Into the Dark Lands

by Michelle Sagara

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY MICHELLE SAGARA WEST

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Introduction

  prologue

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  interlude

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  epilogue

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY MICHELLE SAGARA WEST

  Cast in Shadow*

  The Sundered Series*

  Children of the Blood

  Lady of Mercy

  Chains of Darkness, Chains of Light

  The Sacred Hunt Duology**

  Hunter’s Oath

  Hunter’s Death

  The Sun Sword Series**

  The Broken Crown

  The Uncrowned King

  The Shining Court

  Sea of Sorrows

  The Riven Shield

  Sun Sword

  *As Michelle Sagara

  **As Michelle West

  acknowledgments

  I think that more work is done, by more people, on a first novel than on any that follow, and I’d like to thank the people who know best the truth of this: editor, Veronica Chapman, who saw something in the book that I first sent and was kind enough to put up with all of my ignorance about publishing; her associate Deborah, who didn’t laugh when I asked about type-faces, among other things; and Gord Davis, who could probably, with humor and ease, sell a wolf to a shepherd—but wouldn’t, on principle.

  And to this, in 2005, I would like to add my thanks to Glenn Yeffeth of BenBella books, and Meghan Kuckelman for her kindness in shepherding me through the happy world of the production assistant, a job so entirely necessary and so often invisible when all things go according to plan. I’d also like to thank Kenn Brown and Chris Wren for giving me an absolutely glorious cover; I may have waited over a decade for it, but things late are often more valued for the wait.

  dedication

  1991

  For Thomas, who must know, better than anyone, that a few pages a day is a poor return for all that you give me. I couldn’t have written this, or anything that might follow it, without you. Proof? Read it; try to tell me where, in these words, you can’t be found.

  2005

  For Thomas, because what was true then, is still true. At the heart of these words, the thing I remember most is what it was like to be engaged to be married when the world was full of possibility and the dreams of being a writer. Those dreams, you kept, and because you could, I wrote.

  introduction

  Well. I asked for this small bit of space before the story because I wanted to say something about it. But sitting here, there’s either too little to say, or too much. This is not going to come as a huge surprise to many of my readers.

  When I first conceived of the story itself, I thought it would be a short story, because I knew the ending. Then, when I realized that to make the ending work emotionally I had to actually have a story in front of it, I thought it would be a novella. And when I finished the first book, I knew it would be at least two books. Now, it is actually four novels long, but the ending is what I envisioned before I began to set words on paper.

  But back a bit, because back story is important. When I was near the tail end of university, I was at that happy age–yes, that’s ironic usage–in which I realized I would have to do something with my life. Until then, I’d been coasting. I had always written, and I had always loved fantasy novels–they were the heart of my reading. But for the previous three years I had written mostly poetry, which is a very different form.

  Poetry, for me, speaks to experience–the aha! moment in which you both recognize what the writer is talking about and at the same time see it with new eyes. Prose, on the other hand, is meant–again, to me–to invoke an experience that the reader hasn’t had before, to walk them toward it, laying out the stones of the road they’ll follow.

  So the writing of the first novel was difficult in many ways, because poetry distils event, and prose expands on it. Language is also used differently, and mine had been camped in the very spare modern world of free verse.

  I wrote my first book over a period of six months, and then revised it. Then I sent it off into the world and started writing the second book.

  The first book came back with a very enthusiastic rejection letter, and the editor asked me to call her, which I did. This resulted in more revision, after which the editor passed the novel on to Lester del Rey, with her recommendation to buy. Lester then went on to reject the book, and one of the things that he really hated about it was the fact that the story didn’t begin where it should have.

  I read his four-page letter and winced a lot, but I found it enormously useful. It was beyond blunt, but I was prepared for that because Lester del Rey didn’t do anything that wasn’t, as far as I can tell, beyond blunt.

  And then I started the novel you’re holding now. The events of the novel were told in a ninety-odd-page flashback toward the end of the book. This flashback I then removed and threw out.

  I started again, from the beginning, and of all the novels I’ve written, I think this one was the easiest to write because emotionally I knew what it had to be, and I’d been given the room–even the mandate–to make it so. When I finished, I once again revised it and sent it back to my editor, the very perky Veronica Chapman. She passed it back to Lester, and this time he liked it enough to offer to publish it.

  I was, as they say, over the moon. (No, I don’t know why they say this.) But after that, I was once again left with a number of revisions, the first of which was: add description. I added ten thousand words of description; this was actually very difficult and in many cases involved rewriting entire scenes. But once again, this taught me something useful, and I confess that one review mentioned the lack of description even after I’d added so many words.

