The God in the Shadows (The Story at the Heart of the Void Book 1)

by TorVald, Nikolas

  She said nothing in reply, just walked over to her horse with an air of injured dignity and tied her saddlebags to the animal before mounting it. Aren followed closely behind her and Kant and Mattle were already waiting in their saddles. “We should make our way back to the road today,” Kant said with a thoughtful frown marring his face, “We won’t make fast enough time in the forest, none of us are ready for that after yesterday’s events, and I doubt we have to worry about spies.”

  “Are you sure?” Aren asked, “This close to the border the chance that we’ll encounter a Mardulian spy increases tenfold, the more people we come into contact with the more potential that someone questions our journey. After all, it’s not often that a mage and two inquisitors go riding across a kingdom. Word will outpace us and that could be dangerous.”

  “That’s why we won’t be two inquisitors, a mage, and some random girl. We’ll be four humble travelers.” Kant replied and he pulled a brown cloak out of his bag and tossed it to Aren. A second one followed the first and he switched out his color changing cloak for the plain brown one. Aren frowned in distaste at the cloak but he followed Kant’s example and when Selth looked at Mattle she saw that he was doing the same. Aren muttered a few words under his breath and the gem at the top of his staff was suddenly just another piece of wood, an old man’s walking staff, and with that the four of them rode off.

  At first the sound of wildlife surrounded them. Rabbits darting across their path and deer stepping lightly through the forest. As they rode, though, the sounds gradually faded to nothing and new sounds took their place. The creak of wagon wheels and the stamp of feet on hard packed dirt drifted towards Selth and the others and, as they kept riding, the sounds grew louder. Just before they came out onto the road Kant swung around, “Try to let me and Mattle do the talking. Anyone here could be a Mardulian spy and the two of you are far more likely to let something critical slip than either of us.” he gestured between himself and Mattle then turned his horse back to the road before any of them could get a word in. With a flick of the reins he trotted out of the forest and into a sea of refugees.

  Selth scowled after him but followed suit and soon the whole party was out on the road. A few travelers gave curious looks to a party of people riding out of the forest to join the road but said nothing, the majority kept on their way, heads bent and defeated looks on their faces. For a while Selth missed the sounds of the forest all around her, but she soon realized that coming to the road had been the correct choice by far. They traveled three miles on the hard-packed dirt for every one that they could have gone through the forest and there was something comforting about having other people around them at all times.

  She sank into thought as they kept riding, it was obvious that Kant meant to drive them on without stop for a while yet and she wanted to understand what had happened when she used her power and what she should expect when she tried to use it in the future. The logical step was to try and use her powers over Shadow. She hadn’t touched them since the incident the previous day but those powers had nothing to do with light. They likely wouldn’t cause that same horrifying pain. Selth swallowed hard and, extending her influence, she grabbed hold of the shadow of a passing tree and made it grow in size and twist so that it stretched all the way across the road where before it had barely touched it. She waited pensively, holding the shadow with the barest thread of power so that any sudden jolt would cause her to let it go. Nothing happened. She breathed a huge sigh of relief, she wasn’t as crippled as she had believed if she could still use those powers.

  A thought hit her like lightning, the warning voice had given her all the pieces of the puzzle. Calling up the dream from the recesses of her mind, Selth watched as the traiganidorian claw pushed through her from the back and realized that when it had done that, the light and dark blades had been in her hands. She would have bet a thousand gold marks that if the shadow daggers had been in her hands she wouldn’t have been able to control shadow without experiencing the same massive pain as before. Thinking about the voice again she remembered that it had said the traiganidorian which had stabbed her had to die before she could regain her powers. Selth scowled to herself, how was she supposed to locate a thing like that? It wasn’t as if traiganidorians walked around Andin without a care in the world; she doubted very much if Aren had even heard of one of them.

