Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  For an agonizing stretch of time, the two remained fixed in their positions. Spittle dripped from the cripple's tongue onto the girl's squirming shoulders. Finally, as Helis swayed on the verge of suffocation, the creature let her go.

  "You will do," he said, licking his fleshy lips. "Your spirit is not weak, and your fear is ...exquisite." He turned a glutton's grin on the rest of them. "Who will come to me next?"

  "I will," Isiem said. He took Helis's place, shut his eyes, and tried not to flinch as the wet, warm flesh came slithering out to envelop him.

  The stench of the thing's tongue would have choked him even if the tongue itself hadn't. It writhed over him, prying and slobbering. Just as he thought he would scream from the horror of it, the limbless one pulled away.

  "Good," he pronounced with a smack of his lips. "You, the little one. You next."

  Isiem stepped back. He wiped his face on the bottom of his shirt and watched as Loran and Ascaros were taken by the tongue in turn. When it was finished, and the crippled one had deemed each of them satisfactory, the chains began clanking again and the iron cocoon creaked its way back up the pillar, bearing its grotesque burden.

  "Go," the Joyful Thing said. "You are worthy to begin your training. In Zon-Kuthon's name, I declare it so. To the end of the hall with you, young blood. You will find your rooms there. Do not think to come back this way without a proper escort. We have our eyes and our mouths; we will call the alarm. And then things will go badly for you, my tasty little ones. Oh, very badly."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Their rooms were waiting, as the creature had said. They looked like cells, albeit comfortable ones. The steel traceries on these windows thickened into bars. Their doors locked only from the outside, and their narrow beds, lofted over equally narrow desks, were arranged so that there was no place to hide.

  The children scarcely had time to choose their rooms—Isiem and Ascaros to one, Helis and Loran to another—and deposit their scant belongings before a new shadowcaller came to them.

  This one was a woman, strong-jawed and severe, with black hair pulled into a tight knot at the base of her skull and her left sleeve buttoned over an arm that stopped at the elbow. She looked them over as a farmer might examine a new litter of piglets, deciding which to keep and which to slaughter young.

  "You're early," she said. Her voice was as hard as the rest of her. "The rest of this year's cull isn't here yet."

  The three older children looked at each other, none sure what to say. Isiem felt as if he were being accused of something, but as far as he knew, they hadn't done anything wrong, and he didn't know how to remedy the trouble if they had.

  Adults tended to like eagerness, though, so he tried that. "May we begin early, then?"

  The woman laughed, a sharp brittle sound. "What's your name?"

  "Isiem. Of Crosspine."

  "Forget that last part. Your piddling little village has no more claim on you. If you come from anywhere, it will be the Dusk Hall, or Pangolais. If you prove unworthy of those names, you will never have cause to use them." She paused, fingering the buttons on her empty sleeve. "You are here because the nightglass sensed some spark of magic in you and the Joyful Things tasted no impiety. That means you have potential. It does not mean you will succeed, or survive."

  "What will?" Helis asked.

  "Strength. Skill."

  "I have strength," the girl said, raising her chin. "Teach me skill."

  The woman laughed again, but this time there was a different note to it. "I suppose you may have one brief lesson." She held out her hand, showing them the silver ring she wore. It was the same as the other shadowcallers': a band of silver brushed with countless tiny scratches that left the metal a lustreless gray. A smooth black jewel, the size of Isiem's smallest fingernail, sat bezeled in its center.

  "What do you sense in the ring?" she asked.

  Isiem stared at the stone, gritting his teeth in concentration. At first he felt nothing, and wondered if she wasn't playing a prank on them ...but then he opened himself, as he had when he freed Ascaros from the nightglass, extending his thoughts and senses in some way that he could feel instinctively but did not know how to define. And when he did, and looked upon the black-gemmed ring with new eyes, he saw a nimbus spring up around it, like the hazy aura that surrounded bright flames on the coldest winter nights.

  "I see ...light," Helis said. "A misty halo."

