by Matthew Ward
“In this, if in little else.” Anastacia brightened. “Perhaps I should pay Viktor a visit. I’m of a mood to ask him a few questions, and care little about how I get the answers.”
“Lord Droshna’s escaped. They think it happened while Calenne…” Altiris swallowed, the event still too near for words to frame. “Four dead knights, and no alarm given.”
“Tzila?”
“I don’t know who else could. Grandmaster Tanor thinks he’s left the city. He’s sent heralds to every corner of the Republic bearing warrants of arrest.”
She snorted. “As if Zephan Tanor’s judgement is worth anything. I’m surprised he didn’t have you locked up.”
He grimaced. “To be honest, I never felt much like a prisoner – not after the fires were out. He sat with me while I was in the watch house. He didn’t say much, not that made any sense, anyway. He’d the look of a man caught between impossible choices, who feared he’d made the wrong one.”
Anastacia arched an eyebrow. “And what does that look like, exactly?”
“Lord Trelan, for the most part.”
A scowl became a sigh. “You need to lose that habit. He’s your father now. Call him Josiri.”
Easy for her to say. Not so easy for him to do. “Yes, Mother.”
Narrowed eyes threatened a terrible fate. “The things we do for love…” Her voice faded, the mock-arch expression become one steeped in thought. “Viktor hasn’t left the city. Not yet. I know where he’s going. Come on!”
Plucking a greatcoat from the porch’s coat rack, she made for the outer door.
Altiris grabbed her arm. “Shouldn’t we wake Lord Trelan?”
She shot a forlorn glance at the stairs, doubt creasing her brow. Doubt, and something Altiris couldn’t quite identify. Close to fear, but not quite. However lightly she’d spoken of Lord Trelan’s condition, she was hurting to see him thus. “You couldn’t even if you wanted to.”
Swallowing his misgivings, Altiris reached for his cloak.
However bad the wind in Tressia’s built-up streets, it was worse in the exposed lychfields of Duskvigil Church. Save for the scattered tombs and headstones, the ancient structure stood alone on a rock-strewn promontory, surrounded on three sides by a sheer, dizzying plunge into waves driven to white-crested frenzy by the howling wind. An outpost of wild, elder days, barely part of the city at all. A place for pilgrims, penitents – and, according to Anastacia, for relics the archimandrite deemed too corrupting to keep around righteous folk.
Staggered by a gust, Altiris grabbed at a tomb. Soil crumbled beneath his foot, sending a scatter of small pebbles bouncing away down the rutted path. A handful vanished over the ragged, grassy tufts of the cliff edge.
Coat and skirts streaming behind, Anastacia strode on towards the crooked spire. Taking a deep breath, Altiris followed, forearm raised to keep stinging rain from his eyes.
He stumbled across the first bodies a moment later. A man and a woman in constabulary tabards, just beyond the low wall that marked the boundary between lychfield and the church’s inner ward. Sentries, their vigilance in vain. The woman lay against a headstone in a pool of rain-diluted blood, her sword alongside. The man bore no obvious wounds, only a wide-eyed, terrified rictus, and a patina of frost glistening across uniform and blued, mottled flesh.
Glancing away, Altiris stumbled after Anastacia, who stood at the base of the winding, serpentine stairway that led up to the church proper. The lower steps were thick with bodies. Altiris’ gut twitched as he realised what he’d at first taken for a broken statue was in fact another corpse, frozen solid and shattered across a plinth.
“Lord Droshna did this?” Foolish words, but he could summon no others.
Anastacia nodded, her jaw set though the rest of her shook with the cold. “We’re too late.”
Altiris stared up at the church and its towering, golden statue of Lumestra, her arms spread in welcome towards the eastern horizon. “All this for a lump of rock. He’s mad.”
She shook her head viciously, voice barely audible over the wind. “That lump of rock is a piece of a vranastone. It’s how he brought Calenne back from the mists. It’s capable of so much more. I’ve spent three days in this place, keeping Shalamoh blind to the rest.” She sighed. “Of course Viktor would try again. He’s never once learned from his mistakes.”
Altiris swept a disbelieving arm at the bodies. “But this is murder!”
