A Shadow on the Glass

by Ian Irvine

  The night dragged to a close. Monochrome shades gave way to the faintest colors. Pink dawn touched the east The wind died down momentarily. She had survived another night. Her neck ached. Time to go. No, just a little bit longer. She closed her eyes.

  The sun leapt above the horizon. Karan slept, a few blessed moments of peace. Her breast rose and fell. Sunlight crept up her outflung arm, her slender throat, struck gold in her lashes and brows, bronze in her hair.

  The hound crept closer, taking advantage of every shadow, every hide, to get within springing distance of Karan, crouching on its belly, then swinging its gaunt body up and forward on anchored feet; springing forward one bound then crouching down again. Now it was just a leap away. It opened its long mouth in a grinning yawn.

  Karan dreamed that she was lying in a lovely soapy bath, luxuriating, warm and clean. Suddenly the bath dream drained away and she was naked, unprotected. The wind blew on her throat, shivering her awake, shocking her with the realization that for the second time she had slept on watch.

  But the sun was just up. She had not slept long at all, and she had survived the night. A fragment of another dream came to her, a child’s birthday party. It’s my birthday! Not much to celebrate. Nonetheless the thought was a little bit cheering. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, massaged her scalp with her fingertips, ran fingers through tangled hair and automatically looked around.

  The biggest, gauntest dog she had ever seen crouched just a few paces below her. It wavered its muzzle from side to side but the yellow eyes did not leave her face. Karan felt for her knife—it was by her side—and grasped her stick. She rose to her feet, sliding back into the rocks so that it could only come at her one way. She flicked her eyes around but there was no one in sight. Did the dog plan to attack or just bail her up here until its master came?

  She lifted the stick with both hands. The dog quivered. “Get away!” Her voice sounded unconvincing. The hound grinned then leapt at her.

  Karan swung her stick and struck it on the shoulder, knocking it to one side in a jumble of legs.

  The dog was up again at once, unhurt, gray claws scrabbling on the rocks. It snapped at her thigh. She swung the stick again but it struck the overhanging rock and jarred out of her hands. Karan snatched the knife with her right hand.

  The dog sprang and hit her in the stomach, knocking her back on the stone. It straddled her, snapped, and caught her knife arm halfway up to her elbow. Then it looked her deliberately in the eye, sank its teeth in and held her.

  Blood ran down her arm; saliva dripped from the huge jaws onto her chest. She let her arm go limp and the knife clattered on rock. One crunch of those great jaws could probably bite her hand off. She stared up at the dog, trying to find a chink in its armor. It wore an iron collar. The front teeth were broken stumps though most of the side ones, the bone crunchers, were good.

  Karan moaned. The dog flicked up its ears. She moaned again, putting all of her pain and weariness and fear into her voice, trying with all her talent to reach the dog, to convince it she was harmless, to make it let go for an instant. But even if she could reach it, put it off-guard for a second, what could she do? Her reflexes were lightning fast but hardly as fast as a dog’s. Unless the dog was slow and awkward like the master…

  Karan gave a little sigh, rolled back her eyes and closed her lids to the merest slit. Her body went limp. The dog held on, standing patiently. She gave a low shivery groan, then a shudder that rippled her from head to foot.

  The hound lowered its head and sniffed at her face. She shuddered again. The dog let go her wrist and instantly her left hand flashed up, grabbed the iron collar and twisted with every ounce of strength she had. It jerked back, choking. She balled up her right fist, punched it through the open jaws and jammed it hard into the dog’s throat, at the same time pulling it onto her fist by the collar.

  The dog convulsed, jerked its head and fell sideways, almost tearing her hand from the collar. It snapped its jaws, the rotten teeth lacerating her wrist and forearm. Sure that she was going to lose her hand, Karan thrust harder down its throat, thrusting and thrusting while its claws scratched frantically at the rock.

  Just then someone whistled, a low creepy sound not far away. The dog flung up its head, trying to bark, its eyes rolling, and Karan’s wrist snapped with a shocking pain. She wanted to shriek, to scream out her agony, but instead thrust against the pain until the dog went still, and even after that until she was sure mat it was dead.

