10
GUANO
Osric
wo ladies’ maids, seduced; one valet, ditto; one Northumbrian man-at-T arms, dead in his bed. Osric was having a good day.
It couldn’t last, due to the fact that Fairhrim existed.
She had been of spectacular utility for the embolus, but whatever goodwill Osric had developed towards her was eradicated by the arrival of her deofol.
“Stop interrupting me during jobs,” said Osric as Fairhrim’s albino genet took shape.
“I can’t seem to choose a time when you aren’t killing someone,” said the hellrat. It twitched its whiskers at the corpse in the bed. “Is he dead enough yet? Are you sure? Perhaps more stabbing?”
“This is hardly an excess,” said Osric. “This is industry standard.”
“Can you stop fingering him while I’m speaking to you?” asked the deofol.
“First of all, this is my thumb. Secondly, no. He pushed a scroll up his bum. The very scroll that I—unfortunately—was paid to retrieve.”
“Grim,” said the deofol.
“I know,” said Osric. “These gloves were new.”
Osric retrieved the scroll and placed it in a pouch. “You’ll have to tell your mistress that I can confirm the obscurity of anals.”
“What’s in the scroll?” asked the deofol, tilting its pointy head. “Other than giardiasis, I mean.”
Osric threw his soiled gloves into the fire that flickered in the dead man’s hearth. “Plans for Northumbrian fortifications, of interest to Strathclyde.”
“What did they pay you?”
“A very small fraction of the fortune I paid for the pleasure of Fairhrim’s assistance. What news have you got for me?”
“You’re to meet one hour before sunset the day of the Blædnes moon, at Muckle Flugga.”
“At what?” asked Osric, unsure if the deofol was clearing its throat.
“Muckle Flugga,” repeated the deofol. “In Fortriu. It’s the northernmost
point of the Tīendoms.”
“Romantic appellation.”
“There’s a lighthouse there. The waystone is at the Woolf. Kindly bathe before you go. You smell like a latrine.”
With this concluding remark, the deofol disappeared.
A FEW DAYS LATER, AND very much not smelling like a latrine, Osric burst into existence at the Woolf. The pub itself was long abandoned and consisted of a few crumbling walls. The waystone was so worn and low that it served as a passable seat, which Osric placed his buttocks (shapely, muscular) upon.
Before him stretched a lovely vista of rocky shore dissolving into sea, and there, at the end of an outcrop, the lighthouse. Save for a salty breeze and the wheeling of birds overhead, all was still.
Osric wished to take a moment to pause and appreciate the beauty—and so, of course, Fairhrim arrived with the gentleness of a small blizzard.
The waystone spat her into Osric’s lap. She rose in a swirl of skirts and things, in uncharacteristic disarray. She was in her stocking feet, her hair was
unbound and flopped wetly over her shoulder, and she was only half-dressed.
“What—” began Osric.
“Hold this,” said Fairhrim, smacking her satchel into Osric’s chest. “And this”—she tossed her cloak over him—“and these,” she said, adding her boots to the pile.
With the help of a buttonhook, she worked her way up the long line of buttons of her dress. A round stone with a hole in its centre, usually hidden by her dress’s high neckline, hung at her clavicle. The hagstone and its worn leather cord were incongruous amid Fairhrim’s other adornments, which were all sharp and silver.
“Shocking,” said Osric, due to the fact that she had a throat.
Fairhrim did not deign to reply; his principal function, at that moment, was to prop her up as she pulled on a boot.
“Indecent,” said Osric, given that she had an ankle.
Fairhrim’s pinchy hand was at his shoulder. “Had to rush. Couldn’t miss the tide.”
Water from her sopping curls dripped onto Osric’s cloak. He smelled soap. “Might I ask why you look like you’ve just come out of the bath?”
“Because I have,” said Fairhrim.
“Why would you have a bath just before we climb up a lighthouse?”
“There was an incident with my last case.”
“An incident?”
“Draining an ulcer. It was…explosive. Remarkably purulent. Sprayed half a litre of pus into my hair. Do you want to know more?”
“No,” said Osric.
“I thought not.”
Fairhrim got both boots on. She wrung out her mass of hair and twisted it into its usual Repression Bun, pierced through with a silver curette. She snapped her wrist towards Osric, who duly passed on her cloak and satchel.
After a final straightening of skirts, Fairhrim resumed her usual appearance and composure. She held her chin high, as though she hadn’t just landed on Osric like a half-dressed cataclysm.
“Well,” she said brightly, “shall we go waste our time again?”
“Oh, do let’s,” said Osric.
