The Shadow Realm

by James Galloway

  "I see a few strands ahead," Tarrin replied. "We're coming out of this magical void."

  "Good. I have felt decidedly uncomfortable since entering it."

  I never realized how much the magic is a part of me until it was taken away," Allia said quietly. "I should pay more attention to my studies."

  "You should," Dolanna agreed emphatically.

  "Phandebrass has been trying to study the void, but since his magical spells will not function, he is not having much luck," Allia told Tarrin with a smile. "How is Sapphire?"

  "She's doing alright," Tarrin replied. "Why do you ask?"

  "Chopstick and Turnkey have been very listless since we entered the void. I think it affected them."

  That seemed strange. The birth of the new sui'kun had had very little effect on the two red drakes. They didn't seem to have any magical abilities either. So why would entering a magical void cause them distress? It didn't seem to affect Sapphire very much...but then again, she'd slept almost through the entire thing. Tarrin wasn't even sure if the void affected her lightning magic, since he'd slept through it right along with her. "Strange," he gave voice to his musings. "I wouldn't think that it would affect them."

  "All drakes are magical creatures, dear one," Dolanna told him. "Even though Chopstick and Turnkey do not exhibit their magical natures as dramatically as Sapphire does, magic is still in their blood. The void could not help but affect them in the same manner it affected us."

  "True, but like you said, it's hard to imagine those two as being magical beings," Tarrin said. "Sapphire's personality changed with the new sui'kun's birth, where Chopstick and Turnkey are still Chopstick and Turnkey."

  "Sapphire's magic is stronger than theirs, so it is not a stretch of logic to assume that such a thing would have a stronger effect on her than it did on them," Dolanna told him.

  "Good point. I wonder if--"

  Tarrin stopped dead and flinched as the wind suddenly seemed to double in power, howling over the ship and threatening to drag Dolanna's robe right off of her. Tarrin put a paw around his mentor's wrist to keep her from blowing away, then turned his back on the wind and sheltered the diminutive Sorceress from it as Allia huddled beside her. The steamship seemed to struggle to continue forward for a long moment, as the sound of the engine screaming became audible over the wind, as the engine battled the wind for mastery of the ship's direction of movement. The engine raced, pushing the ship inexorably forward finger by finger, span by span, as Tarrin, Allia, and Dolanna staggered carefully to the closest shelter, huddling behind the foremast as the patched mast creaked and groaned very loudly and very alarmingly as the wind assaulted it.

  "I think we have just discovered the wind in the poem!" Dolanna shouted over the howling gale.

  "If the wind is blowing so hard, why are there not large waves to go with it?" Allia asked keenly, looking over the rail. "The sea is still as choppy as it was before we entered this!"

  "It may not be very wide," Tarrin shouted in reply. "There has to be alot of wind to create high seas!"

  "No, Tarrin, Allia, the wind is blowing down!" Dolanna shouted, pointing. "Look at the water!"

  Tarrin looked, and saw immediately what she meant. The water around them was flat, more than that, it was depressed, at a lower level than the water around it. The steamship had slipped down into the bottom of that very shallow, very wide depression, and had just started trying to climb up the other side. The wind changed direction, from blowing in their faces to blowing over the bow at an angle, and then it was blowing from directly above, threatening to push the ship under the waves. The ship slid down alarmingly as the wind drove it downward, but the powerful steam engine was keeping the ship moving, climbing it up the shallow embankment of pure water on the far side of the strange phenomenon. Tarrin put his claws into the mast and his two friends hung onto him as the wind suddenly lost its direction, seeming to swirl wildly and randomly around them, trying to pick them up or slide them laterally or push them down, often all at the same time.

  The steamship, her engine driving as hard as it could, finally pulled the ship up out of the depression on the far side. And as soon as the keel tilted level with the water at the top, the wind simply stopped. Not stopped, Tarrin realized, looking behind them, over the sterncastle. The wind was stationary, what had happened was the ship passed through it!

