Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  I made on before sunup. Having gained time, I had no mind to lose it again.

  It was hilly country for the most part, though off to the east lay a flat, smoky plain, mirrored by countless dim green waters, so that it seemed at times portions of the bright sky had fallen there among its spreading osiers; the edge of some marshland I was glad to have bypassed.

  The second night, there was a cave. I slept too comfortably and lost some hours riding.

  That day the land peaked up, rough grassy country and thin woodland, spruce, oak saplings, pine and ivy-clad rock-thrusts, and here and there a great white mound of limestone, old quarries mined no longer and sprinkled yellow with premature wildflowers.

  Having got high enough, I watched some minutes among the trees, scanning through the cloud and sun-play over the terrain below and behind. It was raining northward, obscuring the insubstantial mountains. Presently, between the rain and the light, I made out a formation of dark specks. The hunt.

  They were less than a day away from me already, and had gauged my direction. Perhaps they had seen me on the skyline ahead, or picked up the marks of hooves in the softer clays of the marsh-skirting slopes.

  I remembered, with a sour irony, how I had tracked the Eshkir slavers through the mountains the spring before, guided by their horses and their negligence.

  I had rationed the hare, now ate none of it and rode on, dismounting at moonrise to rest the horse from me, but continuing on my feet and leading him. I had exercised care since I spotted the hunting party, keeping to cover, or skulking along under the tops of the hill crests.

  With the hunt this close, I needed stratagem rather than pace.

  I eventually foresaw I should have to relinquish my horse.

  It is the oldest trick of the quarry to dismount, and thrash his beast on ahead to mislead those who come after, yet it is not a step to be taken lightly. Once the horse is gone, he is gone for good, and then you are on foot, half as slow and half as vulnerable again as you were before. However, you cannot instruct your horse not to release his dung, not to make dents with his feet in mud, and, unless you want him wind-broken and dead, you can only force him to race for just so long, and no longer.

  The hunt had a guide, a clever one; I had reasoned this out. He could follow the horse tracks perfectly. The fifth dawn had come, and I saw riders gathered behind and below me in a narrow green trough under the hills. There were only nine or ten of them, and one—the guide—kneeled on the ground among some rocks, examining the place where I had allowed myself an hour’s sleep. That decided me. They were gaining rapidly, the guide was astute, they anticipated I should ride till I dropped from my saddle with bone-weariness. Thus, I must let the horse run on alone, and hope to make fools of them.

  I walked the horse till noon. The grassy hills had ragged tops of chalky stone; between, the way was level enough to give him some decent running. One of the Whip winds was blowing up from the north; at least he would not be plunging into it. I let him eat as we went, removed the bit and bridle, and loaded the saddle-pouches with clods and rocks to minimize the difference the depth of his tracks would show the guide, once I was off. I slung my water-flask about my neck, and set the horse easterly. I trusted he would not bolt onto the treacherous marshy plain, but keep to the edge of it. There was plenty of speed in him still, and the Eshkiri horses like to run.

  I stung him with my belt to make him go. It seemed a rough and thankless parting to offer a good mount, but there was no help for it. He shot forward, the grass spraying from his hooves, and shortly vanished over the green ridges under the blowing black and white sky.

  The ground was hard enough here, I hoped, to bequeath no track of my own. I turned due south, carrying the bit and bridle perforce, so as to leave no clue, and broke in to the rhythmic, mile-eating man-trot the boys learn in the krarl. If your legs and your lungs are whole, you can keep this up for quite a while and make excellent time.

  Then all my planning want for nothing.

  The wind cracked the sky open. A white lightning flash, and rain slanted on the gale like a gray sheet. Three flashes more and I was engulfed in a curtain of water.

  What would happen now was this. The rain would wash out the beguiling traces of the decoy horse; it would additionally form mud which, if the deluge ceased as abruptly as it had commenced, would dry the perfect imprint of my own footfalls. Meanwhile, blundering blindly through the wet, I would distribute as many obliging tokens of my passage as there were unseen bushes to trample through and branches to snap. There was also one other pleasing thing. Some horses will not turn in a storm. Maybe my Eshkorian steed would balk, freeze, or bolt back the way I had sent him, empty saddled, into my pursuers’ midst.

