The Shadow King

by Alec Hutson

  Green light leaped from Alyanna’s hand, carving the air. The genthyaki’s claws and the congealing darkness vanished, and when the beam faded the creature’s arm ended in a steaming stump. It threw back its head and howled, pressing its mutilated limb to its sunken chest. Alyanna gestured and a swarm of glittering silver blades flashed towards the reeling monster, tumbling end over end. But just before the first of the summoned knives pierced the genthyaki, it fell backward . . . and vanished through a rippling patch of air.

  Alyanna screamed in rage, the knives winking out of existence. She threw out her arm, and a line of monuments farther up the hillside tore loose from the earth and went crashing down the slope.

  For a long moment she stood there, head down, breathing heavily. Then she turned, looking directly at where Keilan was watching from around the edge of the tomb.

  “Come out,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.” She sounded exhausted.

  Keilan glanced at Nel. Should they trust her?

  “The paladin is dying,” Alyanna said, waving her hand dismissively towards where Senacus was crumpled.

  She was right. Taking a deep breath, Keilan came out from behind the tomb and hurried over to the Pure. Despite the razed lichyard, the paladin had been untouched by the sorcery, though his face was pale and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His shining eyes were only slightly open and seemed duller than just a few moments ago; Keilan thought he was unconscious, but it was hard to tell with the Pure. As Alyanna had claimed, he was clearly slipping away.

  “Can you help him?” Keilan asked, his concern for the paladin overwhelming the fear he felt towards this ancient sorceress.

  Alyanna snorted. “He is one of the Pure. Healing magic would do nothing for him. And anyway, I am no healer.”

  Nel appeared beside Keilan holding strips of cloth and a flask. “Help me get his armor off,” she told Keilan. “We need to clean the wounds and stop the bleeding.”

  “Leave him,” Alyanna said, bending over to rummage through the sack she’d dropped earlier. “More of the light-blinded fools are coming. They will save him, if he can be saved.”

  “He killed one of his brothers,” Nel hissed through gritted teeth, struggling with Keilan to pull off the paladin’s white-scale cuirass. Finally, with a grunt she slipped it over his head and tossed it aside. Beneath the armor his tunic was soaked with blood.

  “I’m sure he had a good reason,” Alyanna said. “Perhaps he can explain himself to them.”

  There was something in the sorceress’s voice that indicated they were not alone. Keilan looked towards the temple as Nel began to slice away the stained cloth. At the foot of the hill, a crowd had gathered around the wrought-iron entrance to the lichyard. Mendicants in their white robes, lightbearers carrying swords and axes . . . and a pair of tall warriors in gleaming white armor, their eyes burning like embers in the early morning light.

  “Oh, no,” Keilan whispered. The Pure would be arriving soon, and there would be little mercy shown with the reek of sorcery in the air and a dying paladin leaking his lifeblood into the soil.

  A shiver passed through Keilan as Alyanna formed a spell. He turned his eyes to her and found that the sorceress had pulled a silver sphere from the sack she’d brought. She let it go and it hovered in front of her, and with another tendril of sorcery she made its surface ripple like water. She placed one hand above and one hand below the orb, and then began to compress it so that it bulged outwards, becoming flatter.

  “Keilan!” Nel said sharply, and he pulled his gaze away from what Alyanna was doing. “I’ll need you to lift him soon.”

  The knife splashed the contents of her flask on Senacus’s wounds, and the paladin groaned and shifted weakly. “Up,” she commanded, and grabbing hold of the Pure’s shoulders Keilan raised him slightly so that Nel could wrap the strips of cloth around his body. She managed to cover most of the cuts, but the cloth instantly darkened as the blood continued to flow.

  “We have no time,” Alyanna said. “Keilan, you must come with me. If the woman wants to stay with the paladin, so be it. But you are needed elsewhere.”

  A thin disc now floated beside the sorceress, wide enough for a horse to stand on. It dipped slightly and then rose again as she climbed atop it and settled herself cross-legged, placing the sack beside her. Alyanna beckoned at him impatiently, sparing a quick glance towards the faithful of Ama laboring up the slope. They would be here in moments.

