Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  "And then he dies?"

  "If he's lucky." Helis pinched the moth's bald wings and, with sudden savagery, rolled them into wrinkled, translucent twists between her fingers. She broke off its legs one by one and tossed the crippled insect onto the pile of the dead, where it rolled helpless as a Joyful Thing plucked out of its cage.

  Isiem stared at the garden below them, trying and failing to grasp the full implications of what he had heard. White-throated flowers and umbral leaves rustled at a passing breeze. Moths spun around the branches of the sour apple trees, their wings reflecting the distant glow of the courtyard's hanging spheres. One drifted past Helis's shoulder and perched in her hair, just above two of the strangled corpses of its kin.

  "Go away, Isiem," Helis sighed. "Go to sleep. It's late."

  "You'll be well?"

  A strange, sad smile touched the girl's lips. She nodded, very slightly. The dying moths trapped in her hair renewed their flailing. "I'll be fine. Go to bed."

  He went. And, after only a short struggle with his conscience, he slept.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In their fourth year at the Dusk Hall, two months after Loran's change, the students began their initiation into the mysteries of Zon-Kuthon.

  All of them, as children of Nidal, had spent their lives surrounded by the Midnight Lord's worship. They had gathered around his fires at the Festival of Night's Return, sat vigils in remembrance of their ancestors on the Day of Salvation, and submitted to the Joyful Things' tasting and testing of faith before entering the Dusk Hall. They saw the scars willingly suffered by his petitioners, and they sensed the fear that suffocated the faithless. All were familiar with the Prince of Pain ...and, at the same time, all were strangers to him. Not one of them had communed with the god directly. Not one could channel his magic.

  Over the course of the following year, that changed. A true shadowcaller was versed not only in arcane magic but in the divine, and in Nidal that meant one thing: embracing the glory and cruelty of Zon-Kuthon. Each of them walked a different path to reach their god, but all came to the same destination, and none of their roads was easy.

  For Isiem, the moment of revelation came in the endurance of pain.

  The rites of the Midnight Lord's worship were never gentle, but the initiation rites could kill. For a full day and night, the initiates were locked in the Dusk Hall's cathedral, kneeling in lines and circles and chanting in constant prayer. Exhaustion and terror soon took hold of them: the ache of sore knees and stiff muscles warred with the fear of what would happen if they moved.

  Everything about the rite was designed to disorient and overwhelm its participants, bringing them to the brink of the numinous. Dizzying smoke spilled from the censers overhead, lashing the initiates with slow, breaking coils. The cathedral's candles wept blistering wax onto their backs; the chants of their superiors drowned them in a tide of solemn song. The thousand shadowlights of Pangolais spun around them, creating the illusion of motion among the sculptures that writhed in stony suffering on the cathedral's walls. In Isiem's dazed, drugged vision, those marble men and women seemed to convulse in rapture ...but, on a second glance, they were only stone again.

  His own agony was no illusion. He had not been allowed to move except when the shadowcallers overseeing the rite ordered all the initiates to change positions, and it seemed that every such change was a worse contortion than the last. The shadowcallers paced constantly through their ranks, spiked chains whirling, and struck at any initiate who was improperly bowed. Isiem had taken two such blows, and he thought the shadowcallers' chains were laced with poison, for the wounds burned with a feverish, shivering thrill.

  At midnight the great bells tolled, shuddering through the worshipers' bodies and souls. A hooded priest stood before the altar, holding a chain of glowing iron. Although tens of yards long, it was no thicker than the band of a lady's ring. Many-faced hooks blossomed along the chain like flowers on a vine, each one shining bright and hot as the never-seen sun. Isiem squinted his watering eyes, blinded by the chain's shimmering heat.

  "Raise your heads and be humbled," the hooded priest said. The intonation was strangely distorted; Isiem couldn't tell if the speaker was male or female, young or old, coaxing or commanding. The priest spoke with the voice of a god: all that came through was power and the promise of pain. "Open your mouths and be still."