  Shaking thoughts about traiganidorians and the powers of light and darkness from her head Selth turned to observe Mattle. It could have been a coincidence if he had just looked familiar to her but he had been the one who asked about her rather than the other way around. That was too much to be discounted. Studying him, she saw that he had the same wiry build as Matt and the same dark hair. She cursed herself for not paying more attention to him before but he hadn’t done much so far on the trip and when she finally stopped skulking long enough to talk to either of the Inquisitors things had started happening at such a high rate of speed that she’d barely been able to get a word in.

  She swung her gaze towards Kant and saw that the Inquisitor was riding beside Aren. Remembering that Aren had said he would ask the Inquisitor about Mattle Selth reached out and twisted the ears of the shadow of Kant’s horse so that everything that it heard was passed through to her. Kant was speaking with Aren, as she had hoped, but it wasn’t anything about Mattle. Instead they were discussing how long it would take to get to Mardule’s border. Aren seemed to think that it would take five days but Kant disagreed.

  “You aren’t aware of how far into Andin the war has pushed,” he said to the mage, “for twenty miles south of Mardule’s border you won’t see another human aside from soldiers. Getting there will take four days, yes, but to cross it will take at least another two or three. That’s if we don’t get killed by soldiers while we try to cross. Andian patrols and Mardulian war parties will both attack us without asking the reasons we have for being where we’re at. So it’s going to be nice, slow going when we try to cross that land or all of us are going to die.”

  Selth broke off contact with the shadow and kicked her horse into a trot, drawing even with Aren. Kant immediately stopped talking and gave her an annoyed look but Aren waved him back and allowed her to ride level with him. “Did you ask about Mattle?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the road so that neither Kant nor Mattle could get a sense of what they were talking about.

  “I did,” he said cheerily, “And lo and behold he is from the slums. It appears you’ve found your lost boy.” Selth’s jaw dropped open. Even after the possibility had been introduced to her she couldn’t believe it had actually happened. The idea of Matt being alive was right up there with meeting The Provider, or being a false god a more cynical part of her mind chipped in.

  “What else do you know about him?” she demanded, struggling to keep her voice low as Aren’s statement washed over her in waves of shock.

  “He’s a crooner apparently, that’s why Kant picked him up to train with the Inquisitors. He found him talking to a bird one day outside of Redtower and that was enough for him to drag Mattle off and test him to see if he had potential. Not particularly pleasant, but then, who would expect the Inquisitors to have a pleasant initiation protocol.” Aren was calm, as though the two of them were doing nothing more than talking about the weather.

  “What’s a crooner?” Selth asked, curious about how Matt had changed since leaving the slums. Curious to see if what had happened to him could in any way compare to what had happened to her.

  “It’s a person who can talk to animals.” Aren said, as though she should have picked up on that from his previous statement, “They’re more in tune with the things going on in nature than the rest of us and have power over objects that exist as part of the natural world, such as animals and plants. Eventually they find an animal that they bond with for life and gain even more power than they previously possessed.” He glanced back at Mattle critically, “He’s nearing the point where he’ll start looking for such a companion, we might even get lucky
and see it happen while we’re traveling.”

  Selth frowned down at her saddle then looked back to the road, “If he’s a crooner then why didn’t he call animals to our camp each night so we could eat.”

  Aren looked shocked at the idea, “I suppose you’d be happy to kill an animal you had touched minds with as though it were just a pig for slaughter then?” he asked scathingly.

  Selth shrugged her shoulders, “It’s just an animal, isn’t it? It’s not like it has thoughts of its own, like a human being.”

  Mattle suddenly appeared on her left, “Actually, they do. And your horse isn’t at all happy about what you’re talking about. It’s also not happy about the way you’re riding it but for some reason I can’t figure out what it’s saying. Something about shadows.” he shook his head thoughtfully, “I’ve been trying to figure out how riding and shadows go together this whole trip. Do you know what that’s supposed to mean?”

