The Shadow King

by Alec Hutson

  Winter had finally claimed these lands. Most of the blood-red leaves had sifted down from skeletal branches, laying a carpet upon the dirt road that crackled beneath the wagon’s turning wheels. The trees were not bereft of color, though, here at the edge of the Blightwood: jewel-bright birds flickered between perches, peering down at the strange procession that had invaded their forest. Six covered wagons of white wood, their sides painted with golden sunbursts: the faithful of Ama, returning from a long pilgrimage to the holy city.

  Alyanna wrapped the woolen shawl Mam Jerith had given her tighter around her shoulders, but despite the thick fabric she still felt the day’s bite. She sat on a small ledge of wood at the back of the last wagon, her legs dangling over the side. Beneath her the ground flowed by in a river of brown and red, dry winter earth and withered crimson leaves. She squinted at the mountains receding into the distance, where the jagged peaks of the Spine gnawed at the white sky. Somewhere among those mountains was the sanctuary of the kith’ketan, but it had vanished from her sight long before she’d even descended into the foothills of the Shattered Kingdoms.

  From behind her came the rapid clapping of hands and a tumble of bright laughter. Mam Jerith’s girls, playing a variation of a children’s game that Alyanna herself had enjoyed long, long ago. She leaned her head back against the wood, listening to the familiar verses being sung within the wagon. Strange how it was children’s rhymes and games that survived across the ages, through war and famine and pestilence. Grown men and women had no qualms about reinterpreting scripture or changing traditions to suit their needs, but to children, what had been shared was immutable. If she ever wanted to pass a message to future generations she would hide it in the lyrics of a children’s song.

  Cloth rustled as a stout, matronly woman pushed through the wagon’s curtain. She held two steaming mugs, and a cheroot was clamped between her teeth. After a deep sigh, she settled on the wooden ledge beside Alyanna, passing her one of the cups.

  “A fine winter’s day,” Mam Jerith said, then removed her cheroot and blew out a stream of blue-tinged smoke.

  “Too cold,” Alyanna murmured, warming her fingers by holding the cup with both hands. She breathed deep of the rising vapors – the drink was scalding hot water poured over a gnarled root, and one of the most bitter tastes she had ever tried. After her first sip a few days ago she’d nearly gagged, and only the intense desire to put something hot in her body had compelled her to finish the cup. Now she wondered how she would ever be able to continue living without bitter root tea.

  Mam Jerith squinted at the dwindling mountains. “Too cold, you say. Much colder up in them peaks. Only by the Radiant Father’s grace did you make it out of there alive, blessed is His light.”

  Alyanna said nothing in reply and sipped from her cup. After fleeing the mountain of the kith’ketan she’d spent several days hiking through the narrows passes and across the high bluffs of the Spine. The way would have been impassable for her a fortnight ago, but now that she could again draw upon her sorcery the going had been easy enough. Wrapped by layers of warming spells, she’d barely felt the frozen winds, and no animal had dared bother her. Then, when she had emerged from the mountains, she had found herself on one of the tributary roads of the Wending Way, the great highway that linked the east and west. Not long after that, these pilgrims had appeared. She’d told them a tale of how her merchant father’s caravan had been buried in a rockslide while crossing the Spine, and that she was the only survivor. Mam Jerith had immediately adopted her.

  “You give any more thought to letting the Father’s light into your heart?”

  Alyanna quirked a smile and shook her head slightly. Mam Jerith had taken it as her personal holy mission to bring Alyanna into Ama’s sheltering radiance. At another time the woman’s proselytizing would have infuriated her, but not now. Perhaps it was because, despite her best efforts, she found herself drawn to Mam Jerith and her girls. From what Alyanna could piece together, her husband had been a tanner and master leatherworker in Theris. He’d died from some sickness, leaving her with four young children and a struggling shop. Instead of accepting her fate as a poor widow, she’d learned her husband’s trade and become far more successful than he had ever been. Alyanna could tell she was a woman of considerable wealth, despite the vow of temporary poverty this pilgrimage demanded.

