by Shel, Mike
“I have,” answered Agnes.
She heard the man mutter an incantation from within, then the sound of a lock being undone. The door opened a crack and Helmacht peered out, first spying Agnes. Then his gaze landed on Qeelb behind her. “No one else is with you?” he whispered.
Agnes shook her head and the sorcerer opened the door wider, motioning them both in. She hesitated.
“In, quickly!” Helmacht commanded.
She may not have managed, she realized, had Qeelb not put a brace-clad hand on her shoulder and gently urged her forward. She walked over the threshold, eyes on the floor.
“Dark necromancy, indeed,” said Qeelb in a voice of preternatural calm.
“Greetings, goddaughter,” said Lenda, her words pleasant and welcoming.
“Hello, godmother,” she replied mechanically, eyes still on the ancient tiles.
“While Helmacht removes our new friend’s braces,” said Lenda, “let’s you and I chat for a bit.”
Helmacht offered Agnes a chair next to the table where her godmother’s head rested. She nodded absent thanks and sat, not hearing Helmacht introduce himself to Qeelb and take him to a far corner of the chamber. Lenda was quiet for a time, but Agnes kept her eyes on her hands, resting in her lap like a girl receiving a reprimand.
“I know it’s hard, Agnes,” said Lenda at last, “but you need to look at me, dear.”
Agnes tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry as a desert. She summoned the will to tilt her head up, fixing her eyes on those of her impossible godmother. The hair was matted, sticky with blood, which also stained teeth and cheeks, black and red gore like a second skin, everywhere. Where neck had been separated from the body, the skin was torn and ragged, its edges curling up. A small pool of some terrible nameless liquid puddled about it. Something fluttered within Agnes, like a bedsheet in a breeze, hung outside on the line to dry. She imagined it was her sanity, or maybe just her ability to control her emotions, and she knew she needed to find a way to grab hold of it and hold tight, or it would blow away, forever lost. Say something! Ask a question!
“Are you really my godmother? Or has some Netherworld spirit taken up residence in you?”
“I cannot remember not being your godmother, Agnes sweetheart,” replied the head that wore Lenda’s crooked smile. “I know that I love you, that I want what’s best for you.”
“And you think bearing witness to this horror is what’s best for me?”
“Things are as they are. I did not choose to become what I am.”
“Who made you this way?”
The severed head closed its eyes and seemed to breathe in, though there were no lungs that needed filling up. “I don’t know.”
“How long have you been this way?”
“Since your father and I were in the Barrowlands, in that Djao tomb.”
“He thought he imagined you speaking to him, that he had gone mad for a time. He said you tried to talk him into staying in the tomb as the entry stone was closing.”
“I don’t remember doing such a thing.” Her godmother seemed sincere, her look one of concern—if a gore-caked, disembodied head could be said to show such emotion.
Agnes paused, trying to find her beloved godmother there, amid this dreadful scene. She concentrated on the eyes, milky, a barely discernable blue lingering there; but it evaded her: she could only feel revulsion. She flinched when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Helmacht, making an awkward attempt at comfort.
“What is your purpose then, severed head?” asked Qeelb.
Those milky eyes shifted to Qeelb, standing a few feet behind Helmacht, massaging his now-liberated hands, the witch-braces gone. The head smiled then, baring teeth stained forever red. “Oh, it seems someone has broken you, boy.”
Agnes watched the gaunt sorcerer’s countenance darken ominously. “I am no boy, whatever you are,” he said with a growl. “You would do well to remember that.”
This seemed to give the head pause. She pursed her lips and closed her cloudy eyes, for which Agnes was grateful. “I meant no offense,’ said her godmother’s head, voice a penitent whisper, eyes still shut. “I only do what I can to offer aid, to light the path before you. You would do well to remember that, Aemalin Velish.”
He recoiled a step at that, as though a torch had been waved in his face, and his hands, still bearing marks of the witch-braces, stopped their self-soothing rub. “You pry into minds, then,” he murmured, some of his conviction fled. “That is no great feat. But if you looked deeper, you would know that I no longer own that name. I am now Qeelb.”
