Shadow Knight

by O. J. Lowe

  “I don’t want to do it,” I said. “Mother, you shouldn’t die like this.”

  “I shouldn’t die at all,” she laughed, a sound like sandpaper being dragged across glass. “But it is what it is. Life has a plan for all of us. I was to be a queen; I was just that. I never planned to be your mother. When it came to pass, I had a role plotted out for you. You’ve been more or less adequate so far, nothing more. Don’t fail me with what comes next, for I do not think I could take that shame. I demand you give me your vow, son, that for as long as you draw breath, you will not foreswear vengeance on the usurper queen. You will destroy Leanna’s legacy; you will shatter those who supported her, and you will kill her if you get the chance. Swear on your power for that vow is unbreakable, not without breaking a piece of yourself.”

  As a wizard, I knew that all too well. And yet, the words didn’t stop themselves coming from my mouth. “Yes, mother, I swear. Your vengeance will be had. I will kill Leanna, even if it should cost me my own life in the attempt. Nothing will stop me, in this life or the next, I will fight until my dying breath to make sure that you are avenged.”

  Hmmm… It might not have been me speaking the words per se, but I still felt the weight of the impact of them, of what they meant. It explained much, why Moulton had done what he’d done. I didn’t envy him the choice.

  I could only watch as I forced the pillow down onto her face, held it there. Inevitably she struggled. For all the talk of wanting to die, she still struggled, refused to go gracefully into the night. I’d have expected nothing less from her. After all, she might have been deposed, she might have fallen, she might have succumbed to the ravages of age and disease, but once upon a time, she’d still been the Queen of Air and Darkness, she’d still been Mab. Eventually, she’d gone still, one final twitch and then she moved no more, sadness gripping at my heart as I removed the pillow, realising all too quickly I was never going to hear her speak again, that she’d never laugh or cry or scream invective at me ever again. She was gone. I’d killed her.

  I was relieved to find my eyes were wet. I’d have been seriously worried if Moulton had done that without feeling even a hint of emotion about it. The bond between a mother and a son is something not easily broken. Months earlier I’d seen how Ophelia Kiselevska had moved to tear the Novisarium apart in search of her kidnapped son. She’d died, been broken and bloodied, still hadn’t let that stop her as she’d risen back up and done what she’d needed to.

  The end of Mab’s story lay right here in some hospital room that stank of piss and death. What a fucking waste. Truly.

  Eleven.

  Except that wasn’t the end of it. I only caught a fleeting memory of the attack on High Hall, how Moulton had incited a war between the troll-apes and the fae, how he’d been beaten back by a gentleman bearing armour remarkably similar to his own and what Leanna had done to him, showed him the true face of terror. From what little I saw, I wasn’t keen to go into further detail, had no particular desire to travel further and further down that hole. Things became fractured after that, paths splintering away, shattered reflections deteriorating further and further, I thought I saw an actual phoenix in one of the memories at one point, right before everything deteriorated into fire and pain. That, of course, was impossible. The phoenix has been extinct for a long damn time, the idea Moulton had seen one ridiculous. Just the product of a damaged imagination.

  Fire and pain, being burnt alive, every extremity agonised by suffering as no living thing was meant to. Somewhere amidst it all, there was a voice, a sharp pain in my neck. Blood sluiced from me, ran down my body. How was I still alive? Why wasn’t I permitted to die? Something forced its way to my lips, sharp pain there and coldness entered me, forced its way inside me and lingered there. The ice hurt even worse than the flames had, if that was possible, I hadn’t known it possible to feel worse than I had and yet, here was the proof. From the centre of my being, that frigidity spread, across my organs and across my limbs, every nerve ending tickled horribly by the coldest of touches. If it’d have been possible, I’d have screamed with manic laughter, tortured beyond belief as it spread towards my brain. I had to be about to die, surely, I couldn’t keep this up. If I lived much longer, what sort of damage would be done to me?

