The House of Night and Chain

by David Annandale

  I spoke out against delays, though I barely paid attention to my own words. Montfor remained impassive throughout. She did not look like someone who was being forced to take precipitous action.

  I was wrong. She must have discovered what we did, and she isn’t worried. She has the whip hand, and she knows it.

  When the session ended, I was filled with even greater dread.

  I had Belzhek wait when I left the Council Hall. I crossed the square to the cathedral. I stopped just inside, looking down the length of the nave and up at its majestic heights. I was alone in the vastness of the sacred space.

  Speak to Kalvan. You must. You can’t put it off any longer.

  Only I did. The Emperor did not grant me the spiritual strength to seek out my friend. I let anxiety convince me to delay a bit longer.

  What will he say about what I found? He is my friend, but he is also a cardinal of the Ecclesiarchy. I know what his duty is. There is no question there.

  Delay, then. Give Montfor the opportunity to speak with him first. You will deserve what happens.

  If she was going to reveal the existence of the portrait to him, wouldn’t she have done so already?

  The time might not have been right. The stars may have aligned for her, thanks to our efforts.

  What Montfor planned to do was irrelevant. My moral duty commanded that I walk down the nave in the direction of the vestry.

  Instead, I turned around and crossed the square once more.

  The light was failing when Belzhek turned through the Malveil gates. The days were growing shorter as winter fastened its grip on Valgaast. ‘Night is falling early,’ I muttered.

  Belzhek heard me, and assumed I was speaking to her. ‘Not as early as it will in two days, my lord.’

  ‘In two days?’

  ‘The eclipse, my lord.’

  ‘So soon,’ I said. I had been too long away from Solus. I had forgotten about the eclipse. That would have been impossible if I still had the habits of a native son of the world. I would have been bracing myself for the event. Luctus would pass in front of our star in the hours before sunset. It was so large it would blot out the light completely, and night would fall early, with the suddenness of an executioner’s blade. It was a hard darkness. And the reminder made it loom ahead of me like a grim monument. I would speak with Rivas before then, I promised myself. I must not look up into that deep night with my conscience so troubled.

  I saw Karoff on the grounds again, at the entrance to a different mine tunnel. He was just as motionless as before, oblivious to the frigid drizzle. We passed by some of the other serfs too, also motionless. They were all hard to see in the twilight. Twice I was about to call Belzhek’s attention to their presence, and both times the figures disappeared before I could utter a syllable.

  I even caught a glimpse of a young Zander and Katrin. They too were still, though their heads turned to watch us. They were standing on the slope of a crane’s fallen arm. I felt a clutch of anxiety. They could so easily fall and be hurt. I was failing them again.

  Then we were past, my children vanishing into the deepening grey of the twilight, and I was working hard to remind myself that they had not been real.

  The doubts were strong. I wondered if the effort to see them as apparitions instead of real children in need of my help was not part of the insidious plan of the adult imposters.

  I was braced, at least, for Karoff’s appearance at the house, and was not surprised when he opened the door to admit me.

  ‘Have my children returned?’ I asked him. I decided, provisionally, that he was real. He seemed solid enough. He answered when I spoke to him.

  ‘They have not, my lord,’ he said. ‘They have sent word that they will be not be returning until late.’

  ‘Did they give reasons?’

  ‘Your daughter has duties that are detaining her. Your son said he had an appointment with friends.’

  ‘I see.’ Likely reasons both.

  Too believable. They’re avoiding you.

  I could not blame them, even though I did.

  I thanked Karoff and went to the dining hall. Serfs had my meal waiting for me. I sat at a table that seemed longer and emptier all the time. The clink of my silverware against dishes was the tiny sound of a pebble falling into a deep well. I brooded. My thoughts had no lack of dark subjects to orbit. I thought about Montfor. Now that I was back in Malveil, though, it was Eliana’s journal that preoccupied me more. There was a growing overlap between our experiences. She had seen only darkness in this house. I admitted that there was danger here. Pretending otherwise would be fatal.

