by Jon Sprunk
Baron? His father was nobility? And I never knew. Red-hot anger flooded his thoughts as he brooded over all the things he'd never gotten the chance to know about his parents, but he tamped it down. He had to stay in control.
“Why? Of what value was my father's death to you?”
“Our masters commanded it. We obeyed without knowing the reason, but now we know many things that were mysteries before. About secret dealings. About the heir of House Tenebrae, born of a mortal father and a daughter of Shadow.”
“What are—?” Caim swallowed the question before it passed his lips. His mind turned in a dozen different directions. “Daughter of Shadow. You mean my mother?”
The sorcerer took a step toward him, not threatening in itself, but Caim had seen the man move and felt the measure of his strength. Although thin of frame, this foe was more lethal than a dozen thugs like Ral. Something moved in Caim's peripheral vision. Dark shapes gathered in the gloom surrounding the rooftop.
“We considered allowing you to live.” The sorcerer produced a second knife from the folds of his robe. “But the Lords of Shadow have demanded your extermination, and we must obey in order to be free.”
Caim braced himself, but nothing could have prepared him as a thousand points of darkness swarmed from every direction. The shadows crawled up his boots, latched onto his cloak, and stung him with tiny needle-sharp fangs. He lashed out with his knife, but they came too fast, flowing like quicksilver around his attacks. Pain burst anew from his back, accompanied by the sickening sensation of things trying to wriggle into his wound.
Levictus glided through the mass of his pets, his knives glittering like black jewels in the night. Caim thrust to halt the advance, but the sorcerer shifted without moving and the suete’s point met empty air. Caim jerked back just in time as the black knife traced a searing incision down his cheek. Two inches lower and it would have severed his throat. He spun and attacked from a different angle, but his enemy was gone. The shadows vanished as well, but Caim could feel their presence in the dark, stalking him.
He turned in place, all senses tuned for the slightest sign of the sorcerer. His face burned like he had been tagged with a hot iron. The knife dragged in his hand, almost too heavy to lift. He longed to close his eyes, just for a moment, but the sorcerer lurked somewhere in the darkness, watching him, waiting for an opening.
His ears caught a sound, a near-silent whisper of a foot dragging across wet slate, as black metal gleamed out of the corner of his eye. He closed his stance a moment too late. Two lightning-quick cuts left him disarmed and bleeding from fresh wounds across his injured side. Bile filled his mouth as his knife hit the tiles and clattered over the side. Again, Levictus vanished.
Tears of frustration burned in Caim's eyes as he limped in a slow circle. “What did you do with my mother?!” he screamed. “Did you kill her, too?”
A mocking voice floated in the wind. “You know the truth, but you cannot face it. Cannot embrace it, as I have.”
“Stop talking in riddles and tell me where she is!”
The wind died down for a moment, making the sorcerer's next words resound like thunder crashing over Caim's head. “She dwells in the peerless realm of her ancestors, beyond the Veil in the Land of Shadow.”
The words echoed inside Caim. In his memory he was looking up at his mother, standing on the widow's walk of their family home, her features framed in black tresses like the waters of a tempestuous sea. Her dusky skin glowed in the light of the setting sun as she faced the wild Northlands and the great dark forest beyond his father's demesne. Caim tried to swallow in a mouth gone dry. He hadn't been able to believe it before, but now, like a blind man feeling the surf on his toes for the first time, he couldn't deny it any longer. His mother really was one of the Shadowfolk. His father, a mortal man, had brought her home as his new bride, never guessing the Shadow would come to reclaim its own. He was a half-breed, a freak caught between two worlds, and now he was going to die without the chance to discover what he had lost.
His chest contracted in a painful spasm.
Caim hissed as the breath left his body. Then he caught sight of a dark mass looming in the sky over the palace. He looked up, dreading some new attack, but a familiar voice called to him from the storm-shrouded sky.
“Caim!”
Kit! Her voice sounded distant, as though she were shouting from the other side of the city.
“Kit, where are you? I need you.”
