Shadowfall g-1

by James Clemens

  Their only other companion was the stoic Eylan. The Wyr-woman studied Tylar from across the way, sitting stiffly, ever vigilant. She had spoken no more than three words since first joining them. And those words were Leave me be, to Rogger. Tylar suspected Rogger had heard those words often enough, but never with more command or more disdain. The two were posing as husband and wife, from Tashijan’s cook staff, off to visit relatives in Chrismferry.

  “I don’t know why I married that woman,” Rogger had griped at her rebuke.

  The others had boarded the craft separately. With all of Tashijan’s attention turned elsewhere, none of the guards had given the ship’s passengers more than a cursory glance. The Citadel was more concerned about the godslayer entering Tashijan, not leaving it. Gerrod already had his cabin paid and reserved. Tylar had played the master’s servant, hooded, his knight’s tattoos wiped over with face paint. He had also acted the cripple, not a difficult ruse. Kathryn had entered in secret, using her considerable gift for shadowplay. She kept hidden until all had gathered in Gerrod’s cabin.

  Kathryn stirred from her discussion with Gerrod and turned to Tylar. “Both ravens we sent have been dispatched. Hopefully they’ll reach their intended in time.” She pulled out a letter from her cloak. It bore the castellan’s seal, her seal.

  Tylar leaned over and read the name.

  Kathryn looked into his eyes. “This had been for Perryl. A cover for him to join Gerrod in his trip to Chrismferry.”

  He reached out and touched her hand, lowering the letter. “They’ll find him in time.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  Attempting to distract her from her worry, Tylar pointed to the letter. It was addressed to the same man to whom the wyndraven had been dispatched. “Will your man be able to aid us in gaining access to Chrism’s castillion?”

  “He should. Yaellin de Mar is one of Chrism’s Hands.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Fully.”

  “But with all that’s going on, how can you be so sure?”

  Kathryn glanced past him and out the window. “Because Yaellin is Ser Henri’s bastard son.”

  19

  THE FIRST GOD

  “Keep running,”Yaellin snarled.

  Dart held Laurelle’s hand as they fled through the dark myrrwood. Thorns tugged and scraped, branches slapped and stung. Dart’s breath rasped ragged in her panicked flight. Laurelle let out soft moans.

  Behind them, cries and shrieks grew ever closer. Ilk-beasts, once men and women, pursued them, crashing through the underbrush.

  Dart remembered her dream of a few nights back. She had been chased then, as a babe, carried away by the old headmistress of the Conclave. Why?

  Yaellin kept behind, urging them onward through bower and glade. The myrrwood seemed without end. Dart risked a glance over her shoulder. She saw nothing but a flowing wall of shadow.

  He’s keeping us hidden with his billowing cloak.

  Ahead, Pupp raced through the wood, passing ghostly through bush and scrub without a rustle. Dart watched him bump against a bole of the myrrwood and bounce off of it. The trunk was solid to him, like the blood roots below.

  She had no time for this mystery and chased after him. His glow helped light her path.

  They passed crumbled walls, a moss-covered well, a tiny wooden arbor fallen to ruin. And still the wood continued onward. Grown from a single seed, sown with Chrism’s own blood, the myrrwood’s branches had stretched for four thousand years.

  Would they ever escape its shadow?

  As they ran, Dart noted the trunks grew thicker. They were not heading back toward the castillion, toward light and people, but deeper into the heart of the myrrwood.

  “Where…?” Dart gasped.

  “To the back wall of the Eldergarden,” Yaellin answered. “And over. We must reach the city.”

  As if hearing their words, a keening shriek erupted to the left. A large form crashed toward them.

  “Behind me!” Yaellin called.

  Dart twisted. Laurelle froze. With her hand gripping Laurelle’s, Dart tugged her friend back around. Shadows swept over and past them. Pupp wheeled around and raced toward them.

  Dart dropped to her knees, sheltered by a bole of the myrrwood.

  A dark shape flung itself into their path. Eyes glowing crimson, it ran on all fours, fingers and toes twisted into razored claws. A row of bony spikes pierced through the skin of its arched back. It howled at Yaellin, its jaws hinging its entire head, and leaped at the man.

