Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  “Some wounds can’t merely be bound if they’re ever to heal, they have to be cauterized. Yes, he guaranteed victory but he also made sure he’d be the only one to claim credit for it. And who’s to say how things would have turned out had Khory not fought free of the Malevoiy’s chains and spoiled the spells they had prepared for her? Eamon Asana betrayed her, why couldn’t they then betray him?”

  “You’re uncommon knowledgeable all of a sudden.”

  “Conversation helps pass the hours when you’re mucking out stables. You’d be amazed how much scribes and brownies love to talk.”

  “Hardly.”

  “And how concerned we all are.”

  “Your point, Highness?”

  “This infernal device failed before.”

  “The Chengwei were not properly prepared. They didn’t comprehend the forces they were wielding, nor truly what they were up against.”

  “And you do.” When he said nothing, she made a noise of regret. “I’d hate like hell for you to be wrong, Peck.”

  “Or like Eamon Asana, do you fear losing the credit?” Now she looked at him, her own face set. “I’d be careful whose shoes you try on, Drumheller. Some may take you down a trail you don’t want to go.”

  “If there’s a betrayal here, Anakerie, it’s Elora’s. You were there, you saw! She embraced the Malevoiy.” Saying the words was like drawing a blade from an encrusted wound, tearing it open afresh.

  “I was there. She saved our lives, do you remember that?”

  He remembered the dais in the Crystal Palace and the Resonator. His enchantment was shattering before his eyes, the clockwork mechanism gradually erasing its transformation to stone. In moments it would be free to operate once more at peak capacity and he had no clue how to stop it.

  That was when Elora appeared before him, to tap a single claw upon the dais.

  It had been transformed as well, to a shelf of granite, and with that brief touch the massive stone slab tore free from its mountings and supports of crystal, plunging the Resonator into the Palace’s catacombs, buying himself and Anakerie the time they needed to flee the Palace, and then Ch’ang-ja.

  “Saved her own, you mean. We were an afterthought. She killed Khory!”

  She’d known that one was coming. She had no answer, for him or for herself, beyond a soft and miserable “I know,” that emerged in barely a whisper.

  “I’m a warrior,” she said. “I am my father’s daughter. Show me a battle, I’ll find a way to win it. Yet I cannot rid myself of the belief that those terms, those attitudes, don’t apply here. No, that they mustn’t. You’re the mage, for Goddess’s sake, why the hell are you taking my part?”

  “Find me another way, Anakerie, I’ll gladly take it. I’m sorry but I can’t see one for myself. Until that happens, all I can do is prepare as best I can, and if that means they both must die, the Deceiver and Elora Danan, then so be it.”

  Once again, Thorn Drumheller came to Nockmaar.

  The last time, he’d ridden at the head of an army, with the warrior Madmartigan at one side and the Princess Sorsha at the other, and their cause was buttressed by the power of the sorceress Fin Raziel.

  No army today, merely a gathering of old companions, though Thorn still found himself riding with a Princess. In addition, there was the young scribe, Luc-Jon, and his warhound. Maulroon and those of his crew willing to follow. Anakerie’s brother, Ryn. Franjean and Rool. A motley crew for any purpose, much less to save the world. He might wish for more of them, he couldn’t wish for better.

  The hooves of their horses, and his pony, made a lonely succession of clip-clops as they progressed through the winding succession of switchback passes that led to the vile heart of this range of mountains. No engineer could have designed better defensive fortifications. The way was narrow, the steep defiles providing ample opportunities for the defending troops to harass any invader with continuous enfilading fire. At the same time, rockfalls could just as easily block the way forward and back, leaving those forces trapped and helpless. This was a natural killing ground and anyone who hoped to survive it would have to spend lives and time clearing the slopes as well to secure safe passage. It could be done, but the cost would be as brutal as the battle itself.

  Thorn snorted unpleasantly. That, he thought, was why the common term for casualty lists was butcher’s bill.

