by Matthew Ward
Elzar rubbed wearily at stubbled jowls. “Are you certain this is a good idea? Calenne—”
“You’re free to change your mind.”
Elzar lapsed into silence, eyes downcast. Viktor wondered if he should have told the whole story from the first. Already, he asked Elzar to contravene scripture and tradition – some might even stir the dread word morality into the mix. To undermine that with the appearance of obsession would have been folly, and whatever else Viktor considered himself, he was not a fool. A shadow-draped witch, steeped in the Dark, certainly. Arrogant, perhaps. A man who aspired to much and always achieved less? Unfortunately. But not a fool.
“You’ve not walked Eskavord’s charred fields,” he murmured. “Malatriant’s demise drew Otherworld close enough to touch. The locals hear the anguish of those she took. They feel it on their skin. They say it goes deep into the clay.”
Elzar frowned. “Viktor… it’s not wise to look for meaning in the mists.”
“Perhaps at this moment I am not wise. But I am driven.” Urgency crept into Viktor’s voice, as much at the prospect of disaster as success. His shadow, ever apt to mischief when emotion ran awry, shifted in his soul. “Calenne Trelan proved herself a leader whose mettle we sorely need. For all that folk say I won victory at Davenwood, she made it possible. I could leverage all manner of claims, but the truth is simple. If I can save only one soul from the Raven’s grasp, it must be she. A part of me has been lost these seven years. Calenne is its keeper. I would be whole again, and have her be whole with me.”
He fell silent, overcome by the strain of speaking from the heart. Love was a peculiar spur to thus provoke courage and fear.
Elzar’s expression cleared. “You’ve given so much of yourself to others, my boy. Refusing you now would be truly selfish, don’t you think? I just…” He paused, brows beetling. “I only hope what you’re looking for is what you find.”
“It is.”
“Then we should begin. The night’s slipping away.”
Viktor nodded, lacking words to thank a man who’d been guide and confidant his whole life. Crouching, he retrieved a ewer from beneath the table. Inky water sloshed within, offering no reflection.
“From the Black River at Coventaj.” With reverent care, starting at the head of the table, Viktor emptied the vessel across the doll. Water pooled about its limbs, contained by the table’s high rim, leaving the porcelain figure a lily in a bleak pool. “My mother spoke often of the goddess Endala’s empathy for women taken by cruel means. Kendrial writes that the river is her blood. I see little harm in stacking the deck.”
Elzar’s eyelid twitched. “Coventaj is forbidden.”
For a heartbeat, Viktor stood again in the cavern buried far beneath the city’s deepest tombs, the cruel eyes of pale, lissom statues glittering malice as he pushed his thrashing father beneath the waters of the Black River for the final time. “Then I am nothing if not consistent. Everything we do tonight is forbidden, by one mandate or another.”
“True enough.” A chuckle faded, serious again. “And what is my role in this abomination?”
Candlelight dimmed as Viktor drew the vranastone fragment from its casket and laid his hands upon it. His vision swam, a piece of him already drawn across the veil between worlds.
“Call forth the light.” His voice fell flat and muted. Vision paled alongside, the world’s crispness smoothing away into mist. “Link me to the doll. Treat it as you would the grounding of magic into a new-made kraikon. Leave the rest to me.”
“Gladly.”
Elzar breathed deep. The air about his shoulders shimmered gold, enveloping both Viktor and the doll. Viktor’s shadow hissed displeasure, recoiling from the splendour. Once, he’d have let it, powerless to curb the wilfulness of the Dark buried in his soul. But that helplessness belonged to a younger man – one afraid of his birthright. He brought the writhing shadow to heel with but a thought. Cloaking himself with it – with the Dark – he lifted one hand from the vranastone, and laid it atop the rusted sword.
The workshop peeled away to a misty street. Windows and rooftops reached crookedly into the skies. Listless etravia spirits, pallid in flesh and form, and vaporous below the waist, drifted along tangled thoroughfares without acknowledging Viktor’s presence. Indeed, he wasn’t truly there, just a piece of his soul, cloaked in shadow. Concentrating, he perceived the cracked plaster of the clocktower hidden behind, the candleflames guttering as if in draught. The golden spark of Elzar’s magic.
