Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3)

by Adam J Nicolai

  A pair of incredulous looks. He didn't care.

  "What do you know about her? Huh? That she killed a score of armed soldiers in Twosides, after panicking? Anything else? How about the fact that she's saved my life, Lyseira's life—Hel, Seth's life—more times than I can remember? That she saved the King? That she gave up everything at the drop of a hat to save her cousin? Do you know any of that? Was Seth thinking about any of that? No. None of it. It should have come up in trial. She could have been . . . jailed, banned from chanting . . . I don't know. Something. She wasn't a murderer. She panicked!"

  The entire mess hall had fallen silent now, every eye trained on him. Their weight threatened to crush him. Not a single voice spoke in agreement. How could they, after the speech Lyseira had given about Seth's midnight disappearance? Stressing the importance of responsible chanting, decrying Syntal's failure as a massacre? She had turned the whole city against the dead girl.

  "She was one of us," he whined. "She was our friend. Don't you understand?"

  They didn't. In the sea of faces he saw surprise, outrage, confusion—but no sympathy. No agreement.

  It was too much. Their stares chased him out of the room.

  Past the new Kesprey in the hall, walking and talking and laughing; past the baskets of undistributed grain, so much that they didn't have room to store it all. Fighting to keep the tears from his face because if he hated the way he sounded when he was angry, he hated being piteous and weak even more. Up the stairs to the second floor, then the third, to his room at the end of the hall—where he slammed the door behind him, gulping at the air between stifled sobs.

  He hated what Syn had done at Twosides. It was horrifying. But to kill her for it? To murder her in cold blood, to stab her through the back?

  She was gone. He would never see her smile again, never reconcile with her for his clumsy, botched kiss in Tal'aden. He had hoped she would eventually learn to empathize with others instead of merely caring for them—had imagined that in some distant future, he might have been the one to help her understand the difference. Now he never would. And he was supposed to not only accept her murder, but to turn on her, to fall in line with this idea that she was the bad one, that she'd deserved what had happened to her and Seth's banishment was somehow unjust?

  He stumbled across the room and collapsed into the chair at his desk. The book there still lay open to the last page he'd worked on—the final passage in his chapter on reciprocal treatment, or as he'd begun to call it, the Foundation Law.

  It is written here first because it must come first; all other considerations must be subordinate to this one. When asking any question of justice or rightness, it will be the foundation for a correct response: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

  It had brought him such joy to put those words to paper.

  What a joke.

  He had written that? How could he have possibly taken it seriously?

  Had Seth thought of the "Foundation Law" when he'd stabbed Syntal through the back? Had Syntal thought of it when she slaughtered those militiamen? Hel, had it even crossed Lyseira's mind when she gave the speech defending her brother's actions and condemning Syntal's, a speech that even now emboldened the hecklers and bullies outside Syntal's fledgling chanter school?

  No. Because it was a collection of words on a page, a collection no one had read and no one cared about. It had no inherent power, no matter how true it was; it didn't matter what was right, only what was done.

  The joy he'd felt had never been in the pages on his desk. It had been in him, and now it was gone.

  He slammed the book shut and shoved everything from the desk with a scream—the book, the inkwells and pens, the spare paper. It crashed to the floor in a tinkle of shattering glass and a heavy thud, the papers drifting slowly after like ash from a fire storm. A perfect analogy, he thought—because the Narrator in his head never shut up, no matter how useless or futile it was.

  His pack was at the bottom of his closet—worn and threadbare, the same one he'd had since Southlight. He stalked around the room throwing his things into it: clothes, food, spellbook. He didn't need much. He'd survived on far less.

  Then he left the temple, ignoring the inquisitive gazes and unspoken questions. No one stopped him. They'd all heard Lyseira's speech. They knew he wasn't one of them. He didn't work miracles; he chanted. And now he knew what the new church did to those who chanted: the exact same thing the old church did.

  The cold snapped at him. The drifting snowflakes stung his cheeks. His rage and grief bore him through both, made him as impervious to their warnings as Seth's Preserver training. When he reached Redding Lane, he ignored the jeers of the protestors, the cries of Sinner! and Murderer! He walked to the door, shoulders hunched against the cold and the hate alike, and knocked.

