The House of Night and Chain

by David Annandale

  How many have you lost? The thought struck me. I grew suspicious. Were there more than Leonel? How long have you been major-domo here? I have seen you in the night. Have you walked these halls from the start? Have you always pretended to serve us, when you are loyal to Malveil?

  ‘I am doing what duty dictates,’ I said, my voice hardening. ‘I expect you to do the same.’

  ‘It is in the name of that duty that I am standing here, my lord.’

  I stepped towards him. ‘Leave,’ I said. ‘Now. Or I will know that you are not what you pretend to be.’

  He saw the threat of violence in my eyes. He backed away. ‘Yes, my lord.’

  I would have drawn my sword if I had had it with me. Karoff’s resistance had made me wary. I stayed where I was in the entrance hall, watching the departures until I was sure all the serfs had gone. Then I followed them outside to observe them as they walked away. They trudged down the drive, not at all like apparitions. They were solid in the daylight, without vagueness. The sky had cleared for the first time in days, and watery sunlight washed over the grounds of Malveil. The lines of the world looked hard and brittle. What was real could not be trusted. Its strength was illusory, its stability merely provisional.

  The serfs did not seem to be phantoms. Seem. I would not trust anyone that was linked to this house. I waited until the last of them were out of my sight, then went inside and locked the doors.

  I retrieved Eliana’s diary from my chambers and took it to the librarium. There were only a few pages left, but it had become so illegible, so crowded with mad scratchings, that deciphering the last of her rational thoughts would take hours. This task felt like a necessary preparation for the battle. If there was even one more insight into the nature of the foulness in Malveil buried in these pages, I had to find it. I dreaded what was waiting for me at the end. I dreaded the journal turning into a suicide note. Yet it was my duty to read it.

  I sat down in front of the window and began the laborious process of winnowing out the words from the madness.

  I have done my last walk of Malveil. Was I commanded to do so? Maybe. I don’t know. I am forbidden from knowing which thoughts are mine now.

  Write smaller. Look how big these letters are. They will never do. Make them smaller. Half the size. In half again. See? Yes. Like that. Squeeze the thoughts down to the bone. Maybe they will be mine.

  Mine for what?

  My legacy. Yes. I have one too. I am more than a tributary to the cursed river of the Strocks.

  I have walked. I have seen. I have gone to the Old Tower again. Oh. Oh, I have truly seen.

  I want you to read this, Maeson. I hope you read this. I have things I want to tell you. You think you know so much about duty. Do you think there is a difference between it and slavery? I’m sure you do. Maybe there is. The difference between a slave and a fool.

  What about fate? You liked to talk about the destiny of the Strocks. Their destiny is their duty, their duty is their destiny. Empty words and empty thoughts. Gestures only. Meaningless.

  Everything is meaningless.

  I cannot be abandoned when everyone is empty, when they were never here, when I was never present either. Our flesh covers a void, and only for a short time.

  Listen to me about fate, Maeson. I know you are reading this. Fate is meaningless. That is its purpose. It destroys all hopes and dreams and goals. They are curses we inflict on ourselves so that we may suffer when they burn.

  Everything is empty.

  Empty.

  Empty.

  I hate you, Maeson. It is because of you that I have learned what I have learned. I curse your family. I curse you. I want your destruction. I will have it.

  I am with you, Maeson, as you read this.

  I see you. In the librarium. Before the window.

  I am behind you.

  The journal fell to the ground as I leapt from the chair and whirled around. Light was fading. Time had slipped away while I prised out Eliana’s sentences, one isolated word at a time. The librarium was descending into gloom. But I could see Eliana clearly. She had her own sulphurous lustre. Her hair and her dress waved back and forth as if in a vortex. She stared directly at me. There was a greater force of presence to the phantom than there had ever been. She had been waiting for this moment. Waiting for me to read everything. Waiting for me to understand.

  To feel the curse.

