The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  She wondered absently how the Gray People were faring these days, with no Sage to call orders to them from his stone towers. Had they chosen a new king or queen? Or had they rejoiced when word of his death reached them—if it had—and sang songs of Asha’s death in their strange, flat-stone streets?

  Another blue flash, this one low to the ground. Shadow thought she heard a scream accompany this one and took a step forward before a feeling of dread assailed her. It was deep, all-powerful, sickening and it nearly brought her to her knees. She fought off the Eastern Dark’s influence—that deep, pervading poison he had made her with, turned her with—but she remained in place, rooted in position if not in will.

  Now, more lights joined the Ember fires, and she had to blink to be sure they were there. They were golden, shining like miniature suns, but only when one of those Everwood blades came close or sent out a flare or jet to cause a reflection. Golden armor?

  Shadow laughed mirthlessly. She thought Asha and hers thought themselves above the rest. How pompous, then, were these Knights of the North? How righteous, in their own estimation?

  She sat there, much like the Sage did down below, and watched as a disc of red fire spun in the golden mist and a comet grew out of it that could only be the work of the archer with the power of a Sage. As the comet struck the turf and sent up a shower of yellow and white sparks, Shadow glimpsed the staggered line of fur-clad soldiers with their billowing capes and smiled as she thought of their fellows she had slain.

  Could this whole fight have been her doing? The pure joy of the realization was supplanted a moment later with the dreadful suspicion that Valour had intended it, just as he had intended the rest. Shadow chewed on her lip, her mood spoiled, and thought again of how she might kill him, knowing she never would.

  If there was one thing she could admire in the foolhardy Embers so far from home and in the strong, foolish friends who followed them, it was the courage born of their ignorance. If only they knew the things she knew. If only they had seen the things she had.

  Like T’Alon Rane.

  There was a sharp pain in Shadow’s chest that made her wince as much for the discomfort it caused as for its strangeness. It was a feeling she half remembered from some long-ago time, and one she had not felt since she had cast it off and donned her black shell—or since she had been made to. She couldn’t quite remember which was which these days and didn’t much care to.

  On the back of that sharp stab she felt the familiar hate for the man down below—the Faey-like shade who was less than he had been before, desperate and doubly deadly.

  But unmistakably mortal.

  Shadow found cause to smile again. She stretched in that feline way of hers and stood, disappointed that the light show in the west was quieting some and uncertain if it meant a peaceful resolution had been found or if the Landkist or their foes had been killed.

  Either way, she was exposed up here on the drifting flats. She took a scan around, fixing her eyes on the way the land fell away to the northeast—the way they were likely headed—and then began her climb back down.

  She hadn’t realized how hot and stifling the cave had been when she’d left. The very rock seemed to be sweating, droplets turning to rivulets that merged to form small rivers on the cavern floor. She stepped through them, making sure to splash, and delighted in seeing one of those pointed ears twitch.

  “I never thought you one for ritual,” Shadow purred, balancing in a squat on a rounded stone as she faced the Sage’s profile. He frowned, his lips going white.

  He mumbled something unintelligible and then said something in a whisper behind it, though she didn’t think it was meant for her.

  “Allies?” She caught it and turned it back, covering her questions with a false, childlike innocence that she knew annoyed him more than anything else she did. “Why not invite more of the Sentinels in? They are wild, yes, but deadly.”

  “Not enough,” he said. His throat was dry and cracking.

  “Sentinels are not enough …” She pondered it, stroking her chin like a scholar without abandoning her stooped position. She was certain she cut an image that was both unimposing and utterly ridiculous, which was, after all, the point.

  “Night Lords, then?”

  Another frown, and now he opened his eyes. Shadow caught a flash of orange before the purple came in to supplant it.

  Shadow was silent as the Sage steadied his breathing and stared at the slick floor in front of him. Not for the first time, she wondered if she had gone too far. Shadow had long ago stopped fearing death. What could the realm of the dead do to her that that of the living hadn’t already?

