by Matthew Ward
Fifteen summers old and with Viktor as his patron, Constans would soon be granted a knight’s plume. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. For all that he was becoming the mirror of his long-dead blood father – not least in his precise movement and brooding eyes – Constans lacked Malachi Reveque’s contemplative manner. Too often angry. Selective in authority acknowledged and respect shown.
He’d been quietly ejected from Chapterhouse Sartorov a year earlier – long before Grandmaster Rother had severed ties with the Republic and declared Fathom Rock an independent principality. That Viktor had taken on the boy as both squire and adoptive son – Constans’ relationship with his previous adoptive father being only a hair less strained than his relationship with Rother – had struck Rosa as the wrong message. But as a man with few friends, Viktor remained unflaggingly protective of those he did possess. Malachi and Lilyana Reveque lay five years beyond his aid, but their son…?
“Keep watch,” said Viktor. “If the shadowthorns come, I look to you for warning.”
Constans’ eyes shone. A long dagger twirled about the fingers of his left hand and slid into a sheath on his belt. “At your order.”
Ruined and overgrown streets fell away, the distant weeping louder as night thickened. A brazier hissed and crackled, then burst to blue-white flame as ghostfire caught anew in a waft of sweet-scented duskhazel.
The once-grandiose temple was more imagination than perception, buried by the collapse of its upper storeys and the windblown detritus of centuries. The entire western quarter was simply… gone, crushed by the collapse of clocktowers and galleries. The north fell away into a jagged precipice of broken tile and jutting sarcophagi. The centre, and its cracked altar, was clear only through recent labours. A great spiral stairway descended through the fitful glow of firestone lanterns. A handful of Drazina, stripped to shirtsleeves, formed a work chain on the outer spiral, toiling with baskets and broken stone cleared from below.
Rosa stared away from the leering, bird-headed grotesques that stirred so many old memories, her eyes lingering on burial niches, stale and silent. Some were cracked, others ajar. Yet more lay empty, their sarcophagi plundered by the same degenerate prizraks who wept and howled their hunger beyond the ghostfire perimeter.
The frontrunners of Jard’s picket line set to work heaving sarcophagi to barricade the gateway. One cracked against the ground, spilling cloth-tangled bones across the nave.
Viktor peered into the spiral stair’s lantern-lit gloom. “Master Shalamoh. What progress?”
No reply issued from the depths.
“Master Shalamoh?” Viktor rapped his knuckles against a lantern’s metal crown, setting the light dancing. “A horde of shadowthorns gathers. You choose a poor time to test my patience.”
A thin face appeared at the staircase’s inner curve, accompanied by a voice too rich and deep for the speaker’s cadaverous grey robes. “A horde? That’s most unfortunate.”
In the fortnight since departing Tressia, Rosa had witnessed nothing stir Eldor Shalamoh to excitement that had not been buried a century or more. He projected calm as readily as the very best of soldiers, his young man’s vigour – despite his swept-back grey hair, Shalamoh was some years Rosa’s junior – suppressed behind seemly facade.
“That’s one way to put it,” said Rosa.
He slid a pair of wire-framed eyeglasses from his nose and polished the lenses against a cuff. “Perhaps you should drive them off, Lady Orova? That’s why you brought these brutes, isn’t it?”
“If only we’d thought of that.”
“Have you found the sanctum?” said Viktor.
Shalamoh’s lip twisted. “I’ve found a door. Fascinating petroglyphs. But whether it’s the sanctum or not, I can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“We can’t get it open. Hammers, crowbars. Nothing works. Not even a crack.”
Viktor started down the stairs. “Let me—”
“Father!” Constans burst through the temple gate, out of breath and cheeks flushed. He mantled the sarcophagus-barricade without slowing, boots skidding across stone. “They’re coming.”
War drums boomed beyond the walls. The fanfare of Thirava’s courage found… or more likely, of his reinforcements arrived.
Viktor froze. “How many?”
“At least three hundred spears,” gasped Constans.
“Mount up!” shouted Rosa. “We’ll fight our way clear.”
The labour-chain broke apart, men and women running to their tents in search of armament. Others ran for the makeshift stables beneath the canted eastern roof.
