The Shadow continued to roar, and as it did, the ground around it began to heave. That ground, the surface of the street, and the hint of the buildings that had once occupied it, were black and white, leeched of color. They were soon leeched of their form, as well; they shimmered and began to fold in on themselves, condensing as they did into vastly less-stationary shapes. Shed seen something similar once before, on the very edge of the fief of Nightshade. Where the moving, shambling mass of attenuated Shadow had been, more grew, separate and distinct from it.
She now understood why the front was so heavily occupied; in less than five minutes the whole of the ground on the other side of a border that suddenly felt amorphous and theoretical had literally risen in fury. The newer shapes took on a solidity of form that the central Shadow hadnt: they stretched to eight feet in height, growing limbs as they did. For the most part they had two of eacharms and legsalthough the little details wobbled if Kaylin examined them for long. They were disturbing because they didnt so much walk as glide, and they were utterly silent.
Then again, the mass at their center was doing enough shouting for a small army, which was convenient for it, as thats what it appeared to be raising. It began to move through the rain of Tiamariss fire, and Tiamaris, wings spread, flew once over it. The creature threw some part of itself, as if a tendril, at the moving Dragon.
He dodged, but Kaylin could see hed been hit; he didnt bleed, but the Shadow darkened one wing and began to spread. She drew one sharp breath, but before she could shout, the strangers did. Tiamaris banked, breathing fire as he made his way toward the earth on his own side of the border; he landed behind the front line, behind where Kaylin now stood. She glanced over her shoulder to see Tara moving down the street. Given her height, it would have been impossible to see her if shed actually been walking; she wasnt.
She was flying; her back had sprouted familiar Aerian wings. She headed directly for Tiamaris, and as Kaylin turned back to face the border, the Shadows arrived.
Shadows could, in theory, be stopped by the usual things: swords, clubs, crossbows. The Ferals that had terrorized the night in the fiefs of Kaylins childhoodand still didcould be killed. They just couldnt be killed easily, they were so damn fast.
But the Shadows shed encountered in the High Halls or in Barren, just before Tiamariss reign, had been different. They were visually distinct, for one; they were often larger than a good-size horse; they had an indeterminate number of limbs, heads, or jaws, and the jaws could frequently open up at the end of anything: tail. Forearm. Stomach. Some had no eyes; some had eyes where every other part of a body would otherwise be. Some could fly, some could float, some seeped like the spread of thick liquid; some could speak.
The speech was always disturbing.
It was disturbing now. It wasnt the tenor of the voice, it wasnt the wordsbecause at the moment, the words were unintelligible to Kaylin. It was the fact that they could speak, think, and communicate at all. Ravenous, efficient Ferals felt almost natural. Moving, dense mist shouldnt have been able to keep up a steady stream of continuous speech, continuous command.
But the words came out of the darkness. It drew closer, and as it finally reached the edge of the bordera border defined entirely by eight-foot-tall warriorsblack mist cracked and shattered. It had shattered because what it contained was too large: the thing at its centerstill speakingbegan to unfold, gaining height and width as it did.
It was tall: half again the height of the warriors it now faced. But unlike many of the one-offs, as Morse called them, this one had two arms, two legs; it had, more or less, one head. The head was massive, and it was nauseatingly unstable, the line of mouth and nose and what might have been eyes wavered like a heat mirage. That wasnt what was remarkable about it, though.
It wore armor.
And it was recognizably armor. It was chitinous, but so was Dragon armor when worn in human form; it was sleek, and it covered the whole of the body, except of course the face. It shone, reflecting light rather than absorbing it. The Shadow had continued to speak as it unfolded, revealing itself to the men and women who now waited in grim silence. But when at last it drew its weapon, it, too, fell silent, signaling an end to speech.
An end, Kaylin thought, drawing her daggers to life. She watched the giant raise his sword in two hands, lifting it over his head and exposing the whole of his chest to do so.
And she watched the bolts that flewfrom where, she wasnt certainto strike that chest and that armor. All but one bounced; one snapped. The sword plunged toward the earth, and the men who stood beneath it; they had raised their own weapons, but they werent fools; they moved. The sword crashed into the ground, literally breaking it.
Kaylin leaped to one side of the fissure that was opening beneath her feet, cursing in full Leontine. Nothing she had seen when Barren had ruled this fief and the borders had gone down had been as bad as this.
