A cloud of blue robes filled the doorway, white clay mask peeking out from its mass. Julius noted some blonde hair at the mask’s edges, sticking out at bizarre angles, as if hastily arranged.
“Where’s Mel?” Julius demanded.
“I do not appreciate the tone you are taking, child.” His voice was thick with fatigue, but still authoritative in its depth. There was something else, too––a tone of menace, hidden like a snake in the grass.
“Oh, ‘child’ someone else. Where is Amelia?”
“She is gone. Left. I do hope you woke me for more than this,” He said, turning back to the absolute dark of the inner chamber.
“What do you mean, ‘left’?” Julius said, following as far as the doorway. “She didn’t tell me she was leaving. Where did she go?”
“Quiet down. She insisted on knowing the location of the mountain villages where Calcifer was staying. She said she couldn’t wait anymore; she was running out of time; things of that ilk. I tried to talk her down, but she had none of it. I relented––I showed her on a map where he was, and the safest routes to get there at this time of year.” He was turned fully away now, speaking into the stone room and letting the echo address Julius. “I summoned Netsa and asked her to tell you in the morning. If the doctor saw no point in waking you personally, I did not see the point in doing so either. Better to let you sleep.” Gallant turned back to him, unreadable under the clay mask, and moved to close the door, but Julius put out a hand.
“I don’t believe you,” He said, glaring into the mask’s shadowy eyeholes.
“You have no choice,” Gallant responded.
“Fuck you.” When Gallant could find no adequate response to this, Julius let the door swing shut. He stormed down the hall, towards the dormitories. Behind that clay mask, Julius wasn’t getting any answers from Gallant––but he had an idea of where else to ask.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A HOUSE OF CARDS.
“Why is it that when I heard a knocking at my door at this ungracious hour, I knew it would be you?” Netsa’s face, groggy and lax, peered through the dark, just barely lit by the halo of a candle in hand.
“Because everyone else is scared to death of your scolding?” Julius replied.
“Honesty is not always a virtue,” She said. He could tell she was of half a mind to shut the door and get back to her impeccable sleep schedule. “What is it that you need, Julius?”
“Why are you and the First Adherent lying about Calcifer?” He asked. He found a small delight in the guilty surprise that overthrew her carefully composed annoyance. She tried to avoid his eye, but he stepped closer, forcing her to shrink back against the half-opened door.
“I don’t know what you mean,” She tried.
“No?”
“No, I––well, he–” She stammered, still avoiding eye contact. Then, like a balloon filled to the breaking point, she released a gush of pent-up breath, dropping her gaze entirely. “I didn’t want to.”
“Explain,” Julius said. He followed her into the room, taking in the space that this caricature of neatness occupied. It was almost identical to how his room looked when he arrived––empty closet, blankets folded, walls bare. There were hardly any signs of life, bar a glass of water on the bedside table, and a single piece of paper on the windowsill. It was folded into a small crane. Somehow, this detail took Julius off guard––it was unnervingly close to something a human would do.
Netsa leaned against the wall, and Julius, satisfied with getting any answers at all, kept a comfortable distance. “Up until a few weeks ago, I had never spoken a word with Gallant,” She began.
“Really? You seemed close.”
“Hush. If I’m telling you the story, let me tell it properly. When he’s in public, he doesn’t say anything, only speaking through others. And I had never been personally summoned––not until then, when he fetched me late one night. It was approximately two weeks before your arrival. I was ecstatic––I thought I was being favored, and that if I did well, I would be First Adherent one day. I still believe that,” She added firmly, and when Julius nodded in agreement, she continued. “He acted differently than I expected. I assumed he must be of a forgetful sort––he was always asking details about me, and the acolytes, and how we lived. I thought he was testing me somehow––to see if I was attentive. But one morning I came in and found his record books all over the room––tables, chairs, even on the bed. It was an unbecoming mess. I began to organize them, as a sane person naturally would, and he–” She choked slightly, looking away from Julius and finding a spot on the wall until the moment passed. Julius realized there were tears on the edges of her eyes. “He got very angry. He does not like to be questioned. He said he was studying, and it was very important. ‘We’re expecting visitors’, he said, ‘and I want to be prepared’. So I left. When I came back that evening, the books were all put away––hidden, even.”
