She snarled up at him, gripping his arms. “I will not spend my life hiding!”
“I don’t ask you to.” He held her waist and his eyes softened. “I just ask you to bide your time. That’s all we can do now. This nightmare won’t last forever. Help will come for Pahmey.”
She gave a mirthless laugh and switched to speaking Qaelish, hoping he understood her words. “And who will help us? The Ilari Empire, our neighbors of the night? They hate Qaelin; they’ve raided our southern shores and butchered our people with us much relish as Timandra. The wise old Leen Empire in the northern darkness? No. Their people hide in forests of crystals, worship the stars, and care not for affairs beyond their island. We are alone, Torin. There is no help for us.”
“The Emperor of Qaelin will help,” he said, still speaking his own tongue. “They say he lives in a great city, that he commands an army as large as Arden’s.”
Koyee shook her head, hair swaying. “Then where is he? Where is this army of Emperor Jin?” She blew out her breath, blowing back strands of hair. “I don’t know if this emperor even exists, if this great city of his—Yintao, they call it—is more than some ancient myth. If we bide our time, we will fade into endless despair. Let us strike Ferius now! You and me. Your friends too. We will sneak into Ferius’s temple and—”
“And find hundreds of monks in armor, all bearing maces,” Torin finished for her. “Please, Koyee. You are hurt now, angry, and afraid. I am too. Now is not the time to strike. The tree cracks in the storm; the rushes bend and survive.”
“We have neither trees nor rushes in Eloria,” she replied; she was still speaking her own tongue while he spoke his.
“But you have me, and I swore to protect you. If I die, I will have failed. Please. Don’t hide for the memory of your father. Don’t hide for your people. Hide for me.”
She tore off her clay mask and tossed it down; it clattered onto the alley floor.
“Look at my face, Torin. Look at my scars. The whole city knows what I look like. At The Green Geode, I could wear a mask. Hiding isn’t very easy if it’s outside a pleasure den.”
Torin looked down at the discarded mask and took a deep breath. “There’s one more place where your face can be hidden. You won’t like it, but it’s the safest place for you—a place where monks fear to tread, where no eyes will gaze upon you. Come with me. We go there now.”
She nodded weakly, her belly roiling with fear and pain, and lifted her mask. They left the alley.
They walked along the streets of Pahmey, a soldier and yezyana, a son of sunlight and a daughter of the night. They walked through marketplaces where Elorians shopped, silent and quick as Timandrian soldiers watched from every corner. They passed by columned temples where Elorian philosophers had once worshiped the stars, where monks of Sailith now chanted for sunlight and sunburst banners waved. They passed the Night Castle, a pagoda of brick walls and five tiers of blue roofs, the place where soldiers of Pahmey had once trained … and where hundreds of Timandrian soldiers now lived, including King Ceranor. Everywhere they walked, those sunlit soldiers marched and stood, sentinels of steel, occupiers of fire, ready to deal death to any who glanced their way.
After walking for what felt like miles, Koyee saw the building Torin was leading her to, and she stopped in her tracks.
“No, Torin,” she said. “No. Not there.”
“It’s the only way.” He stared ahead. “It’s either stay here or leave this city and seek your luck in the wilderness.”
“Then I choose wilderness.”
He looked at her. “You will not survive on the dark, lifeless plains of the night. Not with hosts of Timandra sweeping across Eloria. Arden has conquered this city; the other seven sunlit kingdoms march across the rest of the night.” His voice softened. “Come, Koyee. We’ll step inside together.”
She returned her eyes to the building and grimaced. The Hospice of Pahmey loomed above her like a mausoleum for giants. Upon a hundred pedestals, bronze incense burners scattered their scent, barely masking the stench of decay from within. Beyond the smoke, columns supported a roof of black tiles. Through tall windows, Koyee glimpsed healers moving to and fro. Each wore thick leather robes and a beak-shaped mask.
“The Sisters of Harmony wear beaks full of incense to protect themselves from disease.” She shivered. “Torin, this place is full of illness.”
“Which is why Ferius will never seek you here.” He flashed her a rare smile.
