Ashes Slowly Fall

  Ashes Slowly Fall

  By Katya Lebeque

  Copyright © 2018 by Katya Lebeque

  Worldsmith Press

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by mechanical or electronic means without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations for purposes of book reviews and critiques only whereby the author has been notified.

  Cover art: R.J. Palmer Design & Illustration

  Contents Page

  Contents Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  One last thing…

  I wake with a beggar’s corpse near my face. The body, rather than the mind, recoils and rouses me.

  There is a piece missing, I can feel it. The swift, shark-like thoughts are not there. And no memory, not yet. But somewhere within the yellowed, deep cartilaginous remains of my brain the fires of consciousness are stirring. They want me to move, need to move, they say.

  I gather my strength. Ignoring the dead man, the hollows of mind form a message that sluggishly travels along the fibres and the sinews that makes up the rest of my world. I am groggily exultant. Still me, still mine. The gnarled hands and their overlong nails stretch like a miracle, responding to the message, and something within me relaxes.

  Still mine.

  Now, the pieces can slowly come back. I remember the circumstances that led to these corpses on the ground and holes in my world. I remember that the pale, half-drawn shape looking down is my daughter, what is left of her. Her face asks a question without words, but I am tired now, and it is enough to know that I am not gone yet.

  I sink back down.

  Chapter One

  Thirty days

  The corpses glared up at the open sky.

  Where a roof was supposed to be, there were only splinters and unrefined chunks of rubble. The bodies looked up at these shattered remains of mansion and sky; their glassy expressions seeming put out, inconvenienced, to have died this way. One or two looked another way, necks broken to the side, toward the one-eyed lady sitting on a single chaise lounge in the middle of the rubble.

  Vanita had sat down for a moment to rest. The mob had scattered when the prince arrived, so the bodies were spread out wide among the splintered wood which had once been the parlour. Disposing of them was hard work. She was panting. Sweat trickled down in rivulets, past the place where her one eye should have been, down into the bony remains of her body. Ash would have been done by now, but there was no Ash anymore. There was only her, what was left of Mother and the rising smell of rotting men’s meat.

  Sighing, Vanita gathered her strength again, and reached for the nearest corpse’s hand. When she felt strong enough, she hoisted herself and dragged the body slowly to where she had laid the other three, out outside the house where she didn’t have to see them.

  The shock was there still for Vanita. The shock of finding her eye gone and her body irredeemably scarred, so wounded she had almost died. Then the contorted rage in the sunken faces of the mob that had broken into their home, the icy feeling of their steel against her throat as her sister watched on. The prince and, oh heavens, the duke… Then the mind-reeling black mass of the giant bird crashing through the ceiling, blocking out all else.

  It had all been too much. She was ashamed to admit it, but the first thing Vanita had done when the carriage was out of sight was sink onto the chaise lounge, the only seat still standing, and wish to fall asleep and, when she awakened, for fairies or elves or some other nonsense to have come and taken care of this mess. But when she put her head down a pain flashed like lightning through the half of her skull where her eye had been ripped out, and sleep would not, could not, to those who had not yet honoured their dead.

  Vanita did not care about the festering bodies of the oafs that had tried to kill them, but she did care about Tansy. She would not let her lie open to the sun, uncared for, the way Ash had described seeing corpses lying outside every other day. And so slowly, Vanita had pulled the white lengths of cloth off of some of the disused furniture. Slowly, she had lowered her aching body down to the floor and wrapped Tansy up and held onto her as she never had in life. Then she had dragged the body out beyond the rubble to spot where flowers had once grown in the garden. A pansy for Tansy. But there were no flowers now, and so she had taken dried bits of twig, and whatever wood that had fallen from the ceiling which she could lift and had dragged them over and made a lopsided mound of sticks around a girl she could not believe was no longer alive. She’d mumbled what words she knew of prayer from her sister over the sticks and had turned away.

  Her thin white hands tightened on a corpse’s wrist, and she tried to stay in the moment without being repulsed by it. When Vanita had inexplicably just known that there were men breaking in to the house, something deep within her had frozen with fright the way that Ash had described woodland creatures as doing just before getting killed. She thought she would be killed, and she had almost been right, and so something in her had paused then and just stayed that way.

  “Hmm hmm” said Mother, a few corpses away.

  “Mother stay out of the pools of blood.”

