Authors: Tim Akers
“It’s the Allfire, Frair,” Gwen said. “This is not the season for gheists.”
“Some heresies refuse to keep our calendar,” Lucas answered. “Damned inconvenient, I know. But many have died.” He turned to face Gwen squarely. “Call the hunt, Huntress. We have a god to kill.”
D
ARK RAIN ON
thatch. The walls of the little hut creaking in the wind, water pooling on the floor, and Father yelling in the other room. Smoke in the air. Henri squeezed his tiny eyes tight and counted the heartbeats between lightning and thunder.
Not our house
, he thought, curled up in the scratchy dry straw of his bed.
They haven’t taken our house, not tonight. Not yet.
The sky rumbled again, and the sound of it echoed through the ground, shaking the hut. Henri whimpered, turning toward the wall and clenching his jaw. His father’s yelling stopped for a minute. He was listening. Mother’s voice slid into the silence, so quiet. Calm. When his father answered he was quieter, but Henri could still hear his father’s words.
“It’s just a storm. Another storm,” he said.
“That’s what you said the night they came for Jossie and her husband,” Mother whispered.
“Nobody came for Jossie or her husband,” Father answered. “You know that. No one knows what happened to them. Anything could have happened.”
“Don’t give me that. You know what became of them.” Mother sighed, a long shuddering breath that was laced with tears. “We all know.”
Father was quiet for a moment. The storm kept going outside, low, rolling thunder shaking the walls, keeping Henri awake. He wanted to sleep so badly. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut as tight as stones and fall asleep, and then it would be morning and the storm would be gone. That’s all in mighty heaven that he wanted, and he just couldn’t do it.
“It mightn’t’ve been the storm,” Father said. “It was at least a week before Hadley went up there to gather wood. They could have been gone…”
“Please, just… just be quiet. I don’t want to hear—”
A sudden crash of thunder washed over the house, followed by a short, sharp scream from outside. Henri heard his mother gasp, and his father’s heavy footsteps went to the door.
“Was that—” he started.
“The Merrils,” Mother said. “That was surely the Merrils. Jacque, you can’t be thinking—”
“If we were out in the storm, you would want Jeb to come check on us. It could be anything.”
“It could be anything,” Mother agreed sharply. “Don’t go out there, I beg of you. It could be nothing, you said.”
“Never mind that. Martha, if it was us out there—”
Another sharp crack, this one nothing to do with the sky. Wood snapping, like a tree in a storm, but the wind wasn’t that strong. Mother gasped and started to cry.
“I can’t stay here,” his father said. “I can’t sit by while—”
“Please, no. Please stay here. Stay for little Henri, if not for me. You don’t have to go out in that. It could be nothing. They might be fine, Jacque, please.”
“Love, love, I’m sorry,” Father said, his voice muffled, as though his face was buried in Mother’s hair. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stand by.”
Suddenly the storm was inside, the wind and rain whipping through the tiny hut, and then the door banged shut. Mother was left alone with Henri, and he could hear her crying—big, jagged, gasping sobs that she tried to swallow into silence. He gripped the blanket over his head, tighter and tighter, listening to the rain. Listening to the thunder, and the incredible quiet in the hut that his father had left behind.
Hours it seemed. Days. Surely it was morning by now. Surely he had fallen asleep and the sun was out. But the rain still fell, the thunder still rolled. Mother was by the hearth.
The door opened.
“Jacque, what was… Jacque? Jacque!”
Henri opened his eyes for the first time that night, since his mother had tucked him in after dinner. There was light from the main room, and something in the air. Something sharp like lightning struck close. He sat up, sliding his naked feet to the dirt floor. The storm was strangely quiet outside, though he could still feel the wind pushing on the walls and see the lightning flickering between the gaps in the roof. In the main room his mother was crying uncontrollably, her sobs caught between shrieks and breathless wailing. It sounded like madness.
Henri picked up the heavy wooden stick his father kept by their bed, nearly as tall as the child and heavy in his numb hands. His whole body felt numb, unreal, like he was walking through a dream. A dream, a dream, let it be a dream. He crept to the door to the main room.
