by A. C. Cobble
As they walked deeper into the empty city, she was surprised to see no overgrowth of plant life. The city, abandoned for two decades, was entirely dead. No people, no plants. The taint from the underworld wrapped firmly around the place. It made her shudder, seeing the results of long-term exposure to the other side. If the sorcerers they hunted breached the barrier in a similar way, this would happen elsewhere. The taint would seep through, and death would spread over the lands.
They kept going and found more bodies and more shades drifting through silent streets or peering out of vacant buildings. Some of the shades seemed to trail them, following Duke as he strode through the domain of the dead. Once, when he climbed ahead to scout, the spectres began to close on her, and she could feel the angry cold of their intention.
The tattoos that Kalbeth had so carefully inked on her skin seemed to slow the spirit’s notice of her, but they were drawn to Duke, and beside him, she was drawing their attention. It wasn’t the ink on her back that kept her safe. It was the shades’ connection to Duke that held the spirits at bay. The shades’ purpose somehow aligned with Duke’s. If she fell away from him, they’d close on her, and she would have no chance against so many of them.
She stayed on his heels, following never more than two or three paces away. They didn’t speak, but she could see in his eyes that he understood.
When he wasn’t climbing, one hand clutched his dagger and the other unconsciously rose to touch the back of his head, where the simple leather thong kept his hair tied back. His mother’s old tie, she knew. Somehow, the purpose of the shades was aligned with this man.
How? She wondered and worried.
The Cartographer XVII
“There,” he said, eyeing the hulking stone building that stood at the end of a broad boulevard.
Past it, he could see open sky. The structure sat atop a ridge, and below it, the city fell away to Northundon’s harbor. Perched as it was, it had a commanding view of the commercial district and was within easy walking distance of the Church and Northundon’s other important institutions. Spreading out along the ridge to the sides were the residences of Northundon’s peers. Former peers, he amended.
He wondered if the shades of those peers haunted their own homes or if they drifted through the city like all the others. Were the shades even former citizens of Northundon? He realized he wasn’t sure. No one who’d been in the city when the Coldlands attacked had escaped. There was no news of what had happened, nothing to go on except for what the royal marines had found when they’d flown over the city. As far as he knew, the shades could be the result of the destruction or the cause of it.
He shivered from the cold and the prevailing sense of dread that suffused the ruins. The skin on his back crawled. Behind him, scores of shades drifted in his wake, lurking nearby as he and Sam traversed the city, but why?
He forced himself to look ahead to the broad avenue they were walking along. It was lined with giant mansions, but the building at the end was different. It had been built in an earlier age. Before Enhover was a global empire, before Northundon was even part of the nation. This structure, unlike Philip’s palace in Westundon, unlike their father’s seat in Southundon, represented a time when the druids ruled, when those ancient magicians walked the cold, northern shore.
In Northundon, the Wellesleys were interlopers. Officially, they had ruled the northern quartile of the continent for centuries, but in practice, the northerners looked after themselves. They paid their taxes to the Crown as the price of being ignored.
It had never felt like that to Oliver when he’d visited, though. Northundon was his mother’s home. She was of the place, and despite being married to his father and taking residence in Southundon, she never lost the ice in her veins. That same ice ran through his own body, he felt. Northundon was his place, and he wondered if the spirits sensed that or if they had some other plan for his presence.
“You’re sure this is it?” whispered Sam, glancing at the other grand buildings that lined the boulevard.
“That’s where I would have ruled from had all of this not happened,” he mumbled. “Yes, I am sure. If there is some clue to where my mother is, to what happened here, it will be inside that building.”
She nodded. “Shall we?”
He started forward again, wincing every time he felt a passing chill, knowing it meant a shade had come close or had touched them. The apparitions seemed interested in him and what he was doing. As they neared the palace, hundreds of the spectres clustered around them, but so far, none had interfered.
That was the worst, knowing that these creatures summoned to destroy his home were now letting him pass. They thought his purpose was their own, and it was the most terrifying thought he could have.
Northundon’s ancient keep sat in front of them, only damage to the west wing hinting at the violence that had happened around it. It seemed even his father and the royal marines had qualms about bombing this place. His and his mother’s place, he thought grimly. It had been, once, but it was dead and empty now. Shaking himself, stealing a glance over his shoulder at the lurking shades, he led them toward the front of the building.
The door, once proud steel embossed with the Wellesley sigil, was a rusted ruin, hanging ajar, resting on the marble steps that led to the huge portal. He didn’t think he could move it alone if he tried. Fortunately, two decades prior, it’d been left wide open by either the invaders on the way in or the defenders on the way out.
Through the front door, the keep appeared sturdily constructed but bland. It was like that on all of the floors above the surface. Underneath was where the druids’ odd construction stood out. There, twisting, snaking tunnels burrowed deep into the ridge that the keep sat upon. There were rumors of something strange down there, in the earth, but he’d never seen anything. No one had. He wondered if the tunnels were unchanged as they’d always been. They didn’t have time to look, and with the crowd of shades trailing behind, a dark, windowless tunnel wasn’t where he wanted to be.
