Chapter 3 #2
Another courtyard appeared ahead, but this one belonged to a building shaped like a U. Spires and battlements lined the top, and stained glass stretched along the middle interior. A half-dozen people stood in a semi-organized assembly outside the doors, ushering people in with frantic waves.
“Go, go.” The woman pushed him forward. Hands from all sides shoved him away from the road and her. Moments after he stumbled inside, the deep, slow moan of doors closing followed, and the thunder of their resounding slam rumbled as a huge metal bolt crashed.
Jesstin tried to tell people about the woman, that she was still out there with those... those... Well, they weren’t people, were they? But no one would listen, or maybe it was that they couldn’t hear him.
Tall as he was, he could see the whole of the place and was stunned speechless.
There were hundreds of individuals packed into the building, which was probably the cloister Mon had told him about.
The interior was eerily similar to the Night Soul, but there were sofas and blankets and tapestries, and the scent of ales and bread gave it a homey feel.
No. It was the Night Soul—or close enough it made him momentarily forget how scared he should be.
Silence descended upon the room in one frightening instant.
Outside, the wraiths began screaming. So, so many of them, howling.
Women and children and men huddled in small masses, their eyes glossed and wide.
A few milled about unbothered, picking at the food selection and casually sipping their drinks.
“The fiends do this for about an hour.”
Jesstin flagged in relief. It was the woman who’d led him to safety, craned up on her toes to reach his ear.
“They’ll return before lightrise, but as long as you’re in here, you’re safe.”
“You made it,” he replied. She was a stranger, but was also the nearest thing to someone he did know, having been abandoned by Mon.
“Everyone did,” she said. After a guarded look at the doors, she added, “tonight.”
“Why did you help me?”
Instead of answering, the woman moved away from the crowd and nodded for him to follow her between two columned pillars.
A low, thumping music with a rhythmic beat—tabors, sackbuts, maybe vielles—picked up from the other side of the cloister, and the people hiding filtered away from each other and toward the center of the main hall, where they danced.
Neither the music nor the movements were like any he’d heard or seen in any tavern he’d frequented, but he felt the collective call to tap his feet, to move his body.
Voices cried out between beats, “The night is ours!”
“What is this place? This music?” Jesstin whipped his head around. “Why are they dancing?”
Her fingers gripped his chin and jerked his attention back to her. She had to yell to be heard over the music. “You know this place. Why?”
“What?”
“Tell me.”
“It only looks familiar.” He was still feeling the foreign cadence of the music’s rhythm. The instruments shook the floor and drowned out most of the monsters’ roars.
“What I tried to tell you in the Nemus was that your sword will do nothing for you here. The fiends are impervious to physical harm. It will only weigh you down.”
“I asked why you saved me, and you didn’t answer.” Jesstin waited for two men to go by. The music’s strange, hypnotic bass pulsed between his ears. “You risked your own neck to help me out there.”
Her eyes creased in offense. He’d seen that same look before. “What a curious expression of gratitude.”
Jesstin relaxed. “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t random or selfless.” She stretched her shoulders back. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Jesstin inclined downward. He hadn’t heard her right over the music. “What? Waiting for who?”
“He said one would come who knew the way. Who could help her.”
Another round of The night is ours! rippled across the cloister, rolling through boisterous laughter and whoops of enjoyment, like there weren’t disturbing creatures stalking their courtyard. “You’ll need to explain this as though I’m as stupid as you thought I was in the forest.”
Her blue eyes smiled before her mouth. The way she tucked her golden-red hair behind her ears was so cursed familiar that his breathing was no longer spontaneous.
It was then he knew. Before she said it at all, he knew.
“My name is Shioven. Aelloven’s mother. Her blood-and-bone mother. You see it, don’t you? I know you do.”
“I see it,” he croaked. “Same attitude too.” He was back in the sept, watching the blood bubble from Elloven’s lips.
