The Shadow Within

by Karen Hancock

  “We can and we will, Sire,” the captain said, grinning again. His bellowed commands dispersed the crowd like a stick in an anthill. As men raced to attend to their various tasks, Abramm turned to find Trap favoring him with a half smile that was almost paternal.

  “Well done, my lord,” he murmured. “Well done, indeed.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Simon Kalladorne, Duke of Waverlan, Grand Marshall of the Armies of Kiriath, and uncle to the king, stood at the south balustrade of his private balcony, staring into the dark, woolly night. With a thick fog blotting out all sign of the dock and shipyards lying directly below him, he had no hope of detecting anything as far out in the bay as the kraggin’s two dismasted victims had been when twilight dropped its curtain on their struggle. Likely there was nothing to see anyway, the two vessels long since reduced to flotsam by the monster’s massive tentacles. It was well after eleven o’clock now, and there’d been no victory rockets fired from out on the bay, and no word from the shore watchers beyond reports of bodies and wreckage washed up by the tide.

  He sighed and drew his woolen cloak more snugly about himself, the chill seeping into his aged bones. His hip ached where the sword had cut into it forty years ago, a dull pain reaching into the small of his back and down the front of his thigh. He should go in. There was nothing to see out here, nothing that would bring him any more assurance than he already had.

  The boats were surely gone, all three of them—the Mataian barge, the whaler that had pulled it out to deep water, and the Andolen trademaster that had foolishly come to their rescue. Or had perhaps come for the kraggin all along, hoping to claim the ten-thousand-sovereign prize Gillard had offered for the monster’s carcass. Why else would any ship sail into Kalladorne Bay these days? Whatever her reason, the trademaster had paid for it with her life. And so had the Mataians, their ploy to gain favor and power in the realm defeated, for now. They would try again, but tonight Simon could relax, and mourn the men who were lost. . . .

  Wingbeats whispered in the mists coiling overhead, and he glanced upward uneasily. The nights were not safe these days. Especially not a night like this. The kraggin was not the only creature of the Veil to have moved into the realm of late, and only fools pretended otherwise. With a sigh, he turned from the balustrade.

  The glass panes rattled in his study door as he closed it behind him and headed for the sideboard to pour himself a brandy. Despite the conclusions of logic, he knew he wouldn’t truly relax until he looked on the gray choppy water tomorrow and saw the litter of wood and fabric and rope that had once been vessels full of men. Even then the guilt would remain.

  The liquor gurgled pleasantly out of its carafe, its pungent aroma burning his nostrils. Not since his wartime days had he felt an ambivalence of this intensity, hope and fear at odds even as they were the same. For the monster out there absolutely needed to be killed. It had shut down Kalladorne Bay for over six months, devastating the local economy. And since Springerlan was the largest port in Kiriath, accounting for nearly half her population, that translated into a significant amount of hardship and suffering. Suffering that would continue to escalate until the kraggin was removed.

  Unless the Guardians did the removing. Then the suffering would merely change form and venue.

  He replaced the glass stopper with a clink and shoved the carafe back into line with the others, sniffing the brandy with a frown. Guardians of the Realm, indeed! Even the name they chose for themselves was arrogant! To think they alone knew what was best for everyone else, particularly in matters so personal as the spiritual, was not simply galling, it was terrifying. He’d lived this day dreading they would succeed in their effort to deliver the realm from the kraggin.

  “A spawn of evil sent by Eidon to judge us!” High Father Bonafil had declared when the barge was launched this morning. Visions of the demands they would make should they succeed haunted Simon still: a place on the royal council, a chapel in the palace, stringent enforcement of their Laity Laws upon the Court, including mandatory observance of Mataian rituals, bans on religious observances not to their liking, their vicious Gadrielite heretic hunters given more leeway than ever. . . . It was a road of increasing tyranny and oppression that would lead all the way to that unholy purge Mataian fanatics were already braying about.

