Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  What reviewers are saying about Shadow Dancers

  “Carl is an author to watch, for those who like their fantasy strongly seasoned with history.”—Roland Green

  “…a world full of allusions to our own history…magical struggles with treachery as an important element…the main struggle could be called love vs. hate. These books are interesting works of fantasy…a fine series which shows a good historical background with an awareness of the importance of logistics. Whatever one thinks of Amazons as a concept, they are certainly well-done here. Even the villains are complex, well-fleshed out characters.”—Timothy Lane, Fosfax

  “…fantasy that is woven intricately upon a weft of solid classical knowledge, yet is also colored by a creative imagination of great scope and power…the power and delicate precision of the best poetry…tantalizing glimpses of our own antique world, interestingly altered and yet recognizable, give the story an extra dimension. Anyone who believes that fantasy must contain magic and elves has never read the work of Mary Renault…in Lillian Carl we have found another who can offer her readers an alternate reality that will live inside the mind long after the book has been finished.”—Ardath Mayhar, Thrust

  Shadow Dancers

  Sabazel, Book Three

  Lillian Stewart Carl

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011 by Lillian Stewart Carl

  This book is available in print at most online retailers

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Chapter One

  The sword Solifrax flickered in the darkness like the distant lightning of the approaching storm. Andrion gazed narrowly at the blade. It had not shone like this, revealing its latent power, for six peaceful years.

  He frowned. He was king of Sardis, Emperor, named Beloved of the Gods, but he had never been able to interpret the omens of the ancient and capricious deities who haunted him. The wind sighed against his face, carrying a tang of something overripe, almost spoiled. Summer waned and a storm gathered in the north. The friends he awaited did not come.

  Impatiently Andrion tapped Solifrax across the stone of the parapet, eyeing the spiraling roughness that marred its crystalline blade. He had been only eighteen that night when, enspelled, he had thrown himself against the sword and etched it with the path of his own blood. Now he was twenty-five, and could spare a shake of the head for that distant youth. The desire and the duty that had driven that youth to win sword and Empire made the man who now bore them straighten, set his shoulders, and release a grim smile.

  Poets sang that he was born from the mating of sun and moon, melted in the crucible of the gods and poured into the fleshly armor he now wore, an alloy of his father’s courage and his mother’s integrity. Fine metaphor, he thought, but which of my mothers do they name?

  This evening the sun had set early, a blood-red orb consumed by cloud. The night was as dark as a tomb; no stars penetrated the blue-black shroud of the sky, and the waning moon hid its sickly face.

  Andrion peered once again from the rooftop garden into the city, dried leaves shifting about his feet. Iksandarun, too, was haunted tonight. The streets were runnels of shadow, the occasional cressets only struggling wraiths of light. Most of them had not been lit. Gods, an emperor should not have to deal with details as petty as the proper lighting of the streets!

  Somewhere a brief strain of music sounded, an eerie melody of flute and pipes; then a door slammed, blotting it out. The hoofbeats of unshod steppe ponies pattered along the cobbled avenue. We fought the Khazyari, Andrion told himself with a sigh, when they invaded the Empire; debatable, who was victor and who vanquished, when their prince now rides freely through the streets of Iksandarun. But then, I bought his allegiance with honor and with blood.

  There he was. Two dim horse-and-man shapes walked along the avenue toward the palace gates, at one moment garishly defined in torchlight, at the next blots of nothingness in shadow. And behind them … Andrion squinted. Indistinct shapes, clotted darkness, crept from alleys to gather like silent storm clouds behind the riders. The streets had been darkened on purpose.

  “Harus!” Andrion swore. The name of the god stirred the wind uneasily. He thrust the sword hissing into its snakeskin sheath and sprinted across the garden. In the darkness that pulsed around him he knew what happened to his friends in the street as surely as if he were with them.

  Tembujin, Khan of the Crimson Horde, ruler of the imperial province of Khazyaristan, glanced warily from side to side. His tip-tilted eyes glinted like black onyx; the tail of sable hair bound at the back of his head shifted with suspicion.

