Shadow Knight

by O. J. Lowe

  Still, Armitage lingered near the Church of the Unholy Sun only briefly before weaving his way through the section of the Novisarium, no rhyme or reason to his movements, apparently entirely at random as to where he goes and whom he talks to. Eventually Pierce spots him talking to a small boy on a bicycle before vanishing into the store behind him. Only a short time passes before the boy follows him into the convenience store, comes out again not too long after with a parcel. He gets on his bike, Pierce notices, soon cycles away, though he doesn’t look happy about his situation.

  Maybe a minute or two later, Armitage saunters out and the chase continues, on and on, back to the streets until finally he comes up short outside a warehouse. Pierce knows the story of this place; it was abandoned a long time ago after the owner refused to pay his dues to King Santiago. A mistake he wasn’t allowed to make twice. Pierce should know, he was the one despatched to deliver the warning. Long now has he served; he’s never had to repeat himself when it comes to things like this. If the message is clear enough, you need only say it once.

  The other figure is interesting. Armitage smells of ash and fire, the companion of swamp water and graveyards. He catches hints and snippets of their conversation, not daring to get too close lest they become aware of his presence. He smiles as the stranger hurls Armitage to the roof and then leaves, wanders away into the night, though not before fixating on the position Pierce has situated himself in.

  “I’d advise you to stick around,” he rumbles, those wild eyes staring into the darkness. “I think what happens next could well be interesting. Either way, that scene in there will tell a hell of a story, I imagine.”

  With those words echoing in the darkness, he vanishes, leaving Pierce alone. He deliberates on the words for a moment, weighs the options. Inside that warehouse, a subject of Santiago Vressiere could be suffering. Is it not his duty to ensure that every citizen of the Sunlight Court is aware just how far their king and those beneath him will go to protect them?

  He makes the choice to wait and see. Vengeance is just as good as sanctuary.

  Whatever is happening in there, he feels it must be a hell of a battle, he moves closer and realises he can smell the magic in the air, both from the wards around the building to that being thrown around inside.

  This is none of his business now, he realises that, before he hears the shrieks and screams, neither of which sound anything close to human, smells the bitter tang of smoke and hears the flickering of flames and concludes he’d like to see the end. Curiosity, you see. Pierce has always been a curious man, his curiosities have extended from the mundane to the macabre for years, wherever a mystery is to be found, he’s wanted to worry himself over it until an answer presents itself.

  When one of the combatants, for he doesn’t dare illusion himself that this is what has happened, emerges from the warehouse, he notes the near nakedness of Armitage, a much better-looking Armitage for sure. Younger. More powerful. Something different though for the life of him, Pierce can’t figure out what. Confidence? Self-assurance? Satisfaction? It could be all of them or none.

  When he’s confident the assassin has left, he steels himself and heads for the entrance, any hint of the magical wards around the building fades even as he approaches. A sure sign the caster is dead, perhaps. Pierce picks up his pace, wrinkles his nose at the scent of cooked meat, human flesh roasted hot beyond repair.

  The body lays where Armitage left it, death is close, close enough to smell and some spark flickers inside Pierce, something he’s long thought dead and gone. Before he was a vampire, he’d have tried to save him. Now though, he studies the charred corpse with professional detachment. There are those for whom life is a means to create suffering, both their own and others, they cannot live without the conflict and the disharmony. Inevitably those individuals live by the sword and they die by it too.

  The body judders, the eyes are gone, the mouth sealed shut, the nose collapsing in on itself. He can see the breathing is jagged, laboured even and the moment is close. Why? That’s the question on his mind, he wants to know what this poor asshole did that was so bad that he was destined to die like this. Pierce doesn’t even know how it was done; he’s seen bodies thrown in furnaces that didn’t suffer this much damage this quickly.

