Master of restless shado.., p.23
Master of Restless Shadows, page 23
part #1 of Master of Restless Shadows Series
“Not at all.” Narsi rose and his legs felt leaden as he trudged to the bed and dropped down on the mattress opposite Lord Vediya.
In all honestly, Narsi doubted that he could’ve performed all that magnificently tonight even if Lord Vediya had propositioned him. Clumsy fumbling and thrusts of earnest exhaustion weren’t experiences he most wished to share with any lover, but particularly not Lord Vediya.
Narsi stripped. Any burden to make a show of exposing his naked body had been allayed by Lord Vediya’s own artless disrobing. Narsi felt strangely relieved. If only here and now, he wasn’t required to impress anyone or be on guard against any betrayal of his genuine character.
Lord Vediya drew back the blankets and slid under them. A moment later Narsi joined him. He did his best not to take up more than his share of the bed, but he wasn’t a small man and the bed itself wasn’t particularly spacious. Lord Vediya’s leg and buttocks bumped up against Narsi’s thigh. His skin felt warm. The bedding smelled faintly of rose cologne. Lord Vediya snuffed out the bedside lamp, then settled back down, with his back pressed against Narsi’s chest and his hair spilling across Narsi’s shoulder.
“So is this an average day for you?” Narsi asked at last.
“Lying naked next to a handsome man I’ve just met?” Lord Vediya asked. “Not as much as you might expect.”
Narsi laughed.
“No. All this intrigue, magic, ghosts and secret passages. Somehow I’d thought you spent more time penning strange and thrilling stories and less of it living them.”
“Had I been blessed with a more fertile imagination, I probably would. But alas, for the sake of my art I must burden myself with an adventurous life.”
“You say it so cleverly that I feel I should pretend to believe you,” Narsi replied. “But none of what I’ve witnessed today could possibly be written about.”
“Which is why I am forced to sell anonymous erotic tales to a local pearl-drop publisher,” Lord Vediya muttered. “Not that I’ve had the time to even whack off one of those recently.”
“You really published anonymously? I thought I had read everything you’ve written.” Narsi couldn’t keep the disappointment from his voice.
“Oh, trust me, they weren’t masterpieces of forbidden beauty, not by any stretch of the imagination. Trash, actually.” Lord Vediya sounded genuinely dispirited. “We needed money to buy into this place and the Fat Goose. The property belonged to a relative of one of my old classmates, so he brokered us quite a bargain. Still, it came dear.”
“Morisio Cavada, you mean?” Narsi asked. He recalled that Morisio had come from a prosperous family of scholars and merchants before he’d joined the crew of the Red Witch. He even recollected a mention of the young man’s uncle owning several taverns in the capital.
“God’s tits.” Lord Vediya gave a tired laugh. “You truly have read every page of my memoirs, haven’t you?”
“More than once.”
“You’re just extraordinary . . . ,” Lord Vediya murmured.
Narsi couldn’t think of a response to that. Lord Vediya sighed and shifted his back against Narsi’s hips. The sensation of supple bare skin against his naked body nearly undid all of his previous resolve. Then Narsi felt the tension of consciousness drop from Lord Vediya’s muscles. His breathing slowed and settled into a decidedly unarousing snore.
Chapter Sixteen
Atreau floated at the edge of a dream, feeling safe and warm, but uncertain of where he now wandered. He could hear birds singing. Sunshine filtered through the leaves of an almond tree and the scents of a physic garden in full bloom drifted over him. Yellow coinflower blossoms peered out between the blue branches of succulent halda plants. The faint perfume of camphor and sweet cinnamon made him think that he must have traveled to Anacleto.
The idea filled him with relief.
He was no longer in Cieloalta—no longer responsible for the lives of Fedeles’s agents and enemies. Nor had he betrayed his friends and family, fleeing to Labara while Cadeleon burned.
Somehow, all that was over and done. His life could be his own.
