Ember and Eclipse: Into The Gloom

Dawn bled across the ridgeline in a wash of rust and ash, and Maren Ashvale did not look back.

The road beneath them was a black ribbon unspooling into a valley of fog. Her boots found each stone by feel, the worn leather cold and damp, and ahead of her the ember-stallion snorted plumes of copper-lit breath into the grey. The horse's mane hung in thick dark coils, each strand catching the dull orange glow that walked with them, leaping from Maren's fingertips to the gravel, from the gravel to the mud, from the mud to the low bracken. Wherever she raised her hand, the underbrush smoldered. Wherever she lowered it, the sparks dimmed to a guttering ember-red, licking at the edges of bramble and thorn.

Dain Caldere followed three paces behind. She could hear him. She could always hear him, the easy clop of his bay mare, the faint clink of his scabbard against his thigh, the way he breathed through his nose as if the climb were a minor inconvenience and not a pull up a goat track in the half-light. She did not turn around. She had decided this in the first watch of the night, when he had agreed to come with her, and she had been practicing the decision ever since, hardening it the way one hardens a coal between damp fingers.

"You know," Dain said, his voice arriving before the silence could settle, "I've walked behind a lot of people in my life. Marched behind kings. Crept behind rebels. Once even tiptoed behind a goat that turned out to be a magistrate in a rug. None of them were this committed to the back of my own head."

Maren kept walking. The path curled around a fallen birch, its pale bark peeled back in long curls, and she steered the stallion around it without looking. The horse knew her silence by now. It had been trained in the cold northern yards of her father's house, where the grooms spoke only when a horse spooked and otherwise let the wind do the talking. Maren had been a girl then. The girl who had learned that the safest thing to say was nothing.

"Maren." He said her name the way he said most things, with an ease that fit him like a coat cut a little too fine. "I know you can hear me. I know you can because your shoulders just went up around your ears."

Her shoulders had not moved. She was certain of it. She set her jaw and called a brighter flame into her palm, just to feel the warmth of it. The stallion tossed its head, the bit jingling once, and the orange arcs licked out further across the road, catching the wet leaves and making them hiss into curls of smoke. Somewhere in the trees to the left, a bird gave a single startled cry and then went quiet. The smell of scorched bracken rose around her, bitter and green.

Dain sighed. He did not sigh the way tired men sighed, slow and long. He sighed the way a man sighs when he has decided to be patient for exactly as long as he is being paid, and is unsure whether he is being paid. "Right. Well. I'll just keep walking then. Talking to the back of your coat. Which is a very good coat, I should mention. Northern wool?"

She did not answer.

The road dipped. Below them, the valley opened into a long smear of mist that hid the river and the bridge and whatever waited on the other side. Somewhere ahead, past the fog, past the broken stiles and the abandoned shepherd huts, lay the Gloom proper, the name the locals had given to the tract of forest that the cartographers of her old master had refused to mark with any symbol at all. In the margins of his great atlas, Maren had once read the single word Avoid . Just that. No explanation. Her master had died before she could ask.

The stallion's hooves found a stretch of wet slate. The animal slowed, ears pricked forward, nostrils flaring at the air. Maren smelled it too: the change. Up here the morning smelled of pine resin and cold earth. Below, even from this distance, she could catch the first sour taint of stagnant water, and beneath that something older, something that did not have a name but lived in the back of the throat like the memory of a bad dream.

"You're thinking about the Gloom," Dain said, and there was something in his voice now, a thread of attention that had not been there a moment ago. He was not asking. He was confirming. He had that trick of reading people the way other men read road signs.

Maren's fingers twitched. The flame in her palm flickered, dimmed, came back brighter. "I'm thinking about the road."

"You're thinking about the road, and the road goes through the Gloom, and you're worried, and you won't tell me you're worried because that would mean trusting me with something. Which is fine. I am a stranger. I am a sword-for-hire with a price on his head and a mare that doesn't like me. I am the lowest form of useful company. But I am here, and I am awake, and I have a very sharp sword, and I would like to be consulted before we walk into whatever it is you're walking into."

