Dark the Dreamer's Shadow

by Jennifer Bresnick

  There was so much in the world that few men remembered and more wished to forget, but the Warden was not one of those men. His bespoke books held only a fraction of the knowledge he craved, and with the gems pressed firmly into his flesh, his sightless eyes trained on the Siheldi caverns and the Queen prepared to strike, the Warden began to sing.

  ***

  Arran was getting plenty tired of waking up in strange, dark places, groggy and in pain. His forehead felt like it had been split in two, and the rank, sticky wetness that engulfed his left temple was becoming far too familiar for comfort. He had been hit hard – hard enough for the resulting gash to leave a notable scar if he lived long enough for it to heal, and he couldn’t even wipe the blood from his stiff, swollen face because his hands were tied tightly above his head.

  “Faidal, you son of a bitch,” he groaned, the sound scraping across his ears like a rusty saw. “Why does this always happen to me whenever I follow you?”

  “I didn’t do it,” Faidal said, sounding small and scared nearby. “I’m sorry. I didn’t do it.”

  Arran tried to turn his head, but his eye was bruised shut and he couldn’t see her. “What happened?”

  “Just – just don’t draw attention. Be quiet.”

  “I think it’s a little late not to draw attention,” he said, trying to move his fingers and search out the nature of his bonds. Rope. Thick, old rope tied in constrictor knots. Doubled, he thought glumly as he tried to bend his wrists around. He would not be able to pick them apart. And this time, the eallawif was under no obligation to suddenly appear with a knife to help him.

  “Shh,” the neneckt whispered at him as he muttered a curse to himself. “Stop making noise.”

  Arran ignored her. His feet were on the ground, and there was a post at his back. If he could just get a little higher, maybe he could see what the rope was attached to. He stood on his toes and tried to inch his spine upward, his fingertips straining to grab onto the ropes that disappeared above him.

  “You’ll never get free,” Faidal said.

  “Oh, what do you know about it?”

  “I tied the knots,” she told him.

  “What? You lying little -”

  “They made me. I’m sorry. They were – they were going to kill me. I’m sorry. It hurt so much.”

  Arran grimaced, but shut his mouth. She sounded terrified, and he hadn’t even asked if she was all right. Of course she must have tied him up. The Siheldi still couldn’t touch him.

  “It’s fine,” he mumbled, trying to focus again on his task. He knew exactly what they had put her through. She hadn’t had a choice. He probably deserved it.

  She watched in silence as he succeeded in hauling himself about six inches off the ground, his breath held in anticipatory triumph, before his arms simply gave way, firing sparks in front of his eyes and sending him heavily back to the ground gasping in pain.

  Something laughed at him from the darkness, and he froze. You think rope is the only thing holding you here?

  “I was rather hoping so, yes,” he replied. He thought he saw something shifting in the distance.

  Foolish boy. So bright. So full of light…but not for long.

  “You can’t touch me,” he said nervously. “You can’t.”

  The Siheldi was silent, and Arran couldn’t see it, but he knew as a certainty that if the thing had a face, it would be grinning at him like a butcher about to take apart a carcass.

  “You can’t…” he said again, less sure of himself. “Faidal?”

  “I’m sorry, Arran. I didn’t know what they wanted. I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t – what do they want? What –”

  There was a rush of movement, of cold, cold wind blasting him backward, the bones of his shoulders grinding into the rough wood, and an unholy shriek of carrion triumph split the frigid air.

  Arran felt his heart stop. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see, and there was nothing, nothing in the whole entire world except the terror of the Queen’s sudden presence, so much stronger and deeper and more loathsome than it had been when she had tried to reach through the gateway under the smoking mountain to grab him and drag him downwards.

  Do you think a pinch of red iron dust will stop me from obtaining what I desire? the Queen breathed. I have rested and I have fed, and I am not to be denied.

