by J. Gibson
“Reneris,” she said. “Thralkeld.”
“A splendid place.” Grand elven architecture exalted Thralkeld, unique among the kingdoms. The city served as home to the largest elven population in Imios, far denser than the proportion of elves in the Empire. “I heard it in your words.” Her face expressed wonder. His cultured ears discerned foreign elocution without much trouble.
“I thought I’d lost my accent,” she challenged him, a grin playing about her lips. However, the play fleeted. Her expression fell somber. “I must tell you, word of the attack on your village has flown. They are calling it the Erlan Massacre.”
“The common body?”
“And others.”
He had suspected as much. “I reckon it must have a name.” Ominous as that one is.
“There’s more.” She returned to her forward posture. Her legs overlapped, hidden beneath layers of grey robe, with an elbow rested on her knee. A high collar framed her defined jaw, a personalization to her attire, uncharacteristic of deacons. How had she received permission to have her standard issue customized? “I overhead inquisitors in the yard discussing that communication with other sites near the Empire’s edges have fallen. Imports and exports diminish. Supply loads leaving the major cities for rural farmers and graziers are, but a few, stalled. Even fewer arrive. Chevaliers have been dispatched to investigate.”
Is the Undeath spreading?
This was not welcome news, but the truth did not depend on whether he welcomed it. If left unremedied, this would cause discontent from Aros to the underlands in the south and the Grove to the east. Starvation would flourish like overflowing weeds without caravans of stock departing from and arriving at the cities in a regular pace. Starvation meant unrest. Unrest meant rebellion. Rebellion meant military action. Military action meant mass death. Wars began this way, and governments, kingdoms, and societies collapsed.
The ichor that swallows the world.
Then again, there would be no starvation in the south if there were none to starve. The Undeath did not leave warm bodies wanting for sustenance. It left houses standing hollow.
A gentle knock interrupted their discussion.
“Aye,” he called out. “You may enter.”
In the opening stood Aramanth, alone.
“Have you gotten better acquainted?”
Sister Halleck nodded with a smile and he followed, eyes traveling from her to Aramanth.
“A fine deacon,” he said, “and enviable company.”
Aramanth’s cheeks dimpled and she held out her hand. “The warding spell is prepared.”
He breathed a sigh of relief as the words met his ears, running fingers over the scraggles of his beard.
“Amun, might you be so kind as to give Father Latimer his shaving razor before the ritual?”
“Oh!” The deacon fished about in the lining of her robes. “My apologies, Father.”
Sister Halleck had resumed the use of his honorific in the presence of Aramanth. He understood.
Not long after, the deacon produced from her garments a straight razor for him, and rose. “Thank you for allowing me your time.” She bowed and he tilted his head in response.
As Sister Halleck started out, she looked back. “I hope to meet again.” She disappeared down the hall, leaving Aramanth as a solitary figure outside his bedchamber.
“If you’ll follow me once you’re finished,” Aramanth directed in her soothing mezzo, indicating in the general direction of the Ennead’s council chamber. “We anticipate your arrival.”
He gave her a gesture of accord, and so she turned and left as Sister Halleck had, closing the door to his room before she did so. Sauntering away, her footsteps receded.
When he entered his washroom, he discovered that clothes awaited him, no doubt laid out by a machine given the faultless folding at the seams and creases. Dark grey robes and black boots of polished leather, nicer than any he’d had in the Vale. His washbasin centered the counter, filled already with steaming water. The water must have arrived not long before Sister Halleck woke him.
Wonders abound.
He thinned his beard with scissors first, then applied a layer of shaving soap to his face, which he had found along with a brush and a towel next to the basin, each neat in space and uniform. To avoid cutting himself, he shaved with care. The rough agedness of his skin provided the benefit of being more resistant to self-mutilation than it had been in his youth.
His hands dipped into the water, now milky with soap and pleasantly warm, and splashed it against his face and beard, washing away excess hair and lather. He wiped the remnants of his shave from his jaw and lips, dabbing to dry himself. In the looking glass reflected the person he had known. He felt better, and appeared less like a madman.