She turned then. Not all the way, not enough to face him square, but enough that the orange light of her hand caught the front of his coat, the line of his jaw, the one pale scar that ran along the side of his neck and disappeared into his collar. He looked, as he always looked, like a man who had slept in his clothes and won anyway. His dark hair was pushed back from his forehead in damp curls. His eyes were watchful, and amused, and beneath both of those things, careful.

"We are not walking into anything," she said, and was proud that her voice came out steady. The northern drawl of it sat low and even in her mouth. "We are riding. There's a difference."

"There is no difference. Your horse has been walking for the last mile and so has mine. We're on foot. We're in the Gloom. We're consulting with no one." He tilted his head. "Well. One of us is consulting with no one. The other one of us is glowering at the back of a horse."

"My horse," Maren said.

"Your horse," he agreed. "Who has very good taste in shoulders. I say this with respect. I have known worse shoulders."

She turned back to the path. The mist was thickening as they descended, the trees closing in, the rust-orange dawn now filtered to a dull copper wash that did not reach the ground. Her flame became the only color in the world. It caught the wet bark of the trees as they passed, the hanging moss, the spider webs strung between low branches like torn silk. Somewhere ahead, water moved over stones with a low, patient hush.

"Maren." Softer now. The swagger had gone out of it, the easy rhythm of his Riverlands speech giving way to something plainer, something she did not want to hear because it sounded like the man underneath the man. "I know what I am to you. I know what you think I am. But I didn't follow you down this road because I wanted a job. I followed you because the man who sent the men after you has a sword with my name on it, and the man who sent that man has a throne with his name on it, and I have spent the last two years learning exactly how those men operate. You need someone who knows how they operate. You need that more than you need your pride."

"I need my pride," Maren said, before she could stop herself. "I need my pride very much."

"Good," he said, and she heard the smile in it, the real one, not the bright one. "Hold onto it. But hold onto it with one hand. Leave the other one free."

The path leveled out. The trees grew closer, their branches tangling overhead until the sky was only a memory. Maren's flame painted everything in the color of a banked hearth, orange and red and the deep black of shadows that would not quite move. She could feel the heat of it rolling up her forearm, sinking into the muscle, into the bone. Her master had warned her about this. Fire-magic fed on the one who held it. The longer she burned, the more of herself she gave to the burning. He had called it the slow price. She had thought he meant gold.

The stallion stopped. Maren stopped with it, one hand on the bridle, one hand still alight. The animal's ears swiveled forward, then back, then forward again. Its flanks trembled under her palm. She had ridden this horse through snow and sea-wind and the salt-blast of the northern cliffs, and she had never once felt it tremble.

"Dain," she said.

"I see it," he said, and the sound that followed was the soft draw of a sword leaving its sheath, the whisper of oiled steel sliding along leather, the click of the guard settling against the scabbard's throat. She did not look back, but she heard him step forward, felt the air shift as he moved past her on the left, putting himself between her and whatever the stallion had scented.

The mist ahead of them was not moving the way mist should. It sat on the road in a long pale bank, still as poured glass, and from somewhere inside it came a sound that was not the river and not the wind. A sound like the soft exhalation of something that had been holding its breath for a very long time and had, at last, decided not to.

Maren raised her hand. The flame in her palm bloomed outward, orange arcs licking out along the wet road, and where the light touched the mist it parted, reluctantly, the way a curtain parts, and behind it, deep in the gloom between the trees, something that had no face turned its head toward the warmth.

The thing without a face did not step forward. It did not need to. Where it stood, the mist coiled slow around its shape, and from its mouth, or where a mouth should have been, came a sound like the turning of pages in a book whose ink had all run to black.

Maren held the flame higher. The light pushed against the bank of fog, and the fog pushed back, and for one long breath neither yielded.

"Don't," Dain said, very soft. "Don't look at it full. Keep moving."

"I can't see the road."

"I can. Walk. I'll talk you through it."

