Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  The nearest victim's eyes were gone, pecked out by carrion birds or gouged as part of his torture, but the ragged black pits held Isiem fixed.

  "How much is that one?" he heard himself ask.

  "The original price was five crowns, but I'll give him to you for four. We make no promises as to his soundness."

  "We'll take him," Isiem said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  He never saw Edovan Leadthumb again.

  Lamion did not ask Isiem to choose any other slaves, perhaps because he was impatient with how long the boy had taken to pick the first. He made the rest of the selections himself, haggling viciously with Suryan over their prices and, when he was finally satisfied that the cost was cheap enough, signing a contract for their delivery. Then he led the boy back to the Dusk Hall, leaving the Chelaxians to bring their living wares later. The shadowcaller offered Isiem no hint of what the slaves' fates might be, and Isiem didn't ask, assuming that he would find out in due course, whether he wanted to or not.

  But he never did.

  He never saw the slaves come to the Dusk Hall's subterranean dungeons, and none from that day's purchase were ever used in his classes. Others came, and others died, but Isiem never learned what befell the old miser he had purchased from the Chelish line. He never had the chance to ask whether the lictor's story was true, or why Leadthumb had chosen slavery instead of paying for his freedom.

  And in that unknowing was another hard lesson: that he might never know the ramifications of his own choices, and that he still had to make them as best he could. Isiem might flounder in a sea of half-truths and uncertainties, and he might never learn whether he had chosen correctly, but he still had to act, to choose something without hesitation, when the opportunity to do so came.

  Because that opportunity would be fleeting, and refusing it meant leaving the choice to shadowcallers—to Lamion, or Dirakah, or worse. And that, after his visit to the slave market, seemed an even greater cowardice than he could bear.

  Chapter Four

  Gifts

  I'm running away," Loran said.

  Isiem and Ascaros exchanged a look. Helis, reading on her bed above them, snorted.

  "You can't run away," she told her brother. "Where would you go? What would you do? You're eleven, and you can't even get out of the Dusk Hall."

  "I don't care." Loran turned over onto his belly, hiding his face between his crossed arms. Bruises dotted his skin in a panoply of blues, purples, and dirty yellows, vanishing into his sleeves. The gloom of the students' chambers masked the boy's expression as much as his arms did, but nothing hid the misery in his voice or the scars of the shadowcallers' chastisements. "I'll live on the streets if I have to. I'll eat rats. Drink from puddles. It has to be better than this."

  "It gets better," Ascaros said cautiously, closing his own book. Over the past months he had emerged from his own turmoil and found a certain degree of comfort in his studies. The gaunt angles of his cheekbones had softened slightly as he returned to a normal weight. No longer was his hair a greasy shag; now it was washed and brushed and pulled back in a neat tail, like Isiem's own. The reddish tints in his hair were fading, though, becoming murkier day by day, as if the shadows of Pangolais were stealing its color.

  Loran shook his head. His words were muffled; he was chewing on his lip again. "It got better for you. But you have a talent. Maybe not like Isiem's, but it's something. I don't have that. I never will. My lot's only going to get worse."

  That was likely true, Isiem judged. He'd watched with increasing dismay as Loran flailed in the wake of Dirakah's beating. The boy's aptitude for magic was marginal at best, and the disaster with the nightglass had shattered his confidence. Month by month, cowed by his continuing failures, Loran had retreated deeper into timidity.

  It was a choice that might kill him. As the spells they learned grew stronger, and the consequences of losing control became greater, their instructors had become more severe. Mistakes didn't earn beatings anymore. The last time a student had botched a spell in one of Isiem's classes, the shadowcaller had made her flay a finger-thin spiral of her own skin from wrist to elbow. The girl had obeyed in perfect silence, knowing that any cry of pain would double her punishment. Afterward the shadowcaller had healed the wound, but only enough to keep infection at bay. A week later, the shape of it still showed raw and pink on her arm.

