Shiloh

by Helena Sorensen

  For the horses, there was no escape. For Brand, the noble white stallion who had carried both Orin and Amos to safety, and Willa, the tender gray mare who had warned Simeon of the coming of the wolves, and Echo, who had guarded Isolde against attack and carried her over the far reaches of Shiloh, there was only death. It was bloody and brutal, and Isolde wept as black horns punctured the horses’ sleek coats and sharp, pointed teeth tore into their flesh.

  As the Daegan withdrew, the company was struck by the desperate nature of their situation. Except for the weapons they carried and the glass tucked safely into Isolde’s belt, they had nothing. Their food and water was spilled and spoiled in the carnage of the horses. Without their mounts, they could perish from thirst before reaching the end of their quest. And what then?

  “What draws you into the heart of the Shadow, travelers?” A single groove of bark opened in the trunk of the white tree.

  “We go ta the Hall o’ Shadows,” Simeon replied. “And we need help.”

  “The Hall of Shadows?” the voice asked. “You go into grave peril, then. No man returns from the Hall of Shadows.”

  The branches of the tree shifted in a peculiar way, and the travelers grew uneasy.

  “Please,” Amos said. “We’ll risk any danger ta find it. Will ya help us?”

  “How many hang in the Hall of Shadows because of you, Amos, Wielder of Fire? Surely one more does not matter. Surely you would not challenge the Lord of Shadows for the sake of one miserable woman.” As the tree spoke, two circles of bark pulled away to reveal glittering green-gold eyes. White branches snaked around the travelers’ legs.

  “Mordecai!” Amos growled.

  “What has become of you, you who were once the fiery arm of the Shadow?” Mordecai’s grip tightened with every word. “What do you think awaits you at the end of this road?”

  The pain in Amos’s legs intensified, the dull pain of bruised muscles giving way to the deep ache of bones pushed almost to the point of breaking.

  “There is no before the Shadow. There is no beyond the Shadow. There is only Shadow. And it will feast on you as it has feasted on everything and everyone you love.”

  He was afraid. Afraid that Mordecai’s words were true, afraid that no hope remained for Phebe or Simeon or anyone. By now, the fear was familiar. But others had felt the fear and fought anyway. Others like Evander. And Abner.

  Amos wrapped his hands around the branch on either side of his thighs. “Ya said once that wielding fire was not yer gift,” he said, channeling all his energy in a desperate effort to free himself. Beneath his palms, the wood darkened to black. Sap bled through his fingers.

  Mordecai screamed. It was a burning, cracking sound as of logs splitting under intense heat. “No, Amos. My gift has always been —” The wood around Amos’s legs softened and darkened to deep green. “— adaptability.” Mordecai spoke the word just as his shift was complete. Roots and branches disappeared. Only the trunk of the tree and one branch remained. While Simeon and Isolde fell to the ground, Amos found himself in the grip of a monstrous snake.

  He held fast, hands gripping as tightly to the sleek scales as they had to the white bark. A thick, muscular loop encircled his chest and squeezed tighter, tighter. He struggled, gasped for air, but he never lost his hold. Soon, the smell of roasting flesh rose to his nostrils. Mordecai’s long body twitched and jerked. He raised his head, looming above Amos in the golden light of Phebe’s lantern. Long fangs emerged, dripping acid. Mordecai pulled backward, preparing to strike his prey.

  At that moment, Simeon pulled the dagger from his belt. He plunged it into the wide, tensed head of the snake. The serpent relaxed its grip, and Amos fell to the ground, crawling quickly out of range. Smooth green scales clouded and darkened, sprouting into feathers. Nose and fangs shrank and hardened into a sharp beak. Mordecai took his favorite form, flapping owl wings and leaping into the air. Isolde sent an arrow whizzing through the dark, but bird and arrow were both lost from sight. Mordecai was gone.

  The glass globe was still. All of them were. No wind stirred the branches of the Silent Trees. But within the globes, pale vapors curled around the trophies of the night weavers. Over her empty, staring eyes, Phebe’s lashes fluttered, just faintly.

