The waves brushed Raef back to consciousness. Countless stars, unobscured by Grief or smog, twinkled above him. He lay in rocky sand, a bit of seashell jabbing into his back, the plank of broken ship he’d used as a raft was nowhere in sight.
Kinos. Cormac. They were gone.
Kinos.
Cormac.
Blood stained his shirt, but the wound in his side had closed.
How long had he been in the sea? Not long enough to starve or die of thirst.
He remembered the cold of the water, remembered the loss washing through him, so much worse than the fog and silence. The waves had pushed him along.
Now he was here. Wherever here was.
Alone or not, his stomach wanted him to move.
Many of the constellations had set. It was late.
Holding in a groan, Raef stretched, sat up, and took in his surroundings.
He’d landed on a small island. He walked and climbed until he could see more of where he’d come.
South of his little rock, which was one among many other little rocks, lay a larger land. It was no great distance. Had there still been tides, he might have even been able to walk to it when the water was low.
Not that he would.
Across the shore, pressed into a thick crowd, were shades. This was no Grief, no mere shade mist. This was an army.
They were the ghosts of peasants, farmers, and fisherfolk. They stood straight, each shape distinct, each face clear, and every dead eye was trained upon him.
“Thiva,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.
This was the Isle of the Dead.
Raef blinked and wiped his eyes to clear them.
He’d first thought it was a lighthouse. That made sense with the jagged stones dotting the water, but no, the shape was too familiar, a spire of white marble and black basalt. Seven buttresses ringed it, their heights rising and falling to mark the phases. The final phase was the door.
Beyond the ghosts, above the twisted, thorny trees covering the hillside, stood her tower.
Phoebe’s Tower.
Thiva’s temple to the moon, a twin for the one in Versinae, stood intact on the larger island. A lightless little town nestled in its shadow.
All that lay between Raef and it was a short stretch of water and an army of hungry, willful shades.
“I can wait,” he said, taking them in one more time before he climbed back down to the beach. “I can wait for morning.”
The water would protect him. Then he could cross. Still, Thiva’s ghosts weren’t like the other shades he’d seen. They hadn’t dissolved into Grief. They were aware and awake, which meant they must have a regular supply of blood upon which to feed.
Raef passed the night huddled against the rock, his arms wrapped around himself. He wanted to sleep, if only to quell the hunger in his stomach. It nearly matched the hunger in his mind, but when he closed his eyes he saw Kinos sinking beneath the waves, silently calling Raef’s name as he drowned.
The sight wouldn’t leave him.
Raef shivered inside Cormac’s sodden coat and almost missed the dreams of fire. He knew them well, and they were always warm.
Dawn would come. He’d reach the tower. His palms itched with the need to riffle through its books, to uncover its secrets. There had to be answers for the mysteries that had upended his life.
The tower’s height might also give Raef enough of a vantage point to see more of the island, to spy other survivors. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t the only one who’d made it to land alive.
“I can wait,” he repeated.
The sun had fully risen when he dove into the waves. He regretted leaving the coat, but there wasn’t an easy way to carry it. The cold shocked the lethargy from his limbs.
Hunger forgotten in his push to get there, to prove that the tower wasn’t a mirage, he kicked until he reached the harbor of abandoned fishing boats.
Shivering, he climbed ashore.
The town was all low buildings, whitewashed houses of clay and brick.
Everything was sunbaked and brine-stained. It would have been pleasant, peaceful even, except for the silence and the complete abandonment.
The Thivans had painted their doors and shutters a happy blue, but the lack of life already nibbled at the upkeep. The paint was chipped and faded. Grass grew among the clay tiles of the roofs.
No people came to greet him. No birds roosted in the trees.
Then there were the vines. Gigantic, they overshadowed the houses. Rugged, the bark bore no leaves, just thorns as long as his arms and red blooms that emitted a cloying scent. It reminded Raef of rotting apples mixed with the too-familiar taste of blood.
The vines wormed everywhere, snaking across the island. They’d even crushed some of the houses.
