Shadow Star

by Chris Claremont

  Where stood the man he’d slain now reared a dragon, a single sweep of its wings generating a veritable gale, while its great claws gouged trenches in the solidly packed earth and crumbled boulders big as houses to powder. Its tail lashed the ground with the force of an earthquake. It trumpeted its rage with a roar that shook the heavens.

  Some of the troops made to run. Kael by contrast grabbed hold of the woman and crossed her throat with his dagger. The beast could kill him if it so desired, but it would see the woman it loved die as well.

  To his delight, Kael realized the creature was running a monstrous bluff. Dragons were denizens of the Realm of Dreams; they were the stuff and product of the imagination. Its sole anchor to the tangible realm of the Daikini was the body that had just been murdered. It might be able to scare him to death in his sleep, but awake he was in no danger. Even as he watched, its ability to affect the physical world diminished, even as the dragon itself began to fade in the morning half-light.

  The woman screamed his name: “Calan!”

  Thorn let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding and finished the name: “Calan Dineer.” The dragon who had collected him in his sleep fifteen years ago and carried him to Tir Asleen, setting him on the path that would ultimately return him to this hateful place.

  It was Elora, though, whose cry was most heartfelt and lost: “Father!”

  She sank to her knees and repeated her cry, “Father,” in the kind of broken voice a child uses to express its utter desolation of heart and spirit.

  None save Khory noted the chimes at the door, or the monster who filled the doorway.

  “At last,” she said softly, drawing herself to her full height and still looking dwarfed by contrast with the Caliban. “You want one Elora or both, you want anything in this room, you must pass me.”

  The Caliban said nothing, neither word nor gesture. He loomed, creating the impression that he could demolish the entire castle without a second thought should the need arise.

  Out of that supernal silence came a wriggling tangle of whips, possessing a perverse kind of animation, each topped with a fanged head and determined to be the one to capture Khory. None of them came close, as she disposed of the lot with a sideways sweep of her sword.

  For the first time, the Caliban drew his own sword, a weapon sized and weighted for his massive, blockhouse form. Parrying such a weapon would be akin to deflecting a tower of solid iron. Yet when he attacked, Khory was there to meet him, teeth gritted, her own sword backed by all the reserves of her lean and wiry frame. In the comparatively close confines of Bavmorda’s sanctum, the advantage in maneuverability lay with Khory and she pressed it to fullest advantage. Unfortunately, that also required her keeping the duel well clear of Elora and company, which severely limited her freedom of movement. Back and forth they went, she quicksilver, he ponderous, their blades clanging like hammers. Each of those terrible hits should have blown her arms from their sockets yet more than once she chose to stand her ground and have it out with her nemesis face-to-face.

  The Resonator initiated another pulse and with it another timeslip, to the seminal moment of Elora’s infancy, when Kael had stolen her away from Thorn and his companions and galloped her to Nockmaar to be sacrificed. True, an army had followed hot on his heels, composed of the survivors of those great castles who’d already fallen to Bavmorda’s sorcery, the latest being gallant Galadoorn, but Kael gave it little thought. Nockmaar had never fallen that he knew of, and would never fall while he held command.

  Of course, it did, the very next morning, as Kael’s men were hoodwinked into chasing Thorn and Fin Raziel across the plain, only to have the army they believed transformed entirely into pigs rise up out of hidey-holes dug in the ground, fully restored and spoiling for vengeance.

  The infant Elora meanwhile lay swaddled in her sacrificial cloth atop the altar in Bavmorda’s sanctum, where now stood the Clockwork Resonator. Thirteen candles were arrayed about her, one for each of the Great Realms, and a bowl of foul brew stood ready to be mixed with her life’s blood in consummation of the Ritual of Obliteration.

  It was an epic battle, between Sorsha and her mother (Sorsha lost), between Fin Raziel and the woman who’d been her best friend (Fin lost), and finally between the Nelwyn who wanted to be a wizard and the greatest demon sorceress of her age. With a little bit of luck, some dexterous sleight of hand, and a fatal moment of clumsy footwork from the opposition, Thorn won the day and saved Elora’s life. The Ritual intended for her consumed Bavmorda instead, utterly and completely.

