The Outstretched Shadow ou(tom-1 Read online

  Of course, the Mages could claim it… all that involved was the casting of a Boundary Spell. The magickal cost would be high, but that was the City's problem.

  And once they'd claimed it…

  He looked up, and saw Shalkan watching him from the edge of the clearing.

  "Is there trouble?" the unicorn asked.

  "The City's going to expand its boundaries—to here," Kellen said bleakly.

  Shalkan snorted and started back, then stamped his forehoof angrily.

  "There's nothing for it, then," Idalia said angrily, fishing her tankard out of the spring, pouring the water out, and getting to her feet. "We'll have to warn the villages and move farther west. Into the Elven lands, I guess—they won't dare try to intrude there."

  "You mean we're just going to run?" Kellen said indignantly, getting to his feet as well. "Just because the City decides it wants somebody else's land? Why should we move? We should stay and fight!"

  "Don't be an idiot," Idalia said blightingly. Then she shook her head, and moderated her tone. "I'm sorry, Kellen—I didn't mean that; I'm angry at them, not you. You heard our beloved and most merciful father, though, and you should know what that means. They're going to set the borders and then send a Scouring Hunt. They won't even send out a Lawspeaker with a decree this time to give the Otherfolk time to get away. A Scouring Hunt is just that. They'll send Hounds, hundreds of them. You and Shalkan fought two packs and barely survived. How can we—and half a dozen villages full of innocent, unarmed villagers without an ounce of magic among them, at least half of them mere children—fight against pack after pack after pack of Hounds?"

  "Well, they can run, but we should fight!" Kellen exclaimed, feeling his face grow hot.

  "And what if all my friends here decide to help us—they will, you know," she replied tightly. "And then, because the ones that can fight have stayed, their families stay—"

  "It isn't fair," Kellen muttered angrily, kicking at the ground. "We shouldn't let them push us around!"

  "If we stay and fight—if we don't warn them—they'll die, and is that fair?" Idalia demanded.

  Kellen hung his head. "No," he whispered. "But it isn't fair," he repeated.

  "I know," Idalia said gently, "but it's the right thing to do." She sighed, and upended the tankard, shaking out the last of the water. "The right thing to do is almost always the hardest."

  "How—how long do we have?" Kellen asked. His voice shook, just a little.

  "Shalkan?" she asked.

  "A moonturn at least," the unicorn said, tilting his head to the side for a moment of thought. "They'll have to gather the power to set the Bounds, then gather more to awaken the stone Hounds, even with every stonecutter in the City working day and night to craft as many as they'll need. They'll see no need for haste."

  "You don't think so?" Idalia looked skeptical.

  "How could the Western Hills possibly know what a special treat lies in store for them?" the unicorn said sarcastically. He tossed his head. "And we'll need every moment of time between then and now, so we'd better get to it. I'll warn everyone I can, but there are many I can't approach. You'll have your work cut out for you. Don't dally."

  With a bound, the unicorn was off.

  Kellen looked at Idalia and smiled crookedly, though he'd never felt less like smiling in his life. To be Banished was bad enough, but now, to be run out of the Wildwood when it was just starting to feel like home…

  "Well, I guess I don't have to worry about finishing that addition after all," he said, trying to put a good face on things.

  "And I guess you're going to get to see the Elves," Idalia said, doing her best to match his bantering tone. "Come on. We've got work to do."

  BUT as they turned to the work of preparing to warn the Wildlanders of Armethalieh's intentions, some of his father's words came back to him, and Kellen found he couldn't recognize himself in the oh-so-dangerous Outlaw Lycaelon had described.

  Him? Know the deepest secrets of the City? When he'd wandered through his seventeen years there blind and half-asleep to everything the Mages did? Lycaelon was just putting on airs, trying to make him seem more of a danger than he was. He wasn't a danger at all. All Kellen wanted was to be left alone—but telling the Council that wouldn't suit Lycaelon's plans. When he couldn't even save himself from the Hunt without Shalkan's help? Just who did his father think he was going to fool?

