Lucien!

"Yes, well," the Professor says, gazing with reverent eyes upon the battle between mouse and fox going on right before his eyes. "The House of Mirrors here is a repository of nexii ocularum, a convergence of possibilities. It's a very dangerous thing, and it's only by the will of the Carnival itself that the clowns, that is to say, my brothers in arms, they tolerate it, because they revere the Carnival as the guardian of the Grail. Now, having two Jackdaws running around is dangerous, even here, in the depths of the Heart, though from what I've been able to glean, it's less because of the ironclad laws of time-- which, here, are much more permeable-- but because it draws the attention of the Angels, who will do their best to resolve the situation according to their impossible whims; perhaps they will favor this iteration of the dear fox because she is more closely attuned to the Heart, but contrariwise they might favor the one we have been traveling with--"

And regret floods through the tent. You keep your head above it: you've already faced all of these, you've wined and dined and drowned your regrets. There's nothing left for these nasty whispers to hook into, not for you; but the Professor is another matter entirely. Quite suddenly, he bursts into ugly tears, smearing the greasepaint on his face.

"What am I doing, boy? Immortality, here, as some capering imp without any interest in the pursuits of the mind? The mind is not some ship made of planks; I am my memories and my legacy and when I drink that red, red sacrament, it will drown them both until there is nothing left but another clown! All because I could not stand the reaper standing at my shoulder, waiting to call me to my rest!" He takes your lapels in his trembling hands. "Don't let me-- don't let them-- I won't do it! I won't take the Grail!"

A terrible cacophony of honks sounds from outside the tent, and the Professor's face twists into a rictus of ridiculous horror. "They... they'll know... they won't let me go... not after I'm so close..."

***

Ailee!

Sobbing, furious, Surma the Bookhunter is there at your side, using her legs; she plants her hand on your shoulder and rears up into a kick, and knocks Evil Jackdaw right out of the tent. But you won't stop with that, will you? You can't. You have to keep going; you have to put her in the ground. That's the point of the sacrifices you have made.

You lunge outside and come to the conclusion that you have made a mistake. Sure, you bowl over Evil Jackdaw into the mud, hands around her throat like it's the mallet for the test of strength, and-- be honest-- is this fun? Is this fun? Or is it just more misery to be a part of?

Anyway, the wind nearly bowls you over, the rain is punching your back, and there is an entire fucking convocation of clowns arrayed around the tent. Evil Jackdaw writhes underneath you like a snake, and the Bookhunter's still there, but her words are ripped away by the storm.

***

Coleman!

Several things happen all at once. Jackdaw and Wolf are swallowed by the floor, which hardens into a cyst all around them. The Blemmyae lunges for you, and gets his huge hands around your throat. Black Coleman pulls the trigger, and the Blemmyae makes one more transformation from a fury straight from the depths of the pit, about to snap your neck like a twig, into something soft and wet and heavy. When Black Coleman hauls the Blemmyae off you, he kicks him to one side and lets the Blemmyae curl up whimpering into the mortal wound.

"No shit," Black Coleman murmurs as he spins the chamber of his pistol. "Tell me something I don't know. I finally run into you, and we're still too late; Wormwood's still gone. Maybe it won't let itself be fixed as a last bit of bad luck." He fixes you with an exhausted eye, even as a Very Angry Clown approaches to have a word with him about violence! in! the! aquarium!

"What happens? Lucien and the Professor get clowned. Ailee burns herself out to kill King Dragon. Jackdaw goes down past the First Station even after we ask her not to go, and that's the last time we see her. And Sasha hatches into hell, so you go on some damn fool quest trying to travel back to before Wormwood Station was destroyed, just in case it's still connected to the Heart, because nothing's impossible down here. Now give me a hand with this clown."

The breath of the Blemmyae is ragged. Jackdaw could save him, but... well, on the one hand, Jackdaw's just been swallowed up by the Heart, and on the other hand, he was just trying to kill you. Is there any mercy left in you, Coleman?

***

Jackdaw!

The Heart swallows you up.

No, something else swallows you up.

You've been vored. By an Angel.

Wolf digs her claws into you in sudden panic, and then... slowly, she relaxes her painful grip, as nothing violently contracts or tries to kill you. It's dark, and wet, and warm, and... still. Like being held carefully in something's mouth.

The Heart itself has put you in time out. Probably? Definitely. Almost certainly. And it's dark, but the walls all around give off just enough light to see the silhouette of Wolf, and she's not very talkative, so it's completely up to you to fill the silence.

In fact, one might suggest that you almost feel compelled to speak; as if some vast spotlight had been dropped on the two of you, as if you were on a stage being listened to by an audience, as if you have lines that you're supposed to speak. As if your heart wants to be flushed clean.

Lucien realizes he is about to die.

The word of regret flows through him, and yes, it is true, he has wined and dined this fine company time and time again. But a gentleman always dances with the one that brought him, and he came here with his regrets long before he met the Professor.

The blood on his hands has been literal far too often, when he was a young soldier. But isn't that a joke down here? Not only is he all talk down here - and only talk - but the idea he was ever scary, ever a mastermind of anything, rings absurd, and it has for a long time.

Sharks are only scary in the water. Drop a great white a kilometer inland, and watch what happens. See if it matters what it used to be.

And you know what? It's been wonderful, to be a bit of a harmless old joke, hasn't it?

He got ousted from his house by a bloody parliament, and now he's going to get stomped by the floppy shoes of every clown in the damned circus in a spot of the old ultraviolence, and for some reason that sounds exactly correct to him.

