Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  As soon as he squeezed out the first drop, however, the magic flared into a life of its own. The tears of the night swelled under Isiem's skin, spreading wisps of watery darkness through his flesh. A shivering chill wracked him, sudden and disorienting.

  It was only a toe. It shouldn't hurt so much. And yet the magic working through his body was dizzying, a vortex of unreality that sucked at his bones, devoured his muscles, swallowed and silenced the weak drum of his pulse. The injected shadows consumed him, leeching his life away to feed something ...something else ...and the crimson thread he'd tied as a tourniquet at the base of his toe seemed a flimsy barrier indeed.

  Trembling, sweating, Isiem finished the last rune—and as soon as it was drawn, even before the final drop of ink had spilled out, he hurled the deflated syringe-head away and reached for the cleaver resting by his knee. Swiftly he brought the blade down, severing the shadow-poisoned toe and cutting off his ordeal—this part of it, at least—behind a wall of searing, blissfully cathartic pain.

  Who could do that to an eye? Isiem wondered, as with shaking hands he lifted the severed digit to the dish under the scrysphere. He was vaguely surprised to see a dribble of red blood from the stump of his toe; it had seemed so far removed from human flesh, so drastically transformed already, that he had not thought it would bleed.

  But it did. And as he placed the shadow-swollen bit of meat and bone into the sacrificial dish, that blood dissolved into something like smoke, rising upward to wreath the unfinished scrysphere in a haze of crimson and gray.

  The rest of the toe crumbled in on itself, as if reduced to ash by some invisible flame. Then the powdered bone and soot turned to smoke and spiraled up with the rest, leaving the dish perfectly clean.

  The scrysphere drank it all in. Soot and smoke and scarlet threads of evaporated blood spun around its glossy sides and funneled into the sigils that Isiem had etched into the stone the night before. Those sigils shone steadily brighter as the magic gathered within them, like smoldering embers stirred by the wind. And then, as they devoured the last of Isiem's gift, they vanished altogether from his sight.

  Isiem blinked. The smoke was gone, the sigils were gone. The scrysphere was a smooth polished blank. And he saw himself through it—distorted, murky, as though he looked upon the chamber through a pane of dark and bubbled glass. But even so, he saw. Through his own eyes and the scrysphere at once.

  It was impossibly disorienting. Isiem closed his eyes, putting a hand to his swimming head ...and yet he could still see. Struggling with the unfamiliar perspective of eyes not his own, he fumbled his way across the room to retrieve a spare shirt from his closet, then back to the scrysphere's stand. Carefully Isiem dropped the shirt over the sphere, and sighed with muted relief when that ended the doubled sight.

  He'd have to practice. He would have to practice, and accustom himself to viewing the world through the scrysphere's eerie lens. But he had, at last, a way of seeing whether Helis meant to honor his plea.

  A week later, he hid the scrysphere in the library.

  Chapter Seven

  Exorcism

  Helis has stolen a nightglass."

  It was the beginning of summer. Isiem and Ascaros were alone in their room, in a rare respite between classes.

  "She's using it to commune with a demon," Isiem continued.

  Ascaros shrugged. He plucked one of the scrolls from the case Isiem had brought and held it up between two fingers. "This is a scrysphere?"

  "After you mutilate yourself and feed your flesh to the shadow, yes." Isiem grimaced, remembering.

  "I'll survive. It's magic I'm bad at, not cutting. How much?"

  "Nothing," Isiem said, surprised that his friend would even ask. "I don't need your money. I need your help. Helis is summoning a demon. Not just to speak with it. All winter she called lesser spirits to learn this demon's name, and all spring she researched charms and controls before finally calling it forth. She's been planning this half a year or more."

  "Planning what?"

  "I don't know." Isiem shook his head in frustration. "Something for the Festival of Night's Return. Something terrible."

  "And what of it?" Ascaros rolled the scroll into a neat cylinder and slid it into the sling that held his left arm. He told the rest of the students that the arm had been broken as part of an exercise in Kuthite piety and that he was allowing it to heal naturally to prolong the pain, but Isiem knew the truth. The sorcery was spreading in his friend's blood.

