Shadowlith (Umbral Blade Book 1)

by Stuart Thaman

  “From up there?” Alster asked in disbelief.

  Elsey nodded.

  “He’s dead?” Alster wasn’t sure what to make of the news. In less than a day, his already tumultuous life had changed wildly. “How did it happen?” he asked.

  “He just fell,” Elsey lied. She avoided Alster’s gaze, content to stare at the rocks near her feet.

  “Should we…” Alster’s voice wavered. “Should we bury him or something?” he asked awkwardly.

  “I don’t think we brought a shovel,” Elsey reminded him.

  “Where is he?”

  “Over here,” Elsey said grimly, leading the way. She showed him to the other side of the small rise where Rai’s corpse was still crumpled in a grotesque heap.

  Alster took his walking stick from their horse and hobbled over to Rai’s dead body. “He’s dead,” he said, though he had no idea what else he had expected to find. He nudged the body with his stick. “We should take his cloak,” he told Elsey.

  “You’d steal from the dead?” Elsey asked.

  Alster shivered as a fresh gust of wind bit at his skin. “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Help me take it off him.”

  An hour or so later, Elsey and Alster sat at the edge of the ocean with all of Rai’s belongings divided between them. Elsey held the man’s bow and quiver, but she felt like a thief, and a murderous one at that. She didn’t even know how to shoot the weapon.

  “We know where the Blightstone Gate is,” Alster said quietly. His mind reeled with unknown possibilities. Without Rai to guide them, he wasn’t sure where to go, though he saw no reason to stop searching for Alistair the Fourth’s tomb.

  “Sort of,” Elsey responded. “We know which direction to go, but where do we go after that?”

  Alster thought for a moment. “Rai said the soldiers at the Blightstone Gate might recognize me and allow us through,” he said. “Maybe we could get one of them to lead us to Mournstead.”

  Elsey smiled. “Rai said the soldiers would recognize the symbol on the gauntlets and allow us to cross, not that they would recognize your face,” she corrected.

  “Well that may not work,” Alster laughed. “But we will never know until we try.”

  Elsey did not object.

  “I want to find his greaves,” Alster added quietly.

  “When should we leave?” Elsey asked. Despite her relatively massive amount of warm clothing, she still shivered whenever the wind found her skin.

  With the help of his walking stick, Alster got to his feet. He brushed off some of the dirt and frost from Rai’s heavy cloak. “We should leave now. It will be warmer farther from the coast.” He looked back toward the field of pillars marking Scalder’s Inlet. “I don’t think we should stay here.”

  Elsey nodded. “Eastward, then,” she said. After she had helped Alster climb atop their horse, she set their course toward the rising sun. She had to shield her eyes from the light, but it felt right to be moving. It felt right to leave behind the corpse of the man she had killed.

  WESTHAVEN

  Palos shifted from side to side in his saddle. His back hurt and his legs were sore. It had been three weeks since he had set out from Karrheim, and those long weeks in the saddle had wreaked havoc on his spine. Palos loved to ride, but he hadn’t taken such a long journey since his youth, and he was too proud to ask Lieutenant Marius for advice. The younger man seemed to love riding for such long distances, somehow immune to the effects of the saddle.

  On the horizon, the once-marvelous city of Westhaven still stood, marking the edge of the Rift. “We’re here,” Palos announced. He had been to Westhaven only once before, and the city unnerved him.

  Holte sighed. “How long do you plan on staying?”

  “Not a moment longer than we must,” Palos replied. He turned to Marius at his left. “Requisition the supplies we need and exchange any of the horses who might be flagging,” he ordered.

  “Yes, my lord,” Marius replied. “We should depart Westhaven within two days,” he said.

  “Good,” Palos nodded. He urged his mount forward.

  The road to Westhaven was well-worn, but it suffered from a serious lack of maintenance. Once, before the Rift had torn Vecnos apart, Westhaven had been known by a different name. Karrheim had always been the seat of kings, but Westhaven had been the administrative capital of Vecnos, housing the bureaucrats, nobles, the royal treasury, and an expansive military academy. After much of the city had fallen into the Rift, almost all of the populace had fled.

