The Shadow Within

by Karen Hancock

  “It’s getting right strong,” Trap said quietly beside him.

  “Right strong, indeed.” Even the fading feyna scar that still marked his left wrist had begun to tingle.

  They could see the shapes of whaler and barge with naked eye now, and in the gathering gloom of late afternoon could even pick out the crimson flame dancing on the Guardians’ brazier. If the wind held, maybe—

  “There!” one of the men in the rigging cried, pointing across the water. “Surface wake, moving fast. About ten degrees to port.”

  Other men echoed the sighting as Abramm snapped open the spyglass again and trained it left, off the port bow. Magnified waves against the dark backdrop of the distant shore filled the field of view. He was sweeping the scope back and forth, seeking the swell when someone else cried, “It’s breached! Khrell’s Fire! Look at the size of it!”

  Abandoning the glass, Abramm scanned the waters with his bare eye, heart pounding in his throat.

  “Ope—there it goes, down again, heading straight for the barge.”

  “What was it?” another man cried.

  “Cursed big. Dark and rough, like it had barnacles on it.”

  “Whale, maybe?”

  “Not with those tentacles pumping after it.”

  Kinlock was already bellowing for the flagman to signal warning to the whaler and barge, for the spears and harpoons to be broken out and the hunting boats readied for launch. Back on the barge, clear and sharp in the round field of Abramm’s spyglass, no one seemed to have noticed anything, though a flurry of activity had erupted on the whaler.

  “There it is! Still to port, making straight for the barge.”

  This time Abramm lowered the scope, climbed onto the bollard adjacent the portside railing, and saw it—a massive mound of water, rising and falling in powerful lunges across the bay’s gray surface, heading, as the sailor had said, for the same destination as Wanderer.

  “Merciful Laevion!” someone exclaimed from up in the mizzenmast rigging behind them. “Look at it go!”

  It appeared to stand as high as Wanderer’s top deck, and encompassed as much volume. Once he’d marked it, Abramm found it easily with the glass, tracking it as it moved. Beneath the water’s surface sheen, he picked out the dark bulk of the creature’s body, laced with jagged, flickering lines of brilliant yellow-green and eye-searing blue. He scanned backward from it over the water’s strangely curdled surface to the end of those flickering lines of light, estimating its length. By now his heart hammered at his breastbone and his stomach knotted with dread. The thing was huge and moving significantly faster than Wanderer.

  Snapping his scope back to the leading edge of the mound, he tracked forward of it now, over a league of calm gray swells before he found the barge—much too close. Its white-robed figures still marched obliviously around their pan of flames, but by now the other men aboard, those clad in the blue tunics of royal armsmen, lined the railing, swords and spears a’ready.

  “The whalers have launched their first smallboat,” Trap said.

  If Abramm’s will could have powered her, Wanderer would have flown across the water. Guardians or not, they were his folk, and it infuriated him to see this thing bearing down upon them, to feel the evil at its core, the dark, destructive lust to own and utterly devour. . . .

  Half a league from its target, the mound subsided, leaving a remnant of itself to roll on across the bay, losing amplitude until it vanished in the water’s normal rise and fall. The Guardians continued to march and the men at the railings to watch as the hunting boat reached the midway point between barge and whaler. Its harpooneer stood now at the bow, searching the depths. Behind it, the whaler’s second hunting boat dropped into the water and its crew scrambled down to man her.

  Those aboard Wanderer held their breath and prayed for speed.

  Abramm had the harpooneer in his spyglass when the man recoiled and brought his harpoon to bear on something just before his bow. Then he vanished in an eruption of water and foam. Abramm gave up the scope again for the naked eye, but the hunting boat was gone, lost in a frenzy of churning waves, foam, and writhing gray tentacles laced with blue lightning. One arched against the sky, mind-boggling in its length and breadth, and slapped down on the barge with a dreadful rending crack attended by a chorus of screams and shouts. The vessel’s bow leaped skyward, then fell back and was swallowed by the turbulence.

