The Outstretched Shadow

by Mercedes Lackey

  And slowly, slowly, Kellen and Shalkan winnowed the pack, until the Hounds coming against them were few enough to count, and all of them were chipped and battered by previous attacks.

  As their numbers diminished, the Hounds seemed to sense the fact—their leaps grew more frantic, their assaults more desperate. Once Kellen was bitten: the Hound’s jaws closed over his forearm, its teeth just about to break the skin before Shalkan turned the Hound into lifeless stone. But even so, Kellen had to batter the stone body against the wall of the pocket canyon to loosen its unliving grip from his flesh.

  And in that moment of distraction, two more attacked.

  “Kellen!”

  One was missing one of its forelegs. The other had lost its lower jaw and half its head. Kellen managed to knock the three-legged one sideways, away from Shalkan, before the other leaped into the air and bore Kellen down.

  His head hit the ground with an impact that jarred his teeth, and then the Hound, shaking its head like a terrier with a rat, hit him across the side of the head with the ragged remains of its muzzle.

  It could not bite. But it did not have to bite to kill him. All it had to do was batter him to death with blows from its flailing stone head—or hold him, helpless, while others of its pack arrived to finish him.

  “Hold it still!” Shalkan shouted, and Kellen, grimly, struggled to obey.

  There was a jarring impact, and the Hound flew off his chest as the unicorn pivoted and kicked. Kellen heard the sound of breaking stone.

  “Up!” Shalkan cried desperately.

  Kellen dragged himself to his feet, scrabbling for his club. He staggered, dazed and unable to see as dark spots filled his vision. His nose was bleeding, and he snorted, spraying blood. He swung wildly, and felt the blow connect, felt the jarring hardness of wood against stone as he knocked one of the golems flying.

  They fought on. If there was a Hell, this was surely it …

  Finally—silence.

  No thudding of stone-on-stone, no dark bodies rushing at him, no more Hounds were coming up the slope. Exhausted and drenched in sweat, his clothing in rags, Kellen looked around. The ground was littered with broken stone statues that had once been the Hounds of the Outlaw Hunt. Not one of them was whole.

  Horribly, there were lots of bits that were still moving, still writhing, still trying to get at their quarry. But nothing that could do him or Shalkan any harm.

  “We did it—” Kellen said in dull and weary disbelief. He wanted to feel relief, but—well, perhaps there was a spark of it. He hadn’t the strength to sustain more than that little spark, though. Every muscle hurt. He would have given up long since except for the need to protect Shalkan. “We—”

  “No,” Shalkan said bleakly, interrupting him. “Listen.”

  There was the sound of scrabbling stone feet over rock.

  “No …” Kellen said in angry disbelief. More Hounds. “No. That’s not fair!”

  A second pack of Hounds swarmed into view, a pack even larger than the first.

  Kellen stared, watching them come, frozen in shock.

  The City had sent a second Outlaw Hunt. Against all Law and Custom, they’d sent a second pack of Hounds, a second Hunt, to kill him—to kill them. They’d hated him enough to do that—his father hated him enough to do that—and not only was he, Kellen, going to die here because of that, Shalkan was going to die, too, because of the spell Kellen had cast and the vow Shalkan had sworn, to take Kellen over the border of City lands. Shalkan would not leave him, and the Hounds would kill Shalkan too.

  His fault. Because the Council cheated. His fault. Because the Council lied. His fault. Because Lycaelon Tavadon had cheated and lied. His father, the noble, the honorable, the respected Arch-Mage of Armethalieh. The trusted leader of the High Council.

  Someplace in the back of his mind, Kellen had still believed in Lycaelon, believed at least that the Arch-Mage would keep his word. Perhaps even believed that, no matter what had passed between them, there was still something binding them together, and that his father would, in all decency, allot him some sort of fair chance, no matter how tiny. But Lycaelon could not bear to be contradicted, could not bear to be defeated, and clearly would do anything to revenge himself on the person who had done both.

