The Wounded Shadow

by Patrick W. Carr

  “But everything becomes commonplace when you’re around it long enough,” the other woman said. She was thin, with sandy blond hair and hazel eyes.

  “True enough,” the first woman said, pretending to work a spot on the metal. “They’re just things after all. People are more interesting.”

  I leaned forward to peer at the depiction of a man on horseback, but I jingled my purse with the other hand. “A member of the cosp came to my room,” I said. “It would be important to me to know if he passed through this room.”

  “How important?” the blond-haired woman asked.

  I let another half crown drop to the floor and nudged it with my foot, sliding it her way. Without missing a stroke with her cleaning rag she stepped on it while it was still moving.

  “Hradian,” the woman said. “Hard to miss, that one. Looks like one of the queen’s racing hounds, he does.”

  I nodded. “Was he alone?”

  The women said nothing until I relieved my purse of some more of its weight. “No,” the shorter one said. “There was a woman with him, young.”

  I stepped back, letting my gaze run the length of the tapestry and pretended to notice the women at their work for the first time. Before they could respond, I stepped their way, nodding at the mirror-bright candelabra. “You missed a spot.” I pointed, letting my finger touch the hand of the shorter woman, the one who’d spoken first.

  The room receded as I entered into her memories. I had no need to determine guilt or innocence, just the truth of what she’d told me, but her memory of working in the palace held the tenor of the unfamiliar. As time passed in the delve, faster than the blink of an eye, the merest fraction between heartbeats, I found the memories that confirmed my suspicion. Mirren had been with Hradian.

  I searched for the answer to my next question within her mind, but the knowledge wasn’t there. Disappointed and unwilling to put her at risk, I turned away, bending to check my boots and pulled a full crown from my purse. I put the coin on the floor next to the brassy metal of the candelabra. “I don’t talk to servants,” I said.

  “True enough, my lord, but thank you.” The crown disappeared beneath the cloth and I moved away.

  Chapter 32

  We gathered Hradian and left the palace for the cathedral, hoping to meet with Bishop Serius. The lieutenant retained enough sense to sit a horse, but he rode through the streets of Cynestol with the befuddled look of a man who’d expected it to be night exiting a house at noon.

  By the time we arrived at the six-sided monolith that commanded the most dominant order on the continent, his eyes had cleared enough so that he rode his mount with familiarity, if not confidence.

  “Hradian,” Bolt called as we dismounted in front of the cathedral. “Can you take us to see Bishop Serius?”

  His brows furrowed over his long nose, and he nodded, but I could see the makings of a question in his eyes that he couldn’t frame. “Why am I doing that?” he asked.

  “You came to my quarters,” Bolt said. “Do you know what purpose brought you there?”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “I remember being in your apartment.” He looked at Gael, Rory, and me in turn. “And all of you were there.” His gaze rested on me for a moment longer before he turned back to Bolt. “I don’t remember how I got there.”

  Bolt nodded. “What’s the last thing you remember before you found yourself on my couch?”

  He looked at the cathedral and the sun in confusion. “It was night and I was on my way . . .” His face clenched with the effort of remembering. “I was on my way . . .” He shook his head. “I was on my way somewhere, somewhere important.” He tapped his chest. “I can feel it here.”

  “Can you take us to Bishop Serius?” Bolt asked again. “I think he might know.”

  Hradian nodded, but lines etched his face as he struggled to piece the memory of his purpose together. “This way,” he said, his voice hollow with abstraction. “The offices of the bishops occupy the eastern wall so that they can watch the sunrise each morning.”

  He led us through an entrance imposing enough to make a full squad of soldiers feel small, and we walked an open-air corridor constructed of archways that surrounded most of the cathedral. We came to a set of doors at the middle of the east-facing wall and traversed a broad hallway that connected to another corridor running from north to south.

