Shadowblood

Chapter Twenty-Four

Rik stood by the abandoned mansion in which they had taken refuge and listened to the sounds of the night. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted and something moved through the underbrush, perhaps a fox in pursuit of prey. He felt alone, like the last man in the world, for once not even the voices in his head troubled him.

Tamara touched him lightly on the arm. “We’d best proceed if we are going to get these lessons finished by a respectable hour. People are already starting to talk.”

He could tell from the tone of her voice that she was making a joke, but she was also impatient for some reason to begin. He knew he should be eternally suspicious around her but he found he was incapable of it. He suspected that it was just that she had a talent for teaching and was pleased to be able to use it, although as ever that seemed far too mundane a notion when applied to Tamara to be really plausible to anyone else but himself.

They made their way along a path, deeper into the surrounding wood. Rik glanced around to make sure they were not about to be ambushed.

Tamara moved quietly ahead, pausing occasionally to take deep breaths of the night air. Odd scents were there, unfamiliar blooms that grew in these lands but not in his own mixed with more familiar fragrances such as bitterblooms and witch roses. Overhead the moon beamed down through the leaves, its ancient face a skull.

They found a quiet spot in a clearing where some large boulders emerged from the earth, and Rik set the lantern down on top of one of them. Tamara looked thoughtful for a moment. “On a night like tonight who would believe the Servants of Shadow are abroad in our world or that the dead walk the surface of the earth.”

Rik could have done without that reminder of potential danger but he could see what she was getting at. There was a stillness and beauty to the night that moved him, and it came to him that even if the whole world fell to the Shadow that places like this would still remain, and that there would still be mountains and deep forests and seas untainted by evil. At that moment it seemed to him that evil was a very human concept, that it was a property unique to living beings to see things in those terms.

Somewhere nearby a mouse screamed as an owl dropped upon and broke its back. Perhaps he was wrong. The natural world was savage in its own way, and perhaps the Princes of Shadow would say that they were just owls preying on mice.

He had heard people argue that way before, robbers in Sorrow among them, just as he had heard others argue that it was the duty of the strong to prey on the weak, to winnow them out from the race. Those were easy arguments to make when you saw yourself as the strong one. Most such people never seemed to imagine there was someone stronger than themselves.

“You’re right,” he said to Tamara, bringing his mind back to the present. “I suppose in the end even the Princes of Shadow will pass. “

“Apparently they have not managed to do so on Al’Terra yet. They still seek new worlds to conquer.”

“Would it make a great deal of difference if they did?” he asked suddenly. “For most people in this world, I mean?”

“Did Asea put you up to asking that, to test me?”

“No. I came up with it all by myself. I am curious about what you think, that’s all. Would rule by the Princes be so different for most folk than the present regime?”

“I don’t see how you of all people can ask that? They propose to use humans as cattle.”

Rik felt a sourness rising up in himself. “People die anyway, of illness, of overwork, will the method of their death really make much difference?”

“I suppose that depends on whether you believe they have a soul, and whether having that soul eaten by a cosmic vampire is a fate worse than death.”

“It’s possible that people don’t have souls. That thanatomancy works simply by extracting nutrition from their bodies in a way analogous to the way we gain nutrition by eating food.”

“Is that what the voices in your head tell you?”

“Perhaps — but I suspect that I came up with that by myself too.”

“It might work that way, but then again it might not.”

“Looked at on a cosmic scale does it really make that much difference? One being will not live for a very long time. The other will pass in its normal span or something close to it anyway.”

“You are in a strange mood tonight, Rik,” said Tamara. She sounded wary. “Are you saying that you want to join with the Princes?”

“No. I am not. I hate them for what they have done. I hate what they are doing. I hate the fact that they have killed friends of mine by their actions and would kill me if they could. I am just wondering whether, in the long term, opposing them will make any difference.”

“I am not sure whether that’s a question that’s even worth asking?”

“What do you mean?”

“As far as we are concerned we can only affect what happens in our time.”

“You are not concerned with future generations then?”

“That’s a very human way of thinking, Rik. Take into account that I am a Terrarch. It’s possible my life will be scores of human generations.”

“That is not a problem I think I will have,” he replied.

“You do not know that. In any case, we should leave the philosophical discussions to one side for the moment and consider other things. I believe that you are ready to shadow-walk. You have mastered the basics.”

Excitement filled Rik. He had long envied her the gift that let her come and go seemingly unstoppably and without passing through the space between. The former thief in him appreciated how useful that talent could be and all the manifold uses he could put it to.

“I am willing to try,” he said.

“You should just do,” she said. “The secret and the ability is in your blood. It should come to you like breathing does to a baby.”

“After a sharp smack on the bottom?” he asked.

“Spare me the feeble jokes,” she said. “This is not the time. Of all the things I have to teach you, this is the one you most need to master. It is a power that may save your life and mine in the days to come.”

