Shadow Knight

by O. J. Lowe

I opened my mouth to speak, anything to continue the argument, the sound erupted from speakers in the corners of the ceiling, four of them around the room, ugly black boxy things I found myself surprised I hadn’t noticed before. At least we’d been silenced from arguing. That could have gone on indefinitely.

  The voice on the other end of the speakers didn’t have even a trace of humanity in it, fully automated and all the personality of your average kitchen utensil.

  “First brings the path ahead,

  Second brings the fire,

  While third a killer silenced, the death of the dream.

  Fourth sets loose things best buried.

  Time is no man’s friend, the last enemy to be destroyed.”

  I blinked, stared at Moulton for several long seconds, right up until the point he turned and smashed his foot against the door to little avail, bringing his leg back again and again with a series of thunderous bangs until finally he relented with the door standing just as strong as it had before, impassively staring at him. If inanimate objects could smile, I found myself sure it’d be smirking at the utter futility of his efforts.

  Nothing like being mugged off by a door.

  “You quite done yet?” I inquired. “I think you might have beaten the mighty door into submission if you’d given it a little more welly.”

  He glared at me, though only for a second and then his façade shattered. “Think I broke my foot.” His eye, I noticed, had nearly formed back into place. It no longer looked like a particularly abused cork board, though I doubted he had full vision back in it yet. He even winced as he put his weight back on it, withdrew with a sharp gasp.

  “Riddles, eh?” I asked, staring around the room, my gaze falling on the four portraits and the buttons beneath them. Could it really be that simple? “Or maybe a logic puzzle. Something, anyway. Guess we’ve got to push a button. Four buttons. Four choices. One brings the path ahead, a way out maybe.”

  “Two brings the fire,” Moulton said. “Don’t know about you, but I’m quite keen on avoiding that.”

  “It might simply control the fireplace,” I offered with a smirk.

  “Or it might blow us to kingdom come. I’m considerably more flammable than I was before, you know.”

  “I’m not sure I’d say considerably,” I said. “As a pyromancer, I’ve discovered human beings can be particularly flammable, especially when they’re soaked in gin.” I’m a big hit when I do fire tricks at the Vigilant Christmas party.

  “Three,” Moulton said. “A killer silenced and the death of dreams. That sounds ominous, right?”

  “Something that doesn’t kill with noise,” I mused. “That’s not exactly helpful. There’s a lot of things that kill silent.” Like Merlehaun’s Syndrome, I wanted to add, refrained from doing it. I didn’t need to think about my family troubles right now.

  “And I certainly don’t want to know what the beast below is,” Moulton added. “So, here’s a suggestion, how about we avoid pushing buttons two through to four and get the hell out of here?”

  “I like it,” I admitted, studying the portraits. The first. Which would have been the first portrait? The oldest, I supposed. That made sense. I vocalised it to Moulton, he gave me a nod of agreement. That was enough for me.

  “How’s your history?” I asked. I’d already looked at the faces, didn’t know any of them from Adam. None of them stood out, therefore nobody famous. Maybe they’d done something as unremarkable as own this house. The events behind them though, that made things interesting. Rather than a mundane setting, a study or some such background, they’d been placed against vivid backdrops of the Novisarium, far more impressive than the subjects themselves.

  Moulton fixated on two of the portraits in front of him, let his chin rest on his hand as he glared at it. “It might show an old event,” he said. “But that doesn’t make it the oldest. Just because it shows them there doesn’t mean that they…” He tailed off, jabbed his finger against one of the portraits. “Think I’ve seen this before,” he admitted. In the picture, a procession trailed through the streets in the background, some of them carrying signs and banners, some of them flaming torches, the subject in the foreground with a look befitting of one who either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on behind him. “Think this is when they finally strung up Doctor Frankenstein for crimes against humanity.”

