“Fuck, lad, don’t go letting this shit eat at you. It’s not healthy. Let’s get away from this bullshit. You need to focus on the good. We’ve won and won. You pulled us out of that last battle completely unscathed.”

  Chowwick’s voice came through a haze. My eyes could not be moved. I heard my voice speak robotically, tinged with frustration.

  “Not unscathed, Chowwick. A hundred men lost their lives. I didn’t expect the Denver muskets to be so effective… I should have pulled back sooner… It wasn’t unscathed…”

  Chowwick’s voice, slightly stammered, “Shit, well, I meant…”

  I couldn’t take my eyes away. The shiny, marbled white domes gleaming in the moonlight. The rusty brown and black gobs, frozen in dryness, still looking like they were ready to drool down under the pull of gravity.

  My voice, “You meant that the five of us weren’t damaged or hurt. That’s what you meant.”

  I didn’t know if my words were simply stating the obvious or if they were intended to accuse. Chowwick seemed to feel the latter. He didn’t rile against me; he didn’t deny it. His voice was hurt. “I care about the men too. I didn’t mean it like that, lad. I meant as an effective force. It’s sad to see the men die, but they know the risks. Our ability to serve our city wasn’t diminished. That’s what I meant, lad. That’s your job, after all, to shepherd the force, to win the Flows. It’s not your job to care for the men; it’s your job to use them well. And you did that.”

  I closed my eyes, squeezing them tight.

  Denver had held the Griid-Crown for 20 of the last 40 years. Her coffers were full of Flows and wealth. Her armies were among the best-equipped in all the lands. Where many cities had to eschew the expense of building, maintaining, and training troops in the use of mid-order weapons like black-powder guns, Denver could not only afford to do it, Denver could afford to excel at it. We’d all been caught off guard by their professionalism, their efficiency. We’d pushed for the Orb once more, Chowwick leading the way, my form standing as an island, daring the Axe of Denver to take me. The Denver musketmen had lined up at a distance that seemed surely too far from the Orb. Their volleys had shredded our valuable riflemen before they were close enough to the Orb for their higher-order weapons to function. Chowwick had needed to pull back, and I had needed to call the retreat.

  I knew I’d done as well as anyone could, but that would mean little to wives left without their husbands, to children left without their fathers. Reasonable effectiveness couldn’t bring men back from the dead, couldn’t kiss foreheads, couldn’t be a warm touch in the cold night.

  None of that was really what was pressing down on me. What was troubling me so badly was the arrangement before me.

  Chowwick and I stood in the woods, the silver wisps of the moon’s light casting patterns over us as it passed through the dying leaves of the canopy.

  Before me was a strange and vile installation. Piles of skulls arranged with obsessive precision. Long human bones tied together with twine made from the hair of the dead. The remnants of human hearts, most of them pecked away by carrion birds, the remainder dried and desiccated. Globs of gore staining the altar of bones. The flecks of meat and blackened blood clung to the perfect whiteness of the bones, standing out in the moonlight, drawing my eyes.

  Chowwick very tentatively put a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, lad, it’s doing you no good. We shouldn’t even have stopped.”

  I pointed to heaps of refuse a few yards away. “I said, those are Boston uniforms. These are our men.”

  Chowwick was unsure of himself, his voice creaking, “It’s… eh… it’s a fact of life out here, lad. This is the Wilds. Strange folk live out here, far away from the rule of law, they do it for a reason. It’s not the first of its kind I’ve seen.”

  I turned to him. My helm was down, my face exposed. I knew my eyes brimmed with angry tears, and I didn’t care if he saw them. “They’ve desecrated the bodies of men who died fighting for their city! Why aren’t you angrier?”

  Chowwick sighed. “My anger for this dried up a long time ago, lad. You can’t fight religion.”

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  I looked back at the strange arrangement, the gruesome sculpture. “This isn’t religion…”

  Chowwick said, “Whoever did this wasn’t praying to the Oracle, but they were praying to something…”

  “But what… what were they praying to?”

  Chowwick sighed again. “I don’t know so much about it. I remember being young and learning about this shit and getting disgusted. The disgusted bit turned into a curious bit after a while. I asked some questions.”

  My voice was colder and harder than I was used to. “Tell me.”

