Description
The journey is over. The quest for the Sun fallen to ruin.
From the depths of a hopeless swamp, Iliff condemns himself. But when he encounters a dethroned king and his war-torn subjects, he stirs to new purpose: to protect these good people from the darkness of the world. It will be his redemption. Or will it? For the more fiercely Iliff struggles to fortify their light, the greater looms the enemy’s shadow — and his own.
Lights and Shadows is preceded by Escape and followed by Final Passage.
Appropriate for ages 10 and older
The Prisoner and the Sun II
Lights and Shadows
by Brad Magnarella
Copyright 2011 Brad Magnarella
Possum Creek Publishing
Electronic Edition
For my niece and nephew
Chapter 1
Iliff’s feet pounded the gray forest floor; his bag slammed against his back. He considered throwing the bag off, but the fire would not allow him even a moment’s pause. Nearer and louder did it rage, so close that it no longer felt like heat, but something hard and sharp. It tore his skin and ignited the hairs across his arms. Somewhere beyond the fire the river ran deep and cold. He looked for an opening but there weren't any.
Iliff veered and pressed deeper into the forest. He cut through a thick growth of trees. Their closeness broke up the wind and fire, but it slowed him as well. And he was tiring. The adrenaline that had propelled him those first miles was gone. His breaths tore in and out.
A little farther, he urged himself. Just a little farther.
But he did not know what he was holding out for. The situation was more hopeless than ever. He could not see the fire, but he could feel it on his back, could see smoke storming past. The wind pummeled him suddenly and trees to each side burst into flame. Fire rained down.
Iliff did not see the stream until he stumbled into it. The cold that spilled inside his boots felt delicious. He stooped to splash water over his head and arms, but he had to keep moving. The fire was already rising from both banks. He ran with the current in great marching strides. The weight of the water pulled on his legs, but it was the only element the fire could not incinerate in an instant.
The stream spilled downhill and Iliff lunged and splashed down with it. Gradually, the heat fell away. He allowed himself a moment’s hope, but when he turned to look, the fire reared and surged forth to send a stand of blazing trees crashing into the water. He retrained his focus on the falling streambed. He had to keep his footing.
No sooner had he thought this than his boot skidded on a slime-matted rock. His leg swooped from under him; the other leg followed. Iliff landed hard on his back, the impact jarring his vision, his thoughts. He covered his head with his arms.
But he was still moving. His forward momentum and the steep gradient had carried him into a rushing slide. Down the streambed he went, faster and faster. He tried to slow himself but could gain no traction; he tried to steer but had no control. He rattled down a cascade of stony shelves, in as much danger now of being battered as he had been of burning alive.
He strained to keep his head above the stones and thrashing water. Images of the forest shook in his sight. Then Iliff saw something he had not seen in a long time—the color green. But it was not the mystical green of Adramina’s eyes or the burgeoning green of the forest. This green appeared dark, almost black.
Iliff fell from another shelf and became aghast when he did not land. He had been thrown into open space. Mud sluiced around him. He looked down and saw water far below, vast and brown, but could not tell how deep it might be.
He kicked hard and swung his arms until he was upright.
Shooting beneath the water, he encountered resistance almost immediately, but it was the soft resistance of mud and decomposition. Iliff sank into it to his waist, dark peat billowing around him. He wriggled and kicked his way free, then sputtered to the surface. He swam several strokes to the nearest bank and dragged himself onto the marshy ground.
Filthy, in shock, Iliff turned and looked beyond the pool into which he had fallen. The brown waters seeped and spread, flooding the landscape for as far as he could see. Knobby trees huddled on islands of sharp sedges and low plants. Larger trees rose and touched overhead in a sickly canopy where mosses dangled, old and beggarly. The whole place smelled of decay.
Iliff remembered the fire and raised his face to the cascade of mud and water that had deposited him here. The clouds of smoke beyond seemed to come from far away. He did not know whether the fire could reach him here, where the earth was deluged, the air still and leaden.
He moved off, pulling himself through the dense vegetation where he could, wading and swimming where the mounds and strips of soggy land sunk away. When he lifted his dripping bag to his head, he found that the gold crown remained as snug above his ears as when he had placed it there that morning. The discovery gave him odd, though fleeting, comfort.
* * *
For the rest of the day, Iliff slogged and swam through the swamp, moving in as straight a line from the fire as he could. The sky had just begun to dim when he came upon an island that rose higher than the others. A gangly tree presided over the swell of sedge and boggy shrub.
Iliff climbed the island and set his bag beside the tree. He draped his cloak over a low branch and poured the water from his boots. When he took off his clothes to wring them, he was horrified to discover his torso mottled with black worms. They burst red as he tore them away. A cloud of insects descended then, blanketing and biting his blood-smeared skin. He slapped at them while struggling to get his sopping clothes back on. He pulled the cloak on last, stuffing the hems beneath himself where he sat and drawing in the hood.
