A Torch Against the Night (35 page)

“I told you what would happen in that place.” My wounds aren’t visible here, but she winces when she looks at me, as if she can see them anyway. “Why didn’t you listen to me? Look at you.”

“I didn’t expect to get caught.” Spirits whirl around us, like flotsam spinning about in a gale. “Shaeva, what in the ten hells is going on?”

“You shouldn’t be here.” Her words are not hostile, as they would have been weeks ago. But they are firm. “I thought I wouldn’t see you until your death. Go back, Elias.”

I feel the familiar pull in my belly but fight it. “Are the spirits restless?”

“More than usual.” She slumps. “There are too many. Scholars, mostly.”

It takes me a moment to understand. I feel sick when I do. The whispers I hear—thousands upon thousands—are Scholars murdered by Martials.

“Many move on without my aid. But some are so anguished. Their cries upset the jinn.” Shaeva puts her hand to her head. “I have never felt so old, Elias. So helpless. In a thousand years as Soul Catcher, I have seen war before. I watched the fall of the Scholars, the rise of the Martials. Still, I have not seen anything like this. Look.” She points to the sky, visible through a space in the Forest canopy.

“The archer and the shield maiden fade.” She points out the constellations. “The executioner and the traitor arise. The stars always know, Elias. Of late, they whisper only of the approaching darkness.”

Shadows gather, Elias, and their gathering cannot be stopped.
Cain spoke those words—and worse—to me just months ago, in Blackcliff.

“What darkness?”

“The Nightbringer,” Shaeva whispers. Fear rolls over her, and the strong, seemingly impervious creature I’ve become accustomed to vanishes. In her place is a frightened child.

In the distance, the trees glow red. The jinn grove.

“He seeks a way to free his brethren,” Shaeva says. “He seeks the scattered pieces of the weapon that locked them away here so long ago. Every day he gets closer. I—I sense it, but I cannot
see
him. I can only feel his malice, like the chill shadow of a Nevennes gale.”

“Why do you fear him?” I ask. “If you’re both jinn?”

“His power is a hundred times my own,” she says. “Some jinn can ride the winds or disappear. Others can manipulate minds, bodies, the weather. But the Nightbringer—he possesses all of these powers. More. He was our teacher, our father, our leader, our king. But …” She looks away. “I betrayed him. I betrayed our people. When he learned of it—skies, in centuries of life, I have never known fear like that.”

“What happened?” I ask softly. “How did you betray—”

A snarl ripples through the air from the grove.
Ssshhhaeva …

“Elias,” she says, anguished. “I—”

Shaeva!
The snarl is a whipcrack, and Shaeva jumps. “You’ve upset them. Go!”

I back away from her, and the spirits jostle and teem around me. One separates from the rest, small and wide-eyed, her eyepatch still part of her, even in death.

“
Izzi?
”
I say in horror. “What—”

“Be
gone!
” Shaeva shoves me, knocking me back into burning, painful consciousness.

My chains are loose, and I’m curled on the floor, aching and freezing. I feel a fluttering on my arms, and a pair of large, dark eyes regards me, wide and worried. The Scholar boy.

“
Tas?”

“The Warden ordered the soldiers to loosen the chains so I could clean your wounds, Elias,” Tas whispers. “You must stop thrashing.”

Gingerly, I sit up.
Izzi.
It was her. I’m certain of it. But she can’t be dead. What happened to the caravan? To Laia? Afya? For once, I want another seizure to take me. I want answers.

“Nightmares, Elias?” Tas’s voice is soft, and at my nod, his brow furrows.

“Always.”

“I also have bad dreams.” His gaze skitters briefly to mine before breaking away.

I don’t doubt it. The Commandant manifests in my memory, standing outside my jail cell months ago, just before I was set to be beheaded. She caught me in the middle of a nightmare.
I have them too
,
she said.

And now, miles and months from that day, I find that a Scholar child condemned to Kauf Prison is no different. So disturbing that the three of us should be linked by this one experience: the monsters crawling through our heads. All the darkness and evil that others perpetrate upon us, all the things we cannot control because we are too young to stop them—they have all stayed with us through the years, waiting in the wings for us to sink to our lowest. Then they leap, ghuls on a dying victim.

The Commandant, I know, is consumed by the darkness. Whatever her nightmares were, she has made herself a thousand times worse.

