The Shadow Realm

by James Galloway

  "It probably isn't," he said, looking at the humans going about their business. He needed to get away from them. Their presence was like salt in a gaping wound. "If you haven't guessed, I'm a carnivore, Iselde. I like some vegetables, but not very many. If you don't object, I'll take a piece of one of those roasted birds over there."

  "You can help yourself to anything here, honored one," she told him. "Our house is yours."

  Tarrin took one of the smallest of the cooked birds and put it on a plate, then started back to the room. Iselde trailed along behind him like an adoring puppy, quiet and a little anxious, from her scent. She could tell she said something that offended him, and he figured that she was trying to figure out some way to get back in his good graces. "Do you need anything else, honored one?" she asked when they reached the door of the chamber that Arlan had given him. "Anything at all?"

  "I don't think so, Iselde," he said.

  "I don't think your mate is there. Would you like a musician to entertain you? A poet to recite for you? A philosopher to debate issues with you?"

  "No thank you, Iselde."

  "Would you like one of the servant girls to come and pleasure you?"

  Tarrin raised an eyebrow at the Sha'Kar. These Sha'Kar were certainly nothing like humans at all.

  "I'd like to read this book you gave me, and I prefer reading in a quiet room," he told her.

  "As you wish, honored one," she said with a curtsy. "If you do want a musician or philospher or poet or one of the servants to pleasure you, just tell one of the servants. They'll bring you anything you desire."

  "I'm sure they will," he said, maybe a bit too causticly. "What are you going to do now, Iselde?" he asked curiously.

  "I've been asked to a friend's house," she said, looking a bit eager. "We'll take lessons together in the Art from her mother, who's one of the better Sorcerers on the island. Then we'll probably talk, or at least start off that way."

  "You say it like you're up to mischief," he noted.

  She blushed. "Auli is an adventurous friend," she said. "She always gets me in trouble. She likes to play pranks on people, and seduce boys, and go where we're not supposed to go, and she's always taking servants into her room to take pleasure from them. My uncle doesn't like her. He says she's more interested in pleasure than study. My uncle is a prude sometimes," she told him with a wicked little smile. "He doesn't take pleasure from the servant girls at all, and he doesn't like music or dancing. Auli may like pleasure more than study, but Uncle Arlan doesn't do anything but work."

  "What does he work on?"

  "Bettering his Art," she replied. "He spends every day with the Elders as one of their pupils."

  Tarrin picked through what she said earlier, and hit on something that surprised him. "Sha'Kar women take pleasure from the humans?" he asked curiously. In many societies, men were allowed to be promiscuous, but women weren't. That this girl Auli was doing so seemed not too unusual given what Tarrin had seen of the Sha'Kar so far, but Iselde had said it like it was yet another bad thing.

  "Some women do," she answered. "Auli likes humans more than boys."

  "That's not forbidden?"

  "Not really, but some houses frown on it," she replied. "They say we may as well go out and take pleasure from the sheep. Auli has a reputation as a human-lover, so she's not very popular with some of the most prestigious women. Uncle Arlan says that me being friends with her is giving me the same bad reputation."

  "What do you think, Iselde?" he asked.

  "I think they're wrong,"she replied honestly. "There's no harm in it. We can't get pregnant from it, and the humans can't get pregnant from the boys. Before the Breaking, humans and Sha'Kar married all the time, even if they couldn't have children. If our forefathers thought it was alright to take pleasure from humans, then why shouldn't we?"

  Tarrin blinked. That was something rather important there. If the Sha'Kar thought highly enough of humans to marry them back before the Breaking, then what had caused them to change, and turn humans into slaves? Slaves that some Sha'Kar put on the same level as sheep? That needed a little further investigation. Keritanima said if they could get to know the Sha'Kar, they'd be better prepared to deal with them if they opposed Tarrin's mission. Understanding their history and their customs was a good start, and coming to know when the Sha'Kar's attitudes towards humans changed would shed some light on things.

