SHADOW OF THE SEER
A Winter of the World Novel
Michael Scott Rohan
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Dance at the Precipice
Chapter 2. The Citadel
Chapter 3. The Strength of the Earth
Chapter 4. Into the Night
Chapter 5. Darkness Answers
Chapter 6. Beyond the Wall
Chapter 7. Children of Powers
Chapter 8. Jewels in the Snow
Chapter 9. The Eye of the Swan
Chapter 10. The Masks of Ice
Chapter 11. Winged Fire
Chapter 12. The End of Strength
Appendix
Website
Also by Michael Scott Rohan
Acknowledgments
Dedication
About the Author
Copyright
Introduction
The Winter Chronicles record many tales of the folk who fled across the great oceans out of the West, to the land of Brasayhal and the realms of Nordeney and Bryhaine, the peaceful settlers and the savage warriors who pursued them. But of the lands they fled from, all too little is recorded, and that unreliable and inconsistent; for the spreading dominion of the Ice, enemy to all that lived and especially all that thought, had destroyed its ancient civilisations, fragmented its cultures and ruined its records. All that remains is dark shards out of long-shattered centuries, more legend than history. Yet among that darkness, some of the shards still gleam, and legends of heroic deeds and stern resistance still strike a momentary brightness, revealing how humanity could still struggle against the advancing gloom.
Wisdom was denied to ordinary folk, knowledge and craft; the wondrous art of the mastersmiths never took root, or was long buried. A more savage mystery took its place in the hearts of men, tapping similar springs, perhaps, but with less understanding, and more superstition; it was used alike by the enemies of the Ice and its servants, from whom its secrets may even have been stolen. At its best it gave suffering humanity insight and power; but it was unpredictable, always open to misuse, often destructive in the demands it made on its wielders. Nonetheless, it is often of these strange folk the legends speak, and in particular one of the best supported. A tale of heroism and strength against vast odds, true; yet also a tale of destruction and defeat, a sharp reminder that against those odds sheer strength, even the greatest, may not in the end prevail.
Yet still a light was lit, that did not easily go out …
CHAPTER 1
Dance at the Precipice
IT was the light between the mountain peaks that awoke him, rather than his father’s hand. The first long beams fell full on his face, flooding his weary eyes with a wash of blood-tinged flame he could not shut out. It was all too like the vicious dreams that rampaged across his sleep, and he sat up sharply, gasping. Often, he knew, the mind could vastly magnify some slight sound or feeling at the edge of waking; for his father was deep and wise in the lore of dreams. But these apparitions had left him far more seriously shaken than the light could explain, or the touch. His shoulder had been shaken, gently; and his father was not normally a gentle man.
The boy shook his head to clear it, sought to uncross his thighs, and groaned. His father ran a hand down the deep lines flanking his straight mouth. ‘You fell asleep, boy.’ There was no expression in his voice. The boy nodded mutely, ready for the slap that usually followed. Some time in the small hours he had nodded off where he sat, cross-legged, head sagging over the pattern marked out for him on the earthen floor. Now he was too numb and stiff to move. The slap would almost be welcome; but it did not come.
‘You finished the pattern?’ demanded his father; but it was not really a question. The boy stared. Somehow, though he could not recollect it, he must have done. All the small stones were set out in their spiralling swirls of ochre-red and yellow-brown sand, interwoven and interlinked with darker swirls of grey ash and black soot, a fierce contrasting energy of movement that led your eye inwards like a steep cliff path, too steep to take slowly; you had either to run with it, or fall away from it into confusion. He must have finished it on the fringe of sleep, his hands moving instinctively with the practice drilled into him since he had spoken his first recognisable word. He decided to say nothing of that. Safer simply to nod and grunt, as his father did.
But the iron-grey voice said, ‘You have done well, Alya,’ and the boy could not help looking up in surprise at the tone, almost warm, and the sound of his name, which his father seldom spoke. His father squatted easily on his heels beside him, and waved an approving hand over the pattern. ‘The sleep is permitted – this time. You have done well to complete the Trail at all. That in itself often brings darkness down over the mind. But if you are to succeed in passing the barrier one day, you must learn to endure, so that you may understand and direct, and explore – not simply suffer what is shown you. Tell me now what you saw.’
The boy shivered; not simply with the cold in the little hut, or need of food and warmth. Those he was used to. ‘I saw … men, who fought. And more than men. Many, many men, like ants seething in a nest. They fought at the walls of … great villages, towns greater than I have seen. You will laugh at me, but … their huts were huge and of many floors and of stone, as it seems. Like wonders that I have heard of only in tales. Great walls like whole cliffs of stone, yet … yet carven, shaped by some art. Could such things be?’
The older man rasped a thumb against his chin. ‘Towns under siege. Towns of stone. Aye, such things were; still are, maybe, in distant corners of the lands. All I have seen are their ruins; and even those are very mighty. Yet they were thrown down, and burned, long ago.’
