The Night Parade

by Scott Ciencin

  Krystin sat alone, waiting for the sudden wave of sickness that had overcome her to pass. When she no longer felt the pain behind her eyes, and when the cold, metallic taste in her mouth finally vanished, Krystin removed the heavy, dead weight of the locket from her blouse and stared at its seductive, gleaming emerald surface.

  There was a good reason why she could not call Myrmeen her mother: It would have been a lie.

  Lord Sixx had helped her remember the truth, unlocking her buried memories with his power. It was a simple enough task, considering he was the one who planted her false memories in the first place. Exposure to the magic of the apparatus, when she took Shandower’s hand in the safe house to prove that she was not a member of the Night Parade, had created fissures in the walls that Sixx had erected in her mind. Through those cracks had come glimpses of her true life, memories of friends and family.

  A part of her had feared that these new memories could also be a lie, and so during the ride to Shandower’s retreat, Krystin had spoken to the assassin several times, making excuses to be near him. She had found reasons to take his hand in hers, allowing the gauntlet’s energy to course through her. This time, the magic had not affected her. Although Sixx had not restored all he had taken when his emissaries had kidnapped her and arranged for the desert slavers to find her, these memories were true, and he had promised that once the apparatus was in his hands, he would restore all her memories.

  The images that had been haunting her were so easily explained that they almost appeared to be mundane facts glimpsed on a tired afternoon rather than sleek, sharp-as-steel revelations cutting across her darkened field of memory like swords meeting, their metal crashing during a death duel, the rain of sparks adding much needed illumination.

  Her life, all the gods help her, had been dull.

  Her name was Krystin Devlaine. She had never been a hunter for the Night Parade. In fact, she had never known that such creatures existed outside of tales she had heard in harsh whispers at the boarding school where she had been sent by her parents. Those stories were generally used to frighten the younger children who believed in all manner of haunts and demons who knew their names and would come for them if they misbehaved.

  The kindly old man she had glimpsed had been her grandfather, who had died several years ago. He had lived in Calimport and had visited her much more frequently than her own mother and father, who were restless travelers and explorers. They had relegated the task of raising Krystin to others for most of her life. The vulgar, dark-haired man with rotted teeth, who had tried to club her with a shattered table leg, had been a nameless drunk in a tavern. She had crept away from the school and had been trapped in the bar when a brawl erupted. Physical fitness had been stressed at the school, and she had been an especially apt pupil during the lessons on self-defense. Those hours of instruction had benefited her that night. She had crushed the man’s instep, left him howling in pain, and ran from the tavern with a strange girl she had met, a homeless child.

  Melaine.

  That night had been her only true evening of adventure until she was snatched by the Night Parade. The false memories Sixx had implanted had given her a sense of bravado that had accounted for her unbearable ego, her prickly nature, and her caustic tongue. They also had made her so much like Myrmeen that it was not surprising that there had been tension between them from the outset.

  Sixx also had briefly tasted Myrmeen’s memories on one of the woman’s first nights in the city. It had been after Myrmeen’s narrow escape from death at Kracauer’s “orphanage.” Sixx had been disgusted with Zeal’s decision to leave the humans alive, and so he had gone to Myrmeen’s quarters to finish the Harpers himself. He had found Myrmeen sitting before her open window, sound asleep. He had entered her mind to kill her, but soon reversed that decision when he learned who she was and the power she had at her command.

  Shandower’s first instinct had been correct: Sixx had placed Krystin with the Harpers in the hope of eventually gaining control of Arabel through the girl, when she succeeded her “mother,” who would die from an accident they would arrange in a few years. Sixx had not revealed all of this to Krystin, but he had shown her enough so that she could fit all the pieces into place.

  But Lord Sixx had refused to give her all of her memories back, and she knew there must have been a reason beyond the one he had given; there was something he did not want her to know, a part of her past that he did not want her to see.

