Days passed before Isiem spoke to Helis again.
He saw her in the classes they shared, but they couldn’t talk frankly in front of the other students or their instructors, and Helis always disappeared after they were released from their lectures. She seldom visited the dining halls or the library, and she avoided her room.
That room, once their sanctuary in the Dusk Hall, had become a lonely, almost haunted place in the wake of Loran’s transformation. All of Loran’s belongings were already gone; the boy had moved out immediately after the ritual, leaving a bare bunk opposite his sister’s bed.
The empty space weighed on all of them, but it had crushed Helis. Isiem hadn’t seen her set foot in the room since her brother was given to the shadow. Wherever she was sleeping, it was not in her own bed.
Each day saw her frailer than the one before. It was as if grief had rasped away the core of her being, leaving a translucent shell of a girl. She seemed almost to float, ghostlike, through the Dusk Hall. Isiem was afraid for her, and a little afraid of her.
But for far too long, he never had a chance to say a word.
Finally, late one night, he saw her walk past his window. It was summer, and although that did nothing to lift the gloom of Pangolais, it did make the evenings warmer.
As he gained seniority, Isiem had been able to move to a better room—albeit one still shared with Ascaros—and now his chamber overlooked the grand courtyard at the center of the Dusk Hall. He liked the fragrances that drifted in from the nocturnal gardens, and on warm nights often left his windows open to enjoy them. Isiem was still awake, luxuriating in that small sweetness, when he saw a girl drift by on bare feet. She was shrouded in white, her long black hair flying wild in the wind. Helis.
Isiem left his room to follow her. He walked quietly, not wanting to disturb her fugue, but he did not try to hide. If she sent him away, he’d go.
She never glanced back. Swaying from step to step, as if moved by music only she could hear, Helis crossed the Dusk Hall’s central courtyard. Isiem held his breath, afraid that she might try to leave through the great doors—a path that would take her past the Joyful Things, and perhaps to a fate like her brother’s—but she did not turn east to the doors. Instead she went west, turned her face to the sky, and with surprising nimbleness began to scale the carved stone walls.
High above his head she stopped, sitting on a narrow ledge between two of the enchanted, luminous spheres that hung over both courtyards like caged moons. Great gray moths swirled around her, brushing across her brow and tangling in the black net of her hair. In that moment she was beautiful as a fairy queen, and as inhuman. And as terrifying.
She looked down. “You can come up if you want,” she said.
He did. The climb was harder for him than it had been for her. Twice Isiem slipped and caught himself, heart pounding, moments before his head would have shattered like a bloody gourd on the ashen stones below. Helis offered him no help. She sat there, watching him with abstract curiosity, until he heaved himself, sweating, onto the ledge beside her.
“What are you doing up here?” Isiem asked when he caught his breath.
Helis shrugged. She’d already looked away from him, and was toying with a moth that had crashed into one of the globes. Shimmering dust fell from its wings, coating Helis’s fingertips, as the insect struggled hopelessly to return to the air. “It’s peaceful above the gardens. Restful. I like it. Sometimes I pray.”
“To whom?”
She smiled and took her hand away from the moth’s wings. Carefully, deliberately, Helis crushed its head with a fingernail. “There’s only one god here.”
“Does it give you … solace?” Isiem asked, fumbling to understand. The Midnight Lord was powerful, and his clerics were skilled in repairing the damage they caused; perhaps Helis had turned to his faith in hopes of helping her brother. “Hope?”
“No. There’s no hope. There’s no cure.” Helis lifted the moth’s body by a bent black leg and dropped it onto a heap of small, winged corpses. They were screened by her knee, and Isiem hadn’t noticed them before, but when she shifted he saw that there were hundreds of dead moths in the pile. “I went through everything in the library. The shadowcallers had to know why I was there, but they never tried to stop me. I suppose they knew there was no reason; I was hardly the first to look. So many had come before me that all the books fell open to the same pages.”
“That could have been a trick,” Isiem said. “The books could have been bent that way. A feint to throw you off.”
“Don’t you think the same idea occurred to me?” Another moth was fluttering on the ledge, not far from where the first had died. Helis stroked its twitching antennae with an odd gentleness. “I looked beyond those pages. It wasn’t a trick. I was hoping it could be broken like a curse—not something I can do now, but someday … but no. It’s not as simple as that.”
