He shook his head and began walking toward the ruins of the tower, and she followed him. He surprised her by scooping up the Blue Knight she had slain and dragging him back the way they’d come, while Valour, lost in his strange daze, stood in the ankle-deep water and surveyed the destruction he had caused. He ran his hands across the jagged surface of the crystalline spurs that were all that was left of the tower.
At first, Shadow thought he was in awe over his own display of power, and while she knew there was a piece of truth in that, there was something else in his face that she did not want to admit was there. Tragedy. Loss. Valour did not care for the archer he’d slain, or the men and Landkist they had snatched from life for no other reason than to test his power, and perhaps send a warning to the Witch who was all that remained of his kind. It was, rather, the tower itself that affected him so, and Shadow wondered if he had seen this land long ago, when it must have been something different. When it was something to behold.
They dragged the bodies to a partial hollow not far from where the tower had fallen. The smooth walls of the cave shimmered with the reflected light of the eastern sky. Valour said nothing, only sank down in the corner as Alistair began his macabre preparations.
Shadow shook her head and Valour’s deep purple eyes tracked her as she moved to the mouth of the cave. She stood there, scanning from south to north, sure that the Witch would send her legions to take vengeance for the fallen tower. But then, they hadn’t left any survivors to spread the word.
Unless…
There was a hint of movement in the north, like a rolling pebble breaking the space from white to gray mountain spur. Shadow stepped forward, peering as best she could until she was certain.
The cloud cover was deeper and less flooded with the sun’s light from above as it had been before. She found the shadows that were her namesake willing and eager to accept her into their fold. Shadow collapsed into their cold embrace without so much as a glance back at the Sage or his otherworldly companion. She came up out of the blue-black shade just beside the crawling man. He was old, and while wounded, he shouldn’t have lost enough blood to make him hunker so. He didn’t notice her for a time, so she watched him crawl, flat as he could.
Suddenly, he froze, just as the black-haired youth had in the shadow of the tower. He did not look toward her, only sighed. It seemed to deflate him, and though she knew he was thick and solid beneath that fur and chain armor, he looked small in the moment.
“It isn’t personal,” Shadow cooed as she ran her black fingers across the brown fur that once belonged to an innocent beast this man had not even killed himself. Normally, she’d have meant it in a mocking way. Now, she didn’t, but it didn’t stop him from laughing. It was a short, bitter sound.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. She held her hand out and began to call her blade, to make it from that place of swirling black she wished she could join with and never leave. Perhaps all those she killed went there. She often wondered. If so, she supposed she could count this killing a mercy as well.
There was a grip on her heart that felt like a vise. Shadow felt terror whose origins she could not explain. She shook even as she knelt, and she felt that familiar black stare on her as if from a great distance, though he was not so far behind her now.
It was the stare of the Eastern Dark, and it was his grip on the barbs and chains he had set around her heart, just as he had done to T’Alon Rane and Brega Cohr. How quickly she could forget one’s true face. Not the angular, pale skin and dark hair of the Faey-like creature he had been long ago. Not the borrowed face he wore now and stained with his long corruption. Rather, the face that had been given a name more frightful than all the rest, and better earned. A face that Shadow had worked to forget after her long years spent in the deepest reaches of the twisted, broken south as she had earned his favor.
How foolish was she to act so brazen toward one who could challenge gods themselves and win out?
Let him go. The Witch must know what we have done here. She is foolish when she is angry. This will make her angry.
Shadow swallowed. She wanted to kill this man, now. Truly, she wanted to do it, where before she had only thought it necessary—a function of his having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She cares so much for her followers?
No. But she cared for that tower. The last of its kind.
Shadow grimaced and lowered her blade, which evaporated. The old soldier surprised her by turning and spearing a short knife toward her. She caught his hand by the wrist and snapped it neatly, delighting in the blood-curdling scream he let out.
