The Heir of Night

by Helen Lowe

  “You’d better get down and stay with the horses,” she said to Kalan. “There’s a bit of protection in the lee of this wall. I’ll scout around and see if I can find anything better.”

  The tower was larger than she had realized and it took some time for Malian to work her way around its base, especially with the thorn scrub growing right up to the walls. She found the archway on the tower’s far side, a span of stone curved above gaping darkness, and peered through the entrance, expecting to see a circle of ragged stone with cloud above. Instead she found a tunnel that angled down, further into the dark. Malian hesitated, thinking that wild beasts might lair in such a place, then shook her head sharply; at least it was out of the weather. Turning, she made her way back to Kalan, feeling every stumble and thorn stab more now that her mind was no longer focused on finding shelter.

  Kalan was sitting against the wall and holding on to the horses’ reins with the hand that was not pressed against his wound. He got up without complaint when Malian told him what she had found, but he had to lean heavily against her while they made their slow way back around the tower. It was only when they got there that his attention sharpened as he stared up at the weathered arch. “Why,” he said, “it’s the Hunt.”

  Malian looked—and wondered how she could have missed seeing it before. There, etched deeply into the stone, was the fleeing hind and the pack of hounds pouring in pursuit, with the hunters close behind. There was the horn lifted merrily to the sky, the unfurled cloak, and the shaded eyes following the progress of the hounds, just as she had seen it all before in the Red and White Suite. The only difference was the hawk that flew high above them all, its wings spanning the sky.

  “The Huntmaster,” Kalan said, speaking just a little thickly. “He should be there, too, with his crow.”

  Malian shook her head, not quite sure what he meant and hoping that he was not going to turn as strange as Nhairin. “We need to get out of this wind,” she said bracingly, “and take a look at your wound.” She frowned. “Although I’m not sure how the horses will like going down into this place.”

  The horses, as it turned out, had considerable doubts but were willing to be persuaded—particularly, Malian supposed, given the weather and that they were used to the subterranean stables of the Keep of Winds. Nonetheless, they shied as they passed beneath the arch, and stamped and laid back their ears when she began leading them down the curved tunnel. Kalan followed with one hand clutching a stirrup leather for support; the other was still pressed under his arm.

  Malian had been afraid that the tunnel might take them deep underground, but in the end its curving descent was only about one floor. As it broadened, she felt a sense of space above her, as though the roof arched. The air was dry and a little musty but not unpleasant. “What is this place, do you think?” she whispered to Kalan, not yet daring to speak in a normal tone.

  “It looks like a cave,” Kalan replied, looking around, “or a cellar. Oh, I forgot! Sister Korriya gave me one of those cone lamps. It should be in my saddlebags.”

  “Now he tells me,” Malian muttered, and rummaged until she found it. She fumbled for a moment until the lamp ignited, flowering into a small steady glow, then looked around. She saw walls of stone and earth with a heavy layer of dust and leaves on the floor, but no litter of bones or dead animals—nota predator’s lair, then, after all. “Is it a cellar?” she asked, turning slowly and watching light and shadow chase across the walls. “If so, why are there pictures on the stone?”

  Kalan moved closer. “It’s another hunt,” he said. “See, here are the hounds—and there are the hunters following them. But these drawings are much more primitive than the depiction over the arch. They must come from a very early time. It’s not exactly what you expect to find in a cellar, though.”

  “No,” agreed Malian, “but it’s dry and out of the wind. I vote we stay.”

  Kalan nodded and sat down heavily against the wall. He was still very pale, and Malian looked at him worriedly. “I’ll see to the horses,” she said, “and then have a look at that wound, if you think it can wait.”

  He nodded again, his eyes closed, so she tended the horses and hoped the place was as safe as it appeared. Malian shivered, thinking of the Night Mare’s blood-curdling shriek, and wondered if it could continue to hunt regardless of the storm, or whether it, too, would need to seek shelter. She hoped the weather would deter all their pursuers—and that Kalan would recover enough strength to build another shield. “We need a fire,” she said.

