The Crooked Key, Chapter 6: Honest Work
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 6: Honest Work
First, welcome to everyone who arrived from Choice of Games! It's great to have you here! Remember to subscribe for updates every Monday and Thursday.
Consciousness came as a painful and unexpected surprise. For a moment none of his senses worked, except for the vague intuition that guided him around spirits. That burned bright and hot: something dangerous. Something deadly, and close.
Eilo’s eyes snapped open and he grabbed instinctively for his glaive, yanking it off the wall and clutching it in both hands.
“Head wounds are dangerous things,” Panzu said. “Even with all my expertise, sometimes people just don’t wake up. Or they come back idiotic. You look idiotic clutching that spear of yours like a child with a stuffed doll.”
Eilo’s eyes took their time focusing. His ears offered only a gray roar. But finally his senses adjusted. Panzu stood at the foot of his bed—a different bed this time—in her human form, her black eyes haughty and amused, the golden diadem in her hair glinting in the light of day. Her ceremonial bandages were gone—they were still there, Eilo reminded himself hazily, as this form was just an illusion. But she seemed to be wearing a floor-length fur coat, black as her hair. She kept her hands behind her back.
“Where is Skaithness?”
“The hexguards took her,” the wisdom cat said. “To Baristoc, I overheard them say. For trial and execution, I’m afraid I also heard them say.”
The banisher tried to sit up. It didn’t work. He lay back on the pillow and asked, “What happened?”
“Well, I tried to hide,” Panzu said. “Even when they started nosing around my scrolls, I only appeared to them in my regular cat form. But it’s like they knew what I was, and they were…oh, Eilo, they were so afraid. So afraid and angry, and I felt myself…changing. Growing to become what they feared I was.”
She held up her hands. Her fingers ended in long black claws.
“Do you know how hard it is to mash herbs in a mortar and pestle with these? But I did it for you, because after what I did to three or four of them, I felt the need to, you know, balance the scales. What evil sorcery those hexguards have, that they can almost make me…that they can make us into monsters, with only their fear.” She shivered.
Eilo forced himself to rise and dress. This room, which must have belonged to the dead Lord Gloce, stank of medicinal herbs, honey, and sweat. The kitchen was in even greater disarray than he had left it, as Panzu had been busy with her improvised herbalism. The air down there smelled burned and slimy. He found the door off its hinges and hastily repositioned to ward off the chill. When he looked outside, he saw the little village, and also…
“A tower,” Eilo said, regarding the crude serpentine form where cultivated fields gave way to marshland.
“It appeared last night,” Panzu said. “The locals are trying to ignore it.”
Though his head ached, Eilo donned boots and tricorn hat, grabbed his glaive, and headed outside. Panzu followed as a cat. It was late afternoon, and the sky was leaden with the promise of rain, or maybe sleet if the temperature dropped. This place had probably been beautiful a month ago, with the leaves all fiery; now it looked as drained and colorless as an old corpse.
A brief investigation of the green tower, which at a distance had looked as big as Lord Gloce’s donjon, revealed it to be small and malformed, even more crooked than the structure where he had found Skaithness, and without any way to get inside.
“Something is wrong with them,” the banisher said. “Something incomplete. Skaithness said that they needed some sort of throne, some source of law, to make her buildings grow properly. Maybe Nowan de Valc needs the same thing.”
Nowan de Valc, the Mollusk Knight, was a former hexguard and the son of an Emmer Duke. All of that fit together in a way the banisher could not quite see. But if answers awaited anywhere, they awaited at the house of Fylent Maer in the capital. He went to the public house and found a dozen people gathered there, trying helplessly to figure out what had happened. The banisher recognized two of them from his previous investigation, but no one looked happy to see him.
“Where is Lord Gloce?” a priest of Eime demanded. He wore an embroidered coat even finer than his manor lord’s, with silver buckles on his shoes and a jeweled stiletto in his belt; only his turban identified his ecclesiastical position.
“Killed during the fight against the temple that appeared in the swamps,” the banisher said. “Along with his valet, the guards, and Duke Uleino.”
A ripple of alarm passed through the crowd, but the priest only glared.
“And you got out fine?” the gentleman-priest said. He ignored Panzu as she curled around chair legs.
