Malvo's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Malvo counted eight followers in the mausoleum, and eight was not enough to lift a god from the grave. He stood at the cracked altar and watched their hooded faces flicker in the candlelight. Somewhere in the world lay Vecna's severed hand and his lost eye. Recover both, and the Whispered One would rise whole again. But Malvo could not even send scouts to the burial sites. He had no hands to spare. Eight tired villagers, and a promise older than the stone under his feet. He raised the blood-stained grimoire above his head. "This book bled when Vecna's enemies burned it," he said. "And the fire died. The book lived." The followers leaned closer. Their want was real, but want did not fill a war party. He needed twenty. He needed fifty. He needed men who would dig through cursed ground and not run. The door groaned. Aldric stepped in from the dark, red robes dragging across the dust, wooden staff tapping each stone. Malvo's lieutenant had been gone three nights, and Malvo's chest loosened at the sight of the returned scribe. "You're late," Malvo said. "I'm useful," Aldric answered. The scribe smiled without warmth. "Which is better." Aldric climbed to the altar and turned to face the eight. The staff struck the floor once. The room went quiet, the way a room does when someone knows exactly how to hold it. "You came for a dead god," Aldric told them. "Your neighbors will call you fools. So bring your neighbors here. Let them call our master a corpse to his face." The scribe let the words settle, then lowered the voice to a hush. "The village has forty households. Every one has buried a child, a wife, a father they'd claw the earth to hold again. Malvo can give them that. But only if they kneel." Malvo watched his followers' eyes change. Aldric had done in four sentences what Malvo's sermons had failed at for a month. The scribe turned to him, quiet now, for his ears alone. "Give me the book and three nights," Aldric said. "I'll knock on every door in mourning. Grief is a wide gate, Malvo. I only have to walk them through it." Malvo hesitated. The grimoire was his proof, his one relic, and he was handing it to a man who valued usefulness over loyalty. But eight would never dig up a god. He pressed the book into Aldric's arms. "Bring me numbers," Malvo said. "Or don't come back." "I'll bring you an army," Aldric said, and walked out into the graves. Three nights later they returned. Thirty-one villagers filed into the mausoleum, mud on their knees, hope on their faces. Malvo finally had the hands to send scouts to the burial sites. But when he looked for Aldric at the front of the crowd, the villagers were not chanting Malvo's name. They were chanting the scribe's.