Scream of Stone

11

14 Mirtul, the Year of the Gauntlet (1369 DR) Firesteap Citadel

Phyrea dreamed of a monster with a beautiful face.

A snake, but bigger than any she’d ever imagined. Its smooth, dry scales shimmered in the dim candlelight, throwing off sparks of every color. She watched it approach the foot of her bed. While one part of her mind tried in vain to assign its slithering form a single color, another part screamed at her to move, to leap from bed and flee.

But she couldn’t move. The satin and silk bedclothes were loose and warm around her, but still she felt as though they held her firmly against the mattress. She lay on her back, her neck propped up on her favorite pillow, her arms at her sides, palms down, as stiff and as heavy as the world itself. Her legs might have been made of stone. She could breathemore and more in rapid, panting gaspsand her eyes could move in her head, but even her throat refused to allow a cry for help. Instead she gurgled once, then began to breathe even harder, faster.

She looked at the door, still closed and locked, and hoped that Pristoleph would finally come to bed, that he would open the door, see the monster bearing down on her, and kill it before it could eat her, before it could enslave her mind, before it could ravage her still, helpless body. But the door remained closed, and no sound came from the corridor beyond.

The enormous snake stared Phyrea in the eye. Its face was that of a beautiful young girl, but with shimmering multicolored scales in place of youthful flesh. Hair that resembled the feathers of a bird pressed down on its scalp to just barely frame its perfectly-proportioned features. One side of its lips, tightly pressed together, curled up in a smile dripping with murderous glee.

Phyrea had to look away. Her eyes went to the thin windowan arrow loop, reallyand the starless night sky beyond. The sounds of the soldiers camped at the foot of the mighty fortress had long since quieted, and Phyrea knew she could expect no help from that quarter either.

Once again trying to speak, and once again having no luck, she turned again to face her attacker, but the monster was gone. In its place, shimmering with all the same colors, twinkling in the candlelight just the same, was the woman she had seen so many times since that fateful stay at her family’s country estate.

The greens and reds, blues and oranges, faded into a familiar uniform violet when the woman’s knee came down on the bed at Phyrea’s feet. She had never seen one of the ghosts make an impression in furniture before, though the little girl had taken to breaking things. Something about the way the bed dipped under her weight made Phyrea want to scream even louder than she had at the sight of the snake-thing.

“Don’t tell me you want to live,” the woman said, and Phyrea’s blood ran even colder in her already frigid veins. The voice echoed in her ears, not her mindshe was sure of it. “You can’t want to live.”

Phyrea opened her mouth toto what? To scream? To respond? To argue or agree? Even she didn’t know.

The woman crawled over her, straddling her prone, helpless form. Phyrea watched a tear well up in the woman’s left eye and trace a path of purple light down her cheek. The ghost grimaced and sobbed, and Phyrea felt tears come to her own eyes.

“I want you to know something,” the woman said, and the tear hung from the gentle curve of her chili. “I need to tell you what happened to me.”

Phyrea tried to shake her head, but couldn’t. The woman’s face hung above her, and the tear fell onto Phyrea’s chest. She felt ithot on her night-cool skin.

“It was a long time ago,” said the woman of violet light. “I remember that summer. It was the hottest summer I ever knew. People died in Innarlith that summer, and not only in the Fourth Quarter. They suffocated in their sleep, the air itself betraying them.”

Phyrea wanted to close her eyes but couldn’t.

“It was the Year of the Black Hound,” the ghost went onseventy-three years gone by, Phyrea thought. “It was the year of my greatest joy.”

Phyrea wanted to beg her to stop, but still she couldn’t speak. The woman’s right hand closed over Phyrea’s neck, the fingers warm and soft.

“She was born on the twenty-eightli day of Ches, on a warm spring day, to the sound of my husband’s joyful sobs, and the inviting happiness of our assembled family. The midwife gave her to me, her cry strong with the promise of a long life, and she nursed right away, and with healthy abandon. From my bedside my own mother told me I had waited three days to nurse, and all agreed it was a good sign. She was a good baby. A good baby.”

The woman’s other hand wrapped around Phyrea’s neck and with two hands she began to squeeze. Phyrea’s tears blurred the face of the ghostly woman, until only the soft violet glowand the voicewas left.

