Chapter 16: Smoke, Mirrors, and Stone Walls

The sky over Graywatch was doing its best impression of iron, flat, cold, and heavy with judgment. Morning sunlight didn’t stand a chance. It came in filtered and gray, like it had to beg permission to exist. Rain hadn’t started yet, but it was there in the air, just waiting for someone to make a mistake. I bit into a cheese waffle from Hester’s cart, still hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth. She gave me a wink when she handed it over, knew my face by now, knew my appetite too. I tipped her a copper and kept walking. That was about as warm and homey as Graywatch got.

The Guild Square was starting to stir. Lanterns dimming, doors opening, clerks in stiff coats shuffling papers like they were solving murders. Each hall rising like a little kingdom of its own, stone and banners, sigils and statues. The square smelled like ink, wet stone, old parchment, and ambition.

I wasn’t there to join. Gods, no.

I’d just clawed my way out of fifteen years of command chains and battlefield orders. I wasn’t in the mood to polish someone else’s boots or call a greenblood "sir." I didn’t miss the paperwork. I didn’t miss the discipline. I sure as hell didn’t miss the politics. But I did miss the legitimacy.

Turns out, being a war hero with no badge, no papers, and no title in Graywatch meant squat. If I wanted access, if I wanted answers, hell, if I wanted to question a footman without getting slapped in irons, I needed something official. Something the kind of bastards who vanish women behind velvet curtains would respect.

Or fear.

The Watchmen’s Brotherhood sat like a squat fortress on one end of the square. Its black-and-brass crest gleamed with self-importance. They called themselves law and order, but they were a contract force. And like most contract forces, they served whoever had the most gold in their purse and the least shame in their eyes. Rich districts got justice. Poor ones got excuses.

Not my kind of uniform.

The Hunters’ Guild, now that had potential. Trackers, bounty men, a few monster chasers for the flare of it. It ran out of a long hall built like a hunting lodge, all dark wood and antlers, the smell of leather and blood. Their contracts were private, their rules loose, and their work… dirty. I respected that. Didn’t mean I trusted it.

And then there were the Wardens of the Deep. That one was almost funny. Sailors and salvagers with too many secrets and too many knives. They ran the docks like their own kingdom, honor among thieves, with barnacles. Not my world, but it wasn’t a bad place to dig up information. Especially when someone goes missing.

I stood at the edge of the square, chewing slowly on my waffle, watching the guilds open like flowers made of granite. Somewhere in there was the next step. Not a path I wanted, but maybe one I needed. I had no commanding officer anymore. No orders. No war. But I had a name, Caelix Rusiren, and a barmaid who didn’t come home. And sometimes, that was enough.

I took a deep breath. The kind that tasted like rain and old regret. Then I started walking, not toward any guild in particular, just forward. Because if I stopped moving, the ghosts might catch up. And I’d rather face a room full of liars and murderers than the ones that already lived in my head.

The Guild of Arcane Practitioners didn’t look like much from the outside. A square tower tucked into the northeast corner of Guild Square, too narrow, too squat, with a crooked spire that looked like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to fall over or fly away. The stone was clean, too clean, like the building had been scrubbed down with magic and self-importance. A single brass plaque was affixed beside the heavy oak door. No guards. No welcoming committee. Just a shimmer in the air that prickled the skin on my arms and whispered you don’t belong here.

Graywatch had a lot of guilds, but the Arcane Practitioners? They were a breed apart. Most of them didn’t need to lift a finger to make you disappear. That was the problem with wizards. Too many spells. Not enough consequences. I pulled open the door and stepped into a space that immediately disobeyed the laws of architecture. It was too big. Ceiling stretched high like a cathedral. Hallways spiderwebbed in impossible directions. The stone was smooth and silver-gray, veined with magic that pulsed just faintly underfoot.

A front counter waited dead ahead, staffed by three apprentice-looking types in deep blue robes that looked like they’d only just stopped itching. They stared at me like I’d tracked mud through their sanctum, and I had.

“Can we help you?” asked the girl in the middle, her tone all brittle politeness and bureaucratic dread.

“Maybe.” I took two slow steps forward, the soles of my boots slapping the polished stone like a challenge. “I’m looking into a missing person. The man she was last seen with is registered here, Caelix Rusiren.”

They blinked. Whispered to one another. Flipped through a floating file of paper that shimmered and rearranged itself before my eyes. The boy on the right made a subtle gesture toward a nearby rune-warded wall. Probably a silent alarm.

I smiled without warmth. “Don’t bother calling your master. Just point me to someone who handles illusionists.”

More whispering.

Eventually, the girl sniffed and pointed me toward a spiraling stair that hadn’t been there a second ago. “Second floor. Ask for the Illusionist Liaison.”