  “Your parents are alive,” he had said within her mind. “Once they know you have disappeared, they will search for you. I can lead you to them. I can give your life back to you, child.”

  “What about your plans for Arabel?” she had asked.

  “It would probably have been more trouble than it was worth. And the apparatus is far more important to me. Work with me and the humans will live. Defy me and they will die, even Mistress Lhal.”

  Suddenly, Krystin felt a sharp pain in her leg, as if she had been bitten by an insect. The sensation had shaken her from her memory and she brushed at her leg absently.

  Staring into the locket’s emerald depths, Krystin realized that the bauble somehow had acquired the power to reflect her memories, thoughts, and dreams. There had been one last set of images that had not been explained by the revelations caused by Lord Sixx’s magic, memories of figures chasing her. She cleared her mind and began to concentrate on them.

  Time slowly drifted past and soon she found herself staring at movement within the locket’s surface. Krystin stared at the images and allowed the world around her to fall away. She saw a half dozen men chasing her down an alley, vengeful, evil men who were quickly gaining on her. As Krystin concentrated more deeply, she was able to see that they wore uniforms: their leathers were black and on their breasts they wore the insignia of a company, a silver dagger dripping with blood.

  Suddenly her view of the world altered with dizzying speed. She saw the wall to her left flash by and suddenly she was staring at the other end of the alley, where three more men waited. All movement stopped. Krystin became aware of a woman’s sharp breath coming in gasps. The men closed more slowly now, enjoying the terror they inspired.

  Her world view shifted again, this time jerking upward sharply and spinning in a wide arc. The opposing wall came into view and she was turned once again and lowered gently to the ground. A woman, her face too close to be seen properly, kissed her once, then withdrew and faced her assailants.

  Krystin’s vantage point was close to the ground and she felt as if she were watching the dance of giants. The dark-haired woman who had set her down drew a blade and lunged at the closest of the men. To her credit, she wounded three men before they ran her through.

  Suddenly a sword was buried in the soft earth before her. In the reflection of the metal she saw that she was perhaps a year old, no more. A baby. One of the men reached down, picked her up, and laughed. He spoke, but his words were gibberish. Beyond him, she could see another man holding up his empty gold purse, making a joke she could not understand. Suddenly her attention was riveted on a prize that hung around the neck of the man holding her, an object that he had taken from the woman he had killed: A beautiful emerald pendant.

  The images suddenly dissolved.

  Krystin once again sat on the edge of the shaft in Erin Shandower’s cavernous retreat. She looked down at the locket in disgust, then hurled it into the darkness below. She thought she heard it strike the side of the tunnel, but there was no sound to signify that it had reached the bottom. No matter. The locket was gone, but its terrible gift had remained behind and would never leave her.

  Myrmeen Lhal was not her mother. The Devlaines were not her true parents. She was, in truth, an orphan, with more in common with the Krystin Lord Sixx unwittingly had manufactured than she ever would have guessed.

  She had to tell Myrmeen, had to warn her that she had betrayed them to the Night Parade, that time was short. But she could not make herself move. Her limbs were too sluggi
sh to respond to her mental commands, and when she tried to rise, she nearly toppled into the pit. She fell back, darkness stealing over her. She was unaware that the deep, thin wound in her leg from the “insect” that had bitten her was now black and swollen. As her consciousness faded, she glimpsed a single nightmarish flash of the creature that had inflicted the wound as it climbed out over the lip of the pit, the emerald locket caught in its vicelike pincers.

  Within seconds, Krystin was unconscious. If she had remained awake for another few moments, she would have been witness to a sight that was at once horrifying and beautiful. Where a monstrosity had been only moments before now stood a tall, lithe woman with long, dark hair and an ethereal beauty.

  Widow Tamara, the Weaver, stopped before the sleeping girl. Her poison snaked through the child’s system, incapacitating her without stopping her heart. She had no quarrel with Krystin. Tamara went down the corridor where she had heard Myrmeen walk some time earlier. The child’s locket was clutched in her hand. She smiled and hurried to the long overdue reunion that she had left Calimport to experience.

