The Archon's Assassin (37 page)

Ludo must have read his mind. He towered above Shadrak, squinting in the same direction. “Doesn’t bode well,” he said, whipping off his glasses and wiping them on his cassock. “Only sinners going to the castle, for the most part. Poor old sinners, eh? But what if the rules are different from the norm here? What if good is bad and bad is good? What then? I’m assuming this Prior is Blightey, and it’s no secret he has a passion for impalement.”

Shadrak swallowed thickly. The thought of that being done to him was… disturbing. But all the same, he felt compelled to get a closer look; see for himself.

“And Easter,” Galen said like a condemnation. “Did you hear them mention Easter, for goodness’ sake?”

“I did,” Ludo said. “An archaism from the earliest fragments of the Liber that Ipsissimus Silvanus would most assuredly not approve of.”

“Heathens,” Galen muttered, scowling his contempt. “And to think I ate their food. Gurrgh. Two ruddy portions of the muck!”

An owl hooted, and then Shadrak saw it glide down and settle atop the great dome. At least one of them was keeping watch, and not led astray by the grumbling of his stomach.

THE FLAMING SKULL

Verusia, Earth

E
ven vengeance freezes, if it’s cold enough.

Shader’s fury at Aristodeus no longer held the heat to sustain itself. It would come back, he kept telling himself, if ever the warmth in his limbs returned. Once his frozen hands could grip a sword, it would come back.

He slumped over the frosted pillow of Caledon’s mane in the vain hope of dredging a little body heat. The stallion was tiring, each slowing step sinking deep into the snow.

The endless plains of empty white had finally given way to a sprawling forest of firs and pines. Here and there, glistening silver beeches were bowed in frozen arcs, encased root to branch in ice; entombed in it, like the Father of Lies at the heart of the Abyss.

Overhead, charcoal skies buried the world in perpetual twilight. A brighter smudge told him there was still a sun, but whether it was rising or falling, he could no longer tell. It may even have been the moon. Time itself held no meaning beneath the crepuscular pall.

Shader slapped his hands against the horse’s flanks, felt the pricking of blood trying to flow. He clenched and unclenched fingers that no longer seemed his own.

Caledon bore him along the banks of an iced-over river that split the forest like a gash. The wolf-man, Pete, loped behind, fur stiff and flecked with snow, the crimson remains of his last meal smearing his maw.

That had been two days ago, his last hunt in the thickets on the Gallic border. The further they passed into Verusia, the deeper they cut into the forest, the less wildlife they found. Even the birds were silent here, and such sounds as they heard were muffled by the omnipresent blanket of whiteness.

Shader’s rations had run out the day before, and the flask in his boot was empty. Fasting made you used to the hunger, but it could never prepare you for so much cold. A hot broth, the satiety of warm bread taunted him more acutely than an oasis in a desert.

He sat up in the saddle, face taut and stinging. Dark crags poked above the trees in the distance. Not crags, he realized: the teeth of battlements, the jags of spires and turrets. He blinked and shook the torpor from his head. There had been nothing on the horizon last time he had looked. It was as if the castle had silently burst through from the underworld. Either that, or he’d failed to notice the dreary progress through the forest, the blurring of the hours.

Pete sat on his haunches and howled. Scenting the air, he set his jaundiced eyes on a furrow between the trees and scampered off.

Caledon whinnied and pulled the other way.

Shader patted the horse’s neck, whispered soothingly into his ear. He could smell smoke, and then he saw thin plumes of it above the treetops in the direction Pete had gone. He needed to see this, whatever Caledon might have felt about it.

He dug his heels into the stallion’s flanks and shortened the reins. He couldn’t afford to pass up the chance of a meal in this cursed place.

The furrow turned out to be a snow-covered track that opened onto a swept cobblestone path between white hedges. The wolf-man stood erect, glaring over a gate at a thatched cottage. An orange glow warmed the windows, and smoke swirled from the stub of a chimney.

Pete snarled as Shader drew alongside and slid from the saddle.

The front door was ajar. Pete whimpered and dipped his snout toward it. There was an arm trapped between the door and the frame.

