The Shadows Beckon

We rested a night on the third floor before any of us had the stomach to climb higher.

Morning found us pulling down the alarms we’d rigged the night before, and we climbed the narrow stair up into the attic. We listened at the door first. Then up we went.

Cold met us before the light did — dust thick as fog, cobwebs corner to corner, four closed doors none of us much wanted to open. I asked Gabriel how he wanted to work it — I promised myself after that spectre downstairs I’d ask him first, not after — and he had us go door to door, nobody wandering off alone, somebody on watch at every threshold. I sent a little guidance Nyx’s way for those good ears of his at the first door, then did the same for Amanodel down the line — least I could do for the two of them going in first. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. We went around counter-clockwise, careful as anything.

The southern door held a plain bedroom — slender bed, a writing desk gone to crumbled parchment, a wardrobe, a rocking chair, and in the window box a doll, smiling, cobwebbed clean through. Poor little thing looked so lonesome sitting there. I don’t know why I picked her up. Tucked her in my pack, for the time being.

Next, a room of sheeted furniture and a trunk. Unlocked. Nyx found a bundle wrapped in a bedsheet stiff with old blood — mostly bones now, a nursemaid’s uniform still clinging to what was left, stabbed and folded away like she was nothing. This was her — the nursemaid who came for Gabriel on the floor below not long past. Poor soul. We still don’t have a name to give her, but she’ll have a proper rest before we’re through here, same as anybody deserves. The stove beside her held only ash and teeth. We tried burning the sheeted furniture for warmth; the fire wouldn’t hold, caught and died and caught again like the house itself kept pinching it out.

At the next door, a bare little room already stripped of anything worth taking. Amanodel wrote something in the dust before we left it behind — I didn’t get a clean look at it myself, but I’m near certain it was day. Sweet girl probably didn’t mean anything much by it. I choose to take it as a blessing anyway — the Morninglord doesn’t need a reason to leave His mark somewhere, and I’ll take a good omen wherever this house lets me have one.

The last door was locked — the same iron key from the library, finally earning its keep. Inside: two small skeletons, a toy chest, a dollhouse mapping this very house down to doors we hadn’t found yet, including a way back down, hidden in that furniture room where we’d just found the nursemaid. I set the doll from the first room in among the toys in that chest. Wherever she’d started out, this seemed the better place for her — with her own kind, if nothing else.

I knew those two small sets of bones before anybody said a word. Theirs. Rosavalda and Thornboldt Durst. I knelt down and said a prayer just to steady my hands.

That’s when they stepped out from behind the toy chest.

“Rosavalda. Thornboldt,” I said, soft, the way you’d talk to any scared little one. “This was always your room, wasn’t it, sweethearts.”

Rose’s whole face changed. “You’re the lady from the street. You talked to us. You said you’d help find our brother.”

I had. Many hours before, out on that cobblestone street, not knowing then that those children and these two — dead a long, long time, locked away by parents trying to keep them safe from something in the basement, waiting on a nanny who was never coming back — were one and the same.

They told us not to touch their toys, sweet as anything. Then we tried to leave.

Atwaad went first for the door, and what came out of him stopped me cold — his own voice, near enough, but the words in it were wrong. “Don’t leave us.” Small. Scared. Nothing like the man at all. I thought he’d just spooked himself for a second. Then Gabriel started in the same way, talking with his hands wringing, voice climbing up into something closer to a whine than his own, working himself up over something that made no sense to the rest of us. Both of them had gone fidgety, restless, near stamping a foot — the kind of upset that doesn’t belong on a grown man’s face. It took me a beat too long standing there to understand what I was looking at. These weren’t my companions pitching a fit. Rose and Thorn were riding them, wearing them like a coat, throwing the same tantrum they must have thrown a hundred times in this house and never once gotten to finish.

Sweet talk didn’t touch it. Amanodel tried coaxing them, even tried bribing the two of them with promises of dolls and sweets, and it only made them dig in harder. I asked her for a little guidance and tried something else instead. Enough, I told them — stern as I’ve ever been with anybody, living or dead. We are leaving this room. I am done listening to this. It wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t kind, but it worked. Whatever had climbed into Gabriel arched right back out of him and went still, and Atwaad came back the same way a breath later. Both of them rattled, disoriented, and Gabriel didn’t remember a stitch of it. Rose and Thorn themselves went quiet and distracted right after, too caught up in whatever that cost them to notice we’d gone.

I hated leaving them like that. I did it anyway — told myself it was easier knowing we weren’t leaving them for good, that their bones weren’t staying up there another year waiting on nobody. We were taking them down to lay them to rest proper. That’s the only reason my feet moved at all.

We wrapped both children’s remains to carry down for burial alongside the nursemaid’s. Amanodel said the prayers over all of it — bless her for stepping into that so easy — and I was glad not to be the only one carrying that weight tonight.

Down the spiral stair, into tunnels running north and south, a chant pressing in from every direction at once — empty beds and empty tables, where those who slept will sing no more — that turned Amanodel quiet for a moment at the well room, sweet thing, before she shook it off same as she always does. We split up to search the sleeping quarters — gold, silver, moss agates, a carnelian eye patch, an ivory hairbrush turned up between us. In the room I searched myself, tucked away with the rest, I found a shortsword forged in silver. Kept it close. Something told me Atwaad would need it before this basement let us go.

Atwaad went down the well himself after — thirty feet of rope, the chant turning to sail away, sail away the whole way down. I hollered after him the whole time he was under — what are you doing down there, you fool boy, get yourself back up, we don’t have time to play in wells — and he came back up laughing, nothing down there but clean water and a bad tune. That’s Atwaad through and through. Heart of gold, sense of a barn cat.

A pit trap took Gabriel’s feet out from under him in the hallway after — spiked at the bottom, a nasty gash he didn’t need on top of everything else tonight. He broke the spikes before we moved on so nobody else would learn it the hard way. Good heart on that boy, under all that grim.

The banquet room found us next — bones scattered everywhere, two corpses rising before we’d finished looking, more stirring behind them. Nyx’s bow found the first. Atwaad drew that silver blade for the first time and moved like something had lit a fire under him, two strikes landing where I’d only have expected one. Karku flung a bead of something that hissed and ate straight through rotted flesh on contact. Gabriel finished one himself in that crowded hallway, and before he’d even caught his breath another came round the corner behind him and put him flat on the ground.

Second time tonight I’ve had to get to that boy fast. I got across to him before he’d finished falling, hands on him, holding him steady on the edge, and turned what light I had left on the thing still snapping at us while I knelt there. He stayed down, breathing but not moving, until Amanodel’s voice reached him clear across the room and called him back — awake again, but still flat on the ground, no memory of the hit that dropped him, same as the attic. Nyx put an arrow through what was left of it, and Atwaad finished the job.

One more fight waited north — a chittering, tentacled thing with hide like old leather. Gabriel struck first, Atwaad’s silver blade bit deep, and my Sacred Flame caught where our steel hadn’t, right before Atwaad’s last strike put it down for good.

Quiet, after. Real quiet.

There’s still a basement monster we haven’t found, a dollhouse full of secret doors, and three sets of bones riding with us now, waiting on hallowed ground we haven’t found yet. Rose and Thorn are still up there in the dark. I don’t think we’re finished with this house. But we’re walking out of every room a little steadier than we walked in, thanks to every good heart beside me tonight, and some nights that’s the whole of what the Morninglord asks of me.