Shadow (The Pendulum Trilogy)

by Elliott, Will

  The tollways, guard houses, roadside stores and booths they came across all sat empty. Even the message towers were abandoned. Rumour of war had spread and people here had seen so little of it that the thought scared them away. Indeed Far Gaze told Gorb before they left that he’d smelled it coming. A vast army of castle soldiers marched south, men who did not follow Valour’s ideals of war. Occasional war-mage shrieks could be heard from the clouds, though the creatures could not yet be seen. There was no knowing if it was part of the large flock the dragon had decimated and scattered, or if they were new ones and part of the invading force.

  Far Gaze trotted ahead of the others, his ghostly white coat gleaming. He sniffed the breeze and whined in fear. Bald, tucked under Gorb’s arm, muttered nonsense. Siel now found the quiet stifling. ‘I wonder where they all went,’ she said, thinking of the villagers and of the peaceful life she’d so recently envied. It was a melancholy relief to know it had never been on offer after all.

  They could see an occasional redness to the southern sky, but the veil covering the barrier had not lifted. ‘Old Nightmare’s still guarding the gate,’ said Gorb. ‘Just saw him going west. He was moving fast. Keeping the stoneflesh from going over. That Pendulum stuff must be true. Don’t understand it, myself.’

  ‘Each thing has in its make-up an ascribed value, you ninny!’ snarled Bald, spittle flying. ‘Value, weight. Weight, mass. Mass, power value. Anything! A man’s worth a million bugs!’

  ‘Bald—’

  ‘Now you will listen! I divulge secrets! Both halves being of even power value in total, a vacuum effect occurs if a power value’s traded—’

  ‘Yeah well, you’re smarter than me I guess,’ said Gorb, shifting the spluttering Engineer to his other arm. ‘Shoosh now, that’s why the wolf’s growling. He’s telling you to shut it.’

  Far Gaze had halted, head turned to the south. His low growl grew fierce.

  Siel slipped her bow from her shoulder and peered into the incline on the road’s right-hand side. She could see and hear nothing in the darkness. ‘What is it?’ she asked the wolf. ‘You growl to scare something off, but you may just draw something toward us! Hush now.’

  Far Gaze whined, looking from her to the road ahead, undecided.

  ‘If you scent a path less dangerous, take it,’ she said, patting the wolf’s side, not knowing how much of her talk Far Gaze could understand. ‘We’ll follow. If there’s danger in all directions, that’s our fate and we’ll meet it like warriors.’

  The wolf heaved a sigh but trotted forward at a quicker pace, almost too quick for them to keep up.

  ‘What’s worried him?’ said Gorb.

  ‘Choose from a dozen threats or more,’ she said. ‘My bow has never felt so useless.’

  ‘If it’s that dragon again, I can’t do much about a dragon. Even a little one,’ said Gorb.

  If it’s that dragon, it’s probably not very interested in any of you, Siel thought with a shudder.

  ‘What’s that sound, anyway?’ said Gorb. ‘Maybe that’s what got the wolf stirred up.’

  ‘I can’t hear anything but our footsteps. Can you describe it?’

  ‘Sounds the way wood sounds when you bend it. Creaks and cracks and groans of wood, that’s what it sounds like.’

  ‘I don’t hear it.’

  ‘The wolf does. And he doesn’t like it.’

  2

  Gorb had put away the piece of enchanted lightstone since they did not want its light being seen from afar by other things. The road was true enough, and just enough light leaked through the gloom to see their way when it bent and wound. Siel’s legs began to tire from the pace they’d kept over the past hour. She still heard nothing but the scuffle and tap of their boots on the road, and Bald’s occasional muttering. The wolf whimpered constantly, bounding ahead and turning back to glare at them for their slow pace.

  The plains to either side were flat as a dinner plate. Now and then campfires could be seen across the flats, caravans pouring from outcast country and making their way to High Cliffs or Tanton, the last two cities to resist their certain fall. The sight of caravans was heartening somehow, camped in rings for safety from bandits. The wind carried smells of smoke. How tempting to head to one of those campfires and beg a night’s sleep under their watch.

