THE KING OF NOTHING

  Chapter VII: Echoes in the Stone

  The morning in Oskara brought its usual cacophony: the hammering of blacksmiths opening their forges, the screech of cartwheels on cobblestones, the insistent cries of fishmongers and sellers of freshly baked bread. Through the inn's half-open window, that bustle smelled of life, of routine—a decadent, normal luxury that, just days ago in the frozen mud of the north, would have seemed an impossible dream. But breakfast in the common room of The Silver Swan held no comfort. The bread, though fresh, tasted like ash.

  —We can't keep it under the bed forever —Irina said, her voice so low it barely moved her lips, while her blue eyes swept the room to ensure no long-eared patrons were nearby—. That book isn't a battle souvenir. If it was the magnet that drew the Shades into the bowels of Grey Cleft, if what they sought was buried with it, then keeping it is wearing a target on our backs. We are living ghosts, and ghosts attract predators.

  Elara set down her cup of herbal tea with a nervous clack that echoed at their isolated table. Her fingers, pale and fine, interlaced.

  —I know places —she whispered, staring into the dregs of her drink as if she could read the future there—. The Great Public Library is a mausoleum of knowledge approved by the Empire, and its Head Archivist is a puppet of the Council. Too risky. But there are… private collectors. Obscure scholars, mercenary mages of knowledge who pay obscene sums to see something new, something real, without asking the uncomfortable questions the Empire demands. —She paused, swallowing—. I have… contacts. From my time at the Academy of Veils. Some fell from grace. Others simply chose shadow over official light.

  Irina nodded slowly, her tactical mind already mapping the plan.

  —Good —she accepted, her voice a steel whisper—. You talk. Your name still carries weight in certain circles, even if it's the weight of scandal. I'll watch. Places where book-rats live are often full of other kinds of rats. Vael… —she turned her gaze to him— you try not to break anything. Don't touch what you shouldn't. And, for the love of all that's holy, try to seem less… you.

  Vael, who had been focused on stacking breadcrumbs into a teetering, absurd tower on the coarse linen tablecloth, nodded without looking up.

  —Don't break anything. Got it. Seem less like me. That sounds complicated, but I'll make a heroic effort. Can I at least breathe?

  ---

  I. The Scribes' Tower

  The first destination was a tall, slender limestone structure in the Academic District, known as the Scribes' Tower. The air there smelled different: of old parchment, melted beeswax for sealing documents, of dust accumulated over centuries, and the sour perspiration of frustrated intellectual ambition. The silence wasn't peace; it was a tension charged with whispers and the scratching of quills.

  Elara used her House Vane seal ring—a silver band with the stylized sun—as a key to get past the initial porter and secure an audience with Master Gallius, an expert in foreign languages and dialects whose reputation was as high as his arrogance. The waiting room, a narrow, elongated chamber, was flanked by marble busts of past scholars, their carved expressions of severe disdain seeming to judge the living who dared disturb the sacred silence of knowledge.

  When a skeletal acolyte finally led them to Gallius's study cell, the man didn't even rise from his desk, a monster of dark oak buried under avalanches of open codices and parchment scrolls. He was a man of indefinite age, with lenses so thick they magnified his eyes like those of a deep-sea fish, and fingers stained with a perpetual black ink that had embedded itself in the wrinkles of his skin.

  —An unidentified text? —Gallius snorted, not looking up from a manuscript he was transcribing, his pen scraping the parchment with an insect-like sound—. Miss Vane, the Imperial Academy, and by extension this tower, has records and grammars of every dialect spoken, whispered, or dreamt since the Founding. If it's not in our archives —he finally lifted his gaze, and his magnified eyes scanned Elara with glacial contempt— it is not a language. It's gibberish. Barbarian graffiti. Or, worse yet, a naive forgery.

  Irina, staying in the background but with every muscle alert, handed him not the book, but a scrap of parchment where, the night before, with trembling hands, she had copied a selection of the most repetitive symbols. They wouldn't risk the original.

  Gallius took it with two fingers, as if the paper were impregnated with a contagious disease. He held it up to the light of his oil lamp, squinting. He looked at it for exactly three seconds. His face showed no curiosity, only annoyance.

  —Angular geometry —he declared, his voice monotone—. No apparent vowels, no indicators of case or gender. —He tossed the parchment onto the desk as if it were trash—. It's decorative. Probably motifs from some nomad tribe of the Salt Desert, people who want to adorn their clay pots with something that looks profound. It has no syntax. No soul.

  —But the patterns repeat —Elara insisted, forcing her voice to remain steady, though the heat of humiliation rose up her neck—. There's a structure, a recurrence in these groups of three angles… it could be a key, a…

  —It's rubbish, girl —Gallius cut her off, sinking his gaze back into his manuscript—. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have real work to do. The history of the Empire doesn't write itself. And tell your father —he added, without looking at her— that his annual donation for the upkeep of the genealogy section is overdue. Quality ink doesn't grow on trees.

