INTERLUDE II

‘I thought you vowed not to end up in a prison cell ever again?’ Grigio spoke up, when Dwellin Dorr had fallen silent, occupying herself with the moons and the crash of waves. The scribe took an opportunity to massage his sore hands. Grigio had never once considered how inspiring a pistol and a cleaver could be when it came to the count of his words.

‘Look at you, remembering all the details! You trying to needle me, scribe? Sore about the one star rating I gave your early work?’ Dwellin asked, squinting at the night sky.

Grigio pretended to clean the ink from his claws. That had prickled his spines ever so little, he couldn’t lie.

‘It was the bard’s fault first,’ Dwellin replied. ‘The rest of the blame lies firmly with the Venerance and their passion for power.’

‘Seems the prosecutors had good reason to lock you up, even if it wasn’t the right reason.’

Within a blink, Dwellin’s stare shifted to skewer him. Grigio’s heart clenched until he saw the smile at the corner of her mouth.

‘You think me evil, don’t you, Grigio?’ she asked. ‘Tell me.’

Grigio’s mouth became peculiarly dry. He recoiled as the huge drake sat on the windowsilllike a misplaced gargoyle reached his sinuous head forwards, and licked at the apple core perched on Grigio’s desk.

‘No…’ he began to lie.

‘Dear me. I’ve read every tale you’ve penned, Grigio. You’re a merchant of black and white. If you were to write me, it would be as a wytch in one of your stories. A monster, immutably broken. Good only for defeating by some swordsaint or alchemage. Tell me I’m wrong, I dare you.’s

‘Every one of my stories…?’ Flattery distracted him for a moment. ‘No. I don’t want to say. You wouldn’t like it.’

Dwellin laughed. ‘If you’re worried I’ll cut your tongue out for being honest, you have my word that I won’t. Trust me. Everything will stay…’ she waggled her cleaver. ‘Attached. You’re far too important, I’ll have you know.’

For now, spoke the pessimism and fear within Grigio.

‘Fine. Yes. You’re evil,’ he snapped. ‘Is that what you want to hear? If I’m to believe any of this is possible, and that the Venerance could be so unfathomably callous, then yours is still a tale of scum and villainy. You watched your friends get shot and barely mention remorse. You’ve stolen and tricked and pilfered without a care. You don’t fight for anyone but yourself, and make all the excuses you want, but you aspire to nothing but revenge and power just like those you decry. You might as well be a heretic for all the obedience you’ve shown the Venerance and the Great Watcher. In every story I’ve written, in every story in the Realms, you would be the villain, Dwellin.’

He had gone too far. He knew it. Grigio tensed as Dwellin swung her legs from the bed and laid her pistol on her lap facing him. Tasparil growled.

’Perfect!’ exclaimed Dwellin with a relieved grin. ‘Just as I had hoped. I was worried that wasn’t coming across. Did I not tell you that was far from a hero’s tale?’

‘Yes, you did,’ Grigio muttered, feeling his own relief wash through him. Dwellin was evil, and he knew what evil was capable of in tales such as this. And yet why was it, then, that deep beneath his fear and loathing, did he still wish for more of Dwellin’s tale? Grigio had a fine idea what she would do with him when this was over, and yet he couldn’t help but long for more, even if it meant rushing towards the end. Her hooks had forced their way deeper, curse her. He had even caught himself nodding to her ruminations. Caught his faith in the Venerance wavering. Felt questions climbing his throat. He was beginning to hate her for it.

Dwellin rose to stoke the fire, spraying cinders on Grigio’s already ruined carpet. ‘Problem is, good scribe, the world’s not black and white. Evil is a matter of perspective.’

Grigio tensed his jaw. A glimmer of hope sputtered like the taper Dwellin lit. She was right, curse it. Corruption and redemption. The fall or climb of a character. Dwelling was as corrupted as could be. But if a person like Dwellin might just be saved, then her redemption might just save him in turn. He could pray, at least.

‘You look tired, scribe. Maybe we’ll start fresh in the morning—’

‘No,’ Grigio blurted. ‘I mean…’

The noise of a gong interrupted his paltry excuses. It came from deep at the roots of the tower.

Dwellin spun her pistol in her hand, already on the way to the window. ‘You expecting anyone, Grigio?’

‘No—’

‘Don’t you lie to me now, you old lizard.’

‘I’m not!’ The scribe racked his mind. ‘People come and go from this tower all the time. Traders with supplies. Replacement prosecutors. It—it could be anyone.’

His captor peered out past the drake and down to the earth, far below.

‘You should know by now I don’t like interruptions to my plans, scribe,’ said Dwellin. She came marching around the desk and seized Grigio by the gilded collar.

‘It’s not my fault!’ he protested. ‘I don’t know who it is. They don’t tell me anything!’

Grigio was shoved against the windowsill and forcibly leaned over so that his feet left the ground. A wagon led by a kumi and heavy with barrels lay below at the foot of his tower. Several figures in humble green threads and woven shawls wandered about, waving their arms impatiently. One began to holler upwards, hands cupped around his mouth.

‘Hello in there! Anybody awake?’

‘Recognise them?’ Dwellin hissed.

