by Tom Lloyd
‘Shanatin, your Grace.’
‘Then, Witchfinder Shanatin, under the Second Investigation Act you are hereby co-opted into the Devout Congress. Add his name to the register of devout, Fynner.’
The chaplain bowed as Cardinal Eleil continued, ‘Shanatin, you will return to your duties and investigate further. Monitor this sergeant and secure a copy of the schedule for the next . . . how long does the dose last?’
‘Up to a fortnight, sir.’
‘Very well, the next three weeks. You will be contacted in the next few days by someone who will act as your liaison from now on. Do nothing that will alert them. This conspiracy may be bigger than we have seen thus far.’
The cardinal’s tone made it clear the meeting was over. Shanatin didn’t seem to notice, but Fynner did and took the witchfinder’s arm, directing him outside again. The chaplain lingered a moment longer in case the cardinal wanted to speak to him further, but he had already returned to his pork. Fynner shrugged and accompanied Shanatin outside.
Once the door was closed Cardinal Eleil sat staring at it a while, slowly chewing the meat while he thought. He was naturally suspicious - a lifetime of the Serian did that to a man, and Witchfinder Shanatin had prickled his paranoia.
‘He’s just the sort I’d use myself,’ he mused, spearing a piece of apple and holding it up to inspect. ‘Simple and stupid, too obviously a fool to be a good ruse, and therein lies his value.’
He ate the apple, enjoying the sensation of the cooked fruit melting inside his mouth.
‘An attempt to discredit the Congress?’ he said eventually before shaking his head. ‘No, surely anyone trying to make us act rashly would take such information to Garash instead. Misdirection perhaps? Have us waste our efforts on the Knight-Cardinal’s men so others find a little more freedom to move?’
He finished the pork, saving the crackling until last. The first piece he tried was overcooked, too solid for his ageing teeth so he sucked the juices off it and discarded it in favour of other bits.
‘There is of course the possibility that the fat cretin is telling the truth,’ he had to admit finally, ‘that he’s stumbled across something and seen a way to profit from it.’
He pushed the plate aside and stood. Immediately something caught his eye, a small glint half-obscured by a chair near the door. Curious, the cardinal tilted his head sideways. It appeared to be a coin, a gold coin, lying on the floor.
‘Where have you come from?’ Eleil asked the coin, rounding the table. ‘Did I not notice you when I came in? I can’t believe Witchfinder Shanatin would have any call to be carrying gold with him, nor Fynner.’
He stood over the coin, looking down at it, but making no effort to pick it up. The coin was large, but not one he recognised, certainly not Circle City currency. While each quarter had its own, none of the gold coins used there were even similar. After a moment he crouched to pick the coin up, hissing at the clicks in his knees as he did so.
The coin was a thin disc, half the width of his palm, flattened at the rim to produce a very dull edge. There was nothing on it to indicate its origin; it wasn’t really a coin at all since there was no sign of currency stamped on it. He carried it back around to the table and set it down, peering closely at it.
‘So what are you then?’ he asked.
Now he could see that symbols had been badly engraved onto the surface, around a crude cross. Something about that made him think of Elven core runes, but his education on such matters was limited. The cross was not composed of single lines, but half a dozen or so roughly parallel grooves.
He picked up the coin and was about to turn it over when he felt a tingle in his fingertips. On a whim he placed it upright on its edge and turned it around instead of flipping it over. The other side also had a strange script engraved on the surface, so lightly it looked almost like scratches, but the main symbol was a circle of several grooves around the flattened edge. The coin - disc - was old, and the gold had more than a few minor dents and scratches, but still Cardinal Eleil could see a distorted reflection within the polished circle. He turned it again, then flicked it with his fingernail to set it spinning on its edge.
As he watched the runes and faint reflection merge, he thought he heard a tiny sound from somewhere behind, the softest of whispers. He jerked around, but there was no one there. Doors set with two panes of glass led out onto a balcony, but he could see no one though the panes and the bolts top and bottom, out of reach of anyone breaking the small windows, remained firmly closed.
‘Foolishness,’ he muttered, and returned to the coin, which was lying flat on the tabletop, cross side up. Again he put it on its edge and set it spinning to watch the two sides merge. It reminded him of a toy he’d once had as a child, a piece of painted wood on strings which, when turned quickly, merged the image of a bird on one side with the cage on the other.
A susurrus sigh came from his right and the cardinal half-jumped out of his seat. He slapped a palm down onto the coin as he turned to where he’d heard the sound. There was no one there; nothing was disturbed, and the only piece of furniture that could possible have hidden someone, a padded recliner he often took an afternoon nap on, was at such an angle that it would have been impossible.
He resisted the urge to ask, ‘Who’s there?’ and rose instead. He went to the bureau against the wall behind him. With one eye on the far side of the room he pressed a catch just inside the footwell and opened one of the drawers, reaching inside to pull a thin dagger from its hiding place.