He stepped inside, trying to shove down the wave of feelings that cascaded over him. In the foyer there were more bodies. Some of them were wearing tattered, time-faded livery. He’d spent most of his days in Southundon with his tutors and brothers, but he knew he would have met some of these people. They would have served his dinner, drawn his bath, and jested with the young duke.
But the uniformed dead were the easiest. His mother wouldn’t be wearing livery. The skeletal remains of women in disintegrating dresses made his blood run cold.
He couldn’t recall when the attack had occurred or if anyone had known. Morning, evening? Would his mother have been wearing jewelry? Would she have been armed? He didn’t know, couldn’t know. Her skeletal remains may be unidentifiable, even by him. All the dead looked the same. They could be stepping over her body, and he would never know it.
“Are you all right?” whispered Sam.
He shook his head but continued on. They were there, and there was nothing to do but continue on.
He led Sam to his family’s personal quarters, not knowing if his mother would have fled, if there had been time. Would she have been on the walls, leading the defense?
Somehow, he knew that wasn’t the case. Not that Lilibet hadn’t been brave, but he felt a tug, a pull, toward where he’d seen her most. Her place within the old building called to him like a warm embrace.
The shades, hanging behind them, seemed to be waiting, watching as they walked through the dead hallways. Would they interfere if he went the wrong way?
It didn’t matter. Not knowing why, he knew exactly where to go.
He walked unerringly to his mother’s garden. In the winter, it’d been dormant, but during summers in the north, it bloomed with an exhilarating explosion of color and scent. The garden seemed all the more vibrant in the warm months because of the contrast with its lifeless, skeletal appearance in the winter.
Now, as they approached the towering glass doors that led back out
side, he could see the garden was as dead as everything else in Northundon. Not surprising. He’d known to expect that. He’d known they would be looking down over the empty city through the bare branches of trees. Dead from the cold of winter or the life-stealing presence of the shades, it didn’t matter. It looked the same.
He frowned, peering through the glass doors, stained and cloudy from decades of salt air and weather. The dirty windows obscured parts of the empty garden, but other parts were visible through broken panes.
Oliver clenched the obsidian dagger in his fist. Some sort of structure had been erected in the center of the lawn. He didn’t recall seeing it before. He glanced behind them and saw the shades had stopped and were waiting.
Grimly, he tried the door handle. Ravaged by weather and disuse, it broke off in his hand. With a sigh, he reared back and smashed the iron-and-glass frame with a boot, bursting the old barrier open with a crack. A rainfall of glass clattered to the ground as the door swung open and slammed against the wall. The noise was shocking after the quiet hours spent stalking through empty streets.
Behind them, the shades remained motionless.
“Well, I think it’s all right to talk now,” said Sam. “If anything was going to hear us, it has.”
He nodded, still not speaking, his eyes focused ahead on the bizarre arrangement in the center of the lawn. A dozen posts, twice his height, had been set into the ground. Cables connected them in an intricate pattern, but it was broken. Several of the ropes had crumbled and fallen in decaying heaps. A circular block of stone, three yards across, sat in the center, and as they walked closer, he saw a skeleton was stretched across the stone. It was bare bone, worn down from the weather, no sign of clothing or debris around it. A two yard-long lance of jet-black obsidian had been stabbed through the skeleton’s chest. It pierced the block of stone and pinned the bones in place.
He glanced at the small blade in his hand and swallowed.
They walked closer, and he saw skeletons hanging from each of the posts, a dozen of them, all with their arms chained above their heads, all facing the one spread-eagle on the circular stone block.
Ropes were strung through the skeletons’ ribs, but then, he uncomfortably decided they weren’t ropes at all, but twenty-year-old entrails tied to the structure, woven around it like some mad-weaver’s fever dream.
“Ah, Duke…” murmured Sam.
“What in the frozen hell is this?” he gasped. “I-I’ve never seen anything… This looks like what we found in Farawk, off Archtan Atoll. This wasn’t here when I was last in Northundon.”
“Yes, I imagined that,” replied Sam dryly, stepping carefully around the structure, peering at it and the earth beneath the construction.
He glanced behind them and saw the shades clustered on the other side of the glass doors. None of them ventured into the garden. They were thick, there, on the other side of the barrier. Hundreds of them, he guessed, though it was difficult to tell because their incorporeal forms blended together. In the bright light of the moon, it was impossible to distinguish the individual shapes. The garden was completely clear of them, though, the only space that had been so since they’d made it through the first block of the city.
He turned to Sam and saw her still carefully circling the structure, eyes darting between it and the dead garden around them. The silver light of the moon cast the scene in stark black and white. He blinked. The vials of fae light they’d looped around their necks had gone dark. When had that happened?
He shook his, but the creatures inside the vial refused to flare alight. He glanced at Sam. “What is this?”
She stopped on the opposite side of the structure from him and turned toward the sea.
He waited while she stood, stone still.
“I suspected… I suspected, but I could not know. No one could,” she murmured, her voice barely audible over the cold wind and the rush of waves far below them. “This is an altar, an altar specially built for a sacrifice.”