  Thirty-Seven

  The trees thinned, and the travelers walked out into an open country where rolling slopes collided with jagged outcroppings of black rock. Here and there, cliffs jutted from the ground, their heights obscured by mist; canyons appeared suddenly at their feet, cutting great wounds in the land. The ground was blanketed in foul yellow-green mosses. Malevolent mist swirled around them. The fire that burned in the palm of Amos’s hand and the light from Phebe’s lantern could not penetrate it.

  Isolde walked close on the heels of the men and tried not to think of Echo. She was glad that she had not known what her journey would hold when she left Fleete. Why must the road be so long, so perilous, so disheartening? She thought of the life that would have been hers if she had risked nothing, if she had stayed in her little cottage, in her little village, hidden away. And what sort of life did her lovely sister wake to every morning? She’d promised to return for Rosalyn when she found a way out. In this horror of darkness, that promise was the only thing driving her forward.

  They had not traveled long before they were plagued by a parching thirst. Isolde wondered at it again and again. There was no great heat, and they moved at a comfortable pace. She reached out and waved her hand through a current of mist in front of her. It looked wet enough, as if she could cup the moisture in her hands and drink it. But when she withdrew her hand, there were tiny cracks in the skin. The mist, rather than filling up the space it occupied, was feeding on the moisture in the air, draining the life it touched. Isolde grimaced and walked on.

  They stepped over small cracks in the ground and leapt over yawning chasms. They rested their legs, walked, rested again. They pushed themselves to their feet and continued their journey. Hour after hour. Step after step. If night turned into day and day into night, if yet another day dawned in the world outside, Isolde would not have known. Time was immaterial, as formless as the mist that circled their weary feet. They sat down to rest on a pile of boulders. How she longed to lie down on those great rocks and sleep, but she refused to give up. Again she rose. Again she walked into the heart of the Shadow.

  She began to feel that they had walked in this twilight forever. Her cracked lips and swollen tongue cried out for water. And, though she failed to notice it, her light had dimmed dramatically in the hours or days or weeks since Mordecai’s attack. There was hardly enough light to see the place of her next footfall.

  Finally, Amos and Simeon sat down, and Isolde slumped to the ground. They sat long in that way, with no thought of getting up again. Isolde thought only of rest, of sleep, of oblivion. Amos spread himself out on the ground. Simeon’s chin fell to his chest. Isolde stretched an arm over the moss and rested her head against it. And the world faded away.

  Simeon dreamed that the stones around him came alive with legs. They scurried toward him, reached his boots, moved up his trousers. He tried to brush them away. He was frantic. But already his feet had disappeared, wound in webs of darkness. Line upon line, they wrapped him up. The hem of his tunic vanished, then the blade of his dagger. “Show yerselves!” he shouted.

  He woke in total darkness. The last flicker of light had faded from their skin. Simeon reached out, groping for the lantern. His fingers closed on it, and he blew feebly into the interior. As always, bright points of light burst into life, circling each other like bees around a hive. He roused the others from sleep and told them of his dream. But they were weary, confused.

  “What could it mean?” Isolde asked. “Have ya dreamed o’ the Weavers before?”

  “No,” Simeon answered. “But every dream has been a warnin’ or a message o’ some kind.”

  Amos’s brow was
furrowed in thought. “Ezra said that Olwen gave the gift of magic, did he not? My father . . .” he paused. “Da said it, too, long ago. He said that Man and Woman were great and powerful, that their voices moved the world.” He turned to Simeon, “Did anything happen when ya spoke in the dream?”

  “No,” Simeon replied. “I woke. That’s all.”

  “What o’ the glass, Isolde?” Amos said. “Has it anything ta show?” This time there was no mockery in his voice.

  She pushed herself up, raised the glass to her eye, and moved it over the surrounding landscape. When she lowered the glass to her lap, her eyes were bright. “I see a broad green country,” she said, “and towerin’ lines o’ trees some ways ahead.”

  “Does some enchantment lay upon it?” Amos asked. “What does the glass reveal?”

  “The world stripped of Shadow,” Isolde replied.

