The Brush of Black Wings (5 page)

Snowflakes dusted Silhara’s eyelashes, quickly
melting until they streamed down his face like tears. He wiped at
them impatiently and tossed his damp cloak and gloves on the drying
rack near the hearth. His gaze sought Martise. “You found
something,” he said abruptly.

She raised her tea cup in salute. “I did. What
about you?”

He shook his head, dropping onto the bench
next to her. “Nothing if you’re only looking with your main senses.
Not even a thrum of magery, which in its way is odd.” He accepted
the cup of tea Gurn handed him with a nod of thanks. “All the ruins
in the woods are old, that one more ancient than most. The earth
holds the ghosts of rituals. You can feel it in your feet
sometimes. I didn’t feel anything around that one. It’s dead.
Too
dead.”

The mild nausea that blossomed in her belly
when she finally translated the entity’s words threatened to boil
up toward her throat. She took a bracing swallow of tea, wishing
for once that it was something stronger like the tongue-scorching
Peleta’s Fire Silhara stored on a nearby shelf.

“
Martise?” Silhara’s raspy voice
lowered another octave, and his black eyes glittered. “What is it?”
His hand was gentle on her shoulder, a contrast to his dour
expression.

“
If I’m right in my research, and
I believe I am, I translated what the demon said.”

Silhara’s eyebrows rose. “And?”

She pushed her bowl away, all appetite gone.
“It’s ancient Makkadian and means ‘Witch, open the gate for me.’”
The way his lips flattened against his teeth and his eyes narrowed
made her heart beat harder. When Silhara showed concern, it was
wise to be afraid.

“
Are you certain?”

“
As certain as I can be with the
knowledge available to me. ‘Kul’ is Makkadian for ‘hunter.’ A
‘kash’ is a vulgar term for a prostitute, but its original meaning
is ‘witch.’ The Makkadians call magefinders ‘kashkuli.’ Witch
hunters.” She shivered and pressed against Silhara’s side for
warmth. “I traced the language back to its roots. ‘Kashaptu’ is an
early feminine form for ‘witch.’ Whoever appeared in the temple,
spoke a form of Makkadian not heard in a long time.”

Gurn sketched rapid patterns in the air,
almost too fast for Martise to follow. Silhara read them with ease.
He wore a menacing expression sure to scare the blood thin in any
who didn’t call him friend.

“
I won’t just tear it down,” he
almost snarled at Gurn. “I’ll burn it down and salt the earth.
Whatever that thing is, it has no business here and certainly none
with my wife.” He stroked Martise’s braid before taking up his
spoon to stir his stew. “You might as well eat,” he told her.
“You’ll be sharing the library with me, and we’ve a long day and
evening ahead of us.”

He joined her in the library after lunch,
leaving instructions with Gurn to keep the teapot full and send up
the bottle of Dragon Piss just in case. Once in the privacy of the
library, Martise threw her arms around Silhara and hugged him
hard.

“
I’m afraid,” she whispered into
his neck.

“
Only fools and dead men have no
fear, Martise. And the former often become the latter because of
the lack.” He tilted her face up to his with the touch of a
fingertip under her chin. Her candle had guttered, and the winter
light through the frosted windows washed the color from the library
and Silhara’s stern features. “I will do all in my power to protect
you.”

She offered him an anemic smile. “I know. I’m
a fortunate wife to have a god-smiter for a husband.”

“
Looks like a demon slayer as well
now.”

Her hands twisted the fabric of his wool
tunic. “Do you think it’s a demon?”

He shrugged. “That’s my first thought. It
asked you to open a gate. Gates between worlds maybe. Such things
seek travel that way. The temple might have been such a gate once.
The demon sensed your magic and saw it as a means to break the
lock.”

Martise shuddered in his arms, recalling the
image of a tall man with inhuman eyes and swathed in a living cloak
of black smoke that writhed and tumbled into miasmic faces twisted
with agony. “Demon or no,” she said. “He wasn’t human.”

A stray thought made her pause. “He spoke
Makkadian, Silhara. What demon speaks Makkadian?”

