Julian May - Ironcrown Moon

Ironcrown Moon

The Boreal Moon Tale

Book II

Julian May

Copyright 2005

Text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

First edition: April

ISBN 0-441-01244-2 1

CONTENT

Of The Blossom Moon Song,

An Ancient Cathran Ballad

Down in the waters, cold and deep,

My true love has gone to eternal sleep.

Long will I wait for his returning,

Hoping, my heart afire with yearning.

In Blossom Moon, in Blossom Moon, it will never be.

The Royal Intelligencer

An unexpected firing happened last night. As is my habit, I had been working long hours on my Boreal Moon Tale, struggling along despite cramped fingers, dimming eyesight, and the daunting magnitude of the writing project I had set myself at a time when most old men are content to doze and dream. But I have more reason than most to wish my story told to the worldmost specifically to the inhabitants of High Blenholme, island of my birth, whose official Chronicle will no doubt be turned all arsey-versey by my mischievous revelations.

I had laid aside my quill after describing the chain of improbable events leading to King Conrig Wincantors establishment of the Blenholme Sovereignty, thinking this would be an appropriate place to break the narrative and end the first book of the tale. It was very late and bracingly cool, as nights tend to be during midwinter months in southern Foraile, and the air was laden with the sweet scent of moth-jasmine. Oddlythough I did not fully appreciate the fact until later when I went outdoorsthe night was almost completely silent. The usual sounds made by nocturnal birds and insects were absent and the murmur of the nearby DaravaraRiver was muted.

After sanding the final closely written parchment sheet, I added it to the rest and locked the manuscript in the copper box that preserves it from the mice and palm roaches that would otherwise make a meal of it. I rose from my desk, paused to work the worst knots from my aching muscles, and blew out the bright flame of the brass desk lamp, plunging the room into near darkness. A faint illumination came from the lantern that my peg-legged housecarl Borve leaves lit at the far end of the hall to guide me to bed. That was usual.

What was not usual was the odd flickering glow coming through the window that looked northward towards the river. The crescent moon had set early and thick foliage made it difficult to see outside. My first thought was of wildfire, since the light was too ruddy and fitful to be starshine. The rains were late this year and the scrubby hills above the jungle valley were tinder-dry. I made haste to the door, slipped outside onto the veranda, and went down the short flight of steps into my riverside garden so as to have a clear view of the opposite shore.

The northern sky was ablaze with immense rippling curtains and thrusting beams of scarlet, green, amethyst, and flame-gold, so bright that they dimmed the stars, so active and intricate in their movements that every instinct of the beholder seemed to affirm that this was no mere natural phenomenon, but the work of elemental living beings.

I knew who they were, what they had beenthose shining abominations who had fed on pain!

The people of High Blenholme gave them various names: the Beaconfolk, the Coldlight Army, the Great Lights. Their domain is the far north, the arctic barrens and the island in the Boreal Sea from which I had been banished. Never had I seen the Lights during my enforced sojourn on the southern mainland. Early on in my exile, when I had cautiously questioned my manservant Borve about folkloric beliefs in this part of the world, he made no mention of terrible sky-beings in the local pantheon of demons and demigods. Yet here they were, transforming the night of subtropical Foraile into a facsimile of the incandescent heavens above the northland. Was it possible that I was dreaming? I hardly thought so, but it would not be the first time that nightmares provoked by the evil ones among the Beaconfolk had tormented me.

Still less did it seem they should be able to manifest themselves here, so far south! Their once-mighty powers were circumscribed now, pent-up and curtailed so that the pain-eating predators among them might no longer slake their obscene appetites upon humans and other ground-dwelling beings. And yet I seemed to feel something reaching for me, grasping my poor pounding heart with claws of ice and slowlyso slowlytightening its grip. The chest spasm was tentative and entirely bearable, but my feeble old legs now refused to support my body and I subsided onto my knees, eyes still locked on to that dreadful blazing sky.

I have said that the night was strangely quiet. I was aware of this anomaly almost at the same time that I realized it was not quite true. A ghostly sound was discernible at the very limit of audibility, a sibilance that ebbed and flowed like surf, all the while overlaid with a complex rustling that almost resembled speech. I had first heard its like some sixty years ago, as I lay dying on the Desolation Coast of Tarn. The Coldlight Army had blazed above me then in all its awful strength, jeering at my mortal frailty, ridiculing the notion that a pathetic creature such as I might be able to frustrate its devilish entertainment.

But I survived in spite of you! I managed to croak, shaking a fist at them. I used your own twisty rules of magic to thwart your schemes. Do you want to know how? Its simple: I never told you my true name! Im Snudge, but Im not Snudge. What dyou think of that, Lights?

Above me the luminous draperies and glorious colored beacons flared in response to my puny effort at defiance. The faint crackling sound intensified momentarily and I felt a crushing agony behind my breastbone. The pang subsided almost at once and I slowly exhaled, sagging back onto my heels, then sprawling sideways to rest against the trunk of a small tree, my eyes shut tight to banish the sight of the inhuman torturers.

Was the pain really of their doing, or was my aging heart simply giving out at last as I dreamed of my old enemies? I waited motionless, in fearful anticipation of a more violent attack that would finish me; but none came, and at length I relaxed, reassuring myself that the lethal capabilities of the Lights were indeed extinct. They could do me no serious harm. I, Deveron Austrey, nicknamed Snudge, would live.

I opened my eyes, and saw that the sky was empty except for the rich expanse of southern stars.

The grand scheme to unite the four disparate realms of High Blenholme into a single Sovereignty was conceived by my first master, Conrig Wincantor, later to be called Ironcrown, while he was still very young.

Growing up as Prince Heritor of Cathra, the richest and most powerful of the island realms, Conrig idolized his remote ancestor Emperor Bazekoy, the towering personality who first vanquished the great Continental nations of Foraile, Andradh, and Stippen, then set out to wrest control of Blenholme from the Salka and the other nonhuman monsters who had inhabited the place since the dawn of time. The year that Bazekoys conquering army sailed up the River Brent marked the beginning of the Blenholme Chronicle.