The Shadow Stone ta-1

by Richard Baker

  As the sun appeared, the shadows fled. The cold grip on Aeron's heart wavered and dissipated as the daylight drove back the borders of gloom. The racing edge of dawn swept over him, and the dead gray hills and twisted black forests seemed to come alive, the gloom fading away to reveal fresh green slopes and lush young buds gracing the trees and shrubs. The sunrise brought me back, Aeron realized. I must have been right on the borderline between the shadow and the real world.

  But where am I?

  Groaning, Aeron pushed himself to his hands and knees, then tried to stand. His legs wouldn't bear his weight. He collapsed and surrendered to a deathlike sleep.

  "Hey, there! You dead or alive?"

  A harsh voice dragged Aeron back to consciousness, accompanied by an ungentle toe in his ribs. He blinked, stirred, and found himself staring up at a large, dark-skinned man who towered over him. The fellow was dressed in a colorful dyed jacket and pantaloons, and he scowled as he looked down at Aeron. "Oh, you're alive," he muttered. "Well, you shouldn't be. It was bitter cold last night. You're damned lucky you didn't freeze to death, lying out in the road like that."

  Aeron shook his head and climbed to his feet. He was weak, trembling with cold, completely disoriented, but the supernatural chill that had nearly extinguished the fires of his life was gone. He turned slowly, studying his surroundings. The long, low valley and crossroads matched the last place he'd seen in the plane of shadow, but the empty fields now seemed to be furrowed with an early spring planting. "Where am I?" he said to himself.

  The big man beside him took Aeron's question literally. "You're near Markelmen, lad. It's maybe five miles down that road there." He looked at Aeron's dress and added, "You certainly don't look like you're from around here."

  Now that Aeron was standing, the man didn't seem quite so tall, although he topped six feet. He was a heavyset fellow with a round gut and thick, powerful arms. A draft horse and a cart full of small barrels waited a few yards away. The mage considered the carter's words and shook his head again. "Markelmen doesn't mean anything to me. Where's that?"

  "Did some highwayman give you a knock on the head, lad?" the carter asked. Aeron met his eyes with a clear and level look, and the fellow shrugged. "Well, this is the county of Orsraun. The Ors Valley is just over that rise; the river empties into the Reach about twenty miles farther south."

  Orsraun? Reach? They still didn't make much sense. Aeron struggled to fit the names into his mind. Finally he made some sense of it. "You mean we're in Turmish?"

  "Tyr's blind eyes, lad! Of course we're in Turmish! Where in Faerun did you think you were?"

  I wasn't certain I was in Faerun at all, Aeron thought, but he chose not to give voice to that remark. He'd read about Turmish and seen its shape on a map during his studies of the lands about Chessenta. It lay west of Cimbar, on the other side of the Akanapeaks, along the northern shore of the Vilhon Reach. He was hundreds of miles from the college. "What day is it?" he asked the westerner.

  "Today? It's the eighth day of Ches. Are you certain you haven't been rapped on the skull?"

  Ches? But last night was the fifteenth of Marpenoth. Could I have been in the shadow plane for five months? Aeron stared at the man in amazement until the fellow shifted his feet nervously and took a half-step back. "Well, you seem to be up and about. I'll be on my way, then."

  Aeron shook himself out of his astonishment. "Wait! Which way is it to Hlondeth?" If his memory served him right, that was the major port in this part of Turmish.

  "Take the western way from the crossroads," the trader said, pointing. "The road leads straight to Hlondeth, but it's forty miles or more."

  "Thanks," Aeron said. He left the Turmishite shaking his head as the fellow drove his cart off in the other direction. He began walking north, slowly warming up as the morning sun brightened and his exertions worked some of the ice out of his limbs.

  At first he kept his mind on the road and the wind-scoured hillsides, deliberately avoiding any serious thought. As the morning wore on, he eventually found himself considering his situation. He had nothing more than the clothes on his back, a handful of coins in his pouch, and a dozen or so spells locked in his mind, ready to use … if he dared. Each spell he expended would be gone, and without his spellbook-presumably resting on his desk in the college, five hundred miles away-he could not refresh his memory of any spells he cast. More to the point, what would happen if I did work a spell? he thought. Will the stone's influence reach me, now that I've left the plane of shadow? Or am I safe now?

