Beyond The Shadows (7 page)

Dorian sat in the chute room, balancing the crap pot strapped to his back on the edge of one of the chutes. This was the last
pot of the day, and Dorian was sore, exhausted, and grumpy—and he got to spend most of every day in the company of beautiful
women. The chute room slave spent every day in this foul room, directing the slaves who brought in all of the Citadel’s human
waste and maintaining the sewage chutes, and he was the happiest slave Dorian had ever met. Dorian still gagged every time
he opened the door. How the hell could Tobby be chipper?

Aching, Dorian stretched his back as he waited for Tobby to finish with the slave from the guards’ quarters. Tobby pulled
two levers, waited for a few moments, and then pulled a chain to the sound of distant clanking, then the man untied the top
rope on his pack and Tobby tipped the pot over, sloshing the contents down the chute. A rope attached to the bottom kept the
pot from following the sewage down the chute.

After he finished, Tobby walked over to Dorian. “This your last run?”

Dorian yawned and stretched. “Yes, I—” he lost his balance and the weight of the crap pot yanked him backward toward the open
maw of a chute. He screamed—and jerked to a stop as Tobby threw himself against Dorian’s knees.

For several moments, it was agony as the weight of the pot pulled against the sinews of his legs and stomach, trying to pull
him into oblivion or rip him in half, but as the open-topped pot released its contents down the chute, the pain faded.

Once the pot was empty, Tobby was able to help Dorian out of the chute. “Trying to follow your predecessor, huh?” Tobby asked.

“What?”

Tobby chuckled. “Why’d you figure they needed another eunuch? Last harem carrier did what you just did . . .  only I wasn’t
so fast that day.”

“Shit,” Dorian said.

Tobby laughed loudly like a braying donkey. Surely the man couldn’t be amused by feces. Dorian began shaking from his brush
with death. Good God, it hadn’t even occurred to him to use his Talent.

“Funny thing is,” Tobby said, “he didn’t die from the ride. They killed him.”

“What do you mean? Where does this chute go anyway?”

“Where does this shit go anyway?” Tobby echoed, then laughed again. “Down to the mines. Nearly drops on the heads a them sorry
bastards. Soon as Arry fell in the chute, I routed him to one of the safe ones. Would have saved his life, if he had sense.”

“Safe ones?” Dorian asked.

“You don’t know shit, do you?” He punched Dorian in the arm. “Good one, eh? Eh?”

“Funny,” Dorian said, forcing himself to smile ruefully.

“Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?”

“Nope, didn’t see that coming.”

“I got a million of ’em,” Tobby said.

“I bet.” If ever there was a man who deserved his slavery, I’ve met him. “Why are some chutes safe?” Dorian asked.

“These chutes been here hunerds of years. First there was only one chute. At first it was a couple hunerd foot drop, from
the bottom of the chute to the bottom of the chasm—well, after a couple hunerd years with twenty thousand folks shooting shit
down it, there was no drop at all. Good ol’ Batty Bertold got real nervous, thought an army or the pit slaves themselves might
climb up the chute and attack the Citadel from within. So he built this. Now, when the shit gets within fifty feet of the
bottom of the chute, we switch to a new chute. We let that first one sit until it’s all soil. Then the pit slaves cart it
up and the guards sell it for fertilizer. Course, I got to use all the chutes at least once a day so they don’t rust up and
so the pit slaves can’t tell where the soil is firm under a few inches of crap and where the soup is deep enough to drown
in. When Arry went down, I switched up the chutes so he’d have a chance.”

“How fast can you do that?” Dorian asked.

Tobby tsked and pulled the third and the eighth lever and pulled the last chain. It took him about three seconds.

Dorian whistled, fixing the positions in his mind. “What happened to him?”

“He gave some shit to one of the meisters down there. Can’t say I blame him, after what he’d been through.”

“Sounds like he had a shitty day.” Dorian felt dirty for the pun.