“Don’t let the fear take you, Tas,” I say. “You’re as strong as any Mask as long as you don’t let it control you. As long as you fight.”

From the hallway, I hear that familiar cry, the same one I’ve heard since I was thrown into this cell. It starts as a moan before disintegrating into sobs.

“He is young.” Tas nods in the direction of the tormented prisoner. “The Warden spends much of his time with him.”

Poor bastard. No wonder he sounds mad half the time.

Tas pours spirits onto my wounded fingernails, and they burn like the hells. I stifle a groan.

“The soldiers,” Tas says. “They have a name for the prisoner.”

“The Screamer?” I mutter through gritted teeth.

“The Artist.”

My eyes snap to Tas’s, the pain forgotten.

“Why,” I ask quietly, “do they call him that?”

“I have never seen anything like it.” Tas looks away, unnerved. “Even with blood as his ink, the pictures he draws on the walls—they are so real, I thought they’d—they’d come to life.”

Bleeding, burning hells.
It can’t be. The legionnaire in the solitary block said he was dead. And I believed him, fool that I am. I let myself forget about Darin.

“Why are you telling me this?” A sudden, horrible suspicion grips me. Is Tas a spy?
“
Does the Warden know? Did he put you put to it?”

Tas shakes his head rapidly. “No—please listen.” He glances at my fist, which, I realized, is clenched. I feel sick that this child would think I’d strike him, and I unfurl it.

“Even here, the soldiers speak of the hunt for the Empire’s greatest traitor. And they speak of the girl you travel with: Laia of Serra. And—and the Artist … sometimes in his nightmares, he speaks too.”

“What does he say?”

“Her name,” Tas whispers. “
Laia.
He cries out her name—and he tells her to run.”

T
he voices on the wind wrap around me, sending jolts of unease down to my core. Kauf Prison, still two miles distant, makes its presence known through the pain of its inmates.

“About bleeding time.” Faris, waiting at the supply outpost outside the valley, emerges from within. He pulls his fur-lined cloak close, gritting his teeth at the freezing wind. “I’ve been here three days, Shrike.”

“There was flooding in the Argent Hills.” A trip that should have taken seven days instead took more than a fortnight.
Rathana
is little more than a week away.
No bleeding time.
I hope my trust in the Cook was not misplaced.

“The soldiers at the garrison there insisted we go around,” I explain to Faris. “Ten hells of a delay.”

Faris takes the reins of my horse as I swing down. “Strange,” he said. “The Hills were blocked off on the east side too, but they told me mudslide.”

“Mudslide because of the flooding, likely. Let’s eat, stock up, and start tracking Veturius.”

A blast of warm air from the roaring hearth hits us as we enter the outpost, and I take a seat beside the fire as Faris speaks quietly to the four auxes hovering. As one, they nod vigorously at whatever he’s saying, casting nervous glances in my direction. Two disappear into the kitchens while the other two tend to the horses.

“What did you tell them?” I ask Faris.

“That you’d purge their families if they spoke of our presence to anyone.” Faris grins at me. “I assume you don’t want the Warden to know we’re here.”

“Good thinking.” I hope we do not need the Warden’s aid in tracking Elias. I shudder to think what he’d want in trade.

“We need to scout the area,” I say. “If Elias is here, he might not have gone in yet.”

Faris’s breathing hitches and then continues as before. I glance at him, and he appears suddenly and deeply interested in his meal.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” Faris speaks far too quickly and mutters a curse when he realizes that I’ve noticed. He sets down his plate.

“I hate this,” he says. “And I don’t care if the Commandant’s spy knows.” He gives Avitas a dark look. “I hate that we’re like dogs hunting a kill, with Marcus cracking his whip at our backs. Elias saved my life during the Trials. And Dex’s too. He knew what it felt like … after …” Faris looks at me accusingly. “You’ve never even spoken of the Third Trial.”

With Avitas watching my every move, the wise path would be to give a speech about loyalty to the Empire right now.

But I am too tired. And too sick at heart.

“I hate it too.” I look down at my half-eaten food, my appetite gone. “Bleeding skies, I hate everything about it. But this isn’t about Marcus. It’s about the survival of the Empire. If you can’t bring yourself to help, then pack your things and go back to Antium. I can assign you to another mission.”

Faris looks away, jaw clenched. “I’ll stay.”

Quietly, I release a sigh. “In that case”—I pick up my fork again—“maybe you can tell me why you clammed up when I said we should scout the area for Elias.”

