The Outcast

by Louise Cooper

  He’d made a fool of himself. There had been no one on the vault stairs, and nothing in the corridor beyond the small door. He had allowed imagination to run away with him, and had panicked at an illusion … Drachea looked over his shoulder to the entrance through which he had come. The thought of returning didn’t appeal, despite the lure of the books; and with an angry gesture in the door’s direction he started back to the Castle’s main entrance. Inside, and halfway to the stairs, he stopped. To return to Cyllan with nothing to report would be to admit failure, and therefore demean himself - something against which he rebelled violently. He wouldn’t return to the library, as yet (and he dismissed the small inner voice which suggested he was afraid to return there alone). The Castle must hold many more revelations - there were other, and doubtless better, places to search for the answers he wanted.

  With a swift, furtive glance around to ensure he was alone, Drachea hastened away along one of the Castle’s seemingly endless corridors.

  It was sheer fortuitous coincidence which brought Drachea at length to the suite of rooms on the ground floor of the North and centremost wing. He had reached them by a circuitous route, doubling back time and again through the warren of passages that threaded throughout the Castle, and he was tired, frustrated and disheartened when he came upon the studded door with its highly polished surface. But as soon as he lifted the latch and looked in, he knew he’d stumbled on more than merely another empty chamber.

  The room was dominated by a large table with a carved and padded chair set tidily behind it. A pile of papers had been neatly stacked on the table as though awaiting imminent attention; an inkstand and several pens lay beside them. And Drachea’s gaze alighted on something else. A seal, half hidden behind the inkstand He closed the door softly behind him and crossed to the table. As his hand reached out towards the seal he hesitated, assailed suddenly by a feeling that he was trespassing on strictly forbidden ground. If this room was what he thought it was, then merely to touch that seal would be little short of blasphemy. Yet he had to know …

  Mouth dry, Drachea steeled himself and snatched up the seal. The emblem on it reflected bloodily in the crimson glow, and he saw that it was a lightning-flash, bisecting a double circle.

  The seal of the High Initiate himself … Reverently, and a little fearfully, Drachea laid it back in its place and stared about him at the room, feeling suddenly awed.

  This must be - or have been - Keridil Toln’s study …

  he shivered. He had never seen the High Initiate, but his half-imagined ghost seemed to hover in the room, watching from whatever unimaginable limbo he now inhabited.

  Slowly Drachea turned, taking in every detail of the shadowy chamber. Everything was perfectly in place, as though Keridil Toln had left his room for the last time with some premonition of what was to happen. The chill that hung in the air was more than physical …

  He turned his back abruptly to the gaping fireplace, which for some inexplicable reason made him doubly nervous, and approached the table again. Three shallow drawers were set beneath the polished surface on one side, and tentatively Drachea tried each in turn. If records of recent events existed, this was surely where they would be lodged …

  The first two drawers yielded nothing but sheaves of everyday records - tithe lists in the main, and of little interest. The third drawer wouldn’t yield at first, and Drachea thought it to be locked - until, abruptly, it came free with such force that it fell out of its housing, scattering its contents to the floor.

  Drachea snatched up one of the papers at random and his heart missed a beat painfully as one word, one name, caught his eye. Tarod.

  He all but ran to the window, holding the paper up against the glass to make the best of what little light there was. The paper, he now saw, was a formal document, signed and sealed by the High Initiate and witnessed by six elders of the Council of Adepts.

  It was an execution order.

  Drachea put a hand to his mouth, feeling sick with a mingling of excitement and horror as the first echoes of the truth sounded in his head. His suspicions had been right …

  He tucked the document inside his jacket and feverishly set about gathering up the other scattered papers.

  At last he found what he had hoped and prayed for - a report, written in the same careful and well-formed hand as the execution order; and intended solely for the eyes of senior Councillors. With it was an opened letter, and he recognised the seal of the Sisterhood of Aeoris, intertwined with the fish symbol of West High Land Province.

  West High Land, where the rumours of trouble had begun … Drachea lowered himself into the carved chair, no longer caring whether it belonged to the High Initiate or Aeoris himself. Reading was difficult in the gloom, but he no longer trusted his legs to support him.

