“Suppose, Drumheller,” Khory asked, “there are but two?” As in, Elora thought, what if one or more of us should die?
“That’s the risk. Our choice. Our responsibility. Is it better to risk the egg entrusted to your care falling into the wrong hands, or to lose it forever?”
Khory smiled but there was little humor in her expression. It reminded Elora of a predatory cat, facing a particularly intriguing hunt.
“It’s one sure way,” she said, “of ensuring our own survival.”
Elora snorted. “Assuming everyone knows what we’ve done. Or doesn’t have other plans.” Then she turned back to Thorn. “But suppose we fall into the wrong hands.”
“Can we be coerced into opening the wards, you mean?” She nodded, biting her lower lip as her imagination supplied the gory details of such a fate. “Yes, child, we can. Nowt to be done about that. If magic won’t do that trick, there are devices and drugs aplenty to fill the bill. Except”—now it was his turn to smile and it was one she’d never seen from him before, as formidable in its own way as the DemonChild’s, and she thought as dangerous—“my wards won’t allow it. Of our free will, we enter into this compact. Of our free will, and only our free will, can it be broken.”
“That’s a lot of trust, Drumheller,” Khory said quietly.
“Where better for such a gesture than this sacred ground?” he asked. “And who better to ask it of?”
Elora reached out to him with her right hand, aware that she was blinking rapidly in a vain attempt to forestall a torrent from her eyes, and when he took it she reached for Khory with her left. She was snuffling, and knew she must look positively wretched, but she didn’t care. There was an ache in her chest, as though her heart had become a thunderstone of lead, but it wasn’t a bad feeling. Her thoughts were a jumbling cascade of all the moments of her life that had led her to this moment. Mostly, they were of the injuries she’d done her friends, the slights given, the torments inflicted. Faces were etched in her mind’s eye with blinding clarity, of those who had fought for her, sacrificed for her, died for her.
She was glad she couldn’t speak. She was certain whatever she said would be wrong.
Who am I, she thought, to deserve such companions? And with that thought, an echo from the time she’d spent in Khory’s memory, a sense of the same humility, coupled with a determination to prove herself worthy of so signal an honor, from the woman Khory once had been, as she viewed her company of warriors.
“I’m willing,” she said simply.
Khory nodded assent. “As am I, Drumheller.”
“So say we all,” he finished, and as one the three of them squeezed the hands they held. “To begin,” he continued, “we’ll need the eggs.”
Elora reached into her traveling pouch. As always, thanks to the enchantments Thorn had woven into the fabric of the leather, what she required came immediately to hand.
“There’s just the one,” she said in confusion, thrusting her arm into the pouch all the way to her elbow.
“It looks different than before,” Khory noted. “Bigger.”
“Take hold of it, Elora,” Thorn suggested. “Tell us what you feel.”
Her eyes glazed over a moment as she did so, cradling it as gently as before. “I don’t understand,” she said, blinking to clear her gaze. “They’re both here. Somehow, they’ve joined. How can that be?”
“Magic,” Thorn replied with a grin.
“Of course. I should have known. Silly me for asking.”
“Make fun if you wish. I’m still right.”
“Do we banter, mage,” Khory interjected practically, “or do we work? It’s you who’s been saying time’s too precious to waste.”
“Can you fit it in your lap, Elora?” She wriggled hips and bottom, to sit them a tad more comfortably on her heels, and found that her burden lay quite naturally in place.
“Lay your hands on it,” he told her, and moved them slightly until he was satisfied with their placement.
He spoke then in the language of wizards, a tongue like no other. They had the form and shape of words, they could even be recorded on parchment, but only when uttered by those who wore the mantle of sorcery did they truly come into their own. It was like someone striking a great bell in the core of Elora’s soul, that sent out resonant waves of energy to course through her in mingled streams of fire and ice. The sounds made were beyond human hearing, the images that came to her in a great, thundering rush were of granite blocks grinding into place, of raw iron hissing as it made its way from ladle to mold. Pops of sensation exploded throughout her awareness, each an impurity being stripped from the molten metal during the cooling process. A needle stabbed through her, gathering a glittering streamer of brightly colored fire that she recognized as the essence of her own life force. It arched before her, becoming more like an arrow, and she watched entranced as it descended to the egg to spin a cocoon of rainbows, flashing around and around the circumference of the egg before stabbing outward to her fingers. From there, the line bounced back and forth, creating a cat’s-cradle latticework of breathtaking complexity with such speed that Elora found it nigh impossible to follow.
Despite the fact that the bindings covered every bit of the egg’s surface, Elora found she could still see through to the shell, and the sight she beheld there was such a wonder that it made her gasp. The fiery colors left by the stream of energy were matched, and surpassed, by a similar display from within the egg. It was like watching a pair of lightning storms, one the complement to the other.
She was so bedazzled by the show that she barely registered Khory’s hands covering hers. The other’s palms were broader, her fingers not quite so long as Elora’s; they snagged and tugged a small bit at Elora’s skin from the calluses raised by a lifetime’s work with the sword. Thorn’s were the hands of a farmer, Khory’s those of a warrior. Though Elora had done her share of physical labor, and fighting, her skin was still mainly that of a Princess.
