Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  Even now, he found it hard to credit that the Aldwyn had watched over him from birth, that the gift of his power and his destiny had marked him as inexorably as it had Elora Danan.

  It was while saving the baby Elora that Thorn came to behold the other side of magic. The baneful arts. He saw, and felt the lash of, sorcery that had no other purpose than to do harm and discovered in himself the capacity to do the same.

  But he had chosen this path. Yes, he may have been marked by fate but at every crossroads in his life he’d faced the opportunity to turn away from it. That he was here, that he was the man and mage he’d become, those were conscious decisions, of his own free will, and he accepted responsibility for them.

  This was different. The fault of the people around him was solely that they chose to live in Ch’ang-ja. The horror for him was that there was nothing he could do to save them.

  What was inanimate erupted to life around him. Cobblestones grew teeth and snapped hungrily at the feet treading upon them. The wood of joists and beams, of floors, of furniture, of utensils, all regained a portion of the life it once possessed, and a twisted shrieking filled the air, adding to the already unholy din, as dryads found themselves reconstituted in tortured pieces, gripped by a terrible rage at the violence done them and determined to relay it in kind. Like the skins they once had been, hides and leather wrapped themselves tight around the people wearing them, bending and breaking the offending body until it assumed a crippled semblance of the original beast. From every thread of silk, a thousand worms bloomed, to spin new webs from strands of flesh.

  Shapes changed at whim, as beasts assumed human semblance while men and women took their place. With each outburst of energy, the transformations became more extreme, and Thorn saw figures with scales for skin, with wings, with claws and fangs, small as church mice while others could shatter a whole house with their fist. The earth itself came to life, and people were reduced to clay. Others became fire, became ice. The fire attacked the ice and melted it to water, which threatened to drown the fire, which boiled it away to air, which extinguished the blaze with a puff, save for the stray sparks which ignited some combustible tinder nearby and began the cycle all over again.

  Beyond the circle of Thorn’s power, no one was safe, no one was spared.

  “Can this be stopped?” Anakerie demanded, her voice ragged.

  He wanted with all his might and heart to cry yes. To find within himself the enchantment which would set things right.

  Instead, he told the truth: “I don’t know.”

  And then, “The Palace is like any other machine. Eventually, it has to run out of fuel, of magical energy.”

  “Eventually means how long, precisely?”

  Again, he didn’t know, but took heart from the fact that the city around them was increasingly less chaotic as they neared Freemantle.

  “Praise all the Makers that ever were and ever shall be,” he breathed in a rush. “It’s finite, the effects have a limited range.”

  The whole of Freemantle was on the move, that was apparent well before they reached their destination, the berth of Saltai’s schooner, and that panic swept disaster over the sprawling anchorage as surely as the Palace’s magic had ravaged the land. Hawsers were cut without regard to the ability of one ship or another to stay afloat, much less get under way, or of those aboard to function as any kind of crew. There were thumps and groans and screeches as hulls came together, and sharper outcries followed by splashes as people went into the water. Once that happened, the swimmer’s fate was sealed. The huge assemblage of vessels functioned much the same as a field of pack ice; holes that might reveal open water one instant slammed closed the next as a movement forty hulls away triggered a ripple reaction in the surrounding boats. Few there were mariners but had instead grown up viewing their wooden homes as an extension of the land. They never conceived of having to put these ships to use.

  Lathered, foam dripping from muzzle and soaked chest—as much from terror as exertion—the horse Anakerie and Thorn rode staggered to a stop on the dock. Anakerie swung herself off the saddle with Thorn tucked under her arm and handed him up to the deck without letting his feet touch the planks. The hound boarded with a single leap that cleared the gunwale with room to spare, to the demented, delighted shrieks of his brownie passengers, who considered this a ride to tell their great-grandchildren about.

  Anakerie was about to follow when Thorn called back to her, in a battlefield voice reminiscent of her own.

  “You can’t leave the horse!” he told her.

  “I’ll turn him loose.”

