Bloodbound

by F. Wesley Schneider

  I considered meditating, but feared Mardhalas would mistake that for sleeping. So I spent the time listening, folding my hands upon my lap as if in silent prayer, charting our path through Caliphas’s streets by the clatter of the wheels and the feel of the turns. I didn’t fare well, becoming lost soon after passing from the cobbled streets into the city’s outer quarters. Eventually we slowed, turning onto a gravel drive. I allowed myself to part the curtains and look out.

  “Impatient,” came Mardhalas’s judgment, hardly muffled by the rasping gravel. I ignored her.

  There was little to see, the moon a faint haze through a veil of heavy clouds. A processional of lonely trees marched past the window, beyond which a slope dropped away toward nothing at all. The ground fell away into a ghost world, a ragged acre or two of fields and the hint of a distant hedgerow fading into the fog.

  Several long moments passed. Then we turned, and the coach ground to a halt. Sensing my anticipation, my desire to escape the dark, judgmental silence, Mardhalas didn’t make a move. The seconds stretched before the coachman opened the door, letting lamplight spill into the space. I didn’t wait or spare a look for Mardhalas, and made my small escape.

  I almost reared back into the coach with my first step.

  Havenguard Asylum was an old, hungry-looking place. Batlike, its body rose high, dark and furred by mosses. Its eyes were an array of dark windows under sharp gables, ears twin pointed towers bent to the dark, mouth a hollow portal atop a veined tongue of cracked marble stairs. But most prominent were the wings, multistory arms sprawling away from the central structure, symmetrical and marked by hundreds of tiny windows. In either direction, they swept on, eventually dissolving into the dark. I’d never given the city’s infamous asylum much thought, but certainly hadn’t expected something so palace-like in its size and imposition, or that rivaled Maiden’s Choir’s oppressive presence.

  It was the latter that had nearly driven me back. The place had an unmistakable pulse. It thrummed with the breath of hundreds of residents, but also something else. In much the same way one could stand in the goddess’s sanctuary and almost hear the marble echo past prayers, so did this place resonate. Instead of chants and sermons, though, the asylum stones restrained a more discordant choir.

  The High Inquisitor prodded me less than gently from behind. I stepped aside. She fired a few curt orders to the coachman, then strode up the front steps. As she banged on the battered door, the coach followed the circular drive and was soon claimed by the fog, marooning me here with a zealot.

  As Mardhalas’s knocking drifted away I noticed the distant breathing. Rush then fade, rush then fade; it was the sound of water, of surf on rocks. Powerful but repetitive enough to be relaxing, it was strangely apropos, capable of masking any number of sobs and moans.

  “Remember,” Mardhalas only half turned her head to look back at me, “you are here to assist me. Do nothing—say nothing—without my permission.”

  My jaw tightened.

  She looked down from the entryway. “Do you understand?” It seemed as much insult as a question.

  “Yes, High Inquisitor.” I didn’t bother to keep the resentment out of my voice.

  She opened her mouth to say something more, but the asylum door opened. A surprisingly warm light spilled into the night, holding within a slight woman in stark white. A long coat hung open over a well-fitting buttoned shirt with suspenders. The straight lines made her look tall, an impression sharp features and posture reinforced.

  “You’re somewhat early.” She spoke swiftly, her words peculiarly clipped.

  “My message said we would arrive prior to midnight.” Mardhalas, too, seemed uninterested in pleasantries.

  “Yes, but the last three times you’ve called you arrived between a quarter to midnight and a quarter after. It’s currently thirty-four minutes before midnight. Compared to past averages, you’re early.”

  Mardhalas took a moment to acquiesce. “So it seems.”

  “So it is.” The woman looked at the inquisitor expectantly. A moment passed in strained silence. “Come inside,” she finally chirped.

  Mardhalas entered, and I moved to follow, but found the asylum woman standing in the doorway.

  “Yes?” she asked plainly, as though I were some solicitor.

