Piper took her first steps into grandma’s old gallery with a wistful smile most would find unbefitting of the circumstance.
It was too dark to see, the windows papered with layers of decade-old newspaper shielding thin, fogged daylight. But Piper’s nose told her the gallery was damp, musty, moldy – and something else, something more… organic, both decomposing and uncomfortably fresh.
Well. That was all right. She’d brought supplies, just in case.
Piper stepped back into the comparatively clear afternoon, a chill day still in the grip of the morning’s fog. She set her ranger-in-training backpack down on damp black cobblestone and geared up: tucked her red hair behind a particulate mask and goggles, snapped gloves almost to her elbow, and switched on her waterproof flashlight. Not standard ranger gear, but she’d been packing extra for the less appealing parts of outdoors work beyond the walls.
The door was stuck, one side of the wood water-swollen. Piper tugged hard and stepped inside. The musty, moldy smell was mostly blocked by her mask. She tried not to worry about what she’d breathed in a moment ago.
She shone the flashlight at the floor. The blackwood’s finish was dotted with small brown spots. It would take some work, sure, but the floor was lowest priority, to be done last after any other repairs.
Piper swept the flashlight beam up past haphazard boxes, sheet-covered canvases, broken easels, crooked cupboards and warped furniture. The wallpaper hung mid-peel. The occasional drop of water dripped from a sagging and stained ceiling. Black mold dotted every surface. Shadows, corners, and the floor seemed to move with the shifting beam of light. Piper had a whole lot of work ahead of her to make this place safe, let alone comfortable. She tried not to imagine the price.
Hey, wait – things weren’t moving with the light. There was a texture on the floor, the walls, around the wet spots. Piper took a few steps forward and found –
Centipedes.
Thousands of centipedes.
“Whoah,” she said, and crouched to peer closer. The movement she’d seen was swarms of centipedes scurrying away from her cone of light. The largest were the length of her pinky finger, though most were half that or smaller.
Luckily there were so many centipedes that Piper was able to get a decent look as their hiding places filled up and the extras panic-ran elsewhere. Standard Ravenshore centipedes: the charcoal-black, grey-mottled regional variant of the Aulonian creeper, adapted for excellent camouflage. Strange to see so many in one place – Piper thought centipedes were territorial.
She switched the flashlight to its red setting to keep from scaring the poor creatures. She sniffed and realized the mass of crawlers was responsible for that unfamiliar, organic, not-quite-rot portion of the gallery’s aroma. The scent sharpened in the confusion – the tiniest bit acidic and almond-like. A defense mechanism?
In the red light, centipedes calmed and re-emerged from their hiding places. They held high their little heads, adorable feelers and forelimbs wiggling at the air and floorboards, testing the scents and chemicals for new information.
Some of them wriggled snakelike toward Piper, waving feelers. They couldn’t see her – not really, not the way she saw them – but Piper waved back. “Hello, my name is Piper,” she said, to no visible response. She watched them approach her shoes in the red light, carapaces and limbs shining from slightly-reflective edges.
“Ouch,” she gasped. She reached for her ankle; a centipede scurried away from her fingertips. “Ow!” The other ankle, another centipede.
They bit her, jabbed her with their little venomous forelimbs! Not dangerous, but certainly uncomfortable. Piper jumped up and shook the centipedes off her feet, stepping carefully so she wouldn’t hurt them.
More came from the shadows, darting in zigzags. Piper imagined she could hear thousands upon thousands of little feet tip-tapping on the blackwood, coming right at her.
Piper switched the flashlight back to white, waved it at the centipedes to deter them – but this time they didn’t run and hide. This time they kept coming. Waves of them, more centipedes than she’d ever imagined in even her best centipede dreams.
She squealed and backed away. The front door was stuck again. She rammed it with her shoulder and nearly fell into the street.
The centipedes stopped before the threshold, waving antennae, and slowly retreated into the musty black.
Piper wiped tears from her eyes. “I don’t want to go.”
Her older brother Conor reached out, hesitated, then crossed his arms instead. “But you can’t stay.”
“I can if I clean up the gallery.”
“You literally just finished telling me about the centipedes.”
Piper’s vision went wet and blurry again. She screwed up her nose, tried not to let the tears out. “I’ll find a way.”