What's he going to do? Take on the clowns? Take on Ailee and Surma if they survive ᴇᴠɪʟ ᴊᴀᴄᴋᴅᴀᴡ, or ᴇᴠɪʟ ᴊᴀᴄᴋᴅᴀᴡ if she can take them out? And even if he could, then what? Would Coleman and Jackdaw be faring any better right now? Besides - there never was anything in the Heart for him anyway.

Alright. So he's dead then. What a hell of a way to go.

But if this old shark hasn't left the table, yet, he's going to keep dealing the cards and playing with the house's money until he's escorted from the premises. Wouldn't want to throw one last regret to the pile, would he?

Lucien takes "A Victory of Crows" from his pile of books and gives it to the Professor. Thrusts it into his chest, more like.

"Who wants to live forever?" Lucien demands of him. "It'd be worse if you got taken alive. And if you've got anything to live for, you better say it now, because I'm working out a grand finale, here. We're gonna keep dancing 'til the curtain falls!"

He draws his revolver. Powder dry.

What's he going to do? Face the storm. Greet his audience. Help his friends and die trying.

“See, Leelee? I got tough! Just like you wanted!” Evil Jackdaw cackles with your hands tight around her throat, and you are confronted with the terrible possibility that you have not hurt her in any way that matters. “Alllllllllllllllll your lessons worked! The long nights, the early mornings, the skipped classes, the missed opportunities, the wasted years, it was allllll worth it in the end.” She says two words at once. She’s says the dumb boring words to you. She says a Name. It turns her coat’s collar into a hundred piercing spikes that only grow sharper the harder you squeeze, and she says it all in the same breath. “Aren’t you proud? Come onnnn, let’s see that smile!” Her hands shoot for your face and she squishes your cheeks in the rough approximation of a grin and she is drowning in the deepest satisfaction you have ever seen her enjoy because the word is cruel.

Did you think that Jackdaw could ever grow to be cruel, Ailee?

******************************************

Jackdaw let out a panicked yelp, gunshots and Angels and claws pressing into her all crashing in at once. She squirmed in Wolf’s arms, flailing with what little freedom she had, but for naught. She could breath. She could try not to whimper under Wolf’s claws. She could realize where they were.

It didn’t stop her from springing to the nearest wall as soon as she was let free. “Coleman? Coleman!” She hammered at the substance with both her scrawny arms, for all the good it did. This was all the world they had now. Dim light. No sound, past these unspeakable walls. And yet, they could be heard, the two of them. A listening ear was waiting, and would not wait for much longer, so would she be so kind as to carry on?

And the word was ad-lib.

“What do you want me to say?” Jackdaw spoke, her forehead falling against the wall. “Is there something I’m supposed to say here? Please, genuinely, I know that sounds like I’m being difficult, but, I don’t know what my lines are. Honestly, I’m trying! I’ve been trying! I’ve always been trying, but it never comes out right! Or, no,” Now? Of all times, now, Jackdaw?! “It’s not, the delivery isn’t the problem - well, it’s not always the problem - it’s that I don’t say the right thing. I never pick the right one. I’ve spent all my years memorizing, and when the time comes there’s a hundred hundred choices and I never pick the right one, and if you could just tell me! Tell me, and I’ll say it! Please! There’s no time!”

There ought to be more fanfare to your first murder. The universe ought to hold its breath, the air full of tension at the possible decision, as it waits for him to choose a path through the future. Does he offer him life, or take that first step towards Black Coleman?

Indeed, as he kneels down besides himself, he can't help but feel vaguely insulted that it's so mundane. That it's so easy to help himself part the coarse hair, find the veins, grab the knife, and let the toxic sludge inside ooze onto the floor of the aquarium. Probably bad for the tile, that, his mind insists on chiming in. Better find a wet floor sign somewhere.

But... Well, he's uncomfortable with Black Coleman because he sees the path. He sees how he goes from himself to--well, himself, but with a patina of shame. Sees the logic. The emotions. Black Coleman is himself in ways he doesn't feel comfortable acknowledging.

And... Well, he did try to kill Sasha.

Lucien clowned! Ailee shattered! Jackdaw vanished! He can easily believe the first and last, but there was part of him that had even started to buy into Ailee's own beliefs about what would happen in the Heart.

"But do you remember this day? Are you here, in your memories? Is this a cycle we're starting here--the two of us, comin' back here and murderin' this poor jackass over an' over, and not changing a thing?"

"Give it up you fucking clown!" said Ailee, and her word was Wrath. Don't you see how this works, how Language works? It's not just sound and it's not just symbols. Sometimes you need a thesis to say a single Word, sometimes a scream is sufficient. "I didn't want to make Jackdaw tough. I wanted to make her give the fuck up! I thought that she just wanted to tag along because she was clinging to me and that if I gave her a taste of what the Heart was going to be like she'd think fucking better of coming on this shitty suicide mission with me!"

She backs off for a moment, Vice fire wreathing her and... oh, that wasn't fire, was it? That was something... brighter.

"But you know what the truth is about Jackdaw? Beneath all that shyness and all those books, beneath that cloak of indecision there is a shard of fucking iron. I did everything in my power to try to make her choice for her and yet she's still fucking down here. And you know what that means? It means that you're not Jackdaw, because there's no way she would have broken. And if you're not Jackdaw then that means that you're just like every other thing in this damn world: Breakable."

And Ailee spoke the Word. The Word was the Blade, and the Word was Heroism.

And then she does her level best to fucking decapitate Evil Jackdaw with her angelic flaming sword.

Nothing.

Silence.

The audience awaits.

