Part 6 (1/2)

The drummers were standing behind a line of men and women who faced the interior of the fiefs; there were four drums in total that Kaylin could count. The men who beat them had weapons at their feet, but they were otherwise intent on stretched skin, not incoming danger. The four drums circled three people, however, and Kaylin recognized one of them: Mejrah. She was the oldest stranger present, she was about a foot shorter than the People standing beside her, and her eyes were all whites.

CHAPTER 4.

Mejrah was not a door ward, but the hair on the back of Kaylin's neck began to rise, and the marks on her skin began to ache in their usual protest at the presence of magic. Her exposed arm was also, d.a.m.n it, glowing softly; the runes were a pale blue. At the moment, however, the visible marks gave her one solid advantage: no one stood in her way, and anyone who happened to be there moved.

Severn crowded her back to take advantage of the brief openings; he moved, as he often did, like a cat.

”Kaylin, twelve o'clock.”

Twelve o'clock, like positions ten to one, was occupied by large, weapon-wielding men; it was also briefly illuminated by bursts of angry, orange flames. The flames were close enough that Kaylin could feel their instant heat, and far enough away that she didn't burn. But in the wake of fire, she could see the shape of something dark and ungainly rising above a horizon composed of tall warriors. Whatever the creature was, it was not small.

Size, in Shadows, wasn't necessarily directly proportional to their power. But appearance was often an indicator. The creature was not being helpful in this regard: it didn't seem to have a form. Instead, Shadow rose and fell, like black snowdrifts in a very bad storm. Like snow, the blackness accreted. Dragonfire seemed to cause it some damage-but not enough to stop it or destroy it.

The men spoke in short, sharp bursts; they were clearly giving orders in harsh, guttural syllables. Mejrah's voice soared above them, twining as it did with the two voices of the men who stood on either side of her, as sightless as she. Their voices formed words, and these words were tantalizingly familiar to Kaylin; she couldn't understand them, but she felt as if she should. She glanced at Mejrah, and from her to the air just above the old woman's hands; it was wavering, as if it had substance and texture.

Kaylin expected to see words form in that air: ancient words. True words. Instead, light grew, curling in on itself as if it was a trapped, compressed cloud.

The creature drew closer and closer to the boundaries, and as it did, it opened what might-might-have been a mouth, and it began to speak. To Kaylin's surprise, she recognized some of the language. Not enough to understand it, of course-that would have been too easy. It wasn't the ancient tongue, though-it was the tongue that the strangers spoke, and were speaking even now.

They were shouting at the creature, and from their stances, it appeared that they were taunting it. Had she not been so much on edge, her jaw would have hit the ground and bounced. Every instinctive reaction she'd developed over the course of her life screamed in protest: this was suicide. Then again, so was standing still, which they were notably all doing.

Had they been anyone else-in particular, people who would understand a word she shouted-she would have started to shout orders of her own. As it was, she reminded herself, firmly, that they had spent most of their lives fighting Shadows in one way or another. If they were standing there while Mejrah was doing a complicated form of magic that would have had the Imperial mages looking down their noses in contempt, they had to have a reason for it.

Tiamaris roared and the men on the ground took up his cry; she thought they were attempting to repeat what he'd said. The timbre of their voices suited their size; it wasn't Dragon, but it had enough strength behind it not to make a mockery of the word itself. The drumbeats began to pick up speed until all sound was a collision: Mejrah, Tiamaris, the warriors on the ground, and the pounding beat of the skins themselves.

And then, suddenly, there was silence. Light leaped from sky to ground, pa.s.sing through the raised weapons of the strangers. The blades absorbed light instead of reflecting it, as if they were being anointed.

The Shadow roared; it was not a dragon roar-but it was as loud, as intense, as Tiamaris at his peak. It was also cold and dark enough to devour light and the things that came with it. Kaylin took a step back, although she wasn't in the front line; the warriors, however, didn't.

The Shadow continued to roar, and as it did, the ground around it began to heave. That ground, the surface of the street, and the hint of the buildings that had once occupied it, were black and white, leeched of color. They were soon leeched of their form, as well; they s.h.i.+mmered and began to fold in on themselves, condensing as they did into vastly less-stationary shapes. She'd seen something similar once before, on the very edge of the fief of Nightshade. Where the moving, shambling ma.s.s of attenuated Shadow had been, more grew, separate and distinct from it.

She now understood why the front was so heavily occupied; in less than five minutes the whole of the ground on the other side of a border that suddenly felt amorphous and theoretical had literally risen in fury. The newer shapes took on a solidity of form that the central Shadow hadn't: they stretched to eight feet in height, growing limbs as they did. For the most part they had two of each-arms and legs-although the little details wobbled if Kaylin examined them for long. They were disturbing because they didn't so much walk as glide, and they were utterly silent.

