The odds of that shelter actually failing were very low, despite the sheer tension involved. But that tension still left me trembling and near pissing myself. It’s just not a pleasant sensation, hearing the deadliest forces in the world scuttering around with only a thin veneer of stone and mortar between yourself and them.

  It was harder for me than most of the others, I’d not grown up in this shelter. I hadn’t seen it tested and proven a hundred times before—the locals had. Gruin was theoretically in the same boat as me, but if it bothered the Grynkori he didn’t let the fact show.

  Or at least, not more than he had in the cave.

  “Blackmists,” he grumbled while we shuddered away in our own little corner, “why in all the world your people would choose to live on the surface, and be racked by the bloody blackmists, is beyond me.” Why we humans did anything seemed beyond him, but that was neither here nor there.

  “I’m not going to listen to a Grynkori about the madness of living above-ground,” I shot back, “not after finding out what a fucking shygarin is.” I shuddered. Still heard the horrible fucking things, sometimes. Phantom noises that almost shoved me from my skin.

  Still do, actually. Even now.

  Gruin didn’t seem to find that nearly as harrowing though, not, as usual, did he appear to fathom why anybody else might. He burst out laughing, earning us a few glares from the other people whose instincts were probably ordering them into silence lest the dark things be attracted by noise.

  All nonsense fears of course. Dark things know where you are no matter what you do, and it’s only two things that keep them from you. Light and stone.

  Well, our stonework was somewhat lacking now, I had to admit. Better than the makeshift barrier Gruin and I had, the one we’d almost been forced to defend with steel, but still more than a bit shit. Thankfully, the light was not so lacking.

  Good oil costs a lot, but nobody spared expenses when it came to the mists. Everything in the room was within ten feet of a burning lantern, and the few shadows that survived them were all ironically bunched in the centre, surrounded on all sides by shivering people watching the walls bathed in illumination.

  That got me thinking. Because good oil is expensive, but the oil I was seeing burn now was something long past that. It was almost sterile, the cleanness with which it was going, and I’d seen that quality of light only a few places before—mostly in the hands of my own class. The idea that some village peasants had it…Well, it begged several questions.

  I didn’t exactly have much to do for the night, not until the blackmists had cleared up enough for me to go outside without getting turned into the world’s screamiest puddle, so I started shuffling around the shelter and asking people to see what I might be able to learn. That brought another curiosity to my attention.

  Nobody was actually eager to tell me anything. I don’t just mean that they were unfriendly to an obvious outsider—that much was expected, believe me there’s nothing an Anglyshman hates more than another Anglyshman who lives a single day away with a near identical accent and culture—but that they clamped up the moment I started probing for information.

  These days I’m well familiar with this behaviour, seen it countless times. Scared people, cowering under a looming threat. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was looking at back then though. As far as I could tell, or rather as far as I was willing to lazily conclude, I was simply watching a bunch of illiterate cousin-fuckers render themselves mute through sheer, superstitious idiocy.

  Eventually, my constant efforts achieved two things. The first, more convenient, was that I actually did encounter someone who was willing to do more than quiver and ask me—in the endlessly polite way peasants had of asking an armed merchant anything—to stop inquiring and leave them be.

  “Nobody knows where the oil comes from except for the elder,” my convenient little source replied. A younger man, of course, and seeming less courageous or lacking superstition as much as just too dull to properly feel the emotion of fear at all. I listened attentively as they spoke. “Far as I know he imports it from one of the local villages.”

  That smelled like bullshit to me. We were near the centre of the land, and though Anglyn is a great deal smaller than plenty of our Urosean rivals and contemporaries that still left a good fifty or more miles in either direction if you wanted to reach the sea.

  It was possible of course, but unfeasible even for a merchant with expensive wagons and guards for the road. You just took too long on a journey like that. Maybe if the destination was some city—one with a few eccentric merchants or peers who were willing to pay several times the normal price for genuine whale oil lanterns—you could get your money returned, but otherwise such a trek was wealth not being given back.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  And I doubted very much that an elder of this shithole had that much wealth to begin with. This wasn’t possible without operating on a steep and prolonged loss, which this village, clearly, was not able to sustain.

  This was a big turning point for me, because whether I knew it or not it was among the first times I’d actually been pro-active in using rudimentary cognitive abilities to successfully predict information about the world around me. Really, it was a big step. At the time though, it didn’t yield any immediate benefits, and so I hardly thought about it.

  Particularly because I had other concerns to worry myself with.