  But then, there were worse things to endure, and if any creature in any realm knew of them, it was most certainly Ray Valour. Why did she court the ire of such a being?

  “Make you lose your connection?” Shadow asked. She said it in a light way, as if it wasn’t overly important if she had. Ray turned his purple eyes her way, his look not intending to threaten and doing so because of it.

  “They are,” he searched for the words but never moved his stare from her, “choosing.”

  “Choosing, they are,” Shadow said. “Choosing what? And who?”

  Now her questions had the sound of one who truly wanted to know. Valour smiled through Rane’s teeth to let her know he caught it and delighted in it. Power was power, in Shadow’s estimation and experience. But knowledge was a close second, and none had more than this man.

  “You’ll see soon enough on that count,” he said, and Shadow swallowed despite herself.

  “No Sentinels,” she said as much as asked. He shook his head. “No Night Lords.”

  Another shake. “They are too powerful and too few to bring over.”

  “You’ve done it before,” Shadow argued for the sake of it. “Four times, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Once,” Valour said, turning back to face the wall, “to the count of four Night Lords. And only one of them truly retained much in the way of his previous power, never mind his disposition.”

  “The one the Ember slew in the desert?”

  “Hardly alone,” Valour said, “but yes. That one. Now, the World Apart is too near. Inviting them in would risk catastrophe. And once here, I’d hardly be able to control them in their full glory.”

  Shadow nodded, though she did not understand. Not really.

  “If control is the order of the day,” she said, wheels turning, “why not turn more Landkist, as you have before? As you did with Brega, Resh and T’Alon Rane?”

  “I wonder if you’d have included your own name in that list, had you remembered it,” he said. Shadow felt that familiar fire burning in her gullet and pushed it down.

  “No more Landkist,” the Sage said. “As you can see, too much of the will remains.” He seemed to catch his breath as he said it, as if something had tried to choke him.

  Shadow watched the imagined battle play out on the Sage’s normally stoic features. He still didn’t wear Rane’s skin right. But then, who was she to pass judgment?

  “Power tends to be a precursor to will,” she said, examining her black claws as she pulled them back with nothing more than her mind and rounded them back into smooth digits.

  “Or the opposite,” he nodded.

  “You search for power,” Shadow said, “but not the will to accompany it. You say yourself, it’s a difficult thing to find one without the other. Impossible.”

  “Ah, but my dear Shadow,” he said, turning back toward her, “that is where cause comes in. You see, no matter the power and no matter the will, each and every thing in this World and the next sentient enough to do so has a cause. When the jackal makes for the wolf’s kill, he is rebuffed. When the bear comes and the wolf is driven off, the jackal eats his fill. The bear and the jackal have common cause, you see. Both know that winter comes, and that she is a mistres
s unkind and very like to kill.”

  “A jackal, then,” Shadow said, her flat expression showing him she didn’t much care for his riddles or long-winded comparisons. “You forego the strength of Sentinels, Night Lords and Landkist besides … for the company of jackals.”

  Valour regarded her for a time. He did not seem angry, nor did he look amused. It was rather as if he saw her as the jackal from his tale. But he hadn’t asked for her help, had he? He hadn’t come with gifts and promises, nor talk of common cause.

  He turned back toward the wall and the Blue Knight’s sorry form that was propped up against it, held and spread apart by invisible bonds that did not shimmer like the armor she had worn. Her ribs moved too slightly to see, and Shadow was beginning to know that whatever consciousness she had would not be waking anytime soon. Not in the way she expected.

  “We need allies to win this war, Shadow,” he said, coming onto his earlier thread. “Or to stop the true one from coming any closer. And what,” he said, “makes common cause quite like fear, and of the same thing?”

  Shadow did not answer. She meant to, but then the air began to shake. She scrambled from her low perch on the smooth, rounded stone, thinking at first that the Landkist of the Valley had found them, or else that the Blue Knight’s fellows had found their wayward captain and her captors.

