Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  But to what end? Isiem recognized the spell she was casting—they had all learned the same simple illusion early in their studies—but he could not discern its purpose. Helis moved back, taking up her proper position for the ceremony's end, and nothing seemed to have changed.

  Then Serevil swept his hands down, plunging in the last reed, and Isiem realized in a flash of horror what she had just done.

  Blood fountained from Dirakah's throat: a vertical flood of it, painting Serevil's astonished face and the floor behind him and the nearest circle of the audience in hot red gouts. A horrible wet gurgle choked in the reed. Its crimson pennant, soaked through already, rippled with each new spurt like lakeweed caught in the continuing flow of Dirakah's lifeblood.

  In moments the shadowcaller would be dead. Not because Serevil had killed her, but because Helis had. A minor illusion to shift the incision point from Dirakah's windpipe to the great artery in her neck was all Helis needed to kill the woman who had led her brother's destruction.

  And Dirakah would die, unless Isiem stepped in. So would Serevil. No one was permitted to intervene with any of the great tortures except the torturers themselves. The risk of disaster was ever-present; it was no small part of the audience's thrill.

  But that did not mean the students could not be punished for their failures. Serevil was already doomed to suffer for injuring a superior; if Dirakah died, so would he. That knowledge seemed to have paralyzed him. The youth stood white and unmoving, too stunned to react. Blood dripped from his cheeks and hung in garnet drops on his eyebrows.

  There was no chance that Serevil would recover from his shock in time to save Dirakah. Pushing his own ambivalence aside, Isiem strode forward, steeling himself to call upon Zon-Kuthon's uncertain mercy. As he prepared to utter his prayer, Helis grabbed his wrist with a hand like a manacle of ice.

  "No," she hissed, too softly for the audience to hear.

  "Let me go," Isiem said, trying to pull away.

  She did not release him. "No. Dirakah has courted this end for years. Do you think this is anything she didn't expect? Anything she didn't want? She deserves this."

  "Does Serevil?"

  Beneath the hood, Helis's eyes grew hard. "Is he any better?" Her hand tightened on his wrist, hurting him. "We're all monsters, Isiem. We all deserve this."

  To that he had no answer. The prayer faltered on his lips, failed.

  And under their hands, Dirakah died.

  Chapter Six

  Seeing Darkness

  Are you happy?" Isiem asked Helis the next time they sat together above the courtyard garden.

  She looked up from picking at the tatters of her sleeve. Already there were so many holes in it that the gray wool looked like Taldan lace. "Happy?"

  "Content. Satisfied. Something. Now that you've had your revenge."

  "No." Helis shrugged, waving her ruined sleeve over one of the black iron claws that caged the lanterns below them. A moth dancing around the globe's ethereal glow blundered into the cloth and was caught. She pressed the trapped insect to her wrist, suffocating it slowly against her pulse. "It was a thing that needed to be done, and now it has been. There is no happiness in that. Only the fulfillment of fate."

  "That wasn't fate," Isiem said. The anger in his own words surprised him. He paused, gathering his composure; open emotion was unbecoming of a Nidalese. "You killed her. Not the impartial hand of destiny. You."

  "And you," Helis said, lightly and almost playfully, as if they'd been sitting at a game of chance and he had drawn a losing card. She plucked the dying moth from its woolen trap and carefully pushed the insect into her hair, just above one ear, as though it were a flower. "You killed her too, Isiem."

  "No."

  "Yes. You could have stopped me. You didn't. She died."

  "That isn't the same as killing her."

  "Of course not," Helis said, turning her little smile down to her soft white hands. One of the moth's antennae was trapped under the nail of her forefinger: a bent black fissure across her fingertip. She picked it out and let it fall, spinning, into the garden below. "Yes, I see that now. It is entirely different."

  But it was. Isiem held fast to that thought in the days that followed. The memory of his passivity overwhelmed him with guilt, although he saw nothing he could have done differently. His only other choice would have been to betray Helis—to cause her death, instead of standing silent at Dirakah's—and that was no choice at all. Their friendship had become a frayed and feeble thing, but Isiem wasn't ready to discard it entirely. Not when it was one of the last links he had to his life before the Dusk Hall.