The stairs shifted under my boots as I climbed. Not in a way that said magic, in a way that said arrogance. Every step screamed you don’t belong here, and I didn’t argue. The Liaison's office was a box. No better word for it. A small, windowless, broom-closet-sized room, lit by a lazy candle and stuffed with more paper than I’d seen outside a military quartermaster’s tent. The man behind the desk looked like he hadn’t slept since the Queen took the throne. His robe was creased, his eyes sunken, and his hair the unfortunate color of dishwater.

He barely looked up. “State your inquiry.”

I gave it to him straight. “I’m trying to find a missing woman. She was last seen with one of yours. Name’s Caelix Rusiren. He a member?”

“No guild record is available for non-members of the Practitioners. That information is restricted.” He said it like he was reciting it from a cursed plaque.

I stepped closer. “You didn’t hear me. A woman’s missing. And this man? He’s the thread.”

He sighed, still didn’t look at me. “The Guild does not concern itself with the social or romantic activities of its mages.”

I set both hands on the edge of his desk and leaned in.

“Look at me.”

He did. Slowly. Like a man staring down the barrel of something he’d rather not name.

“I’ve killed men in three countries. Fought a war that left cities in ruin. And I’m real tired of being told no by people who hide behind rules while women disappear. Now. Tell me if this bastard works here, or I’ll find out myself by ripping this place down one brick at a time.”

That got his attention. He swallowed. Flipped through a stack of glowing parchment until he found what he didn’t want to.

“Caelix Rusiren,” he said, voice quieter now. “Registered. Junior member. Experimental illusionary specialist. His area of study falls under nonlinear magical realism and boundary manipulations.”

“In Common,” I said, “not Academy babble.”

“He plays with the border between real and unreal. Projects things that shouldn’t exist. Sometimes... things that do.”

I stepped back, let that sink in. I didn’t like it.

“Where is he now?”

“His last reported lodging was the Velvet Clover. Beyond that, I cannot say. We are not permitted to track members without authorization.”

I snorted. “Of course not.”

Then the floor lit up beneath my boots. A teleportation glyph, activated by the weasel behind the desk.

“Wait…”

Too late. The world twisted sideways and I was standing outside the tower, the brass door already sealing shut behind me like I’d never been there. Locked out. Literally and figuratively.

“Crom’s bleeding knuckles,” I hissed. “By Marzanna’s frozen tits and Bess’s foaming mug, seven hells stacked sideways!”

I kicked a loose cobble hard enough to scatter the puddles.

“May the gods choke on their own damned ley lines. Twisting skyborn goat-wizards and their rune-etched egos. Experimental illusionist my ass, hope he projects himself into a sewer trench and drowns in his own conjured piss.”

I stood in the drizzle, fists clenched at my sides, jaw aching from how hard I was grinding it. I wanted to hit something. No. I wanted to break something. Or someone. Instead, I lit a cigar with hands that trembled more from fury than cold, and turned on my heel. If I couldn’t go through the front door, I’d find a back one. If there wasn’t one? I’d make it. But first? I needed a drink. A strong one. Maybe two. And gods help the barkeep that watered it down.

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The guild square looked like a painting I wanted to set on fire. Midmorning light bled through the clouds like a slow wound. The spires of Graywatch’s mighty institutions rose around me, self-important stonework carved by dwarves who never had to live under the weight of their own architecture. To my left, the Watchmen’s Guild, all black banners and judgmental crests. To my right, the Hunters’ Guild, polished mahogany doors and the faint stink of blood behind a handshake. Both places full of people who might’ve helped, if I’d been the right kind of citizen, or the right kind of desperate.

But I’d just come from the Arcane Guild, where I’d been teleported out like a drunk at closing time. My pride was still bruised, and my fists were still itchy. I didn’t have room for groveling. And I sure as hell wasn’t about to hand over my spine to another authority just to make them feel comfortable. I needed legitimacy. I needed reach. But more than that, I needed a lead.

So I did what soldiers are taught to do when the plan burns up and the world starts closing in. I went back to the beginning. My father, General Mikael Blackthorn, long retired before I took my first steps, always told me the real heart of a city beats in the chests of its lowest. He taught me never to look down on anyone unless I was helping them up, or putting them down. He believed in the strength of the small folk. So did I.

Graywatch was a city of masks and marble towers, but under all that polish were alleys slick with truth. The kind of truth that smelled like old piss and desperation, but it was truth all the same. So I went to find it. I started with the corner near the Velvet Clover, one of the covered alcoves where a cluster of beggars usually gathered for warmth and loose coin. The moment I stepped through the shadows, the conversations paused. That’s what happens when you carry yourself like a warhound in a city of cats.

But I didn’t threaten. Not yet. A few coppers and a round of hot flatbread from a vendor three alleys over opened more mouths than fists ever could.

