Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  Other things were with them in those pools. From across the room, Isiem saw Ganoven lift a dangling, cat-sized creature out of a curved glass tank in the wall, stuff it into a metal cage, and drop the cage into one of the compartmented sacks he'd brought. A moment later, he pulled out another tank and reached into it with gloved hands, snatching out two smaller creatures that went into a second cage. Pulcher sat cross-legged on the floor, clumsily teasing a bit of yarn in front of another creature that was loose in the room.

  Ascaros cleared his throat. Startled, Pulcher dropped the yarn. Ganoven's head snapped up, and an apprehensive, guilty look flashed across his face before he shook it off and put on an oily smile.

  "You surprised us," the Aspis agent said.

  "I can see that." Shaking the last of the white smoke from the hem of his shadowcaller's robes, Ascaros crossed the circular room. Isiem followed, glancing at the glass dome in the chamber's center as he passed it. The floor underneath the dome was worked into a series of concentric ovals in different colors of metal and stone. Among them, Isiem recognized silver, iron, ink, glass, salt, and amethyst in myriad shades of purple and swirled lavender. Protective magics, all of them. They warded against everything from deceitful illusions to fire and acid, while both the inner- and outermost rings were inscribed with runes to contain fiends.

  There was nothing else in the dome, though, while there were things in the glass tanks near the back of the room. The skeletons of rats, cats, and other small animals sat in those prisons, along with droppings that had dried to rocks and the dust of their last meals. Greenish-gray mold and white-tufted fungus covered their bare little bones.

  As Isiem walked by, his floating light bobbing over his shoulder, one of those skeletons stood up and looked at him.

  It was a turtle. Mold furred its shell, obscuring its original colors and patterns underneath a coat of dull gray. Tendrils of ropy white fungus braided around its skeletal legs and muzzled its dead bony beak. Eight chitinous, serrated legs clattered along the underside of its shell. From a crack in that shell sprouted a monstrous, fleshy set of jaws on a long stalk, like some horrid green-veined flower. The turtle's eyes were long gone, but the black pits that remained were undeniably fixed on Isiem's approach, and as he stared at it in momentary shock, the dead creature lifted a stubby leg at him and pawed at the front of its tank. Its toes looked like tiny human fingers, and they left smudged greenish prints on the glass.

  "Remarkable, isn't it?" Ganoven trotted over, his bearded face split in an ingratiating smile. "They aren't really alive, of course, but they do seem to be capable of basic responses. They can walk, and they move toward food or water, although they can't seem to ingest any of it. They move away from extremes of heat or cold, and if something damages them, they scuttle away upon being exposed to it again. So they are capable of learning, as well as reacting on instinct."

  "What are they?" Ascaros asked. Around them, more of the dead creatures were stirring. Rats and cats and patchy-feathered birds, bald but for a few stray plumes that poked through their moldy bones, had risen onto their fleshless feet and were watching them through the glass. Every one of them was deformed in some way, with malformed appendages, extra heads, or strange vegetal growths protruding from their bodies, and all had the same eyeless jawstalk growing from somewhere in their bodies. Fibrous strands connected their bones like puppet strings of misplaced sinew. The room echoed eerily with the sound of their scratching at the tanks.

  "Not undead, not possessed, and not truly alive. Beyond that, we don't quite know," Ganoven admitted. "My spells have some limits."

  "Evil?" Isiem raised an ivory eyebrow at the half-elven man. "Surely you can sense that."

  "Evil ..." The Aspis agent gave a reluctant, concessionary shrug. "No, actually. I mean that I don't have a way of sensing it, not that they aren't. Or are, for that matter."

  "Well, who isn't," Ascaros said, with a lopsided little half-smile. He pulled on a kidskin glove and traced his fingertip across the surface of the turtle's tank. It snapped at his hand, and he stepped away, his smile deepening slightly. "Vile little things. These are what you were putting into that sack when we came in?"

  Ganoven's mouth opened, and he hesitated, then nodded briskly. "Safely contained, of course."

