Vile

by Keith Crawford

  A thousand other things she should have said. The moment she’d looked into the pitiless blue eyes of Elianor Paine, she should have screamed at her son to run.

  And now she sat here in the dark. They called the downstairs rooms ‘guest chambers.’ In Lutense, it would have been a boudoir. There was a four-poster bed, a cabinet, and a bowl of water on a dressing table with a red-lined mirror, all intended to create a little space of privacy and invitation that visitors could rent by the hour. The door led directly to the saloon. The curtains blocked the view of the garden, the same garden she had watched the Magistrate lead her son out through, after she had failed to stop his arrest. Now the garden was stacked with bodies from the battle.

  She gasped and let go of the incense stick. The ember had burned her finger. The stick bounced across her lap and onto the floor. She had already forgotten it.

  “Mother?”

  Derec’s eyes popped open. It had been horrifying the first couple of times, no matter that she understood corpses sometimes did this. If it had been anybody else, she would have sewn them shut. But he will wake up, she told herself. He will wake up, and it will all have been a mistake. No. That wasn’t it. She thought about thinking it. That was how she was supposed to hold on to hope now that there wasn’t any hope. But the body didn’t look like Derec. Derec moved and laughed and argued. Derec’s eyes never stopped moving. The slab of flesh on the table might have been a slab of flesh in the kitchen. How was she supposed to feel?

  “Mother?”

  “Go away, Olwen.”

  It’s okay, it’s just a boo boo, it won’t hurt in a minute, be a brave boy for your daddy, give your mummy a kiss and go back and play and a tear dropped from her cheek. Had she ever been that sort of mother? Why wouldn’t anybody tell her what she was supposed to do? She reached out and closed his eyes with her palm. He wasn’t there. She couldn’t pick him up because he wasn’t there. What had she done wrong?

  “I let her take him away,” she said, to nobody but herself.

  “There wasn’t anything you could do then, but there are things you can do now.” Olwen said, still from the other side of the door.

  “Somebody has to stay with him,” Haf snapped. “You won’t even come in.”

  Haf looked at her fingers and waited for Olwen to start crying.

  “There’s a second load of supplies passing through,” Olwen said. “We need you to check them. You have a relationship with the mercenaries.”

  “You don’t have relationships with mercenaries. Pay them and they give you what you want. You grew up in a whorehouse, you should understand that much at least.”

  Haf felt her own mother’s voice echoed in the reproach, the stink of strident moral superiority that came from years of being a blight on anybody who spoke or thought or acted differently from her. Was this her mother’s final victory? Her ghost, haunting the wreckage of the places she always said would fall into ruin? Her voice, shrieking through her daughter while she wept over her son?

  When Haf had told Derec to stay in Shadowgate, to be patient, to build the business before expanding it east, had it been her speaking or her mother? When her own mother had told her to stay, had she understood she was driving her daughter away? Had her son imagined he would end on a table on the ground floor, mud on his trousers and bloodstains at the corner of his mouth? She pulled out her hairclip and let her hair fall over her face. No. That wasn’t it. She was playing at grief, not grieving. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

  “Okay, but we still need you to come out,” Olwen said through the door. “I’ve sent on the main wagon Anton asked for, along with the last of those who wanted to fight. Now I need everyone that’s left to help me open tonight. You have to talk to them.”

  Haf wiped the sleeve of her dress across her face, smearing makeup and tears over the swollen skin where the Magistrate had struck her. Then she got up and pulled the door open so hard that Olwen, startled, fell over the hem of her dress. As soon as she saw Derec’s body, she tried to turn her face away. Haf seized her by the arm.

  “Why did you put him in here?” Haf shouted. “He should be out where everyone can see, where everyone can get their money’s worth! A penny for a pound of flesh!”

  “This is a hostel, not a whorehouse. We don’t buy people here.” Olwen kept her head turned away as she spoke. “I want to remember him alive.”

  How could this girl, this girl who cried over nothing, this girl who cried for everything, have no tears left for her brother?

  “Bullshit. You watched Anton carry his body down the hill. You watched him hang.”

  Watched him hang and did nothing, she wanted to say. Olwen still wasn’t crying. Haf shook her daughter so hard that she span on her heels and dragged them both a few steps into the barroom where the boy cleaning the floor was trying not to look and faces poking from the balcony were trying not to be noticed. Haf raised her hand to strike. Olwen kept looking away.

  “I don’t want Zach to see him,” she said.

  “He needs to learn about death. There’s going to be plenty more for him to see.”

  Olwen stopped still. Haf tugged. Her daughter held her arm steady. She lifted her face and looked her mother in her eyes. Haf raised her hand higher, but now Olwen was holding her up, like the mother was the child, like her hand was made of china and would break with the slightest contact.

  “You can stay in there staring at his body, but the living must keep on living.” Olwen forced Haf’s arm until it rested between them. “I thought being a Madam of a whorehouse gave you experience in covering bruises.”

  “Your father isn’t coming back.” Haf said. “You didn’t see what Persephone did to him. Anton doesn’t care how many of us he gets killed.”

