A Plague of Shadows (13 page)

His eyes fell on the darkened mirror. The same way he planned on getting to Eget Row, that’s how someone could get here. But Heimdall wouldn’t let people through. This was the first he’d felt another presence in the room, something concerning the mirror.

It was disconcerting. He had tried many times to step on to Eget Row, and every time he’d been pushed back, away from the rainbow bridge by the might of Heimdall.

He scowled.

The energy tasted of the light, and
something
else. What was it?

The dark wyrd within him recoiled at the touch, yet at the same time yearned for the power. There was a trace of the Waking Eye still in the room, and that masked the feel of whatever he was searching for.

There was one way to find out, the real reason he’d come into this room was to use the mirror anyway, it wouldn’t take much more to scry out the energy in the room from the depths of the mirror.

He drew the iron dagger from his belt and pierced the palm of his plagued hand. A puff of shadow drifted up out of the wound like smoke. He blew at the smoke, and like fog it eddied toward the mirror, brushing against the surface.

Instantly the mirror began to fog over, and from within the depths he could see a spark of light. The light grew until it was the size of his palm. He leaned forward, forehead nearly touching the mirror and whispered.

“Show me where the God Slayer is.”

The light within the mirror flickered, and moments later it gave way to an image.

And what was more, it had been in this very room moments before.

A smile split his face. This was much easier than he’d thought.

“Soon, brother, Hilda and I will come, and we will deliver you from the root of the great tree. Be patient, Anthros.”

He crossed to the window, paying no mind to the mirror as it returned to normal.

It was almost
too
easy. Fresh indents outside that could only be footprints led away from the window and north, toward the Fey Forest.

“Yes,” he said. “Into the kingdom of darklings, that’s perfect.”

He tossed open the window, embracing the rush of cold air with opened arms. He tilted his head back, closed his serpentine eyes, and let the darkness flow out of him.

It oozed away from his body, slithering along the snow, darkening the whiteness beneath and toward the forest it ran. As it continued, shapes took form from the shadowy wyrd. Shadows of ravens burst from the power slithering along the snow and took to the sky like a cloud of nighttime headed for the forest.

Still more forms writhed out of the shadow, and soon his power had melded into an army of shadow snakes and birds, all headed for the Fey Forest.

Finally, with a great force of will, he exuded more darkling wyrd out of him. The wyrd exploded out of Gorjugan in a cloud of smoke. It coalesced in the space before him and took shape. A warrior, that’s what he needed, and that’s what the darkling wyrd called from the ether of the underworld to crouch on the snow before him. A great beast of a man with a horned helm and fur armor. Once the warrior’s skin had drank in all of the darkness, he looked up at Gorjugan.

The warrior’s eyes flashed red, but they didn’t have an effect on Gorjugan. He smiled.

“You will do well,” Gorjugan said “Bring me the God Slayer.”

Sometimes at night the forest resembled a living entity that breathed and sighed like a deep inhalation and exhalation of breath. The pines roared and twisted, whispered and danced in the cold gale. Before the three years of winter the nocturnal sounds of the massive Fey Forest were frightening for it spoke of another world not fully known. A world just this side of imagination where anything was possible, even probable. Even more recently with the coming of the darkling the forest seemed all but hostile at night.

But sometimes the breathing of the great, ancient forest was like something from a story book. Sometimes the sounds of the forest would carry the mind on its whispering to a place where tales were born. Where even the most mature mind could not help but follow and dream of times long past, of a world just beyond seeing, of creatures born of myth, of legend, and of fear.

This night was both frightening and fantastical for Abagail.

She sat before the sun scepter, watching the light waft out of the rod to illuminate the ground, and she thought of home. The light of the staff reminded her of the light she’d seen before coming through the window in her father’s study. She yearned to touch the staff with her plagued hand, but she wasn’t sure what would happen if she did.

Abagail worried that if the light of the staff touched the plague on her hand she would vanish in a puff of dust like the darkling she’d smote in the study. But then she thought maybe the light that had opened out of her palm would react to the light of the staff, and she would be healed.

The shadow on her palm itched, and she found herself starting to slip the work glove off.

“What are you thinking about?” Rorick asked, coming to sit beside her.

Abagail jumped and pulled herself from her thoughts. She pushed her hand further into the glove and shrugged. She glanced up to see if Leona was listening, but she was too busy watching Daphne and talking to the elf to pay them any attention.

“Worried about father,” Abagail told him honestly. Under all of her concern for herself she was truly worried about her father. She realized now that Dolan had just told her and Leona what they needed to hear to get them out of the house and to safety. “Wondering what we’ve gotten ourselves into, and worried about this.” She held up her hand.

“Yea, work gloves can be pretty worrisome,” Rorick said.

“Ha ha,” she said and rolled her eyes. Rorick nudged her with his shoulder.

“Do you feel any different yet?” he wondered.

“I’m not sure how to answer that question,” she told him.