  So he had held his tongue and stayed his hand as Helis committed murder with the hands of another, and now guilt dogged his every step.

  Little of that guilt was for Dirakah. The shadowcaller had been a vicious and coldhearted woman, and she had courted the Midnight Lord's last embrace for years. If there were any tragedy in her finally receiving what she'd wanted so long, it was in the desire, not the consummation. Isiem felt no pity for her.

  Serevil, though ...that was a heavier weight to carry. Serevil had only been a student, no better and no worse than any of them. That death haunted him.

  And the worst of it was that he didn't even know if Serevil was dead. No one knew. After the disaster of the Needled Choir, he'd simply vanished, swept away along with Dirakah's body and the injured prisoners. None of the other students had seen him since. In the silence that followed Serevil's disappearance, every terror in their collective imagination flourished—for what, they all wondered, could the shadowcallers possibly do to him that would be worse than the horrors they'd already witnessed?

  Isiem had no answer for that. He only knew that he bore the blame.

  To escape it, he threw himself ever deeper into his work. It was easier now that their focus had shifted back to true magic. Having mastered the great tortures, the students were allowed to return to their wizardly studies. A few found themselves called to Zon-Kuthon's side, and chose to concentrate on the rites and invocations of the priesthood. But most, Isiem included, were privately relieved to let that part of their schooling pass. They were all born Nidalese, and they could withstand the terrors of the Midnight Lord's gifts without flinching; but even they, whose forebears had lived under his rule for millennia, seldom welcomed those gifts.

  True magic, unstained by Zon-Kuthon's touch, was easier to embrace.

  And it was well that Isiem thought so, because their instructors pushed them to new heights every day. It was as if they were determined to make up for all the time lost to the students' religious studies, and did not care how they did it.

  Day after day, the students were pounded with a relentless torrent of lectures, experiments, practice sessions. Day after day, they struggled not to drown in the flood. They learned to enhance the magical resonances in precious materials suitable for crafting into enchanted items, and how to blend rare resins into inks that would hold the ephemeral echoes of magic. They mastered the tedious labor of gem-setting and woodcarving to make worthy receptacles for their spells. They copied cryptic diagrams and repeated incantations in long-dead languages until their hands cramped and their tongues ached, and then they pressed on for one more spell. Always, always one more.

  Those who failed went to the shadow.

  The same fate, they learned that autumn, had befallen Serevil. After months of silence, he reappeared in their classes without a word of explanation, as if he'd never missed a day. But he was not as he had been: vertical slashes striped his face with white scars, both his ears had been burned to curled husks of leather, and his eyes were no longer human. Only the void stared out from those eyes, and few in the Dusk Hall could meet them.

  Isiem couldn't. He spent the first few days after Serevil's return working himself into a frenzy of exhaustion, and when that failed to push the guilt away, he sought out Helis.

  She had forsaken her usual haunts. As the evenings grew cooler, she visited the gardens les
s often, not because of the chill, but because she had taken to spending her nights in the perpetual twilight of the Dusk Hall's library. Most of the students, including Isiem, found those creaking, crooked shelves and gloomy piles of books unsettling, and spent as little time there as they could. Helis, however, seemed to take solace from its musty loneliness.

  It was there that he finally found her, drifting among the leatherbound stacks. She was skeleton-thin under her cloak of black hair, every bone in her face drawn sharply in starved beauty. A shroud of silvery moths fluttered luminous in the dark around her—an intricate illusion, woven for no evident purpose save to amuse her. Upon brushing Helis's skin or clothes, the moths shriveled into decrepitude and tumbled, age-broken, to the ground, only to re-form from the dust within moments and rejoin the whirling dance.

  "Helis."

  She looked up, startled. An illusory moth drifted toward him. It passed through his candle's flame, burst into fire, and dissolved into glowing ashes. "Isiem."

  "Serevil is back. Shadow-seized."

