When Shadows Fall

by Bruce Blake

  “Let’s see what else we can find,” Danya said pulling away from her brother’s grip.

  Awe-struck by the enormous suit of armor, he let her go. The slap of her bare feet on the granite floor echoed through the room, but the prince barely noticed. He took a step closer, leaning in for a better inspection of the quality of workmanship displayed in the armor.

  The enameling was flawless, the precision of the casting and smithing beyond anything he’d seen produced in the inner city. The lines of the silver highlights were exact, with a perfect straightness separating it from the red. He leaned closer, squinting at the shimmering markings.

  “They’re letters,” he whispered, and the room carried his words to lofty heights.

  “What did you say?”

  His sister’s voice broke the armor’s spell. He glanced at her, sensing danger as she approached the only other item in the room: a lectern carved of marble.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said and hurried across to her.

  “I’m not touching it,” she said, hands clasped behind her back in the manner of a child caught sneaking sweets from the pantry. “What did you say when you were looking at the battle suit?”

  “I think the silver bits are words.”

  He moved past her to see what the lectern held and found a rolled parchment sitting atop it, but nothing else.

  “Words? What did they say?”

  Teryk took a step toward the rostrum, barely noticing his sister’s words. “What?”

  “I asked what the words said.”

  The prince shook his head. “I’m not sure. It’s another language.”

  “What other language?”

  “Quiet,” Teryk snapped and raised his hand. A hurt expression on her brow, Danya opened her mouth to protest, but didn’t. “Do you hear that?”

  A tiny sound—completely unnoticeable when either of them spoke, lost amongst their footsteps when they moved, hardly there compared to their heartbeats—but he heard it. The faintest of hums masquerading as a buzz, pretending to be a breath. He took another step toward the lectern.

  The sound emanated from the roll of parchment.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Sshh.’

  Teryk crept closer. The noise didn’t grow any louder, but it became more distinct—not a hum or a buzz or an exhalation, but a susurrant tangle of whispers, each indistinct on their own, but together combining to the softest of murmurs.

  “It’s saying something,” he said, near enough now to reach out and touch the scroll if he wanted. He leaned his head closer still, listening, straining to perceive a recognizable word. “You can’t hear that?”

  The pad of Danya’s bare feet on the stone floor sounded a cacophony in comparison, assaulting the prince’s ears and making him want to press his hands to the side of his head, but then she stood beside him and the tumult ended. They both held their breath, the only sounds in the room the beat of their hearts and, hidden beneath, the whispers of the scroll.

  Teryk counted twenty heartbeats pass before Danya shook her head and parted her lips, but he raised his finger, stopping her. Ten more beats, the scroll murmuring to him, talking to him. If only he understood it.

  Why can’t she hear it?

  A feeling easily mistaken for satisfaction settled into the prince at knowing a thing she didn’t, but it disappeared in an instant. Danya understood languages better than he, as she was better at most things. He wished she could tell him what language it spoke, what it said, what it wanted from him. He leaned closer, his sister leaning with him, his ear a handspan away from the edge of the rostrum, and then he understood.

  “It wants me to take it with us.”

  “What?” Danya straightened and put her hand on his arm. “No, Teryk. We can’t. We don’t even know how to get out of here.”

  “I have to.”

  He shrugged her off and took the last step to the lectern, raised his hand toward the scroll. Before he stretched his hand out to touch it, before Danya did or said anything to stop him, the roll of parchment leaped into his hand and the whispering ended.

  I was right.

  Teryk held it up, staring, sensing his sister’s eyes on it, too. The parchment was rough against his fingers and smelled old—two qualities one might reasonably expect of a ancient paper. A spot of blue wax pressed with an unfamiliar seal held the scroll from unrolling. When the prince rubbed his thumb across it, chunks of the brittle material flaked away.

  “We have to find a way out, Teryk,” Danya said.

  “What’s your hurry?” He didn’t move his gaze from the roll in his hand.

  “Trenan will be looking for us, remember? You have pike training.”

