tmp_48d41530aaad86c106555e2e52630fd9_VLf2O0.fixed.tidied

by Scott Andrews

  Fabek stroked his beard. “There are whispered tales of strange shadows amongst our soldiers who fought in that battle. Some had come across stormfolk raiders on hands and knees, unable to rise and fight. It seemed that the enemies’ own shadows bound their wrists and ankles, not letting go until they were dead. I thought they waxed poetic, but now. . . .”

  “Now the spider advances on the fly,” I said.

  “What will you do?” asked Fabek.

  “Play her game, but one better. Let her think she’s in control, for now,” I replied. “Perhaps I can steal a moment alone with Selenja, and discover what web Anansya weaves.”

  ~ ~ ~

  A feast at Austere was bereft of glittering goblets and silver knives. The meat, wine, and delicacies fresh from the Sunlit Sea were more than enough. As guests of honor, Anansya, Selenja, and Pol sat at the same table as Fabek and I, though this table was no different from any other in the hall.

  Pol sipped his wine as he spoke of his part in Hraken’s downfall. “Selenja teased Hraken with her charms, but refused him. It would break her vow of chastity, she squealed!” Pol laughed, but Selenja pinched him hard in retaliation and he adopted a more serious tone. “As I was saying, it only drove Hraken to desire her more, and she tricked from him the whereabouts of his trappings. Once we knew where he hid it, it was easy to disarm his traps and steal his hide. The rest you know.”

  Selenja looked away, unwilling to meet my eyes. She had used Hraken the same way she used me. Was she ashamed of what she did? What hold did Anansya have over her? I had to speak to her alone.

  “There’s a song my father loved,” I said to Anansya. “Moonlight’s Vow. If you could play it in the company of our musicians, it would honor his memory.”

  “I’d be delighted,” said Anansya. She picked up her nine-stringed gusli and joined the musicians.

  I signaled Fabek. He poured more wine for Pol. Out from under his mistress’s watchful eye, Pol eagerly drained his cup. Fabek filled it to the brim again.

  Anansya began to play.

  “May I have this dance, Selenja?” I offered her my hand.

  She accepted. I led Selenja to the heart of the hall, encouraging others to join us in the moondance. When I drew Selenja close, Anansya misplayed a note.

  Selenja’s touch was soft and warm, and she hit every step of the intricate dance flawlessly. Another time, another place, I would savor this moment. But given all that I knew, I had to remain cautious. “Sweet one, let there be truth between us, if you truly cared for me,” I whispered. “Was I but a pawn in your mistress’s game?”

  She nearly missed a step. “I may be Anansya’s dark hand, but my heart is my own,” said Selenja, her voice a-tremble.

  “Then tell me what your mistress intends.”

  “I would if I could, but—” Selenja shifted so that my hand would drift over the small of her back. I felt scars under the silk that my fingers did not remember. Burns? “I underestimated her, once. Don’t make the same mistake.”

  “I will protect you, Selenja.” I gently touched her cheek and turned her head. “My eyes speak the truth, my love.”

  Selenja’s breath caught in her throat. At last, she spoke. “Age has caught up to Anansya, and she desires a young body. She knows a dark ritual and has all she needs. Black honey from a demon-hive. Wine as ancient as the sea. Skin of a selkie and emperor silk. From you, a drop of royal blood, all so that she may steal your flesh.”

  “What does the ritual involve?” I asked.

  “A shadowplay,” Selenja said. “When the story is told, she will claim your life.”

  “If I simply refuse to attend, will that thwart the ritual?”

  “No. When you gave your blood freely to Anansya during your pact, you opened the way into your mind and your flesh,” Selenja explained. “Given her skill, Anansya can invade your dreams and perform the shadowplay while you sleep. However, if we err, the magic may kill you. That is why she wishes you to attend the shadowplay in person.”

  Anansya quickened the song’s tempo. She was eager to cut short our dance. “What if I imprison or slay her?” I asked Selenja.

  “She’d vanish into the shadows before you could draw your sword, and risk the dream ritual from afar. If you are slain, she intends to seek out your sister instead. However, you, as the direct heir, remain her first prey. It saves her from shedding more blood to wear the crown.”

  Either way, Anansya intended death for me, and perhaps death for my sister as well. “We must stop her, Selenja. Would you be able to sabotage the ritual?”

  The song hurtled towards its end. “I do not dare. The wrong move and the magic could kill you.”

  “Still, better to fight than accept certain death,” I said. “Anansya must be most vulnerable during the ritual.”

  “It may be your best chance, but she is strong.” Selenja shivered. “Pol’s her creature too. We cannot prevail against them both.”

  “Then we must even the odds.” A dangerous plan began taking shape in my mind.

  The song ended abruptly. Selenja and I broke apart, short of breath. Anansya gestured to her, and she returned obediently to the witch.

  I pulled Fabek aside. “Bring me everything on selkie magic and mythology. I need to understand a Stormlord’s curse.”

