Chương 63: Do You Believe in God?

Lamb listened patiently to the dripping sounds of water hitting the floor. There had been nothing for a while, until two came in quick succession. But then nothing again. For several hours, Lamb had been trying to find a pattern, but he couldn't find one yet. Maybe because he just wasn't trying hard enough? He remembered Job telling him about how everything requires you to give your best at it. Then that helped make sense why he wasn't finding a pattern.

After all, he was only listening because searching for the pattern that wasn't there was better than looking at the arm. The arm was still pretty wrong, but he guessed that maybe it didn't matter too much. It was fine. Bodies adapted! That was what they did. But Lamb didn't like how the cold boy's face kept arriving uninvited inside his head. Inside his mind, inside his head, inside his mind, inside his head… He shivered at the memory of those alien amber eyes.

Sometimes, they looked alive, like they were going to come crawling out of the eye sockets. Lamb sometimes also giggled at that particular imagination, because maybe he would get to eat them if they did. Terry's thumbs. The cold boy knew about Terry. Lamb wanted to see Terry's thumbs again. The sound of the dripping water came again. Lamb was bored, so he began thinking about the Girl's gold-ringed eyes. He wondered how their texture would feel like. Would they squeeze open like cold grapes?

Or maybe remain as unyielding as hard marbles? The sound of footsteps began to echo down the connecting sewer tunnel, dragging his attention away from his thoughts. Lamb's head snapped up. His training took over his body immediately—the familiar Kingmaker's curriculum. He smoothed his features into that empty, pitiful blankness Job had drilled into him years ago. It was the cold boy, probably.

Coming back with more questions, questions that teased and taunted his very being and personality, full of words that tasted of copper and felt like needles, wanting to turn him into a bad monster. But it was okay! This time, Lamb would be ready. He would be like a fortress! The footsteps came closer. Yet, when the figure finally breached the entrance, Lamb could see that the silhouette was too tall. It wasn't the cold boy. No, it was a man he'd never seen before.

The mysterious man glanced around the room, then looked at Lamb. He smiled, the grin warm and cordial.

"Are you Lamb?" he asked. Lamb said nothing. Silence would be his best defense, but his mind was whirling. Who was this man, and how did he know his name? The man studied him, then chuckled softly, shaking his head.

"Playing it safe now, are we?" he murmured. He took a few hurried steps closer, and crouched down in front of Lamb. Then he reached out with his left hand—clad in a glove of white silk so fine it clung perfectly to his skin—and cupped Lamb's cheeks. The touch was startlingly gentle, his long fingers caressing the skin softly. Their eyes met. And for just a second, the man's pupils blazed gold, as warm and rich as molten gold.

He leaned in closer, his breath warm against Lamb's cold face, as his lips parted to utter five simple words.

"Do you believe in God?" ◈◈◈◈ Scillo wrapped the fur coat even tighter around him, his breath blossoming into white clouds that vanished into the biting air. He was huddled in the back of a rickety wagon, completely sandwiched between two big supply crates. Peering out from under his frozen lashes, he watched the frozen road reveal itself beneath them. He tried to stretch, attempting to work a stubborn kink out of his arm, but the space was too cramped to allow even that small mercy.

The wagon really was a cheap, miserable bastard. Its wheels seemed determined with seeking out every ice-filled crack and rut on the road with unerring accuracy. Each violent jolt rattled his teeth and sent fresh jolts of pain through his stiff joints, crippling any faint hope of sleep. Scillo had no idea where the hell he was. Well, he knew the general direction they were headed in. It was north. One would have to be stupid to not notice the progressively colder temperatures. But specifically? Not a chance.

It had all happened so fast that Scillo still hadn't fully realized the sequence of events that had landed him here, miserably frozen and wedged between two supply crates in the middle of nowhere. One moment he'd been standing at the cordon watching the Crater City office of the Bonfire Trading Company burn to the ground, and then the fairy tale handler had simply said, "Follow me," and started walking. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

As Scillo obeyed, he'd naturally tried asking questions, of course. But the handler had refused to answer a single one. Then they had arrived at the wagon, the handler climbing up onto the driver's seat. And they'd simply left, leaving Crater City behind. Scillo hadn't even been allowed to pack his belongings, not that he had many. He glanced over at the other occupants of the wagon.

Two organization operatives he didn't recognize sat across from him, both wearing plain travelling clothes, both looking entirely unbothered by the temperature. Which, to be honest, was slowly pissing Scillo off. They had barely spoken to each other, simply staring out into the distance. And so did Scillo. And then there was the handler. He sat perched at the very front of the wagon bed, looking content as his hands loosely held on the reins.

Ahead of him, a pair of hardened mules paced forward, their thick muscles working in tandem as they pulled the heavy vehicle along the road. The handler's thin leather coat was entirely inadequate for the biting northern temperature—the collar already being stiff with frost—but he somehow didn't appear to notice the chill at all. Four days in the mysterious man's company, and Scillo still didn't even know his name.

He tried asking it once, but the handler just changed the subject, telling him a story about a hermit crab that changed its shell so many times it forgot what its original shell had looked like. Since then, Scillo had decided that the man might be mentally ill. His train of thought was shattered as the wagon lurched again, more violently than the last few times. The wheel slammed into a particularly aggressive rut, snapping his jaw shut. Scillo winced as his teeth clacked together, snipping the side of his tongue.