  They left the tower plunged in thick silence, their hands empty and Elara's dignity shattered on the polished slabs of the vestibule. The street air, laden with the stench of manure and street food, suddenly seemed cleaner than that sanctum of contempt.

  —Arrogant old man —Irina muttered through clenched teeth, adjusting her cloak over her shoulders with a brusque gesture—. Knows ten dead languages but can't recognize fear when it's standing in front of him.

  Vael, who had spent the entire meeting in a corner, seemingly absorbed in trying to balance a goose quill on the tip of his nose without anyone (except for a particularly severe marble bust) noticing, yawned thunderously.

  —He had very boring books —he commented, as if they had just left a mediocre play—. Not a single drawing of animals. Or battles. Just cramped letters. Made me sleepy.

  ---

  II. The Alley of Dust

  The second stop was an abrupt descent in tone and urban geography. Elara led them, with increasingly uncertain steps, into the District of Shadows, a labyrinth of alleys where buildings leaned into each other like drunks sharing a secret, and the red sunlight barely filtered down to the ground, leaving the air in a perpetual dusty twilight.

  They entered an establishment called "Morb's Antiquities and Curiosities." The doorbell tinkled weakly, as if ashamed of its own existence. The interior was a cavern of organized chaos: shelves crammed with objects ranging from the mundane to the incomprehensible, all covered by a uniform layer of dust that smelled of basement damp, old cat, and secrets for sale.

  The owner, a small, hunched man named Morb (or so the sign said), emerged from behind a counter laden with broken clocks. His eyes, round and constantly shifting like those of a frightened bird, scrutinized them without blinking. He rubbed his hands continuously, a nervous, repetitive gesture.

  —Dead tongues, yes, yes… buy, sell, trade —he said, his voice a rough whisper—. Have something interesting?

  Irina, once more, presented the parchment with the copied symbols. Morb took it more carefully than Gallius had, but with visible tension in his fingers. He held it under the dim light of a dirty oil lamp. His eyes moved quickly over the markings.

  His expression changed. The initial avarice faded, replaced by something more like fear. A greenish pallor spread under his sallow skin.

  —This… this gives me a bad feeling —he murmured, and for the first time he stopped rubbing his hands to push the paper away as if it burned.

  —Do you know what it is? —Irina asked, her voice low but charged with an implicit threat. Her hand, under her cloak, rested on the hilt of her short sword.

  Morb shook his head, a frantic, almost spasmodic motion.

  —No. And I don't want to know. But the angles… those angles… they hurt to look at if you stare too long. —He lowered his voice even further, leaning in—. There are things, my ladies, that are written not to be read, but to be locked away. Things of the Old Cults. Witchcraft from the Black East, from before the Empire brought order. That writing doesn't speak… it screams. And it attracts ears that shouldn't hear. —He straightened up abruptly, pointing a trembling finger toward the door—. I don't want that in my shop. Brings bad luck to business. And to health. Get out! Take it away!

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  He practically shoved them out into the street, slamming the door behind them with a bang that shook the dirty windows. The click of the lock sounded like a full stop.

  The day was consumed in a slow agony of frustration. From door to door, from study to dive, from institutional arrogance to superstitious fear. No one knew anything. Or, what was worse, no one wanted to know. The mystery of the blue book, with its geometric symbols and its binding of silence, stood as an impenetrable wall between them and any answer. Each rejection was another brick in that wall.

  ---

  III. The Fountain of Twilight

  The red sun, that perpetual ulcer in the sky, began to hide behind Oskara's western walls, bathing the city in a long, bloody twilight that stained the stones a sickly purple.

  They found a corner of relative peace in a forgotten square, dominated by a circular stone fountain that had been dry for decades, perhaps centuries. The central basin, carved with forms of dolphins worn by the elements, rose like a monument to drought. They sat on the fountain's cold edge, the weariness of the day—physical from poorly healed wounds, mental from the repeated blows to their hope—weighing on their shoulders like leaden cloaks. The frustration was a tangible presence, a bitter taste in their mouths.

  Irina, with a sigh that sounded like defeat, took the book from the canvas bag she wore across her chest. She kept it hidden within the folds of her cloak, allowing only a furtive glance at its pale pages. She looked at it not with curiosity now, but with resentment, as if the object itself were to blame for their exhaustion.

  —Maybe… maybe Master Gallius, the old pedant, was right —she whispered, rubbing her temples with her index fingers and thumbs—. Maybe it's just scribbles. The decorative delirium of an extinct tribe. And we, like fools, are breaking our heads against a wall, looking for meaning where there is only… noise.

