Shannivar

by Deborah J. Ross

  May his wisdom guide you,

  May his Shield protect you . . .

  The sky went dark, as if the shadow of something vast and terrible stretched across the living world. At the very margin of Zevaron’s vision, light gleamed on steel. A face loomed over him.

  He staggered backward. Slow, too slow.

  The storm reached down to him with fingers as cold as ice. Burning white and beautiful, they plunged into his side. For an instant, he felt no pain, only wonder.

  In the distance, someone screamed his name. The world slipped sideways.

  He raised one hand to the place where the ice had branded him. His fingers came away hot and sticky.

  Pain shocked through him. Laced his breath. Sent him to his knees, sword loose in his grasp.

  He looked up, forced his bleared vision to clear. Get up, he screamed, but no sound came. He hauled himself to one foot, then the other.

  Someone appeared in front of him, beating back the Gelonian soldier, not the one he himself had fought, but another man.

  He could not breathe. The wound in his chest burned, molten. His fingers were going numb, and yet he managed to lift his sword again, bracing one hand over the other. Darkness lapped at him.

  “Zev! Let’s go!”

  At the sound of Danar’s frantic shout, a mist fell away from Zevaron’s vision. He was standing, but just barely, on a darkened street, lit only by a guttering torch and a string of garish paper lanterns. The knot of people had scattered. The one remaining Gelonian soldier sat in an awkward jumble, clutching the front of his shoulder. Blood streamed through his fingers.

  “Zev?” Danar sheathed his own sword and reached out his free hand to Zevaron. “Can you walk?”

  Zevaron’s injured side throbbed with each pulsation of his heart. He struggled for air, managed to wheeze out, “Got to—” and then toppled into Danar’s outstretched arms.

  Danar cursed in earnest now, phrases in Gelone Zevaron had never heard, not even in all his time with Chalil. Zevaron didn’t care what the words meant. He had to stay on his feet and keep moving. Grunting with the effort, he straightened up and managed a shambling run.

  “Hold on, Zev. I’ve got you. Just stay with me. A little further and then you can rest.”

  Air rasped through Zevaron’s chest. From the pain and his shortness of breath, he thought his lung had been punctured and collapsed. Once in Tomarziya Varya, he’d seen a wound like this.

  He couldn’t think what to do. His muscles had turned to powder. Grayness, like a surging tide, washed in waves across his vision.

  Hold on, the voice had said.

  He held on.

  Chapter 3

  STREETS blurred, lights smearing together into a wash of agony. Zevaron heard Danar’s voice, asking directions.

  Which way to the river barges? Do you know where the Mud Puppy is? Down this way?

  His hand pressed over the still-bleeding wound, Zevaron leaned heavily on Danar. Somehow he managed to stay on his feet, one lurching step after another. Now they had no hope of disguising their flight. He must be leaving a path of blood that even a blind man could follow. Once or twice, he came close to fainting.

  Eventually Zevaron realized he was no longer staggering across cobbled paving stones or hard-packed dirt, but over planks of wood. River-tang filled his head. He heard the creak of timbers, of ropes stretching against their moorings. Before him, in the shadowed dark, lay a boat. He heard a distant wail, the sound of pain too great to bear.

  “. . . we’ve got to . . . right now, do you hear me . . .” Danar pleaded.

  Zevaron shook his head and stared at the flat, clumsy outlines of a river-barge. He did not know the man who stood before Danar, anger and fear in his every gesture.

  There was more discussion in hushed and urgent voices. Then hands slipped beneath his armpits and lifted him as if he were a baby. He felt a bed under him, a thin straw pallet, and then the rocking movement of a vessel over water. Paddles splashed. A voice called out orders. The boat settled as the current took it.

  Light soared and swooped above him, an osprey hovering over its prey. It stung his eyes.

  “Seen somewhat like this before,” a man said with quiet authority. Zevaron felt a touch on his side, over the center of red pain. “Sword musta slipped between the ribs, maybe nicked a rib, I can’t say.”

  “But what do we do for him? There must be something.” Danar’s voice was laced with desperation. “He can hardly breathe.”