  “Please, don’t,” he tried to say, but his throat was tied in tighter knots than the ones that held his straining arms suspended. He was afraid. Not of death, necessarily, but of the pain that would come before it. He didn’t want that to be the last thing he ever knew. “Please.”

  The word turned into a wild shriek as she struck at him, like a runaway log in a raging river slamming into his chest. He didn’t know what was happening, and he didn’t care. He just wanted it to stop.

  Not even his locked jaw, grinding his teeth together, could stop him from screaming when the tender scar across his middle cracked and burst, a flood of blood and yellowing pus running down his side, thick and gritty with specks of rusting red iron pulled from the fibers of his innards. He was sobbing in agony, no thoughts in his head beside the wooden repetition of a long-forgotten prayer he had never believed in, graven into some lost corner of his mind by his mother’s fervent belief.

  Even the prayer faded under the Queen’s deadly hand, and as he numbly slumped over, shaking like an autumn leaf, the Siheldi laughed.

  Through the cloud of tears that clustered in his eyes, Arran could see the glowing outline of a thin, elegant hand cupping a jewel that seemed to impart its light into the ghostly flesh. He could not flinch away as the Queen pressed the gem against his lowered forehead, the smooth stone sliding on the slick of sweat that had gathered on his skin, boring like a stone drill beneath the bones and into the soft matter of his brain, searing itself into the core of his being as some secret flame crackled through him.

  Pain was not something that typically bothered him. He couldn’t remember who had said it to him – a grizzled bunkmate, maybe, amused by the innocence of a wide-eyed boy on his first voyage away from the mainland – but he had once been told that the root of all courage was the ability to separate what hurt from what had to be done anyway.

  He had always thought he had done rather a good job of it. Cuts and scrapes and the occasional broken finger were hazards of any occupation that required a man to do more than sit behind a shopkeeper’s counter, and he had gotten used to ignoring the twinge of an achy joint or swollen bruise as he went about his usual business, certain in the knowledge that such little inconveniences could be borne without his body meaningfully betraying him.

  Even on the rare occasions when he fell into the clutches of Paderborn’s surgeons, he had drunk his rum and bitten down and blinked back his tears with the best of them, before dusting himself off and limping away to scratch at his stitches in silence when no one was looking.

  But this was not the ordinary unpleasantness of a lingering sprain, or even the deep, gasping agony of being snipped and tugged and teased apart from the inside by a physician’s clumsy tools. This was not even the racing, heightened fright of sensing the presence of a night spirit on the prowl for its supper, or even the heart-stopping terror of feeling the brush of invisible fingers across the hairs on the back of his neck.

  This was the Queen of all despair and she was inside him, burning her way through the feeble guard of what his bravery thought it could muster, to scrape a hollow from the core of him and plant the seed of his death.

  It was more than courage could expect of any soul, and he felt himself screaming without the slightest shade of restraint. He felt the shame of it, which only made him beg her to stop, which only made her laugh again. For what was mortal man, bowed and betrayed, beaten thin and brittle – what use was the notion of fortitude in the face of such madness?

  He didn’t know how long the Queen kept her touch upon him. It must have been no more than a fraction of a moment – his helpless wailing was still echoing
in his ears when he half-saw a flash of dim movement next to him, drawing him for a moment out of his torment. Faidal.

  The neneckt didn’t have to untie knots in order to free herself. She just ripped right through them, terror and anger adding to her strength. She climbed, like a cat vaulting up a tree, to the top of the post that held Arran bound.

  Before the Queen could straighten up to stop her, she had pulled Arran free, the gemstone slipping from his head before he had a chance to understand what had been done to him as his skull seemed to burst into a boil.

  A sudden blaze of light filled the cavern, blinding him as surely as the dark had done. He crumpled bonelessly onto the floor as the Queen howled amidst the acrid stench of burning black powder.

  Faidal scooped him up, throwing him over her shoulder as she sprinted away, his ear bumping against her back as her breath ran raw with the effort.