“No.” Viktor snatched a lantern from its hook. “We can’t lose this chance.”
Drums crashed to crescendo, and faded to nothing. Defenders froze, wrong-footed by sudden quiet and contradictory orders. Beyond the walls, a lone prizrak sobbed its hunger to the skies.
Rosa stepped closer and lowered her voice. “If we stay, we die.”
Viktor turned on his heel. The air crackled with cold. A deep breath, and his features softened to something approaching friendliness. “Rosa, please. Trust me.”
“That’d be easier if I knew why we were here.”
He drew himself in, eyes imploring. “This is not pride, but necessity.”
Grubbing around in forbidden Darkmere? Guided by an upstart scholar and the pages of an outlawed text? Five years before, it would have made for a special kind of madness. But Rosa scarcely recognised that world. So much of what she’d thought myth had been proven real.
But one truth remained. Whenever she’d doubted Viktor, others had paid the price.
“We’ll buy you as much time as we can.”
His hand found her shoulder. His eyes, hers. “I know.”
Then he was gone beyond the curve of the stairs, Shalamoh in tow.
“You heard!” shouted Rosa. “We hold!”
Knights gathered to the barricades. Midnight black and hunter’s green. Commander Tanor stood tall among the latter, a veteran of Govanna among untested Drazina.
Rosa drew closer. “Spread our lads and lasses out, Zephan. Let Essamere stiffen the line.”
A ghost of a smile tugged at worn, Hallowsider’s features. The Drazina were acclaimed as knights, but they weren’t the equal of the old chapterhouses… and certainly not Essamere.
“I’ll watch over the right, mistress. You the left?”
The left end of the barricade faced both the temple gateway and one of the navigable window arches. Where the fighting would be thickest, in other words. “You want the grandmaster’s circlet that badly?”
The smile returned. “You’d rather you were bored?”
“The sisters shine for you, Zephan.”
He straightened, pleased she’d invoked Lunastra alongside her radiant sibling. Hallowsiders didn’t look to Lumestra alone to keep them safe. “Until Death, mistress.” He strode away along the barricade of sarcophagi. “Gennery. Tolsav. Prasiv. You’re with me.”
The drums crashed back. Dust spilled from stonework. Rosa unslung her shield and took position with the Drazina at the gateway.
“The Lord Protector commands we hold, so we hold.” She let her voice blossom beneath the approaching drums. Solidity. Certainty. Leadership was more than a bloodied sword. She’d been years learning that. Some never did. “Stand together. Do the dead proud, and—”
Ragged shrieks tore through the thunder of the drumbeats, and billowed madly into the night sky. Terror that shivered the soul without decency to first encounter one’s ears.
To Rosa’s left, Captain Jard paled beneath his helm. “Blessed Lumestra… What was that?”
“I doused the outer ghostfires.” Constans’ voice arrived at Rosa’s shoulder, swimming in self-regard. “I thought it’d make things more interesting.”
Shouts echoed beneath the screams. Bellowed orders. Rosa’s mind’s eye glimpsed the horror Constans had unleashed. Pallid, scarecrow-tatter prizraks falling upon the Hadari with tooth and claw, eyes burning
like coals beneath thick red tears. Her stomach coiled in disgust.
“Reveque. You’ll take position on the left, and your lead from Sergeant Danarov.”
“I’d rather stay here.”
She met the truculent stare head-on. “I didn’t ask.”
Eyes threatened refusal, but at the last he blinked. “At your command.”
Screams faded, the prizraks slaughtered or driven back to the shadows. Drums regained dominance, their rumble louder with every heartbeat.
“Tirane Brigantim!”
A hundred voices washed over the ruins. Running feet thundered beneath.
“Here they come!” shouted Rosa. “Death and honour!”
“Death and honour!”
The gateway crowded with golden scale and rust-coloured silks. Swarthy faces roared challenge from beneath close-set helms. Ghostfires ripped and flickered.
An Immortal barged Jard’s sword aside with his golden shield and vaulted onto the barricade. He died there, swept away by a slash that juddered Rosa’s arm to the shoulder.
