(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (106 page)

“Very well,” he said. “I have learned that there is something interesting about the murderous
kulikos
spirit. It is female, always female. When it is summoned, it only will inhabit the bodies of women.”

“Madness!” cried Anissa.

“And it is particularly a favorite weapon among the witches of Xand and of the southernmost lands of Eion. Lands like Devonis.”

Anissa turned to her stepdaughter, holding out her hands. Briony couldn’t help shrinking back just a little. “Why do you let him say this to me, Briony? Have I not always been kind to you? Because I am from Devonis, I am a witch?”

“It is easy enough to discover,” Chaven said loudly. He thrust the small gray object closer to the king’s wife. “Here is the stone. Look at it. It was tossed aside by the one who employed it to murder the prince regent after she had used it up, but doubtless a little of those dark magicks still remain. Touch it, my lady, and if you have anything to hide, the stone will show that.” He extended his hand, bringing the stone close to her bare arm. Anissa tried to squirm away from it as though it were a hot coal, but couldn’t disentangle herself from the protective embrace of her maid Selia.

“No!” Selia snatched the milky-gray stone out of Chaven’s hand so quickly that as he closed his fingers on nothingness, the girl had already pulled it against her own breast. He stared in surprise. “There is no need for this,” the maid declared, then snapped out something in a language Briony did not recognize—a short, sharp cry like a hawk falling on its prey.

Briony tried to say something, to curse the young woman for interfering, but a change in the air of the room suddenly made it hard to talk, a cold filling and tightening of her ears as though she had dunked her head into the water.

“There is no need for this, or for anything else.”
Selia’s voice suddenly seemed to come from a great distance.
“I did not drop the stone away as a man drops away a maid when she is a maid no longer. I was weary and it fell from me, and when I was strong enough again to go back and search for it, it was gone.”
The girl’s voice rose, ending on a triumphant cry, harsh, but still muted by the strange squeezing of the air.
“No one lets to drop a
kulikos
stone, little man! Not by choice!”
Selia lifted her hand and put the stone in her mouth.

Her face abruptly blurred and changed, her torchlit skin seeming to shrink away even as something darker unfolded from inside. This devouring of light by darkness spread over her in the matter of a few heartbeats, as though someone had tossed a rock into a stream in which the girl was reflected, muddying the surface. The strangling air of the chamber finally began to move, but instead of bringing relief it sped faster and faster, a breeze that became a harsh wind, then a full gale, swirling so swiftly that Briony could feel needle-sharp bits of dust and flecks of stone stinging her skin. The guards shouted in surprise and terror but she could hear them only faintly.

The candles blew out. Now only the fire gave light, and even the flames were bending toward the dark shape growing before the bed, the shape that had been the pretty maid Selia. Anissa screamed, a thin, threadlike sound. Briony tried to call to Chaven, but something had knocked the little man to the floor where he lay limply motionless, perhaps even dead. The room was filling with the mingled smells of hot metal and mud and blood—but blood most of all, powerful, heavy, and sour.

Strangely, Briony could still see something of Anissa’s maid in the horror, a thickness at its core that echoed her shape, a gleam of her features in the dark, crude mask, but mostly it was a blur of growth, an inconstant, shadowy thing armored like a crab or spider, but far more irregular and unnatural. Jagged-edged plates and lengthening spikes of powdered stone and other hard things grew and solidified even as Briony gaped in astonishment, as if it built itself out of the very dust whirled through the chamber by the rushing air.

A glint of eyes from deep in the dark instability of the face, then the thing lifted an impossibly long hand. Scythelike claws clacked and rasped against each other as it advanced on Briony. She stumbled back, almost boneless with fear, knowing now beyond doubt what had killed her brother Kendrick. She was weaponless, wearing an impossible, ridiculous dress. She was doomed.

Briony grabbed up a heavy candleholder and swung it, but one of the thing’s clawed hands swept it from her grasp with a ringing clash. Something rushed past her; a long pole crashed into the thing’s stomach and for a moment it was driven back.

“Run, Highness!” screamed the young guardsman Millward, trying to keep the thing pinioned on the end of his halberd like a boar. “Lew, help me!”

