The Outstretched Shadow

by Mercedes Lackey

  But if Jermayan hated Vestakia, it was because he hated all Demons, and Kellen had no doubt that destroying the Barrier was his highest priority. Jermayan would do what he had come to do.

  “It will be over soon—one way or another,” he said to Jermayan.

  “One way or another,” the Elven Knight echoed grimly. “And I hope your human heart has not betrayed you, Wildmage.”

  Kellen supposed that this was as good as he was going to get in the way of a reconciliation. He turned away and began to climb.

  The half-dome was steep, and it was also absolutely bare rock. There was a sort of furrow in it that gave purchase to his hands and feet, and Kellen used it to pull himself up to where the incline was less steep and he could actually move forward in a sort of crablike crouch over the pale stone. Without Vestakia, he and Jermayan would never have found this route to the Barrier, not in weeks of searching.

  As he caught up to Vestakia, he could see her shuddering. She would shake for a moment, clinging desperately to some invisible cracks in the rock, then the spell would pass and she would creep forward a pace or two before the shivering started again.

  “It is wearing off,” she said glumly. She pointed, ahead and to the left. “Whatever it is, it’s that way.”

  Kellen looked where she was pointing. They still had to climb a good distance to reach the top of the dome of rock they were on, and he could see nothing beyond that, but what he saw around and behind him suggested more of the same kind of terrain—mountains and high hills, the only vegetation a little moss and lichen at most, the rock scoured clean by the battles of that long-ago war. Once they got to the top here, they might have some serious climbing ahead, and none of them had brought so much as a coil of rope. And worst of all, there was no more than an hour or two of good light left at best.

  But they were close to their goal—close enough that they had to press on immediately, because they were already within the pall of Shadow Mountain’s influence, and Kellen was coming to suspect that spending very much time here wasn’t very healthy for living things. He followed Vestakia and Shalkan. He was relieved to see that the unicorn was staying close to her, but Vestakia seemed to be completely recovered from her earlier beating, and was moving without difficulty.

  And they were close to their goal—

  Now he sensed it; the despair and the bitter ache at his bones had a source, close enough that they had to press on immediately.

  When they reached the top of the rock dome, it proved to be no more than the foothill of a true mountain, and Vestakia was miserable for other reasons. She’d thrown back the hood of her cloak, and her ruby skin was beaded with sick-sweat. She was breathing hard, almost panting, holding her stomach as if she were in pain. Kellen wondered if she could go on.

  “Still want to take the lead?” he asked. “Or do you need to rest a little?”

  “I’m fine,” she said irritably, in answer to his query. “It’s far worse than this when there’s a Demon around.”

  “There’s a path up the mountain,” Jermayan said, as if speaking pained him. “Look, there, where that shadow starts, see? It’s narrow, and you can barely see it, but it’s there.” He looked right at Kellen, obviously waiting for a decision.

  Kellen looked in the direction that he had indicated, and made out the beginning of a goat track in the shadows around the curve of the cliff. It didn’t look very wide, and it climbed rather steeply. If it got any narrower, they’d be edging their way to the top with their backs plastered against the stone wall.

  “Then that’s the way we go,” Kellen said reluctantly. Vestakia nodded, very slightly, confirming his guess that that was the direction of the strongest Demon-taint. It looked like a long climb. Once they reached the top, it would be too dark to return safely. Kellen touched the pouch with the keystone, more to reassure himself than anything else. In his half-formed imaginings of the moment when he reached the Barrier, he’d always supposed it would be full daylight, that he’d be rested and ready for the final fight, not arriving after a long day of brawls, petty squabbles, and climbing up the side of a mountain. His bruises ached, he was tired, and he hated being at odds with Jermayan. Depression weighed him down as if he were carrying a full pack. Despair whispered that he was about to fail. The bitter air burned his throat and made him horribly thirsty. It seemed that Reality always managed to play tricks with your dreams and imagination, turning your fantasies inside out when it made them come true.

