The taste wasn’t unpleasant. There was just the slightest tang of acrid smoke. Afterward he could not remember exactly how the blackfire bile tasted … only that he craved it, would have sold his soul for more. Desperate as a dreamflower addict, Corban reached for the next flailing rat, and the next.
And then, suddenly, there were no more. Corban blinked in confusion, looking around as though waking from a drugged dream. He wasn’t sure, for a while, where he stood.
His hands were red to the wrist, striped with crimson smudges above that. He dimly remembered licking those spatters. Looking down, Corban saw six little bodies on the pier around him. They were stiff, doubled over around the holes he’d torn in each one’s belly.
What have I done? Corban shivered. He wiped at his mouth, licked reflexively at the back of his hand, and then froze in horror at his own gesture.
What am I doing?
Retching, he grabbed the rats’ bodies and threw them into the water. He washed the blood from the pier, scrubbing at it until what was left became indistinguishable from the old stains of the sea. With the worst of the grisliness out of sight, some of his terror began to subside. Corban spat into the water, trying to ignore the fact that nothing had come up in any of his heaves. Whatever he’d swallowed, it was still in there. Still in him.
He sat on his heels, digging his hands into his hair and rocking back and forth as if he could shake a solution free from his skull. Something had overwhelmed him. Something had made him commit a horror.
What?
He felt like a man who, having crossed an old and uncertain bridge, had looked back to see it swept away by a flood tide. He could remember taking the journey, even some of the individual steps … but when he tried to retrace the way he had come, he found it utterly impossible. A roaring chasm stood in its place, terrifying in its vastness.
Whatever had befallen him, salvation was beyond his own ability to find.
There was only one person he could trust. Only one man Corban knew wouldn’t betray him to the Celestians, if only because his own sins were greater.
He hobbled out of the apothecary’s cellar, squinting against the blaze of daylight and mumbling apologies to his quarrels for abandoning them. It was for a good cause, and only for a little while. A very little while.
Back in his long-neglected office, Corban blew dust from a sheaf of papers and selected a page less wrinkled than the rest. His ink had gone dry, but he spat in the well and scratched at it until he had stirred up enough to write a short message.
“Come,” he wrote to Gethel. “Help me.”
11
Carden Vale was a desolate town.
Viewed from a bend on the mountain road just past Laedys’ cottage, the buildings and their mud-choked port seemed like ancient relics, forgotten for centuries, rather than places where people had lived and laughed and loved only a few short months ago. Asharre could not imagine, as she gazed down upon it, what it must have been like to call Carden Vale home.
All the Skarlar holds together would have fit easily inside its walls. In its glory days Carden Vale must have held thousands of souls; even now, with half its buildings collapsed and the others surrounded by weedy pines and silt instead of wheat fields and clean wharves, there was a certain ruined grandeur to its lines.
But the surviving core of the town was huddled within the shell of what it had been, and as Asharre stood and studied it, she could not shake the feeling that Carden Vale was under siege.
There were no enemies in sight, of course. There was no one moving at all. It was the stillness that made it so eerie.
There should have been farmers out sowing their crops, women washing or drawing water from the river, children playing in the grassy market square. Asharre saw none of those things. There was only silence, as if all the lives in Carden Vale had ended when Ang’duradh fell, six hundred years ago.
“Admiring the view?” Heradion asked.
She shook her head and turned away from the steep drop at the roadside. The wind tugged at her cloak with icy fingers, and would have whipped her hair into her eyes if it had been longer. Another reason to be glad that sigrir wore theirs short. “Wondering what we will find when we arrive.”
“Prayers, prayers, and more prayers.” His blue-green eyes twinkled above the scarf he’d wrapped around his face. “Under the circumstances, however, I can’t complain.”
“No,” Asharre agreed. Colison had wanted to give them another full wagon of supplies. It was only after both Falcien and Evenna insisted that his men needed them more—and demonstrated that they could purify the springs of Duradh Mal into safe water—that he’d begrudgingly settled for giving them a few extra water casks and bundles of fodder, taking Evenna’s cartload of plants and drawings back south in return.
