Matabar

Book II. Chapter 35 - The Long Night (Part 6)

When Ardi could at last see again and, more importantly, could breathe without feeling like every inch of his body was being wrenched apart, broken, and torn to shreds, he found himself on a decidedly grotesque platform. The place was similar to the underground grotto where the Spiders had conducted their experiment. They were standing on a broad platform accessed by four staircases that merged into the shape of a pyramid. Only this time, the steps had been carved to look like naked, mutilated corpses piled atop one another, their faces frozen in a mask of horror and despair. Along the sloping sides, between these gruesome effigies, there were old, crusty smears of scarlet—bloodstains that had long since dried—that had recently been joined by fresh splashes of red…

Around the perimeter of the oval chamber loomed statues of emaciated, tormented humans and Firstborn. These figures held great bowls on their shoulders. Liquid fire was once meant to slosh around in them, but now they housed only Ley-lamps whose cables twined around the cracked limbs of the titanic statues. Winding across the ceiling was a half-ruined frieze depicting scenes that made Ardan’s skin crawl, even though he had been inured to horrors. But what concerned him far more was another scene entirely.

On the platform, which was nearly fifty meters across, his colleagues lay, barely breathing, clinging not so much to the fragments of their wavering consciousness as to the mere fact of existence. Klementiy, whose left arm had almost been cut off just above the elbow, was clutching the dangling stump (held there by only a strip of flesh) to his chest and whimpering, curled up in a ball. Ardi could not blame him. Loops of intestine were also spilling out from Klementiy’s stomach, resembling sausages in a butcher’s shop.

Parela… Parela had thrown herself over him, shielding him with her own body. Long spikes that at first glance looked like crystal shards were buried in her back. However, they had actually been formed of hardened blood. She was barely breathing and showed almost no signs of life—her hair had burned away and part of her scalp had peeled back like a stocking, nearly slipping off her partially caved-in skull.

Din, his legs bent the wrong way like a grasshopper’s, was sitting back-to-back with Alexander, whose forearms had shards of shattered bone jutting out of them. It seemed like someone had disposed of them in passing, unwilling to waste much time on mere mortals. Pools of molten metal had spread across the stone beside the operatives—the remains of their protective medallions. An identical, silvery puddle was still cooling under Milar as well, for his medallion had likewise melted. He was hunched over, positioned under a still-intact, flickering shield, holding his revolver at arm’s length for some reason.

Apart from the senior investigator, the only one still standing was Mshisty. Gasping for breath, soaked in blood, and clad in the tattered remnants of his clothes, he had a feral grin on his face as the accumulators still glowing on his bracelet flashed periodically.

“Ard!” was all Milar managed to shout.

Ardan wanted to slam his staff against the floor, but he simply didn’t have time to do so. A gust of warm—though far from gentle—wind snatched him up, and a moment later, a torrent of blood struck the spot where he’d just been standing. The crystalline whirlwind gouged a melon-sized crater into the stone, then scattered into the air in a hundred droplets, each of them shifting into a long, thin spike.

This time, Ardan managed to react in time. Finding himself beside Milar, he drove his staff into the ground with all his might (as if that could somehow help), causing his modified Orlovsky’s Reinforced Shield to flare to life. Not just twelve, but a full twenty discs of light appeared around him this time, draining a good amount of the energy he had left. A rain of scarlet spikes came crashing down on him—a horrific downpour of someone else’s blood. Some spikes shattered on the spinning shields; others punched through, only to meet new shields forming behind them. But the spell could only hold for so long, and a few particularly zealous barbs embedded themselves in Ardan’s right thigh and shoulder.

Growling, the young man snapped them off with his staff.

“By the Eternal Angels and our damn vacation…” Milar croaked, spitting out red-tinged saliva. Apparently, they hadn’t exactly had a pleasant time getting here. “…which we, damn it, never even got to finish. Ard, please tell me that girl isn’t here for nothing.”

Ardan turned to where his partner was looking. There, amid the blood and rubble, stood Elani’atie. With her golden skin, black hair, and almond-shaped eyes, she did not resemble a Sidhe at all. Three times now, Ardan’s path had led him to encounters with Sidhe, and each time, they’d embodied what believers might describe when talking about the most radiant of angels, or how poets and painters spoke of muses. One never even had to outright mention the beauty of a Sidhe—it existed beyond ordinary descriptions. Rather, upon seeing them, one would feel something more than the eye could grasp. And it wasn’t due to their skin shimmering with silver or their eyes that were like a starry night sky; it was simply that, upon beholding a Sidhe, one could never mistake them for anything else. And yet, Elani’atie looked like a completely ordinary young woman of about twenty-four. Yes, her skin was flawless and her body’s proportions almost too perfect, but she still appeared entirely unremarkable compared to her other kin.

