Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  It was a vulpine thing, its face lean and clever and cruel, its teeth white as winter stars. Lidless, slanted eyes shone between a pointed nose and pointed ears. A ruff of melting darkness, somewhere between spikes and fur, wreathed its too-long neck. Its shoulders, and whatever else might exist of its body, remained within the mirror.

  "Impressive," Dirakah said. "Now send it back."

  Isiem nodded, scarcely feeling the gesture. He withdrew from the nightglass, simultaneously releasing the shadow-creature's imagined form and pulling it apart at the edges. It unraveled like an unfinished garment, dissolving back into formless darkness with a mute howl of frustration.

  "Good." With that curt note of approval, Dirakah dismissed him, turning her attention to the next student in the circle. "Perahni."

  It took her twice as long, and what she finally coaxed from the mirror was little more than a shapeless mass of coils ending in disjointed spiders' legs, but ultimately Perahni called a shadow-creature to drink her offering too. Other students followed, with greater and lesser success, until it came Loran's turn.

  The boy stood hesitantly, edging toward the nightglass with sidelong steps. Fear radiated from him. He held his dish of chicken blood steady, and he did not shrink from gazing into the curved black glass ...but he held himself closed to the shadows in its depths. Whether because of something that had happened during his test in Crosspine, or because of all the misshapen monsters he'd seen the other students call forth, Loran was unwilling to open his own soul to the mirror. And, being unwilling to use his own mind and spirit as the lure, he could conjure nothing from the glass.

  Isiem saw it clearly. If he saw it, Dirakah could hardly fail to do the same—and, indeed, her lips thinned in displeasure and her hand twitched toward the thin black rod she kept tucked in her belt. She did not take it out, however, and Isiem's trepidation grew. If she wasn't going to beat Loran with the rod, it only meant she had something worse in mind.

  "Step away," she told the boy.

  "Yes, mistress." Loran bowed over his untouched bowl of blood and backed away from the glass. Shivers wracked his skinny shoulders, and he set the bowl down rather than let it fall from his trembling hands. Making a mess would only have worsened whatever was coming.

  "You are afraid." Dirakah stood, walking toward her student with icy implacability. Her heels clicked on the floor's polished stone. "Your fear makes you fail."

  Loran watched her come, too frightened or emotionally exhausted to do anything but stare at her with the huge frozen eyes of a mouse pinned under a serpent's gaze. "Yes, mistress."

  "There are worse things to fear than the nightglass's shadows. Perhaps you require a reminder."

  "If—if you deem it so, mistress."

  "If?" Blinding-fast, her rod sliced through the air, striking Loran's cheek. He crashed to the ground and lay there without protest, not even reaching toward his wounded face. A broad pale swath striped his cheek; as Isiem watched, the white flesh turned a mottled red, and a line of blood welled in its center. "You do not say ‘if' to me, worm. ‘Yes.' All you may ever say to me is ‘yes.' Do you understand?"

  "Yes, mistress," Loran mumbled. He did not blink as blood trickled from his wound toward his eye. Neither did any of the other students. They watched his punishment with practiced stillness, unmoved as gray-robed statues.

  "Dirakah." The door eased open, and a dark-haired man in shadowcaller's robes stepped in. It took a moment for Isiem to recognize him as Lamion, one of the trio that had taken him from Crosspine; the man was not one of the Dusk Hall's instructors, and Isiem had not seen him in the years since. He looked much the same, apart from a few threads of gray in his hair and a new series of scars across his right hand.

  "What?" Dirakah snapped without turning around.

  "The Chelaxians are here with a new string of slaves. Good ones. They will go quickly. You'd best hurry if you want to secure any for your students."

  "These half-wits don't deserve good slaves. I should make them feed the shadows from their own wrists for their idiocy." But she drew back from Loran, breathing hard as she looked over the gathered students. After a moment she pointed to Isiem. "Take that one. Have him choose. He's the least stupid of today's lot, for what little that's worth."

  Lamion glanced at Loran prostrate on the floor, curled his lip in a sneer, and nodded. "How many do you want?"

  "One, and only if that one can be had for something approaching a reasonable price. I'll not waste the Dusk Hall's gold for the benefit of these fools."

