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Title: Shades of Grey.
Writing Date: 2017.
Rating: General.
Warnings: Murder.
Fandom: AU: Spira.
Characters: Tyki Mikk, The Millennium Earl, Incidental.
Summary: Tyki attends a Akuma-based disturbance in Ankh-Morpork.
Almost every city of a respectable size and age had one.
A district or quarter whose name could send a shiver up the spines of anyone foolish enough to be caught riding in a carriage through it, let alone walking. A place spoken about only in whispers and crossed only at a quickstep on foot by the well off and poor alike, with a weapon clutched in a pocketed hand and a collar turned up against the fear as if it could be kept out like a gust of wind.
They were often the oldest parts of a city, and it wasn't uncommon to find that they were places where industry had once thrived. Factories were likely present on every road, austere things, square and grey and topped with chimneys that used to belch out smoke so thick it had a Jagd-like effect on the weather in the immediate vicinity. Inside, machines had rattled, clanged and crashed so loudly that those who worked in there would probably have been able hear a spider fart ten feet away in the ringing silence left when they were turned off for the night. If they were turned off for the night. And if they hadn't been half deaf as a result of the constant, unrelenting clangour. Or they were dockyards, once lively and hectic and full of the cries of street sellers, calling crewmen and the deep honking of shiphorns.
Now they were near empty. Factories still stood, though they were more monuments to a quickly changing way of life than anything functional, and their walls covered in snaking cracks, moss invading the weak points and weeds fringing their crumbling roofs and collapsing chimney stacks. Similarly, the ports still lingered, their murky water eating away at the wooden dockposts as readily as the leavings of optimistic seabirds devoured the metal they encrusted. Silence reigned where their cries had once filled the air; when the daily hauls of fish stopped coming, so did they.
Water-based ports had been supplanted by Aerodromes. With the taboo of Machina lifted, and the rediscovery of old technology and the invention of new techniques coming to the fore, both manufacturing processes and the methods of import had moved on and moved away.
Commerce and industry retreated from cities like a tide going out. In their wake little was left but the ghosts of the past, a dirty tidemark leaving only the greasy stains of yesterday, and the fish who were unable to get to deeper water were left gasping in the new emptiness. Cities were for living now, not for heavy industry.
In Archades it was known as Old Archades, the Old given a capital letter to show its significance, or lack thereof. When the city had expanded, both outwards and upwards, the New part had replaced the Old and distanced itself from it like an embarrassing relative or humiliating reminder of its youth. Those that had helped build the luxury apartments and beautiful tiled streets had found themselves left behind, in the quaint but ageing shadow of the city that now wore the mantle of Capital and tried desperately to separate itself from its impoverished forerunner. Midgar, when Midgar still stood, had the Underplate, where the disadvantaged lived in slums. Having failed to make a life above the plate, they had fallen through the cracks and settled in the lightless world below, like sediment in a glass of dirty water. Luxerion had the Warren, a gated district beyond even Old Town, where only the most desperate and destitute tried to eke out a living.
In those places, and the many others like them, crime was a problem. Where the fallen congregated and the poor lived apart from the rich, there were always people who made a living out of the poverty or vulnerability of others, and the wealth of those too stupid to know where their feet were taking them. Loan sharks swam the streets, cut-throats lurked in the shadows and those who would take their misconduct to more affluent areas returned to the places the law feared to tread as readily as rats to a sewer.
The Shades of Ankh-Morpork was no different, except perhaps in how cheerfully it embraced tradition.
The older area of the Shades, a small part of a larger section marked on maps, could be held up as an particularly shining example of the trend. If it were possible to crown a particular area of the world the king of all the other places that were in any way like it, the Shades would already have the ermine-trimmed coat and ball-topped sceptre waiting in its wardrobe. It wasn't that dangerous didn't quite cut it, it was that dangerous was too smart to set foot there either. The Shades was such that even criminals feared to walk the winding, close-run alleys out of deference to the local lads and who-are-you-calling-a-ladys.
In the daytime, the sun, such that it was after it had filtered down through smoggy cloud and bounced off grime-covered windows before finally reaching the cobbled pavements as a thin mockery of its former self, seemed to keep the cut-throats at bay. It wasn't that people didn't fall foul of blades and casual muggings when it was light, it was just that there were fewer shadowy places for them to hide in, thus cutting down the risk of accidentally walking past somebody of ill-intent, though not significantly. During the night... well, the City Watch didn't investigate crimes that happened when the sun went down. It wasn't their job to mop up after the local suicides.
Night had fallen. It hadn't quite fallen far enough to make it through the sooty haze that covered Ankh Morpork like a paling, but the effect was almost the same, although the moon and stars had cordially turned down the invitation except to peek in occasionally to see what they were missing.
Instead, the streets were lit with a sickly and somehow oily yellow light. Just the streets, though. The alleys weren't so lucky. In spite of the darkness, it was impossible to shake the unpleasant feeling that one was being watched from every angle. Strangers to the city found this sensation especially disconcerting.
Tyki Mikk was no different.
Well, that wasn't entirely true. Tyki Mikk was very different, he just wasn't different in feeling slightly uncomfortable at the sensation that a myriad of predatory eyes were on him as he walked. They had the potential to make things messy and rather more difficult than they needed to be, strictly speaking.
From the corner of his eye he saw a curtain twitch. Calling it a curtain was doing it a kindness, because even in his peripheral vision he could see it was little more than a moth eaten scrap of cloth half concealed behind a window so caked in grime it might be called frosted, but he was feeling generous. He felt, rather than saw, a shadow some distance behind him, but he paid it little mind. It was one of many hidden in the dark and it wasn't hiding as well as they were.