A man leaned against his back in easy familiarity. Atreau luxuriated in the sensation of naked skin grazing his own. He longed to run his hands over the other man’s body but stilled with uncertainty. He tried to remember who it was that stood behind him. Atreau turned to glimpse his companion’s face but the sun at his back shone too bright and he flinched away.
“Who are you?” Atreau whispered.
“Don’t you remember?” the man asked.
Atreau tried to look at him again, but the sun had intensified to a blinding heat.
Now Atreau could smell smoke. Fear rose like bile in his gut. He remembered flames gushing up thatch roofs and bell towers collapsing. The garden was burning. Birdsong turned to screams. Willow leaves seared away. The man at his back cried out as the fire rolled over him. Atreau threw his hands over his clenched eyes, desperate to block out the ferocious light. But it seared through the flesh and bone of his arms.
He bolted upright, coming awake to find himself on a sagging mattress in a dark room. A long, lean body lay pressed against him. His companion breathed easily and released a contented sigh from the depth of sleep. Atreau squinted, picking out the lines and shadows of his face. The master physician, he belatedly remembered, Narsi.
God’s teeth, he looked young in this faint light.
Then the burst of white light flared from beneath the crack in the door, followed by the sound of a pebble striking the wood. The light dimmed just a little.
Atreau glowered at the door. What would they do if he just refused to answer one day? What if he packed his bags and boarded a ship for Yuan, leaving all of this behind? What would it matter? But of course he knew—he’d been there when ancient spells shattered and the city of Milmuraille crumbled and burned. He’d treated the injured and carried the bodies of the dead to mass graves.
Atreau scrubbed his palms against his face. He’d gone too far to back out now.
Another pebble smacked against the bedroom door. Then a third and a fourth.
“Just one night,” he muttered to himself. “Can’t I sleep all the way through just one damn night?”
Atreau snatched his trousers from his discarded clothes and pulled them on. Had it been any other rap at his door he would have taken up his sword belt and weapons as well. But there was no point. He strode across the room and didn’t bother to peer through the tiny spy hole. He knew exactly what he would see in the barren hallway.
Atreau stepped out and closed the door behind him as quietly as he could. The less he had to explain—or lie about—to the fetching and far too curious Narsi, the better they’d get along.
A dry, stale scent hung in the air, and where a bare white wall should have stood directly across from the bedroom door there now appeared to be a large, seeping black stain. The odor of mushrooms and loam wafted from the darkness. Then a pale rock came hurling out. Atreau managed to catch it before it smacked against his door.
“I’m coming,” Atreau muttered. He stepped neared to the dark stain. The edges rippled and pulsed like something living—some shuddering, hungry maw wheezing a decayed dry breath over his face. His entire body tensed as he tried to stride into the darkness. An intense dread rooted him in place.
He knew that Javier couldn’t step foot in Cieloalta without countless spells surging to life and setting off alarms all across the city. That would bring Yago’s men directly down on him here and provide evidence that the royal bishop would use to accuse Atreau—and likely Spider as well—of heresy.
There was no option but for him to take that single step forward. Still he remained where he was, with his heart pounding like a drum and sick dread turning his muscles to lead.
Another pebble flew out, this one clipping his chest.
“God’s tits! I’m coming!” Atreau charged in, his vexation offering him enough motive to overcome his instinctive horror.
In a single step he passed through the wall and into the darkness. Then he stood there, on the Old Road, as Javier and his fellow Bahiim called it. The Sorrowlands, as he and Elezar knew it. By any name it was a realm of darkness, where luminous blue mists slowly rose into the likenesses of the dead. They called in whispers and moans, pleading for help, for comfort, for a final goodbye. Already Atreau could hear the voices.
He glanced around him for Javier but saw nothing through the dark. Then a haze of pale blue mist swirled into a familiar form. Atreau recognized his mother, though her dark hair hung over most of her wan face. In her gaunt arms she cradled the wide-eyed corpse of his stillborn daughter.
Atreau stared, feeling their presences as much as seeing them. They were both so weak, both starved for warmth and love.
“She can’t sleep.” His mother’s pale lips trembled over the words. “Why won’t you hold her? Don’t you hear her crying?”