She lowered her hand and walked, one boot after the other, the stallion's breath hot against her wrist. Dain's voice came from just behind her left shoulder, steady as a tide.

"Six paces. Stone on your left, step wide around it. Four more. The road dips here, soft ground. Three. The trees close in, branches low, duck your head. Two. The bank thins. One. Step through."

She stepped through. The fog fell away behind her like a dropped cloak, and the road lay open again, rutted and rain-dark, climbing toward the ridge that divided the river country from whatever lay beyond.

Dain did not speak of what they had passed. He resheathed his sword with the same unhurried motion he had drawn it, and when she glanced back his face was the face he wore when something had come too close. Easy. Too easy.

"The ridge," she said.

"Aye."

"How far?"

"Half a day, if the horse keeps its nerve."

The stallion had not yet stopped trembling. She could feel the tremor running up through its shoulder into her forearm, a fine, constant shudder, the pulse of a small animal that knew it had been watched by something larger than itself. She gentled her thumb along the ridge of its neck, the way her father had taught her, and her father before him.

They climbed.

The road steepened. The trees that had crowded the riverbank thinned and fell away, and in their place rose older growth, hemlocks with bark like hammered iron, their roots knuckled over the path so the stallion picked its way with care. Maren kept her hand alight, and the flame burned clean. Above them the sky was a lid of pewter, low and close, and below, somewhere far below, she could still hear the river they had left, diminished now to a thin silver sound.

An hour passed. Another.

The wind changed.

It came at first as a small thing, a sourceless draft at her collar, then as a smell, something dry and old and faintly sweet, like the dust of a sealed room, like the inside of a coffin, like the last breath of a candle left to gutter in an empty chapel. Maren's eyes watered. She blinked and looked at her hand.

The flame was smaller.

She fed it. She had learned to feed it without thinking, the way one breathes, drawing from that place inside her chest where her mother had said the gift lived, where her mother had said nothing lived at all. She drew now and the flame steadied, then thinned again, then steadied, like a pulse grown uncertain.

"Dain."

"I know."

"You don't. Look."

He looked. His mouth thinned. He had not sheathed his sword; he wore it across his back, and now he reached up and freed it again, and held it in his hand across the saddlebow, the steel catching what little light there was.

"Quench it," he said.

"What?"

"Quench the flame. Now, Maren."

"Dain, if I quench it I cannot call it back. Not in this air. Not without time."

"Then we will buy time." He swung down from his saddle, leading the stallion close beside his own grey, and when he spoke again his voice was not the voice of a man giving an order. It was the voice of a man who had given such orders before, and remembered what they had cost. "When we crest the ridge, we will be inside it. The Sable does not like fire. It will smother her in you if you keep her fed."

"You want me to go blind into that."

"I want you to come out the other side breathing." He stepped close, and his free hand found her wrist, above the glow, and held it. His palm was cold. "Trust me."

"You have done this before."

"No. I have watched others do this before." His thumb moved once across the inside of her wrist, the way she had moved her thumb across the stallion's neck, and the gesture was so plain, so unstudied, that she almost laughed, or almost wept. "I watched a column of Eclipse Guard ride into the Sable at dusk with every lantern lit. I watched the lanterns die one by one, like eyes closing. I watched forty men go in, and I watched how many come out."

"How many."

"Eleven." He let her wrist go. "The eleven had the sense to smother their own fires before the Sable did."

Maren looked at the flame in her hand. It had been with her since she was a girl of nine, when her mother had pressed her lips to her daughter's palm in the cold kitchen of the Ashvale manor and whispered a word that tasted of iron. It had warmed her through long winters. It had lit her way through the salt cellars and the sea caves of her apprenticeship. It had burned in her when she signed the cartographer's contract in a stranger's hand. It was, in some quiet way she had never said aloud, the closest thing she had left to her mother's voice.

She closed her fist.

The flame went out. The dark came in like a flood.

She had known darkness before. She had known the darkness of coal cellars and the darkness of caves and the darkness of grief, and she had thought she knew the shape of them all. This was none of those. This was a darkness that had weight. It pressed against her face, against her open eyes, against the lids she closed and opened again to be sure. It filled her mouth. It filled her lungs.