  Maybe it didn't matter. Lycaelon was creating a paper tiger, a bogeyman, out of the only material he had at hand, trying to make Kellen seem to be the heart and ringleader of some grand conspiracy of evil with designs on the conquest of Armethalieh, when in reality he wasn't a danger at all, and never would be. All Kellen had wanted—all he'd ever wanted— was to be left alone—

  That wouldn't suit Lycaelon's plans, now, would it?

  "He's using me as an excuse, isn't he?" Kellen asked.

  Idalia sighed. "If it gives you any comfort, yes, at least partly—though I'm sure Lycaelon also hopes that in extending the boundaries, he'll get another chance to hunt you down as well. But I don't think that's the whole of it by any means. I'm sure that even if you were still tucked up safe in Armethalieh, the Arch-Mage would have found some bogeyman to wave in the Council's faces. This can't be a spur-of-the-moment thing." She shook her head. "I just wish that I'd known about this sooner. Shalkan's right. It's going to take every moment we've got to get folk warned and out of here."

  "At least I am here now, and I know the truth," Kellen replied, setting his chin with stubborn determination. "I'd rather know the truth and be here, facing a Scouring Hunt, than be sitting there, safe, believing his lies!"

  IN his small office just off Arch-Mage Lycaelon's far grander one, Chired Anigrel, the Arch-Mage's own confidential secretary, awaited the outcome of the Council session as he worked his way slowly through a large stack of requisition forms, all of which would require the Arch-Mage's personal signature and magickal seal.

  He had no doubt of how the session would go. Lycaelon Tavadon was a persuasive orator, with the strength of utter conviction to lend power to his words.

  It is always better that way. Sincerity is the best disguise of all.

  And all the better for being no disguise. The Arch-Mage had no hidden agenda, no secret double game that lay beneath the surface of his words… aside from the rather charming and innocent desire to bend the entire Council wholly to his will or even dispense with it utterly. No, the secret desires and hidden agendas here within the Council House belonged solely to Lycaelon's so-deferential and self-abasing private secretary and whipping-boy, Undermage Anigrel.

  Who would have thought that both of Alance's brats would show the Taint? Since Kellen's—The Outlaw's—Banishment, Lycaelon had been harder than ever to deal with. Anigrel could blot out the man's petty life with a lifted finger, but every day he was forced to pretend that he was a mere Journeyman-Undermage, years away from attaining the exalted dignity and power of a High Mage. If not for the brat's defection to the ancient enemy…

  Anigrel gritted his teeth in annoyance at the lost opportunity that Kellen's departure represented, and kept himself from blotting the parchment beneath his hand with an effort. If he had only managed to get Kellen under his thumb, and then corrupt him utterly, what a prize for his Dark Lady the boy would have been!

  "There are no failures, only opportunities," she had told him when he had told his Dark Lady what had happened, making his report as he did once each month at moondark. It was the greatest risk he took, the one moment of unhallowed magic that the Council might conceivably detect. But his talismans, spells, and wards protected him, and in all the years he had played his double-game, he had so far escaped discovery.

  "Lycaelon is vulnerable now. Play upon his fears, make him believe that his son could not have escaped him without being cunning as a serpent and powerful as a Demon Prince. He wishes to make Armethalieh strong; foster those ambitions and make them synonymous with his own prosperity. Make the Golden City h
ated by all the world."

  Her mind-voice was like a caress, wakening a hunger that must go eternally unsatisfied, until he could rise high enough in the ranks of the Mages to slake his lesser appetites in the poorest quarters of the City.

  Or until the City fell.

