Ravencaller

by David Dalglish

  So naïve. So stupid. So hopeless.

  Alone in a dark alley, still surrounded by fleeting memories of the dead, Dierk sobbed and sobbed, utterly convinced he was the loneliest, unluckiest, most miserable person in all of Londheim.

  INTERLUDE

  Fredrik Milles stood on the smooth shores of Oris, an easel wedged into the sand before him and a stick of black chalk in his left hand. He drew long, arcing lines across his canvas, molding the ever-moving ocean into fixed curls and waves. Fredrik had traveled throughout the Cradle in his youthful days, but now that he was in his seventies and the tastes of the wealthy clientele had shifted firmly over to inks, he no longer felt the same need to explore. His weekly sketches and scribbles of the ocean were enough to satisfy his subdued creative drive.

  “The water’s angry today,” a fisherman named Perry said as he paused on his walk to the market, a string of fish slung over his shoulder. Every day Perry liked to stop and chat before leaving the coast with his haul. It was never about anything serious, just the ways of the weather and the shifts in the tide.

  “Looks like some aren’t intimidated,” Fredrik said. With the approach of winter, the city’s beaches had fallen quiet but for the fishermen and a small group of men and women swimming several hundred yards down shore.

  “Eh, they’re young,” Perry said. “They still think death is for other people.”

  A few more minutes of idle talk and Perry was on his way. Fredrik turned his attention to his canvas, and he decided his drawing didn’t quite catch the same anger the fisherman talked about. He brushed his stained thumb over lines, smoothing waves to shadows and highlights to match new, bolder lines. The ocean did seem strangely hostile today. The waves came crashing in with rare speed, and they pulled out farther than usual on the retreat.

  An omen of a bad winter? he wondered. Nearly every town and city had similar signs they believed portended a bad harvest, a scorching summer, or a season of storms and tornados. Some bore truth, while others were nonsensical superstitions. Fredrik’s personal favorite from his travels was a village where the elderly forced a frog to hop toward multiple sticks, with each stick representing a good, mediocre, or poor harvest. How a frog possessed this knowledge baffled him, but his painting of the town crowded around the small track had sold for a nice chunk of gold crowns, so he wasn’t one to judge. Let simple people believe in superstitions and magic. It did no harm.

  The ground rumbled beneath Fredrik’s feet, strong enough that he had to grab his easel and hold it steady. He immediately looked to the swimmers. They may think their youth protected them from the cold, but a sudden quake like that meant strong waves that would make a mockery of their slick bodies. Thankfully he saw fishermen farther down shouting at them. Witnessing a drowning would be a sorry start to the day.

  “Shit,” Fredrik muttered when he realized the sudden shifting of the sand had caused his hand to errantly scrape across his drawing. Years ago such a mistake would have left him furious, but long gone were the days of him painstakingly detailing one image over weeks. He let out a long sigh and wondered if he could integrate the mark somehow, perhaps as part of a pier or a fishing pole…

  Again the ground shifted, and this time he could hear its deep rumble. Distant voices screamed. Fredrik was torn between watching the receding shoreline or checking the buildings behind him for collapse. The strangeness of the ocean kept him still. The way the water moved, it defied his understanding. Pulling down, draining, yet at the same time rising in scattered, uneven portions unlike any waves he’d ever witnessed.

  And then the dragon’s head emerged from the water.

  It bore six eyes, three on each side of its head. To call them eyes seemed strange, for they looked like enormous sapphire boulders. Its scales were slabs of emerald. The teeth of its gaping mouth were diamond. This gemstone monstrosity had a body like a snake, and as it continued to rise above the waters, Fredrik’s mind struggled to comprehend the impossibility of its existence. Its body… it continued for miles and miles, a winding, seaweed-covered serpent taller than buildings and longer than the horizon.

