The House of Night and Chain

by David Annandale

  We went through the house, lighting it up as we went. It took more than an hour, and even then, there was no way we could look in every possible hiding place. All of us were going through the motions. I did not believe we would find any living being. They did not believe we would find anything at all, though Katrin, at least, did not entirely rule out the chance of a security breach.

  The one place we were not able to bring more light than what we carried was the Old Tower. The spectacle was as disturbing to Katrin and Zander as it was to me. The draught from below caressed our faces with cold. By unspoken agreement, we looked from the doorway and then left. No one would be hiding there. That was certain, even if there was no firm basis for the certainty.

  There was no one in the house but us. We extinguished the lanterns as we retraced our steps, returning Malveil to the night.

  ‘Well, that was exciting,’ Zander said when we were outside the bedrooms again. He waved a goodnight and closed his door behind him.

  ‘Can you describe what it was you heard?’ Katrin asked.

  ‘Not well,’ I said evasively. ‘Maybe the wind woke me up.’ That was a weak answer, and she knew it.

  ‘Has that been happening to you a lot?’

  That felt like the beginning of an interrogation. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Once or twice.’ She won’t believe a blanket denial. ‘Being up in the tower might be a factor.’

  ‘It might be.’ She was watching me carefully, her tone noncommittal.

  We parted. I headed back to my tower door but did not go up the stairs. I waited until I was sure Katrin had gone back to bed, and went back out to the gallery. I kept only one lantern lit, the one by the tower. I accepted, without thinking about the reasons, that I must embrace the darkness and solitude. I walked slowly down the gallery, waiting. I was hopeful and fearful at the same time. I moved quietly, making sure to make no noise at all when I passed by Katrin’s door. I had wanted witnesses to the impossible. Now I understood this was not to be. So I did not want witnesses to behaviour I could not easily explain.

  The sobbing began again when I reached the head of the grand staircase. I did not resist this time. I descended, and followed the sound to the librarium. I saw Eliana when I entered. She was sitting at the window, bent over, her hands covering her face. The waning light of Luctus touched her, yet gave her none of its colour. She had a shimmering pallor, the grey of grief.

  Wind slammed against the window, fierce and sudden as a shout. I jumped, and looked. Outside, the trees shook once with violence, and stilled.

  ‘Eliana,’ I began, but she was gone from the chair. I saw her just as she passed through the far exit of the librarium. She disappeared through the closed door.

  I followed.

  At first, Eliana stayed out of reach, always just rounding the corner, or at the far end of a hall. Then she began to enter the rooms that Leonel had filled with his madness. She moved slowly before the heaps of possessions, staring at them with a fixed desperation. Her sobs became strangled moans. I kept back, fearful that if I came too close, she would vanish.

  But when I stood some distance away, she remained before me, clearly visible. She was as I remembered her, even with her colour washed away in grey. The movements of her arms and hands were slow and graceful, as though she were under water. She was in the nightdress I had seen in what I still thought of as a dream. This time was different. The world around me was hard and real. I was painfully awake.

  I looked at her, pain wracking my chest. I understood nothing, but I accepted without question that I was truly seeing my dead wife, and that she was consumed by grief.

  ‘Eliana.’ My choked whisper was inaudible beneath her sobs.

  She did not linger very long in any room. She roved between the piles, hands moving as if trying to divine some hidden secret, and then she moved on. I followed. Her agony grew more intense with every room, and now I cried out to her, begging her to let me comfort her. She did not respond. She began to move faster. Her tears were desperate now. She seemed to be searching for some key that had eluded her in life, and doom was coming for her anew.

  We reached the Old Tower. Eliana paused before the door. Her head ducked down, her body shaking with the force of the sobs, and her hands twisted into claws. Then she passed through the door. I rushed forward and clasped the ring. Before I could pull it open, her scream came from inside. Long, high, loud, it was a howl of horror and despair that climbed and climbed and climbed until I was screaming too. It cut off as if severed by a blade.

  In the silence that followed, I knew there was no point in looking for her. She was gone. I fell against the door, slid to the ground and curled into a ball. Now it was my turn to weep.

  Chapter 9

  I attended worship the following evening at the Cathedral of Faith Unmerciful. I had need of the succour of my faith. I sat in the lord-governor’s private box, beside Adrianna Veiss. The box was attached to one of the huge pillars at the cathedral’s transept crossing, diagonally across from and just below the level of the cardinal’s pulpit. It was where the lord-governor sat to be witnessed while maintaining a modicum of privacy. Everyone in the congregation could see me. No one could hear me apart from Veiss.

  We spoke before the service began, but my mind was not on our conversation. I was barely aware of what I said. I kept looking down the nave towards the altar. The tower of marble and obsidian rose sixty feet above the aisle. Mounted at its peak, the enormous skull of gold and bronze looked down upon the congregants, its wings spread wide beneath the gothic arches. It was a vision of judgement in full flight, a reminder that the Emperor saw all. He protected, but to fail Him meant rightful, wrathful punishment.

  Though I needed the help of the Imperial Creed, I didn’t know in what form. I needed to know what to do. But I did not want to hear an answer that meant Eliana would disappear forever.

