Shadow Dawn

by Chris Claremont

  So strong and urgent were their injunctions that Elora didn’t stop to question or argue but let her feet take her quickly off the bridge, back the way she came. She didn’t pause or even look back until she was once more well into the broad, sunlit expanse of the plaza.

  “Have you lost all sense, girl?”

  “Pleased to see you, too, again, Franjean.”

  “If you could see yourself through my eyes—! Elora Danan, what cut your hair, you go all dozy too close to a herd of sheep?”

  Common sense put a brake on the retort that sprang to her lips. Franjean was already in rare form and could cut with epigrams more deeply than Khory with a sword. Moreover, experience told her that his acerbity in this instance came from a genuine fright.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked instead.

  “Thorn lives there,” the brownie replied, with a turn of the head to indicate the Citadel that created a wall of its own along the far border of the plaza. “Thorn works there. I live and work with Thorn. You don’t want contact with him, that’s your lookout.”

  “I have good reason, Franjean,” she tried to explain, but he would hear none of it.

  “Not passing judgment, wouldn’t think of it, your decision after all, but don’t see a need to be bound by it either, especially when your foolishness looks to put my friend Rool in jeopardy.”

  “I would never—!” she protested.

  “Turn about,” Rool told her. “Slowly.”

  “What’s this all about?” she asked instead.

  “Take in the sights.”

  “What do you see, then?”

  “Buildings.” A pause. “People.” A longer pause. “Lots of people.” There was the merest thread of unease running through her ostensibly casual tone. “I’ve never seen so many, not up this close. Not in Angwyn, nor at the bazaar in the Valley of the Mountain Kings. Where do they all come from? How can they live so chockablock, all one upon the other?”

  “Daikini and ants,” groused Franjean. “Go figure.”

  “I’m serious, Franjean.”

  “And I am not? Don’t imagine there’s a species born that isn’t social, one way or t’other, Elora. It’s just you Daikini tend to carry that impulse to extremes. Brownies now, we like communities where all the names are known. Big enough for spice and variety but not so much that there are strangers among us. Hive like this, everyone’s a stranger. Don’t see the sense. But then again, in the eyes of most folks hereabouts, I’d wager the likes of us are considered too small to matter in their scheme of things.”

  “The way you talk, Sandeni’s already pretty much in the Deceiver’s camp, with no time or truck for any people but themselves.”

  “You misunderstand, Elora,” Rool offered laconically. “They have both time and truck, just not a whole lot of gratuitous respect. Big folk beyond the Veil, elves especially, aren’t used to that. Don’t much care for it.”

  “Right now, I don’t much care for you,” snapped Franjean to his friend. “If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes, I’d never have credited it. You let her stroll across that bridge, pretty as you please, knowing what was waiting!”

  “What was waiting?” Elora asked, resisting the urge to steal a glance over her shoulder.

  “That’s of no mind right now. D’you see the strollers on this promenade, where they wander?”

  A nod. In actuality, she’d noted the difference even before the question was asked.

  “None of them near the bridge. None even close to the moat. Wards?” she asked, after brief consideration.

  Franjean was taken slightly aback. He’d assumed he’d have to take her through this step by laborious step. Instead she was leapfrogging ahead.

  “Passive mainly,” he explained, “innate to the land and structures themselves, radiating a pervasive background suggestion that you’d be better off somewhere else. Reinforced by the gargoyles, of course. They woke up when you looked like you were about to stay awhile.”

  “So I felt.”

  “Anyone else would have leaped from there faster than from a red-hot skillet. You hardly noticed and walked through the rest as though they didn’t exist. If not for us, you’d be there still.”

  “Would they have attacked?”

  “Doubtful, given who you are,” said Rool. “She was in no danger, Franjean.”

  “Run up a flag, why don’t you?” Franjean’s tone was acid mockery. “Build a platform in the center of the plaza and reveal her true nature. Save us all a lot of fuss and bother.”

  “What is the matter, Franjean?” Elora demanded.