  All others fled, but Fredrik would not. He tossed his current picture aside to reveal the second canvas beneath. His chalk sliced across its blank surface. Fredrik had drawn many wonders in his life, but they all paled compared to the gemstone dragon. He relied on fierce dedication to overwhelm his terror. His mind may disbelieve, but drawing it made it real. He sketched its gold whiskers, each the thickness and length of a Helwoad Pine. He formed deep divots with the chalk to represent the ruby slabs that coated its underbelly, which was barely visible from the tilt of its neck as it approached. If only he had his paints! Their color would fail to capture the dragon’s true wonder, but at least it would showcase it better than his black and gray scribbling.

  A wave crashed up to his knees, but Fredrik clung to his easel and kept steady. The dragon was close now, so close. He feared his heart would break from how heavy it pounded within his chest. The dragon’s chin scraped along the sand, carving itself a pathway. The shift of sand, the flow of water, it was deafening, yet the assault on his ears meant little compared to how its very existence scrambled Fredrik’s mind. Monsters and magic did not exist. Though fantastical drawings of faeries and goblins were popular, he had never painted such flights of fancy. To stand before such a thing threatened to completely break his mind down to nothing and then wash him away like sand upon the tide.

  The mouth stretched open, a yawning chasm with diamonds for teeth and a slick coating of onyx for a tongue. The chalk slipped from Fredrik’s hand. There were no words to offer. His mind was as blank as his canvas at the start of his early mornings. From within that endless darkness walked a woman in a flawless silver dress. Her skin was smooth as water and black as obsidian. The perfection of her face would be the envy of every rich heiress throughout Oris. Her blue eyes held him captive. Her raven hair, so long it hung to her ankles, taunted his mind with its playful swish. Her only decoration was a thin silver crown woven through her hair and studded with sapphires.

  “Can you write?” she asked him. Her voice was clearer than any instrument crafted by the hands of humanity.

  “I can,” he said. By comparison, his voice was harsh and rough as sand.

  “Then write a message for me, human, and bring it to your queen.”

  Fredrik flipped his canvas over to its back. His first wedge of chalk was long gone to the waves, but he kept a spare in his vest pocket. He withdrew it with shaking fingers and gently pressed it to the canvas.

  “What shall I write?” he asked.

  “By order of Chyron the Beautiful, you are to release your hold upon the lands you call West and South Orismund, to allow the humans there to become countries free of the crown.”

  Fredrik wrote the words, baffled by the demand and unsure of how the Queen might respond. He knew her as an acquaintance, one luxury afforded him by his prestigious career. She was not one to give in to threats.

  “You ask for much,” he dared say. “We have fought wars to keep Orismund united. Why would she relinquish those lands now?”

  Chyron stepped closer. Something of her demeanor changed. She seemed taller, her eyes darker, and her dress sparkling with unseen power.

  “Tell her to do as I command, or I shall bury Oris beneath the waves.”

  Her crystalline lips kissed his cheek. All the world froze. Even the waves were like immutable stone. Fredrik tucked the canvas underneath his arm and ran every step of the way past the beachside shops, through the three-story homes of Seaside District, over the bricks of the Sparkling Bridge, and to the palace gates of Queen Woadthyn the Ninth. It was only then, when he touched the shoulder of a guard manning the giant ornate doors, that the world resumed its proper pace.

  “A message for the Queen,” Fredrik said, and thrust the drawing toward the surprised and frightened guard moments before his legs gave way and his heart shuddered its last.

  CHAPTER 23

&
nbsp; The cell door slammed shut behind Adria with a violent clang. Tamerlane rubbed and stretched his jaw as she leaned against the bars and watched him.

  “That contraption never gets comfortable,” he said. “So, do you have news to share of the outside world? I can tell from the whispers of the guards that something exciting happened over the past few days, but they don’t feel the need to share with their lowly prisoner.”

  “I can’t imagine why not,” she said dryly. Deakon Sevold was just a few cells over, struggling to breathe under the care of a physician and two Faithkeepers. It’d be a constant reminder to the guards why Tamerlane was imprisoned in the first place.

