Cam’s brow furrowed. She approached the edge of the tower’s wall which was built to the height of her waist. It wasn’t until then that she remembered the maze in front of the tower. And from here it looked… Like blood-bathed earth. The ground glared red from the roses like some kind of open wound. The maze was, in fact, far from ordinary. It was not the little wooden ones she and her sisters used to construct with Owen when they had been younger. The maze had strange yet familiar shapes. Curves and turns too elegant to be constructed just for a maze.
Cam gasped. “Letters…” But she did not know the word. “So...we only walked through half of that maze?” she exclaimed as she ripped her eyes from the sight below her.
Joel nodded. “It’s one word from the Mingroth tongue, I would say since it was them that carved it.”
Cam turned. “What does it mean?”
Joel’s voice was solemn. “Poison.”
The next sound was something elegant edged in sharpness as he said it in the Mingroth tongue. “I believe that’s how it's said.” Joel pointed. “The door starts there...at the beginning of the word.”
“Why...poison?” Cam queried, ripping her gaze from the ominous letters punctured in the ground.
“The King of Mingroth had the letters dug when he conquered Enboria. He ordered his people to build stone walls. They’ve been here ever since. Of course, they aren’t as deep as they once were, and my grandfather installed the door.”
A shudder passed through Cam. “Do you think this king still lives?”
Joel shrugged. “Perhaps, but he doesn’t rule now. His daughter took the throne.”
“And the roses? What’s the long story behind that?” Cam asked slowly, her voice beginning to shake.
“His daughter did that too.” Joel paused to lean idly against the railing. “We call her the Queen of Poison, but her name is Silva Andel, daughter of King Andel.”
Ten
When Leviathan had said they would travel north, Riah did not
realize how far he had meant. He had not imagined that “north” meant so far that travel involved boarding a ship. Sailing was something Riah Drakon had experience in. But it was the sort of sailing one did on a sunny day on placid waters. So, when the Shadow Bearer led him onto the street bordered by massive ships set into the murky green water, Riah was set with some unease. The street was not burdened with the heavy feet of weary sailors or their barrels of fish. This was not the river docks in Gnosi where the water glowed golden and laughter was around every corner. The harbor was silent, save for the wind and the waves crashing on the stone barrier which prevented the small vicinity from being flooded.
“Not that it would matter,” Riah thought. “Who the would want to live here anyway?” Riah’s surroundings seemed to mirror the sky. The vacant buildings were of gray stone, and the air itself felt as though it held no life. Nets were cast into the very streets as if they had been dropped during what appeared to be a hasty exit.
Leviathan planted his feet before a glossy, black ship. Riah’s escort shot him a sideways grin as Gnosi’s former heir peered around the side of the ship and read its title. “You’re a pirate?” Riah questioned, even as he turned from the silver letters that spelled Leviathan on the ship’s side. “You never cease to surprise me,” he thought, not caring if Leviathan was inside his head at the moment.
As if he had heard Riah, Leviathan’s wicked grin widened. “She is magnificent, isn’t she? I did not want her named after me. My name isn’t feminine enough. But alas, it wasn’t my choice.”
The Shadow Bearer ambled closer to the end of the dock. “I’ve lived a long time, Riah. Why should you be surprised that I’ve done something other than start chaos in countries not my own?” he said over his shoulder.
Riah would have laughed had everything around him not mirrored some sort of nightmare. Nevertheless, he loped after the Shadow Bearer. “I know the ship is named after you, but you run it, too? Is there...a crew?” He was glancing around, noting once more that there were no signs of life.
Leviathan remained calm. “Of course, I run the ship. I need some way of reaching my home and the Infernal Cities without paying my way or earning the trust of stupid, suspicious sailors.”
“I would be suspicious if a man who ha d desolated an entire harbor wished to board my ship,” Riah returned dryly.
Leviathan turned slightly with rippling fury ignited in his eye. His hands were pushed lazily into his pockets, and his cape whipped in the wind behind him. “What makes you believe I destroyed this place?” He waved a hand behind Riah to indicate the harbor they were leaving.