  "As you will." Lamion bent a knee briefly and retreated from the doorway. "You. Come."

  Immediately Isiem left the circle and followed Lamion into the hall. He fell in quietly behind the shadowcaller, walking one step to the side and three behind, as he had been taught. The older man did not address him, or give him so much as a glance, until they were out of the Dusk Hall and walking along the wide, curved streets of Pangolais.

  "Have you been to the markets?" he inquired as they passed beneath a pair of towering iron lampposts that resembled the trees overshadowing the city. Pallid globes of light hung among the trees' thorned black branches, drawing a constant swirl of gray moths.

  "No, master," Isiem replied.

  "They are a spectacle."

  It did not take long for Isiem to see what he meant. The city's market square was a vast expanse of flat gray stone. Gargoyles and contorted statues, wearing crowns and needled gorgets pierced through their stony skin, overlooked the bustle from freestanding plinths and the grand buildings that hemmed the square.

  Some of those statues were not carved of marble or limestone. They were living bodies that had been flayed and broken, drained of blood, then pinned into oddly beautiful configurations with lengths of sharpened steel. Those enormous needles were enchanted to keep their prisoners alive and suffering beyond all mortal endurance. High above the teeming crowds they hung, with only their feeble gasps and the occasional twitch of a finger to show that they were anything other than pure ornament.

  Few in the crowds seemed to notice their torment. The market's wares held more interest for them—and for Isiem, too. He saw barrow-carts piled high with long white radishes and dark furled mushrooms dug up from the depths of the Uskwood; he walked past jewelers' stands draped with filigree necklaces, earrings, bracelets—all in silver, all set with glowing gemstones in white or gray or black. Anything he could imagine, ordinary or rare, seemed to be displayed on a table somewhere.

  Slender noblewomen picked through trays of cosmetics that promised to accentuate the whiteness of their skin, darken their lips, or lend the shimmer of crushed nightmoths' wings to their eyelids. Scarred Kuthite priests tested razors and studded lashes on themselves or on the tongueless slaves staked by the merchants' tables for that purpose. Shadowcallers in flowing gray brushed past peasants and artisans, ignoring the mumbled obeisances that the latter were always quick to offer.

  And then they came to the slave market, and Isiem was truly overwhelmed. Elsewhere he had seen things strange and wondrous ...but here, for the first time, he saw people who were utterly foreign to his understanding of the world.

  Some of the slaves on the rope were huge. Some were tiny. Many were inhuman. Their skin was ruddy or golden or a deep rich brown that amazed him; none had the ghost-pale complexion of a Nidalese. Their hair was not only ash or white, but flame or brass or brilliant sun. One small, large-mouthed creature, barely half the height of a human, had extraordinary blue eyes and wild spikes of purple hair. Next to it was a hulking female with bronze-capped tusks and callused gray-green hide that, over the creature's slabs of muscle, gave her the look of a walking statue. Isiem gaped at them openly, too astonished to hide it.

  "Congratulations, novice, you'll pay double the price now," Lamion muttered, although he seemed more amused than irritated by Isiem's reaction. "Let me do the bargaining."

  "What are we looking for?" Isiem asked. As his initial surprise dissipated, he realized with some pu
zzlement that many of the slaves appeared to be old, very young, or sickly—not what he would have expected a slaver to choose for the long and arduous journey into Pangolais.

  "Emotion," Lamion said, walking down the line. "Emotion and experience."

  "Emotion?" Isiem repeated, uncomprehending.

  "Others buy slaves for their deft hands or strong backs. We seek sacrifices for our art. I saw that Dirakah had you practicing with the nightglass. Surely you must have noticed that its shadows demand to be fed—and that they come into the world stronger and surer once they have eaten."

  "Yes," Isiem said, remembering the foxlike creature he'd drawn out of the mirror, and how abruptly the feel of the thing had changed once it tasted his offering of blood.

  "Those shadows need us. They need life. They have none of their own. Warm blood—the taste of life—is precious to them, but more precious still are the dreams and emotions that living people possess. The memories. It doesn't seem to matter much what the memories are, only that they're strong ones. Vivid. Fear, hate, love, it's all the same to them. The intensity is all they care about. It makes things easier for us, and more profitable for our friends from Cheliax."

