Unbroken Chain: The Darker Road

by Jaleigh Johnson

  “The flock is short one blade,” the witch said. “Always alone, always left behind. Not tonight and not ever again. Maybe Daruk’s song did serve a purpose.”

  “Daruk’s song? Stop—Ilvani, wait. What am I walking into?”

  She looked back at him over her shoulder. “A ride you’ll never forget,” she said. “Are you afraid?”

  He shook his head.

  She scowled. “Then stop making sounds. Come with me, so we can all be at peace tonight.”

  He followed her without another word, but he unlooped his chain from his belt and held it taut between his hands. The wind wafted snow crystals across the open ground and into their faces. Soon Ashok’s exposed skin was numb from the cold.

  This lack of feeling unnerved him and made him feel displaced from his flesh. They couldn’t be away from the fire too long. The cold was becoming dangerous out here on the deep open plain, and Tuva was right about the snow blindness. A more violent wind could make a seasoned tracker lose his way and freeze to death.

  They reached a dip in the land—the remnants of a dry streambed. Boulders and dead brush had filled the streambed long ago. Ilvani went down on her knees and moved aside one of the lighter stones.

  “This is the hard part,” she said. “It may not work.”

  “What won’t work?” Ashok kneeled beside her. “If we stay in the snow like this for very long, we won’t be able to walk back to camp.”

  Ilvani closed her eyes. She seemed to be concentrating on something very hard. She set the sphere in the snow and removed the glove from her left hand. She held her hand up in the air between them.

  At first, Ashok didn’t comprehend what she meant by the gesture, but then she looked down at his hands. He let go of his chain and took his gloves off. He raised his right hand but hesitated with his palm an inch from hers.

  With a quick, striking movement, she grabbed his hand. Only then did Ashok realize her other hand rested on the stones, the remnants of what looked like a funeral cairn.

  Energy pulsed through his body. Ashok’s heart stuttered, but he kept hold of her hand. The blowing snow froze in her hair, making stiff rods around her face. Her lips were blue as she spoke the words of a chant. The pulse came again, and Ashok had to close his eyes against the force of it even as he reveled in the awakening. The sensation was like plunging his frozen body into scalding water. He came alive again. He opened his eyes and tilted his face to the sky to savor the moment, though he did not understand its purpose.

  By the light of Ilvani’s sphere, he saw the rider.

  The human lay slumped across his horse, his arms dangling aside his head. Blood streamed from an arrow wound in his horse’s flank. The beast took a step forward and collapsed, dumping its rider in the snow.

  Ashok pulled away from Ilvani and jumped to his feet. He ran to the man’s side, but he didn’t immediately see a wound. He brushed aside the human’s dark hair to examine his head and feel for a life beat at his neck.

  The man opened his eyes and spoke at the same time Ashok felt the dead, hollow space where his heart should have been beating.

  “Palum,” he said, “have you come to take me to the army?”

  Ashok breathed in and out, harsh breaths that formed steam clouds. It took every bit of discipline he’d ever learned not to hurl the dead thing away from him and draw his chain to attack. The quavering in its voice stopped him. The thing that had no heartbeat looked at him with such imploring dead eyes that Ashok couldn’t look away.

  “Have you?” The man spoke again, but his words changed to a language Ashok had never heard before.

  “You must answer him,” Ilvani said. “We have to go soon, or they’ll be on the move.”

  “I don’t understand him,” Ashok said. “I don’t understand any of this. That thing shouldn’t be talking. It should be in the ground.”

  “He is,” Ilvani said. She laid her hand against the gravestones. “He sleeps, but he’s not at rest. Two worlds fade into one. Didn’t you hear him call to you?”

  “I heard—” Ashok looked at the dead man’s face, though it unsettled him greatly. The face did look vaguely familiar, and then he remembered his vision, the man who’d reached out his hand before some distant battle.

  If we’re meant to die today …

  “I’m Palum,” Ashok said. The dead man looked at him and for whatever reason saw his friend’s face. When Ashok said the name, the dead man’s eyes filled with tears.

