In the Ravenous Dark

by A. M. Strickland

  My eyes close. Maybe I’ll wake up again in that strange place, I think dreamily. Maybe …

  Darkness swallows me.

  18

  Deep within the darkness that blankets me, muffling all else, I feel the oddest thing: pressure on my mouth. Lips pressing against mine. At first they seem to draw more than a kiss from me, as if trying to pull me out of my body faster than I’m leaving it. But then, suddenly, they give something back.

  Sensation floods me. It’s wine refilling my broken barrel. And yet it’s sharp, colorless, and cold, so different from what spilled out of me. This is more like ice water than wine. I’m already freezing, but this seeps into spaces within me that I didn’t even know I had.

  It’s also like a crisp breath of air in my lungs after nearly drowning. Somewhere, I feel my first inhalation—through my nose, because my mouth is, well, occupied.

  During all of this, an image floats out of the darkness, consuming my vision: a stark white temple, in front of which looms a man wearing a black hood and wielding an ax. The man shoves something like my head—but not my head—down onto a block of stone, already red and warm with gore. A voice—not my voice, but seeming to come from me—masculine and terrified and familiar, cries out and pleads to be let go.

  It’s Ivrilos’s voice. This time, I’m more than just looking over his shoulder. I’m looking out of him. Is this a memory?

  The ax comes down, and we next open our eyes on that strange, dark, dissolving world I just saw. But now there’s another man, far more frightening than the executioner, with hair like Ivrilos’s and a flat stare that burns with a sickly blue fire. He stands before a structure that looks like the sprawling fortress, except it’s nowhere near so big as what I saw before. While it’s still completely black, it’s unfinished, ending in jagged points that pierce the half light, but only at the height of a few men standing atop one another. Those points seem to drip upward, running like melted candle wax, the drops falling up into the sky like reverse rain. There’s no door, so I peer inside to the throne, also black, and angular and liquid at once. It, at least, is finished.

  Ivrilos and I are on the steps leading up to the structure. The man stands at the top with two other women. Both are crying, even harder now that they see Ivrilos.

  “There you are. Welcome,” the terrifying man says, addressing my guardian. “Glad to see you come when I call.” He wears a crown of gold laurels, just as kings in the living world do.

  “Father.” Ivrilos’s voice again, seeming to come from the both of us. Begging.

  So the man is Athanatos. And I know for sure, now, who rules the underworld. I’m not entirely surprised. It makes a sick kind of sense that the first king is still king, down below.

  The two women with Athanatos, one older, one younger, are mother and daughter, I somehow understand.

  “I could use you,” the first king continues. “These two, however … they’ll make a prime example of what will happen to you if you disobey me.”

  He seizes the women, both wild-eyed with terror, and presses their faces against the wall of the tower.

  They scream. Ivrilos shouts, lunging forward up the steps.

  Nothing keeps their skin from darkening, collapsing, until their whole bodies vanish into the structure as if submerged in liquid. It’s as if they’ve melted into it, becoming part of it. Only smooth wall remains where they once were. But the jagged top of the tower rises, stabbing farther into the cold, heartless sky, sharp points dripping up and away like daggers drenched in blood.

  I try to shout now. Instead, I open my eyes. My own, this time. The dark world—the memory of it—is gone.

  And I merely stare, uncomprehending at first. Because peering right back at me with a strange expression on his face, less than a finger’s breadth away, is Ivrilos. His cool lips are still pressed to mine.

  He’s kissing me.

  My eyes fly wide. Without thinking, I sit up and shove him away. It takes me a second to realize I actually push him, my flesh-and-blood palm connecting with his chest. I can feel the solidity of him, the slight give of his tunic and the firm muscle beneath. I stare at my hand in shock, but it looks the same as always.

  Now I’m more awake than ever, even as I glance around in confusion. Everything appears hard and sharp, all shining edges. Shadows sink darker and highlights flare brighter, despite the deep gloom of the royal gallery, my sigil-summoned flame long gone. And I feel … strange. I’m ice cold. My skin is prickling.