  ‘That fire’s too big,’ Gorb muttered just as Far Gaze halted ahead of them again and growled. ‘Look! Whole wagons are burning.’

  Shouting voices faintly reached them across the plain. It was as though a battle were underway somewhere in the gloom. The hairs on Far Gaze’s back stood on end. He crouched low, his growl fierce.

  Siel peered into the darkness. At the very furthest reach of her vision it looked like a wagon was indeed burning. She notched an arrow, wondering who she would be shooting at. Had the castle army reached this country already? Or were Blain’s men attacking?

  Gorb took the piece of lightstone from his pack with a grunt as though he’d forgotten he possessed it. He squeezed it. It spat out its glow, pushing darkness away from the road around them.

  They all recoiled. Standing horribly close to the road was what Siel would have taken for an instant to be a burned tree, if she had not seen Tormentors before. Its obsidian skin glistened in the lightstone’s light; its rock-lump eyes stared down from double her height. Its mane, a thick fan of spiked needles, rattled.

  Far Gaze ran behind it, growled and yelped as though to draw the thing’s attention to himself. With exaggerated sweeping movement its head swung around to peer at him, the stiff limbs of its body creaking. Siel’s arrow struck its chest and bounced off broken – she might as well have fired at a wall of stone. Forgetting the wolf, it turned to her. She froze in its gaze, paralysed with horror.

  It seemed later, when looking back on this memory, that she stood there staring into its eyes for a moment that stretched out forever. While the thing regarded her, she searched its face, looking for something to understand. A hungry animal that wished to eat her, she’d have understood; a bandit wanting to rape her, a war mage doing its mindless duty for its lords, an enemy soldier raising his weapon: those she’d have understood. But not this creature. Something burned in its heart, but whatever it was was utterly foreign.

  It seemed in that long-drawn stretch of time, as she tried to comprehend this alien horror, that all her understanding broke down, that nothing at all was real, she herself least of all. She was nothing, abstract. That it would now draw her to itself and with its spikes and blades unmake her body, for no reason she had a hope of discerning, all dwindled to irrelevance.

  A sound – thwock! – and the top part of the Tormentor’s face flew away. Gorb had one of Bald’s guns out, planted on his knee. He quickly stuffed another sharpened stone down the barrel.

  The Tormentor’s body turned toward him, arms flailing in the gestures of some surreal elegant dance. Siel watched it with her mouth hung open, still transfixed, until the half-giant scooped her up in his arm.

  The wolf whined and ran. Gorb followed with Siel and Bald under his arms, his big strides keeping pace with the wolf, though his breathing was laboured. Siel watched the fields by the road, the whole world jolting heavily with Gorb’s steps. Set against the odd distant fire dark shapes were silhouetted, though some were surely tricks of her eyes. She still saw that thing’s face, staring, and wished desperately to know its mind. It had not hated her, whether it meant to kill her or not. She was sure of that much.

  They ran on. As the first light of day bled through the gloom Gorb staggered, clearly exhausted. Still he kept pace with Far Gaze, who now veered off the road, past a farmstead where a family stood on their porch armed with crossbows and burning brands. They watched two Tormentors stalk across their land some way distant, hardly noticing the new trespassers.

  Far Gaze yelped and tore across the sloping fields, faster than Siel had yet seen him run. Gorb stopped, bent double, huffing air. She climbed out of his grip. Over a rise in the ground came eight men on ho
rseback, with almost as many vacant horses in tow. They wore Tanton’s deep scarlet lashed with gold; High Cliff’s colour, gold, taken after that city was conquered long ago, an insult never forgotten. She knew the figure leading them, one arm in a sling, was Tauk the Strong.

  For the sight of his injury her heart rose with hope: here was a leader himself willing to fight and risk his precious flesh, to brave a journey such as this. Some of the Mayor’s entourage saw them and gestured in signal language: Approach if you are peaceful, flee in safety if you are not, we seek no needless fight with you and shall not pursue. Siel gestured back: We are friends; do not mind the wolf.