  “I thought … you would leave me behind,” the man said. The language had reverted to Common. “I rode all night to be here, but the brigands were waiting. I managed to evade them, but it was a hard fight.”

  “You were victorious,” Ashok said. “Yet your horse—”

  “Is here,” Ilvani said. She stood up and took the nightmare’s reins. The stallion watched the witch’s movements but allowed her to lead him to Ashok’s side. “You can ride together.”

  The man looked up at the nightmare with an odd expression. “The horse is not … I don’t see it.…”

  “It’s all right,” Ashok said. He draped the man’s arm over his shoulder and looked to Ilvani. She nodded, so he lifted the man to his feet and half carried him to the disguised nightmare. The stallion did not react to the dead man, so Ashok placed him across the nightmare’s back and mounted in front of him. The man’s hands came around his waist in a weak grip. Ashok held on to his arm and guided the nightmare with his legs.

  “Where are we going?” Ashok asked Ilvani.

  She pointed to the north. “Ride fast but not far. You’ll make it in time. I’ll meet you on the other side.”

  The man turned to look at Ilvani. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Hold on tightly,” she said. “You’re almost there.”

  “You heard her,” Ashok whispered to the nightmare, and dug in with his heels. “Let’s see where the ride takes us.”

  The nightmare took off across the snow-covered expanse. The wind turned fierce and drowned out all sound. Ashok could barely see through the blowing snow to keep them pointed north. He had to trust the nightmare to lead them. He felt the heat of the creature’s body and took comfort from that buried fire. They could use it if they had to. Would Ilvani be so warm, walking the plain alone? He had to trust her, too, the same way he trusted that the man clutching him was not some dead yet animated abomination.

  You wanted to walk in Ilvani’s world, Ashok told himself. This might be your one chance to know the world as she knows it.

  When he felt the man’s voice at his ear, a voice with no breath behind it, Ashok gritted his teeth against the wrongness, the need to lash out and destroy.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  Ashok searched his memory for the name the man had called him. “Palum,” he said.

  “That’s right. I thought.… Just now, I thought you were someone else. We will fight together, you and I?”

  “Yes,” Ashok said. To a battle that was already lost. If the man was one of the Tuigan from Daruk’s song, he had no idea that his invasion failed and his people were defeated. All he knew was that he could not bear to be left behind.

  “It would be safer for you to stay here,” Ashok said. He thought the spirit didn’t hear him above the wind, but he answered.

  “To be safe is to lose my soul,” he said. “I am a warrior. I must fight.”

  Ashok felt a chill that had nothing to do with the biting wind pass through him. The man spoke like a shadar-kai. “You’re human,” Ashok said. “You could be anything you wanted.”

  “No. My fate was decided from birth. I will follow its course and be proud.”

  “I’m carrying you to your death,” Ashok whispered. Maybe that was Ashok’s fate—the rider of nightmares, the bringer of death.

  The land angled upward. The nightmare fought its way up a steep hill overlooking a broad valley. Ashok leaned forward with his burden to keep from falling off. When they reached the crest, the nightmare stopped and, with
a startled cry, reared in the air.

  Ashok surged forward to grab the stallion’s neck. His hands brushed the enchanted necklace—it was hot, nearly hot enough to blister flesh. The magic strained to keep the nightmare’s true nature in check.

  It will burn out soon, Ashok realized. The necklace won’t last the journey to Rashemen.

  He would have to deal with that later. For now, he worked to keep the beast from bolting down the hill and leaving them trampled on the plain. After several minutes of curses, cajoling, and threats with his chain, Ashok got the nightmare to keep its four feet on the ground. Only then could he begin to take in what had upset the stallion so violently.

  Behind him, the man loosened his grip on Ashok’s waist and looked over his shoulder across the valley.

  “We arrived in time,” he said, and there was such profound relief in his voice that it almost distracted Ashok from the sight of the vast army spread below them.

  Men and women on horseback, armed for battle, rode in ranks as if they’d been born on the back of a horse.

