Where am I?
* * *
The snows had stopped, and even the rain had abated for a night. The smog’s translucent flesh squatted beyond the balcony against which he leant, more mist than smoke or vile stench: it was lying particularly thick, impenetrable, over the streets, and he felt that it was a boon from Belestae, hiding him in this place from unfriendly eyes.
Or Yane, he admitted to himself. It’s his work I’m doing.
The wave of repulsion he experienced at the thought was weaker this time; weaker every time.
The thrill was the same.
Mists of the Blade-Lord, conceal my actions from those who love me.
“Watcher after, Mortenn? Watcher lookin’ for?”
It was quite the philosophical question.
It was difficult, given the pause a proper answer necessitated, but Jaroan did his best to gaze back coolly into Ti’s beady eyes as he replied.
“Control,” he said at last.
There was an “ooh” of wonder from some of the other kids gathered on the balcony. Jar tried not to grin, but the instinct was irresistible.
Ti was nodding slowly. “Good answer, Mortenn. Gots ter have control, ain’t we? We control it all. We control ever’thin’.”
The others started nodding too, Jar along with them.
“Yer part of ‘er family now,” Ti said with a wicked smile. “Zandrina’s gonna own all this soon enough.” He flicked his gaze about the creaking wooden landscape, looming above and around them. “Not like ‘alf of it’s worth owt.”
That produced a chorus of chuckling from the assembled knife-boys.
He’s right, Jaroan confirmed silently. We might as well live in hell.
“An’ you, Yorbi?”
“I-i-it’s Yordi, sir,” whined an auburn-haired, freckle-faced kid, at least a year younger than Jaroan.
Ti just stared at him, and Jar shuddered inwardly. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the recipient of that stare.
“Errr, I mean,” Yordi looked around at the others as if for help before returning his gaze to Ti, “I mean, I want money?”
Ti laughed harshly, and another chorus of chuckles escaped the group.
“Money. Who don’t want money! An’ there’s gonna be a lot of it. Ere. Open yer ‘ands.”
Ti reached inside his coat pocket, producing a small coin-bag. He withdrew several gleaming metal discs, and, before Jar was even holding it, he knew it was gold.
When he had the surprisingly-warm coin in his hand, he clenched his fist tightly.
Is this how he felt? he wondered. How Feychilde felt, when he first got paid?
How Kas used to feel, when he was a street-thief.
Not that his brother had ever gone into details about that period of his life, but Jaroan and Jaid had once worked together to uncover the truth, sharing the titbits of information they’d each gathered over the years. He knew Kas took money from bad people. He knew Kas hurt people. Maybe it was a long time ago, but what did that matter?
No. He knew that, wherever his brother’s soul was now residing, Kas had no right to look down on him in judgement for what he was doing.
I’m doing what you did, aren’t I? Except I’ve got even more reason, haven’t I? What reason did you have? Mum and Dad weren’t even dead yet! You didn’t have to…
He couldn’t continue the thought. He’d never understood Kas, not really. He’d tried emulating him. Tried contrasting himself with him. None of it ever quite worked. He was never simple-enough to accept a definition from outside. Every time Jaroan thought he had a grip on him, Kas had changed.
No, Jar thought grimly. I’ll start at the beginning. Work my way up. Maybe, one day, I’ll be like you.
Locked up?
Dead!
Yeah. That.
“Now yer ‘ands are full, time ter get ’em dirty. I know what feels good. Rippin’ an’ slicin’ as a mob. But yer know what feels better? Winnin’. An’ I’m gonna show yer ‘ow ter win. Yer gonna learn. Yer gonna take orders, and yer gonna see ‘em runnin’ scared. See, our inkatra’s the best. Near ter eight minnits a go. Now. Who ‘ere ain’t got their blade?”
They all dutifully unsheathed the grimy little knives. Kitchen implements or crude woodworking tools, for the most part. Just one boy, someone whose name was unknown to Jaroan, had produced a proper dagger.
“Real fightin’ blade,” the kid said proudly as Ti passed him by, inspecting their arsenal.
“Ain’t no room for fightin’,” Ti said harshly, though not judgementally. He had the air of a teacher from a book explaining things patiently to a classroom of posh little dolts. “Dat ain’t what we about. Yer gotta fight, jus’ run. Trust me. Knives…” He presented his own dagger, almost as long as a dirk and spotted with old brown blood. “Knives is for killin’.”
Jar remembered the idea of it. Sticking his invisible dagger in the big guy’s throat in the Bertie Boys’ basement. It was a notion detached from reason, emotion. He could examine it in all its clarity.
He wished he had done it. He wished Killstop never came in with her crazy antics, laying out the thugs, laying down the law to Jaroan about what he could and couldn’t do. So what if she thought killing was wrong? It was easy for her to say that, someone who knew death intimately, knew how to avoid dying…
Someone with power. Control.