Others pressed behind, howling and screaming. Hammering at helm and shield. A young Drazina collapsed to Rosa’s right, gasping for breath an opened throat couldn’t claim. An Essamere shield took the woman’s place, ramming her slayer back across the sarcophagus and into the press of bodies.
Spears stabbed across shield and stone. A thrust ripped Rosa’s surcoat and skittered across her pauldron. Another scraped between the plates at her flank, rousing flesh to fire.
Details blurred, lost in red screams and ragged breaths. The judder of the parry. The bite of steel on flesh. The hot stink of death rising through the mist.
A war hammer struck Rosa’s helm and set her world spinning. Reeling, she ducked the Immortal’s second swing. His third strike crumpled the upper edge of her shield. She let it fall. Gauntleted fingers about the hammer-wielder’s belt, she dragged him down behind the barricade. Her sword, now tight in both hands, crunched through armoured scales to split his spine.
“Until Death!”
Rosa screamed the words and reclaimed her place at the gore-slicked barricade. A fur-clad Silsarian clansman shied from her onset, and died before his sword touched hers.
Lumestra, but how she’d missed this! Even with her head ringing. Even with skin hot and clammy with sweat and blood. Even with the fire of jarred bones and bruised flesh leaping through her veins. Battle brought bleak vigour.
She scraped a parry and sent another shadowthorn screaming into Otherworld. Her fist closed around a hank of filthy hair and slammed a helmless head against stone.
Why had she ever forsaken this? Allowed herself to become a tutor to recruits? To exchange the soldier’s sword for the mistress’ mantle? This was where she belonged. It was what she was for.
Then, as the fighting lulled and she sought an unbroken blade, she saw him.
He sat on a fallen keystone, hands folded behind his back and black goatee twisting quizzically below a mask of dark feathers. Tall, and yet with a suggestion that his true presence was vaster still; his coat rumpled and his tall hat scuffed.
Breath staled in Rosa’s throat. The temple receded into grey, as did those who strove within, their clamour muffled beneath her stuttering pulse. The Raven. Had she drawn him there, by forgetting the lessons of times past and losing herself in slaughter?
“No…”
She blinked and found no sight of him in a world restored to sound and colour. The patch of rubble on which he’d sat was empty.
The whistle of arrow and the scarlet hammer-blow in her shoulder came as one.
A crunch of knee on stone warned Rosa she’d fallen. The clang of steel that her sword had slipped from her grasp. A gasp sent fire raging through her lungs.
“Shields!” roared a voice.
A parapet of shields topped the makeshift barricade. The air clattered with cheated bodkins. The duller, wetter thump as others found flesh. Gaps showed in the shield wall. Fresh screams rang out.
Gold gleamed in the night.
Brow slicked with cold sweat, Rosa gripped the arrow tight, straining for leverage to snap the shaft. Her shoulder screamed and her hand fell. Shaking. Useless.
It wouldn’t have been so, not so very long ago. She’d have ripped the arrow free without blinking. But that woman had been eternal, endless. Now she was ephemeral. Mortal.
Mortals died.
Black uniforms vanished beneath a rush of gold. A brother of Essamere slumped across the barricade, his helm crushed and a spear in his belly. Abandoning her useless battle against the arrow, Rosa closed her good hand about her sword.
An ear-splitting crack shook the temple. The ground heaved.
Stone plunged from the upper storeys, pulverising the dead and shattering flagstones. And the sensation… Not cold, not exactly. Cold was the mirror of heat. This was something else. Not the flipside of the coin, but another coin altogether. It felt old beyond words.
Drums fell silent. The Hadari bled away into the night, babbling their fear. Rosa stared towards the spiral stairway, giddy mirth spilling from her lips. “Took you long enough, Viktor.”
But Viktor was nowhere to be seen.
Retreating footsteps faded. Survivors stirred to aid the fallen.
Hot blood rushing against cold skin, Rosa levered herself upright, her shoulder more heavy and numb than raw.
It had to be Viktor. He’d pulled similar tricks before; loosed his shadow to blind the foe and set them to flight. Granted brief life to the dead, if a boneless, puppeteered existence could be considered such. Always on the brink of disaster, as was ever a saviour’s wont.
