The House of Night and Chain

by David Annandale

  They’re going to get louder. Closer. Sooner or later, they’ll find you.

  Stop it. Stop it.

  The fear the memories were stirring was real. The pain they were causing was real. The voices were not. They were no more real here than they had been in my quarters on the Eternal Fury.

  The children’s voices, whispering now between the laughs, kept growing closer. They were louder now than the screams of my soldiers, louder than the snarls of the tyranids. The ­giggling climbed the steps of my tower. In a moment, it would be outside my door.

  I held my breath, waiting for the scratch of fingernails.

  I was straining with all my being to listen, trying to hear what I did not want to hear. I was rigid on my bed, paralysed as I waited for the impossible to happen.

  It’s haunted. The memory of Katrin’s voice, quiet and fearful.

  I had to let the breath go, and I realised I was listening to silence. There were no voices.

  I gasped for air. The only sound was my breathing. There was no laughter. There never had been. I could move again. The howls of the memories had receded. I was back in the quiet.

  The tension gradually flowed out of my body, as if the rigidity had turned to water and was slowly leaking from me, into the bed, to the floor and down through the house to the ground below. I took deep, grateful breaths. I thought I would sleep. I actually welcomed the prospect of sleep.

  In my last moment of consciousness, the sound came, clear and beautiful as a chime. Eliana called to me, ‘Maeson.’

  There was a spasm of grief. I was leaving her in the waking night as I fell into the dream world. Then she came with me.

  At first I saw her in a cascade of memories. I was dancing with her again on the night we first met, at a ball for the nobility thrown by Leonel in the Council Hall, at a time when he still left Malveil. I saw her striding from the Administratum Palace, where she reigned over an entire division, her walk as she descended the steps sure and purposeful, the simple movement of a leg locking itself forever into my heart. I saw her holding our infant daughter. I saw her comforting our son when he had fallen as a toddler. I saw our lovemaking.

  Each memory was perfectly defined, as clear as if I were experiencing present moments. But I knew they were the past. I felt the moments as I had when they occurred, and I felt them through the filter of loss. I mourned anew, seeing so clearly what I had once had, and never would again.

  My dream self sobbed.

  ‘Maeson.’

  The images came quickly, nearly simultaneously, a flickering gallery of joys turned into pain. Through them, I kept hearing her voice.

  ‘Maeson.’

  She was there before me. Not a memory now, though we were standing in the entrance hall of our apartments in Valgaast. I was myself as I was in the present. I had aged. I was faintly aware of the background hum of my prostheses’ servo-motors. Eliana was as I had last seen her. The sharp eyes that saw through me and loved me all the same, that understood what I meant even when I was speaking like a fool. The smile that mocked without truly mocking, that invited me into the shared joke between us.

  ‘Maeson,’ she said again. ‘What are you staring at?’

  ‘You,’ I said, my voice a breaking croak, riven by joy and grief to be speaking with her again. ‘I don’t know that dress.’

  ‘It’s my nightdress,’ she said. ‘It was new. You never saw this one. It’s the one I died in.’

  I tried to answer. I could only groan.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. ‘Everything is all right.’

  So often I had wished for just one more conversation. A wish to say goodbye, to say at least one of the things that were so important and that I had never had the chance to say. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here,’ I said.

  Her smile became melancholy. ‘There’s nothing to forgive. You couldn’t be here.’

  ‘I miss you so much.’

  ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘There, there. There, there.’ She raised a finger and stroked my cheek.

  I felt her touch.

  I jerked awake with a gasp, the touch lingering on my skin, hot and cold at the same time. Then I saw that I was still in the dream. Though I was in my bedchamber in Malveil, Eliana was there too, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said, holding out her hand.

  I climbed out of the bed. Everything seemed real. I felt the brushing of the sheets against my legs and the cold of the floorboards under my feet. But when she took my hand, I felt nothing, as if the more concrete the world around me became, the less present she was.

  ‘I wanted to be here with you,’ I said. ‘In this house.’

  ‘We’re together now. We have this, at least.’

  ‘It isn’t enough.’

  ‘I know.’ She smiled. ‘Come with me. Come! Come!’

  I could not feel her hand, yet she tugged, and I followed.

  Walking through the dark of Malveil, I did not see where we were going. All I could look at was her, the wonder of her. I knew this was not real, and I was thinking about how I would feel when I woke up.

  Treasure this. You spoke to her. She spoke to you. This is the farewell you never had. And it isn’t over yet. She is still there.

  She touched your cheek.

  I would hold that memory as real, I vowed, even when I was awake.

  I was floating. She seemed to be drifting through halls, blown to her destination by an ethereal wind. Perhaps the corridors would go on forever. I would have been happy never to wake.

  And then she stopped.

  We were in the librarium. The room was dim, lit only by a dirty yellow wash of moonlight through the windows. It frosted the spines of the books with amber. I could see Eliana clearly. She was looking at a row of books on a shelf just below chest-height. Her smile turned sad.

  I sensed that the moment of our parting had come. ‘I love you, Eliana,’ I said.

  She turned to face me, her smile growing wider and wider. I looked into her eyes to see the reflection of love.

