Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  He broke away from those thoughts, an effort that left him shaking like a rider who’d just reined in a runaway mount, and cast himself wholly into the grasp of his Talent. InSight showed him a Scar that wasn’t dark at all, at least not around the edges. It was like looking at the evening sky, in the moments before night claims its full dominion; the dominant hue around the periphery was a rich purple, shot through with bands of a brighter shade, mostly reds, winding traceries that looked random at first glance, with an unsettling resemblance to the patterns of blood vessels he could see burrowing through his own flesh. They faded, in number and intensity, as his eyes moved toward the center of the depression, until they were no more. The forces unleashed here had scoured the topsoil clean and reached deep into the bedrock, purging the land not only of the Corruption that had tried to claim it but of all capacity for life as well.

  Nothing in his experience, nothing in his imagination, had ever presented him with so barren a wasteland.

  And he thought, What price, victory, if it costs everything you’re trying to save?

  He was beyond tired, he knew that. By rights there was nothing he could do, even if he was of a mind to try.

  He fumbled in his pouch, one of two he carried on his belt. Provisions for his wanderings, and the tools of his trade. Came up with a handful of seeds and one plump acorn.

  Interesting, he thought with a sniff of surprise, high meadow aspens make sense, as do the rowan. This oak, though…

  He began to walk a rough line along the crater, pausing along the way—in the same seemingly arbitrary manner he’d used to pick up stones within the Scar—to hunker down and stab his thumb into the earth. Into each hole went a seed.

  The oak was the centerpiece, the anchor for the entire copse.

  For that, he returned to the clearing.

  “We be gone?” Geryn asked companionably. Thorn chose to ignore the dour undertone to the man’s voice; it had been a hard night for them all, no reason to expect best behavior.

  “I’ve one thing left to do,” he replied.

  The Daikini wasn’t much interested. With a grunt of effort, he hefted his saddle pack and moved off through the scrub. For all his talk, the site of the battle made him twitchy; it wouldn’t break his heart in the slightest to see the last of it.

  That feeling suited Thorn; for what he intended, he preferred to be alone.

  This hole, he dug with both hands, muttering darkly as a nail tore badly enough to draw blood, then smiling—a thin, hardly noticeable tightening of the lips—in wry self-mockery at how the fates sometimes conspire to give us what we require, only not quite the way we intend. Or desire.

  He rubbed the few drops of blood into the loamy earth, added some water from a bottle he’d pulled from his other pouch, feeling the texture of the dirt change around his fingers as he worked the soil. This hadn’t been the best land to begin with; no farmer in his right mind would settle in the lee of a mountain range, too many different kinds of weather and almost all of it violent as a pitched battle. Few species survived here and even fewer prospered. There was no guarantee what he was planting would do either.

  But there was the possibility. There was the hope….

  He cast his spirit self into the soil and felt all his good intentions shrivel. The brush and shrubbery of the clearing had been deceptive, as had the sparse patches of grass scattered along the slope. The elemental force that had scoured the Scar had reached beyond the crater, chasing down with a ruthless ferocity every vestige of the Power that had destroyed the mountain. It reminded him of one of the first healings he’d attempted. Less than a dozen years gone, now that he took a moment to count the days, yet it seemed to him like ancient history. A young man, one of the freebooting Cascani, viciously savaged by a pack of Death Dogs; the wounds had turned septic from the start, generating a gangrenous rot that was eating him alive from within. Thorn was flush with his own gifts then, strong beyond his dreams but sorely lacking in control. The healing got away from him; he found to his horror that he couldn’t call back the energies he had unleashed. He was purging not only the infection but healthy tissue as well. It had been a hard struggle that very nearly consumed Thorn, but the man lived.

  Much the same had happened here. The mountains had thought only of expunging the poison that would have ultimately killed them, not of the consequences. They’d been attacked, that attack must be repelled. To save themselves, they’d as much as destroyed the land around them.

