Midwinter 02: The Office of Shadow

by Matthew Sturges

  The villa was dark when they arrived. Odd, since the evening wasn't that far gone, but not worrisome; they were three days late, after all.

  The villa was a great pile of moss-covered stone set amid a stand of willow trees. An old rope swing hung from a willow branch in the wide, walled-in front garden. In the stable next to the house, horses quietly whickered at their approach.

  Silverdun led the way through the gate and up to the house. He knocked. Receiving no answer, he knocked again, louder.

  "What do we do?" asked Sela.

  "Perhaps Virum doesn't want to take any chance of being seen with us that he doesn't have to."

  Silverdun tried the door and found it unlocked. They went inside. There was no one to be seen.

  The house was elegantly decorated; thick damask curtains hung over the windows, and the furniture was plush and well crafted. Timha spied a soft divan in a parlor off the entryway and slouched toward it. Silverdun raised a bit of blue witchlight, looking for a lamp.

  "Hello, Journeyer Timha," came an oily voice from the parlor. "So lovely to see you again." A tall, thin figure dressed entirely in black stepped out of the shadows and swiped at Timha's throat. Blood spattered purple in the witchlight, and Timha fell to the floor, gasping.

  The slim figure stepped into Silverdun's light. It was Bel Zheret. Another appeared on the stairwell, and another materialized out of the darkness of the hallway. Each of them held a long, serrated knife.

  "You are the Shadows, yes?" said the one in the parlor. His knife was smeared with Timha's blood. Before Silverdun could react, he said, "Hold a moment, won't you? We have no wish for further violence."

  Silverdun stopped, knife in hand. No one moved. From everything Paet had told them about the Bel Zheret, a fight in close quarters could well be suicide.

  "What do you want?" said Silverdun. "Other than murdering poor Timha."

  "I am called Asp," said the Bel Zheret in the parlor. "My colleague on the stairs is Dog, and in the hallway is my dear old friend, my boon companion, Cat."

  "Lovely meeting you," said Silverdun. "Again, what do you want?"

  "We Bel Zheret take our promises very seriously," said Asp. "It's in our nature, you see. We were lovingly crafted by Mab to be loyal, honest, and most of all, reliable. I made a promise that I would kill Timha if he failed his queen, and I am unable-constitutionally unable, mind you-to ignore that oath. Surely you can understand."

  "Of course," said Silverdun. "A promise is a promise, after all."

  "Now," said Asp. "As I'm sure my old acquaintance Paet has informed you, you Shadows are woefully inadequate to the task of defeating us in combat. He probably told you to flee us on sight, as he did us, back in Annwn."

  "Tell me," said Cat. "Does he still walk with a cane?"

  Silverdun felt an odd sensation. He turned to face Sela, saw her glancing at him. She was pressing against him with her Empathy. He dropped his guard and let her in, much as it pained him to do so. He allowed her access to him, and immediately regretted it. The remorse and sense of loss was palpable; it washed over him, draining what little hope he had of escaping this confrontation alive.

  "He does, in fact," said Silverdun. "It's a jaunty thing, too. Head in the shape of a duck."

  He felt a thought forming in his mind. I can stop then. It was less a statement than a collection of emotions: aggression, confidence, concentration. But the intent was clear. Then came worry, concern. You and Ironfoot must be out of the way. She looked down at the band around her arm. Frustration, impotence. Make this go away.

  And fear: Run.

  "Well, here's a proposition for you," said Asp. "We've been here waiting for you for a few days, and it's given us a chance to talk and think about things, reminisce over old acquaintances.

  "It also gave us time to nibble on that priest Virum. And my, was he tasty."

  Both Paet and Sela had been cagey about exactly what purpose Sela's armband served. It was a restraining band-that much was obvious. They were generally used to bind prisoners with Gifts, to render them reitically harmless. Sela was already a powerful Empath. What would happen if she removed the band? He wasn't sure he wanted to find out, and he certainly didn't want to be connected to her when it happened.

  "So we decided on a fun compromise," Asp continued. "You came all this way for poor Timha, and you didn't get him, so I don't see that letting you go could do much harm. So we'll just take one of you, and let the other two go free. On the assumption that if we were to fight, there's some chance that you might kill at least one of us. I think that's a very good bargain."

  Silverdun glanced quickly over at Ironfoot, who nodded. He was connected with Sela as well.

  Asp frowned. "Please tell me you're not planning some kind of secretive maneuver," he said. "It's just going to get you all killed."

  "Fine," said Silverdun. "You can have the woman."

  "What?" said Sela, looking at him in horror. Had he misunderstood her? Or was she simply playing the part? Her connection to him vanished before he could sense the answer.

  "Oh," said Asp. "Well, that's lovely! I honestly didn't think you were going to agree. All that Fae propriety and so forth."

  "We Shadows have no use for propriety," said Ironfoot. "They leached it out of us, just as your masters did to you."

  "Not quite," said Asp. "We never had any to begin with."

  "So, we give you the woman, and you let us leave?" said Silverdun.

  "Why, I suppose so!" said Asp, seemingly delighted.