You couldn’t even call her a proper beauty; she was simply pleasant to look at.

But then she ran her hand gently through the air. In its wake, the air itself rippled into waves, like a brook at the height of spring. Those waves became her simple peasant dress—a dress that was five centuries out of fashion, at least.

“You struck a bargain,” the figure in the dark cloak stated rather than asked.

In places, the cloak was torn, and in others, it was charred. It revealed skin stretched thin over bone at times, and elsewhere, patches of raw flesh with exposed muscle and sinew. It seemed like Mshisty had managed to batter the vampire quite well, since the creature hadn’t been able to fully heal his wounds.

“I came to remind you, walker of the night,” said the Sidhe-demon… or demon-Sidhe—it was hard to say—in an icy cold tone, “that I promised to rip out each of your fingers and then stab them into your heart.”

“I was merely fulfilling the terms of a deal, Lost One,” an unpleasant, crowing chuckle replied. Yes, this was indeed the vampire—he laughed exactly the way Cassara had. “I bear you no ill will.”

“That may be the case, dead man,” Elani’atie nodded, and a staff appeared in her hands. Not a normal staff, but one that looked as if it had been made from the multicolored stained glass of a cathedral window. “But what am I to do about my ill will?”

She swung her staff an instant before two blood-red swords appeared in the vampire’s hands (one of his hands had shriveled like a Zafirian mummy’s, while the other was seemingly intact). These were swords forged of crystalline blood. With his good hand, he slashed one crimson blade toward Mshisty, who had nearly finished forming an incredibly complex construct of interlocking seals.

The vampire swatted it aside. And during that same swing, a wave of blood as tall as Ardan and as broad as a military truck erupted from the edge of the scarlet blade and fanned out toward Mshisty. Pulverizing the platform’s stones with a terrible roar, it slammed into Mshisty’s hastily-raised shield. The shield had taken the form of the gaping, fiery maw of a Kargaam lion which, after devouring the wave of blood, was puffing up its cheeks to exhale a stream of flame at the vampire. Before it could do so, it exploded from within, peppering Mshisty with a hundred bloody spikes.

Thrown aside, the mage tried to stand, but his one arm—still clutching his staff—was pinned to the floor by a blood stake. Then the same happened to his legs. The final stake, aiming for his back, slammed into a vibrating shield of compressed air that flared to life from a seal on his cloak.

Mshisty wasn’t moving, though he was still breathing.

“Fucking butcher,” Milar hissed.

“What?” Ardan asked.

He was not destined to hear a reply. Everything that happened to Mshisty had taken less than a second. Meanwhile, a sweep of the vampire’s second blade had spawned a flock of cawing blood ravens. They soared up toward the high ceiling, and when they reached it, each raven morphed into a long, curved blade that darted toward Elani’atie from the most unpredictable angles and at varying speeds.

The Sidhe, with a simple sweep of her staff, quite literally began to shine. Or perhaps it was her staff that was shining while the girl wrapped herself in weightless shards of multicolored light. And when those shards blossomed like flower petals, where there had been one Elani’atie a moment ago, there were now a dozen identical copies of her.

The previously orderly swarm of blood raven blades broke apart. They fell chaotically upon the heads of the glass Elani’atie copies, which even the keen nose, ears, and eyes of a Matabar could not distinguish from the real one (right now, unlike their first meeting, the Sidhe’s heart was beating and she smelled of morning dew). The impaled copies shattered with a telltale chime into dust, and that dust hung above the blood-spattered stones as a shimmering haze. Elani’atie floated within that glassy mist, each new sweep of her staff forming more and more figures from the haze.

“Mshisty knew some kind of powerful beast would be waiting for us here,” Milar said, still spitting blood, his voice cutting into the kaleidoscope of magical flashes. “And I was wondering why that bloodthirsty bastard was so damned calm.”

Elani’atie whirled amid the multicolored ribbons, each one sharper than a razor as it hissed through the air. Snaking like living serpents, they streaked toward the vampire, turning the scarlet ravens into a mash of thick blood along the way. The vampire, moving far faster than human or even Matabar eyes could follow, became an erratic mist of black and crimson. His cloak no longer looked like cloth, and his blood-forged swords bent almost more gracefully than Elani’atie’s ribbons.

“Why do you think that?” Ardan inquired.

He felt, if not idiotic, then exceedingly foolish right now. A mere twenty or so meters away, entities older than most cities of the Empire were locked in battle, and here he was, just standing there, sheltering behind a second enhanced Orlovsky’s Shield that had consumed the last of both his accumulators and the energy in his Stars… and he was just chatting.

