BleedingTears
patreon
Arcanist - Chapter 90
🕑 Added 2025-05-05 14:08:43 +0000 UTCThe next day, a group of specialized personnel, supposedly from the Department of Internal Affairs, arrived from the Cathedral to start the operation. They parked their horse-drawn carriages by the door and began hauling off what was left from Miss Martha’s legacy to the extensions strapped behind them, while Valens and Selin watched under the supervision of a silent Dain.
Word came that Garran and others were out for a haunting case in the West Meadow, a rather rich part of Belgrave involving a certain famous businessman. So today, they were granted Dain’s silent but judging eyes to act as the gaze of the Church.
Efficient men, Valens realized soon, when the special personnel finished clearing the whole house in just a couple of hours. These were men stuck in their First Trials but used the stats wisely to make themselves useful, which was to carry couches and beds as if they weighed nothing.
Once they were done and gone to fetch Valens’s list of ingredients, the real duty began.
“This is tricky,” Valens mused when the look of dusty floors, moldy planks, soot-riddled walls, and broken faces of the back rooms confronted him. “I suppose we can’t be too liberal with our use of water here. This place hardly stays afoot as it is.”
“There’s a pair of buckets in the back. I can start with scrubbing the floor—”
“Nonsense. I won’t have you tire yourself to death to cleanse this little bit of wood. Just let me think it through,” Valens said, smiling at Selin.
He began to march around the main hall, thinking of a way to be gentle about this. He wasn’t nearly as adept in water-based spells as wind-based ones, so he had to come up with a real plan rather than diving straight into it.
The cracks across the floor… We have to fix them, but if I try to go over them one by one, it will take days to finish the floor, not to mention the walls.
“Dain,” he said a moment after, turning to the towering Templar who lounged by the door, looking out into the foggy street while appearing as uninterested in this deal as possible. “Do you know about the regulations behind the construction in Belgrave?”
“Uh,” Dain muttered, a single word.
Valens’s eyes glinted. “Is there a specific rule about keeping to the character of the street while constructing new buildings? As in, do we have to keep the theme of Knuckle Alley in mind while attempting our renovations?”
The Templar looked confused for a second before shaking his head at him.
“Good,” Valens said, rubbing his chin. “What about fires? Wooden buildings can be hazardous when built in such close proximity. So there should be a case involving a great fire of sorts, right? How do the courts deal with that?”
“No sires,” Dain said.
“No fires,” Valens nodded, unsurprised. “What about digging? Granted, you’re obviously not entertaining the notion of solid construction here in Belgrave, but can I dig a hole in this plot? Or one in the yard?”
“Uh,” Dain nodded.
Good.
“Selin, would you be kind enough to wait for me in the backyard?” Valens said, looking around the walls in consideration. The place was emptied, and there in its cracks lingered the stench of that horrifying ritual. That was why Valens thought the memory of this house would serve better as a reminder to people than its disgusting appearance.
“Mr. Kosthal, what are you thinking?” Selin said curiously, but already she was on her way to the back door. “I can help you—”
“Oh, you will, but not now,” Valens said and waved her off, waiting until she closed the door after her, leaving Dain and him alone in the hall. “And I suppose,” he continued, this time gesturing at the Templar, “you will have no qualms about a little destruction?”
Dain glanced briefly at him, then down at the house, seemingly thinking of the reason why Valens would mention destruction while they were standing inside the house.
“You see, Earth Magi are rarely appreciated for their efforts, but they play just as important a role as Healers when building a community. They are especially crucial in the longevity of a state and the ways it could further expand without breaking the tradition. Good people, too, those are. Slightly obnoxious and sometimes a little too rigid in the head, but good and hard-working people nonetheless. We ought to learn from their ways.”
“Whaf?” Dain said, turning stately toward him and looking him down as if he were an annoying fly. Through the frequencies, however, Valens could see that the man was simply curious.
“I’m not in the mood for cleaning,” Valens said, gesturing at the house. “That’s why I’ll break it down and bury the pieces in the yard. Not all of them, though. I’ll save some for a roof.”
Dain’s eyes slowly widened. His mouth parted slightly as he pointed with a finger down at the very floor upon which they stood. “Thif?” he hissed through the gap of his teeth.
“Yes,” Valens said, smiling widely around him. “All of this. It won’t take long, though, but just to be safe, I’ll have to ask you to vacate the place and wait kindly with Selin in the backyard. There will be dust, and I have to keep the mold in one place. Serious work, you might say, and I’ll have no use for distractions.”
He grumbled just then, asked, and pointed all the while Valens pushed him step by step toward the back, until they embraced the heavy fog outside and arrived by a lonely Selin, looking worriedly up at the house. Valens left Dain there, patted him on the shoulder, then turned his back to them and raised his hands.
“Don’t expect a mansion, please,” he added for good measure, to keep their expectations in check. Not like building a mansion in Knuckle Alley of all places would serve their plan of keeping a low profile in the slums. No, a replica of Miss Martha’s haunted house would be enough, and this time, it wouldn’t be a wooden abomination.
There’s nothing better than soil and rocks.
Yes, he even had a few glyphs for isolation waiting in the back of his mind, too.
.....
Carter hauled the couch with one hand, jerking himself sideways to squeeze through the depot while keeping the damn thing high enough so that it wouldn’t catch anything. It was an old thing flung here and left alone, waiting in the dusty vault of the parish for the Blessed Father knew how long.
Still, as a Laborer, he preferred the simplicity of the work here to searching around the market and shops for strange things written in that long list. It was around when they bought a great deal of alcohol and boxes of bread that he decided to question the literacy of Turner, who claimed with stubborn insistence that these were, indeed, things written clearly in the list.