  "Yes. Safely contained. Like that one?" The shadowcaller gestured to the creature that Pulcher had been baiting with his bit of yarn. It was a cat, as fungus-ridden and skeletal as the others. Hair-thin fangs filled its empty eye sockets like ingrown eyelashes, gnashing softly at nothing. Only a bit of striped orange fur on the tip of its tail and across the knuckles of its paws hinted at the dead cat's original appearance.

  "It's my pet," Pulcher said, sulky as a chastened child. "Been alive for a thousand years, how many people have a pet like that? I named him Sparky. Ganoven said I could have him."

  "Sparky," Ascaros echoed, musing. "Yes. Appropriate." He pointed at the offending cat and murmured a word, and although Isiem recognized the spell and knew what was coming, he still flinched as a hissing stream of fire erupted from the shadowcaller's hand to annihilate Pulcher's skeletal pet.

  Sparky burned swiftly, mold and bone and fragile cartilage going up in a rush of popping flames. The jawstalk that had been hiding inside its ribcage lunged out, belching bitter smoke as it burned upward from throat to teeth. Wider and wider the mouth pulled, until the top of the head collapsed under its own weight and tumbled back into the smoke and was lost from view.

  For an instant, Isiem thought he heard words in that billowing belch of smoke. Threats, curses, imprecations in some inhuman tongue—the meaning of it eluded him, but the intent was clear. Hatred, and a promise of vengeance.

  Or so he thought. It took only seconds for the skeleton to burn away, and almost as soon as he imagined there were words amid the snapping sparks, the tiny conflagration was gone.

  Pulcher, once he recovered from the shock of being so narrowly missed by the shadowcaller's spell, turned a furious glare on Ascaros. A red flush crept up the sides of the big man's neck, darkening his ears. "Why'd you do that?"

  "Do what? Burn Sparky?" Ascaros asked, his apparent boredom belied by a malicious twinkle in his dark eyes. "Because I wanted to see if the smoke would kill you."

  "Why you—" Pulcher began to lumber to his feet, but Copple grabbed him around the waist and pulled him back to the ground. Gasping viciously and clutching at the leg that the Splinter Men had slashed, the chubby thug nevertheless managed to warn his friend off with a furious shake of his head.

  "No," Copple hissed, "not now."

  "Not ever," Ascaros said calmly. He crossed to where the two thugs sat sprawled on the floor. Ostentatiously ignoring Pulcher's hate-filled stare, he poked at the cat's charred bones. "You should thank me. And you should see Teglias for a curative spell. While I certainly hope I acted swiftly enough to prevent you from catching Sparky's contagion, I can't be sure. Therefore, I suggest you explain your stupidity to the cleric in case I was too late."

  Pulcher's flush had drained from him as the shadowcaller spoke. By the time Ascaros finished, he was pale. "Do you think I'm sick? With the mold?"

  "I think you should run off and see Teglias," Ascaros said with a small shrug, still studying Sparky's remains. "Or not. It's entirely your choice. Since your stupidity can, once again, only kill you, it's of no great concern."

  "You're a bastard, you know that?" Pulcher got back to his feet. Glancing nervously at the skeletal creatures trapped in tanks all around them, he edged toward the hallway's entrance, then hurried away, with Copple hobbling and cursing at his side.

  When his lackeys were gone, Ganoven wiped perspiration from his brow. The sudden realization of how much danger he'd put them in, and Ascaros's fiery show of force, seemed to have unnerved the Aspis agent badly. His arrogance had evaporated, leaving him white and shaken. "I should apologize for letting him—"

  "You should," Ascaros agreed, "but I don't care to hear it. It doesn't matter anymore. I
trust you will not be removing those cages from their sacks until we leave this place."

  "No, no, of course not," the goateed half-elf said hastily. "That would be very foolish."

  "Yes. It would." At last Ascaros turned away from the cat's charred bones, fixing Ganoven with an icy smile. "Very foolish. I'm glad we agree. Now perhaps you should go see whether your lackey is better at following my instructions than yours. I would hate for him to get lost looting another room instead of going to Teglias promptly."

  Ganoven nodded jerkily and went to the hallway, all but fleeing from the Nidalese. Once he was out of sight, Ascaros let out a long, angry exhalation and dropped his pretense of calm.

