Shadow Knight

by O. J. Lowe

  “My condolences for your wife,” he said quietly. “It’s never fun when you realise you might have to bury a loved one.”

  “The same regarding your mother,” I shot back, relieved to hear my own voice coming from my mouth again. “A shame I never got to meet her; the stories always made her out to be such a remarkable lady.”

  “The stories lied,” Moulton replied. “Remarkable, yes. Strong? Absolutely. A good mother? She tried, bless her. Didn’t even come close to succeeding,” he added with a bitter laugh. “I wasn’t sorry when the end came.”

  I’d felt his tears on his face, I knew that was a lie. Either that, or he was further gone than I’d believed, well down the path into full vampirism. They tended not to feel sympathy or remorse for what they’d done, they simply carried on as if nothing really mattered. I decided not to broach the subject. It wouldn’t do any good.

  “Hey, asshole,” I shouted into the blackness. “We played your game; we did what you desired. Now show yourself.”

  “As you wish!”

  The lights snapped on, filled the room with their illumination and I threw an arm in front of my eyes to shield myself from the glare, the whole place a lot larger than I’d initially believed it to be, almost a colosseum if the truth be told, like it was expanding around us in order to fit the power around us. The man we’d seen in the lobby stood in front of us, same purple robe, same silver scarf, same impression.

  “You made it this far,” he remarked. “I’m impressed. Most don’t, they see the final hurdle and they falter. Both of you might well have given up more to the bradoomn than you’d have expected to, but that’s only natural for your first time. After all, you’re little more than babes playing with a power you can’t even begin to understand.”

  “We played your game,” Moulton said. “How about you let us go?!”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Rules,” he said. “You set them up, you should abide by them. After all, what’s our motivation to keep on playing if you’re going to cheat us out of our prize.”

  “You know, I once considered the rules to be God,” he said. “I had a duty and for centuries, I followed it, I did what was expected of me, I played my part. I was Xarence’s enforcer, a concession to a people he drifted further and further from. I was his way of keeping an eye over them.”

  “You’re the Judge?” I asked, didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “What is this house then? There’s powerful magic at work here, though nothing I recognise.”

  “And why would you?” he almost sneered. “The way the world works should not be a surprise to you, wizard. However, you’re painfully limited in your outlook, you see things as the way you desire them to be, not as they truly are.”

  “I’d dispute that,” I said, tucking my thumbs into the loops of my waistband. “But do go on.” Strangely, I found myself interested. I’m always interested in hearing truths about the way of the world, about deepening my understanding of magic. Where that’s concerned, well I open my ears to listen. You never know when a bit of knowledge becomes the rope that saves you in a storm.

  “There’s more to the world than the magic than you know, there’s more to it than any of us can go. There’s deeper magic out there, older magic lost to the millennia. And there are those who—” He paused, grinned at us. “It’s been such a long time since I had an audience, you know. Anyone who cared to listen. The vampire courts, they just want you to fix their problems, even that got boring after a while. De Lune and Vressiere, they don’t need me, they just want to pass the buck to me, let me be the villain so it keeps their hands clean. Once upon a time, the rulers came to me before they even thought about executing one of their own, such were our numbers, now they do it whenever they damn well feel like it. The Moonlight Queen even anoints a mortal to be her knight, to get around the rules. No doubt the King of Sunlight will do the same given time. These monarchs, they live long enough, they become creatures of habit. New thinking is an alien concept to them.”

  “They missed your presence,” Moulton said. “They sent people to look for you—”

  “And this house killed them, the way it would have killed you had you proved unworthy. Funny that, pure blood vampires couldn’t do it, but we have a mortal and something I can’t even classify. You, Mister Moulton, are an abomination, not one thing or another but three wildly contrasting things. Vampire and wizard, perhaps. Wizard and fae, absolutely. Mix the three and well, you don’t have much time left at all. You might not feel it, but I can, your body rejecting everything about you. Soon you’ll die horribly, Mister Moulton and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

  “We all die in the end,” he said. “It comes to the end of the book; we simply fade out into anonymity. Do I fear death? Not a chance. Do I fear you?” He burst out laughing. “Not even fucking close.”

