“I’m running away,” Loran said.
Isiem and Ascaros exchanged a look. Helis, reading on her bed above them, snorted.
“You can’t run away,” she told her brother. “Where would you go? What would you do? You’re eleven, and you can’t even get out of the Dusk Hall.”
“I don’t care.” Loran turned over onto his belly, hiding his face between his crossed arms. Bruises dotted his skin in a panoply of blues, purples, and dirty yellows, vanishing into his sleeves. The gloom of the students’ chambers masked the boy’s expression as much as his arms did, but nothing hid the misery in his voice or the scars of the shadowcallers’ chastisements. “I’ll live on the streets if I have to. I’ll eat rats. Drink from puddles. It has to be better than this.”
“It gets better,” Ascaros said cautiously, closing his own book. Over the past months he had emerged from his own turmoil and found a certain degree of comfort in his studies. The gaunt angles of his cheekbones had softened slightly as he returned to a normal weight. No longer was his hair a greasy shag; now it was washed and brushed and pulled back in a neat tail, like Isiem’s own. The reddish tints in his hair were fading, though, becoming murkier day by day, as if the shadows of Pangolais were stealing its color.
Loran shook his head. His words were muffled; he was chewing on his lip again. “It got better for you. But you have a talent. Maybe not like Isiem’s, but it’s something. I don’t have that. I never will. My lot’s only going to get worse.”
That was likely true, Isiem judged. He’d watched with increasing dismay as Loran flailed in the wake of Dirakah’s beating. The boy’s aptitude for magic was marginal at best, and the disaster with the nightglass had shattered his confidence. Month by month, cowed by his continuing failures, Loran had retreated deeper into timidity.
It was a choice that might kill him. As the spells they learned grew stronger, and the consequences of losing control became greater, their instructors had become more severe. Mistakes didn’t earn beatings anymore. The last time a student had botched a spell in one of Isiem’s classes, the shadowcaller had made her flay a finger-thin spiral of her own skin from wrist to elbow. The girl had obeyed in perfect silence, knowing that any cry of pain would double her punishment. Afterward the shadowcaller had healed the wound, but only enough to keep infection at bay. A week later, the shape of it still showed raw and pink on her arm.
Loran had fared worse. Isiem seldom saw the boy during their daily lessons; he was older, and more skilled, and had long ago moved to more advanced studies. But he often visited the siblings’ room during the quiet hour after dinner, when the students had some time to themselves, and he had seen Loran trying to pull a stoic mask over his suffering.
Never sturdy, the boy had shrunk into a wide-eyed waif. His ears and nose had always seemed too large for the rest of his face, but now they were the only features with any definition at all. Loran kept his eyes downcast and his mouth shut tight, as if he were always holding back cries. His lower lip was covered in scabs; he gnawed at it constantly, using the small pain to distract himself from larger ones.
Isiem sometimes wondered why the shadowcallers had taken the child, or why they didn’t send him to some other task. It was clear that Loran would never be a great wizard. He might never master anything beyond a cantrip. Perhaps he was too young, or too frightened, or lacked the sharpness of mind necessary to grasp arcane theory … but whatever the cause, the result was the same. Wizardry was beyond him.
“You’ll need a plan,” Isiem said quietly.
“You can’t mean to encourage him.” Ascaros said, aghast. “We’ll help him do better. Revisit his lessons with him. Practice cantrips after dinner.”
“We’ve been doing that.” And as far as Isiem could see, it hadn’t improved anything.
“No one leaves the Dusk Hall.” Ascaros sounded desperate. “They’ll kill him if he tries.”
“I’d rather die,” Loran muttered. “At least then this would all be over.”
Helis slammed her book shut with a thump that made her brother jump. “Don’t be stupid. You aren’t going to die, and you aren’t going to run away. All this talk is idiocy, and I won’t have you two”—she glared at Isiem and Ascaros—“indulging it. Out. Now.”
