Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  “Just like in Angwyn,” Anakerie muttered, “when the Deceiver disrupted the Ascension of Elora Danan. That bitch has a lot to answer for.”

  As it turned out, the Guard hadn’t followed them into the maze of streets and alleys—but they also hadn’t given up the chase. An alarm had been sounded and word passed to every district station, so that when the pair of them emerged into the mercantile department they found patrols searching for them on foot and horseback.

  “What now, Peck?” she asked of him, making that insult a tender endearment.

  “Elora told me of a man over in Freemantle, who she suspected had ties with the Cascani traders. If we can reach him…”

  “Freemantle’s halfway around the bay from here. What’s wrong?”

  Thorn was staring at his hands. He held them up before her, and Anakerie watched flickers of saffron lightning roil about his splayed fingers, gathering intensity as they swarmed past his wrists, around and through the weave of his shirt—making her wonder if his flesh would prove any barrier to them—plunging down his chest and diving headlong into his heart. Thorn went on tiptoe, back hunching as if from a blow, his arms flying wide to full extension. Anakerie reflexively reached to catch hold only to find herself slapped away from him and off a convenient wall by a backsurge of energy that packed a more than respectable punch. His eyes and mouth opened and the lightning poured from one and into the other, out his nostrils and into his ears. His back arched the other way, to so extreme an arc that Anakerie feared it would snap, and then as suddenly as it had appeared the lightning vanished.

  She heard a thunderclap, a report as impressive as any that ever sounded over the Great Western Plains, and Thorn dropped like a castaway puppet, to knees, to face, without making the slightest attempt to break his landing.

  There was a sharp stench of ozone to the air, the kind of atmosphere that heralds the worst kind of storm, and if she’d been with the Maizan on the open prairie they’d be looking for shelter against an oncoming tornado. Her first attempt to touch Thorn was a quick stab of the finger against his breast; concerned though she was, she didn’t want to risk another such shock. She was bruised enough from the first.

  Whatever force had possessed him, however, was gone, and she gathered his limp form onto her lap, swiftly seeking his neck for signs of a pulse. To her relief, it was regular and gaining strength with every beat.

  “Too late,” he breathed when he found strength and wit to speak.

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” he said further.

  “Why?”

  “You saw,” he told her. “The Deceiver.”

  “Looks like the Elora who grew up in my father’s palace, so what? These past three years, I’ve seen that monster wear the body of Castellan Mohdri. And before that, it took a fair stab at impersonating you. That’s why you call it the Deceiver, is it not?”

  “So I once thought. Did you not see Elora as well?”

  “Aye,” she replied with a terse nod. “Wish to Goddess I’d been blind for that one, I’ll grant you. The way she looked at us”—she shuddered at the recollection, with a sudden and disturbing empathy for how the bug must feel impaled on the pin of the collector—“the way she laughed.”

  She looked down and her brow furrowed, as if she were seeing something for the first time. Clutched tight in her left hand, where it had been all along, was a leather traveling pouch, plain of decoration but of quite respectable workmanship.

  “She gave me this,” she said, a thread of wonder and mystery to her voice. “Why didn’t it register before now? As she got up, just before she attacked Khory Bannefin, Elora thrust this bag of hers into my hands. The belt it hung from was useless, rotted away to nothing by the acid, but the bag was untouched.”

  “The protective spells are mine,” Drumheller said. “The power to sustain them came from her.”

  “Why would she give me her traveling pouch?”

  Thorn shook his head. He had no answers. He was tired of seeking them out. He wanted to sob, to yield to such misery as he’d never known.

  “Probably,” he said, “because she had no further use for it.”

  “But why attack Khory?”