  Less than five minutes earlier, Erin Shandower had heard a voice that had nearly driven him to suicide before he identified its owner. He turned and was startled to see the familiar, gaunt face of a man he had presumed dead.

  “Lucius!” Shandower said as he rushed to the mage, whose white smock was covered in blood from his wounds. Lucius Cardoc stood with open arms and buckling legs. Shandower caught the mage as he fell to his bed. The sorcerer’s eyes lolled back in his head; his lips trembled.

  Shandower suddenly realized his mistake. “You’re—you’re not breathing.”

  Lucius looked up at him with a sad, tortured expression, a deep, powerful sympathy in his eyes. The lanterns Shandower had lighted started to dim, the candles dying one by one. Suddenly the room was wreathed in shadows. From the darkness Shandower heard skittering and laughter.

  Turning, he found a man he had never seen standing between him and the gauntlet, which he had allowed his dead lover to remove from him earlier. In a startling moment of complete lucidity, Shandower understood that it had been Lucius who had appeared to him, Lucius using his magic because the sorceries of the Night Parade would be worthless against him as long as he wore the gauntlet. Lucius had betrayed them, but why he had done so was a mystery to the assassin, and would remain as such.

  “Greetings,” Lord Sixx said with a smile. Shandower tried to dart past the Night Parade leader, but Lord Sixx grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. He repeated the maneuver several times until Shandower was delirious with pain, the stump of his arm bleeding from the impact.

  “We found your ally trying to follow you. He died during questioning, but I was determined not to let that stop our little game,” Lord Sixx said as several figures strode forward from the shadows. They were misshapen figures that would never be taken for human, even in silhouette. Lord Sixx looked over his shoulder and said, “This is the man who has killed so many of your brethren!”

  The creatures advanced in a murderous frenzy, halting only when Lord Sixx held out his free hand to order them back. Shandower glimpsed the deformities of the first few monsters and thought he might gag in disgust.

  “Now,” Lord Sixx said, “you can tell me what you’ve done with the apparatus, or you can tell them.”

  Shandower anxiously looked over Sixx’s shoulder, then whispered, “Go back to whatever hell you came from.”

  “I would, but I’m not welcome there anymore,” Lord Sixx said as he flung Shandower with inhuman strength toward the monstrosities. They reached out for him with claws and tentacles, the razor-sharp teeth in their eye sockets grinding in anticipation. Shandower tried to scream as he was dragged into the shadows, but something cold and wet was jammed deep into his throat, preventing him from warning the others. Lord Sixx sighed as he watched his minions consume the man.

  “I glimpsed your secrets when you slept,” Lord Sixx said. “I was merely hoping to make you feel the anguish of betraying all you believed in before you died. Ah, well. I would say you left this world with dignity, but that would be a lie.”

  The creatures Lord Sixx had taken with him giggled obscenely as they feasted on the assassin’s hot flesh.

  From the bed, Lucius moaned. “Release me. I have done what you asked. I am dead. Release me!”

  Lord Sixx grinned. He took a staff standing in a corner and stabbed at the gauntlet until he was able to slip one end into the glove and raise the deadly item into the air.

  “Please,” Lucius begged. “You promised that you would spare my wife and children and that you would release me!”

  “Not just yet,” Lord Sixx said as his gaze slithered across the undead mage’s face. “I still have plans for you.”

  Eighteen

  The nightmare was always the same:

  Myrmeen was a child, living at home with her parents in the boarding house she one day would burn to the ground. Her father was trying to perfect a new composition, plucking notes on his lute with passion and skill, while her mother allowed her to help stuff a pillow that she would place inside a beautifully woven slipcover and sell in the market. They lay together on the sky-blue rug that Myrmeen loved so much. All she had to do was roll onto her back and look up to see the painting she treasured, the portrait of her parents, with her sandwiched between them.

