Shadow Knight

by O. J. Lowe

  “Since you took over, reports of violence in this part of Dead Town are at an all-time low and that makes the job of my organisation so much easier,” I said. “Long may your reign continue in such a fashion.”

  “You’ve never ruled a people, Sevo,” she said. “For a people like mine with enemies like ours, peace is always a temporary state. Eventually, a touch paper will be lit, tempers will be frayed, and a spark will be struck. We cannot stay friendly forever, but a lack of pointless death is something to be cherished while lasts.”

  “I agree. Death should mean something. Every leader who throws their people into an engagement that serves no value or point will lose their crown sooner or later,” I replied.

  “I don’t think you came here to discuss my foreign policy,” she said, changing the subject with a strangely feline grin. “As much as I enjoy people telling me how great I am.”

  It wouldn’t do to respect her too much, I realised as I rose to my feet. She needed to know that I considered myself as much her equal as possible, she needed to take me seriously if this negotiation was to work. A delicate balancing act between avoiding disrespect and being taken seriously. “Always beware those who praise you too much,” I offered. “When you hear nothing but good, it makes it hard to take the bad seriously.”

  “And you think I don’t know this?”

  “I think it’s always worth being reminded of,” I said.

  “Why are you here, Sevo?” The overt pleasantness had faded now, her smile with it. Before, she might have considered me a tame pussycat, something to tickle and stroke, no danger at all. Now though, I liked to think she’d been reminded that this cat had claws.

  “I desire something,” I replied. “And I think it’s something that only you can give me.” I hesitated for this was deadly ground to stand upon. “I have a problem. My wife is sick. Merlehaun’s Syndrome. It’s a—”

  “I know what it is,” Clare replied. “It’s a horrible disease, the sort of thing which shouldn’t exist in a society like ours. Yet, is it that you desire me to do about it.”

  “She’s not got long left to live,” I said. “I’ve tried everywhere, magic, mad science, more crazy artefacts and faith healers than I thought possible.”

  “And now you come to me,” she said. “You wish for her to be turned into one of my own? A child of the eternal night?”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all. Not even close. She wouldn’t want that. For as long as I’ve known her…” I choked back the words, tried not to let her see my weakness. If she was half the woman that I believed her to be, she’d probably already worked it out, but I had to make the effort. For Carla’s sake. “For as long as I’ve known her, she’s never desired to be anything other than normal.”

  “Normal.” Clare said the word with such disdain I found myself wondering if a mistake had been made. “What is normal? It’s a word used by those who try to deny themselves. Everyone is special in their own way; some are more special than others. My people for instance. Long ago, we were gifted eternal life, we were declared the children of the blood. In another life, we might have been hailed as gods and yet Stoker wrote that fucking book of his and it damned a lot of us. Fucking Xarence, fucking Vressiere and anyone else involved in it.”

  I smirked at that; the expression faded as she gave me a scowl. “My point, Sevo,” she said, “is that however much we might want to convince ourselves otherwise, we cannot deny what we are. If she does not desire to be changed, then what can I do?”

  “Vampire blood,” I said. “You’re an old vampire, you’re a queen, your blood might well be able to stabilise her.”

  “It might,” she said. “It likely wouldn’t cure her, but frequent treatments might well stave off the worst effects of it.” That was all I needed to hear; vampire blood could do a damn lot of things in the right doses. As I’d later see, it could bring a badly burned man back from the brink of death. It could forestall the inevitable when it came to a shitty disease like this. “But tell me, Sevo. You seem to be under the impression I’d be open to giving up some of my blood every manner of weeks, every month, all for a woman who means nothing to me. I’d love to know what possesses you to believe such a thing.”

  “What do you wish for in exchange?” I asked.

  “You think of me to barter with like a common shopkeeper?”

  “I think we’re both busy people,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time, yours is likely even more precious to you. We could banter back and forth, offer half meanings about what we want or need, never speaking the truth and yet it wouldn’t get us to the crux of the matter. I apologise for my bluntness, but these are desperate circumstances, your majesty and well, you wouldn’t even be talking to me now if there wasn’t something that I could do for you.”

