by Ari Marmell
And along with that light came the sharp tang of sugar candies and cinnamon.
Luchene forced herself upright on shaking legs. Still squinting, she felt around blindly until her fingers came across the stiletto and small flintlock that lay atop the table beside the impossibly gleaming lantern.
Every room of the estate was similarly equipped; the duchess had survived too many assassination attempts in her youth to live otherwise.
“Not the most friendly welcome I've ever received.” Twin voices, speaking in unison, a young boy and an old man. Luchene spun toward the sound; the creature she recognized from Widdershins's description as Embruchel, the Prince of Orphan's Tears, gazed back at her through mirrored eyes.
She felt as though a jagged hailstone had formed in her throat. Simply speaking was a heroic effort.
“How…how did you do that with the lamp?”
The gleam of the fae's inhuman gaze flickered as he blinked. Apparently, whatever he'd expected her to say, that wasn't it.
“I stripped away the shadows around it,” he said finally. “So the light had more room to expand.”
“I don't…” She took a shuffling, sideways step toward the door. “That doesn't make any sense!”
“It makes perfect sense,” Embruchel insisted, almost petulantly. “Your definition of ‘sense’ is too narrow.”
In the distance, a chorus of children cooed and chortled.
Another slow, careful step, edging closer to escape. “Don't you—” she began.
“Slow, stupid mortal thinks we're all slow, stupid mortals! That's no door, not for you. Wrap your sweaty fingers around the latch, and I could still pull your bones out through your flesh, slick and dripping, and suck them dry before you could squeak the hinges!”
Luchene shot him.
It was difficult to tell, given the lack of pupils in his glassy eyes, but she thought they might have crossed as he tried, in vain, to examine the large hole in his forehead. “What was the point of that?” He sounded honestly puzzled.
The duchess softly gurgled something in reply.
He strode toward her, that impossible creature. She couldn't help but note that he left bloody footprints on the lush carpet, a trait that Widdershins had not described. “Weren't you asking me something?” he inquired.
“What? I…?” She'd just been trying to distract him, then. Still, keep him talking, maybe she could buy herself some time…“Just, I thought you always traveled with an entourage.”
Embruchel looked at her as though she were the crazy one. “They're busy,” he explained, his words slow and precise, as a parent might speak to a particularly dim child. “What did you expect, that I would take the time to murder your entire household by myself?”
Beatrice's soul shriveled. Her dagger fell from a suddenly limp grip.
“I don't normally take a personal hand with someone old and childless, like you.” He raised one arm, allowing the hideous lashes that served as digits to unfurl dramatically in the bright light. “But I'm doing a favor for a friend, you see.”
Screaming—in rage far more than fear—the duchess lunged at him, determined at least to go down fighting, not as some helpless, sniveling victim. She had only her bare hands now, since she'd dropped her blade, but really, it would have made no difference.
“…determine what exactly falls into our purview,” Bishop Sicard was saying as he addressed an assembly of priests, gathered in that same private chapel. Some were his own people, clergy of the Basilica of the Sacred Choir; others were loyal to various Houses. For days, now, they had remained in counsel, taking time only for sleep, for meals, and for prayer. What they had done regarding the Finders’ Guild would rock High Church law. What Sicard had told them he wished to do was absolutely and utterly unprecedented.
“Again, we may not even have the opportunity. In the end, it's not our decision whether or not even to try.” Several members of the assembly muttered at that, as it was something like the eighty-third time he'd made the point. “But if we do, I want us all to be certain that we are moving forward with only the greatest reverence for—”
He couldn't breathe. The air in the chapel seemed to have frozen into a thick paste. His whole body shivered, his skin reddened. With an effort that pained him from head to stomach, he forced himself to inhale. It was like trying to suck wet soil through a straw.
After that first breath, it grew easier, but the room still felt deathly chill. Yet he saw no other signs of cold; his breath didn't steam, nothing around him was frozen to the touch.