He didn't stop walking as he reached into his pocket to retrieve a slightly flattened roll-up and a box of matches. He held the cigarette between his lips as he struck a match, an abrasive scrape followed by the fizz and flare of firelight. In the glow of the flame he was briefly fully visible. He looked pale, cheeks a little pink in the cold Blackfrost air, hair pushed back and squashed under a tall hat. His clothes were neat, black and expensive, and rather more suited to a ball than the close-run alleyways of Ankh-Morpork.
He lit the cigarette, inhaled, and shook the match out, discarding it with a practised flick of the fingers. The darkness seemed to have closed in since the light receded, his shadow with it. He had been able to see his breath curl in front of him before, but the match had rudely compromised his night vision to the point where he could barely see the smoke from his cigarette, let alone anything else. He didn't stop walking, though. That, he'd heard, could be a bit of a silly thing to do. Instead he kept his steady pace, his achingly expensive shoes clip-clipping on the ancient cobbles until his eyes adjusted once more.
If the city had been given a modern drainage system, he fancied he'd be able to see the requisite unidentifiable steam rising from grates in the floor. As things stood, the stench that seemed to infiltrate absolutely everything in the vicinity was just how things were. It had probably originally come from the river, if one could call it that, but it had settled into everything over time, like fabric in a drawing room sucking up the smell of tobacco and never letting go.
He felt largely ambivalent towards Ankh-Morpork. Given the choice, many wouldn't have set foot in that almost famously stinking cesspit of a place, let alone the Shades, but he didn't have that sort of hang up. It was a storied city, filled with the sort of history that could probably fill the sort of gilt-edged books he'd have set his eye to pilfering in his youth in the days before he'd gotten good at cards, but some of that history was dark enough to make even him pay attention, especially the modern stuff. The immediately modern. The type of thing you see on newspaper stands.
The hair prickled on the back of his neck. It wasn't that he was afraid; he'd walked slums before, and worse, and felt that he'd got rather good at it after years of practice. As far as he was concerned he had as little to be afraid of as a wolf loosed amongst rats, but the entire district seemed to exist in a state of nervous limbo, leaving him unable to shake the feeling that the other shoe was about to drop. It was nothing, he decided, to do with the would-be subtle follower he seemed to have earned and everything to do with vestigia.
Flesh didn't hold magic, impressions of magic or the people that had cast it for long, but metal, stone and brick ... they soaked it up like a sponge. The Chakra of spells cast and uncast lingered in those materials almost as readily as it did in Mist. It was what gave old buildings their atmosphere, old books their character. Sometimes the echoes of the past were comforting or warm, sometimes they were mildly eerie for reasons you couldn't quite place. It wasn't unusual to almost hear a snatch of ghostly laughter, feel the summer sun on your face for half a second on a rainy day, or get a brief surge of somebody else's jubilation, anxious tension or burning rage. Then there were the times where a place had seen so much fear, and dread, and end-of-life panic that it seemed to infect those unused to it like a contagion, sending them into a state of nervous hyper-awareness and making them start at every scuff and movement. Old prisons, places were executions took place and old battlefields were the worst for it, but the Shades seemed to embody the sensation just as willingly.
When, after a few winding lanes had gone by, Tyki hadn't yet been accosted, set upon or otherwise inconvenienced by opportunistic muggers with the poor fortune to select him as a target, he found himself beginning to doubt the veracity of the claims made by scared nearly-locals and tourist boards alike, vestigia be damned. Those dedicated to outlining the more colourful attractions and aspects of the city's most famous district had promised fear around every corner, quaint buildings and a real sense of authenticity when it came to Ankh-Morpork's darker side. Some of them had been particularly descriptive.
About to mentally assert that the Shades did not, in any way, live up to the hype or warnings, he paused at the sound of a scream. The scrape of a boot some distance behind him suggested that he wasn't the only one.
The scream didn't drift towards him, fighting through the filth in the air, it cut a path. He considered that quite a feat considering both the foggy air quality and the type of scream. One would usually expect a shrill shriek, the horror movie squeal found in many a stock-sound archive, but it certainly wasn't one of those. No, this was a desperate, terrified cry of abject panic. Worse, it was followed by a growl, a snarling noise like a saw blade overlaid with a breathy, reptilian wheeze that, nevertheless, rested uncomfortably on the edge of human.
Tyki knew that sound. It was, after all, the whole reason he had come to Ankh-Morpork.
He took a drag on his cigarette and listened. It was hard to determine the direction of the cry. The streets took sound, bounced it around and muffled it, and made it seem to come from everywhere, and nowhere, all at once. It could have as easily come from behind him as in front, though even Tyki wouldn't have been surprised if it had crawled out of the fog itself. There was always the chance it wasn't purely fog. There could have been Mist mixed in, though he silently hoped that Mist wouldn't sully itself by drifting around the Shades. It was better staying where it was, lurking around the University's Tower of Art and imbuing regular common or garden animals with uncommon intellect, and not adding to the problem that was currently happening in a hard to pinpoint place somewhere in the immediate area.
"No! Get awa-- HELP! Someone!"
Ah, the hunted.
The voice and the desperation in it grew, but Tyki couldn't hear the scuffle he knew must have been taking place. He moved again, trying to work out where the scene was unfolding. He felt his shadow tense, unseen.
"Get back!"
A rush of warmth came from his right. It wasn't real warmth, it was merely the impression of it, the warm breath of a spell being used and the byproduct of that reaction. It wasn't a powerful spell, probably little more than a panicked elemental effusion, but it was enough. Had it been more substantial, he suspected he would have heard a yelp, but instead what followed was an enraged snarl, a wordless cry and, when he got closer, the sound of something tearing. Cloth, it sounded like.
The cry cut off abruptly. The snarling didn't. The thin clatter of something metal hitting the floor made Tyki suspect that the poor soul had tried to use a knife when magic had failed him. He could hear a strange noise mingled with the snarling, a scraping, like flint being dragged across stone. He almost didn't want to know.
