The Shadow Realm

by James Galloway

  "I think you're being completely unfair," she accused.

  "You're right. I am. Can you do anything about it?" he asked in a dangerous tone.

  "No," she sulked.

  "Then live with it," he told her.

  "That goes for you two as well," he said, pointing at Zarina and Liza. "You two are too important to risk. And that means that someone is going to have to stay behind to watch over them. Kimmie will be one, but we'll need one more. Who wants to do it?" He looked around. "None of us are going to think any less of you, because you'll be doing something important."

  "Dar," Dolanna said to him, "I want you to stay. You are young yet, and have great potential. But your potential is not fully realized. If there is any one person I would wish to survive on if we fail, it is you."

  "You make it sound like you're not coming back," Dar said fearfully.

  "My friend, there is a good chance of that," she said grimly. "We were warned repeatedly of the great, fearsome guardian of the Firestaff. We cannot just happily assume that we will all stroll in and claim it without suffering casualties." She looked around at them. "There is a good chance that some of us may not return."

  Tarrin did not like the way that sounded, but he couldn't refute Dolanna's statement. If this guardian really was that dangerous, then there was a good chance that it was going to kill someone. Part of him refused to accept that. He had kept all of them alive since they lost Faalken, and he vowed not to lose another friend on this mad quest. If anyone was going to die, it was going to be him. He wouldn't allow anyone else to die. Not if he could help it. Even if he had to die for it, he wouldn't loseanyone else.

  "Miranda, you're staying," Keritanima ordered. "Binter, Sisska, so are you."

  "No, your Majesty," Binter said bluntly. "Our place is with you."

  "I won't split you up like that," Keritanima said. "If Miranda stays, then--"

  "You are our primary task, your Majesty," Sisska told her. "If Miranda stays, she will stay. But we will not abandon you. You may need us."

  "I'll be fine by myself, Kerri," Miranda told her. "Kimmie and Dar will be here. I think Sisska won't mind if they watch over me in her place."

  "I'm going," Camara Tal declared bluntly.

  "We need you," Dolanna told her. "You nave no choice."

  "I'm going," Azakar declared. "Between me, Tarrin, Binter, and Sisska, we should have enough muscle to handle almost anything, and you could always use an extra sword. There aren't enough of them in this group as it is." He looked to Dolanna. "Would you object if I asked if I could take Faalken's place by your side, Dolanna?" he asked in a sincere tone. "I know I'll never be able to replace him, but you've gone long enough without a Knight to protect you."

  "My dear one, I will accept you happily," she told him with a warm smile. "Faalken would have wanted you to take his place. You were one of the few he respected enough to entrust with my life."

  Tarrin couldn't help but feel very happy about that. Azakar had never asked that of her, probably out of respect for his friend and the close bond Dolanna and Faalken had shared. They had been good friends as well as Knight and Sorceress. Dolanna couldn't have gotten a better Knight. Azakar was young, but he had been trained by the best warriors in the world. She could do no better than him.

  Phandebrass, who had seemed strangely muted by having had himself taken over, finally spoke. "I say, I'd like you two to watch my drakes. They're getting very restless, they are, being locked up in my room and all. They're lonely and they need some company, they do."

  "Sapphire, I know it's asking alot, but would you stay with Kimmie?" he asked her. "I'll feel much better knowing that you're watching over her. If anything, you've proven yourself in that respect."

  "I will protect her, dear friend," she told him with her usual dignified aire.

  "That makes me feel alot better," Tarrin said. "Well, I think we're about done here."

  "Agreed," Dolanna nodded. "I will go with Kerri and Auli and try to find Auli's mother. Iselde, Allyn, choose the nine strongest Sha'Kar and please ask them to come. We have much to tell them. Dar, please go with them. Tarrin, if you do not mind, could you watch the Grand for us? He may wake up soon, and we will need your power here to prevent him from using his."

  "I'll keep an eye on him," he agreed.

