Darkness Rising 1: Chained

by Ross Kitson

Chapter 6Funerals and Forts

  Windstide 1920

  A dozen candles cast their dancing light over the walls of the shrine, yet their amber glow did not warm the chill of the place. The heat of the gathered bodies faired no different, nor did the small brazier that lit the far end of the room. Emelia felt as if she would never know the comfort of summer’s warmth again.

  Lord Ebon-Farr had generously allowed the service to be held in the tiny shrine that served the garrison. It was a dank and musty place, tucked away at the rear of the building. Its solitary window opened out through the sheer back wall of the Keep. The wall fell precipitously away to the foot of the mountain, thousands of feet below.

  What would it be like to leap through the window and fall almost without end? Emelia thought. It was a macabre notion, given the nature of her friend’s demise.

  The priests of Torik had not matched Lord Ebon-Farr’s kindness. The acolyte who normally preached within the shrine had refused to give the service. He regarded it as sinful that the deceased was both with child and had undoubtedly taken her own life whilst wracked with shame. It was fair to say that this was the general consensus of opinion, as difficult as it was for the other housemaids to believe of their friend—a friend who had lit up their daily lives like a beacon.

  Emelia’s eyes were dry as she gazed across the small shrine, crammed shoulder to shoulder with the other girls. Her tears had gone, dried in a near constant flow of grief. Now all that was left was anger and a fury that simmered and throbbed within her at the injustice of all of this.

  The elderly attendant of Torik droned words of prayer at the far end of the shrine. His face was like an old boot, worn leathery skin stretched tight with a shock of grey hair. Emelia knew that he was normally responsible for cleaning the shrine and maintaining the candles and brazier for the acolyte. Mother Gresham had clearly offered him some recompense for his ‘sermon’, dismayed that a proper priest wasn’t amenable. He stumbled over his words like a nervous suitor but no-one really cared. All were relieved that someone was simply saying them.

  In addition to the snuffling servants were Mother Gresham, two cooks and two of the soldiers, their stoical faces betraying occasional flickers of emotion. Captain Ris was also there and Emelia still struggled to meet his eyes. Torm stood in the corner, seeking solace in the shadows. By Emelia’s side was Abila, their prior frostiness having thawed in the heat of their grief.

  It was grief like none she had ever known. Emelia considered she had had some experience of loss in her fifteen years of life. She had endured the ache of separation from her childhood home, albeit a ramshackle shack on the edge of a beach. She had a sense that her servitude had lost her what a childhood should have been: full of love and fun and the warmth of a father’s smile or a mother’s hug. She considered she had lost free will as now her only real freedom was that of her imagination and her dreams. Yet in retrospect she was deluded, for true loss, true sorrow, was an ache more terrible than she realised could happen. It was the ache of what would never be, the ache of all the “if only”, the ache of the “should have.”

  The first night, when she’d finally forced the image of Sandila’s broken body from her mind she had fantasised, as was her want, about how she might have changed things. Perhaps if she had kept Sandila talking that hour longer, perhaps if she’d not run in panic that day in the lower city and gone with Sandy to the wise woman, then her friend would never have come up to the Great Hall to talk that morning. She replayed the scenario in her mind a dozen times and in all the day-dreaming Sandila was alive and laughing at the end.

  Her eye caught Torm’s gaze. He smiled slightly and then looked towards the shrouded shape that was Sandila. Emelia stared at the amorphous form, a white sheet covering the broken body; the husk that her departing spirit had left. She had heard from Abila that Mother Gresham had bullied and begged enough coins to pay for Sandila to be interned in a mass grave in one of the lower city cemeteries, a great boon for a foreign girl in servitude. Coonorians buried their dead in deep holes hewn into the rock and only the rich had the luxury of privacy in their final resting place. Abila had been confused at Emelia’s lack of joy at this news, interpreting it as distorted grief rather than Emelia’s memory of her last trip to a cemetery.

  Emelia’s ruminations about her imminent move to the Enclave and her ever-present fear of the dark sorcerer had been suppressed by the tide of grief. Sandila had loved life so very much and a fire was smouldering inside Emelia now: a passion to live, a burgeoning desire to experience something beyond the stifling chambers of Coonor.

  The ceremony was drawing to a close now and as was the custom the attendant was lighting the spirit lamp. It consisted of a small candle held by a wire frame to a large paper lantern, in this instance decorated by Gelia and Annre. The attendant gestured to Emelia and she stepped forward and took the lamp. He then turned, walked to the window and flung it open, the breeze making the candles flicker.

  “Thus we guide your spirit to the eight winds of Gracious Torik,” the attendant said. “Lord of the air, Master of the great breeze and Father of the storm we pray to thee to lift the essence of this poor girl, taken too soon in our mind yet never too soon for your great realm. Torik, Air Father, hear our prayers.”

  Emelia leaned from the window and the early morning air sent her dress billowing. The icy wind finally elicited tears. She released the spirit lamp and it flew from her grasp and soared into the sky, its light flickering as it took Sandila’s soul to the peace of the heavens.

  The room was silent for a minute before Mother Gresham began rounding up all the girls and sending them back to work, clucking how even in death Sandila could instil laziness all around. Emelia did not miss the thickness in her voice as she gruffly bossed the maids about.

  Emelia stared out of the small window, the panoramic view like a majestic tapestry before her. She would give anything just for a month to walk to that horizon and back rather than around in this rock pool of Coonor. That last conversation with Sandila still played in her head. Her time was running short before she left for the Enclave. It would be tomorrow morning and all this would be a bitter memory fading like the tapestries in the upper corridors.

  Run away, Emelia, let us run away, Emebaka urged.

  How will I live if I were to escape Coonor? And that’s even if I could evade the black sorcerer.

  Are you a lamb to the cull like your poor friend or are you a mighty eagle, your wings beating against the winds of change? Are you to live in this half-life, scared by the shadows? the dry voice answered.

  Her temper flared at this insult. It is not that simple, Emebaka. I am no warrior, no princess of fairy tales and no sorceress to have talent to battle against the fate the gods have decided for me. I am a maid, a servant, illiterate and worthless, a commodity to be bartered and sold, given for a favour and used until I am of age. And then what? Abila told me straight—there is no chance of me leaving this city to find my parents. And why would I? Do I really want to put myself and my family through the pain of reunion, even if they were alive? If I am truthful to myself, do I want to ask my father if things were really so dire that he had no choice but to sell his daughter into servitude in a land a thousand miles away?

  How wrong you are, Emebaka replied, the truth sits on the edge of your mind like an itch that cannot be scratched. The birdman knew when he looked in your glittering eyes that you are meant for greater things than this. The gods put you by the door that day for you to listen, they guided you into the cemetery that night and they put you behind that tapestry to learn the truths of this place. Beneath the façade of nobility is a rotten core; behind the masque is a face that is vile.

  A shudder of expectation juddered through her body and a sudden sense of inevitability pervaded her. It was as if all her self-consciousness, that sense of being a stranger in her own flesh, of being a girl in a woman’s body, fluttered away in the wind. It drifted upwards, carried with the spirit of her dead f
riend in that glowing lamp. Emebaka was correct; she knew what she needed to do.

  She had to confront Uthor.