Chapter 31: I Thought I Heard Singing

The tyflochs offer hymns to Anpiel, though she is not one of the winged mothers who bore them through the seas when their Eden was razed. So many gardens, so many fires, so many fallen stars.

Eris and I made a home in a vacant mausoleum, likely built for a well-to-do family who had recently come into prominence, wanting a private lot to preserve the memory of their now significant line. The sepulcher was nearly as large as Matias's shop, and the mausoleum's partially subterranean locale kept it mostly hidden from view to any wandering from the ruin of Haven. For a time, it was our own private Eden.

Little was left of the surface towns when I descended from the domain of the targs. In the days of my absence, Eris had put her house to the torch so that those who murdered her father would think her gone. She then faded into the faceless crowds, a pale whisper unheard by the cacogens sent to route opposition to the ambitious juniors of the Board. The ringers of the bells led me to her, winding through paths walled by glaring eyes and gaseous rushlight. The clattering of bone chimes in my ears, her hand touched mine and she drew me through bleak alleys where abortionists peddled their wares. In the wake of the coup, many were driven to the surface, where the targs were meant to keep them suppressed with fear, their pay being undeterred access to the useless, the unskilled, the unwashed lessers who dwelled closer than the Board to the tarnished sky. But the targs were no more, having torn each other to pieces after the regicide by Belial's surviving guard.

Poor Eris, she had no notion of her father's efforts to defend the old Board, passing messages and intercepting intelligence. She had thought him to be a victim, fooled by an old acquaintance into unknowingly aiding a clandestine operation. But he had been in contact with the old saurian for months, so they said, and enlisted his help, and so he was punished.

"They wanted you dead, too," she told me over a sad fire in a muddy town square. I said nothing in reply, but was deeply suspicious of the mission to the targ city.

After pulling my ambling body from the crowd, she took me to a space beneath scaffolds where light from high lamps sifted through a maze of mesh platforms. We held each other for a long time, shivering in the noontide air, and she cried softly as she clutched at my robe. I remember how badly my legs ached, but I endured the pain to appear strong for her. I wanted her to feel safe enough to grieve.

She had survived by making herself useful as a spy and a thief. She found a dispossessed band with neither, and took advantage of being unnoticed, hiding in the tall shadows directly beneath lanterns and rushlights and waiting for the time when food and blankets were left unattended. You might judge her, but then you might not, if you have been in a damaged city after a coup, or anywhere on the surface in times of trouble. And I tell you, there are worse things she could have done. She was adamant that we flee to some hidden place. I asked why, and she insisted my arrival would threaten the delicate balance of her band, and they would likely respond aggressively.

"Are there truly such people among our populace?" I asked with disbelief.

"Some would rather be kind, but all are afraid, and a few are capitalizing on that fear to calm their own."

"I'm a soldier," I told her. I had trained hard to earn my commission, and was not among the weakest of Haven's warriors.

"You're ill," she reminded me. "You can barely stand." Cold, slender fingers touched my cheeks. "We can find a place, my love. Our own place."

She never asked me what happened to my legs, but once we were away from the frightened throngs of refugees, corralled like caged animals by their own volition, she found a place under the shade of a half ruined awning to sit, and she lifted my robe, then peeled back legs of my thermal underlay. My skin was very thin, almost translucent, and my blue and green veins showed clearly.

"How did you manage to walk all this way down?".

I couldn't answer, as it seemed in my hazy memory that I had floated more than I walked. I had so many strange thoughts and questions in my mind then, all spiralling like schools of fish evading a predator. Mostly I wondered about the strange mingling I experienced with Belial, and the reason for the ennui's attack. But it was difficult for me to concentrate on any one thought with Eris standing so close. Thunder split the air and we both looked past the awning to the blackening sky. Green and red flashes of lightning showed me our path, and my ghost sight took me the rest of the way. I saw only the top of the wall as it jutted ever so slightly over the line of the hill, and we made our way to the door just before the slick, oily rains began to fall. We huddled for warmth under the cornice, and if not for my darklight vision I would never have managed to find and pick the lock. That it was engaged at an empty mausoleum angered me, but as we sat in dry comfort during the storm, I imagined what a horrid mess any vagrants or targs might make in this place.

