Shadow War (15 page)

“Sir—” Caelan
began.

Without warning,
the prince struck Caelan a harsh blow across the face.

Caelan went
staggering back, and managed to catch himself against the hut. He straightened
slowly, his cheek throbbing with pain. He could feel a hot trickle of blood
down his jaw, and guessed he had been cut by the prince’s signet ring.

Tirhin advanced on
him and struck him again. “You followed me. You deliberately disobeyed my
orders.”

He lifted his hand
a third time, but Caelan brought up his sword and held the point between them.

Caelan’s own
temper was running hot now, and he let it show in his eyes. “I came to help
you. To protect you from what has followed you tonight.”

Illuminated by the
torchlight spilling outside through the open door, the prince kept a wary,
furious eye on the sword in Caelan’s hand. “The only one who has followed me is
you, you filthy spy. This is the end of you!”

Caelan refused to
back down. He intended to drag Tirhin back to the palace and denounce him
before the emperor for his crimes. But if he said so, Tirhin would fight him.
Better to lie and be crafty for now.

“Your highness
promised me I should be your protector,” Caelan said. “That is why I am here.”

“Stop being so
damned noble. I am sick of your honor. Sick of your loyalty. You are like a dog
that is kicked but still comes cringing back for more.”

“Where is the
priest?” Caelan asked, interrupting. “We must go, and quickly. There is danger
here. It—•”

A shriek, similar
to the one he had heard before, but much closer, cut across his sentence. The
hair on the back of Caelan’s neck stood up. For an instant his bowels were
water. He did not know what it was, but it was not of the earth.

The prince whirled
around, his eyes bulging.
“Shyrieas!”
he said in a strangled voice. He
made a clumsy sign of warding and stumbled back into the hut. “Sien!” he
shouted. “Sien!”

Caelan followed
him, and stood blinking on the threshold. The priest was gone as though he had
never been there. Even the cup that Tirhin had thrown on the floor had
vanished. The fire on the hearth had been put out. Only the torches still
burned.

The prince was
buckling on his sword with a wild look in his eyes. “Damn him,” he muttered,
thrusting his dagger into his belt sheath. “This is his way of punishing me.”

Caelan barely
listened. He was eyeing the hole in the roof where the earthquake had broken
it. Kicking the debris across the floor, he circled, feeling edgy and trapped. “This
could have been a refuge. Better than taking our chances outside. But with that
hole, I don’t think we should stay here.”

Prince Tirhin
nodded grimly. He glanced at the door and swallowed. “They hunt in packs. The
blood on you will draw them.” As he spoke, he gave Caelan a second look and
blinked. “In fact, you’re covered with blood. What is all that?”

“I killed
something,” Caelan said shortly, picking up a torch. “I don’t know what it was.”

“Something that
was following me?” Tirhin asked.

Nodding, Caelan
tossed the torch to Tirhin, who caught it deftly, and picked up the other. “Ready?”
Caelan asked.

“These torches
will help, but they won’t last long.”

“It’s less than an
hour till dawn,” Caelan replied grimly. “That is our hope.”

Shoulder to
shoulder, armed with torches and drawn swords, they left the hut and began to
run.

It was crazy,
running like this, struggling up the steep hill, stumbling over the sharp, cold
lava that sliced through footgear. Ducking tree branches and avoiding puddles
of hot bubbling mud, Caelan ran until his lungs began to heave, until his
stomach felt as though it would spew the evening’s rich dinner, until his
freshly healed side ached. He ran, hearing the prince’s breath sounding harsher
and more ragged. He wondered if he was a fool to fear so much, when as yet he
had seen nothing.

Yet they were
coming, the dreaded guardians of the Forbidden Mountain, and all his instincts
knew it. Fear filled him, clouding his mind. He remembered the night he’d been
caught by the wind spirits, and knew the
shyrieas
would be somehow
worse.

They splashed
through the warm stream, and a little ray of hope lifted in Caelan. Better than
halfway to the main road now. He did not think reaching it would save them, but
at least it meant they would be off the mountain, in the clear, and on better
defended ground. They would make it to the road, he told himself, and there
they would fight.