  "Then come along, Ironfoot," said Silverdun.

  "But the next time we see each other," said Asp. "I wouldn't expect any such bargain."

  "Understood," said Silverdun. He and Ironfoot backed slowly toward the door. Sela looked at him, forlorn, empty.

  At the doorway, Silverdun stopped and said, "I'm so sorry, Sela." He stepped toward the door, raised his hand as if to bind the witchlight in the room to keep it lit, but instead channeled Elements, and dissolved the silver lining around the iron band on Sela's arm. He heard it clatter to the floor, heard Sela shriek.

  The world exploded with light. Not actual light, like the witchlight that Silverdun had conjured in Preyia. Something else: an illumination of reality that separated and defined everything in Silverdun's vision: each blade of grass, each willow, each stone on the garden path. He and Ironfoot ran, and when he looked at Ironfoot, he saw a being of light, a superimposition of bone and blood and flesh and something else, a column of white entangled in a web of blackness. That web, he knew, was in him as well. It was what made him a Shadow, he realized with total certainty. The pit that Jedron had thrown them in, the pool of blackness. It was in them and around them and it had somehow become them.

  A sound came from the house that Silverdun had never heard before. A howl-no, a pair of howls-rising shrilly into the night sky, a sound of infinite pain, infinite horror.

  Reality shifted back to its normal state. The front door to the house slammed open, and one of the Bel Zheret, Asp, lurched out of the front door, lunging at Ironfoot.

  "Monsters!" he screamed, tackling Ironfoot. The two of them went down in a tangle. "She killed them! She took them! You are all monsters!"

  The Bel Zheret was stronger by far than Ironfoot, who was still recovering from his close call with Timha on the ledge. All for nothing, Silverdun realized. He ran and kicked Asp in the stomach as hard as he could.

  Which, it turned out, was harder than he imagined. The Shadow strength flowed through him. The Bel Zheret flew off of Ironfoot and slammed into a nearby willow trunk, his knife clattering from his hand. Silverdun pursued him.

  With astonishing speed, Asp righted himself and met Silverdun's approach. He grasped Silverdun by the throat and hammered him with his fist, in the solar plexus, driving Silverdun's breath out of his chest and knocking him backward. The force of the impact twisted Silverdun's neck in Asp's iron grip, and it felt as though his throat was about to split open with the strain.

  He hi
t back, his dagger still in hand, slashing across the Bel Zheret's belly, drawing blood that came out black in the dim moonlight. Asp barely seemed to notice. He shoved Silverdun to the ground and stomped on Silverdun's ribs. Silverdun tried to catch his breath, and couldn't. Spots appeared and wavered in his eyes. He felt Asp snap his wrist, prying the dagger out of it. Felt teeth on his throat. Felt the percussive damage of fists on his face, in his groin. He swam toward consciousness but felt himself slipping deeper and deeper into the darkness.

  He looked up and saw Ironfoot standing over Asp, holding Asp's own knife, reaching it around to slit the Bel Zheret's throat, just as Jedron had taught them: the certain kill.

  But it was too late. Asp already had Silverdun's knife and was digging it upward through Silverdun's belly, twisting it, angling it, plunging it into his heart.

  Ironfoot slit the Bel Zheret's throat, and it fell over Silverdun.

  "Silverdun!" Ironfoot shouted. He yanked the Bel Zheret's body off of Silverdun and hurled it at a tree. It was dead, its eyes blank, its black blood running out onto the lawn.

  Ironfoot looked back at Silverdun. He wasn't moving. His eyes were closed. There was no breath.

  Silverdun was dead.

  Ironfoot heard sobs coming from the door of the villa. Sela!

  He ran into the house and saw Sela, alone, on the floor of the entryway, weeping. The other two Bel Zheret were nowhere to be seen. Sela was holding the iron band up on her arm; he could see that the bare iron was burning her skin, and that it was a severe effort for her to hold it on.

  Ironfoot was no Master of Elements by any stretch of the imagination, but he could manage a simple shaping.

  "Give me the band," he said. "I can resilver it."

  "No!" she shrieked. "You can't remove it. Can't! Can't! Not ever again!"

  "Okay, okay," said Ironfoot. She was hysterical, her eyes crazy and wandering.

  Ironfoot held up the Bel Zheret's long knife; its blade was of hardened silver. He touched the knife's edge to the iron band. The band repelled it with a force like magnetism. He had to push the blade onto the band. It dug into Sela's arm and she shrieked, pulling away.

  "Hold still, dammit!" he shouted.

  "It hurts!"

  "I know it hurts; if you'll hold still, I can stop it."

  He channeled Elements into the silver of the dagger and pushed hard against it, flowing it off the blade and onto the iron band. He'd never worked with iron, and realized that he didn't know the binding that compelled it to bond with the silver coating. He channeled Insight into the binding on the knife and saw that it was not particularly complicated. So he simply copied the binding from the dagger and placed something similar on the band, wrapping it around the silver coating. The binding took hold, thankfully, and the silver coating stuck onto the band. It was by no means pretty, but it worked. He tossed the dagger aside, and Sela collapsed in his arms.

