by Paul S. Kemp
As Sayeed watched the rain wash the stain of the creature from the plains, he recognized that he was no more human than it had been. He should have felt fatigue, soreness, pain, but he did not. He occupied flesh, he moved, but he felt nothing, not unless he was killing something.
Standing there, he realized there was nothing left in him but hate, for himself, for his brother, for the world. The Spellplague had done more than transform his body. It had transformed his soul, robbed him of hope. He’d once tried to kill himself, slitting his own throat with a dagger. For a brief, glorious moment, his vision had blurred and sleep and death had seemed within reach. But his flesh had healed far more quickly than he could bleed out.
He wanted to die but the world would not let him.
Hearing his brother shambling near, he recovered himself, his blade, his shield. He used the grass to wipe the ichor from both. His brother was grunting like a beast. Sayeed tried to block out the sound, tried to quell the impulse to drive his blade into Zeeahd’s guts, expose whatever foulness polluted his brother’s flesh.
The surviving dog hovered at a distance, whimpering, unwilling to approach. Sayeed sheathed his blade and turned to the dog.
“Here, boy! Come!”
The mastiff bared its fangs, turned a circle, whined, and did not come any closer.
Animals always saw them for what they were, he and his brother.
Zeeahd lumbered among the carnage, gasping, awkward with the bulges and swells forming under his robes. The cats followed, their eyes glowing red in the dim light.
“Are none alive? Sayeed, are none alive?”
Zeeahd sounded as if he might weep.
Sayeed felt nothing for him.
“Sayeed!”
Sayeed sighed, sheathed his weapon, and slung his shield. He went to the women, the younger and the older, and kneeled beside them, found them both dead. The men and all the children were dead, too, all except one.
“The girl is alive,” he said, and gently rolled her over onto her back. She looked pale, her dark hair pulled back and tied with a leather tie. Her breast rose and fell with her shallow breaths. She might have been fifteen winters old.
The dog whined. The cats hissed at it, eyed it hungrily.
“Excellent! Excellent!” Zeeahd said, and waddled over. His voice was wet, as if he had a mouthful of liquid. “Leave her to me. Leave her, Sayeed.”
Sayeed stood, backed away a few steps. He made another attempt to win over the dog—he didn’t know why—but the mastiff would have none of it.
Zeeahd kneeled at the girl’s side, cradled her in his arms, and spoke words of healing. They came awkwardly to his brother’s lips, accustomed as they were to uttering arcane words that harmed.
The girl moaned and her eyes fluttered opened. Sayeed saw the panic form in them.
“Let me go! Let me go!”
“Be at ease, girl,” Zeeahd said, his words sloppy, wet with drool. “You’re safe now.”
Sayeed realized that his mouth was dry and that he still had the taste of the devourer in his mouth. Odd that he could barely taste even the finest food, but the foulness of a devourer lingered. He drank from his waterskin, swished, spit.
Thunder boomed.
The cats ringed Zeeahd and the girl, although they stared out at the growling dog with unmistakable hunger in their eyes.
“What happened?” the girl asked. “Who’re you? Where’re mama and papa?”
Zeeahd used his roiling girth to shield the girl from the sight of the corpses. “You were attacked. You were with your family?”
She craned her neck and looked around Zeeahd at the carnage.
Sayeed saw her expression fall, saw the light fade from her eyes. She had just died, although her body still lived. In that moment, she had become him.
“Not my mum and dad. Oh, no. Oh, no.” Tears leaked from her eyes, snot from her nose.
Zeeahd daubed at both, as gentle as a wet nurse, and wrapped the distraught girl in his overlong arms, enveloping her in his cloak. His body pulsed and seethed under the sodden cloth.
“There, there, my girl,” he said, his voice the gentle roll of thunder before the lightning. “It’s all over now.”
Sobs shook the girl’s small frame. The cats milled in a circle around them, their meows like a question. Zeeahd tried to shoo them while tending the girl. His hand poked from his cloak and Sayeed saw its malformation, the claws, the leathery skin, the fingers almost twice the length they should have been.
“That creature!” the girl said through her sobs. “It was awful. Oh, father!”