With that in his hand he advanced to the other end of the room. The light was starting to fade and Cardinal Eleil realised the room was gloomier than he’d realised while eating. This end of his study had only one small window, above head-height. Set into the wall was an elegant fireplace with a tallboy on either side and a gilt-framed mirror above.
He glanced back at the coin, on the table where he’d left it. Its warm yellow colour looked markedly out of place in the dimly lit room. A slight scratching sound came from the wall by the door and he whipped around - to see nothing there at all ... but his heart gave a lurch when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something reflected in the mirror. He faced the wood-panelled wall, but still he saw nothing unusual there at all, and when he looked back at the mirror it was empty.
‘Gods, am I going mad?’ he whispered, his fingers tightening around the grip of his knife.
He looked back at the other end of the room, almost certain that for a moment he’d seen someone stood in the corner there - a grey figure - but it remained steadfastly empty. When he inspected the mirror that too looked fine, free of dust or dirt that might blur the image.
Again he heard a tiny whisper somewhere behind him, this time more like the rustle of pages, and so faint it was nearly drowned out by the frantic drumming of his heart. Each of the tallboys had glass-fronted shelving at the top, filled with leather-bound books. Nothing within them moved.
He waited a while, standing still and listening until he was forced to breathe deeply. Immediately there came a different sound, like fingertips being brushed gently against the wallpaper of the far wall. When he looked the sound faded to nothing, leaving him uncertain whether he’d heard anything at all.
‘Ah, my imagination’s playing tricks on me now,’ Cardinal Eleil declared rather more boldly than he felt. ‘You’re a foolish old man whose hearing isn’t as good as it once was, nothing more.’
He opened one of the glass cases and ran his fingers down the spines of the books. ‘I refuse to pander to my imagination,’ he said aloud, finding the book he was looking for, ‘so I’ll look up that rune instead.’
He flicked through the pages of the book with forced briskness, finding the section he was after easily enough. His familiarity with Elven runes was only very basic, limited to what he’d learned over the years within the Serian. The knife he kept in hand, underneath the book. It was an ornate weapon with a slim guard, gaudy but wickedly sharp.
Heretical
academics frequently used the runes in their correspondence to each other, often using them for code, though sometimes the cardinal suspected it was mere pretension on their part. The closeted idiots had no conception of the dangers their research could result in. The Serian had saves thousands of lives over the course of his service, stopping reckless and foolish academics playing with forces far beyond their control.
‘Aha,’ he announced to the empty room, ‘here we are. Azhi? Azhai?’ he read, fumbling slightly over the pronunciation since the book was written in Farlan, ‘and it means . . . oh. Well, not a lot.’ He sighed and glanced up at the room to check. It was still empty.
‘Azai; a concept requiring context, potentially implying weakness or absence,’ he read aloud. ‘Other possibilities are substitution, usurpation, manipulation or corruption. At its most basic it can mean the shadow of something.’
His eyes flicked up to the mirror and he gave a gasp. At the corner of his vision he saw a faint movement on one side - too quick to catch, indeed, could have been the flash of an eyelash or trick of an ageing eye - but it had looked as though someone peeking through a window had ducked to the side of it.
He checked the room again, knife held ready, but there was absolutely no one there ... but still he imagined soft whispers on the edge of hearing from the far corners of the room. Heart hammering, feeling both foolish and terrified at the same time, he moved back to the mirror and edged carefully around it, as though wary of something reaching out from the reflection. There was nothing there; the reflection showed an empty room and nothing more —
He turned away, but as he did so he glimpsed a face, grey and formless in the glass, as though staring straight over his shoulder. Cardinal Eleil yelped with terror, dropping the book as he tripped over his own feet in his haste to turn. Behind him there was nothing, no man or shadow beyond those cast naturally.
The room was grey now, a layer of gloom covering everything as twilight began its reign over the Land. With shaking hands Cardinal Eleil looked down at the book, but he couldn’t bring himself to retrieve it. It could stay there for the night happily enough. Only his trembling knees that threatened to give way underneath him prevented him from fleeing the room entirely.
The ageing cardinal gripped the mantelpiece in an effort to steady himself, but as he did so the whispers from the far corners of the room increased. A fresh lurch of panic surged through his body. He looked into the mirror and for a moment thought he could see a faint shadowy face in the gloom, smiling malevolently over his shoulder. Then the image faded and he realised he’d been holding his breath out of fear. He put both hands on the reassuringly solid mantelpiece and bowed his head, his eyes closed as he drew in heaving breaths of air.
‘It’s pronounced “Az-ae-ir”,’ came a murmur in his ear.
A moan of terror escaped his lips as pain flared in his chest. His eyes flashed open again, but this time the mirror was empty. A chill whisper of breath brushed his ear and Cardinal Eleil fell, his chest wrapped in burning agony.
Ilumene leaned forward over the bed, a cruel smile on his face and a dagger in his fingers. The tower bedroom was dark, lamps still unlit though Blackfang’s shadow made the twilight even darker. Ruhen lay on the bed, fully dressed and laid out like a corpse, but as Ilumene watched his eyelids flickered and his lips twitched. There was a slight movement in the small boy’s cheek, then another. His eyebrows trembled . . . At last his lips parted and Ruhen gasped for breath, as though returning to life.
