Cast a Bright Shadow Read online

  Rothger laughed. He yelled wordlessly back at the dying Faz, an enemy strung with fifteen necklets of eyes, all of them agog at his collapse. Though controlling the reins of the lion-team, Rothger had secured them around his waist, as in a war chariot it was done. He shot with the Chaiord’s own bow, the one Athluan had given over to him, bringing man after man from his horsaz. Rothger quilled the sea-beasts with arrows too, because it amused him.

  To the south of the field of conflict bulked a row of stationary chariots, where stood the war mages. Guarded by Jafn warriors and beset by Faz, they cast thaumaturgic energies along the lines. Out at sea, in turn, the reiver shamans were also busy on the Mother Ship. Rays of psychic fission lanced and crossed, until the battlefield below bubbled under an iridescent spider’s web. Raw concussions rocked the sky.

  Another foe had evolved, more personally: not the first to try, he was climbing into Athluan’s chariot. The Fazion axe flapped, and the long knife, deceptively weightless. Athluan deflected them and carved the Faz free of his body.

  A former would-be invader, before he was repelled, had slashed Rothger across the back. It had been a light blow like a razor’s, letting blood, but as yet unfelt, unheeded. Athluan too had been marked. Against the three-year scar lying along his upper arm was now added a sibling stroke. Meanwhile a Faz knife-hilt had opened his cheekbone and bruised it black. Both brothers were covered in blood, mostly not their own.

  A streamer of mage-fire dropped through the turmoil. It appeared to do no actual physical harm.

  A reiver leapt from his dying horsaz towards them, and Rothger shot the Fazion through one of the non-jewelry eyes in his head.

  The day’s brightness was now entirely gone. Gradually, beyond the net of sorcery, the sky congealed. Specks of cold touched the heat of faces.

  As snow again began to fall, Lokinda’s big-eared son manifested by Athluan’s chariot.

  The Kree had lost his own charioteer – his bastard brother. Handling the car himself, his weapons all blood, he grinned. He was drunk on murder. ‘God snow them in deep where they lie.’ He spoke the ritual phrase with relish.

  Athluan nodded. ‘Deep on deep.’

  He noticed a sort of lull had formed about them here. Through the snowfall he saw Klow, Kree, Shaiy and Fazions hacking and hammering down the shore. Fewer blue faces, however, were visible.

  Was Lokinda’s boy distressed his kinsman was dead? Or had he always distrusted and disliked him, as Athluan did Rothger? In battle things were sometimes arranged … Something nudged Athluan low down in his mind. You too could have arranged it. You may regret you did not.

  He would not glance at this thought; he had never countenanced it for long.

  ‘Some of the outland muck broke for the plain,’ said Lokinda’s son.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rothger, ‘look there – twenty Jafn chariots in pursuit of them.’

  In the snow, Athluan was not so certain of numbers. But other holds and villages dotted the plains, and the Fazions were equally vicious in triumph or defeat. They must be followed, eradicated.

  Elsewhere here, the Jafn victory was spreading. At the sea’s wet edge, Klow and Kree fired flaming shafts at the Faz Mother. Several had struck. Two masts burned and smoke rushed from her. Her magic rays diminished.

  Athluan turned to Lokinda’s son, whose name he had abruptly forgotten. ‘Sir, will you oversee the taking of the Mother Ship?’ The boy seemed pleased: it was an honour, but not a taxing one now the shamans were waning. Otherwise such vessels were crewed by slaves eager to rebel.

  ‘Trust me. The Jafn captives will be brought ashore.’

  ‘I’ll go inland after the dregs,’ Athluan said.

  Lokinda’s nameless son saluted him. He signalled to the northern wise-woman. Her chariot was pulled by men, who brought it forward now.

  Athluan, as Rothger spun the chariot, saw her slender and upright, green hair blowing back in a wind of supernatural power. For some reason, it made him think of Saphay. But his feeling for Saphay was poisoned, and he dreaded the coming of the child which was not his. Tonight, when the fight was done, he might take the wise-woman aside. She was young, and had smiled at him when she fired his sword. She might well be willing.