The priests had stood, or fallen, or knelt to pray. Clearly they felt it, too, whatever it was. The two Church soldiers—present mostly as a formality, since nobody expected the assembly to turn violent—dashed forward, struggling to find some means of helping. They, obviously, were not experiencing the same effect.
Then what…?
Tarnish crept over the Eternal Eye, symbol of all 147 gods of the Hallowed Pact. The chandelier strobed, darkening and brightening to impossible extremes. The air thickened further still—no harder to breathe, but an oppressive weight, a building pressure.
That pressure, and the rightmost door to the sanctuary, both burst.
The thing on the threshold was only somewhat human. Back-bending, batrachian legs supported a torso that seemed normal enough, but its head…utterly hairless, it gaped open as if the jaw were hinged at the ears, revealing a writhing mass of barbed and grasping tongues.
Although their faces blanched, the soldiers advanced with halberds raised. Sicard waved them back, his mind racing. This creature of the Gloaming Court, as with most fae, would be undaunted by normal weapons. He might hold it at bay for a time, with prayer and his own icon of the Eternal Eye, as he had with Iruoch, but only for…
Even as the monstrous creature stepped into the chapel—leaving, for some reason, a trail of bloody footprints behind—a smile split Sicard's beard.
“Iruoch stood inside this church,” he announced, retreating toward his fellow priests. “And his presence felt nothing like yours. Nothing so heavy. And having met him, seen him, I feel safe in saying that he was no more holy, no less profane, than you.”
The fae halted, eyes rotating obscenely to peer over the edge of its own distended jaw and meet the bishop's gaze. A wet, burbling sound popped from its throat, a sound that might have been, “So?”
“So perhaps it's the excess of devotion in this room. You appear darker, against a brighter light. And while I, alone, might prove unable to stop you—”
The thing hurled itself forward, tongues lashing out, stretching yards from its maw. At the same moment Sicard raised his amulet and began to pray. First one of the priests, then a few more joined him, until their voices filled the chamber in a deafening paean.
The thing froze, leaning forward as though battling against a mighty wind. It pushed, and the holy men and women of the Hallowed Pact pushed back. Both sides strained, both refused to yield.
And both began to tire…
The corridors of the Guild were strangely, even disturbingly quiet.
No surprise, there, not with so many dead or incarcerated. Still, as Igraine knelt in the darkened chapel, before the hood-blinded idol of the Shrouded God, it nagged at her. A sense of wrongness, nibbling at the edges of her focus as she prayed for guidance.
The place wasn't entirely silent, of course. Not every Finder had been present for the raid, and the Guard was too busy dealing with the masses of criminals they had arrested, as well as the tension on the streets, to pay much attention to the headquarters of what they knew to be a broken Guild. Slowly, then, in dribs and drabs, a tiny population of remaining thieves had returned to their halls.
Some were Finders who fled when they learned of Lisette's takeover, either loyal to the Shrouded Lord and the priests or simply unwilling to follow a woman they clearly remembered as unstable. Others were members of the Guild who'd simply happened to be out that night, and who, though they'd been willing to follow
Lisette while she was here, were wise enough keep their heads down and ride out this new change in regime as they had the last. A few had even been present during the raid but managed to remain hidden from even the most meticulous searches.
So, disturbingly quiet, yes, but it meant that when the nearest hall went completely silent, when sound ceased trickling around the partly open door to the chapel, Igraine noticed swiftly enough.
I suppose I should have expected this.
The priestess concluded her prayer, then stood from vaguely aching knees and turned, facing the door and placing her back to the effigy of the Shrouded God. Idly wishing that she had a pistol or a larger blade on her person, she slid a thick-bladed dagger from its sheath.
“I know you're here!” she called.