“What is it?”
Helis caressed the moth’s wings, rubbing them translucent. Glimmering silver flakes dusted her skin. She pressed a finger to her small, perfect lips, leaving a shining print. “What happened to Isiem—what happened to all the souls seized by the shadow, century after century, ever since Earthfall—is not possession, and not transformation, but a little of both. One of the hungry shadows was invited into his body. Not to possess him, but to become him. It has mapped its soul against his, taken his memories for its own, adopted his being—his habits, fears, aspirations—to guide its stolen life.”
Isiem nodded, finding the news grim but not surprising. What she told him only reinforced the teachings of the Dusk Hall.
Most of the creatures that inhabited the shadow realm were neither benign nor malevolent, but simply oblivious to the mortal realm. They had their own world: a gray and twisted reflection of the one inhabited by men, but not an inherently evil one. The doings of humanity concerned such beings no more than birds concerned the creatures of the deep black sea.
Some, however, watched the mortal world jealously, craving the warmth and vibrant solidity that their own existence lacked. Although the hungry shadows were few in number, they were by far the most likely to be encountered by a mortal wizard, for they flocked to gates between the worlds.
They were also the ones most often called, for they were the most easily controlled. The other creatures of the shadow realm wanted nothing from the mortal world, and being indifferent, they were difficult to command or cajole. But the ones who lusted after life … those would leap to do a shadowcaller’s bidding. All they asked in return was a drop of blood, a captured memory—something that gave them, however fleetingly, a taste of what it was to be alive.
That taste would buy their obedience, for a while, but the hungry ones always wanted more. Every student in the Dusk Hall was warned of that danger, again and again, until the words circled in their skulls as they slept: drop your guard, and the shadows will take you.
It had never occurred to him, though, that the shadowcallers might deliberately give one of their own to the dark.
“Can the shadow be driven out?” Isiem asked.
Helis shook her head. “Not by you or me. Not by any magic I know. It’s devoured pieces of him, mind and body, and insinuated itself into the gaps. Like one of those fungi that sends its threads all through a living rat, tangling its fibers into blood and brain. You can’t pull out the parasite without killing the host. It’s too much a part of him, now, and what’s left of him is too much part of it.”
“What will happen to him?”
“Eventually the shadow will kill him. It’s not of this world, Isiem. It doesn’t belong here. It consumes life just by its proximity. Loran’s life energy is sand in its hourglass. It might try to stretch its time by adding more sand—getting the shadowcallers to heal its stolen body—but eventually it will run out. It might be years from now, maybe even decades, but it will run out. Someday.”
“And then he dies?”
“If he’s lucky.” Helis pinched the moth’s bald wings and, with sudden savagery, rolled them into wrinkled, translucent twists between her fingers. She broke off its legs one by one and tossed the crippled insect onto the pile of the dead, where it rolled helpless as a Joyful Thing plucked out of its cage.
Isiem stared at the garden below them, trying and failing to grasp the full implications of what he had heard. White-throated flowers and umbral leaves rustled at a passing breeze. Moths spun around the branches of the sour apple trees, their wings reflecting the distant glow of the courtyard’s hanging spheres. One drifted past Helis’s shoulder and perched in her hair, just above two of the strangled corpses of its kin.
“Go away, Isiem,” Helis sighed. “Go to sleep. It’s late.”
“You’ll be well?”
A strange, sad smile touched the girl’s lips. She nodded, very slightly. The dying moths trapped in her hair renewed their flailing. “I’ll be fine. Go to bed.”
He went. And, after only a short struggle with his conscience, he slept.
* * *
In their fourth year at the Dusk Hall, two months after Loran’s change, the students began their initiation into the mysteries of Zon-Kuthon.
All of them, as children of Nidal, had spent their lives surrounded by the Midnight Lord’s worship. They had gathered around his fires at the Festival of Night’s Return, sat vigils in remembrance of their ancestors on the Day of Salvation, and submitted to the Joyful Things’ tasting and testing of faith before entering the Dusk Hall. They saw the scars willingly suffered by his petitioners, and they sensed the fear that suffocated the faithless. All were familiar with the Prince of Pain … and, at the same time, all were strangers to him. Not one of them had communed with the god directly. Not one could channel his magic.
