Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  "A pity," the merchant said, although his expression never changed. "Did you need a priest for some particular purpose?"

  "A merchant would do as well. If he were the right merchant." Isiem touched the Kuthite emblem on his chest as if in absent-minded consideration.

  The Chelaxian paled. "Perhaps you wish to speak to the man? This former priest? He might still be of use for—for whatever purpose you seek."

  "I will do that," Isiem agreed. He dropped a small handful of gold on the merchant's table as surety against the loss of his slave. One of the guards was already unbinding the priest. A moment later, the man came to join him at the eaves of the tent, rubbing his skinny wrists.

  "What do you want from me?" the priest muttered, keeping his eyes on the mud.

  "A name might be a start," Isiem said. He strode away from the tent, turning his back on the slave merchant and his remaining chattel. The drizzle had turned into a real rain, but that was good; it would reduce the number of eavesdroppers in the market. "Walk with me."

  "You're not worried I'll flee?"

  "You are in Pangolais. No." Isiem slowed as he passed through a screen of marble pillars. The cleric slowed with him, wary but curious. "A name?"

  "Bedic," the priest said, after a hesitation. "Why?"

  "So that I might call you something other than ‘slave.' You cannot have been a slave long if you still have the temerity to ask questions."

  "No." Bedic's mouth twisted as if the admission itself was bitter. "It's hardly been a week."

  "What happened?"

  The priest's shoulders hunched. He puffed a little breath through his lips, obviously reluctant to answer and yet afraid of what silence might cost him. At last, never looking at Isiem, he spoke. "We were in the Uskwood. Two companions—two friends—and myself, chasing after rumors and rumblings and old pleas for help from people who were likely dead before we started.

  "The druids found us on the first night. I was standing watch, and I should have warned the others, should have woken them, something ...but I didn't. I just fled. The terror that came over me ..." Bedic put a trembling hand to his face, covering his eyes, then dropped it. "I saw a campfire through the trees. I ran toward it. Whether I hoped to find help for my friends or safety for myself, I couldn't even tell you. But whichever I wanted, it wasn't there.

  "The fire belonged to that slaver. I wonder, now, if the druids weren't there to deal with him ...but it hardly matters. He asked me to sit at his fire, offered wine, pretended concern at my condition—and when he was satisfied that I was alone, and that I might have some value, he signaled his guards to take me."

  "And your friends?" Isiem asked.

  Bedic shrugged. "I never saw them again. Perhaps they died. Or, if they were less lucky, perhaps they're on the other side of this market."

  "The slaver said you were a priest, but that you are no longer. Is this true?"

  The priest's blue eyes strayed past Isiem's shoulder and fixed on an indeterminate point in the distance. The tip of his tongue flicked out, brushing his lower lip. "Yes."

  "You're lying. Why?"

  Bedic smiled tightly. There was no warmth in it, only self-loathing and a kind of grim relief at being caught. "Just before we came to Pangolais, when there was no longer any doubt about where we were going or what we faced, one of the other captives freed his children. Not by cutting their bonds. That would have done no good; we were too deep in Nidal for that kind of escape. He killed them. A loving father with two young children, and he had no better choice for them than death.

  "When his children were dead, the father tried to strangle himself. He botched it. The slaver found him slumped and blue with a cord knotted around his throat ...but there was still a spark of life in the man. So he demanded that I heal his slave."

  "And you refused," Isiem said. "You told him you couldn't do it."

  "Was there any better choice? Anyway, if it was a lie then, it won't be for long. Sarenrae has no use for cowards, and I've been nothing else since I came to Nidal." Bedic took a shaky breath. "I'm sorry if you needed a cleric."

  "I don't need a cleric," Isiem said. "I need a virtuous man."

  "Why?"

  In sparse words, Isiem told him: what Helis had done, what she planned, how she had bargained with a fiend. The demon's price to betray that bargain.

  Bedic shook his head in refusal even before Isiem finished. "You want me to give myself to a demon to save shadowcallers and Kuthite priests?"

