Shadowmasque

by Michael Cobley

  Then the newcomer seemed to notice Ayoni and Chellour for the first time, regarding them with a stony distrust.

  “Perhaps that is why Bardow asked you to look for witnesses,” he said. “Lady, ser — I am Ikarno Mazaret, former Lord Regent of this sad and withered place. I do not know why this party of strangers have come here but I fear the worst, thus any and all aid would be most welcome.” He turned back to Atroc. “I will be in the gardens, watching…”

  The old Mogaun sketched a stiff bow. “Of course, lord.”

  Ikarno Mazaret, Ayoni thought as she watched the tall, spectral man stalk off along an overgrown path. Who survived the final battle in the Lord of Twilight’s realm, according to the sagasongs.

  “Come,” said Atroc. “We shall take a direct course.”

  As he spoke, they all rose into the air along a curve that swept up and through the palace battlements to emerge within a large building outwith them, then ascended past empty broken floors to the loft where birds perched on rusting iron joists and the stumps of buttresses standing stark against the sky. At one end of the long, roofless attic, a pale figure stood staring up at something on a crumbling section of wall. As they approached, Ayoni could see that there were several tub-like contrivances jutting from the wall, each set at a different angle from the others, and it was through one of these that the stock figure of a man was peering.

  “Ah, good,” the man said without looking round. “Thank you, Atroc, for bringing such noble guests to our regrettably ramshackle abode.” He gave them a sideways glance and smile. “I’m glad you are here and I hope that, as mages, you might be able to shed some light on the mysterious visitors who arrived here by sea several hours before that army of Ilgarion’s set up camp.” He straightened, turned and clasped his hands. “But firstly, introductions. This is Atroc, shaman and seer, as you may already know, and I am Chael Bardow, former Archmage to his imperial majesty Tauric the First, and you are…?”

  “Ayoni, Countess of Harcas, and bound by outh and duty to the Order of Watchers,” she said.

  “Nyls Chellour of Adnagaur,” Chellour said sardonically. “Likewise of the Order of Watchers.”

  “Excellent,” Bardow said. “And the fact that you are currently imprisoned by that fool Ilgarion speak volumes to me about your character.”

  “Pardon my asking, archmage,” Ayoni said. “But do you know much of what happens in Sejeend?”

  “Not specifically,” Bardow said. “We pick up a few useful details about recent events from the pilgrims who travel to and from the city, although the more worthwhile comments come from others like traders, sailors and the like.”

  “When they can be bothered actually talking about such matters among themselves,” Atroc said sourly.

  “But occasionally I also come up here,” Bardow went on. “Not all of these neareye tubes are for looking up at the stars. But enough of these pleasantries — perhaps we should now proceed to the Keep of Day and see if they’ve let slip any revealing details.” He looked at Atroc. “Is Yasgur still on duty there?”

  “Gilly has the watch now.”

  “Good, and I am finished here for now…”

  Ayoni smiled at him. “Archmage, I confess to being puzzled by both our and your presence here and in these form. Forgive me, but are you all ghosts and if so, then what of Chellour and myself?”

  Bardow nodded as she spoke. “I likewise admit uncertainty, Countess. We seem ghostlike and are invisible to all the pilgrims and the few city residents, as well as most animals. We seem to inhabit an empty place congruent to this world, thus we are able to pass through solid objects since they are absent from where we truly are. Yet when people sleep and dream they take on a new form which is how Atroc was able to bring you here.

  “But are we ghosts? That implies that we died and these pale shades are our spiritual residues — certainly I do remember my death in the realm of the Lord of Twilight, how I was cut down by those reptile-riders with their scythes, and how I later found myself wandering through the streets of Besh-Darok as singing, cheering crowds celebrated the fall of the Shadowkings and the collapse of their reign — yet none could see or hear me. Soon after, I encountered Ikarno Mazaret, his form as pallid as misty as my own, and his last recollection was the awful climax of that battle in the Lord of Twilight’s realm. Others like he and I arrived in Besh-Darok in the days and weeks following the end of the war, and every one had a similar tale to tell.”

  “Who were they?” Ayoni said. “And where are they now?”

