Shadows of Destiny

by Rachel Lee

  Erkiah waved a hand at his young charge. “Apologize not, my friend, neither to me nor to her. Apparently she waited only minutes after your ruse before scurrying off to meet her sisters at the temple and continue her own work. In other times, lovers might pale at such a thought. But you both know there is much to be done and little time in which to do it. The shame is only that you could not speak openly of it, one to the other.”

  “I fear I am not yet accustomed to marriage,” Tom said. “Nor is Sara, I suppose.”

  “I pray that you will have time to grow into it,” Erkiah said, sadness on his features. “For all that has happened, the greater burden lies before us.”

  “And Lord Archer’s strength will fail,” Tom said.

  Erkiah nodded. “Sadly, yes. Thus it is foretold. It weighs upon us to ascertain how, and when, and stand ready to fortify him.”

  “Show me those prophecies, please,” Tom said, walking to the shelves on which Erkiah’s scrolls lay. “Nothing we have learned together will matter if in this we err.”

  “You speak truth,” Erkiah said. “If my memory fails me not, that text is on the second shelf, third scroll from the right.”

  “If ever your memory fails you,” Tom said, reaching for the vellum, “the gods themselves will quake with fear.”

  “You do me too much credit,” Erkiah said, laughing. “I am but a man, and like any other I am prone to error.”

  “But not in matters of consequence.” Tom met his eyes, then unrolled the top of the scroll. “Eshkaron Treysahrans. Your memory does not fail.”

  Erkiah nodded and watched as Tom stretched the scroll over the table and weighted the corners with candlesticks.

  He shuddered and spoke. “I would that I had forgotten. This is a text I have not read since I was a young man. It frightened me so that never again have I touched it, save to pack it for my journey here, and unpack it upon my arrival.”

  Tom studied him gravely. This was not the Erkiah he had come to know, eagerly seeking knowledge as a hungry man at morning. “I would ask why it frightened you, but I know your answer already. You will tell me to read it, for then I will know.”

  “That is true,” Erkiah said, “though hardly prophecy.”

  “Of course it was not prophecy,” Tom replied, smiling. “It is simply what you always say.”

  “Prophecy,” Erkiah said, “would be to tell me why I say those same words each time.”

  Tom shook his head. “No, it takes no prophet to see this. If I simply commit to memory all that you say, I can never be more than your pale image in the mirror of time. Your wish is that I will be greater than that, and thus you compel me to read for myself and challenge you.”

  Erkiah smiled weakly. “I would that we had met in happier times, my son. Were it such, we might spar thus hour upon hour and take joy in the sparring. Alas, we have no such luxury.”

  “We will,” Tom said firmly. “We will.”

  The Eshkaron Treysahrans was the most difficult of the prophetic writings, but Tom slogged through it with a determination that Erkiah found both admirable and almost frightening. While the name of its author had been lost in the sands of time, Erkiah considered it to be among the oldest of the prophecies, and the one least changed by the pens of the intervening scribes, in large part because few had chosen to transcribe it. His copy might be the only one still in existence. If not, he doubted there were even a half-dozen others.

  The title of the work—The Death of the Gods—gave little clue as to its meaning. Unlike the titles of most prophecies, this seemed to have been chosen by the original author, for reasons that had little to do with illuminating the text itself. In fact, the author had gone to great lengths to avoid precisely that sort of illumination.

  The text was divided into three sections. The first was a series of riddles without either answers or, it had seemed to Erkiah, any connecting subject line. The second part was a fragmentary chronology, beginning with “the death of the last of the First” and ending with “the birth of the first of the Last,” without any context to identify what beings, or even what kind of beings, were referenced. The few scholars who had appended notes to this section had served only to muddle the issue, with interpretations ranging from the gods themselves to the Firstborn to the Ilduin and even, among the last scholars to attempt, to the Bozandari nobility.