  "I know." She crooked a finger at the falling sparks of the candle-burned moth. They spun back together, whirling into a fiery spectre—the shape of an insect sketched by shifting, burning motes. The sight seemed to enchant her. One by one the other moths in her illusion exploded into flame. They continued their dance as burning ghosts, the unreal light of their wings spinning off the gilt on the books all around her.

  "That's all you have to say about it? You know?" Isiem started forward, reaching out to seize Helis or strike her, but caught himself at the last moment and stopped just short of touching her. If showing anger was anathema to Nidalese, making physical contact without invitation was unimaginably worse—a breach of etiquette that could easily lead to the loss of the offending hand. Slaves and prisoners had no right to their own bodies, but that was a mark of their low status. They were non-persons. Free Nidalese were inviolate.

  But it was tempting. It was supremely tempting.

  Isiem raked a shaking hand through his long white hair. "All of this was for revenge, wasn't it? Retribution for what they did to Loran. And now you've inflicted the same fate on another student—another boy no more deserving than your brother. Is that what you wanted? Is that what you hoped for? To give another innocent soul to the shadow?"

  "They aren't innocent," Helis said softly. "None of us are innocent."

  "I don't care," Isiem snapped. "Stop. You've had your revenge. Dirakah is dead. It ends."

  "It never ends." She laughed: a short, breathy sound of hurt. "It's eating him, Isiem. The shadow in Loran. It doesn't understand. How to live—how to keep him alive. It doesn't understand flesh. It forgets to sleep, it doesn't eat ...it mortifies his body constantly for the thrill of feeling pain."

  "And now Serevil will suffer the same." Isiem scowled, cupping his candle to protect the flame as he turned back toward the door. "If you want to find a way to free Loran—if such a thing can be done—I will help you. However I can, I'll help. But this foolish, futile quest for revenge ...it has to end. Promise me that, Helis. Please."

  She shook her head, retreating past a shelf of time-dulled tomes. Her burning moths snuffed out one by one, returning the library to its dusky gloom. Isiem hadn't realized how much light they shed; with Helis's illusion gone, his candle's flame was a puny thing. He couldn't see anything but the black-bound books and dusty shelves crowding at his elbows. Helis was invisible in the dark, although he could hear the whisper of her footsteps receding.

  "Please, Helis," Isiem whispered, unsure whether he meant it for her or himself.

  She did not say a word. But he heard the rustle of her sleeve, and he saw the wick of his candle bend suddenly, crushed into its wax by an invisible hand. The flame died. Midnight engulfed him: the absolute lightlessness of Zon-Kuthon's rule.

  Heavy-hearted, Isiem dropped the useless stub and blindly he felt his way out of the black.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Winter came subtly to the unchanging city of Pangolais. The eternal trees did not turn their broad black leaves, nor did those leaves fall. Under their canopy, the shadowed days and nights melded into one, and no change in their length could be told. No crops ripened among the white paths and onyx obelisks of Pangolais; no beasts fatted themselves for a long sleep until spring. Only the moths danced under the caged lights of the Nidalese.

  But the evenings' humidity lightened, and the early morning chill grew sharper, and an air of anticipation began to suffuse the libraries and study chambers of the Dusk Hall. With the advent of winter, six years after their arrival, the students' work was finally approaching its end. Next autumn, one way or another, all of Isiem's class would leave the Dusk Hall.

  Only one task remained before they finished their novitiates and apprenticed to individual masters: the crafting of a scrysphere.

  On one level, a scrysphere served as a benchmark of the student's ability. A wizard capable of enchanting one was powerful enough to be useful to the Umbral Court and knowledgeable enough to avoid dishonoring his teachers; his creation was proof of his skill.

  But the test of the scrysphere went beyond that. Other spells, equally demanding, made for more impressive demonstrations of wizardly skill—hurling fireballs, taking on the shapes of wolf or mountain cat, riding the wind on invisible wings—but none of them held the scrysphere's place in Kuthite theology. Not even the spells that commanded darkness or pain shared the same prestige, for their magics were fleeting, while the scrysphere endured.