Over the course of the following year, that changed. A true shadowcaller was versed not only in arcane magic but in the divine, and in Nidal that meant one thing: embracing the glory and cruelty of Zon-Kuthon. Each of them walked a different path to reach their god, but all came to the same destination, and none of their roads was easy.
For Isiem, the moment of revelation came in the endurance of pain.
The rites of the Midnight Lord’s worship were never gentle, but the initiation rites could kill. For a full day and night, the initiates were locked in the Dusk Hall’s cathedral, kneeling in lines and circles and chanting in constant prayer. Exhaustion and terror soon took hold of them: the ache of sore knees and stiff muscles warred with the fear of what would happen if they moved.
Everything about the rite was designed to disorient and overwhelm its participants, bringing them to the brink of the numinous. Dizzying smoke spilled from the censers overhead, lashing the initiates with slow, breaking coils. The cathedral’s candles wept blistering wax onto their backs; the chants of their superiors drowned them in a tide of solemn song. The thousand shadowlights of Pangolais spun around them, creating the illusion of motion among the sculptures that writhed in stony suffering on the cathedral’s walls. In Isiem’s dazed, drugged vision, those marble men and women seemed to convulse in rapture … but, on a second glance, they were only stone again.
His own agony was no illusion. He had not been allowed to move except when the shadowcallers overseeing the rite ordered all the initiates to change positions, and it seemed that every such change was a worse contortion than the last. The shadowcallers paced constantly through their ranks, spiked chains whirling, and struck at any initiate who was improperly bowed. Isiem had taken two such blows, and he thought the shadowcallers’ chains were laced with poison, for the wounds burned with a feverish, shivering thrill.
At midnight the great bells tolled, shuddering through the worshipers’ bodies and souls. A hooded priest stood before the altar, holding a chain of glowing iron. Although tens of yards long, it was no thicker than the band of a lady’s ring. Many-faced hooks blossomed along the chain like flowers on a vine, each one shining bright and hot as the never-seen sun. Isiem squinted his watering eyes, blinded by the chain’s shimmering heat.
“Raise your heads and be humbled,” the hooded priest said. The intonation was strangely distorted; Isiem couldn’t tell if the speaker was male or female, young or old, coaxing or commanding. The priest spoke with the voice of a god: all that came through was power and the promise of pain. “Open your mouths and be still.”
Isiem lifted his head toward the priest and opened his mouth. The initiates to either side of him did the same. Sweating and straining, they held their positions until the hooded priest came to grant them communion. The chain spilled between his—her?—fingers, its serrated radiance stitching the ranks of bowed initiates together through the infinity of gloom.
The priest stooped over each of them, seizing their tongues and pulling them taut. In her-or-his other hand the chain came up, its cruel fire-flower of hooks glowing, and, in a sizzle of scorched blood and saliva, was driven into each of their tongues.
When his turn came to take the communion in hot iron, Isiem screamed. And in that instant, near-blind and paralyzed with pain, he felt the unbearable touch of his god.
Endure, it said, as euphoria swelled and crashed through him like a flood-swollen river bursting its dam. Survive. Master the pain. There is no purer test of will, no greater show of strength. And no greater ecstasy than to stare down suffering and prevail.
Isiem made no answer. Even if he’d been capable of speech, thought was far beyond him. It was all he could do to stay on his knees instead of collapsing on the cathedral floor.
All around him, students moaned or gasped or wept around their own mouthfuls of searing agony … and he could feel them, could share in the bewildered bliss that they found on the far side of pain. The spiked chain joined them in suffering and in faith, and the intensity of the experience, amplified over a hundred souls or more, overwhelmed Isiem completely.
He did collapse, then, and he was far from the only one. The cathedral was littered with the writhing bodies of initiates and the shivering clatter of barbed links against flagstones. Isiem lay among them, half-sensible, and watched as the chain slowly stilled and its fiery flowers, quenched in blood, grew cold.
But the euphoria did not leave him. It stayed, filling him with fear and wonder, even as Dirakah stooped beside his helpless body and pried the iron hooks from his tongue.