  Silently, avidly, he scanned the letter first. The Lady Kael Amion … she was Senior at West High Land, it seemed; the dispatch she had sent to Keridil Toln was of the utmost urgency, and concerned an Initiate and one of her own novices. Yes, it began to make sense … but he needed more; much more.

  Drachea’s hand was unsteady as he picked up the report. He read it in its entirety, only the occasional rustle of a new page breaking the room’s bleak silence.

  And when he had finished he stood up and, with a deliberation that suggested he wasn’t quite in control of his limbs, hid the papers carefully with the first document inside his coat. His face was ashen as he turned to look again at the fireplace and the flagged floor in front of the hearth. A morbid fascination urged him to go closer, to study that part of the floor for signs that would prove what he had read beyond doubt; but he couldn’t.

  And the High Initiate’s words rang too icily true for there to be any shadow of disbelief.

  He had to show what he had found to Cyllan. He had to prove to her that he was right - far more right, in fact, that he had ever dreamed. And above all, he needed to share the burden of his fear.

  Drachea replaced the fallen drawer, straightened the seal so that it aligned neatly once more with the pens and the inkstand on the High Initiate’s table. He closed the door of the study quietly behind him and made the sign of Aeoris before his heart before turning and hurrying back towards the main stairs.

  Chapter 5

  Tarod’s acute senses were alerted by the first inkling of something untoward that pervaded his mind. It was as though a faint breath of wind had disturbed an utterly still day, presaging some change; and it disturbed him on a deeper level than he cared to admit.

  He rose from the battered, hide-covered chair where he had been sitting, and moved silently to the window which looked out from the spire’s summit over the sickening drop to the courtyard. Nothing moved there; and the sky that seemed to loom so chillingly close to the window was still empty and dead. But, somewhere in the Castle, something was amiss …

  A sudden sharp sensation in his left hand surprised him; a once familiar feeling which he had almost forgotten. He glanced at his fingers, at the ruined base of the ring which once had held his soul-stone, then flexed the hand thoughtfully. Fear was beyond him, but whatever it was that had come to disturb the Castle’s deathly quiet would have struck panic into a mortal man.

  Behind him on a small table, amid a clutter of books and manuscripts which he had idly gleaned from the library vault, stood a sconce containing a single, partly burned candle. Tarod moved his left hand over it and a pale, nacreous green flame sprang into being. Holding his fingers in the flame he coaxed it, drawing it upward and outward, watching it respond to his mental command until it formed a perfect if sickly halo. The light reflected on his face, highlighting gaunt shadows, and his eyes narrowed as he looked into the elemental fire and beyond it, seeking the source of the disturbance.

  He found the source, and, again, it troubled him. At a single sharp gesture the green fire vanished, and as the small room sank once more into darkness Tarod turned towards the door. A peculiar compulsion was urging him to leave the spire, where he spen
t so much of his existence, and seek out the root of the strange and unexpected shift. He crossed the room, ignoring the jumble of scattered artefacts that made it chaotic, and which he never took the trouble to clear. He was as indifferent to his own comfort as to anything else; but something was challenging that indifference, and his curiosity was aroused. Beyond the door, black stone stairs spiralled down into crimson-tinged darkness. The door closed softly behind him, seemingly of its own accord; then Tarod’s dark shape faded and merged with the shadows, leaving only a brief after-image.

  Cyllan hadn’t barred her door. Tarod’s hand on the latch met with no resistance, and he let the door swing open gently and slowly. For a moment he thought the room empty; then he saw her - and an old, dead memory lurched deep within him, momentarily breaking through his guard.