  Yaellin’s cloak sailed to a branch overhead, a flow of living shadow. Snagging purchase, Yaellin flew upward. The beast passed below him, snapping and spitting. With a hiss and a slash, it whirled.

  But Yaellin had already dropped beside it. He struck out with his fist-no, not just a fist. He held a dagger with a shining black blade. He struck the ilk-beast in the side, then rolled backward. A lick of fire chased him, like a splash of blood, from the beast.

  The creature reared up, claws extended-then collapsed into ash, faintly ruddy, like wood embers from a dying fire.

  Yaellin waved to them with his dagger. “Hurry…”

  Dart knew the weapon he had employed: the cursed blade from Jacinta. Dart was now glad Yaellin had stolen it. She and Laurelle fled to his side, and the chase continued.

  But the pause to dispatch the lone beast had cost them. The howls had drawn closer.

  “I… I can’t go on,” Laurelle moaned. Her feet began to trip.

  Yaellin was there, scooping her up in arm and cloak. He reached for Dart with the other.

  “I can still run,” she said, not wishing to burden Yaellin. Besides, she had the wind for this. She had been running her entire life.

  She turned to flee, Pupp at her side.

  They dodged around boles as wide as carriage carts. The scent of myrrh grew stifling, trapped under the dense leafy canopy where wind, rain, and sunshine never reached. The underbrush turned skeletal, thorny, with strange red berries aglow in the gloom. Through the upper branches, luminescent butterflits of azure and crimson fluttered lazily, hanging and gliding in the too-still air.

  Ahead a wall appeared, lit by the ruddy glow of Pupp’s molten form.

  Dart hurried ahead, sensing salvation. What had terrified her before-the empty streets of Chrismferry at night-now seemed a welcome place. At least their pursuers seemed to fall back, losing their track, or maybe they had come upon the smoldering ashes of their fellow beast and now proceeded with more caution.

  Either way, they had to find a way over the wall.

  Pupp had stopped ahead. Over the millennia, a thick deadfall had blown against the wall, tangled and dark in the night.

  “Caution,” Yaellin warned behind her, farther back than she expected.

  “Where can we cross the wall?” Dart asked. The deadfall looked treacherous and unstable.

  “It’s no wall, Dart.” Yaellin hurried to her, his voice dropped to the barest whisper.

  Her foot crunched through brittle twigs and branches as she joined Pupp. She saw Yaellin was right. What she had thought was wall was instead a tree of such immensity that the curve of its trunk could not be easily discerned, appearing more like a wall of smooth, gray bark.

  “Quiet now,” Yaellin whispered. “Around to the left. Keep out of the bones.”

  Dart frowned, then saw where Yaellin pointed. She stumbled back with a strangled cry, crackling a mouse’s rib cage under her heel. She gaped toward the tree. The snarl of deadfall showed itself to be bones, piled and broken: slender leg bones of deer, cracked skulls of rabbits, ribs of giant woodland slothkins, ivory horns of lothicorns.

  “The true heart of the myrrwood,” Yaellin intoned. “The one trunk from which all else spread.”

  “The Heartwood,” Dart said, remembering the stories told. She stared around her. Here was Lord Chrism’s private sanctuary, a forbidden, sacred place. None but the god was allowed to enter. Even the sun hid its face from this soil.
“What happened?”

  “Corruption… like with the men and women.”

  They circled its bole, keeping wide of the ring of bones. As they ran, a soft skittering sounded. A skull of a slothkin rose from the pile, lifted by a writhing root. Its empty eye sockets bloomed with a sickly yellow flame.

  Yaellin guided them to the side, skirting bushes and trunks. “It wakes.”

  More skulls rose, igniting with fire. Riding roots, they pushed out of the pile and snaked outward. Piled bones toppled with a hollow wooden sound as the roots quested into the surrounding wood.

  They ran, keeping hidden.

  Movement to Dart’s left drew her eye. A cracked skull of a deer, still antlered, teetered up from a beach of bone. It swung around, meeting her gaze. She found the blaze in the sockets fixing to her.

  Her feet slowed.

