The Crooked Key, Chapter 1: A Man Stands in the Corner
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 1: A Man Stands in the Corner
There is an order to the world; only, no one knows what it is. Like many before me, I will try to explain the years of confusion from which we have only recently emerged. Unlike others, I will not waste my reader’s time with the rise of the Nine Nails or the politics around the Egg of Eime, historical events that have long since been dissected into meaninglessness. Instead, I wish to capture something we have already started to lose: the experience of living through those perilous and bewildering years. Our histories have already begun to forget the essential experience of not knowing what was to come. Without understanding the breathless confusion of that time, our histories make no sense.
Other histories begin in Baristoc, because most historians live there, but the truth is that the metamorphosis began about twenty leagues west of the capital, in the village of Upper Bant. There, one of the last banishers was handling some business, as a gentleman from that village had reported the appearance of a ghoul, or perhaps a vampire.
Not even the banishers knew the true order of the world, but they saw more clearly than most. As Eilo of Nysse rode one morning into the village center on his black horse, hat slung low so one dark eye gleamed from its shadows, he tried to categorize everything he saw. First, of course, there were no “ghouls” or “vampires;” the categories into which the banishers organized the Emmer Duchies’ walking dead did not correspond to the popular imagination. So when Eilo’s gaze raked the muddy village, taking in the old wattle-and-daub buildings not yet replaced by good treated hardwood in the modern style, the painted doors with their intermittently useful apotropaic symbols, the young children who abandoned their morning work to shout “a gentleman! a lord!” because they could not imagine anyone else riding a horse, he tried to figure out what had died here and come back.
According to reports of the village lord, who compiled at least eight relatively consistent sightings, it appeared only at night. Perhaps a mordwec? Or a gentleman-jackal? They were common enough dwellers in darkness, especially this close to a forest and a mire, but either of those would have killed someone by now. This thing only watched people as they tried to sleep. A barrow child or one of Hausen’s Brides? They could be intimate with the living in the most unsettling ways, but they were also great talkers, and this thing had remained silent.
Eilo noted the patterns on the doors.The new pigments and designs of Baristoc had reached even this far into the woods, probably brought by traveling actors. The new designs were pretty, though a worried voice in his mind told him that the protective signs painted on the doors and walls were almost useless now, effaced by patterns of flowers and the faces of heroes.
The voice was the voice of his old mentor, chieftain of the Nysse Clan, whose people had been banishing unwelcome spirits before the Emmer Dukes learned to plant crops. Some people called the old man the last of the banishers. Others said Eilo carried that title, but Eilo knew a dozen men and women who called themselves banishers or still carried on parts of the old work; some were even members of his adopted clan. What did it even mean to say Eilo was the last? When does anything really end? The young banisher knew how things lingered on in a pitiful twilight of existence, neither living nor dead…
The village had a church to the Egg of Eime. It was made of wood, small and warped and ancient, like an old crone bent from a century of carrying wood. Only one building in Upper Bant was stone, and Eilo directed his black horse up the grassy slope toward that rough donjon: a circular tower favored by the New Clans in the early years of their conquest, covered in ivy and moss and surrounded by a walled garden. He led his horse to a stable, though no one was there, and then he hammered on the great iron knocker in the shape of a pumpkin.
A man met him at the door, half-dressed. He was old but not elderly, dressed in tattered hose and a long gilded coat, and without a hat. A gentleman, not a servant.
“He’s still asleep, the useless old pig,” the gentleman said in answer to Eilo’s unasked question. “My name is—”
Fourteen dogs howled and ran out the door, swarming around Eilo and the gentleman, howling and chuffing with excitement. Then they ran down the hill and all at once, stopped and turned themselves into little commas on the green grass.
“—Lord Gloce,” the gentleman said as the dogs took turns shitting on the lawn. “Gods to come, it’s good to walk outside again! Been raining three days now. Which is how long it took you to answer my summons, boy.”
“I had work in Lostdark,” Eilo said. He went on, as a way to establish his credentials: “Last ten days I had to track down a demon of spite that had been pushing its way out of the halls and poisoning people with its tongue.”
“You got it?” Lord Gloce asked. He took a step back into the house, as if afraid Eilo carried the demon’s poison on his skin.
“Wasn’t a demon at all,” Eilo said. “An apprentice hatmaker had been poisoning merchants, working his way through them in a complicated order to get at an inheritance he would receive from the master merchant’s rather complicated will. Keep your final testament clear and simple, Lord Gloce.”
