DAY ZERO

In the barracks they huddled. There were chairs and stools edged in close enough to scratch the legs of one central table. Such furniture was built for more impressive chaps, but it was their butts what filled them and possession was nine tenths of you know the rest. Throats were cleared and cards laid down.

When off the job, young lads needed grab what fun they could. They all sized each other up, they in their bright livery, sized each other up as if to determine whose wispy lip hairs were most pronounced and thus deduce the natural Rank and Order of Things. But, for once, the bickering subsided. They’d been promised story time.

“Alright, you scullery maids,” snapped Buxtehude, standing tall atop his bar stool, ale sloshing over the rim of the mug in his hand. “Alright, you bright-eyed pups, you prepubescents.”

The lads—there were some dozen of them, squires and pages all—leaned forward, trading glances. Some flicked tongues over their forefingers, pinching out candle flames.

“On with it,” said one—Jopwell, usually charming enough, though his temper was red as his hair. He and Bux had arrived around the same time and had become friendly.

“Aye, Buxom Bux,” said Nap, Bux’s bosom friend. “We’ve not got all night.”

“Actually, we do,” cut in a third—Miftin Strykes-Hume, fifth son^[1] of the Earl of Weeds-on-Berm. Adding, “But that’s all we have. Tomorrow’s for the war.” He twirled a dagger, point spinning on the oaken table, gently, round and round.

“And what’s a pre-pub essen?”

“If you’ll all shut up,” said Buxtehude, and he smiled when the chatter at last died down. A sharp breath, and he continued, “This tale comes from my grandfather, Duke Ingo Perdurable. In his day, the days of the Grand Duchy of Hivenshire, there was trouble brewing in the Old Wood out at the edge of Dromederry. Men, they said, men walked about in long, long, white cloaks.”

An audible, jaw-cracking yawn interrupted Bux. Tough crowd. He rallied. “These men, though, had no faces.”

“For the gods’ sakes,” shouted one of the lads, “yes, the Faceless Watchers. They were mere pilgrims wearing black masks. Felicitations, sirrah, you’re the dullest child in the room tonight.”

Bux’s cheeks burned. Moisture boiled at the corners of his eyes, so much so that it was another moment before he realized he didn’t recognize the one who’d spoken. He hopped off the bar stool. “Excuse you,” he scoffed and jabbed his mug in the general direction of the interrupter. “Who do you think you are?”

He leaned back, that coal-haired youth, the only one among them to have weaponized sideburns in the war for superior masculinity—now Bux was sure he didn’t know this impressive creature.

“Oh, many pardons, Your Grace. Goja, I am.” He grinned. “At your service.”

Bux drew himself up to his full height, one leg on the lower rung of the stool before him. Then, somewhat conscious that this position exposed his crotch to the world at large, he put his feet together. “Buxtehude J. Perdurable,” he said, “at yours.” He drained his mug and slammed it on the table, globs of foam striking the playing cards strewn about. “I can’t help but notice your peculiar accent, sir.”

“Well done.” Goja clapped three times, forefingers to wrist. “I’m not from around here.”

“Ah. Wherefrom do you hail? I must say, you’ve chosen an odd time to tour the Lomenshire. There’s a war on, you might have deduced. Still,” Bux paused, crossing his arms and touching a finger to his chin, “a blessing’s a blessing. And to what do we owe the blessing that is your visit?”

It pleased Bux to watch Goja’s arched brows furrow, to witness his twitching spasms which sent waves through his thick black hair, shoulder length only on the right side, cut close on the left. The other boys were happy enough to watch this battle from the sidelines. Entertainment, no matter the form, was nothing to sneeze at.

“None of your affair, where I’m from, why I’m here,” the boy named Goja mumbled.

“How mysterious!” said Bux. “Perhaps you’ll regale us with a tale of this place, so magical and wondrous you daren’t even tell me its name. Oh, please do.”

Bux examined his prey intently. He could see the pressure working at him. Goja might have sparred with Bux all night, but he’d been challenged now. His peers were witness. The skirmish had thus bled into full-blown war, and Bux felt with grim certainty that he’d made a life-long foe. Worth it, he thought. This was Reputation, after all, and that was, well, everything. Even his father, the Duke Perdurable and Lord of Dromederry, and all the other nobles—they all played at this game, this very serious game.

The stakes high, Goja raised him, “I grew up in a tower, overlooking a swamp.”

“A swamp?” said Bux, laughing.

“Aye, a thrice-damned swamp,” Goja snapped. Then his voice softened, “It lies at the heart of the realm, that far off land which I will not name here.” His eyes darkened. He was pale in the dim glow cast by the single lit candle. His face a shadow, he began his tale, and he commanded attention.

