Careless, so careless. Corban hadn’t bothered to tie the man before beginning his circles of charcoal and chalk. Hadn’t even thought to search for weapons. He’d just assumed, stupidly, that the man’s ale stupor would be restraint enough.
It hadn’t been, of course.
The dogs gathered in silent, staring circles whenever Corban began a new ritual. They assembled for the drunk as they had gathered for each other. The man woke in a ring of their green-glowing eyes.
Perhaps it was the dogs that unnerved him, or perhaps he saw something in those scribbled runes that told him what lay ahead. Whatever it was, the drunk had an escape hidden in the top of his boot, and he used it.
By the time Corban finished drawing the sigils and went to fetch his guest, the corpse was already cooling. Runnels of blood ran from his wrists to the sea.
Corban left the body there. He thought the dogs would eat it, but they never did. It was still sprawled on the pier, fat with gas, when he brought the next man down.
The second time he made no mistakes.
He remembered it with a hurting kind of bliss, as a starving man might remember the last grand feast of his life. The moments after the end of that ritual had been so sweetly free from pain. It was better than the respite the first dog had given him, if only because his suffering had been so much worse. For those few hours, Corban believed that he’d broken the curse’s hold on him, that having made the ultimate sacrifice of another human being, he was truly, gloriously free.
But it was, again, a lie.
Too soon, the pain crept back, reclaiming his body inch by inch. The old gray scars on his hands throbbed. His teeth ached; his eyes felt swollen, too big for their sockets. Maddening prickles ran up and down his legs, jabbing him out of sleep.
Corban knew then that there would be no escape. Not through dogs, not through men. Not for him. Even the path his first victim had taken was closed to him. He’d tried.
So he had sought a third drunk. One last sacrifice.
And it was working, in a small and limited way. The tide of confusion that smothered his mind was … not gone, but receded. Enough that he could piece together these scattered memories, at least. Enough that he could think, and act. Barely. The fiend that tormented him had relaxed its grip just slightly, allowing him enough sanity to carry out the rite.
Corban no longer doubted that the fiend existed. He didn’t know what it was—god, curse, or malevolent shade—and he didn’t know why it was torturing him, but he knew that it was there, goading him with pain and luring him with promises of relief. Pulling him into perdition.
Gethel was wrong. No saboteur had laid a curse on the blackfire stone, and there was no way to purify it. The blackfire stone was the curse.
Gaping holes riddled his memory, yet Corban could still look back and see scattered events, stepping-stones on his path to damnation. The smoke he’d breathed in Carden Vale, the scratches he’d taken from the packing straw, the rats … each one dragging him a little deeper, each one eroding the foundations of his life until he had nothing left to stand on and was flailing, drowning, spinning into the void …
He’d tried to stop it. He had. But Corban was only human, and whatever plagued him was not.
Stopping it was beyond him. It had probably been beyond the man he was; it was certainly beyond what he’d become. He could try to slow it, though.
He had to do it now. Before the tide came rushing back. This was the best, perhaps the last chance he’d have; any respite Corban might earn by giving up another damned soul would be feebler and more fleeting than this one. The magic would answer—whatever god or demon had accepted his gifts was bound by the laws of sacrifice, and had to answer his prayers if he paid in blood—but it might come too weak or misshapen to do him any good.
The drunk was mumbling. Confused. He didn’t yet realize where he was, or why. Soon enough, he would.
Corban picked up his knife, gathered his worn lumps of charcoal and chalk, and began.
WHEN IT WAS OVER HE WALKED toward the ladder, splashing through the foul-smelling effluvium of his long stay in the cellar. The dogs watched him with incurious eyes. They had their own ritual to attend. Surrounding the bloodied drunk in a circle as united in purpose as it was disparate in appearance, the dogs waited for him to stir. At the first sign of his awakening, they closed in, lapping his wounds clean like so many mothers washing birth fluids from a monstrous, two-legged puppy.
Corban hurried past them. He’d seen the dogs’ rite once before, and it had disturbed him profoundly—not only for its ugly parody of birth, but because of the animals’ unnatural unity. The intelligence that guided them was not their own. A single will shone in their eyes, and it terrified him. He had put it there.