The scream rent
the air, right on top of them, so startling, so unworldly that Caelan cried out
with it. His heart was pounding as though it would burst. He was out of breath,
out of strength. Sweat poured off him in a river. His sword weighed a thousand
pounds, and he was too weak, too spent from running to lift it.

Caelan
severed
,
leaving his weariness behind. A part of him knew he was taking a risk,
severing
so close to the prince. Tirhin might suspect his secret, yet what
did it matter right now? Surviving was more important than anything else.

Whirling with all
the speed he was famous for, Caelan lifted his torch aloft, just in time to
ward off the creature rushing at him.

It
was
a
wind spirit, he thought, feeling fear return. Yet the detachment and heightened
awareness of
severance
was already telling him differently. The
shyrieas
swirled and circled about them, long misty entities half seen in
the darkness. Some seemed to have the faces of women; others were too fearsome
to describe. They shrieked, and the sound was horrible enough to drive a man
mad. Caelan heard Tirhin scream.

The prince dropped
to his knees, and in a flash the
shyrieas
were on him, swarming in
silent flight, rending with claws and teeth.

Caelan waded into
them, feeling as though his skin was being sanded away. His clothes billowed in
the wind of their passing. He felt the cloth tearing into shreds. His sword
passed through them without effect, but everywhere the torch touched, a
shyriea
screamed and shied back.

Grimly Caelan
could think of only one thing to do. He focused on his torch flame and shifted
to
sevaisin,
joining himself to the flame, becoming flame, becoming
heat.

Fire shot down the
length of the torch and along his arms. He screamed in the flames as they
consumed him, yet when he opened his mouth, fire burst from him and blazed
across the
shyrieas.
They parted in a frenzy, melting and dissolving as
the flames drove them back.

Caelan’s hair and
clothes were on fire. Flames shot from his fingertips, from his eyes, from his
open mouth. He could not stop it, could not control it. He was burning in the
fire, dying in it even as the spirits were dying.

He felt the earth
scorching his feet as though he were drawing fire from what seethed below its
surface. From far away, he heard a rumble that grew in volume as though the
whole mountain stirred.

Then from the top
of
Sidraigh-hal
behind them, molten lava spewed forth a shower of red
and gold. The rumbling grew more violent, shaking Caelan off his feet.

The fire in him
went out, and somehow he was able to reach for
severance.
It snapped the
last connection, and he was free, blessedly free, back in the icy safety of
nowhere at all.

“The void,” he
mumbled, and lost consciousness.

* * *

He awakened in the
cold grayness of dawn to find himself sprawled on the ground while a fine mist
of rain fell on him. His clothing was sodden and plastered to his skin. Across
the canyon, the mountain still belched smoke, indistinguishable from the mist
at this distance. The air smelled of sulfur and wet ashes.

Caelan groaned and
managed to roll over until he could sit up. His clothes hung on him in filthy
tatters. His hands were streaked black with soot and grime. His hair smelled as
though it had been singed. Still, as bad as he felt, he could have been dead.
He
should
have been dead.

His amulet pouch
swung heavily against his chest. He held it a moment for comfort, then frowned.
It felt wrong. With sudden foreboding, he shook the contents onto his palm.
Before, he had had two small emeralds. Now they were fused together into a
larger whole, as though somehow they had grown. He did not understand what had
happened. His memories of fighting the
shyrieas
were unclear. Yet
clearly there had been much magic wrought.

He ran his
fingertips over the gem and frowned. It worried him that the emeralds had
changed. It was as though he was losing a piece of his last memories of Lea.

Finally he put the
emerald back in the pouch. It barely fit there now. He secured the top of the
pouch tightly and frowned, still disconcerted.

His sword was a
melted lump of metal, useless. He climbed stiffly to his feet and stamped
around unsteadily, observing the ring of charred grass around him. What had he
done this time, he wondered dazedly. He could barely think, much less remember.

Then he saw a
crumpled figure a short distance away. Caelan’s breath caught in his throat. He
stumbled over and dropped to his knees beside the prince.

