Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  “You’re wrong,” Elora cried as Havilhand pumped himself for all he was worth along the steepling rise. “He’s wrong,” she said again, to Thorn and the others.

  “We won’t burn, then?” From Ryn, all naive innocence, with intent to amuse.

  Thorn looked him in the eye, having already decided to stop their hearts before the flames claimed them.

  “No,” he said simply.

  “Well, that’s a relief. Nor die neither?”

  “Can’t promise that, I’m afraid,” was Thorn’s response, and now he smiled.

  “Now you tell us!” The Wyr rolled his eyes for dramatic emphasis.

  “Into the hollow,” Thorn instructed them, all business. As Elora passed he touched fingertips to her arm, the barest brush touch. “Thank you,” he said. “Truly.”

  Traditional fire sounds now, like drum heralds before an advancing line of battle, bringing with them the first flashes of heat. All the humidity was vanishing from the air; Thorn could feel the skin of his face tighten as the scene was sucked dry of ambient moisture. The stand of trees was still too thick, the trunks stood too tall, for them to get a decent view of the approaching conflagration; by the time they saw it in full, it would be upon them. Conditions were changing with dramatic speed, as though the hurricane that was battering the coast had turned its attentions full on the land.

  The hollow wasn’t so terribly deep, Thorn could see over the top simply by standing erect, but there was nothing better available. Khory set Ryn in the deepest part, taking up position on one side, with Elora lying beside him on the other, both snuggling as close to the Wyr as they were able.

  An explosion caught Thorn’s eyes, downslope in the neighboring ravine, and he watched a sinuous, serpentine shape—colored as though blood were made molten and leavened by pure gold, so that it gleamed from within with an intensity to shame the sun—dive into the trunk at its base. His eyes followed its progress up the heart of the tree, although at first nothing could be seen by the naked eye, until the wood itself began to glow. Every leaf burst alight and then dollops of raw fire leaked into view, the way a smithy might use a white-hot bar to sear his way through a plate of metal. Fountains of flame rocketed from the ground, as the roots were consumed, and with a tremendous whoumpf of expanding gas the tree itself instantaneously combusted, brilliantly ablaze from floor to crown.

  “Bastard,” Thorn snarled, yet again in helpless rage as the firedrake leaped to another target.

  He was sweating. In the matter of seconds it had taken the tree to die, the fire had pumped the temperature a score of degrees, from autumn to summer. He pulled a bottle from his pouch and upended it over the hollow, not so much to drench anyone lying within or the ground beneath but primarily to remind them what it felt like to be wet. A pool wouldn’t save them, when the smallest breath of that superheated air would scorch their lungs worse than a cauterizing iron, and the water itself would be heated to a rolling boil.

  His cloak wasn’t big enough, so he borrowed one of Elora’s, shaking it out to cover the whole of the depression; a spray of water went on it as well.

  One big advantage in a fast-moving fire such as this, he knew. Its intensity made it a horror almost beyond imagining, but its very speed made it one that didn’t have to be endured long, where a more leisurely blaze might be around awhile. On the one hand, speed and intensity were the hallmarks of a brush fire; they didn’t occur in oldest-growth forests. On the other hand, Cherlindrea’s Groves didn’t burn, period. Fact of nature, like the rising of the sun. Presumably, that was where the firedrakes came in, happy to consume what a match couldn’t possibly ignite. Which meant, ultimately, that all bets were off.