  The ice ripped into my brain, tore through my mind and some ice-cold clarity returned, some memory of my situation, though not much. Somehow, inexplicably, I was getting better, aware of the furious itching covering my body. Every so often, more ice-cold liquid would be forced into my mouth, the more I drank, the better I felt, so much so that I found myself counting down the hours until I got my next fix. Eventually, it became all I could think of, I wanted it, no I needed it more than ever. By the time my vision returned, my eyes reforming in my skull, my nose and ears and mouth all repaired, most of my skin had grown back and the itching had subsided somewhat. The cravings however, had not, and I found myself wondering what exactly it was that they’d been feeding me. Generally, something that makes you want it more and more isn’t usually good for you. Somehow though, I genuinely didn’t care.

  Strangely, the mirror no longer held a reflection for me I’d later find, so it was only as I scratched my itching scalp as my hair started to grow back that I realised for the first time in decades, my ears had repaired themselves, pointed once again. Somehow, now, I knew that even if I mutilated them again, they’d merely grow back.

  I hadn’t seen light, natural or artificial for how long now? I didn’t know, this place felt like a cell, not the good kind either. The longer I went, the less the darkness pervaded the space around me. Pretty soon I could make out the outlines of the furniture around me, could navigate quite easily.

  I got my first visitor eventually, at least the first I could remember, a well-dressed black man with a goatee and hair just as dark as his skin, quite slender. He moved like water across the floor, graceful and supple like a cheetah.

  “You’re awake,” he said. “We were wondering.”

  “Uh-huh?” I asked. “And who is this we?”

  “Perhaps an impolite way to greet the one who saved your life,” he remarked, studying me the way one might examine a particularly fine medical specimen. “When I found you, you were dead to rights. A little longer and you wouldn’t have been for this world, something broken, smelling of bacon. I saved you.”

  “You a doctor?” I inquired.

  “Once upon a time,” he said. “I used to be. Since then however, I’ve taken an alternative path to medicine. There’s more than one way to keep someone alive.”

  “Physiomancy?” I inquired.

  “You’re a wizard?” he asked. “Then that too is interesting.” He gestured to my repaired ears, a dismissive look on his face. “If I’d have known, perhaps I’d have let you die, rather than allow you to experience the suffering that followed. Your blood and mine shouldn’t really be mixed. A disastrous combination, to be sure.”

  “Your blood?” I repeated. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Alexander Pierce,” he said. “I’m a noble of the Sunlight Court. You were found burned almost to death in our territory. I, for one, wanted to know why Cassius Armitage was trying so hard to kill you.”

  “He’s a contract killer,” I said. “I assume he had a contract.”

  Pierce smiled at me, flashed his fangs and folded his arms. “If that’s the way you wish to play it, then so be it. I gave you your life back, or something like it. I can just as easily take it away. That’s my right as your creator. However, I am not unreasonable. Talk to me. Tell no lies, share your secrets and we can do this the way gentlemen should.”

  He made a convincing argument. I didn’t know what to think though, he was right, my blood shouldn’t have intermingled well with vampire blood. What did I look like inside right now? Wizard. Fae. Vampire. I don’t think I’d ever heard of anything like me before. Pierce had saved my life. If he’d given me a second chance, if he had killed me in order to do that, all my old arrangements
and agreements and oaths had just been voided.

  The part of me that was John felt more than a little unnerved by all these thoughts. The more I watched, the more I realised they appeared to be becoming a part of me.

  “The Shining Council,” I said. “They didn’t approve of something I did, so they sent Cassius Armitage after me. I fought him and well, he clearly won. He burned me; I don’t remember how. It’s all—” I swallowed, not an entirely conscious gesture as the words caught in my throat— “It’s all a bit of a blur.”

  “So much of the last few moments of your old life usually are,” Pierce said gently. “Dying is a traumatic experience, it’s best forgotten. Still, I’d love to know what exactly it was you did to annoy the Shining Council so much they’d turn on one of their own.”

