Shadows of Ivory

by T L Greylock

  “Do not speak,” she hissed. “You offend the Twins.”

  He ignored her. “Keleut,” he tried again, shaking the Seycherran woman by the shoulder this time. “What do you want me to do?”

  There was no answer—not from Keleut anyway. The acolyte, infused with holy fury, it would seem, had plenty to say.

  When she had finished, running out of breath more than words, Albus, who had sat straight-backed and stiff throughout the tirade, watching the city go by as they were carried around the cliff edge toward the sea wall, turned his gaze on her.

  “I don’t suppose it matters now, seeing as how we appear to be moments away from dying, but you should try reading Erona. Maybe Aristivicus. Even Dephonides would do, though he does tend to use twice as many words as necessary to make his points,” Albus said, quite giddy with the mildness in his voice.

  The acolyte looked at him blankly.

  “Philosophers. You might learn a thing or two about the yoke of religion. How it can corrupt the human spirit.”

  The young woman didn’t speak for the rest of the journey.

  Albus closed his eyes, a strange calm falling over him. He had, after all, thought quite a lot about death. Not in any morbid way, of course, but of the nature of death and its relationship with life, of the temporal state of men and women, of their need to be more than dust lost to time.

  He was, in short, prepared to be dust. Oh, there were things he had intended to do, of course, opportunities these strange Twins would rob him of, contributions he wanted to make to the study of linguistics, for instance, translations of great works of philosophy or literature. He even, he could admit, felt a deep pull to study the god discs, those infamous Hands of Fate—which he attributed to spending too much time with Eska. He thought of the strange bronze disc she had left in his possession and wondered if she would ever discover where he had hidden it during his hasty departure from Arconia—or why he had left.

  The sensation that he would never know settled over him. But that was the nature of life. Things were left undone, unknown. Albus could live—die, he supposed—with that. By the time the litter reached the middle of the sea wall, Albus was ready to die.

  He was not prepared for the method, as it turned out.

  ***

  It was the reverence in the acolyte’s expression that turned his stomach.

  The young woman, her face still streaked with tears, her eyes still puffy from crying, stared at the tool of her destruction with such fervor, such adoration, Albus wanted to strike the jar of oil from her hands and let it shatter upon the iron walkway that lined the top of the sea wall. Even Keleut, for all her fierceness, was subdued by this show of docility and acceptance.

  Except it wasn’t a show, Albus realized. It wasn’t a performance on a stage. He felt certain the young woman would have gone to her death in this manner with or without an audience.

  Albus leaned over the short parapet of the iron wall, risking a glance at the sea below. He was startled to see more than just white-tipped waves slashing against the sea wall.

  “Are those sharks?” The question was out—loudly, too—before he quite realized he was speaking. Albus glanced at Keleut and then at the stoic guards surrounding them. When no one answered—he did detect a twitch in the pirate captain’s jaw—Albus looked again. “Have you,” he began, then hesitated, sure he was imagining it. It was a great height, after all. “Have you put offal in the water to summon them?” The horror squeezing his throat pitched his voice high. “Surely not.” But the sharks below swarmed, frenzied, their dorsal fins darting here and there, and the sea around them was stained a darker color and dotted with bits of matter. Albus swallowed, feeling his inner peace quiver and diminish.

  The acolyte raised the jar above her head, her eyelids fluttering madly as she worked herself into a state to match the predators below. As she poured the oil over herself, there was a rush of heat behind Albus and he quickly leaned aside to let the two men bearing the flaming wreath through, their arms protected by thick leather gloves. It was taller than a man and smelled of laurel and the sight made Albus shudder.

  The men walked the wreath to the edge of the wall and settled it into a pair of prongs where it burned with a satisfying crackle. As the flames weakened its structure, boughs of laurel collapsed into the center of the wreath, creating a fiery web. For a moment, Albus thought this a mistake, that the wreath would surely be replaced with a new one.