He turned the corner and raised saw almost exactly what he had expected.
A creature, pale and vaguely lupine, stood over what had, mere seconds ago, been a man. Whatever it was now, it wasn't a man any longer. Now it was just meat. He lay face down, or at least, front down. The face pointed slightly to the back, wide eyes staring up at the dirty sky and, because the moon had taken that moment to poke its face into the party, they shone bright. Tyki couldn't be sure whether the creature had broken his neck, or torn out his throat. Either way, blood, ink black and sparkling in the near-darkness, pooled in the grimy space between the cobblestones leaving the stones themselves sticking out like little islands.
"Even you should know better than to hunt in a city," Tyki said, exhaling a smoky breath.
It turned. It would have bared its teeth were they all already not on show. The face was skull-like, bone white and splashed with black in the weak light. Its claws caught on the ground beneath it ... the cause of the scraping.
It was a low-level Akuma and not a particularly smart one, to Tyki's reckoning. It was, if he was any judge, young, or at least recently turned. It was possible that, in life, it had stalked these streets like a shadow looking for easy prey and that's why it had returned now it had finally attained a form, but it might just have sensed the despair and fear that had seeped into the brickwork over the years and been drawn to it. Regardless, it was hunting.
It growled, a wheezy, un-wolflike sound, despite its appearance. It was lizardlike, like a Baritine croc exhaling a hissing breath. Tyki had first thought it was being protective of its prey, but that wasn't the case. The renewed shine in its beady eyes suggested it had set its sights on a bigger prize; him.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, that you weren't entirely normal, Tyki thought. It didn't take much for the fact that Akuma, for all their teeth and claws and bone-white masks marked them as animals, had the unnatural ability to detect even suppressed Chakra, and the general, if not precise, potency of that, to slip his mind. It had read him while he had admonished it and it had found a much more satisfying meal.
He grinned widely, his teeth as visible in the thin moonlight as the Akuma's mask. It paused, paw above the cobbles, discomfited. Then something changed, rippled in the air, and the Akuma backed up a step, the growl fading to a soft whisper.
"That's more like it," Tyki said, dropping the burned out end of his cigarette to the floor. When he lit another, he slipped it between near-black lips and exhaled the smoke from the corner of his mouth.
The moonlight disappeared, obscured by cloud.
Some feet behind him, Crazy Jack Mivin didn't know what to make of the situation. He'd spotted a toff in a top hat walking brazenly through the Shades like he owned the place. Well, he might have. It wasn't unusual for some of the posh bastards of Ankh to own some of the land and property this side of the river, but they rarely came themselves. Owning somewhere that poor people had to live didn't afford them any protection. A note from the Thieves Guild might have saved him from being mugged, but that wasn't what somebody dressed like that would be facing there. As such, Crazy Jack had found himself wondering when he had decided that he had nothing left to live for. Since he was such a kind soul, he had decided to do the man a service, so he'd opted to follow him and pick his moment, stick in hand.
He looked moneyed. His trousers even had the lines of an iron in them. His shoes, when they caught the light of a street lamp, or that of the moon, shone like a laced up mirror. Crazy Jack thought he could see spats, but he wasn't entirely certain.
He'd stopped when his quarry had lit up a cigarette, a brief pause in his game-stalking. As if dressing like he had taken the wrong turn to a Gala wasn't bad enough, he'd decided to advertise his presence with a veritable torch. He'd looked around, trying to spot other hungry eyes on his prize. None shone in the matchlight.
The hair on the back of his neck had stood up at the scream and fear had settled into the pit of his stomach at the sound of the snarl. Neither were uncommon sounds around there, people screamed all the time. Dogs growled all the time too, until somebody managed to grab and cook them, but that didn't sound much like a dog. It sounded like the sort of thing that could crawl out of the River Ankh and swallow up a dog, if the river was the sort of watercourse that could support life more complicated than a load of squirming, wriggling things.
He'd stopped at the sound of a scuffle, and at the strains of the Shades' traditional begging-for-your-life anthem, even though the toff he was tailing had kept on, looking for the scream, or the owner of it. Even the Watch didn't run towards a scream in the Shades. Crazy Jack decided that this guy even had even more of a death wish than wearing a top hat and a nice suit suggested he did.
He hung back as the man closed in, debating whether to pull the blade from the stick he carried, and staying back as he spoke. His accent ... sounded posh enough, but not as much as he might expect. He sure as hell wasn't local. There was something familiar about it, an accent he sort of knew, but it was twisted by an attempt to sound less common.
Crazy Jack shivered when something ... altered. He couldn't say what it was, but something changed, shifted. The growling stopped. Somehow, that was worse than the noise. He heard claws again and he squinted, trying to make out the scene as the light faded back to blackness.
The darkness covered everything. Light was barely visible in the distance, the oily yellow glow of a lamp, but it didn't get anywhere near far enough to shed any light on the situation at hand. It took the moon showing its face again to reveal anything more than a foot in front of Crazy Jack's nose.
"Can I help you?" Tyki asked.
He was grinning. He could feel the grimy air against his teeth, and smell the man's fear. The Akuma at his side growled, shoulders hunching like a hound's about to leap. His shadow eyed the beast, jaw going slack.
"I tell you what," Tyki said, taking a long drag of his cigarette and blowing the smoke out. He was close enough that the man's nose wrinkled at the smell of foreign tobacco. "I'll give you a head start. Let's say ... to ten. One..."
Crazy Jack ran.
Tyki picked up the stick from the cobbles and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped off the grime, and the blood, and examined it in the sickly yellow light of a streetlight. It was really rather nice. It was of decent quality wood, if a little marked, and the carving and metalwork were masterful. It had clearly not been looked after since being no-doubt liberated from its rightful owner. Well, Tyki would, he decided.
