Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Page 37

  "It's here," Faerloss said, his gaze sweeping back to the wreckage. "I know it is." He set to prowling the room like a bloodhound, eyes darting, fingers outstretched. D'haan joined him, circling the great chamber from the far side. The two of them slowly converged on a single seagull, pecking at the body of a rat.

  D'haan peered at it, shook his head, looked around the room, and peered at it again. "Illusion?" he offered to Faerloss. "But who would even know to―?"

  The gull, suddenly frightened, took to the air and made for the breach in the ceiling. Faerloss spun after it, a black sword suddenly in his hands, and sliced the air. A sliver of brilliance tore itself from his blade and caught the bird in the breast, hurling it into a reckless spin that slammed into the far wall with a thud. The animal dropped.

  When it hit the floor it was a young man with hazel eyes, bright with panic and vertigo, and a beard like a wild bush. The blackened remnant of an old skull slipped from his hands, down the curve of the floor, and into a stagnant puddle.

  "Speaker," D'haan said.

  Faerloss lunged for the skull. The young man—the "speaker"—shook off his daze in time to match him. He shot out his arm just in time for Faerloss to spear him through the hand—and fell back, howling, as his hand wept blood.

  "You," Faerloss said. "How did you―?"

  Iggy Ardenfell, Caleph suddenly realized. One of the children from Southlight. But things were moving too fast for him to follow—no sooner did he recognize the boy than he vanished again, replaced this time by a red-tailed hawk already leaping for the sky.

  "Kill him!" Faerloss shouted to D'haan. He knelt and scooped his Queen's skull into his hands, cradling it like a child, as D'haan streaked into the sky behind him.

  iv. Iggy

  No! No, no, no, sehk!

  After weeks of eavesdropping in the halls of Sanctaria, weeks of pursuing the monsters across the sea, he had nearly succeeded. He'd had Her skull in his hands; he could've destroyed it, could've thrown it, could've made for the breach instead of trying to hide—anything, he could've done anything other than what he'd done—and he would've won. He'd have stopped them.

  Now they had Her, they would bring Her back, and he would die before he could warn anyone.

  He banked with the wind, heart thundering, and caught a glimpse of a black form launching out of the shattered tower behind him. The second Mal'shedaal, its vileness slick as nausea, tearing across the sky in pursuit. Raw terror detonated in every pump of his heart, panic at the memory of his last encounter with one of these things and his narrow escape from death. Go back, some part of his mind screamed. Circle back, try to sneak up on them, you can't let them get that skull, you can't—but the avalanche of terror drowned out this voice, amplified by the hawk instincts that drove him forward.

  He pumped his wings for altitude, clawing away from the Hel-damned island and its awful tower, hoping to catch a strong southerly wind that could bear him away faster than the Mal'shedaal could gain—and the All-Mother heard him, buoying him toward the distant archipelago. The grey ocean spooled away beneath him, and that revulsion, that seething aura of repugnance, slipped slowly away. He risked a quick bank that afforded him a glance backward, and saw with devastating relief that the Mal'shedaal was falling behind. He didn't dare to hope—he stifled its wild cry in his breast—but the thing behind him didn't have his wings. It didn't have his Mother's blessing. Maybe, if he could just maintain this pace, he could outfly it.

  Then the air thickened. His feathers bristled with an instant of remembered alarm. On instinct, he tucked his wings and dove.

  Lightning shattered the sky behind him, splitting the wind with a thunderclap that nearly blasted him into a daze. The bright, lingering smell of storm air was so strong he caught a whiff of it even as the hawk. Then instinct screamed again and he plunged into a barrel roll, devouring the distance between him and the churning waves as a second blinding burst of lightning tore away above him. He quivered, his eyes and ears reeling from the blast—but again his Mother took hold of him.

  A second southerly gust seized him and launched him north, toward home. In its gentle embrace he was able to climb skyward again, restoring some blesséd distance from the sea. With his next fevered glance backward, he saw the shadow vanishing back into the mists of the distant tower. Its scent faded, replaced by the cold rush of wind and sea spray.

