“Why not? Let them come in force,” Shane scoffed. “I took them on single-handedly. What chance would they have against my army?”
“No chance,” said Halawir. “But creatures who cannot fly are easily surrounded, and we do not have time for a drawn-out siege. Not when we are so close to freeing Kovo.”
Shane nodded. There was no sense drawing out the conflict just because the Greencloaks didn’t know when they were beaten. “Then you’ll have to lead them away,” he said. “I’ll make my own way home.”
“Across Nilo?”
“I’ve got Mulop’s talisman,” Shane replied. “I’ll swim.”
“Very well,” Halawir said. “But do not tarry. You would not wish to displease Gerathon.”
“I know that,” Shane spat. His face grew warm despite the blustery wind. “I know that well.”
Halawir scudded to the coastline, so low that the trees below shook in his wake.
“Now would be an opportune time,” he said. “While our pursuers are occupied.”
Shane waited until Halawir was gliding, before the next flap of the Great Beast’s wings brought an increase in speed. They were still going too fast for his liking. They were still too high.
But Shane was used to doing the best he could with poor options.
He let go of Halawir’s feathers and pushed off into the sky.
Shane dreamed of spiders.
He was roaming the corridors of the castle where he’d lived as a boy. Everything was just as he remembered — but there were spiders everywhere.
Big spiders and small spiders. Spiders marked with red diamonds and yellow stripes and brown spots. Hairy spiders and smooth, shiny spiders that appeared wrought from black metal.
They’d taken up residence in the castle Shane had left behind, and as he made his way through the hallways, he was forced to step through one web after another. He swept his arms out ahead of him, slapping the webbing aside, but it clung to him, and he ended up with strands in his mouth and his hair and tickling at his ears. He was sure some of the spiders themselves were on him too. He couldn’t spare the time to look, but he could feel them skittering across his skin.
He had to find Magda. When he’d led his forces to war, he’d left his family’s kindly servant behind. For her to have let the castle fall into such a state — something was obviously wrong.
The webs slowed his progress but couldn’t stop him, and eventually he caught sight of an open door ahead. As he approached, a figure stepped into the doorway from within, blocking his way. It was Magda.
The look on her face was grave. “You may not enter, my prince.”
“I’m not a prince,” Shane said. “I’m the Reptile King.” He pulled his collar aside to show her the crocodile tattoo, but it was completely obscured by spiderwebs.
Shane looked up at Magda, and he caught a glimpse of something beyond her — a human figure on the bed. A girl …
“Who is that?” Shane asked.
“Don’t look,” Magda said, but without any emotion in her voice. “Don’t look.”
The shadows in the room shifted, and Shane thought he might get a better look at the figure. But then he realized it wasn’t shadows obscuring his view but spiders, a whole sea of spiders, swarming over every surface of the room. Was there even a girl on the bed, or only a thousand spiders in the shape of a girl?
The spiders were on Magda too, Shane realized. How had he not noticed before? They were crawling all over her. Most of them were small, skittering in and out of view. But clinging to her arm was a massive specimen, black and yellow, and it was sinking its fangs into the pale flesh of her arm.
Shane tried to scream for her, but the name on his lips was …
“Drina!”
Shane awoke in a sweat, to find his vision filled with green.
He was on his back, staring up into the canopy of a forest.
His back hurt. His head hurt. He had a nasty cut on his forearm, no doubt from plummeting through the trees. But when he brought his hand to the pocket of his leather tunic and the talismans were still there, he let out a sigh of relief.
He sat up and took them from his pocket for the first time. Each talisman was a pendant in the shape of an animal — a Great Beast — and each bore a portion of the beast’s power. There was an eagle wrought in bronze that bore a striking resemblance to Halawir, and a delicately detailed swan carved from marble. The wolf and the lion were made of precious metals, silver and gold, but the most beautiful to Shane’s eye was the leopard of amber. It seemed to glow with its own inner light.
