Eric Van Lustbader - Shallows of Night - SW2

SHALLOWS OF NIGHT

Sunset Warrior Book 2

By

Eric Van Lustbader

Shallows ofNight

ERIC VANLUSTBADER

All of thecharacters in the book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons,living or dead, is purely coincidental.

First Edition

ISBN:0-385-12968-8

For all theheroes

Contents

One

ICE

Two

AEGIR

Three

SHA'ANGH'SEI

Four

HART OFDARKNESS

There is nojourney's end.

Bujun saying

ONE

Ice

Soaring through frigid mists androiling clouds, he stretches fully his long wings upon the unpredictablecurrents. Streamers of silvered plumage, running bilaterally across his wingsand cresting his majestic questing head, ripple and blur in the wind. He banks anddips. There is a moaning in his ears. His large liquid eyes stare unblinkinglyahead at the immense eye of the setting sun, its face a broad and flatteneddisk, wider at the sides as if caught in a vise of immeasurable proportions.Then thick ribbons of cloud of a metallic gray ride before it like the ghostlyremnants of a once vast, victorious army, reaving it.

He banks again, deftly avoiding atreacherous downdraft, and turns his incurious gaze beneath him, through thelayers of cloud and mist, to the painful twisting of the earth far below.

High peaks beaten by age and scraped bymerciless weather, crowned in bitter frost, sealed in pearl and emerald ice,thrust their humped backs in snaking lines against the whipping winds which,forever swirling, gather layers of fine powdery snow from the mountains'slopes, turning them into rising sheets, hurling them forward, like giantsstriding across the barren land.

He floats over sheer gorges, frostedthickly in gleaming sheets of periwinkle ice, plumes of loose snow driftingalong their flanks like smoke from a funeral pyre. His keen eyes trace thevertiginous descent from dancing ice crystaled green-turquoise-magenta in thedying light to the violent violet of their yawning and uneasy depths: precipitouschasms sliced out of the land as cleanly as if by a cruel blade of immensesize. Powerful wings flutter as out of these depths now is heard the agonizedgroaning of shifting rock. Ozone and sulphur fill the air as the earth shuddersand trembles. Shards of ice shear off in dense clusters with infinite slowness,hanging impossibly in mid-air, crumbling in layers until, with an abrupt andcomplete swiftness, they explode silently into vast spurts of hyalescent sprayhigh in the sky that turn to rainbow arcs as they catch the last oblique raysof watery light.

He wheels in the colored, suddenlysolid air, unperturbed.

Everywhere is ice and draperies of snowwith only the occasional tired fist of granite or twisted schist rising likeancient tombstones in an alien desert, useless punctuation on a blank andcrumbling page.

Against this inimical icescape nothingmoves.

The bird banks and glides in the sky,his black-irised eyes scanning the dreadful sameness of the land. Into thesetting sun he flies, his majestic plumage stained a dilute scarlet and,glancing once more earthward, he sees a dark and tiny shadow limned before theglare of the ice. Muscles respond to the brain's command and the wings dip,their silver plumage losing for a moment the scarlet wash, turning a richlustrous gray, as he heads southward for a closer look.

Resolution of image comes far tooswiftly, for the shadow is huge. Abruptly it moves and, startled, the birdwheels away from the edge of the steep precipice along which he has been flyingand, flapping his wings in alarm, speeds westward, rising, gaining the highcurrents, diminishing into the light of the lowering sun.

Transfixed, Ronin stands at the vergeof the high ice ledge staring southward, oblivious to the receding speck in thesky.

Motionless, his body tall and muscular,he appears more a statue erected to the countless legions who, throughout themyriad ages, have fought across the changing faces of this land. For here oncegrew lush verdant forests of giant fern and slender willow spreading their fansof feathered leaves, building dense jungles of crowding greenery and thicktangles of vines through which cocoa warriors crept and crouched, sweating,listening methodically to the shrill cries of startlingly colored birds,readying the leap, an uncoiling blur, tan and brown shadow, flickering in thefiltering light, the quick silent slash, the gout of bright blood beading thefoliage, the dying body of the enemy. And in another ageearlier or later, onecannot be surehere swelled and sucked fifteen fathoms of green water alivewith the riotous growth of the sea. High-booted feet tramped the stained tarreddecks of wide-beamed wooden ships, long oars extending from their high curvingsides, beating through air and water in hypnotic rhythm. Hoarse shouts filledthe sky heavy with brine and heat as helmed and bearded warriors preparedthemselves for battle.

Layers of hard snow encrust theslippery ice of the precipice upon which he stands, feet apart and plantedfirmly in the frost. Unconsciously he clenches his left hand, which is coveredby a strange scaled gauntlet, dull and unreflective. The wind gusts, screamingin his ears, and rushes by him, unheeded, sucked in by the crevices and piledhillocks of the plateau tumbling at his back. The air is dry and chill. Thestaggering sight at which he gazes longingly resonates in his mind with thesupravivid impact of an ecstatic dream. And for this time, the events of therecent past mercifully dim.

For what lies before and below him,just past the beetling lip of the high ledge, is a cyclopean sea of ice.Desolate. Limitless. Awesome and electrifying.

"An overwhelming sight," saidthe voice quite near and behind him. And he turned slowly, as if in a dream, tobehold Borros, the Magic Man.

"The true wonder is that we havebeen denied this sight for all of our lives." A thin and weary smilecurled Borros' lips.

Wind whipped loose snow against theirlegs as they stood atop the ice plateau, strange creatures garbed in theone-piece foil suits they had found on the highest Level of the Freehold beforeeach, in his own time and his own way, breached the last metal defense of theirsubterranean world, cracking the outer hatch, buried in drifting snow. Thesuits were extremely light, skin tight along chest and arms, with filledpockets of hardware and food concentrates, vacuum-sealed, immune to the ravagesof time, even a small supply of mineral-enriched fluid to refresh themselves. Thesepockets ran around the suits' waists and down the outside of each leg, somehowincreasing the warmth of the garments.

Ronin stared at Borros, seeing him nowas if for the first time, the focus of reality at last forced upon him, and allthe raw hate that he had held in abeyance for these long moments flooded backon an inexorable tide. Caught in the slipstream of sewage; shook himself, as ifthe motion would somehow cleanse him. He knew that he carried now within hisdepths an anger and a sorrow, that thus was bound to him irrevocably a hideousstrength.

The Magic Man had misunderstood thegesture and he grasped Ronin's shoulder.

"Surely you are not cold?"

His fingers moved along the foil to afold at the back of Ronin's neck. "Look here." And he pulled gentlyupward, the metallic skin stretching to cover Ronin's head, leaving only hiseyes and mouth exposed. Borros wrestled his own hood into place.

Borros turned to stare behind them,peering across the rubble of the frozen waste to the hidden Freehold, the tinyaccess hatch leading down and down to the world inside, a world at war now,factions struggling for desperate power.

"Do not think me a fool," theMagic Man said urgently. "But we must flee from here at once."

Tears call to Ronin and the mountainsmelting as he ceases to feel the bite of the wind at his eyes and lips. The skycolorless and the earth with no substance. His feet leaden. His heart poundingas it hit him searingly like the aftershock of a deep wound, the rent cauterizedbut the nerves still in dysfunction. At first there was no feeling at all.Numb. The body protecting itself. But there is a limit. His consciousnessnarrowed because he was struggling against it now. All his loves, all hisfriends, all the people. Gone in a wink of an eye. Just a flutter of time, thespace to pull two breaths and lives are snuffed like tapers at first Spell.K'reen and Stahlig and Nirren and G'fand andthe Salamander, the center of itall, still down there, alive, alive