Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  The werewolf felt a spike of agitation race up his spine, and the sirenous call of the moon took a deeper hold of him in his lapse of will. “Given what I’ve seen of your wraiths outside, words may be all I need. Where is she?”

  The Spaniard’s defiance shriveled when he saw a flash of yellow ripple across the Seeker’s wild eyes and a slight broadening of the shoulders. “H-here.”

  The Seeker considered breaking both of his hands right then to remedy his obtuseness. The clumsily concealed dagger on the other hand, only inspired a rare pang of amusement within the werewolf. “Take me to her.” He was expecting a danger fraught journey through the man’s crypts, filled with all manner of treachery to keep him from uncovering Rodrigo’s prize.

  He did not expect a shrug of the shoulders, and a few steps to the left to one of the coffins resting against the wall. It was the very same closed coffin that he stopped himself from opening earlier. Crafted in fine mahogany and stained black with silvered engravings, the thing put many a noble’s resting place to shame.

  The Spaniard’s hands fumbled around the interlocking seals and spared a few furtive knocks against the polished wood. “Mind you, my friend, she can get very... very testy for a corpse.” More clicks sounded out from within the coffin, reaching their crescendo with an expulsion of dust. “The conversations we’ve had, while not thought provoking, were always... exciting. A game of risk, you might say.”

  He stepped away from the thing as the lid popped off, hitting the ground with a loud bang. The Seeker’s eyes pierced through the dark and beheld the rancid wretch within. Dressed in rotten yet form fitting black robes, the witch was an alluring woman in life, as was ever the case of those touched by magic. Bones covered in the grime of decay jutted through cloth and frazzled, straw like hair ran from the top of her mottled skull to the bottom of her knees. Her face had just the barest traces of dried flesh, holding onto bone like moss on a log.

  Her deathly visage was contorted into an expression of the blackest rage. Bone lent emotion where withered facial muscles could not. Rather than bearing the circular black holes characteristic of total decay, her skeletal sockets were molded into a demonic glare. The contours of her cheek bones were raised too, to accommodate her teeth clenching grimace.

  The Seeker was expecting more, and noted how Rodrigo regarded him with such expectation. “She’s still. Her lips say nothing, her face even less.”

  “A trait as common in death as it is in living, noble Seeker.” Rodrigo stepped closer to the coffin and peered into her lifeless, black eyes with such familiarity and interest as to elicit a twinge of disgust within the werewolf. “To truly understand what passes through the lips of the dead, one must adopt a new kind of understanding and perspective...”

  The Seeker sighed with such power it was as if the entire room partook in his exhale. “Become like you. And squander a lifetime.”

  A near imperceptible flash of indignation flew across Rodrigo’s face before he smirked and leaned his back against the edge of the coffin. “More than a few, if my memories are to be believed.”

  “They aren’t. Move aside.” The Seeker stomped forward and felt a familiar fount of warmth well up within his calloused palm. Rodrigo stepped away but kept his eyes steady on the pale, blueish empyrean light swirling under the skin of the Seeker’s hand.

  “What are you doing!?”

  The Seeker clasped his fingers around the witch’s spine, just below her skull. “I did not come to join you in your madness, Rodrigo. I came for answers.” The red light in the room flickered and dimmed to the new eddies of energy flowing into the desiccated corpse. New cracks and snaps floated into the air as the corpse’s latent soul essence reacted to the new infusion of power.

  Rodrigo paced back and forth. “It’s one thing, my friend, to attune oneself to hearing what messages may lie in the dark, it’s quite another to bring back the messenger herself!” He had done many unwise things in the past, simply because he could, but never did he think he was in danger. Until now. “Necromancy is forbidden!”

  So the idiot stumbles upon a truth. This hunt grows stranger. “She lives by my will alone. Be calm.” He wouldn’t raise her into undeath. Nor could he. This was divination by corpse, nothing more. Treading along the lines of the laws he used to kill and imprison so many, but nothing he hadn’t done before to rip justice from an unjust world.

