The Spirit of Roshall
by Luke D. Evans
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
“Tranton!” Cadovis hollered back, dodging the blow with a quick parry and dart to the side. Tranton swung wildly, chopping like an axe downward, then swinging sideways as if he would see Cadovis sliced in two.
Cadovis dodged, slid aside, blocked another blow. He was stumbling backward in the small space.
Tranton had slammed into the kitchen counter, stunned himself, and turned back on Cadovis. “Foul beast!” he yelled. “What have you done to Ister?” Tears flew from his face.
“Tranton, please! I’m Cadovis!”
Tranton swung wildly again, and Cadovis butted him in the head with the pommel. Tranton cried out, then recovered, charging viciously, hatred in his eyes.
Cadovis took a step back and topped over an armchair, his back slamming against the floor and sword pointing up and out at an angle.
The cries stopped, replaced by a sick gurgling sound. Tranton stood at Cadovis’s upturned legs, the sword driven into his chest. He slumped against it, lifeless.
Cadovis cried out, and the castle returned. It had never left. He had imagined the house, hadn’t he? There had never been a house. He’d tripped over a root is all. Indeed, there it was. A great jutting root. He clambered to his feet, pulled the sword from Tranton’s chest. His old friend fell to the ground, dead. He had gone mad, thought Cadovis, to be the enemy. No other way to explain it. Cadovis suffered one last look at Ister, barely recognizing what remained of her. She was split open and the vine was slithering through her, consuming her from within.
Cadovis stumbled out of the courtyard. Loksey and Angern, where were they? He must find them. He weaved his way through the castle, through one wide, tall corridor after another. In a great room off one of the corridors stood a stone pedestal, and at the pedestal stood Loksey, his back to Cadovis and a scroll before him.
Cadovis approached Loksey cautiously, calling out his name.
“Cadovis.” Loksey turned slightly. “This” — he gestured to the scroll — ”This is for you.”
“What is it, Loksey?”
“He was here. He told me to give this to you.”
Cadovis took the scroll, looked it over. It was a map, fanciful names and vague markings etched into it in a looping script. The map was emblazoned with extravagant drawings seeming to fall into the page. A tree with many trunks? A keyhole island? A tower? He turned back to Loksey, puzzled. “Who was here?”
“Why, the man. He said” — Loksey paused, as if unsure of the words — “he said he had your father. Was keeping him safe for you.”
Cadovis gripped Loksey by the shoulders. “What else did he say? By the shades, tell me everything!”
Loksey pointed at the tower on the map. “He said your father is here. But” — he held up a finger — “you must start here, or you will never find it.” He lay the tip of his finger on the tree.
“Is that all?” Cadovis buried his gaze into the scroll. He spotted the castle, vaguely the direction of the tree. Distances were meaningless.
Loksey shook his head, backing away. “I’m sorry. I... I cannot stop it.”
Cadovis gawked at Loksey’s terror-stricken face. His sword had been placed tip up, and that tip now rested under his sternum. Cadovis lowered the scroll. “What are you doing?” he demanded, an edge of panic in his voice.
Loksey screwed up his face. “I do not know. I don’t want to—” At that, he lunged forward.
“No!” Cadovis hurtled himself toward Loksey, but too late. The tip of the sword buried several spans deep. Loksey tipped over to the floor, blood pooling from his mouth and chest.
Cadovis stumbled away, closed his eyes, and drew in deep drafts. The map. That was why he came here. They had sacrificed everything for this map, for his father. He wouldn’t let their deaths be in vain. He rolled up the scroll and ran out, down the great steps, and out the castle into the jungle.
* * *
Cadovis awoke in the top of the tower next to Angern. How long had they been up here? He could remember when the snow had stopped and the smell of fresh buds filtered through the little window slit. The heat of summer followed, when the tower grew hot and stuffy, and he thought they would roast in this oven. He would stretch in his chains for the window, desiring any cool breeze it could muster.
When had the chains taken hold of him? Who had done it? It had become a meaningless question, one he could no longer ask lest he grow mad. Someone had sneaked up on him, he supposed, bludgeoned him in the head and shackled him here. He could think of no other way. Not for the first time, he wondered about what he ate and drank. He had faint memories of crusty bread and stale water in a pan. He could almost see them in his mind’s eye. How long had it been? He was always hungry, always parched with dry lips.
Angern almost never stirred. He couldn’t recall how he’d gotten here either. Many years, he’d said. Many long years. The season had turned again to autumn, with old leaves, brown but never red or yellow, falling through the window and flying around, caught in a dizzy.
Snow had returned. Cadovis lay his head against Angern’s thigh. He stank, but so did Cadovis. He had grown accustomed to it. The stink had become familiar, welcome.
The nights stretched long. Cold blew through the window, and snow howled in behind it. A black thing slunk around the edges of the tower wall. Cadovis had grown to expect it. Every night, while Angern slept, this shade came to him. At first, it said nothing. It seemed to caress him, to wrap around him and keep him warm at night.
“Who are you?” Cadovis asked it.
