As it turned out, the prefect did not eat children, though he did sometimes kill them. Never intentionally, but only the strongest were able to survive the rigorous and often brutal training he put them through. And when they died, his servants disposed of their bodies by tossing them over the cliff into the sea. Sharks and other carnivorous fish nibbled on the remains, taking as much of the soft tissue as they could and leaving behind much-gnawed carcasses for the villagers to find and spread rumors over.
At first it seemed as if the cursed infant would join the ranks of the discarded dead. By the prefect’s guess, he had been adrift for days without food or care. Not being a hellfiend as the superstitious old peasant had assumed, the babe was in dire straits, starving and dehydrated. But over the next several weeks, the prefect’s elderly housekeep nursed the child back from the brink of death.
While this went on, the prefect scoured his formidable library for information on foreign lands, continents and islands beyond the known where strangers with yellow hair like dry summer hay thrived. His texts and scrolls reinforced only that which was already known—the Reviled Islands of the far west, the land bridge to the Deep Continent. None mentioned yellow hair or fat, slow ships like the one that had run aground past the ruins of the lighthouse.
The prefect sent word to his vast network of eyes and ears, then turned his attention to the child. He’d never trained one from an infant before. He could, in theory, begin the practical training as soon as the child could walk.
But what was stopping him from beginning the philosophical training now?
He leaned over the basinet the servants had purchased. The cursed child, Lysander, looked up at him with icy blue eyes, cheeks much fattened from the skeletal and starving thing the villager had dragged out of the sea.
“You’re nothing,” the prefect told him. “You come from nowhere. You aren’t here now, and you never will be.”
If the prefect could just instill in him this simple idea, the boy might survive the Path ahead.
*
Lysander scaled the high stone wall, the Ro spikes in each hand digging into the mortar, then pulled himself to his feet on the top.
“Snap garotte,” the prefect’s voice ordered.
Barely into his fifth year of life, Lysander’s Ro had already advanced once along the unnamed path. He spun and manifested a thin strand of ruby wire, shooting it at the guard who’d spotted him. The cord wrapped flawlessly around the man’s throat and jerked tight. The crunch of a breaking neck signaled the guard’s death.
But already three more rushed the boy, Ro weapons glowing red in the darkness.
“Intent of attack, then disappear.”
Lysander willed his Ro to send out a feeling of deadly will, a certainty that he would attack and kill them. But as they charged him, Lysander shifted his technique, willing himself not to be seen as he dropped into a low crouch. Immediately, his Ro darkened and obscured him in shadow. He slipped behind them on silent feet, slashing their hamstrings and planting darkened Ro daggers in their kidneys.
“On to your target.”
Lysander climbed over the far side of the wall and dropped to the ground. He landed silently, cushioning the blow with bent knees. His target would be found in the darkened window there, a bedroom.
He darted across the courtyard toward the manse, his short legs eating up the distance. A wide moat surrounded the structure, smaller twin to the one he’d already crossed outside. As he reached it, he sent his still-darkened Ro down through his body’s lower pathways and manifested them into wide, flat panels.
The stinking water splashed as he stepped out onto it.
“Too loud.” Pain lashed across the back of Lysander’s calves.
He slowed, trying to silence his motion, but he began to sink.
More strikes from the cane followed. “Too slow.”
Lysander let the Ro panels dissipate and ducked under, cutting through the water like a fish.
A crocodilian maw clamped down over his arm and shoulder. His heart leapt into his throat and his lungs bucked in panic as the creature began to roll, but he squeezed his eyes shut.
You are nothing. You come from nowhere. You’re not even here now, and you never will be.
The familiar creed stilled his fear and focused his mind. He couldn’t die here tonight if he’d never been there in the first place. Pain couldn’t touch what didn’t exist.
Lysander sent out a wave of Nothingness from his heartcenter. The technique couldn’t be seen, but he knew it could be felt. The prefect had used it on him more than once during his training convincing Lysander that he wasn’t there even as Lysander looked him in the eyes.
