Shadow of the Raven (The Reckoning Book 1)

by Ward, Matthew

  "At this moment, my lord, what you believe is of very little concern to me. Family hobby, is it? The red-hot poker, and the serrated knife?"

  I felt panic rising. I tried to fight it down. There was no way I could fight this, not unless Quintus believed me. "I'm being set up. You know I'm being set up. This is Solomon's doing. His men took that dagger from me earlier."

  "What, the good lord murdered his own nephew just to spite you? And that's before we even consider those other poor bastards lying dead in the ruins of your home. Can you hear what you're saying? Even if I believed you – and I just might, despite the evidence – no one else will."

  "Solomon's a snake!" said Arianwyn. "You can't believe him."

  "Aye, perhaps," Quintus allowed. "But proof sides with the snake, and not with your good friend here." He jabbed a finger at me. "Let us say, for the moment, that this is all an elaborate deception, that you aren't as guilty as sin. Come with me now, quietly, and without fuss, and I'll do everything I can. I'll even keep you in my cells whilst I investigate rather than send you to the Pit. The law does not see innocent men executed in my city."

  It was a fair offer – a lot fairer than I had any right to expect, under the circumstances. I wanted to take it, to grasp that small chance, but I knew I couldn't. Once I was locked up, Solomon would find it laughably easy to finish me off. As long as I stayed free, I had a chance.

  I shook my head, and took a deep breath. "I can't do that."

  "I'm not giving you a choice," Quintus shouted. He pointed at the front door. "I've twenty men out there, and as many again around the back. If you don't come out, they'll come in and get you. Like as not, it won't be pretty."

  I exchanged a glance with Arianwyn. She'd warned me of this very situation only a short while ago. I should have believed her.

  "I'm sorry, Quintus. I can't."

  I expected another explosion, but it didn't come. He just regarded me sadly, and I knew, with absolute certainty, that I'd failed a test, just as I had at the Silverway tavern.

  "Of course you're sorry," he bit out. "We're all bloody sorry." He wrapped the dagger back in its cloth and opened the front door. "I'll give you a minute or two to think it over. If you're not out by then, we'll drag you down to the Pit by your heels."

  The door slammed behind him.

  I sank against the wall and smoothed my face with my hands. Arianwyn gently touched my shoulder. "We're not done yet."

  I barely heard her. My mind was still reeling.

  Arianwyn raised her voice. "Constans?"

  The connecting door opened and Constans emerged. "That didn't sound good."

  "It wasn't. Get Jamar. We're leaving."

  Constans nodded and went back through the door.

  "We can't escape," I said. "There are four of us and at least forty of them. Only a miracle would beat those odds and that's if I wanted you to fight for me, which I don't." I paused. "I'll go with them. You find a way to prove my innocence."

  "You'll be dead within two days," she said. "And not at the executioner's hands. Don't worry; there are more ways out of this house than through its doors."

  "The roof?" I asked wearily. "It's no good, he'll have thought of that."

  Constans and Jamar entered the hallway, the latter with his sword drawn. Arianwyn gave my arm a reassuring squeeze, and then spoke softly to Constans. He smiled briefly, walked to a small window by the door and opened the shutters so that he could see outside.

  "You'd better hurry up," he said to Arianwyn, "it looks like the good captain is getting impatient." He glanced at Jamar. "Put your sword away. You're not going to need it."

  Jamar ignored him. For the first time since he'd arrived, the havildar's dark face was alive with something approaching contentment. Perhaps he would get to die for me, after all.

  Arianwyn walked up to the front door, but instead of opening it, she began to mutter rhythmically under her breath. She crouched and pointed an index finger at the base of the frame. The wood glowed dully where she touched it. It was harder to breathe; the air felt thinner. Arianwyn didn't seem to notice.

  She traced her finger around the architrave. It left a glowing line behind wherever it passed and when the four sides of the rectangle were complete the door vanished, swallowed from sight by the mist that inexplicably rushed in to fill the glowing shape. Slowly, the mists cleared, replaced by darkness and pinpricks of bitter green light. Constans grinned.