Had someone told him a story like this in his childhood, he would have laughed at it and not believed a word. Not even his great-grandfather had ever spun a yarn so absurd.

“When we found the children’s bodies and the torture rooms Klementiy called laboratories,” the captain said, wiping a torn shirtsleeve across his likewise torn lip. “Mshisty didn’t even let us linger in this Light-forsaken labyrinth, Magister. It’s a labyrinth, you understand?”

Ardan did understand, but he couldn’t respond to Milar.

Elani’atie, suddenly motionless, wiped a bead of silvery blood from her cheek and struck her staff against the ground once more. The remaining glassy mist—much of it had been spent on creating those razor-sharp ribbons—swirled around the Sidhe in a sparkling vortex, then stretched outward into a broad tapestry of living images.

Ardan, like the captain, tried to gasp. They were suddenly standing on sand, and above them, the sun blazed. It blazed so mercilessly that their vision swam and their eyelids felt like they’d been scalded with boiling water. Their lips cracked and crumbled into a fine, dry ash, and their blood sizzled and spat like an over-boiled kettle.

The vampire was screaming with unbearable pain. Or, well, he seemed to be screaming, since no sound was actually coming from him.

Either way, a moment later, the partners were holding themselves to try and stay warm. Clouds of hot vapor escaped their blue lips, instantly turning to snow. It wasn’t white, but black as a starless night, a night that had suddenly fallen over a pale, dead land, where even the stones looked like shattered tombstones.

Now Elani’atie was the one screaming.

Ardan closed his eyes and imagined the Alcadean peaks. He sank deeper into their expanses, where aside from snow, sky, and peace, only the wind and the lessons of his forest friends had kept him company. This was where his heartbeat was always steady. Where truth lived, and not the illusions spun by ancient beings.

Ardan opened his eyes.

In the center of a vortex of bloody feathers and glass mist, Elani’atie and the vampire stood frozen on the slashed stones of the platform. They were in the exact poses they had held a moment before. The blistering noon and the dead, moonless midnight began to flicker back and forth deliriously.

“Milar,” Ardan touched his staff to his partner’s back, and with a yelp, the latter came to his senses.

“Fuck,” the captain swore. “I truly love this stupid magic, Ard. Things used to be so much simpler…”

“The labyrinth,” Ardan prompted, returning to the original topic as if a vampire and a Sidhe weren’t facing off in a magical battle of wills right beside them. “You think Mshisty knew where to go?”

“Maybe he didn’t at first, but he definitely had a way to figure out the right direction,” Milar said, holding his head with one hand and blinking hard. “That’s why he let us tumble straight in here. Damn it all! The bastard just wants to one-up Aversky!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Aversky taking down a demon, which everyone knows about. And Mshisty fantasizes day and night about outdoing… well, a dead man now,” Milar glanced toward the still-living Mshisty. “Mark my words, I won’t mind writing a report that sends that bastard to the deepest asshole of the Empire!”

Ardan opened his mouth to say something else but, as always, he didn’t get a chance to. From the whirlwind of blood and glass dust, a barely-discernible image of Elani’atie separated itself. She drifted over to Ardi and spoke in a chiming voice:

“I cannot defeat him, student of the Ice Princess,” she said, extending a ghostly hand and pointing toward the vaulted ceiling. “This place serves him and feeds him power. Here, no one except an Aean’Hane of the Ean’raane could handle him.”

“But you’re a Sidhe! You-”

“I was one,” Elani’atie interrupted him. “But I remember almost nothing. I don’t have enough strength to overcome this creature, young Speaker.”

Ardan swore under his breath, and Milar, looking back and forth between them, let out a howl like a wounded dog.

“She didn’t say anything good just now, did she?” The captain muttered, his voice heavy with despair and exhaustion.

“We could try to ru-”

“You know perfectly well you won’t manage to escape,” the Sidhe cut him off again… Or was she an almost-Sidhe… but no longer a demon… probably…

Sleeping Spirits!

One could speculate endlessly on what exactly she was, because it was likely that, in all of history—human and Firstborn alike—no one besides Ard had ever encountered such a phenomenon.

“I sense that I have power, but I don’t remember its Name and I don’t remember its essence,” Elani’atie said, extending her glass hand to Ardan. “Allow me, young Speaker, to give you a drop of my power. With it, you can lay a path to the Name of Ice and Snow for a short time. I will guide you to it! The Ley is strong here. With my help, you can pass through!”

