A Plague of Shadows (6 page)

Yet, she was being punished.

Something thumped upstairs in her father’s study, and before Abagail realized that she’d moved, she was standing at the foot of the stairs, her silver dagger clasped in her hand and dripping water all over the wooden floor of the hall.

She stared up the dim stairs. The entire house was cast in gray twilight, and the light was fading fast. Against her better judgment Abagail put one foot before the other, climbing the stairs, her ears hyper-aware of any noise coming from the study.

There was power in the upstairs, a kind of fog that slithered along the floor. It had settled in the corners, and along the doorways, creeping toward the stairs. It was coming from the study door, which stood ajar. From inside the study, silvery light filtered into the upstairs common room.

Abagail hugged the wall, creeping along as silently as possible to see what was happening in the study. Her eyes scanned the common room, making sure nothing was out of place. Her eyes landed on the heap of the bee keeping uniform on the floor, but that was the only thing she noted that wasn’t exactly as Dolan kept the upstairs.

Except the door to the study.

The second time it’s been open.
Abagail thought. She hoped that it might be something as simple as another butterfly, but the power leaking from the cracked door warned that it was something much more malicious.

How?
She wondered.
We have the house protected. Could the All Father really have turned away from us like the Light Guard says?
It was a common belief that the All Father had turned from them, that’s why the darklings were coming. If they were pious, maybe he would return.

She peered through the opening to the otherworldly room beyond. There was another source of light from inside, and she could see the purple butterfly flitting here and there inside the room.

There was also hissing.

Abagail eased forward, the floorboard creaked loudly underfoot. She inhaled deeply and held her breath, waiting to hear anything that might be different, anything that might tell her if whatever was inside the room had heard her approach.

The door swung open, and Abagail flailed backwards with a shout. Her arms wind milled and she fell backwards, landing heavily on the splintery floor. Slivers dug into her flesh, but they were just a distant annoyance to what was looming up out of the doorway before her.

If there was anything human about the darkling in the doorway of the study, it was in shape only. It had a bald head, but no other discernable features. It wore the shadows like a cloak, or a robe that slipped and slid across the floor with a liquidity like the very fog clogging the upstairs of the house.

The shadow loomed over her, hissing at her, as if trying to speak in some obscene language. It reached out a hand to her, and as it hovered above her chest, her heart hiccupped in response. The shadow moved its hand, and Abagail’s body convulsed as if she were nothing but a puppet. She felt energy tug at her stomach, felt the strength being sapped from her body as if the darkling were siphoning her life force, which it very well might have been doing.

In a flare of violet light, the butterfly appeared in the air above her, as if summoned from the ether. But this time, she noticed, it wasn’t precisely a butterfly, but a little human with wings. A fairy. Her day was getting stranger and stranger. No matter what the creature was, it did the trick, and in the brightness of the coming purple light, the darkling stumbled back toward the door of the study.

There was something about the study, however. Abagail knew that she couldn’t let the darkling get to the mirror. She wasn’t sure
how
she knew it, but there was a certainty in her that the shadow shouldn’t reach the mirror!

The need to keep the creature from the blackened glass drove Abagail to her feet. She searched the floor for her silver dagger, but couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter though, she had to get between the darkling and the mirror, no matter what the cost.

She followed the shade and the fluttering purple fairy into the room. The fairy was shooting purple plumes of smoke at the darkling, and whenever it struck the shadowy beast there was a roar of pain, and a bright white flash.

Abagail charged into the room, and stopped. The mirror was bubbling, like she’d seen it the day before when the butterfly turned fairy, came from it. Something was either coming through, or. . . .

The darkling was making for the mirror. Nothing was coming
from
the mirror, but something was trying to get
into
the mirror that stood upright on the wooden table.

Abagail slipped around the edge of the room, but the shadow was already stepping up to the table, away from the fairy.

All Father!
Abagail cried out in her mind.
If you’re still listening to me, and this room is anything other than a study, please, turn your Waking Eye to this window!

But nothing happened. Maybe she really was cursed, or maybe this room wasn’t anything special like she thought it was. But she couldn’t think about it just then because the shadow was oozing up onto the table, and already reaching for the safety of the bubbling mirror.

“Stop!” Abagail shouted, and held out her hand. There was a strange feeling of separation in her palm. Where the darkness had marred the surface of her flesh, the skin folded back like an eyelid, and out poured a radiant swath of golden light.

The darkling held its arms up and stumbled away from the light. Outside the window midday flared to life, and the light of the Waking Eye flooded the room, combining with the golden radiance of Abagail’s palm.

The shadow exploded, and drifted around the room like sand carried on an unfelt wind.

The shadow settled around the chamber like dust, and then vanished as the light of the Waking Eye flared brighter outside the study window and then suddenly gave way once more to the silvery light of the Sleeping Eye. The room seemed to spin, and the fairy settled on the edge of the table, staring at the mirror. As the creature watched, the mirror grew still and flat once more, no longer a portal, but now a blackened scrying mirror once more.

Abagail blinked at her hand a few times, her mouth slacked open. The light had left her palm, maybe it had never been there in the first place. She flexed her fingers and watched the muscles and tendons work under her skin. But there was something else happening, some other transformation occurring. Her head grew light, and she stumbled back into the wall, her breath coming in ragged gasps. What had been just a speck of darkness before had spider webbed across her palm.