  Cyllan lay sprawled on the floor, her head twisted at an ugly angle and one arm flung crookedly out. She looked like a broken doll, and the image she presented was instantly superimposed in Tarod’s mind by another image, another woman. Themila Gan Lin, who since childhood had been his dear friend and mentor, lying on the floor of the Council Chamber, her life bleeding away from the wound inflicted by Rhiman Han’s sword …

  It had been pure accident, a moment of hot-headed confusion which had ended in tragedy. Themila hadn’t had an enemy in the world; the small, elderly historian had been like a second mother to many of the younger Initiates, and especially so to Tarod when he came, clanless and injured, to the Castle. Yet she had died and with her death the whole savage chain of events had been unleashed. Cyllan’s huddled, broken attitude recalled the dying Themila, and Tarod was shocked to realise that the memory brought back all the pain of her loss, as though from a great distance his lost humanity was striving to reassert itself.

  He crossed the room, ignoring the pebbles which slipped and scattered under his feet, and knelt beside the girl. She was alive, and there was no outward sign of injury; but neither was there any clue as to what had struck her down. Tarod’s immediate thought was of Drachea, but he dismissed the idea, sensing something afoot that Drachea couldn’t even comprehend, let alone influence. The atmosphere of this room was subtly changed, charged … some power independent of his own had been at work, and he couldn’t begin to guess at its source.

  But the motivating force was a less urgent consideration. Tarod lifted Cyllan, surprised by her lightness, and carried her to the bed, taking care to lay her down gently. She stirred, mumbled something unintelligible then lapsed into stillness once more, and he stood back, looking at her. Something had stirred briefly within him, conjured by the juxtaposition of Cyllan and Themila in his thoughts, and now, though he tried to dismiss it as meaningless, another, older part of him was fighting back. Ghosts of the past had never troubled him before; the past was lost and could never be regained. The manner in which he had thwarted Keridil and the Circle had seen to that when it rendered him soulless and immortal … yet something stirred, and he couldn’t banish it.

  On impulse, he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoothed Cyllan’s tangled hair away from her face. Her lip trembled in response, and her eyelids fluttered spasmodically. One hand reached up blindly and Tarod took hold of it, offering her a physical link with consciousness as she began to awake.

  ‘Drachea … ?’ Her voice was weak and hesitant.

  ‘Not Drachea.’

  Her eyes snapped open and she swore aloud in shock, a drover’s oath that Tarod had never heard uttered in the Castle. She pulled away from him like a cornered animal, and he released her hand, the expression on his face hardening into a thin, humourless smile.

  ‘You’ve suffered no ill effect from your ordeal, I see.’

  ‘I - I’m sorry. I didn’t intend … ‘ She shut her eyes again, overwhelmed by confusion. She had been trying to read the stones - something had come, something from outside; and she’d been so afraid - Uneasily she forced herself to look at Tarod once more, her eyes hunted. She feared him too, but at least his was a physical presence, an anchor to hold her back from the edge of the nightmare.

  ‘I was trying to read the stones…’ She had to find an outlet for the unformed terror, but her tongue couldn’t cope with more than a simple statement.

  Tarod asked, more gently, ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Something came through the door … ‘ she whispered. He waited, but she offered no further explanation; and the few words she had spoken disquieted him.

  Something through the door … Either Cyllan had hallucinated, or she had unwittingly tapped a force that shouldn’t have been able to exist in the Castle, unless he himself had deliberately conjured it. Another, alien presence? It surely wasn’t possible …

  Cyllan’s voice intruded abruptly on his thoughts. ‘I thought,’ she said slowly, deliberately, ‘that you were responsible.’

  Tarod’s eyes lit angrily. ‘You think I have nothing better to do than divert myself by frightening undefended women. I thank you for the compliment!’

  She was unsure of her ground, yet now that the nightmarish memory was giving way to reason she could see no other answer. ‘Who was responsible, then?’ she countered. ‘Drachea? I doubt it!’

  Her determined aggression amused Tarod. She wasn’t afraid of him, and for some inexplicable reason he found that pleasing. He laughed, and Cyllan turned away sharply.

  ‘Mock me if it entertains you,’ she said, ‘but I’ve seen no other power here save yours. And you don’t seem overly concerned how you use it!’

  Tarod sighed as the momentary amusement gave way to irritation. ‘Believe what you like,’ he retorted coldly.

