There Will Come a Darkness

by Katy Rose Pool

  His breath caught in his throat. The esha thrummed, so distinct from those of the myriad of buzzing people around him. He could almost taste it, like the air before a thunderstorm. It felt somehow familiar. Except Anton was absolutely certain he’d never felt it before.

  Without knowing quite what he was doing, he pushed past Ephyra and burst through the door into the hot morning sun.

  “Hey!” Ephyra’s shout was faint behind him. “Where are you going?”

  He squinted in the light, briefly glancing around at the street before setting off at a furious clip. He flew past apothecaries displaying bright amber tinctures and tackle shops with fishmongers proudly offering the catch of the day, and wove alongside merchants, sailors, and tourists come to see the once-great City of Faith.

  All around, the buzz of esha mingled together, a low hum vibrating from every direction, but so quiet, so indistinct, compared to the one that rang in Anton’s blood. The strange esha grew stronger, like a wind picking up, and Anton quickened his pace along the Sacred Road. As he approached the bustling marina square, the crowd thickened, choking the arcaded entryways. There were far more people pouring into the square than out. It was clear something was happening—something noteworthy, to draw this large a crowd.

  Still, he was barely aware of the other bodies around him as he stood suspended in the crowd, the esha surging like a storm.

  A sharp jab to the gut brought him back. He turned to see a pair of kids—younger than he was, but not by much—jostling past him through an archway.

  “Stop elbowing me!”

  “Come on, I wanna see!”

  Snatches of conversation filtered through the crowd.

  “… arrived this morning … silver sails…”

  “… disappeared after the Prophets…”

  “… haven’t been seen in a hundred years…”

  Hands grasped at Anton. He seized up, frozen, as a woman pulled him abruptly against her bony chest.

  “They’ve returned! They’ve finally returned, after all this time!” she cried out euphorically. Her long fingers were latched onto his shoulders, shaking him, tears streaming from her cataract-clouded eyes. “Praise the Prophets! Praise Faithful Pallas! The Order of the Last Light is here!”

  Anton tore himself out of the woman’s arms.

  “The Prophets will return now, don’t you see?” she said. “They haven’t abandoned us. They have answered our prayers! They’ll save this city!”

  Terror gripped him, the kind he felt in the depths of his nightmare. With the stormlike esha still bellowing around him, he shoved the woman away as hard as he could. She stumbled into the crowd, jostling the other spectators.

  “Watch it!” someone yelled.

  He fled from the crowd, darting into an alleyway behind the shops that lined the square. He leaned against a limestone wall, his breath catching in his chest, two distinct and directly opposed desires blooming within him. One was to find whomever the thundering esha belonged to. The other was to turn around and run as far and as fast as he could.

  Anton did neither. He pressed his fingers against his throat and started to count the beats of his pulse.

  When he looked up, Ephyra was standing in front of him. He hadn’t realized she’d followed him.

  “I thought you were trying to run away,” she said.

  “I was.” Anton’s pulse tapped against his fingers.

  “You look like you’re about to faint.”

  “I was doing that, too.”

  She squinted at him. “What’s got you so freaked out?”

  Anton glanced up at her and then slid his gaze to a shop’s back balcony.

  It wasn’t difficult to climb up.

  “I was just asking!” Ephyra cried after him.

  He ignored her, edging around the side of the balcony to climb on top of the arcade that fed into the square. He felt Ephyra close behind, climbing even more quickly and easily onto the covered walkway.

  From here, they could see the entire square and the brilliant turquoise waters of the marina beyond it. Amid the vast merchant ships and the red-sailed clippers floating in the harbor, a ship with silver sails was docked at one of the main wharfs. Its hull was a graceful sweep of pale white, the bow tapered and slender. Sunlight glinted brilliantly off the silver sails, so luminous Anton almost couldn’t gaze directly at them.