“She’s right,” Ascaros murmured as they walked from the siblings’ room to their own. The hall was empty, but the continual dance of shadows through the Dusk Hall’s many-tinted gray windows surrounded them with the flickering illusion of motion. “He needs to study, not daydream about running away. And that’s all it’ll ever be—a daydream.”
“Aren’t we allowed to daydream here?” Isiem asked mildly. He opened the door and held it for his friend.
Before Ascaros answered, he closed the door and made a series of swift gestures. A mote of white light, no bigger than a firefly, winked into existence and hovered over his palm. If any magic were nearby, the mote would change color. Both boys watched it intently, holding their breath as they waited to see whether it would shift toward the yellowish tint that meant divination.
The spark stayed white. No enchanted eyes were on them. Ascaros let his cantrip expire. Then, at last, he answered: “No. Not about escaping.”
“I’m doing it to protect him,” Isiem said.
“How?”
“He can’t hurt himself daydreaming. As long as Loran spends his time planning to run, instead of actually doing it, he won’t get in trouble. If he tells us his plans, we can point out all the flaws in them. There will be many, I’m sure; we both know he’d never make it past the Joyful Things, let alone out of the Dusk Hall. Then he’ll have to think up ways around those problems. He might finally accept that there’s no escape. But even if he doesn’t, we’ll keep him from doing anything stupid, and we’ll have that much longer to help him with his magic.”
Ascaros exhaled, looking simultaneously deflated and relieved. “All right.” He pulled his shirt and trousers off, folded each with neat, efficient motions, and squared them atop the drab gray stack of his other garments. Nothing was out of place by a hair—it never was—but Isiem still glanced over to make sure. Any untidiness would draw the night watchers’ ire.
There was none, however, so he just reached over and snuffed the candle burning in the wall ledge by his pillow. A moment later, Ascaros extinguished its twin.
“Can we help him?” Ascaros asked into the dark.
“Maybe.” Lying on his back, Isiem blew a soundless sigh toward the ceiling. “I don’t know. He’s too afraid to grasp the magic. Every time he comes close, he flinches back, like he thinks it’ll burn him. I’m a poor teacher, anyway. I don’t have the patience.”
“He isn’t smart enough,” Ascaros said.
“He’s young.”
“And not smart enough.” After a pause, he added, “I’m not saying that to be cruel. Only because it’s true. It makes things harder. This place … I don’t know if you see it. Everything comes so easily for you. I’m not saying you don’t work hard—I’ve seen the hours you spend at the library, the stacks of books you bring back here—but you don’t know what it’s like to struggle just to follow what the lecturers are saying. You don’t know the fear.”
“There’ve been lots of times I haven’t understood things in lecture,” Isiem objected.
“It’s not the same. If you don’t understand something, it’s a good bet at least half the class doesn’t either. You’ve never had to weigh whether it would be better to ask a lecturer something, and risk getting ridiculed or beaten for your stupidity, or forge blindly into a spell and risk it failing, or turning upon you, or worse.
“I’ve seen you ask questions in lecture. You don’t flinch. You don’t understand why other people flinch. I don’t think you even notice. That’s the luxury your intelligence buys—that you can talk theory with the instructors, and they’re patient, even pleased, when you ask about variations while the rest of us are just struggling to comprehend the basics. You’ve never had the terror of wondering whether you’re the last to understand.”
“Are you jealous?” Isiem asked quietly.
“No.” The answer was an exhalation into blackness. “I was, when I first realized what was happening. Now I’m more worried for you than I am for myself. The instructors barely notice me. I’m in the great middling mass, not exceptional one way or the other. It’s safest there. You they notice. You they know. And that’s dangerous, I think. Nothing good comes of the lecturers noticing you.” Ascaros’s bed creaked as he turned over. The scent of hot candlewax and burnt wick drifted past. “Anyway, my point was just that you don’t feel the fear. I do. And I don’t think Loran ever escapes it.”
“You did.”
“Not by suddenly getting smarter.” There was an odd note in Ascaros’s voice, as if he hesitated on the cusp of a confession he wasn’t sure he wanted to make. Isiem sat up, curious, and saw that his friend was also sitting up in his bed. “I found … another way.”
