The Shadow Within (65 page)

Prittleman was still raving when an ear-piercing yowl cut him off and brought every man to horror-stricken attention. It came again, a black arrow of sound that froze the body as it impaled the heart with the knowledge that something evil and brutally violent was at hand. Dying echoes rolled over the knoll and the road and the lines of men made suddenly aware of their own mortality.

Like the rest of them, Abramm sat transfixed, stunned by the realization that the visions that had long tormented him were about to become reality. Then Warbanner reared up, screaming an angry challenge. The moment he came down, Abramm wrenched his head around and kicked him hard. They flew up the hillside and through the line of archers as easily as Abramm had predicted, had topped the misty knoll by the time he heard Gillard bellowing orders behind him, then Trap’s voice, swiftly swallowed by a rising tide of shouts and screams and the muffled thunder of hoofbeats.

Abramm never looked back, guiding Banner up a wide bank of grassgrown steps, across a plaza, up another bank of steps, and finally racing him for all he was worth up a long promenade flanked by mist-hung pillars and low crumbling walls. At its end they clattered up the stepped sides of the temple’s wide porch, through the arched opening of its freestanding façade and across the flat beyond, wet grass intermingled with the irregular remains of the stones that had once formed the temple’s main floor.

Then the mist parted and the knoll ran out. Warbanner skidded to a stop at the edge of a steep-walled, boulder-strewn canyon, churning with runoff. The passage Abramm sought was not here after all. Perhaps there’d been a bridge once, but today they faced a deep cleft, too wide for Warbanner to jump, the other side too steep to offer purchase even if he could.

They returned to the temple porch to find Trap, Channon, and the rest of Abramm’s men having taken a stand at the midpoint of the promenade Abramm had crossed only minutes ago. Gillard’s men had closed with them, and the two groups struggled fiercely. Banner was fast enough, Abramm knew, that by the time anyone saw him he could easily evade them—but to what purpose? The horse wasn’t faster than the morwhol, and it would only be a matter of time before the beast hunted them down. Besides, Abramm wanted Banner as far away as possible when he was finally forced to face off with it. Better to take his stand here.

Knotting the reins to keep them on the horse’s neck, he sprang from the saddle and—

Cresting the top of the pass, he flung himself down the now-descending trail,
shrines looking on with bright benevolence, swirling shreds of mist rising up
around them. The man-scent was growing stronger, swelling his head and chest
with bloodlust till it felt as if they would burst.

The jolt of his landing pulled Abramm back to himself. Warbanner had stopped and was looking round at him in puzzlement. With a shout, Abramm swatted his pale hindquarters, and the stallion wheeled with an indignant snort. He trotted a few paces along the top of the stair, glanced at Abramm again, then plunged down the steps and raced away. Too late Abramm realized he’d taken the pike with him.

The battle on the promenade had shifted, and a few horsemen had broken through the line, racing headlong now toward Abramm’s position on the temple porch. Leading them was a big man in a golden breastplate. Abramm jogged down the porch stairs to meet him, unwinding the sling from his wrist as he went. He pulled a stone from his pouch and slid it into the sling’s leather cradle just as he reached the bottom. Praying for more of the uncanny accuracy he’d enjoyed outside Graymeer’s the day of the picnic, he dropped it back and let fly. Gillard’s eyes widened as he spotted Abramm for the first time, shifted his weight backward to stop his horse—

The stone struck dead center of that gleaming breastplate with enough force to knock Gillard out of the saddle and reeling on his horse’s rump. The morwhol screamed again, closer now than ever. Gillard’s horse, already flustered by his rider’s erratic weight shifts, spied Abramm now, too, and shied violently, as if Abramm himself had been the source of the scream. Gillard hit the ground rolling and came up with his rapier in hand.

But then he staggered and leaned forward, coughing and gasping back the breath that had been driven out of him when the stone hit him midchest. By the time the three gray-cloaked men who’d accompanied him pulled up to flank the royals, though, he’d recovered, advancing toward Abramm with a sneer. “You just gonna throw rocks at me, little brother, or will you finally show me you really do know how to use those blades you wear?”

The taunt stung, as always, rousing the familiar, almost instant anger. And better to save the stones for later, anyway. Swiftly Abramm rewrapped the sling about his wrist and pulled out his blades, rapier and dagger both. One of the Gadrielites tossed Gillard a buckler, and the brothers closed, circling.