Silhara hugged her close before setting her
from him. “I don’t give a flying pig’s arse if he recited poetry in
magefinder,” he said over his shoulder as he made his way to a
ladder leaning against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases. “I’m
only interested in killing him, not taking language lessons from
him.”

Martise burst out laughing. The Master of
Crows was a caustic, temperamental man with a razor tongue and no
hesitation in using it to flay someone bloody. Sometimes though, he
blunted its edge a little, offering a sharp wit instead that
encouraged a laugh and made a day such as this one less
frightening.

She returned to her work table with its stacks
of books and notes she’d taken earlier. Open the gate. Open the
gate. She tapped the tip of her quill on her lower lip. Was the
temple the gate? Ferrin’s Tor with its standing menhirs was a type
of gate and one she and Silhara had used to reach Corruption’s
domain and kill the god. The temple might be a lesser gate. Such
weren’t uncommon, and those always contained an element that
anchored two worlds together—some artifact or spellwork that drew
one side to the other through ritual or invocation.

Her Gift might have acted as a beacon to the
entity, but she hadn’t recited any invocation or traced the precise
and measured steps of a ritual circle. If an ensorcelled gem or
prayer bowl were buried there, Silhara’s plan to burn the ruin and
salt the ground would destroy whatever link bound Neith to an
unknown darkness.

Martise glanced at Silhara who clung
precariously to the ladder. “What do you know of the histories of
the ruins in your woodland?”

Nimble as a cat, he descended the rungs,
scrolls tucked under his arms. “Almost nothing. They’ve been here
as long as Neith itself as far as I know. Some are human-built;
some aren’t. The one we’re concerned with isn’t. An Elder creation
I think, but it’s anyone’s guess as to which race.” He dropped the
scrolls on the table cattycorner to hers. “You think this ruin is
an anchor?”

“
Maybe.” She shuffled through her
notes. “Your library surely has something about the structures
built in the wood. I’d like to learn a little about this one before
you tear it down.”

Silhara gave her a disapproving stare. “It’s
too dangerous to leave standing for scholarly pursuits, Martise.
The moment the effects of your Gift wear off and I have better
control of my power, I’m turning that heap into a dust pile. The
sooner, the better.”

“
You’ll get no argument from me,”
she said. “I hope you turn them all into dust piles.”

He unrolled one of the scrolls and held it
down at the corners with flat river rock. “That’s my intention. I
don’t like unexpected human guests at Neith, much less demonic
ones.”

The library fell silent except for the scratch
of Martise’s quill as she jotted down notes and occasional
mutterings from Silhara as he perused lists of spells. She watched
him from the corner of her eye. He searched for the combination of
invocations that would dismantle not only the temple’s physical
structure but its ethereal net as well and do so without killing
himself. The knitted lines between his eyebrows as he glowered at
one scroll told her he wasn’t yet successful in his search. Tiny
sparks of red light shot off his fingertips as his narrow hands
moved in unconscious motion, sketching sigils and signs in the air.
Her Gift had fueled his magery, turning a bonfire into an inferno.
Infinitely powerful and just as unpredictable. Any spellwork he did
while his magic sang with her Gift’s force required immense control
and caution.

Her own research yielded better results. A
dozen books and countless scrolls later, and she probably knew more
now about the history of Silhara’s home than he did, and the
knowledge guaranteed several sleepless night.

There had once been more than a dozen temples
or ritual sites within the woodland that obscured Neith’s front
façade. The wood itself had spread over more acreage as well,
giving way over time to the plains. Of the five temples that
remained in their various stages of abandoned decay, the one she’d
visited that morning was the oldest, and as Silhara had mentioned
earlier, built by those who weren’t human.

The mage stopped her as she returned to one of
the bookcases. Unlike hers, his hands were warm. Candlelight
flickered across his stern face. Winter had paled his burnished
skin to the color of honey, making his eyes even blacker than
usual. He lifted her chilly fingers to his mouth and
blew.

