“Yes, Lord Elf,” said the girl, who managed to get the words out without stuttering, though she was terrified. In haste, she filled two cups and set them on the counter while the other employees carried out Arvalaeon’s bidding. “They…they are on the house, Lord Elf.”
“Of course not,” said Arvalaeon with mild reproof. “That would be inappropriate. How much?”
The girl stammered out a number. Arvalaeon paid her with exact change, and the girl bowed, put the money into the register, bowed again, and all but sprinted out of the shop.
“You sure are a charmer,” I said, watching the cars screech out of the parking lot in haste.
“Come,” said Arvalaeon. I shrugged, took the second cup, and followed Arvalaeon to a table.
So, I sat and had coffee with an Elven archmage who had ordered me kidnapped off the street and beaten.
“We didn’t have anything like this on Kalvarion,” said Arvalaeon, gazing into his cup. He took a sip and looked out the window, frowning at some memory or another.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. So. Won’t it be weird if someone looked through the windows and saw an Elven archmage having coffee with an Inquisition captain?”
“We will not be long,” said Arvalaeon. He set down the cup, drew out his aetherometer, and scowled at it. “We shall not need this building for much longer.”
“Right,” I said. “You said you wanted to ask me a question, and you asked it.”
“Indeed,” said Arvalaeon.
“And the whole point of this is that you need to me to stop Castomyr,” I said.
“Yes,” said Arvalaeon. “Thanks to the Thanatar Stone, I cannot stop Castomyr, nor can any other Elf trustworthy enough to undertake such a mission. His magic is sufficiently powerful that it would take many human troops to overcome him, and even then, there is no guarantee of victory. The safest course would be to fire a nuclear missile at La Crosse, but I wish to avoid large-scale loss of life.”
“If you can’t stop Castomyr and the Inquisition can’t stop him,” I said, “what good am I going to do?”
His cold green eyes considered me. “I am going to give you what you really want. I will give you the power to defeat Baron Castomyr.”
“How?” I said. That seemed suspicious.
Yet…part of me, the part that wanted more power, was excited.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
God, I was such a fool.
Arvalaeon took one more sip of his coffee, set it down, and then stood. “Do you have any electronic devices on you?”
“My phone,” I said, patting the side of my jacket. It was still in my pocket. I pulled it out to see if it had been smashed, but it was still functional, the lock screen showing the time and the date. July 19th, Conquest Year 315, 1:37 in the afternoon.
“Leave it on the table,” said Arvalaeon, removing his smartwatch and setting it on the table alongside his phone.
I swallowed. “We’re going to the Shadowlands?”
“Correct,” said Arvalaeon. “Or a specific part of the Shadowlands. Come.”
I swallowed, took a deep breath, and got to my feet.
Arvalaeon cast a spell and opened a rift way.
A sheet of gray mist shimmered before him, and then seemed to peel open. Through the rift way, I saw something that looked like the main street of a small town, though the sky burned with strange fire.
Arvalaeon beckoned, and I followed him through the rift way and into the Shadowlands.
Chapter 4: The Town
Traveling through a rift way is a strange experience.
Physically, it’s just a single step, as easy as going through a door and into another room. Magically (or metaphysically, if you want to get deep) it’s much more significant. That single step takes you from Earth to the Shadowlands between the worlds, to the place that is both the source of magic and a twisted, warped reflection of our own world. It’s also infested with dangerous creatures, and those creatures had tried to kill me several times.
Stepping through the rift way had a sensation of falling, of traveling a vast distance with a single stride.
But it was over in an instant, and I looked around.
I knew what I expected to see. I had been to the Shadowlands several times before, and I was familiar with the empty black sky, dark save for ribbons of eldritch fire that danced and writhed. I had seen the plains of gray grasses that stretched in all directions, the dead forests of twisted trees, the colossal mountains and the half-ruined citadels that looked mad and surreal.
I was expecting all of that.
So, I didn’t expect to find myself in a little town.
My shoes scraped against asphalt, and I came to a startled halt. I was standing in a parking lot next to a gas station, and behind the gas station rose the three enormous metal cylinders of a massive grain silo. I turned in surprise and saw the town’s main street stretching away. It looked only about nine or ten blocks long and was lined with little shops and businesses. In the distance, I saw tall, wooded hills, and I realized the town was nestled in a little valley of steep hills. The town couldn’t have been home to more than eight or nine hundred people.
The place looked no different from rural towns in a dozen different states throughout the United States, save for two major differences.
The first difference was the cathedral.
On the opposite end of the town and the valley, at the base of the wooded hills, stood a cathedral. Like, an actual Gothic-style cathedral, its towers five hundred feet tall, its stained-glass windows adorned with various scenes. I had driven through a lot of small American towns, and I had never seen one with a cathedral that looked as if it had been plucked from medieval France.
The second difference was the sky.
It was on fire.
No, that wasn’t right. The sky wasn’t on fire, but it was the harsh yellow-orange of a flame, and it made the entire town look as if it was bathed in the light of a smelter. Ribbons of yellow-orange energy snapped and crawled across the sky, which meant we were somewhere in the Shadowlands.