  The men watched with interest as the huge white wolf approached them, whining only to point out it was not growling. A good distance from their alarmed horses Far Gaze lay down and began to shift form, writhing, twitching, convulsing, shedding hair, his bones breaking. By the time Siel and Gorb slowly crossed the rise and joined him, he was almost finished.

  ‘Now you keep quiet, Bald,’ Gorb instructed. Bald obliged by falling asleep curled up in the grass.

  ‘This is a sight,’ said Tauk, his voice cheerful, though his entourage looked tired and bore wounds. ‘A half-giant, a warrioress, an Engineer, and a very ill horse-sized wolf.’

  ‘This is Far Gaze, Mayor. Magician of the Mayors’ Command,’ said Siel.

  ‘Ah, I know the name. I have met him. No one told me he was a shape-shifter,’ said Tauk. ‘I’m glad you’ve lived through the night. For us, it was a near thing. We were singing songs one moment, surrounded by horrors the next. Hail, Siel.’

  She blinked in surprise – she’d just once met the Mayor, in a crowded briefing from the Mayors’ Command on the night she’d asked to join them. She’d not known he’d noticed her then, let alone memorised her name and face. She bowed low.

  Far Gaze had finished shifting and now stood, his body naked and starved. He swayed on his feet, bowed low before the Mayor – though Siel saw the sneer on his face – then noisily threw up.

  Said the Mayor, ‘Far Gaze, it’s good of you to have found me. You must know of the demon beasts that have come in the night. Is this what it appears: a planned invasion from beyond World’s End? Or are they sent by more familiar enemies?’

  Far Gaze pondered the question at length, then laughed long and loud. The men to either side of the Mayor looked askance at each other. Tauk himself bristled. ‘I have lost fine men tonight, personal friends among them. I find no humour. Where is the Pilgrim?’

  Siel, mortified by Far Gaze’s continuing laughter, quickly said, ‘The Pilgrim has left us, Mayor. Flown away on a drake, with Aziel, Vous’s daughter.’

  The Mayor’s face went ashen. ‘Vous’s daughter was in your possession? I see there is much to tell me. Where have they gone, and why?’

  ‘They did not linger to tell us,’ she said.

  ‘Then they took our hope with them,’ said a rider to Tauk’s left. ‘And we rode through this foul night for naught.’

  Stark naked, Far Gaze sat cross-legged on the ground among the wolf fur he’d shed. He wiped tears of mirth from his eyes but at last managed to speak. ‘I smelled much in the night. The wind tells me a huge force comes from the north and crosses the Great Road, still some way distant, but coming. They come to take your city, Tauk the Strong. And then High Cliffs, of course. They bring war machines, siege towers, trebuchets. War mages will come too.’

  ‘Those foul things will be weak in our city,’ said one of the men. ‘There is little magic.’

  ‘They will use their claws and teeth, and cast at you even if one spell kills them! An army like this has not come to wage death on such a scale since the War that Tore the World. But there’ll be far less death than that, for you haven’t nearly the force to make a contest of it. They mean to burn and poison the land outside your walls, where your food is grown. Occupying your city is not their instruction. All your people will be killed, their bodies thrown in massive pits. The vanguard of that force will reach your city soon and test your defences. The rest is some way distant.’

  The men had been, throughout this, getting angrier and angrier at Far Gaze’s glee, which he still did not bother hiding. But Tauk’s face showed none of his thoughts.

  ‘Meanwhile death comes from the south,’ Far Gaze went on. ‘It marches with no purpose and no named enemy. But it marches north. Do you understand? What we saw and travelled through on this night was just the scattered edge of it! You know of Strategist Blain’s men? The rebel faction he sent, to guard World’s End?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘More than ten thousand men. They are the Tormentors we’ve met! We learned what those beasts are: men changed by poisoned airs from Levaal South, or airs which become poison when they mix with ours. A massive gust of this poison crossed the barrier. Not all Blain’s men were changed, but a good portion was. Several thousands! More Tormentors than were used to take and hold Elvury, you can be sure. Did all this fit Blain’s private plan? I know not. But it was not the Arch’s plan.