  Mam Jerith took another deep draw on her cheroot and expelled a cloud of blue smoke. “Ah, well. If you’re meant to come to the light, those walls within you will come down eventually.” She grinned, showing teeth stained by the evonasia weed. “But perhaps I’m the stubborn one meant to knock ‘em over. So I’ll keep bothering you.”

  “I expect nothing less,” Alyanna said softly.

  “Mama! Mama!” cried a tow-haired little girl as she came crashing through the curtain.

  Alyanna tensed, readying her sorcery to catch the girl if it seemed like she was going to tumble off the back of the wagon, but the girl arrested her hurtling momentum by wrapping her arms around her mother’s neck.

  “Careful, child!” Mam Jerith snapped as some of her tea slopped over the rim of her cup. “I’ll paddle you so hard you won’t be able to sit for a month!”

  The girl giggled, and Alyanna released the strands of her sorcery. Good; this time she’d managed to grasp them immediately. Ever since her power had come rushing back she had found herself fumbling with simple spells, as if once again she was a newly-robed apprentice at the Arcanum. It was why she was hesitant to use her power to warm herself while traveling with the pilgrims – one of the Pure rode with them as an escort, and any small slip would reveal herself to the paladin.

  The girl rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, staring at Alyanna with guileless blue eyes. “Mama, can Ali come inside and play with us?”

  Mam Jerith snorted. “Didn’t I hear you playing with her all morning, Jessia? You shrieking demons have exhausted her. That’s why she’s snuck back here to rest.”

  “I’m not a demon,” the girl said, tangling her fingers in her mother’s hair.

  “I suppose not,” Mam Jerith grudgingly agreed, “because Lord Septimus would have banished you back to the abyss if you were.”

  “Mama, we need a queen to play Lords and Ladies!”

  Mam Jerith spread her arms wide, holding her cheroot in one hand and her cup of bitter in the other. “And why can’t I be your queen?”

  Alyanna chuckled when she saw Jessia’s eye-roll.

  “You don’t look like a queen, Mama. But Ali does.” The small, shy smile the girl gave her plucked at something deep inside Alyanna. This disquieted her, and she turned away to watch the barren forest sliding past. What was this hollow feeling in her chest? Ever since her sorcery had returned she had felt different, like the flood had swept away other things as well. Barriers that had been constructed over many centuries. She would have to rebuild what had been breached – this was not a time for weakness. Especially considering where she was going now.

  Mam Jerith crushed the remnants of her cheroot against the wood. “Perhaps tomorrow Mistress Alyanna will play with you and your sisters, Jessia. Leave the poor woman alone.”

  “I’m leaving in the morning after we break camp,” Alyanna said suddenly, and Mam Jerith glanced at her in surprise.

  “What? There’s nothing here. Theris is still a few days away, and these woods aren’t safe – there’s always fighting in these parts, some lordlings settling grudges. Bandits and desperate farmers as well.”

  “Ali, stay,” whispered the small girl, reaching out to clutch at her shawl. “Please don’t go.”

  “I know these lands,” Alyanna said, hardening herself against the sadness she heard in their voices. “My old home is near.”

  “Must be a town I don’t know,” Mam Jerith muttered, peering into the woods. “Didn’t think there was much out here.”

  Alyanna did not reply
to this, taking a sip of her bitter tea. Mam Jerith was wrong – she likely did know the name of the place where Alyanna was going. But if she shared her destination with Mam Jerith, the woman would think her mad.

  Alyanna closed her eyes, sending out tendrils of sorcery, taking utmost care that none of her power leaked beyond the barriers she’d constructed to keep herself hidden from the paladin riding with the pilgrims. She found what she was looking for almost immediately. It chimed like an answering bell as her sorcery brushed against it, and the reverberations made her shiver. The sensation was so familiar, and yet decades had passed since last she’d felt it: the Black Road, the great avenue that had once linked all the mightiest cities of the Kalyuni Imperium, twisting through these forests like a sleeping serpent. It was only a few leagues away, waiting for her to stride its gleaming tiles once again. And if she followed the road it would lead her to the reason she had come into the kingdoms – to the only one of the Mosaic Cities that had survived the cataclysms.

