Nightglass

by Liane Merciel

  "What could do that?" Ascaros marveled, holding a candle to the wounds as he examined them in the privacy of the siblings' room.

  "I'll kill them," Helis swore. Tears trembled in her eyes. "I'll kill them all for what they did."

  "You won't," Isiem said sharply, "and you aren't stupid enough to try. Loran needs you. Do you think anyone else has the patience to nurse him through this? Look after your brother, or he's dead."

  Helis's jaw worked silently as she ground her teeth against his words, but after a long while she nodded. "All right."

  Later that night, when the two of them were alone in their own room, Ascaros said, "He's dead anyway, whatever she does." He said it evenly, as he might have reported the results of an elementary practice divination.

  "Maybe," Isiem said.

  "There's no maybe about it. He's broken. Whatever they did to him in the hidden halls, it shattered his body and mind. He might survive the former, but he's no use to anyone after the latter. I just hope Helis doesn't throw her own life after his."

  "He might recover," Isiem said. "I don't think they would have returned him if he were just going to die. This is meant to be a lesson—and if they thought the lesson were best learned by forcing us to watch them kill him, they'd have done that in the chapel."

  Ascaros gave him a dubious look, then blew out his candle and rolled over.

  But Loran did get better. Slowly. They kept him out of his classes and took turns bringing his meals to Helis's room, where his older sister fed him, one bite at a time, until he was strong enough to hold the fork himself.

  Day by day, the cloudiness faded from his demeanor. His gait lost its dragging heaviness, as if invisible weights had dropped from his feet. His awareness of the world returned.

  And when his wits were fully restored, and he remembered where he was and what lay before him, Loran ran.

  The boy never warned the others of his plan, if indeed he had one. The first inkling Isiem had that his friend intended to flee came after it had happened.

  He was in one of Dirakah's classes, practicing a simple mending spell again and again as their instructor paced along the circle of students, slashing at their clothes with a long razor. If a ripped shirt was not repaired by the time she came back around to that student, Dirakah's next swing was harder, slicing through cloth into flesh and bone. Halfway through the hour, several students' clothes were bloodsoaked tatters.

  In the midst of their suffering, a bell tolled. It sounded only a single peal, but its echoes rang strangely in the Dusk Hall: each seemed simultaneously louder and quieter than the last, as if the actual sound diminished with each reverberation, but the presence of it became stronger and more oppressive. As one, the students stopped their spellcasting and looked up in confusion. Dirakah paused as well, canting her head toward the open doorway like a hawk waiting for an unsuspecting hare to break cover.

  The bell's bronze echoes died down. In the quavering silence, a new clangor broke out: a shrieking cacophony of iron. The rattling rain of chains pouring down, the shriek of spinning saw-wheels, the stuttered scrape of hooks sliding across stone—there was too much, too fast, for Isiem to distinguish all he heard.

  It all meant one thing, though.

  "The Joyful Things," Dirakah hissed. Snapping her razor shut, she strode from the room.

  The students shared an uncertain look. Some of them stayed where they were, afraid of reprimand. Others followed Dirakah.

  Isiem, impelled by curiosity and a tingling, nameless anxiety, went with the latter group. He rushed through the long halls, carried along by a growing tide of students as other interrupted classes emptied from their rooms. He wasn't afraid, precisely, and he wasn't sure what had happened, but he knew in his bones it was bad, and he wanted to meet the trouble head-on instead of waiting to see if it would come for him.

  But it wasn't really about him at all.

  The Joyful Things had descended from their pillars. Their bloated pale faces shone with unholy glee above their black cage-cocoons; the spiked chains that bound them had come loose, stretching around their pillars and grasping at the air in a monstrous manifestation of hunger. In their midst, Loran stood cornered, a small white fish caught in a net of thrashing iron chains.

  "He tried to flee," a Joyful Thing crooned, and the others took up the cackling chorus. "He tried to run! He is afraid. Unworthy, unworthy."

  Other shadowcallers were arriving in the chamber. Some came alone; some came accompanied by knots of fearful students. All looked upon Loran without pity.

