Shadowlith (Umbral Blade Book 1)

by Stuart Thaman

  As he turned the blade over in his fingers, Alster felt a sense of strength rising from it. He felt empowered. Knowing the weapon had belonged to Alistair the Fourth brought a smile to his face he could not hide and in his solitude, he did not have to share his happiness with anyone.

  TRUTH

  Elsey sat down next to Alster with a bowl of warm soup. The table was noisy, tucked away at the side of the banquet hall and intended for servants and other low-ranking people to use. Alster saw his father sitting far away at the head table, an ornately carved work of art with miniature thrones at every place setting instead of the wobbly stools at his table. Jarix sat at Palos’ right hand, covered in white bandages and moving slowly. Jarix would live, Alster had heard, but not without great aesthetic impairment. He would bear scars for a lifetime.

  “Do you think your father will kill that boy?” Elsey asked quietly. It was the question on everyone’s mind. The servants and other employees had been talking about the incident ceaselessly over the last two days.

  “I’m surprised the boy wasn’t killed the moment he was found,” one of the estate’s several smiths replied across the table. “Palos is a member of King Gottfried’s high court. He can kill whomever he wants, I suppose.”

  Alster liked sitting with the servants. The working men and women did not view him with silent contempt as they did his brother and father. They welcomed him and gave him a place to belong, but they didn’t dare to show him any material comfort for fear of Palos’ wrath landing on their own heads. The servants sitting closest to him saw his wound and offered him concerned looks. Sadly, he knew those looks were as much sympathy as he would ever get.

  When the dinner had nearly concluded, Alster’s tutor, who had been seated at Palos’ left, left to begin preparing the second event planned for the night—an execution. As the tutor was making his way from the banquet hall to the courtyard, Palos himself stood to address the assembly. When he tapped a spoon against his golden goblet, the roughly three hundred voices in the hall fell silent.

  In front of him, Palos’ table was still covered with all manner of delectable foods procured from the farthest reaches of Vecnos. Alster thought to the meager soup he and the servants had been given and frowned. His meal had tasted fine, but it was a far cry from the exotic spread his brother and father had enjoyed.

  “Guests,” Palos began, his deep voice booming across the hall. “You have been gathered here on this momentous occasion to bear witness to a judicial proceeding in accordance with the laws of Vecnos. The laws by which we live have been passed down for generations from one high court to the next, and their infallibility is what keeps our lands safe.”

  A few of the servants rolled their eyes. One of the men next to Alster scoffed. “The laws are there to fatten your purse, old bastard,” the man said under his breath.

  “Tonight, we will continue a great tradition,” Palos went on. “As you have heard, we captured a traitor in our midst. This traitor,” Palos spat as he said the word, and Jarix visibly shrank in his chair, “was a member of our own militia. The boy tried to kill my son, the heir of this venerable estate, and so he shall be punished.”

  The wealthier guests near the front of the hall roared their approval, but the back of the room remained relatively disinterested.

  “Everyone will be busy in the courtyard,” Alster whispered to Elsey. “Want to check out that room beneath the archive?”

  Elsey nodded eagerly. “I’ll help you up,” she said loudly enough for the nearby workers to hear. With her help, Alster got to his feet and balanced himself between Elsey’s arm and his crutch.

  No one questioned the two as they slowly headed for the banquet hall’s exit. If Palos saw his son leaving the event, he didn’t care. The man continued with his impassioned speech, and Alster could still hear his voice even on the other side of the door.

  “The caretaker must have been busy hunting that boy with my father,” Alster said, placing a hand on the door. “No one has bothered to lock the archive.”

  “I doubt many people come in here anyway,” Elsey replied.

  Alster remembered the utter darkness of the hidden room underneath them and shuddered. “We should bring a lantern or a torch,” he said.

  Elsey nodded. “I’ll get one from the stables. Meet me under the painting of Alistair,” she told him.

