Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  “They build a machine.”

  “And here you have it. The device they hope will prove their great equalizer.”

  “Forgive me, Thorn, but it’s far more than that.”

  The Vicar-General had begun to speak.

  “For the glory of the Khagan,” he proclaimed in a dry and serene tone, his voice so bland it took considerable effort to pay attention to it, “recognizing both the peril of these days and the opportunity, we rival orders set aside our ancient differences.” Elora understood at once the reason for the Vicar-General’s obviously artificial composure; the more extreme the noise, of any kind, the greater the danger of introducing a flaw into the body of the Palace. That also explained the mist that rendered the walls either translucent or outright opaque. It probably possessed some sound-dampening qualities as well, to protect the crystal.

  “This is the moment”—the Vicar-General waved an arm to encompass the device behind him—“and this the means, to be not the subjects of prophecy, and mayhap its victims, but the masters of our fate.

  “The Great Realms stand poised on the brink of a transcendence that occurs once every epoch. When it passes, nothing that we know may remain the same. The opportunity will not come again until long after the brightest lights of our own era have burned out, and our greatest works fallen to dust. If ever there was a day to be seized, this is it!

  “The primal arcane energies of the cosmos itself will be harnessed by our Clockwork Resonator, focused and amplified to a degree unattainable in nature alone. Then, through a meticulously crafted magical formula, those forces will be applied to each of the Great Realms in turn, reordering them—even restructuring them—according to our requirements.”

  Klik-klak Klik-klak

  The Vicar-General paused, brow furrowing, features twisting with evident discomfort, as though he’d been wickedly pinched.

  Elora meanwhile was aghast, and she gave full voice to her horror and her disbelief with Thorn’s own words.

  “Are you all bloody insane?” she cried.

  Klik-klak Klik-klak

  The Vicar-General worked his mouth, but no words came forth. One arm flailed to the side and behind him, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the carved and polished surface of the device, the only object in the Palace save for various rare bits of furniture not cast from crystal.

  “This—toy?” Elora shouted. “This building? The conjurations of finite, mortal beings against the whole of Creation?”

  “It can be done, Elora,” Thorn said quietly. “In theory.”

  She rounded on him, more in shock than rage.

  “And you should know better than anyone why it must not. Have you forgotten Tir Asleen, Drumheller? Have you forgotten the Cataclysm? You’ve felt the power of this device, how can you stand by and watch it used?”

  “Have you considered the alternative?”

  Klik-klak Klik-klak

  The Vicar-General’s other hand pressed against his chest, in a futile attempt to force out the piercing ache that was tormenting him. His body hunched over itself, its language speaking eloquently of confusion and disarray.

  “What’s the old engineer’s saying,” Thorn said, “ ‘Provide me the proper lever, I can topple the world’?”

  “The operative word being topple. And when this device brings all the Realms crashing down to ruins, what then?”

  “At the very least the Deceiver will be neutralized.”

  “That’s too neat a choice of words, Drumheller. How very Chengwei of you. Better to say she’ll be dead.”

  “I would consider that a fair price for all she’s done.”

  “I would consider you wrong.”

  “Elora Danan, how can you say that?”

  “This can’t be about killing, Thorn. Killing’s where it all started, with my mother, remember, butchered in a Nockmaar dungeon. No,” she realized with a blinding flash, “it started long before that, don’t you see? Our Epoch began with a war, maybe the cruelest ever known. And that war ended with a betrayal. Those are the defining keystones of our world: blood and treachery. Yes, the cause was noble. Yes, it was a fight for freedom against the most tyrannical of oppression. But it could also be the reason why the Realms have been at each other’s throats ever since.

  “The ard-righ Eamon Asana betrayed his warlord, the woman who loved him, for what he thought was the greater good. The ends justified the means. After that, who could dare trust again? And if the Malevoiy could be cast out by blood and fire, why not the Daikini, or the Realms of Faery?