Ardan gulped. If not for that episode with Lea Morimer when he’d been forced to use purified Ley energy for the same purpose, he would never have agreed to this. Even if Elani’atie was no longer a demon (at least for the moment… damn it!), one should still never accept anything from the Fae or Sidhe, neither as payment, and especially not as a gift.

“Quickly, young Speaker,” Elani’atie urged, shaking her outstretched hand. She’d switched from the Fae tongue to Galessian. “I grow weaker with each passing second! He’ll send all of us to the Sleeping Spirits! You can help me!”

“Ard?” Milar turned to his partner.

Ardan looked into the eyes of the glass phantom. She had deliberately said that in Galessian so that… Well, whatever goal Elani’atie had, she’d achieved it. He could only hope that if the glass sorceress was no longer a demon, she wasn’t quite a Sidhe yet, either.

In any case, Ardan reached out his hand and had no time to notice how…

***

He was standing amid the snowy expanses of his native Alcade. He was not the young hunter who’d remembered nothing of his roots or the ways of the human tribe.

No, there was only Ardan here. He was dressed in his usual suit, the one he’d bought for a decent price, and not even at Tend’s flea market, but from a tiny atelier on the very edge of the Central District, near the Martyrs’ Bridge. He’d spotted it once while passing by on business. It had been six exes and thirty kso, and worth every coin.

It was strange that Ardan was thinking about his suit right now, rather than about how the air around him was crackling faintly from the frost trying to nip at his weathered skin. And how the snow beneath his feet was grumbling like a grouchy old man disturbed by children making too much noise. It was grumbling, even cursing and waving a dishrag, but deep down, it was glad and smiling happily at the visit.

It seemed to be anticipating the moment it would be scooped up, shaped, and made part of the games. Snowballs would fly. Then, in a matter of hours, the walls of ice fortresses would arise right here. Boys and girls would fill the once-sleepy valley with their laughter, competing with one another.

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And everything around them would whirl and dance in a vortex of warm emotions. Not warm like in summer, when the heat melts the hair on your head, but warm in a completely different way. A cozy warmth. A soft warmth, like a beloved old blanket you dream of after an especially hard day.

The earth beneath his feet yearned for the same. Tired of giving life, exhausted from the labors of spring and summer, it had waited so long for a chance to rest and dream. It desired dreams in which children laughed and didn’t worry about getting their coats dirty; in which the young of every kind snuggled into the fur of their slumbering hunter-parents and prey-parents, not yet knowing that the future held more than just warm days and games.

Such was the snow beneath Ardan’s feet—his native snow, which had fallen on the very same day he’d first opened his eyes in a wooden house on the bank of a mountain stream.

***

Everything was different this time. When Ardan had shattered Paarlax’s glass sphere with his staff, he had only filled an external shard of the Name of Ice and Snow with borrowed power—a shard he’d managed to discern over the past twelve years of regular practice. But now it felt… it felt as if he could actually Hear it. He could Hear the Name in the loud crunch of snow underfoot, in his quickened breath, and in the way his hands tucked under his armpits to warm themselves.

It was a Name that seemed to know his own and was just waiting to say hello. And Ardan answered. He said hello back and beckoned it to follow him—to come play amid the stone of this defiled ground.

Something resounded in answer. Something Ardan could not yet make out.

But even so…

Ice and Snow came at the call of the young wizard.

***

Milar, as if spellbound, stared at his partner. He had read Aversky’s reports of his battle against the elven Aean’Hane, so he knew that when someone wields the art of the Firstborn, their eyes would change. But it was one thing to read about that and quite another to see it for himself.

The whites of his partner’s eyes had filled with a blue haze, and the staff in his hand was coated in patterns of gleaming frost. The glass witch was gripping him by the right wrist and seemed to be convulsing in pain, and on Ardan’s left wrist, there was a glowing… kiss mark? No, surely Milar was seeing things. In this madhouse, he’d seen so much in the past half hour alone…

And yet, when Ard struck his staff against the ground, the captain did not expect what happened next. Not only did he see the stone surface of the platform ripple like the surface of a disturbed lake—he felt it under his feet. Milar truly found himself standing not on solid ground, but on water.

Waves spread out in every direction, and then stone shot upward—toward the ceiling—in a spray of shattered fragments. And where the granite ceiling split open, a blizzard and snowstorm burst free. They whirled through the ancient hall, covering the walls with glittering rime that arranged itself into murals of animals and of landscapes unfamiliar to Milar. They also sheathed the hideous corpse staircase in a layer of ice, transforming the subservient statues into enormous snowdrifts. Finally, they came to rest as a cloud of white mist.