Like a puppet without strings, Jackdaw slid down the wall until she collapsed to her knees. “What did I do wrong, to me instead of them?” She asked the Heart, and left no room for an answer. “They weren’t older than me! They didn’t have anything I didn’t! They were generals, lovers, heroes, Archmages! So why am I still sitting here on a useless pile of words, just, still me? Why?! Is it something I’m doing right now? Did I mess it up a long time ago? Is that why-”

Why what, Jackdaw?

Why your memory runs clean as a fresh river, until one day it just stops?

Why your earliest moment was spent alone?

Why no one ever came for you?

She fumbled through her pockets, fishing out a precious scrap of folded-up paper. A list, started by a friend. With a recent addition, in a shaking hand.

Jackdaw: Worries about a lot of things, but her friends will do anything to help and protect her. Worries a lot about what others might think, because she cares very deeply. Good listener.

Ruined the Vermissian Line.

“...is that why every name I try ends up a disaster?”

She cast her tearful eyes to the waiting darkness.

“Please. Just. Tell me what I’m doing wrong...”

****************************

Metal on metal. Blade on blade. Heroism on Dominion.

“Oh, so I’m broken without you, is that it? I'm only whole if I waste my life under your heel?” Her blade dances through the air, catching yours at every turn. “Gosh, I almost forgot what a piece of work you were. Couldn’t just tell me to leave, so you wake me up every morning with a fake gun in my mouth? Who does that?!”

“Getting away from you was the best decision I ever made. And your Jackdaw? Your Jackdaw’s a fool for giving up all this to stick around with a dumpster fire like you."

"I dunno, for all your gloating about how great it is to get away from me you're still here," said Ailee, face settling into a smirk.

Ring ring ring. She has her blade overhand like a samurai and rains down blows from above. Crash crash crash! Slowly she's accelerating and the pace and a frenzied smile is breaking out over her face.

"So stop whining!" she said as wrothful fire blazed around her feet, prideful peacock tendrils exploded behind her, and regal judgement wrapped in purple vines around her falling golden sword making it hammer and broadsword all at once. "You want this! You want to throw yourself into my fire! You want to test yourself against me, blade to blade, word for word! Well here I am! Here's your moment! And if you don't enjoy it while it's here I'll fucking kill you!"

Lucien!

Somewhere, The Fairy's Aire and Death Waltz is being played, enthusiastically and with great technical skill, on a pipe organ threatening to come apart from the violence being done to its keys. But that might be the point. Whatever a clown has become has no greater aspiration in eternity than being able to play something that should, by all rights, be unplayable. The band plays on, and the musical assault whines and howls over the chaos of the storm.

"It's downright magical, ain't it?" The Ringmaster has shucked off whatever he once was. It's impossible to say if he was once human or an animal; he looms like a statue, clothing pulled taut over bulging muscles. His buttons are gleaming gold roughly hammered into shape, and his coat is the rusty red of dried blood. His mouth is a nightmare of crooked knives, and his eyes are hot coals under the brim of his hat. "We haven't had a holler like this in too long, too long. We'll have a right sacrament for you, Pilgrim," he says, to the Professor trying to hide behind his book.

All around, grips tighten on pins and clubs and cleavers. In the midst of the storm, the assembled clowns of the Dark Carnival don't look funny at all. They look like monsters born from a cup of blood, wearing joviality and ridiculousness as an ill-fitting suit. They are a final punchline, mocking the world for thinking that anything could matter at the lip of reality's crucible. And the moment that one of the two feuding magicians wins, as soon as there's a winner on one side or another, they'll go into a feeding frenzy.

And only pieces of Ailee and Evil Jackdaw will be left after that. Very small ones. And a pitcher for blessing the man who doesn't want to go through with becoming immortal. You are, once again, the man of the hour. What's the last cheap trick you've got up your sleeve?

***

Coleman!

"Of course I don't remember," Black Coleman says, sourly: not directed at you, that longsuffering bitterness, but outwards. At this madhouse at the bottom of the drain of reality. "For all I know, you're an Angel trying to test my commitment. Or maybe you're the real one, and I just walked out of the Heart with all my memories no more than an hour old. The Vermissian was our stability, Coles, and with it gone, everything's sliding down into the Heart itself."

He squats down on his haunches and gives Sasha a lookover. "Though I've been thinking a lot about how things went down, back when I had to hatch Sasha myself down there. Maybe if I had the thought earlier, things wouldn't have gotten so bad. I thought I had to make her something that could survive the rails. But maybe what we really need is something that makes the rails better."

***

Jackdaw!

The Heart regards you in the dark with... not indifference. A lack of answers. A hole in the world that broken people climb down into to try to find something that's important enough to risk everything for.

In the dark, Wolf pulls you closer. She's still so skinny. So painfully thin. But there's a wiry strength in her that makes clinging to her easy. She strokes the back of your head and silently invites you to let the tears flow. The world is huge and cruel and doesn't make any sense at all, and the Heart is huge and cruel and eats sense for dinner, but the two of you are small and kind anyway. That's the secret, the one that she can't say out loud because she suffers from a scarcity of words just as you have too many, and for much the same reasons.

Two hurt and broken people hold each other, and the Heart watches from all around, in the wet and the dark and the silent. No. Not silent. A low drum. A heartbeat. A pulse in the dark. An absence of words. And in its presence, the boundaries between identities become more fluid. Wolf has opened herself to you, and you in turn to Wolf, and words are unnecessary here.

Roll to Speak Softly with Wolf, or to Speak Softly with the Heart, as you choose.

Nobody expects the last card up your sleeve to be from the tarot.

Lucien rips their shirt open. Their hair is tall and ruffled with static and sweat. To kiss their cheek would be to lick a battery. To kiss their lips would be to know the hour of your death.

