1. A black coin. One side bears the staring visage of a spiral-horned woman with mean eyes. The other: an eyeless skull. A tarry blackbird, ragged, follows the carrier of said coin at cautious distance, watching with fish’s eyes.
2. A bone smoking pipe. Its stem is too short for the smoking of coquelicot, and the bowl is too small for any substantial amount of pepperelle. Said bowl is carved with imaginary creatures, perhaps chimeras.
3. A bogwood hand with silver inlays indicating the location of every bone in the wrist, palm, and fingers; all labeled in a looping, unknown script.
4. A box made of petrified, grey wood. Square, palm sized, and unusually heavy. Has a lid and iron hinges, but no latch. A face, moon-like and squinting mirthfully, is carved on the immoveable lid.
5. A brand, or perhaps a rosette iron. Small, and quite delicate in the handle. Scorches a pressed surface with a two-inch-tall capital M if heated cherry-hot.
6. A brass ring set with an oversized, round brown bezoar for a gemstone. Extremely ugly, by modern standards.
7. A brooch composed of three overlapping green-enameled nickel silver leaves secured together by rusted hinges. The enamel is cracked and dusty. If worn, the leaves click together; a sound reminiscent of clinking spurs on riding boots. 
8. A box compass, hard leather, scuffed, and no larger than a snuffbox. Reveals a sphere struck through by a red needle, suspended in a crystal ball filled with clear liquid. The needle points north, even if rotated in three dimensions.
9. A cast iron fly, large as a chicken's egg. The legs are bent, and a wing is missing. Tucked between the legs is the remnant of a mounting track, the kind used to attach ornaments to connection pins on metal armor.
10. A chatelaine lined like a human palm. Five short iron chains hang from it, no more than two inches long. Each ends in a lead fingertip pendant. When pinned to a garment or belt, the piece hangs like a strange, disembodied hand.
11. A chessman, a king, crafted from blackest jet. He sits in a tall throne worked with a scrollwork relief, bearing an expression of deepest weariness. He rests, chin in palm, with a short knife tucked in the opposite hand. A finely worked piece.
12. A chunk of amber included by a blackened, fossilized thing curled up upon itself. It is big-headed and roughly humanoid, like a minute fetus, but has distinct ridges or spurs running down its curved spine.
13. A clay whistle, shaped like a toothless, leering skull. With some practice, a user may develop a queer embouchure and play the thing, which requires a forceful blow into the cranium. It produces no music; only a high and rattling cry of human terror. A blood-curdling scream.
14. A cloisonné dreidel. Each face, gold-leafed lead set with colored garnets, depicts a geometric face, each bearing a different expression: Bare-toothed anger, sneering disgust, white-eyed fear, and twisted, wretched misery.
15. A copper cicada tarnished blue-green. Large enough to fill the palm. The hump of its thorax is set with a large malachite cabochon. Some examination reveals said cabochon is a button. Its mechanism, though somewhat stuck with age, causes the cicada's wings to lift, revealing a small, oblong storage space in the abdomen. The wings must be reset manually. They click into place, locked tight.
16. A crystal shoe. A heeled slipper, one made for the foot of a small woman. Bluish and lightly faceted. Quite hard, and able to be worn and walked upon, albeit uncomfortably.
17. A cylindrical spinning top, quite wide, and made of light, white metal, weighted towards the needle. A row of little skeletons is painted around the cylinder. If spun and looked at dead-on, the skeletons become one and animate. It dances, and not pleasingly, made lively by the kinesis of the whirring top.
18. A die with six sides. An inch square, and cut from decayed walrus ivory. The carved faces, their lines filled with dirt, are thus: A long-fingered hand, a thin eye, an acorn, a seven-pointed star, a spiny fish, and a rose in full bloom. When rolled, the fish consistently lands facing up.
19. A dried serpent, coiled in a foggy crystal tube sealed with wax. A husk of a creature, like onion skins wrapped around brittle fishbones. A leak of ash and smothered cinders spills from a split in its long, desiccated gut.
20. A fibula. Twice the usual size. Made of rusted, wrought iron delicately carved with scrollwork and decorative rivets; all nearly obscured in red oxidization. Rusted hard to a scrap of fine chain maille still lodged between pin and plate.
21. A folding knife with a curved tang, like a straight razor, but with a wickedly hooked blade. When closed, it forms a semicircle. The blade is quite pitted but has been cleaned of its rust at some point. It is keenly sharp.
22. A fragment of bone, obviously the concave top plate of a human cranium, edged with pitted gold. Three inches wide and carved on the inside with cramped script. A reader adept in Ancient Nor will discern an outdated version of the Lord's Prayer carved within.
23. A glass heart. A 1:1 scale disembodied human heart crafted of dark, smoky glass. Hole for dipping in the gaping atrium. Filled with the gummy remnants of old, reddish resin, perhaps ink. Quite heavy.