  I stood in the lightning-splintered rain, cursing myself to further thought. It seemed to me I should proceed no farther than to the nearest hiding place, and thereby create as few tracking signals as I could. The horse, if it continued going despite my doubts, would mark indications of its flight the guide might yet discover. And, whatever happened, they would not imagine me crouched at the wayside. They would believe I had pressed on.

  Accordingly I made up the adjacent slope to the little natural tower of limestone at its summit. Here, between two porous spurs, in the black glue of the mud, I resigned myself to waiting out the storm.

  It was to be a long, long wait.

  The storm battered on the hills, sometimes stampeding off a way, then returning. The rain and wind did not abate. Four hours must have passed, and with grim humor I began to keep a look out for the hunt. I had by then started belaboring myself; I should have foretold the foul weather, the warnings of it had been there to see, I should have retained the horse, I should have run on south, trusting the rain to hold and confuse my track. In short, I should have done everything I had not.

  Presently five riders dashed across the slope below, heading southeast.

  Obviously the party had split, no longer sure of my direction.

  They were all Kortis’ men. Even through the rain, I had made out their black, their silver skull-faces with black glass eyes. Only the captains of Kortis Phoenix Javhovor wore the uniform of my father’s guard. Still set on retribution?

  I wondered how far they would get before they came up with my horse, or else turned back for cover. I wondered, too, where the other four or five had taken themselves and if any of Erran’s soldiery were with them. Though my usefulness for Erran was over and he had no particular interest in vengeance, there were still his scientific philosopher’s experiments with my flesh. Maybe he had offered some reward for me, and Kortis’ impoverished captains were riding for it. Nemarl might have sent men, too. Yet there were only ten I had noted. Not many for the pelt of the Black Wolf, son of the Black Wolf of Ezlann. Perhaps there were other parties abroad I had not yet seen.

  This conjecture made me sullen, at myself, my situation, my lack of advantage.

  Suddenly three more riders came through the rain, this time moving slowly. As they drew level with my concealment, the first dismounted, kneeled in the mud, and cast about. The horse of this, the guide, was smaller and stockier, and he was unmasked. A Dark Slave. The two captains, hooded against the weather, showed me their blank silver skull-heads; then one reached idly to brush the rain away from a clump of grasses growing in the hillside. It was a fatuous womanish gesture, his wrist slender in its gauntlet, and so I knew him; Demizdor’s kinsman, Orek.

  “Well,” the other called to the slave, “what do you make of it?”

  The slave mumbled something in a stilted version of the city tongue.

  The captain said, “We have lost him, Orek, unless our luck turns.”

  Orek flung around in his saddle furiously.

  “No, by my soul, we shall find him. Ah! Why did Lord Kortis give us no bronzes?”

  “He thought it wasted effort. He would not set soldiery to catching Erran’s wo
lfhound.”

  Orek struck his thigh with his fist, that mannerism especial to girls and girlish men hoping to ape virility.

  “Erran shall not get him back when we have him, no, by the golden whore.” Then his voice broke like a boy’s, as if he wept. That surprised me. I thought, Does even Orek weep because he is angry? Before I could reason it out, he slashed his horse viciously with the silver-headed crop, and it floundered forward and away into the rain, after the rest.

  Next moment the Absurd took a hand.

  The remaining silver captain dismounted and began to lead his horse up the slope toward my limestone shelter, calling to the slave over his shoulder, “I’ve had enough bathing, fellow. I am for waiting here till the storm’s done. Ride and tell Zrenn where I am. Tell him they’ll be riding blind till midnight. We’ll find no tracks till this downpour’s spent.”

  The guide got back on his horse, and rode off northward to where, presumably, the remaining group of men were searching. The captain continued walking up the hill toward me.