  “We have to bring him!” Keilan cried.

  The sorceress muttered something, and for a moment Keilan thought she would abandon them, but then she sighed. “Very well. But be quick.”

  Keilan hurried to where they had stowed their travel packs on the other side of the tomb they’d sheltered behind and slipped the straps over his shoulders. There was no way he was leaving the black knife behind, not after all it had cost him. Then he returned to where Nel squatted behind Senacus’s head. “Take his legs,” she commanded, and together they lifted the limp paladin. Straining under the big man’s weight, they carried him over to the hovering disc and slid him onto its shimmering silver surface.

  Keilan clambered up beside Senacus. Instead of joining them, though, Nel dashed away.

  “Where are you going?” he cried after her.

  “Fool,” Alyanna hissed, and Keilan felt the sorceress send a flicker of sorcery into the disc, compelling it to rise. Without considering how he knew what to do, Keilan sent his own pulse of magic flowing through the disc, holding it down. Alyanna glanced at him in surprise, her large dark eyes wide.

  With the Pure and the other warriors of Ama less than a hundred paces away, Nel scooped the paladin’s fallen white-metal sword from the churned earth. Something else small was on the ground near the blade, and she picked that up as well, and then she was running back towards the disc.

  A great wave surged from the onrushing paladins, and for a moment Keilan feared he would drown again in the power of Ama’s chosen, but it broke harmlessly against an invisible barrier. He looked in surprise at Alyanna as Nel leaped onto the disc, making it rock dangerously.

  “They cannot touch ones such as us,” the sorceress said, holding his gaze, “if we do not let them. Now release your hold on the chavenix.”

  Keilan assumed she was referring to the disc, and he unclenched his sorcery.

  The disc rose smoothly into the lightening sky, the upturned faces of Ama’s faithful dwindling beneath them.

  She should be dead.

  That was her first thought as she came awake. Cho Lin lay there, stiff from sleeping on the cold stone, and considered her slow, even breathing and the dull thudding of her heart, trying to make sense of things. Around her, moonlight trickled through the rents in the ceiling, illuminating the small chamber with a pale radiance.

  Her hand drifted to where the demon had cut open her side, fingers pushing through furs stiff with blood. She brushed her skin, tracing the ridges of a scar that felt like it had healed some months ago. To her surprise, the wound barely ached as she prodded it. She touched her ribs, the ones she’d feared had been broken. Again, only the slightest discomfort. It was like she’d spent months recuperating from her ordeal in the arena.

  Fragments of her dreams floated up. She had been in Nes Vaneth, walking among the white stone buildings. But instead of tumbled ruins the city had been whole, though a thick mist had clotted the streets, coiling around columns and making it impossible to see more than a few span in front of her face. That had made it hard for her to follow the woman in white as she drifted down the streets – no matter how fast Cho Lin ran she never managed to catch her, and the intense frustration she’d felt still lingered, even now that she was awake.

  The Pale Lady. When she’d stumbled from the arena Cho Lin had been half-dead, her thoughts addled. Now, as she lay in the ruin where she’d found solace, she remembered the story Verrigan had told
her when they first approached the Bhalavan, about the Min-Ceruthan ghost that haunted Nes Vaneth. A harbinger of bad luck, he’d claimed. Is that why the Skein had turned back rather than follow her into the ruins? Had they also seen her?

  Cho Lin shivered. In Shan, the spirits of the dead did not slip across the veil unless they wished to inflict harm. Usually they raged against some injustice that had been done to them, taking vengeance by leading men to their doom, then drawing the warm breath from their mouths so that for a brief moment they could feel what it was like to live again. Had the Pale Lady led her into Nes Vaneth to die? And if so, why was she not only alive, but unnaturally healed?

  Cho Lin climbed slowly to her feet. The small chamber looked different in the falling moonlight. The water in the basin at the statue’s feet had a silvery hue, and as she watched, a ripple spread across its surface. She looked up, squinting at the holes in the ceiling, wondering how it could rain in these cold wastes. For that matter, why was the water in the basin not frozen? What was keeping it warmed?

