The Dark does not hunger. The Dark does not cradle.
The Dark answers, and the Dark calls.
/
The first of the children who earns them the name of Saintsmaker watches them wait; she may be a Heart-Seer, and she may not. They are not yet certain. She watches the world with a Heart-Seer’s eyes; it is said, too, that she has been found in a trance outside the catacombs—where the air is yet thick with the primal’s aether, even years after its slaying—but she has not yet spoken a prophecy.
The Saintsmaker does not need her to. They have their own prophecies to speak enough, become more vivid than ever in the child’s proximity. In truth, they have taken her into their keeping for the rumour of the catacombs alone: even without a Heart-Seer’s gift, she is an amplifier. Of this they are certain.
When the Dark speaks, it is their duty to listen. In the catacombs it has whispered her into being, called her to its bosom as it once called the Saintsmaker themself.
In the time when they were still purely and utterly flesh and bone. In the time before Blackram’s callous, misguided usurping of the Dark. Now, their right hand is cold and unfeeling—but sensate in its own ways—where Blackram’s was death.
Never will it rot. The Dark will ever live on in the hand they have given to it; they will reclaim it if they must purge the catacombs of Blackram’s primal with their own.
Their little would-be saint says, “What are we waiting for?”
And the Saintsmaker replies, “Why do you say we are waiting?”
“Because you are.”
There: the Dark shows itself through her. She stares at the Saintsmaker as though they are every question and every answer.
“We are waiting, child,” they say, touching their right hand to her hair, “for the blood of the first martyr to return home. And it will, in due time.”
/
“I feel like I’m doing some kind of wrong,” Gawain confessed.
“To the boy,” Avis asked keenly, ripping up the last of the bloodstained floorboards, “or to Wulf?”
“I— Both? Wulf? I’m worried he’ll see it as a betrayal. Like we’re getting rid of…”
“I don’t know about you, Gav, but if I died in a tavern, I wouldn’t want a bunch of drunk bastards trampling and spitting and spilling ale over the place I died. And if I owned a tavern—which Wulfric does—I wouldn’t want to have a blood-covered floor welcoming folks in.”
“I know,” Gawain sighed.
“And maybe it isn’t fair to say, but if Wulf wanted to have a say in what we do up here, he’d have stayed,” Avis said—a remnant of bitterness, of hurt.
Gawain met this with a dark look. “No, it isn’t fair.”
“Well, it’s done. We’re all going to have to live with it.”
He considered the pile of blood-dark wood a moment, then said, “Best burn them. So all of him can rest.”
Avis nodded as she rose, dusting her hands off.
“We could ask Wulf if he wants to be there. He didn’t even show up to the funeral.”
If he hadn’t even been able to get himself up a hill, Avis had no high hopes for Wulfric crawling out from whatever hole he’d slunk into in his grief now, but she didn’t say that. She just put a hand on Gawain’s shoulder and said, “Let’s put them outside while I finish up here, yeah? Then we’ll go look for him.”
Gawain helped her carry out the old wood into the alley, and they laid the new floorboards together, clean and quick. The new wood was far paler than the old, unworn and untouched by years of sun; once Gawain pushed himself up to stand and considered their work, he took the sight in with growing unease. Maybe the blood was gone, but the place wouldn’t let go of the boy Marco’s death. It would not let it be forgotten.
When they returned outside, the bloodstained boards were gone.
/
“See?” says the Saintsmaker, both hands on their little saint’s shoulders. They stand together on the edge of the Saintsmaker’s territory, watching as the martyr’s blood returns home. “It is as I said.”
“How did you get them to find it?” asks the child.
“I did nothing of the sort, my dear; my hands were still, and did not toil towards an end. I only knew he would come back to us.”
The Saintsmaker regarded the Masks trespassing upon their territory with barely concealed disdain.
“I thought the commander’s guard dog had done away with the last of you,” they said—and in this, too, they made no effort to appear concerned. Neither did they show disappointment; the continued presence of the sect in the Undercity was unpleasant, to be sure, but it was also an inevitability, like vermin in the tunnels.
“She can try,” said one of the Masks; their would-be leader, the Saintsmaker surmised. “She failed to bring the Griffin to heel once. I mean to make her powerless in the face of Yiazmat for as long as she shall live.”
Yiazmat was not theirs. Neither had it been the Griffin’s; he had warped its nature by allowing himself to be compromised by Ascian influence, as Blackram once had. But the Saintsmaker would waste no breath explaining this to fanatics.
“Such pretty words from one who was not upon the Wall to witness the ascent of his own god,” they said, because the Dark had whispered it to them: in front of them stood a misplaced longing, arrested, unformed. The Mask’s mouth made a pretty line. “Why must you pollute my domain so?”
“We thought to bring you an offer of strength,” said the Mask, with a sourness that betrayed his temptation to reconsider.
“I have all the strength I need.”
A sneer. “Do you? I heard your last little saint escaped your clutches. They’re saying the Liberator took him from you—didn’t he?”
The Saintsmaker’s jaw did clench at that. Sihtric’s loss was not one they took lightly—but if the Mask saw it as an issue of pride or strength, then he would never understand. The boy’s absence was like the sky losing its sun, and all hope leached from the stars.
“I tried to prepare the boy for his ascension and he chose the path of the unfit. All he denied was himself.”
“He denied you Yiazmat,” said the Mask, leaning closer to them as though to tell a secret. The Saintsmaker’s metal fingers curled into a fist. “We offer you an alliance; we want the same thing. The same god.”
Not the same god. Not the same ends.
The Saintsmaker allowed themself a smile, a cold thing from days long gone.
“What do you imagine I could possibly want from this alliance of yours?”
“Why, a saint.”
So sure of himself was this Mask. He put a gloved hand on the Saintsmaker’s shoulder and closed what remained of the distance between them to whisper in their ear, his breath smoke-heavy.
“The Warden, Saintsmaker,” he said, the answer to a question the Saintsmaker didn’t care to ask.
That was one way to make them laugh.
“You would offer me Lady Blackram for a saint!” the Saintsmaker said, their voice carrying to the rest of the assembled Masks. Their hand shot out to grip the leader’s throat, metal pressing divots into pliant flesh. “Be grateful to hear me speak and listen well, sheep. The Undercity is strongest when it is ungovernable. No man nor woman shall hold dominion over the Dark—that is my promise.”
One of the Masks bared steel. “Release him, Saintsmaker.”
“Do you not hear me?” the Saintsmaker demanded, gripping harder. Fingers clawed at their hand as the Mask choked. “Your Warden would claim this place for her birthright. She would spit upon the blood of the martyrs in her own veins, the trapped life-force of the one true saint, and bring us all to heel as he once did. And thus, to traitors, I say—”
