“She was so beautiful and smart and funny. She helped me at great risk to herself, and I killed her. She was right, I’m a weak coward, allowing my dark clone to achieve by joining what he couldn’t in combat. I let him dominate me and use me to destroy her.”
“If you’re going to kill me, Mandalee, do it. I won’t try to stop you. But if you let me live, I swear I will keep my dark side under control long enough to kill Kullos. After that, I don’t care what happens to me. Either way, it’s your choice.”
Mandalee was torn as never before. She didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, she was saved from the choice when a wolf slunk out of the shadows. Both Daelen and Mandalee looked on in disbelief as it changed into Catriona Redfletching.
“So, does this mean we’ve got the real Daelen back, or what?” she asked, in the same tone she might use to ask the time of day.
“Cat!” both her friends exclaimed at once and wrapped her in a three-way hug.
“Be careful,” she laughed, “or you’ll kill me for real this time, by suffocation!”
“But how?” Daelen asked.
With a wave of her staff, the dead Catriona vanished.
“A simple Mirror Image spell,” she answered, as if that explained everything.
*****
My mother was three steps ahead, as usual, gentle reader. She had been working on the spell since she found out Daelen could copy himself. It seemed like a natural extension of her Nature’s Mirror. If she could reflect beams of light, then surely, she could reflect an image of herself in a similar way to taking a photograph. Couple that with her Windy Steps spell, making air solid enough to stand on, and she could make her copy seem solid and real, too. She already had experience of the workings of photography; she just needed a little more detail. A quick look at the book on the science of photography provided the final piece of the puzzle. When Mandalee had left the room, Cat had cast the spell, leaving her copy sitting right there while her real self took the form of a seagull and flew out to investigate what was going on with Daelen.
*****
“So, the Catriona I killed was just an illusion!” Daelen gasped, much relieved.
“That’s right, and now that I’ve successfully used such a simple trick against you, maybe it’s time you swallowed your ego a bit.”
Mandalee demanded some solo attention then, hugging her friend tight, saying, “I’m so happy you’re alright.” Then she stepped back and slapped Cat across the cheek. “And that’s for letting me think you were dead.”
To Daelen, she warned, “You have some serious making up to do before I will ever trust you again.”
“I swear nothing like that will ever happen again,” Daelen vowed.
Cat inclined her head in acknowledgement. “So, what exactly happened to you out there? I didn’t get much from my spying.”
Daelen promised to explain all about Aden’s request to parley, but he wanted to take them somewhere first. They followed him to his portal room, where he ushered them through the one he had told them led to Earth. There to retreat, recover and train. Also, to buy time, almost literally.
He reasoned that no matter what powers of detection Kullos might have, he surely couldn’t spy on them on another world.
“What about Shyleen?” Mandalee asked.
“Up to her,” Daelen replied, simply. “If she comes, she’ll have to stay in my grounds – can’t have a leopard running around in the city. Otherwise, she can stay here on StormClaw. There’s plenty of wild prey out there so she won’t starve. Remember, it’ll only be a few days for her.”
Shyleen chose to stay on StormClaw, and just admonished Mandalee to be mindful and take special care of her half-Faery friend during her ‘difficult time.’ The White Assassin tried to press her on what she meant by that, but the leopard kept her own counsel and would say no more.
*****
The portal room on the other side was inside a facility that was virtually identical to his base on StormClaw. As they stepped out into the corridor, Cat pointed out the photographs that were mounted all along one wall. Head and shoulder shots, each with a name underneath. A few appeared human, while others were species that she couldn’t identify. They were all from different worlds, Daelen explained. None from Tempestria. His bases didn’t run themselves, clean themselves, maintain themselves, stock themselves with food and supplies. So, he usually kept two or three people on as his personal staff. Presently, he had two young women in his employ: Sara and Jessica.
“They’re out at the moment,” he informed them. “I haven’t had chance to forewarn them like I normally do. I’ll text them – send them a message – and ask them to come in to help out with a few things tomorrow.”
“And they’re from one of those other worlds?” Mandalee wondered.
Daelen confirmed it. “Their stories are not mine to tell. Suffice to say they’re refugees of sorts. They’re happy to take care of my base here and elsewhere, in exchange for the chance to escape and see other worlds.”
Cat nodded; she could see how that would be appealing.
“Can they pass for human?” Mandalee wondered.
“Hardly!” Daelen laughed.
“Not that I’m worried about how they might look,” Mandalee assured him, quickly, lest there be any misunderstanding. “I’m just wondering how they fit in out there.”
“Or are the people of Earth used to seeing aliens?” Cat suggested.
Daelen smiled as if at a joke he knew his companions wouldn’t get. “Not normally, no,” he replied. He told them that, as a rule, whenever they went out into the wider world, Sara and Jessica wore a device called a perception filter. “But if I’m right about where they’ve gone today…” he opened a door into a bedroom and peered around the door for a moment. “Yep, I’m right. They’ve left them behind. Today, they don’t need to worry about it.”
“Why not?” Cat asked, unable to work it out.
“For the same reason you don’t need to worry about your clothes or your markings looking too conspicuous when we go out.”