  “She had bound herself to the Malevoiy. Our companion wore the face of their greatest foe. Perhaps they wished to avenge that ancient defeat? Perhaps it was the price demanded of Elora for their aid, that she betray one who trusted her—just as Eamon Asana did. Pick any answer you like, Highness. What matters is that she is lost to us. Whatever the reason, this is a crime that cannot be forgiven.” He fixed bleary, beaten eyes on the Angwyn Princess, and Anakerie saw in them the hollow stare of men who’d been too long in combat, who’d fought so hard, in conditions of such unspeakable brutality, that they could conceive of no other existence. Men for whom life had become just another unbearable burden. “So tell me, Anakerie, renowned as you are as a strategist—when your greatest foe and your greatest champion may well be one and the same, and that selfsame champion willingly embraces the most fearful race in the Twelve Realms, what are we to do?” There was no mercy in her eyes as she returned his stare, nor tenderness. She had seen her share of death, taken her share of lives; she knew that awful look because she’d seen it in her own mirror. She spoke to him not as a friend, nor as a woman who in another time and place would have embraced him as her lover, but as a commander. There was steel in her voice to match what she usually carried in her sword hand.

  “Whatever, dear friend, this isn’t the time or place for such a decision. Any warrior worth the name should know when’s the time to fight, when to yield, and when to run. This, Drumheller, is the last.”

  “First by damn sensible comment I’ve heard from any of you Tall Folk lot!” New voice, new arrival, comment capped by a gruff basso bark of major irritation from the hound the brownies were riding.

  “Where in all the hells,” Rool fumed, mood and manner matching his companion’s, “have you bloody been?”

  “Have you any notion, the pair of you,” cried Franjean distractedly, with anxious looks past the shoulders of the fugitives, and he wasn’t worried about any pursuit, “of how doomed this accursed city is?”

  “How did you find us?” Thorn asked of them as they huddled close.

  “The old-fashioned way,” Rool replied, scratching the base of the hound’s ear. “We followed Puppy’s nose.” Normally, such attentions would be a pleasure, but the great hound was as troubled as his riders. He kept dancing on his toes, claws making quick castanet taps on the cobblestones, the stark tension of his body making plain how much he wanted to be far away from here. His breed wasn’t good at whining, so he conveyed his growing concern with a series of staccato subvocalized growls from deep in his throat. In their own way, these sent as primal a message as the laughter of the Malevoiy, reminding Nelwyn and Daikini both of an earlier and more primal Age, where the order of the world was considerably different from today. When those races who now considered themselves Lords of the Earth weren’t even certain of their own survival.

  “If you’ve been searching,” Anakerie said, taking charge of the situation, “then I assume you’ve somewhere safe to lead us to?”

  “That would make sense,” agreed Franjean, never one to acknowledge anyone as his superior, even when she was both Princess Royal, heir to an Imperial throne, and a warlord.

  “We’ve a boat in Freemantle,” explained Rool.

  “I told you,” said Thorn, staring once more at his hands, which were crackling again, though not quite as fiercely as before. He suspected that would soon change, and not for the better. “There’s no time.”

  Anakerie didn’t bother with a reply; she simply embarked on a course of action.

  Crouched as they were in the shadows of a service alleyway, they’d thus far escaped the notice of roving mounted patrols. She spotted a quartet of horsemen approaching along the street and strode
out to meet them.

  The brownies were master dissemblers and had few equals at the art of the ambush but even they were impressed by her ploy. Anakerie’s reaction was picture-perfect, that of a fugitive who’d unwittingly stumbled into her pursuers. Of course, she bolted. Of course, they spurred after her. Her every action bespoke panic; theirs, an obvious and overweening contempt. After all, she was alone, a foreigner, and a woman. How difficult could her capture be?

  They soon learned.

  She let them catch up to her and then she dropped flat, right beneath the hooves of the charging horses. The animals perceived her as a hurdle, as she knew they would, which they proceeded to jump. The moment they thundered past, she was up and scrambling for the rearmost rider. He meanwhile was too busy reining in his mount, who wasn’t at all happy being jerked from a full gallop to a dead stop. For those few critical moments, the trooper was too busy staying in his saddle and trying to calm his frenzied and furious animal to realize his predicament. By that point, too late, he realized he wasn’t alone on the horse’s back. Anakerie jumped up behind him, using the momentum of that leap to propel the man to the ground. He dropped with an impressive crash of armor.