‘Burned! Aye, there was fire! Men outside, who fought to enter, and raised ladders and great engines. And the defenders, men cased in glittering metal, running up and down the heights of those walls like goats on a cliff. They hurled all manner of things down upon the others, weapons, darts, arrows from strange sh
ort bows. And then the fire came, fire from above, raining down in great blasting streams … I saw it. Like all the evil things in the world, in one unhallowed shape. Scales … and claws … whirling around in smoke and confusion; and great beating wings. A thing that flew, a great thing but no bird, vast beyond any bird I could imagine …’
‘Yes?’ demanded the older man curtly, as the boy wavered and closed his eyes.
‘I do not know … More like a bat, as big as a cloud and blacker by far, sending down blasting spurts from its jaws … You will strike me, when I say many mouths. Yet only one creature …’
But his father only shook his shaggy head. ‘Tugarin! The Buryakud! Tugarin son of Zamai, eldest and worst of the curses of the Ice!’ He breathed out. ‘But surely that was long, long ago. You have seen far and well, my son, farther even than I dared hope. It is many an age since that horror was loosed upon the world! You will be a powerful chooser of the paths to your folk one day, a wise Seer. More so than I, maybe.’
The boy glowed with this sudden and unprecedented praise, but his father simply snapped, ‘Now, what more? What then?’
Alya closed his eyes again, felt them sting with smoke, although the peat-damped hearth gave off no more than a faint warmth. ‘There was fire, fire everywhere, all over the walls. They blackened; and the men fell from them, blazing, or cast themselves into the abyss. Fire … They were so majestic, those walls. The huts behind them, so mighty and tall and fair, like the pillars of the sky. But the fire rolled over all. Still I strove to see, more closely …’
His father’s face changed, the eyes as intent as a stooping hawk’s. ‘Yes. And then?’
The boy felt the shudder of fear return. ‘Then it was as if the walls changed before my eyes, and become a real cliff! Of rock, black, jagged and fierce, as if weather had never touched it. Yet the blazing spew of the beast still trickled down it in rivulets, so that the very stone smoked. So hot that it burned my cheeks and drove me back, every time I sought to approach it.’
The thin lips turned down grimly. ‘Indeed, my son. Learn now, then, that that which you call a cliff is not of any stone that ever was upon this world, even among the Firedream of its first forging. That cliff is a barrier set before you, before whatever you would see of your own will, rather than be shown. It is the Wall, that lies at the end of the Trail. Every shaman, every true Seer must first build it up within himself, and then contrive to pass it, whatever the obstacles it places in his path, whatever the terrors. Only then can his spirit be free to begin its journey on roads it chooses, and wield freely what power it has.’
‘Yet I seemed to see across it, beyond it, even as I woke. There was a horizon beyond it, as there is here. Blue, uncertain peaks …’
‘Most likely these above us, remembered in dreaming.’
Emboldened now, the boy shook his head. ‘Father, no! They stood across … across an expanse of water, wider than a river, a lake, anything. The hugest trees, larger than I have ever seen; and then the water. Like a great grey beast-fell spread out about the world …’
The older man only snorted, and snatched a bundle wrapped in greasy leather from the wall. ‘Water to put out the fire, no doubt! Forget it, my son. If you have come thus far, there is work still to be done, and without delay, indeed. Come with me now! Leave all this, and follow. Leave your robe. Take no food. Cold and hunger are the Seer’s friends. But bring your bow, in case!’
So they left the little hut, with its floor of trodden earth, where his mother and sister lay still asleep within the wattled inner chamber, plastered with mud and dry grass to hold in the precious heat of their bodies. Had they been awake, they would not have dared to listen to what passed on the other side of the fire, let alone watch. That was men’s work, and they knew better than to brave the father’s wrath. Women had their own mysteries with which to content themselves.
The tiny knot of huts was barely stirring, the old watchman on the wall nodding in the blessed moment between the perils of dark and day. Yet he sat up straight as the pair passed. He knew the very shadows that stretched before them, as he knew all in the little farm, the older man’s tall and lean, but shoulders bowed as if by great burdens. And little Alya, already grown so much like him, almost a man now at his fifteenth summer, with a full chieftain’s name to bear, Alyatan-kawayi’wale Atar. The watchman saluted them with hand to brow, and eyes on the ground. Nobody dared watch what paths the Seer took, or cared to wonder what was held within the dark bundle he bore – one reason he was an outliver among his folk, with only a few poor kin in his huts to gather and work the soil for him. When they took the stony path to the valley’s ridge, father and son, and beyond that to the mountain-ways, none dared mark their going. Seer and Seer to be, they walked alone on paths lesser men could never follow, and it was known that the hard earth beneath their feet was not always where their spirits trod.
