Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  Occasionally, they came upon a tree that had been overthrown by some combination of circumstances—say, whose location on a slope had been undercut by erosion to the point where it could no longer be supported, especially in any sort of wind. There was little sense of the tempest they all knew was still raging, both trees and the ridgelines provided a more than adequate bulwark, but there was likewise a constant agitation across the crowns of these forest giants. In this instance, when the wind pushed hard, there was no foundation left to withstand it, and so, down the tree went. The trunk formed a monstrous bridge across the ravine, which they happily used to save themselves time and effort, and discovered along the way that it was still very much alive, sprouting a whole line of fresh branches that over the centuries might well become full-fledged trees in their own right.

  The contrast between Elora and Khory couldn’t be more striking. Geryn’s focus was the trail, finding them the easiest, quickest route to get them where they wanted to go; to his dismay, that left Elora in Taksemanyin’s charge, and the Wyr proved as solicitous of her well-being as a border collie, save that he always let her rest when he sensed the need. She progressed in much the same manner as a cow or sheep; when nudged along her way, she went. No questions, no problems, in a stolid, plodding, functionally mindless gait that never really varied. Khory, on the other hand, couldn’t stay still, or on the trail. Her vitality appeared as boundless as her reserves of strength; she would spend some time pacing Geryn before sashaying up the ridge, or down a ways, to closely examine some piece of flora or fauna that caught her gaze, before dropping back to Thorn to ask him about it. She was nothing but questions—what is this, where did this come from?—bludgeoning him with a barrage as infuriating as it was genuine, to the point where he would as cheerfully throttle her for her enthusiasm as he would Elora for her equally total lack of it.

  There’d been little change in the degree or quality of the light. It was much like a winter day in the far north, where time was measured by levels of murk. Thorn’s internal clock told him it was late afternoon when a concerned Geryn took advantage of the latest rest stop to hunker beside him for a quick conference.

  “Know this country, does yeh, Peck?” he asked.

  “By reputation. The only maps are too superficial to do us any good, I’m afraid. Beyond that, it’s my first visit. Why?”

  “The forest’s somethin’ special, am I right?” Thorn noticed the Daikini couldn’t keep wholly still; in his own way, Geryn’s senses were as alive and questing as Taksemanyin’s, save that he used eyes as his primary receptors, where the Wyr preferred ears, searching the gathering dusk as though some attack were long overdue.

  “It’s the trees themselves, the oldest of old growth. They’re consecrated to Cherlindrea. Said, so story tells, to have been first planted by her own hands.”

  “Too damn quiet, an’ yeh ask me.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Thorn agreed.

  Geryn gathered and released a slow and steady breath, deliberately taking his time, repeating it twice more before he spoke again and using the opportunity to sweep his gaze through the arc of a full circle around their resting place.

  “Not a sign of life. Not among this world, nor the Veil Folk. Not deer, not lizard, not dryad nor nymph. Not a case o’ them havin’ moved on somewhere’s else, it’s as if they’d never been.” He held out a leaf. There was a dusting of glitter along its edge, a crystallization that had barely begun on high but hadn’t faded in his grasp.

  “Frost,” Geryn wondered, “am I right?”

  Thorn touched his tongue to it, nodded.

  “All the wet in the air behind us, won’t be long afore we’ll see snow.”

  “In a land that’s never before known winter.”

  “So you say. Ain’t speakin’ f’r the trees, my point’s if we’re still in these ravines when it starts, tha’s as far as we go.” He puzzled a long moment. “Think tha’s why everyone’s skipped, mebbe? Seekin’ warmer climes, like any other migratin’ critter?”

  “Might explain the animals. The Veil Folk aren’t like that.”

  “Can yeh light us up a’night, so we can continue on our way?”

  “I think we’d do better with some proper rest.”

  “I got an instinct says yeh’re right, another shriekin’ that’s a mistake.”

  Thorn nodded, extended his hands. “Close your eyes,” he told the Pathfinder, and touched both lids with fore and middle fingers, casting a spark of Power across the way to his companion.

