When she woke, Tori knew it was a memory. The images ran over and over in her mind, and she knew she had seen them before. It was a memory she had forgotten completely. But how could I forget something so… real?
Tori did not understand it, but she did not ponder long before the guards came and drained her blood, and she sank back into her blood-spent stupor.
But the dreams always returned.
She dreamed of the night her mum betrayed her. They sprinted through the tent city, Tori gripping her mum’s hand. Her palms were cold and sweaty. Her mum was filled with fear. Tori had always remembered that. She had thought it must have been regret or guilt for selling her own daughter. In her dreams, the tent city was haunted by soaring, twisted shadows that seemed to choke the very life out of the city...
Why have I thought so little of that night? Why was Mum so scared?
Try as she might, Tori could not bring clarity to the memories, and soon enough, her blood was drained, and any clarity she’d managed would vanish.
Tori tried to recreate the sense that had come over her when she destroyed the gallows. To find that energy in the world. She reached out with her mind, tried to focus, to rediscover that inexplicable awareness of the world. Everything had seemed so vivid, so wondrous, so full of life. Tori longed for that feeling again, the way a drunk longed for another tankard of ale. But even at her strongest, in the moments right before the guards came, day after wretched day, the world of her cell appeared as it always had, blocks of cold stone stacked and mortared to form this cube of a reeking room. Astoria Burodai had no power here, and soon enough, her blood was drained and her mind fogged over again.
In those brief moments of lucidity, Tori also thought of Darien—what horrors he had to be enduring in the Shadow Camps, how she’d failed him, how she’d taken away the power of his attempted resistance. He thought her dead and, she supposed, he would likely be dead soon as well.
They would both slip away into the great void of those who resisted the mighty. And when they were gone, the chancellor’s power would grow, and his dominion would spread from Osha to the far reaches of the New World, fueled by Tori’s magic. The longer this realization sunk in, the more she wondered whether her resistance mattered at all.
Months passed, and the snow and the cold returned. The only constant was Tori’s monthly trips to the chancellor’s palace. She hated the way he doted on her, dressing her up, feeding her fine food, tempting her with little tastes of civility, as though she were some battered pup who would come running for the slightest form of reprieve.
“Your resilience is impressive,” Cyrus Maro had said at her last visit. “Truly, I expected you to be dead by now.”
It irritated her, the way he would speak so admirably of her. Tori might as well have been dead. As the months passed by, her body slipped from frailty into decay, and her mind drifted further and further into slumber.
It was horrible to be left alone with haunted thoughts, no one to dispel the fear, the guilt, the despair. Tori began to lose track of where her dreams ended and her consciousness began. In the dark stink of her cell, she lost herself inside her own mind.
One morning, Tori woke to the sound of swords clashing outside her cell. Then, Darien burst in. Her heart filled with joy. After all this time, he had come for her. Her resistance hadn’t been in vain. Darien smiled, his copper skin glowing in the lantern light. He rushed in, cut off her shackles, kissed her forehead, and embraced her. His warmth washed over her, filling her with life.
“It’s all right, Tori,” he whispered in her ear. “We’re safe now. Come away!”
And Darien ran out the door.
Tori stumbled across the cell only to find the door sealed shut and her room empty, and then the lock clanked and the Morphs came for her blood.
The hallucinations never turned dark, however. In her fantasies, Tori always escaped, things always got better. It was as though her mind were playing sick games with her, filling her with false hope. She dreamed of feasts and sunshine and green meadows while she lay in the cold, damp darkness. She dreamed her powers returned, and she killed the guards and fled.
Tori grew fond of the hallucinations. They kept her company, kept her mind off the reality that she was slowly dying. Every time her blood was drained, she felt a little closer to death…
When her mum came to her, Tori told her straight away, “I know this isn’t real. You lied to me. Sold me. Abandoned me!”
“I’m sorry I left you,” Celene Burodai said. Her skin shone like the sunrise.