There were cairns beside the path, some mere heaps of stone, some half concealing a worn stone stump with some trace of natural shape. From some cairns the boy watched his father take a stone, and add one to others, often with a brief clasping of the hands and a swift, nasal chant. They climbed and climbed the narrow trails, for long hours, until the boy felt exhaustion weighing down his limbs, his belly griping on nothing and his chest sucking painfully at the thinning air. His father gave him dried leaves to chew, which tasted foul but eased both the hunger and the pain, leaving only a light, faint giddiness he dared not give way to.
For the last stage they truly climbed, rather than walked, scrambling across cold, frost-shattered rocks to a crevice, a chimney and above that, even as the boy’s strength failed, a ledge. He pulled himself on to the harsh rock, softened by odd patches of mossy soil, and lay gasping, sickened yet unable to vomit. Gradually the feeling subsided, and he saw his father outlined against the sky, sitting cross-legged, hands outstretched as if in supplication to the brilliant glaring blue sky. ‘Come!’ was all he said, and the boy scurried to sit beside him. Yet even as he reached the edge he stopped, and gaped, and sank to his knees, still staring.
The elder shaman nodded. ‘You see what it is most fit for a Seer and a chieftain’s son to see. Behold the world, spread out as upon wings beneath you!’
The boy drew breath, deeply, shakily. They had ascended for hours, but the sun still stood below its zenith, not far above the peaks at their back, and its rays reached out like shafts of yearning across the expanse beneath. The lower slopes it left in shadow, touching only the very tops of the foothills with glowing colour, as if the brown scrub burned suddenly from within. But the vale beyond, where grass still fought to grow above the bed of unmelting ice and scattered stone in the thin soil, it lit with kindly warmth, whitening the smokes that twisted up from the little scar of tended land that was theirs.
And beyond that, the open expanse that the boy had always seen as featureless infinity extending to the world’s edge, it revealed first as a rolling mass of low brown hills and shallow, greener vales, cut by meandering streams with strange little woodlands crouched along their banks, and brown bogs and livid green reedbeds above which flights of birds seemed to float like dreams, among feathery wisps of cloud. Along the water’s edge some small herds of great beasts strayed.
‘So wide and free,’ said the boy, wondering. ‘And so passing fair … Can we not go out there some day, and see it at close hand?’
‘You may live to see more than you wish,’ said the Seer, and his son was to remember those words. ‘Look now to the northward, whence come those dark rivers that stem not from our mountains. Does that seem so fair?’
It was not so far in that direction, along the black wide streams, that the brown hills seemed to become browner and the green grew less, the trees and bushes lower and scrubbier. The earth showed through them in wide bare patches, and through it in turn the grey bones of rock and stone, rolled boulder and solid, rising ridge. Colour and life drained from the land, till it became a rounded, riven country of stones. And increasing
ly, as one looked, it grew tinged with white, light and uneven at first but swiftly thicker and solider, till it enveloped height and distance and identity in a hazy featureless mantle that seemed to bleach the very air above. Sky and cloud mingled as one with the earth beneath, a chilly veil behind which lurked some suggestion of massive solidity, massive as the mountains beneath them, and cool, remote menace.
‘Yonder lies the realm of the foes of men,’ said the Seer, neutrally. His eyes were steady. ‘The ancient powers of the Eternal Cold, and their domain, undying citadel and weapon in one, the moving Walls of Winter, the glaciers of the Ice. There, in their stony hinterlands, the warrior tribes they have corrupted, our kin no longer kin to us, dwell – the Aikiya’wahsa, the Ekwesh. And thence they ride forth to rape and raid, and take for their own what little men have wrested from the earth to feed themselves and theirs. Well, would you see more?’
‘Not of that!’ shivered the boy. ‘Can we not look elsewhere?’
‘It is wise to,’ agreed the Seer, and pointed once again. ‘Yonder, my son, to the south and the west. There in warmer lands the ancient green of the growing land lingers still among the stones, even to forest and woodland of a kind. There dwell our kin, still, some in settlements such as ours but greater; and perhaps some even in those towns you remember from your infancy – such as have been spared. But for the most part they dwell in isolation and in fear. Their only hope is that the storm will pass them by, and perhaps also their children. Beyond that they do not think, save in idle fancies and foolish visions.’
‘Yet you say yourself that even the faintest dream-picture may have deep meaning—’
The slap came, this time, a hard one. The boy bore it as he had learned to, but his eyes burned. His father’s voice was unyielding. ‘I speak of what is shown us from within, not stupid fictions men confect, to console themselves for what is not. Hear for yourself! These empty heads say that if you only voyage far enough eastward, you will come to some enormous lake, wider than sight or sound, with a greener land, more forested, such as this land once was, along its shores. Well, that is as may be; but they also say it is thick with salt! Think of the hot springs you have seen, mineral-encrusted, stinking. Could anything green grow along such a shore? And there is more. They claim that on its further shore there is a better land yet, where men with white faces dwell!’ The elder hawked and spat, copiously, out into the glassy air.
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