  A vast fury filled Kellen—if there’d still been love there between the two of them, father and son, that love had been betrayed and defiled so utterly and completely that it left a terrible vacuum; and this rage rushed in to take its place. It swept away Kellen’s pain and exhaustion. In his rage, he felt nothing but the need to destroy this terrible thing, this thing that should not be. He stepped forward and struck at the first of the Hounds, tears of grief and fury streaming unnoticed down his face. In his blind, berserker anger, he felt nothing but the need to destroy.

  There was not even room in his mind for thoughts, only a focused and diamond-hard rage, white-hot, searing away everything else. He stepped forward and struck at the first of the Hounds with a strength he didn’t even recognize as his own. His eyes blurred and cleared; there was wetness on his cheeks. His tears were irrelevant. All that mattered was the enemy before him and the weapon in his hand.

  He’d ridden all night and fought off one pack of Hounds already. Kellen didn’t care. He was beyond thinking. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Rage filled him but did not overmaster him. He was beyond thinking, but that only freed him to act. As if he, too, were made of stone, he fought, drawing on reserves he did not know he had and did not question the source of. He could not lose this fight—whatever the cost, whatever the price he must pay later, he could not lose. His whole world narrowed to the few feet of space just before the mouth of the canyon. Whatever entered that space he hit.

  Afterward Kellen retained only a blurred and confused body-memory of disjointed moments of the fight, as though once the picture of what had happened had been whole, then someone had smashed it and left Kellen with nothing more than a handful of jagged pieces.

  He remembered doing things that were impossible, and doing them because he had to.

  He remembered batting a Hound out of the air, feeling as if he had all the time in the world to strike the blow because the creature just seemed to hang there, as if Time itself had stopped.

  He remembered the feel of stone jaws closing on his flesh. No pain, just a crushing coldness, as if the cold of the stone had somehow transferred itself to his body.

  He remembered forcing his fingers once again around the shaft of the club, seeing that one of them wouldn’t move, seeing that it was broken, closing his other hand over it and forcing the broken finger into place. He did not feel the pain.

  He remembered how quietly the Hounds’ legs sheared away, how the place where the stone broke glittered like fresh-spilled salt in the afternoon sun. He remembered how the light flashed off their polished skins, making the moving pack flicker like the surface of the harbor on a bright day when the wind was blowing over the water, and in the back of his mind, Kellen could almost hear the faint scream of gulls. He did not remember his own screams, how as the battle wore on, his voice cracked and broke, and became only a whisper of unyielding fury.

  And still the Hounds came. And still Kellen fought.

  “KELLEN. Kellen.”

  Someone was calling his name.

  “Kellen. KELLEN!”

  Dazedly, Kellen tried to raise his club once more, and realized that at last he had no strength left. His muscles shook; a slow constant tremor as if he were wracked by fever-chill, but he felt almost as if he were floating, somehow distant from his body, as if everything he had done, he had done almost in his sleep.

  He was staring at the ground. He couldn’t raise the club, because he wasn’t holding the club. The world around him was silent, without the clack and rattle of living stone moving to attack. Somehow there was a wrongness to that, and Kellen felt a faint pang of alarm. Where was his club? Where were the Hounds?

  He raised his head, slowly. The effort made
him nauseous and lightheaded. He blinked. It took a conscious effort, and his eyes felt gritty and dry. He knew, obscurely, that he should be in pain, but he wasn’t yet. Just—numb. Exhausted, and numb.

  Shalkan was standing beside him, gazing at him with a worried expression. The unicorn looked rumpled, his head hanging with exhaustion, but there was no blood on his silver fur.

  Kellen raised his hand to touch that fur, and gasped as shooting pain lanced through his body, shocking him back to himself. He looked down. Swollen and bloody against his forearm was the deep print of mastiff jaws.

  “We have to go now,” Shalkan said gently, raising his head with an effort. The unicorn’s voice was hoarse, and Kellen felt a dim flare of alarm for his companion.

  “But the Hounds,” Kellen said. His voice sounded clumsy and strained, as if he’d forgotten how to speak. He looked around, blinking at the brightness of sun on stone.

  “They’re all dead,” Shalkan said flatly. “Or if they aren’t, they’re no danger to us.”

