Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  Puppy was at their side in moments, bounding up the stairs even as Luc-Jon tried to gather his wits, announcing his arrival with a basso growl that got everyone’s instant and undivided attention.

  He had no interest in any of the people present, be they Daikini or Faery, his eyes went straight to the pouch, and at the sight of it his stance shifted into one of attack.

  Flames of purple fire burst around the sword like prominences from the surface of the sun. They formed fingers to clutch at the steel in a vain attempt to do it harm or at least push it loose, but the magical energies could find no purchase on the sleek, polished metal. The flames took on defined and recognizable forms, changing color and intensity all the while. They burned ever more brightly, with the manic desperation of creatures fighting for their lives; paradoxically, as the colors grew increasingly dark, the strength of the blaze appeared to increase. Where flames and sword were in actual contact, the blade grew pitted, their attacks scoring the steel as acid would.

  Ignoring Luc-Jon’s shout of alarm, Elora stepped forward to close her bare hand around the blade below the sword guard. She felt a burning sensation across her palm where the edge drew blood but she didn’t mind; when this was done, a moment’s healing would see her good as new again. She sang a Song of Remembrance, reminding the steel of how it had felt when it was touched with fire. Of the glorious moment when, rushing headlong from cauldron to mold, it was one with the molten heart of the world.

  The sword began to glow. Red-hot to start, then quickly white, and finally a pristine radiance shot through with silver, so intense a glow that both Luc-Jon and Tyrrel were forced to hide their eyes to save themselves from blindness. By rights, Elora’s hand should have been reduced to ashes by a heat as terrible as the light it cast.

  Instead, it was the creatures in the oilskin who died, with nothing to mark their passing but a harsh burn scar up the pillar that supported the tower’s beacon.

  Elora was breathing hard, winded worse than after an exercise session with Khory. There was tremendous tension across her collarbones and the top of her chest and the cords of her neck were stretched taut. The battle had been as intense as it was brief, the opposition so formidable it had to be vanquished quickly. And completely. She closed thumb and forefinger of her bare hand about the flat of the blade and slid her hand along its length to the point. She broke no skin this time, but left instead a faint trail of crackling silver fire. Then, transferring the hilt to her bare hand, she laid the sword flat against the burn scar, letting its steel seek out any taint of infection that might have escaped to the wood.

  There was no response, acknowledged by her grateful sigh of relief. She reversed the sword and laid it along the length of her left arm before holding it out to Luc-Jon.

  He tilted the blade so it flashed in the sunlight.

  “There isn’t a mark.”

  “As clean as the day it was forged,” she agreed. “And happy to be so.”

  “What did you do, Elora Danan? Are you all right?”

  “Tired.”

  She turned to Tyrrel and went to one knee before him, bowing her head in a formal show of respect.

  “There was no time for explanations, my lord,” she told him.

  “That pouch.”

  “Your scouts, those who survived.”

  “You killed them.”

  “I ended their torment with what mercy I was allowed. I freed them from bondage. I saved what they would have slain.”

  “I am their Liege, Elora Danan. They would not turn on me, nor do me harm. Their fate, in any case, is mine to decide.”

  “Tell that to the Caliban. He would have claimed you, too, given the chance. He took a try at me, Tyrrel”—she rose to her feet—“I know his taint. It was on that pouch.”

  “Abomination,” Tyrrel hissed, and Elora wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the Caliban, or to her.

  “How could such a thing be done,” the Faery Monarch growled, “and me remain unawares?”

  “I don’t know. My contact with the fairies was brief, but they were transformed beyond all recognition. One touch, Tyrrel, the merest contact, would have condemned you faster and more certainly than the kiss of iron. It didn’t feel like any magic I’ve ever encountered, more like a kind of…chaos.”

  “A demon?”

  “I hope not. But these are the times we live in, Majesty, where the rules that order our existence are splintering before our eyes. Would you still leave well enough alone, when the power exists to make a change?”

  “Can you guarantee that change is for the better?” Tyrrel’s face rose, his eyes fixing on a distant point above and far beyond where Elora stood. “Boy,” he snapped, meaning Luc-Jon.

  “Forgive me,” he amended as the young man straightened to attention. “I mean no disrespect, Lieutenant.”

  “None taken, milord.”

  “Summon Colonel DeGuerin. Have the tocsin sound the call to arms. The Chengwei have arrived.”

  The lay of the land about the fort was simple, and from a military standpoint a defensive joy. The Cascadel itself acted as a natural moat to the east of the fort, its current too fast, the river itself too wide and deep to be practically forded, especially since the opposite shore consisted of a series of step-back cliffs too high and steep to support any assault force. A similar escarpment rose past the fort to the west in a shallow curve that created a fan-shaped flatland valley roughly twice as long as it was broad. It wasn’t so much that the terrain was impassable—paths could be found for small parties on foot or horseback. However, for the mass movement of quantities of troops and goods there was only one path, along the shore of the Cascadel, where the convergence of the two ridgelines created a natural funnel.

  When Elora followed Tyrrel’s gaze, nothing leaped to her eye at first, until she was attracted by a flicker of movement on the crest of farthest rise to the south.