  “Nothin’ to be done. If the fever don’t get him, if the wound don’t go bad, then he’ll mend.”

  Movement, a stir of the air, and then he was alone. And not alone.

  Voices spoke to him, at times a woman’s—his mother’s? No, she was lost forever, dead! Laid over her words like a ghostly echo, he heard the deep bass of a man’s.

  “Gelon is not the enemy,” Tsorreh whispered. “Qr . . . and its progenitor . . . Forgive me, I did not have enough time to prepare you . . .”

  Qr? Gelon? What was she talking about? The fever must have affected his brain. Yet as he heard the word progenitor, another phrase resonated through his thoughts: “Shadows that cast themselves upon the souls of men . . .”

  The words hung before him, as if written in fire. He had read them a hundred times in the te-Ketav, the holy book of his people. He could trace every line and loop of the letters that formed them. Almost, he could feel the texture of the age-worn pages between his fingers.

  Shadows. And darkness, and fire. Fire and Ice.

  Khored and his brothers and the magical Shield, the Shield of seven crystals . . .

  “Rivers boiled, mountains crumbled . . . fields became peaks of hardened ash.”

  Swords sang beneath a sky torn with light and thunder. “And it came to pass that Khored and his brothers defeated Fire and Ice and exiled it to the mountains of the north.”

  Once again, he sat with his mother in Jaxar’s laboratory and climbed the ladder to the tower observatory. In hushed, urgent tones, she spoke of a comet sweeping through the northern sky. He stood alone now on a platform, surrounded on every side with night. Above stretched a band of stars. The air was cold, the points of brilliance edged in ice.

  “There,” Tsorreh whispered, “look there.” And he lifted his eyes.

  At first, he saw only a smudge of dimness, a thread stretching to the north. As he watched, it grew brighter and larger. Its light shimmered, an iridescent corona that filled the heavens. Moment by moment, it drew him. He soared with it, higher and faster than any bird, than any arrow.

  Around him and through him, the firmament glowed, cold and burning like moonlight on ice-clouds. Its music sang in his veins.

  High and wide, sweeping, arching, he sped faster. Faster. Ahead lay high desert plains of grass, silver in the moonlight. Beyond them, hills rose into mountains, massive and ancient, forming range upon snow-whitened range. Zevaron watched as the flaming ice plunged to earth beyond the peaks.

  The ground shuddered as it struck. Sheets of glacial ice broke apart and tumbled free down the sides of the mountains. Rock shattered, setting off more avalanches.

  The Shield is scattered, the mountain prison breached.

  Was it Tsorreh’s voice, or some other’s, deep and ancient?

  The vision was shredding now, the mountains tattering into mist, into bits of flying whiteness. Behind the images, he sensed a stirring, as if a vast, incomprehensible force roused itself from slumber. He had no sense of its nature, hidden as it was behind the thickening mist, the vapors that froze and burned. He only knew, in the shivering marrow of his bones, in the innermost chamber of his heart, that something terrible had happened.

  * * *

  Zevaron woke again from a dream of sailing past the Firelands, with gray-blue icebergs to either side. He had been standing at the Wave Dancer’s prow when a
chunk of ice clipped him on the side. Melting, it trickled down his skin.

  No, he lay on his back, naked to the waist and shivering, and the slow chill touch was the sponge Danar used to wipe him. Light streamed in from above. The cabin was narrow and low-ceilinged, and the vessel beneath them rocked gently.

  Danar lifted a metal cup to Zevaron’s lips, but Zevaron pushed it away and struggled to sit up. His head barely missed the sloping ceiling. The effort left him gasping, and he realized that he was now able to draw air into both lungs. Gratefully, he accepted the cup. The drink in the cup was watered wine, thin but pleasantly fruity.

  “How long until we reach Verenzza?” He slid his feet off the edge of the built-in bed and craned his neck to look at his wound. It had closed, although a ring of fiery red bordered the scabbed area.

  “Two days, but as soon as it’s dark, Aratchy will put us ashore.”

  Zevaron frowned, trying to think. Going ashore in midpassage wasn’t part of the plan. They’d have to find another boat, and that might not be easy.