She tried to breathe and could not.

Something in her chest seized, a hard clench, a rejection, as if her body had decided that this air was not air at all but the ghost of air, the memory of air, and would have none of it. Her vision swam with sparks that were not there. Her knees folded under her, and the stallion snorted, and a hand caught her shoulder before she fell.

"Hold," Dain said, somewhere very close. "Hold on to me."

"I cannot breathe."

"I know. Breathe shallow. Through your nose. Small breaths, small ones. Do not fight it."

She fought it. She could not help fighting it, the way a drowning woman fights the water that holds her down. Her fingers clawed at his sleeve, at the leather of his coat, at anything, and somewhere above her she heard him murmur something she did not understand, words in a tongue she did not know, spoken low and even, like a lullaby sung badly to a child that would not sleep.

The dark shifted.

It did not lift. It moved. It drew aside the way a heavy curtain draws aside when someone walks behind it, parting around them in a long slow arc, and where it parted Maren felt something else close over them in its place. Not dark. Not light. A third thing. A coldness that had form, that had texture, that pressed against her skin like the skin of something breathing. She opened her eyes, and there was nothing to see, and yet she was not afraid. She could not say why she was not afraid. The coldness was a stranger, and strangers should have frightened her, and yet this stranger wore a face she recognized.

"Easy," Dain said, very near her ear. "Easy. It is only me."

"Only you," she said, and her voice came out thin, a child's voice, a frightened voice, and she did not care.

"Only me. What you are feeling is me. I have to do this, or we will not pass."

"You are doing this."

"Yes."

"With your shadows."

"Yes."

She had heard rumors of him. Lirien had written her, years ago, in one of the careful letters that arrived at the cartographer's shop with no return address, that the captain of the Eclipse Guard had been broken and sent home for refusing a torching. Lirien had not written it with sympathy. Lirien had written it with the sharp cold interest of a sister who was already, at nineteen, playing a longer game than her family could see.

Maren had pitied him then, the way one pities a stranger in a story. She pitied him less now, inside his shadows, with his cold arm around her shoulders and his strange soft voice in her ear.

"My sister knew you," she said, because the dark made her say strange things.

"Your sister," he said, and she heard the smile he did not let his mouth make, "knew a great many people. Few of them well."

"She said you refused an order."

"She was right."

"She said you were a fool."

"She was right about that too."

Maren breathed. The breath came shallow, but it came. She could smell him now, beneath the dust and the road-smell of him. He smelled of pine smoke and steel polish and the faint sour undertone of a man who had not slept in days. The stallion stood close, warm against her hip, and its trembling had gentled, as if even the beast could feel that whatever had folded around them was not aimed at them, was not hungry for them, was only holding them safe.

"How long," she said.

"As long as we are in it."

"And if we are in it a long time."

"Then we are in it a long time."

She almost laughed. She swallowed the laugh and turned it into a breath, and the breath came easier, and the easier breath let her think. She thought of the column of forty men. She thought of the eleven. She thought of the captain who had watched and learned and carried what he had learned into the hills with a price on his head.

She thought of Lirien, and where Lirien was now, and what Lirien might have bartered for the chance to be standing where Maren stood, inside a man's shadows, breathing borrowed air.

The ridge lay somewhere above them. The Sable lay somewhere ahead. Somewhere behind them, far behind, in the river country and the stone city and the palace of King Malachai Souldark, Forge-Lord Torven sat in a counting house and waited for word that the woman with the relic had not yet arrived.

Maren closed her eyes against a dark that was no darker than her eyelids, and leaned her weight against the man who held her upright, and let him walk her forward into the gloom.