  “These are the offices of the leaders of the Merum church,” Hradian said. He pointed to the office immediately to our left. “That’s the Archbishop’s office. He . . .” Hradian stopped. “No, that’s not right. The Archbishop is dead.” He squeezed his eyes shut—“I knew that”—and shook his head, trying to clear it. “Come.” He set off at a crisp walk. “Bishop Serius’s office is only a few doors down.

  We entered the anteroom of the bishop’s office, a high-vaulted space apparently designed to impress upon its occupant their insignificance in the grand scheme of Aer and the church. If so, it succeeded. In the center of the room sat a man of more than middle years dressed in the red of the Merum order, writing. The scratching noise of his quill reached us despite the distance.

  Bolt stepped forward to the edge of the table and waited. Gael, Rory, and I stood behind him while Lieutenant Hradian walked the perimeter of the room, his eyes hooded and confused. After another moment, the man raised his head, showing no recognition of the last Errant.

  “Yes?”

  Bolt bowed from the waist until his torso paralleled the floor, a gesture I’d never seen him make before. “Errant Consto seeks an audience with Bishop Serius.”

  The man rose and nodded. “I will see if the bishop is accepting visitors.” He disappeared through the door behind his desk, only to reappear a moment later.

  “The bishop will be with you shortly, Errant Consto,” the secretary said. “If you will excuse me, I have an errand to attend to.” Without a glance for the rest of us, he departed, closing the door behind him.

  Rory was the first of us to speak. “Have you ever felt someone not looking at you?”

  Gael nodded. “He had his eyes locked on the door the moment he came out from the office.”

  Behind me, I heard Hradian muttering. “Was I here? Is this where I was?”

  Bolt growled an oath and crossed to the exit. “Locked from the other side,” he growled. “Quickly,” he ordered, “into Serius’s office. They’ll be coming for us.”

  We darted the length of the room and into the bishop’s expansive quarters. Bookshelves of rich, silver-gilded wood lined each of the four walls, their contents filled with books and scrolls of every imaginable description. In front of a pair of arched windows stood a solitary desk, three paces wide and a pace deep, with a heavily padded chair in red behind it.

  Where Serius sat staring blankly at us.

  “Rory, lock the door and find some way to wedge it closed,” I said.

  I didn’t bother to wait for Bolt’s encouragement or permission but crossed over to the bishop and entered his mind, touching him just long enough to see the disruption to his memories. Less than a heartbeat later, I came out. “Mud,” I said, “just like I saw in Hradian’s mind. Mirren’s been a busy girl.”

  “You’ve got to put his memories back together,” Bolt ordered. “With Vyne dead, this man is our best chance for stability in the Merum order.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t do what I don’t know how to do. You’ve been with me the entire time I’ve held the gift. You know I can’t do this.”

  “Mirren’s newer to the gift than you are,” Bolt said, “and she managed to destroy them.”

  “What’s easier, breaking a bone or healing it?” I asked.

  The sound of men flooding into the room beyond, curtailed whatever answer he might have made.

  Rory crossed over to the window casement and swung the lever that opened the windows. “This way,” he said.

  Bolt nodded. “Go.”

  I caught a glimpse of Rory’s fluttering cloak as he dropped out of sig
ht. The sound of a key turning in the lock behind us accompanied his departure. Gael crossed over to the casement and looked down. “It’s too high,” she said. “Willet can’t make the jump.”

  Bolt shook his head. “He can if we catch him. Now go!”

  The fall lifted her hair, giving the impression that she didn’t jump so much as flew. Then she was gone. The chair Rory had used to block the door shifted and cracked as the men on the other side hit it with their weight. Bolt crossed over to the window and leaned out of it, but instead of jumping, he closed the casement.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s too far. When you’re as old as I am, your bones can snap like dried twigs.”

  I didn’t bother to look out the window. I knew he was lying to me. A pair of thumps sounded from the far side of the door and the frame of the chair wedged beneath the lever cracked. “If you leave, the three of you will have a better chance of rescuing me.”

  His shoulders shifted beneath his tunic, but he didn’t make any move to draw his sword. “I don’t break my vows.”

