Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  That moment had been glorious. The next, the elves came, a raiding party from Greater Faery, determined to slaughter the Maizan Warlord as well as Elora herself.

  They failed, but the battle still gave the young woman nightmares.

  “Didn’t help matters,” Renny was saying, “she vanished that night, with you an’ Drumheller. It was weeks before you reappeared at Tregare. Politics abhors a vacuum as much as nature does. Into that vacuum went a lot of fears.”

  “So you mean to accept the Maizan terms?”

  “Hells, no. Freedom is our birthright, paid with the blood and sacrifice of too many generations to cast it aside. Resistance isn’t the issue, it’s whether we’re better served with Elora Danan by our side or without her.”

  “And?”

  “Minds aren’t made up. The only consensus is that nobody’s comfortable with her running loose, as a free agent. My men are searching for her as we speak, through that crowd yonder. They find her, there’s a suite waiting inside the Citadel.”

  “Do they truly believe they can take her, much less hold her?”

  “My secret hope is, it won’t come to that. I see her ever, I’ll have to do my duty. Otherwise…” He let his voice trail off.

  Khory hitched her sword belt, shuffled her feet, sighed. As far as she was concerned, the conversation was done.

  “For the record, Constable,” she said truthfully, “I’ve not seen her since I came through the Gate.”

  “Nor I” was his reply. “And I pray to keep it so.”

  He looked around them, raking his eyes along the shore of the island, examining the bridge. He and Khory stood quite alone.

  It was near to day’s end, and the city’s workers were on their way home, adding exponentially to the crowd in the plaza. Elora joined that throng, moving with weary confidence, just like those around her. She caught a trolley and rode it along one of the broad avenues that radiated outward from the plaza like the spokes of a wheel, past Ministry Row (wherein much of the essential bureaucracy of national government did its much-maligned but altogether essential work) to University. From that stop, she proceeded on foot over a half-dozen bridges (of the hundreds) that connected the many patches of rock and earth that dotted the floodplain formed by the upland rivers that spilled over the Wall.

  Her original destination was a modest islet called Madaket, whose teahouses and coffee bars, cabarets and taverns, provided entertainment for both students and government employees. One of those taverns was an establishment named Black-Eyed Susan’s, so named for its proprietor, where Elora had earned her keep as a troubadour. But when she reached the Street of Lost Dragons, she kept on going. She had too many friends here, she was too well known, this had to be one of the first places Renny Garedo’s Constabulary would look for her.

  Instead, she turned her steps back toward University, and the home of another friend.

  His living quarters were a moderate disaster. Giles Horvath was one of those academics who cared little for his person but lived instead for his work. So while it was only through the stalwart efforts of his housekeeper that his house wasn’t condemned for a myriad of health reasons, his study and library—where he did his research and the bulk of his teaching tutorials—were comparatively spotless, the contents of his library meticulously cataloged and filed.

  For all his personal carelessness, Giles was a gregarious soul, who enjoyed social interaction and tried his best to be good at it. Thusly, when Elora appeared quite unexpectedly at his door his initial reaction was to offer tea. He made the usual apologies about the state of his kitchen and ushered her instead into his study while he busied himself with boiling water and gathering appropriate fixings and crockery. Elora couldn’t help a grin of recognition as she noted his dishes were as mismatched as ever, with no two pieces of the same set and most of it looking like he’d collected it from a low-rent jumble sale. While she waited, she set out her own gifts for him, the rich dark fruitcake he loved and a selection of buns and cakes, which she’d charmed to stay fresh until he chose to enjoy them, no matter how long that took.

  “Oh my” was what he said in delight when he beheld her modest bounty. “Oh my,” he said again as he plopped into the chair opposite.

  “Have you the slightest notion how hard these treats are to come by?” he inquired, his expression half wondering if this was some trick of the eye, or even a dream.

  “Some folks are worth the effort” was her reply, in an equivalent humor. In fact, the difficulty had been a revelation to her and had brought home how much difference even a comparative few weeks had made in Sandeni’s situation, and by extension the world’s.

