He swallowed, and nodded. Was it a lie? He felt well.
He saw disquiet in her face, and her gaze passed from him to Talin, who was then being escorted out of the hall and into some quieter, more comfortable spot.
‘What is it, Diana?’ he said, though it cost him to ask the question. He was not sure that he wanted to know the answer.
‘Nothing,’ she said shortly, and turned from him. She was gone the next instant, bustling away, already calling instructions or orders or reprimands to somebody else.
Konrad retreated until his back hit the wall, and stayed there.
‘Konrad,’ hissed a young voice, and he looked down to find Tasha half concealed in the shadows at his elbow. ‘What’s going on?’
‘How did you find me?’
‘Eetapi fetched me. Something about nightmares.’
‘Oh? Why did she fetch you?’
‘She said you were going to need me.’
Konrad’s brows rose at this idea. ‘In what way?’
‘I was hoping you could tell me that. What in the Spirits’ name is going on here? Why is everybody forting up in the temples?’
Forting up. Diana had used the word “war”. Konrad’s head spun. He made himself speak calmly to Tasha, recounting everything that had happened since that fateful knock upon his door.
Tasha, as always, took it in stride, reacting with a low, impressed whistle. ‘Excellent,’ she said.
‘Excellent? Tasha, the thing could kill half the city.’
‘Don’t exaggerate. We’ll probably manage to destroy it before it kills half. Quarter, maybe.’
‘We?’ said Konrad, ignoring the rest.
‘I did say I was here to help?’
‘You’ve some manner of expertise regarding malefics, I suppose?’
She shrugged. ‘As much as anybody else, right?’
Fair point. Expertise was exactly what they lacked.
A brightness entered, bringing with it a penetrating, commanding voice to rival Diana’s. The hall was thinning out by that time, half of The Malykt’s Order having dispersed into the Temple. Still, though, people enough remained to obscure Konrad’s view of whoever had come in, save for that indefinable lightening that she brought with her.
Until the people melted from her path like snow, and she stood in uncontested possession of the centre of the hall.
Katya, as Diana had called her. Ekaterina Inshova, seventy years old if she was a day, but utterly unbowed by time. She stood several inches shorter than Konrad, rather shorter than Nanda too, but her presence in no way gave that impression. She stood tall in power and authority, radiating that sense of hope and light, the soft lines on her face in no way marring her beauty. Her wealth of hair, white with age, was neatly coiffed, and she wore a plain, dark green gown under a heavy black cloak.
Nanda’s superior, Konrad mused. Chief among the Shandral, a real avatar of her Mistress’s power. And just the person wanted in this calamity, besides Nanda herself.
She’d asked for an explanation. Diana having gone out of the hall, and no one else seeming much inclined to answer her, Konrad took the risk of approaching her.
Only to see her eyes widen slightly, and narrow again as she looked upon him.
Konrad bowed. ‘I am—’
‘I know who you are.’
The words lacked warmth, but her tone did not. She looked on him with the same, odd wariness Diana had displayed, but with approval also. No enemy of the Malykant here.
Encouraged, he went on. ‘There is a malefic loose in the city,’ he said quietly. ‘Or the spiritlands, we are not at present certain which. It has killed in both.’
‘It has come, then,’ she said, in no wise as shocked as he had expected.
‘You anticipated it?’
She bowed her head. ‘Diligent as you are, it could not be avoided forever.’
Konrad felt a new burden of guilt settle over him. It blended perfectly with the rest. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said helplessly. ‘I’ve tried—’
This she waved away. ‘Were you and your predecessors less diligent, it must have come all the sooner. This is not the time for self-reproach.’
True.
‘Tell me everything.’
Konrad, wearying of repeating so horrific a chain of events, nonetheless did so in as much detail as he could remember. The success of this war, if war it would be, must depend to a fair extent on this woman’s understanding and support. Without the full and knowledgeable assistance of her Order, little could be done.
He had not fully finished this latest narration when Tasha stiffened beside him, and drew in her breath in a sharp hiss.
Konrad broke off. ‘What is it?’
