Siege of Shadows

by Sarah Raughley

  “Agents are out trying to locate the remaining trainees of Fisk-Hoffman, assuming they’re alive. Communications is still attempting to track Saul, but he’s hidden his frequency. We don’t know where he’ll attack next. Of course, the usual method is to track phantom movements, looking for swells in activity, but we’ll always be at least a little late. The only way to get ahead of him is to find out who he is and what his goals are.”

  Which meant we needed Natalya. Marian. Me.

  “We know they’ll be coming for me eventually.” The dread I felt seemed the perfect reflection of the grim skies above. “Then again, Vasily seemed pretty confident that I’d go with them on my own. That I’d ‘listen to Jessie,’ whatever that means. Either way, I can’t rest easy.”

  I shut my eyes, ignoring the cold sting of the window against my temple. It was hard to imagine there was once a time I woke up every morning and ate Uncle Nathan’s pancakes. Being an Effigy had stolen the one connection from me I needed most right now. But worse still, it’d placed a target on my back.

  “We’ll be here with you.” She’d said it simply, her stern gaze never leaving the road ahead of us. “The three of us.”

  “The three of you . . .” I let the words fall to silence, but they lingered between us nonetheless. The three of us. Yeah. Being an Effigy may have stolen one connection from me, but it had given me others in its place. I couldn’t forget that. “Despite everything, we’re in this together, right?”

  Belle glanced at me and nodded. And with just that gesture, Natalya’s haunting spirit had been banished, the two of us freed if only for that fleeting moment. We were what I always wanted us to be. Mentor and protégé. Part of the same team. I didn’t know how long the feeling would last, but it was there, unmistakably. I smiled.

  Belle drove us into London, through the winding streets. There was a church on the corner of Friary Road, its large sundial beneath the steeple carved into stone.

  “A church?” I frowned as Belle parked by the side of the road.

  “Natalya brought me here once to train me,” Belle said, unbuckling her seat belt.

  “This place will help me scry?” I considered it. “Well, scrying requires calm,” I said. “I guess a church might make sense, but . . . I mean, I know you’re Catholic and all, but I’m not particularly religious.”

  “Neither am I.” Belle stepped outside. “And this is not a Catholic church,” she added before shutting the door.

  As I got out of the car, a scrawl of words written below the sundial caught my eye. “Et in . . .” I paused. “In tenebris . . .” I squinted, partly from the sun in my eyes. The Latin words were hard to read, chiseled too lightly on the plaque below the sundial. “Invenies?”

  “ ‘And among the shadows, you will find them.’ ”

  Without saying more, Belle walked up the stone steps and entered the church. I understood the second I entered through the arched doorway and saw the solemn march of black robes down the long aisle. Rich, haunting chords from the church organ gave the procession its rhythm, and never once did they fall out of sync. Even their hands were sheathed in black gloves as they carried tall candles to the altar at the front of the church, where a man in flowing white robes spread out his arms, ready to receive them.

  Phantoms painted black across the white walls . . . “Wait, this is . . . this is that death cult,” I said, my voice hushed because the old man sitting in the last pew stirred and looked back at us once the door slammed shut behind us. “You’re kidding me. They’re Scales, Belle.”

  “The Deoscali,” Belle said simply, using the “proper” term, as if we somehow needed to respect a group of psychos who thought getting eaten by phantoms was some kind of honor.

  I’d heard they did rituals and worshipped phantoms in “churches” like these before going on pilgrimages into Dead Zones through illegal networks and letting phantoms kill them. They were probably in the middle of one now. Montreal’s Cirque de Minuit may have had an unhealthy fascination with using phantoms for entertainment, but they did everything on the level and kept people safe. Then you had Scales, who took unhealthy fascination to a whole new level.

  Not very many people out there bent the law in order to get killed.

  Motioning me to follow her, Belle took her seat in the second-to-last pew. Disgusted, I trailed behind her nonetheless.

  That was when the old man launched himself at me.

