Prelude
Ayanda
The Most Serene Republic of Venice
4 March 1865
Moonset
I bolt upright and into dark. The pitch-blackness seems to tremble, vibrating with the echo of a scream.
My heart pounds. Heavy blankets weigh upon me. The sweat-soaked collar of my nightdress digs into my throat and my medallion burns cold in my fist. Faint smells twine through the darkness, of fading embers, leather books, silver polish. My room.
My brain feels soaked in fog. I unclench my fist and let the medallion fall beneath my collar. I must…it must have been a nightmare, though I can’t have slept for long…
I fall back onto my bed. It’s nothing, go back to sleep…
I close my eyes, adjust my pillow and draw my comforter to my chin, my still-healing arm aching. I wait for the sounds of Venice waking, the distant voices, the clang of the Campanile bell or perhaps the distant soaring of an aethership. They always lull me to sleep at mistrise, but now…
Quiet.
I open my eyes. It should be past dawn. The room should have brightened by now, but no pale light slips through the draperies. It may as well be midnight.
A horrible jolt darts into my chest. Something’s wrong.
I throw back the covers and slide out of bed. My mind races as I feel my way around the room. The Dead. The Dead must be near…but no, I don’t feel their cold, nor any growing strength…
I knock into my vanity table and fumble in a drawer. The flare of the match is blinding, nearly scorching my fingers as I light the lamp. A small, unsteady flame glows inside the smoky mantle. Shadows swell behind the furnishings. Through the parted curtains the window-glass reflects me like a black mirror. The girl inside hovers in a void, the quivering light blurring her edges like those of a mirage, or a ghost.
I go to the window. Not even the thinnest wisp of fog curls between the panes. I twist the latch and push open the casement.
The window swings open into nothingness. Blackness hangs like a curtain, featureless and cold, as though the Shadow Palace has been carved out of the world and set adrift into space.
I grab another match from the vanity and rush back to the window. I light it and let it fall. The match drops into the darkness, down, down, and melts away.
I bite down hard on the inside of my mouth. I clench my metallaric fist and strike myself in the thigh. But my room and the nothingness remain, icy, endless, and silent.
This is a dream, it must be….
But why can’t I wake?
I go to the door. I’ll find a way out. I can’t sleep forever. At some point this must end…
I throw open the door. A cloud of dust billows into my face. I blink my tearing eyes, coughing, and choke back a scream.
The black-and-gold papered walls, the worn hallway runner and the battered grandfather clock of the Shadow Palace are gone. A row of hanging lanterns casts sickly orange light over a corridor I’ve never seen. Long veils of cobwebs drape from a high arched ceiling, turning the hall to a maze of ragged, gauzy shrouds.
The door slams shut behind me. I whirl and see only a cobwebbed wall. The door to my room is gone.
I feel the wall, sweeping my hands through inch-thick dust. Beneath the grime isn’t the wall of the Shadow Palace but scratched ceramic tiles. Parched, acrid air fills my lungs, smelling of hot metal and dead coals, and something sharp and rotten.
A dream…it’s only a dream, it must be…
I face the corridor. Beneath the cobwebs I make out the walls of a fine house or manor, scabbed with flaking painted tiles, and something more is wrong. The walls slant, some corners too wide, others too pinched. The hallway bends ever so slightly, twisting one way and then another like a broken backbone. The entire place is unbalanced, an enormous dry shipwreck stranded in a waste.
The awful chill seizes me again. I search within myself, for the black knot in my heart and the filaments that bind me to the Dead of my Court. Hear me! I scream. Help me!
But the filaments shrivel away, severed as though I’m a spider in the middle of a broken web. Alone.
A tremor shudders through the corridor, a deep, earthen growl, like some underground giant grinding its teeth. A lantern tears from the plaster and smashes against the wall. A wide crack jolts across the ceiling.
I run, ripping through cobwebs and raining grit. Sour air scorches my throat like mouthfuls of cinders. I’ve no thought at all, naught but to get away from this corpse of a house before it splits apart…
Broken rock grinds under my feet as I cross a threshold. A carved door appears ahead, crooked and cracked nearly in two. I shove its halves apart and topple into emptiness.
A splinter catches my sleeve, jerking me to a halt on a ledge of shattered floor. The entire mansion crumbles away into open air. Sulfrous wind whips about me, plucking at my nightdress. Ash rains from the sky, drifting like black snowflakes over a swath of wreckage that pours down the slope like an avalanche.
My sleeve begins to tear. I grab the jutting splinter and haul myself back onto the ledge. I swipe ash from my eyes and gasp.
The mansion perches atop a hill overlooking a wasteland. It seems it was once a grassy plain, dotted with short stubs of trees, but now it’s coated in ash, shivering in the smothered moonlight. The plain stretches for what must be miles and rises, traveling over foothills and crags, higher and higher, climbing the slopes of a mountain that…
I can’t even gather the breath to gasp. The gigantic mountain looms over the plain, capped with snow and burning orange at its peak. A tremendous, towering plume pours from the fiery glow and into the sky, boiling like smoke made of rock, shot through with cracks of lightning.
Another tremor thunders through the mansion. Cracks split the ledge. Part of it collapses, fragments tumbling away.
The door crashes shut. I grab the handle and wrench, but it doesn’t so much as rattle. I look about, searching for something heavy, anything to bash my way in—
A boom bursts from the mountain. The entire mansion groans. The ledge crumbles further.
A murmur wisps through the crack in the door like a curl of smoke. “Escúcheme.”
The ledge rocks beneath me. I cling to the handle. “Who are you?” I yell. “What do you want with me?”
The voice speaks in Continental, with an accent I’ve never heard. “Escúcheme. Le ruego,” it whispers. “Listen to me. I beg you.”
The mountain booms again. Another billow of ash erupts from its peak, blooming into the sky like a horrible bubbling fungus.
“You must go. Leave Venice.” The voice is dry, ashy, dull as that of a sleepwalker. “He’s coming for you all.”
The cracks on the ledge fork closer. I grip the handle hard enough to snap my knuckles. “Who is? Tell me!”
A crack roars from the mountain and smashes into me like a railway train, flattening me against the door. “Go,” the voice whispers. “Go. Run!”
A tremendous grinding ripples across the plain, the sound of a sea made of stone. Another ashy cloud pours from the mountain, not rising but rushing, tearing down the mountainside like a monstrous wave of rock.
The ledge beneath me shatters. I fall, screaming, plummeting towards the wreckage as the hurricane of ash roars towards me and—
Something hard slams into my side. My head bangs against a floor. Clean, cold air wraps about me, smelling of wood and the distant sea, of Venice, of home.
I twist about and sit upright. A long corridor stretches before me, not wrecked and dusty but with walls of shimmering black. The Shadow Palace.
No ash falls from my nightdress as I clamber up and run for my room. I burst inside. The bedcovers are disheveled but the lamp is untouched. The casement window is shut. Pale morning mist billows past the glass, bearing the sounds of the city waking.
A shiver buckles my knees. I catch hold of the doorknob as words flit through my head, not dying like the remnants of a dream, but sharp, plain, real.
Go. Leave Venice.
He’s coming for you all.