Shadow Dawn

by Chris Claremont

  Bastian provided eyes, scouting out the path ahead. As the sun coursed below the western horizon Elora used InSight to join her perceptions to the eagle’s in a search for somewhere decent to spend the night.

  Fortune smiled on someone else that evening. The best that could be arranged was a moderately dry plot where Elora improvised a lean-to with her cloak, taking the opportunity to bless its unwieldy size and bulk as fervently as on other occasions she’d complained about it to high heaven. Bastian scrounged some stout, short branches that she used as tent poles. The sharp angle between roof and floor left no room to crouch, much less stand upright, but the final result allowed for some decent snuggling.

  There was no convenient fuel for a fire but Elora didn’t mind. In this bleak and open country, flames and smoke were too glaring a set of signposts for any pursuers. Better to once more lay hands on her firestones and call on them for warmth. Being a quiet sort of magic, no more really than an enhancement of nature, it could be easily hidden from questing scanspells.

  Rool made a sour face when she passed him a mug of leftover soup.

  “Tastes of troll,” he groused. Then: “Smells of troll.” And finally, what she knew had been coming all along: “So do you.”

  “Stepped in dung right after I arrived,” she related, memory making the moment far lighter than it felt at the time. She even chuckled at the sight of herself hobble-hopping into the pond. “There was a den up under the rock pile, a ways beyond the waterfall.”

  “And…?” the brownie prompted.

  “It chased me into the burrow. It took my stuff. I went after.”

  “No blood smell.”

  “No, Rool, I didn’t kill it. The troll had babies. They were hungry and sick. That was why she attacked, she was afraid for her young.”

  “With good reason. Only good troll’s a dead one.”

  “I’ve heard the same said about brownies.”

  “And I, about Daikinis,” he flared right back at her. “You are daft, to follow a troll to its den.”

  “It needed help.”

  “And if you found a Night Heron with a broken wing, I suppose you’d nurse it, too? Or better yet, a Death Dog!”

  That brought a chirruping cough of protest from Bastian, who up till then had contented himself with the field mice and plump voles he’d claimed for his own dinner. To make his point, the eagle balanced with fine delicacy on one wickedly sharp set of claws, while holding his limp and lifeless prey in the other. A snap of the beak severed the corpse neatly in half and Elora tried not to hear the crunch of tiny bones as Bastian chewed and swallowed. The point was deftly made: where herons and hounds were concerned, the eagle offered neither quarter nor mercy.

  “They’re not the same,” Elora explained patiently, trying to work out the concepts in her own head even as she spoke them aloud. It was quite an effort, to find explanations for acts she’d committed solely on instinct, and truth be told, she still wasn’t altogether sure what impulse had prompted her. Her only comfort was the eerie certainty that she had done right.

  “But if there existed the same spark, the same…potential…for decency and kindness in those creatures as I sensed from that troll”—she took a breath—“yes, I think I would offer the help. Remember Angwyn, Rool. You were there in my tower. You saw. A rookery of Night Herons, yet none of them ever did me harm.”

  “Doing the Deceiver’s bidding, most likely.” He spat, to put a period to his opinion.

  She shrugged. “Quite likely. But I don’t care.”

  “Madness. The whole world’s gone so totally daft nothing makes sense anymore!”

  “Can’t argue with that. Thorn’s in Sandeni, yes?”

  The suddenness of the question caught the brownie off guard. Rool nodded before he could catch himself.

  “Which is where?”

  He gestured downstream with his chin. “Off there-away. That was very neatly done, Elora Danan. I didn’t even see it coming.”

  “Told you I was getting better. To the north of here, then.”

  “And a bit east, aye. This water’ll lead us.”

  “That’s a relief, anyway. I was half-afraid to discover myself on the opposite side of the world or something.”

  “Were that so, we’d be near Tir Asleen.”

  “Do you miss it, Rool? The lands of home?”

  “Do you, lass?”