“That is no name,” retorted the head, “it is a function. ‘Weapon’ in the Azkay tongue. They made a tool of you and you have embraced that dehumanization.”
“As have you, undead thing,” Qeelb shot back.
Undead thing, Agnes thought, chilled by its aptness.
The head of Lenda Hathspry looked upon the broken sorcerer with its sightless eyes, perhaps some amusement there. It responded then in a voice all peace and reason. “I will not joust with you anymore. If you hadn’t an important role to play in this little affair, I would give you a kiss to remember me by. Instead, I will speak with my goddaughter, as I intended, before I go away. And worry not. Those eyes of yours won’t see me again, Weapon.” The milky blue gaze turned to Agnes, the lips smiling. “First, Weapon is capable of terrible things, Agnes sweetheart, but they are terrible things you will require. You contend with a living god. Remember that when this instrument of destruction acts. As for this place you are going, dear, Gnexes…take very special notice of the idols of Pember the Far-Seeing, unless you wish to wander forever. And when the time finally comes for you to strike—strike true.”
The eyes closed, the jaw went slack. Agnes’s heart raced at those last words. Strike true. They echoed in her mind, carrying with them some dreadful import that filled her with more fear than had the animated head itself. Helmacht stepped forward now and touched the forehead gingerly.
“It is dormant again,” he whispered, wonder in his tone. “When this last happened, it was silent for months.”
“I think it spoke as many words as it wished,” said Qeelb, stepping toward the door to the chamber. “But I don’t think it will stay quiet forever. We should go, young Agnes. You must sleep.”
“How can I sleep after this?”
“I can offer you a simple cantrip for the purpose,” Qeelb answered, flexing the fingers on his left hand, then his right. And as they left the room and her godmother’s head behind, the broken sorcerer spoke again. “That…thing, it’s an abomination, yes. But it speaks the truth. Remember what it said to you. And I will, too.”
Agnes wasn’t quite sure why she trusted Qeelb, but he was true to his word. The broken sorcerer put two fingers to Agnes’s forehead when she lay down on her bed, and the next moment she was fast asleep. She dreamed of a cold, dark place, wind howling through stony catacombs, the flame of her torch casting frantic light as it danced fitfully, near to guttering. She walked down a twisting, rough-hewn corridor, her passage guided by a hopping carpet of toads.
“This way, this way!” said her Aunt Lenda’s voice.
A loud bang echoed, once, twice, a third and fourth time; perspiration on the walls dripped down with the reverberations. She cradled the severed head of her godmother in her arms, gently, like a sleeping baby. Its eyes and mouth closed, she began picking at the bits of black gore that clung to forehead and cheeks. When that mouth broke open in a bloody, toothy, lopsided smile, and the eyelids fluttered up, she dropped it. It rolled across the rocky floor of the place, causing toads to scatter. It came to rest against a cave wall, staring up at her.
“No time for childish fears,” said the head of Godmother Lenda, grinning.
The bang again, louder, more insistent. Agnes turned to look behind her, where the sound seemed to originate. A
nother bang, this one making the very ground shake. Then Lenda’s voice in her right ear, an intimate whisper.
“It’s time to answer the door.”
A further loud bang woke Agnes from her dream. There was a commotion in the halls. She threw her blankets aside and reached for her rapier, drawing it and stepping from her bed in a single, fluid motion. When she opened the door of her room, she found several novices and instructors flowing down the hall, wielding weapons and bearing shields. She grabbed the nightshirt of a frantic initiate with the splash of a purple birthmark on her face, holding an axe too big for her.
“What is it?”
“A mob!” she answered, eyes wide with fear or excitement. “They’re at the doors of the Citadel, trying to batter them down!”