24. A glass jar, blue, sagging with the slow melt of ages. Within are three seeds, somehow not yet turned to dust. They are like those of a pumpkin, or squash, but are reddish and much pointier.
25. A green, glass apple barely skinned with flaking gold leaf. Within, there are visible countless rivers of incredibly tiny veins, fibers, and seeds, as if a real apple were refashioned precisely as glass. Said seeds are glimmering red, perhaps rubies. The apple is profoundly strong and cannot easily break.
26. A gunmetal sphere, slightly pitted. It rings dully when shaken and feels as though some thick liquid or sand shifts inside. If shaken vigorously, it becomes chillingly cold. A shallow mark has been stamped on one side: A long triangle, perhaps a tooth or an icicle.
27. A hairwork needlepoint displayed under a cabochon of greenish glass. Mounted on a nickel silver brooch. The needlepoint depicts, in black and blond, presumably-human, hair, a smiling black skeleton beckoning to a quizzical, robed child.
28. A handheld fan with lightweight steel leaves. When fully opened on its creaking rivet, it forms three quarters of a circle. The leaves are spotted with delicate openwork in flowering geometric patterns, some of which have been eaten through by rust.
29. A head-sized dodecahedron; bronze and blackened. Each of the twelve sides has a wide hole in its center. Visible through the holes is the indistinct form of a lead-dipped skull, evidently entrapped there when the hedron was forged.
30. A heavy silver ring with a flat, round head. A cap lifts off the top, revealing a folded-down needle, which may be lifted into place, and the markings of a sundial around it. None of the marks, all twiggy, natural shapes, correspond to modern notation, save the fact there are 12.
31. A human mandible with strange, silvery crystals jutting in a painful major from the ramus and processes, where it might connect to the skull. The teeth, of which the incisors are sharp, are faintly coated in platinum leaf.
32. A jade moth. Trapped in a squat, glass bottle. Crafted of jade slivers and twists of silver wire. Will fly feebly, briefly, if warmed by a living palm.
33. A jointed ceramic finger on a leather thong. A nub of bent and broken metal, whereupon the thong is tied, sticks from the stump like an end of bone ripped from its joint in a whole hand. The finger's two joints may be manipulated with some difficulty, articulated over some rusty armature of metallic bone.
34. A large blue coin with a powdery finish, perhaps tarnished. A hole is punched in one side, lending it the appearance of a tag. One side bears rows of blocky characters; a lost tongue. The other shows a many-towered skyline, all spires and soaring onion domes.
35. A large locket, its case and door crafted from faceted, cracked, yellowed glass cut like a rectangular gem. Its interior frame holds not a painting, nor a phototype, but a fuzzy, silver mirror. The mirror, when polished, has a hidden effect: If one looks into it, centers their face in the frame, and focuses upon the background, they may discern a tall, unmoving woman there, towering behind them. She is ghostly, as if cut into the silver, and looks on with deep, piercing eyes. A pair of long, spiraling horns extend from her gaunt and mirthless head.
36. A lead slate, five inches by four, and quite worn, with five lines of text written across the back in small, punched holes. Each line appears to be the same phrase, simply repeated in five languages. The first, punched out in the symbols and tongue of the Ancient Nor, which is still read today, reads "what wrought we here should be forgot."
37. A lensed brass tube, like a telescope, but not collapsible. Anyone who peeks through its cracked and dusty lens sees the world upside down and in faded, red-monochrome negative.
38. A lock of human hair preserved in a cylinder of yellowing resin capped by false-gold ends. The lock is purple black, a color rarely seen these days, in humans.
39. A long steel tuning fork. When struck, it hums at a lowing, worrisome frequency that stirs the gut and causes a listening ear to rush alarmingly.
40. A long arrowhead with only one barb, like a fishhook. The shank is helically grooved, as if meant to screw onto a shaft. No rust, nor any sign of age or wear at all shows on the brilliant, blued alloy from which the point is crafted.
41. A long-necked vessel, small, of porous, white porcelain. Glazed with black, metallic enamel, within. There is a small face stamped on its bulbous end; a curl-lipped face nestled in a pentagram. The vessel becomes dewy, if left in the open air, and over the course of a single night wells up a collected, cloying droplet in its bulb. This fluid is sweet but turns the stomach. It kills insects and small animals that drink of it.
42. A miniature, silver-plated skull inlaid with black fretwork. The skullcap lifts of on a tiny hinge, revealing holes for three vials, grouped in a triangle, within. Only two vials are there. They are octagonal, ruby red barrels capped with silver.
