Colison balked. “It’s empty. That firewood hasn’t been touched in days. Weeks, might be. It’s clear what happened here. Laedys caught the man prowling about, shot him, and was so frightened she went down to the village rather than stay out here alone. No need to go prying about her home while she’s away.”
“It isn’t prying,” the Illuminer said. “We’re looking for anything that might explain who this man was, why he came, and what happened to him—both when he died and after. Laedys will probably be glad she didn’t have to deal with it herself.”
“Still don’t like it,” Colison grumbled, but he went.
There was no answer when Asharre knocked at the cottage’s door, so she tried the handle. It was locked from the inside, but after three good kicks the door gave way.
Inside, the cottage was black and cold. Nothing moved. There was a stale smell to the air, and a whiff of the charnel house kept muted by the chill. Asharre stepped away from the splintered door and reached out a gloved hand. “Give me the lantern.”
Colison hooked the metal handle over her fingers. Holding it high, Asharre went back in.
The place was a wreck. Broken dishes littered the floor. A brass mirror on one wall had been scratched and gouged until it became a maze of crazed, opaque lines. The wooden shutters that covered the cottage’s two tiny windows rattled loose in the wind; lines of snow and broken glass shone white beneath each one. Cold ashes filled the hearth; scraps of charred paper lay among them.
As Asharre moved into the cottage, her lantern’s light fell upon charcoal markings scribbled in loops all across the floor. They had the repetitive intensity of a madman’s scrawl, though they were pictures rather than words. Most were meaningless to her, but some looked like the sunburst that Bassinos had put in the windows of his chapel: four rays over four, each one ending in a bulbed tip that made her think of grasping hands.
She went on. Countless sheets of paper fluttered on the far wall, rustling like a forest of dead leaves. Crabbed writing covered each sheet, some in charcoal and some in a reddish brown ink that looked uncomfortably like dried blood, but any curiosity about what they said was driven out of her mind by the corpse that crouched in the corner.
It was Laedys. Asharre had no doubt of that. The corpse was a small, gray-haired woman wrapped in a patchwork quilt that had yellowed and gone rancid with the sweat of bad dreams. At first Asharre thought she had simply died with her face in her hands, but then she saw the dark webs of blood spilled over the woman’s wrists and realized that the first two fingers of each hand were sunk to the knuckles in her eyes. She had been dead long enough that the smell of slow decay crept through the cold air.
“Falcien!” she called. Her voice echoed strangely in the cottage, and for an instant she imagined that the papers nailed on the walls flapped in response. “Come here. I want you to look at this. Colison—better if you stay out. Laedys is dead, and it is not pleasant to see.”
Glass cracked under Falcien’s boots as he entered. The Illuminer stopped by Asharre’s side, taking in the corpse and her scribbled surroundings with a quiet “Oh.”
“What do these things mean?” Asharre asked.
“The markings on the floor are protective sigils, though none quite like I’ve seen before,” he said, tracing one of the circular scrawls. “This one wards against the ‘hunter in dreams’—one of Anvhad’s servants, a creature that has not been seen in Ithelas since Rhaelyand fell. It isn’t drawn correctly; these dots are misplaced. They should be here and here”—he tapped one of the sigils to indicate—“above the script, not below. Doing it in reverse changes the meaning. This one, the double spiral, is modified from an even more obscure sequence. It’s at least six hundred years old. The original was intended to help its user find her way out again from god-granted visions, distilling truth from obscure symbolism and awakening her to reality when the spirit journey was finished. But it, too, is changed. The spiral’s end faces in the wrong direction, west instead of east, and the doubled drawings cross lines too often. They should be kept clear of each another, and they aren’t. Again, the alterations change the meaning, but I’d have to study them to determine exactly how.”
“Do they have any power?”
“No. Well, I shouldn’t say no. It’s unlikely. The inscriptions have no power in themselves; all they do is channel the magic that a deity gives to one of her Blessed. Unless Laedys was secretly Blessed, these are just marks on the floor. Remarkable ones, though. I wonder how she knew so much of runecraft.”
