Of Darkness and Dawn

by Wight, Will

  Two minutes later, a messenger came through the door again, breathless.

  “Grayweather?” the Emperor asked. Armor rattled as Jarelys Teach moved toward the door.

  Shera opened her eyes a crack. She knew danger when she heard it.

  Grayweather turned out to be a woman old enough to be Shera's mother, with long brown hair tied back, and a sword at her hip. Most notably, she was dressed in the long black coat of the Blackwatch, a silver badge on her chest displaying her Guild's Crest.

  Shera didn't know much about the Blackwatch. She'd grown up thinking of them as monsters leashed to the Empire, little better than an Elder cult themselves. They captured and studied Elders, which was almost like saying they summoned and dissected ghosts. Everyone knew Elders used to be real, but many people considered them extinct. Only the superstitious believed Elders had any effect on day-to-day life.

  Of course, Shera now knew better. As a child, she had been somewhat afraid of the Elders—enemies who couldn't be fought or understood. Now, having worked with the Emperor for years and fought the Children of Nakothi face-to-face, her fear had changed. Her ominous dread had largely transformed into respect for a collection of dangerous enemies.

  And if the Blackwatch were contacting the Emperor directly, it could mean nothing but Elders. Shera reached over to Lucan, shaking him.

  “You were to remain in supervised custody,” the Emperor said softly. Teach stood at his side, hands free. Shera knew she could reach her sword in a split second.

  The Grayweather woman dropped to one knee. “How could I be under closer scrutiny than yours?”

  Shera would have laughed, but she didn’t think the Emperor would react well.

  He didn’t respond to Grayweather, so the Watchman hurriedly continued. “I've been working as the Guild Head's personal attendant. Bliss wanted me to deliver you an urgent message, but I was turned away by your guards.”

  “They have done their jobs well,” the Emperor said, and Teach grunted. “What is your message?”

  “We've lost contact with the city of Silverreach,” Grayweather said. “It's—”

  She didn't get any farther. Teach pushed past her, tearing the door open and bellowing for her Imperial Guard. The Emperor turned his back on the Watchman, walking over to the edge of the tower. The wind tore at the folds of his clothes like the hands of a thousand demanding children.

  General Teach turned to him as the Imperial Guard shouted to one another several stories below. “Will you be able to deal with it from here?”

  He shook his head, expression dark. “Not anymore. I’ll have to go in person.”

  She grimaced but accepted that, thundering down the stairs in her armor. The Emperor looked over his shoulder and spoke to Shera. “Meet me at the harbor. Pack for a fight.”

  Shera glanced from Lucan to Meia. “Should I wait for them?”

  “Have them carried, if you must.” He looked from her to Grayweather, who bore the stunned expression of a woman facing the utterly unexpected. “Tell Bliss I will handle this personally.”

  Then he stepped over the side of the tower and vanished.

  “Yes, Your Imperial Highness,” Grayweather said, in tones of absolute confusion.

  Shera looked at Grayweather. “What’s in Silverreach?”

  Grayweather tucked her hands inside her jacket pockets, still staring at the spot where the Emperor had vanished. “Officially? Nothing.”

  “Officially, I don’t exist. And I’m definitely not guarding the Emperor on his way to deal with…nothing.”

  “Point taken.” Grayweather thought for a moment, gathering herself to answer. “Silverreach was built over an ancient library. The same library where, according to our records, the Emperor once sealed the Great Elder Ach’magut.”

  Shera reached back into her memory, trying to recall what she’d heard about Ach’magut, the Overseer. “Does he have something to do with spiders?”

  “His spawn are called Inquisitors. They have many eyes and many arms, and they crawl all over the world to seek and gather knowledge for their master.” She hesitated. “But yes, they look like spiders.”

  Spiders. Something else her blades could hardly touch. Why was the Emperor even taking her along?