  He closed his eyes and let whatever was happening keep happening. There wasn’t anything else he could do. There was something burning inside his head, something sharp and sinister that was spreading its creeping tendrils deep into his flesh, and the Queen’s laughter was following him like a swarm of angry wasps.

  More than laughter was following. Faidal was running as fast as she could, but her legs only worked as well as a human’s. There were Siheldi behind them, and they were not encumbered by muscle and bone.

  “Where are you going?” Arran said, the words barely stumbling out of his mouth, but she didn’t respond. There was nowhere to hide from the Siheldi. Not in their very own home. It was dark, and they were at their fittest, and the Queen had done more than feed on him. She had done something worse, and the fizzing pressure building in his brain felt like a moneychanger’s lead weight settled into the space between his eyes.

  “Hkeka, osh, ninda, nibka,” Faidal breathed as she darted this way and that.

  She was counting, he realized, marking off twists and turns that she must have traveled before in order to reach the surface. Maybe she really could find a way out, he thought, his hope rising for a miniscule moment before the slashing, crushing pain in his head blotted it out.

  Time passed, somehow, as he jostled and moaned and bled across her shoulder. He may have lost his consciousness when the pounding and jolting became too much, but he found it again when she lowered him to the ground, panting with exhaustion, and shook him to get him to waken.

  “Can you climb?”

  “Climb?”

  “Up. Here. Put your hands here,” she coaxed, pulling his arm towards a shallow little divot in a sheer rock face. “Climb.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Hurry up,” she said, pulling something out of her pocket. Flints. A packet of something wrapped in crinkling butcher’s paper. “Get up above me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. You have to. Go.”

  Arran tried to shake his head, but it wouldn’t move. Nothing would. He could hardly feel his legs. The only thing he could feel was the throbbing, insistent beat of his blood galloping thinly through his heart, through the aching mass of bruises and ruined skin, through the place where the gemstone had been and something else now was. He couldn’t climb. He couldn’t do anything.

  “This will only burn for ten minutes,” Faidal said, striking her flints together to catch a spark on the paper’s edge. “That will be enough time if we hurry.”

  “I – I can’t, Faidal,” he whispered. “Please. I can’t.”

  The cracking sound of the flint and steel was replaced by another stark light, a terrifyingly bright fire that filled the space and gave Arran his first chance to look at exactly what Faidal was asking him to do.

  Climb? How could he climb the steepest cliff he had ever seen? They were sitting at the bottom of a circular shaft that rose straight up, carved by an ancient spurt of steaming rock and capped by unidentifiable murkiness long before it came to an end.

  They could be miles underground, for all he knew. It could be days, and there was nothing to help them but a few crudely hewn handholds all along its terrifying length. He couldn’t do it. He would fall to his death as surely as anything.

  “Seven hells, Arran,” Faidal said, nudging the burning packet of powder away from her with her foot so that it would fill the entire tunnel with a light that the Siheldi would not cross willingly. Her face was drawn and dirty – there was blood on her, too, and he didn’t think it was his own. She was hurting, she was flagging, and she was willing to give everything she had for the slightest chance to save him.

  “Faidal, I’m sorry,” he told her, not even able to care that he was weeping like a child. “I can’t.”

  “Will you stop calling me that, you fool?” she said softly as she picked him up, wrapping his hands firmly around her neck like a harness, shushing him as he whimpered in distress. She dug her toes into the first little ledge and hoisted herself upward. “My name is Nievfaya.”

  ***

  Megrithe tried not to let the queasy lurching of her stomach overtake her as she sat very still, eyes closed, on the chair in Leofric’s room at the Spearman. Nikko had given her a goodly dose of his people’s medicine, and she had been regretting it ever since. The sweetly salty taste was muted by a hiccup that brought up a bubble of bile into her throat, and she moaned quietly as Jairus made a similarly unhappy noise beside her, breathing deeply and slowly in and out through his nose.

