The Kingdom of Shadow

by Richard A. Knaak

  Tsin’s slanted, silver-gray eyes peered over his aquiline nose in obvious disdain. The diminutive mage had no patience whatsoever and clearly did not see that his own life hung by a thread. Of course, as a Vizjerei, he not only had spells with which to likely defend himself, but the staff he held in his right hand also carried protective magicks designed for countless circumstances.

  One quick strike, though, Kentril thought to himself. One quick strike, and I can put an end to this sanctimonious little toad . . .

  “It’s about time!” snapped the mercenary’s employer. He shook one end of the staff in the captain’s face. “What took you so long? You know I’m running out of time!”

  More than you think, you babbling cur . . . “While you were wandering off, Master Tsin, I was trying to save a man from one of those water serpents. We could’ve used your help.”

  “Yes, well, enough of this babble!” Quov Tsin returned, his gaze slipping back to the jungle behind him. Likely he had not even heard what Kentril had just said. “Come! Come quickly! You must see!”

  As the Vizjerei turned away, Captain Dumon’s hand rose, the sword at the ready.

  Gorst put his own hand on his friend’s arm. “Let’s go see, Kentril.”

  The giant casually stepped in front of the captain, effectively coming between Kentril and Tsin’s unprotected back. The first two moved on, Kentril reluctantly following them.

  He could wait a few moments longer.

  First Quov Tsin, then Gorst, vanished among the plants. Kentril soon found himself needing to hack his way through, but he took some pleasure in imagining each dismembered branch or vine as the spellcaster’s neck.

  Then, without any warning, the jungle gave way. The early evening sun lit up the landscape before him as it had not done in two weeks. Kentril found himself staring at a series of high, jagged peaks, the beginnings of the vast chain running up and down the length of Kehjistan and heading even farther east for as far as the eye could see.

  And in the distance, just above the eastern base of a particularly tall and ugly peak at the very southern tip of this particular chain, lay the weatherworn, jumbled remains of a once mighty city. The fragments of a great stone wall encircling the entire eastern side could still be made out. A few hardy structures maintained precarious stances within the city itself. One, possibly the home of the lost kingdom’s ruler, stood perched atop a vast ledge, no doubt having once enabled the master of the realm to gaze down upon his entire domain.

  Although the jungle had surrendered in part to this region, lush plants still covered much of the landscape and had, over time, invaded the ruins themselves. What they had not already covered, the elements had battered well. Erosion had ripped away part of the northern section of the wall and taken with it a good portion of the city. Further in, a sizable chunk of the mountain had collapsed onto the interior of the city.

  Kentril could not imagine that there would be much left intact anywhere inside. Time had taken its toll on this ancient place.

  “That should assuage your anger a bit, Captain Dumon,” Quov Tsin suddenly remarked, eyes fixed on the sight before them. “Quite a bit.”

  “What do you mean?” Lowering his sword, Kentril eyed the ruins with some discomfort. He felt as if he had just intruded upon a place where even ghosts moved with trepidation. “Is that it? Is that—”

  “ ‘The Light among Lights’? The most pure of realms in all the history of the world, built upon the very slope of the towering mountain called Nymyr? Aye, captain, there it stands—and, for our needs, just in time, if my calculations hold true!”

  Gasps came from behind Kentril. The other men had finally caught up, just in time to hear the sorcerer’s words. They all knew the legends of the realm called the Light among Lights by the ancients, a place fabled to be the one kingdom where the darkness of Hell had feared to intrude. They all knew of its story, even as far away as the Western Kingdoms.

  Here had been a city revered by those who followed the light. Here had stood a marvel, ruled by regal and kind lords who had guided the souls of all toward Heaven.

  Here had been a kingdom so pure, stories had it that it had at last risen whole above the mortal plane, its inhabitants transcending mortal limitations, rising to join the angels.

  “You see a sight worthy of the loss of your men, captain,” the Vizjerei whispered, extending one bony hand toward the ruins. “For now you are one of the few fortunate ever to cast your eyes upon one of the wonders of the past—fabulous, lost Ureh!”

