Prologue A Man With No Name
PROLOGUE
A MAN WITH NO NAME
There were several valid reasons to despise the Micrean royal city of Amaris. The man who was looking for his wife had three:
First, it was too big.
Second, reading the language took too long.
Third, there were too many dead people. All over. Stuffed into corners and left under collapsed horses, just dead.
The man was trying to ignore them like the rest of the city did, but was cursed with a sensitive nose and the body lounging outside of a rowdy tavern was starting to melt to goo.
Someone had tried to make the corpse look like it was sleeping by throwing a blanket over it, but in Amaris there was no stillness that was not death.
Even now, with the full, pale moon standing watch, the city’s denizens poured from their slanted houses into Amaris’s labyrinthine streets.
Beautiful women in ugly brothels writhed to music floating on the air.
Knights banged on tables in crowded pubs for their tenth round.
Holy women drowning in their robes snorted pink powders deep into their “sacred vessels.” Amaris was a ballroom for debauchery and its dancefloor was packed, reveler against reveler, shaking and shimmying to the beat of the city’s screaming music.
How fitting it was, then, that the man was looking for his partner.
Well, his partner and a mirror. His hair, currently plaited behind him, was long enough to have developed a mind of its own nowadays. He wanted to look at least halfway presentable when he found his wife again.
And he would find her again.
The tenth shop the man visited felt promising, its windows unshattered and with no suspicious smells wafting out from the red-and-gold curtains hanging in front of the entrance.
The man ducked under the too-low doorframe and found walls cramped with tarnished bits and bobs: brushes, knives, letter openers, handkerchiefs, and—
And two people having a lovely night on top of a display table. And on that display table, groaning under their combined weight, was the shop’s only mirror.
Well. He didn’t need it that badly. He slipped away without being noticed.
The world outside of this rat-run city was bleak, but Amaris was steeped so deep in chaos that Magic candied the air.
Just to move through this place felt like wading through caramel—if the caramel was full of sex fiends and drugs and corpses.
But if his wife was anywhere in this world, it was here.
The man had already exhausted his leads on other continents.
A woman who could manipulate metal in a country far south turned out to be just a gifted smith.
Another queen who spoke to lizards was simply an excellent animal trainer.
So far, he’d found only legends. Even in this country, he’d collected stories of Wraiths, slithering immortal creatures born of divine rage.
Apparently one was the product of a snake orgy, which, against all his better senses, the man desperately wanted to witness.
Unfortunately, though, he’d learned already that humans in this world had a penchant for stories.
There was no use hunting down those “Wraiths,” who were probably just humans different enough from these humans that someone felt the need to spin a tale to explain their existence.
“Aye, come and see a marvel of Valos!” a showman standing on the world’s ricketiest wooden box called out over the din.
Passersby clogged the gurgling streets to give him a few seconds of their attention.
The man told himself he needed to keep looking, even spotted a shop up ahead, but unfortunately, he’d been cursed with curiosity.
He veered to the side of the pocked and slanted road, standing at the back of the showman’s crowd with his arms crossed over his chest.
“You sees the card, yes?” the showman said, pulling a playing card from the pocket of his colorfully patched jacket that depicted a monarch with the head of a raven. The crowd leaned in to check the weathered edges and thinning paper. “What’s it, say you?” he asked a boy standing at the front.
“A King o’ Ravens!” the boy shouted.
“Aye!” The showman waved his free hand, nails grown out almost to claws, over the card three times. “But if ye look again with Valos eyes, perhaps ye may see… a viper!”
A cloth serpent sprung out of the showman’s sleeve and the crowd screamed, leaping back. The kid up front was so terrified he ran off down the road.
“Or maybe even a maiden.”
The showman drew his crowd’s attention back to his hand, only for the card to have changed its face.
Now, it was decorated with a beautiful blonde person plucking the string of a bow as if it were a harp.
The showman raised his brows at a lovely woman standing at the front of his crowd and reached the card out to her.