  The crowd standing just beyond the wharf began to part, making way for seven figures dressed in deep blue cloaks emblazoned with the symbol of a seven-pointed star pierced by a blade. Swords of silver hung from each of their waists. The people crowded in the square craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the swordsmen, their incredulity and wonder palpable. Some of them seemed to be crying in elation.

  A hundred years had passed since anyone from the Order was last seen. There were traces of them left throughout Pallas Athos, the city they’d called their headquarters for centuries, until the Prophets disappeared. Some people theorized that the Order had disappeared along with them. Others thought that the Order had simply disbanded, until none of its members were left. And some believed they’d gone into hiding, retreating to a secret fortress.

  The group of seven Paladin were now making their way through the crowd toward the head of the Sacred Road. Spectators had gathered all along the road to watch their procession, spilling up the curve of the lime-washed street all the way through the High City to the Temple of Pallas high on the hill.

  “I thought the Order was long gone,” Ephyra said, beside Anton.

  The mysterious esha surged in his veins. He wasn’t sure he could speak.

  “Why do you think they’re back?”

  Anton shook his head. He tore his gaze away from the Paladin. The mysterious esha at last began to ebb, leaving him like a passing storm. Whoever it belonged to had left the immediate area of the marina square, and Anton didn’t know if it was relief or despair that filled his chest.

  “I don’t know,” he answered Ephyra at last. He thought about what the woman on the street had said. The Prophets will return now. But she was just a superstitious old woman. There was no way that could be true. He turned away from the square. “What does it matter?”

  “Wait,” Ephyra said, getting up after him. “You’re not leaving.”

  Anton turned to pull himself back onto the roof, but Ephyra’s hand shot out to grab his arm, holding fast.

  “You’re not leaving,” she said, a threat in her voice this time.

  He looked down at her hand wrapped around his arm. If she wanted to, she could kill him right now. Hold on to his arm, draw the esha from his body, and leave a pale handprint there, just like her other victims. He glanced at her face and saw that she was staring at her hand. Was she wondering, like he was, whether or not she would do it?

  “Look,” Anton said slowly. “It’s not that I don’t want to help you and your sister. I tried.”

  “So try again.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not going to change anything. There’s something wrong with my Grace. And it’s only getting worse.”

  First, the nightmares. Then, the way his memory had overtaken him in the scrying pool. Now, here, that strange storm of esha overwhelming him like nothing ever had.

  “What do you mean, something’s wrong with your Grace?” Ephyra asked. “What happened exactly, when you tried to scry for the Chalice? What did you see?”

  He closed his eyes. “The same thing I always see. A frozen lake.”

  “A lake,” Ephyra repeated. “That’s all?”

  “The lake where I almost drowned.”

  Ephyra let go of his arm. “What are you talking about?”

  It had been a long time since Anton had told anyone about his nightmares, about the memory that kept him clutched inside its claws. But he was keeping a secret of hers now, and maybe if she thought she had a secret of his, they would be even. Maybe if she knew what he was running from, she’d let him go.

  “It was winter,” he began. “The
lake was frozen over. I was playing outside in the snow when my brother found me. He chased me out onto the ice, and it broke beneath me. I reached for him, and he … he pushed me under.”

  Anton opened his eyes and saw Ephyra staring at him. She looked horror-struck.

  “How could someone do that?” she said.

  Anton looked away. “I wouldn’t think cruelty and murder would surprise the Pale Hand.”

  “He was your brother,” Ephyra said, as if that changed anything. As if cruel people, wicked people, could not be blood.

  “We grew up in the Novogardian Territories,” Anton said. He could still remember the shivering winters, the hunger that pitted his insides. “Life is different there. The Graced are much rarer, and there’s superstition about them. Novogardians believe all kinds of things about them—about us.”

  “You mean like the Witnesses?”

