A storm was brewing, one that threatened to become a fullscale blizzard. There was a touch of sorcery about it and Darkhorse knew then that there was no time to waste. Shade had already begun whatever new experiment he planned. If there was a time to catch him with his guard down, it was before the plan reached fruition. The shadow steed had failed at that once. This time, though, the tale would end differently.
Darkhorse rose quickly, tearing and snapping the bonds that had ensnared him. Where they had sought to leech from him, he now returned the favor, causing them to dissipate in mere seconds. Things of sorcery, they left no remains. The only regrets Darkhorse had was the vile taste of them; they were filled with the taint of Vraad sorcery.
In the distance, he witnessed a vast aurora and knew immediately that there was where he needed to go. There, he would finally have Shade where he wanted him.
A portal offered too much risk. Darkhorse raced across the empty land, feeling somewhat at sympathy with it for all it had been through. Once, there had been trees here, life. Now, nothing but emptiness. The land looked much the way the eternal felt.
It was, he thought, a fitting place for what would be coming next.
Erini was the first to come within sight. She stood much the way she had in the chamber, save that her eyes were open and she seemed to be saying something. Darkhorse slowed. Something seemed wrong. When a rise brought Shade into view, the shadow steed knew that the scene before him was not as it should have been, that something was amiss.
The warlock was seated before his captive, his head low and his arms outstretched as if he were the one giving of himself.
Darkhorse sped across the remaining tundra and began casting his first—and likely last—spell. Entranced as he seemed to be, Shade would not notice until it struck. From the corner of his eyes, Darkhorse noted Erini’s gaze turning toward him. Her mouth opened as if she intended to say something, but the ebony stallion ignored her. For the moment, it was only Shade that mattered.
When the attack caught him unaware, the shadow steed’s first angry thought was how the warlock had tricked him again, laying some trap that he knew Darkhorse would be unable to resist. Then, as the world turned upside-down, he realized that it was not his ancient adversary who had caught him by surprise, but Erini. Erini had attacked him, as if she actually wanted her captor’s spell completed.
Before he could rise and demand explanations, Shade’s voice suddenly rose above the howling wind. “No, princess. It’s all right. He doesn’t understand—and, besides, it’s taking its own course now. He won’t be able to touch me; no one will.”
“I can only try!” Darkhorse roared, standing. The snow fell from his huge form as if glad to abandon his fearsome presence. “Stand away, Erini! You shall be compelled no further!”
“Darkhorse!”
He ignored her shout, supposing her to be under the warlock’s influence. “The female is under my protection, Shade! You will release her will and face me!”
Shade lifted his head toward Darkhorse. It was pale and drawn, but distinct. The stallion’s first thought was that he had failed again. Cursing, he kicked at the snow and readied himself to perish fighting. The warlock, however, rose on surprisingly unsteady feet and shook his head at the leviathan ready to charge him.
“I’ll face you, Darkhorse, but only to say goodbye.”
“You will not leave me behind again!”
Shade smiled without malice. His face was as pale as the snow—or was that the snow Darkhorse saw? The warlock stepped toward him, leaving no trail. His movements were slow and he seemed to ripple with the wind. The warlock paused just out of arm’s length from his adversary.
“You can’t follow me where I’m going.”
Darkhorse lashed out with his hooves, hoping to take Shade by surprise with a physical attack. To his dismay, he struck only air. Behind him, the massive stallion heard Erini gasp.
Wrapped in his cloak, the warlock stepped back so that he now faced both Darkhorse and Erini. Turning to the latter, he said politely, “You have what you wanted in return, sorceress. May it please you.”
Erini would not respond, but her face grew almost as deathlike as the warlock’s. She suddenly shook her head and sat in the snow, shivering from something other than the cold. The princess buried her face in her hands.
“What we gain is never quite what we originally wanted, is it, Darkhorse?” It was impossible to deny anymore; Shade was little more than a ghost in form, a memory more than a man.