“Why didn’t you tell me what I was?” Tori sobbed.
Her mum smiled, her eyes sparkling bright like little pieces of night sky. “I had to keep you safe, my love. I have always been keeping you safe.” She reached out and touched her face, and Tori pressed into her mum’s touch. Oh, how she had longed for it, missed it. Tori was filled with warmth.
“I’m so sorry,” her mum whispered.
“Y-you didn’t… want to leave, did you?”
Celene Burodai stepped back. Her smile seemed to fill the room. Her hand brushed Tori’s face, gently, so gently that it passed right through her.
Her mum disappeared, and Tori was left alone once more, lying on the floor of her cell.
Water was drip-drip-dripping rhythmically. When it splattered, it sprayed her with tiny droplets. Very tiny droplets. As though they were pieces of something much larger, something that composed the entire world.
Tori shot up from the ground. It’s the sense! My magic!
She could feel it again. Feel the way it weaved in and out of everything, like so many threads binding the world together. So small, you could move your hand and it would pass right through without noticing.
But not for Tori. She noticed.
The Metamorphi were running late. If her senses were returning, they should come soon. Any moment, Tori feared, they would arrive and the sense would be gone.
Or worse, the sense itself might just be another hallucination.
But the Morphs never came. And the sense grew stronger, sharper. Her mind quickly oriented itself to her surroundings.
Minutes crawled by, and Tori barely breathed. She could feel her body gaining strength, clarity growing in her mind, the sense expanding.
Beyond the door, she could hear steady breaths, and there were hints of something potent on the air, like the wine she and Darien had drunk on their last night together. But there was something else as well, something sharp. Something that did not belong.
It came to her in a burst of final clarity. The steady breathing, the wine, the thing that did not belong.
Someone is helping me escape!
7
A trap! Tori thought, not daring to hope. Of course, it has to be a trap.
How else could it be explained? The Metamorphi were right outside her door, as they’d always been. This had to be the next stage in the chancellor’s sick mind games. The same way he offered her fine food and clothes when she visited him. Now, he was teasing her with a little taste of her magic. And the more her senses swelled with that glorious awareness of the world, the more she longed for it to be true. But she forced herself to wait, to resist the temptation.
An hour passed and no one came, and Tori felt as though the spring sun was shining down on her after a long, dark winter. Her mind was nearly singing. Everything felt so real, so vivid, despite the dreary nature of her surroundings.
There came no sound from beyond her cell door but steady breaths. Even so, it was some time before Tori mustered the courage to test her abilities for the first time since the square. Finally, she could not resist it any longer.
It was as though her magic were willing her to use it again. In her mind, Tori sensed the intricate mechanisms of the lock on the other side of the door. Each one rang with a certain timbre, and if it was nudged just right, it rang more sharply, it rang true.
One by one, with a strange flex of her mind, Tori nudged the mechanisms with her sorcery. Fo
r a moment, the ringing got muddled, and she feared the Metamorphi would wake from their slumber and catch her. But of course, the ringing was only in her head. It was the sense. The mechanisms slid ever so slightly, and there was a soft clang, and then Tori pressed at the iron door. It groaned as it swung free. Strength and confidence rose up within her, and she stepped from her reeking cell. At the sight of the Metamorphi, Tori’s heart leapt in her chest.
They were unconscious. Slumped against the walls on either side of the door.
Tori slipped out into the corridor. She could feel the creatures’ rhythmic breaths. Between them lay a pair of goblets and a half-empty bottle of wine. Drugged, she thought. Well, it’s run or die, now.
Tori shut the cell door behind her, took a lantern off the wall, and headed into the dark. Winding down corridor after corridor, her atrophied legs ached beneath her meager weight. She kept expecting her limbs to collapse from fatigue, but the more steps she took, the more her legs loosened up and grew stronger. Her stumbles turned into steady strides. Her mind soared with marvelous clarity. Tori winded down corridors for some time, marveling at how they continued on and on. How many other cells are there in this place? Are there others like me? Other sorcerers being harvested by the chancellor?