43. A monocle-like disc upon a fragment of silver chain. Unfit for wear as a monocle, as the thick, yellowed lens is scratched and scuffed with countless minutia and little pitted points. The points seem to coalesce as a man-shaped form. If set before a bright light, the lens projects a diagram: A flayed man, splayed in anatomical position, with labels in an odd language indicating his spilled organs and opened bodily structures.
44. A monster tooth dagger, somewhere between a shark's and the long canine of a great cat. The edge, nicked and worn, appears, on some inspection, to be an extension of the tooth's root, as is the grip. There are holes and dents, thereupon, suggestion the iron itself was once fed by nerves and veins.
45. A defaced iron insignia shaped like a shield. Someone has taken a sharp knife point and defaced the thing with a rough X symbol, then crushed it flat. Under the X, the shape of a crudely molded fir cone barely shows.
46. A needle file, steel, a foot long, and slightly dull at the point. The file itself is unexceptional, save some rust, but the handle is long and fashioned like a bone. A very human bone, recognizable by the knobbly epiphysis of a femur at its end.
47. An hourglass, slightly melted, set in a drooping, ancient housing of twisted glass. Within the bloated glass bulbs, there are two, separate liquids: A clear, slightly yellow oil that fills the space like air, and a heavy, cherry-red liquid separate from it. This cherry liquid acts as sand, dripping in slow globules from the top bulb to the bottom. Despite its age, it keeps a perfect hour.
48. A nickel silver pomander. Eight hinged segments of scrolled openwork separate and swing out from a bottom ring of hinges. The central stem, topped by a ring and the catch disc for all eight segments, bristles with sharp, metal thorns. They are rusted with ancient, brown stain. Atop one, a tiny bone is embedded.
49. An iron hook, barbed, like those meant for fishing, but quite too large. Two links of rusted, cast iron chain trail from it, followed by a flat, similarly cast tag of iron. It shows, under ample rust, the simple etching of a bony man hung by a hook sunk through his collarbone. Three runes, like circles cut with spurs, are stamped below. The tag has another hole opposite the attachment of its links, suggesting more where attached thereafter.
50. An ivory comb, the kind meant to lay flat and stay a plate of hair. Blackened, either with age or with purposeful tarnish, and carved on its handle with images of plagued skeletons, obviously grues, spilling over each other in a chilling accurate depiction of frozen, unnaturally insectile movement.
51. An ivory playing piece shaped like the bust of a muscled, eyeless man with interlocked fingers and palms rested atop the pummel of some weapon haft. He is eyeless, for the metal dome of a lead skullcap covers his ears, nose and eyes. Only thin lips show below.
52. An operculum pendant on a fragment of silver chain. The whorl of the operculum if filled with bright leading. The reverse side is carved with a knot of engraved text in block letters; a language unknown.
53. A pair of pointed thimbles conjoined by a flexible loop of steel. The clawlike tips join nicely, like a tweezer. They may be worn on thumb and forefinger to pluck up small objects with some precision.
54. A perfume vinaigrette shaped like a tiny, long amphora. Made of some silvery metal and worked all over with tarnished curlicue. If shaken, the vinaigrette rattles, as if filled with large grains. Its lid clicks open, allowing, from the grated neck, a mossy odor of chypre. A scent neither in vogue nor disliked, today. The scent does not run out, nor fade.
55. A petrified egg, slightly orange, with one side cut away. A hideous embryo, also fossilized, is curled there. It is a long-backed, anencephalic neonate with long, rodent-like incisors that join to form a sort of beak. It clutches, in three-fingered hands, its own tail. The thing is shot through with long maggots turned by time into red stone.
56. A pewter acorn with a lead cap and stem. Something sloshes heavily inside, like mercury. The cap does not open.
57. A pitted fist of ore, quite heavy, that contains strange fossils. Neither the bony, many-legged fossils nor the metal within the ore are readily identifiable as any known to science.
58. A ragged, thin tin box containing two long, steel nails. Each has a shaft convoluted with organic whorls and notches, and a head showing a carved rose or curling tongue. On the box's lid is pasted a hand-drawn, musty sketch showing where the nails should be driven into a human's skull.
59. A ring with a miniscule lockbox in its setting. Both the ring and the setting are plain, black alloy, save for a small, square sodalite cabochon set in the lid. A key of extraordinarily small proportion would be required to open said lid.
60. A ruby ring on a finger bone. Heavy, plain, and gold, set with a fat, badly cut ruby. In modern times, it would be a man’s thumb ring, though an ugly one. Surrounds a thick finger bone. Won’t come off the bone, as the knuckles are knobby and too wide. The bone is fragile with age, and conspicuously blackened.