For a second, the captain thought he would start shivering from the cold, but instead, he suddenly realized he felt warm. Even warmer than before. It was as if he had, just like in his childhood, wrapped himself in a blanket on his own bed, hiding away from nightmares and all misfortunes.

Icicles began to drip—or was that laughter? Or perhaps both at once.

The vampire and the witch, who had been frozen in a vortex of blood and glass, were flung apart in opposite directions. Milar didn’t catch how exactly it happened, but a second earlier, Ard had been held by a glass mirage, and now the actual black-haired witch was holding him.

No, the captain hadn’t been mistaken after all. The witch truly was enduring searing pain from the contact between them, and on his partner’s wrist, the outline of a woman’s lips were indeed gleaming. And in all likelihood, those lips were definitely not Tess’…

Right now, however, Milar was far more concerned with the vampire than with the mysteries of his partner.

The creature raised a blade, trying to summon another bloody monstrosity, but a laughing gust of harmless wind whooshed past him and the vampire—like this was some ludicrous stage play—simply slipped. A slick sheet of ice appeared under him, and the ancient monster who had vanquished three military mages, including Mshisty, actually stumbled.

His cloak billowed open like broad wings, but it could not lift its master. A moment later, icy shackles conjured by the descending snowstorm clamped down on the vampire, and the creature was slammed into the platform.

The ice beneath him cracked open and the monster fell into the depths of a frigid lake that had formed where, moments ago, blood-soaked granite had been.

Milar was hardly even aware of what was happening, and most importantly, of what he was seeing, hearing and feeling. He could have sworn on the saints’ icons and the Eternal Angels’ crests that he was standing on stone, breathing the stale air of an underground grotto, and seeing only gloom and the morbid pyramid with its top sheared off. And yet, at the same time, his nose was being insistently filled with the smell of fresh snow; something as soft as a friendly cat was brushing against his skin—the cold, gentle for now, nuzzling him; and before his eyes stretched a lake. And thrashing in that lake was an ancient vampire.

With the desperation of a drowning man (though an undead creature cannot drown), he clawed toward the surface, but that surface, despite being right there, kept receding from view. Or perhaps the vampire was sinking deeper and deeper into blue depths that, in reality, did not exist and could not exist…

Milar had seen Star Mages fight a couple of times, but it had never looked like… this. He was pretty sure that he now understood why, out of the entire Black House, only a handful of mage operatives were ever sent out to detain or eliminate an Aean’Hane.

The vampire’s dark cloak, which had turned into a torn off, living scrap of the night sky, whirled shreds of darkness around its owner, trying to fend off the onslaught of icy currents… which had taken the form of playful otters. The otters didn’t even try to bite or scratch the creature—they merely tugged him deeper and deeper toward the bottom. Finally, the vampire tore an arm free from their grasp and bit down on his own wrist.

A bloody haze streamed from the wound and through the ice, and the vampire was hurled upward, where he landed once more on… solid ice. It was as though neither the lake nor the otters had ever existed. The little creatures were gone, replaced by stately spruce trees that had sprouted right before his very eyes. They were so pristine and elegant that they looked like crystal figurines, only life-sized.

That strange, wintry wind blew again, bringing not a stinging, evil cold, but the tender, half-forgotten warmth of a child’s bed where there are no worries and no woes.

The vampire shouted something in a language Milar now recognized but still didn’t understand. It sounded like the Fae tongue, anyway.

“Ehok tur!”

The words sounded rough, like a curse or an insult…

Bones cracked in the vampire’s “good” arm and black, viscous blood oozed from his wounds, resembling tar more than tar itself did. Coming together in one massive blob which was the size of a young calf, it rolled across the icy ground, turning into a maw lined with blood crystals.

Milar snapped up his revolver and took aim at the vampire’s head. His investigator’s instincts were screaming at him, telling him that if that blob reached its goal, no magic in the world could save his partner or the strange witch. But he never even had to fire.

That same wind from before, which had made its home among the crystal spruces now dusted with snow, raced through their feathery, frozen boughs. The branches clattered against each other and a flute’s trill swept across the grotto, filled with laughter and cries, with the heavy sigh of streams falling asleep beneath a blanket of frost, and with something more. Many things, in truth. It was just that Milar, over the course of his life, had heard those sounds but had never truly listened to them, and so now he couldn’t remember where he knew them from.

But they were there, nonetheless.

They had come at the very first call of the young man whose eyes were drowning in a blue haze.

The sound swelled and swelled until it became an overwhelming cacophony. Perhaps this was the sort of terrifying chorus that accompanies an avalanche as it tumbles down from the mountains? Milar didn’t know.