  That, thought all involved, was the end of it.

  How was Thorn to know better? He was years removed from the wisdom and experience that would have prompted him to act and Fin, well, she was old and thankful to have emerged from the battle alive. None realized that Bavmorda’s enchantment had opened gates between Elora and all the Great Realms, the better to sever all her connections with them when her soul was obliterated. They knew nothing of her parentage, of the husband who’d lost his bride, the father facing the annihilation of a child he’d never hold. Calan Dineer was Sovereign of the Dragons, Lord of the Great Realm of Dreams, the quintessence of everything known as magic.

  So when Bavmorda acted to sever the link between the baby and the greatest of the Twelve Great Realms, Dineer reached out to shield his daughter from the spell’s effects. He knew the limits of Bavmorda’s power and of his, he felt he had a fair chance of success. Perhaps his efforts provided the moment’s delay that allowed the heroes to arrive in time? He never said, and could not be asked. What he’d forgotten in his agitation and his fear was where this abominable act was taking place, the ancient seat of power of his most hated enemies.

  As Bavmorda’s ambitions went awry, so, too, did Calan’s spear of destiny. In that moment, as the sorceress Queen’s conjurations twisted back upon her and her body flared brighter than a dying star, consumed instantly and utterly, the road of time was split in twain.

  Two paths, two destinies, two of everything mortal flowed forth from that accursed spot. Twice, Thorn watched himself carry Elora down to the cheering throng below, to be welcomed by Madmartigan and Sorsha. And then beheld them all ride off to vastly different destinies.

  “The spell was never banished,” he said, his voice growing hoarse with the enormity of the horror. “Its residue still taints this room. By the blessed Fates, what have we done? What have we done?”

  He turned to Elora, but had no idea how to even begin to atone for this tragedy. Ignorance on his part might serve as an adequate explanation, but he would never accept it as an excuse.

  Nothing prepared them for the wailing banshee shriek that tore from the Deceiver’s throat, or her onslaught as she leaped from her place upon the floor to reach Elora in a single bound, the pair of them pitching headlong over a table to land in a messy sprawl hard against the Resonator. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the Deceiver’s attack; these were the reactions of a child, purpose wholly without plan as she pummeled Elora again and again with her fists, her feet, her knees. It was fortunate for Elora that her hair had been cut too short for a decent handhold, else the Deceiver would have pulled that as well. At the same time, the Deceiver bombarded Elora with volley after volley of words—cruel, harsh insults cast forth for no other purpose than to do her harm. The sheer frenzy of the assault kept Elora on the defensive initially. The others were torn over how to respond, for the duel between Khory and the Caliban was reaching its own climax, announced by Khory’s body tumbling through the air from one end of the sprawling room to the other, to a pinpoint landing midway up the farthest wall.

  Regrettably, she couldn’t stick to that wall and therefore received another set of bumps and bruises when she flopped bonelessly to the floor. She was in rags by that stage, one bicep ringed with circles of angry purple shot through with darker shades of crimson where the Caliban had caught hold of her arm. She’d thought
then that he would tear it from its socket. He had the strength, but to Khory’s amazement it was his will that failed him. He hesitated—only for a moment, hardly enough time to notice, but more than enough for her to act. A kick, a stab, a wrench of the arm, and she was footloose once again.

  There was blood, too, mainly hers, but while she was slow and careful about regaining her feet, the fire in her eye told all present this duel was in no way finished.

  She still held Elora’s sword, and as the Caliban lumbered past the others and full into the field effect thrown off by the Resonator, Khory returned once more to the attack. She struck with a masterful series of moves that left even Anakerie gasping in amazement. A double-handed diagonal strike across the body, reverse the sword and return it laterally and one-handed to open the belly, switch hands with the blade still reversed and rake it over the thorax along the opposite diagonal. Three strokes, executed with flawless precision in less than a half-dozen seconds, any one of them a mortal wound.