Wet snow sifted down as they came to the end of the mountain. The flakes beaded on Asharre’s gray-green cloak and the bullocks’ heads with melting droplets. By the time they reached the valley, the snow had shifted to rain, and all the world wore a silvery veil.
The fog was thicker on the vale’s northeastern wall. It rose in serpentine blue coils, like the fragrant bundles of sweetsmoke burned at the Celestians’ purification rituals. They had burned that incense at Oralia’s formal funeral, too, though there was no body for the pyre at the Dome of the Sun. Asharre gazed at the swirling haze, remembering, while the misty rain gathered on her cloak and wept quicksilver.
“That’s Devils’ Ridge,” Evenna said, following the direction of her stare. The Illuminer was walking between the wagons to stretch her legs. She wore no hood in the rain. Ringlets of glossy black hung around her ears where her hair had come loose of its haloed braid. “The stones are scalding all the way to the crest. In winter, when snow hits them, it’s said to become a white wall of steam that rises high enough to hide the stars.”
“What causes it?”
The younger woman shrugged, quirking her lips in a one-sided smile. “Some say the souls of all the Rosewayns’ victims lie under those rocks, and that smoke is really their spirits trying to break free so they can cross the Last Bridge. Others say it’s the souls of the Rosewayns themselves, burning in torment for the evil they did when they lived. I think it’s just a vein of fire under the earth. Ang’duradh was built upon a volcano, if you believe the legends. The Baozites forged their swords in its heart and built the Shardfield from the stoneglass that the mountain flung out when roused.”
Asharre held her palm up to the rain. “If the water carries madness, and the rocks turn it to steam, are we not in danger if the wind blows it our way?”
“I shouldn’t think so. If that were true, the rain would already have doomed us.” Evenna’s smile turned wry. “Falcien spent more time studying theology than I did; I was more interested in herbs and healing. So the best I can offer is a guess. But I think the corruption has to be swallowed to take effect. The act of knowingly accepting it is important. Accidentally touching it, or breathing in vapor that fills the air, does nothing. The choices we make matter to the gods, even when the choices aren’t quite what we think they are.”
Asharre was still considering that when they came, at last, to the gates of Carden Vale. The town seemed even lonelier up close than it had from afar. A high wall curved around its southern side, but it was badly neglected. The crenels were clogged with mossy dirt, and the iron spears on the merlons were jagged, rust-gnawed stumps. Rain brought the night down early; it was full dark by the time they reached the gate.
It must have been a fearsome sight when Carden Vale was young. The southern wall was built of tree trunks, each one thicker than a fat man’s waist and bound to the next by spiked iron bands. Crimson runes tattooed the metal between the spikes. There must have been some magic in their making, for the sigils shone like new-spilled blood after six hundred years.
Bronzed skulls leered atop the gates. Some were human, while others were strange and hideous. Serrated ridges crowned the brows of one; the next had five nose ho
les in an arc above a fang-filled grin. At first Asharre took the monstrous skulls for sculptures, but when they stopped before the gate, she saw that those, like the human ones, showed bone where the bronze had worn away.
“What sort of beasts are those?” Heradion wondered.
“Ansurak,” Falcien answered. “Not beasts. Those were men, once. They gave themselves to one dark god or another, letting their bodies be shaped along with their souls, until they turned to monsters.”
Asharre studied the skulls. There was something human about them. It was a faint and fleeting resemblance, but it was there, in the curve of an eye socket or the joint of a jawbone never made to hold fangs. She could believe that they had once been men.
“But why?” Evenna asked. “Why would anyone choose that?”
“Power. Punishment. The Baozites considered it both a blessing and a curse to become ansurak. For some, it is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to their god. For others, it is the price of disobedience—being transformed into a brute with no purpose but to fight and die on the field.”