“Was he suspicious of you?” Julius asked.
She gave him another silencing look. “Of course he was suspicious of me. For good reason, too, since––well, I’ll get there. He brought me into his personal chamber––oh, don’t give me that look––and offered me a drink. I didn’t know what to expect––I agreed. I felt I had no other option.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gallant raised a glass towards Netsa, eyes steady in a contemplative stare. This was only the second time she had seem him without the ceremonial mask, as he had assured was allowed in private. His features were slim and pretty, but undercut with a deep tone of good humor. She took the glass, hands shaking minutely, and sipped from the dark brown brew.
“Very strong,” She managed through a choking cough. “I don’t really drink.”
“Yes, I can tell,” He smiled. Her cheeks had already worked up a rosy glint––but she wondered if that had much to do with the alcohol.
“If I may ask, Brother?”
“Yes?”
“What are we celebrating?” She felt sheepish asking, as if he expected her to know the answer already. He had a way of quizzing her on everything she asked, turning her questions around. She supposed it was his way of teaching.
He leaned a little closer, taking a tone of secrecy. “It is in halves a celebration and an apology. I didn’t mean to blow up at your earlier––I really didn’t. Before I became a brother of Saint Shina, I was a very angry man. Sometimes it is hard to separate oneself from their nature.” She nodded eagerly, and he continued. “We should prepare for guests. I have been expecting them for weeks, but in my meditation today, I felt a growing sureness that it would be soon.”
“That is very wise of you,” She offered. His smile widened, and she felt a similar smile reach her own face, almost unwittingly.
“It is a doctor named Amelia Saul. If we treat her with kindness, I think she may pose the solution to our Calcifer problem,” He said. She nodded again, remembering how he explained at length that Calcifer had left a month prior, and that she should allow the acolytes to keep to their regular lives. If they got worked up, he reasoned, they were only more likely to fall ill; the content of your body had much to do with the content of your spirit, as she so well knew. “Keep an eye out for travelers on your walks about the grounds. If Shina has deemed it fit to provide, I would hate to squander her blessing.” Then he drained his glass in one gulp, forming his lips around the ice cubes to push them back. Although only intensified her curiosity about his life prior to the Monastery, she said nothing––it was not prudent to ask anyone about such things.
“I should get back to the acolytes. I would hate to miss something important,” She said, placing the glass down on a small table. He nodded, although he seemed a little disappointed––the implications of which she couldn’t begin to sort out until she was alone with her thoughts.
“If you must,” He replied, refilling his own glass. She moved around him, towards the door, and on an impulse looked back at the room. It was the same as
it had been, small and warm in the light of the fireplace, paneled with dark wood and slate. But her eye insisted that something was out of place. She analyzed the room over and over, until finally the problem jumped out at her––a blue strip of fabric, caught in the door of the closet. In a watershed moment, she turned and pulled on the door, which was only a few steps from the entrance of the room. It swung open. Gallant’s face contorted with alarm and ugly wrath, but Netsa took no notice; her eyes were focused elsewhere.
On the floor of the cubby, curled into a bent, broken ball of blue cloth was a man, head jutting out at an unnatural angle. His face was crusted with spots of a dark fluid, and the strip of blue fabric, which brought her attention to the grisly secret in the first place, was one of the few parts of the robe not dyed a deep, sticky maroon. With horror, she noticed his neck was lacerated into folds of loose skin and flesh, making up the epicenter of what she could imagine had been a fountain of blood. The final detail she could take in was the man’s face, which was curiously familiar to her; it wasn’t until much later that night that she realized he was the spitting image of the white clay mask on the table. She was hit with a wave of nausea.
