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“Jonathan. Jonathan Wheatley? Your boss?” The figure in the doorway – previously in the doorway, now moving forward into the room – leaves the uncanny impression of a prayerbug: lank and tall and strangely deadly: slender hands stuffed into buckskin gloves, favouring the basket-hilted broadsword at his right hip the way some southpaws do. He speaks with the edging annoyance of an official whose schedule is being hampered by a clerk or a lower-level bureaucrat. His name is Benedict Cain.

“Ah, right. John. Well, he’s not in just now. What’s this about anyway?” Jarvis is staring through Benedict. His eyes are unfocused and glassy like the expression of a man who’s spent most of his life somewhere else.

“It’s regarding his financial assets. I really need to speak with him.”

“Hm. I see, but like I says, he ain’t here. Um. Could pass a message if you’d like?”

“No, that won’t do. Look, I’m sorry if I’m being impatient, but I was supposed to meet Jonathan here first thing in the morning. Now, I’ve come all the way from the capital to see him and it’s a bit too urgent to just leave a message.” Benedict’s eyes are brutal and bright and unflinching. The pause between the first statement and the following one is not long enough for an interjection, only for an effect. “I work for the treasury.”

“Oh. Ohhhh. Well— well, all I’m sayin’ is he ain’t here right now. Might have stepped out, not really sure, but, well, yeah. You—you best just come back later.”

Jarvis has spent the last nine years in a locked room inside his head. Years spent in the same routine, in a machine that he has no notion of its existence or control over the levers of its dominion. He is hollowed-out and numb by too much memory and not enough joy. He thinks about money and how there’s never enough. About food. About how, in secret, his stillborn child some months back is treated as a blessing. Mostly, though, he’s just waiting for lunch and that small spot he’d found for himself between two boulders. There’s whiskey there in his satchel by the desk for when the day gets hard, and it gets hard often. His tongue feels swollen and dry and he wonders how much he can get away with and still be functional; he’s got one more chance, John says. His life is coming apart, it seems. Between the cracks in his stare, a man can see it from a thousand miles distant and yet every day Jarvis the Derrickhand still has to wake up and do it all again. He can remove the drill string in his sleep, now. Can guide the pipe and line it up with the fingers by memory, done near on four thousand days, back-to-back, and thousands more to go. He feels nothing for the numbers because sometime before he’d emptied that feeling out with the hope. His hands are still sore from yesterday’s work and sometimes they’ll gnarl up at night and won’t go right again until the morning. He worries about his wife, sick at home, and about the fever she’d come down with in the night. He’d wanted to stay with her, but the medicine would be expensive, and he had to work. It’s not sadness that sits in his eyes anymore. He looks tranquilised, mostly. His knees haven’t stopped aching for nine years.

Benedict looks at the door he’d come in from while smoothing out imaginary wrinkles in his doublet and sighing. He looks back. Jarvis can’t help but think that Benedict is unusually beautiful and elegant or that his conciliatory smile unsettles him. He isn’t sure why, but it does.

“Forgive me. None of this hassle of mine is your fault. Mr. Wheatley can be a difficult, non-communicative man who expects everyone to read his mind. I know this. I expect he even failed to mention me or our business. That’s not your fault, sir, and you’ve been gracious enough with your time, time that I imagine you don’t need some quill-hand from the city robbing you of. John does enough of that himself for the both of us.” Jarvis tries to interject but is clipped off. “However, that doesn’t resolve my issue nor yours. I offer a concession – or a treaty, if you will: I’ll pretend I never saw you, that you were not here, but hard at work, while I sit here – right over there on the bench, to be specific – and wait for him to return and you can get back to whatever it is that needs getting back to.”