  Right there and then in that cell, I told him, I told him it all, the stories of Mab and my childhood, how she’d shaped me from birth to be an instrument of vengeance, to how I’d killed her with the pillow, to my failed attack on High Hall and subsequently slinking back to the Novisarium with my tail between my legs and how Armitage had attacked me. I even told him of my experiences of crawling back from the void.

  “Well that right there,” Pierce said, “is an interesting story, Mister Moulton. An intriguing one. The child of a fae queen and a wizard. We don’t usually turn your kind. Too unpredictable.”

  “Am I a vampire?” I asked, knew it sounded a stupid question. Surely, one should know if that was the case. And yet, I genuinely couldn’t tell. Beyond being a little cold, beyond being tired and hungry and a little miserable, I didn’t feel any different than I might have before.

  Pierce studied me with those dark eyes, thoughtful in his appraisal. “Not yet,” he said. “Not quite yet. The change takes time. You’ve ingested enough blood to heal, you stand with a foot in two worlds. Right now, you’re neither one nor the other, not until you’ve ingested human blood and quite a bit of it right out of the body. That’ll bring about sudden change to you, at that point it becomes irreversible. You’ll lose quite a bit of who you were, you could become so much more.”

  “I see.” I didn’t, not entirely, this whole situation felt entirely alien to me, but it felt like the only thing I could say to him. “And what happens to me now?”

  “That remains to be seen,” he said. “That is largely up to my king.”

  Santiago Vressiere, the Sunlight King. Why did I suddenly feel as if all the confidence had been sucked out of me. I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, he had a reputation for a brand of ruthless pragmatism bordering on the fanatical. If it benefited him in any way to have me killed, he’d do it.

  “For now, though,” he said, his voice gentle, steel clad in a velvet glove, “I recommend you sleep, regain your strength. Coming back from what you did, it had to be difficult, it took fortitude rarely seen and for that, I commend you, Moulton.”

  As someone who’d met Santiago Vressiere more than once, I could testify he was a lot more impressive in person than simple words could describe, a vitality exuding from him as if he were a force of nature, an unstoppable locomotive charging forward without a care in the world, ready to break those who’d stand in his way. With olive-coloured skin and his pointed black beard, I’d always thought he looked like a grand vizier from an old Arabian Nights film or something, not least when his head had been polished so much you could see your face in it. Or I guess that had been the real me, not the memory of someone else me. Yeah, it was starting to give me a headache too. When I stared at the head here, I simply didn’t see anything.

  That was an unsettling sensation, I had to admit.

  The other thing about Vressiere I’d always noticed was the sheer power the man radiated; he gave the impression he couldn’t be contained by his flesh alone. More than once, I’d met the man and come away truly glad I hadn’t had to try and arrest him. Such an act would likely result in death and injury.

  “Mister Moulton,” Vressiere mused. I’d been brought before him not long before, taken from my cell and cast into a candlelit room as he perched on his onyx throne, his suit the colour of crushed ivory, his gloves a subtle shade of midnight as he rubbed his chin while fixating on me. Us aside, the court had been emptied, not even a sign of my saviour, Alexander Pierce. Not that it’d make a difference. If Vressiere wanted me killed, Pierce wouldn’t move to save me. Hell, he’d probably offer to wield the axe himself. “Knight of shadow, heir to High Hall, the son of Air and Darkness. And now child of the Sunlight Court. You have lived an interesting life, have you not? I must say, people like you have a knack of making the rest of us feel truly inadequate, as if we haven’t done enough with the time we’ve had.”

  “Just a gift, I guess. I never set out to make any of it happen.”

  “And yet, sometimes life happens to us when we least expect it, does it not?” He came across as genial, almost fatherly but I could see something missing within the gestures, something empty about them as if he were going through the motions rather than truly meaning them.

  “All my life,” I said, “I’ve been told by others what I was intended to be, what they wanted me to be. I was told I was to be a hammer; I was told I was to be a rapier; I was told I was to be vengeance unleashed. There’s been nothing unexpected about my life, I’ve had it plotted out for me from the moment I was born.”