  Yet it was Khory who was smashed to her knees by a bare-handed clout across the shoulders. She managed to turn that to her advantage, pushing off one leg and raking her sword across the Caliban’s knees. With a blade that keen, by rights she should have amputated both legs; all she achieved was to make the creature stagger somewhat.

  While they fought, with increasing ferocity, the Resonator continued generating pulsations of energy, blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, scrambling those that separated then from now.

  As Khory rose into a watchful, wary crouch, balanced on the balls of her feet, both she and the Caliban were struck by balls of fiery energy that seemed to burst outward from their own bodies. In Khory’s case there was a flash from somewhere below her belly, while the Caliban’s was hidden within the voluminous folds of its cloak, and the pair of them were suddenly painted in the most vibrant of colors. Light energy came alive, with the madcap effervescence of firedrakes, racing over and under their clothes in a race to see how quickly the whole body could be explored.

  In their wake, both Khory and the Caliban began to change. Flashes of radiance illuminated different parts of their bodies in random order, revealing the person they’d been at the start of their lives. For Khory, there was little alteration in her actual appearance, save that Elora and the others gradually got a sense of the style of armor and costume worn in those bygone days. Only Elora noted that the raptor tattoo on Khory’s face was casting forth a radiance of its own, completely distinct from the flashbursts triggered by the Resonator pulses. The difference for Khory was internal, a resurrection of the spirit that once had been.

  The Caliban, however, underwent a far more striking transformation as each flash stripped away one after the other of its cloaks, as a chef might delicately peel an artichoke to reach its heart. What lay underneath was a figure that Elora recognized at once, possessed of a power and glory that was a match for any Monarch in the other Great Realms.

  “Ard-righ,” she breathed in wonderment as Eamon Asana was stripped at long last of all his disguises. “The High King of legend,” she went on to say, “Eamon Asana himself!”

  And yet…

  The glimpse Elora had beheld in Khory’s memory was of a man she’d willingly follow into any battle, against any foe, no matter the odds, solely on the strength of his word. This was more a ghost who happened to bear a close resemblance. There was a softness to the once-clean line of the jaw, a petulant twist to the edge of the mouth, a flatness to the eyes, that prompted Elora to turn her head to the Deceiver and back again, finding echoes in her other self of that same corrosive weariness. A sense of battles without number, so many that it no longer mattered whether they were won or lost because there would always be another. A nagging, caustic doubt that ate inexorably at the soul, with the question that if the High King was so gifted, so blessed, so worthy, why could he not bring this conflict to an end? Why was there always another battle? What was the point anymore?

  “Your sacrifice bought the world peace, Khory” was what he said to Khory. The look she returned was as piercing as a well-shot arrow.

  “Are we merchants then, to barter for what should have been—could have been—fairly won in battle?”

  “At a cost of how many lives? Your one saved tens of thousands.”

  “The right decision then, the act of a statesman, courageous to the core. I’d salute you, Eamon Asana—if I weren’t so curious about what brought you here. How many of those souls you putatively saved has the Caliban claimed over the generations since?”

  “There’s just one left to take, Khory. Then, at last, I can rest.”

  “You were our High King, my lord. How came you to this?”

  “I betrayed my best friend and by so doing, myself.”

  Swords slashed the air with such speed they left trails of liquid silver in their wake. Despite the corruption that had claimed almost every decent part of him, Eamon Asana was still the man who’d faced the Monarch of Greater Faery in single combat and emerged without a scratch, to flesh or garments. He fought with the desperate strength of the damned and the brute confidence that came with an uncountable string of victories. There was a hunger in him as they fought too reminiscent of the Malevoiy and that look grew only more intense as he scored first blood, then second, then third. Slashing wounds, as messy as they were effective.

  “She did better against the monster,” noted Thorn.

  “The Caliban had no need for skill. Force alone did the trick,” said Anakerie. “There’s movement outside,” she reported.