“What?”
“Do you remember my aunt? The one in the Midnight Guard?”
“How could I forget? It’s only been three years since we left Crosspine and you finally stopped bragging about her.”
Ascaros laughed weakly. “Right. There was one story about her I never told.”
“Impossible.”
“Oh, it’s very possible.” There was a smile in his voice, but it drained out as he went on. “I only met her once that I remember. She was a stern woman. Much like Dirakah, now that I think of it … all the way down to her dead arm.”
He fell silent for a while, so Isiem prompted: “Dead arm?”
“Her left arm was withered and gray. Like an old gnarled stick. I think she could move the fingers, a little, but that was about the only use she had of it. I always assumed it was an old spellwound, but that was just an explanation I made up for myself. When I asked her about it, all she told me was that if it was my fate to know, I’d find the answer on my own.”
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“I didn’t think so either. Not when I was nine. But since we came to the Dusk Hall, and especially over the past year or so, I’ve begun to understand what she meant.”
“What was that?”
Ascaros gestured to the candle by his bed. Its wick flared into flame, gradually steadying into a glassy white blaze. He moved into its light, turning his left arm outward so that the inside of his arm, which had been concealed against his body earlier, was plainly visible.
A patch of skin on his inner elbow, a little larger than Isiem’s thumbprint, stood out sharply. It was scabrous and crusty where the rest of his skin was soft, a dark wrinkled gray where the rest was smooth white.
Isiem sucked his breath in. “What—”
“It’s the mark of my family’s magic. Of our original sin, I suppose.” Ascaros pulled away from the light, returning to his bed. The white candle went out, trailing a thread of pale smoke. “I’m not a wizard, Isiem. I never got better at the incantations, the studies, any of it. All I did was learn how to tap the magic in my blood. Some spells … some of them just come naturally to me. Like there’s an instinct waiting to be awakened, or a memory waiting to resurface. When I watch those lessons … I don’t understand, not really. I never know what the lecturers are talking about. But I don’t need to. I see the patterns in my head. It’s like—like hearing a song once, and knowing how to play it because you know the notes. You don’t need the music written on a sheet. You already know the sound. That’s how it is for me.”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” Ascaros agreed. “If the spells don’t come by instinct, they don’t come at all. I’ve been able to hide it so far, but sooner or later the instructors will have to suspect. When they do…” His blankets rustled as he shrugged. “It has to be possible to survive the Dusk Hall as a sorcerer. My aunt did it.”
“If I can help, I will,” Isiem said. He didn’t know much about sorcery. The shadowcallers made no secret of their scorn, disdaining such inherited powers as the province of savages and lesser races. Ascaros’s secret would likely earn him expulsion, or worse, if it became known.
No wonder Ascaros had worried about his survival in the Dusk Hall. Isiem was acutely aware of just how much his friend had confided in him. And yet, as much as anything, he was curious. What was sorcery like? “Does it hurt?”
“No,” Ascaros said. “All I ever feel from it is a sort of … cold, when I’m drawing on the magic in my blood. It feels like the shadows did when they seized me through the nightglass back in Crosspine.” He paused. “It frightens me. The cold reaches deeper every time I call on its magic, and the mark … spreads. It’s like something’s claiming me, and its claim gets stronger whenever I invoke its power.”
“Then I’ll try to help with that, too.”
“Thank you.” Ascaros’s laugh was short-lived and weary. “Anyway. We were supposed to be talking about Loran, not me. I only wanted to explain why the solution that I stumbled upon likely wouldn’t work for him.”
“We’ll find Loran his own answer,” Isiem said. “We just need him to listen … and give us time.”
* * *
Fate, however, did not seem inclined to grant either of those wishes.
The day after Loran blurted out his longing for escape, he vanished from the Dusk Hall.