  “I’m Jadain Losritter, a priestess of the Lady of Graves.” My nod was a little bow. “A pleasure to meet you Miss …”

  She didn’t budge.

  “She’s my assistant for tonight,” Mardhalas explained from inside. The inquisitor stared at me again, blaming me for the holdup.

  The woman regarded me, her eyes moving slowly over my purple vestments, seeming to follow every swirl and twist, embellishments suggestive of Pharasma’s holy spiral.

  “You’ve never required an assistant before.” She was speaking to Mardhalas despite not turning from me. I didn’t like the way this was heading, and certainly didn’t relish the idea of spending my night waiting outside an asylum.

  “I do tonight,” Mardhalas said flatly, not offering that she was using the outing to flex her ecclesiastical authority.

  “Why?” the tall woman absently pressured.

  “A precaution, should some aspect of the exorcism go awry. Can we get on with it?”

  “So then your past work has somehow been unsafe?” The woman leaned in uncomfortably close, scrutinizing the holy symbol hanging around my neck. So close, I could make out rusty spatters flecking her starched coat.

  “No,” Mardhalas snapped. “Do you have need of our services tonight or not?”

  The casual inspection continued.

  I tried to reassure the asylum’s gatekeeper. “I promise you, miss, I’m quite capable—”

  “Doctor,” she corrected, stressing the title. “Linas.” Her name came almost as an afterthought.

  “Doctor,” I amended. “I’m quite capable of assisting the High Exorcist and providing an additional degree of protection for both her and the asylum’s residents.”

  “Patients,” she corrected again, but with no hint of arrogance.

  “Of course.” I nodded. “Please consider my participation evidence of the importance the faithful of Maiden’s Choir place on our relationship with Havenguard’s healers—an additional blessing on your continued good work.”

  She looked from me to stoic Mardhalas, then back.

  “Ceremony. Of course.” She turned and began walking away.

  Stepping out of the night into the asylum was a matter of stepping from one chill into another. The entry was not what I might have expected, with dark wooden paneling and polished doors giving the hall the look of some welcoming noble estate. Solid waiting benches lined the walls, interrupted by cases of the metal and leather curiosities of those who healed with intellect rather than faith. A carved lion silently roared at the base of a narrow stairway’s banister. At a broad landing above stood an array of thick glass windows, each pane thoroughly shattered but still balanced in its frame.

  Doctor Linas ascended the stairs two at a time. I moved to follow, but the High Inquisitor didn’t budge. As I passed, she fell in one uncomfortably close step behind me.

  Taking the steps, I realized as we approached the landing that the windows there were not shattered. Rather, dark molding created an elaborate fractured design that, upon taking in the whole series, created a subtle but predictable pattern. It was clever, but still unnerving. I could imagine such being a theme here.

  The doctor led us to an equally well-decorated second-floor hall, tiny metal plates on the doors suggesting administration and record-keeping. We turned through a pair of swinging doors and the decor changed, taking a dramatically utilitarian turn. Two large men in coats similar to Doctor Linas’s lounged at a stained table, its wood an antiseptic white that repeated upon the walls. A dented metal door hunched behind the attendants. Despite its fortress-like bulk, someone had still reinforced it with a second swinging door of crossed bars.

  One of the guards practi
ced balancing a heavy leather baton upon a finger. Noticing the doctor, he gripped it seriously, and the other stood from his chair, both adopting sober expressions. “Good evening, Doctor,” they stammered in unison.

  The doctor ignored the men’s inattentiveness. “I am escorting the exorcists to Cell 18. We will return in …” She looked to the High Inquisitor.

  “Within the hour,” Mardhalas said.

  “Forty minutes,” Doctor Linas amended. “I will be ignoring the standard prohibitions on visitors and weapons on Doctor Trice’s authority.”

  Both nodded, one rattling keys while the other unbolted the grating on the sturdy door. The metal squealed as it opened, even the door’s lock screeching at being turned.