  Loran had fared worse. Isiem seldom saw the boy during their daily lessons; he was older, and more skilled, and had long ago moved to more advanced studies. But he often visited the siblings' room during the quiet hour after dinner, when the students had some time to themselves, and he had seen Loran trying to pull a stoic mask over his suffering.

  Never sturdy, the boy had shrunk into a wide-eyed waif. His ears and nose had always seemed too large for the rest of his face, but now they were the only features with any definition at all. Loran kept his eyes downcast and his mouth shut tight, as if he were always holding back cries. His lower lip was covered in scabs; he gnawed at it constantly, using the small pain to distract himself from larger ones.

  Isiem sometimes wondered why the shadowcallers had taken the child, or why they didn't send him to some other task. It was clear that Loran would never be a great wizard. He might never master anything beyond a cantrip. Perhaps he was too young, or too frightened, or lacked the sharpness of mind necessary to grasp arcane theory ...but whatever the cause, the result was the same. Wizardry was beyond him.

  "You'll need a plan," Isiem said quietly.

  "You can't mean to encourage him." Ascaros said, aghast. "We'll help him do better. Revisit his lessons with him. Practice cantrips after dinner."

  "We've been doing that." And as far as Isiem could see, it hadn't improved anything.

  "No one leaves the Dusk Hall." Ascaros sounded desperate. "They'll kill him if he tries."

  "I'd rather die," Loran muttered. "At least then this would all be over."

  Helis slammed her book shut with a thump that made her brother jump. "Don't be stupid. You aren't going to die, and you aren't going to run away. All this talk is idiocy, and I won't have you two"—she glared at Isiem and Ascaros—"indulging it. Out. Now."

  "She's right," Ascaros murmured as they walked from the siblings' room to their own. The hall was empty, but the continual dance of shadows through the Dusk Hall's many-tinted gray windows surrounded them with the flickering illusion of motion. "He needs to study, not daydream about running away. And that's all it'll ever be—a daydream."

  "Aren't we allowed to daydream here?" Isiem asked mildly. He opened the door and held it for his friend.

  Before Ascaros answered, he closed the door and made a series of swift gestures. A mote of white light, no bigger than a firefly, winked into existence and hovered over his palm. If any magic were nearby, the mote would change color. Both boys watched it intently, holding their breath as they waited to see whether it would shift toward the yellowish tint that meant divination.

  The spark stayed white. No enchanted eyes were on them. Ascaros let his cantrip expire. Then, at last, he answered: "No. Not about escaping."

  "I'm doing it to protect him," Isiem said.

  "How?"

  "He can't hurt himself daydreaming. As long as Loran spends his time planning to run, instead of actually doing it, he won't get in trouble. If he tells us his plans, we can point out all the flaws in them. There will be many, I'm sure; we both know he'd never make it past the Joyful Things, let alone out of the Dusk Hall. Then he'll have to think up ways around those problems. He might finally accept that there's no escape. But even if he doesn't, we'll keep him from doing anything stupid, and we'll have that much longer to help him with his magic."

  Ascaros exhaled, looking simultaneously deflated and relieved. "All right." He pulled his shirt and trousers off, folded each with neat, efficient motions, and squared them atop the drab gray stack of his other garments. Nothing was out of place by a hair—it never was—but Isiem still glanced over to make sure. Any
untidiness would draw the night watchers' ire.

  There was none, however, so he just reached over and snuffed the candle burning in the wall ledge by his pillow. A moment later, Ascaros extinguished its twin.

  "Can we help him?" Ascaros asked into the dark.

  "Maybe." Lying on his back, Isiem blew a soundless sigh toward the ceiling. "I don't know. He's too afraid to grasp the magic. Every time he comes close, he flinches back, like he thinks it'll burn him. I'm a poor teacher, anyway. I don't have the patience."

  "He isn't smart enough," Ascaros said.

  "He's young."

  "And not smart enough." After a pause, he added, "I'm not saying that to be cruel. Only because it's true. It makes things harder. This place ...I don't know if you see it. Everything comes so easily for you. I'm not saying you don't work hard—I've seen the hours you spend at the library, the stacks of books you bring back here—but you don't know what it's like to struggle just to follow what the lecturers are saying. You don't know the fear."