But he was convinced of it. The sound turned into a multiton, unending avalanche crashing down onto the vampire. There was no actual snow or ice there, but the undead still fell. He didn’t seem like a tree that had been cut down, but like a broken doll.

His legs shattered in dozens of places, the bones spearing through flesh and flying apart like splinters. The creature’s body folded in several spots like a crumpled paper accordion. His ribs splintered and scattered in every direction, and his arms were smashed so badly that nothing remained of them but unrecognizable pulp.

The vampire was trying to scream something and maybe even get up, but he had countless wounds inflicted by the invisible avalanche. And it didn’t stop striking him until the wind died down, and along with it, the once-merry, and now dreadful song of the frozen trees came to an end.

The creature wheezed and trembled. His body spat up gobs of blood as it kept trying to regenerate, but it was clear that after battling Mshisty, then the witch, and finally Ard… the vampire had no strength left.

Milar was about to return his revolver to its holster when he heard a faint groan.

Whipping around, he saw his partner practically hanging off his own staff. The young man was withering—his skin turning ashen, his gaze dimming—and yet, at the same time, an unearthly radiance was burning brighter and brighter, causing the witch’s skin to glimmer with starlight.

The captain had no idea what was happening, but he had no intention of parsing the details. His gut told him that his partner was being devoured alive, and that was enough for him.

“Let him go!” Milar shouted, leveling the muzzle of his revolver at the witch.

Where the creature’s eyes had been perfectly human moments before, they were now gradually clouding over—turning into something like an endless night sky filled with alien galaxies and constellations.

“Shit,” the captain spat, and pulled the trigger.

The first bullet, which was an ordinary round, struck an invisible barrier and exploded into lead dust, but the second—one of Dagdag’s special rounds cooked up by his eggheads—flared bright as it flew through the air. A tiny seal formed before it, and instead of a slug of lead, an orange beam lashed at the target.

The witch screamed and let go. In that same instant, almost faster than the eye could follow, a bluish orb of light flew from her hand and surged back into Ard. The young man regained a healthy coloration (relatively speaking) and his by-now familiar, if inhuman, amber eyes.

The witch’s own skin lost its mystical gleam, and her eyes ceased trying to mimic the universe.

Milar dashed over to his partner and patted the young man’s cheeks briskly.

“Hey, you alright, Magister? Still in one piece? Still in the land of the living?”

Ard’s head hung in a disoriented fashion for a moment, until, at last, his gaze focused on Milar’s face and he croaked:

“Yeah, I’m… fine.”

“Well, that’s good,” Milar grunted. He rose, took two steps, and pressed the barrel of his revolver to the forehead of the stunned and seemingly frightened witch. “Thank you for the help, ma’am, but I don’t like you.”

He cocked the hammer and—by all the Saints, Martyrs and Eternal Angels—he would have emptied the entire cylinder into her, and then given her a few extra licks with his saber just in case if not for Ard.

“Don’t,” Milar heard Ard say from behind him.

“Have you lost your mind, Ard? This… this… She damn near sucked you dry! And not in the way that could turn into a dirty bar joke!”

Milar never took his eyes off the motionless witch, so he didn’t see it, but he heard Ard get to his feet with a labored groan and approach to stand at his right.

“I could feel that she was resisting the urge,” his partner said. With each word he spoke, Ardan’s voice grew steadier, and that, more than the words themselves, halted the captain’s next shot. “She was resisting as much as she could.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Milar. If she’d wanted to, she would have drained me the instant she’d touched me. In fact, she could have done it the first time, not just now.”

Ardan, who was wiping sweat from his brow, never took his eyes off the Sidhe. Elani’atie truly had resisted the Hunger as long as she’d been able to. But he couldn’t let her harmless appearance fool him. Whatever Lea’s device had done, whatever experiments that talented mage scientist had performed by delving into the depths of forbidden magic, Elani’atie had not become herself again. She was not the Sidhe of the Joyous Memories. She still hovered somewhere on the brink. And while on that brink, she would be tormented by the Hunger, which warps the nature of every Fae who strays from the path.

“Forgive me, young Speaker, forgive me,” Elani’atie was whispering, tears rolling down her cheeks—tears that oddly resembled birch sap. “I didn’t want to, but it is so strong… my Hunger is so strong… If you hadn’t recognized my Name, I’m afraid I would have killed all of you… Oh Sleeping Spirits, I don’t want to remember all those people and all those Fae I destroyed while I wandered in the darkness.”

“What’s she saying, Ard?!” Milar shouted, raising his revolver again.

“It’s alright, Captain,” the youth fibbed a little, and stepping closer to the Sidhe, he attempted to help her up, but the witch flinched away from him.