The seriousness of her tone affected him and he gave his full attention to what she said. He let himself relax and reach out with the other senses she had taught him to access. The night grew quieter, as if he had only a limited store of awareness available to his brain, and what he gained by concentrating in one area, he lost in another. The shadows became clearer to his sight and more than that, he became aware in some strange way, of what they contained. They were more vivid to him than objects he could see. He perceived them as if by an odd admixture of sight and touch, a mingled awareness of their weight and mass as of their shape and size.

He found that if he concentrated, he could pool his perceptions within one shadow, and become aware in much greater detail of all that was within it, although at a loss of his awareness of what was going on in the surrounding shadows. It was like concentrating on something through a magnifying glass. He was still conscious vaguely of what was happening elsewhere, as a man would be of objects moving in his peripheral vision. With an effort he could wrench his perceptions from shadow to shadow, moving it further and further away until he reached the limit of his ability perhaps a few hundred strides away.

He allowed his mind to jump to the fireside where Asea and Karim huddled over the rabbits they were stewing. He was aware of their conversation in part as if he was overhearing it and in part as if the very outlines of the words in the air were pressed into his thoughts. In some ways it was an experience similar to the ones he had undergone when he had taken some of the wizards drugs that Asea had given him.

Asea shivered as Rik concentrated his awareness on her, and Rik wondered if her sorcerer’s senses were so keen that she knew that she was under supernatural observation. According to what Tamara had told him, some people had a talent for that. Why not? Rik himself could detect a shadowgate being opened.

Rik wrenched his awareness back closer to hand. Aware that Tamara was shaking him by the shoulder and talking loudly in his ear.

“You’ve got to be careful of that,” she said. “You can get lost in the seeking, and waste hours shifting your consciousness from shadow to shadow.”

“How long was I out?”

“A few minutes.” It had happened before but not for so long, and Rik could see the danger at which she hinted. He had no idea how much time had passed since he had started the process, but he would not have guessed it was that long. It seemed there were subtle dangers in shadow magic, and that it was like a drug in more ways than one.

“Now,” said Tamara, “concentrate on the shadow beneath that tree on the far side of the clearing.” Rik did so, throwing his perception forward to the deep pool of darkness Tamara had indicated. Immediately he was aware of the shape of the ground around him, and mass of the tree above.

It was like being two people, divided, with one part of him living breathing flesh standing beside Tamara, the other a shadow outline in the place he perceived, and it came to him then that it was so. Somehow he had sent his shadow into the distance. He knew that if he looked down at his feet now, there would be no shadow there.

“Good,” Tamara said, her voice seeming to come from a great distance away.” You have completed the first part of the sending. Now you must complete the second. You must open the way.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” he asked. Forcing each word from his lips was like lifting a very heavy weight. He would not have believed how much the effort would cost him if he had not experienced it.

“Let yourself feel the space around your shadow-self. Be aware of it, as you would be of water around your hand if it were plunged into a pool.”

“I am doing that.”

“If you concentrate hard, you will become aware of something else, of a sensation of things underlying what you can feel, of a somehow distant chillness.”

He was immediately conscious of what she meant. It was as if his shadow were on the outside of something, part of the final layer of skin on an onion, and he was aware of something beneath, a different space, a tunnel into elsewhere. It was like rapping with his hand on a secret panel and becoming aware of the echo beneath. He could feel the energy there as he sometimes could when he was working sorcery.

“Do you have it?” Tamara asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“Tear a hole between your shadow self and the shadow realm.”

“Are you sure that is wise?”

“Wise or not, it’s the only way you will open the gate.”

“Is this how you do it?”

“It is how I did it originally. Now the whole process is so smooth that I don’t really notice how it’s done. But everyone and everything has to start somewhere.”

Rik tried to do as she said, but found that he could not. He simply had no idea of what he was doing. It was like asking a blind man to paint. He tried though and he kept trying until his frustration built. He felt obscurely humiliated that Tamara was here to witness this and angry with her as if she were deliberately asking him to do the impossible to make him feel foolish.

She sensed this, and he could almost picture her sardonic smile when she said, “It’s not always about you. I am trying to teach something in weeks that it took me years to learn.”

“I appreciate the effort,” he said. “I could only wish for more success.”

“Observe,” she said.

He felt another presence close to his shadow-shape and he knew it was hers. A tenebral hand reached out to cover his, and he felt that other presence guiding him through what had to be done. Suddenly there was a small gap, through which chill energy poured, widening itself. Within moments, it had suffused his shadow self.

He sensed the ebb and flow of secret energies, and then as if a key had turned in a lock, the parting of the veil that separated the Shadow world from his own. There was a sense of immense coldness and of alien presences whispering on the edge of the world, of things looking in from somewhere else. For a long moment his grasp on reality teetered. The way was open.