They gave each other false, joyless smiles, and proceeded towards the lighthouse.
“Any changes to your seith since the embolus?” asked Fairhrim.
“None that I’ve noticed,” said Osric.
“Good. And have you discovered anything about those intruders at Swanstone?”
“I’m working on a lead. Have they investigated on your end?”
“Yes, but with limited success. We know they didn’t arrive by any of the nearby waystones. The incendiary devices were handmade; our Ingenaut couldn’t identify their provenance. And their cadavers revealed nothing.”
Fairhrim huffed out an impatient breath. “I told Xanthe you’re helping us, in
exchange for the embolus fix.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. She’s pleased, and hopes that you will manage to justify your existence by being of some use to the world.”
“Optimistic.”
“That’s what I said.”
Fairhrim led him seawards. Underfoot danced a mix of seagrass and wildflowers Osric couldn’t name—white, purple, pale yellow.
“Your precious Widdershins told us we must be at land’s end, and this is one of the endiest points in the Tīendoms,” said Fairhrim. “My dataset for the Blædnes moon favours sunsets at sixty-seven percent of the time—when the stories were good enough to specify a time at all—so that’s today’s in- between temporal dimension. This place also offers several of those cusps that the data, such as it is, favours—between earth and sky, between tidal shifts, a shoreline. And the lighthouse stands at an ancient crossroads.”
“Roman?”
“Norse. A seaway.”
“And what of my precious Widdershins’ blackened sun?” asked Osric, given that the sun arced bright above them, and was notably not blackened.
“I don’t know,” said Fairhrim. “You’ll have to ask him what he meant. I did check the barometer, and it’s supposed to be cloudy today. Perhaps even
rainy.”
“Oh yes,” said Osric, eyeing the violently blue sky. “It’s absolutely going to piss down, I can tell.”
“This is the North Sea. The weather can’t go five minutes without changing.”
As they approached the shoreline, the breeze picked up. Osric had expected something bracing and salty, but was instead hit by what could be described only as a reek.
“What is that stench?” he asked as his nostrils filled with acridity.
Fairhrim sniffed and said, “Guano. There’s a large gannet colony
somewhere round here.”
“That’s foul,” gagged Osric.
Fairhrim was undisturbed by the odour of sun-fermented piss-shit. “After today’s purulent drainage, this is downright pleasant.”
Serene amid the fetidity, she glided on. “I once had a patient with multiple gastrointestinal fistulas. The ooze that came out of those—that was putrid. Necrotising fasciitis is worse, though. You can taste it for days afterwards.”
Osric extracted a handkerchief and pressed it to his face.
“Better?” asked Fairhrim.
“Yes,” said Osric, in a muffled voice. “Can’t smell anything anymore. I think my septum has dissolved.”
As they neared the lighthouse, they spotted a few burly figures wandering about at its foot.
Fairhrim stopped. Osric walked into her.
“What?” asked Osric.
“Them,” said Fairhrim, pointing at the figures.
Obviously, that’s what would have her concerned—a few twits wandering about, and not the immolation of Osric’s sinuses.
“This lighthouse is meant to be unmanned,” said Fairhrim.
“It looks very manned,” said Osric.
“Perhaps they’re sightseers,” said Fairhrim. “If there are any at the top, I’ll ask them prettily to leave so we can carry on with our time wasting
unobserved.”
“I should do it,” said Osric. “I’m prettier than you.”
Fairhrim threw her head back, said, “Hah!” as though Osric had made a good joke, and kept walking.
This vexed Osric, because he was prettier than her. Wasn’t he? Was she prettier than him? Impossible. He surveyed Fairhrim with a new, jealous assessment, but only her back was visible now, and all he could conclude was that she had a good figure.
“This isn’t the time for your jokes,” said Fairhrim, over her shoulder.
“Let’s focus on the assignment.”
“I am the assignment.”
Cloak pulled in tight against the wind, Osric followed Fairhrim through a track of crushed grass to the edge of the sea, and they argued about their relative prettiness, and Osric said, “At least admit that I’m handsome,” and Fairhrim asked, philosophically, if a disease could be handsome, and vexed him further.
The sightseers at the lighthouse looked remarkably well armed.
“A jolly bunch of holidaymakers,” said Osric. “About to have a family picnic, I’ll wager. The broadswords are to cut up the roast.”
Fairhrim did not share his amusement. “Who are they, and why are they here?”
“I’ll go find out,” said Osric. “You stay put.” Then, because Fairhrim looked as though the instruction displeased her, he added, “I need you alive, and not skewered by Dodgy Gooch and company down there.”