  Isiem felt lost again. "Easier?"

  Lamion gestured contemptuously at an old man in the line. Like all the other slaves, he was bound with a loop of enchanted rope around his wrists and ankles. The soft gray strand flexed perfectly around its prisoners, avoiding any abrasion while keeping them confined in bonds stronger than steel. Yet even that seemingly fragile restraint looked absurd on the old man's liver-spotted wrists. He could hardly stand upright; any fight in him had died decades ago.

  "Who would buy that one?" Lamion asked. "Look at him. The necromancers of Geb might pay a few coppers for his bones, but he's worthless to anyone else. Except us."

  And him, and his family, Isiem thought, but he held his tongue. Lamion clearly thought nothing of that; it did not matter a whit to him that all these slaves could hear every word he said. In the shadowcaller's eyes, these creatures were not people.

  "His memories are what matter," Lamion continued. "His pain. If he can suffer, he has worth—to the shadows, and so to us."

  "Do we need him?" Isiem asked hesitantly. The shadowcaller gave him a curious look, but he did not seem angry, so Isiem pressed onward. "Can we not feed the shadows ourselves, instead of relying on these poor creatures?"

  "You do." An auburn-haired woman stepped out from the canopied tent near the slave line. Turquoise-studded silver pins held her hair in an elaborate crown of braids. She was slim and pale, like a Nidalese, but she was not one of them. Her pallor tended toward gold, not white, and although her dress was black leather like a Kuthite's, it was trimmed and slashed in red. The emblem of Cheliax was worked in crimson on her breast.

  Lamion did not seem pleased to see her. "Suryan."

  "Lamion." She gave him a radiant smile and raised her hands in mock-affectionate greeting. "Who is this charming child you've brought me?"

  The woman's effusion seemed to increase Lamion's annoyance. The shadowcaller stepped back, withdrawing into a shell of unfriendliness. "Isiem. He's new."

  "He must be. You haven't crushed all the questions out of him yet." She regarded Isiem with the same too-charming smile. Her eyes sparkled: now blue, now green, now somewhere in between. He wondered if she used some minor magic to change their hue. "New as you are, however, you must have seen that the people of Pangolais are ...different. A lassitude envelops this city. Its people are wan, thin, silent. You might say they're shadows of themselves. Or, perhaps, that they've fed shadows of themselves."

  "Suryan," Lamion said again. This time it was a warning.

  She ignored him. "You must have seen, too, that most of your fellow students do not come from the city, but from the little villages farther from Nidal's heart. If they've started letting you out of the Dusk Hall, you may have noted that there are few children in Pangolais. I've been visiting this city for a decade, and I doubt I've seen twenty children in all that time here. Why is that, do you suppose?"

  "Suryan," Lamion snarled.

  "Ah, the truth is prickly." She turned to Isiem, encompassing the market around them with a wave of one hand. Her nails were painted blue-green, too. "The Nidalese do feed their shadows. Constantly. Every breath you take under the trees of Pangolais is taxed for their sustenance. And even so, all these people giving up their vitality can only sustain the gloom over Pangolais. To call beasts from the darkness, you need more—yet if you fed them with your own blood, drained as you are, it might kill you. Therefore you need our charges to pay the toll."

  "Which is why we've come," Lamion said sharply. "If you could cease your fairy stories long enough to sell some."

  "I suppose, owing to our long friendship, I might do you the small favor of negotiating for one or two." Suryan's smile twinkled, although her eyes stayed cold. "Which would you like?"

  Lamion nodded toward Isiem. "Choose."

  Choose. The immensity of the decision rooted Isiem to the ground. How did one choose who was worthy to live? If Lamion's intimations were true, and the intensity of a sacrifice's emotions strengthened the shadowbeast that fed on him, then it was likely—no, it was certain—that the sacrifice would be tortured first. No Kuthite would let an opportunity to inflict suffering pass.

  Whoever he chose would be tortured and killed. And if he didn't choose anyone, he invited that fate upon himself. Isiem had been in the Dusk Hall long enough to know that.

