by Kesia Lupo
This ghastly scene felt like a bad omen, a warning. Constance glanced over her shoulder, but quickly steeled her resolve. A memory returned to her with frightening clarity: the bare brick walls of the small reflection chamber, the deep pool in the floor, a voice emanating from nothing, perhaps from Constance herself, perhaps from someone hidden. How could she have known? She had been forced to stare at the pool for countless hours, her knees hurting beyond the point of pain, the water reflecting her own exhausted, mask-like expression. Pursue the things you fear, the voice had said. If you do not seek them first, they will seek you.
She shook away the memory and ventured deeper into the complex of elaborately knotted beds and twisted footpaths, stepping carefully among the strange white roots that prised up the paving stones. She jumped at the sound of movement; but it was only a rat, scurrying into the dead reeds beside the stagnant fountain. Her lamplight caught on the face of a statue, its cherubic delight made grotesque by streaks of black, like tears.
‘Constance.’ Another light joined hers, its flickering glow illuminating Irvine’s eyes, which glittered like green water on a sunny day. The lower half of his face was swaddled in scented scarves. The material was richer than it had been earlier in the day, a shimmer of gold cloth, the glint of silver thread in dark silk. The Swordmaster drew his blade from the hilt at his belt, the slim rapier gleaming in the shifting light, the jewel on the pommel glowing green. He set his lamp on the ground. His voice was muffled. ‘It’s a long time since we’ve sparred, Constance.’ He threw her another blade from one of the two scabbards at his belt. Despite all the years since she’d practised, she caught it in her right hand easily.
‘Really?’ she said, lifting an eyebrow.
‘Really.’ He flashed her a smile and raised his sword.
‘Wine, pointy knives and poor visibility sound like a dangerous combination to me,’ she observed.
‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’
She smiled, rested her cane against the side of the fountain and mirrored his stance, the unfamiliar posture exposing stiffness in her muscles, her left arm held awkwardly behind her back. Suddenly she felt as sober as if she’d plunged her head in cold water. The storm cloud seemed to thicken and wheel around them, a slow carousel turning to its own silent tune, grumbling softly. Constance and Irvine stood at its centre, holding their weapons, gazes fixed.
She should have felt sixteen again. She should have felt the last six years falling away like autumn leaves. But this was different. Strange and serious.
He attacked first, a low simple swipe that Constance knew was designed to test her. She parried, the blade feeling unnatural in her palm. And yet – some memory of the fight remained. Once, it had been her greatest pleasure.
‘I don’t believe a word you spoke in there,’ said the Swordmaster.
‘That’s your prerogative, I suppose,’ she said coolly. She swiped at his collarbone, but he stepped back gracefully.
‘I so badly want to trust you. I stuck my neck out for you earlier, and the Justice has a sharp and ready axe.’
‘So trust me. Aren’t you swordsmen supposed to follow your instincts?’ She tried again, pirouetting in a feint, changing direction at the last minute. A fancy move for an ill-practised swordswoman. Her skirts fanned out, sending the storm cloud into a frenzy, but Irvine neatly parried the blow. Her blade rang, her wrist jolting.
‘Ouch,’ she said mildly. Her muscles already ached.
‘Wherever you’ve been, you haven’t been fighting,’ said Irvine.
‘Ouch,’ she repeated.
‘Enough of this game,’ he said, his expression suddenly serious. ‘Tell me the truth. I deserve to know.’ He leaped on to the ledge of the fountain. ‘Why did you leave?’ He swiped at her head, and Constance lurched backwards, rather ungracefully.
‘Hey, careful!’
But his voice grew even harder. ‘Answer me. Why did you leave? And why did you return?’