  “Alright,” Alster agreed, opening the archive door slowly. He watched Elsey scamper around a corner. Once inside the dark room full of artifacts, Alster crept toward the painting as quietly as he could. As he had suspected, it looked like no one had entered the archive since his expedition a couple days before.

  Alster stared at Alistair’s portrait until Elsey arrived with a lantern some time later. Again, he found himself captivated by the painting. Everything about the scene was mesmerizing. At some level, the image seemed to be more than just an artist’s paint on a simple canvas. Alster felt something when he looked at Alistair atop his horse. He felt different.

  “Are you ready?” Elsey asked from beside him. She adjusted the shutter of her lantern to let plenty of light flood into the archive. Reaching up with her other hand, she pulled down on one of the sword hooks set into the wall and the secret passage opened once more.

  “I’m ready,” Alster said. With Elsey’s help, they descended the spiraling pathway under the archive, but Alster found that the lantern’s light made him more nervous rather than less. His eyes darted toward every shadow and around every corner. He had to actively resist the urge to look over his shoulder as he went.

  At the bottom of the winding passage, they took a moment to view the full extent of the subterranean complex. There were several rooms, and likely more they could not see, and each was barred with heavy iron like a dungeon cell. Instinctively, Alster went to the chamber to his left where he had found the gauntlets.

  In the light of the lantern, Alster marveled before the full extent of the trove. The room was filled to capacity with artifacts which appeared to be from Alistair’s time. Racks of antique swords hung against the walls, spears leaned in stacks in the corners, and several large sets of barding covered multiple wooden tables.

  “Do you think all of this stuff belonged to Alistair?” Elsey asked, her voice full of wonder.

  Alster nodded. “Look at the tabard,” he said, pointing to a stand with a white cloth draped over it. The cloth was checkered, and the top right corner held the image of a riderless horse against a background of fire. “In the portrait, Alistair wears that tabard over his armor.”

  “Look at that,” Elsey said. She pointed to a small, cylindrical metal cage perhaps ten feet from the iron bars. The cage was twisted, misshapen, like a lantern which had been mangled by a horse’s hooves.

  “What is it?” Alster asked. On the top of the cage where the bars met in a point, there was a heavy lock.

  “It looks too small for falconry,” Elsey said. The light from their lantern reflected off the red gilt of the strange object, leaving no doubt that it had once belonged to Alistair or one of his advisors.

  “What do you think is in the other rooms?” Alster asked. They both turned to investigate the rest of the chamber, but a sound stopped them in their tracks.

  “You heard that, right?” Elsey whispered.

  Alster swallowed, and his eyes darted from shadow to shadow. “It sounded like the wind,” he said after a moment. The other rooms were dark and silent, eerily calm in the quiet of the night.

  “There aren’t any windows down here,” Elsey said. “We’re too deep underground.”

  “I know.”

  Elsey took a few hesitant steps torward to the center of the room. She swung her lantern from side to side, trying to find what might have made the noise, but saw nothing.

  While Elsey scanned everywhere the light fell, Alster kept his eyes trained on the places still bathed in shadow; the places he dreaded.

  “There!” Alster exclaimed with a desperate whisper. Elsey whirled the lantern toward
the corner where he pointed, but there was nothing. The stone wall was completely ordinary in every aspect.

  As Alster focused his eyes on the areas to the sides of the lantern light, he saw it again. Something moved in the darkness. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was there. He saw a small sliver of shadow darker than the places around it. Something had drained what meager light once existed, and in its wake, nothing but a black abyss existed.

  “You need to close the lantern,” Alster whispered. He didn’t know for sure if Elsey could hear him. She did not move. The lantern trembled in her hands, the light wavering, but the shadow remained. “Do something! Blow it out!” Alster urged.

  Finally, Elsey closed the shutter on the lantern to extinguish the light, leaving the two in complete darkness.

  “Run!” Alster said, staggering through the pitch-black room as quickly as he could manage. With his walking stick slowing him down drastically, he couldn’t help but feel like he was just moments from being consumed.