Kids are scared of clowns. Kings are scared of Fools.

This is where the chaos sings purest, and Lucien is in the mood to dance to the beating. This is different from being subsumed in the role of Fool of the Sky Court, in the place of mushrooms and angels where reality was at its thinnest. They were safe as long as they did not think of the past or future - They lived in the moment, between concepts.

Lucien is the Fool Inverted, a role of his own making. He will dance through the chaos, though the role grants him no power that was not already his own. Reckless, daring, stupid - and he's got a bloody gun. He knows his future and he thinks only of it. He will land his punchline. There will be no encore.

Lucien shoots ᴇᴠɪʟ ᴊᴀᴄᴋᴅᴀᴡ point blank in the spine, through the place where her heart should be. This is no great challenge. She is so focused on Ailee, the real threat. His gun is a joke. Everybody knows that. It is a work of moments to walk behind her, silent under the impossible thumping music. There was no way this could have killed her, everyone knows that too. It doesn't need to. It ends the fight.[1]

She will hold the clown's attention better like this, anyway. The old saw about the tiger and the running shoes comes to mind. "Surely you can't shoot all the clowns?" "I don't have to-" The clowns flock to the feast.

Lucien is standing in ᴊᴀᴄᴋᴅᴀᴡ's silhouette as she crumples, and stands eye to eye with Ailee. Are those tears in them? Or are his own eyes watering, staring into her power like this. Let her see him and know what he has done, and what he will do, and for all the love he has ever held for her, let her understand.

But we aren't finished yet, are we? The bouncers are walking towards the table. Nothing to hold back now, there will be no rainy days left to save for after this. It is time to cheat.

Surma had a book on her, oh yes she did. What kind of Bookhunter doesn't domesticate their most useful catches? It's just one of those things that caught his eye, made him so immediately cautious about hiding a spine from her - har har, a running gag.

Wouldn't it be such a shame if she had lost that book when the word of Regret hit her? Dropped it, even, in the scuffle. Wouldn't it be a shame if Lucien had picked it up? Wouldn't it be miraculous if it was just the thing he needed?

As any card-counter knows; good cheating is indistinguishable from good luck. What was it he told the professor about his ability to extrapolate? He had tapped into the ultimate nexus of bad luck in the Heart, and he's had plenty of time to think about it. He'd been right in the thick of it when it blew up - able to learn from both cause and effect. It's a damned shame he didn't get more of a chance to practice.

As it is, he'd just learned enough to see the thrum of the thread leading Ailee and Surma to himself at just the wrong moment, and for the spiral out of control since. Just hit after hit of bad luck and awful coincidence. Enough to form a pattern. Enough to extrapolate.

"Tell Coleman to hug Sasha for me, she deserves it, and tell Jackdaw to always remember me fondly. Please." His voice breaks too hard to say anything more to Ailee. He's crying. How can he be crying, when he is also laughing and smiling? He laughs at that, too. This is all very silly, isn't it? Yes, it is.

He takes Surma's book from his pile, opens it to a black-velvet bookmarked page, and hurls it at Ailee's chest. It's a panic button. It's a safe escape. And, if Surma was especially clever and good at her work - which Lucien suspects she is - she will have linked herself to it, so she will go wherever Ailee is as well.[2]

Somewhere safe.

There is only one last thing to take care of. The ringmaster is still here, and Lucien still has five bullets. The clowns will only be distracted feeding on ᴊᴀᴄᴋᴅᴀᴡ for as long as she keeps squirming. After that, there is him and the professor.

ᴊᴀᴄᴋᴅᴀᴡ is live bait. Let them get closer. Lucien has five bullets and a target.

Lucien moves through the clowns in a blur of burlesque, ballet and boxing. Leap, lunge, kick-in-groin, spin, twirl, stomp-on-foot, shoot-in-kneecap, two, three, four.[3] The professor is dragged behind him, when he’s not being pushed ahead of him. The clowns are ripping into the mockery of their friend, and there is a heavy spray of blood in the air keeping their attention.

He does not have to fight the clowns. He just has to push through them. Any that get funny ideas about the weaponized professor he carries with him is dispatched in hilarious fashion. The clowns do not see a kick to the genitalia as a threat, they see it as a joke, because that's all Lucien is, remember?

The Ringmaster doesn't fall for it. He makes his way for Lucien, not the carrion. The Ringmaster knows a good joke when he sees one, and he doesn't want to be the butt of it. The Ringmaster is here to escort Lucien from the table and drop the curtains.

One last bit of sleight of hand. As long as he's looking at Lucien, he's not looking at the Professor about to drop him into Crows. There will be consequences for this. They are in the middle of the clown mob, just as planned, and he's played all the cheap tricks he's had. There's no way out of this one.

Lucien smiles as he thinks: Fried pickles are a hell of a last meal, aren't they? He can still taste them on his breath. Lovely.

Once upon a time a little mouse had made the decision to save the world.

People would ask her 'from what?' as if heroism was about waiting for opportunity to come knocking on your door. She'd always thought it should be the opposite. Evil hid, after all. It filled pits and archives and dark places, swarming and multiplying until it burst the seawalls and its creatures stalked the streets of Grand Jelt. They're fearsome enough while they're up here, how terrible must they be when they're down there?

But that was a lack of vision. The fingers are far more terrible than the Heart. She determined she was going to slip by them and plunge her golden sword into evil's core. Everything else, including becoming Evil's own avatar, was mere stratagem. Her deception would need to be perfect to fool the emerald eyes of King Dragon, the eyes that she herself wore. Be proud, Ailee. Be wrothful and judgemental and wasteful and curious. The fire alone is not burned.