  But at least I’m alive. I hope.

  “What—?” I say, and I can’t resist reaching toward Ivrilos again. He gives me a strange, almost longing look, and this time my hand passes right through his face, like normal. Well, if I normally tried to touch his face. “I don’t understand.”

  Then I remember what happened. What he did. The bodies of the guards, blood congealing around them, are still here to help jog my memory.

  I scrabble away from my guardian and the corpses, my limbs responding quicker, stronger than I could have anticipated. “You killed them. I saw.”

  I also saw something else, possibly Ivrilos dying in his own memory, but I can’t think about that right now. That happened four hundred years ago, and this is happening now. My guardian still crouches, seeming dazed, glancing around like he’s just now realizing where he is.

  “I’m glad I put the room’s protections back when I did,” he says distantly. “It’ll look like only the guards entered here, fought, and then killed each other, especially when I smooth over your footprints. We need to get out of here immediately, before anyone else sees you.”

  “Or else you’ll kill them, too?”

  He turns on me, eyes like daggers, no trace of longing for me anymore. “You should hope that I can, and that they don’t shout for help. There’s no way I could save you if the wrong people found out that I’d helped you like this. I couldn’t save either of us.”

  My stomach drops. “Helped me like what? What did you do to me?” I touch my chest, my mouth. “I feel odd. Cold. And everything looks … the same, but different.”

  “Rovan, we need to go.”

  I let my hand fall, trying not to think about the cool press of his lips on mine. “Why should I care what you need?”

  “Think of yourself … and your mother. If they find you here like this, it would mean death. For you, for me, and for her.”

  “You’re already dead.”

  “I can die again. Forever.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  Ivrilos holds my eyes in that unwavering way that makes me want to lean into him. “Because I want to stop all of this. For the past four hundred years, I’ve spent every breath on stopping this.”

  I almost can’t believe what I’m hearing. He makes me want to believe, despite everything. But all I can say, nonsensically, is, “You don’t breathe.”

  The corner of his mouth quirks. “All I am is breath.”

  I remember my father defining pneuma, the essence that composes the spirit, as another word for breath.

  “Fine. But you’ve spent the lives of others, too, or their pneuma or whatever. I’ve felt you take it from me.” Maybe I’ve even seen him do it, to the two dead guards in that strange, upside-down place.

  “You’re right.” He isn’t apologetic. “About everything. And I’ll explain it all if you leave with me now.” He bows his head, the thin silver circlet glinting in his dark hair. “I promise.”

  I stare at him, every line of him as sharp as a blade in the darkness. He’s a knife’s edge in human form, and for some silly reason I want to touch him again. The word escapes my lips almost involuntarily. “Okay.”

  His whole body relaxes like a sigh, but then he’s on his feet, gesturing for me. I hop upright with surprising ease. A few of his muttered words send a breeze gusting along the floor, swirling over my footprints and blending them back in with the rest of the dust. The guards he leaves exactly as they lie. He hurries over to a blank stretch of wall, me
in tow, along with a cool draft that chases me, covering my tracks.

  “I thought you knew another way out—oh,” I say, as the stone parts like curtains after a few more words from him. I walk through in stunned awe, staring at the almost liquid quality of what was perfectly solid only a moment ago. Before I know it, we’re standing in a palace hallway, the wall once again smooth behind me, the royal gallery sealed off.

  And yet, while I can see gleaming marble and columns of blooming flowers in the torchlight, I can’t see myself.

  Before I can exclaim, Ivrilos assures me, “I’ve masked you and the sound of your footsteps. It would be best if you don’t speak until we are back in your apartments. There I will explain everything.”

  He sets off down the hall, beckoning for me.

  Invisible, feeling like a ghost, and not entirely knowing what the hell just happened, I follow.

  19

  I can’t get warm. As soon as I close myself in my apartments—happily able to see myself again—I start shivering violently. My skin feels like a corpse’s, nearly white underneath the crimson lines of my sigils.