“With what money?” Conor said. He spread his arms and dropped onto her bed beside her. “I mean, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to change – I just – you know…”
She nodded slowly. Conor was terrible at explaining himself as usual, but Piper did know. She didn’t have a job; there wasn’t really time when she was taking ranger training seriously. Her parents paid for it, thinking it was still just a phase she’d grow out of, so she absolutely could not let them know she wasn’t enjoying the work in the island’s woods and swamps. Her only money was a small allowance, meant for her to have the occasional treat and somewhat of a social life.
Piper knew Conor’s fumbling was meant to be sympathetic and maybe a little frustrated. He’d kept her secret that she disliked most of the ranger training, helped her push through some of the rough patches because she really wanted to learn the magic to talk to animals and spirits.
But he wouldn’t back her on this.
Conor bumped her with his shoulder. “If we move to Aulonia like grandmother’s will says, we get her whole fancy estate and all her money from her famous artwork. You could have, like, seven bedrooms. Even use one of them to keep bugs. We’ll actually see the sun instead of fog and clouds and that everlasting storm in the bay. You’ll never have to worry about who’s paying for ranger training. Or, I don’t know. Other things. Anything, I guess.”
“But that’s not what I want,” Piper said.
“What do you want?”
“To stay in Ravenshore.”
“Why?” Conor’s exasperation was creeping into his voice. “You barely have any friends. Sorry, it’s true. Most people think your hobbies are weird. You don’t have a job. Me and mom and dad are all moving to grandmother’s place and if you stay you’ll be on your own with nowhere to go.”
“I do have somewhere to go. The will says anyone who stays inherits the gallery and the apartment.”
“We just – the centipedes – you’d only get the gallery, not – ugh.” Conor stood and paced a tight circle, hands on his head. “Look, I get it more than mom and dad do, and I don’t get it. I just – I don’t -“
Piper gave him her flattest look. “You’re worried about me and you don’t want me to be stuck on my own when you’re not here to help.”
Conor spun and pointed. “Yeah. That. Exactly. Yeah. Just – at least figure out why you want to stay.”
She flopped back onto her bed and stared at the little spiders in the corners. Da said that when she was four, she somehow managed to climb the dressers and draw bugs in dark and hidden spots so she wouldn’t feel alone at night. At the time they thought it was adorable, but as the years passed and Piper refused to let them paint over her bugs, her parents stopped coming into her room.
If she stayed, she’d be alone again. And Conor was right – even she didn’t understand why she wanted to stay.
Piper kicked her feet, sighed, and reached over to draw another little spider in the corner with the pen she kept on her nightstand. At some point, Conor wandered away.
“So you have a bit of a problem here,” said Boeb, his voice muffled by the mask of his containment suit.
Piper braced herself, tried not to shiver in the clinging fog. “How much will it cost?”
“Well, unfortunately price isn’t the only issue,” said Boeb’s partner Boab, also muffled by his own suit. “But even if it was, it’s very expensive.”
The two men of ‘Born Bros Pest Control brushed centipedes off their suits, some of the bugs clinging with jaws or pincers, still trying to sting. They took turns spinning each other round, inspecting with extra-bright headlamps built into their suits, making sure no centipedes were left before they stepped into the street where Piper waited.
The ‘Born Bros removed their hazard masks, enormous bulky things – Boeb was hellborn with jagged horns and Boab was dragonborn with a wide saurian head. “Oops,” said Boab, and plucked a centipede from Boeb’s sweaty ruffled hair.
“So here’s the thing,” said Boeb, lips thin and expression grim. “The reason you have so many centipedes is not just the perfect conditions – dark, damp, warm, surrounded by prey bugs in the alleys and basements of the bakeries and cafes around you, undisturbed for over a decade. The real problem is you have a centipede spirit living in your basement.”
“Oh wow,” gasped Piper. “That’s so interesting.”
Boeb and Boab exchanged glances, brows raised. Boab grinned and said “Sure, it is very interesting. We’ve had some real fun or strange interactions with spirits.”
Boeb ruffled his hair and continued. “So the trick is. Centipedes aren’t smart. They run on instinct, like little machines. A centipede spirit, though, can think. It shares the senses of its fellows and has some kinda… control or empathy with them.”
