Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  A rustling in the water ahead made one of the crew call out about giant sea snakes or some other kind of monster. Perhaps he meant it as a jest, to relieve the increasingly unbearable tension; if so, it was a wretched failure and the ripple of anxiety and distress that resulted communicated itself to the horses, who began to whicker and stomp their feet. They were already upset enough at the normal movement of the deck beneath them; it wouldn’t take much to trigger a frenzy.

  Anakerie stepped into this breach, with a sharp command to Luc-Jon to help. Without being asked, the brownies pitched in as well, while Maulroon offered a scathing assessment of the crew and what passed in them for courage. The noise was the whirlpool, in the first stages of its generation, as the outflowing ocean tide reached through the channel to pull the harbor water after it. This made Maulroon’s and Thorn’s jobs both easier and significantly harder. Less wind was required to move the schooner, the water itself was assuming more and more of that work. At the same time, though, that ever-swifter current limited Maulroon’s overall control over their progress. There was less warning of any obstacle and less opportunity to pivot around it. To compensate, he ordered men to the sides, manning both bumpers and sweeps, to fend off any obstruction he couldn’t avoid.

  The sky behind them was lowering fast, the way it does in advance of a monster storm when in a matter of minutes bright sun can give way completely to a darkness to rival night. The shadows were shot full of weird lights and colors, purples and vermilion and a ghastly green that made the healthiest of faces look like an animate corpse. The cannonade of thunder beat constantly upon them, as though they were being pummeled by spiked hailstones, and not a few mouthed prayers of thanks at their distance from the city. None wanted to consider what it must be like directly beneath such a display.

  “Past the whirlpool,” Maulroon bellowed, to make himself heard over the din, “the lad signals clear water.”

  He twitched the wheel, taking them onto the outer edge of the vortex, letting them join with the current itself in adding to their speed. He’d timed the maneuver perfectly; the schooner accelerated with a surge that was noticeable on deck.

  “Hands to braces,” he yelled. “Gimme all the canvas she can fly!”

  Lines whistled through blocks and great sheets of cloth unleashed some snap and thunder of their own as they were opened to the sky. Topsails and staysails were added to the mains, booms winched tight to present their best aspect to the breeze.

  Thorn spared a quick, flashing glance at the city and then at the Palace built out of the substance of Sagat. Its spire might well be mistaken as an extension of the peak itself; of all the chapter houses, it was the only one constructed of what appeared to be stone rather than the more stylish and elegant gem crystals and precious metals favored by the other sects, and he wondered how that might affect the original spells.

  As for the city itself, he could no longer bear to look at it; nor could any of the others aboard. It seemed from the glances he spared that it had stolen a measure of its aspect from Elora Danan and the Malevoiy. It was defined now wholly by darkness, in negative imagery, the buildings standing out as filigreed etchings of gray against a sable background. He was reminded of the Void that the melded sorcerers had created to consume the Deceiver and feared suddenly that the rift was still open.

  The schooner reached the far end of the whirlpool, but fast as she was going through the water she lacked sufficient speed to break free of the maelstrom’s clutches. In less than a heartbeat, her bow would be turned toward shore and Thorn knew with absolute certainty that there wouldn’t be time for a second attempt. Even a single revolution around the circle would doom them.

  Once more he held his little model boat before pursed lips, but this time he offered up a puff of breath.

  Instantly, ropes snapped taut and the whole structure of the ship groaned at the effort demanded of her. Her bow attacked the waves ahead like a charging lancer, dousing the foredeck under a shower of foam and spray. The deck as a whole tilted alarmingly to the side and a number of sailors rushed to the aid of Anakerie and Luc-Jon as all their efforts with the horses were nearly undone.

  Maulroon offered a roar of defiance, his face alight with the passion of the moment as he sent his ship into the teeth of the ocean. Saltai, looking half-drowned, his finery ruined, had the presence of mind on his perch forward to pitch a grappling line over the side, wrapping it around himself and a cleat to provide sufficient anchor for Ryn to clamber back aboard.

  They were racing free of the shore now, faster than any sailor aboard could remember, even the oldest, most experienced salts among them keeping wary eyes on the masts as they flexed under the press of the wind.

  “Y’ did well, lad,” Maulroon congratulated Ryn as the Wyr made his way aft, but Ryn had no eyes for the trader, no ears to hear his praise.

  Thorn followed his look, as did Anakerie and the brownies. Saltai looked for Maulroon, who kept his own gaze on the task at hand, the sea ahead, the ship below, the sails that drove them. It was his responsibility to make sure this was enough to save them. If it wasn’t, he had no interest in seeing whatever was to claim their lives.

  Anakerie uttered a small sound, the kind some make when pierced by a mortal blow. She dropped to her knees because she needed to be held and while she loved her brother dearly, that wasn’t the emotion she required. Thorn held her close and let her tears stand surrogate for his own. His own eyes burned with grief and rage but he could no longer find within himself the tears to ease that pain. Like the Magus Point in Ch’ang-ja, overflowing with more magic than it could bear, he had endured too much sorrow. He was done with weeping.

  Ch’ang-ja was done with magic.

