A Gathering of Shadows

  Alucard blew out a puff of air, and the two stood there, side by side on deck, staring out into the fog. It sat above the water, blurring the line between sea and sky, but it wasn’t entirely still. It shifted and twisted and curled, the motions as faint and fluid as the rocking of the water.

  The sailors called it scrying fog—supposedly, if you stared at it long enough, you began to see things. Whether they were visions or just a trick of the eye depended on who you asked.

  Lila squinted at the coiling mist, expecting nothing—she’d never had a particularly vivid imagination—but after a moment she thought she saw the fog began to shift, begin to change. The effect was strangely entrancing, and Lila found she couldn’t look away as tendrils of ghostly mist became fingers, and then a hand, reaching toward her through the dark.

  “So.” Alucard’s voice was like a rock crashing through the vision. “London.”

  She exhaled, the cloud of breath devouring the view. “What about it?”

  “I thought you’d be happy. Or sad. Or angry. In truth, I thought you’d be something.”

  Lila cocked her head. “And why would you think that?”

  “It’s been four months. I figured you left for a reason.”

  She gave him a hard look. “Why did you leave?”

  A pause, the briefest shadow, and then he shrugged. “To see the world.”

  Lila shrugged. “Me, too.”

  They were both lies, or at best, partial truths, but for once, neither challenged the other, and they turned away from the water and crossed the deck in silence, guarding their secrets against the cold.

  V

  WHITE LONDON

  Even the stars burned in color now.

  What he’d always taken for white had become an icy blue, and the night sky, once black, now registered as a velvet purple, the deepest edge of a bruise.

  Holland sat on the throne, gazing up past the vaulting walls at the wide expanse of sky, straining to pick out the colors of his world. Had they always been there, buried beneath the film of failing magic, or were they new? Forest-green vines crept, dark and luscious, around the pale stone pillars that circled the throne room, their emerald leaves reaching toward silver moonlight as their roots trailed across the floor and into the still, black surface of the scrying pool.

  How many times had Holland dreamed of sitting on this throne? Of slitting Athos’s throat, driving a blade into Astrid’s heart, and taking back his life. How many times … and yet it hadn’t been his hand at all, in the end.

  It had been Kell’s.

  The same hand that had driven a metal bar through Holland’s chest, and pushed his dying body into the abyss.

  Holland rose to his feet, the rich folds of his cape settling around him as he descended the steps of the dais, coming to a stop before the black reflective pool. The throne room stood empty around him. He’d dismissed them all, the servants and the guards, craving solitude. But there was no such thing, not anymore. His reflection stared up from the glassy surface of the water, like a window in the dark, his green eye a gem floating on the water, his black eye vanishing into the depths. He looked younger, but of course even in youth, Holland had never looked like this. The blush of health, the softness of a life without pain.

  Holland stood perfectly still, but his reflection moved.

  A tip of the head, the edge of a smile, the green eye devoured in black.

  We make a fine king, said the reflection, words echoing in Holland’s head.

  “Yes,” said Holland, his voice even. “We do.”

  BLACK LONDON

  THREE MONTHS AGO

  Darkness.

  Everywhere.

  The kind that stretched.

  For seconds and hours and days.

  And then.

  Slowly.

  The darkness lightened into dusk.

  The nothing gave way to something, pulled itself together until there was ground, and air, and a world between.

  A world that was impossibly, unnaturally still.

  Holland lay on the cold earth, blood matted to his front and back where the metal bar had passed through. Around his body, the dusk had a strange permanence to it, no lingering tendrils of daylight, no edge of approaching night. There was a heavy quiet to this place, like shelves beneath long-settled dust. An abandoned house. A body without breath.

  Until Holland gasped.

  The dusty world shuddered around him in response, as if by breathing, he breathed life into it, set the time stuttering forward into motion. Flecks of dirt—or ash, or something else—that had been hanging in the air above him, the way motes seemed to do when caught in threads of sunlight, now drifted down, settling like snow on his hair, his cheeks, his clothes.