  It was a briefly tempting thought—one way out of his dilemma—but as he faced that thought, and the finality of it, Isiem quailed away. He didn't have it in him to choose death. Not the kind of death Zon-Kuthon's adepts would give.

  How, then, could he do the least harm?

  "Tell me about that one," he said, pointing to the little creature with the shock of purple hair. A whimsical pattern of colored dots, garishly out of place in Pangolais, had been tattooed up one shoulder and the right side of its neck. Three feet tall and bizarrely bright-eyed, the purple-haired creature looked the least human of the slaves in line. If it was a monster, as he hoped, his choice would be easier.

  Suryan went back into the canopied tent and returned with a ledger held open on one hand. She flicked through a few pages, then read: "Quilli Brightburst. A gnome. Lost her tongue and freedom for preaching treason in Westcrown. Magically gifted, although she will need a new tongue before that's of much use. The price is eleven platinum crowns."

  Lamion was staring at the gnome with naked hunger, but he shook his head reluctantly at mention of the price. "Too much. Gnomes are expensive."

  "Experience and emotion, wasn't that what you wanted?" Suryan glanced up from her book. "Gnomes surpass all others for that. And then there is the matter of the Bleaching. Gnomes crave new experiences. Need them. Die without them. You can make them do so much in the name of novelty, and then deprive them of it entirely in the end ..."

  "I'm well aware," Lamion snapped. "Eleven crowns is too much. Choose another."

  "What about that one?" Isiem indicated the tusked, heavily muscled woman. Her forehead was ridged with ritual scars, her eyes small and suspicious. She carried herself with a subtle tension, as if she expected danger to leap out from any direction and did not intend to be caught unawares. And yet, Isiem imagined, there seemed to be a certain fatalism to her as well, as if she had already accepted that her end would be bloody and viewed that as no great tragedy.

  "Atan," Suryan read aloud. "A half-orc. Formerly the property of House Henderthane. Offered on the open market after rebelling against her rightful masters and allowing a defeated foe to escape instead of bringing him to House Henderthane's diabolists as commanded. Suspected of allowing others to escape on previous occasions. Exceptionally strong, but impulsive and defiant. Ideal for the gladiator's ring."

  "Less so for beginning students." Lamion crossed his arms. "That one is likely to be too much trouble for them. Still, with so much violence in her soul ...wh
at are they asking?"

  "Sixty platinum crowns, or two good fighting slaves to House Henderthane in exchange."

  The shadowcaller snorted. "Half that would be an outrage."

  "Henderthane sets the price. We only ask it," Suryan answered with a shrug. "According to the entry, she is quite accomplished in battle. Good at finishing her foes in a showy mess. Audiences like that."

  "The old man," Isiem suggested, feeling a twinge of desperation. Lamion had discarded all his suggestions so far, giving him some reprieve, but the shadowcaller couldn't reject every slave in the line.

  "Edovan. Called Leadthumb for his heavy hand on the merchant's scales." Suryan closed the book. "I know the lictor who transferred this one. He said the man was suspected of arson and murder—it was rumored that he'd burned down a competitor's shop, killing the family in their beds as they slept above the blaze—but only fraud and deceit could be proved. Leadthumb chose a term of slavery rather than paying off his fines. Too much of a miser to give up his gold, even at the cost of his freedom."

  Or too worried about his family's penury, Isiem thought. He wanted to believe the lictor's tale. His choice would be easier if he could believe this old man had murdered a whole family out of greed...but he wondered whether that was why Suryan had told the story. Maybe it was just a subtle way to push the sale by salving his conscience. Maybe there was no murder, no arson, only false accusations of fraud, and Edovan Leadthumb, unable to shake his accusers, had sacrificed himself so that his children wouldn't have to starve.

  He'd likely never know the truth. Did it matter?

  Why not accept the comforting answer? What harm could it do?

  It's cowardice. Isiem looked away, not wanting to meet the slaves' eyes. But they were everywhere, all around him. The only place he could look without seeing them was skyward, and there he found his gaze caught by three suffering bodies pinned together in an ornamental circle by gleaming silver needles. Their shattered arms and legs were arrayed in graceful whorls within the wheel, creating a filigree of flesh.