A Necessary Sacrifice

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Yet the Empress’s Shadow had it on the very highest authority that one would be born here tonight. And it was her sacred duty, the last order of her doomed Empress, to ensure it never drew breath. To cut the tongues and extinguish the words that would, in a moment of misplaced conviction, carry the final name of her people from memory to terrible, irreversible reality.

The work ahead was bitter, and it was a night to match. Distant thunder rattled the stones, threatening a tempest with rage enough to break the earth. A wind uncoiled from the great black clouds and slithered down the mountains. It slipped through the towering minaret, whipping the great brass bell violently back and forth as it went. No one heeded the call to prayer. There were few left to hear it. The wind fled on, snaking past the apple trees the monks tended on the slopes, plucking out the last rotting blossoms of spring and bearing them down into the Valley of corpses. On its way, the wind wound around the Shadow as she labored up the hidden path to a place she once called home, pulled at her with hands greedy for the death it would find below. It shrieked through the jagged peaks, wailing like a leopard in heat, or, thought the Shadow, like the unquiet spirits of the dead. The dead were always here; their presence a weight on any soul who lived and worked in the fortress-monastery that stood sentinel at the pass. How could it not be so, with the bones of thousands drying in the cold mountain air?

The Shadow remembered walking down among the bones with the other monks each dawn before training, a shovel clutched in her hand. She remembered digging the graves for those whose mourners had long ago cried the songs of supplication for a soul unburied far from home, left to wander the world. She had felt the echoes of emotion jangling along her bond, impressions of fear, of sadness, of bewilderment from nothing living. All who lived and worked in this place had. Such thoughts were as close to her now as they had been in childhood, when she had thrashed many desperate, sleepless nights away in the monastery. She had listened to these same winds. She had been haunted by these same ghosts. She had never thought, in those days, she could ever be glad of the howling that presaged the oncoming storm. She was glad of it now. Now, the bitter moans of warriors long-dead muffled the screams of her people as they fought and died in the unwinnable battle below.

She tried not to think about what they were dying for. Tried not to think about the Empress, her Empress, bright and ferocious and beautiful and kind and hard, leading them into the hungry jaws of the invaders. A necessary sacrifice, the Empress had called it. The Shadow was used to climbing, though, and had been this way often. It was easy for the mind to wander. To remember nights in another place, one that sat at the very heart of civilization. A place of light and softness, of music and poetry, rooms bathed in candlelight, redolent with scents from the five corners of the world. The type of place she never dared dream of as an adherent at the monastery, learning to cultivate life and to take it, or, earlier, as a slave in the pits. She remembered cool lips and warm breath against her ear, her neck, her mouth. She blinked, refocusing on the climb. Clean exertion. No need for thought.

The monastery perched at the juncture of two great mountains in a vast range. They had names once—the monastery, the mountains, the range—but they had been taken. The ancient complex’s main bulk was centered above the Three Gates which had long represented the only viable way for an army to reach the heartland without having to take the significantly longer, more treacherous route around the mountains. The rest of the fortress and temple were splattered across the cliff faces and burrowed into the mountains themselves. A woman approaching the First Gate would see the imposing stone bulk of the citadel main wedged into the ravine ahead; the outbuildings spread around her like falcon’s wings up the sides of the basin. It was said a god had fallen to earth here and smashed a hole where a third and greater mountain had once stood. Then the dragons had come, drawn to its power like iron filings to a lodestone, and then they had died. A shrine had been in this place as far back as human memory went.

As ages passed and the tribes grew in size and strength, the strategic importance of this pass quickly became apparent. It had ceased to be somewhere the locals came to kneel and kiss a jagged piece of stone that came from the stars, and had become instead a site of utmost holiness to be secured and protected. The gates had been built then, and the citadel, and the monastery had taken on the shape and role it had held since. The locals still trekked to kiss the holy stone and bring offerings to the monks, but soon enough they were replaced with harder, grimmer pilgrims bearing sharper, deadlier gifts. The monks taught that an army sent to do battle in the basin was lured here by the god who had fallen, whose thirst for blood sacrifice was unending. As such, what they did in defense of their temple was holy work, and the god, glutted, would be content with the outcome regardless of which army prevailed in the field. They had reason to know this, for they had known the name of the god then. They did not now.