  Thunder rumbled like distant battle, and the wind purred as if mocking the khan and the plaque of the lion he wore on his chest. The young boy he held before him piped, “Father?”

  Tembujin soothed him with a touch. “Never mind, Ethan. We are almost there.” The great gate of the palace loomed out of the shadows, torches shedding a thick brass light that barely touched the dimness of the avenue. The sentries dozed, leaning upon their spears, as motionless as statues.

  Andrion sped past the guards who waited in the garden door, calling to them to follow. His oddly supernal vision shivered his mind into facets of dread, anger, calculation—an attack on the khan must be a warning for me—of whom, of what—hurry, hurry!

  The huge warrior who rode behind the khan and his son heard the scrabble in an alleyway, the sudden yowl of a cat. Tembujin set his hand on his long dagger, shrugged his bow farther up his shoulder, clasped the child and urged the pony to leap ahead through the murk into light.

  A rush from the darkness. Hands seizing the bridle of the pony. It reared, whinnying in terror as hands dragged Tembujin and Ethan from its back. The khan shouted. His dagger flashed and someone cried out.

  The bodyguard attacked. Bodies flew and lay crumpled on the street, but others swarmed forward. Knives flared and fell. The warrior went down beneath them.

  In the moment’s distraction Tembujin thrust the child behind him, against a wall in the thin light of a sputtering cresset. The boy found himself clutching his father’s dagger. Eyes wide, small mouth set, he brandished it before him. In one supple motion Tembujin slipped the bow from his shoulder and set an arrow to it. The assassins shifted uneasily, feinting this way and that. The body of the guard did not stir.

  “Cowards,” said the khan’s lightly accented voice. “Cowards, to sneak in the darkness like rats. Come into the light, I dare you.”

  The assassins surged around their prey. The string sang, and the foremost went down. The bow was strung again without Tembujin’s hand seeming to move.

  The wind carried the sounds of battle to the palace. The guards started. One ran inside. One ran forward, counted his opponents, hesitated. Andrion swept by them, playing his clear voice like a herald’s trumpet, “Come! Follow me!” The guards steadied in his wake. Others rushed from inside the gates. The avenue filled with a metallic cascade.

  A bolt of lightning split the night, cast not from the sky but from the street itself; Solifrax drawn in battle. Tembujin’s eyes fired with recognition and relief.

  With a cry of outrage Andrion fell upon the assassins. His black cloak snapped behind him like the wings of an avenging god. Solifrax blazed, setting the shadows to dancing. Its threat alone scattered the dark forms in panicked flight.


  “Follow them,” Andrion snapped. His guards split, some running after the assassins, some forming a cordon around the Emperor and the khan. “Scum! How dare they attack you, Tembujin, here under my very eyes?” The gold diadem on his brow sparked, and his dark hair gleamed with auburn highlights, embers stirred.

  The khan still stood poised, bow bent. “This is the third attack within five days, Andrion. I thought I would be safe here, but your eyes do not see overmuch, do they?”

  “You were once an enemy,” Andrion replied. “Some have not forgotten.”

  “Have you forgotten?” The quiet voice was a whiplash of challenge.

  Andrion’s nostrils flared. “Yes.”

  Tembujin straightened, letting the bow fall, and bent over his guard. “Rats,” he breathed, “to kill him here like this.”

  “He saved your life and Ethan’s. A good man; I am sorry …” Condolences were meaningless to a Khazyari schooled in revenge. Mouth tight, Andrion extended his hand to the child. The boy crept from the wall, trying to saunter bravely, but his cheeks were pale beneath the bronze of his skin. The dagger fell from his hands and clattered upon the cobblestones. Andrion clasped him against his side. “You did well, Ethan.”

  Ethan, uncertain, said nothing. The glow of the sword was reflected in his dark eyes; he blinked, dazzled. Andrion caressed the child’s smooth hair, thinking. Yes, the sword is tantalizing. How well I know.

  Tembujin stood with a muffled curse, reclaimed his dagger, saw his son in Andrion’s arm and pulled him away.