Tasha, after a long pause, relaxed. Mostly. ‘Nothing, I think,’ she said.
Then Nanda was there, rushing headlong into the Temple with another army at her back. Spirit-witches. Konrad recognised none of them, but he knew who they must be. They came prepared, he saw, if only in resolve, for in their faces — male and female, young and old, from all levels of society — he saw the same bleak determination, the same fear suppressed.
Nanda split away from this group, her gaze alighting immediately upon him. She approached at a near run, filled with an urgency, and an anxiety, that Konrad could not make sense of.
‘Don’t say there’s been another death,’ he said, catching the two hands she instinctively held out to him.
‘It isn’t that. It’s— oh, Konrad, do you feel well?’
‘Well? I am perfectly well.’
‘Are you sure? There is something you don’t know. About— the malefic, and being struck. It corrupts, Konrad. If we want to know who opened a door at the bridge, we need only find whoever lived in that ice-house, I think—’
‘Talin?’ Konrad snapped. ‘Nanda, what madness is this? She’s been with the Order her whole life through. She couldn’t have done such a thing.’
‘Not normally, no, but she is not quite Talin anymore.’
Konrad’s sense of crawling unease grew. ‘But that means…’
‘Yes,’ said Nanda, her anxious eyes searching his face.
‘I would never—’
‘It struck Konrad?’ Tasha said abruptly, sharply.
‘Yes. I healed him, but I cannot know whether the poison persists.’
‘There’s—’ began Tasha, but then Konrad heard it too. A distant shriek, a tearing sound fit to turn the guts to ice. It echoed off the cool stone walls of The Shandrigal’s Temple, and was then repeated.
An ordinary, human cry followed. Then a scream.
Konrad was running before the first shriek had faded, unsure of where he was going in that unfamiliar place. ‘Talin’s here,’ he said to Nanda, on the other side of the hall by then, following the distant sounds of distress. ‘Injured. They took her somewhere—’
‘There’s an infirmary,’ she said, and took the lead. ‘It’s this way.’
Down a corridor, feet pounding on the cold tile as another scream echoed down from above. Up a flight of stairs; left; someone passing in a headlong flight, bloodied, vomiting black bile—
‘Stop him,’ Konrad shouted, willing only to pause.
‘Got it,’ said Tasha, and tore off after the beleaguered man.
On again, and then Nanda burst through a door into a quiet infirmary, beds laid out in neat, white-blanketed rows. Or it had been quiet, once. Chaos now reigned, and blood, and bile, such wet redness and glistening blackness, flowing in streams and tides all over the cool floor.
Talin was on her feet. Not in any strength; she swayed, white as death, ready to topple at an instant’s notice. Her white, white eyes were not as they had been. She was emptied of Talin, become something else, at least in this moment.
Nanda hissed. ‘There’s a door here,’ she gasped. ‘She’s opened one.’
‘And the malefic came through,’ said Konrad, though there was no sign of it now. Only the destruction it left behind it, in the form of two attendant
s, bent on caring for Talin in her distress and now cruelly punished for their solicitude. One lay huddled against the far wall, her hair spread out in the pool of black bile she’d fallen in. She was dead, eyes blank and dark.
The other sat on the edge of one of the beds, leaking blood onto the pristine blankets, his shirt and coat dripping black fluid. His wounds were not such as to kill him, but he appeared dazed, staring at nothing.
Konrad approached the woman who stood, alone and terrible, gasping in air. ‘Talin,’ he said. ‘Tell me. What has happened?’
She turned her terrible eyes on him, and he saw in them the same ugliness he had felt astir in his own soul. A bleak, blank cold.
Then a cry tore from her throat, and she collapsed. Not dead, despite Konrad’s immediate fear. Weeping. Tearing, heartbroken sobs.
‘It seemed a nightmare,’ she said indistinctly. ‘I thought I remembered — I thought I had — and I did.’
‘The bridge?’ said Nanda softly.
Wordless, Talin gave a single nod.