"There's a sepulcher," Eris said. I said that the family must have had quite a bit of coin, affording such an expansive domain for their own dead. In truth it was a fine burial place, with the sepulcher in the center for the family heads, and numerous sarcophagi surrounding them. There was even a small living space for the tender, which we slept in, as it had a relatively soft bed. Everything the family needed to honor their dead was here in this covered space. There was even a jinn watching the sepulcher, though he seemed out of sorts, as he only showed himself after we had been inside the mausoleum for well over an hour. When he spoke, his voice stuttered badly, and he soon retreated into the ether.

Eris rose and went to where the jinn had stood, searching the ceiling and the floor.

"What are you looking for?"

You are reading story Erebus at novel35.com

"Its vessel," she replied, her voice grateful for a distraction.

"Why?" I made certain my tone was curious and not critical. I loved her, and wanted to be a source of joy to her at all times. I wanted her to live a life that offered more than only pain.

She wore a long black cloak with a hood that hid much of her lined and weary face. Under that cloak were a plain tunic and ragged pants, but I knew she had on heated small clothes, and a hidden pouch that ran along the small of her back at the top of her breeches. She pulled from that pouch a thing that stopped my heart. I had acquired it on the day we met.

"How do you have it?" I asked, shocked.

She looked sorrowful, but came close to me, putting the metal case in my hands. "Your friend brought it to me, and made me promise to keep it hidden and safe. He said it's imperative that you read its message."

"My friend?"

She nodded. "The lucien."

"Where is he? What happened to him? When did he bring you this?"

Cold, slender fingers returned to my cheeks. "He'd gone, Victor. I heard nothing, but in the morning I saw him, little more than a stain on the side of a building."

The Chalcedony Angels carried weapons of terrible and forbidden designs; heavy blunderbusses that emitted a wave of sound so powerful and concentrated that they could bring a body to boil, melting flesh from bones or rupturing organs. I had seen them once in a photonic article kept in the Bibliotheca. The angels also wore armor that expanded their size and strength to thrice that of a normal human, with faceless bronze visors and furnaces within their breastplates. These weapons were only used when the very safety of Haven was threatened. How Caduceus could have been such a threat was beyond me. I hated that metal case and the devilry it contained, and told Eris I wanted nothing to do with it as I let it fall clattering on the mausoleum floor.

She stopped her tears, letting only a few slip, and lifted it slowly, then held it to her heart. "My father died because of this."

She found a raised tablet near the door of the sepulcher. A wave of her hand and the case opened, emitting light as it had done when Caduceus made a similar gesture. She took from it a thin shard of crystal and held it to the tablet. The jinn's vessel then appeared, a small box that hung over the tablet, spinning slowly while floating. Eris set the crystal on end between the vessel and the tablet, and an image glowed like blue fire in the space above. Within the borders of the image I saw a ring, a diamond, three lines like ocean waves and a row of seven red squares. The shapes then faded, and I saw a series of visions that tortured me for reasons I could not even guess. There was a tower on a mountain. Atop the tower was a door into the night, its stair rising upwards upon nothing, and beyond the stair I saw the inside of a grand tomb filled with thrones. Upon one throne was a severed hand, on another was an eye (removed from the head, it stared eagerly at me, twitching and swiveling with a hunger to be found), on another was a blindfolded skull with its mouth open as if to speak, and on another was a lordly vessel half filled with blood. The vision left me trembling with a strangely familiar dread, as if I had been reminded of an impending errand I wished dearly to avoid.

"You saw something," Eris said.

"You did not?" I was confused, bewildered even. All she did was shrug.

"There were shapes of colored light, and then numbers moving too fast for me to read. I saw nothing more."

I looked for a chair to sit on, and settled for a sarcophagus. Eris sat by me and hugged my arm. We sat quietly until the pattering of rain on the roof made us sleepy, then went to the grave tender's quarters and passed the night in silence. In my dream I saw flocks of tyflochs gathering at the feet of a mountain tower. They raised their hands and spread their wings, and though there was no sound, I was certain they were offering hymns to Anpiel.

You can find story with these keywords: Erebus, Read Erebus, Erebus novel, Erebus book, Erebus story, Erebus full, Erebus Latest Chapter