  The whaler, its masts gyrating wildly on the stormy seas, had heeled round in an attempt to close with the kraggin. Already it had fired one harpoon, and now it loosed a second as another dark tentacle reared out of the waves and coiled round the top of the whaler’s mainmast. Rocking the ship like a child’s toy, it yanked down, snapping the four-foot-wide timber like a twig, yardarms shattering, canvas and rigging ripping free.

  More tentacles shot out of the churning water, sweeping men off the decks of both vessels. The second small hunting boat had long since vanished as another arm tore down the whaler’s foremast with a crash. A horrible booming squeal followed close in its wake as the barge’s ailing front half wrenched free of its stern and disappeared under the waves.

  Abramm watched in helpless fury, gripping the gunwale with one hand, the spyglass with the other, desperate to close the gap and seeing it wouldn’t happen in time. They would lose both ships, and the monster, as well, and he could do nothing to stop it.

  Then, as swiftly as it had begun, the attack ceased. The tentacles released both barge and whaler, and the beast sank back into the depths, leaving a field of foam-flecked flotsam and dying waves forWanderer to sail into, far too late. A cluster of keening Guardians clung to the barge’s rapidly sinking end section while most of their unfortunate fellows thrashed—or floated limply— in the roiling waters around them. Kinlock ordered Wanderer’s longboats dispatched to pick up the survivors, and the hands leaped to obey. But once the two vessels had been dropped into the water, all activity stopped. To a man the crew stood frozen, looking down at the boats, at one another, at the ruined barge and dismasted whaler barely afloat amidst the flotsam of their floggings. Even Kinlock held silence.

  Abramm could feel their fear, a thick, stifling mantle crawling across his flesh and squeezing the air from his lungs. These were tough, courageous men, used to incredible danger, but between the power of the kraggin’s aura and the horror of what they’d just witnessed, they’d reached the end of their resources. He glanced at Trap. His liegeman saw the decision in his eyes, started to protest, but already Abramm was swinging round the companionway turnpost and thumping down to the ship’s waist.

  If I’ve got it wrong, my Lord Eidon, he prayed grimly, please head me off now.

  He reached the gunwale unimpeded, men stepping aside to allow him passage, one of them taking his overrobe as he shrugged out of it. Two rope ladders already dangled over the side above the still-empty longboats.

  “Hand me down some of those spears,” he called as he hitched a leg over the gunwale. “And a harpoon or two, as well.”

  “Ye can’t row and spear at the same time, my lord,” Kinlock protested.

  “No, but then I probably won’t have to.” Abramm swung the other leg over to catch a foothold on the rope rungs. “And it’s better than standing on deck with this flock of quivering yelaki.”

  He started down the ladder. By the time he’d jumped into the boat and got his balance, Philip was halfway down the side after him, while Trap was commandeering the other vessel. Philip landed between the thwarts, Abramm steadying him as the boat lurched, and for a moment their eyes locked. Abramm had a flash of memory—the lantern-lit stern cabin last night, an impromptu liege-giving ceremony, this young man on one knee before him, reciting the ancient oath of fealty all Kiriathans gave to their king. Now here he was, ready to make good on that oath, maybe even to die doing it. And hardly more than a boy.

  Nausea swirled in Abramm’s gut, a sudden sickening realization that it was his own action and need that placed Philip in jeopardy. But then t
he youth grinned at him with the sense of immortality that belonged only to the young and said, “Eidon has made us a way, Sire!”

  Abramm forced a smile back. “Indeed he has, Phil. Now let’s do our best to make good on it.”

  Releasing the youth, he reached to snag the bundle of spears descending toward them, then saw that his parting words to the crew had borne the fruit he’d hoped: seven seamen now came scrambling down Wanderer’s hull to take up oars in the two boats. Thus they set out to round up the survivors, undermanned, underequipped, and praying fervently the kraggin did not return until they were done.

