The Porcelain Fox Disturbance

Gazing down on the royal ballet from the dusty rafters in Cornum Hall, the falseness within the spectacle snapped into vivid focus. The dancers wore tarnished satin and thrice-owned silk that barely shrouded the fatigue in their wrapped feet as they pounded against the unpolished timber. Their faces were masks of porcelain—smiling, silent, unreadable. Their flowing movements projected an effortlessness that concealed deep wells of strength and anxiety.
And it was all in service of an even more elaborate farce playing out in the audience. This chattering mass of newly minted nobles, rough-hewn gentry, and other sycophants to power acted out roles no less fanciful than the chorus of ballerinas. They executed their practiced bows, precise deference, and perfect posturing with an obscene elegance. Everyone in this hall was as artificial as the cartwheeled trees decorating the stage. From Culdo’s vantage, it looked like one giant con.
A violinist’s bow dragged like a skeletal finger across the strings, followed by a lonely flute. This was the final movement. It was called The Fading of the Light or Luria’s Tears or some equivalent banality. Culdo’s lip curled in disgust. He turned his attention to his partner, Xircus, perched beside him like a wiry bird of prey, humming along with the mournful melody.
“Xircus, I need you to focus,” Culdo said. “It’s almost showtime.”
“Requiem for Luria’s Light,” Xircus said, still transfixed by the scene below. “Penned in memoriam of the Old Empire’s loss of divine favor.”
His partner’s academic interest in the old faith always struck Culdo as odd. He certainly evinced no other outward signs of piety or religious conviction. Even so, he always took on this wistful reverence when speaking of the Pantheon. It was one of his many eccentricities. “Pretty shabby memorial for a dead goddess, if you ask me,” Culdo said.
“Well, this performance is a shadow of its intended grandeur, of course,” Xircus said.
Culdo studied his strange Talidasan collaborator through the shadows. He had a face like a barn owl, with polished obsidian eyes. His skin bore a sickly green pallor, and a subtle iridescent flush occasionally glinted across his ghostly visage like sunlight refracted in the ocean. It was a unique affliction of the Coastal Talidasa, inherited centuries ago during the Manaphagia and passed through the generations.
They had been working together for nearly a year now, the boldness of their job increasing alongside their continued success. Xircus was nothing like the gormless tavern brawlers and scheming lowlifes that Culdo had grown accustomed to wrangling. He had the manner and bearing of a chamberlain or university professor. He was also one of the most cunning and proficient rogues he had ever known. Culdo knew little of his past, and he’d long since given up trying to dig. In his line of work, everyone had ghosts, and summoning them was seldom useful for the task at hand.
Xircus let loose a forlorn sigh as the adagio took flight. “They say the best musicians hear the silence between the notes.” He floated his arm in wide arcs, as if conducting the orchestra from the rafters.
Culdo snorted and took a swig from his flask. “They hear the clink of coins, more like.”
“So cynical,” Xircus said, his tone landing somewhere between disappointment and pity. The light from below illuminated his narrow face. It was as defenseless and open as ever. “I thought you were an appreciator of the arts?”
“This isn’t art,” he said, shifting his bulky frame in the rafters, sending motes of dust floating down onto the Adesian nobility below. “This isn’t even a hall. In the war, it was an infirmary for sailors on the Eastern Front. Before that, it was a fish house. You can still smell the blood and fishgut in the woodwork.”
Xircus pressed his forefinger against his waxy lips and considered the audience before turning his attention back to the dancers. “You should spend some time thinking about what kind of man attends a royal ballet and focuses his attention on the scent of old death in the rafters.” The Talidasan looked at Culdo and tapped his forehead twice.
Culdo scoffed. How could anyone ignore this bile-inducing hypocrisy? This was the central contradiction endemic to the Kingdom of Adesium. After a generation spent in bloody conflict against their Ottribani overlords, the Adesian people still paid homage to the absentee gods of their former oppressors in song and dance. His father fought and died under the banner of the Adesian Republic. The noble houses sold them a story of liberation, and the people responded by delivering them the smoldering ruins of a six-century empire. Tens of thousands were slain by the blade and cannon fire or died thirsty in the worm-eaten cells of Ottriban’s labor camps. Countless more fell victim to the blight, all in the name of freedom.