His explanation did little to answer Cat and Mandalee’s confusion. All he would say was that they would see what he meant when they went out to a place he called a ‘shopping mall.’
“Sara and Jessica are at an event in an adjoining building:
“A sci-fi convention.”
Chapter 18
The two young women had never seen such crowds before. Even a busy marketplace in Walminster couldn’t compare. The speed of their road transport – a horseless carriage called a car – took some getting used to, as well.
Laughing, Daelen joked that if they thought that was fast, they should try a rollercoaster.
As they travelled, Daelen talked about his meeting with his dark clone.
They had agreed to communicate telepathically, to maximise privacy, and Aden had made a surprising amount of sense. After his defeat at the hands of Dreya the Dark, he’d thought of a way to use his much-drained power to his advantage: to spy on Kullos through astral projection.
Daelen admitted he’d done much the same thing when he was suffering from the effects of Pyrah’s venom.
“That’s news to me,” Cat objected.
Mandalee nodded in agreement.
Daelen apologised but assured them he had always intended to tell them when they got here and could talk without risk of sensitive information being overheard.
Mandalee had to concede that made sense and given how many times Catriona had criticised his lack of strategic thinking, she could hardly complain. She did find it interesting, though, that he and Aden had both had the same idea under similar circumstances.
“He and I were split from the same shadow warrior,” Daelen pointed out, “so it’s not too surprising that we think along similar lines, sometimes.”
“And now that you’ve remerged, I guess you’re literally of one mind again,” Mandalee supposed.
Daelen shook his head. “Not so. We’re still separate, despite o
ur merging. That’s why he was able to dominate me for a while. I will have to battle him for the rest of my life, same as ever. Only the battlefield has changed. I can never again be what I was – what the original Daelen was. Complete. Whole.”
“You’ve glued the two halves of the box back together again,” Cat mused, thinking of his analogy for his people as being ‘light in a box,’ “but the damage cannot be reversed.”
Daelen smiled, grimly, “Not unless you really can turn back Time a thousand years. But even if you could, I suppose we’d lose everything we both experienced in that time. That’s not a price I would ever pay. Maybe if I could return home…” he trailed off, and then dismissed the idea, “but that’s impossible. Anyway, for the moment, it’s just as well,” he added, “because I can compartmentalise certain information that we don’t want my ‘other half’ to know.”
Cat nodded, recognising his oblique warning to be careful not to mention certain things, such as the presence of the being that killed her parents. Michael might call it a ‘void-creature,’ but to Cat, it would always simply be the ‘Monster.’
Daelen returned to his story.
*****
‘Kullos wasn’t paying attention to a power signature as low as mine,’ Aden told Daelen. ‘He was too busy watching you, which wasn’t difficult considering all the noise you’ve been making. What have you been doing out here, anyway? I’d have thought you’d be sneaking up on him.’
‘Believe it or not, that was the plan,’ Daelen admitted, ruefully. ‘Things got a little out of hand.’ Not wishing to discuss it any further, he asked what Aden had found out from his spying, wanting to see if it would match what he had observed for himself.
‘Well, I must admit your distraction proved quite useful,’ Aden conceded, ‘because I was able to snoop around for ages and I found out where Kullos was getting all his extra power from. You know, don’t you?’ he asked.
Daelen had learned a lot about information trading from his question-for-a-question game with Catriona, and he wasn’t going to blurt everything out just because Aden might already know.
Instead, he simply replied, ‘You tell me.’
‘He has his dimensional control device,’ Aden told him. Even though the communication was still telepathic, Daelen could still detect fear creeping into his words. ‘Or most of it, at any rate.’
‘Yes, I saw that, too,’ Daelen agreed. ‘But how? It was destroyed a thousand years ago when we were split,’ he objected.
‘Was it really?’ Aden gasped. ‘Well, goodness me, I had no idea. I mean, it’s not like I was there at the time or anything. Oh, wait – yes, I was.’
Having got that out of his system, he went on to say he’d gathered that Kullos must have been in the process of finding the lost fragments for some time.
Again, Daelen objected that even if he could find them all, it wasn’t as if he could glue it back together and expect it to work like new.
Aden pointed out that Kullos had already got it working well enough to access the energy from that part of himself that was still in the shadow realm. Aden didn’t understand where he’d found the technology to do it, but he had.
‘Someone’s been interfering with events that really ought not to be tampered with any more than they already have been,’ Daelen quoted.
‘What?’ Aden wondered.
Daelen decided to add Time Intervention to the list of information to be shielded from his dark clone.
‘Just something I read in a sci-fi novel on Earth,’ he lied.
‘Why would you bring that up now?’ Aden frowned.
‘Just popped into my head,’ he shrugged, dismissing the issue.
It was all just speculation, anyway. Kullos had always been a skilled engineer, so it was conceivable he’d figured out a way to do it all on his own.
Aden conceded they might have underestimated Kullos’ technical skill.
‘It could even be an application of some kind of new magic,’ Daelen supposed.
He had expected Aden to scoff at such a suggestion and was surprised when he didn’t.