None of which forestalled the rise of gooseflesh, or the strange certainty of being unmoored beneath a stark, viridian sky.
Nausea gathered, as it had the first time Viktor had walked the Raven’s domain. The vranakin thief Apara Rann, unable to resist the shadow he’d rooted in her soul, had been his guide. She’d dragged him more than he’d walked, his senses overwhelmed and his shadow screaming. Not so this time. Calenne’s sword throbbed beneath his hand, guiding him on.
He followed the spoor, the fragment of spirit within the sword calling to the whole. He threaded the ethereal crowd through town and field, along cobbled road and sunken tracks whose mud clung to his boots. Cawing shapes murmurated overhead, their cries deafening and vengeful.
He quickened his pace.
The path led on through a field of stone. Tombs jutted from the soil. Upturned swords grew like trees, their hilts spread as branches. The sounds of battle rose to clamour. The etravia, Viktor’s companions upon the impossible road, passed beyond the cusp of mist, leaving him alone.
All save one.
She stood within a ring of swords, beneath a canopy of crooked, black trees. Unmistakeably Calenne for all that she was not. The slenderness of feature, the firm cheekbones and noble brow… even bereft of colour and bleeding vapour, they’d long ago seared themselves into Viktor’s mind. But the expression? In their brief, blessed time together, Calenne had been by turns waspish, proud, solemn and gleeful. The empty-eyed soul had none of that, not even simple curiosity. A canvas without colour or form. The tyranny of Otherworld – the longer one walked its mists, the less of you did the walking.
Was he too late?
“Calenne?”
Viktor reached out. His fingers passed through hers. At once leaden and numb, they fell to his side. Chest heaving with icy spasm, he collapsed to one knee, thoughts awash with raven cries and the thrum of wings.
((Viktor?)) Golden light shimmered. Elzar stepped closer through the mists, voice and form no realer than anything else in that world. ((What can I do?))
“Stay… Stay back.” Viktor forced the words through chattering teeth and stood, his good hand held up in warding. “Leave me be.”
Elzar faded, lost to the mists. Viktor blotted out the raven-song and willed life into his frozen arm. A mistake to touch the ethereal with ephemeral flesh. He’d known, but in the moment had been unable to help himself. The stony heart of Viktor Droshna was a lie. Calenne had made it thus long ago.
Fingers prickling to life, Viktor let his shadow flow outward. He cloaked himself in Dark, a shield against Otherworld’s malice. He reached out once more. This time, his fingers closed around the spirit’s. Gentle. Mindful of his strength and her frailty.
“Calenne,” he breathed. “It’s time for you to come home.”
At last, the etravia responded. Her brow softened, features gathering to panic.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Her voice was barely an echo. A memory. But for all that, it set his soul alight. Unmistakeably Calenne. He clasped her other hand, holding both tight. “Nor should you.”
Lips pinched tight. For the first time, Calenne truly resembled herself. “Poor Viktor. Always so certain you know what’s best.” She shook her head, strands of ghostly matter wisping away. “He’s here.”
Viktor turned, following her milky gaze. Clouds gathered like a bloodstain in the mists, the thunderheads of a storm, the white devoured by the black.
Before he could move, they sm
othered him.
He clung to Calenne’s etravia and reached into his shadow, desperate for a means of defence.
The storm passed as swiftly as it had come. Clouds parted, and Viktor stood once more in the workshop’s candlelit gloom. Failure thick in his throat, he stared down at empty hands. At the doll’s lifeless body. Sword and vranastone sat motionless in the black water alongside.
Gloved fingertips brushed the blade. Smoke curled upward from the caress.
“No!” Viktor stared in horror as the sword crumbled to rust.
“Have you not learned your lesson?” Immaculate in coat, hat and feathered domino mask, the Raven looked up from the doll, and planted his walking cane between his legs. His goatee twitched a frown. “I told you before. I will not be stolen from.”
Elzar gaped, the light about his shoulders fading to nothing. “Lumestra preserve us.”
“Ha!” the Raven replied. “I doubt it.”
