comacho’s death. It was a clear night, she remembers that, and cold: the air bit into her gloves when she went out on the roof to smoke a joint. The stars were high, high and alien, and crowded into the bowl of the sky. Sheila was sensitive to smoke, so she had to smoke outside. Which was fine; it kept her in time with the seasons.

She pictured him, conjured the image forth into the lungful of smoke, power pushing through her; a short dark kid with a crew cut who used to pretend he was a velociraptor in the halls. She didn’t know him well, but they’d hang out sometimes watching the breakdancers during lunch. Been shot in the head outside of a house party, just randomly, some stupid fight or other, she didn’t know.

She went to his grave, next time she went back, left a knot on his stone. Marble for memory, cedar for waste. This, she knew, even then, nothing more than raw superstition. The dead are the dead; all her Art is reserved for the guilty surviving.

Gnosis

That slow sick spread of certainty: he has spent weeks, months, both evading and cinching the net ever tighter. The streets are dark with crematory smoke, greasy with ash. Those who can, leave; run for the cleaner air of the hills, the safety of the monasteries. Those who must stay bar their doors, cover their heads and eyes with ruby glass, tattoo gargoyles and demons on their arms against sickness.

Superstitious nonsense.

He has forged his chains himself, from brutal logic: cause and effect in terrible array. He has studied charts and stars, the movement of mice across the temple steps, the simple tests of cards and books. He has worn his eyes ragged in the lab. No. The signs are clear. He is cause and generation of this plague; it is his sin, his crime, that grips the city, that runs red and joyous through the shuttered houses and the empty streets.

And now?

He climbs the five thousand steps from the water to the cliff top and looks out and down at his city, Albion, Albion on the winedark sea. He has bled and suffered for its glory, fought against the seeping corruption eating at its bones, dosed its worm-raddled heart with bitter tonic. Weeping, gnashing his teeth, he turns his face to the white line of the desert and flees.

Foundation

The work of generations, setting bones, curing warts, delivering babies. They don’t get much call for war-work, but every spring and summer the men drain off to the east and return lighter a limb, shorter an eye, aching in joints broken and reset in haste; these too need tending. Half of what Jillian knows is useless garbage, an indecipherable bit of success scrawled in the margins of the little Red Book; words have shifted, since then, or men, or climate, assuming it ever worked at all.

It’s a dark night with the rain coming down and she’s up late writing the day down in her logbook by the watery light of the coals when the knock comes and the door opens hard on its heels, spilling rain and a man all over her floor. “God save us all,” she growls, and levers herself over to see what the devil has brought her.

It’s a well-made shape he’s taken this time, barring the scarring and the blood all over his front. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got,” she tells him, and humps his leaking corpus over to the side bed redolent with rosemary and ivy. Underneath the wreck of his clothes he’s a marvel in ruin, a shipwrecked statue, his belly torn open down to the fork. Jillian looks up and his eyes are open, but milky. “You’re bound to die, son,” she tells him, but he either doesn’t hear her or doesn’t care.

She does what she can, but it won’t be enough.

Morning finds her asleep in her chair, arms black to the elbow with dried blood and pine tar. She pries gummy eyes apart to find him standing over her, numinous with health. It hurts to look at him, and when he speaks, it’s a tall tree in her ear. He passes, and the day is empty for his going. The side bed is pierced through with blue flowers of new-grown rosemary, black berries of ivy.

Transitioning

Fog, and weeks of fog. Mold and moss digs furry fingers into every nook and crevice, and the greasy face of the Sailor’s Quarter goes piebald with crusted salt summoned from the slate grey pucker of the bay. Markfeet is cold to the core of her, no matter what fires she builds or drinks she swallows; she swaddles herself in colorless, bulky sweaters, festoons herself with charms against the dusk. No matter — her fingers still ache, bloodless and so stiff she can hardly hold flame to her cigarette. Forensics has to do it for her, her face moony and foolish in the red light of the match.

“So? What did you learn?”

Forensics flinches. “Not much, alas. Vegetarian. A drinker, to judge by the liver, but not a smoker, going by the lungs. Brain raddled with worms, but–” she holds up a hand to forestall Markfeet’s next, obvious question– “years old. Probably got exposed during the last skirmish.”

“Sailor, then?”

“Hard to say. Could’ve been an islander, or maybe just unlucky. Worked with his hands, sure enough; see the calluses? That says sailor, right enough, only his feet are soft as lambskin.”

“Maybe they were new-grown?”

Forensics purses her lips. “Y-e-e-e-es,” she drawls. “that could have been it. Hard to tell in this weather, but they do seem pale, don’t they? We’ll get you a list of backalleys that could have put them together for him; maybe they’ll know something.”