As night descended, Iliff became aware of a fiery haze. It showed through the fabric of his cloak, high and to his right, far away. He thought he could hear distant crackling, but the sounds of the swamp, sinister and swelling, soon arrested his attention. Unseen creatures glugged in the foul waters and emerged dripping onto the shore below. A shrill cry from the island’s lone tree made Iliff start up; several other cries sounded in answer, all seeming to converge overhead. At one point something large and long wend through the sharp grass. It stopped at Iliff’s bag and circled it before slithering off.
Iliff hugged his knees and breathed the damp, dark air inside his cloak. He thought of all the places he had been, both pleasant and unpleasant, and wished he could be in any one of them now. He thought of all the company he had known, both kind and corrupt, and wished he could know their company once more. He thought of Troll and his heart broke. In his mind he watched the flames roaring up violent and red. He watched them consume his path to the Sun as well as the path back to the people and places he so longed for now. He watched them swallow Troll.
Then the fire faded and he saw the brown waters as they had appeared to him from below the surface. And he knew with a horrible certainty that this place would be his home now. There was nowhere else for him.
And though Iliff’s sobs were mostly silent that night, the weight of them caused the entire island to shudder.
Chapter 2
Iliff awoke with a gasp. Gray morning sat damp and heavy on his cloak. Remembering where he was, he pushed his head through the cloak’s hood and peered out. The island showed wet and dark around him. There were no signs of the biting insects or the creatures that had emerged during the night. Iliff prodded the sedge grass with his boot. Nothing stirred.
He looked off over the waters. A thick mist rose and drifted, making it appear for a moment that his island was moving. But, of course, it was no
t. When Iliff peered up, he was surprised to see small flakes of ash. They fell around him, soft and silent. He listened intently but could no longer hear the fire. It had moved on.
Iliff knelt and looked through his sodden bag. He had food, but not much, and a full skin of water. He removed Troll’s knife without looking at it and slid it inside his belt. He would need to dry the spare clothes. There was the tinder pouch from Adramina, though little good it had done him. Little good anything from her had done him. He came to the trowel last and pulled it out.
It served you well once, she had said. But it is a tool you no longer need.
He looked out again. The mist was breaking up to reveal the flat brown water, the scatterings of poor islets. Remembering the worms, he reached under his tunic and felt the tender welts. How far could he get before they drained the rest of him? he wondered. To that distant strip of land? Perhaps. But what would he be any closer to?
Iliff stood with his trowel and went in search of materials for his shelter.
* * *
There were no seasons in the swamp. Airless nights grayed into long damp days, one after another, without change or cease. Months passed, perhaps years; Iliff could no longer tell.
He passed the time beneath his lean-to at the top of the island. He looked out from under the dripping sheaves of fronds, from the layers of dried and drying mud that shelled his body and hid his blood heat. The image of the swamp, brown and unchanging, stained his eyes and mind.
When he moved from his shelter at all it was usually to eat. A variety of large catfish wallowed in the shallows around the island, their worm-like tendrils pushing and probing the muck. He speared them with a sharpened stick and ate them raw. Their flesh was soggy, their flavor foul. He could feel them rotting inside him for days after, but it was all there was.
* * *
In the dark nights of those first months, he dreamt of the prison. He dreamt that he was back inside, back on the repair crew. He could see the men who prepared the mortar, the mixer at the center of everything, pushing and pulling and doling it out, the man who ferried the boards to and fro. He could hear the sanders on either side of him. And then he would take one of the boards and scrape up the mortar and press his trowel deep into the stone. He would seal the fissures, one after another, until there were no more fissures, until that world was solid again, and unending.
He dreamt of Troll too sometimes. But he never saw him. He could only hear his harsh breaths rising from behind. Sometimes they threatened, sometimes they pleaded. Every time, Iliff ran from them.
Iliff had only succumbed to his grief that first night. After that he had been too occupied with building his shelter and finding food and keeping the swamp’s bloodletting creatures off of him. Then, little by little, beneath the sameness of the view from the island, beneath the weight of the mud that encased him, he stopped feeling altogether. And in those scarce moments when his mind stirred enough to consider his condition, he thought it better that he should not feel.
* * *
The afternoon Iliff’s shelter broke apart, he had been tying fresh fronds to the roof and leaned too hard against it. He looked from his toppled shelter to the swollen sky. He hurried to right the main supports and retie the broken lashing. He picked up the limbs that had fallen away and worked them into the walls and over the roof as best he could. The rains fell sharp and hot. By the time he had the fronds back in place, the mud on his body was breaking up and dissolving away. The sight of his own skin startled him and drove him under the shelter.
When the rains tapered, he went to the bank where he gathered his mud. He lathered it on but it would not stay. The mud slipped and spilled from his pale skin. He looked to the steaming waters where the insects would soon rise in their dark clouds.
He took a fistful of mud and flung it at the swamp. “Curse you,” he muttered. They were the first words he had spoken in months.
With his second fistful he directed himself to the old man in the prison: “Curse you.” Then to Adramina, and with even more venom: “Curse you.”