“Your mark, young Speaker,” Elani’atie looked at his left hand the way a branded beast might eye a white-hot iron. “That magic is Allane’Eari’s, my cousin’s. That magic will destroy me if I touch you a third time.”

Ardan stepped back, and in that moment, he realized that he had heard more than she had perhaps intended him to.

“Cousin?” Ardan repeated. “You’re one of the Summer Princesses?”

Elani’atie’s eyes widened and she mulled it over for a second, then began to shake her head frantically, hitting her temples with her fists.

“I don’t remember, Speaker… I don’t remember… Around my memory, there are walls of darkness and they bite… It hurts… I hardly remember anything…”

Milar, who had been standing behind them this whole time, cleared his throat.

“Hate to spoil the moment, Ard, but I’ve seen behavior like this… in an asylum. And you know the worst thing those patients can do there? Fling their own shit at the guards. But this one casts spells that nearly made me lose my mind.”

“She’s a Sidhe,” was all Ardan replied with.

“Oh, well if she’s a Sidhe,” Milar growled, waving his revolver, “then that explains absolutely every—frigging—thing. Whoops, did I say explains? Because I meant to-”

Milar didn’t get to finish his tirade because a wheezing rasp sounded behind them—one quite distinct and easily recognizable.

The vampire was gradually coming back to himself.

Elani’atie, who had been pounding her own head a moment ago, went still, then turned toward the fallen creature and dissolved into a shimmering mist. She disappeared from one spot and instantly reappeared beside the undead, planting the base of her glass staff on his chest.

She might not have remembered anything, but she still knew deep down, as all Sidhe did, how to walk those paths not meant for mortals.

“What do you want to ask him, Speaker?” She asked, still using the Fae language even though she knew Galessian as well.

Ardan and Milar exchanged glances and the young man translated the question.

“Have her ask what all those children were here for—the ones we found on the way to this… place,” Milar growled through clenched teeth.

“What were-”

“I know Galessian, fool,” the vampire rasped. In that visage mangled by the Alcade avalanche (even if it was but a small shadow of the true avalanche

) it was hard to discern anything beyond the hate-filled, fish-like eyes situated amid the pulp of bone and flesh. “Why should I answer you, hound?”“Because…” Milar started, then fell silent.

Ardan understood perfectly. With a human suspect, they could have offered them something in exchange: perhaps to spare them a death sentence and send them to do hard labor instead, or at least guarantee them incarceration in a city prison where conditions were better. And if a criminal refused, they could threaten torture. And if there were mages present—especially Ardan with his Witch’s Gaze—they could simply pull whatever was needed directly from the person’s mind.

But this was a vampire. An ancient vampire, and a fanatic to boot.

He would not divulge anything, even under threat of annihilation. Torture didn’t frighten him—he could simply deaden himself to pain. And Ardan wouldn’t dive into the mind of such a creature for all the exes in the world, because such a journey would be a one-way ticket with no return to familiar shores.

The vampire laughed—a harsh, crow-like cackle that was cut short almost immediately.

“I meant to arrange things so that you would remain in my debt, young Speaker,” Elani’atie said in a clear, ringing tone that sounded like the clinking of glasses. “But I nearly took your life, so it is I who am in your debt, not you in mine. And I will repay it right here and now.”

She leaned in closer to the creature and extended her hand.

“No, you fool! What are you doing?!” The vampire suddenly shrieked, abruptly stopping his laughter. “You don’t even understand! You were on our si-”

He fell silent. Forever. The moment the Sidhe’s hand touched his flesh, it began to crumble away like torn parchment. Soon, nothing remained on the floor but a stain of indeterminate origin and a scrap of cloth.

Milar had already begun to raise his revolver toward the witch again when a glassy whirlwind swirled up beside her, forming a translucent silhouette of the vanquished vampire.

“It’s the shadow of his mind,” Elani’atie explained in crisp Galessian. “I don’t remember how to create them properly… and I am weak… so he will only be able to answer a few of your questions. Ask wisely, and please, do so quickly. I can’t hold him here more than a couple of minutes.”

Milar uttered a barely audible curse and, lowering his revolver, stepped forward.

“Tell us in detail what all those children were doing here—the ones we found on the way to this… place.”

The shadow’s lips did not move, but a familiar, hoarse, cawing voice touched their ears nonetheless:

“They were brought by the Aean’Rahne so that Lea Morimer would fulfill the terms of the deal and finish her research from the ship.”

Ardan was almost surprised by how clear and straightforward the answer was. In his great-grandfather’s tales, such magic tricks usually yielded only murky riddles and half-hints.