Confused, the crocodilian opened its mouth and thrashed its head, trying to find the prey it thought it had lost. Still hung up on its teeth, Lysander manifested a long, thin awl in his free hand and jammed it through the beast’s eye into its brain.
When the death throes finally calmed, Lysander surfaced. He felt no burning desire to breathe—nothing needed nothing—but he forced himself to take a silent breath. Immediately, his vision sharpened. He must have been under for far longer than it seemed waiting for that crocodile to die.
Another lash from the cane sent pain searing across his shoulders. Fairly easy to ignore while he was nothing. Using the Ro-cycling technique the prefect had taught him, the wounds left behind would heal over and disappear by morning as well, leaving no evidence that they’d ever existed, either.
“Your failure’s cost you the element of surprise,” the prefect said from somewhere nearby. “You’re forbidden from using Ro for the rest of the night.”
Shouts sounded as a patrol came running to investigate the noises from the moat.
Dripping wet and bleeding, Lysander crawled up onto the bank and sat hugging his arms around his legs. He threw back his head and wailed, shivering extra hard.
The heavy bootfalls of the patrol thudded to a stop.
“What’s going on here?” a stern voice shouted.
Red light shined on the backs of Lysander’s eyes as a Ro weapon approached. He hugged his legs tighter to his chest and sent out a wave of helplessness.
“It’s a child,” a softer voice said. Armor clinked and a gauntleted hand landed on Lysander’s shoulder. “What happened?”
Lysander sniffled and choked and gasped until one of the guards picked him up and carried him inside. Baffled servants bundled him in warm, dry furs and too large clothes. They fed him hot broth and patted his back while asking each other over his head how a village child had gotten locked inside the gates after sundown.
“We’ll get you home in the morning, little nephew,” a dimpled maid promised, kissing his cheek. “Never fear.”
Lysander looked up at her with wide eyes, willing his heartcenter to send off a wave of helpless gratitude. The compound emotions were still hard for him to recreate, but he was getting better. Based on the maid’s charmed smile, he thought he’d managed that one all right.
After an appropriate length of time, he started yawning. The maid picked him up and carried him to a soft bed off the kitchen. She tucked him in, smoothed his yellow hair from his forehead, then left the poor little thing to sleep.
When he was certain she’d gone, Lysander slipped out of bed and into a crouch, darkening his Ro once more and creeping through the halls. He was nothing. The few servants and patrols he passed agreed with this, not seeing anything out of place.
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He ghosted into the target’s bedchamber, slit the target’s throat, absorbed the glowing ruby cloud of Ro, then disappeared through the window like he’d never been there.
*
Lysander was fourteen when he advanced again. He’d been at a birthday celebration of a local duchess, talking to the woman’s daughter when he felt the Ro in his heartcenter crumple and condense like a star on the verge of implosion.
He sent off a wave of deep fascination and infatuation to encourage the daughter to keep talking. Not that he had to try very hard. The highborn girls were always interested in the foreign adopted son of the mad prefect. Most even after their parents warned them away from him. The girls could pretend all they liked—they could afford it—but an outsider like him would never truly be a part of their society.
While the duchess’s daughter held most of the conversation by herself, Lysander turned his focus inward. Shadowy, smoky Ro roiled in his heartcenter. Not an hour ago, he had absorbed the Ro of a target he’d slain in one of the upper rooms. That, it seemed, had been the tipping point.
He caught the eye of the prefect. The man tilted his head ever so slightly. Lysander raised his drink in a toast, then knocked it back in a single gulp. Lysander’s reticent guardian had told him nothing of the path he followed, keeping back all but the techniques themselves, so he had no idea what to expect, but he had a feeling this advancement was going to be messy.
A moment later, Lysander vomited his drink down the front of the duchess’s daughter’s finest robes.
“Sincerest apologies,” the prefect said, slipping through the crowd to collect Lysander. The prefect bowed gracefully to the disgusted girl and called over servants from the perimeter of the room. “You two get her cleaned up. I’ll send the funds to replace the robes in the morning. You, call around my carriage. My son needs his bed.”
By then, Lysander had doubled over, spilling another gutful onto the floor. He wove drunkenly on his feet and sent out a wave of stupefied intoxication and childishness.