  That first time, nearly two decades ago, events had happened so quickly that Bavmorda’s generals didn’t have the opportunity to muster a proper defense. By the time they realized the full extent of the threat, Thorn and his companions had swept up to the walls of Nockmaar itself like a flash flood, to lay siege to that dread stronghold. Then again, when you serve a sorceress of the power of the likes of Bavmorda, who can transform an entire army into swine with the wave of a hand and the utterance of an ancient curse, the fundamentals of tactics hardly seem relevant.

  Thorn allowed himself a grim smile, appropriate to the memory and his demeanor. When you’re a sorceress of the power of Bavmorda and your foes are a withered crone who might once have had delusions of being your equal and her protégé, a Nelwyn hedge wizard, overconfidence comes easily. The battle hardly seems worth the effort.

  That fearful night was when he beheld the best and worst of magic and found within himself the courage, and the skill, to wield it as he and Fin stood fast against all the wickedness of Bavmorda’s enchantment to keep themselves from succumbing like their comrades. Afterward came the equally daunting challenge of restoring those poor souls to their true forms, without alerting either Bavmorda or her acolytes to what was happening.

  Anakerie leaned over in her saddle and pressed a copper into his hand. It was an Angwyn penny, probably filched from Maulroon’s strongbox, which held coinage from every mint in the Realms. There was nothing grim about the smile she flashed him, only the gentle invitation to share his thoughts, and his burdens.

  “Nothing of import,” he told her.

  “Thorn Drumheller, you are such a liar.”

  “So you say, Royal Highness.”

  “So I know, Peck. You can no more dissemble to me than to Elora Danan, we both know you too well.” His face made plain his feeling at the mention of Elora’s name. “Don’t you glower at me, Nelwyn, or try to bind me with your rules and strictures. I’ll speak my mind to you, as I will to any comrade. Or Monarch, for that matter.”

  “So much, I see, for tact.”

  “I’m a Princess Royal, and a warlord, my friend. Tact is a weapon like any other, to be wielded or not as circumstances require.”

  “You still oppose me, then?”

  “I think you’re wrong, Thorn. There’s a difference.” As Anakerie spoke, she levered herself upright, standing on her stirrups, and turned right the way around for a look at the surrounding slopes.

  “What?” Thorn prompted.

  “We had to break ice from the moment we reached that river of yours, all the way inland from the sea. Snow was packed so deep across the countryside most houses couldn’t be seen and the wind was so cold and dry we might as well have been crossing a desert.”

  “It’s worse on the plains below Sandeni.”

  “I can well imagine. What I don’t understand is why the landscape here is clear. These mountains are as cold as outside…”

  “Colder, actually,” Thorn muttered, but not loudly enough to interrupt.

  “…but they’re dry. There’s been no snow here, where I’d have thought the valleys would have been choked with the stuff. Impassable.”

  “It never snows here,” he told her. “And it’s always been cold, regardless of the season. There are legends that call this place an open wound on the body of the world, to remind us always of the horrors that once were. Nothing good ever came from Nockmaar.”

  “Elora Danan came from Nockmaar,” Anakerie commented. “As I recall, you told me she was bo
rn here.”

  His silence was his answer, his visage so hawklike and predatory that the Angwyn Princess reined in her horse and swung herself down to the ground. He stayed mounted, her height and his pony’s allowing them to face each other eye to eye.

  “Do not do this, Drumheller,” she told him flatly.

  “You oppose me, Anakerie?” His own tone was as dangerous as hers.

  “I say you’re wrong,” she repeated. “What you intend is as much an abomination as this place.”

  “It’s our only hope.”

  “So you say!”

  “This is wizard’s business, I’m the wizard. Why can’t you trust me?”

  “Because I’ve seen that device in operation, as close as you.”

  “It’s the only power left with even a prayer of challenging them, don’t you understand?”

  “That was tried in Ch’ang-ja, remember?”

  “The Chengwei made mistakes.”

  “And you’ll do better?”

  “I understand what they did not.”