  "That idiot," he fumed. "That thundering, colossal, dung-brained idiot. Those cages he's using probably aren't even enchanted. It would serve him right if they all die of plague once he pulls them out of the sack. All of them, all his entire consortium of idiots. They must all be unfathomably stupid to have entrusted anything of importance to that lackwit."

  "Enough," Isiem said. "It's done. We'll take precautions in the future, as they can't be trusted to take their own."

  "Killing them now would be a good start," Ascaros said.

  Isiem shrugged. He had no love for the Aspis agents, and they no longer seemed much of an asset to the expedition. It was possible that Kyril might disapprove of their deaths ...but they were not good men, and she seemed to have few qualms about striking down the unjust. Nevertheless, he felt no urgency to deal with them now. "Do you know what afflicts these beasts? Do you really believe it's a plague?"

  "I don't know," Ascaros admitted. "I'm not sure what to make of all these bones." He returned to looking at the charred cat, and Isiem joined him.

  The little creature had burned fast and hot, although it was impossible to tell now whether that had been a result of its bones' age and dryness, a property of the mold that grew upon it, or something else altogether. Little remained but a few blackened fragments and a suggestion of caustic foulness that prickled at his nose.

  "Did you hear something in the flames when it burned?" Isiem asked.

  The shadowcaller gave him a blank look. "Such as?"

  "Words. A voice, maybe. Anything peculiar."

  "No." Ascaros turned on his heel, walking past the rows of glassy cages to leave the smoky chamber. His silhouette was distorted by the great dome in the center, which shrank his reflection, then stretched it, then squashed it down again. "Nothing."

  And that, Isiem knew to a certainty, was a lie.

  The cythnigots, Eledwyn had written, are minor parasites among their kind. Nothing more than nuisances to the great powers of the Abyss, they lurk in stinking sulfur swamps and prey upon the weakest demons they can snare. They hurl themselves against every spellgate I open, flinging themselves mindlessly at me like sand crabs washed up onto the shore with every wave.

  Feeble as they are, they may prove useful. At least as a starting point.

  Isiem closed the book gently. He closed his eyes, too, and rested a palm flat on the smooth, clear dome that occupied the chamber's center. The glass was cool under his skin. Tranquil. It conveyed nothing of the horrors that must surely have taken place under its shield.

  "What did you find?" Ascaros asked.

  "A beginning." Isiem held up the notebook. It looked the same as the ones in the apprentices' room: slim, unassuming, bound in plain grayish green. But no apprentice had recorded the thoughts captured on those pages.

  The writing was in a small, precise feminine hand uninflected by emotion. Beautiful as the archaic script was, it did nothing to hide the ugliness of its writer's work, nor had she made any attempt to soften her deeds. Her recordings contained no suggestion that such hesitations had ever crossed her mind. The clinical coldness of the notes, which had detailed so many horrors in the previous pages, spoke of Nidalese training; Isiem recognized it even across the chasm of centuries.

  It was Eledwyn's notebook. He was sure of it. And whoever she had been before coming under Mesandroth's thrall, there was nothing but ice in her soul by the time she'd written these lines.

  "A beginning to what?" Ascaros lowered the sheaf of papers he'd begun to sort through.

  Isiem gestured toward the cages of deformed, fungus-tufted bones. "This."

  "If you know what they are, say so," Ascaros said impatiently. "Now is no time to be cryptic."

  "These creatures were infected with Abyssal parasites," Isiem said. "Something called cythnigots. Apparently, in their native habitat, they insinuate themselves into the bodies of demons and, eventually, kill them. Eledwyn summoned them to begin an early stage in her experiments. She thought some of their abilities might be transferable to other purposes."

  "What abilities, and what purposes?"

  "That I don't know, and I'm not being cryptic. I haven't read that far."

  "Then I suggest you get to it."

  While Isiem reluctantly returned to Eledwyn's notebook, Ascaros eased open another drawer recessed in the wall between rows of bone-filled glass cages. Like the glow-globes in this chamber, and the silver-plated hall that led to it, the magic that had once locked these drawers had failed in places. Some of them slid out easily, while others remained secure.

  The Aspis agents hadn't touched those compartments—having tried two and found them locked, they'd given up on the rest—but it had been a trivial matter for Isiem and Ascaros to determine which enchantments were failing. A cantrip told them where the magical auras were weakest, and there they focused their efforts.