“Thank me for letting you go,” Shadow said. She leaned in very close and felt the barbs around her heart pull tighter, as if she were a fish on a line. “Thank me,” she said through gritted teeth, ignoring the Sage’s threat.
The soldier grumbled something that Shadow changed to suit her needs. She stood and left him to it, not bothering to tell him he did not have any cause to continue crawling the rest of the way to the north.
Valour wanted to reprimand her when she returned to their blue-and-white alcove. She could see the need dripping from him, but he refrained, another show of false strength before their new companion and another show of weakness to her.
The Shadow King had arranged the bodies, naked and quite dead, against the underside of the ridge, locking their wrists in place with gray-yellow rings that looked to be formed of the same armor that coated him. Their furs, belts and boots had been piled in the center, and Valour leaned forward and lit them with a glowing palm. Shadow saw that the effort was far greater than it should have been. He had spent himself bringing town the tower, far more than Rane ever would, and he seemed to be taking a longer time recovering. As marriages went, that between the Sage and his Ember host had seen brighter days.
Shadow settled down with her back to the windy east and prepared to sleep, thinking the ritual would take as long or longer than Valour’s had when he had called Alistair in from the World Apart. Instead, Alistair merely cocked his head, closed his eyes and appeared to listen to voices she could not hear.
When he opened his eyes, he snapped a finger, simple as could be, and the bodies along the back wall wriggled, writhed and contorted into shapes wider and taller or shorter and thinner than they had been before.
Shadow had expected them to look like Alistair. One seemed to. She was female, lithe and thick, but with the same pink-red eyes as him. She was naked, but seeing him standing before her, she soon willed the same bone-plate armor to grow and cover her modesty. The other four were far different, though. Shadow supposed they were just varying shades of strange. There was a warrior with red skin and black eyes. He came wearing a flowing cloak and polished armor, and then he seemed to change.
He clutched his chest and bent double, as if he were going to retch, and the other three—a green and two whites like the snow outside—began to match him.
“Do not fight it, brothers,” Alistair said. “Do as Myriel has done. As I have done. Let this world make you what it will.”
“Fascinating,” Valour whispered from the side of the chamber. Shadow looked toward him and saw him leaning onto his knuckles, watching the Shadow Kings convulse and morph until the lot of them bore the same boney, ridged skin and unsettling, sickly eyes as Alistair, along with that natural armor that Shadow now knew could become a weapon at will. “Can you see it, Shadow?” Valour asked. “They cannot bring their full power into this world, as I suspect we could not in theirs.”
“Our power is not lacking,” the green one said, hate dripping from his moist and open maw. “Only the decor.”
“These are our allies?” the one called Myriel asked.
Alistair nodded. “They are more powerful than they appear.”
“And what,” one of the whites started, “do they know of our quest?”
“Little,” Alistair seemed to admit. “Little but for that it has the same direction at present, and,” he added to Valour, �
�the same goal.”
The large, red one spat. “This is the one who first opened the door,” he said. He licked black teeth and Shadow had the impression he wanted to test Valour’s power for himself.
“He shared in the folly,” Alistair allowed. “But it is another who is responsible for the strong pull we’ve experienced of late.”
“A fool,” Myriel said.
“A bitch,” another said.
“A powerful one,” Valour said, firm. He stood, and the Shadow Kings took the measure of him.
Myriel approached him. She was blue, not unlike the knights, and she looked a little more full than the others. She had seemed to fight the transformation least. Her hair was fuller and her skin less mottled and more smooth. She stood just before the Sage and nearly touched him, her hand tracing the outline of his face as he studied her.
“What do you know of the Last God?” she asked.
Shadow perked up at that. More so, she perked up at the look that passed over the Eastern Dark’s face. Confusion. Ignorance. Fear.
Myriel twisted around to regard Alistair. “He must know, if he is to help us stop it.”
Alistair nodded, reluctant.
“So be it.”