The energy Thorn drew from Khory was of a wholly different texture and not so long ago the mere sight of it would have hurled the life from any decent soul and raised a shout of terror from Elora herself. The dominant color was a scarlet that echoed the color of Elora’s gown, that of blood. It defined Khory’s being as the land did Thorn’s. But laced thickly through those streamers was another hue that defied description, and even sanity itself, whose very presence in a living being seemed an act of both rebellion and utmost violation. No human eye could look upon such a primal chaos without being driven instantly, irredeemably mad; even Elora had to grab tight to herself to keep from being desperately ill. If dragons were the stuff of dreams, then demons—unbelievably, their closest kin—were the font of nightmares. By rights, these two elements, a demon’s soul bound to a human body, should have been anathema to each other, and the resulting conflict should have sealed her doom.
Thorn, however, made it work by leavening the mix with a measure of his own nature. He’d added to Khory’s physicality a portion of his wizard’s strength, the ability to overmaster even such creatures as demons, and in return taken unto himself a similar share of the DemonChild’s being. Here, it was the fact that the DemonChild was hardly more than an infant that made success possible. A creature fully grown would have been too powerful, the patterns of its behavior too ingrained; the attempted spell would have proved instantly fatal.
Khory’s string was composed of equal strands of demon and human, laced through with a portion of Thorn’s soul to bind them together. In Thorn’s case, the patterns of his life force were similarly colored by threads of purest demon.
At first, she thought he was simply laying each weave atop its predecessor but as she watched, all those myriad filaments appeared to take on independent life of their own. They wriggled and rolled before eyes that went wide with astonishment and then amazement and finally delight, entangling themselves in a weave o
f such marvelous complexity that Elora couldn’t begin to pick it apart. The colors likewise merged, yet at the same time each remained distinct so that she found herself dazzled by two antagonistic perspectives that presented her with each distinct and individual element and also the conjoined whole. The fires leaped and danced within her grasp and she deliberately tensed the muscles of her arms to make sure her body was still awake, suddenly desperately afraid she might drop the egg and thereby ruin everything. Her heart was thundering, her skin felt ablaze, her body pushed to its limits, as though she was equally caught up in the madcap passions encircling the egg. She couldn’t tear her eyes away but knew that Thorn and Khory were gripped by similar sensations. It stood to reason, she realized; since their life forces were empowering Thorn’s binding spell, their bodies would pay the price. She wondered suddenly if the mage had underestimated the power required for the task. What price the safety of the dragon’s egg if their own hearts burst in the process?
Light blazed, blinding her, and she cried out in startlement.
Then, without any warning, the flash from her lap was answered by an infinitely greater explosion from all around them. One moment, they were in darkness as absolute as death itself, the next cast into the heart of a radiance so absolute and pure that it could not be endured. Elora thought wildly that this must be what it was like to be struck by lightning, actually to become lightning—her imagining confirmed a heartbeat later when the three of them were struck by as primal and all-encompassing a sound.
She called it thunder but that was like calling the core of the world hot, or the midday sun at high summer bright. It cracked like a whip yet was at the same time so sonorous that it shattered her to the core.
Once more, she found herself in darkness, and at first she gloried in the amazement of being able to “find” herself at all. That betokened awareness, which came from thought, which meant that she was alive. She did nothing for the longest while, content to remain snug within the darkness the way she used to huddle within a cocoon of quilts when she was a child. She heard a quiet finger-snap from her right, where she remembered Thorn was sitting, and his globe of radiance once more popped into being. He’d raised it a little higher than their heads, to illuminate their faces. There wasn’t any more to see in the darkness that engulfed them and so he saw no need to make the globe excessively bright. They’d endured enough on that score already.
Elora dropped her head, to confirm by sight what her tactile senses had previously reported, that the egg still rested safe and sound in her lap. It looked quite unremarkable, without the slightest outward hint of the energies that now protected it.
Without a word, she slipped the egg back into her traveling pouch.
She offered no comment to the others about what had just happened, afraid that doing so would somehow diminish the moment.
A sudden, nervous demand for reassurance sent her hand back to the pouch, to feel for the egg and make certain it was all right. But what came to her grasp, and made her brows purse with surprise, was the lean, cylindrical shape of a sword hilt.
The blade she drew forth was slightly shorter than the broadswords she had seen, and possessed a shallow curve in the manner of weapons from the eastern isles, beyond Chengwei. Scabbard and hilt were both utterly plain, lacking any ornamentation, because the blade itself needed nothing to enhance its terrible beauty. In the light of Thorn’s globe, steel gleamed like chrome silver, and when Elora held the blade out from her body it seemed most like an extension of the natural curve of her arm.
“This is yours,” she said, handing the scabbard over to Khory and then reversing her wrist so that the blade itself lay along the top of her arm, its hilt toward Khory, edge pointing away from Elora. She didn’t require proof as to its sharpness, every instinct she possessed screamed to the young woman that the sword was the deadliest such weapon she had ever held.
Khory took the blade, nodded approvingly at its workmanship.