  "There've been lots of times I haven't understood things in lecture," Isiem objected.

  "It's not the same. If you don't understand something, it's a good bet at least half the class doesn't either. You've never had to weigh whether it would be better to ask a lecturer something, and risk getting ridiculed or beaten for your stupidity, or forge blindly into a spell and risk it failing, or turning upon you, or worse.

  "I've seen you ask questions in lecture. You don't flinch. You don't understand why other people flinch. I don't think you even notice. That's the luxury your intelligence buys—that you can talk theory with the instructors, and they're patient, even pleased, when you ask about variations while the rest of us are just struggling to comprehend the basics. You've never had the terror of wondering whether you're the last to understand."

  "Are you jealous?" Isiem asked quietly.

  "No." The answer was an exhalation into blackness. "I was, when I first realized what was happening. Now I'm more worried for you than I am for myself. The instructors barely notice me. I'm in the great middling mass, not exceptional one way or the other. It's safest there. You they notice. You they know. And that's dangerous, I think. Nothing good comes of the lecturers noticing you." Ascaros's bed creaked as he turned over. The scent of hot candlewax and burnt wick drifted past. "Anyway, my point was just that you don't feel the fear. I do. And I don't think Loran ever escapes it."

  "You did."

  "Not by suddenly getting smarter." There was an odd note in Ascaros's voice, as if he hesitated on the cusp of a confession he wasn't sure he wanted to make. Isiem sat up, curious, and saw that his friend was also sitting up in his bed. "I found ...another way."

  "What?"

  "Do you remember my aunt? The one in the Midnight Guard?"

  "How could I forget? It's only been three years since we left Crosspine and you finally stopped bragging about her."

  Ascaros laughed weakly. "Right. There was one story about her I never told."

  "Impossible."

  "Oh, it's very possible." There was a smile in his voice, but it drained out as he went on. "I only met her once that I remember. She was a stern woman. Much like Dirakah, now that I think of it ...all the way down to her dead arm."

  He fell silent for a while, so Isiem prompted: "Dead arm?"

  "Her left arm was withered and gray. Like an old gnarled stick. I think she could move the fingers, a little, but that was about the only use she had of it. I always assumed it was an old spellwound, but that was just an explanation I made up for myself. When I asked her about it, all she told me was that if it was my fate to know, I'd find the answer on my own."

  "That's not much of an answer."

  "I didn't think so either. Not when I was nine. But since we came to the Dusk Hall, and especially over the past year or so, I've begun to understand what she meant."

  "What was that?"

  Ascaros gestured to the candle by his bed. Its wick flared into flame, gradually steadying into a glassy white blaze. He moved into its light, turning his left arm outward so that the inside of his arm, which had been concealed against his body earlier, was plainly visible.

  A patch of skin on his inner elbow, a little larger than Isiem's thumbprint, stood out sharply. It was scabrous and crusty where the rest of his skin was soft, a dark wrinkled gray where the rest was smooth white.

  Isiem sucked his breath in. "What —"

  "It's the mark of my family's magic. Of our original sin, I suppose." Ascaros pulled away from the light, returning to his bed. The white candle went out, trailing a thread of pale smoke. "I'm not a wizard, Isiem. I never got better at the incantations, the studies, any of it. All I did was learn how to tap the magic in my blood. Some spells ...some of them just come naturally to me. Like there's an instinct waiting to be awakened, or a memory waiting to resurface. When I watch those lessons ...I don't understand, not really. I never know what the lecturers are talking about. But I don't need to. I see the patterns in my head. It's like—like hearing a song once, and knowing how to play it because you know the notes. You don't need the music written on a sheet. You already know the sound. That's how it is for me."

  "Sometimes."

  "Sometimes," Ascaros agreed. "If the spells don't come by instinct, they don't come at all. I've been able to hide it so far, but sooner or later the instructors will have to suspect. When they do ..." His blankets rustled as he shrugged. "It has to be possible to survive the Dusk Hall as a sorcerer. My aunt did it."

