William King: Shadowblood

Perhaps it had not been him but the things that looked out of his eyes. She had sensed them there, the Elder world demon and its victims. He had partaken of its forbidden knowledge and she wondered whether it would destroy him in the end.

It was such knowledge that had really destroyed her father. Malkior had become ever more erratic in recent years. No mind, human or Terrarch, was capable of devouring another one and remaining completely sane. There was no way to integrate so many conflicting memories. Even Terrarchs, whose vastly longer lives meant more memories than humans, could not do that, and humans went insane swiftly when they practised thanatomancy. It would be interesting to see which part of his heritage won out. Perhaps it would be the true test of whether Rik was human or Terrarch.

She forced herself to rise and walk over to the pack she had stowed with her travelling gear. Within it was a silver flask and within the flask was moonglow wine. She took off the stopper and drank some, letting the cool rich taste run over her tongue and down her throat until it settled, burning in her belly. A morsel of strength returned.

She returned to the chair, set the bottle beside her and the runic dagger on her lap. Malkior was dead, she thought. Her father was dead. And she was glad although it was a gladness alloyed with many other emotions.

She remembered him from when she was a child, watching her proudly as she spelled out the runes in her book, and telling her wonderful tales of the world the Terrarchs had lost and would one day have again. He had been bad to the bone even then, but she had not known it, and had merely looked at him with the eyes of a doting daughter.

She fumbled with the locket at her breast and opened it. Within, in opposite faces of the casing were two miniature portraits of her parents. The likenesses were good, showing their ageless Terrarch beauty.

He looked poised and confident, the soul of charm, and she was sure that there had been a time when her mother had loved him. It had most likely been finding out what he really was that had driven her mother mad in the end. Lady Alysa had married a monster and given birth to another and it had been one of her father’s pleasures at the end to torment her with this knowledge, when she was too sick to tell anyone, and even those servants who listened to her ravings had thought her mad. There was sadness in the features the miniature portrayed, as if even then her mother had known what was to come.

She remembered the kindly, beautiful woman of her early years and supposed she must have loved her too once before her father had turned her against Alysa with his subtle words, his silent disrespect, the things he did not say that were more damning than the things he did. Her mother had spent many years trapped in the huge echoing mansion on their enormous estate, cut off from her friends and family, surrounded by servants who were her fathers slaves, watched constantly even by her maids. For decades, she had been unable to think of her mother except with contempt. It had taken a long time for her to realise how much her father had encouraged her in it. He brooked no rivals in her affections.

Why had they married? Her mother had loved her father she knew and perhaps there had been a time when in his own twisted way, he had loved her. Perhaps that’s why he had kept her a virtual prisoner, taken the time to subject her to his most exquisite mental cruelties, returned home after his many affairs. Of course, there had been other reasons. His mother was the last survivor of an ancient line, immensely rich, inheritor of many magical treasures, and her father had been a collector of such things, as many powerful sorcerers were. Perhaps her mother had merely been another thing he had collected.

She looked down at the blade. It had come from her father’s trove, part of the dowry her mother had brought, a product of the ancient magical arts of Al’Terra. It had their exquisite beauty as well as their potency. It could slice through magical protections, slay demons at need. It was woven round with protective spells to shield its bearer against death magic.

Strange, her father had not died from a blade, but from a weapon that had not existed on the home world; a truesilver bullet fired from a weapon that most Terrarchs thought obscene, the bane of their age, the herald of the end of their dominion. A gun had ended Malkior’s life. It was a new weapon for a new age, an age in which humans were rising against their betters, and had the tools to work the overthrow of even the most powerful of sorcerers. With truesilver bullets they need have no fear of demons. Even the Shadowblood could fall before them.

Perhaps Rik, half-human, half-Terrarch, as comfortable with guns as with sorcery was the symbol of this new age, and of the bastard culture that would grow out of it. She thought of his mixture of arrogance and fear, and wondered what would become of him. Perhaps he would survive. Perhaps Asea would use him up and then discard him as she had done so many others. Perhaps he would fall to the Shadow, the first of many like him, who would become its agents in this world. Like Asea, the Shadow used whatever tools it found most useful.

Something irritated her eyes. Her face was wet. Her father was dead. He was dead and all the things she had wanted to say to him would remain forever unsaid, all the questions she had wanted to ask would never be answered. All the complex knot of emotions would never be untangled.

Thinking about her father and about the Shadow she felt oddly adrift. She had served both, but she realised now that she had really served her father, seeking always to please him, to gain his attention even when she had defied him. Until recently she had possessed no real knowledge of what the Shadow was like. She had thought she had known, but she had not, not in the way that he had.

Malkior had been one of the First. He had come through the gates from an older, purer world. He had experienced the Shadow first hand, had served it since childhood, had bowed before its glory willingly, had been touched by it and granted power. He had not thought of it as demonic. He had talked about it as liberation, of freedom from the tyranny of Adaana, of the old Angels who had held back their people for so long.

She had known such things only through him, his stories and his faith. He had been its prophet and its embodiment and now he was gone. There was nothing left for her to serve. She felt more loyalty to the Queen-Empress of Sardea than she did to the Shadow’s cause. Without the physical anchor of his person, the Shadow’s was merely a side on which she found herself by accident.

Doubts she had long suppressed beat black wings around her skull. In a way she was glad that her father was gone, his plans to use the Black Mirror and open a gate to Al’Terra unfulfilled. For all his certainty of their glory, she had found the idea of the Princes of Shadow manifesting in this world a frightening one. It was one thing to work towards such a goal in the long distant future. It was another to live with the knowledge that soon the world would be utterly and irrevocably changed. She was not like him. She had grown up in a world where everyone thought of the Princes as the embodiment of purest evil, and it had tainted her with a suspicion from which she could never entirely be free.

She was merely putting things off, she told herself. She really ought to be going. Her work here was done, and the longer she stayed the greater the danger to her would become. There was no guarantee that Rik would not report her to Asea or to the authorities, and with a High Inquisitor in the vicinity, things could become very dangerous very quickly.

She needed to get back to Sardea and report the failure of her father’s plan to the Queen Empress and to Malkior’s former associates.