“The young are so free with their advice,” Lord Gloce said, stepping outside into the morning sunshine and inhaling deeply as the dogs finished their business on the lawn. “But wait, if there was no monster—”
“I still get paid,” Eilo said, ignoring the use of the word ‘monster.’ Even demons had once had a place in the order of the world…whatever, exactly, that order was. “That’s in the clan charter.”
“So you found this apprentice hatmaker and you…?” Lord Gloce trailed off, but managed a weak gesture toward the apparatus on Eilo’s back.
The banisher unslung his glaive, which, like many things in his line of work, was badly named. About four feet long when fully collapsed, the “glaive” of the banishers was a steel pole topped by a complex head that included (in Eilo’s case) a hook, a hammer, a spike, and a cutting blade. Eilo used the adjustable, collapsible pole for prodding, hooking, climbing, corralling, and, when necessary, killing.
“I didn’t do anything to the apprentice,” Eilo said. “He had actually misread the will and had no chance of inheriting, even if he had poisoned all those people in the right order, which he hadn’t. He hanged himself. Speaking of suicides, I can make a guess at what’s haunting your people, but guesses don’t solve problems. Show me to where it last appeared, please.”
The old gentleman retrieved a broad-brimmed hat, once scarlet, now faded by sun and wind, then spent half an hour looking for a feather while his servant snored in an upstairs room. Herbs hung from the rafters. Eilo studied them for evidence of witchcraft, but they seemed ordinary. The smell of herbs and dust reminded the banisher of Castle Nysse, that pitiful hulk where he had spent his childhood. A minor duke, furious at the banishers for some obscure slight, had all but destroyed it twenty years before Eilo’s birth, and Eilo had grown up in the ruins. His mentor had clung to the place, as old men cling to their illusions. He had died there. Eilo had not been back since the old man’s death.
“You don’t enjoy my decorating sense, eh?” Lord Gloce asked, noticing Eilo’s frown. “A stinky old place, I know. I suspect that when the wheel turns and the gods claim their thrones—or whatever is going to happen—it’ll just fall down. That’ll tell everyone that this dusty old world doesn’t need it. With luck I’ll be dead by then. Let’s get back into the fresh air.”
The banisher followed Lord Gloce and six or seven dogs down the hill to a long white house with an L-shaped addition. Part of the building served as a public house, though Eilo could not imagine too many visitors this deep into the woods. Gloce did not knock, only pushed his way inside. Eilo, who did not like entering dark rooms first, waited until half the dogs had gone in, listening carefully.
The room’s single occupant, a pretty black-haired woman, wore silver earrings and a silver fillet that flashed in the light of the open windows of the far wall. She was sweeping the floor when Gloce entered. She smacked the dogs indifferently away with her broom, ignored the village lord as if he were an errand boy, and fixed her black eyes on Eilo.
“You’re a real banisher,” she said, studying the head of the glaive visible over Eilo’s shoulder.
“Do you think I’d hire some hexguard, Medru?” Lord Gloce said. “Some shivering fanatic? Those villains conjure up the things they claim to put down, that’s how they do it, the swindlers.”
Eilo reappraised Lord Gloce. It was not exactly correct to say that hexguards created the monsters they then put down. They were not a gang of confidence artists, like the ones who roamed the hillsides, splitting the take with their compatriot caravan guards, but the result was almost the same. The hexguards, sworn to the Egg of Eime, saw the world as under siege: from sin, from demons, from an elaborate system of ritual impurity that only they could interpret and rectify. Many spirits reacted to thought and mood—something the banishers knew well. Many were created things, invented by mortal wizards among the Clanless or the First Clans to carry out their wills. Even in later and lesser years, sometimes witches and sorcerers learned how to control those spirit-servants with will and word. But the banisher knew that if you approached a scry-skull or a cupbearer spirit with a calm heart, it would leave you alone, or sometimes even help. Approach it with fear and rage, as the hexguards did, and it would lash out. Inflict enough of that zealous fear on the poor thing, and it would change permanently. And then the hexguards would be able to justify their hunt for “demons.” Or, if the hexguards all died or fled, the banishers would have to deal with it.
Even as he thought these gloomy thoughts—for there were more and more demons in those days, created by hexguards who failed to subsequently destroy them—Eilo examined the woman, the public room, and the behavior of the yipping dogs. Gloce and the woman, Medru, were now arguing about their argument, like an old married couple, with Gloce defending his choice to employ a banisher and Medru arguing that yes, she agreed, but Gloce could stand to be more polite to the woman who ran Upper Bant’s most important business.
