Shadow Dawn

by Chris Claremont

  “Tell me, Constable,” she asked at last as the tavern gradually emptied, “what is it you’re looking at?”

  “You have good bones, Elora, why hide them beneath all that paint?”

  “I like to be seen. I want to be remembered.”

  “But the paint is artifice, the memory a lie.”

  “I’m a performer, Constable.”

  “Nothing to hide, then?”

  “Everything. Nothing.” She batted her eyes. “Mystery is my stock-in-trade, Renny, as keen eyes are in yours.”

  “Point an’ game t’ ’lora, Renny, tha’s my way o’ thinkin’!” chortled Tam. “Pay him na’ mind, lass,” he continued to Elora, “man’s a sponge o’ questions.”

  “Another useful talent in my profession, Tam,” Renny said.

  “Too damnably suspicious by half, Renny, an’ y’ask me!”

  “Right,” Rico announced, rising wearily to his feet and stretching his back to ease the kinks. “Your pardon, gentles, but it’s been a long workday and I’ve bairns a’ home I’d like to see afore they’re off to class in the morning.”

  “It’s not that late, Rico,” protested Elora.

  “Puttin’ y’r garden abed on the morrow, are y’, Rico?”

  “Aye, that’s my thought, Tam. Might leave some veg till the first hard frost but better this year to be safe than sorry. Will we see you then?”

  “Said I’d help. But prob’ly not till after midday.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “No obligations?” Elora asked Tam, after the taller man had departed.

  “Single man, single life.”

  He smiled. She smiled back. They both turned their eyes on Renny, who was tactful enough not to mention the hint as he smilingly took his own leave.

  There was no sign of Duguay at closing, not downstairs nor up in the rooms they shared when Elora changed from costume to what had become her favorite everyday leathers. An inquiry to Susan revealed that he’d gone his own way soon after their performance was done, to find a companion for the evening who wasn’t quite so judgmental. That proved the final seal on Elora’s decision to walk with Tam partway home—if he was interested, which he was.

  As they passed the Citadel there were still lights to be seen at various windows across the otherwise dark and featureless expanse of stone, testifying to those still at work on state business despite the midnight hour. To Tam, what was the value of work that took you forever away from home and family, and what then the point of having either if you allowed your work to so dominate your life, and finally, what kind of person allows himself to be caught in such a tangle? Is that someone they really want deciding the fate of the nation?

  “What do you say then,” she demanded, with a fair portion of the passion she’d put into her song, because she was thinking of those she knew and loved, no less than herself, “of those who’ve lost home and family but struggle on regardless?”

  “Would those things ha’ been lost, my girl, had they paid proper mind?”

  “The world isn’t always so easily ordered, Tam. And I’m not your anything.” She said it deadpan, but the twinkle in her eyes gave the game away.

  “So,” Tam began, hesitated, almost began again, hesitated again, in the manner of a deliberate man working himself up to something spontaneous. Very much a Nelwyn trait, Elora thought, reacting to him with a mixture of exasperation and amusement. “You an’ the bard.” Another pause, before he backed away from the question he wanted to ask. “Y’ sing well t’gether.”

  “We have our moments,” she conceded, “good and bad.”

  “Y’ like him.”

  “There’s a lot to like.”

  “An’ a lot, I’ll wager, makes y’ want to slap him upside his noggin with the flat of a cast-iron pan.”

  She chuckled, then said, in answer to the question he hadn’t asked: “He’s my teacher. We travel together.”

  “Companions, then.”

  “Not the way some mean that word, no,” she said hurriedly, for she knew in many contexts it described a relationship one small step shy of marriage. “Why do you ask?”

  “Man likes to know where he stands in the scheme of things.”

  “I never realized the scheme of things could get so complicated.”

  “Couldn’t tell that from the way you sing.”

  “Duguay’s the master in that regard, Tam.”

