The Rebels, page 21
“Maybe he died unexpectedly during a journey,” Jikat said, eyeing the ghost that kept staring at the ground, lost in thought and oblivious to her and Jikat’s presence. “It happens sometimes. Or maybe he was killed, and the killer hid the body. Or it is witchcraft.”
“Witchcraft?”
“To curse this place with the blood of a sacrificed innocent,” Jikat said. “Or to bind what was once a living being to this place, so it has to protect it against trespassers. Maybe we can discard this last hypothesis, considering that this place is more or less a ruin.”
“I could ask,” Dee said. “Although sometimes they don’t know. If they have died recently, they are often clueless about what happened to them.”
“Leave him alone, then,” Jikat sighed. “Let him believe he’s still alive for a little longer.”
In the morning, the ghost was gone, and they left the shelter too. They had walked until then, taking breaks often because Jikat tended to get tired easily, and arrived at Luminaris when the sun was setting.
“Wait here,” Jikat said when they found the first inn beyond the city wall.
Dee found a spot in the narrow street next to the inn and sat down, Daraech standing next to her, unhappy to be back inside a city. It was better if Jikat went inside the inn on his own. Not all the innkeepers disliked nyvans, but some did, and it was easier to avoid confrontations with them when asking for information.
When Jikat came out of the inn, he handed her a slice of potato pie.
“Thanks,” Dee smiled.
The pie was very warm, and the moment Dee touched it, she glimpsed the fragment of a vision. She saw Hasden walking with Ven at his side along a city street. She didn’t recognise the place. It could have been Luminaris as well as any other big city of men. She hadn’t thought of Hasden and Ven in some time, and the vision puzzled her. She leant to give a piece of pie to Daraech. “Are the Iron Knights still in the city?”
“They took residence in the castle,” Jikat said. “Together with a group of witch hunters.”
“Witch hunters?”
“Apparently. They are no less noticeable and mistrusted than the Iron Knights.”
There was no way of knowing when and where her vision would happen. For all she knew, Hasden could walk on that street a year later or more. But it was a strange coincidence. “Are they looking for witches?”
“The innkeeper didn’t know,” Jikat said. “Which probably means the hunters are here for some other reason. Innkeepers would certainly know if witches had taken residence in their city. But I have the feeling it’s not a coincidence. I’m sure the Iron Knights are in Luminaris for the same reason the witch hunters are.”
“There’s a possibility that I know one of them,” Dee said.
“What do you mean?”
“I had a short vision just before you mentioned the witch hunters,” Dee said. “I met one of them not long ago. He is the one who went with my sister Yarrow to Lacreemara. I’m not sure, but he may be here in Luminaris.”
“Is he someone we can trust?”
Dee nodded. “Yes. He’s a friend. And he never goes anywhere without his dog. I may be able to find him, if we get close enough.”
“Let’s go near the castle, but we need to be careful,” Jikat said. “Many Iron Knights know my face.” He took one of his black cloths and draped it around his neck, partially hiding his face. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Iir didn’t need Terven or Kitaj to tell her which one of the group of women standing in the park of the beautiful palace was the queen. As soon as she saw her, by spying through the bars of the iron railing that circled the park of the Palace of the Monsters, Iir recognised her, although the first time she had seen her, the queen wasn’t wearing trousers and a uniform but an elegant dress of blue velvet and cerulean silk that enhanced the colour of her eyes.
She wasn’t the queen at the time, but she was already married to the Red Prince. Iir had seen her in the first hall she, her father and the Green Sentinels had crossed, standing on a balcony with two equally elegant ladies at her sides, and two enormous korros guards standing just behind her. The Red Prince had been in the castle too, but he had been with his father and his brother Revon.
Iir had watched Princess Alygenas and the other guests, curious and a bit worried to see so many guards, especially korros guards. The only korros she had seen before were the ones sent to attack her village. The princess didn’t even look at her, although she had briefly observed their group, her plump lips twisted in a derisory smile. Iir knew what she was thinking. The same thing that the nobles of the Two Kingdoms always thought: that the Green Sentinels were savages, inferiors who lived in forests like animals.
She had seen the princess again later, after cutting off Lord Kred’s arm. Iir was following Terven, walking a few steps behind him, and he had raised an arm to tell her to wait. They were walking along a corridor, and they were about to pass in front of an open door. From the door came the voices of several people, most of them women, all laughing.
To those rich people, the death of her father and his friends was something to celebrate. Her stomach churned, and she wanted to throw up. There was a pile of dead nyvan in the courtyard, and these fools were having fun and stuffing themselves with expensive food and wine.
Blinded by rage, she was about to walk into that room ready to cut as many heads she could with her axe from which Lord Kred’s blood was still dripping. As if reading her mind, Terven turned, his index finger over his sealed lips. “Do you want to get out of here alive or not?” he whispered.
Iir didn’t care. She wanted to make these people suffer more than anything else, but then she remembered her sisters waiting at their camp. If she got captured or killed in that damn castle, no one would take her sisters to safety and protect them. So, she nodded, lowered her axe, hid it behind her back and followed Terven as silently as his shadow. She only dared to take another quick peek at the beautiful lady with cold blue eyes. She wanted to remember her, certain that she would make her pay one day. And maybe that day had arrived.