  ‘Maeson,’ Veiss said gently.

  I blinked, tearing my eyes away from the great skull and looking back at her. ‘What did you say?’

  She cocked her head. The feathers of her headdress swayed slowly from left to right. ‘I asked you a question a full minute ago.’

  I had no idea what that question had been. ‘I’m sorry.’ No point trying to pretend I could remember what we had been discussing.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I would tell you if I could.’ And I wanted to, desperately.

  ‘Then you should.’

  I thought carefully before answering. I trusted Veiss with my life. The more I opened up to her about what I was experiencing at Malveil, though, the greater the burden I would be placing on her. On the other hand, since she could see something was troubling me, she wouldn’t simply let the matter drop.

  ‘You still miss Jarallen,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I do. All the time. I especially miss her at the beginning and at the end of each day.’

  I nodded. Those were the worst moments, when life’s demands eased and the loss cut to the quick. The absence in the other half of the bed. That second upon regaining consciousness when you forget there is no one there, and then the terrible second that comes next, when you remember you are alone.

  ‘Do you…’ I hesitated, then started over. ‘Have you… Have you ever seen her?’

  Veiss said nothing for a long time. Her gloved hands tightened, then relaxed slowly, as if she were consciously ordering her fingers to open again. Her shoulders shuddered once. ‘In my dreams,’ she said. ‘So often. To see her is beautiful, and then it is awful when I realise I’m not really seeing her. I bless those dreams and I curse them. Is that what you meant?’ She looked hard at me, clearly hoping for my sake that I would answer in the affirmative.

  I had gone too far to lie now. Too much was happening for me to try to find solace in an easy lie. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Have you ever seen her while you were awake?’

  ‘No,’
she said quickly. She took a breath. ‘You’ve seen Eliana?’

  I didn’t answer. I stared straight ahead, into the vast, dark orbs of the skull.

  ‘More than once?’ Veiss asked.

  ‘Yes.’ I barely moved my lips.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Malveil.’

  ‘And in the city?’

  ‘No. Only at the house. Only at night.’

  ‘What do you think you really–’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It isn’t really her.’

  I grunted, unwilling to admit that possibility. As late as yesterday, I would have agreed. No longer. The explanations I used to reach for no longer sufficed.

  ‘You’ve been through a lot.’

  Even her vagueness was enough to stir the memories of Clostrum to life again. They had been slumbering of late, pushed under by the extremity of emotion caused by seeing Eliana. I forced myself to remain present in the cathedral. I could not let the old horrors capture me here. ‘What is happening is not what you’re suggesting. It is not in my mind.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Yes. No.

  ‘You’re going to speak to Kalvan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  That seemed to satisfy her for the moment. She said nothing else, but gave my shoulder a companionable squeeze, letting me know I was not alone.

  The cardinal appeared in his pulpit, and the service began. Flights of servo-skulls passed through the nave, clouds of incense pouring from their open jaws. I inhaled the smell gratefully. The hymns began, and I joined in with fervour. I sang of our abasement before the glory of the Emperor, and of our absolute obedience to the creed. I condemned the sin of original thought. I celebrated the extermination of the heretic. I could not hear my voice. When I sang, it was as if the vast choir of the congregation emerged from my mouth. I was part of the whole, of the thousands in the cathedral who sang and thought and obeyed as one. There was comfort in this. My eyes brimmed with tears as I threw my soul into the iron embrace of the Emperor. There was nothing to doubt here. There was nothing to fear except the sin of disobedience and the righteous punishments it brought upon the sinner.

  We sang, and then Kalvan Rivas spoke. ‘For each of us,’ he began, ‘there is only submission to the Emperor. Nothing is beyond His law, and beyond what the creed declares, there is nothing. Our every action must be in accordance with His law, and so our every action is submission. Our every thought is submission, for nothing can be conceived outside the Imperial Creed.’

  I listened desperately. Rivas said what I needed to hear, and what I feared. I had been trying to remind myself of these precepts, trying to make them strong in my soul once again. Submission to the will of the Emperor had sustained me in every battlefield. Even in the nightmare of Clostrum, when the horror of the tyranids and the shame of failure had engulfed me, I at least had the consolation of knowing I would die having served without question. But it was getting harder for me to believe as unwaveringly as I always had in every tenet of the creed. They denied that what I was seeing at Malveil was possible. If all I had seen was an illusion, then my mind had truly become treacherous. But if even one thing was real, what then?

  If nothing was real, Eliana was not real. Accepting this, embracing this without any deviation, would banish her. I could not bear that thought.

  Nor could I, in full honesty, believe it. Not after last night. There was something happening at Malveil. Something real. I had already gone too long trying to pretend this was not so.

  ‘Illusions have real consequences!’ Rivas thundered. ‘To deny the truth is a crime!’

  Yes, they do. Yes, it is.

  The service lasted three hours, three hours in which I rocked back and forth between comfort and frustration. When it ended, I was no better off than I had been before. I had to speak to Rivas.

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ said Veiss. The cathedral was slowly emptying. ‘I’ll see you at the doors.’

