by J. Gibson
“Aye.” Delacroix seemed to predict her question. “The killing bore no relation to the hanging, as best we can tell. Mythos had no hand in it. These Saints, as they call themselves, have been mobilizing against us since Kravae formed the group and vowed to destroy this institution. We’ve had an eye on them. This day, they made their move. They act as we speak, ignorant of our knowing, ‘twould appear.”
Amun needed a moment to draw together and reclaim her composure. Absorbing the words like an infection, they left her hollow. She wished she could have intervened to save Garron. But she could have done nothing. Not against these outlaws. They would have slaughtered them alike.
The Archbishop made her way back to her table and chair for another drink. “Aitrix has always had a flare for the grandiose.” She looked at Amun. “Deluded ambition.”
“Do you know Kravae?”
“Vicariously. I observed her on a few occasions when she was teen-yeared, sitting alone in the gardens, gazing into the air with a dull expression.” A quiet exhalation of amusement escaped the Archbishop’s nostrils. “Ages ago, I made regular visits to the institutes of erudition across the capital. Aitrix was a pupil at Anukara’s Institute of the Material Arts. Her preceptor was Magus Mia Kreighton, a fine materialist. Naturally, as the prodigious great niece of Besogos, everyone took an interest in her. Aitrix had a starlit future.”
“What happened?”
“Magus Kreighton described her as a virtuoso, deeply connected with the Aether. She has a natural capacity which, for many, no amount of training could surpass. They believed that she may be an energist, the first in generations. Eventually, however, her limitations became undeniable.”
“Forgive me, Archbishop,” Amun said, her forehead creasing. “I know little of energists.”
“Of course.” A pause. “There have been but a few casters throughout the ages who were powerful in all three of the Aetherian arts, who could perform spells without incantations. Certain philosophers say these mages, energists, derive their power from a source known as Infitialis Res, an energy which comes from Asdamos’s portal in the sky. Not even Besogos, for his talent and knowledge, was an energist.”
“Do you believe this?”
“I can’t say that I do, but I can’t dismiss it.”
The admission surprised Amun.
“While favor gifted Aitrix in materialism and metaphysics, like myself, mentalism was her frailty. She could neither influence the mind nor shield her own. This limitation consumed her.” The Archbishop smoothed the lap of her robes. “Aitrix suffers from what the magi refer to as aetheromania. She is gripped by magic, shattering her ceiling, deepening her well, unlocking the mystery of energia. Yet there is no secret. Energia cannot be learned. One is an energist, or not. Aetherian limits are inherent to the individual, insurmountable. Aitrix refuses to accept these realities, and has let them manifest a rage within her that I suspect she carries still.
“Her frailty became clear when she nearly killed another student during demonstrations. The task was to ward their minds against psychic influence, and to influence their partner. Aitrix could do neither. Her opposite had an innate gift in the art. Aitrix lost consciousness during the challenge. When she awoke, she demanded a duel in materialism. Her partner accepted and suffered severe injury. Magus Kreighton subdued Aitrix by force. She admitted to me later that she did not do so with ease.”
“Terrible,” Amun replied.
“The school allowed Aitrix to remain for a time, due to her name and innate talent. She was Aitrix Besogos then. Even as a girl, she conducted herself with a feigned composure and grace. I saw her true self. She veils it well.” Her tone became grey. “She would kill us all, if she could.” The Archbishop stood. “Aitrix was expelled shortly after, at my suggestion. She went on to form her organization, pledging, I suppose, to have her vengeance against those she feels so wronged her.” Her expression fell stolid. “Aitrix Kravae is a mad dog, escaped from its leash.”
A thought, unrelated, nagged at Amun. “Archbishop.”
“Hm?”
“Do you think Father Latimer has gone to Nihil, or the Blackened Yonder?”
“That’s difficult to say. If his overarching life course determined his placement, I would imagine, the Nothing. Yet we know little of exactly what dictates one’s destination outside of adherence to the three pillars.”
Amun looked down.
