Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  “They did.” Corien’s quiet delight kissed her thoughts. “Some took to it better than others.”

  “And if they refused?”

  “I convinced them.”

  Robbed of speech, Rielle chose to approach the pit and knelt to peer inside.

  Beneath the grating, snapping and pawing at one another, were creatures—reminiscent of the cruciata corpse, but ghastlier. Rielle gazed breathlessly upon their beastliness: hulking shoulders, ropy with muscle; stubby wings of flesh and feathers; shaggy dark pelts and scaled hides; beaks and claws. Heads as blunt and huge as anvils. Horns that clacked against the grating and sparked like flint. They gnashed their teeth and swung their heads, moaning as if in furious agony.

  And though they were malformed and distorted, each a patchwork of horrors, they all shared certain distinctive features. The tails, for one, and the wings, and the rough, furred hides.

  “They’re dragons,” she whispered. “You’ve changed them.”

  “Improvement by way of the grotesque.” Kneeling beside her, Corien looked thoughtfully at his creations. “One of my generals started calling them crawlers, as you can’t really say that they’re dragons anymore, can you? The name has rather caught on. Though so far I’ve found it impossible to completely control the mind of a godsbeast, our treatments keep them docile, and beyond that, the children’s castings bind them like a harness does a horse. And of course, I control the children. Watch this.”

  He snapped his fingers—for the show of it, Rielle knew. His abilities needed no outward trigger.

  Surrounding the pit, the elemental children snapped to attention. Echoes of their hoarse cries rang in the silence. Corien reached for a mechanism attached to the grating, pressed a catch. A door in the grating flew open.

  “Show her,” Corien commanded, his voice brimming with excitement. As soon as the word left his mouth, one of the children—a young boy, fair of skin and hair, gray-eyed and round-cheeked—raised his banded wrists.

  A crawler leapt up from the pit to latch on with cracked claws. Hanging there, it opened its wide mouth and howled.

  Every torch suspended from the grid overhead exploded to life. Roaring pendants of flame spewed from their brackets, filling the cavern with blazing light and heat. Metal plates molded around the beast’s chest, belly, and shoulders shone liquid with fire, matching the brilliance of the boy’s castings.

  Rielle stepped back from the inferno, her heart pounding as the truth became clear to her.

  The crawler’s armor was part of the child’s casting, binding them together. A pair of killers, pliable and pitiless. And whatever power lived in a godsbeast was no doubt enhancing the elemental magic the child already possessed.

  And Corien…

  Corien could control them—the children, and their beasts.

  He could control all of them.

  14

  Jessamyn

  “Translated from the formal Qaharis, ‘Vaera Bashta’ means ‘den of sorrows.’ This massive, cavernous facility, spanning two square miles beneath the city of Elysium, houses prisoners from every country in Avitas, and was designed by the Emperor, in His infinite wisdom, to torment its human inhabitants beyond repair.”

  —The Glory of Elysium: An Introduction to the Emperor’s City, compiled by the Invictus Council of Five for students of the Lyceum

  It happened twice a month, announced by five sharp blasts of the huge brass prison horns—some kept underground, others bolted to nearby rooftops in the city above.

  Jessamyn crouched on her perch in the prison of Vaera Bashta and watched the chaos unfold. In the common tongue, it was called the culling. In Lissar, it was cinvayat, and in Qaharis, it was praeori kyta. A time when all the locks in the prison’s fifteen wards were undone, all the doors thrown open.

  For three hours, thousands of prisoners were free to do as they pleased, to kill who they wished, to cower in the shadows and hope no one found them—until the angelic wardens forced them back into their cells.

  Jessamyn waited until the horn blasts had faded, then jumped silently down from the stone ledge overlooking section E3. The grated walkway below was empty, untouched by the chaos of the culling. It led to the solitaries, and the prisoners kept there were not allowed the same fun as the others. The solitaries were special. Many had personally affronted the Emperor. Conspirators. Dissidents.