  It opened swiftly, faster than he would've expected, and Angbar nearly wept at the sight of the young woman who stood inside. "Can I come in?" he asked, somehow forcing the words through his anguish, and Takra welcomed him.

  iii. Caleph

  In the days following Gove's murder, Caleph prayed for death. It didn't come.

  Instead, Faerloss realized D'haan's wisdom in taking the body of one of Caleph's closest allies, and they ambushed Manther—the second of Caleph's four Preservers. Alone and outnumbered, with both Baltazar's miracles and the Mal'shedaal's prowess to contend with, he was quickly defeated.

  Where D'haan had worn a ring, Faerloss wore a black cloak. Baltazar draped this over Manther's shoulders as the Preserver died, and the transformation was complete. Faerloss stood in Manther's body, his cloak and his wounds vanishing with a simple caress of the cloak's hood.

  Baltazar publicly claimed D'haan's old vessel, Breer, had been a traitor who tried to kill him. This story easily quelled any concerns within the Church about the missing cleric. And no one even questioned the disappearance of Faerloss's former vessel, the strange farmer that had spent so much time in the Fatherlord's presence.

  In their new forms, the Mal'shedaal could meet with Baltazar easily—and keep a constant eye on him—without raising suspicion. Caleph felt the last of his hope smothered. He watched in numb horror as the Mal'shedaal stripped every shred of his once-awesome power from him. And he felt an answering pang of despair from Baltazar, whose own chances of betraying the Mal'shedaal and preventing the resurrection of their nightmarish mistress grew increasingly thin.

  Faerloss made sure Baltazar's army was made ready. He insisted that Baltazar order his church to feed their people manna, just as the Kespran church was no doubt doing for theirs. The Archbishops received this order with no small outrage, but as Baltazar reminded them, he was Akir on Earth and his word was absolute. They carried out his wishes.

  Finally, as Shimmerfall drew near, the Mal'shedaal ordered Baltazar to set out on their journey to the island they believed held their queen's remains. They made him insist that two of his Preservers remain in Tal'aden, leaving only two—Manther and Gove—to accompany him on the trip.

  In this way, Caleph's own captor was himself a captive, bereft of loyal followers and at the Mal'shedaal's mercy at every moment. Caleph was now a hostage within a hostage.

  It was a day's sleigh ride to Fen'akir Crossing, followed by four days down the Grey Dew River to Coward's Bay, where a pigeon's message sent previously had secured the ship Plethora for the journey southwest. The next days passed in shivering gusts of grey wind and sea spray, beneath a leaden sky like the ceiling of a prison cell.

  When the island finally came into view on the seventh morning at sea, out beyond the southern stretches of the Scar's archipelago, Caleph realized he had heard of the place. It had always been mysterious—a collapsed tower on a lopsided island, its origins and purpose unknown—but for all that it was just a legend for children to whisper over in Night stories. Any lingering items of value had been looted from the place centuries ago, leaving the fallen tower as little more than a near-forgotten curiosity.

  For
his captors, though, it had some far deeper meaning.

  "Do you think She's still there?" D'haan murmured to Faerloss as the Plethora sought to cast anchor a safe distance from the treacherous rocks. "After all this time? Look at the place—it's a ruin."

  "I don't know," Faerloss answered. "If we're lucky, She is. If not . . ." He drew a deep breath, released it steaming into the winter air. "Then we've a long search before us, and it starts today."

  He's dead, Caleph thought. I saw him murder Manther and take his corpse. How can he still breathe like that? The question was the pondering of a prisoner, irrelevant, but he figured it out as soon as he had the thought. He can't. It's more illusion. The devils' attention to detail was flawless—every breath, every blink, even the smoking air as they exhaled was replicated by whatever sorcery they used to disguise themselves. They had managed to infiltrate the highest ranks of the Church, and their technique was flawless.

  The anchor splashed down, swallowed by the black water, and the captain approached. "I'm sorry, Your Holiness—this is as close as we can take you without risking a hole in the hull."