  They had done it! The steamship had managed to penetrate the wind! The air was breezy, but it wasn't the powerful wind they'd faced the last few days, and what was most important, it was blowing gently from the stern. The focus of that weather phenomenon made the wind blow outwards, leaving the air inside it relatively calm by comparison.

  "All stop! All stop, before the boiler explodes!" Donovan screamed as he came from the bridge, rushing towards the stairs leading to the engine room. The Tellurian disappeared below decks, and scant seconds later, they all heard the whining, overworked engine begin to quiet down quickly but not explosively, as the engineers below did whatever it was that they did to bring the engine to a halt. After that kind of a stress, Tarrin thought it only smart that they shut the engine down and check it out before running it any more.

  "Crew on deck!" Captain Jalis shouted from the bridge. "Prepare to drop sea anchor and secure for inspection!"

  "I think we have just passed the first test," Dolanna said quietly, looking towards the bow. "We have passed behind the wind, just as the poem required. Now we must find behind the wind," she said, looking at Allia. "The poem says that it is your task, dear one."

  "Maybe not," Tarrin said, frowning. "Something doesn't fit here."

  "What?"

  "The poem said that the steamship would let us reach behind the wind. Well, not only did we reach it, we just passed through it. It said that it would take the champion to pass behind the wind. Did I miss something here?"

  "Maybe, but maybe not," Dolanna said. "The poem references behind the wind with every line. I think it is a unifying phrase, like the use of twenty, a means to keep the poem sounding like a poem. And I get the feeling that this is a large area, Tarrin. We are behind the wind, but we still have a great deal of sea in front of us," she said sagely. "I think that the poem stated that the steamship would let us reach behind the wind. If you think about it, dear one, we have reached behind the wind. There the wind is, and we have reached the sea behind it. So, we have fulfilled the first part of the poem's instructions."

  "So, you think the place where the Firestaff is is out there somewhere, and we'll have to look for it," Tarrin reasoned, looking out over the bow. "But the poem calls everything on this side of the wind behind the wind, so we still have to find our goal and get there."

  "Precisely," she nodded.

  "That still doesn't explain why we need to pass behind the wind when we're already here."

  "I think the part about the champion means that we will need you to overcome some obstacle that will stand between us and our destination," she told him. "Often, when one speaks of overcoming a challenge, they are said to pass the test. Perhaps that is the context the poem uses."

  "That does make sense, deshida," Allia agreed.

  "Either way, whether we misread the poem or it is right or wrong, it does not change the fact that now we must find our destination," she told them. "We have reached an important landmark, my dear ones. But we still have far to go."

  "Very far," Tarrin said quietly, looking out over the ocean. "Very far indeed."

  Chapter 10

  The hope that they were coming out of the void faded quickly after the ship started moving under the power of its sails early the next morning, as they got closer to the strands that Tarrin had sensed. The fact was, they were strands, but they were not strands. They were the strangest strands Tarrin had ever assensed, because they were closed. They were strands, and they did have magical power flowing trhough them, but the strands seemed to be sealed off somehow, resisting Tarrin's every attempt to look into them or draw their power out of them. He couldn't even
sense how strong the magic that flowed within them was, he could only go by the metaphysical dimensions of the strands to get a rough estimate of them. They were fairly large strands, and that meant that they probably could move a good deal of magical energy. He could see them, but he could do nothing else with them or to them. It was almost like they didn't exist as anything but an Illusion.

  Quite clearly, they had encountered something that none of them had ever seen before, magic on a level not seen in the world since the Breaking. Tarrin was still separated from the Goddess, so he didn't think she could explain the strands to him. They rose up out of the sea and stretched into the sky, beyond his ability to see the Weave, for that aspect of his augmented vision had a range more limited than his normal sight. Since the strands were closed off in that unusual way, and they were in the general vicinity of the wind, Tarrin reasoned that those closed strands were somehow feeding the magical effect that created the wind, granting them the magic to operate even within this area of magical emptiness.