She’s forgotten what it’s like, he thought, staring at the stolen, iron-wrought knife in his hand. He’d cleaned it, and its edge gleamed in the mist-light. What vulnerability is.
“Yer gonna use the knife, an’ when yer do, doan show it off. Just use it. Fast. Underarm. Stab ’em ten times ‘fore they even know what’s hit ’em.” Ti demonstrated, violently savaging the air with a flurry of stabs, in-out, in-out, in-out. “Aim fer the middle, right? Doan matter where as you get ’em. They’ll leak, jus’ like a skin o’ red wine.”
Jar felt his eyes widen as he watched Ti perform the actions, mimicking killing people, and Ti seemed to notice.
“Doan be scared, kids. You got the control.”
Jaroan realised he was looking at some of the others while he was speaking too, and breathed an inward sigh of relief.
“Tell yas… If yer ain’t wantin’ to use it, then yer can – just show it ’em. Tell ‘em my name. Tha’s usually enough. Show ’em the knife, an’ let ’em know what’s what.”
Showing it. Just showing it.
Kas had bought him a knife with a blade only he could see. This was the opposite.
Not hiding. Taking control instead.
Ti handed out the assignments, speaking with surety: nothing was written down, of course. Whether that was due to a desire for plausible deniability or just because Ti was illiterate, Jar was unsure, but the older boy definitely had a sharp memory.
“You, an’ you – yer at Drink Alley and that stupid crone, Gittel. She owes fer ‘alf an ounce. You, an’ you – take this ter the Hurams an’ collec’ fer las’ time. C’mon, tekkit! Two ounces. You, an’ you –” he was indicating Jar and Yordi “– go see Venny on Finch Street. See if ‘e’s willin’ ter pay yet, an’ if ‘e is, I might jus’ be so kind as ter let ‘im off wi’ a scar. S’long as ‘e wants more produck, ya know. Uvverwise…”
Ti pulled a savage grin, and dragged his fingers across his throat.
Their gang-leader finished handing out his commands, and Jaroan was still frozen on the spot, staring.
Fingers across his throat.
Imagination and recollection met, and he was back in the cellars of Wyre, contemplating murder.
The future came pushing its hands back through the veil, grabbing his shoulders and pulling him through.
The sensation of warmth on his hands.
Killing.
Killing? I can’t do it.
Jaroan knew it, all of a sudden. There was no way he was going to be able to kill someone. Intimidate them? Sure. Scratch them? Why not? But… to actually put the knife’s blade inside them?
The contents of his stomach turned into a rotten flopping fish, too-long dead to have been eaten and far too alive to stay down – nausea flooded over him. He gripped the rail with his hand, drawing a deep breath and swallowing minutely, hoping no one would comment on his pallor.
It was dark. It was almost over. He just had to hold on. Vanish into the mist.
No. You can do it. You need to do it. It will be easy.
I can. I can do it. It’ll be easy.
“… stamp it out. Yer hear me? Yer all hearin’? Yer got yer jobs, now scarper! Two nights. We meet outside Berthoni’s on Giblet.”
Putting away their knives, the gang of kids quietly dispersed, Ti the first to leave. Jaroan turned about, looking for Yordi, and found the boy staring out into the mist as he’d been doing just a minute ago.
Sympathy arose in him, but something sliced it in two. The role Jaroan needed to play seized hold of him with purpose, dragging him through the motions.
“What’s up?”
Yordi started like he’d been struck.
“You havin’ second thoughts?” He grinned. “Ti wouldn’t like that.”
“I – oh, no… You,” Yordi licked his lips nervously, “you saw things, right? Your b-brother… Have you ever… ever killed someone?”
Jaroan’s grin melted into a smile, but he kept it from falling into a frown.
“Almost.” He looked the trembling little lad up and down, then sighed theatrically. “C’mon, Freckles. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
He put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, pulling him away. The kid was trembling. It was like the nervousness had left him, and entered the youngster.
Yane be praised.
Finch Street wasn’t far, and in the end he didn’t need his knife. He only needed his words. His tone. His smile.
As he collected the debts for his boss, Jar never asked himself why he was smiling. The reason was obvious.
Gold? A means to an end, but what was the end?
Control? That was a fanciful notion. It was more like submission. It was going with it. It was surrender.
Death.
Surrendering to the season of death. Letting the world finally turn. Turning with it.
That was why he was smiling.
* * *
The shrine of Mortiforn nearest the graveyard was small, and, despite its ominous reputation, somehow welcoming. It was located underground, a subterranean structure of brown brick and grey mortar. On the surface there was only what looked like a brick hut, its dark, gateless doorway floating there like a yawning throat in the middle of a particularly-wide road. Its stony base rose a few inches out of the drop, cart-wheels and passers-by sometimes stepping up onto it as they brushed past traffic coming the other way. A smattering of lantern-light was spilling up from below to illuminate the spiral staircase, but it was hard to pick out on the approach – Jaid only knew it was there because this wasn’t her first time here.