Eilo took off his hat to reveal his bandaged head, and said, “I need to tell hunters in the capital everything I saw, and I can’t linger. I need to buy a horse and a mule.”
“So that’s it, then,” a farmer Eilo had spoken to during his investigation said. “You show up and Lord Gloce dies, and Claeby and Anagar die—” (that must have been the villagers on the mules), “—and you just leave? The hexguards told us what you were doing, working with that witch-girl in the enchanted armor.”
“The hexguards Captain Aklurian led to the swamp betrayed him to the Mollusk Knight,” the banisher said, trying not to lose patience. “I saw them shoot the duke. Aklurian is heading to the capital with that armored woman, who tried to save the duke’s life, and I mean to stop him. Now let me buy a damn horse, and I’ll leave.”
He held up the bag of coins. The little clinking sound made his head throb.
The priest glared and said, “You’re going to pay us with the money you took from—”
“He paid me for the wolf job,” Eilo snapped. “You saw the head I brought back.” But they were all snarling now. Sometimes people see too much. His old mentor taught him about the fear, how it could spread like fire across thatched rooves, until a whole town was ablaze with it. Eilo also learned how to tamp it down before it spread, but the herbs in his bloodstream were numbing his thoughts...
“Get out of this town, banisher,” the priest said. “You can walk back to Baristoc.”
“Enough!” Panzu said. She hopped up onto the bar of the common room, her diadem glittering in the light as Medru’s earrings had, except gold instead of silver. “I’m not going to linger in this pigsty of a town. Sell the man his animals and we’ll be on our way.”
“What in the name of the Egg of Eime is that?” the priest screamed.
“The Egg is fake,” the wisdom cat said. “It’s just a box that makes you hallucinate angels when you open it. A plaything for a long-dead wizard-king. Your whole religion is based around a wind-up music box.”
The priest shrieked and drew a jewel-handled stiletto. That’s when Panzu took on her human form, or rather her near-human one. She appeared as a tall woman with claws and a cat’s head, and with a single, easy gesture, she slashed open the priest’s throat.
The villagers screamed and fled out the back. Panzu made to go after them, but Eilo drew his glaive and pinned her to the wall. She struggled, turned back into a regular cat, then hesitated as the last of the villagers fled, overturning stools and smashing baskets in their haste. Onions and potatoes rolled around on the straw.
“Why?” the banisher said.
“It’s the fear!” Panzu screamed, her tiny head making her voice shrill and monstrous. “The stink of it from the hexguards still hangs over this town. It’s driving me mad, banisher!”
Eilo reached for the trigger on his glaive that would send banisher’s wine trickling over the blade.
“Also,” Panzu said quickly, “he drew a knife on a lady over a difference of religious opinion. Maybe we can take that up with your legal friend, what is his name, Maer? What do you think he will say about a woman’s right to defend herself?”
“You’re dangerous,” Eilo said.
“Anyone is dangerous if you try to stab them,” the wisdom cat said. “But the madness that priest caused, it’s fading. He wanted me to be a monster, Eilo. That’s the worst thing you can do to someone. I don’t want to be dangerous. And speaking of danger, we need to get out of this village before those people come back.”
The banisher hesitated, but he had promised to transport Panzu to Fylent Maer. And she was right: the priest had attacked her first. He glanced down at the dead man, then withdrew the glaive.
“Get back to the donjon and get your scrolls,” the banisher said. “I need to steal a horse.”
He ran outside through the main door. That’s when the skies opened up. Rain fell first in big, irregular drops, then in a hammering wave that smashed his hat down over his bandaged head.
“There he is!” a woman shouted. Two villagers ran outside to apprehend him, but they didn’t have hats and Eilo lost them through the simple, if undignified, expedient of running around the entire house in a big circle.
Eilo knew of two stables in town, but Lord Gloce’s was empty and the one near the town center, where the High Guard and hexguards had kept their mounts, would probably be guarded. But when he looked away from town, toward the crooked green tower, he saw a boy running for cover through the rain. He was leading two horses, and a sheepdog ran in circles around him. One of the animals was Skaithness’s draft horse, which must have wandered back to the village. He ran toward the confused boy, raised his money purse so it clinked, and pushed it into the boy’s hand. Then he took both the horses.