“There now,” Zeeahd said. “The creature is no more and that’s all that matters. What’s your name?”
“Lahni,” the girl said, her voice muffled by Zeeahd’s cloak. “Lahni Rabb.”
“That’s a beautiful name,” Zeeahd said, and stroked her hair.
Sayeed took another drink from his waterskin. He wished it was wine; he wished he could drink himself into unawareness. But even drunkenness was denied him. He toyed with the idea of decapitating Zeeahd, an idle thought that made him smile.
The mastiff whined, barked uncertainly, sniffed the air, hackles raised.
“The dog won’t come,” Sayeed said, because he had nothing else to say and the silence was awful.
The dog turned a circle, agitated. Spit frothed on its muzzle. It began to shiver, as if in fear, but did not abandon the girl.
“That’s our dog,” said Lahni. “Papa’s dog.”
“What’s its name?” Zeeahd asked.
“King,” she said.
“King,” Zeeahd said. “That’s a fine name. We’ll see to the dog.”
He waved an arm in the direction of the dog and the cats tore off past Sayeed toward King. The guttural sounds that emerged from their mouths were nothing Sayeed had ever heard from cats. The dog barked once in alarm, wheeled around, and fled, the cats in pursuit.
“What is this?” Zeeahd asked, his malformed fingers closing on a charm the girl wore on a leather thong around her neck. “Is it amber?”
“Mum gave it to me for my fifteenth lifeday.”
“It’s beautiful,” Zeeahd said. His clumsy fingers nearly dropped the amber charm.
“Oh, mum!” the girl said, and melted into Zeeahd’s grasp, sobbing.
Zeeahd stroked the girl’s hair, harder, harder.
“That hurts,” she said.
“I know,” Zeeahd said. “I know.”
“Stop,” she said, fear creeping into her voice. “You’re hurting me.” “I can’t stop,” Zeeahd said, his voice guttural.
“Please. . . ”
“I’m sorry,” Zeeahd said, his voice little more than grunts.
The girl pulled back, looked up into his cowl, and her eyes widened. “What’s wrong with your face? Oh, gods! Help! Help!”
Sayeed had braced himself, but the girl’s screams still hit him like a knife stab. He wanted to turn away but his feet seemed rooted in place, stuck in the mud, stuck in the horror of his life with his brother.
Zeeahd held the struggling, screaming girl in his hands, his form roiling, and half turned to Sayeed, his face thankfully lost in the shadow of his cowl. “Stop looking at me, Sayeed!”
The words freed Sayeed to move. He turned away, bile in the back of his throat, acrid, harsh.
Lahni screamed, a pitiful, terrified shriek.
“One kiss for your savior,” Zeeahd grunted in the voice of a beast. He began to cough, to heave. “Just one.”
“Help! Help!”
The girl’s pleading stopped, replaced by muffled sounds of terror, a wet gurgling.
Sayeed tried not to hear his brother’s retches, the girl’s abortive wails, the final, violent wet heave followed by blissful silence.
Sayeed stared off at the plains, at the darkness, at the rain, and tried to make his mind as blank as his emotions.
“It’s done,” Zeeahd said at last.
Sayeed steeled himself and turned.
&n
bsp; His brother, his form more normal than it had been in a tenday, stood over the limp, prone form of the girl. She looked tiny on the ground, her arms thrown out, her head thrown back, like a broken flower. Open eyes stared up into the rain. A rivulet of black phlegm hung from the corner of her mouth. The tendril of black mucous wriggled like a living thing and disappeared into her mouth.
“She was a girl,” Sayeed said. “Just a girl.”
“I know that!” Zeeahd said, wincing. “Do you think I don’t know that? This is the price I must pay to keep the curse at bay. He holds me between worlds to ensure I do his work and find the son.”
“Mephistopheles?”
Thunder rumbled and the darkness seemed to deepen.
“Do not say his name!” Zeeahd said in a hiss. He looked about, eyes wide with fear.
Somewhere, out in the plains, the dog, King, yelped with pain.
“We can’t continue like this,” Sayeed said dully. “I can’t.”
