by A. C. Cobble
He stared at her, flummoxed.
“You should not be here, but since you are, I will offer our hospitality,” continued Lilibet. “Spend the night. Rest. Provision your airship for the journey home, and I will grant you whatever supplies you need. Do you have enough crew to pilot the other airship back? It seemed many of your men died in the confrontation with our outriders.”
“We have enough,” mumbled Ainsley.
“Then I will grant what provision you need for that airship as well,” said Lilibet. “My servant is coming, and he will show you to rooms that you may use. You can inform him of what you need for your crew.”
“We are not leaving so easily,” said Sam, taking a step toward Lilibet.
Oliver raised a hand to slow her then dropped it. He knew what the priestess was thinking, what she intended for his mother. He knew he should stop her, but he could not. He couldn’t think straight at all. Couldn’t—
“You yearn to harm me, Samantha, but you cannot,” claimed Lilibet. “You are tied to a part of me, and the only thing you can offer me is completeness. When I sensed you coming through the storm wall, I thought to ask you to make me whole, but I am not sure. Not yet.”
Sam reached behind her back and drew the tainted dagger from beneath her vest. The steel whispered against the leather sheath as it emerged. It gleamed in the diffuse light of the fog-bound air.
Before anyone could move, Lilibet sprang at Sam, grasping her wrists.
Sam cried in surprise, but Lilibet was too fast. She pulled Sam close, their faces a finger-width apart, and then she shoved Sam back.
The priestess stumbled away, her mouth open in surprise, her hands empty.
Sticking from Lilibet’s stomach was the hilt of the dagger.
“Mother!” screamed Oliver.
He tried to rush forward, but Ainsley caught him, held him back.
“I-I didn’t mean to…” stammered Sam. “Duke, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to! She grabbed my hand. She—”
Lilibet smiled at the three of them and then drew the dagger from her body. She spun it and offered it back to Sam, hilt first. In her open palm, the blade of the dagger shone bright silver. There wasn’t a speck of blood on it.
“I am not your mother any longer, Oliver,” she said to him. “Do yourself a favor and forget me. Move on. Your potential shines like the sun. You can provide the balance that the world needs. You can strike down the dark tree that has taken root and fulfill the prophecy. It is by your hand that it may become a true foretelling. That is a task worth your effort. I am not. Leave here. It is a waste of time to dwell on the past, on what you cannot change.”
The Priestess IX
They walked from the room in stunned silence. Sam had felt the tip of the dagger slide into the other woman. She’d felt the resistance of the armor then of the flesh. The tainted blade, touched by Ca-Mi-He, had penetrated until the cross-guard stopped it. When the weapon had been removed, she’d seen the hole in the other woman’s armor. Sam knew the weapon had punctured flesh, but there had been no wound. No blood.
She shuddered. Lilibet Wellesley had told the truth. She was no longer Duke’s mother, no longer what she had once been. Spirits forsake it, what did that mean? What was she?
Sam looked back through the open doorway, but Lilibet had turned and was looking down over the city. Was Lilibet a sorceress or something else? Not even Yates or William Wellesley had power to do what they’d just witnessed Lilibet do. Had the woman bound some great spirit like the cabal had attempted?
Shivering, Sam hurried after her companions, trying to ignore the absolute chill that had encased her when she had realized the blade had not marked Lilibet, that the woman had grabbed her wrists and forced the blow because she wanted them to stop wasting time thinking of harming her. The utter disdain for their abilities to do anything in the situation was breathtaking.
Sam caught up to Captain Ainsley and saw the woman looked as if she was ready to start directly back to the airship.
Sam touched her shoulder. “We need supplies, don’t we?”
“I hate the idea of taking anything from this spirits-forsaken place, but… yes,” admitted the captain. “Do you think… do you think he’s all right?”
Sam could only shake her head. She walked beside Duke, but she didn’t know if he heard them. She didn’t know if he was aware of anything going on around them. He simply strode forward, blank-faced, following their direction. It was like he was sleep walking, moving through a dream.
She didn’t blame him. She’d never known her mother or her father, but at the moment, she was glad of it. Lilibet Wellesley was no mother, not anymore. She was… Sam didn’t know. She couldn’t fathom what had become of the woman.
A cowled man was waiting halfway down the long, stone corridor. Silently, he gestured for them to follow and took them to a room that had wide windows barred with wooden shutters. There were couches, chairs, and a table. There was nothing on the walls and nothing on the floors.
“Who should we see about supplies?” asked Captain Ainsley.
Their guide ignored her and left.
Ainsley stood in the center of the room, hands on the butts of her pistols, frowning. “Do you think they mean to capture us in here?”
“If so, then we’re already captured,” remarked Sam, “but I haven’t seen any doors in this place. If they mean to hold us here, how would they?”
Duke slumped into one of the chairs, staring at the wooden shades on the windows.
Sam moved across the room and found them closed by only a simple catch. They were not locked. They were not prisoners. “Shall I open the window?”
Duke didn’t respond, and behind him, Ainsley shrugged. It was obvious the captain was waiting on Sam to bring it up, to get him to talk.