  “Always think that’s misleading,” I said. “He didn’t just piss humans off. Think the zombie population wanted to lynch him as well. And the vampires. And the wizards. Jesus, now I put it like that, I think it’s been the only thing anyone ever agreed on in this damn city. We didn’t mind the grave robbing; it was when he started putting them all back together that people got upset about the whole damn thing.” And it’s true. Nobody wants to think that their granny, or at least part of her anyway, is wandering around, stitched into part of some shambling facsimile of life created by a man equal parts genius and lunatic.

  “This might just be the Novisarium’s greatest violent acts,” Moulton mused. “I think this is when they killed McMurdo at the Burning Battle of St Sebastien.”

  Funny story there, or at least the makings of one. There used to be a Novisarium district called St Sebastien. Despite the name, it hadn’t been the fanciest of places, little more functioning than Stoller’s Shanty, it’d been set up as a place for interdimensional refuges by a humanitarian named Sebastien Bruchard. His critics said it was little more than a migrant camp, little amenities, but those who praised him for the wrong reasons were at least pleased that he’d kept them out of sight of the rest of the city.

  Welcome to the Novisarium. You can’t please everyone. And after some refugees from Muspelheim rocked up, things turned very bad indeed.

  Six.

  I’ve always had an affinity for fire. If I was feeling especially poetical, I might well say that the fires inside me fuel me, my passions drive me forward and whenever I feel wronged, I feel a burning sense to put it right. Because after all, that’s supposed to be a characteristic of a wizard, right? Skilled with fire, eager to use it to burn things. History is laden with tales of those magically inclined with a saga as long as your arm when it comes to arson and property destruction.

  Me? I’ve always been a little more restrained. And my last apprentice couldn’t burn down a building even if he tried. Well, that’s not technically true. If he had a fuel can and a box of matches, he could. There are five basic affinities to magic. (And five families in the Shining Council too. Work out whether that’s a coincidence or not. I don’t think it is, they’ve certainly never claimed it to be.) The four traditional elements, fire, earth, air and water, as well as shadow. Just because one has an affinity they’re most strongly attached to, it doesn’t mean they can’t learn others, but never the polar opposite to their speciality. It meant I couldn’t use water magic; it meant my apprentice couldn’t use fire magic.

  Why was I training him then? Let’s just say I saw something special in him and leave it at that. No rule says I can’t. I’ve trained apprentices in all schools of magic. Once you’ve mastered one, or more often developed a rudimentary understanding of it, there are other fields of learning to approach, such as psychomancy, the art of mental magic, or beastmancy, the art of summoning and controlling creatures from other planes of existence.

  Except I wasn’t training him these days, was I? I made a choice, for better or worse. I’d live by it, I’d die by it, I’d hope that one day he might understand. Mark has always been emotional, sometimes a little too much so. It’s not necessarily a criticism, a lot of wizards draw on power from their emotions. Where it becomes a problem is with distress or anger comes a lack of clarity, with that lack of clarity can come a disturbing lack of control. When you’re wielding the primordial forces of creation, losing control can be deadly. Common sense really. Getting lost in the magic, drawing too much upon it, it can have its own consequences. Those who use it wildly, without a care for the consequences, it can lead to a magica
l addiction, to the desire for more and more power often with negative effects on those around you. I’ve heard stories of addicts trying to physically suck the magical energy out of those around them, often with fatal consequence since so much of magic is tied up within our life force. You take that, it diminishes us. I’ve heard scholars try to use it as an argument to classify those who wield it as something other than human, but it always gained little traction. Largely because those chinless wonders on the Shining Council don’t want to admit to being less than human. Some of them have a big thing about the whole idea of human superiority over other races, if they suddenly started classing themselves as something else, it’d lead to all sorts of arguments.

  That, you might argue, was a good enough reason for it in itself. Maybe I’m a troublemaker, ironically for someone with the iron boots of law enforcement upon their feet.