Boab rubbed his scaly red chin. “If you trap or poison the little centipedes, the spirit doesn’t just know – it feels everything, and it’ll fight back. The only way to deal with this kinda infestation is to either cast a banishment spell or destroy it.”
Piper winced. “Oh, I don’t want to destroy it. They haven’t done anything wrong.”
“True, true,” said Boab, “But the magic you need to permanently banish a spirit is even more difficult than destroying it.”
“So more difficult means lots more expensive,” Boeb added, “And not easy to find, which means even more expensive.”
Piper frowned. There were plenty of mages in Ravenshore – they had a real archmage tower full of wizards, a whole magic district with shops, law enforcement who practiced nonlethal containment spells, dreamwalkers, dueling leagues, ghosts, battles of the bands – not to mention the rangers training Piper. How could it be hard to find a banishment spell for spirits?
Well, the wizards were academics, the magical equivalent of mathematicians, and didn’t interact much with nature or spirits. Fine. Law enforcement, duels, battles – combat magic, not nature magic. Okay. What about… er… the rangers, she supposed, but they had few veterans and were desperate for trainees.
Huh. Well, maybe there was another way.
The ‘Born Bros watched Piper, expectant, hopeful, yet wary. She hated to disappoint them. “Do you know anyone else who might have recommendations for me? Less expensive recommendations?”
The ‘Born Bros both laughed. Boeb told her: “So, we’re not charging you for this consultation, but we also ain’t gonna send you to the competition. Might not find a better price anyway – it’s a cutthroat industry. You can ask around, but, well, good luck.” Boeb stripped out of his containment suit and threw it into the ‘Born Bros van, emblazoned with stylized cartoons of their hellborn and dragonborn faces, winking. Friendlier than Boeb had just been.
Piper sighed and leaned against the lamppost. She sniffed and wiped her eyes, pretending they were only wet from the fog condensing on her eyelashes. The gallery was her only chance to stay, all the more frustrating when she still couldn’t put her finger on why she was so desperate not to leave.
Boab leaned with her. “You know, there is – I mean, don’t take this as a recommendation, I wouldn’t say I endorse her – there is this girl who started up recently, does some spirit work. Charges almost nothin’ ’cause she’s barely had any jobs. No special talents or equipment as far as I can tell. Except for some kinda fancy mainland gun, but that won’t help with your centipede spirit.”
Piper nodded and squinted up at Boab. He was very tall and his draconic features were intimidating, looming over her like this, especially bulked out by the containment suit. “Why are you telling me this?” Piper asked.
“Rumour is she’s got some kinda connection to the city elemental.”
“The what?”
“The spirit of Ravenshore. The city and all its ravens and crows. Here.” From somewhere inside the torso of his suit, Boab pulled his own business card and a pen. On the back of the card he scribbled a radio frequency. “Again. Not a reco. Just maybe worth a call.”
Piper nodded and tucked the card into her bag. “Thank you. Really.” She pulled some money from her wallet. “I know you don’t charge for consult-“
“Hey, no, it’s all right.”
“Please, it’s a tip. I’m… your help means a lot.”
Boab hesitated, then gave a close-lipped grin – the least threatening kind dragonborn reserved for humans. “Thanks.”
The ‘Born Bros finished packing up. Piper waved as the truck pulled away from the curb and into the fog.
Piper sat cross-legged and barefoot in her favourite green dress on the well-worn but still-comfortable carpet. She worked the family radio, centerpiece of the living room. Its second crystal dial was still sticky, and with her tongue out, Piper fiddled until she landed on the correct arcane frequency.
“Ma, Pa, Conor, I’m on the radio,” Piper declared to the whole apartment.
“Okay,” Ma called back over a clatter of cutlery on pans.
“It’s important!” Piper yelled back.
“O-kay.”
She waited for relative silence, took a breath, and clicked the transmitter. “Triple S Investigations, Triple S, Triple S. This is Piper Byrne, Piper, Piper. Over.”
She counted a minute under her breath, then repeated her transmission. Piper hoped the woman would be –
“Piper, this is Kat Morowa-Arnesdotr at Triple S Investigations.”
She grinned and gripped the transmitter with both hands. “Hi! I have a problem with a spirit and I wanted to ask how you’d deal with it and how much it would cost.”