  Teryk redirected his gaze from the scroll to his sister, his eyes moving lazily, as though mired in the royal cook’s version of oatmeal. They crossed the void between them, seeing the dust dancing in the light, the gleaming stone floor, the red with white pillars soaring toward the ceiling.

  And the battle suits crossing the floor in silence behind her.

  Blood rushed away from Teryk’s face, turning his cheeks cold and making him suspect his eyes might pop out of their places. In an instant, his fearful and surprised expression spread to his sister, who glanced over her shoulder to find out what behind her caused her brother’s distress. Before she turned fully, the prince grabbed her arm and pulled her away, heading toward the end of the room opposite where they’d entered.

  An archway set in the wall suggested a door, but there was none. The slap of the siblings’ bare feet echoed through the room, disguising the movement of the battle suits, mixing and milling with the sudden pounding of Teryk’s own pulse in his ears. Seconds ago, the world had been silence, nothing but the whisper of ancient voices trapped here and waiting for the prince’s ear. Now, footsteps and heartbeats grew and multiplied like a thunderhead breaching the horizon.

  They stumbled up the three short stairs to the archway, panting and fearful. Neither of them looked back, afraid of what they might find pursuing them.

  Teryk threw himself into the wall, jarring his shoulder and nearly dropping the parchment, but nothing moved except his bones. He stuck the scroll in the waist of his underpants and put both palms flat against the wall, pushed and pushed. Nothing.

  “Help me,” he yelled to Danya, who was searching the edge of the archway.

  “There must be a hidden switch,” she said.

  Teryk pushed again, ignoring her.

  “Please,” he said, their other noises enough the room didn’t take these words and toss them into the heights of the ceiling for fun. “Please open the door.”

  A click sounded, followed by the grinding of an ancient mechanism, and the wall pulled to one side as though he’d spoken the magic words.

  “Come on!”

  He grabbed Danya’s arm and ushered her over the threshold ahead of him, then jumped through as the wall slid shut behind them. Before it closed all the way, he peeked between the wall and the edge, expecting to find giant-sized suits of battle armor reaching for them, a hair’s-breadth from snagging them and ending their lives.

  He saw a lectern, columns carved of granite, and no armored suits at all.

  III Lines of Chalk

  The chalk quivered in N’th Ailyssa Ra’s fingers as she raised her hand toward the wall, preparing to inscribe the ninety-eighth line. Never had she drawn more than thirty-two, except when a child grew within her, and most times never exceeded the twenty-eight chalk lines expected between bleeds.

  She closed her eyes and expelled a shuddering breath, reminded herself she’d been aware this day would come, as it did for all Mothers, all women. But she’d imagined it differently, thinking she’d move from Mother to Matron and be an elder of the church, like had happened for N’th Adesi Ra no more than four moons ago.

  N’th Adesi Re, she corrected herself.

  Ailyssa opened her eyes and took the last step toward the wall, pressed the flat end of the chalk again
st the stone. With a final sigh, she drew it downward, marking the ninety-eighth rising of the sun since her last bleed.

  More than three complete turns of the moon.

  With her last coupling five moons gone, far too much time had passed to be carrying a child and not showing signs. Sometimes the blood might fool you and continue to flow for moons after conception but, at her age, the belly couldn’t conceal its secret for long. The times she’d been with child, her heart had been aware of the little soul’s presence before her body announced it to the world.

  N’th Ailyssa Ra set the nub of chalk on the ledge beneath the marks, wiped its dust from her fingers on the front of her smock, and tilted her head back to observe the scores on the wall above the chalk lines. These ones had been scratched into the stone, meant to be permanent, not erased every twenty-eight sunrises—give or take—as were the spotty white smudges she drew each morn.

  It took her a moment to count them, though she knew how many she’d find: fifty-four. She’d been counting them often of late. The more chalk lines she drew on the wall, the more she counted the carved marks, it seemed.

