The Shadow Within (28 page)

Lady Madeleine watched more intently than ever, while Trap positively smirked. The other men didn’t seem to know what to make of it, though all were highly amused. Channon, as ever, looked worried. Perhaps he feared Abramm would hit himself in the head with his own stone. His first shot, released too soon, dove into the grass only ten yards in front of him, raising a puff of dust at the point of impact. His second took the cabbage’s hat off. He loaded a third, swung the sling a few times over his head to get the feel of it again, aware now of the smirks and elbowings and good-natured muttering. He was making a fool of himself and should stop. Just a few more tries, then he’d give it up.

He let the sling drop back behind his shoulder in the ready position, drew a deep breath, and fired up a quick prayer for help. Then, aiming right between the apricot pits, he flexed back, drew himself together, and flung the sling overhand, releasing it just as the two thongs pulled hard in his grip. The stone flew forward, too small and fast to see. He heard a faint
thunk,
saw the cabbage quiver, and noted, with some satisfaction, no puff of dust from either ground or cliff. He was pretty sure he’d hit it.

Everyone waited while Foxton and Whitethorne went to examine the target. After a few moments of hunting around in the grass, Foxton called back, “I’m afraid you missed it entirely this time, sir.”

“No, Fox, I think I hit it.”

“He’s right,” Laramor said. “I saw it shiver.”

“Must’ve hit the pole, then.” Foxton went back to searching the ground.

“Bring the cabbage here,” Abramm ordered.

The cabbage was brought, Whitethorne turning it in his hands. “Not a nick on it, sir,” he said apologetically, handing it to Abramm.

Abramm turned the “face” up and felt a chill of wonder when he found the hole he sought, for he knew he was not this good. The stone had pierced dead center of the apricot pits, its entry hole hidden by the edges of overlapping leaves and the fact Whitethorne had been looking for a large chunk of missing cabbage, not a narrow hole.
Thank you, Eidon
. “A direct hit,” he said to the men, who examined the hole he pointed out to them, then looked up at him in surprise.

“So it is, my lord,” Foxton affirmed. “And right between the eyes at that. Too bad it bounced off.”

“Oh, it didn’t bounce,” he said. “Cut it open.”

Doubtfully, Whitethorne set the cabbage on the ground and sliced it in half. At the middle of the densely packed, pale green leaves lay the red stone, its narrow entry track clearly visible. Whitethorne loosed an oath of disbelief as Foxton took the halves from him, inspected them himself, then handed them to Laramor. As the slain cabbage made the rounds, Simon looked at Abramm with that exasperatingly blank expression he was so good at. “I thought you said you were a novice.”

“It took me three tries, Uncle. And I wasn’t even moving.”

“Well, I’ll grant your claim of deadliness,” Simon said as he passed on the evidence to Bucklen. “I still say it’s a peasant’s weapon.”

“No argument there. In Esurh the peasants are forbidden to own swords or bows, and would lack the resources to maintain them, anyway.”

“So the peasants taught you, then?”

Abramm grinned at the memory of King Shemm’s painstaking tutorials. “Not exactly, sir.”

And there was Lady Madeleine again, looking like a cat who’d finally caught her mouse.

About that time Gillard and his merry men arrived—Matheson, Moorcock, and Michael Ives. They halted just uphill of Abramm, Gillard’s eyes sweeping the crowd around him. He was smiling in that way Abramm had learned long ago meant he was angry.

“I understand you are giving a demonstration, sir,” he said to Abramm with a nod that again just satisfied protocol. “I should very much enjoy seeing the lethal aspects of a”—he glanced around as if bemused—“stone?”

“I’m afraid you’ve missed it,” Abramm said. “I’ve just finished.” He started up the hill to punctuate his remark.

“And was it a compelling argument for the use of stones as defense?” Gillard asked as Abramm came abreast of him and paused.

“It was, sir,” Foxton said, holding up the split cabbage, Abramm’s red sling stone still in place.

Gillard glanced at it and away as if it were a sight he had seen hundreds of times. “Well, if an army of cabbages awaits us in Graymeer’s, I suppose we can rest easy knowing our king will deal with them decisively.”