“What have you done now, warlock? What have you demanded of Erini that leaves her in such pain?”
“She cries at the vast extent of her reward, Darkhorse. I leave that for her to explain. As for me, I have taken the only path left to me. A final path, you might say.”
“Final—!” Darkhorse probed the figure before him—and found nothing but a dying emanation of power. Nothing physical stood there; what remained was of magic. Magic that was fleeing even now to where it belonged. The farthest stretches of the Dragonrealm and a crippled, tortured place called Nimth.
Shade had made Erini reverse his earlier spell, drawing forth not only his newly accumulated powers, but those forces within him that had originally cursed him to what had once seemed an endless chain of phantom incarnations, personalities that existed, but did not truly live.
Sorcery was all that truly remained of the original spellcaster and, when the last of it had dissipated, there would be nothing. No Shade. Not even the ever-present cloak. All of him was magic, nothing more.
“All that power, all that glory, was not worth facing—facing?—a continuation of that damned, horrible mockery of immortality, of life.” There was little left of the warlock now. He looked like a reflection in a piece of glass, wavering in the wind. The storm that had threatened seemed to be dying with the man who had likely been its cause, but the wind, oddly, was picking up in intensity.
Or was that so odd? Darkhorse gaze locked with Shade’s. The warlock smiled again and nodded ever so slightly.
“I had another name, once,” he started, as if seeking to take both of their minds off of the truth. “It was…”
Words and warlock drifted away with the wind.
His name. He wanted to say his name to me. The black steed stared at the place where his adversary, his other half, had last stood. There were no tracks, of course. The last tracks were those where Shade had stood and given himself to Erini. Where he had finally, absolutely, ended his curse in the only way left to him.
“Darkhorse?”
Erini. He had forgotten her presence.
“I will never know love as you do, princess,” he rumbled without removing his gaze from Shade’s last stand. “But I know that I have lost one who could be considered a brother to me despite the evils he caused.”
The sorceress was silent. Darkhorse, urged by a feeling he barely understood, trotted forward and kicked snow across the warlock’s remaining tracks, not pausing until they were buried. Gruffly, he turned to his companion. For the first time, the stallion seemed to see her. Though her abilities protected her from the elements, she had suffered as few others had. Twice Shade had used her, forced her to touch something of a world that was little more than a sick parody of this one. He hoped she would recover once they returned to—
His ice-blue eyes widened as he recalled what was occurring in their absence. “Talak! Lords of the Dead, Erini! You should have said something!”
The human was drawn and weaker than he would have suspected, considering the power she had absorbed. Darkhorse sensed also a loss to the aura, the presence, about her. She was worn to the bone, too, but none of that was why she now sat in the snow, gazing at the emptiness without truly seeing it.
“There’s no need to hurry,” she stated quietly, finally responding to his words.
“No need to hurry? With Talak under siege by the drakes?” Had her ordeal at last overtaken her mind, too?
“Shade said that I had been rewarded.” Er
ini laughed bitterly. “It seemed so perfect. They didn’t deserve to survive. I keep telling myself that they would have killed Melicard and all the rest if I hadn’t agreed.” Her voice caught. “Yet, for some unfathomable reason, I can’t help crying at the suffering they must have gone through, the shock when they realized what was happening.”
“You make no sense, mortal!” She did, but Darkhorse had trouble believing what he was imagining.
She looked up, so pale he almost expected her to dissipate in the wind as Shade had done. “I want nothing to do with sorcery, Darkhorse. It seemed the best way to rid us of them, but… so many lives!”
“The drake host?” he finally asked with some misgivings.
She nodded, putting her head in her hands again. “All of them. Swallowed up without damage to anything or anyone else—save Mal Quorin, I suppose. I even pity him, if you can believe it. Shade killed them all with my permission.
Now it was Darkhorse who could say nothing. He wondered at the carnage they would see when they returned. In some ways, it had been necessary, but the scope of what the warlock had been capable of…
Erini looked up again, tears for her enemies in her eyes. “Take me back to Talak, Darkhorse. I—I can’t do it myself. I might—might appear in the middle of—I want Melicard!”