Linn rarely dreamed. That was something for Kole. For Iyana. That was something for those who knew who they were.
She would often watch her sister as she tossed and turned in their lakeside abode. She always thought of waking her, but never did. Perhaps the dreams had meaning to the Faeykin, more so than to anyone else. Perhaps waking her would be dangerous.
Perhaps Linn simply enjoyed the solitude only the late, empty hours could grant her.
Kole had found sleep difficult for the same reasons they all did. Ever since that fateful night when his mother’s fire had winked out in the northern passes and his had awoken. Still, he slept more than Linn. She remembered watching his window crack with the force of his restless mind as she sat on the roof below the gentle and judging moon after coming down from their battle in the peaks.
The first of many, and Linn had never pretended to hope for anything different.
Linn rarely dreamed, but tonight, she did.
There were no images to speak of. Perhaps a swirling bit of black and red that was a bit lighter than the surrounding ether. The hint of a leering face, black and formless.
Here, in this void, Linn was without her body, and, she thought for a time, without her strength. And then she felt the currents as she fought to orient herself. The current she felt closest was not an unerring pull, but rather gusts and swift runnings. It was the wind she had been gifted, and here, in this place, it was her and she was it.
Linn had her mind. She concentrated, forming a body of tangled gusts and chaotic spins. She tried to right herself, but there was no direction here. And just when she thought she was getting a handle on her new reality, the screaming started.
It was so loud Linn couldn’t hear it. So loud it produced no sound, or else destroyed the possibility of hearing it. If there were words, they were impossible to make out. But Linn felt the accusation and the intent. The void had noticed her, fleeting and falling in all that tumbling darkness. It wasn’t about to let her go.
Linn was very near to giving up, to letting the darkness rip her apart and cast her into a state and void more peaceful and more true than this one. But she was Ve’Ran, and that meant she would never do anything easy, including giving up.
She steadied herself and began to see the images of her arms and hands, ghostly white like Iyana’s and not the swarthy brown that was her true skin. There was light beneath it, she realized, and that was when Linn remembered the second gift the White Crest had given her.
Before she lit it like the most blinding storm’s dawn, Linn saw a face in the void. A face that left a hard-burned image on the backs of her eyelids even as she bolted awake and took in her corporeal surroundings.
Linn sat awake and panting. The palace chamber she had taken alone, though seemingly formed of ice—Nevermelt, as the queen called it—was warm enough to feel stuffy to her in her panic. She breathed, long and slow, but even after she had sat awake for a long time, she still thought she could hear a faint, pervading rumbling.
Linn swung her feet over the edge of the austere bed with gold-painted oak rails and feathered down coverings and braced for the shock of cold as she pressed her bare feet to the floor. It didn’t come. The floor was not warm, but it didn’t steal her heat and form a slick film between skin and glass. This was strange and seemingly eternal magic, and Linn did not like to think of how strong was the one who formed it.
Her chamber had a balcony, and Linn went to it. She was in one of the inner spires closest to the hollow mountain spur, but her view was to the north. She looked out onto a ring of similar towers set higher than they could have seen from the entryway the day before. She looked down to a large, oval courtyard that looked like a frozen pond beset with red-flowered trees with frosted blue trunks. She saw a white owl flit from the branch of one to another, saw the glint of gold as one of the Blue Knights marched past.
Linn turned and looked toward the blue-white hall, which was lit by candles she could not see whose light reflected and refracted through the levels and twisting ways until it spilled its soft, cool glow just as intended. Though she knew the others were in chambers close by—Kole and Shifa nestled just on the opposite side of her opaque wall—she felt that she could very well be alone.
She saw the conical towers and glittering spires, the white drifts of snow in the troughs of the frozen waves out on the sea she alone could just see over the northern walk, and impressions from her youth came flooding back. Stories from the old world that Linn had always suspected to be nothing more than a lie, or, more innocently, idealized flights of fancy by the elders among the Emberfolk who had seen their children and grandchildren suffer so greatly.