  That was when she saw it. The statue’s cheeks were veined with dampness, as if it had been crying, and the tear-tracks glistened the same silver color as the water in the basin below. Against her better judgement, she stepped forward and pressed her thumb to the face of the stone girl. It came away wet.

  And that wasn’t all. A long and thin piece of metal had been placed in the outstretched arms of the girl, and Cho Lin was certain it had not been there when she first entered the chamber. Tentatively, her heart beating fast, she lifted the metal shard from where it rested and carried it to where she could see it more clearly in the moonlight.

  It was a piece of a blade about the length of her forearm. The end tapered to a curving point—she knew what sword this had once been a part of, and she barely held back a choking sob, her hands shaking. It was the Sword of Cho, the ancient weapon of her ancestors. She glanced around wildly, peering into the chamber’s shadowed recesses. Who had brought it here? And why?

  The sword seemed to shiver in her hands, and she looked at it again in surprise. Was she going mad? Moonlight slid along the blade, and she saw her reflection staring back at her.

  No. That wasn’t her. The girl in the metal had the same glistening black hair, but her skin was darker, her face broader. Cho Lin brought her fingers to her thin lips, and the image in the sword did the same, except the girl trapped in the sword brushed lips that were much fuller. There was a humming in her head, faint but growing louder. Cho Lin fell to her knees, swaying, unable to look away from those piercing eyes . . .

  The screams were terrible.

  They came clawing up from Consort Wei’s swollen belly, ragged with pain and fear. Jhenna crouched in the corner, hugging her knees to her chest, watching in cold dread as midwives in olive robes scurried back and forth. Some held silken sheets stained bloody, while others carried silver bowls slopping over with pink water.

  Something was very wrong. Jhenna had witnessed a dozen births out on the steppes, beneath the Great Sky, but never had any lasted this long. It had seemed like an eternity since she’d watched fingers of pink dawnlight crawl across the floor. Now that same stone was bruised purple by twilight, and servants had hung lanterns from the ceiling, though they had not yet lit the candles within.

  Then it was finished. As terrible as the screams had been, the silence that followed was worse. It clotted in the room like milk gone sour. Finally, when Jhenna thought she couldn’t bear it any longer, a trembling, age-spotted hand pulled back the moon bed’s gauzy red curtain. The Autumn Warlock of Shan emerged, blinking, his face slack, his arms stained red up to his elbows.

  The head midwife approached respectfully, her face lowered.

  “The child, my lord?”

  “Dead,” the warlock murmured, shaking his head slightly, as if having trouble focusing on the matronly woman standing before him. “And the mother as well.”

  Scattered gasps came from among the gathered midwives. Jhenna had to bite down on her knuckles to stifle a sob.

  The midwife bowed her head. “It was Heaven’s will, my lord,” she said, but the strength in her voice faltered. Jhenna saw a tear fall, and she rubbed at the wetness on her own cheeks.

  A curt gesture from the midwife brought several of the servants who had been standing in the shadows forward. They held a long bolt of gleaming black cloth; behind them, other servants bearing cloth the color of the morning sky clutched their burden to their chests and remained motionless. They would not be needed this day.

  Their movements slow and solemn, the servants unhooked the red curtain and replaced it with the black. Jhenna glimpsed what lay upon the bed: a tangle of soiled silks, smeared with blood. Black hair spread over velvet cushions. She couldn’t tear her eyes from Consort Wei’s pale arm, dangling over the edge of the bed, and her plum-colored nails – it was only yesterday that Jhenna had applied that lacquer while they gossiped about the other women in the palace. Now she was gone.

  The head midwife cast a fearful glance behind her, at the chamber’s entrance. “My lord . . .”

  “Go,” the warlock said tiredly. “He may be wroth.”

  The midwives and the servants hurriedly retreated from the room, their eyes downcast. The head midwife was the last to leave, briefly slipping within the black curtains, then emerging a moment later cradling a small bundle. She bowed again to the old warlock and followed the others from the chamber.

