Page 59 of House of the Beast

Chapter

W arm torchlight was soon swallowed by darkness as we moved away from the waystation.

Shades and phantoms lurked along every street, drifting slowly in and out of the empty, dark buildings.

Some of them flew into a frenzy at the sight of me, like dogs that had been starved.

They fell easily before my blade. Others merely let themselves be cut down with something akin to an exhalation of relief.

Aster breathed in deeply, his white robes aglow against the darkness as I butchered another offering in his name.

It wasn’t just my imagination—he became brighter, more alive somehow, the longer we spent here.

He’d been in an annoyingly good mood ever since I’d kissed him in the foyer and was now leading me toward the entrance of an imposing building several stories high.

A brass sign out front proclaimed it as the Grand Peninsula Hotel—one of the more luxurious accommodations in Sorrowsend.

“Here,” he said. “This will be perfect.”

I eyed the tall, brass-and-mahogany double doors in trepidation. The walls around them were overgrown with vine-like shadows that pulsed gently like a slow heartbeat. There were sure to be terrors lurking inside.

“Are we going in there?” I asked.

“Yes, and then to the rooftop.”

I creaked one door open slowly. Something moved in the dark, stately lobby. I unsheathed my sword and held it out. “We couldn’t have done this back at the statehouse?”

Our plan was to hunt the Wanderer of Still Waters the same way that Aster had once led me to find those small, dying animals in the Avera estate.

We would follow the trail of death it left behind like breadcrumbs through a forest. First, I would have to find a place to meditate.

I would have preferred someplace where I knew I would be safe, but Aster had other ideas.

“Death was too strong back there,” he explained, standing aside as the thing in the shadows charged at me. It looked vaguely like a horse—perhaps from a previous Pilgrimage—but with terrible teeth jutting out from its many mouths. “And it’s easier if we’re higher up. Closer to the stars, that way.”

I charged back, dodging its clumsy approach and thrusting my sword clean through its neck.

It fell to the ground with a terrible screeching whinny, hooves knocking against the floor.

Another thing rose from the darkness, this one with many misshapen legs, and came lurching toward me.

I sent it scuttling back with a neat jab at its chest. I pursued the shadowy terror, hacking off one limb and then another as Aster’s bond soared through my metal arm, guiding my sword exactly where it needed to go.

I was barely breaking a sweat. I tried not to think about how this—the killing, the flash of my sword—was so much easier than bringing the wounded Dreadguard to the waystation.

“What if it’s too far away for us to see? ”

The creature died with a reluctant sigh, deflating into a cloud of shadows that swirled around my feet.

Aster kicked it into the air as he strode through the now empty hall and toward a set of grand stairs.

“Everything is amplified here,” he explained as he began to climb.

“The things we see will be much clearer.”

I followed him to the top of the building, which opened up into a rooftop terrace.

The view from here was astounding. On one side was sheer black void, where the ocean would have been if we were in Sorrowsend.

On the other was miles and miles of city, bathed in perpetual shadow, and in the distance, at the very center of it, the Weeping Lady’s grand cathedral was refulgent with celestial light, surrounded on all sides by arcane mechanisms erected by the court to protect her presence within.

The city stretched valiantly on for a little farther beyond that; then, past a certain point, it warped into other things—a forest of trees standing at strange angles, a field of flowers that seemed to glow.

Some parts of the ground were simply breaking off to float toward the sky, suspended, and even farther off, almost fading into the night, I could see the bones of some giant, ancient creature half-buried in the darkness.

Aster went to the middle of the terrace and motioned for me to join him there. As he took my hands in his and pulled me down to sit, he said conversationally, “I’ve been wanting to show you this sky for a long, long time.”

I looked up. The stars were so bright it was dizzying. A low hum resonated through the air, deep and almost melodious, like the notes of an ancient song.

“What is that?” I said, looking around for the source of it. “That sound. Like someone singing.”

Aster smiled and pointed a finger upward. “Them, of course. It’s much easier to hear them here.”

The stars were singing. They were singing, and I could hear them now. All my life, I had thought it ridiculous that the vessels of the Four High Houses were worshipped as deities.

