Chapter 4
Late the next afternoon, when the sun was painting the mountain red, Brother Benzin walked into the meditation chamber to find a woman washing blood from her arms in the sacred font.
One of his tasks, at the end of each day, was to clear away the straw mats and clean the clay pots in which they burned incense.
It was a job he usually found relaxing. The scent of spiced rose oil clung to the room, and it was blessedly quiet, the view from the windows looking out over the interior gardens.
But at the sight of the woman, he felt a small measure of panic.
If they were due a visitor from outside, he had completely forgotten about it, and the Dawn Abbot had already retired to his room for the day.
Immediately, Benzin was thinking of where he might put the woman until he could rouse the abbot.
The day room, where they normally saw outsiders, was currently being used by Sister Rosea to sort through old robes.
His eyes just skipped over the blood, not quite taking it in.
‘Oh my goodness, forgive me, I had lost track of time.’ He bustled over to her, giving her his sunniest smile.
He didn’t rec ognize her as a relative of any of their current novices, and she was dressed most unusually for a pilgrim; a lush scarlet gown of silk and velvet, embroidered with leaping cats.
On her feet she wore golden slippers. He wondered how she had made it up the mountain path in such garments.
‘Were you here to see the abbot, my dear?’ Benzin glanced at the white marble font, the water in it stained pink, and then at the woman’s hands, now dripping wet.
Her nails were red. Disquiet bloomed just behind his breastbone.
He shifted his weight so that he would be able to move quickly if he needed to.
If she made a move for the door, he would stop her. ‘Did you come through the Red Gate?’
The woman was watching him with sharp, yellow-green eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said after a moment, ‘you’ll do.’ From a pocket in the skirts of her gown she produced a dagger with a curved blade, the golden hilt studded with rubies. ‘Lord, taste this death on your noble tongue so that I may bring your loyal acolytes to this distant place.’
Benzin moved instantly, calling on a lifetime’s worth of training without a thought, but even as his foot flew through the small space between them, his heel aimed squarely at the hilt of the dagger, the woman blazed with sudden ruby light.
His foot stopped some three inches from its target, curtailed by an invisible barrier.
In that brief moment, Benzin saw a kind of shield around the intruder, a construction almost like stained glass leaded with red fire, and then it was gone.
He almost fell, his balance thrown off by the unexpected collision, but he managed to keep on his feet.
The woman stepped forward briskly and thrust the blade into his guts, twisting it in a sharp movement that seemed designed to undo something inside him, and indeed he sank to the floor as though he were a puppet with severed strings.
Benzin clutched at his stomach, amazed at the heat of his own blood.
‘… No…’
Even through his pain and confusion, he caught the scent of something terrible and wild in the room.
Benzin lived with danger every day—it was his calling, to watch over the troubled souls of the Golden Tower.
But the presence in the meditation chamber felt beyond anything he had encountered from a Sleepless man or woman.
Whatever it was, this was a thing of wild appetite; a thing that could consume forever and never be satisfied.
And what it ate would be alive and screaming.
‘It’s done,’ the woman said. She wiped the blade on her exquisite gown, staining the golden threads red. ‘The monks of the Perpetual Morning are rare enough to please Him, I should think.’
From where he lay on the stone floor, Benzin saw the space around the woman waver and shimmer, like the air over a heated brazier.
There were shadows within the shimmer, figures that appeared to grow more solid even as Benzin’s vision grew dim.
There was a rustle of fine fabrics as the woman stepped over his body.
‘Quickly. We have a lot of work to do.’
Artair was out at the northern edge of the gardens, in the small place where the Sleepless buried their dead.
Chessun’s grave was marked by a piece of grey slate, his name and the date he arrived at the monastery scratched into it with a careful hand.
Someone, probably Reah, had placed a handful of yellow daisies on the raw earth.
He had known Sleepless who had died before—mainly through escape attempts—but it seemed impossible that cheerful, practical Chessun was gone.
Artair kept thinking of his friend’s eyes, how they had grown briefly paler when the spirit had taken him over, and the sharp look of fury that had narrowed them.