  He realized his error when the acolyte, with a horrifying cry of joy, sprinted across the width of the wall, leaped—

  —and burst into flames when she passed through the burning laurel.

  She fell to the sea, a tumbling ball of fire and limbs, the smell of burned hair lingering behind her.

  Albus wanted to retch. For all his sickness at sea, he had not felt so desperate a need to empty his stomach as he did in that moment. Keleut’s hand clutching at his elbow was enough to keep him from doubling over, though his chest heaved with fear. A glance at Keleut showed the same fear in the pirate’s face. Fear and something he supposed was resolve.

  In the silence that followed, the trident-bearing guards stared calmly at the place in the air where the acolyte had been. And Albus, throwing caution to the winds, found his voice.

  “This is how you treat your faithful? This is how the Twins reward devotion? Your gods are barbaric,” he shouted, waving his arms. “And someday your gods will fall to mine, for my gods are the only gods: truth, knowledge, logic, and free will.” He thought he was finished, thought that was all he needed to say. “And compassion,” he burst out. “Mercy, not destruction.”

  It was, he thought, with that hazy sort of clarity that accompanies death, his finest moment. It was a pity there was only a Seycherran pirate to hear him.

  Two guards grabbed him away from Keleut and shuffled him along the wall. Two more replaced the spent wreath with a fresh one. The oil came in a sudden flood, poured over him by an unseen hand. He tried to blink it away, tried to spit it out of his mouth, but it coated everything. He sought Keleut’s face, though it was not the face he would have chosen to look upon at the moment of his death, and was relieved to find sorrow and solidarity in its strong lines.

  Hands pushed Albus forward. He stumbled, was righted. The heat of the wreath seemed to beckon to the oil covering him. Albus tried to lean back. Hands propelled him again. The flames waited.

  And then the fight left Albus, replaced by the resolve he had seen in Keleut’s face. He would not allow them to take his free will. He would die with that.

  Albus stepped forward and prepared to leap.

  Shouting. Frantic voices.

  A figure tackled Albus to the ground.

  As he lay sprawled on his back atop the sea wall of Onaxos, trying to understand that he wasn’t falling to the sea in a ball of flames, Albus saw black smoke rising from the spire, black smoke and the wings of white birds.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “If you’re lucky, your neck snaps quickly.”

  Somehow Manon doubted her four-day pass granted her permission to burn the Principe’s hunting lodge to the ground.

  She had made it out alive, Justina a step ahead of her and Luca a step behind, each of them clutching as many things as they could carry, Luca going back to the stable for all four horses, and from the safety of the pebbled beach, they watched the grand timbers and high rafters of the lodge transform into a smoldering frame of charred wood. The horses danced nervously, the whites of their eyes showing.

  The rain, for all its earlier ferocity, had only managed to enhance the smoke rising from the ruins—though it made quick work of the witnesses. Even Justina hadn’t repressed a shiver, though, Manon reflected, that could have been at the sight of the roof collapsing.

  “I imagine that’s the rope for us,” the huntress mused, the first to break the silence.

  “The Principe will hang you for this?” Manon asked.

  “I never said anything about hanging,�
� Justina muttered. Manon waited for an explanation and then, when one failed to materialize, turned her gaze to Luca’s melancholy face.

  He sighed. “The Principe prefers a different method. Stretching.” Manon flinched. The big man saw it. “If you’re lucky, your neck snaps quickly.”

  “Most aren’t lucky,” Justina said, her gaze still fixed on the ruined lodge. “And you forget, Luca, he also likes a good hunt.”

  “Our Principe isn’t fond of mercy.” Luca said it as though he were apologizing. He glanced down at the clothing and packs and supplies strewn at their feet and then at a piece of paper crumpled in his fist. He spread out the wet parchment in his palm and squinted at it. “Manon Barca?”

  Manon nodded blankly, then stooped down to shove what remained of her belongings into her pack. She drew her cloak back over her shoulders, its damp weight settling on her, and gathered her saddle in her arms.

