The Arcana: Shadow Wars, Codex I

Chapter XXII

In the Tower

In which a soldier faces the error of his ways

Alia’s heart somersaulted, and her hands shook as she ran the Ellura again. The auras of Aunt Nalini and the two women were suffused with terror, in shades of greys and steely blues. Something had frightened the three of them. Then, all at once, the answer came to her.

The shades!

Oh Huntress help her, of course. Not only would her aunt and the women have seen the ghosts, but they also may have encountered the horsemen she’d sent fleeing. Her second boundary included this part of the park; the shades could have come this far.

But why was Aunt Nalini afraid? What happened to her to make her weak enough to fear either shades or man? The Ellura revealed a muddled grey aura, an indication Aunt Nalini was not well. Whatever the Handmaiden had done to her, it left her vulnerable enough to know fear.

When she ran the Ellura over the slope, and along the trail, a picture emerged: The women had attempted to flee, but were intercepted by the bearers of auras from the same side of the lane as the tower.

Alia stared down the confusion of footprints in the dirt lane. Footprints which ended with the wooden doors of the tower. Her fingers tightened on her reins. Aunt Nalini was trapped within that mass of cold stone.

As were their enemies.

But allies also, perhaps.

The latter meant she would not be alone when she made her move. Every instinct told her Aunt Nalini needed her now; attempting to fetch Sheridan and Tregarde would expend time she did not have.

Alia glared at the door. Though neither dryad nor sorceress, she still enjoyed options, as a priestess. What she faced was an ordinary door with an ordinary lock; the Ellura confirmed it so. Wood, not iron. Options, therefore. Clutching her amulet, she focused all of her will upon the door.

“I curse you now, in the name of the Huntress. A seed you once were, dead you are now, and like the dead, you shall wither!”

Smokeless. The door crumbled to ash in a smokeless heap, which fascinated Alia on the rare occasions she invoked the curse. No scent of burning, either. Iron fittings and hinges clattered to wooden floor of the anteroom. Wincing, Alia waited to see who would respond to the noise. When no one arrived, she steeled herself and stepped over the threshold.

A lone candle kept the anteroom dimly lit, showing a single door leading to the inner tower. The bare room held only a scrap of a rug and an iron chandelier overhead, which held the lone candle. A plain, serviceable room.

Looks could be deceiving.

Alia put her hand to her pistol, in its scabbard on her belt. Then she shook herself, remembering the holy salt in the circle. The women must have anticipated encounters with arsha’tûm or other Erebossi. They used their salt to successfully repel jackals, a strong indication the jackals must have been possessed. How much more warning did she need?

Am I in the lair of the queen?

Alia shivered, and drew her moonbow-steel knives instead. The opalescent sheen on the blades reassured her an arsha’tûm wasn’t close at hand, for the blades would have glowed with a white halo if so. She exhaled, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.

Re-sheathing her knives, she stepped forward. Her stomach plunged, along with the rest of her as the floor dropped from beneath her. A void appeared below her feet. Pure darkness hurtled towards her. The scream barely escaped her throat before everything went black.

Darkness. And pain. And cold. Not just beneath her, but all around. Alia clenched her teeth and tried her best to keep from shivering; it would only aggravate the pain.

I have got to stop waking up like this, she scolded herself. Agony radiated from her hip, shooting up the entire left side of her body, and screaming out more acutely on her left arm. Ah, so she had landed on her side.

Alia gingerly rolled onto her back. She let out a quiet exhale as a wave of pain came over her. When the wave ebbed she allowed herself to probe her arm and hip. Nothing broken, thank the Huntress. Exhaling again, she began to psych herself up to rise from the stone floor. Her every move was slow, deliberate, and required her to ride out subsequent waves of pain.

When at last she gained her feet, she massaged her arm and assessed her situation.

She had fallen through a trap door.

A conclusion that left her marveling and bewildered all at once. Why place a trap door in the antechamber? A dim light glowed in the distance, enough to let her see she was not in a prison cell. Rather, she seemed to be at the end of a corridor, a long one, judging by the distance of the light.

Trepidation grew inside her. Had she fallen into a room, a prison cell, the trapdoor would make sense. But a corridor? Perhaps the trap door hurled her into a dungeon with terrifying sentinels…

Her Ellura remained unbroken, and Alia said a prayer of thanks to the Huntress before she activated it. The Ellura assured her nothing magical lurked in the hall. Traps could be mechanical, though, just like the trapdoor. The faint glow up ahead may be enticement into another trap. However, the glow of the Ellura’s lights told her she must go forward. Remaining in place would allow a patrolling sentinel to corner her.

