Lord of Shadows

by Alix Rickloff

  Somewhere a door slammed in the wind. A gutter rattled. Animals shifted upon their bedding. All normal night sounds. Nothing that should have touched off his wary soldier sense.

  A sister unable to sleep. A servant rising to stoke a fire. No more than that, surely.

  Still he kept watch. Waited for the telltale slipup that would reveal the intruder.

  There. A latch falling. A furtive step. A light glinting then dying in a doorway. He hadn’t imagined it. Across the way in the main building.

  The plaguing sense of an unseen force pushing against his brain sank through him. He accepted its seeking, slithering presence. Let it glide between the walls of his mind. Easier than struggling and less painful. It also allowed him to hold onto the shreds of a fast diminishing illusion of control.

  Hunching his shoulders, he stepped out of the shelter of the cloister. Picked his way through the concealing gloom. The order’s rectory stood imposing and grim. Narrow, arched, staring windows. A shallow set of steps to a double door.

  He bypassed the main entrance. The sounds he’d heard had come from the side. A less conspicuous entrance.

  As he slid inside, he felt the stir of air from an upper corridor. A muffled breath. Whoever he followed held a knowledge of stealth. Yet it gained him little. Daigh was better. Quiet and inescapable as a tomb.

  At the top of the steps, he followed the weak light of a shielded taper down a wide corridor.

  Ard-siúr’s office lay in this direction.

  Anger writhed and curled with needle-sharpness along his nerves. Burned black and wicked with his blood. Buried itself so deep within him, he could no longer be sure where he ended and the presence began. The strength of one augmenting the other until they became one.

  Stalking the last few yards to the door to Ard-siúr’s office, he slid into the antechamber, alive to any waiting danger. Bookshelves. A glass-fronted highboy. A desk holding an open ledger. A stack of books. A set of chairs lined like sentinels against the far wall. An inner door, standing cracked. A sliver of pale light pointing like a dagger at his feet.

  Tapping the inner door wider, he stepped into the narrow breach. Barely dodged the downward plunge of a heavy vessel aimed at his head. Took the makeshift weapon on his shoulder, numbing pins and needles shooting down his arm. He swung into the room, escaping a second attempt to brain him.

  The figure remained impossible to distinguish from the thick cluster of shadows. A twisting slick of ghostly movement that had Daigh sucking wind from a punch to the gut. Brought him to his knees with a chop to the neck.

  He shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Let the vicious lick of flame torching his body ignite the predator in him. His vision contracted onto a man. Dark. Lean. Dressed in unrelieved black, but for the silver flash of a knife. It swept at Daigh’s throat. Sliced a deep wound across the palm of the hand he threw up to deflect the blow.

  Unfolding from the floor with slow deliberation, he speared the attacker with a furious glare. The dagger arced a second time. Stung Daigh across the ribs. And again—this time aimed at his stomach.

  He threw himself to the side but not in time.

  The dagger pierced his flesh with a hot agony. Tore through muscles. Tendons. Ended buried hilt-deep and quivering against a rib. Daigh opened his mouth on a scream. Choked it back until his cry became only a muffled, anguished moan.

  This was his hunt. The intruder his quarry. He’d not alert the bandraoi. Not until he understood the danger.

  The man smiled, his eyes wide with triumph. Turning from Daigh’s still crumpled body, he relit his candle stub. Worked in a methodical inch-by-inch search, starting at the shelves to the right of the door.

  Ignoring Daigh.

  Bad idea.

  Wounds would slow but not stop the relentless hammer of his battle prowess. Death would be turned aside.

  He wrapped a hand around the blood-slicked dagger. Yanked it free, almost passing out from the pain. His whole body tremored until he grit his teeth against the spasms ripping through him. Squeezing his eyes shut, he counted to one hundred slowly. Opened them to another freshly healed scar crisscrossing his torso. A road map through hell and back.

  He traced the puckered ridge of skin with the tip of one finger. Experienced a tingly icy numbness, but beyond that no lasting effects from a wound that should have killed him.