  CHAPTER

  2

  While Trap swept round to starboard, gathering up those who had been lost when the barge’s front end went down, Abramm steered directly for its stern, pausing to fish out survivors on the way and putting those who were able to the oars. It was a gruesome journey paddling past floating bits of barge and whaler, of canvas and rope and oar, of bodies broken and bloodied and still. With twilight moving in, the wind had died away, and now the water gleamed like polished pewter, tendrils of mist coiling from its placid surface. A few tiny lights winked out of the gloom clotted now at the base of the headlands, while at the bay’s end, Springerlan was a cascade of stars sprinkled along the shore’s dark flank.

  Abramm focused on guiding his boat through the wreckage. A snag, a fouling of the oars, even a collision would waste precious moments. The kraggin would return soon—he could sense it in the depths now, as he knew it could sense him—and the last thing he wanted was to fight it with these fanatical holy men at his shoulder.

  Though the aura-producing shadowspawn typically avoided Terstans, they would fight if pressed to defend themselves or their kills. And the disabled whaler and barge could now reasonably be classed as kills. The kraggin had already taken a few prizes when it went down, drawing them one after the other toward the wide, beaklike mandibles at the midst of its tentacles, and chewing. . . .

  Abramm grunted and shook the image from his head. Where had that come from?

  Up close the barge was much larger than it appeared from afar. Ten Guardians clung to its slowly sinking stern, most of them waist-deep in water. Together they held aloft a flattened bronze orb two feet in diameter—a traveling brazier for the Mataio’s Holy Flames, which they’d managed to keep alive in all the chaos. Scanning the group as he guided the boat alongside, Abramm gave thanks when he recognized none. Though he knew himself to look a very different man from the youth who had sought Eidon in the Flames until six years ago, someone who’d known him well might see the truth regardless.

  He secured the tiller and, with the nearside oarsmen, helped the first of the bedraggled Guardians—a withered horror of a man for whom this present disaster was obviously not his first—into the boat. The left side of his face and neck had been seared into a mask of waxy scar tissue, with no ear, no brow, no eye, and nothing but a slit for lips. Only a scattering of coarse gray hair sprouted from the puckered scalp, his waist-length pigtail drawn predominantly from the hair on the unscathed right side of his head. As Abramm helped him over the side, he felt the hard claw of a hand twisted with scar tissue, the tough, ropy feel of an arm likewise damaged. His one good eye was the worst, though, burning with madness and latent anger, as if it had somehow absorbed the fire that had scarred him.

  The Guardian spared Abramm neither glance nor word of thanks, releasing his clawlike grip and swaying to starboard to settle on the first thwart, facing astern. In a voice as rough as a barnacle-covered reef, he demanded they return to Wanderer at once, as if the rest of them existed only as instruments of his will. Alone pure among the unworthies that made up the bulk of mankind, he could spare no time for pleasantries—not when he had the work of Eidon before him.

  Grimacing to think he’d been like that once, Abramm turned his attention to helping the next man aboard.

  “We must continue our supplications before the creature is able to renew its strength!” the disfigured Guardian declared to no one in particular. His mad eye roved the quieting sea as he gripped his knees and muttered to himself. “Cursed Terstans! They have brought this on us. They and that woolwit of a king who wouldn’t see the truth if it fell on him. They should all be hanged! No. Burned. Made to renounce their heresies or burned!” He laughed softly.

  From the corner of his eye, Abramm saw Philip, helping men in at the bow, glance his way. The oarsmen all faced away from him, so he couldn’t read their reactions, but he saw a couple of the rescued armsmen exchange eye-rolling gazes.

  Once the last of the survivors was aboard, the oarsmen pushed off from the barge, powering the overloaded vessel about in a creaking of oarlocks.

  For a moment Abramm floated in the darkness far below, digesting his prize and savoring the comforting pressure of the depths, his limbs drifting loosely before him in an uneven corona of sparkling blue light.

  “We must hurry, I say!” croaked the mad Mataian from afar. “Why aren’t we under way?”

  “We are under way, Master Rhiad,” said one of his subordinates, jerking Abramm violently back to the here and now.

  Rhiad?! Abramm gripped the tiller hard and, after one reflexive glance at the scarred man sitting knee to knee with him, tore his stare away and fought to keep his face expressionless. Surely this creature was not the Rhiad he had known, the Rhiad he had last seen four years ago in that ancient cistern in the SaHal, threatening to kill Abramm’s sister if he would not drink the man’s sedating potion. That Rhiad had been young, dark-haired, and handsome.