Tamara’s presence guided part of the shadow-self back to him, to where his shadow should have been and suddenly it was there, his shadow, in two places at once. More than that, there was a connection, a corridor between them that ran from one place to the other.

“Step forward into your shadow,” she said. “But be very careful, hold the opening at the other end open, otherwise you may be lost. I will do my best to guide you but do not rely on me being able to save you if things go wrong.”

What did she mean by that exactly? Was this the moment of crisis at last? Was this where treachery would occur? He told himself not to be so stupid. If she had planned to kill him she could have done so a hundred times before now. Ah, but this way she would have an explanation to give Asea. It would not be her fault if something went wrong with the way he cast the spell. He would be entirely to blame himself. He paused for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Stay or go?

He moved forward. There was a feeling such as he sometimes had in dreams of taking a step and beginning a fall down an infinite well. He was surrounded by blackness and grasping presences, the whisperers he had heard before, so like the ones who resided within his head, but which seemed to be native here, the natural inhabitants of this dark cold place. He sensed vague echoes of the world from which he had come, the bleak presences of shadows of trees and plants and small animals.

He put out his hands to steady himself, aware that somewhere ahead was an exit from this strange foul place. His lungs felt like balloons in a vacuum, as if all the air within him were threatening to explode outwards. His eyes stung and he felt the cold kiss of the void on his flesh.

He had no idea how long he fell for. He seemed to be outside time, in a dream space where events that lasted hours could be over in seconds and things that should have taken a heartbeat held the leaden touch of eternity.

Then he emerged from wherever he had been and stepped into the shadow of himself that anchored one end of the path. Time seemed frozen for an instant, as if he had stepped from a reality in which things moved much faster and to which his senses were still attuned. He was aware of a moth caught frozen in the air. It seemed as still as if it has been painted and he was certain he could have reached out and caught it if he so desired.

The shadow coated him like a film, surrounding him. He was it and it was him, and it was as if he had no more reality than it. He sensed possibilities there, of becoming like a shadow, of remaining in that strange half-realm between worlds and for a moment, sought to maintain the form and take a few steps. It was a strange feeling, as if he had suddenly become much lighter, or travelled to a world where gravity was far less and so was his mass.

He felt more like he was flowing over the surface of the world than walking on it, as if he were invisible and intangible as a shadow in darkness. He could not hold the form though, and his concentration slipped and somehow he was back in his own world, slumping to his knees, feeling gross and heavy and made of flesh and clay, with blood flowing sluggishly in his veins and his heartbeat ringing in his ears. His breath came from his lungs like a hurricane and he felt more real and yet more like a dream than ever he had in his life.

In another heartbeat Tamara was standing beside him, without having passed through the intervening space and without any part of the expenditure of energy it had cost him, or so it appeared. She stood over him, and looked down, at once worried and appalled.

“What did you do, there at the end?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I felt the gate open because I was linked to you when you created it but you were not there where it emerged. I am not sure what you did, but I thought something had gone wrong, that you were struggling to emerge, that you had failed and were gone forever.”

So he had been invisible to her. Rik considered telling her what he had experienced, the sense of the strange possibilities that he had encountered. It seemed apparent that she had no idea of what he had encountered. Tamara was a very good actress but he could not see what she had to gain by pretending ignorance of what he had just been through. If it was not something she knew about, it was not something she could help him with, and the knowledge might prove useful to him, give him some advantage over her if she planned treachery so he said, “I do not know. I felt like I was drowning and had to force my way back to the shore, and fortunately I succeeded.”

“It’s as well,” she said. “Staying too long in the shadow world can kill you. Natural laws are different there and you can run out of breath or heat or life. It is best to spend as little time there as possible and make your escape when you can.”

“Doubtless you are correct.” He allowed himself a smile as the realisation sank in that, whatever else he had achieved this night, he had performed his first successful shadow-walk. He had proved he had the gift, even if he had required her guidance at first to use it. He cast his thoughts back over the procedure and he thought he understood what she had done, and how he could duplicate it. “I did it,” he said. “I walked through the shadow.”

She nodded, obviously troubled by what had happened and not nearly as elated as he. “That you did. That you did.”

“I want to try it again, on my own this time.”

She shook her head grimly. “Not tonight. You have used up enough of your energy for one night. A second time and you might not make it.”

He felt oddly disappointed but he could see the sense of her words. He had barely enough energy to get to his feet and he had to place both palms on the ground and push himself up. He really did feel like an exhausted swimmer pulling himself from the sea.

“You did well,” she said. “It took me months to master what you have learned today.”

He concealed his inward feeling of triumph, and clutched his secret revelations close. He felt like he had touched on a source of power independent of Asea and of her, one which would be his alone, and in that moment became aware that he was feeling the lure of Shadow.