The Shadow of the High King

by Frank Dorrian

  Two dozen paces above the cripple-king, clinging to the wall of softly glowing stones, was the vast face of death, empty eyes glaring down at all beneath it. The blank, baleful visage of Ancu, pierced through with an enormous spear never meant for the hands of men, but for something greater. The antlers of a gigantic stag jutted from Ancu’s temples. A monument to Luw the Hunter, the horned god. Or his resting place, perhaps, if the cripple-king was to be believed. Next to it, atop a round shield taller than any man, skewered by a sword twelve feet long, was the same dead face, a twin of the first. Cu Náith the Warrior.

  Other things circled the walls, carvings of giant faces from the chamber’s natural stone. Béchu the Elder, wizened and ancient. Síla the Maid, beautiful yet wanton. Ogmodh the Bladesmith, his long beard strewn with thick rings. Barín the Earthsinger, his hair like trailing vines. Aodhamar the Enkindled, fatherly and magisterial. Seven gods of the Evermore. Only Ancu had no monument, Cu Náith and Luw’s faces aside, because death is unending, eternal, and the only god that still lived on against all else.

  ‘No more are you a Child of the Sea,’ said the cripple-king, ‘no more do you shuffle blindly forward in ignorance. We hate not the flesh that makes you, but seek instead what lies beneath, what runs in the deeper places of your being. For you are Dhaine Sidhe, now, Harlin, of Clan Faolán, and yours is the blood of the earth itself.’

  The circle of shadows knelt, heads bowed. Memories built, anger grew, and Harlin stood, teeth bared, fists clenched, every muscle drawn taught, heedless of the pain that still stabbed through his stomach.

  Something stirred within him, something new, something alive, and Harlin saw everything again, everything Duana had shown him and he had not wanted to believe. The chamber vanished, replaced by blurred, speeding images of past days. The royal banners, his father, his mother, his sisters. Everything, again, and again, a thousand times in the single beat of his heart, until Harlin realised he was on his knees screaming, palms pressed into his eyes trying to shut out the sight of their dead faces. It ended as quickly as it came, and Harlin was surrounded by shadows and dead gods once more.

  ‘Do not fear it,’ Corrom Duhn’s voice came. ‘The Sight is a weapon. Master it. Wield it. You are of the old blood now, Harlin. Take the Earthbond’s gift, and in your throes of rage, you will hone your craft.’

  The Weaving? What had they done to him? He went to stand, placed a hand on the ground to steady himself, and felt a rush of something beneath his palm. A pulse of life, awareness, a thousand tiny, wordless voices whispering over one another. It felt like being in the thrumming heart of countless different living things all at once. He recoiled, he had felt it before when he had first awoke, but not as strong. It was… terrifying. Yet exhilarating. He shot to his feet, and looked up at Corrom Duhn upon his dark throne.

  ‘Wield it, Harlin,’ the cripple-king uttered, ‘and in your vengeance, be merciless.’

  Harlin nodded ever so slightly, more to himself than the enthroned creature. He flexed his hands, frozen hate still lingering in him, afterimages of horrors on the fringe of his mind’s eye.

  One of the kneeling shadows before Corrom Duhn stood and strode towards Harlin, their burning eyes fading to a dull glow as they halted before him. The Dhaine Sidhe planted their spear before them, a slender, grey hand removing the mask they wore. Pushing back her hood and shaking her long, pale hair free, Duana gazed at Harlin expressionlessly, eyes gently aglow.

  ‘It is time for you to learn the old ways, Harlin,’ she said, and offered her hand.

  Chapter 21

  The High King of Luah Fáil

  ‘Do you see it,’ said Duana, grey face placid, amethyst eyes glowing softy, staring out towards the east. ‘Focus yourself, little wolf, reach out and it will answer. Let the Bond take you, let it teach you, show you what you would see.’

  ‘Let me try,’ Harlin answered, focussing himself out eastward, squinting as the wind stung his eyes. They were high up the side of Morbha, and the coming winter’s touch was cruel here.

  It felt like falling, or melting, like joining some greater awareness, melding with something vast and formless, yet infinitely complex. A rush of heady sensation, a feeling of oneness – tranquil, against the thousands of whispers that nipped at the ear.

