The Truth of Shadows

by Jacob Peppers

  “Remember,” Alesh said, “we have to convince this Sigan to smuggle us out of the city underneath the Chosen’s nose. If not…”

  He didn’t finish, but then, as far as Rion was concerned, he didn’t have to. If not, they died. Of course, they’d probably die anyway, but there it was. “Thanks for the reminder,” he said dryly. “Otherwise, I might have forgotten and found myself relaxing in some tavern, my feet kicked up and an ale in my hand.”

  Alesh wasn’t paying him any attention though. He was stepping forward, his eyes on Katherine. “Be careful,” he said. “If anything happens, come back here as quick as you can…just be careful.”

  She smiled, blushing prettily enough, and Rion considered reminding them that they weren’t in some knightly romance tale of the kind favored by giggling noblewomen. If their lives were a story, then it was most certainly a tragedy. The two were still staring at each other, and Rion cleared his throat. “I’ll be careful too—thanks for the concern.”

  Alesh blinked, as if he’d been startled awake. “Right. Well—” He cut off as Sonya ran past him, practically launching herself at the woman, Katherine, who caught her in an embrace.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” the little girl said, the tears clear in her voice.

  “I know, sweetling,” Katherine said, “but I’ll be fine. Everything will be okay, you’ll see, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

  A moment later, she let go of Katherine, and Rion grunted in surprise as the girl rushed at him to give him a hug. He glanced at the others, clueless as to what to do, and saw them grinning at him. Rion was an only child and had no younger cousins in the city, so he knew nothing of children. “Um…thanks,” he said.

  The girl looked up at him, smiling. “You’ll be okay, won’t you, Uncle Rion?”

  Rion opened his mouth to answer and noted Katherine staring threateningly at him, then cleared his throat. “Of course we will. Nothing to it. Easiest thing in the world.” After all, there are few things easier than dying—even fools have the knack of it.

  Abruptly, she let him go, walking back to stand beside Alesh, and Rion was surprised to find that he was at once both relieved and disappointed. The two groups stood studying each other for a moment until Darl finally stepped forward. “Come—I will see you to the city safely.”

  Rion started after Darl, but Katherine remained behind, studying Sonya with an anguished expression.

  Alesh put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and gave Katherine a smile that Rion could tell cost him. “I’ll keep her safe.”

  The woman finally nodded, then they were off and heading toward the city.

  ***

  He watched from where he stood enveloped within the shadow of an ancient oak. It was dangerous here, in the daylight, for the sun was high in the sky, its light chasing away most of the darkness through which he could move, to which he was in some way he still did not fully understand, connected. But as hard as it might try, the sun could never banish all the shadows, not completely. They might retreat before that light, but they would wait in the dark places of the world, under stones, within caves and tunnels deep in the dank earth, until the day retreated once more, giving way to the night. The time of shadows.

  Dangerous or not, he had not been able to resist the urge to come, to listen to what words they would speak, and he was glad now that he had. They were separating, the fools, and in their separation, they would be weaker. For while many flames might banish the darkness, even the power of the greatest torch could be extinguished, if it stood alone. A torch such as the man who stood with his hand on the little girl’s shoulder, watching the others travel into the woods with something like anguish on his face. Something like, but not true anguish. That, he would learn in time. That, they would all learn.

  Yet despite the fact that the man was the true threat, the one his god had sent him after, the shadow found his eyes drawn to Rion as he walked with the Ferinan and the woman. Sevrin was not the man he had once been, but part of that man remained, and the part that remained hated the nobleman, hated him with a passion stronger, even, than the temptation of finding the man called the Son of the Morning with only a small child to help him, should the worst come. A passion stronger even than the directive of the shadow’s god, the one who had asked…no, that wasn’t right. The shadows never asked, and the voices which spoke from within them did so not in question but in demand, a demand that was no less powerful for all its subtlety.