Then again, the ma.s.s at their center was doing enough shouting for a small army, which was convenient for it, as that's what it appeared to be raising. It began to move through the rain of Tiamaris's fire, and Tiamaris, wings spread, flew once over it. The creature threw some part of itself, as if a tendril, at the moving Dragon.

He dodged, but Kaylin could see he'd been hit; he didn't bleed, but the Shadow darkened one wing and began to spread. She drew one sharp breath, but before she could shout, the strangers did. Tiamaris banked, breathing fire as he made his way toward the earth on his own side of the border; he landed behind the front line, behind where Kaylin now stood. She glanced over her shoulder to see Tara moving down the street. Given her height, it would have been impossible to see her if she'd actually been walking; she wasn't.

She was flying; her back had sprouted familiar Aerian wings. She headed directly for Tiamaris, and as Kaylin turned back to face the border, the Shadows arrived.

Shadows could, in theory, be stopped by the usual things: swords, clubs, crossbows. The Ferals that had terrorized the night in the fiefs of Kaylin's childhood-and still did-could be killed. They just couldn't be killed easily, they were so d.a.m.n fast.

But the Shadows she'd encountered in the High Halls or in Barren, just before Tiamaris's reign, had been different. They were visually distinct, for one; they were often larger than a good-size horse; they had an indeterminate number of limbs, heads, or jaws, and the jaws could frequently open up at the end of anything: tail. Forearm. Stomach. Some had no eyes; some had eyes where every other part of a body would otherwise be. Some could fly, some could float, some seeped like the spread of thick liquid; some could speak.

The speech was always disturbing.

It was disturbing now. It wasn't the tenor of the voice, it wasn't the words-because at the moment, the words were unintelligible to Kaylin. It was the fact that they could speak, think, and communicate at all. Ravenous, efficient Ferals felt almost natural. Moving, dense mist shouldn't have been able to keep up a steady stream of continuous speech, continuous command.

But the words came out of the darkness. It drew closer, and as it finally reached the edge of the border-a border defined entirely by eight-foot-tall warriors-black mist cracked and shattered. It had shattered because what it contained was too large: the thing at its center-still speaking-began to unfold, gaining height and width as it did.

It was tall: half again the height of the warriors it now faced. But unlike many of the one-offs, as Morse called them, this one had two arms, two legs; it had, more or less, one head. The head was ma.s.sive, and it was nauseatingly unstable, the line of mouth and nose and what might have been eyes wavered like a heat mirage. That wasn't what was remarkable about it, though.

It wore armor.

And it was recognizably armor. It was chitinous, but so was Dragon armor when worn in human form; it was sleek, and it covered the whole of the body, except of course the face. It shone, reflecting light rather than absorbing it. The Shadow had continued to speak as it unfolded, revealing itself to the men and women who now waited in grim silence. But when at last it drew its weapon, it, too, fell silent, signaling an end to speech.

An end, Kaylin thought, drawing her daggers to life. She watched the giant raise his sword in two hands, lifting it over his head and exposing the whole of his chest to do so.

And she watched the bolts that flew-from where, she wasn't certain-to strike that chest and that armor. All but one bounced; one snapped. The sword plunged toward the earth, and the men who stood beneath it; they had raised their own weapons, but they weren't fools; they moved. The sword crashed into the ground, literally breaking it.

Kaylin leaped to one side of the fissure that was opening beneath her feet, cursing in full Leontine. Nothing she had seen when Barren had ruled this fief and the borders had gone down had been as bad as this.

Mejrah shouted; her voice was higher and rougher than the voices of the men, and it carried. The warriors regrouped a few yards away from the armored giant, standing their ground as the Shadows that he had summoned poured toward them.

This shouldn't be happening. Kaylin knew it. The Tower was active, and it had a Lord; that had been the whole d.a.m.n point. She backed up-it was that or be trampled-and she saw that the Shadows had changed their formation: they were flowing into the fissure the sword had made, following the damage done.

Fully half the warriors on either side of the gap in the ground now turned their weapons upon the invaders, and those weapons-lit, still, by the brilliance of the odd light Mejrah and her two companions had chanted into existence-cut through Shadow as if it were insubstantial mist. But insubstantial or no, the Shadow burned.

It also attacked. This army of summoned Shadow was in no way as impressive as the summoner, but it didn't have to be: it was still chaotic, amorphous, unpredictable. The uniformity of form that had existed before the lesser Shadows had attempted to cross the border through the breach melted away, and the Shadowy forms that had echoed the warriors were lost. The separation between the forms was lost, as well, as the warriors struck; the Shadows began to bleed into one another, combining and congealing into something vastly less human in appearance.