  “They were mostly mages of one kind or another, or those who had been directly touched by either the Lesser Power or the Wellsource. The great majority of them simply moved on while we few stayed out of a sense of familiarity or attachment, or perhaps because we hope that one day long-lost faces will eventually show up, passing through.” There was a palpable sadness in his words. “But I do not think we are ghosts. More than a week after the phantom-like Ikarno Mazaret arrived here, he and I were to see the flesh and blood Mazaret ride in through the city gates. The same happened with Alael and Gilly, although our Gilly stayed here while the real one left for Cabringa.”

  Chellour was intrigued. “So does that mean that Lord Mazaret watched himself….grow old?”

  “He was there in the Court of the Morning when his beloved Suviel Hantika appeared amid a bed of flowers,” Bardow said. “And while his real self greeted her he could only stand there watching in silence.”

  “How sad,” Ayoni murmured. So that’s why he said he would be in the gardens.

  “Alael had a similar experience, watching herself be crowned, then finding her way into the role of queen, ruling, commanding, weighing problems and crises, judging and punishing, or rewarding.”

  “That must have been difficult for her,” said Ayoni.

  The Archmage smiled faintly. “At some point I think she decided that this other Alael was just another, different person and her interest became less encompassing. But when the real Ikarno Mazaret passed away, at a crotchetty 82, there were two Alaels mourning by his deathbed. Our Mazaret avoided it, and the burial ceremonies.”

  “Understandable,” Chellour said drily.

  “So, ser Bardow, if you are not ghosts then what are you?” Ayoni said.

  The Archmage glanced up at the sky for a moment, smiling enigmatically, then said, “I think that we are the echoes of our true selves. Something colossal happened when Suviel and Tauric confronted the Lord of Twilight in the Void, something which affected certain people and cast reflections of them into this dream-place.”

  “I don’t feel like an echo,” Atroc said gruffly.

  “Yet we have been trapped in this ageless bodiless existence for 300 years or more,” Bardow said. “Well, we may at some point find an answer to the enigma, but for now let us employ our ethereal nature to our advantage in the Keep of Day.”

  Then as one they rose into the air, heading north, and moments later passed through the outside of the Keep of Day, the great cylindrical bastion which oversaw the inner and outer parade grounds. Most of the flat roof had fallen in and roughly a quarter of the outer wall lay in grassy mounds of rubble at the base. Lightless yet still visible to their eyes, the interior was a muddle of caved-in floors, cracked pillars and stairwells choked with shattered masonry. As they descended through the floors, it seemed that the lowest had escaped the worst of the structural ruin. Then they arrived at the ground level, in a large circular chamber plentifully lit by torches and where a wide ring of 10 small, conical candles sat burning in the middle of the floor. Before each candle a cowled figure sat facing out, and the moment the four spectral mages entered the chambers the nearest candle flames flared and tilted in their direction.

  “Master!” cried out the men nearest their entry point. “Another intruding presence, over here!”

  At the centre of the circle of ten was an eleventh who sat straighter then pushed back the heavy cowl to reveal a handsome, finely-featured face whose dark eyes glea
med with arrogance. Ayoni stared at him in surprised recognition.

  “Mother’s name,” she said to Chellour. “It’s Limbor cul-Mayr!”

  Chellour stared a moment then nodded. “The threadbare lordling himself, and I’ll bet that’s his flock of nightkin….ah, I’m not sure what he’s doing but perhaps we should back off a ways…”

  Cul-Mayr had taken a small blowpipe from within his robe and calmly slipping a little red-feathered dart into the mouthpiece. The four quickly retreated beyond the wall of the chamber to a dark, curving corridor along with another man, translucent, bearded and grinning, was strolling.

  “Wondered how long it would take,” he said. “Did he spit one of his darts at you?”

  “We didn’t wait to see, Gilly,” said Bardow, turning to Ayoni. “You know the leader of those men? He is familiar to you?”

  She regarded the newcomer for a moment, certain that he had to be Gilly Cordale, then nodded, saying; “He is a penniless noble who lost almost all his family’s estates and riches through trade debt and gambling. We’ve been sure for a while that cul-Mayr was involved with a malefic sect called the Nightkin but solid proof has evaded us — until now.”

