The Shadow Within

by Karen Hancock

  The little girl, they had learned, had gone out to collect the eggs, only to find the chickens slaughtered and the beast awaiting her. Her screams had brought the dog to her defense, which had held the creature off until the man and his sons arrived with ax and staves. But the beast was too small and quick for them, and perhaps too smart, as well, leaping to attack the father’s face where his sons could not use their weapons. They had pulled it off him only to let it slip their grasp and flee into the mist. After that they’d been too frightened—and too preoccupied with the girl’s injuries—to search further.

  “We were just getting ready to start that, Sire,” the investigating armsman said to Abramm. “I doubt it’s still around, but there might be a track we could pick up.”

  Abramm nodded his approval, then gestured to the people huddled by the door—a tall, sun-weathered man in homespun clothing, his slender gray wife, and two boys, one nearly grown to manhood. “I think I’ll talk to them myself now.”

  “I’m not sure they’ll talk to you, sir. At least not . . . coherently.”

  Abramm eyed them again, noting how their gazes flinched away. “Why not?”

  “They’ve been bad enough with us. They’re sure to be . . . overwhelmed by your presence. On top of everything else. The girl was chewed up badly. They say she’s got the wound fever.”

  “How could she have wound fever? She was attacked only a few hours ago.”

  “I know, sir, but the poor babe is burning up. Likely won’t live the day.”

  “She may be spore-sensitive,” Madeleine murmured at Abramm’s side.

  That was the most likely explanation. He felt a dull anger rise within him—that a little girl should suffer because of a madman’s thirst for vengeance. . . .

  “It’s probably gone back to the fortress by now,” Trap said from Abramm’s other side.

  “No doubt at first light,” Abramm agreed. “Still, I want to see her.”

  The armsman was right that his presence had overwhelmed the crofters, but not, he thought, because they counted it an honor. They reminded him more of the poor folk of Esurh, afraid of authority, afraid that if the king so much as noticed them, they would lose their heads. Perhaps with good reason, for it wasn’t just fear he saw in their faces. The woman, especially, bristled with a latent hostility that suggested she believed this was his fault. That his audacious invasion of Graymeer’s had stirred this evil up, and now she was paying for it. The man would hardly look at him as he answered Abramm’s questions, his fear and anger and grief making him all but inarticulate. At length Abramm gave up and asked to see the child herself.

  “Talia? She is abed, sir. Sore sick. We dare not bring her out.”

  “I never thought you should. I will go in to her.”

  Wide-eyed expressions of alarm passed among them. “But . . . she cannot speak to you, Your Majesty. She is wild with fever.”

  “Nevertheless, I will see her.”

  They looked at one another again, then scrambled out of his way.

  “Keep them out here,” he said to Channon. Then with a glance at Trap and Madeleine to accompany him, he ducked beneath the weathered lintel and entered the house.

  A small fireplace stood to the left of the single large room, pats of sheep’s dung smoldering on a bed of ash. Across from it stood a roughhewn wooden table and several chairs, and beyond them, rolled sleeping pallets lay stacked in the corner. The air hung close and moist, sour with the stench of smoke, vomit, feces, and the irritating musk of spore. The girl lay near the fire, drenched in sweat, tossing restlessly on a straw-filled mat. Her blond hair lay in lank, wet strings, and her face was a network of already suppurating scratches and bite marks. Red blisters lined each cut and her little nose was swollen twice its size.

  Abramm knelt beside her, the accusations he’d received at Graymeer’s echoing through his head. You should not have come, Abramm Kalladorne. . . .Their blood will be on your hands . . . your hands. . . .

  Before him lay the first casualty: young, innocent, completely undeserving. It waited for her. Hid in the croft and waited for her! Rage bubbled up through his guilt. If it was for me, why didn’t it come after me? Why this poor little child?

  “Talia?” he asked softly. “Can you hear me?”

  She did not stir, though beneath closed lids her eyes moved back and forth.