Faris groans. “Damn it, Hel.”

“You were stationed at Kauf at the same time as him, Lieutenant Candelan,” Avitas says to Faris. “You, Shrike, were not.”

True—Elias and I ended up at Kauf at different times when we were Fivers.

“Did he go somewhere when things in the prison were too much?” There’s an intensity to Avitas that I’ve rarely seen. “An … escape?”

“A cave,” Faris says after a moment. “I followed him once when he left Kauf. I thought—skies, I don’t know what I thought. Probably something stupid: that he’d found a hidden stash of ale in the woods. But he just sat inside and stared at the walls. I think … I think he was trying to forget the prison.”

A great emptiness opens up inside me when Faris says it. Of course Elias would find such a place. He wouldn’t be able to bear Kauf without it. It’s so like him that I want to laugh and break something at the same time.

Not now. Not when you’re so close.

“Take us there.”

«««

A
t first, I think the cave is a dead end. It looks as if it’s been abandoned for years. But we light torches anyway and search every inch of it. Just as I’m about to order us to move out, I catch a glimpse of something glimmering deep within a crack in the wall. When I go to pull it out, I nearly drop it.

“Ten hells.” Faris grabs the bound, crossed scabbards from me. “Elias’s scims.”

“He’s here.” I ignore the dread pooling in my stomach—
you’ll have to kill him!
—and pretend it is the adrenaline rush of a hunt. “And recently. The spiders have covered everything else.” I hold up a torch to the webs in the crack.

I look about for signs of the girl. Nothing. “If he’s here, then Laia should be too.”

“And,” Avitas adds, “if he left all of this here, he can’t have believed he’d be gone for long.”

“You’re on watch,” I say to Faris. “Remember, this is Veturius we’re dealing with. Keep your distance. Don’t engage. I need to go down to the prison.” I turn to Avitas. “I suppose you’ll insist on coming with me?”

“I know the Warden better than you,” he says. “It is unwise to go barging into the prison. There are far too many of the Commandant’s spies inside. If she knows you’re here, she’ll try to sabotage you.”

I lift my eyebrows. “You mean she doesn’t know I’m here? I assumed you’d told her.”

Avitas says nothing, and as his silence grows longer, Faris shifts uncomfortably beside me. I see the faintest of cracks in Harper’s cold façade.

“I’m not her spy anymore,” he finally says. “If I were, you’d be dead by now. Because you’re too close to capturing Elias, and her orders were to kill you quietly when you got this close—to make it look like an accident.”

Faris draws his scim. “You filthy, traitorous—”

I hold up a hand to stop him and nod for Avitas to continue.

He pulls a thin paper envelope from his fatigues. “Nightweed,” he says. “Outlawed in the Empire. Skies only know where Keris got it. A little bit kills you slowly. A little more and your heart expires. The Commandant planned to say that the pressure of the mission was too much for you.”

“You think I’m so easy to kill.”

“No, actually.” The torchlight throws Avitas’s masked face into shadow, and for a second, he reminds me of someone I cannot place. “I’ve spent weeks figuring out how I’d do it without anyone the wiser.”

“And?”

“I decided I wouldn’t do it. As soon as that happened, I began misinforming her about what we were doing and where we were going.”

“Why change your mind? You must have known what the mission would entail.”

“I asked for the mission.” He puts the Nightweed away. “I told her she needed someone in close proximity to you if she wanted to take you down quietly.”

Faris doesn’t sheathe his scim. He’s edged forward, his huge body seeming to take up half the cave. “Why in the bleeding hells would you ask for
this
mission? You’ve got something against Elias?”

Avitas shakes his head. “I had … a question that needed an answer. Coming with you was the best way to get it.”

I open my mouth to ask him what question, but he shakes his head.

“The question doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it bleeding matters,” I snap. “What could possibly have made you change your alliance? And how am I to know that you won’t change it back?”

“I may have been her spy, Blood Shrike.” He meets my eyes, and the crack in his façade grows wider. “But I have
never
been her ally. I needed her. I needed answers. That is all I will tell you. If you cannot abide that, then send me away—or punish me. Whichever suits you. Just—” He pauses. Is that
anxiety
in his face? “Don’t go into Kauf to speak to the Warden. Send him a message. Get him out of his domain, where he’s strongest. Then do what you wish.”