From the shoulder up, the bodies were undisturbed, each lying next to the others in a perfect line. They lay so close that their sides touched. But below the water line, all that remained was fresh white bone, so pristine it seemed to have been cleansed by magic.
The earth beside the streams was unmarred by any signs of struggle. Crisp, calm hoofprints traced each animal's path down to its final drink. The precision of the row made it clear that magic was involved.
"But whose, and why?" Isiem wondered aloud.
"Whose spell, you mean?" Kyril wiped her hands as she walked away from their little cluster of tents. The paladin's face was drawn and grim. Flecks of ichor clung to her dark red hair. "Originally I would have guessed the water bugs', but now I'm not so sure."
"Why?"
"Because something's wrong with Copple." She beckoned for him to follow her back to the tents. "He and Pulcher came running to us while we were still in the other room, yelping something about poisonous fungus smoke. I don't know what your friend said or did to them, but he had both of those poor men in hysterics. Teglias examined them, and didn't find any signs of curses or disease in Pulcher, but when he looked at Copple ..."
They were almost to the tents. The Aspis Consortium's was the largest of the three, although Ganoven had ordered his underlings to set their bedrolls outside its door. Pulcher sat on his, whittling mechanically at a stick that he didn't seem to see. His spectacles had slid down to the bottom of his nose, but he never pushed them back up. The bedroll beside him was empty, and Kyril stepped over it as she held the tent flap open for Isiem to enter.
Inside, Copple lay on a pair of saddle blankets that smelled strongly of horse. His shirt was soaked with sweat, but his face was peaceful and his chest rose and fell in the easy rhythms of untroubled sleep. His trousers had been pulled down to his knees, exposing an angry, purplish line where the Splinter Man's knife had cut him.
Teglias was kneeling near the sleeping man. As the Nidalese wizard stepped into the tent's canvas dimness, the Sarenite moved aside. "Ah, Isiem. I'm glad to see you."
"Kyril said something was wrong with Copple."
"Indeed. I've eased him into sleep so that we can discuss it without troubling him." Teglias gestured to the man's wound. "Tell me, what do you think?"
Isiem squinted at the slash. It was grossly discolored, but there was no visible crest of pus. He touched it tentatively. The flesh felt oddly fibrous to his touch, compressing stiffly under his finger, but there was none of the heat or swelling he would have expected from an infected wound. "Poisoned, maybe."
"Perhaps. This wound was healed twice. I saw Copple drink a potion when we arrived, and I healed it myself when he came to me today ...but while that drove back whatever is troubling him, it clearly was not a cure. He's been deteriorating since." The cleric's blue eyes were grave. "Does your companion know whether the Splinter Men envenom their blades?"
"I'll ask."
Isiem made his way back out to the garden. It was nearing night, or the closest thing to it in this artificial place. The golden sun that shone overhead was turning toward the farthest reach of its track, and their campsite was falling swiftly into shadow.
Ena had built a campfire and was just returning to it with a kettle of water. From the angle of the dwarf's approach, Isiem could see that she'd gone far afield to get water from a stream where she wouldn't have to look at her dead pony. She'd been crying.
"I'm sorry," Isiem said. That seemed terribly inadequate, but he didn't know what else to say. He would never have imagined that Ena, prickly and practical as she was, might be reduced to tears by the loss of a pony.
The dwarf scowled and dashed a sleeve across her face. Her eyes were puffy and red, but dry. "It's nothing. Horses die. People, too. There's no use crying about it."
It didn't sound like she believed that, but it sounded like she wanted to. Isiem inclined his head and left her.
Ascaros was in the Nidalese tent. The shadowcaller sat crosslegged on his bedroll, a jumble of chains and collars lying in a ring of agates and tiny mirrors around him. A second, larger circle of aventurine and melted green candle stubs surrounded the first one. Two white candles sat on opposite ends of the shadowcaller, each just within arm's reach. One was lit, the other not, although its wick was blackened and the wax vanished slowly as if it were being consumed by an invisible fire.
As Isiem pushed open the tent flap, allowing a gust of sage-scented smoke out of the tent and fresher air in, Ascaros opened his eyes. "Did you tell them about the nightblade?"
