The Shadow King

by Alec Hutson

  A creeping sense of unreality was stealing over Keilan. He remembered now what this girl truly was, yet he was having trouble reconciling what he saw standing beside him with the images seared into his memory of the gaunt, ragged children emerging from their temple of twisted corpses to confront Niara. He watched Ko Yan with uncertainty. Had this child been buried deep within the Chosen for all this time?

  “Your master is gone,” Keilan said lamely, unsure how he should respond to her. “You do not need to bring him tea.”

  She was quiet for another long moment. Then she nodded slowly. “I see.”

  “I brought you here,” Keilan said quickly, gesturing at the shimmering waves. “Do you like it?”

  She pursed her lips, as if considering his question carefully. Her nature seemed to be the complete opposite of his oldest friend – where Sella was wild and impetuous, this girl was measured and thoughtful.

  “Yes,” she said finally. The surf rushed closer again, and she watched the foaming water with a look of concentration as it enveloped her bare feet. “I like it here.” She crouched to examine a small shell that had been left behind as the water receded. “Do you—”

  A sudden explosion of movement beside him sent Keilan stumbling backwards; he cried out in surprise as he lost his balance and fell heavily, his hands sinking into the wet sand.

  Alyanna had appeared as if she had stepped from a crease in the very air, long black hair and purple robes billowing in the wind. Without hesitating, she grabbed the little Shan girl by the scruff of her neck and began dragging her down to the sea.

  “What are you doing?” Keilan cried, lurching back to his feet.

  The sorceress ignored him, just as she was ignoring the girl’s frantic struggles. The child’s legs kicked the air and her arms flailed helplessly as Alyanna carried her closer to the water.

  “Kay-lan!” the Shan girl screamed.

  “Alyanna, stop!” Keilan commanded, running after her.

  The sorceress waded out until the waves surged around her knees. Then she thrust the girl’s head under the water and held it there. Ko Yan’s small hands grabbed desperately at the hem of Alyanna’s sodden robes.

  Sloshing through the swells, Keilan took hold of Alyanna’s arm. “Wait! Don’t do this!” he cried, pulling hard.

  It was like trying to move a mountain. Alyanna did not even take notice of his efforts as she pushed the girl’s head deeper beneath the water. The small fingers clutching at the sorceress’s robes slackened.

  “Alyanna!” he shouted, just before cold hands began to squeeze his lungs. Keilan collapsed in the water, spluttering as he tried to keep his head above the waves. Something was pressing upon his chest, robbing him of his breath.

  “Abominations!” he heard Alyanna shriek, but it came from a great distance, overwhelmed by the roaring in his ears. Darkness bled across his vision and he felt himself sinking . . .

  Keilan came awake gasping for air, his fingers clawing at his throat.

  He tried to sit up, but only managed to smash against someone who had been leaning over him. In the darkness he couldn’t see who it was, but the contact seemed to dislodge something inside him and he managed a ragged, wheezing breath.

  “You!”

  Wizardlight flooded the cavern, the radiance scouring away the darkness. Keilan blinked, momentarily blinded.

  “You dare?”

  The spots faded from his vision. Alyanna loomed above him, crackling with power. Dark lightning crawled along her arms and her hair writhed like it was alive. Her eyes were wide with surprise and anger, and Keilan saw murder in her face.

  Across from her was Nel, and it must have been the knife who he’d collided with when he’d awoken. Her mouth was set and she was brandishing one of her daggers in the direction of the raging sorceress.

  Alyanna gestured towards Nel, and Keilan felt a surge of sorcery. Fear stabbed him.

  “No!” he rasped, certain the knife was about to be torn asunder by the sorceress.

  The sorcery melted away before it could envelop Nel.

  Alyanna’s jaw dropped as Keilan gave a choking cry of relief. The sorceress’s eyes narrowed and a filament of darkness whipped out to wrap itself around Nel, but as the glistening thread touched the knife, it too vanished.

  Nel flinched like she was about to hurl her knife, but then she thought better of it. Instead, she held up the thing in her other hand; whatever it was gleamed white in the harsh wizardlight.