  "Yes," the woman breathed. "Now draw it out. Shape the magic. Follow my movements, my words." She raised her other hand, curling her fingers through a slow pattern as if playing some invisible instrument. At the same time, she intoned three words, or perhaps only one word that comprised three syllables. Isiem didn't recognize the language, but the sounds struck a chord in his soul. He repeated them carefully, and heard Helis echo them at his side.

  The aura intensified. It became clearer, stronger; he could discern shadowy faces swirling in its frosty nimbus. They opened their mouths in silent screams, broke whirling apart, re-formed and screamed again. An overwhelming sense of grief and pain came from them, and a ghostly charnel stink.

  "Death," Isiem whispered. "The magic is death...and pain. So much pain." He blinked, clearing the alien sights from his vision.

  "Necromancy. Yes." The woman seemed pleased at his words. "You are a clever boy to sense so much with your first spell." She glanced at Helis. "Perhaps the two of you have some promise, if not the others."

  "They're just children," Isiem said, feeling a need to excuse Loran's and Ascaros's inability to do whatever he and Helis had.

  "Do you imagine that matters?" the woman asked icily, her flicker of approval vanishing. "Should childhood entitle you to be incompetent?"

  Yes, Isiem wanted to say, but he didn't. He could tell from her abrupt coldness that it was the wrong answer, but he had no idea why. Nonplussed, he stared at her until the shadowcaller turned away from them in a swirl of velvet.

  "There is no excuse for incompetence in the Dusk Hall," she told them over her shoulder as she departed. "None. You had better learn that very quickly if you have any intention of becoming wizards rather than corpses."

  "I'm tired," Ascaros announced as soon as she was gone. Without another word to any of them, he retreated into his room and shut the door.

  After a moment Isiem followed him. The younger boy was already bundled in his charcoal blankets, face to the wall. As quietly as he could, Isiem changed into his sleeping shirt, snuffed the room's lone candle, and climbed into his own bunk.

  Ascaros wasn't sleeping, though. In the stillness he stirred, turning back toward Isiem.

  "Why did you call us children?" he asked.

  "Because we are," Isiem whispered back, surprised.

  "You didn't say that, though. You said ‘they're just children." Loran and me. Not you."

  Under his blankets, Isiem squirmed. He'd only meant to make the shadowcaller forgive them, not to insult his friend ...but it seemed he had doubly failed. "I didn't mean anything by it. I'm sorry."

  Ascaros didn't answer for so long that Isiem wondered if his friend had fallen asleep. When he finally spoke, his voice was muffled and unsteady, as if he were on the brink of tears and had pressed his face into his pillow to hide them. "No, you were right. We're children. Just stupid children dreaming of magic."

  "That's not true."

  "I didn't sense anything in that ring." Ascaros let out a long, shaky breath. "Nothing. I tried, but ...it didn't come to me."

  "The nightglass answered you," Isiem reminded him. "The Joyful Thing accepted you."

  "The Joyful Thing." Ascaros shuddered. "Is that what becomes of failures?"

  "I don't know."

  "I just wish ...I wish ..." He broke off, unable to hold the sobs back any longer.

  "Abandon your tears," Isiem told him. It was a phrase that the Kuthite priest in Crosspine had been fond of repeating. He'd died years ago; Isiem barely remembered him. The priest had been a reclusive man, unpleasant and ill-lik
ed, and when he took sick, no one lifted a finger to keep death from his door. But he'd had Zon-Kuthon's blessing—the only person Isiem had ever known, before the shadowcallers, who did—and he had often told them that the Midnight Lord loathed the weak. In this place, surrounded by Zon-Kuthon's devout, those words seemed good guidance.

  "Abandon your tears," Ascaros repeated. His laugh was unsteady, but it wasn't a sob. "That's what we'll have to do now, isn't it? Accept the Joyful Things' caresses, master whatever spells they care to teach us, never leave the parts of the Dusk Hall we're permitted...and abandon our tears."

  "You can do it."

  "I know." Ascaros turned over again, directing his words to the wall. "I will."

  Chapter Three

  Bargains

  There were no seasons in Pangolais.

  Days melted into weeks, into months, into years, and life in the Dusk Hall never changed. Under the gaze of its unliving statues and half-living Joyful Things, children prayed, practiced spells, and—somewhere along the way—learned to leave childhood behind.