“Uh huh,” Tobby said, not catching it. “Two meisters guard the pit slaves. It don’t make ’em happy. They don’t take no shit.
They turned Arry inside out.” He shook his head, somber. A moment later he grinned. “They don’t take no shit, huh? Huh?” He
punched Dorian’s arm.

Dutifully, Dorian laughed. I could take two meisters.

When Dorian returned from emptying the crap pots, the concubines were keening. Dorian had never heard anything like it. He
set the crap pot down and stared at Hopper.

“It’s the Godking,” the old man whispered, frozen by the sound from the next room. “We just got news. He’s dead.”

Dorian’s heart stopped. My father’s dead.

He wandered into the great room of the harem in a daze. Nearly two hundred women were gathered in the cold marble luxury of
the place. They were tearing their clothes, ripping out their hair, beating their naked breasts, scratching bloody furrows
in alabaster skin. Black tears rolled from kohled eyes. Some had flung themselves on the floor, weeping uncontrollably. Others
had fainted.

In grief as in love and in drink, Dorian’s people were extravagant, but these women’s tears were not for show. They had all
lived in awe and terror of the Godking, and few of them would have dared love him. None of his favorite concubines were here.
No one would report who had wept and who had not. But His Holiness had been the center around which their lives revolved.
Without that center, everything collapsed.

They would be compelled to throw themselves on Garoth’s pyre to accompany him into the afterlife and be his slaves forever.
And Garoth had always liked his women young.

Dorian saw one beautiful girl, Pricia. She was barely fourteen and just past her flowering, sitting alone, staring into space.
She was still a virgin. Yorbas Zurgah had intended her as a present to the Godking when He arrived home.

“You have a chance,” Dorian told her woodenly. “The next Godking might claim you.”

“All my friends are going to die,” Pricia said, not even looking at him.

Her answer shamed him. She hadn’t been thinking of herself. This place was starting to make him think cynically, like the
old Dorian.

The other implications of Garoth’s death pounded Dorian a moment later. The Godking had left no clear heir, and whichever
aetheling succeeded him would certainly kill off the others. If the concubines knew of Garoth’s death, the aethelings would
soon, if they didn’t already.

Jenine!

Dorian burst into the eunuchs’ room where he’d left Hopper.

“Get them all out of here,” he ordered the old man. “Start with the virgins.”

“What?”

“Hide them in my room. At least one of the aethelings will try to seize the Godking’s harem as a declaration that he should
be the next Godking. Or the guards may go crazy. You can’t hide all of them, but at least the virgins will have a chance to
be claimed by the next Godking. If they get raped, they’ll die with the others.”

Hopper nodded at once. “Done,” he said.

Dorian ran up the Tygre Tower. The dreads guarding at the base of the tower were gone, and his heart dropped. He sprinted
up the steps three at a time. He heard raised voices as he came up the last twenty steps. “ . . .  come, or I hurt you and
then you come.”

“All right,” Jenine said, defeated.

The latch had been melted off the door. The fucker. It was Tavi, come to violate Jenine. Dorian kicked open the door just
in time to see Jenine pull out the dagger he’d given her and bury it in a young man’s chest. He screamed and his vir rose
to the surface of his skin instantaneously. A white ball the size of a fist slammed into Jenine’s chest and threw her across
the chamber.

He turned at the sound of the door bursting open, but he didn’t have time to move before Dorian’s flame missiles hit him.
Six burrowed through his chest and out his back before he fell facedown, dead. It wasn’t Tavi. It was Rivik, Tavi’s sidekick.
Dorian went to Jenine.

She was whimpering, struggling to breathe, her chest concave with six broken ribs. Dorian put his hand on her chest, Seeing
the damage. She relaxed as he washed away her pain. Bone after bone snapped into place seamlessly, and in moments, Dorian
was done.

Jenine stared at him, wide-eyed. “You came.”

“I’ll always come for you.”

She inhaled experimentally. “I feel . . .  perfect.”

Dorian smiled shyly and then started grabbing candelabra, tygre statuary, anything he could find made of gold.

“We can’t carry all that,” Jenine said.