  TWO

  She had alabaster skin devoid of even the slightest imperfection, long chestnut-red hair that fell well below her perfectly rounded shoulders, and eyes of the deepest emerald green. If not for the eastern cast of her facial features, he might have taken her for one of the tempestuous maidens of his own highland home. She was beautiful, everything a weary, war-bitten adventurer like Kentril had dreamed of each night during the innocence of his youth—and still did to this very day.

  A pity she had been dead for several hundred years.

  Fingering the ancient brooch he had almost literally stumbled upon, Kentril surreptitiously studied his nearby companions. They continued their back-breaking labor in complete ignorance of his find, searching among the crumbled, foliage-enshrouded ruins for anything of value. So far, the treasure hunt had been an utter failure as far as Kentril had been concerned. Here they worked, fifteen men strong, in the midst of the remains of one of the most fabled cities of all, and the sum total for three days of hard effort had been a small sack of rusted, bent, and mostly broken items of dubious value. The intricately detailed brooch represented the greatest find yet, and even it would not pay for more than a fraction of their arduous journey to this bug-infested necropolis.

  No one looked his way. Deciding that he had earned at least this one token, Kentril slipped the artifact into his belt pouch. As leader of the mercenaries, he would have been entitled to an extra share of all treasure anyway, so the scarred commander felt no qualms about what he did.

  “Kentril?”

  The captain bit back his startlement. Turning, he faced the one who had so stealthily approached him. Somehow, Gorst could always manage to move in silence when he chose to, despite his oxlike appearance.

  Running one hand through his hair, Kentril tried to pretend that he had done nothing wrong. “Gorst! I thought you’d been helping our esteemed employer with his tools and calculating devices! What brings you here?”

  “The magic man . . . he wants to see you, Kentril.” Gorst had a smile on his round face. Magic fascinated him as it did many small children, and while so far the Vizjerei sorcerer had shown little in the way of spells, the brutish mercenary seemed to enjoy the incomprehensible and enigmatic devices and objects Quov Tsin had brought with him.

  “Tell him I’ll be along in a little bit.”

  “He wants to see you now,” the bronzed figure returned, his tone that of one who could not understand why someone would not want to rush over immediately to find out what the Vizjerei desired. Gorst clearly believed that some wondrous spectacle of sorcery had to be imminent and any delay by his friend in returning to Tsin would only mean prolonging the waiting.

  Knowing the futility of holding off and realizing suddenly that he had reason to talk to the Vizjerei, Captain Dumon shrugged. “All right. We’ll go see the magic man.”

  As he started past Gorst, the giant abruptly asked, “Can I see it, Kentril?”

  “See what?”

  “What you found.”

  Kentril almost denied having found anything, but Gorst knew him better than anyone. With a slight grimace, he carefully withdrew the brooch and held it in his palm so that only the other mercenary could see he had anything at all.

  Gorst gave him a wide grin. “Pretty.”

  “Listen—” Kentril began.

  But the massive fighter had already started past him, leaving the captain to feel foolish about his attempted subterfuge. He never knew completel
y what Gorst thought, but it seemed that to his friend the matter of the brooch had been satisfied, and now they needed to move on. Gorst’s “magic man” awaited them, obviously a far more interesting subject to the mercenary leader’s companion than any picture of a centuries-dead female.

  They found Tsin impatiently scurrying around a display of stones, alchemaic devices, and other tools of his disreputable trade. Every now and then, the balding sorcerer would scribble notes on a parchment atop the makeshift desk his hired crew had put together early on. He seemed especially interested this day in peering through an eyeglass pointed at the very tip of Nymyr, then consulting a tattered scroll. As they approached, Kentril heard him chuckle with glee, then resort to the scroll again.

  The Vizjerei reached for a device that most resembled to the mercenary a sextant, save that the sorcerer had clearly made some changes in the design. As his bony fingers touched the object, Quov Tsin noticed the pair.

