Eric Van Lustbader - Sunset Warrior 2 - Shallows of Night

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SHALLOWS OF NIGHT

Sunset Warrior Book 2

Eric Van Lustbader

Shallows of Night

ERIC VAN LUSTBADER

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

1978

All of the characters in the book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual

persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

First Edition

ISBN: 0-385-12968-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-12884

Printed in the United States of America

For all the heroes

Contents

One

•ICE•

Two

•AEGIR•

Three

•SHA'ANGH'SEI•

Four

•HART OF DARKNESS•

There is no journey's end.

—Bujun saying

ONE

•Ice•

Soaring through frigid mists and roiling clouds, he stretches fully his long wings

upon the unpredictable currents. Streamers of silvered plumage, running bilaterally

across his wings and cresting his majestic questing head, ripple and blur in the wind.

He banks and dips. There is a moaning in his ears. His large liquid eyes stare

unblinkingly ahead at the immense eye of the setting sun, its face a broad and

flattened disk, 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 ghostly remnants

of a once vast, victorious army, reaving it.

He banks again, deftly avoiding a treacherous downdraft, and turns his incurious

gaze beneath him, through the layers of cloud and mist, to the painful twisting of the

earth far below.

High peaks beaten by age and scraped by merciless 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 giants striding across the barren land.

He floats over sheer gorges, frosted thickly in gleaming sheets of periwinkle ice,

plumes of loose snow drifting along their flanks like smoke from a funeral pyre. His

keen eyes trace the vertiginous descent from dancing ice crystaled

green-turquoise-magenta in the dying light to the violent violet of their yawning and

uneasy depths: precipitous chasms sliced out of the land as cleanly as if by a cruel

blade of immense size. Powerful wings flutter as out of these depths now is heard

the agonized groaning of shifting rock. Ozone and sulphur fill the air as the earth

shudders and trembles. Shards of ice shear off in dense clusters with infinite

slowness, hanging impossibly in mid-air, crumbling in layers until, with an abrupt and

complete swiftness, they explode silently into vast spurts of hyalescent spray high in

the sky that turn to rainbow arcs as they catch the last oblique rays of watery light.

He wheels in the colored, suddenly solid air, unperturbed.

Everywhere is ice and draperies of snow with only the occasional tired fist of

granite or twisted schist rising like ancient tombstones in an alien desert, useless

punctuation on a blank and crumbling page.

Against this inimical icescape nothing moves.

The bird banks and glides in the sky, his black-irised eyes scanning the dreadful

sameness of the land. Into the setting sun he flies, his majestic plumage stained a

dilute scarlet and, glancing once more earthward, he sees a dark and tiny shadow

limned before the glare 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 rich

lustrous gray, as he heads southward for a closer look.

Resolution of image comes far too swiftly, for the shadow is huge. Abruptly it

moves and, startled, the bird wheels away from the edge of the steep precipice along

which he has been flying and, flapping his wings in alarm, speeds westward, rising,

gaining the high currents, diminishing into the light of the lowering sun.

Transfixed, Ronin stands at the verge of the high ice ledge staring southward,

oblivious to the receding speck in the sky.

Motionless, his body tall and muscular, he appears more a statue erected to the

countless legions who, throughout the myriad ages, have fought across the changing

faces of this land. For here once grew lush verdant forests of giant fern and slender

willow spreading their fans of feathered leaves, building dense jungles of crowding

greenery and thick tangles 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 the

filtering light, the quick silent slash, the gout of bright blood beading the foliage, the

dying body of the enemy. And in another age—earlier or later, one cannot be

sure—here swelled and sucked fifteen fathoms of green water alive with the riotous

growth of the sea. High-booted feet tramped the stained tarred decks of

wide-beamed wooden ships, long oars extending from their high curving sides,

beating through air and water in hypnotic rhythm. Hoarse shouts filled the sky heavy

with brine and heat as helmed and bearded warriors prepared themselves for battle.

Layers of hard snow encrust the slippery ice of the precipice upon which he

stands, feet apart and planted firmly in the frost. Unconsciously he clenches his left

hand, which is covered by a strange scaled gauntlet, dull and unreflective. The wind

gusts, screaming in his ears, and rushes by him, unheeded, sucked in by the crevices

and piled hillocks of the plateau tumbling at his back. The air is dry and chill. The

staggering sight at which he gazes longingly resonates in his mind with the supravivid

impact of an ecstatic dream. And for this time, the events of the recent 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," said the voice quite near and behind him. And he turned

slowly, as if in a dream, to behold Borros, the Magic Man.