His fellow soldier was slow to come forward; by the time he did take a few timid steps into the blinding storm of grit, the thing had shattered Millward’s halberd like a stick of sugar candy and was free again. It closed with the second guard and dodged his swinging pike. Instead of running, Briony stared, transfixed. Why didn’t the guards draw their swords—who could be fool enough to fight with such long weapons in a small room? The apparition ripped at the second guard’s midsection with a dull flash of talons and he fell back, clutching at his shredded armor, gouting blood black as tar.

The thing now slouched between Briony and the door. Her moment of indecision had left her trapped. She thought she saw something moving behind the monstrous shape—was it Chaven escaping? The young guard Millward had finally drawn his sword; he swiped at the thing but it gave no ground, only let out a rumbling hiss, a sound more like stone scraping on stone than the breath of a living animal, and sank back on itself; its shadowy form became darker and thicker. For a heartbeat Briony thought she could see the maid Selia’s face in it, triumphant and deranged, lips curled back in a silent scream of joy.

The young guardsman leaped forward, shouting with terror even as he hacked at the shapeless thing. For a moment it seemed he might even be hurting it—the monstrosity had shrunk to almost human proportions and the claws spread like pleading hands, the dark face all moaning, toothless mouth. Then the talons darted out almost too quickly to be seen and Heryn Millward sagged and collapsed backward, blood bubbling from the hole of his eye socket, his face a red ruin.

Briony could barely breathe, her heart squeezed in her chest by terror until it was near to bursting. The
kulikos
demon moved toward her, edges shifting, nothing quite clear except the gleam of its eyes and the clicking of the long, curved claws as they opened and closed, opened and closed. She stumbled and slid to the floor, fumbling desperately for a stool, anything to keep those terrible knives at bay. Her hand closed on something, but it was only the butt of dead Millward’s halberd, a length of splintered wood. She held it in front of her, knowing it would be no more use than a broomstraw against that strength and those terrible, hooked talons.

Then a blossom of flame rose in the air behind the thing, haloing it for a moment so that it seemed to have taken on a new aspect, no longer a dark, muddy nightmare but a fire demon from the pits of Kernios’ deepest realm. The fire crashed onto its murky head and shoulders in a shower of sparks and tumbling ribbons of flame. The creature let out a rasping howl of surprise that made Briony’s insides quiver as though they had been completely turned to liquid. It turned to lash out at Chaven, who jumped back, dropping the iron fire basket from his smoking, blackened hands, and somehow avoided being torn in half by the sweep of the talons. Flames leaped on the thing’s body and crowned its shapeless head, burning higher and higher until they licked at the ceiling. Stumbling backward, it pulled the curtains from the bed, tangling itself like a bear in a net. The diaphanous cloth sparked and swirled and now the flames were bound to it. The shadow-shape writhed, flapping its clawed hands, and Selia’s face came into view again, this time twisted in a grimace of alarm. It tore at the flaming curtains and they began to fall away; in a moment it would be free again. Cold fury sent Briony forward with both hands wrapped around the broken halberd staff, which she drove as hard as she could into the center of the terrible thing. It was like running into a stone column—Briony flew back from the impact, dizzied—but the ragged hole of the thing’s mouth popped open and something flew out and clattered across the stone floor.

The
kulikos
beast howled again, this time in true pain and terror, but the air was suddenly full of sparks and flying dust. The wind that had swirled it into being now seemed to be pulling it apart.

Briony tried to get up, but the beast’s grating screech, so loud that it threatened to shake loose the roof timbers, made her stumble and fall again, and so the retaliatory sweep of claws missed her and she lived. The thing that had been Selia threw itself to the floor, moaning as it scrabbled after the lost
kulikos
stone. The crawling shape was wreathed in flame, but at its core the human and demon essences were in confusion now, flickering and rippling in smoke. It lurched up, hissing triumphantly, but the thing clutched in its taloned hand was only a thimble—perhaps one that had belonged to the maid herself. The shape dropped the silvery thing and took a lurching step backward with a bellow of pain and despair, the Selia-face now a visible mask of agony. Briony’s broken pikestaff shuddered in its chest, the wound a fiery hole. It stumbled back against the bed and the entire canopy finally pulled loose and fell atop it, a blanket of roaring fire. The shadow-shape roared and thrashed as the fire leaped upward, then, with a mewling noise that for the first time had something human in it, fell forward and lay stretched on the floor, twitching in the flames.