The eternal let her cry some of the pain away as he slowly formed a sphere around them. A variation on the portal, it would allow them to travel without forcing the princess to act herself. When they arrived in Talak, he would see to speaking to Melicard privately about her immediate needs.
He welcomed her sorrow and her need for his aid. Her trials would give him purpose and allow him another chance to learn. Some day, he might yet understand the mortal creatures he had chosen to make his own. Some day, he might understand their path through life and, because of that, the definition of life itself. Perhaps then, the shadow steed might one day come to understand what could have created the man who had become known in legend and face as simply Shade.
Perhaps then, he might also make sense of the continuous, wrenching feeling that had begun within him when he realized that the warlock had surrendered his life.
XXIII
CABE BEDLAM FOUND the eternal overlooking the northern lands from one of the palace balconies. A vast, well-cultivated field, half wheat and half oat, covered nearly every inch of the level plain before them. Upon first glance, there seemed nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the fact that this was hardly the time of year for such a mature crop. What made the sight stunning, however, was the fact that it was out there where the army of the Dragon King had once stood. It was out there that settlements, wooded areas, and roads had existed prior to this day.
It was there that the drake host had perished down to the least of the minor drakes.
“I’ll never forget the sight,” Cabe said quietly, eyes fixed on the innocent-looking field. “We had barely arrived here ourselves, and then only thanks to the Dragon King Green, who arrived at the Manor and broke the spell Shade had cast over us.” He had already relayed that story earlier, telling how, in response to word from the Lady Bedlam, the master of Dagora Forest had gained entrance and found the two, victims of Shade’s attempt to kidnap their son Aurim. Neither the Bedlams nor their Dragon King ally, Green, could explain why the warlock had abandoned his plan after successfully dealing with the only two standing in his way.
Darkhorse thought he knew, but did not say so to Cabe. It would only make what had happened to the ancient warlock more difficult to accept.
Cabe moved on to the shocking fate that had befallen the charging drakes. “Even with our sorcery, we were only keeping them in check. Some of their number got through from time to time and wreaked havoc until each was killed or driven off. Some of their spells succeeded as well.” The sorcerer shivered, remembering some of the more dire ones. “Word reached us at one point that the expedition to the Hell Plains had turned around, apparently because of some message etched into the ground by a spell of Drayfitt’s just before his death—” Cabe did not notice Darkhorse flinch. That explained the final words he had not heard, the ones the elderly sorcerer had spoken before expiring! To the end, Drayfitt had served Talak with the utmost efficiency. “Though the reinforcements were on their way, the fighting was becoming so fierce that we suspected the drakes would be through Talak’s defenses before they arrived. It was just after that when the ground to the north began to split open.”
What had happened next had driven even stone-hearted Melicard to pity the deaths of his enemies. Great gaps and ravines opened in the earth, but only in and around the moving host. Some estimated that nearly half of the drakes perished in the first minute, as the warriors tried frantically and uselessly to control the sudden panic of their lesser cousins. Warriors and mounts fell screaming into the gaps, which closed up instantly, only to be replaced by others. Many of those who managed to find stable footing during the first onslaught fell easy prey when that ground beneath them suddenly yawned wide.
“Did none of them fly away?”
“Seems logical, doesn’t it?” Cabe wore a grim smile. “They tried it. The sky over the area was literally filled with them—until the winds began to buffet them back to the earth!”
“Winds?”
“Winds followed by lightning followed by a downpour that would have crushed in the roof of the palace had the storms touched the city—which they did not with amazing accuracy! Everything was confined to the area where Silver’s horde was trapped.”
Quakes, wind, lightning, and rain. Earth, air, fire, and water. Darkhorse had to admire Shade’s work. How extravagantly traditional.