  "Thank you, Iselde," he said sincerely. "You just explained quite a few things about your people that I didn't understand."

  "Thank you, honored one, "she said with a blush and a curtsy. "If you want to know more, just send for me. I'll tell you anything you want to know."

  "I will," he promised. "But first, I want to read this book. I'm curious about your people, and I think this book is going to answer many of my questions."

  "I hope it pleases you, honored one," she said sincerely.

  "We'll see. Go have fun, Iselde. I'll see you later."

  She curtsied to him with a smile, and then trotted down the passageway.

  Seating himself on the bed crosslegged, Tarrin put the book in his lap and started reading, his only movement his paws to turn the pages and his tail slashing back and forth behind him. The book was indeed very enlightening. It began as Iselde said it would, with the Sha'Kar seeress who predicted the Breaking. He glossed generally over that section, reading it for its general content rather, reading that the seeress managed to convince a group of Sha'Kar and humans that it was serious enough for them to take action. So the party of them, nearly a thousand strong, took to ships with their belongings and some of the servants that attended them at the Tower and used their magic to defeat the protections surrounding the Ward. He read about the miracle at the Ward, when the unknown Sha'Kar woman managed to breach the Ward with her power, but disappeared in the act of it. Her act was enough to get the Sha'Kar and their ships through the Ward, however, and they were safe.

  Tarrin read about how they arrived and found that they couldn't get back out. They tried to contact the Goddess, but discovered that the Ward was so powerful that they couldn't communicate through it. They found themselves trapped in a prison of their own design, and they despaired until the Breaking. When that happened, the voice of the Goddess managed to touch them during the destruction of the Weave, telling them to hold strong, that when the sui'kun were reborn, the Ward would fail, and they would be free and would be welcomed home. With that knowledge bolstering them, the Sha'Kar and their human companions settled in. At first they wanted to build a tower, but without a sui'kun to serve as its heart, it seemed an empty shadow of their past. Then one Sha'Kar rose up from the ranks and bestowed purpose to them. He was Grand Syllis, and he was the one that suggested they build estates rather than a tower, that they live in a community rather than a single building. Syllis established the Council of Elders and his position as Grand, a title that he would hold until they were able to return to the outside world. The idea worked rather well, the book said. The Sha'Kar found the system to their liking, for the Grand and the Council were much like the Keepers and Councils of their memory, and instead of sharing a single tower, all the Sha'Kar and humans could express themselves with their personal estates.

  The book got a bit boring after that, as it talked about the rise of the seventeen Sha'Kar families that became the hub of the island's society. The book talked about how the forest was cut back to make room for the estates, and how the entire island became populated by the stranded Sorcerers and their servants. It then went on to ramble lengthily about how everyone was happy and prospered, and how they returned to their studies and created a quality of life they enjoyed.

  Then it got interesting again, because tragedy befell the island. It came in the form of a sickness, striking the island about seven hundred years ago. It was a disease that started slowly, but then swept through the island rampantly. It affected both the humans and the Sha'Kar, but where it was merely inconvenient for the Sha'Kar, it proved to be lethal to the humans.
In the span of five years, virtually all the humans on the island died from the deadly plague, cutting their numbers by more than half. All the human Sorcerers that had come with the Sha'Kar died, and the roughly hundred humans left at the end of the plague had been the servants, servants who had contracted the disease, but had survived.

  Tarrin paused to consider that, consider how that may change the Sha'Kar's view of humans, and then he continued reading. With over half the population of the island gone, the Sha'Kar decided to tear down most of their houses and pull back to the shallow valley where the town was now, letting the forest reclaim the rest of the island. Since they had so much room, the fifty Sha'Kar families each were portioned a section of the land to do with as they pleased, and the Sha'Kar built the fifty estates that dotted the grassy plain, estates that Tarrin realized probably were still standing today. The book talked about how each family tried to outdo the others by making a home of great beauty, as the Sha'Kar sought to transform the land they had taken for themselves into a garden of beauty to remind them of the wonders of the towers, memories that grew dimmer and dimmer as time went by.

