Green Rider

by Kristen Britain

  “Touching,” Amilton-Shawdell said. His double voice carried thick overtones of mockery. “One’s father is so very important, is he not?”

  King Zachary emerged from the shadows, not stopping until he reached the dais. He craned his neck to look up at Amilton-Shawdell. “Our father ignored me. He loved you. He loved you even after you made too many mistakes. It was me he felt less for.”

  “He named you king.”

  “Yes, because he loved Sacoridia, too.”

  Amilton-Shawdell waved his hand dismissively. “It is all in the past. Other matters interest us now.”

  “Yes, there are two of you now, isn’t there? But soon there will be only one, isn’t that right?”

  “One? We are together. We work for one purpose.”

  “The man who was my brother will be no more,” Zachary said.

  Amilton-Shawdell rocked on his feet, his forehead crinkling and jaw clenched. Veins bulged on his neck, and his hands curled into balls as if he strove with himself for mastery. A black glow blossomed around the stone at his throat, and his blue eyes flared. In a moment the struggle was over. His features smoothed over and his hands relaxed.

  “We wish it.” He stepped down the dais and stood face-to-face with his brother. “We have learned to draw on the powers of Kanmorhan Vane. They strengthen and unite us. You were a fool to refuse this partnership.”

  “Not I,” Zachary said. “For all Father ignored me, we both shared a great love for this land. You would destroy it. An opening in the D’Yer Wall will cause a great blight and all that is living will perish or be perverted. We will return to the darkest, most primitive of times. The Black Ages will return though we left them behind a thousand years ago.”

  “In destroying we shall renew.”

  “You will renew the evil of Mornhavon the Black, and I will not allow it.”

  Karigan held her breath as the two brothers fixed their eyes on one another, each reading deep into the other’s soul.

  Zachary’s hand lashed out, and he snatched the black stone. Then he froze, just short of yanking it off its gold chain, unable to release it. Bolts of energy burst between his fingers and coiled up his arm. His mouth gaped open in a silent scream.

  Another current erupted from the stone and fused into Amilton-Shawdell’s chest. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply as if taking in fresh air. His hair acquired a radiant golden sheen.

  Fastion ran full tilt across the throne room to aid the king. With the flick of Amilton-Shawdell’s hand, a bolt of energy tossed Fastion across the width of the throne room and against a pillar. The Weapon crumpled to the floor.

  Karigan knit her eyebrows together. She watched in disbelief, shaking her head. “No,” she muttered. “This isn’t right.”

  “What?” Her father was still addled from his ordeal.

  “I was wrong.” Her voice raised an octave in urgency. “Using the magic doesn’t exhaust him, it feeds him. It empowers him.”

  Amilton-Shawdell’s intensity grew and spread out from him like a black aura that pushed away the light. Zachary’s eyes bulged, but he remained unmoving, statue still, trapped in a web of magical currents.

  Captain Mapstone drew her sword, but Mirwell caught her arm. “The final play of Intrigue!” he shouted.

  Beryl raised her hand to strike him, but he turned on her. “Axium cor helio dast, Mor au havon!” The words rumbled from his throat like thunder, and Karigan thought the very air must splinter beneath their weight.

  Expression drained from Beryl’s face. She bowed to Mirwell. “Command me, my lord.”

  “Kill Captain Mapstone.”

  Her sword sprang into her hand. The clash of steel rang in the distilled atmosphere of the throne room. Connly intervened to help the captain repel Beryl’s attack, but she used her sword in a mindless and savage way, causing them both to fall back. Her sword tore and thrust with a life of its own, and the two did all they could to simply defend themselves. Mirwell chortled.

  Karigan had to help the king.

  She tore loose of her father’s grip. With the sword of the First Rider clenched in her hand she charged toward King Zachary and Amilton-Shawdell.

  “Kari!” her father shouted. “Look out!”

  Something snarled and hurtled out of the shadows at her, knocking her down. Karigan sprawled on her side, the sword skittering across the floor out of reach. She took a couple of deep breaths to get air back into her lungs and raised herself to her elbow. Jendara knelt on one knee beside her, her sword tip pressed against her chest. Footsteps approached from behind.

