Shadow Dawn

by Chris Claremont

  “No,” she said softly, flatly.

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. Others seem to.”

  “And they love him for it.”

  “You think he has magic?”

  “I don’t know. And I should, at a glance. I’ve said before, we brownies know the way the world works. We know who possesses the talent of a sorcerer and who does not. I look at Duguay and everything tells me he is precisely what he seems, yet for all that certitude, I don’t believe it. And no, I won’t meet his eyes either.”

  She and Khory parted company the following morning, when the demon warrior rode out with the stage. Elora and Duguay remained that night at the depot, singing for their supper, then set off themselves on horseback. Their reputation preceded them down the road, and each time they broke their journey they found growing audiences and publicans more willing to make them welcome. By the time they reached the Shados, they had earned a decent sum, even by Sandeni’s inflated standards.

  From the barbican, they took the turnoff toward the upper city. This last leg was the easiest, as they passed along another magnificent example of Daikini ingenuity. The road had been carved out of the body of the mountainside, wide enough for two freight wagons to travel side by side with room to spare. A stone wall, hip height on Elora, ran along the outside of the entire route as a barrier to the precipice beyond.

  After a fortnight on Windfleet’s back across all manner of country, ranging from mountain trails barely wide enough to accommodate the mare’s hooves to the broad, well-maintained expanses of the Republican highway, Elora had become used to the mare’s incredibly smooth gait. She’d also learned that the horse could be trusted to keep to the road without active supervision. Through the thickness of the saddle Elora could feel the interplay of Windfleet’s powerful muscles, the easy ride rocking her ever so gently back and forth. The young woman let her awareness drift, until each of the mare’s breaths struck a resonance in her own lungs, each beat of that indomitable equine heart striking fire through human arteries and veins. Elora felt a security that reminded her of the comfort she used to derive solely from her bruised and battered old stuffed bear (now tucked away securely in her traveling pouch), an assurance that here was a friend whose faith, and likewise trust, was wholehearted and unconditional. Windfleet would stand by Elora as she would her own foals, and fight as fiercely to protect her.

  She let her eyes close, her shoulders slump, the way she might in a favorite chair when she wasn’t quite ready for sleep but found herself unable to stay wholly awake. She found herself in the grip of a yearning she could not deny. The immediacy and passion of the mare’s life was plain before her, neat and uncluttered, obligations strictly defined without the slightest confusion or doubt, all bound together by a contentment that had no physical equivalent in her own. Elora wanted to throw herself forward, to stretch herself full-length along Windfleet’s back with her arms wrapped around the horse’s neck until flesh dissolved and these two lives flowed into one. The temptation was so strong that Elora felt actual pain, enough to sting her eyes with tears…

  …but instead of fighting, instead of yielding, she spread wide her wings and leaped for the stars.

  Not really, of course. Although that single beat of her shoulders thrust Elora so high that the figures she left behind of herself and Duguay were reduced to little more than dots, she knew that her body still rode astride the mare. Physically, she had gone nowhere. Only in spirit did she soar.

  It was the most magnificent of sensations.

  Elora couldn’t believe the way she looked, this grandly terrifying form she’d conjured in what she told herself had to be some fantastic and wondrous kind of waking dream. The strangest aspect was that, to her own mind, she remained unchanged.

  She couldn’t help a giggle, and as soon as she started, it grew into full-throated, belly-busting laughter. Three rings to encompass all the signal aspects of Creation, and here she beheld three distinct aspects of herself. A purely physical being, that she was leaving far behind. Another of spirit, that mixed what was with what she dreamed of being. And a third that she had no label for whatsoever, save that it appeared to have some manner of literal being and seemed to be taking her to the farthest reaches of her imagination.

  She turned her neck right the way around, as limber as any swan, to behold this new self, and found a sight to take her breath away.

