1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (87 page)

 It was twice the size of the dogs that had attacked them earlier today. Kellen had seen lynxes in the public zoo in Armethalieh, but those were small animals, little bigger than a large house cat.

 This was like a lynx grown to giant size. It had long dappled silvery fur, and jutting from its upper jaw, two enormous fangs as long as his hand.

 "An ice-tiger," Jermayan said, kneeling beside the body to retrieve his arrows. "Odd that it should be here. They are creatures of the high hills and mountains, rarely venturing this far south."

 "Especially this early in the year," Shalkan said, returning from cleaning his horn in the earth. "And very odd for it to be attacking us at all. Look at it, Jermayan. A healthy young male, no broken fangs, no injuries… it should be attacking its natural prey, not an oddly assorted group of travelers like us. They don't like to be anywhere within leagues of humans or Elves or Centaurs either; they're terribly shy."

 "Another thing that isn't where it's supposed to be," Kellen said grimly. "But is it just an accident… or is this another trap?"

 "Were any of them traps?" Shalkan asked simply. "Or were they all just the sort of misfortunes that would have happened to any traveler that passed this way?"

 "Either way, we'd better move on," Jermayan said tiredly, getting to his feet. "Where there was one, there may be more."

 THEY made an unsatisfactory camp in one of the hilltop groves, keeping a sharp eye out for more rogue shepherds—or anything else. At this point, Kellen didn't trust anything, not a starling, not even a mouse. Before the light failed entirely, there was time for a few minutes of sparring practice with Jermayan, and Kellen was relieved to find that it was still as easy for him as it had been before the battle.

 That night Jermayan began drilling him in the rudiments of shield-fighting—how to draw an attacker's blows to your shield, how to fight using your sword one-handed for greater reach. But there was not time for much of that before it was too dark to see, and neither wished to risk a misstep or a foul blow in the dark.

 In the morning, they struck camp and moved on quickly, none of them willing to linger in such inhospitable territory. By early afternoon they were crossing terrain that was dangerous enough in its own right, without the help of brigands, bandits, or questionable shepherds.

 They weren't trekking now so much as mountain-climbing, their progress slowed to the slowest walking pace by the need to test every foothold before proceeding along slanting, tilting, nearly invisible trails. Shalkan led—the unicorn was as surefooted as a goat—with Kellen clutching the saddle tightly and trying not to look down.

 To Kellen's surprise, for all his size, Valdien was nearly as nimble as Shalkan, the Elven destrier able to follow any path Shalkan chose. The mule scrambled along behind, patient and uncomplaining—or perhaps, now that it had escaped the fangs of wolfhound and ice-tiger, desperate to remain with its "herd" and the protection of the two Knights.

 "Once these hills were lush with forests," Jermayan said when they stopped to rest. "Sweet-smelling cedars as far as the eye could see, and flowering alyon, and fragrant vilya. In my grandsire's time, we built ships from the trees that grew here in the Forest of Tilinaparanwira to sail the oceans of the world. Our home was here in these forests, and in the mountains beyond as well. In those days, we thought ourselves masters of all." Jermayan sighed, as if the ancient memory pained him.

 Kellen looked around. It was hard to imagine anything at all growing here, let alone trees tall enough to provide the masts for an ocean-going ship.

 He glanced at Jermayan. The Elven Knight was smiling ruefully, seeing the expression of skepticism on Kellen's face.

 "But my grandsire lived a very long time ago, as the Children of Men reckon time—just as the Great War itself was so long ago that you have schooled yourselves to forget it. We ride now across the lands where many of the battles of that war were fought—and because of that, for tens of your generations, no blade of grass grew from this tainted earth, no bird flew through these accursed skies. Have you never wondered why the holdings of the Children of Men are so few in this land, yet your cities are armed and walled for war? Though you have purged the very hint of it from your histories, there is a reason for those walls, a reason why Men are so few when they breed so rapidly." He closed his eyes for a moment, as if weary. "But now Life returns. I wonder—is it that which has roused Life's old enemy from its slumber?"