Before her fingers could touch the paper, he gave another flick of his wrist and the card became a rose.
The crowd whooped for the showman’s tricks and the man nodded in appreciation. At least there was something nice in this sex dungeon of a town. Just as the man unlocked his arms to give the showman a clap, he felt something in his pocket.
Of course…
The man pretended not to notice the hand patting around his empty pocket, but it went on just long enough for him to be annoyed.
He got it—he was broke. No need to drag this out.
After the fifth second of the tiny palm grasping around all that empty space, he looked down at his thief.
The little boy who’d shouted out at the beginning of the trick. Expected.
“Lost something?” the man asked. The little boy furrowed his brow. He was about five, maybe, and already a veteran of his trade.
“You need to get a job!” the kid cried, then kicked the man’s shin and sped off into Amaris’s curling streets.
“Shit!” the man cursed, hopping on one foot. Mangy little bastard.
“The little ones sure are funny, aren’t they?” A voice like a finger curling under his chin turned the man’s attention. Behind him, the pretty woman with the rose stood a few inches from his chest. Her hair was as red as the rose she spun in her fingers, with pink powder dusted over her cheeks.
“You could call them that, sure,” the man scoffed.
“Are the children where you’re from any kinder?” the woman asked, leaning closer, and the business of the streets pushed them chest to chest. She batted her lashes up at him.
“I wouldn’t—”
Before he could finish, the woman threw herself on him.
Her mouth tasted like liquor and smoke, and hidden under all of that was the itchy-sweet sting of Magic.
The man pushed her off, but not before she slipped a pressed tablet of something under his tongue.
He bent over and spat the little red pill out, sending it splattering on her shoes.
“Hey! That was fifty talons worth of quality product! You owe me!” the woman shouted as the man spat out pink glops.
At her voice, the showman from before pushed through the crowd, and the man noticed a few other people closing in on him too.
The showman twisted his wrist, and a dagger materialized in his tricky fingers.
Ah, shit.
The man took off up the street. Amaris’s roads curved ever inward, and the man was sprinting to Iksha knew where.
But now the showman, four burly enforcers, and the woman were cutting through the crowds behind him.
The man launched himself deeper into the churn of people, inching farther from his enemies while sinking deeper into the quicksand of bodies.
It didn’t help that every breath stung his chest with frigid Magic.
One more gulp and he feared it’d freeze his lungs.
Up ahead, the man spotted a dark alley. Never before had one of those seemed so lucky.
The man threw himself down the shadowed passage, spotting light from the next street over.
Iksha bless. He’d lose them there. Just as the man let hope warm his chest, two figures stepped into the mouth of the alley up ahead of him—the showman and a massive henchman.
The man turned back, only to be met with the woman who’d tried to drug him and two more oversized enforcers.
They were all armed.
On both sides, his attackers were closing in. The man knew the easy way out of this, but a fireball in an alley this thin would kill not only them but also the unlucky recipients of half-price handies in the brothels on either side of them.
“I don’t have fifty talons!” the man said as his attackers boxed him in, each group little more than an arm’s length away now.
“No, but a big, handsome catch like you will fetch ten times that down in Kalipos,” the showman said, licking his cracking lips and spinning his knife in his fingers.
Slavery? Perfect.
“Oh, Favoriiiite…”
The man shivered at the shrill voice whistling above his head. Of all the times…
“Please don’t make this worse,” he gritted out between his teeth, hands out in an uneasy pause with the traffickers eyeing up his muscles.
“Make it worse?” The man could hear the pout in that voice, but he knew not to trust it. “You are so cruel to us. We only wish to assist, see!”
Before the man could say anything, an invisible hand grabbed the showman’s throat and crushed it.
Bones, muscles, and all. His lip quivered as he tried to suck oxygen down a windpipe dented with the black imprint of Magic’s fingers.
The showman gave a shiver, a shimmy, and then Amaris lost another dancer.