  There was one certain way to find out, but Aeron was hesitant to experiment. In the first place, he would waste an irreplaceable spell, and secondly, what if the experiment demonstrated that he was still within the stone's grasp? He shuddered, recalling the abominable sensation of cold foulness boring through his body, mind, and spirit. He quickly turned his thoughts elsewhere. "Well, where to now?" he asked of the empty road. "Back to the college?"

  He frowned, weighing his words. Oriseus waited back at the college. And the stone was much closer there, even if it lay across the threshold of night. The Shadow Stone's power would certainly not be diminished the closer Aeron came, and it might even increase. That thought frightened him. His spellbooks, his studies, everything he needed remained in Cimbar, but Aeron did not dare return. Well, where then? he asked himself irritably.

  From a still place deep in his aching heart, the answer welled up into his mind: home. It had been more than a year-no, almost a year and a half now, if Ches was already upon the land-since Aeron had left Kestrel and Eriale to study at the college. Suddenly he missed them terribly, longing for the shelter and simplicity of his former life with a fierce pain that brought tears to his eyes.

  He gazed east for a long time, until his homesickness faded into a quiet despair. It would take weeks, maybe months, to round the Vilhon Reach, cross Chondath on the southern shore, and then find his way across Chessenta. "It won't get done until I begin," he said softly, and he started on his way again.

  Late in the afternoon, Aeron began to flag. He'd been walking all day after a harrowing ordeal, and his strength was giving out. The biting wind and dropping temperatures served as an additional discouragement to pressing on. He looked for an inhabited house or a roadside tavern, but the land nearby was desolate, and he eventually settled for a ruined cottage, its roof open to the sky.

  To his surprise, he was neither hungry nor thirsty. He felt only a leaden exhaustion and a bone-deep chill that ached in his limbs, although he was too tired to shiver. One of the spells in his mind would serve to revitalize him somewhat, restoring some of his energy and dispelling his fatigue, and Aeron thought long and hard about attempting it. Another cold night could leave him a very bad way, and he desperately wanted to feel warm again.

  Should I try it? he thought over and over. Sooner or later he would have to know what the Shadow Stone had done to his magical abilities. For better or worse, Aeron was a wizard. He'd wielded magic for years now; it was his life. He did not think he could ever go back to being the simple forester he was once, and that meant that he would have to learn whether or not he could still work magic. And there was only one way to do that.

  "I'd better try this with a spell I don't mind wasting," he muttered, staring into the fire. He considered the spells that lay ready in his head, eventually settling on mage light. It was useful, but Aeron could see better in the dark than most, and he could always light a torch or lantern if he really needed to see.

  He steeled himself with a grimace and whispered the words to the spell. He brought the symbol to his mind and unlocked it, shaping the magic. And he reached for the living energy to power his spell, grasping at the dancing fire in front of him.

  He couldn't feel anything. His rational mind told him that the bright currents of the Weave had to be dancing in the fire, ready for his touch, but he could not perceive the magic with any of his senses. He floundered, grasping desperately.

  His outstretched senses b
rushed against something cold and dark. The campfire guttered, died, and blazed back to life in sick, black flame. Aeron jolted backward, sealing himself from the power he'd found, but it was too late. A streamer of darkness burst from his chest, and he screamed as vile black corruption oozed from his skin, cloaking him in a mantle of shadow. The floating sphere of light took form, but it was pale and sickly, casting a greenish glow through the room. Flailing his arms in disgust, Aeron slashed the spell to pieces.

  The darkness retreated, leaving the stone walls slick with black frost. Aeron scrambled to his feet, digging his nails into his flesh as if to drag the ordure from his veins. He tripped over a low stone in the floor and stumbled into the wall. There was a moment of cold, dark pressure as he slid through the old rock, and then Aeron tumbled to the ground outside. He retched weakly on the grass until finally his thought and reason returned. He rose on unsteady feet and wiped his hand across his mouth.

  He could see the ground through his arm.

  In dull amazement, Aeron held up his hands. His clothes and flesh seemed translucent, indistinct. He could see the umber hillside and the rich red glow of the sunset right through his arms. He whirled, looking around, only to see a second landscape shimmering into view, overlying the world around him. It was a landscape of dead brown grass and leafless trees, roofed by a lightless sky.