  But Valour sat still, undisturbed but for a slow and creeping smile that broke his face. He watched the Blue Knight on the wall and Shadow followed his gaze.

  At first, she slept in that unnatural sleep, and then she stirred as if in dreaming. Her head tossed and turned, and when she opened those gold-speckled eyes, they were wide with a fear Shadow did not want to recognize but did. The Blue Knight didn’t see them, it seemed, but something else. Something that came for her in the darkness that they could not see.

  The woman’s head jerked to the side and she let out a breathless, silent scream. It was all the entrance their ally needed, as she went rigid of a sudden, her eyes going from gold to black and then, slowly, to a red that was the color of blood and poison mixed. Shadow watched in horrified fascination as the knight’s skin changed from sparkling blue to ashen gray, and not the black she herself wore or the Sentinels counted as skin. She was well-muscled, but the muscles changed along with the bones beneath. There was more jerking and sharp pulls, snapping sounds and grinding, and Shadow felt her jaw hang open as the very frame of the Blue Knight morphed to suit its new arrival.

  When the transformation was over, there was not a bald woman sitting before them but a well-muscled man with gray skin and mouse-colored hair with wisps of brown and white, the bangs obscuring his bony features. The bonds that had held him in place slackened and then released, and he fell to his knees and stayed there as if exhausted beyond all sense. He breathed, slow and deep, his lungs seeming to struggle over the close air in the stuffy confines—in an unfamiliar world. When he did look up to meet the Sage’s eager stare, Shadow saw those deep red eyes—like a rat’s—set into a face with a bony brow and wide nose. Not human, then, but something else. Something that recalled the Faey of the south and lacked any of the finery of whatever Valour had been in his far-flung youth.

  Shadow had an epiphany as she watched the newcomer take stock of his surroundings, quick and clever as the Sentinels had been wild and untamed. She recalled images she had pushed down into the far reaches of memory—images of her second birth and the pain it had brought. This process had reminded her of it, but none of the Blue Knight remained. She was gone, to make way for this … beast of shadow.

  “Shadow into life,” Shadow whispered, “and not life into Shadow.”

  Valour’s brow twitched as he caught the words, but he did not take his eyes from the gray-skinned creature, which told her plenty of how dangerous it was. “Feeling nostalgic, Shadow?” the Sage asked, though she thought she caught a hint of uncertainty in his tone. This creature unsettled him.

  “He was made in the opposite way to me,” she said, knowing the words to be truth even as they inspired an irrational panic within her.

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said. “Not quite. But,” he nodded and smiled at the beast, who matched the look, “but yes, I suppose you could say that. You’ve got some of the World Apart in you, Shadow. But he,” he nodded at the kneeling figure whose form seemed unused to kneeling, “he is from the place, and he has come through unchanged—whole in a way I wasn’t sure they could. Not until he told me how.”

  “Through sacrifice,” Shadow said, nodding. The newcomer liked the word, though she did not know if he took its meaning. “Like the Corrupted.”

  “No,” Valour said. “Those were the work of a Night Lord’s power. One of the greatest, who made slaves out of shells, but only after they had expired and no life was left within. Not so for him. He required life to pay. And he has been paid.”

  The newcomer smiled in an approximation of Valour’s earlier expression, only he seemed to mean it now, and Shadow did not know at what.

  “Do you have a name?” Shadow asked him, surprised that Valour didn’t intervene. Those rat’s eyes slid toward her, and when they fixed on hers, Shadow recognized them as belonging to a snake—a cunning and cold thing.

  “Not one for your tongue,” he said, though his eyes roved over her black curves as he said it. He licked his teeth, which were filed into points, and Shadow felt naked before him as she never had before, appreciated in all the wrong ways. She worked to suppress a shiver.

  “He is a Shadow King,” Valour said. “One of a few.”

  “The Shadow King,” the man said. His voice was rasping, as if it was unused to the trappings of humanity.