  I drag a dark green blanket around my shoulders, woven with golden leaves that actually drift down the length of it to pile at the bottom edge. I use the sigil to ignite a fire in my massive stone hearth carved like a lion’s roaring mouth. The thing is hideous, and for a moment I consider asking Ivrilos to change the shape of it—he can do that, after all, with death magic—but my knees practically give out before I can. I sit down on the floor right in front of the fireplace, not even bothering with a chair.

  “Are you sure I’m not dead?” I ask.

  Ivrilos crouches next to me, dark eyes looking softer, warmer, in the flickering light, though his expression is as marble smooth as ever. “I can’t imagine your teeth would be chattering if you were.”

  “Okay,” I say, gathering the blanket tighter. “Here’s your chance to explain what the hell just happened. What you did to me. Why I’m not dead.”

  For a moment, he just stares into the fire, the orange glow playing over his ridiculous cheekbones. “I have to explain a few other things first.”

  “Perfect,” I say, rocking back and forth, trying to get warm, “because as I recall, you promised to tell me everything.”

  He grimaces. “I did, didn’t I?”

  Sighing, he drops all the way into a kneeling position next to me. We’re an incongruous sight—a disheveled young woman and a man who looks like the embodiment of death, huddled in front of the fire—but I’ve seen stranger things this evening.

  “Think of your body like a small raft,” he begins. “A leaky raft. It wants to sink, and sinking is death.” He cups one hand, palm up, and gestures beneath it with the other. “The current is the force that spins the living world. It’s exhausting, and it will eventually, inevitably drag you down. Your pneuma, your spiritual essence, otherwise known as your shade after you die, rides within the raft of your body, and your … living spark, your vitality, whatever you want to call it … is the bucket with which you madly bail to keep from sinking. Some people have bigger buckets, some smaller. Some”—he shoots a barely there smile my way, and it makes my heart kick—“can take their bucket, make it into whatever shape they want, and play with the forces of the living world. Bloodmages, like you.”

  His lips take a downward turn—why am I looking at his lips so much? “I don’t belong here in the living world, frankly, as a shade—a being of pure pneuma with no body or vitality of my own with which to keep me afloat. Bound to you like I am, I’m using you. Especially when I make myself more … present … here. It’s as if I’m hanging off the side of your raft, dragging against the current. In actuality, I’m drawing on your living pneuma, making you weaker as you bail. If I were to draw on you too much, I would swamp you immediately—kill you, like I almost did back in the gallery. To do what I did to those guards, I needed a lot of you. Too much. But even as an extra passenger taking care not to wear out my welcome, I’ll still wear you out all the sooner.”

  “Finally, the truth,” I declare, with a great exasperated breath. “Not that I hadn’t guessed already. But that’s why bloodmages age quicker here in Thanopolis. It’s not the weight of our bloodlines, which, as you said, actually make us stronger.” My lip curls. “You’re like leeches who’ve found the fattest vein. My father knew this.”

  “He did,” Ivrilos says shortly.

  “But you didn’t swamp me, back there,” I continue, eyeing him sideways. “You did something strange. You kept me from sinking.”

  You kissed me, I don’t add.

  Ivrilos’s eyes close and his jaw clenches, as if he regrets what he did. “Yes, I did. I … I gave you my pneuma in return.”

  “But you’re dead!” I goggle at him for a moment. “You mean I have essence of dead man in me?”

  He nods solemnly.

  I bark a short, humorless laugh. “I guess that explains why I’m cold. And why the darkness looks … less dark.” I shudder. “A dead man’s breath in my lungs. Blech. Yuck.” For some reason, the thought of a dead man’s lips on mine doesn’t make me squeamish, but I don’t tell him that.

  “Are you quite finished?” Ivrilos asks, but the words don’t have bite. “I didn’t actually know all the ways it would affect you because I’ve never done it before. It’s entirely forbidden, the strictest law we have. I suppose now instead of weighing you down, it’s more like I’m holding you up, feeding you as you bail.”