  She realized the answer an instant after she asked the question. He wanted his pet assassins along because there was a chance he might lose himself to the Heart of Nakothi. The knowledge did nothing more to improve her confidence.

  But there was no point in delaying further, so she gestured to her semi-conscious teammates. “You take one, I'll take the other?”

  Grayweather cocked her head, looking at the Gardeners, and then she slapped Meia firmly in the face. “Sounds like too much trouble. They can walk.”

  Shera approved.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I’m sorry, Guild Head, there’s nothing more I can do for your grandson.”

  “Is everything still there, inside? Is it still him, or is he…one of them?”

  “Rest assured, sir, what you’re seeing is only a veil of shadow. His mouth, his eyes, his brain, they all still exist. It’s simply that they’re not here.”

  “Where are they, then?”

  “If you love your grandson, Guild Head, please don’t ask him that question.”

  —Mekendi Maxeus of the Magisters, speaking to Jameson Allbright of the Luminian Order

  ~~~

  The triplets sat facing the wall and whispering, and Darius Allbright couldn't figure out why.

  The three girls were perhaps eight years old, though Darius was no judge of children. They wore their brown hair in long braids, with the simple cotton nightgowns of the poor. Well, not “poor” exactly—Darius himself had grown up in a tenement much worse than this one. Not poor, but just humble enough that the mother couldn’t afford a Reader to catch this months ago. Which is precisely when it should have been dealt with.

  At this point, the girls sat motionless and stared at the wall, whispering in sync with one another. When they blinked, their eyelids fluttered in time, and a quick check confirmed that even their hearts beat together.

  Something had bound these girls as one, and he was afraid to open his Reader's senses to find out what. If he Read too carelessly, there would be a fourth figure staring and whispering, and Darius doubted he would look good in a nightgown.

  “You have lovely children,” he said to the girls' mother, flashing her a useless smile. He sometimes forgot that no one could see his expression. “How old are they?”

  The mother stood over her children in the suit of a newly minted businesswoman—no doubt she was one of the clerks at the nearby bank. Her hair and clothes were pristine, but her eyelids sagged with the weight of a dozen sleepless nights, and she wrung her hands as though she meant to twist them off.

  “Ikandi is nine, Aeliana is seven, and Mirian is six.” She chewed on her lower lip. “Do you think their age has something to do with…this?”

  Darius paced around the girls, bending at the waist to get another look at one of their faces. “Age is no defense against the darkness, ma’am, and it actually may help us. Sometimes the mind of a child is flexible enough to bounce back from such an attack. But first, let’s move it back a step or two. They're not triplets?”

  The mother didn't move her gaze from the children. “A week ago, you wouldn't have had to ask.”

  He pinched one girl's cheek, then another’s. Sure enough, one was loose, the other tight. One girl had gained weight, the other had lost it. The third girl had a tiny scar on the back of her neck that the others didn't.

  “Huh.” He could have made up something comforting to sound like he knew what was going on, but he preferred the honest approach. If he had no idea what was happening, he was satisfied saying so.

  Even though his ignorance wouldn't settle the mother. Some among the Order would suggest that, in this case, deceit was a mercy. By pretending to understand the situation, he would be helping her to relax.

&
nbsp; But he didn't believe in deceit, by and large. Deception, illusion, and seduction were the ways of the Elders.

  “Well. Do you have any ideas?” he asked.

  She glanced up at him and then quickly away, unable to stare too long into his face. That was why he wore the hood. “I...I'm no Reader. I don't know anything about Kameira or, or...the other side.”

  He supposed she meant Elders. It seemed like there was a new euphemism for the creatures in every town and hamlet of the Empire. Then again, the word “Elder” itself was almost a euphemism, wasn't it? Far easier and more comfortable to say than “Evil, unknowable horror.”

  “Have they found anything lately? A lucky stone, maybe? An old book? A mirror you bought at an estate sale?” In his experience, Elder-related artifacts tended to look exactly as menacing as they were: the lucky stone would be shaped like a skull, the book would be bound in human skin, the mirror would have a black frame and would whisper threats throughout the night. But that was only for Elder artifacts. Ordinary invested items could cause just as much harm, and they could look like anything.