The wizard shook his head. "Between Copple and the horses, the time didn't seem right. Have you had time to learn anything about it?"
"Some. I've only begun my divinations, but the initial results are ...puzzling." Ascaros tapped the glassy black blade, which rested almost hidden in a fold of the blankets by his bedroll. "Its enchantments are incredibly complex. Summoning, binding, a touch of enthrallment. Some aspects of healing. None of its magic, however, speaks to death or destruction. I'm beginning to think that it's not the nightblade itself that's a weapon, but what it made. Or summoned."
"Perhaps the other pieces will give us some insight." Isiem pointed to the array of shackles that Ascaros had taken from the apprentices' room. "Anything on these?"
"Not much more than you might have guessed by looking at them." The shadowcaller shrugged. He lifted a jade-studded steel manacle on a thin finger and held it over the unlit candle, where the flame would have touched it if there had been one. Fleeting images danced along the inner curve of the metal: distorted glimpses of demonic forms, a faceless figure in gray-green robes with its arms upraised, a great glass dome with flashes of lightning trapped inside. Isiem couldn't make out the rest; the pieces of the vision were too fast, too small.
Ascaros lowered the manacle. The illusory cascade vanished. "They captured demons and experimented on them. They captured humans and experimented on them, too. Sometimes both at once. The shackles kept their victims docile while they did their grisly work. Some of it was very grisly indeed. They wanted to achieve immortality—and that meant testing mortality. In every way they could imagine."
Isiem was silent for a moment, weighing those words. From the look Ascaros gave him, he knew the shadowcaller was thinking the same thing: a Nidalese mind could imagine many, many ways to test how easily a creature died.
But they had not come to dwell on Eledwyn's long-ago sins. "Did you find anything that might help with Mesandroth's curse?"
"No. Although I've begun to understand why it was laid. Eledwyn spent a considerable amount of time trying to find ways to make possession work for her goals. It doesn't appear that it ever did."
"I don't believe it did, no. She wrote about it." Isiem flipped through the notebook. It took a moment for him to find the passage he wanted, but when he did, he held the slender gray-green book open carefully.
"Possession," he read aloud, marking the words with his thumb as he went, "will not serve our ends.
"The possessed die faster, not slower. Demons burn through borrowed flesh without care. Introducing undeath does not resolve the problem, and as subjects invariably go mad between the two transformations, this method is useless for preserving the mind and soul in flesh.
"Working the other way, we find no better results. A human soul can be forced into a demonic body, but soon takes on characteristics of the shape it holds. Demons are too strong in their identities: taking their bodies compromises the soul. Even over short periods, the pull is too strong for the mortal mind to resist.
"We must go older and deeper, to things that are not so set in themselves. We must follow the cythnigots' trail."
"What do you suppose that means?" Ascaros asked.
Isiem closed the notebook and tossed it onto his bedroll. It landed with a soft thump, seemingly too light to carry the weight of what was written within. "That their early experiments—the ones you showed me in that manacle's vision—didn't work. Possession wasn't a road
to immortality, with or without the touch of undeath. So she looked elsewhere. Somewhere deeper in the Abyss."
The shadowcaller's face twisted into a grimace. "If Eledwyn gave up on undeath, then her further lines of research are unlikely to help me."
"There might be indirect aids," Isiem said. "She might have known of other apprentices who continued that line of work."
"Scant consolation, but I appreciate that you're trying to offer me any." Ascaros snuffed the lit candle and put both white tapers back into a small black box, along with the agates and minuscule mirrors. He left the aventurines, green candles, and twists of burned sage, Isiem noted. They looked like the same ones the apprentices had kept. "What are the rest of our companions doing?"
"Worrying about Copple and mourning our horses. I don't suppose you have any insights about either?"
"I'd mourn the horses before Copple, too." Ascaros shrugged. "No, I don't have any idea what befell either of them. I do wish the water bugs had eaten Ganoven's idiot before our animals, though. The horses were useful."
"A sentiment shared by many." Isiem paused. He flicked a fingertip toward the nearest knot of dried, sooty-ended sage. "Is there a reason you've put out the apprentices' herbs and stones?"