It was almost a relief. She lifted a dagger, reversed her grip on it, and threw it cleanly toward an emerging eye; Shadow eyes, in her experience, generally did more than just see things. The throw was mediocre; the dagger embedded itself into the iris, not the pupil. In a normal creature, this would have been fine, but the Shadow had pupils the size of Kaylin's fist. It couldn't see her from that eye, but it turned the bulk of its moving form-which was legless-in her direction, while the warriors hacked bits and pieces off its body.

Those pieces dissolved, seeping into the crevice itself; the Shadow continued to move toward Kaylin. Her dagger slowly disappeared into the damaged eye, as the eye transformed itself into a bleeding mouth. d.a.m.n it. She leaped back as another eye began to emerge; this time, it was lidded, and this time, her dagger bounced. As it did, the lid snapped open.

d.a.m.n it! Eyebeams lanced the ground. Clods of dirt and broken stone rose in chunks, and a shout went up from the warriors, one of whom hadn't been lucky enough to dodge in time. He went down; the rest of his companions, instead of running for cover-which was admittedly a lost cause this close to the border-formed up. They parried the d.a.m.n beams.

No fool she, she threw herself forward, rolled between two of them, and came to her feet. Or tried.

The ground shook, causing her to stumble; the armored giant had once again brought his sword cras.h.i.+ng into the packed dirt and cracked stonework on the edge of the border itself; the rupture traveled across the boundary. The giant, however, did not. No, Kaylin thought, watching him. He couldn't. And the only purchase his Shadows had were in the crevices themselves, at least until the barrier was breached.

She turned to look for Tara and found her easily. The Avatar was glowing. She still had wings, but her face looked like alabaster: white, cold, and hard. Gone were the dirt-stained, slightly oversize clothes of a fledgling gardener; the Avatar's clothing, it appeared, was whatever she desired it to be. At her side, but grounded, stood Tiamaris, and at his side, still enc.u.mbered by the frailer human form, stood Sanabalis. Severn was on the other side of the first crevice, and he was working his chain and its terminating blades.

Tiamaris left the warriors as they hacked away at both eyebeams and the physical body that was shooting them so chaotically. He turned his attention to one of the three new breaks that straddled the edge of his fief; Tara flew to a different one. Sanabalis grimaced, and then walked-quickly for a man who affected age-toward the last. He still hadn't bothered to shed the human form, but he didn't need to be in Dragon form to breathe fire.

Clearly age made some difference; the fire was white, and it was hot enough to cause the ground to glow red. The small amount of Shadow that had leaked into the crevice over which Sanabalis kept watch began to smolder, and black smoke rose as it screamed. For a puddle, it made a lot of noise. Morse joined Sanabalis; she had a long sword, but she stayed behind the Dragon Lord, watching the ground intently. When tendrils rose up the sides and tried to find purchase in the ground above, she cut them down without blinking.

Kaylin cursed as the earth shook again. This was getting them nowhere; the giant could make cracks in the ground all d.a.m.n day and he didn't seem to be running out of Shadow to fill them. He couldn't cross the border; that much was clear. He tried; she could see him straining to move, and she could see the sudden stillness that made his failure clear.

Her arms and legs were aching now, which she expected, given the magic. What she didn't expect, as she turned her full attention to the armored giant, was the way her vision began to blur. This was not the time to pa.s.s out, and as she'd had some experience with that on her drinking binges with Teela and Tain, she recognized some of the signs.

But she hadn't been drinking with the two Barrani Hawks in months; she certainly hadn't been drinking today. She forced herself to focus, and as she did, the whole of the armored giant snapped into place with a sharp clarity that was so sudden it made her teeth rattle. It wasn't his size or his shape or the way his blade-which she doubted she could even lift-was drinking in both Shadow and light; it wasn't the way his armor glowed, or even the way his eyes did-because he had eyes and she could suddenly see them.

It wasn't even the movement of his mouth, the way his lips formed a continuing chain of syllables that she couldn't quite force into words. It was his name. She could see it as clearly as she had ever seen a name before, but for the first time, she actually understood what it was she was seeing. The border that he struggled against was also completely visible to Kaylin as she watched him. It, like his name, had form and shape in a way that it had never had before.

It was hard to look away, and she could only manage it for a few seconds. But the brief glance the effort afforded made at least one thing clear: the Shadows that crossed the border had no similar words at their heart; they had no substance. Which was a stupid thing to think of creatures that could destroy anything standing in their way.

Then again, so could tidal waves and earthquakes, and no one tried to reason with them.