Delacroix gave a wan smile. “We can only hope.”
“If I may take my leave, Archbishop?” Her eyes glassed.
“You may.”
Amun opened the door.
“Sister Halleck,” Delacroix said before she could leave.
She turned, a lone tear rolling down her cheek.
Delacroix approached her and wiped it away with her thumb. “Dwell not.” Her words were soft. “Do not succumb. You have a starlit future too. I want to see what you become.”
Amun inhaled through her nose. “Thank you, Archbishop.”
Various halls and chambers separated the base level of the Priory, above the underlevels. Even one who spent significant time there could easily find herself turned around.
Amun came to the bottom of a staircase on the right side of the main vestibule. She was uncertain what she ought to do. What had become of Garron’s chamber? Had they locked it? Did they guard it? Had they already assigned it to someone else? A stream swept her mind away. She walked across the vestibule to the steps which led up to the area where Garron had stayed, for no other reason than to see.
At the top of the great winding staircase, on which her footfalls resonated with an unusual loudness, she found Garron’s door, as she had a few times. The door that was his.
She breathed deep.
With a gentleness as if Garron might be standing on the other side, she entered and closed the door behind her. A room, well-lit and warm, organized and clean, came into view.
Garron had been an orderly and hygienic man, but this was the work of machines. They had already been there at some point to strip any trace of him from the space, except a ceramic cup on the bedside table.
She crossed the room and peaked around, entering the washchamber and returning to sit on the bed. Beaming light filtered through the window at her back, which she viewed with clouded eyes. A dismal ambiance encumbered this place, though it was little more than an empty room. Not even Garron’s. She longed to hear a word, a sigh, a shuffle of feet. Nothing of him lingered in the world anymore, save the memory and his shell.
The remembrance of life. A hope of the living. The return of a spirit to its existence as before birth in Nihil. These were a normal part of existence, the want to meet the end soon and well, to find that lasting calm. Had Garron found peace? For all their lessons as members of the Church, they knew so little, even those who had devoted their lives to theology.
Matters of earning salvation and the line between upholding the three pillars and deeds of wrong and bad blurred; whether one would go to Nihil, or Eophianon, if they enacted wrong or bad in order to support the pillars. Order gained and maintained through cruelty, taking to give, forging progress through violence, they did not know which outweighed the others or how the hateful tendrils of wicked influence may taint the spirit.
She recalled their initial meeting there. Garron had been a man of fine moral character and gentle heart. She felt dazed. Masking her face with her hands, she fell back against the mattress. She thought to pray, but instead trembled with heartache. Her tears slid in a wealth and ran along her jaw like drops of rain. There was neither grace nor dignity in it, though she restrained each sob as best she could. The image of the violence inflicted on him lingered in her head, would not clear. Nothing comforted it away. The scene remained powerful enough that she felt as if she had never left that place, Black Pass. It continued through her mind in permanent repeat.
From their first encounter, after she had listened to and transcribed the horrors of his suffering in Erlan, she had known him. But
that alone had not satisfied her curiosity. A need to understand more of the man who had endured such a great deal and lived to tell it had grabbed her. She had asked Delacroix if she could meet him, and the Archbishop had agreed. Her stranger’s curiosity became a comrade’s emotion, which had since earlier in that day turned to a mourner’s lament. He had asked her if he might venture out alone, and she had followed. She did not regret trailing him without his knowledge, but she had not anticipated such awfulness. Such a rancid, sinister affair.
When she stood to leave his former chamber, she bumped the bedside table and knocked the cup that Garron had used onto the floor. She gazed down at it with an absent discomfort, then knelt. A machine came unhurried through the door, buzzing in their common whispers, as she scooped the ceramic shards into her palm.
“I have it,” she said as she finished, not looking up.
The machine departed without further chatter.
On her feet, she could not endure in this chamber. She did not believe that she would come again, where she had known her truest friend, as briefly as they had known each other. Garron was wise and critical in his thought, not prone to fanciful musing or fanatical recollection. It would be her duty in his absence to carry his skeptical inquiry; to fight and to know, it could be that he did not die for naught.