Nanda sighed, a soft, weary sound, and turned to face those who had found their way into the room. Tasha was there, hauling the malefic’s other victim with her. He did not look long for this world, Konrad thought dispassionately, and that was possibly for the best.
Diana stood there, too, looking from Talin to Konrad with a look of utter heartbreak in her face.
At last: something that could touch The Malykt’s chief servant. Diana Valentina had a heart after all.
‘Talin,’ she said, and took a step towards her friend.
Talin erupted, pushing herself off and away from the bed — and away from Diana. She backed up until she hit the wall, and stood there, trembling. ‘Give me a blade,’ she said.
Diana’s eyes filled with tears; but only for a moment. Then they were gone, and her mask was back in place. Cool, cold, unbreakable. Wordlessly, she retrieved a short-bladed knife from some pocket in her clothing, and gave it to the nearest man to her. She could provide the knife, then, but she had not the strength to give it into Talin’s hands herself.
Her deputy performed that office for her, his own face expressionless. Konrad realised that he knew this man: Lev Antonov, a necromancer of the Order.
He stepped back, returning to Diana’s side: a solid, perhaps comforting, presence.
Diana did not turn away her head. Konrad stood, watching her as her friend died, and she betrayed nothing. Not a flicker of emotion.
No one spoke into the silence that followed, not for some time. The only sounds came from the wounded: faint moans of distress, too-quick breathing.
It was Nanda who spoke at last. ‘Anouska, of the Enclave, spoke of this,’ she said. ‘She said— that—’
She could not finish the sentence. Someone else did it for her: one of the spirit-witches, Konrad guessed, a big, broad-shouldered man with Nanda’s own icy colouring. ‘She is the eldest of us,’ he said. ‘She remembers the malefic. She spoke of the fate that has overtaken Talin.’
Diana turned her cold, dead eyes on the man. ‘And what does she say is to be done about it?’
‘They must die. There is no other way.’
A tremor passed over Diana’s face, nothing more. ‘Well,’ she said softly. ‘What are we, the Order of Death, if we cannot die in our turn?’
To Konrad’s horror, her attention turned then to him.
‘Not—’ he began.
You are the Order’s executioner, her face said. She would not speak it aloud before so many strangers, but he heard her clearly all the same.
I am not, he wanted to cry. That was a part of his duty only, and only when it was merited. He did not kill innocents. He could not.
And what of himself? He, too, had been struck. Must he not also die?
Was that also there in Diana’s gaze? Did she expect him to follow Talin’s example, and turn the knife next on himself?
He backed away, hardly knowing where he thought to go, or what he imagined he could do. He was out the door, halfway down the corridor beyond, before thought caught up with him at all. He could not stop shaking.
Nanda had followed him. She was there when he slowed, her presence the only comfort that could reach him. ‘Tasha’s already on it,’ she said.
‘Tasha?’ he repeated numbly.
‘Dispatched the fellow she brought up here in one knife-thrust. She was after the other one when I got out.’
His mouth tightened, revolted in spite of himself. Tasha. Such an appearance of youth, and so ruthless a soul. She’d have been twice the Malykant he was.
And she was what they needed now. She had all the resolution he had not; lacked all the sentiment that so impeded him.
‘What now?’ he said, looking into Nanda’s eyes, hoping desperately for an answer there.
He saw only fear. ‘I— Konrad, I don’t know if you are safe. I don’t know if I healed everything the malefic did to you.’
If it were possible to heal that kind of damage, Konrad guessed, the witches of the enclave must know of it. This elder, Anouska, must have known of it. There was no way.
‘But,’ he said. ‘I feel— there is something that isn’t right, but it’s a small thing, Nan, I swear. I’m me. I am still in control.’
Nanda nodded slowly. ‘Of all people, you are perhaps the best to bear it,’ she said, with a trace of her mirthless, unamused smile.
‘I am deathly enough as it is?’ he said, trying to see the humour of it. ‘It must be hard to turn a deathbringer any darker.’
