Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  Franjean offered a courtly bow, Rool a nod of the head. She folded herself into a switchback of calf and thigh and body, dropping her backside to her heels and resting her chin on her knee with that jointless ease so common to the very young, even when they’re a bit plump.

  “I saw you in my aerie.”

  “And we, likewise, lady.”

  “I spoke harshly, to you and of you. For that I ask your pardon. And as well for not knowing you sooner. My memory may be a sieve now, but then I had no such excuse. I owe the pair of you so much, you deserved much better. But then”—and her eyes turned hooded—“so did everyone in Angwyn.”

  “Point to you, Drumheller,” Rool told him after raking his eyes across the girl, “she may be worth the effort after all.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a twist of her old asperity. “I think.”

  “Should I assume the eagles won you free?” Thorn suggested.

  “Damn near thing it was, too. Hey!” Rool roared suddenly in his biggest voice, jumping and waggling his arms like a pip-squeak dervish. “Keep your damn distance, you damn, horn-headed lummox!” And the stag, appropriately startled, backpedaled a few steps with a snort of surprise. He’d been intrigued by the little animates and stepped over to investigate further, to see if they might prove edible. Another downside of so fast and ferocious a healing, it left all concerned, physician and patient, ravenous.

  “Thought we were done when the Night Herons rolled out of their roost.”

  “My stick-leg birds!” Elora cried. “Are they all right?”

  “The Night Herons?” Thorn was unsure whether to be astonished or aghast. “Yours, Elora?”

  She was genuinely puzzled. “Well, they rooked in the tower. No one seemed too eager to shoo them away….” She paused until the hoots of derision from the brownies ran their course.

  “That’s a game worth seeing.” Franjean chortled.

  “Get thee gone, wicked wingie.” Rool affected a high-pitched voice and fey manner, flicking a hand at the wrist as though brushing off a dust mote. “Be off, we’ll have none of your rough sort about.”

  “How long have they been there?” Thorn wondered.

  “As long as I have, I guess—what’s so funny, you two?” She got no satisfaction from her demand, as it sent the brownies into even greater paroxysms of hilarity. Ryn and Khory exchanged a glance of confusion and decided to stay well clear; this was a confrontation best left to the principals. “Certainly,” Elora finished to Thorn, deciding herself that her best course was to ignore the little perishers, “as long as I remember. We’d roost in my garden together. I’d feed them in my tree. I think I sort of liked them because no one would come near when they were about.”

  “None would approach, Princess,” Rool said in his matter-of-fact way, “because herons are known to favor the taste of human flesh.”

  “They’re creatures of evil, Princess,” Franjean told her in his most schoolmasterish tone.

  “Not mine.”

  “It isn’t as if they have any bloody choice in the matter, you know. They’re born that way!”

  “Which condemns them forever, Franjean? You were wrong about Drumheller…”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “But you’re willing to take that risk. The herons can’t learn a different way, they can’t change?”

  The brownie struck an attitude. “I don’t believe my ears. I can’t talk to the child, she’s impossible.”

  “They did me no harm, ever!”

  “Some of us, missy,” and Franjean waggled his sling for emphasis, which reminded Thorn of healing work still left to do, “weren’t so fortunate!”

  “Who looked after them?” Ryn asked suddenly.

  “Never thought of that,” Rool conceded. “They’re predators, they live for the hunt. All I’ve ever seen or heard of ’em, they only eat what they’ve fresh killed.”

  “Not in Angwyn,” Elora told them. “Not the ones in my tower.”

  “Must’ve given the locals pause, I’m thinking,” Rool continued, letting his thoughts choose their own path, “to see their Savior Princess consorting with such abominations. Why didn’t anyone do anything about it?”

  “Actually,” Elora said, “I don’t believe anyone knew, outside of my Vizards. From a distance, to anyone looking from the ground or even the palace itself, they’re just birds. They only came to visit when no one else was around.”

