Paul Kearney: The Mark of Ran

He waited. Nothing. He stood unsure and afraid, hand on the hilt of his dirk. The tower seemed dead and empty despite the light he had glimpsed far up its flank.

All this way he had come for this, and if it turned out to be a barren errand, what then would he do? The night seemed vast and empty and alien to him. He knew of nowhere else in the world he might go.

The door scraped back on its jamb, startling him. A hooded figure stood holding a candle-lantern. He stepped back, and came close to falling off the stairway.

A woman-no, a girl. She was not hooded but had a heavy mane of black hair that fell down on either side of her white face. Her eyes were so pale as to be almost colorless, with no whit of warmth to soften their hue. She stood silent, as severely beautiful as a marble statue.

“I’m here to see Michal Psellos,” Rol stammered.

The cold eyes looked him up and down, and then the door was slammed shut in his face.

He stood gaping for a moment, and then began hammering on the door with his fist. “Open up!” When that failed he drew his dirk and pounded on the stout timbers with the pommel, suddenly furious.

The door opened again. The hard white face was unchanged, but something glittered at the girl’s waist. Before it could register, Rol felt a hard punch to his midriff, and his legs turned to water. He fell to his knees. There was no pain, simply a sense of utter weakness. He had no idea what could have happened, even when he bowed his head and saw the dark stain on his shirt.

He looked up again. The girl seemed to be studying him. Then her foot came up and kicked him in the chest. He toppled backwards, off the wooden stairway, and thumped to the earth six feet below. Lying on his back he looked up at the distant brilliance of the stars until, one by one, they went out.

Four

“You are a rarity, my young friend; a life which sidled past the edge of Rowen’s blade. Perhaps she likes you.” A laugh, unpleasant to hear.

Rol opened his eyes. His vision was filled by a face. A bearded man, hair dark and shiny as jet, the beard oiled and waxed into a curled point. His eyes were the color of a skua’s breast, and they changed even as Rol watched. His eyeteeth were made of fang-sharp silver. He smelled of perfume.

The man withdrew. Rol tried to sit up and found that he was naked, bound hand and foot to the posts of a heavy iron bed. A dull pain burned relentlessly below his rib cage. It was stuffy, and the sweat trickling into his eyes blurred his vision. He was in a candlelit stone room, windowless, circular, the ceiling upheld by heavy beams. More, he could not lift his head to see, but he thought he glimpsed a dark shape sitting at the corner of his eye, close to the bed. The girl? As he tried to twist his neck to look, the pain turned his bowels to water and left his dry mouth in a hiss. He closed his eyes until it passed.

“I must go to work,” a low voice said, a woman’s.

“Very well.” It was the bearded man. “But be back after the middle hour-this fellow will need someone to watch over him, and I have appointments to keep.” No answer but the sound of a door closing softly.

“Look at me,” the man’s voice said sharply.

Rol obeyed him. The man filled his vision again. The colors swirled in his eyes, like oil on water.

“You are Ardisan’s kin-I would know that countenance anywhere. Perhaps it made Rowen turn her blade aside. She senses these things too. Hold still.”

Something hot and moist was pressed against his sternum. A tingling spread from it, a warmth that invaded Rol’s head and made him dizzy as if he were inhaling smoke.

“Well, you’ll live, which proves my point. The Blood runs in you-but how true, I wonder?” Here the man raised a vial of scarlet liquid in the candlelight and studied it intently. Seeing Rol’s bleary puzzlement, he smiled, his silver fangs catching the light in turn. “Call it payment, if you will. If it’s as pure as I think, it’ll keep us in bread and oil for many a day.”

“Psellos?” Rol croaked.

The man bowed. “Indeed. Ardisan is dead at last, I take it. Well, he was a worthy fellow in his time, but he was a fool to bury himself out in the middle of nowhere as he did. We conceal ourselves more easily the more cattle we have around us.”

He leaned close over Rol as though recording his features. “Yes-I see your mother in you.” He glanced back at the door. “She was a beauty too.”

“You knew my mother!”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“How? How could-” Rol tried to raise an arm but failed. “Why am I bound?” he demanded.

“One must be cautious. You could be anything-a doppelganger out of Kull knocking on my door.” And he gestured with one long-fingered hand to a shelf near the ceiling. It was lined with jars, and in each floated a face, a severed head in which the eyes glared brightly. One blinked, and its mouth opened in a soundless snarl, making Rol flinch.

“But I can loose you now, I think. Don’t try to sit up-you must allow the poultice to do its work.” He began untying the knots that held Rol to the bed. “They came for him in the end, did they, the local cattle?”

“They burned our home. And Morin and Ayd they killed too.”

Psellos looked up at that. “I would not worry overmuch about golems, useful though they are. Your grandfather had a way with them, it’s true. My talents lie elsewhere.”

The poultice felt as though it were sinking through Rol’s chest, dragging his ribs down to meet his backbone. He grimaced. “Talents? I understand none of this. What did they kill him for-why did they hate us so? How are we different?”

Psellos’s strange eyes went dark. “That’s for another time, I think, when your guts have stopped leaking out of your belly. Rest for now-and do not try to rise or even raise your head. Do not touch the poultice.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“You cannot drink, not yet.”

“Why did she attack me-that girl?”

Psellos threw back his head and laughed. As he did, Rol could have sworn that for a moment a sharp, finger-thin tongue whipped out from between his lips. It was black.

“Ask her, if you dare. But if she had meant you to be dead, you can be sure you would be, blood of Orr or no. Sleep now, my bonny boy, and be thankful I came home when I did.”

He snapped his fingers with a crack, and Rol slept.

Movement on his chest woke him, something warm and heavy slithering there. Frozen by fear, he felt the thing crawl off him, plump onto the bed, and then land with a slap on the floor. His shaking hand felt the place where the girl had stabbed him. It was covered in some manner of slime, and there was a ridged scar, but the wound had closed. He felt clear-headed, incredibly thirsty. The room was dark, save for the guttering stump of a single tallow candle by the bed.

Rol sat up, and immediately a shadow came out of the corner and a cool hand shoved hard against his breastbone, pushing him supine once more. It was the girl, Rowen. He felt his heart thudding under her palm as she held him down. Her hair was hanging dark as a raven’s wing over one eye; the other seemed almost to take on the yellow hue of the candlelight. She was older than he had thought, not a girl but a full-grown woman, his senior by ten years at least. There were shadows under her eyes, fine lines running from the corners of her nose to her mouth. Her lips were dark as a bruise, and on the back of the hand that pinioned him, blue veins stood out stark against the pale skin. Rol was strong for his age, his muscles hardened by work at sea and on land, but he realized that the strength in her slim arm was greater than his own.

All the same, she seemed to him one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.