Realm of Ashes

by J. D. L. Rosell

  A woman’s muffled scream suddenly sounded from the alley she passed, and Corin’s hair stood on end. Despite herself, she glanced over. Four figures pressed down someone struggling in the dirt.

  Her back tightened, her hands bunching to fists. But four on one — long odds, too long, when those men looked armed and dangerous. And she wasn’t here for a stranger in an alley. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  Corin tightened her jaw and looked aside, pushing down the guilt and self-loathing. A bitter drink she was used to swallowing.

  It wasn’t long before the temple square came into view. Corin remained out of sight in the alley and scanned the area. Dusk had fully arrived. Two city guards stood at their post at the temple stairs. Corin crouched down to wait.

  She didn’t have to wait long. An acolyte exited the temple and, with an anxious look either way, scurried down the steps. As he neared the guards, they turned with stony expressions toward him. One extended a hand. The acolyte fished inside his robes for a moment before producing a bag. The guard took it with a grin and pocketed it. With a cursory look around, they sauntered away.

  It was the same routine they’d followed the other two nights she’d staked out the temple. If the rest of the routine held, she had less than a quarter-turn before four acolytes arrived with a covered ark. Corin found the frost’s calm. She was hard and cold as the age-old ice high upon Jolduun’s mountainsides. When her worries had stilled and her focus had sharpened to a fine edge, she stood and strode toward the temple entrance.

  No one stepped out to stop her. Sweeping her gaze behind, she found no watchers. Yet in an exposed square of this size, there were many places from which she could be watched. Corin lengthened her stride and took the stairs to the entrance two at a time. Reaching the doors, she looked around once more, then slipped inside.

  The corridors within were oppressive, especially for a woman of her height. Corin stifled her usual panic inside closed spaces and continued forward. Of the three passages, she took the left one, then followed it around a bend and down to the level below.

  After a narrow stairway, a square, unlit room opened up. Corin backtracked for a torch, then returned and looked about. The room had been used for moneylending when she’d last visited; now, it lay abandoned. Misgivings rose in her, but Corin pressed on, moving aside the curtains that hung at the back of the room and slipping into the narrow passage beyond.

  This corridor was lined with doors, and Corin moved slowly as she passed them. While she’d been to the prior room three times, she’d never been back here before. Always an acolyte had sat before the curtains, attending the ledgers for the debtors coming in. Corin had never been desperate enough to see what was beyond. Her pulse quickened. Would there be gold enough here to buy her sister’s freedom?

  A door behind her opened. Corin whirled, ripping the knife free of its concealing bag and holding the torch up behind her. Her face was cast in shadow, while the stocky man in robes she faced was blinded.

  He cried out and flung up a warding hand. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  Corin considered him for a moment. Though he was not in his red robes, she recognized the priest who had given her the order to betray Airene. The same as who threatened her sister’s safety. The frost’s calm thawing before her anger, she drew herself up to her full height. “Corin. A debtor.”

  “A debtor? Come back in the morning then.” The priest’s eyes darted to the steel glinting in her hand.

  She released the blade and let it fall. As the priest watched it clatter to the floor. Corin stepped forward, seized him by the robes, and shoved him roughly against the wall.

  The priest barely resisted, the futility of it in her strong grip. “What?” he sneered, his eyes wide. “Do you think to intimidate me?”

  “Tell me where you keep my sister, and I won’t kill you.”

  The priest’s eyes widened and his mouth twisted. She could smell the fear in his sweat. “Kill me? If you kill me, you’ll never recover your witch sister!”

  She slammed him against the wall so hard his head bounced against the stone. His eyes rolled once and a groan escaped him. Corin held him pinned there with one arm, the torch held close to his face, the heat uncomfortable and the light half-blinding. “Tell me where you keep my sister,” she repeated slowly.

  “I don’t know!” The priest’s voice had grown shrill. “I never knew! I was just to deliver you the messages. I never knew their plans for her—”

  “I need more information,” Corin informed him. “Or I don’t need you alive.”