The shades weren’t visible, but Raef could feel their dead eyes on him. He checked his wounds, the cut on his arm, and the splinter in his side. Curiously, both were almost healed.
He’d swim back at sunset, spend the night across the water, and explore more by day, every day, until he had answers, until he could form a plan beyond the now.
Perhaps one of the boats at the dock was seaworthy. Perhaps he could handle it by himself, load it with what supplies he could find, pick a direction, and sail away.
The tide of black and blue, the loss of Cormac, of Kinos, rose suddenly, threatening to overwhelm him.
Raef forced it down.
He had to be quick. He had to be careful. With any luck, he’d soon have answers.
Hurrying up the unpaved road, he climbed toward the tower until his stomach reminded him of practical matters.
Each house had a little garden. Those not starved for light by the creeping, weedy vines had grown wild since the shallowing.
He filled his stomach from an orange tree, swallowing even the seeds. The fruit was almost overripe, too soft when he clawed his way inside the skin.
The sticky juice reminded him how thirsty he was. He found a well in the town square, dredged up a bucket, and drank before taking off his shirt to wash the salt from his face and chest.
Sated, no longer parched, Raef made his way to the top of the town. It rose in a slope to the hill where the tower stood.
The thorn tree wound in a thick ring about its base, but kept its distance. The red flowers made a carpet in the space between, as though the vines besieged the tower but had yet to breach its walls.
He found a gap where he could squeeze between the thorns and took the broad steps in twos. The doors, twice his height, were sheathed in iron. It reminded him of the box, and he took that as a sign. They weren’t freezing to the touch, but were locked. In the tower’s lee, the shadowknife slid from his wrist without prompting, as anxious as him to get inside.
They opened and Raef came face-to-face with Phoebe.
He’d known her statue would be there, but still he choked, shaking, on the verge of tears.
She stood in her boat, the crescent moon, ready to row the dead to the Underworld. The half of her face not veiled by her basalt cloak hinted at a cryptic smile. He’d spent many hours contemplating her stone visage, meditating on whatever he’d done wrong that day. It had been one of Father Polus’s favorite punishments, probably because he knew it bored Raef so much.
“Lady,” he said.
Bowing, he kissed her sandaled feet, wiped the dust from his lips, and found a smile for her before returning to his mission.
The rest of the first floor matched Versinae’s. Slender columns began in basalt, then rose to fluted white marble. They reached for a ceiling tiled in jet and marked with silver stars. Pilgrims and supplicants would have loitered here. It took a larger donation, a rare text or an oblate, to buy access to the higher floors, to the shrines and the library, her most sacred space.
Raef still did not know who his mother was. She must have received something for him, in exchange. He’d been made in the tower itself, at the Spring Rites, which was strange.
The priesthood cared for orphans, but to keep a baby bred there? His mother must also be noble. She must have been devout.
He made for the stairs hugging the outer wall and found a body slumped on the first landing. Its black robe hung loose and stained around its skeleton. Raef knelt to look closer. He could spy no cause of death, no broken bones. The stiff robe didn’t look cut or pierced in any way.
“What killed you?” he asked.
He’d get no answer, at least not by day. The windows brought light enough to keep the Grief at bay. The day was young, but he did not have long. Raef ignored the memories that stirred in the dust around his feet and hurried upward.
The dormitory, with its narrow bunks of beds, could have been his own. He’d best slept to the sound of the other children snoring and dreaming, which had made joining the Lost a comfort.
Corpses filled these bunks.
This was not his tower, these were not his playmates, but he clutched a post to keep upright at the sight of the bones.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He hadn’t understood the safety he’d had, not until a few nights on the streets had taught him what he’d lost. Raef squeezed his eyes shut to force down the tears. He had to find the answers.
He bolted for the stairs. So many of his punishments had been for running. He’d get distracted by something then find himself late for prayers or lessons.
The tower is a temple, not a gymnasium, the Hierophant would chide him.