“He comes at dusk,” one whispered. “That illusionist, him with the sly grin and the long coat.”

“Never looks at nobody,” another spat. “Unless it’s a girl. Then he looks.”

“He gave Grit-Eye a silver to vanish once. Told him to go blind for the night. That was two weeks back.”

They didn’t know names. But they knew habits. And Graywatch's unwanted always remember habits. I worked my way deeper. Past the silks and lamp-lit promenades. Through the steam-wreathed alleys behind the bathhouses. Into the maze of cracked stone and crumbling brick that even the watch didn’t patrol unless they were dragging bodies. The deeper I went, the more the city started talking. By the time I hit the fifth corner of stink and incense, I was tired of riddles and ready for something solid.

That’s when I heard her name. "Mother Harrow." A whisper more than a title. A name carried on sighs, passed between hands gnarled by poverty and soot.

"She sees things,” they said. “Things the guild mages won’t. Things they’re too scared to name.”

Takes coin? Sure. But more than that, she took respect. They told me where to find her, down the Spiral Stair, past the burned-out shrine of Exterus, through a rusted gate choked with ivy and shadow. That was enough. I tucked the directions into the folds of my memory, tipped my hat to the broken gods, and started walking.

Because when magic leaves no blood... and a woman disappears without a scream... you don’t need laws. You need someone who sees through the veil. And I was about to meet her.

The directions weren’t exactly carved in stone, more like whispered riddles with a few hopeful landmarks and an attitude problem. Still, they led true. Or true enough. Graywatch thinned out in places if you knew where to look. Back alleys gave way to ruins and rot, little seams in the city’s proud stone face where the past had been bulldozed but never really buried. I found the Spiral Stair, and just beyond it, where a sagging iron fence curled in like the claws of a dying beast, I saw it, the shrine.

Or what was left of it. Half-collapsed roof. Soot-blackened walls. Ivy chewing through old sigils like time was starving. A broken bench and a cracked stone bowl, green with grime and filled with rainwater gone stale. The faint outline of a traveler’s staff still clung to the stone arch above the entry, chipped and barely visible, like a memory the city tried to forget.

Shrine of Exterus. God of vagabonds, of forgotten roads and those who wander them. Patron of the in-between and the left behind. I stepped closer. When I was a kid, my folks made me go to the temple schools. Thought it might give me some kind of foundation. Maybe it did, reading, writing, basic lore. Enough to recognize the gods when they spat in your face or yanked your fate like a marionette string.

I never cared much for most of them. Bess with her drunken cheer. Crom Cruach and his blood-drenched sermons. Even Einarr, the valiant protector, too many of his followers marched the innocent to war. But Exterus? He didn’t preach. Didn’t posture. Didn’t promise what he couldn’t give. Just watched from the side of the road as people limped past. A god of outcasts who asked for nothing and expected less.

I wasn’t religious. Never have been. But I’m not stupid either. The gods are real. You just have to be smart enough to know they don’t always care. Still… I didn’t like seeing this. I brushed a hand across the bowl, scraping away some of the grime with the side of my glove. Took a step back and picked up the bench, setting it as straight as I could without collapsing the whole thing. I didn’t say a prayer. But I reached into my pocket, found a small silver coin, and dropped it into the bowl.

Not for luck. Not for salvation. Just a nod. From one wanderer to another.

“Still standing,” I muttered to the shrine. “That counts for something.”

And then I turned and walked on, through the crooked gate and into the deeper shadows. The air got thicker the closer I got. Not fog, not mist. Just… presence. A silence that hummed with breath held too long. The alley opened to a half-collapsed courtyard, where broken statuary leaned like old drunks whispering secrets to the weeds. There, nestled in a cracked foundation of what once might’ve been a watchtower, sat a small crooked hut, stone base, warped wood above, with glowing runes flickering faintly across the lintel. A raven sat on the roof. Its eyes glowed soft violet. I approached slow. The door creaked open before I even knocked. She was already waiting.

Mother Harrow.

Old, yes, but not brittle. Not feeble. Her skin was a dusky gray-green, marked by a thousand wrinkles and stories. Half-orc, at least. Maybe more. Her eyes gleamed like candlelight caught in obsidian. Hair like driftwood, wild, twisted, streaked with charms and bones. She wore a robe that might’ve been homespun once but had since been touched by things deeper than thread. Smoke clung to her like perfume.

“You brought gifts,” she said, voice like flint on wood. “Smart girl.”

I nodded and held out the pack. A bottle of whiskey, real whiskey, not the gutter swill most people pass off for decent, and a fresh-wrapped cheese waffle from Hester’s, still warm.

“I didn’t come empty-handed,” I said. “Didn’t seem like the kind of mistake I wanted to make.”