Shane was slow to realize there was no octopus. No octopus, and no ram either.
He checked his pocket again, but he knew he wouldn’t find them there. He scanned the ground around him, but the talismans had all been one great tangled mass in his tunic. There would have been no way for one or two to slip loose. Which meant …
Which meant he’d left two behind. In the hands of the Greencloaks.
Shane leaped to his feet and screamed. He kicked at the dirt and paced in a tight circle, clenching his fists. He wanted to hit something, but there was nothing in reach but the trees.
There was no use going back. Even if he could get to Greenhaven again, it wasn’t worth the risk. He had nine talismans, and he’d left Zerif with three. He just had to hope that twelve were enough to breach Kovo’s prison. With Kovo released, Shane’s obligations to Gerathon would at last be fulfilled. And he, Shane, would rule over a new world order free of the tyranny of the Greencloaks.
Shane took stock of his possessions. He had his sword, a stoppered vial of Bile that had somehow not shattered when he’d fallen from the sky, and the talismans. Nothing else but the clothes on his back and the tattoo that had reappeared on his chest.
He thought grimly that it said something significant about his life that he was lost in the wilderness with Gerathon’s Bile in his pocket, but no drinkable water.
He put away all the talismans except one: a falcon made of copper. He gripped it in his hand and found a tall tree with low branches. Shane had grown up a prince in a castle, but he was far from pampered, and the past year had made him strong. He climbed the tree quickly, his movements confident, and in a matter of seconds he broke through the canopy to the infinite expanse of blue beyond it.
Shane slipped the Copper Falcon’s cord around his neck, and instantly his eyesight sharpened.
“Wow,” he said. So this was what it was like to see the world through Essix’s eyes.
He could see a drop of water on a leaf three trees over. He could see a distant dragonfly, its wings buzzing madly as it rose above the trees. And there, far off across the ocean, he could see an eagle — a massive eagle made small by distance, pursued across the ocean by a ship. Their ploy had worked.
He turned in the other direction. The Conquerors’ camp was too far even for his keen eyes to see. If he could fly or swim, he’d be there in no time. On foot, it would take him days.
He sighed, climbed down to the forest floor, and started walking.
To avoid getting lost, Shane kept the coastline in view. To avoid being seen, he walked just within the tree line, where the forest gave way to Nilo’s beaches. That meant weaving among the trees — there was no natural path. It was slow going, but it was prudent. And Shane had no great desire to plunge deeper into the forest, where the trees grew so thick they blocked out the sky.
Soon the choice was taken from him. The sandy beaches gave way to pebbles, and then to great rocks, and the ground sloped up steeply so that the only way to follow the coastline would be to scale sheer cliffs. He might have managed it with the Granite Ram of Arax … but that was one of two talismans still under Greencloak control.
So Shane stepped deeper into the forest.
Here, at least, there was water from the occasional freshwater streams. He had no waterskin, so he was forced to drink as he went, and frequently. The air was muggy beneath the trees, and Shane was soon sweating. Berries grew in
clusters wherever water touched the soil, but they were unfamiliar to him and he deemed them not worth the risk. With each passing hour, however, his hunger grew.
To distract himself, he decided to familiarize himself with the talismans, careful to use only one at a time. Used together, the talismans exerted control over something called the Evertree. The three Great Beasts who backed Shane had been guarded in their descriptions of the mysterious tree, but one thing they had made abundantly clear: The Evertree was the key to curing the bonding sickness that had swept over Stetriol like a plague. The tree had suffered some kind of damage in the last great war — this was where bonding sickness had come from — and all fifteen talismans would be needed to heal it. Using a handful of the talismans at once, however, would more likely cause the tree more damage, and Shane wouldn’t be responsible for that.
He knew Cabaro’s lion was supposed to bestow its wearer with a ferocious roar. He decided not to try it out, for fear of drawing unwanted attention. Same for the Slate Elephant of Dinesh, which would dramatically increase the size of his spirit animal. Even if there were room among the trees for an elephant-sized crocodile, it wouldn’t help him blend in.
