The Broken Isles

Now where’s that lass off to?

He threw on a thick cloak, managed to find his sword that he had stashed away, and decided the most productive thing to do would be to follow her.

What else, he thought, is there to do?

The element of subterfuge had brought a sudden burst of excitement back into his life.

It wasn’t as cold as he thought it would be tonight, and the sounds of Villiren were enticing once again. His blood was pumping properly.

It felt good. He could hear the sea in the distance, grinding against the geological forms of the bay and harbour; he could hear people talking, glasses being smashed, dogs barking. Comforting sounds for someone if they were used to them.

Quickly, he trotted down some steps, and around the corner where Rika had gone; there, he scanned the immediate streets for any signs of her.

He caught a glimpse of her — in that same dark, military-style garb she had taken to wearing. Her black hair had been cut even shorter, her skin growing abnormally pale, so she wasn’t hard to recognize in the light of some of the ornamental beacons flaring around this district.

The place was less of a mess than before. Rubble was gradually being cleared by community teams; a lot of travellers provided cheap labour to help out with odd jobs around the city. Taverns were doing a good business, too, which was a promising sign.

Citizens here seemed more of a threat than the average person in Villjamur. People there may have wanted a fight or two, but in Villiren the challengers looked as if they might actually win a fight with him.

Rika seemed to have no destination in mind, just taking a random route around the city. Though the streets were no longer constructed according to any available map, she wandered about the place as if she was drunk or overdosing on arum weed. She would head down one street, only to round a corner and head back along a parallel street. She took full circles and went down some only to come straight back up as if she’d met a dead end — except she was free to pass through.

And this woman is to lead the new Empire? Randur thought. She can’t even lead herself at the moment. It doesn’t really bode all that well.

Whenever she passed citizens, she would veer into their path and scrutinize them before lurching away again, leaving them startled and hurrying on.

Is she looking for someone? Over the course of a few minutes, Rika became increasingly animalistic, he noticed: her stance might become a crouch, her walk would transform into a scuttle.

Suddenly she disappeared from sight. Shit! He ran along the street down the entrances of every alley to see if he could spot her, but he found little but rotting food waste, cats, or old men urinating up against the wall. He continued for several minutes and, as time passed, his search seemed increasingly futile. Eventually, assuming he had lost her, he decided to head back the way he had come to the Citadel.

But then there, in one side street behind a destroyed theatre, where the old buildings of the Ancient Quarter met the debris of war, he spotted her hunched over in a corner. She was doing something, but in this light he couldn’t quite see what. He walked to the end of the street and cautiously poked his head around the corner from a slightly different angle.

She had something in her mouth, and he thought for a moment that she might have been eating litter, but it was something far worse.

Randur was agog.

You are shitting me. .

Rika was eating through an arm — one that was still connected to a corpse. She nibbled into it like a fevered fox. It seemed for a moment as if the ambient sounds of the city had fallen away entirely, and Randur could hear the sounds of delight and little groans of pleasure that Rika was emitting as she dined upon the dead flesh.

And the victim was indeed dead — he had been a young male with blond hair, still in his teens by the look of it. The dead boy’s head tilted backwards and both his mouth and eyes were open in an expression of sheer horror. His throat had been cut cleanly, marked by a line of blood, and a gore-covered blade lay beside his body on the ground. The sleeve of his coat had been ripped or sliced open to expose his arm, and a cap had fallen to one side.

Randur was vaguely aware that it might be a good idea to tell someone about this, and soon, but he couldn’t help but stare at the gruesome display. He waited to watch enough of what was going on to be utterly sure, to be confident that he was indeed watching the former head of the Jamur Empire chewing on human flesh.

Once the initial shock had worn off, Randur became entranced by her actions and tried to work out what she might be actually thinking. She was no longer normal — they all knew this — but how could a girl of religious purity transform in such a way?

Rika continued for several minutes, hunched as she devoured the flesh. She had begun with the arm, then moved on to one of the boy’s legs, which, Randur supposed, were logical, fleshy places if this was a wolf attacking, so was she genuinely hungry? He made the connection with her lack of appetite at dinner, though that was a bit vague.

She froze. She looked up.

Randur’s heart seemed to stop, and he tried to turn back before she could see his face, then sprinted along the street, jumped up on a crate, grabbed a piece of guttering and slithered into a concealed position on a flat rooftop.

His heart was racing and he was out of breath. But at least Rika had not seen him. Well, hopefully she had not seen him — he couldn’t be entirely sure.

Randur lay there for some time, for ten or twenty minutes, maybe even longer, every now and then peering over the side to see if she was still there.

Satisfied that he was safe, he slid back along the roof tiles and flipped himself down over the edge. He made his way back to the scene of the crime, curious. When he looked around the corner, Rika was no longer there. Randur approached the body and pushed it over with his boot: the neck wound was clear to see, as was the absence of flesh in certain areas. She had eaten her way through half an arm and just a little thigh.

This would need reporting.

He walked back to the main thoroughfare and eventually attracted the attention of a Dragoon out on city patrol. After a hurried explanation, he guided the slender, young soldier back towards the body, which was still there.

‘You sure you didn’t do this yourself, eh? Guilty conscience n’all that?’ the soldier replied.

Randur explained who he was, the companion of Eir, and where he had come from. ‘So I have better things to be doing with my time than chopping up strangers in dark alleys.’

‘Right you are, sir, I’ll get the lads to bring a stretcher and we’ll record this. You sure you didn’t see who did this?’

‘No,’ he lied. Randur waited for the logical question of Then how did you come to find the body? But it seemed this soldier was not the brightest of sorts.

‘OK,’ the soldier said, shaking his head. ‘You would’ve thought after all the fighting people would’ve seen enough killing, wouldn’t you?’

Randur walked hastily back towards the Citadel, constantly checking over his shoulder. The night was deepening, and he had been out for well over a couple of hours. He realized Eir would probably be worried and, no doubt, would berate him for not letting her know where he was going.

As he reached the streets within a few hundred yards of the approach to the Citadel, he could see there was something of a lively atmosphere growing. People were here in their hundreds, milling about the streets expectantly — and there were quite a few military types too. The noise grew. It seemed peculiar since a little while ago there was nobody about. Randur pushed his way forward, glancing to and fro to locate gaps in the crowd.

He turned to a middle-aged couple. ‘What’s going on here? Why’s everyone out and about?’

‘The Night Guard is back,’ the man replied. ‘There is news of their arrival tonight. They say they saved the