From Any Natural Thing

Crossing the mountains separating Lyria from Temonia wasn’t, as far as Rufio had gleaned through rumors, the most brutal act of self-flagellation a footsore wanderer could attempt. The passes here were less treacherous than those north of Rhatia, the weather this time of year less dangerous to a man on foot than to ships crossing the northern inlets of the Inmost Sea. Their supplies were still adequate. There were inns to be found, at intervals, though they were the bare, run-down sort that was wont to spring up outside the walls of Imperial border forts. His feet had grown leathery and stopped blistering, by this point. And the views could be spectacular, like the basin of the Istros River he looked down on from the inn’s front porch now, on whose near bank civilization ended and across which the lands of the Bolthoi began.

But damn it, he couldn’t bear being cold a moment longer.

He turned for the door. As he tried to steady his shivering hands enough to get a grip on the handle, it swung open.

“Your Majesty.”

Valens growled. “Hadrian was perfectly tolerable, if a bit reserved, for the better part of a year. Now all of a sudden he’s some groveling sycophant. I don’t need you bandying Your Highness and my emperor about, too, even if you mean it half in jest.”

“I know, I know. And I’m sure Nikaphoreans or Alexios’ loyalists wouldn’t be the only factions that stand to gain from killing you in your sleep. But I’m pretty sure that innkeeper knows who you are, anyway, and I’ve learned not to trust that sort with secrets.”

“I may have passed this way… a few times, and not always spent my stay sober. Still, I want both of you trained in discretion by the time we get down into Temonia proper.”

“I’ll hold my tongue, Valens. Even if it means I need to train myself back out of it, once you declare yourself openly. Now, good man who is a captain of monster-hunters, and nothing more, please let me pass, before this cold freezes off something I would need to declare myself emperor.”

Valens stood aside for Rufio, then stepped out and closed the door. Rufio threw himself onto a bench beside the fireplace, next to Atia.

“And how are you holding up, princess?”

She blushed, a little, although it was hard to tell whether she was less jaded about titles and forms of address than her father, or it had something to do with the heat of the fire. “Oh, already worried about my son. Your own mother must’ve been the same way, when you told her you were leaving for Aureliopolis.”

“She was supportive, but… yes. I figure, once we get there, and we deal with this monster, and a bunch of merchant ships go out at the beginning of spring, I should send her a long and detailed letter.”

“I’d tell you to do it sooner, but I don’t think it’d arrive a single day earlier, if you left it here for another band of fools like us passing the other way to deliver.”

“What’s the farthest you’ve been from home? From Lyria, I suppose, since it doesn’t seem like you keep much of a fixed address.”

“Oh, not long after my father’s sight started coming back in earnest… Longinus would’ve been only five or six at the time, and his father still alive… we sailed east for awhile, spent a year or two practicing our trade in the desert.”

“Why?”

“We’d already killed everything dangerous enough to warrant a bounty in Lyria, and there wasn’t nearly the same flow of shadow-spawn coming in from north as there has been lately.”

“What, exactly, puts a monster into the class of shadow-spawn? The only two examples I know of are the Leupin and their Shadowmen, but I get the impression they come in greater variety than that.”

Atia sighed, her eyes lost in the fire’s embers. “Well, let me tell you a story about that time in the desert. I think that would help, more than when my father tries to describe classes of monster anatomically, like he’s a natural philosopher.”

“Do I need to fetch you a drink, before you get into it?”

She shook her head. “It isn’t that kind of story. While we spent most of that time in the far east of the Empire, Kamut and the other provinces along the southeast coast of the Inmost Sea, we did for about two months wander a bit further inland. Past Shar-al-Qaddim lies the bleakest land you will ever see. Have you ever stood on the prow of a ship, where you couldn’t see land in any direction, but only waves that came up the height of your ship to peak above your head?”

The memory from this past autumn between Rhatia and Lyria brought a churn to his stomach. “I have.”

“Imagine the whole thing froze in place, the surface still smooth and featureless, but those waves turned into still hills, unadorned by any tree or grass for miles. Imagine those hills were made of yellow-white, scorching sand.”

“Sounds like it’d be a welcome break from our current winter crossing… for all of five minutes.”

“Just as that desert starts to seem interminable, it gives way to rocky, cave-dotted hills, then to a coastline where most of that country’s people reside. No one knows the breadth or depth of the cave system in those hills, but mundane beasts and bandits are by far the most pleasant of the things that hide in it.”