  “Is there any connection between these cultists and that army camped on the other side of the Great Canal?” said Bardow.

  “We know that certain members of the nobility as well as senior military officers have some involvement,” Ayoni said. “But we know almost nothing about their motives or their goals so it’s difficult to make sense of their actions…”

  “Well,” Gilly Cordale said, “It so happens that there’s an open doorway along this passage which we can watch from without signalling our presence.”

  All agreed to this and as they proceeded round the curve the archmage formally introduced Gilly and Ayoni and Chellour.

  “I miss Sejeend very much,” Gilly said. “Even as the overcrowded city that it’s become.”

  “So why are you here rather than there?” Chellour said.

  Gilly Cordale smiled bleakly. “The one thing worse than being a disembodied spirit is being one in a place you think of as home.”

  When they reached the open doorway they gathered on its threshold to watch. The leader, the noble Limbor cul-Mayr, was still seated at the centre of his Nightkin flock, and from a casket was producing several small golden emblems which he placed on the floor all around him, ten in all. To Ayoni’s eyes each one possessed a strange ashgrey nimbus. Cul-Mayr smiled an unpleasant smile as he placed the last one then surveyed the Nightkin.

  “Brothers,” he said. “The blessed vulsors.”

  Hands dipped into pockets or delved within robes and brought ten pendants, all identical — a flattened copper ring with a greenish stone at its centre and glyphs inscribed all around it. As the Nightkin hung them about their necks, Ayoni noticed that they possessed the same flickering grey aura. There was nervous, quiet laughter, exchanged looks, dry lips licked, hands restlessly moving or tensely clasped. Cul-Mayr nodded in satisfaction.

  “Now the orisons.”

  The ten began a low-pitched chant in old High Mantinoran, archaic syllables that Ayoni could just about understand as imprecations for an entity called the Great Shadow, pleading for its intercession. As the Nightkin repeated their chant, cul-Mayr began to declaim in Yularian;

  “Hear thy servant, Great Shadow of the age — the foes of Holy Night are weak and scattered and our lands lie fallow, awaiting thy plough, thy seed, thy scythe. The towns and the cities will cast down their walls before thee and thy eternal word shall become the very arbiter of life and death. Open the fount of thy will and wisdom, we pray, that we might further perfect and strengthen our purpose. Open the well of thy powers that these poor servants of thine may offer themselves up as truly worthy vessels of thy inexorable might…”

  Cul-Mayr continued in this vein for a short while before lapsing into silence. But this was only a brief pause before he started again, introducing a string of servile oaths and vows, promises to pursue the Great Shadow’s enemies and exterminate them down to the last. When he paused for a second time, Bardow turned to Atroc and said;

  “Do you recognise any of that, I wonder?”

  The old Mogaun grunted. “Before the tribes came to this land, the Acolytes of Twilight often walked among us, trying to teach us their prayers. While many shamen were swayed, the seers remained wary, always seeking to avoid cages for the mind. The doggerel that this one is spewing is a corruption of those ancient devotions.”

  “So this is a ritual for invoking the Lord of Twilight?” Bardow said.

  Atroc shook his head. “Such a ritual would be more than just words; it demands all thought, all belief, all of love and hate. No — you should look at the charms they are wearing and the ones he put on the floor around him. There is something darker coming.”

  Bardow looked Ayoni and Chellour. “In 300 years all of us have borne witness to innumerable groups of zealots, mystics and self-proclaimed prophets in this place, so something may transpire, or it may not.”

  “And yet the Carver came here and ascended,” said Chellour. “Did any of you witness it?”

  “Only Nerek saw it,” Atroc said. “And she said very little save that the Carver’s body became wholly like ours before he disappeared.”

  “Is that what these are attempting?” said Gilly. “Ascension of some kind?”

  “No, my friend,” said Bardow. “Real power in the here and now is their goal, power to use for their own self-aggrandisement, power as a way of gaining more power…”

  “Something’s happening,” said Ayoni.