  "Soon, my impatient love," his Dark Queen purred in his mind. "Serve me well and you will have all you desire …"

  And so, with an idle comment here, an innocent observation there, Anigrel had worked day and night to turn Lycaelon's anger at his son's defection outward to a hatred of the Free Borderers, and to fan a furious envy at Mage Breulin's successful policies of enclosure into a more grandiose plan of his own. That Lycaelon's agents had received the bit of fortunate intelligence about "The Outlaw's" location at the most opportune moment to make an otherwise harmless boy into a nightmare menace was no surprise to Anigrel; he knew perfectly well who had given it to them, and why. The Dark Lady had agents everywhere, and if she could not have Kellen corrupted and in her power, she would use his mere presence on earth to serve her in other ways. Anigrel knew without envy that he was but a small component in a glorious Working, so that one day the Tree of Night would flower and spread its branches against the sky, blotting out the sun once more, this time forever.

  And to his well-concealed relief, at last Lycaelon had taken his careful hints to heart. When the news about The Outlaw came, Lycaelon set Anigrel to immediately preparing the preliminary paperwork for a Scouring Hunt of enormous proportions. The Arch-Mage explained nothing, of course, but after laying so much groundwork, Anigrel didn't find it difficult to guess what lay in Lycaelon's mind.

  Soon bycaebn will come and tell you that he has proposed a glorious campaign against the east to extend the boundaries of the City all the way to the High Hills — incidentally running that dreadful and dangerous enemy, The Outlaw, to earth—all in the name of Purity, and that the Council has given it their full support. Be sure to act surprised, Anigrel told himself mockingly.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Revelry and Ashes

  THE NEXT FORTNIGHT was a desperate race against time.

  Every village in the Western Hills was busy with harvest and had few people to spare for other tasks, but everyone who could be spared was sent with messages to still other villages and far-flung crofts, warning that Armethalieh was extending its reach into the Western Hills.

  Kellen had gone back to Merryvale a few days later to meet with the Council of Elders. He spent two days there, explaining in detail what Armethalieh's rule would mean to them—not only the taxes and tithes, the restrictive laws about what you could buy and sell, but the fact that nonhuman folk weren't welcome in Armethaliehan lands at all, and mixed villages like Merryvale were considered an abomination by the Priests of the Light.

  "But… why?" Master Eliron and the others kept asking him, and all Kellen could do was shake his head and repeat over and over: "That's just the way it is."

  The debate went on endlessly, as if the people of Merryvale simply couldn't comprehend what he told them. They probably couldn't, he reflected. It must seem utter madness to people who had lived as they had for so many decades.

  "But surely—if Armethalieh is a city of Law—we, too, will have rights," the Mayor said hopefully. "We will send the City a petition protesting this violation of our sovereignty…"

  "And I'm sure they will receive it, Master Badelz, and perhaps even read it. And they will tell you that the Law of the City is for the good of all, and that your rights begin and end with doing as you are told by the High Council. They will tell you that the Otherfolk have no rights, because they are not human, and the first thing they will demand is that you cast them out of Merryvale. And if you do not do as you are told, they will treat you as an enemy. Please, sir, remember that they have armed men, trained in fighting, to enforce their rule. What do you have? And they have High Mages, who—well, their magic doesn't require the prices that Wild Magic does; they can make it do anything they want to. You've heard about the Outlaw Hunt—Idalia says a Scouring Hunt is a hundred times worse. They're going to set it on all Wildmages, and all Otherfolk. And if you try to resist them they'll set it on you humans." He swallowed hard. "I am… I was the son of the Arch-Mage, Master Badelz. I know every Mage on the High Council, and they speak with one voice in this. I know what I'm talking about."

  Kellen almost wished he hadn't told them that, because of the way they looked at him then, but he knew he had to convince them at any cost. Idalia was right. If the stone Hounds came here and attacked, there would be nothing left of the village.

  But he also knew that the Hounds would be looking for him; and for Idalia most of all, once Lycaelon realized she was still alive. Idalia was right. If the two of them could cross the border into Elven lands before the Scouring Hunt was set loose, perhaps the Hounds wouldn't waste too much of their energy on lesser targets.

  "Well, if the colt says that, it's good enough for me," a Centaur named Yadrian said firmly. "I'm taking my family and heading east—now—before some greedy Mage decides to hitch me to a plow!"