  I thanked her and headed for the vestry. It was at the far end of a maze of corridors behind the altar. The door was open, and Rivas was still in his vestments, leaning against his desk. He smiled when I entered.

  ‘Were you expecting me?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Because you saw me in the box?’ I felt a flush of guilt that it had taken me this many days to attend.

  ‘Because I saw the pain on your face.’ He gestured at the tall-backed iron chair in one corner of the room. It faced both his desk and the smaller altar behind it. To sit there would be to feel the eyes of the cardinal and the Emperor at the same time. A salutary position. ‘What is going on, Maeson?’ Rivas asked.

  I took the chair. I looked straight ahead, at the eyes of my friend and the eyes of the skull. I told Rivas everything. I spoke as calmly as I could, and without exaggeration. I described what I thought was real, and what might be phantasm. I could no longer decide between the two. The nightmare about Eliana troubled me more and more. Above all, I did not want to picture the eyeless horror having a reality greater than what my subconscious could grant it.

  Rivas listened without interrupting. When I paused, he would murmur a question to get me to clarify a point or to get my thoughts moving again. He barely moved the whole time, but the lines in his face seemed to grow deeper, his eyes more and more troubled. When I was done, he asked, ‘Have you ever experienced anything like this before?’

  ‘No. Though Adrianna has pointed out that my state of mind is not as stable as it once was.’

  ‘She was probably a bit more tactful than that.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You also think she’s wrong.’

  ‘Not about my state of mind. But that my condition might explain what I’m seeing.’

  Rivas clasped and unclasped his hands. He looked more worried than Veiss. ‘I agree with you,’ he said. ‘I think there might be something wrong with Malveil. I think you should leave immediately.’

  ‘What is wrong? What could be causing this?’

  Rivas sighed, frustrated. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is there something in the creed that could account for what I’ve seen?’

  ‘No.’ Rivas looked as if he were about to say something else, but stopped. I recognised the look on his face. It was the expression of a man wrestling with unwelcome paradoxes.

  ‘Am I seeing Eliana’s ghost?’ I asked directly.

  ‘There are no such things.’

  Rivas’ answer was too pat. It sounded recited, backed by insufficient force of belief.

  ‘Then…’

  ‘I do not have an answer for you now,’ he said. He was choosing his words carefully. ‘I do not want to speculate rashly, but you are seeing something. That is why I want you to leave.’

  ‘I can’t.’ In a day full of doubts, that was the most categorical sentence I had uttered.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Her journal… I’m starting to understand what it meant to leave her here. The responsibilities she had to shoulder…’

  ‘Nothing she didn’t know from the start. And you had left before, when the children were very young. She was fine then.’

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. But this time something broke her. It killed her, Kalvan.’

  He nodded sadly.

  ‘I think I might have a chance at atonement if I stay at Malveil.’

  ‘A chance with what? What will forgive you? Not Eliana. That vision can’t be what you think it is.’

  ‘I can’t take the chance that it isn’t.’

  ‘What about Katrin and Zander? Have them leave, at least.’

  I shook my head, feeling stubborn. My family was together again. Zander was showing signs of acknowledging something like duty. Katrin was speaking to me. We might never be close, but we were not actively estranged. I would not give up on
what I had accomplished so far. ‘They haven’t seen or heard anything.’

  ‘Can you honestly state that they’re safe there?’

  ‘Safer than they would be on their own. Montfor isn’t going to give up. She failed to kill me. She knows her days are numbered. That makes her even more dangerous. She’ll attack me and my family in any way she can.’

  ‘There are other ways of protecting your blood,’ Rivas said.

  I didn’t want to hear them. ‘There’s no reason to think they’re at risk. It isn’t as if I’ve been attacked.’

  ‘Your nightmare…’

  ‘It might have just been one. And even if it wasn’t, I wasn’t harmed.’

  ‘Injuries are not just to the flesh. You don’t need me to tell you that.’

  He was right. But was I worse off than I was before I came to Malveil? I didn’t think so. And if I could atone… I thought about the pain in Eliana’s face. If I could take that pain away… If I could give her peace…

  I knew that my reasoning flew in the face of everything Rivas had been saying. I was thinking and acting as if what I had seen really was Eliana’s ghost. As if it truly was Eliana.

  I needed that to be true. I saw, with a sudden, calm lucidity, that the only path that stood any chance of giving me peace was to act as if this were true. Because if I did as Rivas asked, and denied the existence of the ghost, and he was wrong, then I would be forever beyond forgiveness.

  Rivas saw that he would not be able to sway me. ‘All right. You’re going to do what you’re going to do.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re going to ask the Inquisition to pay me a visit?’

  ‘You know better than that.’ He looked hurt.

  ‘Sorry. That was unfair.’

  ‘Promise that you’ll tell me everything that happens.’

  ‘I will.’

  He seemed reluctant to let me go on that, but he was also resigned. I felt his concern following me out of the vestry.

  The cathedral was empty now. My foosteps sounded small and hollow as I crossed the nave. Veiss was waiting at the door, as she had promised. Stavaak was with her. Their faces were grave.