  “Word on the river is the ports are being watched,” Danar went on. “Nothing gets on or off a boat without Cinath’s men searching. They’ll be waiting for us at Verenzza. This is as far as we dare take the river. We must go overland instead.”

  “Overland? To where?”

  “Isarre, of course. Our captain says there’s a trading post inland where we can buy horses without too many questions. Um . . . can you ride?”

  “Isarre? Are you crazy?” Immediately, Zevaron wished he hadn’t spoken so loudly. Bolts of pain jagged through his skull. He lowered his voice. “We can’t get there by land.”

  “I think we can. Remember, I brought maps from Father’s library. I’ve been studying them while you were asleep. It is possible. But that’s not the problem. Our route will take us along the borders of Azkhantia. That will be the most dangerous part, but it’s also the safest. The steppe is the one place Cinath will never think to look for us. We can do it if we don’t lose our nerve. We will do it.” Zevaron heard a stubborn note in Danar’s voice and remembered how fiercely he had worked to free both his father and Tsorreh. “We have to. There’s no other way.”

  “Where’s my shirt? I’ve got to talk to the captain.”

  “You’re wasting your breath.” Danar crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve already paid him, and he wants us off the boat before he reaches Verenzza. Do you think he’s going to risk his skin by keeping us aboard? Or do you propose throwing him to the fishes and piloting this thing yourself?”

  Danar was undoubtedly right. If Cinath’s men were searching all boats on the water, they had to get off the river as soon as possible. This Aratchy, this barge captain, had already stretched his own agreement to take them this far, and then probably only because Zevaron had not been fit to travel in any other way.

  Danar had saved his life back at the Aidon river district. He’d been unconscious for longer than he realized, wounded and ill, seeing visions.

  He had promised Jaxar to see Danar to safety in Isarre. At the time, it had been the logical choice, for Tsorreh was of that royal lineage. As her son, Zevaron could claim the bonds of kinship. Jaxar had thought it a suitable sanctuary for his son. But Isarre was barely capable of holding Gelon at bay.

  Azkhantia, on the other hand, was home to bloodthirsty savages, horse-nomads who obeyed no law and knew no restraint, or so the stories said. They’d thrown back Gelonian invasions time and again, not just in Cinath’s time, but in his father’s, and his grandfather’s before him.

  Perhaps it was not in Isarre but in the wind-swept steppe that he would find the allies he needed to free Meklavar and avenge his mother’s death. The route Danar had described would take them close to the borders of Azkhantia.

  “In that case,” he said, “I can ride.” And then . . .

  Zevaron’s fingers curled, claws tightening into fists. In his mind, fire raged across the hills of Aidon, as hot as the blood pounding through his temples, and the ashes of the conquerors blew away in the wind.

  He would return with an Azkhantian horde at his back, bring down the towers and palaces, and set all the seven hills ablaze. The Golden Land would crumble into salt, and no man would remember those who once lived here.

  By the Shield of Khored, by the memory of my mother, by everything holy, and by all that is unholy if need be, I swear that Gelon will pay.

  PART II:

  Shannivar’s Hope

  Chapter 4

  ON the Azkhantian steppe, the Moon of Mares had given birth to the Moon of Golden Grass. Now, on a bright summer day, Shannivar daughter of Ardellis rode laughing through the feathergrass. Grasshoppers scattered beneath the hooves of her horse. The scent of the ripening seeds rose up around her. Surely, she thought, the goddess Tabilit must have been drunk on k’th when she created the steppe and covered it with such a sky as this, such rolling hills, such a sweep of gold and green. What more could anyone desire in life but a fine horse, a hunting bow, and the wind on her face?

  Like all her people, Shannivar was small and bronze-skinned, her body sculpted by long days in the saddle. Her hands were broad and strong, her dark eyes hooded like a falcon’s. A single braid of glossy black hair hung down her back from beneath her peaked felt cap. Feathers from the totem animal of her clan, the Golden Eagle, fluttered from the point of the cap. She wore no jacket, only a shirt and felt vest, embellished with stylized eagles and symbols of good fortune, loose camel’s-wool trousers, a wide woven sash in bright colors, and butter-soft boots laced to the knee.