“And the other gods?”
Falcien shrugged, sending a cascade of droplets rippling down his cloak. “Maolites seldom choose it, though they suffer that fate more frequently than any other deity’s servants. The madness of the Four-Armed Beggar finds expression in their flesh whether they will it or not. The Maimed Witches might mortify their bodies to honor Kliasta, or those maimings might be the marks of ansurak. We don’t know enough about them to say. The Nightingale’s faithful choose undeath rather than becoming ansurak, and we know too little of Anvhad’s ways to say what his servants do.”
Asharre frowned, puzzled. Even in the bones, she could see the strength that those creatures had possessed. “Why does your goddess not make ansurak?”
“She did, once. During the Godslayer’s War.” Falcien’s eyes glinted in the depths of his rain-sodden hood. “After the slaughter on the Field of Sorrows, when the war was ended and Maghredan slain, we forswore the rituals that made them. Ansurak lose what makes them human. Ours lost the ability to understand weakness, to see sins and forgive. They became terrible in their righteousness. There was, as well, a danger in their pride. The Blessed already stand outside ordinary society; the ansurak of Celestia were feared and worshipped as gods. We did not want that. Our duty is to serve, not rule. Once we saw where that road would lead, we chose to walk away. The Bright Lady has no ansurak. The Blessed are enough.”
“Enough to counter the others’ monsters?”
“We’ve done well enough against them so far.” The Illuminer shrugged again. “What good is a weapon if its use defeats the purpose of the fight?”
“What good is standing out here in the cold?” Heradion interrupted. “I’m wet and tired and hungry. As fascinating as these skulls are, I’m more concerned about my own soaked bones. I’d like to find a nice warm inn where I can put my feet up by the fire and maybe have a bit of roast mutton.”
“You won’t find it here,” Asharre said, surprised he hadn’t already realized that. “Look at the houses. The empty wharves. This rain has softened the road, but there were no tracks on it before ours. No one lives here.”
“It looks like a plague town,” Evenna agreed.
“Well, if no one lives here, there’ll be no one to complain if I lay a fire in their hearth,” Heradion said. “Staying cold and wet doesn’t help anything.”
Evenna wiped away a raindrop trickling down her cheek. “Should we leave the wagons outside?”
“Why?” Heradion asked.
“If they try to close us in …” The young Illuminer said no more, but no more was needed. Asharre thought of the bone-stripped corpse in the snow by Laedys’ cottage. Whoever had done that might be in the town—might be all that was left of the town. The notion of being trapped inside Carden Vale’s skull-mounted walls with such madmen was not comforting.
If it came to fighting among the streets and empty buildings of an unfamiliar town, however, the odds would be against them with or without the wagons. And leaving their oxen outside the walls made them easy prey for wolves or feral dogs. She hadn’t seen any of those beasts in the valley, but if they were here, they’d be hungry and bold enough to attack the wagons with all their other meals gone. “Better to bring them.”
They found an inn near the gate. A sign over the door named it the Rosy Maiden. The specks of red glass in the common room’s window, representing the five crimson jewels stolen from Baoz’s crown in the age of myth before the Godslayer’s War, suggested that once the place had borne a different, grimmer name.
Nonetheless, it was in good repair, and that was what mattered. The Rosy Maiden’s stables were empty and the hearths cold, but there was firewood stacked under the eaves and water in the well. Heradion drew buckets for their animals and Falcien prayed to purify them, while Evenna went inside to build a fire and Asharre stalked around the inn’s perimeter, checking for danger.
She saw none. There was no indication that anyone had been anywhere nearby for days. The kitchen garden was overrun with weeds, as were those of neighboring houses. The market square, which should have been littered with wilted cabbage and the feathers of unlucky chickens, was clean and bare. Even the town’s cats were gone.
The emptiness added to her apprehension even as it deprived her of any solid cause. Defeated, she returned to the inn. The night passed quietly, and the next morning she went out again, ranging farther afield. Still she saw no one, apart from Falcien and Heradion on their own wanderings.