  “The Malevoiy should have been at my Ascension. Every other Great Realm was represented, why not them?”

  “They’re evil, Elora.”

  “You can’t pick and choose, Thorn. They’re a Great Realm for a reason.”

  “I’d call it a mistake.”

  Klik-klak Klik-klak

  The Vicar-General brought his hand away and found it soaked, as was his robe, with his own blood. He cried out, but no one heard. No one noticed. In a room full of the most powerful sorcerers in a nation constructed upon the bedrock of magic, he had been fully enshrouded in a glamour and none around him was the wiser.

  Too late, Elora made the connection between the man and the distant sounds that had been gradually, but ever more emphatically, impinging on her consciousness. Sharp, staccato taps, striking like spikes but with the unwavering constancy of a metronome, so regular a cadence she almost mistook it for the ticking of a clock and wondered if the Vicar-General had set his infernal device in motion without telling anyone.

  They were footfalls.

  With that realization, the very air before her appeared to shred, the way a piece of cloth will if left too long at the mercy of the elements. The Vicar-General seemed to sense Elora’s awareness of him, he turned a little toward the young woman, tried to reach out a pair of imploring arms, her own eyes going round as marbles at the sight of him.

  Klik-klak Klik-klak

  The old man’s body spasmed, as though he’d been struck from behind by some monstrous edged weapon. He arched like a drawn bow and blood sprayed from him in an awful fountain, to strike the floor and Elora together. His own cry was matched by hers and though she knew he was dead, she dived forward to catch him as he fell, in the vain hope that there might be something she could do.

  As he toppled into Elora’s arms, the glamour vanished, allowing all present to behold what was transpiring.

  In the background, a susurrus of agitation and alarm rose from the crowd, accusations flying every which way, accompanied by demands that the Khan summon his troops, that the sorcerers repair to their own palaces for safety. The chaos and panic was reflexive. It would last but a minute before some more rational soul—possibly the Khan, who had seen his share of battles and bloody murder, or Khory or even one of the sorcerers—applied common sense to the situation and calmed everyone’s fears.

  Elora knew they wouldn’t have that minute, and figured rightly that even if they did, it wouldn’t save them.

  Her eyes sought Khory’s, meaning to coordinate some defense and possibly an escape, but when their gazes locked Elora found herself staggered by an image thrown forth from the collective memory they shared. The force of the vision was so emphatic that she lost her footing, tumbling almost all the way to the floor before she managed to catch herself, though one leg was twisted from the hip at an angle it didn’t much appreciate, enough to make Elora wince.

  The pain didn’t register. Nor did any aspect of the atrium. She was in another room, worn stone, dank air, as badly lit as heated by a reluctant hearth. She saw the scene through the eyes of Khory Bannefin and beheld her friend, her comrade in arms, her monarch, the ard-righ Eamon Asana hand up a golden goblet to toast the impending battle with the Malevoiy and the hope of triumph. She drained it dry, for the wine was delicious. The next she knew, her captains were sl
ain by those selfsame Malevoiy and she had been delivered to them as their captive. Her King, her friend, had betrayed her, for what he firmly believed was the good of his Realm, and all the others.

  Now Elora Danan was being given leave by Khory to do the same.

  “No!” she cried, in her fullest battlefield voice, but nobody heard her.

  Because that was when the doors shattered.

  Being crystal, the sound should have resembled shattering glass, but it was nothing of the sort. It began with a note of music, so extreme in pitch and intensity that it hurt, yet also projecting a wondrous beauty. The note splintered, as though it could be parsed like a sentence into all its constituent elements, each vibration a match for the hairline fractures that erupted across the face of the doors.

  The explosion, when it came, was marked by the abrupt cessation of that melody. In silence, shards of gleaming, dagger-point crystal burst through the air, as murderous a fusillade as any barrage of arrows. The quiet was short-lived, hardly more than a heartbeat, before the air filled with shrieks of pain and alarm as the projectiles struck their targets. Sorcerers clutched at themselves, twisted desperately to and fro in an attempt to find cover, dropped in terror, in agony, in death while those shards which missed ended their flight against walls or floor with a succession of elegant chimes.

