After a restless night’s sleep Tiren woke with a burning pain in her leg. Her wraithlike dreams still swirling about her head she pushed herself up on her elbows and tried to make out anything in the darkness. She was sure she had seen windows last night coming up to her hard unyielding bunk.
Why was it so dark? Her body was telling her in no uncertain terms that morning was here, time to get moving, but the cold darkness was untouched by so much as the light of a candle. Even if she had awoken before dawn, as she often did on her travels, the gloom would hardly be this absolute.
She sat up and waited for her eyes to adjust, and in doing so realised that the reason her bunk seemed so hard, so spartan, was that she was lying on a stone floor, thinly carpeted in a strange, dry moss that crinkled like straw when she touched it. The darkness was shifting, still impenetrable but somehow more comprehensible, and she realised that someone was approaching with light. Instinctively she knew that being awake when they arrived would lead to questions, and so she let herself fall back limp on the ground, forcing herself to breathe slowly as one asleep and dead to the world.
The footsteps of the distant figure grew louder, the crunching of the moss like frost under his feet. Tiren chanced to open one eye a fraction and, as the light grew, found she could make out more of the room around her. It was larger than she had thought, vanishing still into darkness a handful of strides from where she lay, but finite at last. The walls were pure black, given shape only by the reflecting of the sickly candlelight, bluish flame flickering.
Tiren slid a slim, puncturing dagger from its compartment inside her shirt and concealed it in her hand. She would not meet the captor defenceless.
He drew close, and the candlelight flashed off a polished steel mask. She could hear him breathing, felt his presence radiating a vile aura as he leaned over her. A chilly, rough hand scraped her cheek.
Tiren grabbed the monk by the wrist and pulled, bringing him over top of her and onto the hard stone floor with a crack. In an instant she was over him, her knee on his chest. He tried to push her off, flailing, and she brought the knee onto his neck.
In the light of the candle, which had fallen to the floor but remained alight, she saw naked terror in his white eyes within the silver sockets of his mask. The dagger in her palm turned, and she plunged it downwards. The white eyeball burst instantly, and she kept on pushing until crimson blood spilled like tears from the mask’s eyes.
To his credit, he had never broken his vow of silence. Tiren waited for the shock to finish its job of shutting his brain down forever, for the eye she hadn’t punctured to glaze over and the dilated pupil to shrink as the muscles ceased to pull, and wiped her dagger clean on the corner of his robe.
In his hand, something glinted. She knelt down and picked it out of his curled fingers, closed up like a spider’s legs. A surgeon’s blade, glistening glass edge white in the light. What kind of evil purpose it had, she had no interest in knowing, and she threw it aside in disgust.
The last shuddering exhalation came from the monk’s lungs. She picked up the candle and jammed it back onto the brass candlestick, and it flickered but did not go out. Whatever else these monks were involved with, the candles were remarkable, Tiren thought.
She reached her hand out as she approached the black wall and touched it palm-first, her fingers splayed. On first impression, it was smooth, but the longer she touched it the more she got the sensation that there was a texture there that she simply couldn’t perceive. A crawling sensation in the skin where it contacted the wall. She pulled her hand away suddenly.
Was it… moving? Surely not. She touched it again, gingerly. There it was again. The feeling like a beetle crawling over your hand, a thousand times over. The wall was smooth, and not. Cold, and not. She looked at her hand in the bluish light of the candle. Nothing seemed amiss, which was almost more troubling. She ran her fingers along the inside of her palm, digging the nails in a little. All seemed horribly normal.
Tiren set her jaw and decided she was done worrying until she was out of this nightmare once and for all. She closed her hand around her knife and raised the candle, edging forward down the hallway.
The black, empty hallway loomed ahead of her, silent and still. It did not care that a killer roamed free. Tiren tried to remember how many silver masks there were. She had killed one. That left nineteen? Though some of them might be outside the Abbey. That was if she was inside the Abbey at all. The black stone suggested yes, but hadn’t she already been walking long enough to cross the length of that building she had seen from the outside?
She stopped and raised the candle. It was pointing backwards, as if blown by a breeze ahead. But Tiren felt no such wind. She stood still and closed her eyes, letting the air move around her. She felt no breeze.
“If my fate lies in here, let me face it,” she muttered. “Let there be no more of this black and silent skulking.” She carried on down the hallway, and came to a fork where the path split into left and right.
She looked up each path. They were, aside from their opposition, indistinguishable. She yelled down each. The yell echoed, strangely deadened, the same either way. There seemed to be nothing to choose.
She held the candle up along the left side. It flickered, shone just the same. She held it to the right – – and it blew forwards, down the hallway in another immaterial breeze. The wind came in great pulses, as if something was breathing deeply behind it and blowing every breath out at a tremendous force. As if pulled by the force of the flame, Tiren followed it down the hallway. Why she followed, she could not say. Only that she could feel something that drew her towards it, that she could not explain, that something very important lay at the end of that path.
She became aware that the crisp crunch of the underfoot moss was softening, the chill receding from the air. It was almost warm here. She raised the candle above her head and saw the ceiling was higher too, disappearing into darkness.
Suddenly, the walls dropped away as she left the hallway. It was pitch dark, a mysterious chamber of unknown purpose. She crept forwards, approaching a black column that rose out of the floor and disappeared above into the shadows, and as she came closer she saw that it was not a column but a tree, a living tree that was made of the same not-stone as the walls. She could feel life inside it, the rustle of its silent leaves. It was like a thing from a nightmare. She touched the bark, and was overcome with the same crawling sensation that made her pull her hand back with a cry.
A cracking sound of wood made her turn, eyes wide and wild.
“Where are you?” she said, and her voice shocked her with its tremor. She renewed her grip on the knife and turned her back to the tree.
A sound above! She turned and slashed blindly, and caught a fraction glimpse of a shadowy figure rising back into the canopy. So he moved above her. She turned to retreat back into the hallway and found she could not find it, closed and sealed behind her with an unyielding black wall.
The branches above her moved, and she dove aside at the last moment, rolling and turning in one movement to face her attacker.
The beard was like a mane. He loped closer, low to the ground, on hands and feet, body contorted impossibly.
The forester snarled, and she saw blood in his fangs and in his eyes.
He leapt, and she slashed with the knife, giving him a long wound on his side that splashed black blood across her face. The beast roared and turned, cautious now. Tiren was not meant for caution. It did not exist in her. She darted forwards, blade raised and trained on his throat. As he tried to leap into the trees again, she caught him and clung to his back, bringing him down to earth. As he tried to shake her off, she brought the knife round and plunged it into his chest, again and again, until his breathing became ragged and his limbs went limp. She stood up, and carried on.