Shadow Dawn
Page 53
As Elora and Duguay repeated their dance, with the Deceiver between them, they left a trail of power behind, as volatile as oil. Its climax would be the spark that set it alight, and the energy of that blaze would pop the Gate open wide. Mohdri would be carried with Duguay and Elora to Duguay’s domain, there to remain forever. He might find a way out, but she doubted it, since she would remain to bar his path. For all the Deceiver’s power, her senses told her that he was still fundamentally human, grounded on too many basic levels to the Circles of the World and the Flesh to long endure that of the Spirit. That the same applied to her, that the same dissolution of self would ultimately claim her, was a fact she chose to ignore. Was this her purpose? She didn’t know, she didn’t care, what mattered was the victory. Ending the threat of the Deceiver. For whatever followed, the Realms could settle their own affairs.
Why is Duguay smiling? she thought, and said, softly, so as not to break the seductive rhythm of their dance and disturb Mohdri. “Why are you smiling?”
“At you, pet, who dare so much and know so little.”
“Some of the bravest deeds spring from rank ignorance.”
“See to your friends. I will finish here.”
She didn’t comprehend for a moment and stumbled over a toe. No lasting harm done, Mohdri appeared well and truly caught up in the flow of their movements, responding to Duguay’s cues as readily as Elora.
“What?” she stammered. “What?”
“You have a destiny. And I an obligation. I would have died at Ganthem’s Crossing but for you.”
“Does corporeal death have meaning for such as you?”
“The spells those High Elves meant to cast would have held me for a time. That time would have been unpleasant. Now that debt is paid. In truth, I hold in my arms what was desired from the start.”
“The Spell of Dissolution—!”
“Has no power over the likes of me. You are much desired, my pet, but needed more elsewhere. Go now. Quickly.”
He released his hold on her hands and, in that same blink of time, gracefully brought Mohdri around to face him so that they were arm in arm as he and Elora had been. The young woman stood stock-still, uncomprehending, and watched them twirl away, moving faster than they had before.
She turned back to Thorn and crossed the distance to him at a dead run to find him ministering to Khory.
“Get to our World Gate,” she told them.
Duguay and Mohdri were dancing faster still, a waltz fit more for demons than for human beings, and Elora felt a pang of loss at the thought of the glory she was missing. The climax of both dance and spell was near.
Elora took a step toward them.
Something wasn’t right.
Another step, ignoring Thorn’s call, shaking her head at a stabbing discontinuity of vision as InSight yanked her to another place rich with a giddy excitement unfelt for too long a time. Elora staggered, wondering if this is what it was like to be one of those daredevils who go off the Wall in a tub, determined to make the plunge into Morar and live to tell the tale. Her breath went out of her as though she’d been punched. She looked around frantically, seeing not the caldera of the dragon’s volcano but another vision overlaying it, some grand and royal celebration with music and dancing and she, as always, the belle of the ball.
She put one foot before the other, faster with every step, wishing for wings to cover the distance to Duguay and Mohdri more quickly.
The dance was interacting with Mohdri’s spell to strip away illusions, it wasn’t what he intended, Duguay couldn’t help himself.
To her horror, Elora realized, He’s dancing with Mohdri the way he would with me!
They stopped, all of a sudden, Duguay taking a step back in reflexive surprise, Mohdri staggering himself, wrapped in confusion, part of him screaming of danger while another yearned plaintively for the waltz to start again.
Mohdri raised his head, only it wasn’t his head any longer. The Deceiver’s mask had been torn away.
What Elora beheld was her own face.
Older, so much older, skin touched with gold instead of gleaming silver, hair the vaguely remembered shade of strawberry blond. Not so ready a smile anymore, and lines etched deep wherever lines could go. It was a face that had never known physical hardship or privation, whose fiercest struggles had always been on the battlefield of the soul. Win or lose, she had paid a terrible price.
It’s a lie, Elora wanted to say, desiring more than anything to shout it to the highest point of the heavens. What else to expect from a creature called the Deceiver?
Yet it explained so much. Knowledge that no one else could have, and the power over Elora herself that came with it. The ability to anticipate events: small surprise if they had already happened to her at some point in the past.