It obliged her by appearing in the doorway, and for all her bravado, Igraine couldn't repress a shudder as she pressed herself tight against the cold stone of her god. It was gaunt, painfully so, and taller even than the idol, which was itself slightly larger than a big man. Shadow clung to it in rags, ignoring the efforts of the chapel's lanterns. She could make out little, save that its limbs were gangly, diaphanous wings buzzed at its back, and its facial features consisted solely of a pair of glinting, faceted eyes.
And given that shudder, she could never be certain, but she'd have sworn the statue at her back also quivered a bit at the thing's approach.
Not one of the creatures that made its presence known at Widdershins's capture, according to the story as she'd told it, but “Gloaming Court” wasn't precisely a difficult conclusion to reach.
Clicking and chittering, it advanced on her, though she noted on two separate occasions that it hesitated in mid-step. Only for a fraction of a second, almost unobservable, but definite.
“You don't like being in here with the idol, do you?” she asked, just a hint of taunting peppering her words. It buzzed something in reply and came on once more. Only a few steps away, now.
“I live by my faith,” she continued, struggling to meet its terrible, cracked gaze. “I have faith, for instance, that he will guide me, prevent me from looking where I must not.”
A narrow, serrated limb stretched toward her. Still she hadn't so much as raised her dagger in defense.
“And that his curse, though meant for mortals, isn't something you can just ignore. Shall we see?”
Inches from the fae creature's grasp, Igraine reached up and yanked the hood from the idol of the Shrouded Lord.
Evrard d'Arras fell backward, tumbling awkwardly over the carpet. The ragged gashes in his cheek and his shoulder left a smeared trail of blood across the weave. It looked like a child's art project, compared to the delicate footprints, also a wet crimson, that had stained that carpet moments before.
He coughed, wincing as a ripping pain ran across his face. One hand on the wall, the other using a rapier as a cane, he forced himself to his feet. Not good for the blade, that, but given how horribly marred and scratched up it had become over the past few minutes, it hardly mattered.
Heralded by a gust of floral-scented air, she emerged from the hallway. Lithe, graceful, with hair of autumn, wardrobe of leaves, eyes of bark, and fingers of thorns. She laughed, and it was the airy rustling of wind through the branches.
Through the windows, thunder roared its deep counterpoint.
“At least tell me,” Evrard gasped, “that I get the most beautiful of you because I'm particularly worth it.”
Those rose-stem digits struck, wrapped around the sword he'd barely raised in time to parry, digging more creases into the steel. Skilled duelist as he was, he didn't even try to riposte; he knew from personal and painful experience that a normal blade would barely even inconvenience the creature.
Time for other options.
When those tendrils withdrew again, preparing for a new attack, he hurled the rapier along with them. By no means harmful, of course, but it startled her into retreating half a step. That extra instant was enough time for Evrard to reach the rack of swords he'd been steering them toward with every fall, every backstep.
The weapon he drew from it was too thick to qualify as a rapier; perhaps a particularly long and slender arming sword.
Even stranger, however, was the dull hue of the blade—very much not the glint of steel.
“Had this custom forged,” he told her, pausing to wipe blood from his lips, “after our little spat with Iruoch last year.”
The creature's hiss at the mention of that name was a cracking branch, slowed to a drawn-out breath.
“So yes, that is holy scripture etched down the blood groove. And yes, it's iron. Pure.”
He swung through a few muscle-loosening arcs, then dropped into an expert defensive stance. “Now…shall we try this again?”
The soaking rain transformed cinder and charred wood into thick paste, clinging to shoes or mixing with the mud in a distasteful slurry. Choked with soot, the rivulets running over the wooden skeleton—the portions of it still standing—came over black in the light of the overcast moon and streetlamps.
So thickly had they permeated the property over the years, the aromas of roasting meats and pungent alcohols remained detectable even over the much stronger, crisper stench of the more recent fire.
“We'll rebuild?” Robin asked for the hundredth time, forcing the words out between sniffles and slow, erratic steps.