“And when has Viktor ever let death unseat his dreams?” Anastacia gazed up at Lumestra. “Our darkest moments reveal us for who we are. He was always apt to this. We just looked the other way.”
The wind dropped. A scream echoed down from the church.
Altiris started towards the steps. “He’s still here.”
Anastacia seized his arm. “No. Go back for help. Find Grandmaster Tanor. The Essamere chapterhouse isn’t far.”
Altiris stared again at the bodies, the cold gathering in his bones nothing to do with the wind. What could the two of them do that the church’s defenders had not? Facing Lord Droshna across drawn steel was bad enough. To contest his shadow? Anastacia was right. “We can’t lose him.”
“We won’t. I’ll keep watch. If he leaves, I’ll follow and send word.”
At last, he realised that she shook not with cold, but anger. “You go. I’ll stay.”
“You’ll be faster.” She cracked a mirthless smile. “Obey your mother. Hurry back.”
“All right. But please, Ana… take no chances.”
She nodded, her eyes still on the rain-lashed statue. “I’ve none left to take.”
Viktor braced his feet against the floor and heaved. With a screech of grinding stone, the tomb’s lid slid clear and cracked against marble flagstones. The musty smell of ancient dust rose to contest the bitter tang of blood. And there, amid yellowed bones and tattered vestments: the tomes stolen from the clocktower, and the vranastone’s jagged fragment. Dancing specks of pale green light flickered to contest the feeble glow of shattered lanterns. His shadow seethed, malcontent on consecrated ground.
“No good can come of this!” cried Shalamoh.
Turning, Viktor stared past the altar and along the corpse-choked pews of the nave. Constables. Conscripts. Essamere knights. The old fool in golden robes who’d thought to bar the threshold with nothing save a broken-down old sunstave. The serenes who’d offered misguided prayers to contain the vranastone’s supposed evil. All as dead as Saint Selna, in the care of whose desiccated bones they’d hurried to conceal his prize. But secrets lasted only as long as defiance. They’d not remained defiant long.
He recalled few of the deaths. He’d set his shadow free, and that had been that.
They’d been warned. They’d made their choice. Foolishness was not courage.
“Calm yourself, Master Shalamoh,” rumbled Viktor.
Shalamoh thrust a trembling finger in his direction. Even with his eyeglasses cracked and his grey clothes spattered with others’ blood, he conspired to dignity.
“This is an abomination!”
“How can you say that? You who set my feet on the path?”
“I was wrong. The world is better off without magic, and without gods.”
Viktor snorted. He’d once thought the same. An excuse for timidity. A cage the weak fashioned for the strong. “You lack vision.”
He turned his attention to the casket once more. If the bones of a saint held magic, they revealed nothing of their bounty as he ripped the vranastone free. His senses crowded with Otherworld’s presence. The scent of forbidden days and forgotten lives. The whispers of the dead, pining for freedom.
“No!”
Shalamoh lunged, reaching for the vranastone. Viktor’s shadow embraced him, hauling him high above the pews. Eyeglasses shattered on the flagstones. Cries of terror choked off as darkness smothered his sight and oily tendrils crawled across his lips. The air crackled with ice.
No remorse, not even for Shalamoh whose aid had once been invaluable
. Gratitude too was sometimes foolishness.
Viktor’s shadow pulsed. Shalamoh’s cries weakened, his struggles alongside.
The church’s interior blazed bright as the sun.
The flash of pain and the shadow’s scream came as one. Viktor threw up his hands in reflex, though he was already blind, the vranastone falling back into Saint Selna’s uncertain care. He sank against the tomb. Heard the thud as Shalamoh struck timber pews. The shriek of his flailing shadow, and the howl of the wind about the church’s timeworn stones.
Anastacia’s voice rang out above them all.
“I should have done this the first moment you entered our lives!” The words rippled and shook, something more behind them than mere ephemeral purpose. A chime of distant bells. Sweet voices raised in chorus. Echoes of faded worship long past, drawn into the present at the command of Lumestra’s exiled daughter. They hurt as the burst of daylight had hurt. “But you were such a charmer. So earnest. So righteous. How we’ve paid.”
