1. The King’s Latrine

Zarin negotiated the crumbling streets of the old quarter, bearing the weight of a dark deed, a broken sword, and a lantern that hadn’t gone out in a thousand years. Yet its flame now flickered with uncertainty. The moment it died would be the moment the Kingdom of Thandia fell, and the rest of the world would follow closely on its heels.

Being a royal inquisitor, Zarin had little desire to set foot in a city like Wardenfell, let alone its most ill-reputed establishment. But duty once again demanded that pride be swallowed, and she picked up the pace, her polished boots thudding on cobbled stones. I wish we could resolve this matter once and for all, she thought. So I can return home!

She adjusted the silver insignia pinned on the left breast of her high-collared, navy coat. The compass rose with an eye at its center marked her an agent of the Royal Inquisition Bureau. The three silver stripes pinned below that ranked her a senior inquisitor. She wore her black hair short and tucked beneath her peaked cap, and her dark brown eyes scanned the street ahead, cold and calculating, and always in search of any detail, big or small, that might appear out of place. Zarin carried herself with the authority of someone who had been doing what they did for as long as they could remember.

Some had called her peculiar. But she preferred the term precise. She shuddered under the whisper of a northerly breeze and fastened her top coat button against the cold. Her white gloves did little to warm her hands, however. Then again, warmth was not their intended purpose, but she regretted not bringing her winter pair on her travels. Fall was drawing to a close, and the icy winds of winter waited in the wings of the northern parts of the world. Her hand brushed the hilt of the broken sword strapped to her right hip before checking the black silk cloth concealing the lantern hooked on her left.

Satisfied that everything remained secure, she turned down a narrow road where the buildings clumped together like they huddled against some invisible threat. The Old Quarter didn’t benefit from as many night lamps as more prosperous parts of the city, and almost all of those it did have had fallen into disrepair. A few offered a quivering glow or a half-hearted glimmer, but most stood as dead as the night. It leant a dark desperation to the area and made Zarin think of the lantern at her hip, an artifact that had been entrusted to her for better or for worse. Which one remained to be seen. That caused her mind to wander down paths she wasn’t ready to tread.

She pushed the edges of those heavy thoughts aside and passed a row of run-down, single-story houses without so much as a candle inside for illumination. The people here truly were poor.

“Scouting clear, ma’am,” Inquisitor Dane Rivers said as he emerged from a dark alley. He smoothly fell back into step beside her, wearing the same uniform that marked him her partner. He wore a standard issue RIB rapier sheathed on his hip and carried a heavily waxed leather evidence bag on his shoulder.

“Good,” She responded flatly. “I would ask what reason anyone could possibly have to base their operations in the city slums, but I should know better than to expect anything reasonable of a pirate. Especially one who fancies himself a Sky King.”

“My contact informs me that the Sky King prefers the term privateer, ma’am,” Dane said with a slight smile. “And he just so happens to command one of the most powerful airships this side of Thandia. An airship we need if we’re to capture Hawthorn and Turner. In my books that means he can call himself whatever he pleases.”

Her jaw tightened at mention of the traitors. “Two years we’ve been charged with their capture, Inquisitor Rivers. Two years chasing them across half the kingdom. I took an oath, and I mean to uphold it.”

“As do I, ma’am,” Dane agreed. “We were charged with their capture, and we’ll see it through to the end.”

“They’ll pay for their terrible crimes,” she added.

“I don’t doubt it, ma’am,” Dane said in his characteristic deadpan tone. “But I do wonder whether dressing down might have been more appropriate given our wherabouts.” He gestured to his uniform. 

His coat remained in pristine condition despite hard travel. It bore the same silver Bureau insignia with two horizontal bars below marking him as Zarin’s subordinate. Though in his forties, Dane could have passed for someone ten years younger. His dark hair fell in ringlets around his Bureau cap. His features were as lean and smooth as his movements, and his beard was trimmed with precision. He smiled sparingly, but when he did it was mildly apologetic.