Shader wrapped Caledon’s reins around a gatepost then closed numb fingers around the hilt of the gladius. Frost burned his palm. For a second, he hesitated, recalling how the sword had rejected him that time in New Jerusalem; how it had chastened him for his slaughter. With resolve born of shame, he forced his fingers to take a firm grip. The stinging cold spread to his forearm, but he refused to let go. With a fierce jerk, he freed the gladius from the film of frost holding it like a vise in its scabbard. It came out dull, amid a scatter of ice. He half-expected it to glow, to unleash a golden conflagration to drive back the cold, but if it was the same blade that had served him during the time of the Unweaving, it was now dormant, maybe even dead.

He approached the door warily, moving in a wide semicircle. The wolf-man let out a low growl, eyes flitting from Shader to the arm, as if he were considering which to eat first.

Shader pulled the door wide, stepped over the body of a man.

In the hallway behind the corpse, two more bodies were sprawled atop a shagpile carpet. One was a girl, no more than four or five years old, hair fanned out around her head in an auburn halo. The other was a woman, her pleated skirt riding up milky thighs. The head was twisted at an unnatural angle, and a mass of blonde hair obscured the face.

Shader rolled the man over with his boot. Air rushed from dead lungs, and he leapt back, heart scudding about his ribcage. He berated himself for being foolish. How many corpses had he seen in his time? How many had he been responsible for? They all let out breaths and gases. They all did, and yet this one unnerved him.

The face was sunken and gray. Desiccated. He stooped to close the eyes, but drew back. There
were
no eyes: just black holes with angry blisters around the sockets.

Shader sucked in a sharp breath, looked over his shoulder at Pete still standing by the gate, watching.

The little girl’s eyes were the same: hollow as the void, scald marks around the cavities. But as he swept the hair out of the woman’s face, an eyelid fluttered, and there was a glint of white beneath. She emitted a soft moan, turned her head toward him.

Shader winced, anticipating the snapping of the neck, but there was none. Maybe he’d been mistaken. Maybe it hadn’t been as bad as it looked.

She gazed blearily at him, and her lips parted a crack. “Eddie?”

Instinctively, Shader knelt by her head. She threw an arm out, grabbed his coat. He helped her half-sit, half-lean against his chest. She nuzzled into him, one limp hand falling on top of his.

“Oh, Eddie, you’re alive.” She began to sob, caught herself with a palpable effort of will, and started to breathe in harsh gulps and sighs. She lifted her hand from his, as if scalded, and sat up by herself.

“Kara? Oh, Eddie, where is…”

Shader stood and backed away as she saw the child; looked past her to the corpse beyond.

“I’m not Eddie,” he said needlessly. “I am… I’m a priest.” He fretted about what reaction that might evoke out here in Verusia; wondered if they even had priests. He needn’t have worried. She showed no signs of having heard him.

She crawled to the girl, prodded her with the tips of shaking fingers. “No,” she moaned. “No, no.” She reached out a hand to the dead man’s leg, dragged herself along it until she could see his face. “Oh, Eddie.”

Over her head, through the open door, Shader saw the wolf-man shake its fur and pad off back into the woods.

Caledon stood with the patience of a statue, watching him with baleful eyes.

***

The warmth from the hearth fire brought Shader scant comfort, and sent a prickling sensation beneath his skin as the circulation returned. He’d never thought heat could be so painful—except maybe in the Judiciary’s dungeons. Thankfully, Ludo had come for him before things had gone that far. He stretched out his injured knee with a sharp click, rubbing at the joint and kneading the surrounding muscles.

The woman was sleeping soundly on a couch in front of the fire. Her light snoring was interspersed with inchoate mumbles, fragments of speech that seemed disconnected and made no sense.

Shader had done the best he could with the bodies of her husband and daughter: shallow graves out front, already piled high with snow. He’d do better later, once she was ready. If she was. What had happened, she still had not said, but how someone came back from such loss, whether they even could, was beyond him.

Caledon was stabled in a lean-to at the rear of the cottage, with enough hay to restore his strength. Pete, though, had not returned. Shader felt a pang of disappointment. The wolf-man might not have been capable of speech, but he’d been a welcome presence on the long trek across Gallia and into Verusia.