Before his father’s bones had time to settle at the bottom of the Tovar Sea, those same nobles ceded control of the republic to a queen consort, with ties to an even more powerful and expansionary regime to the West. Across the Middlesea, the Corcellean Empire sold the same tales of liberation, pressed and bound using fantastic new machines. According to this new “Empire of Progress,” peace and prosperity would flourish, not through crude emancipatory wars and rebellions, but by the clockwork hand of technology and reason.
Culdo knew it was bullshit. There was a roiling anxiety to the order of things that could be difficult to looking straight on. When viewed from above, however, the entire landscape sparkled with clarity. It was a dismal affair, full of desperate laughter and jockeying amongst dull-witted second sons, wine-drenched maidens, and dead-eyed company men. Each of these playacting nobles owed their comfort and rule to the toil of the common-folk. With each rotation of the clockwork hands of Cocellean-sponsored “progress,” their debt to the people grew larger. And Culdo intended to collect.
The ballet swelled toward its climax as the orchestra began its final crescendo. Whistling along to the Ottriban dirge, Xircus wrapped his rope around his waist and forearm.
“I admit, it’s not the grandest,” Xircus continued. His black eyes reflected the colorful stage lights. “You Nor’easters are such a crude bunch. Still, it’s a passable performance—considering your... limitations.” He punctuated his jab with a patronizing smile, as if he were describing the weather to a child.
Culdo ignored the insult and rubbed his eyes. They had been lying in wait for hours. It was time to look sharp. “It’s a sham for vulgar shitheads with too much gold in their coffers,” he said, fastening his harness.
Both men donned porcelain masks fashioned into the likeness of the white fox. Xircus proposed the disguise in mockery of the Adesian King’s sigil. Positioned strategically throughout the theater, their team awaited the high sign from the rafters. Culdo marked two white foxes at each exit and two more on each balcony—just as they had planned.

by Hauntogram

“Well, we won’t be able to remedy the vulgarity tonight,” Xircus said, as a matter of fact. “But we most certainly can relieve them of their gold.”
Xircus reached into his cloak and produced a leather pouch. He cocked his head and resumed his conducting of the orchestra, flinging the pouch’s glittering contents on the unsuspecting dancers below.
“What the hell is that?” Culdo asked, watching the crystalline dust drift down onto the stage like the first snowflakes of winter.
“Just a little something I picked up from a trader on a Tovari merchant vessel,” Xircus said with a black wink. “I suspect it will make the finale a bit more... grand.”
Culdo watched the dancers, now at the denouement. One by one, they slowed, their graceful movements giving way to jerky stumbles and awkward falls. Rippling murmurs spread through the audience. They appeared to be growing uneasy, becoming less convinced that this uncomfortable spectacle was part of the performance.
On stage, the mythic reenactment devolved into something surreal and demented. One dancer cried out in fear, another in rage. A third ballerina, clad in a white gown and elaborate costume ram horn headdress, craned her head upward toward the exact spot where Culdo and Xircus spied down from the rafters. She let loose an inhuman screech and bounded off the stage and into the crowd like a wild animal. Chills ran down Culdo’s spine. She was wearing a white fox mask.
“Who the fuck is that, Xircus?” Culdo seethed. “This wasn’t part of the plan.” He didn’t like surprises.
Xircus looked at his partner with his blank eyes and that selfsame placid smile. “Don’t worry; they’ll be fine.” The owl-faced trickster swung his free arm aloft and leaned back from the rafter.
“But, who—”
“The show must go on!” His partner’s dark eyes flashed in the light, and he was gone.
Without hesitating, Culdo grabbed his snaplock and dropped into the breach, following his enigmatic partner’s lead. He landed center stage with a crash. A sickly sweet waft of sweat, spilled wine, and generous splashes of Corcellean perfume burned his nose. Dancers and musicians and Cornum’s wealthiest patrons all gaped at the sight of the towering firebrand as he rose to his feet and dusted the cobwebs from his cloak. Somewhere on the balcony, a woman shrieked.