  “He is my sister’s child,” Andrion said softly. “No matter what you did to her, I would not harm him.”

  Tembujin opened his mouth. He realized that soldiers clustered around him, their ears gaping even as their faces feigned indifference. He shut his mouth and tossed his head. The black fringe of hair framing his forehead and temples rippled like a banner in the wind. The wind was suddenly cold, but no less rotten.

  Several guards returned, dragging two bodies and one wounded man. Andrion inspected their faces but did not know them. They were no doubt simple ruffians hired to do the dirty work by someone too powerful to do it himself. Someone who must be powerful indeed to throw down such a challenge… . Andrion’s stomach tightened, a soft creature contracting so that only its hard shell is exposed, its mortal belly protected.

  The prisoner would have crumpled to the pavement if soldiers had not held him erect. Blood from an arrow in his side was only a dark stain on his garments. Andrion grasped the man’s hair, jerking his face up.

  “Kill him,” said Tembujin.

  “Then we shall discover nothing,” Andrion returned. He set the blade at the man’s throat and asked with perilous calm, “Who paid you to do this treachery?”

  The pale light of the sword scoured the man’s features of color and definition. His widely dilated eyes were bottomless pits in a face tightened to the bone. “Who?” Andrion commanded.

  The man quaked. A sour, sickly odor clung to him, sweat and dirt and something else, something subtly familiar. Solifrax muttered threats against his flesh. His tongue stammered nonsense.

  His eyes were as vacant as a dead man’s. Nightshade, Andrion realized, and perhaps hashish. The man was drugged, and more … “By the talons of the god!” Andrion spat under his breath, recoiling. The back of his neck tightened, the soft creature inside him cramped cruelly.

  “Sorcery,” hissed Tembujin, holding the child away. “I have not sensed sorcery since the witch my father’s wife died almost seven years ago.”

  Sorcery, yes; the memory of that odor was seared on Andrion’s mind. Who now dared to use such arts, and to what end? He straightened to his full height, half a head taller than any man near him. His rich brown eyes were depth upon depth of light and substance; his face was stern, frost rimming fire. Solifrax hummed in his hand, but he saw only the empty streets, and his own soldiers gazing raptly at him, and shadows discouraged by the light of the sword.

  In a few terse words he gave his orders. He spun about. Tembujin and Ethan hurried not behind, but beside him. They strode through the pool of light at the gate and gained the palace.

  The corridors streamed like fragments of a fever dream. Lamps were sudden pinwheels against shadows writhing in the corners of Andrion’s eyes. If men are shadows dancing at the whim of the gods, he asked himself, and the gods are shadows given substance by man’s naming of them, then who truly rules this world?

  Is the plot only against Tembujin? Or, as is much more likely, is it a plot against me? And its goal? Not difficult; the lust for power corrupts, and breeds treachery, and the allegiance of the Empire has always gone to the strongest.

  Andrion returned the salute of a sentry and thrust Solifrax away. Thunder quivered in the ancient stones of the palace. Lightning flared, and a dim garden leaped into sudden color, asters as red as blood nodding in a gusty wind. Andrion’s black cloak fluttered, encompassing Tembujin. Tembujin thrust it away.

  Another sentry, another salute, and the broad wooden doors of the first wife’s antechamber slammed open. The wide, well-lit room was scattered with tables, chairs, and bright faces turning toward the doorway, expectant and wary both.

  Two women sat on either side of a tapestry frame, needles frozen in midair, bits of bright yarn dangling. Tembujin’s wife Valeria gulped at her husband’s expression, cornflower-blue eyes frightened. “Another attack,” she stated under her breath.

  “Ursbei is dead,” Tembujin returned, flat.

  Instinctively Valeria gathered her children, three high-planed bronze faces; Ethan ran across the room and threw himself into her lap, sending a ripple through his siblings. The mound of Valeria’s belly concealed Tembujin’s fifth child.

  Andrion’s wife Sumitra looked up. Her fine black brows rose in silent query, but did not try to breach his shell. She set her needle aside and clasped her hands in her lap, waiting with patient dignity. Always waiting.