  The dread, justified as he considered it to be, nevertheless fueled a powerful self-reproach, for his fears were only fears, while the kraggin was real, and so was the suffering it inflicted. To want that to go on, for any reason, was unconscionable. And it wasn’t as if there had been no opportunity for others to act. Gillard had done nothing for all these six months, after all, still waiting, he said, for the development of an experimental harpoon with an exploding tip. “No need to risk men and ships until we know we can kill it,” he maintained. Meanwhile, the height of the trading season slipped away as more and more lives were ruined.

  Absently he reached for a wilted rose blossom fallen from the flower arrangement at the sideboard’s end, catching himself just in time. With a muttered oath, he impaled the bloom with his dagger, uncaring that the blade point drove into the sideboard’s polished wood. It was by now one of many such point marks.

  Immediately the staffid uncurled from its disguised position, reverting to its normal tricolor of blue, gray, and black. Suppressing a shudder of revulsion, he drew the point free of the wood, the staffid’s legs rippling wildly, its multisegmented carapace arching back and forth as it tried to free itself. The cursed things had invaded around the time the kraggin had taken up residence in the bay and were everywhere, disguising themselves as fallen flowers, wadded papers, balls of lint or string, rocks, jewelry, even morsels of food. They were disgusting and annoying, their bites producing itchy red welts that lasted weeks. People had taken to hanging swags of onions near their doors and windows to ward them, but the plague would take him before Simon stooped to that!

  “Blasted vermin!” he muttered, casting the creature into the fire. It writhed frantically as the flames consumed it, flaring a harsh, bright blue amidst the gold and amber, and he watched it die with perverse satisfaction. Would that all his troubles could be so easily dispatched!

  Snatching up his drink, he collapsed in the overstuffed chair before the hearth as the birdcage clock on the mantel struck the hour in tinny, chiming beats. Midnight already. No rockets. No word. The ships were dead.

  So why did he feel this sense of growing doom? And how could Gillard be so oblivious to it? Even after the Mataians’ almost-success today, the young king had waved off Simon’s concern with that annoying, limp-wristed gesture of disdain he’d recently acquired. Sipping his brandy with an amused smile, he’d even suggested the Mataio was right, that it was all the Terstans’ fault and a purge wouldn’t be so bad. His three little lordlings, without whom he never went anywhere, had laughed, but Simon was long past being intimidated by ignorant young louts. He told Gillard sternly that if he did not get serious about the responsibilities of his station, he could very well lose it. To which Gillard had only huffed. “And who’s going to take it from me? You, Uncle?”

  Which his louts thought even funnier than his earlier remark. They’d gone off to the gaming tables after that, singing and laughing as if twenty good men had not died today, as if a monster didn’t still prowl the bay outside their windows and there were no religious fanatics drooling to seize control of the realm.

  The brandy’s warm fire chased down Simon’s gullet, driving away the chill he’d gained from being outside but doing little to alleviate the chill that gripped his heart. He stared gloomily at the life-sized portrait of his grandfather, Ravelin Kalladorne, glowering down at him from above the mantel. Tall and lean and blond with the dark Kalladorne brows and hawkish nose, Ravelin was a man’s man, the last real warrior-king in Kiriath. He’d worn his blond hair short, with a close-trimmed beard edging mouth and jaw. No courtly frippery for him—he’d been painted in his hunting leathers astride his favorite stallion, a
huge, ill-tempered bay that had terrified Simon as a boy. Those were the days of the Chesedhan wars, and Ravelin was a strong, decisive leader, ruthless, stern, courageous to a fault.

  But even Ravelin would not be able to put things to right these days. His personality and methods were for another time, another generation. No, the only one who could do anything was Gillard. But Simon was cursed if he could figure out how to motivate the lad anymore. Dropping his chin onto his chest, he inhaled the brandy’s aroma and thought that if he were a praying man, he’d ask that something be sent to startle the boy awake before it was too late.

  He didn’t remember getting into bed, but the window-rattling booms of what he first thought was cannon fire awakened him there. When it was not repeated, he deemed it his imagination and slipped back into slumber, only to be assaulted anew by his manservant’s shrill voice and a blinding light. As he rose up on his elbows, groaning and cursing, the servant, Edwin, turned from where he’d flung wide the velvet draperies to reveal the first glimpse of sun Kiriath had seen in two months.