  I had had plenty of roosting in the wet, and plenty of being hunted, too.

  I quickly unsheathed the bronze-mask’s sword I had stolen, waited till the silver man came around the first spur, then stood up and cut him clean through, breast to back.

  His glazing stare of surprise was evident, even through mask and smoked glass eye-pieces. I pulled off the mask and the rain danced on his eyeballs.

  The horse, used to storm and ungentle behavior, stood patiently, observing me with indifference. I looked at the wet black clothes of the dead man, his mask, his horse, and I thought, Why not?

  One quarter of an hour later, a silver captain rode down the slope, masked, gloved, hooded, leaving a half-dressed corpse wedged in the chalky mud of the hilltop.

  The captain had not gone far when two others rode up from the north, hailing him with cries and news.

  “Zrenn has made south, with Nemarl’s seven and the slave. He thinks Vazkor has gone that way, and Zrenn means to circle around and trap him between two bands.”

  “Does he?” said the silver captain.

  The two riders trotted over to him and cowered in the rain. If they had known how near dry dust they were, they would have savored every drop. The silver captain leaned to the nearest and knifed him between the ribs. As this one toppled, his neighbor, with an oath, snatched at his sword. Not quickly enough. The captain’s own sword, already bloody, went through his neck, ending oath, intention, and life.

  This silver captain, clearly a renegade and madman, thereafter turned his horse and galloped southeast, letting the rain clean his weapons as he went.

  We see what we have always seen. If it seems, it is.

  The renegade mad captain—I—soon came on three more silvers. The storm was slackening at last, in sinking buffets. The rain eased and left a sky purpling with dusk, with one brass hammerhead standing where the sun should have gone down. Beneath a rocky overhang, three men wrung out their cloaks and reviled nature, and spoke of Zrenn and Nemarl’s seven captains and the lack of bronze soldiery, and, noticing me, hailed me, and soon lay in the grass, one without his head.

  From being quarry, I had turned hunter, and it pleased me.

  These men who had jeered as they watched me writhe in Eshkorek now ended their quest on my blades. I should not, had they caught me, have ended so daintily. I did not mind leaving the clues of their corpses for guide and pack. Coming on their dead, the living must have imagined witchcraft was afoot in those southeastern hills.

  I was learning, too, from their snippets of dialogue before I killed them, the strength of their forces and their method of campaign.

  All told, there were eighteen silvers, seven of them Nemarl’s men, scouring the land for me. It appeared an odd number. If they were intent on having me, why send this few; if I was worth little, why bother with me at all? It seemed a personal feud, as before. I considered that Demizdor could have rallied her kinfolk on my trail, her bitter love curdling into hate again. That would certainly account for the small number of Kortis’ men, and for the sparsity, yet determination, of Nemarl’s band, for no doubt there were several in the city who were sweet on my blond wife and ready to run her errands.

  As for their plan—some rode ahead, less, now that I had had dealings with them; some rode around, circling for me. The storm had disorganized the hunt, and the wolf had fallen on the pack from behind.

  The night dawned black, rain-washed of its stars.

  The marsh had slid from sight to the east; the hills were leveling into rolling uplands of gray chalky turf and clawing trees.

  My body felt hollow from wanting sleep, but I had a powerful urge to keep going, and to say I had got no keen joy from killing my enemies would be to lie. In fact I was looking forward to next meeting them with a distinct thirst for blood, a raiding warrior again, with a store of fury to spare. I had been slave and coward and sophisticate too long in Eshkorek, and the gilt was wearing thin.

  Eventually, I saw a red glow on the black ahead of me.

  In an ancient quarry about eight feet below, a fire burned, and around it sat seven men. Two were unmasked skull-heads, the other five wore the ragged gray and saffron livery I recalled as being Nemarl’s. The slave guide was also with them, roasting over the flames on a skewer a couple of ill-skinned rabbits.

