Dalamar The Dark (classics)

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  "With the help of Lord Garan, with the prayers of Lady Elaran, with the iron goodwill of Lord Keilar and each of the House Holders, I will do as you wish, my lord king."

  So close did she stand to him that Lorac saw the first tear shining in her eyes. None other saw what he did, the pearl of her grief. They saw only a princess whose courage matched her beauty, Alhana Starbreeze whom they would follow anywhere, even into exile.

  On the last day of the month of Autumn Twilight, the day elves named Gateway, the sky stretched out over the Cooshee Gulf, hard and bright and blue as ice. Winter prowled near, the wolfish season whose teeth were cruel, whose claws knew nothing about mercy. Gulls creaked in the sky, and wind hummed along the ratlines already skimming over with a thin coating of ice.

  The deck beneath Dalamar's boots groaned, an aching sound as though the ship could not bear the thought of leaving the shore and must moan for the loss of sweet Silvanesti. Such moaning as this was heard all through the close-packed hold of King's Swan, the cries of the seasick and the weary and those who felt the strings of their hearts stretched tight to breaking. All around the ship other vessels bobbed, rising and falling with the sea, as one after another, captains set sail and left the bay to follow Wings of E'li, Lord Garan's flagship. King's Swan would have her turn soon.

  Dalamar leaned his arms on the rail and looked out across the bay to Phalinost, gleaming in the last light of day. Gulls sailed around the tall towers, gray ghosts haunting the empty city. Dalamar imagined that no one lived there now but the rats and the gulls. What he thought was very nearly the truth.

  We are all exiles.

  How spectacularly the gods of Good had failed the elves, who had in all ways professed their abiding love for these deities! They did all for these gods, the children of Silvanos. They permitted no other worship, no other magic, no other gods within the borders of their kingdom.

  Dalamar shook his head, eyes on the restless waters of the bay. So much the elves had lost in that trust, so much. E'li and his clan had not been worthy of that love. He thought of Lord Tellin, one among many who'd died for faithless gods. He thought of all the others, the Wildrunners and Windriders, the refugees on the road, all turned into corpses and exiles. Where, then, were the gods they trusted? Nowhere, nowhere to be found.

  In the north, upriver beyond Silvanost, lay four spellbooks, three small and one large. He had never had a chance to take them out from the cave, and now they lay hidden, perhaps until some soldier of Phair Caron's stumbled upon them.

  But the king will save the city. He will save the land. No minion of the Highlord will dare set foot in the heart of the kingdom… So said everyone aboard this ship, and everyone aboard the others.

  Everyone but Dalamar. You leave a thing, you lose a thing. And so the books were lost to him, but he didn't rage and he didn't sorrow. They were but a few of many things lost in the abandoned kingdom. Perhaps it was that he'd gotten from them all he needed-more magic than the mages of House Mystic would give him. A glimpse, said a dangerous thought, of a darker god than elves liked to see. What promises did he make, Nuitari, who was the son of Takhisis and the god of vengeance? How well did he keep them? Dalamar didn't know, but he wondered.

  A woman's voice shouted "Look!"

  Dalamar saw a sailor point to the sky. High above, where stars had just waked to wonder what great voyage of elves was about to challenge the sea, the sky had changed from deepest blue to the sickish throbbing green of a wound too long unattended, of flesh rotting.

  "In Zeboim's name," the sailor whispered. Her cheeks, sun-burnished and brown, drained to ashen. "In her sea-blessed name, what's happened to the sky?"

  She swore by an unchancy goddess, the tempestuous daughter of Takhisis, but Dalamar noted that no one of the E'li-worshiping elves had anything to say in response. What should any landsman have to say about the niceties of worship to a sailor who plied Zeboim's realm? Nothing. At the rails dark figures gathered, sailors and Wildrunners and some passengers. All looked up, their faces shining ovals in the darkness. Some pointed to the sky, some kept still, and those, Dalamar was certain, were praying.

  The waters of the bay woke, rough and restless, shoving against the shores of Phalinost. Upon the waters the waves ran, like horses galloping to the shore. Dalamar shuddered. The proud arched necks of the waves, Zeboim's Steeds the sailors named them, wore a green tint, and he thought of corpses washed up on the shore, the wreckage of a ruined ship, men and women with seaweed tangled in their hair.