  Kalan opened his eyes. “Dare we?”

  “Feel how cold it is already,” Malian answered, “even out of the wind. It’ll be worse tonight. And glancing blow or not, that wound should be cleaned.” She tried to remember what the guards had always told her about making fires in the wild. “The roof’s high, so it shouldn’t get too smoky, not if I keep the fire small and can find dry wood.” She turned toward the tunnel entrance. “I’d better go now, before it gets dark.”

  “Be careful,” Kalan said, but he did not try and stop her.

  It was bitterly cold outside, and Malian’s heart jumped in her chest every time the wind whistled through the rocks or howled amongst the ruins. But nothing untoward happened, and she found plenty of dry wood under the thick scrub cover. It took several trips to get all the fuel from the arched entrance down into the cellar, but Malian did not grudge the effort once she had coaxed the first small blaze from a meager beginning of twigs and leaves.

  It was remarkable how cheering that fire was—and it meant she could boil water to clean and bandage Kalan’s wound. Malian winced in sympathy as he removed his jacket and fresh blood seeped through his already bloodstained shirt. He had been lucky, she saw, when she helped him ease the shirt off, for the knife had scored the fleshy area below the armpit, but had not cut deeply. Being the child of a warrior House, she knew enough to worry about the dangers of infection and cleaned and bandaged the wound as carefully as she could. Afterward they both huddled close to the fire, knowing that overhead the cloud-hung day would be darkening into a freezing, windswept night.

  “I’m glad we’re not still up there,” Malian said, listening to the wind shriek. She propped her chin on her drawn-up knees and looked across the fire at Kalan. “Will you be able to build us a shield?”

  He nodded, and she watched his expression focus, his eyes concentrating on forces that she could not see. She tried to imagine what it would be like, reaching for a sense of the tumbled-down stone of the tower and the dark air that stretched across the entrance—then building an illusion of stone on stone to fill the empty archway with a semblance of wall. Kalan would have to shape thorn scrub across it, too, so it looked no different from the rest of the tower, and set an invisible perimeter around the top of the hill.

  Kalan collapsed back, sweat standing out along his forehead and upper lip. “Done!” he said, but Malian could see he was exhausted. She unrolled his blanket and placed it over him, on top of her cloak, then lay down on the other side of the fire, her arms crossed beneath her own blanket. The firelight played across the archaic drawings on the wall and she thought about Kyr and Lira, who might be dead, or wounded and trying to survive in the storm. Her fists clenched, thinking about Nhairin.

  “I don’t know which I hate more,” she said slowly. “The thought that Nhairin really was our enemy and might have betrayed us, or that she isn’t and is lost somewhere out there, in this weather.”

  Kalan was silent, and she wondered if he was asleep. When he did speak, she guessed that he must have been weighing his words. “There was always something in her, gnawing away, but I didn’t see it until we came into Jaransor.” He hesitated. “I think she really was mad, in the end.”

  Malian shivered, not just because of the madness, but because she felt that Kalan was right and the influence of Jaransor had revealed a condition that was already present in Nhairin, however well concealed. She could not bring herself to mention Kyr and Lira out loud, even to him,
as though speaking of what might have happened could make the worst real.

  All we can do is hope, she thought, and try to keep faith with them by surviving, which is what they wanted us to do.

  Very slowly, despite the fears and dangers of the day, Malian began to relax—until another thought brought her up on one elbow. “Kalan, what about the shield? Do you think that it will still hold if you fall asleep?”

  There was no reply, just the even rhythm of Kalan’s breathing and the murmur of the fire beneath the voice of the wind. Malian sat up and fed the small blaze. “Well,” she said, to the flames and the dozing horses and the Jaransor night, “I guess we’ll find out. But one of us had better stay awake.”

  29

  Shadow Journey

  A day’s journey away, the ruins of another watchtower rose from a murk of low-lying cloud and intermittent sleet, but the dark shape of the man standing beside it cast no shadow against the crumbling stone.