But she could not risk opening any doors to find out. She continued on, hoping as she turned each corner that she would not walk right into a guard.
The corridors seemed to stretch endlessly into the dark, and she began wondering if she would be found lost in this maze, days later, and then be put to death—or worse, kept alive for more months of bloodletting and agony. Perhaps it was still somehow part of the chancellor’s games. But she could not turn back. She clung to hope.
After some time, she reached the end of the passage—a rounded room with no exits. And there had been no other passageways behind her. Tori cursed the gods and turned, about to head back and brave the staircase, when she felt a twinge in her mind beckoning her back.
There was a grate in the corner. Tori drew near. The opening was just large enough to shimmy through. A stench rose from the sewage vent, and it reminded her instantly of the waste fields in the Fringes after a hard rain. The horrid odor made her stomach lurch.
But Tori could either endure the stench or wander blind until she was captured and thrown back into an equally rancid cell. She just hoped the vent led out of the tower.
The tunnel was about four feet high, and despite her slight stature, it forced her to crouch low. She followed the slow seep of sewage, one hand holding the lantern, the other plugging her nose. Each footstep squelched, and the waste seemed to sink in and grab at her rotted boots. Something brushed past her leg and she jumped, covering her mouth to keep from crying out.
A dark blur scurried off down the tunnel. It was a rat, the size of a small dog. Tori recovered herself. Her hands were shaking. The farther Tori ventured, the more blurs scampered away. The place was infested, but they ran from the lantern light. Every twenty or thirty yards, small tributaries joined the main flow of sewage. Little shadows disappeared up the smaller tunnels. They were only rats, but with every squeal and sudden movement, Tori’s heart quickened.
Legends told of other, more fearful beasts underground. It was said the beasts of the underworld were the only ones who survived the purge of the Old World. The Gulag—a worm-like monster, with multiple heads and teeth the size of skulls, that burrowed deep below the earth and formed the cavern realms beneath the Crooked Teeth. The Kroqala—the demon faeries driven below by the Watchers of old. And the Nosferati—the cursed race of cannibals that feasted on humans who wandered too deep. Tori’s mum had loved to tell tales of such beasts to the children of the Steppe.
Tori steadied herself and pressed onward, waving the torch. She could deal with rats.
But gods, the smell! It was a poison slowly numbing her mind the longer she breathed it in. Her head seemed to be floating somewhere above her body, as though she were looking down upon herself while she stumbled through the sludge.
Ahead, she caught a faint glimmer of the world above. Moments later, she tumbled out into glorious fresh air and scrambled out of the flow. Ducts bore the waste down to the harbor and dumped it into the Boundless Sea. From this viewpoint, at the base of a large hillside, Tori knew she was in the lowlands outside the limits of Maro’El.
She scrambled away from the ducts and lay in the snow, taking in fresh breaths. Towering leafless trees stretched out to the heavens like the fingers of Fringe babes grasping for their dead mothers. In the moonlight, Tori could make out her frail form. Her trousers were tattered and rotting around gangly legs, grey with grime and malnourishment. Her cloak was grungy and patchy. But she was alive.
Tori gazed up at the cloudless sky. She had never felt so grateful to see it in all her life, to lie upon snow and breathe sweet, frigid air. The stars fluttered, and the twin moons of the New World bathed the grove in a near daytime light. Tori felt as though the Sisters were shining down just for her.
Beside a small seedling in the grove, a lone purple flower poked through the snowpack. A winter lily. It was the first to bloom in the North. Winter is coming to an end.
The Northern winter had been nearing its end on the day of the Gallows. Which meant it had been a full year since Tori had breathed fresh air and felt anything but pain. A year spent bleeding, starving, lost inside her own mind. Yet here she was—free—gazing up at the war between dark and light waging in the heavens, and tonight, the light seemed to be winning.