  “You should give y’rself more credit, ’lora. He’s got the voice, tha’s certes, can’t remember myself hearin’ one better. But there’s no heart. No truth. I don’t listen to him. Wi’ you, it’s near impossible not to.

  “Hightown’s not so bad for a visit,” he then said, responding to her comment about the city. “Got the view for certain, and some sights to match. It is quite the proper venue”—without missing a beat, Tam presented an acid, dead-on mockery of the accents practiced by many of the university students, with lots of smoothly rounded vowels—“for proper people.” Just as smoothly, he reverted to his normal way of speaking. “But the prairie’s the place t’ live.”

  “I thought they called it Lowtown.”

  “They would.”

  At the terminus of each cable-car line, a broad set of stairs descended to a level beneath the plaza, where Elora found a huge arcade connecting them all together. There were stalls aplenty, all shuttered and locked, offering goods and services of every conceivable description.

  Their footsteps set up cascading echoes in the silence, adding to the quietly sinister mood cast by the lanterns. Staccato spots of sound that complemented these spots of light amidst the otherwise all-encompassing shadow. It was a lonely place, the kind where it seemed natural to expect ghoulies or some other, worse monsters to leap from the darkness to wreak unholy mayhem on all in their path, and more than the evening chill made Elora shiver.

  Would Tam think the less of me, she wondered to herself, if I unlimbered my cloak from where I tossed it over my shoulder and wrapped myself up snug inside? And then, a counterpoint question: Would that make the slightest difference? Is it this gallery that makes me cold, or my own imagination?

  The unnerving quiet wasn’t as absolute as first she’d thought, either. There was a faint vibration, set up through the soles of her boots, of a piece with a roar so muted and distant that it was likewise felt more than actually heard.

  “Is that sound,” she asked, “the falls?”

  “Tha’ ’tis,” replied Tam. “Can’t get away from it in any part o’ Sandeni, plateau or prairie. Shouldna’ sound so ungrateful, tho’, since it’s wha’ helped make us what we are.”

  “They sound so far away. But they aren’t really?”

  “Had to do somethin’ t’ mute their thunder, else the din would make this depot unusable. Tha’s why there’s a quarry’s worth o’ stone ’tween us an’ free water.”

  “I keep forgetting the city here’s mainly built on platforms.”

  “Y’re na’ alone in tha’ regard, ’lora lass,” Tam told her, “an’ we live here. Least you have the excuse of ignorance.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “Meant no slight, take no offense. The ignorance of an outlander, is what I’m sayin’. There’s a whole rat’s-nest maze o’ tunnels down here, natural an’ man-built, some the province o’ them what was here b’fore us Daikini, so many I don’t think they ever been properly charted in the altogether.”

  “Wow,” was what Elora said.

  And then “Wow” again, when they came upon the funicular.

  As with the trolley cars, there were six lines, only these were set right beside one another and dropped almost straight down through the floor of the platform. There were three stages—or levels—to the cars, allowing them to carry a total of better than a hundred passengers each per trip. The same principle operated them as the trolleys: a serie
s of cables, running vertically along perpetual loops about huge wheels that were partially visible overhead where they extended from their housings in the roof. In this instance, each vehicle rode a double cable. Tightening the clamp on one line initiated a controlled descent to the plains below, while the other brought the car back up again.

  The journey was in a tunnel all the way. Tam explained that there was an external funicular consisting of two sets of cables and much smaller cars but that was mainly for tourists and sightseers. These were to move people, and freight, between plateau and prairie with all the speed and ingenuity Daikini wits could muster.

  At bottom was another tunnel, another network of cable cars to take riders from the cliff to the first cataract. There’d been plans for years to use the same technology to establish funiculars and trolleys the whole of the distance to the sixth cataract, but the farther out from the cliffs the city expanded, the more opposition its planners and engineers had encountered from the Veil Folk.