Dorian dropped the unwieldy pile on the table. He winked at her and put his hands on each object in turn. One by one, they
melted. The gold puddled onto the table, separating and connecting into lumps like quicksilver. The lumps began congealing,
thinning, hardening, until each was flat disk bearing the likeness of Garoth Ursuul.

“What . . .  how . . .  ?” Jenine stuttered.

“The coins are only worth a fraction of what the art was, but they are a more liquid asset.” He smiled as she giggled in wonder.

He allowed himself that smile, but things were not going according to plan. Dammit, everything was ready for tomorrow. The
worst of it wasn’t the wasted preparations, the lack of horses, the lack of warm clothing for the perilous crossing through
Screaming Winds, the lack of dried food. It was that Dorian had used southern magic. Any meister who smelled him would sense
it. Luxbridge might drop him into the chasm.

The chaos in the castle might not help them. More soldiers and meisters would surely be running about, and more aethelings
definitely would. It meant that all Dorian’s meticulous memorization of guards’ watch routes and personal habits was for nothing.

Still, he was here, the armies of the Godking were not, nor were any of the Godking’s older sons; Jenine was alive and safe,
and the passes south were still open. In his wrath, he had vented far too much magic on Rivik, but he still had some left,
enough to take care of a meister or even a Vürdmeister if caught unawares.

“What are you doing?” he asked as Jenine turned Rivik’s body over. He didn’t want her to have to look at that.

“I can’t go like this. I’m taking his clothes,” she said.

Together, they stripped Rivik. There was blood on the front of the tunic where Jenine had stabbed his chest, and six small
burn holes on both front and back, but otherwise the tunic was fine. Rivik had been a slight youth, so the tunic was only
a little big.

Jenine threw off her blouse and pulled on the dead youth’s tunic, not asking Dorian to look away or turn his back. He stared
at her slack-jawed, frozen, then looked away, embarrassed, then wondered why he was embarrassed and she was not, and looked
again and looked away. He was twice her age! She was beautiful. She was brazen. She was being perfectly sensible; they didn’t
have time to be coy. Her head emerged from the tunic and she saw the look on his face. “Hand me the trousers, would you?”
she asked nonchalantly.

The color in her cheeks told him it was a bluff, so he matched brazenness for brazenness and watched her as she pulled off
her skirt. She snatched the trousers from his hands. “If you don’t watch it, Halfman, you’re going to be considerably more
than half a—” she said with a significant glance at his trousers, but then her eyes went past Dorian to the body behind him.
Her jest died and her high color drained away. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I hate this place. I hate this whole country.”

She finished dressing in silence and pulled on the floppy hat Dorian had frequently worn to cover his own face as much as
possible, piling her long hair on top of her head in a bundle. In the end, it was a poor disguise, not because of the clothes,
but because Jenine didn’t walk like a man, and couldn’t learn in the few moments Dorian was willing to spare trying to teach
her. But if she didn’t look like a man, she didn’t look like a princess either. They’d just have to hope everyone was distracted.

Feir had asked for two hours to get Lantano Garuwashi’s sword out of Ezra’s Wood. He had no idea how much of that time had
passed. In fact, he couldn’t remember how he’d come here. He looked up at the towering sequoys stretching to the sky.

Well, at least, he knew where here was. He was definitely in Ezra’s Wood. He looked at his hands. Both of them were scraped
and his knees hurt, as if he’d fallen. He touched his nose and could tell it had been broken and then set properly. There
was still crusty, dried blood on his upper lip.

Dorian had told him stories about men who’d taken a blow to the head and forgot themselves, either forgetting everything before
the blow, or more commonly completely losing the ability to remember anything at all after the blow. They could meet a person,
the person would walk out of the room, and five minutes later return and be greeted as a stranger once more. For several moments
Feir felt a panic rising inside him at the very thought, but aside from his nose, his head didn’t feel as if he’d taken a
blow. He could remember leaving Lantano Garuwashi, he could remember approaching the vast bubble of magics that surrounded
Ezra’s Wood, and he could remember the turmoil within those magics as—miles to the east—the Lae’knaught had entered the Wood
and been trapped within it. Feir had used that turmoil as a distraction for his own attempt. But from that point, he could
remember nothing.