  A soul rending shriek billowed out of the witch’s decrepit mouth and the Seeker scowled in pain as her arms shot out and clawed into his. At once he ceased the flow of magic into her form. Rodrigo stumbled backwards into his bookcase, holding his ears in pain as dusty tomes tumbled from the shelves and hit his head.

  The screaming continued unabated for a moment more and then stopped. The witch possessed tremendous strength in her arms but the rest of her body had not been so revitalized. Her ruinous skull creaked to the side as her hollow eyes took in the Seeker’s face. The tiniest orbs of whitish flame floated within her dark sockets, regarding the werewolf with utter hatred. “Man of Spain! Why does a Seeker torment me!?”

  Her voice was like old parchment dragging along stone and even the tested Seeker felt a chill flood through his being at her necrotic utterance. “He will not speak. If you do not answer me clearly and truthfully I will set a fire in your chest and you shall never see the sky again.” She made grotesque sobbing sounds while black fluid oozed out of the crevices between her ribs. “Your mistress is good at covering her tracks.” The witch let out a phlegmatic laugh at his misfortune. But she didn’t cover you.

  “Yes, yes she was very clever girl... clever girl, heh...”

  “The roots of the Black Rose coven persist long after its tree has been cut down. Tell me where she makes her stand.” He noted her claws tense around him, sinking more into his muscular forearms.

  “I know not, it is after time, my time, to know what must be known!”

  The Seeker willed an invisible heat to seep from his fingers and radiate into the delicate bone of her neck. The witch convulsed and sizzled as his touch began to undo bone. “You reached 157 years of age, 147 of which were spent as an acolyte in her order. You acquired the knowledge to chain your soul to your body and were buried in a coffin that killed every single man that opened it before this one.” He gestured to Rodrigo. “Irina Venetov, you must know something.”

  “Stop it the fire!”

  “The pain ends when the truth begins.”

  Irina made a sound of pain and anger as smoke floated between her ancient teeth. “In veils of ice, in sun of winter, lies the price—”

  “Gone in 1357. The Uppsala sanctuary was turned to ash when they trespassed against what lay beneath the ice.” The orbs of pale fire within her eyes flared for a moment, whether it was in indignation at being interrupted or at the news that her coven had lost a limb, the Seeker could not tell.

  Her voice spilled out in a torrent of foetid air once more while her teeth remained clenched in a rictus scowl. “In the forests of the east, stalks the violet eyed beast—”

  “Destroyed. 1405. The Teutonics set upon them with as much fervor as they did the Livonians before them.” He had grown weary of her recitals of ancient bonds of fellowship and almost yanked her out of the coffin. “All the places you think to list, are no longer. All but one. The place I seek, would have to be an old place, iron strong and unseen.”

  The witch’s unnatural eyes dimmed for a moment. “Ahh yes... it could only be now, but not here... that is why you are here.”

  The Seeker snarled and broke her left arm, though her claws stayed embedded in his own. He grabbed her by the back of the skull and brought her face to his face. “Look in my eyes Irina. You have ten seconds before I kill you.”

  “Yes, yes yes! These are the words, the words of prophecy: the grave of the old empire shall be the womb of the new, then shall magic run anew.”

  The Seeker punctured his sharp fingers through the back of her skull and focused on the imprint of her soul. “Se
eker I told you what is known!” Ghostly threads of silver plunged into her spirit, plucking through old emotions and a haze of disjointed memories, some glamorized, others false imaginings lent realness through the passage of time.

  For a moment, his soul touched with hers and the Seeking began, the ancient rite for which he was trained to do. Any other witchbreed but for the purest born would have been subsumed within the ancient witch’s void of a soul, for she had so little soul essence left that all he felt was a howling nothingness.

  Through their connection point he walked through memories, spoiled by her tempestuous emotions in the present. Moments of pleasure with a male sacrifice were thwarted as shadows bled from stone walls and maggots writhed out of the man’s mouth, his face decayed beyond belief.

  The Seeker marveled at how much pleasantness had turned to ash. Every witch and warlock he had hunted in the past had some moment of glory or triumph to cherish but Irina’s past had become as twisted as a cave of mirrors. In some memories, entire chunks of the sky were missing, vast swathes of black eaten out of the wild blue. Her opinions of others turned vivid. A portly baker was a demon of gluttony, bloated and ruddy; a scholar a withered and ghastly demon of sloth, lashing his tongue around his lips obscenely.