Raef had spent entire days in the old man’s office at the top, reading one book or another as Father Polus went about tower business. Raef would ask him endless questions, but Father Polus wouldn’t answer. Instead, he’d send Raef to fetch books from the library and bring them back so he could find his own answers. He’d read and read in that little room. At times he’d hated it.
Chest aching, Raef opened the office door, half expecting to see Father Polus’s burned shade sitting behind the desk, working his mouth to impart one final secret, but the portrait on the wall depicted a woman. Her auburn hair crossed her shoulder in a braided rope. She wore a kind smile Raef hadn’t expected. The plaque named her Arden, the tower’s High Priestess. Father Polus had never smiled like that. He hadn’t been jovial, not like Father Hanel or some of the other priests.
None of Arden’s papers helped. The drawers held moth-eaten vestments, a ledger that tracked deliveries, shipments of books from the other towers or the docks, and a necklace, a disk of black glass hanging from a cord.
Raef looked through it. He knew these. They were lenses for looking at an eclipse, as well as a symbol of darkness.
It may be tied to the Black Sun, but Raef needed to know about the shadowknife, about the box—what it might be and why someone would want Kinos inside it.
He needed to know if he had truly heard her, truly seen her, or if he might be going mad.
Raef left the office and entered the library, the tower’s heart. Two open stories of shelves and balconies contained all the scrolls and books the priests had collected and copied. Cult statues, hooded priests, and lesser deities were worked into the pillars. Each held a finger to their lips, pleading for silence in the goddess’s most sacred space. Raef longed to linger here, to take one of the ladders to the higher stacks and read the first book that caught his eye. He could have spent his life reading. He’d been meant to spend his life reading.
The place looked untouched, like the priests might return at any moment and demand he dust the desks or fill the inkwells. For all its familiarity, the air lacked the smells of coal and industry. Here was only sea salt, sun-warmed vellum, and a touch of old death, the bodies that had withered below.
These books had been the priests’ passion—Phoebe’s passion. He’d been an irreverent child, but he recalled the day he’d smudged a page with an inky fingerprint. The priests had punished him, but it hadn’t compared to the shame he’d felt, the sense of having marred something precious to the goddess.
Raef scanned the shelves, not knowing what to search for. A heavy volume with the mark of Dodona’s tower, an oak leaf inside a waxing crescent moon, perched on the nearest desk. It was a treatise on wheat.
Phoebe was the goddess of the moon, of knowledge both hidden and revealed. Hadn’t that been the point of all the Hierophant’s lessons, of making him read so much? Knowledge was won and wisdom mined. They weren’t freely given.
What Raef needed wouldn’t sit where some clumsy visitor might stumble onto it. This tower was the same as Versinae.
Damn it, he cursed silently. Even with all of them dead, with her dead, he wouldn’t say it aloud, not here.
Raef had known what to look for all along, a carving that was not a carving, a door that was not a door. He’d let his homesickness overtake his wisdom.
He hurried down the stairs, past the barracks and the statue, through the bronze doors, and into the undercroft.
The shadowsight came as the vaults and cellars opened before him.
He had to be careful. There was no light here, nothing to keep the shades at bay.
Raef almost slumped to the ground at the sight of the black door. The carving was here too, but it stood broken, shattered from the center, like something had clawed out of it.
He called the shadowknife and ran it through the glass. He felt for a catch, like he did with any lock, like he had with the box, but he knew it wouldn’t open again. No matter what day or night it was, this was not the door he needed.
He remembered the collapsed vaults in Versinae, the drowned texts he couldn’t read.
Traces of an old odor, like rotten meat, tainted the air as he progressed.
Raef drew his knives and stalked on. The first tunnel had been crushed in Versinae, but Thiva’s ended in a room full of little beds and child-sized cages.
He knew this place, remembered its twin. A ladle stood in a cauldron, encrusted with fossilized porridge. More bodies, slight and still, child-sized, lay beneath their blankets. Someone had covered them.
Raef did not want to look, but he knew he had to. Somewhere deep in his guts all the things he’d swallowed down, all the things he did not want to remember, rose.