“Either that or they fled when they first saw you.”
Leviathan remained staring long and hard at his apprentice. “I did not destroy it,” he murmured at last. His tone did not seem resolved. Riah’s brows creased as he followed Leviathan up onto the ship’s bow.
Even after seeing the harbor in an unusual state, Riah was taken aback at the sight of the crew. They too were Shadow Bearers, but were not in the form Leviathan came in. They were far from flawless and beautiful.
So alarming were they that Riah didn’t think he could ever paint them. There were four. All were hunched and seated on barrels. They were clad in clothing of soft, black material over wrinkle and scale- infested skin the color of ash. A single, black eye was set into each of their faces on the left side. The right eye, if one existed, was concealed with an eyepatch. They had no hair but did have metal rings fastened on various parts of their faces.
They were the color of neglect. The shapes of ones who had been forgotten. Cast aside. “The Castaways…” Riah breathed. He had read about them. Few passages could be found, and those that were, mentioned them only as Shadow Bearers who had once possessed power, some more than others. Then, due to betrayal or failure, they had been cast aside, made to serve in a fashion degrading of their kind.
But it wasn’t their looks that had Riah’s muscles stiffening and stomach churning. It was their silence. Even their bodies were strangely quiet. As if no life really dwelled inside them.
They stared at Leviathan and then at Riah with their unwavering eyes, one to each face. They were not the bustling, jesting, gossip-gorging crew found on the ships Riah had seen back home. They were silent and eerie. Riah would have called them the silent pirates had Leviathan not said, “I am not a pirate and neither is my crew. We do not take other ships, nor do we hunt hidden treasure on far off islands. They are merely my transportation.”
At these words, the four creatures lowered themselves into deep bows before the master of the ship. “They are the Castaways, aren’t they?” Riah asked, finding that he was rather breathless. He ripped his gaze from them.
Leviathan nodded slowly. “They are the lowliest of my race. They have the ability to make themselves invisible but are otherwise powerless. They are not like the Shadow Bearers you gathered for your father’s army.”
“They are not like you either.”
Leviathan’s laugh was piercing, sharp and unpleasant. Riah refrained from wincing. “Do not worry, Prince. You will not rule over creatures as lowly as these. And no one is like me. These are the least like me. At least I can speak.” Despite his words, something of a foreign emotion flickered in Leviathan’s eyes.
“Why can’t they?” Riah did not voice the question aloud because he was rather afraid of the answer. But apparently, Leviathan had crept into his mind and heard the question.
“Look at the x over their throats.”
Riah did not. “You made them mute?”
The grin that did not reach Leviathan’s eye was answer enough. The master of the ship turned on his heel and vanished into a cabin below the main deck. With a twist of his wrist, he signaled his crew to set sail before he slammed the door shut. The sound of finality.
Riah stood alone on the upper deck of the ship, the wind whipping his cloak and hair, which was in desperate need of trimming. When he gazed out over the water, he found the expanse t
o be dark green and tumultuous. “So much water…” he murmured. “Voria,” he said aloud. “The sea of Voria.” Voria meaning veil because, once, as he had translated from one of the books Leviathan had instructed him to keep, a veil had indeed kept the northern parts of the continent invisible.
“But with you,” Riah started as he glanced at the Shadow Bearer.
Leviathan finished it for him, “We can see and sail right through it.”
She was sprawled on a slab of stone. The walls around her were
glittering. Her eyes were half closed, but her lips were parted. A hand laid flat on her stomach. The clothing at her flesh ripped apart. The hand curled around the blade poised just above her supple flesh. He felt a lurch inside him. A string somewhere in the pit of his being pulling, pulling, pulling….
But he could not move.
The blade was pointed at her navel. Twisting. Blood in a thin line dribbled beneath the waistline of her skirt. Her head was laden with a sheen of sweat. She whimpered and thrashed. He saw them then. The shackles at her wrists and the red marks that they had made, having been clasped too tightly.