  Only Jhenna and the sorcerer remained. He did not seem to notice her, huddled as she was in the corner. This did not surprise her. She had grown very skilled at not being seen in the months since arriving at the Jade Court.

  A shudder passed through the old warlock, and before her eyes he seemed to grow more gnarled and stooped, as if finally allowing the weight of what had happened to fall fully upon his shoulders. He raised his hand to run it through his gray-threaded hair, but then stopped himself, staring at his blood-drenched arm.

  Footsteps. Not the whisper of a servant’s slippers as they hurried to their tasks, or the heavy clump of a soldier’s boots, but confident, measured strides. Jhenna turned to the archway that led deeper into the women’s quarters and caught a flash of yellow robes as someone entered the room.

  Her breath seized in her throat and she threw herself to the floor, pressing her forehead to the cold stone.

  He was here. The Beloved of Heaven had come. He may be wroth.

  “Excellence.”

  “Bae Fan,” the emperor said softly, “what has happened?” He didn’t sound angry, Jhenna thought. Weary, perhaps.

  There was a long pause. Jhenna could imagine some of the various explanations and excuses the old sorcerer was considering. In the end, he told the truth, as Jhenna had witnessed it.

  “Consort Wei went into labor soon after breaking her fast this morning. I hurried here, and immediately could tell that something was very wrong. The child . . . your son had wrapped his birth cord around his neck. He was strangling himself, and he could not finish pushing his way out. I tried to save him and the mother by cutting . . .”

  Again, a terrible silence filled the birthing chamber. Jhenna wanted to glance up and see the expression on the emperor’s face, but if he glimpsed her doing so, such impertinence would result in a beating, or worse. So instead she ground her forehead into the stone and breathed as quietly as she could.

  “Give the prince and his mother a proper funeral. Let them lie for three days and three nights in my family shrine, then inter them in the tomb of my ancestors.”

  “As you wish, Excellence.”

  The footsteps began again, this time receding. Jhenna stayed in obeisance for another dozen heartbeats to make sure the emperor was truly gone. When she finally raised her head, she found that the Autumn Warlock had vanished as well. She hadn’t heard him leave.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. Not long ago the birthing chamber
had been a riot of activity as a dozen people had endeavored to bring new life into this world. Now she was the only one here that drew breath.

  Jhenna rose and slowly approached the bed. Hesitating only for the briefest of moments, she pulled back the curtain.

  Consort Wei lay as if asleep. Her eyes were closed and her striking face was untroubled, her thin lips slightly parted. She had always been unusually pale, but now she looked like one of the noble children’s ceramic dolls. The color that had drained from her cheeks stained the sheets. Jhenna reached down and laced her fingers with Wei’s, brushing her thumb against the consort’s still-warm skin.

  She brought her lips to her ear. “May the Mother of Mares carry you past the Great Black Grass, my heart sister.”

  A tear escaped as she gently kissed her friend’s brow. It fell upon Wei’s cheek and trickled away, leaving a glistening path.

  Jhenna straightened. With a last, lingering look at the one friend she had made in Shan, she drew back the black curtain—and gasped.

  She was no longer alone.

  A young man stood in the chamber, his hands clasped behind his back. His dark blue robes were decorated with twining dragons picked out in shimmering red thread, and the hilt of a jeweled sword was thrust through his black sash. He watched her without expression. Her heart thundering, Jhenna stepped from within the curtains and fell to her knees.

  She knew who this was – she had seen him in court, standing high up on the Heavenly Steps. Ma Qin, first son of emperor Ling Qin.

  Jhenna dared to look at him. He had his father’s strong jaw and fierce black eyes, but there was also something different. While the emperor’s gaze reminded her of the golden eagle that her father, the Yari of her people, had kept as a hunting bird, the prince’s did not. There was less of a predator about him, more softness in the corners of his eyes and the cant of his mouth. She swallowed as they stared at each other for a long moment, and then some emotion she could not place shivered the prince’s face.