The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “I did see it coming, Shadow,” Valour said. “I’ve been trying to stop it for a hundred years. More. My first step was to make you.”

  She felt something sharp in her chest, like a double-edged blade that threatened to poke her heart and throat at the same time.

  Valour did not look at her as he spoke.

  “My champions,” he said. “The greatest Landkist of all the wide lands. Resh of the Red Cliffs. Brega Cohr of Center. Muhle of the Bogs. Cristaine of the Stone Towers. T’Alon Rane, the King of Ember …”

  Their faces flashed in Shadow’s mind. She remembered them all, and a few more besides. Together, they had hunted the other Sages at the Eastern Dark’s behest. They had killed many. The Twins of Whiteash. The Serpent of the Longmoores. The Bat of Graymount. They had done it all without losing a single member of their company, all of whom—with the exception of Shadow herself—had joined the dark Sage willingly, a shared desire for vengeance on the great and warring powers of the World the only thing binding them together, or else not splitting them apart. They had fought and killed the greatest powers the world had ever known. All until they came here and challenged the Prince and Princess of the Nevermelt. The Frostfire Sages.

  A bloody day, and one that did not go their way. The Dark Landkist, champions of the Eastern Dark and forgotten heroes of the world, had lost several of their company when the battle that killed one of the Sages was done. Rane had burned the prince away, but his princess had withdrawn to her frozen palace and declared herself queen. They had left her to war with the Sage of Balon Rael as the three who remained—Shadow, Rane and Brega Cohr—licked their wounds and counted the days until they would earn another try. Shadow looked at Valour’s face and thought it a shame Rane wouldn’t be here to collect his own brand of vengeance for Resh’s death.

  A strange mood had come over the Sage in recent days, and one Shadow had never seen before. She had thought it a result of his unwilling merging with the Ember king, but the longer the union persisted, and the less of Rane she saw, the more the sense of brooding—even of melancholy—seemed to weigh the Sage down. Now, standing out on the edges of a frozen ocean, she saw the way he looked to the crystal palace that was only visible as a faint and ghostly outline against the night sky and all its embattled stars. The look was heaviest there.

  There was much of the past in this land of frozen memories and wasted lives. Much of Ray Valour’s past, and not the Eastern Dark’s, who had been made in the salted and rotten bogs of the south. A place where snakes slithered, birds seldom flew, and shadows lengthened and became something more. And all, she had thought, because of his meddling in the first place. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Not after what the Shadow Kings had to say. Not after how Valour had reacted, or better yet, how he hadn’t.

  “You see, Shadow,” Valour said, not taking his eyes from the eastern horizon, “I built plans upon plans, and my brightest and best—or so I thought—was to shelter the Embers in that Valley core. I allowed Uhtren to seize the Dark Hearts, to weave his own magic through them and so be ensnared. What better way to shake that war-like Valley grown suddenly peaceful? What better way to reignite the Embers’ fire, to restock the veins and manhoods of the desert—”

  “To create new Embers,” Shadow said, her voice going soft as the implications washed over her. The Emberfolk had fled the western deserts largely because of Valour’s unrelenting and covetous gaze. He had seen the folly of his tampering with those ancient, foreign powers in the World Apart and had need of more than mere champions. He needed an army. The irony was almost enough to make Shadow laugh.

  “Yes. And all to fight against what I called here in the first place.”

  It was as close to an admission of guilt as Shadow had ever heard from the Sage. Perhaps more of T’Alon Rane had got into him than he thought.

  “She is calling to him and she has no idea,” Valour said. He nodded sharply toward that low mountain ridge and the sparkling towers, like dust glittering atop the melt. “He is drawing strength from this world and through her, all while she thinks she grows stronger. He draws strength from our Worldheart.” He nearly choked on his sardonic laugh. “We never had a name for it before, but the Shadow Kings know of it. It should have been obvious. All of it.” He looked down at his feet. Past them and below them, as if he could see the center of the World. “The Soul of the World, the Landkist call it. I always thought it the work of superstition, falsehoods of belief.”