  In one of those drawers, they'd found Eledwyn's notebook and the sheaf of loose pages that Ascaros had examined. Isiem had taken a glance at those himself, and had seen that they were lists of imports into Fiendslair: furniture, food, plants and livestock, spell components. Eledwyn or one of her underlings had possessed a particular fondness for sweet spices; they'd spent a small fortune on cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.

  No doubt there were clues to be found in there somewhere, but they'd take time to tease out—time that none of them wanted to spend in Fiendslair. While Ascaros fiddled with the remaining drawers, Isiem returned to his reading.

  Eledwyn's world enveloped him in its precisely measured horrors. He read her tally of sacrifices: caged beasts infected with cythnigots and observed until their deaths, summoners' gifts offered in supplication to greater Abyssal powers, four apprentices consigned to the void for stupidities or disloyalty.

  He read, too, about the knowledge she purchased with the blood of others. Both those secrets and the blood that bought them could have overspilled a sea, and the final count went far beyond the pages of one slim book. But it was enough for Isiem to grasp, however dimly, the enormity of what she'd done. Somehow, Eledwyn had crystallized the power in blood into a new form—a magic that recalled the obsidian huts of the Splinter Men and the lightless curves of Nidalese nightglasses, but that had a purpose more alien than either.

  And she had not used human blood to do it. She had used the deaths of demons.

  "I think I have it," Ascaros said softly from the other side of the room. Awe and fear and uncertainty tangled all together in his voice. A sleek white drawer rested between his hands, its edges curled into fanciful representations of vines, or perhaps deformed bones.

  "Have what?" Isiem asked.

  "The nightblade," Ascaros said. "One of them." He held it up.

  It was a sliver of obsidian, or so it seemed at first glance, like a more delicate version of the Splinter Men's knives. Its shape suggested a wide compass needle, similar to the ones on the bloodstones Ascaros had handed out earlier. The nightblade's handle was a curve of plain silver, slightly smallish in a way that suggested it might fit a woman's hand more readily than a man's, although it seemed to rest comfortably in Ascaros's grip.

  As he studied it more closely, however, Isiem could see that the nightblade was anything but simple. Its glossy black blade had the same lightless infinity in its depths that he remembered from the nightglasses of
Nidal, and there was a flicker of crimson along its edge that recalled the hellish glow of Sukorya's diamond and the gate into Fiendslair.

  The sight of it brought the taste of bile to his tongue. "‘One of them'?"

  Ascaros nodded. He lowered the nightblade, wrapping it back in its shroud of black cloth. That, too, called unpleasant echoes back from Isiem's childhood. Nightglasses were kept the same way. "The only one in here. It was in a case with empty loops made to hold more. I imagine there are others. Bigger ones, judging by the difference in loop sizes. There were three gaps in the case, so that suggests at least two more blades exist."

  "Where would they be, if not here?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps they were destroyed when Fiendslair fell. But we have one. If they can manage to share, our allies' work here is done." It was hard to tell whether Ascaros was elated or disappointed by the prospect, but there was a current of some tense emotion running through his words.

  "Maybe," Isiem said. He tried to stretch the weariness from his shoulders, with very limited success. The ache seemed to go deeper than his bones. "I don't hold much hope of that, myself. Let's go back. We should talk to them."

  Chapter Sixteen

  Haunted

  They found the camp in a tumult.

  Their horses were dead, all of them. The tale was easy enough to read from their carcasses: one by one the animals had stooped to drink from the streams that wandered through Eledwyn's enchanted gardens, and one by one they'd been seized by the bony white insects that lived in the water. Not one of their beasts had been spared, not even the pony that Ena had fought so heroically to save from the Splinter Men. It lay alongside the others, its shaggy mane cut short where it touched the water.

  It was less clear how the insects had killed them, for nothing was left of the horses' submerged heads and necks but bare bone. Every morsel of hair and flesh had been stripped away; not a fleck of blood dimmed the diamond clarity of the streams. The scuttling bugs had even crawled into the horses' skulls to clean out any tiny clinging scraps of brain matter.