Chương 47: God

Scillo had already reorganized the shop's inventory at least three times by now. Of course, it wasn't because he was obliged to do it. Fettis Groane couldn't care less about that kind of thing. It was just that he was so, so, so bored. Bored out of his mind. He looked at the window, where bouquets of wilted roses rested, their petals dull, yellowish, and completely lifeless. Scillo sighed in frustration. He'd tried everything.

More water, less water, different water, moving them closer to the window, moving them away from the window… Nothing worked! A snore startled him out of his thoughts, and he glanced at where Fettis was asleep behind the counter. How could the man just sleep when his own store was going into ruin? Scowling, Scillo moved a display of dried flower arrangements from the left wall, in an attempt to cover up the dead roses as best as possible.

As he did, he peered outside for a bit, watching as the afternoon crowd outside drifted past the grimy windows. How he wished he could be as carefree as them. He carefully set the display down, and stepped back to survey the result. He stood there for a moment, staring at the flowers with a vacant expression. This sucks. Turning around, he moved towards the main storage shelf. It was old and heavy, loaded to the brim with ceramic pots of varying sizes, thick bags of floral seeds, and various gardening tools.

He'd been meaning to move it for days, as it blocked out too much of the sun, and was a sore sight to any customer that had the unfortunate luck to walk in. He positioned himself, getting his shoulder behind it, and pushed. With a horrible scraping noise, the shelf ground across the floor, making Fettis's snores pause for a moment, though he didn't wake up. It moved about two feet before Scillo ran out of momentum and bodily strength. He groaned, his back already aching.

Looking down at the floor where the shelf had been, he grimaced. The floorboards there were the same dark wood as the rest of the shop, but was covered in a thick layer of dust, cobwebs, and grime. Scillo could only imagine the cleaning session awaiting him. Sighing, he turned around to get a pail of water and some rags, when something caught his eye. One of the floor boards wasn't as dirty as the others. It was roughly the length of his forearm and positioned to the very left of where the shelf had been.

It wasn't clean like someone had been cleaning it, but instead clean because the grime had worn away through regular contact. Scillo stared at it, then hurriedly looked at Fettis, confirming that the drunkard was still asleep. Crouching down he rapped his knuckles on the wood board, knocking lightly. His eyes widened. The sound it produced was unmistakably hollow! Scillo sat back on his heels, the information that the fairy-tale handler had told him about, along with the information he himself had gathered.

Wormwood Moss had worked in this shop for a few years. During that time, he'd been obsessed with Ghenna, talking about it to every customer who would listen, like a suicidal fantasy. And when he'd finally made that descent and came back up, he'd stood outside staring at the sign, apparently trying to remember something. And then he'd left the city and never come back. Scillo licked his lips with excitement. What else had the handler said?

Right, Wormwood's rune had been [Bird's Eye], a rune that could document everything he saw, rendered in perfect precision. The handler had said they'd recovered his maps from his apartment, floors one through nine, but nothing from floors nine to fourteen. Nothing from floors nine to fourteen… Could this be…? Scillo pressed his fingers against the board's edge and felt around, until he caught a slight gap on the inner side.

He dug his thumbnail into it, then lifted the board carefully, making sure not to damage the wood in any way. Underneath, a shallow cavity was revealed, cut into the ground with a depth of perhaps four inches. It had been sealed and packed with some sort of treated leather, so it was dry inside, protected from any sort of moisture. And inside the cavity was a single piece of folded paper. Scillo's heart began pounding. If this was what he thought it was, maybe he could get out of this hellish job!

With trembling fingers, he gingerly reached in and took it out. It was surprisingly heavy, the paper being of dense making and of unusually good quality. It had been folded many times, as though Wormwood had been trying to make it as small as possible before hiding it. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. Scillo unfolded it carefully, doing his utmost best not to harm or damage the paper, spreading it flat against the floor. It was… A map! Scillos' heart soared.

He even recognized Wormwood's style immediately, as the handler had shown him some samples of his work during the briefing. The same cramped, obsessive penwork, every surface detailed to such an extent that most normal cartographers would faint just seeing the precision. This was clearly Wormwood's [Bird's Eye] rune at work. Now that Scillo thought about it, what hadn't Wormwood been more famous with a rune like this? If it had been Scillo, he would've made a fortune selling these maps to the Union.

But as his eyes drifted to the top left corner of the map, where the title was written, a small frown creased his lips. This map wasn't detailing floors nine through fourteen. No, in the notation located on the corner, written in Wormwood's handwriting, read: Floor 15. Scillo's heart began racing again, not from excitement this time, but trepidation. Hadn't the handler said that Wormwood had only reached Floor 14? So then why…? He hurriedly spread the map wider, smoothing the fold lines carefully with his palm.