“Be welcome in our faith,” she said, and carried the chain away.
* * *
Their lessons changed after the initiation. They spent less time on arcane theory and more on the rites and sacred teachings of Zon-Kuthon. Their classes moved from the south wing of the Dusk Hall to the north side, and they were permitted to pass the Joyless Things freely. While the caged cripples had prevented them from escaping before, they were no longer needed. Once initiated into his faith, the students were bound to the Midnight Lord; wherever they went, there would be no escape. One and all, they were his. And so they were free to spread and strengthen Zon-Kuthon’s presence in Pangolais.
The Umbral Leaves, the holiest text of their faith, eclipsed their scrolls and spellbooks. The powdered gems and murky tinctures of their wizardly studies vanished from the classrooms; in their stead, the students practiced with razors and vises, learning to cut and crush flesh with all the artistry their god demanded.
It was a shattering experience for Isiem, and not only for the obvious reasons. The students were required to suffer as much anguish as they inflicted—often they inflicted torments on each other, reversing the roles of victim and torturer many times in each lesson—but, harrowing as the pain was, worse was what he saw it doing to them.
They were changing. Under the weight of that constant trauma, all of them were changing. Sometimes, amidst the haze of blood and iron-scented smoke, Isiem would catch a glimpse of Loran’s face twisted with fear and rapture: rapture for the intensity of sensation that the boy’s mortal flesh afforded, fear that he might have damaged it too greatly and would be forced back to the numb emptiness of shadow if his stolen body failed.
It was an expression that his lost friend would never have showed, and the sight of it on that once-familiar face forced Isiem to see how alien Loran had become. What was in him was not human, and its yearning to experience humanity only reinforced how very foreign it was.
Isiem couldn’t bear it. Nor could he bear what he saw in Helis, who sometimes seemed to have traded her own soul for something bleaker than her brother’s. She gave herself to the pain with an intensity bordering on anger, as if she could obliterate her memories in its inferno. No matter how grievous the harms they were asked to cause or endure, Helis never held back; if anything, she went further than their instructors desired. She truly did not seem to care if she killed or died, and the enormity of her indifference frightened him. They were friends, or had been, but now he felt that he scarcely knew her at all.
For his own part, Isiem just wanted to survive. As their studies continued, drawing them deeper and deeper into Zon-Kuthon’s embrace, his sense of right and wrong went spinning away. If morality was a compass, his had lost true north—and, lacking that core certainty, Isiem could find nothing else to orient him.
Was it wrong to torture a helpless slave, if serving as their practice subject was all that kept that slave alive? Was it still wrong if he inflicted the same pains on his closest friends, and suffered them in turn? Not eagerly—not because he was able to take any pleasure in it, as more devout Kuthites seemed to—but because he, too, survived only by the lash?
If it was not wrong, was it right?
Isiem didn’t know. He was increasingly unsure whether he cared. Questions of that sort seemed relics from another world, as irrelevant to his own life as the intricacies of Tian chrysanthemum ceremonies or the proper protocol for greeting Taldan dignitaries in a foreign court. They were things that existed in books, and they had no place in shadow-swathed Pangolais.
What existed here was pain, over and over, in infinite variations that admitted no possibility of release.
Not even their instructors were immune. The shadowcallers took their turns serving as the students’ subjects, although Isiem noticed that some of them tended to avoid certain students. In particular, Dirakah seemed careful not to place herself at Helis’s mercy.
“Of course she is,” Helis said when he asked her about it. They were perched above the courtyard’s garden again, sitting among its caged lamps and spiraling moths. “She’s afraid of me.”
“Because of Loran?”
“Yes. She’s right to be.” Helis smiled—that melancholy, faraway smile she’d only showed after her brother’s sacrifice. She lifted a stunned moth up to brush a kiss across its wings, coating her lips in silver dust. Extending her hand delicately over the precipice, she blew the moth off her finger, sending it spiraling downward on translucent, useless wings.
Isiem watched the moth fall with troubled fascination. “Why?”
Helis shook her head lightly and patted his knee. Her hand left a ghostly outline of shimmering powder on his leg. “Go to sleep, Isiem. It’s none of your concern.”