“I'm trapped. He's blocking me.”
“What?” Caim glanced up and around. The rounded dome of the palace was topped by a narrow steeple, but the dark cloud hovered above even that.
“Caim…Help!”
She sounded weaker. A gust tickled the nape of his neck and Caim spun around, only to be confronted with a wall of dense shadows. He could feel his death approaching on silent footsteps. “What can I do, Kit?”
But she was gone. Caim ground his teeth together. Just when he needed Kit most, she was beyond his reach. But something she said nipped at his brain. He's blocking me. What did that mean? Was she talking about Levictus? How could he…?
Shadow magic. The sorcerer must have detected Kit's presence and taken steps to separate them. But how could he help her?
Kit's words at the cabin came back to him. The blood calls to its own, Caim. You already possess everything you need.
The blood calls to its own.
The sorcerer appeared out of nowhere. Caim backpedaled across the slippery tiles as the black blades sought his flesh. He evaded their touch with a roll and came up on his feet perilously near to the edge. He was trapped. The rage returned, fiercer than before, burning away his fear. If he was going to die, he would do it as he had lived, on his feet and facing his enemies. As Levictus approached with firm, steady strides, Caim reached up over his shoulder.
An electric shiver ran through him as his fingers closed around the smooth hilt of his father's sword. A vision appeared before his eyes: his father's estate as it had been sixteen years ago. The villa in flames. Glowing embers fluttering into the night sky like a cloud of angry fireflies. Levictus standing over his father. Above the wrappings of long black robes, the sorcerer's pallid features shone in the moonlight. The blade pierced his father's chest and Caim cried out, pain bursting from his insides as if the weapon had pierced his flesh instead.
Caim blinked.
He ran through a field of wildflowers in every hue and variety. His parents chased after him, their laughter ringing in the summer air. He glanced over his shoulder, but they had fallen far behind. He could barely see them. Yet their eyes latched onto him from across the distance, watching him, waiting for…
Caim blinked.
He was back on the palace rooftop. The sword shimmered like a shard of black ice in his hand. Water danced along the temper of its razor-keen edges. It felt odd, holding it, and at the same time familiar, like coming home. His father's voice reached across the years.
Justice.
Levictus had stopped half a dozen paces away. The sorcerer stood there with raindrops streaming down the hard planes of his face. Watching. Waiting.
With a grim smile, Caim stepped toward his enemy, and the ache in his chest exploded. Kit appeared as a sensation of weightlessness enveloped him. Joy radiated from her smile like the dawn of the first morning. He had never seen her like this before. Gone was the girlish ingénue. In her place was a woman in full bloom, the woman Caim had always imagined she could be.
She bent down to him, and the darkness flowed along her body like a second skin, but it wasn't entirely black. Murky patterns twisted within the dark. As he reached up, they played along the flesh of his hand and arm like tiny vibrations, and then penetrated his skin, through the muscles and sinews down into his bones. Colors beyond description spun around him, striations of light and shadow cast into physical form.
“Trust yourself,” she whispered.
Caim took a deep breath. He knew what had to be done, but cou
ld he do it? Could he release the bands of self-control that had held him together for so long? If he let go, would he lose himself? He took another glance over the side. The darkness parted around him like a veil of sheerest gossamer and he saw Josey, clinging to a stone projection. How she fought for life! She wouldn't give up, not as long as a single breath remained within her. Yes. He could do it, for her.
Caim released the breath, and with it all his reservations. The sorcerer stood like a statue of some forgotten demigod of the night. But Kit had said he could bleed. If he could bleed, he could die.
Caim saluted with the sword. His sword now. Levictus nodded as if they had come to some agreement, and then advanced across the rain-splattered tiles. Again the shadows darted at Caim. He could see them better now, not as amorphous blobs, but as small, sleek creatures with sharp teeth and glittering black eyes. But before they could reach him, a black shape erupted from the darkness. The tiny shadows scurried out of the beast's path. It was huge. Striding on four big paws, it resembled a great sable mastiff.
