When Darkness Falls

by Mercedes Lackey

  The cost to her of forging that tiny chink in Armethalieh’s defenses had been great. It had taken her years, as the World Above measured time, to prepare the spell, years more to fully recover from the casting of it, as her human catspaw grew from boy to man.

  Now she meant to cast a spell more subtle still.

  Uncounted thousands of years ago, when the Elves were a hundred scattered warrior tribes who fought against each other as often as they fought together, and humans were no more than grunting brutes yet to find their magic, the Endarkened and the Elves had fought for the first time. In those days, there had still been Elven Mages, and the most powerful of these was Vielissar Farcarinon, whose name was still a curse among the Endarkened.

  It was she who had united the Elven tribes beneath her rule, she who had brought the dragons to be their allies, increasing the power of the Elven Mages a thousandfold.

  It was Vielissar Farcarinon who, through the power of the Wild Magic and the power of the dragons, had forged the bargain that would keep He Who Is from acting directly upon the world for ever after. To win that boon, the Elves had given up their magic.

  Wounded nearly to death in that war, maddened with grief by the casting out from the world of their Creator, it had taken the Endarkened millennia to recover from their defeat. When they had next struck against the Children of Light, they had expected their victory to be quick, for though He Who Is had been barred from the world, the Endarkened were still creatures of magic, and the Elves now had none.

  But while they had slept in the World Without Sun, a new race had risen in the World Above. Humans had aided the Elves, and with them had come the Wildmages. Though human magic was a subtly different thing than the Elven Magery the Endarkened had faced before, the Endarkened had still been defeated.

  But now they are weak, all of them. They have forgotten. And I…I shall call He Who Is back into the world again. His presence will assure our victory. I shall become first among His children, and none of my subjects will ever challenge my power. And all this world will at last become what He willed that it should be, what He intended it to be when we were first created.

  Changeless.

  Perfect.

  Eternal.

  Savilla drew a deep breath, readying herself for what she would do next. Later would come the sacrifices—and there would be many of them, until she had filled this chamber once again with blood, as she had done once before, so many years ago. But now, to begin, simple intent was enough. In a sense, a promise.

  To any senses but those of the Endarkened, the chamber would have been unremittingly black. Savilla saw, not colors precisely, but a thousand shades of darkness, hues that no other race had words for. The darkness showed her a chamber carved of the living rock. Every inch of the walls and ceiling was covered with deeply-incised symbols in the ancient Endarkened script. They did not run in neat rows, but swirled along the rock, dipping and arcing, as if perhaps they had once been straight, and Time itself had bent the lines of writing, while leaving each etched symbol sharp and clear as the day it had been cut into the rock. As if what was written there was too horrible for even Time to touch it.

  In the center of the chamber there was a long hollow spike of obsidian that stood as high as Savilla’s heart. It tapered to a needle-fine point, and looked as delicate as any of the glass knives in Savilla’s own torture chamber, but she knew from experimentation that nothing she could do would chip or break it.

  There were a hundred ways to kill someone with the obsidian spire.

  Impale a victim upon it, and they could die as quickly or slowly as Savilla wished. The chamber enjoyed the slow deaths, as was only to be expected. But most of all it enjoyed the deaths she brought about when, as a living victim writhed, impaled upon it, she struck the obsidian shaft with one of the round smooth black stones that lay scattered about the floor of the chamber.

  Then the entire chamber rang like a crystal bell, the glyphs upon the walls blooming into dark fire. The victim died at once—but not painlessly. No. That death was the most agonizing of all, as if every iota of pain it was possible for one frail mortal shell of flesh to experience were somehow compacted into one single moment.

  Those bodies simply vanished.

  But those executions were not without cost to Savilla, for when she engineered such ultimate communions for her victims with the obsidian spire, she felt everything her mortal victims did.

  A high price.

  But it will be worth it, to allow He Who Is to return to the world once more.

  The last time Savilla had left the chamber, it had been littered with bone and decaying flesh. All that was gone now, dissolved by the strange alchemy of the Black Chamber. All that remained were the scattered stones upon the floor, the spell-runes upon the walls, the obsidian spire itself.

