The Knife in the Dark

by D. W. Hawkins

  “Dormael, you’ve been asleep for days,” Shawna said, putting a restraining hand on his leg. “Your legs will buckle halfway down the stairs, and I’ll be carrying you. I’ll sit here with you, give you water, but I won’t carry you down a flight of stairs.”

  “You wouldn’t do that for me?”

  “It’s not ladylike to be seen kicking a man down a flight of stairs that way,” she said, a wicked smile forming on her lips.

  “You’re a terrible person, Shawna Llewan,” he said, a laugh making the muscles over his ribs and chest ache with every tug. “Fine. Just yell out the door for an Initiate.”

  “An Initiate?”

  “The kids wearing the blue tunics,” he clarified. “They’re students in their first four years of study. They have classes, duties, that sort of thing. They’ll do everything a full wizard tells them to do.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Shawna said.

  “Just tell them that Warlock Harlun needs two plates of food up here, and he needs them yesterday. They’ll run to see it done, believe me. If you want, make it harder on them and tell them to bring us some milk, too. I’ve a taste for milk, for some reason.”

  “Adversity does build character,” Shawna smiled, and the two of them shared a short laugh.

  Suddenly her expression changed, and she moved back from him in alarm.

  “Dormael!” she said. “Your…your chest. What is that?”

  He looked down to where the blankets had fallen from his shoulders, revealing his naked torso. At first he thought the woman was playing a joke on him, but when he looked down, he hissed in surprise. Across his chest, from his neck all the way down to his lower ribcage, was a giant bruise in the shape of a three-fingered hand.

  Dormael felt sick to his stomach all of a sudden, and poked at the painful bruise with one finger. It hurt to the touch just as any other bruise would. The memories of the black, of the ancient voice, of the creature that had pushed him from the darkness came flooding back to him in a moment of clarity.

  “Shawna…call for D’Jenn. Send an Initiate for him,” he breathed.

  “What is that thing, Dormael?” she asked, staring at the bruise in horror.

  “I don’t know,” he said, at a loss for words. “I just don’t know.”

  **

  D’Jenn walked the halls of the Conclave Proper, nodding to people he knew in passing. He saw a few faces that he recognized from his First Four, in the days before he had been selected for Warlock training. Those people, though familiar, may as well have been strangers to him now. The years had dimmed his emotional connection to the memories of his early childhood.

  When an Initiate completed his First Four in the Conclave—which was full of classes on nature, philosophy, magical theory, literature, and mathematics—they were given a choice as to which Discipline they wanted to pursue. There was only one Discipline that was not open for choice—the Warlocks. Instead, the Warlocks chose their recruits from the most promising students. Once a child was offered a position in the Warlocks, they had one chance to make that choice. If a child declined, they were never offered a position again. Many declined.

  When an Initiate was accepted into the Warlocks, their training was intensified. While other students were perfecting crafts, or deepening their understanding of the world, Warlocks were trained to kill. Every day of training was a test. The children were organized into classes by their generation, and the classes were always small. In D’Jenn’s generation, there were only twenty-four students to be accepted. Only fifteen had completed the training.

  Students were pitted against each other in elaborate war-games. Other tests revolved around cunning, or strategy. Competition was the theme behind every situation—Victus believed that only adversity could hone his students’ abilities.

  Alliances and close friendships always developed as a result. D’Jenn often wondered, in quiet moments, whether Victus had designed things that way. Was the form of his training something the Conclave had always done, or was the entire thing the brainchild of Victus Tiranan? D’Jenn smiled as he remembered times when he had cursed his deacon, cursed the Warlocks, cursed ever having come to the Conclave for one reason or another. Warlock training was not easy. Looking back, though, he now felt as if those were the best times in his life.

  The first person that D’Jenn went looking for was Vera.

  Even as he thought of her name, a smile came unbidden to his lips. She would shit two golden marks to hear the story of this past winter, and he knew she would want to meet Shawna and Bethany. There was no one whose insight he would value more than hers.