  He was close behind her, on an observation platform cut through the face of the cliff that offered the most spectacular view of the prairie beyond. In the background the clank of gears announced the departure of the next descending funicular. They’d held hands on and off along their stroll, initiated by one or the other, briefly maintaining contact until some impulse pulled them apart, and had gradually learned that each was more shy than the other had expected. Tam had set himself on a step that allowed him the slightest height advantage, which was a bad thing for Elora to think about because the fact that she was taller, if only by a bit, almost made her giggle. Then he placed his hands on her sides, where she curved out from her waist and over her hips.

  “Could they be afraid of what they don’t understand?” Elora asked.

  “Fates forfend!” Tam sounded legitimately shocked. “Why, would’na’ tha’ make them,” he paused for effect, “just like us?”

  “Troll-boy,” said a voice from out of eyeshot to raise the hackles instantly on Elora’s neck, “you are nothing like us.”

  Tam spun about like he’d just been stroked by a bullwhip and his face was ugly with rage as he reflexively shoved Elora behind him.

  “Who?” she stammered as a handful of shapes moved in the gloom between them and the funicular. There was less light than before, a number of wall sconces had been extinguished, but she’d been so wrapped up in the moment, in her enjoyment of it, that she hadn’t noticed.

  “Tha’ lot from y’r place, looks like t’ me,” Tam said. Then, louder: “We want no trouble here. This is a public place!”

  “All the more reason to enforce a modicum of civilized behavior, don’t you agree? If you and your slut desire to do the nasty, Tammy Troll-boy, find one of your burrows or whatever.”

  “You take tha’ back!” Tam took a step forward. Elora locked both her hands on one arm but he broke her grip as though her fingers were made of straw.

  “Which part, pray?”

  “All of it, damn your eyes!” She grabbed for him again, he broke her grip again.

  “Tam, don’t do this! You’re giving them what they want!”

  “More’s the pity for them!”

  As he lunged forward Elora felt a wild twist in her own perceptions. In that moment, but fortunately only for that moment, her awareness was yanked wholly from her body, as InSight splintered into a half-dozen component elements to merge her perceptions with those of her attackers.

  In a flash, spirit and flesh restored, she dropped to a crouch on one bended knee, bracing most of her weight on her hands as she used them as she used arms and foot together for a pivot point and swung her remaining leg around like a scythe, catching Tam right behind the knee and dumping him to his back a heartbeat before a pair of crossbow bolts whizzed past.

  After that, a whole host of events seemed to happen all at once, even though memory after the fact strung them all together in a linear sequence. Tam, delightfully quick on the uptake, rolled one way, and Elora the other. No time to grab for a weapon from her traveling pouch, she had to make do with whatever came to hand. She heard a scream from along the vaulting passageway, that redoubled with every echo until she had to hold her ears against its fury. Then there was a gust of wind as a golden eagle—not Bastian, Elora recognized, but his mate, Anele—swept through the opening in the cliff to strike at one of the bowmen with beak and wings and, most especially, her murderously deadly claws. The would-be assassin worked his mouth like a puppet, ruined eyes above, gaping throat below, flailing with both arms in a futile attempt to protect himself before collapsing to his seat, dead before he’d realized the eagle had stripped him of sight, of voice, of life itself.

  Another bowman—Elora tagged three so equipped, from a total of eight—yelped and leaped like someone who’d just had his socks turned all to brambles. He slapped at his cheeks, at his breast, at his butt, making noises like a dog in agony until Elora put her shoulder into his belly so hard he folded right over with all his breath slammed right out of him. There was a sliver of thorn on his face, proof positive that these attackers weren’t the only ones armed with bows. Brownie arrows may be small as splinters, but the poisons they were coated with made hornet and wasp stings seem mild. Worse, both Franjean and Rool were such formidable archers that neither clothes nor mail, nor on occasion even steel-plate armor, was any protection against them.

  Elora swung back to the main body of the fight, having yanked the fallen man’s dagger from his belt, in time to see Tam take down three at once, two with his hands and a head butt for the last. Bastian had harried another into headlong flight. She did an instant head count, came up four short.