  “To go where? He’s done us good service, Anakerie; he deserves better. We’ll need him later, trust me. And his friends.”

  Thorn didn’t have to point. The clatter of hooves was already sounding drumbeats on the planks as a half dozen more animals, cavalry mounts by the insignia on their saddle blankets, clattered riderless down the wharf.

  “No,” bellowed Baghwan Saltai, over and over as he thrust his way forward to the gangplank. “No no no no no no no! I’ll not have it, you’ll not bring one of those mangy hides aboard my ship. Free those lines,” he told the anchor watch. “Warp us into the stream so we can be free of this hellpit! We’ve got to go now,” he pleaded with Thorn. “We’ve waited too long for you, maybe, as it is; there’ll be too many other hulls ahead of us, blocking access to the main channel. Mount your sweeps,” he called to his crew, meaning the great oars laid out on a rack between the main and foremast, for use when the ship was becalmed or for maneuvering in port. “We’ll row clear if we must!”

  “You heard Lord Drumheller,” said another voice softly, with the thinness of tone that comes from severe sickness but also with a strength of will and purpose that refused to be denied. “Load the horses,” he said. “I’ll get you clear.”

  In his heart, Thorn welcomed Ryn Taksemanyin with the greatest grin possible, but too much was happening right now for any of that to show on the Nelwyn’s craggy face. He trundled as best he could down the gangway, reaching out with his InSight to touch the thoughts of each horse in turn, to gentle and calm them so that they would allow themselves to be led aboard and behave themselves during the madness surely to follow. He didn’t command, though once he might have for that was the way of sorcerers; he took a leaf from Elora’s copybook and asked the animals’ help. Limited though their intelligence might seem to Daikini, these horses were nobody’s fools; they wanted out as badly as anyone and quickly allowed Anakerie and Luc-Jon to lead them aboard. There was no time to put them below, and no space rigged to accommodate them, so they were tethered on deck, and the boom of the foresail raised above their heads.

  As the final set of hooves clattered on deck, the gangway and the remaining hawsers were cut loose. There was sufficient breeze to establish steerage way and with agonizing slowness the schooner began to open the distance to the land.

  All the while, Baghwan exhorted boat and seamen. “Hurry,” he said, with the force of an incantation, never taking his eyes off the city across the harbor, “hurry hurry hurry hurry hurry.”

  Anakerie was thunderstruck to find her brother awaiting her, and she felt no shame in the outburst of scalding tears as they embraced. There was salt to his scent and to the taste of his fur, telling her he’d just come from the deep ocean that was his home.

  Their father had been Daikini, their mother of the seafaring Wyrrn. In the manner of such things, in the defiance of all custom and the wishes of their parents (who were certain no good would come of the union) they had met and fallen passionately in love. He was heir to the throne of Angwyn, she was firstborn of a sept of some note. For love of him, she left the sea and assumed the form of the Daikini. She never regretted that choice, for while she never lost her love for the sea she also discovered a deep and abiding affection for the wild coastal domain that became her new home. As a warrior, the King had few peers and while
her own martial skills were considerable, the Queen’s true vocation lay in governance. He defended the kingdom and she ran it. She bore him twins, girl and boy, and when the children were barely a dozen years old, she died, in the same fearful cataclysm that brought Elora Danan to Angwyn.

  That night, so the world was told, the young Prince perished as well, but that wasn’t what happened. With her dying breath, the Queen committed her son into the care of her own people, in hopes he would find more safety there than on land. As she had taken on the form of the Daikini, so did Ryn assume that of the Wyrrn. His height was his own, regardless of race, but as a Wyr he was covered top to toe in a pelt of luxurious mahogany fur. The arrangement of the limbs was the same as the Daikini but the proportions were skewed, with webbing between fingers far longer than any had a right to be and a broader shape to the foot. He was impossibly limber and while he could move with ease in the air his grace underwater beggared description. He smiled more easily than his sister and his nature was more generous. She had the better laugh, but his had more practice.

  Another surprise awaited Thorn at the rudder wheel. Steering the boat was Maulroon, Master Trader of the Cascani and one of his oldest, dearest friends.

