by T. A. Miles
The manner in which the beast had embedded itself so deeply made Korsten wonder about the isolation of another. The Vadryn required the presence of people or animals, in order to feed. They preferred people, so it was necessary for them to exist socially, whether in the form of a bedridden family member in need of attendance, or someone in a position to have frequent interaction with others.
At Lilende, it had been the arms master, who was also responsible for the daily training and guidance of the younger soldiers. That particular beast had considered its conditions not only ideal, but also harmless. It had tried it impress that it had achieved control and balance, and that it was in some way contributing to a healthy relationship with its victims. The demon had done it all through the mouth and with the personality of Bael, who Korsten had considered a likable person. It had all been very disarming. From that moment, Korsten had been deliberately rejecting the independent intellects of the Vadryn. He was afraid to lose sight of the people by allowing demons to have either personality or reason. They were instinctive and opportunistic, and ruining. And based upon that, Korsten could conclude that it made no practical sense for the governor to have been possessed and hiding in isolation. He should have been among them, pretending to have been unchanged, else the town should have been in complete ruin and abandonment.
By the time they returned to the constable hall, the entire affair had been festering on Korsten’s mind, and had become direly in need of an answer. Upon entering the front room and being returned to the company of the girl-constable and her host of lackadaisical middle-aged assistants—of which there were only two—he commenced with questioning them at once.
“Why is the home of the governor being hidden?”
Sesha stood rigidly at the table, her gaze slipping past Korsten and Merran. Korsten looked back at Phyodar to see his response. With their exchange being plainly viewed, the man held off making any expression. He only drew back his hood and placed his crossbow down on the table.
“What is happening here that you won’t tell us?” Korsten asked, leaving his gaze with Phyodar for a moment before returning his focus to Sesha. “Who is overseeing you?”
“No one,” the girl decided to answer.
Though it was unsatisfying, it was an answer. Korsten continued. “Where has everyone gone?”
“No one chooses to live here.” This time, Phyodar provided the answer, and he did it in such a way that Korsten believed he meant to deflect the question rather than truly answer it.
“Where would they have gone to?” Korsten pressed. “There were people here originally—whether or not anyone chooses to live here now. Where would they have gone to?”
“I don’t know,” Sesha said, her expression beginning to show some signs of perturbance. “Feidor’s Crest.”
That was the wrong answer. Not only was it untrue, it was ignorant. “If that’s true, then sadly, they are all dead.”
That stopped the girl. Now, finally, she understood that she was in the presence of two who knew more of the region than she did, and who had legitimate cause to be at Endmark and asking questions.
The trace of compunction she demonstrated, inspired Korsten to pause, so that she would not feel overtaken. He had no desire to badger anyone, but the facts were as they were. “Please, tell us what’s happening. Merran and I are going to search until we find out, so you are only delaying us. If you’re stopping anything, it’s our opportunity to help you.”
“Are you truly priests?” she asked.
“Yes, we are.” The information probably didn’t require digesting at this point, but Korsten allowed it all the same.
Merran was the one to continue when he felt sufficient time had passed. “We’re here to do whatever we can to aid this town. I cannot tell you that we’ll be able to, but even if the town itself is lost, there’s no reason for anyone else here to die, or disappear.”
Sesha seemed very young in the moment her frown relaxed and she began to actively demonstrate in her expression that she was afraid of everything that had been happening. It was easy to visualize what she might have looked like as a child, but when she spoke, she sounded adult, even though her answer revealed her naivete. “They promised they would leave us alone, and that we could rebuild when it was all over.”
“Who did?” Korsten asked. “Morennish agents?”
“I wouldn’t know,” the girl replied, beginning to bristle again.
“Sesha, that promise will not hold.” Korsten took a step toward her, helplessly; he felt compelled to reach for people who were at risk, emotionally or otherwise. “Whatever is of such value to you here, is there no way that you can relocate it—and yourself—to someplace safer?”
Sesha took a step back. “I will not leave.”
“Will you at least tell us why?” Korsten braced his hand on the table, locking his gaze with hers. “Will you show us?”
Sesha was held for some moments in Korsten’s gaze. Eventually, she and Phyodar exchanged looks. It was then that the cousins decided that they would relent.
“Come with us,” Phyodar said. Again, he tried to carry an air of authority over the priests in his presence. And this time, he was promptly scolded by Sesha.
“Shut up, Phyodar,” she snapped, leading the way from the constable hall.
•—•
They proceeded to the inn. Merran was in no way surprised. He expected to return sooner or later in direct regard to their investigation, ever since Korsten mentioned his dream.
Within the building, the innkeeper seemed surprised to see them before evening. He even offered the beginnings of protest, though Sesha refused to hear it. In the same brisk manner she had scolded her cousin, she contradicted the innkeeper’s argument against Merran and Korsten entering the building with such purpose behind the constable.
It was Phyodar who appeased the man. “They know most of it already, Behn.”