  She had no eyes. There were only holes in her skull, black and deep and cold. And her forehead was a crater, punched in by the impact of her fall.

  Chapter 6

  I woke with a yell. I staggered, disorientated, to find that I really was in the librarium, standing where Eliana had brought me. I had never walked in my sleep before, or had so vivid a dream. It was resilient, resisting the erosion of wakefulness. I remembered every moment of Eliana’s visitation. I remembered what I had promised myself. But when I tried again to find the comfort of being able to see and speak to Eliana, her eyeless, shattered face filled my thoughts. I trembled with the effort to banish the sight. It was wrong. It was a crime to think of her that way. My mind had betrayed Eliana and me.

  Standing in the librarium, in the very spot where I had seen the monstrous Eliana, I was finding it hard to break from the embrace of the nightmare. It was as if it had not ended.

  ‘It is over,’ I announced to the dark librarium. ‘Finished.’

  I was sick of dreams and memories. I was sick with them. Knowing this was important. Armed with this knowledge, I would, with the Emperor’s help, triumph over them.

  I knelt. I made the sign of the aquila, crossing my arms and pressing my hands hard against my chest. I closed my eyes tight. ‘There is no wisdom but the word of the Emperor,’ I recited. ‘There is no interpretation before the word of the Emperor. There is only obedience. Faith through obedience. Strength through faith. When my senses lie, the creed is my shield.’

  The words of the prayer calmed me, though not as much as I had hoped.

  ‘Get light,’ I told myself.

  I felt my way carefully through the dark until my hands bumped against a small table next to the armchairs in front of the window. Outside, the vast orb of Luctus gazed blankly at
me, an eye filmed by cataracts, its light outlining shadows and making them deeper. I found the wrought-iron stand of a lumen globe on the table, and finally I could see properly. The immediacy of the dream receded, its waves lapping at the edge of the illumination.

  I thought about the way Eliana had been looking sadly at a shelf before her eyes had vanished.

  No, she was not, because she wasn’t really here.

  It was time to leave the librarium. I would feel better in a different space. I headed for the door, passing by the spot where Eliana had stood.

  Reality turned to thin ice and began to crack.

  The books Eliana had been looking at were a multi-volume chronicle of the martyrs of Solus. One book was smaller and thinner than the others, and had no printing on its spine. It was nestled in the middle of the collection, its binding just as dark as that of the other books. It was easy to overlook. It was also protruding just enough to disrupt the uniform line of volumes.

  I reached for it with frozen fingers. My pulse grew loud in my ears as I took it down and opened the cover.

  I stared at pages covered with Eliana’s handwriting.

  My hands convulsed around it. I expected the book to turn to air in my hands, because it could not be real. I waited for the jolt of truly waking up. It did not come. The journal remained solid.

  I walked unsteadily over to the table and collapsed in one of the chairs. Eliana’s words swam before my eyes. I took long, shuddering breaths and tried to find an explanation that made sense of what was happening. The Imperial Creed denied the existence of ghosts, and I would not, could not, go against that teaching.

  Yet a fundamental fracture had opened in the world. I could not see how to close it.

  You must have seen this before and forgotten. When Veiss and Rivas were here, your eye must have passed over it. Then the memory surfaced in disguised form. Something like that must have happened. Nothing else makes sense.

  The rationalisation was a weak one. It would have to do for now. It was the only bulwark I could throw up against superstition.

  I ran the tips of my fingers over the pages. This was a treasure much more precious than what I had hoped to keep from the dream. This was not a wish-fulfilment memory construct of my wife. This was real. It was something that truly did come from her. These were her words.

  I paused for a long moment, placing my palm over the first page. Are you sure you want to read this?

  No, I wasn’t sure. No matter what journey this book described, Eliana’s broken body lay at the end of it. There would be things I would regret learning.

  You have to learn them. These are Eliana’s words, Eliana’s truths.

  Could I put this aside? Could I imagine not reading it?

  Of course not.

  My pulse was still hammering in my ears as I moved my hand away from the page and began to read.

  The house is ours now. Ours. It feels ironic to write that word. Ours. The right to live here has come to Maeson, the children and me, but I am the only one here. Curse Leonel for waiting to die until Katrin and Zander were away at the schola.

  Malveil is huge. I did not have an appreciation of how big it is until today. Seeing it from a distance is a poor preparation. Even so, it’s strange to feel so dwarfed by the space here. I’ve never experienced a sensation like this before. If I could understand why I feel the way I do, perhaps I could do something about it. I’ve been inside large buildings before, after all. Maybe the difference in this case is that this is supposed to be my home. It doesn’t feel like one. What am I supposed to do with this space? It’s empty enough when the serfs are here. Malveil just swallows them up and leaves me alone. And they’re going to leave for the night in a short while.