‘I’ll talk with Diana,’ she said. ‘She cannot possibly—’
‘She’s already ordered my execution, in effect,’ said Konrad. ‘What makes you think she will hesitate to hasten it along?’
Nanda had no response to make to that, could only look at him with great, frightened eyes.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, already backing away. ‘If they find me here, I’m done.’
‘Tasha would not hurt you.’
‘You are sure of that?’
‘Not like this,’ she amended, and there it was: she was as unsure of Tasha’s capacity for mercy as he was.
‘I’m going,’ he said again. ‘To the Bones. The spiritlands. Anywhere but here.’
‘I go with you.’
‘Nan—’
‘Don’t even bother,’ she said, crossly, as though he had come home late for dinner and tried to fob her off with an excuse. ‘You know it’s futile.’
He smiled, faintly, at that. ‘I might hurt you,’ he said, serious again.
She shrugged. ‘Then I’ll have to kill you.’
‘Or I will,’ said a new voice. Tasha. A composed Tasha, not wielding a naked knife-blade, not leaping upon him with his death in her sights.
Konrad looked down at her. Not a speck of blood on her, somehow. ‘You can’t come. You are what we’re trying to run away from.’
‘That’s Diana, no? Don’t worry, Konrad. I won’t kill you unless I have to.’
‘That hardly seems fair. Look what you just did to my fellows.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t care about them.’
‘But you do care about me? You?’
‘Hard to believe, isn’t it? Are we going or not?’ Tasha marched off down the corridor. Konrad, hearing the approach of voices, hurried after her. If he did not make himself scarce right away, he would lose his chance.
Chapter Six
Later found Konrad, Nanda and Tasha secreted deep in the Bone Forest, in hiding.
Not, to Konrad’s regret, in his own, familiar hut. He had made his way there on instinct, but Nanda had stopped him partway there with a vicelike grip upon his arm.
‘You’re going to your hut.’
‘Where else?’
‘Konrad. Nobody but the three of us knows about that place, right?’
Konrad had given it due thought. ‘How could they?’ he had concluded.
‘I don’t know, but people have learned unwelcome truths about you before. You need t
o be sure, Konrad. Do I need to remind you that your life literally depends upon it?’
In the end, he had only been nearly sure. Nanda was right. For all his caution, he had at times been caught out. Followed, out-guessed, pre-empted.
‘Where else, then?’ he’d said again, standing there in an indeterminate spot in the Bone Forest, sleet-soaked and exhausted and afraid. Night fell early out in the Bones, and the shadows already loomed and leapt and flickered among the pale trees. Ordinarily this had no effect on him, but today was different. Today, he started at every shifting shadow, jumped at every sudden noise, even the sound of twigs breaking under his own feet.
‘Come with me,’ she’d said, and then led them by a winding route to a different part of the forest, one Konrad rarely ventured into.
And then down, into a hole in the ground. Down through the stout, twisting roots of a cluster of three ancient trees, down into the cold earth.
‘Nice place,’ said Konrad, taking a long look.
Nanda snorted in response. The abode had promise, perhaps, but little of that had been realised. The bare earth walls were densely packed and sound, but empty and damp. Ditto, the floor. Nanda — or someone — had built rudimentary furniture at some point: a species of couch, woven from felled branches, and a pallet for a bed, not dissimilar to Talin’s in its general appearance. Only the canopy of ice-droplets was missing.
Konrad left this superior comfort to the ladies, and reposed himself upon the couch. Wrapping his coat more tightly around himself, he shivered deeply, and sighed. It was cold that made him shake like that, he told himself. Just the bone-deep cold.
Silence reigned for a time. The shocking events of the day had to be absorbed, thought about, reconciled to. Or simply stuffed down somewhere where they could not, for the present, cause trouble. Konrad attempted the latter, and found it difficult. He kept seeing Talin’s white face: as he had first seen her, injured and regretful and frightened, in The Malykt’s Temple. Then as he had seen it again so soon afterwards: twisted, marred by a cold evil. Then, heartbroken.
Was this the fate that awaited him? Would he, too, succumb, and turn loose a malefic upon the city he loved so well?
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