  A trilling filled her head, sweet and high. The wood grew darker at the edges. The skull and eyes glowed brighter. Words grew in her head, speaking with her own voice: come, sleep, rest, come…

  Fingers gripped her chin and turned her face. “No,” Yaellin said. He had placed Laurelle down. “Don’t look.”

  She nodded, but still felt drawn to glance over. Her feet drifted her back toward the deadfall. Motion snaked throughout the pile. Bones skittered and rolled. New fires lit the night as more eyes opened, a dance of fireflits.

  Pretty…

  She turned to see-but a sweep of darkness dropped like a curtain across the sight.

  “No,” Yaellin repeated behind her. “Only a little farther.”

  Laurelle stumbled up to her, her face bled of all color.

  A shape leaped before them. Both girls yelped, falling into each other’s arms. But it was only a dwarf deerling, no taller than Dart’s waist. Its ears quivered. It stopped on tiny hooves, blind to the three of them, then bounded forward, toward the deadfall.

  Dart glanced after it.

  It landed, knee deep in the bone pile. The treacherous footing stumbled its perch. It fell forward. Only then did it seem to note where it was. Its head snapped up, neck taut, a confused bleat escaping.

  Then a snarl of roots tangled up out of the bones. It lifted the deerling high and swamped over its body. The animal fought, but the roots penetrated flesh as easily as water. A sharp wail squealed forth, but it ended in one heartbeat as yellow flames sprouted from the deerling’s mouth and nose. More fires spat out from its ears and rear quarters.

  Flesh roasted from the inside out, falling to ash as the body was shaken and jerked by the roots. All that was left of the deerling were bones, raining down upon the pile, growing the deadfall.

  Aghast, Dart stumbled ahead. Through the darkness, other animals came to the call of the Heartwood. Cries rose all around the immense tree.

  “This way,” Yaellin said, finally reaching the far side of the tree. “The others must have herded us here, hoping we’d succumb to the tree.”

  “What is it?” Laurelle asked.

  “Another ilk-beast. Trees are living creatures, like man or beast. As those who served Chrism drank his blood, so the first god once fed this tree. Its Grace was his to corrupt if and when he chose.”

  Dart remembered the blood roots in the tunnel. She risked a glance back toward the horror. She now knew where all that blood had come from, sucked by Grace from the woodland creatures.

  Yaellin guided them onward. The howl of the other ilk-beasts had grown silent. Dart found the quiet more disturbing than their hunting cries. Were they lying in wait for an ambush?

  For another full bell, they fled through the woods, no end in sight.

  “Dawn is not far,” Yaellin said. “We’d best be out of these woods and lost into the streets before the sun shows her face.”

  “Why are you helping us?” Dart finally asked. She eyed his cloak of shadows. “Who… who are you really?”

  He glanced down to her. He had lowered his cloak’s hood.

  His black hair, though, remained enough of a cowl, loose to the shoulder and as dark as the night. The only break was the streak of silver from brow to behind his right ear. “It seems, little Dart, we are half siblings in a way.”

  Dart frowned. Though the Hand had clearly saved them, she still felt wary.

  “The headmistress of the Conclave was my mother,” he said. “Melinda mir Mar. And you were the little one she rescued and raised so long ago. The little stray sheep hidden among a flock of others.”

  Dart shook her head in disbelief.

  “It’s true, little sister.” A glimmer of a sad smile graced his face. “All was told to me by my father when I was about your age. He set a duty upon me like no other.”

  “What was that?”

  “To keep watch over the Godsword.”

  “This is what Ser Henri told me,” Kathryn said. She leaned closer to Tylar to keep their words private. The flippercraft’s mekanicals chugged in rhythmic fashion. For a moment, his storm-gray eyes caught her gaze and her breath. She glanced down. “He… he told me once.. a half-moon after you were shipped away. He was deep into his cups, of sour and sanguine a mood. Over you. Over my loss.”

  “Your loss?” Tylar asked.

  “My loss of you…” she mumbled, speaking a half-truth. She was not ready to speak of the other yet.

  He nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  The anguish in his words drew her eyes up. “I’m as much to blame. Before the adjudicators, I should’ve been more of a lover, less of a knight.”