  The acorn would hatch, a sprout take root, but it would be a weak, pathetic excuse for an oak. No matter how deep or widespread the root network grew, the ground wouldn’t have strength enough to anchor it. A few decent winds would yank the tree loose and hurl it away; same with all the others he’d planted.

  He’d had these suspicions from the start, that the damage was so great, but he’d denied them to himself, afraid of what would be required to overcome it. Yet he couldn’t walk away, any more than he could from the Daikini’s horse, any more than he could from his responsibilities.

  He willed a little more blood from his cut finger, felt the anticipatory tingling along his nerves that heralded each manifestation of his Talent. He desperately wanted sleep, he ached in every limb and bone, he cast the feelings aside.

  He started to sing, a winter song, about the world still and quiescent, where all the elements of being tidied themselves from the previous season and gathered their energies for the one to come. He reminded the earth of falling snow, though in his telling the storms were gentle and restorative, no mention of killing blizzards or freezing cold that turned the ground hard as stone. With each refrain, each new verse, he moved the days forward, the sun staying longer overhead, its warmth gradually reaching deeper into the ground. First melting the snow, its fresh, clean water saturating the earth. At the same time he cast the mixture of water and blood that he was continually and thoroughly kneading outward from the hole he’d dug, burrowing channels of energy in every direction, as though he were the tree and this the formidable tangle of roots that sustained him. Only in this instance, he drew no sustenance from the soil but undertook the reverse, as he had with the mare, sending the essence of his own life cascading down these many pathways. His voice deepened and darkened with passion, building naturally toward a crescendo, reminding the land of spring, when it woke from winter hibernation to find life in all its myriad varieties bursting forth in glorious chaos. Life, death, rebirth, the age-old cycle. How it had always been, and should ever be.

  He was sodden, top to toe, as though some cruel spirit had laid a magnifying glass atop his head to gather every wayward scrap of sunlight and focus it on him. Molten within, melting without, a race to see which would consume him first, far, far worse than what he’d endured to heal Windfleet.

  No comparison between the two healings, he’d known that from the start. The mare at least had been alive. She’d fought for that life with the same determination she’d shown against the Death Dogs.

  He clenched his fists, so tightly he’d crush coal to diamond, then released them with a rush. He spread his fingers as wide as they’d go, a greater spread than most Daikini hands could achieve, laying his palms into the sodden earth as gently as he’d bathed his fresh-born children, no restraint now to his Casting, not a single conscious thought, trusting to blind instinct in this final effort to guide him.

  He felt the raw energy course along the pathways of his nerves, couldn’t help a smile as he heard squawks of alarm from the brownies as those same traceries made themselves visible under his skin. There was a style of dance in the Spice Lands on the far side of this continent, at both village festivals and at Court, where the dancers attached lengths of brightly colored ribbons to wrists and ankles; the challenge was, so long as the music played, to never let one of these streamers touch the ground or come even slightly to rest. Not so hard for the wrist-bound ribbons; something altogether different for the ties at each ankle. Th
e dancers would prance and spin and whirl, the ribbons would stream behind them like pennants or wrap themselves around the outstretched limbs until it seemed that the figures were no longer flesh at all but composed instead of wild, flashing bands of color.

  Although Thorn was still as stone, he thought he looked much the same, casting a radiance bright enough to show even against the sunlight, and then he wondered if that would bring the Daikini back for a look. He had neither strength nor thought to spare to cast a Shield Wall to keep the man away, and then wondered why it was so important to hide the full extent of his Talent. Another flash of instinct. Trust one, trust them all.

  He cradled the acorn in his hands, energies coruscating about the tiny seed, awakening its own infant passion, but most of all imbuing it with a portion of Thorn’s own essence. A dash of wonder, a bit of joy, a pinch of determination. Some of what he hoped was the best of himself, he passed on to the tree, and by extension to this plot of land.