  “Effigy!” he spat as he grabbed me by the collar and pushed me back out of the pew. “You’re not welcome here. . . .”

  He tried to push me again. Swiftly, I shoved him back into his pew and held my foot against his chest to pin him down.

  “Okay,” I said, no longer bothering to keep my voice low. “And you want to tell me why you took me to some den of phantom-worshipping death cult nutjobs? Especially when they hate us?” I added as the old man struggled against my foot.

  “Not all of us,” said the priest standing at the pulpit. Despite the commotion of the attack, the procession hadn’t even stopped shuffling toward him until he put up his delicate hand. He’d tied his wavy brown hair in a ponytail behind his giraffe neck, showing the contours of his soft, small face. “Joseph, please escort Mr. Goffin out of the church.”

  A large man who’d been standing silently by one of the white pillars nodded at the order.

  “Yeah, teach him some manners while you’re at it,” I said as Joseph grabbed the cursing man by the arm and began dragging him out.

  “Pastor Charles,” Belle said as the man came near us. “I thought you had made some progress with your teachings.”

  I straightened my blouse. “What teachings? Or do I want to know?”

  The halted procession had turned to take a look at us and finally I could see each of their faces, all manners of shapes, sizes, and shades, but each with the same fear tinged in a slight hint of distrust. Scales were stupid enough to worship the monsters responsible for terrorizing mankind. Of course, this made Effigies the bad guys. We were like their Lucifer or something.

  “Please sit,” Pastor Charles told us. “Let us finish here. Then we’ll speak.”

  When Pastor Charles asked the procession to continue, they did so, but only reluctantly. After prying their eyes from the two Effigies at the back of the church, they managed to complete their ritual, marching up the steps of the pulpit platform, circling the altar with their candles. I watched from my seat while their quiet chants rumbled low to the floor like the silent tremors of an earthquake. It was hard to concentrate for those ten minutes that they “gave thanks” to the beasts they called the spirits of life and death, “for where life begins, so too must death.”

  “The spirits, you see,” Pastor Charles explained once the procession had ended and the worshippers had left, “are agents of both.”

  “Spirits.” I stood up with Belle. “That’s what you’re calling them? Is that the politically correct term? Or are you trying to make phantoms more marketable and cult-friendly?”

  “Phantoms are not spirits,” he said. “Phantoms are of spirits. But they are not spirits. The spirits’ existence is what allows for life and death to occur naturally in the world. In that way, they are also agents of fate.”

  Walking up the aisle, he spread open his arms as if the painted phantoms would tear themselves from the wall and fly to him.

  “Life and death.” Pastor Charles kept his hands behind his back as he spoke to us. “During our present lives, they maintain that balance, giving us the tools we need to live. They are in all things. They are our souls, the souls of nature, animals, the elements, the universe. They never leave us. They are with us always, even if we cannot see them. Feel them.”

  Closing his eyes, he breathed in the air as if he didn’t look crazy enough.

  “And when we die, our spirits leave our bodies and join the chorus before it’s time to be reborn again. Maia, these spirits are not our enemies.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite.” I tilted my head. “You s
aid phantoms weren’t spirits. They were of spirits. Now, I have no idea what you mean, but all this weird crap just sounds to me like you’re trying to let phantoms off the hook for what they do. If that’s the case, then I’ve seen enough of their handiwork to respectfully disagree with you on that, sir,” I told him.

  I didn’t dare close my eyes, even for a second, because if I did, I’d see the dead bodies of all the people I’d failed to save.

  “The phantoms are not spirits,” he insisted. “Indeed, phantoms are evil,” he agreed, surprising me. “But the spirits are not. Neither are the Effigies. And that is what I’ve always tried to teach here.”

  “What do you—”

  “Pastor Charles,” Belle interrupted. “I called you earlier about a request.”

  “Ah, yes.” He nodded. “And this is Maia Finley.”

