Shroud of Shadow (32 page)

Her soft shoes made dusty sounds on the bare floor of the hallway. Perhaps she could slip out the postern, and perhaps she could do so without detection. She hoped so. She wanted to sleep under the stars tonight.

But a pang of conscience made her hesitate at the juncture of two corridors, and, after a moment, she turned in the direction of the servants' wing. She would not leave Marjorie lying dead and unattended throughout the night; she would not leave a corpse to be discovered in the morning like a piece of discarded furniture. She would tell someone. And only then would she leave.

She padded down corridors, through rooms, feeling her way with her hands because she had no light and only Elves could see in total darkness. The layout of the Aldernacht house was confusing, but if its maze of secret passages was still beyond her, she had at least mastered the visible and ordinary portions of it, knew the turnings that she would have to take. She would tell Eudes of the death, and then she would be gone.

As she approached the last flight of stairs, though, a noise made her stop and pause with her foot hovering above the first tread, her ears straining for a repetition of something that had sounded so out of place in a house tenanted by the dead and the would-be dead that it was almost blasphemous.

There it was again: a soft moan, half stifled, accompanied by deep laughter.

And the moan had been Omelda's.

But it had not yet come from the servants' quarters, and in only a minute or two (yes, there it was again, and again), Natil had determined that it did not emanate from any of the rooms customarily inhabited by the Aldernachts, but rather from somewhere
between
, from the secret corridors and chambers that interpenetrated the mundane living space of the mansion as a shaman's spirit world co-existed with mundane matter.

Another moan. Another whiff of laughter. Natil shuddered. It was Omelda. She knew that it was Omelda. And she knew also that the deep, mannish mirth came from the throats of Edvard and Norman.

She heard again the words of the betrayed and forsaken woman.
I'll be all right. Don't worry about me.

I'll be all right.
Natil put her free hand to her face. “
Ai, Elthia.
”

Again, a moan, soft, but carrying with it an edge as of velvet-wrapped glass.

Steeling herself against the wrench that each cry put into her, Natil began examining the walls of the room in which she had stopped. Paneling, molding, tapestries. Her hands explored the walls section by section, her knuckles tapped cautiously, her ears listened.

Nothing. She moved on to the adjacent corridor, the next room. Foot by foot she probed the vertical surfaces, searching for a hollowness, a yielding, a shift in the sound of the moans and laughter, anything that might indicate that something lay beyond the visible surface of stone and plaster. With nothing but the most basic of human senses available to her, she continued. Slowly, methodically. Feel. Listen. Tap.

And then a supposedly solid panel felt less substantial than its fellows, and with an instinct born of desperation—or perhaps from an increasingly innate understanding of the habits of human thinking—she reached behind a hanging and found a catch. For a moment, her fingers felt its shape, learned its use. And then she pressed it.

A soft click. Her hands told her that the suspect panel had swung back a finger's breadth.

Silently, still in darkness, Natil pushed the panel open, entered the passage, heard the volume of the moans and laughter abruptly increase. Hesitating only briefly, she closed the door behind her and heard it click into place. She had no idea how to get out, but she did not particularly care. She would either find Omelda, and from there would take her escape wherever she could find it, or she would die within the walls of a house that, in her mind, had already become a tomb.

The passage branched, branched again. Natil listened at every turning and bifurcation, chose her direction accordingly. The moans grew louder. So did the laughter.

Her universe had become an impenetrable darkness bounded by walls, floor, ceiling: a stagnant night filled with the smells of men and tobacco, of wine and brandy and unwashed bodies. And though Natil tried, as she moved through it, to remain detached, she felt nonetheless connected, involved, bound. Here was her heritage of mortal ways and mortal smells, of bodies that decayed even as they lived, of petty fornications and even pettier lusts. She could not see in the dark, she could not find the stars, she no longer had any real conception of the Lady. She slept and dreamed like any human. Did she now stink like one, too?

She held up her hands before her eyes. Not a shred of luminescence delineated them. Darkness. Just darkness. And smells. And the moans of the apostate nun to whom Natil had pledged protection and help.