  “Please do not use such abhorrent language in my court,” the Judge said. “I won’t ask you again. It’s the sign of a low intellect and well, it’s impolite for another thing.”

  “I’ve always been led to believe those who swear repeatedly are more honest than those who don’t,” I piped up. “And more capable of expressing themselves.”

  “Your presence here, wizard, is tolerated even less than that of the mongrel stood next to you!” the Judge snarled. “At least he has some claim to the blood, you’re just an—” He paused, sniffed the air and went stock still, though the faintest rumble of laughter broke from the pit of his stomach— “Oh! Oh ho, indeed, perhaps not after all. That is indeed interesting. I can smell it inside you, unmistakeable, rotten to the core. You fight for love, but you forget the meaning of it.”

  “And what would someone like you know about love?” I demanded.

  “I know that the truth about love is that it always ends, Sevo. You don’t get to love forever, it ends just as soon as it starts, a candle in the wind snuffed short. Nothing lasts forever, especially not love.”

  “It doesn’t have to be forever,” I shot back. “Just long enough for—”

  “For what?” the Judge demanded. “For her to stop loving you. To hate the man that you’ve become. Women, eh, they never appreciate what you do for them, never the sacrifices you’ve made.”

  “What would you know about women?” Moulton asked and his response was a long, low burst of laughter.

  “What manner of foundation do you believe this house stands upon?” the Judge retorted. “I know every secret of the vampire courts; I am more powerful now than I have ever been. Soon, it’ll be time for them to remember exactly what manner of man I am when the chips drop and I reveal myself to the city again.”

  I decided there and then this was my opportunity, that if I hesitated, I might well not get another chance at this. My hands flashed, fire danced around the skin and I pitched a fireball at him, one, two, three, four of them sailing hard through the air, crashing square into his chest, red hot tongues licking at the edges of his robes. The Judge however gave the impression the fire had done little more than annoy him, batted them away with a flick of his hand.

  “You dare strike me?!” he hissed, fangs bared bright and proud now, so sharp they gave the impression they could cut the very air themselves. “I’m going to eat your intestines!”

  “Doesn’t that interfere with the all-liquid diet?” Moulton asked, glanced sideways at me. “I hope you’ve got more tricks in reserve, that fire didn’t exactly burn hot on him.”

  “I got plenty of firepower left to play,” I said with a wink at him. “You?”

  “Something better than fire,” he said. “I am the heir of Air and Darkness after all.”

  “Fools!” the Judge boomed. “You think you can defeat with mere magic? I am the dead made mobile, I am the spirit of the first laws ever written, the punishment of the court, the malice of the defendant and the avarice of the lawyers. You don’t know what I am!”

  In the moments which came, we were to find out though, I swept out with more magic, esche
wed fireballs in exchange for white hot blasts that seared into the Judge’s body, left sooty black burns across his skin, even if it never looked close to splitting it. Moulton in exchanged lashed out with tendrils of shadow which snatched at his legs, secured him into place, before battering him with hardened weaves of air which would have shattered lesser men. The Judge merely took it though, let out an almost orgasmic gasp as the magic burst across his skin, shattered like glass into a thousand pieces. His robes bore the brunt of it, the top half burnt away in a matter of moments, shredded into rags by the rage of the winds, whipped about to reveal… Something beneath, a presence embedded in his skin I could neither identify nor see clearly. I got a feel for it though, oily black bitterness burning through my magic senses, like slime forcing its way into my nostrils and choking me out.

  I gagged, bent over double and tried to recover. The Judge moved, taking heart from my predicament, crossed the floor in a dozen rapid steps and hammered Moulton with an open palm, sent him flying across the room with just that single blow. Moulton groaned; a whimper lost beneath the crack of his bones breaking against the stone walls of the makeshift colosseum.