  Over a hundred students came to the Dusk Hall that year. Several failed the Joyful Things' test; those remained wrapped in the cripples' tongues until their struggles stopped and they collapsed for lack of air. Then the shadowcallers carried them away, dragging them down to the lightless cells in the Dusk Hall's depths.

  Sometimes, in the silences of the nights that followed, Isiem could hear their screams. More often he could not.

  The survivors needed no further reminders of failure's price. They kept to the south side of the Dusk Hall, where their classes and living quarters overlooked three small courtyards, each one a jewel-like garden of night-blooming white flowers and exotic plants with dark dappled leaves. The north side, separated by a larger courtyard paved in squares of silver-streaked marble, was reserved for shadowcallers and students of Zon-Kuthon's faith. Other than the library and the cathedral where Kuthite services were held, those rooms were forbidden to the new arrivals—as were the dungeons hidden under the Dusk Hall's solemn grandeur.

  Few were tempted to test that prohibition, and none had time. The newcomers threw themselves into their studies, spending hours bent over the long, low tables in the Dusk Hall's perpetually twilit libraries. They spent hours more in circled lecture halls, attending lessons on everything from the history of the horselords who were their honored ancestors to the rites of propitiation for Zon-Kuthon's heralds.

  They studied the Shadow Plane, a warped reflection of the real world where all was drawn in shades of gray and nothing was substantial. There, distances stretched long and snapped close unpredictably. Landmarks dissolved like dunes of black sand in the wind, only to rise again in new places. Things lived on the Plane of Shadow that did not, could not, exist in the daylight world. It was a strange and surreal realm, largely indifferent to puny human toils. And it was the source of many shadowcallers' spells, so the pupils of the Dusk Hall devoted months to the study of its workings.

  Above all, however, their lessons concerned magic.

  The spells they learned were more innocuous than Isiem had expected. They called no shadowbeasts to hunt innocents in the night. They didn't even offer sacrifices of their own blood over fire, as evil wizards did in the dimly remembered stories of his childhood. Instead they practiced minor ward spells, imbuing themselves with thin weaves of energy that could be used to deflect other magical attacks. They learned to conjure ghostly lights and imagined sounds, to manipulate small objects at a distance, to create sparks of flame and bursts of wintry cold. The only necromancy their teachers showed them was defensive: a method of unraveling the spells that bound undead to this world, weakening their hold on false life.

  Isiem was not, however, reassured by the seemingly benign forms that their lessons took. He understood that these spells were but a prelude: a necessary foundation so that when they did attempt the darker and more dangerous forms of magic, they would not immediately be destroyed.

  He almost didn't care.

  Isiem was good at magic. He had a gift for it. Spells came easily to him, and once learned, were not forgotten. Often he could intuit more advanced forms from the simplified shapes of cantrips, enabling him to leap ahead of the other students and impressing the senior wizards.

  His skill bought him respect, approval, and a certain measure of safety. The teachers of the Dusk Hall did not tolerate failure. Clumsy students were subject to discipline, and discipline in Zon-Kuthon's house was no light matter. Isiem took pride in his talent and cultivated it for its own sake ...but he was also acutely aware that same talent sheltered him from the lash.

  Not all his fellows were so fortunate. Of the three who had come from Crosspine, only Helis matched him. Ascaros struggled. Some things the younger boy learned almost instantly, faster than Isiem himself did, as though the knowledge was already in him and needed only a reminder. Other things he could not learn at all, no matter how furiously he sweated over his books or how many times he repeated the words.

  As the months passed, Ascaros became surly and withdrawn, often sinking into black sulks that forced Isiem to physically drag him out of bed, lest his friend be punished for failing to attend his lessons. Ascaros's nails grew long and hooked; his curly brown hair became a wild tangle that fell over his eyes, isolating him from the world. The lack of discipline shown in his appearance earned the shadowcallers' ire, and so the boy would shear his hair and cut his nails and, for a while, maintain their standards of seemliness. But the weight of his anger and depression always pulled him back down, and within weeks he slipped back into disarray.