  The priest blinked rapidly, his eyes wandering. She wondered if she’d shoved him too hard. “I — The high priest! He will know. We must ask the high priest!”

  “Where is the high priest?”

  “In the sanctum.”

  Corin considered it. It likely would be a trap. The acolytes with the ark could even now be entering the temple. Others might be guarding the sanctum. Yet she’d come this far. She couldn’t leave without knowing how to get to her sister.

  She stared hard at the priest. His eyes shifted away from hers. He wasn’t telling her all, she was sure of that. She wondered if she should kill him even if he told the truth. But as much as she wished to make him pay for the wrongs he’d dealt her sister, for the wrongs he’d made Corin do, he was more useful as a hostage. For now.

  Using the weight of her body, she heaved him to the ground. The graceless man barely caught himself as he tumbled. While he scrambled to his feet, she retrieved her knife and swiftly stood over him again.

  “Lead the way,” she commanded him. “And remain silent.”

  The priest went before her, ascending up the narrow stairway and back to where the passages met. There they took the center passage, the hallway only a little wider than the last. The priest seemed to regain more of his injured pride with every passing moment. Corin considered reminding him why he’d lost it in the first place, but decided it wasn’t worth the noise. They continued forward in silence, the priest only stopping to give small directions. Her nerves were on end as she gazed into each shadowy corridor they passed, but nothing was there. Yet still she felt watched, as if invisible eyes peered out from the walls.

  The passage slowly widened, then opened into a tall chamber. Cool, almost fresh air rushed around her as she entered. Corin shot rapid glances around the room. There were too many places a crossbowman could hide.

  The priest suddenly burst into a run, dashing away from her. “Intruder!” he yelled. “Murderer!”

  Corin cursed in her own tongue as she heeled in pursuit. “Stop!” she shouted. “Or I’ll kill you!”

  He ran slowly across the circle chamber, and she sprinted after him, thinking to catch him before he entered the next doorway. Before she could reach him, though, something moved out of the corner of her eye. Crouching and whirling around, Corin let the priest go as she took full stock of her new opponent.

  Her blood ran cold as her eyes fell on it. It wasn’t human. She wasn’t even sure it was a spirit. It seemed little more than two long bands of shimmering cloth, crossed and intersecting as if around an invisible body, drifting slowly through the air as if gliding through water.

  A Silk of Avvad, she realized. A daemon made manifest. One of the bound pyr that made the Imperium feared across the world.

  An unfamiliar lust reared inside her. She suddenly wanted to throw herself upon the Silk. She wanted to be consumed in its folds. Before she realized it, she’d taken several steps toward it, the torch and knife fallen from her hands as she reached out toward it. She wondered how soft it would be when she touched it.

  The outrider in her reared, and she jerked back. The Silk quivered, seeming to sense her resistance, then drifted forward quicker. The desire redoubled inside her, almost overwhelming her tenuous control.

  Gasping for breath, she thrust a hand into her trouser’s pocket. Her fingers closed around the vial secreted there. But even as she pulled it loose, she didn’t know what t
o do with it. The pyrkin could dampen a warden’s channeling. But what could it do against a daemon?

  She was barely aware of pulling at the vial’s stopper, her hands numb and weak. The Silk was mere paces away, the ends of its strands reaching toward her. Her skin shivered with anticipation.

  Then it touched her, and her skin began to peel away.

  18

  No One

  We have told ourselves this before: We do what must be done. But by our hand, how will the worlds be forged anew? But by our wills, how will the gods be appeased?

  All that is great comes with sacrifice. Better that the nation of our forebears falls than for these to be the final kingdoms the world knows.