  As she watched, the restless grey auras around the ten floor emblems had begun to expand, slowly but noticeably. Not they wer extending upwards, wavering like tongues of ashen flame that encircled cul-Mayr who spoke on and one with eyes closed. At the same time, the pendants worn by the Nightkin began to pulse with the same grey radiance while their wearers sat still and chanted, oblivious as each nimbus extruded a hazy tendril towards the corresponding emblem on the floor next to Limbor cul-Mayr. Suddenly, all the ghostly tendrils lanced forward to join with the auras surrounding the floor emblems and as one the Nightkin acolytes froze in mid-chant, mouths open, lips trembling as they strove to speak or even scream. Seeing this, the seated cul-Mayr smiled.

  “Master, hear me,” he said. “My flock is trammelled and I am ready to begin the Bloodgate ceremony.”

  Then another voice was heard in the great empty chamber, a sibilant rushing voice.

  “You have done well…prepare now for your reward!”

  Then the upward trailing tongues of ash-grey flame swirled and swiftly coiled around cul-Mayr, embracing him from crossed legs to the crown of his head. A look of utmost horror came to his face and his throat gave forth only gasps as he fought against the spectral bonds. But his struggles quickly slowed and his eyes became glazed and vacant. The ten Nightkin jerked where they sat, small convulsion that preceded a darkening of the grey tendrils that bound them to cul-Mayr. Then the darkness grew red and flowed down towards the golden emblems encircling cul-Mayr and before long a crimson flush spreading up through the greyness that entwined him. Ayoni felt sick as she watched, knowing that all of these fools had been betrayed by their master, condemned to be sacrifices in a vile act of blood sorcery.

  One by one the Nightkin slumped or toppled lifeless to the floor as their veins were exhausted. The grey weave enclosing cul-Mayr changed to a dark, mottled scarlet which also began to suffuse his own flesh and garments. By the time the last of his flock finally lay sprawled and dead, cul-Mayr was fully cloaked, encased in a dully gleaming red caul in which the features of his face were only vaguely discernable. Its surface wept shimmering droplets and a heavy vapour drifted down its flanks as it took on a slight glow. The glow brightened through shades of red until it became the unwatchable, burning fury of the furnace. Ayoni and the others averted their gaze as the brightness obscured all and filled the chamber.

  Soo
n it subsided and faded away. When Ayoni looked she that all the lamps and torches had gone out, leaving only the faint, glimmering radiance of the dream-realm to challenge the darkness. As they entered the chamber, she realised that there was a strange blotch of greyness in the middle of the floor exactly where Limbor cul-Mayr had been sitting. Drawing near, she saw that it was an irregular patch of some neutral blue-greyness, like a mould. It was perhaps four or five yards across and had a foot-high mound at its centre and ten tapering protrusions.

  “Nobody touch it,” said Bardow. “This is the result of necromantia, which usually means deadly peril.”

  “I am relieved,” said Gilly with a grin as he rose into midair, and floated over the greyness. “I thought it might be really dangerous.”

  Bardow frowned and shook his head. “If you choose not to listen…”

  But Gilly had reached the centre of the greyness and was hovering a yard or so above the mound.

  “The surface of it is finely texture and very even,” he reported. “There seems to be vague shapes beneath, however…not sure what they are — ah!”

  “What?” Bardow snapped.

  “Er, a pair of eyes just opened in the top of this mound and they’re staring up at me.”

  “Move away from it, now,” Bardow said. “Everyone else get back.”

  Gaining height, Gilly twisted away from the grey mound but then the surface bulged and put forth a thin, flat-tipped tentacle which thrust upwards to wrap itself around his legs. Gilly let out a cry of shock and fought as other grey coils lunged up at him, engulfing his legs.

  “Bardow, what can we do?” Ayoni said.

  “What can the disembodied do?” he retorted angrily.

  “Perhaps nothing,” Atroc said. “Perhaps something.”

  At first the Archmage shook his head, then he shrugged and together he and the old Mogaun flew over to Gilly who was being drawn inexorably down. But the rippling greyness beneath him bulged again and, in an abrupt transformation, became the head and shoulders of a pair of hooded figures, both as grey as the thing blighting the floor. These deathly forms rose suddenly on thick curved columns, hands outstretched. Ayoni and Chellour shouted warnings and although Atroc managed to evade the snatching grey hands Bardow was caught. Then the hooded figures’ outlines melted and flowed, engulfing the archmage up to his chest.