“So, ah, that was your mother,” said Sam, sitting down across from Duke.
“Was she?” he asked.
“No, I suppose she was not anymore,” replied Sam quietly. She glanced at Ainsley, but the captain offered no help.
Duke stared morosely at his hands.
“The woman you knew, the one you thought we would find here, is gone,” said Sam, leaning forward with her elbows on the table. “That woman in the other room, she is something different, something I do not understand, but I know she is not your mother.”
“What do you mean?” questioned Duke. “She’s… she’s controlled by a spirit or something?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Sam. She stood and opened the shutters, looking out at the mist beyond, more to give herself something to do than to see the featureless sky. “She’s a sorceress, Duke, but not like any we’ve encountered before. Isisandra, your uncle, they were trying to achieve power. Your mother is striving for something else, I think, perhaps power in a way that we do not understand. She’s cold. Not her demeanor, but her aura. It’s like how the shades from the other side of the shroud felt. Could you not sense it?”
He grunted. He had felt it, she decided, but he did not want to admit it.
“This city, this entire land, is not concerned with power as we know it,” continued Sam. “Maybe they’re chasing a higher form of sorcery. Maybe there’s some religious dogma that we do not know, but they’re seeking something beyond our world.”
“Seeking what?” questioned Ainsley.
“I don’t know,” admitted Sam.
“Truth,” said a man from the doorway.
The three of them turned and saw a gaunt figure garbed like the rest of the residents of the floating city. He wore plain, black robes, bound at his waist with a simple rope. His hood was thrown back, and his bald head was decorated with a web of intricate tattoos. From a distance, it gave him a skull-like appearance. The sides, top, and back of his head were black. Around his eyes, nose, and mouth were the only unmarked skin, though Sam saw a network of pale scarring there. As he walked into the room, Sam could see the details of the tightly drawn scrawl. It must have taken ages to make all of those tiny,
intricate lines.
He smiled at her, showing white, even teeth.
“Who are you?” asked Duke.
“I apologize. My name is Absenus,” he said. “Few of the others understand your king’s tongue. I’ve come to assist you in gathering the supplies you will need for your journey home. I am told your airships require water? And of course your crew will require food. Do you have enough men to crew the other airship, the one the outcasts arrived upon?”
“We’ll make do,” said Ainsley. “I don’t suppose there is anything you can do about that storm wall?”
The man nodded. “It is meant to keep people from coming here. It is not there to impede your departure. There is a totem I can provide which will ensure safe passage through the storm. I would appreciate after you are clear, you throw the totem overboard into the sea. We have little need or desire for more visitors.”
“Why?” asked Duke. “Why do you want no one here? What are you hiding?”
“We are not hiding,” claimed the man. He stuck his hands into the opposite sleeves of his robes. “Let me see if I can explain. I was taught that your nation follows the teachings of the Church. They believe in the circle, correct, an ever-spinning cycle between life and death, this world and the underworld? We have an understanding of the wheel as well, but we do not worship it. It is a natural force, like the wind or the tide. No amount of worship, begging favors of the circle, will garner a result. The circle, the cycle as we refer to it, is unthinking. Our work, our religion you could say, is not to worship the circle but to manipulate it. It is a difficult undertaking, and we’ve found that your world only offers distractions. To complete our work, we need isolation. Hence, the storm wall, our floating capital… We do not hide. We merely seek to study and work with no distractions.”
“You said religion. If not the circle, what do you worship, then?” questioned Sam.
“Why, the spirits, of course,” said the man. “Where students of your land try to bind the spirits, to control them, we seek a different relationship. We seek their blessing freely given. We seek a communion.”
“Like the druids,” hissed Oliver. “Are… are you druids?”
The man smiled wanly and shook his head. “Quite the opposite. Druids strive to commune with life and help it to flourish. We strive for death.”
The Cartographer XIII
His quill scratched across the fine parchment, inking confident lines as he outlined the great, floating city of the Darklands. Tier after tier of plain stone buildings, vast open courtyards that he now realized were for the sole purpose of providing room for the nation’s dragons to land. The marketplaces in the city were small, the buildings of government non-existent, those of religion profligate but unassuming. There was nothing he’d observed that afternoon, walking around the top of the mountain and looking down, that resembled anything set aside for entertainment.
His quill swept dark outlines defining the creamy pale texture of the parchment. The colorless contrast may as well have been the city itself. There was the verdant green of the forest around the island, the pale stone of the city, and nothing else. The people moved about the place like shades, mere shadows neither effecting nor effected by their surroundings.
He understood now why the people they’d first encountered had simply bowed at their presence. Those people thought the airship was akin to the dragons and their terrible riders. They offered tribute to the floating city and whispered hopes that the lords of the place would leave them alone. The dragon riders collected tithes from the farmers along the river to support the city and its unceasing pursuit of sorcery. There was no agriculture in the city. There was only consumption. This place was about death, while the people along the river struggled for life.
The city itself was designed in all ways to support study of the dark path. The forms of behavior, the activities of the citizens, were all part of a pattern to assist the masters — the sorcerers. One was either of an esteemed rank and strode the corridors like a self-appointed king, or one was a menial servant, so cowed that they refused to raise their eyes from the floor. There was nothing in between.
