Page 3 of Empire of Shadows

The air around Salavert grew colder as he realized that something was at work in that unholy cathedral—something old and powerful.

Something that had nothing at all to do with God.

With her eyes still unfocused, the woman extended her free hand, uttering a single word of command. Salavert bit back another yelp as the guards forced him to his knees. He closed his eyes, preparing for the inevitable blow.

Instead, the woman grasped the neck of his robe. With shocking strength, she pulled his face into the column of smoke that rose from the place where her blood met the mirror’s surface.

With a gasp, Salavert inhaled… and the cave around him vanished.

?

Vincente Salavert stood in the soaring nave of the cathedral at the heart of his native Valencia—a rich and glorious monument to the might of God.

He wore the robes of a bishop. They looked very fetching on him, as he’d always known they would.

The pews were deserted. Candles flickered along the aisle, but all the reverent activity that Salavert should be nobly overseeing—the murmured prayers and quiet footsteps—was gone.

Only silence remained… silence, and a woman.

The barbarian priestess with the unsightly scar on her face stood at the altar, holding the cathedral’s prize—the Santo Cáliz, a chalice of finely wrought gold and blood-red agate believed by many to be the Holy Grail itself. It fit her small brown hands as though it had been made for them.

Her heathen trappings had been replaced by white robes. She looked as sad and solemn as the Holy Virgin.

“What is this witchcraft?” Salavert cried, mustering an admirable tone of holy outrage as he pointed a finger at where she stood.

The fiendish woman ignored him as she held the chalice to her breast.

“I do not know what I will see,” the woman said.

Her words had the aura of a confession. They met Salavert’s ears in the warm tones of his native Valencian, yet other languages with which Salavert was far less comfortable seemed to weave within and between.

“I am torn by too many desires. I want… conquest.” Her gold-flecked eyes flashed to Salavert. The cold, fierce rage in them made his bowels go over a bit shaky. “I want to raise the dead,” she continued, and her expression shifted to one of fresh and terrible grief.

“Those are unholy desires,” Salavert pronounced, mustering a little spurt of holy authority.

“They are,” the woman softly agreed.

She looked down at the holy chalice in her hands.

“We have been like gods,” she said. “But we bought our power with blood… and death.”

The cathedral around Salavert shivered—and then changed. The space grew immense. Pews stretched into a dim and terrible distance.

All of them were full. The seats were packed with row upon row of seated corpses, their skin blackened with death. Unnatural red mouths opened over hearts and across throats.

The horror of it rooted Salavert where he stood—and then the woman was there, her eyes blazing as she glared up at him from a breath away.

“You would give it more,” she declared fiercely. “You and those who rule you. You who already tear the world apart for what youwant.”

The priestess hissed the word like a curse. Salavert felt the sting of it like a whip against his skin and flinched back from her.

“I have seen you,” she said coldly. “I saw you long before you came here. I know exactly what you are.”

She closed her eyes and stepped back. The cathedral returned to a familiar space of candlelit shrines and a soaring nave that would have framed Salavert’s sermons very nicely.

“We bought it all with blood,” the woman repeated softly.

She raised her eyes to him with a look of desperation. The look shifted, hardening into determination, and Salavert was overcome by a sense of terrible anticipation.

---