The Book of Shadows

by Ruth Hatfield

  An army.

  He looked down at the book. He’d written nothing about an army. This couldn’t be happening. This was supposed to be his world, and nothing was supposed to happen in it that he hadn’t dictated. For a second, he felt irritated. And then irritation gave way to fear, and fear gripped his chest.

  Whose army was it?

  Thud.

  Thud.

  Thud.

  The army advanced across the wide plain. As they grew closer, Danny could see no color about them at all. To a soldier, they were black from head to foot. No—not black.

  Clothed in shadows.

  Their weapons were all different—pikes, swords, longbows, guns, cutlasses and daggers, knives and slingshots. They were a hundred different types of creature—men and women, lions and snakes, otters and bears, and eagles in the sky. As they came closer, Danny saw smaller animals around the feet of the larger ones—ferrets and polecats, shrews and mice. There were many he didn’t know the names of at all—ratlike creatures with huge ears that bounced along, lumbering squirrels the size of large dogs, stripy cats with fangs bigger than his arm that curled from their mouths in wicked arcs. Countless creatures, as far as his eyes could see, clothed in their blanket of black shadow, marching grimly toward him.

  But he still had the Book of Shadows. He had the ultimate power. He could write them away in a word or two, as easy as that. There was nothing to fear.

  Danny watched them come. No need to panic—just be ready to write. He wanted to see who they were now that his heart had begun to slow again. He wanted to know what they had come from, so that he could be sure to eradicate it fully from his world.

  He wrote in the book: The army stopped.

  The army stopped.

  He wrote, Their leader came forward.

  A murmuring went up around the shadowed ranks, a rustling and clanking of steel swords and wooden spears.

  The army parted, and a dark figure came slipping from between the ranks, his white shirt ghostly against the shadows.

  He stood before Danny, the tight black curls of his hair shining beneath the sun. His face was the face of a thousand people Danny had known and would one day come to know. His expression was dignified and dangerous. His eyes were as black as midnight, and his cheeks were hollow and thin.

  “But … you’re dead,” said Danny.

  Sammael inclined his head. “I’m not sure that’s entirely correct,” he said.

  “I killed you. I wrote it into the Book of Shadows. You can’t be here anymore.”

  “I go where I please,” said Sammael.

  “No … This is the world of Mab! I rule everything! You’re dead!”

  “The world of Mab? What did you make it out of?”

  Danny felt his cheeks redden. Sammael would only laugh at the truth. A handful of silly stories.

  But what did it matter if Sammael laughed? Even if he’d escaped this time through some minor glitch, Danny would find out what it was and make sure it didn’t happen again.

  “The four elements,” he said defiantly. “Earth, air, fire, and water. It wasn’t hard.”

  “Only four?”

  “There are only four. They’re not the real elements; they’re classical ones.”

  “Ah,” said Sammael. “I know the elements to which you refer, but I’m sorry to tell you, you’ve been misinformed. There’s a fifth one.”

  “You’re lying.” Danny gripped the pencil stub and went to write again in the book. Then he looked up at Sammael, who smiled thinly.

  “Ever heard of the ether?” said Sammael. “The uppermost air. Only it isn’t really air, is it? If you had to describe it, you might say it was … intangible. But nevertheless, ether is the fifth element. And I am ether.”

  Danny stared at him, gripping the pencil and book.

  “A world always has to hold something to surprise you,” said Sammael softly. “Otherwise what kind of place would it be? You’d die of boredom in days.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Danny. “I’m going to make a world where everyone’s happy and everyone’s safe. And there’ll be no ether in it.”

  “Of course there won’t be,” said Sammael. “The ether is the bit that contains imagination, which is terrifying and dangerous and wonderful. I was right about you. You’re the last person in the world who should be let loose with a taro. Think of all that you could have done with it—and all you want is to use it to build a world without magic.”

  “I’m using it for good!” snarled Danny. “You’re the one who does bad things and doesn’t care who gets hurt. You’ve been trying to destroy the whole world, with storms or Chromos or shadows. That’s not great, is it?”