  “Back off, merchant,” Jendara said, her eyes never leaving Karigan. Her jaw was set, her eyes narrowed. She looked a raptor ready to plunge on its prey with talons spread. “Back off, or my sword will taste more of her blood, and yours as well.”

  Karigan sensed her father hesitating behind her. “Go,” she said. “She means it.” She heard his feet pad away and the low tones of his voice as he exchanged words with Sevano.

  Karigan gazed up the length of Jendara’s bright blade. “You shouldn’t stop me,” she said.

  “You should have killed me when you had a chance,” Jendara replied.

  “It was not my way.” Proud Jendara had diminished, it seemed to Karigan, as if her spirit had been beaten out of her. Her fierce hawklike features sagged and were marred by bruises, cuts, and swelling. Had she guessed wrong about Jendara all that while ago? Had she guessed wrong that there was enough good in her worth saving? Or had F’ryan Coblebay been right? Jendara had not killed her outright and that was something, she supposed, a gleam of hope.

  The din of Captain Mapstone’s fight with Beryl seemed to shake Jendara from her thoughts. “I cannot let you interfere with King Amilton,” she said. “We have worked too hard and waited too long for him to claim what has always been his by right.”

  “Your king is dying.”

  Jendara glanced over her shoulder, the ringlets of her lush russet hair shimmering. She seemed to hesitate and Karigan took the advantage—not with a weapon for she had none, but with words.

  “When I fade out, I can see it; I can see the Eletian. The stone he wears binds them together, but soon the Eletian will absorb Amilton completely. There will be no King Amilton. No Amilton, period. If you stop me, there won’t be a King Zachary either. Just the Eletian. Who knows what will become of Sacoridia then.”

  Jendara shook her head. A variety of emotions battled in her eyes.

  “You must see it yourself,” Karigan said, feeling the time pass like blood gouting from a wound. “Is he the same man you pledged to protect? Or has he changed?” Her voice took on a tone of desperation. With every passing moment, the Eletian grew stronger, and King Zachary came closer to dying. She could not let him die. Yet there was little she could do on the wrong end of Jendara’s sword. She would not escape a second time. “He is dying, don’t you understand? They are both dying! They are being sacrificed to augment the Eletian’s power.”

  Jendara’s eyes searched hers. She pursed her lips. Then with a growl she stood up and drove her sword home into its sheath. She grasped Karigan’s wrist and hauled her to her feet.

  “I know it,” she said. “I guess I have known it. He is not who he was. What will you do?”

  “Separate them.”

  Jendara snatched up the sword of the First Rider and thrust the hilt into Karigan’s hand. As Karigan took it, their fingers brushed and in a bare half-second, Karigan understood Jendara’s own sacrifice. No matter how this ended, it would not go well for her.

  “Jendara ...”

  “I’ve made the right decision for once,” Jendara said. She pushed Karigan in the direction of the dais. “There is no time to lose.”

  Karigan had been wrong. Jendara’s spirit had not diminished, but had grown brighter. Yet she had not been wrong that there was still goodness to be found in the woman. She turned to the king and his brother.

  King Zachary’s back was arched, blood trickling from his
nose. His cheeks had gone hollow, his flesh pasty, and his hair had dulled as if his very life force was leaking away. In contrast, Amilton-Shawdell’s expression was exultant. His hair was now completely golden.

  The sword in Karigan’s hand repelled the dark of Amilton-Shawdell as it must have Ages ago in the hands of the First Rider during the Long War. She passed into the aura of darkness, and the magic hummed all about her and prickled her flesh.

  She raised the blade above her head and struck downward. She cleaved through the gold chain that bound the black stone to Amilton-Shawdell’s neck.

  King Zachary toppled away like a stiff column of granite. The black stone slipped from his hand. When it hit the floor, black energy flared up in a curtain around Karigan as if she were in the eye of a storm of black lightning. A tendril of magic arced across the ceiling scorching a black, jagged line through the portrait of King Amigast Hillander.