"Are you finished?" He asked, casting a look at the Akuma.
It growled in response.
----------
"Dog attacks," the Earl said, cheerfully, customary grin in place, shuffling the newspaper in one hand and pointing at Tyki's head with one stubby grey finger on the other.
"Well," Tyki replied, taking off his hat and sitting at the desk. He leaned his new stick against the desk's rim. There was already a cup of tea poured for him.
He eyed the back page of the paper, unable to make out the writing and barely able to read it even if he could. According to the news he'd heard by ear, Ankh-Morpork was on whatever passed for a state of high alert there. Apparently, a vicious dog, or dogs, had been seen stalking the Shades and attacking unwary victims. It had turned out to be quite the interesting news story. Most people who died there were as a result of stabbings or, lately, shootings.
Dog attacks were something different and interesting. For a while, they'd probably make history, until they slowly faded from the public mind and back into obscurity where old news went to rest.
"It won't happen again," he continued, leaning back in the chair the Earl had invited him to sit in. "The Akuma has been returned to its ... owners."
He smiled as the Earl's gaze bored into him. The instruction had been to collect the Akuma before it was able to kill more than the one reported death that had alerted them to its position. In the end, seven people had died. Five had been killed in quick succession, messily and viciously prior to Tyki's locating it. The words 'rampage' and 'spree' had been used. Tyki had been witness to the sixth and had caused the last when he'd told the beast to take out the witness. He hadn't told the Earl this, but he suspected he knew anyway. He couldn't see his eyes, they were hidden by light reflecting on the lenses of his glasses as usual, but he felt his displeasure, even as the wide grin lingered on his face.
"Good, good," he said jovially, folding the paper. "Since you did so well, I have another job for you."
Tyki's mood sank. He felt the smile on his face falter, so he carefully took it down and downgraded to something a little easier to hold. He ran a fingertip along the rim of his hat, sure he was about to be punished for his indiscretion. "Another job?"
He hoped it wasn't another escaped Akuma. If it was, he didn't want it to be in another ... colourful city. He'd had enough of those for a few months. Three pickups had been his previous errands. He knew little about them, just that whoever the Earl had been selling the Akuma to had a bad track record with keeping them contained. He'd heard it was government officials, and that a rich chancellor had been paying him to use the kekkei genkai of his family to bring them in for experimentation, but there was no proof, just rumour. They'd caught Akuma for people before, lowerworld people, not Jyllandi governments. This was, apparently, different. Different circumstances, different reasons, different people.
"Another job," he confirmed, nodding his head happily with a clap of the hands. "You're to take Road and hop yourselves down to Ivalice. There's a meeting I require somebody to attend in my stead and you are the man for the job."
Tyki thought that sounded like a lie. He was never the man for that sort of job.
"What about Cyril?"
"Otherwise occupied."
"Lulubell?"
"Busy."
"Wisely?"
"Tyki, Tyki, Tyki..." the Earl said, neither his voice nor his demeanour losing their jolly quality. "I have chosen you for the job."
"On Ivalice?"
Ivalice was rather far away. Every other job had been in Jyllandi cities. Ankh-Morpork, Altissia and Celapaleis. He'd never even been to Ivalice. Travel between the continents was common enough, but Tyki had never gone. Until his teens, he'd never the money and until recently he'd never had the trust. Road had often teased him about being too much of a flight risk to give the big jobs to, but apparently he'd proven himself.
"Indeed," said the Earl. "I need you to attend a Clan Khamja meeting in my place. Road has the information, but she would seem vulnerable by herself in such company. You'll be there as both a chaperone and to appear to be knowledgeable about the goings on regarding our involvement with the Clan. Road will school you on the details."
Tyki scowled down at his cup of tea. They were to look like they were the reverse of their positions, then. That wasn't at all humiliating. Still, it was better than Akuma wrangling.
"What's the meeting for?" He asked, picking up the cup and bringing it to his lips. It was cool enough that he half finished it in two mouthfuls.
"Various things. They happen semi-regularly, but this one has been pushed forward due to one of the foremost members having been detained," the Earl said. "In spite of diplomatic immunity. He has, quite unfortunately, been ... implicated in the Fall of Midgar."
Tyki had heard about that. Everybody had. Midgar, one of Ivalice's most famous cities and the capital of Bancour, a massive modern city built on stilts above the ground, had been hit by a terrorist attack and fallen, killing all inhabitants both above the plate and in the slums beneath it in one fell swoop. There had been no survivors, no witnesses and no suspects. Well, the second and third of those were now in question, apparently.
"Right," Tyki said. "When do I go?"
"As soon as possible," came the answer, almost before Tyki had finished answering. "Go, go. Road is already aware of how to proceed. I have a feeling there will be other Jyllandi representitives in Khamja's meeting place. Please do not give them any information regarding the Akuma, no matter who they are or what they represent."
That was a warning. It was phrased like a request, but it wasn't one. There was a little too much honeyed venom behind the words, a new steeliness to the glint in the lenses of the Earl's pince-nez.
"And you are to go as a Noah," he said, his voice growing a little more forceful at the last word. "So you will look like one."
Tyki nodded, making a mental note of that. It wasn't his default, not yet, but it would be eventually, he suspected. He finished his tea, replaced his hat on his head and got to his feet, picking up the stick he had pilfered from Crazy Jack on the way up. He crossed the room to the door, and paused with his free hand on the handle, glancing over his shoulder at his smiling patron, his lord and his employer.
"So why do we have to go?" Tyki asked. It was all very interesting, but as far as he was concerned, Midgar had nothing to do with the Noah Clan.
It took the Earl a moment to answer. Tyki swallowed, hearing the movement in his throat in the silence.
"Because, my dear boy," the Earl said at length. "The man in question is Sōsuke Aizen."
