Chapter 4 The Stranger
They were nearly to the guard headquarters, where the doors to the underground prison waited, when Hoff came to a sudden, stiff halt. He snapped his hand to a crisp salute.
Rolan, who’d been walking in a daze, now tried to focus.
They were standing at the edge of Verity Square, in the center of the government district.
The duke’s palace rose to the north, square and white and gleaming, its peaked roofs rippling with flags.
Ahead of them, a tall man in a blue cape stood with his hand on his belt, talking to another man in a black cloak.
A few guards stood about, keeping a watchful eye on the citizens milling around.
Sleepy vendors pushed carts, hastening away from the square.
A Listener glided past, serene and strange in their featureless clay mask.
It took a moment for Rolan to recognize the man in the blue cape. He’d never seen him so close-up before, and he was shorter than the statue that rose just behind him, chiseled into his likeness.
“The duke,” Rolan whispered, feeling a glimmer of hope.
“Hush,” said Hoff.
The street around them was quiet, Rolan realized suddenly.
They were near the heart of the city, where it should be busiest. He noted the closed doors and locked shutters, the hurried steps of the people who did pass by, as if they couldn’t wait to be elsewhere.
Whenever he’d seen the duke out of his palace before, he’d been surrounded by crowds of people, those wanting favors from him, those wanting to sell him something, those who just wanted to see a duke.
But today, it was like people couldn’t get far enough away.
As Hoff ushered him around the duke and toward the guard headquarters, Rolan realized why.
It was the other man—the one the duke was talking with in low tones.
He had a presence that exuded darkness. It made Rolan want to run the other way too.
The day was brightening, sunlight spreading over the city, and yet when it reached the stranger, the light seemed to shy away, parting around him so that he stood in a perpetual swath of shadow.
His long black cloak was patched and tattered, the shoulders capped with hard, studded leather.
A long, sheathed sword hung at his waist, and when Rolan stared at it, he thought he could hear it whispering.
“Keep moving,” ordered Hoff in a low growl.
Jerking his attention from the stranger, Rolan looked instead at the duke. They were nearly past him now. Nearly out of shouting distance.
“Your Grace!”
At Rolan’s shout Hoff let out a furious groan and yanked him along faster. But Rolan didn’t let that deter him from what could be his final chance at justice.
“Your Grace, this man is wrongly arresting me, an innocent and helpless child!”
“Shut up!” Hoff plastered a hand over Rolan’s mouth, but he was too late. Rolan had been heard.
The duke raised a hand. Hoff stopped obediently and glared daggers at Rolan. The other guards rearranged themselves around the duke as he strode toward the boy and the captain, his brow furrowed.
Duke Benhald of Crisanth was a slight man, his graying hair neatly combed away from his face. His mouth rested in an easy, bland smile.
“What’s this, Captain Hoff?” asked the duke.
Rolan tried to speak again, to make his case, but Hoff’s hand smothered his words. He could only wriggle uselessly, probably looking more rabid than wronged.
“It’s the whelp of some criminal lowlife, Your Grace,” said Hoff. “Not worth your esteemed notice.” Hoff shook Rolan until his teeth clacked. “A dose of Your Grace’s hospitality will set him right, I should think.”
Rolan struggled to no avail. He bit the hand over his mouth, and Hoff jerked it away, hissed, then clamped his fingers down even harder. Rolan groaned, afraid the man would break his jaw if he tightened his grip any further.
“Poor, misguided boy,” the duke said, drawing back a little at the expression in Rolan’s eyes.
He regarded him with the same curious pity with which Rolan had once watched a wounded rat.
“What a shame. I have been thinking of instituting some kind of program for the city’s youth, you know. So many troubled young souls…”
As the duke nattered on about rehabilitation and behavioral correction and other words that washed meaninglessly over Rolan, he became aware of another gaze fixed upon him.
The stranger in black.
He was watching Rolan from beneath his hood, his face shadowed but eyes curiously illuminated.
Rolan stared back, unwilling to be cowed by that eerie gaze. His spine began to shiver but he held the man’s eyes all the same. It felt like they were pressing on each other, testing to see who would look away first.
Rolan did, but only because Hoff jerked him backward. Apparently the duke had concluded his monologue about reforming the wayward youth, likely boring even himself, and was now turning away. He spared not another look for Rolan.
So much for justice.
Hoff kept his hand over Rolan’s mouth and growled threats into his ear as he marched him away.
But then, without so much as a whisper to mark his movement, the stranger stepped in front of them.
Rolan sucked in a breath. How on earth had the man moved so quickly? He stopped trying to chew his way through Hoff’s glove. The captain stood frozen, his face white as the stranger met his gaze.
“You’re taking that boy to prison?” the stranger asked softly, his voice as deep as despair, as rough as scraped oak.
“I-I am, sir,” stammered Hoff.
The sudden catch in Hoff’s voice surprised Rolan. He glanced between the two men, wondering why the guard captain was suddenly weak in the knees. The duke hovered nearby, looking annoyed that his day was being held up.
“He is young,” observed the stranger. “Have his people been given time to claim him?”
Hoff chuckled, but it was too nervous a sound to be convincing. “He hasn’t got people, sir. None worth speaking of, anyway. Just another street scamp with rats for brains and sticky fingers. A bit of pondering in a cell will do him good.”
“I have found,” returned the stranger, “that a bit of pondering in a cell rarely does anyone good.”
“All the same,” Hoff replied, his voice gaining some strength now that his judgment had been insulted, “the law’s the law, and truth knows this lad has broken more’n his share of it.”
