The Shadow Sorceress

by Victor Gischler

  I spat a curse and rode after her.

  “Shadow sorceress or not,” I shouted at her back. “She owes me a bloody lute.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The road leading away from Tul Agnon took us east through rolling hills and into a sparse forest, most of the undergrowth having been swept clean by winter. We paused several times to look back but saw no sign of pursuit.

  “Possibly what we saw was only a unit of the city guard,” I suggested. “Out to patrol the walls.”

  “Maybe,” she said without conviction.

  We travelled on and soon spied the lights of the village flickering through the trees. Brookside the place was called according to Lill.

  “Go on ahead,” she said. “Find us a place to sleep.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll just be a minute.” And without explanation, she turned the white stallion and trotted back down the road where we’d just been.

  I watched her go and considered following, but I was frozen to my core. The thought of getting out of the wind was too enticing to resist. I guided my horse toward the lights, and a minute later, I crossed the narrow, wooden bridge that spanned the shallow brook bordering the village.

  Brookside wasn’t a bad little village. In my travels, I’d seen many places far worse. Sad collections of squat huts gathered along muddy roads, hollow-eyed peasants scratching out a living from the soil. Brookside appeared to be a tidier, more prosperous place, small houses with wood-shingled roofs set back from the stream to avoid the snowmelt floods come spring. I guessed this was one of the villages that earned its keep catching and smoking a speckled variety of trout which they delivered weekly to the better places in Tul Agnon. I’d sampled the trout several times myself and had never been disappointed.

  Something to keep in mind for breakfast.

  But first, a warm place to sleep.

  I passed by the first two houses, their windows dark, and stopped at the third, spotting the firelight between the cracks in the shudders. A large barn stood off to the side, a good candidate for a night’s shelter.

  I dismounted, leading the horse by the reins with one hand, pulling the blanket tighter around me with the other. I knocked.

  Muffled voices from within. The sound of a stool being pushed back, scrapping against a rough wooden floor. A second later, the door opened a crack, and a bright blue eye stared out at me.

  “Who’s there? Bit late for calling.” He looked me up and down, and I imagined the tattered horse blanket might give me the appearance of a beggar. But a second glance would reveal good boots and a well-saddled horse in tow.

  I summoned my most affable smile, working hard to keep my teeth from chattering. “My apologies for the hour, good sir. I’m Lord Templeton Kane.” He wouldn’t know me which was a pity as it happened to be true. Not that my noble blood had gotten me far in recent years. I hoped tonight it would help get me a place to sleep.

  “Circumstances have brought my companion and I to your doorstep, and we’re hoping to shelter in your barn for the night.”

  He opened the door wider, looking past me. “Companion?” He was deep into middle age, black hair streaked with gray, face lined.

  “She’ll be along soon.” I showed him the first of two coins I had at the ready, silver glinting in the moonlight. “I would, of course, compensate you for your inconvenience.”

  A couple of coppers would have sufficed, but I was in no mood to haggle, and I wanted to make the decision easy for him.

  He took the money and nodded toward the barn. “Wood pile’s ‘round to the side if you want to build a fire in the forge. Not too big though, if you please.”

  He began to close the door, but I quickly said, “Just one more item of business if I could have another moment.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Eh?”

  “There might be some people looking for us that I’d rather avoid,” I explained. “It’s all a misunderstanding, of course, but my companion and I don’t want any trouble. We’d prefer nobody know we’re here.” I showed him the second coin.

  Gold this time.

  His eyes went wide.

  Even the wealthy in large cities didn’t use gold for everyday expenditures. For a rural villager, it was a staggering amount of money. It was enough to raise suspicions and simultaneously to allay them.

  He licked his lips, reaching for the coin, then stopped himself.

  “You don’t want any trouble like most right-thinking folk,” he said. “Neither do we, milord.”

  “We want a warm night’s sleep then on our way in the morning,” I assured him. “Nothing else.”

  He nodded, took the coin, then shut the door quickly before I could change my mind.

  I led the horse into the barn and tied it the first convenient post. Unsaddling it could wait. I needed to build a fire before I froze to death. The forge was small, an anvil next to it. Not large as smithies went, but it wasn’t a large village, or maybe this was the man’s personal setup. I fetched wood from the side of the barn and took it back inside, working in the dark, cursing, teeth chattering. My hands shook as I struck a spark with flint and steel, and five minutes later, I had a respectable fire going, probably larger than the owner preferred, but considering the gold I’d paid him, I felt not a shred of guilt. He could buy more firewood if he ran low. He could buy a forest.

  I spun a slow circle in front of the fire, trying to warm every part of my body at once.

  Slowly, relief flooded me, and with freezing to death no longer an issue, my thoughts wandered elsewhere. I should have concerned myself with the dangerous men who might be following me thanks to Lill, or actually worried about Lill herself who claimed she would just be a minute, but I found myself again dwelling on my lute, bitterly lamenting the instrument’s loss. As soon as we reached a town of any size, I would have to search out a new one.

  I heard the barn door creak open, and my hand went to the rapier that wasn’t there. Another problem I would need to remedy soon.