  The guardroom’s creamy shade spilled down the hall beyond, covering brick, tile, and doors cushioned with yellowing pads. Dim lanterns interrupted the mirrored march of doors with tiny windows, every frame distinguished by a number on a crowning metal placard. Distant waves whispered calm through the corridor, but even they weren’t enough to completely drown the din of snores, sighs, and faint whimpers. The hall bent some ways ahead. From beyond echoed sharp but quickly smothered giggling.

  It wasn’t a prison, but if there was mercy in this collection of bars and locks, I didn’t see it. I patted the sheath hanging from my belt, the curved dagger—as much for ritual as defense—lending some comfort.

  The door whined behind us, boomed to an echoing close, and not a resident seemed to care.

  I glanced at the nearby placards, both in their fifties. “Cell 18?”

  “The numbers begin at the far end of the men’s wing.” Linas walked calmly on, not bothering to take a lantern. We followed.

  Occasionally I caught glimpses through the doors’ tiny windows, silhouettes or following eyes proving more than one cell occupied. Somewhere in the forties, fingers stabbed into the hall, wiggling obscenely, while another room seemed filled with hissing prayers. I found my opinions changing rapidly in this place. Perhaps it was a prison after all—one of the most important kind. I stopped looking into the cells.

  I came alongside Doctor Linas. “It seems like you’re an important doctor here.”

  “All of the doctors are important here,” she said flatly.

  I nodded, not really having expected Linas to be one for small talk. “But you were the one who met us tonight. Why you and not one of the guards?”

  “I am Doctor Trice’s assistant. He requires I oversee those matters of asylum maintenance for which he has no time. Orderlies have other responsibilities” We turned into a new length of one of the building’s batlike wings.

  “I see. I could tell the guards—the orderlies—respect you.”

  She didn’t acknowledge. We walked on past another dozen cells.

  “You’re a lesser priestess.”

  Her statement surprised me. “I’ve been an ordained priestess of the Lady of Graves for almost five years now. I’m not one of out faith’s leaders, like Mother Thestia—the head of our cathedral—or the High Exorcist, but I minister to any who would explore the mysteries of mortality.”

  “Then explain your decoration.” She gestured to my robes.

  “Oh. Well, the High Exorcist and I are of different orders within the church. While her robes suggest the blood sometimes spilled—”

  “No. Your symbol.”

  My hand went to the sign of Pharasma hanging from a simple braid of thread around my neck. Reflexively circled its spiral design.

  “Yours is wooden,” she clarified. “Hers is silver.”

  “Ah. Yes.” I chose my words delicately. The clergy of Caliphas inwardly enjoyed the benefits of their congregation’s wealth, but outwardly denied any undue luxury. “I started my service to the Lady of Graves in Barstoi, at a particularly poor church. I received this symbol when I began studying the Lady’s mysteries. I’ve kept it ever since, to remind me of those studies and my simplicity in the face of Her grand designs.”

  The answer seemed satisfactory to Linas, who didn’t delve further. The High Exorcist, however, proved impossible to please.

  “We should all be humble in our service, Sister. This is a state of being, not of fashion. If your spiral has become more a symbol of yourself than the goddess, you’d do well to cast it away.”

  I looked back to Mardhalas’s prominent symbol of silver and lapis. It and her eyes glimmered in the dull light.

  A click, and a door squeaked open.

  Doctor Linas returned her ring of tiny keys to her coat. “This is the concern.”

  Matters of interpretation put aside, we gathered close, looking into the shadowed cell. Padded white walls, a dark window too thin to squeeze more than a hand through, and nothing else. The cell was empty.

  “The patient died more than a week ago—choked to death after swallowing his own tongue.” Linas sounded clinically detached.

  I looked at Linas dubiously. She’d seemed quite competent. “Is that possible, Doctor?”

  “He severed his tongue with a sharpened spoon, gagging after swallowing it. The patient believed his dead brother was haunting his tongue, making him say wicked things. I am investigating how he came to have a utensil in his cell and have relieved three orderlies for the oversight.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat, being particularly aware of my tongue’s motion in doing so.

  “Yet he’s not vacated the cell,” Mardhalas said.