  She wasn’t in the saddle herself yet, and there wasn’t time to seat herself properly as the other three troopers belatedly responded to the rapidly changing situation. Anakerie grabbed the reins and slapped a palm sharply against her mount’s flanks to spur him into motion. Off he went, straight for the others.

  Despite what had just happened to their companion, the others still exuded confidence. They were armed, she wasn’t. They figured she was charging to her death.

  One slashed at her, but his blade sliced through empty air as Anakerie pitched herself from the horse’s back, using its speed as a springboard to bounce herself off the street, her powerful arms and shoulder muscles adding thrust to her leap as she rose up and over her mount. Normally, this was a racing remount, which would end with her astride the animal. However, Anakerie kept both legs together and turned the maneuver into a wicked kick that caught the rider on the opposite side full in the chest.

  He reacted as if he’d run straight into a pole and hit the street somewhat harder than the first man. Anakerie executed another racing remount, this time into the saddle, and looked for fresh targets.

  In fairly short order, with sword now in hand, she rejoined Thorn and the brownies.

  “Which way,” she demanded of the brownies as she lifted the Nelwyn into the saddle in front of her.

  “Can you keep up?” Rool challenged.

  “Just make sure to lead me somewhere this beast can follow. As for you”—this was directed at Thorn—“your job’s to keep those damnable cracklings to a minimum. That last shock was hard enough on the ground, I don’t want to be on the receiving end at a gallop.”

  He was thin-lipped and sweating already from the effort, unwilling to trust himself to more than a curt nod.

  The hound launched himself into the street to the wild yells of his brownie riders, standing astride his withers and holding fast to makeshift reins they’d hooked to his massive collar. Anakerie was right behind them.

  If they needed encouragement, it was provided within minutes as they thundered along the waterfront, gathering their share of attention and pursuit. Thorn was leaning forward, as though to embrace their mount around the neck; the easy presumption was that the Nelwyn was holding on for dear life. Considering that his stature made it difficult just to sit astride such an animal, that wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion. It was also wholly wrong. Instead, he was generating as strong an energy field as he could around the horse, to keep it calm and focused in the face of whatever might come.

  It was a prescient act.

  A high-pitched shrieking suddenly pierced the relative peace of the afternoon. It might have been a steam whistle, if such a device had been constructed for the use of giants. It was heard in every district of Ch’ang-ja, and for quite a ways beyond. All along the waterfront, glass shattered as every window touched by that awful noise instantly exploded. People screamed as well, clutching hands to heads, dropping to the ground in agony, deafened for the little life that was now left them.

  Thanks to Thorn, Anakerie perceived it as no more than an ache. The horse, with far more sensitive ears, was similarly protected, as were brownies and hound. Anakerie wanted to see what was happening behind her but she dared not spare even so much as a quick glance over her shoulders; all her attention was required to keep her mount on track and the hound—whose speed was truly magnificent—in sight.

  Thorn provided an answer, via the link they still shared. Without loosening his grasp on the horse, he twisted around until the Crystal Palace came into view, allowing Anakerie to behold the world through his eyes.

  “Am I wrong, Drumheller,” she gasped, “or has that damnable Palace grown?”

  She wasn’t wrong, it had doubled in size and more as the increasing levels of energy stretched its glittering substance to its limit and well beyond. It had dominated this end of the city, as the Gate of Peace did the harbor; now it loomed like an opalescent mountain, its spires topping even the Sagat beacon. There was no trouble making out the swirling ropes of lightning that erupted ever more vehemently from the Palace, as their lesser counterparts had from Thorn’s hands. Anakerie was reminded of an accident she’d seen as a child, during one of the few occasions someone at the Angwyn court attempted a display of Chengwei fireworks. There’d been a bit of carelessness with the strikers, and considerable sloppiness with the layout of the fuses. Detonation of the first wave of explosives ended up igniting the entire presentation. While the audience scrambled and fled for cover, Anakerie—with the arrogance of one yet to reach her teens—stood her ground to watch, and marvel at the spectacular display. The blasts, she remembered, had occurred in sequence, as one level of munitions ignited the next, albeit in lightning succession.

