The Shadow Age (The Age of Dawn Book 7)

by Everet Martins

  Worry toppled onto her side in a burst of tears. Anger followed after her, savagely kicking and screaming curses. Courage and Annoyance joined in on the fun as Disgust and Terror appeared, joining in on the beating. The Shadow Princess joined them, grunting from the pain of every kick thumping over her body, feeling her own kicks against Worry and the kicks of the others. They all kicked and kicked until Worry stopped moving, face battered and bloodied, arms limp at her sides.

  The Shadow Princess fought to get her breath and collapsed beside Worry. She was surprised to find that there was a broken brick clutched in her hand, one side ragged and coated in violet blood. She let it slip from tired fingers, clattering against the stones.

  Anger glared down at Worry, and the Shadow Princess whispered, “Scar her, so she never forgets there is no room for cowards among us.”

  Courage gave both her and Anger uncertain glances. “You’re sure?”

  “She said to do it, didn’t she?” Anger barked.

  “What have we done?” Disgust said, slowly shaking her head.

  Terror only stared, expression blank and eyes unblinking.

  “I’m sure,” the Shadow Princess said, voice breaking into a tremulous laugh.

  Anger understood, bending down and snatching the bloody half of a brick.

  “Always orders. Do this, do that,” Annoyance muttered, squatting down and turning Worry from her side to her back. Worry’s arms flopped like a rag doll against the bricks.

  Anger placed a hand on Worry’s shoulder, the other hand raising the brick behind her head. “You’ve tempted us with your thoughts of weakness. You’ve tried to sway our decision to go to Zoria and have failed. I always knew that someday I’d get to hurt you. I just never thought it would be so soon.” She grinned, showing her mouth full of sharpened teeth.

  Anger drove her arm down in a flash, stone cracking against Worry’s eye socket. The Shadow Princess screamed in agony, blood sprouting from her ruined eye. Pain burned through her face, carried deep into the recess of her skull and down her spine.

  The brick fell from Worry’s — no, the Shadow Princess’s — hand, writhing on the ground, shrieking her rage, and sending it bouncing off the walls of Ashrath.

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing. You are nothing,” she breathed.

  “It will grow back, I think,” a masculine voice said.

  She tried to blink her eyes, making them burn anew. A man stood over her, arms crossed while giving her a pitying shake of his bald head. “Wh-who are you?” Thoughts wouldn’t come, buried under a bed of pain and decaying corpses. There was a flicker of recognition in some ancient part of her mind, an inheritance from her mother. The thought was unclear, but the feeling of it screamed for caution.

  “For your tongue, you may call me Prodal. Self-hatred and self-abuse. What would the Shadow God think of you now? A shame she was destroyed. You’re hardly enough to follow in her… shadow, as it were.” Prodal smirked, setting his arms behind his back as he peered down at her. He blinked, and his eyes shifted from metallic gold to a shimmering black. He blinked again, and they became the deep blue of the ocean. “May I?” He offered his hand, but she shook her head.

  The Shadow Princess pushed herself to her feet, agony throbbing in her skull with every thump of her heart. Hot blood streamed down her eye, over her cheek, fell from her chin, and pattered onto the bricks. She smiled. Weariness settled into her guts at the loss of her duplicates. For a moment, they seemed real.

  “They’ll be back,” Prodal said, gesturing to the empty space around them. “Once I’m gone for a time, I think.”

  “How did you get here?” she demanded.

  Prodal stepped back, raising his chin. She saw a mix of despair, hatred, and even love in Prodal’s eyes. The murky sun gleamed from his head. “I go where I choose, though I think you’re intelligent enough to know that.”

  She licked her lips, forked tongue lapping at both sides at once. Caution! her mind roared. “What do you need from me?” she crooned, sashaying to the wall’s edge, and letting her blood rain onto her minions below.

  “What I need, young princess, is for you to stop your hunt for one of mine,” he said, joining her at her side. “And to keep yourself together long enough to storm the shores of Zoria.”

  “How do you know these things?” She looked him up and down, clothed in simple mortal attire, all brown and beiges. His was a face that could easily be lost in a crowd, aside from the leather necklace lined with finger bones. Lumpy pouches lined his belt.

