Voyage of the Shadowmoon

by Sean McMullen

  They put to sea again, steering for the next settlement down the coast. Around sunset they met with a fishing boat that had been at sea when the invaders had struck. The crew reported seeing a large squadron of lateen-rigged galleys with the blue sunburst emblem of Warsovran on the mainsails. Miraculously, the much smaller craft had not been sighted. The fishermen had later landed at the settlement of Dramil and discovered two survivors: the Metrologan priestess sent by Terikel, and a young stonemason had been in nearby ruins on the evening that the invaders struck. They had watched the attack by Miral’s light and stayed hidden until dawn, when the invaders began tearing down the buildings and hunting for survivors to abduct as slaves.

  “You say you were surveying the site for a Metrologan chapel, Worthy Justiva,” said the shipmaster.

  “That is correct.”

  “At night?”

  “I wanted to survey the effect of Miral’s light on the chosen place. Light is very important to achieve a sense of serenity in our ceremonies.”

  “Miral was not up.”

  “I mean, er, the moonworlds Lupan and Belvia.”

  “And the stonemason?”

  “He was advising me on technical matters.”

  “According to the fishing boat’s master, your surveying equipment consisted of one bedroll and half a jar of claret—all the way from central Acrema.”

  The young priestess scowled. “Celibacy is now optional among the Metrologans,” she muttered.

  Oddly enough, this was the admission the shipmaster had been probing for.

  “Ah yes, and the announcement was declared very recently. Too recently for a spy from Warsovran’s fleet to have known. Very well, Worthy Sister, I accept your story. Your tumble with the mason has not only saved you from the Damarian marines, it has convinced me not to cut your throat.”

  Suddenly Justiva felt unreserved sympathy for Terikel, who also had been saved by being in the wrong bed at the right time.

  Without further investigation the Greenfoam’s shipmaster turned from the coast and headed northwest with the fishing boat in tow. The shipmaster noted that on the twenty-eighth day of the seventh month of 3140, the towns of the new Vidarian empire had fallen to Darmarian marines from Warsovran’s ships. It had been the largest empire in Torea’s history, but had lasted barely a month from foundation to fall.

  Velander noticed that the landscape of inland Torea was changing remarkably as they pushed deeper into the continent. The regions close to Larmentel had been repeatedly seared, so that instead of a crust of vitrified sand there was generally a layer of glass, lava, or rock slag. There were occasional choppy lakes of petrified red-glass waves near the river, breakers of glass frozen while bursting over hills, towns half drowned in glass that had flowed down hills and solidified, and cities that had melted into themselves. Most of the inland ruins were so severely melted and pulverized, that chipping the gold out of them probably would be far more trouble than it was worth.

  Fifteen miles after leaving the Shadowmoon, the gigboat turned into the Bax River. The river water was quite clean and clear, as there was no silt and soil running off the land, only a little dust brought down by the raindrops. Wrecks of barges were visible beneath the surface, and small fish fed on the remains of humans and animals who had escaped charring, only to die when they surfaced and tried to breathe superheated air. There were odd, sloping forests of glass spikes ornamented by colored frills, and amid the nearby mountains they could see glass and blackstone glaciers frozen solid, destined neither to retreat nor advance ever again. The single sign of activity on the landscape was the volcano, Mount Delchan, which was sending a trickle of smoke into the sky, and occasionally rumbling.

  It was six days after entering the Bax River that they reached the little inland port of Tra’Vant, which once had serviced Larmentel. Very little that remained of it was recognizable, even as a ruin. The vitrified surface crunched beneath the stubby spikes of Velander’s clogs as she walked ashore, but it was the sheer silence that made the greatest impression on her. After weeks of ceaselessly creaking ropes and timbers, then the rattle and splash of oars, the hush over the inner continent was like losing one’s hearing.