  Brothers of stubborn princesses who refused to use their power as they ought to.

  The wardens had retreated to their offices, food and drink in hand—none of which would quench their thirst or satisfy their hunger, but the act of consuming it, Varos had long ago explained to Jessamyn, was satisfaction enough. At least for a time. At least until it wasn’t.

  As Jessamyn stalked down the empty walkway, the sounds of violence rang in her ears. Savage shouts as hunters pounced on their prey. Choked, wet cries as death claimed the weak. She caught only glimpses of the prisoners swarming through the dimly lit caverns below. A skinny boy, his shoulder blades protruding from his bare back like a pair of submerged knives, crawled through the shadows and whispered frantic prayers that no one would find him. Someone did; Jessamyn heard his stifled cry, the sound of bone smacking stone. To her right, marching toward the lower wards, a gang of men chanted in Borsvallic, brandishing torches they’d wrenched from the walls. To her left, a gang of half-naked children in filthy rags pounced upon an old man and dragged him to the ground.

  They were hungry. For some, this was a time to kill not for pleasure, but simply for a full belly.

  When Jessamyn at last reached the solitaries, the culling had faded to an echo. The corridor was carved from black stone, immaculate and silent. Two adatrox guards flanked door 14. Jessamyn prepared to order them aside, but they opened the door and stepped away before she could.

  She set her jaw as she breezed past them. She hoped that when the Empire had been elevated to its proper former glory, the use of adatrox soldiers would no longer be necessary. They could be useful tools, she supposed, but she hated their sightless gray eyes, the stupid, jerking way they moved. Controlled by angels, their own human minds flattened and ravaged—the adatrox reminded her of her own humanity, and how weak it was. How easily she could be invaded and manipulated, reduced to some puppet creature, if she failed to prove her worth to the Emperor.

  Someday, when she had earned her angelic name, and with it a place as an adviser to the Emperor, she would tell him this. And he would listen.

  A tiny chill of pleasure skipped down her arms as she imagined it. Since her appointment with the Emperor the day before, she had not been able to stop thinking of him. Blood-splattered, wild-eyed, and beautiful, whispering to her of the plan they would carry out together. Turn the boy Remy into a weapon. Use him to wear down the last of Eliana’s will.

  Show the little shit of a princess that the one person left to her in the world had become an eager pet of the enemy—all thanks to Jessamyn.

  Pride warmed her chest. If only Varos could have seen this day. He would never have doubted her again.

  Jessamyn stood tall in the door of Remy’s cell. He huddled in the corner. The air was foul and cold.

  “Wake up,” she commanded.

  A moment passed. Remy did not move.

  She stormed toward him, grabbed the collar of his prison tunic, and wrenched him to his feet.

  “Wake up,” she repeated, shoving him away with a snarl.

  He stumbled, wide-eyed, and managed to right himself. His bare feet slapped into a shallow dark puddle near the drain in the center of the floor.

  In silence, Jessamyn assessed him. He was a skinny bird of a boy. His head barely reached her shoulder. His matted hair had grown wild; his bottom lip was swollen and bloodied. Scratches marred his arms and feet. He stood with his shoulders hunched, his body curled forward as if to protect his middle.

  Jessamyn sup
pressed a swell of irritation. Presenting a mangy, half-dead child to the Council of Five as her new student would make her a laughingstock, no matter the Emperor’s orders.

  She would need time alone with Remy before anyone at the Lyceum got a good look at him. It was not only her reputation at stake but Varos’s as well.

  “My name is Jessamyn,” she told him. “You will come with me.”

  She turned and made for the door, but he did not follow. At the threshold, she glared over her shoulder.

  “Or would you prefer to stay here?” she asked calmly. “Alone and festering in the dark? Rotten scraps to eat and guards coming every morning to beat you?”

  At last, he spoke. “Is where you’re taking me worse?”