To most, Dane was just another obedient inquisition lackey. But to those who knew what to watch for—the precise arc of his footfalls on loose cobble, the way his eyes measured every street corner, how his hands never strayed too far from the back of his coat—Dane Rivers was something else entirely. He didn’t swagger. He didn’t boast. He simply stood there with haunched shoulders and a little slack in his limbs, letting people believe he was harmless.

“I understand your reservations,” Zarin said. “But it’s crucial that these people know we’re here on king’s business.”

“Even though they don’t exactly like the king?” He ventured cautiously.

“Especially since they don’t like the king.” Her words, though not unkind, cut like ice. “You’re certain you didn’t find any signs of trouble ahead?”

“A few locals going about their business. Nothing that should concern us. But I don’t go looking for trouble half as much as trouble comes looking for me,” he added with a hint of amusement.

“You and trouble tend to make a mess of things regardless of who finds whom,” she countered without pause. “If we don’t have to put up with ruffians along the way, however, I might yet call this evening a success.”

“Wardenfell’s ruffians would be no match for you, ma’am,” he said with no small amount of pride.

She allowed herself a momentary smile. 

“You’re only half right, Dane. I could likely best some here in combat. But that is rarely how the world works. Recall the tale of Ser Valin, a peasant so skilled with the blade he became the king’s champion and was granted lands, deeds, and a noble name, only for a weaselly street urchin to plant a poisoned needle in his arse. They say his insides melted like wax over the course of weeks and that his screams could be heard from halfway across Thandia. And what of Aphimael, the strongest man ever born of a woman? Always in search of adventure until the Hatari overwhelmed him with numbers and pierced his heart with gloamglass.”

“Those are just cautionary tales, ma’am.”

“And I am determined not to become another such tale,” she said resolutely.

“I would never let such a fate befall you, ma’am,” he said with quiet certainty.

“And that is why you are here.” She thought for a moment. “Still, let’s not tempt the fates. The people here once claimed that Kingspire was a city that could not fall.”

Dane nodded. “They should have known better than to tempt the fates so.” He watched an alleyway they passed as if searching for signs of the shadow that had claimed the ancient city in the lowlands beneath Wardenfell.

“It wasn’t the light that vanished first,” Zarin quoted from the Tome of Eli. “It was the sound. No bells. No gulls. Not even a breath. The hole in the sky had opened, slow and certain, like a gaping maw that knew it had no need for haste. And before most knew what had happened, Kingspire and its people had been consumed by the Gloam.”

“A terrible way to go,” Dane muttered.

“None worse,” she agreed. “Besides, as much as I might loathe this place, it would be wise not to underestimate its people. Their forebears were survivors and resourceful to boot. They fled to higher ground and built for themselves this new city, where they prayed that the fates might hold the Gloam at bay. And their prayers, it would seem, were answered.”

“For now,” Dane added darkly.

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “Long enough for Wardenfell to spread across the high hills. Since the advent of airships it has even become one of Thandia’s most affluent cities.”

Dane looked around cautiously, ever alert. “But even the grandest city has rot somewhere, and in Wardenfell most of that appears to have been crammed into the Old Quarter.”

“Of course…” Zarin was going to add something, but her words and thoughts trailed off as she considered the ever-burning lantern concealed beneath her coat. It appeared ordinary save for the glyphs etched into its top and bottom. Symbols whose meaning was lost when the ancient Forgotten suddenly left the world. She pondered on what that bygone civilization had known and all that had been lost when they vanished. Where did they go? What secrets did they take with them? Could they have stopped the Gloam?

The duty with which she’d been charged weighed heavily upon her—not just the hunt for Hawthorn and Turner, but the lantern and its dying flame, a countdown she could not stop. As if sensing her worry, the lantern pulsed warm against her hip, tearing her from her reverie. Once. Twice. Then it trembled. Heat bloomed through the cloth wrapping, too intense, too sudden.

“Bleeding hells,” Zarin muttered. She stopped in the middle of the street and fumbled with her coat, pulling the lantern free. The moment it hit open air, it flared brilliant white and spat sparks like an angry forge.