  “You should go,” Luca was saying. “Take your things. Disappear.”

  “What are you talking about?” Justina cut in, taking a step toward her partner. “She is responsible for this. We turn her in, we might get away with our lives.”

  Luca shook his head. “We are responsible for this, Justina. She had a pass. Your inability to trust that led to everything that followed.”

  Manon set the saddle on her horse and looked from one to the next, trying not to feel like a piece of prey waiting to see which hawk would swoop in for the kill first. But she wasn’t prey. She pulled her shoulders back and straightened to her full height.

  “I’m not running.”

  Luca frowned. “Manon, I believe you would never have set fire to the lodge if I hadn’t done what I did to you, so I’m trying to help you now. Do you want to die?”

  “Your Principe doesn’t frighten me.” This wasn’t exactly true, but there was someone else who frightened Manon more, and she was carrying his seal of power in her pocket. “I have work to do at the stone circle and I will complete that work. If you want to help me, take me there and get me back to Arconia alive—after I’ve found what I came for.”

  Justina shook her head, her exasperation clear, and turned her back on her partner. She paced away from the beach, her metal-wrought foot clacking on the stones. Manon kept her gaze fixed on Luca.

  “I can protect you in Arconia, Luca. The Principe won’t be able to touch you there.” She didn’t add that this would all depend on the Archduke’s willingness to extend his protection to a disgraced hunter whose life another ruler of the Seven Cities might very well demand. That could come later.

  Luca looked out at the grey sea and pushed rain-plastered hair from his forehead. “Both of us,” he said at last. “Or neither of us.”

  “Something tells me she’d rather see me stretched even knowing the ropes would bind her next.”

  “We’re partners, whatever she might say about that,” Luca said. He nudged at the pebbles with the toe of his boot. “She’ll come.” Manon had the distinct impression he was trying to convince himself.

  “I’m riding away,” Manon said, reaching for her mount again. She cinched the saddle and adjusted the reins, then checked to see the second horse was secured before climbing onto the first’s back. “Just,” she shook her head, “just stay away from me. I think we’ve caused each other enough damage to last a lifetime.”

  She turned the mare and set it to a trot, eager to put as much distance between her and that fateful place as she could. The sounds of pursuit came a moment later. Boots scuffing on slippery pebbles. A hasty plea directed at a skittish horse. And then hooves hastening to catch up.

  Manon didn’t look back. When she cleared the beach and the track she had been following began to angle up and away from the coast, she urged the horse to greater speed, but Luca’s mount, a true hunter’s steed, agile and sure-footed and swift, caught her lesser creature with ease. The hunter settled behind Manon like a shadow.

  “You can hate me for what I did,” Luca said. “I wish only to make it right.” He hesitated and Manon resisted the urge to look over her shoulder. “Though I doubt I can.”

  Manon rode on. “You know,” she said at last, “I begin to sympathize with Justina.”

  A moment of silence. Then: “What do you mean?”

  Manon smiled to herself. “You have a talent for being irritating.”

  Another moment of silence. “Yes, she has mentioned that.”

  Despite the rain, despite the looming shadow of the Principe’s wrath, despite the weight of the Archduke’s seal in her pocket, despite even the memory of the void Luca had opened up inside her, a memory that ached and twisted and tore at her still, Manon’s smile grew.

  “Come on. Don’t follow after me like a dog.”

  ***

  “Makes you think,” Luca said.

  Manon looked away from the stone circle and frowned at the hunter. “Think about what?”

  “Who put them here, of course,” he said, gesturing at the tall stones. They glistened with the remnants of the rain, illuminated by the rays of sun slipping through the bruised clouds on the western horizon. The sky had turned a mottled purple and pink in the wake of the storm. “And why.”

  “Speculation,” Manon said. “I put my trust in facts. And the facts are that something is buried here and I intend to get it out of the ground.” The words were very like something her father would have said, Manon realized. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or curse him. She swung down from her saddle and strode into the stone circle. It was large, the stones imposing, the interior dotted with wildflowers.