Their eyes met, across an expanse of sand.
“You’re not me,” was what finally emerged.
“If I fail,” her older self replied, “I am.”
The horror to Elora was that the other woman believed it, with a certainty as irrefutable as the turning of the world.
“I can’t let you do this,” she said, sure of neither thoughts nor emotions any longer but willing to trust her instincts all the same.
“You can’t stop me. The power is already mine, the dragons are little more than ghosts.” Her smile was cruel, made worse by the fact that Elora could see in it a portion of her own. “They were little more than ghosts when I arrived. Their day is done, their lives but shadows, for me to claim as my own. I am the Sacred Princess, such is my right!”
Elora searched for Duguay but the Deceiver struck first, with a force and ruthlessness that made Elora gasp. She lashed out at him with a veritable forest of energy waves that drained the Dancer dry at the touch. In that twinkling, Duguay’s corporeal host was reduced to a husk, but the Deceiver didn’t allow the cord of his existence to snap. She held him prisoner, spirit lashed tight inside that casement of dust while she drew his power to her.
Instinct sent Elora into a leaping backward spin, a sudden movement that caught her by surprise as much as the Deceiver. She arched over her back in midair to come down straight as any spear into the core of the sigil she and Duguay had so carefully wrought. As she landed she called forth all the fire in her soul, the passions she had barely begun to tap, the dreams she would not allow the Deceiver to steal away, and shot them into the ground like a bolt from heaven.
She thought the sigil would ignite like something set afire, with flames racing helter-skelter outward from the center. All its elements, though, flared to life as one, filling the crater with a soft, golden radiance.
At the same time Elora hurled herself at the Deceiver, colliding with a tackle hard enough to bounce that armored figure to the ground. She straddled the villain’s chest, calling on all the hours she spent at Torquil’s forge, all the emotional intensity she’d learned by Duguay’s side, and she heaved. Up and over the Deceiver went, bouncing once as she landed within the boundary of the sigil.
Little fool, she heard in her own mind, in her own voice, as though she was talking to herself, would you doom us all?
Elora had no answer, only determination, and an acknowledgment that this was a price she was prepared to pay.
The face might have been hers but the body remained as strong and vital as Mohdri’s. The Deceiver lunged for her, Elora pitching herself aside in a frantic crab scuttle, only to be brought up short by a collision with a glowing ribbon of energy thrown up by the sigil. As Elora watched, the ground began to melt away along the pathways she and Duguay had made, the radiance rapidly arcing from gold to silver to a blue-white glare so penetrating that it made the flesh of her arms transparent as she held them over her eyes.
You think you’ve won, the Deceiver snarled, but you have not. You would match yourself against me, Elora Danan?
The rad
iance was eating away steadily at all the plots of ground within the sigil, yet the Deceiver didn’t appear to mind. She stood as she might on a set of battlements, surveying the approach of some enemy she was about to destroy. The thought amused her, the battle meant nothing to her. She had no doubt of the outcome.
Learn now, the Deceiver proclaimed, how futile is that enterprise.
The Deceiver cupped her hands one over the other and a ball of energy popped into being. From it curled snakelike tendrils, painfully reminiscent of the ones Elora had seen wrapped tight around Ryn Taksemanyin’s soul by the Maizani sorceress, only these were far more foul in origin and far more deadly in effect. It had a stench to it, this spell, and Elora’s hand went to her throat as the image of the Slave Ring came to mind.
There was one tendril for every dragon, and the young woman knew that the slightest touch would mean their doom. They had been encased in ice to hold them, to sap their physical vitality and weaken their will to resist, as the Deceiver had done to all the assembled monarchs in Angwyn years before. This was to finish them, to steal away their souls, the essence of their being as a race, to some secret place of the Deceiver’s, to be doled out in portions as she saw fit. Or most likely, never to be seen again.
No more laughter, no delight, no dreams of things that never were.
One dragon stood paramount among their number, on a crag that loomed above the head of the caldera, and when Elora’s eyes sought his, she knew this was the true form of Calan Dineer.
“I don’t know what to do,” she cried, despairing that he would hear. “I don’t know what to do!”