  Uthmala.

  Alyanna felt the eyes watching her before she saw them through the trees.

  They were embedded in a great pile of jumbled black rock – the ruin of the Unblinking Gate. Slitted reptile eyes, wide and staring fish eyes, the eyes of men and cats and crawling things, all sunk into dark stone riven by grasping vines. The entrance to every city in the Imperium had been the same, carved with these guardians, spells woven into the stone so that the sorcerers of the Star Tower would know if a threat was approaching. The strength of the warning would have been commensurate with the degree of danger; she could only imagine what a cacophony it must have been as the great tidal wave that had obliterated the Imperium swept over these lands.

  But Uthmala had escaped that flood. It had been destroyed in the chaotic times that followed, when the armies of Menekar had surged over the Spine and put what sorcerers remained to the sword. Alyanna was surprised anything at all remained of this Unblinking Gate; surely the Pure must have sensed the spells infusing its stone, and the paladins of Ama were implacably thorough when it came to eradicating sorcery.

  Likely the wizards of this city had fled the Star Tower here long before the legions had arrived, knowing that their cause was hopeless. The sorcerers of the Imperium had not been the sort to sacrifice themselves when all was lost, and perhaps the armies of Menekar had been too intent on sacking the helpless city and tearing down its tower to bother with what flickering remnants persisted in the abandoned gate.

  The crumbling pile of stones swelled higher as she came to the end of the Black Road, blotting out the midday sun and casting her into shadow. Strange; her skin was tingling like she really was being watched, but the sensation did not seem to be coming from those empty eyes staring down at her—

  Ah.

  Creeping movement among the vines threading the stones. A spider the size of a small dog edged out of a gap above the gate’s entrance, its carapace nearly invisible against the dark rock.

  So her approach had not gone unnoticed.

  For a long moment Alyanna and the spider were both motionless, each watching the other. A cold wind gusted, stirring her hair, and she tucked her hands into the long sleeves of her shawl. Then she sighed. Enough of this hiding. The paladin was far enough away that even if her control slipped, he would not be able to track her here. With a flicker of sorcery, she wrapped herself in a cocoon of pulsing warmth.

  The moment she grasped the strands of her power the spider began to move again, scuttling down the stones and vanishing within the gate.

  Perhaps it had been waiting to make sure she truly was who she appeared to be.

  Ignoring a small tremor of apprehension, Alyanna threw back her shoulders and followed the spider into the darkness.

  Uthmala had not changed much. Tumbled stone veined by roots, gnarled trees growing out of shattered buildings, blocks of black rock scattered in a shimmering field of milk-pale grass. She recognized some of the structures, as they were very similar to what had stood in the other Mosaic Cities. There was the foundation of the Temple of the Last Flame, where countless animals and human prisoners had been led to their fiery deaths. There were the cyclopean pillars that had always flanked the entrance to the various acorpias of the Imperium. Poets had declaimed on those raised stages, and depending on their performance had been rewarded with thrown flowers or rotten fruit. That would have been the local chapterhouse of the Tarnished, home to the mutilated warriors charged with protecting the gates of the city.

  All just ruins now, bones bleaching in the sun.

  The spider was picking its way across the broken tiles of the avenue that sliced through the heart of the city. It was strange to see a creature that usually skulked in shadows and hid in dark corners moving so brazenly in the light of day. Unnatural.

  Alyanna followed.

  The wind strengthened again, rippling the tall white grass growing between the fallen buildings, whispering as it slid across the stone; the voices of her vanished people, crying out into the emptiness. Beyond what was stirred by the wind there was only silence. Stillness.

  But she knew Uthmala was not abandoned.

  The spider led her to one of the few structures that had not collapsed in upon itself. At the arched entrance, which was decorated with an assortment of fanciful monsters carved into the stone, stairs led down into the gloom.