  The lightning was continuous. Likewise the thunder. And as the schooner ran for the horizon, as the range opened, as their perspective broadened and more of the Twelve Kings came into view it seemed to those watching that the seamounts stood like a last barrier against that onrushing chaos. The bars of a cage.

  Except the lightning was picking relentlessly at Sagat, whittling it away, and Thorn wondered suddenly if like called to like. He had been a guest of the Crystal Palace, his own magic had been incorporated however slightly into its substance. Once it clawed and scratched its way through Sagat, would the lightning seek him out?

  He forgot how well Anakerie could intuit his thoughts.

  “Plenty of opportunity for that when we were ashore, Peck,” she told him softly.

  “We’ll know soon enough, I’ll wager.”

  “No,” said Ryn in a voice as strange as Anakerie’s had been before she knelt.

  By contrast, he stood a little straighter, determined to face this test the only way he knew, on his feet and full of defiance and courage.

  Something shimmered against the landward horizon, as though a curtain had been raised right across that back wall of the world. It made no sense at first to those on the schooner, because they had nothing in their experience to compare it with, not even Thorn, who could draw on the collective history of his people. As they watched, it kept rising, quickly dwarfing the highest towers of Ch’ang-ja, and the peaks of the Twelve Kings as well. The scale confused them; for objects to be so tall, they had to be comparatively close to the city, yet through Saltai’s and Maulroon’s spyglasses—and to Drumheller’s MageSight—the city appeared unaffected by this approaching onslaught.

  It was Luc-Jon, of them all the only one of them possessing not a whit of magic, who made the connection.

  “Mountains,” he said, in a whisper as bare as the puffs of breath Thorn used to push them past Sagat.

  “Those are mountains,” he repeated, not believing his words himself.

  “Ahhh,” he cried at last, as if struck. “Those are the Stairs to Heaven!”

  The spine of the world ran straight past Ch’ang-ja, and for nearly a thousand miles farther on. But the land here had colla
psed beneath the waves in ancient days, creating an undersea version of the Wall to rival the one that bisected the continent, so that only the tallest of these peaks thrust their summits above the surface. That meant, to the south and west of the port, there was little in the way of foothills; the land reared straight up into the middle reaches of the range itself, plains yielding at once to mountains five and ten thousand feet tall.

  Compared to what was advancing now upon the coast, those were nothing.

  For Luc-Jon and Anakerie, it was like watching an avalanche. For the seafarers, a tidal wave. For Thorn, the superheated flow of mud and molten rock down the slope of a volcano, racing at incredible speeds even the fastest animal couldn’t outrun. It was as though all the Great Realms of the Circle of the World—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—had gathered together to cauterize this gaping wound before its infection could spread.

  Of them all, only Thorn had ever beheld the active power of those Realms; at one and the same time, that experience saved his life and very nearly destroyed it. Though he was a mage, he felt very small and insignificant and humbled—he felt very Nelwyn—and compared to what transpired before him, that was nothing.

  The heartland peaks of the Stairs to Heaven reared better than eight miles above sea level; that might well have been the height of the wall of rock sweeping down on Ch’ang-ja. Not only did the wave fill the horizon, it filled the sky, to such an extent that the schooner—far out to sea as it was—was cast into freezing shadow. That much mass and volume, at any speed, casts before it a battering ram of air and Thorn was thankful the city itself was hidden behind the Twelve Kings so that none of the schooner could see the results when it struck.

  Of the Twelve Kings themselves, Sagat—weakened by the infernal lightning drawn to its chapter house—was the one that broke. It shattered from within, almost in slow motion, fissures splitting its substance into countless pieces that somehow held themselves in place, separate but motionless, for a discernible moment before being wiped indelibly from existence. The air ram swept the ocean flat and Thorn had barely a moment to cast a shield about the schooner before it caught up to them. As it was he had to suffer a measure of the shock, which shoved him brutally back against a capstan and threatened to squash him flat. Anakerie never let him go, even though that meant taking some of that fearful ordeal unto herself—which was, of course, her intent.

  The wave of rock crested so high above Ch’ang-ja it might well be touching the lowest vaults of the stars themselves, and then it fell.

  Once more, there was desperate need for Thorn’s magic; once more, he knew there would be no margin for error or for weakness.

  Stone fell like water from a cataract, straight into what must have been a bottomless maw, because nothing whatsoever came past the boundary line represented by the Twelve Kings. Over the days to come—over the months, the years, the lifetime—each recollection of this day would bring forth a new memory. Something seen, or smelled, or heard, to bear witness to the event and give it richer and more lasting texture. They would never grasp the enormity of the moment, just as they could only marginally comprehend the forces that were involved, but the passage of time allowed for a more complete perspective.

  For a score of leagues in every direction, up the coast and down and inland, the world reordered itself. What had been part of the Realm of Earth yielded its dominion to that of the Realms of Water and Air and Fire, creating a new seabed as deep on one side of the still-standing Kings as on the other. Now that tremendous basin had to be filled and a new sound filled the air, a different quality of thunder, as the ocean swept over its latest conquest. Suddenly, the distance from land the schooner had come seemed like nothing at all as this monstrous tidal surge tugged them back the way they came, either to smash them on the rocky shores of the Kings or pitch them over the cataract beyond. No wind the schooner could handle could counter such a primal current.