  She reached out with both arms, as if inviting me to an embrace. Her hands, though, were crooked talons. They would tear me open. They would shred my body and hurl the pieces to the winds.

  ‘Maesssssson,’ Eliana hissed. Her lips parted in a hating, snarling grin. ‘I’m here, Maeson.’

  My knees buckled when I heard the same words she had uttered in my dream.

  ‘It will never be all right, Maeson. I’m here. I’M HERE. I’M HEEEEEEEEEERE!’

  The last word turned into a shriek of rage and hunger. Her mouth opened wide, wider, wider. It was too wide, and it kept opening. The upper jaw kept going back, as if on a loose hinge, back and back and back, her skull crumpling and disappearing beneath it, until her jaws were open a full hundred and eighty degrees, her teeth pointing upward, her tongue rising from the open neck like a serpent, twisting higher, becoming a clicking, chitinous thing that searched the air for prey, for me.

  That is not…

  I could not complete the thought. This was Eliana. This was the Eliana as she was not. A devouring thing. A hateful thing.

  A thing that had come to destroy me.

  Her movement was sudden, smooth, a floating strike. She came directly at me, flowing through obstacles, the scream louder and louder, and the window panes rattled with a sudden wind that roared into being with Eliana’s wrath.

  Chapter 18

  I ran. I collided against a bookshelf with bone-jarring force, bounced off it and stumbled as I struggled to keep my feet. The eyeless, shrieking phantom pursued me. I rushed from the librarium into the entrance hall. I had no thought except flight, no idea except to leave the house behind. My vows were forgotten.

  The living Eliana had been right. Everything was meaningless.

  Despite the horror that was reaching after me, I came to a sudden halt in the entrance hall. The main doors were open, and Veiss was there, standing on the threshold and peering into the house with a look of confusion. She was not entirely present. She flickered like static on a damaged pict screen, as if she were an image imperfectly arriving from the past. As she entered the house, something materialised in the air far above her. It was a hideous amalgamation of parts, a thing of limbs from different creatures, a patchwork that had become a monstrous whole. With hooves and claws it dropped from the ceiling. Its fleshy, pale torso had two huge, pincered arms. Its articulated tail was that of a colossal scorpion, and ended in a stinger so huge it could have been a talon.

  A talon as I had seen wielded by tyranids on Clostrum.

  The abomination dropped from the ceiling, its tail stabbing downwards and through Veiss’ skull. Its long jaws crooned and fluted a song of sensual pleasure and horror, one I began to respond to even as I was frozen with terror. A glistening pink mass emerged from the floor. The thing plucked the headdress from the corpse, then scampered away in the direction of the Old Tower, the speed of its movements belying its size. The patchwork fiend loped through the doorway, Veiss’ body dangling from the end of its tail.

  Eliana’s scream was right behind me. Her hand touched the back of my hand, the hand that I knew so well, but cold, cold, cold, and grasping. I broke my paralysis and sprinted through the doorway.

  Outside, there were hints of movement everywhere. Things were struggling to emerge from the walls. Forms gathered in trees and capered over the gables of Malveil. The shapes were still just the suggestions of fiends. They were tearing through into the world. They were not present quite yet. The complete
forms I had seen in the house were not physically present. They were re-enactments, memories of events. The things in the trees and on the roof and in the ground were barely more than ideas, but they were foul ones. Illness and pleasure, rage and the promise of endless metamorphosis took their turn to scrape at my soul as my eyes fell on the squirming crimson and green and violet and blue. Clouds of flies erupted from the earth like geysers, and some of the swarms were singing.

  I looked over my shoulder when I reached the drive. Eliana had vanished. The awful shriek had stopped. A moment later, I heard her scream again. The sound was different. It was a very human cry of terror. It came from the east, from the direction of the tower that held my bedchamber. The chamber that had been hers. The tower at whose base her broken body had lain.