  ~ ~ ~

  In my chambers, I refreshed my knowledge of the selkie Stormlords. Their sealskin trappings granted them not only the ability to change shapes, but also the power to tap into five sources of magic. In their mythology, souls of the dead were swept into five great falls, the Dooms, which plunged into an endless abyss. Shadow, Madness, Silence, Frost, and Oblivion. Whichever doom a selkie earned in life, his soul would suffer in death. Only when a soul was washed clean of his misdeeds would the rising mists lift it aloft to be reborn.

  Libations freed the power of each Doom. “Slay a selkie before he can pour from a cup,” I recall my father’s lesson. “Wine spilt is blood spilt.” During the War, the selkies used all five magics against us, pouring the dooms from their goblets. Silence, to strike unheard. Madness, to destroy our minds or grant their warriors with rabid strength. Shadows to escape the touch of our blades. Frost, for the chill of death. Oblivion to erase all that we once held dear, making it easier to enslave our people.

  I summoned Fabek. “Prepare the Obsidian Room for Anansya’s shadowplay.”

  “Why there?” Fabek asked.

  “Only one way in and out. If Anansya succeeds in stealing my body, she may lose her power to escape through shadows,” I said. “I leave it to you to make certain that such a pretender never ascends my father’s throne.”

  Fabek’s eyes widened. “But sire, you cannot ask me to spill your blood!”

  “If it comes to that, my friend, it will be a just execution for a regicide,” I said. “For that reason as well, only you and I must attend the shadowplay. If you must slay my body, the presence of another might make you hesitate. That must never happen.”

  “I don’t like it, but I understand. Any other instructions?”

  “Have pillows, a plate of fruit, and a flask of wine in place, along with these.” I opened a locked chest, taking out the five goblets that once belonged to Hraken and his lieutenants: the Mooncalf and the Mute, Sleet’s Kiss, Blithe Laughter. “Line them before the pillows.”

  Fabek sighed. “It will be done,” he said, taking the goblets from me.

  I drew Fortune’s Law and held it my hands, remembering what my father told me of the sword. “This blade has been in our family for generations, Dominin. It reminds us of a universal truth: men will gamble on their luck, no matter how slim their odds.”

  I hoped my father was right.

  ~ ~ ~

  The next morning, Fabek and I led the puppeteers deeper into the keep. Again, Pol and Selenja hefted the puppet-box between them. We took a spiraling stair down to an iron-bound door that Fabek unlocked, and entered the Obsidian Room.

  The walls and floors were black stone, polishe
d to a luster. The sides tapered to a point high above, wind whistling through tiny windows at the pinnacle. Torches in iron sconces illuminated the room. The fruit, wine, and cushions that I had requested awaited us.

  “Some call the Obsidian Room an extravagance that does not befit Austere, but I disagree,” I said. “In a place without mirrors, only here might we contemplate our reflections.”

  “Let us begin.” Anansya chanted over the puppet-box before lifting its lid. A gossamer saga-silk lay folded atop the puppets, almost invisible but for its glimmer.

  Pol and Selenja raised the silk screen, stringing it between two wall sconces. Behind the silk, Anansya hung and lit her witch-lamp. At her request, I extinguished all other lights. I sat myself down on a pillow and filled the five cups lined before me with red wine. Fabek sat cross-legged to the left of me, his hand drumming the leather of the boot where he had hidden his dagger.

  The emperor silk could not conceal the puppeteers’ actions. I watched Pol say a prayer before taking the first puppet from its box. It was made of roan hide, cut in the shape of a dragon curled inside the sun, its limbs hinged with studs of bone and fitted with ivory handles for the puppeteer. My skin crawled. So that’s what they’d done with Hraken’s hide!

  “Lohe, Mistress-Sun, a bright hand sets you high!” Pol stood the puppet by its handle on the rack beside him.

  Selenja took the next: a second drake curled in the crescent of the moon. “Zmascu, Master-Moon, a dark hand guides your path!”

  Seven more emerged from the box: puppets of the gods Rapture, Fortune, and Death, a Swan King, a Fox Queen, a Selkie Crone, and a Jester Man, all fashioned from Hraken’s hide.

  Anansya raised a golden thimble. “Three offerings must burn for the gods that slumber, for Fortune, Rapture, and Death,” she intoned. “Dark honey for Hag-Rid-Rapture, amber wine for Fortune-Dreaming, and royal blood for Death-in-Sleep.” She cast the concoction into the flame.

  I held my breathing steady, ready to fight the ritual however I could.

  Anansya strummed the gusli in her lap, and sang.

  Under the deft manipulation of her hands-dark-and-bright, the Sun and Moon each claimed the silk for their own, illuminating the strands of silk or inking them. The shadows resolved into familiar silhouettes, that of my father and myself.

  Anansya began the saga with the coming of the selkie slavelords, their shadows falling upon the golden towns along the tsardom’s coast. Folk of light died upon blades of shadow, and darkness spread across the screen. Then, under Sun’s Gate, a flame-red general rode forth with a great army. My father.

  Despite my caution, I was mesmerized by my own tale unfolding on the saga-silk. High atop the Gate, images of my mother, sister, brother and I waved farewell to Father, but when night fell, my silhouette-self escaped the capital to join the crusade in secret. Anansya captured my defiance well, tracing my journey from my time incognito among the soldiers on the march. The ordeal taught me how men lived and helped one another, and in their company I honed my swordsmanship and learned their hopes and dreams. We played games of skill and chance, like aiming the dregs of our smuggled wine at upturned bright helmets, or betting on the toss of dark knucklebones.