  “You’re a perceptive man,” she mused. “I like that. I suppose I can even admire it, I might not appreciate your tone, but well, that’s something we can work on.”

  “Name your price,” I said.

  “There’s a house in the middle of the Edge Forest,” she said. “An ancient vampire resides there, older than I, perhaps even older than Vressiere, a contemporary of that sneaking leech Xarence.” That was interesting to hear her view on a vampire many believed to be the first of them all. Maybe now she knew he was dead; it gave her the strength to badmouth him in public. Plenty had believed him to be an urban legend, a myth until Tombs had killed him live on television. “The stories are that Xarence left him around to watch over his people, to make sure that we toed the party line. If we wanted to punish our subjects, he was to be the hammer and the whip that made sure we were tough but fair. A judge of us. My mother—” I thought about Cassandra De Lune and the events around her death some several months earlier. It took a lot to kill a vampire queen, especially one as old as her, she’d reigned almost as long as Vressiere had before being struck down. Ever since the De Lune’s had taken the throne from the Abramescu line anyway.

  “Sounds infuriating,” I offered, did my best to sound sympathetic. “You shouldn’t have to have someone like that watching over you. Isn’t the point of being in charge that you shouldn’t have to listen to such petty little challenges to your authority.” I didn’t believe that for a second. I thought oversight was a good thing, especially when those being watched didn’t have souls to guide them. I’m not some sort of dead person racist, far from it. I think there’s plenty of examples of humans doing heinous things with a moral compass to guide them rather than to simply say vampires are bad.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Anyway, the Judge has gone missing. His visits were becoming more infrequent, eventually he stopped showing up at all.”

  “Sounds like your problem resolved itself,” I remarked.

  “Perhaps so,” she said. “But just because one didn’t particularly like him, it does not mean that if he’s been murdered, that we can ignore the insult. I need someone to travel out there and discover what has happened.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t send your own people,” I commented.

  “Who’s to say that I didn’t,” she smiled. “We’ve sent too many to waste them on it. None of them have come back. Reports say my opposite number, Vressiere, he’s done the same and none of his scouts have come back either. That house is a dead zone, Sevo de Souca, anything that goes in does not come out.”

  “And you’re sending me in because?” I hated asking the question, hated the giving her the idea that she had any sort of power over me.

  “Well, I know you’re desperate,” she said. “And I know what you desire. If you agree to it, swear on your power that you’ll investigate it, I’ll give you a vial of my blood right now, enough to take your wife over the worst of it for now.”

  “And what about when she desires another treatment?” I asked. This was a slippery slope, a genie threatening to smash its way out of the bottle. If I did this one thing for her, I’d likely be under her thumb for the rest of my life. If I didn’t do it for her, Carla wou
ld die. I supposed better to do it for the queen rather than some underling. Not much better but still.

  “Then, I suppose you should really be looking for another way to make yourself useful to me,” she said. “Because useful people get rewarded. Useless people, well they get nothing aside from perhaps an early grave. Assuming people ever discovered your body.”

  She smiled at me, leaned back in her seat and placed her hands on the arms of her throne, whistled an eerie little tune that set the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. “So, what’s it to be? Which do you desire to save more? Your integrity or your wife? You don’t wish to bargain with me, I’ll let you walk out of here unscathed, just now that the house you go home to will be silent and empty. Like the grave. And that’ll be the first night of the rest of your life.”

  She had me by the balls. She believed that she’d won, and maybe, just maybe she had. Of course, no victory is absolute until one side is completely wiped out. She wasn’t willing to make that sacrifice and so, ultimately, she wouldn’t claim the whole win. I still had some cards; it was simply a matter of working out the best way to play them. And I’d never played with the intention of anything other than winning.