“What’s your problem?”
“There’s a centipede spirit living in the basement of a gallery in the old downtown with a colony of thousands of centipedes. I need to get them out without killing them.”
“Ew.”
“Oh, they aren’t so bad! They don’t cause any structural damage or make much mess, they eat the bugs that cause bigger problems like roaches or termites, they really prefer not to be around people and don’t -“
“Sure, okay, but thousands of them isn’t easy or fun to deal with.”
“Well, I suppose not.”
“Piper, dinner in five minutes!”
“Ma I said I’m on the radio! Sorry. So, what would you -“
“The first thing I’d try would be talking to the spirit. Convince it to leave with its colony. Make a deal of some kind. How smart are centipedes?”
Piper frowned. Her ranger training included some basic magic to talk to and gently influence spirits. It wouldn’t even cost anything except a few basic spell components. Why hadn’t Piper thought to try talking to the spirit? Maybe her parents’ just a phase outlook influenced her more than she wanted to realize.
“Okay, thank you,” said Piper. “I’ll, um, consider my options and get back to you?”
“Wait, my rates are -“
“Thank you, out,” Piper said, and switched off the radio with a satisfying thunk.
Okay. Talk to the centipede spirit herself. She could do that. Just a simple spell and chat. Easy.
Piper stood on the black sidewalk in front of the gallery. Hopefully her gallery, soon. She breathed deeply of the sea-fog air, opened her bag, and began chalking out a ritual circle.
“Hey, lady, no spell circles on the sidewalk.”
She looked up to find a Protectorate officer on patrol, wearing the traditional blue-and-black mail. “Oh, sorry, I just -“
“You’re blocking the way.” The officer crossed her arms, but she didn’t seem impatient or aggressive.
Piper nodded. “Okay. You’re right. Sorry.” She stood by the gallery door, fidgeted with the chalk. “Officer, you wouldn’t by any chance be available to help with a centipede spirit issue just inside?”
The Protectorate officer squinted and said “Sorry, no. But if you call the non-emergency frequency -“
“Thanks,” said Piper, and before she could lose her courage, she unlocked the door and stepped inside, into the musty darkness.
She shut the door behind her and brought out her flashlight. The moldy, water-damaged gallery was unchanged: the same sheets, ruined canvases, warped furniture, and thousands upon thousands of centipedes scurrying back from her light.
This time the centipedes organized quick, forming into masses at the edge of her flashlight beam. Piper resisted the impulse to wave the light around, try to push them back. Instead she kept the light steady, checked her thick tights and boots, and set the light down on the floor. With mostly-steady hands, she began to draw the spell circle.
The circle’s runes focused on spirits, linking, and communication. Piper incorporated lavender, lemon balm, and grease into the core and border of the circle, then burned sage and said the words. The runes briefly flickered emerald green, not enough to illuminate the shadowed gallery.
She didn’t feel any different. “Hello,” she said, tentatively, her voice cracking. She swallowed and spoke up. “Hello. I’d like to speak with the spirit who lives downstairs.”
Some of the centipedes reared up, waved their feelers. Piper almost thought some of them cocked their heads, but centipedes didn’t do that? They couldn’t hear well enough to –
The swarm retreated from the edges of her flashlight beam, clearing a path.
Piper took slow, careful steps, holding the flashlight beam steady, as non-threatening as possible. “Hello,” she greeted the centipedes. Many of them reared up – getting a better vantage for their chemoreceptors? Piper wanted to think they were waving, returning her greeting, but she knew the risks of anthropomorphizhing.
She followed the open path, edged around centipedes, cloth-covered crates, and bits of furniture. The stairs up to the apartment and down to the basement were at the back of the gallery, sectioned off by a rusty chain and a streaked sign with “Staff Only” barely visible in hand-painted cursive.
As Piper descended the blackstone stairs she felt the tiniest, lightest touches in her hair, on her shoulders near the walls of the narrow staircase. Centipede feelers, inspecting her. Remembering the stings from last visit, she did her best not to flinch.
Save for a utility closet, the basement was long and empty, a yawning blackstone chasm. Piper expected to see crates of artwork, but of course grandma took the paintings when she moved away.