  Elara sighed, a deep sound that seemed to expel all the air from her lungs. She rested her chin in her hands, elbows on her knees, defeated. The simple dress was dusty, her boots caked with the dried mud of the less-traveled alleyways.

  —I hoped… I don't know. To find an answer. A clue. Something that would tell us why. Why everyone died in Grey Cleft. Why we survived. Why… this. —She pointed a weary nod at the book—. But it's like trying to read the damp stains on the ceiling. You only see what you want to see. Or nothing.

  Vael was sitting a little apart, on the opposite edge of the fountain. He had gathered a handful of small stones from the base and was tossing them, one by one, with bored, mechanical accuracy against the dolphins' pedestal. Clack. Clack. Clack. Each impact was a dry beat in the square's silence.

  —Let's see —Vael said suddenly, without stopping his stone-throwing—. Let me see that again. Out of curiosity.

  Irina, more from inertia than hope, passed it to him over the stone rim of the fountain.

  —Be careful —she murmured, automatically—. It's heavier than it looks.

  Vael held it in his long and, they now noticed, surprisingly clean hands. He didn't open it. He just ran the pad of his thumb over the symbols engraved on the leather cover, those sharp, interlocking angles that had confounded scholars and terrified dealers.

  He was still for a moment. Then, he frowned slightly, like someone trying to remember the name of a distant acquaintance.

  —Ah, yes… —he murmured, more to himself than to them, scratching the back of his neck with the distracted gesture of one recalling a nursery rhyme—. I thought it looked familiar.

  Elara's head snapped up. Her eyes, once dull, fixed on him.

  —What? What did you say?

  —These drawings —Vael said, pointing at the writing with total naturalness, as if pointing to a map to the nearest farm—. I've seen them before. Years… many years ago. When my parents were still alive. —He paused, looking at the twilight sky as if the memory were projected there—. We used to travel, before we settled. We were itinerant merchants, the kind that sell salt and tools. Once, on the way south, we camped one night near some ruins. Black stones, very old, that rose in a forest clearing like the teeth of a dead giant. People from nearby villages didn't go near. They said they brought bad harvests, that the spirits of the earth were angry there.

  Vael opened the book, flipped a few pages with casual respect, and pointed to a specific line of symbols.

  —There were people there that night. Not villagers. People in dark hoods. They were a bit scary, honestly, but they didn't bother us. They spent the whole night around the biggest stones, chanting. It wasn't a cheerful chant. It was… monotonous. Deep. And they repeated over and over these same marks that are carved on the stone. My father told me they were crazy, a sect of fermented root-wine drinkers who believed they could talk to rocks. I hid and watched them. The symbols on the stones glowed a little in their torchlight.

  Irina stared at him, her veteran skepticism battling a growing astonishment. Every muscle in her body was tense, alert.

  —And do you remember anything they chanted? Any words? —she asked, her voice carefully neutral.

  —They repeated a phrase —Vael said, shrugging, as if it were the most normal thing in the world—. Over and over, like a mantra. It stuck with me because it sounded… big. Strange. As if the words were too heavy for their mouths.

  He pointed again to the first line of the book, his index finger, now dirty from the plaza dust, resting on the sequence of angles.

  —It means… —he said, and for an instant his voice lost its careless tone, adopting a slow, ritual cadence— "The-One-Who-Stands-Upon-Nothing. The First and Last Wall. The Flesh That Devoured the Moon."

  The silence that fell over the square wasn't a silence of stillness. It was an absolute void, as if sound itself had been sucked from the world. The wind, which had been whispering between the flagstones, stopped. The last few pebbles Vael held in his hand dropped to the ground with a solitary, absurdly loud click. Elara felt the air freeze in her lungs. A shudder, deep and ancestral, ran down her spine—a fear that had nothing to do with monsters of flesh and bone, but with something far older and vaster.

  Irina kept looking at Vael, but now her expression wasn't skepticism. It was a cold, contained fury that made the pain of her ribs seem a minor annoyance.

  —Wait a minute —Irina said, her voice dangerously soft, like the edge of a dagger before it slides between ribs—. Are you telling me… you knew this? You remembered it, word for word, since this morning when you first saw the book in the barn?

  Vael blinked, his expression returning to that of benign confusion.

  —Well, yes —he replied, with a naturalness that bordered on offensive—. When you took it out there, in the hay, and I saw these scribbles, I thought: "Look, the drawings of the crazy people from the stones." But you two were so excited, talking about experts and mysteries… I didn't want to ruin your fun.

  Elara jumped to her feet, the abrupt movement making the stone grind under her boots. Her face, once pale with fatigue, was now flushed with pure indignation.