“We’ll have release,” Zeeahd said. “We need only find the son. Bear with it a while longer.”
In the years they’d sought Cale’s son, Zeeahd’s divinations had revealed nothing; consultations with seers and prophets had not availed them. It was as if the son had fallen out of the multiverse. But recently, Zeeahd’s divinations had pointed them to the legendary Oracle of the Abbey of the Rose.
“The Oracle will know how to find him,” Zeeahd said.
Sayeed looked past his brother to the girl, Lahni, lying still in the grass among the corpses of her family. He hoped the Oracle would know. Sayeed just wanted to sleep. He’d never wanted anything more in his life. His brother had turned into a monster serving the Lord of Cania. Sayeed had turned into a monster serving his brother.
The cats padded out of the shadows, their paws and muzzles covered in the dog’s blood. They stopped, sat, and licked their paws clean while they eyed Sayeed and Zeeahd.
Sayeed didn’t want to see the remains of the dog, if there were any. He turned back to his brother to find him staring at the cats.
“Why do we keep doing this, Zeeahd? I’m so tired.”
Zeeahd peeled his eyes from the bloody felines. “Because we must. Because my pact with him is the only hope we have. And because I’m getting worse.”
Vasen’s adoptive father, Derreg, had buried Varra in the common cemetery atop a rise in the eastern side of the valley. When Derreg died, Vasen laid him to rest beside Varra. They’d known each other only a short time, but Derreg had insisted that he be buried beside Varra in the cemetery for layfolk rather than in the catacombs under the abbey.
The stones that marked their graves were the same as those that marked all the other graves on the rise. A simple piece of limestone etched along the bottom with the spraying lines of the rising sun.
Vasen sat on his haunches before the graves. He’d plucked two of the pale orchids that grew at the base of the mountains and placed one on each of their graves.
“Rest well,” he said. “I’ll return when I can.”
He stood, turned, and looked out and down on the vale. The Abbey of the Rose sat in a deep, wooded valley, a gash hidden in the heart of the Thunder Peaks. A hundred years earlier, the Oracle, then only a child, had led the first pilgrims to the valley, telling them that it was a protected place into which the Shadovar could not see.
“We will be a light to their darkness,” he’d said, or so the story went.
And, as with all of the Oracle’s pronouncements, the words had proven true. The vale had remained unmolested by enemies, its location a secret to all but a select number of the faithful.
Ringed on three sides by cracked limestone cliffs that merged with the sloped sides of pine-covered mountains, the vale felt like a world unto itself, a pocket of light in the heart of shadow, a singular thing, like the rarely seen sun. Vasen loved it.
Foaming cascades from melting glaciers poured out of notches in the eastern and northern cliff faces, falling with a roar to the valley floor. The rushing waters joined to form a fast-moving river that bisected the vale before carving its way farther down the mountains. Smaller brooks and streams branched from the river to feed the vale’s lush vegetation. Dozens of tarns dotted the terrain, their still waters like dark mirrors.
Vasen took one last look back at his mother’s grave, at Derreg’s, then headed down the rise. When he reached the valley floor, he picked his way along the many walking paths that lined the pine forests. Pilgrims had trod the same paths for decades. Nesting cowbirds fluttered unseen in the branches; they’d head for warmer air to the south soon.
From time to time the canopy thinned enough overhead that he could glimpse the sky, the whole of it the gray of old metal, as if the Shadovar had encased the world in armor.
Despite the impenetrable sky, Vasen’s faith allowed him to perceive the sun’s location. He always knew where he could find the light. Yet he felt comfortable, even welcome in the shadows. He credited his blood for that, and it only rarely bothered him.
He had mostly reconciled himself to his dual existence. He told himself that his connection to both light and shadow gave him a better appreciation of each. He existed in the nexus of light and shadow, a creature of both, but a servant of only one.
His hand went to the rose symbol the Oracle had given him. Silver under the tarnish, light under the darkness.
“Where will you go when I die?” the Oracle had asked him.
He kicked a piece of deadwood and frowned. He could scarcely conceive of the Oracle’s death. The Oracle was the fixed star of Vasen’s existence. Vasen’s sworn purpose was to protect him. Without the Oracle, without the oath, what would Vasen have? Who would he be?