  “No one else,” Ryn prompted, “besides the Vizards.” Elora nodded.

  “They knew,” the Wyrrn said. “But they didn’t tell.”

  “Can’t be certain,” from Franjean.

  “Given Elora Danan’s position at Court—and what happened to his wife and son—the King would have acted immediately to protect her from even a hint of threat.”

  “You speak like you know him.”

  “Not necessarily,” Franjean interjected, saving Ryn from any reply. “Your precious king sanctioned the presence of the Maizan in Angwyn, why not the herons as well? Maybe he believed they’d protect her.”

  “Nobody,” was Rool’s retort, “is that naive. Present company excepted.”

  “Enough,” Thorn said quietly and, to his amazement, was obeyed. He tried not to let the unexpected achievement go to his head. “We need shelter, we need food, we need rest. Find those, and you can all argue to your hearts’ content.”

  The stag huffed, pawing the ground with a forehoof before using his horns to shunt Thorn around until he was facing the mountain fastness of Doumhall.

  “Returning the favor, are you?” he asked the stag, who offered another sharp exhalation that might have been agreement, might even have contained a breath of amusement.

  “It is the easiest road,” Thorn noted.

  “Too easy, do you think?” asked Ryn.

  The Nelwyn shrugged. “Prudence dictates we assume the worst, namely that the Deceiver must know we’ve survived his holocaust. We can’t afford to wait for his next move, whether he comes for us himself or uses more surrogates. There’s no decent path along the shore, and following any other route means slugging our way up and down these gorges. Anybody here feel up to that?”

  The silence included even the wind, which chose that moment to pause.

  “Right, then, it’s decided. To Doumhall we go!”

  And with stately tread, the stag led them on their way.

  They thought they’d have a view once they reached the Doumhall heights, the opportunity to properly gain their bearings, but the whole summit of the ancient peak was occluded by the storm. The cloud base settled in about a third of the way up the main slope, and if the winds below were any indication, there was no going any farther.

  As it turned out, the stag had no interest in leading them high but picked his way instead along a track that meandered around the broad eastern flank of the mountain. The fire had flowed as Thorn had surmised, cresting across the valleys like a storm surge against a beach, though its greatest intensity appeared to have been concentrated on the hollow where Thorn and the others had taken refuge. The stag set a gentle pace, for his own comfort as much as theirs, but it was soon apparent that had they followed Geryn’s lead, only Khory could have possibly escaped alive.

  They had to stop more than once, and well before the end, the DemonChild had placed Thorn across her shoulders. He hadn’t complained before she picked him up, but he didn’t protest either; in truth, his hips were an ever-tightening knotwork of pain and not even spells could keep away the surety that bone ground on bone. Elora looked to Ryn, who lamented being denied the option of switching to a purely four-footed incarnation to make his journey easier. She wasn’t in much better shape, devoting her focus mainly to placing one foot safely and surely before the other. She hadn’t been hurt, but she was as exhausted as any of them and the stresses of the past days were beginning to make their presence felt, oozing through cracks i
n the walls she’d built to protect her inner self.

  “According to story,” the Wyr said, to pass the time, “the world has two ways of ending, in fire or in ice.”

  “I’m done with endings, I want no more of them,” Elora said, refusing to be cheered.

  “No problem there, Highne—” He caught himself before she could cast a rebuke. “Elora. Since you proved yourself so adept at chasing away the one, all that’s needed is to banish the other.”

  “I didn’t chase anything, you nit! I just talked to them.” Despite herself, she flashed a smile of remembrance. “I wish you’d seen them as I did. There were so many textures to their flames, it was as if a piece of the sun in the sky had been brought among us and given life.”

  “Who’s to say it wasn’t?”

  “Who, indeed? They weren’t…of us, do you know what I mean? Not Daikini, not Nelwyn, nor Waking World, nor Veil Folk. We speak so casually of Gods and Powers, yet when I touched them I felt a kind of purity that we can’t even dream of.”