  Thorn made sure it didn’t have to. He kept his place on the afterdeck, the space between the wheel and the taffrail, seated with Anakerie by his side. He traced signs in the air and on the wood beneath him that blazed with a kind of colored fire, one color seeping into the fabric of the ship while the other leaped aloft to enshroud it in what most described as a giant soap bubble. Thorn had bound the ship to him, made its life force one with his own, and created a field of energy that lowered its resistance to almost nothing. As far as the water around them was concerned, the schooner had no physical substance.

  Just to make sure, Thorn etched a third sigil and cast it from him as powerfully as any arrow shot from a longbow. Into the ocean it went, straight to the bottom, through the accumulated silt and soil of ages until it struck bedrock, where it took hold as firmly as any harpoon.

  The enchantments were all in place. All he had to do now was sustain them until the danger passed. He guessed that would be tomorrow dawn, because that was about as long as he believed his strength would last, even augmented by Anakerie.

  It was a terrible night. The shock of their flight, the narrowness of their escape—the fact that they still weren’t free—wove a tapestry of gloom about the crew. There was too much time to reflect on what had happened, what might yet happen, too little to do to keep minds and hands occupied. Fear knuckled about the deck because most Daikini were comfortable with the world as it was; those who bothered to learn the catechism of the Twelve Realms rarely took it seriously, even those who had truck with the other Realms. Storms and earthquakes they understood and accepted as part of the natural order. But the world turning itself inside out to obliterate a city of millions, that left them wondering when it might happen again and who might be the cause. Eyes turned to the afterdeck and sought out the brownies and talk turned to retribution.

  Thanks to Thorn’s InSight, Anakerie sensed the shifting currents in the crew’s emotions, because they struck small resonances in her own heart and soul. Once before, when they first met in the dungeons of the Palace Royal in Angwyn, she and Drumheller had shared minds. The experience had been hard for both of them, because it was an interrogation. The aftermath was harder still, because they had fallen in love.

  The problem was, Thorn was pledged to another, whom he loved as dearly, though he hadn’t seen her since the Cataclysm. And Anakerie was pledged as strongly to her kingdom.

  Through the night, they strolled the byways of each other’s dreams. They shared an intimacy most couples cannot imagine and found a fulfillment that would last them to the ends of their days.

  Anakerie stirred first, a soldier’s habit, sight returning to her eyes to reveal the stillness that heralds sunrise. The horizon aft was like ink, with no line of demarcation to separate sea from sky. As she rose from her seat, surprised to feel no protest from muscles and joints that hadn’t moved in the better part of a day, she made out a pale lightening ahead. Maulroon sat on a folding captain’s chair by his wheel, which had been lashed in place; a folding table was set before him and he was finishing his transcription of the day’s events in his log.

  There was a carafe of coffee, steaming from the galley, but only the one cup. He was generous enough to share.

  “You’d best hoard this blend, Master Trader,” Anakerie mentioned after savoring both the scent of the rich and aromatic brew and its taste. “This is the last we’ll see of Chengwei Spice.”

  He chuckled. “I’d forgotten, the fields were terraced just below the city. Casks in the hold should allow us to turn a tidy profit on this voyage then, even assuming we all drink our fill.”

  “The sea seems calmer. We’re not moving as much.”

  Another chuckle. “Moving more, actually, but it’s the natural rhythm of the sea. Light breeze, moderate swell, fair start to the morning.”

  “It’s so still,” she said suddenly, looking toward the darkness.

  “Aye,” he agreed. “The noise’s been droppin’ steady-like since midnight.”

  “I half e
xpected trouble overnight.”

  Maulroon shook his head. “Stands t’ reason, there’d be mutterin’, with all that’s happened. But Saltai’s as good a judge o’ sailors as I am. It’s a decent crew, his. Y’ve nowt t’ fear from the likes o’ them.”

  “Even with the world crashing down about our heads?”

  “Especially so, Royal Highness. That’s the mark o’ true Cascani, not just blood but strength o’ heart an’ soul.”

  “I pray so. I’ve a feeling we’ll need all you have to offer and more—what’s that?” she cried with alarm as the darkness was suddenly speared by a flash of golden light that raked down on their position from north to south before disappearing, to be replaced almost at once by a similar spark of emerald.

  “The Bayan beacon,” Maulroon said with admiration and thankfulness, both at the quality of the workmanship that had allowed it to survive this catastrophe and the fact that the fates had been merciful enough to allow its survival. It had only reestablished itself over the past few hours, which told him that someone had been in the lighthouse to fix it and start it running again.

  With the dawn came the discovery that only one of the Kings had fallen, Sagat. The others reared skyward as proudly as they always had, albeit in a more solitary state than before. Maulroon’s spyglass provided one other startling revelation, that the Gate of Peace had likewise survived.

  “There’s a story t’ tell our grandchildren,” Maulroon noted as he closed his glass with a clack. “Assumin’, Drumheller, we’ll any of us have any.”