Maren did not know how long the corridor was. She measured it by breath, by the slow drag of her boots through something that did not feel like earth or stone but answered to her weight with a yielding patience, like deep snow or dark water held perfectly still. Dain's fingers rested against the inside of her wrist, and the skin there ran cooler than the rest of her, cooler than it had any right to be, as though the corridor had leached the heat from the place where he held her. His pulse, when she became aware of it, beat slow and even, the pulse of a man who had learned not to startle. The stallion walked close behind her, its hooves falling soundlessly, and she could feel the warmth of its breath against the back of her neck, the velvet push of it, warm and real, the only truly warm thing inside the dark.

She thought she smelled water somewhere. The ghost of a stream, mineral and cold, running beneath a stone that did not need to be stone but was. The corridor flexed. Not around them, not visibly, but in the ears, in the inner architecture where balance lived. A turn. Another turn. The stallion's harness clinked once, a tiny bell-sound that died the instant it was made, as if the dark would not permit even small metals to speak.

She let him guide her. That was the hardest part, harder than the dark, harder than the missing sight. Letting go of the choosing. Letting her steps fall where his steps chose to set them. The scout in her, the cartographer's daughter who had learned to read a map by feeling the relief with her fingertips, wanted to count the turns, wanted to chart them on the inside of her skull, wanted to own the path. She swallowed the wanting. She swallowed the wanting because he had not asked her to come. He had laid out the options and watched her choose. She had chosen.

"Don't make me regret this," she whispered.

His hand tightened a fraction on her wrist. Not a squeeze. A settle. The fingers of a man who had heard the words beneath the words.

"Say it again," he said, barely voiced, "when we are clear."

She did. She shaped the words without sound. Don't make me regret. Don't make me. The dark took them and gave nothing back.

The sentinels came as a change in pressure, a thickening in the already thick corridor, as if they were passing between two closed doors in a long room and could feel, in the ribs, in the soft meat of the lungs, that something was pressing close on both sides. She did not see them. She heard them, after a fashion, a low frequency that was not quite sound, a hum pitched so far below hearing that the bones in her jaw answered it, the small bones in her wrist, the stirrup bone behind her ear. The stallion sidestepped and Dain's free hand pressed against the horse's flank, a long steadying pass, palm flat, and the animal quieted, though its hide twitched under his hand, and its skin prickled against her shoulder as she leaned past it.

They held their breath. All three of them. The dark had no opinion on breath. The dark had no opinion at all, and that was the worst of it, the absence of opinion, the absolute and uncomplaining blankness, as if they were walking through a page that had never been written on.

Then the pressure thinned. Then the hum dropped away into a distance that had no measure. Then Dain's hand left her wrist and came back to her shoulder and turned her, a quarter turn, a half turn, and the air opened around them, cool and a little less cool, and she felt the floor change under her boots, rougher, older, and the stallion's hoof struck something that rang, a flat stone, the lip of a threshold.

They were inside a ruin.

She knew it before the dark thinned into dim. The roof above them was gone in places, and where it was gone she could see a sliver of cold blue, the underside of clouds that held no moon, no stars, only the pale wash of a sky that was not finished being night. The walls around her were old squared stone, fitted without mortar, set down by hands that had meant to last longer than anything but weather and the Creep had allowed. A hollowed ruin. A shepherd's shelter, perhaps, or a wayfarer's chapel long since unhallowed. There was a hearth. There was a hearth, and in the hearth a small careful fire burned, fed from what supply, lit by what hand, she could not yet tell, and the warmth of it reached her across the stone floor like a held hand.

"Sit," Dain said, and his voice was different here, rough at the edges, the Riverlands smoothness stripped to the grain beneath. He had let go of the shadows the way a man lets go of a held breath, with a kind of shudder he tried to hide in his shoulders. He crossed to the stallion and unbuckled its bit and laid his forehead against the horse's cheek for a long moment, breathing with it, equalizing, and the horse lipped at his hair. Then he turned to her and in the firelight she saw what the dark had hidden. He was pale under the tan. The skin beneath his eyes was bruised with a tiredness that was not of one night. The price on his head, she thought, was not the only weight the man carried.

She sat. The stone was cold even through her leggings, and the warmth of the fire did not reach the floor, and she was glad of the cold because the cold was a thing she could name. The cold was honest. The corridor had not been honest. The corridor had been a kindness wrapped around a mercy she did not trust.