  “Well,” Shadow said, “that’s about as close as I’ve seen to you admitting you were wrong.” Valour turned a questioning look on her, and she felt it safe enough to continue. “The Landkist were right, weren’t they? The Worldheart blessed them with its gifts. And …” her eyebrows quirked up as new implications came to the fore, “I would guess they weren’t the first.”

  Valour seemed to consider what she said, and she could see by the subtle turns of those yellow-flecked lavender eyes that he had considered it before, long ago, and that recent events had brought it back up, like sludge on the bottom of a shallow mire.

  “The Last God is a parasite,” Valour said, choosing not to answer the seeming accusation. He nodded back toward the blue cave, which had grown dark enough to lose its color with the fading ashes. “He drained their Worldheart. Consumed it completely. No new power in that world on which he can feed.”

  “Other than them,” Shadow followed, nodding slowly. The picture was coming clearer in her mind. “You would think they’d be thanking the Night Lords for bringing him down.”

  “Beasts of chaos,” Valour said sharply. “No doubt some vile perversion—the result of whatever fallout occurred when the Worldheart died.”

  “Why would they stop her?” Shadow asked, lowering her voice so as not to be heard. She did not like the way it made her look, but Shadow’s instincts had ever and always pushed her toward survival, and survival was often more than a stone’s throw from courage. “They must know their world is beyond saving. What does it matter if the Last God flees? The Night Lords remain—most of them.”

  Valour actually smiled. “We are all playing games, my dear Shadow. The Shadow Kings no doubt hope to introduce this realm to the remaining Night Lords. They haven’t even tried to hide the fact. Likely, they feel they can be defeated, drained as they may be after crossing over.”

  “Drained?”

  Valour looked at Shadow as if she were daft. “Those Shadow Kings are pale versions of what they should be, and we should count ourselves thankful to have allies whose power only rivals our own and does not dwarf it. No doubt the Night Lords would experience the same.”

  It was difficult for Shadow to imagine, given what she knew of the Night Lords. Given how much power they wielded and how even the Sages of this realm feared to fight them. Perhaps, if they had retained their full power, the White Crest would have fallen against one. Instead, he had thrown down three in the northern passes of the Embers’ Valley.

  “Would that not also hold true for this so-called god, then?” Shadow pondered. Valour tipped his head to one side and gave a shrug.

  “He is cleverer than that, I think,” he said. “Clever enough to gain my notice centuries ago, to turn my gaze in his direction so that I might start his long road toward this world.”

  “You don’t know that,” Shadow said, and Valour’s look showed that he did not know what she meant. “You said yourself it was your meddling that brought this about. You and your brethren. The Sages. Perhaps he never would have seen this realm, known of it if it weren’t for you.”

  “Perhaps,” Valour said. “But the question, it seems, is now moot. Whether we invited his notice or he invited ours, our worlds are colliding, and she,” he turned back toward that crystal palace, “is the agent of the coming clash.” He shook his head slowly, as if lost in thought. “He must know something. He must know he can defeat us.”

  “You’ve certainly made it easi
er for him,” Shadow risked. “Killing your brothers and sisters, and all. Then again, I suppose that was more my doing. And Rane’s.” She saw a twitch at the mention, but it was smoothed over quickly enough.

  “She is planning something,” Valour continued, heedless of her prodding. “She must know. She has ever been a … difficult one, but never foolish.”

  “Love makes fools of us all,” Shadow cooed, beginning to grow bored with the exchange. Let the World Apart come in all its shadowy fire. Let the Sages and Landkist and Shadow Kings try to throw it back, and let her find a way to see it to its ending.

  But something she said had frozen the Sage in mid-thought. His eyes widened for long enough to make her heartbeat quicken.

  “Shadow, Shadow,” he whispered. “I do think you are wiser than you know.”