  With the cracking sound of a drumstick in the jaws of a hound, the chair gave way and cosp filled the room, but when they saw Hradian standing there, they stopped, momentarily confused.

  Bishop Gehata, standing behind a row of gifted soldiers, snapped his fingers in our direction. “Take them, all of them.” He pointed at me. “Take care with that one. Don’t harm him, but don’t allow him to touch you.”

  “Arms up,” one of the soldiers in front gestured with his weapon.

  Hradian shook himself like a dog coming up out of the water. “I came here.” He nodded. “Something had happened to . . .” He turned to Bishop Gehata. “You did something.”

  “Take the lieutenant as well.” Gehata pointed at Hradian. “His mind has been corrupted somehow. Perhaps we can heal him.”

  Rough hands relieved me of my sword and daggers, even the one I kept hidden in my boot. I tried to think of some way of getting my hands onto one of Gehata’s men, but the bishop kept his gaze fixed on them, as if they might turn into vipers any second. One of the guards unbuckled Bolt’s sword and pulled a foot and a half of the steel from the scabbard, his gaze appreciative.

  Bolt leaned forward, his expression flat. “Be mindful of that. I’m going to want it back.”

  Gehata nodded. “Who knows, Errant? Perhaps you will find yourself in a position to use it again.” He backed toward the door. “I think it would be better if we continued this discussion in a more private location.” He spared a glance for Bishop Serius, still at his desk staring blankly at the scene before him in incomprehension. “We wouldn’t want to disturb the bishop from his contemplations.”

  I sucked air to make a retort, but Bolt stepped on my foot and shook his head. The cosp took us to a set of stairs at the southern end of the cathedral. They must have sent runners ahead to clear the way, because we didn’t see a soul on the way down.

  We descended until we were below ground level, the passageways growing progressively damper with each descent. Lieutenant Hradian was the first to be interred, and then we descended down another level and the guards stopped in front of a cell. Gehata pointed at me, and a quartet of sword points came to rest against my chest.

  “I have far too much respect for your abilities, Errant Consto, to allow you any heroics.” He nodded toward the cell. “In you go.”

  I saw my friend consider for a moment, and I knew he would be calculating speed and distance for each man he would need to kill and how much damage he could take to himself and still succeed. At the last, with a small indifferent shrug, he entered the cell, but his gaze held threats and promises for Gehata.

  We resumed our trek, descending yet another flight of stairs into the bowels of the cathedral. “May I lower my arms?” I asked. “My shoulders are getting tired.”

  Gehata laughed. “How very civil of you, Lord Dura.” He gave me a fluttering wave, and the guards put a circle of naked steel around me. “And here I’d been led to believe you were brash, ruthless, and defiant, even to your own detriment.”

  I gestured to the halls of monolithic stone surrounding us. “Putting each of us on a different level of the cathedral prison seems a bit extreme.”

  Gehata shrugged, but in the flickering torchlight I could see his self-indulgent smile. “There’s no point in allowing you to confer if I can prevent it. I’m a cautious man. The cathedral contains nine levels to serve as places of interment for those the church considered dangerous, a holdover from the Order Wars.”

  “Am I dangerous, then?”

  Gehata smiled, but his eyes no longer held the pleasure of a moment before. “Immeasurably so, Lord Dura. You surely must realize by now that I’m aware of your gift.”

  I nodded. “It seems strange that you would take me prisoner, given the church’s tradition of allowing autonomy for us.”

  His smile grew until it became predatory. “The church has made many mistakes concerning your kind, as well as in other matters—mistakes that I intend to rectify.”

  At his signal we stopped at the threshold of a cell with a puddle on the floor in front of its door. “My mistake,” I said. “I thought you were ambitious. Now I discover you’re insane.”

  He laughed at me with something akin to genuine mirth. “Me? You accuse me of being insane? Why, Lord Dura, you’ve found a jest to lighten my heart. Almost I’m tempted to spare you and keep you by my side to ease the burden of rule.”