  By history and nature, the Maizan were nomads. Their horses and herds took sustenance from the vast grasslands of the plains, and the Maizan kept themselves fed by hunting the swarms of bison and deer and elk that shared the land with them. With the change in the weather over the past three years, however, those animals had made their way south to gentler climes. Normally, the Maizan would have followed. But now, unknown to them, their Castellan was no more than a puppet, animated by the soul of the Deceiver, whose goal was to forge this wandering tribe into a ruthless and irresistible instrument of her will. Their first conquest had been Angwyn, the preeminent Daikini monarchy of the west; their latest was to be Sandeni.

  The Deceiver was responsible for the change in the seasons, but Elora knew her foe had no magic to spare to protect the troops who fought and died for her. They had to conquer Sandeni before the snows came or in all likelihood they would perish. That in part was why their warlord had opened negotiations with the Council, to spare both sides the cost of a protracted and no doubt brutal conflict.

  “I trust the information I helped provide proved of some value,” the Professor inquired, though a casual observer might conclude he was far more interested in the hot cross bun he savored.

  Elora knew better. For all his cluttered demeanor, very little escaped Giles’s notice. In that regard, he was very much like Thorn Drumheller, and Khory.

  “Giles Horvath,” she mentioned quietly, enjoying his reaction. He looked almost embarrassed at first before a relaxed and lazy smile crept across his face to open a small window onto the man he once had been.

  “I was younger.”

  “Ah.”

  “The government is being very circumspect about Tregare.”

  “From their perspective, with good reason.”

  He understood immediately. “Cyril’s library,” he asked, meaning the fort’s Master Scribe.

  “Some we placed in storage on-site,” Elora told him. “The rest we brought. Once he’s finished making his reports to the Council, you’ll likely find him at the Athenæum, sorting and cataloging his collection. Price of admission, y’see. Everyone who passed through the Tregare Gate had to carry a book.”

  “Cyril left his tower?” Giles sounded a mite incredulous.

  “Kicking and screaming, until Colonel DeGuerin had a word with him.”

  “I know Ranulf. He can be quite…persuasive when the need arises. Still, for a master to leave his tower…”

  “He had no choice, really.”

  “That’s an apprentice’s duty, to leave when danger threatens. Our credo is to save the younger generation.”

  “Luc-Jon”—and Elora forced herself to take a breath so she could finish the sentence—“chose to stay, in obedience to what he felt was a higher obligation.”

  “I applaud your young man’s courage, Elora Danan, but he was wrong.”

  “I pray you get the chance to tell him so.

  “How much of this collection did you gather, Giles,” she asked him, taking refuge in a change of subject, “on your own quests?”

  “In number, not so many.” His sudden grin took years off his appearance. “But some of them are choice. Sadly, the most important isn’t here. It was considered to
o dangerous to try to move. We couldn’t craft wards strong enough to mask its presence and had too much experience with the kind of horrors that it attracted. Too long a journey, too great a risk.”

  She finished her mug of tea and held it out for seconds, buying herself a smidgen more time to collect her thoughts and memories by stirring in some sugar and munching on the last of her own piece of fruitcake.

  Then she reached with both hands into her pouch and drew forth the Malevoiy text. It was a marvel to her, that whatever she required from the pouch of what she’d stored within always came immediately to hand. Food she’d stashed away so long ago she’d forgotten it, emerged as fresh and tasty as when it was stored. Weapons, clothes, tools, souvenirs—the capacity of the pouches had no limit nor did the contents add any weight to the bags. No matter what they held, the two pouches sat comfortably on her hips. The only constraint appeared to be the width of the opening. Whatever wouldn’t fit, Elora would have to carry the old-fashioned way.

  She’d carried magical objects before, without any trouble. Whatever power held sway inside enforced a kind of order among the contents, but the dragon’s egg was too precious and the Malevoiy book too fearful to risk them riding together. She’d decided to carry them in separate pouches.

