Kathryn stepped closer to Argent. “Perhaps you should have tested their stories before breaking my latch and entering my inviolate spaces. My hermitage is as sacrosanct as your Eyrie. To break that threshold upon the rantings of an injured boy is an affront beyond measure.”
Before he could respond, a figure stepped out of Dart’s garret and back into the main room. His face and hands were caked in black, reeking of black bile. A bloodnuller. Kathryn gaped at him. She had not known anyone was still in there. Men of his caste were imbued with alchemies of bile, able to nullify Grace with a smear of their fouled hands.
“Nothinggg,” the man slurred with a bow toward Argent.
Kathryn shoved her arm toward her door. “Begone from my rooms!”
The man hesitated until Argent gave him a slight nod to obey. He shuffled out, trailing his stench behind him.
Kathryn glowered at Argent. “I hope such a discovery will temper your unseemly haste until you’ve had the squires properly soothed. As I understand it, one of your squires had already confessed to attacking my page. Yet it is upon the word of such dishonorable young men that you break the peace of my private rooms.”
She said this last loudly enough to be heard out in the hall, where she was sure many ears were listening. Let that rumor be spread, too—to counter the talk of daemons.
Argent’s face grew a shade more red. “That is all well said,” he forced out grudgingly. “I certainly owe you my sincere apologies. But in such dark and trying times, it seems that an overly officious attention to protocol might not serve us well. Remember, we have many high personages from around Myrillia under our roofs and have a responsibility for their security. Do we not? Is it proper to sit on our swords when word arises of daemons among us?”
“Better to sit on our swords than panic,” Kathryn said, loudly yet again. “There are reasons for protocol, for rules of conduct…lest in haste someone get accidentally stabbed with a cursed sword again.”
Argent’s one eye flared. He flushed as if she had slapped him.
Off to the side, she noted Master Hesharian backing toward the door. This was a tender point that even the master wanted to avoid.
Argent glared a moment more. “Then we’d best begin the soothing this very night. I find it strange, though, that your page remains missing.” He let this question linger, tying guilt to her absence.
Kathryn refused to let it hang unaddressed. “Is it truly any wonder? After being attacked by three squires twice her size? She must wonder whom to trust after such a violation.”
“I assume she trusts you well enough,” Argent said, heading at last toward the door. “And I’m sure you’ll present her to be soothed when she comes out of hiding.”
Kathryn followed him, ushering everyone from her rooms. “Most certainly. And the first question I will ask will be concerning her attack. I wonder if it was a random act of malice or if some other hand might have directed them. I understand that all three bore the sigil of the Fiery Cross. And that a branding iron with your symbol was found in the room where the attack took place.”
Argent glanced back to her. His eyes narrowed, more with concern than anger this time. Kathryn doubted the warden had had any hand in the attack. At least not directly. Members of his Fiery Cross had grown more emboldened of late, stoked by Argent’s fiery speeches. Still, it didn’t hurt to plant a seed of doubt in his mind. It would be a blight on his image if it was found that the Cross had planned the attack as some affront against the castellan. It could turn the tide against him.
Kathryn suspected that to assuage such suspicions, Argent would spend a fair stretch of the night doing his own private investigations. The distraction would allow her additional room to maneuver, to find some way to circumvent Dart’s exposure.
With nothing else to be said, Argent sailed out of her room with a flourish of his cloak. He was followed by a cadre of his men, a flock of black geese headed to warmer climes after the cold greeting they’d received here.
Master Hesharian bowed, almost mockingly, and left, collecting another robed master with him—Master Orquell, the one who had come here from Ghazal. His milky eyes glanced over Kathryn’s face as he turned. Though he appeared to be nearly blind, she suspected he saw more than most ordinary men.
At the door, Keeper Ryngold promised to console Penni. “A bit of honeyed mead and a warm fire will settle her. If there is anything you need in the meantime…”
“I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
He set off, and the hallway slowly emptied out beyond her door. As the flow of robes and cloaks drained away, a single figure remained, a bronze boulder in the waning stream.