  And so, too, did its sacrifice.

  The crafting of a scrysphere demanded a tithe of flesh from its creator. Most wizards contented themselves with giving up an ear, the joint of a finger, a small toe—the smallest acceptable losses, and the most easily concealed. Those who wished to flaunt their devotion plucked out an eye, mirroring their god's mutilation; Cuvandos the Shadow-Sighted, a legendary archmage, had earned his sobriquet by sacrificing both of his. In their stead he had worn his scrysphere on a black silk band tied over his scarred, empty sockets, signifying that he had forsworn mortal sight in favor of the arcane.

  For that was the purpose of a scrysphere: it enabled its creator to see from a ball of polished onyx, as if he himself stood in its place. And that purpose was exceedingly valuable to the Umbral Court.

  A scrysphere was small, easily concealed, and invisible to most methods of magical detection. It could be easily slipped into the decorations of a visiting Chelish dignitary's room, hidden among the sooty rafters of a tavern where would-be rebels conspired, or even worn as jewelry to a private soiree. And because a scrysphere was difficult to detect, the constant threat of observation kept the treasonous cowed even when they were not being watched.

  Isiem, alone in his room, wondered whether anyone was watching him.

  Unlikely. And even if they were, they'd see nothing damning. His work today would be seen as commendable eagerness to leave his student days behind and take up a shadowcaller's mantle.

  The treason would come later.

  Exhaling slowly, Isiem closed his eyes and sought serenity. He needed to remember everything about this experience, so that he could transcribe it faithfully onto a scroll that would enable others to command the same magic he was about to attempt.

  There was a thriving clandestine market in scrolls at the Dusk Hall. Not every student could master every spell; the sheer volume of their studies meant that, inevitably, some minor magic would go neglected amid the rest. Isiem himself had let some of the cantrips and elementary spells fall by the wayside—a necessary sacrifice so that he could devote his time to more demanding forms.

  For the most part, their instructors overlooked such minor failures. But when a spell was required, as the scrysphere was, and was difficult enough that many students failed to learn it properly, then a great demand arose for scrolls that trapped the magic for them.

  In order to graduate from the Dusk Hall, students needed to create a scrysphere at some point during their final year. They did not
need to understand the arcane theory behind its workings or the metaphysics of their sacrifice of flesh. They only needed to produce the finished ball of onyx and demonstrate its magic. For their purposes, then, a scroll was better than a book-scribed spell.

  And that meant there was a great deal of money to be made by whoever could provide those scrolls.

  Isiem fixed on that thought, trying to ignore what his hands were doing, as he reached for the bulbed needle to begin.

  The needle was not metal or glass, but the entire preserved head of a mosquito-like parasite—a winged, pigeon-sized thing with a hollow proboscis that it used to drain the blood from its victims. Trappers in the Uskwood caught them and sent the corpses whole to Pangolais, where they could be more delicately flayed. The parasites' heads were dipped into rubber sap, adding strength and flexibility to their paper-thin skin, and sold as syringes.

  Squeezing the hollow head to expel the air trapped inside, Isiem opened a vial of black liquid with his other hand. Tears of the night, that liquid was called. It was not of this world. Supposedly the tears were wept by mortal men and women trapped on the Plane of Shadow, just before they succumbed to its endless night. The shadowcallers gathered it, and Isiem did not like to wonder too long about how.

  He let the inky fluid fill the syringe. It rose through the proboscis, past wax-stoppered nostrils, into the resin-coated head. Although Isiem had drawn only a small amount of the liquid into his needle, it seemed to expand to fill all available space; the head swelled between his fingers, and darkness roiled behind the empty rubber shells of its eyes.

  Uneasy, Isiem pulled the needle away and stoppered the tiny black vial. He drew a breath, steeling himself, and then slid the dead white needle under his skin.

  He had chosen to give up a toe. Working as quickly as he could without compromising his precision, Isiem used the needle to trace the prescribed arcane sigils in his flesh, outlining its shape in droplets of ink.