61. A sharp pen. Long, and crafted in smooth onyx. It will bear no ink on its piercing nib; only human blood. The silver nib will neither rust nor tarnish.
62. A signet ring, quite wide, made of cast iron. The signet face is that of a beaked skull, one halfway between that of a human and a crow. The ring is too wide for a human to wear and seems to have been designed for a finger doubly wide the usual.
63. A silver brooch shaped like an imperious face framed by stylized, curling locks. It has small, yellow garnets for eyes. The eyes seem to be backed by mirrors, for they flash with an unusual brightness while in light. The brooch is magnetic, on its iron back, and connects powerfully to metal objects.
64. A silver pendant, sans chain, shaped like a cone snail's shell. There is a hole beside the chain loop, but no stopper within. Inside, the shell is hollow. Close inspection reveals that the shell culminates in a very sharp, short needle. Fluids placed in the shell well at the needle's vicious end.
65. A silver tube, long, worked with branchwork, and thin, filled with yellow powder. Said powder smells of hickory and some astringent tang. It fills the tube, which is closed with a screw cap, to the brim.
66. A single earring of an ugly style. A thick, short hoop of reddish, soft metal. It smells faintly of wet iron or raw offal when touched and seems to make the fingers sticky. It attracts insects, large ones, that sit within the loop, when worn, and worry and wash their hairy legs, buzzing lowly in the wearer's ear.
67. A skeleton doll, articulated. It's blackened ivory bones, rather detailed, are joined by small iron rings. One arm is missing, and one eye socket is filled with a small garnet. If carefully inspected, it becomes evident there are two more rows of teeth than normal in the jaw.
68. A slumber, small, shaped like a pint-sized ampoule of green glass. A faint, flickering heartbeat can be heard within, if listened to in absolute silence. The glass emits faint heat, like a living thing.
69. A small, cartouche-shaped plaquette made from bronze, meant to hang around the neck by a chain, like a modern dress gorget. The chain is gone, replaced by simple cord. A sculpted, leonine face looks out from the front, snarling.
70. A small, ivory figure nailed to a Y-shaped crucifix, also ivory. The figure is carved in excellent detail. Though emaciated and wracked in stiff-limbed agony, a wide and tooth grin is present on the figure's hollow-eyed face.
71. A small knife, unfit for fighting, with small notches and teeth, like those of a key, cut into its edge. Plainly made from dark, patinated iron. Shiny and sharpened at the hard, toothy edge.
72. A small show globe, akin to the large sort hung in chemists' shops, capped and banded with blackened silver. The screw cap is stuck on but might yield with some twisting. Contains bright blue powder, so fine that a single breath might send it all blowing away.
73. A small silver spoon. Long, with two slots in its bowl. Any food it contacts develops an acidic flavor; savory, but not pleasant to a modern palette. Any water does so, too, and turns a greasy grey.
74. A small whistle shaped from ivory, perhaps bone. Yellowed and chipped, thin as a pencil, and perhaps the length of one's hand. It has eight holes for fingering, but they are of no use, for the whistle produces no sound when played. It vibrates subtly, producing naught but raised hairs and a sensation of anxious, horrid dread in all who are near.
75. A spherical astrolabe, small and brass, inlaid with gold leaf, without a stand. It has six rings, and none of the celestial details thereupon correspond with the earth's night sky. Has a loop upon which it might hang from a cord or chain.
76. A spheroid box, small, and ribbed like a squat pumpkin. Splits neatly in two. The halves, which join nearly flush via a thin, inset lip, are conjoined by a short silver chain. Every link in the chain, oblong and blackened, is glassed and opens like a locket. Only one of these frame-links contains a picture: A minute, painted image of a man with a pig's head.
77. A spool of gold wire. Soft, and of a wide gauge. Wound round a cracked ivory spool. Every millimeter of the wire's surface is carved in conjoined, cursive letters in a scratchy, unknown script.
78. A square bell, rather small, and unusually heavy. Smooth, unrusted, with a short tongue that wags with only great force. It sheds no sound; only heavy vibrations that shake the hand, vibrate one's teeth in their sockets, and touch ringing tones of nearby metal objects.
79. A squarish iron key, large, with three blocky teeth. One of the teeth rotates, with some difficulty, grinding with rust. The wide, handle portion of the key is also rusted, but depicts, in bas relief, a square door with a howling, heavy-browed face above the keyhole.
80. A steel-bristle brush, round and palm-sized. The ferule and handle are rusted iron, but the bristles maintain a stainless shine. If the rust is scraped away, the mark of an obscure, two-crested helmet may be seen stamped atop the grip.
