Tanis the shadow years (d2-3) (10 page)

When the mage and the previous day's hero finally climbed the barricades, Ankatavaka was a village that felt fear no more.

But then, the battle had not yet begun.

The foq on the beach was so thick, that Tanis couldn't tell if the sun had come up or not. He walked back to Reehsha's shack in a murky gloom that mirrored his inner thoughts. He realized now that the chances of finding his father were more remote than ever. There were too many humans and too little time. Once the battle for Ankatavaka began again in the morning, many would die-possibly Tanis himself. And when one side won the battle, the other would be slaughtered. He had vowed to Yeblidod that he would wreak vengeance on her attacker. His mind was numb with shame; he wasn't likely to fulfill his oath.

With a heavy heart, he climbed the rocks that led to Reehsha's home. It wasn't until he neared the shack that Tanis noticed, with a start, that no candles burned there as they had when he had left. Had something happened? He rushed to the door and anxiously flung it open, not bothering to knock.

Brandella looked up in startled surprise. She was sitting next to Yeblidod, swabbing the sleeping dwarf's head with a cool, damp cloth. The woman put a finger to her lips, indicating for Tanis to be quiet.

Tanis nodded meekly, letting the tension drain from his neck and shoulders. He glanced around the inside of the dingy one-room cabin and saw that Brandella and Yeblidod were the only ones there. "Where did the others go7" he whispered.

"Wait," she silently mouthed, getting up and coming toward him. When she reached him, she took his arm and led him out the door. They walked a short distance in silence, the gray fog enveloping them as they strolled through the rocks to the beach. They could see each other, but little else, the shack merely a dark image that floated in the distance.

"Kishpa, Mertwig, and Scowarr have gone back to the barricades," explained Brandella. "They left just a short while ago." She'd thrown a shawl over her head, but droplets of moisture clung to the curls above her brow.

"And Reehsha?"

"He's gone to tend to his boat. When he returns, he will look after Yeblidod." Brandella glanced at him curiously. "And what of you? Will you stay here, or will you go to fight the humans?"

"Perhaps neither," he answered truthfully. "I came here for a reason."

"I know," she commented matter-of-factly.

Tanis did a double-take and took her by the shoulders. "You know?" he asked.

"Yes," she replied, her face puzzled, pulling slightly away from him. "Scowarr explained it to us last night after you ran off. He said you came to Ankatavaka to find two people."

"Oh. I see." Tanis took a deep breath. He could hear the waves in the distance, but they were lost in the gray- ness. The fog seemed to be suffocating him. Or maybe it was Brandella. The mist played around her face, softening her features and giving her an aura that seemed altogether fitting for a woman who was a memory.

"The human you were chasing? Was he one of those you came for?" she asked, gently extricating herself from Tanis's grip.

"No," said the half-elf, not quite knowing now what to do with his hands. He finally pretended he was cold by blowing on his fingers and rubbing them together.

'Then why did you run after him?" Brandella persisted.

"It doesn't matter now," he said, face downcast. He felt the damp of the fog clinging to his leather clothing. Seagulls cried, somewhere out at sea.

"It seems to matter still to you," she said, reaching out and tenderly touching his cheek, "or you wouldn't seem so sad." She surprised him with her gentle gesture, and she seemed more than a little surprised herself that she had been so bold.

"You're very kind," he whispered hoarsely.

"And you are very brave." It was a statement, not a compliment. Her eyes were frank, not coquettish. "I saw you on the southern barricade yesterday. I hoped that you would live."

"I hoped so, too," he said with a smile.

She laughed, a warm and infectious sound that came easily. "Scowarr's sense of humor must have rubbed off on you," she said.

Tanis raised an eyebrow. "You find Scowarr funny?"

She nodded, dark eyes quietly amused. "I don't know if it's what he says or how he says it, but, yes, he makes me laugh. Isn't he remarkable?"

"It would certainly seem so."

"He's more than just funny, though," the woman went on. "He also tells the most amazing stories. Truth to tell, I found them a little hard to believe. He told several, for instance, about you."

"Oh7" Tanis turned toward the sea.

"He said you appeared out of thin air, right in the middle of a skirmish. He was watching from a hollow tree trunk, and one moment there was nothing and the next moment you were standing there." Out of the corner of an eye, the half-elf could see the weaver eyeing him, watching for his reaction.