But it was, for the moment, distracted … and that gave Corban his chance.
The gate of bones stood silent behind the cellar’s ladder: a hanging pit framed in a wreath of stark white hands. Its very stillness frightened him. No sheet of polished stone was ever so lifeless. Onyx or obsidian misted with the viewer’s breath, shifted its reflections as the world around it moved. Even the vastness of a starless night was less implacable than the darkness of that gate, for the sky was graced with clouds and moon and the awareness, however remote, that under it living things walked and sang and bled.
The gate admitted no such possibilities. Corban’s mind tottered under the finality of its gaze.
It was from this place that the doom of Duradh Mal had come. He’d been a fool to give it a window from which to escape—but, he thought, that window could be closed.
Corban grabbed one of the fleshless arms. A sucking cold brushed across his fingers: an unreal wind pulling him into the abyss. Quickly, before his sanity and courage could desert him, he yanked the bones off the wall.
The arm came free in a tumble of cracking mortar. The yawning void of the gate vanished like a pricked bubble, leaving a ragged hole in the wall. Dirt on the other side. Just dirt. Before Corban could catch his breath in relief, something struck him from behind, growling furiously as it knocked him to the ground.
Dogs. The dogs were on him. Snapping fangs, heavy paws, a flurry of rank-smelling fur. A dewclaw gouged his cheek as a mastiff trampled his face. One butterfly-eared lapdog locked its teeth into his foot, ripping through his rotted boot and biting off his toes.
But they were too late. The gate was broken, the arms stripped of whatever magic had let them latch onto the wall. Reduced to inert bone again, they were falling off the bricks like empty cicada shells toppling from tree trunks.
He’d won. The gate was gone. It was gone … and the demon that rode him remained. Corban closed his eyes, laughing and weeping, as the dogs tore into him.
26
On the night that Bitharn came for her, a storm rolled in from the sea, smothering the moon and casting the city into rain-drowned gloom. By midnight it had not lifted. Asharre lay on her pallet and looked out to a city that shivered under a sky cold and wet and grim. Even Heaven’s Needle seemed pallid under those leaden clouds.
She hadn’t slept. A peculiar alertness had suffused her since sundown. The sigrir felt every current in the air, every thread in the rough wool blankets pressed against her skin. It was the same acute awareness, at once attuned to her immediate surroundings and strangely remote from her own body, that came over her before battle. Her heartbeat was a steady drum, calling her to a dance that was about to begin.
It did not surprise Asharre when Bitharn knocked. She had been expecting the signal, or something like it, for hours; even before opening the door, she knew Bitharn had come to summon her to the hunt. The sigrir rose, swept on her cloak and swordbelt, and stepped outside. She carried Aurandane, not her own caractan. Her weapon was an old familiar friend, but it would not serve tonight.
“The Thorn has found Corban,” Bitharn said, slightly breathless. Under her hood, her cheeks were flushed from cold and exertion. Her rain-sodden cloak dripped a puddled circle around her f
eet.
“Where?” Asharre asked.
“Near the docks. He wouldn’t tell us more than that. We’re to meet him in the Illuminers’ safehouse on the Street of Little Flowers. Kelland should already be there.”
Asharre nodded, raised her hood, and followed the younger woman from the temple into the storm.
Outside the sweeping dark fell upon them, whipping them into silence with lashes of wind and rain. Asharre pulled her cloak tight, huddling against the deluge and narrowing her focus to Bitharn’s boots splashing across the cobblestones two steps ahead.
The city was empty in the storm. Half-blinded by the sleeting drops, with her only companion a faceless wraith ahead, it was all too easy for Asharre to imagine that she was back in Carden Vale—or, worse, walking through a vision of what Cailan might become if they failed.
The streets would run red first, though. And the conflagration that would consume the city before it settled into the silence of ashes was a horror Asharre did not want to imagine. She closed her mind’s eye to it, concentrating instead on the weight of the rain on her cloak, the slippery cobblestones underfoot, the wail of wind over stone-tiled roofs.