For a moment Alia tried to decide if she should let the Ellura light her way, and thus announce her approach to whoever might be at the end of the hall, or take the chance that she could move stealthily down the hall.

But common sense reasserted itself. Her screams as she fell would have alerted the denizens of the dungeon to her presence. Surprise was not an option, what mattered now was reaching the light ahead in one piece.

Pain dogged her steps, as did her fear, but Alia refused to step more than one foot ahead at any time. At least she treaded soundlessly, in keeping with what her mother and aunts taught her.

The thought stopped her cold for a moment. Shahin’s words echoed in her mind. Was it true that dryads didn’t foster humans into adulthood? Did Samara keep her solely out of affection? Or was it because Alia proved herself an apt pupil in their training of her in the ways of the Exalted Mother?

Or another reason altogether?

Aunt Nalini would know. She would talk.

As she walked, Alia forced herself to remain calm. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. When calm washed over she turned her attention to her surroundings. In this place of all places, she must keep her wits about her.

At long last she reached the light, an oil lantern as it turned out. One which marked the end of her corridor, and the beginning of another. More lights punctuated this next path.

And cells.

Iron bars lined the left side of the hall. Did one of them contain her aunt?

Alia crept along, keeping to the same caution she’d been using down the first hall. Thick layers of dust covered the floors of every cell; no one had been inside them recently. As she passed each cell she counted, excitement and fear battling within her with each one she looked into.

But at last she came to it.

Someone had not quite done their research.

This cell used a door and a floor of iron, a sensible precaution for imprisoning a dryad: they governed the wild and uncultivated, not that which had been wrought by humans.

But stones were within a dryad’s power, and just as Alia had withered the door, Aunt Nalini could pulverize stone. The people who imprisoned her here thought the iron bars would check her power. But a heap of gravel told the tale: here remained the stones which once held the iron. Here also lay the door, fallen against one wall.

Aunt Nalini had been captive here. She’d possessed enough strength to effect an escape, but not enough to secure it.

Alia trembled, this time in rage. Any dryad could shake the ground, summon a snowstorm in midsummer, and change a dragon to an insect to be squashed beneath her feet.

But that was before the blight. Before the sorcerers poisoned the grove. Before the infernal queen set her followers against the daughters of the Huntress.

She prayed, “Dear Huntress, I beg of You: give me the strength to kill every servant of Your enemy. Make my hands swift, my eyes sharp, and my aim true.”

A sound answered her, making Alia nearly jump out of her own skin.

Clank clang. Clank clang. Clank clang.

Armored feet against stone. Alia drew her daggers, and stepped into the cell. She didn’t have to wait long. Soon enough the bearer of the armor came into view. An ordinary man, armored like the soldiers she’d dealt with earlier. With a swing of her arm his head went rolling to the floor, making quite the racket as his helmet met the stones. She didn’t need him at her back while she searched the dungeon, and no one who dared to imprison a dryad would deal gently with a priestess of the Huntress, either.

His heavy corpse obliged her to drag, kick, and finally shove his body into the cell. Last she tossed his head upon the cot. Hopefully, his fellow guardsmen would not discover him right away, which should buy her time.

Now she waited, alert for other sounds. No footsteps echoed, so she continued on her way. However, a mix of auras was confusing the Ellura, and she sighed. Until now, she believed the Ellura No. 8 to be cutting edge, but now she saw room for improvement. The Ellura company loved it when she sent them after action reports about how their products performed in the field. Time for her to make a few feature requests for an Ellura No. 9.

At least the confusion of new auras did not prevent the Ellura from remaining locked on the original two auras she was tracking.

The mysterious women were here. Deeper within, but here.

The Ellura led her on. On occasion faint voices made their way to her ears, down corridors she hadn’t taken, but they were always great enough in number that she decided against confrontation. The Ellura’s clicks grew stronger, and Alia mentally put in for another feature request: a silent mode on the detector.

She turned it off; the voices she’d heard were growing louder, too.

Now had come the time for stealth.

The night was a disaster for Farrokh, captain of Protector Amavand’s Manticoran Guard. First, those damnable ghosts. To see the enemies he’d killed appear in that clearing—as if someone had reached into his nightmares and plucked out the thing he’d feared most. The shades were relentless, stalking him and his men tirelessly through the park. The ghosts didn’t cease to give chase, until—until they came to her.

They found a dryad in the woods. A dryad. Farrokh shook himself, silently begging the gods to take him as far from here as possible.

Protector Amavand had said—and the Handmaiden had said, that a human huntress sent the eagle to humiliate Protector Amavand during the festival.

“Catch her or kill her, but bring her here with all speed,” the Protector had commanded.