  The twelfth line was wider and deeper than the others, indicating her first bleed, the day she earned the title N’th. She recalled it as though there were not more than forty other lines drawn in between it and the last. Her joy at waking to find her bed sheets spotted with the Goddess’ will that morning had been nearly enough to overshadow it also being the last day she lived with the woman who brought her into this world. The next day of her birth—her thirteenth—marked the first time she carved a line in the wall herself.

  She traced the mark with the tip of her finger, remembering N’th Pedra Ra who gave Ailyssa life. They’d followed the Goddess’ wishes, and Mother and Daughter were separated after Ailyssa’s first bleeding, and she often wondered what became of the woman who birthed her. Did she go on to become N’th Pedra Re? Or did Ailyssa’s lack of Daughters, and her Daughter’s lack of Daughters, lead to her expulsion?

  Perhaps Pedra bore other Daughters who brought honor to the order and the Goddess.

  Ailyssa moved her hand away from the deep wound in the stone and blinked back a tear. Her fingers hovered over the next row, where circles ringed three of the marks, the first crossed out by two lines. She kept her touch and her gaze away from this one, knowing tears came easily at its sight, but she rested her fingertip on the second. This one recorded the birth of her Daughter, Claris, when the Goddess had seen fit to bestow upon her the title of Ra—Mother.

  Thirty-four marks had been carved in the wall between that circle and the last line, and still N’th Claris hadn’t been blessed to become Ra. Ailyssa heard word of her now and again when one of the Matrons traveled and brought back news, and they’d told her that the Goddess did not yet judge her Daughter fit to give birth to a Daughter of her own.

  Her hand moved to the final circled scar, one separated by thirty-two similar lines from the most current mark carved fewer than two moons ago. No other circles disturbed the rows between, and this last one represented Ailyssa’s greatest pain. When she’d given birth to her first son—her first child and the first circle on the wall—it seemed natural he be taken from her, and she knew no different. She’d drawn the line through his birth circle without second thought; it wasn’t until she held her second child in her arms that she understood what she missed with his absence. Before then, she’d never thought to wonder what became of him, it simply was what was: the will of the Goddess.

  The last circle represented her second son, also taken away as a babe; a child she’d not seen since and never expected to see again. His birth had been the most difficult for her and, at times, she’d wondered if the struggle was the reason she’d birthed no more children in honor of the Goddess. Though it may be, she realized the circumstances of his birth were also why she mourned him so. Unlike when her first baby came into the world, her young daughter still nursed at her breast when the third came, and she knew what it was like to love a child.

  The pain of his loss wounded her, leaving a scar on her heart far deeper than the one on the wall—a pathetic representation of a child whose fate she’d never learn. She’d been unable to bring herself to inscribe the mark of ‘son’ across it as she’d done the first, unable to act as though the birth and the child it brought never happened.

  Ailyssa had memorized the writings as did every Daughter before they became N’th: do not mourn a son, for they are worthless. But, even after carving thirty-two lines in the stone, sleep eluded her some nights, leaving her to lay awake, wondering...wondering. She couldn’t even bring herself to look upon the first circle.

  Her hand dropped to her side and she counted marks again.

  Ninety-eight since her last bleed.

  Thirty-two since her last child.

  Forty-two since her first drops upon the sheets.

  That meant near forty-two times thirteen moons she’d wiped the chalk markers from the wall and began anew. She hung her head, wishing for her blood to come and allow her to erase their menacing implication one more time.

  “N’th Ailyssa Ra. It is time.”

  She raised her head and saw N’th Adesi Re framed in the doorway, the smile on her lips laced with the same sadness and resignation Ailyssa held inside herself.

  At least they sent a friend.

  “It is time already?” Ailyssa said, climbing to her feet.

  Adesi nodded. “Your coupling partner is readying himself. It is time for your preparations.”

  Ailyssa clasped her hands and bowed her head in deference to the Matron. Before she let go and raised her eyes again, she noticed chalk dust trapped beneath her nails, accusing her of failing the Goddess.

