“We’ve been cross-referencing all our records, especially the calendars, and we’ve established the bare bones of a working hypothesis that suggests that the generations of dragons’ lives are not random, as so many of us have believed. Neither are they arbitrary. They have a shape, as do our own, defined by this celestial pattern. The passage of our world through one of these celestial Magus Points is what marks the boundaries of their existence, and by so doing forms a window of opportunity when everything for us can change. When perhaps even our relationship to existence itself can be altered.”
“Big window,” Elora muttered, “to last from my birth till today.”
“That’s Tall Folk thinkin’,” Rool told her, “that your lives are all that matter. What’s sixteen years compared to a Nelwyn’s span, or a brownie’s for that matter, hey?”
“The next question,” Giles posited, “is, do you believe the Deceiver is aware of this?”
“Her whole plan’s based on it,” Elora said. “Khory Bannefin hails from the last point of change, when the Malevoiy were driven from the Realms they’d conquered. The Deceiver must have traveled from the next.”
“Is that possible,” the Professor wondered, awe mingling with disbelief, “to travel so in time?”
“Not for us,” Elora said, her voice growing more hollow as she considered the ramifications. “Not for anything whose existence is defined within the Twelve Great Realms, no. But demons don’t acknowledge the Realms, or any form of structure or order. Everything has its balance, you see: good and evil, light and shadow, life and death, order…and chaos. Consider demons the rebel ghosts in the great machine of Creation. That’s what she is, the Deceiver, that’s what she has to be—a ghost. A rebel. A demon.”
“ ‘She,’ Elora Danan,” Giles Horvath told her. “Not you.”
“Not yet. These charts you’ve been making, the calendars and so forth, can you project dates forward, look to the future as well as the past?”
“How do you mean?” There was a growing measure of approval in the old scholar’s eyes as he listened to the young woman skip from concept to concept like she was hopping across stones to ford a stream. She was learning the craft of strategy, and leadership, and putting those lessons to good use.
“We have three key dates already,” she said. “My birth, or rather the day Bavmorda chose to sacrifice me; the day the Deceiver first came for me, when Tir Asleen was destroyed; the day of my Ascension, when the Deceiver tried again. If we can determine whether or not there are any more such moments of vulnerability, and when, we can be prepared for her attack. For once, we’ll have the advantage.”
“If she’s truly from the future, won’t she know all that to begin with? Our plans and such?”
“If that were so, she’d have won at the start. The fact we’re still free means we still have hope.”
Books Giles had aplenty, from every quarter of the Daikini Realm and the whole breadth of recorded history, plus a daunting number from beyond the Veil. It was more raw information than Elora could digest, simply looking at the tremendous wealth of knowledge made her poor head ache (though she told herself it was more likely the musty smell of the ancient tomes). The Professor, by stark contrast, was wholly in his element, as rapturous as a firedrake in a roaring furnace.
“Giles,” she asked, as she roamed among his collection.
“Elora Danan?” he replied.
“What do you know of the Caliban?” She stopped abruptly as he raised his palm to shush her.
“Forgive me, child,” he apologized, “but certain names should never be spoken.” He looked around, as if to make certain they were alone. “One never knows who might be listening.”
“You know something then.”
He led her around some corners, up another flight of stairs to the loft once more, gathering a title or two along the way, adding them to the considerable piles already in place on the long worktables.
“It is a creature,” he began, as if addressing a lecture class, “whose existence was first reported”—and he shuffled through a set of pages in one book, cross-checked it with another, scribbled some notes—“roughly a generation after the banishment of the Malevoiy.”
“You’ll say their name but not its?”
“They were banished, Elora. It still walks the world.”
“Only the one?”
“Thankfully.”
“What is it?”
“The most fearsome slayer imaginable, so these chronicles state. In some references, its appearance is as cruel and arbitrary as a storm of nature. In others, there are indications of purpose, that it served some lord or other. Those it opposed were vanquished. But invariably, its employers likewise suffered an ill fate. No good came of any association with this monster.”
“It has sorcerous powers, then?”
“It kills sorcerers, Elora. Their power, it claims for itself, and their souls become trophies on its hatbrim.”
“The bells I heard!”
“So I would assume. If it was this…creature you encountered, you and Master Drumheller have no idea how fortunate you were to escape at all, much less unharmed.”
“Can it use the powers it’s absorbed, Giles?”
“If you mean in the sense of casting spells, enchantments, and the like…” More shuffling of pages, for a fair while as the Professor rooted through a half-dozen various tomes to be sure of his answer. Elora passed the time by poking about this end of the room, which seemed to be rarely used by Horvath’s apprentices and students.
“No,” he said at last. “Apparently not, at least on no occasion that was ever recorded.” He shrugged. “These histories are of course far from comprehensive, but the indications are that the stolen power is exclusively defensive, to make the creature functionally immune from magical attacks of any kind. And likely, magical beings as well. By way of example, I don’t believe even a firedrake’s flame could do it harm. Or a demon’s claws. It possesses extraordinary strength, that’s how it deals with most of its foes, using brute force. But don’t let that mislead you, Elora, for this creature’s life span rivals that of dragons themselves. Think of what it has seen, consider who it has fought, and how it has fought. As much as your Deceiver, and perhaps more so, this is a foe you dare not underestimate.”