They were led upstairs, past the second and third floors, and to the fourth, by way of a tight stairwell. The door at the top was embedded in the ceiling, and pushed up, providing access to a broad attic space. A dramatically sloped ceiling led to the edges of the room, allowing only a narrow path by which anyone could walk, least of all two of Korsten and Merran’s height. There were slatted windows on two sides of the attic, and they allowed only bands of daylight to enter. Those bands were largely blocked by the clutter which had been pressed to the room’s peripheries.
At the center, they were faced again with a display of chains. This time there were none of the curious stakes, and the manacles were not empty. They connected to a man and to the chair he was sat in. He was blindfolded. His hands were behind him and his body slouched, his head lilting toward his chest. Gray hair hung limp around a grizzled face. The mouth was coarse and cracked, moving minimally. He was alive.
“What is this?” Korsten asked, his tone taking on a slight air of appalled.
“This is our governor,” Sesha answered, unaffected by what she may have grown somewhat hardened against seeing. “My and Phyodar’s uncle.”
“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” Korsten asked, and Merran knew that it was not for his own benefit, but for theirs.
“More than what shows here,” was the girl-constable’s answer.
In case either Merran or Korsten wondered what exactly she meant, she swiftly kicked the nearest extent of chain.
The man in the chair didn’t react, but the chains did. Tendrils of a black, filmy substance manifested, turning over and around the chains. Eventually, the movement inspired some stirring from the governor, which only demonstrated that the tendrils weren’t connected to the chains, so much as they were connected to him. They had merely wandered over the chains, perhaps, while they reached out from the body they had rooted in …or that they had grown out of.
“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” Sesha challenged.
Korsten looked to Merran, so he said, “This man is not possessed. He’s overtaken.”
And now Ergen’s cellar beast was easier comprehended. The creature had both been collected and hidden in the area of the chains, and had probably been trapped in the moments it left—or was taken from—the body it had been growing in. The man had been poisoned by one of the Vadryn. It did happen from time to time, but not quite in this manner. And not in such a way that the incidentally created demon could be extracted intact and physically from the body.
“What does that mean?” Phyodar demanded.
“It means that he’s been fed from,” Merran answered, reiterating his own thoughts. “He’s been poisoned by one of the Vadryn and its toxin is festering within him, creating a new Vadryn.” And now, Merran gave his gaze to Korsten, shutting out the others in the room. “It’s being hidden by some manner of Shroud spell.”
And Korsten said, “That’s why I couldn’t detect it.”
Merran believed that was precisely why.
“But what’s to keep it from leaving here at any moment?” Korsten wondered. He came up with his own answer before either of them had to voice it in front of the cousins. The idea of a man being digested by a growing demon directly before them dampened his spirits and raised his worry noticeably.
The promising aspect to any of it was that there was nothing else in place to suggest that either its growth or any sustenance it received was being augmented by any other magic. For now, it was, more or less, the contamination of a demon festering. And it would likely stay in place until it felt that it was growing low on sustenance.
“It’s dangerous to leave him like this,” Merran said to Sesha and Phyodar. “There are measures that can be taken.”
And Sesha promptly, and firmly, said, “No.”
Sixteen
“Let us help him,” Korsten said to Sesha, not for the first time since they’d retreated from the inn’s attic to its common room on the ground floor.
The cousins had agreed to assemble the town’s remaining residents. What few of them there were filtered into the space within an hour. And there were pitifully few of them. Merran had been correct in his previous assessment.
“Will it kill him?” Sesha asked.
And Merran said, “It may.”
“Then my answer is no.”
Korsten couldn’t help that he cast an expression in Merran’s direction. Clearly, it was better to be truthful, but at times it felt as if Merran delivered his answers not only bluntly, but with the intent to bludgeon the recipient.
Merran would not be made to feel remorse for it and merely looked at Korsten in return.
Korsten resumed his efforts to reason with the Izwendels. “Sesha, we watched one of these creatures being grown in this manner, not far from here. It devoured everything that was immediately around it.”
“But not the two of you,” her cousin pointed out.
While Merran cast Phyodar an aggravated glare, Korsten said, “No. But it did kill the host. And it killed the man who was attending to it as well.”
“We’ll see to it ourselves,” Sesha declared, which was rather a bold thing for anyone not trained at the Vassenleigh Order to declare. “When it’s necessary—if it’s necessary.”
“I wouldn’t advise that,” Merran said. He also felt that it was prudent to ask, “Are any of you attending to it?”
Phyodar was incensed to violence by the suggestion, but Behn held him back, which was better for Phyodar, since Merran was clearly not in a mood to be gentle with these people.
It was true that their current audience made gentle difficult. Still, Korsten preferred to keep trying. “It is imperative that we know whether or not it’s been able to feed, outside of its current source. Maybe someone who hasn’t been around, but who initially stayed with the rest of you. Do you know for certain what happened to those who left?”