She took the offerings with a raspy chuckle, turning the bottle in her hand like she was checking its weight against something older than value. Then she looked me over, not just my face, not just my scars. All of me. Like she was seeing my shadow, my choices, the blood I’d spilled and the things that still followed me from it.

“You stink of war,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” I said. “And regret. But that one doesn’t come off with a bath.”

She nodded once and stepped back from the door, leaving it open.

“Well then,” she said, “let’s see what the road dragged in.”

And I stepped inside.

The inside of Mother Harrow’s hut was everything I expected and a few things I didn’t. Smelled like old ash and elder root, the kind of scent that clung to your coat and your memories. The space was bigger than it had any right to be, smoke curled through the rafters, and shelves groaned with jars filled with teeth, moss, and things better left unexamined. There was a single cauldron at the back, iron-bellied and singing to itself in bubbling whispers.

The old witch settled into a crooked stool like she’d been poured there, her bones folding one at a time. Her eyes never left me. I followed her lead, dropped into a low-backed chair across from the cauldron and set my tribute down beside the first batch, my last three cigars, tucked in waxed paper and lined up like dead men waiting for fire. She grinned like a skull at a funeral.

“You honor the old ways,” she said.

“I respect the ones who walk outside the walls,” I replied. “Same as me.”

She dipped her head. Not a bow, not quite. More like acknowledgment and waited until the room stopped creaking like it was listening in.

“I’m looking for a woman,” I said. “Name’s Fessy. Dockside barmaid. She went missing two nights back. Last seen with an illusionist.”

Mother Harrow’s gaze sharpened at that. “Magic always leaves a scent. But names lie. Do you have her essence?”

I reached into my coat and pulled out a worn wooden comb. The kind you could buy five for a copper, but this one had a crack down the middle and three strands of hair caught between the teeth. Fessy used to keep it behind the bar. Said it kept her curls from tangling when she worked.

“This do?” I asked.

She took it with something like reverence, hands delicate despite the age carved into them.

“Oh yes,” she murmured. “This will do fine.”

She shuffled toward the cauldron, whispered something in a language that wasn’t made for polite ears, and dropped the comb into the bubbling mix. A hiss, a pop, and a bloom of green smoke curled toward the ceiling. She stirred with a carved bone wand, muttering with her eyes rolled half-back, voice scraping the inside of the room like claws.

“She is… alive,” Harrow rasped. “But the veil around her is thick. Shrouded. There is power keeping her hidden, power old and patient.”

I leaned forward. “Where?”

She shook her head, frustration wrinkling the folds of her face.

“I cannot see. Something blocks the sight. Something hungry.”

I didn’t back off. I’d faced down warlords and worse. “You’re telling me she’s alive, but you can’t tell me where. That’s not good enough.”

She stiffened. “Do not press me, soldier. I am not one of your informants or in a uniform with a rank and a death wish.”

I held her gaze. “I don’t need a map. Just give me a direction.”

Her breath rattled out between her teeth.

“She’s below,” she said, finally. “Far below. There are tunnels, old places. The Velvet Clover, hells the whole city, was built on something ancient. Blood has been spilled there before, and it feeds the roots of that place still.” Her eyes flared wide. “And there is a stink on the air. A god’s stink. Not the kind that brings rain or mercy. The kind that wraps a blade in silk and laughs when you bleed.”

She leaned forward, voice dropping to a hoarse whisper.

“Erlik,” she said, and then immediately made the sign of the evil eye with fingers gnarled like tree roots. “Speak that name to no one. It draws things.”

The cauldron surged, and her eyes snapped shut. Her body jolted. I felt it too, like someone had just tugged the room by a string tied to its heart. She shrieked once. Then her hand slapped down on the edge of the cauldron, and the smoke blew out like a storm. I stood, instinct taking over, hand already moving toward the knife at my back. But she waved me off, pale and trembling.

“Something followed the spell,” she gasped. “Tried to ride it back.”

“You alright?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But I will be.”

I waited. Gave her a chance to recover. But her hand shook when she reached for the whiskey, and her voice rasped like broken flint.

“I’ve told you all I can. What waits beneath the Clover is old and wrong. It bargains. It feeds. And it’s using her.”

And then… I blinked… And I was outside. Alone.

Standing in the alley, the rune-marked gate shut behind me like a judge’s verdict. The sun had dipped low. Evening was curling around the eaves of the city like a cat preparing to pounce. For a second, I wasn’t sure if any of it had been real. The shrine. The witch. The spell. But the smell of smoke still clung to my coat.

And the name, that name, echoed in my skull like footsteps in an empty hall. Because if Fessy was beneath the Clover… then that’s where I was going. Even if the shadows down there already knew my name.