Void-Born: The Knight Who Devours Curses

The Gate Detail

Harrowmere spent the next nine days pretending to be a better town than it was.

Banners went up along the main road, blue and gold, already fading in the damp. The cathedral steps were scrubbed twice. Tolliver, the guild clerk, had his cuffs washed for the first time in living memory, and the town watch was issued new tabards that didn't fit anyone.

Cael watched all of it from the roof of the Rusted Hound, where he was mending a leak for free in exchange for a month of stew.

"You're hammering like you've got a grudge against the shingles," Brannoc called up from the yard.

"I have a grudge against everything lately."

"Come down. Guild runner's here for you."

Cael climbed down with a nail still between his teeth. The runner was a freckled boy of twelve, out of breath, holding a folded slip of paper like it might bite him.

"Rhensworth?" the boy asked. "Tolliver says you're to report to the guild hall. Special assignment."

"Special," Cael repeated around the nail. "That's never good."

Tolliver's office smelled of ink and old sweat. Three other hunters were already crowded inside, the kind the guild sent where it didn't want to be seen sending anyone. There was Dorn, a scarred axeman with one ear. There was Pell, a lanky archer who never spoke. And there was a broad woman called Hask, who looked at Cael the way people looked at a dog that might or might not be rabid.

"Gate detail," Tolliver announced, tapping a map of the town. "On the fourteenth, the Crown Prince's procession enters through the east gate at dusk. The watch will handle the formal escort. The guild has been asked to supply additional bodies for crowd control."

"Bodies," Dorn said flatly.

"Persons of adequate size and no particular distinction." Tolliver's eyes flicked toward Cael. "You four qualify. Pay is three silver each, no surcharges, no fees."

"No surcharges?" Cael raised an eyebrow. "Did someone die?"

"The prince's household is paying. I'm merely the conduit." Tolliver's lips thinned. "You'll stand at the gate, keep the crowd back, and say nothing to anyone. If you're asked a question, you're to answer 'Yes, my lord' or 'No, my lord.' Is that understood?"

"Perfectly," Cael said. "I'm an expert at being unnoticed."

Hask snorted. Tolliver pretended not to hear.

He told Brannoc that evening, expecting a lecture. Instead the old knight set down his rag and stared at him for long enough to be uncomfortable.

"No."

"It's three silver."

"No." Brannoc's voice was flat. "I told you to stay out of sight on the fourteenth."

"You told me a prince doesn't come to a border town for no reason. You didn't say why." Cael leaned against the bar. "Three silver is a week of rent. And I can't exactly refuse a guild assignment, you know that. They'd pull my license."

"Then let them."

"And do what? Hunt without one? I'd be arrested the first time I sold an ear."

"You could do worse than leaving this town."

Cael stared at him. "Leaving?"

"I'm not saying forever." Brannoc scrubbed a hand over his face, and for a moment he looked every one of his sixty years. "I'm saying there's a price on certain kinds of attention, kid, and I don't want you paying it."

"What kind of attention?"

The silence stretched.

"The kind that notices when a man heals too fast," Brannoc said at last, very quietly. "The kind that remembers what the crystal read, and what it didn't."

Cael felt the old prickle crawl up his neck again. "You're scaring me."

"Good. Maybe that's what it takes."

"Brannoc." Cael pushed off the bar and held his gaze. "I need you to tell me what you think I am."

"I don't know what you are." The old knight's jaw worked. "I only know what I'd bet my other eye you're not. You're not empty. I've known that since the day you walked in here at fourteen, bleeding from a crown-sponsored beating, and told me you didn't need help."

"I didn't."

"You did. You were a child." Brannoc looked away. "I should have said something then. I should have said a lot of things."

Cael waited, but the old knight only shook his head and picked up his rag again.

"Take the detail," Brannoc said finally. "I can't stop you. But stay at the back. Keep your head down. And if anything strange happens, anything, you run. You don't stop to look, and you don't stop to help. You run to me."

"What strange thing could happen at a gate?"

"Promise me."

Cael sighed. "I promise."

***

On the thirteenth, the night before, he couldn't sleep.

He lay on the narrow cot in his rented room above the cobbler's shop, listening to the rain tick against the shutters. A single candle burned on the sill, and he watched it the way you watch a drunk friend: half amused, half worried.

The flame guttered. Not from any draft. The window was latched, the door was shut, and still the little yellow tongue bent toward him as though leaning in to listen.

"Stop that," Cael whispered.

It didn't stop. It shrank to a bead of blue, then flared, then went out. Smoke curled upward in a thin, deliberate line and bent, once more, in his direction.

He sat up. His heart was pounding harder than the ghouls had managed.

"It's a draft," he told the dark. "A draft. Nobody can read my mana, nobody ever could, there's nothing to read, there's nothing to feel. It's a draft."

The dark did not agree with him.

Something was awake in his chest, he realized. Not a pain, and not quite a feeling. A kind of patient attention, like a hound that has lifted its head. It had been there for days, since the ghoul nest, or maybe before. Maybe it had been there his whole life, and he had only just learned how to hear it.

He pressed a hand to his chest. Nothing but a heartbeat. Slow, steady, ordinary.

"You're tired," he said. "You're tired, and you're scared, and Brannoc rattled you. Go to sleep."

He lay back down and stared at the ceiling, and sometime before dawn he must have slept, because he dreamed of a crystal the size of a house. Inside it, something vast and dark turned over once, slowly, and opened an eye.

The fourteenth dawned grey and cold.

By dusk the whole town had crowded the east road, jostling and craning, waving little blue flags and shouting at children to stay out from underfoot. The four guild hunters stood in a line at the gate with their cloaks pulled up, trying to look like furniture.

"You're sweating," Hask muttered, glancing sideways at Cael.

"It's warm."

"It's autumn."

"I run hot."

"You run strange." She shifted her weight. "Everyone says it. The kid who was thrown out of Solmere, the hollow one. My cousin saw you do something at the academy once, did you know that? Said the spells just died when you stood near them."

"Your cousin has a vivid imagination."

"Maybe." Hask's eyes went back to the road. "Or maybe she doesn't."

Cael opened his mouth to answer, and a horn sounded from the east, long and golden, and the crowd surged forward with a roar.

The procession came into view around the bend in the road: outriders in blue, banners snapping, a long black carriage drawn by six white horses with the royal crest on its door. Cael kept his eyes down, as promised. He watched the cobbles, the mud, the toes of the people pressing against him. He did not look up.

But as the carriage drew level with the gate, the thing in his chest lifted its head all the way.

He felt it before he understood it: a cold, bright point of malice somewhere above and behind him, high on a rooftop across the square. It was ancient and patient, and it was pointed directly at the carriage.

And at him.

"Hask," Cael said, very quietly, and found his own voice unfamiliar. "Something's wrong."

She turned. "What?"

He looked up, past the cheering crowd and the swaying banners, to the dark shape crouched on the slate roof of the cathedral's bell house, a figure in a grey hood with both hands raised and a halo of black smoke curling between its fingers.

*Run,* Brannoc had said. *You don't stop to look.*

But there was no time to run, because the figure's hands came down.