I noticed a third difference as well.
There was a wall of mist atop the hills. It looked about a hundred feet tall, and I saw that the ring of mist encircled the entire town and the valley. That was another oddity. Because of the flickering light, the town looked like it should have been swelteringly hot, but it wasn’t. If anything, it was cool. It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and I was glad I was wearing my motorcycle jacket.
Then I noticed a fourth difference.
There was a huge bronze clock sitting in the parking lot of the gas station.
It was a clock of Elven manufacture. Morvilind had a few clocks like this, but not one this size. It was a bronze monolith about fifteen feet tall, and the face of the clock had a dozen different arms pointing to different rings of Elven hieroglyphs. I recognized only a few of them. Below the dial was a row of numbers carved into rounder tumblers, like a slot machine or an old-fashioned mechanical clock. Underneath the row of numbers was the word DAY.
Right now, the clock read DAY 1.
Arvalaeon stood a few feet away, waiting for me to orient myself.
“Where are we?” I said. “This is the Shadowlands, right?” At least, it felt like the Shadowlands. Magic came from the Shadowlands, and it always felt more powerful here.
“This is correct,” said Arvalaeon.
“Then…where are we within the Shadowlands?” I said. I was afraid that anthrophages or cowlspawn or something worse might find us, but the town looked deserted.
“This was once part of Earth’s umbra,” said Arvalaeon. “A reflection of a small American town in a lightly inhabited area of the United States.” He looked at the dark shape of the cathedral on the other end of the town. “I realized that it might serve my purposes, so I severed it from the rest of Earth’s umbra and sealed it within its own particular pocket of the Shadowlands.”
“Uh,” I said. I couldn’t
imagine the level of magical power that must have taken. “This is a demesne? And that makes you a lord of the Shadowlands?” I had always heard that lords of the Shadowlands could not leave the boundaries of their demesne, but perhaps Arvalaeon was powerful enough to circumvent that.
“No,” said Arvalaeon. “The bond of full lordship is much more difficult to implement. A lord is essentially invincible within his demesne but is bound to its borders. This is merely a domain under my control. I can prevent anyone from entering or leaving it, but I derive no extra magical power from it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay, then. What does a Lord Inquisitor need with his own private domain in the Shadowlands? A vacation home?”
“It has its uses,” said Arvalaeon. “It is commonly used for training. Which, as it happens, is why we are here.”
“Training?” I said.
“You wanted power,” said Arvalaeon. He stepped past me and stopped before the massive bronze clock, frowning at the dials. I wondered if the huge thing was an aetherometer. “Specifically, magical power. Training is the best way to acquire it.”
“Okay,” I said. “But if there are only thirty days until Castomyr acts, that’s not a lot of time to practice. Also, if Morvilind figures out that I’m here…he might not be able to kill me while I’m here, but he will kill me the minute I step back on Earth.”
“Morvilind is otherwise occupied,” said Arvalaeon. “And thirty days is sufficient for our purposes. Come.”
He started down the town’s main street, and I followed him.
Everything had an archaic look to it, and I figured out why after a block or so. Arvalaeon had said he built this place from the reflection of a small town during the Conquest, so everything around me looked as it would have looked back during Conquest Year 1, or 2013 AD according to the old calendar. Though things didn’t look that different. The cars were chunkier (and there were more foreign-built ones), and there were no portraits of the High Queen and the nobles, and all the corporate logos were different, but other than that, it didn’t look that different. I thought about what Arvalaeon had said, how the High Queen and the Elves had taken apart human civilization and rebuilt it as a tool to keep humanity docile. I wondered how many people realized that.
The Rebels had, certainly. Suppose that had ticked them off.
“Look at this,” said Arvalaeon, stopping two blocks from the clock and the gas station.
He had stopped next to a blue four-door car. The front was adorned with the logo of some pre-Conquest car company or another. Arvalaeon opened the driver’s side door. Apparently, no one locked their doors in the Shadowlands. He reached behind the visor, drew out a key, and put it into the car’s ignition.
To my surprise, the engine started.
“I thought internal combustion engines didn’t work in the Shadowlands,” I said. I peered at the dashboard and saw that the controls had lit up as well. “Or electricity.”
“They do not,” said Arvalaeon. He shut off the engine and returned the key to its place. “I have modified this particular domain of the Shadowlands. Internal combustion engines and some forms of electricity will work here, though electronics and chemically-propelled firearms will not.”
“Do you have a particular reason for that?” I said.
“Yes,” said Arvalaeon, closing the door.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“No,” he said, stepping over the curb.
“That’s just so wonderful of you,” I said.
I noticed with satisfaction how the silver fire in his blood pulsed.
Arvalaeon deigned not to notice. “This way.”
He led me down the town’s main street, away from the massive grain silos and in the direction of the cathedral at the base of the hills. There was a drug store, a general store, and a post office, and a brick town hall that doubled as the local police station and fire station. Utterly silence hung over the street. I knew this wasn’t a real town, but some weird thing that Arvalaeon had built for his own reasons in the Shadowlands, but it was nevertheless eerie to walk through a deserted town. Even if the sky looked like it was on fire.