Faustine, her arm already around her lover's waist, supporting her as she limped through the ruin of the Flippant Witch, squeezed Robin more closely to her. “Of course. You heard what Shins said. It'll be better than it was!”
“But it won't be the same!”
“No.” Faustine turned Robin so she could hug her with both arms, now. They gazed at one another, bedraggled, shivering, drenched to the bone and hair plastered flat by the rain, until they pulled themselves tightly together. “No, love, it won't. But nothing ever really is.”
Robin sniffled again in response but nodded against the other woman's shoulder.
At the far edge of the seared property, Shins waited, arms wrapped around herself, staring intently at nothing. It seemed awfully considerate of her, giving the young couple a few moments of privacy, but the truth was she'd almost forgotten they were there, forgotten where she herself was.
As much of her heart as the Witch occupied, she was currently deep in discussion about something far more important. Unlike her two friends nearby, when she shivered, it had nothing to do with the temperature.
“…course I don't want to!” It shouldn't have been possible for her to shout under her breath, but she'd been talking that way long enough to learn the tricks. “Gods, Olgun, you're a part of me! It's like asking me to give up my sense of humor, or my lungs, or…I don't know, any knowledge or memory of anything that starts with a vowel.
“But you…” She welcomed the rain, not so that it would hide any tears from Robin, or even Olgun, but because it provided an excuse for her to deny them herself. “We've been lucky these last few years, and we both know it. If something happens to me…. Oh, stop that! It's absolutely possible! Just last week, if Renard and Igraine hadn't shown up…” She squeezed herself tighter, until her ribs creaked.
“I don't want anything to happen to you. I'm supposed to die eventually. I mean, not for a while or anything, yes? Eventually, though. But you? You're supposed to go on. You're supposed to have forever. I don't…you can't lose that. I can't…” So much for pretending she retained any composure whatsoever; her sobs nearly doubled her over. “I can't be the reason you lose that.
“We've been talking about this since it all started. We knew it had to happen.” Each syllable was an effort, one she could barely stand. Her throat was so tight she'd almost have wondered if Olgun were doing something to her, trying to keep her from speaking, if she didn't know him so much better than that. “I need to do this. For you! I need to go to Sicard and—”
It all replayed before her, as clear and clean as when it happened. In a span of seconds, she rel
ived every good moment of her life with Olgun. Every triumph, every joy. Every comfort.
All followed by an aching loneliness such as she'd never known, vaster than the gulfs between the stars of the night sky.
He was willing to risk death itself—an immortal willing to relinquish at least one hand from his grip on eternity—to stay with her.
It was too much, too overwhelming. Something inside her melted. “Of course you'd feel that way now,” she sobbed, “but in ten years? A hundred? A thousand?”
If anything, his grip grew tighter. She felt him entwined with her memories and dreams, wrapped around her soul. And despite her tears and her certainty, she couldn't help but shake her head and smile.
“All right, all right! No decisions for now. We'll take our time. I won't break up the team just yet.”
Her grin widened at the surge of joy that bubbled up inside her. “Or maybe I should say I won't kick you out of the nest yet. Big baby.” She laughed aloud—something she had wondered, mere moments ago, if she would ever do again—at the expression she felt him make.
Behind her, two feminine voices cleared their throats in unison, barely audible over the rain.
“How long have you two been there?” she demanded, blushing faintly.
Robin stepped forward and offered her friend a short hug from behind. “Long enough to know you're upset. What's wrong?”
“Nothing.” Widdershins turned, making this a proper embrace—and then, after only a moment's hesitation, held out one hand for Faustine to join them. “Nothing's wrong.” They stood, the three of them, by the grave of the old Flippant Witch and, they swore, the cradle of the new, each drawing support from the other.
“Okay, enough of that!” Shins finally declared, stepping back from the others with an obviously false scowl. “We don't need to spend all night here. I'm pretty sure if I get any wetter I'm going to sprout gills. Tomorrow, or whenever the rain stops, we'll come back and start trying to figure out—”