  “An essence transcending mortal physicality.”

  “You’ve seen them.” She clapped delightedly, losing all her hard-won maturity and reminding them all she was still very much only a girl, on the merest cusp of adolescence. “You know!”

  “Know, perhaps. Seen them, not what you have, nor the way you mean. They’re a Mystery, that’s why the word in this context has a capital. What?” he asked suddenly, at the stark alteration in her expression, as though an inner torch had been doused.

  “You’re talking like a tutor.”

  “Knowledge does that. Ask the brownies, sterling exceptions that prove the rule.”

  “I don’t think so,” scoffed Franjean, from his perch on Thorn’s pouch.

  “All the airs but none of the learning?” asked Elora. “That isn’t very nice. Or, I think, very true.” And Rool made a very rude gesture he’d picked up on a military parade ground.

  “Stop a moment, Khory, will you, please?” Thorn asked.

  A moment later he was riding behind Anele’s eyes, enjoying once more her superb view—even circumscribed as it was by the lowering roof of storm clouds—of the world below.

  “There’s something about this place…,” he mused, sharing his thoughts with the great eagle, as always.

  “Good, bad, indifferent?”

  “Not sure. You?”

  “I’m definitely good”—beat—“when I’m not bad. But indifferent, never!”

  “You’re developing a far too human sense of humor.”

  “Ah. Forgive me, mage, I had no idea ‘humor’ was the sole prerogative of you two-leg walkers. Or, for that matter, what you call ‘humanity.’”

  “Well, it is. The one, anyway.”

  “And as for the other?”

  “I stand suitably corrected.” He sighed, sobriety restored.

  “Not see what you want?”

  “Can’t see what I want. The perspective’s not right, I need more altitude.”

  “Not here, not while that city glows and these winds howl.”

  “How bad do you think it is in there, Anele?”

  Now it was her turn to sigh as she measured the power of her wings against that of the storm. She didn’t like to come out wanting, but she liked dissembling less.

  “Franjean says you stink of Demon—not because you shared a cage with one; he says the taint’s a part of your soul.”

  “I can’t deny it, much as I’d wish to.”

  “Smell much the same to me, old duffer, for what that’s worth. But then I key off visuals mainly. Far as Bastian and I are concerned, that wind, that’s a demon. It’s a whirlpool of air, drawing anything it snares to the heart of that damnable city. We heard some wing-born”—and her voice took on a coloration of sorrow—“crying as they were swept past. For help, for mercy. For death. Couldn’t offer any of it.

  “The vortex sweeps you in, tighter spirals, faster winds, takes all you have just to hold position, there’s nothing left to maneuver. Try to go sideways, you end up being swept along until you’re right back where you started. You get tired, you lose a little more air; eventually, there’s nothing left. And you’re lost.

  “Going to play hell with migrations, Drumheller. This maelstrom lies smack across one of the major flyways.”

  “When you and Bastian broke away, when I came to Angwyn, did you mark anything of this peak?”

  “All who fly the Bay ‘mark’ Doumhall, Drumheller, same as the mariners and seafolk do. It’s the clearest landmark on the entire coast.”

  “Have you a distinct memory, Anele, may I see?”

  The eagles had been much higher that day, the last full day of sun, and her keen gaze found for him in an instant precisely what he’d been searching for.

  “Thank you,” he said, as he returned wholly to himself.

  “As always. And apologies to the Wyr, from me and Bastian both.”

  “He’ll be more receptive, I think, when he’s full healed.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Blessed Bride,” he said in a marvel, after Khory set him on the ground, so beside himself he was talking more like Rool. “It’s no mountain. I mean, no natural mountain. It’s a fortress!”

  “Drumheller,” Ryn asked incredulously, “are you saying somebody made this place?”

  “Looks that way, yes.”

  “I thought it was a bedtime story,” Ryn was shaking his head in wonder, “something passed down by the Kings in Angwyn to make them seem better than they were.”