  The revelations in Silling had imposed a new weight of duty on me. I must fight to expunge Devris’ crime.

  How? How will you purge the shadow of what he has done?

  I ate, but tasted nothing. I didn’t notice when the serfs cleared the table. I had a vague sense of Karoff wishing me goodnight. I had been alone in the house for some time when I finally rose and took a proper account of my surroundings again.

  I knew what I had to do. Eliana’s journal had shown me the way again. Though there was only darkness in what I was managing to decipher, there were lessons to be drawn. There was duty to follow. It might lead to salvation.

  Eliana had realised that she had been avoiding the Old Tower. I had been, too. I had looked in it, briefly. It held the most extreme of the piles of discards. The serfs had been working on the chambers on the ground floor and in the west wing of the second floor. They had not touched the Old Tower. I was as sure of that as I was sure that it was night. The soul turned away from the Old Tower. The mind sought to pretend it did not exist.

  I saw that this was what I had been doing, and that understanding removed the excuses to avoid it.

  I headed for the tower, lighting every candelabra as I went. Where light could be, I summoned its presence. It was a welcome ally. It was also a weak one. When I reached the door of the Old Tower, shadows were reaching around me and pooling at the threshold. They refused to be banished.

  I waded into them and opened the door. Inside, the frozen cyclone of debris awaited. I carried a lumen torch, and when I shone its beam at the discards, it was terribly narrow, the merest splinter of light. I could see better than I had before, though. And there were no windows. It made no difference to come here in day or night. It was the home of darkness.

  Eliana had gone down. I would too. I started down the stairs, the cold breeze leeching warmth from my body. The steps had been rounded and made uneven by use and time. Their shapes were strange. I would have expected the worn depressions in the middle of each step caused by centuries of ascending and descending feet. Instead, there were depressions on one side or the other, sometimes both. Some steps looked as if a huge mass had depressed one end into the stairs below, the rockcrete behaving with sudden molten properties. I had to walk slowly. I almost lost my footing several times. The surfaces were as slippery as if they had been coated in slime, though they were dry.

  I pictured myself falling and rolling down and down and down the staircase, breaking bones, coming to lie broken and helpless in the abyss below. There I would await death, an echo of the shattered remains of Eliana. It would be a long time before I would be found. I might never be. I would disappear, swallowed by the Old Tower and the secret it held.

  Whatever Devris had done, it had been done here.

  As I descended, stopping on each step to steady myself, I played the torch on the pile beside me. As slow as my progress was, it was enough to create the illusion of movement. The vortex of objects seemed to be spinning slowly, rising from the far depths, like some terrible engine starting to life in the heart of Malveil. The further down I went, the more the cyclone drew and held my gaze. I had to pause even longer on each step. I had to make a deliberate effort to look where I was going. And though I kept staring at the grandiose waste
left by my ancestors, I saw nothing of use. Eliana had made it sound like the secrets of Malveil offered themselves up to her gaze here when she finally looked. They were hiding from me.

  I judged I had descended as deep as the cellars in the newer portions of the house and still had far to go when I saw movement. Real movement, not an illusion. A small, thin, graceful waving in a breeze that could not exist. I drew closer, cold sweat breaking out. I saw the beautiful traceries, the rich scarlet against deep blue, the distinctive colouring of the pataarka bird’s plumage.

  Veiss’ headdress.

  The breeze gusted, buffeting the headdress, almost knocking me off my feet. It was as strong and brief as a harsh bark of laughter, and then it subsided.

  The headdress sat on top of an upended bureau. I reached out slowly, half expecting and half hoping that it would vanish as soon as I tried to touch it. The feathers brushed against my ­fingertips, their touch inexpressibly gentle and lonely. My breath hitched. A sob caught in my throat, hard and painful as a stone.