* * *
If Dirakah was afraid of Helis, however, she showed no fear of anyone else. Nor did she show any fear of death. If anything, she seemed to court it. More often than anyone else, she served as their subject in practicing the Kuthite arts. To her, their lessons were ancillary. The real dance was between Dirakah and her god, with the students serving merely as the means by which the shadowcaller flirted with destruction. She was addicted to the intensity of life at oblivion’s edge, and she chased it at every opportunity.
As their arts advanced, the less pious shadowcallers stopped offering themselves. A flogging was one thing; any Kuthite could take that, and a clumsy hand with the lash was scarcely more dangerous than a deft one.
The great tortures were another matter. A mistimed touch on the Crystal Chimes would kill the subject and, perhaps worse, shatter the instrument’s delicate blades. A misspoken incantation into the Veil of Whispers could result in both the invoker and her victim being drained to death by its gray gossamer.
Day by day, the difficulty of their arts rose higher, and the potential for lethal mistakes became greater. One by one, the shadowcallers stopped taking their places on the torturer’s table. Most of them put prudence above piety, and did not want to risk dying at the hands of beginners. Soon the students’ work shifted entirely to slaves.
Slaves … and Dirakah. She, alone among the shadowcallers, never quailed. When it came time for Isiem and his fellows to practice the Needled Choir, it was Dirakah who lay bound on the table before them.
The Needled Choir, like most of the great tortures, was a performance piece. It was not meant to wring information from its victim, nor was its primary purpose to inflict pain. It was, rather, meant as a spectacle to delight and intrigue the audience, and was most often conducted in Zon-Kuthon’s cathedrals during the celebration of his high holy days.
For the Needled Choir, bound victims were laid on tables arrayed like the spokes of a wheel, with their heads pointed inward and their feet radiating outward. There might be as few as three or as many as twelve; Chellarael of Nisroch, who was infamous for her excesses, had once conducted a Choir of forty-eight arranged in two concentric rings. Today’s exercise had only three: a pair of condemned prisoners requisitioned from the Umbral Court’s dungeons, and Dirakah.
Deep, soft pillows, covered in white satin to show blood better, held each victim’s head and shoulders bent back to expose their necks more cleanly. The victims’ mouths were sealed—only with cloth wrappings, for this exercise, but in a true performance they would be stitched shut, or even maimed with knives and acid, then magically healed into a smooth whole. However it was done, the purpose was to leave the victims silent and unable to breathe through their mouths. Until they sang through the needles, they would make no sound again.
Three of those needles rested on a white satin cushion near Isiem’s hand. He glanced at them and swallowed, trying to hide the nervousness that thrilled through him.
Each of the steel-tipped needles swelled into a hollow alabaster reed designed to be pierced into the victim’s windpipe, where it would stand upright and vent the victim’s trapped breath into fluted notes. A scarlet ribbon hung at the end of each needle; during the performance, it would flutter in the channeled breath, flapping like a geyser of blood.
The insertion, however, was a delicate task. If the needles were thrust in too deeply, or imprecisely, they could pierce the carotid artery. Clumsy placements could also ruin the victim’s voice, or allow air to escape and bubble under the skin of the face and neck—a phenomenon that, once it was discovered, gave rise to its own tortures, but was still considered a grievous failure in a performance of the Needled Choir.
If Isiem did botch the needles’ insertion, the responsibility for healing lay entirely with him. Earlier in their training, a shadowcaller had always stood ready to remedy their worst mistakes with magic, but now that they had all advanced sufficiently in their prayers to command their own curative spells, the students were expected to keep their own subjects alive.
The slaves they used were not expensive, and the condemned were virtually worthless, but Isiem was queasily aware, however much he tried to heed his training and ignore it, that a human life lay at his mercy. In the eyes of the world, the measure of his failure might be a few pieces of gold, but in his own, it would be far worse.
A roll of drumbeats broke through his introspections. The ceremony was starting. Taking up a scarlet-flagged needle in one hand, Isiem exchanged a tense look with the students on either side. To his right, Helis stood by the other prisoner from the Umbral Dungeons. To his left, a hollow-eyed youth named Serevil leaned over Dirakah. Neither of their faces betrayed any hint of the anxiety Isiem felt. He hoped his own was as impassive.