  “Well.” Sammael put his head on one side, and for a moment his face was light. “We all get cross when we’re tired.”

  “Tired!” Danny spat. “You did all that just because you were tired? And I’m wrong to want a world without you?”

  “Yes,” said Sammael. “Because a world without me would lose its wildness. And wildness is the life of the world! It is chaos; it is the unknown. It keeps the hearts of you mortal creatures singing out for the future. Without wildness, your world is this lifeless desert, waiting for your direction. And whatever world you build, even you, in time, will run out of ideas and become hopeless, and your world will be as brown and barren as you yourself are. Because you are only human, and wildness is a greater force than you will ever be.”

  “We can do without your kind of wildness, thanks very much,” said Danny. “It’s just spreading fear and danger. It doesn’t matter to you—you’ll never die, or have to see people you care about die. Though there was your dog, wasn’t there? Kalia would still be alive, if you’d left me alone. So you even hurt yourself with all this stuff. It didn’t work very well, did it?”

  “But that, my friend, is what life is for,” said Sammael, shrugging with a tightness that seemed to be holding the name of his dog away from his body. “To feel everything. Joy and pain. Safety and terror. Gain. And loss. You can’t select the ones you want and try to keep the others from you. You can’t panic as soon as the steering wheel slips out of your hands. If you seek to control everything, you are asking to live in fear of the moment when you lose control. And it will happen. It does happen.”

  “It won’t happen!” shouted Danny. “I have the Book of Shadows! It’ll never happen to me, never again!”

  “It isn’t always bad to lose control, you know,” said Sammael. “Why don’t you ask any of this lot?” He swept his arm toward his vast, waiting army.

  Danny glanced over the shadowed ranks. “Who are they?”

  “All my friends,” said Sammael. “They are all the creatures who gave up their sand to me, so that I could continue to scatter Chromos about the Earth. In return, I opened their eyes to the world around them, in whichever ways they wanted. And they were so pleased with what they got, that all that remains of them will fight alongside me to beat you and make sure I stay in the world.”

  “But you can’t beat me with an army!” Danny laughed. “I can just write you to lose!” He let the sword rest in its scabbard and picked up the pencil. “The pen is mightier than the sword!” he yelled, taunting. He’d heard it somewhere. It sounded good.

  And Sammael’s army vanished, he wrote.

  The shadows advanced. They shouldered their weapons, then raised them, beginning a chant that hissed around their ranks and stuttered out toward Danny.

  “Chromos! Chromos! Chromos!”

  “What’s that?” said Sammael in his clear, cutting voice. “You think they’re my army? Think again!”

  The Chromos army vanished, wrote Danny.

  The weapons waved high in the air, and the ranks stayed. Not the Chromos army, then.

  He was alone. There were thousands of them. He had no army.

  The army in front of Danny vanished, whoever it belonged to. Danny had his own army. A bigger one. A very big bigger one. His own army, he began to scribble frantica
lly.

  Why wouldn’t they vanish?

  Danny knew why the army wouldn’t vanish.

  But the air was loud with the cries of thousands of shadows, and the book was silent. It seemed to have no knowledge to give him.

  Danny’s army could kill shadows—

  They sprang up behind Danny, ranks and ranks of them—warlords with fur hats and machine guns, soldiers in tight red jackets mounted on cavalry horses, warriors stripped to the waists holding curving scythes, creaking tanks, nimble chariots pulled by shaggy ponies. Every kind of soldier was there, gathering around.

  “Charge!” Danny yelled, dropping the book and fumbling for his sword.

  No! He couldn’t fight with them. He had to write all the right things, or he would lose. He saw Ori leaping into the fray, her golden coat shining in the stark desert sunlight. That traitor. Was she going to join Sammael’s shadows?

  No, she was attacking them. Fighting for him.

  The shadows began to fall under the onslaught of Danny’s fighters. Their darkness began to thin—he could almost see the sunlight behind them now. He looked for Sammael, wanting to see his defeated face.

