Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  As gently, she disengages. “These are my people, this is my home.”

  “Worth your life, are they?”

  His challenge is flippant, her reply is not. She fixes him with a calm and level gaze and speaks as truly as she knows how.

  “Yes, Castellan, they are.”

  “Do they feel the same in return?”

  “The one isn’t contingent on the other.”

  “You left once.”

  “And came back.”

  They cross the aerie’s shadow and the Castellan suddenly stops, staring at nothing but with his head cocked to give better reception to some sound only he can hear, as suddenly alert as he would be on a combat patrol about to engage the enemy.

  “Impossible,” he breathes. “The prisoner…”

  “What of him?” Her tone grows chill.

  “I could swear…”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense, Castellan, finish your sentence.”

  He blinks and looks at her as though for the first time.

  “Why are you so angry, my pet?”

  “I’m not your damn anything, Castellan, I thought that was understood from the start.”

  “You are unfathomable sometimes, Keri.”

  “Anakerie, if you please. My brother was the only one I let call me that.”

  “You never seemed to mind before.”

  “You never noticed.”

  “Is that why you left me? Did you truly believe I took you so for granted?”

  “What was to believe, Mohdri, it was plain fact. Like horses having four legs. What about the prisoner?”

  “I had this sense of being watched.”

  “Considering who’s in residence, and the Powers they command, that’s hardly a revelation.”

  “I know the taste of the Veil Folk; this was different.”

  “Legend reputes the castle is haunted.”

  “It wasn’t a ghost.”

  “I didn’t mean a ghost. We have Demons here, didn’t you know?”

  “Nor Demon neither.”

  “The Nelwyn’s locked up tight, Castellan, and thanks to you probably broken all to bits.”

  “What I did was done for your protection, Princess.”

  “How reassuring.”

  “We mean you and yours no harm. The Maizan come as friends.”

  “And the Magus?”

  “Likewise, only more so.”

  “Don’t call me ‘my pet’ again. I feel like you’re casting a ChangeSpell.”

  “Would you were so easily tamed—peace, Princess, it was only said in jest!” He holds up his hands in a placating gesture, meeting Anakerie’s furious gaze with the most irresistibly charming of smiles. “Forgive me.”

  When she says nothing, he tries a slight change of subject. “And the prisoner?”

  She rounds on him. “Castellan, I have more things on my mind than that pathetic little creature you seem hell-bent on tormenting. You think he’s watching us? Find me a scryer to back that up with proof and we’ll proceed accordingly. Until then, I have too much else to do. And, with all due respect, you’re in the way.”

  He takes a step to follow, but Sergeant Major Jalaby chooses that moment to hurry a section from the stables for saddling and inspection, and the yard is instantly filled with a score of men and mounts, hooves cracking sharply on cobblestones, the air alive with snorts and whinnies and the occasional neigh, commands and curses flashing back and forth with practiced enthusiasm. Everywhere the Castellan turns, he finds his pathway blocked, and with each of those turns, Anakerie puts more distance between them.

  Mohdri and Jalaby lock eyes. Without breaking contact, the old campaigner tilts his head a little down and to the side and spits. And smiles.

  Mohdri smiles back, and seeing what is in his eyes, the men nearest the sergeant major reach for swords and lances.

  The Castellan turns on his heel and strides away.

  “He knows,” Thorn said with a small wail, “I’m watching.”

  Suspects.

  “For such as him, suspicion is certainty.”

  All the more reason, little magus, for you to focus on the task at hand.

  “Madness,” he cried. “This and me!”

  There was sweat on his face, but he couldn’t break contact with either hand to wipe it off. He wanted to sleep, and remembered a day—an age past, a lifetime gone—spent hefting bags of seed corn to his barn. Each had been as big as he, and weighed more; the only way to carry them was to bend his body double and use his back as a barrow. He didn’t hurt while he was working, he simply got more and more tired. His muscles recovered within a day or so, but it was the better part of a week before he came out of this eerie stupor. As though he’d walked up to the edge of the Final Abyss and leaned over to see if Death was home. Thankfully, no—but the Reaper had somehow wrapped Thorn in a piece of itself, a lingering taste of what would someday be in store as a caution about being so foolish again.

  Of course, he hadn’t listened. His whole life since, he sometimes thought, had become an endless and madcap reel along the edge of that chasm.

  The longer he procrastinated, the weaker he became, the less able even to survive the spell, much less succeed with it.

  “Can you do that to Elora Danan?” he heard himself ask.

  “But, having done this,” he heard himself reply, “what will she say when she sees me again? Demons are cast out of human hosts, not the other way round!”

  “Can’t be any worse than what she’s said and done already, am I right?”

  As an attempt at humor, it wasn’t much—certainly not in the brownies’ league—but he decided to let that pass. The discussion was academic anyway, his die had long since been cast. He would see this through to the end, whatever came.

  As though that realization was a cue, the room about him grew close and heavy, oppressive in the way air can be heralding an approaching storm. There was a sour stench of burning that left a metallic tinge at the back of his tongue, the harbinger of a lightning bolt. His mouth was dry, but licking his lips brought no relief; his tongue was as raspy as sandpaper, and every part of him rapidly grew bloated and swollen. Summers were like this back home, so steamy that thought itself took an effort and movement was out of the question. Salvation then was a soak in the stream behind the house and some heartfelt prayers for an evening breeze.