  “Share y’r insight, laddie-buck,” suggested Maulroon, looking like a ridgeline himself as he reined in his animal. He wasn’t terribly comfortable on horseback. Here was a man who could keep firm footing amidst a full gale, with his deck tilting every which way, pelted from all the corners of the compass by wind and rain and sleet and hail, complaining from the start about how the beast’s movements felt “funny” to him. His mount clearly shared those sentiments, but they both made the best of it.

  “What do we find a’ the end o’ this wee track?”

  “A slagheap of a stronghold,” the Nelwyn replied, pulling hard on his reins to yank them from Anakerie’s grasp and tapping his heels against his pony’s flanks to start him walking again. He wasn’t trying to escape Anakerie, merely regain a measure of initiative. She didn’t remount, but chose to pace him on foot, leading her own mare. “So old,” he continued, “so…fitting to this abominable place that most mistake the fortress for part of the landscape. The walls are all in grays and blacks, as though once they were hosed with flame the way you or I might water a garden, with a great sweeping spray of fire.”

  “Dragons did that?” Maulroon asked, and Thorn shrugged.

  “I suppose they must have, I’m not sure I want to imagine anything else capable of expressing such power. The heat should have cracked those stones to powder, yet all they did was score the facings, the way a pot will look after being left too long on a stove, so the food burns.

  “Nothing will grow in these mountains,” Thorn told them. “That’s why we have to pack in all our supplies.”

  “But an invader would control the lines of supply,” Anakerie noted, “so that should be no problem. The advantage would go to the besiegers. They could simply starve Nockmaar into submission.”

  “So you’d assume,” agreed Thorn. “Except that according to the chronicles, the larders here were never empty. Be it sustenance or armaments, what was needed was always at hand.”

  “That’s like Elora Danan’s traveling pouch,” said Luc-Jon, though he knew the mere mention of her name was a lash across the Nelwyn’s shoulders.

  “Magic,” snorted Maulroon.

  “Of course,” Thorn told him. “This hole fairly chokes with it. There’s more potential concentrated among these rocks than at any other point on the globe. Supposedly, this is the Prime Magus Point, the first that ever existed, and the most powerful.”

  “Yet it was left untouched by the Cataclysm?” Anakerie wondered.

  “I’ve wondered about that myself, in recent years. Tir Asleen, the original seat of Elora’s power, was destroyed. Nockmaar, the home of her enemy, was left unscathed. I always suspected it was more than just fate being perverse.”

  “Why is everyone so scared of it?” Luc-Jon asked.

  Thorn pulled his pony to a halt, nudging it around to more easily face the lad, genuinely amazed by the question that had been asked.

  “I thought you knew,” he said to Luc-Jon, “you of all people, with the access you had to your master’s archives.”

  “Forgive me, Master Drumheller,” Luc-Jon suggested with a smile, “but that was half a world removed from here. And while my master’s collection may have been eclectic it was far from comprehensive.”

  “True,” the Nelwyn agreed. “For some reason, I keep seeing you in Giles Horvath’s library. Most curious, as though that was your destiny.”

  “It’s a dream I’ve had, sir, to study at the University in Sandeni.”

  “No no no, not studying, teaching.” Thorn fell silent, realizing that his companions were staring at him, none of them having the slightest clue how to deal with this minor revelation. “That’s curious,” he managed to say at last, hoping to deflect any concern with an attempt at humor.

  His hope shriveled in the face of the brownies’ withering commentary.

  “Bloody daft is more like it,” suggested Rool.

  “Playing with those damnable spells as we crossed the deep water,” agreed Franjean. “Dancing yourself through who knows what kind of wormholes. Y’know, don’t’cha, Drumheller, the stench o’ demon’s about you stronger than ever.”

  “If that’s so,” the Nelwyn replied, showing teeth, “be careful you don’t earn yourselves a bite!”

  “Drumheller,” interjected Anakerie, “the young man’s question.”

  “What? Oh, yes, I beg your pardon, Luc-Jon. I always sound more scattered when I’m agitated. I sound more scattered, thank you very much.” This impassioned declaration went to the brownies, whose comments were no less pithy because they were entirely silent. “In every other respect, I’m quite fine.”