  Isiem lifted his head toward the priest and opened his mouth. The initiates to either side of him did the same. Sweating and straining, they held their positions until the hooded priest came to grant them communion. The chain spilled between his—her?—fingers, its serrated radiance stitching the ranks of bowed initiates together through the infinity of gloom.

  The priest stooped over each of them, seizing their tongues and pulling them taut. In her-or-his other hand the chain came up, its cruel fire-flower of hooks glowing, and, in a sizzle of scorched blood and saliva, was driven into each of their tongues.

  When his turn came to take the communion in hot iron, Isiem screamed. And in that instant, near-blind and paralyzed with pain, he felt the unbearable touch of his god.

  Endure, it said, as euphoria swelled and crashed through him like a flood-swollen river bursting its dam. Survive. Master the pain. There is no purer test of will, no greater show of strength. And no greater ecstasy than to stare down suffering and prevail.

  Isiem made no answer. Even if he'd been capable of speech, thought was far beyond him. It was all he could do to stay on his knees instead of collapsing on the cathedral floor.

  All around him, students moaned or gasped or wept around their own mouthfuls of searing agony ...and he could feel them, could share in the bewildered bliss that they found on the far side of pain. The spiked chain joined them in suffering and in faith, and the intensity of the experience, amplified over a hundred souls or more, overwhelmed Isiem completely.

  He did collapse, then, and he was far from the only one. The cathedral was littered with the writhing bodies of initiates and the shivering clatter of barbed links against flagstones. Isiem lay among them, half-sensible, and watched as the chain slowly stilled and its fiery flowers, quenched in blood, grew cold.

  But the euphoria did not leave him. It stayed, filling him with fear and wonder, even as Dirakah stooped beside his helpless body and pried the iron hooks from his tongue.

  "Be welcome in our faith," she said, and carried the chain away.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Their lessons changed after the initiation. They spent less time on arcane theory and more on the rites and sacred teachings of Zon-Kuthon. Their classes moved from the south wing of the Dusk Hall to the north side, and they were permitted to pass the Joyless Things freely. While the caged cripples had prevented them from escaping before, they were no longer needed. Once initiated into his faith, the students were bound to the Midnight Lord; wherever they went, there would be no escape. One and all, they were his. And so they were free to spread and strengthen Zon-Kuthon's presence in Pangolais.

  The Umbral Leaves, the holiest text of their faith, eclipsed their scrolls and spellbooks. The powdered gems and murky tinctures of their wizardly studies vanished from the classrooms; in their stead, the students practiced with razors and vises, learning to cut and crush flesh with all the artistry their god demanded.

  It was a shattering experience for Isiem, and not only for the obvious reasons. The students were required to suffer as much anguish as they inflicted—often they inflicted torments on each other, reversing the roles of victim and torturer many times in each lesson—but, harrowing as the pain was, worse was what he saw it doing to them.

  They were changing. Under the weight of that constant trauma, all of them were changing. Sometimes, amidst the haze of blood and iron-scented smoke, Isiem would catch a glimpse of Loran's face twisted with fear and rapture: rapture for the intensity of sensation that the boy's mortal flesh afforded, fear that he might have damaged it too greatly and would be forced back to the numb emptiness of shadow if h
is stolen body failed.

  It was an expression that his lost friend would never have showed, and the sight of it on that once-familiar face forced Isiem to see how alien Loran had become. What was in him was not human, and its yearning to experience humanity only reinforced how very foreign it was.

  Isiem couldn't bear it. Nor could he bear what he saw in Helis, who sometimes seemed to have traded her own soul for something bleaker than her brother's. She gave herself to the pain with an intensity bordering on anger, as if she could obliterate her memories in its inferno. No matter how grievous the harms they were asked to cause or endure, Helis never held back; if anything, she went further than their instructors desired. She truly did not seem to care if she killed or died, and the enormity of her indifference frightened him. They were friends, or had been, but now he felt that he scarcely knew her at all.