Koyee had begun to roll her eyes when wails and chants rose behind her. She turned and covered her mouth. Oh stars of Eloria …
A group of women walked toward the hospice, clad in robes of boiled leather and iron bolts, their masks mockeries of beaks. True birds—wingless creatures as tall as horses—walked among them, pulling a wagon. Twenty or more Elorians lay in the wagon, shivering and sallow, moaning with disease. Boils covered their skin, and their hair had fallen, revealing spotted scalps. They gazed at Koyee, whispering with toothless mouths, pleading, begging for death.
“They have the sunlit curse,” she whispered.
The plague had come with the Timandrians, borne upon their ships like the feral cats. A decade ago, it had culled those of Timandra susceptible to its miasma. But in Eloria the disease was new, and it struck everywhere. Some Elorians never caught the illness, even when close to those infected; others fell at the first whiff of its stench.
“Bless you, my friends,” Koyee whispered as the wagon rolled by. She raised her hand to the stars. “May Xen Qae heal you.”
As they walked by, the robed women—the Sisters of Harmony—turned slowly, their suits creaking. Their leather beaks faced her, long and strange; the women seemed like vultures hungry for flesh. The masks spread across their faces; their eyes remained hidden behind smoky glass lenses. Wide hats topped their heads, and their robes trailed along the ground, clattering with iron bolts and buckles. Not a speck of their flesh was exposed; they could have been automatons of metal and leather, great toys with gears and springs inside.
“Beware the curse of light,” one said, voice deep and eerie inside her mask. “Beware the wrath of boils, the raw gums, the blood that blackens. Leave this place, daughter of the night. This is a place of pain. Seek solace in the shadows, for the sun rises.”
Koyee stared into those dusty lenses, those inhuman glass eyes, and shivered.
Here is a place, she realized, that I must enter.
She too would wear this mask, becoming a strange vulture of nightmares, and she too would watch so many perish.
The Sisters of Harmony turned back toward the hospice. They kept walking, taking their wagon of disease with them. The dying Elorians wailed, slumped together like discarded skins. The healers led their charges between the columns and into the great mausoleum.
“No one ever emerges from there alive,” Koyee said.
“Those who catch the plague do not,” Torin said. “But you will be a healer, not a patient. You will wear the beaked mask and none will hurt you.” He squeezed her hand. “You’ve been with me for half a year now. I do not believe the sunlit plague favors you, or it would have struck already. But Ferius would kill you … and so here you must hide.”
She shuddered and they stepped forward.
The incense burners crackled at their sides. Smoke wafted. They stepped between columns and into the darkness of the hospice. The stench of the dying flared, and the screams washed over them like waves.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE QUEEN OF SUNLIGHT
Linee the First of House Solira, Queen of Arden, arrived in the dark city of Pahmey with a cavalcade of splendor—knights on horseback, musicians in motley blowing trumpets, jesters juggling silver balls, and Dalmatians running alongside her carriage with silver bells ringing from their collars. Yet no fanfare could soothe her now. She leaned toward the window, peered outside her carriage, and wrinkled her nose.
“It absolutely stinks,” she said. She cuddled her puppy to her chest. “Doesn�
�t it, Fluffy? Absolutely stinks.”
She didn’t understand how anyone could possibly live in this place. The night was just … just awful. First of all, it was too dark everywhere. Linee had known it was dark in Nightside—this place the natives called Eloria—but, well … she had imagined that at least the sun emerged sometimes to shine. As it was, she had been traveling through Nightside for twenty hourglass turns now, and she hadn’t seen so much as a single sunbeam, only those awful little spots people called stars and that hideous, bloated face they called the moon. For so long, the wilderness of endless darkness had spread around her, just shadows and rocks, and every creak of a soldier’s armor, and every bump on the road, made her squeal with fright and imagine an army of demons.
And now, after so long in the dark wilderness, they finally finally reached the city, they finally arrived in this fabled metropolis called Pahmey, and it was just dreadful. Linee had expected to find civilization in the darkness. Instead she found a place more nightmarish than any she could have imagined.
“Look at them, Fluffy,” she whispered, holding her puppy to her breast. The little terrier whimpered, pink ribbons in his fur. “They’re … they’re like naked cats or something.”