  The same was happening to the Crystal Palace, although on an apocalyptic scale.

  Lightning raced up the tower, as it had Thorn’s arms, and stabbed through to the center of the structure, toward what Anakerie guessed was whatever remained of the atrium. From that spot grew a light that was unlike any she’d ever seen. It cast forth nothing she could describe as radiance. Indeed, if looking at the sun was akin to gazing at the Heart of Creation, this was a view into the essence of chaos itself. Every aspect of it was antagonistic to her being as a Daikini and she knew that if she were beholding it with her own eyes, she’d feel like she was being turned inside out.

  Thorn understood immediately what was happening. This was a manifestation of the energies sorcerers encountered when trolling for demons. Such a materialization was considered the acid test of a mage, the ultimate challenge to training and skill and talent. It could take years to bring such spells into being and he’d read and heard of those who’d slaved a lifetime without ever coming close. None but the most powerful of adepts—and precious few of those over the countless generations—were able to produce such a conjuration, much less survive it. For the rest, the kindest fate was death. The most frequent consequence was a terrible living madness, as the hapless sorcerers came away from the experience possessed by the essential chaos that was the fabric of the demons’ existence.

  Thorn could look on it in safety because the work he had done to bring Khory into being had touched his soul with a demon’s. He shuddered at the thought of its effect on a city of ordinary folk.

  Then it was as if a monstrous invisible ax descended from the heavens to split the Palace in twain. The two great pieces of crystal calved apart, that act of separation creating a backwash that sucked the chaos light back within the body of the Palace. For a heartbeat, Thorn prayed that would be the end of it, that he’d seen the worst.

  The explosion proved him wrong.

  There was no smooth progression of events. The blast registered on Thorn’s eyes as a sequenc
e of still images, pieces of frozen time. Air took on the properties of water and a great swelling wave of force rippled outward from the Palace, even as the core crystalline matrices that composed the structure discorporated, translating in a heartbeat from tangible reality to energy. In its wake, all the manifestations of magic were taken in hand and savagely twisted. Nothing remained fixed. Buildings lost cohesion, the collapse of those whose construction was abetted by spells dragging down those around them that used none. Thorn didn’t want to consider the fate of those within those rooms when the structural boundaries failed. The most prosaic examples of the arcane arts flashed to their extremes: a spell designed to regulate the environment of a house instantly made it as hot as a dragon’s flame, as cold and lifeless as Bavmorda’s soul. The states of physical objects changed capriciously—solid to gas, liquid to solid—and once they reduced themselves to essentials, the elements themselves took on lives of their own. Fu dogs turned on their masters, or each other, or they became precisely what they appeared to be, gaily painted statues, with no more life to them than a rock. Every natural law was perverted into a mockery of itself: walls that appeared solid turned out to be liquid suspended vertically from the street. That street, in turn, was now partially air. The air, solid as stone. What went up didn’t necessarily come down.

  Everything happened with such suddenness, there was no time for panic. Many were consumed before becoming aware of their danger. The rest were overwhelmed by the enormity of the disaster. Their minds couldn’t cope with what their senses reported, it was too far beyond human ken. The city was already supersaturated with magic, as it would be with humidity in the midst of monsoon season. The Resonator was the catalyst that made it rain. It didn’t matter anymore whether one was born with the talent to be a mage; the power came to everyone, whether they wanted it or not, whether they could handle it or not.

  When Thorn was very young, long before the thought of becoming a mage entered his head, magic for him was everything the word implied. Strange, mysterious, wonderful in the way a sunrise was, or the blooming of a flower, or the raw, marginally tamed passion of a naked flame in his hearth. It was the stuff of dreams, and, he believed, the means of making those dreams reality; a way, he believed, of making them reality. He’d thought the High Aldwyn, the wizard of his village, the most blessed of Nelwyns and though he came to yearn to follow the old man’s path, he never truly accepted that day would ever dawn.