One night, it answered. Its voice was a low hiss, as of air squeezing through a tight space. It took on a vaguely human form in shape only, never anything in reality save a black formless gas or a mere shadow of nothing at all.
“I am your father,” it told him, its voice like smoke, pungent and vaporous. He would have shrunk away from it, but it told him stories, things only his father could know, things even Cadovis himself didn’t know but, when he heard them, he knew they were true.
Things about his mother. About building their cabin, and where he found the trees, how he cut them down and sawed and lumbered them. It told him how his mother had left her home to follow him there, how they had grown close and survived their first winter in the harsh Praetian landscape, isolated from the nearest established town by blowing wind and drifts. It told Cadovis about taking him hunting when he was a mere lad, showing him how to put his fingers on the string to draw it back, to hold it steady, to measure his breaths.
Tears fell from his eyes. Cadovis felt them and let them fall. He came to look for the shade, to welcome it and fall asleep to its stories. It was the thing he could cling to.
One night, Cadovis asked if it could help get him out of the tower. The shade shrank away. “I will try,” it told him. It vanished after that, and he did not see it for several long days and nights.
When it returned, sliding around the floor at the tower wall and looking like someone had spilled ink across it, it said nothing. Instead, it chose to curl up like a dog, an inkblot beside Cadovis on the floor. He tried to smile at it, but he was unsure where its face would be. Did it even have a face, really?
The shade unfolded, seeming to face him. It grew, the inky blackness overtaking Angern asleep against the wall, blotting out the window, filling the little space at the top of the tower. Cadovis shrank back as much as his chains and the unforgiving stone walls would allow. The shade turned a hollow, formless face toward him. Its eyes were empty slits, its mouth spread from one eye to the other in a huge, monstrous grin, its nose flared into two distinct nostrils. Not human at all anymore, he thought, or grotesquely so.
“Who are you?” Cadovis rasped out.
“I’m your father,” it said, its voice no longer a low, desperate hiss, but a reverberating cacophony, as if a hundred voices rattling in his head had joined together into one horrible chorus. “You want out.” He pointed at the window. “Go ahead.”
The thought had certainly occurred to Cadovis before. He held up his chains, and they fell off as he did so. He tried to push his head through the narrow slit, but it wouldn’t fit. He looked back at the great demonic shade, if it was ever a shade at all.
“Not you.” It pointed at Angern. “Push him through.”
Cadovis’s heart pounded. Would it not be a mercy? He was about to protest that the window was still too small when it widened behind him with a snap.
“Throw out the old man, and I will let you go, too.”
When Cadovis hesitated, it spoke again. “I remember your mother very well. I was so pleased to hear she was dead.”
Cadovis bristled, fists clenching. But what could they do? His breaths came ragged. He looked again at the window, gritting his teeth and narrowing his eyes.
“All those things I told you were true. About me, your father. About you and your mother. I have been so much happier here without you.”
Cadovis closed his eyes. He blocked out the voice, the wind, the cold, the smell of his own stink and Angern’s. He retreated into himself. He remembered his mother’s voice instead, her songs as he fell asleep. The sound of it softened him. It took away his hate and soothed his pain. And there, deep within, in the sound of his mother’s lullabies, he found what he had forgotten he had. A great welling filled him. He rode it out as on a deep surf.
The spirit-sense surged within him. He opened his eyes, but everything sailed around, refusing to focus. He held out his arms and cried out with all his voice, everything he had left. The tower spun around him. It seemed to lift off, stones breaking apart, and fly off past him, around him, into the sky. The floor remained beneath Cadovis, hanging as if on the air itself.
The blackness, too, was it the shade, as he had thought? No, it was a spirit, some terrible, powerful spirit that swirled around him, shrieking, clawing at him. Great gashes opened on his arms, on his chest, and blood sprang from the wounds.
As the spirit swirled, it shrank, growing smaller and smaller. The world around Cadovis lost all form, leaving an empty nothingness in its stead. Finally, the blackness was reduced to a tiny bead on the floor. It fell with a clink, seeming to float on nothing at all. Cadovis reached out, picked it up, and placed it in his mouth. He swallowed it.
His eyes snapped open. He was back in the original house. Day had turned to dusk, the sun setting on the horizon. Ister lay split open as before. Tranton was run through with Cadovis’s sword and Loksey on his own. Beside him lay Angern, no longer old or haggard. He stirred also as Cadovis watched. Cadovis leaned over and vomited black bile, heaving and hurling for several minutes.
When it finally ceased, he felt eyes on him. Angern was watching him with an expression of wonder, exhaustion, and admiration. “Thank you,” he said. His voice was broken, as if a long time unused.
Cadovis nodded, unsure what to say. “You saw it then?” he asked at last. He got up and went to the window, but turned away at the sight of Aralkin dead and broken in the glass.
“I know it all,” he replied. “Thank you for not throwing me out the window. I cannot say I would have done the same. But if I ever get the chance, I will repay you.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Cadovis said. He helped Angern to his feet. The man appeared unhurt aside a disuse to his legs, as if his muscles had forgotten how to work. They placed arms around each other’s shoulders and limped back up to the road.
Copyright © 2025 by Luke D. Evans