How am I ever going to tell Father that I’m turning into a darkling?

Abagail shucked her wet clothes and slumped down onto her bed. The evening air was cold against her bare skin, bringing goose flesh bubbling up along her arms and legs. She didn’t care though, all she could do was stare at her hand. Her other hand was clasped tight around her wrist. Maybe if she squeezed hard enough she could choke out the shadow from creeping further.

Again she thought of the knife, but before she could complete the image of severing her hand from her arm, she shook her head to clear it of the musing.

Alright,
she thought.
Calm down. This isn’t going away, so what do you know about it?
She knew a lot about darklings, but only what other people told her. They were evil, the shadows of evil people who’d been destroyed by Hafaress in a rain of fire from the heavens. The fire had been so bright and so intense that it had melted away everything of the person, save their shadows that were burned into surfaces around them. Their shadows had taken up their baneful lives then, spreading through the world, creating havoc wherever they went.

And when the Sleeping Eye rises high, and the Waking Eye is set they can roam freely.
Alright, that wasn’t helping. What did she
really
know about darklings?
Nothing other than what the Light Guard says, and who knows if that’s true?
Great, now she sounded like her Father.

But it seemed that the darkness in her hand only spread when she came in contact with the shade. The bees, the darkling in the study.

The darkling in the study disintegrated like the bees when I touched them.
She’d never heard of that happening before. She’d actually
seen
a darkling once when she was younger. The sorceress had already been consumed mostly by the shadows. The only thing that hadn’t turned black on her had been one milky white eye. Abagail shuddered at the thought. That sorceress had been killed with silver because they couldn’t get the fire to catch and they couldn’t wait any longer since she could turn into a full shadow at any moment and be harder to kill.

The sorceress hadn’t turned into a puff of debris like the bees or the darkling in the study. She had died like a regular person, and then been burned once the fire would catch so she wouldn’t rise again.

Not all of the bees had turned to dust,
Abagail remembered. It was true, some of the bees that hadn’t turned completely black had been substantial enough that she could pick them up.

The rumble of a wagon outside brought her attention back to more immediate concerns, like her father and Leona.

Abagail found a tunic and some breeches she used for evening time and changed into them. She felt like she needed to clean up again, but that could wait. She considered putting on gloves, but that would have been too obvious.

The front door groaned open and she could hear her father and Leona chatting and laughing about the rain. Abagail had forgotten about the storm, but now that they mentioned it, she could hear the deluge slapping against the roof and hammering the windows.

She met them in the living room. Leona was already working on a fire to ward off the chill creeping into the house, and as a source of illumination. Abagail stood there for a moment watching her father and sister toil away with the lights.

Finally Dolan turned to look at her, his smile fading from his face to a look of concern when he saw the distraught face of his oldest daughter.

“Abbie, what’s wrong?” he asked, coming toward her.

“Daddy, what’s happening to me?” she asked, no longer able to hold the tears at bay. They came out with a sob, and she held her hand out to him, palm up to show him the veins of darkness running over the surface. She shivered in fear and the emotions that she’d kept in check all day long.

Dolan took her hand in his and gazed at her palm. There was a moment of intense concentration before his face melted into a mask of horror.

“No,” Dolan said, his voice as worried as his face. He pressed Abagail into a chair, and sat before her, clasping her hand and staring at it as if merely by watching he could erase the shadow from her hand.

“Is it dirt?” Leona asked.

“Yes, Leona, I’m crying over fucking dirt!”

“Abbie,” Dolan warned, but his voice lacked any true emotion. “Great All Father, I’d feared something like this would happen.” Dolan rubbed his eyes tiredly.

Shouldn’t he be more concerned? Shouldn’t he be crying with her? Shouldn’t he be telling her how he was going to protect her, how they could make the shadow go away? All of the hopes she’d rested at her father’s feet were vanishing faster than her tears had come.

Abagail pulled her hand back to herself, clasping it against her chest, and hiccupped away the remaining tears. “What?”

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Dolan said. Standing he went to the fireplace and lit a pipe. The sweet smell of tobacco wafted to the rafters above. Absentmindedly Abagail slid over allowing Leona to sink into the chair beside her. “The shadow plague has crept into all of the nine worlds along the Tree at Eget Row. It’s a sickness some think originated in the tree itself, though that can’t be readily determined by ways that I know of. Here in O, we have the Light Guard, and they fear the shadow, they seek to wipe it out, though it’s not something easily done.”

“What are you talking about?” Leona asked, pulling her wooden doll closer to her. At fourteen Abagail thought it was bizarre that her sister still carried the doll, but she didn’t say anything. In a world of harsh living, it was unique that someone could remain as innocent as Leona.

“There are people, in other worlds, who have learned to live with the shadows,” Dolan said.

“But how is that even possible?” Abagail asked. “How can one
live
with this? It’s consuming, it takes over the body. The only way to be rid of it is with the fire of the Waking Eye.”

“That’s what the Light Guard think, and they are such a force that there’s no reasoning with them. The shadow doesn’t
have
to consume, or at least not as quickly as it normally does. There are people with the shadow plague who live long, full lives in other worlds.”

Other worlds,
Abagail thought.
They aren’t just a myth?
There were too many thoughts swirling through her head to even make sense of. How could any of this be real? She didn’t realize she was staring at the darkness in her palm until her father started speaking again.