  “Anton didn’t kill Derec. He did everything he could. It was you—”

  Haf slapped Olwen. It was too late. Somehow, the power had shifted from mother to daughter. Inside she heard fractures, splinters, broken glass, as if all the bones in her hand had smashed against the side of Olwen’s face. No. This wasn’t grief. This wasn’t how grieving felt. Olwen didn’t move at all. Haf turned her back on her daughter and looked up at the people on the balcony, the people pretending not to watch, the people too scared to fight and too scared to run.

  “We’re not opening tonight,” Haf shouted. “If you don’t have the balls to flee, then hide in the cellar and pray. But if you know what’s coming, then take everything you own, and take the tunnel out through the cellar, and never look back.”

  She turned on her daughter.

  “Tannyr’s coming, Olwen,” Haf said. “You like fucking fat men? He’ll like fucking you.”

  Olwen turned pale and Haf saw she had finally got through to her. She had nothing more to say. The swelling in her ankle was worse, but let them see her limp, let them see the damage, let them see what was coming. She slammed the door of Derec’s room behind her. It rattled in the frame and bounced back open.

  “Father always comes back,” Olwen said, but her voice was shaking. “And so will Anton.”

  Haf got on her knees next to Derec. When she went to take his hand, an imaginary pain held her fingers an inch from his skin. Gwyion had said “you killed my son,” when he’d held her in his arms and had been so very calm about her visit to Tannyr Brek. She thought about how little Uwen looked like Tannyr. Gwyion had flinched when she had said “every dead Brek is a step closer to us being safe.”

  She had hidden things from him. She’d failed him. Then, when by some miracle she’d found him again, alive, but broken and bleeding in the cart, she’d given him so much laudanum he hadn’t been able to speak. And she’d walked away. Was this grieving? She should have sewn his eyes shut.

  Chapter 61

  Elianor and Nathaniel stood face to face, hand in hand, in the courtyard of Demon’s Pass Monastery.

  “I told you already,” Nathaniel said. “I told you I sent the letter to your master.”

  “And I don’t
know how, but you’ve found some way to lie to me. I thought it was the first time, but it was the second. You didn’t write the letter and, worse yet, you don’t know who did—which is why you’re so anxious about being here, about me being here.”

  Nathaniel watched her closely. He licked his lips.

  “Okay. I didn’t write the letter. We’re being manipulated, I don’t know by whom, and that effects the extent to which I can trust you. Don’t you see? How did the letter get to your master? Who could send it without anybody in the castle knowing? I said I wrote the letter to try and draw out the puppet master. But they remain hidden and, as long as they do, we are all in terrible danger.”

  He had lied to her. He had lied to her again, and again, and not once had she been able to discern it. Was this some weakness in her, or had Nathaniel discovered a secret to the Truthsense, hidden away in his library, hidden up in the mountains?

  “You may not have written the letter, but it was you who antagonised the Garns and the Breks, you who stirred up the question of the Black Dog, and you who provoked our mysterious letter sender to have me come here,” Elianor said. “Did you arrange for Derec Garn to meet me? Or did you push Anton into it?”

  She held his gaze. The rising sun peeked over the church at the tomb of Dalard Carada. Deep shadows pulled back to reveal the disturbed dirt of fresh-dug graves.

  “I had to do something,” Nathaniel said. “My father is doing something terrible, and nobody else was asking the right questions. I think the Garns are involved, but I was sure that if I investigated on my own, Arbalest would just kill them. You’ve seen what he’s like. He wouldn’t even need an excuse.”

  “So, you put the Garns in my way. And you lied when you claimed Lord Vile ordered us here.”

  “I’ve wanted to come to the monastery for years, but the others wouldn’t risk disobeying father. I couldn’t just come on my own: if I discovered the truth who would believe me? So, I needed a Magistrate to come, someone with the authority to investigate, somebody with the will to act.”

  “Don’t try to flatter me, Nathaniel,” she said. “People have died.”

  But she didn’t let go of his hand.

  “I knew if I made enough trouble, stirred up things between the locals, spread new rumours about the Black Dog, then somebody would contact the capital. And I knew it was likely they would send you, because of your father, because the connection between our house and Lord Carada. But I thought it would be Anton, or Persephone, or maybe even my father. Don’t you see? Not knowing who sent the letter changes everything. This is much bigger than a senile old Lord dreaming of his sons stealing the throne. There is a greater truth here, and that truth is hidden in the abbey.”

  “Why the deceit?” Elianor said. “Why not tell me all this when I arrived?”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me without figuring it out yourself. That much was obvious the moment I met you.”

  Would she have done the same in his place? Isolated, ruled over by a tyrannical father, desperate for answers and with nobody to trust?

  “If Seren and Begw are dead, your inaction makes you complicit.”

  The sun continued to climb, driving the shadow from the library door.

  “If there’s a Shaper here,” he said, “you’ll need my help to beat it.”

  “Alright. Your word, Nathaniel. If there is a Shaper, we face it together. And then you come with me to the capital and do what needs to be done. There’s going to be a reckoning. Be sure you’re on the right side.”