  To the west, the last sliver of the sun's orb was vanishing behind the gray hilltops. A cold wind began to blow contrary to the brisk salt breeze from the sea, making his cloak flutter and twist against the wind as bit by bit he discorporated on the border of night. "Help me!" he screamed, his thin voice wailing on the shadow wind. No one answered.

  I'm being dragged through the veil, he thought, trying to master his panic. With each moment, his hold on the real world grew more tenuous, and he could feel tendrils of ebon substance reaching out to seize him, to hold him within the darkness. Mustering all his willpower, he concentrated on restoring his tattered frame, anchoring himself to the wet grass and clean rock of the hillside in Turmish.

  Somehow it worked. The sky brightened, the winds failed, and he grew heavier and more substantial until he felt his heart lurch into motion again, moving blood that had begun to freeze. The darkness retreated, and with a weary sigh, he collapsed outside the cottage, staring up into the twilight.

  Aeron walked from dawn to dusk for the next month or more, turning his footsteps toward home. He traveled south and west along the coast until he reached the bustling port of Hlondeth, but he had no money for passage to Cimbar. He also feared what would happen if the wind between the worlds came upon him while he was dozens or hundreds of miles out to sea. He resigned himself to a long walk and resolved to endure it as best he could.

  He followed the shore of the Vilhon Reach west from Hlondeth, passing through the rugged hill lands of the Cloven Mountains and then into the green eaves of the Winterwood. From the old city of Ormpetarr, he followed the river Arran into the mighty Chondalwood, striking southeast through the forests mantling the western flanks of the Akanapeaks. The great greenwood reminded him of the Maerchwood and home, although it was darker and wilder than the golden glades of his youth. On several occasions, he fell in with fellow travelers, pilgrims and merchants who shared his road for a time, but Aeron learned that he could not keep the same company night after night; when the sun set, he began to fade, wraithlike, into the shadows until the bitter winds of the crossing buried their icy talons in his bones and the deathly cold covered him in sparkling frost. Nothing he could do prevented form and substance from slipping away, and more than one erstwhile companion fled, screaming, at Aeron's unnatural disappearance.

  As Ches gave way to Tarsakh, he joined a party of pilgrims braving the old road through the Chondal Gap and climbed into the high vales of the Adder Peaks before winding back down into the sheer foothills in the southwestern corner of Chessenta. In the dense pine forests south of Oslin, he picked up the headwaters of the Winding River and followed it east as it wound through the wild and deserted lands in the southern marches of Chessenta. The land grew gentler and more open as he wandered into the old heartland of Chessenta, checkered with prosperous farmlands and crisscrossed by well-traveled roads.

  As the miles passed behind him, Aeron gained a stronger command of his mind and spirit, healing from the foul touch of the Shadow Stone. The chaos and corruption that had nearly driven him mad faded, and he discovered an amazing clarity of thought, a pure and lucid apprehension that illuminated every recess of his mind. But even as his spirit strengthened in the face of the journey, his body weakened. Each night a little less of his substance returned from the shadow crossing. He was slowly starving, not from want of food, but from want of solidity.

  Two nights before Midsummer, he crossed completely over, despite every effort to keep a tenuous hold on the world around him. For long hours, he pushed himself along a dark road beneath a barren sky, convinced in his heart that if he gave up and stopped moving, he would never see the dawn again. Finally, near morning, the shadow dissipated, leaving him standing alone on an empty road, hollow as a piece of weathered bone. Somehow he found the strength to continue.

  In the rugged hill country of Villon, only six or seven days from his home, Aeron lost the struggle. He had already walked most of the afternoon in the same tireless pace he'd used for weeks, his feet barely seeming to touch the ground. He came to an empty crossroads beside a burned-out, abandoned inn, and paused to consider his way. It was raining steadily, and the road was churned into thick black mud. To his left, an old signpost stood, its markings blurred. Aeron stepped closer and brushed his hand over the wood, trying to make it out.

