The Outstretched Shadow

by Mercedes Lackey

  There was a booming sound in the sky, as loud as a sudden crack of thunder, and when Kellen looked up, he saw that one of the dragons had launched itself into the sky.

  Dragons?

  He’d wanted to see a dragon. Now he had that wish.

  It bore as much resemblance to the lizards of the forest as Shalkan did to a horse, and as little. Long sinuous neck, tail twice the length of its body, ending in a broad flat barb to help it to steer in the currents of the upper air.

  As he watched, its spread wings caught and held the light, glowing like colored glass, for somehow Kellen was aware that even though it was still night where his body truly was, what he was seeing was taking place in the day. The plates of its underbelly—all he could see at this angle, as it caught an updraft and began circling higher—glowed like burnished metal.

  And on its back rode the other-Kellen, the one to whom the summons had gone.

  All around him the tide of battle surged. Though a part of his mind knew that this was dream or vision, nothing that could touch him now, it was so real that it was easy to forget and be swept up in the urgency that surrounded him, the screams and cries of embattled men and creatures.

  All thought of Reality faded away as he looked around himself for familiar forms—for humans, Elves, unicorns—and saw none. To his left, a phalanx of towering figures in faceless red armor, twice as tall as a man, waded slowly into battle, swinging thick black clubs slowly before them and chanting rhythmically in deep rumbling voices. On his right, he heard a rumble of hooves, and turned to see a horde of bizarre cavalry rush forward, overtaking the giants. The animals were ponylike, but squatter and stockier, with cloven hooves, yellow eyes, and hairless skin and tails. They snapped and squealed at one another as they ran, like pigs or rats.

  Their riders matched their mounts in a chilling way; just as stomach-churning, as bestial, and as terrifying. They were the size of children, but their bodies were thick and apelike with muscle, and their skins were the dark purple-grey of an old bruise. Protruding yellow teeth, like a forest boar’s, deformed their mouths, giving their faces a brutish aspect, and their fingers ended in long hooked claws like a badger’s. They were dressed in rough animal skins, with what looked like animal bones braided into their coarse black hair, and they howled maniacally as they rode. Each carried an iron hammer and a long hooked knife thrust through his belt, the weapons dark with old blood.

  Were these the Allies of whom Jermayan had spoken so proudly? Kellen wondered in horror. He looked behind them, to where their General stood before his bright silken tent, its banners flowing proudly against the sky.

  Saw the glorious ornamented armor—

  Saw the wings—

  And realized, with a disappointment too deep for despair, that the Kellen who fought here today, the Kellen who rode his dragon high above the battle, the dragonrider who shared his name …

  Fought at the side of the Endarkened.

  But he lost. Jermayan said they lost! Kellen told himself desperately.

  Across the field, another dragon, then another, launched into the sky.

  Fervently, Kellen urged himself to wake up. He didn’t want to see any more. But all he seemed to be able to do was move himself from the hilltop—for so it had been, a thousand years ago—down onto the plain of battle itself.

  It was horrible.

  Here humans and Elves—and other creatures for whom he had no name—fought and bled and died. It was his own battle with the hill-bandits, magnified a thousand, a million times. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could plan something like this—or direct it—or be willing to go through it twice. He stood it for only a moment before he began to run. He didn’t care what this was—dream, nightmare, vision—he couldn’t stand it. If he couldn’t wake up, he had to get away.

  Above him, the two dragons wheeled and screamed, attacking the third that the other-Kellen rode. Their wings cast flashes of blinding light down onto the battlefield, as though someone overhead were holding a giant reflecting mirror over an anthill.

  Suddenly, there was a great ripple of magic across the field, and the light became brighter. With the sudden intuition of dreams, Kellen realized that up until now both armies had been fighting in a sort of spell-cast gloom that the Allied Wildmages had been able to break. He stopped and looked back.

  The Endarkened forces were burning.