  Aren was glaring at Selth twice as hard as before and Mattle was looking just as expectantly. She felt herself wilt in her saddle under the combined pressure of their stares. “You’ve been using the shadow to control the horse this whole time?” Aren hissed in her ear, “What kind of barbarism is that? The poor thing is probably dying of fright right now and it can’t even understand what’s going on!”

  Selth swallowed uncomfortably and released her hold on the horse’s shadow, she had grown so used to holding it that it felt like pulling her mind out of quicksand. As soon as she let go of the shadow her horse darted forward and tried to throw her from its back. She clung on for dear life, realizing she had made a terrible mistake by not dismounting first. But suddenly the horse quieted down and stopped trying to kill her. She looked up and saw that Mattle was murmuring under his breath and looking pointedly at her horse. When he and Aren reached her he said, “I don’t know why she hates you so much but I’ve convinced her not to kill you just yet.” then he rode past her and Selth had to jerk her horse around to catch up to the two of them.

  The next several hours she rode in silence, a few times Mattle tried to engage her in conversation but she didn’t feel up to the task of reacquainting herself with a person she had believed dead for so long, no matter how close their relationship had been. She had locked all her thoughts and feeling about Matt behind an immovable iron door in her mind, to have him back as Mattle was throwing everything into mayhem.

  As she rode, Selth felt a growing pressure all around her. It was as if she needed to reach out and touch the powers that had come into her after her meeting with Cereus. She could feel an abyss of power within her reach and the fact that it would cause her unbelievable pain seemed to be secondary to the desire to draw it through her body and channel it into the world. Adamantly, she blocked herself off from it. She couldn’t channel it for now and that was that but as they kept riding the pressure grew. It had felt amazing to bend the light all around her back at the campground, it had been as if she were finally doing what she was meant to do. Even twisting shadows to do her bidding didn’t feel the same. That felt more like a reflection of something greater.

  As the sun reached its zenith Kant called a brief halt to pull bread and cheese from his saddlebags and Selth pulled herself level with Aren. He had been ignoring her ever since he found out that she had been controlling her horse with her shadow but he was the only person who could explain what was happening to her. “Aren, I need to use the power.” she hissed to him, hunched down in her seat as she attempted to battle off the nearly irresistible desire to channel.

  He looked down at her as though she were crazy. “What? Selth, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you want to use your power then use it but if this is some absurd scheme to get yourself out of trouble for brutalizing your horse for the past several weeks it’s not going to work.” he shook his head at her angrily, “Just keep to the back of the group and maybe I’ll decide to forgive you when we reach a stopping place tonight.”

  Selth shook her head, sweat streaming down her face from the pressure of power that was building all around her, “No Aren, I need to touch the power I gained in the forest. The power that nearly killed me the last time I used it. I can feel it building all around me, you can’t know what this feels like,” she nearly groaned, “I have to use it.”

  His eyes flashed with sudden concern although he still looked at her suspiciously. “If this is some sort of trick then I’m making you walk the rest of the way to Mardule,” he said curtly. Reaching out a hand he put it on her forehead and started muttering under his breath. When he finished his face drained of all color and he jerked his hand back as though it were burned. “That’s not right,” he said, shocked, “That can’t be right. No human can have that much power flowing through them. That’s not right at all.” Selth gave another groan and his eyes flashed to hers. “No, that’s not important.” he said and seemed to steady himself. “Selth, this is common. Most magi go through a similar phase at some point in their lives.”

  “So what do I do?” she snarled at him, causing Aren to rock back on his heels. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t control her temper right then and the mage should have known better than to bring up how different she was from everyone else. He knew that she didn’t like that idea. He knew how touchy a subject it was; he had been there when she saw the blood-spattered armor.

  But Aren apparently didn’t remember that. Instead he gave her an angry look for attacking him without reason. Then he cleared his face of emotion, seeming to re-center himself, “Focus on a wall. A wall of the strongest substance you can think of and place it around the power that’s trying to reach you. Most magi choose diamond or obsidian to build their walls if that helps.”