  With surprising daintiness the spider navigated these steps, reaching out carefully with its front legs, not unlike an old man descending a steep staircase. Alyanna paused before following, her hand on the ancient, cracked portico, and glanced behind her to squint at the city. Bright sunlight splashed over white stone; wisps of clouds threaded a brilliantly blue sky. She turned back to the seamless black where the stairs vanished. It seemed like she was at the entrance to the underworld, poised to pass from the world of the living and into the realm of the dead.

  It reminded her of how she had felt as she spiraled down into the depths of the mountain to meet the thing that coiled in the darkness. Demian had been at her side then, and she had drawn strength from his presence . . .

  Alyanna shook her head, banishing those memories. With a thought, she summoned a pale sphere of wizardlight and sent it floating down the steps. Ghostly light skittered over the stone, revealing a large open space at the bottom of the stairs. Alyanna spent a moment hardening her wards. She would not be taken unprepared, she promised herself as she started to descend.

  It had been a bathhouse. A dozen pools of varying sizes were sunk into the tiled floor; most were empty, but a few were still partially filled with stagnant water. The remnants of vast mosaics covered the walls and the ceiling; in places, large swathes of the stones had been gouged from the walls, but in others the images were still recognizable, unclothed men and women cavorting in the pools.

  The spider had already reached the far side of the great room, and as Alyanna watched, it vanished inside a ragged hole cut into the base of one of the mosaics, its bulging abdomen nearly brushing the stone.

  Of course the Mazespinner would make Alyanna approach on her hands and knees. A reminder of who was the empress in this domain.

  Alyanna stalked across the decrepit bathhouse, trying to keep her annoyance in check. What if she enlarged the hole with her sorcery, ripping a larger tunnel from the rock? Perhaps if the Black Lady felt again the intensity of her power she wouldn’t dare to play such games.

  Alyanna breathed in deep, mastering herself. The one she had come to see had survived for so long by being exceedingly cautious – perhaps there were no larger entrances remaining to her labyrinth. Also, Alyanna had come to beg for favors, and was not so stubborn that she couldn’t swallow her pride.

  Darkness poured into the bathhouse once more as she sent her wizardlight drifting into the hole where the spider had vanished. Then she crouched and squeezed herself into the tunnel.

  Her shoulders brushed the sides, her h
ead bumping the ceiling, and she wanted to shudder at the thought of all the dust and grime that was getting into her hair. There were webs, too, as was to be expected. Her wizardlight had pushed through most of them as it preceded her down the tunnel, but gauzy scraps still clung to her face and hands as she moved forward.

  To her relief, the way quickly grew larger, until she could walk only slightly bent over. The tunnel did not seem to have been hewn by human hands – the walls were too rough, as if some burrowing creature had carved it from the stone. Up ahead her wizardlight waited, suggesting that either the passage came to a dead end, or that there was more than one way to proceed.

  It was the latter. Her wizardlight had paused just outside another small hole hacked from a wall of rock. Turning her body sideways she slipped through and found herself in a much larger corridor. The walls here were smooth and decorated with designs incised into the stone, geometric patterns that reminded her of something she had seen before in nature, strung between branches or recessed in the corners of unused chambers.

  Webs, of course.

  The spider waited for her, clinging to the ceiling, but as she emerged it turned and scuttled down the passage. Alyanna let it lead her on. They arrived at several branchings, and each time her guide chose the way with confidence. Almost always the passages slanted downwards, bringing her deeper and deeper below the city. Dust lay thick in these corridors, and it did not look like men or women had disturbed the silence of this place for countless years. There were markings in the dust, though clearly not made by human feet.

  Alyanna came to a chamber’s entrance – the spider did not hesitate as it crawled past, but she did, as this was the first room that she had seen within this twisting labyrinth. Strange reverberations were welling up from within, spilling out into the passage. Her skin prickled, and it was almost like she could faintly hear a chorus of whispers. With a thought, she sent her wizardlight drifting into the chamber. The pale radiance slid across the surface of many inky-black shapes, failing to fully illuminate what was inside, but from what she could discern in the gloom it looked like a host of tall stone statues, unnaturally thin and elongated. All their heads were severed. Alyanna swallowed at the rolling waves that were emanating from these statues.