81. A steel measuring chain. Identifiable as a measuring instrument, as each two-centimeter link is labeled with a careful line and a unit in its end. The units appear to be standard numbers, but with some odd, serif-like additions to each. 110 links, in total.
82. A steel tooth cap, keenly sharp, meant for the upper jaw. Converts the canines and lateral incisors into long, pointed fangs. There are sockets in the fangs' fronts, as if they once held gemstones. A pair of blackened, ancient teeth are still stuck within the cap's inner groove.
83. A strange, tiny inkpot, barely large enough to contain more than a few drops of ink, with a pointed, small-diameter needle protruding from its bottom. The needle, if embedded in one's flesh, causes the pot to well with waiting red.
84. A strange pin, like a clothier might use for sewing, but larger, and with a slightly serrated shaft and a red glass bead for a head. Larger than is useful by a factor of two. If stuck in red-blooded flesh, into which it sinks readily, the red bead glows, faintly, flickering like a faint flame in a bloody shade.
85. A syringe with a squared-off crystal barrel. The plunger, flange, and needle hardware are nickel alloy ornately etched in twining, serpentine coils. Though it has no needle, and the plunger no longer seals, it is finely made, given its age.
86. A thick crystal sphere, large as a grapefruit. Delicate fronds of green flora lie within, all sprouted in a choked abundance from a mess of roots and humus. Yellow dust, perhaps pollen, swirls about the stems amidst motes of white gas. The sphere does not open, and the plants within are like none seen on the earth.
87. A thick iron ring with eight chains attached. Each quarter-meter chain, composed of nine links, has a short spine protruding on either side of each link. Investigation shows that the large, central ring, which has a spike on one end, has a broken nub opposite it, where the whole affair might have been attached to a haft.
88. A tin ear with a hole through the middle. The back has three serrated pins, slightly wobbly, presumably meant to have connected it to a host's skull.
89. A tiny bronze kettle, or perhaps a retort, dark with tarnish. It has a curling chimney, rather than a spout. When liquid is heated inside, it immediately evaporates.
90. A tiny green ingot, pale emerald all the way through, as verdigris, in a torn-open lead envelope. On contact with skin, it turns the flesh a spongy, pale green, causes chills, and elicits an itching from the scalp. A geometric, faceted signet has been pressed into one corner of the ingot, presumably while it was cast.
91. A toadstone, brown, nearly circular, wrapped by dull lead wire. A loop is spun into the wire, and a new leather thong is tied through the loop, allowing it to be worn as a pendant. A symbol is carved on the stone's bottom; that of a curled, bat-winged serpent.
92. A warm, black iron marble; like a very large bearing, but rougher. The rough, iron exterior has worn away at a thin spot, showing a smooth, shiny yolk of hard, tungsten-grey metal within. Balmy warmth emanates from the marble, but slowly burns nearby skin an irritated red, if kept nearby for too long. The redness takes time to fade, and flakes and weeps before it does.
93. A white handkerchief, slightly yellowed, bordered in black thread. The soft, silky weave sloughs away all soaked or stuck-on mess once fully dried, no matter how dirty. Impossible to tear, by hand, but frayed around the edges. Bears a monogram in one corner; a rune reminiscent of a G, but with more curls.
94. A white marble mortar, quite small, chained to its pestle with a thin iron leash. Stained on the interior with blotchy brown. Carved on the outside with simple images of tiny, impish individuals grinding teeth in mortars just large enough to accommodate a molar.
95. A wide, gunmetal ring. Plain, on the exterior. There is lettering inside the band, raised and sharp. If worn on a clenched fist, the lettering digs painfully into its finger, leaving the word "momento" imprinted in red welts.
96. A hastella, six inches tall, made of fragile wood. Defaced with profane graffiti deeply scored with a pointed knife. The rude letters belong to a language now forgotten. They have since been filled with some silvery metal, and their edges now rise higher than the worn-down wood. 
97. Half of a broken mask of brittle iron. An impassive, large-eyed face shows on the front, genderless. Within, the mask is not smooth, but convoluted by the canals, chambers, and processes of the facial skeleton, as if this shattered mask once composed the front portion of a living skull.
98. The skeleton of an unknown animal encased in a mound of yellowing resin. It is much like a garden frog in both size and shape, albeit a garden frog with long claws and a protracted, toothy snout.
99. The steel tip of a horn capped in plain steel and pointed like the punch-shape of a bodkin arrow. Dry, keratinous splinters of horn, fragile with age, are still stuck on the inside.
100. Two glass eyeballs in a tarnished silver box with gold hinges. The orbs lie on dusty, red velvet divots. They are green glass and irregularly shaped in the back. Oddly convoluted inside, like jelly and fish eggs. Gold leaf irises lie under the hard, crystal lenses.