He ran his hand over his hair, looking at the heavy, circular stone block. “Obviously…”
She shook her head, turning from the sea to face him. “Not this. Not just this, I mean. I’m talking about Northundon, Duke. Northundon is the altar. The people trapped inside the city walls were the sacrifice. All of them. The entire city, Duke. That’s what the shades were talking about in your vision. Northundon is what they meant when they spoke of the sacrifice. Every man, woman, and child who died here was sacrificed on an altar of dark, foul sorcery. This is… This is unlike anything we’ve seen before. This isn’t Archtan Atoll again. It is far, far worse. Northundon, the entire city, was the altar. The white fire you saw, Duke, that was why the shades were marching into it. They were going into the inferno of sacrifice over and over again until the bargain can be completed.”
His mouth fell open.
“Tens of thousands of people…” She gagged. She looked away and softly repeated, “Northundon was sacrificed. They… they are still being sacrificed on the other side.”
“But…” He clenched his fists, looking at the shades clustered inside of the building then back to Sam and the structure.
“What did the shades in the underworld tell you, Duke?” she asked suddenly. “In your vision, what did they tell you?”
He closed his eyes, forcing himself to breathe deeply, to remember. The vision came to him clearly, as if he’d just witnessed it moments before. A true vision, he knew that now.
“They told me she was part of the bargain, part of the sacrifice,” he said. “I didn’t know what it meant. How could I know what that meant?”
“You couldn’t. No one could,” assured Sam, walking around the structure to stand beside him. “Your mother was part of the bargain, but they said she was not there, not in the underworld. Your mother escaped, Duke. What else could it mean? That’s what the shades were telling you. Your mother escaped, so the bargain has not been completed. They want her soul to finish the sacrifice, and only then can these shades return fully to the underworld, reclaim their rest while they wait upon the wheel.”
Emotions rushed over him like a summer storm. He staggered beneath their onslaught. His mother was not in Northundon, but where was she? Why had she not come to his father and brothers in Southundon? Why had she disappeared?
“This structure,” said Sam, waving at the macabre scene in front of them. “I don’t think it was built by the same sorcerer who unleashed the shades on Northundon. This pattern is an anchor, a binding designed to ensnare anything that crossed the barrier from the other side. I think this design is meant to hold the shades here, in the city.”
“I don’t understand…” muttered Oliver, falling to his knees.
“The entrails from the bodies, the obsidian lance,” she said, frantically moving around to the other side of the structure, “the twelve points, symbolizing entirety, completion, mimicking the full-moon cycle, a year… How many towers are there surrounding Northundon, the ones we saw still standing along the exterior wall? I’d gamble all of my sterling there are twelve of them. That pattern was set long before, though. This design mirrors that of the city. See, twelve posts, twelve towers. The stone that skeleton is lying on is the same material as the keep, is it not? Druid stone, I suppose. I’ve never seen the like. That block represents the palace, I think, and the lance is this garden. The design is similar to a bridge to the other side, but there’s no opening. No part of this pattern breaches the shroud. This is a trap but not for us.”
“H-How… For who?” stammered Oliver.
“For the dead,” she said. “If the shades were locked here, within the circle of Northundon’s old walls, then they could not fulfill their purpose. They could not pursue the one they needed to complete the bargain. They could not finish the sacrifice. Duke, I think this pattern was meant to hold the shades in Northundon while their target escaped.”
The Priestess XVI
She let him mull that over, not wanting to say it. He had to see
it himself, to understand the awful knowledge. In his vision, the shades had spoken true. There was one element of the sacrifice missing. There was one person who was meant to die in Northundon but had not. There was one person who would benefit from crafting the pattern in front of them.
His mother was a sorceress. She’d fled while Northundon was consumed by an army of the dead. She’d trapped them there, the souls of every man, woman, and child who had lived within the city walls, trapped them there for decades so that the city remained nothing more than a war-ravaged necropolis. She’d made her home inhabitable, filled it with the spirits of its former residents. Had she done it to save herself, or was there some other purpose?
Sam didn’t know.
Perhaps there was an explanation. Perhaps someone else had built the construct to protect her. Maybe something other than callous self-preservation was at play. The pattern in front of them was beyond anything Sam knew. The sacrifice of the city… It was beyond anything she could fathom. All she knew was that Duke’s mother, Lilibet Wellesley, had survived but had not fled to Southundon. Lilibet had not sought out her husband, her children. She hadn’t even written a letter. Were those the actions of a guiltless victim?
“My mother’s alive,” Duke whispered, staring at the grim tableau in front of them.
Again, Sam waited, hugging herself tightly in the cold night air.
“How?” he asked. “How could she be alive? She was here when the attack happened. When… Who could have done this?”
His face was twisted in confusion, and as he looked around the garden, seeing the banks of windows that flanked it, she saw the terrible light of understanding dawning on him. Hundreds of people likely worked in the palace. Who could have done such a thing right in the center of the structure and gone unmolested? Crafting the pattern would have taken a full day, if not longer. Who else could have been responsible? How could his mother have fled and survived when so many others died?