Not wishing to keep the Ennead in delay, he resolved to complete shaving his body when he returned, unless his dream, or terror, came to fruition. If they apprehended him and threw him in a dungeon or hanged him as a murderer in the city square, whether he finished his grooming wouldn’t matter.
Another idle fantasy of a myriad, increasingly macabre in nature. They had become frequent, every manner of deranged ideation, creeping into his head like insects through a window’s crack. He expended great effort to bat them away, but the thoughts persisted. Such ideas had never occurred to him before all this. Before the massacre. Before it touched him. Before his crime.
It will not always be so. The Ennead will mend my troubled mind.
Convinced, he dressed himself and set off.
CHAPTER IX: MATRON
Athenne
Wordless, she walked. A river ran with vengeful ferocity to her left. Rain cascaded in lonely trickles. A hugging mist held in suspension, rolling over her, evading as she approached.
In the distance, a figure.
Features swimming out of the fog were diminutive and soft, a child’s. Round faced with green eyes, wrinkled and squinted, a hand shielding her brow.
The girl screamed. A shriek burst forth, expanded, as if a seal had dislodged in the pit of the girl’s spirit. Athenne kept walking and observed her clearer, changed in a blink. She looked pale and black about the lips, rotten, purple and green at the neck, her temples incurved, with gnaw marks near her chin and nose. Her eyes were glassy as a doll’s, clouded and recessed. The girl threw herself back into the river, and Athenne, as though moved by another power, dove in after her. Water swirled, dark and boundless, tasting bitter. A mass formed below Athenne, its details indiscernible. She sank with rising quickness.
Athenne rotated in the water and swam up for the air, but something snatched her by the wrist and dragged her toward the bottom. Her lungs blazed. She struggled to hold her breath, thrashing against the water as it drew her in, hungry, vicious, and cold. What pulled was invisible. No light shone there, only the flowing, enveloping void. She ached at the back of the legs, the neck, the arms, with the strain of resistance, her limbs stiffening in the chill. Her eyes stretched wide and stung.
No! I didn’t mean it! Please, I didn’t mean it!
“Eclih!”
A calamity exploded beyond the waters, something external to seeing and touching and hearing. Through the surface, light broke in varied hues of silver, orange, red, and blue. Athenne heard a shuffling and howling, muted and muddied by the bubbling and gushing in and out of her ears.
This is not real. You are not here.
In the evening, after they left Ghora and set up camp, Athenne stirred at a commotion and screaming. Half-asleep, she propped herself on her elbows and peered around, discomposed from her night terror and groggy from her rest and unrest. As the forest developed, she saw two objects in the distance, fading away.
“Athenne!” Bhathric called, at a gallop on horseback, tailing the furthest object. “They’ve taken Eclih!”
They were gone.
Athenne scrambled to her feet and followed on an agitated Shah, both of them unprepared for such a hard ride. She had already packed most of her be
longings, but left her sleeping mat at their makeshift clearing. They all had abandoned their mats, in fact. Pursuant, fearful, frenzied, fatigued, raw at the hands and thighs, she caught up enough to see Bhathric. The sight did not assuage her discomfort.
Bhathric looked back. “Knights of Faith!”
Knights of Faith? Athenne had heard tales. The Order without Order, they called themselves. A thorn in the spine of the Church. A testament to their mental god, Vekshia, the Matron of Hope and Despair. This did not bode well for the three of them, if these were true members of the Orderless.
They were Acolytes, higher servants of the gods. Rather than being direct creations of their Matron, as other Acolytes were under their respective celestials, the Knights of Faith were mortals who had sworn themselves to Vekshia for a share of her goodwill and strength. Their mastery of her favored magic granted them immense power, too monumental a challenge under Matrian wards for her and Bhathric and Eclih, even as a joined force. The wards did not restrict the Knights the same as others, for they drew upon an outer authority.