‘They’re from the local farms. I don’t know their names, but the old man’s the father and those three are his sons. They bring vegetables for the kitchen every week just like they have done for years,’ Grigio explained. Though they had never shared more than a wave and a good morning, he had watched the boys grow from brats to men. ‘You’re not going to kill them, are you?’

A gong rang again, agitated in its clanging. One of the farmers had a lantern and was shining it on a reddish-brown stain in the grass. A discarded sword lay close to the tower.

‘That depends on you, Grigio,’ Dwellin answered, winding the cog of her pistol until it glowed fiercely. ‘And whether you can get rid of them. Make it quick, would you?’

‘Hello down there!’ Grigio yelled without a thought. ‘We’re… erm, closed for the evening!’

‘Closed?’ Dwellin whispered. ‘Thought you were the imaginative sort.’

‘You what?’ a deep and aged voice yelled. The grizzled father of the bunch.

‘Come back another day!’ Grigio hollered back.

A younger voice rose up. ‘And leave this all to rot? Are you damaged in the head, scaleface?’

A yelp came as the speaker was elbowed sharply.

The whispers were the kind that were no whispers at all. ‘That’s the lord of the tower, you tit. Shut your hole and have some respect.’

‘My apologies, sire!’ spoke an older tone. ‘Forgive me for askin’, but is all well? I see nobody guarding the door like usual–‘

‘All’s very well and fine, thank you! No problems here! Nothing to see.’ Grigio cut him off with a squeaking voice. ‘Go away now!’

The scribe watched Dwellin as not-so-whispered complaints of ‘lizard-shit’ and ‘bollocks’ wafted upwards on the night breezes.

‘Beggin' your pardon, sire, but there’s a lot of blood out here. Looks like somebody’s been hurt—’

‘No!’ Grigio shouted. Not at the farmers, but at Dwellin, who had taken a long glass vial of brightly-coloured coloured dust from a pocket in her armour, snapped something in its cap, and now dangled it near the void of the window.

Dwellin deflected his meagre grasping with a slap across his face. ‘Got to do better than that,’ she hissed. ‘You sound far too polite for the so-called lord of a tower.’

‘I’d rather that than be like you,’ Grigio hissed right back.

The farmer was an insistent sort. ‘You alright up there, sire?

Dwellin whistled. ‘Your way doesn’t seem to be working very well, scribe.’

Grigio licked his lips, tasting his own blood. ‘Either you leave now, peasants, or I’ll have you strung up by your guts from the cliff’s edge!’ he yelled as loud as he could manage, mostly in Dwellin’s face.

Thankfully, that seemed to put the fear in them. The father shoved his sons towards the wagon and had the kumi turned and trotting away within moments.

Dwellin grinned. ‘There’s that Drola swagger!’ she cackled as she watched the farmers beat a panicked retreat. A barrel even tumbled from the back of the wagon but they paid it no heed.

‘Good work, Grigio. However, you were a little too slow,’ Dwellin said with a nonchalant tut, waggling the vial. The colours behind the glass were beginning to glow like the chamber of her blight-pistol. Before Grigio could utter even a grunt of protest, she hurled the vial from the window.

For several moments, it was a mere harmless streak in a gloomy night. Grigio was halfway to assuming Dwellin had tricked him when the vial collided with the ground. A fireball of scarlet and gold erupted with a chest-shuddering boom. The darkness fled before the light of the explosion. The grass that wasn’t scorched dead shone as if daylight had dawned.

Grigio stared aghast as the fire cleared, showing a wagon snapped in half with its bones spread across the grass. Two of the boys were splayed in the dirt. The remaining two were busy frantically clouting flames off each other while they scarpered for their lives. The kumi was already running up the nearest hill.

Dwellin was chuckling to herself. ‘That should do it,’ she whispered before shoving Grigio back to his desk.

‘Why would you do that?’ he spluttered.

‘I have my reasons. The main one being that vial would have exploded whether I threw it or not. That’s how I designed it. Would you have preferred to go off in this lavish room of yours?’

Grigio stood shaking. ‘No,’ he admitted after some hesitation, selfish though it may have been.

Dwellin shook her head. ‘Ha! See? You’re starting to get it, Grigio,’ she said. ‘You think me evil? Well, I call it a matter of perspective, just like I told Voldo. And perspectives change like the seasons. You’ll learn.’

‘I will not.’

‘Then you’ll do your job, and pray to the Watcher nobody else comes to disturb us until it’s done! Otherwise…’ Dwellin slid two more identical vials from a pocket with a fiendish grin.

‘If you kill anyone else I won’t write another word.’

Dwellin laughed as she raised her cleaver to tuck under Grigio’s chin. ‘Yes, you will. Unless you can tell me truly that you don’t want to know how this all turns out?’

Grigio couldn’t, no matter how he tried to pretend.

‘You can stop your worrying. If all goes to plan, my dear Grigio, you’ll be thanking me.’

‘What plan?’

Another shove sent him back to his seat. ‘Nice try, scribe! That’s enough chatter out of you. Back to the quill and ink. Don’t you remember? There’s no rest for the wicked, and the prisons of Catacrone await.’

Redemption, was the word that rolled around Grigio’s head. It was his only hope, and he clutched at it harder than the quill he strangled.