  —You made us walk all day! —she shrieked, completely forgetting noble manners, her voice cracking with fury—. I endured the condescending insults of that old Gallius! We were thrown out of a shop that smelled of dead cat and despair! My feet hurt, my shoulder hurts, and my pride is in tatters! Why? Why in the name of all that is holy didn't you say anything eight hours ago?

  Vael looked at her, his head tilted like a dog not understanding a complicated command.

  —Well… —he said, drawing out the word— you two said very seriously: "Let's go find the city's experts, the ones who know about these things." I'm a farmer. A recruit. My opinion about drawings on old stones doesn't count. It seemed rude to interrupt your… academic quest. Besides, the pastries we bought were good.

  Irina closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, a long, trembling sound that swelled her chest and, for a moment, made her half-healed ribs protest. She was forced to count mentally to ten, then to twenty, to keep from standing up and applying her hand-to-hand combat lessons to Vael's apparently hollow skull.

  —When my ribs are completely healed, Vael… —she said, opening her eyes and fixing him with a gaze that promised very specific and prolonged pain— I am going to hit you. Not a training blow. I'm going to hit you with the accumulated force of every rejection, every dead end, every contemptuous look from today. I'm going to hit you very hard.

  —Noted —Vael said, nodding seriously, as if he'd just been given an important instruction on horse care—. I'll keep that in mind for my schedule of avoidance activities.

  Irina let out another sigh, this one of deep, weary resignation. But when she looked again at the book she held in her hands, something had changed. Vael's exasperating joke had burst the bubble of tension and frustration, but the truth he'd dropped so casually was still there, weighing more than ever.

  —A cult… —she muttered, her voice now thoughtful—. Or the remnants of one. If this book is an artifact of an ancient cult, buried or hidden, it explains why no one in Gallius's ivory tower recognizes it. The Empire erases what it doesn't understand, or what it fears. And it explains why it was hidden in the deepest foundations of a military fortress. It wasn't a treasure. It was a prison cell.

  —And why they attacked —Elara added, who was still standing, still glaring daggers at Vael, but her mind already racing down the new paths opened—. The Undead… or whatever controls them. Maybe they weren't after the fortress. They were after this. Their "monster." Their "One-Who-Stands-Upon-Nothing."

  Vael stood up and stretched, making the vertebrae of his back crack with a series of small, nauseating sounds.

  —Or maybe —he said, while adjusting his simple linen shirt— they just liked the blue color of the cover. Who knows with the walking dead. Simple tastes. —He looked at his two companions, one still furious, the other sunk in grim thoughts—. Can we go eat now? I'm starving, and translating traumatic childhood memories gives me a thirst that cries to the heavens. Besides, the stew smell from that street is promising.

  Irina put the book away with quick, decisive movements, hiding it again deep in her bag.

  —Unfortunately, Vael is right about the essentials —she conceded, her voice regaining its practical tone—. We won't get anything more out of today. But at least we have… something. Not just a name. A title. Or a description. "The-One-Who-Stands-Upon-Nothing. The First and Last Wall. The Flesh That Devoured the Moon." —She repeated the words, and each one fell into the twilight air like a slab of ice—. That doesn't sound like something you pray to for good harvests.

  Elara brushed the dust from her dress with brusque gestures, as if she could brush off the feeling of unease as well. She looked at Vael, and in her eyes was a complex, boiling mixture: gratitude for the information, a deep rage at his concealment, and a growing, bewildering suspicion that there was far more behind his mask of simplicity than he would ever admit.

  —Sometimes —she said, through gritted teeth— you are surprisingly useful, Vael. And other times you are so profoundly insufferable I question my decision not to leave you on the cellar floor.

  —It's the ambiguous charm of country life, miss —he replied, winking at her with a familiarity that would have made her mother faint—. You learn to listen to everything, see a lot, and speak only when it's strictly necessary to get food.

  —Well, enough philosophy and mysteries for today —Irina cut in, adjusting her cloak over her shoulders with a gesture that put an end to the discussion—. Let's go. If we don't hurry, the inn's kitchen will close and I refuse, on principle, to end this shit day eating hard bread and rancid cheese again.

  Vael nodded with genuine enthusiasm.

  —I hope they serve chicken today. Or lamb. Something that had a mother and a name. I'm sick of grey "mystery" stew.

  The trio set off, leaving the square of the dry fountain and the grotesque, elongated shadows the bloody twilight cast from the buildings. They were lost in Oskara's maze of streets, three more figures among the crowd hurrying home before night—true night, not just solar—fell upon the city. But now they carried with them not just a book, but the first words of its curse. And the unsettling certainty that the man who tripped over his own shadow beside them was, perhaps, the most incomprehensible key of all.