28. When Shadows Speak
The crossing was a single step that seemed to last a thousand years, yet no time at all.
One moment, the cold, wet hollow of the marches, and then, in the next breath, came nothing but stone.
We came out into a tunnel of it, something ancient and vast. The hint of a vaulted ceiling somewhere in the dark above.
The walls were choked with pale roots that had forced their way through the joints in the masonry over what must have been a hundred lifetimes.
Water dripped slowly somewhere, its echo magnified by the tunnels.
The air was cold, deathly still and smelled of old earth and even older stone.
A faint grey light came from everywhere, yet it had no source.
Instantly, I felt lost without Acelin, leaving only my own two feet to guide me.
My strength to continue was the precious weight in my arms as I carried her through this new hell.
Through the long curving tunnels with their broken arches and their dripping roots.
It looked like a place where even death dared not touch.
Yet deeper we travelled into a place that felt older than the world above.
But holding her kept me anchored to my own kingdom in a way that only ones fated ever could. I didn’t even feel her weight, not once, because there are some burdens a man’s heart simply refuses to let his arms call heavy.
As for Theron, he walked beside me, silent now, watchful. His cockiness gone entirely. Whereas Aster and Lazaros came behind with blades half-drawn, the sound of our boots the only sound in all that vast and waiting dark.
A darkness that found us long before we saw them. One moment, the tunnel stood empty before us, and the next, it didn’t. They came out of the shadows as though they had been a part of them all along, a dozen blades levelled at our throats.
It wasn’t exactly what I would call a warm welcome.
More startling yet was that they weren’t beings, at least not by my definition.
Or at least not any longer, for I had no idea what they once were or what the shadow realm had made them into, for they were something else entirely.
Every one of them was taller than they had any right to be, wreathed in living darkness that frayed at their edges into smoke.
So much so that I couldn’t have said where the warrior ended, and the shadow began.
Unsurprisingly, they all wore black like a second skin, ragged robes on some, tight wrappings on others, with deep hoods that swallowed their faces whole. Where I could see faces at all, they were masked or worse… they were simply absent. Like a smooth nothing where features should be.
And the eyes.
Gods, the eyes.
They burned out of the dark in colors that did not belong to anything living.
A cold gold here, a bruised violet there, a pair resembling the dead white of bones.
And not one of them blinked. Not one of them spoke.
The blades in their hands were made from solidified shadows, pointing at us so steadily that they looked frozen in time.
Aster went still as stone at my side, as surprisingly, even he had nothing to say, but it was Theron who stepped forward into the ring of levelled dark.
He did so with all the unbothered grace of a man arriving late to a feast held in his honor.
He spread his empty hands, and when he spoke, his voice carried down the vaulted dark with the weight of one crown addressing the servants of another.
“Be at peace, for we are no thieves, and no enemies of your master.” He inclined his head slightly in a king’s courtesy, and no more.
“I am Theron of House Chrysaor, King of the Badlands. We have crossed your threshold by blood freely given, as is the old law, and we seek an audience with your king.”
For a long moment, nothing moved. Instead, only eyes burned in the dark as their blades didn’t waver.
Then, somewhere far ahead in the dark, a low sound answered.
Not a voice, not quiet, but more the memory of one.
Hearing this, one of the shadow-warriors stepped back and turned towards the tunnel ahead.
A signal for it to suddenly open up in front of us, as fog as thick as a wall sank all at once into an abyss below.
Like a Rift, only this time, one led to what looked like,
The end of the world.
The cavern fell away before us into an immense, drowned gorge.
Far across it, rising sheer from a black cliff that plunged down into mist with no end in sight, stood the castle.
It clawed up out of the dark in a forest of spires, more than I could count.
Spires upon spires, slender and savage and impossibly tall.
Black stone, half gone gray with age, pinnacles like spear-points raised against a sky that was no sky at all.
It was more like a churning, starless storm.
Lightning moved in it without ever falling.
And every dark window in that terrible place seemed to be watching us as we came closer.
Somewhere behind those ten thousand windows waited the only creature in two worlds who could save her. My Queen. And there was no hell I wouldn’t walk through to make that happen. Which meant that I would walk into the dark and bargain with a legend to do it.
The shadow-warriors did not sheath their blades as we walked towards the castle. Which meant the meaning was clear enough… follow or stay and learn what the dark did to those who lingered, unwelcome within it.
A bridge spanned the drowned gorge, though I would not have honored it with the word.
It was a single span of that same black stone, incredibly narrow and without rails.
Its precarious surface was slick with a wetness that looked like it never dried.
And beneath it, there was nothing at all but the long grey fall into mist.
I carried Alexandra across it with my eyes fixed on the gates ahead and her heartbeat fluttering thin against my chest. I refused to look down as my father’s voice came to me for the first time in years.
Words of encouragement that always kept the fear at bay when I was a child.
The words would have been similar to, ‘Don’t look down, because a man who has decided to bargain for a life cannot afford to be reminded how easily the dark takes them. ’
The gates opened before we reached them, yet they were touched by no hand. They simply drew apart. Huge slabs of iron-bound black wood, taller than the walls of my own keep, which led us into the cold.
A single figure stood waiting for us in the hall beyond. He stood alone at the center of all that giant, frozen emptiness as though he had been waiting a very long time and would have gone on waiting a great deal longer without complaint.
He was tall and robed in black like all the rest, but where the warriors had been wreathed in restless shadow, he was unnaturally still. Eerily so.
But then, it was hard to focus on anything but his face, the likes of which I had never seen before.
Half of it was stone. Smooth, pale stone, white as old marble and grazed all over with fine cracks like a glaze gone to ruin.
The other half was not stone at all, but black, and porous.