  “Ah! Dumon! About time! And has your latest day’s labor born any more fruit than the previous?”

  “No . . . it’s just as you said. So far, we’ve found little more than junk.” Kentril chose not to mention the brooch. With his luck, Tsin would have found some relevance in the artifact and therefore confiscated it.

  “No matter, no matter! I let you and your band search mostly to keep you out of my way until the final readings could be made. Of course, had you found anything, that would have been a plus, but in the long run, I am not bothered by the lack of success.”

  Perhaps the sorcerer had not been, but the mercenaries certainly grumbled. Kentril had promised his companions much based on the words of the Vizjerei, and the failure would hang more around his neck than even Tsin’s.

  “Listen, sorcerer,” he muttered. “You paid us enough to get this madness underway, but you also made promises of a lot more. Myself, I could go home right now and be happy just to be out of this place, but the others expect much. You said that we’d find treasure—ample amounts of it—in this ancient ruin, but so far we’ve—”

  “Yes, yes, yes! I’ve explained it all before! It is just not the proper time! Soon, though, soon!”

  Kentril looked to Gorst, who shrugged. Turning his gaze back to the slight mage, Captain Dumon snarled, “You’ve told me some wild things, Vizjerei, and they keep getting wilder the longer this goes on! Why don’t you explain once more to Gorst and me what you’ve got in mind, eh? And make it clear for once.”

  “That would be a waste of my time,” the diminutive sorcerer grated. Seeing Kentril’s expression darken further, he sighed in exasperation. “Very well, but this is the last I’ll speak of it! You already know the legends of the piousness of those who lived in the city, so I’ll not bother with retelling that. I’ll go straight to the time of troubles—will that do?”

  Propping himself against a large chunk of rubble once forming part of the great wall, Kentril folded his arms, then nodded. “Go from there. That’s when your story starts getting a little too fantastic for my tastes.”

  “The mercenary’s a critic.” Nonetheless, Quov Tsin paused in his tasks and began the tale that Captain Dumon suspected he could hear a hundred times and still not completely fathom. “It began during a time . . . a time known to those of us versed in the arts and the battle between light and darkness . . . a time known as the Sin War.”

  Hardened as he had become over the years, Kentril could not help but shudder whenever the short Vizjerei muttered those last two words. Until he had met Tsin, he had never even heard such legends, but something about the mythic war of which his employer spoke filled the mercenary’s head with visions of diabolic demons seeking to guide the mortal world down the path of corruption, leading all to Hell.

  The Sin War had not been fought as normal wars, for it had been fought by Heaven and Hell themselves. True, the archangels and demons stood opposing one another like two armies, but the battles most often took place behind the scenes, behind the eyes of mortals. The supposed war had also stretched hundreds of years—for what were years to immortal beings? Kingdoms had risen and fallen, fiends such as Bartuc, the Warlord of Blood, had come to power, then been defeated—and still the war had pressed on.

  And early on in this struggle, wondrous Ureh had become a central battleground.

  “All knew of Ureh’s greatness in those days,” the bald sorcerer went on. “A fount of light, the guiding force of good in those troubled days—which, of course, meant that it drew the attention not only of the archangels but of the lords of Hell themselves, the Prime Evils.”

  The Prime Evils. Whatever land one had been born in, whether in the jungles of Kehjistan or the cooler, rockier realms of the Western Kingdoms, all knew of the Prime Evils, the three brothers who ruled Hell. Mephisto, Lord of Hatred, master of undead. Baal, Lord of Destruction, bringer of chaos.

  Diablo.

  Diablo, perhaps the most feared, the ultimate manifestation of terror, the nightmare not only of children but of veteran warriors who had already seen the horrors men themselves could produce. Diablo it had been who had gazed most at bright Ureh from his monstrous domain, who had most been offended by its glorious existence. Order could be brought forth from the chaos created by Baal, and the hatred of Mephisto could be mastered by any man with strength, but to have no fear of fear itself—such a thing Diablo could not believe and would not stand.