  If he’s going to do something, he knows it must be done now. Those final moments approach and once the last breath is taken, it’ll be too late. He runs his tongue across the fangs in his mouth, grimaces at the prospect. He’s never liked his food this well-done since the change. Medium or rare for him, always. Still, he swoops on the corpse, fangs bite into the neck. The blood is hot, left bitter and sour by whatever burned him. He makes sure to drink it all down, swallows it and tries to ignore the lurch in his stomach as he slashes a nail across his wrist.

  “I’m a curious man,” he says, watching as the crimson starts to gush from the gash in his dark skin. “I’m a patient man, but never mistake that for passiveness.” He thinks back over those he’s changed before, those whom he’s brought into the fold of the Sunlight Court. Whoever this poor burned man is, they’ll soon find out.

  He slashes the lips open where they’ve melted together, steam gushes from inside him and Pierce presses his bleeding wrist to the stranger’s mouth, lets it drip-drip-drip into him. His throat might be ruined, but soon the reaction is there, soon he’s sucking away like an infant at its mother’s tit.

  “Drink up, son,” Pierce says. “You’re going to be just fine. And you’re going to be better than new. You’re not going into the night, not without my say-so.”

  It threatens to ruin his clothes, but he holds him, like a proud parent and waits. And waits. And waits.

  Back in his mortal life, Alexander Pierce had a wife, he had children. Since becoming a vampire, he’s been in this position before. It’s always the same, now and then. Either he’ll get better, or he won’t. Pierce, like any vampire, has given him a single chance, and that alone. Whether he has the nerve to claw himself back from death, that’s down to him.

  Blood Knight and Beyond.

  Prologue.

  We all have choices to make we often find unseemly. I suppose you have to ask yourself what you would do if you were ever in those circumstances. Throughout my life, I’ve made many choices, some of them good, some of them bad and some necessary. It’s the lattermost that people judge you by, I’ve always found. Some people can’t always understand the necessary choices, they lack the capability to see beyond their own point of view. Actions and consequences are the building blocks of life, if you’re prepared to live with the consequences, then you’re free for you have no hesitation in action. It’s never so much about whether you should do something, it becomes more about how you’ll do it.

  For a long time, I thought I had my limits, I thought there were lines that I wouldn’t cross. I always knew I’d take it so far, skate on the edge of an unseen boundary and yet then I’d turn back. My world is a world of rules, of regulations and so many of those unseen boundaries, lines that I have to follow. It is a world of law and order, a barricade against the chaos that threatens to swamp my city every night.

  My name is John Carlos de Souca. Sevo of the Novisarium Vigilant and wizard. I am one of only two men to currently hold that rank permanently, one of them currently suspended for making some inexcusably poor decisions regarding a prisoner and a bounty hunter. Therefore, the forces of balance dictate most of his workload falls onto me. Of all the law enforcement across the Novisarium, the city between cities, only one figure holds a higher rank than me, the infamous Morningstar. Years ago, he managed to get a transfer from ruling Hell to taking charge of the policing here. What qualifications or experience he might have to do the job, I cannot say, but I’ve always found him pleasant enough. I’ve had worse bosses, put it that way.

  His first day on the job, or so Cavendish told me as I wasn’t in charge then, he allegedly called both his sevos into the office and told them he was leaving the policing of the city to
them. Whatever decisions they wished to make, he would back them, whatever they needed to do the job, he would ensure they got that support. While they did their job, his focus was on corruption. The Vigilant back then wasn’t the Vigilant of now, there would always be those who thought joining it a ticket to grasping the best that Novisarium shopkeepers can give up in exchange for protection.

  I suppose the literal devil would know, corruption is a bad seed, it sits there rotting and the longer it does, the more it spreads. I wonder what he’d say if he knew about my choices of the last several hours. It might sound dramatic, but believe me, I feel as if all my previous qualms about crossing lines and breaking the rules, they’ve been thoroughly shattered into a million little pieces. I haven’t just crossed a line; I’ve jumped over it and dived face-first into the abyss without a care what it’s going to do to me.