Asharre shrugged. “What about the writings on the walls?”
He hesitated, but plucked one off its bent metal pin and held it to the light. “This is written in bastardized Rhaellan. An older form, almost archaic, but that isn’t uncommon in the mountains.”
“What does it say?”
“‘They are watching me. They are watching me. Eyes peeping in the glass, madness in the mountain’s belly. The nightmare is waking, the old death is coming. This is my warning. Turn back: death comes from the mountain. It watches me in the glass and in the water and I cannot blind its eyes. Eyes everywhere.’ It goes on like that.” Falcien cleared his throat. “The others say similar things. Over and over again.”
“But nothing that explains why she shot that man or clawed her fingers into her skull?”
“Not that I’ve seen so far. I’ll have to take them to study, of course. I haven’t read them all. But these writings suggest that she was trying to protect herself against something—watching eyes, evil dreams, the ‘death from the mountain,’ whatever that might mean. It doesn’t appear she was successful.”
Asharre rubbed the hilt of her caractan. The weapon was comforting, but not as much as she would have liked. “You still want to press on to Carden Vale?”
“We must. Whatever is happening here, it’s killed at least two people already, and it will not be stopped by mortal means. I know we’re young, and we must seem terribly green to you … but this is what we train for, what we live for: to meet the enemies that others cannot.”
“That’s what the Knights of the Sun train for,” Asharre corrected him. “Not you.” She’d seen Falcien handle a sword during their practice sessions. Once. A sick kitten would have bested him. For all his grace, the Illuminer had no idea how to fight.
“There isn’t one Knight in a hundred who could have identified those runes. This is our battle. Whether you come with us or not, we have to fight it.”
“I won’t be coming,” Colison said from the doorway, faceless in the dark. “Nor will my men. I don’t know what’s out there, but I’ve heard enough. We’re going back. Any aid I can leave you, I will, but my first charge is my caravan, and that means we leave.”
“Of course,” Falcien said, lifting his head as if startled that the merchant-captain was still there. “We’re grateful for all you’ve done.”
“Least I could do.” Colison turned away, hesitated, and added over his shoulder: “About the runes. I couldn’t help hearing. I don’t know what they are—don’t care to come in and see them either, if it’s all the same to you—but I know for a fact that Laedys was no scholar. She couldn’t read or write a word, Bright Lady bless her. She’d save the letters her daughter sent so that I could read them to her when our caravan came through. And those were in Calant, not Rhaellan.”
Falcien froze. Then he nodded, slowly, his lower lip pushed out slightly in a pensive frown. He took down the pinned pages, stacking them in the same order that they had hung on the walls. When they could no longer hear Colison’s retreating steps, the Celestian glanced at Asharre. “Will you go with him?”
She shook her head. It wasn’t even a question. She’d failed Oralia; she would not fail these Illuminers too. “Magic didn’t cut the bones from that man outside. Knives did that. Knives in human hands. You need my sword. I’ll stay.”
10
Summer passed into autumn, and autumn’s leaves turned red, without Corban selling a single blackfire quar
rel. He hadn’t even sent letters to any of the prospective buyers he’d considered. Every time he drew up a chair and opened his inkwell to begin, Corban found his mind locked stubbornly mute. He couldn’t think of a simple salutation, let alone how to explain what he’d discovered without sounding like a liar or a madman.
In addition to being deadly as tools of war, the blackfire stones seemed to possess some healing magic. The scratches on Corban’s hands, which had been inflamed and painful for days, were soothed almost immediately when he clasped a quarrel between them. They healed soon afterward, leaving scars like charcoaled bird tracks across the backs of his hands, but causing him no further pain.
A few days after the scratches had healed, Corban was plagued by sudden, blinding headaches. The quarrels were the only thing that could alleviate the pain, and they worked miraculously. After a few visits to his safehouse, the headaches were cured altogether. When he came down with a wracking cough the next week, he visited the apothecary’s cellar once more—and that ailment, too, vanished.