  Tremendous wings stretched from her shoulders, from a body that matched them in grace and timeless power. If she landed in the center of a parade ground, an easy stretch would allow her to touch opposite parapets with her tips. From nose to tail she doubted she was much shorter. Her skin gleamed with a shimmering iridescence that reminded her of Angwyn Bay at night, when she would look out from her tower to watch the moonlight play across the water. The sparkles she saw then were silver; these comprised more hues than she had names for, that changed continuously in a fantastic interplay of color and intensity with every ripple of her skin. There was a gleaming sheen to the flesh as well, that gave it a familiar metallic cast; in it, she saw the reflection of a head that was shaped like a blacksmith’s wedge, whose mobile features allowed for an unexpected range of expression. She bared fangs longer than most Daikini were tall and knew she’d assumed the form of a creature that knew how to hunt and fight and kill. A pair of horns curled up and back from her temples, in a manner more aesthetic than functional. From their base grew a double line of secondary ridges that made their way along the length of her spine, peaking in size at her shoulder blades, then fading away as they descended her tail.

  I’ve never done this before, she marveled, giddy with the joy of flying as well as the myriad sensations that came to her from this new and wondrous body. She remembered her wistful comment to Tyrrel atop his tor, about flying, and thought with delight, Now I know.

  This is like the story Thorn told, she thought further, when the dragon brought him to Tir Asleen. Except in his dream he only got to ride a dragon, and she felt a set of subsonic rumbles that passed in her for chuckles, where I—!

  “Yes, you are,” she heard from above and behind. “At long last.”

  First thought: There’s someone on my back. But the quality and timbre of the voice was all wrong. Too deep for someone small enough to climb aboard, and too far removed. A turn of the head should give her a sight of this new companion, but she decided on something more dramatic. Impulse combined with physical instincts and linkages well beyond the reach of her still primarily human consciousness to make desire reality as she closed her wings, twisting eel-like the whole length of her body as she’d seen Ryn do in water, dancing wickedly across all three dimensions of flight in a snap roll meant to loop her around her mysterious companion and essentially reverse their positions so that she’d be on his tail.

  It was a totally outrageous maneuver, especially for one whose active flight time could be counted in minutes. It might have worked, too, had not the other dragon rolled the other way in that selfsame instant, the pair of them racing around each other in wild circles until Elora belatedly realized that every attempt to shake free of him had failed.

  Elora heard laughter and redoubled her efforts, the pair of them darting from the top of the sky to near its bottom, slashing their way through the mountains with the reckless abandon of children playing tag, brushing treetops with their bellies, mountainsides with wing tips. There wasn’t the slightest hesitation in Elora, any more than in her rival, the thought of disaster was utterly inconceivable to them both. It was the invulnerability of ignorance and it cloaked her as surely as any armor.

  She couldn’t remember when she’d had such fun, in dreams or awake, though her fiercest efforts didn’t bring her close to catching him, nor did they provide any opportunity for escape when she found him on her tail.

  In the full dark of night she couldn’t get a kinetic sense of him even with her MageSight. Try as she m
ight, she could grab only the most fleeting of glimpses as his body briefly occluded the stars beyond. He had the ability to bar her InSight as well, she couldn’t merge her consciousness with his.

  The sight of the tor brought her up short, the one great sweep of her wings it took her to come to a full stop striking the air with such a shock that the sound of whipcrack thunder echoed through the mountain passes.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the perspective granted by flight, or some enhancement of her vision that came from her change of form, but the shape and structure of the hill below appeared more clear to her now. A pattern was visible where before she’d seen only stands of stone.

  The altar stood dead center atop the tor, in a space formed by the intersection of three circles, each of those demarcated by a border of sarcen stones. The stones themselves began as paving blocks, hardly bigger than Elora’s human foot, set flush with the ground at the point of the circle farthest from the altar. She counted twelve in all, set in tandem at equidistant points around the circumference of each circle. Each pair doubled the height of the one before until they reached the last, directly opposite the first and a tall Daikini’s body length removed from the altar. Those three cardinal stones formed an equilateral triangle with the altar at its heart. At the same time Elora beheld another pattern overlaying them, the sense of a fourth circle, running through those cardinal stones and enclosing the altar.