Author's Note

Lantern Bearers

"Seveau, send down the sledgehammer, will you?"

From on high, down the deep and dimlet well of stone, a long-hafted hammer crashed into the tiled floor, threw up chips and dust. "Much obliged," said the speaker, a woman wrapped in red scarves over an iron cuirass. She took it up.

"Hey, Boile. Bloody Greenleaf. Watch this," she said, pointing at a nearby wall covered in tile images of rose thorns. With a twist of the waist and a screwed-up grunt, she levered the heavy mallet into it, brought the thin stone and delicate tilework crashing down.

"Uof, there," she went, coughing at the resulting pall of acerbic, ancient dust. "Look. Knew there was pickings left in this hole. Bloody T&F corkers ain't so thorough as they say."

Boile, a long-nosed lad with

Remains

Curios and Curses

They crept through an autumn wood. Two men in green coats and stalker's caps tugged over black hair. One young, the other old, bearded. They carried lever guns in the crooks of their sleeves, stepped lightly round dry stands of elderberry and the musty detritus of fallen leaves. 

A hound walked before them, nose whuffling eagerly at the earth. A flop-eared cocker with a blotchy coat and thick collar. It held close and obedient to the younger man's leg.

"I've been thinking about the wedding," said the man, softly, kept his eyes low, scanning the brush.

"Ai?" said the elder. "What about?"

"Whether it should be, well, postponed."

That earned him a sideways glance. "Hm? Why, Alphons? I do hope the two of you are getting on."

"Lasuli is… fine Papa," saidAlphons. "It's just, well." He pursed his lips. "The disappearances. In the village. The folk say something's been taking people all year, especially after festivals. It's killed five, now. The reception is at risk."

"Ai, Alphons," bemoaned Papa.

"Please. I know you don't truck much with Northern superstition, but, well–" He quieted, for Papa had raised a finger to his lips, gestured to the surrounding wood.

"Sorry." He whispered. "Forgive me, but it's as Mama says: You married a Northerner. You must know how many of their superstitions have more than a little tru–" *

At that moment, they both quieted, for the cocker had frozen, set its nose in a definite point. Its brown, wide-set eyes fixed on a bramble some fifty meters ahead. Alphons produced a hunter's glass, dialed its focus on the brush. Within, near obscured, milled a flight of fat, long-billed woodcocks. They poked at the earth, drawing up pink worms and sour elderberry seeds. He passed the glass to Papa, who squinted through, nodded, readied his leverette. **

Both men crouched low, leveled their guns, set a bird each in their sights. "Uno, dos," whispered Papa. On "tres," the birds dropped in a puff of feathers. The remaining woodcocks flushed in a flutter and a panic, dispersed with the fading ring of shots.

They grinned at their successful kills. "Go on, Blotto. Find them up," said Papa, patting the dog. It shot off, tongue lolling, under the low thorns of the bramble.