  He did not elaborate, and Shadow wasn’t willing to ruin the seeming compliment by prying for more. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

  “Don’t they know their world is dead already?” Shadow asked. She was asking a lot of questions these days. She always had, she supposed, but now she asked them true. She asked them because she wanted to know the answers, not because she wanted to see the effect they had.

  “Perhaps they have a fool’s hope that it can be restored,” Valour said. “When the Frostfire Sage lies dead and stiff beneath snows of her own making, the Last God’s connection to this realm will be severed, and with it, his last vestiges of power. He will wither like a plucked flower or poisoned root. He will die, and they will have a chance to throw down the Night Lords and take back their realm without that parasite rising again to spoil the attempt, to pick over the victors.” He paused. “Or perhaps, Shadow, they merely seek vengeance. Is that so difficult a thing to understand?”

  Shadow did not answer.

  “Where does a power like that come from?” she wondered aloud, knowing the Sage did not have an answer.

  “It seems all worlds have their own hearts of power. Their own souls, as it were.” He seemed uncomfortable with the word and uncomfortable with the thought that his power might not have been his at all. That there was, in fact, very little separating him from the Landkist he and the other Sages had lorded over for centuries. “Some hearts go dark. Some fester and rot. Some are never full.”

  Shadow shivered at the tone he adopted.

  “We should let her finish whatever it is she’s doing,” Shadow said. “Her ritual.” She waved her hand in the air, making swirling patterns that annoyed Valour. She added another flourish just to further that end. “Draw him in. Expose him. Kill him. Burn him away.”

  Valour did not refute the thought nor accept it easily. His face changed very little, showing her that he had been thinking the same thing. She had wondered why he did not charge across the frozen wastes with his shadowfire and his ancient and righteous-seeming rage to snuff her out. She had thought it, if not fear, then a healthy respect for the power of the Sage and her followers. Add to the mix Reyna, Ve’Ran and the Landkist of the Valley—the most potent Shadow had seen since her own roving band had terrorized the would-be kings and queens the world over—and the thought was not hard to rationalize. Now, she wondered if she had stumbled upon something closer to the truth.

  Perhaps the Eastern Dark had a shred of bravery about him after all. Perhaps he meant to meet this dark god, and then to kill him with his own hands—or those he’d borrowed.

  “Perhaps,” Valour said. “Either way, she has to die.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Shadow,” Valour said, “I think you are right, and that love nests at the heart of the matter. She will have to die.”

  Shadow shrugged.

  “How foolish you must feel,” Shadow said. She was getting tired, and weariness made her lazy. Lazy enough to draw the ire of a Sage with the power of a fallen sun. “Following the lilting song of a trickster god into a place of shadows and wraiths, promises of treasures and power beyond counting.”

  “We will see,” Valour said. “We will see who has the last laugh. I learned much in that realm and without it. Much more than this supposed god could understand.”

  They were silent for a time, and Shadow had thought before that the land was as well. Now that she listened, she could hear it. It was rough and keening, the wind playing sharp notes on the small shards and runs within the ice, the hiss of rattlesnakes as the dust scraped the surface of the glass and made it rough.

  All lands had their own voices. She had learned to listen to them in her long solitude in the south. That land had its own songs. They were deep and full of threat. Out on the road, when she had been forced to join with the Eastern Dark’s champions—his roaming band of conjured and captured death—she had listened to the voices of the other lands. Not the birds and beasts. She knew those well, even if the tones and pitches changed from patch to patch. No. Shadow listened to the land itself. She listened to the wind as it passed through the nettles and coiled around the trunks of trees. She listened to water—fresh or salt—as it pooled around stones or crashed upon cliffs. She listened to sand as it ran in currents of its own making, and to that distant, sonorous hum when all the world seemed quiet.

