A Dance of Chaos: Book 6 of Shadowdance

by David Dalglish

  The sun was almost gone when he heard the soft footsteps behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Delysia climbing the hill to join him. A twinge of nervousness hit his chest, and he did his best not to dwell on why.

  “Is it all right if I join you?” she asked, stopping just short. He patted the grass to his left, and she crossed her legs and gently eased into a sit beside him. He’d always been comfortable in her presence, yet now there was a wedge between them, and no matter how hard he told himself to forget it, the wedge remained.

  “It’s been a while since I actually watched the sun set,” Haern said. “Usually I’m running the other way, or it’s hidden behind Veldaren’s walls.”

  “It’s been a while since you did a lot of things,” Delysia said, reaching out to put a hand on his. “I’d say relaxing is one of them. Perhaps you should try it as well.”

  He laughed and shook his head. Inaction bothered him. Even taking the hours he’d needed to sleep had left him feeling guilty, let alone waiting for sunset, but Thren had sent a boy runner with a note while he’d slept, informing him where to meet come nightfall, and so he waited. There should be more he could do, he knew. He’d promised to protect the city, yet out there lurked a madman with the power to bring it all crumbling down into fire and ruin. To let things reach such a horrific precipice, to fail so terribly the people he’d sworn to protect …

  “You’ve always been one for solitude and silence, but I know something’s wrong,” Delysia said. She looked his way, then patted his hand. “You’ve hardly said a word to any of us since Muzien’s attack. If something’s bothering you, then talk to me.”

  “It’s going to get worse,” he said, staring at the horizon. “Even if we somehow escape all this with Veldaren intact, hundreds will still die. How many of those deaths are on my hands?”

  Delysia thought for a moment, and he appreciated that she did not give him an immediate, instinctual denial.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what brought Muzien here. I don’t know what you’ll need to do to secure peace. But Haern, don’t you dare put the blood of the innocent on your hands when others are holding the knives. It’s terrible enough when vile men do vile deeds, don’t let them cast the blame onto others. It doesn’t wash their own hands clean, nor stain yours.”

  She spoke what he needed to hear, and he tried his best to believe it.

  “I may not bear direct responsibility,” he said, “but all those people at the square … they died because Muzien wished me captured. Without me, they live. How do I not feel blame?”

  “You took me from the aftermath before I could heal the dying,” Delysia argued. “Would you have me shoulder the blame for their deaths?”

  “No, that’s ridiculous.”

  “Then why are you any more responsible?”

  He had nothing to offer, so he let the words linger in the air, and he turned his attention back to the dwindling sunset. Delysia leaned closer against him, and though she appeared relaxed, he could sense her tension, her apprehension.

  “Why didn’t you let me stay?” she asked, finally voicing what had bothered her. “Those people, all those wounded … you should have let me heal them.”

  “Just like I should have let you heal Ghost?”

  A cheap shot, and he felt guilty for saying it, but the frustration had weighed on him ever since that moment, and he could not bear letting it linger in silence on his shoulders. He thought she might snap at him. Instead she looked exhausted, all the anger of that moment drained out over the past few days.

  “Why does it bother you so?” she asked. “What makes you so angry that I’d rather have had him live than you taking your vengeance? Would you consider retribution more important than anything else you believe? Because I don’t think you believe that yourself.”

  Haern rubbed at his eyes, maddened by the questions, mostly by his inability to answer them in any way that didn’t leave him sounding like a child.

  “It’s because it’s impossible,” he said. “What you hope for this world to be, it just … can’t. Giving mercy to murderers? Finding redemption in those who once raped and stole? It’s a dream. A beautiful dream, but still a dream. The world isn’t like that. There’s no saving these people, no redeeming them from their cruel lives. I tried speaking of such things with my father, did you know that? He spit it back in my face. This world is filled with miserable people, some inflicting misery, and even more dwelling in its sick embrace. I don’t see how I can be what you’d have me be, yet still survive.”

