The Shadow of Elysium (Shadow Campaigns)

Also by Django Wexler

The Shadow Campaigns Novels

The Thousand Names

The Shadow Throne

The Price of Valor
(coming July 7, 2015)

The Forbidden Library Novels

The Forbidden Library

The Mad Apprentice

The Shadow of Elysium

A Shadow Campaigns Novella

Django Wexler

InterMix Books, New York

An imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

THE SHADOW OF ELYSIUM

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2015 by Django Wexler.

Excerpt from
The Price of Valor
copyright © 2015 by Django Wexler.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19709-1

PUBLISHING HISTORY

InterMix eBook edition / May 2015

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

This story takes place in the universe of the Shadow Campaigns, at around the same time that
The Shadow Throne
begins. None of the other Shadow Campaigns books or stories are required reading to enjoy it, but if you’re interested in how Alex ended up in this mess, it’s chronicled in the short story
The Penitent Damned
, available online.

It’s June by the time the little caravan works its way down out of the mountains, six wagons accompanied by as many horsemen. Each wagon is full of trade goods from the Sallonaik, the great blue lake where our journey began. Half are stacked with barrels of salted fish, fat red-eyes and narrow, blue-scaled clipper. The other half carry treasures from the south, painstakingly hauled over the Worldshearts and then sailed across the lake on the long, multi-oared trading galleys of the canton cities. There is Hamveltai glass and porcelain, packed in straw; Deslandai jewelry in heavy iron strongboxes; fine cloth from Vheed and the cities of the Old Coast.

Valuable things, things people want. And me.

I ride in the back of a farm cart, along with some of the strongboxes. I have offered no hint of resistance, but the guards take no chances. Ropes bind my hands together and secure my ankles to the driver’s seat, with just enough slack so I can shift my weight and hang on when the cart tips or shudders.

I might have worked the cord down and over my feet, or scraped it apart on a nail in the bed of a cart like the hero of a romantic story. But then what? Heroes never seemed to have to think that far ahead. Even if I were to evade the half dozen armed, mounted men who surround our party, no small feat for a boy as unskilled in woodscraft as myself, then I would be afoot and alone in a lonely, hostile country. Every night, we heard the howling of the wolves in the woods. And if I were to escape my pursuers
and
the wolves
and
slow death by starvation or exposure or any number of other grisly ends, where was there to go?

That I think of escape, in spite of all of this, is a clear sign of my insanity. My demon, perhaps, wrecking the fabric of my mind. Peter is two hundred miles away and getting farther with every weary day. He is strapped to another wagon, headed to another prison.

Even if I broke free, crossed the miles, rescued him from his captors, he would not welcome me. This time, he would probably kill me himself.

***

But one cannot help but hope. So I sit, and wait, and plan. We will not be in the mountains forever. Sooner or later we will reach a wider road, and there will be towns along the way, places to lose myself and evade pursuit. I can read, write, and do sums; there is always a living to be made for someone with such esoteric skills. I will survive.

I sleep in the cart, under a thick wool blanket. Twice a day, the guards let me off my leash to give me a chance to squat in the ditch beside the side of the road or make water. They feed me, hard black bread and sometimes a handful of greasy meat; squirrel, or rabbit, or fat gray mountain birds I’ve never seen before. The outriders travel with rifles at the ready, hoping for a shot at any animal flushed by the noise of the oncoming wagons. When they miss, all we have is bread.

Tullo is a mercenary, a southerner from the League cities. He has lank, dirty red hair and a curly red beard he rarely bothers to trim. Every second or third night, he comes to my cart, already drunk, hands fumbling with the strings of his leather trousers. He joins me under the blanket and I take his cock in my mouth. I feel his fingers grip my hair and I listen to the harsh sound of his breath until he spends himself.

Afterward he lets me take a swallow from his belt skin, which is filled with a clear spirit so harsh it burns my throat, and leaves me an extra measure of bread. I eat it, huddle back under my blanket, and try to sleep.