  Two great statues marked the entrance to the city. Palos watched the marble-hewn kings staring down at him as he passed beneath, their stony visages fixed into disapproving snarls for eternity. Ahead of the statues, the streets of Westhaven were nearly empty. A few citizens, almost all of them government officials paid by King Gottfried to maintain the city, carried on with their daily tasks, though none of them stopped to take notice of the small army.

  In the center of the city, a wondrous marble fountain stood, its central pillar reaching into the sky. Behind the fountain, a cold, grey, stone wall marked the edge of the Rift. Guardhouses had been erected every hundred yards or so along the wall, and Palos saw a few soldiers sitting in them playing dice or drinking.

  “Hello!” Palos called to the nearest guardhouse. “Soldier!”

  One of the men looked over the side of the guardhouse with a frown. He wore a chainmail hauberk under a blue and white tabard, though nothing else about the man indicated he was prepared to fight. “What do you want?” the man called back.

  “The stables,” Palos replied. “Which direction to the stables?”

  The man pointed north along the wall with a lazy flick of his hand before returning back to whatever game it was he played with the other soldiers in the guardhouse.

  Palos sighed. He considered chastising the man for his insolence, but he knew it would change nothing. The men stationed to watch the Rift had one of the most boring jobs he could imagine. Few people ever tried to cross the Rift, and they certainly did not attempt such a journey near a town full of royal guards.

  It didn’t take long for Palos to find Westhaven’s garrison. The garrison commander, a middle-aged man with a bald head, bushy eyebrows, and a gut that extended far beyond his belt, came out to greet them. “Welcome to Westhaven!” the commander said jovially, waving to Palos and his entourage of officers.

  “Well met,” Palos called back to him. He dismounted and handed his reins to an attendant who came up to meet him.

  “One of my men watching the road told me of your arrival, though we have had little time to prepare a proper welcome,” the commander said.

  Palos shook the man’s hand. He smelled like ale and old cheese, and his fingers were greasy. “Our journey has been unannounced,” the lord told him. “Our orders are only known to myself and a handful of people other than King Gottfried. Tell me, how are your supplies?” He puffed out his chest as he spoke, emboldened by his royal orders.

  The garrison commander nodded curtly, letting the questions in his mind go unanswered. “Only a few hundred people still bother to live in this strange place,” he replied. “We have everything you need and then some. My men will see to it that your contingent is well-stocked and back on the road in no time.”

  “Good,” Palos said. “Make sure they have plenty to eat and drink, and we may need to borrow a few of your horses.”

  “Certainly, my lord,” the man said. “Our stable houses fifty at the moment, each animal bred for war.”

  Palos nodded. He gazed around the city, taking in the sights, what few they were, from where he stood. The military complex was impressive, large enough to rival some of the buildings in Karrheim, but everything else was old and dilapidated. “It has been many years since I have visited Westhaven,” Palos said. “The last time I was here, some old lunatic kept going on about some method he had for bottling the Rift. I wonder, is that man still alive?”

  The commander smiled. “You met o
ld Master Reiken?” the man said with a laugh. “He’s been dead for ten years or more, but his students still live here.”

  “Students?” Palos asked curiously.

  “A damned cult if you ask me,” the commander replied. “Come, I’ll take you to them. Always a sight to see, that lot.”

  Confident that Holte and Marius would handle all of the important work to be done in Westhaven, Palos shrugged. He followed the commander a little ways farther north along the wall until they reached the ruin of what appeared to be an old mansion. The Rift had torn the building down the center, leaving gaping holes in the roof and a stone wall running through what used to be the kitchen.

  “This place hasn’t changed a bit,” Palos remarked.