 There was no answer he could make to that, and Kellen didn't even try. They rode on, with Kellen trying to imagine what this place might have looked like when it was as lush as the Flower Forest around Sentar-shadeen must have been before the drought. Jermayan had said the Great Alliance had paid a terrible price for their victory; looking around at a landscape so scoured that grass barely grew here now, Kellen was only now beginning to imagine what it must have been like.

 "Look there," Jermayan said a few moments later, pointing off to the left.

 Kellen looked. Halfway down the slope—probably a couple of miles away; distances could be deceiving here—he saw an odd row of tall narrow boulders standing in a line on what looked like a gentle sloping plain. Kellen knew from his experience today that that sort of terrain was particularly treacherous. Either it was gravel over rock, and just as slippery as oiled glass as a result, or it was a thin layer of topsoil over granite, which meant that the footing would hold just long enough to give you a false sense of security before giving way and sending you tumbling to the bottom of the slope.

 He took a closer look at the boulders, since they seemed to be what Jermayan was pointing at. They didn't look like the rest of the stone around here, which was mostly pale grey granite. The boulders were black, and looked as if they were made of something else. He couldn't tell what, though, and had no particular desire to investigate more closely, having spent most of the morning getting up an incline that looked pretty similar to that one.

 "That is Ulanya, where the last of the Dark-corrupted dragons fell with his Mage. It is said the dragon's bones endure to this day. As you see."

 "Huh," Kellen said, shaking his head as they rode on. If those boulders were dragon-bones, Kellen revised his desire to see a living dragon. Judging from the size of them—if they really were dragon-bones, and not just funny-looking rocks—a full-sized dragon must be larger than the Council House where the High Mages met. No wonder both sides in the war had wanted to get their hands on them!

 And on the Wildmages who controlled them.

 Once again unwelcome worries intruded into Kellen's mind. Why hadn't Idalia told him about the Great War, and the dragons, and why the City had outlawed the Wild Magic and invented the High Magick to take its place? Why hadn't she explained to him what he was going to be facing? She'd told him everything else—except the most important thing: that he was riding off to face an ancient enemy that had a lot of experience in corrupting Wildmages and turning them to its own purposes.

 Had she thought ignorance would protect him? Had she thought Jermayan wouldn't tell him the truth? Maybe he wouldn't have, if Kellen hadn't turned out to be a Knight-Mage. Maybe she'd kept it from him for his own protection. Maybe the fact that Kellen now knew the truth was going to make things go wrong somehow.

 Or maybe she counted on Jermayan to tell me the truth; counted on me being brave enough to face it. She had put plenty of challenges in his path before, and reckoned on his being able to meet them.

 But she could so easily be wrong. She didn't know him! Not really. She didn't know how often he failed or messed things up.

 He couldn't afford to worry about things like this—it was too late to change things, and he couldn't unlearn what he knew—but somehow he couldn't stop himself from constantly poking at the problem, as if it were a sore tooth. The whole thing was just too big and too complicated, made worse by the fact that the more he learned about the Demons, the more formidable an enemy they seemed to be. No matter how much confidence Jermayan seemed to have in Kellen's emerging powers as a Knight-Mage and Wildmage, Kellen didn't have the same confidence, not down where it counted. He knew how many mistakes he'd already made in seventeen short years of life, and now, with so many lives resting on him making all the right choices, he didn't feel any smarter than he had when his choices didn't matter to anybody but him. He'd already almost gotten Jermayan killed once.

 All it took was one wrong move.

 Just one.

 THOUGH Jermayan had been reluctant to talk about Shadow Mountain and the Great War initially, as they rode that day through lands he could have never seen—for Kellen now knew that Jermayan, old as he was from Kellen's standpoint, had been born centuries after the War was over—the Elven Knight spoke of those ancient events as if he had indeed been present at that last great battle between the forces of Life and those of Darkness.