No one had seen the Dragon King himself perish nor, for that matter, Mal Quorin’s fate, either. It was safe to assume, however, that they had fallen with the rest. The entire horrible sight had lasted perhaps five minutes. When the last drake had perished, the wounds in the earth healed themselves and the storms dwindled to nothing. No one could really say when exactly the field had risen up, though everyone swore it was there only moments later.
Voices within informed him that the one he had been waiting for had finally recovered enough to join the rest. Darkhorse excused himself from Cabe.
“I’ll not forget the good he did, Darkhorse,” Cabe called after him.
“Do not forget the evil, either.” He trotted into the vast room.
Her face lit up as she noticed him.
“Princess Erini!” He dipped his head in her honor. “Glad I am to see you better! Cherish this woman, King Melicard, for there are few as worthy as she!”
The king had one arm securely wrapped around his betrothed. The love he bore for her was spread equally across both sides of his face. The elfwood arm, the one that held Erini, looked as supple and lifelike as the real thing.
It is the spirit of the wearer that makes of the elfwood what it will be. With love comes life, it seems!
“Darkhorse.” Erini separated herself from Melicard, walked up to the shadow steed, and hugged him by the neck. Off to the side, the Lady Bedlam smiled sourly. “Thank you for giving me my life again!” the princess added.
“It is I who should thank you! Are you truly better?”
“It will take me some time to learn not to shiver each time my eyes turn north and see the field.”
Darkhorse laughed. “Think of the field as the first heralds of peace! What Shade did was horrendous, but did not cowardly Silver bring it upon himself?”
“I suppose.” The princess looked down, as if remembering. Then, she looked back up, staring into his glittering eyes. “What happens to you now?”
The shadow steed felt as if all eyes in the room were now on him. “I shall roam the Dragonrealm as I always have! For Darkhorse, there is no grand scheme, no destiny! I shall roam and see what there is to see! I—”
It was the Lady Bedlam who spoke the words that he would not. “You shall search the lands to see if, somehow, he survived, won’t you?”
The
room grew silent as he stared first at her and then at Erini. She looked puzzled, having seen Shade freely end his tortured existence. Slowly, he nodded. “Yes, I will search the Dragonrealm for him. There must be no doubt. If he has survived, he may need help.” Darkhorse absently pawed at the floor, leaving scars. “He may also need destroying again.”
The ebony stallion stepped back from the mortal creatures around him. “It is past the time for me to leave! I am glad you are all well and that most of us have lived to see this peace.” He looked specifically at Melicard and the Dragon King Green. There was hope there for some sort of compromise, a lessening of Talak’s zeal toward those drakes who sought peace between the races. Erini caught his stare and looked at her betrothed, who nodded noncommittedly. “I now bid you farewell!”
“Come back to Talak when you wish,” the princess called.
Darkhorse nodded to her and also to Cabe, who had rejoined his mate. He reared, summoning a portal.
“Come to the Manor sometime,” Gwen said, startling both Cabe and the eternal. “You must meet the children. They would love you.”
The shadow steed laughed cheerfully, the echoes resounding through the palace. “This, then, is truly a day of miracles! I shall take you up on that offer soon, Lady Bedlam. Ha!”
He entered the portal still laughing, his destination—and his destiny—unknown even to him.
THE SHROUDED REALM
PROLOGUE
TOOS THE REGENT, ruler of Penacles, stared down at the rolled missive the courier had just left in his hands. Undistinguished as it looked, the crimson-tressed ruler knew it for a thing of potentially great importance. It was the latest in a series of communications he had had with Cabe Bedlam, the warlock of the Dagora Forest. They were comrades of some fifteen years, and spellcasters both.
As he carefully broke the seals, both seen and unseen, he pictured in his mind the youthful visage of the warlock. Cabe’s more regular features contrasted sharply to his own older, foxlike image, and it was hard to believe that so much knowledge and power rested within a man who was less than a third of the regent’s own hundred-plus years. Of course, Cabe would probably look the same even when he was two hundred. There were benefits to having a talent for spells.
Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. II Page 32