  Khory was bloodied by the attack but her armor saved her and Anakerie from any grievous harm, as she shielded the Princess Royal with her own body. Elora did much the same with Thorn, dropping over him on all fours and crushing him beneath her.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” said the Deceiver from the doorway, in that mocking good humor reserved by executioners for the condemned.

  Elora levered herself around for a view of her foe. The Deceiver was as she’d appeared in Tyrrel’s Realm, though perhaps more beautiful than ever. Gold of hair, fair of skin, this was the Elora Danan that should have been if you ignored the cruel twist that accented even the most overtly generous of expressions and the fact that the eyes were flat inside, the soul so well hidden it was like looking into the doll’s eyes of a shark. Her armor was the same as before, making the Deceiver appear as though she’d been dipped in gleaming onyx chitin. The boots looked better made for posing than for any sort of activity, be it walking, riding, or battle, with a heel like a spike.

  But then, Elora thought, what better way to strike at the magicians than through the Palace that was both home and the repository of their power? With every step, those heels struck the crystal floor of the Palace like chisels, and the constant, inflexible pace had set up a resonance pattern whose cumulative power was deadly beyond words. The simple act of striding from the building’s entrance to this chamber had not only fractured the surfaces the Deceiver walked on but the Vicar-General’s body as well.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t know what you planned?” There was genuine bemusement in the Deceiver’s tone, that she could still be so underestimated. “Poor, pitiful, benighted wretches, you’ve been mine from the start.”

  A new sound intruded, that of tiny bells chiming in concert to the tread of feet like pile drivers. Huge though the doorway was, the Caliban seemed to fill it, to make it and the atrium itself appear somehow smaller than life-size, thereby diminishing those within as well.

  The Vicars-General of the other orders took heart from the creature’s entrance, even as the Deceiver moved into the room, clearing a space between her and the new arrival, and Elora saw an echo of herself in the way the woman cocked her head, set her body, assumed a wary thoughtfulness as she assessed what had to be a potential threat.

  From one voice, cracked and shaken by what had happened so that what was meant as a martial command emerged more as a querulous plea: “Kill her!” From another: “Destroy the abomination!” They weren’t afraid, not really, not yet. They respected the Deceiver’s power, but they assumed the Caliban would prove its checkmate, especially in concert with their own.

  Right or wrong, Elora wasn’t interested in staying to find out. She looked for Thorn, to discover that the Nelwyn had crossed to the dais and, after a glance at the remains of the Vicar-General, was staring intently at the Resonator, the way Elora herself did when she was trying to fix a picture indelibly in her mind.

  She called to Khory, in time to see the warrior draw her sword. It was a Chengwei blade, shorter and thicker than her own broadsword, but she handled it just as well. Khory yanked Anakerie clear of the crowd, at the same time putting as much distance as possible between the pair of them and the villains at the door. Then, in a maneuver executed so quickly and superbly that it registered on Elora’s senses as only a blur, she slashed her weapon straight down the length of Anakerie’s back.

  With that weight of steel, and the force of a roundhouse strike like Khory employed, it was the kind of blow that easily broke bones. The slightest error would have crippled Anakerie for certain, and more likely left her dead. What happened instead was that Khory slashed through nearly all the gowns impeding the other woman’s movements. The pair of them scuttled about the edge of the crowd, Anakerie engaging in a series of awkward hops and skips as she wrenched herself loose of her ensemble, leaving herself just a silk shift.

  While this was occurring, the sorcerers took the initiative in their own defense. In the blink of an eye, the air became supersaturated with the hollow smell of ozone as bolts of lightning ripped forth from scores of hands, the prelude to combat spells of incredible lethality.