  Dirakah held up her hand. The Joyful Things fell silent. The clatter of their chains ceased.

  "This one has proved undeserving of his gifts," she said. She drew up her hood and stopped before the circle of chains. Something about her pose and position struck Isiem as ceremonial, hearkening back to a rite they had studied but which he could not immediately recall.

  Another shadowcaller approached the circle and stopped. He lifted his hood over his head, letting darkness obscure his face. "He has refused the gift of knowledge."

  "He fears the gift of magic," said a third shadowcaller. She took up a position opposite from the other two, forming a triangle around the Joyful Things' circle.

  Two more hooded shadowcallers came forward, transforming the triangle into a five-pointed star. "He cringes from the gift of pain," said one. The other intoned: "He is blind to the gift of shadow."

  "He denies the gifts of Zon-Kuthon," Dirakah said, "and he is not one of us." The ring of chains parted, and she stepped through. One by one the others followed, bringing their star within the circle, and the black iron chains closed around them again.

  "We offer him to you, Midnight Lord," they said in unison. "We offer his flesh to cloak your servant. We offer his life to sustain it. Reclaim your gifts from this unworthy one. Welcome him to your court."

  Throughout their chant, Loran had not moved. Their final words, however, seemed to strike terror into him, shattering his shell of icy paralysis at last. He ducked, spun, and darted between two of the shadowcallers, trying to flee the circle of chains.

  He didn't make it to the perimeter. Three of the chains struck at him like metallic serpents, piercing his wrists and stabbing through one of his ankles. As the boy thrashed and bled, more spiked chains coiled around him, immobilizing his limbs and wrapping tight around his throat. A collar of blood wept dark from his neck.

  "Bring me the mirror," Dirakah said.

  One of the younger shadowcallers hurried to obey. Isiem caught a glimpse of Helis standing in a corridor on the far side of the room, momentarily visible through the press of instructors and students. Her face was white and frozen, her eyes huge with shock. She didn't seem to see him, and soon the crowd swallowed her up again.

  Moments later, the shadowcaller returned, holding a small nightglass. Although nothing but its size distinguished this black mirror from any other, Isiem thought it might be the one from which he had first summoned a shadow—and to which Loran had refused to bare his soul, beginning his fatal spiral of failure in the Dusk Hall.

  The shadowcaller brought the nightglass to Dirakah. With measured steps, each one clicking on the floor's smooth gray stones, she brought the mirror to Loran. The Joyful Things' animated chains jerked the boy's bleeding hands up to receive it, then wrapped his fingers in spiked iron coils and forced them around the edges of the glass.

  "We give this one to you, Zon-Kuthon," Dirakah said, as Loran stared helplessly into the black glass. The other shadowcallers, within the ring and outside it, echoed her words in an unearthly chorus. "We ask you to make him worthy."

  Darkness spilled from the glass. It came in sooty tendrils, wreathing the mirror and reaching toward Loran, and it undulated in the air as if in response to the shadowcallers' chant.

  As shadows flowed out of the mirror and wrapped around Loran's head, a colorless reflection of the boy's face gradually took shape in the glass. Initially it was formless and featureless, little more th
an crude white smudges with empty gaps to signify its eyes and mouth. It gathered detail swiftly, however, and it seemed to become more vibrant, more real, as the living warmth drained out of the boy in the shadows' grasp.

  The pale duplicate rose from the nightglass like a swimmer surfacing from a pond. It did not come out fully—perhaps it couldn't—but it thrust its face toward the pinned boy's and trapped him in a kiss, and when its lips met Loran's, its being flowed into his. Isiem caught a glimpse of amorphous shadow, trailing a mass of inky tentacles, as it poured from the nightglass into Loran's mouth ...and then it was gone, all of it, leaving the mirror blank.

  Loran reeled, choking, in the chains' grip. The Joyful Things' chains held him mercilessly, wrapped and impaled, and after several painful minutes his struggles stilled. His head drooped low; his feet dragged limp.

  Then, slowly, he looked up. His eyes were liquid black.

  "Let me go," he said. The voice was still Loran's, but ...different. The inflections were gone. The boyishness. Isiem took a step back, disconcerted by the strangeness of hearing another presence speaking through his friend's mouth.