  “Your knowledge is broken, but your soul is not. Be still.” He sighed as he picked up his mark’s trail through the fog of Irina’s memories. Irina’s night haired mentor was as beautiful as he imagined, the only person in her remembrances who hadn’t been twisted in Irina’s long and bitter sleep. The sounds of their conversation were muted and incomprehensible through the gauzy film of time but what he saw; maps, the position of the night stars and the swaying of tall cypress trees told him all he needed to know. “Italy. You could’ve just said Italy and you’d be in less pain for it.”

  Rodrigo piped up, raising a finger in objection. “Actually, my friend, she couldn’t. Those not quite dead and not quite living are caught in between what the soul knows and the mind believes and so the truth... becomes more abstract.”

  “You don’t say.” The Seeker pulled his hand out of her skull and pushed her back into the coffin. “Thank you, Irena. Your mistress’s death will be clean.”

  “It will do you no good, Seeker! When the land becomes ripe with power again, I will rise with it... it...” her voice diminished, fading like an echo as the twin white orbs of malevolent flame left her black sockets with the finality of a blown out candle.

  The Seeker stared at her corpse and bunched his muscles up, as if waiting for something. Her decrepit body became limp and as still as a forgotten statue. A more subtle creaking sound sprung from her bones as the tide of the Seeker’s magic receded and the laws of nature filled its void.

  Rodrigo’s voice intruded in the air, mellifluous and treacherous. “Delightful though she is, staring at her won’t bring her back.”

  “Nothing will.” The Seeker fished into his robes and pulled out a pack of matchsticks before igniting one. The quavering flame stood suspended between two fingers, burning through the ruddy darkness of Rodrigo’s den. He looked at the flame and whispered his incantation. The flickering white tones in the flame were overcome in a flash by searing cobalt light, roiling and tempestuous as the inconstant edge of the light was outlined in an infernal red glow.

  In one brutal motion he ripped through the side of Irina’s chest and flicked his match at her black heart. The unnatural ember exploded with life, feeding upon her combustible insides like carrion to a corpse. The light in her chest burned blue and shifted to red as it radiated outwards through the cracks in between her ribs. Pops and snaps resounded in the air; her body yielded to the flames. The Seeker noticed odd flickers of iridescence as the flames licked at her bones.

  Her soul essence had become unbound.

  The Seeker ears twitched to the sound of Rodrigo leaping up to his feet and spun around in time to catch his silver dagger.

  “She’s my corpse!” Rodrigo screamed, his eyes wild and desperate. “I spent too many decades tracking her down for it to end like this. She knows things, can see the colors of time, knows where all souls are stowed... I need her!”

  The Seeker snatched his dagger and backhanded the Spaniard down to the floor. He lay sprawled on his carpet, quivering with rage. “Her ashes are yours and that is all you merit beyond death.”

  “You said—”

  “I know what I said!” And a promise wasn’t it. “She and her kind were marked for death. That judgment does not diminish with time.” The Seeker dropped the dagger, noticing the metal had already created a pink rash upon his palm and fingers. He stepped over Rodrigo and approached the wooden shelf next to his desk.

  “You fucking killed her!” Rodrigo babbled, his eyes misting over in rage. “Forever... gone. You took them both from me, but the clock... the clock! It took the first one first! It stole the soul and Time took the rest! Take the love but leave the shell and all you have is a breathing grave... that little ticking tock... tocking like I didn’t know what it did!”

  The Seeker eyed him with caution and clenched his fist. All those cracks finally broke. He didn’t engage in the lost warlock’s gibbering, and instead looked to his shelf.

  The thing was stocked with vials, globes and ampoules teeming with dark and bright fluids. “The Order of Orion will compensate you for accommodating one of its servants.” With a long overdue death. His fingers skimmed over the glass, and uncanny light bloomed through the liquid. The cosmic essences within tempted the Primal in his soul, inviting him to break free of the flesh of man and stalk with the eyes of the wolf. “Did you hear me, Rodrigo? I’m taking these.”