  Elsey ran ahead of him, using the wall to guide her through the darkness. She was close enough to have a tenuous hold on Alster’s hand, but her urgency threatened to break them apart. Alster held on with all his might. A thousand thoughts flew through Alster’s head. Facing whatever was living in the darkness terrified him, and losing his grip on Elsey’s hand terrified him even more. In the lightless passage, he wasn’t confident he would be able to find his way back to the surface.

  “Slow down,” he said breathlessly. “I can’t keep up.”

  Elsey kept her pace, practically dragging Alster up the stone corridor. The extinguished lantern rattled in her left hand and clanged against the wall as she ran.

  Finally, somehow, they emerged from the secret passageway and stood panting at the side of the archive. Alster looked up to the portrait behind him with something akin to gratitude.

  Then he saw the light in the room.

  From somewhere outside, a torch cast its light through one of the archive’s windows. Where there was light, there could be shadows. Where there were shadows, there were shades.

  All at once, Alster’s fear came rushing back in debilitating waves.

  “We can’t stay here,” he said, moving toward the door. To the right of the archive’s exit, something moved. It was larger than whatever he had seen below, nearly as tall as the door itself, and it darted from the doorway to the corner as though something had spooked it.

  “A... A shade,” Elsey stuttered. “I saw it too.”

  Alster grabbed her arm and shut his eyes, wishing it would simply go away. When he opened them again, he saw it, a patch of shadow darker than the rest, roughly humanoid in shape, standing in the corner of the archive. Alster tried to calm his breathing to get his thoughts in order, but he felt the thing staring at him, looking into his eyes as though it was specifically hunting him.

  “We have to leave,” Alster whispered, never taking his gaze from the corner. “I don’t think it can hurt us.” He remembered the lesson he had learned earlier from his tutor. He had always been told that shades were physically harmless, but now he knew otherwise. Some shades could harm people. They were killers.

  “Just go slowly,” Elsey said. “Maybe it can’t see us. Maybe it won’t follow us.”

  Alster nodded and reached out with his walking stick, taking each step slowly. He knew he wasn’t a threat to the shade, but he had no way of knowing how the shade perceived him.

  It took the pair almost half an hour, but they reached the archive door before the shade moved again. Alster gingerly reached for the handle, trying to be as silent as possible.

  The shade turned.

  Its two-dimensional body shifted sideways, repositioning itself to look more closely at what was happening.

  Elsey shrieked. She immediately pulled her hands to her mouth, dropping her lantern noisily in the process, and her voice carried painfully beyond the archive.

  “If someone heard,” Alster said, his mind whirling from the shade to his father in a heartbeat.

  “Go!” Elsey urged, nearly throwing him through the doorway.

  In the hallway, lanterns illuminated the ground almost fully, giving Alster a shred of hope that the shade could not follow him.

  Voices echoed from the direction of the kitchens, and they sounded upset. “Run,” Alster said to Elsey for what felt like the hundredth time that night. “Go up to my room and wait for me there. I can play it off, just don’t let them see you.”

  Elsey nodded and took off for Alster’s tower bedroom. Wasting no time, Alster lifted his stick and knocked one of the nearby lanterns from its sconce, spilling oil all over the floor and his feet. Luckily, the wick extinguished before the lantern hit the ground. Just then, the caretaker turned the corner muttering a stream of curses under his breath.

  “What’s all this ruckus?” the old man spat.

  “I’m sorry,” Alster began. “I came down to get something to eat and I fell.” He pointed to the broken lantern with his crutch. “I’m sorry I broke the lantern. It was an accident.”

  The caretaker let out a deep sigh. He looked from Alster to the sconce on the wall and shook his head. “I’m surprised you could reach that lantern, boy,” he said.

  Alster’s stomach dropped.

  “My stick hit it when I fell,” he said, hoping the caretaker would believe the obvious lie. It was the best thing he could concoct without pausing and giving himself away.

