The Shadow of Elysium (Shadow Campaigns)

by Django Wexler

  In any event, I have no other options.

  ***

  I begin caching the extra bread Tullo brings me inside my filthy shirt. After two or three nocturnal rendezvous with the mercenary, I steel myself and make my move.

  “Hey,” I tell the guard who brings Alex soup. “Do you want me to do that?”

  He looks at me quizzically. But he is thinking about it, which means another guess of mine was correct—the ordinary guards do not know what sort of people they are transporting. Now I need to hope he is lazier than he is dutiful.

  “Can you reach her?” he says.

  I nod and shuffle across the wagon bed. Stretching my chains to their limit, I can just about put my hands on Alex. I have to stretch to reach her head. The edges of the fetters have chaffed the skin of my wrists into a mass of sores and scabs, and putting pressure on them makes me wince, but I try not to show the pain.

  An irony: no matter how I try, I cannot use my demon to soothe my own hurts.

  “It’s just that you do this every day, and I imagine you have better things to worry about. Keeping us safe from wolves and so on.” I give him my best guileless smile. “I’m just sitting about here anyway, right?”

  Emotions flicker across the guard’s face. He’s not very bright, but even he can see there must be more to my offer than it appears. On the other hand, spooning soup into a sleeping girl isn’t the most pleasant duty, and I’m sure he’d be glad to be rid of it. It might work. It might work—

  “No.” Voryil, the leader of the guards, materializes from the darkness outside the wagon. “Feed her yourself, Bokka.”

  Bokka looks briefly truculent. “Why should I? If he want to help—”

  “He only wants to steal her food for himself,” Voryil says, looking at me. “Leave the wretch alone and see to your work.”

  The guard shrugs at me and goes back to his task. I retreat to my corner and eat the hard, moldy bread I’d been saving.

  ***

  The next time dinner is late, and Alex starts to blink and open her eyes, I speak to her in an urgent hiss.

  “Alex. Alex, can you hear me?”

  She looks up at me blearily. “Wha’?”

  “We have to get out of here. We have to escape.” I keep my voice low. There’s no telling when Hunter will arrive. “Could your demon break these chains?”

  Alex stares. “Can’t. Too . . . too sleepy. Can’t think straight.”

  “But if you were awake?”

  Her eyes cross with the effort of will it takes to produce a coherent answer. “Yes. I think so.”

  “I . . . I might have a way. But it’s dangerous. It could hurt you badly.” Another pause. “I don’t want to try it unless you’re willing. But if we wait too long, they’ll take us to Elysium.”

  The back of the wagon opens with a clunk. Hunter is earlier than usual. But Alex fixes me with her gaze, then glances in the Penitent Damned’s direction, and carefully mouths her words.

  I would rather die.

  I swallow hard and close my eyes.

  ***

  There are two things I need to do, if this is going to work. First, Alex needs a clear head to break the bonds that hold us to the wagon.

  Second, Hunter needs to die. He told us himself that his demon will let him track us wherever we flee. If we leave him alive behind us, we will only be captured again, and he has spoken often of the torments that await the recalcitrant. The lengths the torturers of Elysium can go to while leaving a victim alive and bound to his demon.

  If it comes to that, Alex is right. I would rather die. But it would be better to live, and that means killing Hunter. I think I know how to do it.

  The mask hides his face, and by day he speaks only Murnskai like the rest of the caravan, but the man’s pride gives him away. It is the Priest of the Red who leads the expedition, who gives the orders, who never hammers a tent peg or pulls a stone from a horse’s hoof. He cannot be Voryil—Hunter is a big man, and the guard leader is skinny as a rail—and I cannot imagine Hunter taking orders from a man like Tullo or the other guards. He must be masquerading as the priest.

  And Priests of the Red are trained in medicine . . .

  ***

  My demon waits, slick and cold at the back of my skull. It feels . . . eager. I shiver.