  Watch, his maker had told him. Watch and remain vigilant. The opportunity will arise. And so it had. An opportunity to catch the man alone, while he was weak and without aid. Yet it was not this opportunity that pulled at the shadow, that tugged at him. That, instead, was the thought of Rion, with only the Ferinan and the woman to protect him. And what the creature that had once been Sevrin thought of then was not obedience, but revenge. Not duty, but blood. The man thought that he had won, thought that he had bested Sevrin, conquered him. But none could conquer the shadows, not fully. They returned. They always returned.

  The thought of what he would do, of the price he would extract from the man’s flesh, his soul, caused his concentration to slip, and his attention was drawn back to the other as he grunted, spinning to stare directly at the oak and the shadow it cast.

  Sevrin froze, and saw to his horror that the man had let go of the girl, that he was, even now, stalking closer, studying the darkness in which Sevrin lurked as if he had some knowledge of its truth, some understanding of its mind.

  “Alesh? Shouldn’t we go back inside?” It was the girl, her voice worried.

  Slowly, the man turned to glance at her. “Of…of course, Sonya,” he said. He shot one more look at the shadow, then frowning, he turned and walked to the girl, taking her hand and leading her back into the relative shelter of the forest cave.

  The creature felt something stirring within it. Was this fear? Surely, it could not be, for the shadows were not given to fear. And yet…he was afraid. Afraid of the man, of the power he held, power that even he did not fully understand. A light strong enough to battle the darkness. Perhaps a light strong enough to kill it. It was no wonder that this one had been the true concern of his master, the one he had ordered him to watch.

  Sevrin hesitated, unsure, but the thought of his revenge was still blazing within him, not fully doused by the fear, and finally he decided, turning back to the direction in which Rion and the others had gone. They would have put some distance between themselves and him now, but it did not matter. The creature that had once been Sevrin knew well the shadows. He could travel them, if he so chose. And choose he did.

  ***

  They stopped at the edge of the woods, and Rion felt a deep sense of foreboding as he gazed at Valeria’s walls in the distance. The trees of the land nearest Valeria had long since been cut down so that no attacking army might hide beneath them as it approached the gates. Rion was covered in sweat, and his nerves were frayed, yet despite how scary the thought of venturing into Valeria was, he found that he was relieved to have reached the city.

  He, Katherine, and Darl had spent the last several hours winding their way around patrols, the numbers of which Rion had long since lost count—probably just as well, for had he known the exact amount of men searching for them, he suspected he would have curled up into a ball, too scared to move. Rion had been born in the city, had spent all of his time there, and despite the Ferinan’s attempts at showing him how to move silently, despite his own efforts at trying to mimic the man’s walk—efforts that made themselves plain in the terrible burning in his thighs and calves—Rion had felt like a child stumbling along in his father’s wake, awkward and unsure.

  The Ferinan moved through the woods as silently as a ghost, seeming at home beneath the trees even though—if the stories Rion had heard were true—the man’s home land was mile after mile of sand and little else. Even Katherine had done better than Rion, a point she made clear every time she turned to scowl at him when a pebble skid
ded away from his boot or he hissed at the prick of a briar on his skin, as if he meant to make noise.

  She needn’t have bothered. Rion had spent the last several hours in a constant state of terror. Each time he’d stepped on a leaf or heard a twig snap beneath his boot, he had been sure that this was going to be the time that one of the passing patrols heard them, the time that they came charging with their swords to finish what their companions had started. Death by twig. An ignoble end for a nobleman, but one that had felt like nothing but a certainty.

  So it was that he felt relief. And if he was being honest with himself—something he always tried his best never to do—he was surprised that he could still be counted among the living. Of course, the cure for that particular state was waiting just inside the city, but if the last few weeks had taught Rion nothing else, it was that a man had to take what small victories he could when, ultimately, all roads led to his doom.

  Darl reached out, taking Katherine’s hand and shaking it, a smile on his face as if he were a man wandering around on Fairday. Then, without a word, he turned and started into the forest.