  She glared at him, “How does it help to know that magi build imaginary walls out of diamond or obsidian?” she said scathingly, “It’s an imaginary wall, why can’t it just be of an imaginary impenetrable substance?”

  He tugged at his beard thoughtfully, “I suppose that could work.” he said, being insufferably unhelpful, “It’s just helpful to have something real as a focusing point, something such as diamond or obsidian. Without that focusing point it would be far harder to create something realistic enough to fool your own mind and power.”

  Selth shook her head in disgust at the lackluster explanation but the power was threatening to overwhelm her and she had to do something about it. Closing her eyes she dived towards where it was trying to force itself out into the real world. It felt like staring into the eye of a firestorm, an infinite amount of power was swirling and pulsing around her and it wanted to be used, wanted to escape into the world. Crackles of lightning flashed across the surface of the storm and surges flickered up out of the endless pit she was staring into. It was like staring into the face of chaos itself. Focusing, Selth threw a wall up in the face of the power. She tried using diamond since Aren had said that a focusing point was useful and as she did it, the surge of power lessened. She breathed a sigh of relief deep inside her head, she had expected it to be more difficult than that. The diamond wall blew apart. Selth stared in disbelief, she didn’t know of anything that could break a diamond, but her power roared up even more potent than before, trying to force her into using it.

  She pushed an obsidian wall into place around the power but that was destroyed even more quickly than the diamond one. She threw up wall after wall, every material and combination of materials she could think of, but the power destroyed those imaginary walls as soon as she placed them. A voice echoed through her head, “Have we really become this desperate, having to block out the power which makes us what we are?” it roared with laughter, “And unable to even perform that simple feat!”

  “Tell me how to block it then!” Selth screamed inside her head, to whatever voice was talking to her. Briefly she wondered if talking voices inside her head were a bad sign. In Redtower people who talked to themselves in that manner were sent to the crazy house. She angrily cast that idea aside, listening to voices had worked wi
th Renth and besides, as the world kept reminding her, she was different from everybody else. This was magic and those people had just been nut jobs on the street.

  “Not very nice of us, thoughts like that.” the voice laughed, “What’s so bad about being crazy anyways. You can’t be exciting if you’re not a little crazy. Maybe that’s the issue, hmm. We’re thinking of things in too conventional a manner. Our power’s not conventional, maybe it takes a bit of crazy to figure out how to deal with it. Ever think of that?”

  “What do you mean by that?” she screamed out.

  “Think it through, we’re rather clever. I’m sure we can come up with something.” the voice echoed through Selth’s head, laughing. She cried out her question again but the voice didn’t respond. She turned towards the pulsing well of power again. Unconventional it said. She could do unconventional. Selth pulled up a wall of traiganidorians facing the pulsing power, the scariest thing she could imagine. The power ripped through them as though they weren’t there and continued to push her for release. She looked down in embarrassment, apparently scaring the power didn’t work as well as she had hoped it would.

  Thinking hard, she pulled a wall of shadow across the force of the power and a feeling of sweet relief hit her as the power was held at bay. She was about to open her eyes and say that she was ready to keep moving when the wall of shadow was ripped down. Selth frowned to herself. She should have known better, she already knew that her powers over shadow were far weaker than the ones she had gained.

  She grinned as an idea flashed through her head. Obviously nothing was strong enough to stop the power from pushing at her, she’d have to have a whole different reservoir of power of the same strength pushing back to stop it. She didn’t have that, instead, she had the power swirling before her. She pulled a wall made out of a mirror into her imagination and placed it in front of the rippling well of power trying to escape into the world. She felt that power recoil as it faced the mirror and smiled to herself. An unstoppable level of power, and it clearly had enough sentience since it wanted to escape into the world, but not enough to recognize what it saw before it. Selth opened her eyes, barely concealing her amusement. A wall of mirrors had stopped something which even a traiganidorian couldn’t. Some things just had to be taken as amusing.