  It was the third section—Aneshtreah, or “Admonitions”—which had struck fear in Erkiah those many years ago. In the style of a stern master writing to a recalcitrant young student, it was a series of warnings, each more dire than the last. Its central message was one about trust, or, more aptly, suspicion. It began:

  Trust not your mother.

  In pain has she born you, in hardship sustained you,

  And great her resentment, though hidden it may be.

  Trust not your father,

  For first when he spawned you was last as he fed you,

  And greater his wrath at the end of the day.

  And so it continued, admonishing the reader to trust neither man nor beast, friend nor foe, neither wife nor children, neither master nor servant, neither god nor priest. The cold dissection of each relationship left no room for honor, commitment or even love. The final stanza banished all hope:

  Trust not the Shadow,

  For shadow must fail in the presence of light,

  The Dark One must yield to the Fair in the fight.

  Trust not the Light,

  A dagger he wields for the heart entombed,

  While cruelty unbounded his soul attuned.

  “By the gods,” Tom whispered as he sat back from the scroll. His face was ashen. “It cannot be.”

  Erkiah nodded. “So I thought as well, my friend. And yet, thus it is written.”

  “Do I read this right?” Tom asked. “Lord Archer is the Shadow, and the Enemy the Light?”

  “The legends say that Ardred was the fairer of the brothers,” Erkiah said. “And surely it does not surprise you that Archer would be called the shadow. From his hair to his visage to the way he has slipped through this world almost unseen for all of these years.”

  Tom shook his head slowly. “But if that is true, then Archer will fail us.”

  Erkiah simply nodded.

  Tom’s face fell as he completed the thought. “And our future rests in the hands of Ardred.”

  Chapter Five

  The temple seemed troubled, Tess thought. All of the joy she had felt in its walls yesterday was gone, replaced by an aching sense of loss. She tried to avoid the statue of Elanor, hoping that perhaps some other niche, some other graceful curve of stone, would speak to her this time. Yet it was as if the stones had fallen silent, save for a grief that threatened to crush Tess’s heart beneath its weight. It was as if the temple had chosen this moment to mourn the loss of every fallen Anari.

  “It hurts,” Tess said softly.

  “Yes,” Sara said, tears in her eyes. “Why must it be thus? Cannot we have joy in our lives? Has all of the joy left this world?”

  “Perhaps the world was never a well of joy,” Cilla said. “Perhaps joy is something we must bring into it, as an act of will.”

  Tess shook her head. Anger grew within her, anger at the way death had stalked her these past months. It was an anger that seemed to spring fully formed from the grief she felt in the stones around her. She had been set onto this path by powers she did not comprehend, impelled and enabled by the death of her own mother, into a game whose rules and objectives were unknown and unknowable, and where the only certainties were blood, sorrow and horror. And death, death, always more death.

  Her jaw ached from clenching it as she tried to fight down the surging rage that swelled within her. Losing the battle, she reached for the statue of Elanor, not with the hand of a supplicant but with the hand of an interrogator.

  “What foul-tempered god,” Tess asked coldly, “would create a world of pain and misery, and lay upon its frail children the burden of creating joy and hope?”<
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  None, my child.

  The voice coursed through her like the shock from a cold stream, and for a moment Tess nearly yanked her hand from the statue. Then, as if steeling herself for battle, she placed her other hand on it.

  “Then make yourself known,” Tess said, a firmness in her voice that shocked even herself. “The times are too dire and our hearts too troubled for more riddles. We grow weary of your games. Make yourself known!”

  With a crack like the opening of the world itself, the temple flooded with a light so intense that Tess had to turn her face away. Elanor’s presence filled the room, causing the hair on the back of Tess’s neck to rise and her heart to thunder.

  You have wielded the sword of the Weaver, but do not dare challenge me!

  “I dare and I do!” Tess shouted. “Look at my sister, in tears on the day after her wedding, when she ought to be lying in the arms of her true love, coming here to learn more of that which we need for our journey! Look at my other sister, her heart filled with love and longing for one who cannot know love through the scourge of battle. Look at us and tell us that we have not bled and wept and walked in this path that you have set for us! Look at us and tell us that we are not worthy of even the barest comfort!”