Dain did the camp work without speaking. He brought the saddlebags in from the doorway where he had set them. He brought the roll of oilcloth. He unsaddled the stallion with hands that knew the knots and did not fumble and rubbed the beast down with a handful of dry moss he pulled from a crevice in the wall. He set a small kettle over the fire and filled it from a clay jug he uncorked and did not offer her to taste. He laid out a pallet of two blankets, one rough, one finer than she had expected, and a folded greatcoat that had seen hard miles.

He did not explain the fire. He did not explain how he had known the ruin or who had lit the hearth before them. He did not say, Look at me, and so she did not look. She sat with her back against the wall and her hands in her lap and watched the fire move across his knuckles as he worked, and the fire was small and orange, and the ruin was larger than the fire, and the night was larger than the ruin, and somewhere in the night the Creep was breathing, the way tide breathes, the way weather breathes, in no hurry at all.

She ate what he set before her without thanking him, and he did not seem to require it. She drank from the clay jug when it was offered, and the water was sharp, almost mineral, and it tasted of the stone it had been drawn from. She lay down on the pallet when he gestured and pulled the finer blanket over her shoulders and did not take off her boots, because a woman who did not take off her boots was a woman who was not certain she would stay.

He took the first watch. She knew this because he sat facing the doorway with his sword across his knees, and she could see his profile in the firelight, the line of his jaw, the old scar that started at his ear and ran down into his collar, and his eyes were not closed. His eyes were not open either. They were set somewhere in the middle distance, in a country she could not see and he did not invite her into.

She watched him for longer than she meant to. Then she closed her eyes, and the dark behind her eyelids was the same dark that had folded them, and the same dark the corridor had been, and the same dark the Creep was made of, and she slept anyway, because the body is a stubborn creature and will sometimes do the kind thing without consulting the mind.

She woke once, in the small hours, and the fire had been fed, and Dain had not moved, or had moved and come back, and he sat where he had sat, and his eyes were where they had been, and the stallion had lain down beside her and breathed warm against her hip, and she put her hand on the animal's neck and felt the slow tide of its pulse and was glad, and slept again.

She woke to grey. The grey of morning filtered through a roof that was mostly not a roof. The fire had burned down to a low orange heart. Dain was no longer sitting. He stood in the doorway, and beyond him the world was mist, white and patient, and somewhere in the mist a single bird called, twice, and was answered by nothing.

He did not turn. He knew she was awake.

"Still want to go on," he said, and his voice was quiet, and the question was real, and she heard underneath it the second question, the one he was too careful to ask, which was whether she was still choosing him, whether the dark had changed her mind, whether she understood that what waited beyond the mist was the Sable, and that after the Sable was the counting house, and after the counting house was the bargain, and that there was no version of the road she could walk that did not end in a room where someone reached for what she carried and did not understand she carried it.

She sat up. The blanket fell from her shoulders. Her hair had come loose from its plait, and a strand of it clung to her cheek, and she pushed it behind her ear with the hand that had rested on the stallion's neck.

"Say it again," she said, "when we are clear."

He turned then, in the doorway, and looked at her, and the look was not the look of a captain of the Eclipse Guard, and it was not the look of a sword-for-hire with a price on his head, and it was not the look of a man laying out options for a woman who had not asked for them. It was the look of a man who had been told he would not be forgiven, and was finding, against all his expectations, that someone was willing to try.

The mist moved behind him, white and patient, and the bird called once more, and somewhere beyond the mist the road went on, and beyond the road the city, and beyond the city the palace, and beyond the palace the counting house, and in the counting house Forge-Lord Torven waited with a patience that did not blink, and the night the woman with the relic had not yet arrived was almost done.

Maren stood. She folded the finer blanket, and laid it over the saddle, and buckled the girth herself, because her hands needed to do a thing that was hers, and the buckling was hers, and the morning was hers, and the road, whatever it cost her, was hers to walk.

"Clear," she said.