He forded toward her through the last of the onlookers.
“Gerrod…” Kathryn sighed with relief. She stepped aside to invite him into her rooms.
He touched her on the elbow as he passed, a silent approval of her handling of Argent.
She closed the door after him.
He stood a moment, glancing around.
“We’re alone,” she assured him.
Satisfied, he pivoted a switch at his neck and his helmet peeled back, revealing his bald pate and tattooed sigils—and also the wry amusement in his eyes. “Argent will not be sleeping this night.”
Kathryn smiled.
“And I’ve heard he had to cancel his grand feast.”
“Small favors there.” Kathryn motioned him to a seat. “At least Tylar will be happy to hear about that.”
“Yes, but he might not be so happy to hear about what we discovered about his flippercraft.” He ignored her offer to sit and crossed toward her draped windows.
Kathryn followed him, noting a slight complaint that rose from his mekanicals. “What did you find?”
He pulled aside the heavy woolen drape. The hearth’s firelight cast the glass into a mirror. She read the worry in her friend’s expression.
“The ship’s apparatus appeared fine—at least what we could tell from the burnt slag. But it was the reserve of blood alchemies that seemed to be the source of the trouble. We tested the level of Grace and found it almost drained. Only a few dregs of power remained. The ship was lucky to land at all.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“The Grace must have been drained from the alchemies while it was in flight.”
Kathryn sat straighter. “How? A saboteur? Did someone pour black bile into the mekanicals?”
“No, I spoke with several of the crew. The problems all started when the ship was caught in the front edge of the storm that besets us now.”
“The storm?”
Gerrod nodded to the window. Kathryn stepped closer, sharing the opening in the drapes.
The world beyond the panes was misted with a swirl of snow. The branches of the wyrmwood tree that shaded her balcony were heavy with white shoulders. And the snowfall grew thicker.
“I don’t understand it,” Gerrod mumbled. “But I mistrust this storm. Even my own mekanicals grew stiff when I was out there. At first I blamed it on the cold and dampness, but even once inside, out of the ice and snow, the sluggishness persisted.”
He moved an arm, and she heard the wheezing struggle.
“And your armor is driven by air alchemies.”
He nodded. “Along with fire, too. I suspect the remaining fire alchemies are the only reason I’m still able to move at all. I plan on testing the flows within my armor once I return to my study.”
Kathryn pondered all he had described. “So then what are you saying? You believe the storm is somehow siphoning air alchemies unto itself?”
He shrugged. “It is air that drives every storm. And as strange as the weather has been of late, perhaps this odd blizzard may offer some answer as to why. Maybe some wild Grace is loose upon the winds, born out of this prolonged winter. Either way, until the storm blows out to sea, it will be death to fly into or out of Tashijan. And I’m not even sure it’s safe to travel afoot through the blizzard.”
Kathryn watch
ed the blanketing fall. “So no one should come or go?”
Gerrod nodded. “I’m sorry to add another burden.”
Kathryn rubbed a finger along her cheek’s lowermost stripe. “No matter. Better to know this now and proceed with caution. I will spread the word to the outer village and lock down our gates until we know more.”
She had begun to turn away from the window when she noted something else in his eyes, a deep-set worry reflected in the pane.
“What?”
“The timing of this storm…” He shook his head. “Tylar’s knighting…everyone gathered here.”
“Surely you don’t think it was planned. Not even a god can control the path of a storm.”
He continued to stare through the window.
“Gerrod?”
He shook his head—agreeing, disagreeing, she couldn’t tell.
She finally turned away, trusting Gerrod’s judgment enough to lock everything down until this storm blew itself out. But she refused to believe worse. There were limits to even a god’s reach.
Gerrod spoke, as if reading her thoughts. “But what if it were more than one god?”
She had no answer. All she could do was take precautions and hope Gerrod was wrong in this last regard. All she knew for certain was that no one should be out in this storm.
