Prize of Night

by Bailey Cunningham

  “You know what comes next,” she said.

  He stood before Felix. Neither said anything. The room was waiting. Morgan had readied an arrow, but Fel shook her head. There could be no trick shot this time. No miracle roll. This moment no longer belonged to them.

  Aleo knelt before Felix. He leaned over and whispered something into the man’s ear. The meretrix nodded slowly. Then Aleo rose. He placed one hand on Felix’s head and positioned the knife against his throat.

  The foxes stirred at her feet. Babieca was walking toward the edge. She tried to grab his arm, but he kept walking. Morgan was saying something, her voice heavy, but Fel couldn’t make out the words. Eumachia had taken off her pearls. Like Babieca, she looked ready to jump. Fel reached for her die. It was a reflex. She didn’t even know what she was trying to do. She looked away from Felix for just a second and saw that Drauca had vanished.

  “Do it now,” Latona said.

  Aleo tightened his grip on Felix. “I offer this man to the dark below, to the living skies, to the dancing fire. I offer him to the smoke that swallows all.”

  Fel saw his hand tremble.

  A cry split the silence of the great hall.

  Not a cry. A low, attenuated note, rising from the ground and shaking the walls. Her blood thrilled alongside it. The horn. Aleo looked up, eyes widening. The courtiers were nervous now, moving in a wave of finery toward the edges of the room. The armed guards began to herd them like sheep, but they were also uncertain. They looked to the basilissa for clarification. Latona was staring at the entrance.

  “You know better than this,” she called. “You swore an oath to me. Your princeps will tear you apart for breaking your word.”

  Septimus stood in the doorway, the horn still raised to his lips. Skadi was beside him. The crowd parted before them in flickers of terror.

  He lowered the horn. “I have reevaluated our agreement,” he said. “I think you will find that it was flawed from the start.”

  Now the caela were visible. The lares of air, exiled centuries ago, but freed through the power of the horn. We stole their place—what did the auditor call it? Their chaos. We’re breathing air that belongs to them. Everything had its chaos. The elements had once belonged to the lares. Perhaps they would again—very soon.

  Fel could see the caela as coils of smoke, gathering among the arched ceiling of the oecus. They grew and darkened into slick black folds. They tightened as they lowered themselves, a gyre of burning eyes and blinding grit. As the storm expanded to fill the room, Fel could see mouths in the gray. Last time, it had been the oculus that controlled them. Septimus would not be such a benevolent master.

  He pointed at the shield wall surrounding the basilissa. “Show them what you are,” he cried, “oh hungry sky travelers, oh spirits of the welkin! Show them!”

  The smoke rushed over them, eyes and mouths and insensate screams. It was one scream, one howling note that shook the foundations of the Arx of Violets. Blood fanned against the walls in a grim tracery. It sizzled on the lamps, even as the sound was covered by crunching bone, unraveling marbled by streaks of black. Aleo was yelling something, gesturing wildly. The courtiers ran in all directions. Some of them vanished in clouds of red.

  Where was Felix? She couldn’t see him. Morgan was sending arrows into the smoke, but they vanished as quickly as she could loose them.

  Fel ran down the stairs. Someone was yelling, but she ignored the sound. Her blade was drawn. She cleaved to the edge of the wall, keeping her distance from the caela. In the dim, she could see two black shapes moving. The silenoi. Amber eyes held her and blazed up suddenly. Fel raised her sword. But the shadow moved past her. Now was not the moment.

  Then Latona was there. She had Felix’s knife.

  “Hold him!” Her voice cut across the room. There was blood on her face, and her eyes belonged to something much older, something like the lares themselves.

  Two of the miles grabbed Felix by the arms. They pinned him in place, and she advanced, holding the knife.

  Where was Septimus? The monsters had vanished into the smoke. Or were they all monsters in this moment? She was too far away. She’d always seen something like this coming, but not precisely this. The ashes in her mouth. The blood on her lorica. Felix saw her. Something bright and frail passed between them, and she remembered what held them together. The boy on the other side, waiting for her.