  - Tales of the Desolate, uncensored; 1092 SLP

  As they finally pulled off my trousers, the cold, wet mud on my bare skin awoke a new depth of terror, vast and numbing. Even as I squeezed my legs closed, I knew the futility of it, and was confirmed as their rough hands forced them apart again. My cries went unheard, their leader still having his hand clamped tight over my mouth. The dusk mob passed by the alley entrance. Enraptured with rage, none of them noticed the five figures hunched over in the alley. Or perhaps none of them cared.

  I felt the fight dying inside me as a man knelt between my held-open legs. My mind fled my broken body, seeking any escape it could from its ending. And it would be the end, I had no doubt. I’d crossed Kalindi. I’d visited Talan and hadn’t told the Undermaster of his location. Now I’d pay his price.

  I watched as if from a distance as the man untied his pants, his three companions standing around him. Time slowed, drawing out the pain of the moment so thinly I fooled myself into thinking I no longer felt it. It was all I could do to stare at the scene. I was a warden. Yet I couldn’t stop the rape and death that were swiftly closing in on me.

  I pulled further away, fleeing. The man moved as slow as if through honey. Why prolong it? I despaired at my thinning sanity. Why make this moment linger? I wanted it over with. I wanted all the pain to stop. At least I deserved that dignity, didn’t I? I deserved to become nothing, no one. I deserved not to exist.

  I wrenched my gaze away, no longer able to watch the scene. As I looked up, surprise dampened the despair. Around me, Oedija had become mirrored, a thin layer of emptiness filling the gaps between them. I glanced down again at the scene below. The Guilder kneeling before me had still not fully taken off his trousers. On the street next to us, the dusk mob flowed like a river of molasses.

  I’d fled into the Pyrthae, and time had slowed. I’d channeled quintessence. But I couldn’t wrestle with what that meant now. My body was still below. I had to do something.

  But if I was going to do anything, I’d have to work quickly. I stared at the men surrounding my body. What quintessence could do to them, I didn’t know. I’d just have to try.

  I threw my Pyrthaen self down at my assaulters, heedless of what the speed might do to me. I aimed first for the man kneeling before me, his pants halfway down his thighs, his desire open for all to see. Screaming soundlessly, I reached my ghostly hands forward as I crashed against him with all the force I could muster.

  For a moment, I lost myself. Flashes of scenes filled me as I dove inside his mind. A boy skipping down a muddy street. A man beating a woman into the dirt floor of a house while a boy cried in the corner. A boy winning his first fistfight and feeling the glow of victory as the other boys clapped him on the back. The first whimpering girl he took in a dark, dirty alleyway.

  Rage brought me back to myself, and I wrenched myself away. I felt the Guilder’s pain briefly, then awareness ceased as I broke the connection. Soaring back into the sky, I glanced down to see the man collapsed over my legs, senseless, even as my body lay prone and unstaring up at the sky.

  I had to struggle hard to keep myself together. The foray into the man’s mind had left me weak and strained. I didn’t know if I could survive another attack. But seeing as I had no other weapon to fight with, I braced myself for a second dive.

  Cold as I’d never experienced before pierced my arm. Shocked, I tried wrenching myself away from whatever had seized me as I looked around. An amorphous cloud of flickering light hovered next to me. Only the hand thrust from it was distinguishable as human. But as its presence flooded me, I knew it wasn’t human.

  I’ve been waiting, the daemon gloated. Waiting for when your foolishness brought you here again. Now you are in my plane, human. You can’t escape!

  I cried out wordlessly and tried to resist. To my horror, I was losing my shape. My feet and hands began to grow indistinct, melting into glowing mist. Memories leaked from me in wisps of light, and I began to forget as they trailed away from me. Who am I? I thought desperately. Who am I supposed to be?

  You are mine. That is all you ever need be again.

  NO! Denial surged within me, shutting out the comfort of the lie. I pressed against the pyr’s foreign presence. Bit by bit, I forced it out of my awareness until I reached the boundaries of my body. Then I wrenched my arm away and floated to the side.