There were the tales of princes and princesses, kings and queens in far-off towers who called down to their adoring subjects below. Subjects who fought for them and in their many-syllabled names. Names for stories and songs. Names to be lost to the ages and remembered incorrectly, and for all the wrong reasons. Linn had never liked these sorts of stories. Neither had Iyana, come to think of it. But Jenk had. Jenk and Kaya Ferrahl.
Linn sighed as she thought of how the Ember of Last Lake had died in the rain. The thought brought all the others screaming back. The fight in the Western Woods. Larren Holspahr lying broken between two rain-slicked boulders, his legendary spear nothing more than a leaning black stick. She remembered the cave and Baas’s seeming death at the burning hands of the Second Keeper come back to haunt them.
And then she remembered the peaks, and how Jenk had fought to protect her. How Nathen Swell had nearly died rescuing her. And how she had nearly killed the King of Ember to do the same for Kole. For the Valley, and all whom she loved in it, and not for the iron-forged vengeance that nested in the heart and burned in the blades of her closest friend.
“Uhtren.”
Linn tested the name. Unlike that given to the Eastern Dark by this northern queen, it seemed to fit the image of the White Crest she had known as a girl even if it clashed with the horror he would later become. It sounded light and strong at once, airy and mysterious. It sounded ordinary enough to be human.
How strange it was, to think of the Sages thus. To see them rendered, for all their power, utterly mortal. She supposed she should have rejoiced at the prospect. If the Sages could be killed, their tyranny, where it still thrived, could be ended. If they were mortal, their minds could be changed and their intent with it, for better or worse. That was the hope that had driven Iyana and Captain Talmir Caru into the western sands and had rewarded them with whatever macabre fate the Eastern Dark had teased when she had addressed him at Center.
But Iyana still lived, and the Eastern Dark was changed. Linn knew it. She could have smelled it had she Shifa’s nose for it.
Linn straddled the rail high enough to give
a fright to any who might happen to glance up her way from below. She thought of the Sages, and how stingingly disappointing she found the lot of them. For years, Linn had hoped against hope that the War of Sages was a righteous one that the folk of the Valley were simply on the wrong side of. That the Sages in the wider world were fighting against the darkness of the one known as Ray Valour; that they would set aside their differences and stand against the inevitable coming of the World Apart.
The reality was so much less than she could have hoped. The Sages were as petty as any lowly lords among men. More so. Their long years had not made them wise but twisted them with sour shades of the same bitterness she felt coursing through her veins and stinging the lower reaches of her throat now. Their conflict was as complicated as it was misplaced, the reasons that kicked it off in the first place now transformed beyond recognition.
Then again, it seemed the Sage of the Red Waste had withdrawn from the conflict, just as their own Uhtren had. The two had even gone so far as to forge an alliance with the King of Ember for the sole purpose of saving a people from the clutches of the Eastern Dark, the worst kind of villain, whose covetous grasp would seek to wield them against his own kind. And there was the Sage of Center, who had abandoned his own life, falling on his own sword in some sheltered glade and in turn becoming it, leaving it and all its immense power in the sure hands of a mortal man.
But that was where Linn’s sympathy turned from earnest to grudging before winking out entirely. The Sage of Center had retreated from the great war he had no doubt had a large part in starting. The Red Waste had done the same, hiding amidst the sea of sand. And the White Crest had withdrawn to his red-topped citadel, content to watch the ages pass him by. Content to watch the people wither and die in the crossfire of his fellows or in the ever-growing threat of the World Apart, if it weren’t for their mighty Landkist.
Linn told herself she was beyond the point of caring why it all began in the first place. But in the place of satisfaction and catharsis, the queen’s mundane tone and steady account of the folly that had brought the World Apart close enough to touch prompted a smoldering in her core.
The Frostfire Sage (The Landkist Saga Book 4) Page 35