  Once begun, once promised, Savilla could not stop or turn aside. At best, she could delay, and delay would come at a price.

  But she did not wish to delay.

  She would prepare the way. She would gather the power.

  He Who Is would enter the world once more, and reward the one who had made it possible.

  And destroy all His enemies.

  Savilla placed her hands atop the obsidian spire, and pressed down. The point pierced both her hands. She saw the glistening black point break through her scarlet skin, and saw the dark blood well forth around it. Her body shuddered faintly with pain, her great ribbed wings trembling and unfurling.

  All around her, the chamber sang faintly in approval.

  Two

  Against All Odds

  NO MATTER HOW desirable it might have been to keep what the Wildmages had learned confined to the High Command alone, Kellen quickly discovered that wasn’t possible. Almost the first thing he’d learned when he’d first met the Elves was that they gossiped as naturally as they breathed, and that gossip flew through an Elven city—or an Elven war-camp—as swiftly as summer lightning.

  “Everyone knows,” Idalia said succinctly.

  She’d come to his pavilion the morning after he’d seen Redhelwar. Isinwen had undoubtedly asked her to come—at the moment, Idalia was the only Wildmage Healer they had.

  Kellen had slept for the rest of the day and through the night as well, and awoke feeling much stronger. Not fully recovered, of course, but if the Gods of the Wild Magic—and the Enemy, of course—allowed him another sennight of rest, he knew he’d be back to his old self.

  “I’m fine,” he’d said hastily, the moment he’d seen her. Idalia’s strengthening cordials were notoriously unpalatable.

  She’d laughed, seeing his expression. “Then I’ll just make tea. That way I can tell Isinwen that I’ve seen you, and that you’re not at Death’s Gate.”

  Kellen made a rude noise. “He’s seen me at Death’s Gate. He should know the difference.”

  Idalia glanced over her shoulder, in the middle of kindling the brazier for tea. “But this time it’s more than a matter of a few Shadowed Elves, and an Enemy who may not come for decades … or centuries. Tell me, when you saw Redhelwar yesterday, how did he seem to you?”

  “Not very happy.” Quickly Kellen related the details of his conversation with the Army’s General—and the strange orders that had come from Andoreniel.

  Idalia set the pot on the brazier to heat and squatted beside it. She shook her head ruefully. “Well, Andoreniel has to do something. The whole army knows what we saw in the mirror by now—and that includes the Centaurs, the Herds-folk, and the Mountainfolk. They don’t have Elven land-wards to protect them. And the Mountainfolk trade with Armethalieh. They know how powerful the High Mages are. The idea that Armethalieh could come in on Their side …”

  “That doesn’t mean we just give up!” Kellen protested.

  Idalia met his eyes. There was no despair in that violet gaze, but there was no hope there, either. “Can you tell me Armethalieh isn’t going to fall because of Anigrel? Can you tell me we can convince the High Mages to fight on ou
r side? Can you think of some way we can protect our Allies? You said it yourself—even if they try to move in winter, the weather will kill as many of them as They will. And winter’s only half over.”

  “So we need to give them hope,” Kellen said stubbornly. “Idalia, I don’t have answers—not all of them, anyway. Most of the time I just seem to know when something’s a bad idea—and giving up and trying to fight a defensive war against Them is a really bad idea.

  “And I know—and so do you—that if They didn’t think we could defeat Them, They wouldn’t be working so hard to weaken us instead of attacking us directly.”

  The water had boiled, and Idalia sifted loose tea—Armethaliehan Black, Kellen’s favorite—into the waiting pot and filled it. While the tea steeped, she and Kellen sat in silence, listening to the wind whistle over the heavy silk of the pavilion.

  When the tea was ready, she filled two mugs, added several honey-disks for sweetening, and passed one to Kellen.

  “You know Redhelwar values your advice,” she said at last. “What will you suggest?”

