Authors: Liane Merciel
“Did he?” Evenna asked, offering the other Illuminer a cup of tea.
Falcien held the cup without drinking as he continued
his pacing. “
They
did. Near twenty of them. I'll spare you the recitation of their deeds. But they had a pattern: the killers extracted the victims' bones after every slaying; sometimes that was what caused the death. Cannibalism appears repeatedly in their crimes, and almost all of them attacked children in preference to other victims. They were mostly people with no history of violence, and many had become religious shortly before the killings. Several complained of bad dreams, and some wrote complicated rune circles or prayers in languages they had no way of knowing. Protective prayers,” he finished. “Like Laedys'.”
“How do you know so much about them?” Asharre asked. The few gaolers she'd known had been an uncouth, illiterate lot. They considered themselves put upon if they had to list their prisoners' names and crimes. Not one would have kept such detailed records.
“The town gaoler was one of the first to go mad. He murdered every prisoner in his charge. After his execution, the solaros took up his duties. He knew
something
inhuman was at work, if not what, and wrote down all he could about the killings as they happened. He was trying to puzzle out the
why
behind the slaughter, just as we are.”
“Then we should go to the chapel,” Evenna said. “If the solaros was struggling to piece together the mystery, he might have left something useful there. We'll go after dinner.”
No one objected, although no one looked enthused by the prospect. Their meal was short and somber. Heradion tried a few jests, but stopped when the others refused to laugh. At sunset the two Illuminers prayed together, moving through the graceful sequence of the dusk ritual with fluid synchronicity. Asharre practiced the Sun Knights' prayer on her own; she had no use for the invocation, but her muscles needed the work.
When the prayer ended, Heradion strapped on his sword, Asharre swept her travel-stained cloak back over her shoulders, and the four of them went out to the chapel.
Carden Vale's chapel was neither large nor rich; the town had worshipped another god in its youth, and the Celestian chapel had been built well into its decline. Taller buildings surrounded the plain stone dome, but it was set to catch the lightâif any had broken through the day's gloomy graynessâand it was favorably situated at a crossroads near the town's heart. No matter where they started, the convergence of the roads would have brought them to its doors.
Those doors were marred with gouges and blunt, splintered dents. The entablature was chipped; the windows nearby were broken. Those that remained whole were crudely daubed with the sunburst she'd seen on houses elsewhere: four arms over four, rendered in thick red strokes that strangled the light falling through. Rubble was piled knee high before the door, and some of it was stained with blood.
It unsettled her to see such brutal scars on this holy place. Other than the marks on their windows, the other buildings in Carden Vale were undamaged, but here the memory of rage hovered like a living spirit in the air. There had been hatred here, hatred as strong as if the long-dead Baozites had risen to find their ancient enemy's temple on their land.
“Who would do this?” Evenna asked softly, to silence. The young Illuminer stepped forward, picking her way carefully over masonry and fallen blocks. She laid her hands over the damaged wood, as if she could heal its wounds, then pushed inward gently. The door gave way with a shudder.
Inside, the devastation stopped abruptly. It was as if the invaders, having forced their way in, immediately lost interest. The only damage Asharre saw was a series of scrapes on the floor where some barricading object had been forced back by the hammered doors. The barricade itself, whatever it had been, was gone.
The rest of the small antechamber was undisturbed. It held pegs for cloaks and benches for aged worshippers to rest while they waited. An ever-flowing bowl, enchanted so that water flowed in equally from all sides of its rim and created the illusion of stillness in the center of perpetual motion, stood on a pedestal to one side. The bowl was a common symbol in Celestian temples; it invited visitors to wash the dirt from their hands and the weariness from their bodies, ritually purifying them before they proceeded into the sanctum. Straight ahead, a low arch, wide enough for two men to walk abreast, led to the main prayer hall. Rows of pews waited in dusty silence there.
“This place is desecrated,” Evenna whispered as she led them in.
If it was, Asharre could not feel it. There was a coldness in the air, and a whiff of rot, but it was nothing compared to the ugliness she'd seen in Laedys' cottage.