  The smell made him gag. He had no name for it, save that it was awful. He’d been a farmer, he knew the stench of nature. He’d been a warrior, albeit reluctantly, and knew the same of battlefields. He’d looked upon the face of Evil—at the time he’d thought Ultimate Evil—and gotten a taste of that foulness as well.

  No comparison. This was far worse.

  He tried breathing through his mouth, to no avail. He knew from long experience that the nose quickly grew accustomed to scents; it was simply a matter of waiting until he became used to this one. Only that didn’t happen. If anything, it got worse. The miasma coiled about him like a lover, pressing against every part of him, soaking like water into a sponge through clothes, and then, to his horror, flesh as well.

  To his OutSight, he remained unchanged.

  What his InSight showed Thorn made him want to howl like one demented. His skin was boiling off his bones, great pustules bursting forth like gas bubbling from a tar pit, spreading the foulness over him. Nothing of him was anchored anymore, he felt organs slide within him as his own flesh sloughed off his bones and then the bones themselves begin to putrefy. There was rot in his mouth, in his heart, in his soul. Not the clean decay of nature but a betrayal of it, as though the component pieces of himself were there only for show, they served no other function.

  And yet, as the concept of eyes melted from him, he found other means of sight. A concept of being grounded in a single, solid, physical form gave way to one more akin to quicksilver, where no aspect stayed stabl
e for longer than a whim. He thought at first he was being plunged into a maelstrom, but soon realized that was wrong. In a maelstrom, the elements flow in the same general direction; there’s a pattern and purpose to it that was nonexistent here.

  He struggled to reassert himself, but found no self to focus on. He had a body, untouched and unharmed, reduced now to a vessel as hollow as the woman’s. But the bonds that linked flesh and spirit were no more.

  Too late, he wondered about a trap. Two hosts for the Demon, for the price of one.

  O ye of little faith.

  His voice or the Demon’s, he couldn’t tell.

  He hated the stones about him, looked for claws with which to tear at them, laughing at the thought of the great keep above collapsing into rubble and dust, as Tir Asleen had done.

  His dream or the Demon’s, he didn’t want to know.

  He saw the thread of his soul, the one thing left him that remained untouched by his transformation. Yet even as he watched, a darker strand reached out to embrace it, winding itself around and around until the two became inextricably intertwined. The intricate knotwork twisted more tightly together until it seemed to him that a single rope had been formed, the dark and light equally balanced. In desperation, he lunged forward to grab his soul and hold it fast, forgetting he had nothing left resembling hands.

  It shattered.

  Like gossamer soap bubbles, like the most fragile crystal, like life itself. Blew apart before him, scattering every which way, no means to catch the bits, no means to follow.

  He howled.

  Elora whimpers and hunches herself forward the little distance allowed her by her robes, to the dismay of her dressers, who fear she will mar their presentation and take it out on them.

  And in that same instant…

  Anakerie hauls tight on her reins, so startling her horse that the animal dances nervously and almost bucks.

  “Anakerie?” asks Jalaby, the first time she’s ever heard him use her name.

  “How many damned fanfares is that, Jalaby?” she asks through gritted teeth, projecting a calm she no longer feels in an attempt to gentle her mount.

  “Ten of twelve, I think. They’re almost done.”

  “So’s the day. Procession starts at sunset, ceremony’s at midnight.”

  “You fear treachery, Highness?”

  She smiles and shakes her head. “Thankfully, no. Everyone’s got too much to lose should today go wrong. I just wish I knew better what it meant should things go right.”

  “The people have faith.”

  “Probably said as much at Tir Asleen. Split off two sections, Sergeant Major, have them check the city gates. I want the watchmen at their posts.”

  “So ordered, Highness. I’ll do the job myself.”

  As Jalaby leads his twenty men away at a canter, another officer joins her with a salute.

  “I have the honor to report, Highness, that the Red Lions have taken up their assigned positions along the promenade, the esplanade, and the Royal mile.”

  She can see that, even without her field glasses. Great crowds are gathering along the seafront and the main road, with many more thronging the city’s parks. Everyone who can walk is out tonight. A housebreaker’s dream, the fire brigade’s nightmare.

  “The Maizan, Captain, what of them?”

  “The Castellan is in the palace, together with a pair of bodyguards, to escort the Protector Magus to the ceremony. The rest of his Thunder Riders are in quarters, as you commanded, being discreetly and properly looked after.”

  Thorn tasted blood, not his own, coating the stone, seeping through the cracks and spaces between the massively hewn blocks, so many men, so quickly done to death, Night Herons tearing at flesh as easily as they feasted on souls. There was joy in him, a hunger for more.