Writing Date: 2017.
Rating: General.
Warnings: Murder.
Fandom: AU: Spira.
Characters: Tyki Mikk, The Millennium Earl, Incidental.
Summary: Tyki attends a Akuma-based disturbance in Ankh-Morpork.
Almost every city of a respectable size and age had one.
A district or quarter whose name could send a shiver up the spines of anyone foolish enough to be caught riding in a carriage through it, let alone walking. A place spoken about only in whispers and crossed only at a quickstep on foot by the well off and poor alike, with a weapon clutched in a pocketed hand and a collar turned up against the fear as if it could be kept out like a gust of wind.
They were often the oldest parts of a city, and it wasn't uncommon to find that they were places where industry had once thrived. Factories were likely present on every road, austere things, square and grey and topped with chimneys that used to belch out smoke so thick it had a Jagd-like effect on the weather in the immediate vicinity. Inside, machines had rattled, clanged and crashed so loudly that those who worked in there would probably have been able hear a spider fart ten feet away in the ringing silence left when they were turned off for the night. If they were turned off for the night. And if they hadn't been half deaf as a result of the constant, unrelenting clangour. Or they were dockyards, once lively and hectic and full of the cries of street sellers, calling crewmen and the deep honking of shiphorns.
Now they were near empty. Factories still stood, though they were more monuments to a quickly changing way of life than anything functional, and their walls covered in snaking cracks, moss invading the weak points and weeds fringing their crumbling roofs and collapsing chimney stacks. Similarly, the ports still lingered, their murky water eating away at the wooden dockposts as readily as the leavings of optimistic seabirds devoured the metal they encrusted. Silence reigned where their cries had once filled the air; when the daily hauls of fish stopped coming, so did they.
Water-based ports had been supplanted by Aerodromes. With the taboo of Machina lifted, and the rediscovery of old technology and the invention of new techniques coming to the fore, both manufacturing processes and the methods of import had moved on and moved away.
Commerce and industry retreated from cities like a tide going out. In their wake little was left but the ghosts of the past, a dirty tidemark leaving only the greasy stains of yesterday, and the fish who were unable to get to deeper water were left gasping in the new emptiness. Cities were for living now, not for heavy industry.
In Archades it was known as Old Archades, the Old given a capital letter to show its significance, or lack thereof. When the city had expanded, both outwards and upwards, the New part had replaced the Old and distanced itself from it like an embarrassing relative or humiliating reminder of its youth. Those that had helped build the luxury apartments and beautiful tiled streets had found themselves left behind, in the quaint but ageing shadow of the city that now wore the mantle of Capital and tried desperately to separate itself from its impoverished forerunner. Midgar, when Midgar still stood, had the Underplate, where the disadvantaged lived in slums. Having failed to make a life above the plate, they had fallen through the cracks and settled in the lightless world below, like sediment in a glass of dirty water. Luxerion had the Warren, a gated district beyond even Old Town, where only the most desperate and destitute tried to eke out a living.
In those places, and the many others like them, crime was a problem. Where the fallen congregated and the poor lived apart from the rich, there were always people who made a living out of the poverty or vulnerability of others, and the wealth of those too stupid to know where their feet were taking them. Loan sharks swam the streets, cut-throats lurked in the shadows and those who would take their misconduct to more affluent areas returned to the places the law feared to tread as readily as rats to a sewer.
The Shades of Ankh-Morpork was no different, except perhaps in how cheerfully it embraced tradition.
The older area of the Shades, a small part of a larger section marked on maps, could be held up as an particularly shining example of the trend. If it were possible to crown a particular area of the world the king of all the other places that were in any way like it, the Shades would already have the ermine-trimmed coat and ball-topped sceptre waiting in its wardrobe. It wasn't that dangerous didn't quite cut it, it was that dangerous was too smart to set foot there either. The Shades was such that even criminals feared to walk the winding, close-run alleys out of deference to the local lads and who-are-you-calling-a-ladys.
In the daytime, the sun, such that it was after it had filtered down through smoggy cloud and bounced off grime-covered windows before finally reaching the cobbled pavements as a thin mockery of its former self, seemed to keep the cut-throats at bay. It wasn't that people didn't fall foul of blades and casual muggings when it was light, it was just that there were fewer shadowy places for them to hide in, thus cutting down the risk of accidentally walking past somebody of ill-intent, though not significantly. During the night... well, the City Watch didn't investigate crimes that happened when the sun went down. It wasn't their job to mop up after the local suicides.
Night had fallen. It hadn't quite fallen far enough to make it through the sooty haze that covered Ankh Morpork like a paling, but the effect was almost the same, although the moon and stars had cordially turned down the invitation except to peek in occasionally to see what they were missing.
Instead, the streets were lit with a sickly and somehow oily yellow light. Just the streets, though. The alleys weren't so lucky. In spite of the darkness, it was impossible to shake the unpleasant feeling that one was being watched from every angle. Strangers to the city found this sensation especially disconcerting.
Tyki Mikk was no different.
Well, that wasn't entirely true. Tyki Mikk was very different, he just wasn't different in feeling slightly uncomfortable at the sensation that a myriad of predatory eyes were on him as he walked. They had the potential to make things messy and rather more difficult than they needed to be, strictly speaking.
From the corner of his eye he saw a curtain twitch. Calling it a curtain was doing it a kindness, because even in his peripheral vision he could see it was little more than a moth eaten scrap of cloth half concealed behind a window so caked in grime it might be called frosted, but he was feeling generous. He felt, rather than saw, a shadow some distance behind him, but he paid it little mind. It was one of many hidden in the dark and it wasn't hiding as well as they were.