His father, what was left of him, hovered in the doorway. He hung limply in the air, one arm outstretched, mouth slack. Something stood behind him. Something Henri couldn’t look at, his eyes sliding to the side whenever he tried to fix it in his vision. Father came in, followed by the thing Henri could not see, came to his mother.
The floor beneath his father rippled like a pond. Small waves of dark energy, blue and crystal black, washed through the room, wave after wave. They lapped over Henri’s numb toes. Something about his mother changed. She began to flow into his father, as if she was drawn up into him. The nothing-thing behind Father grew. It stretched, and the ceiling shivered overhead. Henri dropped the stick and covered his face, but he could still see. Father and Mother, and the unseen thing.
Henri cried out.
Well into the room now, the thing turned to him, and he could see it for a second. It was a creature bound in white and blue lightning, a spirit shaped like a mockery of a man, and beneath its skin was another man, and then another, each one smaller and deeper, buried just beneath the spirit-man on the outside. It was like an onionskin of lost souls, each spirit wrapped in another, and Henri recognized the spirit on the outside.
Old Jeb Merril, loose skin hanging from his cheeks.
While Henri watched, old Jeb sank deeper into the spirit, and a new form grew around him.
Father
. Jacque Volent shivered and looked at his son, reached for him. The air around the spirit’s hand swirled with dark blue lightning, wrapped in a milky shroud. The bolt struck Henri, and his eyes and teeth felt frozen in his skin.
He screamed and ran, turning to the door and stumbling out into the storm. The sound was back, suddenly, as if an invisible wall had been keeping the howling wind away. The child ran through the rain and the mud, his fingers tingling, his feet numb. He ran and he ran, and the rain fell onto his face, mingling with the tears and the snot, running into his eyes and mouth as he ran screaming into the night.
It was only later, huddled in the lee of a broken oak, that Henri realized he couldn’t feel his face. That the skin was cold and dead.
* * *
Volent woke with a start, the memory of rain on his face fading as he sat bolt upright in bed, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps. He ran fluttering fingers over his cheeks, under his eyes. Nothing. He felt nothing, not even the damp of tears. The skin of his face felt like cold, stiff wax under his hands.
He struggled out of the twisted sweat-stained ruin of his bedding and went to the ceramic bowl in the corner of his room. A beaten metal mirror hung over the bowl. Henri stared into the smudged image as he splashed water over his head. Just a habit, the water. He never felt the chill until it reached his neck, ran in goose bumps down his chest, his arms. A sliver of light from the window illuminated the pale ghost of his body. He looked down at himself, trembling with the dream, the same dream, the every-night dream.
It was spreading. A blossom of icy dark veins flowered across his chest. A small area, hardly larger than the palm of his hand, but when he ran a blade across it there was no feeling, no pain. On his thigh, too, and inside one forearm. The veins crept up from the depths of his bones like spidery tentacles emerging from a still sea, stealing the feeling in his skin.
Volent splashed more water on his face, shivering as it froze the skin on his shoulders. His arms and hands were shaking as he raised the water to his head, matching the mad beating of his heart.
Silence, Henri
, he thought, staring at himself in the smudged mirror. Achieving calm, he dried off and got dressed. The numbness had spread enough that he could keep most of this shaking in his bones. The mornings were always the worst, with the dream and the fear fresh in his waking mind.
A knock. Volent shied away from the sound, then limped to the door and opened it a crack. There was a servant in the corridor. The boy looked terrified.
“Sir Volent? My lord has summoned you to his throne.”
“What time is it?” Volent asked. His voice was as soft as velvet, his lips barely moving with the words.
“Nine bells, sir.”
Volent nodded and closed the door.
* * *
He stood outside the great hall of Greenhall, waiting for an audience with his liege lord. He was making the other courtiers nervous. The court was already in a state of nervous shock, the gheist horn still echoing from the walls and in their minds, the avenue outside lined with the bodies of those who had died in the attack. He stood silently in front of the door to the chamber, his hands folded comfortably at his waist. Waiting. He wore dingy gray armor, the plate unadorned and poorly maintained, the sleeves of chain frayed and unraveling at the cuff. Even his blade was of poor quality—hardly what would be expected of the favored servant of a duke of Suhdra, much less the knight-marshal of his master’s realm.