"I'd like to let you in on a little secret to these formal events. Always ask for your glass to be topped up every three sips, make sure you always have something to nibble on with it, and nobody can tell how much you're really having. Well. For a while, anyway."

And at first Lucien had seemed like just what she'd needed. A ruthless, thuggish mind wrapped in a smiling face and hideous shirt, no different from the rest of his government. Here, she had thought, is a henchman - exactly the kind of person I won't have to mourn when he dies within the Heart. Exactly the sort of person whose life I can spend wastefully at some critical moment to prove to King Dragon that I am his creature and slide the celestial sword one step closer towards the Heart.

And that's exactly what happened - or close enough to the plan that she can run when she has to. She'd known that when the moment came she couldn't afford to hesitate or let regret - or Regret for that matter - slow her down. She'd known she'd step over the bodies of all her friends before the end, and here she was doing just that. She'd allowed herself all those dark and melancholy moods on the promise that when the time came she'd have done her crying in advance.

But now the Sword of Heroism was no longer a blade from a fairytale in her hand. Now it was a six-shot revolver. A hidden weapon, one she could conceal within the folds of her shirt until the time came to shoot evil itself in the spine. He'd gotten there first but she'd bring down the bigger game.

She was too full of words for just tears, and before long they spill forth from her too.

“I never remembered any other name.” She clung tighter. Wolf didn’t complain Or even noticed. She could’ve squeezed with all her might, and she doubted she could bend her an inch. “And, it couldn’t be right. Jackdaw isn’t a fox’s name. Jackdaw’s the name of, of,” Funny, how the words clawed to stay in her heart, when it was just the two of them, without a thing more to lose. But it was much too late for anything less than honesty. “A...cruel little bird. A thief. Who steals away treasured things it has no use for, and preens itself up like it owns them. Like they make it special. And, important.”

“I just thought...it couldn’t be right. If I had my real name, I could, somehow, know who I really was. Except that wasn’t it. That wasn’t really it.”

Why did you come down here, Jackdaw? What would bring you to this awful place?

“I wanted to know I wasn’t that. I wanted a name I could hold up as proof.” No great quest. No real prize she was after. She just...wanted to know she wasn’t trash. That she was something. And not just a stupid pile of other people’s treasure. And now that she’d said it out loud, she could truly appreciate what a vain, horriblereason she’d risked her life for.

Wolf didn’t complain. Or even noticed. She sat and stroked her head with the same care as when she didn’t know Jackdaw was a wretched, pitiful thief. Which was wrong of her, of course. Mistaken. Confused. Blinded. Deceived. Tricked. Duped. Fooled. On the cusp of regret.

Instead of saying any of those or other equally suitable words, Jackdaw put her paw on top of Wolf’s, to stop her, and.

Left it there.

Maybe...she did have one more thing she wanted. Or, rather, seeing the miserable wreck of her dreams, she wanted something more than that. Wanted to want something more than that. It didn’t feel fair, in this moment, to moan about her own troubles exclusively.

So. She left it there. And waited for Wolf to take her turn.

[Rolling to Speak Softly with Wolf: 5 + 5 - 1 = 9. What is her treasure? What is it that she wanted, all this time?]

Coleman taps Sasha on the calf, and she obligingly reaches down.

When did she get so big? It hasn't been that long since their journey started, surely? Time was, he barely fit inside her cockpit; to move was to get jabbed by some lever, dial, oddly placed bit of metal, and he'd come out with scales rubbed raw from the squeeze. Maybe that's why kobolds, after all--nobody larger could possibly fit in a nascent engine.

He hasn't had any missing patches of scales in a while now, has he?

Look at her! Tall, mighty, gleaming, big enough to scoop him up in one hand, cup him like a child against her. He wriggles closer, presses his back against her. Feels the familiar shifting of the coal in her firebox, the soft prickle of the water in her boiler, warms himself in the heat seeping through his overalls and into his scales.

"Amalgamation," he murmurs. "Take bits of the Heart, shove it into her DNA. Armor her, graft in enough of the Flood to save her from drowning in it. I remember."

What must Black Sasha look like? Warped--recognizably an engine, but more Heart than Machine, stealing elements of angels, clowns, flood, anything and everything to help her survive. Could he recognize his own Sasha in there? Would he want to?

Quietly, he pulls out the little rag, and sets to work brushing off the coal dust his overalls have left on Sasha. It's something to do, something meaningful, to keep his hands thinking.

"But to make the rails better?" He huffs a small, pained laugh. "Well, you and I both know we're no Carinadir. We might be able to set Wormwood straight with a time machine and seven lifetimes of work, but then it wouldn't be Wormwood, worm-would it?"

It's a lame joke, and neither of them laughs.

Frowning, Coleman dips the rag in the can of polish and studies the bronzed plate. "But... Well, it occurs to me that we might not be able to make the rails themselves better. But what about the trains? No, no, hang on, I getcha, I'm not talkin' about Amalgamation, lemme get at it..."

Y'see, every train is part of the Vermissian Line, see? Technically, they all follow the same codes and there's some agreed-upon regulations and practices set down by the ancients and revised as necessary. But every Engine and every Engineer knows the real score--every train is a line unto its own. It's an empire of one, with their enmities, borders, ancient feuds. And of course, everyone knows that their train is the best.

"What if--instead of meldin' our train to fit the Heart physically--we tried to bring the Engines together? Again, not amalgamation, but friendship-like? Come to another engine's aid if they're in need, sorta thing. Cooperate in ways that don't involve decidin' who's invadin' who's track. Sounds like in your future, we fracture. Every train for 'emselves, kill and steal an' cannibalize as needed and as can be done. If we can figure that out--how to unite the lines--ain't no war to be had, right?"