  Not all of them, but enough. The horrible dwarves on their misshapen ponies had burst into flame and were running in circles, screaming, to be easily slain by the nearest Elf or human. The giants had stopped where they stood, toppling to the ground like disenchanted stone golems. Elsewhere on the field, other smoky pillars of flame indicated that there were other creatures of the Endarkened’s forces that could not bear the touch of true sunlight either—and whose end was far more spectacular. As Kellen stared, sickened and fascinated, the Allied army began to surge forward, across the battlefield toward the enemy position, regrouping and slaughtering as it went.

  It was a great victory.

  It was sickening.

  It was too much.

  “No! Make it stop! No! No—”

  “Kellen!”

  HE awoke—for real, this time—to find Jermayan shaking him, a hand over his mouth to muffle his shouts, and Shalkan standing over him anxiously.

  “Are you all right?” Jermayan said when he was sure Kellen was really awake.

  “I … sure. It was just a bad dream,” Kellen said, sitting up. But the details of the dream didn’t fade, the way dreams did with waking. If anything, they seemed to become clearer, sharper, as if they were an old memory that had just been waiting to be summoned to life.

  Had that been him—some ancient version of him? Or had the coincidence of names been no more than that—a coincidence? Lycaelon had always taken pains to remind him that he’d been named for a revered ancestor, that generations of Kellen Tavadons had upheld the honor and traditions of House Tavadon in Armethalieh. He wondered how proud his father would be of the name if he knew …

  “It must have been some dream,” Shalkan commented sourly.

  Kellen looked around. It was still full dark, sometime after moonset but long before dawn. Jermayan had lit the lantern, and was making up the fire to brew tea, the Elven panacea for all ills.

  “It was,” Kellen said in a low voice. He hesitated, not wanting to make things more real by speaking about them. But hadn’t keeping secrets caused enough trouble already?

  Enough of secrets. If there is something wrong with me, I want Jermayan to know about it, before—

  Before it was too late? But what if it already was too late?

  But perhaps it wasn’t. All he could do was to tell the dream, and let events play out as they would. “I dreamed about the battle … the one Jermayan said was fought here. I don’t know if it was real, or just my imagination, but …” He stopped, reliving the horror of the moment when he realized that the other-Kellen was fighting for the enemy, had actually embraced the fate that Kellen himself feared so greatly.

  “Probably a little of both,” Shalkan said. “You’d have to be blind and deaf not to feel a little of what happened here, but we didn’t have a lot of choice about where to stop, really. So what did you see?”

  “Monsters,” Kellen said bitterly. “Monsters, and dragons … they always talk about war like it’s such a grand adventure, but if real battles are anything like what I saw, why would anybody ever do that twice?”

  “Because the alternative to fighting is worse,” the unicorn said somberly. “Or people think it is. And in this case, we know it was. But that isn’t what’s bothering you, is it?”

  “No.” Kellen glanced past Shalkan’s shoulder. Jermayan was staying politely on the other side of the campfire, keeping busy with the tea-things and pretending not to hear, but Kellen already knew that he wasn’t out of earshot. Never mind. At the moment, he valued even the illusion of privacy for what he had to say.

  “There was someone there. A
Wildmage, I guess—an evil one. With my name. I didn’t see him clearly. He had a dragon. And he was fighting for the Endarkened.” The words came quick and harsh, and having said them, Kellen felt better and worse, as if he’d managed to gag up a meal of bad meat.

  “That’s bad,” Shalkan agreed, lowering his head to rub his cheek against Kellen’s in a quick caress. “But it could be nothing more than your own fears talking, you know.”

  “I know,” Kellen said, trying to convince himself.

  “No one knows the names of all the Mages who were corrupted,” Jermayan said, coming to kneel beside Kellen and place a cup of tea in his hand. “When we return, I can go to the Hall of Memory and discover what I can, if you wish. But no matter what I find: that man is not you. That you share a name, even a lineage, means nothing. A man is not his bloodline; a man is what he is.”