  Despite his incredibly twisted point of view, he seemed nice enough. I shook his hand. “I don’t agree with you at all, but it’s nice to meet you.”

  “Come.” He flicked his head toward the front of the church. “We’ll take her to the cellar.”

  We followed him through a door at the rightmost corner of the church, which he opened with a key. He continued to explain his philosophy as he led us down the corridor.

  “The common perception of the Deoscali is that we worship phantoms. And you’re not wrong.” His white robes skidded across the stone floor. “It’s a common perception among the Deoscali as well. But this is only a corruption of the true teachings handed down to us—the teachings of Emilia Farlow, the originator of our church.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Which are?”

  “That it is the spirits who are agents of life, death, and fate. Not the phantoms. You see, we Deoscali are a relatively new religious group. The practice of worshipping phantoms began just shortly after the phantoms appeared themselves, but it quickly devolved into the blood-worshipping cult you’ve probably grown to disdain. I, too, once fell prey to this ideology.” And he looked like he regretted it. He shook his head. “Many view Effigies as the enemy. Groff grew up believing this. He only recently joined us here at this church. An uncomfortable amount of Deoscali have even come to believe in the terrorist Saul as a kind of a prophet, an envoy of the phantoms.”

  Saul, a prophet. It really didn’t take much to get people to believe in garbage.

  “I’ve been trying to rehabilitate some of these wayward thoughts. One can only hate the Effigies if you worship the phantoms. But the phantoms are not the spirits. The spirits only exist in the world as silent shadows, protecting the world without ever being seen.”

  “A world of shadows . . . ,” I whispered as Saul’s words from that night in Marrakesh bubbled up in my memories.

  “As I said, they are agents of life, death, and thus fate, existing all around us, existing in us, connecting us in a cosmic chain crossing space and time. They only become phantoms when something provokes them: a great sin, a great evil. The phantoms are a manifestation of that imbalance. Only then do they become beasts of nightmare.”

  It felt like semantics, a way to ease the guilt of worshipping monsters, but he was earnest enough as he spoke.

  “Oh, yeah?” He was probably so into his own babble, he didn’t notice the mocking edge I’d slipped into my voice. He didn’t show one way or another. An eerie serenity possessed him as he spoke about his beliefs. Creepy, to say the least, but maybe all religious types were like that. “So then, what are we?”

  “The Effigies.” Pastor Charles breathed a sigh as he considered us as if we were the one puzzle he hadn’t yet cracked. “Farlow’s writings spoke at length about the spirits and the phantoms. But only one time did she ever refer to the four of you.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “That you were blessed.” Pastor Charles grinned down at me. “Perhaps it was the spirits that gave you your gifts. Perhaps you’re more connected to them than any of us will ever be.”

  My family was never that religious. While many had taken to the refuge of the steeple to explain the existence of the phantoms, others like us chose to just take things as they were, but for me at least, I’d always figured there was a god. God. Magic. Spirits. Effigies and monsters. What was true? Or was it all true in this world where the impossible was possible?

  I shook my head. “So what’s in the cellar?” I asked as we turned a corner and started down a flight of stairs.

  “I met Natalya, the fire Effigy before you, about a year before her unfortunate death,” Pastor Charles said, and I felt Belle go rigid beside me. “She was curious about my views, about why my teachings differed from the usual discourse of the Deoscali. And one day, during our discussions, I showed her this.”

  The cellar looked more like a crypt. A small, square room, it was built entirely of gray slabs of stone, dark but for the sunlight streaming through one clover-shaped window.

  But there was something else about this room, something I couldn’t name. A silence hung in the air, so heavy I could feel it whispering against my skin. And when I breathed in, something primal in me lifted its head and groaned, a slight tremor stirring me from the inside.

  “What is this place?” I asked, staring down at my tingling hands as if I’d never seen them before. At the far corner of the room, one of the stone slabs had writing etched into it, but I couldn’t make out the words from here.