Jackdaw!

Seven by seven by seven.

Wolf pulls out something that isn't a candle and unlights it. It flickers dark and hungry, and you see that which is not in its light. Wolf smiling, hearty, hale. Unhaunted. Fortunate.

The woman who used to have a name that wasn't just Wolf came down into the Heart because she was hunting something. A sign, a crown, a betrayal. Seeking it, even. She hated that she dreamed of it, that in empty moments it would signify itself at her, seven by seven by seven, flickering candles one by one on the Candle Line. She took up a gig on the trains because the kobolds were friendly, and because she needed to go someplace that was otherwise than she was, and because she could drown the signs and symbols in the ten thousand lights of the Candle Line. And then her fate swallowed her up and stranded her in the oubliette of fortune, where all the bad girls go when they won't stop but they won't go forwards, neither.

You're seeking a Name, Jackdaw. She's seeking something similar, but it's not hers. It belongs to something else, some other story down here, the light at the bottom of a well or at the very edge of dreaming. What matters is that you're both being eaten up by something so much bigger than you. When Wolf regains her voice and her strength, that story is going to keep pulling at her. Her story. And maybe it'll eat her, and maybe she'll come through it different. Sometimes two people just meet for a little while, you know? And sometimes they give what they've got, because why else do we do things? Why have things if not for the moments when they're needed by the people whose orbits we move into?

In the priceless light of something that's not a candle, you can see the lack of exit clearly, if not painlessly. Wolf (which is not her name, but it is the name you know, a collection of sounds all crammed against each other, a signifier for someone with her history and heart trapped behind the hollows of the words she ate when there was nothing else left) takes your paw and leads you fearlessly to the place where there is not an exit (for of course there is no exit from this place, and it is not too dark and too regular and too impossibly frightening to look at, looming like the side door that led down to the unlit basement that you always convinced yourself did not have the monster from the woodcut so that you could walk past it without vividly imagining those bulging eyes leering at you through the window, a not-door that might as well be screaming that here there are monsters), and Wolf's shadow flickers with bells and candlelights and the way that light passes through the windows of a train, and for a moment, in the unlight, she is not beautiful and she is not at peace.

My treasure is that, impossibly, I am still alive, Wolf does not whisper into your ear, because she cannot, because she is skin and bone and trauma. I am still alive and even if every step brings me closer to the one I cannot take back, it's still one more than I thought I'd have. I am alive, and I choose.

And she chooses to walk you through the place that is not an exit, and into the rain (which does exist) and the storm (which does exist) and the clowns, wild and frothing and fatal (which should not exist). Wolf growls a warning, tail lashing, holding nothing, putting herself between you and the clowns and--

Oh.

Lucien.

***

Lucien!

click-clack click-clack go the hagstones. Crowhame is twisting and infecting the storm all around you as the Professor holds the book open as desperately as he can. The rain is black. The space between the rain is white. The Ringmaster is an offensive purple splotch of color, grabbing you with a hand like a sack of knives. And above you, the hagstones of the Flayed go click-clack click-clack click-clack as it gives you two a frozen idiot grin, all black-and-white-and-red all over, the black-dot eyes rolling in those white side-sockets. What better god to greet a clown but the shrike-god, the trophy-god, the sacrifice-god, white skin pinned back from white animal bones with black sutures, white stones swinging in that opened chest where all his organs should be, white antlers splitting the black sky into fractals?

You swing from one arm, which may very well be dislocated, as the Ringmaster bares his teeth in the mother of all smiles and then roars a challenge at the intruding alien god. (The Flayed being what it is, it doesn't seem to notice; its jaw clatters in what might be laughter, or might just be a spasm of sinew.) It appears that the Ringmaster intends to beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker. And there's not a lot of soft places to land there, just angles and bony knobs and fingers sharpened into talons.

Well, it's been a good run, hasn't it? And look on the bright side: you'll probably black out from the physical trauma well before you actually die. Like falling asleep at the end of a very long day.

***

Ailee!

There is a fountain. It falls in and on itself, water dancing for the sake of dancing, and Surma unlaces her boots and slips her feet into the pool. "<Bastard,>" she says, affectionately. "<A genuine> Victory of Crows <and he just takes it away from me.>" She doesn't talk about how Lucien was a hero. She doesn't ask you how you're feeling or tell you that everything's going to be all right. She just invites you to sit next to her by implication.

The interdimensional hutch is decked out in trophies from the Heart and keepsakes from the Old Country and a small shrine with the prayer sticks lit to keep the memory of people she's lost alive. What's one more stick slowly smouldering out? What's one more name added to the sticks, never to really die as long as they're remembered? What's a pretty girl like her doing alone at the bottom of reality, if not looking for one more score to make the prices she's already paid worth it?

The gun lies heavy in your hand, and ridiculously, impossibly, you know how you're going to kill King Dragon. Or, at the very least, what's been consecrated for that purpose.

***

Coleman!

"You know," Black Coleman says, thoughtfully, "the Heart can piss off. Because for you, that means you can try it, see if it works. But you and I both know that we're not going to meet again, like as not, and now I've got a face to put to the question of what if it had worked? What if I'd made that gamble, that we wouldn't tear each other apart over dwindling fuel supplies and the Powers muscling in on the Vermissian and... what if, what if, what if."

He tosses you a bit of the coal that Sasha likes particular. Naturally, you catch it. "Good luck making a better story, though. I'd like to think that yours ends well, you know? And in one version of the Heart's fuckery with time and space, there was a kobold who had a train, and for a little while, everything was all right. But you're needed somewhere else right now, aren't you?"