  Though the world around me trembled with the advent of unspeakable horrors, I slowed in my flight and turned my head, as Malveil directed, to see another echo.

  I turned to see my wife die.

  I turned, I thought, to see her fall from the tower. Instead, she was on the ground, still alive, and in the clutches of another abomination. The creature that had killed Veiss was like an animal. This one was a monster of deep, malevolent intelligence. It was horned, and a hooded robe draped muscular flesh of a deep, violent pink hue. One of the fiend’s three hands cradled a great tome. The book’s pages whispered a language I could not understand, yet my ears began to bleed at its sound. Its syllables spoke to me with hints of destiny, of fates determined millennia past or horrors not yet born but whose arrival, aeons from now, would be determined, irrevocably, by actions on this day.

  As the horror held high its book of fate, it placed Eliana’s body on the ground, then stepped on her spine, crushing it. It looked at me as it did so, and smiled, as if receiving applause from an appreciative audience. Then, muttering to itself, the abomination broke bones and arranged limbs, creating the picture of a suicide out of torture and murder. Choked, gargling moans came from Eliana right to the very last.

  The vision faded away.

  It was still day, but the light felt old and brittle.

  The huge shadow of Luctus was moving in front of the sun, turning day into twilight. The eclipse had begun. Night was rushing down.

  Light was vanishing behind Luctus.

  The movement of monsters began again. The creatures had stilled while I witnessed Eliana’s final moments and the beginning of her long torment. Now they moved again, their actions angry and joyful and dancing and savage. They pushed and pushed at the veil that separated them from reality. Things much more solid than echoes threatened to come for me.

  The thing that Eliana had become shrieked once more. It appeared in the doorway of Malveil. I had been commanded to witness, and I had been released. I was Malveil’s plaything.

  I ran. I could not fight. At some level, I knew I could not flee. I ran all the same. I ran down the hill into the deepening gloom as Luctus devoured the sun. I ran, and all about me the grounds of Malveil were stirring to unholy life. Things wailed and sang inside mine shafts. The wind howled through the dead trees. It rang cables against the rusted arms of cranes. Things flew on the wings of the wind and danced on the limbs of fallen machinery.

  I tried not to look at them. I was half blind with terror and barely saw where I ran. I followed the road downhill, Eliana’s shriek following me. Then I heard a sound that made me want to weep with gratitude. I heard an engine, its sound so ordinary, so banal and thus inimical to nightmares. I rounded a bend in the drive and had to throw myself to the side of the road to avoid being hit by Rivas’ car. I fell, rolled and hit a hill of ejecta so hard I was stunned.

  The driver slammed the vehicle to a halt. It skewed across the road. Rivas got out and rushed over to help me up. He was in his full Ecclesiarchal regalia. It weighed him down and gave his movements a solemn, prayerful slowness.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  I pointed back uphill, expecting to see Eliana’s spectre closing in on us. But though the wind’s ferocity was undiminished, the grounds had fallen quiet. The movement had stopped. The horrors had ceased their efforts to emerge.

  I told Rivas what had happened as succinctly as I could. I trusted that he would believe me, and he did. Once I was steadied, he returned to the vehicle and took out his cardinal’s staff and heavy book, as holy in its appearance as the monster’s had been foul.

  ‘Go back,’ he told his driver. ‘Return to the cathedral. Stay there and pray without cease until you hear from me again.’

  When we were alone, Rivas said, ‘This will be a hard battle. And all the more vital for its difficulty.’ He took a deep breath, bracing himself for the effort, and began the walk uphill.

  ‘Do you know what we are fighting?’ I asked as we slowly made our way back. I could not imagine any way to combat what I had seen. If the abomination of Malveil could be fought, I needed to know that. I needed the hope that came with a plan of action.

  ‘I know some of its nature. I know some of what we must do.’ He gave me a thin smile. ‘I have some friendly contacts in the Inquisition.’

  ‘The Inquisition understands this?’