  “The oath will not fail,” Latona said. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the storm around her. “I offer this man to the dark below, to the living skies, to the dancing fire. I offer him to the smoke that swallows all.”

  Something rose above her voice, then, above the sounds of the dying. Not the horn, this time. Fel recognized the sound with a start.

  A lute.

  She looked up. Babieca stood halfway down the staircase. He was playing as quickly as he could. The notes were rough at first. But then they rose. His face was a mask of concentration. Fel could see the sweat on his forehead. He had chosen the perfect spot. The angular walls of the room served to amplify his music, until it crashed over them, a sweet, scalding melody that cut through every other sound.

  It was a wordless song. But Fel knew it. Because she had sung this to herself, during the longest nights, when everything seemed to have fled. Morgan knew it too. She had lowered her bow and was listening. Her face was very still. Even Latona was watching him now, and her expression was a secret that she kept. But she heard it.

  The guards were frozen. Felix had stepped free of them, but he didn’t try to run. Everyone was listening. Somewhere in the staff of notes, they could hear what they’d lost. It hovered just on the edge of their perception. Though stilled, they were reaching. And the singer too was reaching, climbing the fire of the song. Blood shone on the lute, but he kept playing, until his fingers were nothing, a gleaming knot, an unseen promise.

  Light moved over the surface of the smoke. It recoiled at first. Then the dragon settled its wings and eyes, and listened. Mangled horrors lay strewn across the palace floor. Some were still dying, loudly, their features obscured by the swirling dust. The song was for them as well, a guiding threnody. It offered its naked body to them, asking for their forgiveness.

  A silence settled over them, as if the world were about to begin again. The smoke was still, though not tame. It waited now. Aleo stood in the middle, unsure of what to do. His eyes no longer darted around the room. They were fixed on Babieca.

  The last notes were for him. They were a memory, and a promise, and a love on which all of them balanced. It held them up. And even the smoke knew it, and remembered that instant of decreation, that dawn so long ago, when it too had been held fast.

  Babieca fell silent, and smiled. There was blood on his hands, tears in his eyes. He seemed to be glowing.

  “I told you—”

  The air froze. A shadow moved next to Babieca. A trick of the eye, it seemed. But then he stopped. Everything stopped. Fel saw a gleam of silver, like a stitch, move down the singer’s chest. That’s strange. It was her only thought. The stitch made a kind of Z, and then she saw that it was a delicate knife. Blood danced in the silver.

  Babieca looked down.

  He laughed. Then shivered.

  Then fell.

  Mardian stood behind him. The knife stained wine-dark. He looked down at the singer, now a cut thread.

  “The oath will not fail,” he said.

  PART FOUR

  OCULUS

  1

  Close to dawn. The living skies had begun to wake in brushstrokes of wild color. Goose song and the whirr of insects in the long grass. In the distance, the golden mean of the legislature, now scaffolded, was fading to gray. The whole park was shaking itself from rich dreams. Even the sleepless fish that survived in the toxic waters now circled, listening. There was an air of patience and recognition, a settling of forces
. Webbed feet moved over the hill, as clusters of eyes regarded them, sincerely. Everything wanted to know about the body.

  Andrew sat cross-legged in the grass, still slightly dazed. His arm ached—the old wound. His thoughts were much slower than usual. The world turned in a cauldron of honey and blood, like the mead of poetry that Odin had once rescued. He flexed his fingers. He was still alive.

  The body was not.

  It was familiar. Diminished, perhaps, but no more than one who slept deeply. The difference was that its eyes were open. The pupils were receding, the fragile irises beginning to come undone. Already, the humors were escaping their bonds. The body was nude, and he could see the ragged mark where the blade had kissed its heart. A majuscule Z with frayed edges.