On cue, the grand entry and massive perimeter doors all slammed shut. At each point of egress, Culdo’s white foxes stood in pairs, wielding snaplock pistols and stiletto blades. He gave them strict orders not to kill anyone, but these were highwaymen, not soldiers, and they were itching to settle scores with the Adesian Court.
With practiced steadiness, he surveyed the growing chaos spiraling about Cornum Hall. Xircus was already hard at work, bounding through the bedlam in a manner befitting his name, snatching jeweled chains and coin purses, tossing them in his bulging knapsack. Even by Talidasan standards, his partner was something of a virtuoso. Culdo assumed it was an effect of the aetheric anomaly inherent in his people, though he’d seen nothing like it like during his service in Talidasa. When the fighting started, it was almost as if Xircus operated on a different temporal plane. His reflexes and agility defied anything Culdo had ever encountered in all his years of thieving and fighting. He’d seen the mercurial trickster evade a hail of musket fire from the City Watch, blinking out of harm’s way by just a few inches. At the time, Culdo attributed it to a trick of the moonlight or his own frayed nerves during the rush of combat. Watching him now—a blur of motion amid the panicked courtiers—he was certain something more was at play.
On the stage, ballerinas were winding down their frenzied dance and collapsing in heaps on the floor. One dancer wept under a painted plywood cloud festooned with dangling blue ribbons. Another cursed her parents. The rest of them appeared to be sleeping. What had Xircus dosed them with? And why the last-minute surprise? “I’ll need to have a talk with him about going off-script,” he said out loud to no one.
Culdo pointed his snaplock toward the rafters and pulled the trigger. A fiery crack resounded through the hall. Bits of wood and plaster rained down through a cloud of gunpowder smoke.
“Listen up, you swine!” Culdo stood illuminated by the stage lamps like a grizzled thespian about to deliver his big monologue. “Your bodyguards are all indisposed. As I speak, the only way out of this hall is by blade or musket fire. So, I suggest you all get comfortable.”
The costumed rabble gaped, exchanging looks of shock and impotence as Culdo’s white foxes relieved them of their remaining valuables. They knew they were beat. It was always the same with the monied class. If they banded together, they could overpower Culdo and his highwaymen without much difficulty. Not one among the crowd possessed the will to rally their peers and lead the charge. That would require sacrifice and solidarity—both anathema to these types.
“You think us thieves and scoundrels, yeah?” Culdo asked his audience. The crowd exchanged confused glances as he stalked the stage like an ursine predator. “You are the thieves! You are the wretched criminals who sold the Republic for this gilded fish house.” Culdo spat on the stage. “We’re just here to collect our due. So stand and deliver, and nobody needs to get h—”
“You call this justice, Adesian?!”
A stocky man in a blood-red doublet stood up from the crowd, his bulldog face flushed with wine and fury. The woman seated beside him tugged at his sleeve, her eyes filled with a mute begging for her wobbly husband to be seated.
“Ah, we do have a hero in our midst,” Culdo announced with the aplomb of a carnival barker. He holstered his pistol, replacing it with his flask, and beckoned the man forth. “Come, brave hero, speak in defense of your people.”
The man stumbled past the cowering nobles, mumbling slurred curses, as he made his way to the aisle with difficulty. Culdo spotted Xircus at stage left, standing beside his giant sack of loot. The Talidasan leaned forward and tapped his masked forehead twice.
Someone trained a reflector spotlight on the drunken man, who attempting to steady himself in the aisle, mustering his dignity and indignation with considerable effort. He wore the insignia of the golden clock—a Corcellean. “These are not my people, you fucking... cutpurse,” the man slurred. Culdo signaled for his men to lower their pistols. “Do you have any idea who I am, Adesian?” Venom and contempt cut through his boozy cast like a marsh viper.
Culdo took a swig from his flask and made his way down from the stage, the plywood steps creaking beneath his solid frame. “I am not a respecter of titles held on either side of the Middlesea.” Culdo spat. “So dispense with the riddles and identify yourself, you piss-drunk old fool.”
“I am Tiphon Sorelle, Count of Montreat, Special Envoy to Emperor Lukas Lakravan of Corcelle,” the man barked. He appeared to regain some of his composure. “And you have made a major miscalculation.”