  For all the good they did, the sorcerers might as well have been fighting the Deceiver with wood swords in a training yard. Infuriated more than afraid, still confident in their ultimate triumph, the Chengwei wizards redoubled their efforts.

  It was a magician’s kind of fight; Elora had no qualms about leaving them to it.

  “We have to find another exit,” she bellowed over the steadily increasing din, many of the spells generating a threnody response from the Palace, like the wailing of lost souls.

  “From this room,” Thorn told them, “there isn’t one!”

  “Can we climb or levitate to the next level and use the gallery to escape?”

  That must have been the right idea, because it galvanized the Caliban into purposeful action. To that point, the creature had simply held its position. Now, to the sorcerers’ alarm it charged, bulling its way through their ranks toward the Deceiver with the force of a battering ram.

  The consequences for the Chengwei were devastating. These were sorcerers, whose greatest weapon was their knowledge. They could summon forces capable of reducing fortresses of stone and steel to dust, and laying waste to whole cities, but they had as little experience as liking for a brutal, old-fashioned, knock-down-drag-out fistfight. Bodies went flying, some so broken by the confrontation that they didn’t move again. Others scrambled for their lives, while a mad few attempted to stop both the Caliban’s onslaught, and the Deceiver’s as well, as she took advantage of the sudden confusion.

  Wizards discorporated the fundamental order of matter and thereby transmuted collective physical reality into a collapsing house of cards. Spells were unleashed of such malevolence and ferocity that even Drumheller blanched at the sight, for he knew the terrible cost exacted by such foul conjurations.

  Specters of ice were conjured, and of fire. The Deceiver was assaulted with spells that slowed time to a crawl, and accelerated it to such a rate that decades passed in the space of heartbeats. The Chengwei transformed air to acid so corrosive that metal armor was eaten away to nothing at the merest contact; its effect on flesh was even more dreadful. All of this horror was hurled at the Deceiver and was as deftly parried, so that this fearsome attempt by the assembled sorcerers to destroy their foe served only to decimate their own ranks instead.

  Those exposed chose to end their lives with a single breath of that toxic cloud, considering it a merciful release from the unpardonable agony of an entire body being eaten ali
ve. And that was far from the most terrible effects of those increasingly loathsome spells. Bodies were seen to sweat blood, they went blind, flesh melted from bones which then remained animated and deadly until smashed to bits.

  Throughout, the Deceiver and the Caliban maintained a delicate and deadly balance that reminded Elora of stories she’d heard of bull dancers, where folk her own age would go into a ring with a full-grown longhorn. It was part performance, part ritual, as they tempted the bull into a charge again and again, trusting to their own speed and agility to spare them from harm. Honor was won through the closeness of the miss, and the grace of the evasion. But this was a game with little margin for error against a foe with no concept of mercy.

  So it was here between the Deceiver and the Caliban. She dared him to the attack, and used each charge to lay waste to more of the Chengwei sorcerers unfortunate enough to be caught in his path. He may have been an unstoppable force but she was an object who never stopped moving; regardless of how hard the Caliban tried to reach her, the Deceiver always managed to be somewhere else. She used none of her power against him. That she left to the Chengwei, preferring to take the fullest possible measure of her new foe.

  As the battle progressed, she didn’t seem pleased by what she saw.

  Thorn added nothing to the carnage. His sole focus quickly became the safeguarding of his companions, mainly Khory and Anakerie as they made their way around the edge of the killing ground to join him. Some of the threats could be dealt with by a basic, all-encompassing mystical shield. That was what he used to protect them from the acid air. Most, unfortunately, required specific counterspells and they had to be blocked with the same skill and care a warrior would use against an oncoming blade or arrow. Worse, this had to be done at breakneck speed, without hesitation or margin for error since these attacks came at them from virtually every quarter, either directly or as ricochets. At the same time, Thorn had to keep himself alive, and Elora as well—though in his heart of hearts he gambled that, since this was a magical battle, her innate immunity would afford her a significant measure of protection.