The Shadow wished they still knew that name, wished bitterly they still had all the names of their gods as she looked down into the churning morass of humanity in the Valley. If they had, this battle, lopsided as the numbers were, would have been over before it had begun. But the gods’ names were gone from them now, so her people fought without their aid. She risked a glance down. She had never been afraid of heights, but she had a moment of vertigo as she held tight to the worn handholds of the secret way—more sheer rock face than stair—and gazed at the massacre taking place below. She squinted, trying to separate the two armies into distinct masses. It was impossible to tell them apart. From this height, there were no individuals, just a forest of flashing blades and falling bodies. It should have been easier, the Shadow thought, to know her people, to separate them, even in the chaos of battle, from the Sirelians, the invaders, with their pallid skin and savage bearing. It seemed wrong, somehow, that they all looked alike from here, distinctions in coloring, arms, armor, formation blurring to a meaningless jumble when viewed from a distance. This was the final stand, and her heart, her Empress, burning bright and terrible, was down there now in the middle of the deadly swarm, fighting for their people. But she had a task to complete. She turned and began hauling herself up.

It wasn’t much further now, and the Shadow tried her best to relish her burning muscles and the cool sweat trickling down her back. It was difficult to focus on the work, though, knowing what was coming, knowing what was already lost. The Shadow remembered the day the monks had shown her group of adherents the door in the stone that led to this hidden stair. The burying of the dead finished for the day, the adherents had begun the long trek up toward the gates, preparing mentally for another day’s long training, but the monks who had come with them led them to a jagged outcropping of stone some distance away from the gates. They had stepped forward, pressing palms into an otherwise unremarkable little nook in the rock, and, noiselessly, a portion of the stone had swung outward. Then, they had given the order to climb. The lessons had been like that. Knowledge of a thing gained through experience of it. Whoever had first called the hidden way a stair had a cruel sense of humor. There were no steps, just worn handholds and footholds, only visible if you were looking for them. She wasn’t looking as closely as she ought now, but her fingers did not slip, and her footing was sure.

A friend of hers had died that day. Sometimes, learning meant dying. They’d been about halfway up when he’d put a foot wrong and slipped. She had seen his face as he’d tumbled. He had looked shocked. The only sound he’d made was a short cry, quickly aborted. He had sounded more startled than afraid. She remembered feeling that brief surprise touch her bond on the way down. A last impression, like the lingering flush of a kiss goodbye. They’d buried him at dawn alongside that day’s pile of bones. The Shadow had sung the mourner’s plea for his soul to find its way home. But what was home to an orphan? What was home to a slave? She wondered this as she hauled herself up the final slope and into a small cave, hidden from the Valley below. She stood in the cramped unlit space. It was barely large enough to stand in, more a hole in the rock than a cave in earnest. There was an old wooden door just ahead, carved into the rock, and it would open into what was, from the outside, a tiny, locked shed among the cluster of dormitory buildings on the high slopes of the mountains. The Shadow pushed it open, taking pains not to look back.

There was a man in the room beyond, a Gatekeeper. He kept mostly to this shack, making safe the way only adherents should know. At any other time, he would have known she was coming. He would have sensed her through his bond as it pulsed out from him, resting in the air, feeling the presence of other bonds, being gently shaped by them. She would have felt him there, too, as her own bond brushed against his, sending and receiving signals of faint emotion. She would have felt his unspoken welcome, perhaps a thrum of excitement as he prepared to greet her in earnest, and she would have known him. This night, he would have felt something different from her: a wariness, a cold determination that may have alerted him. But he did not feel her coming. She had chosen mutilation. She knew he was here because he was always here, but her bond told her nothing, because her bond, the gift of her people’s blood, was gone. The world around her was dead, muted. This, too, was a curse she would never have considered a blessing before tonight. But she did not want to feel what came next.

The Gatekeeper stood at the creaking of the heavy old cedar as its warped bulk ground out of the stone doorframe. It had not been barred. The Shadow came out slowly, her hands raised. Her hair was wrapped, but her face was visible in the dim light of the lantern hanging next to the Gatekeeper. She saw the Gatekeeper recognize her, his look of alarm shifting to one of confusion, then a relief that threatened to break her. He was older than when she’d last seen him, and he’d been old then. His shoulders had a slump to them she had never seen before, and the dusting of cropped hair on his dark, weathered head was nearly white now. But his eyes still held a warmth she knew. There was a half-eaten apple on the small table where he’d been seated, very like the ones he used to sneak her when she was supposed to be fasting. He had a spear in one hand, its tip thrust out just a handspan in front of her face, lowering now. The Gatekeeper smiled, opened his mouth to say something, a greeting, and struggled for a silent moment, the smile faltering. The Shadow knew what he was trying to say, why he couldn’t.