  Sammael was smiling.

  He shouted something across to Danny and pointed a hand at a fallen swath of shadows, and Danny watched in horror as the shadows began to glow. Yellow—no, green—no, orange—no, blue—

  All the colors of the rainbow. All the colors of Chromos. All the colors of the vast universe.

  “Dreams!” yelled Sammael, grinning broadly. “They’re not even an army! They’re just dreams!”

  Danny scribbled in the book. Danny’s army killed dreams.

  And his heart grew cold and leaden, and he dropped to his knees, trying to bear the terrible weight of it.

  What did he want?

  Danny’s army won. They fought the dreams, only just the dreams that Sammael controlled or the dreams that were anything to do with Sammael—

  Nothing changed. His heart grew heavier still. All dreams, gone.…

  Were all dreams to do with Sammael?

  All of them?

  Danny kept his own dreams, the good ones, because he was going to make a new world, even though there wasn’t any point if it would just be the same as the old one—

  He struggled to keep his pen straight, to remember what he had been trying to write.

  Danny’s new world was going to be safe so that nothing could ever go wrong, so he had to win the fight—

  There was only space for one more line on the page. He tried to explain it all, exactly and precisely, trying to peer through the darkness in his mind.

  Danny beat Sammael but saved the dreams.

  It was too vague. How, exactly?

  Danny’s army killed—

  Not dreams. But who else?

  No more room on the page. He turned it over.

  “Herbs to Cure Sore Hands.”

  He stared at the page.

  The last page of the book. Already written on.

  No space left.

  If he could rub out some of the words—

  But he didn’t have anything to rub them out with.

  The last page had gotten him, again.

  He sank to his knees, and his warriors surged over him.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE BOOK OF SAND

  Danny twisted away, trying to scramble out from underneath the battle. Every nerve in his body burned. He got to his feet, shaking, as the snarling and grunting of the warriors raged around him, and as he looked to the right and the left, he saw his army fighting on grimly, their hearts hard against Sammael’s dreams.

  Their faces showed nothing: no fear, no joy, no pity. They reached out to the dreams with their blackened weapons, cleaving them in two, severing heads from bodies, arms from hands. Sammael’s dreams were many, but Danny’s army was terrible, and the dreams might keep coming, but they couldn’t win against the Book of Shadows.

  Danny was afraid of his own warriors. Ori shone golden among them. She had thrown her head back and was baying, her barks and howls as eerie as those of a mountain wolf calling to the moon. She was not looking at Danny anymore.

  “Ori!” he called in desperation, and the dog looked across the mêlée. Her lips stretched over her teeth in a ghoulish smile, and she caught his eye briefly before ducking down behind a group of fighters, so that he couldn’t see her anymore.

  So that was it. Even Ori had deserted him at the last. All the dreams would die, and he would be left with his barren desert, and no space in the Book of Shadows to let him fill it with life. And he would have to call that victory. At least Sammael would die, in the end.

  But even that was starting to sound awful now.

  How did I end up killing dreams? thought Danny. I’m supposed to be the hero here.

  Then he saw Ori again, ducking and weaving through the crowd, heading away from him. As the ranks slashed and surged, a gap opened up, and Danny watched the dog dodging swords and spears, leaping over the corpses of fallen fighters. Where was she going? Surely not toward—

  Toward Sammael.

  Danny’s heart plunged into bleak despair. Why had he told Ori to go away? He hadn’t meant it. She was his friend, his best, most loyal friend. Sammael or no Sammael, Ori had never harmed him. She had risked her own life to save his, and he had rejected her because he hated even the whisper of Sammael’s name. Because he had been blind, bloody-minded, stubborn—

  Ori bounced around another knot of soldiers and swerved off to the left. As Danny watched, she dropped down so that her golden belly was on the desert sand, and then began to crawl. More soldiers clashed together, closing the gap, and Danny lost sight of the dog in the warring madness.

