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Zolf Smith is too many drinks deep in a Polish bar when Wilde finds him.
There’s no particular reason why Zolf is in Poland, other than that he didn’t want to be in Prague and he didn’t want to go back to England. He likes Poland well enough. Damn near no one speaks English, so he can’t overhear any news. He doesn’t want to. What would it change, if he overheard a man talking about a massacre in Prague, about some mercenaries that tried to help and failed and died? Zolf has enough grief to carry.
But by now the world is pleasantly blurry around the edges and his blood feels hot and full and the screaming memories of brains in vats and Sasha’s lungs in his bare shaking hands and Feryn’s dirt-muffled shouts start to fade into the background noise of fuzzy apathy. The barkeep is a dwarf — she doesn’t speak much Dwarven, but she speaks enough — and she’s looking at him with a professional frown that probably means she’s going to cut him off soon. Zolf asks for another round before she can make up her mind.
“Again whiskey?” she asks in thickly accented Dwarven.
“Please.” He puts his silver down before she can change her mind. His fingers are clumsy with it. He’s running low on cold coin, but he’s been avoiding the banks. He thinks about Hamid and about money and about Sir Fucking Bertrand and his mind trails off for a bit until the bartender sets the whiskey down in front of him. It’s lower quality than what she’s been serving him. She probably figures he’s drunk enough that he won’t notice or care, and she’s half right. He swallows a burning mouthful of it without complaint.
The door opens and lets in a thick sheet of rain. The barkeep shouts something in Polish that, if Zolf had to guess, was something along the lines of close the fucking door. The wave of damp, cold air sweeps over him for a moment and, pissed as he is, Zolf experiences a dizzying moment of feeling back at sea, with wet air on his face and the floor rocking beneath him and a trail of carnage and death behind him. He shuts his eyes and takes another swallow of shitty whiskey like it’s an antidote. It might as well be.
Zolf, he thinks in a voice that sounds a dreadful lot like Hamid, this isn’t sustainable.
Fuck off, he thinks to the Hamid in his head.
Mr. Smith, says a voice that sounds enragingly like Bertie, now isn’t this a state to be in, hmm? And in public, no less! Well, you know, dwarves are rather predisposed to ailments of this sort—
Zolf, says a voice that sounds like Sasha Rackett, are you listening?
“Fuck off,” he mumbles into the whiskey.
The barkeep looks at him warily, and then fires off a string of annoyed Polish. Zolf takes another swig of whiskey and is about to remind her he doesn’t fucking speak Polish when someone else speaks.
“Oh, good, you’re not busy.”
Zolf shuts his eyes. Oh, he’s nearly drunk enough for this, but not quite.
Oscar Wilde slides into the dwarf-sized chair next to Zolf, folding his legs out to the side to fit. “I need to talk to you,” he says.
“No, you don’t.”
“I wouldn’t have had to teleport halfway across the planet to find you if I didn’t.”
Zolf continues staring straight ahead at the chipped and scratched bar surface. It spins in front of him.
“Zolf.” Wilde’s voice darkens. “Have you been paying attention? Have you heard about the riots? The fighting? Cairo?”
Zolf tips back his glass and drains the rest of the shitty whiskey in one go. The barkeep is eyeing them both with open suspicion now, her hands on her hips. He’s not getting another drink.
“Meritocratic rule is breaking down. Communications are compromised at best. Zolf, things are collapsing. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”
Zolf snorts and weighs the odds of being able to storm out of the bar with his dignity intact. Probably not, if his swimming vision is anything to go by. Regardless, he slides out of the chair and takes a few seconds to adjust his balance. Between the whiskey in his blood and the legs he still hates — the density is all wrong, and gods, he can’t even kick a wall when he feels like it, it just splashes — he has to hold the edge of the bar for a minute.
By the time he’s got his balance sorted out, Wilde is already standing, too. “Go ask the lot that still works for you,” Zolf manages. “I’ve quit.”
“They’re gone.” It’s curt.
Zolf is too drunk and angry to care. “How’d you find me, anyway?”
“You can get a scry at most apothecaries these days. And you aren’t being terribly careful at covering your tracks. Zolf, listen—“
Zolf turns to leave. He doesn’t have anywhere specific in mind other than out and away and just fuck off, Wilde.
Wilde, predictably, annoyingly, follows him. “Listen,” he says again, and that’s when Zolf whirls and lands a sucker punch in Wilde’s gut.
To his credit, Wilde takes the hit like a man and hardly even doubles over. He does take a minute to cough and gag, and Zolf takes the opportunity to stumble out the door and into the pouring rain.
He doesn’t get far before Wilde appears in the doorway behind him, still half-crumpled, and shouts “Hamid’s dead!”
Zolf stops.