From the darkness something rushed toward her. Piper had the impression of furiously churning legs and a snakelike shape. Before she had time to gasp, the centipede spirit loomed over her, clicking its mandibles, legs extended as if ready to grip her entire body, the scent of almond-acid pouring over her.
She was too fascinated to be intimidated. The spirit was enormous: at least thrice as long as Piper was tall, its body wide as hers, standing with half its length looming over her. Its many legs flexed and grasped, black-grey chitin shining in the steady beam of the flashlight.
“Hello, my name is Piper Byrne,” she said, touching a hand to her chest. “Do you have a name?”
The centipede spirit clicked and clacked and shrunk before her eyes. As it did, a swarm of centipedes scurried out of its body to lurk nearby in the shadows. The spirit itself was now the size of a very large dog. Piper knelt to meet it at its level.
“No name,” the spirit replied. Its voice rasped and clicked, as though cobbled together from an assembly of many smaller noises.
According to the rangers, every spirit had a secret true name one could use to gain power over them. Of course it was both uncomfortable and terribly rude to invoke the true name, so no spirit would share it. Most spirits did choose or acccept other names, but if this centipede spirit didn’t, that was okay.
“All right. Hello.” Piper took a breath. She wasn’t sure how intelligent the centipede spirit was, how well the communication spell would translate, whether she could match what she had to say to the spirit’s kind of intelligence. Did it understand ownership?
“I want to make this place part of my territory and live here,” Piper said slowly, “But I would have to change things and it would not be good for centipedes.”
The spirit seemed to consider this, waving its feelers in a slower pattern. It lowered its head. “You want us leave.” It reared up; waves of centipedes rushed to the spirit and it grew in size to match Piper. “We want stay.”
She grimaced at how she’d underestimated the spirit. Piper waved her hands slowly, trying to match the spirit’s antenna movements. “No, not – I mean – I’d have to fix the place to stop the water and mold, and make it clean and bright – but what if you all stay down here in the basement?”
The centipede spirit clacked its mandibles and grew taller still, looming over Piper with a scent of must, acid, and almond. “You get our home and we get less home? What else? What more? How this help us?”
Piper blushed and tried not to take a step back, away from the menacing spirit seemingly ready to grab her with dozens of pairs of sharp articulated legs. “I’m sorry, how rude of me,” she said, “Of course you should get something in exchange.”
But what could she trade a centipede spirit for the bulk of its home? She certainly didn’t want to have to call back Kat or the ‘Born Bros or some other pest control company and make the situation even worse, but she wasn’t sure what…
Pest control. There might be something… Piper frowned and pinched her lip. Pest control. The thought nagged at her like Ma summoning her for dinner while she was on a call.
The pest control companies she’d consulted for a problem of her scale were too expensive. The cheapest she’d spoken to had planned to talk with the spirit, make a deal. Piper could speak with spirits. Piper could make deals.
Pest control.
Piper held up a finger. “What if you live in the basement, I arrange things so you have nice damp dark hiding places, and I bring you food?”
“How?” the spirit clacked.
“What if I open a pest control company and we help other people get rid of bugs by having you and your friends eat them? You would have to come with me but we could… You could visit more centipedes or…”
She trailed off, watched the spirit. Its feelers waved in that slow pattern Piper thought meant contemplation, almost figure-eights, nearly brushing her face, occasionally touching her hair.
“If no one wants us?” asked the spirit, cocking its head. “Not everyone have bugs all time.”
“Then… then I bring food here when there are no jobs,” she suggested.
The spirit loomed before her, waving its feelers. “I think. You wait.”
Piper nodded and smiled. She stood, watched the centipede spirit grow larger and darker as it incorporated more and more of the gallery’s centipedes into its body. It grew until it was thicker than Piper.
She found it fascinating. Some part of her tried to stay aware of potential threat, that the centipede spirit was now plenty large enough to crush her by body weight and rigid chitin alone, should it so choose. But it wasn’t aggressive, it was communicating, it was considering.
It considered for quite a while. Piper took a few steps back to sit on the stairs, lean elbows on knees, and watch the spirit. Was it deliberating with the individual centipedes, somehow? Did adding more to its body allow it to think better?
The spirit continued to increase in size, curled up to fit in the narrow basement. Eventually the spirit burst into waves of bugs, most of which scurried to the walls, the corners, the cracks. They vanished into holes too small to see.