  Too much of it can go the other way, to swear off magic completely like Mark vowed to do, it invites withdrawal symptoms. Constantly using something every day, just enough to get a practical use of it, it still has an adverse effect on you, your body becomes used to it. Suddenly cutting yourself off to make a point, vowing never to use it again, your body suddenly lacks that thing that it’s gotten used to, it can have consequences just as negative.

  So, the moral of magic. Use it, sure. But not too much. And for God’s sake, don’t suddenly stop. That’ll fuck you up just as badly. Magic. I once heard someone say it’ll get a guy killed. Personally, I’ve found it’s more of a balancing act, those wizards with the most harmony within them will inevitably get the best results.

  Ironic really, given those choosing to walk the path of the wizard usually have something within them forcing everything out of whack. Sometimes I consider magic as a metaphor, as it being a result of the things that we wish that we could have, as the things we wish we could change, it makes us everything we always wished that we could be.

  Since Carla, it might be argued my magic was well and truly out of whack, everything off, emotions high, the control escaping me. That was the reason I’d chosen merely to use the silverthorn on those who might know something rather than threatening to burn them alive. Because I doubt that I’d be able to pull back from that threat if it truly came down to it.

  I’d been a young officer in the Vigilant when St Sebastien had burned, the district not the man. When those who’d called themselves the children of Surtur had rocked up, escaping those who’d tried to kill them, there’d been uproar. Some of them still roamed the city as anarchist arsonists, but their numbers were few, ever since the battle. When you have that many angry young males floating into an area with a different cultural belief to the rest of the population, it immediately causes problems. Sometimes those differences are too much to bear and it only takes a spark to light the touch paper. Sometimes quite literally in this case, someone burned the wrong person and we had too many nights of rioting. The Vigilant had to go in, they had to recruit a shitload of new staff in the aftermath. Some said the policing was heavy handed, I said they hadn’t given us a chance.

  “Yeah, I remember this,” I said. “About sixty-five years ago. I’m not likely to bloody forget it.” I gave Moulton an uneasy grin, my way of reminding him that he hadn’t even been a glint in his daddy’s eye when this had all gone down. “So, we’ve got two pictures of public disturbances, both involving Novisarium events.”

  “This one,” Moulton said, tapping the picture. “I think that’s Vressiere in the background.” I turned my attention to the third picture, didn’t fail to recognise the bald-headed vampire with the olive skin at an altar. A woman with skin darker than mine stood across the altar from him, an ivory-coloured gown across her frame, her eyes a shade of violet.

  “You met him yet?” I asked.

  “Should I have?”

  “You know what he looks like,” I said.

  “All the knights did,” he replied. “We need to know what the enemies of the Shining Council look like. Just in case we need to put them down. I’ve not met everyone in the Sunlight Court. I don’t even think I’m full vampire yet, they’d probably kill me on sight.”

  We were both in agreement then, that a vampire from the Sunlight Court had been the one to bite him. The two courts didn’t get on, all in the Sunlight Court were male, those in the Moonlight Court female. Science tells us that in the event of a Sunlight vampire biting and trying to turn a woman, she has a very painful few days before eventual expiration. Something about the blood being unable to mix with the chromosomes. Mind you, some might say it’s a better fate than what goes the other way if a Moonlight Court vampire bites a man, though it’s never been proven that the blood completely overwrites their genetic structure, rewrites their chromosomes. Someone once told me we all start life as female; the blood of a Moonlight vampire has a reset effect on the system.

  That’s never been proven though, at least not scientifically. Unofficially, it happens every now and then. Usually for people who’ve pissed the queen off something rotten. You mention it in polite company, especially to one of the nobles, they take it as the ultimate insult. Insinuate they were the product of such a change, they’d be liable to rip your head off and nobody would stick their neck out to stop them.