  The strangest thing is that I no longer care about the consequences of my actions. I did the only thing I could do.

  I’ll live by that. I’ll die by it. Above all else, I’ll stand by it. No matter what.

  One.

  Bitter water forced its way into my skin, up my nostrils and up my lungs and I woke up choking, the pain rushing into me, a sudden companion I hadn’t been aware of until I took that first step into the waking world. I blinked, tried to find my sight, the room dark, my arms bound above my head, special attention paid to make sure my hands and fingers were secured. Well, whomever had done that knew what they were doing. Wizards need their hands historically. My feet trailed across the floor, my shoulders and back aflame as I tried to steady myself, every little movement setting me swaying. I coughed and spluttered, tried to throw the vile liquid out of my system, to spit it up. My throat ached horribly as I groaned, still fighting the losing battle to still myself.

  I closed my eyes, tried to ignore the pounding of my heart in my ears, focused on whatever I could. Sight was out, my taste buds inflamed by brackish water. That left three other senses to try and work out what was going on. At the Vigilant, we’re trained to never focus on just one of them. Having no vision at the moment might not be such a bad thing, sight is the one sense we rely on more than most and it’s actually the one most likely to deceive us.

  What could I smell? More water. That didn’t help. Beyond that, I took several deep breaths, thought I caught a hint of copper in the air. Blood perhaps? I didn’t think I had any wounds on my body, though it was possible I hadn’t become aware of them just yet. Okay, so smell hadn’t helped either. For another being, a vampire or a shifter, it might well have. The olfactory senses of a human are remarkably stunted in comparison to either of those. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Just simple evolution.

  Touch then. That didn’t help either, all I could tell was that the chains were made of some sort of metal, probably good quality steel by the way they refused to give as I tugged at them, that the floor was wet beneath my feet, probably soaked concrete or something like that as I flapped my foot into a puddle, heard it meet the hard surface beneath. I stretched my fingers up as much as I could, tried to shut out the pain as some of them were forced into place by the chain, strained to see if I could touch ceiling above. They scraped against some sort of metal O-ring, I grimaced and gave up for now.

  Okay, what could I hear? I’d left this until last, give my thundering heart the chance to quieten down. If I strained my hearing, I was sure I could hear voices somewhere in the distance, quiet admittedly, very muffled, not a chance of making out what they were saying, but voices regardless. Somewhere around me, I caught the sounds of dripping water, no doubt from my soaked clothes onto the ground.

  Where had that water come from? That felt a pertinent question, I realised. Either I was underneath a giant faucet, or someone was in here with me. I stiffened, pricked up my ears even further and tried to catch even the faintest hint of whether I was alone or not.

  “Hello?” My throat hurt, even with that single, simple word. Some of the water had gone down the wrong pipe, it would appear.

  “You’re awake. About time.”

  The lights snapped on and I recoiled, shied away from it, squeezed my eyes shut, flinched as it threatened to scorch my retinas. When light is minimal, the pupils of the human eye expand to try and let as much light in as possible. When there’s plenty of it, they contract to reduce it. Suddenly switching between the two is not a pleasant experience, as I could testify.

  By the time my head stopped pounding and the sunspots faded, the chains retracted around my arms and suddenly I was falling, no longer held up. I hit the ground and groaned as the breath was forced out of me, flailing across puddled grooves in the concrete. This was not turning out to be my day. I made to roll onto my back, desperate to confront the asshole who was doing his level best to piss me off.

  Except in a heartbeat, the concrete was no longer there, snapped apart with a click, my hands suddenly scrabbling against empty air as I fell, plummeted through empty space out of control, the scream bursting from me. I couldn’t have controlled it, even if I wanted to. Falling is the very personification of having no control, you’re at the mercy of gravity, of the air around you, of the environment. Some people outside the Novisarium do this for fun, jump from aeroplanes and yet I’ve never seen the attraction of it. Never mind that machines are banned from the sky in the Novisarium. You see old movies of people doing skydives and I personally think they’re out of their tree.

