Night of Knives

EPILOGUE

At his cripple’s pace Edgewalker struggled across the chamber of slanted walls dark as vitrified night. He followed a path smeared through a finger-bone’s thickness of otherwise undisturbed dust. The trail ended at two prone men, motionless as the dust itself. He paused, stared down at them for the longest time as if searching for signs of life.

‘What in the Word of the Nameless Ones do you want?’ croaked one.

Edgewalker inclined his head in a shallow bow. ‘Greetings and welcome, Lord, to Shadow House.’

The one who had spoken sat up. Aside, as if to a third party, he offered the tired flick of two fingers of his left hand. Edgewalker turned to his rear where a twin to the other man now stood with barred blades. As he shifted to study the shape on the floor, it shimmered from sight.

The sitting one giggled. ‘My apologies. Old habits. You are?’

‘Edgewalker.’

The man nodded thoughtfully. ‘Ah yes. I recall the name. You are mentioned… here and there.’

The man raised an arm. ‘Help me up… ah, that is… Cotillion.’

The weapons in Cotillion’s hands disappeared and Edgewalker saw that in fact they had not been true weapons at all but the shadows of weapons, and that from now on these two might create whatever they wished from the raw stuff at their disposal.

Standing, the man hardly reached Edgwalker’s breast. Hunched and grizzled, he gave the appearance of an old man, yet his movements betrayed no hesitancy. He glanced about at the slanted angular dimensions of the chamber and grimaced his distaste. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘Not to my liking at all.’ He waved and the chamber blurred, shifting. Edgewalker now found himself standing in a keep’s main hall. Stone flags lay beneath his bare feet and a stone hearth flamed at one wall. Above, blackened timbers spanned the darkness. The man cast a sharp eye right and left then nodded, pleased with himself. ‘That will do. For the nonce. Now, Cotillion, care to make a turn about the Realm?’

‘What of this one?’

‘Ah. Edgewalker. You may be our guide.’

‘I think not.’

The old man paused, blinking. ‘I’m sorry. You said…?’

‘I do not take your orders.’

A walking stick poked Edgewalker at his chest. He could not quite recall exactly when it appeared in the old man’s hand. ‘Perhaps I should summon the Hounds to tear you limb from limb.’

‘They would not do so.’

‘Truly? Why?’

‘Because we are all kin. Slaves to Shadow.’

The old man peered closely at him, raised his brows. ‘Ah, I see. You have been taken by Shadow. You are a slave to the House. Very well. I shall allow you your small impertinences. But remember, while you are slave to Shadow, I command Shadow. Remember that.’

Edgewalker said nothing.

The old man leant both his hands on the silver hound’s head of his walking stick. He and his companion Cotillion faded from view, like proverbial shadows under gathering moonlight, until they disappeared, eventually, from sight.

Edgewalker turned and limped from the House. Out upon the open plain he struck a direction towards the featureless horizon. Dust-devils dogged his heels. How many times, he wondered, had he heard that very same conceit from a claimant to the Throne? Would they never learn? How long, he wondered, would this one last? Why was it none of the long chain of hopefuls ever bothered to ask why the Throne should be empty in the first place? After all, perhaps there was a reason.

Still, this one’s residence should bode new and interesting times for Shadow. He should be thankful to these men, for in the end the one thing their presence might bring to the enduring eternity of the Realm was the potential for change and thus, the continuing possibility of… progression.

The strange thing looked like nothing the boy or his sister had ever seen or heard of before. Out crabbing during the evening low tide they came across it wedged between limpet-encrusted rocks, half buried in sand. Against his sister’s silent urgings to move away, the boy used a stick to prod the pale shape.

‘It’s a man drowned,’ whispered the girl, hushed.

‘No,’ the boy answered, scornful of his sister’s knowledge of fishing, or anything else for that matter. ‘It’s scaled. It’s a fish.’

The girl peered down to where her brother knelt, and the pale shadowed length at his feet. Its glimmer in the fading light reminded her of the glow she sometimes saw at night along the edge of waves. To tease her brother, she asked, ‘Oh? What kind of a fish is it then?’

The boy’s face puckered with vexation at the silliness of girls’ questions. ‘I don’t know. A big one. It sure stinks like a fish.’