Bhathric stopped at the fore of a building.
Athenne came around her side.
“A Matronian temple?” Bhathric sounded surprised.
Wet stone formed a windowless structure, streaked with black moss, lichen, and dead vines from its square base to its conic apex. Bare greenery and misting, black pools encased in rock surrounded it. As they approached, slurping mud, clay, and decaying vegetation clung like quicksand to the hooves of their horses.
Bhathric dismounted. “We’ll have to leave them outside.”
They secured their steeds to a nearby bush.
Few had witnessed these phantom temples, which disappeared from one place and reappeared in another, seemingly at random. A phrase etched atop the doors of this structure made it clear to whom it belonged:
All know She who walks beneath the Crown of Two Spirits
Matron of the Order without Order
“Wait,” Athenne said. “Should we rush in?”
Temples of Vekshia were not places of worship as most temples, or spaces for mortals not of Matronian persuasions to wander. She had read of them; illusory mazes where the senses deceived their source. Those who intruded without the Matron’s fondness were subject to her whims.
They reached the entrance, a tall, rectangular mouth housed in a wall in the likeness of a woman’s face, perhaps an homage to the Patron of None herself.
The doors of this mouth, like teeth parting, split down their seam, disappearing into the walls at either side. No light guided their way within, only a black hole and the slightest sight of a descending staircase, narrower than one could wish. Something about it tugged at Athenne, beckoned her forth.
“We haven’t the luxury of wise reluctance,” Bhathric replied. “Eclih is here. We cannot leave him.”
Athenne would not deny Bhathric this, could not demand that they desert her partner. If the Knights had brought Eclih to this temple, Vekshia had surely willed it so.
Inside, the cold crippled them. They meandered through corridors, aromas of honeysuckle and other sickly-sweet scents concentrated in oily air, no doubt with intent. Athenne abhorred the odor, so thick she could taste it.
A toxic wind from further in ripped at the dust and filth that coated the ground and walls and their skin and clothes, shredded through the cavernous bowels of the temple, which seemed to plunge perpetually into the Earth. The air gripped, searching, seeking, as though looking for anything in motion, anything alive. It found them, and cut them to their bones. They huddled together, tried to see, fought to draw breath without pulling in the frost that threatened to shatter their lungs.
Athenne choked as the rush tore the air from her throat and filled her mouth and nostrils. She turned her head to inhale, a shallow gasp. The wind stifled Bhathric as well. She gazed at Athenne through half-shut, teary eyes.
With embattled motion, Bhathric indicated toward the ground. Dropping to the floor on their hands and knees, they ducked beneath the spiteful gust. Their heads low to keep debris from their faces, they crawled, fingers clawing at the begrimed surface, until the roaring ceased and the temperature of the room and its light changed.
They had come into an antechamber. A blue haze filtered down from wide vents at the peak of the temple. The stone of the space glittered with what looked to be a merger of shale, marble, kimberlite, quartzite, and diamond, amalgamated into a deviant, impenetrable skin. On walls tilted out at the ceiling and in at the floor, they found three doors, not counting the hallway by which they had entered.
Shadows of indeterminate origin passed through the rocks, swaying and shaking at the margin of view. From the dark corners came a hum. The tone arose at one side then moved to the next. Each after another, singing a low-pitched tune. A soft twittering and droning chatter bounced through them in rotation. The discordance whirled and wound upward until it became as a raging storm of no distinct quality.
They covered their ears.
As soon as it had come, the disharmony fell silent. The tonal shift jarred Athenne’s ears so that they popped, as though she had climbed to the crest of a cloud-touched mountain.
With the quiet, they relaxed.
At the center of this chamber rested a tome wrapped in leather of an ashy hue like moth’s powder. The middle of the cover, bordered by black vines, depicted a woman. Pupilless eyes sat shaded in low-lidded sockets. From her temples splayed six spikes. An ovular black jewel split her forehead. On the sides of her skull were four horns, shaped as those of a ram. Around her horns, she had dark hair with banded braids to both shoulders.