  Her door, though, was cold and silent. He knew as soon as he knocked that no one was behind the door, and could feel the stillness of the room beyond. His magic fluttered in and sniffed about, but he could tell from the sound of the very air that she hadn’t been there in a while. Disappointment rose in his guts.

  “D’Jenn,” said a voice behind him.

  D’Jenn turned to find Mataez, one of his classmates, standing in the hallway behind him. Mataez was a Runemian, with short, dark hair. He was a stocky fellow, but agile in his way. D’Jenn smiled as he saw the man, but the look on Mataez’s face made the expression die on his lips.

  “What’s with that look, brother?” D’Jenn asked.

  “You were…looking for Vera?” Mataez said, gesturing at the door. His tone was hesitant, which put D’Jenn on the defensive.

  “I was,” D’Jenn said. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  Mataez’s expression fell. “No one’s told you, I guess.”

  “Told me what, Mataez?” A cold feeling crawled into D’Jenn’s stomach.

  “Vera,” Mataez said. “I’m sorry, but she died, brother. She’s dead.”

  D’Jenn’s eyes went to the door. He had a spike of confused emotion that went through his chest before he could stop it. It was there and gone in a flash, like a sword made of ice.

  “She’s dead,” D’Jenn repeated.

  “I’m sorry, brother,” Mataez sighed. “Gods, somebody should have fucking told you. How long have you been back?”

  “A couple of days.” His voice felt empty.

  “Eindor’s blighted eye,” Mataez cursed. He came up and clasped arms with D’Jenn, pulling him into a one-armed embrace. “I’m sorry you’ve got to hear it like this, mate. From me, too—I’m the worst with this sort of thing, you know?”

  “When did it happen? How did it happen?” His head still felt a bit cloudy as he tried to make sense of what he’d just heard. How could the woman have died? She was one of the most resourceful people that D’Jenn knew.

  That I used to know, he corrected. The voice in his head was angry.

  “D’Jenn,” Mataez sighed. “Let’s go down to the dining hall, brother. You’re going to want a drink in your hand to hear this story.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not just Vera, brother. It’s Taglion, Jastom, and Kirael, too.”

  D’Jenn felt like sitting down. That was nearly a third of their entire class, all dead. How could such a thing be true?

  “What? That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why wasn’t I told of this?”

  “Did you check your missives, brother?”

  “Of course I checked my fucking missives, Mataez,” D’Jenn snapped before he could stop himself. He took a moment, and held up his hand in apology. “I’m sorry. This is just…surprising.”

  Mataez waved off his apology. “I understand. We all know how you felt about her. She was family, you know. There’s so few of us, mate. We all loved her.”

  “I know,” D’Jenn sighed. “And the others? How did this happen?”

  “Lost at sea,” Mataez said. His voice was flat, wooden. “No one really knows, mate. But the speculation on the ship was paid out to the families of the crew—that much we do know. I looked into it myself. It’s been a rough year, D’Jenn. You and your cousin just disappeared on us. Where is he? Is he alright?”

&nbs
p; “He’s in his rooms,” D’Jenn replied, still reeling from the news. How could so many of them have died at once? It didn’t seem possible. “You should go and see him. He’s hurt.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “We don’t know anything yet,” D’Jenn shrugged. His eyes wouldn’t leave Vera’s door. No wonder the room beyond had felt so cold to his senses. “Go, look in on him. I’m going to take a walk.”

  “I’m sorry you had to hear it like this, D’Jenn,” Mataez said, a grimace on his face. “The deacon will tell you what happened, I’m sure. He’s been busy all season. All of Eldath is going crazy, brother. The gods are shitting on us all.”

  “Looks that way,” D’Jenn said. He didn’t feel like talking.

  Mataez offered him a pained smile, and walked off in the direction of Dormael’s rooms. D’Jenn let out a long sigh and sat back against the wall. The reunion he had been hoping for would never happen. So many of his friends were dead. How was such a thing possible?