  “Horsemen,” she reported, “and standards,” as she noted flags and pennants opening to the breeze.

  “The Chengwei commander and his staff,” agreed Tyrrel. Around them, Fort Tregare bustled like a breached anthill, civilians scurrying to the safety of their bunkers while troopers hurried to take up positions on the ramparts.

  “Ahead of their troops or following behind?” she wondered.

  “There’s your answer, lass.”

  A troop of horses broke from the tree line, to turn parallel to the forest and trot from the shore of the river toward the point where the ridgeline made its presence felt. There were perhaps forty in all, arrayed in a column of twos atop mounts that were smaller of stature than the horses Elora was familiar with but no less sturdy, their shaggy coats proof against the cold and storms of the mountains they’d traversed to reach here. The uniforms were more brightly colored than those of their Sandeni counterparts, baggy trousers and segmented armor as opposed to chain mail and molded plate. Curved swords instead of straight, single edge instead of double, wicked-looking axes slung across the back, short spears as well as lances. In stark contrast to the compact recurve bows favored by the Maizan, these warriors used an asymmetric longbow that was taller than they, with longer arrows to match, the shaft laid and sighted at the bottom third of the bow’s length rather than the midpoint where Elora had been taught.

  “What are they doing?” she asked.

  “Marking turf” was Tyrrel’s reply.

  “Determining the lay of the battleground” was DeGuerin’s, as the Colonel joined them atop the watchtower. “Laying claim to their piece of it, making sure it’s clear. Here come the rest now.”

  The assault force emerged from the trees to the sound of massed drums, a tattoo of such power that Elora concluded each soldier had his own personal drummer to mark the cadence. They advanced along a single broad front, forming a rectangle five deep by two hundred across. Fifty paces behind them came a second identical fo
rmation, and a third and ultimately a fourth.

  “Four thousand men,” said Tyrrel in a tone that made plain his disbelief. “They’re serious.”

  “Cavalry only,” said DeGuerin with a dismissive shake of the head. “All they’ve got is whatever they can carry.”

  “Plus whatever it was killed my folk.” And the Monarch of Lesser Faery indicated the burn scar Elora had placed on the beacon post. “We’ve that to contend with, don’t forget.”

  “Find me a way to deal with him, then,” the Colonel said, to Tyrrel, Drumheller, and Elora together. “In the meanwhile, I’ll fight the way I know how. They won’t strike at a single point, the vanguard’ll most likely divide when they’re close, hit us on two walls and hope to split our forces. Same for the second wave. The last two, they’ll go where they’ll do the Chengwei the most good.”

  “From what you told us, sir,” Luc-Jon questioned, “I expected more.”

  “Men, you mean? They’ve got us in numbers right now, lad, and I suspect they’ve plenty more waiting in the wings. Isn’t just numbers to contend with, either. That commander and his men, they know their business. The fact they neutralized our every picket, Daikini and otherwise, makes that plain.”

  “How do we stop them?”

  “By keeping them as far away from the walls as possible. So much for your bog, Lord Tyrrel,” he noted with a mirthless smile.

  The land was dry as old bones, each step the approaching soldiers made sending up whorls of dust from earth that at sunrise had been too sodden and saturated with water to support even a child’s weight, much less that of a man armored for battle.

  “Archers to their places, gentlemen,” DeGuerin said to his officers, and the order was as quickly passed as carried out.

  To Elora’s eye, the range was extreme, but the Colonel had trained and equipped his men superbly well. At his command, bowmen rose as one, stepped to the ramparts, and let fly. The air whistled with the flight of their arrows, three full flights in the air before the first struck home. The Chengwei pulled a “turtle,” raising small, circular shields to form a roof over their heads. Infantry were better suited for this kind of engagement. Their shields were rectangular and in many cases equipped with hooks and grooves so that the edges could be linked together, denying the arrows any convenient points of entry. At closer ranges, and flatter trajectories, the pull of the standard longbow was such that a war arrow could punch straight through most thicknesses of armor, even that of a shield. Here, however, so much distance had to be covered that the shafts had only the force of gravity to sustain them in flight, thereby minimizing their penetration ability.

  Sight as always traveled far faster than sound. Elora beheld the moment of contact a heartbeat before she heard the faint thok of steel points embedding themselves in solid wood. It reminded her of archery class and the sound her own arrows made as they struck the target butts. She also could make out the sound of a second, softer impact and thrust from her thoughts the images of what that had to mean, even though the proof was plain before her eyes as holes began to open in the ranks of the enemy. The vanguard began to leave a trail of bodies, some moving, others forever still. The troops that followed simply marched over them, while the decimated vanguard contracted in on itself to fill the gaps, five lines becoming four and then three, sacrificing depth to maintain the width of its battlefront.

  The second wave came in range, forcing the archers to split their marks. They continued to take a fearful toll on the enemy but the overall effect began to be diffused. They had too many targets, and no effective way to deal with them as a whole. Despite their efforts, a significant force of the enemy would likely reach the walls.