No matter the cost, she would uncover the truth.
CHAPTER XIX: SLITHER
Athenne
There was no one in sight. Athenne had crossed the Priory’s garden and made her way through its cloisters into a hall. Aitrix’s ensorcelled compass served as her guide. Doors shuddered open, closed, and echoed through the building’s labyrinthine passages. Every sound not of her own breathing or footfalls needled her with fresh terror. In her head writhed the dread of hearing a voice or seeing another face.
Without warning, she came upon a machine as it turned a corner and moved in the opposite direction. She nearly crashed into the wall at her right as she ran to get out of its field of view. The stony maze rang with a dreadful quiet as the machine disappeared around yet another bend.
She crept, as silent and gradual as trepidation allowed, halting on occasion to listen for signs that someone had noticed or tailed her. At one juncture, she heard a noise like steps and made herself flat in an alcove. Her heart punched against her sternum and in her head, pumping through jagged, ripping splinters of ice. Horrifying visions churned into her mind with every beat. Try as she did, she could not shake the distress, for this place had trapped her in its merciless claws, where pleas of pain and remorse would not avail.
Not a silhouette passed. No machine rolled by. Had there been someone, unless deprived of sight or hearing, they would have spotted her. A joy that she had not lost the task replaced her shaken terror. Peering out from the recess, she admired the shining marble against flickering torch light, appreciating the featurelessness that came into view. She continued to the right, in haste to where the compass drove her.
On more than one occasion, she walked down a hall to find that it led nowhere or that a room fell at the end, but not the one she sought. At last, she met the close of a passage distinct from the others. The door here looked heavy, and rather than handled or latched by some conventional apparatus, it sat adjacent a rune, embedded in the wall to its side. Engraved on this rune, the Imperial Overcross. Her ensorcelled compass indicated that the direction she must venture lay ahead.
Athenne felt the cool wooden face of the door and found no hole for a key. How do I enter?
As she reflected on how she came to be here in the first place, she removed the lunar tears from the folds of her robes and ran them across the door. Nothing. Next, she pressed the beads against the rune aside the door. The rune pulsed once and the door shivered.
She threw the door open forcefully, as though she expected someone to be standing on the other side. Nothing appeared, save steps descending into a dark pool. Her mouth soured with fermenting fear. I must go down, black and baleful as it is. She could not miss her opportunity. This leads to the underlevels and the ward. It must. Should she turn back and fail the mission for all of them, she would have nowhere to go, no friend or ally in the Saints or the Matrian Church. Intent is as much a crime as doing.
An explosion of presence interrupted her ruminations.
She distinguished the words as she spun around.
Inquisitors.
“You, there!” a paladin woman called. “What are you doing?” The inquisitor’s eyes moved from Athenne’s face to her hand, where she held the beads.
Athenne ran down the winding stairway, and the inquisitors followed. Near the bottom, she fell, crashing hands and forearms first onto ungiving floor. She sprung to her feet before the pain came, and ran with confusion through the cells, broken into rows, horizontal and vertical. Two inquisitors pursued her. The commotion must have alerted others, however, because the greave-clad peril at her back grew from a few to many.
At her periphery, to the path between the cells on her right, stood three inquisitors. She froze, moved to retreat, only to discover two more paladins. To her left, she saw the corner of the space; blank, dark rock. She backed away from her hunters, like a cornered animal, her eyes darting.
The inquisitors surrounded her, scowling, hands on the hilts of their weapons.
“What have you in the bag?”
Athenne clutched the strap of her satchel. She had but one choice. “Bombs,” she answered, as though the fact were more a threat than a statement of it. “I’ll detonate them before you can kill me. Back away!”
The inquisitors withdrew a few paces.
“Be not afraid.” A robed woman appeared, and walked from behind the paladins, who had divided for her. “I am Archbishop Aramanth Delacroix. My conjecture is that you are a member of the Saints of Aetheria.” She folded her hands in front of her waist and smiled. “Am I correct?”