“I won’t bludgeon you with the hammer if you answer it honestly,” he promised, making a show of setting the hammer a few feet away from him.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said with a smile. “I just don’t know if it’s affecting me or not. I mean, back there when I got angry with Celeste, I didn’t
notice
a change in my frame of mind. It was like the shadow was working with my own emotions, like I was angry that she was keeping me from my family, and the shadow came to my aid.” She frowned. “If that makes any sense.”

“It does,” Rorick nodded. He scratched at his bearded. “The shadow isn’t noticeably making you angry, it’s just working with your anger when it comes up.”

“Right,” Abagail agreed. “I just wonder if it will work with my other emotions as easily.”

Rorick made a noise that could mean he was thinking the same thing, that he didn’t know, or that he was bored with the conversation.

“How are you doing?” Abagail asked. It had been a lot for him too. His family had just been killed by the darklings, and then he was in this new world with her. She knew that he was trying not to think about everything he had left behind, or what had truly happened to his family back on O, but it was hard.

Rorick sighed. “Just trying not to think about it. It feels wrong, like a dream that I will wake up from with my mom calling me down for breakfast. A normal day full of chores that I will try to sneak away from to see you.”

Abagail blushed and looked down at her feet.

“And then I have this feeling of falling, like my mind is outside of my body, and I’m yanked back to reality. I realize they are gone and. . . .” he stopped talking and just stared at his hands. Abagail allowed him a moment of silence to get his mind wrapped around what was really happening.

“We’ve all lost,” he said, shaking his head and opening his eyes wide to clear them of unshed tears.

She recognized it as his way of trying to put the subject to rest, and she let him. She reached out for his hand and clasped it tightly. He squeezed back. Abagail was never good at these kinds of things. She never knew what to say and she felt horrible that she couldn’t afford her close friend the comfort that he so needed just then. She tried to express through her grip that she was there for him, that if he needed to talk, she would listen.
Who knows if he understood that?

She looked up at the overcast sky above through the opening in the canopy. Moments before there had been stars staring back down at her from their icy home. Now she couldn’t see them, but she could see the telltale flashes of lightning shimmer through the heavens.

“I know,” he said.

She let go of his hand, but Rorick kept holding it, so she tightened her grip again. The feel of his callused skin in her hand made her heart thump faster. She hated herself a little for it. Here he was grieving for his dead parents, and all she could think about was how the neighbor boy she’d had a crush on since they were children was holding her hand, and didn’t want to let go.

“It looks like a storm is heading this way,” Celeste said to them, coming closer to the scepter and settling down on her side to watch them.

Abagail felt strange with the elves cool blue eyes on them, and she tried to shake her hand free from Rorick. Rorick didn’t seem to notice, his eyes were still rooted on the clouds.

“Is it normal for there to be thunder storms in the winter on Agaranth?” he wondered.

“What’s normal now?” Celeste asked.

Leona flopped herself down and Abagail looked her way. Her sister was doing her best to avoid Abagail’s look. Her nostrils were flared, and her arms crossed over her chest.

What’s she mad about?
Abagail wondered, but brushed the thought off.

“I would say that no, during the winter we don’t have thunder storms, but this isn’t winter. Besides, the storm has the feel of wyrd to it,” Celeste told them. She rolled over onto her back despite the snow, and stared up at the coming storm. “Seems like someone already knows you’re here.”

“Darkling?” Abagail asked. “Already?”

“It doesn’t take long. They have your scent now, which means we will have to be careful.”

Daphne descended in lopsided circles to land on Celeste’s chest. The elf perked up as if she was listening to something the pixie was saying. She frowned and laid her head back down, but didn’t offer any information, so Abagail didn’t press her. They had enough to worry about with the storm.

“Should we be worried?” Abagail asked.

Celeste shrugged. “It’s just a storm, it will pass. We should be worried that the darklings have sensed you, but not about the storm.”

The storm blew in during the night, and Abagail got little sleep. The shadows at the edge of the clearing were growing restless. She hoped maybe the storm was nettling them, but she couldn’t be sure.

In the flashes of lightning she could see shadows of birds perched in the trees. More were taking wing and landing around the clearing. A cacophony of chirps and squawks were raining down at them.

“Darklings,” Celeste told her when she realized no one else was able to sleep. “If we can’t sleep, we might as well move along.” There was something different about Celeste since Daphne had landed on her and whispered something to her. It was almost like the light within her eyes had dimmed.

The elf gathered up the few possessions she’d sat out and packed them away into impossibly deep pockets. While the rest of the group gathered their things, Celeste jerked the scepter out of the ground, and the light dimmed only slightly. She raised it high, and the birds shrieked and took wing, flying further away from them.

The birds were scattering now, but Abagail still didn’t have a good feeling about them, no matter what Celeste said about them not being able to break through the barrier of Singer’s Trail. She gathered her cloak around her, and fell in step behind Celeste and Leona.

Leona and Celeste were up ahead, talking. Well, Celeste was talking, and Leona was staring at the right side of the path. At first Abagail thought she was watching the darklings beyond, but when she looked at her sister, and not at the spot her sister was looking, Abagail was able to make out a wisp of a figure beside Leona. It was tall and appeared to be made of smoke. She couldn’t get a good reading on the figure, but she felt the sense of prophecy about it.