  The garrison commander walked up to the mansion’s front door and pushed it open. A small splinter of wood came off near one of the hinges as the door swung loudly inward. “Hello?” the portly man called inside. They could hear a few people shuffling about somewhere to their right, but no one responded. “This way,” the man said, leading Palos toward a staircase which had been built against the city wall.

  “You know these people?” Palos asked. The whole building reeked of mold. He couldn’t imagine visiting the place often, much less living in such squalor.

  “I deal with them from time to time,” the commander replied. “Every few weeks they seem to set something on fire, though they continue to claim they’re closer and closer to whatever they insist they’re trying to achieve.”

  When they reached the top of the staircase, Palos was reminded of why he had wanted to make a stop in Westhaven. There were other garrisons he could have visited, but Westhaven was the only one built adjacent to the Rift. From the top of the wall, the Rift was magnificent. Tendrils of purple and black magic writhed in the fissure below like the arms of some giant sea creature.

  All along the massive scar, pockets of dark gas pulsed from the ground, ripping free from bubbling blisters every few minutes. “A true sight to behold, yes?” the garrison commander mused. He smiled as he gazed upon the Rift, surveying it as though it was some prized tract of land he was considering selling.

  “Indeed,” Palos replied absentmindedly. To his left, a handful of cult-like alchemists worked busily in a wooden hut constructed partway over the wall itself. From their workstation, several buckets hung on ropes down into the Rift. The purple mist lingered around the buckets, some of it collecting in the bottoms of the containers. As Palos watched, one of the men hoisted a bucket up into the workstation. Moving gingerly, the man placed the bucket beneath a large glass plate where the mist began to condense into a liquid. At the end of the glass, the liquid ran off into an oddly shaped alembic.

  “How goes the progress?” the commander called to the men.

  One of the alchemists looked up from a beaker of the purple liquid with a puzzled expression on his face. “Progress is not the child of interruption,” he chastised before returning to his work.

  “I sit on the king’s high court,” Palos told the men. “I’m sure Gottfried would be interested in knowing what you do here,” he said. That got their attention.

  The man watching the liquid condense turned to regard them once more, his expression promptly softening. “Apologies, my lord,” he began. “We have been working to understand the nature of the Rift. We want to see if it can be harnessed for practical applications.”

  “See?” Palos said with a condescending smile. “That wasn’t so hard. Now tell me, what sort of applications do you expect to discover?”

  The man shifted nervously from foot to foot. “Do you wish to see a demonstration?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Palos was quick to reply.

  The man turned to a wooden crate resting on a bench behind him. Inside, padded with straw, rested a dozen or so glass orbs filled with the condensed liquid, each one roughly the size of an apple. Moving slowly, he took one of the vials from the box and delicately brought it over to Palos.

  “Do you think you can throw it across the Rift?” the man asked, presenting the sphere in the palm of his hand.

  Palos nodded. The Rift was deep, but it was not very wide. “What will happen?” he asked. He held the orb carefully, afraid the cork on the top might leak if he tipped it accidentally.

  “We never know for sure,” the man answered. “Sometimes the result is quite impressive, though not always.”

  “Let’s see,” Palos said. He heaved the glass orb across the Rift as hard as he could. The purple liquid sloshed as the sphere traveled through the air, and some of the taller tendrils shrank back from the object’s path.

  The glass shattered on a ruined cobblestone street on the other side of the Rift. As it exploded, a dark, circular area of shadow splattered against the stones. At once, the ring of shadows erupted into motion. Grasping hands of congealed shadow reached upward, thrashing at the air, searching for something to rip apart.

  The shadows disappeared a few seconds later with a sizzle. “Very impressive,” Palos said, truly amazed. He imagined what would have happened had an enemy soldier, one of Hademar’s men, had been standing there.

  “Thank you, my lord,” the man said rather jovially. “Not every sphere produces the same results, though the shadow pool, as we call it, seems to be the most common.”

  “How can you tell which result will come from which orb?” Palos asked. The possibility of using such missiles in battle intrigued him greatly.