  6

  My father lived, but he was never the same man afterward.

  With the demon flowing through my hands, I could feel his body as I had felt Sagamet’s, in all its intricate complexity and machinelike precision. The damage was obvious, a thrown gear in the clockwork pump of the heart, but it was more than that. I could feel his brain, a great crackling cloud of bottled lightning, and feel the damage spreading there as well. The heart was simple enough; even an ignorant boy like me knew its function, and my demon had no trouble reassembling it. But I dared not turn it loose in the brain, where I understood nothing. I timidly fixed a few obvious gaps, but that was all.

  It has haunted me ever since. If I had embraced my demon instead of turning away from it, practiced healing wounds and illness, I might have had the skill my father so desperately needed. Instead, I’d tried to pretend the thing didn’t exist, and now when I needed to command it I was clumsy and useless.

  At first, all seemed well. My father’s breathing eased, and color returned to his face. He slept for days, but peacefully. When he woke, though, it became clear there was something terribly wrong with his mind. He could seem almost normal when he was engaged in a familiar task, his fingers handling a pen or mending a pot with all of their old skill, but on closer inspection the sense of the task would be wrong. He would fix pots that weren’t broken and write endless reams of gibberish with apparent satisfaction.

  Sometimes he didn’t recognize me or called me by the wrong name. Sometimes he pretended I wasn’t there at all.

  The villagers, to my surprise, were sympathetic. Though the children now had another name to shout at me—the mad scribe’s son—the adults were more understanding. There were gifts, dried fish and sacks of grain, and requests for my scholarly skills that were probably more generous than they really ought to have been. I did my best to feed us both, though my father never showed any understanding or gratitude. It was painful to watch him and remember the kind, loving man he had once been. I thought, over and over, of taking my demon to him again and trying to fix what had gone wrong, but the memory of the torn, intricate web of connections inside his skull always stopped me. I could easily make things worse, or kill him, and for all that he had become difficult I still loved him.

  In addition to my father, there was Peter to deal with. That day, when I returned to myself, he was gone from our house. He told me later that my hands had glowed with an eldritch light, and he’d taken to his heels at once; all I knew at the time is that he must have seen something that told him of my true nature. I waited, for the first night and the next day, for the angry crowd of villagers outside my door, led by a grim-faced Father Orrelly.

  At the very least, I never expected to see Peter again. What sane man would knowingly associate with a demon’s host? And what priest of Elysium would suffer one to live?

  ***

  I no longer had time to read in the clearing. I spent my days either scribing for the village folk, when work was available, or fishing when it was not. My skills in the latter area were woefully inadequate, and I nearly capsized our ragged little boat a half dozen times. A few of the other villagers condescended to show me the very basics of the art, and I usually managed to catch enough for our dinner, though never to supplement our income. When the peddlers came to town, I no longer examined the books they had for sale; instead, in spite of my efforts with pen and rod, I was forced to sell off my father’s painfully acquired library, piece by piece. The coin went to food, patches on the roof, patches in the boat, broken rods, and new pens and ink and all the other li
ttle expenses that combine to ambush you when you think you’ve got things sorted out. I held each book for a while, like an old friend, before pressing it into the peddler’s hands for a fistful of copper.

  It was a month after my father’s illness when Peter came to see me at our shack. It was morning, and I was pulling our boat down to the water, cursing the awkward, many-times-knotted ropes that scraped painfully against my arm as it slid past. I had my feet in the muck at the water’s edge when I noticed he was there, watching.

  I dropped the rope and straightened up. Peter was wearing his red-striped robe of office, as always—I don’t know if the priests had provided him with any other clothes—and his expression was solemn. I’d already played out this meeting in my mind, a dozen times, and I’d determined that if he had come to condemn me as a demon host, I wasn’t going to deny it or try to fight him. My hope was that I could appeal for pity on behalf of my father, who would die without me to care for him. If the Church wanted to take me, perhaps Peter could be convinced to intercede on his behalf.