  “This,” I said, studying the picture. “It happened a long time ago. Before mine. Before anyone, barring the vampires themselves,” I paused, glanced at another figure stood not too far from Vressiere. The bald vampire wore an expensive suit, an unnerving smile. Hell, most of the stuff vampires did was unnerving in my experience. I’d seen the other figure and recently, grey haired and quite distinguished looking. Most people in the Novisarium who thought themselves to be in the know, they hadn’t believed he existed until they’d seen proof on the television recently, followed by his public execution at the hands of Libby Tombs. Welcome to the drama of the Novisarium, I’m sure we didn’t have crap like this to deal with every so often. “Most of them might not even be alive. I’m not sure I remember the exact details, but they called it the Red Wedding.”

  “Really, just like—”

  “This was the best part of five hundred years ago,” I said. “Nobody had written those books back then. Everyone had just been thrown into the Novisarium, we’d been kicked out of the outside world and I think the vampires had plans, they thought they could use the opportunity to forget old grudges, band together and rule things themselves.”

  “I think I heard the stories of this,” Moulton said. “What happened?”

  “They were going to have a wedding, try to band the king and queen of each court together in marital bliss, if not unity then at least a truce. The Abramescu family sat on the throne of the Moonlight Court then, that’s her with the white gown on. Talia Abramescu.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “They couldn’t forget old grudges. Someone said something at the wedding, it all kicked off and the whole thing was abandoned as an idea.” I gave him a grin. “The whole ill-feeling was compounded, I do believe, because nobody wanted to pay for the wedding and the caterers ended up trying to take both courts to court. I think they’ve still got it tied up in red tape. Talia Abramescu was killed, Cassandra De Lune stole the throne out from beneath the only other Abramescu, Zarah, and well, the De Lune’s have sat on it ever since.”

  “Zarah Abramescu is still walking around though,” Moulton said.

  “Your point being?”

  “It must have been a bloodless coup.”

  “You’d have to ask them about that,” I said. “I don’t know what the hell happened between them. Maybe Cassandra made her a better deal.”

  “What could be better than being queen?”

  “Not being a target, maybe,” I said. “Not everyone is cut out for that position. Being at the top, you’re seen as the first line of prosperity. If things are going well, you must be good. If things are going badly, you’re obviously shit at your job.”

  “Not on the Shining Council,” he said stiffly. “If thi
ngs are going badly, it’s the fault of the people who have been put in charge to organise it by the people at the top.”

  “If someone appoints someone who does a bad job, they should be removed as well,” I said with a grin. “It’d make things so much simpler. Maybe it’d make them think a bit more about the potential consequences of their choice.”

  “And what’s the final picture?” Moulton asked, changing the subject as he tried to peer past me to view it. I turned, studied the final figure in front of a woodland backdrop, a fleeing figure with red-gold hair the colour of firelight being chased by a man in rags carrying a knife. The faces had been obscured, but the more I studied it, the more I found myself sure of the location, even if I’d never been there.

  “Well now,” I said. “That’s interesting. You know where that is?”

  “High Hall?” he asked.

  “High Hall,” I confirmed. “I’ve heard about this painting. It’s called The Flight of Titania.”

  Something flashed across Moulton’s eyes at the mention of the name, the briefest hint of recognition at the name. I wasn’t surprised, everyone had heard of the two fallen queens of fae. It just goes to prove that nothing and nobody lasts forever in the hardest of jobs. What did that mean for me at the Vigilant? I didn’t want to think about it.

  “I heard,” he said. “I recently spent some time there. And if that’s Titania—” He jabbed at the picture of the fleeing woman, then to the man following her— “Then that must be her murderer. Ronnie Frazer, the false queen’s knight.”

  “For all intents and purposes, Queen Leanna is the true ruler of High Hall,” I reminded him, as much as I got the impression that he didn’t like to hear it. “Once there were two, one of summer and one of winter, but now that power resides in a single figure.”

  “She stole the power,” Moulton said. “She’s no better than a common cutpurse and if she’d done it here, she’d have been executed, her hands cut off. Hell, I’d have done it myself given the chance.”