He was facing the bubble now, as if he was leaving. He took a few more steps, disoriented and came around the trunk of another
giant sequoy. Before him, not fifty paces away, just outside the magic, were Lantano Garuwashi and, oddly, Antoninus Wervel.

Maybe I have gone mad. Antoninus Wervel was a red mage, one of the most powerful and most intelligent men to walk the halls of Sho’cendi in decades.
He was a fat Modaini man, and he’d been a casual friend for years. To see him sitting awkwardly cross-legged beside Lantano
Garuwashi, who sat as gracefully as he did everything, was surreal.

Then the men saw Feir and both rose. Antoninus called something out, but though he was only forty paces away now, Feir couldn’t
hear him.

Feir walked straight to the wall of magic. Whatever clever magic he’d used to get into the Wood, it obviously hadn’t been
clever enough. He was alive only by the forbearance of whatever it was that lived here. So Feir walked straight through the
magic. It slid around him, and for a moment, he could swear something in the Wood felt amused.

Then he was out.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Antoninus Wervel.

Antoninus laughed. “You escape the Wood, something no mage has done in seven centuries, and you ask what I’m doing?”

“Do you have my sword?” Garuwashi demanded.

Feir was carrying a pack strapped to his back that he hadn’t been carrying when he entered the Wood. “Him first,” he said.

Antoninus lifted his kohled eyebrows, but said, “I came with a delegation from Sho’cendi to recover Curoch. After the Battle
of Pavvil’s Grove, the delegation turned back. They were sure that if Curoch had been present in such a desperate battle with
so many magi and meisters present, that someone would have tried to use it. No one did, so they decided to backtrack and follow
other leads. The truth is, I don’t think Lord Lucius trusts everyone in our delegation. He and I don’t care for each other,
but he knows where my loyalties lie, so he released me. So now it’s your turn, Feir. Did you recover Ceur’caelestos?”

The Modaini was too damn smart. Feir could tell that the man had put together Feir, who’d held one nearly mythical sword,
with the appearance of another nearly mythical sword and found no coincidence.

Feir opened the pack. There was a note inside with directions and instructions, written awkwardly, as if the hand writing
it had been writing in an unfamiliar language. Feir read it quickly and remembered bits and pieces of what had happened in
the Wood. Setting the note aside, he pulled a hilt out of his pack—a hilt only, with no sword. It was a perfect replica of
the one on Ceur’caelestos, and it would fit Lantano Garuwashi’s sheath perfectly. As long as the sa’ceurai didn’t draw his
sword, no one would ever know.

“What is this?” Lantano Garuwashi demanded.

“It’s three months,” Feir said.

“What?” Garuwashi asked.

“That’s the time I need,” Feir said. “I’m a Maker, Garuwashi, and I received instructions in the Wood—a prophecy left by Ezra
himself, centuries ago. If you prefer death, I will be your second, but if you want to live, take this hilt. Antoninus and
I will go to Black Barrow and do things no one has done since Ezra’s time. I will make Ceur’caelestos for you by spring.”
Or at least a damn good fake. “You can be the king you’ve always wished to be.”

Lantano Garuwashi stood for a long moment, eyes hot and then cold, trapped between his desires and his honor. He swallowed.
“You swear you will bring me my ceuros?”

“I swear it.”

Lantano Garuwashi took the hilt.

Logan and Kylar rode at the head of Logan’s five hundred horse and nine hundred foot. Logan’s bodyguards rode ten paces back,
giving them privacy. The sharpened-tooth simpleton Gnasher rode in his usual spot beside Logan, but he didn’t care what they
might say; he just liked to be close. Kylar unrolled a worn letter.

“Whatcha got?” Logan asked.