  His heart racing, Dalamar gripped the rail. The waters of the bay grew stronger, the waves heavier, and the deck rolled beneath his feet. In the sky, the green glow deepened.

  "Some ploy of the Highlord's," an elderly elf-woman murmured. Her husband hushed her, but she went on. "Some new evil of hers to bring against the kingdom!"

  Someone's prayer rose up above the frightened voices. "Into your hands, O E'li, we put ourselves. In perfect trust and with perfect faith. We are yours, O Shining One! O Champion Against the Dark, remember us, for we are yours!"

  All around the deck people calmed, their voices weaving together in comforting prayer. Trusting, they offered themselves to the god who had not shown himself since first Phair Caron's army savaged Nordmaar, whose own dragons had not come to do battle against the evil dragons of Takhisis. "But he is near," they said. "He will come," they assured themselves, "and he will defend us." Even as the sky above the forest throbbed with eerie green light, even as the best beloved lifted sail and fled, they prayed and they hoped.

  Only Dalamar was silent, only he did not pray. In the gods of his fathers he had no trust, for he had seen it broken, time and again. Blasphemy! He knew it. Elves have been cast out for such thoughts, banished from the company of the Children of Light, left to die in the outworld.

  Yet, strangely, as he stood shivering in the cold winds off the water, watching the shore fall away, the strange green sky grow distant, Dalamar Argent did not fear his thoughts. He looked around to be sure that no one guessed his blasphemy, but the thoughts themselves-why, they held no fear for him.

  All the voices of his past swirled around the ancient king. The voices of childhood, his playmates, his fellow students in the Academy of House Mystic, the young girls in the meadows plucking the flowers of spring and braiding them into their long shimmering hair. Hair like the pelts of foxes; hair the color of a deer's dark eye; tresses like honey poured from the jar. Among them was one who shone like a jewel, golden-haired, her eyes keen and gleaming as brightly as the north star, a light for hearts to steer by. Lorac Caladon had steered by that light all his days.

  By the light of Iranialathlethsala's eyes he steered yet, for he saw those eyes in the crystal globe that was his dragon orb.

  Your orb, yes, sighed the artifact of Istar. I am yours, and in me you will find all that you need. Look! Look deeper, come closer, find in me what you must have. The voice sighed, soft as the wash of the Thon-Thalas against its banks, soft as a breeze, and it seemed to the elf-king that the voice changed a little. He would not have that it sounded like the voice of his dear Iraniala, yet it did recall her voice, perhaps in the cadence.

  My love, he sighed, in his heart, without words. Countless years of joy he recalled, and these were not embittered by the years death had denied him. My love!

  Your land, said the orb. Your kingdom, your people. The Dark Queen lurks at your borders, king.

  Lorac shuddered, and upon the marble walls of his great audience hall that shuddering was seen in shadow as curtains of darkness flowing down from the heights of the great tower, as light from the moons and the stars did flow.

  Takhisis will tear down your kingdom. She will lift up the pieces as her warriors lift the bodies of your slain-spitted upon spears running with blood!

  To hear those words spoken in rhythms so like those of Iraniala's, in a voice gone suddenly soft as hers had been, was to hear a terrible doom proclaimed with all the weight and authority of Iraniala's own magic. She had
been a Seer…

  And she had foreseen her own death. O gods! My Iraniala! I am doomed, she had said on the day she knew the name of her illness and the day of her death. I am lost!

  The world is lost!

  So said the voice that was not hers and yet seemed so like to hers. The voice of the dragon orb turned mocking suddenly, as the wind shifting over the sea, it turned hard and cold as sleet.

  What do you quest after, elf-king? Your queen so long dead? How can you think of her when a darker queen, a Warrior Queen, stands upon your doorstep, ready to tear apart your kingdom and make of your people her most wretched and despised slaves, your men for her armies, your women for their whores, your children for the meat on the boards of her minions so dark and terrible that even she has not granted them names?

  Shuddering turned to shivering. Lorac returned his gaze to the orb.