A honeycomb of hollowed skin, torn into a dark and intricate rot as though something had eaten the flesh away.
And deep in that ruined face, two eyes burned like the pale gold of flickering candles.
He did not look like a living thing. He looked like a statue that had been broken open to show what festered inside it, and then, against all sense and mercy, taught to move.
A shape detached itself from the dark at the edge of the hall and crossed to him. A woman, or the memory of one at least. She was hooded, her face lost entirely in shadow, moving without ever seeming to walk. The trailing hem of her wrappings dissolving into smoke behind her.
She bent to the ruined marble ear and spoke, too low for me to catch a single word.
But I didn’t need the words. I saw the way her hooded head tilted back toward us, toward the threshold we had entered.
So I understood that she was telling him where we had been found, and how, and what we had paid to be standing here at all.
The pale gold eyes considered us a moment longer. Then he inclined his ruined head, the barest fraction of a bow.
“Follow me.” His voice was the slow grind of stone on stone. “The king is expecting you.”
He turned without waiting to see whether we would, leading us deeper into the cold.
If the castle had seemed formidable from across the gorge, it was worse within.
We passed through halls built to a scale never meant for men, more like that of giants.
The ceilings lost to the dark so far above us that I couldn’t have said whether they were vaulted in stone or simply opened onto that starless storm.
Pillars rose like the trunks of petrified trees, carved all over with script I couldn’t read and didn’t wish to, even if I could.
Stranger still, there were no torches. Only the light that came from nothing.
A faint, sourceless blue glow pooled in the hollows, leaving all the space between drowned in shadow.
The further in we went, the colder it grew, until my breath smoked before my face and frost gloved the stone beneath my boots.
I pulled Alexandra closer, a feeble attempt to warm her.
And there were faces in the dark.
I felt them more than saw them. Figures wreathed in living shadow standing motionless in every alcove and along every high gallery, watching us pass.
Their eyes caught that blue light and threw it back in cold pinpricks of gold, white and violet.
A whole court of them. An army of them even, yet none moved.
None spoke. They only watched, and the silence they kept was a threat in its own right.
The passage finally opened, and we came into the throne room of the Shadow King.
It was the size of a cathedral and looked like one built for gods. The floor was black glass, or black water frozen solid, I couldn’t tell. The polished surface mirrored the stormy, dark ceiling above, giving the illusion that we walked on the sky itself.
Two rows of carved pillars marched away into the gloom. And between them, at the far and distant end, a single shaft of cold blue light fell from somewhere high above and onto the only thing in all that emptiness worth looking at.
The throne.
Grown from the ground in a single twisting mass of black stone.
Or it might have once been root, bone, or both.
A twist of nature that had fused and knotted together, now clawing upward into a high savage crown of spikes and horns.
Each of which flung jagged shadows halfway up the wall behind it.
It was like a creature that had stopped, mid-snarl, the very moment before it devoured whoever dared to sit in it.
And clearly, there was one who not only dared but demanded it yield to his power, as a single masterful figure sat upon it and tamed its core with royal ease.
Our ruined guide crossed the great hall without a sound and took his place at the right hand of the throne, folding into stillness so complete that he might have been carved there.
The figure upon the throne rose. He stood without haste, reaching a height I wasn’t prepared for.
He was tall, taller even than Aster and built broad and powerful beneath robes that were not robes at all, but shadow worn like cloth. Black and bottomless and never quite still. The strange material stirred and flowed about him as though he stood waist-deep in slow black water.
A deep hood was drawn up, and beneath its edge I could make out only the lower half of his face. A hard, severe jaw, ashen skin the gray of old stone, a mouth set in a line that had plainly never once in its long life troubled itself to smile.
One shoulder bore a single piece of sculptured and spiked black armor.
Rings were clustered on one clawed hand, each tipped in a hooked black point, making them small weapons in their own right.
And where the shadow-robes parted, I could see the markings on the hard plane of his body.
Like swirling tattoos, coiling lines of living darkness moving slowly across grey skin as restless as smoke beneath a sheet of ice.
He raised a hand and pushed the hood back from his face, and I understood, then, why the old stories had never given him a face at all. Because no story could ever have captured it.
He wasn’t grotesque. If anything, he was strangely beautiful, which isn’t how I would ever have thought of describing another man, but it couldn’t be denied.
That was the obscenity of it. Beautiful, the way a drawn blade is beautiful, the way a storm over open water is beautiful.
A thing made to be looked at with admiration, and never, ever approached.
Severe, sculpted bones went beyond regal. Cheekbones that cut shadow into the hollows of his face, his skin around his eyes dark and bruised as though painted.
Long dark hair, bound back from his face in coils and woven locks, shaved at the sides of his skull, which were marked with those same crawling shadows. A few strands had fallen loose across one cheek, the only part of him that seemed real.
And his eyes. As his gaze moved over us, they kindled into a cold, depthless blue that seemed to burn brighter as something behind them stirred. And then from the bound darkness of his hair, fine threads of shadow began, very slowly, to lift and drift, as though even his fury wore a kind of grace.
He looked at us the way a man looks at insects that have found their way under his door.
And before any of us had even drawn breath to speak, he got there first. His voice rolled out across that frozen hall, low, cold and completely indifferent.
The voice of a creature who had never once in his existence been made to wait for anything.
“There is royal blood in this room.” His eyes moved over us, unhurried, weighing.
“A great deal of it. “And yet…” He paused with the faintest tilt of his head before continuing, “…only three kings stand within these walls.” Myself. The Gorgon, who I will at least credit with the good sense to announce himself.” That ice blue gaze settled on me, and I felt it like a hand laid flat against my chest before I was branded by only two words…
“And you.”