  He visibly gathered himself, sitting straighter in his saddle and adopting a more commanding mien.

  “Perhaps we should camp here for the night, Maulroon,” he said, and for all the qualified phrasing this was as much an order as any Anakerie—or Maulroon himself for that matter—had ever uttered.

  “There’s still a fair piece o’ daylight left us, Drumheller.”

  “I know, and we haven’t all that far to go. But I’d rather we reach Nockmaar with the day before us, not the night.”

  “You expecting trouble?”

  “Not the kind you mean. I just don’t like the ghosts.”

  “Bloody hell!” snarled the Cascani Master Trader. Gaunts and ghoulies were the last thing he wanted.

  “The castle’s haunted?” Luc-Jon asked.

  “In ways you cannot begin to imagine.”

  “Is that why people are scared?”

  “Not by the haunting itself, but what it represents. Before the last turning of the wheels, when the Great Realms were theirs alone to command, Nockmaar was the greatest stronghold of the Malevoiy. It was said to be the only place in the Realms that existed as much on the Faery side of the Veil as on ours, allowing the Malevoiy to cross back and forth as easily as they pleased.

  “My fear, my friends, is that if Elora Danan has her way it will be so again.”

  * * *

  —

  Once again, Elora Danan came to Angwyn.

  The first time, she came wreathed in fire, cast down from the heavens like some godling hero out of legend. Now she approached on foot, across the icy expanse of Angwyn Bay, which had frozen solid right down to the sea floor. The wind howled and shrieked, assaulting the land in a katabatic storm that generated winds whose velocity put the strongest hurricanes to shame. It was a dry, angry wind, the kind you’d expect to find on a desert, driving a wall of dust before it. This one made do with ice, imbuing the minute slivers with such force and fury that they cut more sharply than a surgeon’s scalpel and were capable of stripping the flesh from the bones before the victim had time to realize he was doomed. She’d passed a number of examples on her journey. Some were animals, too old or weak or unlucky to fi
nd shelter from this now perpetual tempest. The rest were Daikini who’d been foolish enough, or desperate enough, to make a try for the Deceiver’s life. Nothing remained of them save bones so coated in hoarfrost that they gleamed prettily in whatever light touched them, be it sun or moon. She found a sword stabbed into the ice. An attempt to pull it free snapped the blade; a tap of the two broken pieces together shattered them both to shards and powder, which were immediately blown from view by the gale.

  This was a tempest so fierce that a deep breath seared the lungs, the intense cold doing the same damage as breathing flame.

  On every side was desolation, a stark and barren landscape that had been scoured of even the potential for life. Overhead, the sky roiled, as clouds swept down from the north in a great Coriolis circle centered on the city of Angwyn itself, colliding with one another in a colossal pile that thrust them as high into the sky as there was air to sustain them. Lightning flashed constantly amidst that titanic maelstrom, bolts that seared the eye and did not vanish in an instant but lingered as though summoned. She assumed there was thunder to match but nothing could be heard over the keening howls of the wind, so piercing a threnody she wondered idly if it was being produced by the souls the Deceiver had enslaved.

  That prompted a grin, feral and hungry, complete with bared fangs and a flex of both hands to extend her claws.

  Amidst this field of limitless whiteness, she was the jarring note. Animation and life, where there should be none. And as the ice pack she strode across had been leached of all color, Elora Danan by contrast was the absolute and total amalgam of it, her body painted a black so intense it seemed to absorb the available light.

  There were ships moored at the mercantile docks, with crews on watch and people on the wharves beyond. Though not the equal in size and population to the metropolises of Chengwei, Angwyn was one of the great ports and great cities of the Daikini Realm, capital of a kingdom that laid just claim to a significant portion of this continent. It was modern and cosmopolitan and crowded.

  None of that mattered anymore, for Angwyn was a city sheathed in ice, buildings and people gathered into a frozen hibernation in the space between one breath and the next.