Isiem was terrified when he heard that Loran was gone. He and his friends always searched for magical spies before speaking freely, even in their own rooms, but something might have slipped past them. They were only students, and their instructors doubtlessly had tricks they couldn’t begin to imagine.
It didn’t have to be magic, either. A curious ear pressed to their door might have undone them. Regardless, if one of the shadowcallers had learned of Loran’s childish plans to run off, and had spirited him away to be questioned, then the boy was doomed, and the rest of them likely were too.
But as the days trickled by in an agony of unknowing, it began to appear that they had not, after all, been undone.
Loran had failed the trial of the nightglass again, one of the students in his class told them. Not only had he been unable to call any creatures from the mirror, but he hadn’t even been able to look into it. When Dirakah ordered him to touch the nightglass—perhaps intending to force the child to confront his fear—Loran’s hands had trembled so violently that he had knocked it to the ground. Although the enchanted glass hadn’t suffered a scratch, Loran’s clumsiness and impiety had driven Dirakah into a rage.
She hadn’t punished him there. She hadn’t punished him anywhere the other students could see. Instead she had dragged the sobbing, stumbling child into the black rooms below the Dusk Hall, where those who failed to pass the Joyful Things went. That was where the dungeons lay, all the students knew, but none of them had been allowed to go there yet.
No one had seen him since.
Helis was enraged upon learning what had happened to her brother. Isiem had just closed his eyes. If Loran had wept in front of one of the shadowcallers after three full years of study in the Dusk Hall, his fate was sealed. Such weakness in the face of pain was unforgivable.
But before Helis could do anything stupid to get her brother back—or Isiem could do anything to stop her—the shadowcallers returned Loran of their own accord.
He had suffered. The boy said not a word about it. He had learned his lesson about stoicism; he kept his eyes lowered and his mouth shut. But the marks were plain on his body.
Loran walked like an old, old man. He shuffled from place to place in a daze, seeming hardly aware of where he went or why, and he clutched at a ghostly wound in his side. Neither Isiem nor Hellis could find any indication of what pained him there, but they found countless other injuries that he did not seem to notice. Burns, cuts, abrasions of rope and rasp—all partly healed, none fully so.
Worse than those were the holes that riddled his thighs and the flesh between his ribs. Some were small as a fingerprint, others nearly as large as a crabapple, but apart from their size they were all hideously the same: empty spaces where the skin stretched taut and translucent as a drumhead over its shell. Underneath was nothing—no flesh, no bone, not even blood pooled to fill the wound. Only murky darkness, glimpsed through a window of dead-looking skin.
“What could do that?” Ascaros marveled, holding a candle to the wounds as he examined them in the privacy of the siblings’ room.
“I’ll kill them,” Helis swore. Tears trembled in her eyes. “I’ll kill them all for what they did.”
“You won’t,” Isiem said sharply, “and you aren’t stupid enough to try. Loran needs you. Do you think anyone else has the patience to nurse him through this? Look after your brother, or he’s dead.”
Helis’s jaw worked silently as she ground her teeth against his words, but after a long while she nodded. “All right.”
Later that night, when the two of them were alone in their own room, Ascaros said, “He’s dead anyway, whatever she does.” He said it evenly, as he might have reported the results of an elementary practice divination.
“Maybe,” Isiem said.
“There’s no maybe about it. He’s broken. Whatever they did to him in the hidden halls, it shattered his body and mind. He might survive the former, but he’s no use to anyone after the latter. I just hope Helis doesn’t throw her own life after his.”
“He might recover,” Isiem said. “I don’t think they would have returned him if he were just going to die. This is meant to be a lesson—and if they thought the lesson were best learned by forcing us to watch them kill him, they’d have done that in the chapel.”
Ascaros gave him a dubious look, then blew out his candle and rolled over.
But Loran did get better. Slowly. They kept him out of his classes and took turns bringing his meals to Helis’s room, where his older sister fed him, one bite at a time, until he was strong enough to hold the fork himself.
Day by day, the cloudiness faded from his demeanor. His gait lost its dragging heaviness, as if invisible weights had dropped from his feet. His awareness of the world returned.