He didn’t know. He lacked family and friends. Without a purpose. . .
He inhaled deeply to clear his somber mood. The air was thick with the smell of pine and wildflowers, the scent of his home.
“Wisdom and light, Dawnfather,” he said softly. “Wisdom and light.”
Ahead, a beam of sunlight escaped the cloak of the shadowed sky and cut a line down through the pines, a golden path that extended from the hidden sun to the hidden vale.
Vasen whispered his thanks and hurried forward to the boon. He placed his hand in the beam’s light and warmth. Shadows leaked from his dark flesh, the blade of Amaunator’s sun and the darkness of his blood coexisting in the light.
The beam lasted only a few moments before the sky swallowed it again, but it was enough. The Dawnfather had heard, and answered.
His spirits lightened, Vasen turned the direction of his thoughts from his own concerns to those of the pilgrims he would soon lead out into the dark.
He asked Amaunator for wisdom and strength, prayed that his light and that of the Dawnswords would be enough to see them all to safety.
A voice broke the spell of solitude. “Well met, Dawnsword.”
Surprise pulled a rush of shadows from Vasen’s flesh. He turned to see one of the pilgrims standing on the path a few paces behind him. The man had come with the most recent group from the war-torn Dalelands.
“The light keep you,” Vasen said, recovering himself enough to offer the standard greeting between believers. “Are you . . . lost? I can escort you to the abbey if—”
The man smiled and approached. He wore a gray cloak, dark breeches, and a loose tunic. The compact stride of his lithe frame wasted little motion.
“Oh, I’ve been lost for years. But maybe I’m finding my way now.”
The man’s eyes struck Vasen immediately—pupilless orbs the color of milk. Vasen might have thought him blind had he not moved with such confidence. Tattoos decorated his bald head, his clean-shaven face, and his exposed neck—lines and spirals and whorls that made a map of his skin. He held an oak staff in his hand and carved lines and spirals grooved its length, too.
“I didn’t hear you approach. Orsin, isn’t it?”
“So I tell myself these days. And you’re Vasen.”
“Aye. Well met,” Vasen
said, and extended a hand.
Orsin’s grip felt as if it could have crushed stone.
“Do you mind if I join you?” Orsin asked. “I was just . . . walking the vale.”
Ordinarily Vasen preferred to prepare his mind and spirit in solitude. But he remembered the Oracle’s admonition—“Things change, Vasen.”
“Please do. I was just walking, too. And the company of a brother in the faith would be welcome.”
Orsin hesitated, an awkward smile hanging from his lips.
“Something wrong?” Vasen asked.
“Not wrong, but . . . I should tell you that I’m not a worshiper of Amaunator.”
Given the context, the words struck Vasen as so unlikely that he thought he might have misheard.
“What? You’re not?”
Orsin shook his bald head. “I’m not.”
Now that he thought about it, Vasen did not recall seeing Orsin at dawn worship, or at any of the Oracle’s sermons, or at anything else associated with the faith. Concern pulled shadows from Vasen’s skin. He tensed.
“Then what. . .”
Orsin held his hands loose at his side. Perhaps he read the concern in Vasen’s face. “I’m not an enemy.”
“All right,” Vasen said, still coiled, eyes narrowed. “But are you a friend?”
Orsin smiled. The expression seemed to come easy to him. “I was, once. I’d like to be again.”
“What does that mean?” Vasen asked.
“I ask myself the same thing often,” Orsin said.
Vasen’s faith allowed him to see into a man’s soul, and he saw no ill intent in Orsin. Besides, the man would have been magically interrogated in the Dalelands before being brought to the vale. And had he been hostile, the spirits of the pass would have barred his passage. Still, Vasen could not imagine anyone other than a follower of Amaunator risking the Sembian countryside to come to the abbey.
“I’m . . . at a loss,” Vasen said. “I’ll need to tell the Oracle.”
“Oh, he knows.”
“He knows?”
Orsin smiled, shrugged. “He does.”
“I’m confused. Why are you here, then?”