She waited for her opportunity, then sprang through a gap ahead of a pair of packhorses, lifting her feet out of the sludge with care to ensure her boots stayed on. No one gave her a second glance, and anyone who gave her a first glance knew better than to challenge her. Few things were holy, these days, she reflected, but death and its mysteries were still held in respect, even here in one of the city’s worst slums. No one went to Mortiforn without purpose. No one found themselves here by accident. The lost didn’t descend the stairs with skeletal faces carved into the stones, the empty eyes of skulls peering from the shadows.
It was a place filled with meaning, with divine intent, and she could feel it even just three steps into the stairwell. She was leaving Sticktown, leaving her old self behind.
The role she’d adopted since first setting foot inside this hallowed temple – it came over her again, completely consuming everything she was: her past, her trials, her emotion. It wasn’t some magical effect, from spell of enchanter or prayer of priest, and yet somehow it was all the more magical for it. She felt the relief as though it were a physical weight she had shed, a heavy, burdensome skin that came coiling away from her scalp, her temples, down her neck and back, tracing her thighs and calves to trail like a shadow at her heels.
The steps were shallow and broad, the stair itself describing a gentle, curving slope, designed for the small wagons used to transport corpses up and down. As she went, she passed a fellow neophyte on their way out: they nodded solemnly to each other, no other greeting necessary. It was in her nature to say a cheery ‘morning!’, she thought, but those instincts had long since atrophied. Now it was just an observation:
That’s how the old Jaid would’ve acted.
Whether it was the loss of her brother – the loss of both her brothers, really – or her tutelage under Brother Porsico, she was uncertain. She liked to think it was the latter, that it was her choices, not the things that had been done to her, that really mattered. But her initiation into the lay clergy of Mortiforn might’ve just been a symptom, rather than the cause of this new Jaid. She knew herself well-enough to recognise this. She knew it had all been taken; she’d given nothing, none of it willingly. Her life was in tatters and she’d not made a single sacrifice.
She rounded the bend, coming to the room they called the Chalice: square pillars were spaced at regular intervals, and the chamber itself was a perfect square, perhaps a hundred feet on a side with ten feet of room over her head. On her way to the centre, the ancient Sister at the undertakers’ desk shot her a smile, causing her to almost smile back: sometimes she wondered whether the crone was testing her or if the Sister felt some genuine affection for her. Jaid sensed a blush slowly spreading across her cheeks and turned her head back, locking her gaze upon her destination and snatching up an initiate’s robe from the table as she passed.
The chamber had many exits – tunnels of brick, or bored into layers of rock, leading to the various halls of inspection and internment. However, her shift wasn’t due to start for almost an hour yet, and before she headed off to perform her duties she had a more important rite to perform. She ignored the passageways, crossing implacably between the pillars as she pulled the brown woollen robe over her head.
The Chalice’s namesake was another perfect square in the middle of the room, a shallow pool perhaps fifteen feet on a side, appearing to be filled with water – but the nostrils alone gave the lie to that assessment, even before the eyes and ears picked out what the three other neophytes about its edge were doing.
She found a free spot, smoothed out her robe and sank down to her knees, putting her chin over the cold rim of the low stone wall. Then, at last, she raised her eyes to the statue in the very heart of the pool.
A man of melting, raw grey flesh, said to be rendered, renewed and remade eternally, all from the salt of their tears.
My tears.
“Illodin is the tension before the tears fall, and each tear shed cuts him, brings him closer to death. Mortiforn is the good to be found in death. Mortiforn is the realisation leading to release. Mortiforn is the way to Yune.”
I always thought we’d be inseparable. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The fat man opposite her had the edge of the wall biting into his throat as he wept soundlessly. The woman to her left was talking quietly about her mother, the one-legged boy to her right about his injury. She tuned them out, guiding her consciousness in a singular direction.
“I keep asking myself.” She bit her teeth together, grinding them for a moment before recovering the force of will to prise them apart, hurl the words from her tongue. “How can I be strong enough to… To take this. But I know. I know. We are not strong! I can’t be strong enough to take it! That’s why I put myself through it, over and over, lying there in bed, lying in it, in the agony… Why do I do it? Do I love the agony?
“I think we put ourselves through pain because we’re weak. We’re weak, all of us. Kas was weak. Jar is weak. I liked to think Kas was strong, liked to think he’d always be there to look after us. I like to think I’m strong. We only… pretend we’ve got strength. So that others won’t see us. True strength… I thought I’d seen it, but… does it exist? I’ve started to think, maybe Xan’s the strongest person I’ve ever met! But to give up… Give up what you want. Not for other people to see, though. Not even… Not for the gods. Just… Just for me.”