  She withdrew her hand. Her forearm was rent by dozens of gouges and punctures and there were strips of skin hanging off. Blood poured down her wrist. Karan sat down suddenly, feeling that she was going to faint beside the emaciated hound. Though it had been her life or the dog’s, still this corpse was almost as bitter to her as the horse she had left up the road.

  The whistle came again, off to one side, shocking her. Karan wiped cold sweat from her brow with a hand that shook, found her knife and climbed awkwardly up into the rocks. The slightest movement was an excruciation.

  On a rock she perched, washed and salved the wounds and tried to bind her wrist. Though she was left-handed, her efforts would have been comical if the situation had not been so dire, the pain so awful. She found some knobbly sticks for splints, but could not fix them tightly enough to make any difference and finally gave up, just binding her arm and wrist and hand as tightly as she could bear, knowing that it was a hopeless job and would have to be redone today if her wrist was to heal properly. Happy birthday!

  “Droik! Droi-ik!” called Idlis in his burbling voice, looking this way and that as he came closer. It would be his dog! If she looked down Karan could still see the dead thing, gray tongue flopping out. She started to clamber up between the stones. She did not want to be here when Idlis found it.

  “Droiiik!” A moan of utter despair. “Droik, little puppy.”

  Don’t look down. She looked down and beheld Idlis cradling the giant hound in his arms and weeping as though it was his own child. Then he looked up and saw her staring at him. His face showed no recognition. His agony moved her soft heart, but she wanted to be well away when his grieving was done. She eased her way between the rocks and ran.

  It was nearly midday when next she saw him. Idlis, the tireless one. It was as if they had been running together for weeks, for all of her life, some thread of common purpose holding them together. Karan was empty inside now, sucked dry, an exhaustion of the spirit, her wrist and arm a killing pain. Why did she run? She no longer knew. Why did he follow? She couldn’t even imagine what drove him.

  Now he was close behind, so close that she could hear the grit squeaking beneath his feet It was a hot day for late autumn, with clear skies and a dry wind blowing. Now she fell, cutting her knee open on a rock, scrambled up; but it was all over—Idlis was on her. Disgusting creature! Desperation lent her a last strength. She flailed at his face, tore at his robes, leapt backwards. The fabric tangled about her good arm and, rotten from sun and sweat and wear, tore right off his back.

  Idlis gave a strangled cry and snatched at the cloth. Karan jerked the other way and fell backwards, carrying his robes with her, hood and all. All he had left was a rag in his fist and a short underskirt that fell from a band around his hips and was looped back up. His flesh was the pallid gray of a fish, his limbs bony and thick-jointed, the ribs raised bands around his chest.

  Karan scrambled to her feet and limped away, unwinding the cloth from her arm as she went. The fall had badly jarred her wrist and the least movement was agonizing. Then she was struck by the distress on Idlis’s normally blank face. He ignored her and ran jerkily toward his habit, one arm shielding his anemic face from the sun. She scooped the rank garments up in her good hand and hobbled on.

  For more than two hours the chase went on, on that barren plain, but Idlis became slower and slower, his motion more palsied, and at last was lost to sight What kind of trick was this? A blatant one perhaps but Karan was bothered by it and so she wen
t creeping back. She found him collapsed on the red soil. Even from a distance she could see that his limbs were contorted, his bare torso and shoulders burnt bright orange over the gray.

  Closer she crept, her curiosity aroused now. Did they have a weakness after all? The Whelm had lost his eye shields in his last travail, and as the long head lifted sluggishly all Karan could see were his eyes, and they were red, weeping wounds.

  Once she would have pitied Idlis but not any more. Not after Lake Neid. Then she looked in those eyes and that gave her pause, for she saw what she had seen in her horse’s eyes as she cut its throat

  “What can I do with you?” she said.

  The Whelm gave what passed for a painful shrug, a curious oscillation of the shoulder blades. “Do what you will,” he said, blinking fluid out of his eyes. “I expect no mercy, nor would give any.”

