Shadow Dawn

by Chris Claremont

  Death had visited this place, and not so long ago.

  Elora let out her breath in an outrushing sigh, a little nonplussed to discover she’d been holding it so long a while that her chest ached, her surprise deepening with the discovery that she held an ax.

  “My-oh-my,” she said, taking the measure of the tension across her body as she did of the weapon itself. “What do we have here?”

  “You drew as you turned,” Rool told her. “Reached into your pouch and there it was.”

  “Comforting to know my gear always seems to know what I need.”

  She worked her hand on the hilt to make the grip that much more comfortable, but did not return the ax to its scabbard. It was the one she’d found outside the troll’s den and taken off the slain Daikini warrior. As she did with so many things she gathered up along the road, she’d simply stuffed it into a traveling pouch and forgotten all about it.

  “What can you see?” Rool asked quietly, meaning through the eagle’s eyes.

  A blink of the eye was all it took for InSight to join Elora’s consciousness with Bastian’s. With another, she was back in herself, shaken by what lay ahead.

  Rool, bless him, didn’t ask for details.

  “Go around, maybe?” he suggested, but Elora shook her head.

  “Can’t.” That had been her hope as well until Bastian’s perspective dashed it stillborn.

  “Why not?”

  “There’s a natural flow to the trail, that’s why the village was built here, this is the only way. Bastian can’t see any other path through the hills. They either dead-end in some blind canyon or other, or wind back on themselves so a body spends more time going sideways than ahead. And while the summits aren’t ferociously high, the slopes are murder, without an easy climb to the lot.”

  “What did you both see, Elora?”

  “Someone got real mad here, Rool. And then they got even.”

  With that, she crossed the bridge, to discover in part the reason why.

  Gibbets had been erected along the road at the far end of the structure, three on either side, with a crow cage hanging from each. Thankfully, their contents had long since yielded up their lives. Elora didn’t need a close examination to tell what they were. A family of trolls, by the tatters of skin left on their collapsed and vermin-savaged bones, who in the ancient way of their kind had attempted to make a home beneath the bridge. Or perhaps, since this looked to be a natural ford, they’d been here all along, with a den tucked into the bank.

  The reason for their being didn’t matter, their mere presence sealed their fate. Trolls were here, they were in the way, they were removed. Hung like scarecrows, to scare away others of their kind.

  “Is that all we can do, Rool? Hate and murder?”

  “You’re asking me? You’re the Daikini, Elora Danan.”

  “I’m not very proud of that right now.”

  “Would you be so charitable if it was your lambs been stolen, or your baby grabbed for dinner?”

  “You tell me. Those are naiads in the last two cages, and I think the pens hung up top inside, they were made for something smaller.”

  Water nymphs could be as changeable as the streams they called their home; the more wild the environment, the more wild the naiad who protected it. Two of them meant either siblings or a mating pair. One had died curled up in as tight a ball as possible, while the other’s arm was stretched to full extension in a desperate attempt to reach across the gulf between the cages.

  InSight had given Elora a spectacular overhead view of the setting, a modestly sized village numbering a couple of dozen houses whose construction mixed wood and stone, arrayed in scattered clusters along the slopes that reached up from this bank of the stream. They were solid, substantial structures that, in more than a few cases, were designed to be extensions of the hillside on which they rested. Elora suspected additional rooms had been hollowed out of the earth behind them. Each cluster of homes was arranged so that it formed a substantial defensive position, with interlocking fields of fire. Very much like other frontier communities she’d seen on her travels, and that Thorn had told her of.

  An altogether sensible scheme.

  It hadn’t saved them.

  The first house she came to proved the pattern for the rest. After the first cluster she lost all desire to see more. The assault had been as brutal as it was thorough, the stout stone walls breached by a massive succession of hammer blows, the rooms within consumed by balls of dragonfire. The heat of those magical flames was so intense, especially concentrated in so small and enclosed a space, that the inside walls crumbled to powder at Elora’s touch, reminding her of Torquil’s training forge after their encounter with the infant firedrake. For all within the outer chambers, death came as a moment of blazing agony before oblivion. They were the lucky ones. Farther in, Elora found slaughter enough to sicken the most hardened of butchers.

  The sun was still a presence overhead but not for much longer as it lowered toward the western ridges. This was the heat of the day but all she could do was tremble as a dank draft wound its clammy way about her head. She seemed to have lost all sensation in the outer parts of her body, while her inner self had never felt more delicate, almost as if she was at war with herself. Her mouth was dry, yet her skin felt slick and queasy on her frame, as though it had been coated underneath by a layer of slime. She forced herself to breathe in a regular rhythm, keeping it slow but shallow, to counteract the growing queasiness in her belly. She wanted to be sick. She didn’t dare.

  Strangely she also found she couldn’t cry.

  “No sign of siege engines,” she remarked to Rool as he strode in her direction, “nothing powerful enough to make these holes anyway. Nor any residue of spells.”

  “No need for either when you can whistle up a crew of ogres to do your dirty work.”