  Beyond the strands was more magical emptiness. But now Tarrin did not hide in his cabin, for the realization that they had passed the first of the poem's listed obstacles made all of them edgy and anxious. All twelve of them were up on deck, Azakar wearing his armor and Camara Tal her breastplate, ready for any possible surprises. Dar and Dolanna and Allia dispensed with their lessons that day, Allia up in the crow's nest so her eagle eyes could spy things on the horizon that nobody else would be capable of seeing. Miranda helped with a spyglass borrowed from Captain Jalis, standing on the roof of the sterncastle that covered the ship's wheel and scanning the seas with the spyglass. Tarrin and Keritanima stood in the bow with Binter and Sisska in quiet, vigilent attendance, standing there as if waiting for something to appear on the horizon any minute now, but not quite sure what it was. Phandebrass and Kimmie were the only ones that seemed relatively unphased by their situation, as Kimmie sat on a chair Tarrin conjured for her, just beside him, with one of the captured spellbooks in her lap, as Phandebrass continued his research on the Zakkite flying device. Sapphire felt well enough to come out of the cabin, sitting on a jib low in the rigging with Chopstick and Turnkey perched up there with her. The sailors working in the rigging worked around the three little drakes, though they didn't really have to go far out of their way, since the three drakes weren't perched in a place that had much traffic.

  It was quite a change from what they had endured before. The wind blowing from behind was cool and dry, and it was just strong enough to push the ship at a fair pace without being so strong that it threatened to break the already damaged foremast. It was a big change from the stifling heat on the other side of the storm, almost as if they had somehow sailed directly from the tropics to the northern marches. But the Skybands above told them that they were still relatively close to the equator, for they were still a knife-edge across the sky. Only now they leaned into the northern sky, when Tarrin was so used to seeing them hovering just inside the southern section of the sky. Keritanima explained that long ago by telling him that the Skybands were a heavenly body, like the moons, and they seemed to sit right on the equator. When one was in the northern hemisphere, they looked to be in the southern sky. When one was in the southern hemisphere, they appeared to rest in the northern sky. As they continued to move south, further and further away from the equator, the Skybands would expand in size, creeping ever deeper into the northen sky as their inside edge remained somewhat stationary.

  The constant wind blowing into their faces before made it hard to enjoy the change in temperature, but now it was quite pleasant. The sailors and engineers especially seemed to enjoy the cooler air, the engineers sneaking out of the engine room to get a breath of fresh cool air before returning to the hot confines of the hold. The steam engine had ruptured a few pipes in the attempt to breach the wind barrier, but Donovan had told Keritanima that morning that they had plenty of spare pipe stored in a corner of the engine room, and they'd be back under steam by suppertime. Until then, the ship would continue on under sail, and also enjoy much calmer seas than they had endured while sailing up into the wind.

  They were all wary and observant that day, but they stood guard against empty sea. None of them felt foolish in the slightest, for they were in uncharted territory, and they'd already managed to get past several insidious magical obstacles. Anything could happen when one was dealing with ancient magic, still functioning after thousands of years, and so delicate and subtle that not even Tarrin could sense it. The Ancients had hidden the Firestaff for a reason, and they'd done a very good job protecting it thus far. The protections were so effective, in fact, that Tarrin didn't quite understand why the Goddess wasn't willing to leave the artifact where it was. Only a steamship could have breached that wind, and only the Wikuni and the Tellurians had the technology to do it.