  D’Jenn’s eyes went to the door once again, and he contemplated going inside. The smell of Vera’s hair came to mind, a spicy scent she bought from a vendor in the East Market. The memory drove another cold spike into his heart, and he had to turn his eyes away from the door.

  There was no way he could go inside. The sight of the room, bare of her presence, would stick with him forever. He didn’t want to remember that sight, so he decided not to expose himself to it.

  A thought occurred to him.

  D’Jenn had been passing letters with Vera for years. The Warlocks maintained a mail office in the Conclave Proper, a drop where classmates could leave communications with one another. Vera and D’Jenn, though, had established their own drop site after their first year in training, and had continued to use it in the years since.

  D’Jenn rose and walked down the hall. He found one of the narrow stairways that Initiates and servants used to move about the tower, and slipped into the darkened passageway. A few twists and turns took him to the ground level, and he rushed out through a side passage and out onto the Green.

  The Conclave had a large campus, and there places tucked away into the corners of the grounds that people rarely traveled. Such places were perfect for a pair of amorous youths looking for a bit of privacy to paw away at one another. D’Jenn and Vera had set up their letter-drop near the place where they had spent so much exploratory time together.

  He would have run across the damp grass, but attracting attention went against his instincts. Even if Vera was dead, he felt that this little secret between them should be preserved. There were many people strolling through the Conclave grounds, and D’Jenn didn’t want to deal with their interested gazes.

  He followed a stone path to the southeastern corner of the campus. There, in a little-used park, was a bronze fountain that hadn’t spewed water in years. A patio surrounded the fountain, with a small and weathered shrine to Neesa, the goddess of love and music. The little stone statue had a space hollowed beneath it—one that D’Jenn and Vera had created. They had written a ward into the base of the shrine that would allow no one but the two of them to open it. Even as he approached the fountain, he could feel the magic resonating from the statue.

  He reached out with his Kai and unlocked the magical ward. The statue of the goddess felt gritty beneath his hands, and the stone was cold. Lifting the statue from its base, he looked into the space beneath it. There, tucked into the leather folder they had used, sat a single letter, folded and sealed with a dollop of wax. D’Jenn stared at the thing.

  Part of him wanted to rip it open and devour the words contained within like a dying man eating his last meal. Still, another part wished to preserve it, to hold on to the missive until his last dying day. They were, after all, Vera’s last words to him.

  The letter felt like a terrible weight as he pulled it out.

  The wax was sealed with a blank stamp, yellow and gummy from the moisture in the air. D’Jenn held it for a moment, unable to open it, and unable to put it away. It lingered in his grasp like a prophecy. Should he read it, and know the secret of Vera’s last message? If he did, he knew that he would crouch over the thing every night for weeks, trying to derive meaning from every single word, every turn of phrase. He would agonize over those words. If he didn’t read it, though, the letter would weigh in his pocket like a lodestone, a constant reminder that she was gone.

  Grimacing, D’Jenn tucked the letter away.

  He sat staring at the fountain for a long time, the message weighing his pocket to the spot. Finally he rose, but turned away from the Conclave Proper. The campus was large, after all, and a walk would clear his thoughts.

  He resolved never to visit the fountain again.

  **

  “The only possible explanation is Mind Flight,” said Victus Tiranan, Deacon of the Warlocks.

  Victus was a large man, and built more like a blacksmith than a wizard. He had a wild mass of pitch-black hair, and a beard that was just as unruly as the hair on his head. He was swathed in a heavy, dark blue robe—which Dormael was sure concealed a knife or two—and his meaty hands tapped out a nervous rhythm on the table’s surface. His single golden ring of office, two sinuous bands woven together, practically shone against the skin of his sun-browned hands. Dormael had always thought he seemed out of place at the Conclave, like some beastly nomad dressed in a robe and taught pleasantries he barely understood.