  Once upon a time, he told them, as they continued on, content for the moment to follow the stag’s lead—since he, of them all, appeared to have a destination—Gods walked the world. It was a far wilder time, so the story went, and the Powers in play more elemental, composed of utterly primal forces. No subtlety to being or deeds, they displayed a raw, untamed strength that boggled the mind. Wherever they strode, they left their mark, but they were giants in stature as well as accomplishment and those who came after too small in every dimension to comprehend the wonders they had wrought.

  This was one such place.

  “Doumhall Mount,” the Wyr proclaimed, once the varied, good-natured comments concerning peoples’ stature, or lack thereof, had run their course, “seat of the ancient fortress of Angwyn.”

  Thorn picked up the tale, relating what he’d seen in the eagles’ memories.

  “You can’t tell from the ground; even looking at the mount from out to sea isn’t much help because of all the growth that’s gone on about it, obscuring the clean lines of the structure. But from the air, from high above, the look of the place suddenly comes apparent. It’s the symmetry, you see. The slopes fit too neatly together, they drop too smoothly to the water—hellsteeth, take the mountain itself! You have to go all the way to the continental spine to find anything near as big. Sure, it looks much the same as the rills and ridges that make up the coastal range, only it’s three times their size.”

  The stag picked up its step, to a faster walk, and they hurried to keep pace as it led them through a series of folds in the rock that turned out to be far wider in actuality than first appearance. The whole mountain was an artful blend of optical illusions, and Thorn grabbed at a firefly of memory, of an early voyage with Maulroon when the big man showed him twists and turns in the rivers where it seemed that the water ahead simply…ended.

  For mile upon mile as they approached, rock walls loomed before them, forming a barrier none could pass. Until they found themselves rounding a sharp bend to discover the stream continuing on as broad and powerful as ever. No wall, merely a chimera of the eye, and it was much the same here. Folds in the rock that, to the distant and casual observer, might be taken for the natural deformations were transformed on closer scrutiny to passages and sally ports, ramparts that stood so tall they put Cherlindrea’s woods to shame.

  “Is this a door?” Thorn
asked in wonderment, bending back so far to see its lintel that he nearly toppled onto his back.

  “No moat,” commented Ryn, gazing at a parade ground beneath arching drapes of stone that could hold the whole of the Maizan Horde, with room to spare.

  “Of course there’s a moat, you lumping ninny of a hairball.” Franjean was in rare form. “You just call it the Bay.”

  “How old do you think this place is, Drumheller?” Elora asked, as they passed within.

  Franjean beat him to the reply—Rool stayed with the eagles, who despite the magnificent space preferred to remain outside—and delighted in it. “Might as well ask, milady, how old’s the world.”

  As they progressed, earthen floor gave way to flagstones, each spanning greater dimensions than the foundation plan of a good-sized Daikini town house.

  “Is the whole mountain hollow, d’you think?” Ryn wondered.

  “Very likely.”

  “Must be hell to heat.”

  “Quite easy, I’d wager,” and all eyes went to Khory, as this was the first she’d spoken since coming near the peak. “You can feel it in the bedrock stone, lava streams relatively close beneath the surface.”

  “Makes sense,” agreed Thorn. “Probably thermal springs as well, scattered through the interior.”

  “What,” Ryn exclaimed, “are you saying this is a volcano?”

  “All of the assets, none of the liabilities,” Thorn told him cheerfully. “If it had any tendency toward eruption, I suspect people would have heard by now.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time a builder screwed up his location.”

  “Whoever they were, Taksemanyin, they’re long gone—from this place, from the world.”

  “No offense, Drumheller, but I suggest we follow their example.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Perhaps I’m like the eagles, I’ve never been very comfortable under a roof.”

  “We need the shelter, Ryn, and the rest. Our friend didn’t bring us here by accident,” and he indicated the stag, standing patiently to the side. “I say, let’s have faith in him, as he did in us to save him.” He cast his thoughts to Bastian.