  “I know many things,” he shrugged.

  She sensed then an unfathomable power in him, so strong she felt as if she should wither under its glow. Memories her mother and father passed on to her regarding this creature came in spurts and trickles, all of it tinged with fear and caution. “I’ve made no deal with you. You have no control over me. That is your law, is it not?” She felt herself stammer, the shame of it making her wound throb harder.

  “No, not yet.” He pursed his lips, gazing out over the city. Tens of fires burned with black lines of smoke, curling and dissipating into the eastern winds. “You’ve not made a bargain with me. I come as a friend with a simple request.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall, turning to face her. “There is a man close to the Arch Wizard by the name of Isa Dodred. Do not hurt him. He is mine, you understand.”

  She felt herself involuntarily nodding before she could consider a response. “I understand. But why only him?”

  Prodal chuckled, his voice as deep as the worlds beyond her reach. “Protect him from your ravages.”

  “My storm will grow. It will be enough to end the usurpers,” the Shadow Princess mused.

  “Of course it will, dear. They don’t love you, you know?” muttered Prodal.

  “Yes, they do,” she answered, knowing he meant her duplicates. She knew he understood things none could. She thought of trying to understand what he was, but the voice of memory spoke of madness and a path best left untrodden. “We share things together. They help. Do yours share with you?”

  Prodal regarded her with a scowl. “Do they touch you like you want to be touched? If they loved you, then they would touch you. But, no. They only hurt you.” Prodal grinned, showing rows upon rows of jagged teeth traveling down his throat. “Have they ever touched you? Even once?”

  Never. Not a single time.

  She glanced down at her horde. The backs of the once towering demons were hunched and appeared to be trembling in her agony. Terribly alone. “Not all love is physically expressed,” she said. Why don’t they touch me?

  “I have your assurance that you’ll leave Isa alone? I need him. I must confess his life is the linchpin in the Tower’s fall. You’ll need me for this. If you kill him, you’ll likely fail in your quest for revenge.”

  “No.” She giggled, reaching out to touch him. Are you real? “I’ll kill them all.” Before she could blink, she was lifted from her feet and ripped into the air, rising up twenty or so feet above the ramparts. “Release me!” she shrieked, legs kicking and arms flapping her wings to no avail.

  Prodal had his arm raised, hand curled as if to crush her. “Promise me,” he growled. An image of his human face was briefly replaced by something she found curious. His head had taken on the shape of a six-pointed star, each leg of it formed from a triangle of flesh, the center punctuated with the same fang-lined mouth she glimpsed earlier. This creature did not hail from any mortal plane. A curling neck double the length of a human protruded from his torso, flesh the color of amber.

  “Release me! No!” She punched the air, and a wave of violet fire sprung from her fist. The stream crackled and crashed against Prodal’s form, parting harmlessly around him like he was a boulder against her onslaught. “How?” she whispered in dumbfounded amazement. She ceased her kicking and flapping, knowing her protests were useless. Could he endure her most powerful spells?

  When the fire parted, his human face had returned, smiling with stoic poise. He laughed at
her, every second of it like a knife plunging in and out of her mind. “Stop laughing!” she screamed.

  She summoned spears of violet from the strength of Shadow seeded in her heart. They formed a great halo around her, rising up a bit then stabbing down in streaks of light. The spears pinged from an unseen globe around him, tearing through the stone of the ramparts and traveling onward into the earth below, a few impaling her children.

  “Stop. There is nothing you can do to me. You’re wasting your strength, but you already know this,” he said with a sigh. “Will you be a good girl now? Or are there perhaps a few more tricks you’d like to try? Hm?”

  She screamed her rage, voice joined by the shrieking screams of her horde. She folded her wings against her back and tried to dive for him, tears and blood hot in her eyes, his hold on her unbreakable.

  “Is that enough?”

  She went limp in his grip and solemnly nodded. “I yield.” He gently lowered her to the ground. Blood pulsed from her eye in fat droplets. “I’ll leave him alone. But only him!”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” He smiled. “You are so very interesting. Well, you should get a move on, attacking the Tower and all that business. The time is right.”