  The man paused at the tapestry hanging behind Ard-siúr’s desk—figures bearing a litter toward an open tomb. Fingered the heavy cloth for a moment before wrenching it from the wall with a shrug and a grunt of success. Shoved it into a waiting satchel.

  This was Daigh’s cue. He rose like the walking dead, the blood-sticky dagger gripped in one trembling fist. His body stretched taut as a bowstring, every nerve screaming. “You should make certain of your kills.”

  The man froze in a pose of astonishment mixed with terror. “How?” he breathed. “I saw”—his eyes flicked to the dagger—“no one should have survived such a thrust. No man alive could . . .” He straightened, comprehension dawning in a grim smirk. “But you’re not a man, are you?” he mocked in a cruel jest. “Nor alive in the strictest sense.”

  The presence strained to be released. The beast uncoiling with serpent strength. Sinking its fangs into his bloodstream.

  Daigh contained it through sheer will. Twitched against the jags trembling his hands. Shallowing his breathing to an animal pant. This black-jacketed villain knew him. Who he was. What he was.

  Daigh couldn’t kill him until the thief spilled what he knew. Then he would do as he wished.

  Buckling the satchel, the man slung it over his shoulder. “My apologies. Máelodor gave you up for dead.”

  Daigh’s lips curled in an empty smile. “As you see, harder than it looks.”

  “Poor phrasing on my part. Not dead then, but absent from your meeting in Cork. Máelodor’s anxious to recover the tapestry. He sent me in your stead.”

  “Did he?”

  Máelodor? The tapestry? None of it stirred any answering memory within. He focused on his first and loudest thought.

  “You say I’m not a man. What would you term me?”

  Black Jacket stiffened with wary apprehension. Eyed Daigh like a disease as he drew the satchel up onto his shoulder. “I meant no offense.”

  “Then what did you mean?” Daigh asked through gritted teeth, patience waning.

  “It’s obvious isn’t it? Look at you. Looming up out of the dark like a demon from a nightmare. I’d not really believed Máelodor’s claims of resurrecting a Domnuathi. Too far-fetched, like something out of a faery story.” He shifted slightly, his gaze flicking to the open office door. “The name suits you though. Lazarus rising from the dead, eh?”

  Daigh flinched, his vision hazing as the final door was flung open.

  Not Lazarus. Never Lazarus.

  He had another name. Another life.

  The creature exploded through his skull. Daigh heard it laughing as it crushed him in its coils.

  He flung himself at the man, reason lost amid the howl of killing ecstasy. Heard the bark of a pistol through the pounding in his ears. Stumbled to his knees at the slash of sizzling heat gouging a path through his chest.

  The man never paused. Instead he leapt for the door, footsteps slapping across the flagstones. Any pretense at secrecy over.

  Daigh could do nothing but watch as the man vanished, satchel in hand.

  Máelodor. A tapestry. Domnuathi.

  Not a man. Not alive.

  Lazarus rising from the dead.

  He clutched his bloody chest, but it was the whirlwind in his skull that held him immobile.

  Oh gods, what nightmare had he stumbled into? And how could he hope to battle his way back out?

  How had she slept through it all? Had she really been so tired she’d been unaware of a commotion that turned the convent into a seething mass of raised voices, hostile interrogations, and in one or two cases, womanly vapors bordering on hysteria?

&nbs
p; Apparently she could.

  And did.

  Now, standing in the stillroom doorway, she breathed deeply through her nose. Pulled her pathetic self together as she scanned the empty room. Every trace of its recent occupant had been erased. Even the scent of Daigh destroyed beneath a new layer of soapy clean. All as if he’d never been. As if he’d only been a very involved and lifelike hallucination.

  She tried swallowing past the lump in her throat. Breathing around the tightness in her chest. Rubbing her arms in an attempt to ward off the gooseflesh pebbling her skin. No hallucination—no matter how convincing—would leave her flushed with passion’s afterglow. His embrace had been real. His kiss had been very real.

  It was only the snatched glimpses of herself as part of Daigh’s past that held the stuff of delirium. And those, in the reassuring light of day, she chalked up to the overflow of his tumultuous emotions seeping into her mind. Other empathy gone awry. Nothing more.