  And yet—Abramm stole another glance—was there was not something familiar in the shape of his unruined eye, the whorl in his hairline above his forehead, that lilt of a sneer at the lip?

  Fire and Torment! It is him! But what in Eidon’s wide world has happened to him? Had the etherworld corridor Rhiad himself had opened in that cistern done this? Abramm had been unconscious when Carissa shoved the Mataian into it, but she said there’d been an explosion, and the Terstan talisman she’d worn unheeding in her belt showed signs afterward of having conducted the Light.

  Abramm’s gaze came back to the ruined face, horror—and pity—hitting him hard.

  Suddenly the dark, fiery eye snapped up to fix upon him. “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare, boy?”

  Abramm averted his gaze, feeling the blood leave his face. It was the first time Rhiad had actually looked at him, and unlike the others, Rhiad had seen him since he’d left six years ago. . . . But if Rhiad recognized him, he said nothing, his attention once more on the sea and the beast he’d come to ward.

  Abramm returned to his steering just in time to avoid one of the whaler’s masts as it floated under the water’s surface in a mass of rigging. As it was, the lead portside oar got snarled in that rigging, and they wasted precious moments working free while Rhiad chastised them bitterly.

  In the depths below, the beast drifted in suffocating darkness, peering up at a pale distant glow, its blue-shot limbs floating in an ever-widening circle. Its hunger, weeks in the making, remained unblunted by the meager prizes it had consumed. It needed more. And the enemy that had stolen its kill was much smaller than it had first thought. . . .

  Abramm shuddered and blinked at the Guardian on the thwart directly across from him. The man was asking him something, but Abramm couldn’t hear him, feeling strangely weak and suddenly very small, a bit of frail flotsam on the sea’s vast surface, a tiny morsel to be plucked from this bench and pulled toward those grinding, clattering black beaks—

  With a gasp he tore free of the kraggin’s spell, shaking his head to clear it. Nausea churned in his gut, and sweat greased his palm, shaking on the tiller. He drew a deep, slow breath, fighting panic. He knew the images invading his mind were part of the creature’s defenses, but it was as if the aura had switched on all the fear reflexes of his flesh and he could not turn them off. He could, however, stem the influx of doubts and images it ignited. Thus he set himself not to think about the coming strugg
le and the beast drifting in the murk below, with eyes big as dinner plates—bright crimson rings encircling pupils of dark red-brown.

  No! He would not think of that. Nor of Rhiad, gazing blankly over Abramm’s shoulder and muttering curses on all who wore the shield. He would think of the tiller in his hand, the angle needed to steer the bow through the bobbing, rolling beams and planks and pieces of yardarm and canvas—and far too many bodies. He would plan what they would do once they returned to Wanderer and off-loaded these Guardians.

  Dusk was settling in, foggy veils drifting over the water between them and the sparkle that was Springerlan. Ahead, crewmen lined Wanderer’s railings, calling for them to hurry. Trap had already come alongside her hull to debark his passengers, the healthy ones scrambling up the rope ladder, the injured lifted to the deck via canvas stretcher.

  Oarblades flashing in single coordinated sweeps, Abramm’s longboat surged forward. His legs shook now, along with his hands, and he told himself it was only because they were wet and cold.

  He knew the Light could slay this beast. He just didn’t know if he could keep the channel open long enough, or open it at the right time, or open it at all. He remembered those last moments in Jarnek too well—when the resurrected Beltha’adi had faced him, mouth opening to deliver the last fatal blow while Abramm found himself bereft of the power that moments before had allowed him to slay the greatest warrior of the southern lands. It had been the Light of others that had saved him that day.

  Yes, he knew much more of it all now, but he also knew of the Shadow that dwelt within him, straining to choke out the Light. A Shadow that, if he let it, would disrupt his concentration and open his guard to every illusion the kraggin’s aura threw at him. It wasn’t Eidon or his Light Abramm doubted; it was himself.