  Guri had left the Jafn war camp last night before any moonrise. He had sped over the land, fleeter than a deer, bounding and cackling. Once he noticed bears and paused to annoy them, for they suspected his presence even if they could not properly see him. When he was tired of that, he went away into that region he could not afterwards recollect. It was actually only like falling asleep for an hour or so. The Olchibe favoured ordinary sleep; it refreshed him. Then he made on towards the Klowan-garth, where the child would be.

  The child was now always there, attracted increasingly to its fleshly self since the woman was close to birthing. It seemed all spirits did this. Even he, Guri, must have done it twenty-eight years before, when his mother was lugging him about in her womb.

  Of course, he did not need to run there, even if running so fast and far was exhilarating. For now Guri had found he could be anywhere he wanted in the blink of an eye.

  Up on the snow plains, then, he stopped, to watch two moons rising hand in hand. The third moon, thin and wan tonight, had already slipped embarrassedly away.

  As Guri watched, he became aware – as he believed, for the first time – of some wonderful and perfect other thing. Exciting to him, yet calm to him, this thing was nothing he could identify – and yet he knew it, and knew that he did. Guri, when physical, would never have observed in himself such a feeling. Now, however, he began to think he understood what it was. It was the There calling to him. There which Olchibe and Gech titled the World Behind the Moons, and the Jafn called the Other Place – and which in Ruk Kar Is they luxuriously named Paradise.

  Guri stared at the sky, thinking he saw the route now which led into the second world, the world of There. And he was infatuated with it. For all the enjoyments he had been having here recently, they could not begin to compare, he sensed, with an afterlife. He knew they could not. They were flimsy beside its potency, inspiration and splendour.

  For a pivotal instant, forgetting everything else, Guri lifted his arms, preparing to fly upward into eternity.

  But sweetness fractured in irrecoverable pieces.

  ‘Guri – Uncle Guri – Uncle Guri—’

  The child’s shrill voice had smashed the dream of elsewhere. Mislaying elsewhere at once, Guri turned his back on limitless joy. He had given his word, and he dived headlong from the night – into the country of Saphay’s unconsciousness.

  They were themselves running.

  Bent forward as she ran, the woman held the child in her arms.

  It was beneath a sea, beneath a roof of frozenness, like clouds, supported by columns made of midnight. Comets and stars that were fish sped by.

  Her hair blew behind her, gone a sour shade in the water. The child’s hair blew also, dark like blood.

  Guri knew them both quite well by now. He stepped into their path. With a pang of uneasy relief, he saw how the boy at once reached out to him. But the woman gazed at Guri with insane wild eyes. Did she recall they had already met?

  He knew her name, having heard it spoken about the Klow House.

  ‘Saphay – wait, girl. Is it him, that stink-god, comes after you?’

  She had halted. She panted, thinking she had run far, although in this present form she did not need to pant or even breathe. She could say nothing.

  The child now struggled away from her. He propelled himself through the water at Guri.

  ‘Up on my back, my lion.’ Guri turned again to Saphay. ‘He hates the baby. There are animals like that: they kill their cubs.’

  Behind the woman, in the core of the liquid night, some great advent was approaching. Flares and redness spurled before it, as if from a volcano erupting under the sea.

  Guri thought the girl was a dunce and useless, but he said, ‘You’re caught in your dream. He’s ca
ught with you, this one. And that other gets in as he pleases. Wake yourself up. Go back to the world. You’re safer out there. I’ll take care of the boy.’

  ‘I can’t wake,’ she said. ‘They smoked an incense to ease the pain – a drug. It makes them happy, but makes me sleep. I am …’ she hesitated, he saw her face grow savage with female scorn, ‘in labour, half dead. If I die, then he—’

  ‘Don’t die then, silly bitch. Go on, go back. I’ll help you.’

  The sea behind her was sprawling wide in a laval labour of its own.

  Guri glimpsed a vehicle, pale racing animals with horrible eyes, and a violet face, almost a man’s, whose eyes were Hell itself.

  Then he slapped Saphay so hard she folded up like a city book, closing all together, becoming two-dimensional, half transparent, fading … going back.

  The sea trumpeted.

  Like a crashing meteor, the chariot came.

