2026-08-21.
Rain in the morning, plain clean ordinary rain, the first ordinary thing in a fortnight. To my books, and then the news, which is this.
The four are out of Westcrown, by a hole they broke in a wall themselves, having judged the gates too loud. The priest dragged Drusca, senseless since the statue, the whole way, and set him down only to fight. In the barracks, their telling goes, they came upon a mound of the melded dead, alive after its fashion but unable to move its own weight; the half-orc would not spend the axe on it, but broke the floorboards and put it under, which puts the thing off rather than ends it. In a wall they found a child, half-elven, fourteen or near it, holding a hole and nothing else, and no hope in his face when he looked at them. He would not come. The half-orc left him his coat and his name.
They have lodging now, and the house reports they slept, the first time since the docks. Drusca is awake, and stood out bare-headed in the morning’s rain. At their table it was said to his face, my listener being near enough, that he was made Herald and given nothing with the name. The camp has kept an old man called Herald, name only, since before New Year.
The work now is water. The river is the only water, and the river carries Westcrown’s dead, enough of them, the glass shows, to slow the current. They that drink of it begin to be sick in their bowels, and they will drink of it still, there being nothing else. The priest has changed what he prays for, which he says himself a priest rarely does, and makes clean water of nothing and clean food of spoiled, and carries both down the rows to such as are too far gone to ask, that they may live long enough to be taught. It is slow, and it is arithmetic: so many hands, so many gallons, so many souls.
Late in the day, worse news, and the glass does not love to linger on it. There is a house in the rows where a woman wails in two voices at once. She was Golami, priestess of a small chapel, and her husband, who keeps her door though he can scarcely stand, will have it that our fallen Lord visited her the night of the breaking. What sits in her now wears her face and his together, poorly mixed, and keeps a second pair of arms folded inside her ribs the way cargo is lashed against weather. The four went in to her, or such of them as the husband would suffer. Drusca put his hands to her and his hands were kept, the wrist ending where the shoulder began; he came out the back door with them again, and I have not paid to learn the price. She rose at the last and spoke in the doubled voice, saying come unto me, my children, he anointed me and I will cherish you for him, and unfolded the inner arms to make good the offer. The husband ran to her embrace and was taken in entire. Outside a crowd had gathered under a preacher to tell the half-orc to his face that he is the one that killed their Lord.
And so to bed.