  ‘Rejoice, Tauk the Lucky! You will only have to defeat the castle vanguard. They’ll have likely avoided the Tormentor swarm, as I judge your city shall too. But the castle’s main force is two days or more behind the vanguard. They will not be so lucky. And Tormentors will be an enemy they’re ill prepared to fight. Trebuchets, swords and arrows will not do them much good.’

  Siel’s heart sped as though it understood, though her mind had not yet grasped it. A wave of talk broke out among the men. ‘Do you mean to say …?’ began one.

  ‘I laughed from unexpected joy, from relief,’ said Far Gaze, lying on his back with his legs akimbo. ‘It is a strange world. For the moment – for the moment, mind – you are no longer doomed. There is yet a battle to win against the vanguard force, which itself will test you. Get High Cliffs to send support, now! You must win, for the castle will soon lose most of its strength, as the Arch always meant it to do. But he meant it only after all Free Cities were ruins and ashes, and all your people dead!’

  ‘Then we will have won,’ one of the riders said sceptically.

  ‘No,’ said Far Gaze sitting up, suddenly more sober. ‘You’ll have survived just one peril. Your prize will be a land crawling with death, and a foreign world to your south about which we know nothing. You are close to the barrier. Vous remains on his throne, a god rising. He will need no armies, and you must hope you no longer matter to him. What’s more the dragons in the sky are on the brink of freedom, and they mean death to us all. You won’t know peace for a long time, if you ever truly do. For the Pendulum swings. You probably do not know what those words mean, and I doubt my explanations will mean much to you.’

  If Far Gaze meant to erase any sign of hope or optimism in the men, no spell could have done it swifter. ‘Will more poison come?’ said Tauk quietly.

  ‘Who knows? Forgive my laughter, Mayor, and my one moment’s relief, joy, hope. It has been the first I’ve had in a long while.’

  ‘You are forgiven, of course.’ The Mayor stared into the distance, thinking. ‘A question. Are you familiar with the spell which shares your name?’

  Siel saw intense annoyance run across Far Gaze’s face; mages were never pleased to be asked to cast something, even by those who were their allies, friends or commanders. He said, ‘I know one version of it.’

  ‘I understand to cast it requires high ground. Take me to such a place, and cast it for me, if you will be so kind.’

  ‘If you ask me to look to the south, beyond the boundary, I will not! A greater mage than I was already corrupted by—’

  ‘Calm yourself, I don’t ask that. I wish to look upon these lands. Will you cast it for me?’

  Far Gaze spat. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ he said angrily.

  ‘Excuse me, Mayor. Have you Engineers?’ said Gorb, who had been itching to speak for a while now.

  ‘We do, as you must know. That one there sleeping, he is one of ours, unless he has acquired those garments i
n some other way. His clothes come from our city.’

  ‘A tattoo on his foot will reveal his origin,’ said another of the entourage.

  ‘He is yours. But you might be happy the village I came from borrowed him,’ said Gorb. He held up one of Bald’s guns. ‘There were two monsters over in that field, back yonder. Got time for a quick show of how these weapons work?’

  Tauk said, ‘There’s no time for that now, and we will not go near those creatures when we needn’t. I need to see with my own eyes what the magician has claimed.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Far Gaze with a sardonic bow.

  ‘It is no insult, good mage,’ said Tauk. ‘But a wolf’s nose can’t be the basis of decisions I must now make. I will see with my own eyes how things have shifted, if indeed they have. Then maybe I will laugh along with you, for a little while.’

  3

  They rode half a mile east until they came to a suitable hilltop, then sighted a taller one further away and headed there instead, to Far Gaze’s silent fury. He and Siel gladly rode on horseback, but the entourage was not mindful of Gorb, who lagged some way behind them carrying the Engineer. They encountered no Tormentors on the steep winding paths through a dense glade filled with ferns.

  (As they rode Siel could still not free her mind of the sight of that Tormentor staring at her. What had it seen? Enemy? Prey? Would some other happenstance mage one day look back from far into the future and see its spiked body swing around with alien grace, hear the rattle of its needles, and wonder the same thing?)

  They reluctantly left the horses tied to tree stumps when the path got too steep, then climbed a long-abandoned track through thick foliage and found the highest point they could. ‘Ready?’ said Tauk.