The residents of Endmark looked about the room at one another, indicating that they did and wouldn’t say, or that they were legitimately innocent of knowing.
“If you know, you must tell us,” Korsten pressed. “There may be another demon not accounted for, and if not that, then someone who may have been working alongside them all this time. Who was it that initially told you that you would be left alone if you complied?”
“It was Izwendel’s son.” The voice of an elder rose in the silence. “He took them all.”
“What do you mean?” Korsten asked, seeking the senior out. He made eye contact with an old woman, seated nearer to the fire, which had been lit a short while ago, when the fog began to drift back into town.
“Lord Endmark,” the woman said, as if it clarified the matter.
Sesha scoffed. “He’s not the lord of anything. His father is still alive.”
“That man upstairs is dead, Sesha,” the elder said. “That is not a state of living. Even so, it’s still true that his son took everyone away from here. I don’t know how he did it, but I know it was him. I always thought he was possessed by something, and now that these two are here, I know it. The demons have come, Sesha. We can’t deny it anymore—if we ever could.”
Conversation erupted in the room. It swiftly turned to arguing with one another.
Korsten decided that they should have a moment to do so. Clearly, they had been under excessive strain, regardless of what had brought it upon them or how blameworthy any of them may or may not have been.
“Why would anyone do this?” he asked Merran quietly. “Why bind a handful of people to this place by such means?”
Merran seated himself on the edge of the common room table. “I think that these few people were here to convince us that there’s nothing of concern at Endmark. Their newest problem is that we weren’t convinced.”
“Do you think that she knows where the soldiers and our peers are?” Korsten asked next, indicating the elder.
“It’s difficult to say.” Merran glanced over at her, then about the room at the rest of the villagers. “It seems unlikely that she actually witnessed anything and survived it, but she may be more intuitive than her neighbors.”
“You mean she may have observed the changes and the behavior of the governor’s son, perhaps, and formed her own conclusions.”
Merran nodded.
“But what became of the manor? None of this explains why that building is hidden from view.”
Before Merran could answer, Sesha addressed them.
“All right, priests of Vassenleigh,” the girl said, inspiring Korsten and Merran to exchange a look with one another over her manner, which was erring back to a presentation of bold, over trepidation. Without regard for their exchange, she continued. “There’s someone here who may have more answers than any of us.”
On that statement, the Izwendels guided Korsten and Merran back to the constable hall and up to the second floor. As they walked, Sesha went for her ring of keys, and Korsten wondered if they had previously arrested someone who had been a witness to events in the area. Someone they may have taken for mad or perhaps for an agent of Morenne. It occurred to him also that it may simply have been an agent from Morenne.
At the top of the stairs, they entered a narrow passage of doors, some of them ordinary, others barred. At one of the partitions equipped with bars, Sesha used her keys to unlock it. The heavy door was pushed open, and a woman with curling dark hair, wearing a brown tunic with tan shirt and trousers turned to face them. She appeared to have been actively pacing. Her skin was olive-toned and her eyes a luminous jade. They were perhaps the softest aspect to her otherwise strikingly sharp features.
“Merran?” was the first thing she said. And if that didn’t give her away, the black flyer that immediately came away from the bench and hid itself somewhere on her person did.
They had just accounted for one of the missing priests.
•—•
With their fellow priest recovered, Korsten and Merran took their leave of the constable hall for the time present. They walked with the woman whose name was Tahlia, down the abandoned street while the sun was setting over the rooftops of Endmark. Tahlia was a warrior-priest. She had been assigned to the battle to assist soldiers, not only against other soldiers, but against any of the Vadryn or their offshoots that may have been present. With her was her partner and one other who shared their class as warrior-priests. The fourth among them was an ambassador. While all Adepts were trained for conflict, the hunters specialized in tracking and expunging, the warriors specialized in battle, and the ambassadors were to focus on relations. They were typically paired with warriors or other ambassadors. And while it seemed that Merran could well use the presence of an ambassador, as it turned out, what cast Korsten as an enthraller qualified him to be an ambassador as well, so it all worked out. For the most part. Merran had worked alone for much of his career. At his age, he would still do as he did, regardless.
He proved that with his first question to Tahlia. “How did you come to be imprisoned in an ordinary cell, by people who are technically on our side?”
Tahlia appeared to take his blunt manner well enough. “It isn’t a very long story,” she said, “but it’s interesting. I’m still puzzled by it, even given time to do little else than mull it over.
“Whatever happened on that battlefield, it was without doubt a spell, and sourcing from a practitioner of the wild craft—the type that Morenne have found some uses for, and which passes to any demons they’re hosting. I don’t know precisely what it did, only that it was fast and sweeping …rather like a Reach, but not exactly the same. There was not really a gate that opened up and there wasn’t any light to it. It was only the swiftness of it and the sensation of movement. I don’t know why it didn’t take me, but it took the others. All of them. Into Hell’s depths, I imagine. I don’t really know.”