  “Damn you, Tembujin,” Andrion said. He released the falcon-winged brooch he wore and threw his cloak down, standing braced in chiton and belt and sword.

  Tembujin, sworn at often enough, leaned against a table, crossed his trousered legs, crossed his arms before him and scowled. “Yes, certainly I staged an attack on myself!”

  “By Ashtar’s golden tresses, man, I believe nothing of the sort! What I do believe is that there are those who think your influence too great. Who resent your having sons …” He cast a quick glance toward Sumitra. Her lips thinned, but she did not flinch.

  Go ahead, say it. “I offered in the council six days ago to make Ethan my heir; he is my half-sister Sarasvati’s son and the grandson of Bellasteros my father, who freed the Empire from the corrupt dynasty that had ruled it. But Ethan is illegitimate, they said. He looks like a Khazyari, they said. He lives with you, they said.”

  “And I have contaminated him with my barbarian ways?”

  Andrion made a sharp, swift gesture, a sword thrust of denial, and looked away from the accusing face.

  On the tapestry before him was stitched the face of his father Marcos Bellasteros, the Sardian conqueror, and the face of his mother Danica, Queen of Sabazel, engaged in some heroic quest. And yet his official mother was Chryse, the gentle sparrow who had been Bellasteros’s first wife, who had raised his children by other women after her own daughter Chrysais had married far away.

  A proper tangle for the genealogists, he thought. As was Tembujin’s family, for Valeria nurtured her husband’s two sons by other women as well as her own: Ethan, Sarasvati’s son; and Zefric, the son of Dana of man-forbidden Sabazel.

  Dana. The name was a razor slicing Andrion’s senses. From birth I have been beguiled by the daughters of Ashtar; my only child is Dana’s, a girl, the heir of Sabazel, not the Empire. My wife sits, her hands clasped in her lap, holding nothing. A petty issue. A vital one.

  Who to blame? Tembujin? Sumitra? The gods? Or myself? he asked. And answered, no; anger and hatred are strong liquors that in the end rot w
hat they touch. He inhaled deeply, damping his frustration. And yet his sinews still prickled with the sour odor of sorcery.

  Tembujin shook back his tail of hair. “Can you not control your rabble and protect your sworn ally? What must I do to prove fealty?”

  Dryly, Andrion replied, “Call me; ‘My lord’?”

  Tembujin’s eye glinted, not without humor.

  “Do you mistrust me so easily?” Andrion retorted. “We passed too many tests of loyalty in the war to doubt each other now.”

  Tembujin looked down at his felt boots, discomfited.

  “Did I not defend you,” Andrion continued remorselessly, “when some said your half-brother died from poison?”

  “Kem, my only legal son, would be my heir in any event.”

  Yes, Andrion thought, we make our children our pawns. Valeria laid her cheek against Kem’s head and looked ruefully up at him. Jeweled necklaces clanked on her bodice as the visible signs of Tembujin’s power. No, Andrion could not blame her either.

  He raised Sumitra’s hand and kissed its satin warmth, drawing her eyes to his. They were dark, ebony dusted with cinnamon and gold. They were deep, summoning… .

  A knock at the door. Andrion straightened, stifling another oath. Tembujin lounged against the table, sending petitions and maps scuffling backward, and with elaborate indifference began to toy with a malachite paperweight.

  A sentry announced, “The high priest of Harus, my lord.”

  Well, Andrion thought with a sigh, one cannot know a god by his minions. Fortunately so, for some call me a god. He set his face in affable lines, and when the fat little man bustled in, sweeping an acolyte in his train, he nodded with all the courtesy due a priest of the falcon deity.

  Bonifacio settled his robes, bowed deeply, bent over backward to look Andrion in the face. “I heard of the attack, my lord, and came as quickly as I could. Surely these evildoers have not injured our beloved emperor?”

  “I am not the one who was attacked.”

  “No, no, of course, my lord, it was your vassal, who lives by your generosity upon our northern moors—”