  Tarrin wondered at that. The outside certainly didn't look like a garden of beauty now. Surely, it was pretty, but there weren't the vast gardens and crystal statues that the book mentioned. Everything outside was actually rather plain, from what he'd seen. Sure, it was pretty, but it was all natural. Grassy lawns behind ornate fences, with simple white stone paths between them.

  Tarrin's curiosity was answered very quickly. Fifty years after the plague, the volcano erupted, burning most of the town to the ground. The extravagant houses and huge gardens they'd built had acted like fire traps, fanning the flames set by small embers falling from the volcano's peak. The Sha'Kar endured, the book said, stoically rebuilding their estates, but this time the Grand decreed that only the buildings should carry the beauty of the Sha'Kar. That the land should be allowed to be grassy lawns, grass that can more easily be extinguished by magic if it was set on fire. What was more, fences were built, and into them an enchantment was placed that would prevent fire from crossing them, so as to isolate any further fires so they couldn't spread across the entire city as they had during the eruption.

  Tarrin frowned slightly. He guessed those fifty estates he thought were still standing actually weren't.

  The book droned on and on about how they rebuilt a third time, and how few of the children of the human servants displayed any power in Sorcery. It talked about how they were taken in by the Sha'Kar families and trained in Sorcery, what they called the Art, and then the matter of the humans seemed to simply disappear.

  As well as anything of interest, because almost nothing had changed, according to the book, up to about fifty years ago, when the book was written. The book just repeated itself about how happy everyone was, and how the families continued to train in the Art. It did talk about every new Sha'Kar birth like it was a matter of celebration, but made no mention of the humans. In fact, the history of how the humans had come to be marked like slaves and made to serve the Sha'Kar wasn't in the book either.

  Tarrin put the book aside and pondered on its contents. Odds were, the change in looking at the humans came after the plague. He wondered how they had come to develop the system they had now, for the book made no mention of it. Then again, the book did mention servants. It mentioned that the Sha'Kar came with servants. They may not have been used to having grand mansions, but they were used to being served. Odds were, after the human Sorcerers died, they saw the humans more and more as just...servants.

  It was the only explanation he could fathom, but it didn't answer the question. The Sha'Kar seemed to be decent folk. The book talked endlessly about how they worked together, how they cared for each other, how they strove to improve themselves and be happy. It just couldn't explain their change in attitude for the humans, humans they had considered as equals. Humans that most of the Sha'Kar had been alive to consider equals. These were not the descendents of the Ancients, these were the Ancients. It had been a thousand years since their isolation, but it didn't add up. The Sha'Kar were an ancient civilization, and he seriously doubted that a thousand years of isolation could have changed them that much, could have pushed them so far out of the culture they had practiced for millenia. If Sha'Kar were like Selani, then they wouldn't change easily.

  He wondered how the Sha'Kar viewed the human Sorcerers among them. That would answer some of his questions.

  The door opened, and Kimmie came in with Sapphire in her arms. The drake chirped happily and wriggled out of her arms, then flapped over and landed in Tarrin's lap. "Where have you been, Sapphire?" he chided her as he scratched her between the horns. "I was about to go looking for you!"

  "We saw her and Phandebrass' drakes flying around the house," Kimmie answered him. "The Sha'Kar have never seen a drake before. I almost had to wrest her away from them."

  "What were you doing?" he asked her as he Conjured a bowl of water for her, and set it on a stone table not far from the bed's pedestal. "I was reading this book on Sha'Kar history that Iselde gave me."

  "I was slinking around in cat form," she answered, stretching languidly. "I couldn't get out of the fence, but I saw quite a bit."

  "Like what?"

  "Like they work their servants like dogs," she frowned. "Those farmers out there are trying to work the land with just a handful of beaten-up old tools. Most of them are doing it by hand. I saw Allyn out there too," she grinned. "Allyn has it hot and heavy for Allia. He was trying to impress her with Sorcery and poetry while she wandered around the lawn. I hope he doesn't go too far. Allia looks like the kind that deals with unwanted suitors permanently."