Which made sense.

The world was working as it should be.

But now, he wondered. Rumors echoed in his mind. Rumors he once carefully ignored, about the dryads. For some incomprehensible reason the Protector was obsessed with dryads. Incomprehensible it would forever be, because asking for clarity meant becoming one of the Disappeared.

Farrokh had been willing to play along; he was a soldier of Elamis and he’d sworn loyalty to the protector of Elamis. Until death, he would keep his oath.

But the whispers he heard, the quiet palace rumors, hinted dryads possessed a power beyond caring for trees. Memories flickered, and half-remembered legends came to the forefront of his mind. One in particular stood out sharply when he saw her.

When dryads crossed paths with ghosts, said the legends, they would take it upon themselves to guide the lost souls to Erebossa.

When he saw the dryad, it dawned on him that if they could ferry the dead in one direction, they could ferry them in the opposite direction as well.

Shudders rippled along the length of his body. The Eitanite cocked her head at him, snapping him out of his reverie. The foreign woman claimed she was not a huntress, yet she carried the same knives wielded by the Huntress, forged of precious moonbow steel. Furthermore, she had cut down several of his men with those knives … and she’d been with the dryad.

A daughter of the Huntress.

Too many coincidences.

And when the ghosts faded to nothingness at a word from the dryad, it was all he could do not to fall to the creature’s feet then and there.

You should have, the voice in his head told him. Her voice? His own?

For months now he’d felt as if doors were slamming shut, and walls were closing in. Traps and snares yawned ahead. He felt as if a knife were poised behind his neck. Tonight, tonight he would pay for his loyalty to the lord of Elamis. He felt it in his bones.

“They’ve contacted the Handmaiden,” Rewniz said, coming back into the room. “She will come.”

“Shut the door,” Farrokh said quickly.

As a boy, he could not sleep unless he knew the monsters were all shut out of his bedroom. In those days he would contemplate barring the door, except he worried he was trapping himself inside with the monsters, if they should materialize. A perverse mirth bubbled inside him, but he managed to keep from laughing. Would his boyhood instincts save him now? He resisted the urge to ask Rewniz to lock the door.

The dryad was in here with them, after all.

She eyed him balefully, from her position on the floor. Farrokh’s men took care not to touch her. She’d only come with them peacefully because Farrokh had been smart enough to promise to find a healer for the pale foreigner, who did not carry Huntress knives at all.

But the dryad was not appeased.

At her command, his horse threw him off; so also were his men thrown from their horses. Worse, the horses fled, in the opposite direction of the palace. Would they run all the way out of the city, and into the desert?

“If you would have my mercy, you will kill the ones who come through that door,” the dryad said to them, in a voice as cold as winter. She pointed to the tower, and dismay grew in Farrokh’s heart.

Obedience was not so simple—the Handmaiden’s apothecary had been one of those who exited the door. Farrokh trembled to think of how she’d react when she learned he’d killed her manservant.

But the dryad was here, right now, and she had commanded the horses to overthrow their riders and they did, and she had commanded the dead to go back to Erebossa, and they did.

Let the Handmaiden confront her, he told himself. Let’s see if she would do better.

Dread would not leave his stomach. He could think those words, but not say them aloud.

Rewniz was talking, addressing himself to the women.

“Are you them?” he demanded, favoring first one then the other with a forbidding glare. Farrokh noticed he did not dare look at the dryad.

Rewniz raised his voice, repeating the question. The women looked at each other, but did not appear impressed by Rewniz. They focused on the dryad instead.

“I don’t think they speak our language,” Farrokh said, affecting a bored tone.

Rewniz blinked, considering it. “Oh right. Protector Amavand said they would be foreigners.” He gamely tried Pelasgian.

The Eitanite looked at him.

“Perhaps explain what you mean by ‘them,’” Farrokh suggested.

He kept an eye to the door. If he left the room … how fast could he walk? He’d have to walk away with just what he wore on his back. He couldn’t even risk going home for a change of clothes or to get supplies suitable for a trek through the desert.

Would it be better to die of thirst, or from the sting of any wild manticores he’d encounter out there?

How could it be worse than what the Handmaiden would do to him? Or what the dryad would do to him?

And as for the dryad, her peaceable behavior aroused only suspicion and terror. Why was she quiescent? Did she need to gather her strength to open a portal to the Abyss? Would she throw him into it?

Rewniz expanded his inquiry to the women. “Are you the ones here to kill Protector Amavand?”

The pale one replied, “Little man, if we were planning to kill your leader why would we tell you?”