Outside the vault, his arms strained as he searched for a place to fit the couch in the cart. Among the boxes of ungodly things and strange tools, there was just enough space for a single couch, which he found after laboring around it for some time.
He let the old thing plop gently so as not to spike the horses, grunted his way on top of the cart, and dragged it to the side to keep the boxes caged in the back. This way, even if they caught a hole or a broken cobble on the way, the boxes would remain safe thanks to the cushioned side of the couch.
That done, he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, stood up, and peered at the carriage that waited out in the front. Turner was grumbling as he fought against a chair that rattled and shook, finally deciding to lay it down in the cart rather than have it stand proudly against the winds.
“We’re late!” Carter yelled at him, to which a bedraggled Turner answered by climbing up to his carriage, waving a brisk hand at him. Then he cracked the whip and set out to the Knuckle Alley, with Carter following him suit.
The Eastern Drowning parish saw scarcely an effort of this magnitude in the last few years, other than the few times they got charity deliveries from the other parishes. It was often the way things worked here. They would be the ones getting things, not handing out chairs and couches and buying stuff for a stranger whose name was kept a secret from them.
Turner said it was some dark work. Carter agreed with him. There was nothing but dark work in the Knuckle Alley, and he reckoned it was because of the air there. There was a bastardly stench there, hung across the streets with all those rotten rats lying about and half-dead ones scampering mindlessly up and down through the sewers.
Good thing he saved Bess from that place after all those years of work. Found a place down in the Midpath in the Saintly Crossing, a two-room flat with the weekly rent of a few crowns. Expensive place, that house was, but he reckoned nothing was worth more than to see that rosy face smiling at him every day after the work was done.
He told Turner to do the same thing, but the fool was something of a dull. Broken in the head, he reckoned, to keep that good woman still in the Eastern Drowning. Laboring for the Church paid good, he told him once, so why not rent out a good place when you have your arms and legs still working?
“Oi!” Carter straightened and yelled out when a pair of bloody buggers tried to climb the cart from the back. “Hands off, you little gutter rats! That’s not yours, nor’ll it ever be!”
He flashed them a fist to indicate he was meaning it, got two bloody grins as an answer, turned and hacked into the dirt, the veins in his neck bulging. “Think I’m haulin’ this for your sticky fingers? Off with you now, or you’re gonna get it!”
That seemed to work, or it was because the bastards didn’t catch sight of something worth the trouble in the boxes, but they pissed off and left Carter alone.
“Shadows eat you,” he cursed, rubbing the side of his back. “Nothing’s good gonna come from this part of the town. Why bother with all this?”
He nudged the horses round a corner, sucked in a breath from the muddy air, heard his chest rattling with all the foul air. Good thing, indeed, that he saved himself and Bess from this piss-poor part of the town. Left them alone to their rot and dirt here forever.
But now that he did it, he wanted more. Who wouldn’t? Back in the day, he’d sworn he’d be a Warrior and join a big Guild, and go off into the Broken Lands. Earn himself a fortune and a name, then come back to Bess and give her more than a place to put your head in.
They talked him out of it. Told him that he’d be dead before he knew it. That shadows didn’t play with fools like him. That you have to be a man with means to do that sort o’ thing, and there was no place for a bastard in their ranks.
The church work, though. Now that was some honest work. Safe, too, he reckoned after working here for all those years. Safe, indeed—
Shaking under the ground. Shaking so hard he felt it in the back of his teeth. His jaw clamped shut, the reins nearly slipped from his fingers, and he found himself dangling by the side of the coach, one leg fixed into the compartment the only thing saving him from a fall down into the dirt.
The horses cried. Whimpered as they scuttled back, halted with a screech of wood and boxes, Turner looking up out in front of him, then back at him with eyes wide and fingers trembling.
“Uh,” Carter grunted as he pulled himself back to the seat, stretched the reins, and pulled them off to stop the horses’ maddening. He looked about himself. No, they were in the right place. A few blocks away from the place where they were supposed to deliver the goods. A few blocks away—
But the whole street was choked up in a thick cloud of dust. He coughed. He sneezed. He reckoned whether he should get back when the cloud slowly cleared. Turner was quick to act. He nudged the horses to continue, and that’s what Carter did. He followed the man. One block after another.
Then they came up to the one-story house. Supposed to belong to some widow, they were told. But it wasn’t there.
“Hell’s own teeth… it’s growin’, it’s bloody growin’!” Turner yelled, one finger trembling as he pointed it out toward the parting cloud.
Carter squinted up at it. Made an effort to see through it. Strange things happened round here in the Knuckle Alley, and they all involved dust and shadows. But he couldn’t die. This was meant to be a safe job. Safe in Belgrave, the capital of whole Melton for Blessed Father’s sake!
“Bess…” he mumbled, looked back, and saw the end of the street. Could make a run for it if he wanted, but there was something about that dust cloud that called out to him.
He’d been a curious fool all his life. He had to take a look at it.
“What’s growing?” he called out to Turner, who was in the front, then plopped down to the ground and ran toward his carriage, one hand shielding him from the parting dust cloud.
He coughed his way to the near of his brother, then stood and stared at the place where that widow’s house should’ve been.
“Oh, piss on me grave, that ain’t right,” he muttered when he saw it. “That ain’t right!” he yelled, stumbling a step back. “Tell me you’re seein’ this too,” he said to Turner, but already knew the answer.
He was seeing it too.
There was a damned house growing out of the dirt there out in front of them.
.....
Wish I was a Mage too... uh.
Comments
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
Caleb Reusser
I think he made an impression on the locals. Might not be the one he wanted though.
ReadingObsessed
I love that idea that Earth mages haven't been asked to build architecture in so long they just don't do it anymore.