  Harlin slipped from his skin into the earth, became the earth, and through the ground he sped eastward, finding the sea, the Muil Márda, shooting forward through darkened, frigid waters like they were but air. Faster, faster. He burst from water into earth again, rising up, carried upon the air. Tásúil, the sky purpling above it as the night fell early. Houses, lights, clanfolk and street-scavenging mongrel became a streaked blur, as Harlin soared past the town centre, over dirt roads and wooden walls, until he struck against the rocky shelf of land above the town and drifted upwards again, passing through the locked and guarded door of Radha’s hall.

  A fire roared in the central hearth, logs crackling and spitting, handfuls of bright sparks curling upward towards the smoke hole above. Figures were sat around it in conversation that was muffled and distant, mostly unintelligible. Their outlines were blurred, hazy and wavering, almost indistinct at times, as was everything else in the hall. It was difficult at times to see and hear clearly through the Weaving, like trying to observe things through dirty glass, or listen to things through water. Everything seemed to move slow or strangely. Duana had said the Sight would come clearer with time, and maybe it would, but for now, the lack of clarity was frustrating compared with the feeling of sheer euphoria and knowing the Weaving often brought with it.

  Harlin could make out who most of those gathered here were though. Radha, Ceatha, and a few older clansmen and women. Chieftains, he thought, great landholders, considering their women. There was something around them, imperceptible to the eye, but pulsing from them in waves he could feel like the lap of the tide. The Weaving. Waves of life, a pulse, like some heartbeat that surrounded their very bodies and made it difficult to look at them directly without wincing or cringing slightly. The same feeling came from both Radha and Ceatha, only theirs was more like a raging storm against the senses, so strong was it. It spoke of power, hinted of potential, of knowledge, and swirled around them violently like a living thing, an ever-coiling, writhing serpent, an entity in its own right.

  Cautiously, Harlin edged closer to Ceatha, inch by inch, forcing himself to move against the feeling that emanated from her until her face at last became clear. Her face was a pale mask of both beauty and sorrow, her heart beating slow and steady, audible if he listened. She thought of Bradan still, and of him. The two would never be separate in her mind now, the day of their fight lingered with her endlessly. Guilt was writ upon the pattern her heart drummed, and Harlin listened, delving deeper into its pattern, seeking traces of what lay beneath.

  Stop looking at her.

  Duana’s voice echoed from somewhere far off, and he dragged himself away from Ceatha reluctantly, veiling his annoyance, speeding through a forest that had shed its leaves for the winter and stood in silent watch over Tásúil.

  Jealousy does not become you, Duana, said Harlin, silence greeting him.

  Onwards he travelled, following the rippling wake of Duana’s passing ahead of him, and into the Middenrealms of Caermark, where ice was beginning to grip the land as the cold crept down from the north.

  There.

  Duana’s touch through the Weaving was gentle, like the grace of cool fingertips, yet the power that dwelt behind it almost made Harlin recoil and withdraw with the shock it sent through him, though he managed to regain focus and stay the course.

  South and east by degrees she guided him. A barren, muddy plain, bordered by southerly hills. A river ran a winding, south-westerly course, its sound like distant music. Tinkling crystal hiding roaring thunder.

  There was a settlement here, clinging to the river’s banks. Or there had been, rather. It was rain-sodden ruins now, a sprawl of burnt skeletons and the charred remains of humble wooden home
s and other, taller structures, unknowable in their ruination. A scent hung over the place. Death and fire. Bodies, slowly being reclaimed by the earth, stripped away by nature, were everywhere. Piled up, hanged, skewered, butchered. The violence of it all stained the land darkly, with more than simple scorched earth and old blood. A taint lay over the scene below, a gristly, harrowed halo. It felt akin to sliding a hand into scummy, stagnant waters, and Harlin held a shudder in check as he focussed his Weaving upon it. It made the sensations all too intimate, like bathing in a sewer.

  There had been a battle near the former town, outside its burnt walls. Many had died. Thousands. Their shapes were hard to distinguish from the bare, muddy earth now they were empty, lifeless things, but they were everywhere he looked.