"You were saying?" said Papa. He recocked the leverette, stowed it back in his elbow, raised his eyebrows to Alphons.

"There are many of their myths which are true."

"I am certain many are." Papa knelt to pat the hound as it returned, a bird clasped gently in its jaws. He turned the feathered lump in his hands. "But this tale, I do not believe as one of them."

Alphons frowned. "You are husband to the Earl. *** I can't understand how, after all these years, you've never come to trust her, your, people."

"Because, hijo, for every myth that is true, there is another that is a lie." He smiled encouragingly at the hound as it returned again, trotting happily with a limp bird in tow. "Willfully or not, they are a mask for crime, or disease." He took the bird, rubbed the cocker's ear. "Or sin." The dog yipped once, scampered away.

The bearded man rose, both birds in hand. "The killings were committed by that mad hermit they hung last season, if you recall. I am certain." He turned to go, whistled for Blotto. "Come." Alphons followed, diffident.

A wind came up. Brown leaves tumbled around them. "I want to see you without worry, Alphons. You are soon to be wed." Papa turned to him; eyes crinkled. "Ai?"

"I try, Papa. I hope you are right."

"Good." He looked ahead, idly strung the birds onto a cord on his belt. "Shall we try the back range, now? I am sure they are roosting, there."

"Let's." 

"Bien." He clicked his tongue for the dog. "Come, Blotto. Vamos."

The dog's trotting footsteps gained behind. It bumped his leg, whined. "Eh?" said Papa. Both men looked down, froze.

In Blotto's mouth, limp like a bird, there were bit the skeletal remnants of a human hand. Red stings of flesh joining white, wet bones. Blotto proffered it obediently. The men recoiled. 

"Dios mio."

Alphons met his father's wide eyes, spoke. 

"It would seem that lie has killed again."

"Let me get this straight, Master Saddleback," said Alphons, overlooking a long table of beer glasses, breads, and linkwurst. "To do this, you really needed two crowns of…" He waved a hand at the spread, set up in a flower-strewn field beside the looming wood. "Celebration?"

"Precisely," said the cutter beside him, a hard-bitten, scruffy man with bushy eyebrows. He tugged the collar of his jerkin, scratched his rough neck. "If'n the beast is what we think, it'll hate a celebration. Song, laughter, firelight. It'll hate 'em all. Best way to draw it out. It'll come after we bed down te sleep, but we shan't sleep. We'll be waiting. "

"I see." He watched a pair of cutters, both long-haired and strapped with blades, carry a keg to the table. "My father is dubious, but I've faith of your record. And I've convinced the Earl."

"Ta. They'll see."

"And, " said Alphons, running a hand through his hair. "What did you call the monster?"

"A barghest," nodded Saddleback. He sniffed, spat on the grass. "'Bear-geist,' so goes the old Awnish. When they believed such things as spirits."

Alphons nodded, too, but still he frowned. He turned to behold the nearby wood. A shrub-choked reach of waving trees, just turning to brown, with an evening shadow within. They rustled in unceasing movement. He gulped. A hand twitched at his side. "H…how did it come to prey here?"

Saddleback raised his eyebrows, shrugged. "Well, me more academic compatriots suspect it's the fault of that logging camp upriver." He turned a pointed gaze to Alphons.

"Ah," said the nobleman's son, lowly. "The one owned by my family."

"Indeed," Saddleback said, wry. "Your woodcutters've gone and depleted the territory, and all manor of ill shite's come wanderin' down to these parts instead." He raised his eyebrows at Alphons. "Can't give ye family too much sass, though. Been makin' fine coin. Banks n' governors've had us cleanin' up the result for the past month. It's a rich life, for a cutter."

"A rich life," trailed Alphons. He watched a one-eared mouse hop by with a fiddle, followed by a bald woman with a bundle of pikes. The orange of leaves and declining sun glowed in their burnished points. Both of them carried about with gleeful step, and not a glance to the gloaming wood.

Some dour tension grew between Alphons' eyes. "What an interesting life you and yours lead, Saddleback." 

Saddleback focused on him, furrowed his brows. "Got something on ye mind, mate?"

Alphons' jaw worked, undecidedly. "You know, I am arranged to be married, soon."

"Ye?"

"Marry, make a family, groom the land, prepare to pass this world on to my heir. Like my mother to me."

Saddleback remained impassive. "Woss wrong with tha'? S' a better life than mos' get."