Her tears joined the pool’s. She moved the slowest, bitterest droplets with her fingertips, one by one as she’d been taught, taking them from her cheeks to the rippling surface and tapping them free.
“I give up my desire to be strong. To matter. I…
“I am thy sacrifice, my Lord Suffering.”
“You display remarkable improvement,” Brother Porsico murmured from behind her.
The sound of his voice held the same bittersweet tinge as the air they breathed, and she was the only one of the neophytes to turn their head, looking up to meet his gaze.
“Come with me, child.”
“Mortiforn wills it,” she murmured.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
She got to her feet, shook off the last of her tears, and strode after the minister. He wasn’t walking at a brisk pace but he had long legs and she didn’t want to fall behind. They departed the Chalice, entering one of the brick-built corridors, insufficient torchlight throwing them into darkness for four out of every ten steps.
“Your brother?” Porsico asked conversationally over his shoulder.
“The same,” she managed to reply, trying not to pant. “Worse…”
“It is not for you to bear those burdens named to him, nor contest the trials he has ahead of him. Let him be.”
“But isn’t my brother my burden?”
Don’t I have to do my best to carry him, when he’s fallen?
“There is the adage, of Lord Ymer upon the sand, ere the Age of Nightmares fell. You have heard the name, Prince Rivorn?”
She shook her head.
“It is a tale of fairies,” he said somewhat apologetically, “yet there is a kernel of truth buried within the parable, I believe. So it is said that before he was made King of Adorathan, Rivorn, son of Starren, was apprenticed to the one the gods themselves learned from. Ymer, as was, pupil and master of the Tower of the Evening Star, arch-foe of Lithiguil. Together Ymer and Rivorn walked many worlds and times; the Lord put the prince through innumerable trials, hurled him alone into battles the likes of which cannot be imagined. The boy was bit, and burned, cut and choked, withered in body and wounded in mind. And then at last Ymer found him and freed him from his bonds, and took him to the shores of Hell, where an endless, bottomless ocean of blood seethed, wracked with red storms. They stood upon the crimson-drenched sands, and watched the sea’s violence as it broke upon the black rocks.”
Jaid felt herself shuddering. Brother Porsico’s voice continued in the same, almost amused tone, but even if the battles were unimaginable, she still found herself able to imagine this: the boy and the old man, tiny and frail against the monstrousness of that infernal landscape.
She thought again of Kas – of Feychilde.
“The boy pointed to the two tracks of their footsteps, and traced the line back, where a single set of imprints shadowed the sand. ‘That is where you abandoned me, left me to face the darkness alone!’ he accused.”
“I know this one!” she burst out, almost daring to grin. “This is from the Joran stories – Joran says, “No. That’s where I carried’ –”
Porisco halted and turned on his heel, raising a hand to stop her. She almost stumbled as she froze on the spot.
They were in the shadows between the guttering torches, and the minister of Mortiforn whispered.
“Yet Ymer only replied: ‘Yes. That is where I left you, to face the darkness alone.'”
She didn’t know how to reply, and Brother Porsico turned about smartly and continued on his way, forcing her to gather her feet as well as her wits as she struggled to resume her place just behind him.
She pondered the meaning of the story.
“Ymer sounds cruel.”
“There is the question as to whether Ymer meant he left Rivorn in relative safety, to face alone yet greater darknesses.” They descended another curving stair, and she saw from behind as Porsico affected a slight shrug. “This is, to me, quite obvious, and quite apart from the true meaning. The lesson we are to learn, I think, is that we require abandonment in order to grow. If you seek to carry a burden that has its own legs, trust that it was not made for one to bear. Set it down before it grows too heavy, before it bends your back – before you too must become a burden. Only thus may it learn to bear its own weight. The followers of Belestae would cast aspersions at me for this, but I do not believe you can gain without sacrifice. I do not believe in luck.”
“Kas gained,” she blurted, already knowing what he would say.
“And who has not paid a sacrifice for his gains? Him? You? Your twin? Even your parents… if you see time as the gods see it.”
The priest swung open a door, and the sweet aroma of decay struck her, making her eyes sting and skin crawl for a moment as it always did.
She steeled herself, of course. She only almost vomited that very first time, and she’d swallowed it right back down without causing a fuss. She was a Sticktown girl – she was born to handle strong smells.
He stepped aside, and she scanned the room quickly. It was one of the big halls designed for use following Infernal Incursions, hundreds of stone-topped tables spreading out imperceptibly into inky darkness.
Only a few of the nearest tables were occupied, three ripe cadavers lying motionless under candlelight.
She stepped after the priest into the midst of the corpses. A handsome man and a pretty woman, still youthful-looking even in death. Their complexions were chestnut-brown and the third could only be their child, a girl perhaps half Jaid’s age.
All of them cold.
“But… why are they here?” She stifled her own voice, barely breathing the words.
Why am I on my own this time? she longed to ask, but dared not.