  Jermayan drew his sword with a hiss of steel. As Kellen turned toward him, the Elven Knight met his eyes and inclined his head ever-so-slightly. Despite his misgivings, Jermayan would follow where he led.

  Kellen turned back toward the mountain, and pointed. “Let’s go. The sun won’t wait for us.”

  Shalkan led the way, his white fur glowing almost as brightly as it had the first time Kellen had seen him. So short a time, measured in sennights, but it held a lifetime of experiences. Now Kellen was gambling—with all their lives—that he’d learned the right lessons from them, and was making the right choices now.

  Vestakia followed immediately after Shalkan. If the trace of Demon-taint shifted, she would be the one who would know first and be able to alert them to retrace their steps. She would also be the first to know if there were any actual Demons in the vicinity.

  That’s one certainty, anyway. She might betray us inadvertently, but she won’t do it deliberately. If I can’t trust a unicorn’s judgment, I might as well just throw myself off this rock and be done with it.

  Kellen followed her. Jermayan came last, his sword drawn and ready in his gauntleted hand.

  When they reached the trail, they saw it was both steep and narrow, a double-handspan cut into the side of the mountain, with a sheer drop on one side and the sheer cliff on the other. There was no way to hurry. Of the four of them, only Shalkan found it even halfway easy going, and that only because he had four feet, not two, to apply to the trail. The wind blew harder the higher they climbed, and seemed to turn colder with every step, until Kellen could feel the ache of cold right through the padding beneath his armor. The sunlight weakened, not that it had ever had much strength in the first place, but it seemed now as if what light there was came to them past a dark veil over the sun’s face.

  Kellen concentrated every fiber of his being on just managing to take the next step—finding the place he would put his foot, moving it there, testing it with half his weight, trusting it with his full weight, moving on to the next step. He drove every other thought to the back of his mind.

  At last they gained the top. It was a relief to step out onto secure footing at last, and no longer have to fear that the slightest misstep would plunge one or all of them hundreds of feet down the side of the mountain. Kellen eased his way past the others and looked around.

  All during his long journey to reach his goal, Kellen’s greatest fear had been that he wouldn’t know the place he was looking for when he reached it, but now he realized that had been foolish. There was no mistaking it. He’d seen this place before. He’d been here in dreams and visions. This was the place of all his nightmares. This was the place he had seen that time he’d tried to scry in the forest pool, the hilltop covered with warring Demons.

  The top of the mountain was broad and flat, as if some impossible power long ago had sliced its peak off with a knife. The flatness was scattered with the same huge tumbled boulders that Kellen had seen at the ancient battlefield where he and Jermayan had once camped, and now Kellen imagined an assassin lurking behind every one, ready to ambush them. The wind whimpered and moaned around the stones, stirring up dust, the source of the bitter smell. Nothing grew here, not even lichen. Sand and stone, grey and black, a landscape of sterility.

  In the center of the wasteland was an enormous conical cairn built of dull grey-black stone, larger than the Great Library of Armethalieh and as tall as a four-story building, with a set of stairs spiraling around it to the top. Its base was ringed with more of the b
oulders that were scattered about the mountaintop, as if someone were trying to fence it in. At its apex stood a glittering black obelisk, the top half of it just visible from this angle.

  But in all of this deadness, the obelisk was alive.

  All of the obelisk that Kellen could see from where he stood was covered with tendrils of greenish energy like miniature lightning bolts. They spat and hissed along the surface, licking out at the wind. They ran over the sides of it like some terrible fountain, constantly spewing from the crown and running down the sides in an endless cascade like some hideous toxic wellspring of all that was bad and unholy in the world.

  This, without a doubt, was the source of the disruption to the natural order of the world, the Barrier that he had come to destroy.

  Kellen glanced up toward the sky. Though the day had been overcast when they started and the clouds had not lifted, the sky directly above the point of the obelisk was clear, a huge unnatural ring of cloudless sky that was now the white of mountain twilight.