Aren't you indeed. Here you are, jawing off with yourself, when someone needs to go find where everyone's run off to. It's the conductor who knows the end of the line best, after all.

There's always been a romanticism to the cyanide capsule hidden in a tooth. The problem with it was that it made just about any blow to the jaw lethal. Always seemed like a terrible idea.

Well.

He can't tell through all of the everything, but Lucien hopes the professor didn't suffer. That'd be a real downer note to end on.

Ailee was surprised by the smile, but let it stay. That was a good thought. That was how she should tell this story. He went out stealing a book. She had a feeling that, a few years removed from these events, he'd love to hear her tell that story.

"Small thinking," she said as the water brushed her ankles. "Both of you. Why go through all that trouble to steal a book about someone else? Aim a little higher and the books will be about you."

She sat amidst emerald eyes. That's right. Those are her lines. A comprehensible motivation: pride. Vanity on a cosmic scale. Nothing new beneath those crackling eyes. Nothing new except a wink.

"You coming with or cashing out?"

She could never stop thinking, could she?

Walking through a land of nots, stepping into a downpour of crows and clowns, as her mouth gasped and her heart cried out and both her paws gripped Wolf’s, her studious mind was packing it all away for later. All of it, every moment, into the boxes now. No telling when she might need these again. Musn’t go to waste! Later, she may need the word for the quiet warmth at the end of all things, and out would come their time in the Angel’s mouth. The face of a woman, not-shadowed...that would go someplace she could get at easily. Perhaps, right alongside...

My treasure is that I’m still alive.

She could never stop thinking. Even as her useless body locked up in terror, and a hundred desperate screams failed to pass her throat, her mind held onto that one, shining thought. Amid the miserable wreck of her dreams, and crumbling of her present, she held on. She held on to something she wanted more than a name. More than proof against her own uselessness.

She wanted Lucien to have one more step.

Her arms yanked. Her legs leapt. Somehow, she pulled Wolf behind an upturned donut cart, the fallen fryer hissing in defiance of the storm. “Stay.” She pointed at the ground between them. “Stay. Anchor. For me.” They were now two, again. She with too many words, and her with not enough. But there was no time, and she hardly knew what she was doing herself. Out of her infinite repertoire of better people’s magic, she reached deep into her heart, and offered all she had to Wolf, and the word was

“Please?”

[Jackdaw’s clever brain activates Let Me See That on A Victory Of Crows:
-Who made it, and why should I care about them?
-What was this made to do, and how can I use it or break it?]

Coleman is not so vain as to think that the Heart will fail without him. He's not here to kill King Dragon or set right the abuses of the monarchy. The shifting pathways to the depths of the Heart are littered with the remains of train eggs and the knights that failed. If he and Sasha don't make it, the only ones to mourn him will probably be the crew of the Mighty Natascha.

But, as he feeds the nugget of coal into Sasha's burner and receives the answering purr, well... Well, the Vermissian's gonna fail with him. It maybe wasn't his fault that Wormwood imploded while he was there, but he was there. Ain't it at least his job to make sure that things don't entirely explode just 'cause he wasn't good enough?

Over his thoughts, though, he can hear the screams, feel the wind. The Carnival is heaving, the screams of tormented passengers turning to screams of joy from the clowns. Something is wrong. The world is red and white and--

He eases the throttle forwards, and Sasha's steps turn to a run.

He should be running away. Sasha comes first, right? If she's crushed by something, then he's not going to be able to help anyone. But if he runs...

If he runs, it's every train for themselves. It's scrabbling over dwindling resources. It's "not my problem."

The world bleaches white and red as he approaches the screams. Bones and crows and clowns, a fury of winds, the Ringmaster in all his glory, like skin stretched over something that's forgotten how to be human, and above it all...

Below it all, Jackdaw and Wolf behind a donut card. Lucien, dangling limply from a fist made of all the wrong bones.

And somewhere in there, a path that lets all of them get out alive.

[5,6,+1. 12 on Look Closely.
-Tell me about the Ringmaster. How could they hurt/help me?
-What will happen if I join in on the Ringmaster's side?
-Tell me about the things summoned by Victory of Crows. How can they hurt/help me?]

Jackdaw!

A Victory of Crows was manifested in the latter years of the Hlon Dynasty by the mystic scholar and cult leader Birthing-from-Stones. That is to say, the book was made of and from him by his disciples, a method to stop the great rented way torn by the rites of Hu Xian, who sought in that otherplace a final vindication in their long rivalry.

Can you see them in their green tunics, Jackdaw? The rise and fall of their axes, the white-hot terror of acting as a cordon, even as Birthing-from-Stones writes on each page he draws from inside himself, his eyes lucid even as his body shakes feverish with its transmutation of form. Blood on snow, red on white that becomes black, as the trees loom huge and hot and hateful, as the crows laugh. There is no sophisticated argument to be had here about the value of the extant world and its right to not be overwritten, to be a palimpsest like the many-layered Heart that hangs below all the possible worlds. They fight for the simple reason that we treasure what we have, and will not dive into some new world without thought, without consideration, without knowing some small thing about how our lives will change-- unless we are like Hu Xian, who became a slash of red and white, who emerged in a glory of eyes and tails at the eleventh hour, at the very stroke of her doom. Shake out the red, watch it clot to black, let the snow slump under the heat.