“What if it’s still here in the summer, and it appears in the guest rooms? That’s when we make most of our money, and—”
“Did you see it?” Eilo asked.
“Twice now,” Medru said, waving for him to follow her upstairs. “The first time, I told his lordship to get a banisher right away. It appeared the night before last, too, during the worst of the storm. Shaped like a man, but bigger. Black.”
“You could tell its color at night?” Eilo asked, climbing the wooden steps amid the sea of dogs.
The woman scowled and slowed down, then said. “I guess not. But it looked like—”
“First off: was it shaped like a person? Did you see it clearly enough to tell?”
“Yes, and a man, not a woman,” Medru said, reaching the upstairs hall and throwing open a window. “But thick all around, especially in the middle. The head was high up, too high up to see. Hidden in the roof beams.” She held her hand up to the ceiling. About eight or nine feet high, then.
“Did its knuckles drag on the floor?” Eilo asked.
“What?” She stopped outside the door. Then the woman thought carefully. “No. It raised its arms once, and they were thick, but not long.”
So that ruled out mordwecs, tarry lopers, and Tuvinar, Prince of Monkeys. What was left?
“Is there a river or pond in town?” Eilo asked as Medru opened the door to her room. “With a dock?”
“It’s away from the road,” Lord Gloce said, “so you wouldn’t—get back you little shit devils!” He kicked the dogs; they ran around the hallway as they all squeezed into Medru’s room. “No dock, though. The river is slow here but it’s whitewater upstream and tangled mire downstream: no good for travel. Just a pier for fishing.”
Eilo made a circuit of the room, investigating the straw bed, the little wardrobe, the ewer and basin of unexpectedly fine porcelain. He checked under the rug and, with apologies, rummaged through Medru’s clothes, finding only the typical accoutrements of a fairly wealthy woman in a fairly poor village. He asked questions as he worked.
“Where are your parents?” Eilo asked Medru, who could not have been older than twenty-five.
“Dead,” Medru said.
“How long ago?”
“Ten years, and five. I know what my father looks like, banisher. It wasn’t him.”
“Are you sure it was the same man both times he appeared?”
“Yes. Same body. He was naked. He…lay beside me.”
“Did he try to fuck you?”
“By the Egg!” Gloce cried. “Medru isn’t some tavern girl, you know!”
“He couldn’t fit in the bed, for one thing,” Medru said, laughing to hide her embarrassment. He lay down beside me, on the floor, and looked at me. Whenever he moved he creaked, like the trees. I kept trying to see his face, to see if it was someone I knew, but…”
“What did you do?”
“Tried not to scream?” Medru said with another nervous laugh. “Maybe you do this sort of thing every day, banisher, but it was the scariest moment of my life. I couldn’t look at his face. Then he just went into the corner and disappeared.”
“Who has died here in the past year?” the banisher asked Lord Gloce.
“Why, no one,” the gentleman said.
“Not even visitors?” Eilo asked. He found nothing in the corner, no residue, not even dead flies, which would point to certain kinds of undead. “It’s busier in summer, right? Did anyone die during a fair? Did robbers kill any merchants nearby?”
“No,” Lord Gloce said. “We have to report that sort of thing to the priest and the duke’s people.” As Eilo headed down the steps and back outside, Gloce and Medru then listed off all the people who had died in the past five years, but none of their descriptions felt right—felt like the sort of thing that comes back.
“So what do you think it is? Who do you think it is?” Medru asked as the banisher reached the river and studied the little wooden pier.
They were getting frustrated, as if these matters could be solved with an hour’s conversation. The banisher decided to offer them something that would not lead to gossip, as gossip could lead to private vengeance.
“It might not be one of the dead returned at all,” he said. “I see a pier and boats, despite the whitewater nearby. And a far shore.” He studied the other side of the river.
“What does that mean?” Lord Gloce asked.
“Rivers are powerful,” Eilo said. “They are roads and barriers at the same time. Our work—the work of the banishers—is not just to hunt down ‘monsters.’ We don’t bother anything unless it bothers people first, and to be honest, something standing in a room doesn’t merit destruction.”
Lord Gloce grumbled, as if fearing Eilo was about to saddle his horse and leave.
“The work of the banishers isn’t to hunt. It’s to separate the sacred and the profane. Both have their place. They can be combined safely in certain ways, but bad combinations are catastrophic. Sometimes, as you know, a fox will come in the shape of a woman and live among people.”