  Elora, too, had heard the skittering approach of the Malevoiy, as had the Deceiver. That sound effectively put an end to their own struggle and neither offered resistance as Thorn and Anakerie pulled them apart.

  “It’s this damnable machine, Drumheller,” fumed the Princess Royal. “Is there nothing to be done to stop it?” She half raised her own blade, offering that as her best suggestion. Thorn shook his head, vehemently.

  “Disrupting the matrix, that’s the surest path to killing us all!”

  “You still believe you’re in control!” Anakerie sounded genuinely appalled.

  Eamon Asana stood over Khory and smashed his sword down on hers again and again. There was no finesse to his attack, it was the kind of technique best used to chop through anvils. She was splayed on the ground, forced to brace her torso with one arm, while protecting herself one-handed with her sword. As a display of strength, she was pretty impressive herself for there wasn’t the slightest quiver in her blade as his crashed down upon it. She met him on his terms and held her own.

  Thing was, though, while the blade didn’t waver, each strike moved it that much closer to Khory.

  Then came the moment that took them all off guard. When it appeared that the next series of blows would decide the issue once and for all, Khory suddenly unfolded herself from where she lay. Up came the supporting arm, to catch hold of Asana’s thick wrist just as the blades made contact.

  He didn’t mind. He immediately drew back both arms, which in turn hauled Khory upright. His intention was to break her hold and finish the matter but try as he might he couldn’t make her release her grip. He put the full weight of his body and the force of every sinew to the task. She was as immovable as a mountain.

  “Impossible,” he sputtered. “There’s no way Khory Bannefin—!”

  “The Khory Bannefin you knew died at the hands of your new friends, her lifelong foes.” The woman spoke with Khory’s voice but her stance told a different story.

  “She was here!” He sounded strangely desperate.

  “For a time, torn from her time and a sleep she’d earned. She’s gone, Asana. I remain.”

  “Demon!”

  The warrior smiled.

  She shoved him back, just clear enough to give him room to raise his sword.

  Their blades met with the sound of quick, staccato c
himes and the occasional burst of sparks. Each contact made the raptor design etched onto Khory’s face burn that much more brightly, the radiance touching her eye itself so that it, too, began to glow.

  Asana punched her in the stomach and, when her head dropped, kneed her in the face. She staggered a few steps clear of him and before she could recover, he was on her, his sword slashing across the length of her body. It was a masterful ploy. It should have worked.

  But his edge cut mostly air, though some more of her blood was spilled. Hers came up and under his attack, with the full force of her own powerful shoulders behind it, off-balance though she was and unable to provide a proper stroke to her swing. She cut him open to the spine and as he staggered past, the arrogance still on his face, she rose to her feet and pivoted. Her sword came down, his head came off, and the ard-righ of legend, the Caliban, was no more.

  Elora caught Khory as she crumpled, the toll of battle finally exacting payment. The warrior tried to maintain hold of her sword but her fingers had lost all sensation. She couldn’t close them around the haft.

  “Second wave,” Anakerie informed them, and Elora stood to face the Malevoiy.

  There was only one, the manform who’d struck the bargain with her in Ch’ang-ja. It held the Caliban’s broad-brimmed hat in hand, juggling it slightly, watching amused as an unending number of bells fell from their perches like snow, each sounding a delicate chime before vanishing in a puff of brimstone flame.

  In an intentional parody of Court etiquette, the Malevoiy proffered the hat to Elora, who met its gaze but made no other move. It held the hat out to Anakerie, who responded with a sneer. It tossed the hat into the air and they all watched it settle in Khory’s lap. The Malevoiy bowed.

  Elora couldn’t help herself. In a move that matched the DemonChild for speed and sureness, she lunged for Khory’s sword and slashed it back through the air toward the Malevoiy, meaning to deal with it as Khory had with Asana. Quick as she was, the Malevoiy was faster. It grabbed her blade, the shock of that contact giving her shoulder a painful wrench, and then, with its other hand, shattered it.