“Who is the Duke that Lea Morimer was serving?” Milar continued.

It seemed like he had indeed read Ardan’s report. They hadn’t discussed the note Lea had left him—“you lost to the Duke” —since it could have been anything from a trick to a moniker.

In response, they heard only silence, which was undercut by the faint groans of the wounded Cloaks nearby whom they really ought to tend to soon.

“And why is he keeping quiet?” Milar wondered aloud to no one in particular.

“The spells placed upon him are extraordinarily powerful,” the witch answered after a few moments. “I’m not sure if I’ve ever encountered such magic before, but it’s beyond the ability of almost any mortal.”

“Almost?”

“The one you call the Archmage,” Elani’atie nodded, “and the students of Aror… perhaps they could have placed such enchantments upon him that would hold even after undeath, but I’m not certain… I don’t remember…”

Ardan didn’t bother asking why Elani’atie remembered the Archmage and his great-grandfather’s students. He was now thoroughly convinced that the Sidhe wasn’t pretending or playing any kind of game with them. She was really not herself.

“Alright, even this silence is an answer in itself…” Milar grumbled to himself, then, more loudly, he continued the interrogation. “What was the research about?”

“I overheard by chance that it concerned the possibility of symbiotic coexistence between a demon and a human. I know nothing further.”

“Symbo… what kind of nonsense…”

“Symbiotic,” Ard whispered into his partner’s ear. “I’ll explain later.”

“Who else did you see coming and going at the estate, and what happened to the rest of the children?”

Ardan made a mental note to ask about “the rest of the children” later.

But once again, the only answer was silence.

“Fantastic,” Milar sighed, throwing up his hands. “Well—at least that’s something… Do you want to ask him anything else, Magister?”

Before Ardan could reply, Elani’atie warned them:

“I only have the strength for one more question, and please, ask it quickly.”

“Go on, Magister,” Milar urged, “maybe you can come up with some sensible idea.”

Ardan glanced at the glass mirage, then at the Sidhe, then back at the mirage, and only then asked:

“What do you know about Elani’atie, the Sidhe of the Joyous Memories?”

Milar’s face went through an indescribable range of emotions, but Ardan would explain his reasoning to his partner later, along with that strange term.

“I know that she became a demon during the War of the Birth of the Empire and was imprisoned in the dungeon of the City on the Hill. I don’t know for what crime exactly, but I know that her own husband ended up there as well for attempting to free Elani’atie.”

“Husband…” The Sidhe whipped around toward the “vampire.” “I had a husband?” —and then she answered her own question, “Yes… my eternal companion… I think I remember him. But I don’t recall who he is… tell me, walker of the night, who is he? Is he still imprisoned in the City on the Hill?”

The vampire slowly, jerkily turned toward the witch and mouthed:

“You’ll return to the Darkness all the same, traitor…”—and in the next instant, his echo dissolved into a cloud of fine glass dust.

“Damn it! Magister!” Milar burst out, unable to contain himself. “I have so many questions and you have only two kneecaps for me to shoot!”

But neither the Sidhe nor Ardan paid any heed to the infuriated captain.

The witch drifted through the air over to Ardan and gazed into his eyes. She did not attempt to use the Witch’s Gaze on him, but even so, Ardan felt something brush against his mind.

“You did the right thing, young Speaker,” she said, her bell-like voice trembling. Afraid to touch him, she passed her hand a hair’s breadth from Ard’s cheek. “Now I owe you once more. You gave me your question, so one day, I will bring you an answer in return. Until then—do not seek me out. I will go to search for my memory and for my husband. But we shall meet again. We’ll meet when you find joy in your own memories, and I realize that you are ready for my answer. Then I will bring it to you.”

Ardan, instead of replying, merely inclined his head slightly.

“Remain vigilant around her,” Elani’atie added, shifting her gaze to his left wrist. “The princesses and princes born on the border of Summer and Winter are the most cunning of us. Whatever they do, never trust them. That is my little gift to you, as the keeper of my Name. Do not forget me, I beg of you. As long as you remember me, I can fight the Darkness.”

Ardan nodded again. He was, after all, dealing with a Sidhe, and given how much he had already said and done, it was wiser to remain silent now.

“You have a beautiful Name of Ice and Snow, Strong Roots. Do not lose it in the Darkness.”

Ardan could not help himself.

“How do you know what I am called, Highborn Sidhe?”

But she only smiled and vanished, and the air echoed with one last message:

“Thrice I spoke, and thrice you listened. Farewell until next time, young Speaker.”

He was left standing on the platform with Milar.

“Arrgh,” came a groan from somewhere off to the right.

Okay, not just Milar…