  It turned out that Yadrian spoke for most of the Centaurkin in Merryvale. By the time Kellen left the village, they had already begun dismantling their houses and shops, preparing to head east to places of greater safety. By the time the first Lawspeakers from the City arrived, the only sign that Centaurs had ever been here would be the carvings on the village walls—and the Lawspeakers and Militia would probably insist those be taken down and burned, Kellen thought gloomily. Not that it would matter much. He thought that even the humans who planned to stay and protest Armethalieh's land-grab would be following the Centaurs and the rest of the Otherfolk within a season or two.

  WHILE Kellen was in Merryvale, some of the other free souls who had heard the news came to visit Idalia. Most were afraid, all were angry— some were even angry for Idalia's sake as well as their own.

  "How can they do this to you, girl? I've half a mind to ride down into that City of theirs and fetch that high-and-mighty Arch-Mage a clout on the ear he wouldn't soon forget!" Kearn said.

  Kearn was a Mountain Trader, making a last pass into the lowlands before the snows made the passes of the High Reaches uncertain. He often stopped to look in on Idalia, and this year she was even gladder to see him than usual, for Kearn traveled with a hardy string of pack mules, and she and Kellen were going to need mobility and speed for themselves and their possessions to make their way west and over the border ahead of the Scouring Hunt.

  At least the Centaurs have their own means of transportation, she thought regretfully.

  "Ah, Kearn, if I thought it would do any good, I'd send you to him with my blessing. But the High Council Mages are"—she paused, trying to think of a way to make him understand—"they're the worst possible combination of vices. They're greedy, stupid and scared, and utterly convinced that they are the only possible people in the world who can, should, and deserve to sit in authority over others, and that's all there is to it." Idalia shrugged.

  "Hard weather for the littlefolk, though," Kearn said sympathetically. "They depend on you, you know. From what I hear, the City won't have any care for them."

  "Do you think I don't know that?" Idalia said crossly. "If I stay, things will only be worse for them—and I won't be let to help them anyway with my 'evil magic' " She didn't bother to remind him that she would be under a sentence of death for that same magic. "Besides, most of them are leaving now."

  "Aye, I thought the Wildwood seemed a bit thin of company as the girls and I rode through," Kearn said, gesturing through the open door of the cabin to where a string of hobbled mules stood placidly behind a large white-stockinged bay. "So the Shining Folk are leaving as well?" he asked, using one of the many names the Mountain Traders had for the shyer Otherfolk.

  "Why should they stay where they are not welcomed?" Idalia asked sharply. Shalkan had spread his warnings far and wide, and the dryads, sylphs, undines, gnomes, sprites, brownies, pixies, and fauns h
ad already begun to leave the Wildwood and the surrounding hills. Even the dryads were leaving, difficult though that was for them; they were taking seedlings of their trees, and going. The land would be less fertile and forgiving in their absence—and wouldn't that be an unwelcome surprise for the Mages, who must have gotten reports about how lush and productive the western farmland was?

  "But I'm glad you're here, Kearn. You're a trader. I want to trade."

  Kearn regarded her with wary interest, for he'd traded with Idalia before, and knew she was a sharp bargainer. "I'm not sure I have anything you want with me this trip, Idalia," he began slowly. "Unless you're planning to come home with me, you and the boy. Not that it isn't a great honor, of course…"

  "You have the mules," Idalia interrupted, cutting off what promised to be a lengthy speech.

  "Sell one of my girls?" Kearn looked shocked. "They're like family! Besides, I need them to carry my own things home."

  "But you won't be waiting to take on a full load this trip," Idalia pointed out mercilessly. "You'll be heading home today or tomorrow, with only what you have now, because the news I've given you can't wait a few extra sennights to be delivered. If Armethalieh is claiming the Western Hills, how long until it claims the Western Mountains, and everything right up to the Elven borders? For that matter, you'll have a lot of folk heading out of the Hills up into your mountains now—right into the teeth of winter, some of them—humans and Centaurs, fauns, and others of the Shining Folk besides. Your folk will need to make ready to receive them."