  “The lands around Ureh grew darker with each passing year, Captain Dumon. Creatures twisted by evil or born not of this world harried those who would journey to and from the city walls. Sinister magicks insinuated themselves where they could, barely driven back by the sorcerers of the kingdom.”

  And with each defeat by the peoples of Ureh, the Vizjerei added, Diablo grew more determined. He would bring down the wondrous city and make its inhabitants the slaves of Hell. All would see that no power on the mortal plane could withstand the most foul of the Prime Evils.

  “It came to the point when no one dared travel to the city and few could escape it. It is said that then the lord of the realm, the just and kind Juris Khan, gathered his greatest priests and mages and decreed that they would do what they had to in order to save their people once and for all. Legend has it that Juris Khan had been granted a vision by an archangel, one who had declared to him that the powers above had seen the trials of their most honored followers and had felt moved to grant them the greatest of havens, so long as the humans put it upon themselves to reach it.” Quov Tsin had an almost enraptured expression on his wizened face. “He offered the people of Ureh the very safety of Heaven itself.”

  Gorst grunted, his way of expressing his outright awe at these words. Kentril held his peace, but he had trouble imagining such an offer. The archangel had opened the very gates of Heaven to the mortals of Ureh, opened to them a place where not even all three Prime Evils combined could have made the slightest incursion. All the people of Ureh had to do was find their way there.

  “Some gesture,” the mercenary captain interjected, not without some sarcasm. “ ‘Here we are, but you can find your own good way to get to us.’ ”

  “You asked for the story, Dumon—do you want it or not? I’ve far more important things to do than entertain you.”

  “Go ahead, sorcerer. I’ll try to keep my awe reined in.”

  With a disdainful sniff, Tsin said, “The archangel came twice more in Juris Khan’s dreams, each time with the same promise and each time with some clues as to how this miracle could come to be . . .”

  Guided by his visions, Lord Khan urged the sorcerers and priests to efforts such as none had ever conjectured before. The archangel had left what hints he could of what needed to be done, but the restrictions by which he existed forbade him from granting the mortals any more than that. Still, with the faith of Heaven behind them, Ureh dedicated its efforts to achieving this wondrous task. They knew what they had been offered, and they knew what fate likely would befall them if they failed.

  “What little we know of that period comes fr
om Gregus Mazi, the only inhabitant of Ureh to be found afterward. One of the circle of mages involved in the casting of the great spell, it is assumed by most scholars that at the last moment he must’ve faltered in his faith, for when the sorcerers and priests finally opened the way to Heaven—how is never said—Gregus Mazi was not taken with the rest.”

  “Hardly seems fair.”

  “From him,” Quov Tsin went on, utterly ignoring Kentril, “we know that a tremendous red light enshrouded Ureh at that point, covering everything up to and including the very walls surrounding it. As Gregus—still heart-stricken at being left behind—watched, a second city seemed to rise above the first, an exact if ethereal twin of Ureh . . .”

  Before the wide, unblinking eyes of the unfortunate sorcerer, the vast, phantasmal display hovered above its mortal shell. Even from where he stood, Gregus Mazi could see torchlight, could even see a few figures standing upon the ghostly battlements. To him, it had been as if the soul of Ureh had left the mortal plane, for when he glanced at the abandoned buildings around him, they had already begun to crumble and collapse, as if all they had been had been sucked from their very substance, leaving only swiftly decaying skeletons.

  And as the lone figure looked up once more, he saw the shimmering city grow more insubstantial. The crimson aura flared, growing almost as bright as the sun that had set but moments before. Gregus Mazi had shielded his eyes for just a second—and in that second the glorious vision of a floating Ureh had faded away.

  “Gregus Mazi was left a broken man, Captain Dumon. He was found by followers of Rathma, the necromancers of the deep jungle, and they cared for him until his mind had healed enough. He left them, then, an obsession already growing in his heart. He would join his family and friends yet. The sorcerer traveled all over the world in search of what he needed, for although he had been a part of the spellwork that had enabled the people of Ureh to ascend to Heaven, he had not known all of it.”