  Something’s wrong, he thought, his gaze focusing on the barracks. The waryard was deserted, troops properly deployed throughout the city, servants going about their business within the palace, as normal a scene to the casual eye as could be expected. He saw a shimmer in the air, a faint coruscation much like a heat haze, marking the presence of what first glance told him was a minor glamour that served the same function as his Cloak; anyone crossing the yard, or looking down from the battlements, would pass over the barracks without a second thought. But he saw through the Demon’s eyes and those perceptions told him this something was far more insidious, a spell of such extraordinary sophistication and subtlety that lay folk and sorcerers would be bedazzled to equal effect. All would see what they expected to see, and no more.

  A pain lanced up from deep within, as if some greater Power had taken hold and snapped him in two as he might the wishbone of a turkey. The walls were blood, the air was blood, he was blood, awash in it, alive in it. Around him were scattered the shards of his soul, but he could no longer tell which were his and which the Demon’s; there was scarlet everywhere, everything looked the same.

  The second pain was greater than the first. He’d thought the ChangeSpell agony, but it was nothing compared with this.

  The third spasm broke his consciousness as he himself had smashed his soul. He was no more than the idea of life. The concept of being. Not “I think, therefore I am,” or even “I am.” No “I” at all, but simply “am.”

  He knew there’d be a fourth spasm and a fifth; it would go on and on until the Demon’s child was delivered or he ceased to be. It wasn’t a tangible awareness; he lacked the coherence to string together even a single thought. More akin to fundamental knowledge, imprinted on the primal fabric of his being, like the body’s understanding at birth of how to take a breath, or the heart itself to beat. Or even just the notion of thought itself.

  From that nowhere, he drew back to himself a sense of self, an “I” to place before every other concept. A name to fit the pronoun.

  I am

  Followed by

  I am Thorn Drumheller

  Like waking up, only much more slowly. Begin with nothingness, a transitory oblivion—or so it seems, unless one is gifted (or cursed) enough to remember all the evening’s dreams—that ends with the opening of the eyes. With sight, revelation: a rebirth of sorts. Identity, memory, awareness, answers to all the primal questions: who am I, where am I, what am I?

  Shard by shard, he found himself. Accomplishing by active choice what was normally taken for granted, assuming all the scattered, disparate elements to himself, uncaring as he went which were his and which the Demon’s.

  He felt a vibration trickle through the fabric of the foundation stones, as though the palace itself were waking with him. New enchantments casting resonances off of Powers long dormant. Nothing would come of it, they had slept too long, were too set in their ways, to take any active part in the ceremony. But they were aware…

  …as they had not been for longer than the memory of man.

  Fools, he cried within his thoughts. Fools! What are you doing up there!

  He wanted to hurry, that same awareness lashing him as an eager carter would a tardy mare. And the image came back to him of that day in the barn with the sacks of grain. He wanted to hurry then, too, simply to be done. Supper was waiting and a hot bath, the sweetest reward for a miserable bear of a day. Unfortunately, desire—no matter how fervent—didn’t make the bags weigh any the less, or his feet plod any more nimbly. His muscles did the best they could, the task had its proper rhythm and would be done when it was done. Making himself frantic in the process wouldn’t help.

  He heard a final fanfare. It was precisely the moment of sunset.

  At that same moment Thorn feels the doors of Elora’s great hall thrown open. Within, the space is alight with a multitude of candles, casting echoes off reflective paint from the ceiling overhead to create the illusion that all are entering the vault of the rapidly darkening sky.

  The room is a symmetrical oval, two aisles bisecting length and width, forming a circle w
here they meet. Interlaced around the chamber’s circumference are the Great Seals of the Domains; the pattern is repeated along the border of the circle, with Elora’s own as the centerpiece. Between each set of seals is a section of seats for the respective Domain, three for each of the four quarters. The walls describe the same arc reaching up toward the ceiling as they do from side to side, thereby preserving the room’s form throughout every physical dimension.

  The Vizards enter first, with solemn, stately tread, two columns of robed, masked figures, each bearing a staff of office down the central aisle, around the outer border of the central circle, and on to the end, where they turn outward to reverse direction along the perimeter of the chamber itself until they reach the entrance, filling in the lesser aisles along the way. All stand facing the dais.

  Next come the representatives of the Domains. In every case but one, the rulers of each, that sole exception being Kieron Dineer. All the other seats are filled; Kieron’s section, virtually empty. Sovereigns of the primal elements, Earth and Air and Fire and Water; of the primal states of being, flesh and the spirit; and of the primal mysteries. Some appear human because that is their true nature. Others do so out of courtesy. A few—proudly, defiantly—make not the slightest pretense. There is excitement, but it has a dangerous edge to it, none present are sure whether the night will end in joy or disaster, each determined to emerge triumphant regardless. Thorn thinks it like staring at a cheering crowd and wonders what it will take to turn them into a mob, their festival into a riot.

  The room grows still. Two sections remain, both flanking the head of the room, opposite the doorway.

  Then, to all appearances, the candle flames begin to dance. Tiny spots of light and color, buzzing wildly through the air, bouncing off each other with cries of wild delight, forming evermore-intricate patterns with the streamers left in their wake. Some of those watching respond in kind, others with grimaces of dour resignation at a display seen often before. The fairies take such negative responses as a personal challenge and redouble their efforts. The fiercer the frowns, the more infuriatingly radiant their smiles in return.