  As he says it, his eyes dart away from me. I wonder if, were he alive, there would be more than just firelight coloring his pale cheeks.

  “So it’s usually you feeding on me, but now it’s the opposite?”

  “Yes. We became a closed loop, at least temporarily—which is why you could touch me for a brief moment. We were of the same essence. Mine was almost entirely filling you, since yours had nearly moved on. But your pneuma came back to your body, once I revived you by giving you a … a breath for one drowning. This weakened me, of course, but I had the strength to spare.”

  “How?”

  He gives me a look I can only describe as mildly chagrined. “As you’ve pointed out, I’m old. A shade can fade—they’re sometimes called fades, in fact, those who are evanescing. Or, if one doesn’t fade, one can … grow. Strengthen. Deepen their capacity to take in pneuma. Just like your capacity for wine is gained by drinking, we can draw more and more on the essence of the living over time, though only from those we are bound to. Live pneuma is more powerful than our own, and far more invigorating with blood to animate it. Which is why guardians, especially older ones like me, are much stronger than normal shades, linked to the living as we are, for as long as we’ve been.”

  “But still, you nearly killed me to … take care of … those guards. And yet somehow you were able to revive me and then death-magic everything”—I draw my hand out of the blanket to make a sweeping motion—“without finishing me off?”

  His voice goes quieter. “We can also draw on the essence of other shades in the afterlife, without needing to be bound to them.”

  “But if they’re already dead, and they don’t have a way to replenish themselves, then that means … you kill them? Again?”

  Ivrilos meets my eyes. “I told you, there is a second, more permanent death.”

  “You’re avoiding my question.”

  “Yes, Rovan,” he enunciates, holding my gaze. “I killed the shades of those guards in the underworld. I consumed them, giving them their second death far quicker than they would have found it by fading. I couldn’t allow them to linger and tell any tales. Their pneuma also gave me the strength to death-magic everything, as you call it, and to keep you from dying.”

  “Why?”

  He looks away again. “I need you.”

  “Why?” I repeat, throwing the blanket off and jabbing a finger at him. “Answer me. You said it yourself: You hate this place. I see why now. I saw, when you … fed me.” I suppose that’s less awkward to
say than kissed me, but not by much, based on how neither of us can meet each other’s eyes all of a sudden. Instead, I recall the terrifying man I saw through Ivrilos’s eyes, and what he did to those two women. “I mean, I think I saw him, Athanatos, in a memory of yours. Your father arranged your death, didn’t he? To bring you to him in the underworld? He did that, and…” But I don’t want to bring up the rest, not with how shocked Ivrilos looks, his dark eyebrows climbing. “And yet you’re still following his rules.”

  “You saw that?” He sounds horrified.

  I’m not going to let him get sidetracked, not even by visions of his own death. “What do you want, Ivrilos?”

  He swallows, staring off into the flames for a long moment. I cultivate patience I didn’t know I had, waiting for him to speak.

  His voice begins low, monotone. “I have a brother. Kadreus. Not by my mother, but by my father. As I mentioned, I was a bastard. My mother had only a daughter after me, and neither of them had long second lives, thanks to my father. And yet my brother, his son and heir, never ended up in the underworld. My father could have drained Kadreus after death, but … I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  Ivrilos shrugs, another incongruous sight. It’s like he’s thawing, turning more human, less shade, the longer he sits in front of this fire. “My father loved him far more than me, and even I’m still around. So I guess you could say I’m looking for my brother. This is the only place he could be—perhaps trapped between life and death somehow. I need to find him, but there are places here I cannot go on my own. Only one, really.” He takes a deep breath. “The king’s quarters, which every king from Athanatos to Tyros has occupied, is surrounded by magic I cannot penetrate. To get inside, I need to get close to the king, closer than I have ever been able to get before.”

  I blink. “To Tyros?”

  “Any king over the years would have sufficed, but yes, it’s Tyros now.”

  I scoff. “You’ve been waiting four hundred years just to get near the king? You’re in the palace now! You can’t just, I don’t know, walk up to him?”