  The ground around the pocket canyon was littered with the lifeless broken statues and scattered limbs that had been the Outlaw Hunt—and worst of all, here and there, the limbless bodies of still-animate Hounds, helpless but still attempting to reach their prey, squirming like hideous caterpillars of stone.

  “Get on,” Shalkan said again, taking another step closer to him. “They’ll have figured out by now that we’ve managed to get rid of the first packs. They’ll be creating more. Fortunately, it will take them some time, and the new packs won’t get here until morning. But we’re only safe over the Border. Get on. You have to get on; we have to get out of here.”

  “I can’t do that again,” Kellen said in a ragged whisper. “I can’t.”

  “Kellen,” Shalkan said harshly. “Are you listening to me? Get on. We have to go now. We have to get over the border before they send another pack.”

  Kellen finally turned toward Shalkan, but when he moved, his knees buckled and he fell. The unicorn moved forward quickly, so that Kellen fell half across his back, stomach down.

  Shalkan stood steadily beneath his weight. Kellen sprawled there for a long moment, his body suddenly aware of how much it hurt, and wondered how he would ever find the strength to lift his leg across the unicorn’s haunches.

  But he had to. Because if they stayed here, another Hunt would come. And this time, they’d both die.

  He couldn’t let that happen to Shalkan.

  Gritting his teeth, Kellen swung his right leg across Shalkan’s back.

  The bolt of sudden unexpected agony shocked him back to full consciousness. He realized that there was a deep welling bite high on the outside of his right thigh, and that his left ankle had been bruised between a Hound’s jaws sometime during the fight. It twisted beneath him as he put his full weight on it to mount, and he grabbed Shalkan’s shoulders, gasping for breath. As he did, his broken finger momentarily hurt worse than all the other injuries put together, and he gasped and coughed, choking on the pain. Shalkan half crouched, and suddenly Kellen was on his back, sprawled astride. There was no way he could hold on—but at least he was in place. More or less. For now.

  “Comfy?” the unicorn asked sardonically, shifting his weight to settle Kellen more securely on his back. And somehow, that single word—or perhaps the tone, laden with heavy irony—brought a little more life back into Kellen, though he could not have said why. Maybe because, if Shalkan was feeling strong enough to be sarcastic, there was still hope.

  Kellen laughed raggedly, feeling blood from his thigh starting to trickle down his leg and into what remained of his boot. “Oh, yeah.” His voice was hoarse and cracked, and his throat hurt.

  “Don’t fall off,” Shalkan advised.

  “Right.”

  Shalkan picked his way carefully down the slope, avoiding the still-moving bodies of the crippled Hounds, and continued along the trail, still at a slow walk. All the grace and vitality of the unicorn’s gait was gone now. Forget bounding across the forest, Shalkan moved as ploddingly as if each step was an effort. Kellen empathized with his friend—for at some point during the fight, Shalkan had become just that—but at the same time a small selfish part of himself was grateful, because he could not possibly have managed to stay on Shalkan’s back if the unicorn had set any faster pace. As it was, each footfall jarred him all the way through, making everything hurt afresh with each step Shalkan took, and Kellen bit his lip to keep from crying out as they moved slowly down the trail. He realized as he did so that he’d bitten it before—or something had. His face was a mask of blood. His nose felt swollen and hot; he started to touch it, and thought better of doing so. Maybe it was broken. It was a lot easier to breathe through his mouth.

  As the combination of adrenaline and stupor wore off, Kellen gradually became aware of just how extensively he’d been hurt. The bite on his thigh was only the bloodiest of his injuries; Kellen had been bitten in half a dozen places during the battle; crushing or tearing wounds that burned and throbbed, the bruising almost more agonizing than the pain. The hand with the broken finger was swelling and starting to turn dark, making his right hand stiff and almost impossible to use. His muscles ached with strain; his head hurt as if it had been hit—hard—several times … in fact, he didn’t think there was any part of him that didn’t hurt just now.

  “Do you suppose they’re poisoned?” Kellen asked, to distract himself. “The Hound’s teeth, I mean?” Talking still hurt, but he found he really wanted to know.