“Nelwyn forged,” she noted. “But the alloy’s more than metal. There’s enchantment to this blade, the elves of Greater Faery had their hands in its making.”
“The dragons heated the forge,” Elora started to say and then corrected herself as that memory shifted into proper focus. “Calan Dineer heated the forge, with his own breath.”
“And added a dollop of his own life’s blood to the melt,” Khory finished. “I can taste it.”
“How?”
“He’s dragon, I’m demon, we’re kin. I’d know his kind anywhere, girl”—and suddenly she fixed Elora with a sharp and assessing gaze that made the younger woman squirm—“same as he’d know me and mine.”
In a movement so swift and sure the blade left an afterimage in its wake as she spun it through the air, Khory snapped the tip of the sword to the top of the scabbard and shot the weapon home. Then, with both hands and surprising formality, she held the sword out to Elora.
“Her sword, Princess,” she said. “I have one.” She meant the straight blade that hung from her belt, an old campaigner’s weapon taken from the body of an honorable foe betrayed to an untimely death the night Khory was born and the city of Angwyn ensorcelled.
“I can’t take it,” Elora protested.
“Whose hand found it? Nothing in that pouch comes to you by accident, girl. You walked a while in old Khory’s boots, saw her world through her eyes, in this place where dreams can be made flesh. Now you find her blade. Happenstance? I think not.” The warrior took a breath. “Some blades have souls, same as people. The how an’ why of it, that’s not for me to say. Can’t say as I even care all that much. I know it for truth, though, as does Drumheller. I can use that blade, aye, as well as any. So can Drumheller.”
He coughed. “Within my own limitations,” he demurred.
“Too modest y’are by half, sorcerer,” Khory chided him. “Get over it. We can use it,” she repeated to Elora, “but it’s meant for you.”
Elora took the blade, but only because Khory didn’t give her any other choice. She slipped the scabbard beneath her belt over her left hip, in the style of the eastern islanders, wholly unaware—as her companions were not—of how easily her body shifted to accommodate it, of how both hands came to rest, one ready to brace the scabbard and hold it steady while the other drew the sword itself.
“Now what,” she asked, turning to Drumheller.
With no more warning than the hiss of steel as her blade was drawn, Khory swung for Elora’s throat. Thorn’s mind registered the attack but it happened so quickly his cry of outrage and warning perished stillborn as Elora met it with a parry of her own. Contact didn’t come with the flat tang of steel on steel, this struck a purer note, as a chime on crystal, and flashed a spray of sparks that left the Nelwyn dazzled and blinking. Both women used the momentum of their blows to surge to their feet, managing to remain completely balanced as they rose, trading a couple more blows as they did. Khory had the advantage of height and strength; moreover, her straight blade was longer than Elora’s curved weapon. If the girl had any edge at all, it was her quickness, but that was essentially crippled by the all-enfolding darkness surrounding them. She couldn’t move beyond the painfully small circle of radiance cast by Thorn’s glowglobe because she had no idea of where it was safe to place her feet.
Taking a risk that left Thorn gasping, Elora slapped her bare hand against the flat of Khory’s blade to push it aside, while spinning herself into a swift pirouette along the length of the sword that brought her well within the circle of Khory’s reach. The warrior might be able to punch her, but for this fateful moment she couldn’t touch Elora with her sword. At the same time, Elora brought her own weapon around. It was only a one-handed strike, she needed the other to keep Khory’s sword arm at bay, but the blade itself was so sharp even a whisper of contact would be sufficient to end the duel.
She’d forgotten, in the heat of the moment, that Khory had a pair of arm
s herself. Elora was caught by the wrist and as quickly disarmed by a casual twist she thought would dislocate her entire arm.
At long last, Thorn found his voice.
“Stop,” he commanded, using that single word like a cudgel to get the attention of both combatants.
Elora’s response was a glare of outraged defiance that dared Khory to do her worst. The DemonChild, by contrast, offered up the broadest of grins as she sheathed her sword and offered Elora’s to her.
“What,” Thorn cried in a rushing stammer that made plain how upset he was, “in the name of the Abyss was that all about?!”
“Won’t be an easy journey home” was her taciturn reply. “Wanted to see if the student remembered her lessons. And,” she concluded, “if the teacher’s wounds were truly healed.”
Elora was breathing too hard to make any comments, though her thoughts were enough to make old campaigners blush, her heart pounding so hard from fright and exertion that it gave her a small headache.
“With the dragons gone,” Khory said plainly, “there’s no more direct route from their Realm to the Waking World. We’ll have to return the way we came, through the domain of the Malevoiy.”
“You figure,” Elora asked, “they’ll be waiting?”
“Them, and others. You, they want, moonchild, they made that plain.” And Elora shuddered at the memory of her encounter with the Malevoiy. “Me, my face”—Khory shrugged—“they’ll likely remember.”
“Not fondly,” Elora said. Khory’s comment was another shrug and then she turned her eyes to Thorn.
“You’ll have to be ready to fight, too, Drumheller,” she said.
“Whatever needs doing,” he replied, “provided neither of you frightens me like that ever again.”
“You didn’t hold back, did you,” Elora asked of Khory, “when you first attacked?”
Shadow Star Page 5