Void-Born: The Knight Who Devours Curses

Ferry light

Mira moved faster than anyone Cael had ever seen move with a bad knee.

She hauled the false-bottomed trunk out from under the worktable, popped the lid, and began stuffing grey-bound ledgers into a canvas satchel with both hands. Thread spools rolled across the floor. A pot of paste tipped and spread across the boards like something spilled in a hurry.

"Eleven copies," she said through her teeth. "Nine years of transfers, every anomalous file, every correction notice. If they burn this shop, I lose all of it."

"Then take it and go."

"I'm taking it." She slung the satchel over her shoulder and winced at the weight. "Back door. Past the privy, through the reeds, down to the landing. The ferryman owes me for a rebinding job. He'll cross us without asking."

"Mira, they'll search every boat."

"Then we'd better be on one that's already moving."

She snatched a lantern from its hook, blew out the flame, and shoved it into Cael's hands. "Carry that. If I get hit, don't stop to help."

"That's what Brannoc said."

"Brannoc was right." She paused with her hand on the latch. For a moment her composure slipped, and he saw how young she looked, how frightened. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said his name like that."

"It's all right."

"It isn't. But thank you."

She opened the back door.

The reeds behind the shop were taller than Cael's head and soaked with dusk. They pushed through them in single file, Mira first, the satchel thumping against her hip. Behind them, from the front of the bindery, came a sharp hammering.

"By order of the Radiant Order!" a woman's voice rang out, clear as a struck bell. "Open in the name of the Light!"

"She's early," Mira breathed.

The hammering turned into the crack of splintering wood. A man shouted, "Clear!" and another answered, "Empty! Back room, back room!"

"Run," Cael said.

They ran.

The reeds gave way to mud, then to a plank walkway that rattled under their boots. The landing was fifty yards ahead: a low wooden pier with a flat-bottomed ferry tied to the end, its single lantern swinging in the wind. A heavyset man in an oilskin coat stood at the rope, squinting toward the shore with growing alarm.

"Tobin!" Mira called. "Cast off!"

"Mistress Castellane?" The ferryman's mouth fell open. "There's riders on the hill, the Order's people, they're saying—"

"I know what they're saying! Cast off, or they'll have us both!"

"I can't just—"

"Tobin." Mira's voice cracked like a whip. "You owe me a rebinding and a favor, and I am calling in both."

The big man swore. He yanked the rope free and kicked the pier. The ferry drifted out into the dark current with a creak and a groan, and Cael sprinted the last ten yards and leapt.

He landed on the deck on both knees. Mira thudded down beside him, wheezing. The ferry swung out into the river, and the lights of Wrenhollow began to slide away.

For two long breaths, nothing happened.

Then a voice rang out across the water.

"Cael Rhensworth!"

She stood at the end of the pier with her hood thrown back and her white cloak snapping in the wind. Grand Inquisitor Sorrel Vance was tall and gaunt, perhaps fifty, with iron-grey hair cropped close to her skull and a silver sunburst embroidered across her breast. She held no weapon. She did not need one. A dozen inquisitors had fanned out behind her, their iron lanterns glowing a cold and steady white.

"You will return to the shore," she called, "and surrender yourself to the Light."

Cael got to his feet. He kept the lantern in his left hand and let his right hang loose.

"I'd rather not," he called back.

"Then you give me no choice."

"You always had a choice. Brannoc Hale had one, too. He picked his."

Something moved in Vance's face, brief and unreadable. "The old knight died well," she said. "I will grant him that. But he died harboring a heretic, and you have since killed three men in the Order's name."

"Four, and a bounty hunter."

"Do not boast."

"I'm not." His voice came out flat. "I wrote their names down. I know every one."

A low murmur went through the inquisitors. Vance did not turn her head.

"Purifiers," she said quietly. "On my mark."

Six of the white-cloaked figures raised their lanterns. The flames inside them, if they were flames, brightened from cold white to a blinding gold. Cael felt it before he saw it: a vast, bright, grinding pressure, the weight of six hexes woven into one, a Purification Chorus, the kind of spell used to unmake a possessed city.

"Mira," he said. "Get behind me."

"Cael—"

"Behind me. Now."

She dropped flat to the deck. The ferryman threw himself into the lee of the cargo crate, and the ferry rocked sickeningly as the current caught it.

"Fire," Vance said.

The Chorus left the pier like a sunrise.

It was the most beautiful thing Cael had ever seen.

