The Crypt in the Mist

Zul’jarra spat on the stones of Numazon and did not bother to wipe her tusks. Behind her, the last of the Witherbark captives were limping out of the crypt into a fog so thick a man could lose his own hand in it, and in front of her lay what was left of Ritualist Zongha. She hoped, she said, that whatever loa waited for the Vilebranch in the afterlife would swallow them whole and grind them with its back teeth. Burrly did not argue. He had seen what was down there.

The mist had promised to keep, and it had. Burrly came back to Shadebasin Watch at dusk, where the pines of Zul’Aman lean over the trail like old men listening at a door, and took up the two promises he had left with. Kul’amara the Fierce had been right about the fog. It had not drifted in off any river. It had been laid down over Numazon like a blanket over a body, Vilebranch magic, so that no one on the outside would see what was being done to the Witherbark on the inside.

The Vilebranch were Malacrass’s own tribe, and Zul’jarra was not surprised that they had taken to hex magic. That was a path they chose long ago, she said, a path away from the rest of the Amani. What she would not forgive was the time. What the Vilebranch had done to the Witherbark had gone too long without an Amani answer. So the answer went in through the mist, and the mist, which had been meant to hide the Vilebranch, hid Burrly instead.

He found the crypt entrance in the grey. He cut down eight of the Vilebranch inside it, the ones who stood between him and the stairs, and then went up to where Ritualist Zongha was keeping his work. The chronicler will not describe the work. It is enough to say that Zongha is no longer doing it.

Eight Witherbark came out of the shadows alive because of him. It was only on the way out that the reason for all of it came clear, and it was worse than cruelty. The Vilebranch had not taken the Witherbark for spite. They had taken them as a gift for the Twilight’s Blade. Undead soldiers, Zul’jarra said, very quietly. Obedient soldiers. And we have already lost too many.

That is the thing about the Twilight. They never fight a war with only their own dead.

Burrly came out of Numazon heavier than he went in, in the ways that count and a few that don’t. A belt of the Spiritwarden’s make, from Amani hands, cinched around a waist that has seen too many ship’s biscuits. A Vilebranch hexxer’s mantle, taken off a man who would not need it again, though the chronicler suspects Burrly will not wear it in front of Zul’jarra. On the way through the fog he stopped, as sailors do when there is land under them and nobody shooting, to pull herbs out of the dirt and chip ore off the rocks, and from one of them he pried loose a piece of igneous stone shot through with old fire. Something the mountain coughed up. He pocketed it. The Amani paid him in coin as well, enough to jingle, which is more than the Witherbark could have offered.

Then he walked back into the mist, because the mist had not lifted.

That was the part nobody had expected. Killing the Vilebranch changed nothing. Whatever is breathing this fog over the Temple of Halazzi, it was never just them. Somewhere out there in the dark are the hash’ey shrines of the lynx, and they have to be lit before the loa will show its face. Zul’jarra held her hand up in front of her eyes, frowned at how little of it she could see, and told him not to get separated. It would try her patience, she said. She is not known for having much of it.

Burrly stood at the edge of the temple grounds with a fresh belt, a dead hexxer’s coat and a rock in his pocket, staring into a grey that stared back. The shrines are out there. So is whatever made the fog.