“Fine. Try to be diplomatic, won’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t hurt anyone.”
“Oh,” said Osric.
This answer was, apparently, insufficient.
“Promise not to hurt anyone,” said Fairhrim.
Fairhrim’s problem was that she had too many principles.
“What about in self-defence?” asked Osric.
“Self-defence,” said Fairhrim, in words that Osric immediately planned to make her regret, “is obviously different.”
“Right.”
“Will you promise not to murder them?”
Osric made a show of considering this, then said, “No.”
He strode away. The wind whipped away most of Fairhrim’s retort— something about him being horrid. He didn’t respond, because he was.
He advanced towards the lighthouse. The tide had receded and left a slippery path of rocks in its wake. Barnacles crunched underfoot as Osric stepped along this provisional bridge.
He was challenged as he approached by a rough “Oi!”
“What?” said Osric.
“What’re you doing here?” asked the challenger. With his ill-fitting leather armour and battered sword, there was a whiff of banditry about him.
“Walking,” said Osric.
“Well, you can’t walk here.”
Bandit One was joined by two equally disreputable-looking colleagues,
who eyed Osric’s kit with interest.
“I like those boots,” said Bandit Two.
“I want the cloak,” said Bandit Three. “Is that real gold along the edges?”
Osric decided to exercise his limited diplomacy skills, given that he was being observed. “You lot need to clear out for a few hours.”
“Lighthouse is ours,” said Bandit One, inserting his thumbs into his waistband and broadening his chest. “S’private property.”
“Give us your boots,” said Bandit Two.
“Is anyone else in there?” asked Osric, jutting his chin towards the lighthouse.
“Twenty men,” said Bandit One, at the same time as Two said, “Fifty men.”
“No one, then,” said Osric. “Good. Off you fuck. Don’t make me hurt you.”
The men stared at him as they processed his audacity. Osric wasn’t the most patient sort and would normally have slit throats at this juncture.
However, given that he was under Fairhrim’s steely eye, he gave them another chance.
He removed his glove and flashed his tācn at them. “Last warning.”
“A Fyren,” gasped Bandit One.
“Fuck this,” said Bandit Two.
They both fled. That left Bandit Three, the stupidest of the lot. Osric put his glove back on and studied him with mild interest. How to dispose of him while inciting the least amount of pearl clutching from Fairhrim?
“Bet that’s a fake mark,” said Bandit Three. “Bet it’s just a tattoo.”
This theory he, apparently, decided to test by throwing a punch at Osric.
Osric blocked it; as feeble as the punch was, he considered his nose well shaped, and preferred to keep it that way.
Now that someone else had attempted to draw first blood, Osric’s foray into diplomacy came to an end. He delivered a knockout punch, straight into Bandit Three’s stupid mouth.
Osric waved Fairhrim over. She picked her way towards the lighthouse as Osric hog-tied the man with his own belt.
“Was that really the only course of action?” asked Fairhrim.
“Yes,” said Osric, plucking a tooth out of his glove.
“I thought Fyren were meant to be subtle.”
“I’m not wasting my seith on the likes of him.”
“How nice to have a choice” was Fairhrim’s arid reply.
Osric flicked the tooth at her.
He climbed the spiralling lighthouse stairs. Impressive, how Fairhrim could fix her stare right between his shoulder blades, so hard that he could feel it. Bit stabby, really.
They toiled upwards. They passed through a storeroom scattered with the bandits’ belongings. The pungency of the guano receded and gave way to mustiness. The stairs were thick with dust, save for where the bandits’ feet had trodden.
Above the storeroom was the old watch room, which had been converted
into sleeping quarters.
“Hmm,” said Osric.
“What?” said Fairhrim.
“About ten beds in here,” said Osric.
He regretted having let Bandits One and Two go now. He should’ve been
proactive and killed them.
“Should we be worried?” asked Fairhrim.
“Worried?” repeated Osric. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m here.”
Fairhrim’s raised eyebrow informed him that she thought him a bit of a tit.
“If they come up, they’re dead,” said Osric. “However—I would like us to not be interrupted. Help me with this.”
With Fairhrim’s best attempt at assistance (she flopped her flimsy wrists about and grunted), he shoved and pulled a few crates over the stairwell.
They wouldn’t stop a determined gang of bandits, but they’d give Osric ample warning that someone was trying to ascend.
The next flight up led to the old lightkeeper’s kitchen, scattered with boxes of supplies of dubious freshness.