  My hand closed convulsively around the headdress. I pulled it from the heap. A narrow crust of dried blood was rough against my palm.

  Veiss had come to Malveil when she had said she would. She had died here. Malveil, or the force that lurked within it, had killed her.

  I headed back up the stairs. I fought the urge to run. I was no longer tempted to look at the heap, though the cyclone continued its pretence of turning in my peripheral vision. I took the steps carefully, moving as quickly as I dared. The darkness below was an open maw at my back. My shoulder blades ached with tension, anticipating the pain of a blow, of teeth, of something worse. The exit was so far away. For too long, it was behind the curve of the vortex, and I could not see it. I feared I would be here forever, caught and damned by the spiral.

  I did reach the exit, and the Old Tower released me. It had struck its blow for the night. I hurled the door shut, and the boom of its closing resounded through Malveil like cannon fire. I could run safely now, though only a fraction of the candles I had lit were still burning. I rushed through the emptiness of the house, making for the illusory safety of my chambers.

  There was a heavy knock, a single blow, on the main doors just as I reached the entrance hall. It sounded as if a large branch had been hurled against the house. I paused, panting and confused, then opened the door.

  Tervine was there.

  I was surprised he was strong enough to knock with such force, and I was surprised to see him at all. I had paid him last night. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I need help,’ he said. He spoke without inflection.

  ‘What help?’ My grip on the headdress tightened. I prayed he was about to prove Belzhek wrong about his character and try to blackmail me.

  Instead, he repeated himself. ‘I need help.’ His voice was barely above a whisper. His unblinking eyes stared right through me. He kept twitching, jerking back and forth so quickly he was almost blurred. Spasms of pain shook his face. A grimace, horribly wide, flashed across his features and was gone.

  ‘Show me,’ I said.

  He walked away from the mansion. I followed. The rain had become a fine mist. It coated my face in an instant, chilling me. Tervine walked slowly, yet I could not keep up with him. He was jerking more and more violently, as if he were being pulled in two directions at once. I still carried the lumen torch, its beam weak in the damp night. I could hardly see Tervine beyond the beam, and he seemed to float just above the ground, his staggering, erratic steps carrying him further than they should. The more I struggled to keep up, the more distance there was between us.

  He never vanished from my sight, though. He walked about halfway down the hill, then turned off the drive and moved between the giant iron skeletons of digging equipment. He turned again, going back up the hill a short distance. I kept having to look away from him to pick my way over stones and rusting girders. He stopped a few dozen yards from the entrance to a mine. As I hurried over to him, I tripped and fell. When I picked myself up, filthy with muck, he had disappeared.

  I kept going. There was something in the cavern’s mouth. All I could see at first was a confused silhouette, a fusion of jagged lines with a softer mass at its centre. I was only a few feet away when the torch beam fell on Tervine’s body.

  He had been pierced by spears of stone. They had emerged from the walls of the cave, a few inches thick and running from roof to floor and wall to wall. They were a web, impaling Tervine a dozen times. They split his torso open. Viscera had slid down the lengths of stone to hang just above the cavern floor. His head was ripped in two. The lower jaw was five feet from the upper skull, dangling from a spur that had pierced him on a diagonal.

  There was nothing remotely possible about anything I saw. The stone spears fused seamlessly with the edges of the cave mouth, as if the configuration had always been here and the corpse had grown around it like moss.

  The ground was covered in blood. The drizzle was slowly diluting it. Streams ran down the incline into the cave, feeding the thirst of the mine.

  Tervine had just died, and he had been here forever. I could not guess how he had come to be here. Perhaps he had wanted to see me. Perhaps he had been lured. Perhaps he had walked in his sleep.

  How he had come to be here did not matter. This was what Malveil could do. It could kill whom it pleased, then show its handiwork to me at its pleasure.

  Chapter 16

  I could not go back to the house. I went downhill, growing numb in the chill of the drizzle. I had a single purpose.