Splotches cleared from Viktor’s sight. Through slitted fingers, he glimpsed her – a dark, bedraggled shape advancing along the corpse-strewn nave with fists clenched. As she passed, lanterns exploded to brilliance, their broken glass falling as glittering rain. The eyes of serathi caryatids blazed with daylight. Viktor gritted his teeth, and sought mastery of his panicked shadow. He bellowed as his clothes began to smoulder.
“Do not trust the Dark, whatever form it takes, however noble its aspect!” shouted Anastacia. “My mother cast me to this world to contain it. I failed. Always too worried with what I wanted and what I stood to lose. No more. Even if it takes the last of me. Even if I have to drain every scrap of wonder from these stones, I will see that you hurt no one else!”
Caught between his shadow’s pain and his own, Viktor collapsed across the open tomb. Saint Selna’s bones crumbled, their dust borne away upon rising thermals. The Undawning Deep. Testament of Ways. Vitsimar. Books that had taken years to uncover burst into hungry flame. The fire spread to Viktor’s gloved hands, racing through his clothes and searing his flesh. Gasping through the pain, he reached again for his shadow. Transfixed by Anastacia’s light, it offered no response.
“No!” he spluttered, his own voice as distant as the tolling bells. “You cannot stop me!”
“Oh, but I can.” There was no satisfaction in Anastacia’s voice, but nor was there pity. “Why do you suppose I let Jezek house your wretched trove here? The divine doesn’t linger in Forbidden Places alone. The stones sing with my mother’s love for this church.”
She meant to kill him, and between light and flame, he was powerless to stop her. His nostrils thick with the bitter scent of burning, Viktor sought another way. Skin crackling, he twisted to face her. Even so close, she was nothing but a dark ember haloed in daylight.
“I’m trying to save what I love,” he stuttered.
With a creaking, mournful groan, a statue plunged from above the altar and shattered on the floor. A caryatid cracked clean down the middle, the light in its eyes fading as it crumbled to dust.
“So am I.”
Anastacia reached out to him. Fire raced along his sleeves to his shoulders. The air filled with the stink of burning flesh.
She stumbled. The brilliance of her halo faded, revealing a face frozen in dismay.
“No…” she breathed.
A bead of bright blood showed at the corner of Anastacia’s lips. She brushed at it with the back of her hand, eyes disbelieving, and crumpled sideways, the last of the light falling away alongside. Freed of its prison, Viktor’s shadow flooded back. He drew it closer than ever, set it running beneath his skin where it smothered the fire and pain of burning flesh, though not its memory. Between Viktor and the altar, revealed by Anastacia’s collapse, Tzila twirled a bloodied sabre once about her wrist and returned it to its scabbard.
“Where were you?” Viktor gasped, his words rippling with the shadow that stifled his pain.
[[I saw movement on the cliff.]]
“Help me stand.”
Tzila hauled him upright. A section of roof, weakened by the caryatid’s destruction, gave a yawning groan. An avalanche of stone, timber and tile collapsed into the nave. Spluttering, Viktor doubled over in the cloud of stinging dust. He stared with mounting horror at flaking, igneous hands charred black by flame, livid flesh and golden light showing through the cracks. His fingers shook, though his shadow’s embrace held the pain at bay. He clenched them tight.
It didn’t matter. It would heal. He’d go on.
And what of Anastacia? Another traitor, though it came as no surprise.
He glanced at where she’d fallen and saw only a bloody smear in the dust. Anastacia was gone.
So was the vranastone.
A desperate haul on the reins, and the borrowed destrier slowed to a halt at the boundary wall. Altiris, never less than ungainly while on horseback, dropped to the path, stumbling for balance as the wind redoubled its fury. He was moving before he found it, running pell-mell to where he’d last seen Anastacia. Ahead, fitful flames danced atop the church’s sunken roof. Behind, knights dismounted with grace born of practice.
He’d been gone half an hour, no more. But what if he were too late?
“Spread out!” shouted Grandmaster Tanor, his voice fighting a losing battle with wind and rain. “Find Lord Droshna, but don’t try to take him alone!”
Altiris reached the foot of the steps, dismay quickening to panic. “She’s not here!”
Had Droshna left, and Anastacia with him? Her strange behaviour at their parting screamed for attention an age too late.