“They may be contagious.”
She met Brother Porsico’s gaze as he swept out of the room and put his fingers on the door-handle.
“The will of Mortiforn protects you, Daughter. And if not – you only go to his arms, which await you all the same.
“Sacrifice.”
He closed the door behind him, leaving her alone in the vast blackness against which the candle-flames themselves seemed to shiver.
She looked down at her work. She would need to fetch cloth from the shelves, draw water from the rainwater cistern. Basic stuff.
Sacrifice.
And so she surrendered to her task, and found her own power by giving in.
I am thy sacrifice, my Lord Suffering.
* * *
The moment he heard the dreadful voice, seeming to bubble up from the very planks beneath his feet – Jaroan dropped from the balcony-rail and twisted away to run, reaching out a hand to grip Yordi by the collar.
Between one instant and the next, everything had changed. The wooden beams were teeming with life – or with death. The hundreds of rats pouring up the balcony’s supports weren’t coming to say hello. They were coming to feast. And at the same instant, the air itself thickened with a dark swirl of insects – thousands, tens of thousands of them, coming to devour him –
Feychilde – Kas – please –
He hadn’t managed more than a single step when the swarms passed over him, tickling him, not a bite or sting landing on his exposed skin.
He wanted to look back over his shoulder after them, wanted to see what they did to Ti; he could already hear the older boy’s gasps but something inside Jaroan wanted to behold the look on his face as his gasps became screams, as the reality of dark magic overtook his petty little world of knives and intoxication –
Maybe then he’ll know one fragment, one tiny fragment of what it’s like, being me –
But the opportunity never came.
Blackness, more complete than anything he’d ever before experienced, took him up and swaddled him.
Even if the darkness was strange to him, he’d experienced this kind of exhilarating motion before – he was even vaguely conscious of those moments beyond his control when his feet connected with surfaces beneath him, conscious of the way one foot fell in mud, the other on cobbles, the next on wooden planks –
The blackness over his eyes: textured, soft. A fold of a robe or sleeve…
The hardness of fingers, clutching him – they moved about his body with such speed, shifting his weight between handholds, that he could perceive only the roughness of her grip, never where exactly she gripped him.
Her scent. Perspiration. Vaguely nice.
The first few moments of his rescue had passed, and Jaroan’s mind quickly summed the various sensations into the answer:
An arch-diviner is saving me, taking me home.
Killstop?
It didn’t matter who it was. Even if it was the renegade, risking the Magisterium’s wrath to come back to Sticktown and shield him from a dark druid’s malice, he didn’t want to go back. Didn’t want to have his choices made for him.
Instincts cried out in revolt, but he tried to twist away from her, lifting his arms and bucking. He tried his utmost to throw himself out of the spell.
It was no good. He would’ve spun away from her but she had anticipated the motion, whirling with him. The fabric covering his eyes never budged a finger’s-width.
Momentum increased. Consciousness fell away. His feet no longer impacted the ground. He was being dragged, swept along on a tide of time.
Then he found himself, seated at his ease upon the frost-coated trunk of a fallen tree. The air smelt the cleanest he could remember, the breeze fresh and free. Beams of starlight fell between the branches, illuminating the glade, and he swiftly cast about.
Aside from the black-clad archmage sitting cross-legged on the grass, the bow slung across her lap and the quiver of arrows propped up beside her, the clearing was empty. A single owl was perched upon a branch, but there were no eyes were shining in the eaves or undergrowth, no shapes prowling amongst the thorns.
That hardly made him feel safer. He almost would’ve welcomed witnesses.
She didn’t save any of the others. Maybe the owl is the dark druid…
“No. We are alone, Jaroan Mortenn. Do not be dismayed. I merely wished to speak with you. You’ve been doing the gods’ work, Jaroan.”
The voice was level, though far more formal than he’d expected.
“The… g-gods?”
“Not the ones of whom you’re thinking. The ones of whom you thought. Yane –”
Just hearing the hated syllable spoken aloud brought him twisting up to his feet.
Not Killstop.
“Sit down, boy.” The black-clad figure raised a hand, waved it dismissively in the starlight, and he gingerly sank down, putting his rear-end back on the frost. “I have no interest in ending your life; this much should already be apparent. Glimmer’s gone mad, and won’t obey orders. I’m finally getting somewhere with her, but I have to protect my interests as well, you understand? I do intend to return you to Mund, into the loving arms of your sisters. I would just… speak awhile first.”
Sisters?
But the other question overrode his curiosity.
“Return me…” He cast about again, seeing with new eyes. “We aren’t in… in Treetown?”
“We are some miles from the city. Almost two hundred, in fact. The nearest settlement is approximately one day’s hard march,” she turned a little and pointed over her shoulder, “that way.”