  Chowwick said, “There’s Aos. The Cult of Aos, it’s one of the two really old… movements? I don’t know what to call these collections of loonies. But the Cult of Aos and the Children of the Fountain, they’re mentioned in stories going all the way back to Padraig Dragonheart. There are others, lots of others, but none so old that I know of. None so big either. Hell, lad, there’s probably a little upshoot cult in every settled valley and plain of the Wilds. People need to believe in things, and out here the Oracle feels like it’s a long, long way away.”

  I said, “And who were these fuckers worshipping?”

  Chowwick shrugged. “Lots of ’em use bones and blood. The only other cult I could name is the followers of Cruach… that’s a new one, relatively speaking that is, but you hear stories… Cruach likes a bit of blood and bone, I hear…” He tried to laugh at his joke but only produced a deflated wheeze.

  My lips curled back in disgust as I looked at the altar.

  Chowwick’s huge hand pulled at my shoulder. “Come on, lad, you’re doing yourself no good here. These lads died fighting for the city. If you let your head get sucked into this… you won’t be doing their sacrifice any good if you don’t give the Falling your all. Don’t let this poison distract you. Come with me, lad, we can send men out to bury these poor fellas.”

  I let him pull me, and we started to walk away. Neither of us made to jog or run, and it was too densely treed for the Footfield. So we walked in the light of the moon.

  Chowwick attempted a more enthusiastic character as we walked. “You should be thinkin’ about how things are goin’, lad. About what we’ve done, what we could do next. We’ve won three fucking Orbs, how about that? 50 Flows already, and the key fragments. I’ve never known us to have so many Fragments. We might have a shot at a locked Orb yet. Those fuckers are big. They’ll make the 25er seem like nothing.”

  I nodded, my thoughts obviously still lingering with the grisly display I’d seen.

  Chowwick went on. “And level 27, lad! You could hit 30 before the Falling is over. Think about that! It took me my whole life to get that far, and you could do it in a few weeks. Think about another skill! With what we’re doing already, can you imagine what we’d do if you threw a few more levels on top of what you’ve got and had another skill to use? Imagine it, lad.”

  I realized that the enthusiasm in his voice was not nearly as forced as I had thought at first. I looked at him. “You really think we can win a locked Orb?”

  I was startled by how genuine his face looked in the moonlight. “Oh fucking aye! We beat Morningstar twice! If we can do that, who the fuck else is out of reach? A locked Orb, lad… think about that. Or more. One locked Orb will offer the key to another. You just need a few rubs of luck, and then you’re holding the Griid-crown.”

  I smiled despite myself. I had had those thoughts, but knew them to be madness. To see this older man, this veteran of decades, speaking with such enthusiasm kindled that flame in me. I said, “That’s mad talk… it’s not possible.”

  Chowwick stopped. He put his hands on my shoulders. There was a deep and personal sincerity in his eyes. He said, “Lad, with you as Sword, I don’t think anything’s impossible. I knew from the first moment that you were special… I thought I’d live and die in the suit, and the best that would be said of me was that he didn’t let the city starve. But you came along, and you changed it. You’ll hit level 30 in your first year, what’ll ya be next year? Or the year after?”

  His eyes were glassy with emotion. A tiny moon floated in the wet corners of his eyes. I felt the immenseness of his emotion washing over me, felt my own face quiver.

  Chowwick said, “I’m in, lad. You can see that. I’ll never be a legend, and I’ve never needed to be. But you, lad—you could be the greatest there ever was. And if ya are, then my name will be put in the books: the Shield to the Blood Prince. Fancy that? I’m taking no day for granted now. We can win any battle. We’ll get those fragments, we’ll do it while you’re naught but a rookie. And we’ll put the fucking crown on you.”

  His head twitched as if he realized how nakedly he’d spoken. He snapped his head away and urgently composed himself. “Aye, well. That’s what we’ll do tomorrow. For now, let’s just get back. I’m fucking parched.”

  We jogged on a little. My mind was a tempest. I couldn’t relinquish the image I’d seen, the horrible wrongness of the altar of blood and bones. But neither could I stop Chowwick’s words, his passion, from smothering those mental pictures.

  After a while, as we loped between the trees, I said, “Chowwick?”

  “Aye, lad?”

  “Do you believe any of those things are real? The things the cults worship? Aos, or Cruach, or any of that shit?”

  Chowwick just loped along for long moments in silence. Then he spoke quietly, almost too low for me to hear over the heavy plodding of his feet.

  “I don’t know, lad… I don’t know…”