  The caretaker pondered everything for a few moments, but eventually nodded. “Did I not latch your door this night? I knocked, and I assumed you were asleep when you did not respond,” the man asked. He held out a hand toward Alster, indicating that he would help him back to his room.

  Alster wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t in his room when the door had presumably been shut, so he figured a fragment of the truth was the best option. “I was still at the feast when you must have closed the door, I guess,” he replied.

  The caretaker stroked his wispy beard while he walked. “You were still at the feast, yet you said you came down to get some food,” he concluded after a moment.

  Alster stopped dead in his tracks. He had been discovered, and there was no immediate way to talk himself out of it. “I’m sorry,” Alster muttered under his breath.

  The caretaker’s expression soured further. “Your father will not be pleased to hear of your nighttime adventures,” the man said flatly, though there was a hint of sympathy in his voice. “I believe you will be punished.”

  Alster felt tears welling up in his eyes. He pulled himself in front of the caretaker to face him directly. “Please,” he begged. “Just let me go back to my room. I swear I won’t leave again. Let me go back and everything will be fine.”

  With another sigh, the caretaker put a hand on Alster’s shoulder. “Alster,” he began. “I have to tell your father. You know that. What he does and how he rules his family is up to him.”

  Tears escaped from Alster’s eyes.

  “I’ll give you one piece of advice, son,” the man continued. “Run away from here. It's only a matter of time before Palos buries you in the courtyard, and you aren’t doing yourself any favors by skulking around the estate at night.” There was sorrow in the old caretaker’s eyes.

  Alster tried to keep his fear and trepidation under control, but he could not. He sobbed violently, shuddering with every breath he took.

  The caretaker did not relent. “I’m surprised you’re still here after all these years,” he went on. “You should have left a long time ago.”

  “Where would I go?” Alster asked between sobs.

  The man laughed. “I don’t know, and I don’t care!” he chuckled, his voice turning apathetic. “Just run. Get out of this place. Palos will look for you for a few days, maybe a week, but then he won’t care either. Go start a new life somewhere else.”

  Alster nodded. For once, he felt like someone other than Wilkes had told him the truth. He needed to leave. “Thank you,” he said quietl
y.

  “I won’t tell your father you’re missing until noon,” the caretaker said with a sigh. “That’s the best compromise I can give you. Now go.”

  Alster hurried along, his stick clicking against the ground with every step. “Thank you,” he said again, though his voice was too quiet to be heard.

  ESCAPE

  Alster met Elsey in front of the door leading to the tower which housed his bedroom. “I have to leave the estate,” Alster said solemnly.

  She didn’t appear surprised. “Did they catch you?” she asked.

  Alster unlocked the door and slipped the key into his pocket. “The caretaker found me. He told me he wouldn’t turn me in until noon tomorrow.”

  “You can sleep in the stables tonight,” Elsey replied. “Get what you need from your room. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t have much to take,” Alster responded, moving up the stairs to his room. “Steal some food from the kitchens, and I’ll meet you at the stable,” he told her.

  At the top of the staircase, Alster leaned his walking stick against the wall and went to work gathering what he could carry. The dead of winter would be upon Vecnos before long, and Alster only owned one heavy, hooded cloak. He grabbed the garment from a pile of clothes in the corner of his room and wrapped it around his shoulders. Prying up the loose floorboard, Alster took Alistair’s gauntlets, strapped them to his wrists, and slid the small dagger into his belt.

  He looked around the room for anything else he might own which could be useful, but nothing caught his eye. When he realized how very little he truly possessed, Alster could only shrug. It didn’t matter.

  “I’ll find somewhere to go,” he said to himself. He clenched his hands together and felt the scalloped steel of Alistair’s gauntlets curving around his fingers. They felt perfect on his arms. He traced his leather-clad fingertips over the red filigree on the back of his right gauntlet. A smile spread across his face.