Void-Born: The Knight Who Devours Curses

Left Branch

Cael went out the window because there was nothing else to do.

The cobbler's lean-to roof sloped away beneath the sill, slick with rain, and he slid down it on his heels with the satchel clutched to his chest. Shingles skidded out from under him. He hit the stockroom yard hard enough to jar his teeth, rolled behind a stack of barrels, and lay there with his heart slamming against his ribs.

Above him, through the thin boards of the building, a door crashed open.

"By order of the Radiant Order," a man's voice rang out, calm and carrying, "this house is placed under inquisitorial seal. All occupants will remain where they stand."

"Occupants?" Brannoc's laugh was a bark of pure contempt. "There's a cobbler, a cat, and me. The cat's the only one with any sense."

"You are Brannoc Hale. Retired knight of the Third Garrison. Proprietor of the Rusted Hound."

"I'm the man who's about to ask what in the hells you think you're doing in my lodger's room."

Cael pressed his forehead to the wet cobblestones. He should be moving. The trapdoor was ten paces away, behind a sack of tanned hides, exactly where Brannoc had said. But his legs refused to carry him, because the voice above him was the voice of the only person who had ever stayed.

"A man was struck by a forbidden curse last night and did not die," the inquisitor said. "Witnesses place him at the east gate. Witnesses place him on this street. His name is Cael Rhensworth."

"Never heard of him."

"You are lying."

"I'm sixty years old and I've been lying to better men than you since before you were weaned."

A pause. Then, softly: "Search the room."

Boots thundered across the floorboards. Somewhere in the walls a door banged, and then another. Cael finally dragged himself upright and crept toward the stockroom, keeping low, one hand dragging along the brick.

He reached the hides. He heaved them aside. The trapdoor lay beneath, an iron ring set into the planks, and he had his fingers around it when the voice came again, nearer now, through the floor.

"There is a second heartbeat in this house."

Cael froze.

"I can feel it," the inquisitor went on, almost gently. "A void-shadow. I have not felt one in eleven years. Brannoc Hale, you are harboring a heretic."

"I'm harboring a dead rat and a leaking roof."

"Last warning."

"Then I'll give you mine."

There was a sound Cael had never heard before, the sound of a sword leaving a scabbard that hadn't been drawn in a decade. It was a long, clean, ringing note, and it went through him like grief.

*No,* he thought. *No, no, no, Brannoc, don't—*

"Kid!" The old knight's voice thundered through the boards, huge and ragged and unmistakably meant for him. "You hear me? I know you're down there! Go!"

Cael's hand closed around the iron ring.

"I said go! I'm not going to say it a third time, you stubborn bastard!"

The inquisitor's calm cracked. "Seize him. Seize the old man and burn the floorboards if you must. The shadow is directly beneath us."

"Then let me introduce you to what a Third Garrison knight does with his last good day."

Steel met steel. A man screamed. The whole house shook.

Cael heaved the trapdoor open and dropped into the dark.

The tunnel stank of old rain and rot. He landed in ankle-deep water, stumbled, caught himself on a slimy wall, and for several long seconds stood there in the blackness with his chest heaving and his eyes burning.

Above him the fight continued. Boots, shouts, the crash of furniture. Then, faintly, one more sound, a single deep voice raised in a roar that was almost a laugh.

Then it stopped.

The silence that followed was the worst thing Cael had ever heard.

"Brannoc," he whispered.

Nothing answered.

The thing in his chest, the second heartbeat, went very still, and something cold and bright and enormous unfolded beneath his ribs, something that had never wanted anything until this moment. It wanted the inquisitor. It wanted him with a hunger so sharp it made Cael's teeth ache.

"No," Cael said aloud, and his voice shook. "Not yet. Not like this."

The hunger pulled at him like a tide.

"I said not yet."

He wrenched himself away from it, away from the open trapdoor, and ran.

The left branch was narrower than the right and half-flooded. Water lapped at his knees. Rats scattered ahead of him, their eyes glinting in the dark, and he caught himself looking at them and flinched away, not trusting his own gaze.

Behind him, a clear voice rang off the stone.

"The shadow has gone below. Fan out. Use the lanterns."

Light bloomed at the far end of the tunnel, cold and white, spilling over the wet brick. Cael ducked behind a pillar of crumbling masonry and pressed himself flat. Through a crack in the wall he saw the inquisitor step off the ladder, the tall man with the shaved scalp, his white cloak now streaked with red along one sleeve. He carried an iron lantern that burned with no flame. In his other hand he held a sword-cane, and the blade was bloodied to the hilt.

Cael's stomach turned over.

*That's Brannoc's blood.*

"Come out, Rhensworth," the inquisitor called. His voice was almost kind. "You cannot run from the Light. It has no edge to hide behind. Come out, and I promise you a clean death."

Cael said nothing. He did not breathe.

"Very well."

The inquisitor lifted his free hand. Silver glyphs flickered along his knuckles, and a ring of pale light spread outward across the tunnel floor, probing, tasting. It crawled over the water and the bricks and the dead rats, and it reached the pillar where Cael hid.

It touched him.

It was a seeking hex, a tracker's spell, designed to light up the soul of anyone who carried a taint. It should have burned him like a brand. Instead the cold, hungry thing inside his chest rose up to meet it, opened wide, and drank.

The silver light went out.

The inquisitor staggered. The lantern in his hand flickered and dimmed, and for the first time his composed face showed something that might have been fear.

"Impossible," he breathed. "A seeking hex does not fail. It cannot be eaten."

Cael stepped out from behind the pillar. He hadn't decided to. His legs simply carried him, and the thing in his chest hummed approvingly as it took the shape of the spell, sliding another thread into the great cathedral-window pattern that was already there.

"You killed him," Cael said.

"I executed a heretic's accomplice, as the Order requires."

"His name was Brannoc."

"Names are irrelevant to the Light."

Cael raised his right hand. He didn't know what he was doing. He only knew the shape of the seeking hex, the way you know the shape of a word you've just heard, and when he turned it back on its caster it came out of his palm as a ring of black fire, thin as a hair, fast as a thought.

It struck the inquisitor in the chest.

The man didn't scream. He simply stopped. The iron lantern dropped from his fingers and rolled in the water, its cold light guttering out, and his eyes went wide and blank. Slowly, like a puppet with cut strings, he sank to his knees, then to his side, and lay still.

Cael stared at his own hand.

"No," he whispered. "I didn't mean to. I didn't—"

But he had. Some part of him had meant it, completely.

The tunnel was silent except for the dripping of water and the thud of his own pulse, and beneath it, the second heartbeat, steady and satisfied.

Far behind him, a man's voice shouted, "The captain's down! He's down!"

Cael turned and ran, and this time he did not look back.

He came out at the river just before dusk.

A rusted grate gave way under his shoulder, and then he was crawling through reeds and mud and cold water, gasping, filthy, alive. He lay on the bank with the satchel crushed beneath him and the sky turning the color of an old bruise overhead.

Across the water, Harrowmere's cathedral bells were ringing.

Not the evening call. Something wilder, the long, flat, ragged peal of a town raising the alarm.

Cael rolled onto his back and looked up at the first stars. His hands were shaking, and he pressed them hard against his eyes until bright spots swam behind the lids.

"He called me kid," he said, to no one. "Every day for seven years."

Somewhere deep in his chest, the thing that had killed a man for him curled up and went quiet, and Cael lay on the bank and wept like a child.