  But maybe that was the point. The Wikuni and the Tellurians did have the capability to breach the first of the known barriers. If a king like Damon Eram was still on the throne in Wikuna, who was to say how close he would come to getting his hands on the Firestaff? The Wikuni's gunpowder was very fearsome, and if they could bring it to bear against the mythical guardian of the Firestaff, they could very well kill it and walk away with the Firestaff with only minimal losses. Keritanima's steamship proved that if someone was clever enough and resourceful enough, they could very well penetrate the carefully designed obstacles the Ancients created and retrieve what was never meant to be retrieved. The Ancients relied on magic, but in this modern age, what was circumventing their magical defenses was technology. Something the Ancients could not have taken into account when they hid the Firestaff those thousands of years ago and designed the magical defenses to protect it from being reclaimed. Without the technology of the steam engine, the Firestaff may very well be unreachable. But they did have it, and they had used it to get where they were now. If they did it, then anyone with the knowledge they possessed would be able to do it as well.

  Times had changed. Perhaps that was why the gods were so worried now, worried that the advancement of the peoples of the world made the forbidden object not quite so forbidden anymore.

  They stood there for almost the entire day, waiting for Allia to call out at any minute that she had seen something, but it never came. The magical void kept Tarrin from talking to Jesmind or Jasana, which made him a little more edgy, since Jesmind always went nuts when Tarrin didn't talk to her when he said he would. Nobody really got anything done that day except for Kimmie.

  The ship dropped anchor and raised it sails at sunset, not wanting to continue moving in dangerous, unknown waters in the dark, and they all shared a rather quiet, anxious meal. Nobody really felt like talking, mainly because they all shared the same feeling of expectant nervousness. None of them knew what was going to happen next, and that made them not quite as talkative as usual.

  Almost. Kimmie had remained quiet during dinner, but she became quite animated when they got back to the cabin. She talked away as Tarrin put Sapphire down in her bed and made sure she had enough food and water for the night, then continued to talk away as they undressed for bed. She talked about the spellbooks she'd been studying, telling him all about the many spells in them, spells that she and Phandebrass both had never seen before. The Zakkites were a kingdom of magicians, and their spellbooks reflected their very heavy use of magic in their daily lives. They had spells for almost everything, from dusting the furniture to cleaning the dishes, spells for battle and spells for daily life. They even had a spell for the physical gratification of a lonely wife, though Kimmie used terms much less delicate or modest than that.

  "I wonder who would waste time making a spell like that," Tarrin snorted as he shrugged out of his shirt.

  "Well, I guess the men are always sailing around on ships looking for boats to sink. That must make their wives rather lonely," Kimmie said with a mischevious grin. "That, or a woman designed it who couldn't find, you know, a good man."

  "Magical debauchery. Now
I've seen everything."

  Kimmie giggled as she pulled her dress over her head, slashing her tail a few times to settle the fur disturbed when the tail was pulled through the hole cut in the back of the dress to accomodate it. She turned sideways to hang her dress up, and Tarrin saw that her belly was just as flat and sleek as it had always been. It had nearly been two months now since she conceived, but there had been no physical signs of it quite yet. She did eat much more than normal now, and did start to have cravings for certain foods, but since Tarrin was a Druid, he could Conjure anything she wanted at any time. "It just goes to show, Tarrin. Humans are funny creatures."

  "I know," he agreed, laying on his side on the bed, watching her. "It's even stranger to think that we used to be human."

  "Seems like it isn't possible, doesn't it?" she agreed with a smile and a nod, putting a paw on her belly. "I wish this cub would start getting fat. I'm starting to worry that something's wrong."

  "Should you be showing yet? I'm not that familiar with Were-cat pregnancy."

  "I should just start to get thick around the middle about now," she told him. "But since Triana's worried about it, I guess it makes me nervous too. The cub's in there, I can feel it more now than ever. It just isn't growing fast yet."

  "Is it moving yet?"

  "I think it is, but the feelings are so slight that sometimes I'm not sure if it's that or just gas," she said with a laugh. She came over and sat down on the bed and started brushing her hair, one of her nightly rituals. Tarrin reached around her and put a paw on her belly, trying to see if he could feel anything moving around in there. When he put a paw on her, he felt that she was starting to develop a little expansion in her belly. It was hard to see because her sides had expanded a proportional amount, hiding it from his eyes. "You are a little thicker, Kimmie," he told her.