  "The rest of you should remain here with Tarrin until we return with the Sha'Kar. Then we will explain things to them and then allow them to question the Grand. When we are certain they understand the situation, we will get some rest. Remember, we will have a very, very busy day tomorrow."

  "That's an understatement," Camara Tal grunted, summing up the very thing Tarrin had been thinking.

  Tomorrow was it. The day, the day he'd worked and labored and suffered for over two years to reach. Tomorrow, if luck was with him, by sunset, he would finally have the Firestaff.

  His only worry was for the dreadful toll it may exact from his friends.

  Auli's simple idea worked, and it worked perfectly. They assembled the ten most austere members of Sha'Kar society, and after Tarrin defeated the control that had been placed over them and gave them a moment to recover, they brought out Grand Syllis. They'd been outraged by his appearance and their treatment of him at first, but that outrage turned against him when Tarrin and Dolanna explained what had been going on. Tarrin killed the hiding spell in Auli's mother's amulet, a tall, handsome woman with blond hair and a serious demeanor named Ianelle, and she saw exactly what had been in her amulet the entire time. Their outrage reached a fever pitch, to much so that Tarrin feared they would kill Syllis when he told them about the bodies, and how the Council had been killing anyone that escaped from their control.

  Then it was Syllis' turn to talk. Ianelle took Syllis's face in her hands and wove the most powerful Mind weave Tarrin had ever seen, a weave that absolutely dominated the Grand's mind and turned him into little more than a puppet. The the ten Sha'Kar questioned the Grand extensively, hearing from his own lips what he and the others had done.

  It was a chilling story. After the plague began killing the humans, Syllis and the Council had been seeking some way to cure it. They stumbled on the buried information about the Firestaff during their frantic search for an answer, and though it could not help them, Syllis became progressively more and more obsessed with the artifact, and the promise of godhood for the one who possessed it. It was little more than a dream to him until the Sha'Kar sculptors that had been making the figures on the volcano excavated the tunnel opening, and the spell that protected. That was when Syllis realized that getting the Firestaff was a viable dream, and his want for it completely dominated him. He became absolutely consumed with trying to claim the Firestaff, but he knew that the Sha'Kar would not permit him to do such a thing. They became an obstacle to him, and so he devised a way to make them more tractable.

  Syllis was an expert in Mind weaves, and devised the weaves in the amulets himself. He did his first work with his lover in the Council, taking her amulet and casting the spells into it to make her utterly obey him without question, and waiting to see what happened. She became completely under his control, the Mind weaves making her accept anything he said as the truth and as the best thing. She all but worshipped him, and Syllis found it extremely satisfying. So with her help, he carefully managed to enslave the rest of the Council without arousing the suspicions of the others, who had been so preoccupied with trying to find a cure for the disease. As they knew it had, he succeeded, and had complete control of the Council.

  But he decided not to use the same weaves on the general population, because such dominating control would eventually be broken. Syllis found that he had to renew his controlling weaves every few rides, as the minds of the Council began to shrug the effects off. He knew that there were Sorcerers out there, like Ianelle, that would be strong enough to break its control much more quickly than the Council, and he'd eventually face a rebellion. So he devised an alternative, the sinister, cunning weaves that he had used again
st the others, weaves that rewired the mind of the victim to make them seek out only pleasure. Syllis was a master of Mind weaves, and understood the mind better than most. Such an means of attack would be very hard to detect and even harder to resist, for blocking pleasure was almost impossible, where blocking pain was not.

  Infecting the rest of the population with the weave was a simple matter. The Council announced they thought they had a cure, and asked the Sha'Kar to come in, one by one, to be treated. And while they were there, their defenses down, the Grand and the Council set the weaves.

  What to do with the humans was another problem, one that had no quick solution. Only a handful of humans survived the plague, and some of them, seeing the drastic change in the Sha'Kar, tried to find out what was going on. Syllis had them quietly killed, sacrificing the humans he couldn't control for a more sinister solution to the human problem.