The prefect led him out of the celebration, sending out his own waves of embarrassment and dignifiedly attempting to save face.
When they climbed into the carriage together, Lysander groaned and sprawled across his seat. The door clanged shut. With a chirp from the driver, the team broke into a brisk trot away from the duchess’s estate.
“You’re advancing?” the prefect asked.
“That or catching some deadly illness.” Lysander started to sit up.
“Stay down while we go through the city. I should have made you stay at the celebration. By now, you should be able to advance without drawing attention to yourself.”
“I haven’t had a lot of practice advancing in public, and my master never wants to discuss how our path works.”
“Just shut your mouth and focus,” the prefect muttered. “I want this over with by the time we pull in to our prefecture.”
Obediently, Lysander fell silent and focused on the crushing inward pressure in his heartcenter. The Ro gathered there pulsed as if some giant hand were rhythmically squeezing it together. Each time it condensed, his chest felt like it was being crushed.
You are nothing. You come from nowhere. You’re not even here now, and you never will be.
With detached fascination, Lysander realized the pain made it easier to believe in the creed of the unnamed path. While the waves of agony expanded and took over everything in the world, he faded easily to the background, nothing and no one.
His Ro seemed to want to both compact itself and dissolve like a cloud of smoke on a breeze. He could sense a strength and power radiating from it when it condensed, but he also sensed an inflexibility he didn’t like at all. As if to allow that transformation would cement him forever as one thing, unchangeable and rigid. He was nothing, and that allowed him to be everything. He wouldn’t surrender that. Ever.
Holding tight to the creed of the unnamed path, Lysander willed Nothingness. Not on an outside consciousness this time, but on his own life force. It fought him at first. But he’d spent his whole life being nothing. He disappeared from himself completely.
If Lysander had been looking at himself from the prefect’s seat at the precise moment he advanced, he would have seen less than nothing. He would not have seen at all.
With no one to fight, the ownerless Ro conceded and tried to drift away like wafting smoke. It swirled lazily inside the unknown heartcenter, a cloud more nebulous than a living being’s should be.
Lysander flickered back into view and sat up.
“Knuckle blade from a straight punch,” the prefect said.
Lysander’s fist shot out, a minor shimmer just past his knuckles the only indication that a lethal Ro blade stuck out over the back of his hand.
The prefect looked down at the bare shimmer in the air and nodded. With the silver end of his cane, the prefect thumped the carriage ceiling.
The driver shouted to the horses and reined them to a stop.
“Plans have changed,” the prefect shouted out the window. “Take us north.” He turned back to Lysander and lowered his voice. “It’s time the student learns the name of his Path.”
*
For a day and a half, they traveled north, then west, eventually leaving the major trade routes for nothing more than a pair of wheel ruts. The carriage finally pulled to a stop as twilight fell on the second day.
Without a word, the prefect climbed out. Lysander followed. As he stepped down from the carriage, his fine leather boots sunk an inch deep into swampy muck. The horses stood at the end of a road that dropped off into stagnant black water. They’d come to a low marshland, peppered with wide pools and towering trees with root systems like many-fingered hands. Out in the shadows, green-white corpse candles danced and disappeared.
Lysander nudged a bulbous yellow fungal pod with the toe of his boot, and a cloud of glowing pink spores puffed from it.
“Don’t get them on your bare skin,” the prefect said. “There are more disgusting ways to die than fungus bursting from every inch of your flesh, but not by much.”
“Charming.” Lysander stepped away from the little growth of pods and wiped the patch of pink on his boot against a stand of marsh grass, his face twisted with revulsion.
“This way.” The prefect headed deeper into the swamp, walking out onto the water without manifesting water-walking panels.
Lysander watched intently for a moment before his sharp eyes picked out the trick. Just below the surface of the water, posts had been set, forming an invisible walkway. Stepping lightly, he followed his master into the swamp.
Full darkness crept into the marshland as they walked, but the prefect never slowed or misstepped. Lysander’s calves and feet burned with the effort of stepping only on the balls of his feet on such small posts for so long, but he was old friends with pain. He never faltered or fell behind.