  The daemon didn’t follow, perhaps stunned by what I’d done. I didn’t wait to see if it would attack again but looked down, desperate for a way out. My body still lay prone beneath the Guilder I’d knocked unconscious, but no one else surrounded us. Not sparing a moment, I dove toward my body. I felt the pyr stirring behind, but didn’t turn as the world below rushed toward me. Even as I neared, I didn’t dare slow.

  I crashed into my body. As my mind melded with it, returning to its natural form, a flood of sensations washed through me. Everywhere hurt — I gasped and fought to keep above the pain. A ringing filled my ears, and my vision was blurred.

  But as strong as the pain was, my revulsion for the man draped over me was stronger. Summoning the last of my willpower, I heaved the limp man off of me, snatching up my trousers as I scampered back. My body shook as I pulled them back on, emotions twisting inside me. I shoved them down and dressed as quickly as I could, the mud smeared over my legs making the trousers stick and catch.

  I kept a fearful watch as I dressed, expecting at any moment to see three hooded figures running down the alley toward me. Why the Guilders had left, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps they thought both their companion and myself dead and didn’t care enough to check. Or perhaps they feared something — magic, or a daemon — had gotten to us and feared for their own lives. It didn’t matter. Either way, I had to flee before they gathered their courage and returned. I turned toward the street. The dusk mob had passed, leaving the street clear for me to travel. But something made me hesitate still. I glanced back down at the unconscious Guilder. He still lived. I sensed I’d have felt it if I’d killed him by entering his mind, or whatever I’d done.

  Before I could consider it further, my vision suddenly doubled, and I reeled as the world tilted beneath me. As my eyes fluttered open, I saw the mirrored Oedija again hung down above me. The daemon — he must have done something, pulled me out of my body! But as I looked around, I didn’t see him, and I felt myself anchored firmly to the ground.

  But someone watched me. Spinning around, I saw a shape floating in the strange light of the spirit realm. Eleven strands of gray cloth trailed from her robes, and her tilted eyes watched me with avid interest.

  “Clepsammia,” I muttered aloud, the name reverberating in my mind.

  The gray spirit smiled at me. Something in her smile made me uneasy, as if she knew something I had yet to discover.

  I stared up at her, waiting, expecting something to happen. My skin prickled with the danger. I knew Clepsammia, or whatever pyr took her form, might mean me harm. But I couldn’t summon the will to flee. With my head craned back, I felt so tired all I could was stare up at the Goddess of Fate and wait.

  Clepsammia drifted closer. Still wearing her eerie smile, she gestured, twisting around her hand with a finger extended like a spoon stirring a mug. I could only watch dumbly. Whatever she meant to say was beyond me.

  When she rushed
forward, I was barely conscious enough to startle. Yet I couldn’t escape. Clepsammia neared too rapidly, then she crashed into me.

  I stumbled backward, but felt myself lifting up. Exhaustion fled before the invigorating fire that filled me. The pain in my ribs lightened, and my head ceased to ache.

  A moment later, the heat faded, but some of its effects lingered. Though pain crept back in, I had the strength to remain standing, and my ribs didn’t threaten to double me over at every moment. The double-vision lingered though, and I looked up again at the gray woman floating through the Pyrthae.

  Clepsammia put a finger to her smiling lips. Then the Pyrthae shredded out of existence.

  I blinked as my vision returned to normal, and my mind returned to the present. The Guilder still lay at my feet. Dusk had taken hold, the afterglow of the sun fast fading. I’d escaped one trouble, but I had many others to evade. And though Clepsammia, or whoever that pyr was, had bolstered my strength, I felt it once more fast fading.

  Yet despite the urgency, I looked down at the Guilder. Part of me wished to finish what I’d started. Fear, pain, anger was a caustic solution burning as it wound its way through me. The knife Nomusa had given me still pressed against my back.

  It would only take a moment, part of me whispered. Just a quick slit across the throat. You’ve killed before. Why not end this despicable man’s life? He would have raped and murdered you. Why leave him alive? He’ll only do it to someone else.