The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter

by Michael J. Sullivan

  Oswal settled back and breathed, letting the chalice rest on the arm of the chair. Outside the window, he could hear laughter, shouts, and musicians’ instruments being tuned up. Such children, he thought. They have no idea what’s about to happen.

  He didn’t worry so much about his flock. They were docile things. But the Alburn aristocracy, the wealthy merchants and clerks, and the military were another matter. He couldn’t run the kingdom without them. If they refused to recognize him as ruler, which they would if they suspected his involvement in the massacre, or if they found a suitable surviving noble, he’d have a civil war on his hands. A war that he had no army to fight. All he had was faith. That, too, could be taken away.

  “What will the patriarch do? Will he recognize me as the rightful ruler of Alburn?”

  Of course! Venlin said, his smooth delivery two parts velvet and one part barrel-aged whiskey. Venlin was the intellectual of the two, the brilliant confidant and adviser, the shrewd politician. That old recluse granted you complete freedom to choose the best successor to Reinhold. He did so because you know each of the candidates personally. Who better to select the most devoted, the most pliable, the best ally. You’re doing that. He can’t get upset because you did what he asked.

  “But it’s probably not how he expected me to do it.”

  Novron scoffed. Are you serious? Doing what people expect gets you nothing and nowhere. Honestly, man! How did you rise in the ranks with that attitude?

  “I should have asked permission, shouldn’t I? I mean, it feels like such a deception.”

  Novron shook his head and addressed Venlin. Talk sense into him before I throw him out the window, will you?

  Venlin sighed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie or not. If it helps you sleep, then wrap it around you each night and smile. If you had asked for consent, or even floated the idea past Saldur when he was here, you know he wouldn’t have liked it. Better to seek forgiveness than ask for permission. What you count on is that the world will come to see the truth in time. At first, it sounds crazy; worse, it sounds conceited and self-centered. But you were granted the choice to anoint whomever you saw fit, and Oswal, you’re going to do just that. There isn’t anyone in the running who isn’t a shortsighted, self-centered idiot. And, of course, all the candidates will be dead.

  Novron parroted back Saldur’s words, Well, whoever you pick, best keep in mind that he actually has to rule a kingdom, you know?

  That was why he had to pick himself, but Saldur wouldn’t see it that way, and Maurice Saldur was typical of the church. Oswal was the Bishop of Alburn, but somehow Maurice Saldur was more influential. How that was possible was hard to determine. Perhaps it was location. He was Bishop of Medford, and that was but a short carriage ride to Ervanon.

  I didn’t actually chat with the patriarch. I’ve never seen the man.

  Oswal was certain this had to be a lie. While he was busy writing letters, Saldur was handling affairs like the disappearance of the Eternal Empire. Even after botching his own efforts to replace the ruling family of Melengar, Nilnev had given Saldur another chance. He hadn’t even trusted Oswal to take care of his own king.

  They all have it better than you, Novron told him. And Saldur isn’t your problem. Garrick Gervaise, lord of Blythin Castle, is the ox you’ll need to yoke or slay.

  Oswal nodded. He was about to defy the intent, if not the letter, of the patriarch’s orders while living in the shadow of the Seret’s base and ancestral home. Blythin Castle was less than a day’s ride up the coast to the east, and the castle commander wasn’t a philosophical man. Reason and logic, to Garrick Gervaise, were sinful things. Oswal knew that convincing the black knight to support him wouldn’t be easy. Garrick wouldn’t see Oswal’s initiative as a positive development. After all, Garrick saw his job as regulating the clergy, and crowning oneself king would certainly attract close scrutiny. Handling Gervaise would be his most dangerous battle.

  If only he would attend the feast.

  Oswal settled deeper into his chair and drained his cup. He felt exhausted, the sort of fatigue that hits only after all the work is finished.

  “Is it finished?” he asked.

  For now—your part at least, Novron said. All the pieces are in motion.

  He got up and searched for the bottle to refill the chalice.

  “I don’t want to kill them, the nobles, I mean, but it’s best to eliminate one’s competition.” He held his cup away from the desk as he poured so as not to spill on anything important. Although his hands had stopped shaking, his head felt a tad loose, and he had a vague sense of it floating like a bubble on his shoulders. This was only his second cup, but he had hardly touched the breakfast tray. He couldn’t eat then, but he thought he might now. I’d better, or at the rate I’m drinking I’ll pass out before the feast.

  Would that be so bad? Novron asked.

  You do need an excuse not to attend, Venlin said. You can’t trust Villar to contain his violence to only those dressed in blue.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Keys and Coins

  By the time Villar woke up, the sun was high. Light streamed in through the drape that Mercator had hung in place of a door. The old one had likely rotted away centuries ago. The new drape was—like everything else Mercator touched—blue. The long dyed cloth fluttered lazily, letting in varying degrees of brilliant sunlight, changing the shadows in the room. For a long moment, Villar lay on the floor, feeling the pleasant flower-scented breeze and watching the light war with the darkness. Sunbeams ricocheted up the wall, exposing the dye-stained pots and dust motes. Then the breeze exhausted itself, the cloth fell flat, and the room returned to its dull darkness. Outside, birds sang and bees hummed. A perfect spring day, he thought with detached judgment, as if he weren’t part of it but rather some distant observer.