  “So please, do fill me in,” the man insisted. “The world is changing at a rapid pace, and I’m down here blind to most of it.”

  “Magical creatures have taken control of Low Dock and repelled any attempts to reclaim it. They’ve renamed it Belvua, and are petitioning the Mayor to acknowledge the territory as theirs.”

  “Low Dock?” he asked. “Isn’t that your district?”

  “It was.”

  Tamerlane tilted his head, and again she felt naked before his golden-eyed stare.

  “What was it like?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The night the creatures came for Low Dock. What was it like?”

  She pulled the edges of her ridge cloak more tightly about her and suppressed a shiver. Goddesses, it was so cold down there. She almost felt pity for Tamerlane’s lack of blanket or extra clothing beyond his torn Mindkeeper robes.

  “They surrounded my church and demanded my death,” she said. “To hang from the steeple of my church, to be specific. Ravencallers were with them. A fine bunch you have thrown your lot in with.”

  “It may surprise you, Adria, but I am not actually a Ravencaller, even if I have read the Book of Ravens and found it intellectually stimulating.”

  “And why not?”

  “It was once a mystery, but with this old magical world returning, the Book of Ravens’ purpose is now blatantly revealed. It argues that humans are not the dominant life upon the Cradle, and the Goddesses not the perfect, flawless creators we have been led to believe.”

  Adria’s mind raced over the early pages of the book, chastising herself for not having read the entire thing. She’d been much too focused on the curses than the sophomoric religious rants.

  “And what is it you disagree with?” she asked.

  “We humans are the dominant species,” he said, as if it were obvious. “And it will take far more than an old book to convince me otherwise. But I digress. These magical creatures wanted you dead, yet obviously you stand before me, alive. How did you survive?”

  Adria questioned herself for the twelfth time that morning since deciding to come visit Tamerlane. Whatever Janus had done to her, there was no scripture or scroll within their archives detailing its significance. And now that Tamerlane had shaken her trust in her own Vikar, she feared to fully reveal her newfound power to anyone in the church. Having so few to discuss this change with stifled her mind and left her frustrated. But in this dark cell was a man physically bound to silence and possessing knowledge into things she was only beginning to understand.

  “I survived by killing them until they let us go free,” she said.

  “Did you?” Tamerlane asked, his eyebrows arcing upward. “With another curse?”

  Adria swallowed down her fear.

  “No,” she said. “With this.”

  Though a wall was between her and the nearby guard, the light of his soul was an easily visible star to her eyes. She wrapped her mental fingers around it and beckoned it to come. The soul detached from the guard’s head with a metaphysical shudder and then passed through the stone. She set it to swirl about her body, starting from her legs and ending in a hover just above her open palm.

  Tamerlane fell to his knees, and it looked like he might cry from the sight of her.

  “The power to command a soul,” he whispered.

  A flick of her fingers and she sent the soul crashing back into the guard’s body. After a few seconds of smoothing it down, the guard was back to normal. She heard him coughing and shaking his head, no doubt convinced he’d undergone a strange and violent dizzy spell.

  “That is my gift,” she said softly. “That is how I took the lives of the magical creatures.”

  Wonder lit his face with light long denied him within the dungeon cells.

  “How?” he asked. “Please, tell me, I must know.”

  “An answer for an answer,” she said. “Tell me how to un-curse the Deakon, and I shall tell you how I became what I am.”

  For the very first time since meeting him, she witnessed his confidence falter. His desire for knowledge rivaled even Thaddeus’s. Adria waited with bated breath.

  “No,” he said. “I cannot.”

  “Because you do not know how?”

  “Because my curiosity is not worth that monster living another second without pain and suffering.”

  Adria was shocked by his sudden rage. Tamerlane had always been so cocksure, as if even his own imprisonment was beneath his worry.

  “Why did you curse the Deakon?” she asked.

  The man quickly soothed his rage. A false smile returned to his face.