Rewniz flinched, rocking back on his heels slightly. The woman and her Eitanite companion loomed over him when they were standing, but even sitting down she still seemed to look down her nose at him.

“Our job is to hold them, Rewniz,” Farrokh said, in Anshani. He glanced at the dryad, a silent reminder she could speak Anshani. For all he knew she could speak every language humans spoke.

Farrokh continued, “Let the Handmaiden deal with them.”

Rewniz rounded on him. “Do you think we will survive this night if we don’t give the Handmaiden a reason to think well of us? After tonight’s debacle—”

“What debacle?” Farrokh interrupted. “We’ve captured the one who humiliated Protector Amavand. Who else could have sent that eagle at this time of night? Who else could make the eagle refuse to obey our beastmaster? The dryad did these things, and she is here. We’ve carried out our orders.”

“And killed the Handmaiden’s men,” Rewniz reminded him. “We killed them in obedience to the very enemy she told us to find. So you tell me, seriously, how is that supposed to go for us? Think the Handmaiden will overlook that?”

“We have the dryad. And two foreign women caught with the dryad,” Farrokh insisted, more to convince himself than Rewniz. “And if the Handmaiden asks, the women killed her men. Simple as that.”

“The truth-seers?”

Oh. Them. Well. Farrokh shrugged. The Handmaiden would employ torture for her interrogation, not seers, would she not? An example would need to be made of the foreign women, and to be gentle with them would invite scrutiny. The would-be murderers of Protector Amavand would be publicly humiliated and executed.

But the dryad…

All knowledge of her would be ruthlessly suppressed. In the first place, no one would accept killing the daughter of the Huntress. In the second place, the dryad’s involvement would only strengthen the meaning of what the eagle did with the diadem.

The meaning…

At last Farrokh knew why he was scared. Not because of the Handmaiden. Rather because the daughter of a goddess had seen fit to repudiate the protector and bring the dead against his men. The dead that those men had slain on behalf of their lord. No matter what the Handmaiden would claim, that had to mean something.

Upon death, the Abyss awaited him.

This was the end to which he’d brought himself. Not honor, not glory in life, nor triumphant entry to the Everlasting Lands in death.

A lump rose in his throat.

After an eternity, he managed to articulate an answer for Rewniz.

“I give you leave,” Farrokh said, surprising himself by speaking in a firm voice.

Rewniz did a double take. “Leave?”

“I am the captain,” Farrokh said. “All that has happened is my responsibility, and I will bear the consequences. If you aren’t here when the Handmaiden arrives, you—you may yet live. Go now, Rewniz. Leave this city if you can.”

He wanted to tell the man to go to a temple, any temple, and throw himself at the mercy of the gods. But to say that aloud would cost him what little remained of his strength of will.

Rewniz’s lips tightened, a sure sign of his impending mulishness. He was stubborn, was Rewniz, but he was not even Farrokh’s right-hand man. The young man only came to the guard because of his father’s influence, not his own talents. His modest abilities ensured he did not sit high enough in anyone’s council to be so tainted as Farrokh.

Maybe. Hopefully.

“I order it, Rewniz. Go now.”

Rewniz shifted his weight on his feet. He kept looking back and forth from the women to Farrokh, and with the barest of glances, to the dryad.

“Where am I to go?”

“To our shahanshah.”

The only one who could offer him protection from the Protector of Elamis. Maybe. Maybe the high king employed priests and sorcerers who could handle this so-called goddess the Handmaiden served. There would certainly be no hope, no help for him here.

Rewniz started to speak, when Farrokh quickly added,

“You had best go before the city’s gates close for good. If you go now, while you wear the armor, you will be allowed to pass without question. But you must go now.”

At last Rewniz moved. He threw open the door, but glanced back at Farrokh. His lips moved, but what came out was a sharp gasp. The young soldier’s body stiffened, and his eyes rounded in astonishment and alarm. He looked up at Farrokh, silently beseeching him, before turning his head to something in the hall.

Time stopped. Farrokh froze. Only his heart still moved, and for how long? Was the Handmaiden—?

Then Rewniz took one step back, allowing Farrokh to see the long blade planted in his chest, and the gloved hand holding the handle.

Farrokh inhaled.

She heard everything, she will—

She crossed the threshold. It took Farrokh several seconds to get past the implacable fury on her face to realize there was something wrong with her appearance. Her arms were sheathed in a strange material he didn’t recognize, but he did recognize their forest green color and their falconer’s shape. The gleaming gold armlets carved to suggest an eagle’s wing, the amulet…

Oh by the gods, Farrokh thought, glancing at the dryad. This woman was not the Handmaiden, after all. But he didn’t feel any safer when he realized what she was.

A huntress.