  Guri had never faced a god before. He put this down to his own infinite good sense.

  He dropped on his knees, and from his etheric person pulled a cloak of disguise across the child who clung to him. Saphay had vanished.

  The chariot stilled. It idled there, and the white wolf-things shimmered, black saliva beading out of their mouths.

  Guri, eyes downcast, gripping the boy’s feet in hands of iron, prayed. He prayed to Saphay, that she should wake up.

  The god spoke. ‘Have you seen a woman with a child?’

  It was what any man might say on the earth outside. Guri supposed his brain translated what the god said, for doubtless this Rukar deity of double aspect did not even speak to Guri in any known language.

  ‘I see nothing much, lord. I’m only dreaming: about me and my little brother that died of a fever.’

  ‘He you have hold of?’

  ‘Yes, lord. An ugly little wretch’ – Guri had made sure he altered the child to look ugly and much older, five or six years, caked with sluhtin mud and fire-smoke and fleas – ‘but I loved him well.’

  ‘You are lying,’ said the god. ‘Yet I cannot now go past your lie. We shall meet again. Then let us see what you will do.’

  Guri felt an alarming wrenching. The sea fragmented, he tumbled upward, thrown away. Guri knew what this was: not the god’s fury, which had been withheld coyly until another time, but the final spasms of birth.

  The Olchibe warrior regained the natural world. He landed smack in a corner of a room of women, among screeches and smell and showering blood. He saw one old dame holding up, on a silken serpent of birth-cord, a baby made of noonday. Still joined, Saphay on her back lay staring at what had been dragged from her.

  Unseen by any adult eye, Guri took out and displayed the little toy mammoth, showing the newborn child what delights were in store; that life was worth living.

  Wind and snow drove thickly across the plains, and had brought down the dusk. Through this twilight and storm, the Jafn chariots pursued the last of the Fazions.

  Now and then the Jafn signalled to one another with shouts, and mage-lights still lingering on swords. Now and then they came up with and killed more Fazions. But generally the Faz were scattered. Despite, perhaps even because of their repugnant scaley steeds, the reivers preferred sea travel and the hem of the ocean. Gradually, too, the hunt being so widespread and successful, regardless of their signals the Jafn became separated.

  Athluan had lost track of time and of locality. The sidelong snow had begun to hypnotize him, a thing he had heard of, yet never before himself experienced. He thought maybe the wound in his arm had been caused by a weapon with a bane on it. He would need to consult a mage.

  For now, he did what he must. He was a Chaiord, a warrior.

  It was later he started to think that, along with himself and Rothger his charioteer, something else rode with them in the chariot.

  The being was pallid and semi-impermanent – here, then not here. Three times only he caught the smeary gleam of its eyes.

  He said nothing to Rothger. Athluan was not entirely sure the being – a seef of the waste, most likely – was really present. He felt ill, and might be imagining it.

  In any event, he did not trust Rothger.

  Rothger, like the Fazions, was his enemy, though he hid it more ably than they.

  He wants my place. Oh, I always knew. In his way he has always shown me. Why do I bother with this now?

  The wind cantered off. Like a gigantic beast made of freezing flaking sky, it reversed itself, then came galloping back towards them.

  On either side, the three or four accompanying chariots responded with calls, and the snarls of their lions. Then all company was gone.

  Athluan found he was alone with his brother. As they drove forward, the vehicle lurched, the runners struck against some obstacle obscured in the malicious top-snow. With a disintegrating sound, a metal shriek, the chariot juddered to a halt. The lions were punched upward, one falling, then scrambling to its feet again.

  In their sudden immobility, the ravening beast of the wind slammed against them all. They stooped beneath it. The gust surged over, and Athluan saw how the lions and Rothger lifted up their heads, masked and bearded in dead white. He shook the whiteness from his own face, and beheld the seef with utter clarity. It smiled at him like a co-conspirator, and melted away.

  ‘Do you note,’ said Rothger, ‘what lamed the chariot?’

  Athluan glanced down. He saw a man’s, arm and shoulder poked up from snow, among the breakage of the left runner. From its jewelry, a Fazion.

  Rothger swung over the rail, to land beside the Faz.