She remembered the Malevoiy, how it stretched its sibilants the way people think a snake might talk, of how for all its age it found delight in the thought of killing.
She would kill, it told her gleefully.
It would be good.
“No,” she wept, and took no notice of the fact that one of the Deceiver’s spell strands was reaching for her, and more back toward where Thorn and Khory lay watching.
In her mind Elora forged a spear. It was a work of wondrous beauty, with an edge that could cut spirit from flesh, for that was its purpose. It came from the forge of imagination white-hot, a shapeless blob of incandescence, to be taken in her tongs and hammered and pounded and honed, the metal folded again and again and again until there wasn’t a substance in creation that was proof against it.
Elora worked quickly because there was no time, but she remained true to the craft that she’d been taught. In every way, when she was done, this was a creation to be proud of.
A vision of her stood tall within her mind, bouncing the spear a few times to gauge the heft of it.
She looked at each of the dragons in turn, knowing their peril, but determined to fix each and every visage indelibly in her memory.
While she lived they would not be forgotten.
In her imagination, that vision of herself reared back and let fly the spear.
And because this was the Realm where imagination could be made flesh, that spear took tangible form that selfsame instant. She and Calan were separated by miles, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t the strength of her arm that propelled the shaft, but of her will.
Calan lifted his great head to the sky, as did the others in kind, and in a voice that made Elora’s heart leap to her throat, the dragons cried their defiance here as they did in the story she told back at the fort, a whole lifetime ago it seemed.
As one, they called out, Freedom!
And like that ancient hero, they died.
There was a light too impossible to be endured. There was the heat of all creation being born. There was sensation that could not be described, as an entire generation of dragons was returned in that terrible instant to the celestial fires that gave them birth.
Elora saw it all, heard it all, felt it all. She stood at the heart of the holocaust, but was not consumed. She felt the substance of the Deceiver melt away, but knew that meant nothing. Her adversary would not be beaten so easily. In this place the Deceiver was spirit made flesh, an animate projection of her will, brought to life in part by the sacrifice of the twelve Maizani sorcerers who’d opened the Sandeni Gate. The corporeal form of Castellan Mohdri was no doubt safely bunkered deep within Maizani territory.
With measured tread, Elora crossed the whole of that great caldera, now hollow and empty for the first time in living memory.
Unsure of what they’d find, or what to do, Thorn and Khory followed, giving wide berth to that portion of ground where the sigil had been drawn and the World Gate opened. It appeared solid enough but neither was of a mind to test it.
They too had beheld the Deceiver’s true face. To Thorn the sight was a stab through his heart, made worse by what Elora had done right afterward.
The dragons were the soul of the world, they stood at the summit of the Third Circle of Creation. Now they were gone.
Elora Danan met them halfway, a vision in silver with robes the color of blood, as wild and elemental as the first spring of a newborn world.
She walked proudly, happily, and on her face was a smile that spoke of a whole world of possibilities. In each arm, she carried a dragon’s egg.
The past was done. In her charge, as freely accepted as given, was the promise of the bright, new future yet to be.
To
THE GREY LADY
who nourished my soul,
without whom this book would not have been possible
&
Black-Eyed Susan’s
Finn & Pam
Donald & Yoshi
Who sustained my body
And thanks as well and most of all to
Diane & Peter
for Edgewater
A home away from home
PUBLISHED BY BANTAM BOOKS
SHADOW MOON
First in the Chronicles of the Shadow War
SHADOW DAWN
Second in the Chronicles of the Shadow War
SHADOW STAR
Third in the Chronicles of the Shadow War
CHRIS CLAREMONT is best known for his seventeen-year stint on Marvel Comics’ The Uncanny X-Men, during which it was the bestselling comic in the Western Hemisphere for a decade; he has sold more than 100 million comic books to date. His novels First Flight, Grounded! and Sundowner were science fiction bestsellers. Recent projects include the dark fantasy novel Dragon Moon and Sovereign Seven™, a comic book series published by DC Comics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
GEORGE LUCAS is the founder of Lucasfilm Ltd., one of the world’s leading entertainment companies. He created the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series, each film among the all-time leading box-office hits. Among his story credits are THX 1138, American Graffiti, and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. He lives in Marin County, California.