  “Got time, and patience, to hear the list? That island doesn’t even wholly exist in this plane of being! It dates from long before the founding of the city, that’s why no attempt was ever made to move it or alter its shape. Supposedly, in its heart is an ancient World Gate. No one’s ever found it, wouldn’t matter if they did since there’s no energy left here’bouts to power it.”

  “Like the tor,” Elora mused.

  “I heard about that,” said Franjean, “from the demon child,” which was his term for Khory. Of them all, he still refused to refer to her by name. “Bad business.”

  “Happy ending,” Rool commented. “And you should be more polite, Franjean, since we’re sworn allies now, Lesser Faery and Elora.”

  Franjean retorted with such a face coupled with the most disrespectful of noises that Elora nearly burst out laughing.

  “The physical aspect of the world changes with age,” she said, returning to her thought. “And why not, since the world’s a living being? The patterns of force it generates change with it. What’s true for one age may not prove so for the next.”

  “Is that helpful?” Rool wondered.

  “Not really,” she confessed. “Not yet.”

  “Regardless,” Franjean announced, reclaiming the conversation, “that island serves as home for all the local embassies of the Veil Folk! No one visits uninvited, same as no one finds a brownie burrow unless we’re of a mind to allow it. Walking on that bridge is trouble enough. Not being attacked brands you for certain.”

  “I understand, Franjean. I’ll be more careful.”

  “You’re in the world, Elora, as you so proudly proclaim. Ignorance—rather, stupidity—is a luxury you can’t afford.”

  “You rather I hide?”

  Franjean, always the more voluble of the pair, made a noise of extreme exasperation.

  “Faint hope of that, the mind you’re in,” he told her. “But mark me, girl, in the scheme of things you’ve only now come into your milk teeth. You’re a fledgling with more down to your wings than proper feathers.”

  “I’m not helpless, Franjean.”

  “Not that helpless, perhaps,” he scoffed.

  “I’ve held my own pretty well so far.”

  “And our charge is to ensure that doesn’t become your epitaph.”

  “You are in a choice mood.”

  “Clothes are adequate,” he said dismissively, abruptly changing the subject with the most minor and grudging of compliments, which was as quickly undercut. “For traipsing through bogs and fens and the like.”

  Elora rolled her eyes and tried to exchange expressions with Rool, but the other brownie was nowhere to be seen on her shoulder. Nor, when she turned her head the other way, was Franjean, although his voice made his presence as plain as his opinions.

  “I suppose you hate my body paint as well,” she dared him.

  “Actually, that has possibilities.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “Truth,” he conceded grudgingly, “if I hadn’t known from the demon child and Bastian what to look for, and hadn’t spotted Rool in the bargain, I’d most likely have passed you by. You’ve gone through more than a skin change, Elora, and walked a far piece from the girl you were, in both body and spiri
t.”

  She said nothing, where ordinarily she’d have been floored by Franjean’s unexpected and gracious compliment. Indeed, she seemed to have hardly heard him.

  “Elora,” asked Rool suddenly, “what’s the matter?”

  “What I said before. All these people. All this noise…” Her voice trailed off.

  The plaza was the center of urban life for upper Sandeni. From it ranged a whole network of walkways and esplanades that took strollers to the edge of various falls, or right to the cliff itself. Portions had been cleared of stone, over the strenuous objections of the military, and planted with stands of trees, so long ago that those saplings had grown taller than the surrounding buildings. Both groves and flower beds were interspersed with plots of grass and benches where citizens could enjoy some quiet contemplation, or a meal in the open air. Strolling buskers entertained, speakers harangued, children played, cutpurses cruised for marks while avoiding the watchful, wary eyes of the patrol constables. Elora heard the sound of shoes on flagstones, the background susurrus of thousands of voices, skeins of music, all battling to be heard over the constant rush of water over the falls. Nothing before her stayed still, all was constant motion in a never-ending panoply, a feast for her eyes that she found both entrancing and terrifying.