  He blinked fiercely, eyes suddenly flooded near to overflowing as giant blotches of fatigue swam lazily across the field of his vision.

  And realized that he was done.

  He looked down at the ground where he’d been working by canting his head, letting it loll forward at an awkward angle so he could properly see. The hole he’d dug was completely filled in, hardly a sign to differentiate it from any other part of the clearing.

  He bent all the way over to touch his forehead to the ground and took a deep breath. He couldn’t help a smile. There was a change. There’d been no smell to the land: a dry, dusty neuter before, worse than the harshest desert.

  Now it reminded him of home.

  His plantings had their chance.

  “Whatever the hell yeh doing, Peck?” demanded a voice from on high, in an avalanche of gruff confusion. Diminutive term for a diminutive people, favored by those lacking sufficient wit to see beyond the obvious. He hated it.

  He spared a look up the leg of the walking, talking Daikini mountain.

  “Resting,” prompted Franjean, from hiding, with a hiss.

  “Resting?” Thorn repeated.

  “Thought yeh were the one, wanted to be gone so quick?”

  “Just tidying up,” he offered with a groan. It was easier to sit than he’d expected. That was the ongoing irony of his Talent, one of the aspects that never failed to surprise him: the more powerful the healing, the more it took out of him; yet, at the same time, he invariably found himself restored almost as much as his patient. What was offered was returned, good for good, the balance maintained.

  He hadn’t cast out so much of himself, freely and without restraint, in ages, nor felt so fulfilled as a result.

  He scratched himself, painfully aware once more of how unutterably filthy he felt—Heavens know, he thought, what I must look like!—then noticed the Daikini gazing about the campsite.

  “ ’S different,” Geryn noted.

  “Oh?”

  The Daikini shrugged, “ ’S nothing.”

  Thorn clambered upright. “Lovely day,” he said, which it was.

  “Beats what could ha’ been, an’ tha’s a fack,” was Geryn’s stolid response. Clearly a man who related to the world straight-on. “Had food an’ water, a week’s worth, mebbe, husbanded proper.”

  “ ‘Had’?”

  The man sighed. “Damn dogs. Food was trail rations, salted proper, packed proper.” Thorn knew what he meant. Standard issue for travelers, food so awful to the taste that even the eagles wouldn’t touch it. “All rotted overnight,” Geryn continued glumly. “Water bags’re torn to shreds. None o’ that left, neither.”

  Faron’s doing. Nothing was safe from the innate corruption of the master of a Great Hunt, so stories told; given time enough, and the right quarry, it was said that such a creature could putrefy stone to bring down a fortress wall.

  Thorn gathered up his own knapsack and followed the Daikini to the outer edge of the brush, where it faded into scrub grass and boulders. There, Geryn paused. His hands rested on his belt, an ostensibly casual pose, belied by a thread of tension running through the muscles of legs and back and shoulders. His scabbards, for sword and big knife, hung low, angled for a quick, combat draw, and the Daikini stood with a respectful separation between himself and Thorn.

  “Saw yeh change, Peck, ’fore the attack,” Geryn said. “So yeh some sorta Shaper, mebbe?”

  “Just a wanderer,” he replied.

  “Saw what I saw, an’ tha’s a fack.”

  “A seeming, was all.”

  “Then yeh are a witchie-boy!”

  “Hardly.” Which was as far as he dared stretch the truth, since he didn’t consider himself a witch and hadn’t been a boy in longer than he cared to remember.

  “Wha’cha do with them bodies, hey?”

  “Tossed ’em in the hole, the Scar back that way, where the mountain used to be.”

  The Daikini nodded sagely. “Heard tell of it, down the flat. Didn’t hold much truck wi’ the stories, though. I mean, mountains, they don’t just blow t’ bits.”

  Thorn made a half turn, raised a hand to present the scene beyond, as if inviting the Daikini to take himself a look.

  “Yeah, well,” Geryn floundered, body language making plain that he had no intention of doing so.