“Colder than a witch’s teat,” Rogger grumbled.
“And I’m sure you’ve had the necessary experience to make that observation,” Tylar said as he passed under the spiked portcullis and exited Tashijan.
Rogger considered Tylar’s words. “That be true. But that Nevering blood witch was at least warm everywhere else. There’s nothing toasty beyond these gates.”
The thief was buried under rabbit furs, a woolen scarf over his face. Behind him strode the Wyr-mistress, Eylan, in a heavy greatcoat with a collared hood. Tylar had tried to encourage her to remain behind, to guard their rooms, but Sergeant Kyllan had already secured the wing after all the talk of daemons.
So as a group they crossed the bridge that spanned the frozen moat and entered the boarded-up bazaar that lay between the village and the thick walls of Tashijan. Normally it was a raucous strip of alehouses, inns, trading booths, and makeshift tents, brimming with the drunken, the slatternly, the wily, and the quick. It continually rang with shouts and screams and song.
But no longer.
Snow fell in a heavy hush. Even the winds had died down, though they could be heard whispering farther out, beyond the village, as if a great sea rolled and churned upon a beachhead. Closer at hand, the world had been drained of color and depth, leaving only a half-finished landscape, an etching of charcoal on white parchment.
“Stay close,” Tylar warned as they trod through the ankle-deep snow.
He lifted the lamp he held and opened its shutters to reveal a tiny flame, flickering like a frightened bird in its cage. The glow cast by the lamp hardly reached past his outstretched arm.
He led them past the bazaar and into the narrow streets of the village. Here there were at least a few signs of life: the filtered glow through a shuttered window, the lone minstrel strumming a lyre from behind a barred door, the scent of woodsmoke from a few stone chimneys. But as they moved farther from the great shield wall of Tashijan, even these faded into darkness, cold hearths, and held breaths.
“I don’t see anything untoward,” Tylar said, stopping and stamping his boots to clear the snow. But even he kept his voice to a whisper, suddenly wary of being overheard.
Rogger shivered beneath his furs. “I’ve never felt a late-winter storm carry a chill like this one. Perhaps the rats merely had enough sense to flee to the warmth of our halls and cellars.”
Tylar noted that Eylan had her face raised, nose to the air. She lowered her chin and matched gazes with him. Framed by the lynx-furred hood, her beauty warmed through the cold, a pretty trap intended to catch his seed when he was ready to bow to his oath. But beyond her high cheekbones, narrow flare of nose, generous lips, there remained something icy in her eyes, a reflection of the winter storm, reminding him yet again that she was of the Wyr, birthed under strange alchemies in an unending quest to instill godhood into human flesh.
But at this moment he read something beyond the ice in her eyes.
Fear.
“What is it?” he asked.
“We should not be here,” she answered and turned to search beyond the last of the village homes. “The storm…the snow…it smells wrong.”
Tylar tested the air, drawing a fuller breath through his nose. He scented nothing unusual in the crisp air. Just ice. His body, though, shuddered in its haste to warm the cold from his chest. And something else noted the chill, stirring away from it.
Tylar rubbed at his chest, momentarily unmoored. Ever since the death of Meeryn, it had lurked inside him—Meeryn’s naethryn, her undergod—hidden behind the black palm print burnt into his chest, trapped in the bony cage that was his body. He had not summoned the shadowy creature since the Battle of Myrrwood, preferring to leave it undisturbed, perhaps even forgotten. But as it stirred now, the movement stripped Tylar of his delusions. All that was not skin or bone shifted inside him, illustrating again how little of his flesh was his own, leaving him feeling hollowed and empty.
It took three more shallow breaths to resettle and moor himself.
Rogger watched him, eyes narrowing as if sensing his unease. Then he merely shrugged. “We can always turn back. A warm fire and a nip of wine is more inviting than all this skaggin’ snow and wind.”
