Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3)

by Adam J Nicolai

  From the darkness where she stood watch, Ylaine asked the question Seth and the other student, Mark, wouldn't. "Who was she?"

  "A page," Retash answered. "One of dozens, running the halls of Basica Tiisan in Ornbridge. A girl of rare beauty, with a soul to match."

  A stunned silence fell over them. The Teachings forbid . . . Seth thought reflexively, before quelling the thought. The Teachings forbade a great many things, he had come to realize—many of them as inevitable as the morning sun.

  "You loved her," Ylaine said.

  "No." Retash dropped his hand to his side. "But I wanted to. She loved me, but I was a fool. I had hoped that now, maybe . . ." He trailed off, eyes trained on the epitaph as if he could draw some other meaning from it if he only tried hard enough. "It doesn't matter," he said at last. "It's just another thing they took from me—another thing I let them take."

  He turned to face them, his eyes hidden in the black of his hood, and said, "We know you're there. You can step out."

  Seth glanced around, startled—and saw two shadows emerge from around the corner of a mausoleum. "Seth," one of them said.

  Seth doubted his own ears. "Iggy?"

  Iggy took down his hood; Melakai did the same behind him.

  The King changed his mind, Seth thought when he saw Melakai. Or the captain of the Crownwardens decided to take matters into his own hands, and Iggy came to join him. Iggy had never been that fond of Syntal, but he was fiercely loyal. No doubt word of Seth's betrayal had enraged him.

  In that instant, as he recognized a renewed opportunity for death, he wondered how he would react to it. He would never harm Iggy—or Kai, really, who was only doing what he thought was right. But he had also lost his appetite to end his own life. He didn't know if justice demanded that he submit to them, but he did know he had lost his desire to do it.

  His uncertainty vanished quickly. Free to decide who he would be, he found his disdain for cowardice undiminished.

  "I won't fight you." He offered his hands. "I said I would submit to the King's justice, and I still will."

  Kai glowered. "This isn't about that."

  "So it's true, then?" Iggy said. "You really killed her?" His voice held some final, quivering strand of hope or denial.

  Seth clipped it. "I did."

  Even in the moonlight, he saw Iggy blanch. "You—blesséd sehk, Seth, you really . . . ? I mean, I heard about it, but I didn't really believe . . . Why? For the love of winter, how could you do that?"

  "For the wrong reasons," Seth said. "I didn't . . . she should've answered to the King. I can't . . . I don't have an answer for you."

  "Sehk'akir. And Helix didn't kill you?"

  Kai took Iggy's arm. "I told you this was a mistake. We need to go."

  "No." Iggy pulled out of the older man's grasp. "No." He looked back to Seth. "Are you . . . ? Sehk, Seth, I need your help and I don't know if I can sehking trust you. I don't know who you are."

  "I don't know, either," Seth answered. Then he realized: "But I'll always help you, if I can."

  Kai grunted. "He's lost his mind. Forget it. I'm axing this idea." Again, he took Iggy's arm. "Come on. We're running out of time."

  Iggy didn't move. His eyes searched Seth's face in the darkness, running through some impossible calculus. "It's Revenia," he finally said. "They're going to resurrect her."

  The weird peace that Seth had found in Hannah's Ridge wavered. A familiar wave of desperate hate washed over him. " . . . what?"

  "They have some altar they want to use—the Foundation Altar—and we have to break it before they do." He rushed through a story riddled with holes and nightmares, culminating in his team's arrival that night and their plan to enter the crystal tower. "And the Mal'shedaal aren't here. That . . . it's like a gift from God, Seth. It's too lucky. We have to go in now, and . . ."

  He tightened his jaw, committed to his final choice. "We could use you."

  Resurrect Revenia. The words were too horrible, too alien, to fathom. The Raving Witch. The one who made the Waste. The one who terrified Ethaniel and Lar'atul and every other bizarre being in the Hall of the Council so badly that they broke reality to kill Her. This danger made Syntal look like a gnat. Of course it had to be stopped.

  And yet—

  The fervor that rose up in him in response to that danger was as untrustworthy as Syntal had been. The craving for final solutions, the blind willingness to murder, threatened to seize him as surely as any Binding. He had only just broken free. He had only just begun to understand, to become something different.