  This was the place he’d seen in his dreams, or as close to it as Kellen ever wanted to come while he was awake. And there was a wrongness about it that wasn’t subtle at all.

  “Here,” Vestakia groaned. “This place.”

  Kellen turned back to see Vestakia sink to her knees, her face contorted with nausea.

  Shalkan managed a few steps toward her and nuzzled her sympathetically, but Kellen could see that the unicorn wasn’t in much better shape. The place reeked of Evil.

  Now, that particular phrase had occurred in many a wondertale that Kellen had read, and it happened to be a conceit he thought both trite and overwrought. He hadn’t really understood until this moment that there was usually some truth behind even the most overused of metaphors. The place stank. Not in a physical way, but it was just wrong.

  It wasn’t really something he was perceiving through his normal physical senses, Kellen realized. Each time he tried to focus one of his senses upon the pervasive sense of utter wrongness, he realized he wasn’t really sensing what he thought he was, but it didn’t help. When he concentrated, he could tell there was no particular odor to the place, but the moment he did that, the wind took on a discordant, jangling, keening note that was a subtle torment. When he concentrated on the fact that he wasn’t really hearing anything out of the ordinary, the horrible smells returned, and when he could shut out both the scent and sound of the place, his eyes insisted that everything around him was tilting and wavering, moving and yet standing still in a way that made him ill to see it. At least he could pick which sense he wanted to have abused, more or less.

  But obviously neither Shalkan nor Vestakia were able to do even that much. It was simplest to say that the place reeked of evil, and to be honest, Kellen couldn’t imagine how the unicorn could bear it. Now that he could feel the wrongness of the structure just as Vestakia did, the presence of the obelisk was agony to him and to Shalkan as well as to her. He didn’t think either of the others would be able to get much closer to the Shadow keystone.

  Fortunately Jermayan …

  Then he took a good look at Jermayan.

  The Elven Knight was leaning on his sword for support, using it as if it were a cane. His hand was pressed to his side where he’d taken the blow from the Centaur’s mace, as if it were still fresh and unhealed. His face was pale and set—with pain now, instead of hatred. But Kellen had healed him …

  Then Kellen realized what must be happening. The Demon-magic was very powerful here, powerful enough to undo Kellen’s magic, or at least to suppress its effects. At this moment, Jermayan’s wound was suddenly as fresh as if Kellen had never worked his Wildmagery and it had only had a few days to heal on its own. At least it was partly healed: it meant that Jermayan wouldn’t bleed to death on the spot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said aloud. I’m sorry I got the three of you into this. I should have come alone. I’m sorry …

  “Do what you came to do,” Jermayan said, his voice harsh with pain.

  Kellen looked back at the sky. In an hour—no more—it would be dark.

  He took off his armored gauntlets and the gloves beneath and set them down on the ground. The chill wind—real or illusion, it hardly mattered—bit into his flesh, numbing his fingers. He flexed his hands, willing warmth and suppleness into his fingers, then reached into the pouch that held Idalia’s keystone. He drew it out and unwrapped it.

  This was the first time he’d actually had a chance to take a good look at Idalia’s keystone.

  It didn’t look like a standard keystone at all. All of them were round or oval, and small enough to fit into the palm of the hand. Even Armethalieh’s golden Talismans were flat rune-scribed disks, nothing like this. The last time he’d seen it—by torchlight, at the unicorn meadow in Sentarshadeen—he’d thought it was black. Now it looked as if it were made of the same opaque white crystal Idalia had always used for her keystones.

  It was the size of a small melon. On the outside, it was shaped just like a section of natural mineral crystal, a squat six-sided tube that tapered to a six-sided cone at the end. But inside, the keystone had a different shape. Inside, there was a four-sided cup that tapered to a point inside. It would obviously fit right over the top of the black obelisk he’d already seen. The Wild Magic had known what exactly he’d be facing, even if Idalia hadn’t.

  As he held it in his bare hands for the first time, it began to glow softly.