  “It’s a place of Power,” Thorn told him. “Things happen here, things are seen here, that aren’t like anywhere else.” The Nelwyn held out his hand. “Believe what else you will, Trooper Havilhand, I tell you true I am no demon. Nor, I pray, anything evil.”

  The young man fiddled on his feet, from one to the other, as if his boots pinched. Held out his own hand, still gloved although Thorn’s was bare, took the little man’s in the briefest of grasps as though afraid the contact would leave him cursed.

  “Whatever. Stood by me,” he conceded. “Did’jer fair share on the killin’ ground, only right ta grant’cha that. Scales b’tween us, they’re mos’ likely balanced.”

  “If you’ve a different path to walk, my friend,” Thorn told him as they started on their way, “I’ll not be offended.”

  Geryn looked back over his shoulder in surprise, then spread his mouth in a shame-faced grin. He’d automatically set a trooper’s pace and in a matter of steps had left the Nelwyn behind.

  “In wild lands like this,” he said, as Thorn caught up, “better I’m thinkin’ folks walk t’gether.”

  “The better to keep eyes on one another,” said Franjean in Thorn’s ear from a perch atop the Nelwyn’s shoulder, snugged among the folds of his cloak where the brownie would be hard to see.

  “ ’Sides,” Geryn said with evident pride, “I’m a Pathfinder. I’ll find us the easiest way.”

  “Except that we know the way, thank you very much.”

  “Franjean,” Thorn hissed, “be silent!”

  “Say somethin’, didja?” asked Geryn.

  “Pardon?”

  “Thought I heard?”

  “Me, I’m afraid. Talking to myself. Daft, I know, but it’s a habit I got into roaming on my own. Sort of providing my own companionship.”

  “Whatever,” Geryn shrugged, as though this was but one more strangeness to be encountered on the road, to be recounted—with suitable embellishments—in barracks, to his messmates, over evening ale. “I’ll take the point, shall I, see what’s about.”

  “First a Daikini along a trail few of his kind have ridden,” said Franjean. “Then a Great Hunt of Death Dogs. Interesting coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “I’d rather not think at all, thank you very much.”

  “Not to worry, you have Rool and me to do that for you in the main. I’m simply keeping you informed.”

  Rool was in the pack itself; he preferred it to Thorn’s belt pouches. The pack had solid, tangible dimensions. They’d both taken refuge in his pouch the night before Tir Asleen’s destruction, during what Thor
n knew now was no dream; Rool came out describing it as a warehouse of infinite space, without limit in any perception. He was small enough as it was; he had no desire to spend time in a place that made him feel less than nothing. Franjean, by contrast, had claimed it for his own. It was where, Thorn suspected, he stored his own worldly goods.

  “How kind of you.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, sirrah! You’d be lost without proper minders!”

  I don’t think so, was the thought that flashed in his brain, perfectly matching the way they so often spoke to him. Fatigue fortunately kept it from going any further.

  “Don’t be snippy, Thorn.” Anele now, from overhead, and he felt a flash of heat at how open his mind occasionally remained to his companions. If the eagle sensed that thought as well and took offense, she made no sign. “Listen to what he says.”

  “We had our back to the Scar,” Franjean continued, without the slightest hint of banter to his tone, and Thorn realized the brownie was deadly serious. “That tipped the balance. Anywhere else, we’d have taken our share with us, but we’d have died.”

  He wanted to argue the point but had a grim suspicion the brownie was right.

  “But why, Franjean? We’ve been traveling near a dozen years, what’s changed, to provoke this adversary to make an active effort to find me?”

  “If you think I’m going to do all the work…!” From Franjean’s tone, Thorn knew the answer had to be plainly visible.

  “No game, neither.” That was Geryn, adding to his earlier observations, thinking aloud for Thorn’s benefit. “Haven’t seen any, large or small, since I come to these parts. No water along my back trail, leastways not that we can reach in time; they bin all fouled as well.”