  The river port had endured eight of the fire-circles, and was far worse affected than anything they had seen so far. The clay in the bricks had shattered and crumbled, leaving only the mortar outline in frail, fantastic lattices of fused glass in the vague outline of walls. The thick crust of glass sometimes crunched and splintered under their feet, slashing at the thick, spiked hardwood clogs they had carved while at sea. Ruined stone walls dripped with glass icicles in colors that had swirled, blended, and flowed in the heat and now glowed and sparkled as sunlight fell upon them and refracted through them. Frozen cascades of lead, gold, silver, and copper filled the gutters beneath layers of semi-opaque glass. There was no stench of rotting offal or raw sewage; in fact, the glass which coated the roadway was clean enough to eat from.

  “This place has been burned many times over,” Feran said as he stood looking about.

  “Eight,” said Laron, a moment before Velander opened her mouth to speak the same figure.

  “Look there on the ground, the sand is not just a fused crust, it’s thick, cloudy glass,” said Druskarl. “The walls of brick have become red powder.”

  “Can you imagine death on this scale?” asked Velander. “Not a fly in the air, not an ant walking. I once passed through here, about four years ago. I remember the bustle, the street criers, even the stench of rotten fish-heads and dung carts. Now it is clean, pure and dead. They’re all dead, every one of those who spoke with me or sold me bread and dried figs. Not a child, not a grandmother, nobody left alive. There was a boy named Massoff who sold me fresh apples. He was quite handsome and had a most charming manner. Who will remember Massoff, now that his family, friends, rulers, customers, lovers, and enemies are all dead? All their faces are ash upon the wind, coloring the sunsets as red as blood on a battlefield.”

  The others shivered, but did not reply. No words could possibly encompass death on such a scale.

  Feran, Velander, Laron, and Druskarl set off in the early afternoon, leaving the gigboat sunk and weighted down with glass icicles in the river. After two hours of determined walking over the smooth, sterile ground, they passed over the boundary of the seventh fire-circle. A great ring of glass had been pushed up a yard high in an immense, circular, frozen wave that extended out over nine miles from the center of Larmentel. As they climbed over it, Velander noticed an ax-blade buried in the glass crest, the metal as perfect as when it left the master craftsman’s shop where it had been forged. The wood, brass, and leather of the handle were gone.

  A recent earth tremor had fractured a frozen ripple of glass, revealing nests of perfect crystals of green, orange, rose, and aqua. Velander carefully extracted a selection and put them in her pack.

  “Are they worth something, Worthy Sister?” asked Druskarl.

  “I cannot say. I just know that I must have a few.”

  From time to time they passed through little woodlands of spiral-shaped spikes of glass that freakish currents of air had teased up before they set. Some were the size of large trees, others were no longer than a dagger.

  “These are like souls of the dead, held down and frozen on their way to the afterlife,” said Laron as he caressed a lime-green spiral no taller than Velander. “The curves are so sensual, almost like breasts.”

  “And what are these tiny ones?” asked Velander, who was on her knees and peering at some little spirals of sky blue.

  “Souls of mice?” said Druskarl.

  “Well, then, nobody here will miss a few mice,” she said as she reached for her pickhammer.

  Rain had fallen since the fire-circles, and had collected in clear puddles that were quite fit to drink from. There was no dust but a thin smear washed out of the sky by the rain. Brought up in a world where dust is taken for granted, Velander had great trouble accepting the smooth, sterile li
felessness of the lands she was traveling through. For one mile the glass was cerulean-blue ripples, shot through with milky-white streaks, then it changed to speckled red. At five miles they reached another immense circle’s rim, and after this there were jumbled mounds of white like ghosts caught in a pool of frozen milk.

  “Four and two-thirds miles,” Velander commented as they slithered and struggled over the glass.

  Presently there were ruins, but these were just mounds of fused rock. Some were bubbled and jagged like scoria, other mounds were as smooth as the surface of polished jade inlay. Glass icicles hung here, too, but there were also long, flexible threads of glass that waved, tangled, and then untangled with every breeze. On some threads hung globes of glass, and the wind played tunes on the taut threads while the globes tinkled accompaniment.

  “So beautiful,” breathed Velander in wonder at a tiny cluster of glass chimes hanging from thin glass fibers. “Can this really be just an accident?”