  She stood in the crystal silence of the dragon orb, a woman tall and slender, she whose eyes were his guiding light, whose heart held his love, whose body had held and delivered forth a daughter of such rare beauty that poets must shape new forms with which to tell of her grace and charm.

  And now he saw his daughter, shown to him in the glass, his Alhana Starbreeze, standing at the prow of Wings of E'li, his flagship, his pride. The salt winds blew back her hair, a dark pennon sailing against a leaden sky. She lifted her hand to shade her eyes against the limitless horizons.

  Lost! She is lost!

  His heart twisted, wrenching in his breast, and he saw all the fleet behind his flagship, straggling out and losing their way, some turning east and some north. The wind in the sails roared, and it moaned down the ratlines, humming in the ropes like mourners at a funeral.

  The world is lost! So said the wind, so said the voice of the orb.

  "No!" cried the king, sitting back from the orb but never taking his hands from it. "Show me no dark visions! Make good your promises, the ones you tempt and tease with."

  The green light pulsed, a heart beating in stone, a mind roaming and questing always, touching his and dropping back, then touching again.

  Very well. You have been a long time admitting your wish, Elf-king, but I am here to grant it. Now heed, and heed me well! What you want can be, and I will be the agency of its birth. You need only dream.

  Only dream. Lorac sat closer to the crystal globe again, letting himself touch the green glow with his mind. Only dream. He closed his eyes, and yet he saw the beating light.

  Now you must trust me, isn't it so, Elf-king? You must trust me as once I trusted you.

  A shiver of memory rippled across Lorac's mind, across the green glow and the mind of whatever being touched him through the crystal.

  Dream, Lorac Caladon. Dream of the world you will save, dream of the people who will go all their days touched by your vision. Ah, dream, Elf-king.

  "Who are you?" Lorac whispered.

  In his mind, in his heart, he felt as though someone had smiled upon him. Warmth filled him, bone and blood, and it seemed to him then that he sat in a garden on the first day of spring when breezes are perfumed with the waking of the world. He heard his heart beating, and the green light pulsed in perfect rhythm to match.

  I am he who will save your lost kingdom, Elf-king!

  Until now Lorac Caladon had been very careful not to engage the mind he sensed living in the orb, very careful not to extend his own magic to touch the magic within the crystal sphere. This was, after all, an artifact out of Istar, and it was a thing that had lived in older days than even those of the Kingpriest. Still, he dared now what he had never dared before, what all his training and all the wisdom of his many long years had cautioned: Do not engage the magic of such a thing as this dragon orb. Do not, unless you are certain you can control it.

  He touched the magic, and as his hands grasped the orb, he felt it running in him, eager and swift.

  I am yours, said the orb, like a woman sighing in her lover's bed, like the shore to the sea.

  "You are mine," whispered the elf-king, his face hollowed by shadows, made unwholesome in the green light.

  Unwholesome, green, and sickly… but when he saw his reflection in the orb, he saw himself not as unwholesome, not as one whose shadow-sculpted face most resembled a skull. When he saw himself in the orb, King Lorac Caladon saw a young warrior with a shining sword girded on, a king to save the land, a father to rescue his children from the dark terrors of the night. A soldier of E'li, of Paladine the Eternal Champion!

  In the globe, in his mind, the elf-king lifted up his sword and all the light of stars, the light of the red moon and the silver, chased down the steel, running like water and blood.

  Beneath his hands, the orb shifted size, growing, swelling, so that he must extend his arms now to keep his hands on it, wide as though to embrace it. In the crystal he dreamed himself a golden warrior in the heart of his kingdom. All around him in vision he saw the forests and glades, each tree gently shaped and coaxed, grown by the devoted elves of House Woodshaper, those whose blood knew the blood of the sprits of nature. He saw the mighty Thon-Thalas running down to the sea, surging past the cities and the towns, running past the towers of his people. In Silvanost, the precious jewel upon the breast of the Sylvan Lands, the temples to the gods shone pearly white in the streaming sunlight, clustered round the Garden of Astarin. His heart swelling with love, Lorac Caladon cried:

  "We are the children of the gods! We are their firstborn, their best beloved! We are what gods meant all the mortals of the world to be, and we are most deserving of their love!"

