Chapter 291: Heracles

Richard drew the curtains half shut, leaving only a corner of the desk lit.

[Available Points: 2.09]

The trip to the Spice Islands special exhibition had at least pushed his points past two.

He sent a thought into the [walking] entry, and a preview appeared.

"This stat is active. Next rank requires:

Level at Lv.4, Progress 100%;

Available Points: 2;

Escape during a sustained pursuit where the tracker's Rank is higher than your own, without outside help or concealing supernatural items."

The effects were listed below.

"Unlockable trait—walking: traceless:

Strengthens the base effects of [Tireless], and leaves almost no trace on the material or ether planes while moving;

Significantly weakens the lock of perception-class Spell Formulas."

Richard felt a stir of heat at the sight.

He had not paid much attention to walking at first. Unlocking and leveling it had been purely to meet the benchmarks.

Fast, long-winded, tireless.

It sounded like a Hunter's kit. What did a Scholar need with a pair of legs like that?

To run a little faster than someone else when fleeing?

If a Scholar like him ever had to bolt, running probably would not save him anyway.

Yet this preview peeled walking back another layer.

At bottom, walking was simply a body moving across the ground.

A layer deeper, it was the marks that movement left behind.

A person passing through a place always dropped something.

A line of prints, the scrape of cloth along a wall;

On this side of the veil, a string of breaths and heartbeats dragged out an invisible wake of water.

An expert could follow that wake straight to your heels.

[traceless] wiped it clean.

Richard turned it over in his head, more convinced by the second that the trait suited him.

He had never worked in the open.

If a man carrying a lamp wanted to live a few years longer, he kept himself out of sight of the things in the dark.

[Silent Observation] kept him hidden while he stood still;

Now [traceless] closed the gap, keeping him hidden while he moved.

Hermes—messenger, border-crosser, guide of souls.

The winged-footed god spent his days running between heaven, earth, and the underworld on errands for the pantheon.

In the end, the title had come looking for him.

Richard's mouth twitched.

The threshold, though, was harsher than [Reflection].

[Reflection] let him set the stage: find something trapped or sealed, and hide.

[traceless] required him to escape an active hunt, which was a much harder problem.

Richard dismissed the panel.

His eyes settled on the Bronze Sphinx Lamp on the desk.

Outside the window, dance music from the west of the city drifted in broken snatches.

With the fighting across the sea, the Imperial Capital was as loud at night as ever.

..................

That night, past ten thirty.

Richard closed his eyes and dropped his breathing into the low register of Tide-Shifting Breathing.

Inhalations lengthened into long slopes; exhalations gathered into short waves.

The pool of ether in his chest ebbed and rose on its own.

The sea of stars receded.

Marble chill condensed beneath his feet, followed by twelve stone pillars rising from the floor.

Beams, reliefs, the ochre round table—in under twenty seconds, the temple stood complete.

Richard took his footing and swept the ring of stone chairs.

At the head sat Hecate in her Golden Mask, half maiden, half crone.

Above her, Torch and Key had formed with unusual weight—brighter than Richard had ever seen them, bright almost to excess.

Richard looked first at the newcomer.

A man sat in Ares's chair.

He was a size broader than Ares, his shoulders and back banked like two small hills.

He made the stone chair look tight.

His mask was cast as a lion with jaws wide, the mouth swallowing his whole face.

Three things hung above him.

A full lion pelt, golden-furred, draped his shoulders, the head and claws trailing down his chest;

A knotted olive-wood club, thicker than an ordinary arm;

A bow and a sheaf of arrows, the tips dark with the stain of poisoned blood.

The divine name projected itself—Heracles.

Richard knew the weight of it.

Slaying the Nemean Lion, taking the Hydra's heads, dragging up the three-headed hound...

And at the end, poisoned by centaur blood, his flesh rotting inch by inch until the pain drove him to build his own pyre, burn away the mortal part, and take a seat among the gods.

Hecate had been willing to hand out that title and build his name before he sat.

The newcomer carried weight—a Minor Adept at least.

Around the rest of the table, Prometheus's fire burned quietly, and Dionysus held his two-handled cup;

Nemesis sat straight beneath her tilted scales, and Demeter's wheat sheaf hung heavy.

No one asked where the man with the missing arm had gone.

If the others were silent, Richard would not ask either.