Viktor glanced down, clenching and unclenching his fists, barely able to breathe for sorrow. So close. He’d held Calenne in his hands. Part of him still felt her now, for all that she was nowhere to be seen. “Can you steal from a thief?” Sorrow winnowed away until only anger remained. “She doesn’t belong to you!”
The Raven shook his head. “What a man you are to see people as possessions. I am but a guardian…” His expression lost what little friendliness it contained. His gravelly voice grew deeper still. “And one who is fast running out of patience.”
“Calenne Trelan belongs to the living, not the dead.”
The Raven sneered. “So like an ephemeral, laying eyes upon the moment and thinking it eternity. She belongs to herself.”
Candles hissed and sputtered. Viktor took an involuntary half-step back, uncustomary fear thickening his gorge. The Raven wasn’t merely in the room, he was the room. His being filled every nook and cranny.
“There is a balance to life and death,” said the Raven. “It isn’t yours to break. I’d hoped Roslava might reason with you. Alas that you didn’t listen.”
“You turned her against me!” Viktor snapped.
The candles dimmed another fraction. “I opened her eyes to a truth already known, nothing more. Why do you suppose she’s always doubted you?” The Raven tilted his head. “Perhaps we should ask her. Oh, that’s right. We can’t. Not after what you did.”
“What’s he talking about?” croaked Elzar.
“At Darkmere. She shattered the vranastone.” Viktor told himself he’d nothing to feel guilty over. Had his shadow not stolen Rosa’s memories, too much of what she’d seen could have been misinterpreted. A mistake, perhaps, born of a desperate moment, his mind reeling from unexpected separation from Otherworld. But it lay in the past, and not for changing. And what had come after? The pursuit through the rain, Silsarian spears ever drawing closer. He’d atoned for his transgression in blood. “I’d no choice. I—”
“Viktor?” Elzar glanced at the Raven, and back to Viktor. “What did you do?”
“I erred,” he replied. “A rash action taken when I was other than myself.”
The doubt in Elzar’s eyes was a blade in Viktor’s heart. Words were ever deadlier than swords, and the Raven wielded them well. But why wield them at all? A god could call upon better, and yet he sought to cow and convince, or else break Elzar’s faithfulness as he had Rosa’s. Had the Raven been certain of snuffing out Viktor’s life, he’d have done so already, without theatrics. And that left only one possibility.
The Raven was afraid.
At Darkmere, Viktor had sensed the Raven’s presence and his hesitance both. He’d assumed the Keeper of the Dead had resorted to manipulation out of fear of the power rooted in the city’s stones – power kin to Viktor’s shadow. There was nothing to call on here save himself. Was that enough? Viktor had never considered the possibility before, but now recognised its logic. His shadow was of the Dark, and the Dark was older than the Raven – the Keeper of the Dead was a brittle umbra beneath it.
He could be fought. Be beaten. An impossible feat, save for one who had always thrived on challenge. Viktor ravelled in a shadow dissipated by his expulsion from Otherworld, gathering it to purpose.
Again, the Raven stepped closer.
Viktor stood eye to eye with the Keeper of the Dead in the fading candlelight. “Whatever I have done, I remain a protector of my people. A man forever limited by doubt. To embrace the former, I gladly move beyond the latter.”
“Your people?” The Raven punctuated a gravelly laugh with a rat-tat of his cane on the floor. “It’s about you. Everything always is, whatever you claim. Viktor Akadra… I’m sorry, Viktor Droshna… the man who cannot fail because he doesn’t know how. Look what pride has made of you. You cannot outrun the Dark.”
Viktor reached out for the last of his shadow, so goaded by the other’s scorn that he almost missed the snare within the snare – the reason why his shadow was so diffuse. He hadn’t lost his grip on Calenne – he’d never really held her. His shadow had done that, and a portion of his shadow remained in Otherworld, with her. They were still connected, one to the other and both to the doll by Elzar’s tether of light. If he lashed out recklessly with his shadow, as he’d so nearly done, Calenne would slip away. With her sword destroyed, he might search a lifetime and never find her.
Viktor threw sidelong glance at Elzar. “I am not always the man I wish to be. I can only ask that you trust me.”
For all that the old proctor was haggard and pale, he nodded. He knew.