Vekshia.
“How does the magic of this temple sustain within the wards?” Bhathric said now that they could hear and communicate again. With heedful footfalls, she proceeded toward the altar.
Standing around four feet tall, intricate carvings converged at a focal point on the structure’s front: the seven-sided Matron Star. The ends of the star represented the three features of hope: love, friendship, and peace, the three facets of despair: disease, famine, and war, and these features in sum: death, the ultimate source of hope and despair.
In most temples, altars served as a home for rituals, sacrifices or gifts to gods, but in a temple of Vekshia, they were places of offering from the Matron to the lost.
“We’re in Vekshia’s domain. These temples must derive their energy from her. The Ennead has no grasp beyond the walls.” Athenne was not certain of this, but considered it a safe conjecture. “The Knights of Faith could have killed us already.” She examined one of the doors. “Vekshia must have wanted us here.”
Bhathric opened the book, cracked around its corners. Within, a black wooden display and a bronze key nestled in a socket. Below the key, a verse, which Bhathric read aloud:
“Be ye, the bird
Be I, the wing
Fly here, to west
Whence there, we sing”
She glanced around. “Which way is west?”
“I think, this door,” Athenne said, pointing to their left.
Bhathric removed the key from the tome and closed it. Fitting the key into a latch, she rotated it until the lock disengaged with an audible thump. Metallic clicks followed as iron bolts inside the wall retracted and mechanisms churned. The key dissolved in her fingers. She looked back and shrugged.
Athenne returned the shrug.
With a grunt, Bhathric pulled the door open by its drop handle.
They entered a long passageway, dozens of feet tall and as narrow as the stairs by which they had arrived. Down the stone tunnel, they observed sparse torches in symmetrical rows, burning with dim, white flames. The path wound and sloped upward and downward, its air growing warmer and less still by the step.
Relief flooded Athenne as the roof above them ended following what had seemed like miles. They emerged to fresh air and sunlight. The way they had come had disappeared. Bricked rock stood in its place.
Bhathric ran her palm
over the coarse exterior of the wall that blocked their way back, her eyes inspecting the area around them. “Have you seen this before?” They were in an alley, a different world compared to where they had been. The gloomy ambiance that had pervaded their weeks had lifted. Cool, but not cold, the weather afforded their senses a welcome reprieve. Puddles dappled slick cobbles at every side.
Is this real?
The crooked lane tapered beyond its midpoint such that the two of them could not walk abreast. As they exited the dead-end street, they found themselves in a city. High curtain walls, dense and colossal, towered in the distance. A familiar building rose into view. Familiar, that is, in that Athenne had seen renderings of it in art during her youth. The Grand Priory, peeking over the rooftops from far away.
“Aros,” she blurted out, “the Imperial City.”
Without warning, night fell in unnatural fashion, attended by a low hum and awful din. The sun blurred and warped as it dove behind the walls and then the world. The skies darkened to a pitch like coal. A coldness blanketed the air, their breath visible in streaming vapors.
The four sisters rolled overhead, burrowed within a backdrop of clouds and stars. As if budged by the gods themselves, they moved at a rapid pace, uncanny in their path. Starlight bled together from each of its sources like fire spreading across an oil sea. Beholding the frenzy brought her nausea.
Their eyes searched about nervously before coming to a rest on one another. The air churned, blowing and whipping their hair and garments in circles, freezing and thick with a scent akin to burning copper and firewood. Perception overwhelmed Athenne, inundated her with too much at once.
From her periphery, she caught sight of a man. He appeared as a single point of higher motion in a lake of inanimate buildings. She made off toward him and Bhathric followed.
“Mysr?” Athenne’s voice went unacknowledged.
They were at his back. He stumbled over stones down a steep decline and collapsed to one knee. “Mother—Mother, please—” His voice trailed off to repetitious muttering.
“Look at the robes,” she said to Bhathric. “A priest.”