  “What,” he managed to gabble, his confusion amusing the other man tremendously. Maulroon was built like a barrel—Nelwyn proportions actually, but in his case mated to legs that matched the size of his torso—his head ringed by a thicket of curls that had once been the color of midnight but which now showed a hefty scattering of snow. The mistake most people made meeting him was to assume that he was fat. Watching Maulroon aboard ship soon disabused them of that notion.

  “Yon Ryn, he called in a marker,” the Cascani said, but his attention never wavered from the sea ahead, the sails aloft as he sought to squeeze every possible speed advantage out of the schooner. “Said come, I came.”

  “Soon as we heard you’d been taken, Drumheller,” Ryn established, “I sent out the word, to be of help if needed.”

  “Ryn,” demanded his sister, “I left you on the west coast of this continent. Ch’ang-ja is on the east! What, you swam near the whole of the way around the world?”

  “You think the only secret ways in the world are on land?” he countered good-humoredly.

  “If you’ve one o’ those handy, lad,” Maulroon interjected, “I’d be grateful. Elsewise, we’ve a problem.”

  He stabbed a thumb forward, at the jumble of hulls and masts that was slowly but inexorably sliding across their intended course.

  “Shards,” breathed Drumheller, who was looking the other way. “Maulroon, you speak better than you imagine.”

  Anakerie turned to follow Thorn’s gaze, back to the Crystal Palace, which for all the height it had assumed was still a refreshing distance removed from their side of the harbor.

  The flash from the peak of the tower would have blinded all present, had Thorn not had a shield spell primed; as it was, the intensity of the blast was like a spike through the eyeballs. But compared with the sound that followed, this was nothing.

  Thunder comes in as many different varieties as the lightning that spawns it. One example is low-pitched, rolling, sonorous, like rumbling a thunderstone over a wooden floor. It’s broad and heavy and ponderous. Another stands in stark opposition, sharp and furious, taking all the strength of its counterpart and expelling it in a single, incredible report.

  Imagine a whipcrack of sound, only from a lash that could etch a scar deep into the face of the world itself. A hard hammerblow impact to the body, meant to break it to bits where the more resonant thunder acts to crush it to dust.

  As all aboard Saltai’s schooner reeled from the shock, Thorn beheld what they did not, a bolt of energy leaping from the Crystal Palace to one of Jade.

  “Talk t’ me, Drumheller,” said Maulroon calmly from the wheel. He’d deliberately turned away from the railing and put his back to the city and had thus endured the flash relatively unimpaired. “Where away now?”

  A silence descended on the harbor, as though the tremendous clap of thunder had stolen away all other sounds. Then Drumheller heard a distant wail, from one of the other boats, of such misery and despair it squeezed his heart like a vise, forcing him to bend near double at the waist and clutch at a gunwale for support. It was a cry of someone who had lost all hope, whose only prayer now was that the end come quickly and with no pain.

  He wanted to add his own to the rapidly rising chorus but he was Nelwyn and that meant he could be more stubborn than any Daikini. He also had pride in abundance, which refused to allow him to be beaten.

  “We can make it,” yelled Saltai, pointing to the leading edge of the boat city. There was still a fair gap between it and shore. Given the schooner’s lines and a decent breeze, they had a reasonable chance of beating to freedom.

  That would be a false victory, Thorn knew. They needed a better way, a quicker path.

  “Maulroon,” he called, indicating the strait between the mainland and the closest of the Twelve Kings, Sagat.

  “Can’t be done,” Saltai said, following Thorn’s gaze. “There’s no proper channel,” he explained. “Shallows t’ ground ye, rocks t’ tear out ’cher keel. An’ worst of all, out yonder, right past the island proper, the shelf drops deep straightaway. Wi’ the turnin’ o’ the tide, there’ll be a wicked whirlpool forming where harbor water meets open ocean.”

  “It’s that or nothing,” Thorn said simply. “And even then, it’ll be a close run.”