  “Yes. I—”

  Prodal clapped his hands. “Oh. I almost forgot. There will be another army joining yours composed of men and some turned with a curse of the Old Magic. Blood Eaters I think they call them here. They’re all mine, of course. You’ll cooperate with them when the time arrives, won’t you?”

  She bit her lip. She would not be this creature’s slave. “And why would I do that?”

  “You would do that because if you don’t, you’ll not succeed.”

  “You can’t possibly know that,” she said with a snicker of her own.

  “No matter,” he said, flicking his wrist. “You’ll still be useful. Sometimes, I wish I were like you.” He gazed up at the sky. “No restraints of the mortal body, men and woman praying to you whenever they needed some trifle.”

  “Like me?” She blinked. She tried to inject his mind with a measure of terror, focusing her ability to illicit one’s deepest fears, forming it into an unseen arrow to pierce his shell. It was much like focusing one’s mind on a precise task such as picking up something so minuscule only one’s talons could grab it.

  He laughed again, shaking his head. “You should stop that before you make me angry again. No. Not like you. The Tower grows stronger with every passing day. Make haste, young Shadow.”

  Before she could respond, he puffed into a thin wisp of smoke. She leaned over the balcony with a groan. “Perhaps it is finally time,” she breathed.

  “Coward. Are you just going to do what any old man tells you?” Disgust whispered in her ear, breath stinking like wet rot.

  “It’s not like that,” she said, gaze lingering over a sky murky with stretching gray clouds.

  “You disgust me. Jump. Kill yourself, useless cunt,” Disgust hissed.

  “Quiet. Or I’ll take your tongue too,” she said flatly, aware that she’d also take her own. Disgust stamped her feet, striding away in frustration.

  Scab leaned over his knee at the prow of the Wem, boot raised atop a barrel of Oakmourn Estate whiskey. The boat crashed down a wave trough, spraying the air with glittering droplets. He peered down at his stub of an arm, the flesh congealed with a Milvorian plate bearing a connector for affixing tools, and more importantly, blades. The Tigerian surgeon had done a hell of a job. Now, where could he find a smith to make a new blade?

  His hair was a knotted mess of salt and pepper interspersed with a few colored beads, framing in a face pocked with scars and lines born of hard travel. His long coat flapped behind him in the salted breeze, the shoulders torn and sleeves sagging halfway down his lone hand, the other folded back over his stump. The toes of his leather boots were worn through, showing the white of the cotton lining. A mix of dried and oozing blood clung to his upper lip, trickling down from his nostrils. He had a fine sword on his hip, if not for the rust speckling the handle from countless years of neglect.

  He took another, maybe his hundredth glance back at the fading shores of Tigeria, a black strip dotted with browns in an emerald sea. He could cover it with his thumb at this distance. It wasn’t far enough for comfort, surely not for rest, but maybe for a drink. In the center of the realm was Ashrath, the capitol, marked by a dark orb of unnatural clouds surrounding the city. It wouldn’t be long until the whole damned world looked like that, he wagered. He just had to hope he figured out a way to come out on the winning side of it while preserving some measure of his wealth.

  He had a store of gold and a dozen famous paintings concealed in a room in the cellar of The Devil’s Axe, his tavern in Helm’s Reach. They would fund his eventual retirement when his body finally gave way to decrepitude. They were the results of his arduous years of cutting throats, hauling slaves, and throwing dice. It was perilous work that few had the guts to do. Some called him a scoundrel, but he called himself a survivor. Did the cockroach refuse to eat shit because it didn’t taste good? No, he thought. It learned to like the taste of shit. It did what was necessary. A strict code of ethics always left you for dead.

  He wondered if the old tavern still stood. It was likely razed to the ground after the rumors of his death spread. Scab was a betting man, and he’d wager none had yet to find his valuables. He just needed a way to get to them while remaining undetected. The news of his untimely death by the Arch Wizard’s hand surely had traveled among his former compatriots. Being dead should make accessing his cache that much easier.