  A sudden swoosh of air up and across her back heralded the madcap arrival of her pursuer, but as she frantically twisted around to catch at least a partial sight of him, the only figure to greet her eyes was a boy, standing by himself in the third circle, leaning nonchalantly against the cardinal stone as though he’d been lounging there all along.

  In the moonlight he appeared as silver as she, though to be honest, a second, stronger look forced her to call his gender into question. He seemed of an age and body form where either pronoun—he or she—might be applied with equal justification. His clothes were no help, either. He wore a snug-fitting suit of fabric that splintered every element of radiance that struck it into glittering pieces of light and color. A dazzling enough display at midnight, well nigh unendurable, she suspected, at sunrise. His hair was as black as Duguay’s dyes had made hers; another aspect he and Elora shared in common was their barber, who’d done neither of them any favors.

  “I know you,” she hazarded, delicately balancing herself on her hind legs atop the other two cardinal stones, as though claiming the Circles they represented—of the World and the Flesh—for her own. He stood at the heart of the Circle of the Spirit.

  The faintest nod was the only reply. The manner of that gesture, the crinkle about the eyes, the mix of familiar and strange within them, clinched his identity for her. She wished it hadn’t. The sudden insight was like a spear through her soul.

  “You’re dead,” she breathed.

  “Join me,” Kieron Dineer said, and held out his hands as though to invite her to join him in a dance. He had a lopsided smile that was just off-kilter enough to be endearing.

  She never had a chance to know him. He alone among the whole assemblage at Angwyn had stood to her defense. His sacrifice had bought Thorn Drumheller the precious opportunity he needed to rescue Elora.

  Then she remembered the other portion of Thorn’s story, that all he’d assumed was dream that fateful night was in fact reality. Somehow a dragon had plucked his spirit from his bed and made it flesh, and brought him across the leagues and miles to Tir Asleen so that he might see his dearest friends a final time and unwittingly carry away the brownies Rool and Franjean to safety. And most important of all, to deliver his birthday gift to Elora Danan: a stuffed bear he’d made with his own hands, and imbued with a portion of his own magical strength, together with the injunction that it keep her safe till his return.

  Reflexively, her hand went to her traveling pouch, where she kept the bear—but in this incarnation, this aspect of reality, neither was there. Her heart was starting to pound faster and faster, like a drummer sounding the tocsin call to arms, as she raked her gaze across the horizon to see how clearly every feature of the landscape was etched in place. It was as though a moment had been plucked from time and then gone over by some celestial artist whose task was to integrate all its component elements into a perfect harmony. The peaks to the east were touched with the faintest roseate glow that hinted at a dawn she knew would never come, blades of grass and the edges of leaves glistened from a decorative application of dew. Nocturnal animals had just tucked themselves into dens and burrows and nests, while those who stirred by day had yet to rise. There was a preternatural stillness to things that should have been a wonder, but in this instance left Elora terrified.

  “What have you done?” she demanded of the boy. Unspoken, the twin injunctions, to the world, Kieron, and then, to me? “What is this place? Where am I?”

  “Where you must journey, Elora Danan, for your own circle to be complete.”

  “Don’t speak in riddles, that isn’t fair!”

  “This isn’t about fair, and it isn’t meant to be easy. Some prizes must be won, little Princess, and others earned.”

  “What do you want from me?” she cried.

  “Your life,” was his reply, and he burned.

  They weren’t the flames of honest combustion but dragonfire, the most extreme manifestation of sorcerous might. Kieron blazed from top to toe, with such intensity that he should have been consumed in an instant. This was energy in its most raw and primal state, that might have been scooped from the foundry of Creation itself, an essence of nature so profound that nothing mortal could endure its touch, much less stand against it.