Protection and help! Such audacity this harper possessed!

Grimly, Natil wound her way through the guts of the Aldernacht house, treading carefully, feeling for turnings, doors, obstacles. The moans grew louder, and still louder, and yet they remained muffled, sobbing: cries of hopelessness and—Natil feared—habitual abuse. Ahead, somewhere, was a place where pain had become custom.

I'll be all right. Don't worry about me.

Shaking, the harper approached a solidity ahead that she sensed was a door. From just behind it came the moans . . . and a voice:

“Farther in, Norman. I want to feel it from here. No . . . go on. It feels good.” Then, sharply, impatiently: “Dammit, go on, she's not complaining, is she? That's it. Yes, by God, yesyesyes . . .”

Feeling her face go cold, Natil set down her harp, felt the door, groped for a latch, found a knob . . .

“Oh, God, yes! Keep at it now. I can—”

A sudden click from the door stopped Edvard in mid-sentence, and, an instant later, Natil's dark-accustomed eyes were dazzled by the meager light of the two candles that illuminated the room beyond. She saw the glow of quiet flame on Omelda's smooth, white skin, the glistening of her dark hair. But she also saw her bent head, her bound and contorted arms and legs, the long prod protruding from her bloody anus, and the burns and lacerations and bites that studded her body like the rampant stigmata of plague.

Edvard, conjoined with her as she swung suspended in the center of the room, was staring at the opening door. But he could, Natil knew, see nothing. Her eyes w3ere dazzled by the light. His were confounded by darkness.

Norman, though, still half dressed and unencumbered, was heading for the door. “What on earth? I thought I gave orders that—”

Natil found that she did not need the stars. She did not need the Lady. She did not need elven instinct or magic. She had instead two hands and two feet. She had teeth. She had will and strength . . . and an anger that had abruptly burst the narrow and restricting confines of compassion and mercy and overflowed like molten lead. Norman had not even reached the door before he was seized by the throat and dragged into the dark corridor. He did not even have a chance to cry out before his skull struck the far wall and shattered on thick oak paneling.

He fell in a heap, wheezed once, shuddered, and then lay still. Natil charged into the room, face pale, eyes wide, hands reaching.

Edvard had scrambled away from Omelda, but there was no escape from the room save by the single door. Pale, naked, his arms waving and his manhood limp with fright, he attempted to dodge past the harper, but Natil's long harper fingernails raked across his eyes and sent him staggering back as blood and aqueous humor sheeted down his face.

One scream, two screams shuddered through the air, threatening to awaken the house. But before Edvard could utter a third, Natil clubbed him to death with a stool, striking again and again long after the life and breath had left him, striking until the ribs collapsed and the flesh split like the skin of an overripe fruit, striking until Edvard was no more than a ruined heap of gristle and bone. And only then did she drop her weapon and stand, breathing harshly and loudly—silence was for Elves, silence was for the dead and the faded—listening for movement, for alarms, for shouts.

Nothing. The room was isolated, far from any ears that might be aroused by stray or suspicious sounds.

In the center of the room, Omelda still hung, prod inserted, blood seeping from bites and scrapes and anus and vulva. Tenderly, Natil freed the young woman, her hands shaking, her heart laboring with horror and with the utter frustration of a healer who had no more healing to give, of a wielder of magic who had found her powers all turned to dust. She was not an Elf. She wished that she was.

Omelda was only half conscious, and dull moans and other sounds that Natil could not place dribbled out of her mouth. Her eyes rolled back and only whiteness showed between her lids. She gave no sign that she recognized the woman who had come to her.

Edvard's body was a puddling blot of darkness in the corner as Natil sluiced Omelda's wounds with water from a pitcher that stood on a nearby table. She bathed her forehead, made her drink a mouthful or two. Slowly, the young woman's eyes rolled into sight, her lids parted, and her fingers, blue from the shackles that had held her, twitched and took on life.

“Na . . .” She struggled to get the name out. “Na . . . til . . .”

The harper bent her head. Protection. Help. It was all over. “You are safe now, beloved.”