His own companions laughed at that, but it comforted Abramm to see the rest of the men did not—and that Gillard noted the lapse. He himself honed in on Gillard’s choice of pronoun: “
Us,
brother?” he asked. “You wish to go to Graymeer’s with me?”

Gillard’s white-blond brows flew up. “Well, of
course,
sir. Did you not say earlier we should work together? If you really do mean to go, I wouldn’t dream of letting you enter that dangerous place without my sword at your side.”

Or in my back?
Abramm wondered, chilled by the sudden resurgence of dream memories. Maybe it had been prophetic, after all. Madeleine had already come itchingly close to revealing his secret. Now here was Gillard, insinuating himself into the procession to Graymeer’s, hurling Abramm’s own words back at him as justification.

A smirk played at Gillard’s lips as it grew clear that he had won. Again Abramm felt that dark current of rage arise in him, urging him to accept his brother’s challenge after all. To stop lying and hiding and pretending to a forgiveness he did not feel. To get it all out into the open, right here, right now, in front of everyone. That would wipe the smirk from that beardless, hawkish face, wouldn’t it?

His right hand came up to his belt and hung there, a gesture Gillard didn’t even notice, or if he did, discounted completely. Abramm, after all, was no threat to him. Abramm was nothing but a scrawny little loser who never should have come home in the first place.

CHAPTER

17

A shadow dropped over them as if a cloud passed before the sun. Except . . . the sky was cloudless today, was it not? The question and the concern it aroused, faint though it was, checked the momentum of Abramm’s dark intentions. At the same moment he felt someone standing close at his right elbow, and Trap’s familiar voice murmured, “Shall I have your horse readied, sir?” The combination brought him to his senses, the bitter current receding even as the sunlight returned, and a quick glance upward revealed there
was
a cloud there, the first of the morning. But likely not the last.

When he refocused on Gillard, he found his brother frowning at Trap, and stepped immediately to the right to block his view. Of everyone here, Gillard was most likely to recognize Trap, knowing, alone among the rest, just how and why he had not been executed six years ago. “Aye, Lieutenant,” Abramm said. “Ready him.” And now, having recaptured his brother’s attention, he added, “If you really mean to come with me, Gillard, you’d better hurry.”

Gillard took his words to heart, he and his merry men mounting even before Abramm himself and heading immediately for the track that led up to the fortress, obviously intending on leading the procession. Abramm sent Captain Channon over to tell him he’d be traveling at the
back
of the column.

“I doubt he’ll be much problem once we get up top,” Trap said, moving into Channon’s place at Abramm’s side. “The griiswurm auras are pretty strong. And he’ll be susceptible.”

“Aye, but with him around, so am I,” said Abramm.

“Then you’ve made him a weapon in the hands of your real enemies, sir.”

Abramm glanced at him sharply.

As usual Trap had drawn his perspective back to the big picture, reminding him there was more at stake here than petty, personal conflicts. If he continued to allow Gillard to provoke him, he would put himself under the Shadow’s mastery as surely as if he’d never known the Light. Which was the last thing he needed going into a place filled with spawn, traps, illusions, real physical dangers, and possibly even the threat of Command, should someone be hiding up there capable of invoking it. And while he doubted there was, he couldn’t rule it out.

No sooner had he resolved not to let Gillard distract him, however, than he had to deal with Prittleman, the man and his four gray-cloaked subordinates riding up in full expectation of leading the procession themselves. Having put off answering the man earlier, Abramm now had to inform him bluntly that his services would not be needed. And when shock drove Prittleman to the audacity of arguing, Abramm was forced to point out that since he no longer held with Mataian teachings, he did not believe the Flames would protect them, anyway. As the Gadrielite struggled to comprehend the sundering of his assumptions, Abramm thanked him for his concerns, asked him very coolly to move aside—he did so as one dazed—then trotted Warbanner through the resultant gap and onward, at last, to Graymeer’s.