  Bone. She held a knob of bone threaded by a silver chain. Nel was carrying the amulet Senacus had used to hide his power. She must have taken it from the paladin; Keilan remembered dimly that he had seen her scoop something from the ground when she had gone to retrieve the Pure’s white-metal sword from where it had fallen in the lichyard.

  “I was about to destroy one of them,” the sorceress said to Nel with cold fury, stalking closer. Even though she had proven her immunity to sorcery, the knife still took a quick step back.

  “Look at him!” Nel said, gesturing at Keilan with the point of her dagger.

  Alyanna hesitated, her eyes narrowing, as if she expected some trick.

  “Look!” Nel cried, louder than before.

  What is she talking about? Keilan glanced down at himself. Black lines were etched into his skin, crawling up his arms. His hand went to his neck and he felt hard and swollen veins pulsing in his throat. And now that he could breathe again, he noticed the fire coursing through his body. He moaned, his head spinning.

  “He was dying!” Nel cried, and through his haze Keilan felt her beside him, keeping him from toppling over.

  “Touch me again with that thing,” Alyanna hissed, “and I’ll bring this mountain down on top of you!”

  With a snarl of frustration she whirled on her heel and strode away, her wizardlight following her. The shadows rushed in as she departed, swallowing Nel as she knelt beside Keilan.

  “Are you all right?”

  Keilan took a deep, shuddering breath. The pain in his body was slowly abating. “Yes,” he said shakily, reaching out to grip her arm in thanks.

  “I had to wake you,” Nel explained. “I could see that evil swelling in you. I thought you were going to die! I didn’t know what to do, so I touched you both with the bone of the Pure . . .”

  He felt her lift her hand, as if to show him what it held. In the blackness he could not see the amulet, but the dangling chain brushed his leg.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Keilan tried to swallow away the dryness in his throat, unable to answer.

  Over the next few days, Jan drifted in and out of consciousness. The phantasms that had plagued him since his injury had vanished, but he was still weak and exhausted, and had trouble staying awake for more than a short while. Every time he came to himself, however, he felt like a small sliver of his strength had returned.

  During this time he was unable to speak more with the queen, as she was always asleep when he woke. Once or twice he thought she was speaking to him, but these mutterings were actually conversations carried out in her dreams. She was afflicted by terrible nightmares: he was startled several times when she whimpered or moaned while tossing back and forth.

  It was one of these cries that had woken him, he thought, though she had subsided into uneasy murmuring by the time he became fully aware of his surroundings. He lay there, his heart pounding. The night was dark, the interior of their prison black as pitch. He couldn’t see her, but the small sounds Cein was making did give him some measure of comfort. No noises came from outside, and the wagon was still.

  Slowly, the darkness became less complete. He could make out the blacker lump that was the queen, and he could see a few faint points of light through the narrow windows. He found his thoughts wandering. Why had the Skein kept him alive? The queen he could understand, perhaps, as she was a valuab
le hostage. Him, however? And where were they going? They had been traveling for days, and he assumed the direction was north, deeper into the Frostlands, as the air had grown steadily colder. But why—

  His breath caught in his throat as fear swept through him. A tall, crooked shape lurked in the corner of their prison. Jan swallowed. It must be his imagination playing tricks on him. However, it did not dissolve into nothing the longer he stared at it; if anything, it seemed to grow more distinct. He couldn’t help but remember the stories he’d heard in the Bhalavan of the Nightfather, the hoary old god who watched from the shadows, waiting, and could only be seen after death had come swirling down. Jan almost pinched himself to make sure he hadn’t died in his sleep, but then sighed at his own foolishness. The gods of these barbarians were certainly not real.

  The shape moved. It shuffled closer, detaching from the wall and coming to loom over the queen. Jan’s mouth was dry, and though he wanted to yell out a warning, he managed only a hoarse rattling.