  “Why do you hunt me mis way? What have I done to you?”

  “The master’s shame is ours. We cannot rest until we have you.”

  Karan could not understand. “What evil creatures you are.”

  Now the Whelm did not comprehend. “You stole our master’s mirror, you killed my pup—and you call us evil? Did we serve you, you would know none more faithful.”

  In spite of herself Karan was fascinated. She crept closer, though not too close. She had never met anyone like him. “Who are you”

  “I am Idlis the Healer.”

  “Healer!”

  “Why not? We hurt, we get ill, we die. We feel.”

  His words struck Karan strangely. Somehow she had not thought of him as being human. “But what are you, Whelm?”

  “We are just Whelm. We came from the wilderness of ice. Before that—” he was momentarily confused “—too long ago. We have lost what we once had—a perfect partnership of servant and master. We cannot even remember our true master, so long is he gone.” He seemed a little sad, a little wistful. Then his face changed and his voice went cold with rage and self-disgust. “So Yggur is our master now, though he hates us. ‘The contemptible Whelm,’ he calls us. And we serve him, to our shame.”

  “Then why do you serve?”

  “We are Whelm!” Idlis said vehemently, as though that explained all. Then, seeing that it did not, “Without a master and a purpose we were nothing. We cannot go back to nothing; so we serve Yggur. Do you kill me then?”

  “I do not.”

  He writhed. Karan leapt back, then realized that he was trying to put himself in her shadow. The very skin of his face seemed to be dissolving. He wrapped his long arms around his torso. “How the sun burns.”

  Karan said nothing, only looked down at his blistering face. His eyes wept thick yellow tears but he could not ask.

  “I pity you,” Karan said. “That is my weakness.” The Whelm flinched. The eye shields were lying about twenty paces away. She walked over and picked them up. They were carved from a single piece of flexible, yellow bone. Idlis watched her without expression. She should do for him as she did for her horse. But he was in torment. She feared him still but could no longer hate him.

  She came back and threw the eye shields down on the dirt before him. He showed surprising dignity-reaching across, he touched the bone, then slowly and painfully forced himself to his feet, the yellow tears flooding his cheeks, and bowed to her. She looked at him in astonishment. He bent down, picked up the shields and put them over his eyes.

  “Your weakness is your strength,” Idlis said, “your pity my humiliation, the worst torment you could put me to. No one has ever done me a kindness before.” He said the word in a shuddering way, as if it was an insult or an offense, and his upper lip twisted back to show the gray gums and the dog teeth. “What can I do? To let you get away is treason. Yet honor demands that I repay even an enemy her gift. Come, let me attend your wrist. I can see how it hurts you. You are quite safe—I do not avenge my dog today.”

  Her wrist was now so swollen and painful that she had to hold it rigid with her other hand. The knee, by comparison, was a minor wound. Karan was no stranger to the dictates of honor and duty but his kind was beyond her understanding. How could he offer aid one day while planning her demise for the next? She could never trust him, this alien Whelm. The thought of his touch, his rubbery cold fingers on her wrist, his nearness, was worse than the pain. “No!” she said with a shiver.

  “Then go. I give you half a day, though it cost me dear.”

  Karan stepped back half a step. Idlis’s skin had grown redder even as they spoke, and huge blisters were forming on his shoulders, his arms, his chest. He must be in agony, though he showed it only by a shuddering.

  She put her hand in her pocket to take the weight off her wrist and encountered something long forgotten, the slab of chocolate that Tallia had put there in Freddie. Instantly her mouth filled with saliva and longing. She unwrapped it, still staring at Idlis, and broke it in half.

  “It is my birthday today,” she said, offering him one half.

  Idlis’s face twisted and a yellow tear leaked out of one eye. “I am your enemy still,” he said, bowing his head. “But I wish you joy this day.”

  They ate their chocolate in silence. Karan had never in her life eaten anything that tasted so delicious, so intensely sweet. She was glad she had shared it

  “My brother Whelm are coming,” said Idlis. “My torment is their shame, which they must amend. Go at once.”