  “How few?” Shadow asked, not wanting to break the stare. After a few agonizing moments, the man gave a slight nod that Shadow took as appreciation.

  “Half a dozen,” Valour said. It could have been taken as an approximation, but he said it straight. Six. Six Shadow Kings, and if every one of them was as confident and cunning as this one, she hoped he had no plans to bring them through.

  “Why not open a rift?” she asked.

  “Rifts are exceedingly difficult to close, Shadow.” Now Valour was beginning to grow impatient, and the newcomer watched him curiously. It would not have surprised Shadow in the least if he rose into a sinuous crouch and fell upon the Ember Sage with all the violence and fury of the World Apart. Instead, he knelt, though he straightened up enough to give Shadow a glimpse of what was between his legs. If his gaze roved, so would hers.

  She came away disturbed. There was nothing there to mark his sex. Nothing to separate him from another. He caught her staring and smiled, all teeth.

  “King, is it?” she asked. “And not queen?”

  The insult had no effect on him, but she had pushed Valour far now. He showed it in the tension of his jaw and the way he clenched his fists into unmoving balls over his crossed legs.

  “Are you the one I spoke to?” Valour asked, drawing the stranger back to him. “Alistair the Cordial?”

  Shadow nearly laughed at the name. “Some translation …” she said under her breath. The Shadow King—whose name would inspire less fear than confusion in those of her World—did not seem to take offense. She realized with a slow dawning that his earlier remark to her must have been made in jest, and seeing her recognition, he smiled.

  “If it please you that I be him,” Alistair the Cordial said, lowering his chin. Shadow did not think he was lying. She was quick to spot those. It took the Sage a bit longer to decide how it struck him or how it did not.

  Shadow worked the name through her mind. It was at once new and familiar, not something demons from a world of choking ash and spinning dust would be called, but rather lords with shimmering finery in their high stone towers.

  “The others let you through first?” Valour asked. He was probing. Ever probing, searching for signs of deception or weakness. Search
ing for signs of threat. As far as Shadow was concerned, this creature—this king of the World Apart—was made of the stuff.

  “Did it ever strike you that my name was …” he seemed to search for the word, “coated in iron?”

  “Ironic?” Shadow supplied and he smiled appreciatively. She liked him in that moment, and then the mask dropped, to be replaced by that constant gray slate that watched and learned with uncommon speed.

  “Ironic,” Alistair the Cordial said. “That’s me.”

  “You killed them?” Valour asked, sounding worried, though Shadow could not imagine a better scenario than five more of his like being dead and gone in whatever world they inhabited.

  “I won the argument,” he said. “As I often do. But no, they live. They have heard your promises, the same as I. They want to be free of the same stench as I, the same … dominion. They will heed your call, when next it comes.”

  The Shadow King looked around as if for the first time. He seemed disappointed, as if this sorry cave set into the sheer wall of a black cliff in the north was the whole of their World.

  “It is good that I waited for this form.” He looked down at his gray, muscled bulk and ran his fingers along his thick thighs and the ridges of his torso. “The nobles came at your first offer, passing in through those rifts. Fools, every one, though, I grant you, the one you made in the west was truer and less jagged than those the other made. Those in the south of your World were shoddy and shaking. They drove most mad as they passed through, and the Sage’s magic on the other side, corrupted as he was, saw them bent into his service completely.”

  Shadow thought there were more muscles on Alistair than on any man she had ever seen, even if he wasn’t the largest. His ribs seemed thicker and fewer, his chest broader and his waist more narrow in a way that didn’t quite fit the meat of his legs and haunches. If one were to glance over him with a passing care, one might assume he was just another man, but now that Shadow looked—really looked—she couldn’t see him as the same. Bones covered his chest, the caps of his knees and his insteps. Bones that made a natural armor. For all her strangeness, Shadow knew what was beneath her black shell. She remembered the girl she had been. The girl who was still there, clawing in the depths, and not gone like the Blue Knight.