  ‘What in God’s Night are you doing?’

  Athluan heard his own voice, which was abruptly unsteady like a boy’s.

  He watched Rothger kneeling in the snow, slitting the dead Fazion with his knife, letting the blood gush up, drinking the blood, on and on. Presently, as the flow clotted and ceased, Rothger heaved more of the Fazion from the snow, found his neck and cut it open and, bending his head again, drank from that.

  Why does he do this in front of me? Before, I have suspected he has done it, but never seen.

  Athluan felt adrift inside his own body. He clutched after the sword the wise-woman had enflamed with magic, but it had stuck fast in the scabbard, and no longer gave light.

  Rothger stood up again. His mouth was bloody, but he wiped it carefully on his sleeve. Now it was only more blood spilt in legitimate battle.

  ‘Get out of the chariot, brother,’ said Rothger.

  The lions, Athluan’s own, dressed in their war collars, glared at Athluan, unblinking. Only last night he had fed them from his own hands. He realized now they were changed towards him. They did not know him.

  He left the chariot. He saw he and all things had sunk beneath some deathly spell.

  Rothger moved off a little way. Then he stopped and beckoned. Athluan found he must go to him.

  ‘You thought you could be Chaiord for ever,’ said Rothger, ‘and I would be your little faint echo, while you got your alien slut with sons to rule after you. I saw it, that child in the room upstairs. Where did that red hair come from, Athluan? Her tribe? I seldom heard yet of any of the Ruk who get red hair. And among the Jafn, never.’

  Athluan turned away. The storm was solid as a wall, but after the one great gust had passed, no wind blew. The snow hung motionless in air.

  ‘You’ve worked magic,’ he said.

  ‘Have I? Someone has. My lovesome friend the seef. He needs me to drink blood for him. I’ve grown to like it. We suit each other well. He’s been a better kinsman to me than you, Athluan. He gives me things: nicer than a knife or a bow I’d already spoilt for you.’

  ‘Whatever you plan,’ said Athluan, ‘will be discovered.’

  ‘No. This very minute, you and I are riding still in our chariot out there, seen by all our companions. We’re after the last of the Fazions.’

  ‘An illusion.’

  ‘No, dearest brother. This is the illusion.’

  Athlu
an stared. He stared at the lions. He saw they were not real. The half-visible seef had been more real than they. He longed to find himself, but knew he could not and despaired.

  ‘Tell me the rest.’

  ‘Soon told. Out there, a Fazion arrow, flighted black with raven feathers, will pierce your heart. We will all see you die, quickly and nobly as the leader should. First I must make you die here.’

  ‘How could you and a seef manage all this—?’

  ‘I’ve also human friends: Lokinda’s unhandsome son, and a green-haired witch from the north, too, who assisted me.’

  Then the bane had come from her. How curious, Athluan thought, and he had fancied her afterwards.

  Out of his body, this vestige of his physical persona, this totally diluted disarmed spirit of Athluan, waited now in silence.

  There were legends that related such things. Two deaths: the intelligence and life killed first, to make the killing of the body simpler.

  Yet how strong Rothger had made himself. All those years endeavouring, while he had seemed only so shallowly to exist. I never saw it, I never looked to see.

  Then the wind returned. It came seething low across the white plain, which now was empty of all other things, even of the chariot, the lions, his brother Rothger.

  Looking into the wind, Athluan remembered Saphay, the child, after all with regret and sorrow. He would at least have protected them.

  But among men, only the dead see the wind.

  It smote him: a thousand dagger-points bit him through. Creatures were in the wind, gelid ice-creatures, winged and fanged. He saw his flesh – not of the body but of the inner body, which is wounded often first – saw it torn off in chunks. His atoms flared all around him, devoured in the mouths of vampire-fish that flew.

  As Saphay had done, Athluan shut his eyes.

  Out beyond the area of sorcery, where the Jafn tackled the last of their foes, a Fazion shaft, recognizable by its flight feathers, skimmed from the tussle. It buried itself in the physical heart of Athluan. Many witnessed it. Rothger alone was aware of the hand which had guided it, translucent, just flushed with nourishment, lost in the falling snow.