  Simeon was quiet, thinking on Mordecai’s words. There is no before the Shadow. There is no beyond the Shadow. There is only Shadow. He thought of the children, chanting and pacing, in the Village of the Blue Lights. Had the Lost Clan, a thousand years past, braved the Whispering Wood and the Black Mountains only to sit down in the darkness and abandon their quest? Why had they failed? What had they forgotten?

  “Leto’s curse,” Simeon said. “What did she say the Children o’ the Morning would forget?”

  “Their names, their creator, their gifts,” Isolde said.

  “Isolde, look at me.” Simeon said. “Look at me through the glass!”

  She looked at Simeon and raised the glass to her eye. She flinched and dropped it again. “It’s too bright. I can’t look at ya, Sim.”

  They had already forgotten their glory. Amos laughed aloud, and there was a blinding flash of light. Their skin lit with brilliant fire, igniting the air around them. They breathed deeply, feeling warmth and energy coursing through them, feeling hope rise in their hearts again. Their weariness and thirst forgotten, they stood and walked shoulder to shoulder into the deepening dark. And the mist fled before them.

  The glass had spoken truly. Not far ahead, trees were growing. They were low and scattered at first. Then, they came together into a thick grove that rose up to a great avenue of mighty trees. Gray-white webs draped the branches, weaving them together into dense pavilions of Shadow. The grove was pregnant with movement. They had reached the lair of the night weavers.

  Simeon’s heart pounded in his chest. These were the loathsome, creeping demons that had spirited away his Phebe. He burned with a desire to crush them all. But the webs stretched in every direction, teeming with legions of invisible enemies.

  He stepped into the grove. The ground rustled with the sound of numberless legs skittering over dank weeds. But nothing touched him. Not yet. The night weavers fled from his brightness, moving in another direction instead.

  He covered ten paces, twenty, thirty. In another twenty, the grove came to an end in a wall of trees. Thin shafts of light filtered through the branches from the other side of the wall. Simeon made for the light, Amos and Isolde following close behind. Five more paces, then three, and Simeon realized that the shafts of light were disappearing. One by one, the breaks in the trees were being filled. The night weavers were gathering to block their escape.

  “Amos, they’re comin’ together,” Simeon shouted, “movin’ toward that gap up ahead.” Fear washed over him. He faded. Something grazed his shoulder. Something else brushed against his leg.

  “Stop,” Amos said.

  “We can’t stop. She’s close, Amos!”

  “Yer dream, Sim! Remember yer dream!”

  It seemed absurd to think that this wicked horde could be moved by the power of his voice. This was the lair of the Shadow. Fear was natural. Fear was reasonable.

  Something dropped onto Simeon’s shoulder and crawled down his back.

  “Show yerselves!” he shouted.

  And they did, though Simeon and Amos and Isolde were unprepared for the writhing, twitching mass of legs that appeared. They were everywhere, crawling over one another along the forest floor, scurrying across their webs, dangling from the branches. By their sheer numbers, they could have overwhelmed Shiloh, spinning darkness around their victims by the thousands and carrying them away to the last man.

  Fear and revulsion froze Simeon for an instant. Then a fire of righteous anger kindled inside him and he lit up like an inferno. Seen for what they were, the night weavers were a conquerable foe. Their power lay in secrecy, in mystery. He pulled his dagger from his boot, and fiery light from his arms and his blade burned up the night weavers as if they were dry leaves. They gave way before him, tangles of legs spilling and tripping over one another in a desperate flight.

  He smiled, blazing with brilliant light, and slashed through the wall of weavers and webs that blocked their escape. They burst out of the grove into a long, tree-lined lane. Everywhere, crystal globes hung from the branches. Simeon’s smile disappeared. The Hall of Shadows.

  Thirty-Eight

  If a rainstorm of epic proportion had broken in the sky, and if time had stopped just as the first wave of giant raindrops fell in among the trees, it would have looked very much like the watery globes suspended in air, suspended in time, in the Hall of Shadows. The travelers had broken into the lane some halfway down its length. To left and right, the Silent Trees stretched long branches in and up, forming a pointed archway over the lane. The faint luminescence of the globes was the only source of light in that black hall.