  “Wait a damned minute,” Rion hissed. “Not a word? Not so much as a ‘good luck’?”

  The Ferinan gave a quiet laugh. “We who serve the Light do not need luck, friend Rion. We have something better.”

  And with that, he was disappearing into the shadows of the trees as if invisible. “Like what?” Rion demanded of the empty air. “Delusion?” But the man was gone, and the only answer was the snort of the woman beside him.

  “Are you ready?”

  “No. But let’s get it over with,” Rion muttered, glancing up at the sky. He was surprised to see that their trip through the forest had taken them so long that it was nearly dark. “Well then,” he said, offering her his arm, “let us depart, lady wife.”

  She scowled, clearly no more at ease with the identities they’d chosen to use as she had been when he first suggested it, but she took his arm anyway.

  “It’s a good frown,” Rion said, “you’ll fit in nicely with every other married woman I’ve met.” And with that, they stepped out of the woods and toward the city.

  ***

  Sevrin flitted through the shadows, surging from one to the next where they were connected by the tremble of a branch in the wind, the shifting of leaves, Sevrin himself no more than a blur of darkness. He arrived just as Rion and the woman were preparing to step out of the woods and into the field, a field in which the sun held sway, where no shadow could be seen, a field into which he could not follow them.

  No, he thought viciously, you will not escape me. He called deeply on the blessings of his god, hurtling from the shadow of a tree to the flickering darkness caused by a single falling leaf. Not a creature with a physical body at all, not then, but no more than a black smear of night underneath the canopy of the trees, blurring as he launched himself from the infinitesimal shadow the leaf cast to that of a tree within reach of Rion and the woman in the split second that the two overlapped.

  Then, forming within that shadow, his mangled face stretching into a wide grin as he reached out with his handless arm, little more than a stumped wrist left from the nightlings’ attentions. Even as he did, a hand of darkness began to form, shifting and moving, the fingers changing to talons as he reached out to rip his enemy apart…

  The briefest contact as one clawed nail touched the man’s flesh…hate and joy and expectation all mingling together so that one could not have been separated from the other…he would kill him, he would get his revenge on—

  A thunderclap of pain as something struck him, hurling him through the air. Not traveling the shadows now but flying beneath the canopy of trees as if he’d been rammed by an onrushing horse, flipping end over end, screaming as human flesh and shadow flesh were struck here and there by the intermittent rays of sun that made it through the treetops.

  Light. And pain. Pain unlike anything he had ever known, unlike anything he’d ever imagined, worse even than when the nightlings had exacted the price of his revenge from his flesh. Screaming and screaming, but no voice with which to utter his agony, and then brought up short by something clamped around his throat. Something that writhed and squirmed, slick and oily and somehow wrong against his skin.

  “You,” someone rasped, and mewling with terror, the creature that was Sevrin looked up into the face of the man who held him. But no, not a man, a god, and in that face nothing but the deepest darkness.

  “M-master,” Sevrin rasped, “p-please—”

  “Do not,” the other said, the words crawling into his ears like worms burrowing into the ground. “Do not.”

  The hand around his throat tightened, and Sevrin struggled against it, but all his newfound strength, his power, was as nothing against this one, as if he was trying to drown water or burn flame. “Pl—” he began in a croak, and the hand tightened more, a vice threatening to crush him.

  “You would disobey me?” the shadow demanded. “You would put your own wants, your own pathetic revenge, before your god?”

  Sevrin knew that he was going to die, could feel death creeping into him, spreading like a fire, burning through him and leaving what it touched nothing but ash. Then, just when he thought it would take him completely, that he would be given the mercy, the release of a final death, the hand released him, and he collapsed to the ground.

  He hacked desperately, searching for air but finding none. Then, finally, he felt the cool sweetness of it against what was left of his ruined throat, sweeter than anything he had ever felt or tasted before.