“She did everything early. She smiled, she laughedshe was my joy. She was my life. She was Anjeel. The world should know that her name was Anjeel.”

No air passed through Phyrea’s throat. She did everything she could to struggle, but there was no use. Her body had seemingly already diedperhaps that was it. Her stubborn, impatient mind was simply being helped along, was being forced by the ghost’s crushing fingers to follow her arms and legs to oblivion.

“It was that summer,” the woman went on. “That summer.

The heat. The stench from the Lake of Steam. One morning I went to the nursery”

The woman’s voice caught. Phyrea tried to gasp for air, tried to do anythingtried even to die more quickly, to just be done with itbut could only lie there. The woman’s grip on her throat tightened. Pain lanced through her, sending bolts of agony up through her face and into her temples. Her vision went dark then came back again and she could blink. The tears fell from her eyes and rolled down the side of her face, burning her skin they were so hot. She blinked again and the woman made of violet light had taken on solid form.

The dream ended. The dim candlelight was gone, replaced only by the ambient light from the campfires far below, and the dim embers from her bedchamber hearth. The violet glow was gone too, and the woman who sat atop her, whose hands were even then squeezing the last of the life from Phyrea, had a new face.

Her skin was dark brown, the color of freshly tilled soil, and her hair, slicked back tightly against her scalp was as black as the endless Abyssa black to match her cold, heartless eyes. Her clothes were a mix of black wool, black leather, and black silk, and the glint of steel betrayed a row of slim throwing knives sheathed along the length of a leather strap that went from her left shoulder to right hip.

She was no ghost.

Phyrea’s vision dimmed around the edges. Her lungs burned.

The door opened.

Torchlight flooded the room and the woman who was strangling Phyrea turned her head and tightened her grip at the same time. Phyrea was only dimly aware of a new fear creeping into her mind: that her head might come away from her shoulders before she was successfully throttled.

Phyrea heard something, but the part of her mind that could interpret words had gone dark. All that was left was a burning, desperate, but helpless need to take in a breath!

Her lungs filled with air, cool in her burning throat. The fingers had come away. She rocked and bobbed on the soft mattress, still only dimly aware of anything but her own breathing. She gasped and choked, sputtered and gagged as around her the bed shook, someone shouted, feet stomped on the wood floor.

Phyrea tried to sit up but couldn’t. She had one hand at her throat, feeling it spasm as it fought to replenish lungs that had been fully emptied of life-sustaining air. The paralysis was fading, but slowly, and just as slowly her consciousness returned.

She blinked and could see the woman standing at her bedside, her lithe form a study in shades of black. The assassin slipped a knife from the strap, which had been emptied of half the weapons Phyrea had seen before. She didn’t so much throw it as flick it and it seemed to simply disappear from her hand.

The grunt that followed was unmistakably Pristoleph’s.

“Close your eyes!” he barked. “Phyrea, close your eyes!”

She didn’t want to. She wanted to see him, but she did as she was told.

Fire washed over her. She felt and smelled her hair singe. There was a loud scream that at first Phyrea thought might have been her own, but her throat was still too raw, too tight to make a sound like thatnot a sound that loud, and so inhuman. The scream was like a dozen screams woven into one, a chorus of sounds from a single throat.

Phyrea opened her eyes and saw the woman. Smoke whirled around her, rising into the air from her shoulders, arms, and head. She didn’t seem to be burned when she turned to look Phyrea in the eye. What passed between them in that look was what must pass between a wolf and a sheep when the shepherd’s arrow finds its markanger, frustration, and a promise they would see each other again.

The woman slithered out the window, which from where Phyrea lay appeared far too thin to accommodate her, and she was gone. Too late, a sword blade rang against the stone windowsill, sending a spark out into the night.

The sword sliced back across the stone with a shower of tinier, short-lived sparks, and Pristoleph cursed. He didn’t spare the time to look out the window before he tossed the weapon to the floorboards and fell at Phyrea’s side on the bed. Blood soaked his dirty white tunic in at least three places.

“Phyrea!”

She coughed and made herself smile. He lifted her up, and though it hurt her at first to bend at the waist, the movement brought blood into veins that felt dried and brittle, and she was able to move a little more, just enough to put a hand on his shoulder, but not enough to keep it there.

He turned and shouted for Wenefir, and Phyrea let the darkness take her at last.