  But at that point, it was a book. It was, I thought, finished. Then I learned the next important thing from the experience: that once it’s finished, once it’s out there, there are no more opportunities for revision; it’s not software, there is no version 2.0. Unless you’re David Gerrold, but I digress.

  Years later, I’m not the writer I was then. This should come as no surprise, because I’m not really the person I was then. There are authors who hate the sight of their first novels, seeing in them only the flaws that later experience prevents. I would have to say that I’m torn; I do see things here that I would do entirely differently were I to write the story now, and I see things that–yes–make me wince. But I also see, in the writing, the heart of the story that moved me; I know that it was the very best book I could have written at that time.

  It is still, among many of my readers, their favorite work. The flaws that I see, they don’t, or perhaps they don’t care; it isn’t the flaws that drive them, after all. I had considered revising the book before it was reissued, but a conversation on-line cured me of the impulse, and even the desire. It wasn’t about my book, oddly enough; it was about another author’s revisions of his earlier work.

  What he had done to make the book better–in his own eyes, and for his own aesthetic sensibilities–had taken some essential part of the experience of reading the book away from those readers who loved the earlier version. It had neve
r occurred to me to look at my own writing in this light; I think about text, in all ways, first as a writer, and I can never approach my own work as anything but a writer.

  But readers don’t do that unless the book isn’t working for them; they read as readers, and their first impressions, especially emotional ones, are always true. It’s my belief that a book exists as something in the space between the writer and the reader; that before a reader comes along, it’s waiting in limbo, missing a vital half of something that isn’t quite conversation and isn’t quite monologue. But what a reader makes of text, and what I try to convey, are often different, sometimes wildly and sometimes only barely; I don’t argue for specific interpretations unless they’re entirely based on fact, and often not even then.

  One of my readers said to me, after finishing this novel, that it was Beauty and the Beast at heart. It had never occurred to me that this was the case; I didn’t do it on purpose. But I could see what she meant the moment she said it, because Beauty and the Beast was my favorite fairy tale, and I own many different versions of it. What I had taken at a very early age into my own heart grew there, and it grew into something I couldn’t easily recognize until someone else pointed it out.

  So, the book remains as it was then, and I can read it now and wonder, a little, at who I was when I was twenty-five, and at how strongly I believed in this particular story, this dark romance.

  —Michelle Sagara West

  Toronto, 2005

  prologue

  From the teachings of the Lady of Elliath, First

  Servant of Lernan, God,

  to the Lines of the Sundered.

  All life has a beginning, and in that sense even the mountains and the earth we dwell upon are alive. But imagine, if you can, a thing which has no such life, and no unfolding: It is, it has been, it will be. This is a hard task, but I ask it only for a moment, for I will tell you of our beginnings, and I, too, must start somewhere.

  There was the Light, and there was the Dark. The Light was glorious, ordered, strong; the Dark, ugly and twisted. Each slept in perfection; each spread cold dreams in a wide net, reaching ever outward. Thus did They find each other.

  The Light touched the Dark; the Dark the Light—and both were awakened. And where They touched, They frayed into small, moving strands of Light and Darkness. Thus were the Sundered born, the Servants of the two, like their parents to your eyes, but lesser and diminished by the method of their creation. Still, the Sundered of the Light cleaved to Light; the Sundered of the Dark, to Darkness.

  I was the first Sundered of the Light; I beheld the first Sundered of the Darkness and I knew him for my enemy. It was my first thought, my only thought. With my brethren of the Sundered, I prepared for battle.

  Battle we did, for the Dark would consume all without our resistance. The voice of the Light was strong and sure. Stars grew, stars died, and in the cadence of His words, we found strength and glory; battle all but consumed us.

  Yet neither Dark nor Light was victorious. The Sundered fell around me until my Lord could bear their loss no longer. I remember it well, for Light cut the void as He moved in a dwindling spiral toward the Enemy. I knew there was danger, but I did not know its nature and I could not follow the path that my Lord made; it was too bright, too fast. Yet the Dark must have felt His purpose and His boundless anger, for Darkness began to trace His own path, His own menace, across the vastness. He made no retreat, but instead moved to meet my Lord. The First Sundered of the Enemy made haste to follow, even as I—but who among the Servants, whether of Light or Dark, could hope to match the swiftness of their masters? Although we traveled with all haste, nothing was left for us in the end but to watch.

  They joined, locking Their essences around each other. Neither gave ground, and neither retreated from the tight embrace of Their struggle. We of the Sundered heard the voices of our Lords grow weaker and fainter until they did not reach our ears at all. Worse, we saw the Light dim and the Darkness brighten; you who have always known dusk and twilight will never comprehend our terror. No more Light or Darkness was sundered; They were too closely knit for that.