Jhi’s Bamboo Panda made him feel suddenly refreshed. The ache he felt from his fall disappeared the moment he placed the charm around his neck, and didn’t return when he removed it again. Halawir’s talisman allowed him to nudge the air around him, the way his hand might divert the water in a stream. The Silver Wolf of Briggan sharpened his senses of smell and hearing just as the Copper Falcon had sharpened his eyesight. The effect was almost overwhelming in a forest teeming with unseen life and activity. Kovo’s Obsidian Ape likewise enhanced his vision, but in a subtly different way than the falcon did. Shane couldn’t quite put his finger on the difference. He examined a tree trunk in the distance, and it came into sharp relief. He could see the lichen growing upon its bark, the stress points where it might be felled with a single well-placed ax blow. Something about the effect was unsettling, and Shane removed the pendant and stuffed it back into his tunic.
In the end, he opted to wear the Amber Leopard of Uraza. It bestowed a feline grace to his movements, allowing him to move more quickly through the trees and avoid the knotted roots that tried to trip him up every dozen yards. It made him feel at ease in this Niloan jungle Uraza had once called home.
It was simply the most practical choice, he told himself.
Night was falling when Shane at last came upon a village.
The forest was so thick with trees that its daytime was like a green-tinged twilight. Shane thought he’d lose track of day and night entirely, but it wasn’t so — the forest was definitely getting darker, and the tenor of animal sounds was shifting as nocturnal frogs and insects overtook the birdsong that had accompanied him throughout his long afternoon hike. He knew it would be wise to stop soon.
When he saw the trees parting ahead and a cluster of huts in the clearing beyond, his heart soared … and his stomach grumbled. But his relief was short-lived. The torches at the outskirts of the village were cold; there was no light beyond what the dusk provided, and no human sounds among the chirp and wail of the insects.
Shane stepped into the clearing and knew at once that this village was a carcass — a dead remnant of a thing once living. Half the huts were burned out, their walls black and blistered and their thatched roofs collapsing. The wooden benches ringing the central fire pit had been knocked over and the animal pens hacked apart, fences swung wide.
Everywhere he looked there were signs of violence and panic. The village was not just dead — it had been murdered.
The people, however, seemed to have escaped. There were no bodies among the wreckage.
Shane sighed and wiped the sweat from his brow. Perhaps it was just as well. This way, he didn’t have to explain what he, a young noble from Stetriol, was doing wandering the Niloan jungle alone. But he had been looking forward to a meal. His stomach grumbled again, and this time it was echoed in a rumble of thunder overhead. Shane looked up. The village stood in a clearing, so he had a view of the sky for the first time in hours. The fading light of the sun illuminated storm clouds rolling in from the coast.
He walked among the empty huts until he found one that had been left intact. It had no door, just an open doorway, and Shane knew that said much about the people who had lived here. They had trusted their neighbors. That had apparently been a mistake.
He stepped into the doorway as thunder rumbled once more and the wind picked up. Shane could smell the rain coming and was glad for shelter, whatever had become of the people who’d built it.
The space, a single room, was simple. There was a bed of straw against the far wall, and various agricultural tools hanging from hooks. He searched a series of chests and found clothing, a tattered hidebound book, and a child’s doll, but nothing to eat. He caught a whiff of something foul, and realized it was his own body — he was soaked through with sweat.
Shane pulled off his boots with some effort, and his toes throbbed with relief. He removed Uraza’s talisman and put it and all the others into his left boot, then shoved both boots under the straw bed. He untied his tunic and shrugged out of it, hanging it from an empty hook. Immediately the night breeze from the open doorway cooled his clammy skin, spreading gooseflesh across his chest.
He crawled into the bed, traced a finger down the winding crocodile tattoo on his torso, and wondered what his life might have been like if he’d bonded with a koala instead.