And when his wits were fully restored, and he remembered where he was and what lay before him, Loran ran.
The boy never warned the others of his plan, if indeed he had one. The first inkling Isiem had that his friend intended to flee came after it had happened.
He was in one of Dirakah’s classes, practicing a simple mending spell again and again as their instructor paced along the circle of students, slashing at their clothes with a long razor. If a ripped shirt was not repaired by the time she came back around to that student, Dirakah’s next swing was harder, slicing through cloth into flesh and bone. Halfway through the hour, several students’ clothes were bloodsoaked tatters.
In the midst of their suffering, a bell tolled. It sounded only a single peal, but its echoes rang strangely in the Dusk Hall: each seemed simultaneously louder and quieter than the last, as if the actual sound diminished with each reverberation, but the presence of it became stronger and more oppressive. As one, the students stopped their spellcasting and looked up in confusion. Dirakah paused as well, canting her head toward the open doorway like a hawk waiting for an unsuspecting hare to break cover.
The bell’s bronze echoes died down. In the quavering silence, a new clangor broke out: a shrieking cacophony of iron. The rattling rain of chains pouring down, the shriek of spinning saw-wheels, the stuttered scrape of hooks sliding across stone—there was too much, too fast, for Isiem to distinguish all he heard.
It all meant one thing, though.
“The Joyful Things,” Dirakah hissed. Snapping her razor shut, she strode from the room.
The students shared an uncertain look. Some of them stayed where they were, afraid of reprimand. Others followed Dirakah.
Isiem, impelled by curiosity and a tingling, nameless anxiety, went with the latter group. He rushed through the long halls, carried along by a growing tide of students as other interrupted classes emptied from their rooms. He wasn’t afraid, precisely, and he wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew in his bones it was bad, and he wanted to meet the trouble head-on instead of waiting to see if it would come for him.
But it wasn’t really about him at all.
The Joyful Things had descended from their pillars. Their bloated pale faces shone with unholy glee above their black cage-cocoons; the spiked chains that bound them had come loose, stretching around their pillars and grasping at the air in a monstrous manifestation of hunger. In their midst, Loran stood cornered, a small white fish caught in a net of thrashing iron chains.
“He tried to flee,” a Joyful Thing crooned, and the others took up the cackling chorus. “He tried to run! He is afraid. Unworthy, unworthy.”
Other shadowcallers were arriving in the chamber. Some came alone; some came accompanied by knots of fearful students. All looked upon Loran without pity.
Dirakah held up her hand. The Joyful Things fell silent. The clatter of their chains ceased.
“This one has proved undeserving of his gifts,” she said. She drew up her hood and stopped before the circle of chains. Something about her pose and position struck Isiem as ceremonial, hearkening back to a rite they had studied but which he could not immediately recall.
Another shadowcaller approached the circle and stopped. He lifted his hood over his head, letting darkness obscure his face. “He has refused the gift of knowledge.”
“He fears the gift of magic,” said a third shadowcaller. She took up a position opposite from the other two, forming a triangle around the Joyful Things’ circle.
Two more hooded shadowcallers came forward, transforming the triangle into a five-pointed star. “He cringes from the gift of pain,” said one. The other intoned: “He is blind to the gift of shadow.”
“He denies the gifts of Zon-Kuthon,” Dirakah said, “and he is not one of us.” The ring of chains parted, and she stepped through. One by one the others followed, bringing their star within the circle, and the black iron chains closed around them again.
“We offer him to you, Midnight Lord,” they said in unison. “We offer his flesh to cloak your servant. We offer his life to sustain it. Reclaim your gifts from this unworthy one. Welcome him to your court.”
Throughout their chant, Loran had not moved. Their final words, however, seemed to strike terror into him, shattering his shell of icy paralysis at last. He ducked, spun, and darted between two of the shadowcallers, trying to flee the circle of chains.