  "I . . ." Of course he would help. He had to help.

  But how could he?

  When Retash's hand settled on his shoulder, Seth was grateful for it.

  "You go to break an altar," the Preserver clarified with Iggy. "Not to commit a murder."

  "I mean, I don't know what's going to happen up there," Iggy answered. "But that's why we're going, yeah."

  But the words hadn't been for Iggy; they'd been a reminder for Seth. Retash took his hand back, and Seth nodded. He handled the words like they were a sleeping viper: "I'll help you."

  "As will I," Retash said, and Seth looked at him, startled. "I know enough about what's happening to understand the importance of this." His eyes flicked briefly to the tombstone. "Perhaps it was why I was drawn here in the first place."

  Seth glanced at Ylaine and Mark. Ylaine took a position next to him and nodded.

  "No," Kai said. "You and your master—fine. But we only have one chanter with us, and he's new to this. Two extra bodies are going to tax him hard enough. The others have to wait outside."

  "We can keep watch," Ylaine offered.

  "You won't have a way to get us a message." Kai chewed on the offer. Shook his head. "And you could draw suspicion."

  "Suspicion on the ground may be suspicion diverted from you," Retash offered.

  "Sure, but clerics have ways of getting information from the people they capture. Stay out of the square."

  Seth turned to Ylaine. "If you do see something, give us whatever warning you can. I'll help you both get home when we return."

  If I return, he thought, and then realized the chances were even grimmer than that.

  If any of us do.

  v. Melakai

  He didn't like surprises, and the sudden addition of an exiled murderer to his team was the worst sort of surprise. He knew Seth would hold his own against the guards, if and when it came to that—he'd seen the kid fight too many times not to feel a little safer with him at his back. But he'd seen him buck the rules, too; take matters into his own hands to terrible consequence. If he did that tonight, he could get all of them killed.

  For now, at least, Seth and his master fell in quietly, moving like shadows through the city streets. They all rejoined with Elthur and Torthan, waiting at the cemetery gates, and made for Sanctaria.

  Elthur steered them wide, but kept to his word: the streets they traveled tended to be quiet. They saw plenty of townsfolk and several clerics, but no one gave them a second look in the dark. They feel safe here, Kai realized. They're the aggressors in this war, not the defenders. They've got no reason to suspect outsiders.

  That, he predicted, would change after tonight.

  It took twenty minutes to near the Basica square. "M'sai," Iggy whispered, pulling into an empty alley. "I'll scout it out, try to find a window on an upper floor—thirteenth, if I can."

  "Torth," Kai said, "if there's any preparation you need to do for the spells, now's the time. As soon as he's back, we have to be ready to head in."

  The chanter gave him a quick nod. Iggy vanished into the night. They waited in the tense muddle of distant city sounds: hooves clopping on cobblestones, the occasional shout or argument. Iggy returned in a rush of hidden wings, manifesting out of the darkness.

  "Lucky again," he muttered. "Open window on the thirteenth floor. Leads into a little library. I saw a bunch of stained glass windows, too—I think that might be the hall w
here they're keeping the altar, but I couldn't see inside.

  "I'll become the owl again. I can lead you to the wall right below the window. Then I'll wait on the sill above, guide you in."

  "M'sai." Kai looked at Torth. "You ready?"

  In answer, Torth chanted, clasped his hands, then pulled them apart. With a whispered touch against his own shoulder, he Vanished.

  Kai took a steadying breath. Here we go.

  One by one, Torth Vanished the other members of the team. When Kai saw his own hands disappear, his own body vanish from beneath him, a surge of vertigo seized him. He put a hand to the wall and closed his eyes, waiting for it to pass. "Take a moment," he whispered, "if you need to." When he opened his eyes again, he had become a ghost: disembodied, a consciousness floating in the night air yet tethered to the ground.

  Scorch this, he thought. After tonight, never again. "Torth, Igg, you ready?"

  Torth whispered assent. Bitch's tits, Kai thought in alarm. He sounds like he's already breathing hard. He shoved the warning from his mind. All it could do was rattle the man; it was far too late to change anything.