  “Indeed.” Linas scanned the room, just as I did. “Four, including myself, have heard his distinctive raving since his death.”

  “Only in this cell?” the High Exorcist asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “Wintersun, Elistair.” Linas said it like she was reading a file.

  “Sounds Kellid.” Mardhalas made the name of the northern people sound like a slur.

  “It is,” I said, ignoring her prejudice toward my mother’s people. “One of the old Sarkorian clan—”

  “Sister Losritter. See what the goddess reveals to you.” It was an order, but it was the first time the High Exorcist had addressed me without contempt. If not polite, at least she was professional.

  I strained my eyes, staring into the cell’s shadows. The darkness collected at every corner, but nothing so much as shivered within. “I don’t see a thing. Perhaps more light …” I reached for the lantern by the cell door.

  “Inside,” Mardhalas ordered.

  I looked at her, incredulous. “Me?”

  “You’re not here just to observe. Go inside and tell me what you feel.”

  I looked to Doctor Linas for some sort of support, hopeful that she’d advise against such a course. She considered me calmly, but offered nothing. She might as well have been observing one of her patients.

  Fine. I took the lantern from beside the cell door and, not sparing a look for Mardhalas, held it before me as I took a tentative step inside.

  Once my younger sister, Sylvie, got stuck in the middle of a frozen lake, her sled taking her farther than she’d expected. She wasn’t able to do anything more than sob as the ice around her cracked and popped. Taking that first sliding step onto the ice to drag her back in was the most frightening step I’d ever taken in my life.

  Stepping into that cell, I longed to creep back onto the ice.

  As I lifted the light to the corners of the room, the last sputters of the cell’s former resident revealed themselves upon the walls and floor, a spattered array of scrubbed brown stains. Nothing unnatural made itself known, but still the feeling was here. The passage of death resonated in the space, the clinging sense-echo of a tragedy.

  Placing the lantern carefully in the center of the room, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and ran my hands over the always cold, smooth wood of Pharasma’s holy symbol. I whispered a prayer, letting it touch every corner of the cell. The power in the goddess’s words reached through padding and stone, searching for affronts to the goddess’s will. A moment later, they murm
ured back.

  “He’s close.”

  The door squealed and slammed shut behind me. High Exorcist Mardhalas looked through the tiny cell window, eyes hard.

  I stifled my shout when ink burst upon the interior of the cell’s door, blooming from its padding. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. The black stain spread fast, pressing into the air of the chamber. As if through soaked satin, a sagging face pushed forth, writhing and seemingly trapped within the liquid dark.

  I tripped back, the edges of my holy symbol biting into my hands. The stained thing fixed me with what would never again be eyes. What served as a jaw fell away, spilling putrid drops. Thought-breaking babbling followed, boiling into the air, the frustrated railing of a soul still shackled to madness in death.

  As its insane song rose, I added my scream to the chorus.

  5

  UNWELCOME GUESTS

  LARSA

  The night’s fog was already retreating by the time I reached Thorenly Glen, withdrawing as the first shades of daylight bled over the distant tree line. The walk had taken considerably longer than I’d expected. The city’s constables would be on their way soon, following up on Lady Thorenly’s distress from the previous night. I wouldn’t have much time to investigate without interference, or to deal with what would assuredly ruin a couple of guards’ morning.

  The blanket of mists receded slowly, and its removal wasn’t flattering. A manor house rose across a lake of weeds and shapeless hedges. Porch sagging, windows blinded by shutters, roof shedding shingles like an old man’s hair, Thorenly Glen lacked anything in common with the pastoral haven its name suggested. A road-worn coach rested in the weedy turnabout just before the mansion’s cracked steps. Whoever the estate’s guests were, no one had bothered to prepare for them.

  I circled the manor at some distance, following a line of knotty trees. Unbelievably, the estate was putting its best face forward. The roof over the house’s back porch had collapsed, blocking doors and windows and burying much of the rear in splinters. Ivy crawled through the ruins. The damage was far from fresh.