The smell was undeniable. Yet the girl remained uneasy. She thought she saw the glint of an eye, watching them from behind a tangle of seaweed at one end of the body. Hoping to scare her younger brother away from the thing, she whispered, ‘It’s a corpse. A drowned man. Come away or his ghost will haunt you.’

The boy glared back. ‘I’m not afraid.’

The girl did not answer, for behind her brother the pale shape moved. An arm, lustrous in the dark, slipped from under it. The seaweed fell back from a face of angular, knife-like lines holding molten golden eyes.

The girl screamed. The boy shrieked as a cold hand clasped his ankle. Both screamed into the empty twilight while the thing’s mouth moved, its message obliterated beneath their combined cries. Then the thing released the boy’s ankle.

Sobbing, the boy scrambled away on all fours, his sister tugging upon his tunic, urging him on, as if he were yet held back. Behind them the shape collapsed among the shadows of the rocks.

After sunset a single torch approached the rocks. The incoming tide slapped and splashed among their black, glistening teeth. Torch held high, an old man eased his way through the pools and gaps. His long hair and beard shone white, whipped in the contrary winds. At the shore, a glowing lantern revealed brother and sister, hands clasped together.

Methodically, the old man advanced. He swept the torch before him, down into crevasses between boulders and low over the rising water. He turned back to the children and called, ‘Here?’

‘Farther out,’ the girl answered in a near gasp.

The old man drew a knife from his belt. Its blade was thin, honed down to a sickle moon. He exchanged torch and knife from hand to hand, then edged farther into the tide. Standing waist-deep in the frigid water he decided that he had gone out quite far enough. He would step up onto the last remaining tall rocks standing like a bastion before the waves, then return to tell his grandchildren that the ghost had fled back to its salty rest.

Sister and brother watched their grandfather pull himself awkwardly up the very tall rocks amid the spray of the gathering tide, then disappear down into their recesses. They waited, silent, neither daring to speak. It seemed to the girl that her grandfather had been gone a very long time when her brother cleared his throat and whispered haltingly, ‘Do you think it got him?’

‘Shush! Of course not,’ the girl soothed. But she wondered, had it? And if it had, what would they do? Where could they go? The town? Pyre was a day’s walk away. And besides, what help would come from there?

The girl was brought back to herself by her brother’s hissed intake of breath, his chill damp hand tightening on her own. She looked up to see the ghost lowering itself down from the boulders. But it was not a haunt because it carried a torch and no ghost would carry one of those, no matter how potent a shade it might be. Watching her grandfather gingerly feel his way from rock to rock, a new, disturbing thought occurred to her: even though their grandfather was safely returned, how could she ever be sure the ghost hadn’t got him? For haunts, she had heard from many, were notoriously slippery things, and who could say what had happened out there in the darkness, hidden among the rocks and foam and sea?

When her grandfather stepped up out of the surf, smiling, he teased her brother. The spirit, he said, was long gone back to his home in the sea. The girl knew he was lying. The ghost had got him. She saw it in his eyes — something new that had not been there when he left them. Her brother was too young to see. It was there and did not go away even as he told them that sea-spirits might visit the shore from time to time, but that they all must return to the deeps, just as this one had. She nodded but was not fooled. She would keep a close eye on him.

Walking home the old man took no notice of his grandson’s tight grasp of his hand, or of his granddaughter’s thoughtful face as she trailed behind with the lantern. He saw instead the churning amber eyes of the man from the sea with hair like weeds — the Stormrider. The Rider had spoken to him and to his amazement he had understood. It had spoken a halting Korelan, the language of the isles south of the Cut where the Riders and Korel inhabitants continually warred over the Stormwall — the human-raised barricade that stands between land and sea. His own grandfather had claimed the family had come out of Korel ages ago, and had taught him bits and pieces of the tongue when he’d been a lad, enough to understand the Rider’s own crude mouthing of it. It made sense to him that the Riders should simply assume that Korelan was the human tongue.

Lying half-dead in the foam the Rider had asked a question — a single simple question that triggered an avalanche of inquiry in the old man’s thoughts.

‘Why are you killing us?’ the Rider asked, and he had stared, thinking the alien must not understand what he was asking. Us killing them? They were the demons that cracked ships open and sent men to their doom. But three more times the Rider asked before he’d managed to steel himself sufficiently to reach down close enough to draw his blade across its throat. He would never forget his surprise as the Rider’s blood gushed warm and red over his hand.