  By the time I’d recovered, I found myself forced into evading a similar wild swing towards my face, ducking beneath the blow and my silverthorn came up, the blade went through his wrist as if it were made of marshmallow and stuck fast inside. The Judge winked at me, drove an elbow sideways, straight into my ribs and I groaned, collapsed in a heap, sharp fiery pain rupturing inside me as something snapped.

  “Whatever else you might have, you’re not hers yet,” the Judge smirked. “She hasn’t gotten her claws into you; she hasn’t blessed you and she never will. I can smell her on you, you know, her perfume, her musk. She’s already marked you as her property, even if you don’t realise it yet and there’s nothing more tragic than a man who doesn’t even realise when he’s being used.”

  I wanted to reply, could barely breath through the pain in my ribs, something pithy dying in my mouth, I didn’t get the chance as something pale and squat hit the Judge, piledrove into him, fists flailing against hard skin. I once walked through a kitchen, heard someone beating the hell out of a steak with a meat tenderiser, this sound had most of the same charms to it. Remorseless, relentless battering of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable flesh. Moulton didn’t let up, carried the Judge a considerable distance before the bigger man found his footing and slammed him hard into the ground, Moulton letting out a whoomph of pain as his face met stone flooring.

  If fire wasn’t going to work, I went with terramancy, slammed my foot into the ground and the shock wave ruptured upwards, the pressure breaking through the stone flooring and hit the Judge hard, stone shards cutting into him as he found himself thrown from his feet. He landed in an undignified heap, moaned as he pushed himself to his feet. A single piece of stone the size of a banana stood upright from his arm on its own, he gave it barely a second glance before pulling it free and tossing it aside. “If that’s the best you got,” he snarled, “then this truly is you both out of your depth. You’re running out of options, both of you. I’ve been blessed by the Gardener, I’ve felt the touch of the void, I accepted his gift.” He gingerly touched the protruding area in his chest, resting above his heart, the area swelling and rising with every tiny motion as if it were hungry. “I took upon his seed to myself, nourished it with my blood, fuelled it with every bit of power I could find. And from bitter seeds grow the trees of change.”

  Some part of me snapped. What the hell was it about villains in this city who fancied prefixing their names with ‘The’. In the last few months, we’d seen the Gentleman, the Heavensent, I faced the Judge now and he’d thrown the name of the Gardener in the mix too. This was starting to piss me off.

  “Change is always something the Novisarium has resisted. Yet through sheer force of will, it shall be remade, power and pressure, we’ll apply plenty of both and it will serve us, the worthy as vassals for the greatness that is yet to come to us all. It’s coming, it’s our time now.” The Judge rose to his feet, dusted himself off, smiled sweetly at the both of us. “You cannot win.” My silverthorn still protruded from his arm, he made no move to remove it, didn’t even regard it with anything approaching pain.

  Inside, I tried to ignore the gnawing seed of worry threatening to flower. So far, we’d thrown our best shots at him, he’d merely shrugged them off as if they were little more than an irrelevance, he’d limited himself to trading blows with us. Only a few, mind, but they’d hurt. He’d done more to us with less than we’d managed to inflict on him.

  “You should never have come here!” he barked. “It was always going to be your downfall to enter my demesne. In here, I might as well be a god. That’s the gift of the Gardener’s seed, as it crawls through my veins, I’m unstoppable.”

  Moulton coughed, I trailed my vision to him, he shot me a look of regret, of sorrow and sadness. Blood plastered his face, gave him a ghoulish quality as the light caught its stain across his skin. In that moment, I saw his resignation.

  Thirteen.

  So, what circumstances drew me to that point? What possible reason could I have for ending up in the home of the Judge? I’d found out why Moulton had shown up, I’d realised that in the end, maybe neither of us were so different when it came to it. We’d both come out here in the name of living. Maybe Moulton had done it more for himself than someone else, but I couldn’t exactly hold it against him. Both the Judge and Moulton himself might well both think I was barmy for doing all this for Carla. As far as I was concerned, it made me better than them.