The Elorians were everywhere. Once Linee had gone with her husband, the noble King Ceranor, on a hunt. While he’d run off spearing boars, she had tried to collect flowers for him, and insects flew everywhere, and not even nice ones like butterflies, but nasty things like bees and mosquitoes. She had cried and begged Ceranor to take her home, and this was even worse. This was the worst thing Linee had seen in all her twenty-one years. Thousands of the pale, thin nightfolk filled this city, staring at her carriage with those huge, weird eyes, their silvery hair flowing like shrouds, their skin white like corpses.
“Don’t they know that Pahmey belongs to me now?” she said. “My husband, the brave king, conquered this place for me—for somebody pretty and decent, not for these weird creatures.” She shivered and hugged her puppy as close as she could, even as Fluffy squirmed.
The royal procession kept advancing, the knights on horseback clearing the way, the trumpets blowing, the jugglers juggling, and the Dalmatians yipping. They moved along narrow, cobbled streets. Lanterns swung alongside upon poles, their tin shaped as ugly, mocking faces like the girls who used to torment Linee before she had married the king. Behind the lamps rose buildings of opaque glass bricks and sloping, tiled roofs whose edges curled up like wet parchment. When Linee stuck her head out the window, she could see towers rising ahead, not beautiful white towers like those back home, but weird things of crystal and glass like translucent bones. Pahmey didn’t even seem like a city at all, more like a bad dream after eating something too spicy. It was still too dark and too cold, and Linee trembled.
“I hate it,” she whispered into Fluffy’s fur. “I wish we had never come here.”
Her pup whimpered and licked her face.
Linee knew that she had only herself to blame. Ceranor did not want her here; when marching out to war last year, he had told her to stay in the palace back in sunlight, to play with her dolls, to pick her flowers, and to ask her seamstresses for as many new gowns as she pleased. She had done so for months, and it had become so boring. She missed her Cery, her dear old husband, a man thirty years older than her and so much wiser. She missed the boy Torin, the gardener who had spent a summer in the capital, playing boardgames with her and teaching her the names of flowers. In the long months alone in the palace, she had even begun to miss Bailey, that gangly girl she had once thought so horrible, what with her rough words, boy clothes, and angry brown eyes.
“And so I came here to find you all,” she whispered as her carriage trundled along. She whimpered when she saw two Elorian children scuttle by, and she pressed herself deep into her seat and closed her eyes. “But now I’m afraid. Now I want to go home to sunlight.”
This dreamscape city her husband had conquered for her sprawled for miles. Linee huddled in her seat, almost disappearing into the plush upholstery, and refused to look outside the window again, but she could still hear the city—a cackle of Elorians speaking their language, the caws of strange wingless birds as large as horses, and clinks and clatters of bones and metal and talons. And she could still smell the place too—a tang of seafood, spices, tallow, and oil. She tried to breathe through her mouth and cover her ears, but Fluffy kept sliding from her lap.
It seemed to take hours before her carriage finally halted and her knights knocked on her door.
“Your Highness!” said Sir Ogworth, peering through the window. He was a young knight with a handlebar mustache; she had thought him handsome in Dayside, but here in the night, their oil lanterns painted everyone an ugly red like a baboon’s backside. “We’ve arrived in the Night Castle, my queen.”
When he opened the door, Linee whimpered. She had spent so long wishing she were here with her husband, yet now she couldn’t bear the thought of actually setting foot in this place. She just wanted to go home. This city was nothing like what she had thought, and nobody would see how pretty she was here. In this lamplight, they would think her just a baboon’s bottom too.
“I … I changed my mind, Sir Ogworth,” she said in a small voice. “Turn the carriage around. We’ll return back to Dayside.”
The knight’s eyes widened. “Your Highness! We’ve traveled for almost two months to arrive here.”
Linee peeked outside the window and shuddered to see the darkness, the swinging lanterns with their faces, and the stars above. They could have traveled here much faster by boat; she knew that, and perhaps Ogworth would have been more willing to turn back then. But Linee had always feared the water, and so they had braved the rocky plains with horses and carriage; they would just have to spend another two months traveling home.
“This city is not what I thought,” she said. “Please, Sir Ogworth. Please. Can we go home now?” Her eyes welled up with tears. “I’m your queen, and I’m very beautiful, and you have to do what I say. You have to.”