  So quickly and so silently. To look back for just a moment, only to find this. And maybe never looking back would have prevented it. To be as vigilant as those eyes that were shrinking even now, becoming caves where you could hear the low murmur of glaciers. If he hadn’t moved. If he’d only moved faster. If the smoke had cleared. If he’d reached for the blade, then it would have been in his hand, not Mardian’s.

  Like miracles, some deaths were reversible. Some were not. An auditor might swallow seawater and still be saved, though changed forever. A blade to the heart was a different thing, a more precise line break.

  What was the right thing to do?

  The body was a smooth punctuation to his questions. It gave nothing away. Its edges seemed to swallow the gathering light, the park noise, his thoughts. And it was not beautiful, like bodies in paintings. It was ordinary. It belonged to an order of things ruthless and predictable, banal as dandelions, a cat purring, a kitchen window.

  It’s different with us.

  Everyone was slowly regaining the power of motion. Sam had a dreamlike expression. She stared at the grass, then at her knees, checkered in green. Shelby was looking at the body’s pale feet, soles exposed to the damp earth. A pebble between the toes. She frowned at the pebble, as one might at a spider crawling across a picture frame. Ingrid was the only one standing. Like the body, she was nude, though much remained in shadow. Her expression was neutral as it took in everything. She was performing a silent assessment. This was probably not her first time. He noticed the dark bruises gathering along her shoulder, and the way that she favored one arm. The puckered mark along her leg, healed but not forgotten. His own scar ached in sympathy, and he rubbed it, without thinking.

  Sam crawled forward. She reached out, uncertainly, to touch the raveled wound.

  “Don’t move it,” Ingrid said.

  Sam looked up. “What?”

  “It has to stay exactly as it is.” Her voice seemed to be coming from far away.

  “I don’t—” She blinked. Her confusion was bright. “You mean . . . him?”

  She gently took Sam by the wrist and pulled her up. “Yes.” Then: “We all need to get dressed.”

  Sam looked down at herself, as if realizing her nakedness for the first time. “They’re behind the tree,” she said. “The clothes. At least, I think that’s where I put them. Sometimes I can’t tell the trees apart.”

  They dressed in silence. The dark lay on the grass next to them, also silent. They covered it gently. When they were finished, a neat pile of clothing remained. Worn jeans, thrice-folded by Shelby, a collared shirt, socks balled up so that they resembled a blind tulip bulb, and boxer shorts. They stared at the pile for some time. The hiking boots were arranged next to it, scuffed toes spaced slightly apart. Everything you needed to make a person.

  “What do we do with them?” Sam asked. “Should we dress—” She shook her head. “No. That would be tampering, right? Like in the forensic shows?”

  “We’ll need to dispose of them.” Ingrid’s voice was underwater. “There’s no blood on the clothes. We can’t say that it’s a mugging. We’ll have to tell the police that we found him like this, in the park.”

  Sam’s eyes widened. “But they’ll think—oh God, we can’t let them think that, can we? That’s not something we can tell his family. His mother.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Shelby said. Her voice was a cut thing. “I’ll try to make her understand.”

  Sam was pondering the boots now. “How do we get rid of them? We can’t burn them, can we? Do boots burn?”

  Andrew felt himself move. Up until now, he’d been rooted to the spot. He picked up the duffel bag and gently placed Carl’s clothes inside. He laid the boots on top.

  “We need rocks.”

  Shelby stared at him. “What?”

  “To weigh it down.”

  Nobody moved at first. But then it became a thing to do, an incredible distraction. They busied themselves, prying up rocks. They loaded down the duffel bag until it felt like a bier. Andrew grabbed one side, and Ingrid grabbed the other. They walked along the edge of the lake. Andrew could feel the others watching. Ingrid said nothing. They made their way down the empty pier.

  “On three,” Andrew said.