  Thus was the Earth born, and gray humanity which holds in equal portion a measure of Light and Dark and knows both life and death, love and hate, pain and pleasure. And the Light and the Dark slept again, Twin Hearts in the body of the world; the Bright Heart and the Dark Heart as they are known now. We cried out into the void all our ancient evocations—to no avail. What slept we were powerless to awaken.

  Thus the Servants were alone among humanity, each carrying the heritage of his parents. All that we saw as we first wandered the body of the world was ugly to our eyes, stained and impure. We saw the mortals rise from folly to folly; saw them born and saw them die. In time, we grew to hope that out of the gray we might pull Light—or Darkness. The Sundered chose to mingle with the mortals that had so displeased them at first, and from these unions, you were born.

  Thus began the battle we now fight. The Servants of the Darkness and their offspring furthered the ends of the Dark, as those of the Light furthered the ends of the Light. Humanity proved amenable to all of the influences of both: fear, love, hate, pain, and hope.

  And the Light and the Dark continued to sleep, untouched by the conflict, until the battle of Pellen Fields and the fall of Gallin of Meron, who was our foremost warrior, the champion of my choice.

  The Bright Heart is not human or mortal; He knows no life as we know it. But the strength of Gallin’s dying touched Him, where a living creature could not. And as Gallin died, the power of the Light—of God—flowed to him. And the Servants of the Darkness fled or perished as the power of their Enemy reawakened. And we who had served the Light since the beginning heard again the whisper of His voice and His purpose.

  Thus did Lernan, God, return in power to us, His followers, lending us the strength of His purpose. Love, He gives us, and light, and hope. Yet even awakened, He was still lessened; the world that He had formed could not release Him to us. The void was no longer His home; nor would He wander it again in all His brilliant glory. He was interred. The Light of the Bright Heart would know no release from His body. Still, with His aid and strength, our victory was assured.

  Or so we hoped.

  But such was the nature of the Darkness that He could not sleep while His one Enemy awakened—and so did the power of the Dark Heart also enter the world, to speak once again to His ancient Servants, and the half-breed Malanthi that they had engendered. And to them returned the power of Darkness, the power of the blood ceremonies.

  You, who are Lernari, bear some of the blood of the Light. You are the children of the Sundered and the mortals; you are our hope and our connection to the gray humanity. You will know death; we cannot prevent it. You will know time and feel its passing. More than this, you will know war.

  And as the Sundered of the Light to the Sundered of the Dark, you will be enemy to the Malanthi, those borne of the nonblooded and the Darkness.

  I ask you only to remember that you are kin to the nonblooded humans; you will live as they do and die as they do. Protect them and teach them.

  chapter one

  The Lady of Elliath waited in shadowed silence. All around her, trees and flowers flourished under the light of no natural sun. This was her hall, and even the vagaries of the weather were trapped without. Still she knew, without seeing it, that lightening branched and forked its way through the gray and murky sky. The distant low rumble that followed would make itself known throughout all of her lands save these.

  But war was never as distant as thunder. And from some tidings there was no escape, no matter where she chose to bide her time.

  A sound, like a gentle chime, wafted across the breeze, and she rose, stately and elegant, to examine the details of a fresco that had been painted by one of her descendants. A whisper of foot brushing undergrowth grew louder as someone approached. She drew her light around her tall, slim form and let it trail like a cloak behind her.

&n
bsp; A man stopped, ten feet from the sight of this glowing shroud, and bowed low. Without looking, she knew him for Latham, master scholar of Elliath.

  She knew the hour, then, and the day; knew all that he would tell her in the sudden chill of the garden. A Servant’s memory was perfect and endless.

  Twenty mortal years ago, he had stood so before her, straight and tall, with a hint of gray pain about compressed lips and nearly closed eyes. Twenty years and more, she had chosen, for the sake of her line, to chance the veil of the future at the behest of the Bright God. She had not taken the trance lightly, and Latham had been among those to argue against it. But the war they fought had been dire, and the undoubtable outcome bitter. She had retreated to her hall and begun the spells and openings of the ways. Here, she had taken her first step.

  The paths of the possible were not easy to wander, and for the first year of her trance she had moved with care. Other minds and lesser Servants had been lost to the veils. Still, she was the First of Lernan, and as she had gained an understanding of those paths she had walked them more quickly and more confidently, changing what she chose to do, and how, to see what might come of it. Three more years had passed in her search for an end to the war, but she had found it.