“Wonderful. Any clues as to how it might be beaten?”
The Professor wasn’t sure if she was serious, so he hazarded a rueful chuckle, which she took as answer enough. In a rare few cases, the Caliban’s prey had escaped—but only for a time. No one had ever found a way even to do it harm, much less end its existence.
As Elora tried to make sense of this latest complication to her life, she found her interest snagged by a corner cupboard close by where she and Giles had stored the Malevoiy text; on it were piled a number of books that resembled that book in size and general appearance. It was disconcerting to find them lying in plain sight, without even the most cursory of locks to guard them. Evidently, such traditional measures of security weren’t required; these books seemed well able to look after themselves. None of the other scribes went near that corner of the loft; indeed, for the most part they behaved as if the corner didn’t exist. Moreover, despite the effective combination of daylight and candles to illuminate the Professor’s library, this particular corner remained stubbornly in shadow.
Elora found herself drawn to these books and as she departed from the light with steps that were strong and confident, she wondered to herself if her role was as predator or prey. They were bound in a heavy leather, each manuscript clearly unique though similar in general style. The covers were plain, lacking completely in title or decorative ornamentation but the bosses and buckles were massive constructs of the same disturbing bone lacquer the Malevoiy used in their armor.
She began to touch one, then drew back her hand, fingers curling reflexively into a fist, a
s though she’d approached an open flame. Parchment was cured hide, hide was skin—and there was a resonance off these books that made her face twist with disgust and horror at the realization of the raw materials used in their construction. It wasn’t only Daikini skin that formed the pages of these grimoires, but elf and fairy as well. Every race that lived was represented and Elora bit back an outcry of protest at the realization that among them was a dragon.
Even more awful, the sure and certain sense that those skins had been stripped from the flesh of their owners while they still lived.
How could they? she screamed silently, undone by such casual cruelty. How could you, she wanted to shriek to the Professor, how could you bear to have such monstrous obscenities within your household? Small wonder his guests gave this cupboard a wide berth.
Elora looked wildly around, flashing the whites of her eyes much as a panicked horse will before it bolts. She thrust herself blindly from that awful corner, from shadow to light though she took no comfort in it, missed her footing at the landing, tripped and stumbled partway down the stairs before recovering and landing hard at the bottom, jarring ankle, knee, and coccyx all in sequence, hard enough to give her a limp as she bulled her way toward the door.
Giles Horvath’s voice brought her to a stop before she crossed the threshold.
“I believe I have your date,” he said, from deep within the house.
He made no move to follow, nor any other attempt to dissuade Elora from her headlong flight. This choice had to be hers. She couldn’t stop trembling for the longest time, not so much because of what she’d found but because the Malevoiy offered her the opportunity to make such a book of her own, a catalog, a keepsake of her own kills. And she was tempted.
He didn’t return her to the loft—that was a test of courage she could leave for another time—but instead led her back to his study, offering the time it took to boil water and prepare tea for her to regain a semblance of composure.
“Do you know what they are,” she said, her voice a husk of normal, “those books?” She couldn’t help but make the last word a curse.
“Yes” was all he said.
“How can you”—she searched for the most innocuous of phrasing, hoping to use the banality of language to strip the texts of their power—“bear to have them so close?”
“If we hide from evil, if we flee from it, we give it that much more power over us.”
“How many of them are yours, Giles?” Meaning, how many did you find?
“All.”
He shrugged and for the first time allowed Elora to behold how haunted his eyes were. Here was a man whose love of scholarship had led him to the ends of his world, a quest for knowledge to rival Drumheller’s, and who had paid a commensurate price.
“When I found the first book,” he told her, as stark a confession as hers to him earlier, of the story of her life, “it opened an awareness in me of the others. One led to the next.”
“You could have turned away, Giles.” Impulsively, she reached out to clasp his hand. It was like ice in hers.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of someone else finding them. Of what they could do to an innocent soul. Of what they could do in concert with a corrupt one. Since I survived the initial brush of that poison, I presumed to myself a kind of immunity. You have reason for your terror of the Malevoiy, Elora Danan, and for your attraction to them, for I have felt both. Feel both. All the more reason they must be confronted.”
There was silence for a while, while the hearth cast forth its proper measure of warmth as Elora had requested.
“The winter solstice of this year,” Giles said at last. “That appears to signify the greatest confluence of these celestial ley lines of energy. It’s the closest match I’ve found to what little remains from the last such encounter. There won’t be another such conjunction for farther ahead than we’ve been able to determine.”
“That gives us a time, what of a place?”
The Professor would not meet her gaze.