I will survive.

***

At the base of the mountains, there is a road leading north and south, and a little town. It’s barely bigger than my village by the lake, no more than two dozen log-and-shingle buildings, but the caravan stays well clear. Most of the guards go into town, to buy supplies, while another keeps an eye on me. It might be a good time to begin my escape, but the guard seems attentive, and his rifle is loaded.

When the others return, they direct us to the north road, where another wagon is waiting in a little clearing. It’s larger than my farm cart, with high sides and a gate at the back, pulled by a pair of horses. Sitting on a high box is a big man in a stained crimson robe, a Priest of the Red, and beside him a thin, ugly fellow with a bulbous nose and protruding ears under a mop of dark hair. It is accompanied by another half dozen guards, hard-looking men in forest leathers with rifles and long knives.

The leader of our party, a man named Voryil, has a conversation with the priest while the rest of us wait a little distance away. I can’t quite overhear the conversation, but I catch the occasional word. “Demon,” he says. “Sorcery.” Voryil seems to be arguing some point, but the priest says something that shuts him up. Clearly, Voryil is outranked.

A few minutes later, the guards untie me from the bed of the cart and lead me over to the high-sided wagon, opening the rear gate so I can climb in. There is a girl in rough linens there, curled on her side, asleep or unconscious. She is small, about my age but slight and very thin, and her black hair is limp and matted with filth. She has iron bands around one ankle, secured by a chain to a metal loop in the center of the wagon bed. Before I really understand what’s happening, the guards are strapping a similar band around my leg and locking it into place with a steel pin.

Looking down at my new confinement, I wonder if I have missed my chance to escape after all.

I don’t remember my mother, or where I was born. I can remember, barely, arriving in Nestevyo. I was riding behind my father, gripping him hard around the middle. A second horse, following placidly behind us, carried all we had in the way of possessions. Clothes, tools, a few precious books.

We moved into a shack near the water, a few hundred yards from the village proper. I don’t know if my father paid anyone for the right to live there or not. It hadn’t been used in years, perhaps in decades, and there was nothing much left but four ugly walls and a fire pit. I remember the first night, sleeping under the stars, nothing overhead but the skeletal shapes of the rafters.

The next day, my father traded the horses to some of the villagers in exchange for help rebuilding the roof. A pack of them came over, riding in a wagon heaped high with dried grass. They were dour, suspicious men, often with their dour, suspicious sons along, and they stared at my father and me as though we were circus attractions. But they had brought ladders, and they spent all day putting up thin wooden shingles covered with mats of dried grass, fixed in place with an awful-smelling muck that looked like liquid shit. My father, though unused to manual labor, did his best to help, and in the evening he broke open a bottle of spirit he’d brought in our bags and poured each villager a generous measure.

It was as auspicious a beginning to our life in Nestevyo as we could have hoped for. Nevertheless, it was clear from the outset that we could never truly be a part of the village. In our old home in the south, where the Mithradacii tide rose high and lasted long, most of the old peoples of the world were erased. It’s easy to forget that north of the Worldshearts there are clans who never knelt to any tyrant, people whose children bear no trace of the blood of the Children of the Sun. The people of Nestevyo were descended from such stock, short and broad shouldered, with hair as black as a crow’s wing. They call us
mikadvi
, which means “muddy” and is appropriate enough. My father and I both had hair the color of freshly turned earth; we would be unremarkable in the lowland cities, but here in the Murnskai mountains we were as foreign as Khandarai.

My father put food on our table however he could manage. He sold his services as a scribe, or traded them for things we needed. Aside from the village priest, no one in Nestevyo was literate, but there were still occasional things that needed writing down: wills, papers for the provincial government, letters to distant family. This did not bring in enough to either feed us or keep my father busy, so in the meantime he fished, like every other man in the village. The dark waters of the Sallonaik are bountiful, rich enough that even a clumsy pen pusher like my father could coax a fish or two onto his line. The other villagers laughed at his scrabbling efforts, and in spite of the hurt to his pride he laughed with them, and joked at his own expense, and got them to teach him how to do it properly.