  Now go back, the voice of reason tried to whisper again. Catch them in the night. You can't let them get to Tal'aden with that skull. You can't. But while the Fatherlord slept every night, the Mal'shedaal never did. They would always be on their guard for him, and they could see through his efforts to hide. So they'll kill you. It doesn't matter, as long as you break that skull first. All you have to do is reach it. Just reach it. It was the right thing to do—the heroic thing. Ciir-goath would expect it of him. Two years ago he'd have expected it of himself.

  She turned Ordlan Green into the Waste. You saw it with your own eyes. You can't let them bring Her back.

  The hawk screeched, its shame echoing across the wintry waves, and pushed on toward Keswick.

  v. Seth

  He turned east at Bitterfork, taking a bridge across the river and pressing on into the plains. The rural road vanished; he knew east only by the light of the sun, but he trudged toward it anyway, the vaguest inkling of a destination beginning to form in his head.

  The night before, for the first time in his life, he had gotten drunk.

  Alcohol was utterly forbidden by the Teachings. It deadened the mind and the senses, clouded rationality—the opposite of every value he had striven for his entire life. But this prohibition, rather than dissuading him from the ale, had driven him to it. He was a walking list of sins—a murderer, a traitor—and one more would hardly doom him further. So he had imbibed, hating himself as the heat rushed down his throat and into his stomach, spreading into his limbs and soaking into his mind. Hating himself as he ordered his second, and third, hating himself until finally, mercifully, he forgot who and what he was.

  He had a dreamlike recollection of getting into a drunken brawl, of being vaguely surprised when his instincts—the ones that had brought down clerics and arc hounds, that had let him hold his own against Preservers with twice his experience—became sluggish. He'd woken this morning reeling and sick, with a cut lip and a map of bruises across his entire body, and rather than worrying about whether he had killed anyone or had any money left, he found himself craving the blackness the ale had eventually brought him. Whatever else it was, whatever its costs in violence and broken promises, it was the only escape that had ever worked.

  Retash would have been disgusted.

  The thought of his old master stuck with him. He remembered the man's lessons, his sternness and certainty, as if they were relics of a simpler time when he'd known all the answers. But Retash, too, had proven fallible—like Seth, he had traded away the foundation he'd spent his entire lifetime building, and Seth didn't even know why.

  He remembered vaguely that his master had mentioned his home town once: Hannah's Ridge, a little village just outside E'lay, near Tal'aden. Retash was unlikely to be there, but Seth didn't care. Something drove him toward Hannah's Ridge anyway, some notion that if he were to die at the end of this walk, he would like to do it in his old master's hometown.

  And so he was surrounded by the silent white, alone with his thoughts and his failures for most of each day. Sometimes, when he first woke, he had a few empty seconds before all his memories returned: a precious, narrow window in which he couldn't remember or care who he was. But it never lasted. The old emotions woke just after he did, slithering around his heart and seizing it like a python with prey. Self-hatred settled on to his shoulders, weighing them down, while his breath grew shallow and his mind recited his sins:

  Turned my back on my Teachings for my sister.

  Turned my back on my sister for myself.

  Killed a lifelong friend.

  Failed to destroy the book.<
br />
  Failed to kill Marcus.

  Fought against Marcus in the first place.

  It was a labyrinth of wickedness, where turning away from each crime only led to another—a never-ending ricochet of incrimination. There was no escape from it.

  A journey that should have taken him a week started to look like it would take closer to two. He should have had enough food from Keswick to last the trip, but only if he could suppress his appetite as he had learned from the Teachings. Increasingly, his constant litany of accusations crowded into the silent space necessary for that suppression, and as his focus slipped, his hunger grew. Worse, his splintering focus was another failure, lengthening his list and crushing him further.

  The possibility of dying in the snow started to seem more real. If he lacked the courage to open his own veins, maybe the indifferent winter could succeed where he had failed.