Tirhin lay on his
side, unmoving. His clothes were as torn as Caelan’s. The rain had streaked the
bloody stains, washing them to pink. Cautiously Caelan touched Tirhin’s
shoulder and turned him onto his back.

The prince’s face
was pale and drawn with pain. He was unconscious, but not dead. Caelan did not
waste time trying to rouse him. He remembered that men attacked by spirits
often went mad. It would be easier to handle Tirhin this way.

Kneeling, Caelan
pulled the prince’s weight over his shoulder, then stood up, staggering a
little. His feet sank into the mud, and he found it hard to get his balance,
but little by little he made it up the hill to the main road.

There, the mire
was deeper than ever, but Caelan trudged steadily southward.
Sidraigh-hal
grumbled and belched threats behind him. Caelan was glad to turn his back on
this evil place. He hoped he never saw it again.

It would be a very
long walk back to the city. If the gods were kind, Tirhin would not die on the
way. To live was not what the prince deserved, but Caelan might as well run for
his own life as bring home a dead master.

“Traitor,” Caelan
said aloud, grimly ignoring the ache in his muscles and the prince’s heavy
weight. He forced himself to walk steadily and slowly. He had a long way to go.
“Master traitor, what will I say about you when I get you home? What will I do
with you? Bargain for my freedom in exchange for silence? Pit my feeble word
against your exalted one? Hope to gain an audience with the emperor, which is
as likely as learning how to fly? What am I to do? Who will believe me? As a
slave and a foreigner, I am nothing, and you are all. There is no one who will
believe me, for I have no proof of your infamy.”

Every word he
spoke aloud depressed his spirits. Would the prince be grateful for having his
life saved? Caelan no longer believed in fairness, not from the man slung
across his shoulder.

“All my life I
have believed in the wrong things,” he said aloud, speaking to the sky that was
slowly brightening despite the rain. “I should be running for my life. I think
I would be safer trying to hide in the wilderness than going back to resume my
chains.” He sighed. “A fool who serves a traitor. The gods help me.”

A loud noise
awakened Elandra from sleep.

Groggy and
confused, she sat bolt upright and brushed back her long heavy tangle of auburn
hair from her face. She listened, even drawing back the velvet bed curtains,
but all lay silent around her. Not even the palace servants were stirring yet.

It was that cold,
still time just before daybreak, when the night reluctantly released its dark
grip on the world. Elandra had been dreaming—strange, unpleasant dreams mingled
with intense anxiety about some task she had to perform.

Sighing, she
gripped her head in her hands. She felt tired. Sleep came fitfully these days,
if at all. She could not stop worrying about the coronation and all it
entailed. Since Kostimon had told her last month that she was not to be crowned
consort but instead sovereign, she had suffered a sense of gnawing dread.

Everything had
been changing so quickly since the announcement. She had already been moved
from the women’s wing of the palace to new state chambers near the throne room.
She had her own guards now, the members drawn from the elite Imperial Guard.
All were strangers to her. They had been brought before her yesterday in a
brief, private ceremony, wearing tunics emblazoned with her new coat of arms.
One by one, each man had knelt before her and sworn to serve her with his life.
Afterward, she had been informed that this ceremony of fealty would be repeated
following her coronation. She was asked to choose a color for her guardsmen.
One of the chancellors also muttered that a protector should be chosen. The
protocol involved seemed unclear; there had been no empress sovereign since
Fauvina some nine hundred years before. Many ancient tomes in rotting leather
bindings were pulled down from the palace archives and consulted with much
head-shaking and lip-pulling.

Even the
coronation ceremony itself had to be conducted differently. There was some
problem with the Vindi-cant priesthood over the matter of the wording. Elandra,
beset with seamstresses fitting her for her coronation robes, had not yet
learned the words of her own oaths because she kept getting revisions. Her
political tutor, Miles Milgard, stamped in and out of her chambers regularly,
trying to teach her history or inform her of the current state of alliances and
trade agreements while she stood on a cushioned stool like a mannequin, with
four seamstresses surrounding her, pinning and stitching as fast as they could.