  On Tyrrel’s tor, in the Hour of the Wolf, when the night is darkest and the boundaries between the Realms are at their thinnest, in that terrible moment where the NightGaunts hunt their prey across the Field and Forest of Dreams, it seemed to Elora Danan that Kieron Dineer had come to repay her in kind for his life, and in full measure.

  She tried to fly, blind instinct prompting wings to lunge for the sky, but even as she clawed desperately for altitude an awful paralysis gripped her and she tumbled to earth with a crash that shook the hills like the fall of some colossal thunderstone. Her frantic struggles had thrown her wholly beyond the circles, the size differential between herself and Kieron so extreme that even flat to the ground as she was, she still looked down on him across the crest of the tor.

  He didn’t look pleased. Matters were not going as desired. She wasn’t in her proper place in his scheme of things, the pristine perfection of the setting had been marred, she hoped irreparably. She was glad.

  She struggled to move, denying the lethargy that wormed its way through bone and sinew and gave her flesh the immobile consistency of metal to match its appearance. She was growing cold inside, as still in her own way as the ground she lay upon, and saw that the only source of warmth available to her was Kieron’s burning, outstretched hand.

  “Why are you doing this?” she cried, angry with herself because she wanted only a warrior’s strength and defiance in her voice and what she heard sounded too much the girl.

  “Because I must. You must. We must.”

  “I deny this!” She heard her name called. “I deny you the power to do me harm!”

  Again she heard her name, and from Kieron’s reaction so did he, and from his scowl came the realization that this, too, wasn’t part of his program.

  A third time, her name. With the last of her will, for her strength was nearly gone, Elora screamed her reply:

  “Duguay!”

  * * *

  —

  The hearty aroma of spiced chicken soup told her she was safe, and the toasty comfort of a down quilt. To begin, she simply lay where she was, luxuriating snugabug in her cocoon of bedclothes and using those sensations as bulwarks against the aches she knew lurked just offstage.

  She was
in no place she recognized, taking stock of a fire in the hearth beyond the foot of the bed. She arbitrarily labeled it as “cheery” because that’s how it made her feel, as did the warming pan tucked a bit beyond her toes.

  It was a huge bed, her kinesthetic judgment confirmed that when she creased her eyelids open for a proper look. Best she’d seen since Torquil’s. She’d stayed in rooms smaller. She could stretch full length from its center, arms and legs both as long as she could reach, and not touch the edge of the mattress in any direction. Lots of pillows. The design of the bedframe was as simple as it was elegant, composed of smooth and gracious curves, and the bed in keeping with the rest of the room. Furniture was functional but well crafted, the harder edges smoothed by accents of cushions or throw rugs. There was personality to the room, as well as considerable taste, but it was of a general nature that told Elora she was in a hostelry rather than someone’s home.

  At the moment the only light came from the fireplace, which consisted more of glowing coals than outright flames. Elora gathered a pillow to her that was so big she could easily wrap both arms and legs around it. She folded her legs up within her nightgown until her knees were almost to her shoulders, making herself as small as possible within this cozy little nest. She was trembling, a physical reaction that had nothing to do with being cold. Her eyes were wide and haunted, as liquid as a trapped fawn, though she felt no urge for tears. She didn’t want to touch any of the memories of what had happened, but found they were like a scab that itched abominably until she just had to pick at it, no matter if doing so made the wound bleed afresh.

  So like a dream, she wanted it to be a dream yet knew it was not. The shape of her body didn’t fit her quite as it was supposed to; she was too small and every twitch of her shoulder blades only served as a reminder of wings that were no longer there. She could recall every moment that had passed atop the tor, with a clarity that transcended what she beheld now with open eyes. It was nothing like what she’d experienced with the ghosts at Ganthem’s Crossing. There’d been hardly any sentience to them, they were shades of spirit as much as of flesh, the leftover resonances of what once had been, defined mainly by their rage and their pain at the manner of their death. Kieron was something altogether different, as alive during this encounter as in Angwyn. Yet she knew he was dead, and with that acknowledgment, she wept for his passing and for the role she had played, however unwitting, however unwilling, in it.