  But it was only Lill. She led her horse inside, tied it next to mine, then went directly to the fire.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Watching,” she said. “I don’t think we were followed.”

  She grabbed a milking stool and put it directly in front of the fire. She sat, pulled off her boots and heavy woolen socks and stretched her white feet toward the warmth, toes and soles pink on the bottom. She sighed, relief and contentment.

  “I thought you didn’t get cold,” I said.

  “This is nothing like deep winter high in the Wastes,” she said. “But yes, I’m cold.”

  “I thought you could keep the cold at bay,” I said. “Tap into your energy or whatever.” The powers of an ink mage were still largely a mystery to me, but I’d seen Lill do amazing things.

  “The spirit,” Lill said. “But I can’t stay tapped into it forever. I’ll wear down. It will run out.” She wiggled her toes at the fire again. “My feet are always cold. No matter how I wrap them up. Even in the summer some nights. Always the feet.” She sighed.

  The fact she had cold feet was a very minor personal revelation, and yet it caught me by surprise. I supposed because she always seemed invulnerable, a rock on which all the perils of the world would shatter into a million pieces. I had to admit, these rare glimpses of the human behind the ink mage delighted me and served to make Lill all the more fascinating.

  Maybe that was part of what motivated me to tag along on an adventure that was really none of my business. We’d been thrown together and sent on a wild errand for a reclusive wizard. By all rights, we should have parted when our quest was concluded, but I wanted to know more about her, bear witness to whatever happened next. Lill seemed like the sort of person who walked through the world, changing it as she went, events altering in her wake. My experience was different. I stumbled through life ducking and dodging everything it threw at me.

  A dangerous affection welled up inside me, all the more disturbing be
cause it wasn’t completely a surprise. I decided to chase other questions.

  “Why didn’t you fight them?”

  Her eyes shifted to me. “What?”

  “The men in the courtyard. There were only five of them.” I’d seen what she could do with a sword and a battle axe.

  She smiled at me – again, sudden and unexpected – and I felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire I’d built in the forge.

  “Soft, pretty man like you might have gotten bruised if I hadn’t gotten you out of there,” she told me.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Anyway, five might have been fifty in another minute,” Lill said. “A swift departure suited me better.”

  My eyes went back to her feet. I noticed the tattoos of the lightning bolts below each ankle. “You found a wizard to put them on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How fast are you now?”

  “Very.”

  “What did he want in return?” Wizards were not known for their generosity, or, at least, that had been my personal experience.

  “I gave him the materials for the tattoo,” she said. “Once I had the lightning bolts, I didn’t need them anymore.”

  “Rare items,” I said. “Expensive.”

  “He threw some valuable information into the bargain,” Lill said. “The location of another tattoo. One owned by the Shadow Sorceress.”

  “Who is this Shadow Sorceress that she has so many men-at-arms at her disposal?”

  “The Baroness Ilga Gorwick,” Lill said.

  I winced for two reasons. First, it was an ugly name, and it was alarming how often ugly people were attached to ugly names. I summoned a mental picture of the Shadow Sorceress which did nothing to lesson my anxiety.

  Second, if my knowledge of local geography was correct – and it was – then the village of Brookside lay within the Gorwick barony.

  “May I ask why we are riding toward the people who are after us?”

  “I’ve told you. I misdirected them,” Lill insisted. “Coming this way is the last thing they’ll expect. Anyway, going through Gorwick’s territory is the most direct route to Klaar.”

  “Klaar? Why are we going to – no. Never mind. One question at a time. Let me guess. You wanted this new tattoo from the Shadow Sorceress, but she refused or you couldn’t come to terms or something, so you decided just to take it.”

  “That’s the short version, yes.”

  I rubbed my eyes and sighed dramatically. “I’m finding it rather hard to take your side in this. I presume stealing is frowned upon even in that frozen savage land you call home.”

  “There are gray areas,” Lill said. “A man who steals bread from a starving widow is sent to the ice for three years. A starving widow who steals from a rich man must take care of his children for a year, or his animals if he has no children.”

  “I take it that’s your way of saying the Shadow Sorceress didn’t need the tattoo, but you did, so you had the right to steal from her.”

  “She already has the tattoo. It is the source of her shadow powers,” Lill explained. “She no longer needs the items I stole for making the tattoo again, a list of runes and a bottle of special ink. I do have a need. But I think her magic is something different than mine. There are similarities, but it could be the two magics are not compatible. I don’t know. I will need to find someone who can tell me. But if I can use the magic then I will.”

  Lill had left the Glacial Wastes under dubious circumstances, and she hoped to return with the ability to set things right. Thus had she been on the hunt for additional tattoos to make her even more powerful. Her singlemindedness blinded her to her wrongdoings, or possibly she simply didn’t care. She frequently referred to warmlanders as soft, our ways strange. It wouldn’t surprise me if she simply didn’t think us worthy of consideration. Why should the weak and the timid hinder the strong and the brave?

  I was about to advise her on the dangers of robbing the rich and powerful regardless of how soft she imagined them when raised voices drew our attention. Lill hurriedly pulled her boots on, and I went to the barn door, putting my eye to a crack. Snow fell heavier, covering the ground. Men and horses.