Culdo “To the contrary, My Lord, it is you who have miscalculated.” He refused to let this walleyed lush intimidate him with his pedigree, but the Count was correct in that he had not expected Corcellean nobility to be among the attendees at this ballet for backwater gentry. Another surprise. “Montrat is a thousand miles from Cornum, and I don’t—”
“We’re closer than you think, dog.” Sorelle said with a vicious sneer. His eyes met Culdo’s without hesitation. This was a man accustomed to being heeded without challenge. Culdo felt his restraint growing gossamer thin.
A piercing shriek cut through the hall from the balcony. All around the theater, lanterns went black. The lone spotlight beamed down from nowhere on the Corcellean. In a single motion, Culdo unholstered his snaplock, and aimed square on Sorelle. Was he somehow orchestrating this? He peered into the darkness toward the anguished cry. A second spotlight illuminated the balcony, sending Culdo’s head spinning in search of its source. Then he saw her, in the state box—the masked dancer with the costume horns perched like a gargoyle atop a gilded rail flying the banner of Adesium. Fresh blood ran from her headdress horns, and deep crimson ran in streaks across her porcelain fox mask.
The ballerina screamed again. The sound ripped through his skull like a serrated bolt. It felt as if her screams were emanating from inside his skull, forcing her pain to become his. Culdo winced. “What is this? Identify yourself, woman!” He said, squinting in the blinding light. Lord Sorelle stood motionless, eyes forward, unphased by the horror unfolding behind him. The monstrous ballerina hissed and spat and leaped from the rail, landing in the aisle behind the drunken Count Sorelle. This was not right. Who was operating these fucking lights?
The ghoulish dancer broke into a beastly sprint toward the Count, wailing and gnashing as she closed the gap. Culdo’s focus drifted, and he found himself admiring the way this unhinged terror managed to retain the fluid grace of a danger as she charged forward. Without thinking, he aimed his pistol. She bounded over the Corcellean with ease, dragging a consuming darkness behind her—very close now.
“We’re closer than you think, dog,” a familiar voice repeated. It was sonorous, controlled, and, above all, sincere.
“Xircus?”
The surrounding hall faded, and his surroundings lost coherence. He felt as if the fabric of reality was tearing asunder, leaving only this spotlit void and the charging monster between him and Count Sorelle. “What is happening?” Culdo asked, shouting into the black.
He found it difficult to focus. As the creature bore down on him, he saw her face contort and transform—flesh and porcelain fusing into the grotesque visage of a feral white fox. A cruel set of teeth, each the size of a stiletto blade, protruded from her gaping maw. Her horns grew gnarled and sharp for the goring, and her bloody hands twisted into terrible white porcelain claws. Fuck. No time to think. Culdo hated surprises.
—tap, tap
The crack of his snaplock was deafening.
When the snaplock shot hit her chest, the abomination burst into a cloud of smoke that engulfed him completely. And for a long time, it did not clear. The world around him stopped. The screaming crowd grew dim until the shorebirds’ cry supplanted their wailing. Culdo could smell the Tovar Sea. When the smoke finally did clear, he was somewhere else.
The walls of the old Cornum Fish House were faded and discolored with age. The brine air stung his eyes. Old wooden beams stood like sentinels, all wrapped in hanging fishnets and salted cod. At the end of a long wooden table, a solitary man was gutting a fish. Golden light shining down from the rafters illuminated the man, and a second light—an inner radiance—filled the room with his warmth. Culdo recognized him right away.
“Father?” Culdo called out across the empty room. The man did not respond.
Culdo stepped forward with difficulty. The floorboards were slick and wet, and something was impeding his movement. “Father?” he repeated. Still no answer. A chill filled the room, and the golden light faded. Culdo looked down and saw that he was wading knee-deep in brine and fish guts. He removed his mask and called out again. And again, silence. He pressed forward, traversing the length of the impossibly long table with difficulty. His father was humming a tune. It was the old Cornum folk song that they would sing together while cleaning and salting fish.