  Worthy? Elanor raged back. Would the worthy have rent the world asunder at the start? Would the worthy have set upon this world a race too weak to protect their sons and daughters from the slaver’s block? Would the worthy have gone into the service of Chaos? You speak to me of worthy? ‘I dare and I do,’ you say? Then dare it and do!

  “Tess,” Sara said urgently, taking her hand. “Tempt her not.”

  “No!” Tess cried, jerking her hand away. “This must be! Too long have we watched our brothers and sisters slain, our hopes dashed against the rocks like so much worthless pottery. Too long have we quailed before gods, only to see those gods leave us to the wrath of our own kind. We sisters, cursed to see the deaths of our own mothers, that we may become pawns in the games of those gods. No more! No more, I say! I command you, make known yourself!”

  You command me?

  “Yes,” Tess shrieked, her voice rising above the rushing roar around her. “I command you!”

  In an instant it felt as if all of the air had been sucked from the temple. The light swirled and compacted, growing brighter moment by moment, until it distilled into the form of a shimmering snow wolf.

  “It cannot be,” Sara said, aghast.

  “Aye,” the wolf replied, amber eyes flashing. “Tell me of commands now, Weaver. Tell me that I have not walked beside you, seen what you have seen, borne what you have borne, and more, more than you will ever know? Tell me that my sisters and I have not succored you in your need, from your first battle with the minions of Glassidor to your battles in these mountains to your entreaty to the host within your midst just this morning. Tell me that I have left you alone, and that alone you have faced these hardships. Tell me that I have not guided your steps to this day. Then, and only then, I will attend to your commands.”

  Tess, shaken to her core, fell to her knees. The rage and anger born of danger and fear gave way to racking sobs. “I did not know. I did not know.”

  The wolf stepped closer, and its muzzle nudged her cheeks, its delicate tongue drawing out her tears. “Faith is found when we do not know, my child. Faith and courage alone can carry you through this time of trial. Never would you have found it had you known.”

  Tess nodded, shame and anguish rolling through her in equal measure. Finally spent, she felt her sisters’ hands upon her, stroking her shoulders. The wolf sat before her, its face impassive, patiently waiting.

  “You must not tell any other of this,” the wolf said. “None but Ilduin blood may know it, and none but Ilduin blood would believe. You must find your sisters, those whom the Enemy has not yet taken. You will know them when they see me.”

  “And you will stay with us?” Tess asked.

  The wolf smiled. “We are of different worlds, my child. I can no more stay with you than can the wind. I—we—will be with you as we have always been.”

  “May I never see another snow wolf pelt,” Sara whispered, remembering the trappers in the mountains around her native Whitewater.

  “We forgive them, for they do not know,” the wolf said to Sara. “Do likewise. Always.”

  And then the wolf was gone as if it had never been, save for a single, snow-white hair on the statue of Elanor. Tess, as if bidden by an unknown force, took the hair with trembling fingers and tucked it into the pouch with the Ilduin stones.

  Rising unsteadily to her feet, she took a moment to gather her determination and will once again. “Come, sisters. There is work before us. And hope.”

  “One thousand, three hundred and sixty,” Topmark Tuzza said, looking across the table at Archer. “Twelve strong companies, enough to form a single regiment. That is how many men I have fit for battle. Perhaps another four hundred could be ready in a month. The rest…”

  Tuzza sighed. He had brought six thousand men into the Anari lands. More than half now lay in unmarked graves along his route of march, victims of disease, hunger, the incessant Anari raids, and the final battle in the canyon. He had presided over the worst disaster in the history of the Bozandari Empire.

  As if reading his thoughts, Archer said, “And your men are willing to follow you again.”