He didn't stop walking as he reached into his pocket to retrieve a slightly flattened roll-up and a box of matches. He held the cigarette between his lips as he struck a match, an abrasive scrape followed by the fizz and flare of firelight. In the glow of the flame he was briefly fully visible. He looked pale, cheeks a little pink in the cold Blackfrost air, hair pushed back and squashed under a tall hat. His clothes were neat, black and expensive, and rather more suited to a ball than the close-run alleyways of Ankh-Morpork.
He lit the cigarette, inhaled, and shook the match out, discarding it with a practised flick of the fingers. The darkness seemed to have closed in since the light receded, his shadow with it. He had been able to see his breath curl in front of him before, but the match had rudely compromised his night vision to the point where he could barely see the smoke from his cigarette, let alone anything else. He didn't stop walking, though. That, he'd heard, could be a bit of a silly thing to do. Instead he kept his steady pace, his achingly expensive shoes clip-clipping on the ancient cobbles until his eyes adjusted once more.
If the city had been given a modern drainage system, he fancied he'd be able to see the requisite unidentifiable steam rising from grates in the floor. As things stood, the stench that seemed to infiltrate absolutely everything in the vicinity was just how things were. It had probably originally come from the river, if one could call it that, but it had settled into everything over time, like fabric in a drawing room sucking up the smell of tobacco and never letting go.
He felt largely ambivalent towards Ankh-Morpork. Given the choice, many wouldn't have set foot in that almost famously stinking cesspit of a place, let alone the Shades, but he didn't have that sort of hang up. It was a storied city, filled with the sort of history that could probably fill the sort of gilt-edged books he'd have set his eye to pilfering in his youth in the days before he'd gotten good at cards, but some of that history was dark enough to make even him pay attention, especially the modern stuff. The immediately modern. The type of thing you see on newspaper stands.
The hair prickled on the back of his neck. It wasn't that he was afraid; he'd walked slums before, and worse, and felt that he'd got rather good at it after years of practice. As far as he was concerned he had as little to be afraid of as a wolf loosed amongst rats, but the entire district seemed to exist in a state of nervous limbo, leaving him unable to shake the feeling that the other shoe was about to drop. It was nothing, he decided, to do with the would-be subtle follower he seemed to have earned and everything to do with vestigia.
Flesh didn't hold magic, impressions of magic or the people that had cast it for long, but metal, stone and brick ... they soaked it up like a sponge. The Chakra of spells cast and uncast lingered in those materials almost as readily as it did in Mist. It was what gave old buildings their atmosphere, old books their character. Sometimes the echoes of the past were comforting or warm, sometimes they were mildly eerie for reasons you couldn't quite place. It wasn't unusual to almost hear a snatch of ghostly laughter, feel the summer sun on your face for half a second on a rainy day, or get a brief surge of somebody else's jubilation, anxious tension or burning rage. Then there were the times where a place had seen so much fear, and dread, and end-of-life panic that it seemed to infect those unused to it like a contagion, sending them into a state of nervous hyper-awareness and making them start at every scuff and movement. Old prisons, places were executions took place and old battlefields were the worst for it, but the Shades seemed to embody the sensation just as willingly.
When, after a few winding lanes had gone by, Tyki hadn't yet been accosted, set upon or otherwise inconvenienced by opportunistic muggers with the poor fortune to select him as a target, he found himself beginning to doubt the veracity of the claims made by scared nearly-locals and tourist boards alike, vestigia be damned. Those dedicated to outlining the more colourful attractions and aspects of the city's most famous district had promised fear around every corner, quaint buildings and a real sense of authenticity when it came to Ankh-Morpork's darker side. Some of them had been particularly descriptive.
About to mentally assert that the Shades did not, in any way, live up to the hype or warnings, he paused at the sound of a scream. The scrape of a boot some distance behind him suggested that he wasn't the only one.
The scream didn't drift towards him, fighting through the filth in the air, it cut a path. He considered that quite a feat considering both the foggy air quality and the type of scream. One would usually expect a shrill shriek, the horror movie squeal found in many a stock-sound archive, but it certainly wasn't one of those. No, this was a desperate, terrified cry of abject panic. Worse, it was followed by a growl, a snarling noise like a saw blade overlaid with a breathy, reptilian wheeze that, nevertheless, rested uncomfortably on the edge of human.
Tyki knew that sound. It was, after all, the whole reason he had come to Ankh-Morpork.
He took a drag on his cigarette and listened. It was hard to determine the direction of the cry. The streets took sound, bounced it around and muffled it, and made it seem to come from everywhere, and nowhere, all at once. It could have as easily come from behind him as in front, though even Tyki wouldn't have been surprised if it had crawled out of the fog itself. There was always the chance it wasn't purely fog. There could have been Mist mixed in, though he silently hoped that Mist wouldn't sully itself by drifting around the Shades. It was better staying where it was, lurking around the University's Tower of Art and imbuing regular common or garden animals with uncommon intellect, and not adding to the problem that was currently happening in a hard to pinpoint place somewhere in the immediate area.
"No! Get awa-- HELP! Someone!"
Ah, the hunted.
The voice and the desperation in it grew, but Tyki couldn't hear the scuffle he knew must have been taking place. He moved again, trying to work out where the scene was unfolding. He felt his shadow tense, unseen.
"Get back!"
A rush of warmth came from his right. It wasn't real warmth, it was merely the impression of it, the warm breath of a spell being used and the byproduct of that reaction. It wasn't a powerful spell, probably little more than a panicked elemental effusion, but it was enough. Had it been more substantial, he suspected he would have heard a yelp, but instead what followed was an enraged snarl, a wordless cry and, when he got closer, the sound of something tearing. Cloth, it sounded like.
The cry cut off abruptly. The snarling didn't. The thin clatter of something metal hitting the floor made Tyki suspect that the poor soul had tried to use a knife when magic had failed him. He could hear a strange noise mingled with the snarling, a scraping, like flint being dragged across stone. He almost didn't want to know.