Kylar gave him an inscrutable look, shrugged, and handed it to him. In small, tight handwriting, it said, “Hey, I thought
it was my last one, too. He said I got one more for old time’s sake. He might even have been telling the truth. Be careful
who you love. Don’t follow prophecies. Don’t let them use you to bring the High King. Your secret is your most important possession.
You’re more important than I ever was, kid. Maybe for all those years I was just holding it for you. MAKE NO DEALS WITH THE
WOLF.”

“I assume this all means something to you,” Logan said.

“Not all of it,” Kylar said.

“Who’s the Wolf?” Logan asked.

“Someone I made a deal with right before I found that letter.”

“Ouch. And the High King?”

Kylar grimaced. “That was part I was hoping you could help me with.”

Logan thought. “There was a High King who held Cenaria and several other countries maybe four hundred years ago, but Cenaria’s
been held by lots of different countries in the last thousand years. Sounds like an Ursuul thing. They’re the only ones in
Midcyru in a position to rule over other kings. I’d guess they’re dredging up a prophecy to give themselves legitimacy. Is
the secret what I think it is?” Logan asked.

“Here we are,” Kylar said. They had circled Ezra’s Wood, looking for signs of the Lae’knaught. Kylar said it was something
Logan needed to see for himself.

Fifty paces away, Logan saw a wall of dead men. Hundreds of them pressed against an invisible barrier, trying to escape the
forest. In places, bodies were piled twenty feet deep as men had clambered over the dead, hoping to reach the top of the invisible
wall. There was no movement. No one was merely injured. Every body had been mangled, torn with sharp claws that must have
had godlike strength. Helmets had been crushed flat. Heads were simply missing. Swords had been snapped like twigs. Even the
horses were dead, heads torn off, sinews ripped through the skin, some muscles snapped instead of torn.

For as far as the eye could see into the sequoys, there was only devastation, and as far as the eye could see west and east,
Lae’knaught were pressed against an invisible wall. They’d tested every place they could before dying, and found it everywhere
impregnable. Gore still drained from the bodies, sliding against the wall like glass, but strangely, there was no smell. The
magic sealed in even the air.

Logan heard vomiting from his bodyguards.

“The villagers of Torras Bend say someone tries to go into the Wood every generation. It happens so much that their term for
suicide is ‘walking into the Wood,’” Kylar said. Logan turned. Kylar’s eyes were hollow, stricken. “I did this,” Kylar said.
“I lured them here so they’d fall into the Ceurans’ trap instead of you. These souls are on my tab.”

“Our scouts heard the fighting. That’s why we held back. What you did here saved fourteen hundred lives—”

“At the cost of five thousand.”

“—and maybe saved Cenaria.” Logan stopped. It wasn’t making a dent. “Captain,” he said. “Bring the men forward in groups.
I want everyone to see this. I don’t want any Cenarian to ever make the mistake we almost did.”

Kaldrosa Wyn saluted, obviously glad to be given a duty to take her away from the massacre.

Logan changed tack. “Kylar, I know you think you’re a bad man, but I’ve never seen anyone who will go to the lengths you will
to do what you’ve decided is right. You are an amazingly moral man, and I trust you, and you’re my best friend.” Logan looked
steadily at Kylar to let him read the truth.

Kylar gave a sarcastic, you-can’t-be-serious grimace that slowly melted. The tension left his face as the truth sank in. Logan
meant every word. Kylar blinked suddenly. Once, twice, and then looked away.

Oh, my friend, what have you gone through that being called moral nearly makes you weep? Or was it being called friend? Logan thought. He had been isolated for months in the Hole and found it hell. Kylar had been isolated for his entire life.

“But?” Kylar asked.

Logan heaved a deep sigh. “Not stupid either, are you?” Kylar flashed that old mischievous grin, and Logan loved him fiercely.
“But you were a wetboy, Kylar, and now you’re something even more dangerous. I can’t claim that I don’t know what you might
do to Terah—”

“Do you really trust me?” Kylar interrupted.

Logan paused, maybe for too long. “Yes,” he said finally.

“Then this conversation is finished.”