  N’th Adesi Re led her from her room.

  ***

  The laving ritual took no longer than any other of the countless times she’d participated in it, but to Ailyssa, it stretched on for a quarter turn of the moon or more. Three young girls who’d not yet been blessed with their blood and therefore not acquired the title N’th attended her, scouring every part of her with pumice rock and lye soap until she cringed at their touch. The Goddess wanted her cleansed for the coupling—cleansed of dirt and sweat, cleansed of impure thought, cleansed of sin. Cleansed of her very skin, Ailyssa sometimes thought, but never said so aloud for fear of prolonging the sacrament and drawing it out until she was raw.

  With the cleansing complete, they brought out the Goddess’ blade and removed every hair from Ailyssa’s body, from her head to her toes. Some areas required more attention than they had in her youth, some less. After the blade came the lotions. Ailyssa closed her eyes and let them complete their duties, taking no joy from the touch of their hands.

  When the attendants finished, she waited while they retrieved the simple white shift she’d wear for the coupling. Water dripped from her to the warm rock under her feet. She peered down, past her breasts drooping more than they had seasons gone by—from age, not from nursing babes, which they hadn’t done in so long. Beyond her chest, her belly lay too flat for not having birthed half the number of children as many of the Ra. She looked past her body, which had betrayed her, at the spatter of droplets drying on the stone, disappearing the way she felt her life would soon, too.

  The attendants returned and rubbed her with oils to stem the flow of blood from any scrapes made by pumice stone or sharpened steel. They draped the shift over her head, tied it at her waist with a length of white rope, rubbed her shoulders to ensure she was relaxed.

  N’th Adesi Re returned and the attendants took their leave. The Matron offered her hand and Ailyssa took it and the friends held onto each other as they made their way along the long hall to the coupling room.

  “They say he is the most fertile of men. He has sired dozens of Daughters, many of whom have become N’th, and three are already Ra.”

  Ailyssa forced a wan smile.

  “At your age,” the Matron continued, “if you produced a Daughter, I think the elders
would look well upon your situation.”

  “Do you?” She struggled to keep a cynical tone from her voice.

  “I do.”

  They paused before the door, and Adesi put her hands on Ailyssa’s shoulders, looked in her eyes. Ailyssa’s gaze wandered, unable to hold under the Matron’s scrutiny. Instead, she focused on her friend’s ample bosom that had provided milk to half-a-dozen Daughters, at her rounded goddess body made that way by honoring the order and the Goddess. Seeing it squeezed Ailyssa’s heart.

  What will I do if they cast me out?

  N’th Adesi Re gave her friend a gentle shake, prompting her to raise her head, then spoke as though Ailyssa had uttered her thoughts aloud.

  “This is your last chance,” she said, eyes shining with concern Ailyssa hoped was genuine. “Take as long as you need. Do whatever you must.”

  The Matron stepped aside and pushed the door open. N’th Ailyssa Ra hesitated, watched her friend who offered a smile likely meant to reassure but which increased her nerves, then she crossed the threshold.

  The portal clicked shut behind her and Ailyssa’s gaze dropped to the floor. She’d stood here many times before and, each time, the butterfly flutter of nerves in her stomach kept her from gazing upon the man with whom she’d couple. This time, the butterflies were angry, the flutter a quake. If she’d bothered breaking fast this morn, she wasn’t sure the food would have stayed put.

  “Ahem.”

  She looked up at the sound of the man clearing his throat and saw him standing beside the coupling bed, naked and erect. Ailyssa kept her eyes on his face.

  “I am Ailyssa,” she said, hesitant.

  The man shook his head, dark hair brushing the tops of his shoulders. “Your name does not matter.”

  Ailyssa found a sheen of perspiration on her palms; she wiped them on the front of her shift, then wondered if this man might find her doing so unattractive. The thought surprised her, for she knew coupling had nothing to do with attraction. How could a man and a woman possibly consider each other comely? The man sat on the edge of the bed, his erect manhood pointing at the ceiling.