Rising from his armchair, he stooped over the woman and pulled her covers up. Her scent hit him like a blow—he’d not noticed it before: cloying musk that made his head swim. It threw up images of Lallia that time in Sarum. He quickly quashed them.

His eyes traced the pulsing vein in her neck, to where it intersected a thin white line that had probably been the result of wearing a necklace in the sun. Not that there was much in the way of sunshine. Shader doubted Verusia had seen anything but the gray of winter for a very long time. It had been the same at Trajinot, when he and the Seventh Horse had learned the hard way how to survive the extreme temperatures; how unnatural enemies could lay in ambush beneath a snowdrift; how ice could render a cavalry charge more hazardous than anything the foe could throw at them.

He tried to imagine the landscapes he’d passed through since Gallia in the vibrant colors of spring, or with a clear summer sky above, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Somehow, any season other than winter seemed incompatible with Verusia.

The woman rolled her head, lips curling into a smile as she dreamed. Perhaps she’d just stay there, in the land of slumber, rather than wake to face the nightmare.

Her mouth parted to offer the merest hint of polished teeth. Her eyes opened languidly, almond-shaped and turquoise, the color of the ocean in Sahul. His breath caught, and he fought an involuntary urge to kiss her. He coughed into his fist and drew back.

“You said you were a priest.” She reached out and touched the back of his hand. “You said you could…”

“Out front.” He’d read the Liturgy for the Dead before he shoveled dirt and snow over them. It had helped him more than them, though not the way he might have expected. It had brought back his anger. Not just against Aristodeus this time: it was a simmering rage that threatened to boil over in the face of any more senseless suffering, any more needless deaths. The kind of person who would do such a thing—the kind of creature—deserved… deserved… He slammed the door on that particular train of thought. That was a slip too far; a precipice he might never come back from.

“I prayed over them,” he muttered, as if he were embarrassed. Just saying it brought to mind her needs. Nous, he’d done little more than clean up the mess and hide the reminders of what had happened in the front yard. What if she needed to see them? To say goodbye? To commend them to whatever god Verusians believed in. He only hoped it wasn’t the Liche Lord.

“Thank you.” Her eyes closed again, and she drew in a long, shuddering breath. “A good man.” Shader started to correct her, but she wasn’t talking about him. “A beautiful daughter. But life goes on.” Her face darkened for an instant, as if she were reliving the horror.

Shader watched her awkwardly, then asked, “Do you remember what happened?”

She threw the covers off and swung her legs from the couch. “No. But it’s not hard to guess.” Her voice was tinged with bitterness, and something else. “But you must be starving. Let me make you something to eat.”

“No, I couldn’t.” Not now. Not after burying her family. “And you should talk. What you’ve been through, you need to—”

“Nonsense. Something hot to warm you inside. Do you like stew?”

Shader’s stomach rumbled, and she put her hand on it and giggled like a child. The incongruity struck him dumb, and he was helpless to resist as she led him by the hand to the kitchen.

“Lips may lie,” she said, “but tummies are steeped in virtue.”

***

“What happened?” Shader asked again, mopping the grease from his bowl with a hunk of bread.

He suppressed a pang of guilt that he had accepted the meal, allowed the woman to cook for him when she should have been grieving. But there was no sign of grief. Now that he’d buried the bodies and cleaned up the mess, no sign that anything untoward had happened.

The salt from the stew turned his mouth dry. He licked his lips and reached for the water.

“Uh, uh,” she chided, rising from the table and bending over to reach for something at the back of a cupboard.

Shader averted his eyes, but not before he’d noticed the curve of her buttocks, the sweep of her hips. He should have touched his forehead, invoked the aid of Nous, but his nostrils were inflamed with her scent, and the food had anchored him, set his feet firmly back on the ground and forced his head to follow.

For once, he was a simple man, with simple needs; but he was wary enough to recognize that slippery slope for what it was. Eating to stave off hunger and the cold that had seeped into his bones was one thing, but indulgence in one pleasure opened the floodgates to others. He was a Nousian, he reminded himself with hollow conviction. He was a priest.

She turned with a fanfare. “Ta ta! Château de Chevaliers, courtesy of our neighbors across the border.”