  Of a sudden, in a way she’d never experienced before and didn’t understand, she felt tiny, like a fairy among giants. And most awfully alone.

  “There are so many!” she wailed softly, to herself. “And this is just one piece of one city of one domain among the whole Daikini Realm. And that Realm is one among twelve.”

  “Thirteen,” reminded Rool.

  “The Realm of Elora,” she snorted.

  “If you’re afraid,” Franjean said with uncharacteristic kindness, “knock on the Citadel door.”

  “Is Thorn watching, Franjean?” Her eyes scoured the battlements but they were too high and too far away. She could find no details she was sure of.

  “No. More fool him. The demon child pled your case, he accepted. Won’t watch for fear of someone watching him.”

  “It was easier at Ganthem’s Crossing, or on Tyrrel’s tor,” she said. “The goals were tangible, they were right in front of me. Someone needed saving, I did it, hooray for me. The consequences were immediate and personal.” She took in a deep breath, released it in a rush. “I look around here and see all these people—!”

  “There’s no harm in accepting your limitations,” said Franjean.

  She reached into her pouch, to find Luc-Jon’s gift at hand. She stroked her thumb on its cover, thinking her skin would never feel so sleek, and to her mind came the vision of the sigil that stood alone.

  Another breath, this one of acquiescence, and for an instant both brownies feared she had given up.

  “I gave my word, Franjean,” she said simply, before casting about for the trolley stop. “Just like Thorn did to Cherlindrea, when she asked him to take me to Tir Asleen. Knowing your limitations is a good and necessary thing, my friends. Knowing your honor,” she finished, “is more.”

  The university was larger than many towns she’d known, a community unto itself chockablock with subordinate colleges that dealt with each other much like rival states. She enjoyed the stroll through the school’s environs, painfully certain from the way she marveled at every sight how much the country bumpkin she must appear despite her leather costume, and soon got used to the brusque manner the students applied to anyone not of their college. The brownies were less charitable. Within short order they were gleefully plotting between themselves the nature of their spectacularly malicious revenge against all and sundry.

  As predicted, the professor was in class, but Elora had timed her arrival so that she didn’t have long to wait. Also as predicted, he had an abiding fondness for sweets.

  “Ah, Luc-Jon,” he mused, picking crumbs off his faded black robe and popping them in his mouth with a diligence Elora had never seen. “I told Parry”—Luc-Jon’s master—“that if he’d send the lad downriver I’d sponsor him myself.”

  “He’ll be honored to know you think so highly of him, sir.”

  She offered the plate of cakes. He made a show of reluctance, then shook his head, scratched his beard, and plucked the richest of the lot.

  “You’ll pardon me for saying, miss,” he said to her between mouthfuls, “but you’re not the sort we’re used to seeing about these precincts.”

  “Sort of what?”

  “Person, for one. Your appearance is rather more…theatrical than most.”

  “As is my profession.”

  “Yet you come to me for some assistance.”

  “A need born of a regrettable lack of education.”

  “I would scarcely credit such a statement.”

  “Appearances are deceiving, Professor.” Elora laughed. “To be well-spoken is not necessarily to be well-read. To be well-read doesn’t always provide one with the knowledge one requires.”

  “What do you require?”

  She almost answered him but caught herself over the way he’d phrased his question.

  “I ask,” she said, offering an entreaty where he’d been expecting a command, “your help.”

  “Regarding?”

  “The prophecies of Elora,” she told him.

  He made a tremendous whoulf sound that turned heads at some of the neighboring tables.

  “And the nature and truth about dragons,” she told him.

  He made the same sound, louder than before, and tossed his hands up in the bargain. A waiter hurried to his side, concerned that the professor might be having some sort of seizure.

  “And this,” she said at the last, when the waiter had departed. She set the book Luc-Jon had given her down before him.

  He steepled his fingers before his face, stared at the book, then at her, and was silent for long enough to make her nervous. If not for the brightness of his eyes and the vibrancy of his spirit, she might have made the waiter’s mistake and assumed the worst as well.