Oliver and his companions traveled freely through the palaces. None of the servants had the courage to challenge them, and they carefully avoided the masters of the place, warned by the sound of their confident strides.
He and Sam had walked the ring at the top of the city after they’d deposited Captain Ainsley back at the Cloud Serpent with his mother’s tattooed seneschal. Ainsley could handle resupplying well enough on her own, and they needed her to calm the crew. Oliver could not leave, not yet. He hungered to understand this place, to understand who his mother had been, and how she’d become what she was now.
What he did understand gave him no comfort, though. His mother was as cold and uncaring as the pale stone of the city. Everyone in the place was. She was a master, an iron-fisted ruler, who commanded the servants with little regard for anything other than her own needs. The hushed reverence the bald seneschal used when he spoke of her hinted that perhaps she was something even more. What that was, the man would not say.
Quiet like a graveyard when night fell, the city made Oliver’s skin crawl. He and Sam had been given rooms. They’d been provided a feast for the two of them, and wordless servants poured wines that had traveled all of the way from Ivalla. All just for the two of them, apparently at the instruction of his mother. He hadn’t seen her since they’d left her rooms, and he wasn’t sure they would see her again before they left the Darklands.
It felt hollow, knowing that, but the meeting with Lilibet Wellesley had awoken a horror inside of him. He’d started second-guessing all that he knew. He couldn’t reconcile his memories of a smiling mother in the palace at Northundon with the blank-faced woman they’d met. The woman he’d known never would have left her family. Not for the dark path, not for anything.
He set down his quill and picked up his wine.
The soft sound of the feathers on paper and the scrape as he lifted his glass, along with Sam’s gentle snoring from where she’d dozed off on a comfortable couch, were the only noises in the dead city. The staff walked through stone corridors on wool-wrapped feet, terrified of interrupting a master. There was no music, no sounds of revelry that rose from the buildings below. Just silence. Like the underworld itself.
Oliver was caught by surprise when the strange bald man who’d spoken to them earlier cleared his throat in the doorway. Cursing and jumping to his feet, Oliver’s hand went to his hip, but his broadsword was not hanging there.
“You do not need that for me,” assured Absenus, the seneschal, “though if you’d like to bring it, I understand.”
“Bring it?”
“Something is happening that you should see,” explained the man. “There are sometimes disagreements within our people about how to best pursue our journey. We have no king as you do. No elected council as the Southlands did prior to your occupation. In the Darklands, we follow the mantra that strength decides. In recent weeks, Lilibet has grown stronger and has begun asserting that power over other factions in ways that have not been done in hundreds of years. Those who have been independent no longer are. Strength decides. There has been quiet resistance, but everyone was afraid to challenge her in case what they sense is true. Your arrival, and the confrontation between your airship and our dragon riders, has torn open a barely hidden rift. A challenge has been issued.”
“A… a challenge?”
“Do not fear. Lilibet has answered.”
“I don’t understand,” muttered Oliver, casting about for where he’d laid his broadsword earlier.
Sam, rubbing sleep from her eyes, was arming herself as well.
“Rijohn, the dragon rider who survived the fight with your airship, has challenged you to individual combat,” said the seneschal. “Lilibet stepped in, as is her right as your mother. If she wins, he will be dead. If he wins, you will have to face him.”
“But we were promised—”
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br /> The man held up a hand. “You were promised by Lilibet, and she is upholding that promise. If she had not spoken of your protection, then she would not be standing for you. As it is, she will defend you as necessary. I suspect Rijohn heard of her promise and believed it meant she could not be what she is. He thinks she is still your mother.”
“I can fight my own battles,” growled Oliver.
“Not this one,” said the tattooed man, shaking his head. “I’m afraid one against one, without the benefit of your technologies, you would not last long. Rijohn and his fellows are young and arrogant. They were not prepared for you because they did not understand the nature of your airship or the weapons inside. He understands now, and it is not some mundane bow and arrow he’d bring against you. But have no fear. It will be a short fight. Rijohn and the others do not believe Lilibet is what she is, either. She has not declared it, and she has not demanded the respect she is due, but some of us have determined her nature. Because she is a foreigner, a woman, they think we must lie. It is not a lie, and she has the strength to lead us all. Tonight, Rijohn’s death will show us what she is capable of. I believe you should witness this as well. Maybe then, you will understand.”
“Hold on,” said Sam, taking Oliver’s side.
“No, we have little time if you want to witness the challenge,” said the man. “Come with me.”
Oliver and Sam fell in behind the seneschal, walking through the darkened, silent hallways of the floating city’s palaces. They moved from the building that Lilibet seemed to inhabit and then through several others, seeing no one except quiet servants shuffling through the corridors with their heads ducked. The little lighting was provided by sparsely spaced oil lamps. There were no fae lights, which struck Oliver as odd since the fae were sold in the markets of the Southlands, adjacent to the Darklands. The stench of the underworld, he decided. The small life spirits could not survive the exposure to the shroud.