“It’s alright,” she said. “I am glad to see you too, whatever name they have cursed you with.” She offered a thin smile. He didn’t respond at once. His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he was searching her for something. Her heart thudded. Had he guessed why she’d come? The tip of his spear had dipped, but it was still level with her chest. When he finally spoke, however, his voice was touched with sorrow, not suspicion.

“Oh, child. We thought you might come, hoped, but…what have they done to you?”

“Nothing I did not ask for. I have a message, an answer for the High One. Will you let me pass, Gatekeeper?”

“Ask for?” He was confused, and the pity in his eyes was intolerable. “Why would you ask for this? Hollowing, it can’t be undone, girl. What madness possessed you?”

It was too much. “Careful. I am neither child nor girl. I am Shadow to the Empress. I come at her request, bearing words she spoke. I ask again: will you let me pass?”

If he was startled or offended by her tone, he did not show it. The unbearable sympathy, tinged as it was with sadness, with horror, remained in those eyes even as he straightened, pulling the spear up to stand at attention.

“We are humbled to receive you, Shadow.” Was it her imagination, or had there been a slight emphasis on the title? “I will take you to the High One.”

“That will not be necessary,” she said, “I know the way well enough.”

“As you like.” He began to turn toward the door, which opened on a narrow path leading to the monastery proper, and the Shadow caught the barest hint of a smile as he did. “Stubborn girl.” He took hold of the latch. The Shadow took two quick steps forward, pulling a blade from her sleeve, and stabbed the Gatekeeper. It was a precise, practiced blow, one hand coming up to cover the Gatekeeper’s mouth while the other slid the blade under his outstretched arm and between his ribs. The old man gasped once, short, surprised, as the Shadow jerked the blade forward then pulled it out. Blood sprayed, and the Shadow stepped back, withdrawing her weapon hand quickly.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but the Gatekeeper had already fallen to the stone floor, slumping against the door he’d been preparing to open for her. She pushed the body aside, taking care not to step in the rapidly spreading pool of blood. Another necessary sacrifice. She clenched her fists hard enough to hurt. Her eyes burned. She went for the door, pausing as her gaze caught again on the apple the Gatekeeper had been eating just before she’d arrived. It was a withered thing, and she knew its bitter, mealy like all too well. The man lying dead at her feet had given her one when she’d first arrived, starved and scared and still crusted with old blood. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathed, banished the memories. She stepped over the body and through the door. Thunder bawled overhead, and a sun-white flash of lightning illuminated the narrow path that wound up to the citadel. The Shadow felt a first fat raindrop hit the top of her head-wrap. The storm had come. She was home.

She did not have to kill any other old friends on the way to the citadel. The other monks must have been occupied with defense against those without, and less concerned about infiltration from within. She said a silent prayer of thanks to a god whose name she had known once, but who was now an absence in her mind. Worse than an absence. A jumble of Sirelian consonants, meaningless in their foreign sounds, clattered around in place of the god’s true name. She permitted her mind then, as she neared the citadel’s great brass door, to wander down paths better left untrod. They had been winning this war. Her people, chosen of the gods, with the gods’ names on their lips and the gods’ power in their hands, had driven the invaders back and back. They were outnumbered, but numbers were no object when you spoke and divinity answered. But the Sirelians had done something and the names were torn away. Not only the names of their gods, but every name they had. Rock and tree and river and self and the sky and the earth and all things below and between. The knowledge had been stolen; their very minds invaded by the language of the hated enemy.

Even Three Gates Monastery, the place that had made the Shadow who and what she was, was something else to her now. Treportatre was the word that she now knew, and while it meant Three Gates, it only had meaning in the tongue of those who would see her people ground to dust, so it had less than no meaning at all. Despite that, she could not remember, try as she might, what she had called it in her own language. It didn’t matter. It mattered. It mattered more than anything else in the world. But it didn’t matter now. Now, all that mattered was what waited for her beyond the great brass door. All that mattered were the whispered words of her Empress, hot breath caressing her ear, the order given, unambiguous, final. The Shadow stood before the great door, and the storm screamed around her, a wail that seemed ripped from her very own soul, and she could no longer hear the sounds of battle beyond it. She had come at her Empress’s bidding, and she had come to extinguish the last hope her people had. She pushed open the door.