  "What have you done?" I asked, awestruck.

  Arianwyn swayed slightly with exhaustion. "Opened a door. Quintus can't follow us through here."

  "Time to leave!" called Constans. "They're coming!"

  "Quick, everyone through the portal," Arianwyn urged. "It won't stay open long." She took my hand. "I'm sorry I got you into this," she whispered. "We'll make it right, I promise."

  And with that, she led me through the glowing doorway, and into an uncertain future.

  Twelve

  I stepped into a land unlike any I'd ever seen.

  Superficially, the street was a copy of the one I'd expected. It had the same proud buildings, the same birch tree colonnades – although these trees were barren and lifeless things – and the same tightly-laid cobblestones. I stood on steps identical to those I'd climbed to enter Arianwyn's house just a few hours earlier.

  Yet the place was wildly different, all the same. For one thing, it was almost entirely without colour. The black sky had neither stars nor moon to soften its bleakness. Everything else was tainted by the same bitter green light that had shone from Arianwyn's portal. Stone and cloth, branch and flesh – all were infused by that same sickly pallor.

  The people too were different. I saw no sign of Quintus, nor of the constables and praetorians with whom he'd arrived. The streets were full, nonetheless.

  Shiftless figures drifted up and down the cobbles, their translucent bodies clad in the garb of many places and times. Some styles I recognised from my time in the city or my life in the Empire. Others I knew only from paintings or sculptures crafted long ago. A great many I didn't recognise at all. The walkers flowed through the street in the manner of any other crowd, the mass of bodies parting and recombining at will to allow the passage of those heading in the opposite direction.

  Some of the figures, I saw, were incorporeal beneath the waist, with naught but trailing vapours where their legs should have been. Others were fully formed, but left misty tendrils swirling in their wake. When I looked closely, I saw similar vapours rising from the buildings and swirling into the sky. Nothing seemed even the least bit diminished by this process, and I wondered if anything of it was truly real – at least in any sense I was familiar with.

  I looked down at myself and saw that I, at least, was completely opaque, though suffused with the same green hue as everything else. Arianwyn and Jamar also appeared much as they had done before, the strange light notwithstanding. Arianwyn was perhaps a little unsteady on her feet – presumably tired by the effort of opening the portal. Jamar looked thoroughly unperturbed. For all the expression on his face, we could have been back at the embassy.

  How could he be so calm? I didn't account myself a coward by any stretch. I'd led men into battle against tremendous odds and had performed acts that other men would have blanched at. And yet the events of the last few days had left my composure a fragile and brittle thing. Every time I reconciled myself to a horrible new truth about the world I thought I knew so well, another more terrible revelation lurked somewhere beyond my sight. I'd held myself together so far, but for how much longer?

  I still couldn't believe that the embassy was gone. I hated the building, of course, and everything it had reminded me of, but it had at least presented a point of certainty in the world. Without it, I was adrift – especially with Stefan dead and Quintus alienated.

  Arianwyn closed the portal with a flick of her wrist and a single unintelligible word. She definitely looked tired. If this was the price of using magic, then I wanted no part of it.

/>   I realised something wasn't right – or rather that someone was missing. "You have to reopen it. We've left Constans behind."

  She shook her head. "I can't. And he chose to stay."

  "Chose? Why?"

  "He had his reasons, I'm sure."

  To my mind, that wasn't a terribly helpful answer. It didn't even really establish whether or not Arianwyn knew why Constans had stayed. Then I remembered their hushed conversation in the moments after Quintus had left. She knew, all right.

  "You do know what'll happen to him if he's captured?"

  "Yes. He'll either be kept hostage against your surrender, or handed over to Solomon." She sighed. "Look, I don't like it any more than you do, but it was his choice. Besides, one person alone has far more chance of escaping. You've seen Constans in action and you know what he can do."

  "That's not really the point. You keep asking me to trust you, but you're not giving me much reason."

  "I know, but I'm afraid some things are unavoidable."

