Each step she took down the stairs produced a faint chime, a high-pitched ring like thin glass splintering. The dimension folded closed after her, but Karys did not look back to see it. She fixed her gaze only on the next stair. The walls and the roof of the space were fathomless black. The light was low, sourceless.
She should not jump to conclusions. Her heart beat in her throat. She should not assume the worst. If Sabaster planned to call her compact, then he probably would not leave her with the chance to commit suicide. Other vassals did that, or tried, and even if the Ephirit thought highly of her, he could not be so naïve as to believe … no. He would not take the risk. This summons had some other purpose. If she kept her head, she could survive.
In the years that Karys had served him, Sabaster had summoned her only once, a few weeks after her twentieth birthday. A rare honour, a sign of his especial favour. Not long before, she had begun plying him with gifts, applying lessons learned during sleepless nights of research in the College’s library, attempting to debase herself to best effect. It was a period of guesswork and fraught experimentation, scouring the limited accounts of earlier deathspeakers for advice, searching for any kind of guidance at all. When the initial summons came, it had seemed like it was intended as a reward—Sabaster gave her a strange tour of his domain, and Karys received the impression that he wanted her to approve of it.
Ting, ting, ting: her shoes rang on the stairs. In her peripheral vision, shapes bulged from the darkness. Karys refused to look at them directly, unwilling to acknowledge the malformed limbs as they grew more numerous. The impression of hands reaching toward her: slightly too large to be human, crooked joints, fingers clawing the air, some bent back upon themselves. There was hunger in their stiff, grasping movements, but they came no closer.
The stairs ended. The groundcover at its base was thick and fibrous, like grass but more slippery, and it moved with clear sensitivity. Thin strands probed at Karys’ feet, hundreds of pliant, creeping cilia stirring to taste the intruder in their midst. Further ahead, impossibly tall tubes rose from the ground. They stood at precise intervals, emitting rings of crystalline white light that vanished into the cavernous space overhead. It was warm and very quiet; the air damp and heavy with the oily, sweet smell of Sabaster.
The ground trembled under her heels, the cilia rippling with alien feeling. Karys kept walking, following the crystal lights, one foot in front of the next. It was difficult to judge the size of the domain; it might have been infinite, but it felt inexplicably close. There were figures here too, standing just outside the circles of light. They appeared identical: naked, hairless, milky-fleshed men in the deep shadow. They did not move, and they stood with their backs to her, looking out at the blackness. The cilia had wound along their legs before pushing up and through the skin of their calves, then out again, like loose stitches in a tailor’s mannequin. Rooting them in place.
I’ve seen how capable you are. Ferain’s words repeated in her head. You aren’t helpless, and you aren’t alone, and you’ve survived worse than this. Not alone. Not alone, because she had dragged him down with her. She could detect her shadow even now, his presence at her back. It made her feel sick. It made her feel stronger. Embrace, I’m sorry.
Ahead was the palace—what she thought of as the palace. It was not exactly a building, but it seemed to be where Sabaster dwelled—a deliberate architecture, something made with purpose and intent. The structure reared up from the flat landscape, visible as a perfect snow-pale pyramid balanced on its peak. It glowed brighter than anything else in the environment, and stood at least fifty feet tall. Its outer appearance belied its true size and dimensions; Karys knew that from her last summons. What lay inside was far, far larger. As she drew up to its base, the light grew dazzling; she could not see through to the space within. She walked on into the whiteness, conscious of the ground sloping upwards, and then she was inside.
The antechamber was soaked in red. The colour suffused the air itself; it was illumination and haze, transparent and dense. The walls of the room branched in fractal formations, sharp, precise, and angular, and they moved ceaselessly like gears in a colossal machine. As they slid apart and re-formed, they spoke in a steady, monotonous chant. Favour is ours, favour is ours, favour is ours. Not human words, not a language Karys had ever heard, but she understood all the same. The floor was smooth red glass, and wet. She crossed the chamber and it reshaped around her, peeling back to admit her to Sabaster’s trophy hall.
Why the Ephirite treasured the Bhatuma’s corpses, Karys had never been certain. It struck her as some form of perversion. The way she had witnessed Sabaster croon over necrotic heralds was not strictly sexual, but reminiscent of that—an uncanny, tender state of arousal.
The beautiful Bhatuma—the largest and most prized of her master’s collection—remained flayed out across the trophy hall, dripping slow yellow ichor. Swollen body parts hung in the air or were staked to the walls and floor, the entire gruesome display connected by stretched bands of shining sinew. The herald’s face, the same face that had haunted Karys for almost a decade, looked serene in death. As large as she was tall, with moonlight eyes as wide across as her forearms.
Karys’ nerve failed her; she stopped and a small sound escaped her mouth. It was the herald’s eyes, always those silver eyes in that perfect face. Eyes that did not look dead, because they still moved. Their gaze roved the room, blankly absorbing the ruin of their body. Never blinking. They passed over Karys without recognition.
She dug her nails into her palms. It was dead. Whatever the Ephirite had done to preserve and animate the corpse, the soul within was gone. This was … puppetry. Karys breathed in. Kept moving, kept her eyes level and her head raised.