  Kellen ran his hand through his hair, raking it back out of his eyes. It hadn’t been cut since he’d left the City, and it was long enough now for some of the shorter Elven styles—though no Elf would ever have to contend with Kellen’s mop of unruly light-brown curls.

  “Right now two-thirds of the army isn’t fit to fight, and we’ve got a lot of wounded. On top of that, we still need to locate the other Enclave of Shadowed Elves that the Crystal Spiders told us about. And …” Kellen hesitated. “Andoreniel is the King. Redhelwar will follow his orders, not my suggestions.”

  “Then we’d better hope you come up with some good suggestions,” Idalia said. “And that Vestakia can locate that other Enclave.”

  BECAUSE of their Elven blood—no matter how debased and Tainted—the land-wards surrounding the Elven Lands did not recognize the Shadowed Elves as enemies, and while any yet lived, they could use that weakness to bring other ancient foes of the Elves into the land, bypassing the protections of the land-wards, as they had done when they had helped the Frost Giants and Ice Trolls to attack the caravan bound for the Fortress of the Crowned Horns.

  When Kellen and Idalia had gone down into the caverns where the Shadowed Elves laired, they had found allies, for not all creatures who lived in darkness were of the Dark. The Crystal Spiders had suffered greatly from the Shadowed Elves’ encroachment, for the Dark-tainted Elven hybrids had preyed cruelly upon the gentle unworldly arachnids, taking their webs to make hunting nets, and feasting upon their eggs and their young. When the Elves had liberated them, the Crystal Spiders had promised to help them in their fight in any way they could.

  In communicating with them while cleansing the Further Cavern of duergar, Kellen had discovered that the Crystal Spiders shared a sort of group mind—and that furthermore, they also seemed to be in contact with all the other Crystal Spiders in the other caves across the Elven Lands, no matter how widely separated. That was how Kellen had discovered that there was at least one more Enclave of the Shadowed Elves.

  But attempting to communicate telepathically with a race so alien was a long and exhausting process. The Crystal Spiders neither saw nor thought as humans—or even Elves—did. It was Vestakia who had realized that if the Crystal Spiders could sense the presence of what they called “Black Minds,” possibly they could tell the army where to search for them. Vestakia had volunteered to take on the task of attempting to figure out what the Crystal Spiders were trying to tell them.

  It was a suggestion motivated by something very near to desperation. Vestakia was the daughter of the Prince of Shadow Mountain. Her mother, Virgivet, had been a Lostlands Wildmage, who had worked a powerful spell, so that even though Vestakia had much of the outward appearance of a Demon—Their ruby skin, yellow eyes, fangs, and even a pair of tiny golden horns upon her forehead—her heart and soul were as human as her mother’s. She had been raised in hiding, for no one in the Lostlands who caught sight of her would believe she was not the monster she appeared to be—nor had her father ever stopped searching for her, to drag her back to Shadow Mountain. Yet the Gods of the Wild Magic had granted her a second boon besides her human spirit.

  Vestakia could sense the presence of Demons and their magic, and had used that gift to hide herself from them in the Lostlands until the day Kellen had rescued her from a thieving goatherd. As her powers grew, Vestakia came to be able to sense all forms of Demonic Taint, and that was how she had discovered the first three Enclaves of Shadowed Elves.

  But she had to be nearby for her powers of detection to work—within a few miles of the source at the outside. Earlier in the winter, Jermayan had taken her on patrol with Ancaladar. They had covered hundreds of leagues, searching for Shadowed Elf Enclaves. But the weather was much worse now, and that method wouldn’t work any longer.

  A few days ago, Redhelwar had re-established a secondary camp at the mouth of the farther caverns, so that Vestakia could go down into them to work with the Crystal Spiders no matter the weather.

  It was the first time she had seen him in many days, for Kellen spent little time in her presence, and none of it alone with her. Vestakia understood the reason for this very well. It wasn’t because Kellen didn’t like her quite as much as she liked him. Entirely the opposite, she suspected—and hoped. But Kellen was a Knight-Mage, and he was vowed to a year and a day of chastity and celibacy, the price Shalkan—and the Wild Magic—had required for rescuing him from the Outlaw Hunt. Her own mother had given up twenty years of her life to pay the Mageprice that had given Vestakia a human soul. She knew Mageprices could be harsh things.