 So vivid were his descriptions as he pointed out the landmarks of the conflict that had shaped Kellen's world that it almost began to seem to Kellen as well that he could see the armies marshaled upon the battlefield: humans, Elves, and Centaurs in their gleaming armor, the swift and terrible unicorn cavalry, their bright horns flashing in the sunlight. Overhead, dragons wheeled and soared in the sky, their scales glittering radiantly—red and green, gold and blue and black—and the air seethed with elemental forces, as sylphs and salamanders awaited the bidding of their comrades and allies.

 And arrayed against them, the terrible forces of the Endarkened and their slaves: the Darkmages, the duergar and goblins and trolls, protected from the sunlight fatal to their kind by the magic of the Endarkened—a protection that might be withdrawn at any moment, should the Endarkened need their power for other things.

 "Across that valley—there—in the distance—is a place once called The Field of Sorrows. I do not know if it has a name now. There, the army of Countess Karissa of Avoret was utterly destroyed." Jermayan's eyes were shadowed with sorrow, as if the tragedy had taken place a decade ago, instead of millennia. "Ten thousand warriors, the flower of human pride and knighthood, were gathered there to do battle, and not one of them escaped alive. It was the first great human loss of the War… you had underestimated the barbarity of the enemy you faced until then, I think, and thought they would fight by the civilized code of human men. But they gave no quarter, slaughtering the wounded, those who had surrendered, the servants and children who rode with the army… all. Not even the supply oxen were left alive, and when our army arrived, too late to aid you, the battlefield was a lake of blood too vast to sink into the earth."

 Kellen blinked, trying to picture it and failing utterly. It was just too horrible to get his mind wrapped around. And this was the enemy they would have to confront!

 "When the Count came and saw the place where his daughter had died, he swore that he would not rest until the power of the Endarkened was broken forever and the treachery that had slain his daughter was avenged; that if he must defy Death himself to allow this to come to pass, he would find a way. He was a great Wildmage; how his story ends, the histories do not say, but it was through his tireless efforts that the human kingdoms fought at our side staunchly through all the dark days of the War, though the Endarkened tried constantly to make a separate treaty of peace with you. They would willingly have promised you anything to withdraw from battle, knowing that they would turn on you later once they had achieved victory over us."

 How many humans failed to listen to the Count, Kellen wondered. How many thought that a separate peace could be achieved, and been betrayed? There must have been some, or the rest would never have known that Demonic promises were lies.

 "But here is a happier tale, if any story from those days can be said to be a happy one," Jermayan went on, pointing into the far distance. "See there, that mountain pass?"

 Kellen strained his vision—he suspected Elven eyesight was better than human—and in the distance he could just barely make out a notch between two mountains that might be the pass Jermayan spoke of.

 "That is Vel-al-Amion, where The Seven held back the entire army of the Endarkened for three days, until Cirandeiron Istemion and King Damek could arrive. Their names have been lost to history, and so they would have wished it to be, remembered only as The Seven, comrades in life and death, who did what could not be done, and so saved us all."

 "How could you forget them if they were Elves?" Kellen asked, since if he'd learned one thing in his time in Sentarshadeen, it was that Elves had very long memories, and kept excruciatingly accurate records of their families and genealogies.

 "The Seven were not Elves, not all of them," Jermayan corrected him crisply. "They were of all the races that fought against the Endarkened. And they were not warriors at all, but scouts, sent out to patrol in advance of the army to learn the disposition of enemy forces and to report back."

 Not warriors? Then how could they ever have held against a host of Demons!

 "But this time, knowing what they knew, seeing what they had seen, they dared not. They knew the Endarkened host must come through Vel-al-Amion, and so they retreated to that pass, sending messages to their commanders, messages that they could only hope would reach them, knowing they would never know if word had gotten through in time. And when all the hosts of Darkness and foul magic descended upon Vel-al-Amion, the Demon army found its way barred by seven scouts who would not yield the pass."