  They do look like trophies, Amos thought with a shudder as he peered at the lifeless faces behind the glass.

  “There are thousands,” Simeon breathed. “How are we ta find ’er?”

  Isolde picked up a stone and cast it at the nearest globe. Inside, a young boy with blank eyes hovered motionless. The stone hit the crystal and fell to the ground with a disheartening thump. It hadn’t made a crack.

  “By the gods,” she said. “How are we ta free ’er?”

  But the men had already gone in search of Phebe. There were so many, so many captives: men in trousers and tunics and belts branded with signs from every clan, women with flowing hair and flowing garments, and children. Many children. Small faces that should have been bright with life and hope stared blindly out of glass prisons. It was terrible to behold.

  Amos and Simeon had one blessed advantage. Phebe was dressed in white, a color worn in Shiloh only on the rarest and greatest of occasions. In a sea of gray-clad prisoners, she stood out. They found her hanging near the eastern end of the hall.

  “Phebe!” Simeon rushed to her, pressing his palms to the glass. The black stain of the river water still marred her lovely shift. Her black hair moved with the motion of the swirling white vapors, and her eyes focused on some invisible point in front of her. Simeon drew his dagger and stabbed at the globe.

  “Do somethin’ Amos!” he raged. “Ya must undo what you’ve done!”

  Amos touched the glass tenderly. He remembered her little rag doll, the one with the scraps of colored yarn that she played with by the hearth. He remembered how her eyes flashed when he teased her and pulled her hair. He remembered how she greeted him with a hasty embrace whenever he walked through the door. Most of all, he remembered her voice. It was like the sound of bright bells cutting a path through a fog of black memories.

  And now her mouth was closed, her voice silent. Her arms hung limp at her sides, and her face was blank. His eyes traced the scar that ran along his sister’s cheek. If only the cat’s had been the deepest wound she had received. How could he ever free her from this living death?

  Amos knew that all the prisoners screamed and fought, pounding the walls of their prisons, when they first came to the Hall of Shadows. He knew that Erebus of the Nether Darkness slowly stopped their cries, slowly bound their hands and feet, until the victims were as lifeless as stone. Phebe looked as still as all the others
. He raised both hands to the glass.

  “Little nightingale,” he whispered. There was the slightest flutter of Phebe’s dark lashes, and Amos caught his breath.

  “Phebe, ya have ta remember,” he said.

  But words failed him. He couldn’t think what she had to remember. Would memories of Abner and Wynn be enough? Those memories were shadowed with sorrow. And what of her childhood? Of the years haunted and hunted by the Shadow. No. Phebe needed something more, something deeper. She needed to remember what all the Children of the Morning had forgotten.

  “Phebe, bright daughter o’ the Fire Clan,” Amos began. “You were made by the hand of Ram, the First Creator and the Father o’ the Immortals.”

  Phebe blinked.

  “You were given gifts of beauty and song and strength and magic, and a glory that shines like the sun.”

  Her fingers twitched.

  “It’s there, Phebe . . . the sun. Just beyond the veil o’ Shadow.” Amos’s expression was agonized, his muscles tensed, his fingers gripping the glass. “Da knew it was there. Ma, too. She just . . . forgot.”

  Amos rested his head against the glass and struck it with his fist. He didn’t see Phebe’s eyes focus on him, didn’t notice her hands touching his through the glass.

  A tiny crack appeared in the globe, at the place where their fingers met. Amos felt the subtle shift. He looked up into Phebe’s eyes as the crack branched out in a dozen directions, a hundred directions. The Hall of Shadows echoed with the sound of shattering crystal as the globe fell to pieces and its prisoner fell limp into Simeon’s arms.

  “Phebe?” he asked, laying her down and stroking the hair back from her face.

  She sat up and looked about her, at the trees, at the globes, at the motionless prisoners. “This is the place I always feared,” she said. For a moment her eyes met Isolde’s. Then she turned to Amos. “Are we goin’ home?”