  “MageSight,” he told Geryn, when they moved apart again. “Better vision than a cat, in anything less than absolute dark. More suitable than a torch. I’ll offer the same to the rest so we’ll each be on equal footing.”

  “Damn,” Geryn responded in wonderment. “Damn! When this fades, it’s be like goin’ mostly blind.”

  “I’m sorry for that, because it will fade. The charge is temporary, and there’s a limit to how often I can reenergize it. The body has a finite capacity, it can be taxed only so hard before it begins to break down. Superhuman strength will eventually burn out the muscles or shatter the bones; enhanced sight will make you blind. Each Gift has its price. The more you desire, the more you pay.”

  “Yeh go well enough.”

  “And it’s cost me dear.” He spoke with an edge that hadn’t been intended and Geryn’s face twisted a little, as though the Nelwyn had suddenly brandished a knife.

  “Do best, I’m thinkin’,” he said, brushing his trousers as he rose stiff-boned to his full height, “breakin’ a trail along the central crest till we’re past Doumhall. Rather stay high along the ridgeline than low, an’ keep to the lee side of the range.”

  “Agreed. You’re still not happy.”

  “Bein’ watched we are, Peck. An’ not by friendly eyes. Sooner we’re clear o’ this place, safer I’ll feel. We ain’t welcome here.”

  “That shouldn’t be. There are no strangers in Cherlindrea’s Groves. That’s true the world over. Nothing of Shadow can endure here, nor any harm be done.”

  “Everything else about the damn world’s dove straight t’ hell, why should here be any different?”

  Food for thought, as fatigue curled in about the muscles of his legs, the joints of his hips, like tendrils of a fog bank, despite his best efforts to banish it. The others were in considerably less discomfort, once he’d worked a small Dismissal to immunize them against the effects of fatigue. Unfortunately, the same rules of cause and consequence applied here as with the enhanced sight he gave them all; his enchantment allowed them to use their physical instrument to its fullest extent. When it wore off, the need for recovery would be just as dramatic. Thorn’s problem was that he was starting from a far lesser plateau, well into reserves of strength and spirit the others had only begun to tap. His senses were as acute as ever, but the orbits of his eyes burned with strain, his joints cast off a constant ache, he moved with the gingerly grace of an ancient. In a way, he was the axle that kept their wheel turning, but there was less and less oil to grease the mechanism; metal had started grinding on metal, wearing it gradually but inexorably away. His challenge was to find them a place of refuge before that happened.

  Geryn’s right about the silence, he thought as he tried to find even a semblance of beauty in the perpetual twilight.

  He had walked such stands as these often; Cherlindrea planted them where she pleased and they flourished in spite of local conditions. Normally, there was a humid warmth to the groves, as the sun warmed the air beneath the overhanging canopy, which in turn prevented it from slipping away as day progressed toward nightfall; in addition, heat was given off by the decaying matter scattered across the floor, everything from fallen leaves to fallen logs. Sound carried a goodly distance and it wasn’t uncommon, if a visitor walked with care, to hear evidence of the creatures who dwelled within. Many was the night when sprites and spirits themselves would come
to visit, drawn to his power as a moth to a candle flame. He’d danced at his share of their circles, helped them be born, and helped them gently die. These were among his favorite places, because in atmosphere they most reminded him of home. They were places where he felt at peace, finding a simple joy that brought renewal to his soul as the rest restored his body.

  Here, though, he found desolation. A semblance of what was, form without substance. To the surface eye, his OutSight, all the elements seemed as they should be: the trees were as sturdy as ever, the earth as firm beneath his feet. Yet they were hollow. It wasn’t a case of the Veil Folk hiding from strangers; as Geryn said, it felt to him, too, as though they’d never been.