‘Before my run-in with Dreya the Dark,’ he replied ruefully, ‘I might have dismissed such an idea, but now…’ He trailed off and then admitted something Daelen never thought he’d hear his clone say. ‘Daelen, I was scared. Me, a shadow warrior, scared of a mortal wizard!’
‘They’re on the verge of something,’ Daelen offered. ‘Me, you, Kullos and Michael – we can’t go on, the four of us like it’s business as usual. Things have changed, and we need to do the same.’
Daelen had to hide a smile when he realised he was paraphrasing Catriona. She had made quite the impression on him already. He wondered how strong that influence might yet grow.
Aden agreed, ‘I think Kullos figured that out a while ago and he’s left us scrambling to catch up. Think about it: he must have enough of his control device assembled by now to re-Ascend, but he hasn’t. Why?’
‘Because that’s not his intent,’ Daelen realised.
*****
“So, what is his intent?” Mandalee asked as they reached the shopping mall itself.
Cat nodded. She wanted to know the same thing.
As they stepped towards the doors to the shopping mall, they opened automatically, as if in welcome invitation to the treasure trove of wonders that lay beyond. It was by far the largest single building they had ever seen. Even the Council building in Walminster could fit inside it. Either side of wide aisles, were densely packed shops, selling all manner of clothes, shoes, bags and jewellery. The smell of food mingled with that of perfume, and the noise was deafening: A million conversations, constant background music, announcements and strange sounds made by technology and gadgets at whose function neither my mother nor Aunt Mandalee could begin to guess.
True to his word, the presence of people from the ‘sci-fi convention’ did seem to provide excellent cover for their Tempestrian clothing and Cat’s half-Faery features. Indeed, there were several people – native humans, they assumed – dressed in outfits far more outlandish than Mandalee’s white leather and Catriona’s red robes. Catriona’s usually feint Faery spots seemed to glow under the strange lighting, but people just thought they were done with make-up. Most of the crowd never even gave them a second glance, although there were a few smiles, and several people asked to perform what the girls assumed must be some kind of religious or cultural ritual known as ‘taking a selfie.’ Keen to fit in with local customs, they saw no reason to refuse. When these people showed them the end result of their ‘selfie,’ Catriona recognised it as a form of photography, but clearly far in advance of what their world had yet developed.
Mandalee was quite happy to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy the experience, while Cat had to restrain herself from continually asking how things worked. She was especially interested to learn that these people had taken Calin’s core concept of making knowledge accessible to all, to a whole new level. They had found a way to make knowledge instantly available from anywhere, as she understood it, by storing all their information in clouds in the sky. The sky that, she realised as she looked through the glass dome in the ceiling, was totally free of void storms.
Catriona filed that away in her mind under ‘things to discuss later.’ For now, she needed to focus on what Daelen was telling them, and his answer to Mandalee’s question definitely brought her mind back down to, well, Earth, she supposed.
Daelen spoke two words, “Heaven’s Surrender.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?” Mandalee wondered.
Whatever it was, Catriona was positive of one thing: it did not sound good. Still, she was momentarily distracted by her friend’s turn of phrase.
“‘When it’s at home’?” she asked, with a puzzled frown.
Mandalee explained that she’d been trying to discreetly listen to snippets of conversations in the crowd, and she’d overheard that expression.
“Did I use it right?” she asked Daelen.
&n
bsp; The shadow warrior grinned and nodded.
“Spot on,” he assured her, “and if you’re interested in learning Earth expressions, you’re going to love Jessica. She uses them all the time.”
Bringing the conversation back to more important matters, Mandalee repeated her question.
“So, ‘Heaven’s Surrender’?”
Daelen reminded his friends that Kullos had once been both his people’s Chief Engineer and their greatest Champion.
“Heaven’s Surrender was a weapon he devised in a desperate attempt to win our ongoing war.”
It had been his responsibility to deploy the weapon against their enemy, only their enemy found out about it and took it from him before he could use it. He was severely injured in the process, and while he was evacuated to a medical facility, his shadow warrior unit tried to wrest the weapon from her. The weapon was damaged in the struggle, and a fraction of its power was unleashed. It wasn’t enough to harm their enemy, but the entire two-dozen-strong shadow warrior unit was totally obliterated.
“Any further development on the weapon was banned from that moment on,” Daelen explained. “It was deemed too dangerous.”
“So, how can Kullos use it, if this enemy of yours took the only one?” Mandalee asked.
“Because there was a prototype,” Daelen explained as he continued to guide them around the mall. “There was no known safe way to dispose of it, so it was entrusted to, guess who?”
“Kullos!” his friends chorused.
Daelen nodded. “He kept it safely locked away in his own personal vault.”
“Don’t tell me,” Cat groaned, shutting her eyes and cringing at the thought. “A pocket dimension.”
Again, Daelen nodded. “Right.”
“And with a repaired control device thing, he’ll be able to pull that prototype out of mothballs and use it,” Mandalee deduced. “That’s why you recombined with your dark clone? So, you can get there quick and stop him before he gets all the pieces?”
Daelen shook his head.
Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) Page 15