  For his own part, Isiem just wanted to survive. As their studies continued, drawing them deeper and deeper into Zon-Kuthon's embrace, his sense of right and wrong went spinning away. If morality was a compass, his had lost true north—and, lacking that core certainty, Isiem could find nothing else to orient him.

  Was it wrong to torture a helpless slave, if serving as their practice subject was all that kept that slave alive? Was it still wrong if he inflicted the same pains on his closest friends, and suffered them in turn? Not eagerly—not because he was able to take any pleasure in it, as more devout Kuthites seemed to—but because he, too, survived only by the lash?

  If it was not wrong, was it right?

  Isiem didn't know. He was increasingly unsure whether he cared. Questions of that sort seemed relics from another world, as irrelevant to his own life as the intricacies of Tian chrysanthemum ceremonies or the proper protocol for greeting Taldan dignitaries in a foreign court. They were things that existed in books, and they had no place in shadow-swathed Pangolais.

  What existed here was pain, over and over, in infinite variations that admitted no possibility of release.

  Not even their instructors were immune. The shadowcallers took their turns serving as the students' subjects, although Isiem noticed that some of them tended to avoid certain students. In particular, Dirakah seemed careful not to place herself at Helis's mercy.

  "Of course she is," Helis said when he asked her about it. They were perched above the courtyard's garden again, sitting among its caged lamps and spiraling moths. "She's afraid of me."

  "Because of Loran?"

  "Yes. She's right to be." Helis smiled—that melancholy, faraway smile she'd only showed after her brother's sacrifice. She lifted a stunned moth up to brush a kiss across its wings, coating her lips in silver dust. Extending her hand delicately over the precipice, she blew the moth off her finger, sending it spiraling downward on translucent, useless wings.

  Isiem watched the moth fall with troubled fascination. "Why?"

  Helis shook her head lightly and patted his knee. Her hand left a ghostly outline of shimmering powder on his leg. "Go to sleep, Isiem. It's none of your concern."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  If Dirakah was afraid of Helis, however, she showed no fear of anyone else. Nor did she show any fear of death. If anything, she seemed to court it. More often than anyone else, she served as their subject in practicing the Kuthite arts. To her, their lessons were ancillary. The real dance was between Dirakah and her god, with the students serving merely as the means by which the shadowcaller flirted with destruction. She was addicted to the intensity of life at oblivion's edge, and she chased it at every opportunity.

  As their arts advanced, the less pious shadowcallers stopped offering themselves. A flogging was one thing; any Kuthite could take that, and a clumsy hand with the lash was scarcely more dangerous than a deft one.

  The great tortures were another matter. A mistimed touch on the Crystal Chimes would kill the subject and, perhaps worse, shatter the instrument's delicate blades. A misspoken incantation into the Veil of Whispers could result in both the invoker and her victim being drained to death by its gray gossamer.

  Day by day, the difficulty of their arts rose higher, and the potential for lethal mistakes became greater. One by one, the shadowcallers stopped taking their places on the torturer's table. Most of them put prudence above piety, and did not want to risk dying at the hands of beginners. Soon the students' work shifted entirely to slaves.

  Slaves...and Dirakah. She, alone among the shadowcallers, never quailed. When it came time for Isiem and his fellows to practice the Needled Choir, it was Dirakah who lay bound on the table before them.

  The Needled Choir, like most of the great tortures, was a performance piece. It was not meant to wring information from its victim, nor was its primary purpose to inflict pain. It was, rather, meant as a spectacle to delight and intrigue the audience, and was most often conducted in Zon-Kuthon's cathedrals during the celebration of his high holy days.

  For the Needled Choir, bound victims were laid on tables arrayed like the spokes of a wheel, with their heads pointed inward and their feet radiating outward. There might be as few as three or as many as twelve; Chellarael of Nisroch, who was infamous for her excesses, had once conducted a Choir of forty-eight arranged in two concentric rings. Today's exercise had only three: a pair of condemned prisoners requisitioned from the Umbral Court's dungeons, and Dirakah.