"For safety, of course." Ascaros's smirk was mirthless. "From what, I don't know. But they did."
"I see," Isiem said, although nothing was further from the truth. He withdrew from the tent, letting its flap fall shut behind him.
Ena had a pot of porridge boiling over the tiny fire, but it didn't seem that anyone was much interested in eating. Nor did it seem like the dwarf had much interest in cooking: Isiem could smell the scorched grains from his tent twenty feet away. Ena had never burned their porridge before, but she wasn't even pretending to watch the pot now. She stared past it, to the glimpse of the creek that was visible between the screening trees and the slumped outlines of their dead horses, their bodies fading into the artificial night like a line of dusk-blurred hills on the horizon.
He paused beside her, wanting to say something, but in the end he swallowed his words and went on to find Kyril.
The paladin was sitting by the water, twenty feet upstream from the dead horses, sharpening her weapons. A lantern hung from an angled pole that she'd driven into the stream bank. It swayed gently over her head, drawing ripples of fire from her dark red hair.
"Ascaros knows nothing about what's afflicting Copple, or how our horses died," he said.
Kyril nodded, keeping her gaze on the knife in her hands. She drew the sharpening stone across it in swift, sure strokes. "That's about what I expected, although it would have been nice to be wrong. Well, no matter. It's in Teglias's hands. Better rest while you can."
"While you stand guard alone all night?"
She glanced up at him with a bit of a smile. It made his throat clench. "I'm waiting to see if the water bugs come back. I've got my hook and my net. I'll spend the night fishing if need be."
"Do you expect you'll need help?"
The half-elf's smile deepened, but she shook her head. A suggestion of perfume drifted past, carrying a breath of unopened honeysuckle buds and crisp green leaves. Isiem couldn't tell if the fragrance was Kyril's or the garden's, but it was intoxicating. "It's not worth losing spells over," she said. "You need your sleep."
Accepting her dismissal with a bow, Isiem returned to his tent.
Ascaros was asleep in his bedroll, snoring softly through the wizened leather of his nose. His illusions usually lingered a while after he dozed off, but the spell had clearly reached its end. Isiem turned away from his companion and pulled his blankets close, but it was impossible to get comfortable. He had tried to fix the memory of that green and subtle fragrance in his mind, hoping its beauty might fend off the ugliness of all that had happened to them today, but other thoughts kept pushing it away.
The wizard had never been given to imagining vivid pictures as he read. Indeed, he'd always had difficulty doing it when he tried. That inability to visualize had been a blessing during his studies in the Dusk Hall, and he had thought it would be the same for the apprentice's notebook. But it was not so.
Unwanted images filled his head as he lay restless on his pillow. A brimorak in rune-carved chains, shrieking as boiling blood gushed from its gurgling throat. Four goat-horned spite demons with their limbs broken and interlocked in a flattened pinwheel pattern. A man slowly dissolving into the gooey shapelessness of an omox, flesh and bone melting into slime while his terrified eyes, untouched, fell loose from his skull and floated in the puddle. Isiem saw them all in flashes and fragments, one sliding into the next with the perfect unreality of dreams. Throughout the cascade of horrors, the gentle music of the stream flowed: a sanctuary from all the evil Isiem saw, and yet touched by evil itself.
He wasn't sure if he was dreaming, or if he was somehow envisioning those awful sights while still awake. They seemed more like things remembered than ones imagined, but he had no such memories of his own. Surely they hadn't been among the phantasms Ascaros had showed him in the manacle—had they? His thoughts were murky, muddled; only those alien images seemed clear.
And then a shout ruptured the artificial night, and the muzziness vanished like a pricked bubble.
Ascaros startled up from his bedroll. Without his illusory face, he was a ruin of a man in those blankets, his mouth a pucker of yellowed teeth. "What's happening?" he hissed, the words deformed by his lack of lips.
"I don't know." Isiem threw back the tent flap and looked outside just as Kyril rushed past their tent, long hair flying loose behind her. She'd taken her boots off while she waited by the water, and her feet made white flashes in the gloom. The paladin's sword blazed bright in her hands, scattering shadows in her wake.