  As if sensing his scrutiny, Ascaros folded his good arm over the useless one and gave Isiem an even look. "What would you have me do? Ask her to stop? You tried that, and it was useless. Tell the instructors? They'll kill her or give her to the shadow. Sabotage her by stealing the mirror? Then I've got a nightglass, and damned if I want that kind of trouble. There are no good answers, Isiem. The best we can do is keep our heads low and our mouths closed."

  "That's the best we can do," Isiem echoed flatly. "Really."

  "Yes," Ascaros snapped. "Really." He stepped past Isiem, heading toward the door, but as his hand closed on the handle he turned back. The anger receded from his voice, leaving weary resignation and, perhaps, a touch of sorrow.

  "I'm sorry. I would help you if I could, but I have my own troubles." Ascaros untied the sling binding his left arm. He pushed up his sleeve, revealing a band of gray, wrinkled flesh that encircled that arm from elbow to shoulder. Fingers of withered gray stretched toward his chest and crept down his inner wrist. A faint, spicy odor clung to the discolored skin, redolent of the Osirian fragrances they used to mask the stink of decay in the Dusk Hall's corpse rooms. It was not an unpleasant smell, but in this context it was unsettling.

  "I knew it was bad, but ..." Isiem trailed off, unable to put his shock into words.

  Ascaros gave him a pained smile and shook his sleeve back down. "Every time I cast a spell it worsens, and we've been working quite a lot of magic these last few months. It's dead—all that gray flesh. Completely dead. I've burned it and felt nothing. I've cut into it and seen no blood."

  "And the smell?" Isiem asked quietly.

  "A precaution. It doesn't reek of death yet. At least I don't think it does. But I wonder when it will start, and who might notice when it does." Ascaros pushed his useless arm back into position, tied the sling into place once more, and collected a tall black staff leaning in the corner by the door. It was a new affectation, although it already seemed familiar in his hand. Pierced silverwork adorned sections of the staff, and through those censer openings, more Osirian fragrance spilled.

  "Let it go," Ascaros advised him, opening the door. "I'm not asking you to close your eyes to what Helis is doing. You should watch her, and be wary, and keep yourself safe. But let it end there. Her fate is not yours to decide, or mine. We have our own paths, our own problems. Do you truly need to take on the troubles of another?"

  "If you will not help me," Isiem said, "the scroll will be three hundred gold sails."

  Ascaros hesitated, but reached for his coin pouch. "Costly."

  "Survival is."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Two nights later, when Isiem knew that Helis was away practicing the great tortures and the scrysphere showed that the library was empty, he went down to meet her demon.

  It seemed darker than he remembered. Colder. The shelves seemed to loom over him like hostile sentinels; the gaps between books seemed alive with whispering shadows. Dull bronze and faded parchment accented the gloom without relieving it.

  Helis kept her stolen nightglass tucked high up on a seldom visited shelf, behind a musty treatise on the geneaology of the great houses of Westcrown before Aroden's fall. Isiem eased the book out of the way, taking care to avoid cracking its spine. Age had dulled its once grand gilt and dried the leather to a fragile shell; no doubt Helis had chosen that book in part because anyone who disturbed it too roughly would damage the bindings and betray his hand. But Isiem was careful, and the mirror slid out smoothly.

  It
was a small one, no larger than the palm-sized glass the shadowcallers had used to test them as children at Crosspine. Isiem unwrapped it cautiously, conscious of a tight dryness in his throat.

  The mirror was wholly unreflective. A pit of darkness in his hand. He swallowed past the dryness, weaving the first threads of magic that would awaken the nightglass's gate between worlds. It wasn't a true spell—it hadn't enough force or shape to be a cantrip, even—but it might give him more control over what answered the nightmirror's call.

  He'd barely begun when something—someone—yanked the nascent magic from his grasp. It spun out into a shape of unimaginable complexity: a chrysanthemum whose every petal was a dragonfly wing, and whose every vein in those wings was the edge of a continent. Isiem caught only a glimpse before it swelled into a nova and contracted to a single point, and darkness filled the world where it had been.