  Leofric had taken the draught so many times that he no longer felt ill afterwards, and Megrithe could tell that he was impatient to be on his way, even though Nikko insisted on giving the two novices a space to recuperate. The pair of them were sitting together, talking seriously, Leofric holding both of Nikko’s hands clasped in front of him, no doubt trying to bolster his spirits after the revelation of his secret.

  Megrithe tried not to eavesdrop. It was none of her business. Nikko had looked so dejected after telling her about his past that she had resolved to forget it all immediately and keep her mind on what was really important: her own immediate future.

  “This is horrible,” Jairus said, breaking into her increasingly worrisome thoughts as she faced the idea of returning to Sind Heofonne.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Someone hit me, thankfully, and I escaped the worst of it.”

  “Feel free,” he said, tilting his chin towards her, and she laughed.

  “I’m not really – all of that with Bartolo – I’m not really like that,” she said sheepishly. “I don’t go around knocking people to the ground everywhere I go.”

  “That’s a shame. I did so admire you for it.”

  “Really?” she asked, then ducked her head as the flush crept up from her throat. “I mean, of course you didn’t. Don’t be silly.”

  “I most certainly did. He had it coming to him. And don’t I wish I could add to his discomfort right about now.”

  “I think there’s enough discomfort to go around already, at present,” she said, fighting down another wave of dizziness. “I feel awful.”

  “Does it go away?”

  “Eventually,” she said, and they both sat in silence again for a little while, Leofric’s whispers half-heard above their swimming heads.

  “Nikko is very upset,” Jairus said eventually.

  “Don’t listen in,” she scolded. “It isn’t right.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Cover your ears, then.”

  Jairus shook his head. “I need something to work properly, at least. No eyes, no ears…I’d be completely useless.”

  “You’re not useless at all,” she said, and the flush crept higher. “That is – you seem to do all right. You thought you’d be able to kill me, right?” she offered as a consolation thought, even if it was a strange one.

  “I could kill you,” he said. “But I don’t want to.”

  “You’re going to be in an awful lot of trouble,” she said awkwardly.

  “Yes. Which is why I thin
k it might be time for us to be going. As clever as the Warden is, I don’t think he can follow me a thousand feet under the sea.”

  “But you’ll have to come back up again.”

  “I hope so,” Jairus said. “But I can deal with it then. Maybe I’ll go back to Paderborn and start over again.”

  “Really?”

  “I have some friends there. And the Guild may still have some use for me.”

  “Of course they will,” she replied. “They don’t just throw inspectors aside.”

  “I’m not an inspector. Not yet.”

  “Oh. I beg your pardon.”

  “That’s all right. I could never take the tests, and they didn’t see fit to try to accommodate me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That isn’t right of them.”

  “It’s their prerogative,” Jairus said mildly. “I don’t deserve special treatment when there are a dozen men more capable to fill the place.”

  The Guild used a variety of codes to communicate with its agents, many of which were written or based on the colors and patterns of coats, kerchiefs, or shoes. While there were certainly enough spoken passwords or other methods to compensate for someone who couldn’t manage to read or see, the inspector’s school considered its tests an ancient and immutable tradition. Megrithe had seen fellow students fail and face expulsion for something as simple as smudging a bit of ink when drawing a symbol or hesitating when reciting the correct phase of the moon during an exchange.

  “They only took me up from the list when they did because I was keen but expendable,” he said. “They didn’t think I would last very long in the Divided.”

  “But you’ve done well, it seems.”

  “I’m not done yet. I wish you would tell me about the red iron you found.”

  “It seems rather a small piece of all of this,” she said.

  “Yes, but it’s an important one.”

  Megrithe didn’t reply. For the Guild, the forges she had found on the palace’s grounds during her pursuit of Arran were critical. That was the secret she had come to Niheba to ferret out, and she had succeeded.