  When he had to, he started a fire and slept. When he didn't, he slogged through the snow, ever northeast, dragging the ball-and-chain of his self-loathing behind him. Occasionally he would stop in the snow-shrouded ruins of dead villages to forage for forgotten bits of food, and when he did, he wondered if Hannah's Ridge even still existed.

  He lost track of the days. The ninth day melted into the tenth, which ran backward into the eighth. Every morning dawned identical to the one before it. On one of them he opened his pack and ate his last crusts of sourdough. Numbness crept into his toes and fingers, then up into his feet and arms.

  He pushed on because he didn't know how to do anything else.

  When the homes of Hannah's Ridge finally came blurrily into view, shimmering behind the snow haze like a desert mirage, they were empty. No bell tolled as he approached, no bored guard emerged to collect a toll. He had never seen the village before, but any outsider could tell it shouldn't look like this: the streets clogged with snowdrifts, the doors hanging open to admit the cold. When he spied a frozen hand, jutting from the snow like a grave marker, despair finally leaked through the last of his defenses and bore him down—first to his knees, then face-first into the snow.

  Maybe it would suffocate him. Maybe it would freeze him. He didn't care which.

  The world rushed toward a darkness more total than even his drunken blackout. He opened himself to it, craved it—and when he felt hands beneath his arms, pulling him to his feet and dragging him through the snow, he would have fought them if he'd had the strength left to do so.

  Retash loomed above him when he woke, though he barely recognized the man: gaunt and bearded, with drawn eyes like twin pools of shadow. "I have no food for you," he said.

  "Master," Seth croaked. They were inside, and somewhere nearby, a fire crackled. Heat tingled in Seth's extremities, chipping away at the cold. Beyond Retash, Seth heard or sensed others.

  "I'm not your master, Seth. That time is gone."

  "Master," Seth said again. Something broke in him, some last, crumbling edifice. He pulled in a hitching breath, felt tears leaking from his eyes. "I am so lost."

  He shuddered beneath the weight of this final failure, this utter abdication of the strength he'd been raised to embody. He was a wreck, a shame, collapsed before his former master in shattered remnants. He expected nothing: not acceptance, not absolution, not even condemnation. He didn't weep to make an impression; he wept because he couldn't stop. For a long time, Retash said nothing.

  Then he lay a blanket over Seth's quaking body and kissed his forehead.

  "We are all lost here," he said. "Now sleep."

  He had spent years suppressing his weakness. He had declined hundreds of hours of rest.

  Now he tumbled backward into blackness, and his body claimed its due.

  vi. Angbar

  He worked in a cramped, drafty room with a single narrow window looking out onto Redding Lane. It was hardly more than a closet. A warped table had been crammed into it, and he sat on a creaking chair with uneven legs. One furtive candle tried to give what illumination the window couldn't—which, the last few days, was a lot. Clouds like slate choked the sky. A snowstorm had started two days ago and showed no signs of slowing.

  The bleakness of the weather matched his mood. He caught himself, every so often, wondering if the heavy snowfall was making it hard to deliver the Winterwheat grain. There had been grand plans before he'd left, plans to get the grain to every town west of the Ley—surely this unforgiving storm was making that difficult.

  But he shrugged off the concern every time. He had different priorities now. Lyseira had plenty of people to help her; she didn't need him.

  He turned back to his open book, where another clean page had been covered with formulae, hypotheses, and scribbles. Syntal would've been proud. Since he'd left Majesta he'd spent most of his time here, devoting all of his focus to the chant at hand. He'd thought a lot about ways he could've prevented the massacre in Twosides, and most of them seemed to start with Syntal's Vanishing. That had kindled an interest in the illusion, a desire to learn more about how it worked and whether it could be modified or improved. Takra had allowed him a copy of the chant, given him a crash course on the parts of its construction, and respected his wishes to be left alone.

  If he was honest with himself, he knew that this sudden surge of interest in chanting—an activity he'd always been, at best, lukewarm toward—had more to do with Syntal's sudden death than anything else. A desire to be close to her, to honor her memory, maybe, or to simply refuse to let her be erased. But he didn't spend a lot of time ruminating on it. The whole point was to tax his mind to the point that it had no capacity left for rumination.