  The chains retracted, releasing his gouged hands and pierced ankle. Loran opened and closed his hands stiffly, as if unused to the motion. He did not seem to notice the bloody holes punched through his palms.

  "This flesh is not strong," he said, "but it will serve. As will I."

  "As do we all," Dirakah said. Again the shadowcallers echoed her words. "As do we all."

  The phrase seemed to be the signal that whatever had happened was at an end. The Joyful Things withdrew their chains, licking at the blood that clung to their spikes, and creaked back up their pillars. Loran left without sparing a glance for his sister. The shadowcallers dispersed. Many herded their students back to their classes, but Dirakah ignored hers.

  As the others filtered away, Isiem walked over to Helis, who stood rooted to the ground in the hallway. She didn't turn until he touched her elbow, trying awkwardly to offer comfort.

  "They killed him," she whispered, too shocked for tears. "He tried to run, so they just ...they just killed him."

  "He isn't dead," Isiem said, not sure he believed his own words.

  Helis shook her head fiercely, knocking his hand off her arm. "My brother is dead. They killed him and put some other thing in his body. That isn't Loran. They killed him, and I'm going to kill them for it. Don't even try to talk me out of it, Isiem. I'm going to kill them all."

  Chapter Five

  Faith

  Days passed before Isiem spoke to Helis again.

  He saw her in the classes they shared, but they couldn't talk frankly in front of the other students or their instructors, and Helis always disappeared after they were released from their lectures. She seldom visited the dining halls or the library, and she avoided her room.

  That room, once their sanctuary in the Dusk Hall, had become a lonely, almost haunted place in the wake of Loran's transformation. All of Loran's belongings were already gone; the boy had moved out immediately after the ritual, leaving a bare bunk opposite his sister's bed.

  The empty space weighed on all of them, but it had crushed Helis. Isiem hadn't seen her set foot in the room since her brother was given to the shadow. Wherever she was sleeping, it was not in her own bed.

  Each day saw her frailer than the one before. It was as if grief had rasped away the core of her being, leaving a translucent shell of a girl. She seemed almost to float, ghostlike, through the Dusk Hall. Isiem was afraid for her, and a little afraid of her.

  But for far too long, he never had a chance to say a word.

  Finally, late one night, he saw her walk past his window. It was summer, and although that did nothing to lift the gloom of Pangolais, it did make the evenings warmer.

  As he gained seniority, Isiem had been able to move to a better room—albeit one still shared with Ascaros—and now his chamber overlooked the grand courtyard at the center of the Dusk Hall. He liked the fragrances that drifted in from the nocturnal gardens, and on warm nights often left his windows open to enjoy them. Isiem was still awake, luxuriating in that small sweetness, when he saw a girl drift by on bare feet. She was shrouded in white, her long black hair flying wild in the wind. Helis.

  Isiem left his room to follow her. He walked quietly, not wanting to disturb her fugue, but he did not try to hide. If she sent him away, he'd go.

  She never glanced back. Swaying from step to step, as if moved by music only she could hear, Helis crossed the Dusk Hall's central courtyard. Isiem held his breath, afraid that she might try to leave through the great doors—a path that would take her past the Joyful Things, and perhaps to a fate like her brother's—but she did not turn east to the doors. Instead she went west, turned her face to the sky, and with surprising nimbleness began to scale the carved stone walls.

  High above his head she stopped, sitting on a narrow ledge between two of the enchanted, luminous spheres that hung over both courtyards like caged moons. Great gray moths swirled around her, brushing across her brow and tangling in the black net of her hair. In that moment she was beautiful as a fairy queen, and as inhuman. And as terrifying.

  She looked down. "You can come up if you want," she said.

  He did. The climb was harder for him than it had been for her. Twice Isiem slipped and caught himself, heart pounding, moments before his head would have shattered like a bloody gourd on the ashen stones below. Helis offered him no help. She sat there, watching him with abstract curiosity, until he heaved himself, sweating, onto the ledge beside her.

  "What are you doing up here?" Isiem asked when he caught his breath.