  “It’s as if some god was trying to make up for all its devastation with these exquisite little gifts,” Laron speculated.

  “I once studied for a year at the University of Larmental,” said Velander. “It was all towers and walkways, high in the air, and very serene and quiet. I hate to say it, and I know that the price of all this was millions of deaths, yet it is almost as beautiful in death as it was in life.”

  At dusk they stopped in a field of azure glass that was fringed by melted, skewed stumps of columns. Close by were the city walls, or more precisely, the breakwater of greenish grey glass that marked where the walls had stood. They decided to stop for the night and travel the last three miles in the morning. The surface was hard and cold, and not conducive to easy sleep. Velander took the first half of the watch, and Druskarl the second. Laron went some distance away to be dead in private.

  The rising sun cast gleaming highlights and scintillations over the melted landscape as the travelers breakfasted. The last miles to the center were over a progressively more melted and uniform landscape of huge, circular, petrified ripples over which they had to clamber with the aid of handspikes and ropes. Between the ripples were shallow expanses of trapped rainwater. The sky was clear, and there was no wind. Neither were there any birds or leatherwings. Nothing but the four travelers moved or made a sound, yet they glanced about constantly, feeling very, very exposed. There was an irrational sense of being watched, as if everything nearby was lying still for fear that something huge and deadly would awake and pounce. They told each other that all was silent because everything was many months dead, but that did not seem to help. As they climbed over the last and highest of the frozen glass ripples, they beheld a circular lake, about a half mile across. Velander sat down and removed her clogs as the others entered the water. It proved to be only calf-deep and was absolutely clear, but as they waded out across the water their feet stirred up a thin layer of precipitated dust. They spread out as they reached the area of the center, where the water was knee-deep.

  “Something ahead, something white,” Feran called.

  It was a skeleton. Decay progressed slowly in this sterile wasteland, yet the body had been reduced to bones and scraps of clothing. Another body was found nearby. Velander was shaken, wondering who might have reached this place before them, and wondering, too, why they might have killed each other.

  “His coins and rings are untouched,” said Velander, reluctantly examining the first body.

  “Murdered for their silence,” concluded Feran. “Marines in Warsovran’s navy wear standardized greaves like these.”

  “Found something,” called Druskarl in Diomedan. “An imprint in the glass.”

  “You mean another body?” asked Feran.

  “More like an area has been dug out. It’s about a yard square.”

  They converged on Druskarl, who held up a piece of broken, greenish glass. Velander eagerly reached for it and held it close to her face. There was a percussion point on one side, but imprinted in the flat surface was a pattern of circles with triangular arms and other decorations. Druskarl pointed to an area about the size of an adult’s torso, where the glass on the bottom had been dug away. Somebody had smashed it out with a heavy pickhammer.

  “The quiescent form of Silverdeath is a jacket of jewelry,” said Velander. “The basic unit is made up of circles with three arms. Each arm interlocks with an arm of three other circles.”

  She handed the glass it back to Druskarl.

  “That’s enough proof,” concluded Druskarl. “Silverdeath did survive the fire-circles that it generated, and it has already been salvaged.”

  “Ow!” cried Velander, hopping about on one foot. “I found another chunk of glass—or it found me.”

  “Keep it,” said Laron. “If someone thought to remove the other chunks, they might be worth something.”

  They spent the rest of the day examining the glass crater, but found nothing else other than some more stray chunks of glass. Eventually Velander and Druskarl left to set up camp for the night.

  “Well, there is not much more to do,” said Laron to Feran as they waded through the water, searching for anything that might have been missed in earlier passes.

  “So, navigator, what else should we do?” asked Feran. “It’s a long way to come again if we have missed something.”

  Laron stopped, tossed a chunk of imprinted glass in the air and caught it again. “This glass came in contact with Silverdeath and was also at the center of every fire-circle. Its feel suggests quite a potent warp in the fabric between etherworlds.”

  “Ah, so that is why Warsovran chipped out all the other imprinted glass along with the mailshirt,” Feran concluded.