  One of the cosp unlocked the door, and the sword points around me shifted position to force me into the empty cell. “Lovely accommodations,” I said, “but you forgot the rats.”

  Evidently, Bishop Gehata’s need for conversation had run dry. The heavy timbers with their barred window slammed shut with the booming echo of a drum. Gehata’s light receded until the cell and the corridor turned to pitch. I waited for my eyes to adjust, but the Merum prison was utterly lightless.

  I walked my cell, too far below any food source to harbor rats or spiders or other vermin, and obviously beneath some portion of Cynestol’s water table. Over half my steps created a soft splash. The farthest corner from the door must have been slightly elevated. While not dry, it didn’t hold water the way the rest of the cell did. I huddled to preserve my warmth and gave myself to contemplation of Gehata’s threat.

  He’d mentioned sparing me, but the context said plainly that he had no intention of doing so. I laughed softly. Even a village idiot could have figured out what Gehata intended. It might not work. I didn’t know enough about the seventh gift, the gift of domere, to know whether it would pass on to whomever was closest at my death or whether it would ignore them and go free.

  I hoped it would be the latter. The prospect of living in a world where Aer allowed the wicked a free hand in corrupting His plan bothered me more than a little. From somewhere in my past, before I’d been diminished by war and the duties of a reeve, came a prayer for the lost. I recited it even as questions of its intention swirled in my mind. Just who was I praying for? Myself? The Vigil? Serius or Gehata? In the end, I couldn’t decide. It occurred to me that any of us met the requirements.

  I stood, my hand tracing its way up the damp stone of my prison. Since I had no intention of trying to measure my cell as precisely as Volsk had done in Bunard—I was weak in the mathematicum anyway—I gave myself to thoughts of escape.

  Gael and Rory had fled, and it was barely possible that they might find a way to sneak into the prisons of the cathedral and free me. Possible, but unlikely in the extreme. My best chance of escape lay along one of two different paths, both only slightly less unlikely. First, I could try to deceive Gehata into believing I was more valuable alive. Chuckles welled up in me at the thought. In my entire life I’d been able to deliver a successful lie less than a handful of times. I was that bad at it. Even if I told Gehata the truth of how the gift of domere had come to me, of how Elwin had refused Iselle’s touch so that he could give the gift to me, I doubted I would be bel
ieved.

  My other option lay in attacking him from an unexpected direction. Bishop Gehata meant to kill me slowly enough to allow my gift to pass into him or one of his choosing, but the bishop would almost surely have Mirren delve me first. He’d already tried, and his hunger for power implied an equally voracious appetite for knowledge.

  After Elwin had been killed, I’d managed to deceive Laewan into thinking my mind was empty by locking my memories away. It had been a gamble I probably should have lost, and I’d survived by the slimmest of margins. Attempting the same ruse here would only get me killed that much quicker. If Gehata thought my mind was empty, he would open an artery in my arm or leg or throat and wait for the gift to flee my dying body.

  I needed another way. In my mind I replayed the steps I’d taken to my captivity and tried to determine in which direction the Everwood Forest lay. It probably didn’t matter, but I turned a slow circle with my eyes closed, hoping to feel some tug within me when I faced it. After a moment, I stopped.

  “Ealdor,” I called. “I need you.” A moment passed, and I had the opportunity to compare the cadence of my heartbeat to the dripping of water in my cell. “Please. No one’s here to teach me.” I looked around. Perhaps with enough imagination my cell would transform itself into a church. It shouldn’t be too hard. It was dark, and Gehata had entombed me in the bottom of the Merum cathedral.

  I lifted my hands and began the Exordium.

  Chapter 33

  As I finished the Exordium I waited . . . in silence.

  “Gehata means to kill me, Ealdor. Please.”

  Desperation sharpened my voice to an edge. “You’re fairly capricious about when you choose to honor your vows.” But even as I said it I knew I wasn’t being fair. He had come to me several times when it wasn’t within the rules. Doing so had resulted in his diminishment. He no longer inhabited the physical world. My friend had been reduced to nothing more than a wounded shadow.