  So when Kellen came to escort her down into the caverns to meet the Crystal Spiders for the first time, Vestakia did her best to pay as little attention to him as she would to any of the Elven Knights who were her nearly-constant companions.

  EVERY day was shorter than the last, and colder, and darker. Idalia said this was normal, and had nothing to do with Demon sorcery; Kellen, raised in a city where Mages had controlled the weather, was dubious, but supposed she must be right. As Redhelwar waited for the Unicorn Knights he had sent to Sentarshadeen to return, the army began to resume its normal activity. As they had planned before the spell of Kindolhinadetil’s Mirror, arrangements were made for Vestakia to go down into the cavern to try to communicate with the Crystal Spiders. As they were shy and timid creatures, Kellen went with Vestakia to perform the introduction.

  He hadn’t seen her since Cilarnen’s arrival in camp, and was alarmed at how tired she looked.

  “You work too hard,” he blurted out before he could stop himself. “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “I suppose you’d rather do it yourself,” Vestakia shot back. “Keirasti told me how much you both enjoyed the caverns.”

  Kellen forced himself to look away. No. He mustn’t tell Vestakia not to do something because he was worried about her—any more than he’d tell Keirasti, or Isinwen. Or Idalia.

  Kellen grinned to himself, imagining how much luck he’d have telling Idalia not to do something “for her own good.”

  “They’re cold and damp and very uncomfortable,” he said, forcing a light tone into his voice. “But Redhelwar tells me you won’t have to sleep down there. He’s established a secondary camp at the cavernmouth, so you’ll have all the possible comforts of, ah, camp.”

  Without waiting for her reply, he swung into Firareth’s saddle. Isinwen assisted Vestakia into her palfrey’s saddle—a courtesy only, as by now Vestakia had gotten enough practice to become quite a good rider.

  Kellen’s troop rode toward the farther caverns, along the well-marked track made by the supply-wagons that had gone on ahead of them to set up the camp. A light snow was falling, but by now hardly a day passed without some snow, and Kellen barely noticed it.

  When they reached the caverns, Kellen dismounted and chose six of his troop to accompany them into the cavern. Such caution was automatic by now—even thou
gh the caverns had been thoroughly cleared of Tainted creatures, there was always the possibility that something might have crept back in.

  Supplying themselves with lanterns—Kellen didn’t want to count on his ability to cast Coldfire just yet—they entered the caverns.

  It was a long walk, and one that brought back unpleasant memories for all of them.

  “Not much farther now,” Kellen said, when they’d passed through the cavern where the Shadowed Elf village had once stood. Little remained to show what it had once been; the Elves had scoured the place thoroughly in the aftermath of the battle, and even taken down most of the crude stone huts that the Shadowed Elves had constructed.

  Kellen reached the place where he’d last encountered the Crystal Spiders. The cave was so vast that their lanterns gave very little light, and even with their superior night-sight, Kellen doubted that the Elves could see much more than he could.

  “I’m sure they know we’re here,” he told Vestakia. “But it may take them a little while to show up. We should move away from the others a bit—I think they’re sort of shy.”

  Vestakia made a stifled sound that might have been a giggle. “I suppose they have every right to be—with odd-looking strangers barging into their home at all hours! Come on, then.”

  The two of them walked a few yards away from the others and stood, waiting. Kellen set his lantern down on the cave floor and rested his hand on the pommel of his sword.

  He didn’t feel nervous, precisely. He felt some of the same keyed-up energy that he did when he was about to go into battle, but it was an energy without an outlet. There was no battle to fight—not an immediate one, at any rate. And there were far too many problems that had to be solved.

  He’d learned enough since the day he’d ridden out from Sentarshadeen to join the army at Ondoladeshiron to know what most of them were, unfortunately for his peace of mind.