  Rodrigo was on his knees, watching the witch pop, burn and crumble with unnatural fires. Tears of reverence inched down his cheeks, catching the vivid colors within their passing liquid prisms. “She... she had shown me such dreams... dreams of a new world... and we were going to reclaim lost love from Time...” He turned his head to the Seeker, still pilfering concoctions and brews into his robes. “The world will never see her like again.” he said coldly.

  The Seeker lifted one last dusty flask into his satchel and turned to his morose supplier. “Yes it will. It will see her kind over and over again, until the seas boil, the sun fades and the night rules the earth.” He walked over to Rodrigo and placed his hand on the top of his head, ready to end him right there.

  Enjoy it Rodrigo. Not all see such a blaze before they die.

  He stared ahead and watched the skull of the witch topple inward with mirthless eyes. “The madness and treachery you call visionary is the cockroach of the world. Eternal. Pitiless. Mocking of the boot that stamps out its life. My duty is futile and endless, but it must be done, again and again. Balance must be maintained.”

  Rodrigo let out a bleak laugh as more flames started to burn the outside of the witch’s charred ribcage. “Balance? Heh, my friend, you sound like one of those forest dogs...”

  The Seeker looked down on him. “Justice is balance. A correction against disorder.” He loathed to be compared to his more wild kin. Fanatics whose ideas of balance was just as nebulous as their ideas of chaos and order. Chaos is their order. He was thankful they were but a small number.

  At once a horrific scream ripped through the room and interrupted his thoughts. The witch’s chest exploded in a small ball of fire before crumbling down to the bottom of her coffin. The walls of the place seemed to writhe and twist at her soul’s release and the intense red light of Rodrigo’s abode dimmed before her power. He braced himself and stood strong as her soul passed through him.

  The Primal within stirred as her ethereal fingers tried to drag him along to the afterlife. Another owns my soul, witch. The tug on his soul dropped off at the first sign of resistance, but then a chill ran down his arm and onto his hand.

  The hand that was on Rodrigo.

  “Yess...” hissed Rodrigo, “show me her!” Before the Seeker could do anything, the Spaniard had raised his arms up in surrender before the bur
nt out coffin and arched his back. A disturbing sound rattled out of his throat and his eyes fluttered. The Seeker couldn’t think, his mind grew diffused and foggy as he watched his contact fall on his back. Color drained out of the Spaniard’s skin as his cheeks hollowed out.

  A rictus grin formed on Rodrigo’s face and his eyes seemingly solidified into marbles. Glassy and dead, they reflected the ceiling in a light of deranged ecstasy. When the room’s red luminescence returned, the Seeker felt the chill leave his arm and his mental faculties become acute once more.

  “You damned fool.” he said to the Spaniard’s corpse. Already Rodrigo’s place was losing its unreal glow. The passage of his spirit, so attuned to the very fabric of his domain, had made some books turn to dust, bottles explode and cracks race down walls. The Seeker quickly took stock of things and made his way out back into the alley he had come from.

  As the light dimmed and the dust rose, darkness fell and his sharp ears picked out a ticking in the darkness. The stopwatch. He had a feeling it did so much more than show time, grateful to be away from it.

  Still, he felt cheated, as if an injustice had been born. He had anticipated a time and place for the roguish warlock’s final stand, a place where he could pitch all his mastery and cunning at the Seeker and still fall before his implacable advance. And now he was dead. The Seeker pushed it to the back of his mind.

  The greater injustice would be forgetting there was a renegade that still ran free.

  Chapter 15: Chains of Flame

  His eyes pierced the darkness.

  The place was carved from black stone, the edges clean, precise but dusty with age. Cells went forth in rows before him. They would not be out of place in a modern jail but for the thickness of their black bars, inlaid with straight edged scroll work that seemed as a mess of lines before his untrained eyes.

  The top of the cells belied the modernity of the stark surroundings, each crowned with the head of some crumbled entity, the tops of their heads sculpted with wavy hair that struck the vampire as vaguely flame-like.