  For Tarathan, standing within the Gate of Dreams, it was as though a great storm of power was building over Jaransor. It might not have broken fully in the physical realm, but here in the world beyond the Gate, Jaransor was thrumming. He could sense the Swarm minions, like a darkness moving on the face of the land, as well as the aura of the psychic predator they had brought with them. Its hunger and thirst for blood were palpable, but it left no track that he could follow. Above all else, he felt the brooding presence of the storm, which he now knew was something more than a natural force. Any disturbance that was entirely of the physical world would not leave any footprint beyond the Gate of Dreams.

  The tremendous buildup of energies had made his passage beyond the Gate both slow and dangerous. He had been tossed around like a leaf bobbing on the surface of a flood, buffeted from one current of power to another. Tarathan thought it quite likely that he would have been lost in the turbulence if it were not for two factors: The first was that he was still connected to Jehane Mor’s steadfast presence a very long way behind him. The second was that the watchtowers themselves provided a refuge, like islands in the torrent of power.

  Tarathan was not quite sure whether he had made his own way to this one, or whether it had extended its influence and plucked him from the flood. For one dangerous moment he had felt the integrity of his spirit presence beginning to fray; the next he had been standing in the shadow of the tower and looking out, as though through a shroud, into the physical world of Jaransor.

  The herald had waited for some time, recovering his strength, before extending his awareness again. He could see the fragile thread of his connection to Jehane Mor running from island to island behind him, providing a clear path back—and could observe how the two landscapes of Jaransor, one on either side of the Gate, reflected each other.

  So it is true what the loremasters say, Tarathan thought: These hills exist simultaneously in both the physical and the metaphysical realms. He frowned, wondering whether this meant that events in the two realms would mirror each other exactly, or whether it was possible to act in one without creating an effect in the other. As if in response to his thoughts, the murk that surrounded him began to clear, revealing a narrow path that looped around the tower and ran almost to his feet.

  He knew, then, that there must be somewhere nearby that he was meant to go—or something that he was meant to see.

  The moment Tarathan stepped onto the path, he received his first sense of Malian and Kalan. The impression was very faint and overlain with what he guessed must be the auras of their pursuers. But he was sure, now, that they must have passed this way in the physical realm.

  He found the shadow of the first body several hundred yards from the watchtower. The actual body must be lying on the same hilltop in Jaransor and could not have been dead long; its shadow retained too much substance. The shadow body wore black armor with a visor closed over the dead face, and the cause of death was a Derai arrow in the throat, a precise shot into the narrow gap between gorget and breastplate. Tarathan considered it, narrow-eyed, before moving on, every sense alert for hidden danger.

  The next bodies were only a short distance further along, one sprawled on the path, the other fallen forward over a rock; again, both had been shot by Derai arrows. Tarathan walked on until he found the shadow of a horse collapsed across the path, its dead rider trapped beneath it. There was the faint impression of tracks—the very shadow of a shadow—around the bodies, and Tarathan knelt to examine them more closely. The tracks told him that a number of riders, perhaps as many as twenty, had gathered around the fallen horseman before fanning out again. They would, he knew, have been hunting in earnest by then, determined to end the depredations of the Derai archer, or archers. He could detect no track that might have belonged to the psychic predator, or sense any other hint of its presence with the riders. Tarathan frowned, wondering whether this absence might mean that the predator was hunting on its own account, an ally rather than a servant of the Darkswarm warriors.

  There were no more bodies for nearly a mile, then Tarathan rounded a rock outcrop and found a man’s body spread-eagled between two down-bent saplings. The shadow of a man, he thought automatically, strung between shadow trees—except he knew that what he saw was real, in Jaransor. This man was no Darkswarm warrior, but clothed in the leathers and somber cloth that a hunter or a traveler might wear. What was left of his face had been smashed in by a blow from what had almost certainly been a mace or morningstar, but Tarathan still recognized him. He had been one of the guards who accompanied them into the Old Keep. Kyr, that was his name: a dour, grim sort of man, but a competent soldier.