  That surprised her. Such a miserable-looking creature; he didn’t look as though he had any wits left about him.

  “Better in some ways, worse in others,” she answered, for there was no point in lying. She forced herself to gentle her voice. Let him think she could be a friend. “But you will see your sister. In fact, if you do as I tell you, there will soon come a time when you’ll be able to see her every day.”

  His face brightened. In his eyes shone a small light of hope.

  Jessamyn frowned as he limped to follow her. So there was softness in him yet.

  There would not be for long.

  • • •

  That night, Remy sat on a stool in Jessamyn’s room at the Lyceum, watching her closely in the mirror.

  “Your face is your biggest failing,” Jessamyn told him. A silver snip of her scissors. He had bathed, and now she was trimming his hair to a respectable length. “I can see every question you wish to ask, every emotion you feel.”

  She watched him attempt to school his features into a cold mask. It might have been humorous, had the Emperor’s words not still been whispering in her thoughts.

  Maybe he was watching them even now.

  Jessamyn glared at her muddled reflection in the scissors’ blades.

  “I understand,” Remy told her, his voice carefully even.

  “You understand nothing.” Jessamyn stepped back to check her work. “And if you want to survive, you will do everything I tell you. You will study, you will practice, you will train. You will eat what I eat. You will sleep when I sleep.”

  Remy fell silent, watching her as she tidied the room and swept the hair from the floor.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked quietly.

  Jessamyn did not look at him. When she had first been assigned to Varos, she had been a mere child. She had slept on a hard pallet on the floor of his bedroom. Many a night, she had lain awake, listening to him breathe and fighting sleep, for she knew she would wake with Varos’s hands around her throat and would have to fight him or fail yet another lesson. At first, she had been afraid of such tests.

  Later, she had come to crave them.

  Remy would be the same. And someday, Eliana Ferracora would see that light in his eyes and know all was lost. There was no reason to fight. There was only the Empire, and the glorious purpose of serving His Majesty the Emperor of the Undying.

  Jessamyn found her old pallet under the bed and threw it to the floor. It was brown with dust; the edges were frayed and patched.

  Then she turned and found Remy standing very near her, a placid expression on his face.

  One glance at the mirror showed her the scissors clutched behind his back.

  Fool boy.

  And she was even more the fool for letting memories distract her.

  With a snarl, Jessamyn snapped her hand to Remy’s throat, jabbing him in his windpipe. He dropped the scissors and staggered back, gasping for air.

  She followed him, smacked her palm hard against his ear, punched him just below his chest. He cried out with pain, fell to his knees. She had seen him favor his left side; he had a bruised rib, she suspected.

  In an instant, she had wrenched back his head, one hand in his hair. The other held one of the knives from her belt. She pressed the blade to his throat and leaned so close that her lips brushed his cheek.

  “Why am I doing this?” she asked, repeating his question. “Because He has chosen me to guard His works.”

  She yanked him to his feet, kicked his thigh. He fell once more, onto the pallet she had laid out for him.

  Jessamyn followed him. “He has chosen me to receive His glory,” she continued. It was the induction oath of Invictus, one she should have uttered before the Five with Varos standing proudly behind her.

  Remy scrambled up at her approach, tried to run. She grabbed the stool and threw it past him at the door. It smashed against the wall and splintered; Remy ducked to avoid the flying wood.

  “I am the blade that cuts at night,” Jessamyn said, following him. “I am the guardian of His story.”

  She grabbed Remy by his shoulders, forced him back toward the mirror. Standing behind him, her hands hard on his arms, she made him stare at his wide-eyed, tear-streaked reflection. Across his throat, a thin line of blood.

  “Someday, you will be too,” she said to him. “So the Emperor commands. It’s been done, Remy. The order has been given.”

  Then Jessamyn turned him around, caught him by his chin so their gazes locked. His mouth trembled; his eyes glistened with tears.