  ‘The Ordo Malleus does.’

  I shook my head. Like anyone else, I knew little of the Inquisition beyond the need to avoid its displeasure. I had never heard of the Ordo Malleus.

  ‘They fight daemons,’ Rivas said.

  Daemons. The word filled my mind. It seemed to rise from an atavistic abyss, and I wanted to hide from it, to burn the word and what it represented from my head.

  ‘There is much that is still hidden from me,’ Rivas went on. ‘It was a task to know where to look, and whom to speak to, and what to say that would not bring destruction to those who do not deserve it. But I know something. I know enough. Malveil is a thing of the greatest evil, Maeson.’

  ‘That much is very clear to me now. I should have listened to you sooner. I should not have come back here. I was deceived.’

  He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘In truth, I don’t know how much of a difference anything you could have done until now would have made. The history of your predecessors is a bleak lesson.’

  ‘You mean the absence of that history.’

  ‘True.’

  The eclipse reached totality just as Malveil hove into sight once more. Night swept over us. Luctus was triumphant, the day murdered by its vast shadow. The house looked down at us, coiled and poised to strike. Its quiet was a threat. It was taking the measure of a new enemy.

  ‘It knows who you are,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure it does.’

  ‘I wonder if anyone has ever challenged it directly before.’

  ‘There has been no record kept of any attempt to fight it,’ said Rivas. ‘None, at any rate, that I could find.’

  ‘That is why it erases history,’ I said. ‘It keeps its threat hidden until it is too late for those who finally sense it.’

  We paused at the main doors. In the darkness of the eclipse, the entrance was a waiting maw. The black windows gazed at their prey, their darkness full of terrible knowledge.

  I looked up at the sky. The stars had come out, and their presence emphasised the huge circle of black they surrounded. An eye of void had opened in the firmament, and there was kinship between it and the abyss that waited for us inside Malveil.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Rivas intoned.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ I repeated.

  He raised his staff in challenge to the house. ‘I walk with the Emperor, and He with me. I am nothing, but I am everything, for He speaks His will through me. Fear me, unclean things, as you surely fear Him.’ He lowered the staff and nodded to me.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ I said again.

  ‘He surely does. Now and forever.’

  We walked through the open door.

  The darkness in the ho
use was profound. I felt along the wall until I found a lantern. It lit with great reluctance. Its glow was weak. The shapes of the entrance hall seemed distorted, as if their shadows had physical substance and would cut our flesh if we touched them.

  ‘We must strike the abomination at its heart,’ Rivas said. ‘If at all possible, the purification must begin at the source of the taint.’

  ‘Where Devris made his pact.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Old Tower,’ I said. ‘The core of the evil is there. Of that much, I can be sure.’

  The journey through the halls was a long one. The eclipse had sunk so deeply into the bones of Malveil, it seemed that the house was the true source of the night. I did my best to give us some illumination. I had little success. None of the lumen globes worked any longer. The lanterns and torches were sparks in the void. We could see where we must go, and that was all.

  Silence slithered through Malveil like a living thing. It coiled around the creaks of our footsteps and the deeper groans of the house. In another building, those would have been the sounds of settling. Here, they were the low snarls of Malveil preparing for battle.

  The house had delighted in tormenting me. My agony had been its game, its pleasure. Rivas was something different. He came armed.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Rivas intoned. ‘Before His gaze, the abomination falls to ash. The light is His. The strength is His. Hear me, Malveil. I name you that you may know the Emperor beholds you, and judges you. Terrible is His wrath. It comes for you, and will scatter your powers like chaff in the wind.’

  The windows rattled in answer. The wind outside howled in anger.

  The door to the Old Tower stood open before us.

  Rivas noticed my surprise. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I locked that door. This feels like an invitation.’ Malveil wanted us to descend further.

  ‘The abomination is proud,’ Rivas said. ‘That will be its downfall. Where do we go now? Up or down?’