The stranger looked at Rolan again, turning his head to reveal more of his face.
He had a full black beard with silver streaks in it, a nose like an axe-blade, and more scars than Rolan had ever seen on a face before.
It was a hideous face. The face of a murderer or a warlord.
Tattoos twisted up his trunk of a neck. Beneath his tattered cloak, his shoulders were thick and powerful.
He loomed over Hoff like a mastiff over a lapdog, all shadow and muscle and cold, steely eyes.
“I’ll claim him,” he said.
Rolan started, too shocked to speak even when Hoff drew his hand away.
“Come again?” Hoff said.
“I’ll claim him,” repeated the stranger in a tone like rumbling earth. “The law’s the law. And it states a lad under sixteen has three days to be claimed before he’s imprisoned.”
Hoff looked around—at the other guards, at the duke—as if someone might step forward to interpret. No one did, but the duke grimaced, as if he were thinking of the fancy breakfast he was missing to be here.
“That’s not how it works!” Hoff protested. “You’d have to be his father or other relative, or his master. Not just anyone can—”
The captain choked off his words as the stranger leaned in. Was it Rolan’s imagination, or did shadows spread around him as he loomed closer to Hoff? Did the air get a little colder? Did the sun dim?
Surely it was his imagination.
But even Hoff shuddered.
“Am I just anyone?” the stranger asked in a low, terrible voice that was somehow both a growl and whisper.
“O-of course you’re not just anyone,” stammered Hoff. “B-but the law—”
“Very well,” said the stranger, leaning back. The air seemed to relax when he did, the shadows Rolan had or had not imagined fading away. “I claim the boy as my apprentice. There. Does that satisfy your law?”
Hoff blinked. “Well. I suppose. If he really is your apprentice.”
They all looked at Rolan—Hoff, the stranger, the duke.
“This delinquent pup?” said Duke Benhald to the stranger. “I know I’ve been hounding you to take an apprentice for years, but… surely you could do better.”
The man in black only gazed at Rolan, who both rankled at the duke’s rudeness and felt a spark of curiosity about a man who would so casually ignore a duke.
“What do you say, boy?” the stranger asked, his hand resting on the hilt of his huge sword.
Rolan shrank back. “I… I don’t…”
Hoff squeezed Rolan’s arm tighter. “I beg Your Grace, give me a moment with the lad.”
When the duke nodded in assent, looking irritated, Hoff dragged Rolan backward, away from the stranger, where he could whisper privately.
“Do you even know who that big man is?” he asked.
Rolan shook his head. He peered around Hoff, watching the stranger, who was watching him.
“If I say I’m his apprentice,” Rolan said, “can I really go with him? No prison?”
“He’s the Arcanist, boy.”
Rolan froze.
The Arcanist.
He knew that name. Everyone in Crisanth knew that name from the time they were little children.
If the Cryptics don’t get you, the Arcanist will…
His job was to hunt Cryptics. Not the little ones like the monster that had been in Rolan’s cell, but the enormous ones out in the forest. He held them back from the city—but at the cost, it was said, of becoming a monster himself by using the Cryptics’ own dark powers.
He was the man of nightmares. The man who knew all your secrets, all the dark shames and hidden deeds you didn’t want anyone else to know.
He could see into your soul and read your thoughts.
He lived outside the city, outside the safety of the lamps and light, close to the forest with all its shadows.
He feasted on Cryptic flesh.
A man more monstrous than the monsters he hunted.
“They say he chops little kids up and uses them as bait to lure in Cryptics,” Hoff said. “Then he kills the monsters and eats them raw, taking their dark power for his own.”
Rolan stared at the captain, his stomach turning over.
“I’m only telling you so you know what’s what,” Hoff went on. “You go with him, I can’t guarantee your safety.”
“Since when have you ever cared about my safety?” retorted Rolan. “You just want me to give up my pa.”
“I do my job. But I’m no monster. I’m not him.”
Rolan glanced at the stranger—the Arcanist—again. As if to punctuate what Hoff was saying, the man put his hand on the hilt of his terrible sword and stroked it gently. A warning? A promise? What did that gesture mean?
Hoff shook Rolan, making his teeth rattle.
“Tell them you don’t want to go with the man.
Tell them you’d rather take the cell. Ten years, boy.
Ten years and this will all be behind you.
Or better yet, you tell me where to find your father, and I cut your sentence in half.
At least you’ll have a future this way.”
“He can’t be all bad,” Rolan said. “They wouldn’t let him near the duke if he were.”
“The duke pays him, you little idiot. He pays him to stay outside the city and keep the biggest of the Cryptics away. Even a dog knows not to bite the hand that feeds him.”
“Enough!” called the Arcanist. “Forget it. I have work to do. This is a waste of my time.”
He turned and began storming off.
Rolan licked his lips.
“Wait!” he shouted.
Hoff sighed, releasing Rolan. Darting past the captain, Rolan ran to the Arcanist and grabbed his cloak, his heart fluttering as if trying to escape through his ribs.
“I’ll be your apprentice,” Rolan said breathlessly. “I mean, if you still want me.”
The Arcanist gave him a long, probing look.
“You don’t want this one, sir,” Hoff said, hurrying over. “He’s all wickedness and spite. If you want an apprentice—”
The Arcanist silenced the captain with a look, then returned his gaze to Rolan. Wordlessly, he lifted a black-gloved hand and gripped Rolan’s jaw. His thumb dug into Rolan’s cheek, into the pale scar that had been carved there for years, a half-moon just to the left of his mouth.
“He’ll do,” the Arcanist rumbled. “I claim him.”