  Tarathan studied the shadow of the body with care, trying to read the story of Kyr’s death. The blow to the head had undoubtedly been the finishing stroke, but the man had already taken an arrow in the knee and a spear in the back, probably trying to break away.

  So then they strung him up, Tarathan thought grimly, for the macebearer to finish the job in style. He sighed. It was the nature of wars to brutalize those who fought in them, and the Swarm and the Derai, if the accounts were true, had been at war for a very long time. But it went against the grain to leave anyone like this, especially one who had, however briefly, been a comrade in arms.

  Tarathan drew his knife and cut through the shadow bonds, unsure whether his action would have any effect on this side of the Gate. But the two Jaransors, it seemed, were close enough for that. He had to move quickly to ease the weightless body down onto the hillside, turning Kyr’s broken face to the sky.

  “May you find peace with your Nine Derai gods,” the herald said, and turned away.

  Two more armored warriors had fallen to Derai arrows on the edge of a small plateau where old ruins lay exposed to the sullen sky. A third was sprawled a little distance away beside another dead horse. It was clear that someone had been using the ruins to play a game of hide-and-seek that disadvantaged mounted pursuers—but they had caught her in the end.

  She must have turned to fight at the last, Tarathan decided, for she lay on her back with a lance impaled through her stomach. It looked, from the limp twisted body, as though a horse or horses had trampled over her. He could see the shadow of her blood, pooled on the ground, and he thought how sharp and clear her image looked, almost substantial for the world of dreams. It was only when he knelt beside her that he realized that the guard called Lira was still alive.

  Only just alive, Tarathan thought, looking at the slick of almost black blood that trailed from the corner of her mouth, and the terrible wound in her stomach. He knew that there was nothing, either in Jaransor or beyond the Gate of Dreams, that could be done. But slowly, incredibly, her eyes opened; the herald watched them focus on his face. He was not surprised that she appeared able to see him, not only because they were in Jaransor, but because the Gate of Dreams was a spirit realm and Lira’s spirit was very nearly all that was left of her. Even so, he had to bend close to the shadow of her mouth in order to hear what she said.

  “Malian … south
…” It was barely a thread of sound. Lira’s eyes remained locked on his face as though to a lifeline and she struggled on, dragging each word out. “Save… Heir … ’ware … treachery … save …”

  The thread of her voice died and her gaze lost focus, drifting beyond him. Tarathan covered the shadow of her hands with his own. “Be of good heart, Lira of the Derai,” he said. “We will do all in our power to find your Heir and save her.”

  Her gaze returned to him, holding his eyes with painful intensity. “… your word… herald… give… your word…”

  “You have my word,” he replied steadily, “so be at peace. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  The ghost of a smile caught at Lira’s lips, but he had to bend even closer now to hear her whisper. “… kiss … farewell …”

  “I would be honored,” Tarathan replied softly, “to kiss one so valiant and so true.” The ghost smile deepened for a moment as he kissed her, very gently, on the shadow of her cold mouth. Her lips parted as though to speak again, but no more words came.

  Tarathan reached out his hand and rested it briefly on the shadow hair. “Farewell, Lira of the Derai,” he said quietly. “You died well. Now I must honor my word and both find and save the Heir of Night—if I can.”

  “Fear not,” said Jehane Mor’s voice, clear in his mind. “We will find them one way or the other, in life or in death.”

  Tarathan swung around, but all he could see of her was the glow of the filament that joined them, fragile as a cobweb. He turned to follow it back, but the connection began to reel in far faster than he was expecting. The watchtowers rushed past below and Tarathan wondered whether it was the Gate of Dreams that was done with him for now, or Jaransor itself. He could feel the substance of Jehane Mor’s presence growing, grounding him—and almost missed the glimmer of power below, no more than a firefly spark in the vastness of the hills, before he stepped back into the anchor of his body.