I smiled bashfully as I cleaned my desk, secretly pleased with how it’d gone down. I’d been practising their tongue alongside the twins, without letting any of the natives in on what I was up to. An hour a night with Ysara proved sufficient to keep us improving, without too much of an impact on our time. Not that the twins spent much time with me anymore – I had my burgeoning school-cum-workshop to deal with, and they were taking full advantage of my various distractions, heading off with their peers of similar age whenever opportunity arose. (At least I knew that, with the crown prince present, they would be well-guarded on their little jaunts under the palace to who-knew-where.) There were days when Telese-class was the only time I saw them. It’d been three days since either of them bothered attending one of my lessons, but I couldn’t exactly hold it against them. They finally had their chance to be free – I just had to hope that they were enjoying themselves here as much as I was.
They said they were. Their eyes told a different story – as much as the old wounds had healed, they’d been severe, leaving scars in our three-way relationship that might never go away. There was plenty of terse politeness from Jaid, and a few wise-cracks from Jaroan, but that was pretty much the extent of it. As much as in my isolation in Zyger I’d wished I’d been there for them more, that I’d been a better big brother, I found myself slipping straight back into old habits. I was buried in books most of my free time, planning lessons or new ways to use my powers for the betterment of Telior. I remembered the trinkets I’d heard of or seen back in Mund, and some evenings I did little more than fiddle with fish-attracting lures for the nets, braziers that sensed your presence and warmed up or cooled accordingly…
I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it wasn’t just the easy way – it was the only way. I knew I was supposed to stay on top of them, coddle them, keep them safe – and I knew without having to ask that if I did what I felt compelled to do, I’d only drive them further away. If they were at arm’s length right now, at least I could still keep a grip, a tenuous handhold on them, their lives. Trying to draw them into an embrace, I would only push them out of reach.
Or, at least, that’s what I was telling myself.
There were times like now, when I was just cleaning my desk and bathing in the company of my sorcerous peers – sorcerous sycophants – that I could almost forget the emptiness inside me. My face smiled of its own accord. I should have been happy. I should have felt satisfied.
Was it just the twins? Or was it something more? Was I homesick, or something? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t scry out the source of my discomfort.
The door banged open, letting a smattering of pale natural light into the globe-lit room, and I looked up to see a courtier, backed up by a bunch of spear-armed guards.
There wasn’t much space to manoeuvre in here. The place was crammed with desks, and the walls bristled with shelves containing assorted items few men would wish to go near. Every walking-path was too narrow for one, never mind two.
They stayed up there in the doorway, and the courtier declared:
“Warlock! You are summoned.”
I felt myself frowning, but I started moving towards him nonetheless. He wasn’t like one of the courtier-folk in Mund – this young man, probably a minor lordling on loan to the king, looked like a fighter. His hair was short, his hands were big, and he too had suffered a broken nose at some point. He wore a shiny, undented breastplate and a fancy-looking sword-grip was at his left hip, the scabbard hidden by the folds of his shaggy black cloak.
“What’s going on?” I asked him plainly.
“Zere is… a problem.” The messenger looked uncomfortable. “A problem… for dark magic.”
I stopped at the bottom of the short stair, just beneath him.
“My apprentices? It’d be good for them to get some hands-on experience.”
I felt the collective tension in the room go up about three thousand percent.
“I am ask to summon you… Hool Raz.” He seemed to force the formal term of address out between clenched teeth. “No other.”
I sighed, and looked back to shrug at the others. Most of them looked incredibly relieved.
“Fine,” I muttered, then glanced around at them. “Anyone who wants to try what Roba and Nafala came up with, feel free to give it a shot. Other than that, Ghena, can you get everyone started on the braziers?”
I started up the steps – the courtier turned on his heel and stalked out into the wind, his guards waiting for him to pass then falling in behind him.
As an afterthought I brought forth Gristlehead to finish the clean-up at my desk, opting to err on the side of discretion as to the exact nature of the mess, and headed out after them into the cold, readjusting my wraith as I went.
They didn’t slow for me, but two of the spearmen had hung back to serve as my escort, falling in to flank me as I passed between them.
“Oi, what’s all this?” I called, halting abruptly.
The guards turned and parted – the broken-nosed courtier glared back at me.
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I dimmed further, and floated.
I noted the faint look of terror that came into every eye, and many of my escorts shuddered, using the motions to mask their fear as they each drew away from me slightly.
“I’ll not be marched like a prisoner,” I crooned at the leader. “I’ll walk at the front, with you.”
I hovered closer to him.
“Or fly,” I finished softly.
Suffice to say, the courtier stayed at my side and didn’t dare put half a foot in advance of me as we made our way towards the palace steps.
“So what’s this really about, then?” I asked conversationally, drifting up the stairway. If my eldritch substance loaned a certain deathly hollowness to my voice, that just couldn’t be helped, now, could it?
I caught the loud swallowing sound that echoed from his throat before he answered.
“Hool Raz… It is for the king. There is – how you say? – a ghost?”
I turned my head to regard him, and he shrank back from my gaze like I would immolate him with my mere awareness.
“A ghost? Interesting. Doesn’t he have a sorcerer on his staff?”
“His… staff? Hool Raz, I do not –”
“I mean – no sorcerers in the palace?”