  The landing wasn’t the worst I’d ever had, soft enough at least, more air knocked from me as I hit the crash mat and rolled off in an untidy heap, simply lay there for a moment to try and regain some composure. I’d had some bad times in my life, working for the Vigilant is never a simple life, but I had a feeling that this particular incident was going to make a suicide run towards the top ten. Maybe even the top five.

  Higher, perhaps?

  I immediately reached for the magic inside me, my eyes widening as I realised that I could feel it, if not touch it. I’d never experienced anything like this before, like the magic inside me lingered behind a glass barrier, able to be seen, able to be sensed, able to be heard but never touched. For all intents and purposes, I was powerless for the moment. I tried again, tried to take a grip on it, my magic howled behind the barrier, but it held fast against my efforts. Whatever had done this was a tricky bit of sorcery, I had to admit. Not many could weave a trick like that around me.

  Did I regret the circumstances that drove me here? I couldn’t. Not if I succeeded. Whatever this place threw at me, I had to survive, had to come out with what I needed. People were depending on me. People I couldn’t afford to let down. Reluctantly I pushed myself into a kneeling position, rose to my feet. It was lighter down here, a few scant candles towards the back of the room, casting the area around them into murky shadows. Some sort of basement, I guessed, I glanced upwards at the chute I’d fallen down, a dark hole some ten feet above my head. I wasn’t going back that way.

  “You’re not the first to consider it.”

  I spun around at the sound of the voice, wondered how I’d been so blind as to miss the pale man sat in a seat across the other end of the room, his hair a ridiculous shade of pale blond. What immediately drew my eyes were the pointed ears, some sort of fae heritage. That automatically set my teeth on edge. There’s maybe one good fae half-breed in the Novisarium, and even that’s subjective. He’s good if you want someone found and shot. Maybe not so good at knowing where the lines are.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We all end up at the bottom at some point or another. Dumped down beyond the lowest rung of the ladder. Everything in life is a ladder, you know. You get to the top of one, it just leads to the bottom of another.”

  “An interesting philosophy,” I said, studying him. I felt like I knew him from somewhere, definitely something familiar about the face, not that I could place him right at this moment. Too much other stuff on my mind. “A little defeatist.”

  “Practical, I think,” he said. “I’ve been in th
e same position. I was once at the top. I had a great fall. I thought I’d hit rock-bottom. Turned out I was wrong.” He let out an eerie high-pitched laugh, slapped his leg as if he’d said the funniest thing ever. “There’s always further to fall, you know. We never hit the bottom, some of us will just fall and fall forever. We’ll spiral into an eternity of torment, never knowing that if should we start to climb again it’ll do us any good or not.”

  A door stood at the back of the room, I ignored him for the moment and moved across to study it, stood with my hands on my hips as I took it in. It looked heavy, a great brass keyhole staring defiantly at me. Kicking it in wasn’t an option, the polished wood looked thick, thicker than I was capable of damaging without magic. I tried to reach for it again, burning it to cinders would be immensely satisfying and yet I wasn’t to have that release. I grimaced, took a step back, turned to find the pale-skinned man right up in my face. I’d never seen eyes like that before, lost and wild as if any sense of self within them had been lost and found half a dozen times and the man behind them didn’t have a buggering clue when he was going to wander off again.

  “Every door has a key,” he said in a sing-song voice. “Every key has a lock. Every lock has a door. Cycles.”

  “Is there a key in here?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t be much of a prison if there was, would it?” he asked, grinning inanely, like a simple child. “Can you feel it?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Feel what?”

  “The weight of expectation,” he said. “The idea that we’re expected to act in a way because of our circumstances. We’re stuck in here with each other, we’re being watched most likely—” I found myself scanning the room for any sort of tell-tale black eye that might signify a camera. It didn’t mean there was one, they might well be scrying us. Not a lot I could do about it if that was the case— “and well, you’re probably wondering why.”