  In that darkness rose a voice, slow and black and burbling, as if every word were contained in a bubble that belched from the depths of a tarry swamp. It was the voice of a demon—not a creature of the shadow realm, but a true demon, the essence of malevolence made flesh—and its foulness was indescribable.

  What is Helis thinking? Students in the Dusk Hall were expressly forbidden from consorting with demons. Even full shadowcallers seldom dealt with them. Demons were infinitely treacherous, inconceivably malign, ever hungry for the corruption of human souls. Again and again their instructors had told them: nothing a demon can offer is worth the risk of contact. There were countless other paths to power—slower, perhaps, but safer and surer. Only fools conjured demons.

  Yet here Isiem was, speaking to one through a stolen nightglass.

  You are the watcher, it said to him, in words that were not words. There was a pause for the gathering of thoughts, or for the gathering of energy to force the demon's thoughts into a semblance of human ones. I have felt your eyes on us as we talked.

  "Yes," Isiem admitted, donning a mask of impassivity. The fiend's thoughts seemed to crawl across his soul like slugs, leaving trails of sticky slime he could not wipe away.

  Yet you come to me, not her. A chuckle, wet and stinking. What treachery do you plan?

  "What does she want from you?"

  Destruction. A swirl of distorted images filled Isiem's mind: people crowding the grand square of Pangolais, heatless white torches burning on sleek pillars around the throng. Elaborate effigies in white and gray wood, carved but unpainted. The Festival of Night's Return. The vision was stretched and murky about the periphery, as if he were watching it through a crooked and dirty glass—but he recognized the city and its people, and the high holy day of Zon-Kuthon.

  In the image, three shadowcallers raised a nightmirror to the heavens, calling the children of Pangolais to come forth and be tested. There were not many children in the city—there never were—but the ritual went on all the same. Four boys and girls stood in a wavering line, uncertain as Isiem himself had been at his own test those few forever years ago. And as the first of them gazed into the glass, chaos erupted.

  Shadows spilled from the mirror. Ugly, muddy, long-clawed shadows leaped from the nightglass, springing onto children, parents, any festival-goer they could reach. The wizards of the Dusk Hall threw up translucent shields, and the clerics of Zon-Kuthon called on their god to save them, but the ordinary Nidalese had no defense. The shadows leaped upon them, prying open people's jaws and squeezing themselves into screaming mouths. And when they were within, the screams stopped, and their victims blinked, and their eyes were black and empty over wide, wide grins.

  It wasn't a true vision, Isiem knew. Prophecy was unreliable since the death of the god Aroden. What the demon had showed him was only a stage-play of illusions on a scaffolding of shrewd guesses. But it was more than enough to disturb him.

  "That is her plan?" Isiem asked. "To give innocents to the shadow?"

  To give them to my servants. They are seldom fed. Your shadowcallers do not like us. This will be a wondrous feast for my loyal ones.

  "A feast for them. But not for you?"

  I am bound. My joy must come in the watching. It is enough.

  "How are you bound?"

  By virtue. Another gurgling chuckle, fouler than bog gas. A virtuous man died to bind me. Only another virtuous man's flesh may house me. Otherwise I will wait here a hundred hundred years, blind and bodiless in this realm. Twenty-seven such years have passed.

  "What if I could find you that virtuous man?"

  Who would give his flesh for me to wear? Yearning warred with disbelief in the demon's thoughts. If you could find me such a man—if you will give me freedom—then, little watcher, I will give you treachery. Any treachery you want.

  Isiem nodded. He pulled his awareness from the nightglass, gratefully severing his connection to the demon's world, and slid the heavy book of genealogies back into place on the shelf. Coins jangled in his pocket as he stepped away: Ascaros's payment for the scroll.

  Not enough for a virtuous man. But, if he sold a few more, it might be.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The next weeks passed in a haze of sleeplessness and overwork. Every spare moment that Isiem could snatch from his studies was spent locked in his chamber, feverishly scribing scrolls. Mostly he penned scryspheres, reliving his own torment and sacrifice again and again as he set down the magic for others to use, but he was willing to write any scroll for which a fellow student might pay him. His fingers were ink-stained, his concentration ruined, his soul weighted down by the memories of pain ...but scroll by scroll, coin by coin, Isiem gathered the gold he needed.