‘Look at you, taking the high ground,’ she said, stepping out of his reach. ‘I suppose things look so simple from all the way up there. It’s complicated, Lord Irvine, and I can’t tell you why. But I can tell you it isn’t idle ambition. It’s important. It’s sad that I even have to tell you that – I thought you knew me better.’ What she had said was true, and she infused her voice with outrage. She could have lied to him, she supposed. But she didn’t want to – besides, it wasn’t a good idea. If you build a tower of lies, some day it will fall and crush you, the High Priestess had once told her. Build your lies as false bricks into a tower of truth, so that no one can tell them apart. ‘Why can’t you just trust me?’
His face settled into something sterner. ‘I would never have questioned the Constance I knew six years ago. But that Constance disappeared, and I’m not exactly sure who has returned.’ He leaped from the ledge and spoke in a voice low with mingled anger and tenderness. ‘Tell me one thing … did I mean anything to you at all?’ Before she could reply, he attacked – one, two, three, four times, metal clashing each time she parried, driven further and further back. Her muscles protested, burning painfully.
‘Hey!’ she managed, as he attacked again, shocked at the ferocity of the strike. She stepped on the hem of her cloak and tumbled backwards to the stony ground, her sword crashing down beside her.
Irvine lowered his blade. He still looked angry, but a smile tugged again at the corners of his mouth. ‘Sorry.’
‘You’ve been practising,’ huffed Constance. ‘And I ought to get extra points for fencing in a party dress.’
She took his proffered hand and stumbled to her feet. Irvine laughed. A flash of blue lightning lit up his smile – and suddenly she was laughing too. For a few moments, their easy friendship had returned.
‘Tell me one more thing,’ said Irvine, through a smile. ‘Why won’t you call me by my name?’
She snorted. ‘All right, Lord Alexander Irvine.’
‘You used to call me Xander.’ He was serious again. ‘We were the best of friends. More than friends …’
‘You seem a bit grand for “Xander” now. We’re not children any more.’ She handed him his spare sword and retrieved her cane from beside the fountain. She grinned as a memory returned to her, unbidden. ‘Do you remember how you used to dress? Your mother would have a fit every time you returned, covered in mud and leaves and scratches. She said you were too old to be getting into scrapes like that. And now?’ She looked him up and down, leaning closer. ‘You’re a proper lord. You’re handsome and you dress in silks, and there’s scented oil in your hair, isn’t there?’ She smiled as his cheeks reddened. ‘You have two hundred and fifty men under your command, you’re responsible and brave and authoritative. Your mother would have been proud. Hardly the ragamuffin I knew back when.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Two hundred and fifty men? Who’s counting?’ His tone was light. ‘Have you really missed me, Constance, or are you just after my sword power?’
She laughed, though it was only half a joke. ‘Winton told me.’
An unreadable expression – discomfort, perhaps – passed over Xander’s face.
‘What’s wrong?’ Constance asked. ‘Did something happen between you and Winton?’
He shook his head. ‘My … my fighting style wasn’t quite right for him. He’s built for a longsword. Captain Trudan was the perfect mentor.’ He avoided Constance’s eyes, and – for the moment – she chose to let it pass.
‘Now, Xander, was this rendezvous just an opportunity to humiliate me in the practice ring, or did you have something to tell me?’
He glanced at her with mingled relief and sadness. He sheathed his swords and sat on the fountain’s edge, sighed and rubbed his temples. ‘Where do I begin?’
She sat carefully beside him, the damp stone cold against her thighs, even through layers of silk. ‘My father … how long has he been like this?’
He nodded. ‘As good a place to start as any. His condition began just over two y
ears ago. The Pestilence had done its worst by then, more than half the population dead, a terrible toll each year in the summer months, regular as a harvest. The shallow crypts in the lower town were full to bursting. And traders refused to enter – instead, special convoys left produce on the outskirts of the forest, collecting gold in return.’ His voice was quiet, full of horror. ‘Things were bad. And the Pestilence showed no regard for wealth or status: my younger brother, my sister, my father … to name only a few. Everyone had lost someone. It was a terrible, dark time.’ The lamplight flickered across his eyes, shining green. ‘But the Duke’s strength in the face of great personal suffering helped us all see him as a true figurehead, a leader. He wasn’t idle. He stockpiled food and supplies. He tried to stem the spread of the Pestilence. And he even sent envoys, messages to the City of Kings … but no one came. Perhaps the messengers were swallowed up in the storm cloud. Or perhaps no one cared. And then … something changed.’