"For me, it has been, certainly." He tilted his head. "Only, I've been thinking. About Parousia, in the South. And awful things I've learned at the Academy. And barghest at our door." He stopped a moment, beheld the looming wood. "I feel we're fighting against other worlds, and we're losing. I fear there won't be anything left of my world to pass on, soon enough, and it'll be my kind's fault, to boot. 

He looked to the cutter, all scars and scruff and leather. "It's a world for your kind, now, Saddleback. And I'm almost jealous." He turned away. "Suppose that's what's on my mind."

Saddleback scoffed. "Ye only just realize tha'?" He raised his eyebrows.

"What?" said Alphons. Surprise widened his eyes.

"Dinnae take no academy te tell ye the world's split in pieces, Lordlin'." He raised his chin, sneered. "I'll beg ye forgive me, but ye're playin' catch-up. We cutters've known it a long time. Been plenty of us cleanin' up for decades, all so the rest o' ye can pretend things is alright." He gave a snort, poked a finger at Alphons. "And don' say yer jealous of us, for there ain't a cutter among my posse who'd not trade lives with you."

Alphons blinked a moment. "My apologies, Master Saddleback. I am embarrassed for my blindness."

"Och, well," said the cutter, simmering down. "At least ye've got one eye out of the sand." He narrowed his eyes. "Jus' remember: Ain't no one's known the damage done this world who's not worn a cutter's boots."

"I suspect you're right," said the heir, dourly, squinted at the setting sun. "It grows late." He turned for the road, which wound towards a great, crenelated country house atop a nearby hill. 

"Thank you, Saddleback. Good luck"

"Ta. We'll need it."

Alphons watched from the safety of a distant balcony. He leaned, hunting glass set to eye, elbows on a rail midst planters filled with dead begonia pixies. Autumn wind brought the dry petals to shiver, carried the sawing of a fiddle and the hum of a solemn tune: the celebration of the cutters, feasting and reciting mythic lays down and a darkened hillrise away.

O'er the hills,

Across the plain,

Ride chevaliers from Even Fane.

Crimson banners,

Raised high and plain,

All to war, to war in vain

They had sung with energy, before the sun set. Jigs and reels, trotted out on the trampled, sweet grass. Alphons had watched them all the while, watched them feast and pour beer, a flask of whiskey at his own side. But as the night grew, and the shadow of the wood overcame their firelit camp, and the flask emptied, the cutters grew quiet. They sang airs of solemn antiquity, instead. Tales of älves, and serpents, and dead heroes. 

Now, Alphons watched them turn to sleep. The smoke of their shortening fire reached him even there, mingled with the ashen dregs of whiskey. He watched the fire fade, nodding many a time. Eventually, the hunter's glass rolled into a begonia planter, and the heir slumped, hunched under a quilt, quite asleep.

He awoke to distant cries.

Alphons startled. The quilt rolled away. In the distance, screams and flashes of fire emanated from the hill. He scrambled for his hunting glass, looked.

On that hill, the cutters battled a giant. A rawboned, four-meter bear stood up like a great, stooping man. A gaunt behemoth with nubs of deformed bones burst from its taut and mangy hide. With arms thick and twisted as branches, it swiped cutters like pins, whipped weapons from hands and limbs from torsos with equal ease. With every swipe, it pulled, maniacally, fresh meat to the lipless gawp of its gnashing jaws.

The cutter's efforts were fruitless. Pike points were swatted, flashing, away. Firebombs missed or broke with little effect, for the thing ignored all flame consuming its fur, its flesh, so enthralled was it by the act of killing and eating.

A stench of burning hide reached the balcony, strong even on the distant wind. Alphons blanched. He gagged, hung on the rail. There, he clung for some time. Until the ring of slaughter died. Until the barghest, fattened with the meats of men, rose, faded, smouldering, back into the black of the wood.

He slunk from the rail, disappeared into the manor. By candlelight, silent, to avoid waking the house, Alphons gathered a pack, provisions, gear for travel. A knife, a leather duster, his gunspring, and a pair of heavy boots. He saddled a muscled roan, and, laden with the goods of a cutter, rode for the estate's end.

At the road, he turned the roan about, beheld the still-smouldering hill where the cutters had died. Smoke streamed in wisps against the black, cloudless sky

"I'm sorry, Saddleback." 

Alphons spurred the roan, rode hard the opposite way.

Maneater

Footnotes