Caim leveled his sword at the creature. But instead of attacking him, the thing turned to pursue the shadows, scooping them up in its massive jaws and tearing them to bits. Then he realized this was the same shadow creature he had seen before, at the Vine and in the cellar under Josey's manor. It had never threatened him, only his enemies, and by the vibration thrumming in his head as the beast tore through the sorcerer's pets, this thing was somehow bound to him.
A violent hiss was the only warning Caim got. He lifted the sword in time to deflect a black knife aimed at his throat. Phosphoric sparks flew as the weapons connected, recoiled, and clashed again. The shadows had fled into the darkness, and the beast with them. Caim almost felt like his old self. On the next pass, he beat the sorcerer's counterattack by a fraction of a heartbeat. He feinted high and slashed. The sword tore through black fabric and found flesh underneath.
Levictus vanished, leaving behind a few spots of blood. But this time, Caim witnessed something he hadn't before. As the sorcerer disappeared, he stepped into a hole in the air, like a window into nothingness. It slammed shut behind him, but tendrils of dark luminescence remained. Caim turned, following them with his eyes. He was ready when Levictus reappeared on the other side of the roof. He struck. The sorcerer nearly fell on his back evading the lunge. His knives deflected the sword's path enough to avoid being spitted. Then, like a cat he righted himself and kept coming.
Around and around they circled while Kit danced above their heads. Her laughter rivaled the thunder. Caim took a scratch on his left hand, a shallow wound, but Levictus followed up with a series of stabs that put him on the defensive. Yet the sorcerer was slowing with every step, while Caim felt his stamina improving. The sword twitched in his hand like a living thing. He pressed with a riposte, but Levictus parried and leapt at him. Caim tried to reverse his momentum as the tip of a black knife raced toward his unprotected chest. He didn't have time to think as he twisted to avoid the deadly strike. The edge of the roof reared up toward him. Off balance, he would have fallen, should have fallen, except that the darkness billowed around him, cradling him in its grasp. His feet left the tiles, and came down a moment later behind the sorcerer. Somehow, he had been transported a dozen feet through thin air. Levictus turned, his knives moving. Even as his brain boggled at what had just happened, Caim lunged.
Levictus made no sound, but the tendons of his neck stood out like taut cables. His eyes stabbed at Caim with the hatred of the damned for one interminable moment. Then, he slumped to his knees.
Caim shoved the blade deeper and stepped back. The sword's hilt quivered in the sorcerer's chest like the masthead of a floundering ship. In his mind, Caim saw his father, kneeling in the blood-drenched yard of their family estate.
Justice. At last.
Sibilant whispers echoed in the darkness. Caim balled his hands into fists as the shadows returned, but they ignored him. Skittering like tiny spiders, they adhered themselves to the sorcerer's body until they encased it in a black cocoon. The corpse dissolved before Caim's eyes, melted away with the rain and ran down the cracks between the roof tiles. A minute later, nothing was left but his father's sword and an empty, sodden cloak.
Caim watched the black garment flap in the wind. The presence was gone, the beast and the little shadows with it, and something else as well. His fear. A weight had been lifted from his mind. He was different—he accepted that—but he wasn't a monster.
A faint wail rode the storm's howl. Josey!
He limped toward the roof's edge, but froze as a barrage of lightning strokes illuminated the night. Ral blocked his path, face streaked with pink lines of blood, sword drawn back. Caim recoiled, but there was nowhere to go. Even an old woman couldn't miss from so close. Ral grinned through his gory mask as the sword shot forth like a bolt from an arbalest. Caim grabbed at the blade with his naked hands, but it slid between his fingers and plunged into his stomach. Warm blood bubbled over Caim's hands as he braced himself for the disemboweling twist, but the sword dropped from the killer's hand to clatter on the tiles. Ral gaped with a stunned expression as he collapsed at Caim's feet for the second time.
Caim lifted his gaze to the slight figure in drenched rags standing behind the dead assassin, one of his suetes clutched in her shaking, bloodstained hands.