  Tuzza shook his head. “They are loyal to the Weaver, because they have witnessed her miracles. They are loyal to their Topmark—whomever that might be—because of their training. But I have no illusions of their loyalty to my person, Lord Archer. Whatever loyalty I might have inspired was bled white along their journey here.”

  “Personal loyalty is a fickle thing,” Archer said. “Only our Enemy can rely on absolute loyalty, and only because his magicks have broken the wills of his minions. No man should ask for such.”

  “That much is true,” Tuzza said.

  “What of your officers?” Archer asked. “Do they still trust in your judgment?”

  Tuzza nodded. “What few remain, though I worry of them as well. Too many of my best officers—those inspired by their deeds rather than their words—fell with their men. And too many of those who remain have come to me petitioning for promotion. They assert claims of noble blood, spin tales of their courage, and whisper against their comrades.”

  “Such men are not fit for command,” Archer said.

  “And well I know it,” Tuzza replied. “Yet I have not enough officers as it is.”

  “Your men would not serve under Anari officers,” Archer said. It was neither a question or a criticism, but simply a statement of fact.

  “No,” Tuzza said. “They would not.”

  Archer sat for a moment, as if pondering the dilemma. Twice he made as if to speak, bringing Tuzza forward in his chair, before shaking his head and drifting again into his thoughts. Tuzza could well sympathize, for many long hours had he spent on this same question.

  Finally, Archer spoke. “We have already decided that your men will establish a new camp, alongside the Anari.”

  “Aye,” Tuzza said. “I will go this afternoon to look at possible sites, and draw up plans.”

  “Do not,” Archer said. “Rather, use this as an opportunity to test and select those who would serve as your officers. Simply assemble your men and direct that this be done. Your real leaders will emerge.”

  “Yes, they will,” Tuzza said, a smile working its way across his features. “I will see who can talk and who can act, who can say ‘go and do it thus,’ who will say ‘follow me,’ and whom the men will follow.”

  “And always with an eye toward those who will enlist the aid of their Anari brethren,” Archer said. “For in our time of need, we need to turn to one another.”

  “That,” Tuzza said, sighing, “may be a sticking point for some. I need leaders, Lord Archer, and not merely men who will be puppets of the Anari.”

  “Certainly,” Archer said. “And you should demand no les
s. But one need not be a puppet to ask where water may be found, or where wood or stone are at hand for building. There are Anari who still do not trust you and who would lead you astray. You must have leaders who can discern whom they can trust, and enlist their help without giving undue offense to those Anari who would object.”

  Tuzza could see for himself the truth in Archer’s words. “The campaign before us will be unlike anything we Bozandari have before conducted. We have never fought beside an ally. We have never needed one.”

  “But now you do,” Archer said, nodding. “This will call for leaders who can meld their actions with those of their Anari brethren.”

  Tuzza drew a breath. Long had Bozandari command been rooted in bloodlines and patronage. He himself was a minor noble, and a beneficiary of the very system he was now compelled to overhaul. “There are some among my officers and men who will resist and resent any change that does not recognize their heritage. They may resent even more those whose positions remain unchallenged.”

  “Such as your own?” Archer asked.

  “Precisely,” Tuzza said. “It is not enough for me to direct my men, and then stand above them, testing them. I must put myself to the test as well.”

  “Then do so,” Archer said. “For I have no doubt that you will pass this test, and perhaps in the passing of it, restore your own confidence.”

  Tuzza shook his head. “No mere test can erase the stain I bear, Lord Archer. Still, there is no other way to prove myself to them. And prove myself I must.”

  As Archer left Tuzza’s tent, the problems of the coming war weighed heavily. In its own way, this would be a far more challenging task than those they had faced thus far. Not only must Tuzza find officers who could work with the Anari, but Archer must find Anari officers who could work with the Bozandari. And this promised to be no mean task, especially when one of his chief lieutenants—his longtime companion, Ratha Monabi—was still dark with fury and grief over the death of his brother Giri. Worse, Ratha had watched Giri die, at Tuzza’s own hand.