“And, being monster-hunters, you…”

“We tried to catch our quarries out in the open, on their way to or from their hunts. We took a contract for a pack of a dozen of these little imp-creatures, and got most of them as they came down a dry creekbed, but three got away. The payout would’ve been much higher if we had the full set of their heads, and Longinus’ father gave chase. I went after him, but we got ahead of my father and the rest of our company, and I lost his trail not long after he followed them into one of the cave-mouths.”

She leaned in close to the fire, the blue light of her eyes mingling with the dancing red of the flames. “When I looked back, I could still see the blue of the sky where the cave opened, but everywhere else there was an… unnatural darkness. I had not gone in far; I held my hands about a span from my face, and should have been able to see them, but couldn’t. I formed a Fire Sign for a light, but the flames twisted into… this cruelly grinning face, for a moment, before going out. Then something pressed on me from all sides. If you’ve ever woken from a nightmare to the feeling of something pressing down on your chest, it was like that, but from every angle, against my chest, back, arms, legs, neck… then a voice came out of the darkness. ‘Speak for me!’ ”

She put on a harsh rasp in her throat, as she quoted the voice; the affectation was not expert acting, and would have sounded comical, but for the sincerity behind it. Though she was failing to capture the sound as she had heard it, her face spoke to the impression it left on her, how even if she couldn’t replicate it, she would never forget it.

“It let up, just enough for me to breathe, and to get a few words out. ‘What do you want from me?’, I managed, before it squeezed me again. When I started to kick and flail in a mindless panic, like one on the gallows, it softened its grip again. ‘Speak for me!’, it demanded again. It was all I could manage to scream, ‘Speak for you how? What are you asking that I say?!’, before it took hold of me again, and I thought it would crush me outright. Finally, it let go of me completely, and a third time, louder, it demanded, ‘Speak for me!’. Rather than carrying on the exchange further, I took the chance to run. Something pursued me out of that cave– some monster I never dared to turn and look directly at, it might’ve had the form of a giant jackal bedecked in gold, or a glistening mass of crab-claws and tentacles, or a shadowy man-shape six cubits or more in height. Each of these was an impression I got, at some point or another, from what I heard or saw out of the corner of my eye. Each in contradiction to the last. Only when I found my father again did I dare to turn around, and when I did, nothing was there.”

“What happened to Longinus’ father?”

Atia’s eyes lingered on the fire’s coals for the better part of a minute, before she looked up at Rufio. “I saw his face again only once. I will not say that I saw him again. His name was Cornelius, but when we found something wearing his face in Armandar, the nearest major city, it did not recognize us, and it introduced itself as Nabi. It had his face, except… the eyes. Gray and dead, like a Leupin.”

“A Shadowman took his form?”

“Maybe. I assumed, at the time, something had killed him and taken over his body. There are problems with the notion it was a Shadowman– for one, I’ve never head of a Leupin that far south– but therein lies the point of this story. We call a monster shadow-spawn when it seems to have originated out of the Shadow. What the Shadow is, no one knows, or at least no one who’s bothered to tell the monster-hunters who might actually make use of the knowledge. It is found in caves in the south, and under the eaves of trees in the north, poised just close enough to the civilized world to menace it. There is a wicked intellect to it, though whether all the Shadow is one or each place were it is found has its own agency, I do not know. But I do have… a sense, the impression of a pattern, in the monsters it brings about.”

“Your father spoke of monsters seeming to darkly reflect humanity, in some way… Moroi invert well-wishes on expecting mothers, werewolves are men whose cravings have helped transform them into something bestial, and so forth. What do shadow-spawn reflect?”

“On one hand, they’re individual reflections, same as other monsters. Many men have been Leupin, in a sense. Note how we speak the same language, Lucius, despite my being Lyrian and your being Rhatian. That’s because I’m far from the first Lyrian woman to share her bed with a Rhatian man, and many before me didn’t have the luxury of choice. But the shadow-spawn are a collective or an identity, reflecting such a thing. Humanity. Civilization. Good. The divine order of things. I think they stand counterpart to one of those.”

“...and like civilized rulers, or like the King on High, the Shadow directs them all according to some plan?”

“The Bolthoi are among the rare peoples who’ve willfully migrated close to places inhabited by the Shadow. They probably understand things about it we do not, and they worship it as a god, or a set of gods. I would treat it, at least, as a ghost or a demon, for all the intellect and malice that implies, and the shadow-spawn as agents acting on its wicked designs.”