It looked as if it had been abandoned only minutes ago.
“Are we the only ones here?” I said.
“At the moment,” said Arvalaeon. He stopped before the door of a small shop. “A restaurant.”
He opened the door, and I looked inside. The interior looked like a little diner, with linoleum booths and a bar opening into the kitchen. I smelled bacon grease in the air. A chalkboard next to the front door listed today's specials and soups.
“That’s nice,” I said, wondering why Arvalaeon was showing me this. The electric lights were working, at least.
We left the diner, and he showed me a grocery store a block down. It looked like a typical small-town grocery store, with only two aisles, freezer cases with a lot of meat, and shelves with a lot of strong alcohol.
“Right,” I said. “You’ve got a well-stocked liquor store in the Shadowlands. Good for you. I know some men like to drink alone, but you’ve taken it to a whole new level.”
“I’m afraid the food and drink are illusionary,” said Arvalaeon. He flicked a finger and cast a spell of telekinesis. A bottle of whiskey shattered, and the liquid within it unraveled into gray mist. “There is more to show you.”
We left the store. I wondered what the point of all this was. Arvalaeon wanted to give me the power to kill Castomyr, and I wasn’t sure how this strange Shadowlands domain would accomplish that.
Maybe I could coax the answer out of him.
“That wall of mists atop the hills,” I said. “That’s the boundaries of the domain, right?”
“Correct,” said Arvalaeon.
“What happens if someone tries to cross it and get into the rest of the Shadowlands?” I said. “Does the mist poison them or melt their skin or something?”
“Certainly not,” said Arvalaeon. “Raw force is not always the best solution to a problem.”
“Said the man who kidnapped me from the street.”
Arvalaeon did not respond to the taunt.
“That cathedral,” I said. “It wasn’t there in the original town, was it?”
“No,” said Arvalaeon. “I copied the design from some cathedrals in France.”
“Why?” I said.
“The building suits my purposes,” said Arvalaeon.
“Super,” I said. “What is the purpose?”
“You will find out quite soon,” said Arvalaeon.
“Great.”
A shiver of dread went through me. Arvalaeon had said he was going to give me power, but I was old enough to know that people never gave you power without a price. Arvalaeon’s price was that I killed Baron Castomyr for him.
But what other price might that power carry?
We turned off the main street and headed into the residential part of the town. Like a lot of rural towns, there were no sidewalks, and the streets had no gutters, which had to make them a pain to clear in winter. Most of the houses were old farmhouses, two stories tall, painted white or blue. We passed a pair of small churches, one of them Catholic, the second Lutheran. Behind the Catholic church was a big park with a baseball diamond, a jungle gym, and a picnic shelter.
All the while the huge cathedral loomed over us, as out of place here as if a spaceship had landed. I saw the gargoyles looming on the towers and the walls, and as we drew closer, I could make out the images in the stained-glass windows.
I came to a surprised halt.
“What the hell?” I said.
The windows showed images from my life.
In one window, I saw a stylized picture of myself as a child, pledging loyalty to Morvilind, who looked just as intimidating in the stained glass than he did in person. In a second window, I saw myself learning magic under his tutelage. A third showed me kissing Nicholas Connor for the first time, and the fourth showed me stopping his plan to kill tens of thousands of innocent p
eople to assassinate Duke Wraithmyr of Los Angeles. Another window showed me dancing with Riordan for the first time at Paul McCade’s Conquest Day gala.
I just had time to note that I looked good in the black dress I had worn on that night, and then shock overrode vanity, and I looked at Arvalaeon.
“Why did you do that?” I said.
“Do what?” said Arvalaeon.
“Those pictures of me in the windows,” I snapped. “As if you weren’t creepy enough already, you did that? Why?” I pointed at the windows. “I…”
I fell silent.
The windows had changed.
They still showed scenes from my life, but different ones. In one the anthrophages chased me as I fled for the gates of Grayhold, the Ringbyrne Amulet in hand. In another, I killed Sergei Rogomil as he lay on the floor of the Ducal Mall. A third window showed me kissing Riordan in my apartment as we prepared to steal the Nihlus Stone from Venomhold.
“What do you see?” said Arvalaeon.
“My…my life, scenes from my life,” I said. “But they change every time I look away.”
“It is the nature of the windows,” said Arvalaeon. “They look different for everyone who beholds them.”
“You see scenes from your past?” I said.
“Yes,” said Arvalaeon, his voice distant.
“What do you see?” I said.
He didn’t look at me. “The horrors I have endured to gain the power I wield now.”
I swallowed. “Cheery thought.”
“Perhaps you shall see for yourself,” said Arvalaeon.
A concrete square rested before the cathedral doors. Arvalaeon crossed the square, climbed the steps, and threw open the doors. The resonant bang seemed to echo across the town, and I followed him into the cathedral.
The vast nave was empty. There were no pews or railings or anything else, and there wasn’t an altar at the far end of the nave. On the walls between the pillars, I saw the stained-glass images of my life, but for the moment, they didn’t hold my attention.
Cloak Games: Truth Chain Page 6