Isiem grabbed his satchel of spell components. "Cover yourself," he said to Ascaros as he ducked out of the tent. "Your real face is showing."
Without waiting to hear the shadowcaller's response, he hurried toward the Aspis Consortium's tent. Kyril was already there, Ena and Teglias with her. Ganoven stood shivering in the grass, wrapped in a elaborately embroidered Osirian robe that stopped just above his skinny knees.
Lying on the ground between them all, pale and delirious under his woolen blanket, was Copple. The garish tattoos on his arms writhed with the unnatural twitching of his muscles. His eyes were wide, totally white, and unseeing. The cords of his throat bulged as if he were being strangled by invisible hands. Spittle flecked his lips, which moved in continuous, inaudible whispers.
"He just started screaming," Ganoven said, nearly as white-faced as his stricken underling. "Then he said something else—it was all garbled, I couldn't make it out. And then he started flopping around like a hooked fish. He's been whispering the whole time, but I can't make any sense of it."
"It's not Taldane," Kyril said. She seemed calmer than Ganoven, or at least more controlled. With a smooth motion, the paladin sheathed her sword, snuffing its divine flames. "It's not any human tongue. He's speaking the tongue of demons."
Ganoven flinched. "Copple? Copple doesn't know anything of the sort." He cast an alarmed look at the paladin. "What's he saying?"
She shrugged. "I don't speak it. I just recognize the sound of it."
"Let me." Isiem drew a pinch of soot and salt from his satchel, rubbed them together, then touched his dusted fingertips to his left ear and Copple's lips in turn. The man's flesh was cold and stiff as a corpse's. He kept gasping those strange, choked whispers even as Isiem's magic carried his mutterings to the wizard's ear.
The strangled words Isiem heard weren't in Pulcher's voice, though. They weren't in a male voice at all. It was a woman's voice he heard, sweet and almost childlike, whispering in the tongue of demons.
"We come for you, sinners. We come. Your spells cannot save you, your smoke cannot shield you, your prayers will give you no refuge. There is no escape. We come." Hearing his own voice translate the whispers in his mind was eerie, and for an instant Isiem had the uncann
y sensation that the woman speaking through Copple spoke through him as well. A clammy, alien feeling lingered in his mind like an echo of each word he uttered.
Unnerved, he ended the spell, wiping the dust from his ear as hastily as if it were poison. He raked his fingers through his hair, scrubbing away the spell's imaginary residue.
"Was that all he said?" Teglias asked. His blue eyes were sharp with curiosity, and his gaze stayed fixed on the wizard.
"It's as much as I cared to hear." Isiem closed his eyes briefly, willing the unpleasant memory away. "It isn't his voice. There's someone else speaking through him. It sounds like a woman, but its mind is ...other."
Even as the wizard said it, though, Copple's frantic whispers slowed to a trickle and then stopped. The man's chest rose suddenly, causing Ganoven to start in alarm again, then sank as he exhaled a deep, shuddering breath. His eyes rolled back down, although they remained unfocused under fluttering lids. Whatever fever seemed to have him in its grip relented, and the tension drained out of his muscles.
The others watched uncertainly. No one spoke; the only sound was Copple's labored breathing gradually returning to a normal rhythm.
Then Ascaros joined them, his footfalls rustling through the garden's long-dead leaves. The shadowcaller had donned his formal shadowcaller's robes and restored his masking illusion. Curly black hair, as thick as it had been in his youth, framed his handsome scholar's face. His body seemed hale and strong, untouched by any shadow of the grave.
He carried Sukorya's diamond enclosed in its silver case. As he reached Copple, the shadowcaller let the spiked chain rasp through his fingers, dangling the case two feet above the unconscious thug's face. It revolved slowly in the air, but nothing more than gravity and its own momentum seemed to be moving it, and eventually it stilled.
Ascaros cocked his head at the case, looking puzzled and slightly worried. "There's none of Mesandroth's magic in him."
"There isn't any, or there wasn't any?" Kyril asked. "Whatever was in him seems to have passed. Perhaps it's just gone now."
Nightblade Page 18