  Her mother’s sanity had not returned in the hours since the enormous events of the morning. She was now drifting absently between the bodies, in a kind of figure of eight pattern that existed only in her head. It reminded Vanita of Ash’s mother. Although she had never met her, the noblewoman’s death was still fresh when Vanita had arrived at Rhodopalais, and one of her dying wishes had been that a servant read a story from her curious Bible text each morning. The old-fashioned religion’s stories had been strange, and what she remembered now was the story of a man whom God had made a pact with by cutting several animals in half, including a bird, and walking in amongst the remains in a looping pattern. It had always seemed to Vanita like a strange thing for a God to do.

  “Come Mother, come inside. Yes, inside… Remember?”

  Vanita’s head was throbbing, the space behind her good eye seemed ready to explode and her thin frame was shaking with hunger and exertion. But she led her mother over carefully and sat her down.

  The chaise was absurdly pink and floral, and there the noblewoman sat, hands properly placed in her lap as she stared blankly out from her ornate chair, surrounded by tangled bits of ceiling shards and wood, the sky above her. In her line of sight, the emaciated frame of her daughter heaved the corpses of their would-be murderers into a hole where part of their mansion had once been.

  ***

  Hours passed.

  When the day began to fade, Vanita’s mind turned back to the living. They needed warmth, food, water. Vanita shook in her dress, staring out at the jagged, mouth
-like hole in Rhodopalais” front reception wall. The stars were bright in their settings, in spite of the chaos of the day. Everything echoed a shimmering, lonely loveliness up there, but below in the real world… Well, things were less beautiful. There was an empty aching space in Vanita’s mind now, just like there was in the house. She sighed. Perhaps it was the cold.

  Food. Shelter. Warmth. Water. Food, shelter, warmth, water. Foodshelterwarmthwater… Perhaps if she repeated it over and over to herself, it would feel useful, like doing something. And she could forget that she didn’t know the first thing about getting any of those.

  Mother was still sitting on her battered chaise lounge, barely visibly shuddering in the night air under her frayed frills. A jolt of guilt went through Vanita and she went over to the older woman, lending her meagre warmth by sitting arm to arm.

  “Let’s go up to bed, Mother,” she said, as though they were retiring after a harpsichord recital. They hobbled together towards the looming grand staircase in their tattered gowns.

  ***

  Morning light knifed its way into Vanita’s consciousness. It seemed all the world was white and searing. Gingerly, she awakened. The sun was high in the sky already, piercing through the window like a sword, straight into her remaining eye.

  Strange, tattered bedsheets were around her, and it was already so hot that it could well have been afternoon. Vanita did not understand, opened her mouth to call to Ash, and then understanding came. Her sister was gone, everyone was gone. And she had collapsed into her own mother’s bed from exhaustion, after finally getting her there the night before.

  Vanita looked to her left. There was her mother, still in yesterday’s clothes, wide awake and watching her silently with a slightly glazed expression on her face. It was impossible to know what the time was, when last the woman had eaten. Vanita needed to get up.

  She gathered her strength, propping herself up on the mattress. So, it appeared that she couldn’t even wake up without Ash, judging by the height of the sun in the sky already. Feeling guilty, she lurched towards the side of the bed to stand up.

  Pain rang through her body the moment she moved, and Vanita fell back into the bed, gasping. What had not seemed that real in her dreams was now very apparent – she had almost died little more than a day ago. What she had tried to forget, her muscles and bones could not: the steel of the knife against her throat, the rough hands… And then the owl, those claws, and the curious out-of-body feeling of floating somewhere near the roof of the carriage as she looked down at herself, still in magicked ballgown finery, after the carrior had torn her up.

  Stop. Stop this, she told herself. It would not keep her mother warm and fed either.

  “I am going to try get us something to eat, Mother.”

  She may as well not have bothered. Her mother was still looking at the same stretch of bed Vanita had been lying in, as if there was someone still there. Vanita turned and walked away.

  She went through her mother’s doorway by memory and then found the bannister for the stairs – or rather, her hand found it after groping disconcertingly at empty air for a few minutes. She could see the solid old wood, but when her hand reached for where her one eye said it would be, she found that her eye had lied. It brought a lump to Vanita’s throat that made her feel both foolish and a child again. Silly girl, she chided herself, the world will not wait while you learn to live with this loss.

  Slowly, she forced herself to take the steps one by one. There was time enough for this, although she wanted badly to race down the stairs without thought, without looking, and fetch her mother some food. Head cocked down and to the side, Vanita took small steps, trying to tell herself that it would take longer to pick her already broken body up off the hard marble below. She found that if she kept her eye upward on the dome above the staircase, see its glass blackened over with dirt, then her feet would remember where to go. Eventually, she reached the bottom of the stairs.