  “It feels wonderful, doesn’t it?” This time, when he lifted his head and closed his eyes, I understood why. There was something here, something that cast shadows of stillness over us. “Many years ago, when I was still young and misguided,” Pastor Charles said, “I was fortunate enough to go on a spiritual pilgrimage with a traveling sect of the Deoscali. It’s where I learned to return to the old teachings of Farlow. And where I learned there are many secrets in this world. Secrets beyond the old dichotomy of phantoms and Effigies.”

  “He calls this cellar the Listen,” Belle told me, gesturing toward the chamber. “It’s the same as I remember it. You can feel the cylithium here, can’t you?”

  I did. Cylithium existed in nature, and in some areas it was more concentrated than others. Those were the areas human populations stayed away from, the areas where phantoms sprang forth. But it was different here. The atmosphere seeped inside me, a targeted assault on my nerves, but strangely soothing all at once. Even though I knew London’s antiphantom municipal defense was strong, I half expected phantoms would suddenly emerge in front of us, growing their limbs and bones and putrid flesh from thin air as they always did in cylithium-rich areas. But nothing happened. A strange sort of peace washed over me.

  “Calm,” I whispered. “I feel calm.”

  “For only in the calm can you hear them speak,” the pastor said as if reciting lines from a text. “The leader of that sect had a cellar like this built in an old chapel where she would rest every so often. She used it to meditate, to commune with the spirits.”

  When I breathed in deeply, my bones felt like liquid. “How did you draw so much cylithium here?” Like most cities, this wasn’t a cylithium-rich area. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he answered. “The religious sect I told you about—they were kind enough to build one in my church, though they refused to share its secrets and I haven’t been able to find them since. Natalya meditated in this place once or twice before, to do what you call scry, particularly when her mind was too perturbed to achieve meditation on her own. You Effigies have your own way of connecting with spirits of this world, it seems.”

  Spirits. No, not spirits; it was the cylithium resonating with what I had inside me. Had to have been.

  “Go ahead,” Belle said. “Find out as much as you can from Natalya. Try to reach Marian.”

  My body felt heavy, my heels tingling with each step toward the center of the room. The dense air dried me out inside. It was as if the warmth of my palms and the flush of my face had been sucked out through the skin. And my thoughts seeped out with it.

 
The secrets of the world.

  Sighing, I sat quietly on the ground and closed my eyes.

  Something shivered past my cheek, and I opened my eyes with a shudder, but there wasn’t anything else here. Concentrate. Ignore the presence of Charles and Belle. Keep everything out. The breathing techniques Belle had taught me were useful enough to calm my nerves, but this was more intense: the rich energy in the air, the silence, the feeling of my sensations dying off inside me.

  I listened and heard it: her humming. The same tune. Always the same tune. It was her song that carried me into the recesses of my own mind.

  The water was still against my ankles. Ah, the white stream. I’d seen it many times before, ever since Saul had forced me into my own subconscious in New York. That’s when I started to see their memories, the Effigies who’d fought before me. For a long time, I’d bumbled carelessly, recklessly through Natalya’s thoughts, picking up only jagged pieces of a frame. But, as Belle had taught me, this was the proper route. Here in the white stream with the thick fog surrounding me. And the red door, large and magnificent, like the entrance to a palace. The door to her memories. The first door of many, perhaps.

  But this time, Natalya was not guarding it.

  I felt the tip of her sword against the bare skin of my neck, just above my neck-band.

  “This . . . thing,” Natalya said in her Russian accent, softly clinking her sword against the steel plate. “You let them cage you. You trust too easily.”

  “What’s wrong?” I kept my voice as still as my breath. Losing my cool wasn’t an option. My nerves were a latch Natalya could use to open the window into my body. “Mad because you can’t go running around in my dreams anymore?”

  “Your dreams. My memories.” Natalya laughed lightly through closed lips. “We were becoming closer, you and I. The barrier between us isn’t as solid as you would like to think. Who knows, we may become closer still.”

  “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” I hissed. “It would just make it easier for you to steal my body.”