  The Dragon’s own luck was ever on his side, always able to squirm his way out of circumstances that would ruin the average man. Why the Arch Wizard hadn’t ensured the job was done was a mystery that haunted his moments of solitude. Before the Great Tree, he’d betrayed Walter and Grimbald for coin. Despite the departure of he and his men, the two of them managed to slay countless Death Spawn and Alena, a member of Asebor’s Wretched. Scab never liked either of the two, but even he had to admit the feat was impressive.

  Scab made his way to the Western Coast, setting up a shack to live out his days by the seaside. Somehow, the Arch Wizard found him. He was certain he was going to die on that beach. Blood had pumped from the severed arm she’d taken in spurts. He’d seen enough men die to know the signs. He’d given up and laid himself down, embracing death. Then he appeared, the man with the bald head and revolting necklace of fingers. He offered him a second chance and Scab had gladly agreed. He liked living.

  It was a poor decision, perhaps a mistake. He was on borrowed time and should’ve died then, but resolved to make the most of it. He knew this was a debt he couldn’t repay with coin. There was a chronic ache in his gut, warning of the day the debt would be called in.

  A hundred or so other boats surrounded them, carving white paths through the Far Sea. They were the last of the Tigerian armada, about half of which had made it out from Moz Harbor. The other half fell to the Shadow cunt’s last parting gift, a shrieking horde of demons and snakes cutting down every living creature but the few who’d already made it onto boats. Scab paid a princely sum to ensure he was one of them, not that it mattered to her demonic beasts.

  He licked his upper lip, tasting sea salt and the tang of blood. He managed to slip on the gangplank, steadying his balance with his face. He was one of the lucky ones. Thousands of Tigerians and men alike draped the port with their dismembered corpses, feasted upon by beasts of Shadow.

  The Tigerian fleet’s boats were long, narrow, and fast. They gave up stability for speed, leaving Scab hurling his guts out every half-hour. They were about three hours from Tigeria, but not far enough for him. Each ship had a foremast, a mainmast, and a mizzenmast with sails embodied with Tougere’s heads. There were ten or so seats for oars, but it was rare for them to be used. In the holds were stalls for Tougeres, though most of these were sorely empty. Most had been slain upon their escape, loyally stopping to fight the att
acking horde while their owners fled on foot.

  He was impressed by the Wem’s navigation, following the same route he would’ve taken around the most crippling of currents. The helmsman managed an almost perfect turn a few miles out, and the following passage had been taken with the least of corrections. The captain’s eyes were red-rimmed with terror and exhaustion. He took meticulous readings from the positioning of the twin moons with his sextant, occasionally shouting back corrective orders.

  Crugen, King of Ashrath, frequently went around the boat, inspecting the catfolk to ensure they would be presentable for the Arch Wizard when they reached the shores of Zoria. The threat of battle left them all nervy and anxious. It had been over five hundred years since a convoy of Tigerians sailed for Zoria. In addition to a tidy appearance, they also had to be prepared for an unfriendly welcome.

  The Tigerian king had a sharp tongue. Scab wished he would take better care before liberally dashing his crew with his criticisms. He almost ordered one of the cleaners flayed for missing a button on his shirt despite the circumstances, but seemed unconcerned that the catfolk’s ear had been slashed away, pinking a swaddling of bandages around his head. Crugen deducted a week’s salary from the lad before ordering him to clean his quarters again.

  They’d already been through enough hardship, and a drink or two would do fine to please their spirits. Scab eyed the barrel below his boot, wondering if anyone would notice if he opened it. The cork streamed out a thin jet of whiskey, tempting him to drop to all fours and lick it clean.

  On the whole, Scab assessed that the raiding party, should they be needed, were as ready as they could be. He wondered whether any of them had ever been in combat, against wizards no less. When the flesh cooked from your bones under the assault of Dragon fire, plans didn’t mean a whole lot.

  “Do you think she will slay us or welcome us to her shores?” Crugen choked the words out. His dark brown fur was striped in blacks, matted with damp. He wore a saturated coat of navy blue ornamented with golden threads down the front and filigreed with silver about the collar and wrists. His eyes were large and feline and glowed with an intense yellow. His cheeks were heavily whiskered, each spanning about six inches.