  He shouted it, that shining warrior, and he never blushed to wonder whether he was wrong. How could he be? Centuries of lore had taught him this creed, and when he looked around him, in waking and in vision, he saw the proofs of lore everywhere.

  "For the Sylvan Lands!" cried the warrior, his yellow hair blowing back, his eyes shining.

  Behind him where he did not see, in the tiniest corner of his vision, his saving-dream, a small corruption throbbed, a darkness on the land like the first small spot of disease upon the lung of a fair young queen. Unseen, unfelt yet, still it was there and quietly killing.

  In the Tower of the Stars, the elf-king howled high to the heavens, shrieking to the gods. So loudly did he scream that the echoes of his agony rolled 'round and 'round his circular walls, like thunder never-ending. So long did he scream that his throat began to bleed, and he would have choked on the blood, but that was not to be permitted.

  Out from the orb leaped a dragon, wings wide, fangs gleaming, he who had been prisoned there since before the days of Istar's glory, who had watched as a kingpriest thought he might like to become a god, who had found a way out of the destruction to come by whispering his dire warnings and false promises to a young mage flushed with his first glory, to Lorac Caladon. He had heard Takhisis call her dragons and wake them. Like fire in him, the sound of the goddess's call, like flames running all through his mind and his soul. Awake! Awake! My dragons, awake! But, enspelled and unable to find a way out from his crystal prison, Viper had remained trapped-until now.

  The touch of a reptilian mind, cold and dry and with no other feeling than death-lust, froze the mind of Lorac Caladon, making motionless his hands. He could not scream. He could not breathe. He felt that mind twine around his like a snake around the limbs of a helpless child. His heart had no prayer. Fear felled faith. His soul turned chill, and the magic in him writhed like something dying.

  And then-in an instant! — that dragon-mind was gone from his, the grip broken. Lorac breathed, but only once. Then came another mind, a stronger one, and this one seized him heart and soul in a taloned grip the like of which Viper could not hope to achieve. Too late, too late, he knew he had opened the magic of the orb and that was like opening a door. Another dragon, this one stronger, this one crueler, came rushing in. Viper roared, but the sound of his fury was already distant, the beast banished. In the soul of Lorac Caladon, a voice whispered words, like fire rushing, like wild wind
in the winter-bare forest, the voice of another dragon.

  Now you may scream, my little mageling-king!

  Lorac did scream, so long and so hard that at last he became voiceless. Yet, unvoiced, still he screamed, and all his dreams of the golden warrior come to save his kingdom turned into nightmares, dreams grown so hideous as to sow the seeds of madness into a mind once celebrated for wit and wisdom and cunning.

  He did not scream wordlessly, and he did not howl as beasts howl in the wilderlands. He screamed the words he had learned at his mother's knee.

  "We are the land, the land is us!"

  And so-it must be, it must be, for the mightiest mage of the Silvanesti spoke in the fullness of his magic-the insanity of the king fell upon his land and every living thing became warped, twisted in body, twisted in soul, imprisoned within the nightmare of the king as Lorac Caladon fell spiraling into despair.

  The Nightmare King went out from his palace, his Tower of the Stars, and before him his guard of Wildrunners ran screaming, their faces etched in horror, their eyes the eyes of those who stand at the brink of the Abyss, the dread of damnation opening before them, the bone-white hands of the Dark Queen reaching to snatch them. In prayers one hears of that place-Save us from the Abyss, O E'li! Turn our step from there, O Guardian of Light! — in the darkest hours of night one imagines it. These, the flower of Lorac's army, the ones who would not leave their king no matter the danger, these saw the Abyss, that place in which dwells the darkest of goddesses and all the torments she can devise, torments for the body, the flaying of flesh, the shattering of bones, the blinding, the mutilations, the rivers of blood and fountains of tears. He showed this to them, with his merest glance he shaped it like their worst fears, their most secret dread. Wailing like demented children, they fled him, the Nightmare King. He laughed to see them flee, laughed to feel their madness running in him as though it were the blood running in his veins.