  "No. The shadowcallers can defend themselves. They are in no danger. It is the common people of Pangolais, not the Kuthite adepts, who will suffer if you refuse. I want you to save innocents. People trapped by their circumstances, as you are."

  "At the cost of giving a bound demon a body."

  "Yes." Isiem pulled a small vial from his sleeve and held it out for Bedic's examination. Liquid sloshed inside the dimpled glass, its crystalline blue muted to a silvery hue by the twinkling lights of Pangolais. A dragon's hoard in gold, distilled to a bottle no larger than his thumb. "A dying body."

  Chapter Eight

  The Demons' Festival

  The Festival of Night's Return was not the same in Pangolais.

  Crosspine was small and at the periphery of Nidal; its villagers were largely left to do as they pleased. Their Festival observed the proper pieties—they weren't entirely outside the Umbral Court's eye—but it had laughter, too. Games. Dancing. Merriment.

  There was no such joy in Pangolais.

  There would be feasting, later, after the rite reached catharsis and the people watched the powerless foreign gods burn, but even that was different in the Midnight City. In Crosspine they'd have roast pig and salted acorn jellies and early summer wine, all served on tables of felled logs. In Pangolais they feasted on the same dishes—and many rarer delicacies—but their tables were not rough pine. Here they ate on enormous, intricate puzzleworks of bone, cut from the bodies of Kuthite sacrifices and bleached by alchemical acids.

  The bone tables were meant to signify the hardships, and survival, of their ancestors. In the black days after Earthfall, when great clouds of dust hid the sun and all the world was cast in shadow, the ancient Nidalese had ventured from their god-shielded grasslands to find that other men and beasts, lacking Zon-Kuthon's protection, had died in masses. The Nidalese had stripped the bones from the corpses of their ancient enemies, using them to build temples to the glory of the god who kept them safe.

  And in each of those temples they had built a feast table from the same bones, so that they might remember, at each holy meal during those lean cold years, that but for Zon-Kuthon's grace they, too, would have starved or frozen on those withered sunless plains outside the Uskwood.

  Today they would feast on similar tables. Not the same ones; thousands of years of use had worn those down to dust. All that remained of the original bones had been collected into a single ceremonial table in the Umbral Court's own cathedral. But the prisons and torture chambers of Pangolais gave up more than enough bones to rebuild the tables for every fall's Festival. At the end of the night's ceremonies, the alchemically treated bones would be burned in an incandescent bonfire, signifying the sacrifice of all those victims to their god's mirth.

  Beautiful, and terrible, and ultimately unimportant. Those victims were already dead. Helis's were not. Isiem wrested his thoughts back to the moment. If he allowed her plan to go forward, more than bones would burn in the square tonight.

  The Dusk Hall's shadowcallers and their students stood in a loose formation at the periphery of the crowd. More were scattered within the throng in gray-clad groups of two and three, each surrounded by an arm's span of empty space. Close-packed as the crowd was, no commoner wanted to stand too near Zon-Kuthon's true faithful.

  At the head of the crowd, atop a three-stepped plinth of bone and black steel, the Black Triune led the masses in prayer. As the familiar words rolled past, Isiem glanced at the priest tethered to the chain on his wrist.

  B
edic's pupils were dilated, and perspiration made his forehead shimmer under the Midnight City's witchlights. He'd drunk the bluekiss tincture earlier that day; it would have been too suspicious if he had drunk it in the market square. Isiem had used a prayer-scroll to delay the poison's effects and prevent the cleric from dying immediately after swallowing the draught, but the magic was beginning to fade. In a few minutes it would fail altogether.

  He hoped he'd calculated the timing correctly. He needed the priest upright until the demon took him, and then he needed the man to die very quickly indeed. If his spell expired at the wrong moment, the cleric might succumb before the demon could take his mortal shell—or, worse, might survive long enough for the demon to purge the toxin from his blood.

  Before Isiem could worry about that, however, he needed Bedic to hide the poison's effects a little longer. In a few moments, the Black Triune would finish their prayer and signal the shadowcallers to bring down the dark, and no one would notice if the priest collapsed in his chains. But until then, he needed to avoid drawing suspicion.