  “Dark cloaks,” I said.

  “Shit.”

  Shit, indeed. I didn’t recognize any of the faces, but the men questioning the man who owned the barn wore the same dark armor and clothing as those who’d attacked us in the courtyard back in Tul Agnon.

  “How many?”

  “I count at least a dozen, but I don’t have a very good view,” I told her. “They’re questioning the man who owns the place.”

  I couldn’t hear everything, but the words “hours ago” and “away up the road” gave me hope that my gold had purchased a story about Lill and I riding into the village and then continuing on. Lill’s subterfuge had clearly failed. The Shadow Sorceress’s dark cloaks had tracked us somehow. Our only chance now was that the soldier believed the lie my gold had purchased, and that the dark cloaks rode on.

  That’s not what happened.

  The soldiers shoved the man to the ground, kicked him. A woman erupted from the house, tried to put herself between the men and her husband. Bad move. One of the men grabbed her by the hair and jerked her out of the way. She screamed. Another kick. The man on the ground rose to one knee and pointed directly at the barn.

  “We’re fucked,” I said.

  Lill reached into the forge, grabbed a fiery brand by the unlit end, twisted and flung it into a pile of hay in the corner. It caught, flames climbing the wall of the barn.

  My eyes shot wide. “Are you out of your mind?”

  The fire crawled across the barn door.

  “That should make them pause,” Lill said. “Come on.”

  She grabbed the reins of her stallion and led it out the barn’s backdoor. I followed with the gelding. We mounted, and I paused, looking back. I would not have thought a barn could go up that quickly unless is was soaked in lamp oil, but flames swirled the structure, completely engulfing it, snowflakes lit up orange-red like fat sparks riding the wind. The heat washed over me, nearly unbearable even at this distance.

  Lill was right. That would give them pause. But not for long.

  “The snow will make it too easy to track us,” Lill said. “Into the stream.”

  The horses slid down the steep bank into the water which was deeper than it looked, coming up to the horses’ chests. We turned the animals upstream and rode until the burning barn was only a bright glow over the trees behind us. I thought we’d leave the stream and head east, but Lill kept going. I supposed she wanted to throw off the trackers as much as possible.

  We travelled another mile and then another, and I was about to object, thinking the cold water had to be hard on the horses, but Lill steared the stallion up the bank to dry ground, and I followed.

  “I don’t see how they could track us now,” Lill said. “If we keep riding, we should be well clear of them.”

  “Thank Dumo for that,” I said, teeth chattering so violently, I feared I might bite through my tongue. “Find our frozen corpses would be a terrible shock for them.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  We were deep in a pitch-black forest, the moonlight filtering through the trees not nearly enough to see the way.

  “We’re going to break our necks,” I protested.

  “I can see.” Lill’s voice had that eerie calm to it, and I knew she was tapped into the spirit. “Just let your horse follow mine and hold on.”

  I sat there and let the gelding do the work. I had a general sense of heading east. The crack of twigs and dry leaves. And the cold, always the cold, seeping so deep into my bones that a vague ache soon became a gripping pain. The small fire I’d built in the forge seemed decades ago and thousands of miles away.

  I blinked and realized a gray light had crept in while I dozed in the saddle. We emerged from the edge of the woods just before dawn. Rocky hills rose ahead of us.

  “They won’t
find us now,” Lill said. “But just in case we’ll head over the rocks and into the hills. Let them try to track us there.”

  “Can we build a fire?” I almost didn’t have the breath to ask it. I was too exhausted to even shiver.

  “No.” She spurred her horse. “Come on.”

  She headed for the hills, my gelding galloping to keep up.

  Once high in the hills, Lill tied the reins of her stallion to the limb of a scrawny, leafless tree. I followed suit. We were in a small space with boulders on three sides, and I breathed a minor sigh of relief to at least be out of the wind.

  Lill dismounted, scrambled to the top of the largest boulder, looking back the way we’d come.

  I asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Watching the treeline.”

  “I thought you said they couldn’t follow.”

  She shook her head. “They can’t.”

  I sat hunched in the saddle, thinking of nothing except how utterly, miserably cold I was. I was out of the wind, but dawn had come, and Lill sat directly in the new orange sunlight of morning. It seemed warmer than squatting in the shadows, so I dismounted and climbed the boulder to join her.

  Sitting in direct sunlight warmed me considerably although I was now exposed to the wind. I wasn’t sure if I’d come out ahead or not.

  “I feel bad for the poor man,” I said.

  Lill kept her eyes on the treeline. “What?”

  “The man back in the village. He’d had a barn before he met us.”

  Lill grunted. “You paid him, didn’t you?”

  More than enough, I supposed. I wasn’t aware of the current barn to gold exchange rate, but he could probably build a new barn bigger and better a dozen times over with the money I paid him. Still, getting dragged from your home and beaten while you watched your property go up in smoke isn’t something I’d wished on the fellow.

  “We’re going to need a plan soon,” I insisted. “I can barely move, I’m so cold.” I tried to make a fist, but my frozen fingers ached. “We need shelter or fire or something to get warm.”

  “Fuck me,” she said roughly.