  Often, when Shadow would disappear into the black patches and rifts that were her namesake, Rane and the others would assume she communed with the beast beside her. Sometimes she did, but often she had merely found a quiet place where she could listen to the stories the land wanted to tell her. They were rarely boring things.

  “She is living in old memories,” Valour said after a time. “No time for spires these days. No time for palisades and silver horns. No time for towers.” He spoke in a voice barely above a whisper, and Shadow could tell he would have said it had she been standing there or not.

  “You had plenty to do with the last,” Shadow put in, looking beyond him and back toward the jagged collection of icy shards that had been a proud and even majestic tower just hours before. He ignored her.

  She watched his eyes flit and flicker as the first hint of yellow began to creep up over the edge of the east. The orb would not fly high today. Shadow could smell it. Instead, it would skirt the horizon, painting the sky the color of burnt blood and starflowers. In a week or three, it would barely do more than that. And soon after, it would only show a pale yellow fin as it fought the haze of the horizon for a few lone hours of light to keep away the Dark Months, when things much worse than Shadow would appear, crawling from their rifts and hiding in their pockets. Few enough to make some folk in some lands doubt their existence. Plentiful enough in some places to make a nightmare of the season.

  “It is not ice anymore,” he said, his brow creasing as he examined those distant crenellations. “There is no water left in the place. It seems she has finally perfected the art of Nevermelt. No fire will bring it down. No fire I’ve seen. Her power has been changed by the World Apart, just as mine was. She will be … potent.”

  Valour did not turn toward Shadow, but it seemed the startling beauty of the rising sun did enough to touch even his shallow, black heart.

  “You must think there is nothing separating the Sages—separating us—from the monster coming our way,” he said. Shadow raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “Believe it or not, we used our power—stolen or otherwise—to create. And we did for a long time, Shadow. We built great towers and ploughed the lands in all directions. We planted seeds and made them grow tall enough to build castles and keeps within their branches. We raised great cliffs of red clay and hardened them to stone to keep the drakes of the north from our lands and from our peoples. We froze an ocean—or a part of it—and raised towers whose lights would never extinguish, to bring our sailors home.”

  Shadow waited for the second part. The part where he talked about what the Sages had done after, when they had built monuments to their own glory and fought wars for the same with the blood of those deemed beneath them. When they had taken s
laves and called them champions. When they had broken the lands they had planted and ruined generations of those who had called them lords and—in some places—even gods.

  He did not say the second part. He did not say anything.

  “What’s our next move?” Shadow asked. Valour glanced at her, likely hearing the way her voice had shifted. He had to know why. If he cared, he gave no indication, and her smoldering, acid bitterness returned, splashing and running through the well-worn grooves in her veins and heart.

  “The old fool you let go was slow-going, but tough. He’ll arrive today. If he doesn’t survive, a patrol will find him. The Blue Knights will work themselves into a frenzy. Perhaps they’ll be foolish enough to strike out for us, to face us in the wastes.”

  “And if not?”

  “We enter a grand place in grand fashion.”

  Shadow considered it. She felt a thrill that mixed a twinge of intoxicating fear with anticipation. It was a feeling she loved, even as it threatened to raise bile in her throat. No matter how calm, how serene she might feel in times of quiet reflection, when she listened to the songs of the land and the musings of Sages and Shadow Kings, Shadow was a dark blade, and one used to killing. She liked it, and had long ago given up trying to find out if she had always been that way.

  “You will need the Valley Landkist on your side,” she said. “At least, you will need them not to be against us. They should know that we’re after the same thing.”

  “I will tell them what their would-be queen has done, if they don’t know it already,” Valour said. He sounded unconcerned, but Shadow heard the effort in the attempt. He was nervous, and if there was anything more exhilarating than her own fear, it was that of a Sage she had once trembled before. “No matter what those with him believe—no matter their end—Reyna wants the Sages dead. He wants me dead, but he won’t suffer the Witch to live.”

  “Reyna would meet with Rane,” Shadow said. “He won’t with you.”