  I hated to agree, but had little choice. Was I worried about Constans, or did the guilt arise from elsewhere? The deaths of Romark and Haril hung heavy on my conscience. Whilst I wasn't so foolish to believe that they'd be alive had I treated them differently, they had still perished as the result of my actions. Then I thought of Solomon's other victims that day, and my mood turned darker.

  Next to me, Jamar stirred. "Where are we, savim?"

  "Otherworld," Arianwyn replied, matter-of-factly.

  Jamar's eyes widened with surprise, and even I felt a little taken aback. The streets packed with ghostly figures had been a heavy hint, of course, but for Arianwyn to confirm it so calmly was profoundly unnerving.

  Arianwyn reached the bottom of the steps and put her hand on the gate. "Before we go any further, you both need to understand that this is not a safe place."

  That much, I'd worked out for myself.

  "First of all, follow me carefully. Do not wander off. The paths through Otherworld shift all the time and if I lose sight of you there's no guarantee I'll ever find you again. Is that understood?"

  I nodded. Jamar did the same.

  "Second, don't speak to the ghosts, and don't touch them. They'll part before us. We don't want to give them reason to take notice."

  Her piece spoken, Arianwyn opened the gate and passed through into the street. As she'd predicted, the ghostly walkers parted before her.

  I motioned to Jamar to precede me, but he shook his head. "When travelling unfamiliar paths, the middle of the party is the safest place." He mimicked my gesture. "After you, Ambassador."

  *******

  Arianwyn led us at an unhurried pace, partly to conserve her own flagging energies, but also, I suspected, to prevent our lonely trio from becoming separated. She headed left out of the gate, then right into another house-lined street. These, I noticed, were of not quite the same style as their counterparts in the living world. After another turning, the houses were gone completely and the road was lined by crumbling ruins of a far more ancient sort than anything found in Tressia.

  "This isn't what I expected of an afterlife," I observed, carefully following Arianwyn onto a half-collapsed bridge. I could hear water rushing in the blackness below, but saw no sign of it.

  "It's different for everyone. I brought you here, so you see this place as I do. Were you to come alone, it would be very different."

  Three Tressian knights galloped over the bridge, their ghostly steeds straining in pursuit of some unseen foe. Taken by surprise, I flinched away from them, and would have fallen into the darkness had Jamar not steadied me.

  "Besides," Arianwyn continued, "this isn't really the afterlife, as such. It's merely the Realm of the Dead. Where souls go from here, I don't know. Maybe if we take the correct path we'll arrive at Ashana's palace or at Skanandra, that pit of depravity the Thrakkians speak so highly of. But this isn't either of those; it's just a place that exists side-by-side with our living realm." She frowned. "I'm sure Death's palace is here somewhere, but I'd just as soon not find it, if it's all the same to you."

  I remembered tales from my childhood, of damned souls battling Ashana's daughters beneath the moonlight. In such stories, there were always those who were willing to court a great power in the search for a moment of glory.

  "Does that mean we can expect to stumble across those undead legions Malgyne's supposed to have at his beck and call?"

  I'd not spoken seriously, but Arianwyn glared at me. "It's not wise to joke about the fallen, not here."

  "You're right, sorry."

  She'd overreacted, but I understood why. To me, the fallen were just a story. When Ashana stopped Malgyne from stealing souls, he started tempting them instead. Some, he snared with promises of vengeance and glory; others he offered a second chance at life, provided that they fought in his name. He cheated them all, in the end. A cautionary tale, and one a little too obvious in its message for my liking.

  For Tressians, the fallen were all too real – a part of their history they'd sooner forget. According to legend, Droshna had led an army of such creatures until Sidara had defeated him. I'd always thought this exaggeration on the Tressians' part. After all, their holy Lady of Light needed an army of darkness to vanquish, didn't she? A mercenary rabble didn't have quite the same cachet. However, in the cold mists of Otherworld, I grudgingly admitted I shouldn't have discounted the legends so easily.