“Jo—” Caim tried to say, but the roof jumped up to smash his face.
Then, he was on his back. Josey and Kit knelt on either side of him. Their hands tugged his jacket in different directions, each trying to pull him upright, but the darkness held him in its embrace. His thoughts were slow to come. Water coursed down Josey's face. Overhead, the heavens roiled in their wrath, but an expanding sense of peace filled the hollow spaces of his soul. She was safe.
“It's all right,” he whispered with a smile that took all of his dwindling strength.
“Don't leave!” Josey and Kit shouted in his ears. “Stay with me!”
He wanted to stay, but he had to disappoint them both as the night pulled him down into its unfathomable depths.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Morning brought a fresh glow to the city. Breezes laden with the sea's cleansing tang blew across the cemetery grounds and banished the lingering stenches of smoke and death. Low strains from a six-piece orchestra filled the grassy strips between long rows of tombs while people gathered around the freshly dug plot.
An imposing marble gravestone stood in the midst of the assembly, the beveled edges of the words engraved upon it glinting in the pale sunlight.
Caim Du'Vartha
1218–1242
Dear Friend and Loyal Subject.
It is Not the Night We Fear,
But the Gathering Shadows Beyond Our Ken.
From his vantage in a thicket of aged brushwood Caim read those words, their letters seared into his brain like harbingers from the next world. Although the faux funeral had been his idea, Josey had come up with the epitaph. He wasn't keen on the “loyal subject” part.
It was an odd thing to observe his own funeral. He supposed this was how ghosts, recently evicted from their corporeal bodies, must feel as they watched their friends and loved ones gather to pay final tribute. In all, he found it rather dreary.
Then again, the world had taken on a different shade since the events on the palace roof. The trees, the grass underfoot, even the people attending his memorial—none of them seemed completely real. A new presence flitted in and out of his awareness, always on the periphery. Every so often he would catch a glimpse of a shadow—low to the ground, moving swiftly—and then it would be gone. It was as if he had stepped through a doorway into another world, one deeper and more profound than the one he had known all his life, and there was no going back.
Kit hadn't changed, of course. Or rather, she had returned to the same waif she had always been, ever youthful and bubbling with effervescence. Whatever transformation happened to her that night, it had reversed back by the time he regained consciousne
ss. She refused to discuss the beastly presence, refused even to admit she'd seen it, which shouldn't have surprised him. Same old Kit.
But everything else was different, much of it oddly so. For a known assassin to enter the palace was unnerving enough. To awaken in the imperial bedchamber, attended by dozens of physicians and nurses and servants, had almost been too much for him. But then Josey had appeared and everything seemed right again. Even now the sight of her, dolled up in full regalia as she officiated over the ceremony, made his pulse race. She looked every bit an empress. Her hair had been dyed back to something close to its natural color. A gown of crushed velvet in somber purple lined with snow leopard fur accented her complexion and set off the jewels dripping from her neck, ears, and wrists. She was every man's fantasy: young, beautiful, kind-hearted, yet tough enough to stand on her own. And as far beyond your reach as the moon and stars.
A graceful young woman stood beside Josey. Anastasia, a friend from some important family. Fetching enough for a blonde, but she was outshone by the empress. A stooped, elderly man in a plain gray suit perched at Josey's elbow. Earl Frenig's manservant had been squirreled away in the palace dungeons after his master's murder. Besides being a bit undernourished, the old codger was little worse for wear.
Hubert stood in the front row amid several palace ministers. Head bowed, his left arm in a sling, the new Duke Vassili was a hero. In Low Town they were calling him “Lord of the Gutters.” Not the most charming title, but he had taken to it like a kitten to cream. Just days after taking over his father's affairs, Hubert had spearheaded an effort to revive the Thurim. Their first item of business was a salvo of bold reforms aimed at relieving the plight of Othir's poorest citizens, including a plan to rebuild the parts of the city destroyed in the fire. Together, Hubert and Josey were going to accomplish magnificent things.