A gasping thin wail slowly rose. Atreau lifted his hands to cover his ears, but it made no difference. The broken sobs weren’t real. Neither was the vision of his daughter and mother.
Atreau knew that the longer he concentrated upon them the stronger their presences would grow. Still he had to stop himself from stepping nearer. He raised his hands, almost offering to take the child from his mother as she struggled to rock the sobbing infant in her arms.
Then he caught himself and turned his back. He focused on the darkness in front of him, refusing to acknowledge the fading voices behind him. For an instant nothing but darkness surrounded him. Then a faint glow swirled up. Atreau’s gut tightened. He prayed he would see Javier standing in a pool of white light.
Instead, Miro Reollos floated a few feet from him, as he always did. Beautiful, despite the blood pouring from between his full lips. He accused Atreau of nothing, but simply pulled open the folds of his robe, exposing his gaping wounds.
“I never meant for you to be hurt—” Atreau cut himself off.
This wasn’t Miro. This vision just one of the countless devils that inhabited this hellish place, and fed by luring the living into their hidden jaws.
“Atreau, please,” Miro’s voice whispered. “Hold me one last time. I’m so alone here . . . how you left me . . . bleeding . . . dying alone. Please—”
A wave of radiant white light seared through the wispy blue image of Miro. The surrounding darkness seemed to writhe back from the growing sphere of light, exposing a featureless expanse of flat gray ground and bleak gray sky. Javier strode out from the center of the blazing white light. Despite how long his black hair had grown over the past thirteen years and the strangeness of the Bahiim robes he wore, he still looked like the undaunted nineteen-year-old youth whom Atreau had schooled with so long ago. He surveyed his surroundings with the assurance of a boy who’d ruled over a vast dukedom at seventeen and commanded the fires of the White Hell before he was twenty.
“Sorry about letting them creep up on you like that.” Javier rolled two white stones between the fingers of his left hand and held a piece of blank paper in his right. “I went to fetch a few more pebbles.”
“Not satisfied with beaning me in the chest just the once?” Atreau snapped. His heart was still hammering with fear and anger. Even knowing Miro’s image was only an illusion, he’d still felt overwhelmed with guilt. It had been nearly six years, but this place made the horror fresh as it had been that night.
Javier shrugged and tucked the paper away into his cloak. “All the Labaran witches assure me that stones fall where they are fated to come down. So I couldn’t possibly take credit. Or have I completely misunderstood Labaran fortune-telling?”
“If you mean casting a vei, then yes, you’re going about it all wrong,” Atreau replied. His mother had believed in veis and often insisted that destiny wasn’t a preordained fate but a destination reached through a lifetime of the paths taken and choices made.
Here in the Shadowlands, Atreau could almost hear her whispering to him. You forge your own vei, my darling. Be true to yourself and your destiny will be of your own making.
She’d died brokenhearted and abandoned in a convent infirmary. Atreau didn’t want to believe that she’d played any part in her own downfall. At the same time he knew that her decision to trust his father, despite countless betrayals, had been her undoing. More than that, her death had left Atreau and his siblings bereft of their one protector. After that, there had been few choices for any of them to build their destinies upon.
Javier drew near enough that Atreau briefly glimpsed the white bones shining through his pale skin. His dark eyes looked black as the hollows of a skull. Then his expression turned playful and he threw his arms around Atreau and pulled him into a firm embrace.
“It’s so good to see you, Atreau.”
Returning Javier’s hug, Atreau felt his earlier resentment dissipate. Javier’s lean body felt cold in his arms, and not for the first time Atreau wondered what it cost Javier to lay claim over the paths of the dead. Atreau reminded himself that he wasn’t the only one who’d suffered loss or made sacrifices. Javier had been stripped of his noble title, his family and his home.
Javier released him just enough to gaze into his face. The affection in his expression seemed to wipe away the deathly quality of Javier’s countenance. “Has it been bad in the capital? You look tired.”
“The last two weeks were taxing. We lost Ciceron last night. Beheaded—”
“And Fedeles?” Javier tensed as if he meant to tear out from the sanctuary of the Sorrowlands and race to his cousin’s side.