  “I know,” Kellen said miserably. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank, savoring the heat and the unfamiliar spicy flavor. They might be forced to exist on Elven trail-rations, but Jermayan had still packed a dozen different kinds of tea, suitable for every occasion. And the “small magics” of the Elves ensured you could get a hot cup of tea on short notice, even in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.

  “It just … I know it probably didn’t even happen, and if it did, it’s just some kind of coincidence. But I feel … betrayed. It’s stupid, but there just isn’t any other way to describe it,” Kellen said.

  “Yes,” Jermayan said softly. “And so were the great dragons of the earth betrayed in those days, who bound their immortality to a span of mortal years in a bond of love and more than love such as even we Elves can only dimly guess at, and found that love profaned in unimaginable ways when their Wildmage mates were corrupted by the blandishments of the Endarkened. It was in many ways the worst of all of the betrayals of the War, for the dragons could do nothing but what their mates willed, and so they found themselves fighting friends, battling their own kindred, and could not stop themselves, though their great hearts were breaking. Perhaps it is that sorrow you sense here, Kellen.”

  “This just gets better, doesn’t it?” Kellen said bitterly. It wasn’t bad enough that Darkmages were creatures of cruelty and evil—no, they had to ruin the lives of creatures who had even given up immortality for them. He took a deep breath and sighed. “Look. It won’t be dawn for hours yet, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep, but why don’t you at least try to? No sense in everybody sitting up just because I’m seeing ghosts.”

  “Fair words, Wildmage,” Jermayan said gravely.

  Kellen had thought Jermayan might argue with him, but apparently Jermayan did him the courtesy of assuming he knew what he was talking about. Without further discussion, the Elven Knight took the empty cup back from Kellen and banked the fire again before returning to his bedroll.

  Kellen pulled his blankets up around his shoulders more firmly. It was cold out here.

  “You can use me for a backrest,” Shalkan invited, kneeling down behind him. “Warmer that way.”

  “Thanks,” Kellen said, leaning back cautiously into the unicorn’s muscular softness. Soon the small camp was utterly still once more, save for the blowing of the wind and the faint rustling of the grass. The stars were very bright overhead.

  He’d wondered if Jermayan might have put sleeping herbs into his tea, but apparently the Elven Knight trusted him to make his own decisions and take their consequences, for Kellen remained wide awake. The memory of the dream-landscape overlaid the real one he now saw—a thousand years ago the land here had been more even. Forested, as Jermayan had said. Now the terrain was all blasted away to almost bare rock, the gentle slopes he remembered from the dream entirely gone.

  And it really didn’t matter whose magic had done it, Allied or Endarkened, because the end result was the same. What used to be the Forest of Tilinaparanwira was a wasteland, and even another thousand years wouldn’t be enough time to make it the way it had been before the Great War. All the survivors of that war could try to do was hold on to what they had left, because even as hard as they’d fought, they hadn’t fought hard enough to defeat their enemy once and for all. Shadow Mountain had survived, and the Endarkened were ready to go to war again.

  And if there was another war, no matter who won it, would there be anything left at all this time?

  If? In the cold hour before dawn, Kellen had the depressing certainty that it wasn’t an if. It was a when. And that when wasn’t far off.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Allies and Enemies

  HE DOZED OFF finally just as the sky was beginning to lighten, to be awakened as Shalkan moved out from under him.

  “Rise and shine,” the unicorn said, looking down at him. “It’s the start of a beautiful new day.”

  “I’ll rise,” muttered Kellen, rolling over on his stomach and hugging the blankets to him, “but I refuse to shine.”

  And in fact the day was hardly beautiful. Though the night had been clear and icy cold, clouds had rolled in toward morning, and the day had dawned—if you could call it that—cold, grey, damp, and overcast. Kellen gave thanks for the thousandth time that Elven armor didn’t rust, but there was no power on earth that could make it warm and inviting on a day like this. Even a mug of hot tea and a bowl of soup did little to cut the biting chill.