  She shrugged. “How can you miss what you hardly remember? Angwyn should have more of a claim on me, considering how long I lived there. But to be honest, none of those places feel exactly…right. Is that strange, to think that home is somewhere I’ve never been?” She didn’t give him the opportunity to answer that question but posed a more practical one instead: “And how far to Sandeni?”

  The brownie looked to Bastian for the answer.

  “Longer for Daikinis afoot,” was the eagle’s reply, “than myself aloft. Quicker for Daikinis than brownie.”

  “Some great thumping bloody help you are,” groused Rool as he returned his attention to Elora. “But it’ll be a fair walk, sure, an’ that’s a fact.”

  “The Maizan are riding out of the west,” she said thoughtfully, and drew her body tighter, wriggling a touch or two closer to her heated stones, hooding her eyes beneath their lids to hide her growing apprehension. “Which puts us between them and the city, am I right?”

  “Too right by half, my girl,” Rool agreed unhappily. He sat with his back mainly to Elora, eyes sweeping the darkness beyond the open wedge of their lean-to. If she’d taken the effort to look for herself, Elora would have seen Bastian striking the same vigilant posture outside. She would sleep the night through. They would not, as each alternated a stint of sentry duty.

  “I’m not a girl,” was her rote protest. “I do think, though, I am in a whole lot of trouble. And, my friend,” she continued, in a tone that the brownie hadn’t heard from her before (as he hadn’t been around for the two years she’d been growing into it), “it is Thorn Drumheller’s fault.”

  “Blame him for all the faults of the world, do you?” Rool’s tone made plain what he thought of that.

  “No,” was Elora’s flatly rational reply. “I blame him for leaving me vulnerable. I can’t defend myself without the proper tools. Without the proper knowledge, Rool.”

  “Defending you is our job, Elora Danan.”

  “Then where is he? Where were you?”

  Rool didn’t even try to meet her eyes.

  “Told him,” he said, staring out into the misty midnight darkness. “Me, Franjean, the eagles, talked ourselves stupid. But he wanted you safe. That meant, he figured, sending you away, keeping you distant. He had to establish himself in Sandeni; that meant taking risks, making enemies. His thought, an’ you can’t fault his courage, child, nor his love for you, nor his devotion to your cause—!”

  “Have I ever?”

  “Nah.” That came forth as a sigh. “Anyroad, he hoped, if he made himself a target, too big, too important, to resist, you’d get lost an’ forgotten on the sidelines.”

  “You believe the Deceiver would fall for that?”

  “Think it through, Elora Danan. Polar forces you two may be, but you’re not head-to-head in battle yet. Maybe not for a while. Have to work through surrogates. He uses the Maizan, while you’ve got us. If the Deceiver was all-powerful, we’d have lost an age ago. So, we confuse his cat’s-paws, best we can, until you’re a match for him.”

  “So tell me, O small sage, how’s that ever going to happen if I spend all my time in hiding? I’m sorry, Rool, but those cat’s-paws you mentioned, they flushed me out. I’m in the open now, I can’t go back.”

  Bastian had stalked beneath the shelter during the conversation, and when Elora was finished, he leaned forward and bopped the little man on the crown of his head with the knob of his beak. Rool was of a good height for
a brownie, but the eagle topped him with considerable room to spare and used that stature to good advantage. True to form, Rool squawked, so Bastian clocked him again.

  “Told you so,” the eagle said, with rare enjoyment.

  “You never did!”

  “Our bet. My win. You pay.”

  “Under protest! This isn’t what we wagered on at all!”

  “You’d rather feel the tip of my beak again?”

  “Threats, is it?”

  Bastian shook his head, and even if his face wasn’t shaped to muster a smile, his voice did it for him, as broad as could be.

  “Not in the slightest. I’m merely considering removing a dishonorable little wretch who refuses to pay debts freely—I might even say, eagerly—entered into from the collective food chain of Dame Nature.”

  Rool hunched his head deep between his shoulders, taking a stance that dared the eagle to try. Their confrontation was so serious to the outward eye that Elora had a sudden burst of unease that these two old friends might actually come to blows.