  Deep, soft pillows, covered in white satin to show blood better, held each victim's head and shoulders bent back to expose their necks more cleanly. The victims' mouths were sealed—only with cloth wrappings, for this exercise, but in a true performance they would be stitched shut, or even maimed with knives and acid, then magically healed into a smooth whole. However it was done, the purpose was to leave the victims silent and unable to breathe through their mouths. Until they sang through the needles, they would make no sound again.

  Three of those needles rested on a white satin cushion near Isiem's hand. He glanced at them and swallowed, trying to hide the nervousness that thrilled through him.

  Each of the steel-tipped needles swelled into a hollow alabaster reed designed to be pierced into the victim's windpipe, where it would stand upright and vent the victim's trapped breath into fluted notes. A scarlet ribbon hung at the end of each needle; during the performance, it would flutter in the channeled breath, flapping like a geyser of blood.

  The insertion, however, was a delicate task. If the needles were thrust in too deeply, or imprecisely, they could pierce the carotid artery. Clumsy placements could also ruin the victim's voice, or allow air to escape and bubble under the skin of the face and neck—a phenomenon that, once it was discovered, gave rise to its own tortures, but was still considered a grievous failure in a performance of the Needled Choir.

  If Isiem did botch the needles' insertion, the responsibility for healing lay entirely with him. Earlier in their training, a shadowcaller had always stood ready to remedy their worst mistakes with magic, but now that they had all advanced sufficiently in their prayers to command their own curative spells, the students were expected to keep their own subjects alive.

  The slaves they used were not expensive, and the condemned were virtually worthless, but Isiem was queasily aware, however much he tried to heed his training and ignore it, that a human life lay at his mercy. In the eyes of the world, the measure of his failure might be a few pieces of gold, but in his own, it would be far worse.

  A roll of drumbeats broke through his introspections. The ceremony was starting. Taking up a scarlet-flagged needle in one hand, Isiem exchanged a tense look with the students on either side. To his right, Helis stood by the other prisoner from the Umbral Dungeons. To his left, a hollow-eyed youth named Serevil leaned over Dirakah. Neither of their faces betrayed any hint of the anxiety Isiem felt. He hoped his own was as impassive.

  The drumbeats died. Holding his breath, Isiem watched from the corner of his eye as Helis held her reed high over her victim's throat, then plunged it down with a dramatic swoop. Her aim was unerring, her control complete: the needle p
ierced the prisoner's windpipe and stayed there, emitting an unearthly shrill. Its crimson flag lashed the air once in a straight line, then subsided into twisting contortions.

  The drums picked up again. Now they insinuated themselves around and beneath the mournful haunt of Helis's reed, accentuating its song instead of overwhelming it. Their erratic stutter evoked a failing heartbeat, and when it fell into a long, tense lull, Isiem knew his turn had come.

  Sideways between the third and fourth tracheal rings. It had been easier on the corpses they used for practice, with the correct incision point inked on stiff cold flesh...but, after a frozen instant, Isiem found that same point on the living man. Offering a quick prayer that his hands would be steady and his aim true, he plunged the needle down.

  It caught for an instant—the windpipe was tough, and although the needle was sharp, it took some force to push it through—but he executed the movement flawlessly, and he did not strike too deep. A second eerie note rose from the prisoner's punctured throat, joining the song that Helis had begun.

  Moments later, after the drums had risen and dwindled again, the third student raised his reed to complete their song.

  Isiem had already taken a half-step back when he noticed that Helis had not moved back with him. Curious, he stole a glance at her, although he knew it would draw a reprimand from his instructors if any of them noticed. Any deviation from the appearance of singleminded concentration was a flaw, but looking to other participants for guidance was a serious one.

  No one noticed. And what he saw piqued his interest even more: Helis had torn a bit of loose fleece from her sleeve and was rolling it surreptitiously. Her lips moved in a slight, soundless murmur; clearly she'd practiced delivering that incantation subtly. From even a few steps farther away, her gestures would have been invisible, and the reeds' drone drowned out her whispered chant.