  I didn’t want a sister anyway, she thought. Then we would have to get a new painting.

  The notes her father played suddenly changed. The music became discordant and a heavy thumping replaced the light strum of his fingers upon the strings.

  “I’m dripping,” he said in a murky voice.

  Myrmeen looked up and saw she was an adult dressed in silver armor with a phoenix headdress. The sword that had been forged for her by her second husband was in her hand.

  “I’m dripping,” he repeated. “I hate that.”

  This time she saw what he meant. His flesh was leaking from his bones, his eyeballs drooping to his jaw.

  “Honey,” he said insistently, though his tongue was now curling up in the back of his skull, “can’t we do something about this?”

  Her father had always wanted her mother to do something when a situation distressed him. Myrmeen was never quite sure what that meant. At the moment, she did not want to find out.

  “All right,” her mother said, in a voice that made it clear that she no longer was her mother, or, at least, no longer human. Myrmeen heard a thump beside her and refused to look up. Another thump. Then another. Something leathery brushed against her and she felt its texture despite the armor she wore. Myrmeen twisted out of the monster’s path, refusing to believe that this was her mother.

  The thing reared up to its full height, tall enough to scrape the ceiling with the top of its head. Its body was thin and skeletal, a burnt sienna mass of twisted bones and looping muscle filled with gobs of pure white feathers. Wings with the patterns of spider webs branched out from the small of the creature’s back, and its head still contained the gentle features of her mother, marred by insect eyes and pincers that had been driven outward through the cheeks.

  “Sweetheart,” her mother said as she turned in Myrmeen’s direction—the word came out slurred and sounded more like Swuuud-harddd—“Sweetheart, give Daddy your arm to chew on. He’s hungry.”

  “Stay away,” Myrmeen said.

  “Honey!” her father bellowed. “It’s getting worse!”

  Myrmeen made the mistake of looking back in her father’s direction. He was telling the truth; his dissolution was increasing. Even his bones were becoming soft and oozing. She realized in perverse fascination that his body was not so much melting as it was changing, becoming huge strands that reached out to the ceiling and floor, sticking to the walls, and forming an intricate web whose sinewy strands emitted the odor of rotting fish.

  “Get in there, sweetheart,” her mother urged. “Get in there and set that terrible knife down first—”

  �
�It’s a sword,” Myrmeen interrupted.

  “It has an edge!” the woman shrieked. “It cuts. It’s a knife. You don’t want to cut your father to pieces do you? Not like the way you cut our hearts to pieces, not the way you did before. You remember, before, when we told you the other one was dead and you would be our one and only. You smiled. You thought we didn’t see you, but we did and it cut our hearts out. So don’t do it again. Be a good girl. Get in the stinking web and let us eat your heart!”

  The creature advanced on Myrmeen and she woke suddenly, bolting forward in bed. She tried to scream and could only force a high, quiet squeal of terror from her lungs because she had been breathing so hard that she no longer had the air inside her to muster a scream.

  Myrmeen squeezed her eyes shut. She was alone, dripping with sweat. The nightmare was just that, a bad dream, nothing to worry about. She knew that she should be used to it by now, but it continued to affect her deeply, cutting furrows into her heart each time it returned to her. The dream was a lie. She had not been happy when she learned that her baby sister had been stillborn, or when she knew that her own daughter was dead.

  Of course you were.

  She had not smiled, not even a little bit.

  Admit it. You were relieved.

  No! she screamed in her mind, her hands clamped over her face. She tried to say the word, but no sound came.

  Something in the darkness made a scratching noise.

  Myrmeen looked up suddenly, her warrior’s instincts taking control. The darkness in her chamber would have been absolute if she had not left the door slightly ajar, to make it easier for Krystin in case she decided she did not want to sleep alone. Myrmeen’s eyes adjusted to the semidarkness rapidly and she saw an object the size of a man clinging to the far wall. She could make out very little detail other than that it was alive and moving.