As soon as Gillard’s back was to the steps, Abramm attacked, forcing him to retreat awkwardly upward. Halfway to the top, he broke it off and danced out of the line of attack, ascending even with his brother. Gillard remained condescending.

“Well, apparently you do know something of the sword, after all.”

“The stories are true, Gillard. I really was the White Pretender.” And again Abramm attacked, forcing Gillard back on the diagonal this time, not letting up until they’d reached the porch itself. By then Trap and Channon had left the main battle on the promenade to engage the three who’d come with Gillard, a contest Abramm was aware of only peripherally.

The bloodlust was overwhelming. Eagerness made his great limbs shake as he
loped down the trail, the scent of his prey strong now, and close. He came around
a bend in the canyon walls, the road curling across the face of the steep grassy
slope below. And finally, there they were: gray-cloaked men ranged across the hillside,
their backs to him as they looked down into the mist-filled valley below them,
the slopes of the temple knoll rising to their right. Blind, deaf, ignorant as the
woolly ones. He laughed and slowed to savor the moment. They had no idea they
were about to die. . . . Then he was among them, biting and slashing and tearing
.

Abramm wrenched free of the other’s mind, trying to master the trembling in his own limbs, and the shadows of fear and guilt that sought to over- whelm his soul. “Gillard, this is stupid. That thing is killing your own men! Let me face it.”

“I thought they were
your
men.” Gillard bared his teeth, circling the tip of his rapier in Abramm’s face. “It’ll be here in good time, little brother.”

“And then it will kill you, too.”

“No, it will kill
you
. And once you’re dead and it’s vulnerable, then
I
will kill it—avenging the loss of my brother as I rid the realm of yet another dangerous enemy.” He paused. “It’s close now. Can you feel it?”

He leaped onto an outcropping, his powerful hindquarters launching him from
there onto the back of a fleeing man. His fangs sank deeply into his prey’s flesh,
and he sucked up the scarlet flame of his life energy even as he sucked up the
blood
.

Of course Abramm could feel it! Breathing down upon his neck, a dark oppressive presence filling his mind with visions of carnage that were no longer portents but reality. But how did
Gillard
know—

As Abramm grasped the implication of his brother’s words, Gillard capitalized on the shock they produced to launch a combination of thrusts and feints that nearly relieved Abramm of his dagger. Then Abramm’s sword tip caught the top of Gillard’s breastplate, a hair’s breadth from jumping the edge, and stopped his momentum. They returned to circling, moving slowly across the porch.

“So you’re part of it, too, then,” Abramm said. That day at Graymeer’s when Gillard’s palm had been slashed just like Abramm’s: Rhiad had needed
his
blood, too. The morwhol had been birthed by the hatred not of one man, but two. Gillard must be linked in the same way Abramm was. He had known all along that it was coming and what it intended to do.

Gillard laughed. “Surprised you, did I?”

No wonder he let that left line of the funnel be so weak. He
meant
to draw
me up here, away from the others
. And now through that mutual link with the morwhol, Abramm grasped the rest of the plan, as well: Gillard’s alliance with the Mataio had never been sincere. He was only using them, knowing the morwhol would go after them and that many of them would be killed. When it became evident they had not aided him in his battle against the beast, he would not be beholden to them in the aftermath, the alliance dissolved, all obligations nullified.

“Everything Rhiad promised me is coming true,” Gillard went on, flashing that feral grin again. “I can feel your shock, Abramm. I can feel your fear, your helpless fury. Soon it will get even better. Soon I will feel your pain.” The grin turned to a snarl as he drove in with his rapier, aiming for Abramm’s throat.

Abramm brushed the lunge off. “If you can sense it, you must know it’s already killed your partner. Two nights ago, north of Brackleford.”

“Rhiad’s not dead, brother. He’s simply been transformed.”

“Absorbed, is how Carissa described it. Screaming all the way.”

“Yet he is alive, and no longer the crippled ruin you made of him. In fact, he’s more powerful than ever.”

“Powerful, indeed, since he must know you mean to kill him, yet that has not stopped him. Why is that do you suppose?”

With a snarl, Gillard went after him, too confident, too fast. Abramm caught the blade between dagger and sword and flicked it from his brother’s fingers. Gillard staggered back, eyes wide, his hand opening and closing as if he could not believe the blade was gone.