  “The soothmancers would’ve had the truth out of you either way.”

  “But what was the truth?” she said, hating herself for sounding so bitter. “I was so distraught. So shaken by the accusations.” She turned away. “You did come to bed bloody that night. Your sword was found at the home of the murdered cobblers.”

  “I know. I barely remember even waking that morning…”

  “Castellan Mirra said you were fed a draft of drowsing alchemy. Probably in wine.” Kathryn explained what the former castellan had related to her and Perryl, how Tylar was a pawn in a game of power among factions in Tashijan.

  “Ser Henri knew my innocence?” Tylar asked at the end, clearly shaken, his voice hardening. “Even as I was sent away?”

  “Do not judge him too harshly. He came to that knowledge late, and to speak it aloud at that time would have exposed too many others. Even Henri’s wardenship would have been threatened, and Argent ser Fields and his Fiery Cross would have assumed the Warden’s Eyrie much earlier.”

  Tylar seemed little settled, breathing hard. Kathryn knew this mood. She smelled the heat of his skin. It awakened other unwanted memories, but she shoved these down. “Tylar, if Ser Henri had laid this all out, given you the choice of sacrifice or freedom, which would you have chosen?”

  He remained silent, staring out the windows. The craft’s aeroskimmers glowed against the night sky. “It was not just my life in that balance,” he mumbled and turned back to her.

  Those eyes again… she felt her heart tremble.

  “But perhaps you are right…” He released her, glancing down. “At the end, I may have walked of my own volition onto that slave ship. I was not without guilt. I had dealings with the Gray Traders. I placed myself into position to be that pawn.”

  Kathryn heard the pain in his voice, but her heart still echoed with his earlier words: It was not just my life in that balance. What if Tylar had known about the child… or even if Ser Henri had known at that time… would matters have changed? Would decisions have been made differently by all? Tears rose to her eyes. They came so fast, a surprise.

  “Kathryn…” Tylar said.

  “There is something I must speak to you about,” she finally said, “but not here.” She motioned to the cabin door. She needed to move. Though the others had offered some privacy by surreptitiously glancing elsewhere or murmuring in their own conversation, she still felt exposed.

  Standing, she led Tylar out the cabin door. The axis hall of the craft led forward to the ca
ptain’s deck and backward to a communal room with a viewing window. Checking to ensure the hallway was free of prying eyes, they headed toward the stern.

  Once in the vacant back cabin, Kathryn crossed to the curve of blessed glass that opened onto a vista below. A railing bounded a gallery overlooking the lower window. She grabbed it firmly. Below a small village slid by, lit by a central bonfire.

  “What is it?” Tylar asked.

  “There is one more thing you must know about those awful days.” She girded herself for what she must say. Tylar must have sensed her distress and placed his hand over hers on the railing. It was too much. She slid her hand away, perhaps jerking it too quickly.

  “There was a child,” she said, speaking woodenly, trying to be dispassionate. “Our child.”

  “What…?” Tylar stiffened.

  “A babe… a son. I was to tell you the night you came drunk-what I thought was drunk-and bloody to our bed.” She shook her head. “Then the guards, pounding on the door in the morning… there was no time to tell.”

  “Tell me now,” he said in a low voice, thunderous in its depths.

  “The trial… the accusations… my testimony… it was too much.” A sob bubbled out of her. She had been holding it in for half a decade. “I was not strong enough.”

  Tears flowed. She felt her knees go weak, her entire form trembling. The night coming back to her in full horror. “I lost the baby… my… our little baby boy.”

  She was blind now to the view below. All she could see was so much blood, on her, on the sheets, everywhere. She tried to wash it up, alone in her room, so no one would know. Then more cramping, more blood…

  “I was not strong enough,” she sobbed.

  Tylar tried to put his arm around her, but she shoved him back.

  “Not strong enough… not for you, not for our baby.”

  Tylar again pulled her to him, with both arms now, hugging her tight. “No one’s that strong,” he whispered in her ear.

  She barely heard. She cried into his chest. Words escaped her like frightened birds. “Would you have… would you have…?” She choked.