Back at the donjon, the wisdom cat had double-wrapped her scrolls in oilskin; they got all three boxes loaded onto the draft horse. Panzu howled wretchedly when she saw how hard it was raining and refused to go out. Instead she turned back into a cat, crawled into an empty copper bird cage hung among the drying herbs, and screamed for Eilo to wrap her up and carry her outside. The banisher sighed, wrapped the hissing cat in an oilcloth, and strapped it into place next to the scrolls. Then he mounted the other horse—a dappled gelding—and together they galloped away from the village.
They hastened for an hour through the rain. The banisher retraced the route that had taken him into town; he knew that after a few hours he would reach a crossroads that led to Baristoc.
“Twice now,” he shouted as the rain hammered down, “I have left people in that town worse off than when I found them. First that poor wolf-woman, and now the priest.”
“You also let Lord Gloce and Duke Uleino kill each other,” Panzu said from the birdcage.
“That was the business of gentlemen,” the banisher said, “and not my affair.”
“Foolish boy,” the wisdom cat said. “What did you call that knight? Nowan de Valc? A noble’s name, from way out west, right? This whole affair with the Mollusk Temple is the business of gentlemen. Why do you think he wanted to kill the duke? Work it through. Feel free to take your time.”
“I already have,” the banisher said. “A dead duke means his minor son inherits the throne. If the disreputable stories I read as a child reflect reality, a minor on the throne means ministers and viziers run the kingdom—in this case, the Trusted Seven. If the Mollusk Knight wanted to kill the duke, it means that he has connections among the Seven.”
“Exactly,” Panzu said. “Nowan de Valc is not some death cult fanatic. Believe me: I know death cult fanatics. The foundations of the world are changing, but the Mollusk Knight is not just a sorcerer: he’s a political actor. Back when the Glyphic Islands were a single empire instead of mercantile city-states, our version of banishers understood their work to be inescapably political. In this age of the world, spirits mostly keep away from the great cities, and any hex-worker of real power remains hidden, exploring the trinkets of previous eras rather than, for example, trying to conquer nations. Maybe that’s what’s changing. Maybe the age of wizard-kings will come again. And if so, you will need to change too, Eilo of Nysse. Is there anything to eat?”
That was an excellent question, and when the rain finally let up an hour before sunset, the banisher inspected the horses he had overpaid for. The scrolls were still secure on the plodding draft horse. The other animal, Eilo realized with a start, was one of the High Guards’ horses, as any fool could see from the purple caparison.
“How many people rode past us?” Eilo asked the wisdom cat.
“I was under a blanket,” she said. “But you should probably—”
“I know how to hide evidence, cat,” Eilo said. He stripped off the caparison and tossed it into a muddy field by the side of the road, removed the wheat-and-star design of Duke Uleino from the reins, then searched the saddlebags. He found payment vouchers, unopened letters (which he intended to return, as digging through a dead man’s mail would be low even for a banisher), and fifty ducats in assorted coinage (which he pocketed as payment for not opening the letters).
“At least we won’t have to sleep outside tonight,” Eilo said.
The proprietor of the ramshackle crossroads-inn between Baristoc and Lostdark recognized him and greeted him as “banisher,” which he did not like, then promised him a hot bath, which he did like. After a long and indulgent session in the inn’s copper tub, the banisher headed back into the common room for dinner and found five of Trezion’s Boys seated around the central fireplace. He almost walked out the door when he saw the mercenaries, but they looked at him first. Looked at him and nodded in a perfunctory fashion—professional to professional. They had no idea who he was, and took him for some kind of bravo or violent criminal, probably because of his hat. Eilo hid his glaive in his room, then ordered lamb dumplings and wine. The innkeeper smiled and broke into a fresh cask of de Valc.
“The wine is a little funny,” the wisdom cat said, hiding under his low table. “Smile a little; you look mournful.”
“Put your face away,” Eilo muttered. “Someone will see.”
Despite his worries, no one accosted them at the crossroads-inn or the next day as they headed east toward the capital. At first he had wanted to beat Aklurian and the hexguards back to Baristoc, until Panzu observed that without the help of his lawyer clanmate, he couldn’t actually do anything for Skaithness. So when the banisher learned about trouble on the road, he stayed long enough to sort it out.