  Pale light flooded the wagon as a sphere of wizardlight materialized above the shoulder of the White Worm shaman. Lask turned from staring down at the queen to regard Jan with his unnaturally blue eyes. His thin lips twitched when he saw Jan was awake.

  “Sorcerer,” he said softly. “You’ve returned to the land of the living.”

  Fragments of memories came to Jan. He remembered his face pressed against cold iron, the shaman on the other side of his prison. Lask had taunted him, showing him something. Then the shaman had put whatever it was in his mouth . . .

  “Your strength impresses me. A lesser man’s spirit would have perished long ago.”

  Jan propped himself up on his elbows. In the presence of the White Worm shaman the emptiness where his eye had been had begun to itch terribly, but with an act of will he kept his hands at his sides.

  Despite his fear and hatred of this sorcerer, he couldn’t restrain his curiosity. “Why are we here? What do you want from us?”

  Lask studied him for a long moment without answering. His sunken cheeks were pools of shadows in the wizardlight’s wan radiance. “I want to know how alike we are,” he finally said.

  Jan nearly choked in surprise. “Alike? We are nothing alike.”

  Lask tilted his head to one side, his brow creasing. “Surely you know that is not true. We are special, you and I.” He gestured with a long fingernail at the motionless queen. “And she is, as well.”

  “We are all Talents,” Jan hissed. “That is all we share in common.”

  “Hm,” Lask grunted. “Let us find out if that is true.”

  He snapped his fingers and the queen shuddered awake, gasping.

  “Your Highness,” he murmured, stepping back as she moved her arms and legs weakly.

  She managed to push herself to her hands and knees, staring up balefully at the shaman.

  “Do you require anything? Satin pillows? Sweetmeats? Spiced wine?”

  Cein d’Kara said nothing, her face twisted in hatred.

  Lask turned back to Jan, and it almost looked like there was a trace of amusement in his eyes. He sniffed, his nose wrinkling. “At the very least we must clean these rushes. It smells like they have been soiled, and that is not fitting for a queen’s chamber. Surely you have never suffered such squalid conditions.” He raised a thin eyebrow. “That, at least, is one way we differ.”

  The shaman crouched beside the queen and stroked her cheek with his long fingernail. For a moment Jan was surprised that she did not flinch or try to strike his hand away, but then he saw how her jaw was tensed and her brow gleamed with sweat in the sallow wizardlight. He was holding her immobile with his sorcery, taunting her with how powerless she was while collared.

  “Leave her be,” Jan croaked, struggling to stand.

  Lask watched him dispassionately. Jan felt no swelling of sorcery, but suddenly his limbs froze, hardening into stone. He toppled forward, his face striking the floor of the wagon. Then he was lifted by an unseen force and pushed roughly against the wall.

  Lask’s mouth quirked. “So many years have flowed over you, yet they did not lead you to wisdom. You know things, though, sorcerer. Secrets of the past.” His finger drifted down to brush the metal collar around the queen’s neck. “This artifact and others like it have been worn by the women of my adopted tribe for centuries. They thought them trifling baubles. It was not until the servants of the Skin Thief came to us that I learned the true power of these little circlets.” The shaman settled himself cross-legged on the floor. “You think me a barbarian, but you are wrong. A barbarian does not know he is ignorant. He believes the old ways and the traditions his father taught him are in fact superior. A purer, more holy way of life.” Lask shook his head slowly. “I suffer from no such foolish sentimentality. I have seen the wonders the Min-Ceruthans crafted.” His gaze flicked to Jan. “Your people.”

  “And you think I can bring them back? Whatever you’ve seen is just a fading echo of what once was. That age is dead.”

  “The dead nourish the living,” Lask replied. “It is the way.”

  Again, a hazy memory swam up from the depths. The shaman had said this before as he crouched outside Jan’s cell, when he had – and now Jan forced himself to face what had happened that day, and the horror of it made his skin tingle – when he had eaten what remained of his eye. Jan’s gorge rose. What kind of man was this?