Tanis shifted his feet on the seaweed-strewn sand. He didn't know if he'd have another chance to speak with Brandella alone. If he was going to tell her why he had come to Ankatavaka, this had to be the time. She had given him the opening; he only hoped he could convince her that he was telling the truth.

"I did appear out of thin air," he said softly.

She took an involuntary step backward, clutching the knot of shawl at her throat. "Then you aren't real!" she breathed, eyes wide. "You're an image, an apparition!"

Tanis threw back his head and laughed. Her words struck him with such ironic force that he couldn't help himself. "I'm unreal?" he said, choking on his words, taking a few steps away from Brandella and then turning back and facing her. He threw aside both hands. "I'm an apparition? Oh, how I wish Scowarr could hear this," he added with a broad grin. "He thinks I lack a sense of humor. If only he knew!"

"Only knew what?" Brandella asked, confused by Tanis's strange behavior.

"That I'm the only one here who is actually real. You, Yeblidod, Kishpa, Scowarr, Ankatavaka, the humans outside the barricades-you're all only images living in the memory of a dying old mage. When he dies, you all will disappear. This isn't your life the way you lived it; it's the life you lived as he remembers it. I'm real flesh and blood. I'm the living being walking among the ghosts of one man's past. He cast a spell and sent me here."

"You're madl"

"You don't believe that," Tanis said. "You know that Scowarr was telling the truth. You know I've come here for a reason."

Her confusion seemed to be turning to anger. A pink spot appeared on each high cheekbone. "You can't just stand there and tell me I don't exist," she protested. In her annoyance, she let go of the shawl and it fell back from her glorious hair. Tanis caught his breath.

"You do exist-in memory," he said. "You are real-in memory. You do live and breathe-but it's not your own life. I've come to change that."

A sob suddenly rose in her throat, and Tanis felt a pang for what he was putting her through. "No," she cried, turning away from him and becoming nearly lost in the mist. Like the ethereal figure she was, she called out to him from the enshrouding fog, her words a painful cry: "I've dreamed of you-but with fear!"

Tanis moved quickly through the mist and reached out. He snared Brandella by the arm and pulled her in close to him. "Don't fear me," he pleaded. "The old mage sent me here for you, Brandella. To free you."

She stood her ground, curls flying free in anger. "Free me from what7" she demanded. "From my happy life? From the man I love? This is not possible. I refuse to gol"

Tanis shook his head. "You don't understand. This is Kishpa's dying wish."

She straightened defensively and flounced back a step. "He's not dying. You said so yourself. You said he would live to a ripe old age."

"So I did. And so he has. Listen to me. Where I come from, ninety-eight years have passed since you cared for Kishpa here in Reehsha's shack. Where I come from, he is old now, dying in a burnt-out glade, lying against the side of a blackened tree, imagining you, remembering you in your glorious youth. And it is he-the old mage, the old Kishpa-who has sent me here to take you from his memory before you cease to be."

'It's a lie!" Brandella cried, eyes aflame. "It's a trick. Kishpa suspected that you were not to be trusted. He told me so. And now I see that you have come to destroy us. I won't let you!"

To Tanis's utter astonishment, Brandella drew a short- bladed knife from a hiding place inside her shawl. She was fast, and Tanis was too dumbfounded to move. But she stumbled as she jabbed the blade at Tanis's side, drawing blood with a cut above the hip.

Before she could stab him again, he grabbed her wrist and squeezed it until she let go of the blade's handle.

"You're hurting me," she protested.

"I could say the same of you." As he spoke, he picked up the knife and threw it into the rocks at the edge of the beach.

A small but steady stream of blood oozed from what was luckily a minor wound. He stanched the flow with his thumb, jamming it over the cut.

"You do me an injustice," he said with more calm than she might have imagined possible from someone who had just been attacked. "I mean you no harm. I only wish to do what Kishpa has asked of me. And I'm afraid there isn't much time. He could die at any moment, and that would be the end of all of us."

She started to turn her back but appeared to think better of it. "Your brain must be addled," she objected.