  “I fear you won’t get much out of her until it’s passed,” Madeleine said, standing at his side. “If it does pass.”

  He shuddered at the thought of her death, and the same sense of personal responsibility that had claimed him when he’d gone after the kraggin claimed him now. “Maybe we could heal her,” he said.

  And even as he spoke the words, he knew that was what he had to do— touch her with the Light and draw away the spore that was ravaging her tiny body. Whatever he couldn’t remove would be residualized, placed into a dormant state her body could better tolerate. It was not a skill at which he was adept—he’d never even used it before—nor was it without risk. In drawing off the active spore, he could easily transfer it to himself.

  “You know,” Trap said. “She may not be spore-sensitive at all. This thing strikes me as being closer to veren than feyna. Its spore may just be more virulent. Perhaps you should let me do it.”

  “Or maybe all three of us,” Madeleine suggested.

  “No,” Abramm said. “It was made for me. I’ll do it. Although . . .” He glanced over his shoulder at the family standing outside, watching him through the doorway. As usual, Trap picked up his meaning without his having to speak and stepped into the opening, blotting out light and the family’s line of sight at the same time.

  Abramm drew a breath, reminding himself that Eidon’s power could easily match anything lurking in this girl. Then he took her hand—it was limp and hot—and called her name. She did not move. He felt the spore in her as a faint buzzing irritant and reached cautiously toward it. At once she moaned and shivered, her eyes moving under the closed lids, her hand twitching against his palm.

  “My lord,” Meridon said from the doorway behind him, “stay alert. This may be a trap—”

  The girl shuddered, the tiny hand twisting to wrap her fingers tightly about his thumb. Breathy little whimpers burst from her throat as her head began to toss and the shudders increased in magnitude. Then, before he could assimilate what was happening, she rose up on both elbows and opened her eyes. They blazed with a green malevolent fire, twin suns in a black sky that snared his own gaze and in a heartbeat carried him into her memories. He stood, small and frightened in pungent-smelling darkness from which emerged a vision of blood and feathers and torn flesh, of a small, dark, manlike face with a short snout and gleaming teeth beneath bright green hatefilled eyes. A torrent of fear flowed into his soul, spinning new visions out of old, visions of blood and death and screaming pain all centered about the same beast—no longer small, but huge and powerful, with massive head and shoulders, sloping hindquarters, whiplike tail, clawed feet. It roared and ripped and spat, slashed and clawed in a blood-spilling frenzy, leaving its victims— men, women, even children—to wheeze out their lives in field and yard and street, mauled and maimed, attacked for one reason alone—because they were Abramm’s subjects, and thus were hated as much as he was hated. Watch and remember, Golden Prince. For as I do to them, so will I do to you.

  Dimly he heard the girl screaming, felt her hand tugging hard at his. He knew he must focus the Light and burn off this poison rushing into him, but the thought was carried away by new visions of horror and death. You cannot stop me. No one can stop me!

  He heard other voices, sharp with concern and warning, knew they were telling him something important. But they were so far away, and so faint . . . lost in the roaring of the beast and the screams of its victims.

  The monster became his only reality, its green eyes boring into him, the rankness of its breath raising his gorge. Suddenly he lay pinned on his back as a dark shape, impossibly big, loomed close above him
. Hot, stinking breath washed into his nostrils as a clawed hand hovered above his face, then slashed downward, tracking fire through brow and cheek. Blood trickled hotly down his temple and he gasped, as much in shock as in pain. The claw struck again.

  And again, slicing arm and chest and hip and leg, shredding skin and muscle into blood-soaked ribbons as his terror rose like a head of boiling foam. You will lose it all, Abramm Kalladorne. Crown and people and station. Face and skill and body. I will take it all and no one can stop me!

  And it was truth. He knew it was truth. This was a vision of what awaited him and he could not elude or evade it. It would happen.

  Then something closed upon his shoulder and white light burst through his darkness, swift and searing as a bolt of lightning in a howling storm. And no mere flash, either, but a current sustained and widening as it linked with the Light that lived in him. Night turned to day in an instant, the black torrent of fear boiling away like steam.