  Then Rool growled, “Who you calling ‘little,’ feather-head?”

  “Excuse me?” Elora prompted.

  “All fledglings have to leave the nest sometime,” Bastian said quite companionably. “They fly or they drop, but we don’t carry them back.”

  “That’s hard, Bastian.”

  “We don’t abandon our chicks, Elora Danan. We protect them as best we can. But the air is our element. The nest is home, but never a sanctuary; our wings are that. Whatever the reason for leaving your nest, you’ve chosen to fly, and I salute you for it.”

  “You disagree, Rool?” Elora asked the brownie, with an expression of such dangerous innocence he considered a fair while before offering his reply.

  “You’re not a bird, and I’ve come to trust Drumheller’s instincts.”

  “Bravo for him,” she said. “But I have to learn some of my own.”

  Unbidden then came the thought, which she didn’t bother hiding from either of her companions, if it isn’t already too late.

  They breakfasted with the dawn and were packed and on their way before the sun cleared the distant peaks. Elora started at a military pace that she’d learned from, of all people, Ryn Taksemanyin, a long-legged stride that made the miles pass at a surprisingly natural rate. Though where one of the sea-dwelling Wyrrn had mastered such a ground-pounding cadence she had no idea, nor was Ryn, ordinarily the most talkative and gregarious of souls, at all forthcoming himself on the subject.

  She continued to follow the stream because it was the most comfortable route, again using Bastian high overhead as her pathfinder and lookout. Whatever moved within the eagle’s eyeshot, she’d know about it.

  “What do you know of the Realms Beyond?” she asked Rool. He was riding her left shoulder, snugged deep into the folds of her cloak with a spare blade thrust through her brooch as a companion to Elora’s own fibula spike that held it fastened in place.

  “I’m a brownie,” he said, and she didn’t need a sight of him to know he’d spoken with an all-encompassing yet dismissive shrug.

  “Who know all,” she chided gently, “but never tell.”

  “That’s our reputation, right enough.”

  “Covers a multitude of sins, that does,” she agreed, “especially on those occasions when you don’t know anything.”

  She heard him snort, a sound that carried with it a fair portion of admiration.

  “You are learning,” he conceded. “Don’t think Franjean’ll like that. Nor Drumheller, neither,” he finished with a grin, but her thoughts were too somber for these volleys of humor to have any lasting effect.

  “I’m serious, I’m afraid,” Elora said a while later. “How much do you know?”

  “We watch the way the world works.”

  “So you told Thorn. Is the world all there is?”

  He looked sharply at her.

  “What makes you ask such a thing?” he demanded.

  Now it was Elora’s turn to shrug. “Too many things I don’t have definitions for, I suppose. Or explanations. How do you describe what isn’t there?”

  “Isn’t that why the gods gave us speech?”

  She looked back over her shoulder.

  “Nothing’s there, Elora,” Rool told her.

  “Are you sure, Rool?”

  “If there was, Bastian would see. He’s good like that.”

  She nodded, but plainly wasn’t convinced as she picked up the pace again.

  “You ever have the feeling, Rool, that you were being stalked?”

  “Every time I see a cat. Or worse, don’t see one. Stalked by what?”

  “I wish I knew.” Then, in the same rushed breath: “I’m glad I don’t. If I call its name, I think I make it easier for it to find me. Assuming there’s an ‘it’ that’s looking.”

  Rool nodded agreement. Learning the true name of an arcane being, or a person, was the most effective means a sorcerer could use to gain power over them, but that knowledge could be a double-edged sword. There were some beings so powerful that no wards were proof against them. Worse, merely saying their name aloud might be all the invocation necessary to attract their attention. The consequences of such foolishness were often deadly.

  “I keep drifting back in my head to the grotto and Carig’s World Gate,” Elora said softly, following a fair pause wherein she let her mind go still as she worked up the courage to confront her experiences of that fateful night. She remained vaguely aware of her surroundings as they passed but otherwise ignored the landscape as she would the background noise of a crowd. She spoke in a halting, musing tone, guardedly giving voice to her memories only after carefully vetting them to make certain they were safe. It was a kind of caution that didn’t come naturally to her, or easily.