  I’d deal with Clare later. For now, though, the hour was late, her nails had already taken on claw-like qualities, digging into her wrist, a scotch tumbler in hand. If that was the price of my honour, I’d pay it.

  I didn’t have a choice.

  Fourteen.

  “Moulton gets it,” the Judge crowed. “He alone of the two of you knows just how doomed you are. I’ve killed those the royals sent here for weeks now; they just don’t seem to get the message!” He couldn’t keep the triumph from his voice, crowing with the roar of victory in his message. “Perhaps with the body of the sevo, the Novisarium will know fear once more.”

  “I know you never shut up,” I said, rose to my full height and sucked in a deep breath. If I was to die, then I would do it as a man, die on my feet and fighting for my life. Garrett Moulton might already believe his end was here, yet I refused to do so. Twines of fire circled around my hands as I kept my focus on the Judge, my mind frantically racing with all the possibilities of causing him harm. So far, nothing we had tried had even come close to working.

  Something had to give. I snapped my arms, the twines unfurled and burning ropes raked across the Judge’s body, securing him in their burning embrace and he laughed as fire scorched his skin, scoured the dark flesh red, the smell of burning filled the room and it made me want to gag as his hands closed around the whips and he pulled me closer and closer, hand over hand as his manic laughter filled the colosseum, echoing from the walls. “That tickles, Sevo!” he barked. “A fire is like the bite of a flea to one such as me, it cannot burn me, it cannot dominate me for I am something new, something grown in the gardens of the void. I’m the first of many!”

  He clapped his fists together, my burning whips froze solid in an instant, no longer able to hold their own weight and they fell to the ground, shattered into a thousand tiny chunks. Beneath my feet, the ruined stone flooring took on the consistency of treacle, I nearly slipped on it once, twice, fell to my knees on the third attempt, my hands sank in, almost to my elbow.

  I’d forgotten about his ability to control the area around him, the way his will had dominated the house, the way he’d been able to run the traps and tricks. I supposed I’d been lucky, in a way, the fight might well have been over much sooner if he’d thought to use them. But old habits die hard, he didn’t have the discipline of a wizard, of a magic wielder. We know what it’s like to hold the forces of creation in one hand and destruction in the other, we’re disciplined enough to keep a hold of them, even when the fighting is at its most vicious. Those with power thrust upon them they don’t entirely understand; they never use it at its most effective if you can keep them off-balance. As I’d already seen with the Judge, he’d been a brawler before and it was what he’d fallen back on the first chance he’d gotten, using fists and feet to great effect.

  I yanked my hand free with great difficulty, the thick syrup sticking to it like glue, I made a face at it, stood up and tried to keep my footing, to avoid my feet sinking into the mire. I felt it getting less dense by the second, soon it would have the consistency of water and that would be fatal if my head went under, I somehow doubted I’d get back out. I moved to cast, hurled a fireball in the Judge’s direction, the magic sluggish beneath the sludge over my hands. Some of the sparks got through, others frazzled out against the suddenly sizzling syrup. With what little hit the vampire, the orb embedded in the flesh of his chest pulsed and glowed once again, shone like a living disco light. A stray ember cascaded across it, seared the flesh away to increase the effect, though he showed no ill signs from it.

  “I like my prey to fight back, Sevo,” the Judge said, his voice quiet and hypnotic, almost mocking but not quite enough to cause offence, “but I think you’re taking this a little too far. Just lay down and die, it’ll be quick and easy, a good way to go out. It’ll be painless, you can die the death your life has deserved.”

  “He’s never going to stop fighting,” the voice said from behind the ancient vampire. “He’s a hero. That’s what they do.”

  The Judge turned, straight into the punch from Moulton, a bellow burst from his fanged mouth as his head snapped back under the force of the blow, he took a few errant steps, slipped in the syrup and went down with a splash. The former shadow knight was on him before he could recover, straddling him like he would a lover, hands clamped across the Judge’s chest. For the first time, Moulton’s claws or something approximating them were out, tearing through the flesh around the lump in his body, thick gouts of black blood forced out as if eager to get away from whatever lay near. Steam erupted from within the vampire, hit Moulton hard face-first and he bellowed in pain as his skin took on the consistency of freshly boiled lobster, though he didn’t desist, continued to pull and probe, tearing the skin with every pull.

