The Nightborn by Isabel Cooper (howl and other poems TXT) 📗

the ash tree nearest a second-story window. Fewer still would’ve been able to throw rocks from that position hard enough, and with enough accuracy, to take out the wooden separation between the panes and then the leaded glass itself. Branwyn did it in three throws, then leapt, grabbed the sill, and pulled herself in. Glass scraped her fingers and her back, but she’d had far worse injuries.

One day, Yathana observed, you’ve got to stop jumping through windows.

“I’m not jumping, I’m climbing,” Branwyn whispered, “and I’d love to. Furthermore, you’re the reason I can’t go in the normal way, you know.”

They’d thought about trying to bring Branwyn in as Zelen’s “captive,” the reason he’d come back in such a hurry, but there’d be no way to keep Yathana with her, and the soulsword gave her too many advantages to risk for the deception. Once Zelen had said his family likely conducted their rites in one of the disused wings, the window had struck her as the best choice. Branwyn could have wished for a quieter way, but perhaps distance and rain would be on her side.

She’d landed in a room without distinguishing features. It had likely been a bedroom, and the windows suggested it had housed family or guests, not servants, but the furniture had been moved out long ago. Now it was dustless but anonymous, only a dark square of walls and floorboard.

There was no obvious threat there either. Nothing any of the five senses could detect seemed off. The room was as bare of skulls or the smell of old blood as it was of furnishings. All the same, Branwyn felt her stomach start to coil, and a sour taste crept up the back of her throat. It might have been her mind, since she had a broad idea of what happened in the house, but she’d learned to trust her instincts, all the more so since the night at the Rognozis.

Deathmistress, give us a good ending, said Yathana. If a sword had a stomach, she would have been three seconds from losing an entire week’s worth of meals. This is what I sensed all along.

“It’s not just me then,” whispered Branwyn, drawing the sword slowly.

If you feel like the entire building is made out of flyblown meat, then no, it’s not just you. Gods, how long have… How did we…

“I know,” Branwyn said, “but speed is of the essence here.”

Yes. The sword-spirit gathered herself together. Sorry, girl. I should be able to guide you to the worst of it, at any rate. That’s probably where they’re keeping the kid.

“Silver lining, I suppose.”

Branwyn opened the door slowly, which didn’t keep it from creaking, and stepped carefully out into a dark hallway. The walls held brackets, but no torches, and they were bare of any ornament that might provide either color or warmth.

Darya, Branwyn’s friend and fellow Sentinel, spent much of her time hunting in ruined cities. Now Branwyn recalled her stories with a new perspective, one that let her understand them much better. She didn’t think any of the rooms would contain the restless dead Darya had talked about, but neither guards nor cultists were an especially pleasant alternative. As for monsters, one never knew.

Down, said Yathana, and I think on the left. Hard to say from this distance.

Regardless, Branwyn opened the doors up and down the hallway, gave each room a quick inspection, and left when they contained neither a child nor, in most cases, any signs of use. One end of the hall was boarded up, and scorch marks stretched long, misshapen fingers out onto the wall in front of the boards on either side.

“With any sense,” Branwyn whispered, “they’d have given up being cultists after all of this.”

Nah. Probably made them try harder to be worthy. That’s how fanatics work. Yathana chuckled. I should know. But my cult’s right.

“Is this the time for existential philosophy?”

In a desecrated building, right before we might die? Absolutely.

Branwyn opened the last door, found nothing, and then followed a winding, narrow staircase down to the ground floor.

There, a reasonably skilled and fairly unpleasant person had carved murals into the wood. Most of them showed a giant head—presumably Gizath—glowering at people in different states of vice: a man in a gutter with a bottle of wine, a woman in a low-cut gown, a mob at the gates of a castle. Another scene met with its evident approval, one in which a well-dressed family accepted the obeisance of three soldiers and a peasant couple.

Oh, for a picture of a waterfolk orgy.

The first door Branwyn opened led to a small room with a table, a chest, and a bookshelf. She didn’t spend much time investigating, but at least one of the books looked like it was bound in…

Well, it could, in theory, have been goatskin or pigskin, undyed, but Branwyn wouldn’t have been confident about saying it was either.

New plan. We get the girl, the knights execute every damn one of these people except Zelen, and then we come back with a squad of Blades and set fire to the place. Sorry about your young man’s house, but…

Branwyn doubted he’d mind.

Chapter 35

It’s at the end of the hall, said Yathana, as Branwyn crept forward. At least, that’s where the corruption is strongest.

“Do you know if they’ve still got a demon?” Branwyn asked under her breath. The door opposite the study had only been a linen closet, though why cultists conducting rituals in an abandoned wing would need linens…

Well, she did know. Or she could guess, little as she wanted to. They were quite organized about the whole business; Branwyn had to give them that much.

No. After a certain point, degrees of corruption don’t register. Once you’ve drowned, it doesn’t matter if you tried to breathe twelve feet of water or only ten, does it?

“No,” said Branwyn, and the neatly stacked linen took on a new connotation. “How long would you say they’ve been worshipping the Traitor? Sacrificing to him?”

Generations. Maybe since before the