The other Celestians, however, seemed to agree with Evenna. Even Heradion, never the most pious of souls, frowned and ran a thumb over his sword's pommel as he stepped across the threshold. He eyed the ever-flowing bowl as if he expected the water to turn to lye at any moment, and he kept close to the two Illuminers. Both of them made ritual obeisance at the bowl, dipping their fingers into the water and touching it to brow and heart, but neither Asharre nor Heradion did.
“There's no holiness here anymore,” Heradion said
when the Illuminers looked at him. “No point in being purified for it.”
“This temple is laid out in the traditional pattern,” Evenna said, pointedly ignoring his comment. “Patients' rooms and healing garden to the east, to draw upon the dawn light. The solaros' private chambers to the west, where the long sun sets. The library, if he had one, will be to the west as well.”
They went to the library first. A quiet air of loneliness hung over its cozy clutter. An overstuffed armchair, its once-red leather worn to a frayed pink, sat in the room's center with a round table at its elbow. Small, empty bottles dotted the floor at the chair's feet, along with a clay mug and a stack of well-thumbed books. Asharre leaned against the wall, crossing her arms. She understood the need to investigate, but nothing in this room seemed significant, and it felt ghoulish to pry into the details of someone else's life.
The others did not seem to share her compunctions. Heradion picked up a book resting beside the armchair. “
The Thousand Journeys of Shalai the Wise,
” he read aloud. A loose button dangled from its pages, held by a knotted thread that served as a bookmark. He set it down and examined the next book. “
The Garden of Perfumed Delights.
I remember this one. Racy reading for a country solaros. Badly treated, though. Almost all the pages are torn out. Maybe he wanted to keep the good bits by his bedside?”
“Shouldn't need to tear a book apart for that. Why not just take the whole thing?” Evenna picked up the mug and held it to her nose. She paused, then sniffed again, frowning. “Dreamflowers? Was he having trouble sleeping?”
“
The Garden of Perfumed Delights
can be quite rousing,” Heradion said. Evenna shot him an acid look, and they moved on.
A door on the far side of the library opened to the priest's private chambers. These rooms, too, had an air of comfortable, bookish poverty. More leatherbound volumes, and more tiny bottles, covered the lone table in the solaros' sitting room. They looked older, and grimmer, than the texts in the library. A plate and jug were pushed an arm's length from the table's only chair, allowing the books to be brought closer.
“A man who put writing above eating,” Evenna observed.
“He'd have made a good Illuminer,” Heradion agreed, leafing through the books. “Curious choices for dinner reading, though.
Eristhei on the Twelve Corruptions. A Codex of Curses. A Life of Halivair Rosewayn
. I rather preferred the books in the other room.”
“So did he, I'm sure.” Evenna lifted the
Codex
and riffled through it. Papers covered with hasty, smudged writing were tucked between its pages. Some were homemade rag papers, clumpy and matted. Others, Asharre realized, were the missing pages from
The Garden of Perfumed Delights
and the other torn books, their margins and the spaces between their lines filled with scribbles. The man must have been desperate for notepaper.
“This wasn't pleasure reading,” Evenna said. “Look at these notes. Every page. He annotated
every page.
I can barely read this, the script's so small and shaky.” She waved a hand at one of the empty bottles. “And do you smell that?”
Heradion sniffed at the greenish residue inside. “Burned cat hair?”
“Close. Tincture of vigil's friend. Burned cat hair would probably taste better. He must have been drinking it straight, or near enough to make no difference. It's a wonder he could keep his hands steady enough to writeâ
and no wonder he needed dreamflowers to sleep. Our solaros was drugging himself for alertness and concentration, then drugging himself to sleep when he couldn't hold off exhaustion any longer.” Evenna clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “A man could kill himself doing that.”
“Seems a bit excessive just to take some notes,” Heradion said.