  He’d been going to do a Finding Spell to seek their path this morning, but after his experiences of the night before, Kellen hesitated to work any magic, still feeling off-balance and out of sorts. If they didn’t find any clear sign that they were on the right road by the time they stopped for their midday rest, he’d do one then, but he hoped he wouldn’t have to. The thought of the mounting cycle of debt and obligation that was a necessary part of a Wildmage’s life still bothered him. In the normal course of things, he wouldn’t mind—or not much—but right now, when any Mageprice might take him away from the vitally necessary task of placing the keystone at the Barrier, Kellen grudged any spell he needed to work, for fear its obligation would lead him astray.

  You’ll know what to do when the time comes… . All very well when you were not surrounded by enemies, with Demons sniffing for you, when you were in, say, Merryvale or the Wildwood and the most dangerous creature in the forest was Cormo. And it was easy enough to try and tell himself that since the Wild Magic “wanted” the Barrier broken, it wouldn’t put an obligation on him that interfered with that.

  Easy to tell himself that, but hard to convince himself. It was a matter of faith, he supposed, and he just didn’t have a lot of faith in anything or anyone, when it came right down to it.

  Not even in himself.

  And the consequences of refusing to pay for his magic were not to be considered … .

  IT was a relief, coming down off the hillside, to strike a real road at last. It wasn’t what Kellen would have considered a road at the start of their journey, but after so long traveling through the Lost Lands, even this narrow beaten track—obviously going from Somewhere to Somewhere, and frequently used by someone—was a welcome change, providing sure footing for horse and mule. The only thing that marred Kellen’s relief was that he still hadn’t seen any more clear signs of Endarkened Taint in their surroundings—although that wasn’t altogether surprising, since there wasn’t much around them to see besides rocks and a little sparse grass. It was hard for either grass or rocks to go awry in any noticeable way. How warped would grass have to get before he’d notice the Taint?

  I suppose it would have to be purple, or something.

  There hadn’t even been birds in the sky.

  Up ahead the trail forked. One branch led down, into a broad valley, while the other curved off and away around the side of a rocky hillside. Either could have been the right road.

  But there was a third path, almost invisible, a narrow goat track leading up over the crest of the hill at right angles to their present course.

  You will know what to do when the time comes.

/>   Certainty descended over Kellen like an invisible cloak. This was the moment the Wild Magic had prepared him for. Now was the time to pay his Price.

  “Which way?” Jermayan said, reining Valdien to a stop.

  “This way,” Kellen said, pointing toward the hill.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jermayan scoffed. “It goes almost straight up—and probably back the way we came, besides. The animals will never make it, and—Kellen! Come back here!”

  But Kellen wasn’t listening. There. There! Something—someone—needs me. Is in trouble! He couldn’t have turned aside from the path now if he’d wanted to. And he didn’t want to. “Come on,” he said to Shalkan. “We’ve got to hurry.”

  He didn’t know where the sudden sense of urgency came from, but the unicorn accepted it without question. Shalkan bounded up the goat track and lunged along it, as surefooted as the goats it was meant for. Kellen clung to the saddle, ignoring Jermayan’s frustrated shouting somewhere behind him.

  They reached the top of the hill, and Shalkan broke into a bounding run. Kellen didn’t know where they were going, but the demand of his obligation drew him onward, and he followed it without hesitation.

  In the valley ahead, there was actually some healthy-looking vegetation, trees, a stream—not lush, by any standards, but far more livable than the country they’d been passing through. Shalkan bounded over the stream, and headed up the hillside, following that goat track around the curve of the hill, and a small stone hut appeared up ahead, just under the crest of the hill, on the lee side—a shepherd’s croft, undoubtedly, the sort of crude construction of stone, mud, and thatch that the natives of the Lost Lands might build.