“The korros standing next to her,” Iir whispered. “I remember him too. Who is he?”
Kitaj’s upper lip raised a fraction, showing the knight’s teeth in an expression of hardly contained disgust. “Scantravost Thunderdark. The head of the Iron Knights.”
“He wasn’t a knight at the time your father was killed,” Terven said. “He had recently arrived in our kingdom at the service of Alygenas. She helped him made a very fast career.”
“All the same,” Iir said. She had heard his name before.
“Have you sworn to kill him too?” Kitaj said. “Well, at least with korros it’s easy to obtain a duel. You only have to ask. They can’t deny anyone the right to avenge any blood they may have spilled. What shall we do now? They may not remember Iir, but both Alygenas and Scantravost can recognise me and you, my prince.”
“We can leave for now,” Terven said. “But I believe we should at least try to use the Eye too. Or we will never know why they’re going to Malanomber. We’re so close. We must find a way.”
For the first time, Iir saw a fire in Terven that she had never seen before. Kitaj must have noticed too because he smiled. “I thought you had lost your adventurous side. It has been some time since I saw you so determined. Well, I’m in. But it won’t be easy, as I have already said. With the celebration going on, we may be able to sneak in unnoticed. But the room with the Eye is small with no place to hide, and it will be heavily guarded. Unless we find a way to be invisible, it will be impossible to enter the room and travel with the Eye.”
“Maybe we can wait until Alygenas has travelled,” Terven said. “The wall with the Eye solidifies slowly when the device closes down. The soldiers are supposed to stay in the room until the process is completed, but they often leave sooner.”
“It can be dangerous to use the Eye when it’s not completely open,” Kitaj said.
“Well, if it is too solid, we won’t risk using it,” Terven said. “Maybe we can learn something about Alygenas’ intentions just by entering the palace. I say we should at least try.”
“I fear that you’re too optimistic,” Kitaj said. “But I don’t have a better plan.”
***
Yarrow was resigned to losing another night of sleep. She wanted to at least start reading the book about the Mage King, but she couldn’t do it during the day. It looked too much like a book that belonged in a library.
It seemed a good idea to stay in the servants’ quarters to do her reading. It was much safer than sneaking inside the library, considering that the mage hunters didn’t patrol the servants’ quarters. Also, she was sleepy. She wanted to stay as close as possible to her bed, so she could go lay down if she realised that it was too hard to keep her eyes open.
After the other servants were asleep, Yarrow got up. She had gone to bed still dressed. Since it was cold at night, she put on her cloak. Sewn inside its hem was the magic silver coin that her mother gave to her a long time ago, the one that gave her the ability to summon a shadow warrior. She didn’t think she would need it while reading the book, but it always made her feel safer to have it close to her, as if her mother was protecting her. She also put in her pocket the crystal that Hasden had given her.
In the kitchen, she lit a candle. She was going to hide next to the oven, a spot that could not be seen from the entrance. If someone walked in, she could push the book under the cupboard and pretend that she had just wanted to make chamomile tea to help her sleep.
She cast on the floor a protective circle made of salt, to make sure that the curse connected with the book was contained, and when that was completed, she sat inside it with a candle and the book. The book weighed over her crossed legs. She had the intention of taking it back to the secret library once she had finished reading it, but she felt a bit guilty for having removed it from its safe place. Hasden would probably disapprove of her if he knew what she had done. She needed the book for a good cause. To help Iir. But she knew that the book was dangerous, and she wasn’t even sure if it was safe to have it lying around in the servants’ quarters. She wished she could ask the dead Mage Rector Folia for advice. Undead or not, she was knowledgeable, very wise and a pleasant company. Yarrow missed talking to her, but the summoning she had unwillingly performed the previous month had finished its course, and she had to repeat it if she wanted Rector Folia to reappear, which meant taking another big risk. She had also no idea where the book with the spell was. It was a book that Loucree had taken out of the library, and Yarrow, at the time, didn’t know it could be of use to her and she hadn’t thought of learning its title.
Sighing, Yarrow rubbed more salt on the cover before opening the book.
She had lived for six months on the mountains near Mount Glass, and she had heard legends about the Mage King. People remembered especially the cruelty of the kalanviri, and that their magic was poisonous, even if they had used it to create wonders too, like the oldest parts of the Academy and many magic artefacts. The Rector Mages and some of the senior scholars were the only ones who could access those artefacts in recent times. After living in the Academy for a couple of months, Yarrow doubted that the Mage Rectors deserved that kind of trust. She liked Mage Rector Folia, but Rector Vesperii, considering the quickness with which he had moved his alliance from one cruel king to another, seemed to her more a power-hungry politician than a wise and knowledgeable mage.