  Speak to Kalvan. Confess to him. Tell him everything, and tell him now.

  The foolishness of my delay bordered on the heretical. But even now, I wasn’t sure if I would have done things differently. Eliana still needed to be saved. I couldn’t save her alone.

  Things moved in the darkness around me. The shapes were indistinct, and vanished whenever I looked to see what company I had. I saw Tervine again not long after I had rejoined the road. He came gradually and smoothly up the hill, his haunted eyes staring in the direction of the site of his death.

  ‘I need help,’ he said, the words a toneless, mindless refrain. ‘I need help. I need help.’

  He walked on and disappeared. He passed me once more a short distance away from Karoff’s gatehouse. ‘I need help. I need help. I need help.’

  There were other figures, motionless in the rain. I saw Karoff and the serfs again. I also saw Katrin and Zander. The adults. Cold statues gazing at me.

  The masks are coming off.

  I stopped outside the gatehouse. The windows were dark. Water dribbled steadily from the eaves. I could wake Karoff and have him summon Belzhek to take me to the cathedral. Only I didn’t know which Karoff would answer my knock. I had no certainty it would be the real one.

  I couldn’t be sure there was a real one.

  I moved on into the night, making the long walk to the Square of the Emperor’s Bounty. It was a journey of several miles. I was already wet and chilled to the point that I did not think I would ever be warm again. The chill went down through my soul. The walk was a penance for everything I had failed at, and for every­one I had failed.

  I had lost track of time. I had no idea of the hour. The streets were as deserted as ever in the industrial sector, and they were quiet beyond that shell, the misery of the night driving all who had homes or shelter to find them.

  I was not alone, though. The spectres of Malveil were with me. In the shadows of doorways, at the far ends of streets and in the gloom of narrow alleyways, they were there, stillnesses that watched, shapes that were just clear enough that I could tell who they were, yet vague around the edges, dissolving into the mist and dark.

  Once, and only once, I asked myself again if they were phantoms of my mind. The headdress I held gave me the answer, once and for all. Malveil was using dreams and phantasms on me, and the line betw
een apparition and real person was blurred, but I knew I was not dreaming now, and whether the figures I saw were visible to anyone else or not, I was not imagining my ordeal.

  Sodden from the rain, the headdress hung limply in my hand. I did not know how Malveil had killed Veiss. It seemed to have pulled a nightmare out of my past to do it. I could believe the house was capable of almost anything. Even this. And the cruel implications of Veiss’ and Tervine’s murders were sinking in. Malveil had killed them because of their relationship with me. Their deaths had nothing to do with them. Malveil had stolen their lives of meaning. They were relevant only as a means to my torment.

  Did they know why they died? Throne, I think they did. That would be worse than dying in ignorance. That would be more cruel.

  I cursed the house. I cursed Devris Strock and what he had done to our family. I was tottering on the edge of an abyss of despair. There seemed to be no point in struggling any longer. My family’s legacy was a sick joke. My mission on Solus was another, a thing of twisted irony. My walk of atonement was a lie. The sin that lay at the foundation of Strock power was too great ever to be erased.

  During that walk, the urge came to leave Malveil forever. To walk away and keep walking until I found the welcome of oblivion. The urge was piercing, acute and brief. It stabbed me, and then it evaporated. It vanished for one simple reason.

  Eliana.

  I vowed I would not abandon you. I will be true to you, my love. I will not leave you again. I will save you.

  My lips moved, repeating the vow silently, and then, at last, I saw her again. She was far away. I was on the last stretch of road leading to the Square of the Emperor’s Bounty, and she was several hundred yards ahead of me, at the entrance to the square. Her figure wavered in and out of my vision, thin and fragile as a hair in front of my eyes. She was further than she had ever been since I first began seeing her. If her forgiveness was tentative, I could not blame her. But she was there again. I had a chance.