  Despite his wild appearance, though, Victus had a conniving, astute, and analytical mind. The man was one of the smartest people that Dormael had ever known, and was widely regarded as the next in line for the office of Mekai. Unlike most of his colleagues—the deacons of the other disciplines in the Conclave—Victus had an almost military bearing, and a deep dedication to his mission. Dormael held an unshakable respect for the man, who had overseen not only his training, but the training of all the Warlocks.

  Victus was loved by the Warlocks, and hated by the other deacons.

  “Mind Flight is not the only possible explanation,” a woman said from down the table. “We have to consider the possibility that young Dormael’s mind was in an advanced state of sleep, and the entire episode was created by his Kai.”

  Lacelle—the Deacon of Philosophers—was among the other deacons that hated Victus.

  She was everything that Victus was not—willowy, graceful, and light. Lacelle had the sort of icy beauty that one might find on a statue of an ancient queen. Her hair was straight, and a color of blond so light that it was almost silver. Her eyes were the color of a wintry sky, and her skin pale. She stared at Victus with undisguised disdain, and tapped her own ring of office against the table to illustrate her points.

  “Physical manifestations of magic are a known phenomenon, Victus, as are descents into madness,” she clipped. “Why must you complicate this—something that could endanger the people around your Warlock—with talk of Mind-Flight? Where did Dormael’s consciousness go, then, Victus? Into the Void? Maybe to the place where the faeries live.”

  “Don’t mock me, woman,” Victus grumbled. “Just once I’d like to have a discussion with you in which you were acting like a deacon instead of a petulant child.”

  “Child?” Lacelle sneered, a laugh bubbling from the edges of the word. “Let’s talk about who’s being childish here. You have a mistaken urge to protect your Warlocks—like a child with his favorite toy, unable to admit when one of them is broken.”

  Dormael winced. Lacelle could indeed be right, but her comment made him feel somehow guilty, as if he was lying about what he’d seen, or that he had misunderstood. He had a sudden urge to speak up and counter her arguments, but he disciplined himself to silence.

  What’s the gods-damned point?

  The argument had been going on for almost an hour.

  The large room—lovingly referred to as the War Room by Warlocks—was paneled in white plaster, and hung with multiple tapestries that depicted victories by Warlocks of the past. Dormael looked up and saw a larger
and more detailed version of Gimmael Facing Down Morvlund the Mad than the one that hung in his room. He spent a few moments following the lines of the artwork. Though the argument between the two deacons concerned him, they were already to the point of the conversation where they were repeating themselves, and hurling insults.

  “I know my Warlocks, Lacelle,” Victus said, slapping the table for emphasis, “and Dormael’s head is as fine as it ever was. You tested his lucidity yourself. The simple fact that he woke up discounts the theory that his mind was broken, or that his magic was wild. There were no occurrences of wild magic reported either by him, or his companions on the road here. It must be something else, and I just don’t see why his testimony is considered suspect.”

  “His companions are not reliable witnesses. One of them is his cousin, the other his brother, and another his concubine,” Lacelle replied, the disdain clear in her voice. “Do you really wish to posit those three as examples of objectivity?”

  “Shawna is not my concubine,” Dormael said, breaking his silence, but Victus was already speaking over him.

  “What exactly is your problem, Lacelle?” Victus snarled, leaning forward in his seat as if he meant to take a bite out of the woman. “The Baroness Llewan is not his concubine, and even if she was, that’s no business of anyone else in this room.”

  Dormael wondered why in the Six Hells the Mekai had invited Lacelle to this meeting in the first place. If the woman was going to be hostile to him, and on such a personal level, he didn’t see what value she would add to the conversation. Philosophers didn’t understand the world outside the Conclave in the way the Warlocks did. They knew the natural world, sciences, and such things, but people were beyond them. Dormael suppressed another urge to rise to his feet and defend himself.

  Part of him thought that this wasn’t about him at all. It was rumored that Victus and Lacelle had once been lovers, and only became enemies after having a vicious row. It was true that Lacelle went out of her way to make things difficult for Victus, but Dormael had to admit that he’d noticed times where the opposite was just as true.