I took in deep, steadying breaths. It would follow us until it destroyed us? But we’d hurt it, hadn’t we? My brow furrowed. “I hit it. We hit it.”

  “I fended it off. The only creature here that actually hit it was you, with your ridiculous Conviction and even more ridiculous shovel. I could only strike where you had struck first. Now that you are aware of what it truly is and what it can do, you will not be capable of such a thing again. And even that was due to the fact it had likely just devoured forty souls and its stomach was on the verge of splitting.”

  I hefted the shovel. “Why can’t I do it again?”

  “You fear it now,” he said. “I can see it in your singular eye, in the line of your mouth. What is fear if not doubt?”

  I closed my eye, because the man wasn’t wrong. What was fear if not doubt, huh?

  “How do Convictions work?” I said.

  “A conversation for the long road ahead,” Cato said, because of course he did. “You have chosen a foolish one. You will alternately be capable of impossible things and utterly and profoundly useless the moment your heart fails you.”

  “What class are you?” I finally said.

  “Warlock,” he said, “Though from the knowledge you seem to have accessible to you, I doubt you grasp any of the ramifications of what that actually entails.”

  He was correct, I didn’t. So, The Herald would chase us. We’d have to deal with it later. Cato was convinced we had gotten lucky. Maybe, but that always meant you could get lucky again. I made to turn around and head towards the three, but Cato dropped his staff, catching me in the hip.

  “Do not further waste our time with them. You refusing to follow me out the back was mistake enough. There is no need to continue it.”

  I narrowed my eye and reached out to grab the staff. I held it, and caught his gaze.

  “I’m not livestock.”

  His nostrils flared. “There is no point in conversing with them.”

  “You don’t decide that.” I pushed the staff upward, but he snapped it back down.

  “You should not have returned,” he insisted. “There was good reason I sought to leave--there is no saving that where the Herald has touched.”

  “It touched me,” I said, stubborn.

  “What do you mean it touched you?” Cato’s voice took on a noticeably higher pitch. He lunged for me again, but I stepped backwards, turning in the direction opposite Cato’s staff.

  Four corpses lay where four people had sat breathing, not so long ago. I stopped, blinking rapidly. The two women had died next to the Knight, and the other man--a Warlock like Cato, perhaps--had died sitting on his bench.

  I knew they were dead at a glance because they seemed to have been dead for weeks. Their eyes had rotted out of their sockets, their mouths lay open to the air. Tongues long gone, flesh peeling from muscle, turning slick with the slime of rot, teeth gleaming.

  None had spoken to me, really, but all had lived and breathed not a minute ago. They had died in silence, while my back had been turned.

  Even as I watched, their decay got worse, and one of feather-hat woman’s limbs crumbled into dust.

  I lurched forward--like I could somehow help, somehow stop what had already taken place.

  “W-what--”

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  Cato’s staff snapped across my stomach, delivered with enough force that I staggered backwards. “Such is the power of Entropy, that all within reach of it wither to ruin. Do not touch them. The power that returns them to dust yet remains. What do you mean it touched you?”

  I grabbed the staff and yanked hard. The fucker had been waiting for me to do that, for he only pulled back with a strength that didn’t suit his lanky frame. Digging the flat of the staff into my chest, his eyes went wide, lips curled back in fury. “I will not let you kill yourself by flinging your body upon their decaying corpses.”

  I tightened my other hand’s grip on my shovel. The urge to slam the flat of the steel against the top of his head was very strong.

  I looked back at the group. The decay was getting worse, more and more bones revealing themselves, flesh congealing into liquid and then drying. They would be gone soon. Tears burned at the edges of my eye.

  “Put your fucking staff down,” I said, my voice rough.

  To my surprise, after a moment’s hesitation, he did just that. He snapped it back up, studying me. “You make me repeat myself thrice. How did the Herald touch you?”

  “Tossed me against the wall,” I said, though my words were ponderous, my tongue thick. “Backhand.”

  Cato stepped back. He tore a hand through his white hair and pulled at it, yanking it hard. He breathed so harshly through his nose that it reminded me of an agitated stallion. His shoes made a horrible sticking sound as he went back and forth through the blood.

  The four bodies were decaying faster. Another sixty seconds or so, and they’d be gone. It was like watching a gruesome time-lapse.

  “You knew,” I said, my words still choking out, thick and difficult. “You knew they had died, and you didn’t say anything.” I had my back to them, but Cato had been watching this happen over my shoulder. His face hadn’t even flinched, not an iota of his expression giving away that he’d just watched four people silently fucking die.

  “And risk your foolish hide touching them in some vain, useless attempt to soothe your sense of feeling? They were dead before you flung yourself into this battle,” he spat, each word thrusting at me like a jab. “Only to learn that you…that you have…” He was spluttering from the rage.

  The corpses were all skeletons now. I was crying, tears streaming down my face. I didn’t know their names either. How many memories of the dead I could not call by name were going to haunt me?

  “But you are not decaying before my eyes.” Cato was mumbling to himself. “You are a Paladin. If we should get to New Sins, perhaps--” He stopped himself, spun on me, coat flaring out around him. “I do not know why you just did not follow me. Did you think I made that decision for the mere fun of it?”

  “You’re a dick,” I said, watching as the Knight’s bones slowly crumbled into soft dust. I could taste the salt of my tears in my mouth. “Dicks are usually cowards.”

  Came with that whole “selfish” thing. If you were selfish enough to decline the effort of kindness, then you were probably selfish enough to choose yourself in a life-or-death situation.

  Cato came to an abrupt stop. His mouth snapped into a thin line, his eyes wide. He looked so much like an affronted cat that, were it any other situation, I might’ve cracked a smile at the bastard’s sense of drama. He’d called me all sorts of things, and yet looked like I’d bent over and mooned him in public the moment I’d said the truth.

  Unfortunately, nothing else about what was happening was funny.

  “Do not declare me craven,” he hissed. “It is not fear that drove me to leave in that manner, it was good sense. If you confuse stupidity for cowardice, do you mistake night for day?”

  “White-hair, being brave is stupid,” I said.

  A flush actually worked its way up Cato’s neck and onto his face. He was an ugly blusher, though I don’t think this was a blush of embarrassment. His face as a whole was turning so red that he looked like a red water balloon on the verge of bursting. When he managed to speak, it was only with great effort.

  “You will not dare,” he hissed. “I have informed you of the name I wish you to call me--specifically, Surtr, as I do not grant you the right or familiarity of my primary designation.”

  “You gonna stop poking me with your staff?” I asked.

  He raised his chin even higher, somehow, like he was trying to shove his nose up a cloud’s ass, and his lip curled. “Do you intend to stop acting the sheep, devouring the grass until there is nothing but earth, and licking the dirt until your stomach swells and bursts?”

  I snorted. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” I turned back to watch the other four’s bones finish crumbling into dust. I took a deep breath, gripped the shovel, and then bowed, bending at the waist. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could grant them--my witness, my respect, and my memory.

  “You are ridiculous.”

  “I’m sorry for White-hair,” I said to the crumbled remains.

  “You will not apologize for me, as if you presume to be my handler--”

  Yeah, I was just gonna stop listening to that bullshit.

  The building shook and groaned. A chunk of wood fell from the rafters, rotted through. It was all collapsing to dust. The Herald of the Decline, huh?

  I turned and left.