  Nathaniel just smiled.

  The double doors of the church were jammed. Nathaniel rattled them by the great brass hoops hung at either side. The doors didn’t move more than a few centimetres, ramming back and forth against whatever blocked them.

  “Let’s see if we can find a way in through the cloister,” Elianor said.

  They continued around the outside of the church. She could see Nathaniel looking for another tomb, but they saw neither tomb, nor gravestone, just the endless hodgepodge of stone walls and paved slopes. The south door was also locked. Elianor spotted a window, high and narrow.

  “Boost me up,” she said.

  She slipped through the window and dropped down into the room. The fall was farther than she expected; she tripped in the darkness and fell on her hands.

  “Are you okay?” Nathaniel called. He had jumped up after her and had his head and shoulders through the window.

  The room was a balneary: a communal bathroom for the monks. A pair of large rectangular baths took up most of the space. They were encased in a thousand little blue and white tiles but otherwise sat naked in the dark, for there was no water, only a thick layer of dust. A drift of snow had burst in at the far end where a window had broken, and nobody had cleaned it up.

  “You think the monks gave up bathing?” Nathaniel said, grunting as he dropped after her.

  Elianor looked along the windows. The drop was farther on the inside, the windows high and narrow. Not a route to leave by in a hurry. They would have to find another way out.

  “I think the monks are dead.”

  A crash sounded out in the courtyard, back from where they had come. They both whirled, their swords raised.

  There was nothing to see but the light from the broken window.

  “Looks like an infirmary this way,” Elianor said, pointing through the second door out of the balneary. “We should keep moving.”

  From the empty infirmary, they passed through a short corridor. Open doorways led to dormitories, abandoned, narrow cots, empty, unused. After a steep flight of stairs, they found a large dining hall. Nathaniel glanced around to orientate himself.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to the far side. “That should be an entrance to the church.”

  The cold struck them the moment Elianor opened the door. Freezing air carried on the gloom. Elianor had to take shallow breaths until her lungs adapted. The main hall of the church was almost entirely in darkness. What little light there was came from high up and to their left, but it was deadened, dank, and did little more than empower the shadow.

  They stepped out beneath a low pillar-lined aisle. This demarked the edge of the nave, an open hallway marked by wide wooden benches all the way up to the chancel and the altar, mirrored on the opposite side by an identical covered aisle. The nave was large, far too large for a community of two dozen monks. It could easily seat a hundred. Scattered across the benches were pieces of furniture, or sacks of stores, or something else making lumpen shapes Elianor could not see clearly in the dark.

  Nathaniel followed closely as she walked between the benches. Atop the pillars at the other side was a triforium, a row of smaller arches that supported the clerestory, where the interior rose above the external rooftop so that small windows might admit daylight. These tiny yellowed windows circumvented the base of the grand basilica, a trail of sickened breadcrumbs leading the way to the only true source of light in the great, solemn chamber. This was the lancet, a huge window as high as the church: an unadorned, simple piece of glass, two-storeys high, which must have shone glorious blue sky out over the convocation before it became entirely encased in filth.

  The line of the lancet led to a reredos, a decorated screen that showed an armoured knight in battle with a tentacled monster. The monster was a Kindred Prince. It was a mess of tentacles and claws that swarmed around an oddly beautiful, androgynous face, black blood flowing from a series of deep wounds. The knight stood over it with his sword raised to the sky. His helmet had fallen by the corpse of a comrade, and his long blond hair flowed behind him as if caught in the blast of the Kindred’s dying roar.

  Was this meant to be Arbalest Vile at the battle of Demon’s Pass? Was the dead soldier his friend and patron Dalard Carada? It was hard to know what to think of those stories anymore. From what she had seen of the Kindred, the monster’s injuries in the painting would not stop it in real life.

  The reredos was arranged so that the point of the knight’s swo
rd met the base of the lancet, and if the huge window had been clean, it might have appeared that the light of the heavens had cut the monster down. But the window was black with filth. Elianor’s eyes were adjusting better now. The painting was a backdrop to the chancel, the cloth-covered altar, and an elegant carved stone font.

  A cloaked figure stood before the font with its hood low enough that Elianor couldn’t see its face. It could have been a scarecrow dressed in a funeral cloth. Stiff arms gripped the rim of the bowl. Its hands were withered and dead. Elianor did not need to look inside the bowl to know there was nothing but dust. The figure didn’t move at all, although Elianor had the weird impression that it twitched every time she turned her head.

  “Abbot Bayard?” Nathaniel called.

  They edged closer, into the choir space between the nave and the font. Their wet boots left marks in the grime.

  “Not anymore,” Elianor said.

  And she realised what she had seen on the benches.

  Chapter 62

  What she had taken to be smashed furniture, or sacks of stores, were the broken corpses of the monks of Demon’s Pass. Their bodies rested against their misericords as if they had nodded off in prayer and simply never woken. Elianor took hold of Nathaniel’s forearm.

  “Look!”

  “Oh shit,” he said. With her hand on his arm, they edged away, trying to keep equidistant between the standing corpse in the chancel and the seated bodies on the benches.