Safe? How dare she!

“Ed . . . vard—”

“They are dead.”

Omelda nodded vaguely. Then: “I want . . . to go home.”

Natil almost wept aloud. She, too, wanted to go home.

“I want . . . to go back . . . to Shrinerock.”

Eyes closed, tears breaking free at last, Natil nodded slowly. “But what about the chant?”

“I don't . . . care. I'll go . . . mad out here.”

“Omelda . . .”

“I want . . . to go home.”

Natil put her hands to her face. “I . . . understand . . .”

“Home.”

Dropping her hands, Natil looked at the room, shuddered at the thought of how many times Omelda must have been brought here. Madness lurked everywhere, but certainly its kingdom was the Aldernacht house, for here it roamed with impunity, and its worshipers were legion.

“Natil . . .”

“We will leave tonight,” said the harper. “We will leave now. I will carry you if I must.”

But—dogged, ox-like, with the dull determination that had seen her through two years of wandering and untold abuse—the apostate nun clenched her teeth . . . and staggered to her feet. “They've hurt me worse that this,” she said softly, a breath more than a voice. “I'll walk.”

And she did. Guiding Natil, still losing blood in thin streams that streaked her white legs and marked the floor with scarlet footprints, Omelda walked out of the room, down the hall. Her steps were definite, purposed, as though she had been carried or driven or dragged this way often enough that the turnings and the doors and the hidden panels had rooted themselves in her memory just as the intrusive and iterative plainchant had fleshed itself within her soul.

Natil followed her, no longer lithe and elven and silent, but staggering with the weight of horror that had fallen upon her. But what she had seen was inevitable: humans did not reserve their lusts and their hatreds only for the immortal and the compassionate, but spread them thickly everywhere. And not the Dance of interaction and life governed their deeds, but only the crazed causality of dull, stupid chance.

Grievous actions, grievous thoughts. But she followed Omelda to her room and, as though in a dream, stripped off her livery and donned her old clothes as the apostate nun compounded the old bloodstains of her rags and tatters with new spatters and drips. Then, down another corridor and down stairs, and at last there was a door that opened near the stables and sent the mingled odors of horse piss and rotten straw into the passage.

IN the faint light of moon and stars, Omelda bent to examine herself, grimaced at her wounds. But then, after binding her skirt up between her legs so that she would not drip blood and provide an uninterrupted trail for any pursuers, she shrugged and stepped outside.

And perhaps it was that final, utilitarian action so steeped in resignation that finally goaded Natil's thoughts and heart into rebellion, for the harper suddenly found herself gripping the door frame as though to rip it out of the wall and bring the whole house down along with all the hideous changes and transformations that circumstance had forced upon her. But her eyes were fastened upon the stars that shone above the rooftops of Ypris: bright, illimitable, emblematic of an inner firmament that had for countless millennia imbued her life with a vision of sacramental wholeness.

She remembered. She forced herself to remember. She was not human. She would not be human. Even if the core of her being had been so reshaped by a changing world that she had become, yes, human, mortal, redolent of the stinks of sentient monkeys, she would reject it. If will or determination counted for anything in this mire of venality, then will and determination would change her again, reshape her spirit, give her back her heritage.

Her dreams were not delusion and fraud. Wheat and Hadden would drive across the deserts and mountains of another land, would find the pain of human suffering leavened and transformed by a vision of the stars and—maybe—the touch of
Elthia Calasiuove
. Four and a half billion years of healing and helping, of loyalty and love, would not be proven to be the fever dream of a terrified soul. She would believe. She would be certain. She would make it true.

And much later, after passing streets and climbing walls, Natil stood watch while Omelda whimpered herself to sleep in a stand of trees far outside the city. But while she watched, her blood-spattered harp was in her hands, and her fingers were seeking among the bronze wires a strain of elven melody that might help to bring it all back, to make for herself a place she could call home, whether in this world, in a far distant future, or, if necessary, only in her mind.

“I am an Elf,” she murmured. Will. Determination. “I am an Elf . . . forever.”