At the head, Hecate saw the table settled and spoke.

"Everyone."

"Tonight I bring a new friend to the table."

She lifted a hand toward his chair.

"He holds the name of Heracles."

The table's eyes turned together.

Richard watched Prometheus give the man a slight nod, and Dionysus lift his cup.

The two older members were noticeably polite to the newcomer.

The courtesy was mostly for Hecate, who had spoken for him herself.

"Heracles," Hecate's motherly voice went on, warm and smooth.

"You will learn the table in time."

Heracles dipped his head toward the chief's seat.

"My thanks, Chief."

"I had heard this table was not ordinary." He looked around the ring, his face unreadable behind the Lion-Mouth Mask.

"Seeing it today, the talk was right."

Hecate's Golden Mask turned, taking in the six faces at the table.

"Two matters tonight," she said.

"First: the masks I promised you are ready. I will hand them over shortly."

The air at the table shifted.

Everyone was weighing what kind of strength their name might lend them.

"Second." Hecate's crone voice dropped.

"Heracles brought several things to the table tonight—materials tied to evil creatures—and they serve well as a warning."

Behind his red copper mask, Heracles gave a sound of assent.

He lifted his hand, and several objects settled into line across the center of the table.

Richard thinned his Inspiration to a trace and reached out along the drift of ether toward them.

At the same time, [Erudition] opened the archive in his head.

The first was a length of ossified needle tubing.

About a finger long, gray-white throughout, hard to the eye.

A few tight shreds of membrane still clung to the bone.

Richard's files held no exact match.

"This one is a new evil creature out of the Textile District."

Heracles nudged the bone needle forward. "I named it the Seam-Eyelid Monster."

Hecate raised her hand.

An image formed above the torch over her head.

It showed a half-collapsed textile mill.

The blast marks from the boiler were still fresh, the steel beams blackened and twisted together.

Something crawled out of the wreckage.

When Richard saw it clearly, his stomach turned.

The evil creature was built entirely of taut, half-clear skin.

No face, no proper outline—it looked like an old coat blown up from the inside.

Rows of bone needles grew across its chest, dense as bristles, points out.

It made no sound across the factory floor.

In the image, a surviving hand huddled in a corner was caught.

The thing extended those bone needles and brought them to his face.

The points went through the eyelid and out again, rising and falling like a needle in cloth.

It sewed the man's eyes shut, stitch by stitch.

Then the lips.

When the thread was tied off, the creature backed away.

The man still sat in the corner, his skin still warm.

But he would never open his eyes or speak another word.

"It took the motion of sewing into its nature."

"The mill collapse, the boiler blast—too many women died on that floor.

Died with unfinished work in their hands."

"The resentment steeped in one place until it bred this."

Richard remembered his earlier thought.

The dead zones along the industrial belt were breeding things stranger by the month.

"It isn't hard to break." Heracles pushed the tubing into the center of the table.

"One strike took it apart. This tube takes ether well—good material for a focus."

Heracles raised his hand again.

A second piece rose: a section of neck bone with a thread of tissue trailing from it.

The thread drifted above the wood, giving off a cold, pale light.

"This one is stranger. Came up from the south."

The image changed to an old lying-in room down by the Harbor.

A woman in labor lay on the bed.

From the rafters came a drip, drip.

The woman looked up.

A head hung inverted from the beam.

Only a head, with a long string of viscera trailing from the severed neck.

The eyes were wide, smiling down at the bed.

This time Richard's archive found a line.

A marginal note on evil creatures: the Floating Head, from the stories of the southeastern seas.

A head freed from its body, flying by night with its entrails behind it.

It hunted women in labor and the bleeding, sharp to the smell of blood.

"A spice merchant brought it in."

Heracles went on.

"Something that shouldn't have been there got mixed into the ballast. It found a weak spot by that old lying-in room near the Harbor and took root."

Richard's Inspiration lingered on the bone.

The Empire's ships went down and turned their shrines and graves inside out.

They brought back hold after hold of supernatural items, spices, and strange curios, and a few of them had teeth.

"The glowing gut-thread can be boiled for medicine or used as a focus."

Heracles pushed the neck bone toward the center. "Look if you want."

No one reached for it.

The Floating Head was foul enough that no one wanted to touch it.

"One last piece."