  “Oh my,” Giles said again, though he made no move to take the massive book from Elora’s hands. “Oh my,” he repeated, but there was a wholly different quality to the expression than when he’d used it to acknowledge the gift of cakes. The sense she had was of an old campaigner once more coming face-to-face with an ancient and fearsome foe. The battle between them might have been fought long ago but the memory was still fresh, the victory worth savoring.

  He withdrew to another room, returned with a pair of ironcloth gloves in hand. They were marked on palm and back with sigils. The fingers were armored and the gauntlets themselves reached to his elbow. They reminded Elora of the gloves she used when working in Torquil’s forge but these were designed for combat. He had donned a surcoat of the same well-worn material, split to the crotch for riding, padded to provide protection from the elements and blows.

  “As Sacred Princess, you may be immune to magic, good and ill,” he told her with a grim flicker across the lips that passed for a smile, the kind you’d see on the face of a hunter before he descended into the woods after a wounded boar. “I have no such natural defense. As I teach my students, regardless of how safe and secure a circumstance may seem, it’s always wise to take precautions.”

  Together, they proceeded into his library and up flights of stairs to the topmost gallery. He had a place already prepared for the book, that until tonight he’d assumed would never be filled. He let Elora handle it, on the presumption that she’d made it this far unscathed. He was confident of his own abilities but it had been a lifetime since he’d last handled this manuscript. He preferred to take no chances.

  “Shouldn’t there be—?” Elora began as Giles ushered her back toward the stairs.

  “Wards?” he suggested and when she nodded, said, “This is Sandeni, child. They have no power here. Neither, thank the Maker, does that foul excrescence, not in the way it was originally intended. It’s just a book.”

  “Is that why you let me do all the work?”

  “We have a history, it and I.”

  “I have others,” she told him as she settled once more into the comfy chair in his study. “The ones Cyril and Luc-Jon felt were most important, that should go directly to you. There’s one that Luc-Jon found, I call it a diary…”

  “I know the one you mean. Your warrior companion’s in it.

  “Khory?” And Elora nodded. “In her original incarnation, yes.” She could see a whole host of questions in the Professor’s eyes and was thankful that he kept tight rein on them. For all his nigh-insatiable curiosity, he was content to trust her judgment. If this was a story she wanted to tell, he’d let her do so in her own time. If not—he had stories aplenty to take its place.

  Try as she might, Elora couldn’t stop fidgeting. The chair was a wonder yet her body refused to allow her to enjoy it. More than once, she choked off the impulse to spring to her feet and start pacing. She knew she was exhausted, she knew she needed sleep, she couldn’t rest.

  She told the Professor everything. Of her birth in the deepest dungeons of cursed Nockmaar on a wild and stormy night, of the midwife who’d smuggled her from those bloody walls and paid for that act of courage and defiance with her own life. Of how she’d been found by a Nelwyn farmer and how that discovery had led to that farmer’s becoming one of the greatest sorcerers of the age. How the witch-queen Bavmorda had sought Elora’s death but found her own instead, in part at the Nelwyn’s hands.

  For a year afterward there was peace in the Daikini Realm.

  Then, on the eve of her first birthday, disaster. A cataclysm rent the whole of the Twelve Great Realms. It destroyed the fortress that had been Elora’s home and all within, save her. Instead, she found herself cast to the farthest end of the world, to Angwyn, where she was raised in accordance with her rank and station as the Sacred Princess of Prophecy, putative Savior of the Great Realms.

  What that meant was that she was spoiled rotten.

  The problem was, while the prophecy was common to virtually every sentient race throughout the Realms, that Elora Danan was the chosen one, the living divinity who would usher in an era of peace and good fellowship, no one was altogether sure how that goal would be achieved. Some weren’t even sure it could be. A very few didn’t want to try. They liked the worlds as they were, with various peoples on both sides of the Veil at each other’s throats. Conflict for them was a path to power, and profit. Peace was anathema.