The blade was drifting to her ribs. Swift swipes and there were x marks. So many of them. So numerous and small they seemed like nothing. The cave was dim, but he could see the marks from where he stood. What he could not see was the face of the blade master.
But he knew who it was anyway. He always wore the same tasseled, grey cloak in these instances. His hands were knobbly and old, unlike the ones he displayed for his people. He knew that a smile sneered on the creature’s lips and that his eyes were hollow black pits.
He raised the blade and…
He felt the scream but did not hear it. The blade plunged into her. Saffira’s eyes flew open.
And… “Saffira!” he was screaming. But the sound was muffled. Saffira was the one shackled to the stone, Apollyon’s blade buried deep within her.
And then...in the blade master’s hands were shards of glass. “I shall recreate her, Riah. Just for you. Make her insides as glorious as my own…”
Riah jerked awake.
He was dripping in sweat. He tore his hands from where they dangled, bringing them before his eyes with haste. No shackles. And no cave. He was...in a cabin, on a ship. Alone. And still, this same dream that had occurred nearly every night to him since his father’s demise seemed even more real than before.
He breathed. “In, out, in, out….” His tiny cabin smelled better than any other part of the ship. The ship’s captain was nowhere to be seen, so Riah set out to find himself something to eat. The cabin holding a store of food did not provide an extensive variety. With a grumble, Riah selected a slab of pork and a small loaf of hardened bread. He did not touch the moldy cheese. The wine was nearly as distasteful, but…
“Tolerable enough,” he decided. His hands were still shaking from the dream.
He returned to his cabin, he ate fast enough to drown out the buzzing in his mind. But when the food was gone, he found that his thoughts were still screaming, his heart still racing. The old bread and diluted wine didn’t help his digestion. “And four mute monsters prowling above you doesn’t help matters,” he muttered.
Riah sat up, noting how stuffy his cabin seemed. He pulled his sweat-drenched shirt over his head and cast it into some dark corner of the small space. And that was when his eyes alighted on his bag. He rummaged through it. A distraction. A stash of wrinkled parchment tumbled to the cabin’s floor, and, when he went to pick them up, he froze.
The charcoal drawn image formed a picture of Saffira, one he had drawn weeks ago on a scrap of fabric he had found in his prison in the Royalty Realm. He slid the cloth between his fingers as he drew it to the light. He gulped, realizing that the way he had drawn her eyes did not justify the light they truly held.
Riah stuffed the picture back among the extra clothing he had brought and pulled out a glass jar of black paint and the seven brushes he had also placed within his carrier. He took a deep breath and stared at the cabin walls all around him. There wasn’t actually much wall, not with the hammock extending across one, and a map spreading over another. He pushed the dusty trunk in the corner into the middle of the cabin and examined the paneled walls.
Riah twisted open the jar, dipped his largest brush into it and swiped a single stroke across the wall.
Riah became lost.
He became lost in an array of shapes, colors, tones, and shadows, even when black was his only color. Riah’s arm began to ache presently, but he ignored it and continued painting until the rough sketch covered the entire wall. Then, with his smaller brushes, he fine-tuned the edges, blending shadows and creating contrasts. He worked at the corners and darkened the inner folds of the robe on the woman he had painted before him.
Riah softened the curve of her lower lip and the dark eyes. He painted a flourish of loose strands of her hair, framing her small face. When he stepped back, he saw the stern expression of his mother with laughing, mischievous eyes. His lips tugged upward in a small smile. His heart lurched. His heart beat against his lungs as though he had been running. He scratched his head as he tilted his neck, examining his work.
Riah did not look at his painting as he returned his brushes and the nearly empty jar back among his clothing. He had retied the bag when a curt knock sounded at the door. Riah hesitated for a brief moment, for he did not wish for one of those things to come knocking at his door. Without awaiting a reply, the person behind the door swung it open and stepped through.