  “Do you know what you have here?” he asked in a tone meant for her ears alone.

  “I’ve heard it described as a kind of bestiary.”

  “Fascinating. I’ve never heard it described at all.”

  “But you know what it is.”

  “I suspect,” he said with gentle emphasis, and a succession of qualifiers, “I may know what it is supposed to be, that is possible, yes.”

  “Why are you so afraid, Professor?”

  “Truly, you don’t know?” She shook her head. “I am a man of letters, the closest I’ve come to weapons are the knives I use to cut my meat. That’s as it should be, for I’ve no skill whatsoever with the bloody things. But as I am a man of letters, I’ve read accounts of weapons and battles by those who know both well. I know, for example, there are blades of so fine an edge that any fool struck by one will see the offending limb fall, completely severed, before the body has had time to realize what’s happened.”

  He reached out a finger as though to tap the book by its cover, but never made contact.

  “This is much the same. Do you know why Parry gave it up to you?” he asked her.

  “Luc-Jon didn’t say, beyond that it had no value and he despaired of ever deciphering its contents.”

  “Hard to decipher what you can’t blessed see,” chortled the professor. “I’ll wager any sum you like that the one time, and one time only, Parry opened this book he saw naught but blank pages. Tossed it on a shelf after and never gave it a second thought, not even to use for himself.”

  “The pages aren’t blank.”

  “You’ve been told,” he inquired sharply, “or you’ve seen it for yourself?”

  “I’ve seen.”

  “Then, my dear, you are singularly blessed. Or cursed. It is an encyclopedia, a census if you will, of those who are said to in
habit the Third Circle.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  His mouth quirked a little ruefully, at opportunities set aside. “I have been told about it. I am a scholar, not a sorcerer. Only they can perceive its true nature, and thereby its contents. Only a magus”—and his eyes met hers a moment before dropping away—“can actually use the summoning sigils.”

  “Setting the book aside, Professor,” she said, and did so, sweeping it casually back into her pouch, “what about the rest?”

  He slid a key across the table to her.

  “You are welcome to my library at any hour. Whatever is in my power is yours for the asking.”

  If Keeys College were the castle it pretended to be, the professor’s lodgings would be one of the subordinate keeps, three stories of stout stone whose interior was as solid and conservative in design as the building’s facade. His actual residence was little more than a closet, and as she passed it by Elora felt a surge of sympathy for whoever was responsible for keeping it tidy. While those rooms were a veritable chaos, the work spaces were anything but. Cases of volumes climbed every wall to the ceiling, while others, not quite so tall, stood alone in ranks across the floor. A space was set aside for desks and there was a whole collection of ladders to reach the topmost shelves. At the far end of the room she could see a circular stairway of wrought iron, leading, she assumed, to the floors above.

  “Iron steps,” the professor said idly, “iron mullions between the windowpanes, iron facings on the doors. Simple precautions”—a flare of a smile, as quick as the blink of an eye—“but effective.”

  “Against what?”

  “Knowledge is power. And ambition is not solely a Daikini trait.”

  “I have to go, Professor. Do you know the Street of Lost Dragons, on Madaket?” He nodded. “Come by Black-Eyed Susan’s some night. I’d like you to hear me sing.” She took him by the hand. “I’ll be back,” she said.

  “The books will be here. I will be waiting.”

  * * *

  —

  A long embankment formed the southernmost boundary of the university along the shore of the Paschal, smallest of the six rivers that flowed through Sandeni. It was also the only one that stayed wholly independent all the way to the edge, forming a cataract all its own from the heights of the cliff to Lake Morar below. As she strolled along Elora could see the sparkling trail made by the Paschal as it plunged off the heights of the Shados in a series of wild cataracts that brought it to the level of the plateau. The mountains met the tableland like the point of a wedge, in an arrowhead formation of jagged and imposing peaks, as though they meant to crack the land asunder, the way an ax might split a log.