  “I will help you survive it,” she told him, and at least this much was true. “But try to hurt me again, and I’ll make you wish you were back in that cell, rotting away in the dark. Do you understand?”

  After a moment, Remy nodded. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and Jessamyn fought the urge to scold him for it. This was no ordinary student. She would have to tread carefully.

  “Good,” she said instead, and nodded toward the washbasin. “That was our first lesson. Now clean yourself up.”

  15

  Eliana

  “Bring me two hundred musicians. The ones we just disposed of were entirely inadequate, and you knew that when you presented them to me. Bring me composers who write their helpless mortality into every melody, singers with storms of grief in their lungs. Bring me people who wish they could stop listening to the music boiling in their blood but cannot, so they tear it from their bodies the only way they know how—through air and strings and drums and pen.”

  —Letter from His Holy Majesty, the Emperor of the Undying, to Admiral Ravikant, dated May 11, Year 1018 of the Third Age

  The words drifted through Eliana’s mind on a faint breeze: Will you hurt me to get her back?

  She stirred from a deep sleep and opened her eyes to a thick white fog. Her tongue was dry and fat, her limbs heavy. She wanted to walk, but she could not stand.

  So she crawled.

  • • •

  She reached a courtyard, then a clean hallway padded with a thick blue carpet. Sunlight streamed through arched windows bordered with colored glass, and Eliana found the strength to rise. At the end of the hallway stood a door, and through it, Simon’s office.

  Her palms tingled at the sight of it.

  Inside, she found him beside the open windows, dozing on a chaise with an open book on his chest. A breeze ruffled the pages.

  Eliana moved the book aside with a grin, climbed atop him, reached for his face—and then went very still, her hands hovering over his skin.

  He had opened his eyes and now gazed up at her with a sleepy smile. “What a sight to awaken to,” he said softly.

  She scrambled away and fled the room, her heart pounding. She clenched her hands into fists, ordered her buzzing palms to quiet. Around her hands, the chains of her castings shivered and sparked.

  Not here. She formed the thought and pushed it down her arms. Not ever again.

  • • •

  Eliana opened her eyes.

  Will you hurt me to get her back?

  “I don’t know who you are!” sh
e cried. “Who are you?”

  No one answered.

  She stood at the edge of a strange leafless forest. She did not like the look of it, but there was no choice but to enter.

  Moving through the trees, she realized too late that they weren’t trees at all. They were bodies in all colors and sizes, naked and staring. Their eyes were black and lidless.

  Angels, waiting for her to save them.

  The empirium had punished them, had stripped magic from the world.

  “Only you can bring it back,” one of the bodies whispered, and though it did not move, Eliana felt its fingers clutch at her skirts. “Only you can bring her back.”

  “Save us,” another wailed. “Help us see.”

  “We are ravenous.”

  “We are thirsty.”

  One shivered as she passed. “Touch me. Make me feel again.”

  “Find her.”

  Eliana clapped her hands over her ears and ran, the angels’ cries chasing after her. Heat from her palms scorched her skin, and her lips were wet with blood, but she kept her hands pressed tight against her skull.

  If she was going to burn, she would do it alone.

  • • •

  Eliana opened her eyes.

  Will you hurt me to get her back?

  She stared in horror at the man huddled on the ground at her feet. He had been pummeled; black bruises drew continents across his sallow skin. He clutched his stomach with one hand and reached for Eliana with the other. Between the fingers pressed to his abdomen, the end of his life bubbled crimson.

  “It was a ruse, Eliana,” Simon said, his voice ragged. “Please, help me. I did it all for you.”

  Eliana stepped back from him, her eyes burning as hot as her hands. “I can’t. I won’t.” She glanced at the sky. They were on a cliff, overlooking a range of bald mountains. The sky was red with sunset. Rings of blood marked her palms, rimming her castings. They were hot; they were ready.

  She denied them. Not here. She imagined plunging her hands into an icy pool, how her castings would steam and shrivel.