No one knew for sure how the fortress had come to be in its present state, but the most pervasive legend said the bulk of the damage occurred in the second barbarian war, during which it was captured and held for six years. Kiriath won it back in the final battle of that war, only to discover that more than its walls and gates had been damaged. The bedrock on which it sat had been tunneled through—by obviously arcane means—and the dark, twisting passages infested with shadowspawn. Since that time, a mist had hung between its walls, mysteriously warding both wind and rain. Garrisons subsequently stationed there suffered frequent accidents and disappearances, and there were constant reports of mysterious floating lights, disembodied voices, and agonized screams rising from the new-carved warrens below. Gates would not stay closed, weapons would not stay shelved, and worst of all, cannon would not fire from the ramparts, though the weapons could be trans- ported just down the road onto the flat and work perfectly. No one had any explanation save that the place was cursed.

King Eberline had used it briefly as a prison, abandoning it when all the inmates went mad and died at their own or their guards’ hands—or no human hands at all. A few attempts to restore it had followed, the most recent being part of the Chesedhan wars before Abramm’s birth, which Simon himself had organized. But that attempt, like all the others, had ended in failure and death.

Abramm expected it to be much like the Dorsaddi capital of Hur, which had been cursed in a similar way and cleaned without too much problem. Though the warrens full of spawn would unquestionably add a complicating element, that was offset by the fact that the fortress stood in Kiriath, a land as yet unclaimed by the Shadow. The ghost stories he attributed to the effects of griiswurm auras and other spawn that those without the Light had been unable to withstand. The so-called disappearances were likely men who’d fled in terror, then deliberately vanished to avoid the punishment desertion merited.

As he zigzagged up the face of the rise, however, his optimism waned, and soon he was entertaining every misgiving anyone had ever raised about this expedition, from the potential distraction Gillard posed, to his need for a squad of Terstans experienced in dealing with shadowspawn, to Abramm’s own lack of skill in unleashing the Light. He couldn’t even kill a staffid without touching it, and was probably now rustier than ever, what with his lack of having found a Terst to learn with. What if there were feyna up there? What if there were
rhu’ema
up there? What if . . .

Halfway up the face of the rise he sheepishly realized his fears were all griiswurm induced. Trap had said the shadowspawn not only abounded in the fortress’s yard, but likely filled all the passages underneath. It made him wonder just what they might be guarding. Unfortunately, as always, knowing the cause didn’t immediately remove its effects, and it wasn’t until they reached the final switchback that he finally secured a stable focus on the fact that the Light within him was more than sufficient to handle whatever might await him in the fortress.

At that point, Channon, who rode beside him now, and who, like Abramm, had not been up here yet, gave vent to his own inner turmoil. “You do know, don’t you, sir,” he said, “that Rhiad has disappeared?”

Abramm glanced at his companion. “You think he’s come up here, Captain?”

“He’s been exiled from the Keep. Where else can he go?” He paused. “They say
he
made the kraggin, sir. Or at least had a hand in it. That’d mean he can Command the spawn. An’ if that’s so, well, then, he’d be at home here.”

Abramm doubted none of Channon’s words. “You think I should fear him?”

“He hates you powerful bad, sir. There’s talk he’s sworn to bring you down.”

“He’s already tried that several times.”

“He’ll try again, sir. And sure he’ll know you’re coming up here now. The day, the time, who’ll be with you.” Channon eyed the crumbling barbican guarding the entrance just ahead of them now, its opening flanked by a pair of white standards.

“He could ambush you himself, sir. Or send feyna. Or . . .” He shifted uncomfortably as the barbican drew nearer. “They say he has . . . powers, sir. Powers of Command. That’s when a man who has—”

“I know what it is, Channon.” He’d been the victim of Command more than once—twice at Rhiad’s behest, in fact—and knew he could easily resist it. At least as long as he didn’t let the Shadow have him.

“He might use it to lure you down into the warrens, sir. Take you by surprise.”

“With you and Lieutenant Merivale glued to my side?” Abramm raised a skeptical brow. “I think you’re letting the spawn auras get to you, Captain.”

“Spawn auras, sir?”

“Aye.”
Doesn’t he know about this?
“Griiswurm emanate a warding that stirs up all a man’s doubts and fears, particularly about proceeding into the place they’re seeking to keep him out of.” He glanced up at the walls towering above on the right, the mist shredding over and between the crenellations. “There’s probably thousands of them up here. That’s why you’re concocting these disaster scenarios. And why they seem completely reasonable.”

But why so many?
he wondered again.
Is it only to keep us from guarding
the entrance to the bay and the river, or is there more at stake here we don’t know
about?