It was almost a surprise when they came to the safehouse. The Street of Little Flowers, named for the cheap brothels that lined it, was one of the rowdiest parts of Cailan. Sailors and dockworkers stumbled through it at all hours, drunk or on their way there, while bawds called enticements and footpads stalked them in the alleys. Tonight, however, that endless game of chaser-and-chased had been pushed indoors. The glow of firelight through the brothels’ rain-drummed windows, accompanied by snatches of rowdy song, suggested that the merriment continued there—but the street itself was desolate.
The safehouse, which ordinarily stood out like a maiden aunt at a drunken revel, was just another house shuttered against the storm tonight. Curlicued ironwork barred its windows, and salt-poisoned rosevines clung feebly to the trellis over its door, suggesting a certain gentility, or at least an attempt at it, in an environment utterly unforgiving of such graces.
The door opened to a musty-smelling sitting room carpeted in drifts of cat fur. Scented candles dotted the tables and alcoves between the windows, adding a layer of cloying sweetness to the stuffy air and giving just enough light to outline the two people who sat waiting for them inside: Kelland, trying without success to pick cat hairs off his trousers, and a sleek-haired older lady who knitted deftly in the near-dark. A fat dowager cat sprawled in the woman’s lap, twitching its ears to the click of her needles without opening an eye. Another sat on the back of her chair, and a third paced sinuously around Kelland’s boots, weaving its body through an endless double loop.
“Homey.” Bitharn swatted at a puff of cat hair on a chair, then made a face when it stuck to her wet hand.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Kelland said. “We aren’t staying long. As soon as Asharre is disguised, we’ll go to meet the Thorn.”
Bitharn looked up, surprised. “I thought we were meeting him here.”
“Good. You were meant to … as was Malentir. In truth, it was a bit of hair-splitting. We, meaning the three of us, are meeting here. We’ll meet him near the brothel across the way.”
Bitharn’s nose wrinkled. “Coisette’s? That place is a snake pit.”
“Hardly fair to the snakes. But yes, it’s a den of degenerates and dreamflower addicts—and, as it happens, our upstairs windows have an excellent view of its doors. I can think of worse ways for a Thorn to occupy his time than trying to ferret out which of Coisette’s patrons are secretly Celestians.
“Whether or not he chooses to spy on Coisette’s guests, however, he won’t know where the real safehouse is. And,” Kelland added, as the old woman put away her knitting and removed a case of tiny bottles and brushes buried in her yarn basket, “we won’t have to rely on him to disguise us tonight. I expect he’ll want us to wear the faces of the dead, and while I can see the wisdom in hiding ourselves from Corban as long as possible, I don’t see any reason we should resort to bloodmagic to do it. Our disguises will be simpler things. Hooded cloaks for the two of us. A little more for Asharre.”
He gave the sigrir an apologetic shrug. “No other woman in Cailan looks like you. I don’t know that Corban truly has any sentries guarding his lair—if he did, I’d like to think we would have found them—but there’s no reason to chance being spotted early.”
The old woman set her case on a stool near Asharre and clicked it open. The sigrir looked into it curiously. She’d heard a little about the sisters who lived here from Oralia. In their younger years, both sisters had practiced on the Avenue of Camellias, where they’d learned the arts of paint and powder from an Amrali-trained courtesan. They could turn a toothless drab into a beauty, or a handsome youth into a wart-covered fright. As Oralia told it, when they were finished with a man, his own dog might not recognize its master.
After surveying Asharre with a critical eye, the woman clicked her tongue, nodded, and reached into the case. “You’ll make an easy man,” she said. “A big full beard to cover some of those scars on your face, an old case of pox to explain away the rest … yes, you’re an easy one. Hold still.” She dabbed a strong-smelling glue on Asharre’s face, covering each daub with a pinch of coarse reddish hair.
“You don’t need better light?” Asharre asked.
“Hush. No talking, unless you want your new face put on crooked. There, now …” She chuckled softly as she worked. “Weak light suits these old eyes well enough. It lets me see you as the man I’ll make you, not as whoever you are … and you’ll not be wearing this face to one of Lord Gildorath’s galas, will you? The eyes that see you will have no better light than this. It’s the outlines that need to be strong tonight, not the details.”