The feeling of isolation came crushing down on him then. He wasn’t just alone, he was gone – at a darkmage’s mercy, and –
“Don’t say it aloud,” she murmured. “It won’t help. He’s gone. He can’t save you. Only I can do that. And you won’t even know what I mean, until it’s too late.”
She sighed, and reached up to her face with both hands; within a few moments she had released her black mask and hood, and was pressing her fingers into her temples.
Jaroan kept silent, smiling, suddenly flooded with relief.
She might’ve been pretending to be someone else – putting on a harsh voice, cursing like a darkmage – and maybe the events of the last month or so had really changed her. By the starlight, sections of it looked to have been dyed white right from the roots, gleaming like pearl. Maybe she really was different.
But it was still her. He was still safe, with her.
He watched without comment as she drew her fingers through her tangled curls, then tucked the sweat-damp hair, brown and white alike, back into her hood.
She replaced the mask, put her hands on her knees, and returned her focus to him.
“What do you want, Jar? Most of all?”
She’d dropped the pretence. She was a Sticktowner again, just like him – and he’d never heard her sound so dejected.
“Want?”
He stared at her.
“Would you go back? If you could, I mean. Would you go back, do it all differently?”
She’s asking for herself, he realised. She’s… she’s alone too.
But the arch-diviner would never know he understood this; there was no way he was going to say something like that aloud.
He shook his head slowly.
“It’s like that story – Chraunator’s pocket-watch,” he mumbled into the silence. “You do it again, only it’s worse – so you try again, and again –”
“Until the world is broken, and Chraunator offers you a chance to return to the initial timeline…”
“Exactly! Only this time, you realise this is…”
The silence crept back in. After a few seconds, the owl in the tree hooted softly and spread its wings, coursing off through the branches.
Nothingness swallowed it.
“You realise it is…?” Killstop prompted him.
He stared after the owl.
“How things are meant to be.”
“You don’t envy the bird its freedom?”
He blinked. “Sometimes… Yes. Of course.”
“And what would you do, with such freedom?”
She didn’t give him time to answer.
“They will never give it to you. You’ll sit in the drop, twiddling your thumbs till you die. You have to take it. That’s what I’ve learned. You can’t trust them. Can’t trust your powers. They’ll just take those too, leave you for dead. You can’t be granted freedom, only imprisonment.”
“You…” He didn’t know what to say, but his hidden desires spoke through him. “You regret it? Turning into an archmage?”
She shook her head softly, staring now at the ground. “I can’t regret it. I’d be – I’d be dead. But it broke me the same way it broke him. Almost all of us – why do you think the Thirteen Candles even exists? And now – now I can’t show my face. They’ll never respect me, never talk to me. I’ll never be me again. Can’t let anyone know I’m… I can’t… They’ll kill me!”
Suddenly she was sitting the other way, and he was staring at the back of her hood as she hunched over her knees, shoulders shaking with silent tears.
He slowly slid off the tree-trunk, heading towards her.
“Killstop –“
The warm folds of blackness returned, and with it his fear. This time his consciousness had only one object: she filled him with her voice, and he shrank into himself. He no longer felt safe. He knew what he should’ve known all along.
She never lifted a finger to save Ti from his doom.
“They killed Killstop. She was never real. They killed her, and they’ll die in turn. I am Nightfell. I’m what’s left. A harbinger of fate. The future they earned. I’ll show them.
“I’ll show them all.”
* * *
“Do you believe the blind man when he tells you there is no such thing as light? Do you see my problem now? How can I describe the Light to you? Of course you will deny it. It sounds like something super-natural…”
She put down the book when she heard the door, stashing it under the covers, and waited patiently for her brother to enter.
“Welcome home, Jar.”
Jaid managed to say it without animosity.
No love, either. But how could she love him? She couldn’t even love herself.
He didn’t reply, and closed the door behind himself with uncharacteristic gentleness. Jaid pursed her lips, scrutinising him. She only had a handful of candles lit, and his face was swathed in shadow.
“What is it? What happened this time?”
He sat down on his bed and pulled off his boots and socks, his face carrying the shadow with it. His eyes burned like coals.
“Jar!” she hissed. “What is it?” She licked her lips. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” he snarled back suddenly, thrusting out his chin and glaring at her. “Go to sleep, Jaid. Just go to sleep.”
He pulled off his outer clothing, yanked the blankets up over his head and rolled over to face the wall.
She sat there, staring at the back of his neck.
He’ll talk, in time.
When the candles sputtered, one by one flaring their last, she didn’t light new ones. She let the room’s illumination dwindle and die. Let the darkness drink it all in until only their breathing was left. She lay there hugging her pillow, waiting.
He still wasn’t asleep. He’d pretended to be, then had given up.
“What happened, Jaroan?”
He started sniffling. She couldn’t feel sorry for him.
Did he kill someone? Is that it, Jar?