  Something struck him low in his back, a handspan left of his spine, driving a red-hot wedge of pain into his torso. He clapped his hand to the source of the pain, twisting about, and felt something hard sticking into his back. Wincing, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the dark fletchings of an arrow quivering in the air. He drew his hand back and was surprised to see bright red blood running through his fingers.

  "Damn, Rolf, what're you waitin' for? Shoot him again!" a coarse voice hissed in the middle distance, behind him.

  "The damned bowstring broke. Besides, I got him. He ain't going anywhere." A second voice, deeper and slower.

  Aeron felt his legs beginning to give out and leaned against the wooden post for support. In dull shock, he turned to look back at the ruined inn. Several men were rising from the wreckage, tattered ruffians with hollow cheeks and burning, feverish eyes. One of them, a big stoop-shouldered man with long, strong arms, held a longbow in his hand. He scowled at the weapon and then looked at Aeron. "Horse dung. He's just a small fellow. I didn't need to break my string for him."

  "He's still standin', Rolf," one of the men in the back observed. "You can't have got him too square."

  "It was the bowstring," Rolf complained. "If it hadn't broke, I'd have put the arrow clean through the bastard." He tossed the bow to the ground and sauntered toward Aeron, drawing a heavy knife from his belt.

  Aeron could feel warm, wet blood trickling down his back, and the arrowhead burned with a white-hot fire just under the last rib. He could feel metal scraping on bone when he gasped for breath. He pushed himself away from the signpost and staggered away down the road, one hand holding the arrow in his lower back.

  "Hey, don't you run off with my arrow, you sorry bastard!" Rolf called, to the harsh laughter of his fellows. Aeron ignored them, trying to get away, but when he looked up again, he saw that the highwaymen were easily pacing him, moving up to surround him.

  He reeled to a halt, turning to watch them move closer. "I don't want any trouble," he gasped. "Just let me go."

  "Doesn't matter what you want," the first highwayman said. "Trouble's what you got." He leaned closer, scrutinizing Aeron. "Say, what kind of man are you? You don't look right to me."

  "Those're elf ears," Rolf announced. "We've found a half-breed, lads. Now, what'll we do with him?"

&n
bsp; "Whatever it is, better make it quick," the last bandit observed. "This fellow's bleeding like a stuck pig, Rolf. You might've got him after all."

  Aeron felt his knees buckle and he sagged to all fours, fighting to remain conscious. He felt nauseous, and his vision swam drunkenly. I'm going to die, he realized. It made him sick and sad, but he didn't feel any real fear yet, just surprise.

  "Ahh, you're right, I guess. Besides, the king's men might come along. No sense wasting time." Rolf advanced on Aeron, knife held casually in one hand.

  Aeron forced himself to look up at the burly brigand. "Stay back," he warned in a weak voice. "I'm a wizard."

  "Is that so?" Rolf said. "You'd better use any magic you've got, boy, 'cause you're going to be a dead wizard in just a moment." He leered wickedly at Aeron and seized a handful of Aeron's hair, jerking his face up to the sky to bare his throat.

  One last spark of resistance flared in Aeron's heart. Closing his eyes, he banished his pain for one moment, long enough to unlock a spell from his mind. He stretched out his senses to work the magic, knowing what would happen. Dark, potent force rushed to fill him, springing out of the quiescent blackness in the marrow of his bones, filling him with remorseless strength. Aeron locked his eyes on the bandit's and spoke the words for the fire hand spell.

  With nothing more than his force of will, he directed the jet of raging flame against the highwayman Rolf, charring his arms and face to brittle cinders. Aeron allowed the searing heat to play against the toppling bandit until he vanished in a pillar of fire, then swept the jet around to scorch Rolf's companions. With a distant fragment of his mind, he noted that the flames were a shade of black or purple that made his eyes ache.

  One of the highwaymen nearly escaped, but Aeron greedily drew power enough to beat the ruffian into the ground and blacken his flesh until it sizzled and smoked. When all four had stopped moving, he allowed the dark flames to gutter and fade, leaving a roaring, buzzing sound in his ears and bitter ice clinging to his bones. The world began to grow ghostly, and he looked down to see his body fading into insubstantiality. But dusk isn't near, he thought irrationally. The unearthly chill of the crossing blasted him, freezing the flow of blood down his back to a dark trickle. Aeron howled in pain as the shadow claimed him.