  “The strangest things entertain you,” Shalkan said, but Kellen could hear a note of relief in the unicorn’s voice that he was asking the question—or any question at all. “No, I don’t think so. But cheer up—there’s always the chance of infection. Or gangrene. Or maggots. Now why don’t you see if your water-bottle survived intact and have a nice drink?”

  Kellen had forgotten about his backpack—though he’d fallen on it a couple of times during the fight—and completely forgotten about the water-bottle he’d filled at the stream at dawn today. Balancing himself carefully on Shalkan’s back, he managed to get the backpack off and open it with his good hand.

  The water in the small waterskin was warm and tasted of leather, but Kellen had never in his life tasted anything so delicious. He drained it in a few thirsty swallows before replacing the bottle and shrugging the backpack carefully into position once more. It hurt, but it was worth it.

  It was the last halfway pleasant experience of the afternoon.

  Kellen’s sense of victory at having defeated and escaped the Outlaw Hunt swiftly disappeared in the presence of the grinding pain of his injuries. His entire body slowly became one throbbing, feverish ache, interrupted by unexpected lances of fiery agony. As the pain increased, the afternoon sun seemed fiendishly bright, the cool air of the high hills alternately freezing in the shade, or a choking furnace heat in the sun.

  “I have to get down and walk,” Kellen said at one point, barely aware of what he was saying. He knew that Shalkan was as exhausted as he was, though he didn’t think the unicorn had actually been injured in the fight. He had a vague notion that it would hurt both of them less if he walked; he’d managed to forget that he was too badly hurt to take even a few steps.

  “No you don’t. Just hold on,” Shalkan said soothingly.

  Kellen leaned forward, resting his whole weight against the unicorn’s neck and awkwardly embracing it. It was easy enough to do; the unicorn’s head hung low now, his neck parallel to the ground. Shalkan’s bristly mane dug into Kellen’s neck and chest, pressing now against bare skin, because his undertunic had been reduced to rags by the Hounds’ attacks, but Kellen barely noticed that small discomfort. Dimly, he remembered that there were things he ought to be doing, things he should be worrying about, but the pain was like a vast thick liquid that was slowly submerging him, taking away his ability to reason, to think.

  They crossed the ridge and went down into forest again. Kellen’s head ached fiercely, the poundi
ng pain throbbing in time with his heartbeat. He groaned aloud, unable to understand why they were back among the trees—were they going back to the City? Why?—but glad to be away from the bright sunlight. Sometimes he heard Shalkan speaking to him, repeating the same words over and over with weary patience, but he was unable to rouse himself enough to make sense of what the unicorn was saying. Sometimes he tried to answer, not sure if his answers made any sense, but finally he was unable to make even that much effort, and sometime after that, Shalkan stopped talking to him.

  An eternity seemed to pass as they walked—slowly—toward the setting sun. Kellen never lost consciousness, not completely. A tiny part of his mind was always aware that he had to hold on, though at times he wasn’t sure where he was or even, near the end, what he was holding on to. When he felt himself drifting too far into unconsciousness he fought to bring himself back by forcing his broken hand into a fist, or slapping it against Shalkan’s shoulder—making the unicorn stagger—and that worked for a while.

  But at last he lost the strength for even that.

  “WE’RE across.”

  The pain ebbed, a little. Just a little. Just enough for Kellen to understand that the unicorn had stopped moving. “We’re across,” Shalkan repeated. The unicorn staggered to a stop and stood splay-legged, swaying.

  Kellen opened his eyes. Either it was dusk, or his vision was failing. He closed them again, and tried not to move.

  Something was pulling at him, dragging him from the unicorn’s back. In his mind, Kellen struggled wildly, but his body had no more left to give. He tried to see his attacker, but it was too dark, or his vision was gone at last. He felt himself being pulled upright, away from Shalkan. His feet brushed the ground and he cried out, a hoarse cawing sound, as pain lanced upward from his ankle to the crown of his head, making the world flare lightning-bright for a brief moment. Then the oblivion he had been fighting against all day swept over him in a sudden wave.

  And then nothing.