  “I don’t believe it. Ogres are like bears, territorial and solitary. One might claim this land, two at the most, but then they’d be more interested in fighting each other than any settlers. And even if you’re right, attacking a village like this isn’t their way.”

  “Who’s the one been sayin’ the old ways are changing?”

  “That isn’t funny, Rool.”

  “Signs are plain, Elora. Ogres and elves, working in concert. Ogres breach the walls, elves conjure the dragonfire. Ogres get to make a meal of whatever doesn’t get too badly cooked.”

  Elora swallowed convulsively, her eyes blinking rapidly in a vain attempt to generate tears. She’d suspected the truth from the moment she stepped across the scorched and broken threshold. Hearing it from Rool’s lips, in the brownie’s matter-of-fact tone, struck her like a blow to the belly. Ghouls ate carrion, as did trolls for the most part. Ogres, however, liked their food fresh, preferably alive, and had a reputation as loathsome as their appetite. What made them all the more horrific was their physical resemblance to Daikini, and the fact that they possessed a keen intelligence. Ghouls and trolls could be thought of as mostly animal by nature; ogres seemed uncomfortably human.

  “What do the elves get?” she asked at last.

  “No more Daikini,” he said. “Here’bouts, anyroad.”

  Rool held up an arrow as long as he was tall. Its barbed head was marked with stains of dried copper.

  “Folk here didn’t go quiet,” he said. “They put up a fair fight for their homes, made their killers pay.”

  “How dearly?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Attackers took away their wounded an’ their dead, but there’s blood on the ground all about here. And the aftertaste of dying.”

  “Good.”

  He gave her a sharp and searching look.

  “What’s that you’re holding, Elora Danan?”

  It was a mess, a poor semblance of the stuffed toy it once had been. In one of the back bedrooms, snugged beneath the surface of
the hill where the householders intended their safest and final refuge, she’d found a set of shelves, below which lay a collection of dolls and other toys. Some were hard, carved and painted wood, while others were stuffed cloth. All had been hand-carved or stitched. All had been savaged.

  “I think this was the child’s favorite,” she said, as her legs slowly gave way at the knees and she sat back on her heels. Reflexively, she set her ax by her side, never allowing her hand to stray far from its hilt. She spoke haltingly, finding it difficult to translate what she’d seen into words. “The poor dear must have thought it would keep her safe, same as I believed my bear would me.”

  When Elora was barely a year old, Thorn Drumheller had come to her on the night before the Cataclysm that destroyed her home and changed the shape of the world entire. He’d thought it a dream, because he’d ridden to her on the back of a dragon. Only much later did he discover that the dragon had been as real as the moment. He’d made her a stuffed bear for her birthday, and when he left it with her he charged it to keep her safe from any and all harm. It was the kind of wish any parent might make, but since he was a sorcerer it turned out to be the kind of wish that came true.

  Somehow, when the night exploded into flame, she had emerged unscathed, with her bear held so tightly in her infant arms that even grown men couldn’t pry it loose.

  “There was nothing you could do, Elora,” Rool told her, laying a hand on hers where she clutched the child’s doll.

  “I know, Rool. Doesn’t make this hurt any the less. It shouldn’t have happened at all! For as long as anyone can remember, there’s been peace between the Realms!”

  “Uneasy peace. Imperfect peace. There’ve always been outlaws.”

  “This was a deliberate massacre, Rool. Nothing was taken here except lives, and those as brutally as possible.” She took a deep, shuddering breath in an attempt to master her emotions, to tame her rising fury. “I didn’t tell you what else Bastian saw. Lining the road downstream of the town. Heads on pikes. Scores of them.”

  “What’s the old saying, ‘turnabout is fair play.’ ”

  “Rool!” she snapped at him in horror.

  “It’s a warning, Elora, meant to be as plain to Daikini as those crow cages were for trolls and naiads and the like.” Then his tone gentled slightly and turned a bit more sad. “Yours aren’t the only kind with a claim to this land, you know. If Daikini won’t share with the Veil Folk, why should any of the Veil Folk share in return?”

  “Is that the future for us all then? We slaughter each other until the last one left standing claims title to whatever’s left. Assuming it’s even worth having? Can’t we be better than that?”

  “I think, Royal Highness, that’s where you’re meant to fit in.”

  “Well, right now I don’t feel very up to the job.”

  Abruptly she sniffed, a furrow of concentration appearing between her brows as she cocked her head a little to one side and muttered a quiet curse. In that same brief span of time she gathered her ax once more into her hand. The doll was set aside, with a last loving finger-stroke caress farewell.

  The river wound around a modest headland, a knob of rock on which had been constructed the town’s most impressive building, rearing a full three stories above the road that passed beside it. The tower was stone, intended to provide a place of refuge and defense from any attack.

  There was smoke rising from its chimney.

  The sky high overhead was still blue but the valley itself was mostly shadow, peaks behind Elora splashed with light that mixed gold and rose, while those ahead had lost much of their definition. The evening breeze flowed the length of the valley, from darkness toward light, the tower to her, and she chose not to think about the other scents mixed in with that of wood smoke. Torches, as well as the cookfire itself, illuminated the interior of the modest keep, but nobody inside stepped out or passed by any of the narrow embrasures that passed for windows. She had no idea who might be present, or how many. Rool, however, was certain that she wanted no part of them.