  “My lord Simon!” the man repeated, far too loudly. “They’ve slain the monster! They’re bringing it right into port! Come and see the size of it!”

  At first Simon couldn’t think what he was talking about, so intrusive was the light and the pain jabbing his skull. His stomach felt queasy, too, and his mouth tasted like the inside of a horse trough. Did I drink that much brandy last night?

  “My lord?”

  What had Edwin said? “They’ve slain the monster.”

  It all connected in a flash and Simon leaped out of bed, staggered badly, and caught himself on the bed table before he fell. There followed an irritating moment of waiting for his head to settle, but finally he was at the window, fighting the pain from squinting into the bright morning light.

  The fog had not yet surrendered fully to the day, a ragged train of gray puffs sailing across the sky and shredding low over the water. The bay stretched southward in a great blue swath, on which two of the many tallships stranded in Springerlan now sailed halfway to the distant gold-crowned headlands that marked the verge of open sea. So desperate were they to begin recouping their losses, the tallships’ captains hadn’t even stayed for the celebration.

  And celebration there was.

  The harbor teemed with boats as it had not for six months. Mostly small to medium sized, their masts and bows fluttered with the brightly colored pennants reserved for festival days, and they raced about at great speed, a swirling crowd of attendants for the battered Andolen trademaster and her equally battered whaling companion, now limping into port. In the night the trademaster’s crew had juryrigged a new main mast and replaced or stitched up enough of her torn rigging and sails to get her under way. But even with the bright, stiff wind—unfortunately a land breeze she had to tack into—and the advantage of most of her sails, she still needed the help of the five smaller vessels arrayed before her, towlines taut as they pulled her into port. It was not her injuries that slowed her, however, but the carcass she dragged behind her, a creature half again as long as she was.

  Hangover nearly eclipsed by his sudden, keen interest, Simon hurried from the bedchamber into his study, snatched up his spyglass, and stepped into the cool morning breeze on the balcony, uncaring that all the world might see a grizzled old soldier in his bedgown. He strode to the balustrade, snapped open the scope, and fixed it upon the monster trailing in the trademaster’s wake. Dark-mottled, rough-surfaced, it shone wetly in the sun, having a long tubular body with a flangelike tail from which the trademaster’s towline was fixed. From its other end a fan of long arms trailed through the waves, some dark, some gleaming pearl white, a few of them twice the length of the rest of it combined.

  Some of the boats had come in close, and a few braver souls poked it with gaffs and spears. As he lowered the telescope to view the whole scene again, a puff of smoke erupted near the dock to his left and a rocket shrilled skyward, exploding in a burst of sparklers, its boom making him wince again. Two more followed, and he heard the distant cheers of the men on the docks and in the boats while those on the trademaster—he had the scope up again—waved from rail and rigging. He aimed the glass at the bow, picked out white painted letters spelling Wanderer, then swept the telescope sternward along the gunwale. At once he came to a cluster of white-tunicked men carrying a flattened oval of bronze and swore aloud.

  Guardians. Their barge was gone—he’d seen the kraggin’s tentacles cleave and sink it himself—but somehow they’d survived. Looked like they had their pan of flames, as well. Plagues! They’ll take all the credit sure as they’re standing there.

  He continued his survey, stopping again when he came to a group of men in the tattered blue remnants of royal armsman uniforms standing near the boarding portal in the mangled gunwale. Several of the white-garbed Mataians stood among them, conversing with the man who appeared to be the trademaster’s captain. One of the group, a tall, bearded blond, snagged Simon’s eyes with a sense of the familiar, but then he spied the spare form and goateed face of his friend and one time protégé, Lieutenant Shale Channon, commander of the royal armsmen sent as escort, and joy superseded idle curiosity.

  It was short-lived, itself superseded by the realization that no matter how greatly the royal armsmen had figured in the kraggin’s defeat, the Mataians would claim it was only because of the protective power of their Flames.

  He snapped the scope shut and strode back through the study to the bedchamber, Edwin following him in. “Has the king been told?” Simon asked, throwing off his bedgown and pulling on the breeches Edwin handed him.