18
Siege
The nightmare was grotesque and vivid, a diabolical mixture of cruel novelty and the dreadfully familiar. Auric revisited his flight from that hungry temple ruin in the Barrowlands—what had lurked in those ruins had gleefully consumed the lives and bodies of his closest Syraeic colleagues: Meric, Brenten, Ursula, and Lenda. In the dream he stumbled again through rugged hills of thick, sickly green grass, clutching a broken sword in one white-knuckled fist, holding in the other a severed human head by its gore-soiled hair. Those years ago, when they had rescued him, he was talking to that head, as though they conversed, coaxing from it dark, unknowable secrets in clandestine whispers. It had been Lenda’s brutalized head he carried with him in that wasted land, but in the dream, it was the head of his daughter, Agnes. Not the Agnes of today, grown brave and strong and in no need of his fatherly protection, but Agnes as a freckle-faced little girl.
The head of Agnes wailed, it pleaded for him to save her. And it pleaded with him: to cut down her mother, who dangled from a noose tied around her neck; to roll away the jagged stone that lay atop her brother Tomas’s broken body. Auric lumbered forward, screaming for her to shut up, longing to cast the chattering, abominable head from him. But when he tried, Agnes’s girlish soprano would weep and beg him, “Papa! Papa, please! Don’t leave me here in this awful place!”
He was readying to hurl a curse at Agnes’s head, vowing that he would cast her into the deepest of the Yellow Hells, when he tripped in a hidden hole and pitched forward, falling, falling. It was that fall into a yawning black pit—a pit that transformed itself into the mouth of the Aching God—that startled him awake at last, sweaty, in a tangle of sheets. He reached instinctively for the sheathed Djao blade that he habitually propped against the night table in his cubicle, but it wasn’t there. A fresh surge of terror invaded his heart like a sudden conflagration. He reached about in the dark, windowless space of the room, knocking over an unlit oil lamp, a pair of books borrowed from one of the libraries. Stolen? Stolen! Someone had snatched the priceless weapon right from under his nose, hurried it away to the hidden markets in the bowels of the city that trafficked in such things. It would end up hanging above the mantle of some soft, pampered aristocrat with a surfeit of coin, mounted there as though it was nothing but a pretty, jeweled ornament. In the darkness he banged into a chair, then slammed against a wall, pivoting away to catch his balance. Near the door now, he yanked it open to let in light from the hall.
This illumination revealed that his Djao weapon lay beside the bed; while he slept it had simply tipped over and fallen to the floor. There were no thieves wandering the halls of the Citadel, absconding with precious artifacts like his sword. It was sheathed in the leather scabbard he had made for it in Daurhim. He scurried to the weapon, scooping it off the stone floor with both hands as though it was an infant fallen from her crib. With his fingers wrapped around the hilt, his anxiety receded. It was as though a prowling beast had decided to skulk off in search of easier prey.
Auric was unsure how long he stood there, patting the scabbard as though comforting the weapon it cradled, as one would a frightened child. As he recognized the idiocy of the gesture, a wave of embarrassment washed over him. He felt exposed with his door open to the hall, though no one passed by. If someone had, what would they see? A foolish, aging man, spooked by phantoms, clinging to an old weapon for security. He tossed the sheathed blade onto his bed, affecting a casual air he didn’t feel. He knew as he did it that it was to reassure himself, a demonstration of nonchalance. But he couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t just panicked at the thought of being parted from the Djao artifact. Auric felt profoundly alone in that moment, wishing for the counsel of Belech Potts, retired legionary of uncommon wisdom and compassion.
But Belech Potts lay cold in a sepulcher beneath Dyrekeep in Daurhim, dead this past year. Auric picked up the lamp from the floor, inspected it: it was undamaged by the fall. He lit it and set it back down on the side table, then closed the door to his cubicle gently, deliberately. He sat on the edge of his bed, running a hand through his graying hair. He took a few long, deep breaths, shook his head. Sleep would evade him now.
He retrieved one of the slim volumes from the floor, a decrepit thing with a scuffed cover of faded brown leather. It was a tedious history of the mountainous earldom of Ironwound. The librarian who had given it to him reported there was a brief passage regarding the cave-temple of Pember at Gnexes. The book lacked index or table of contents, so he leafed through it passively, skimming paragraphs for the tell-tale excerpt. Pallas Rae had set a pair of her young antiquarians to searching the libraries and archives for information on their objective. It was they who would discover whatever knowledge the Syraeic League’s archives held. He gave up finding the passage after twenty fruitless minutes of browsing, setting the thin book down on his nightstand.