Sabaster waited on the far side of the room. The wings covering his body were fanned out, and they fluttered as she approached. The mouth of his lowest face hung open in a silent scream.
“Karys Eska,” he breathed. “Vassal of my will.”
He had company. Two other Ephirite hung behind him, smaller and more colourful, differently formed. Karys did not dare to look at them. She knelt and opened the flask of blood, spilling it over her hands and then her head. The cold dark liquid trickled down her face and back.
“My lord, I am undeserving,” she said, bowed. “I was unprepared for this honour.”
Her voice did not betray her; she spoke smoothly. She licked her lips. A small miracle—her throat felt dry as ashes.
“You are to be witnessed.” Sabaster’s rattling chorus of voices drew closer. Karys stayed stock still. “My will, my selection—it is to be measured.”
She had never heard of the Ephirite observing each other’s summons before. This was not regular, not normal, not a situation she knew how to navigate. She addressed the slick, shining floor. “How may I serve you?”
Sabaster circled around her once, unspeaking. Was this a test? She did not think so. Her master’s behaviour seemed different; he fluttered and twitched, and a steady, rhythmic clicking sound filtered through his wing-shroud.
“Witness my will,” he whispered. “Witness.”
He was nervous, Karys realised, then flinched when something lightly tugged on her hair. Sabaster had arched over and picked up a bloodstained lock between his needle-pointed fingertips. She clenched her jaw, suppressing all sound. The Ephirit almost never touched her. His body’s workings pulsed against her scalp; he rubbed the hair in his hand as if to test its texture. Or … or to reassure her? Karys’ mind rebelled.
“She holds honour,” he said. “Chief among my vassals, Karys Eska. My will is hers.”
He pulled her hair sharply, jerking Karys’ head up. A gasp of pain escaped her. Sabaster probably had no intention of hurting her; he seemed to have simply forgotten to let go. He moved toward the Bhatuma carcass, gliding across the floor.
His companions’ attention remained fixed on Karys. The first Ephirit was a shorter, wider version of Sabaster, wing-covered and hook-spined, but with six smaller faces instead of three—they moved just as asynchronously, arranged in a perfect circle on its chest. Its fellow had no faces or feathers at all. It was the colour of spoiled meat, and its shroud continuously melted down its rake-thin frame like a mudslide, like skin sloughing off.
“It is small,” said Six-Faces.
“Small,” echoed Faceless.
“The scourge and the stain, it could not encompass them. The flesh is not suited.”
“Not suited.”
Karys stared back at the Ephirite, rigid and uncomprehending. What is this? What do you want from me? She could not navigate this conversation if she did not understand her master’s intentions.
“This I will overcome,” said Sabaster. “She can be re-formed and made fruitful, shaped to house my intention. This I will do. Witness.”
With reluctance, the other Ephirite moved to join their host beside the corpse. Karys turned her head to watch them. Her master was swaying from side to side over the raw curve of a blistered Bhatuma organ. His mouths worked, and he spoke again.
“It grows still, I coax the receptacle to flowering. Where other means have failed, mine shall not.”
The dead herald’s flesh squirmed and swelled, as if something inside it strained to break free. Briefly, the tissue turned glasslike, revealing a large spherical object within—a translucent ball that pulsed with a muddy yellow light, something that had rotted without dying.
“It resists, but I tend it,” said Sabaster. “Soon, it will unbend and be joined to my vassal. She will substitute the Disfavoured, and I will wed her.”
Karys did not mean to rise, was not even conscious of her body moving before she was on her feet. “My lord, I do not—”
“The vassal is small,” said Six-Faces with stubborn insistence. “The receptacle is broken.”
“I would have no other.” Sabaster’s shroud flared, wings pinioning outward so that he seemed even larger and more terrible. The air around his body rippled with workings. “The receptacle will mend. This is our Favour, this is our reproduction. Am I not Prince?”
“You are Prince.”
“She shall be the culmination of our will wrought in flesh. I choose her to bear that first honour.” Sabaster settled, the air calmed. “I will sire our Favour.”
“No!”
Karys’ shout rang through the trophy hall. She shook violently, she clutched the empty flask and dripped with blood, she did not think. The Ephirite had gone still. Her head pounded.
“This wasn’t in my compact.” The words tumbled from her mouth. “No. I never—I cannot accept this. It was not in my compact.”
A brief silence. Then Sabaster made a warbling, crooning sound. His companions repeated it.
“You have honour enough, Karys Eska,” he whispered. “First of my vassals, you will be reshaped to bear the blessing.”
Incapable of speaking through her horror, she shook her head—but the Ephirite would not understand that human gesture. They would not even understand the concept of a vassal refusing them.
“I measure. She is witnessed,” said Six-Faces.
“Witnessed.”
“No.” Karys’ tongue felt paralysed. “No, my lord—”
“You will be summoned once the receptacle blooms.” Sabaster’s faces grinned and wept and howled. “I will honour you beyond understanding, Karys Eska.”
The floor melted under her feet before she could speak again. It collapsed like a wave, and she fell into nothingness as the domain disappeared above her. The summons was over.