  I was curious to learn how they would eat these, the households of the two Javhovors, unlike Erran’s, keeping as they did to the pretense of secret stomachs. But I never did learn, for one of the skull captains turned to me, took in my gear and horse, and said, “Well, Skor, we have abandoned the search for tonight. Did you come across Zrenn and Orek and the rest out there, chasing their tails in the dark?”

  So it was the cousins of Demizdor who were yet absent, together with two of Nemarl’s men. All others I had accounted for, bar these in the quarry.

  “No,” I said. I was smiling in the mask, biting on the feel of violence to come. Seven men for killing. I never thought I should not do it. Even if they wounded me, I would heal. They were babes left in the grass of the lion’s run.

  “No? That’s a short sentence for Skor,” a man remarked. “What, no grumbles about the storm and the ride, and a wolf hunt with no wolf to be found?”

  “Oh, there’s a wolf,” I said.

  And I rode the horse straight over the edge and across the fire at him, striking him down as I passed, wheeling, and leaning to slaughter three more before they realized properly what devil was loose among them.

  The Dark Slave had tumbled aside. I took up his skewer, the roasting rabbits still fixed on it, and got another unmasked skull-head through the brains with it as he came for me.

  Then someone had stumbled the horse, which crashed over, and I with it. A man of Nemarl’s leaped on me; I twitched aside, and his blade, missing the heart, pinned my right shoulder to the earth. I wrenched up the length of it with a howl of agony and rage, and smashed my fist into his jaw, and as his head snapped back, I stabbed him left-handed in the throat.

  He fell on me, stone dead. I got up from under him and worked the sword out of my flesh. Only the slave and I remained. The last skull-head was scrambling from the quarry, yelling for Zrenn (or maybe for his mother; it was hard to be sure). I wished for an arrow or spear to bring him down, but had none, and a knife would not travel far enough.

  But I did not require an arrow. Now, when I barely needed it, I grew aware of the armament I had in me, as I had in Ettook’s painted tent.

  Yet it was not the same. On that occasion the energy had used me to escape into the world. Currently it seemed I could control the thing, saddle and ride it, and dismount when I was done. I pulled off the silver skull-mask, dropped and kicked it aside.

  Become easy, I scarcely felt it leave me, that sorcerer’s power, by the door of the eyes.

  A thin white skim of light over the quarry. The
yelling man floundering there let go his hold and flung wide his arms as if to fly, and dropped back among the scattered embers of the fire, and was silent.

  I felt dizzy, but not weak; I had contained the power, utilized it, and put it to rest. This exhilarated me. I turned about and found the Dark Slave still standing near me.

  His ugly face showed no fear, enjoyment, or chagrin at the death I had inflicted on his masters. But he got down, without a word, onto his belly, and pressed his face in the mud and ash before me. Then rising, still speechless, he sought the murdering skewer, the end of which was affixed in the forehead of a man, plucked off a part-roast rabbit, and loped away with it into the pit of the night.

  I had been worshiped as a god, and I had been ignored as valueless.

  Two strong liquors to mingle in one cup.

  My shoulder was spurting blood. I assumed it would heal quickly and paid no heed to it. Indeed, I was very arrogant about the matter. After this I remember little for several days.

  My game with the power of white light had cost me something after all. My wound was slow to close and bled much. Weary as I was, I must have staggered for miles, forgetting the horses or that four hunters remained to seek my trail.

  Somehow I eluded pursuit, or else my drunkard’s insane wanderings took me out of the path of it.

  I went mainly east, I think. At one point I rambled over a thread of river by a bridge of stone older than the old trees that grew there.

  I lost about four days in this obtuse state, and finally came to myself lying by some pool where I had crawled to drink like a sick bear. My wound was healed, and my thickheaded stupidity with it. The air smelled new to me, an open, singular smell, and the pool was salty.

  I muttered to myself that never again must I kill by use of a white energy harvested from the brain. But I sounded like a lunatic mumbling there. I could hardly believe any of it, and a sense of reality returned to me only in stages.