Netsa felt firm hands on her shoulders, and she was whirled around. Gallant was eye to eye with her now, hardly inches between them, but it didn’t thrill her the way it might’ve an hour earlier. Instead she felt only fear and shame, mangled and conjoined, her feelings bastardized.
“I won’t tell,” She whispered.
“You won’t tell,” He repeated, low but now husky and threatening. “You won’t say a word. When our visitors arrive, you will tell them what I told you about Calcifer. Nothing will change. Do you understand?” She nodded frantically. “I hope so. Because it could be you in that closet, and a slit throat would be merciful.” Then he shoved her towards the door. She tripped over her feet and slammed into it, forearms first, struggling to stand.
He kicked the door open and pushed her out into the dark. Looking back, he was a silhouette against the light of the fireplace, like a devil in hell, and although she couldn’t see it she was sure he was holding back a grin. She scrambled to her feet and ran back to her dormitory, desperately stifling anguished weeps.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The last words of the story came between long pauses where Netsa did nothing but stare at the wall, dissociative, almost unaware of the streams of tears cutting paths down her cheeks. Julius watched and said nothing, only observing the silence, which was remarkably different than the sort she had become so accustomed to. It felt numb, like the cold outside, and equally invasive.
Eventually, she came around again and finished describing that night. Julius had no trouble believing her; he had felt touches of his sinister intent himself. It explained a lot––the lies, and Mel’s disappearance, which was now all the more upsetting. He hoped that, because Mel apparently solved his ‘Calcifer problem’, she would still be alive––but it wasn’t a hope she felt comfortable depending on.
Julius put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t move.”
She nodded. “You’re not–”
“Mel is gone. I’m going to go stab Gallant until he tells me where.” He moved for the door, ignoring how her hand snatched at the back of his jacket.
“Stop! He’s dangerous, you can’t–”
“Netsa.” He set aside his annoyance for her, and her condescending attitude, and the meticulous air about her that drove him insane, and he looked her in the eyes. “Trust me. Okay?”
Slowly, she nodded. “Okay. Be careful.”
This trip to Gallant’s red door, which Julius sincerely hoped was his last, was even shorter than before. He didn’t knock, or wait for a response; he simply slammed his sprinting body into the heavy slab of wood. It flew back against the stone wall with a crack like a whip, and he stumbled into the room, heading straight for the door he had seen in the back corner on his first visit. It wasn’t nearly as heavy, and yielded under a single kick.
The room was empty. The fireplace was lit, although the flame was low and flickering, casting a dim red light. The room was in perfect order; furniture square, two empty glasses lined up on a small table by one of two plush seats. Even the bed, a thin scrappy thing in the corner, was perfectly made. If he had really pulled Gallant from his night’s sleep, he certainly wasn’t sleeping now––and wherever he was, Julius was willing to bet Mel was close by.
He searched the room slowly, which was not a strength of his. Whenever he began to waver, he thought of Netsa, and what Gallant did to her––but more importantly, how she found the body. He examined the cabinet of bottles; stripped the bed; checked the chairs; pushed around the ashes of the fireplace, searching for overlooked details.
As was the nature of such things, it wasn’t a misplaced oddity that told Julius what he had to know; it was a thing that was missing altogether. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, he noticed the corkboard above the fireplace, on which rows of identical, glimmering keys hung. The rows were not perfect; there was a single key missing, its outline framed in dust along the rough surface of the board. Its label was red with the reflection of the fireplace, but perfectly legible.
They were hidden in the Meditation Hall.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE ENDGAME.
The curled shape of a man, edges softened by layers of cloth and burlap, leaned against the doorframe of the ramshackle house, hardly moving but to shiver. The top of his head, feverish and red, poked out from the nest of blankets, along with a pair of shrewd brown eyes, sunken under the weight of violent illness. They took in the winter landscape; it was oppressive, although the furious downpour of the hours prior had petered out into clingy mist about an hour before. He recognized, in a way desperate people rarely do, that this was the tipping point; if he was moving, this was the moment.