Finally—and with much huffing and puffing, which both Osric and Fairhrim did their utmost to suppress—they reached the lantern room. It was circular, glass rimmed, and offered a spectacular view of the sea.
The light sat, black and idle, in the centre of the room.
Fairhrim examined the contraption. “I’ve never seen so many bulbs— have you? A fascinating bit of work by the Ingenauts. I suppose it turns on at sunset. I wonder where the sensors are?”
Lighthouse engineering did not number among Osric’s priorities. “Should
we be outside, or in?” he asked.
“Out,” said Fairhrim.
After a bit of searching, they found a handle on one of the panes of glass, which led to an outdoor platform.
Osric stepped outside, followed, with marked hesitation, by Fairhrim. In response to his eyebrow, she said, “I’ve no head for heights.”
“You live in a tower.”
“The tower’s got stone walls twelve feet thick. And windows separating me from death.”
Osric couldn’t further grill her on her contradictions because they were both assailed by the wind. Up here, it was a living thing. It cuffed the back of Fairhrim’s head and unravelled her bun. It whisked Osric’s cloak up and had a fair go at strangling him. It tumbled and tore around them, and every attempt to correct its chaos—pinning the bun, attaching the cloak, holding down the skirts, saving the cravat—became a game.
Osric gave up first. Cloak and cravat were thrown back into the lantern room.
Fairhrim was more determined, but, after a fruitless fight with her hair, cloak, and skirts, she, too, threw her detachable things indoors. Her hair whipped about in a long, voluminous ponytail, dividing its time equally between lashing her across the eyes and getting into Osric’s mouth.
Osric took pleasure in seeing her so discombobulated for the second time today. A bit of chaos among her order might do her some good.
“Less of the guano up here, at least,” said Osric. The wind penetrated his open mouth—rude—and came out of his nostrils.
Fairhrim pinned herself to the glass wall, as far from the railing as she could get. Her voice was thready in the wind. “Sunset’s in a few minutes.”
“Right. And where are your clouds?” asked Osric, because Fairhrim was, obviously, personally responsible for their absence.
“And where is your blackened sun?” asked Fairhrim, as though the fault were his.
A fresh eddy whipped at them as though delivering a smack. Fairhrim’s heavy skirts gusted up past her knees. Osric, seeing a flash of white stockings and, above those, a black garter, learned that Fairhrim wore her garters in the new fashion, at the thigh. A nicely shaped thigh—round, with a delicious little indentation where the garter pressed into soft skin.
Which might’ve been interesting to look at if Osric had a thing for garters, which he didn’t, and if he thought Fairhrim remotely attractive, which he also didn’t. (So he told himself, with great confidence, suppressing any memory of darkly brilliant eyes and a curl of hair across a damp lip.) Given that the sight was so uninteresting and that he’d rather be looking at anything but Fairhrim’s legs, Osric turned his attention to the sea.
It roiled below them, alive and uneasy. The tide began to rise as the sun began to set. The sky’s relentless blue gave way to deep purple.
There was a creak behind them. The enormous set of bulbs in the lantern room turned on and flashed a first beam across the sea. It caught the agitated waves and tipped them, briefly, in gold.
“Look,” said Fairhrim. The single syllable was stretched and snapped away by the wind.
Beyond the flashing, gold-glossed waves, a mist was building upon the horizon. At least, Osric thought it was mist. But, unlike mist, it moved with volition. It thickened until it became a cloud bank moving towards them—a cloud bank advancing, impossibly, into the wind.
The cloud approached in stutters, visible only when the flashing beam of the lighthouse hit it.
Osric realised at last that it was a single, frothing mass of birds.
“The gannets,” said Osric.
“Sort sol,” gasped Fairhrim. “It’s what they call murmurations in the Danelaw. Sort sol—black sun.”
With a dizzying din, the colony—thousands, hundreds of thousands, of birds—billowed towards the lighthouse in a single, seething entity.
Osric took a step back, as did Fairhrim. The light flashed again; they saw their own silhouettes flicker against the advancing wall of birds. The beat of wings and hearts without number churned the air until it thrummed. The thrum went through Osric, filled him, reverberated in his bones.
The lighthouse flashed its luminous pulse against the multitude. Osric saw things in it as it swept to and fro above—now a tree line, now cascades, now waves smashing upon rock. Things dim, things shimmering, things Awake.
He felt disoriented and ill. He wanted to touch something solid.
He went for Fairhrim’s hand just as she went for his. She clutched at his gloved fingers; his thumb pressed hers.
The maelstrom whirled overhead. They were the only fixed point in the universe; everything else spun around it.
The maelstrom was on them.
It erased the world.