  There must have been thousands. The ghosts of the Tuigan invaders prepared to follow their leader into battle. Ashok saw the wild exultation on their faces as they slapped blades and rode their horses side by side.

  In the distance, a horn blared. The riders shouted in answer and formed into lines. Their horses reared and neighed in frenzy, eager to run. The nightmare quivered beneath Ashok. The call to battle had infected him.

  “Time to go,” the man said. “Will you ride with me, Palum?”

  Ashok surveyed the steep slope into the valley. It would be a punishing ride, getting down to the army. He grinned and dug his heels into the nightmare’s flank.

  The beast took off at a dangerous gallop. Ashok leaned all the way back in his seat, grinding his legs into the nightmare’s body to keep his balance. Snow and mud flew up around them. Ashok’s teeth clamped together painfully at the jarring motions. Fire burned in his muscles. Then, with a final, wild leap, they were in the valley and riding among the ghost horses and the Tuigan warriors. They saluted him with blades thrust in the air as he rode into their midst.

  A fierce cry ripped from Ashok’s throat. The roar of hoofbeats deafened him. The charging army was a furious storm tearing across the plain to meet its fate. Come what may, the riders were together, and in that breath, they were invincible. Ashok lost himself in that feeling of wholeness, just as he’d once done among the shadar-kai dancers in Ikemmu. Now he was a man among ghosts, but they looked at him and saw—what? Not a shadar-kai but a warrior—his soul marked him as one of their own.

  They rode out of the valley and into blinding snow. Ashok’s vision blurred. He raised a hand to see in the darkness, but there was no path to follow. Reluctantly, he reined in the nightmare and forced him to stop. When the wind died enough that he could see again, Ashok realized the ghost army was gone. He felt behind him, but his passenger had vanished as well.

  Ashok slid off the nightmare’s back and walked a few paces back toward the valley. There were no hoofprints, no signs to mark the horde of invaders as ever having existed.

  He retraced his steps on foot, leading the nightmare. After only a few minutes, he came upon the stone cairn and the dark form of Ilvani crouched in the snow. Ashok sat down beside her and left the nightmare to rest.

  He had too many questions, so he asked the most obvious first. “How did I get back here so quickly?”

  Ilvani regarded him somberly. “I told you. You traveled fast but not far. At the end, he was so close to his army. He just needed a guide.”

  “I touched a spirit tonight,” Ashok said. He looked at his hands. He hadn’t put his gloves back on after touching Ilvani. “I didn’t know it was possible to feel the touch of an undead thing without it corrupting my flesh.”

  “They do corrupt,” Ilvani said. “But they do it insidiously—one small touch, then another and another.”

  “They’re restless. They pull and grab and overwhelm you,” Ashok said, understanding at last what she meant. “It’s enough to drive a person mad.”

  “So they call me.”

  “There’s power in your gifts,” Ashok said. “I’ve seen it and not just tonight.”

  She looked at him curiously. Ashok put his hands on the cairn where the Tuigan warrior’s bones lay. Two worlds overlapping.

  “Eight months ago, when I was imprisoned in the caves, waiting for the shadows to take me, I dreamed …” It was hard for Ashok to speak of it, even after so many months. “I saw my father and”—he would not say Reltnar’s name in front of her, not ever again—“others I’ve killed. They waited to take my soul. Then you came to me in the dark. You drove back the shadows.”

  Ilvani gave him a sympathetic look. “It wasn’t me.”

  “No. I wanted it to be you—I still feel when I look at you that there’s a connection.”

  “It’s safer to think that,” Ilvani said. “He knows that, as well as we do. That’s why He takes different shapes—me, Natan—he takes the pieces he needs and puts them on like puppets on the hand. The game isn’t fair.”

  Ashok nodded, acknowledging her words, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe them, not entirely. It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to accept the weight of Tempus’s presence in his life. Ilvani had been there. She’d come to him in his cell and left her box of ashes. He’d given it back to her, but they’d never spoken of what it contained and how it had saved him, how her forgiveness had saved him. If she hadn’t been there, Ashok would have faded and been condemned to the void, a nightmare realm of lost souls.