She imagined it – going to the shrine tomorrow – cleaning the body – not knowing whether it was the marks of his knife on the cold, cold flesh…
“I thought I could take the power back!” he moaned at last, rising to a sitting position. “I thought I could have control. Of my life. Fate. Whatever you wanna call it. But I can’t! They’re always there!”
“’They’?”
“The mages! The magic! It’s everywhere here, it’s in everything!” His voice ended up hoarse, and he continued croaking: “The men with knives, they took Mum and Dad. The mages took Kas. I just, I had to… I had to be someone – I had to know what it was like –“
“I understand.”
She spoke quietly, not meaning to interrupt, but he silenced himself instantly.
He looked at her for a long time in the darkness.
“Thanks,” he said at last.
“Did you kill someone, Jar?”
“What? No!”
It was good enough for her. She could hear the sincerity in his voice, and she didn’t much care beyond that.
She couldn’t remember falling asleep, but when she woke up, Kas wouldn’t stop pestering her.
Consciousness came flaring back into life, a candle-flame reignited, time running in reverse like upward-falling rain.
She whirled up from the bed, staring at the intruder.
The plain, angular face, half in shadow. The haunted green eyes, the long knots of fair hair behind the ears. The scar, a little crescent-moon high on his cheek.
It was perfect in its mimicry.
A fresh candle had been lit, and the shape looked like him, like it could have been him – once. But there was meat on the intruder’s frame. This was no prison-starved skeleton of a man. No weakness in his the words he’d said, still echoing around in her brain.
“… rustle up a blackberry pastry… if Pinktongue’s not scoffed them all.”
It couldn’t be him.
Unless he found healing.
No. A demon with his voice, his face, his clothes?
Ah. A darkmage. A heretic, impersonating him?
She remembered well all the nuances of the illusionist stories she’d heard – such a thing was certainly possible. The heretic at whose mercy they’d been held, during the Incursion – could it be him?
She froze, wanting to scream.
“Shh!” he said in Kas’s voice.
There’s only one way to survive this, she realised. Make him think it’s worked.
She ran to him, put her arms around him.
If only I had the invisible dagger…
He felt different. It didn’t feel like her big brother, someone she’d hugged ten thousand times. She caught a better glance of his face once he released her, and he was just too healthy. Too alive.
It isn’t him. Somehow, the knowledge was reassuring. It isn’t him, and I’ll find a way to kill him.
But why? Why?
Then she realised that her hair and forehead were getting wet, and, simultaneously, that the intruder was weeping. His chest wasn’t heaving; he wasn’t even breathing heavily. And yet, the tears fell, trickling down his face and down her own.
She twisted, looking up into her brother’s eyes. Grief and self-loathing, yes, and the pain of recent hardships… but there was something else. An almost imperceptible light of pure, heavens-sent exultation.
The whole embrace was transformed – now she was the stranger. She was the interloper here, the heart of the mistrust she was feeling. It wasn’t Kas who’d changed – it was her.
She heard Jaroan’s sob from behind her and that did it.
She almost screamed, and buried her face in Kas’s chest to stifle the sound. He’d asked for quiet, probably needed it… and she would give it to him.
Joy, and sorrow.
Once more the kinship almost bound their minds, but it couldn’t happen then. Couldn’t bring them to the brink of enlightenment. Something was, once more, missing.
She was left to think the thought alone, squishing her face into his mud-caked robes:
Inseparable.
* * *
Only a void separated him from the ground, but he was used to it. Even Jaid was starting to enjoy it now, he suspected. Gazing down on the shadowy forests and ravines, picking out the sparkling lakes and rivers, pools of starlight in the dense darkness – the wind moving over him, through him, barely even cold. After so many hours, it still didn’t get boring.
This is how gods feel, he said to himself silently as they flew. I found the bird’s freedom, Killstop. Or it found me.
But Killstop no longer existed, and he suspected he alone knew the truth of it. He would try to tell Kas sometime, maybe, if it came up.
If he deserved it.
Still, freedom didn’t quite encapsulate what he felt. He’d never before really understood why Nentheleme was even a thing. Freedom itself was a bit of a wishy-washy concept. He hadn’t had a context into which he could place his own self. Now he was finding out how small he really was, in the grand scheme of things. It filled him with pleasure and chagrin in equal measure. There was so much out there, to see, to do. So many not even half-ideas, vague notions of what life must be like in the various places they’d passed through. Lives he could live, if he chose to.
Jaroan had been to visit the sea with Kas and Em. He’d flown, multiple times. But this was different… so different.
The outside world had always been neatly compartmentalised in his mind. There was Mund, which was quite clearly the centre of everything, the nexus point of all important events in the universe. Even the dragonslayers had been drawn here, and the prophecies of the ancient wyrms apparently centred on this place. The seaside, Salnifast – that was only part of the city. It was important because it was close to Mund.