“Ma’am,” Dane said while shielding his eyes. His tone carried a warning.

“I know.” She held the artifact at arm’s length as the flame danced erratically inside the glass. Shrinking. Swelling. Throwing contorting shadows across the narrow street. “I can’t help it. It’s getting worse.”

The lantern’s bright flame sputtered violently before finally settling back to its normal steady glow. However, Zarin was certain the flame inside had weakened considerably.

“How much time do we have?” Dane asked, as though hearing the question in her own mind.

“Less than we had this morning.” As the lantern settled, relief washed over her, however its light had already painted them both in stark relief for anyone watching. She quickly wrapped the artifact again, its warmth still pulsing through the cloth.

Dane scanned the street, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “We should keep moving, ma’am.”  

“You’re right,” she said, gathering herself and continuing her march.

Dane sighed. “I still would have preferred we did this during daylight. Unfortunately, my contact made it clear that the Sky King only appears at night.”

“Fitting,” Zarin said, still trying to collect her thoughts. “The charge we bear also demands discretion. Wearing our uniforms is non-negotiable. They carry the weight of royal authority that will help pave the way. However, the fewer people who notice a pair of royal inquisitors tracking fugitives this far west the better.”

“Something tells me that watching eyes might be as much of a problem tonight, ma’am.” He tilted his head back, indicating where the lantern had flared. “We haven’t exactly been as discreet as intended.”

“Good old Dane Rivers,” Zarin said with quiet sarcasm. “The eternal optimist.”

“Realism, not optimism, ma’am,” he said dryly. “But feel free to carve that on my tombstone.”

They turned down another narrow street, the buildings pressing closer. Zarin’s breath misted in the cold air. The lantern’s warmth pulsed against her hip beneath the coat, steady as her own heartbeat.

“That’s the thing about field inquisitors, Rivers,” she said. “We don’t always get a tombstone when we die.”

“Now who’s the optimist?” Dane said, but his tone had shifted. Lighter. Almost too casual. The way he spoke when something was wrong.

Four shapes detached from the shadows ahead. Men, though that word was generous. The Old Quarter bred a particular kind of desperation in people, and it showed in their posture, their weapons, and their eyes. One carried a garden hoe with a chipped blade. Another clutched a crossbow so caked in rust Zarin wondered whether it functioned at all. A third bore what might have once been a ceremonial sword, all decorative scrollwork and dull edge. The last, their leader by the way he stepped forward, held a club studded with rusty nails.

“Evening,” he said, his smile revealing too many missing teeth. “Awful late for folk to be wandering about these streets.”

Zarin’s hand drifted toward her hip, not to the lantern, but to the broken sword sheathed at her side. The blade ended halfway down its length, sheared clean, the pointed end absent. But even half a sword was deadly in the right hands. She’d proven as much on her travels and would need to prove as much again. Her fingers brushed the hilt. Not yet. Not for these fools. The blade had a mind of its own. It also had rules. Rules she had learned the hard way. Drawing the weapon exacted a heavy toll. And that was a price she was not willing to pay this night.

“Stand aside,” she said evenly. “We’re on official business.”

“Saw your little light show back there.” The leader’s eyes fixed on the bulge at her left hip. “Something that bright, that valuable…be a shame if something happened to it. Or to your partner there.” He gestured toward Dane with his club. “May as well hand over that bag you carry, while you’re at it.”

Dane hadn’t moved. He stood with practiced stillness, his right hand casually held by his side. Professional. Controlled. Utterly unthreatening.

“You really don’t want to do this,” Zarin said.

“Oh, I think we do.” The leader stepped closer. “See, something that precious, carried by someone so scared…”

He took her hesitation to draw her blade for fear. That was his first mistake.

“I’m going to give you one last chance,” Zarin said, removing her right glove. “Leave. Now.”

The leader laughed. That was his second mistake.

His men joined in. “Hand it over, and maybe—”

Dane’s bag dropped to the cobbles and his professional demeanor vanished.