“I never believed that sort of thing,” Lord Gloce said.
“You should,” Eilo said conversationally as he investigated the dock. “Your dogs are descended from a fox spirit. I recognize the fiery streak in their tails. But foxes don’t visit much anymore. Everyone knows a fox’s tricks. But a boat…sometimes even things can want to come and live like us. Last year, there was a new knight at the South Palace in Baristoc who earned respect and accolades despite his lack of family ties. It took a great deal of investigation to learn that he was not a knight at all, but a sword who had grown tired of being wielded in practice bouts.”
“You think…” Lord Gloce took off his hat, scratched his balding hat, and put his hat back on the wrong way. “You think a boat has been coming into people’s bedrooms at night and staring at them?”
“Everyone wants to be told that they’re hunted by werewolves,” Eilo said. “But sometimes it’s a boat. To find out, I want you to get all the boats in this village around this pier. Bring the fishermen and ferrymen back for the day.”
Lord Gloce, eager for a chance to boss people around, immediately got to work.
The banisher considered it possible that a boat had taken a man’s shape, but not likely. Medru’s description sounded like a dead thing, not an animated object. But then, maybe the order of the world was changing already, Eilo mused. Maybe by this time next year, all his meticulous book-learning and careful field observations would be valueless.
“You don’t really think it’s a boat, do you?” Medru asked. She followed him back into the cluster of buildings that constituted the village center.
“It’s possible but not certain,” Eilo said. “Mostly I wanted to give Lord Gloce something to do. You know these people, Medru: why don’t you join me as I speak with everyone who’s seen this apparition.”
Medru smiled, her hair net and earrings glittering in the yellow-white light of the autumn sun.
“I’d like that.”
They counted six sightings in addition to Medru’s two, and spoke with everyone who had seen the apparition, as well as the village’s supply of busybodies and cranks. The village priest was out of town for the week, which made Eilo speculate as to his involvement, especially since Medru disliked the man. Witnesses told the same story with only a few variations: the man would appear at night in the corner of a bedroom. Sometimes it only stood, sometimes it lay down beside them, but it never touched them. The witnesses either could not or would not look at its face—descriptions there were particularly confused, though everyone agreed that its face must be terrifying.
Everyone also described it as making noise, but no one seemed to agree what it sounded like. Medru said it creaked, which made Eilo think of boats, but others said it whimpered or grumbled. It always vanished by disappearing into a corner.
Medru handled introductions and asked smart questions—a talent most bartenders had—and, when they had exhausted their list of witnesses, served him fish stew back at the empty public house.
“This is delicious,” Eilo said, trying not to sound too surprised; the Bantish towns were infamous for their bad food.
“You’re not what I expected from a banisher,” Medru said.
Eilo sipped the stew with both hands, letting the wooden bowl warm his palms, and waited for Medru to go on.
“We had a hexguard in town maybe four years ago, chasing something in the swamp. He said there was a temple out there that appeared and disappeared. I could…almost feel his fear and anger. Like he was making all the spirits of the world hate him, and hate us, wherever he went.”
“Did he find his temple?” Eilo asked.
The door banged open: a puddle of dogs, swirling at knee-level like loud fog, and then Lord Gloce, who helped himself to some cider.
“He disappeared,” Medru said. “Just disappeared one morning, just before the actors were going to put on The Shivering Abbess. I figured he didn’t want to stay for that material.”
Eilo laughed, as The Shivering Abbess was not the sort of play actors should perform during a summertime festival, but Gloce said, “Are you talking about that damn hexguard? He stole one of my dogs, you know. My best stud.”
“He stole a dog?” Eilo said. “You’re sure?”
“Well, he—the dog—disappeared at the same time as the hexguard just wandered off into the swamp looking for that temple,” Lord Gloce said.
“Wandered off into the swamp and…died?” the banisher asked.
“Of course, of course!” Lord Gloce said. He downed the cider in one messy gulp. “What if he sank? He could’ve come back as a…what are they called? A dripper. And there was that saucy play, and you know how hexguards are wound up all tight. Medru, be a dear and fetch my sword.”
“Your servant has it,” Medru said. She retrieved Eilo’s tricorn hat and set it on his head.
“Damn, then it’s lost forever,” the gentleman said. “But we have the dogs. Come on, boy!” And before Eilo could caution the old man, or insist that banishers work best alone, he ran out the door, and Eilo could only follow.
“Be careful, banisher,” Medru said. “And be prepared for the fear, if you find what you’re looking for. The fear will steal your thoughts away.”
*