  His eyes blinked behind the bone covers and what she saw there frightened her badly. She looked back. Half a league away a small patch of dust clung to the stony plain. Karan walked away without another glance, but rather more hastily than her own dignity would have liked, and when she was beyond his sight she ran and ran and ran.

  There was no pursuit for hours, but after that their presence, and his face, were always in her mind. She set her wrist clumsily, so that it ached constantly and the hand was almost useless. Several times she crossed the hills of Sundor, back and forth, working her way east toward Hetchet and the mountains beyond, feeling that they were driving her and knowing that she would be trapped there.

  There were five of them now and they were mounted again. She often saw them in the distance, far apart, and though she managed to keep away from them in this rough country she could not find a way past; there was no way to go but the way they allowed. At last the Gate of Hetchet appeared at the end of the road, the slot in the hills that framed the once great city of the same name.

  She had grown hard and humorless during the past month. Cold and obsessed. Emotionally closed off-the most difficult thing of all for her. The Whelm were not far behind. Where to now?

  She still longed to go to Chanthed, to seek out someone to tell her the Histories, what she needed to choose the fate of the Mirror. She knew people in Chanthed but they were not chroniclers. Who had she met there that would know? Only the master of the college, a withered little man called Wistan, at a meeting with her father when she was a child. Wistan was still there, or at least had been a few months ago. He could surely tell her what she needed if she had the courage to approach him.

  But she sensed that the Whelm were too close, possibly between her and Chanthed. Even with the crowds there for the festival it was too small a place for hiding, unless she sat in a cellar for weeks. Not Chanthed then. How she longed to hear the Great Tales again. How she wished that she’d said no to Maigraith, that she’d never met her. But Maigraith was in Yggur’s cells and she was here.

  With heavy heart Karan turned away and took the eastern path to Tullin and Bannador, miserable, exhausted in body and soul, trapped. The moon was in its first quarter, and all of it was dark—a miserable omen. The terrible dreams kept coming back. Looking up at the mountains she saw that already they were white with snow. Even uninjured it would be a hard crossing. She was more tired than she had ever been. How her wrist pained her. If only it would end.

  The Whelm came to Hetchet close behind her. It was Utile more than a village where once a city stood, but every step told of it
s former greatness: the wide streets, curbed and guttered and paved with flat stones that were as neat and even as the day they were laid; the magnificent temples and columns and empty villas on either hand. And its people seemed to have the same air about them, an air of pride, antiquity, dignity.

  “They are the proudest goat-herders in all of Meldorin,” said the Whelm leader with contempt. He was quite unlike the others, being short and stout. They rode up to the great gate, so broad that ten could ride abreast between its carved stone flanks.

  “We seek a young woman with red hair,” said the tall man with the face like a hatchet. The gray skin was scarred and flaking as though it had been burned, and the whites of his black eyes were stained yellow.

  “Such a one was here recently,” replied the guard.

  “And where is she now?” The Whelm moved forward in their saddles.

  The guard had spoken to Karan more than once, and liked her. He would help her as long as there was no risk to himself.

  “She asked for the road to Chanthed, and she went that way,” the guard lied, moving backwards into his box.

  “Chanthed! You are sure of this, guard?” The hard eyes probed him.

  The guard looked away. “People come and go every day, and I speak to them all. She said Chanthed. That’s all I know.”

  The Whelm rode away. “Why would she go to Chanthed?” one asked, a woman who looked rather like Idlis. “What is there, save the College of the Histories? The guard must be lying.”

  “Doubtless he is, Gaisch,” said the stout one. “But nothing can be left to fortune. There are those in Chanthed who might have an interest in the Mirror, even though the other thief said Sith. Two will go to Chanthed. Another two will come with me: you, Idlis, where I can watch you, and you, Gaisch. It is more likely that she goes to Bannador, that being her home, but she will find no refuge in the mountains in winter. To go off the main way means death. But if you do find her in Chanthed, bring her back here. Away!”