As he studied it, he found that Floor 15 was extremely large, being in fact much, much larger than the upper floors the handler had shown him samples of. It seemed to resemble a maze, with complex passages that branched off and rejoined in patterns. How Wormwood had documented all of it, Scillo couldn't even possibly begin to imagine. And then, he noticed something else.

On the northeastern section of the map, in what appeared to be a large chamber set apart from the main passage network by a single narrow approach corridor, Wormwood had drawn a circle, marking it with a dull red ink. It was the only marking on the entire map that wasn't a faithful representation of a physical feature. And beside it, was writing. It was the same regular handwriting of Wormwood, but it had been scribbled rather than inscribed professionally. It was just a single word. God.

With a long arrow pointing at the circle. Scillo stared at it for a very long time. He looked down. For some reason, his hands were trembling. Why am I…? Shaking his head, he looked back at the circle again. What could 'God' possibly mean? Was it metaphorical? Literal? No, that was impossible to be taken literally. Had Wormwood really just lost his mind by the time he'd reached Floor 15, scrawling some nonsense onto his maps? Or had he seen something in that chamber that was really… God?

Scillo himself wasn't a very religious person, having a natural distrust of more religions as they all just seemed like glorified cults to him. But even he sometimes thought about the point of life, whether they had a purpose, and if there really was some sort of creator that had called everything to being with their omnipotent power. Scillo's mind was spinning, spiraling into threads of different theories— He jumped up as a scream split the air outside.

The scream was followed by another, then several more, along with the sound of a huge crowd starting to run. Behind the counter, Fettis let out a loud snort, his eyes blinking open blearily. He squinted at the ceiling for a moment, then looked over at Scillo.

"Whassat?" he mumbled.

"Nothing," Scillo blurted out automatically. Whirling around, he folded the map back as fast as he dared, trying to replicate the exact fold pattern Wormwood had used. As he slammed the board back down, his thumb accidentally caught on the corner of the board. He hissed through clenched teeth, the pain shooting up his knuckle. But he had managed to put the board back in place, though the shelf would have to stay where it was for now.

He stood up, pushing his throbbing thumb into his mouth, and moved quickly to the door. Outside, people were running in all directions, vendors abandoning their stalls, customers were spilling out of shop fronts, and as he looked up, somewhere to the north, there was a thick column of dark smoke rising above the rooftops, curling upward into the pale sky. Scillo grabbed the sleeve of a man sprinting past him.

"What's happening?" he demanded. The man barely slowed, yanking his arm free.

"Fire!" he gasped out.

"It's a huge one! Merchant Row's already been mostly burned to the ground!" Scillo stood in the doorway, staring at the smoke. His stomach dropped. Merchant's Row? It had been burned to the ground? Scillo's mouth went dry. That was where the headquarters was! Abandoning all care into the wind, he began dashing towards the fire.

The crowd pushed back against him, as all of them were streaming in the opposite direction, and so he had to shove and duck and squeeze his way through it, all the while earning several elbows to the ribs. But he kept going. He had to see the damage for himself. Before he felt the heat, the smoke engulfed him first, suffocatingly thick and black. It stung his eyes, and he pressed his sleeve against his mouth as he pushed forward into the thinning crowd.

Then the heat hit him, a wall of it pushing against him like he was standing in front of an open oven. Continuing onward, he stopped at the edge of the cordon that the city guards had hastily thrown up, and looked beyond it, where a line of men were desperately throwing bucket after bucket of water and sand at the flames, though it achieved almost nothing against the sheer scale of it. Beyond them, Merchant's Row was completely unrecognizable. The northern block was almost entirely gone.

The cartographer's shop was a blackened ruin. The cloth importer beside it was just… Not there anymore. And where the Bonfire Trading Company had stood, there now only remained a blackened skeleton, which was slowly getting devoured as well. Around him, the remaining spectators murmured and pointed, their faces orange in the reflected light. He didn't know how long he stood there. But at some point, he became aware of someone standing beside him. He turned around, and saw the handler.

The old man was standing at the cordon's edge with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, his watery eyes lit up by the dancing orange light of the fire. For some reason, he looked entirely unbothered, like he wasn't just watching the very home of his organization being razed to the ground. He seemed to sense Scillo looking at him, because he turned his head. Giving a small nod, the corners of his lips curved upward into a warm and gentle smile, the firelight throwing long, ghostly shadows across his face.

"How are you doing?" he asked pleasantly. Scillo faltered.

"I-I'm doing… okay?"

"Very good." The man looked back at the fire, tilting his head slightly to the side as a section of the cartographer shop's remaining wall finally gave way and collapsed. His smile spread wider.

"Would you like to hear the tale of The Candle that Burned the House Down?"