  One of the big men, the village’s elder—Arlig, his name was— had stepped out to greet Gruin and myself with, approached me then. He moved with the kind of deliberate swagger men learn to get when they’re too used to having size on everyone they fight.

  Size alone was good cause to take note of him though, and I quickly got to my feet as he approached in case things turned violent. They didn’t quite, I could feel a fight bubbling just under the surface anyway as he aimed a finger at me.

  “What are you doing exactly, outsider?”

  I actually didn’t know how to answer that question. Not because I’d been caught in some devious subterfuge, but rather because I had no idea what it was he might be getting so angry about.

  “Uh, asking questions?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he took a step forwards. An inch or two shorter than me, the effect of his presence was spoiled only slightly by seeing him have to cock his head slightly backwards to maintain eye contact.

  “Aye, and what are you asking about?”

  I still wasn’t quite following, hadn’t yet figured out I was being intimidated, so I just stared in confusion at the man and tried to think of what I might be doing to fuck him off so much. Fortunately, before I could respond, another walked over. This one was smaller, sneakier. He had a queasy smile that set my teeth at edge and moved as if his every step were considered well in advance.

  “Is something the matter?” he asked his question with a smile, probably meant to disarm me in case things were more tense than they looked from afar. It didn’t though. That smile freaked me the fuck out, reminded me of a cat playing with a mouse, and it did more to set me on edge than anything the dumb thug had mumbled.

  “All fine,” I replied. Almost at the same time, the big one spoke up too.

  “This one’s been asking questions,” he growled.

  Before I could process that, let the confusion boil over into a more tangible suspicion, the smaller man was skewering his associate with a glare so harsh and rending that it actually sent me back a step.

  “Nothing wrong with asking questions,” he smiled without smiling, “people can ask whatever they want in Cheshin, eh?” there was a wideness to his eyes that clearly wasn’t natural, a warning in them.

  But not aimed at me. It lasted only a second, and sent the larger man’s gaze dropping down to the floor as he nodded wordlessly. The smaller one nodded back, then glanced towards me.

  “And you, sir, what questions have you been asking? I know more about this town than most, I can answer whatever you’re curious about.”

  A cordial enough offer, helpful even. So why was it that I felt myself grow so instantly, explosively suspicious about it?

  Well the answer there seems obvious enough. Even back then I was piecing things together. The village of Cheshin did not like inquiries aimed at it, and it was this man’s job to both stop them and mislead the ones sending them out.

  “I was just about done asking,” I said slowly, “just wondering what’s in those lamps to make them burn so well.”

  The man smiled wider, making the creepiness all the more intense and sending a shiver down my spine.

  “Whale oil,” he explained with a grin, “the elder has it imported special-like.”

  He either didn’t know the story was bullshit, or did and didn’t care. I politely nodded and made my way back to Gruin, noticing as I went that both men had their eyes furtively on me now. That wasn’t ideal. I really didn’t want more attention from the local thugs than I absolutely had to get.

  Gruin, on the other hand, seemed positively excited when I recounted the interaction to him. It had been weeks since our run-in with the shygarin, and though his wounds were still mending—having been worse than mine by far—it seemed that most of his strength was already back.

  “Do you think they’ll try and kill us?” he asked me eagerly, already toying with the handle of his hammer and twitching the way he always did when his body wanted very much to do things his brain knew would get us into trouble.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied truthfully.

  Gruin looked openly disappointed at that, sighing.

  “Well here’s to hoping then, come morning we’ll be off.”

  I planted myself down beside him at that and started chewing into some of the jerky from my pack, having little else to do before I awaited the touch of sleep. It’d be hard to let it embrace me, with the blackmists outside, but eventually exhaustion would win out. I knew that from experience.

  Well, I wasn’t wrong. It won out.

  Come day, the world felt wrong. It always did, following a blackmist night. Like the normalcy was in some way at odds, like the very earth and skies were ignoring something vital by now shivering still. That feeling would pass though. It was internal, not external.

  What wasn’t internal was that the air had caught a chill, and by the smell of it I just knew that there’d be another bout of blackmist the next night. We weren’t out of danger yet then. It was rare for the mists to linger more than one night, but not unheard of. Happened one time in ten, maybe.

  “Looks like we’re here for a while longer,” I thought allowed. I hadn’t expected anything to come from the remark. Bigger fool me, Gruin was practically drooling.

  “Aye, it does. What do you say we do a bit of poking around then?”

  Utter, crippling terror washed over me at that suggestion, all at once. Like frigid waters dousing my body.

  “Sounds good,” I grinned.

  God knew what the Grynkori would do if I showed off my cowardice now.

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