  That aloof perception lasted no more than a minute. It took that long for the pain to catch up with his sleep-muddled mind. When it did, the observer became the tortured. Villar felt terrible. He always did the morning after. His head throbbed, his body ached, and his muscles were drained. He continued to lie there, breathing slowly, letting the blood bang at his temples. It would subside in a little while, always had in the past. That’s when he realized this wasn’t like the other times. He’d stayed with the golem longer than usual because the little hooded foreigner was fast and agile and saw him coming. That was odd. No one had ever seen him before. But that wasn’t all that made this time different. Villar felt pain in his chest. It, too, throbbed, but it also burned, and that didn’t make any sense at all.

  Grunting as he engaged stiff muscles, he rolled to his side, his elbow and hip hurting where they pressed against the floor. He had lain down on a blanket, one of the blue-dyed ones that Mercator had stacked all over. Should have used more than one. Should have used all of them, made a thick comfortable cocoon. He’d learned never to run a golem while standing or even sitting. Too easy to become disoriented and fall. When in the golem and on the hunt, the experience was so vivid it was easy to forget it wasn’t his body running, jumping, and fighting. Everything was so real.

  Villar didn’t know his safety point—how long he could maintain the connection without going too far. Griswold had warned him never to remain for more than two chimes of Grom Galimus, but that was only a rough estimate; he didn’t think the dwarf really knew. Villar speculated that the cutoff point would be different for each person. Not everyone’s strength of will was the same. It stood to reason that an individual with a strong sense of himself could maintain the golem longer. The real concern, as Villar saw it—and perhaps this tied in to the idea of losing one’s soul—was that in the heat of things, it was easy to miss the passage of time, and everything else. Still, Villar was confident he hadn’t gotten anywhere near two chimes. And for the first time, it wasn’t he who had severed the connection. The connection had vanished all by itself.

  No, not by itself. The golem had been destroyed, and I was nearly killed. Tha
t’s what happened, but how?

  When he possessed a golem, he wasn’t actually there. The golem acted on his commands, but no matter what happened to the creature, Villar was safe because he was miles away. The whole process worked much like a dream. Dreams, no matter how awful, were safe; they had no power to penetrate the real world. He thought hard. Trying to remember. Then it came to him. The gargoyle had fallen off the cathedral and hit the plaza. The moment it struck the ground, the connection snapped, releasing whatever demon he’d trapped in the stone, but because the gargoyle fell rather than Villar, that was all that should have happened.

  Then why do I have this pain in my chest?

  Thinking perhaps the pain was imaginary, a lingering, vivid memory, Villar reached up and touched the spot that hurt. Running fingertips lightly, he found that his shirt was stiff, stuck painfully to his skin. Gritting his teeth and emitting a pained grunt, he pulled the tunic off. With the agony of ripping off a scab, he tore the cloth free of his skin. Thank Ferrol, I don’t have hair on my chest. On the shirt, a large rusty-red stain radiated out in a circle from a small slice in the garment. Touching his bare chest, he felt a very real wound.

  I was stabbed. I was stabbed? How could that have happened?

  The wound wasn’t deep. It had cut the skin but was stopped by the sternum. Judging by his shirt, however, the injury had caused more than its fair amount of bleeding.

  After the two strangers had broken into the meeting, Villar had left and waited outside. He’d watched as the hooded foreigner and Mercator set off together. The two had a plan to contact the duke. If they succeeded, everything could unravel. If they convinced Leo to intercede, no one would support the revolt. He couldn’t allow that. When the two went separate ways, he considered killing the foreigner but wasn’t certain he could. The prior chase across the rooftops had made him second-guess his chances. Instead, Villar came up with a better plan, an easier and ultimately far more enjoyable one. He would use a golem.

  He’d followed Mercator back to the temple and waited for her to leave again. The ancient ruin had been the perfect place to keep the duchess. It existed at the three-way intersection of the remote, the secluded, and the inaccessible. No one ever went up there—too much trouble and too many brambles along the way. This had long been Mercator’s secret craft shop, and all her dyed cloth was worth a small fortune. She’d used this place as a safe haven and wisely never told anyone about it.

  The ruins made an excellent place for him to store his supplies as well. Over the previous months, Griswold had provided him several boxes of gravel, keys to various statues stationed around the city. He had plenty to choose from. And of course, he had his hearts, a reagent he had to provide for himself. They were not nearly as plentiful as the gravel. He had been down to his last two, but that problem could be easily rectified. He’d have the golem collect several more before breaking the connection. It was worth risking a heart to stop the foreigner and Mercator from reaching the Estate.

  Once Mercator left, he entered. In his haste, he didn’t bother with his usual safeguards. This wasn’t the main event, merely a brief interlude. He’d be safe enough; only he and Mercator knew about the ruin, and she wouldn’t be coming back. He made the bed and began the ritual.