It shouldn’t have opened. It shouldn’t have been unguarded. But it did, and it was. As she took in the achingly familiar sight of the hall—the ancient mosaics glittering above, the alcoves where she had whispered and giggled with friends and lovers both, the unadorned stone floor, polished to a shine by generations of feet and countless hours of scrubbing, and the shrine of the stone that sat at the center of it all, ringed in candles, unlit now—she wished with a fervent desperation that her Hollowing had torn away her ability to feel entirely, instead of only taking her bond. There was no one there; the hall was dark, and it trembled with the onslaught of thunder outside. But her goal was further inside, where the citadel burrowed into the stone of the mountain like a groundhog trying to escape the hunter’s spear. As she moved through the dark labyrinthine back hallways by touch and memory, she couldn’t decide whether she felt more like hunter or hunted. There was another Door waiting for her. Not half so grand as the great brass one, but what it held was more dangerous by far. She had stood in front of it only once before. She remembered the words of the old High One, falling in the dense silence of the hallway like the whisper of dry parchment in front of the ancient carved wood of the Black Door.

“Here, sister, beyond this Door, lies the last mystery. The Last Name. The Lost Name. Forgotten by choice. Sealed by necessity. The oldest and greatest of gods. The first and final dragon. Beginning and end. This is the knowledge unknowable, the unopened Door, and its preservation is our holiest mission. This world will crumble to dust and ash, and this Door will remain. It has always been. It always will be. There is no extremity of need so great that its opening could be justified. We are the unwatched wardens of power beyond the imaginings of our greatest gods.”

But the old High One was twelve years dead, buried in the Valley alongside the unclaimed bones, and his replacement was a zealot, chosen against the wishes of her Empress. That knowledge had brought her here, to the last turn. Her fingers trailed along the rough stone, finding the small marks carved there by generations long past to guide her. There was no light, but as she rounded the bend, she knew. The Door stood ahead, just a short way, and it stood open. Beyond, there was cold, and it was the cold of an infant without a heartbeat, the cold that filled the space between worlds. The dark gaped open, and, far within, the Shadow could make out the faint glow of firelight, and she could hear voices rising in a chant. There was horror and revulsion within her, but there was also relief. Soon, her work would be done, and she could rest. She moved forward, pulling her two long blades from her back as she stepped through the Black Door.

Here, finally, were the familiar faces she had dreaded. They were gathered in the center of the room, which was vast enough to swallow the scant candlelight by which the two dozen or so monks read. In the center of their circle stood an obelisk; its black surface, carved with letters in an endless chain, shone with a silvery sheen. The High One was there, too, his arms raised above his head, his zealot’s voice ringing above the others with the passion of untamed belief. There was a form huddled before him, but the monks were too densely packed for the Shadow to make out who it was clearly. The soul of the first and final dragon would need a vessel once the monks finished speaking its name; the only name they had left after what the Sirelians had taken. The others did not matter. She was here for that vessel, the sacrifice who the dragon’s soul would ride to the unmaking of the world. A person who would likely be someone she knew and loved.

The others did not feel her coming; they would have if she hadn’t chosen to be Hollowed. She could only imagine the transcendent ecstasy and terror that must have been thrumming through them at that moment; their bonds interweaving and amplifying; their emotions no longer belonging to each alone, but joining into a greater form of consciousness. The hilts of her swords fit her grip perfectly, and she was surprised—as she always was—that her hands did not shake as she crept closer. The volume of the chant rose as the monks read out the forbidden name, and the Shadow could almost make out the vessel, a huddled form on the ground beside the High One that jerked and twitched as the dragon began to awaken within it. The Shadow was only a few paces away when the High One’s heavy lidded eyes flickered to her, almost lazily. His face was a mask of ecstasy. The other monks did not look at her, did not cease their recitation.

“Sister,” he said, “It is good you have come to witness. The Empress sent you, yes? She is here then? Good. We are going to save her. This is not the end for our people, but a glorious beginning.” His voice rang out and was swallowed by the dark that pressed in. “We will drive the serpents from our homeland; the last dragon, the god of gods, will be our vanguard, and he will bring with him all the names that were taken from us. We will be whole as we once were.”

“You forget yourself, High One.”