But by then it was too late for her. The nameless disciple lifted A Victory of Crows from the crumpled remnant of Birthing-from-Stones and drew Crowhame through the rent and into their master's final argument. The oral tradition that sprang from that spiritual surgery was, incidentally, the birth of the Urlokan Parade-Opera, with its fearful masks and procession of actors from one side of the stage to the other, though conventions have certainly changed since then, and the stock archetypes that you'd be familiar with now have little to do with the gods of Crowhame who marched, tumultuous and disdainful, into their new prison, and last of all Hu Xian digging more rents into the world with her claws, obliterating two dozen eyewitnesses with her wild omnidirectional glances, but unable to resist the gravity of the place prepared for her and her new family.

How lucky for you, Jackdaw, that despite the great pressure of the world within that bursts frothing forth into monochrome horror, the book was made from the start to be closed! Once you have the right leverage, the right place to stand, it is conceptually simple to shut the book, and in the process, to draw back the world from its high-pressure outlet. And now, of all times, is the only time that you can! Without suffering greatly as you force your way deep within, that is. Every moment you wait, the Professor (as much statue hacked out of white stone as person, now) becomes definitionally further and further away from you all, buffeted by the world surging out all around him.

Or you could destroy it, tear out the spine and obliterate not just the Dark Carnival and the Grail but an entire layer of the Heart. Not even Crowhame can overwrite the entire Heart, but you would very certainly be making a new landmark in this alien geography, one that would be greater than the Flood could ever dream. Of course, you and everyone here would then have to very quickly self-select for survival, and most of the unfortunates that found themselves in Crowhame would find themselves defined by relation to the attention of a god. This is bad. You do not want this. You do not want your existence to revolve around how you are acted upon by the Flayed, or the Wheel, or the Long, or the Eyewitch.

Especially because time is not native to Crowhame. It is a contaminant. In deep Crowhame, all things happen forever and ever and ever.

Wolf reaches out and squeezes your shoulder. She gives you a ragged, keen growl; she’s out of spoons for words. But when you pull away, you can see the space where the connection between the two of you is Not. And in Wolf’s hands, that’s as good as a chain.

***

Coleman!

The Ringmaster is discovering the limits of violence. He is an invincible honking war-sage, a concentrated murder-wind that snaps bones and tears leather-skin and smashes down the Flayed over and over and over again. But the definition of the Flayed is that it is changed into new forms by the application of violence (inflicted with Lucien or otherwise), and it unfolds with every blow, stretches new taxidermy-limbs and claws and clutches at the sky to pull itself back up. Under its idiot smile he is changing, too. If nothing is done, then eventually the Ringmaster will seize the Flayed and twist its open ribcage in two directions, and then with a mighty heave he will rip his monstrous self apart as the Flayed stays still, and then it will scoop him up in its labyrinth of hands and begin to make him a new creation, and all that purple will leech out until the clown-doll is all red and white and black.

It might not even want to hurt him. It is very literally not of this world, after all.

As for what might happen if you got involved? Depends. The damn thing would probably react very... unproductively to being hit with Sasha. Hey, kids, who wants to see what it looks like when an immature train gets its furnace twisted out of its steampipes? And the Ringmaster probably wouldn't be very grateful in the moment. Or afterwards. Until the very moment it all goes wrong for him, there won't be any doubt in his boiling bones that he's winning this fight. If you're hoping that you might have the Dark Carnival owe you a favor, well, you'd be better off asking Jackdaw to fake a miracle from the Grail. That'd probably do something useful.

Above the Carnival, the impossibly huge head of the Long looms, and all else begins to fall under its vast shadow. You don't want that thing to get involved, either; it's tough to fight something that you can't, by definition, see the other end of. The longer this goes on, the more risk that nobody's going to be able to get them shoved back into the book and still be able to get out before the door closes, if you will.

***

Ailee!

"I should cash out," Surma says, but it's amicable. The look she gives you is sly, calculating. You become a bookhunter for two reasons all tied up together, after all: you owe an astronomical amount to the kind of people who make that a health hazard, and you have a lust for adventure. The sort of adventure where you win it all or lose everything. "But, oh, look, my prize is gone. Shoot. Too bad I don't know anybody who might point me in the direction of a consolation prize."

There's her pride, too: she's not some innocent like Jackdaw, easily spun round on herself. She has standards. And she expects you to damn well show her respect if you want her time. She's not going to huff and puff about it, but when she looks you in that glowing eye and doesn't so much as flinch, that's what she's saying.

"The Heart," said Ailee, standing up, "makes one hell of a consolation prize."

None of her daydreaming imagined this; an 11th hour companion, unknown and untested with matters of cosmic importance. She did not know her strengths or weaknesses or her story or the shape of her heart. But something inside of her made her want to trust Surma and Ailee was not experienced enough with that emotion to say what it was.

What she could say is that whoever this girl was, at the least she wasn't afraid.

"I'm going all the way down," she said. "And I'm not prepared for it. I think that's the only reason I made it this far. Preparing for a journey like this drives you mad, I think." She thought of the ancient and fossilized academics and scientists, the professor driven to clown worship as the grand achievement to a lifetime of study. "So this is the smash and grab approach to reality. Trying to break a game played by ancient wizards and devils by way of berserker rush. The odds suck but they're better than I'd ever get by playing fair. So, that's the pitch - do you want to bet your life on trying to out-stupid the smartest being in the cosmos?"

Not everything can be blamed on Wormwood, but it'd be damn nice to think that this could have been avoided.

So, can't fight. Running could have been an option, but he and Sasha are running towards it. He scans the wisdom passed down from his pappy for ways to survive, and mostly finds "don't be here." Practical, but not very useful.

He crosses the distance to Jackdwaw in two strides, and huddles behind the cart. "I sure hope you know how we can get Lucien back," he says, "because I'm pretty sure Sasha won't survive fighting that. What've you got?"