  “It’s like floating on what you think is a still pond, only there’s an undercurrent you’re not aware of. It doesn’t seem that strong but it never goes away. You have to actively fight it just to hold your place and whenever you relax it takes hold of you again. Pulling you where it wants you to go.

  “That ceremony’s the same. It keeps calling to me. In that memory, I’m the only light but I illuminate nothing. The Gate frames nothing but darkness. Nothing to see, nothing to touch. I’m there to function as a beacon, for whatever Carig was Summoning. Just thinking about it makes me want to dance again. I can’t fix the music in my head but my feet know the steps. Does nothing for you, my story?” she asked him sharply, glaring along her shoulder at his uncha­racte­risti­cally hawklike mien.

  “What you’re talkin’, Elora Danan, should be spoken to a sage. Franjean an’ me, we’re hunters.”

  “Great warriors, so I’ve heard.” She took her cue from him and offered banter as a bulwark to a growing anxiety.

  “Captured Nelwyns and Daikinis in our time, we have. And shared a tree with a captive princess.

  “Anyway, sage would know, maybe, what you’re asking,” he told her, returning to the original subject.

  “Can we contact one?”

  “Where’ve you been, girl—?” He started to exclaim, then realized how absurd that sounded in the circumstances. “The burrows are closin’ all across the continent. Maybe across the world entire.”

  “But surely, farther east, we could find one?”

  “The burrows are closed,” he repeated.

  “All of them?” she persisted.

  “To us.” He nodded. “To you. More’n a few among the Veil Folk name you ‘Cherlindrea’s Bane.’ Some have even branded you with a death mark. No appeal, no mercy.”

  He was speaking to deaf ears, she’d stopped listening after the first two words.

  “You and Franjean, you can’t go home,” she said, mingling such sorrow and sympathy in her voice that the brownie couldn’t help but respond with his bravest sm
ile.

  “In victory, Elora Danan, when we’ve won this war, that’s when we’ll return. An’ if, in pride an’ foolishness, they’ll not have us, then the hell with ’em, we’ll stay with you. More fun anyways.”

  She gave him a kiss atop his head, right where the eagle had bopped him, and quickened her pace. There was still fear deep within her eyes but also determination, backed by a force of will whose strength would surprise her.

  Big mountains gave way to small ones, which in turn gave way to rolling hills. Soggy moor grew firm underfoot, then came more meadows banked by spectacular forests that abruptly ended in the first stretch of cultivated land Elora had seen in years. Technically, by this point, the stream had grown into a river. It was still fordable in places and not terribly wide, mainly because its course took it over rock more than soil. However, its current was still severe enough to gouge out the earth around those stones, thereby creating some treacherous rills and sinkholes, not to mention very wicked currents. The land close by its steep-sided banks bore evidence of the occasional flood. Soon, Elora knew, she’d have to choose which side to journey on, and live with that decision until she found a ferry or a boat.

  Both she and Rool heard a keening cry from so far on high that the eagle who uttered it couldn’t easily be spotted among the big-belly puffballs of cumulus that dotted the afternoon sky.

  To the watching eye, Elora looked casual, just a slip of a thing, a gangly collection of limbs that didn’t fit quite so well together as they had a month before.

  “What?” Rool prompted.

  She completed a slow pivot, turning right the way around, her gaze lingering a fraction back along the way they’d come before returning at last to the road ahead, sweeping the surrounding heights as she did. Every sense was preternaturally alert, from the feel of mingled grains of dirt and stone through both socks and the soles of her boots, to the faintest shrush of a breeze ruffling the topmost branches overhead and the burbling rill of the stream as it rushed beneath the bridge, to the taste of fruit starting to hang heavy on untended orchards. As for smells, they were as rich and varied as they were fundamentally wrong for such a setting. The scent of burned things, wood and plaster, cloth and flesh, mixed with the metallic flavor of blood.