At the time, I did not understand what my father gave up to live in Nestevyo. Like any child, I was concerned only with my own affairs.

***

I was nine years old when I first understood that I carried a demon.

I realize now I had felt its touch before that, the
cold
sensation of scaled skin scraping against the warmth of my heart. At the time, though, I thought nothing of it. It didn’t hurt, exactly, and it always went away soon enough. If I told my father, he no doubt put it down to a chill.

In my ninth year, a villager named Belvetz, for whom my father had done some work copying out letters, gave us a dog. The animal was a runt, the tag end of a litter who would never be useful for work, and normally he would have been tossed into the lake as not worth feeding. Belvetz, who had four sons of his own, suggested that a small dog might make a good pet for a child my age, and so my father brought him home and I acquired a companion. My father named him Sagamet, which is an old Mithradacii word meaning “dirty snow.”

Sagamet was a Murnskai mountain dog, a breed as hardy as the villagers who raise them, thick legged with short, curly hair that sheds water like a duck’s feathers. He was a dark, muddy gray, to match his name, with a few patches of pure black on his haunches. He took to me at once, and I of course loved him with all my heart—no boy of nine can resist the attentions of a friendly dog. Before long he walked at my heel whenever I went out, like an eager shadow, and curled up by my side when I sat down to read.

I did not play with the other children of the village. It was not so much that they hated me, though I suppose they might have and I would never have known it. The differences between us were so vast we knew instinctively they could not be bridged, and neither I nor they ever tried. I was already taller than every other boy my age, with my strange, mud-colored hair. Instead of learning to fish, hunt, and climb like the boys, or even to mend nets and make cloth like the girls, I was devoted to my father’s strange trade of reading and writing. I practiced nearly every day, going through the few books we had over and over whenever the sun was high and the sky was clear. We could not afford to waste candles to give me light to study by, so it was in the evenings that Sagamet and I would venture into the thin woods surrounding the village, or wander up and down the shore of the Sallonaik and investigate its many rocky inlets and pools.

The great lake is so large it has winds and tides, like an ocean, and the shore is covered in rocky columns and tumbled boulders, overgrown with scraggly trees and vines. In some places, these form pools that are connected to the lake when the water is high, but not when it recedes, and sometimes in these pools the lake would leave us treasures. Big fish, trapped by the tide’s retreat, flopping and gasping in the shallow water; one such find could feed us for days. Or bits of detritus, floated in from ships wrecked out in the deep and hung up on the rock. I had once found a man’s shirt, torn and sodden, and a carved bit of wood my father said might have been part of a ship’s rail.

On the day I discovered my demon, I knew the water had been particularly high the night before, and now that the tide had gone out I had hopes of finding either something to play with or something to eat. Sagamet was game for a walk, as always, and we set out up the shore towards a pool I knew, where a short scramble over rocks would let me in to a shallow, sand-floored basin. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, but I had at least a couple of hours before it became too dark to see.

As I walked, I picked up a stick and pretended it was a sword, swinging it around at imaginary foes. I had been reading the
Wisdoms
, specifically the chapters dealing with the wars against the Demon King, and I imagined myself one of the holy soldiers of the Sworn Church battling the evil sorcerers of the south. Demons rose up before me and were cut down, one after another, while my faithful companion Sagamet ran circles around me and barked excitedly every time my stick
clacked
against a tree branch.

When I reached the pool, I looked down from the top of the rocks and saw that something was indeed waiting for me. It was a big gray hummock, longer than I was tall, lying motionless in the middle of the pool. From where I stood, I couldn’t see any more than that—it clearly wasn’t a fish, but it looked too smooth to be a rock. It might be, I thought excitedly, a cannon, half buried in the sand. How a cannon could have floated up and into the pool I had no idea, but I was caught up in the idea at once. I clambered down the rocks, Sagamet following sure-footedly behind me until he was low enough to jump into the pool with a great splash.