He didn’t make it to the perimeter. Three of the chains struck at him like metallic serpents, piercing his wrists and stabbing through one of his ankles. As the boy thrashed and bled, more spiked chains coiled around him, immobilizing his limbs and wrapping tight around his throat. A collar of blood wept dark from his neck.
“Bring me the mirror,” Dirakah said.
One of the younger shadowcallers hurried to obey. Isiem caught a glimpse of Helis standing in a corridor on the far side of the room, momentarily visible through the press of instructors and students. Her face was white and frozen, her eyes huge with shock. She didn’t seem to see him, and soon the crowd swallowed her up again.
Moments later, the shadowcaller returned, holding a small nightglass. Although nothing but its size distinguished this black mirror from any other, Isiem thought it might be the one from which he had first summoned a shadow—and to which Loran had refused to bare his soul, beginning his fatal spiral of failure in the Dusk Hall.
The shadowcaller brought the nightglass to Dirakah. With measured steps, each one clicking on the floor’s smooth gray stones, she brought the mirror to Loran. The Joyful Things’ animated chains jerked the boy’s bleeding hands up to receive it, then wrapped his fingers in spiked iron coils and forced them around the edges of the glass.
“We give this one to you, Zon-Kuthon,” Dirakah said, as Loran stared helplessly into the black glass. The other shadowcallers, within the ring and outside it, echoed her words in an unearthly chorus. “We ask you to make him worthy.”
Darkness spilled from the glass. It came in sooty tendrils, wreathing the mirror and reaching toward Loran, and it undulated in the air as if in response to the shadowcallers’ chant.
As shadows flowed out of the mirror and wrapped around Loran’s head, a colorless reflection of the boy’s face gradually took shape in the glass. Initially it was formless and featureless, little more than crude white smudges with empty gaps to signify its eyes and mouth. It gathered detail swiftly, however, and it seemed to become more vibrant, more real, as the living warmth drained out of the boy in the shadows’ grasp.
The pale duplicate rose from the nightglass like a swimmer surfacing from a pond. It did not come out fully—perhaps it couldn’t—but it thrust its face toward the pinned boy’s and trapped him in a kiss, and when its lips met Loran’s, its being flowed into his. Isiem caught a glimpse of amorphous shadow, trailing a mass of inky tentacles, as it poured from the nightglass into Loran’s mouth … and then it was gone, all of it, leaving the mirror blank.
Loran reeled, choking, in the chains’ grip. The Joyful Things’ chains held him mercilessly, wrapped and impaled, and after several painful minutes his struggles stilled. His head drooped low; his feet dragged limp.
Then, slowly, he looked up. His eyes were liquid black.
“Let me go,” he said. The voice was still Loran’s, but … different. The inflections were gone. The boyishness. Isiem took a step back, disconcerted by the strangeness of hearing another presence speaking through his friend’s mouth.
The chains retracted, releasing his gouged hands and pierced ankle. Loran opened and closed his hands stiffly, as if unused to the motion. He did not seem to notice the bloody holes punched through his palms.
“This flesh is not strong,” he said, “but it will serve. As will I.”
“As do we all,” Dirakah said. Again the shadowcallers echoed her words. “As do we all.”
The phrase seemed to be the signal that whatever had happened was at an end. The Joyful Things withdrew their chains, licking at the blood that clung to their spikes, and creaked back up their pillars. Loran left without sparing a glance for his sister. The shadowcallers dispersed. Many herded their students back to their classes, but Dirakah ignored hers.
As the others filtered away, Isiem walked over to Helis, who stood rooted to the ground in the hallway. She didn’t turn until he touched her elbow, trying awkwardly to offer comfort.
“They killed him,” she whispered, too shocked for tears. “He tried to run, so they just … they just killed him.”
“He isn’t dead,” Isiem said, not sure he believed his own words.
Helis shook her head fiercely, knocking his hand off her arm. “My brother is dead. They killed him and put some other thing in his body. That isn’t Loran. They killed him, and I’m going to kill them for it. Don’t even try to talk me out of it, Isiem. I’m going to kill them all.”