The Heir of Night (5 page)

The writing continued, but the remaining entries were all of Derai life on the Wall; eventually the handwriting changed, as though someone else had taken over the record. Heralds were never mentioned again in any detail, although Malian pored over the faded pages and tried several other volumes. It was tedious work and soon she was yawning steadily. Her eyes grew heavy and she kept jerking her head
back up after it nodded forward, thinking that she would read just a few more pages and then return to bed.

Malian woke to pitch darkness, lifting her head from where she had slumped forward over the book, and realized that the lamp must have burned out while she slept. Her heart was fluttering, high and hard in her breast, and the night was pressing in. She strained her ears, but there was nothing to hear, only a silence comprised of musty air and the tiny noises of the library. And then she did hear it, the thing that had roused her from deep sleep to instant, heart-pounding wakefulness. It was not an external sound but a voice, clear and certain in her mind. The voice spoke just one word, dropped like a stone into silence:
“Flee!”

3

K
alan was hiding from his fate in the broom cupboard on the lowest level of the Temple quarter. News of the Earl’s successful expedition had run through the keep and Kalan had wanted, suddenly and quite desperately, to be part of the camaraderie of the High Hall. He could not bear to sit down to his usual plain meal with the other novices and then return to an evening of dusting books in Brother Selmor’s study. His heart was hot with rebellion when he thought of the laughter and storytelling that would fill the High Hall—and that he was excluded simply because he had been born with the old powers. He had had to get away, to escape the everyday sameness of his peers; and although the cupboard, with its jumble of mops and brooms and buckets, was a poor alternative to the Feast of Returning, at least he could brood over his wrongs in peace.

“It isn’t fair!” Kalan whispered, striking one fist hard against his leg. “Everyone else can go the feast, no matter how low their place, everyone except us!” He sat with his chin pulled up to his knees and stared hot-eyed into the darkness. It wasn’t as though he had ever wanted to be a priest. He came of the House of Blood, one of the great warrior Houses and Night’s long ally—and all of his family
without exception, for generations beyond count, had been warriors. As a very young child he had wished for nothing more than to grow up and join their ranks.

Kalan’s face darkened at the thought of his family. He had been the youngest of seven children, somewhat lost underfoot but well loved enough until the old power emerged during his seventh year. Kalan still remembered the cold, closed look on his father’s face, and his siblings’ hostility as they performed the ceremony that had declared him dead to his family, shutting him out from the mainstream life of the House of Blood. The quiet click of the door to his family home, closing behind him when the ritual ended, had been absolute in its finality.

Even now, that memory hurt. It did not matter that Kalan knew this practice was common amongst the warrior Houses and that his family had not turned him out to starve. Word had been sent to the priest in his hold, and when the door swung shut behind him Kalan had found guards waiting to escort him to his new life. The realization that his siblings’ hostility sprang from fear that they, too, might carry the priestly taint did not help either. Seven years on, the unfairness still cut deep and a slow, hot anger, against it and them, smoldered in his heart. “Unfair,” he said again, as he had thought it so many times before. His jaw set and his fists clenched. “Unfair, unfair!”

The word struck a chord in his memory: Sister Korriya, the temple’s senior priestess, looking down her aristocratic nose at him the first time he had dared to say that he thought his fate unfair. “Unfair?” she had rapped out. “Unfair? I daresay it is. And so is a great deal more in this life, as you’ll find before you are too much older. You had best accustom yourself, young man!”

She was right, Kalan thought, but he still loathed the turn his life had taken. The House of Blood was the most extreme of the warrior orders, exiling all but a bare minimum of those with the old powers—usually to one of the priestly Houses. There were days when Kalan was grateful
that the Temple of Night had been short of novices and so he was still part of the forbidden warrior world, even at a distance. But at times like this it made his lot seem that much harder.

At first, his resentment had taken the form of pranks, or absconding from lessons and chores—and he had incurred his fair share of punishment from Sister Korriya, who had a sharp eye for novice misdeeds. Yet Kalan sensed sympathy in her as well. She had overlooked the stolen hours that he had spent with Brother Belan, listening to tales of the great Derai heroes. Belan, the oldest of the priests, had known all the stories of the priestess Errianthar and her twin, Telemanthar, and how they had beaten back the Swarm of Dark. Telemanthar, the old priest would mumble, had carried a hero’s sword, but Errianthar had called the Golden Fire with her mind and hurled it against the onslaught of the Swarm. Belan could recite the Saga of Yorindesarinen, too, despite his faded voice, and would whisper that Kerem the Dark Handed, Kerem of the subtle mind, had also wielded the old powers as well as a sword.

Back in the good old days, Kalan thought bitterly, when warriors had the old powers and priests trained in the fighting arts—before the civil war and the schism between the Houses.

Brother Belan had died three years before and his stories, the brightness and solace of Kalan’s life, had died with him. Since then, Kalan had retreated further into his own company, exploring the less-used parts of the Temple quarter and discovering the warren of storerooms at its lowest level. The warren made it easier to absent himself at will, although he tried to time his disappearances to avoid unwelcome attention. But lately, Kalan had found his moods of despondency becoming more frequent. It was not just his exclusion from the life of the wider keep, although that galled him deeply, or even the tedium of temple life. Soon he would complete his seventh year as a novice and be required to take the initiate’s vow; after that, there would be no going back.

Until recently, Kalan had indulged a fervent hope that his powers might disappear again as suddenly as they had emerged. Dogged but determined, he had continued to practice the beginnings of the warrior training, learned in his father’s house, in secret. But as his fourteenth birthday drew closer he had begun to despair, knowing that he was bound, whatever his personal aspirations, into a life that promised to be narrow, circumscribed, and dull. He did not know if he could bear it.