  “They’re rousing him now, my lord.”

  But the king had still not emerged from his apartments by the time Simon reached the main foyer, and since his own horse had been brought around, he decided not to wait. The quicker someone of rank gained control of the situation, the better.

  The Avenue of the Keep thronged with people, and the closer he and his men drew to the dock, the heavier grew the traffic. As they fought their way through the congestion, he spied a cadre of Laine Harrady’s men afoot and hurrying back to the palace. Seeing Simon, one of them hailed him. “Have ye heard the news, my lord duke!?”

  “O’ course ’e has,” Simon’s master armsman, Gerard, growled at him. “Why d’ye think he’s come?”

  Simon gave the man a casual salute and pressed on, the crowd nearly shoulder to shoulder, even several streets back from the action. The Avenue ended in a square, brick-paved plaza overlooking the docks. From there the street turned sharply left and sloped down to the wharf proper. It was the first clear view Simon had had of the harbor, now directly below him, since he’d left his balcony. Already there were as many people here as had gathered to watch the Guardians set out yesterday. Striped tents and awnings of every hue floated over the multitude. Spectators lined warehouse roofs, hung out of windows, perched on barrels and hogsheads, and swarmed the masts and gunwales of all neighboring ships.

  The frantic swirling of maritime traffic he’d noted earlier had ceased, vessels floating gunwale to gunwale along a narrow gauntlet formed between the Andolen trademaster and an empty berth on the royal dock. Every eye watched the longboat now threading that gauntlet to a chorus of thunderous cheering. Smartly painted in red and white with gold gilding its gunwales, it was none other than the launch reserved for royalty, broken out to honor the commanders of those who had killed the kraggin. Even with his naked eye, Simon could pick out the blue shoulders of the royal armsmen sitting among those in the boat, a great deal more of them than of the men in white. Which was odd. A glance back at the battered trademaster assured him most of the Guardians remained inexplicably on board.

  A new uneasiness, whose source he could not identify, blew through him.

  His good friend, Ethan Laramor, earl of the border fiefdom of Highmount, sat astride his brown horse near the brick retaining wall, and knowing his master well, Gerard carved a path through the spectators in that di
rection. Ethan, come south for the annual meeting of the Table of Lords, should be happy at least. The kraggin’s depredations had seriously hampered his efforts to gain the military and financial help he sought to stand against an increas- ingly aggressive barbarian presence along Kiriath’s northern borders. With the kraggin prowling the bay right in front of them, no one wanted to think about vague rumblings in the north. Now, perhaps, they would.

  Except Ethan wasn’t cheering. Instead he had his spyglass out and trained upon the royal launch. With his gaunt, pockmarked face, straight strawy hair, and lanky frame, Laramor had a crude, homespun look, intensified by languid gray eyes and the gold ring of Borderer lordship dangling in his right ear. A barbaric custom, people said behind his back, but then the Borderers were only a step away from barbarians themselves. Beneath the bumpkin’s exterior, however, lurked an excellent swordsman, a horseman of renown, and an archer whose aim with the longbow was unrivaled in all the realm. Beyond that, Ethan Laramor had one of the most brilliant minds Simon had ever known when it came to waging war, both on the battlefield and off.

  As Simon pulled up beside him, Laramor glanced aside, then lowered the glass with a grimace. “So. You’ve heard the news, then?”

  Simon responded with a frown of his own. “Of course. The monster’s dead, and we can all rejoice as our pious deliverers seek to steal the credit.”

  Laramor’s frown deepened. “I meant the news about Abramm.”

  Simon stared at him, struggling to put the name into some kind of context and failing. Abramm was dead. Gone. Abducted six years ago after failing the Mataian test of the Flames and sold into a life of slavery he could not possibly have survived. What news of Abramm could be relevant? Perplexed, he shook his head. “News about Abramm?”

  “He’s here. Now.” Ethan gestured with his chin at the Wanderer. “He’s the one commissioned that boat. They’re saying he killed the monster. And that he’s come back to claim the Crown. The Mataians are already hailing him as their Guardian-King.”