  The Deceiver’s doing, of course, his actions gradually establishing a recognizable pattern as he took what was normal and violently twisted it back upon itself. Casting order into chaos, setting one natural force at deadly odds against another. Firedrakes represented one of the primal forces of creation; according to one legend they were born with the universe and swam in the molten hearts of the stars themselves, while another belief held that it was they who burned the holes in the fabric of the sky that allowed the heavenly radiance to shine through to the waking world below. Kin to dragons, some theorized; but where the one was considered to be the quintessence of thought and reason, these were beings of raw and untamed passion, quicksilver emotions to go with their protean flesh. It wasn’t known if they were intelligent; like Demons, their minds worked in ways neither Daikini nor Veil Folk could comprehend. The only surety was that they were a power to be reckoned with. Only a first-rank mage would even consider summoning one, because only the most absolute and all-encompassing of wards could contain their tremendous heat; the problem was, firedrakes apparently hated in equal measure being confined. From the moment of manifestation, they were reputed to fight like berserkers to break free, with consequences to the world if they did couched in the more dire and fearsome terms. Among all the sorcerers Thorn had ever met, the histories he’d ever heard told or read himself, these terrible creatures were considered without exception to be the bear best left sleeping in its den. To be ever avoided and never disturbed.

  Yet the Deceiver had summoned and unleashed, not a single such horror, but an entire clutch.

  “Madness,” Thorn breathed because he still couldn’t believe it was actually happening. “Madness!”

  Nothing gentle about sight or sound any longer. He knew it was time to get under cover, but the sight held him with the attraction of a cobra for the mongoose. There was no way to see far, the forest grew too tall around, preventing the spectacular vistas that should be the stock-in-trade of such a vantage point, but what was in sight before him was rapidly becoming an inferno. Wind hotter than the breath of a dragon, more appropriate to a desert where the only scrap of moisture is what lives within your own body. A roar like an avalanche, as though all the furnaces that ever were had been brought together in this one spot and stoked hot enough to consume the world.

  A hand tugged his trouser leg—Elora—and he ducked beside her, the child hurriedly brushing stray sparks from his hair before they had a chance to do some mischief.

  “I can spell you all to sleep,” he said. “That would make this easier.”

  “If it’s not an essential requirement,” Ryn answered, for them all, “I think I’d rather watch.”

  Thorn lay on his stomach and sank his fingers into the soil, already warming to the touch. There were root networks below, winding around the rocks that composed the ridge, and he knew the firedrakes would happily try a jump from them to the people above, given the opportunity.

  He went to work on their clothes first, recalling what it was like on Morag’s schooner, with the wind howling, the seas booming over the deck. They’d been soaked to the skin, soaked, it seemed, through the skin, every particle of their beings saturated with water. As then, so now. Remember the wet, was his injunction, cast into the earth as well as their clothes. This was a place of generous weather, it had to be to support such luxuriant growth. The sea air created an environment of near-perpetual dampness, and when there weren’t actual storms to soak the landscape, the fog did its best. He chanted of winter, cool time, rainy season, showers falling every day, saturating the earth, a time that was rich with both the promise and actuality of life. He didn’t neglect the air in this, but reminded it of how cool it was on a spring morn, possessing more than a bite still of the winter just past, crisp and invigorating, far removed from the oven without.

  He didn’t speak, there was no point as the leading edge of the blaze swept over them. He’d seen battles where thousands had come together in a clash of arms that rivaled the heavenly thunder; they were nothing compared with this. He’d stood on the slopes of the continental divide, with titanic explosions of thunder tearing at the sky so close above it seemed like he could reach out and touch the cloud base, where the shock of the discharge was felt as much as heard.
Also nothing. They were caught up in a reverberating barrage, where the ordnance was trees being blown to bits by the resin that was their lifeblood being instantly heated to vapor—like the pops made by a log on the household hearth, magnified a millionfold, beyond the capacity of ear or mind to accept.

  He felt a trickle of warmth along his back, as though a line of hot wax had been dripped the length of his spine, and he redoubled his efforts, calling forth visions of the great waves that smashed the boat and the desperate struggle to survive after the schooner’s destruction. He could feel Elora shake beside him; the lesser trembles may have been fear but mostly he was certain it was remembered cold, her garments so sodden they plastered themselves to her silver skin. His were no better, as this enchantment shunted aside the one that normally kept him dry. Problem here, if his teeth chattered he’d lose the rhythm of his spell and that would be their doom. There was no margin of safety, they were in the heart of a true holocaust, balanced on the most razor-thin of margins. As Geryn counted on his legs to save him, so were the rest dependent on Thorn’s will.