  “Hook around the backside of these ridges,” he suggested to Elora and Bastian, tracing their route with a stick onto the dirt. “Bypass the tower to catch up with the road on the far end of town. Then walk straight through the night, get ourselves as far away from here as fast as possible.”

  “Suppose they come after?”

  “Run.”

  “I don’t see the sense of it.”

  “What, you’d rather they catch us? Or would you prefer simply hiding?”

  “Of that, I mean,” and Elora gestured toward the tower with her chin from where she lay beside a jumble of stones atop the ridgeline, so flat to the ground only eyes and forehead were visible. She’d blackened her face with soot from one of the burned houses to dull her argent skin and draped her cloak across her head to hide her hair. It was a simple camouflage, but effective. Even Bastian had a hard time marking her position amidst the gathering dusk.

  “They raze the town, murder the inhabitants, carry off their own dead and wounded….”

  “Classic hit-and-run tactics,” said Rool.

  “Whatever. I defer to superior experience.” Franjean would have preened at the compliment, Rool merely made a grimace of dismissal. “So who is it got themselves left behind?” Elora continued. “Or chose to stay? And why?”

  “I have no great love for cats, Elora Danan,” Rool told her, catching her drift and not liking it in the slightest, “but I caution you to remember what happened to the curious ones.”

  “Isn’t that why they have nine lives?”

  “Bully for them. You’re no cat.”

  “So help me out, Rool. The breeze is in our favor, what can you tell me about the scents from inside?”

  “What do you need me for? Can’t you use your precious InSight to merge with some beastie or other within the tower for a look-see?”

  “Already thought of. Already tried. The interior’s barren. Birds, vermin, bugs, the lot. What’s alive has long since fled. What remains isn’t alive. There are wards up as well. I push too hard, I run the risk of tripping over one. Which none of us want.”

  The brownie nodded grim but heartfelt agreement.

  “Two ogres,” he said, flat-toned, pushing his tongue out across his lips, sluicing them clean of the foul taste of those monstrous creatures. “One of Lesser Faery, two of Greater.”

  “High Elves,” Elora sounded shocked. “On this side of the Veil?”

  “They don’t cross over often and they don’t much like it when they do, but they can survive as easily here as the likes of you or I can in their domains. They talk like they’d die before admitting it but all our races are bound by common threads. That’s why the Great Realms are always portrayed as a sequence of circles.”

  “Is that ‘hunter’ knowledge?” Elora asked innocently.

  “Franjean and I, we watch the way the world works,” he said, as he had often before, as if the phrase was a sufficient answer in and of itself.

  “I wonder what they’re doing?”

  “None of our damn business. An’ even if it was, a single ogre is reason enough for us to keep our distance, much less a pair. Let’s go.”

  She remained where she was, totally focused on the tower, chewing absently on a square of dried beef.

  “Heed me, Elora Danan,” the brownie repeated. “Let us go!”

  “Something else is down there,” she said in so still and offhand a tone she might well have been talking to herself.

  “It’s none of our concern. What’s done here is done. If we interfere, all we’ll do is add our own corpses to the boneyard.”

  “I can’t turn my back.”

  “On what?”

  “My instincts.”

  Rool was so upset, at her obstinacy as much as at the situation, that he spoke with far more heat than he’d intend
ed, his words emerging almost as a snarl.

  “Spare me,” he lashed out at her. “Cloistered as you’ve been your whole life, when have you ever needed instincts? Or had much chance to develop any?”

  “I know what I know.” Her voice quavered ever so slightly but she held her emotions on tight rein. That was the only indication of how deeply his insult had cut her. “I feel what I feel. And I’ll no more ignore it than I will deny you as my friend. No matter how foolish that may sound.”

  She gave him no opportunity to reply. Before she’d finished speaking she’d levered herself up and over the ridgeline, spilling her cloak to its full extension and draping it over herself as she made her way in a cautious sideways crab scuttle down the slope toward the tower. Rool sprang after her but her long legs were more than he could catch. For all that she had no training in the arts of the hunt or war, her innate common sense proved more than adequate to the task at hand. She took advantage of the lay of the land, the dark weave of her cloak making her a shadow among shadows as she slipped from cover to cover.

  “What have you done?” Bastian cried, using mindspeech to make himself heard by both brownie and girl.

  “The hell with that,” Rool howled back at him, the same way. “What is she doing?”

  “Shut up, the pair of you!” came Elora’s commanding response, with such intensity that both eagle and brownie were instantly cowed. “If you won’t help, the least you can do is not make things worse for me. I can’t concentrate with you shrieking inside my skull.”

  “What do you plan?” Rool asked, ruthlessly quelling his anxiety.

  “The lights are on the second floor.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. Stay clear of the ground floor. Ogres like the dark and they don’t like heights. Odds are that’s where you’ll find one or both. Can’t magic yourself inside, either, those three of Faery would be sure to sense it.”

  “Come down from above, then?”