"Please," he begged. "Think a moment. Imagine yourself in his place. You are part elven. You have lived another ninety-eight years, and the human you once loved has long since died. But you remember her well, thinking of her always. And now you lie near death. Except she, in your memory, is still young and full of life, just as you always pictured her, no matter how the years might have changed her. Wouldn't you, if you could, want that image to exist even if the mind that remembered it no longer lived? Wouldn't that, in your moment of passing, be a gift of love beyond anything you could ever imagine?" Brandella did not answer at once. Tears filled her eyes. "Yes," she finally said. "It would be a great act of love." Then she wiped her eyes and composed herself, saying, "It's a lovely thought, but it doesn't mean that what you're saying is true. You're asking me to leave the man I cherish for a string of pretty words." "Not for a string of pretty words," Tanis countered. "For love. Brandella," he whispered, finding it hard to say these words, "I yearn for the ideal that Kishpa has found. All my life I have craved what he once had with you. He grieves for its loss. I never had it, and I grieve even more that I may never know it." Brandella stared at him with luminescent eyes. Tanis drew from the inner pocket of his tunic a piece of once-colorful cloth that still held faded shades of red, yellow, and purple. He held it out to her. Brandella slowly took it from him and examined it. "It's my weave," she said shakily. Tanis nodded. She turned it over, hands unsteady face ashen. "It's a remnant of the same scarf I've been weaving for Kishpa these past few days. How can it be home, unfinished, and here, ancient and tattered7" One hand went to her mouth, lips trembling. Tanis only watched her closely. His heart went out to her in her confusion. "Kishpa gave this to you?" she asked, looking up. "As a token of his love." Tanis saw her eyes shift, and he knew. She believed.

Bnandella broke away from Tanis and ran back toward the shack. The half-elf didn't know what to make of her reaction. Was she reeling with joy or despair7 Inside the cabin, Brandella stood with her longbow in hand and a quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder. "As soon as Reehsha returns, I am going to the barricades," she announced quietly but firmly. Yeblidod stirred in her bed at the sound but did not awaken. "But what of Kishpa's wish?" Tanis demanded from from the doorway. "Don't you understand? He may die any moment."

"I do understand," she fiercely countered. "But I will not go with you. Not now. It is this Kishpa that I love: the one on the barricades, fighting for his village. It is this Kishpa who made me, a human, feel at home in an elven village that I now love."

Sadness and anger vied for dominance on the weaver's face. Brandella had changed to an outfit more suitable for battle than the previous night's skirt and woven blouse-brown leggings the color of a doe's eyes, with an overshirt of deepest green. The costume added to her air of calm assurance. Once again, her self-confidence reminded Tanis of Kitiara.

"Understand me, Tanis," Brandella said firmly. "I was a mere girl floating in the wreckage of a slaveship that foundered in the Straits. The chains were still on my feet, their weight destined to pull me off the piece of hull that I clung to for life. If Kishpa had not had a vision of me during the storm, I would have perished. On rough seas, he sailed out to find me. To save me."

She looked away from Tanis, visibly embarrassed at what she was about to say. "At first I loved him out of gratitude. He treated me with kindness, taking pains to make sure his elven friends-and dwarves like Mertwig and Yeblidod-did not snub me because of my race. Then," she said boldly, gazing once again directly into Tanis's eyes, "he taught me how to learn so that I could teach myself. I learned to weave, to paint, to use a longbow… and finally, when I grew up, I learned to love him. And he loved me back.

"Now you ask me to abandon my mage," she continued in disbelief, shaking her head, "to abandon the Kishpa I know so well, because you say the old Kishpa has a wish. But I don't know the old Kishpa. I don't know how the years have changed him. I only know that my Kishpa would be terribly hurt if I left him now."

She shook her head as Tanis made a dissenting move. "Listen to me," she said. "He is weak from enchanting your sword. He would never admit it, but he is afraid for himself, for me, and for the village. If I desert him now, it will break his heart. How can I deserve the love of the Kishpa of the future if I abandon the Kishpa of the present?"

"You are eloquent in your devotion," Tanis said softly. "Still-"

She cut off his words with a commanding gesture. "Speak no morel" she ordered. "I will go with you when the battle is over. Not before. I will not let my Kishpa down when he needs me most. If what you say is true, and I am nothing more than a memory, I would not have my disappearance in his moment of need be his last remembrance of me."

"Then you will go with me when the battle is over?" Tanis asked.

She still hesitated. Then-"Yes." Decision was suddenly clear on her delicate features.

'Then I will accompany you to the barricades," he insisted. "I will fight alongside you and make sure-as best I can-that no harm befalls you. But whether the battle is won or lost, when it is over, I will take you with me."

"I will make sure-as best I can-that no harm befalls you, either," she said, flashing a sudden warm grin.*****

Fog hugged the shore, but most of the village basked in brilliant early-morning sunshine. Stone-fronted shops appeared deserted on each side. Tanis and Brandella hurriedly stepped down the empty streets, marking the sounds of battle from up ahead.