He paused, a distant look in his eyes above the swaddling of his scarves.
‘What changed?’ Constance urged quietly.
‘It was gradual, but I see it now in hindsight, clear as day. Slowly but surely, the Duke developed an obsession: he wanted someone to blame for the tragedy inflicted on his home and his people. Rather than finding a solution to the storm cloud, his focus turned to rooting out and punishing those responsible. He began to complain of headaches too: it was then that the Duchess sent for Dr Thorn, who began to attend to him regularly. But none of his medicines appeared to help – in fact, he only grew worse. As the headaches worsened, so did his obsession. He spent hours locked away with the Justice, and soon both concluded that the culprit must be a mage, a coven of mages, an infestation of mages – and that they were still in the city, weaving the storm spell stronger and stronger by the day. Soon the Duke sent a message to the King: he was shutting the gates. No one was to enter or to leave. And so he did. He told the King it was to quarantine Duke’s Forest and prevent the spread of the Pestilence, but his true purpose was, and always has been, to trap the supposed culprits inside the city and kill them.’
These were hard words to hear. ‘Do you think … the Justice poisoned his mind? Or did my father truly believe …?’
Xander rested his hand on her shoulder and met her eyes. ‘It has always been my belief that your father is truly unwell, and that the Justice has taken advantage of his misfortune. As your father deteriorated, he handed over more and more responsibility to the Justice, who was eager to accept the reins of power – and eventually petitioned the Wise Men for the Protectorship. The Duchess was always terrified of magic, and she never had a head for politics anyway. She respected the Justice, believed him – he was certain to make a friend of her. Although she cared deeply for the Duke, she too wanted nothing more than to rid the city of mages.’
Constance nodded grimly. She knew the truth of that.
‘He’s a fanatic, Constance. The rest of us watched, helpless. What can the Wise Men do, a mere advisory council, against the decisions of the Duke and the authority of the King?’
Constance lowered her eyes. Did he want her to apologise for not being there sooner? She wasn’t going to, but she let him read into her expression.
‘Don’t blame yourself, Constance. You’re back now, and I’ve a feeling that things are going to change.’
‘Yes. Yes, things are going to change.’ She clenched her left hand tight around her cane.
Once Xander had gone, Constance wished for nothing so much as a cup of hot milk and a warm bed. But she had work to do – and only a few hours left before dawn.
Lifting her broken-paned lantern a second time, she hurried across the pleasure gardens, pulling her cloak tightly around her. The castle was quiet as the grave, her footsteps sounding strangely loud on the cobblestone path. She reached the porch of the great hall, lifted the lantern and extinguished the flame. She slipped inside the heavy wooden door.
Constance waited for a few moments, breathing quietly in the darkness as her eyes adjusted. Eventually, she eased the door shut, satisfied the hall was empty but for the detritus of the feast.
She fastened the bolt behind her and moved swiftly across the floor to check the two servants’ entrances at either end of the room. They were locked already, but Constance whispered a charm, tapping her cane against the handles. A series of rapid purple flashes cast strange, fleeting shadows. If someone tried to open the service entrances, they’d find them mysteriously jammed.
She shifted the benches and brushed aside the piles of dirty floor reeds from the centre of the room – the smell of spilt wine and dust wafted up to her. She stared down at the large trapdoors set into the floor.
This is it.
She undid the latch and lifted one side of the heavy wooden trapdoor. The hinges squeaked. She attempted to ease it to the flagstones, but her fingers slipped and there was a muffled thump as the door dropped. She waited, but no answering footsteps spoilt the night, no cryptlings shuffling from their quarters in the shallow cellars nearby. A waft of cold, stale air hit her in the face as she peered into the darkness beneath.