  Aboroth’s puppet did this, Harlin said.

  Yes, answered Duana, he wields the Bond well. The Land Child King was humbled by it when they met here.

  Many men of Caermark lay dead and decaying upon the earth, foreigners strewn amongst them almost in equal numbers, their dark mail and strange armour of leather scales twisted amongst bloodstained tabards and rusting steel plate. Of Aenwald himself, though, there was no sign, but a handful of his household knights and a few of his Red Cloaks lay dead beside their horses in the wake of an attempted counterattack.

  Something else caught Harlin’s eye, men near the front where the casualties were heaviest. They carried black shields with the white snarling dog’s head, and were clad all in mail and black leather armour.

  They dress like you, little wolf, Duana observed.

  Shield Brothers of the Blackshield Dogs, Harlin replied. I had thought them all dead.

  One time Harlin might have felt joy to learn that the Blackshield Dogs had not been eradicated as he had thought, and to find that Arnulf, nor anyone else he had known, were amongst the putrefying dead. That time, however, was long gone, and now he merely studied the dead men with a cold, distant curiosity. They meant nothing to him, now.

  This way, Duana urged.

  They sped eastwards, following the tracks that Aenwald’s army had left in their disordered retreat into the wilderness. Dead men littered the path of their escape, fewer and fewer the further they went, the slowest and the injured suffering the blades of the enemy in their backs.

  Many miles to the southeast where Duana guided him, Harlin spotted movement. A loose column of men, trailing away through folds of land between rocky, wintermoss carpeted hills. Soaring closer, he saw they were men foreign to Caermark. Tan-skinned, dark-haired and dark-eyed. They spoke amongst themselves in a strange tongue Harlin had heard only once before – at the burning gates of Farrifax. They carried the same shields as they had that day, black, kite-shaped and painted with the red ram’s head before the bloody hand. The memory of it seemed so long ago now Harlin was surprised he remembered it at all. It felt disconnected, isolated, as though it was someone else’s. Maybe it was. Few of his memories seemed to retain their former meaning or value since he had awoken in the Cloister of the Evermore. Since the Weaving ran through his veins. Some, though, burned just as fiercely as they ever had, and just as bitterly. He fought down a spasm of anger and regained his focus, the Sight wavering.

  Descendants of the Land Children’s lost empire, Duana commented as they travelled up the column, descending and winding through the marching men. There were many thousands of them, twelve or thirteen thousand, maybe more, Harlin reckoned, even with their losses. The ones at the column’s rear had been injured from the fighting or lame-footed, and the ones they passed now pressed onward with stiff-backed discipline in tight order, feet stomping almost perfectly in time.

  How bravely they march and eagerly they pray, Duana snickered, and all to a false ideal and a meaningless promise. Aboroth spun his web well for these idiots.

  So it seems, Harlin agreed.

  At the head of the mile-long column was a great horned beast, all of dark, ridged metal, radiating and pulsing with sickening black and violet waves of light, its form wavering, billowing as though caught in a storm of its own making. Harlin felt ill at first to look upon it, it was an unnatural, twisted being, something the Weaving had run wild through until it was unrecognisable to what it had once been.

  It rounded on them suddenly atop its white horse, horned head following them as they circled it.

  Who are you, it demanded. The thing’s distorted form grew, expanded, became more monstrous, as it reached for them with its own foul Weaving. Claws briefly caressed the fabric of Harlin’s very essence, and he heard Duana gasp as she felt the same. In an instant it withdrew from them, regarding the pair for a quiet moment.

  I do not know you, it mused, be gone, and do not interfere.

  Harlin and Duana sped ahead of it together, glad to be away from its hideous power. In silence, they raced over land stripped bare by the falling winter, the world beneath them passing in a blur, miles vanishing in seconds. They slowed, spotting more movement beyond the rough-hewn hills. The remnants of Aenwald’s army marched on at speed through the winter chill, several dozen miles ahead of the foreigners, a slew of different banners streaming along the body of their ragged column. The numerous injured amongst them straggled towards the rear of column, using spears as makeshift crutches where they had them, limping as they fought to keep up with the rest of the army. There were no stretchers, no carts for those who could not walk – they were dead, and far behind now, with the thousands of others they had lost.