  But on a twilight march, Fabek recognized me through my disguise and commanded his guards to arrest me. Licks of golden light on the silk framed my journey to the Scrimshaw Tower, to be unmasked before my father. Atop the bone-bright spire, the silhouette of my father greeted and chastised me through song, and thus began our campaign together as father and son.

  The war of light and shadow raged on the silk. When laced light thawed like ice, the Tsar and I engaged Hraken’s mercenaries in epic battle. Starlight and dark sky struggled ceaselessly for the land as the Sun and Moon once did. I lifted the golden banner of the tsardom high, eager to lay siege to Palace Austere.

  So well did Anansya tell the tale, little did I realize until too late that her ritual had already snared me, thrusting me into the tapestry of shadows. I became the hero laced with light, while my body sat mindless before the screen. The past had become present through Anansya’s magic, the players and props conjured from my memories and fringed by luminescence. I could feel an odd thinness to my flesh. From the corner of my eye, I could see through the silken illusion to my real body in the Obsidian Room.

  The world of the shadowplay forced me to retell my history scene by scene. On a sun-drenched day in late summer, my father the Tsar descended on the stolen palace with his full army in a bid to win back Austere. He stood with his archers on the western edge of the screen, challenging Hraken.

  I tried to tear myself away from where I had stood during that battle, but I could not leap upon my father and push him to the ground, away from the fate I knew awaited him. Selenja was right. Anansya was strong, and the tide of her telling had me snared. It was all I can do to hang on to my identity.

  The smell of battlefield blood assailed my nostrils, and a storm of dark arrows filled the silken sky. The shadow-Hraken stood upon the battlements and raised his spear of white bone in one hand, and with the other he poured light from a black-jeweled cup. The arrows fell through him like hail through shadow.

  Nothing I could do stopped my father from stepping into the open light. I was helpless as Anansya sang us swift towards his death.

  Dark Hraken hurled his weapon. Fast as a bolt of lightning and unerring, the spear skewered my sire through the heart. I raced to his side and held his body again, even as light seeped like blood out of his wounds.

  Shadow-time marched relentlessly towards the end that Anansya intended. She sang of the morning after the Tsar’s death, when the denizens of the east awakened to leaves of gold and flame, as though autumn had fallen too soon. She sang of the black candles that burned in Orsazan, when I led the city in mourning for my father. Soon she would sing of stealing my body, and when shadow-time caught up to real time, it would destroy me.

  But there were episodes in my life that Anansya would never know, tales I had never told. Because she couldn’t script my life exactly, she skipped the parts she didn’t know. When she ended the scene where I sequestered myself in Scrimshaw Tower for a month-long vigil, there was an instant when I gained solitude. I used that moment to re-assert control of my body and struggled to speak. “Selenja! Help me, my love!”

  My words came out in a whisper. Did she hear me?

  Anansya’s incantation grew louder. My blood felt like it was on fire.

  “Selenja! Find your soul in your reflection!” I urged.

  Startled, Selenja turned her head towards the wall and met her own eyes in the reflection. Her hands faltered. “Dominin! Take my strength!” she cried.

  I felt my beloved’s will adding to my own. Selenja’s image appeared beside me on the silken canvas and took my free hand. Together we resisted the combined power of Anansya and Pol, trying to bend the shadow-world away from the witch’s script. Anansya, however, conjured a gleaming bolt that sped towards Selenja, forcing her to release my hand and vanish. But her touch had given me the strength I needed.

  Anansya could not banish Selenja entirely from the canvas, however. She was integral to my story, and soon the shadow-Selenja came to seduce me. We could have abandoned our cares to the wind to relive those tender moments, but that would let Anansya regain control. Instead, we made small alterations to the remembered past, like during my first audience with the witch, Selenja dropped a handkerchief that had not been there before. When we assaulted the castle walls, I fired more arrows at mercenaries upon the parapets, seeking to kill more than nine. But Anansya and Pol blotted out my new missiles before they hit, forcing the events to adhere to the true past.

  Beyond the silk, Fabek—already concerned by Selenja’s sudden cry—had noticed the changes in the play. I caught a glimpse of him slipping the dagger from his boot and hiding it in his sleeve.

  I slung my bow over my shoulder and raced for the walls, but chose a different ladder to scale. Once again, I sunk an arrow into
the Stormlord’s chest, but instead of climbing down a rope, I leapt and landed in a bale of hay. I drew my saber and fought to reach shadow-Hraken, but made focused on parries instead of cuts to push past his defenders. By the time my sword took Hraken’s head in the shadowplay, Selenja and I had altered the script enough to wrest away a measure of power from the puppet-witch.

  I had to play my trump now. “Hraken of the Storm!” I shouted to the darkness. “These shadow-witches stole your trappings to make these puppets, so you have grievances against us all. Your hide ties you to this ritual. If you seek your revenge, come!”