“Hamid’s dead,” Wilde repeats, and even though he’s got Zolf’s attention he doesn’t stop shouting like he wants to tell everyone in Konin. “Bertie’s dead, Sasha’s dead, and, and — fuck, you don’t even know the others but they’re dead too, Zolf! They are gone! The world is ending, do you understand? It’s — it’s just me.” Wilde suddenly sags against the brick wall like his shouting was the only thing keeping him upright.
Zolf reels a little and tells himself it’s from the alcohol. His mind feels thick. “That’s,” he starts, and then stops. “Are you sure?”
Wilde laughs with an edge of hysteria loud enough to hear over the driving, stinging rain. “Am I sure — yes, Zolf, I’m sure. It’s been months.” He pauses. “They went to Rome.”
Rome. It echoes around Zolf’s sluggish brain like the doleful sound of a funeral bell. His pulse starts to pound. “They… you…” He stops, licks his lips. They taste like rainwater and shit whiskey. “You let them go to Rome?” And oh, something is hitting him, something like grief or rage or the gaze of Poseidon. “You sent them to Rome alone?” he shouts.
Wilde pushes off the brick wall, something wild and desperate in his flinty eyes, and rises to his full height like he’s about to grab Zolf by the throat, and then he stops and steps back and sinks into the brick again. “Yes,” he says faintly. “I did.”
Zolf sways a bit, unsure. He wasn’t expecting that. He struggles to think around the rolling waves in his head. The seawater that makes up his legs swirls in currents that try to keep him steady. He hates them for it. “There’s… right. Hang on a minute.” He shakes his head like a wet dog. “Barrett, he… gave Hamid that ring, di’nt he? I mean, fuck ‘im, but he might know—“
“Barrett’s in prison.” Wilde sounds hollow. “Grizzop gave him to the Artemis lot.”
“Who the fuck’s Grizzop?”
Wilde rubs his eyes. “Doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”
Zolf hesitates a moment, then moves to stand by Wilde, then leans against the brick wall with him. It’s cool and wet and soaks through his clothes instantly. (He’d sold the chain mail back in Dresden for hostel money.) Wilde’s hair is short. Much shorter than Zolf remembers it being. “Then — then what do you need me for?”
Wilde stares straight ahead at the sheets of rain. “Because I can’t think of anyone else.”
Zolf thinks for a long moment. “Right,” he says to stall for time. “Right. Okay. First off. Let’s get out of the sodding rain.”
Wilde’s mouth quirks in a way that isn’t a smile and isn’t a frown. “Was that a pun?”
“Shut up. I’m stayin’ nearby. It’s a shithole, but it’s got four walls and a roof.”
“You’ve not checked your bank accounts, have you?”
“Been trying not to use mercenary money.”
“You should. Hamid made sure you still got paid for the last job you did.”
Zolf tries very hard not to think about that. If he thinks too long about Hamid — beautiful, argumentative, spoiled little Hamid — he’s going to unravel. Of course Hamid would handle the money. Of course Hamid would die in Rome.
The rooms Zolf paid for are really just one room and a water closet that really is a closet. They’re both drenched from the walk, and as Zolf wrings out his beard, he expects Wilde to click his fingers and suddenly look immaculate. (Like Hamid did.) (Don’t think about Hamid.) (Don’t imagine Hamid wide-eyed and unseeing and broken and bloody and dead on the cursed sand of Rome.) (Don’t imagine Sasha split open on a table, her kidneys on one plate and her still-beating heart on another, her intestines held like a banner between several delicate pincers, don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it)
But Wilde doesn’t. He stands, dripping onto the bare floorboards, as bedraggled as Zolf’s ever seen him, and delicately shakes out his sleeves into an ever-expanding puddle. “I suppose a towel might be too much to ask,” he says.
“You can’t just magic it away?” Zolf asks. His tongue feels heavy.
Wilde laughs like it’s forced its way out of him and runs his hand over his sodden face. “Not anymore. I’m on a, uh. A bit of a magical sabbatical at the moment.”
Zolf turns that over in his mind a little and then muddlingly accepts it, nods, and fetches a passably clean towel from the water closet. “Right. You wanna. Start at the beginning? Prague?”
Wilde accepts the towel and stares past it at the floor. “Prague,” he repeats. It seems like all the fight has gone out of him. His too-short hair is still plastered to his skull, dripping. He shakes himself a little and scrubs the towel over his face. “Hell. Prague wasn’t even the bad bit. Bertie died there, but we won.” He turns the towel on his hair. “Hamid’s sister, too.”
“Ah.” Zolf doesn’t know what to say to that. He can’t quite recall any of Hamid’s family’s names, but he knows Hamid was close to them. The whiskey makes his heavy tongue loose. “Death of a sibling, that’s rough, innit?”
Wilde’s hands clench on the towel. “It is,” he says after a moment.
The rain lashes the groaning windows in the silence.
