Set Upon a Golden Bough to Sing

Sound carried through the Cathedral of Sacred Beauty from end to end; the cavernous space echoed madly when Rufio did so much as mutter under his breath or set a chisel down on the table beside his easel. It surprised him, then, in spite of his intense focus on getting the scales on the dragon Saint Alexios was running through, when he looked up and saw Atia watching him.

“Chariot races not to your taste, Rufio?”

He looked back down at his work. Maybe he shouldn’t have been doing the linework in such a thick black pigment. “Oh, I guess those have started, by now. Go on without me; I’ll catch up. I woke up worrying about how this damned dragon would turn out, and came in here to work on it by lamplight. You know how the slightest nagging worry keeps me from getting back to sleep.”

Atia stepped around the easel, laid a hand on his shoulder. That might be helpful, he thought, for the simple reason that her glowing Nephilic eyes would let him see this thing under different lighting, get a sense of how to balance the black lines bordering each scale with the metallic leaf he would add later.

Except, no new light shone on the icon. Instead of a cold blue glow, there was only a shadow. He tensed.

“Rufio? Is something wrong?”

He noticed it, this time. Most people called him Rufio. Most of the time, he called himself that.

But Atia always called him by his first name.

He didn’t look in its eyes. If he turned his head, it would know he knew.

“...I think I’ve been going about this linework all wrong. I can probably get a finer line with magic, than with a paintbrush.” He reached for his table of tools, and slid on his Fire-gauntlet. He looked intensely at his icon-in-progress, feigning deep concentration, then turned sharply to face the Shadowman.

The next second overwhelmed his senses, but he found himself staggering backwards, clutching his upper thigh as blood poured through his fingers.

In its hand, the Shadowman in Atia’s form held a bloody dagger. Its right eye was flat and dead, and the left side of its face was scorched by Rufio’s spell, with black smoke pouring out wherever its skin had been broken.

Its face twisted into a cringe of despair, and it wailed, even as it lunged after him. The steel of the blade, red of his blood, and gold reflected from those few mosaics and icons that had already gone up inside the cathedral all glinted together in its weapon as he stumbled backwards, falling over his table and scattering his tools.

The table was only about a cubit wide, and Rufio grabbed it by one leg to use as a shield. Catching a thrust from the dagger on its surface as he rose to one knee, he groped for the nearest tool, and plunged an awl into the Shadowman’s calf.

It, too, collapsed to one knee, and from that mutually weak position the two pushed off each other, the Shadowman’s arm against the table Rufio held. Rufio worked the awl out for another stab, the Shadowman freed its dagger from the wood of the table, and both rose weakly to their feet.

While Rufio recognized that a dagger was a better weapon than an awl, this small table was a surprisingly useful defensive implement; and his powers of Fire, shored up by this gauntlet, let him spray intense gouts of flame at short range, though his limited knowledge kept him from performing more impressive spellcasts. He was bleeding badly from his leg, but the Shadowman was in similarly poor shape, and overall seemed to be at a disadvantage.

To offset this, it drew its duplicate of Atia’s saber. It did not handle the weapon as deftly as the true daughter of Valens, however, and the blade’s dull color suggested some limitation of the creature’s power of shapeshifting had kept it from perfectly replicating the weapon’s metallurgy. Still, it swung it in a wide arc above its head, and kept Rufio trapped in a posture of defense. Though the changeling was slowed by the injuries Rufio had dealt it, the smoke billowing from its wounds did not seem to concern it, as his own bleeding leg did him. Time was not on his side.

He took as big a step back as he could manage, then hurled the awl at the Shadowman’s face. It tried to deflect it with the sword, missed, and ducked only just enough to avoid getting hit squarely in the forehead by the point, getting instead raked across the scalp. As it moved, Rufio aimed low with a Fire Sign, and engulfed the airy chiton it wore in flames.

That, at least, was made of cotton, or something similar enough to burn just as well.

Now it became frantic, and charged him.

A crescent of steel came over its shoulder from behind as it lunged, however, and pulled it bodily away from him. It staggered back into the wide basin where the Sacrificial Flames had burned the day before, fell, and did not rise again.

Sigrid of Thule inspected the haft of her axe, where the flames had singed it. Her charge, the princess Thekla, lingered behind her. “I take it that was not a lovers’ quarrel we just broke up?”

Rufio shook his head. “That was a shadow-spawned monster, wearing her form. It did cast any kind of spell at me; I know enough of these things to assume, based on that, she is likely still alive. Although, she is likely in as much danger as I just was, or more.”

The princess cast a glance out the main doors of the cathedral. “Then there is no time to waste. Do you know where she is?”

“No. She could be in the palace, the hippodrome… hell, she could be on the other side of the strait, for all I know. I have to find her.”

Sigrid looked down, with concern. “You need to do something about that leg, first. You’ll bleed out, if you go sprinting all over the city looking for your little álfablóð.”
Rufio pressed the stab wound shut between two fingers of his right hand, the one without the gauntlet. He made a Fire Sign, producing a small, blue-hot flame above one finger, and gritted his teeth.

Sigrid held the haft of her axe lengthwise in front of his mouth. “Bite down on this.”

When Rufio could think again, he felt bad about the teeth marks he left on the beautiful weapon alongside the char, but only for a moment. Then he was sprinting out of the cathedral and through the acropolis.