His palms had found the truth first, feeling the beat of life within her slow and then stop as he was confronted with total defeat, a problem too far gone to solve.
Her last words had been a plea for him to leave, to save himself, when he’d been too late to save her.
She’d died thinking he believed she was exactly the person she’d made him promise not to see her as.
“Hateful, vengeful magic keeps me from her. Not only in that world but all worlds. Even in this world. I will never, ever see her again. She will never know the mother I could’ve been.
” She closed her eyes to wait for the tears to finish spilling, then blinked them away in annoyance.
“But there are things she needs to know now. Things she must know. She won’t hear them from someone she doesn’t trust.”
“Who told you I was coming?” A crash of beats and shouts made him forget what he was going to say next.
But she hadn’t heard him anyway. “You, necromancer, will deliver these truths, and when that is done, you will open the door that leads us all to our salvation... while you take another and return to the life awaiting you.” She gripped her hands in his.
“But in my heart, I hold on to another hope. A hope that until tonight seemed very foolish... and yet I see that you do know this place, the stones we stand upon, the moonlight breaching the glass—which means you have visited before. In other times or iterations, maybe, but you have been here.”
“It’s not the same place,” Jesstin replied. He was only half there with her, the rest of him holding Elloven’s lifeless hand. Go. Go now. “I’ve never been here.”
“What if it is the same place? What if it is?”
“It’s impossible.” Because if no one’s there to hurt little Elloven, then who is she? Do you even know? He’d never been so cruel, never. Not to anyone. Not even to those who had deserved it.
“You being here, alive, should be impossible too, so how can you be so confident I’m wrong?”
The more he stood there, hungover from the horrors outside and in the presence of a woman he’d never met but knew all the same, the more likely it seemed she was right.
How the Night Soul and this cloister in the netherworld were connected, though, was not a question he had the energy for.
“And if I’m right, then this irrational hope may not be so irrational after all.”
“And what’s that?” Jesstin yelled over the music, his eyes pounding behind his lids. He’d done it. He’d entered Infinita Mori, was still alive, and was standing with Elloven’s mother. Her mother. He couldn’t help imagining Elloven’s endearing grin as she wiggled her fingers and whispered of fate.
“My hope...” Shioven leaned closer. “Is that if you can come and go, Jesstin, maybe the whispers are true, and maybe you can bring her with you.”
Elloven was unceasingly fascinated by the minutiae of the Infinitum that made her feel like she hadn’t gone so far from home, but also that she couldn’t be farther from it.
Her body seemed no different, though she knew her actual body would have been destroyed by now, which she tried not to think about.
The dead measured in miles just as her people had.
Everyone understood one another, regardless of their native language, and they maintained traditions and holidays.
They had jobs. There were carpenters, alchemists, physicians, and cooks.
Plenty of the food she’d eaten was familiar, even if she didn’t need to eat anymore.
Sleep had always been an escape for her, and it was again, as the fiends owned the night.
There were plenty of reminders she was not home though.
The garish, atypical color of the sky was one, especially as illumina transitioned to twilight.
The capriciousness of time and seasons had an order but not a rhythm.
The stones on the roads, not made of any rock she’d come across, seemed to change shape every time she looked at them.
And the forest... Well, it was alive and genuinely frightening.
The proliferate flora dripped fat blobs of their showy hues into the dirt on the roadside, which made her think whatever was inside would be so much worse.
And, of course, the shadows belonged to the simulcra and vigils.
She dragged the sharp end of a rock down the center line of some plump petals, using the short, gradual strokes she’d learned from others.
Yellow curls gathered on the log, which she carefully brushed into the tin cup she’d bartered a lock of her hair for.
Cups, she’d learned quickly, one of her first important lessons, were a privilege.
They held food and drink, neither of which was necessary for the dead, but still one of the few connecting threads that kept them from losing themselves to the delirium of a place whose only true consistency was how creatively it tried to destroy them.