Auric was exhausted after returning from the palace and lay down not long after unenthusiastic bites of a dinner. He was awoken by loud conversation and laughter passing by his door then. He decided that it wasn’t so late as to warrant courtesy from the Citadel’s other residents—it must be before midnight. Hannah would be asleep by now back in cozy Daurhim, spent from the day’s demands of governing the town and its surrounding lands. She was a deep sleeper, so deep he had joked she would slumber through the sound of Marcator’s trumpet. Even when sleep evaded him, he would lie there untroubled against the warmth of her body, the gentle rhythm of her breathing, the flutter of her eyes beneath their lids, the pulse in her temple. But Lady Hannah and little Daurhim might as well lie across the Azkayan Sea now. Indeed, the distance from that comforting place felt even greater.
At last Auric surrendered to his sleeplessness. He stood and belted on his weapon, then snatched the book from his bed table and the other still on the floor. He would make his way to the cavernous main library, a short way from his private room at the north end of the Citadel complex. Perhaps Rae’s researchers had gleaned something of value by now. He passed a fanciful antique water clock on the way, a relic of the League’s long history. He was right about the time; it was only quarter of ten.
A sprawling cathedral to the knowledge of the world, the main library never closed. Every hour of the day or night found members of the League exploiting its priceless inventory. But this deep in the evening, Auric joined no more than a dozen other solitary Syraeics, perusing the stacks by candlelight, oil lamp, or glow-rod. None of those patrons spared him more than a glance, their noses returning quickly to books and scrolls and volumes on shelves. He considered searching the catalogues for more histories himself but decided it best to locate Rae’s antiquarians instead.
Gleaning their identities was a simple thing: two robed women chattering to each other over a stack of scrolls and opened books. He walked over to their table and introduced himself. The two looked up from their conversation with a kind of wonder, as though he were a character out of a story book. After a beat, they introduced themselves as Arbena and Sulo. They might have been sisters, bony and thin, pale complexions, deep, dark circles beneath eyes that had lost many hours of sleep to study. He held out the two tomes he had borrowed at the
librarian’s direction, but the brown-eyed one, Sulo, waved them off.
“Minor works,” she said in her surprisingly girlish voice, “by authors given to flights of fancy. I trust the sources we’ve dug from the stacks here.” She patted a small tower of tomes with a lanky hand.
“Risbo can still yield some useful tidbits, sister,” countered Arbena, her mature tone standing in stark contrast to Sulo’s. “Remember that passage on the succession in Greater Marcien, during the Three Song War? You wouldn’t have uncovered the name of the king’s niece who died in childbirth without it.”
“Fair enough,” replied Sulo, pulling at her lower lip and nodding. “But I don’t think it makes up for the debacle that’s his account of the Battle of Corwen’s Dell, or his description of King Butilo’s shield bearer at—”
“Sisters,” Auric interrupted. “As interesting as these Busker facts are, I’m wondering if you might share with me what you’ve gathered so far regarding Gnexes. Sleep has eluded me and I’m hungry for enlightenment.”
Arbena, whose rather prominent overbite gave her an affable appearance, smiled and nodded, while Sulo wore a severe, thin-lipped frown. “Of course, Sir Auric,” Arbena answered. She reached for a paper on which she had scribbled notes and toppled Sulo’s tower in the process. “Much about the site, including its age, is something of a mystery, as you know. The Cult of Pember laid claim to it when Constans the Bull came upon it in 122. You may know he was eventually made first Earl of Ironwound by King Eduard the First only two years later, after killing his rival, Willem Forsu, grandnephew of the Duke of Marburand, also named Willem. He was the second Duke Willem. To this day the ’Burandi aristocrats rotate through the same four or five names for their male offspring.”
“Six,” corrected Sulo, fastidiously straightening the mess her sister had made. “Reginald is only slightly less common than the others you’re thinking of.”