Chessun had never once been so angry, in all the years they had known each other.
It was a painful reminder of how unknowable the spirits were, and how dangerous. One slipup was all it took.
Artair reached down and touched his fingers to the cold slate.
‘Sleep well, Chessun.’
It was when he heard the birds singing that he realized just how unusually quiet it was.
The monastery was never a loud place, but it had its own subtle sounds that were the background tapestry of Artair’s waking hours: the ringing of the bells calling them in to eat, or meditate, or be locked away in their cells; the laughter of his fellow novices, the sound of them chanting or singing; the bellowing of the abbot when he had found something not to his liking.
But there was none of that. Only the high lonely call of a mountain buzzard somewhere far overhead, and closer, the chatter of the little black-capped sparrows that haunted their garden.
The bells for sundown, he realized abruptly, should have rung a good half an hour ago. He was already deep in shadow.
Artair stood up straight and looked back at the buildings.
He could see no one in the towers by the Red Gate, and no one else in the gardens or dawdling across the grass.
There was a single light burning from a window on the ground floor.
He had the sudden feeling that he was alone in the Golden Tower of the Perpetual Morning—but that was unthinkable.
Filled with a growing sense of disquiet, he began to walk across the gardens. Eventually, he began to run.
In the entrance hall he stepped carefully over a bowl of porridge on the floor, the clay shattered and the porridge smeared across the tiles by a booted foot.
Nearby, a chair had been overturned, but he found no monks and no Sleepless.
When he came to the room with the single burning lamp, he opened the door, half expecting to be chastised for being out in the gardens after dark, and instead found himself rooted to the spot.
‘Ah, here he is. I was starting to wonder where you’d got to. You can’t go far in this place.’
The woman who spoke was statuesque, a shock of white running through her untidy auburn hair.
She was in her fifties perhaps, and she stood tall and straight, one hand on the shoulder of Reah, who looked tiny and somehow drained next to her.
In the room were a number of other people, none of whom Artair recognized.
They wore black and red clothes, with silk masks over the lower halves of their faces, and many of them had knives in their hands.
There was a long, wide smear of blood on the floor, and there, at the end of it, a crumpled shape.
A body. Artair could see a hand lying against the flagstones, blood dotted across the palm, and he was almost sure it was Sister Rosea’s.
Hadn’t those hands wielded the scissors when his hair had gotten too long?
Hadn’t they passed him bowls of food, or mended the holes in his robes?
Artair swallowed hard, a knot of fear and sorrow in his throat. Nothing he was looking at made sense.
‘Who are you?’
The question seemed to amuse her.
‘I am Mother Maura of the Bloody Claw, child.’
‘A mage?’ Artair had heard of mages, of course, but he’d never seen one.
He tried to remember what he knew of the Bloody Claw, one of the twelve patron gods, and a series of worrying images leapt into his mind: blood, lethally sharp teeth, a lion.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t… where are the Brothers and Sisters?
The novices?’ His eyes skittered back to the body he was fairly sure was Sister Rosea. ‘What have you done to them?’
‘They’re gone,’ said Reah. Her voice wavered. ‘They’re all gone.’
‘What?’
‘This one is being overly dramatic.’ The woman calling herself Mother Maura shook Reah by the shoulder, as though they were great friends enjoying a joke.
‘Your fellow novices are perfectly safe, Artair, they’re just not in the Golden Tower of the Perpetual Morning any more.
Let’s be honest, it’s probably an exciting little treat for them. ’
‘You’ve taken them somewhere beyond the Red Gate?’ A new layer of dread settled over the panic churning in his stomach. ‘That can’t be. They’re—we’re Sleepless. We can’t be out in the world, it’s too dangerous.’
Maura chuckled warmly. ‘Oh Artair, you know very little about danger. Listen to me. Your fellow novices are not here. They are not anywhere on the mountain. They are in my sanctuary, Prideful Leap, which lies some distance to the north of Addersport. If you want to see them again—and I can have them back here in an instant—you will need to do a little job for me.’
‘She killed the others,’ Reah said flatly, as though Maura hadn’t spoken. ‘The abbot and Brother Elthem and Brother Benzin. All of them.’