It wasn’t those things that discomfited the other courtiers, in their bright robes and holy vestments. Nor was it his manner, calm to the point of death, so still that you might think him a statue. No, what caused the courtiers to avoid him, what left the priests muttering silent prayers as they passed, what gave the children nightmares and made the whores down in the village charge extra, was his face.
His pale, still, beautiful face.
He heard the whispers, knew the rumors. Ignored them. No one at the court was sure of his age, and there was nothing in his features to give any indication. He had the look of a young man, not yet reached his naming day, a face that would draw the girls and delight their mothers. The problem was that his visage wasn’t natural. The skin was cold and soft. Dead. When he talked, nothing moved except the barest flicker at his lips. He never smiled, he never frowned, never showed surprise or fear or excitement. His face, pale and beautiful, was dead yet undying.
A plume of dark veins danced under the translucent skin like cracks in the icy surface of a frozen lake, hinting at the dark waters beneath. The spider web was centered just beneath his right eye, and traced its way across his cheek and forehead, fading gently as the fractured lines reached his jaw. Though they never seemed to move, those who watched the man closely claimed the shadowy veins were different from day to day, sometimes darker, sometimes wider, sometimes reaching all the way across his face and down his neck.
As for Volent, he was silent about his face, and the origin of his pain—as he was about most things. He kept the dreams to himself. Fear was never an honorable thing in a knight. Henri made a practice of creating fear in other men, and his numb face and quiet voice never betrayed the terror that crept beneath his skin.
Finally, the wide door to the great hall groaned open, and a wave of smoke billowed into the hallway. The duke was in the middle of one of his sessions, apparently. The smoke smelled of frairwood and damp grass, spicy and thick. A servant, his eyes watering, motioned for him to come inside.
“Sir Volent,” he said, nodding, “his lordship awaits.”
Henri Volent did not acknowledge the man, did not bow or nod, but walked briskly into the chamber. As he entered, a knight of the winter sun passed him on the way out. Her face was ruddy, the skin across her cheekbones pocked and red, as though she had recently been burned. The locks of her hair was twisted and crisp. As she passed, the knight gave Volent the barest of glances. Her eyes glittered copper and red.
The servant shut the door, trapping them with the smoke.
The duke of Greenhall sat at the center of the room, attended by a priest. His scryers, men of the Celestial church who had taken vows to Lord Cinder in his aspect as visionary, stood around a fire pit at his feet. Plumes wafted out of the pit, the fire stoked flameless, and the men talked in hushed tones. They waved their hands through the smoke, swirling curls in the air with their fingers as they made the holy signs of the gray lord.
Volent stopped at a respectful distance and dropped to one knee, peering at the floor but listening intently.
“Enough of that,” Gabriel Halverdt said, waving his hand and fanning the smoke away from his face. “I have heard your signs and seen your scryings, old man. You didn’t warn me of this, did you? It took a vow knight from Lady Strife to do that, and still there were eight lives lost—and during the Allfire, no less.
“What am I to make of that?”
“My lord, you must understand,” the priest responded, “the sight of Cinder extends only so far and so clearly. His vision is best used for decisions, for clarity of thought, for reasonable—”
“I’ve had enough of being reasonable, Frair Julian.” Halverdt flicked his cloak irritably over his knees, as if he was cold despite the stuffy, incense-choked air, and rested his head on one meaty fist. “As I have of your excuses. I bring you here to scry my life, to protect my realm. I expect more than this.”
“It is summer, my lord, and the days are long. Lord Cinder’s rule does not begin for nearly three months. Until then, we must make do with what power we can glean at night.” The priest bowed his head. “I am sorry.”
“Sorry will not do,” Halverdt said. “It will not do at all. And must we have more of that?” he complained, waving as one of the priests dropped a handful of frairwood splints on the fire. A gray cloud of smoke blossomed into the air, pluming to the ceiling. “It’s hard enough to breathe in here, much less think.”
“No gheist can stand the frairwood’s essence, my lord.” The older priest crept forward, his hands cupped before him.