His right hand snapped in a blur, and his blade appeared. He didn’t charge and didn’t shout a warning. He simply moved. Then Zarin decided that moved was inadequate a word. Even danced fell short, but it was the closest she could find.

The leader’s club hit the cobblestones before he realized his wrist was bleeding. The man with the ornamental sword thrust forward. Dane sidestepped, and the blade that had never seen real combat clattered away as its wielder stumbled past, suddenly clutching at a long, shallow cut across his ribs.

“By the gods!” The man with the crossbow fumbled with the trigger. Dane tossed his cap. The peak struck the assailant in the cheek, snapping his head back. A bolt fired wild, clattering against stone somewhere in the darkness. A heartbeat later the crossbowman fell to his knees, one hand pressed to his thigh where blood welled between his fingers. Dark blood. Fast blood.

“Get pressure on that,” Dane said conversationally. “You’ve got maybe ten minutes to find a healer. I’d hurry if I were you.”

The man with the garden hoe stood frozen, knuckles white around the wooden handle. His eyes darted between his bleeding companions and the man who’d cut them down with strokes he could barely see. He raised the hoe above his head in blind panic and charged. Not at Dane, but at Zarin.

“Atash,” she sighed.

Heat rolled over her shoulder and coiled down her right arm, and the cool night air shimmered around her extended hand. Flame erupted from her open palm in a roaring gout. Not a careful working. Yet not too powerful. The fire caught the man mid-stride, splashing his chest and face. He shrieked, dropped the hoe, and stumbled backward, beating frantically at his smoldering whiskers. He turned with a scream and fled into the night, unintelligible curses sputtering from his mouth and tendrils of smoke licking at his collar.

Zarin lowered her hand.

The leader clutched his bleeding wrist, eyes wide. His companion pressed both hands against the wound in his thigh, face pale as milk.

Dane pulled a cloth from a belt pouch and cleaned his thin blade with slow, deliberate strokes. Then he crouched beside the wounded man, meeting his terrified gaze.

“Tell them what happened here,” Dane said softly. “Tell them about the woman with flame and the man who cuts. Tell them that the Royal Inquisiton Bureau is in the Old Quarter tonight. Tell them to stay clear. Understand?”

The man nodded frantically.

“Good.” Dane stood upright again and sheathed his sword with a click. He stooped to fetch his cap and smoothly fastened it to his head. His casually professional bearing returned as if it had never left. “You should go. The bleeding won’t stop on its own.”

The leader and would-be swordsman dragged their dying companion between them, leaving a dark trail on the cobblestones as they fled.

Dane retrieved his bag and whistled. “Yet another reminder why not to get on the wrong side of a flamekeeper.”

“Let’s not forget that the Bureau charged us to capture someone who is also a flamekeeper,” Zarin said. “That’s why they sent me.”

“Then I suppose they sent me to deal with her lapdog.”

“Naturally,” she gestured to the makeshift weapons that lay on the street. “But don’t get too cocky. By all accounts, Ardo Turner is quite the swordsman himself. They don’t call him the Heartless for nothing.”

“Of course, ma’am.” He sounded genuinely troubled. “A good thing the lady isn’t as well versed in the arts of the flame as you then.”

“Perhaps so,” Zarin said. “But she’s getting better. On that much the evidence is clear.”

He tapped the bag. “It is also evident that they are both as heartless as each other,” he said. “It’s the only logical explanation for their crimes.”

Zarin wiped her hand on the lapel of her coat and refastened her white glove. “They both deserve to rot in the royal dungeons for the rest of their days. Turner is dishonorable even for a sell-sword. And Harwthorn is an utter disgrace to the Temple of Vignis and flamekeepers everywhere.” She sighed and her shoulders sagged. “We’ve been tracking them for so long, Dane. I’ll see that they meet justice. But I won’t lie. It sometimes grates on my soul.”

“I understand, ma’am,” he said with little emotion. “But I believe we’re close. I swear I can smell them this time. We need only cross the Gloam Sea. And then we’ll have them cornered.”

“Ah, Dane,” she said with a smile. “You make it sound like such a paltry thing. We haven’t even secured passage yet.”