“He was looking for a cure.” Falcien glanced up from the book he held propped against one knee. “He knew there was some dark magic at work in Carden Vale. With the passes frozen and the river trade stopped, where could he hope to find answers except in his books? A shame his library wasn't equal to the task. The
Codex of Curses
is more fairy tale than fact, and while Eristhei collected the best information available in his time, much of what he wrote was badly distorted or untrue. But at least we know our solaros was working on the problem.”
“We also know he failed,” Heradion pointed out.
“But not why.” Asharre stepped through the next door into the solaros' tiny bedchamber, leaving the others to their reading.
The blankets on the bed were knotted and untidy. Wrinkled starbursts showed where they'd been crumpled in sweaty fists. The stench of fear lingered on them, rank and bestial, and something else as well. Asharre had never smelled it before, but she knew at once what it was: bad dreams. Many nights of bad dreams.
A forest of burned-out candles sprouted from the bedside table. More lay in a box at the table's feet. On top of the boxed candles was a book with dated entries. It looked like a diary, but Asharre couldn't begin to decipher the crabbed writing, so she carried it back to the Illuminers. “This was in his bedroom. Nothing else.”
“I'll start work on it tomorrow,” Falcien said, taking the diary and tucking it into his satchel. “We'll need more space to sort through all this, and I can't say I'm eager to try squinting my way through the man's handwriting by candlelight.”
Evenna glanced at the windows. Azure twilight was rapidly fading to black. “Neither am I. The reading can wait until morning. Let's collect whatever else there is to find here and go back.”
Each of them lit a candle from the solaros' stockpile, and Evenna led them to the chapel's east wing. The curved hallway ended in a door of goldenwood and dark windows: the entrance to the glassed gardens, where healing herbs could be cultivated when snow mounded the fields and the earth was frozen to icy rock.
The next door, Asharre guessed, would be the drying room, used for the preparation and storage of herbal medicines, bandages, and other tools of the healer's trade. Carden Vale might have had a real physician or two when the Baozites ruled Ang'duradh, but the poor town it had become had little to attract, or hold, such a man. Good doctors were nearly as rare as Blessed, and had no holy strictures preventing them from catering exclusively to the rich. The village solaros was probably the only healer in Carden Vale, whether or not he actually knew anything about the art.
Evenna bypassed the garden and the drying room to try the patients' rooms. The first two were unremarkable. Clean, airy, scented with a lingering hint of wintermint and wormwood. One had a wide, slanted table for women who preferred to give birth in a holy place, under the Bright Lady's gaze, rather than in their own homes.
The third room was a cell. It had been hastily built:
the floor stones had been pried up to drive iron bars into the earth, and only ash-smeared wood replaced them. The stones lay jumbled behind the door, caked with crumbling earth. The cell's bars were plainly scavenged from other places; though all of them looked sturdy, no two matched, and several had been crudely sawed off to fit. Decorative whorls swirled up and down one brass bar, dull between the bright toothmarks left by saws all along its length. The next bore a verdigrised lady's face in profile. The others, newer, showed no such artistry.
In the corner of the cell was a millstone with a chain looped through its center. The ends of the chain were linked to a man-size leather harness. Rawhide mitts dangled from the harness; rather than shackling the wearer's wrists, the restraints had been designed to immobilize his hands entirely. The mitts were frayed and spit stained, as if wild dogs had been at them.
There was nothing else in the cell. No dishes, no chamber pot, not so much as a blanket to ward off the cold. Its only adornment was a massive iron lock dangling from the door.
Papers covered in the same scratchy hand as the solaros' diary lay scattered across a rickety table facing the cell. Evenna set her lantern on the table and examined the pages.
“Anatomical diagrams,” she said, holding one up.
It looked like a child's drawing of a half-remembered nightmare. The creature sketched on the page was impossible. Twisted limbs sprouted from its body at odd, useless angles; misshapen mouths broke through its skin like gaps in the seams of a rag doll. The solaros had drawn a stream of wavery black lines behind it, as if the creature left a trail of slime in its wake. Asharre couldn't imagine how it walked. She couldn't imagine how it
lived.
“What is that?”