Jahna used the interval to search through her parchment and pull out a drawing that made her blood run cold every time she looked at it. She slid it to Serovek, whose expression shuttered instantly at the sight.
“Did thegallalook like this?” she asked.
The illustration, rendered in charcoal by a talented hand, depicted a creature born of a madman’s nightmares. Even on the static page, it gave one the sense of a writhing darkness whose edges were thin and razor sharp. The vague outline of a skeletal frame hid behind a gobbet of vaporous blackness, and where a face might be, there was only a dark socket for an eye and an open maw full of jagged, tenebrous fangs. The thing looked starved, not for food, but for souls.
The margrave picked up the drawing by a corner pinched between two fingers, as if touching it risked plague. His voice, previously warm and jovial, sounded flat. “Shadowy, yes. Unnatural.” He set the paper down and wiped his fingers on his sleeve. “Imagine if you took the broken bones of various people and animals and stitched them together without plan or purpose, using thread made out of black mist.” Jahna shivered as a tendril of revulsion slid down her spine. Serovek looked from the illustration to her, a frown knitting his brow. “Someone else you spoke with saw one of these things?”
“Not me. Another king’s chronicler. She sat with a farmer who described seeing a clutch ofgallagathered on one side of a stream that borders his land. He drew the picture. According to him, they would have swarmed him had it not been for the stream.”
Serovek nodded. “They can’t cross water. We used that weakness against them on more than one occasion to trap them in a pincer maneuver.”
Jahna tucked the illustration back into her stack of parchment, glad to put it away. “They’re hideous.”
“That sketch doesn’t do them justice, and how they look isn’t as bad as how they sound or move. They can mimic the voices of those they devour, even take on their victims’ appearances for a few moments. They hunt in swarms. Not like bees or locusts. More like roaches.” The revulsion in Serovek’s voice could have curdled milk.
Jahna scribbled fast to capture every word and wrote as she spoke. “It’s said the Kai regent created a spell that allowed you and the others to fight thegallawithout coming to harm.”
Serovek’s gaze took on a faraway cast. “A powerful enchantment. Elder magic no human has ever wielded and most Kai have forgotten. We became what the Khaskem and hisElsodcalled Wraith Kings. Split apart three ways and then brought back together again.”
Once more a serpentine shiver slid down her back as he described a ritual of violent death and unnatural resurrection in which those whom the Kai named Wraith Kings became as strange and grotesque in their new incarnation as the creatures they battled.
It seemed disrespectful somehow, almost blasphemous, to keep writing while Serovek spoke. She wanted to lay down her quill, fold her hands in her lap and listen, both enraptured and horrified as he recounted the struggle against and final defeat of thegalla. But she kept writing until her aching hand went numb. When he paused, she scribbled a little more, then stopped to shake out the cramps in her fingers.
Reliving the horror of that conflict had altered Serovek’s face. He was pale and pinched around the mouth, his eyes hard as the obsidian the trade caravans sometimes brought over the mountains from the far southern kingdoms.
“I’m so sorry,” Jahna said. “We can stop there if you wish.”
The margrave shook himself as if to slough off something foul. “No, this is why I agreed to our meeting, so even generations beyond us will remember what happened and hopefully learn the lessons we didn’t regarding the dangers of Elder magic.”
“And heroes should be remembered and celebrated,” she added.
A wry look flickered over his still pale features for a moment. “We aren’t heroes. We did what we did to survive and suffered a defeat with the loss of one of our own. Megiddo paid the ultimate price for our triumph.”
A terrible despair painted his words. Jahna chose not to write those down. There were some things meant to be remembered with ink and parchment while others were best served with fading in memory just so one might heal.
While five men rode out to battle thegalla, only four returned home. The heretic Nazim monk, Megiddo Cermac, did not, and Jahna shied away from dwelling on the suffering his soul must be enduring trapped in the malevolent realm of thegalla.
She struggled for some words of sympathy to offer Lord Pangion over the loss of his comrade-in-arms. “Maybe since thegallanever touched his body, there’s still a chance he can be saved? Didn’t you say as long as your bodies were protected from thegalla, you couldn’t die?”
“There are the dead, and then there are those who are worse than dead.”
It might have been the dancing light of the hearth’s fire or even the tilt of Serovek’s profile as his gaze shifted from her to the inner horizon of a distant memory, but Jahna swore, in that moment, thin lines of spectral blue fire etched the whites of his eyes, and his face no longer looked quite human.
She was half out of her chair when, with a single blink, the margrave of High Salure was once more just a handsome man wearing a faint smile and sitting in a chair far too small for his big frame. His eyes were still the deep-water blue she found so arresting, but only the irises. The otherworldly cerulean spiderweb that fractured his sclera was gone.
He didn’t seem to notice when she eased back into her seat, gripping her quill like a dagger. “Ask your next question,” he said.
She kept him another half hour, until her hand threatened to seize entirely and her ink ran dry. When they finished, Serovek helped her pack up her supplies, offered more tea which she refused, and escorted her to the door.
They stood together at the threshold for a moment. He bent a little so he wouldn’t hit his head on the lintel. “Should you ever find yourself in the hinterlands, Lady Uhlfrida, come to High Salure. We’ll make you welcome, and if the weather is fine and we’re still at peace with the Kai, I’ll take you to the new Kai capital at Saggara. You can meet the man who wielded the wraith spell and led us into battle.” His eyes narrowed with a wry humor. “The Khaskem isn’t quite as impressive as his wife or his his second-in-command, but I think you’d like him.”
Jahna swallowed a squeal of delight, certain that such a demonstration would make the margrave rescind his offer. “You’re most generous, Lord Pangion,” she said, thankful she sounded so calm, as if war heroes offered to introduce her to Elder rulers every day. “I hope to take you up on that offer one day.”
He bid her goodbye and disappeared back into his chamber. Jahna raced down the hall, eager to return to the Archives and conscript a pair of amanuenses to help transcribe her extensive notes into a neat composition for Dame Stalt to read and review.
As with every year prior to this one, the bailey was a surge of humanity packed in a space too small to fit it comfortably. Thanks to Rodan’s new decree that the various hawkers and vendors were to set up their stalls outside the walls instead of in the bailey itself, there were areas within where one didn’t have to squeeze past bodies and livestock to reach their destination.
Hunger pangs made Jahna’s stomach rumble. She hadn’t eaten all day, and the wine she drank while speaking with the margrave sat in her belly on a sour note. The smells of roasting meat and nuts toasted over fires rose above the stench of unwashed bodies to tease her nose. She had time to make a quick detour outside the fortified walls to purchase something before returning to the Archives.