“Now get out of here, Gillard. While you still can.”

Gillard staggered forward a step, looking dazed. Then anger hardened his face. “No! I told you—this one’s
mine
!”

On the misty hillside above the knoll, he flung a lifeless body aside and lunged
for another victim. He was delirious now from the screams and the blood and the
terror—and all the scarlet life flowing into him. “They’re so stupid! Just like the
woolly ones, running all together, making it so easy.”

Gillard dove at him. Caught still in the morwhol’s perception, Abramm was bulled to the ground, where the force of his fall slammed his hand into a stone paver and he nearly lost his rapier. His grip tightened, the stars faded from his vision, and as Gillard started to pull himself off him, Abramm slammed the butt of the rapier hilt into the side of his head, then shoved his brother away and rolled free, gaining his feet and backing away. Gillard arose likewise, only to charge again, and this time Abramm was ready. His rapier slid over the edge of the breastplate and just under the collarbone, while his dagger sank into Gillard’s left thigh. The blades slid out again instantly, Abramm already leaping out of range. But Gillard launched no counterattack, staggering back with a howl as his left leg collapsed and he dropped to one knee, gripping his shoulder.

And then a throaty breath and the click of toenails on stone somewhere in the mist to his right told him the morwhol was here. He turned from Gillard, backing farther to keep his brother in his line of sight while he sought to find the beast. The temple façade appeared through the mist, the doorway flanked by a pair of pillars. Portions of a low curved wall extended concavely from the outward sides of those pillars, perhaps having once encircled the area in front of the opening. Beyond the walls stretched the flat of the porch, littered with fallen pillars, the fragments of the once great stone sculptures that had sat atop them and a scattering of small dark-leafed bushes. From around the back of the façade, the beast slunk into view, prowling beyond the opposite wall, its ugly, blood-covered snout aimed toward them as it watched them with eyes no longer green, but dark against white, and eerily human.

Abramm was horrified by its size, for it was vastly bigger than when he’d last seen it, bigger even than the description Carissa had just given him. Its hunched and hairy shoulders were massive as a bull’s, and the sleek, brindled hindquarters rippled with powerful muscles as it prowled, the tip of its tufted tail flicking back and forth. It was
far
too big to face with only a rapier, and seeing it now, Abramm realized it would be considerably more formidable than the kraggin. It had a man’s mind, like the veren, but linked as it was, it also knew Abramm’s own thoughts as he had them. Worst of all, like Gillard, it knew his weaknesses. All the ways to provoke and intimidate him, so as to give the Shadow within him ascendance.

Even as he realized this, he saw Gillard laughing at him, enjoying his dismay.

And just seeing that laughter kindled Abramm’s anger. It flared briefly, before it was overwhelmed by a barrage of horrific images and sensations and rising fear as the Shadow within him took control. He put them down, barely, clinging to the Light, reminding himself that none of the awful ends he’d just been shown could happen without Eidon’s permission.

The beast continued its circuit around the outside of the wall, Abramm turning to follow it, careful to keep aware of Gillard. Behind the façade it went, and he sensed its presence without seeing it, tracking its estimated position with his eyes. It passed briefly behind the opening and was gone, only to emerge a moment later on the other side, leaping onto the low wall and seeking to engage him again. Failing that, it turned its gaze upon his brother.

A shiver of fear, not Abramm’s own, went through him, and it struck him suddenly that if the beast absorbed Gillard, it would be stronger still, physically and otherwise. No sooner had he thought it than he jammed dagger and rapier into their sheaths, then released the sling from around his wrist as he fingered three stones from his pouch. He barely had the first loaded when the morwhol sprang, clearing the twenty feet between it and Gillard as if it were nothing. It bowled the big man over as if he were a child, sinking its teeth into his shoulder. Abramm heard his screams two ways, felt his terror only one. But he did not let it disrupt his concentration, seeking the Light and letting fly with the stone. Already Gillard’s body glowed faintly with scarlet light. The stone flew true, turning to a white fireball in the air and hitting the beast square in the side of its head—without effect. The second one hit, as well, and in its wake came a narrow, jagged bolt of Light that crawled over the beast in a netlike flash the moment it hit. The morwhol convulsed, released its victim with a yowl, and bounded away into the mist, leaving Gillard sprawled unmoving on the stonework.