He hissed, his eyes watering from the sting. A coppery liquid quickly filled his mouth, which he gulped down, grimacing as the metallic blood slid down his throat. He shifted in his seat, planning to spit out the remaining away, when something caught his eyes in the distance. Ahead, dark shapes of a town settlement emerged from the morning haze. It was small, with only around thirty or forty buildings.

Many of the rooftops had caved in, their shattered timber peeking out through the snow, while one of the buildings at the settlement's edge was missing its entire eastern wall, leaving the interior exposed and choked with soot. Scillo frowned as the wagon rolled past the settlement. A hauntingly familiar sight. This was the third destroyed settlement they'd passed since crossing into the north. All three bore the same wounds, signaling some sort of primitive attack. The culprit? The northern tribes.

Because of them, the north had always lived like this, raided seasonally by the tribes that roamed beyond the treeline. It was a given fact everybody knew. But three settlements—and who knows how many else—was a bit too much, even for their barbaric ways. Scillo pulled his coat tighter around him, feeling unease creep into his bones. The windows of the ghost-town seemed to be staring at him, vacant and dead. He tried to shake the sensation, but the unease was persistent, a cold knot settling into his stomach.

What was going on in the north? The wagon continued on, and soon, the jarring groans began lulling him into a sort of trance, his mind retreating to thoughts of Walker. Scillo didn't know where the Skinwalker had gone after meeting at the flower shop. He hadn't even found a small trace of him. The creature had simply vanished. Even more troubling was that Scillo didn't know what the contract the Skinwalker had signed with the mysterious boy even detailed. Who knew what that monster was planning to do.

He pressed two fingers to his chest through the coat, where his own binding contract was located. But he felt nothing, only his own ice-cold skin, which told him nothing useful.

"You worry a great deal, my boy," the handler spoke aloud. He didn't bother turning from his perch at the front of the wagon. Scillo lowered his hand, feeling like he'd been caught for some reason.

"Do I?" he asked cautiously.

"Indeed." The handler chuckled drily.

"Tell me, are you familiar with the tale of the Worried Miller?" Scillo lamented silently. Not this again…

"No," he said aloud. The handler clicked his tongue in disappointment, then began recounting the tale.

"Once upon a time, there was a Miller who had a grand windmill, the finest in the valley. But he was a man of great foresight—or so he thought. He spent his nights awake, worrying that a gale would come along and spin the sails so fast that the whole structure would be set ablaze." Please stop, Scillo thought. What was this story even talking about? But the handler, undeterred, continued.

"So, to save his mill from a fire that hadn't happened yet, he climbed up and locked the gears with iron pins. He sat in the dirt, satisfied and safe. But the wind didn't stop just because he was afraid of it. The pressure built and built, and because the gears couldn't turn to vent the force, the wind simply snapped the stone tower in half. And then the mill exploded. He glanced at Scillo, his eyes twinkling.

"By trying to control the 'what if,' he ensured the 'when.' What a noble story, don't you think?" Scillo stared back, trying to keep the flare of annoyance down.

"I… see."

"You don't find it instructive?" the handler asked curiously.

"I find it," Scillo paused for a second, choosing his words with great care, "very provoking to the mind."

"Wonderful," the handler said warmly.

"That's all I could ever hope for." Quickly, before he could get dragged into another story, Scillo looked back out at the passing landscape. The settlements they passed were getting smaller and further apart, each one looking slightly more battered than the last. The people he occasionally glimpsed at the roadside seemed to all be refugees, with no wagons or carts, only carrying what they could on their backs. He had about a thousand questions. Where exactly were they going? What was waiting there?

Why had the headquarters in Crater City burned down? What was going on in the north? And of course… Where the hell did Walker go? Pursing his lips, he watched the grey landscape roll past. Until, the wagon jerked to a stop. Scillo looked up from the frozen road, frowning. Confused, he scanned the horizon. Why had they stopped? There was nothing here. No settlement or any sort of building. Just the open northern plain in every direction. Then he noticed something. A boulder, roughly twenty feet from the road.

It jutted out of the frozen ground, roughly the height of two men, its surface pale and weathered. From a distance, it looked like any other northern boulder. Except… Scillo stared at it incredulously. Is that a door? Carved directly into the stone's face was a faint, rectangular seam. It was a masterpiece of impossible masonry—unnervingly precise, yet devoid of handles, hinges, or keyholes. It was so glaringly out of place that it seemed absurd. How has no one spotted this before? This is way too conspicuous!

His frown deepened, until he blinked, understanding dawning on him. He remembered that his hometown's small regional office had worked the same way. Special rune-smiths had crafted the entrance with a perception filter, making it only visible to those that carried the organization's Binding Oath. To any passing traveler, this would appear as just a rock. The two operatives across from him were already vaulting out of the wagon, their expressions vapid and bored.

Their lack of surprise only stoked the embers of Scillo's resentment. The handler hopped down from the driver's seat, fastidiously brushing the front of his coat. He looked up at Scillo, who was still sitting inside the wagon.

"Well." The handler smiled thinly.

"Here we are." Scillo's brows furrowed.

"Where is 'here'?" The handler gestured toward the monolith, his eyes gleaming with a sort of pride.

"The heart of the beast, my boy. The main headquarters of our organization."