  He wasn’t aware that he was whistling, until he caught looks that mixed amusement and surprise directed his way from the others. He couldn’t help a weary smile—weary because even the muscles of his face felt overburdened, as though he were reshaping soft lead—at being caught. It was something he did when he was lost in thought, drove the brownies positively wild, made them join in themselves, which in turn, because their voices were in no way a match for their desires, sent the eagles winging for maximum altitude, well out of earshot. It was a measure of his profound fatigue that not only was he beyond an emotional response to the memories of his lost companions, but also that he didn’t notice.

  Simple tune, at least at first. Descending thirds, and he paused a moment to listen to the notes rebound through the gullies, echo fading past echo until the air was once more still. It was no tune he remembered hearing, but something that seemed to flow naturally from him as he grew into a life as a sorcerer. Like sorcery, the melody built on what came before, growing in complexity with every refrain. And like magic at its best, it was wholly extemporaneous, an expression of purest intuition, leavened by his deepest feelings.

  A somber cast to this recital, reflecting a mood as sunless as the sky, that absorbed him so completely he put a foot wrong and came near to tumbling off the trail.

  With a start, he recovered wits and balance, to find Elora Danan standing before him, a doughy waif, with a haunted aspect to her eyes that was starkly at odds with the well-fed flesh that encased it. She had no notion of how her clothes were meant to be worn; Thorn had the sense from her that she blanked while being dressed, standing before her maids nearly naked and emerging properly and exquisitely outfitted, without the slightest clue as to how it was managed. Still, she’d tried to arrange them as best she could. Not terribly successful, from the perspective of either comfort or aesthetics.

  Her eyes were very large, the only burst of color on a body that was a casting made flesh.

  “Yes, Elora,” he said gently, flicking his gaze past her to Taksemanyin and Geryn, watching concernedly. This was the first time the child had taken the initiative since they’d come ashore.

  “I know that music,” she said. Her voice was broken, with a huskiness reminiscent of Shando, her larynx as cruelly and thoroughly savaged as her spirit seemed to be.

  “Something I used to whistle,” he conceded, “when you were very young.”

  “It’s my fault,” she said, bleakness spreading like oil across the sea from her eyes to her voice. “I should have given Willow what he wanted. If I hadn’t fought, none of this would have happened.”

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “Look at me,” she cried, her tone disconcertingly as deep as his, “I’m cursed, the world’s cursed, I never meant for anything bad to happen, I was just so scared!”

  “There’s no shame in that.” He took her by the shoulders. A mistake; she broke his hold as though his hands were coated with acid.

  “What do you know, Peck?” and she made that last word as foul an obscenity as any he’d heard, so harsh in speech and intent that he actually flinched. “Don’t you dare touch me,” she cried with a large portion of her own imperiousness. “You brought me to this, nothing about my life was wrong until you showed yourself.”

  Everything was wrong, child, he thought, though it would have been better to have spoken it aloud.

  He was about to, but he never got the chance.

  He heard a scream from above, and was gripped by a staggering discontinuity of vision as he was wrenched from himself and cast into the raging consciousness of Bastian, glaring cold-eyed at five people below, frozen in place by the suddenness of the eagle’s attack.

  “Oath-Breaker,” he heard Rool cry, from his perch on Bastian’s shoulders.

  “Betrayer.” This, from Franjean, riding Anele.

  “Demon!” they cried together, even more of a curse than Elora’s “Peck” had been, a word meant to hurt worse than any weapon.

  His vision bifurcated. In the same moment he saw himself as the eagle’s back arched, her great wings belling outward to break her madcap descent, and beheld through his own eyes Anele’s extended claws, lunging for his face.

  Thorn dropped and rolled. Reflex took him down, wits sent his hands scrabbling for a hold as he dropped over the lip of the trail. He had no doubts that the eagles were trying to kill him; that was clear from the manner of their approach and the furnace fury in their minds, but he had no intention either of giving them that satisfaction or harming them in return. He snagged a sapling, second-year growth, scraping layers of skin from his palm as he used the momentum of his fall to pivot him back toward the trail, working hands and feet like a hedgehog to get him there, trying to protect himself while keeping track of the unfolding fight.

