Arcanum by Simon Morden Read Free Book Online

and it hurt to look at him. What little hair remained on his head shone like a halo.
    “And Gerhard: what about him?”
    He was their prince. Surely they’d know everything there was to know, even things that Gerhard himself had forgotten?
    “I …” She found herself completely disorientated. It was the glowing, dream-like air, the inconstant, intrusive touching, the vibrations in her skull from being surrounded by so much magic.
    “It matters not. All such men are the same, whether they rule few or many.” Eckhardt reached out and took hold of her chin. He turned her head to the left, then to the right, not gently either. His fingers dug into her flesh. “Go. We might need you again. Wait at the adepts’ house.”
    That was her dismissal; she knew better than to argue at her treatment or linger for an answer, and she didn’t want to do either; she needed to obey. She turned, and the frail figures, hunched over their sticks, slowly, reluctantly, stood aside for her.
    She took a step away from the masters, and another to get completely out of range of their hands. A smudge of darkness presented itself ahead and to her right. She walked towards it with the same steady gait that had brought her there.
    The darkness expanded, swallowed her whole, and vomited her outside. She was shaking, retching, scrubbing her body through her clothes with her nails. She needed to lean against something to stop herself from falling. Not the glassy wall of the tower though, and not one of the nearby trees, which were tainted and untrustworthy. Nothing for it then but to stumble down the path towards the base of the hill, which led to the adepts’ house and the novices’ house beyond it.
    The sun, clean and warm, filtered through the leaves. Its light was nothing like the syrupy, cloying incandescence of the White Tower. It was the same sun that had beaten down on her uncovered head as a child. She’d been barefooted then, her clothes nothing more than holes stitched together with remnants of weave; a wild, feral child, tormented and shunned.
    She’d gone far enough from Byzantium to be safe then, and she’d gone far enough from the tower now. She slumped forward against the trunk of a chestnut and hugged its rough bark like it was her …
    No, not that. Her mother feared her and hated her. If she was still alive.
    The tree beat with rising sap, a slow, steady pulse. She could feel it if she concentrated on it, and it was so much easier to do that than consider her first, and only, meeting with the leaders of her Order.
    After a while, when she thought she could stand again unaided, she let go and put her back to the tree, sliding down the trunk in a way that made her robes rise up and expose her legs, and the black ink under her olive skin. The palms of her hands were marked with ridges where she’d pressed them into the bark. But they soon faded. Her knuckles were smooth, her fingers straight. She was young.
    In a hundred years’ time, she would be like them, patting and stroking firm flesh when she could, because it was the one thing she’d never have again.
    Or she might be dead. Broken, mad, immolated, disintegrated. Nothing was certain. And certainly not now.
    “Is that what I really want?” she said out loud.
    It always used to be. It wasn’t just
her
goal, but every adept’s, to be called to the White Tower and meet with the Master of the Order of the White Robe, to undergo whatever ritual was required of them, to be marked with the tattoos that would confer on them the power they craved.
    In the three years since she’d been moved to the adepts’ house, she’d known of two men who’d received that call. There had surely been others before then, and it was her turn next.
    So where were the younger masters? They’d been conspicuously missing from the meeting she’d just had. Eckhardt had been the youngest one there, and no one would ever call him young again.
    There was something else, too, undefinable and