  Pain. Everything was pain.

  But he was alive.

  Somehow—impossibly—he was alive.

  His whole body hurt—not just the wound in his chest, but his muscles and bones—as if he’d been lying on the ground for days, weeks, and every shallow breath sent spikes through his lungs. He should be dead. Instead he braced himself, and sat up.

  His vision swam for a moment, but to his relief, the pain in his chest didn’t worsen. It remained a heavy ache, pulsing in time with his heart. He looked around and discovered he was sitting in a walled garden, or at least, what might have once been a garden; the plants had long since withered, and what still stood of vine and stem looked ready to crumble to ash at a touch.

  Where was he?

  Holland searched his memory, but the last image he had was of Kell’s face, set in grim determination even as he struggled against the water Holland had used to bind him, Kell’s eyes narrowing in focus, followed by the spike of pain in Holland’s back, the metal rod tearing through flesh and muscle, shattering ribs and rending the scar on his chest. So much pain, and then surrender, and then nothing.

  But that fight had been in another London. This place held none of that city’s floral odor, none of its pulsing magic. Nor was it his London—this Holland knew with equal certainty, for though it shared the barren atmosphere, the colorless palette, it lacked the bitter cold, the scent of ash and metal.

  Vaguely, Holland recalled lying in the Stone Forest, numb to everything but the slow fading of his pulse. And after, the drag of the abyss. A darkness he assumed was death. But death had rejected him, delivering him to this place.

  And it could only be one place.

  Black London.

  Holland had stopped bleeding and his fingers drifted absently, automatically, not to the wound but to the silver circle that had fastened his cloak—the mark of the Danes’ control—only to discover it was gone, as was the cloak itself. His shirt was ripped, and the skin beneath, once scarred silver by Athos’s seal, was now a mess of torn flesh and dried blood. Only then, with his fingers hovering over the wound, did Holland feel the change. It had been overshadowed by the shock and pain and strange surroundings, but now it prickled across his skin and through his veins, a lightness he hadn’t felt in seven years.

  Freedom.

  Athos’s spell had been broken, the binding shattered. But how? The magic was bound to soul, not skin—Holland knew, had tried to cut it away a dozen times—and could only be broken by its caster.

  Which could only mean one thing.

  Athos Dane was dead.

  The knowledge shuddered through Holland with unexpected intensity, and he gasped, and gripped the desiccated ground beneath him. Only it wasn’t desiccated anymore. While the world to every side had the bleak stillness of a winter landscape, the ground beneath Holland, the place where his blood had soaked into the soil, was a rich and waking green.

  Beside him on the grass sat the black stone—Vitari—and he tensed before he realized it was hollow. Empty.

  He patted himself down for weapons. He’d never been particularly concerned with them, preferring his own sharp talents to the clumsier edge of a blade, but his head was swimming and, considering how much strength it was taking just to s
tay upright, he honestly wasn’t sure he had any magic to summon at the moment. He’d lost his curved blade back in the other London, but he found a dagger against his shin. He pressed the tip to the hard ground and used it to help push himself to his knees, then his feet.

  Once he was up—he bit back a wave of dizziness and a swell of pain—Holland saw that the greenery wasn’t entirely confined to his impression on the ground. It trailed away from him, forging a kind of path. It was little more than a thread of green, woven through the barren earth, a narrow strip of grass and weed and wildflower, disappearing through the walled arch at the far end of the garden.

  Haltingly, Holland followed.

  His chest throbbed and his body ached, his veins still starved of blood, but the ribs he knew were broken had begun to heal, and the muscles held, and slowly Holland found a semblance of his old stride.

  Years under the cruelty of Athos Dane had taught him to bear his pain in silence, and now he gritted his teeth and followed the ribbon of life as it led him beyond the garden wall and into the road.