  “As of now, we cannot,” the alchemist said. He showed another orb to Palos, one with a more reddish hue than purple. “The red ones are mixed with copper. When they land, they usually set things on fire,” he explained.

  “And how many such orbs have you created?”

  “Eighteen,” the man said proudly. “Well, seventeen now,” he clarified.

  “Excellent,” Palos said. “I will be requisitioning them for official use. Pack them as best you know how and have them delivered to Captain Holte, my second.”

  The garrison commander beamed. “You see why we let them continue their work,” he said happily. “Once the formula is perfected, Westhaven will be an important city again.”

  Palos imagined hundreds of stations built all along the wall to pull the mysterious steam from the Rift. With more alchemists and glass blowers, hundreds of the orbs could be manufactured each day for use in the coming war. “Westhaven is important, commander,” Palos said with genuine sincerity.

  “Thank you, my lord,” the man replied.

  Alster and Elsey headed inland before they continued eastward. They moved away from the towering ice, the field of obelisk-bound shades, and, most of all, the biting cold. Several days after they left the ruins of Alistair’s former command post, they decided to depart from the Frosted Coast altogether, moving far inland and soon losing sight of the towering mountain of ice floating upon the sea.

  Away from the cold, the landscape changed drastically. Happy to be free of their heavy cloaks, they returned to the scrubland south of the forest which dominated central Vecnos.

  Elsey barely spoke as the two of them journeyed. She kept to herself, mostly walking several paces ahead of Alster on his horse, and even when they stopped to eat she hardly said a word.

  “How long has it been since we left the estate?” Alster asked casually as they watched the horse drink from a small stream they had been following.

  Elsey looked up at him with dull eyes. “A month?” she guessed. Neither of them had been counting the days.

  “You’re probably right,” Alster agreed. “Sometimes it feels longer than that.”

  Elsey nodded.

  “We probably only have another week’s worth of food left,” Alster said with a sigh. He rummaged through the saddlebag, separating the dried fruit and nuts from the rest of the venison Rai had hidden from their strange guide. “We could make it last for ten days if we cut back.” He looked at the quiver Elsey still wore on her back. “Do you know how to hunt?” he asked.

  “My father
taught me how to trap mice in the stables,” she replied. “I’m not very useful.”

  Alster didn’t know what to say.

  “We passed a small road a couple days ago, remember?” Alster finally said to change the subject. “It has to lead to a town. Maybe we can trade something for more food,” he said.

  “Sure,” Elsey agreed. She didn’t look up from the stream.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Alster blurted. He regretted being so tactless almost instantly, but he let the question stand.

  Finally, Elsey brought her eyes up to meet Alster’s gaze. Her visage hardened as she formulated her response. “I killed Rai,” she finally said, her voice low.

  “What?”

  “Rai didn’t fall from the ledge. I pushed him,” she declared.

  Though she tried to keep her voice steady and her resolve intact, Alster could see she struggled against the emotion which was welling up inside her. “Why?” he muttered, clearly dumbfounded.

  “Didn’t you ever think it was strange how he just offered to help you find the tomb of The Shadow King without asking for anything in return?” she explained. Her voice rose as she spoke, like she was trying her hardest to keep her emotions in check.

  “Well,” Alster began, but he stopped. He had considered the possibility at first, but the thought of finding Alistair’s armor had easily overshadowed all the doubts he had felt. “Now that I think about it, you’re right. We should not have trusted him so readily.”

  “He was going to betray you,” Elsey said forcefully, her brow furrowed with anger.

  “It’s over now,” is all Alster could think to say.

  “I killed him,” she repeated. “He said something about chests full of gold being in the tomb, about betraying us, and I pushed him off the ledge.”

  “You-”

  “He would have killed us both once he got the gold!” Elsey shouted. The lie tasted sour in her mouth.

  “No one will ever know,” Alster told her quietly.

  “I will,” Elsey was quick to respond. “I see him falling from the ledge every time I close my eyes. I see Rai’s broken body next to the ocean. I can’t get it out of my head!”