He turned the corner and raised saw almost exactly what he had expected.
A creature, pale and vaguely lupine, stood over what had, mere seconds ago, been a man. Whatever it was now, it wasn't a man any longer. Now it was just meat. He lay face down, or at least, front down. The face pointed slightly to the back, wide eyes staring up at the dirty sky and, because the moon had taken that moment to poke its face into the party, they shone bright. Tyki couldn't be sure whether the creature had broken his neck, or torn out his throat. Either way, blood, ink black and sparkling in the near-darkness, pooled in the grimy space between the cobblestones leaving the stones themselves sticking out like little islands.
"Even you should know better than to hunt in a city," Tyki said, exhaling a smoky breath.
It turned. It would have bared its teeth were they all already not on show. The face was skull-like, bone white and splashed with black in the weak light. Its claws caught on the ground beneath it ... the cause of the scraping.
It was a low-level Akuma and not a particularly smart one, to Tyki's reckoning. It was, if he was any judge, young, or at least recently turned. It was possible that, in life, it had stalked these streets like a shadow looking for easy prey and that's why it had returned now it had finally attained a form, but it might just have sensed the despair and fear that had seeped into the brickwork over the years and been drawn to it. Regardless, it was hunting.
It growled, a wheezy, un-wolflike sound, despite its appearance. It was lizardlike, like a Baritine croc exhaling a hissing breath. Tyki had first thought it was being protective of its prey, but that wasn't the case. The renewed shine in its beady eyes suggested it had set its sights on a bigger prize; him.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, that you weren't entirely normal, Tyki thought. It didn't take much for the fact that Akuma, for all their teeth and claws and bone-white masks marked them as animals, had the unnatural ability to detect even suppressed Chakra, and the general, if not precise, potency of that, to slip his mind. It had read him while he had admonished it and it had found a much more satisfying meal.
He grinned widely, his teeth as visible in the thin moonlight as the Akuma's mask. It paused, paw above the cobbles, discomfited. Then something changed, rippled in the air, and the Akuma backed up a step, the growl fading to a soft whisper.
"That's more like it," Tyki said, dropping the burned out end of his cigarette to the floor. When he lit another, he slipped it between near-black lips and exhaled the smoke from the corner of his mouth.
The moonlight disappeared, obscured by cloud.
Some feet behind him, Crazy Jack Mivin didn't know what to make of the situation. He'd spotted a toff in a top hat walking brazenly through the Shades like he owned the place. Well, he might have. It wasn't unusual for some of the posh bastards of Ankh to own some of the land and property this side of the river, but they rarely came themselves. Owning somewhere that poor people had to live didn't afford them any protection. A note from the Thieves Guild might have saved him from being mugged, but that wasn't what somebody dressed like that would be facing there. As such, Crazy Jack had found himself wondering when he had decided that he had nothing left to live for. Since he was such a kind soul, he had decided to do the man a service, so he'd opted to follow him and pick his moment, stick in hand.
He looked moneyed. His trousers even had the lines of an iron in them. His shoes, when they caught the light of a street lamp, or that of the moon, shone like a laced up mirror. Crazy Jack thought he could see spats, but he wasn't entirely certain.
He'd stopped when his quarry had lit up a cigarette, a brief pause in his game-stalking. As if dressing like he had taken the wrong turn to a Gala wasn't bad enough, he'd decided to advertise his presence with a veritable torch. He'd looked around, trying to spot other hungry eyes on his prize. None shone in the matchlight.
The hair on the back of his neck had stood up at the scream and fear had settled into the pit of his stomach at the sound of the snarl. Neither were uncommon sounds around there, people screamed all the time. Dogs growled all the time too, until somebody managed to grab and cook them, but that didn't sound much like a dog. It sounded like the sort of thing that could crawl out of the River Ankh and swallow up a dog, if the river was the sort of watercourse that could support life more complicated than a load of squirming, wriggling things.
He'd stopped at the sound of a scuffle, and at the strains of the Shades' traditional begging-for-your-life anthem, even though the toff he was tailing had kept on, looking for the scream, or the owner of it. Even the Watch didn't run towards a scream in the Shades. Crazy Jack decided that this guy even had even more of a death wish than wearing a top hat and a nice suit suggested he did.
He hung back as the man closed in, debating whether to pull the blade from the stick he carried, and staying back as he spoke. His accent ... sounded posh enough, but not as much as he might expect. He sure as hell wasn't local. There was something familiar about it, an accent he sort of knew, but it was twisted by an attempt to sound less common.
Crazy Jack shivered when something ... altered. He couldn't say what it was, but something changed, shifted. The growling stopped. Somehow, that was worse than the noise. He heard claws again and he squinted, trying to make out the scene as the light faded back to blackness.
The darkness covered everything. Light was barely visible in the distance, the oily yellow glow of a lamp, but it didn't get anywhere near far enough to shed any light on the situation at hand. It took the moon showing its face again to reveal anything more than a foot in front of Crazy Jack's nose.
"Can I help you?" Tyki asked.
He was grinning. He could feel the grimy air against his teeth, and smell the man's fear. The Akuma at his side growled, shoulders hunching like a hound's about to leap. His shadow eyed the beast, jaw going slack.
"I tell you what," Tyki said, taking a long drag of his cigarette and blowing the smoke out. He was close enough that the man's nose wrinkled at the smell of foreign tobacco. "I'll give you a head start. Let's say ... to ten. One..."
Crazy Jack ran.
Tyki picked up the stick from the cobbles and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped off the grime, and the blood, and examined it in the sickly yellow light of a streetlight. It was really rather nice. It was of decent quality wood, if a little marked, and the carving and metalwork were masterful. It had clearly not been looked after since being no-doubt liberated from its rightful owner. Well, Tyki would, he decided.