  Maulroon shook his head. “We’ve a fair breeze f’r this course, Drumheller. T’ cut the way you ask, we’ll be forced t’ tack. E’en without the rocks an’ shallows an’ such, we’ve no room in that wee passage for those maneuvers.”

  “Ryn,” Thorn called, casting aside Maulroon’s caution, “can you be our pilot and lead us through there?”

  The young Wyr didn’t bother replying with words, he simply dived over the side, breaking the surface with hardly a splash.

  “You steer your boat, Maulroon,” Thorn told the Cascani trader. “Leave the wind to me.”

  Reflexively, Thorn reached for his coat pocket only to discover to his chagrin that the state finery provided by the sorcerers of the Crystal Palace had none. Anakerie held forward the traveling pouch she had from Elora and asked if it would serve.

  Gratefully, he thrust his hand inside, came up with precisely what he needed, a square of paper, which he began folding with meticulous precision into the shape of a boat. With each bend and crease, he mouthed the words of a spell, imbuing it with the essence of the larger vessel.

  Another whipcrack across the sky announced that lightning had struck a second tower, beyond the Jade Palace.

  Anakerie intuited what was happening and spoke for Thorn to inform the others. “Thorn thought the powers running wild in the Crystal Palace would eventually burn themselves out,” she explained, “like a fire exhausting its fuel. Those incredible idiots, how could they have not seen the danger?”

  “They saw,” Thorn told her, as he finished his folds. “They believed themselves equal to the task. And the prize worth the risk.”

  “See how the other palaces all echo the design and structure of the Crystal Palace. Like a pure breed of plant or animal. In return for a kind of perfection, you make yourself uniquely vulnerable—because whatever disease affects one, affects all. As the runaway spells consume the Crystal Palace, they jump to the nearest available source of fuel. The more such links it establishes, the more powerful it grows. Drumheller, what happens when it links all twelve?”

  “Do we want to be here to find out?” Franjean inquired.

  Rool shook his head vehemently, echoing Saltai’s earlier chorus of no’s.

  “What happens to any vessel when you apply more pressure than it can possibly endure?” Thorn asked in return. “Ch’ang-ja sits atop a Magus Point, that’s always been the source of its wealth an
d power. It’s a city built on magic. But this isn’t a major point, there’s a limit to the amount of enchanting energy it can handle. I’m not sure any Point can handle what’s building over there.”

  “Can you stop it, Thorn?” Anakerie asked. “Can you do anything?”

  “I can try and win the war, Anakerie” was his somber reply. “So that this may never happen again. Will that suffice?”

  He took a deep and calming breath to center and focus his will, then spoke quietly to Maulroon. “Set your sails, Master Trader,” he said, “and follow Ryn’s lead. Here comes your wind.”

  Thorn formed his mouth into the shape of an O, compressed the circle of his lips ever so slightly with the paper boat held just before him in his cupped palms. It hardly qualified as an exhalation of any kind, the little model didn’t even stir.

  But overhead the great sails rattled their mast hoops as they belled full of air. Creaks and groans made themselves plain as masts and spars, the entire fabric of the ship, adjusted to the new strains. Those on deck could hear the slap and gurgle of water rushing ever faster along the hull as they gained headway.

  “Not too fast, Drumheller,” warned Maulroon. “Steady as we go.”

  “Understood.” It was the most delicate of balancing acts. They required speed to get through the passage as quickly as possible, yet too much would deny Maulroon the accuracy he needed to weave his vessel between the many obstacles before them. Despite the cool of the day and the breeze that covered the deck, both men were soon sodden with sweat, all of it from tension. Baghwan Saltai took his post in the bow, watching Ryn ply the water ahead, using hands to wave instructions back to Maulroon at the wheel. Maulroon kept a light grip on the spokes, for the adjustments to their course were measured in fractions of degrees. They couldn’t afford gross deviations from their path; Maulroon’s plan was to skate as closely as possible to every obstacle and thereby maintain as straight and true a track as possible. Meanwhile, Thorn kept the sails filled and the schooner moving at a steady pace.