  Originally, he had only planned to stop Mercator. Yes, he would kill the foreigner, but Sikara need not die. Keeping them from reaching the duke was the important thing. But then she figured out he’d been working against peaceful solutions since the beginning. If she told the others, they would turn on him—all his hard work ruined. And of course, the mir didn’t need two leaders; he could be both the duke and the representative for the mir people. Besides, her Calian blood made her an abomination.

  He’d borrowed the term from the bishop, but it fit. The mixing of elven and human blood was bad enough. Somewhere in his own distant past, one of Villar’s ancestors had made that mistake, but the Sikara family hadn’t merely succumbed to a necessity—they wallowed in the deep end. Villar’s great-grandfather Hanis Orphe traveled to Alburnia with Sadarshakar Sikara after the fall of Merredydd. The two had a falling-out when Sadarshakar chose to marry a dark-skinned Calian. The tribes diverged at that point, the Orphe being more steadfast and the Sikara more accommodating. Further relations with the Calians led to the dilution of the Sikara bloodline, and Mercator was the obvious result of this weakening. She was more Calian than anything else. She lacked dignity, and commitment, and barely looked like a mir.

  Villar rolled to his feet and moved to one of the pots of clean water. He sniffed it to be sure. Grabbing the corner of a large blanket, he soaked it and gingerly scrubbed at the wound while he gritted his teeth. Most of the blood wiped off easily enough, but around the cut, it had hardened, and he didn’t feel like messing with it.

  Turning, Villar looked at the door to the little cell.

  He had forgotten all about the duchess. The woman had been quiet. She hadn’t even greeted him with one of her usual insipid quips. Usually, the duchess just couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and it was such a large, loud mouth. She was their prisoner, their captive, but she failed to act her part. A helpless, captive woman was supposed to be quiet, tearfully sobbing in the corner, or begging for life, praying to her god. But not this one.

  He had wanted to kill her the night before. The ritual required concentration, and he couldn’t afford any interference from her; nor could he risk her giving away his secret should anyone come looking.

  Villar had planned on killing her for months. Now with Mercator’s death and the feast imminent, he’d finally get his chance. He couldn’t rely on her staying quiet again. Villar looked for a knife, turning over crates of wool and throwing aside mounds of linen. He went through barrels that stank of vinegar and shook out rags. Nothing.

  Seriously, Mercator? How did you work without a knife?

  Then Villar remembered she’d had it with her at the gallery when the golem . . .

  No, not the golem, it was me, and I do regret what happened.

  Her death was a loss; the mir needed to rise to the greatness the past proclaimed them to be, and after the feast, there would be so many seats left unfilled. As duke, he would have campaigned for her to be appointed Duchess of Rise. She might be a mongrel, but she was still the descendant of the famed Sikar. Villar liked the idea of making Alburn a mir kingdom just as Merredydd had been. She could have had a part to play in the restoration of their heritage; her death was a waste.

  Villar took one last look around. Seeing no sign of a knife, he clapped his arms against his sides in resignation.

  I’ll just have to strangle the bitch.

  As a golem, he’d killed dozens. That’s how he got the hearts, those hard-to-obtain ingredients. At first, he’d tried without success to use animal hearts.

  Then Ferrol smiled on him and intervened, reversing his fortune.

  It had happened on the last hot day of autumn. Villar had watched six children playing at the storm drain where the Rookery and Little Gur Em butted up to the city harbor. Villar had gone there to watch the ships load—or so he’d told himself. What he was really doing was searching for a victim, some new immigrant without family or friends. Someone small, weak, and bewildered by the big city. A youth whom he could easily overpower.

  The sky was cloudy as the evening heat invited late-day thunderheads to form. The kids had pulled back the heavy metal lid of the cistern and were taking turns jumping into the stone reservoir, using a rope to climb out. They obviously had done this all summer. The rope was bleached, and its edges frayed where it rubbed against the sharp side of the cistern wall. The children didn’t notice, nor did they appear to care, about the rain clouds blanketing the sky. Villar considered chasing them away for their own good, but one thing stopped him. The group of kids was a mixed lot: two Calians, one dwarf, one mir, and two humans. If it had been simply a group of mir, he would have ordered them out. Even if dwarves and Calians had been with them, he might have said something. But the pre
sence of the humans enraged him. Villar couldn’t bring himself to warn them off.

  As the sky darkened, one of the humans left, as did the dwarf and the two Calians. The other human and, much to his dismay, the mir lingered. The two continued to play as if there was nothing wrong with their twisted friendship. Revolted, Villar was driven to leave. He was walking away when the rope snapped. Screams followed by cries for help echoed up.

  No one else heard.

  “By Mar! Thank Novron!” the human said as Villar peered over the edge. “Can you lower more rope?”

  Can you lower more rope? Villar could still hear that voice in his head. The kid didn’t say sir, he didn’t say please, just can you lower more rope? A common human child, ordering him to obey with the same sense of disregard and entitlement as a noble. The little brat expected Villar to do as he was told. Why wouldn’t he? How many times had the kid seen adults do the same? How many times had he seen grown mir smile and bow as they surrendered their dignity.

  The two children were treading water in the cistern below. Without the rope, the interior sides—sheer and slick with algae—made the site a death trap.