Gethel hadn’t mentioned that the blackfire stones could heal, but perhaps the scholar simply hadn’t known. Anyway, why should it surprise him? The Sun Swords were said to be able to inflict vicious wounds and cure them with equal ease. It was only logical that another god’s perethil could do the same.
Sometimes Corban caught himself wondering just which god had created the blackfire stone. It didn’t matter, really—Gethel had cut the perethil free from their creator, whoever it was—but now and then he wondered, prodding at the question as he might have poked a sore tooth. What deity would release such savagery into human hands? Why?
Was it really wise to sell that?
That worry wasn’t the only reason he hesitated to sell the quarrels, though. If that had been Corban’s only concern, he would have shaken it off and sold all three crates the next day. He’d dealt in swords and arrows long enough for his conscience to have developed calluses over its calluses. Men would brutalize each other no matter what he did. If his new weapons frightened them enough to stop the bloodshed, well and good; if not, the sins were theirs, not his. He was only a seller of tools.
But this tool was different enough to terrify him. Not in itself, but because of what might befall him if the Celestians found it and took it as evidence that he’d been worshipping dark gods. The thought that someone might stumble upon his secret cache, and steal it or betray it to the Dome of the Sun, kept Corban awake half the night. He could hardly walk by a sausage-seller’s cart without smelling his own pyre in the sizzle of smoke and roasting meat.
As the months went by, the idea of giving up the quarrels became increasingly repellent to him. For all those old reasons, yes … but also because they were the only things that brought him pleasure anymore.
Hidden in the apothecary’s cellar, Corban could forget his fears and imagine the joys the blackfire quarrels would bring him: money, women, prestige at court. Once he let go of the bolts, the terror came rushing back, but while he held them he was soothed, and could relax into the pleasures of his imagination. He loved them as a miser loves gold: for their own beauty, and for the power they held, but above all for the limitless potential of what they might buy. They were the distillation of freedom, offering him infinite choices … as long as he never settled on one.
There was little danger of that. Enthralling as his imagined delights were, the reality of them had palled. No courtesan’s perfumed caresses could be as tender as the ones he dreamed of in the seaside cellar. No wine could be so intoxicating. Money, once the measure of his victories, no longer interested Corban; he became so indifferent that he forgot meetings, neglected clients and suppliers, left cargoes to rot in ships’ holds.
His clothes became shabby, his face gaunt under a beggar’s beard. He barely noticed. His little orange cat, tired of waiting by an empty bowl, wandered off to hunt in the alleys. He was glad to be rid of the chore.
By the time autumn’s last leaves flapped away on the winds of winter, Corban’s once-thriving business had shriveled to nothing. He might have revived it, perhaps, if he cared … but he didn’t. His world had narrowed to the apothecary’s hovel, the secret cellar, and the crates that held the only thing under the Bright Lady’s light that mattered to him.
And as he discarded the world, it discarded him. His friends walked past him without recognizing, or seeing, his face. To them he was just a dirty pauper; he didn’t warrant a single glance, let alone a second. The courtesans’ palaces refused him, turning him away without so much as a glimpse of their sandalwood doors. Corban had money. He’d scarcely spent a penny since coming back to Cailan. But money alone had never been enough to buy the time of an Amrali-trained lady, and his once-polished manners had tarnished in the cellar.
None of it mattered. Their rejections only showed how little he’d lost. If his friends were that easily blinded by a little dirt, they were no true friends of his. If women who sold themselves for coin wanted to put on airs, let them; he knew what they were. Corban had better friends and sweeter comforts than anything they could offer.
He rarely left those comforts. The world outside his cellar was too cold, too bright. It stung his face and made his skull ache. Corban had grown sharp eyed in the dark: he could pick out the smallest details without a lantern, and the merest glimpse of the sun made his eyes water in pain. Another reason to stay below.