  Please let her be safe, he begged. If only there were even an inch of space in the Book of Shadows for him to write it—but the pages were covered completely in his mad, scrawling writing, and the book had nothing more to give him.

  He ducked under a swirling sword, escaping it easily. The blows didn’t seem to be aimed at him—it seemed even Sammael wanted him still alive to witness the end of his stupidity. Danny wanted them to hit him, wanted to feel that he was at least getting hurt in this terrible, grim battle, and he was about to run screaming into a wall of waving spears when he caught sight of Ori again.

  This time she was running toward him. She had something in her mouth, something small, and as she bounded through the falling soldiers, her lips were stretched back in the same grin.

  She scrambled to a halt at Danny’s feet and offered the object up to him. He took it. Yet another book—slim, black-bound.

  “What is it?”

  “Sammael’s Book of Sand. I stole it from his pocket.”

  “His what?”

  “His Book of Sand,” she repeated. “Where he writes his bargains. Every single bargain he has ever made. It is the last piece of his power. Without it, he is lost.”

  “You stole it from him? Why?”

  And Ori gazed up at Danny, her face steady. “So that you may win, if you choose.”

  Danny gazed around, watching the ruthless sword thrusts and arrow volleys of his own slaughtering side. This was it. First he had taken Sammael’s coat, then his boots, and now his notebook. This was the last piece of Sammael’s power. This was what he had wanted all along.

  He could stop the fight. His army would stop killing the dreams. Sammael would survive, but without any power to control Chromos. It was a perfect ending.

  He scribbled out the last few incoherent lines in the Book of Shadows, raised Sammael’s little book to the skies, and shouted, “Sammael! Lost anything?”

  One by one Sammael’s shadows raised their heads and lost them to the swinging swords of Danny’s army. A whole line of them fell into the sand, and his army stepped forward to attack the ranks behind.

  “Stop!” Danny commanded them. “Cease!”

  At his word the army stopped, swords raised, javelins held on their shoulders.

  Sammael slid a
round the shadow of a great oak tree, scarred from dozens of sword blows. He stood before Danny.

  “Need this?” asked Danny, keeping the book well away from Sammael’s reach.

  Sammael looked at Ori. “That wasn’t part of the bargain, my friend,” he said softly. “I sent you to help him be brave, not to defeat me.”

  So Ori had been telling the truth. Danny wanted to apologize to her, but there would be time for that later. Instead, he opened the little black book. It was covered in writing so tiny that he had to squint to read it.

  He cleared his throat from the dust of battle and read aloud.

  “I, Olaf Thorn, give freely my sand to Sammael, in exchange for the ability to walk.”

  He looked at the creature in front of him, pale and waiting. “To walk? Who was Olaf Thorn? Was he paralyzed?”

  “He was a blade of grass,” said Sammael.

  “Grass doesn’t walk,” said Danny.

  Sammael shrugged.

  Danny read the next one. “I, Secundus, give freely my sand to Sammael, in exchange for my safe passage in the conquering of the Northern World. Who was Secundus?”

  “A soldier,” said Sammael.

  “When? What was the Northern World?”

  Again, Sammael shrugged. “It’s none of your business. Those are pacts creatures made with their lives. They aren’t silly stories for you to crow at. You should return that to me.”

  “Not likely,” Danny snorted. “Without this, you’re finished. No sand, no nothing. If I tore this book up…” He held it out, a hand on each side, and made as if to rip it down the spine.

  Sammael gasped. It was a sound of pain and sorrow and the deepest regret.

  Danny grinned and stopped his hands. “That’s it,” he said. “I’ve got you. Shall I do it?”

  Sammael stood, white-faced, and then some of the old hardness came into his black eyes, and he was strong again, resilient. “All things have their time,” he said. “If mine is over, so be it.”

  Danny’s triumph faded. He wanted Sammael to beg, to plead, to apologize for everything he’d done. He wanted Sammael to tell him that he, Danny, was right, and his vision for the world was a good one.

  But Sammael would never say that, of course.