“Wise men—fools with money, as they say—tell of phantoms who dwell in the marshes. They come by their sign: the cyan flame. They may take the shapes of men, but really you see what you want to see in them. The phantoms are child-takers, and they’ve taken wicked children in the night for some five centuries. Sometimes they take the children of the wicked—and that’s an important distinction.

“No one knows what ties them to the ninth month of each year, but that is when they come, when the light catches on the westward mountains and the nearer wastes. From the bog a thin mist rises, and all the world takes a breath of that fetid murk. Drives us all mad for a few hours, and everyone becomes still, for fear of shouting out some secret held to the chest for years.

“So as fathers barricade the homesteads, and mothers suckle suckling babes, the flames flicker and the sparks catch and suddenly the boughs of trees are all aglow with blue and green and white.”

Goja stopped. He filled a mug to the brim, cocked his head and tossed it back. No one said a word. He wiped his mouth with a bright orange sleeve. Bux tried to recall his livery charts, the heraldry he’d studied—whose House did Goja belong to…? But the story whisked all these thoughts away.

“They dress in black, these phantoms. It is the black of night and the underside of dream-shadow. Silver seams stitch together the fabric of moonless dark which cloaks them. Their hats curve downward and are wide of brim. They smile from beneath the brims, from behind the shadows. Their hands,” he said, through his teeth, “their fingers wriggle like snakes, pale worms from deep beneath the earth.

“My people call them Lightless. And, one night, some years ago, the Lightless came forth and took my friend. I never saw him again.”

Bux realized he was bent over the table. His lower back ached. He levered himself onto the stool, but his legs did not stop shaking.

Goja grinned, then, the very grin Bux had imagined on the featureless faces of the Lightless. Goja said, “When they came for me, I killed one of them. Do you want to know how I managed that?” Bux gulped. Goja snickered, then, “I told it my name. And—and it faded into the shadow and was gone. Clean gone.”

“But the Lightless,” said Nap, breaking the yeast-smelling silence, “they come for the wicked. They wanted you?”

“None more wicked,” said Goja. He’d pinched the dagger from Miftin while everyone was engrossed in the tale. He dabbed the point with the pad of his finger.

“Why did it vanish, destroy itself?” asked Bux. “Why did it fear you?”

Goja narrowed his eyes. “Why don’t you?”

Silence again. Much like a standoff between thugs and constables in those stories Bux’s nanny had told him when he was a wee toddling lad, none among them dared twitch first. And Bux remained keenly aware that Goja held a dagger in his pale, pale hand. Pale as the Lightless, the Lightless who’d probably haunt Bux’s dreams for weeks to come. Assuming he survived the night, Goja’s night, or the war with the Lindils come tomorrow.

Perhaps five minutes passed. No, an hour. No, twelve seconds.

Light exploded into the room from the hall as the reinforced door swung on its axis, hinges screaming rusted screams. It slammed into the wall. The walls shook. Bux’s teeth rattled.

The silhouette, dark against the sudden inrush of blinding torchlight, did not speak. Bux barely resisted the urge to open, full-stream, the floodgates of his bladder. A trickle in the silence let him know not everyone had been so self-controlled.

The figure in the doorway raised a hand, pointing. “You,” it said and advanced a step.

All eyes on it. No one could move.

Then the figure grumbled. “Ugh. Reduced to errand boy. You, boy—black-hair, there. At attention, whelp.”

He was talking to Goja. The boy, having conquered his shock somewhat more ably than his peers, demanded, “Who calls, and what for?”

The figure, discernibly male now that Bux’s eyes had adjusted to the light, jeered, “Your mother, to rant to you of how fantastic a lover I am.” He grabbed Goja by the shoulders and hauled him from his seat. “Now come along. The Baron wants a word with you.”

The youngest page piped up, “I know who you are!” and the man glowered over his shoulder.

“Keep that knowledge to yourself, or I’ll be back for you,” he said. “I’ll not be known for having played wet-nurse for suckling babes.”

Goja and the stranger left the room. Well, the stranger yanked him from the room like a straw-doll. The door slammed again, shut, snuffing out the last candle.

In the darkness, the littlest page squeaked, “I know who that was.”

Bux said nothing. Everyone actively said nothing.

Moonlight filtered in through a murder hole in the wall.

“I know about him,” moaned Nap in the dark and the silence, chopped by the thumping of boyish hearts. “He’s the source of the stories what my granddad tole the servants’ children so they’d empty the chamber pots without back talk.”

The little page shook his head, covered his mouth with his hands and whispered into them, so softly Bux could barely hear. “Everything you heard ‘bout him is true. That’s Sir Vive.”

Bux, fingers trembling, fumbled for a match so that they might finally get a bit of light.

“I’d hoped he wasn’t real,” he said.

[1] And fourth unwanted.

Next Chapter: DAY ONE