  Holland’s breath caught in his chest, sending a fresh spike through his shoulder. The city sprawled around him, a version of London at once familiar and entirely other. The buildings were elegant, impossible structures, carved out of glassy stone, their shapes drifting toward the sky like smoke. They reflected what little light was left as the dusk thickened into twilight, but there was no other source of light. No lanterns on hooks or fires in hearths. Holland had keen eyes, so it wasn’t the pressing dark that bothered him, but what it meant. Either there was no one here to need the light, or what remained preferred the darkness.

  Everyone assumed Black London had consumed itself, destroyed itself, like a fire starved of fuel and air. And while that seemed to be true, Holland knew that assumptions were made to take the place of facts, and the stretch of green at Holland’s feet made him wonder if the world was truly dead, or merely waiting.

  After all, you can kill people, but you cannot kill magic.

  Not truly.

  He followed the thread of new growth as it wove through the ghostly streets, reaching out here and there to brace himself against the smooth stone walls, peering as he did into windows, and finding nothing. No one.

  He reached the river, the one that went by several names but ran through every London. It was black as ink, but that disturbed Holland less than the fact that it wasn’t flowing. It wasn’t frozen, like the Isle; being made of water, it couldn’t have decayed, petrified with the rest of the city. And yet, there was no current. The impossible stillness only added to the unnerving sensation that Holland was standing in a piece of time rather than a place.

  Eventually, the green path led him to the palace.

  Much like the other buildings, it rose like smoke to the sky, its black spires disappearing into the haze of twilight. The gates hung open, their weight sagging on rusted hinges, the great steps cracked. The grassy thread continued, undeterred by the landscape. If anything, it seemed to thicken, braiding into a rope of vine and blossom as it climbed the broken stairs. Holland climbed with it, one hand pressed to his aching ribs.

  The palace doors swung open beneath his touch, the air inside still and stagnant as a tomb, the vaulted ceilings reminiscent of White London’s churchlike castle, but with smoother edges. The way the glassy stone continued inside and out, without sign of forge or seam, made it seem ethereal, impossible. This entire place had been made with magic.

  The path of green persisted in front of him, winding over stone floors and beneath another pair of doors, massive panes of tinted glass with withered flowers trapped inside. Holland pushed the doors open, and found himself staring at a king.

  His breath caught, before he realized the man before him, cast in shadows, wasn’t made of flesh and blood, but glassy black stone.

  Just a statue seated on a throne.

  But unlike the statues that filled the Stone Forest in front of the Danes’ palace, this one was clothed. And the clothes seemed to move. The cloak around the king’s shoulders fluttered, as if caught by a wind, and the king’s hair, though carved, seemed to rustle gently in the breeze (even though there was no breeze in the room). A crown sat atop the king’s head, and a wisp of grey a shade lighter than the stone itself swirled in the statue’s open eyes. At first Holland thought it was simply part of the rock, but then the swirl of grey twitched, and moved. It coiled into pupils that drifted until they found Holland, and stopped.

  Holland tensed.

  The statue was alive.

  Not in the way of men, perhaps, but alive all the same, in a simple, enduring way, like the grass at his feet. Natural. And yet entirely unnatural.

  “Oshoc,” murmured Holland. A word for a piece of magic that broke away, became something more, something with a mind of its own. A will.

  The statue said nothing. The wisps of grey smoke watched him from the king’s face, and the thread of green trailed up the dais, wound itself around the oshoc’s throne and over one sculpted boot. Holland found himself stepping forward, until his shoes grazed the bottom of the throne’s platform.

  And then, at last, the statue spoke.

  Not out loud, but in Holland’s mind.

  Antari.

  “Who are you?” asked Holland.

  I am king.

  “Do you have a name?”

  Again, the illusion of movement. The faintest gesture: a tightening of fingers on the throne, a tipping of the head, as if this were a riddle. All things have names.