Was it, though? He didn’t recall the melody being so heavy-hearted and somber. Perhaps he was remembering of a different tune? It had been so long ago. He let his mask fall into the foul-smelling muck and continued his trudge through the watery entrails.
When, at last, he reached the end of the table, his father was somewhere else. Culdo looked down and noticed his snaplock still held tight in his hand. A swelling disorientation twisted in his guts. Smoke billowed into the expansive hall, making it difficult to see. He struggled to fetch breath as gun smoke and that revolting Corcellean perfume filled his lungs. His vision blurred. His chest felt like an anchor falling from a ship. As the swirling smoke overtook him, he saw a shadowy figure, collapsed on the floor. “Father, I’m here!”
Culdo gasped and fell to his knees, coughing and wailing into the black.
When the smoke cleared again, he was back in Cornum Hall. The collapsed figure before him was not his father at all. There was no sign of a bestial masked ballerina with stiletto teeth. The world started to reassemble itself around Culdo in all its grim fullness.
It was Count Tiphon Sorelle. His lifeless eyes were fixed toward the rafters, and blood flowed from a gaping wound in his chest. Culdo dropped his snaplock and looked around helplessly at the terrified spectators in all their finery—the grand finale.
The perimeter doors burst open and the Night Watch stormed the theater. Culdo watched in wonder as armed men descended on him.
Then they were restraining his arms with rigging rope and shouting curses. They held his face to the theater floor for quite some time. Guards shouted orders. A clattering of steel boots shuffled all around him.
It was like a dream.
Then they were forcing him to his feet. More shouting. “You’ll hang for this!” “Murdering bastard!” “Traitor!”
What went wrong?
Lady Sorelle collapsed at the feet of her lord husband. Then they were marching him past cheering nobility. Someone spat.
Where was Xircus?
A steel-booted guard delivered a sturdy kick, forcing Culdo through the threshold and into the Cornum streets. He didn’t resist, nor did he fall. He smelled the Tovar Sea. The shorebirds had all gone silent. Somewhere in the distance, someone played a lonely melody on a flute—Requiem for Luria’s Light, or some such.
A procession of caged oxcarts carried away his men. The bound and bloodied outlaws cheered as they rolled past onward toward oblivion. “For the Republic!” “Captain Culdo! Vox Adesium!” He could not face them. Instead, he stared with wide, uncomprehending eyes at the clacking cobblestones, too weary even to scorn their praise. Then the corpse cart rolled. Culdo counted six dead amid a heap of bloodied and cracked porcelain masks, all his men.
Behind the corpse cart, three black riders followed at a trot, each armed with an arquebus and longsword. The cloaked horsemen studied Culdo as they passed. He met their stares. These were not Night Watchmen; they bore neither crest nor banner. They carefully concealed their faces under black hoods. One of them spoke. “The Hand of Order appreciates your generous contribution, dead man,” the hooded rider patted an overfilled knapsack strapped to his saddle. Culdo just stared out from the void, unable to react. The man flipped Culdo a silver that bounced off his shoulder, and they pressed forward.
Then an empty cart stopped for him. An officer hopped off the cart and grabbed Culdo by his rope harness. “Get in, shithead. The show’s over.” Culdo complied.
They were all correct, of course; Culdo would certainly hang for this—if he made it that far. Troublemakers had a bad habit of succumbing to their injuries while in the custody of the Night Watch.
They wheeled him away like he was a stage prop—just another set piece at the grand ballet. As they approached Fishmonger’s Bridge, the sorrowful melody grew louder and more clear. Then Culdo spotted him, perched on the rail at the entrance to the bridge, playing the tragic tune on a shining silver flute. After they rolled past, Xircus hopped off the rail and strolled onto the bridge in the cart's wake. The three black riders appeared on both flanks. When he finished the song’s final, lonesome phrase, the Talidasan tapped his head twice with the flute. Then he smiled at Culdo in his usual way, his black eyes showing no sign of malice or ill intention. For reasons just outside his grasp, it reminded Culdo of his father.
As the procession slowed to a halt at the center of the bridge, Culdo had a pretty good idea what was coming next.
He returned Xircus’ smile nonetheless, incapable of summoning any malice or ill intention.