What is this?
The woman’s lips parted with a click. “We’ve taken your friends, Eclih Phredran and Bhathric Ezeis. The lady Bhathric did not submit as gladly as her companion.” She moved closer. “You caught us at a most inopportune moment.” Extracting their blades a few inches, the paladins revealed glaring silver steel, radiant in the haze of distant torches. “A chance of fortune for you.” The dull space half lit her sharply-angled face. “Had your friends not been so careless in murdering one of our priests, you may well have been successful. Alas, nowhere near the capital is aetherlight employed to my ignorance.” Another step forward. “Drop that and surrender.” She gestured toward the bag Athenne clutched, white-knuckled. “They’re now disabled here.”
Athenne’s face juddered, her lips shivering as one might in the cold. “I do not fear death,” she said, and lied. “If you wish me to surrender, it shall be by force. I would rather take my leave of this world than kneel for you. I would rather perish in bravery than live as a coward in one of these cells.”
“So be it.” The woman indicated with her left hand.
Before Athenne had time to react, the paladins moved in. One seized the bag in her grip, jerking it so roughly from her hands that her shoulders and elbows ached and her wrist popped. Another swept her at the backs of her knees and shoved her down, subduing her hands behind her and laying her prone.
As Athenne’s cheek met the ground, a thunderous rumble erupted overhead. The ceiling quaked and groaned, raining dust and debris. Delacroix’s neck craned as she looked up.
“Take her to the council chamber,” Delacroix told one of the paladins. She walked with haste in the direction of the steps Athenne had earlier tumbled over.
The inquisitors dragged Athenne to her feet and made her walk, forcing her up the steps and down the hall. At the end of a passage, the space opened into a grand room with various doors at either side, multiple climbing levels with guard walls and dead hanging lanterns. In the center of the chamber, illuminated by the low light that peeked through its windows, a familiar figure slid into view.
Athenne’s
escorting paladins froze and squeezed her arms tighter, thumbs digging in.
“That’s her,” one whispered to another. “Aitrix Kravae.”
“It is.” Aitrix’s red eyes shifted toward them and seemed to evaluate Athenne. “It’s alright that you’ve failed,” she said, with a tone of odd comforting, breathy and light in pitch. “I shall not.”
“Aitrix Kravae.” Aramanth Delacroix stood at a distance from Aitrix in the hall. She lifted her hand to inform the paladins that they need not advance as they came into the space. “To what do we owe this visit?”
Eyes to the floor in front of her, Aitrix’s expression remained an untouched canvas. “Ambition.” She raised her arms. With their rise, the lanterns on the walls flickered to life and revealed the corpses of deacons that Aitrix had slain, at least a dozen. Their blood pooled around her, screaming in the flames.
“I see you’ve unmasked your truest self,” Delacroix said with a cool musicality, either composed or pretending to be. “That ugly, malformed creature which scurries around your sordid heart. The shame of this will hang at your neck like a thousand chains.”
“When the blood of your deacons and priests and bishops has drowned this city from here to the countryside, perhaps I’ll feel an ounce of shame, and half of what you should. We shall bear the weight together on that day.”
“You cannot cast in this place beyond these minor feats, but I can.” Delacroix did not dignify her gibes. “Stand down or perish. I’ll kill you if I must, to protect those in my service. Your destiny lies with you to make.”
Aitrix’s hands swirled, tilting at the wrists with the grace of one who had honed her power over many ages, symmetry in every arch and curve. Fingers came together and parted, sculpting patterns in the air. “I cannot be controlled.” Her voice reverberated across the room, echoed like sound in a cave, an uncharacteristic waver and wrathfulness underlying each breath.
Athenne had never seen this rage.
She glanced to Delacroix. A tinge of uncertainty flashed in her face. Though Delacroix was one of the strongest mages in the Empire, perhaps in the world, she knew little of the depths of Aitrix’s power. None of them knew, not even the members of the Saints, for she so rarely demonstrated her capacity.