  Yet even Ascaros fared better than Loran did.

  The child wasn't stupid. He was afraid. He was too young, had grown up too isolated. The Dusk Hall overwhelmed him. His sister, struggling with her own studies, had little time to coddle him. Ascaros and Isiem had still less, although they did what they could. The other students, sensing Loran's weakness, avoided him, and month by month, his loneliness exacerbated his fear.

  One evening, as the students gathered around a nightglass, Loran's terror came to a head.

  The mirror—which Isiem now knew went by many names, of which "nightglass" and "nightmirror" were the most common—was a small one, scarcely larger than Isiem's palm. It was the first time any of them had been allowed to gaze into a nightglass since they had been tested, and Isiem felt a thrill of fear when their instructor—Dirakah, the one-armed woman who had shown them her ring their first night, and who had proved no softer since—lifted the black velvet that veiled it.

  He was not the only one to react that way. A disquieted murmur rose from the other students, but it soon died out: they were Nidalese, aspiring wizards of the Dusk Hall, and well accustomed to subduing their fear. If Dirakah thought them ready to face the nightglass, then they would be ready—whether or not they themselves believed it.

  One by one, the thirteen students in the chamber came forward. Each took a saucer of cold clotted blood that had been collected from the kitchen chickens slaughtered that morning, then returned to his or her place in the semicircle facing the glass.

  "It has been two years since you came to the Dusk Hall," Dirakah told them. "In those two years, you have learned the beginnings of magic. It is time for you to move beyond trivial things and prepare yourselves for true power.

  "Each of you has gazed into a nightglass once before, and each of you has felt the vastness that lies beyond. All that can be imagined can be wrought from the Midnight Lord's shadows ...if you have the strength to bend them to your will, and the gift to bind them." She beckoned Isiem forward. "Come. Try. Call the shadow from the glass, and offer it your sacrifice. The blood it tastes will shape it—not always, not perfectly, but sufficiently for tonight."

  Isiem bowed his head to her, rose, and approached the nightglass. The black mirror stared back at him, waiting, from its pedestal of worked iron.

  Drawing a measured breath, Isiem focused on it as he had that night in Crosspine, willing
himself to look beyond the nightglass and into the pooled darkness at its heart. Starlight swirled across its polished surface, although there were no stars in the sky above Pangolais and no windows in the chamber through which they might shine.

  He let the vortex of impossible light carry him into the nightmirror ...and, as he had before, felt the world fall away.

  The gate of shadows greeted him. It was different in this mirror—like standing at the brink of a forest pool and gazing down, rather than standing before an onyx archway. Dark, elusive shapes stirred in the depths, swirling the cold black water without creating so much as a ripple on its surface. Some of them felt peaceful as they slid past his awareness, most uncaring, a few dangerous.

  Isiem singled out one of those shapes and concentrated his will upon it, alternately coaxing and compelling. What he did was not like any spell he knew, precisely; it felt less like entangling a living creature in his magic than like spinning sound and light into illusion. There was something real in the nightmirror's pool—he felt it twisting and writhing in his grasp, reshaping itself to fit the contours of what he imagined—but it had no substance. It was ephemeral as a ghost, and when it finally drew near, lured up to the surface, he felt nothing from it but hunger and sucking cold.

  His physical body felt sluggish and numb, but he still had control. Isiem raised his dish of chicken blood to the nightmirror in offering.

  This is a poor cold meal. The shadow-thing's voice was more akin to the touch of a frigid wind than any sound. Yet it stretched to take the blood despite its complaint, sending a tendril of darkness out of the nightmirror into the practice chamber.

  A second murmur rose from the assembled students as the shadow-creature manifested before their eyes. Isiem ignored them, keeping his focus entirely on the shade he had summoned. The instant that it touched the blood, a physical shock rolled through him: the ghostly thing he had called suddenly solidified, became real, in a way it had not before. He fought to keep it in the shape he had envisioned. It felt like trying to hold up a collapsing roof with bare hands ...but bit by bit he succeeded, and the shadow poured into the form he chose.