Free 2012-07-Misery's Mirror by Unknown Page A

murmured. Nightglasses were powerful tools, and dangerous ones. An apprentice with a nightglass could summon shadowbeasts that would strike fear into a master wizard’s heart. The Dusk Hall held the largest collection of nightglasses in Nidal, and it coveted more. It was not difficult to believe that their superiors would send a student to retrieve one—even from that student’s dead kin.
    Whether the Dusk Hall had any legitimate claim to the glass almost didn’t matter. The Hall wanted it. Ascaros would therefore have to retrieve it, or risk facing their masters’ wrath. After years of seeing the scars that their teachers inflicted for far lesser transgressions, Isiem doubted his friend would be eager to disobey.
    “When do you leave?” he asked.
    Ascaros raised his head and looked at him. “Tomorrow. I am allowed one companion. One of the masters offered, but… I would feel better if I had a friend. Will you come?”
    “Of course,” Isiem said.
    ∗∗∗
    Black and swollen and slow, the Usk River poured from the hinterlands of Nidal into the sea. It carried the shadowcallers’ vessel from the Uskwood to the coast, and it bore them past the massive, rust-streaked Rivergate that filtered incoming traffic. At the Rivergate their documents were checked three times, their identities questioned, every parcel in their belongings opened and examined—but all of it was done in under twenty minutes. Nisroch saw more merchants and travelers than any other city in Nidal, and its sternly efficient officials kept its traffic moving.
    Isiem’s first impression of the city, as their boat passed through the rain-swept walls, was of towering gloom. Nisroch was known as the Maw of Shadow, and while it did not have Pangolais’s black trees to cast its inhabitants into an eternal twilight, its dense gray storm clouds had much the same effect. He wondered whether the hand of Zon-Kuthon kept those massed clouds hanging over the city; surely no natural storm would linger so long.
    Spires and mausoleums crowded the banks of the city’s wealthy northern quarters, throwing jagged shadows across the river. To the south, the city’s laborers and commoners lived in smaller homes of basalt and dark wood. Two immense bridges, their wet black stone carved into lovingly detailed depictions of tormented petitioners, connected the halves of the city. Rainwater cascaded down the bridges’ sides in shivering cascades, drenching the boats that passed below.
    High above the Nisrochi nobles’ silver-edged towers and iron-gated mansions, the Cathedral of Bone loomed. Sixty feet high and raised even higher on an artificial hill of stepped stone, the cathedral was a gleaming white pearl in a grim black city. It was built entirely of human bone—and the building, legend claimed, was never done. Squinting through the rain, Isiem thought he could make out a lattice of scaffolding clinging to the west side. Somewhere nearby, he knew, Kuthite torturers would be stripping more bones from victims’ bodies and washing them in acid to cleanse them for the faith.
    “We’ll go there first,” Ascaros said. “We must report to the Over-Diocesan and be formally welcomed into the city.”
    “And if we don’t?”
    “It isn’t a choice.”
    Ascaros’s prediction proved correct. No sooner had their boat docked than five Nisrochi officials approached them on the pier. Three wore the harbormaster’s silver pin over their plain black robes. Two wore the spiked chain of Zon-Kuthon.
    “We welcome you to Nisroch,” one of the Kuthites said. She was a short, round woman, her fingernails gnawed to uneven stubs. Her eyebrows were plucked completely bald, an affectation that Isiem had noticed among several of the harbor officials as well.
    The other Kuthite was a man. He seemed younger than his companion, or perhaps merely subservient to her. His eyebrows, too, were plucked bare, and his head was shaved clean—a look that did not flatter his bumpy scalp or