  The last thing Karigan heard was the terrible dual scream of Amilton-Shawdell. Then the world went white.

  TRIAD

  Karigan was stretched out on a cold, hard surface. Her eyes fluttered open to white. Gauzy white. Linen tickled her nose and eyelashes. “Gods!” She tore off the shroud and sat up panting. The sight that met her eyes was not much more reassuring.

  She was surrounded by a milky white landscape and sky—if they could be called such. White plains stretched infinitely in all directions. The sky possessed no sun, clouds, or moon, it was simply white. There was no differentiation, no horizon, no undulating terrain, no defining lines. Nothing broke or blemished the all-pervasive white.

  Even the green of her uniform was washed out as if this strange place could not endure color. Her skin had gone pale.

  Worse still, suspended above her by no means she could detect, was a portrait of herself like a mirror image, only like a sleeper with her eyes shut and hands folded across her chest. A death portrait.

  “Gods!”

  Karigan rolled off the stone slab. It looked exactly like the ones she had seen along Heroes Avenue inscribed with funerary symbols, and tablets adhered to the base depicting scenes from the deceased’s life. The tablets on this slab showed images of her journey. She fought the creature of Kanmorhan Vane on one tablet, on another she faced off with Torne, and in a third she rode Condor at full gallop.

  She put her hand to her temple. “Is this death?” Her voice sounded small and muffled.

  A moving, billowing vapor rolled and tumbled across the plain. In no time it converged upon her and wisped about her, obscuring the white world with yet another layer of cottony white. It enveloped and pressed in on her. She turned round and round, looking for a clearing or point of reference, but the vapor was all pervasive. Attempts to wave it away simply caused it to swirl and eddy in dizzying patterns. She paused, breathless. The vapor moved by her in ragged shreds, and as quickly as it came, it drifted away and unveiled two rows of funeral slabs, each laden with an occupant.

  Not again, she thought with foreboding.

  She passed between the slabs slowly. The shrouds draped the corpses in such a way that she could clearly discern the outlines of their features: Fastion, Mel, King Zachary, Sevano, Captain Mapstone, her father . . .

  With a cry she clawed the shroud off her father. It rustled to the ground beside her. She shook him and patted his cheeks, but his flesh was cold, his body stiff.

  “No!”

  Light, musical laughter rippled around her. “Dead,” a voice said. The Eletian.

  Karigan looked in all directions, but no one was there. “If this is death,” she shouted, “where are all the other spirits?”

  “Dead.” His voice tolled like a sonorous bell.

  On the verge of weeping, Karigan went to Captain Mapstone’s slab. She peeled back the shroud. Here the captain looked far more peaceful in death than she ever had in life. She was dressed in her full formal uniform with its gold captain’s cords on the shoulders, and silken sash tied around her waist. She clasped the hilt of her saber in her hands. Her winged horse brooch gleamed coldly in the white light of the world.

  Karigan’s own brooch resonated, and without knowing how she knew to do so, she touched the captain’s brooch. “I am not dead,” she said.

  A voice in her head responded, True.

  “I am dead.”

  False.

  “Dead!” the Eletian cried.

  False.

  “You must not disturb the dead.”

  Karigan snatched her hand away from the captain’s brooch and turned, heart thumping, to find Agemon of the tombs observing her. He carried a cloth in his hands and bent over Captain Mapstone to polish her saber.

  “Where are we?” she asked him, relieved to see another living being, even if it was Agemon.

  Agemon hummed tunelessly as he polished.

  “Agemon!”

  The little man faltered and gazed at her with a perplexed expression. “Huh?”

  “Where are we?”

  He peered at her through his specs. “It is a transitional place.”

  Karigan licked her lips. Her mouth was dry and the vapor had left an acrid taste in it. “Why are we here?” She gestured at the corpses.

  “They are,” he said, “what could be.”

  Not dead yet, she thought, but could be.

  “Agemon,” she said, “you must show me the way back.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Why?” Desperation crept back into her voice. “I need to go back. I need to help the others, the king—”

  He looked her up and down and clucked. “I attend the dead. You are touched by the dead, but not dead. Not yet.”