Jarvis squints. Benedict doesn’t appear untrustworthy on paper, he notes. His sleeveless, damask doublet is well-crafted with golden patterns woven against a black background. The white shirt beneath it is immaculate, outfitted with ivory cufflinks and a golden pin tacked into the mandarin collar whose symbol is unfamiliar to him. A pair of dark, well-tailored leggings feed down into his tall-shafted boots and the craftsmanship of his blade is immaculate but utilitarian, presenting him as a man who is all business but spares no expense in whatever business that is. Eventually satisfied, Jarvis accepts the offer to the tune of something like ‘knock yourself out.’ He turns and spits between his teeth into a nearby pot.

“Gotta get back to work, then, but John should be in soon.”

Benedict watches Jarvis leave past him, out the door he’d first come. Alone in the room, Benedict sits quiet and immaculate like a statue, his back perfectly congruent with the wall behind him. He tugs at one of his coarse, leathern gloves. He looks around. The office is in one of those old adobe buildings built during the last era by men greater than the ones who use it now. Squat and ugly but made to withstand an entire calamity. He smiles. The land is now owned by one of southwestern Thanalan’s more insignificant oil-drilling operations which is in turn a subsidiary of Godwyn & Smythe. He has come to understand that the acquisition is recent. He’s in the front office, he tells himself. There are two doors but he watches neither of them. One leads out into the desert while the other (a smaller door tucked into the back-right wall) leads into Jonathan’s adjoining office. The overall décor is quotidian and spartan and the fresh furniture and the new doors are already beginning to crack under the stress of poor craftsmanship. His smile disappears and he ruminates on the tragedy of a job badly done: a tool is only as good as the stuff that forges it, he knows. There is an angry, sweltering sound of morning flies from somewhere outside an open window. Benedict doesn’t blink.

Several moments pass before he stands and strides across the room, his hobnail’d boots snapping crisply off the boardfloor. He circles the desk at the centre. The absentee receptionist is immaculate in his care, he notes, as his fingers pass over neatly-categorised stacks of paper, toiled at by a mind that functions primarily on order; this is not Jarvis’ work. He rifles through a sheaf of papers with only a dull interest before moving on, leaving them as methodical as he had found them. He stops at one of the windows and peers sideways at the land stretching out beyond. Everything looks dull and over-exposed in the midday desert sun. An empty, white light that is blinding and hungry.

Nearly an hour passes before the door opens. Benedict is standing before a painting of an idyllic, rural countryside when Jonathan enters the office in a hurry. He makes it halfway across the room towards his own door before he notices that Benedict is not his receptionist nor one of his workers.

“Can I help you?” Jonathan says, out of breath and agitated. Benedict doesn’t turn around immediately.

“In heaven and earth and all the realms, seventy and seven, I know not of a more depraved will than that which sits in the core of man’s heart and begins, simply, with the words: ‘I want.’ “

“Excuse me?” The words are spit out. Benedict looks down and smiles before turning to Jonathan.

“Never mind me, Mister Wheatley, I was only thinking aloud. Let me first say it’s a pleasure to be here. My name is Benedict. You’ve never met me, but I work for the Firm. You’re familiar with us.” Benedict speaks to Jonathan in a crisp, polite voice that stops just shy of worship. Jonathan’s face is already beginning to crumple into horror and the preliminary stages of sobbing. Benedict gestures towards the door he’d been heading for. “Please forgive me, but do you care if we step into your office?”

*

Benedict exits out onto the hot, suffocating porch as the sun sits still in the roof of the sky like a great and scorching eye. The air has a vacuum-pressure quality to it. He is smiling as he uses an old cloth to wipe at his hands meticulously. Benedict bends and unlaces his boots and tugs them off. Pushing them to the side on a small corner of the veranda, he tucks his socks and the old rag into their shafts. His doublet comes next, unbuttoned with his shirt, both folded neat and flat against the side of his boots. His leggings follow, the restraints unfastened with ease and care that seems both rhythmic and methodical. He holds his blade out in front of him resting on his palms. There is ceremony here in the way he folds his legs beneath him and lowers the schiavona onto the pile of clothes. He sings a hymn in a foreign tongue. He runs his fingers along the flat of the blade. He stands.