  Geryn sprang to Elora’s defense, but Anele executed a magnificent turn over the tip of one wing and used the other to swat the charging lad aside. Their bones may have been hollow, but the eagles were a match and more for Thorn in size of body and they could strike with the force of a respectably sized bludgeon. Anele would have dropped on the Daikini, stabbing for his face with claws and beak to maim him, but Khory leaped from her perch on the slope, sword leaving an afterimage in its wake as she aimed a double-handed slash for the bird. Anele backpedaled furiously, making yet another impossible midair maneuver to avoid the blow. She saw at once the DemonChild’s speed, so Anele made no attempt to climb to safety; she broke off the engagement by wheeling toward the ravine and jinking away through the trees.

  Ryn wasn’t so fortunate. He scythed Elora’s legs out from under her to bring her down, and clear her out of harm’s way—the child had neither his reactions nor his experience; she stood frozen by the intensity of the ambush, dumb and upstanding as a post, the perfect prey. But when the Wyr turned from her to Bastian, he was met by an arrow from Rool’s bow. No ordinary dart; that was obvious from an impact that threw him from his feet as though he’d been roped from behind. Brownies, too, had their secrets, generally choosing weapons that stung and annoyed, preferring to harry and humiliate a foe rather than do him actual harm. But when pressed, they could be as deadly as any, striking with poison that could drop a Daikini in a matter of steps or, as now, imbuing their missiles with a portion of their own life force, to give it a striking power far exceeding its diminutive size. At its ultimate, a brownie could trade his life for that of a foe, and Thorn had no doubt that was where this engagement was meant to end as Bastian’s claws opened bloody stripes across Tak’s flank before the eagle surged skyward for a second attack.

  Thorn lashed out with a gust of wind, using it as he would a punch, Bastian squalling in surprise and dismay as he found himself pushed away from his quarry. Rool, always better at a physical scrap than Franjean, managed another shot, but Khory used her sword to block it, her blade slicing the thorn in twain and thereby dissipating its force. She didn’t stop there but charged forward herself, compelling Bastian to follow his mate’s example and flee down the ravine.

  “Damnation,” Geryn cried, clambering sloppy-legged to his feet, with huge snuffling noises as he tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose. “Those birds, Drumheller, they were the ones traveled wi’ yeh!”

  “Yes,” was the flat re
ply.

  There was no hint of a geas, or a glamour, not the slightest whiff of entrancement. They came at him of their own free will, possessed by a rage that bordered on hatred and allowed not the smallest hint of mercy. Not for him, nor for Elora.

  “What has happened?” he breathed. But the question was rhetorical, for InSight had already presented him with the answer, embodied in that one awful word both brownies and eagles had cried at him: “Demon!” He had become one with Khory’s sire in order to bring her into the world, accepted that Bonding fully and freely and thereby branded himself as cursed and outcast in the eyes of all the Veil Folk. It would be the same with the Daikini, if they learned what he’d done, for those who willingly consorted with DemonKind were considered the most wicked and damnable of creatures, wholly beyond forgiveness or redemption. They attacked Elora because they feared he had corrupted her as well. There was nothing he could say to persuade them differently, because a signature of DemonKind was their mastery of the arts of deception; for their own survival, they would assume his every word a lie, and every gesture a trap.

  At least, the brownies had escaped Elora’s tower; that was something. But it hadn’t been a clean getaway, for one of Franjean’s arms was wrapped tight to his body—that was why he didn’t use a bow against them—and there was a wicked scar across Bastian’s back that hadn’t wholly healed. Likely wouldn’t, from the stench it left behind him. They weren’t clean wounds; they cast an infection deep into the bodies that would quickly consume them.

  He didn’t know if he could heal them. Worse, he knew that if he called them back, he wouldn’t get the chance. If they saw him, they would kill him.

  He snuffled himself, nostrils taunted by the faintest tang of smoke on the air. His mind was on other things; he didn’t notice.

  “Very nice,” he told Khory as he passed her.

  “Sword knew what to do,” she replied, “I just helped.”