Trembling, he reached for a blanket. There were only bones, but Raef recoiled, and forced himself to look again.
The child had a tail. The child had horns.
Heart rabbiting, he darted from the room. He had to put that skeleton and the horrible truth it represented behind him. He had to—but he couldn’t ignore it.
It was true. It was all true.
The priests were heretics. They’d consorted with demons. More than consorted, they’d housed them, fed them. They’d . . .
Raef reached the ledgers and plucked a volume from the shelf. Its spine labeled it as Dodona, a polis far west of Versinae. He opened it to the middle and flipped through the pages. Lines connected unpronounceable words to names. A date marked every connection, sometimes resulting in a vertical line leading to a fresh name.
Cormac had said the priests courted nobles for the rites. He replaced the book and selected another, looking for his tower, for Versinae.
Finding it, he flipped through the pages to find his year. He read, and slumped to the floor. He read it again, trying to force it into his mind.
New Moon
Cormac Deslis -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Sati
21 Coeus 1434
Hraefn
Raef threw back his head, hitting the wall hard enough to hurt his skull. The pain almost made enough room for the truth to fit.
He had a birthday. And he had a name.
“Hair-eh-fin,” he whispered, testing the syllables. Hraefn. They’d called him Raef because they couldn’t pronounce his name.
His real name. His demon name.
He’d denied the rumors about the priests, that they’d consorted with the gods’ enemies. He’d thought it a lie, something the Inquisitors had concocted to justify what they’d done to her. Now he understood. That was the purpose of the black doors. They were gates to the Underworld. They’d summoned demons, bred them with nobles—with Cormac, to make him and children like him.
This was what he was? He could have retched.
Cormac, his father, his mother, the silver-masked woman—Sati, a demoness. Raef couldn’t breathe.
He sat, head aching, heart aching, until a wave of cold crept up the corridor.
Raef’s breath came out in a puff of fog as the shadowknife pulsed in warning.
The hairs on his arms stood straight as he found his feet, quietly as he could, and peeked around the doorframe.
A shadowy thing came up the passage. It blocked the stairs.
It was a shade, of a sort, but it had many legs, many arms, and faces, all grimacing with pain. Thorny vines ran through it, stitching the ghostly flesh of many shades together. It lumbered awkwardly, its dozens of dead eyes swiveling in all directions.
Raef pressed his back to the wall.
The cold intensified, as though the shade drank the heat from the air.
It had nearly reached him.
He wasn’t bleeding, but like the spirits on Thiva’s shore, this shade seemed aware as it searched the vault.
The spirit stiffened. All of its eyes swiveled, faster than its body as it turned back toward the entrance. It scrambled that way, quick as its many feet would allow, leaving a trail of mist.
Raef followed. He crept around the corner as golden light lanced like a sunbeam out of the dark from atop the stairs.
The knights had come.
Raef rocked back on his heels. He had to stop them. He couldn’t let them destroy the tower.
The spirit flinched, raised its many arms to shield itself, but made no sound as it burned. The smell was like chalk, dust, and sour blood thrown into a fire. Raef gagged on the taste.
The fire flashed again, bright enough to drive away the shadowsight.
He gaped. Seth, the knight from Versinae, stood atop the stairs.
The spirit extended several of its arms. Thorny veins, red and ropey, shot toward Seth. He countered with fire, but the spirit poured on. The vines beat back the flames. Seth faltered. The thing would have him soon.
“Damn it,” Raef said.
He reached for the table with its ancient, uneaten meal, and tossed a plate like a discus. It shattered against the spirit’s back. The thing turned. Raef tossed another, catching it on one of its larger faces. He wasn’t going to hurt it, but he could distract it, give Seth a chance to escape.
The shade raised its hands, ready to strike at Raef with the same tendrils.
Fire flashed as Seth drew his sword. He leaped and landed, cleaving the thing in two. The shade burned away.
Raef and Seth faced each other in the light of the flaming sword.
“What are you doing here?” each demanded.