The drumbeats died. Holding his breath, Isiem watched from the corner of his eye as Helis held her reed high over her victim’s throat, then plunged it down with a dramatic swoop. Her aim was unerring, her control complete: the needle pierced the prisoner’s windpipe and stayed there, emitting an unearthly shrill. Its crimson flag lashed the air once in a straight line, then subsided into twisting contortions.
The drums picked up again. Now they insinuated themselves around and beneath the mournful haunt of Helis’s reed, accentuating its song instead of overwhelming it. Their erratic stutter evoked a failing heartbeat, and when it fell into a long, tense lull, Isiem knew his turn had come.
Sideways between the third and fourth tracheal rings. It had been easier on the corpses they used for practice, with the correct incision point inked on stiff cold flesh … but, after a frozen instant, Isiem found that same point on the living man. Offering a quick prayer that his hands would be steady and his aim true, he plunged the needle down.
It caught for an instant—the windpipe was tough, and although the needle was sharp, it took some force to push it through—but he executed the movement flawlessly, and he did not strike too deep. A second eerie note rose from the prisoner’s punctured throat, joining the song that Helis had begun.
Moments later, after the drums had risen and dwindled again, the third student raised his reed to complete their song.
Isiem had already taken a half-step back when he noticed that Helis had not moved back with him. Curious, he stole a glance at her, although he knew it would draw a reprimand from his instructors if any of them noticed. Any deviation from the appearance of singleminded concentration was a flaw, but looking to other participants for guidance was a serious one.
No one noticed. And what he saw piqued his interest even more: Helis had torn a bit of loose fleece from her sleeve and was rolling it surreptitiously. Her lips moved in a slight, soundless murmur; clearly she’d practiced delivering that incantation subtly. From even a few steps farther away, her gestures would have been invisible, and the reeds’ drone drowned out her whispered chant.
But to what end? Isiem recognized the spell she was casting—they had all learned the same simple illusion early in their studies—but he could not discern its purpose. Helis moved back, taking up her proper position for the ceremony’s end, and nothing seemed to have changed.
Then Serevil swept his hands down, plunging in the last reed, and Isiem realized in a flash of horror what she had just done.
Blood fountained from Dirakah’s throat: a vertical flood of it, painting Serevil’s astonished face and the floor behind him and the nearest circle of the audience in hot red gouts. A horrible wet gurgle choked in the reed. Its crimson pennant, soaked through already, rippled with each new spurt like lakeweed caught in the continuing flow of Dirakah’s lifeblood.
In moments the shadowcaller would be dead. Not because Serevil had killed her, but because Helis had. A minor illusion to shift the incision point from Dirakah’s windpipe to the great artery in her neck was all Helis needed to kill the woman who had led her brother’s destruction.
And Dirakah would die, unless Isiem stepped in. So would Serevil. No one was permitted to intervene with any of the great tortures except the torturers themselves. The risk of disaster was ever-present; it was no small part of the audience’s thrill.
But that did not mean the students could not be punished for their failures. Serevil was already doomed to suffer for injuring a superior; if Dirakah died, so would he. That knowledge seemed to have paralyzed him. The youth stood white and unmoving, too stunned to react. Blood dripped from his cheeks and hung in garnet drops on his eyebrows.
There was no chance that Serevil would recover from his shock in time to save Dirakah. Pushing his own ambivalence aside, Isiem strode forward, steeling himself to call upon Zon-Kuthon’s uncertain mercy. As he prepared to utter his prayer, Helis grabbed his wrist with a hand like a manacle of ice.
“No,” she hissed, too softly for the audience to hear.
“Let me go,” Isiem said, trying to pull away.
She did not release him. “No. Dirakah has courted this end for years. Do you think this is anything she didn’t expect? Anything she didn’t want? She deserves this.”
“Does Serevil?”
Beneath the hood, Helis’s eyes grew hard. “Is he any better?” Her hand tightened on his wrist, hurting him. “We’re all monsters, Isiem. We all deserve this.”
To that he had no answer. The prayer faltered on his lips, failed.
And under their hands, Dirakah died.