He lurched forward, legs swinging in delirious, uneven arcs, weak with hunger. The blankets swirled around his feet, threatening to send him face-first into the drifts of slushy snow, but by a balance of luck and determination, he managed to keep moving. His eyes never wavered from the horizon; hollowed though they were, there was a deep, furious ember behind them.
He was confident that he knew the way; he could hear the river, and the Monastery had loomed on the horizon as he and the assassin had passed through the wood weeks before. Morgan had wanted to keep him close; close enough to keep an eye on, and to force-feed phials of thick, ghoulish poisons that sent shivers through his veins and tightened his temples painfully, like a band of thin wire squeezing his skull. He had not argued; already, thoughts of murder had rooted in his mind, a tentative flower that bloomed in his dreams, in vicious, colorful tableaus of red and white.
It was with those thought held close, like a warm stone between his curled, shaking hands, that he walked the stone path of the Monastery, his titanic boots thumping the beat of a war drum.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For the first time, Julius felt something like evangelism. Each day he had walked past the towering wooden doors of the Meditation Hall, adorned with brass knuckles and deep, textured carvings of vines and pillars and saints, he was filled with forbidden curiosity, knowing that the contents of the room could never conceivably be known to him. He imagined putting his hands to the door and pushing with all his might, and when that failed, the entire heft of his body, until the dark crack between the panels widened like the mouth of a scriptural leviathan. But now that the moment was upon him, he felt an obscure weight on his hands, perhaps Shina herself holding him down.
He reached for his sword with a superstitious brush of the hand, easing his nerves. Internally, he apologized to Shina, and to Netsa, and even to Gallant, who was most probably long departed. Then he placed his shoulder against the chipped wood of the left door and pushed with his good leg, tensing his entire body.
Even more so than the door to the First Adherent’s chamber, the weight of the wood lent its moveme
nt a curious grace, as if it was parting water instead of air. The moon at Julius’ back spilt its gentle light into the hall, which was cloaked in absolute darkness. He could see a main aisle, which ran to the back of the sizable chamber, where a vague lump dominated the aged stone; on either side, the hall was full of blue square mats, and on those, the sitting figures of what looked like a hundred monks. They were preternaturally still; stiller than even the air, which was hazy with dust and moonbeams. His own breaths were the only indication of life in the room, flat and shallow in the crushing silence.
He realized that the vague lump at the end of the hall was the same deep blue as the robes of the monks. He crossed the room at a trot, senses sharply tuned for something waiting in the walls of dark. As he neared, the shape grew more distinct; first it was a person, leaning against the wall; then, he was a man, their bald head dangling forward over his chest, which was consumed by a morbid purple stain; then, he was dead, their blue robes torn in places, his blood pooling in the grooves of the grey stone beneath. Julius felt his heart take off in gallops; he had the intense feeling of being watched, like a cornered rabbit.
He spun around in time to see something flicker in the shadows. From this angle, the light silhouetted the faces of the monks, casting the room into a nightmarish graveyard of identical, stone-still heads. It was impossible to tell where the flicker came from. It could’ve been a bird flying across the window; it could’ve been his imagination. He moved towards where he thought he saw it, nearer the door, and it happened again, this time too close to react.
Julius felt a hand close around his ankle and pull with awful strength, yanking him off his feet. He jerked in the opposite direction, trying to both free himself and see what had a hold of him; both efforts failed, eliciting only a screaming pain from his injured leg, which felt like it was being pulled out of its socket. He stifled a shriek and twisted, turning over onto his back and kicking out. His foot connected with something, and then a shadow struck out from the dense blackness of the chamber, landing on his waist and pinning his arms down. Long straight hair fell around his face, making a shimmering tunnel where his vision was dominated by a pair of deadpan blue eyes, lined with tired bags. There was a distant flicker of recognition, drowned in the adrenaline of combat.
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