  "If I can help, I will," Isiem said. He didn't know much about sorcery. The shadowcallers made no secret of their scorn, disdaining such inherited powers as the province of savages and lesser races. Ascaros's secret would likely earn him expulsion, or worse, if it became known.

  No wonder Ascaros had worried about his survival in the Dusk Hall. Isiem was acutely aware of just how much his friend had confided in him. And yet, as much as anything, he was curious. What was sorcery like? "Does it hurt?"

  "No," Ascaros said. "All I ever feel from it is a sort of...cold, when I'm drawing on the magic in my blood. It feels like the shadows did when they seized me through the nightglass back in Crosspine." He paused. "It frightens me. The cold reaches deeper every time I call on its magic, and the mark ...spreads. It's like something's claiming me, and its claim gets stronger whenever I invoke its power."

  "Then I'll try to help with that, too."

  "Thank you." Ascaros's laugh was short-lived and weary. "Anyway. We were supposed to be talking about Loran, not me. I only wanted to explain why the solution that I stumbled upon likely wouldn't work for him."

  "We'll find Loran his own answer," Isiem said. "We just need him to listen ...and give us time."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Fate, however, did not seem inclined to grant either of those wishes.

  The day after Loran blurted out his longing for escape, he vanished from the Dusk Hall.

  Isiem was terrified when he heard that Loran was gone. He and his friends always searched for magical spies before speaking freely, even in their own rooms, but something might have slipped past them. They were only students, and their instructors doubtlessly had tricks they couldn't begin to imagine.

  It didn't have to be magic, either. A curious ear pressed to their door might have undone them. Regardless, if one of the shadowcallers had learned of Loran's childish plans to run off, and had spirited him away to be questioned, then the boy was doomed, and the rest of them likely were too.

  But as the days trickled by in an agony of unknowing, it began to appear that they had not, after all, been undone.

  Loran had failed the trial of the nightglass again, one of the students in his class told them. Not only had he been unable to call any creatures from the mirror, but he hadn't even been able to look into it. When Dirakah ordered him to touch the nightglass—perhaps intending to force the child to confront his fear—Loran's hands had trembled so violently that he had knocked it to the ground. Although the enchanted glass h
adn't suffered a scratch, Loran's clumsiness and impiety had driven Dirakah into a rage.

  She hadn't punished him there. She hadn't punished him anywhere the other students could see. Instead she had dragged the sobbing, stumbling child into the black rooms below the Dusk Hall, where those who failed to pass the Joyful Things went. That was where the dungeons lay, all the students knew, but none of them had been allowed to go there yet.

  No one had seen him since.

  Helis was enraged upon learning what had happened to her brother. Isiem had just closed his eyes. If Loran had wept in front of one of the shadowcallers after three full years of study in the Dusk Hall, his fate was sealed. Such weakness in the face of pain was unforgivable.

  But before Helis could do anything stupid to get her brother back—or Isiem could do anything to stop her—the shadowcallers returned Loran of their own accord.

  He had suffered. The boy said not a word about it. He had learned his lesson about stoicism; he kept his eyes lowered and his mouth shut. But the marks were plain on his body.

  Loran walked like an old, old man. He shuffled from place to place in a daze, seeming hardly aware of where he went or why, and he clutched at a ghostly wound in his side. Neither Isiem nor Hellis could find any indication of what pained him there, but they found countless other injuries that he did not seem to notice. Burns, cuts, abrasions of rope and rasp—all partly healed, none fully so.

  Worse than those were the holes that riddled his thighs and the flesh between his ribs. Some were small as a fingerprint, others nearly as large as a crabapple, but apart from their size they were all hideously the same: empty spaces where the skin stretched taut and translucent as a drumhead over its shell. Underneath was nothing—no flesh, no bone, not even blood pooled to fill the wound. Only murky darkness, glimpsed through a window of dead-looking skin.