  “Why is it we who must break?” Delysia asked. “The evil of this world revel in their sin, then proudly demand all others accept it. They will never surrender, and so we must. They will never change, and so we must. ‘See the world for what it really is,’ they say. Hope is branded naïveté. Forgiveness is deemed a weakness. The only change they would foster is the crumbling of all things better men and women have built. Is that a world you wish to live in, Haern? Is that the world you fight for, a world where right and wrong are decided by bloodstained coins and the strength of the fist that holds them?”

  “So you’d throw yourself against a wall of stone?” Haern asked. “Beat your head against it until it kills you? What is the point? Why suffer and die for something that will fail?”

  “Because the smallest grain of sand can wear away a stone wall if given the time. Because every moment, I pray someone else will see, and demand this world embrace something better. Because with every drop I bleed, it might convince another that there is still hope. Would you refuse to give bread to a starving child, all because you cannot feed the thousand others that also starve?”

  “I’m not talking about giving bread to a child,” Haern said, shaking his head. “I’m talking of taking down Muzien the Darkhand, an elf who, outnumbered three to one by the finest fighters in Veldaren, still escaped unscathed.”

  Delysia wrapped him in an embrace with her right arm.

  “Stop being paralyzed by the sheer size of the task at hand,” she said. “Be motivated by it. I know you, Haern. Deep down, I know what you are capable of, and the great things you’d aspire to if given the chance. Would you give that all up due to the faults and failures of other men? If you do, then you’ve already let them win.”

  “The great things I’d aspire to,” Haern said, chuckling. It felt like such a dark joke. “All I am, all I’m good at, is killing people. By killing the right people, I’ve managed to forge a peace. You beg me to spare lives, to look for forgiveness, to offer mercy … I see no way such things can make any difference in the pit that Veldaren’s streets have become. There’s only one way to succeed, and that’s by being who I am. I’m the greatest killer Veldaren has ever known. I need no other aspirations.”

  He’d thought such admissions would hurt her, or frighten her, but they did not. Instead she leaned closer, her free hand pressing against the side of his face, and her eyes met his without any flinching or doubt.

  “Do you know what I pray for every night?” she asked him. “Just before you leave, I pray that it will be the last night you’re ever needed. I pray that you’ll come home safe. Most of all, I pray that when you do come home, you’re still the same man you were when you left. You’re not the greatest killer Veldaren’s ever known. You’re its greatest protector. You’ve given so much, yet this world would take more, and more, dragging you down until you break. That’s what I fear more than anything, Haern. And when I listen to how you talk, when I see you alongside your father, when I remember the tip of your sword at my neck when I went to heal Ghost’s wounds…”

  Tears had started to swell in her eyes, and she sniffled.

  “Then I just pray harder,” she said, looking away. “Pleading that Ashhur never takes from me the man I love.”

  Haern kissed her cheek, and when he rose to his feet, it felt as if boulders were strapped to his back, and he carried them with dead limbs.

  “I’ll be fine,” he told her. “I pr
omise.”

  “You shouldn’t make such promises,” she said. “Not unless you know you can keep them. I’m scared, Haern. I’m scared I’ll lose you forever. Tell me you’ll be all right. Tell me you’ll return as who you’ve always been.”

  He swallowed down what felt like a hundred sharpened rocks in his throat. To save the city, he’d do whatever it took. Whatever must be done. Monsters in the night, he thought grimly.

  “I would,” he said, “but you’d sense the lie immediately, wouldn’t you?”

  She blinked, and twin tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Go,” she said. “The night needs you.”

  She needed him too, but Thren was waiting. Haern had a feeling Delysia knew that as well, and it added to the mountain of guilt that continued to grow on his shoulders. What started as a walk down the hill became a jog, then a sprint, as Haern outraced the demon in his thoughts, rushing back to the world he understood, the black-and-white shadows, the evil with their cloaks and coats, and his father who would lord over them all.

  This time there was no confusion or fear when Nathaniel’s dream deepened and his awareness of his surroundings strengthened. He let it carry him, guiding his consciousness through the sharpening dreamscape of his mind … or wherever his visions took place. At first there was darkness, just the shadowed silence of Veldaren floating beneath him as if he were a great bird, and then came a crack of light across the west. The sun was rising, and Nathaniel felt himself flying to the north.