Mejrah shouted; her voice was higher and rougher than the voices of the men, and it carried. The warriors regrouped a few yards away from the armored giant, standing their ground as the Shadows that he had summoned poured toward them.
This shouldnt be happening. Kaylin knew it. The Tower was active, and it had a Lord; that had been the whole damn point. She backed upit was that or be trampledand she saw that the Shadows had changed their formation: they were flowing into the fissure the sword had made, following the damage done.
Fully half the warriors on either side of the gap in the ground now turned their weapons upon the invaders, and those weaponslit, still, by the brilliance of the odd light Mejrah and her two companions had chanted into existencecut through Shadow as if it were insubstantial mist. But insubstantial or no, the Shadow burned.
It also attacked. This army of summoned Shadow was in no way as impressive as the summoner, but it didnt have to be: it was still chaotic, amorphous, unpredictable. The uniformity of form that had existed before the lesser Shadows had attempted to cross the border through the breach melted away, and the Shadowy forms that had echoed the warriors were lost. The separation between the forms was lost, as well, as the warriors struck; the Shadows began to bleed into one another, combining and congealing into something vastly less human in appearance.
It was almost a relief. She lifted a dagger, reversed her grip on it, and threw it cleanly toward an emerging eye; Shadow eyes, in her experience, generally did more than just see things. The throw was mediocre; the dagger embedded itself into the iris, not the pupil. In a normal creature, this would have been fine, but the Shadow had pupils the size of Kaylins fist. It couldnt see her from that eye, but it turned the bulk of its moving formwhich was leglessin her direction, while the warriors hacked bits and pieces off its body.
Those pieces dissolved, seeping into the crevice itself; the Shadow continued to move toward Kaylin. Her dagger slowly disappeared into the damaged eye, as the eye transformed itself into a bleeding mouth. Damn it. She leaped back as another eye began to emerge; this time, it was lidded, and this time, her dagger bounced. As it did, the lid snapped open.
Damn it! Eyebeams lanced the ground. Clods of dirt and broken stone rose in chunks, and a shout went up from the warriors, one of whom hadnt been lucky enough to dodge in time. He went down; the rest of his companions, instead of running for coverwhich was admittedly a lost cause this close to the borderformed up. They parried the damn beams.
No fool she, she threw herself forward, rolled between two of them, and came to her feet. Or tried.
The ground shook, causing her to stumble; the armored giant had once again brought his sword crashing into the packed dirt and cracked stonework on the edge of the border itself; the rupture traveled across the boundary. The giant, however, did not. No, Kaylin thought, watching him. He couldnt. And the only purchase his Shadows had were in the crevices themselves, at least until the barrier was breached.
She turned to look for Tara and found her easily. The Avatar was glowing. She still had wings, but her face looked like alabaster: white, cold, and hard. Gone were the dirt-stained, slightly oversize clothes of a fledgling gardener; the Avatars clothing, it appeared, was whatever she desired it to be. At her side, but grounded, stood Tiamaris, and at his side, still encumbered by the frailer human form, stood Sanabalis. Severn was on the other side of the first crevice, and he was working his chain and its terminating blades.
Tiamaris left the warriors as they hacked away at both eyebeams and the physical body that was shooting them so chaotically. He turned his attention to one of the three new breaks that straddled the edge of his fief; Tara flew to a different one. Sanabalis grimaced, and then walkedquickly for a man who affected agetoward the last. He still hadnt bothered to shed the human form, but he didnt need to be in Dragon form to breathe fire.
Clearly age made some difference; the fire was white, and it was hot enough to cause the ground to glow red. The small amount of Shadow that had leaked into the crevice over which Sanabalis kept watch began to smolder, and black smoke rose as it screamed. For a puddle, it made a lot of noise. Morse joined Sanabalis; she had a long sword, but she stayed behind the Dragon Lord, watching the ground intently. When tendrils rose up the sides and tried to find purchase in the ground above, she cut them down without blinking.
Kaylin cursed as the earth shook again. This was getting them nowhere; the giant could make cracks in the ground all damn day and he didnt seem to be running out of Shadow to fill them. He couldnt cross the border; that much was clear. He tried; she could see him straining to move, and she could see the sudden stillness that made his failure clear.