“But by the end of this night, we will have it!”

“Those men who attacked us,” she said. “Did you not notice them while scouting?”

“No, ma’am. They kept themselves well-hidden. I sensed we were being watched, but knew it was unlikely someone would attack without cause.” He paused as though carefully selecting his next words. “But I didn’t expect the lantern to provide such cause. I only wish that it didn’t have to accompany us.”

He wasn’t wrong. The lantern’s malfunction hadn’t been her fault, but waving it around in the middle of the Old Quarter at night hadn’t been her wisest decision. Bringing it along on their travels was less than ideal, but whether they liked it or not, it was necessary. “I’m afraid we’re stuck with the lantern, volatility and all. At least for the time being.”

Well,” he said with a sigh. “A handful of beggars with garden tools were never going to pose any real danger. It might even work in our favor. Word will get around, and no one else will bother us.”

Unless they send someone more competent to finish the job, she thought.

They continued through the winding streets, and Zarin found herself walking a half-step closer to him than before.

***

“Here at last,” Dane finally announced.

On the edge of the old quarter, tucked between a shuttered bookbinders and what looked like a ramshackle apothecary, squatted their destination. The tavern’s facade buckled slightly as if the interior bore a secret too heavy to speak. Its patched roof sagged in places, and the stilted porch overlooking the gloam-choked lands far below appeared fit for nought but crumbling. Be it by some arcane power or the sheer stubbornness characteristic of old things, its walls held firm. Merry sounds seeped through those walls, and deep orange spilling from its windows did battle with the cold shadows outside. As ramshackle as it appeared, the tavern hunched in defiance of something older than the Old Quarter, Wardenfell’s last bastion against the things that lurked in the Gloam below.

A song played somewhere inside, a low lament that lent something otherworldly to the jumble of wood and stone. Zarin had never been much of a musician, but she could recognize a reed intrument, at least two fiddles, and a drum.

A worn sign above the door read The King’s Lantern. 

“There can’t be an establishment less fit for a king within a thousand leagues,” Zarin muttered.

Dane made a sound that might have been amusement.

“What’s so funny?” she said.

“My contact claimed the original owner, lacking a basic command of the common tongue, misspelled latrine when painting the sign. He said The King’s Latrine would have been a more fitting name given that its patrons reek of shit and its ale tastes like piss.”

Zarin cocked an eyebrow at his language.

“My contact’s words, ma’am, not mine.” Dane added quickly with a shrug and feigned innocence. 

“You and your contact both need your mouths washed out with horse soap,” she said.

“True…” He pushed the front door ajar and sniffed. “But he wasn’t wrong.”

Zarin quickly confirmed the ever-burning lantern was properly concealed beneath her coat before following.

As they stepped inside, she felt something that words were ill-equipped to describe, something so subtle it almost escaped notice. The King’s Lantern had all the look of an old dying man and twice the stench. Its color had long faded, its boards creaked with arthritis, and its fireplace coughed more than crackled. But it was filled to the rafters with something that evaded more respectable establishments. Mystery bubbled from every gnarled nook and twisted cranny, charm stirred in every piece of scratched furniture, and fable turned upon every scarred surface.

The King’s Lantern had character. Not the fleeting sort one might watch in a play or read about in a book, but the kind that moves with the heft of history, the kind whose weight is such that when it falls upon the shoulders of men, they forget about their troubles for a while. But it had something other than character. Something deeper. Older.

The King’s Lantern wasn’t clean. It wasn’t safe. And it was a far cry from what most considered proper. But it was real. And if you stood still enough…If you listened beyond the clinking glasses, the cackling whores, and the cursing gamblers, you might have heard something. Because The King’s Lantern, for all its grime and ill-repute, brimmed with something rarer than diamonds and more valuable than gold. Something that everything that ever mattered was built upon yet was steadily bleeding from the world.

The King’s Lantern had story.

And somewhere in that den of pirates, smugglers, and tall tales was Viscount Torren Blackwood, the self-proclaimed Sky King, and the one man in all of Thandia who could help them save the world.