  He was left panting and dazed at the girl’s side, still on his knees, the scar on his wrist twitching and searing as if all the pain that had wracked his body had been drawn down into that one point. A twinge of headache, a ghost of the nausea brought on by recently active spore, and all was gone.

  The girl lay quietly before him, sleeping now, the flush of fever gone, the wounds themselves mere slender scabs rapidly on the mend. The hand on his shoulder withdrew itself as he breathed deeply and rocked back, feeling weak and dizzy. Outside a woman was wailing. Her mother, he thought. She must have heard the screams. Some of which were mine, I think.

  He wanted to go and reassure her, but the prospect of gaining his feet seemed a major enterprise. A moment later he tried anyway, and here were Trap and Madeleine to help him, their faces drawn and concerned, Madeleine’s in particular. Indeed, she looked as ravaged as he felt, her skin pale and damp, her eyes sunk into hollows of deep fatigue, as if she had been sleepless for days. It was her hand that had laid on his shoulder, he realized with a start. Her sharing of the Light that had delivered him, not Trap’s.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.” He still felt weak. “You?”

  “Tired. It was only after you.” She regarded him with concern.

  “What happened?” Trap demanded as outside more clamor erupted. Channon’s voice, firm and commanding, quenched it.

  Abramm frowned. “I think I saw what the girl saw when she was attacked. After that, the fear just took over and there were visions of—” He broke off, unable to speak as the memories came rushing back—the mist and the beast and the carnage. The green-flamed eyes with their vicious hatred. You cannot stop me!

  Not me, perhaps, but the One who lives within me can! But he had no sooner affirmed this truth to himself than his breath caught and his heart raced anew with the certainty that the beast was still here, watching him from some hideaway, waiting for its chance. Because it wasn’t just Abramm’s people it wanted, it was Abramm himself. And not merely to kill him, but to ruin him, little by little. Nightmare images flashed through his mind, stoking the fear into a panicked, neck-prickling certainty that if he didn’t get out of this hut right now, it would kill him.

  Swallowing, he forced down the rising terror and reembraced the Light, wondering if he might have some odd form of sporesickness. He could sense no active spore in him, though, so he forced himself to go on. “Visions of what it means to do, I think,” he said. “Not anything it’s already done.”

  “When it’s grown to full size maybe,” said Madeleine.

  “Which is why we must destroy it today,” Abramm said firmly, leaning away from Trap and balancing on his own two feet.

  “But it could be anywhere on this headland,” Trap protested. “The chances of finding it—”

  “It’s gone back to Graymeer’s.”

  Trap frowned at him, looking suspicious and half alarmed. “How do you know?”

  Indeed, how did he? A moment ago he was certain the beast was in this hut with him, breathing down his neck. Now he was just as certain it was in Graymeer’s. He looked from one to the other of them, helpless to explain and caught in a rising urgency to be off. “I know,” he said. “And we have no time to lose.”

  The other two gaped at him as he lurched toward the doorway, staggering when the room spun yet again. Meridon caught him just before he fell, then suggested he sit down. He wouldn’t. Shaking off the dizziness, he tried again, striding unsteadily through the doorway into gray daylight and the whitefaced regard of the crofter family, standing in a semicircle before the hut.

  Talia’s mother clutched her husband’s broad chest, her tearstained face turned toward Abramm. “She’s gone, isn’t she?” the woman cried, no longer attempting to hide her hostility. “You overstepped your place, and my little Talia has paid for it!”

  He stared at her uncomprehending.

  And here was Madeleine again, coming up close at his side to deliver him.

  “Actually, ma’am, the fever’s burnt out. Your daughter’s sleeping peacefully and should be up before long.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed, shifting from Madeleine to Abramm and back again.

  “See for yourself,” Abramm said, finally recovering his wits enough to speak.