Many of the houses bore a peculiar sign carved or drawn in charcoal on their doors: a sunburst with four arms over four, identical to the ones she’d seen on Bassinos’ chapel and Laedys’ scribble-covered cottage. Its placement was random, as best she could tell; the marked houses didn’t seem any more or less dilapidated than the others, and there was no pattern to where they stood. Both Evenna and Falcien recognized it from Balnamoine, and were disturbed to see it repeated in Carden Vale, but neither of them knew what, if anything, it meant. All they could say was that the suggestion of reaching arms and open palms, in this place, echoed the four grasping hands of Maol.
“It’s eerie,” Heradion said when they reunited in the Rosy Maiden’s common room. Evenna had a fire going in the hearth and a kettle over the flames. The fire was a blessing: it banished the chill—the strange, senseless fear—that had settled into Asharre’s bones.
Heradion took a cup of tea from the Illuminer gratefully. “There’s no sign of fighting, no indication of pestilence or plague. The doors are locked, the curtains drawn, the doorsteps swept and tidy. It’s as if everyone in town decided to go on holiday … and never came back.”
“Not all of them left so peaceably,” Falcien said. He paced moodily across the room, crossing before the fire every five steps. “I went to the gaol, wondering if I might find some record of violence or madness similar to what we saw in the mountains. If a man went bloodmad, as that ferret did, he should have hung and burned for his crimes.”
“Did he?” Evenna asked, offering the other Illuminer a cup of tea.
Falcien held the cup without drinking as he continued his pacing. “They did. Near twenty of them. I’ll spare you the recitation of their deeds. But they had a pattern: the killers extracted the victims’ bones after every slaying; sometimes that was what caused the death. Cannibalism appears repeatedly in their crimes, and almost all of them attacked children in preference to other victims. They were mostly people with no history of violence, and many had become religious shortly before the killings. Several complained of bad dreams, and some wrote complicated rune circles or prayers in languages they had no way of knowing. Protective prayers,” he finished. “Like Laedys’.”
“How do you know so much about them?” Asharre asked. The few gaolers she’d known had been an uncouth, illiterate lot. They considered themselves put upon if they had to list their prisoners’ names and crimes. Not one would have kept such detailed records.
/> “The town gaoler was one of the first to go mad. He murdered every prisoner in his charge. After his execution, the solaros took up his duties. He knew something inhuman was at work, if not what, and wrote down all he could about the killings as they happened. He was trying to puzzle out the why behind the slaughter, just as we are.”
“Then we should go to the chapel,” Evenna said. “If the solaros was struggling to piece together the mystery, he might have left something useful there. We’ll go after dinner.”
No one objected, although no one looked enthused by the prospect. Their meal was short and somber. Heradion tried a few jests, but stopped when the others refused to laugh. At sunset the two Illuminers prayed together, moving through the graceful sequence of the dusk ritual with fluid synchronicity. Asharre practiced the Sun Knights’ prayer on her own; she had no use for the invocation, but her muscles needed the work.
When the prayer ended, Heradion strapped on his sword, Asharre swept her travel-stained cloak back over her shoulders, and the four of them went out to the chapel.
Carden Vale’s chapel was neither large nor rich; the town had worshipped another god in its youth, and the Celestian chapel had been built well into its decline. Taller buildings surrounded the plain stone dome, but it was set to catch the light—if any had broken through the day’s gloomy grayness—and it was favorably situated at a crossroads near the town’s heart. No matter where they started, the convergence of the roads would have brought them to its doors.
Those doors were marred with gouges and blunt, splintered dents. The entablature was chipped; the windows nearby were broken. Those that remained whole were crudely daubed with the sunburst she’d seen on houses elsewhere: four arms over four, rendered in thick red strokes that strangled the light falling through. Rubble was piled knee high before the door, and some of it was stained with blood.
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