"Are you finished?" He asked, casting a look at the Akuma.
It growled in response.
"Dog attacks," the Earl said, cheerfully, customary grin in place, shuffling the newspaper in one hand and pointing at Tyki's head with one stubby grey finger on the other.
"Well," Tyki replied, taking off his hat and sitting at the desk. He leaned his new stick against the desk's rim. There was already a cup of tea poured for him.
He eyed the back page of the paper, unable to make out the writing and barely able to read it even if he could. According to the news he'd heard by ear, Ankh-Morpork was on whatever passed for a state of high alert there. Apparently, a vicious dog, or dogs, had been seen stalking the Shades and attacking unwary victims. It had turned out to be quite the interesting news story. Most people who died there were as a result of stabbings or, lately, shootings.
Dog attacks were something different and interesting. For a while, they'd probably make history, until they slowly faded from the public mind and back into obscurity where old news went to rest.
"It won't happen again," he continued, leaning back in the chair the Earl had invited him to sit in. "The Akuma has been returned to its ... owners."
He smiled as the Earl's gaze bored into him. The instruction had been to collect the Akuma before it was able to kill more than the one reported death that had alerted them to its position. In the end, seven people had died. Five had been killed in quick succession, messily and viciously prior to Tyki's locating it. The words 'rampage' and 'spree' had been used. Tyki had been witness to the sixth and had caused the last when he'd told the beast to take out the witness. He hadn't told the Earl this, but he suspected he knew anyway. He couldn't see his eyes, they were hidden by light reflecting on the lenses of his glasses as usual, but he felt his displeasure, even as the wide grin lingered on his face.
"Good, good," he said jovially, folding the paper. "Since you did so well, I have another job for you."
Tyki's mood sank. He felt the smile on his face falter, so he carefully took it down and downgraded to something a little easier to hold. He ran a fingertip along the rim of his hat, sure he was about to be punished for his indiscretion. "Another job?"
He hoped it wasn't another escaped Akuma. If it was, he didn't want it to be in another ... colourful city. He'd had enough of those for a few months. Three pickups had been his previous errands. He knew little about them, just that whoever the Earl had been selling the Akuma to had a bad track record with keeping them contained. He'd heard it was government officials, and that a rich chancellor had been paying him to use the kekkei genkai of his family to bring them in for experimentation, but there was no proof, just rumour. They'd caught Akuma for people before, lowerworld people, not Jyllandi governments. This was, apparently, different. Different circumstances, different reasons, different people.
"Another job," he confirmed, nodding his head happily with a clap of the hands. "You're to take Road and hop yourselves down to Ivalice. There's a meeting I require somebody to attend in my stead and you are the man for the job."
Tyki thought that sounded like a lie. He was never the man for that sort of job.
"What about Cyril?"
"Otherwise occupied."
"Lulubell?"
"Busy."
"Wisely?"
"Tyki, Tyki, Tyki..." the Earl said, neither his voice nor his demeanour losing their jolly quality. "I have chosen you for the job."
"On Ivalice?"
Ivalice was rather far away. Every other job had been in Jyllandi cities. Ankh-Morpork, Altissia and Celapaleis. He'd never even been to Ivalice. Travel between the continents was common enough, but Tyki had never gone. Until his teens, he'd never the money and until recently he'd never had the trust. Road had often teased him about being too much of a flight risk to give the big jobs to, but apparently he'd proven himself.
"Indeed," said the Earl. "I need you to attend a Clan Khamja meeting in my place. Road has the information, but she would seem vulnerable by herself in such company. You'll be there as both a chaperone and to appear to be knowledgeable about the goings on regarding our involvement with the Clan. Road will school you on the details."
Tyki scowled down at his cup of tea. They were to look like they were the reverse of their positions, then. That wasn't at all humiliating. Still, it was better than Akuma wrangling.
"What's the meeting for?" He asked, picking up the cup and bringing it to his lips. It was cool enough that he half finished it in two mouthfuls.
"Various things. They happen semi-regularly, but this one has been pushed forward due to one of the foremost members having been detained," the Earl said. "In spite of diplomatic immunity. He has, quite unfortunately, been ... implicated in the Fall of Midgar."
Tyki had heard about that. Everybody had. Midgar, one of Ivalice's most famous cities and the capital of Bancour, a massive modern city built on stilts above the ground, had been hit by a terrorist attack and fallen, killing all inhabitants both above the plate and in the slums beneath it in one fell swoop. There had been no survivors, no witnesses and no suspects. Well, the second and third of those were now in question, apparently.
"Right," Tyki said. "When do I go?"
"As soon as possible," came the answer, almost before Tyki had finished answering. "Go, go. Road is already aware of how to proceed. I have a feeling there will be other Jyllandi representitives in Khamja's meeting place. Please do not give them any information regarding the Akuma, no matter who they are or what they represent."
That was a warning. It was phrased like a request, but it wasn't one. There was a little too much honeyed venom behind the words, a new steeliness to the glint in the lenses of the Earl's pince-nez.
"And you are to go as a Noah," he said, his voice growing a little more forceful at the last word. "So you will look like one."
Tyki nodded, making a mental note of that. It wasn't his default, not yet, but it would be eventually, he suspected. He finished his tea, replaced his hat on his head and got to his feet, picking up the stick he had pilfered from Crazy Jack on the way up. He crossed the room to the door, and paused with his free hand on the handle, glancing over his shoulder at his smiling patron, his lord and his employer.
"So why do we have to go?" Tyki asked. It was all very interesting, but as far as he was concerned, Midgar had nothing to do with the Noah Clan.
It took the Earl a moment to answer. Tyki swallowed, hearing the movement in his throat in the silence.
"Because, my dear boy," the Earl said at length. "The man in question is Sōsuke Aizen."