  It wasn't only the slave he had to buy. The slave would have to be kept somewhere away from the Dusk Hall, and his keepers bribed into silence, so that Helis would not learn of his plans. Isiem would have to pay off the guards in the market, a few clerks, two or three senior shadowcallers, perhaps a cleric if the slave took sick or was injured ...and then there were other things he had to buy, and other preparations to be made, that dwarfed the cost of all the rest. The apothecaries of Pangolais could procure any potion or poison known to humanity, but their services did not come cheap.

  Two weeks before the Festival of Night's Return, he finally had enough.

  Drawing on a hooded cloak, Isiem left the Dusk Hall in as much secrecy as he could muster. The Joyful Things would know he'd gone, of course, but they wouldn't know where, or why. No one else needed to know even that much.

  A gray drizzle was falling through the black-leaved trees of Pangolais as Isiem made his way to the slave markets. Rain slowed the market's bustle, but there were still buyers seeking bargains and sellers ready to put on a show. Isiem hurried along the outskirts of the square, keeping his head low until he reached the black tent flanked by Chelish pennons.

  In Nidal, Isiem thought dourly, a virtuous man was as exotic as any purple-haired gnome or ring-nosed minotaur. He'd have better luck looking among foreigners.

  The Chelaxians had two long strings of slaves tethered under the tent. Isiem stopped just outside, where the rainwater dripping from the canopy might provide a little more cover, and waited until the guards' eyes were turned away. When no one seemed to be looking, he muttered a surreptitious plea to Zon-Kuthon, clutching the silvered symbol tucked into his sleeve.

  Casting spells at slaves was only a minor breach of etiquette, provided they weren't damaged, but if the Chelaxians got wind of Isiem's particular needs, they'd doubtlessly raise their prices. He wasn't sure he had enough as it was; he could ill afford to excite a dealer's greed. But, to Isiem's enormous relief, no one seemed to notice his prayer.

  Of all the unfortunates bound in the slave line, only two were pure-hearted enough to radiate an inner light to his spell. The others might have been honest folk, even generous and kind at times, but they were well within the ordinary run of humanity, and Isiem doubted they'd suffice to entice a demon.

  The other two might. One of them he dismissed immediately. She was a silver-haired woman, lithe and comely
, with a supernal grace that spoke of divine blood. The price for such a beauty, let alone one of celestial heritage, would be far beyond Isiem's means.

  That left one: a youngish man dressed in dirty orange robes. He stood slump-shouldered in his bonds, apparently oblivious to the other slaves or the market's din or the rainwater that trickled through a hole directly over his head, splattering his wispy blond hair. A step to either side would have avoided it, but the dejected man simply stood there, absorbing the rain.

  "Who's the broken one?" Isiem asked the merchant overseeing the tent.

  The man shrugged indifferently. He was a thin man with a triangular face and slightly protruding eyes that, under pinched tufts of dark hair, gave him a weaselly look. "Some cleric."

  "One of Desna's?" Secret worshipers of that goddess, especially in the outlying villages farthest from the Umbral Court's watchful eyes, were a constant thorn in the Kuthites' side. Isiem's own mother had been one of them, and he sometimes wondered if that fact would condemn him too, should it ever become known.

  "Come now, kind master." The merchant laughed, although his eyes stayed sharp and cold. "A Desnan, here? In the heart of Zon-Kuthon's most devout realm? You make a great joke to me, yes ...but a dangerous one. No, he is no Desnan. Would that he were. A true Desnan, in this place, would be worth twice—no, thrice—any of these others. And I include the lovely Zenobai in that," he added, with a gesture at the silver-haired woman.

  "Whose cleric is he?"

  "Ah. The Dawnflower's, I believe. But it would be incorrect to say he is a cleric of Sarenrae's. Was would be more accurate. Does that disappoint?"

  "Yes," Isiem said curtly. He was quite sure he could not afford to purchase Zenobai, and he was almost equally sure that he would not be able to sell enough scrolls to make up the difference before the Festival. Keeping a woman such as that safe from the casual abuses of slave-tenders would be prohibitively difficult, and he could hardly watch over her himself. But a failed cleric made a poor gamble.