  That was the cue for disaster. A bolt caught Tam in the back of the thigh and he toppled to the polished floor. At the same time Elora was tackled herself. She grappled with her attacker like a leech as they tumbled, landing with her on the bottom. The impact put stars in her vision but she ignored them, using the fact that she was angled downward on an incline to give her leverage enough to pitch the man off. He didn’t go far, she didn’t want him to, as she kicked herself up and over and delivered a knee as hard as she could to the junction of his legs.

  A fist connected right beneath her breastbone, did her assailant more harm than her as the force of the blow, and maybe some knuckles on the bargain, were broken on the sandwich armor of her tunic. Unfortunately, the advantage was as minimal as it proved short-lived as the man unloaded a tremendous backhand to the side of her head that immediately connected all the stars she’d been seeing with bolts of lightning.

  He pitched her on her face and straddled her, putting his greater bulk right across the base of her spine and using his good hand to haul her head up and back from beneath the jaw. If dancing hadn’t made her limber, the move would have snapped her spine. As it was, the sudden shock of being bent backward like a bow, and torqued a little sideways in the process, made her grunt in pain. He knew his business, he had her too well pinned. Try as she might, even with two arms free and one of his out of commission, Elora couldn’t get a grip on him to free herself.

  There was no sign or sense of Bastian or the brownies. Wouldn’t be, in a mess like this. It would take no effort at all to snap her neck. Even the deadliest brownie poisons wouldn’t act fast enough to stop him.

  On the other hand, the instant he relaxed his hold, or his vigilance, even the slightest…

  That moment wasn’t in the cards. A shape approached, loomed, his voice marking him as the student who’d challenged Tam.

  “Bitch!” he raged at her, and raised his hand to strike.

  “Do that,” growled the man holding Elora, “we’re dead.”

  The bravo didn’t understand. He blinked and raised his hand higher.

  “You hit her, I lose my hold, we’re dead,” the man repeated. “Look about, an’ you doubt my word. She had an eagle come when she’s needful, an’ other friends besides. We breathe ’
cause we hold somethin’ they value. She’s our talisman, the only hope we have to walk away clean.”

  From the bottom of Elora’s belly came a cry of rage and defiance, and she flashed fangs of her own as she made a final, ultimate effort to dislodge her captor. The student sneered, his teeth startlingly bright amidst a countenance of shadows.

  That sneer was his last expression as his head suddenly, startlingly, departed from his neck.

  Elora and her captor cried out at once, and then she felt a spray of hot liquid across the back of her head, followed by a cessation of the pressure on her head and spine. The weight fell one way, she pushed herself the other, and never once looked back. She knew what had just happened, but her eyes were only for Tam.

  He lay sprawled facedown where he fell, the crossbow bolt sticking upright from the meat at the top of his thigh. The whole lower part of Tam’s leg was sodden as she rolled him over, but loss of blood wasn’t the real threat. Elora sensed it from the blue-black tinge to his lips, the rictus of pain that drew them away from his teeth. Placing hands gently on his leg, bracketing the wound, confirmed those fears. The bolt had been poisoned. Whatever their intentions, these attackers had intended to leave no witnesses.

  She bent forward for a sniff, wrinkled her nose, and made a face at the strong odor of corruption, as though Tam had been struck by an instant case of gangrene.

  “Franjean!” she called, “Rool! I need an antidote here!”

  “There is none,” was Rool’s reply. The brownie stood across Tam’s body from her, splashed head to toe with blotches she suspected were blood. Franjean had been equally in the thick of the battle, yet had emerged wholly unscathed, without even a torn thread. Beyond them, Khory Bannefin emerged into view, sword in hand. To her left strode Renny Garedo.

  “I don’t want to hear that, Tam’s dying!”

  “His killers have paid the price,” the constable said. “Our friend will not leave this world unavenged.”