  Dawn comes, spoke a now-familiar voice, the firm, authoritative tone of Karak. And with it rises an army of my savior.

  Something about the dream was different, strange, and then Nathaniel realized why. Time. It didn’t race about him in a rapid, erratic manner. The sun did not rise like a leaf on the wind, nor fall like a stone. As Nathaniel soared over the green landscape beneath, broken by fields of grain and herds of pigs and sheep, he saw that they moved as on any other day. There was a sense of truth to everything, of firm reality that had been lacking in his other dreams.

  “All this,” he said. “Is this happening now?”

  It is. Your mind moves where the body cannot, for there is something I would have you see.

  Beneath him the land grew steadily steeper, gentle hills turning sharp and tall. What little he saw blurred as his pace increased, his vision tearing through the sky with such speed it left him breathless … at least, it would have, had he felt the need to breathe. The sharp wall of hills smoothed away, and his path curled more to the west. Clouds zipped beneath him, puffy and white. Nathaniel wanted to reach out to them, to discover if they felt soft like cotton, as they appeared, but he had no hands to move, no physical body at all, just his sight.

  Then, as rapidly as it had begun, his speed lessened, and he dipped lower and lower, weaving through another stretch of hills, these more yellow than green, the short grass broken by scattered juts of rock through the tough soil. Nathaniel felt apprehension growing in him, an intense repulsion toward whatever he approached. He knew where he was going, had been there before in his dreams. Before he could dwell on it further, the hills ended, and the ravine began. It was enormous, hundreds of feet deep. His movement halted when he was just on the edge, and he felt the formation of a phantom body to accompany his mind. The heat of the sun, the blowing of the wind, he felt on skin he could not see. Doing his best to keep invisible feet planted, he peered down into the grand chasm, which stretched out for miles to the north and south. Far, far below he caught a glimpse of a river: a puny, lazy thing that seemed a total mockery of the depth and breadth of the chasm it had carved.

  Nathaniel looked across the chasm to the west, and just as in his dreams, he saw an army gathered. Unlike in his dreams, it was not bathed in shadow, nor did the soldiers’ eyes glow red like monsters’. From such a distance they looked human, albeit taller and stronger, their skins a sickly gray. Even from afar he could tell they were armed to the teeth, and that they numbered in the thousands, the army stretching out from the edge of the chasm like a great tail. And standing in the very center was the man with the ever-changing face. His eyes did not burn, but his irises shone as if they were glass, and within them raged a wildfire. They were tiny dots so far away, but Nathaniel could somehow see the man clearly, watch how the features of his face shifted and twisted, so slowly, so fluidly, that Nathaniel could never be certain what had changed.

  My prophet, Karak whispered, and his voice was filled with love.

  “Even in death, the faithless may be made to serve,” cried the prophet, his voice echoing throughout the ravine. It all was so terrifyingly familiar, except no longer did the fog of dreams cloud over it all. No, he saw it with crystalline clarity as shapes began to crawl up both sides of the chasm. Hundreds, if not thousands, squirming like ants, climbing like spiders. Second after agonizing second Nathaniel watched, their forms growing closer and clearer. They had once been humanoid, and they were dead. What little meat remained upon them was rotted and black, easily scraped off by the cliff wall. Bone and cloth dug into the sides of the rock, scraping until they found purchase. Magnified a hundredfold, the scraping sound was a saw across Nathaniel’s spine, yet there was nothing he could do. His phantom body would not move no matter what he attempted.

  Higher and higher, no resting, no delaying. Sometimes one would lose its firm hold and fall, yet the others showed no reaction. They had no eyes for him to see fear within, no muscles to tire. Higher and higher, always higher and higher, until they came crawling over the sides. Nathaniel tried to flee, and thankfully he was lifted above them so the rotted bodies would not pass through his ethereal form.