So where was he?
Leaving the barricade behind, she stumbled towards the spiral stair.
“Roslava.” The familiar voice. Clipped and gravelly. Weary. Mocking.
She found herself face to face with the Raven.
“You promised to leave me alone!”
For the first time, Rosa saw the old temple in all its glory. The once-bare stone whorled with silver and gold; the roof restored and polished statues presiding over all, their arms outspread in welcome to supplicants shuffling about her like a rock in a stream.
Or so it might have seemed, but for the pervasive green hue and the inconstant, insubstantial nature of the crowd. Not living men and women, but drifting, empty-eyed ghosts, vaporous beneath the waist and indistinguishable from the ever-present mists.
Of the Hadari – of the knights – Rosa saw no sign. She heard nothing but the slowing, pulsing double-thump of her heart.
“I have left you alone,” said the Raven.
“And yet here you are.”
“No.” He scowled. “Here you are. One foot in my world. One foot in Otherworld. Close enough to hear me.”
He’d distracted her. Lined her up for the arrow, all so he could speak with her. She was dying, and the Raven had killed her. The revelation called for anger, but all was leaden – thought, emotion and being.
“Stop him,” said the Raven. “You’re the only one who’ll listen to me.”
“Stop who?”
“Your friend. The Lord Protector. He interferes with something he should not.”
“He’s doing what he must.”
“No. He’s doing what he thinks he must.” Pain flared as he seized her shoulders, his tone darker, urgent. “I once told you that I’d been privileged with a glimpse of coming days. A future bleak beyond my taste. Though the details have faded like smoke, I know one thing: this is where it starts to go wrong. For us all. But for Tressia most of all. What is buried here must remain buried. Stop him.”
Rosa pulled free, and nearly lost her footing. “Stop him yourself.”
“I pledged to cease meddling. Breaking that promise won’t prevent disaster – it will only alter its nature. But you…?” He sighed. “Have I ever lied to you, Roslava?”
She yearned to say yes. But the Raven had never lied, though his truth was often poison. He’d even been kind, when she�
�d deserved nothing of the sort.
The double-thump of her heart ebbed. The space between the beats crawled to turgid agony.
When she doubted Viktor, others paid the price. But was that truth, or merely excuse for inaction? Viktor’s triumphs always levied a price.
The Raven stepped closer. “Talk to him if you can. But stop him.”
“How? I’m dying.” It all seemed so distant. Unimportant.
Levity entered his voice for the first time. “One foot is not all the way. Let me give you a nudge.”
Palms against her shoulders, he shoved her. She fell backward into the mists.
“Mistress?” Zephan crowded close. “Lady Orova?”
Mist thinned. Rosa found herself with legs splayed and a cracked pedestal at her back. The temple was again forlorn, the false splendour of Otherworld scrubbed away. Bodies lined the inner barricade. Some moving. Too many not. Those knights who remained bound one another’s wounds and stared out into the darkness, waiting for doom to befall.
Good shoulder wedged against the pedestal, she edged upright. Her shoulder throbbed, the arrow’s weight tugging at sinew. Oozing blood darkened her torn surcoat.
Zephan steadied her with a hand against her good arm. “Rosa?”
“Don’t shout, Zephan. I’m not deaf.”
“No, mistress.” He winced. “It’s better you don’t move. The physician’s coming.”
For all the good that would do. Sevaka had begged her not to come to Darkmere. If only she’d listened. “I’m sorry, love,” Rosa breathed. She refocused bleary eyes on Zephan. “The Hadari?”
“Gone. I’ve set Reveque to watch for them.”
“Good.” Every breath woke new fire, but pain was better than Otherworld’s creeping numbness. “Snap the arrow.”
He braced one hand against her punctured breastplate, the other about the shaft. A flash of pain and it was done. Through bleary eyes, Rosa stared at the splintered stump. Better.
She gripped Zephan’s forearm. Should she tell him? No. He’d think her mad. Maybe she was. Maybe it was all born of lost blood and fleeting soul. “If shadowthorns return, hold them as long as you can.”