His eyes softened and he opened the carriage door. Linee whimpered and pushed herself deeper into her seat, clutching her dog. Cold wind blew from outside—it was always so damned cold in Nightside—and she trembled.
“Your Highness,” Sir Ogworth said, his voice kind, “I would be most honored to accompany you home. But before our journey, would you not like to see your husband? He has taken residence here in the Night Castle, right outside the carriage. Your friends Torin Greenmoat and Lady Berin are there too. Perhaps you would like to play a round of board games with them before traveling back to Timandra?”
Linee swallowed and peered over the knight’s head. The building that rose there looked nothing like a castle. Real castles had thin, white steeples with a hundred banners, ivy and roses that crawled over their walls, warrens with bunnies in their courtyards, and handsome knights in shining armor riding out their gates. This place looked like a demon’s lair. Rather than sport steeples, it rose in five tiers, each one topped with a slanting roof—it looked to Linee more than five buildings stacked together. Golden statues of dragons perched upon those roofs, and stone dragons guarded its gates, roaring silently. Linee swallowed a lump in her throat.
“Cery … conquered this place for me?” she asked. “Did he kill all the demons inside?”
Sir Ogworth smiled and reached into the carriage, offering his hand. “King Ceranor killed all the Elorians for you, Your Highness. No more lurk here to frighten you. Come, Your Highness, let us step inside. If you’re still scared inside the Night Castle, I promise to take you home right away.”
Linee bit her lip and sniffed back her tears. “All right.”
She reached out and held his hand. She let him escort her out of her carriage. She stood shaking on the cobbled street, clutching her pup, feeling very small and weak in this great darkness. Her soldiers moved at her sides. Her musicians blew their trumpets. Sir Ogworth led her by the hand.
Be brave, Linee, she told her
self. You are Queen of Arden. That means you are queen of this city too.
She looked to the left where the streets sloped down to the river, lined with houses of glass bricks and ceramic tiles. She looked to the right where, beyond boulevards and columned manors, rose the crystal towers of the city’s crest. She looked ahead where loomed the strange fortress, this black and twisted monolith like a demon of stone and metal.
Clutching her dog to her cheek, Queen Linee of Arden held her breath and stepped toward her new castle.
* * * * *
Ceranor stood in the candlelit hall, leaning over a table and studying the maps of Eloria.
Since conquering Pahmey, he had spent most of his time in this hall, a shadowy cavern deep within the Night Castle. Its domed ceiling displayed the constellations of the night, carved in silver—running wolves, leaping fish, brave archers, coiling dragons, and a hundred others. Its granite table stretched as wide as a boat’s deck, flecked with blue and silver like a second sky. Columns rose on every side; bronze dragons wrapped around them, gems bright in their eye sockets, incense burning in their nostrils.
“We light only a corner of Eloria’s great darkness,” Ceranor said, gesturing at the maps of the night. “Our lanterns have brought civilization and order to Pahmey, but beyond this city, the great wilderness of the night still awaits salvation. It too must be liberated from shadow.”
His lords crowded around him, barons and earls and other nobles with pompous titles Ceranor barely bothered remembering. He cared little for their bloodlines and titles, only the troops they brought to battle. They wore breastplates engraved with the raven of Arden, and cloaks of the kingdom’s colors—gold and black—draped across their shoulders. A few wore sunburst pins; converts to the new Sailith religion.
“There are few lands left for Arden!” said one man, a beefy brute with a walrus mustache. “The other seven kings have become greedy.”
Ceranor nodded, trailing his fingers across the map. Wooden figurines, shaped as the sigils of all eight kingdoms of daylight, stood upon the parchment map. The raven of Arden, his own kingdom, stood over a drawing of this city along the river. The bear of Verilon, carved from pine, was invading the northern shores of the Qaelish Empire. The orca of Orida was attacking the island of Leen north of Qaelin, a small kingdom of darkness. The scorpion of Eseer, the elephant of Sania, the tiger of Naya … all were attacking different locations. Some were nibbling at pieces of Qaelin, this sprawling empire, while others attacked the smaller kingdoms of the night.
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