  ‘I’m not interested in your opinion of me, and I assure you I had no hand in whatever happened to you. If I’d anything to gain from - ‘ And he stopped, suddenly furious as he realised what he was saying. ‘Damn you, why should I justify myself in your eyes? If you choose to bring suffering on your own head by dabbling out of your depth, it’s no concern of mine!’

  Cyllan didn’t reply, but rolled over and hid her face in the pillow, her attitude radiating mute resentment.

  Exasperated, Tarod reached out and took hold of her.

  ‘Look at me, Cyllan.’ She resisted and he gripped her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. ‘I said, look at me!’

  She stared back, angry and hurt and defiant at once, and he said softly, venomously, ‘Don’t pit yourself against me. I’d take no pleasure in harming you, but whether you prosper or perish is of no moment to me whatever.’ He raised his free hand, the fingers curling in a casual, graceful gesture that nonetheless chilled Cyllan to the core - then abruptly lowered it again. It would be so simple to inspire in her a terror beside which her hallucination would pale to nothing; but there seemed no point. He could sense the fear in her now, although she did her best to hide it, and suddenly he was disgusted with himself. She was irrelevant; the idea of wasting energy on her was too petty to be worth contemplating and yet he had been on the brink of striking at her as though reacting to some personal slight.

  He released her, and she drew back quickly, hunching against the wall. Irritated, Tarod rose-but before either of them could speak, the door of the bedchamber was flung open and Drachea burst in.

  ‘Cyllan! Look what-‘ And he stopped, eyes widening as he saw Tarod.

  Tarod bowed slightly to him, conveying devastating contempt in the apparently careless gesture. ‘Heir Margrave - I trust your explorations have proved fruitful?’

  His gaze alit on the heavy book Drachea carried in his hands, then moved, amused, to the young man’s face.

  Drachea paled, and Tarod crossed the room to lift the volume easily from his fingers and study the cover.

  ‘Very diverting.’ He flicked a page or two, then graciously handed the book back. ‘If you have difficulty understanding its content, I’m at your disposal.’

  Two spots of livid colour flamed into life on Drachea’s cheeks and he made as if to retort angrily; but a brief movement of Tarod’s hand triggered a force that sent
him reeling backwards. His spine connected painfully with the wall; and by the time he regained breath and balance, the Adept had gone.

  Drachea stared speechless at the still-quivering door, then in a violent movement swung round and hurled the book ferociously across the room. The ancient binding split in half and pages scattered across the floor.

  ‘Curse him, what in the name of all the hells did he want here?’ The question was a savage demand; Tarod had humiliated Drachea in Cyllan’s presence, and he was using her as a scapegoat for his anger. Sensing the underlying accusation, Cyllan flared back.

  ‘I don’t know what he wanted - I didn’t have the chance to ask him! Something happened while you were away; something that -’

  He interrupted her, dismissing what she had been about to tell him as of no consequence. ‘Never mind that! I’ve more important matters at hand.’ Fumbling inside his jacket, he brought out the bundled papers from the High Initiate’s study. ‘Tarod might well sneer at a book from the Castle library, but if he knew I was in possession of these he’d sing to a different tune! Look - look at them!’ He thrust the sheaf towards her challengingly. ‘I’ve learned the truth about your Adept friend, Cyllan. Go on - read for yourself!’

  Cyllan made no move to take the papers. The aftermath of shock, coupled with Drachea’s disinterest in her experience and the tension of the brush with Tarod, had put her on a knife-edge, and she only glared at him.

  ‘By all that’s sacred,’ Drachea snapped, ‘this is no time to be childish! These documents are vital - for Aeoris’s sake, will you read them!’

  Cyllan’s lips whitened and she said harshly, ‘And where do you think that I learned to read?’

  He stared at her nonplussed. ‘You mean … you’ve had no schooling?’

  ‘No. I can’t read, and I can’t write. Is that such a surprise to you? My clan didn’t send me to a tutor-I was too busy learning to gut fish and herd cattle!’

  She felt mortified, hating herself for having had to admit to her own failing. Drachea continued to stare at her with an expression that might have been disdain or pity; she couldn’t tell which. Then he made a sharp, dismissive gesture.