  Iggy, the last of them still visible, blinked into the form of an owl. Kai gave him a step up again, pressing his invisible arm against the front of his legs so he could find it, then lifting him to shoulder height. The owl launched into the darkness with a quick kick, and Kai—and, he assumed, the others—followed.

  The square stood largely empty. A small flock of pigeons scattered as Iggy's shadow fell over them, long and low to the ground; Kai ran through the wake of their fevered departure, grateful for the distraction. The sledgehammer on his back thudded against his spine with every step. When he caught up to the owl at the temple wall, a giddy thrill seized him: they had crossed the wall, braved the city streets, and reached the temple without being seen.

  We might actually pull this off.

  Another whispered incantation, a flailing touch to his shoulder, and he felt a lightness steal into his bones. The ground dropped away as the owl spiraled upward. This time the vertigo slammed into him like a sack of bricks.

  Again he closed his eyes, his fingers dancing lightly along the tower wall as it drifted past. M'sai, he thought, m'sai, just get through this part. Just get past this part. Syntal had Hovered him countless times on their journey to Thakhan Dar, and he'd eventually managed to tolerate it—but it was different when he couldn't see his own body. He was less than a ghost now: he was a memory, a wisp to be dragged along by the winds.

  His gorge rose dangerously, his stomach bucking. His ascent halted. He opened his eyes to see an owl on an open windowsill, eying him.

  "Sehking dogsehk," he muttered, to hear his own voice and confirm his existence as much as anything else. He grasped the ledge, pulled himself in, and felt the Hover drop away as he rolled onto the floor of the library. "That was . . ." Dizziness swallowed the words. He sat against the wall, waiting for the room to stop spinning.

  It finally did. When his eyes adjusted to the low light he saw a small chamber, the walls lined with old books. A single chair and table waited next to the window; the table bucked suddenly, as someone came in the window after him.

  "Kai's here," Kai whispered.

  "Elthur," the cleric said from the empty sill.

  "Clear out of the way, Elthur," Kai said. "Someone coming up behind you."

  So it went until the last of them climbed in—Torthan, who appeared as he stumbled against the table and sent it clattering to the hard wood floor. He lost his feet and crashed to the ground. When he looked up, his eyes were sharp as lantern light and his cheeks stained with blood.

  Already? Kai fought to keep the shock from his face. But we still need to get back down, we still need—

  "Mercy," Elthur breathed, hurrying over to the chanter. All of them were visible now; Torthan had shed all their protective magic, gasping for breath from the burden.

  "I just . . ." he panted, flecking his lips with blood, "I just need . . . a moment . . ."

  Seth and Retash padded to the door, taking up guard. Seth put his ear to the wood, listening, then shook his head. "Nothing. I think we're still clear."

  "Sehk." The curse hissed from Kai's lips like leaking steam. Then to the owl: "Where is the room with the altar?"

  Iggy reappeared. "I don't know for sure. That way." He pointed.

  "Elthur. Do you know where we are?"

  The old cleric shook his head. "I'm sorry."

  "All right." Panic rumbled somewhere in his gut and warnings flitted about his head like flies. He fixed on the goal. "Torth . . ."

  The man looked at him. The blood running from his eyes only accentuated the brilliance and determination there.

  Sehk. I can't ask him this. Sehking look at him.

  But he'd known the risks when he came. Kai had delivered the warnings himself. They had come too far now; there was no choice.

  "How many more Vanishings can you manage?"

  "How many do you need?" Bloody teeth flickered in a pink froth behind the words.

  "Just one—two if you can manage it. We need to get someone through this door with one of the hammers. Two people, two hammers would be better."

  "We can go," Seth said.

  "You're the ones I had in mind."

  "I don't need this to shatter stone." Retash held out his sledgehammer. "Someone else should keep it, just in case."

  "I'll take it." Iggy took the hammer and secured it to his back.

  "Two Vanishings?" Torth said. "I can do it."

  "Are you sure?" Kai pressed. The chanter nodded. Kai wasn't convinced.