In the sudden stillness, Briony felt as though she had been carried away to the moon, to some country from which she could never return to the life she knew. She stared at the thing wrapped in burning curtains, and the fire now smoldering in the carpets. When she was certain it had stopped moving, she picked up a chamber pot and emptied it over the burning shape, dousing the worst of the fire and adding the stench of boiling urine to the dreadful odor of fire and blood. As she listlessly began to stamp out the rest of the flames Chaven crawled toward her, his hands blackened, his face stretched in a rictus of pain.

“Don’t,” he said hoarsely. “We shall have no light.”

As absently as if someone else inhabited her body, Briony found a candle and lit it from a bit of flaming bed curtain, then finished the job of putting out the fires. She lit another candle. She was not crying, but she felt as though she should have been.

“Why?”

Chaven shook his head. “I was a fool. Because she was ill before Kendrick died, and ill afterward, I thought the maid truly had the fever that struck Barrick. I see now she was only preparing the ground before time for the weakness that would overcome her after using the
kulikos
. I thought the witch must be Anissa and I tried to bluff her. I did not guess the stone could work again without much preparation, some kind of intricate charm . . .”

“No, why did she kill Kendrick? Was she going to kill me as well?”

Chaven stared down at the sodden, scorched mass. He peeled back a corner of the curtain. Briony was startled to see Selia’s ordinary dead face, eyes open, mouth gaping. Whatever spell had gripped the girl had now passed, leaving nothing behind to show what she had been except a smeared residue of grit, dust, and ash on her skin, clotted into a foul mud. “Yes, she would have killed you, perhaps by poison—and Barrick, too, if he’d been with you. Your stepmother did not invite you here, Selia herself did. That is why Anissa seemed so confused. Why did she do it?
For whom,
I think is the better question, and I have no answer.” He examined his black, blistered hands and said ruefully, “I was so certain it could only be Anissa . . .”

He looked at Briony and she stared back, both struck with the same thought. “Anissa!” she said.

Briony’s stepmother was curled on the floor on the far side of the bed in a puddle of water, seemingly oblivious to anything that had happened. The queen was half-delirious with pain, her hands clutching at her belly. “It is coming,” she moaned. “The child. It hurts! Oh, Madi Surazem, save me!”

“Get help,” Chaven told Briony. “I am nearly useless with these burns. Send for the midwife! Quickly!”

She hesitated for a moment. Anissa’s wide-eyed look of terror made her feel ill. She remembered her stepmother’s fear as Chaven had all but accused her of murdering her stepson and the feverish feeling grew worse. The Loud Mouse, she and Barrick had called their father’s young wife, teasing, resentful. She would never call this woman names again.

Briony staggered out into the deserted tower with one of the candles, made her way down the stairs and somehow did not fall. At the bottom she forced open the door and found the two guards waiting there. They looked her up and down, amazed. She could only guess what she looked like, smeared in ash and blood and worse, but the guards certainly seemed terrified.

There was no time to coddle them or make up stories. “By all the gods, are you both
deaf ?
Did you hear none of that happening inside? People are dead. The queen is about to give birth. One of you go upstairs and help Chaven, the other run to find the midwife Hisolda. I don’t know where she’s gone—Anissa’s maid probably sent her away.”

“Sh-she and the other w-w-omen went to the kitchen!” said one of the goggle-eyed guards.

“Then go, curse you, go quickly! Fetch her!”

He ran off. The other, still looking at her as though Briony was the most frightening sight of his short life, turned and dashed up the stairs into the tower.

I won’t be the worst thing he’s seen for very long.
She stood, trembling beneath the naked stars, trying to catch her breath. The sound of people singing floated to her across the empty courtyard.

Winter’s Eve,
she remembered, but now it seemed unutterably strange. Everything before the Tower of Spring seemed to have happened in another century.
I just want to sleep,
she thought.
Sleep and forget.
Forget that moment when that dark thing had grown out of dust and air and vile magicks, when her old life of certainty, frail as it was, had vanished forever. Forget her stepmother, twitching in pain and fear.
We’ve betrayed them all by our foolishness,
she thought.
Father, Kendrick, Anissa, all of them.