Tylar shook his head. They had come this far. He wanted to see the true face of this storm. Its low moan swept to them through the remaining crooked streets. These last homes, farthest from the walls, were built less stout. Some were plainly abandoned long ago, while others leaned toward each other, as if sheltering against the cold.
He led them again. The drifts grew between the streets. A wind kicked up, scattering dry snow that stung the face like sharp pebbles. They made a final turn between a set of abandoned stables. Gusts had already peeled away the roofs’ thatching and now tugged at the doors, rattling and banging them, like a dog worrying a bone.
Past the last buildings, the view opened up.
“Sweet gods above,” Rogger gasped. “Who stole the world?”
He was not far wrong.
Beyond the village, the storm swirled in a solid wall. The winds whipped straight across the hills, east to west, seemingly endless, with the force of a gale. Yet where they stood, only the occasional fierce gust snapped at them, warning them to keep back.
“Looks like we’re stuck in the eye of a whirlwind,” Rogger commented.
With Tashijan at its heart. Tylar risked another step out, searching, studying. “Why does the storm just hold out there like that?”
Eylan answered. “It grows. Gathers strength to itself. If you listen, you can hear its hunger.”
The storm’s moan stretched toward a wail.
“No wonder the rats fled,” Rogger mumbled. “Mayhap we’d best do the same.”
Tylar nodded slowly. He needed to alert Kathryn.
“Too late,” Eylan said.
Tylar had started to turn back toward Tashijan, but the Wyr-mistress’s words drew his eyes back to the storm. The perpetual white wall had developed dark streaks, like black ink dripped into swirling milk.
“Something is coming,” Eylan said.
Tylar even felt it. A sudden weight to the air.
But before he could react, a wave of frigid air blasted out from the storm, an icy exhalation awash with hoarfrost. He stumbled back, his cheeks freezing. Ice crusted his lashes. His eyes ached, but even his tears froze. He could not blink, only stare into the face of the storm.
And a face it did have.
The oil-black streaks eddied out of the snow tempest, coalescing into a monstrous countenance, growing as tall as Tashijan’s walls, yet still vague and indistinct. Tylar suddenly knew that it was not oil nor ink that shaped this face, but Gloom,
the smoky essence of the naether world, bleeding into Myrillia.
Tylar murmured between frozen lips, “Run…”
But the cold fought them: numbing limbs and heart, frosting cloaks to a dragging heaviness, freezing boots underfoot. Tylar grabbed Rogger and hauled him. One step, then another. Eylan followed, bent against a wind that wasn’t there.
As they struggled, the timbre of the storm’s wail changed behind them. Or maybe it had always been there, hidden behind the wind. Either way, a lilting sweetness stretched to them, ringing with the crystalline shatter of ice. And behind it a voice…as misty as the swirling face of the storm…singing.
Tylar slowed, straining to hear. He snagged up Rogger’s coat sleeve to stop him, to get him to listen, too.
“Keep going,” the thief protested, twisting.
Tylar ignored him and slowly turned.
But Eylan was there at Tylar’s shoulder. She struck him with a fist, square in the face. His head rocked back.
“Seersong,” she said through the ringing in his ears.
Another wave of ice washed over them, worst by far than the first. It cut through Tylar as if he were naked. Again their boots were frozen in place. He felt his very bowels ice up inside him.
A step ahead, Rogger cried out, grasping at his chest.
Tylar fought to help him—but he had brushed too near a wall. His cloak had iced against the bricks, trapping him. He wrested against its clutch, but the cold had weakened his limbs.
Eylan sank to her knees, clutching at her throat. Even the air had become ice, impossible to breathe.
Tylar glanced back to the storm as his vision darkened.
The countenance had grown more distinct—somehow familiar. Who…? But it had not yet fully formed. Song again distracted him, coming not from the face of the storm but behind it and all around, as if the storm were not snow but pure song itself. There were no words, but its sweetness was like warm wine poured into his frozen ears.