  “Agemon!” She clutched his sleeve. “Please! Show me the way out.”

  He simply stared at her with his frightened hare expression until she let him go. He readjusted his robes and waggled the specs on the end of his nose.

  “You cannot leave once you enter,” he said.

  False, the voice vibrated in her mind.

  “Do not forget the sword,” he said, “or she will be unhappy.”

  He pointed into the distance. Thunderous hooves clamored in her ears after so much silence. Far off, a horse and rider galloped across the plain in silhouette. In moments they disappeared. Karigan glanced down at Captain Mapstone. The saber clenched in her hands was no longer her own, but that of the First Rider. Karigan pried it from her stiff fingers.

  At the sound of humming, Karigan pivoted just in time to see Agemon scuttling away, his legs working beneath his long robes.

  “Agemon! Wait!” She darted after him, but no matter how fast she ran, she could not gain on him. He grew smaller and smaller as the gulf between them expanded, his aimless humming fading until he disappeared altogether.

  “Agemon!” Karigan wailed, but the heaviness of the white air muted her voice.

  Behind her, the vaporous mist, noiseless and suffuse, billowed in again and obscured the funeral slabs. When the cloud wafted away, nothing remained save the endless white plains.

  Out of breath, Karigan collapsed to the white ground. She drew her legs up close and rested her head on her knees. She sat like this for a time, resting, willing herself to stave off despair. It could have been minutes she sat there, it could have been hours.

  Eventually she stood up and walked. There was nothing else to do but walk across the colorless plain. Short, white grass crunched beneath her feet. Otherwise, nothing fed her senses. She wondered if she simply walked in place for she could not identify any changes in her surroundings.

  She recalled the sprig of bayberry she carried tucked away in an inner pocket of her greatcoat and took it out. A gift given to her so she could remember the vast expanses of the northern forest and the green, living things. So she could remember friends.

  The sprig of bayberry defied the bleaching effect of the world and Karigan’s eyes feasted on it. She rubbed a smooth leaf between her fingers. Its sweet scent brought back the bright blueberry blue eyes of the Berry sisters, and the green
needles of a giant pine tree which had towered over Abram Rust. It brought back the earthy smell of the forest after a rain, and of pine needles baking in the sun.

  Karigan rejoiced in the reawakening of her senses, of touching something real in this dull unreality.

  As if in response to her rising spirits, a dark blotch appeared on the plain before her. Her pace quickened into a trot. Her strides brought the splotch closer as though she had taken great leaps instead of steps. The splotch turned into two figures who sat hunched over a table.

  Karigan slackened her pace, hope turning into dismay. Amilton sat in one chair and the Eletian in another. A third chair was left unoccupied. The table and chairs were made of ordinary wood, or appeared to be. On the table, a game of Intrigue was set up. Like the bayberry sprig, the pieces retained their true colors: blue, green, red.

  Amilton leaned over an army of red pieces, his eyes darting here and there over the board. He wrung his hands anxiously, reached out to move a piece, hesitated, and snatched his hand back. He muttered to himself unaware of Karigan’s presence. Shawdell the Eletian, in contrast, leaned casually back in his chair, watching her approach with interest.

  “Won’t you join us?” he asked.

  Karigan adjusted her grip on the sword. “Why are we here?”

  The Eletian smiled his dazzling smile. In this place he was not bloodied or injured from their previous encounter at the Lost Lake, nor was he the ghostly image she had seen overlapping Amilton in the throne room.

  “Would you believe anything I told you?” he asked.

  “I will judge your words for myself.”

  “You will not like what you hear.”

  “Just explain,” Karigan said.

  “All right.” Shawdell’s voice was quiet. “With your actions, you have released wild magic and it has torn the wall between the worlds. You brought us here.”

  ‘’What do you mean between the worlds?”

  “This is a place of passage, neither here nor there. It is not of the earth, nor of your mortal heavens. You have touched it before when you rode with the ghosts, but only the borders. You did not cross over. Many others touch it with their dreams or in death. Some find their way here with magic, but that is rare. This place is not always of the corporeal, but often of images and symbols.”