Wilde dries himself to a seemingly acceptable level and then produces a bottle out of his damp coat. “I got this to share,” he says, “but I’ve changed my mind. This is for me. You’ve had enough. The girl at the bar told me to get you out before you passed out in the corner.”
“You shouldn’t call female dwarves girls,” Zolf mutters. “‘S offensive.”
“Noted.” Wilde uncorks the bottle with his teeth and takes a sip. “Prague, then.”
It only takes Wilde about two hours to tell the highlights. He’s tight-lipped about the goblin, and Zolf can’t be arsed to ask, but it’s over soon enough. They sit in silence as the rain pounds the glass. Wilde undoes his collar. The bottle is half empty and his eyes are bright and Zolf wonders if Wilde is having some sort of breakdown, because that’s sort of what’s been driving Zolf all over Europe and it’s what drove him to a shitty dwarven bar in Konin.
“Huh,” says Zolf instead of saying any of that.
“Yeah,” says Wilde. He stretches his legs and takes a lazy sip of vodka. “I got orders that didn’t make sense, and, you know? I just left. The Meritocrats are scattered or cowering or compromised or whatever-the-hell. So I fucked out of there. Found Einstein. And now, I’m just…” Wilde makes a vague gesture with the hand holding the bottle. “Trying. My best. There’s… there’s something in Japan, I think, but I don’t know, and I can’t do it on my own, and I don’t have a team anymore, Zolf, it’s just me, and I didn’t go with them to Rome, I barely even remember most of Damascus, there’s just fuzzy… bits, you know? You know, when… when you’ve not slept in eight days an’ the shadows are all moving?”
“Yeah,” says Zolf, because he does.
“I was going to go with them. I was.” Wilde sniffs, and Zolf realizes he’s dangerously close to tears. “But I just. I wasn’t thinking right. I don’t remember when Grizzop took me to the temple for healing. I know they cut my hair. But I don’t remember any of it. I never thanked him. I called him an it, you know? Just to be cheeky. I didn’t…” Wilde stops there and stares down at the bottle, looking lost in thought.
Zolf draws a deep breath and levers himself off of the wobbly stool. “Go on, then, scoot over,” he says, gruffer than he means to.
Wilde scoots without complaint. Zolf sits beside him and smoothly snatches the vodka from Wilde’s loose hands. “Listen,” he says, choosing his words as carefully as he can with the alcohol still buzzing through his head. “I’m not… I’m not an asset anymore, Wilde. I’m not a cleric. I’m done with Poseidon, an’ he’s done with me. I mean, sure I’m still a fair hand with polearms, but I’m not… I’m not useful.”
Wilde heaves a sigh and flings an arm around Zolf’s shoulders with the heavy carelessness of half a bottle of vodka. “Zolf,” he says in a very pompous way that reminds Zolf uncomfortably of Bertie, “I am exquisite at my job. I am a scion. A legend. I am the apex predator of my line of work.”
“Oh, get to the point.”
“My point is that I didn’t pick you and your team because I thought you were the best cleric the world has ever seen,” Wilde says with the easy honesty of the pissed. “I picked you ‘cos—“
“Because Bertie was the only top you could find?”
Wilde swats at Zolf’s head with the hand that isn’t slung round his shoulders. “Shut up, Smith. I picked you ‘cos you’ve got heart and balls in spades.”
“You’d better not know a gods-damn thing about my balls.”
Wilde laughs at that. Not a forced one and not one that sounds like a bark of pain, but a surprised and easy bubbling-up that pulls at something in Zolf’s chest. “You’re such a dick,” says Wilde. And he leans over to plant a kiss in Zolf’s hair.
Zolf turns at just the wrong moment.
It’s accidental and he tastes like vodka and rain, but Wilde makes a soft sound of surprise against Zolf’s mouth, and then he doesn’t pull back, and Zolf thinks very hard for moment about whether he wants to — or should? — before he gently eases back.
“Er,” he says.
“Ah,” says Wilde.
“I, didn’t mean—“
“Neither did I,” Wilde says. He lets go of Zolf’s shoulder. His eyes are bright and his hair is drying in wild waves and Zolf can’t look away.
“I just,” says Zolf.
“No, I know, I wasn’t—“
“Right, yeah.” Think about Sasha. Think about Hamid. Think about Bertie, gods, anything other than vodka and rain and waves of dark hair that would feel so soft under his hands.
Wilde looks away. His leg bounces. The shackle around his ankle clinks a little with it. Something’s changed in the air between them. Zolf can’t quite tell what. But he sets his jaw and thinks of Sasha split open from chest to hip and thinks of Wilde explaining what a botched resurrection means and even though Zolf knows it wasn’t his doing there’s still a horribly familiar tingling of guilt stirring in the back of his mind.
Zolf says, “Then let’s go to Japan.”