  The kitchen was a mess. This was the one room in the house that had remained orderly with all their hunger, all the carriors and everything else their family had been though. As it was, it still had on it the imprints of that last conversation before the mob came, before Vanita had known about Old Merta. The last remaining kitchen chair was still flung to the ground after her mother had come in, acting strange, still reacting in terror from the men the night before. The table still had dried blood on it from when Ash must have fixed her, stitched her together after the owl attack. There were even some dried posies on one corner, the desiccated ghosts of lilac roses by the looks of it, although Vanita did not know what that was from.

  A further search found her clanging and stumbling around the kitchen, as Vanita tried to grasp pitchers or pots and either missed them entirely or found her hand clasping something else. It was still deeply unsettling, not to be able to trust your own sight, but Vanita persisted. They had to get food, or they would die.

  Her throat was parched. Where did Ash keep the water? Vanita was beginning to be thoroughly embarrassed by the number of things she had never even questioned, the things her sister had done for them every day. The food and water appeared, as if by magic, and Ash whenever she was needed. How any of those things had happened, the thousand daily steps that led to each being done, were completely shrouded in mystery for Vanita. She vowed that as soon as Ash arrived, soon now, she would beg her sister’s forgiveness.

  At last, she found a receptacle that had the watery remains of Old Merta’s last batch of pumpkin soup. The pumpkin. Of course. She had forgotten all about it. That would keep them fed for a while, as soon as Vanita figured out the first thing about cooking or preparing pumpkin for eating, much less making soup. This was a boon in the meantime, an answer to an unsaid prayer from whatever God might still be there, and Vanita held the dish carefully as she took it slowly upstairs.

  “Mother, I’ve brought food for us. Here.”

  “Hmm hmm,” said her mother, still in bed and looking as though she had not moved since Vanita had left her. After a tentative sip, she forced herself to not gulp the whole thing down and put the dish to her mother’s lips as well.

  The older woman’s eyes were frightened at first behind the rim of the porcelain, but she opened her chapped lips slowly and drank well enough. She even closed her eyes while sipping, something Vanita thought she could probably no longer do.

  Once there were only a couple more sips remaining, Vanita took the dish away and had the last of it herself. Stretching down to put the dish somewhere on the floor, she started when her mother’s voice suddenly filled the dusty room:

  “Thank.”

  It was exactly what she had said to Ash the morning after her eye – mouth too parched to say the full word. Vanita took her mother’s worn, cold hand in hers. “You’re welcome. I’m going to care for us, you and me, until they come. Don’t worry.”

  Without warning, a heavy iron wave of tiredness came over her. So, without much thought about the fact that before yesterday she had never slept in the same bed as her mother, not once in her life, Vanita curled up beside the old woman and immediately fell asleep.

  Beside her sleeping form, the old woman hummed to herself a little before she too drifted off. Around them both, the dusty room remained silent, and waited.

  ***

  Dear Vanita,

  Please excuse the form this letter has taken, it is sent via Pathfinder because it really is the quickest way and, even here amongst royalty, one finds few messengers still living.

  Your sister has told us that all your servants have been killed, save for Derrick, the last one just yesterday at the hands of the mob we faced together. My condolences and, also, apologies from both Prince Rizend and myself. We did not know the situation was so dire or we would never have left you unattended in your manse.

  After conversing with Ash, we realised that her sense of urgency stemmed from this and she wished for you to come to the palace within the next day or two at most. However, since the growin
g disenchantment with the royal family has reached new heights with the commoners and talk of revolts have begun, all royalty and essential members of the court are ferried only monthly between the family’s different primary castles in coaches that have been irreversibly made to only travel to the next location at an undisclosed time. Neither Rize nor myself - not even the king - knows when and where we will go next. At the moment, we have been placed in a castle further away from the palace you saw when you attended the ball.

  So, to be clear Vanita – we have dispatched three soldiers to attend to you and your mother, that being all we could spare. I hope that they arrive soon. But a coach will likely only come in twenty to thirty days” time, and there is nothing either we or the Pathfinders can do to alter this.

  I’m sorry.

  Am I to understand that you and your mother are quite alone in an indefensible house, and that your mother is unwell and there is no one to tend to your wounds?

  I must confess, even the act of writing these words distresses me. I dearly hope you will be alright.

  Ash assures me that you are resourceful and quick-witted, brave and free of both the malice and bloodlust so common these days. I had come up with a similar impression of you myself and was glad to hear it confirmed. You can do this Vanita.

  This message is magicked by whatever way Pathfinders use to return to me at sunrise tomorrow. Please respond indicating if you are still safe and what your circumstances are, if you would. I know it would take much weight off your sister’s mind, Ash is very worried for you.

  As am I.

  If there is anything we can do until such a time as a coach can come, please let us know and I will see to it personally.