  Aenwald’s army was a hectic mass of tired, scared things, fearing death and looking for it everywhere they went. They sought shelter from the falling bite of winter, Harlin thought. The Weaving showed him brief, faded images of a stone-walled town still many leagues from where they were as he pondered it, half-formed fragments of what could be, what might be.

  At their head, beneath his hateful red and gold banner, was King Aenwald. He led their forced march, still regal, still daunting, despite the setback of immense defeat hanging over him. Harlin swooped around him to stare into his face, his hatred burning like a flame, and he focussed on him.

  I will see you soon, Aenwald.

  Come, little wolf, we have seen enough for today. He felt Duana’s Weaving touch him again, a soft tug at the edges of perception, urging him to return. Harlin let go, let his focus slip and the Sight fade. It was like plunging backwards from a clifftop helplessly, waiting for the ground to rush towards him and shatter his body, vision narrowed to a pinprick of distant light. He crashed back into his body with a gasp, wheeling backwards and falling on his arse painfully. Ending the Sight was always the worst part, worse again the further he reached with it. It was disorienting coming to from it, confusing, and took some getting used to, especially the tiredness the Weaving left in its wake.

  Squinting, chilled and bleary-eyed, Harlin stirred where sat and glared up at Duana. She stood over him, buffeted by the winter winds that made a streaming silver ribbon of her hair, that smirk of hers lighting her grey face. She offered her hand. Harlin knocked it away, and she laughed.

  ‘You’re getting better,’ she said.

  ‘My thanks,’ Harlin muttered, picking himself up and dusting himself off, kneading his aching backside. The rest of him felt little better, exhaustion ran through him from his intense use of the Weaving, as though he’d run a mile flat-out.

  ‘You will master it soon enough,’ said Duana, seeming to read his thoughts as he heaved a weary sigh. She came to him, looping an arm around his waist affectionately. ‘Like anything, it takes time, and time is something we don’t have if we are to keep our word to you. But you do well for one so stupid, it’s precious to watch you try so hard.’ She kissed his cheek quite gently, for her, and strode off into the archway carved into the stone behind them. With a frown etched by her sarcasm, Harlin followed her, and they walked together through the dark, winding halls of Morbha.

  The Dhaine Sidhe they passed acknowledged them both with silent, respectful nods, no longer offended by Harlin’s presence. Some
wore their masks and were shrouded beneath hood and cloak, venturing out into the island’s wilderness with spear or sword and shield to hand.

  Harlin had learned much of them since awakening in the Cloister of the Evermore. He had not wanted to believe Duana that the clans had stolen their ways from the Dhaine Sidhe’s own, but living here these past weeks as one of them… it had been eye-opening, almost overwhelming. Their beliefs, their language, their fighting arts, right down to the way some amongst them wore their hair – long and braided, clasped with rings, followers of Cu Náith like his own people – all of it was the same.

  The Weaving had shown him more, when he dared to delve deep into the earth and the memories that flowed in its blood – the old blood. In it, the Sight had drawn him shadows of the past, images of what the earth remembered, and men had long forgotten. Hatred, betrayal, oppression, fire and slaughter. A crowned man, wielding his own atrocious Weaving, cursing and twisting the earth about the Sisters, until Morbha and Moírdhan were nothing but a lightless prison for the Dhaine Sidhe. All he had seen, and all Duana had shown him… it was like lifting the mask from a dead man’s face and unveiling the decay beneath. Like a cold knife through the heart of everything he had believed about his kinfolk. Indeed, the Weaving had shown him a great many things in his searching, none pleasant, least of all the shadows of Bráodhaír, beneath the royal banners of Caermark.

  That he could Weave now had taken no small measure of adjustment. He had distrusted it, thought it a thing of trickery, smoke and mirrors, had feared it almost. For days, the Sight had come unbidden and unwanted, shown him grievous flashes of his dead family, left him screaming, bawling and writhing like a child in its passing. But once he had truly felt the awareness the Weaving birthed from something as simple as a touch, the knowledge and understanding that could be gleaned from it, it was then he had grown to welcome its potential.