  The presumption was that, since she was a Sacred Princess (accent on Princess), the fulfillment of prophecy meant her Ascension to a throne, as overlord of the Great Realms. Consequently, more than a few politicians and Monarchs were eager to set themselves as the power behind that throne, the puppeteers pulling the strings of a girl who’d be little more than a figurehead. Back then, Elora didn’t care.

  The rulers of every Great Realm, and many of their subordinate Domains, gathered in Angwyn to celebrate her Ascension. On that fateful night, meant to be the crowning glory of Elora’s young life, the Deceiver struck.

  Using the same awful Spell of Dissolution that Bavmorda had attempted a baker’s dozen years before, the Deceiver tried to seize Elora’s soul. Now, as then, the Nelwyn sorcerer sprang to Elora’s defense. A dragon died to save her, but while Elora escaped, the city of Angwyn—including all the assembled Monarchs—fell under a terrible enchantment. In a space of heartbeats, the whole of the walled city was enshrouded in a crust of glittering ice, as though all life, even the potential for life, had been brutally torn from it.

  The Deceiver gave chase and ultimately assumed the form of the nomad warrior-king who’d been her primary cat’s-paw in this enterprise, the Maizan Castellan Mohdri.

  The years passed and for a time Elora remained hidden within the household of a cousin of Thorn’s, Torquil Ufgood. But fate and the Deceiver’s machinations drove her once more into the fray and brought her into contact with a roving troubadour named Duguay Faralorn. He taught Elora to sing and dance and with his help she discovered within herself a capacity to move and inspire people through her performances.

  Duguay turned out to be far more than he seemed, not a mortal Daikini at all but an ancient figure of power known as the Lord of the Dance. His goal was to claim Elora as his partner through eternity; his means, to win her love. Instead, she won his, to such an extent that when the Deceiver confronted her and Drumheller and Khory in the Dragon’s Realm, he sacrificed himself to save her.

  One thing more happened on that fateful journey to the Heart of Creation.

  Elora Danan came at last to the attention of the Malevoiy.

  “That’s a name one doesn’t hear often,” the Professor note
d as he charged various lamps and lit a brace of candles, the evening twilight having long since yielded to full night. To give herself something to do, Elora spoke gently to the coals in the hearth and stirred them to open flame, whereupon she added a couple of more pieces of wood.

  “Have a care, child,” Giles cried, “we’ve none of that to spare.”

  “Don’t worry, Professor. We’ve had a proper talk, the fire and I. It’ll take its time with this fuel. These two logs should sustain you the better part of a month.”

  “Bless my soul! It’s a shame you can’t remind the air what it’s like to be spring, or the ground to be fertile. Oh dear oh dear—” his hands fluttered in concert with his sudden apology—“forgive me, child, I spoke without thinking.”

  “It’s all right. That’s nothing I haven’t considered myself, from time to time. I simply haven’t the power.”

  “And yet, through all these travails, the Deceiver remains unable to overmaster you.”

  “She had that chance when I was a baby.”

  The Professor shook his grizzled head, worrying the knob of a finger through the finely trimmed beard that covered his chin.

  “Perhaps in her own mind,” he said, “but that isn’t the story I hear you tell.”

  “Well, I heard it from Drumheller. He’s probably biased.”

  Again he shook his head, more emphatically this time. “Child,” he addressed her, as he would one of his students who’d come unprepared to a tutorial, “you’re not listening. The bear that Drumheller enchanted embodied the Spell of Protection, but you yourself sustained it, with your own strength of body and will.”

  “Terrific job I did, considering all the damage.”

  “Stop this. I’ll not have you sit there feeling sorry for yourself, shame on you, girl! True, a little more age, some wisdom to go with, you might have been able to absorb those energies instead of simply deflect them. But considering the level of arcane forces that had to be involved, the miracle is that you were able to deflect them at all. My students and I have been busy since you left us, researching every aspect of the prophecies; there’s nothing in any of the chronicles that speaks to the manifestation of such power. The only encounters that even hint of some equivalence are with demons—What did I say, Elora? Was it of some importance?”