  But it was gone a moment later, as if someone had shoved a cloth down his throat, a cloth covered in spiders and crawling things. He sputtered and spat and gagged, frantically trying to push away the hand—for surely it must be a hand—that was smothering him. But he touched nothing, as if whatever it was was no more substantial than mist. In his desperate struggles, his gaze fell on the shadow standing a short distance away, watching him. Although he could not see its face or any discernible feature at all, there was something about its posture, about the way it leaned forward, that seemed eager, that seemed not just amused by his suffering, but somehow sated by it.

  Then, as quickly as it had come, whatever force was killing him vanished, and he gasped desperately.

  “How dare you disobey me?” the shadow said, as if genuinely curious. “How dare you think to question my orders?”

  “P-please…Master,” Sevrin croaked. “I…it will not happen again. I will never disobey you again.”

  “No,” the shadow agreed, “you will not. Do you believe yourself special, Sevrin? You are nothing but what I have made you. Do you believe you know the truths the shadows hold? You know nothing,” the form said, gliding forward without any discernible movement of leg or limb, “but you will learn. Oh, Sevrin how you will learn. You have transgressed and now, now you will be punished.”

  The shadows snaked forward, tendrils of them reaching out, and where they touched Sevrin his skin grew cold. Colder than he had ever felt, a cold so powerful it burned. And he screamed.

  ***

  “Boss, did you hear me? I said the sun’s down.”

  “I heard you, Belvy,” Sigan growled, “just like I heard you the first half a dozen times you thought to tell me.” With a grunt, the big crime boss tossed the barely-touched chicken leg back on his plate, reclining in his chair at the head of the table.

  “Sorry, boss,” the other man said from where he sat at one side of the long table. A dozen others were seated there, Sigan’s most trusted employees—not saying much, when they were all criminals that would stab a man as soon as look at him—but there it was. Hard-bitten murderers and thieves, yet none of them met his eyes, studying their own plates with careful determination. All, that was, save for Belvy himself. “All I’m sayin’, boss, is you said he had ‘til evenin’, and evenin’s here.”

  “I know what I said, damnit!” Sigan roared, and the man cringed away. “Do you think I’
ve grown addled, Belvy, or is it that you think you know better than I do? That it?”

  “O-of course not, boss. Only…” He trailed off, which was just as well. His position as boss meant that Sigan didn’t get his hands dirty—or bloody, as was more often the case—as much as he used to, but he was in a foul mood, and just because he hadn’t done any killing in a while didn’t mean he was averse to the idea.

  “It’s only,” Sigan said, “that you want Rion to suffer. That’s it, ain’t it, Belvy? As I recall, Darby was one of your friends, wasn’t he?”

  The man’s face was a twist of emotions, fear and anger chief among them. “He didn’t have no cause, bustin’ up his hand like that. No cause at all.”

  “And what about me?” Sigan asked in a low voice, and he didn’t miss the way those seated at the table seemed to shrink in on themselves. “Did I have a reason, Belvy? You want your revenge, sure, but Rion ain’t the only one that wronged your friend. After all, it was me ordered his throat cut, wasn’t it?”

  The man’s mouth worked for several seconds, then finally he swallowed hard. “You done what you had to, boss, that’s all. You said it yourself—a bruiser ain’t much good as can’t bruise. Besides, I reckon you know best.”

  Sigan studied the man for several seconds, until finally Belvy looked away, studying his own plate. “Yes. Yes, I do know best, Belvy. You’d do well to remember that. You wouldn’t be the first person I’ve had to remind of it and, my experience, men don’t like my way of remindin’. You understand?”

  The man nodded, wanting to say something, that was plain enough on his face, but deciding it best not to. Sigan watched him for another minute then heaved a heavy sigh, grabbing the tankard of ale from the table and giving it a long swig before slamming it back down in frustration. Belvy was a fool, just as Darby had been. The problem was, he was right.