  At that moment, knowledge filled him—the same utter certainty that he felt when he worked a spell of the Wild Magic and gained his knowledge of the Mageprice. Idalia was right; he did know what to do! He felt as if Idalia was standing behind him now, her hand on his shoulder, lending him her strength as she murmured her final instructions into his ear. He knew precisely what he had to do to use this keystone.

  The only problem was that it would require a little preparation.

  He set it back gently into the spell-caul for the moment, and set the silk on the ground, and slowly began to remove his armor.

  “What are you doing?” Jermayan demanded, his voice tight with pain.

  “I can’t wear my armor for this,” Kellen said. No armor, no weapons, nothing of metal. Anything metallic would attract that power crawling all over the obelisk. He wasn’t sure what would happen then, only that it wouldn’t be good.

  Not that marching up there without armor and weapons was good, either, but he didn’t have much of a choice.

  He was far from being as calm as he felt, or as certain. Releasing Idalia’s spell was no longer something he was going to do sometime in the future, it was now, in the next few minutes, after which nobody, least of all him, would ever again be able to say that he wasn’t a full-fledged Wildmage.

  If he could do it.

  Doubts flooded his mind as he peeled off pieces of armor and laid them aside. After all, who was he to be attempting this thing? Even without an army, or even a guard of Demons watching the obelisk in the open, he was certain there were things lying in wait around here. Or at the least, there must be some species of alarm that he would set off when he entered the enclosure. Then what?

  A lot of bad things, almost certainly.

  What am I doing here, anyway? What possessed anyone to think I was up to this job, when all I ever do is muck things up? Kellen thought despairingly.

  When he’d found the three Books of the Wild Magic in the Low Market, he’d had a home and a family and a bright future available for the asking. He’d thrown away all three for stubbornness and willful pride. He was probably never going to see Armethalieh again, and the longer he was away from it, the more he realized how much he missed the City.

  No, not the City. He missed what the City could have been—a place of justice, and honor, and law. He missed the fact that he’d used to believe that it was. He missed the sound of the City bells on a winter morning, and spice-bread and hot black tea, the small good things that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Suddenly he missed them very much.


  Sentarshadeen was gorgeous, but—it was full of Elves, who weren’t the most comfortable of neighbors. Merryvale—well, there probably wasn’t much left of Merryvale now, even though Idalia hadn’t been able to get any news of it. He longed for the company of simple, uncomplicated humans (and Centaurs) with a kind of craving.

  And in a way, he longed for his old life, as well, and the days when his only responsibilities were to be the good son and student his father wanted.

  And most of all, at that moment, Kellen realized that the more he learned about the Wild Magic, the more he realized that it really was truly a dangerous thing. Beneficial, yes, necessary, yes, but not a tame magic, one with the consequences all laid out in advance, where you could see them before you acted. The Wild Magic demanded belief, a faith that the world’s needs were more important than your own comfort and safety, and far more important than your own peace of mind.

  And that—well, that implied that it could be dangerous to him one day. Someday—and maybe that day was now—it might very well ask a Mageprice of him that would kill him, cripple him, or change him beyond recognition, and the Wild Magic wouldn’t care, because it couldn’t care, any more than a general could care about whether or not one of the individual soldiers in his army got hurt in war. The general knew that the war itself was worth fighting, that was all. The Wild Magic would bargain whatever it needed to, for the greater good of all—and some would fall in seeing that greater good accomplished. Wonderful if you were one of the survivors, but pretty hard on the ones who weren’t.

  Piece by piece, Kellen removed his Elven armor and set it aside, as carefully as if he were certain he would be coming back for it. And as he did, a second set of thoughts occurred to him, no more comforting than the first. In neutralizing this spell—if he had the strength, the luck, the will—he would be placing himself—not Sentarshadeen, not Idalia, but him, Kellen Tavadon—in direct opposition to the Prince of Shadow Mountain. The Demons, the Endarkened, the creatures that haunted his innermost fears, the monsters that frightened even Jermayan and Queen Ashaniel, that terrified Vestakia, would be hunting him.