The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 25.1

He'd always thought of him as being, well, black—a shadow of a shadow, clothed in night; silent, fuliginous, matte. A nothing that absorbed the wicked as easily as it—he—absorbed the light. Faceless and mute, Black Hunter emerged from the sanctuary shadows of Oridos to tear from the city's flesh the cancers that would choke it. Not a man but a force, an unthinking, certain justice as inevitable as fate.

Thijis realized now what a crock of shit that had been, what utter myth and fantasy. A thing of the pulps, perpetrated with intention, no doubt, to craft precisely such awe. Not that what stood before him was, in its own way, any less impressive.

The height of the man—and he was that, despite every boyhood rumor to the contrary—was impressive in its own right. But armored, cloaked in black, one gauntleted hand gripping what looked like the hilt of a sword—Thijis tried, once again, shatter the surreal feeling that seemed to have become his constant view of the world. Once again he failed.

The name had arisen from the cloak, he saw now: a full cape that would cover him from boots to gorget when drawn closed. Its hem swung heavily, brushing the ground. He didn't know how anyone could walk in it, let alone fight. But beneath that blanket of night, Kantaris was armored in a strange dark harness that was not truly black.

It had the color and sheen of oiled bronze, and shone golden bright at the shoulder lames and the tassets, where the finish was worn through from use. The breastplate itself was compact, and segmented on the torso—a strange combination of the armor of the Taking and more ancient designs, like nothing Thijis had ever seen in the city's small collections of artifacts.

He wore greaves over heavy boots, and vambraces were strapped over the heavy leather tunic that he wore beneath the armor. But it was the helm, and the center of the chest, that drew Thijis' attention immediately, for it was a sight as singular and ominous as the Horn of Oridos itself.

In the same dark, oiled bronze as the body armor, the beak of a bird of prey loomed over him, forged into a kind of great helm that stopped at the jaw, fitted with two shining crystal lenses that bored into him like twin moons to match the twin suns. Beneath that hooking bill was nothing, a black inner hood concealing the chin and mouth of the man Irik Thijis had, up until this moment, known only as the mysterious Lord Kantaris.

And in the center of the chest, set into the largest of the sections of the laminated cuirass, a great cabochon hemisphere, gleaming in the low light with unmistakable orange glow of elekstone.

The pulps depicted the Hunter in a variety of different ways, depending on whichever hack author was writing the issue in question. Oridos' darkest defender had been drawn to represent everything from an immortal knight of the Taking to an Eberan warrior in disguise to a ghastly sewer lord with a face scarred by leprosy. Nor was there any consistency in the descriptions of those who claimed to have seen him in person—all of them older now. The one commonality was speed, and the black—a whirl of shadow coupled with a brief outburst of violence that left the rescued victim—always alone, of course—shaking and terrified. That and the fact that Black Hunter never stuck around, afterward. No comfort was forthcoming from the night's avenger.

The truth was somewhere in between, he supposed. The quotidian aspects of his attire, however interesting, still added up to a thing out of legend, and Irik found himself wanting to bow his head in submission. To knuckle his brow, and bend his back, and offer his service to this dark lord in an obedient manner he would never have considered had the Lord Protector himself stood before him.

"You understand, now?" said the Hunter, Kantaris' voice just recognizable behind the helm and mask. Thijis swallowed, his throat dry.

"I understand," he said.

"Then this is what I need you to do."

Then the Hunter spoke, and Thijis listened, and the murky areas of the dark waters into which he had found himself so desperately plunged only days before began to clear.

* * *

Yews proseqwaerd. A fucking mouthful, but he knew what it meant. The justice of the forward guard. Talinos, bare-breasted, raising his sword and leading the charge into the thickest of the Eberan forces in the great northern forest, off the shining conflux of the rivers Kanto and Kanta. Legend stuff. Bedtime stories for children, aristocrats and peddlers' sons alike. When they played in the trench-like streets of the Warrens, children flipped coppers to see who got to play the grandest of knights.

The same order that, after a few centuries spent dwindling into bureaucratic oblivion, had become the corps of law enforcement for the Empire and the Protectorate after it. The same order that Thijis had left, some said in disgrace, years before. The same order, it turned out, that had brought him to Kantaris' attention in the first place.

Fucking hell.

It turned out the way you felt in an impossible situation was likewise impossible. Whatever speculation he might have engaged in, whatever causal deduction he may have toyed with prior to learning the truth, it was all shattered. Useless. The dregs of a half-assed effort by a half-assed man, a professional in name only. He didn't know shit.

He wanted a pipe, but the old man had forbidden it—too memorable, he'd said. Not too many smoked the crab, and Thijis was known to. Not that he was even clear where the damned thing was, at the moment. Kantaris had said nothing about cigarettes, on the other hand, and so Thijis had felt only the slightest twinge of guilt when he bought a paper packet of them from the pothek on the corner. The smoke was dry and herbal, cheaper than the ones Krizner rolled, a world away from the sweet, spicy essence of the Inner Sea crabling. But it lit his brain up well enough, got his heart pumping faster. Which was the point, really.

Black Hunter. A kid's tale, torn from the pages of a pulp. And yet, real.

And he wanted Irik Thijis' help.

Thijis finished a cigarette and lit another, still using Krizner's lighter, which had managed to somehow survive the fall from the Horn and his brief stay at Castle Lorck. He'd just inhaled, the harsh, hot smoke hitting his lungs with a sweet pain that he decided he could get used to, when he heard the tolling of the great clock at the University, whose forbidding walls he could see just blocks away.

Taking one last hit and stubbing out the butt on the low stone wall he was sitting against, Thijis got up and crossed the street, passing into the open mouth of the alleyway between the pothek and a haberdasher's.

The sewer cap was halfway down the narrow chasm of the alley. Thijis slid his pocket knife under the lip of it, levered it up, and heaved it aside with a soft grunt. Then, lowering himself into the sewers, he pulled the cover on above his head and climbed down the sweating rungs of the ladder into the darkness.    

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