Leviathan looked as though he were going to announce something to his guest but froze at the sight of black paint drying on the wall. He tilted his head to survey every inch of Riah’s picture. He turned a questioning eye to the cabin’s new owner. “Who is she?”
“My mother,” Riah responded as he dipped his hands into the bowl of water beside the bunk.
“Aw…you must miss her,” Leviathan crooned.
Riah shot him a glare. “No…well yes, but that is not why I painted her. I’ve…well, I’ve…”
Leviathan continued in Riah’s lapse, “Begun painting people who have drastically changed your life. I know. I think it is quite an idea, actually. A decent way to distract yourself from the fact that you are no longer at home and, of course, the guilt you carry.” Leviathan spoke these words solemnly, without any mockery in his lowtone. Hecontinuedto gazeat Riah’s painting. Before Riah could comment on Leviathan’s last remark, the Shadow Bearer said, “You should repaint her in the gallery at your new home. The paintings there are ancient and dull. Besides, you won’t be able to come down here whenever you like to see her.”
“Will there be paint?”
Leviathan turned his eye to Riah. “If you wish. Arria…that is...another person you will work with, she likes to paint sometimes. She keeps her gallery locked up. I have never seen any ofher work. Maybeyouwill convinceher toopen it up.” Riah made no reply as he sank to the mattress on the lower bunk.
“I see you have already plundered our food storage. Do it again, if you need to, but I have a far better selection in my cabin.” As he was turning into the narrow corridor he said, “My crew may not be the brightest or the prettiest, but they can fry a fish better than you have ever had it.”
The fish was good but not as delicious as Saffira had once
prepared it on the banks of the river she and Riah had spent days fishing at when they were younger. He could not remember her learning to cook. One day, she suddenly could, and he asked no questions. He only ate what she offered and savored every bite.
When she had brought the little cakes to him, he would sometimes keep them in his room for days until they had gone stale. “I likedhaving a pieceofherinmy chambers,” he thought. He winced at himself. “That sounded terribly wrong in my head.” But it was true. He also liked the intricate designs of icing she had placed on every inch surrounding the fluffy dessert.
The memory was shattered by a pang of piercing guilt in his chest. Riah stilled as the
thoughts plagued his mind. His gaze grew distant. He saw himself kissing Cam.
Then, Tyron Ardor of Cinis Lumen nailed to a tree. Riah’s heart clenchedin his chest. “I didn’tdo it,” he said. Another part of him hissed back, “But you let it happen. You let him do it.” Ahab had been brutal. It reminded Riah of Apollyon, his own father when he was in his dreams. In his paintings, he had made while imprisoned. Ones he had burned upon release.
Riah shoved the thoughts from his mind with a shudder. Now, he wanted some ale. And there was ale, but it was on the other side of the deck. On that other side, were those four creatures who stared at him from black eyes whenever he passed. Riah decided to forgo the ale for the time being and pretended to be preoccupied with the view from the deck.
Night was folding its robe around them. The ship was now lit with lanterns of pale, blue light. This light was far from comforting. Riah forced his eyes to remain on the horizon ahead. The lapping water blended into the black blurs of the night sky. Black clouds tinted with the deepest green blocked out any sign of stars or moon.“The sky and sea stretch so far...it makes one feel so small…”
“They will not come out here tonight,” Leviathan’s smooth voice rumbled. “The Shadow Wings, like those in Mirabelle called them, are my main allies. They are scanning the shores ahead for any approaching unwanted visitors. They will keep the pirates away.” Leviathan cracked a sinister grin.
Riah remembered hearing of these creatures as the ones that Leviathan took to Imber Fel during their attack at the brink of the past winter. “But what do you call them?”
Leviathan leaned on the ship’s railing beside Gnosi’s former prince. “By their names. But their race, in general, is called the Shadow Wings. Where and when they first appeared, no one I know can tell you. Except for the Prince, perhaps. He was the one who appointed them to me. But since they have often aligned themselves with the Shadow Bearers, they bear a similar title.”
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