  Bedic seemed to realize it too. The priest's white lips moved in his own stuttered prayers. His solitary voice was lost in the measured thunder of the Nidalese chant, and there was no magic in his call; he did not dare invoke Sarenrae's power in this place. But the priest seemed to draw strength from the familiar words, and he managed to keep walking.

  At last the Black Triune finished their chant. In unison they threw their arms to the sky, and in unison they collapsed on their plinths, prostrating themselves to Zon-Kuthon tonight as their ancestors had millennia before. In that same moment, Isiem released the spell he'd held prepared, and every shadowcaster in the square did the same.

  Darkness, absolute and impenetrable, blanketed the crowd. And in that darkness, screams arose.

  Some were pure figments of the wizards' fancies; some were stolen from the throats of Kuthite victims. All sounded of sheer agony. Supernatural cold and wind buffeted the crowd along with the illusory screams, recreating a fraction of the terror that had beset their ancestors in the dark days after Earthfall. There was no need to recreate their despair.

  Gradually the screams dwindled and died. The winds howled louder, stronger, colder, whipping Isiem's hair into his face and flapping his sleeves like the wings of some great crippled bird. And then they, too, died, and in the silence the Black Triune spoke again.

  "Desolation fell upon us, and the Midnight Lord gave us succor. Death came to hunt us, and the Midnight Lord gave us its leash. Pain tried to break us, and Zon-Kuthon taught us that it held nothing to fear. By his grace we are Nidalese. By his gifts we master the night."

  "By his grace we are Nidalese," the assembly echoed, and Isiem relaxed the weave of his spell. Its enchanted darkness loosened, lessened; glimmers of twilight began to seep through, as water might trickle through a basket's rushes. Here and there, shafts of silvery starlight filtered through the gloom.

  "By his gifts we master the night," the shadowcallers chanted. As their spells faded, the neverlight of Pangolais returned, but it felt different now. Tense. Breathless. Hungry, as if the night itself were a living thing, and one that had not eaten for far too long.

  The children came forward to face it. There were six of them, not four as the demon's vision had showed: two boys and four girls, pale but stoic, impossibly young. Their parents ushered them forward with silent pats and too-brief hugs, then receded into the crowd.

  In the spaces between the three plinths, two enormous nightmirrors hung suspended within silver rings, each one a moon in eclipse. And in that darkness, that infinite night, cold and envious things waited.

  One by one the children approached to face it. Each time, Isiem tensed and waited for Helis to make her move ...and each time, nothing happened. The children awoke no answer from the nightglass. They went back to their parents in relieved disappointment, and Helis stayed hooded in the audience.

  Had she given up? Or had she just had some qualm about pitting her demon against innocent children? Isiem watched, uncertain, as the last of the children walked away and the shadowcallers began to come forward.

  Every year their procession was the same. The shadowcallers came to the mirrors in a double file, summoned an unliving beast from the gloom, and led it through the awe-hushed crowd to show their mastery over the terrors of the night. Some offered their own flesh or that of others as sacrifice to show their piety, but whether they fed the dark or not, each of them called it and held it. Death came to hunt us, and the Midnight Lord gave us its leash.

  What none said, and all knew, was that only their obedience kept those leashes intact. The procession of the shadowbeasts was an exhibit of Zon-Kuthon's power, but it cowed the people as much as it exhilarated them. They were proud, yes, but under that pride was fear. At the first whiff of apostasy, the masters would become prey.

  Was that what Helis intended?

  She had moved too far ahead for Isiem to intercept her. At least twenty shadowcallers stood between them, and the crowd hemmed them into a narrow line. There was no more room to manuever.

  Tugging Bedic's chain as if the cleric were a balky dog, Isiem continued his slow march forward. Bedic kept pace beside him, sweating and stumbling. The poison had nearly overwhelmed the man; anyone who troubled to look at him would see that there was something worse than fear at work on him.

  But no one did. The shadowcallers were lost in anticipation, and the common people of Pangolais were distracted by the monsters who had come to walk among them.