Shane dreamed of a wolverine.
It was a warm summer day in Stetriol, and from his vantage atop a high hill, he could see his entire kingdom.
To the north was a crumbling castle covered in cobwebs.
To the west was wasteland, flat and barren.
To the south was an abandoned village, its huts built in the Niloan style but with iron instead of wood.
To the east was the glittering sea, and upon it the looming silhouette of a great warship.
Anywhere he looked, Shane saw suffering. His eyesight was too sharp.
He removed the talisman from around his neck, and suddenly he couldn’t see far at all. He could only see what was directly in front of him: a beautiful, verdant field of tall grasses and sunflowers.
And a squat, savage-looking wolverine.
“Fight me,” the creature growled.
Shane realized he held a saber in his hand.
“I’m just a kid,” he told the wolverine.
“Childhood is over,” it said. “Fight me.” And Shane realized it spoke with his uncle Gar’s voice.
The wolverine leaped at him, claws and teeth shining in the sunlight. Shane went to block with his sword — and the wolverine impaled itself on the blade. Its weight and momentum pulled the sword right out of Shane’s hand, and the animal fell to the ground in a bloody heap.
“I always knew you hated me,” it said in Gar’s voice. “I was vicious and cruel. But it was my nature. I could not help being that way.”
“I’m sorry,” Shane said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“But you hurt me anyway, Shane,” Gar answered. “You killed me, whether you meant to or not. And that,” he said, “is your nature.”
The night was still and silent, but Shane jolted awake, certain that something was wrong.
He held his breath and waited for his eyes to adjust to the faint moonlight coming in through the doorway. There was no one else in the hut. He could feel his boots still beneath the straw, and knew the talismans were safe … for the moment.
He crept slowly to his feet, painfully so, lifting his body from the straw an inch at a time so as not to make a sound. Next he retrieved his left boot and removed the tangle of talismans, placing them in a pile on the dirt floor. The silver wolf gleamed in the moonlight. He put it on, and it was cold against his chest.
The silence of the night receded immediately. He heard an owl taking flight, the soft murmur of a stream, and a sound like chewing.
; And there was the unmistakable scent of death.
Shane had been on battlefields. He knew what death smelled like. But he’d never experienced it like this before, through the heightened senses of a wolf. It was overpowering, like a physical force pressing against him, and he stumbled back, gagging. He pulled the talisman over his head and dropped it back into the pile, where it met the others with a clink of metal on metal.
Instantly the smell was gone, and Shane froze, realizing how much sound he’d just made.
There was nothing for it but to leave. Something was amiss in this village, and his sleepiness was well and truly gone.
He crammed his feet into his boots and reached for his saber, which he’d set on the bedside chest. But something stopped him from gripping the weapon — a half-remembered dream about Renneg, the wolverine he’d spent so much time pretending was his own spirit animal.
Renneg was dead now. Murdered by the Greencloaks. Conor and Rollan had almost bragged about it when they’d told him.
The sound of laughter echoed through the village.
Gooseflesh spread across Shane’s skin, and this time it had nothing to do with the cool night air. He felt eyes upon him and he turned, very slowly, toward the hut’s only exit.
There was a creature in the open doorway, outlined in the silver light of the moon. It looked like a large dog that had been put together all wrong. It had big, beefy shoulders and a small waist, and it stood somewhat askew. Its ears pointed off at strange angles, and it had tufts of bristly hair around its neck, like a lion’s mane that had been hacked up and smeared with mud.
It made a sound like human laughter — eerily so.
The gold of Cabaro’s lion caught the moonlight, and Shane lunged for it. In a single fluid motion he lifted it from the ground, dropped it around his neck, turned toward the creature, and roared.
The sound that came from his mouth was weak and high-pitched. He sounded more like a kitten than a lion.
Shane realized with a chill that he’d mistaken copper for gold in the low light.
The Book of Shane Page 5