Each time, the swamp swallowed the mud and fell dormant again.
Iliff leaned over the bank and glared at the shallows. The tips of his dark hair raked the water.
“And you,” he said. “Curse you most of all.”
He reared his head and spat on his reflection.
That night Iliff stirred from sleep and lifted his caked hands through the dark to his temples. His hair was stiff with mud now, but he had seen them, the silver threads amid the tangles of black. For a moment he had not recognized the image in the water as himself.
How long had he been here?
* * *
Iliff opened his eyes the next morning to see an island where one should not have been. It stood between the near island, with its huddle of trees, and the strip of land farther out. The new island bore no growth. It showed only as a mound, dark and glistening.
Iliff watched it for a long while. He had all but decided that this was how the islands formed—dark masses rising from the depths—when the mound moved. It pushed away in a brown swirl and drifted, then stopped and contracted so that it sat a bit lower in the water. Iliff stood and made his way to the bank. The mound was massive, nearly as large as his own island. The wonder of it excited Iliff’s senses. And then, with barely a sound, the mound disappeared.
Iliff remained at the water’s edge. He scanned the reach of the swamp. He walked slow paces up and down. Gradually the day lightened, then grayed and darkened. He retired to his shelter.
Whatever it had been was gone.
The following morning the mound was back and even closer. Iliff crept from his shelter and watched from behind a sweep of fronds. The mound just sat there in the mist, inscrutable and unmoving. Iliff watched it the morning long, until it drifted and fell beneath the waters again.
Iliff slept little that night. For the first time since arriving in the swamp, he looked forward to the new day. But there was no mound the next morning. Iliff passed the entire day watching, but the swamp appeared as it always had. Nothing rose to challenge its sameness.
The mound did not return the following day or the next or for several days after that. When ten days had passed, Iliff decided to stop looking.
He lay in his shelter, listening to the low noises of night, breathing in the decay around him. He could feel the swollen ground sinking beneath his weight. And for the first time, he realized that this place that had always looked the same to him was in fact drowning. Dying of its own stagnancy. It had just been happening too slowly for him to notice.
And you’re dying inside of it, he told himself.
* * *
The next morning, Iliff ventured to the nearest island and returned with several long branches, which he laid in a row near the water. He hacked them to length with his trowel and carved notches near the ends with Troll’s knife. He fashioned two crossbeams from smaller branches and lashed the whole together with braided strips of frond. Near day’s end he dragged the raft to the shallows and stepped aboard. The raft tipped and tottered but stayed afloat.
It’s one thing to plan to leave, he thought that night. It’s quite another to know where to go. He wondered about his appeals and whether they still had any value. Or ever had. There were still two left.
“Adramina,” he called into the dark. His voice sounded naked to him. “I don’t know whether you remember me. Many years ago I fell into your dwelling. You nursed me to health and set me on the path to the Sun. Like Salvatore before me. But I lost the path at the outset. Then lost it again and again and… but you know this. That’s why you didn’t answer my first plea.”
He almost stopped himself.
“I appeal to you again,” he continued. “Though not to show me the way to the Sun. I’m not worthy of the Sun, I know. I’m not Salvatore. I wish only to be shown the way out of this dying place, to be shown to where I might know life again. Whatever your guidance, I promise to heed it.”
With a sigh, Iliff rolled onto his side and tucked his packed bag beneath his head.
Chapter 3
That night Iliff dreamt he was sitting beneath his shelter, watching the brown waters. They coursed around the island in thick, lapping swells, as though a strong current were pushing past. And then Iliff realized that it was not the water that was moving, but the island beneath him. No, not his island. He was atop the strange mound, the one that had appeared several days before. He felt it bulging beneath him, surging forward.
“Let it carry you,” said a woman’s voice.
Iliff awoke with a start. The morning was damp and misty. He rose and looked out over the same still waters.
He speared a catfish for his breakfast and smeared a fresh layer of mud over his body. He set his fishing spear on the raft. Back at the shelter, he pressed the gold crown down to his ears and lifted the packed bag onto his shoulder. He looked around one final time. He would not miss this place.
Iliff worked the raft into the water. Standing at the raft’s center, he shoved off with a long branch that he had shaped into a pole. The raft dipped and slid into the mist. He steered toward the near island, though he had no idea where he was going. His appeal to Adramina had been as fruitless as the last, it seemed. Now he had only an urge guiding him, an urge to enter the landscape that had become so permanent in his eyes and mind and push beyond it.
The raft rounded the near island, and there sat the mound. Solid and silent. As though it had been waiting for him.
It heaved away at his approach, causing the waters to roil and lap off in a broad wake. Iliff watched the mound recede, watched something flick up several meters behind it and lash the waters. The mound headed toward the distant strip of land. It slowed and drifted along its length.
Iliff leaned into his pole and pushed the raft into the mound’s wake.
Lights and Shadows (The Prisoner and the Sun #2) Page 1