  I feel like I’m falling through two kinds of vastness. The oppressive size of the house is reflecting the size of the task I’ve had to take on, one that I didn’t truly feel until today. I’m trying to manage my Administratum duties while doing what I can to hold the line for the Strocks in council. My position has never been as strong as it needs to be there. With Leonel dead, Maeson would be lord-governor if he were here, but he is not, and I do not have an official title. I am not a councillor. My presence on the Inner Council is, as far as I can tell, a courtesy that has been extended as a result of some kind of negotiation between Adrianna Veiss and Veth Montfor. I exert what influence I can. It is hard to know what effect I am having. It’s odd. Until today, I’ve been able to tell myself that what I am doing there matters. Now I’m not sure.

  I’ve just looked at what I’ve written and I want to scold the person responsible. This doesn’t sound like me. I’m very tired. I didn’t sleep well last night. There was a lot of thrashing, and waking up from dreams that the bed was floating in an infinite void. Fatigue. That’s why I’m reacting this way. I didn’t think the move would take as much out of me as it has. I don’t even know why it did. Karoff has everything well in hand, and there has been surprisingly little for me to do.

  Perhaps that is the problem. I have been rather purposeless today. Perhaps it was a mistake to arrange for the leave of absence from the Administratum Palace. Wandering from room to room here like I’m wide-eyed and lost accomplishes nothing. Sitting in the librarium as if I were seeking refuge from something is even worse. Refuge from what? This is nonsense. I’m embarrassed to write these words. I should be ashamed. If my scribes at the Administratum could see me, they would lose their respect and fear, and well they should.

  Let us have purpose in this day, then.

  Later.

  Perhaps I’m ill. Something must be wrong with me. I tried to go through Malveil in a systematic way. If I knew the space, I thought, it would seem less huge. Seeing all the still-unusable rooms, packed high with the debris of generations, would also help, I thought, because I would see that even Malveil could get crowded.

  I was wrong. I feel worse. The house seems bigger than ever. I tried to explore each wing carefully, stopping at every doorway, and studying every room. I thought I could imprint the geography of Malveil on my mind. I failed. Every time I worked my way to the end of a wing and started back, I would find doors and passages that I had missed the first time around, and end up more confused than when I had begun. I must have attempted the ground floor of the west wing five times, and I still don’t know how many chambers open off the main gallery.

  This is ridiculous. Whatever is wrong seems to be more than exhaustion. But lack of sleep isn’t helping, certainly. I’ll try again tomorrow, and I’ll do it when Karoff and the other serfs are here. I was wrong to make the attempt while I was alone. Not when I’m unwell. I kept paying too much attention to the echoes of my own footsteps.

  That was probably how I lost track of which rooms I’d been in.

  Well. This is a rather unfortunate start to this journal. If I can feel shame about my reactions now, then I can’t imagine how mortified I’m going to be in the morning. So, to the Eliana of tomorrow, my apologies. See if you can’t set the Eliana of tonight straight.

  Throne, I’m so tired. And there’s a session of council tomorrow too. If I don’t get some sleep, I doubt I’ll even be able to drag myself to the bottom of the hill.

  I closed the journal with a shaking hand. I didn’t know how I was going to get out of the chair. I could hear her voice so clearly. Her voice, and her confusion. That distress wasn’t like her.

  With an effort, I lifted my arm and put the book down on the table beside the chair. I needed air, and I needed to change my focus. I needed to plunge back into the turmoil of Valgaast’s political cauldron.

  The journal would wait. I already knew I would only be able to read it a little bit at a time.

  Because I had to savour the gift of my wife’s words.

  That’s what I insisted to myself until I believed it.

  I had taken a risk in having Trefecht arrested. I did not take Vei
ss’ warnings lightly, but I had relished the opening salvo of the war. The risk I was taking this evening gave me more pause.

  The first stage of this campaign had been successful, though. I took that as a good sign. Katrin and Zander had agreed to dine with me at Malveil.

  The three of us sat at one end of the enormous table in the dining hall. Under Karoff’s supervision, serfs unobtrusively served a three-course meal that I had difficulty tasting. The conversation was sporadic and awkward. We were three strangers to each other. Zander was pleasant, but clearly wondering why I had thought it necessary to go through this painful exercise. Katrin was coldly formal, particularly towards her brother. There was no open hostility, though. So that was something.

  When we had finished eating, Zander looked around the immense space with an amused smile. He clinked his knife against the rim of his goblet of amasec and cocked his head.

  ‘The acoustics are striking in here, father,’ he said. ‘Fine echoes.’

  ‘It is rather large and empty,’ I agreed. ‘It needs to have life return to it. I would like to think even three of us is a start.’

  ‘Are you going to be hosting feasts for the council?’ Katrin asked coldly.

  ‘Not until it has been purged.’

  Zander’s smile faltered.

  ‘I heard about Councillor Trefecht,’ Katrin said. ‘That’s a start.’

  ‘Only a start,’ I said.

  To my disappointment, Zander changed the subject. ‘I don’t imagine this hall has seen much use in a very long time.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t. Nor has most of the house. I plan to change that, too.’

  ‘Have you…’ Zander hesitated. ‘Have you seen anything of mother’s? I mean…’ He grimaced, searching for the right words.

  I understood what he was trying to say. ‘Anything that shows that she lived here once too?’

  ‘Yes.’ He gestured at the room around us. ‘You wouldn’t know it to look at this.’