Constance tapped her cane three times against the ground – a steady purple glow flickered to life from the pommel. The stone steps led straight down, down, down, wide enough for four men to walk abreast: large enough for the grandest of funerals. The darkness was so complete that she couldn’t see where the staircase met the floor below.
She took the first few steps, suddenly afraid. Entering the world of the Ancestors outside of funeral rites was a crime punishable by death. According to legend, the Ancestors knew. Understood. And the Ancestors were vengeful.
Superstitious nonsense, she told herself firmly. She had left the Ancestors behind long ago, pledged her faith to a different power altogether. But it had been much easier to ignore them from the grand temples of the City of Kings than it was on the threshold of their world.
Her cane-light reached the first sarcophagi as a rat scuttled across the corner of her vision. When she reached the bottom of the staircase, other tombs emerged into view. This chamber contained the bodies of the Dukes and their families across the centuries and was truly cavernous, stretching far beyond the foundations of the great hall itself. There must have been hundreds of bodies down here – and yet more in the network of catacombs burrowed throughout the mountain. Each grave was an individual stone platform, elaborately carved with the deeds and accomplishments of its inhabitant, most of whom lay out on top in varying states of decay. The Dukes’ graves alone were surrounded by intricately carved screens, hiding the bodies from sight. At the back of the chamber was another staircase, tucked into the wall, leading to the next level down.
There is my mother, thought Constance with a shiver of mingled horror and sadness, and even a little fear, as she spotted one of the nearest Ancestors. She recognised the blue dress, the golden rings woven through the perfectly preserved dark hair. She stepped closer. From the middle distance, her mother was familiar – sleeping, perhaps, on her bed of stone. And in spite of everything, Constance felt an irrational thrill of hope. But as she neared the body, details revealed themselves. The face was sunken and pale, the lips slightly parted and the eyes – replaced with glittering dark sapphires – stared up at her coldly, as if in disapproval, reflecting the purple glow on the bulb of the cane. Nevertheless, Constance lowered herself closer to the face so similar to her own, close enough to touch, close enough to smell the decay, the herbal, oily tang of whatever they used to stave off the rot. They had packed her mouth with cotton, she realised, noticing the material protruding ever so slightly between the thinning lips. She clenched her fists, turning aside from the body.
Focus.
Constance shut her eyes and tried to sense whether any magic lay in the cavern around her. As usual in Duke’s Forest, despite her best efforts, she felt nothing but a residual bass note, the thrum of an old and growing spell: the storm cloud. She slipped the mask from its secret pocket in her clo
ak and fastened it on to her face. Carefully, she turned the wheel to bring the spell-scape into focus. The shimmering storm spell surrounded her in phantom streaks of blue light, like frozen lightning, despite the fact the cloud itself had not reached underground. She adjusted the wheel further, but beyond the slightest grey shimmer above the bodies of the Ancestors, there was nothing.
She wound a path through the sarcophagi, to the first tunnel leading off the main chamber. This passage too was filled with corpses, set in ledges carved out of the stone wall. The inscriptions were much humbler. Families of servants who had lived and worked in the castle were interred here, doomed to serve their masters in death as in life. Constance sent out her senses down the tunnel, searching from beneath the mask, but to her frustration there was nothing hidden in these graves.
The other three passages were equally empty, and she felt exhaustion settle on her, as cloying as the thick blanket of dust and cobwebs smothering the Ancestors. The network of tombs and passages extended for miles, deeper and deeper into the mountain, which was as hollow as honeycomb. Don’t lose faith, she willed herself. She would search again tomorrow, this time in the upper town. As she removed the mask and turned to leave, two bright lights flashed at her from the gloom, and a hiss broke the silence. She spun to face it. Illuminated by her mage-light, she saw a huge ginger cat with a dead rat at its feet, glaring at her as if to say, ‘You are not meant to be here.’