  Anton shook his head. “The Witnesses hate the Graced and believe they are a corruption of nature. But northerners don’t hate the Graced—they revere them. They don’t believe the Prophets gave us our powers—they believe they were given to us by an ancient god, and that those powers give us the divine right to rule. My brother and I were raised by our grandmother, and she believed that, too. She was Graceless. So was her son, my father. So was my brother. And then I was born. My Grace manifested early, and once it did … it was all my grandmother cared about.”

  “And your brother resented that,” Ephyra said.

  “Yes, but—it wasn’t just that,” Anton said. “Most people, when they hurt you, they do it for a reason. To get you to do what they want. Or because they’re angry and they need a way to lash out. But my brother … he hurt me because he liked it. It brought him joy to make me feel pain, to make me terrified, to make me beg him to stop.”

  And how Anton had begged.

  You want me to stop? Illya would say. Then stop me. Aren’t you the one with Grace? Show me how powerful you are, Anton.

  “It was like a game to him, one that I could never learn the rules to.” Anton shut his eyes again. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to put the things he did behind me.”

  “But when you use your Grace, you’re forced to relive them,” Ephyra said. “Is that what happened when you were scrying?”

  He nodded. “For a while, I’d gotten better. I was able to control the nightmares. But when I try to scry, it’s like I’m back there, at the lake. I’m helpless. All I can feel is my brother’s hands forcing me under … That’s why I couldn’t help you. That’s why I have to leave.”

  “And your brother … he sent those men after you the other night?” Ephyra asked. “What does he want with you?”

  That was the question Anton hadn’t been able to answer, though it had haunted him since the moment the Nameless Woman had showed up at Thalassa.

  “I think he just couldn’t stand the fact that I got away,” he said at last. “It must have felt like he lost, knowing he couldn’t hurt me anymore. And he never lost. He’s looking for me so he can make me pay for running away.”

  “So your plan is just to keep running?” Ephyra asked. “Hope he doesn’t find you again, and live in fear of the moment that he does?”

  “It’s not like I have another choice.”

  A sea breeze swept past them, ruffling Ephyra’s dark curls. “What if you did?” she asked softly. “What if you could stop running? What if you could be rid of that fear, for good?”

  Anton took a half step back. “What are you talking about?”

  “You can help us—help Beru. And I can help you, too.”

  “How?”

  Her eyes caught his. “Sooner or later, the Pale Hand will claim another victim in this city.”

  The moment felt like a held breath. Anton had never considered it before, what it would be like to live without the constant fear at his back. To know that his brother was gone—truly gone, never to torment him again.

  “You can keep running forever,” Ephyra said. “You can spend your entire life looking over your shoulder, waiting for your past to catch up to you. Or you can stop running and finally face it. That sounds like the choice to me.”

  Anton dug his nails into his palm. “I just want to breathe without feeling like I’m drowning.”

  “I just want to find a way to keep my sister alive,” Ephyra replied. “We can help each other. You can’t use your Grace while your brother still lives. But if he was gone…”

  If his brother was gone, would Anton be free of his memories, free of the nightmare that kept him in its teeth?

  “I can’t be sure whether that would change anything,” he said. “Whether I’d be able to use my Grace, let alone find Eleazar’s Chalice for you.”

  “But you might,” Ephyra said. “And that’s better than what we have without you, which is nothing.”

  She reached out again, but she didn’t grab him this time. She was offering her hand.

  “We can help each other,” she said.

  Anton looked past her, out onto the shining waves cresting just beyond the harbor. Part of him still wanted nothing more than to leave everything behind—the threat of his brother, the Pale Hand, the mysterious esha he’d sensed in the marina. To leave this city of broken faith and not look back. It was what he always did.

  But Ephyra was right. He’d always be looking over his shoulder. The nightmare, the memory, the lake—they would always be a shadow closing in on him. He was in the icy water still, suspended in those few moments of darkness. He could either succumb to it and let himself sink, or he could reach for the surface.

  He took Ephyra’s hand. “Then it’s a deal.”