  "Now, you listen to me, all right? I'm not looking for bravado. This isn't the time to be a hero. It's a time to be realistic. We need you to do what you can—no more, no less. If you bite off more than you can chew―"

  "I can do it," Torth insisted.

  Kai glanced a question at Seth and Retash—if Torth couldn't hold the spells, they would be the ones to pay for it. Seth answered by stepping forward.

  Torthan tightened his jaw and closed his eyes, steadying himself. Then he chanted, his hands flashing through the motions. Retash stepped up just as Seth vanished; Torth did the same for him, then leaned back against the wall trembling, eyes clenched.

  "If you hear me knock," Kai said, "get back here immediately."

  "Understood," Retash answered from the empty air.

  The door opened just wide enough for the two men to slip into the hallway beyond. Kai took a position next to it as it clicked closed behind them. Then he waited— every muscle tensed, ears straining for any sign.

  Torthan put his arms around himself, his fingers digging into his flesh. He started to rock. "Easy," Kai urged. "Just . . . hold on, now."

  A drop of blood rolled from the corner of Torth's eye. Another from his nose that slid to the ridge of his upper lip and shivered there.

  Then his ears.

  His mouth.

  He started moaning. In the darkness of the little library, his veins began to glow.

  "Sehk," Iggy said. "Torth, stop it. Let it go. We'll find another way." He looked at Kai. "I've seen this before. It could kill him."

  Kai's heart thundered. He slipped the door open, rapped twice on the wall beyond.

  Torth's moan crescendoed, his whole body quaking. His veins flared, glistening with lightning.

  Iggy grabbed him. "Torth! Let it go!"

  "Enough, man!" Kai snarled. "Stop!"

  Torth's mouth dropped open, spilling a river of blood down his tunic, and he screamed. His grip flew loose, his arms thrashing with seizure. The blood glared from within his flesh like strips of sunlight that grew, engulfing him.

  Iggy staggered backward, threw an arm over his eyes. Kai braced himself to die.

  Torth's scream became the roar of Kai's own blood in his ears, the shout of panic from his own throat. It exploded like the grinding of an earthquake, enormous and implacable.

  Then it vanished. The light died. In the aftermath Torthan's
body sprawled against the wall, his flesh pale as the moon and the eyes seared from his skull.

  "You there!" came a shout from the hallway. "Halt!"

  Kai spat a curse and whirled about, tearing the door open just as a Scarlet Guard hurtled through the air and slammed into the wall. He burst down the hallway and saw Seth and Retash in a T-juncture at the end, back to back, surrounded by half a dozen soldiers. Behind the melee, the Preservers had already torn a grand double door from its hinges.

  "They're in there!" Seth shouted, jerking his head toward the door as he fended off a swarm of sword strikes. "He's already started!"

  Kai charged up the hallway and tore his sword loose as a panther bounded past him, growling. Seth dispatched one of his attackers as two more charged up from the cross hall.

  "Get in there now!" Seth roared. "Do you hear me?

  "He's already started!"

  25

  i. Takra

  The cavalry thundered past as she and the rest of Ben's chanters broke into a run for Oak Bridge. All around them, the footmen did the same. They charged together along the banks of the swollen Ley, frothing on their left like a wild dog.

  Where are Tollin's men? The thought flickered behind a curtain of frenzy in her mind. Where are the Kesprey who converted here? She tried to get some glimpse of the bridge as they ran, but it was chaos. Of the men she saw she had no idea which, if any, were from Colmon.

  Finally the front ranks of Isaic's cavalry slammed into the enemy foot soldiers who had made it over the bridge, carving their way through—but the enemy had beaten them to the bridge by a significant margin, and had already laid in a defensive line. Behind them, more soldiers thundered across the bridge, with hundreds more pressing in on the other side of the river.

  Kirkus stumbled to a stop, his hair wild in the wind as he combed the battle with his eyes.

  "What do we do?" Vitar asked, flushed and panting. On the march north they'd spent an extra two hours every night discussing strategies and ideas, formulating battle plans with code names like Cobra's Strike and Charging Horns. Takra tensed, spinning the strategies through her mind, waiting for an order.