First, a plookin had been hexing pumpkins. After a short investigation, Eilo learned that the plookin in question was trying to learn the trick of turning pumpkins into coaches, in order to receive a promotion to a cupbearer spirit. When the banisher treed the plookin (they had a habit of running up trees to oversee their domain, and it was an easy matter to carve a hex mark in the trunk), the plookin told him that a lake smoker had promised to reveal the secrets of promotion. When he went to the lake and cast in the appropriate offering, the lake smoker rose out of the water, sinuous, magnificently bearded, and puffing on its houka, and explained that it had the right to promote plookins, as granted to it by its Mirror of Magnificence. But when Eilo asked to inspect this mirror, he found that it was only a common illusion mirror of the type that flattered appearances and brought about pleasant visions.
“Like the Egg of Eime!” Panzu said. Eilo shushed her.
The lake smoker was understandably mortified by the error, as they are proud creatures who do not tolerate failure in others or themselves, but Eilo settled the matter by offering the flattering-mirror to the pumpkin farmer, who could sell it as long as he promised not to conceal its true nature. That would more than make up for the loss of so many pumpkins.
“Is this really what you do all day?” Panzu asked afterward. “I thought there would be more dragon fights.”
“Most problems are problems of boundaries,” the banisher said, “and most problems of boundaries are caused by sincere ignorance, not malice. At least among spirits. Maybe people are fundamentally wicked, I don’t know. But before I came to the Bantish Towns, I had only been in exactly two lethal and serious fights in my entire life. Plus any number of bug hunts, of course.”
The next town was Stelpyn, or rather Stelpyn’s Landing, which lay on the River Chezaun that also flowed through the capital. It was in turmoil because a young netmaker was betrothed to a tailor’s daughter, but had been seen going into the garret bedroom of a poor but well-regarded poetess. This was a terrible scandal, and one duel had already been fought over the issue. The duel had not involved the netmaker or the tailor, but two students from the capital, one of whom insisted that the events closely followed the first act of The Quick Bishop of Baristoc, from the same anonymous playwright who had penned The Shivering Abbess. The other student had taken offense; the subsequent sword duel had been regarded as a pathetic and abortive affair, ending when both students surrendered at the same time, and then one sat down on a nail, meaning the other was declared the victor.
That duel, of course, has been the subject of its own play, but I should point out that I am not telling the story of Eilo the Banisher as I understand it to rebut Harumanjunan’s excellent and clever The Cowardly Student of Stelpyn. How could I, when that play takes place nearly twenty years after Eilo the Banisher’s visit to Stelpyn, and only references that duel in two lines, both recited by Marhunglio, the drunken suitor? That Harumanjunan uses the duel, so briefly mentioned, as a sort of central conceit for the entire play, perhaps mentioning it only twice because the incident is so well known as to be a joke to many people, is beside the point.
Returning to the situation at hand, something about the double seduction struck Eilo as unusual, so he offered to investigate. After interviewing all the parties twice, he found himself confused by the timeline and unsure how the netmaker could have gotten from one part of town to the other so quickly. The netmaker, for his part, seemed truly baffled. He also believed that someone was spying on him, as he frequently found his tools and notes disordered whenever he returned home.
“I don’t think anyone is lying,” the banisher confessed to Panzu that night as he sat before the fireplace of his own garret room. “Sometimes when no one is lying, someone is so drunk that they’re not remembering correctly, but no one seems drunk. At least no more drunk than I normally see in a dockside town.”
“That netmaker must have been drunk when he got up this morning,” the wisdom cat said. “Or at least in great haste. Did you see how he had hung his tools from his belt?”
The banisher, who knew next to nothing about net making, frowned.
“All out of order, turned around, not easy to reach. A skilled netmaker handles a variety of dockside tasks, and he would have done any of them badly with tools in such disarray..”
“So,” Eilo said, “not like he was drunk. Like he...like one of them wasn’t a netmaker. Of course!”
“Of course what?” the wisdom cat shouted as Eilo ran down the stairs and headed into the night, making for the docks without glaive or hat.