  He set down his quill and stretched his cramping hand. I don't understand this, he thought for the thousandth time, staring at the mess of symbols he'd written on the page in front of him. Then, suddenly disgusted, he jerked his gaze to the window instead.

  Traffic had picked up in the city since Winterwheat, churning the stagnant snow and turning it into a grey slush. Only a few days ago, he'd been able to look out his window and make out the cobblestones. It had given him hope, even if it did make it easier for the chanter-haters to stand outside and taunt them: hope that spring was finally coming, that this curséd winter wouldn't last forever.

  That had all changed with the snowstorm. In a matter of hours, the streets had vanished once more beneath a blanket of silent white. The drifts had built up again, clustering against the doorways before starting to reach for the knobs. Now as he looked out, any hint of spring seemed like a fading dream. If anything, despite the fact that dawn had come over an hour ago, it seemed darker.

  Wait. He jerked straight in his chair, the ache in his writing hand forgotten. Oh, God. It didn't just seem darker. It was darker.

  The sun that had dawned an hour ago was now sinking back behind the buildings, vanishing the way it had come.

  No. He froze, eyes riveted to the eastern skyline. It's just the blizzard. I'm imagining things. He rummaged through his memory, trying to recall how bright the room had been when he'd first come in, and remembered instead what Iggy had said last year in Ordlan Green.

  Eventually, the sun might not even rise at all.

  "Harth!" He pushed his chair from the table, shoved through the door into the hallway. "Takra!"

  He nearly ran into Harth, who was running for the common room. "I know," Harth said. "We saw it, too."

  21

  i. Harth

  "Then there's no more time for caution," Harth said. All eyes in the common room were on him. "The King has to let us break the sixth Seal."

  "I thought Syntal already tried to talk him into that," Ben said. "He refused."

  Harth flinched from his lover's name. It was a knife in his side, bleeding him out, and all he could do was ignore it. The alternative was to lie down and die—or scream until he brought down the heavens.

  "When we first got back with the book, yes," Takra said. "This is different."

  "You think he'll listen to you now?" Angbar asked.

  "He has to,
" Harth said. But he wasn't sure. He'd had faith in the King when the man had declared the Witch's Amnesty, when he'd endorsed the new chanter school. He'd seemed wise then. Visionary. But that was before he'd let Seth walk out of the city—before he'd let Syntal's murderer just walk away.

  "What if he doesn't?" This from Sara, a young woman in her early twenties, who had just joined the school in the last month. One of the few, Harth thought dourly. The King's stunt with Seth had emboldened the hecklers that used to camp in the alley outside the school—and terrified prospective chanters. More than a dozen had dropped their studies since the murder. Only a quarter of the cured blood fever victims were staying on to learn to chant; before, it had been more like four in five. Part of his plan, no doubt. He wants to use us in his war, but he still doesn't trust us. He wants just enough of us to turn the tide for him, and not a soul more.

  Harth had known the King was shrewd, but he'd also found him to be compassionate and open-minded. Now he wondered how much of that had ever been real. His job now, though, was to convince the others of his plan—to demonstrate how shrewd he could be.

  "He will," Harth said. "Just look outside. If I can't convince him, the Stormsign will."

  "Where is the book?" Rebecca asked. "Can we get to it?" In the weeks since Syn's death, the girl had gotten even friendlier. Lingering conversations, fawning looks, accidental brushes in the hallway. It repulsed him. Her latest tactic was to make outlandish proposals for chants (and now, apparently, political strategy), thinking they would impress him. Thinking they made her look more like Syntal.

  But they didn't. There had only been one Syntal. Instead, her efforts at ingratiation enraged him.

  Harth pointed at her. Glowered. "Don't," he said.

  "I’m just saying, if he won't see reason . . . he can't really keep us from―"

  "No!" Harth slammed his fist into the table, shocking the room into silence. "You're talking about a coup! I ought to hand you over to him, let him throw you in the dungeon. If he even found out you were talking like that, do you know what he'd do to us? What the Kesprey would do?"