  It took me back to that night in Lumiere, as I’d strode down the stairs through that incognito door at the back of the club, been met by Zarah Abramescu at the bottom of the stairs, an ebony skinned beauty with long dark hair in a braid, clad in white as she had been every time I saw her. I always wondered how she kept the blood off it.

  “Sevo de Souca,” she purred, folded her arms beneath her breasts, gave me a brilliant smile that didn’t quite hide the fangs in her mouth. Golden bangles clinked at her wrist. “I wasn’t aware we were expecting a visitor from such a high-ranking official of the city.”

  “That would defeat the purpose of a surprise visit, Ms Abramescu,” I said with a smile of my own. As consigliere to Clare De Lune, she held quite a bit of power in the court, the second most powerful vampire in the building and perhaps one of the five most deadly in the entire Novisarium. At the Vigilant, we have a scale for these things, we need to know exactly who the threats are.

  Of course, until recently, Xarence hadn’t been on that list, we hadn’t had the chance to add him before his death at the hands of Libby Tombs. And, based on what I’d see later, the Judge wasn’t there too. So, we do get these things wrong sometimes. We’re only human, we make mistakes. Vressiere, De Lune, Abramescu and Alexander Pierce for sure. The two highest ranking vampires in each court.

  “To what do we owe the pleasure?” she smiled.

  “If you think I’m here for pleasure, if you think this visit will incite pleasure, I’m afraid we’re all to be disappointed I think,” I replied. “I’m here on business, I’m afraid, it might be the sort of dirty thing best discussed in private.”

  “Mysterious,” she said. “I like that.”

  “The queen,” I replied. “I’d quite like to see her now.”

  “You know, we haven’t seen each other in months,” she said. “Not since our little dalliance at the guest of our furry friend, no? That was some night in the lion temple.” I tried not to think about that night more than I had to. It had been an eye-opening experience, not least because I truly believed it had been the first time in my life that I’d seen the face of pure evil. Or at least, I would have had it not been hidden by a hood. We’d all done a good thing that night, we’d saved the life of a god that said man had wanted to assassinate, to steal her power for himself, we’d put a rightful ruler back on a throne she’d always claimed she’d never wanted. We�
�d reunited a mother with her son.

  “What’s your point?”

  “Just that a simple hello would be nice,” she said, still flashing that grin at me. “A little courtesy never cost anything, Sevo.”

  I’ve always been amazed by the ability of royals to be able to clear out their court at a moment’s notice, at the way they give the command and all these people who believe themselves to be so powerful have no choice but to abscond. Clare De Lune had a touch of the untouchable about her, her skin pale with the pallor of death, her hair a shade of icy white blond, her eyes like pools of violet. She wore a dress of sea green, tight in all the right places, daring a casual observer to draw their eyes to her chest while covering her legs to the ankles.

  “Sevo de Souca,” she mused. I knew from the past her voice could be sharp enough to cut glass when she desired. “A most welcome visitor.”

  “I’m humbled to be in your presence, your majesty,” I replied, dropped to one knee in a bow. I didn’t particularly respect her, but given what I was about to ask, it might be best to get things off on the right terms. Clare De Lune hadn’t been on the throne for long, perhaps the best part of a year, but she was still a queen, she likely still felt she had much to prove and, in my mind, that made her dangerous. Those who feared their position to not be as strong as they’d like, they do rash things, they do things which wiser leaders would avoid out of fear of alienating their allies. That wasn’t to say she’d done a bad job in her time on the throne, she’d made an alliance with the werelions, a pact of non-aggression, she’d avoided all-out war with the Sunlight Court so far. “And may I say, from a professional point of view, you’re doing a marvellous job here.”

  Okay, that touched a nerve, in a good way anyway. She leaned forward, smiled at me, though I wondered how much of it was forced. “Do go on?”