But Tori could not rest long. An unsettling question stirred her from her reverie: Who drugged those guards? Who helped me, and where are they now?
Tori scanned the surrounding trees for movement. She felt helplessly exposed in the open grove. Would the Metamorphi come bounding through the tunnels in droves any second?
Her body tensed. But no one appeared. In the distance, the White Citadel was silhouetted against the sky. Tori could make out the outstretched arm of the chancellor’s statue, where her body had hung for all the city to see. But her true body was feeling stronger by the minute; the effects of the chancellor were already wearing thin.
Tori needed to get moving. But where?
To the north, the craggy, snow-capped peaks of the Crooked Teeth loomed over Osha. It would be the last place the Morphs would look, but even if she survived the cold, there were the Crooked mountain folk to worry about. Half-crazed and half-starved, it was told, and there were the Rulaqs, if they truly existed.
The chancellors never bothered conquering the Teeth. The mountains formed the northern and eastern boundaries of the nation, a natural fifteen-thousand-foot wall secluding Osha from the world. No one would dare bring an army through its treacherous passes. To conquer Osha, an invading army could take only three paths: the Boundless Sea, avoiding the razor-sharp rocks, massive icebergs, and towering fjords lining the western coast; the chest-high grasslands of the Green Sea of Greater Osha; or the Haunted Forest of Ghen, where ghosts had been known to drive men to their own deaths.
The sea would involve bartering passage or stowing away. But who knows when a ship will be sailing? Tori did not have time to wait. The Green Sea was the path of the Night Legions. It would be filled with marching soldiers on their way to war against the Morgathians; it would leave her far too exposed, and food would be hard to come by.
The Haunted Forest, then. There was no other choice. The forest lay west of the Fringes, across Glacier Sound. The only way across the sound was by the Meridian, the immense bridge that spanned it several leagues to the east. But the Meridian would be teeming with guards. Again, only one option.
Tori set out at a swift pace, but soon slowed. Her head felt light from her journey through the waste. Or perhaps it was the fact she’d not eaten a decent meal since her last visit with the chancellor. Tori followed the ducts for half a league, then stole through the woods to the outskirts of a small harbor village. The dirt and pebble lanes were empty, save for the occasional fisherman or doc
k servant preparing nets and lines by lantern light, and Tori made her way easily to the abandoned docks. She was beginning to feel blessed by the gods again, until she saw the guard.
The tall, broad-shouldered woman paced the docks methodically. Her head wagged from side to side, keeping count of vessels. Anyone caught ferrying over from the Fringes was put to death. Tori had never heard of anyone ferrying the other way, though. No one desired to leave Osha once they arrived.
Tori hid behind a heap of nets and pondered her next move. Her first instinct was to kill the guard and toss the body into the harbor, tied to an anchor. But she couldn’t help but think of Darien, training to fight the chancellor’s wars. This woman was a soldier like he was. A servant like Tori had been. She could not bear the thought of someone killing Darien out of convenience.
After gauging the guard’s pace, Tori waited until she passed by again, then made her way to the western end and chose an eight-foot qayaq made of socha and sealskin. The vessel was watertight, except for a small hole in the top for her body to slip through. Her legs extended down the length of the vessel, leaving her upper body exposed to row. She heaved off as softly as she could, using subtle paddle strokes to navigate her way from the docks. The guard made her way to the eastern end of the docks, oblivious, and Tori slipped into the night.
As she entered the open water, the waves grew larger and more violent. With every wave, Tori grew more nervous and more tired. Am I making any progress at all? The waves seemed to push back equally for every stroke. She dared not look back, but the shoreline of the Fringes seemed to get no closer. Already, the sky was turning grey with the coming dawn.
Tori paddled with all her strength, the nose of the vessel cutting through the waves. Salt water splashed in her mouth, reminding her how thirsty she was. Her strength was waning fast. Her arms ached. She’d had no food, and adrenaline could only take her so far.
The Shadow Watch Page 6