“We have all forgotten ourselves,” he said, and there was a snarl behind his words. “We were forced to forget. But we have a choice.”

“They have taken our names. We still have our selves. Abandon this. I will give you one chance. It is not too late. The dragon sleeps yet.” Even as she said it, though, the words tasted like lies. The heap next to the High One shifted slightly. The Shadow frowned. She had expected one of the monks, but the shape was small. Too small. The High One was speaking, though, and several of the monks had broken the chant and were turning to face her.

“No. No, Shadow, or whatever name the dogs have given you now. We are close to the apotheosis. We have come too far already.” His voice cracked slightly. “Why have you come, if not to bear witness? Why have you betrayed our Empress?”

“You know the answer, though you do not wish to see it. I am not here in spite of her, but because she knew what you would attempt. She knew you had to be stopped.”

“And if our people end because I did not do what had to be done?” He was screaming now, his dark skin flushed with fury. “I do not believe it. You have come of your own will. Or you have spoken poison into the Empress’s ear. She would not do this.” He turned from her then, and raised his hands to the obelisk. “Bondmates, the Shadow is lost. Kill her.”

“Wait,” she said to the people who had been her family. “The Empress only demanded one life of me. Only the vessel has to die. Please.”

Hard eyes looked back at her as the chanting reached a crescendo. These were warrior monks, raised among the bones of a million dead and more, trained in all the arts of ending life. There was only one way for this to end. Her family moved. And there, in the darkness, by the flickering candle flames, the Shadow began to dance. The monks were, each and every one, deadly fighters, capable of dealing death with skill and brutal grace, and they fought as one, their bonds unifying them, telling each where the others would go before they went. They would have been the match for ten times their number. Twenty. But where they were deft painters, the Shadow was an artist, born and bred. She met them, pirouetting and flowing like the petals of apple blossoms carried away on the spring mountain air, her blades singing a harmony to the liquid motion of her body. Before she had been a monk, she had been a slave in the fighting pits of Ud. She had only been a girl then. She had never thought to have a family before the monks took her in. She cut them down like a farmer harvesting wheat.

The volume of the chanting died as they did, more and more breaking off to face her, to put their bodies between the Shadow and the vessel. Finally, only the High One still spoke, and his voice was a shrieking denial as he pressed his palms to the obelisk, as his last defender fell, as the twin blades drove into him, spearing through his body and striking sparks on the stone beyond. His voice failed then. His fingers clawed desperately, scratching at the final word in the sequence as his jaw worked in a vain attempt to speak it without breath. The veins in his neck bulged and his eyes were wide with desperation as he died. The final word remained unspoken. The name was incomplete. The dragon yet slumbered. But the connection was made. The vessel had to die; one word was all the dragon needed. The Shadow turned, readying her blades, and froze.

The crumpled form of the vessel lay on the ground breathing shallowly, the robe draped over her too large by far. It was a child. Her head was shaved, her skin the same night-black as the Shadow’s. She couldn’t have seen seven summers; still, a vicious scar wended its way from just below her left ear down the side of her face to the corner of her mouth, giving her a twisted leer. This wasn’t the work of the monks. This kind of cruelty only existed in one place. Memories of dust and blood. The child had a sheen of sweat on her brow and her eyes were closed, shifting like an uneasy dreamer’s. The Shadow squeezed the hilts of her swords so hard her knuckles ached. She had killed her friends, her family. She had received orders from her Empress, whom she loved, body and soul. What was one more life? One more death? There was no room for hesitation, no place for conscience. Only righteous action. She leaned down, placing one of her blades against the vessel’s throat.

She remembered the way the Gatekeeper’s last breath had gone out of him. His staring eyes. The spreading blood. Her hand trembled. The Empress had given her a command. The Shadow was honor-bound to move as the Empress could not, do what she would not. A necessary sacrifice. The child, who had been a slave like the Shadow, and marked as such, let out a small whimper. And the Shadow was undone. She sheathed her blades, leaned down, and picked the little girl up. She would take her away from this place of death, where the last dragon was but a syllable away from being spoken into being. The girl would be marked for all her life, inside and out. The name had almost been placed upon her; that was no small thing. But she would be safe and cared for. That much the Shadow could offer, and nothing more. The Shadow’s cheeks were wet with tears as she traced her own steps back through the dark and the blood.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to her family, to her Empress, to her people, to the shadows. They held their silence. Only the girl and her Shadow still breathed.