  "Sela, what did you do to them?" he asked, bewildered.

  "I showed them things as they truly are," she answered, her voice thick. "It's okay. They're not real." She closed her eyes and slumped against him.

  Ironfoot had never felt so alone in all his life.

  Ironfoot didn't sleep that night; he sat watching Sela sleep, wondering whether more Bel Zheret were on their way. He was too tired to care.

  When Sela awoke it was morning. Ironfoot told her about Silverdun, and she broke down all over again. She knelt next to his body, weeping, which was exactly what Ironfoot felt like doing.

  "We have to go," he told her after a while.

  "I know," she said, gathering herself. "We have to bury Silverdun first, though."

  "No," said Ironfoot. "We're taking him with us."

  "I don't think that's a good idea," she said. "He's dead; he doesn't care where he's buried."

  "That's not it," said Ironfoot. "Paet insisted that if one of us died, we were to return the body. If the Unseelie find him"-he nodded toward the dead Bel Zheret-"they can use the Black Art to find out everything he knows."

  "Oh," said Sela.

  She stood. "I'm going to look inside the villa for some proper clothes," she said. "Clearly a lady lives here, or lived here." She disappeared into the house.

  Ironfoot looked down at Silverdun. "Sorry, friend," he said.

  They wrapped Silverdun's body in a rug. Ironfoot fed and bridled the two strongest-looking horses in the stable, and tied Silverdun to the back of the saddle. He placed an inexpert glamour on the awkward bundle to make it look like a saddle roll, but it would only pass the most cursory of inspections.

  They found hard bread in the pantry of the villa and ate a sullen breakfast. On the way out of the house, Ironfoot stopped and looked down at Timha's corpse, at his dead eyes staring blankly.

  "Some help you were," he said. He patted the leather satchel that he still wore. "But at least I got your plans, you bastard."

  Something glinted in a corner. It was one of the Bel Zheret's long serrated knives. Its owner wouldn't miss it, so Ironfoot took it and put it in his belt.

  They mounted without speaking and rode away, to the south, toward the Seelie Lands.

  Elenth was one of only three Unseelie cities on the ground. There were few places in Mab's territory that would support permanent structures, and even those in Elenth were squat and sturdily built against the quakes in the nearby mountains. To the south of the city they rode up the side of the valley and found themselves in a thick forest.

  "If we keep heading this direction, we'll hit the border tomorrow evening," Ironfoot said. "Of course, I have no idea what we'll run into along the way, since that was Virum's job."

  Sela said nothing, only nodded glumly. She would be worse than useless if there was more fighting.

  The wood stretched on for miles and miles, relatively flat and not particularly thick. The going wasn't easy, but they were able to maintain a steady walk throughout.

  Near the end of the first day, Ironfoot looked ahead and saw a break in the trees ahead. A road? Something was moving past, something huge. He waved for Sela to stop her horse and listened. A regular rhythm. Soldiers on the march.

  Ironfoot dismounted and waved for Sela to remain where she was. She didn't respond. He looped his reins over a nearby branch and crept toward the road, using all the skills of silence that Jedron had taught him, which were enhanced by his changed body. He reached the edge of the road and crouched carefully, watching.

  Company upon company of soldiers, grizzled veterans and fresh recruits alike, were moving toward the southwest. Toward Wamarnest, the city closest to the Seelie border, where cavalry had been drilling for months.

  War was coming, and soon.

  But there was a more immediate problem. The few border crossings would now be more closely guarded than ever. The Border Wall stretched across most of the length of the border; it had been created during a long-ago treaty, and maintained by both sides ever since. It was composed of interlocking bindings, one Seelie, one Unseelie, and was impossible to cross from either side. Presumably Virum had known of a secret crossing, one of the spots where the resonance from Shifting Places of the nearby Contested Lands created soft spots in the Border Wall. These were all guarded, but from time to time new ones cropped up. The problem was that Ironfoot had no idea where Virum's soft spot was located.

  Once the column of soldiers had passed, he returned to Sela and they continued, hurrying across the road and back into the forest. That night they camped without a fire, eating berries and nuts and the last of the stale bread they'd taken from the villa.

  The next morning they continued their ride. They must have made good time, because the sun was still well above the western horizon when they ran into the Border Wall. Ironfoot dismounted and examined it. It was merely a low stone wall, nothing particularly imposing, though runes were scattered across its surface. He put his hand out to reach across, and met with resistance. He pushed his hand farther and the resistance grew stronger. A little farther and the resis
tance became physically painful. He quickly withdrew. There would be no crossing here.

  They followed the Border Wall to the southwest, where hopefully he could find a border crossing that wasn't too crowded. He had no idea what he'd do when he found one, but there wasn't much of a choice. Every step they took to the southwest, though, took them closer to the remains of Selafae, and Sylvan beyond.

  Near sunset, they came upon a group of soldiers stationed along a length of the wall. Not particularly attentive soldiers, since they had yet to notice the two riders approaching them, and not a true crossing, simply a soft place. That was a lucky break. Ironfoot counted ten soldiers, however, and that was less lucky.