  The Judge howled, an incandescent bastard wail of pain and anger bred together as the product of an unholy union, he beat at Moulton’s arms with inhuman strength, bone cracking and threatening to splinter, Moulton’s face contorted in pain, a shard of bone protruding through his skin. Still he didn’t give up, a low animal wail of agony breaking through him, his teeth gritted so hard together at the exertions, I was amazed that they didn’t shatter in his mouth.

  “You don’t know what you do!” the Judge howled, a state of existence I recognised as pleading. Maybe, just maybe, Moulton had gotten him worried. “You’ll destroy us all!”

  “Correct,” Moulton gasped, the words just about decipherable through the way he squeezed his teeth together. “I’ll destroy us both!”

  He twisted his wounded arms, I’d never heard a sound like it before as he screamed, though even then the sound found itself drowned out by the cry of the Judge, Moulton tore the orb free from the ancient vampire’s chest and held it high above his head with a bellow, gore and rotten flesh cascading down across him.

  Part of me wondered if I was seeing the remains of the Judge’s heart, it hadn’t had a stake through it, but that surely couldn’t be healthy for the vampire on his back on the ground, the floor suddenly stone again, my silverthorn on the ground next to him. Before I could jump for it, kill him where he lay, the Judge exploded in a burst of rotten organs and flesh, his remains spattering the ceiling in a room that felt a lot less grand than it had a moment earlier, the colosseum fading away and replaced by just a simple store room. Somehow, I got the feeling that if we were to retrace our steps through the house of traps, all would be normal again, somewhat mundane now the magic had faded.

  That wasn’t the end of it though, I realised, the tendrils of light energy wrapping themselves around Moulton’s arms, spreading their wicked way down towards his shoulders and his neck, the skin going black beneath their touch, fading to ash. By the time the look of realisation beat its way across his face, it was too late for me to s
ave him, his arms went the way of his hands very quickly, his shoulders following.

  “John,” he started to say, “I—”

  He never got to finish as the light reached his head, cleaved through his neck and he dropped, though curiously he didn’t explode in a shower of blood and flesh, not in the way vampires usually did. Perhaps, just perhaps, the tiniest fraction of humanity had remained in him and that had been the thing to spare him the cruellest of fates. Still it wasn’t like there’d be anything left to bury beyond ash, his remains collapsing under the touch of the radiant tendrils.

  With nothing left to hold it up, the orb… No, not an orb, I realised, it looked far too organic for that… fell to the stone floor and the light went out, it retreated back into itself and lay inert.

  I wrapped a weave of air around it, brought the thing close to me, close enough to inspect, far away enough to duck back in case it showed signs of being threatening. For the first time, I got what the Judge had meant when he’d made reference to gardens and a gardener. I’d assumed it to be some precious gem, something so brilliant and rare, it could defy magic itself.

  Far from it, for the cause of all these problems, all this pain and suffering was just the simplest of tiny seeds, dull green but coated with blood and ash, the vines already retreating back inside it, the outer shell sealing up behind them.

  Interesting. Most interesting.

  Somehow, I got the feeling I didn’t want this sucker touching my skin. I dug through my pocket, found a vial and dropped it inside, secure it was contained. That vial was unbreakable, should be anyway and I hoped the seed was inert for the time being. With another vial, I might have taken Moulton’s remains to be sent back to the Shining Council for his next of kin, yet somehow, I doubted they’d appreciate it. He had become persona non grata amongst wizards after all. Better to let his ashes become one with the dust, everyone already thought him dead barring the Sunlight Court and I doubted they’d wish to advertise a failure, I doubted that they’d risk the ire of the Shining Council. Last thing anyone wanted was a war, they’d probably leave it be.