  The woman flashed a disbelieving look at her husband, then rushed past them into the hut. As soon as she was gone, Abramm dismissed her from his thoughts, striding on toward Warbanner, who was prancing and tossing his head as if he sensed the turmoil in his master.

  “See that their chickens are replaced,” Abramm said to Channon as he took Banner’s reins and leaped to the saddle. “And bring them one of Hilda’s pups.”

  As they rode out of the yard, heading back toward the Longstrand road, they heard the crofter woman’s shriek of joy. Abramm took little pleasure in it, though, for in his mind’s eye all he saw were the mutilated corpses that would soon litter lane and yard and field if he did not find this beast in time.

  CHAPTER

  30

  They were just turning onto the Longstrand road when Everitt Kesrin and Ethan Laramor came riding out of the mist from Springerlan, Kesrin’s bodyguard Yacopan in their wake. They were bundled in leather and wool, and Laramor’s craggy face was pale—almost gray—and sheened with a film of perspiration. He did not look well enough to be out of bed, much less on horseback halfway up the headland. He also had trouble meeting Abramm’s gaze, his former hostility replaced by embarrassment and shame.

  After the requisite greetings, Abramm directed his attention to Kesrin. “So what brings you gentlemen out here?”

  “You, sir,” Kesrin said. “Ethan thinks he knows something about this mysterious beast that’s roaming the headland. And when we heard you’d ridden out to find it, well . . .”

  He turned toward Laramor, who met Abramm’s gaze stolidly and confessed he’d had an idea someone planned to create such a beast when they’d found the caged dog in Graymeer’s that day. “It’s called a morwhol, sir.”

  Abramm glanced at Lady Madeleine. “Yes, we found a reference to it in some old texts.”

  “I should have said something earlier, but . . . I was a suspicious fool, sir. Your uncle tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen. Now the thing’s loose.”

  Uncle Simon tried to warn you? Well, it’s nice to know I made some headway with him, even if everything has gone over the walls by now. He turned his thoughts back to the man in front of him. “We all make mistakes, Laramor. Had I made it clear from the start what I was, perhaps things would be different. And I doubt we could’ve stopped Rhiad anyway. Now, what can you tell me about this morwhol?”

  The border lord met Abramm’s gaze for a long, hard minute, then gave a little nod and proceeded to tell them of the blood feud of Lords NakNaegl and Breen. “Breen was the Terstan,” he said, “NakNaegl the powerful warlock who commanded the ells. He created the beast and set it loose. It killed most of Breen’s family in its hunt, finally cornering Breen himself not far from where
Breeton stands today, where it slowly tore him apart. Afterward, bound to him even in death, it stayed beside the remains, feeding on all who lived nearby or happened along. It took nearly fifty years to starve to death.”

  “According to the record I found,” Madeleine interposed, “the beast was captured by its maker afterward and used to intimidate serfs until it turned on him and consumed him. That it was his remains it stayed with.”

  Laramor shook his head, his clanlord earring glittering. “The beast turned on NakNaegl before it slew Breen. And it was NakNaegl’s son who claimed to have captured it, but it was really only a wolf in a cage.” His gaze came back to Abramm. “The beast itself was made for Breen and stayed with him until the end.”

  “So if this one kills me here today,” Abramm said, “you’re saying it will stay and feed off people in Springerlan until everyone moves away. And Graymeer’s will be twice cursed.”

  “I think it’s too young to kill you today, sir.” Laramor’s gray eyes met his own grimly. “Which is why you must find it first.” He proceeded to corroborate Abramm’s earlier speculation that it fed on the life energy of its victims, and that the more it killed the larger and stronger it would become.

  “Then we have no time to lose,” Abramm announced when he had concluded, the old urgency rising up in him. “We ride to Graymeer’s.”

  Laramor looked startled. “You know it’s there?”

  “I do.” He told them what had transpired at the crofter’s hut. “It seems I have some kind of link with it. At least I hope I do.” It would be dreadful to waste the time riding all the way up there needlessly, but at the moment he had nothing else.