  The mother had a few ideas, which he duly investigated and then cleared with a touch. No harm there, then. As for the wall itself, there was nothing particularly interesting about it.

  He knelt alongside the sisters and stared with them, looking deep into the water-warped wall. It looked almost like it had been built out of driftwood, gray and slightly twisted. They probably had to deal with drafts in the winter. Maybe something had soaked in from outside?

  The girls had arranged themselves in a semicircle, not staring quite into the corner, but close to it. The east wall, he noted. Was there something significant about that? Kthanikahr's hordes were said to prefer slithering in from the east. Urg'naut's prison was to the east of here...but far, far to the east. Not likely to have any influence from across the Aion.

  “Do you have to feed them?” he asked. He'd checked their eyes, their teeth, and their skin, and none of them seemed malnourished. They seemed to be in the bloom of perfect health.

  “I tried, at first,” she said, her face twisting as though the words were overwhelming her from the inside out. “They wouldn't take it. I still give them some water when I can, but they mostly just...spit it out...”

  She dissolved into tears, and Darius’ heart lurched in sympathy. He'd never had children himself, but seeing little girls in this state should lead anyone to tears. He might even lose his own composure later, depending on how this turned out. For now, he had a job to do.

  Darius glanced at the other walls to compare, and it was like the light of the sun suddenly shone into the dark corners of his brain. He glanced from one window to the other, on the opposite wall. Windows on the north and south walls. None on the west or east.

  In his mind, he traced a line from the north window, then the south. Unless he missed his guess, this corner would remain shaded from dawn to dusk.

  They were staring into a shadow.

  Before he could stop himself, he raised a hand to his face. Or rather, where his face used to be. Now there was only shadow. The hunger of Urg’naut was endless and insatiable.

  With a ring that filled the room, Darius drew his sword. It seemed to catch light from nowhere, gleaming like silver in the candlelight.

  “What...what are you doing?” the mother asked, her voice shaky.

  “No need to worry, this is perfectly routine.” With the flat of his blade, he slapped one girl on the cheek. Not too hard, just enough to evoke a response.

  The mother shrieked and took a step forward, but controlled herself before grabbing his arm. Maybe she'd decided to trust him, or maybe she'd just realized that it wouldn't be the best idea to jostle the man holding a sword to her daughter's face.

  He watched for a second, but none of the girls stirred. They kept staring and whispering.

  “That didn't work,” Darius noted. He found that stating the obvious helped him think; nothing bothered him more than silence. Because it was never truly silence, when your head was wrapped in the void, and he didn’t like to think about the sounds that slithered in from the Elders’ realm.

  He frowned at the corner for a moment, then stepped out, reaching over the girls and driving his sword down into the floorboards. The Creeping Shadow was hungry, and his hatred of life could not be extinguished…but in the end, he still did his work through shadows.

  Darius’ mind sank down into the metal of the blade.

  The smith of the Luminian Order was trained as a blacksmith by Kanatalia, the Alchemist's Guild. At every stage of the forging of this blade, he adds another vial of a solution that he has brewed himself, but that he doesn't understand. He's worried that his superiors will find out that he's unskilled, that he's practically a fraud, and he silently begs each formula to work. When the steel starts to glow with a subtle light even after it cools, he tries to force his Intent inside, to trap the spark of light.

  The prisoner has been kept from execution for years, but he's beginning to consider begging for it. They keep him in the dark all the time, well fed and watered but starved for light. Only now, once a year, do they release him. He stumbles from his cave and into the dawn, clutching a bar of steel that he finds sitting on the grass. He will be allowed sunlight for exactly as long as he can hold on to that metal. As soon as he lets go, or when night falls, he will be returned to his cell.