  “Are they his army?” Nathaniel asked as the dead continued to reach the top of both sides. It felt strange to ask questions knowing that a god would answer, but there was no denying Karak’s overwhelming presence.

  Not his army, Karak’s voice echoed in his head. His tool.

  Nathaniel watched as a rope soared from the prophet’s side to the other, its length crossing the chasm. As it landed, he saw that the rope had been tied to a long piece of bone, which shimmered with dark magic, burying itself into the rough rock. Once it was firmly in place, the dead began to move anew. They crawled across the rope, swarming toward the center with slow, steady movements from both sides of the ravine. The only sound they made was from the popping and rattling of their bones and joints. Once they met in the middle, they grabbed onto one another, arms interlocking, mouths closing over legs. From both sides they climbed, fitting themselves into place, propping up some, linking together others, bone twisting into bone.

  For ten minutes Nathaniel watched, each one a shivering torment of rattling and breaking. When it ended, a bridge of the dead spanned the chasm, and with a triumphant bellow the army began its march across, three abreast. If the soldiers were afraid of the drop, they showed no sign of it, so great was their blood lust. The prophet remained behind, watching the others pass, and Nathaniel was grateful. He feared to be in that man’s presence, even in spiritual form.

  As the army crossed, Nathaniel felt his vision beginning to break. Colors dimmed, as if a thin cloud floated in the way of the sun, and the sound of the army dulled. Nathaniel looked about as it seemed his world crumbled, and in the distance he saw the strangest sight: a winged horse, flying in circles high above the ravine, with a rider clad in green and brown. Nathaniel stared, and he’d have furrowed his brow if he could. The vision collapsed further, turning to gray and black. All sounds ceased, all physical sensations ended, as if a blindfold were over his eyes and mud pushed into his ears.

  And then he opened his eyes, and saw he lay on his back in his bed, his room pitch-black but for the faintest moonlight seeping in below the curtain. His lungs burned, and he felt a desperate need to breathe, but he dared not make a noise. The presence remained, powerful, humbling.

  The time approaches, Karak whispered into his ear. An end to chaos and the beginning of a new age of order. Play your part, Nathaniel. Keep t
he gems of the chrysarium close. When my might roars free, the sinful of this city will learn to fear the name they have mocked and despised since before I was ever imprisoned.

  Like moisture evaporating beneath a hot sun, so did Karak’s presence dissipate, seemingly thinning instead of leaving at once. Upon its absence, Nathaniel finally gasped in air, and he felt his heart pound in his chest as if he’d run a hundred miles. Filled with a sudden need, he reached underneath his pillow and grabbed the nine gems of the chrysarium he’d hidden there. They were like ice to his touch. When he pulled them out and held them, each shimmered with color. Relief flooded through his body as their glow settled across his skin.

  “Keep me safe,” Nathaniel prayed as tears ran down the sides of his face. “I’ll do it, just keep me safe, and Mother, and everyone else … keep us safe, and help me sleep.”

  Eyes closed, he let the gems give him comfort, and when he dreamed, he was amid the marching legion, eyes to the rainbow sky, free from worldly struggles. A wonderful dream. A dream he never wanted to end.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Zusa awoke to find herself chained to a wall and bathed in light. Seven torches burned in a semicircle, each one equidistant from her. Her wrists were bound behind her with metal shackles, the short chain attached to them hooked to something on the wall she could not see. Blinking at the brightness, Zusa fought through a momentary spell of dizziness. She had to regain her surroundings. She had to recover before …

  “Welcome back to the waking world, Katherine.”

  Muzien’s voice rolled over her like a wave, killing what little hope she’d had of escape. He knew of her ability to manipulate shadows, had seen her use it to execute the former members of the Spider Guild. There was too much light, the manacles on her wrists were too tight and too low, forcing her to a crouch. The master of the Sun Guild stood beneath one of the torches, which was suspended from the wall of the small room by a metal hook. His arms were crossed over his chest, and though his pose was relaxed as he leaned against the wall, there was nothing calm or controlled about the awful hatred in his eyes.