Tanor’s gauntleted hand closed about Altiris’ shoulder. “If Anastacia’s here, we’ll find her.”
Altiris nodded, but the grandmaster was already moving, sword naked in his hand and cloak hissing and snapping in the wind.
Halfway up the winding steps, a shout rang out across the promontory. “There!”
Knights broke into a run, converging on a dark shape running headlong down the path, silken cloak and bases streaming like smoke behind. Tzila.
“I want her taken alive!” shouted Tanor, though the Dawn Wind carried his words out to sea. Vaulting the wall’s low parapet, he joined the pursuit.
Altiris’ eyes were drawn back to the church. Two knights made arcing advance from the south, as indirect a course as the cliff edge would allow. Another approached across the broken, grave-strewn ground to the north. Tzila was leaving. Droshna was likely long gone. What had become of Anastacia? Worry returned, thicker and fiercer than ever.
Taking the stairs two at a time, he ran for the church’s main gate.
Fears of a vengeful Droshna scattered as he passed from the porch to the dust-strewn charnel of the nave. So many bodies. Had any still lived when he’d ridden for help? Could he have saved them, or would he simply have perished alongside? Altiris at once recognised the latter as the truth, though it did little to quell his guilt.
As he picked his way towards the altar, one of the bodies moved.
Heart leaping, Altiris spun, sword levelled. Shalamoh, his grey garb white with dust, spluttered and raised a shaking hand to ward him off.
“Droshna… He came for the vranastone.” He broke off, coughing. “But she took it. She was… magnificent.”
“Ana?” Altiris stepped closer, nearly losing his footing on the rubble. “Where is she?”
But Shalamoh had gone again, whether to unconsciousness or to the Raven, Altiris couldn’t immediately tell. Then his eyes settled on the bloody trail leading to the chancel’s northern door, and nor did he care.
The crumbling soil threatened at any moment to pitch Viktor onto the jagged rocks far below. The wind screamed impotence above, its fury cheated by the cliff’s overhang, bearing the fading cries of pursuit and the worst of the rain out to sea. Every step jarred at burnt and blackened flesh, but he pressed on, following the bloody tell-tales of Anastacia’s passage. The pursuit bothered him not at all. Tzila would lead it
away. But Anastacia? Every moment she was gone from sight was a moment in which she might escape.
It was therefore with grim delight that he glimpsed her as he rounded the next corner. She sat on the path barely six paces away. Pale as the doll she’d once been, and motionless, eyes closed, her back against rock and the vranastone in her lap. The white chalk of the cliff face ran pink with diluted blood. Barely a span beyond, the path plunged down a treacherous incline.
Viktor staggered closer. A spill of stone skittered away from his foot and plunged into the sea. Anastacia started to wakefulness. Vranastone tucked close to her chest, she stumbled to her feet and propped a shoulder against the rock, eyes defiant despite her tremors.
“Give me the stone!” he bellowed, his voice still strange with the shadow’s overlay. “There’s still time. You can live.”
Not that her life mattered any longer, now she’d betrayed him.
She shook her head. “I’m done putting myself before others.”
Was she really so deluded? “If the living cannot defend the Republic, the dead must.”
“Is that all Calenne was to you? Someone handy with a sword?”
“She was everything to me!” he shouted, his voice raw. “And now the mists have her for ever. I’ll never see her again! What I do next, I do in her memory and her name!”
As he spoke, he reached out with his shadow, let it slip beneath her thoughts. Nudging, persuading. Seeking the leverage that would make her see the necessity of all he’d done.
Anastacia laughed, even that small motion setting her tottering. “You’re wasting your time. Whatever my body has become, my soul is serathi. You’re just a shadow of a shadow. I’ll give you nothing.”
Viktor drew his sword, untouched since his assault on the church. “Then I’ll take it from your corpse.”
“Oh, Viktor,” she shook her head in disappointment. “You really won’t.”
Pushing away from the cliff, Anastacia took the vranastone’s fragment in both hands, green light flickering across her pallid face.
Seized by horrific premonition, Viktor started forward. He was still a pace distant when her arms convulsed. The vranastone chimed once off the path, again off an outcrop twenty feet below. A wave crowned white as it broke the surface, and then it was gone, Viktor’s hopes drowning alongside.