  He was weeping with effort, taking enough breath to get through a single repetition of the spell, each cycle leaving more of a hollow sensation in his chest. Nelwyns didn’t run, weren’t built for it, that was a Daikini affectation, but he’d seen the Tall Folk when they met for games, especially those who attempted the distance races. He looked worse than they…

  …and thought of the time he crossed the Roof of the World, the greatest of mountain ranges, with peaks so high no living thing could reach the summit. Rashly, he’d given it a try and found himself driven back when he reached a point where the deepest of breaths still left his lungs starving for air. Strange, he remembered thinking, with a scholar’s detachment and a warrior’s frustration (then as now, he didn’t like losing), to feel like you’re drowning, when you’re a continent removed from any decent body of water.

  Same sensation now, as he worked himself ever harder to less effect. Ultimately, he would reach the point where his diaphragm had no more strength to expand his lungs, or his heart to manage another beat. His gamble had been that the fire would blow past them long before that moment. Only it seemed to have stalled.

  He wasn’t surprised.

  Elora swiped his arm.

  There was a faint glow beneath the surface of the sand that put him in mind of a foundry, where a forger had trickled a current of molten metal into a mold. A more fierce, actively hungry radiance than he’d see from a volcanic lava flow, because that liquid rock began to cool the instant it emerged.

  There was no cast-off heat from the firedrake; the wards Thorn cast were holding fine. The opposition was merely making its presence felt.

  “This is different from the ocean,” Elora said in his ear. She spoke in a normal tone, which meant he shouldn’t have been able to hear a word—he could barely make proper sense of his own thoughts—but he understood her fine.

  “Yes,” he said, not trying to be rude but not having the voice or breath to spare.

  “That was natural, this is something else.”

  “Yes.”

  “Willow’s doing.”

  “The Deceiver’s doing, Elora. Whatever face that creature wears, it isn’t Willow. It was never Willow.” He had to pause every few words to chant the next passage of his spell, which made his speech halting and disjointed. He couldn’t even spare the effort to project his half of the conversation through mindspeech; too much of his focus was required to sustain his work.

  “But the deception worked. On me. On those who possessed the power to know better. Cherlindrea above all would have known a lie. If she accepted him, some part of it—some part of him—must have been true.”

  “Impossible!” But beyond that protest, he had no argument to refute her logic.

  The both of them watched the gleaming sinuosity beneath them, while it in turn cast enough of a glow to highlight all their faces in turn.

  “You never answered my question, Nelwyn.”

  Another mystery defying simple solution.

  “Nothing to say worth the speaking of it. I’m sorry,” he added. Or, he thought, the sparing of the breath.

  “It must be nice to be a piece of gold,” she mused. “At least then you’d have some sense of why you were valued. Do you think this fire means Wil—” She caught herself, offered a shy demi-smile of apology. “I mean, our adversary”—and Thorn tossed a look her way at the deliberate choice of the plural pronoun, her smile broadening a fraction more in return—“has given up on taking me alive?”

  “No,” was his flat reply. “But you’ll forgive me for not putting your supposition to an empirical test.”

  “You don’t look well, Drumheller.”

  He had no energy to spare for a shrug, much less a spoken reply. There was a burning in his body that had nothing to do with the fires outside, hot wax turning to acid, coursing along the pathways of his heart and nerves, lacing itself between the cords of muscles until every act of living was accompanied by its own special lash of pain. It was endurable, but it was also getting worse.

  “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.

  “ ‘We’?”

  She met his gaze, without attempting to hide the fear behind her eyes, but also without taking back a word of her offer.

  “I’d like to try.”

  “As you wish, Most Royal Highness.”