“Let me guess,” she said, to make it easy for him. “A saw-toothed range of mountains, arranged in tiers like the teeth of a great shark, surrounding a valley cast in the shape of a dagger. A long-extinct volcano forms the pommel of the knife and from its flanks grows a fortress, the oldest on the world, and the most accursed.”
He nodded, and spoke that dread name: “Nockmaar.”
“Stronghold of the Malevoiy on earth, where the ard-righ Eamon Asana, for what he told himself were the best of reasons, betrayed the best of friends. Where my story began. Oh joy,” she finished bitterly. “Oh rapture,” she said, making that innocent word an expletive.
“There’s more, I’m afraid.”
“Tell me.”
“Your circle binds the others. By all accounts, you’ve made your inroads on the Circles of the World and the Flesh. That leaves the Spirit.”
The one secret she’d kept from the Professor when she told her story was that she held the future of the dragons, and their Realm, in her safekeeping. She said nothing of it now.
“Go on.”
“The nearest approximation I can determine to describe those Realms are: hope and despair, life and death. Elora, hard enough to face the Malevoiy; easy to see, I suppose, where such an encounter might lead to the Realm of Despair. But what of Death? How can you be the Savior, if you die?”
“I suppose I’ll find out when I get there.”
“You have an alternative—you can do nothing.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Let the deadline pass. Let this be the era when change is not embraced. Let this torch pass you by and things proceed as they are. Hide. The Deceiver needs to kill you to survive, so I understand from what you’ve told us. Deny her that opportunity, let her perish, and save the world for the next turning of those wheels you spoke of.”
She took a deep breath and drew her knees to her chin, suddenly looking every one of her sixteen years, hardly old enough for a first love, much less to bear the responsibility of Twelve Great Realms and all their people.
“That’s a temptation I hadn’t considered.”
“The Daikini impulse is to rush headlong to disaster and celebrate it as a ride to glory. Nelwyns prefer to hunker in their burrows and wait for better days. This once, perhaps it’s best to follow their example.”
“Had Thorn Drumheller done so, our world would be a far darker place, Giles. Bavmorda would have possessed the power to shape this point of change.”
“If you confront the Deceiver, can you win?”
“On the basis of sheer magical might?” Elora shook her head. “She knows spells I doubt you or Drumheller have ever heard of and my immunity to sorcery apparently doesn’t include hers.”
“So steer clear of her. Let her own power and ambition consume her.”
“I can’t.”
“Elora Danan, don’t be a fool.”
“If she’s evil, Giles, how can I not confront her?” Elora asked, tossing the Professor’s own words back at him. “If what you posit about the Deceiver is true, my friend,” Elora told him, “I suspect she should have perished a decade or more ago, when her first attempt to claim me failed. But she didn’t. Can you imagine the force of will, the strength of purpose, it took to hold Death itself at bay while she gathered her strength for a second attempt? The courage—yes, the courage—to leap headlong into such an abyss. She won’t fail, she won’t give up, because the consequences of such a betrayal of self won’t allow her to.
“Suppose I do as you say. She needs my body to make herself whole but that doesn’t mean she can’t resort to lesser anchors in the meanwhile. Think of her over all those countless years, stealing body after body, evicting soul after innocent soul, waiting for the chance to try once more for me. Who knows, over such a time, if she’ll even remember why she began. The slaughter may well become
the end unto itself, rather than the means to a greater goal. That’s the Malevoiy way, to kill for the sheer pleasure, to corrupt for the joy of the act, simply because they can. Can we condemn the Deceiver to the same? And that assumes we share the same life span. What happens to the world if its hope and savior dies?”
“You speak like you’re in sympathy with her, child.”
“I’m coming to know her, Professor. I used to think my own death might be the answer, but all that will probably do is open the floodgates for the Deceiver.”
“Presume you’re right. Suppose the Deceiver dies. What then? Think of all she’s set in motion. Her death won’t make the Chengwei fall back from the gates of Sandeni, or the Maizan for that matter. Angwyn will remain accursed, the world gripped by the winter that spell has brought upon us.”
“Change has already begun, chaos is in the wind. The choice that remains before us is who gets to define that change. The horror is that both she and I believe each of us is acting for the best. The difference is, she’s certain, I just have hope. Do nothing, my friend, we’re all damned.”
“Take action and lose, the same result. I say leave well enough alone. Better the devil you know. We can endure this winter.”
Elora placed her fists on the table and levered herself to her feet, leaning forward for emphasis.
“Giles, the dragons are dead. At their own behest, to keep them from being enslaved by the Deceiver, I slew them all. Unless they are reborn, all the Realms lose their capacity to dream, to create, to grow in the best sense of that word, in their spirit. You marveled at the story of how a Princess of Greater Faery could transcend herself and dance with a Daikini, of how they could both set aside the ancient enmity of their races. It happened because I carry the fate and future of the dragons with me. Imagine now, while you can—dream now, while you’re able—this room, these people, and their worlds, without that capability. As we are, so shall we remain—forever! Nothing changes. We merely wear the ruts of our behavior deeper beneath our feet. Is that what you want?”
Shadow Star Page 27