  "It's close enough," Baltazar said, turning for the rowboat.

  "Are you sure you don't want any of my crew to accompany you? They can row or stand guard at the boat once you―"

  "No, Captain. I'll go with my Preservers alone." The captain bowed and step back.

  The rowboat swayed with their weight as they entered. After the crew lowered it to the water, the Mal'shedaal took up the oars and drove it swiftly to the beach. A sea lion's corpse graced the rocky shore, the flesh of its head already devoured by the island's scavengers. A swarm of gulls fought over ragged chunks of its meat.

  The boat scraped to shore, spooking the gulls into flapping away before they realized the visitors had no interest in them. As the Mal'shedaal dragged the vessel over the rocks Baltazar looked up, beyond the dead sea lion, where the ruins of the tower loomed.

  It lay on its side, black with barnacles and stained with old salt, broken into three pieces and partially submerged. The tilt of the rock island lent the impression that sometime in ancient history, the entire island had fallen sideways, triggering the tower's collapse. What could have done this? Caleph wondered. Earthquake? Wrath of God? The island had to have been a decent size, easily a few miles across at its widest. Small wonder the children liked to whisper about it.

  "There?" D'haan pointed to a hole in the tower's midsection, at a floor that would have been midway up the structure's height if it were still standing. Faerloss nodded and started forward. D'haan prodded Baltazar to follow, then drew up the rear.

  They shuffled through the seawater lapping at the breach, which soaked them, freezing, to the knees. Then they ducked beneath the barnacle-crusted overhang and the distant sun vanished behind them. It had been cold outside, but the tower ruins felt like an ice cave: black and silent and freezing.

  D'haan lit a torch as Baltazar prayed for clericlight. The illumination flickered across a riot of shattered stone and debris, too much for Caleph to make sense of. As they picked their way through the destruction, he caught glimpses of wrecked furniture and ruined bones. One wall bore a mark like a blood stain, a memory of old cutlery long gone to rust.

  He had just begun to recognize what he was seeing—an old kitchen, perhaps a dining hall—when they came to a diagonal hallway veering sharply away to the left, its right wall a bizarre series of staggered right angles. Something about it gave his mind a lurch, threatening to unmoor him.

  "Here," Faerloss said. "Upstairs."

  Stairs. The realization should have steadied him; instead it rattled him further. The tower fell over. These stairs used to lead upward. Now we follow them sideways. The imagery evoked the work of Solomon Cortere, a painter from the 17th century who had produced profoundly disturbing images: stairs leading to nowhere, twisted black hallways, mirrors that reflected contorted Helscapes. The Tribunal had convicted the man of demonic possession and put him to death, destroying all his work they could find.

  But some of it had survived and made its way, eventually, to the crystal tower, where it had joined the Fatherlord's personal gallery. It was within the purview of every Fatherlord to review such work, collected over the centuries, and Caleph had found Cortere's particularly compelling. He saw the paintings as warnings—a way to harden one's self against the madness they depicted, not to revel in it. More than once he'd thought that if he'd been Fatherlord when Cortere was convicted, he may have spared the man.

  Now, he found himself not merely observing the artist's work, but held hostage by it—forced to watch as Baltazar led him through an endless series of Cortere's maddest images. They emerged from the sideways stairwell into a room turned upside down, where carved stone chairs sprang from the wall like bizarre stalactites and narrow viewing windows lined the ceiling. Using a rope and hook, their light sources leaping madly, they rappelled down a stone shaft—at the bottom of which another stairway, supposedly leading "up," descended into the shifting blackness.

  Somewhere along the way, the Mal'shedaal dropped their illusions. A pair of corpses now accompanied him, one in a sweeping black cloak. Their true appearance amplified his deranged surroundings, lending them a touch of the grotesque.

  Buried alive within his own flesh, helpless against each deformed feature as it slithered through his perceptions, he lost all capacity to discern what his eyes took in. A splinter of madness caught in his mind, seething.