  She clutched his arm and at first he assumed it a burst of second thoughts.

  “I’m Elora Danan,” she told him, and he responded with a grin of approval, taking a last breath before flinging aside the cloak and rising into hell.

  The world was fire. On every side, seemingly close enough to touch, flames rose to form a roof above them; the ground cracked and seared as badly as any slab of meat. Trees remained mostly as residual afterimages, defined by the ever-shifting shapes of the firedrakes that consumed them, those that hadn’t yet been blown to bits radiating shimmering bands of heat, up the visual scale from golden yellow with scarlet highlights to a brightness so intense it was wholly bereft of color.

  Amidst this inferno, Elora was likewise transformed. Her skin was an ideal reflecting surface and the fiery elements around them restored a warmth to her appearance that had been lost, painting her in wild mixtures of the hottest colors until it seemed to Thorn that she was herself composed of living flame.

  Through the fire moved the firedrakes, as serpents would through water, with the boneless sinuosity of eels, kept at bay by the boundaries of Thorn’s wards but never straying far, always returning to press here, nudge there, testing, ever testing, for that fatal hint of weakness that would allow them entry.

  Elora couldn’t help herself, her hand leaping forward of its own accord to touch the nearest one, Thorn’s reacting as quickly to snap her back.

  “You hurt me,” she said, rubbing her wrist where his fingers had left their mark.

  “I’m sorry.” His head was pounding, the glare like spikes through his eyes, and he despaired at the arrogance, the madness, that had put him in this place, in this hopeless fight. Of their own accord, Geryn’s accusations sounded in memory.

  Peck, he heard, a chorus of voices, slippery and melodious, caressing with warmth, Peck Peck Peck Peck Peck

  The catcalls rose and fell, gaining in mockery as the words themselves crashed against him like hurled stones. He’d heard the diminutive his whole life; it was part and parcel of a Nelwyn’s lot, whether as gentle derision or true insult.

  “Stop saying that,” cried Elora, only to have her own words thrown back at her in the same dissonant musicale.

  Foolish little fleshling, and before their eyes a number of the creatures flowed together to briefly form the image of something much greater, whose true nature was achingly beyond their ability to comprehend, before dissolving again to their normal state.

  “What was that?” Elora asked, more entranced
than afraid.

  “Tales tell of a monstrous celestial Unknowable—some beliefs refer to it as the Phoenix—alpha and omega, beginning and end and beginning of all, the fire that consumes yet brings forth rebirth.”

  “It’s so beautiful, it’s all so beautiful.”

  He had to concede that was true.

  To pit your mortal strength against us, they heard further, with chitters of laughter.

  “Got that right,” he said, and Elora heard the effort in his voice.

  “No,” she said to him, and then she turned back to the flames to repeat herself, “no!” It wasn’t a command, he realized, she wasn’t imposing her will on the flames as she’d tried to do with the water. Instead, more of a statement of opposition. “This is wrong,” she continued, “why do you wish us harm when we’ve done none to you?”

  Our nature.

  “To burn the world to ash?”

  Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes

  The firedrakes were giddy with delight at the image, swirling so fast and brightly across the field of Thorn’s vision that even closing his eyes didn’t help, scarlet and gold stripes branding themselves across the inside of his lids. The heat was so intense here that the last of his strength couldn’t wholly shield them any longer; he felt baked, and didn’t want to think of how Taksemanyin felt under his fur. Around them, the fire had coalesced into a whirlwind, a vortex of unbelievable proportions that no longer needed any outside wind to push it along; here was a monster that created its own, a juggernaut engine of absolute destruction that pulled air to its center just like a hurricane, stoked it hot enough to vaporize steel, and spat it away to carry flames to new tinder. Such a blaze as this would cast a glow to rival the icy radiance of Angwyn, and hurl its superheated poison to the top of the atmosphere, along with smoke sufficient to blot out the day.