‘Old ones still the best, eh?’ Ilumene said with a grin.
Ruhen turned his head to look at the big soldier from Narkang, the ghost of a smile on his face. He nodded solemnly as shadows danced in his eyes.
Venn turned to the yellow eye of Alterr and listened to the silence around him. He stood at a tall arched window, opened wide to admit the cool night breeze. Capan stood at his side, and behind them were two of his best fighters. Each of the Harlequins was silent and motionless, waiting for the signal that their Oracle was satisfied.
His three companions still wore their brightly patterned clothes. Their white masks shone in the greater moon’s weak light, while the bloody teardrops on their faces looked perfectly black.
‘Lomin sleeps,’ he said after a long moment. ‘It is time.’
They had entered the city during the day, walking straight through Lomin’s formidable defences, and shown every courtesy by the guards on the gate. Venn had enjoyed the curious looks he’d received: a man in black with tattooed teardrops on his face travelling with a group of Harlequins. They’d erred on the side of caution and assumed he was to be treated with all possible respect, an intoxicating sensation for Venn after years of living in the shadows, of acting with all humility and resisting the urge to ever walk tall. Such respect from every person they met was more than welcome.
Venn slipped out of the window and balanced on the sill before pulling himself up onto the roof with barely a sound. They were in the house of a local merchant and they needed to avoid alarming the man’s guards. Within a minute he was joined by Capan and Marn, one of the few female Harlequins under his command - though there was little to distinguish between the sexes within the clans. Marn stood a few inches above both Venn and Capan, and from her lithe movement Venn guessed she would push even him in combat.
‘Kail, follow us at a distance,’ Venn called down quietly to the last Harlequin, who had just come out onto the window sill. ‘We can spare your blades easily enough. Watch our backs in case I am more flawed than I realise.’
Kail pursed his lips, but acquiesced, going back under cover. Venn didn’t believe the Wither Queen’s request had any hidden agenda, but caution was rarely punished. Like all Harlequins Kail was careful, and Venn knew nothing would escape his attention if there was anything to see.
With Capan and Marn trailing him, Venn ghosted along the peak of the roof, spending as little time as possible in the moonlight. He hooked an arm around the neck of a stone gargoyle looking over the street and dropped beneath it. Its reaching claws provided an easy handhold and Venn hung by one arm as momentum carried him past. He kicked out and felt his toes touch the jutting capstone of the house’s double-height rear door. He let go, and for a moment he stood flat against the wall, on the balls of his feet, his arms pressed out wide as he caught his balance.
Then he dropped, pushing off the wall so he fell freely, grabbing the capstone as he reached it and spreading his legs to catch his feet on the stone door jambs to silently absorb the force.
A second kick to the side allowed him to reach the sill of a window beside the door and from there he dropped the remaining few feet to the ground. He stepped back and checked the street for watching faces, but it was deep into the night and there were none. His descent from the roof had been virtually silent, with nothing more than a shoe scuffing on the stone.
The others followed, perfectly mirroring his actions.
Lomin was a compact city of tight, weaving streets and alleys, so close to the Great Forest that the inhabitants didn’t have the luxury of expanding beyond the city’s current boundary. The local laws were enshrined on the assumption of periodic siege, so nothing was permitted outside the thick stone walls, and the city elders had gone so far as to connect many of the largest buildings within the city to provide a second line of defence, should it ever be needed.
Venn was already within the inner city, where most of the temples could be found, and from there it was a simple thing for the Harlequins to make their way to the Grand Square in the north-western corner, avoiding Lomin’s Keep, the ducal residence.
The Grand Square itself was a misnamed, misshapen amalgamation. Centred on a monument to a past duke, it presently consisted of three expanses of open ground: the market to the north, the Temple District, that straddled the western piece, and a chaotic mass of open-air taverns and eateries in the southeast. There were some buildings in the Temple District, but they were all small and well spaced, so it looked more a part of the
square than the rest of the cramped city.
Apart from the multi-level many-roofed Temple of Nartis that marked the boundary between the secular and spiritual parts of the square, the temples were all single-storey constructions. Several were strung together and enclosed garden-shrines that the locals flocked to, but this night even the Temple of Etesia, Goddess of Lust, was quiet. The red and purple lanterns hanging from the temple’s eaves swayed gently in the breeze, and Venn heard only soft snores from within as he passed.
He slipped into the jagged shadows of Vasle’s temple, any sound masked by the burble of water. The newest addition to the district was directly ahead of him, facing the cross-shaped Temple of Death on the edge of the square. The Wither Queen’s wooden temple looked poor by comparison; but for the sharp grey-blue painted spire rising from the centre of the peaked roof it could have been a sombre-looking barn.
The roof and walls were black and the shutters covering the windows grey-blue. It looked far from welcoming, not least because of the dead garlands hanging from each corner of the temple.