Benedict looks out on the horizon. An entire country of quiet and violence whose remoteness feels so total as to swallow up man, creature, and meaning. His eyes never blink. To the north, oil pylons rise dark and spider-like, ironed out against the sky. He can see the rumour of motion as the drill line and the primitive pulley draws the Kelly drive towards the sky. A breath. He watches the vague shapes of men, small and vaporous in the heatwaves, guide her back down to the earth. A heartbeat. In some stories, a future. In others, a womb.

He smiles and steps out, barefoot and naked, onto the hard, sand-and-dust earth and disappears into the world beyond.

*

In an hour’s time, Jarvis finds a pile of familiar clothes on the porch and a strange smell. In Jonathan’s office, he finds Jonathan. The men find him screaming.

That evening, someone from the village with a steady eye and a careful voice visits Jarvis and tells him that there are brushfires up in the hills and to stay inside. As the evening redness sinks into night, a fever dream takes his wife in hand and leads her down into a delirium that fills their small cottage with yammering and cries. She is drenched in sweat, the bedding entire one acid-yellow wash of colour. There is the unmistakable droning of flies. Through the windows, a pale corona of light from the fires ascend the ridges around their homestead. To keep her from hurting herself, Jarvis eventually restrains her wrists and her ankles by winding up old cloths and sheets into cords and tying them off to the bedposts. She says she sees eyes in the windows, in the dark corners of the room. She says a man is sitting at the foot of her bed and that his stare hurts. There is ash in the air. Jarvis is sobbing as the nightmares deepen. The flies are screaming. A crescendo that draws across a handful of hours. Sometime, just passed midnight, she falls still at last and all is quiet save her, and she is murmuring. She says: the prophet comes with many crowns to this, His house. He comes with the sword and will wake this old country. He aims to make the land anew.

And then she dies and the fires rage all throughout the night.

*

In Ul’dah, Ja’rhem wakes in a cold sweat from a dream that he can’t remember. His bones ache. His skin screams in psychic agony. He draws himself up into himself while his body quakes. He lays on a pallet of linens and hay in a lightless cellar that he had crawled into earlier that night after a botched job. The darkness in the room is implacable and hostile. Clover is not here because he hadn’t invited her and he wishes he had and he’s grateful he hadn’t. Phosphene phantoms float among the black. A small flame still licks upwards in the crown of his opium lamp, bathing the pipe beside it in a warm and attractive glow. A flood of craving precedes self-loathing, both entering him in a sick and slick way. Or radiating from somewhere deep inside, from an illusory organ or gland that permeates a slavery so total that he doesn’t even know how to wish he wasn’t shackled to it. The sound of a rat dragging its feet over the stonework feels deafening when partnered with the crippling bloodbeat in his head. He can feel their black, beady eyes watching him from the dark. He throws a clay jug across the room in a fit of rage to dispel them, but it smashes ineffectually against one of the back walls. They are with him among the linens, now. He can feel them by the dozens, all skittering feet and coarse hides and squamous tails, always just out of his vision. Always slipping through clutching and thrashing hands. He shudders and something inside him cracks. It tells him that he doesn’t have to hold on so hard. There’s still a little left, it says. He reaches a trembling claw towards the pipe and weakly holds the bowl over the lamp. He waits. His ribs feel shallower than he remembers them. It’s been a bad month and it’s only going to get worse. Were a man privy to the hunger in his eyes, that man might never sleep a solid night in his life again. A sea of madness and raw nerves now shot, backfiring or firing off into a nothingness that swallows everything. He drags the pipe and the lamp back onto the pallet with him and curls around them like a cat finding warmth somewhere inside itself. As he smokes, in this small house of god that looks like bones and skin and a broken boy, Ja’rhem is crying. He disappears into a warm lap that he can’t see but he knows with all his desperate hope that it is Clover and that she is smiling her gentle and patient smile that tells him everything is going to be okay now. That she has him, now.

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