She sighed her thanks as his breath cascaded
over her knuckles, thawing them so they didn’t ache so much from
the cold. “If you keep doing that, I might actually be in danger of
falling in love with you,” she teased.

One black eyebrow arched, and Silhara paused.
“Such declarations will earn you no additional favors from me,
apprentice.” He bit the tip of her index finger gently, smiling
when she pinched him with her other hand. “Nor will your abuse.”
His lips caressed her palm, and he released her hand. “I leave you
to the books. I’ve found two spells that should destroy the temple
and any artifact buried beneath it. I’ll test them in the bailey.
If they don’t work or your Gift makes them work too well, then the
most that will happen is I accidently roast that goat Gurn swears
is eating the bed sheets off the wash line. Then we’ll just have
goat every meal for the next week.”

Alone once more in the library, she returned
to her work. Gurn interrupted her once, bearing a pot of tea. She
nodded her thanks and returned to perusing a set of fragile scrolls
whose edges crumbled under her touch.

They burned her fingers, their surfaces dusted
with the remnants of a sorcery different but as dark as that which
flowed briefly from the temple ruin. Silhara had pilfered these
from Iwhevenn Keep, home to a lich. While the words written on the
parchment were merely a historical recounting, the parchment itself
bore the mark of necromancy. Martise continuously wiped her hands
on her skirts and would have abandoned the scrolls were they not
the ones containing the information she searched for in Silhara’s
vast library.

She read through them as quickly as possible,
lips moving in soundless dictation even as her heart set a
galloping pace. “Not just a demon,” she whispered to herself when
she reached one scroll’s end. “A king of demons.”

Her memory was exceptional, bordering on
wondrous—a useful tool for the master who once owned her. Martise
possessed the ability to repeat everything she read to Silhara in
exact detail. But what she just read rattled her so badly she’d
likely stutter incoherently when she told him her news. She took up
her quill with a shaking hand, paused for a steadying breath, and
continued with her notes.

The sun arced toward the west with the moon on
its hem and then its shoulders. The ink ran dry in the well, and
Martise’s hand cramped around her fifth quill as she scribbled into
the evening. She stopped to rub eyes gritty with
exhaustion.

Her folded arms made a handy pillow on the
hard table, and she rested her head on them. She’d stop for a
moment, give her hand and her eyes a rest and then write more. By
the time Gurn called her down for supper, she’d be finished and
could pass her notes to Silhara for perusal while she indulged in a
bracing dram of Peleta’s Fire.

Sleep came hard and fast. Rest did not. She
dreamed vivid dreams populated with images grotesque and
unfamiliar—skeletal horses made of smoke and fire and men who were
not men armored in black and wearing helmets whose face shields
bore the visages of the tortured and the damned. They carried
swords with blades that shimmered hot blue, as if the swordsmith
who made them captured lightning bolts in a crucible and forged
them into the molten steel.

“
The king is the sword; the sword
is the king,” she murmured.

Her dreams changed, drifting from demonic
warriors on inferno-eyed horses to a vast and writhing darkness
that cavorted and shrieked and withered all it embraced. Not just
death, but Death gone mad.

“
Martise.”

She erupted from sleep with a scream piercing
enough to shatter the windows. Her skirts hobbled her as she
recoiled from the light touch on her shoulder. She lost her
footing, narrowly missing cracking her chin on the table’s edge as
she fell between the bench on which she sat and the table. She
scuttled underneath it to hide.

“
Bursin’s wings!”

The sharp exclamation brought her fully awake.
Martise peeked out from the shadows. “Silhara?”

He bent to peer at her, an angular silhouette
outlined by the moon’s light streaming into the library. “Now that
you’ve managed to put another white streak in my hair, you can come
out from there.”

Backlit, his expression remained hidden, but
she easily interpreted the acerbic tone in his voice. Her reaction
had startled him, and he didn’t like it. Nerves still raw from the
horrible dream, Martise wasn’t inclined to apologize. He didn’t
want her screaming in his ear? Then he shouldn’t sneak up on her
while she slept.