Now he frantically found he had to edit those thoughts – the dragonslayers had been drawn there – Mund was a ‘there’, not a ‘here’. Already it had disappeared, far behind them. Days behind them. Even now, it was difficult to remember he wasn’t just off in another plane.
I’m that far gone, he thought guiltily. That far gone, visiting other dimensions seems easier than this…
What was it they called it?
Exile? Yeah… Exile.
He seized upon the negative word and all its connotations, wrapping himself in it until he was a victim. Yet his unconscious thought knew it not as exile but as escape. Deep down, Jaroan was having the time of his life, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to deny it to himself.
For all that they’d left Mund behind, he was once more infused with magic, once more under a sorcerer’s spell. He had none of the control, none of the power. The mingled jealousy and anger he felt towards his brother had returned in spades even as he had to thank him for the opportunity to get out of there. To seek the change he so desperately craved.
He felt safe, but he told himself he didn’t want to feel safe. Jaroan knew that he was loved, that he’d been forgiven for his misdeeds, but he didn’t deserve it, didn’t want it. What had he done to justify such love? He’d not been punished. He’d spat in love’s face, over and over, and it was easier to keep doing it than to turn and face his mistakes head-on. He’d become his fear, ran from his reflection.
And was it really forgiveness? He felt judged. Rightfully judged. He’d carried the knife, and he’d moved inkatra, moved inkatra money. Kas might’ve bought him an invisible blade, might’ve been a bit of a thief when he was about Jaroan’s age – but those weren’t excuses and Jar knew it. Kas knew it.
There was nothing quite like being rightfully judged to make you want to close down, be the victim of it. Lean into it.
It was strange and it was stupid, and, most importantly of all, it was fake – how long would it be until Kas left them again? It didn’t matter what his brother said; it was inevitable. It had happened before, and it would happen again.
He forgives me, because that’s the easy road. Not because he really does. He’s still waiting for me to change.
Jaroan looked across to his brother’s wraith-face, coursing just ahead as the sorcerer pulled the twins across the sky. He could see the clouds through the transparent shadow of Kas’s substance.
I’ll never change.
* * *
She stood at the rail, and the breeze took up her golden braid, throwing back her muddy cloak, choking the breath in her mouth. For a moment she felt fear, facing the ocean – then the breathlessness became exhilaration.
It hadn’t taken long for Jaid to feel the disconnect. For her it happened the moment they drew up the anchor and the frozen wind caught in the sail. Blackice-town was still within arm’s reach, but then the tug of the first wave had caught the boat in its grip. Suddenly the wharf had been slipping away from her.
Not just the wharf. The land. The continent. The whole Realm…
I’ve well and truly left Mund now, she thought from the heart of the sea, unable to breathe. Gone, never to return.
Finally, she relented, facing away and drawing deep lungfuls of air. Not for the first or thousandth time, she looked back towards the stern, where she’d last seen solid ground.
Open ocean. The undulating skin of Northril.
What would Brenwe Bathor do? she asked herself, as the cold ocean dragged her away from her whole world.
It made it easier to fictionalise her life. Think of herself like a character in one of her books, like one of the Five Founders.
But that was a daft question. Brenwe wouldn’t have needed a ship – she’d have taken passage on her own wings, or given herself the shape of a dolphin…
Which was itself completely beside the point. Brenwe wouldn’t have shied away from an adventure like this. The arch-druid would’ve leaned into it, unworried by futures that might or might not come to pass.
Why never to return? I could go back, some day. Go back, see them again…
Unless Kas keeps his promise. He could bring them to us.
The thought of having Xan and Xas and Orstrum back at her side filled her with warmth that the wind couldn’t claim. Yet now that she thought of it, she found she preferred it this way. She didn’t want to be their old Jaid. She didn’t want the warmth.
I miss you, she thought at them silently, willing the words to cross the distances between them. I’ll see you again soon.
Maybe.
Or maybe you’re my sacrifice.
The pain was lesser than it had been when Kas went to Zyger, but only by degrees. Only by degrees.
She looked over at her brothers: Jaroan was looking like he didn’t know what to do with himself while Kas spoke to the captain, fidgeting with his hand at his belt where he used to keep the invisible knife.
Please, don’t tell me he’s still got it.
No. She could tell from the way he placed his hand, there was no blade there getting in the way of his fingers. It was just habit. Something that would pass, in time.
She caught herself smiling, and slowly removed the expressiveness from her face. There was no one else to see it – she was just doing it out of habit, in case someone cared to look.
She knew she was looking the wrong way.
She moved her eyes back over to the elder brother.
I thought you were my sacrifice, Kas. I thought you were gone and I was ready to change. Now I can’t. I can’t ever change.
We’re inseparable.
The thought horrified her, but she confronted it as she’d been trained.
This is my…
My penance.
Yet the knowledge was just part of it. It was only as the thought passed away like smoke into nothing, only then that she really began to transform.
What I really want is to be left alone.
* * *