  Shannivar’s dun mare, Radu, skimmed the earth with her soft-foot gait. The pack pony trotted placidly behind them, the legs of the dead gazelle flopping against his sides.

  The sun dipped toward the ridge, beyond which lay the river valley where Shannivar’s clan had set up their dharlak, their summering-place. Ribbons of brightness spread across the western horizon. The grass rippled in the lengthening shadows. The sky was clear of any trace of the strange white star, so much more brilliant than its fellows. Surrounded by a peculiar misty halo, it had swept across the northern rim last summer and then disappeared. Now the heavens seemed untroubled, as serene as if the star had never existed.

  There would be light enough, and time enough, to do all that was meant to be done. That had been her father’s favorite saying, and she wondered if he were smiling down on her from the Sky Kingdom, urging her to patience as he had so many times in her childhood. She sighed, for the memory was both a blessing and a shadow on her heart. It was yet another reason to hate the Gelon, whose raids into Azkhantia had increased in recent years. Shannivar’s bond with her father had been unusually strong; daughters bore the names of their mothers, as sons did their fathers, each following in the traditional path of their same-sex parent.

  Shannivar passed the lake and the outlying pastures where the wealth of the clan, the cream-and-russet sheep and the shaggy two-humped camels, grazed. In the dharlak encampment itself, felt-sided jorts stood in concentric circles around a common area. Beyond the crumbling walls of an ancient fortress, a mews housed hunting falcons, but they were only for men.

  One of Shannivar’s younger cousins led a string of horses to drink at the lake’s edge. He spotted her and waved, giving a whistling cry. A covey of children ran out to meet her.

  “Shannivar the hunter!” the children cried. “May your arrows fly true! We will feast tonight!”

  “Yes, little ones,” she said, laughing. Giggling, they clustered around her. “May your words always be sweet! Here, carry the gazelle to Grandmother.”

  She slipped the carcass of the gazelle from the back of the pony and laid it across their joined hands. Even the youngest had learned the ways of working together. Separately, none of them could have managed its weight.

  The Sky People, Tabilit and her consort Onjhol, made us one. We praise them by our oneness in work, in l
ove, in war, went an ancient saying.

  Not one in all things, Shannivar reflected somberly. There came a time when men and women went apart, a time she had been dreading.

  She set aside her tack, the saddle of use-softened leather with its high cantle for support over long distances, the girth and breastplate, the thick blanket, the bridle ornamented with beads of silver and turquoise. She began rubbing down Radu with a plait of dried feathergrass, one long stroke after another. Layers of dried sweat came away, motes of dust billowing in the slanting light. The mare leaned into the rhythmic pressure, eyes half closed in contentment.

  The dun mare was not nearly as fast as Shannivar’s other horse, Eriu, a black with fire in his eye, but few horses could match him. Radu was getting old and had not borne a foal this last spring. She was one of two horses left to Shannivar by Ardellis, the mother who had died at her birth, and was a treasure indeed, one of the fabled soft-gaited horses, said to be Tabilit’s favored children. The other, a washed-out gray mare of indifferent quality, had given birth to Eriu, a mount worthy of any warrior.

  When Shannivar finished, giving the muscled rump a pat, Radu turned to look at her with an aggrieved expression. More? the mare seemed to say.

  Shannivar tugged the long forelock. “You would stand here all night to be groomed, but I have other duties.”

  Radu blew out a resigned sigh. She followed docilely as Shannivar took a handful of mane and led her to the horse field.

  Eriu pricked his small, inwardly curved ears and flared his nostrils as Shannivar approached. Like most Azkhantian horses, he was compactly built, with a short, strong back and dense hooves. Unlike the others, however, he had not been turned out to run wild for the first two years of his life. Shannivar, guarding her small treasure of horses, had kept him close and fed him by hand. She’d sung to him through the long winter nights. He had never needed spurs or whip, for he answered to her voice, the shift of her weight, and the pressure of her knees.

  “Soon,” she murmured, stroking his neck. “We will run, you and I.”