The Raven’s narrow gaze shifted to Elzar. “Don’t listen to him. You can’t—”
Viktor loosed his shadow. It ripped into the Raven. Not only his ephemeral form, but the vast, smothering presence beyond mortal sight. The god screamed in fury, cane abandoned and arms rigid.
The room filled with the shriek of bird voices, and the thunder of black wings. Candles toppled, or were extinguished in the backwash. Drapes danced and tore, bathing the room in moonlight. Books thumped to the floor, their pages shredded and scattered to a maelstrom of pale, forbidden leaves. Breaking glass chimed bright.
Viktor flung up a hand to shield his eyes. Talons raked bright rivulets of pain across scalp and shoulders; the wet rip of beak tugged at cloth and flesh. Choking on carrion stench, Viktor drew his shadow tighter about the Raven… but through it all, held Calenne’s soul tighter still.
Elzar screamed.
“Elzar!” Viktor turned. The old man was naught but a pale glow in the writhing, shrieking mass.
In that moment of distraction, the Raven tore free. Viktor’s shadow howled and dispersed like smoke in the wind.
Breathless, Viktor fell to his knees. He strove to regather his shadow, but every flaring of pain, every ear-splitting shriek, drove it further from his grasp. The part of it – the part of him – anchored to Calenne lost ground with every racing heartbeat.
“Petulant child!” The squalling flock parted before the Raven. His form shimmered. The goateed gentleman in formal garb. An elderly, dark-featured woman in widow’s weeds. One then the other. Both and neither. “I warned you of arrogance.”
Viktor grunted through gritted teeth, panic rising as the last of his connection to Calenne began to slide. Bellowing, he struck at the Raven with what shadow remained.
For his troubles, he received only laughter, and the talons’ bloody caress.
“Do one thing, and do it well,” snapped the Raven. “Ephemerals weren’t meant for more.”
Viktor’s frustration and despair spilled free as a wordless roar. The Raven had the right of it. He couldn’t contest the Keeper of the Dead without relinquishing his grasp on Calenne.
He couldn’t.
Better to let the Raven claim them both than be for ever apart. Except… Except to embrace death was to abandon a Republic that looked to him for protection. He who forsook that charge was unworthy of peace – even the peace of death.
He had to let her go.
“Forgive me,” he breathed, t
he words lost beneath the wingbeats.
Golden light flared. The swarm shrieked, boiling away to the workshop’s corners. The Raven staggered, hands clasped to his face. Elzar slumped against the doll’s table, a wan, tottering form in the moonlight, his golden robes bright with blood. The tether binding Viktor to the doll trembled.
“Bring her home,” gasped Elzar.
The Raven screeched and his flock rallied. A moment bought. But a moment was enough. Shadow resurgent, Viktor lashed at the god’s ephemeral form. It tore like paper, the left half of his being dissolved into black, starlit smoke.
The Keeper of the Dead screamed.
The flock squalled anew, a tornado of talons and wings spiralling around the ruined workshop. Then it too scattered into smoke, and the Raven was gone.
Viktor staggered upright into drifting feathers and the dancing fragments of torn manuscripts, unable to credit the evidence of his senses. A dozen frantic pacings of his heart stuttered before triumph yielded to tragedy. The tether was gone, his purchase on Calenne’s soul with it. He’d bested a god – perhaps even dealt a mortal blow – but that achievement was nothing to the writhing, gnawing loss devouring him from within.
He swallowed, stoic facade crumbling beneath the weight of tears.
“She’s gone,” he breathed. “She’s gone.”
Elzar offered no reply. Viktor found him amid the workshop’s wreckage, shoulder propped against the doll’s table, eyes sightless and still. Careless of the blood, of his own screaming wounds, he knelt and embraced the man more responsible for his raising than any kin. Who’d taught him not to fear his shadow, and how to wield it; to trust to his instincts, however others maligned his actions.
The man he’d led into the clutches of death itself.
Clutching him tight, head cradled against his own, Viktor strove for words that might reach into Otherworld. That Elzar might hear before his soul slipped its last mooring in the living realm.
The ripple of water and the scrape of a porcelain hand clutching at the table’s edge banished them unspoken.
[[Viktor?]]