  “There was a stone found in my city,” continued Holland, “and it called itself Vitari.”

  A smile seemed to flicker like light against the creature’s petrified face. I am not Vitari, he said smoothly. But Vitari was me. Holland frowned, and the creature seemed to relish his confusion. A leaf to a tree, he said, indulgently.

  Holland stiffened. The idea that the stone’s power was a mere leaf compared to the thing that sat before him—the thing with its stone face and its calm manner and its eyes as old as the world …

  My name, said the creature, is Osaron.

  It was an old word, an Antari word, meaning shadow.

  Holland opened his mouth to speak, but his air was cut off as another spasm of pain lurched through his chest. The grey smoke twisted.

  Your body is weak.

  Sweat slid down Holland’s cheek, but he forced himself to straighten.

  I saved you.

  Holland didn’t know if the oshoc meant that he’d saved his life once, or that he was still saving it. “Why?” he choked.

  I was alone. Now we are together.

  A shiver went through him. This was the thing that had feasted on an entire world of magicians. And now, somehow, Holland had woken it.

  Another spasm of pain, and he felt one knee threaten to buckle.

  You live because of me. But you are still dying.

  Holland’s vision slid in and out of focus. He swallowed, and tasted blood. “What happened to this world?” he asked.

  The statue looked at him levelly. It died.

  “Did you kill it?” Holland had always assumed that the Black London plague was something vast and un-fightable, that it was born from weakness and greed and hunger. It had never occurred to him that it could be a thing, an entity. An oshoc.

  It died, repeated the shadow. As all things do.

  “How?” demanded Holland. “How did it die?”

  I … did not know, it said, that humans were such fragile things. I have learned … how to be more careful. But …

  But it was too late, thought Holland. There was no one left.

  I saved you, it said again, as if making a point.

  “What do you want?”

  To make a deal. The invisible wind around Holland picked up, and the statue of Osaron seemed to lean forward. What do you want, Antari?

  He tried to steel his mind against the question, but answers poured through like smoke. To live. To be free. And then he thought of his world, starvi
ng for power, for life. Thought of it dying—not like this place, but slowly, painfully.

  What do you want, Holland?

  He wanted to save his world. Behind his eyes, the image began to change as London—his London—came back to life. He saw himself on the throne, staring up through a roofless palace at a bright blue sky, the warmth of the sun against his skin, and—

  “No,” he snapped, digging his hand into his wounded shoulder, the pain shocking him out of the vision. It was a trick, a trap.

  All things come with a cost, said Osaron. That is the nature of the world. Give and take. You can stay here and die for nothing while your world dies, too. Or you can save it. The choice is yours.

  “What do you want?” asked Holland.

  To live, said the shadow. I can save your life. I can save your world. It is a simple deal, Antari. My power for your body.

  “And whose mind?” challenged Holland. “Whose will?”

  Ours, purred the king.

  Holland’s chest ached. Another binding. Would he never be free?

  He closed his eyes, and he was back on that throne, gazing up at that wondrous sky.

  Well, asked the shadow king. Do we have a deal?

  I

  THE ARNESIAN SEA

  “Dammit, Bard, you’re going to set the cat on fire.”

  Lila’s head snapped up. She was perched on the edge of a chair in Alucard’s cabin, holding a flame between her palms. Her attention must have slipped, because she’d lowered her hands without thinking, letting the fire between them sink toward the floor, and Esa, who’d been sitting there watching with feline intensity.

  She sucked in a breath and brought her palms together quickly, extinguishing the flame in time to spare the tip of Esa’s fluffy white tail.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, slouching back in the chair. “Must have gotten bored.”

  In truth, Lila was exhausted. She had slept even less than usual since Alucard’s announcement, spending every spare moment practicing everything he’d taught her, and a few things he hadn’t. And when she actually tried to sleep, her thoughts invariably turned to London. And the tournament. And Kell.