  Helis shrugged. She'd already looked away from him, and was toying with a moth that had crashed into one of the globes. Shimmering dust fell from its wings, coating Helis's fingertips, as the insect struggled hopelessly to return to the air. "It's peaceful above the gardens. Restful. I like it. Sometimes I pray."

  "To whom?"

  She smiled and took her hand away from the moth's wings. Carefully, deliberately, Helis crushed its head with a fingernail. "There's only one god here."

  "Does it give you ...solace?" Isiem asked, fumbling to understand. The Midnight Lord was powerful, and his clerics were skilled in repairing the damage they caused; perhaps Helis had turned to his faith in hopes of helping her brother. "Hope?"

  "No. There's no hope. There's no cure." Helis lifted the moth's body by a bent black leg and dropped it onto a heap of small, winged corpses. They were screened by her knee, and Isiem hadn't noticed them before, but when she shifted he saw that there were hundreds of dead moths in the pile. "I went through everything in the library. The shadowcallers had to know why I was there, but they never tried to stop me. I suppose they knew there was no reason; I was hardly the first to look. So many had come before me that all the books fell open to the same pages."

  "That could have been a trick," Isiem said. "The books could have been bent that way. A feint to throw you off."

  "Don't you think the same idea occurred to me?" Another moth was fluttering on the ledge, not far from where the first had died. Helis stroked its twitching antennae with an odd gentleness. "I looked beyond those pages. It wasn't a trick. I was hoping it could be broken like a curse—not something I can do now, but someday ...but no. It's not as simple as that."

  "What is it?"

  Helis caressed the moth's wings, rubbing them translucent. Glimmering silver flakes dusted her skin. She pressed a finger to her small, perfect lips, leaving a shining print. "What happened to Isiem—what happened to all the souls seized by the shadow, century after century, ever since Earthfall—is not possession, and not transformation, but a little of both. One of the hungry shadows was invited into his body. Not to possess him, but to become him. It has mapped its soul against his, taken his memories for its own, adopted his being—his habits, fears, aspirations—to guide its stolen life."

  Isiem nodded, finding the news grim but not surprising. What she told him o
nly reinforced the teachings of the Dusk Hall.

  Most of the creatures that inhabited the shadow realm were neither benign nor malevolent, but simply oblivious to the mortal realm. They had their own world: a gray and twisted reflection of the one inhabited by men, but not an inherently evil one. The doings of humanity concerned such beings no more than birds concerned the creatures of the deep black sea.

  Some, however, watched the mortal world jealously, craving the warmth and vibrant solidity that their own existence lacked. Although the hungry shadows were few in number, they were by far the most likely to be encountered by a mortal wizard, for they flocked to gates between the worlds.

  They were also the ones most often called, for they were the most easily controlled. The other creatures of the shadow realm wanted nothing from the mortal world, and being indifferent, they were difficult to command or cajole. But the ones who lusted after life...those would leap to do a shadowcaller's bidding. All they asked in return was a drop of blood, a captured memory—something that gave them, however fleetingly, a taste of what it was to be alive.

  That taste would buy their obedience, for a while, but the hungry ones always wanted more. Every student in the Dusk Hall was warned of that danger, again and again, until the words circled in their skulls as they slept: drop your guard, and the shadows will take you.

  It had never occurred to him, though, that the shadowcallers might deliberately give one of their own to the dark.

  "Can the shadow be driven out?" Isiem asked.

  Helis shook her head. "Not by you or me. Not by any magic I know. It's devoured pieces of him, mind and body, and insinuated itself into the gaps. Like one of those fungi that sends its threads all through a living rat, tangling its fibers into blood and brain. You can't pull out the parasite without killing the host. It's too much a part of him, now, and what's left of him is too much part of it."

  "What will happen to him?"

  "Eventually the shadow will kill him. It's not of this world, Isiem. It doesn't belong here. It consumes life just by its proximity. Loran's life energy is sand in its hourglass. It might try to stretch its time by adding more sand—getting the shadowcallers to heal its stolen body—but eventually it will run out. It might be years from now, maybe even decades, but it will run out. Someday."