The messenger shook his head. “He vould have sent me to Menild, to ze Night Order, before. Now, zere is… zere is anozzer option.”
I smiled to myself. A better option, he means.
But it wasn’t my power that set me apart – it was my discretion, it transpired. Entering between the pillars of the gods and into the Fish-Queen’s gaping maw, I was quickly led to one of Deymar’s private chambers, a room of repose with comfortable furniture, tables and lamps, a small library on the back wall. When the door was closed behind me, I noticed the king himself sitting upon a couch in casual clothing, a silken smock and loose pants – and, beside him, huddled forwards as if to drink in the fire’s warmth, was a man in his forties with bloodshot eyes.
There was no wine, no food upon the table before them.
“Raz,” Deymar said familiarly, “come in. Come closer to the fire, by the gods.”
It was only as I came fully within the firelight that I let go of the shadows, dropping to the bearskin rug. The stranger barely seemed to register my presence at first – and when he did, it was only that a light of hopefulness entered his red-raw gaze. His hands remained clenched upon his knees. The man might’ve shed an outdoor cloak but was otherwise dressed for activity in an expensive-looking white doublet, belted and booted in fine black leather. His headwear was typical of the Telese gentry, stubby and broad-brimmed with a long tail covering the nape of his neck.
When I took the seat farthest from the flames, Deymar made no comment.
“How can I aid you, my king?”
Whenever I used such forms of address for him, I was never sure whether he understood the tinge of sarcasm that was plain to hear in my voice… plain as far as my own ears were concerned, at least. He never gave the faintest impression of offence.
“My friend, the Earl ya Oedenfron. He is… familiar with Mundic.”
I understood the implication of such an introduction, and turned to the earl. “Kur hool.”
“Hool Raz,” he whispered nervously.
“Don’t worry, earl.” I smiled. “I’m only familiar with Telese.”
“Blease – blease, Hool Raz.” Oedenfron’s voice was hoarse when he raised it but he seemed to have no choice, desperation compelling him. “Hel’ me!”
Tears sprang from his eyes, and Deymar looked away awkwardly.
Over the next ten minutes, the king explained the situation, aided from time to time by the sniffling Oedenfron in broken Mundic or garbled Telese. The earl’s story was an intricate and grisly one. The man’s bride had been selected for him when he was still knee-high, and the pair of them became childhood sweethearts long before they were to exchange vows. When the time came for friendship to mature into love, however, no romance blossomed.
“The relationship was consummated… but the bond revisited so infrequently, the chance of an heir being produced was reduced basically to nil.” The king’s awkwardness didn’t let up, and he was telling the tale with his eyes on the floor – yet his perseverance, all to save his friend the ignominy of attempting the same: it only endeared my liege lord to me further. “It was… after some time… that my good earl forsook his oath, and lay with another woman.”
I nodded, indicating that he should continue. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen this turn of events coming a mile off.
“He still loved, and loves, Jenika. Yet when he made mention of divorce she took her own life before his very eyes. This is almost four years ago, now.”
I leaned forward. “Forgive me, but… How? By what method did she die?”
Oedenfron glanced at me, then away again.
“She cast herself into the sea. The drop…” Deymar grimaced briefly. “She could not have survived this fall, Raz. It would be as casting yourself onto stone.”
I sat back once more, remembering Hightown rushing down at me as I fell head-first into its broken wasteland.
I shook off the shudder that threatened to claim me with a surge of wraith-power. “When did the ghostly visitations first begin?”
Oedenfron murmured something I couldn’t catch, and Deymar continued in his stead:
“Two years ago this spring.”
“Two years?” I cried.
It transpired that the haunting had started out innocuously-enough, things going missing, moving around between one moment and the next – occurrences which had gone unexplained until the subsequent, overtly-spiritual events forced their reinterpretation. For six months the earl had thought himself going quietly mad – until her drowned and bloated likeness took shape on the air, standing across the bedroom from him in the midnight hour, clams and kelp-strands knotted in her dripping hair.
“He says that she never stayed longer than it took him to blink, and never made a sound at first, yet her returning came with greater and greater frequency. Now she speaks to him. We all noticed the change in him. We thought… We thought it was rum. But the rum was not the cause. It was the symptom. It… This thing has changed him, Raz.”
I nodded. “And what makes him bring this to you now? To me?”
Surely he could’ve brought this to a priest… Doesn’t he trust the priests?
Deymar pursed his lips, turning to his countryman.
I looked across, into the earl’s bloodshot eyes.
Is he lying?
Perhaps this was all some carefully-constructed face he presented to the world: it could be that he was a womaniser. Maybe he threw Jenika into the sea himself, when she refused him his divorce – or maybe it was that she desired a divorce… Were there witnesses to her last moments? Could anyone be trusted to come forward even if there were, given that it would be their word against their own liege’s?
Then he moaned, in halting Mundic, and if he was a liar he was good. I believed him.
“Because off you! Hool Raz! You scare dak elze! She says… says zat I vill… she vill kill me if I say… if I say zat she is, zat I see her… but you! You free her! Blease, Hool Raz – you free her?”
He was weeping like a baby, and I almost reached out instinctively to touch him, comfort him – then I stopped, catching myself.
“Come on.” I cleared my throat, more noisily than I wanted to. “Let’s go catch your ghost, my good earl.”
* * *