  “Let me keep the sunlight,” the prisoner begs. “Just a little while longer. Keep the darkness from me.”

  In Darius Allbright's hands, the invested blade flared like a star. The corner of the household saw sunlight for the first time since the home's construction, and the girls reacted instantly. They hissed back, crawling away from the light on their hands and heels, scrambling away from the blinding luminescence.

  Light scalded his face as though he’d leaned entirely too close to a bonfire, but he accepted the pain. It was better than the endless cold.

  “I think that'll do it,” Darius said, the gleam in his sword fading. One of the girls lunged for him, tears at the corners of her eyes, shouting abuse.

  He caught her with one hand at the shoulder, holding her at arm's length. “In the name of the Emperor and the Unknown God, I see you, slave of Urg'naut. By the light of the sun, I urge you to be gone.” Up to this point, it was just the incantation that every Pilgrim recited when they suspected they were dealing with a spawn of the Creeping Shadow. But Darius never liked relying on recitation alone.

  He flicked the girl's forehead with a single finger, sending his Intent into her body.

  For an instant, he glimpsed the vision she and her sisters had shared: a black, endless void so vast that could swallow all of humanity. But it was not empty. He could sense, could feel, could practically taste the unnamable entities that swam in that darkness, only an inch from touching his skin. And they were hungry.

  But his Reading was brief, his Intent firm. The vision broke like glass, shattered by resolve and reality. Now, he would only see that void when he closed his eyes.

  “Shoo,” he said. The girl's shadow rippled like a disturbed pond, and she suddenly blinked her eyes open. At the sight of him, she began to cry.

  He released her as her mother scooped her up, then checked the other girls. They were shaky, dazed, and haunted, and they would likely never escape the nightmares. But they were alive.

  Darius reached into his pocket, pulled out a pen that looked more like a long, black insect's claw. With his teeth, he rolled up the sleeve of his left arm.

  And he added three tallies in black ink. Three lives saved that would have otherwise been lost. A good reminder.

  The mother still had her arms full of her children, all of whom were simultaneously crying and babbling about the horrifying other worlds they'd seen. The Guild would probably want them to stay quiet, but he left them to it, pulling his sleeve back down over the tallies. The pen was Awakened, and its ink would stay a part of his skin forever. He couldn't forget, now, even if he wanted
to.

  It wasn't practical, maybe—he had an inkblot on one hand that he could never remove unless he cut his thumb off—but it was his system. It helped him remember why he had never jumped ship to a different Guild.

  “Will they be okay?” the mother asked, her voice shaky.

  Darius moved his palms up and down like a pair of scales. “Okay is a relative term. Unharmed, yes. But they have seen deep into the mind of an Elder, and that can leave…other scars.”

  Her eyes widened. “But they’ll get better, they’ll recover.”

  He knelt down again, as he had before, this time to put himself on the same level as the mother and her three rambling children. They shrank away from him, he noticed, but he didn’t blame them. “If I can make it, anyone can.” He pulled back his hood, giving them a glimpse of his face.

  No one screamed, for which he was grateful. If anything, the mother actually seemed encouraged. Her expression firmed, and she nodded once.

  Darius had started to walk away when the door swung open, revealing a very solemn-looking Pilgrim in white robes. He was only about thirty, though his big eyes made him look younger, and he clutched a leather-bound copy of Meditations on the Unknown God under one arm. His robes were pristine, his White Sun medallion just a little larger than good taste would suggest.

  Before he could say a word, Darius pulled him out of the room. He came along without resistance, his eyes still locked on the family inside. “The girls,” he said. “They're...all right?”

  Darius knew he'd almost asked why the girls were alive. It was good that he hadn't. Darius hadn't broken a Pilgrim's legs in a while, and he didn’t want to fall off the wagon, so to speak.

  He dragged the Pilgrim behind him with one hand. “I'm pleased to say that the servant of Urg'naut has been driven off, and the shadow has lifted from this home.”