Kalan knew from Sister Korriya’s lessons that there had been other temple dwellers who felt they could not bear it. Some had taken their own lives while others sought to flee the Wall. It was not easy, however, to hide the old powers from other Derai. Most were returned to the temples, sometimes with the “R” for renegade branded into their forehead or cheek to prevent further escape attempts.

As if we were criminals, Kalan reflected angrily. Or slaves.

The Earls of Blood were renowned for their implacable pursuit of such renegades, and Kalan wondered whether the Earl of Night would be similarly relentless. Even in the Temple quarter, the current Earl was known for his justice, but there were some nasty stories told about his father, the Old Earl. And the schism between priest and warrior ran very deep in Night, which Kalan found strange, because in all the long history of the Derai, only the House of Stars had produced more heroes with the old powers.

Sister Korriya had shaken her head when he shared this thought. “Strange,” she replied, echoing his word. “Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not. The line between love and hate can run very fine, as we have seen time and again in our history.”

Kalan had not been quite sure what she meant, and he still wondered why the temples were so feared when most clerics only had minor powers. Once, Derai temples had housed sibyls, with their talent for prophecy, and mindspeakers who could communicate across vast distances, as well as those
like Errianthar, whose powers allowed them to move objects and to bring fire with the touch of their minds. Such powers were difficult to hide, particularly when the one bearing them was startled or threatened, although temple tradition held that with training, natural instinct could be overruled. Even so, there were stories … Kalan had heard that there were weather workers in the Sea Keep who paced its walls in savage weather, their physical forms fraying into the elements. Behavior like that drew attention, but it might be possible for those with lesser powers to survive undetected, even amongst other Derai.

Kalan sighed again and shifted, trying to find a comfortable position in his hiding place. It was probably time to start back anyway. There was no way that he or any other priest would see anything of the Feast of Returning, and a longer sojourn with the mops and brooms would not change that. Easing himself to his feet, he peered into the hallway.

The sound was fainter than a whisper, but Kalan tensed instantly. Then he heard it again, the suggestion of a nearly silent footfall or the slither of a cloak against wall. Its stealth made him freeze, his heart beating a sudden, sharp tattoo. Kalan eased backward, retreating into the broom cupboard.

The whisper sounded again, resolving into a definite footfall—and then more than one. It came from the maze of unused corridors and storerooms, rather than the stairway to the upper levels, and this made Kalan doubly cautious. He crouched low, trying to blend with the deeper shadows and the angles cast by the stacked mops and brooms. He had discovered, over years of playing truant, that if he kept very quiet and still, emptying his mind of everything except the image and texture of his surroundings, people tended to overlook his presence. Kalan had never discussed this aptitude with anyone, not even Brother Belan, but he found it very useful, especially when he wanted to avoid unwelcome attention.

The footsteps drew closer and Kalan saw the first shadowy
figures file past the cupboard entrance. They were clad in black, but he could make out sword hilts at their sides and the keen, flame-shaped heads of spears in their hands. They carried no lights, but could apparently see clearly in the unlit hall.

And that, Kalan knew, ruled out any possibility that they were a patrol of keep guards who had gotten into the Temple quarter by mistake.

Besides, there were too many of them, far more than in any guard patrol—upward of a hundred at least, he estimated, swallowing hard. Their silence exuded menace and their helms were crowned with horn and talons like were-beasts, quite unlike anything used by the Derai. Kalan could almost remember seeing something similar in one of Brother Selmor’s books, but the exact detail eluded him. He pressed further back, holding his breath as the lead warrior halted.

The warrior’s grotesque helm peered this way and that, like a hound questing for scent, and Kalan thought desperately of stone, cold and still and rough-hewn all around him. He
became
stone, forgotten in the darkness. The voice that spoke was cold, too; sibilant and metallic, rasping against the silence. “I thought I sensed something, another presence.” The words sank slowly into Kalan’s consciousness, filtering through the weight of stone. They were strangely accented, but he found he could understand them. “Just for a moment… But now there is nothing.”

“This is a temple,” another voice replied, dispassionate as iron. “Even at this level it will echo power. If you cannot sense anything more, an echo is all it will have been.”

The first speaker did not move. “Still nothing,” he said, after a long moment.

“We must go on,” the iron voice said. “The others will be in place soon. We must not fail in our part.” He paused. “What of our … ally? Do you have it safe?”

“For now,” the other replied, a thread of tension in the sibilant voice. “But I do not know how long I can contain it.”

The darkness thickened as he spoke, and Kalan felt a rapacious,
insatiable will striving to push through. It hungered, that will, famished and thirsting; the sweep of its power was like a dark wing brushing across Kalan’s mind. Desperate, he clung to the roughness of the surrounding stone. The first speaker grunted, as though lifting a weight, and the warriors stirred, their hands shifting on their weapons. The warrior with the hard voice cursed under his breath, then gestured the advance, and they moved forward as one, flowing silently up the stairs.

Kalan’s whole body was shaking, cold and sick from the brush of the deadly will across his mind. Cautiously, he released his hold on the image of stone, letting out his breath with a gasp when he realized that the blood was hammering in his ears. “Darkswarm,” he whispered. There could be no mistaking that dark will. For the first time in his life he wished he was a mindspeaker and could raise an instant alarm.

The intruders must have come through the Old Keep, he thought. Brother Belan had always said that there were secret doors from the abandoned fortress into the temple quarter.