  Two by two the shadowbeasts took form. Some were horned, some heavy-jowled; some were tusked in flame. Their eyes were black diamond and smoky topaz and pearl. One had no eyes at all, only weeping rifts in its skull.

  Every one of the shadowbeasts, whether sleek or shaggy or armored in cracking chitin, seemed strangely indistinct in the night. The force of their presence was undeniable. No one could have claimed they were not real. Yet their bodies wavered at the corner of one's eye, like dream-creatures who, infinitely mutable, begin to dissipate the instant the dreamer changes focus. The shadowbeasts, too, were defined only as long as a human will made them so.

  That lack of permanence was the shadowcallers' primary source of control. These shadowbeasts existed in this world only by the will of Zon-Kuthon, and so a rebellious beast could be unraveled. The threat kept them tractable, as much as any such creatures could be. Demons offered no such assurance.

  Isiem could see Helis now. She had reached the end of the line, and walked separately through the empty space before the suspended mirrors. Although she wore a shadowcaller's robes, as they were all required to do, hers were ancient and ragged, their charcoal dye faded to an ashen gray that looked almost white in the gloom. The withered corpses of moths hung pale in the black net of her hair, like flower petals strewn across a bride's coiffure.

  She's going to a funeral, not a wedding.

  Isiem's grip tightened on the priest's chain. "A little longer," he whispered hoarsely. The cleric nodded weakly, his eyes closed as he fought to stave off death's grip for another few minutes. Isiem turned back to watch his old friend—willing, uselessly, that she turn back from the brink of destruction. Bedic was doomed, whatever happened, but Helis need not be.

  "Iskarioth," Helis whispered. Her voice cut clearly through the hush. The nearest shadowbeasts, and some of their masters, lifted their heads toward her plea. They recognized that it was no shade's name she called. "Iskarioth."

  Who calls? The voice was as Isiem remembered—and yet nothing like it. What he remembered was a frail shadow of the demon's full, crushing presence, just as the memory of a nightmare lacked the paralyzing force of the night terrors themselves. His feet were stone, his spine weak as a wilted stem. He stood trembling and unable to move, and all around him the people of Pangolais stood locked in equal fright.

  "Helis of the Dusk Hall," he heard his former friend say.

  What would you have of me? There were eyes in the mirror now. Three
of them. Five. A dozen. A hundred, swirling around one another like rotting leaves caught in an inky whirlpool. All of them shone with the same malignant brilliance.

  "Chaos," Helis said.

  What do you offer me?

  "Chaos," she repeated, the word thick with yearning.

  Terror spiked through Isiem, breaking him free of the numbness. "No," he croaked.

  The eyes in the mirror turned to him. One by one they blinked in a spiral of milky amusement. No? Who calls?

  His throat was dry. Painful. But he scraped the answer out. "Isiem of the Dusk Hall."

  What would you have of me?

  "Betrayal."

  What do you offer me?

  "Freedom." Isiem choked on the word. He did not look at Bedic. After all the cruelty he'd dealt in his training, and all the blood on his hands, he still could not face the man he was about to sacrifice. "I offer you a good man. Young. Strong. Pure of heart. I have done nothing to damage his body. Take it, and leave ours. Refuse this girl her wish."

  I will. The swimming eyes winked out of the mirror. Isiem closed his own. He heard Helis scream, and he heard the wet percussion of bones breaking inside flesh, and he closed his eyes still tighter.

  Beside him, Bedic's chains jangled abruptly as the priest convulsed in his bonds, arching his back so violently that his spine cracked in a rapid trill. Possession was seldom a gentle process, and the sheer force of it, coupled with the poison the cleric had drunk, assured the man's death. Precisely as Isiem had hoped.

  Hadn't he?

  The chains' frantic song clanged to an end. The cleric let out a hoarse shout, part cry and part croak. The sound was despairing, filled with rage—and overwhelmed by grateful glory. Two voices together, one dying, one furious and fading as the demon was drawn back into its prison, denied the freedom of flesh.

  And then they were quiet.

  Slowly Isiem became aware of breathing around him, and whispers. The crowd. The proud and faithful Nidalese, alive because a foreign slave had traded his life for theirs.