  “Are you like me?” Lask mused, tapping his chin with a bony finger. “Has there ever been another with my gifts? Or am I uniquely blessed? Those are questions I want answered.” He stood suddenly, the wagon’s door swinging open behind him. “Come,” he said simply, then in a swirl of dark robes he vanished into the night.

  Jan glanced at the queen. She was still on her hands and knees, staring after the shaman with a look of absolute loathing. The power holding him fast had slackened its grip, but he did not think he had the strength to follow the sorcerer, even if he wanted to. The wizardlight that had remained in the wagon flickered and went out, darkness rushing back to envelop them once more.

  “What should we do?” Jan asked the queen, but before she could answer he felt invisible hands plucking at his clothes, and he was lifted to his feet. The manacle around his leg snapped open and something shoved him from behind, making him stumble forward a few steps. He would have fallen on his face again, but strands of sorcery held him up like a puppet on strings. Jan ground his teeth at the ignominy of it all. Such manipulations were simple enough for a Talent, but using them on another sorcerer, especially one who had been collared, was once considered an unforgiveable humiliation.

  Lask certainly did not know this, and Jan doubted very much he would have cared even if he did.

  Carried along by the sorcery, he stumbled out of the wagon. A bracing wind swept from the darkness, stinging his face, and his boots sank into snow. In the distance Jan could see the glimmer of many fires, and very faintly the sound of barking laughter carried across the empty plain. The moon was hidden this night, but the sky was ablaze with innumerable stars, sharp and glittering.

  A pained grunt came from beside him as Cein d’Kara was compelled from the wagon. She swayed like she would topple over, but the sorcery kept her upright. Her face was a mask of frozen rage, her eyes fixed on the shaman as he strode in the opposite direction to the Skein camp.

  Sorcery pulled at Jan, but more gently than before, as if he was being given the chance to follow under his own power. To his surprise, Jan found that he was able to slog through the snow without falling, though his legs and back ached horribly from the weeks he’d spent huddled on stone and wood. He heard the queen’s crunching steps behind him, and he wondered if she also walked under her own volition.

  The wizardlight hovered over Lask’s head as he led them across the snowy field. At the edge of the radiance Jan glimpsed a tangle of dark trees and boulders; the shadows pooled in the crevices made it seem l
ike there were faces leering at them from the stones. Jan shivered, shoving his hands into his armpits. The cold was like a living thing, creeping along his exposed skin, making his ears and nose burn. If he stayed too long out here he risked losing toes or fingers to frostbite, despite the layers of furs he wore.

  The shaman must have wrapped himself in sorcery, since his thin black robes would have provided little real warmth. His head was uncovered; he hadn’t even bothered to draw up his hood. Jan peered past him, into the night. Where was he leading them?

  As if in answer to his unspoken question, a black shape suddenly swelled from the darkness. It was like the wagon they had just left, a box of wood on curved runners. Empty harnesses lay in the snow; no doubt the horses that had pulled the wagon during the day had been brought closer to the campfires after the Skein had stopped for the night.

  Lask halted outside the darkened wagon and turned back to Jan and the queen. In the harsh light of his sorcery, his emaciated face with its sunken features made it seem like a skull was perched atop his robes.

  “A huntsman found me in a place like this,” he said, gesturing towards the shadowy brambles encroaching on his wizardlight. “A babe in the snow.” He stared into the blackness, as if imagining that long-ago day. “Though that was pure chance, as I was not crying as I lay there among the roots of a dead tree. He feared I was unnatural, but still he returned with me to his home and offered me to his wife to replace the son she had lost that winter.” Lask smiled bitterly. “How different my life might have been if that woman had loved me and raised me as her own. But such a life was not to be my fate.” The shaman’s face twisted. “She told her husband that I must be a demon cloaked in the skin of a man, a spawn of one of the Skin Thief’s servants, and demanded that he return me to where I had been found. So he brought me again into the woods.”

  Lask fell silent for a moment, and Jan heard in the stillness the queen’s chattering teeth. His own body was slowly going numb, but she looked to be suffering far more, whatever little strength she’d recovered being drawn out by the freezing cold.