The Barber of Rem UmThe horde of the Star Witch crossed the Srad overnight, and so Carg rises with the Planter’s Militia to sharpen his shears. He sets up beside the field foundry—once a stone grain silo—and the fighters stop to get their hair chopped before collecting a hammered helmet from the pile beside the smith's moldstones.It's familiar work—chopping tangles and slicing bangs—until Carg uncovers a strip of gruesome skin on the scalp of a stoic lancer. It is unlike the color of the lancer's skin, with ribbed flesh like the armored back of a glyptophant. Carg pokes it with his shears, and it oozes yellow-pink. The lancer puts her weapon to his chin—she has had enough.Carg decides the patch was a boil. But then there are more, the same ribbed strip of skin, on the scalp of every fourth or fifth fighter. Carg asks an archer of the Zom highlands, but the bearer does not know of what Carg talks, and even when Carg takes their hand and puts their finger to it (for Carg has large arms and can tug persuasively) they only shrug.He is relieved to see Wouv Byriver—his shoulders above the heads of other fighters. Wouv is a swordfighter of renown in Rem Um, and they were once lovers who spent summers harvesting honey and drying herbs in the high fields above the glimmering cliffs.Carg was born without legs, and lifts himself to a higher step of his ladder so to reach Wouv’s scalp. He is sad to find the same strange skin patch beneath Wouv’s hair, and tells him of its appearance throughout the militia.“Slice true then,” Wouv urges.Carg flicks his wrist, like cutting a leech from a fish, but his blade catches. Wouv barks in pain but waves him on. Carg cradles Wouv’s head and digs into the skin flap. Beneath is a clay tablet about the size of a thumbnail. Carg can’t read the lines and wedges of written language, but the arcana fills him with unease. He pries it free.They both recognize the mark of the Star Witch pressed into its under side. Anyone in Rem Um would know it, for her ghostesses and dusty soldiers harass the countryside, drown children in caves, bend animals to her ways, and sow rebellion against the ziggurat tree.“What does it mean?” Carg asks, and places the tablet in Wouv’s palm.The big warrior looks at it long and hard. “We are infested,” he says.Wouv is unsettled to hear that, though he said it himself, and he shoves Carg’s hands away, pausing in his exit to touch a trickle of blood from his scalp. He pulls his helmet down atop it. But after only a few steps the blood gouts, spitting like a wildcat out the helmet’s visor. Wouv is dead by the time Carg vaults from his ladder and pulls himself across the grass on the leather sled tied to his thighs.Fighters gather and Carg’s bloody knife speaks louder than his entreaties. They will not listen, and carry him across the greensward and to the stockade built against the outer walls of Rem Um, where once there was a stable.The cage has no locks and the guards have been called to battle, but the ropes across the gate are thicker than a neck, and the knots impossible from within. The fighters tell him that even a betrayer might wish for Rem Um’s victory when imprisoned here, where violence will first land if the city’s defenses fall. But their mockery tempers them, and they leave Carg to his grief with a plugged vessel half full with liquor. Carg drinks.He comes to. On the horizon he sees the purple phasms of the witch’s artillery and hears a sound that might be night birds, until he realizes it is screaming. The city behind him is quiet, its thatch awaiting flame, its people hidden behind abatises, stakes, and wolf holes lined with sharp glass.Then a black vulture lands on the rope lock. Its beak tears at the strands. Carg startles to see a shadowy silhouette inside the stockade with him. Carg calls Wouv’s name in anguish. A face forms in the shifting ecto, then words come, muffled, as if through a boarskin door.“Do not be afraid, beloved,” says the ghost of Wouv. “Free those you can, but should you die in Rem Um, meet me in the Black Meadow—you will know it. There I am marshaling our dead.”“But you are dead because of me,” says Carg.“No. When I woke into death I was pulled toward the witch, and I saw the ghosts of our fallen chained to her siege engines. But I was not fixed by my skull like them. Instead, I held her seal in my palm. All I had to do was let go.”There is an explosion in the distance, and Wouv’s face shimmers. The vulture finishes tearing away the stockade ropes.“She can take Rem Um, but she cannot take us,” Wouv says, as he and the vulture take flight.