GentlemanAnachronism

All cities have a character. Sacaan is no different. Sacaan is a thieves’ city – mazes of back-alleys and side-streets, bolt-holes and hidden passages, and jumbled rooftops pressed so close together in places that you can run from the High Temple to Dockside without your feet ever once touching the ground. Sacaan is a spies’ city – shadowed corners and bolted doors, secret handshakes and hidden knives, innocuous-seeming businesses hiding bloody secrets behind dusty windows and dull names. Sacaan is a magicians’ city – researchers poring bleary-eyed over ancient texts, wild-eyed scholars drawing impossible geometries in chalk on stained floorboards, students in lecture halls dutifully copying down equations and copperplate lists of herbs. Sacaan is a priests’ city – temple bells tolling the hours across the snow-covered roofs, red-robed acolytes heatedly discussing theology in freezing courtyards, quiet worshippers prostrating themselves in prayer in incense-scented

The library isn’t real.  It exists, of course. That much is indisputable. But it is not real.  That doesn’t bother you overmuch. Neither are you.  The stacks are dark tonight, in the library which is not real and thus can contain neither stacks nor darkness, and you hold your lantern higher than you usually would, the light catching the glittering edges of books bound so long ago and far away that the materials used are lost to almost all knowledge.  Not yours, of course. You know what they are, as well as you know that your lantern is not a lantern, but merely the light that has to exist if the darkness does, because how else would you see your way? (You could always decide that the stacks weren’t dark, of course, but the library tends to react badly to that kind of meddling. It has a very strong sense of internal narrative consistency, and you’ve learned the hard way that it’s best to let it alone when it comes to that kind of thing).  The light from your lantern (and, for the

You think you know how this story goes. You think you know who I am. You think you know what I did, and what was done to me. You think you know how this story goes. And you are wrong. My village loved their witch. Not feared, not hated, not even tolerated out of a need for the works and wonders I could perform, but loved. I never wanted, never went without while others filled their bellies, but I sat with them at their tables, took their children on my knee, hauled water at their well and sang with them at their firesides long into the dark while the wolves howled their hunger in the woods beyond the walls. I was the one who called the hunter. Not some jealous priest or spurned lover - their priest knew well I was no threat to him, and I took no lovers of my own kind or otherwise - but my own hand on the pen and my own words in ink upon the page. I told him no tales, wove no webs to trap him, but called him simply by his profession and his will, and bound him to seek out the

“Does it help?”  Sabbat hissed, tightening his grip on the arms of the chair as Archer pressed the damp cloth carefully against the worst of the grazes decorating his ribcage. “Does what fuckin’ help, Archer?” “This.” The vampire made an irritated gesture with his free hand, taking in the bowl of bloody water, the pile of bandages, and pretty much Sabbat’s entire everything. “Bar brawls? It’s not as though you need the practice.” “That ain’t the point.” “Of course it’s not.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose you’d consider switching to boxing.” “Ha!” “I assume that’s a no.” The assassin sneered. “The hells d’you think? Next thing you’ll be wantin’ me t’take up fuckin’ fencin’.” “As amusing as that mental image is, I’ve very little interest in getting stabbed. Again.” To his credit, Sabbat actually looked somewhat embarrassed at the reminder. “I was seventeen, Archer. An’ it was your bloody idea, anyhow.” Which was true. And, if he was entirely honest, attempting a fencing