“He’s sad but perfectly safe.” Atreau gripped his arm. “I’m looking into Ciceron’s murder. The man wasn’t without his own enemies, so his death might not have anything to do with Fedeles or noble politics.”
“You really believe that?” Javier asked.
“No. I’m almost certain that the assassins are connected to some conspiracy of the royal bishop’s, but I’ve been wrong before.”
“Not often,” Javier replied. “You were right about Yago murdering Irsea, the Bahiim who guarded the Circle of Wisteria.”
“But I couldn’t prove it,” Atreau replied; then he recalled everything Narsi had told him of his encounter in the sacred grove. “And speaking of Irsea, it seems that her spirit is still present in some form.”
Atreau quickly related Narsi’s adventure. He supposed it was telling that Javier appeared far more surprised by the description of the towering Haldiim physician than he did by the idea of a quavering Bahiim ghost warning him to flee before the capital was consumed by an ancient war. It further confirmed Atreau’s fear that another demon lord lurked beneath the Shard of Heaven.
“So Hylanya has recovered?” Javier asked.
“Thanks to Master Narsi, yes,” Atreau replied. “She and Kili sailed on the Red Witch this evening. They should be back in Milmuraille in a week’s time.”
“That’s a relief at least.” Javier’s shoulders sagged slightly as tension seemed to drain from him. “I was afraid that we’d have to carry her across the Old Road. This realm is a nightmare for perfectly healthy men and women, but for someone on the edge of death . . .”
Atreau nodded. Earlier, they’d discussed the possibility, but only as a very last resort. Witches reviled the Sorrowlands—even Skellan refused to set foot on the path of the dead and had been carried by Elezar the one time he’d entered the desolate place. More worryingly, Javier hadn’t been certain that he could keep Hylanya’s spirit from abandoning her body to escape the Sorrowlands.
“And of course the place certainly isn’t fit for entertaining nobility,” Javier added with a grin. “I can’t seem to ever burn enough incense to get the smell out.”
Atreau laughed, but his amusement didn’t last. Narsi’s troubling conversation kept turning through his thoughts.
“Do you know what Irsea meant?” Atreau asked. “This unfinished battle?”
“I have a suspicion, but I can’t be certain,” Javier admitted. “Even if I tried to ask her I wouldn’t receive an answer, much less a warm welcome.”
“No?” Atreau asked. “Because you’re Cadeleonian?”
“I’m hardly the first Cadeleonian who’s converted. The problem is my master, Alizadeh. He’s brilliant but not . . . roundly beloved among his fellow Bahiim. Particularly not among the elder practitioners here in Cadeleon. As his student, I’m unwelcome in certain sacred circles. In the capital my presence wouldn’t be tolerated.”
“But she was talking about a war. How can some dispute among Bahiim possibly be more important than averting that?”
“Obviously, I don’t believe that it is.” Javier frowned. “But the fact is that you and I are meeting here on the Old Road because there is an entire web of Bahiim wards that were raised against my master and his followers. Dead or alive, Irsea views my presence in the city as an immense trespass. I’m no better than the royal bishop as far as she’s concerned. Possibly worse.”
Atreau sighed. Why did it always have to be this way? People with so much in common hanging onto grudges when they would all be best served to make peace.
Even as the exasperated thought occurred to him, he recognized his own hypocrisy. How many times had Fedeles nagged him about putting his mistrust of Oasia behind him? But the fact that she’d tried to have him murdered wasn’t something Atreau could easily forgive.
Then he suddenly wondered, what caused so many Bahiim to view Javier’s master, Alizadeh, in the same way?
“Does Irsea have reason to suspect your master of bad intentions?” Atreau studied Javier’s young face. Something like embarrassment flitted over his countenance.
“Ages ago, perhaps, but not now . . .” Javier paused as if weighing his next words carefully. “Long ago he belonged to a group of sorcerers called Waarihivu. They battled demon lords for dominion over a multitude of realms.”