The spirit remained, back to its very-large-dog size. “Agree,” it clacked and hissed.
Piper jumped to her feet and clapped. “Great! I can talk to the bakeries and cafes nearby, maybe we can work out a deal to keep bugs out of their food. I’ll start cleaning up here, and you can tell me what you like for the basement and I’ll -“
She paused, eyed the large centipede. “I don’t suppose you can help me tell my parents I won’t be moving out of Ravenshore?”
“You what?” said Ma. Not the banshee shriek Piper expected – a low, flat, dead tone.
“I’m not moving with you. I’m staying in grandma’s gallery and I’m starting a pest control business,” Piper said.
Ma and Da’s faces were already red and the tone only deepened as their mouths tried to form words. Piper bit her lip, unable to tell whether they were upset, angry, furious, enraged, or apoplectic.
“We’ll miss you, my love,” said Ma. She snorted, wiped her eyes, and shuffled off to her room, shoulders held low. Piper stared after her – not the reaction she’d expected.
Da let out his colour with a deep sigh that went on so long Piper feared he would deflate entirely. “Don’t tell Ma, but I’ll send a bit of money when I can.”
Don’t tell Ma? Was she really that – no, no, it was the terms of the will. Had to be.
Piper groaned and flopped down onto the carpet, splayed out like a cartoon fallen from a high cliff. She’d never lived alone or started a business before.
Well, she’d never negotiated a deal with a centipede spirit before, either, and she made that work. Ma and Da always said she could be anything she decided. Piper never really thought about it, but here, now, laying on the carpet staring at the ceiling, she decided it was true.
Piper was elbows-deep in black mold when the gallery door opened with a flash of light muddled by the swirling spores in the air. She spun round, almost banged her filter mask on a broken easel, ready to shout no, wait. Instead she froze.
“Sure needs some work,” said Conor, casting his eyes around the room and wincing at the briliant work lights. He sniffled and snorted.
Piper tossed her gloves aside and shoved Conor out the door. “Don’t breathe the mold, dummy.”
She pulled the mask’s straps from her tangled red hair and let it fall around her neck. Conor rested his hand on a paper-and-twine wrapped package leaning against the front window, almost as tall as he was, but narrow. Almost like a framed painting. Piper raised an eyebrow.
“Last day in Ravenshore,” he said, looking to the fog. “I won’t miss the damp.”
Piper nodded, unsure of what to say, what to do. She hoped Conor wasn’t mad at her. She couldn’t bear for her last time speaking to her older brother to be –
“Brought you something,” he said, stepping away from the package. “Open it.”
She eyed him again, still said nothing. She tugged the loose end of the twine bow, then carefully pulled at the brown paper.
Inside was a gorgeous wooden marquee sign, still smelling of sawdust and paint. In green and gold – her favourite colours – the sign boldly displayed a rat playing the bagpipes.
“For your pest control business,” Conor said. “You know, ’cause of your name, and with a pest, I thought -“
Piper jumped at Conor and hugged him fiercely. “Thanks, big brother. I love it.” She squeezed him tight, buried her face in his shoulder, tried not to cry – but surely he felt her tears through his shirt.
Conor patted her back. “Hey, the boat leaves in a few hours – I rushed this and really wanted to get it to you myself before I left, but I do have to get going. Help me bring it inside?”
Together they hauled the sign inside and leaned it next to the front door. Conor caught his breath and gave the gallery another look. “Sorry, I should have helped, I’ve been so busy with Ma and Da packing that I -“
“It’s okay,” Piper said and hugged his arm. “I had enough allowance saved up since I never go out to hire a contractor to fix the leaky roof, and really that’s the worst of it now that the centipede spirit is, er… Well, now it’s mostly just a lot of cleaning and redecorating I can do myself.”
Conor nodded. He wouldn’t look at her directly. “Piper, I…”
She gave him a mock-punch on the shoulder. “Call me when you get there. I’ll be okay. This is exciting, really.”
Conor searched her face as if he didn’t believe her, but finally he hugged Piper tight. “Love you, li’l sis.”
“Love you back, big bro.”
For maybe the last time – no, not the last time, she wouldn’t let that happen. For now, Piper walked Conor out the door and said goodbye.
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