  “I missed you,” Peter said. “In the clearing. I’ve got the last book you lent me, if you want it back.”

  “Keep it,” I said, as gruffly as a fifteen-year-old could manage. It was a cheap edition of a Borelgai romance anyway. A peddler wouldn’t give me much for it.

  “Have you been avoiding me?” he said.

  I shook my head, though I had been, a little. I hadn’t been back to church services in a month. “It’s my father. Ever since . . . ever since then, he needs me to look after him. And I have to find food for us.”

  “He was dying. You saved him.”

  I nodded. My heart thumped painfully loud.

  “He ought to have died. That was the will of God.”

  “Can’t my saving him also be the will of God?”

  Peter shook his head. “Demons are snares sent to test us. Every human who gives in to a demon’s power strains the immense gift granted to us by the Lord after Karis’ intercession, sparing the world from final judgment so that we might reform.”

  “Oh,” I said, letting my eyes fall to the sand. “Right.”

  There was a long silence.

  “On the other hand,” Peter said, “it’s a tricky theological point. Saint Ligamenti says to help a fellow man in need is the highest virtue to which one can aspire.”

  “If a demon lets you help someone,” I said, “do the two sort of cancel out?”

  “I don’t know,” Peter says. “We didn’t actually talk much about demons in my classes. Maybe that bit comes later.”

  “Have you told anybody?”

  He studied me for a long moment, wide brown eyes unreadable. “No.”

  I let out a breath, then paused. “Are you afraid of me?”

  Peter shook his head again. “No.”

  ***

  Things weren’t exactly like they were before, after that, but they weren’t entirely different, either.

  Peter came to see me often. He told Father Orrelly that he was helping me in my time of need, and that was true enough. We would go out to fish together, taking turns with one of us working the rod while the other read aloud. There was something uniquely peaceful about staring at the dark waters of the Sallonaik, broken only by the bobbing wooden float, and hearing Peter’s rich voice tell the story of an expedition down the Tsel or describe strange beasts discovered in the Gantean Islands. The other fishermen gave us strange looks, but we were both outsiders, after all, and our ways were not to be understood.

  Even my father seemed to improve, a little. He still often failed to recognize me, but his moods were calmer and flared less often into rage. He seemed to be engaged in some great project, writing and rewriting on the same piece of brown paper until it was nearly black and soggy with ink. I didn’t have the heart to stop him, even if we could hardly afford the expense in stationery.

  I will hide him, he wrote, over and over. I will go to the mountains. They will not have my boy.

  I was sixteen when I kissed Peter for the first time, after nearly a year of frustration and sticky, furtive nights with my imagination. I approached the subject like a hunter stalking supremely dangerous prey, circling round and round without ever giving away a hint of my true intention. I suspect Peter knew what I was up to, and let it play out because he found it amusing.

  So we talked about kissing in general, and the virtues of it, and how it featured heavily in certain dramas we’d read, and then about how I’d heard in general terms about boys who preferred to kiss other boys. Peter allowed that he’d heard of such a thing, too, and even let on that in the boys’ barracks at Elysium there’d been a quiet fraternity of those who’d been interested in the matter. I expressed my fascination, in a purely scholarly sense of course, and wondered if he’d ever been a party to this society, and he hinted that he might have been, once or twice. And I said—

  And so on. By the time he reached over and pulled my face to his, my lips were cracked, and my throat was dry with anticipation. He seemed to know what he was doing, which suggested his Elysian adventures had been more extensive then he’d let on. I clung to him like I’d been drowning.

  After that, my life was almost happy, for a while.

  ***

  My father died, a little more than two years later. It was quick, and in his sleep. I was glad I hadn’t found him until morning, by which time he was already cold. I didn’t want to confront the temptation to call on my demon once again.