  They came to a writhing passage, looping forward in a broken coil. Maybe it had been a spiral staircase, once—or at least a caricature of one—but now it was just another impossible enigma: ramp after steep, twisting ramp, each slick and stagnant with old seawater and cresting at its peak in a seven foot drop to the stone beneath. All while the stairs mocked them, unspooling around, below, and above, but never beneath their feet.

  At the passage's end they jumped down to a wall, where the petrified remnants of an old oaken door lay in scattered pieces. Faerloss pointed upward at the threshold the door had once blocked, set into the ceiling above.

  D'haan nodded and caressed his black ring. His feet lifted out of the thin soup of seawater, hovering inches above the surface.

  "You could fly?" Baltazar accused. "This whole time? Why didn't you―?"

  Faerloss held up a hand, silencing him. His eyes searched the doorway above.

  "She's close," D'haan said. A thrill of excitement ran through the words. "In the bond—I can feel Her."

  Faerloss's dead eyes betrayed nothing. "Dress for Her," he said. "Let us enter Her grave in the form She prefers." His form rippled into darkness, his face vanishing beneath a black cowl. His cloak elongated and opened, fluttering in the still air. He became a creature of absolute blackness, a rip in the air, his features only discernible through their varying shades of midnight. D'haan did the same.

  Then he pinched the collar of his cloak and lifted off the floor as D'haan had. "Here," he commanded Baltazar, then hoisted the high priest of Akir's holy Church onto his back like a child. The floor dropped away beneath them. In seconds they crested the threshold and gracefully stepped in to the chamber above.

  Even with the decay of countless centuries, Caleph could tell the room had once been glorious. Thin channels, carved into the stone of the walls, looped and curved in some ancient runic script. Traces of gold and silver lingered in some of the pathways, hinting at their lost beauty. The bases of old lecterns seemed to swoop from the floor—now the wall—like cresting waves frozen into stone before, mere inches into their rise, dissolving into the jagged remnants of their demise. In the center of that floor, an exquisitely carved chair—Caleph couldn't help but think of it as a throne—still retained most of its form. Its forgotten majesty glared defiantly from the coating of old bird sehk and the lingering juts of broken sculpture. Peering through the ages, Caleph could imagine the loops and whorls of stone shaped like water, spraying from the throne's broad back to form a magnificent frame for the woman
they called the Queen of Dawn.

  Yes, the room was overgrown with vines and gulls' nests, littered with the bleached, brittle bones of the tower's inhabitants. And yes, it was all tilted sideways, forcing that glorious throne to hang from the wall above them in a cruel parody of its stolen grandeur. But even the massive break in the ceiling only served to enhance the chamber's majesty, ushering in a wash of light that gleamed in every stagnant pool and lingering golden thread like the dazzling brilliance of Basica Majesta—as if nature itself held the room in reverence or dread.

  As he took in the breach in the ceiling, Baltazar spoke. "We could've just flown in, right there. It would've saved us hours."

  "We didn't know it was there," D'haan said. "The command chamber was at the heart of Gloryhold. That breach must've opened in the crash."

  Faerloss shushed them. "She's here." He picked his way through the debris, eyes trained on the floor. "I can feel Her." He knelt and sifted through the wreckage, eventually pulling loose half a humerus, and shuddered. "It's Her. She was here." When he stood, his dark eyes gleamed with old guilt. "She died like a rat in this curséd box and I wasn't here. I should've been here, D'haan."

  "We all should have." D'haan crossed to him, his gaze riveted to the old bone. He set a hand on Faerloss's shoulder. "But She foresaw it, remember. This is just a step in Her plan." He turned to Baltazar. "She's here, but broken. How much do we need?"

  Baltazar hesitated, and Caleph's hopes leapt. Maybe it's too late to revive Her, he thought wildly. She's too broken and it's been too long. Seeing Her throne room, experiencing the Hel-damned maze of Her tower, had multiplied his burgeoning fear of this woman, this long-dead queen, into something like gibbering dread. He didn't want to see Her in the flesh. Ever.

  "Not everything," Baltazar said. "A piece of every limb. As much of the hands as you can find. The Altar will fill in the gaps; it's extremely potent. But the skull is crucial. It houses the soul. Without it . . ." He spread his hands.