  “Kill them,” DeGuerin said in quiet exhortation. “Kill them all. Quickly. While we can.”

  Now, the second and third waves of Chengwei began to return fire and cries of alarm and pain rose along the ramparts and from farther within the fort. The vanguard had been reduced to little more than a single ragged line and the casualties of the second formation were almost as horrendous, yet their advance continued at that same inexorable, relentless pace, marking such perfect cadence with their drums they might have been on a parade ground instead of a battlefield.

  “Mounted crossbows,” the Colonel ordered, and word was swiftly passed along the palisade. “Target the rear echelons.”

  “Why don’t they withdraw?” Luc-Jon asked, unable to keep the horror from his voice.

  “They’re making a point,” the Colonel said, as calmly as to a classroom. “As are we.”

  “Where are their ladders?” Elora asked suddenly. “No ladders, no grappling lines, how do they expect to climb the walls?”

  “It was never their intent.”

  From the two corner towers fronting the battle line, the sound of heavy equipment being swung to bear made itself heard above the din. The mounted crossbows were larger versions of those carried by infantry bowmen, capable of hurling far larger missiles—more like javelins than standard bolts—with far more force and significantly longer range. They could also fire in multiples of three. At DeGuerin’s signal, they opened fire.

  The results were devastating. No armor could deflect their points and at this point-blank range they punched through the entire depth of an advancing formation, taking out men in whole handfuls rather than singly. Counterfire from the attacking force was weakening visibly; any Chengwei who raised a bow was likely to find himself the focus of a half-dozen arrows in return. Safer, they apparently concluded, to hunker down beneath their tiny shields and pray for a miracle.

  It didn’t come.

  If there was glory in this battle for the Chengwei, it was the kind born of utter futility. None of the attacking force returned to their lines, the field before the fort belonged to the dead, the dying, the wounded. As daylight faded to dusk, reconnaissance parties slipped from a sally port, to collect any salvageable weapons and give aid to those still living. A rider under flag of truce was dispatched to the tree line to inquire whether or not the Chengwei had any interest in collecting the few survivors. The enemy sent him back with the flag aflame, and the rider minus his head. From that moment forth, the Chengwei were left to lie where they fell.

  * * *

  —

  “I’ll need you tonight,” the Colonel told Elora, as his staff shared sandwiches and hot drink over the latest strategy session, “with that special sight you and Drumheller share, so you can see in the dark.”

  “Understood, Colonel. You think they’ll attack at night?”

  “However they come, Elora Danan, I’d rather learn of it before they scale our ramparts.”

  “Tyrrel’s folk could help in this,” she suggested.

  “And I’ll welcome it as I do yours.”

  “You have doubts?”

  “Not to their loyalty, Highness. But the Cascadel patrol was massacred with none of us the wiser, not even Tyrrel, who is conscious in ways I can’t even begin to imagine of the life and death of each and every one of his people. His scouts were likewise slain, or turned to Chengwei purpose, and again he remained wholly unaware. That tells me the Chengwei have found a way to harm the Veil Folk and keep their purposes hidden. If true, maybe fairy sight won’t see the next attack when it comes, or they’ll be deceived into looking the wrong way. That’s a risk I can’t afford.

  “Luc-Jon,” he said to the scribe, “the Sacred Princess is yours to mind. That’s your sole military mission during this campaign. In the absence of Khory Bannefin, you keep her safe.”

  “Where is Khory, Colonel?” Elora asked. “I’ve not seen her since before the attack, nor Thorn Drumheller as well.” Nor, she thought with a sharp pang of apprehension, the brownies! She remembered their pledge to stay by her always and knew only the most urgent of tasks would have drawn them from her side.

  “I pray, somewhere safe.” But that isn’t, she thought, wher
e you sent her. His next words confirmed that suspicion. “More than that, I cannot say. Get a meal, the pair of you, and then some sleep. You’ll be called for by midnight.”

  Dinner was a hearty stew, ladled forth from massive drum kettles that had been set up in the open yard close by the cookhouse. Bread was fresh and there was a choice of drink, though the wine had been so diluted with water it was little better than juice. While many yearned to get stinking drunk tonight, none was willing to pay the consequences. There was precious little formality among the troops and no ceremony at all. These were professionals and they would face what came as their training and experience had prepared them. They hunkered together in their units and kept their weapons close at hand and one or two among them would always have an eye or ear cocked toward the wall and the watchtower, for the slightest warning of an attack.

  Among the civilians, who for the most part hadn’t seen the battle, the mood was brighter. To them, what mattered was the victory. In their ignorance—or perhaps out of their desperate hope—they took the wrong measure of the enemy. The soldiers knew better and as Elora and Luc-Jon found some space to sit and share their meal, they heard snippets of conversation from every side.

  “Why dint they break? They must’ve seen there was no hope, why dint they bloody withdraw?”

  “Countin’ how many we could mass on a wall, I’ll wager. How many bows, how fast we could shoot, an’ how far.”

  “Four thousand men, just for that?”

  “Not ordinary men, neither. They knew they was dead the moment they started their advance, they came on regardless.”