  Vressiere made a sympathetic sound, clucking his tongue. I didn’t buy it as sincere for a second, the man had made countless enemies over the years and those who had underestimated him for something he wasn’t weren’t really kicking around anymore. You didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was weak or that something existed within him which was conspicuous by its absence.

  “Mister Moulton,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I speak candidly in your presence. I mean to cause no insult—” Somehow I got the feeling he didn’t particularly care whether he upset me or not but he was keeping up appearances for the sake of it— “But if it were up to me, you’d have been left to die in that warehouse. Lord Pierce has informed me of what you said, of your story and how you got to that point. I truly wonder if fate has a different plan for all of us.”

  I tried not to think of Fate, of the woman who shared an apartment with her two sisters, Luck and Karma. Anyone who’d enjoyed their affections didn’t easily forget them, they had a way with flesh about them, they could make a man feel like a king. They knew the ways of the world and the fickle ways of men.

  “I believe there’s a saying in the world of men,” Vressiere said. “Something about lemons and making lemonade. We don’t always get what we want, but we do what we can with what we have. I want you to tell me something, Moulton.” He’d dropped the mister now, I noticed, his fangs on show. I ran my tongue over my teeth, curious to see whether I’d developed any yet. My canines felt more pointed than normal, though perhaps that was just my imagination. I didn’t know, wasn’t entirely sure whether I wanted to or not. “In my position, what would you do? You have the power over life and death, well death and death anyway. In front of me, I have someone like you, someone not one thing nor another. On the one hand, you’ve got some skills. On the other, I don’t know if I can trust your loyalty, you’ve admitted yourself that you have a history of breaking oaths. Added to the fact I could likely name a number of favours from your former masters if I were to tell them that you still live.”

  “I’d just like to clarify something,” I said. “I was put in an impossible situation.” Vressiere yawned pointedly as if to convey how little that mattered to him. “I’d always known this was coming. I never wanted the mantle of shadow knight to be bestowed upon me, but my mother made a point of telling me how much stronger it would make me. I wanted to be loyal to the Shining Council, but I was forced into making an oath to a dying woman—”

  “Did she really force you?” Vressiere asked. “Or is that merely a justification? An embellishment to make you feel better?”

  “I had to do it,” I said simply. �
�No other way about it. I couldn’t break my oath to her, I wanted her to go gently into the night. I helped her die.”

  “Yes, yes, forcing a pillow over someone’s face will do that,” Vressiere said. “I find that the single most particularly impressive facet of your tale. Matricide. It’s perhaps the only reason I haven’t turfed you out.”

  “What do you desire?” I asked. “You clearly want me to give you a positive answer over something, you’d have given me up if there wasn’t. You need something from me.” I stood up straighter, smiled at him. “No doubt you’re throwing me a chance to prove myself.”

  “Well, there might be something,” Vressiere said. “Something you’re suitably possessed of skill to do for me, I believe. You see, there’s a house out in the Edge Forest, a place where one of our kind has existed for a long time. He’s been independent of both courts, an impartial judge if you will. Every few weeks, he’ll get in touch with both the courts of Sunlight and Moonlight, help us resolve any disagreements we might have with each other. His word is law, he was tasked by my father to watch over his flock.”

  “Your father?”

  “Xarence,” he said. “I would say may he rest in peace, but we all know that’s a lie. The Judge, he’s not been seen for months. His house went silent. Every emissary sent there has failed to return. Your task, Moulton, your price of admission into the Sunlight Court, is to get out there and find out what the hell is going on!”

  Twelve.

  Just like that, I blinked back to reality, Moulton staring at me, as if curious as to what reaction he’d get from my trawl through his psyche. I wondered what he’d seen of me, how much he knew. Maybe he’d not intended for so much of himself to pass through my mind, maybe more of me had leaked into him than I’d desired. The memories I’d shown him hadn’t been lost, I still recalled my trip to the Moonlight Court all too clearly.