The netmaker lived on a ramshackle wooden building in the archaic style that stretched out over the water of the River Hezaun. He shared a large first floor workshop with several other artisans and laborers, and that’s where Eilo heard sounds of commotion. He slid the door open and found the netmaker dodging around a large table covered in the tools of his trade. Across from him was the netmaker.
“I hate mimians,” Eilo said.
Both netmakers froze, eyes wide. Then the same thing happens that always happens with mimians.
“It’s him! He’s the copy!”
“Don’t listen to him, I’m the real Clarvis! We talked just this morning! Ask me anything!”
Neither man was wearing his tool belt, so the banisher couldn’t use that to tell them apart.
“He’s the copy, and he’s trying to kill me!”
Eilo grabbed a weighted net from the wall behind him and threw it over the nearest netmaker. He gave it a quick, practiced yank and knocked the man off his feet, so he landed stunned on the planks.
“Thank you!” the other netmaker said. “But how did you know it was really me?”
Eilo grabbed another weighted net and repeated the performance with the other netmaker. Soon he had them both pinned down and screaming bloody murder.
But once he had them both in one place, it was easy to send for a florist so he could conduct a few chemical tests. By then most of the people involved had arrived: the tailor’s daughter, the tailor, the poetess, and the two dueling students. (We were friends again, and my nail injury had not become infected, despite common misconception.) So had a half-dozen town guards. Since he had an audience, the banisher decided to demonstrate his expertise, and when the chamomile touched one of the netmakers, he transformed into an ugly gray thing like a moth with huge eye-spots on its wings and squirming antennae: a mimian.
“That thing tried to kill me!” the real netmaker shouted as the tailor’s daughter freed him from the net. Eilo and I both noticed the wisdom cat crawling along the rafters overhead; for my part, I chose not to say anything about the cat with the head of a woman.
“I did not try to kill you!” the mimian said, its voice like shaking rocks in a tin can. “I was simply going to ship you downstream in a barrel. A barrel with air holes!” the mimian added quickly, turning what I thought was an imploring glance toward him.
“Don’t hurt him!” the poetess cried, falling melodramatically to her knees before the banisher. “He loves me, and I love him!”
“If you love each other,” the banisher asked the mimian, “why were you trying to marry the tailor’s daughter?”
“Isn’t it obvious?,” the mimian said, performing the impressive trick of making his rocks-in-a-can voice sound sarcastic, as if Eilo were the idiot here. “I was going to get the dowry and flee with the money.”
“Honey, no,” the poetess said. “Don’t tell the man that. Or don’t tell it to him in that way.” She turned again to the banisher. “Let us both go and you’ll never see us again, I promise. I want to live with him, in his world.”
“Poets!” I remember muttering.
Eilo turned to the sheriff in charge and said, “No one here is hurt, except for banged elbows when I put them in nets. I can show you how to carve hex marks on your town’s gates to keep this specific mimian out, and discourage others. You should just let them go.”
They had to wake up a magistrate, but that’s what was eventually decided: the poetess (with her meager belongings) and the mimian left town at exactly midnight, to go wherever mimians go when they’re not making nuisances of themselves. Underground in burrows, I think—even Eilo wasn’t sure, and I asked him. We hoped the poetess would be happy. Back at the magistrate’s spacious and well appointed house (as, since he was awake, he wanted to conduct the wedding of the netmaker and the tailor’s daughter right away), the banisher showed the town guards how to carve signs of warding. I watched curiously alongside my friend as we both drank the magistrate’s beer.
“Did you hear about those towers?” I asked my friend, for I had heard a few rumors.
“Sounds like bullshit from the hinterlands,” he said. “But I heard Duke de Valc was protesting the actions of some hexguards. Bunch of assholes, the hexguards, right? Not like you.” He elbowed Eilo conspiratorially in the ribs. He was very drunk, as he lacked my abstemious nature.
“Blasphemy!” the magistrate shouted, though without real heat. He returned to flipping through his marriage certificates.
“And I guess sometimes they catch real monsters,” I said.
“Didn’t they get a mechanical girl, or something?” the second student said.
“I heard something about that,” I said, accidentally setting everything that would follow in motion, and then gracefully exiting the story. “I hear Duke Uleino isn’t back yet to sort through the legalities, so the hexguards are just going to have her executed.”
*