For weeks on end he kept vigil by the quarrels, crawling back into the city only when hunger forced him. Even that seldom happened. Corban had learned to pry off the sickly gray barnacles that clung to the pier’s pilings. Sometimes he caught rats squealing in the dark. Not fine fare, but it was better than venturing up to the streets.
Once, as he was creeping back from an expedition to the city, Corban glimpsed his reflection in a sheet of pitted glass left over from one of the dead apothecary’s experiments. He stared at it, unable to see himself in the bent gray man who gaped back.
The longer he stared, the more disquieted Corban became. It wasn’t only that the face was wrong—although that surely couldn’t be his face that was so worn and feverish—but that the eyes were.
They weren’t his own eyes. Something else stared out at him from that makeshift mirror. Something that meant him harm.
Corban smashed the glass. He didn’t think; he just balled up his fist and swung at those alien, reflected eyes. A white web shivered across the rippled surface; a few shards tinkled out of its center. Sucking on his bleeding knuckles, Corban hobbled away.
After that he avoided reflections. He kept a pocketful of rocks to throw at puddles, and he covered as many of the apothecary’s monster jars as he could. Those he couldn’t drape with scraps of stolen cloth, he hurried past, keeping his head down and eyes averted.
It helped, a little, but it couldn’t give him peace of mind. Nothing but the quarrels could give him that.
The smell of smoke and sulfur, which had once repelled him, was now a reassurance: it told him that his secret treasure was still there, still safe. Sometimes Corban spent hours with his face buried in the packing straw, inhaling openmouthed so that when he left, he might take the scent of consolation with him.
In the increasingly rare moments that he slept, he curled around the blackfire crates, cradling them in the hollow of his body like a cat nursing kittens. His dreams were strange and garish, filled with impossible sensations. In them, Corban made love to headless women whose foggy bodies collapsed and dissolved under the force of his exertions. He drank black wine that filled his veins in place of blood, while his own blood poured out from slits in his wrists and filled the empty bottle.
Those were the ones he could recall. Most he could not. They were more alluring, more disturbing. Corban woke trembling and sweaty, glad to have escaped but yearning to return—to remember.
He never could.
Time flowed on, uncounted. Winter hardened its grip on the city, bringing long nights and gray, sunless days. Corban noticed the cold, vaguely, bu
t he never considered leaving. The subterranean cellar was insulated enough for him; it wasn’t comfortable, but it was safe, and that counted for much more.
If it had stayed safe, he might have whiled away the rest of his life there.
It did not. No human thieves violated his sanctuary … but late one night, as Corban lay in restless sleep, the rats did.
The sound of gnawing woke him. Rats and mice were as common in Cailan’s underbelly as fleas on a mangy dog; while the noise was very close, Corban thought nothing of it until he rolled over, opened his eyes, and saw the wet brown backs of wharf rats scurrying in and out of his crates.
They were eating his blackfire stone.
He knew it immediately, furiously, scarcely stopping to question why rats would eat the foul-smelling stuff. They would and they were. The animals scattered and fled as he came at them, stamping and kicking, crushing them bare-handed against the pier.
Some of the rats didn’t run. Couldn’t. They writhed on the pier, flopping like landed fish and shrilling piteously as the blackfire worked through their guts. Corban grabbed the nearest and dug his fingers into its throat, ripping the animal open. It was a thief—a cursed, sneaking thief—and he would have back what it had stolen. He tore away fur and flesh until he reached its stomach, the membrane pulsing hot around the meal that was killing it.
His meal.
With shaking hands he wiped blood and hair from the exposed stomach, ignoring the rat’s dying squeals. He could just make out the inky slosh of dissolving blackfire stone inside. It was liquid; there’d be no stuffing it back into the quarrels.
He could still salvage it, though. He could.
Trembling, Corban pinched off one end of the rat’s stomach and pulled it out. He fit the bloody end to his lips and pushed its contents out, filling his mouth with bitter bile.
What am I doing? he wondered for a cold, panicked instant, but the thought vanished before he swallowed. He was doing the only thing he could do: punishing the thief and reclaiming what was his.
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