  "She won't kill him," he assured her. "She may break his arm, but she won't kill him."

  "I saw Kerri and Dolanna out there too. They were standing at the fence, talking over it with some of the Sha'Kar outside."

  "Did you see any humans out there?"

  "A few," she answered. "Most were servants, but I did see a couple in robes. Why do you ask?"

  "This book is about what the Sha'Kar have done since they came here," he said, holding up the book. "It doesn't say anything about how the humans came to be slaves, but it did say that a plague killed nearly all of them about seven hundred years ago. All the Ancients who were human died in that plague, leaving only the human servants that were here, probably descendents of the original servants that came with them, alive. The humans here now are the descendents of the survivors."

  "You think that has something to do with it?"

  "I think it might have, but I'm not sure," he admitted.

  "You seem hung up on the humans," she noted.

  "Given how I feel about slaves, that shouldn't be a surprise," he said bluntly.

  "No, I guess not," she sighed. "That Arlan fellow asked me if I was going to the feast in this," she said, holding her arms out. "I told him I'd come naked if he thought it would make a better impression. After he recovered his composure, he suggested I borrow one of Iselde's dresses," she finished with a sly grin.

  "Iselde said that her uncle is very uptight," he told her. "He's almost a human in that regard. Iselde was much more liberal." He scratched his cheek with a claw. "I remember what I read about the Sha'Kar at the Tower. Alot of the customs of the katzh-dashi were originally Sha'Kar customs. These Sha'Kar aren't like the katzh-dashi, so it makes me wonder how else they've changed."

  "Well, I didn't find out very much," she admitted. "I was hoping to see them interact when they didn't think anyone was there, but I didn't see anyone but the humans. I guess there's only those three Sha'Kar here."

  "Three people living in this place," Tarrin mused. "It's big enough for three hundred."

  "No doubt there. Think you can get one of my dresses from the ship?"

  "Not this time," he said. "They don't know I can do that, and I'd rather not give that away."

  "Ah," she said, her eyes brightening in understanding. "I guess I'll just have to make do
with this. I surely don't want to wear one of Iselde's dresses."

  "Why not? You'd look lovely in something see-through."

  "I know I would, but she's not my size."

  "I can fix that," he assured her. "But Iselde's at her friend's house right now, getting into mischief. We'll have to wait for her to come back before you can ask."

  "Getting into mischief, eh?" Kimmie chuckled. "She told you that?"

  Tarrin nodded. "Her friend has a bad reputation. She's a notorious flipskirt and troublemaker. Iselde likes her because her uncle is so strict, and her time with the girl is a chance to feel rebellious."

  "Children seem to be a universal constant, no matter what race they are," Kimmie chuckled.

  "Her friend Auli sounds like a real firebrand," Tarrin said with a slight smile. "She said her uncle hates her."

  "That's reason enough to be her best friend right there," Kimmie laughed.

  "Her description reminds me of Walten, a boy from my village," Tarrin told her. "He was always getting into trouble, but he didn't do some of the things that Auli does. His mother would have killed him. But I guess it's the different culture."

  "What different things?"

  "Seems Auli likes to take humans into her room and have her way with them," he told her. "And she's quite an accomplished seductress of the Sha'Kar boys. That kind of behavior could get a boy or girl strangled back in Aldreth."

  "They are a bit moral there," Kimmie grinned.

  "If they ever caught Walten with his hands up a girl's skirt, that would have been the end for him," Tarrin chuckled. "He did it anyway, but they never caught him."

  "You'd think the mothers would warn the girls away."

  "They did, but it's a big village when a single girl is trying to get herself not noticed, and there are plenty of thick woods around the village. I stumbled on Walten trying to talk Cilia Whitebranch out of her dress one morning about a year before I left for the Tower. The girls were warned away from him, but the very act of warning them away drew them to him like bees to honey. Girls love bad boys, for some reason. Care to explain that one to me?" he asked her.