Her arms and legs were aching now, which she expected, given the magic. What she didnt expect, as she turned her full attention to the armored giant, was the way her vision began to blur. This was not the time to pass out, and as shed had some experience with that on her drinking binges with Teela and Tain, she recognized some of the signs.
But she hadnt been drinking with the two Barrani Hawks in months; she certainly hadnt been drinking today. She forced herself to focus, and as she did, the whole of the armored giant snapped into place with a sharp clarity that was so sudden it made her teeth rattle. It wasnt his size or his shape or the way his bladewhich she doubted she could even liftwas drinking in both Shadow and light; it wasnt the way his armor glowed, or even the way his eyes didbecause he had eyes and she could suddenly see them.
It wasnt even the movement of his mouth, the way his lips formed a continuing chain of syllables that she couldnt quite force into words. It was his name. She could see it as clearly as she had ever seen a name before, but for the first time, she actually understood what it was she was seeing. The border that he struggled against was also completely visible to Kaylin as she watched him. It, like his name, had form and shape in a way that it had never had before.
It was hard to look away, and she could only manage it for a few seconds. But the brief glance the effort afforded made at least one thing clear: the Shadows that crossed the border had no similar words at their heart; they had no substance. Which was a stupid thing to think of creatures that could destroy anything standing in their way.
Then again, so could tidal waves and earthquakes, and no one tried to reason with them.
She turned back to the giant, and to the word that was at his heart. The rune itself wasnt dark, and it wasnt ugly; it was, just as any other ancient word shed glimpsed, composed of familiar broad strokes, fine lines, dots, and hatches. Its meaning wasnt reflected in its visible shape. It wasnt necessary. She could read it. What she couldnt easily do was tease meaning out of it, which was what reading was supposed to be about.
Kaylin! Severn shouted. Something was wrong with his voice, although it took her a minute to figure out what it was: it was the only shout she could hear; all the rest of the noise had vanished. The movement of blades, the shouting of indecipherable orders, the crackling of Dragon breath, had suddenly gone mute. She turnedtried to turnin Severns direction, but her legs had locked in place. She couldnt take her eyes off the rune. Even the form that enclosed it on all sides was now a translucent black with shiny bits. The weapon that extended from both of the giants long arms was the only other part of it that was as solid as the wordbut the two werent connected.
She squinted, looking at the sword, in part because she could. There, along the flat of the blade she could see carvedand glowingrunes. They were, like the giants name, ancient words. She cursed in Leontine, but the words apparently failed to leave her mouth, because she couldnt hear them, either.
What could she hear?
The movement of a giant. The whistling fall of his sword. The muted movement of Shadow, which sounded like the rustle and gather of fallen, dead leaves in a dry wind. The earth, in the universe her ears now inhabited, was not being broken; the Shadows, in the same universe, werent speaking.
She was still frozen in place, although time hadnt stopped. She tried to step back, triedagainto turn, with no effect. Taking a deep breath, she accepted the inevitable and took a step forward. Forward worked. Of course, forward led her to, and not away from, the giant; forward led her to, and not away from, the border. She was momentarily glad that she couldnt hear anyone else because she was fairly certain at least a handful of people were now shouting choice phrases at her in their native tongues.
But the border yielded to her in a way that it didnt yield to the would-be invaders: with ease, and without the necessity of a lot of collateral destruction. The landscape didnt magically change with the crossing; the colors didnt return; neither did sound. But the runes developed a texture and a dimension as she approached them, which made the sword look decidedly more unwieldy.
The giant noticed her only when she was five yards away. His eyes widened slightly, and his sword armwell, arms, given the overhand swingstilled. He then turned toward her; the word at his core didnt shift at all.
But it wasnt a complicated word. It wasnt like the name of the Outcaste Dragon; it wasnt as immense as the name of a world. Kaylin began, as the giant slowly ambled toward her, to speak it. To speak his name, even though she couldnt understand what she was saying.
Speech was now an act of instinct. She wasnt speaking to make herself heard or to be understood; she wasnt speaking to communicate. She was buying time, because she had no doubt at all that if the giant reached her, speech would be impossible. Breathing might also be an issue.
Names in the old tongue had syllables that, in any other language, would compose an entire paragraphs worth of words. Or a page. Or a book. They couldnt be spoken quickly in a breathless rush; enunciating them at all was like trying to speak with a mouth full of molasses. It was messy, it took effort, and it was probably unpleasant to watch.