  Trailing back up the passage, she pictured an empty ribbon of long days stretching before her. A lifetime of dawns and dusks where every day was like every other day. Safe. Quiet. Serene.

  Devoid of meaning.

  Sister Ainnir bent over Sister Moira, listening to her chest.

  “How could you simply let him go?” Sabrina demanded.

  The elderly priestess faced her with a wrinkled lowering of her brows. Straightened, ushering Sabrina before her back down the row of beds to her tiny office. Closing the door firmly behind her.

  “We didn’t let him go. He absconded in the middle of the night,” she answered curtly once they were alone. “After ransacking Ard-siúr’s office. Making off with sacred valuables, and stealing a horse.”

  Ard-siúr’s office? Sabrina’s chest collapsed on a swift exhalation. The night she found him there—had he lied to her? Had this been his purpose all along? “I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t have to believe it. The evidence is indisputable. The man was a common thief who played us all for fools. No doubt his intention all along was to gain freedom enough to move about unwatched. Once our guard was down, he opened the gates to his accomplices in crime.”

  “He must not have known what he was doing. Or they forced him. Threatened him somehow.”

  Sister Ainnir heaved a derisive snort. “And pigs can fly. No one could force that man to do anything he didn’t want to.”

  “I heard there was blood in Ard-siúr’s office. Lots of it. How do you explain that?”

  Sister Ainnir’s lips pursed, unmoved by Sabrina’s fervent defense. “A quarrel among thieves. We’ve seen already MacLir’s inexplicable ability to heal from wounds that would kill a normal human—even the most powerful of Other. That alone should have given us more pause than it did.”

  “We couldn’t have misjudged him so horribly. Ard-siúr would have seen his intentions. Known him for what he was.”

  Sabrina should have.

  His tenderness with Sister Clea. The stolen kiss in the night. It couldn’t have been merely a con man’s sly conniving. The polished art of the deceiver. What of his grief? His pain? She’d sensed them both. But if she were being completely honest, she’d also felt an underlying rage that frightened her with its feral intensity.

  Had those stolen glimpses hinted at something darker? A corrupt purpose he’d hidden even from the skilled scrying of the bandraoi? Had her childish fantasies blinded her to the warning signs?

  “Argue as you will, Sabrina. Even if it’s as you say and Daigh MacLir is wholly innocent, his departure was past due. As sisters of High Danu, we walk a careful line. No hint of our order’s true nature must escape these walls. No suspicions must taint the careful construct we’ve made of our lives. Mr. MacLir threatened that. You know it as well as I. He was a danger, and he brought danger with him. It’s good he left. Now perhaps we can return to normal.” Her pointed stare included Sabrina’s return to normal in that statement.

  It was clear she deemed the conversation at an end. Even before she’d finished speaking, she’d begun tidying away the remnants of her work. Returning bottles to their shelves. Checking supplies, marking her tally against an inventory.

  “But what about—” Sabrina swallowed her words.

  What about me? Her newly emerged, defiant self wanted to shout. Thought better of it.

  Already Sister Ainnir watched her with increasing concern. Jane cast her fleeting, worried glances when she thought Sabrina wasn’t looking, and Sister Brigh searched for more reasons to postpone her elevation to priestess. If she exposed her foolish fascination with a man she’d known for scant days, revealed the inner tangle of captured memories and swamping emotions, or told anyone that Daigh’s disappearance pushed against her heart with an ancient and remembered ache, they’d call her mad. And rightly so. All she wanted would be jeopardized. Best to keep quiet. After all, Daigh had left. Slithered away in the night without even a good-bye to mark his leaving. Her life would go back to the way it was before Daigh MacLir had washed up upon their beach.

  And that was a good thing.

  What she wanted.

  Wasn’t it?

  “What about what?” Sister Ainnir’s canny eye focused on Sabrina’s forehead like a giant magnifying glass.

  Had she been speaking? Sabrina scrambled to clutch the threads of lost conversation. “The . . . um . . . the still-room,” she blurted. “Does it need to be cleaned?” As if she hadn’t smelled the biting stench of lye already. Hadn’t seen for herself the sparse sterility of the tiny space.