A wall of golden light rolled across the water, singing, each of the six voices rising in a different register until the harmonies locked and the air itself rang. It lit the underside of the clouds. It lit Mira's face, wide-eyed and pale. It lit the river from bank to bank, turning the black water to molten brass.

It struck him in the chest.

For one terrible instant Cael felt himself coming apart, thread by thread, every secret and shame and wound laid open to be burned away. The Chorus did not simply kill. It cleansed. It reached for the dark in him and tried to tear it out by the roots.

And the dark, which had been waiting for exactly this, opened its mouth.

He felt the hex go in. He felt each of the six voices slide into the hollow beneath his heart like threads into a loom, and he felt the great cathedral-window shape inside him grow another rose, another spire, another impossible arch. The thing in his chest was not afraid. It was delighted. It had never tasted anything so pure.

The golden light flickered, dimmed and went out.

On the pier, six inquisitors cried out as one and dropped their lanterns. Two of them collapsed. The others reeled backward, clutching their chests, their faces gone slack with shock.

"Impossible," someone whispered, the word carrying clearly over the water. "A Purification Chorus can't be—"

"It was," said Sorrel Vance, and her voice, for the first time, shook. "It was eaten."

Cael stood on the ferry's deck, swaying. His ears were ringing. Every nerve in his body hummed like a plucked string, and the second heartbeat had grown so loud he could hear nothing else.

*Purification Chorus,* the thing in his chest said. *Sixfold, sanctioned. Caster resonance: Sorrel Vance, left-handed anchor, fifty-two years old, a daughter lost to a ghoul plague at nine.*

*Do not,* Cael thought, with fierce desperation. *Do not give me that.*

But it was already there, folded into the shape of the spell, and he couldn't unknow it.

"Cael." Mira's hand closed around his ankle. "Cael, don't. Don't send it back."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking about it."

"I was," he admitted. His voice was a ragged whisper. "I really was."

On the pier, Vance had gone dead white. She stood alone now, the other inquisitors huddled behind her, and she stared across the widening gulf of water with an expression Cael could not read.

"You cannot hold that power," she called, and for the first time she sounded almost pleading. "It will consume you. It consumed every one of your kind before you."

"Then they didn't have a ledger," Cael said.

He didn't raise his hand. He didn't speak a word. He only held her gaze for as long as the ferry kept her in sight, and then he turned his back on the pier and the Order and the burning gold afterimage of the Chorus, and he did not look around again.

The current carried them out into the dark.

The ferryman, Tobin, took up the long pole and worked it in silence, his big hands white-knuckled. Mira sat against the cargo crate with the satchel hugged to her chest and her eyes closed. Cael stood at the stern, watching the lights of Wrenhollow shrink to a handful of orange sparks.

"You ate it," Mira said at last, without opening her eyes.

"Yes."

"All six voices."

"Yes."

"How does it feel?"

He thought about that. "Like swallowing the sun," he said. "And knowing exactly how it works."

She was quiet for a while. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. "Cael. I've spent nine years in the Order's records. I've read every account of a void-born ever documented. They all end the same way. They start strong, they get stronger, and then one day they stop being able to tell the difference between what they took and what they are."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"Brannoc told me to keep a record." He pulled the small leather book from his coat and held it up. "That's what it's for. As long as I can write their names, I can tell which ones are mine and which ones are theirs."

Mira opened her eyes and looked at the ledger, then at him. Something in her face loosened, just slightly.

"That," she said, "is the smartest thing a void-born has ever said to me."

"It's the only thing I've got."

"It might be enough."

"Might."

They drifted in silence. The river narrowed, banks crowding in with dark trees. Overhead the clouds were beginning to tear apart, and a few cold stars showed through.

It was Tobin, standing at the bow, who spoke first. "Mistress?" His voice was strained. "There's someone on the east bank."

Cael looked.

On a spit of pale gravel where the river bent, a single figure stood in the starlight. It was a woman in a long black coat, tall and perfectly still, with a pale face and dark hair bound back in a braid. She wore no sunburst. She carried no lantern. She watched the ferry glide past with the calm, unhurried attention of someone reading a letter she had been waiting years to receive.

As they came level with her, she lifted one gloved hand and, very slowly, inclined her head.

The thing in Cael's chest went absolutely silent.

"Who is that?" Mira whispered.

Cael did not answer. He had no name for her. But as the ferry drew past, the woman in black smiled, a small, sad, knowing smile, and mouthed three words across the water that he could read as clearly as if she had shouted them.

*Hello, Void-born.*