Finally, they reached a spit of high ground where an abandoned shack sat rotting apart. The prefect turned around and gestured behind them.
“Only a ghost could walk that road without being led astray,” he said.
Lysander wanted to ask where they were and what this place had to do with their path, but the prefect was sending out a wave of discouragement from speaking. This was a time for silence.
The prefect walked to the abandoned shack and ducked inside the hanging door. When Lysander stepped inside, the man was already pulling up a section of floor with a heavy wooden ring.
Without windows or sunlight, it was dark inside the little shack, but the hole beneath the floor was total blackness. A void. True nothingness.
The prefect stepped down into the blackness, soon disappearing below. No sound escaped. Lysander felt for the wave of Nothingness or will to disappear, but felt neither. That total darkness had swallowed the man.
It must be a test. Luckily, Lysander had been raised to be as at home in full dark as he was in daylight. He trailed the prefect into the hole, the darkness engulfing him as if he’d dived into a pond full of the stagnant water of the marsh above. The lightless black pressed in on him from all sides given weight and strength by its concentration. There were stairs beneath his feet, walls at his sides. He could have reached out and touched them on either side, but he kept his hands still. He could sense their presence, and that was enough.
He took the steps down cautiously, his strange darkness sense on high alert for any obstacle or danger. His ears whined with the silence, and his eyes began to hallucinate colorful whorls and swoops in the blackness like a scrim of lamp oil floating on a puddle.
Then he felt a pressure in front of him. Too narrow to be a wall, too soft to be a blade. He made it to be his master. Lysander stopped and waited.
“A ghost has no need of sight, sound, or touch,” the prefect’s voice came from just ahead of Lysander. “Those are concerns of the living.”
At once, corpse candles flared to life around the room. Their green-white lights rested in the palms of hooded men and women in the garbs of various professions and tribes.
“This one must not be allowed to live,” one woman said. “He is foreign to our land and will steal our secrets for his people.”
“He is dead to his people and land,” the prefect responded as if by rote. “Born in death yet trained to walk among the living, he can never be a part of them, and thus can carry no secrets to them.”
“Who are you, child?” a man from the opposite side of the room intoned. “Where do you hail from?”
Lysander answered easily. “I’m nothing, and I come from nowhere. I’m not even here now, and I never will be.”
The sensation of killing intent behind Lysander caused him to whirl, the knuckle blade manifesting invisibly over the back of his curled fist. He threw the lethal strike without thinking. It clashed against another invisible Ro weapon and scraped off.
Lysander dropped into a crouch and willed himself to disappear like his Ro while feeling for his attacker. She—he could feel that it had been a woman with the same certainty that he could see certain robes were made for women—was hiding herself nearby, but he couldn’t sense her, only her killing intent.
Acting again out of instinct, Lysander threw up his hand over his throat, palm out. A moment later, the invisible wire of the snap-garotte closed over his palm and bit into his neck. It had come from behind him. Close. Without turning, he manifested an invisible Ro chain sickle and lashed out, slashing the unseen blade where her abdomen would be. The garotte disappeared.
He felt the slightest pull of resistance against the sickle, then she was gone.
And so was her killing intent.
“Who attacked you?” the first woman asked.
Lysander searched the faces behind the flickering corpse candles. Without the killing intent, he couldn’t tell which one she was. It had definitely been a woman, he was certain of that. He watched shoulders, chests, and stomachs, looking for one who was breathing harder than the rest, but found none. Finally his eyes settled on the flaring nostrils of a small, dark woman in handmaid’s robes. A thin strand of hair had come loose from her cap and through the shadows thrown by the corpse candle, Lysander thought he could see a darkened streak on the abdomen of her robes.
But just before he answered that the small woman had been his attacker, her lips twitched at the corner. A leak of smug satisfaction.
The question was a trap.
Lysander turned back to the first woman. “No one. Nothing doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be attacked.”
The corpse candles went out as one.
“Welcome to the Path of the Restless Ghost,” the prefect’s voice said. “Welcome to the ranks of the inji.”