  Gathering myself, I jumped a final gaping hole in the bridge's roadway. Jamar leapt to join me, and I looked back the way we'd come. Bridge and river were both gone, as were the streets we'd so recently passed through. There were just the barren ruins of an abandoned city.

  And the ghosts, of course, always the ghosts.

  As I watched them thread through the desolate streets, I wondered if any amongst them knew that they were dead, or to where they were headed. For that matter, if this decayed and sad city was conjured from the depths of Arianwyn's mind, then what did that say of her?

  It was then that I caught sight of something unusual on the path behind us. One of the ghosts was moving out of flow with the rest, cutting through shuffling files, which parted before him as they had for us.

  Jamar nodded. "What do you think, savir?"

  "I don't know." The figure grew closer by the moment. Was he coming towards us, or were we merely in his path?

  "Pay it no mind," said Arianwyn. "Some of the ghosts have more sense of purpose than others, but they're still harmless so long as you don't make contact. Well, mostly. Don't worry. You'll know if something dangerous crosses our path."

  "That's not very reassuring," I said.

  She shrugged. "It's the truth."

  I soon lost track of time. With no landmarks to aid my memory, the journey became a blur of crumbled masonry and chipped cobbles. Two or three times I looked back in the direction in which we'd come and each time the terrain little resembled that which we had crossed. An empty palace became a pile of rubble, a crescent of houses a towering stone bridge. Yet each time I caught sight of that single ghost, following behind.

  On the third backward glance, my foot caught something. The object skittered off to my right, the vaporous legs of our fellow travellers swirling like smoke in its wake. It was a skull and, I realised with a start, the only physical thing other than the ground that I'd encountered in this dismal place. The skull wasn't alone – the rest of the skeleton lay spread-eagled at my feet. Like us, it retained a measure of real colour, identifying it as an interloper.

  "A fellow traveller in the beyond?" I asked.

  Arianwyn came come to a halt, and regarded me with an impatient expression. "Probably. The barriers between the two realms are weak in many places. It doesn't take much of a mage to breach those bounds." She crouched and examined the remains. "The poor soul probably tried to touch a ghost and was paralysed. With no one to bring him back, he'd have slipped away into the arms of Death. His spirit might be walking past us as we speak."

  That was a chee
ry thought, and no mistake.

  Jamar craned his neck towards the dark sky. "The question is, did he die here by coincidence or did that arise to mark his passing?"

  I followed his gaze. Towering above us was a great basalt column, its hard edges gleaming dully in the green light. At the top stood a statue of an enormous raven-headed being, swathed in heavy robes. I shuddered at a sudden chill.

  "There are no coincidences concerning Death when we're in his realm," said Arianwyn. "He prowls these streets when the mood takes him."

  It was interesting to see how she spoke to Jamar as an equal. Given her manner, I'd half-expected her to treat him as a servant –which, in many ways, he was.

  "Malgyne is real? And we're in his lair?" I asked, incredulous and nervous in equal measure.

  Beside me, Jamar touched his fingers to his brow in silent prayer.

  "Of course," Arianwyn replied. "This is the Realm of the Dead. Where else would you expect him?"

  "Can we keep going?" I asked, suddenly eager to spend as little time in that place as was necessary. "My mind's still wrapping itself around the concept that I've been threatened by Jack; I have no desire to blunder into Malgyne as well."

  Jamar touched his brow again and stared at me in horror. "Did I just hear you rightly, savir?"

  "I'll explain later. Can we please move on?"

  Arianwyn nodded and led us off once more.

  Our departure would have given me comfort, were it not for the flock of ghostly ravens that burst from the eaves of a nearby ruin and cawed noisily over our heads. I considered reminding my companions of the tales concerning Malgyne's ravens, and decided against it. They were both probably thinking about them anyway.

  We encountered several more of the raven-headed statues after that. Each stony gaze seemed fixed on us as we passed. Even when I looked back, trying to spot our shadowy pursuer, every pair of shining eyes seemed fixed upon mine, even if they had been peering in a completely different direction before.