"It has begun," she said grimly.

They ran to the barricades, only to find the elven defenders panicking along the eastern wall. Hundreds shouted at Kishpa from every direction, begging him to do something before it was too late.

Clearly something terrible was happening. Tanis and Brandella climbed the ramparts, clambering their way toward Kishpa, who stood in plain view atop the barricade. When they reached the top, they saw what was driving the elves into a state of abject fear.

"By the gods!" Tanis exclaimed.

The human army had swelled to immense proportions, gaining reinforcements that easily numbered more than five thousand and perhaps as many as ten thousand.

"Where did they all come from?" Brandella wondered, squinting against the sun.

The enemy troops were virtually uncountable, charging toward Ankatavaka like an endless sea of humanity. Their numbers stretched in every direction, entering the open meadows on all three sides of the village. And they kept streaming out of the woods.

The elves didn't have enough arrows to kill this many humans, even if they hit their mark with every one let loose. The odds, they all realized, had become impossible. They were about to be overrun by an army that outnumbered them at least thirty to one.

Yet Tanis was surprised to find Kishpa, a figure in red robes boldly silhouetted against the eastern sky, calmly surveying the oncoming human horde. Tanis looked around for Scowarr and Mertwig, surprised that they were nowhere in sight.

Kishpa, having given Tanis a suspicious stare when the half-elf showed up with Brandella, finally answered his lover's question. 'They came," he said matter-of-factly, "from a spell, and that's how they shall perish."

"Are we imagining them?" asked Tanis.

Kishpa straightened his red robes, fluttering in the morning breezes. "No, it's a duplication spell," he explained. "Most of them are phantom reflections of a much smaller number of real soldiers."

"See there," Kishpa said, and indicated a young, blond human carrying a distinctive quiver tooled in blue and yellow. "Now look there, wading across the stream. And there." Tanis and Brandella followed his pointing finger. A blond warrior carried the same quiver across a creek; not 30 yards from that soldier, a duplicate warrior hurried past a tree.

Kishpa looked pleased with himself, his relaxed smile contrasting. "They might have fooled me," he admitted, "but they overdid it, duplicating far too many soldiers. It made me suspicious, and so I looked more closely. That's when I noticed that too many of them are dressed exactly the same, are holding their bows in the same way, and are running in perfect step with each other. That's when I knew.

'The spell, by the way, is rudimentary," he added, "but I've never seen it done on such a grand scale. There must be at least a half-dozen magic-users in the human camp. If this spell is any indication of their power, none of them are terribly advanced, but, combined, they can come up with very powerful magic."

"Are you strong enough to stop them?" Brandella asked worriedly, putting her arm around the mage. Her brown eyes gazed warmly into his blue ones; Tanis looked away.

"I don't know," the mage replied candidly. "I need to husband my magic, so I must counterattack with a spell that is relatively simple."

"I hope you have something in mind," Tanis said irritably, "because, reflections or not, they're getting awfully close."

"If either Scowarr or Mertwig does his job, then we just might-ah, just in time!" the mage exclaimed, pointing down to just inside the village gate. Little Shoulders skidded to a halt below, holding a small metal box in his hands.

"Open the gate!" Kishpa ordered.

"No!" cried a chorus of elven defenders. The ones who didn't reply looked fearfully at the dissenters but did not move.

"Do as I say!" the mage commanded angrily.

No one moved. Tanis, Kishpa, and Brandella looked into a sea of re- 133 calcitrant, almond-eyed faces. With an oath, Tanis jumped down off the barricade and raced across the cobblestones to the gate. He reached for the pulley rope and was about to yank down on it when, just above him on the battlement, a fearful elf with a knife tried to cut the rope. Instead, Brandella sent an arrow flying through the elf's sleeve, pinning it to the battlement wall.

Tanis hauled on the pulley rope; then, as the gate swung open, the half-elf bowed to the weaver up above. She inclined her head and winked.

Once the gate was open, the mage shouted to Scowarr, "Open your box and empty it onto the ground just outside. Then get back in. And you, Tanis, close the gate!"

Scowarr and Tanis did as they were told.

The human horde was fast closing in, covering the open field between the woods and the village. The sound of their charge was deafening, but Kishpa concentrated on his spell, repeating the same strange words over and over again.

Nothing seemed to be happening-until a terrified cry howled from the front lines of the human army.