  Sister Ainnir sighed. “It’s done already. You’re free until your duties this afternoon.”

  She spoke this like a reward when it only meant Sabrina would have hours to roll events in her head. Tumble them into new shapes. Sort through every shared look and exchanged word that passed between her and Daigh for clues to his duplicity. End brooding over her complete and utter gullibility.

  Perhaps if she wrote it all down in her journal. Seeing it on the page in black and white might help her to place Daigh and her naive infatuation in its proper place. Make her see it all for what it really was. A momentary diversion when she most needed one. Not the life-altering passion her overactive imagination had turned it into.

  Suddenly she was glad of the escape. The hours to herself.

  She hurried back up the aisle. Ignored Sister Clea’s pathetic call. “Where’s Paul? Where’s my brother? He said he’d come back. He promised.”

  And what was a promise worth?

  Sabrina had found over and over to her cost—absolutely nothing.

  The hunt came so easy. Too easy for Daigh to ignore the obvious. He’d stalked his quarry before. Many times. And turned a skilled and deadly hand to it.

  He traced Black Jacket to the village. And from there toward Clonekilty. On to Bandon, where a frightened publican at the King’s Arms assured Daigh a man matching the thief’s description had stopped to rest and water his horse and snatch a bite to eat in the tavern’s tap before taking the road for Cork. No, he’d not spoken of his business in the city, but he’d a foreign look to him and an impatient air, so a betting man would say he’d been making for the harbor.

  Daigh would take that bet. He tracked like a hound upon a blood trail.

  Or like one of the Domnuathi stalking its next victim.

  The truth fired his soul with torchlike intensity. Singed away hope. He’d been fooling himself since waking among the bandraoi. Let the calm of days measured in prayer and work lull him into believing he might be normal. A simple man suffering a simple tragedy that time and patience would heal.

  Nothing simple or normal about him. And he needed neither time nor patience to heal. It was death that was denied him. Or should he say—dying again. He’d been sent to the grave once already.

  But if he now understood what he was, he still didn’t know who he was. What dark power had summoned him back from the grave. How he’d ended half drowned upon a stretch of rocky shoreline. What strange presence infected his mind l
ike a violent disease. Those questions remained along with the scattered bursts of so many others pummeling the insides of his skull.

  Black Jacket knew the answers. Daigh just needed to run him to ground. Force him to give them up—at the point of a blade, if needs must.

  Last night’s rain had become today’s drizzly mist, leaving him damp and miserable. The road slippery and treacherous. Twice his horse had stumbled. And once he’d had to find a path around a wash where the road had completely vanished under a sea of mud and debris.

  Urging the bay into a canter to the top of the rise, he searched the road below as it dipped into a shallow valley. A few carriages. A wagon and team. A farmer in a heavy coat and hat hiking the verge. The rest lost in a gray afternoon twilight.

  Turning in the saddle, he looked back the way he’d come. To Glenlorgan. To Sabrina.

  I’m back for you. His promise to her. The words coming from some lost place within. A place where he saw her laughing. Loving. The two of them sharing a life. But she didn’t belong to him. It had been a mirage. A dream built upon his bones. A desire torn from a life that had ceased to exist centuries ago.

  His hands clenched the slick reins.

  Nothing solid but for the ache of their separation. That held a pain as real and recent as yesterday.

  Sabrina lifted her head after long hours bent over her diary. Squinted against the fast fading light. Rolled her shoulders as she worked out the kinks. And read back the pages and pages filled with impressions, recollections, and conversations, hoping against hope her time with Daigh would make more sense than it had as she’d written it.

  No such luck.

  In fact her frantically scrawled notes sounded quite a lot like the ramblings of a particularly creative-minded bedlamite.

  Memories of a past that didn’t belong to her. Daigh’s face swimming up through her mind as if it had always been there. And a knowledge of things that shouldn’t be hers to know.

  Dear heavens, if the bandraoi got hold of this they’d shackle her to her bed and hide all sharp objects.