Wading in the water, which came up to my thighs, I approached the humped thing. The part of its surface that was out of the water was smooth, like it had been polished. I realized with a start that it was
moving
, very slightly, in and out. Sagamet barked excitedly, splashing back and forth in the water.

I should have turned around and run, then and there. Instead I moved even closer and prodded the thing with my stick.

The books say that the salverre of the Sallonaik is not a true shark, because it breathes air and lacks gills. But it possesses all the other important attributes of a shark, most notably a mouth full of triangular, serrated teeth and a voracious appetite. This one had been stuck in the pool since last night’s high tide, getting angrier and angrier as the water drained away and its hide dried in the unaccustomed sun. The touch of my stick roused it to a fury. Its head, which had been buried in the sand, came up with a spray of water, and it lunged forward by thrashing its long, gray body against the sand. Its teeth snapped closed inches from my foot, and I scrambled back in fright against the rock wall of the pool.

At that moment, Sagamet doubtless saved my life. He charged, barking furiously, hackles raised, and put himself between the salverre and me. The creature lurched toward him, and Sagamet jumped away, then dashed in again, trying to nip at the gray hide. This time the great fish was too quick for him; his barks changed to howls of pain as the jaws closed around his midsection. It thrashed back and forth, dragging the dog through the water, which turned a frothy red.

I forgot my fear at once. I let go of my stick and groped under the water for a rock. When I found one, a jagged chunk of limestone I could barely lift with one hand, I charged the salverre. Sagamet was still howling weakly. The creature opened its mouth as I approached, and he slid free, floating limp in the water in a spreading slick of blood. It came at me, jaws wide, and I brought the rock down on its head with all the strength I could muster.

I must have stunned it. I barely remember what happened next, in the wild tones of a dream. I gathered Sagamet into my arms and ran to the lakeward side of the pool, where there was a small lip of stone I could mount without using my hands. How I got back up onto the high ground without toppling over and cracking my skull, I have no idea. I laid Sagamet down and fell to my knees beside him.

I was sobbing already, from fear and because I could see at a glance that my dog could not be saved. The salverre’s teeth had torn great rents in his flanks, and while his breath still whistled feebly, the pulses of blood from the wound were already slowing. I put my hands on him, and they came away as red as if I’d dipped them in paint. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t have the breath.

Then I felt the
cold
sensation again, right behind my eyes. Without quite knowing why, I touched Sagamet again, and this time the cold flowed out through my fingers and into his torn body. I could feel him, heart and lungs and guts and brain, as though his body were a beautiful, perfect machine someone had smashed great chunks out of with a hammer. In that moment I could see how it all fit together, and I reached out with the cold and began setting things to rights.

I don’t know how long it took. All I remember is opening my eyes, at the end, to find my dog sitting up and licking the tears from my face.

***

I went home that night, after Sagamet and I washed out the blood in a stream, and told my father what had happened. I did not have wit enough to lie. He listened, indulgently at first and then with cold eyes and furrowed brow.

“You have saved Sagamet, but you may have damned yourself doing it,” he muttered when I was finished. “Listen to me, Abraham. You must never tell anyone else of this. Never, you understand? Until the day you die. This kind of miracle does not come from God. It is
sorcery
. There is a demon inside you, working through you. I had hoped . . .”

My eyes had gone very wide. My father pulled me to him and wrapped me in his arms.

“It will be all right. We will tell no one, and you will not use this power again. Just . . . don’t say anything. Not even to me, in case someone is listening. Promise me.”

I nodded, my head pressed tight against his shoulder.

The next day, my father told the other villagers I had discovered a salverre in one of the tidal pools. A party of them went out, with spears and ropes, and brought the creature back in triumph. That night we roasted it by the shore and had a feast. The flesh was tougher than I liked, but I ate a second helping, and I brought home a string of guts for Sagamet.