Yarrow turned the pages. They were difficult to read, white on black, especially by the dim light of her candle, and she wasn’t sure where she could start. She wanted especially information on the Mage King, but the book was also filled with formulas and diagrams and long pieces about kalanviri magic in general. Yarrow looked at the pictures first because they captured her attention more than the pages filled with minute words. All the images were black and white. She stopped to look at one in particular. It was very dark, and there was something unsettling about it. It depicted a high-ceilinged room that could have been in a palace or a castle with a man-like figure standing in its centre. The dominant black colour gave Yarrow the impression that the scene was at nighttime or during a stormy day.
The figure in the centre—which could have been a representation of the Mage King since it wore a crown—was almost completely black, like it was a shadow instead of a person. It was so black that it seemed to neutralise any light around it. The figure’s face had no details at all. Yarrow moved her index fingertip over it and felt an edge. She raised the page and frowned. The face of the Mage King had been cut out, leaving an empty oval through which the next page could be seen, and that page was completely black.
That was strange. Had the page been that way since the book was written or had someone damaged it later?
Keeping the page up, Yarrow looked through the hole. She was seeing the wall next to her, and everything seemed as it should be, but then some undefined figure darted along the wall.
Yarrow raised her eyes from the book. She searched around the kitchen, but she was alone, and nothing was moving.
“You really are a bad book,” Yarrow murmured. It had the ability to make her see things that were not there. She hadn’t found any other magical object that could do this kind of trick before.
Reading the text under the image, Yarrow found a passage about the fortress of Ackanoor. The people who, in the past, had succeeded in entering the ancient fortress and striking a deal with the Mage King had later become haunted. They reported seeing a human-like figure, dark like a shadow, repeatedly appearing near them but unseen by everybody else, the same dark figure depicted in the illustration. None of these poor people had lived for more than a year after striking the deal, but it didn’t say if it was because they didn’t respect their part of the bargain or because the Mage King had deceived them. In the end, they either were killed, or they killed themselves after being delirious. The author pointed out that all these people were not all adventurers. Some of them were famous knights who were well-known and well-trusted. The book also said that, despite mages and witches looking for one, a cure for the haunting and the madness was never found.
Iir, what have you got yourself into?
Yarrow couldn’t help thinking that all the people mentioned in the book had been men. There were no nyvans in the record and no women. History had a tendency of forgetting women and those belonging to races other than the dominant one. It was difficult to say if this was an accurate representation.
What the book said didn’t make much sense, however. Why curse the people who were trying to give the Mage King what he had asked of them? And was he also a witch to be able to curse? It was true that the kalanviri were a different race, and magic didn’t work in the same way in different races. She certainly knew that, since there were no witches amongst the nyvans. Yarrow always thought of herself as nyvans, but she was very different from most individuals of her race, including her own sisters. When her mother was alive, she felt like she belonged because her mother looked as different from the rest of her family as Yarrow did. But after Mother died, although she had never doubted her father and her sisters’ love, she had often felt different. In the Academy, the other servants accepted her like she was one of their own. Except that she was not. She was pretending all the time, making up new memories while the ones that really mattered to her had to remain secret.
She turned a few more pages. There was another thing that the book didn’t say, at least not in the part she had read so far: why did the Mage King want to live for so long. Obviously, everyone would have liked to live for centuries. But what sort of life was he living? Surviving in a dead body inside a fortress in ruin with only ghosts for company? Maybe he thought that it was better than no life at all. Or maybe he was waiting for something, something that would let him return his reign to its former glory. If that happened at the current time, when weaker mages and witches could not match the power of a kalanviri king, he could easily conquer the whole world. That was something worth waiting for, but Yarrow had no idea how the pacts fit into his plans, or how a pact was connected with the legend about the four nyvan heroes, the ones who should have been his father’s sons. The sons he never had because he married a woman, instead of a nyvan, who gave him three daughters.
Four daughters, Yarrow corrected herself. It was easy to forget her sister Willow since her life had been so short. Less than a week. Yarrow had no memories of her, even if they had lived together in their mother’s womb for nine months.
When she was little, Yarrow remembered hearing the laugh of a little child from time to time. It seemed to be a harmless ghost, and Yarrow had just ignored it, until the day Dee, aged five, asked her to make the little ghost come because she wanted to see her.
“What little ghost?” Yarrow said.
“The one that always laughs,” Dee said. “She always follows you.”
She had always thought that the ghost was in the house, but she hadn’t realised that she had a connection with her, even because at that time she didn’t know she had a twin who had died. The idea of a ghost following her around creeped her out.
She tormented Dee to make her admit that it was not true, but Dee refused to do it—Dee always told the truth, no matter how painful it was. Eventually, her mother had come to rescue a sobbing Dee.
“I saw her. She always crawls behind Yarrow. She doesn’t know how to walk,” Dee told their mother.
And Mother had turned pale, and she too had begun sobbing, something that had scared both Yarrow and Dee. After that, they never mention the little ghost to their mother ever again, and if they heard her laugh, they pretended not to hear her. It had been her father who, eventually, had explained her dead twin to her. He also explained that Mother could never talk about her only daughter who didn’t live.
Why Willow had suddenly reappeared, Yarrow had no idea. She sniffled and did her best to push the memory of her family aside and keep reading the strange book.