  He had never improved enough to answer my questions, but I’d gathered hints, here and there, from his scribbles and his raving. He’d known about my demon, long before I had. He’d come to Nestevyo for my sake, giving up his old life, to keep me a secret. After we buried him, and the other villagers had gone, I fell to my knees and whispered the thanks I’d never been able to tell him while his mind was whole.

  By that time my fishing had improved, and my business scribing for the villagers and the occasional traveler was enough that I didn’t need to take the boat out as often. Without my father’s share of the food to pay for, I was comfortable enough. Peter visited as often as his work allowed, which was quite frequently; old Father Orrelly made only occasional demands on his novice’s time.

  There was a distant feeling of looming dread, although that may only be in retrospect. I had a vague sense that what I was doing with Peter was wrong, or at least that his superiors would not approve. More importantly, he was approaching the time when he would be frocked as a full-fledged Priest of the Red and sent off to his final posting, which would almost certainly not be in Nestevyo.

  I resolved to myself that I would follow him. There was nothing holding me in the village anymore, and I was eighteen, a man with a man’s right. I could go where I liked. Peter would object, but I was certain I could convince him. I had visions of living somewhere more civilized—a cozy little town near the coast, perhaps, houses with clay-tiled roofs and brick chimneys. I could keep scribing, read more, maybe even become a scholar and write books of my own. It was a pleasant fantasy.

  Then Father Orrelly died. The village mourned, but it was not unexpected; he was an old man. Peter wrote out a letter to the local Bishop of the White, requesting the assignment of a new priest. A month later, Father Barca arrived.

  Father Barca was everything Father Orrelly had never been—bombastic, imperious, rock certain in his faith, and scornful of anyone who did not share his certainty. He was a powerful man in his middle forties, with a thick black beard and tiny, deep-set eyes. Some instinct made him detest Peter on sight. Perhaps Barca sensed his kindness or his love of knowledge. In Barca’s world, kindness was weakness, and the only things worth knowing were written in the Wisdoms.

  Our life became a series of stolen moments, time together snatched from under the watchful eye of the priest. I could do as I liked, of course, but Peter was bound to obey his superior, and Barca
kept him busy with exercises designed to restore his flagging faith and morals. Peter copied out the Wisdoms, over and over, and burnt each page as a sacred offering. He cleansed himself, holding his hands near the altar candles to the point of pain while he prayed to the Lord for mercy. Barca watched it all with his lip twisted in a smirk, and it was never enough for him. I thought that, a hundred years ago, Barca would have made an excellent inquisitor for the Priests of the Black, forcing heretics to recant with red-hot knives.

  I don’t know when the priest started beating Peter savagely for failing to measure up to his standards. Peter kept it concealed from everyone for as long as he could, but one day I found him stumbling to my doorstep, robes in disarray, blood streaming from the back of his skull. When I took him inside and put my arms around him, I could feel the torn flesh beneath his robes. He was crying, sobbing with the pain, and the cold feeling rose unbidden from the back of my mind.

  I fought it down and led Peter to my father’s old pallet. I stripped off his robe and cleaned his wounds as best I knew how, wetting several rags with blood. When he recovered a bit, he directed me in binding strips of cloth around the slashes on his back and thighs. The priest, Peter explained dully, had given up on the switch as inefficient and started using his leather belt with its sharp-cornered steel clasp.

  “What will you do now?” I asked him when we were done.

  “I have to go back.” His voice sounded broken, dead. “What else can I do?”

  “But he’ll just do this again!”

  “I have to . . . keep him happy. Do my duties better.” He closed his eyes. “It’s not that much longer. Another six months, and I’ll be free of him.”

  “What did you do to provoke him this time?”

  Peter rested his head on the pillow. His voice was small. “I don’t know.”

  I smooth his hair, gently, and rage seethed white-hot in my chest.

  ***

  It wasn’t hard to convince Peter that he should at least spend the night at my house, and apologize to Barca in the morning. Once I was certain he was asleep, I slipped out, padding carefully down the dirt track and into the village.