  They counted to three and hurled the bag into the dark water. It floated for a moment, then slowly began to sink. They waited until it was gone. Then they made their way back to the clearing. Shelby’s eyes were strange. She kept looking at him, as if he were a picture that she couldn’t quite comprehend.

  “The killer wouldn’t have left the clothes,” he said finally.

  “What killer?” Shelby’s voice was low in her throat.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Shelby.”

  She stepped forward. “Do you have something to say? Something to clear this up? Please. Go ahead.”

  He tried to speak, but there was ash in his mouth.

  “Was this your plan?”

  Every time she said this, what she meant was the body. But she wouldn’t look down. She was careful not to see it. Andrew couldn’t do anything but see it. His ears were ringing. Beneath that was a song that he didn’t want to hear.

  “This isn’t the time for fighting,” Ingrid said. But she was somewhere else. It was the way you told a child to stop playing with something, even though you couldn’t quite see what he was doing. An exhausted plea.

  “I’d like to know,” Shelby said softly. “Was this the plan?”

  Andrew looked at her. “No.”

  “I seem to remember you holding a knife.”

  “That wasn’t me. I was playing a part.”

  “It feels like you’ve been playing a part this whole time.”

  Andrew closed his eyes. “I thought I could keep it all spinning. I thought it would work. But Mardian—I didn’t know. It all went up in smoke. And I could see it happening, but I wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t.”

  Sam’s expression brightened. “There must be a trick!”

  Shelby looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “There must be. Like—I don’t know—some kind of power. We just take him back, and we ask the spirits for help. We give them whatever they want. Blood, our souls, whatever. We just take him back. We just have to take him back.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Ingrid said.

  “It worked for Andrew.”

  “That was different. He drowned. There was still—something left. We didn’t have to fight our way out of the palace just to get back here. We had so much time.” Ingrid shook her head. “It was different.”

  “But that’s—” Sam’s face contorted. “The park is magic. We’re magic. It can’t be over, just like that. The basilissa—she’s got power, right? She’s connected. She could do something. Or the silenoi. They’ve got powers that we’ve never seen. There must be, I don’t know, a ritual, or a—” Her voice broke. “Fuck. Something. There’s something. There has to be.”

  “He’s gone,” Andrew said.

  And as
he said it, he knew that it was certain. There was no trick. He was gone because a knife—a gift—had slipped into him like sleep. A gift that he should have kept safe. Felix had said that he would use it, someday. But Felix hadn’t known everything.

  Shelby struck him across the face.

  The blow surprised him more than anything. He touched his cheek. The pain seemed to hesitate. Then he felt it, and swallowed. She stood before him, absolutely rigid, fists clenched at her sides. Everything was slow and white around the edges.

  “Do you think you can just say that?” She was flushed. He could feel the burn of her grief, in the mark slowly forming. “You don’t get to decide. It’s not up to you.”

  “Shelby—”

  “—you don’t decide this. You’re not the center of the goddamn universe, and this is the one thing you don’t get to decide, okay? The one thing.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He told me that everything would be okay, and I believed him. I fucking believed him.”

  Her shoulders were shaking. She was taller than him, and he had to stand on tiptoes to embrace her. They swayed in the clearing. Shelby screamed into his shoulder, and he held on, but not too tightly. He rocked her back and forth. He rubbed small circles on her back and whispered in her ear. He didn’t know what he was saying. He wasn’t sure how long they danced that way. But eventually, a space appeared. The night seemed to separate them of its own accord. There was spittle in the corner of Shelby’s mouth, and snot, which she scrubbed at with her sleeve. His face hurt, and his shirt was wet. Something was trying to get out of his throat, but he pushed it down.

  “I’m going to call the paramedics,” Ingrid said. “I’ll say that we went looking for him. That this is where we found him. The police will need to take our statements. We can show them the text message on his phone. But don’t add anything. It has to be simple.”

  Sam looked at her. “Have you done this before?”

  “No,” she said, looking at her phone. “I’m just a liar.”