Artair looked at the crumpled body on the floor. He found that he couldn’t speak.
‘It’s powerful magic, to move so many people so far, and the Bloody Claw demands his price.
’ Maura smiled. ‘Are you listening to me, Artair? Because it looks as though you are not, and let me be clear, the lives of your little novice friends depend on you paying attention. They are safe in my sanctuary at the moment, being cared for by my acolytes. But that could all change.’
With some difficulty, Artair lifted his gaze and looked Mother Maura in the eye.
‘What do I need to do?’
‘ There you are. That’s good.’ Maura tightened her grip on Reah, gave her another little shake and let her go.
A portal ringed in red light opened up behind the girl.
Through it, Artair could see another place entirely, a cavernous chamber of stone lit with guttering torches.
A shifting pattern of light on the ceiling suggested there was a pool of water somewhere out of sight.
There were stone steps in the background stained with something dark, and clustered in front of it were the other novices.
They looked lost and terrified, and just as Artair was thinking to run to them, Reah gave a small shriek as she was drawn back through the portal by an invisible force.
Artair saw the look of pain and shock that passed over the novice’s face, and then in a blink she and the portal were gone.
The hot stink of wild animal filled the room.
‘She’s at my sanctuary now too. I wanted you to see that, Artair, as I think it’s only fair you know what you’re dealing with. That you know the extent of my power.’
‘I do. I understand.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Please, tell me what I have to do.’
‘So pliant. So agreeable. How things have changed.’ Maura grinned. ‘What I need you to do, Artair, is go to the Jih Forest, which is conveniently located just below this mountain. I want you to go into that place and retrieve something for me.’
‘I can’t leave the monastery,’ said Artair, the words escaping his mouth before he even knew he was going to say them. ‘I am Sleepless.’
‘Do I need to show you the blood on these knives?’ Maura said sharply. ‘Do you need me to cut a few more throats today?’
‘No,’ Artair said hurriedly. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Good. You will go to the Jih Forest, and retrieve for me a keltraxia cub. Alive. That part is very important—a dead thing is of no use to me or my lord. Retrieve the cub and then bring it to me at Prideful Leap.’ Maura nodded to one of her acolytes, and they came forward with a tightly rolled piece of parchment, which they passed to Artair.
‘That,’ continued Maura, ‘is a map to my sanctuary and a description of the keltraxia—I don’t know what they teach you here, but I doubt it’s the true names of monsters—and another map that will show you the locations of several known keltraxia nests.
I could go and fetch the cub myself but, firstly, I do not want to, and secondly, the Queen of Serpents makes her home there, amongst her monstrous children, and it is well known that she does not tolerate mages, especially those dedicated to my lord.
So I need a good little monk to go and collect the creature for me.
I assume my instructions are clear, Sleepless? ’
‘Why do you need a monster cub?’
Mother Maura nodded thoughtfully, as though she had only just considered the question herself.
‘You know, Artair, I have plenty of your little novice friends, and it matters very little to me how many of them actually see this place again. How about we say, for every question you ask I will give one of them to the Bloody Claw? How does that strike you?’
Artair held himself very still.
‘I thought that might clear things up for you. Good. You will bring the cub to me before the next full moon, which is twenty days away. Arrive after the full moon and you’ll find a lot of dead friends. Do you understand what you have to do?’
Through the open window, Artair heard the call of a snow eagle, high and clear and lonely, and it seemed incredible to him. How was the world outside continuing to exist when his whole world had been torn apart?
‘I do,’ he said through numb lips. ‘I understand.’
Mother Maura nodded once, satisfied. She looked for a moment as though she were going to say something else, then shook her head slightly, apparently thinking better of it.
She reached into a pocket in her gown and removed a small glass globe filled with a shifting lilac light.
She threw it onto the floor where it shattered, and when she raised her hand, a ruby-red fire flowed over her and her acolytes, covering them in a bloody, heatless blaze.
There was a deep rumbling noise that made the hair on the back of Artair’s neck stand on end, and then the mage and the acolytes vanished, leaving him standing alone in the room.