  “Finally you ask the obvious question. Have you not wondered why this whole time?”

  “I guess I thought it self-explanatory,” she said. “You’re a Ravencaller, or at least, something close to it. Of course you would hate the Deakon.”

  “Come now, that’s it? You’re far wiser than this. You understand the complexities of this world. Do I seem a man who would curse and harm another for no reason other than a lame belief that it’s what I am ‘supposed’ to do?”

  Heat flushed into Adria’s neck. Damn it, how did Tamerlane keep making her feel so foolish? She was a learned scholar of the church. For him to twist her mind around so easily, it didn’t just shake her confidence in herself. It shook her confidence in all the dogma and tradition she’d spent her life immersed within.

  “No, you seem like a man with a clear purpose for everything he does.”

  “Very good. Then let me ask again… why do you think I cursed the Deakon?”

  “Because you believed he deserved it,” she said. “All else is complete conjecture.”

  Tamerlane clapped his hands twice, the mockery almost enough for her to rip his soul out of his body just to spite him.

  “Indeed, but what fabulous conjecture it is. Was it deviancy? Hypocrisy? Did I interrupt dark plans and conspiracies, or was it in self-defense? I knew him well, Adria. I worked with him closely in the cathedral. We spent years collaborating on sermons and letters. What might break me? What would create such wrath within my heart? Perhaps the question you should be asking yourself is not ‘how do I un-curse the Deakon’ but instead ‘should I un-curse the Deakon?’”

  Adria stepped closer, and her voice fell to a whisper.

  “What did the Deakon do?” she asked. “What great sin did he commit?”

  “Not yet,” Tamerlane said. “You’re close, very close, but you’re not ready to believe me.”

  “I could take the answer from you,” she said. “I could tear your soul from your body and peer through its memories like pages in a book.”

  “And yet you haven’t,” Tamerlane said. “That alone is how I know you are not ready to hear the truth. You fear it. If the Deakon is a vile being, and worthy of his curse, well…” He slumped against the wall of his cell and sat. “Then you might have to do something reckless. Something that might land you in serious trouble with your beloved Keeping Church.”

  Adria stretched her hand out toward him. Tamerlane’s body stiffened, as if he could feel her mind grabbing at the edges of his soul. It’d be so easy to pull it free, she thought. All his pride and intellect would mean nothing compared to her raw power. Every answer she sought, the counter to the mutilation curse, the supposed dark secret the Deakon
harbored, all naked before her. He could not stop her. He could not resist.

  But she could not bring herself to do it.

  Tamerlane collapsed to the ground, and he gasped from a breath he’d held for the past minute.

  “I’m leaving,” she said, whether to him, the guard, or herself, she didn’t know. She exited the cell and hurried down the cramped corridor.

  “Slay your fear,” Tamerlane shouted after her. “It is your one fatal flaw.”

  The guard she’d withdrawn the soul from nodded at her as she passed, the leather gag swinging in his fingers.

  “Don’t listen to the bastard,” he said. “Trust me, he even gets in Thaddeus’s head.”

  Once outside the dungeon, Adria walked the streets of Londheim, her hands clutching the rabbit-fur trim of her cloak and holding it tightly shut. The souls of those passing by were distant stars to her deeply sunken mind. Slay your fear, he’d said, as if it were a simple thing. Her wounded pride insisted she wasn’t afraid. She had power. Authority. People had begun to sing praises to her name. What could possibly frighten her?

  Her feet rooted in place. She shook her head in shame. No, she was certainly afraid. Despite her desperate need to understand her new condition, she’d not done the one obvious thing to seek answers. She closed her eyes, not caring she blocked the center of the street. She meditated on her fears, and on conquering them. Her knees turned to liquid, and already her heart beat faster at the thoughts overwhelming her. Of blue mist rising at her feet. Of walls coursing with starlight-filled veins.

  “Damn you, Tamerlane,” she seethed. “Goddesses fucking damn you.”