  That was training. The human children born after the plague that showed potential were taken aside and conditioned from infancy to obey the Council without question. It took some trial and error, but the Council eventually found a raising regimen that made the humans that would grow up to be Sorcerers just as decadent and hedonistic as the Sha'Kar had suddenly become, so as not to stand out too greatly in their society, and completely under the Council's control. They did the Council's bidding, and they did it willingly. To keep the humans and Sha'Kar from interfering with one another too greatly, since they had to use different techniques of control on them, they instituted the caste society they had today, where humans were second class citizens, and humans with no talent for Sorcery were slaves. The human Sorcerers accepted it willingly, since it was the Council's bidding, and they also preferred being second class citizens to slaves.

  The new children of the Sha'Kar received a similar treatment. As Auli had shown them, among the younger Sha'Kar, it was as much a function of how they were raised as much as it was the control the Grand had over them. They had been raised to believe that everything they did was good and proper, and like the humans, they were going to have to be retrained to think for themselves and function in a new society. Auli was a very good example of that. She had lost her magic-influenced sex drive, but her upbringing made her see no shame in it, and she would probably remain very loose with her favors even after the control had been removed, because she was raised to believe that it was alright to be promiscuous. It would be the same for all the children that had been raised on the island, who had been brought up in the decadence.

  The volcanic eruption that had destroyed the city had not been an eruption at all. The Grand wanted to reorganize things, draw the Sha'Kar closer together so he could keep a better eye on them as they settled into their altered routines without risking them finding out what he'd done to them, so when the volcano started smoking more than usual and a little lava appeared at the top, he burned the city and blamed it on embers from the volcano. It gave him an excuse for it that wouldn't seem so out of place that the Sha'Kar would begin to suspect that they were being influenced.

  But some did. Every once in a while, a Sha'Kar would break free of the control, and attempt to expose Syllis and the Council. Those, they regretfully put down and buried, so their bodies would be near so Syllis could resurrect them after he became a god.

  The society endured like that, and as Tarrin listened to Syllis describe the years roll by without any success in breaching the spell defending the tunnel, he realized that Syllis was truly mad. He all but believed himself a god already, and carried on as if what he'd done was for the best for all. Ianelle seemed to understand that as well, and asked a series of very personal questions that confirmed that Syllis was indeed completely insane. But that insanity hadn't affected his reasoning or his cunning, and that was what had made him so dangerous. The society he built was, to him, absolutely perfect, where everyone was happy. He saw the debauchery and decadence as pinnacles of societal evolution, seeing absolutely nothing wrong with anything that went on the island. As long as no Sha'Kar were hurt and they found pleasure in it. The fortune and fates of the humans meant nothing to him. He saw the Sha'Kar as the greatest race on the world, and all other races existed to serve and give pleasure to them.

  "We do not condone you killing the members of the Council," Ianelle told Tarrin sternly. "There is nothing so severe that requires the use of violence. But given the circumstances, we can understand why someone with your instincts would do what you did. We may not condone it, but we understand that you felt it was necessary, honored one. Those Sha'Kar were slaves as much as we were. It pains me that they had to die for crimes they weren't responsible for committing, but there was little choice in the matter."

  "I'm sorry you feel that way," Tarrin told her. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

  "We will mourn and move on," she sighed. "But for this one," she said, looking at Syllis, "his insanity is so advanced that we may not be able to cure it. For him, death may be the only solution. We obviously can't let him loose, not with his power and his past record. If that decision is made, we would ask you to do it. We cannot take his life, honored one. It goes against everything we stand for. We cannot do violence unless actively defending ourselves. But we know that you have no such restrictions."

  "If you ask it of me, I'll do it, Ianelle," he said. "I'm sure you'll do what's best. I think the Sha'Kar would do well to have you as their new Grand."

