Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Seventy Three: Cracked

A fire crackled merrily in the grate, but the group huddled in the corner of the tavern didn't look as though they felt its warmth. Blane's knuckles were white around his tankard. His old friends from the guard sat around him, equally numbed.

"What a carry on, eh?" Jase said weakly. He took a drink of lager quickly, as if wanting to rinse his mouth of the words.

"Don't envy you boys," Blane replied. "Did well, lads. Did well."

They lapsed into a brooding silence, another in a series of many. Blane looked around the circle; bruises and scabbed-over cuts greeted him, dark hollows for eyes and grim pinches for mouths. It made his sleepless nights look like a minor inconvenience; his temporary leave from the guard may well have saved him a far worse time of it. He hadn't been able to look long at the papers that had appeared across the city proclaiming the names and numbers of the dead, and a call to come forward if a relative was missing. Sometimes the demons left very little to identify their victims by.

Blane raised his glass to his lips and frowned, then noticed he'd finished his drink. He sighed and got heavily to his feet.

"Anyone else for another?"

"Aye," said almost everyone, except for Arun, who had neither touched his drink nor said a word, and Blane was starting to wonder how he'd made it to the tavern in the first place. Jase had taken him aside and told him Arun's brother had been carried off by a Marrowhawk, and Blane had not enquired further.

He went to the bar with his empty tankards. He was grateful for the tavern's thick stone walls, so that the noises of the night were shut out. He suspected it was the reason behind a lot of visits tonight, because the whole city had the jitters over the attack on the castle. Harkenn's rune wall, falling – almost as unprecedented as the portal appearance weeks before. It was a fact of life that Harkenn's wall would never fall to demons.

Yet if one walked along the base of the hill which housed it, the sounds of constant construction echoed through the streets and the breach yawned like a mouth.

"Any news?" Blane asked the barkeep, who was taciturn to the extreme but still more lively conversation than was at Blane's table. He appreciated the quiet; his wife hadn't quit fussing over him since the incident with the Unspoken murder in the courtyard. He had put in for transfer to a new house in the light season, because looking down into that courtyard made him see ghosts these days. He was quite certain his wife thought he was losing his grip.

Kiel's teeth, sometimes it felt like he already had.

"Two Unspoken dead," the barkeep muttered, refilling the tankards and slamming them on the wooden top so foam spilled over. "One killed in action, another died of wounds after the fact. They haven't announced it, mind," he tapped the side of his nose, "but the missus works in the laundry at the castle. Bad times."

"That's four," Blane said weakly, and suddenly the lager didn't look strong enough. "In one season."

"Bad season, though," the barman said, wiping the top down with a dirty rag.

"Aye."

Another silence fell over the tavern, and then Blane sighed and gathered up their refilled drinks. No one had exchanged a word since he'd left; it was so quiet he'd have heard it. The whole city seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something that no one seemed able to put a name to. The portal had unsettled people, true, but the demons behaving so strangely was not nearly as easy to push to the back of the mind. The portal was new, strange, and easily explained as such. The demons' attack was an assault on the very little certainty any Nictavians had. Blane could already sense the scars this season would leave on the city.