Now I was starting to think there might have been some reason to it.

When I was done staring at the sky, Aster lifted our hands to motion that we should start. We were facing each other cross-legged, our arms forming a circle.

I looked at our joined hands. “How is this going to work?”

“Close your eyes,” he said, shuffling a bit closer so our knees were touching, “and just do what you’ve always done. I’ll lead you.”

I closed my eyes. This was decidedly different from the sunlit afternoons where I had first learned to sense death.

Then it had been easy to seek out the coldness among the warm grass and fresh air.

Even at the banquet hall, death had carved a distinct path for me among the glittering, lively glamour of Sorrowsend’s nobility.

But everything here was still and cold. It felt like death was already all around us.

That was when I realized that it was. We were surrounded by it. This whole place hovered in the threshold before death. I felt as though I were floating beneath a still lake with only my face suspended above the water, all these ancient stars and figments of unreality trapped here and undying—

“Deeper,” said Aster, and pulled me under.

I might have gasped. I almost opened my eyes in shock. By some deep stubbornness I managed not to do it, but I knew that I was grasping Aster’s fingers tight, clinging to that grounding touch.

There was something tugging at the edge of my awareness—a sensation that prickled at me uncomfortably.

I turned my attention to it and found before me, clear as day, all the threads of life belonging to the dying souls back at the Carrine statehouse.

Some had already been snapped and were little more than wisps fading away in the dark, while others glowed brighter under the Sorrowless Disciple’s care.

I understood now why we had to walk all the way over.

Even here, a few streets down from the statehouse, it was difficult to pay attention to anything else.

But then Aster was tugging gently at me to continue, and I remembered there were other matters to attend to.

Now that I understood what I was looking for, it was easy to follow the call of other deaths around us.

I grasped at one—not with my hands like one might usually expect to grasp something, because Aster was still clinging to them, but with my mind—and found myself plunged into pure sensation like diving into a body of water.

There was a barked order, the words unclear to me as I scrambled to orient myself, and a screech of metal.

The sky spun. A grand building, like a courthouse, with decorated mansard roofs, stood in the background.

Men in black armor clashed against a creation of metal and dead flesh.

It was holding someone—a familiar face. Fion.

I felt the crunch of bone, the hot wet splash of blood.

The carve of a black sword as it went into a man’s skull, his burst of pain and shock, and then, nothing.

I pulled away from Aster and threw up.

***

I WAS DIMLY AWARE OF A HAND BEING RUN SOOTHINGLY DOWN my back, another hand pinning hair away from my face, as I emptied the contents of my stomach onto the street below.

“There, there,” Aster was cooing inanely. “You did great!”

I held still for a second, trying to gauge whether I was done.

My head was still spinning, my vision not quite realigned.

But the awful nausea was mostly gone, and the flashes of violence did not seem quite so real now.

I spat out the last of the sour taste in my mouth and turned to Aster. “Did you see that?”

“Of course. I was leading you.”

“The Dreadguard were fighting. A Tinkerer’s Thing,” I said. “Kaim must have run into House Goldmercy.”

I recalled what Tomin had told me—that my father had planned to take another Pilgrim’s party and use them as bait.

I did not know if Iloise Goldmercy was allied with my father the way the Mother Meister had been, but trepidation ran through me all the same.

I could think of no other reason for them to clash.

My cousin should have been able to hold his own—but that was undoubtedly Fion I had seen, his arm crushed by the metal hand of a Tinkerer’s Thing.

What if they had been taken by surprise?

What if they were being brought now to the Pyres, to be tortured until their suffering became a delicious meal for the fallen star?

I thought of Sevelie and her quiet wish to see us resolve our differences. Of Kaim, and the weight upon his shoulders as he’d confronted me before the ceremony of initiation. Fion’s quiet smiles and his hope that I would be able to free my cousin from the burden of his station.

I cursed.

Fion had been sure that any meeting between Kaim and me on the umbral plane would end in bloodshed—but I couldn’t sit here and do nothing.

“Aster,” I said, hardly believing I was making this request. “I have to go help them.”