Asharre had her doubts about that, but she held her tongue. After finishing the beard, the old woman mixed a thick putty and applied it to the sigrir’s brow and upper cheeks, filling in some of the scarred runes while emphasizing the ridges of others. When she finished, Kelland stood, pulling his cloak’s hood over the white shells in his hair. Gloves covered his dark hands, and the sun-marked hilt of his sword was wrapped in nondescript leather.
Bitharn had watched Asharre’s transformation curiously, but waved off any suggestion that she should wear the same. “Paint never suited me,” the girl said, wrapping her damp cloak around her shoulders. She checked the watertight case that held her bowstrings, fastened an oilcloth cap over her quiver, and led the way out of the safehouse.
The storm’s fury had not abated during the hours they’d spent inside. Cascading water foamed across the cobblestones, running so strong in places that it threatened to sweep Asharre’s feet from under her. She trudged through it stolidly, splashing across the street until she reached the brothel’s door.
Inside Coisette’s, all was eye-watering smoke and oniony fish stew and the raucous, desperate laughter of the damned. Drunk bawds swayed on the laps of drunker patrons, and although the dingy torchlight made Asharre a convincing man, it could not hide the exhaustion under those painted smiles. The sigrir sat at the periphery of a dice game, halfheartedly losing money, until a persistent tap at the window put an end to her purse’s slow bleed.
It was a sparrow. A little brown sparrow, eyes glossy with rainwater and death.
She had to remember to breathe. The sight of the bird had stunned her with remorse, resentment, rage—all the things knotted around her old grief. All the things she couldn’t afford to show, couldn’t afford to feel.
Asharre inhaled. Exhaled, striving for control.
“That is a truly unfortunate beard,” Malentir said a moment later, sliding into an empty chair at the dice game. He wore another face, but Asharre knew it was the Thorn; his black eyes were too cold to be human, and the other men at the table muttered and moved away from him, troubled by the new arrival without quite knowing why.
“We thought it best to surprise our host.” The dice cup had come around to her ag
ain. Asharre gave it a shake and tossed the dice, watching them tumble with suddenly intense interest. The spinning pips meant nothing to her, but they were safer to look at than the Thorn.
“Oh, I agree,” Malentir said. He lifted a hand. Silver and glass gleamed in his sleeve: three tiny bottles tethered to his wire bracelet by delicate silver chains. “I would have offered a solution, but I see the knight found his own. It was his suggestion, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” And the purpose of that disguise, Asharre realized, was less to deceive Corban than to send a message to the Thorn: the Celestians refused to depend on his magic, or accede to his methods. He had, clearly, taken in their meaning at a glance.
The other players were drifting away, too unsettled by Malentir’s presence to keep their minds on the dice. Kelland and Bitharn took the chairs they vacated.
“Have you learned more?” the knight asked quietly. His words were nearly inaudible in the clamor that filled Coisette’s. Asharre pulled her own chair closer and passed the dice cup to Bitharn.
“Nothing worthwhile. Corban has at least one victim’s corpse lying in his lair. The restless shade led me to him. It was, regrettably, of little use beyond that; less is left of that poor soul’s mind than those of the maelgloth penned in Duradh Mal. I know where Corban hides, but little else.”
“That’ll have to be enough, then,” Bitharn said, plucking at her cloak with a sigh. She checked her lantern, ensuring its flame was steady before she started toward the door. “Pity it couldn’t be closer. I’m exceedingly tired of getting wet.”
Once more they ventured into the storm. Curtains of black rain billowed over the narrow roofs and blotted out the moon. The streets were rain-dimpled rivers, foaming white where they came down steep inclines.
Through this Asharre trudged with her hood pulled low and dripping past her chin. Bitharn and Kelland were blurs in the rain beside her, Malentir another ahead. None spoke. The storm drowned speech as surely as light, and they made their way in silence broken only by the hammering hiss of rain and the far-off boom of thunder over the sea.
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