  “That is a logical premise, fit to be taken seriously. It is more likely, however, that some areas of the fabric were partly embedded in the solid glass and he wanted to remove them slowly, and at leisure. This piece probably just fell off and he ignored it. Look, here’s another,” he said as he reached down into the water.

  They made their way to the camp, and sat down with Velander and Druskarl.

  “Such an awesome place,” said Druskarl, folding his arms tightly and shivering. “I can hardly imagine what happened here.”

  “The weapon assumed the form of an immense bubble when it was discharged,” said Feran. “It floated high above Torea until it was lost to view, then the fire poured down. That’s what the spies told us, anyway. As for the ending—who knows? I suspect the bubble reverted to a shirt of metal inter-lacings when the ocean’s vastness quenched the fourteenth fire-circle, hundreds of miles away. With its cycle of doubled regeneration broken, it would have fallen from the sky into the molten glass and rock below. I expect it would have sunk deep and out of reach at once, but perhaps it floated down as slowly as a bubble, then reverted to its usual form only a few feet above the ground. That way the glass would have had a chance to harden somewhat.”

  “Whoever murdered the two marines arrived here just weeks after the catastrophe, and knew exactly where to go,” said Druskarl.

  Feran nodded. “The armor, the weapons, the coins—all are typical of Warsovran’s marines.”

  “Warsovran must have known what would happen,” said Laron. “He has the thing back, I know it.”

  “Then we have failed,” said Feran. “Let us hope and pray that he has the sense not to use it again.”

  The daylight was yielding to a brilliant tapestry of stars, Miral, and the moonworlds. A watch was not thought necessary, as by now they had accepted how very alone they were in this place. Feran was lying asleep, but Velander sat up in her bedding as Laron and Druskarl prepared to leave again.

  “I am going to conduct some quick tests back at the central glass crater,” Laron explained. “I only need Druskarl to help, but you are welcome to join us.”

  “And stand up to my knees in water again?” muttered Velander.

  “Lacking a boat, yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “It seems to be a p
lace of exceptional etheric power,” replied Laron. “As Feran said, this is not an easy place to reach, so we should make the most of it. What do you say? Miral will not be up for much longer, so we need to get moving.”

  “You, not ‘we.’”

  “All right, all right,” said Laron as they turned away. “What did I tell you, Druskarl? Cast pearls at swine and what do you get?”

  “Muddy pearls?”

  Once they were gone Velander crawled across to where Laron had dropped his bedding and shroud. If this was a place of exceptional power, then there were more ways to explore it than by merely standing in cold water and doing whatever he intended to do. She rummaged in his packroll. Sure enough, there was the iron case she had noticed him carrying. He had left it behind; he obviously did not wish to get it wet and rusty. Guard autons would not bind on pure iron, so it was probably a matter of merely releasing the catch to open it. As the hinges creaked open she saw the circlet gleaming in Miral’s light.

  Velander removed the circlet from the iron case and fingered it, contemplating its strangeness. It was plain but graceful to the untutored eye, yet very obviously from another world. The material had a strangely silky feel. It was as smooth as glass, yet not cold, almost like a leather strap. Perhaps an etherworld tether of some sort? she wondered. She had never owned one before.

  Velander was aware that Silverdeath would stand out like a beacon in the etherworld. Even if it was miles away she would be able to see it. Nobody on the Shadowmoon had considered the possibility that a boat from the Oakheart might have gone up the river just ahead of them. Banzalo, not Warsovran, might have taken Silverdeath. If that were the case, he might still be nearby. After setting up camp, she had conducted several ether resonance tests, and had found an exceedingly powerful presence close by. That could have been nothing else but Silverdeath, she was sure of it. It was just a matter of logic; the Queen of Soulmates had come to her aid again. She had pointed the way to Silverdeath after they had given up hope. Velander put the circlet on her head, then smiled. She began to speak castings. Just a few minutes, then she would raise the alarm and give them Silverdeath’s direction and approximate distance.