  Luca jumped to the ground and grabbed her horse’s trailing reins. He led both animals after her but stopped just short of passing through the stones.

  “I thought you were here to study the inscriptions. Surely you know something about who built this place.”

  Manon turned and put one hand on her hip. “I lied,” she said, appreciating the look of consternation that spread over his face. “Don’t look so surprised. I think we’re past all that, Luca. After all, collectively we’ve burned down a piece of property that belongs to a very powerful man and could lose our lives for it.”

  Luca frowned and looked down at his feet. Manon sighed and continued her traversal of the circle. When she reached the other side, she turned back and noted the hunter hadn’t moved.

  “Didn’t you say something about the stories folk tell? Nonsense, I think was the word you used. Don’t tell me you harbor some sort of superstition about this place. Don’t cross through after twilight? Toss a stone over your shoulder and spin in a circle three times while hopping on one foot?”

  Luca tried to laugh. “Nothing so specific. Respect is all. Something my gran taught me.”

  Manon ran a finger over the indecipherable inscription on the nearest stone. The letters were worn away in parts, nothing but smooth stone left. For the briefest of moments, Manon felt a flicker of something she was astonished to name as loss, a feeling to which she was not accustomed, especially in relation to ancient objects that held no meaning for her. But the thought was quickly washed away by a glance toward the setting sun. She looked back at Luca.

  “Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Now? It’s getting dark.”

  Manon smiled. “Of little consequence.” She breathed in, breathed out, and summoned fire to her palm once more. She grew it between her hands, then lofted it over her head. It floated above the stone circle. The spark in Manon’s ribs purred, content in the wake of her fear, settling the last edges of her nerves.

  Still the hunter looked unsure. “How do we begin?”

  “Begin?” Manon walked back towards her reluctant companion. “That would imply a method. I intend to dig until I have found what I came for. I’m assuming you can use a shovel.” She unstrapped the pair of shovels from the packhorse and held one out to the big man. “Something tells me your partner isn’t going wait around pondering her options. We don’t have much time.”

  Luca took the shove
l but didn’t move. “She’ll be here,” he insisted.

  “I don’t doubt that. The question is whether she’ll come alone.” Manon scanned the stones, looking for, but not expecting to find, an indication of where to start digging. “Which would you chose, father?” she murmured. The stones all looked the same. The sunset was nearly swallowed up by the dark clouds over the sea, but Manon’s ball of fire cast the stones in a faint light. Blowing out a long exhale, Manon marched to the western most stone and thrust her shovel into the dirt near its base. A moment later, she was rewarded with the sound of the second shovel doing the same.

  After she’d pried some large chunks of earth from the ground, Manon looked over her shoulder. Luca was making impressive progress—but then, he was built like a small bull.

  “How did she lose her foot?” Manon called out, bending to her task once more.

  Luca tossed three more shovelfuls over his shoulder before answering. “Justina?”

  “Do you know another woman missing a foot?” Manon nearly laughed at herself, wondering what had prompted this strange good humor. Delirium, most likely. The thought wasn’t comforting.

  “Bear trap,” Luca said, his face grim. “She was trying to save a young wolf caught in a second trap. Poacher’s trap. Her partner was less fortunate.” He stood up straight and, wiping sweat from his forehead, glanced at Manon. “Bear got him. That’s why she says she doesn’t need another partner.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Justina had to watch the bear maul him.” Luca held Manon’s gaze. “And the only reason she’s alive, at least as far as she can figure, is the bear’s stomach was too full of Beloque to need her, too.”

  Manon’s mood faded. “I’m sorry.”

  Luca turned back to his work. “That was a year ago. After she began to recover, she insisted on being fitted for the metal foot. We’ve been together for just a season. Some who knew her before the accident say that metal foot took something from her, that she changed the moment she put it on. They’re wrong. She changed the moment Beloque’s face was bitten off.”