  How easily everything could have fallen apart—for himself and for Ikemmu. The shadar-kai constantly stood on the edge of oblivion in more than one sense.

  “Daruk was right,” Ashok said.

  Ilvani scowled. “About what?”

  “That it might all fall apart—Ikemmu, Uwan’s dreams for the city, and the shadar-kai. Tomorrow it could all be gone, and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.” He feared the fate of the city he’d come to call his home, but if Ikemmu fell, it would not represent the worst of his nightmares. As always, he had only to look to that beast of fire and death to find what he most feared.

  When Ashok first began training the nightmare, the beast sent him dreams that invaded his waking life. The nightmare preyed on the fears of his victims, and for most shadar-kai, their worst fear was to fade and lose their souls to the void. In Ashok’s visions, he’d feared losing his friends.

  Skagi, Cree, Ilvani—all those companions he’d grown to trust—he’d never known a bond such as the one he shared with them. They’d seen him through darkness and accepted the best and worst parts of him. He’d already lost too many in the short time he’d lived in Ikemmu.

  Chanoch, Vedoran, Olra—he’d lost his Camborr teacher so quickly, with barely a breath between the thought and the reality. With Chanoch, it had been slow, agonizing hours spent in the dark. Vedoran … Ashok could not summon an image of the warrior’s face without remembering their last embrace, when Ashok had driven a knife through his heart. What if Beshaba never claimed the warrior? Had Ashok condemned Vedoran to the void, his soul gone forever?

  “The people who gave me life and purpose keep dying,” Ashok said. “How do I know their souls reached their gods? That Tuigan warrior wandered for more than a century before he found his final rest.” When I die, no god calls me home, Ashok thought. His father and brothers were still waiting in the shadows for him. He accepted that fate, but he would do anything to spare his friends. “I have to protect them.”

  “You can’t change their fates,” Ilvani said. “Souls slip through our fingers when we try to grab them, just like memories. In the end, they all fade.”

  “Then maybe it would be better if I had no companions at all,” Ashok said, “nothing to touch me.”

  “Completely alone?” Ilvani said. “Then why not fade now and be one with the void?”

  Ashok heard the anger in her voice. �
��What did I do wrong?”

  “I thought you understood,” Ilvani said. “You can’t run from what you are. All you can do is face it. If you think Tempus will comfort you, then turn to Him, but remember what you have right now. The moment is what matters. Only the moment is real.” Her voice quivered. “You have the power to recognize the truth from the shadows. It’s a precious gift, as precious as life.”

  Ashok looked into Ilvani’s eyes and for the first time saw the void that she feared most, the lurking shadows that threatened to swallow her. Ilvani was most afraid of becoming lost in the dark, of not being able to find her way home.

  He didn’t know how to comfort her. He wasn’t made for gestures like that. Even if he was, he didn’t think she would accept them. If he tried to take her hand now, she would retreat.

  He felt along the ground until he found a flat piece of obsidian half-buried in the dirt and snow. He dug it out and held it up so she could see.

  “This stone is real,” he said. “But it came from the funeral cairn, so it belongs to the living and the dead.” He held it out to her, and when she reached out her hand, he pressed the stone between their two palms. The cold, sharp edges dug into their skin, but their hands didn’t touch. He looked toward the valley where the gathered Tuigan ghosts had prepared to ride out to glory. “When you remember this night, remember that those shadows couldn’t touch you. The stone is this moment, here, between us. We are what’s real.”

  “Real,” she echoed. She pressed against the obsidian, and Ashok pressed back, until thin trickles of blood ran down their palms. When he let go, Ilvani kept the stone, holding it in her two hands as if to make it and the blood a part of her. “We walk the darker road,” she said. “There will be more spirits after this night.”

  “You mean because we’re getting closer to Rashemen?” Ashok said. “What will happen to you in that land?”

  “They’re waiting for me,” Ilvani said. She sounded afraid. “The telthors and the storm are waiting to claim their pieces of me.” She closed her eyes and clutched the stone. “I wish we could live in the breath in between. Out of the shadows, away from all the spirits—right here.”