  12

  HASSAN

  Hassan stifled a yawn as he slid his teacup under the samovar. In the past five days, he’d managed to sneak out to the agora twice more, bringing whatever food and extra clothing he could. He’d made up some lie about collecting them from other Akademos students when Khepri had asked about it. He’d spent his time there doing various jobs around the camps—collecting firewood, minding the children, and cleaning up some of the debris littered around.

  Mostly, though, he spent more time with Khepri. She seemed to have a hand in almost every aspect of the camps—from training the refugees to fixing tents to distributing food—and had no compunction about putting Hassan to work. No one had ever ordered him around before, and each confidently issued command hit him with surprise and a curious sort of delight. For the first time since the coup—for the first time in his whole life, really—Hassan felt useful.

  On his most recent visit, he had stopped in the marketplace on his way and traded a set of gold coat fasteners for a dozen wheelbarrows from the woodworker. He’d then gone to the potter and cleaned out his inventory, carefully stacking the bowls and jugs in the wheelbarrows.

  “What’s all this?” Khepri had asked when Hassan had shown up with the potter’s apprentice and a dozen other kids he’d hired to take the wheelbarrows into the agora.

  “Halima was saying she sometimes spends three hours a day waiting in line for water,” Hassan had said, directing the kids to line the wheelbarrows up against the side of the fountainhouse. “What if instead you assigned some of your trainees to deliver the water?”

  “Oh,” Khepri had said, drumming her fingers on the side of one of the wheelbarrows.

  “What?” Hassan had asked, suddenly worried that he’d overstepped or that she was starting to get suspicious of him.

  But she’d just smiled, shaking her head, and then went to get the trainees.

  Hassan had woken up thinking about the curve of that smile.

  “You missed breakfast this morning,” Lethia said, spooning a tiny dab of jewel-red chutney onto her plate.

  “Sorry,” Hassan replied automatically, stirring the tea idly with a little gold spoon. He’d pressed his luck last night, staying out almost until dawn. But he didn’t regret it—those moments, shared between him and the other Herati refugees, had been more necessary to him than t
he food he now ate or, indeed, a full night’s sleep.

  “I suppose you must have been tired after being out all night,” Lethia went on conversationally.

  Hassan froze.

  “You couldn’t possibly think I was unaware of your little jaunts to the agora, did you?”

  He had, in fact, been certain she was unaware.

  “You’re not exactly a master of deception, Hassan,” Lethia went on, her tone still light and jesting. “Oh, for Keric’s sake, you can speak. I’m not angry.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m not pleased with you, either,” she conceded. “I just wish you weren’t so careless. You’re lucky I knew you snuck off. I spoke with the Sentry captain and had them double the foot patrols around the Sacred Gate.”

  “You can do that?” Hassan asked. Since the death of her husband almost a decade ago, Lethia held no official power in Pallas Athos, but it seemed he’d underestimated the pull she still had.

  “I asked the captain as a personal favor to me,” Lethia said. “I thought it wise after that incident outside the temple with the Witnesses.”

  “You knew about that, too?” Hassan asked, dismayed.

  Lethia gave him a withering look over the brim of her teacup. “There’s little that goes on in this city I’m not aware of. Which reminds me—evidently, the Order of the Last Light arrived in the harbor earlier today.”

  Hassan nearly choked on his tea. “What do you mean, they arrived in the harbor? The Order hasn’t been in Pallas Athos for a hundred years.”

  “Well, evidently, they’re here now. They were seen entering the High City.”

  Hassan’s eyes widened. He knew that the Order had once been the holy protectors of Pallas Athos. They’d watched over the city and the pilgrims who flocked there to visit the Temple of Pallas. Their abrupt departure, right after the Prophets’ disappearance, had caused decades of turmoil in Pallas Athos, turning it from a city of faith and safety to one of danger and vice. Hassan had always thought that members of the Order had slowly died off after leaving.