  "No," she said flatly. "The concept of the Grand obviously failed. Da'shar just aren't meant to stand in the place of the sui'kun. The temptations of power are just too great for us. So then, we accept your authority over us, honored one," she said with a curtsy. "You are the chosen one. We are yours."

  "I'm not going to have time to be your leader, Ianelle," he protested. "What if I just told you to act in my place? That way you're getting your orders from a sui'kun, and this time, it's all legal since I ordered it?"

  "It will not do," another Sha'Kar, a short male with rare red hair named Endelian, stated. "We have decided to form the new Council as ten. None other than the sui'kun can lead us. Ianelle can act as First among us, but you are the one closest to the Goddess. That place is yours, and no one else's."

  "I just don't have time--"

  Keritanima cut him off. "I'm sure the honored one just needs a little time to accept that," she said, stepping on his foot. "As you've noticed, he wasn't raised to command people. I'm sure the idea of him being your ruler is a little frightening to him."

  "We aren't that difficult to rule, honored one," Ianelle said with a smile. "Our society and custom teaches us our place. The youngest of us are going to have to be retrained in the proper ways," she said, putting a steely eye on Auli, "for they were raised in the perverted system instituted by Syllis. It will fall to the elders among us to teach our children our true ways."

  "I'm sure you know why I'm here, Ianelle," Tarrin told her. "I intend to finish my task tomorrow. I came for the Firestaff, and I mean to take it. When I have it, I'll be leaving."

  "Then we will go with you," she said calmly. "You can breach the Ward, or you would never have gotten in. This island will be too much of a reminder for our children of the ways they first learned. We need to teach them properly, teach them the truth, and that will be hard here, with these ridiculously lavish homes and the servants and the lack of contact with others. These are not our ways. I feel lost in this room as it is,"she admitted, and the other nine Sha'Kar nodded in agreement.

  "We don't have room for you on our ship," he warned.

  "Why would we travel by means of such an antiquated contraption?" she asked. "Get us outside the Ward, honored one. We can bring all of us home within minutes. Sha'Kar, humans, and your people all."

  Keritanima looked at her. "How are you going to do that?"

  "Why, Teleport, of course," another Sha'Kar said, a flat-chested--which was quite remarkable among the buxom Sha'Kar--white-haired woman named Riana. "With the help of the honored one and the humans, we can build a Circle large enough to trans
port all of us, as well as your vessel. How else would we travel?"

  All the magic-users in Tarrin's party stared at the woman in shock. "I didn't know we could do that!" Dar gasped, breaking the silence.

  "You couldn't do it, young student," Ianelle told him bluntly. "It is da'shar magic. When you have grown into your full power, the world will be open to you. But not until then."

  "Nuts," Dar growled.

  "Patience, pupil," Ianelle said with a smile. "With patience, diligence, and devotion, all things will be open to you. But you must work for them."

  "How is it that you didn't know?" Riana asked, looking scandalized.

  "Most of what the Ancients--what you know was lost after the Breaking," Dolanna said. "The only ones left alive afterward were the youngest Sorcerers, those without an intimate enough contact with the Weave to kill them. After the Breaking, there seemed to be no one left that could read Sha'Kar, so the history of the katzh-dashi was reduced to what the survivors could remember, and most of them had been but novices, with only the most basic understanding of the Weave. Without written descriptions of the old powers, we became trapped on a plateau of ability that has held us where we are for five hundred years."

  "I am shocked," Ianelle said with a sincere expression. "When we saw the honored one, and saw his power, we assumed that our written lore had been regained, and the new katzh-dashi would have used the lore left behind to rediscover the old powers."

  "Most of those powers would be useless to us," Dolanna told her. "There have been no new da'shar since the Breaking. At least not on the outside," she amended. "The new katzh-dashi developed a great fear of the very thing needed to become da'shar, and those that did find themselves being Consumed died before crossing over. They were not ready."

  "I see," Ianelle mused. "Well, fear not, Dolanna. We will return with you and bring truth back to the towers. We will be stretched very thin among the seven of them, but we will manage."