"The true wonder is that we have been denied this sight for all of our lives." A thin

and weary smile curled Borros' lips.

Wind whipped loose snow against their legs as they stood atop the ice plateau,

strange creatures garbed in the one-piece foil suits they had found on the highest

Level of the Freehold before each, in his own time and his own way, breached the

last metal defense of their subterranean world, cracking the outer hatch, buried in

drifting snow. The suits were extremely light, skin tight along chest and arms, with

filled pockets of hardware and food concentrates, vacuum-sealed, immune to the

ravages of time, even a small supply of mineral-enriched fluid to refresh themselves.

These pockets ran around the suits' waists and down the outside of each leg,

somehow increasing the warmth of the garments.

Ronin stared at Borros, seeing him now as if for the first time, the focus of reality

at last forced upon him, and all the raw hate that he had held in abeyance for these

long moments flooded back on an inexorable tide. Caught in the slipstream of

sewage; shook himself, as if the motion would somehow cleanse him. He knew that

he carried now within his depths an anger and a sorrow, that thus was bound to him

irrevocably a hideous strength.

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

"Surely you are not cold?"

His fingers moved along the foil to a fold at the back of Ronin's neck. "Look

here." And he pulled gently upward, the metallic skin stretching to cover Ronin's

head, leaving only his eyes 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 tiny access 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," the Magic Man said urgently. "But we must flee from

here at once."

Tears call to Ronin and the mountains melting as he ceases to feel the bite of the

wind at his eyes and lips. The sky colorless and the earth with no substance. His feet

leaden. His heart pounding as it hit him searingly like the aftershock of a deep

wound, the rent cauterized but the nerves still in dysfunction. At first there was no

feeling at all. Numb. The body protecting itself. But there is a limit. His

consciousness narrowed because he was struggling against it now. All his loves, all

his friends, all the people. Gone in a wink of an eye. Just a flutter of time, the space

to pull two breaths and lives are snuffed like tapers at first Spell. K'reen and Stahlig

and Nirren and G'fand and—the Salamander, the center of it all, still down there,

alive, alive…

"Now."

Slowly, it seemed to him, he became aware of a plucking at his sleeve.

"Ronin, please, we must be off." He heard the words as if from a great distance.

They hung in front of him like lamps, separate and solid, one after another, turning

on some unseen axis, their sheen…

"Chill take it! Ronin, we must go now! Before pursuit from below can be

organized."

Then the meaning had penetrated and he started as if from a deep slumber.

"Yes," he said hoarsely, turned to look at Borros. "Yes, of course we must be

off." His colorless eyes were clear now, their gaze sharp and quick "But which

way?"

"There," said the Magic Man. And he lifted his arm in a sweeping gesture

outward, over the lip of the precipice to the enormous expanse of the darkling ice

sea.

* * *

There was nought but the crying of the freezing wind. The ancient rock at his

face, rippling, studded with ice in pockets and rivulets, slipped away above him

centimeter by centimeter. The sound was like the wailing of the damned. Striations

made a constantly changing pattern that held his attention as he searched for foot-

and handholds. Following Borros down the immense face of the cliff toward the ice

sea far, far below, he felt all too distinctly the void at his back. The magnitude of its

emptiness beckoned to him, the wind its siren call, ululating hypnotically, Relax, let

go, feel the gentle parting of warm flesh from cold stone, to fall backward, slowly,

effortlessly onto the comforting cushion of the wind, turning, to be borne away,

tumbling, into the void…

An ending he did not wish.

"What, over the edge?" he had said.

A peculiar animation had come to the Magic Man's face, a keen anticipation.

"Yes. Yes! Do you not see?" As if he had waited all his life for this kinetic moment.

"It is the only way down to the ice sea. Our way lies south. South into the land of

men."

And so Ronin had walked with Borros through the crusty snow and treacherous

ice to the very edge, entirely free at last of the ties that bind every man at one time to

home. Masterless but not directionless.

They went carefully along the lip for perhaps a thousand meters and then Borros

slipped over the side. Without a backward glance Ronin too quit the plateau.

* * *

Ronin became aware that Borros had stopped below him. He called down but the

fluting of the wind made communication impossible at this distance. Carefully he

lowered himself to the other's side.

"The way below is blocked," Borros said in his ear.

Ronin peered down through the intermittent showers of snow. Indeed, directly

below them a fresh fall of snow and ice crystals layered the cliff face and it was

impossible to determine the nature of the footing. Suicidal to attempt the descent by

touch alone, yet it was imperative that they move onward.

Ronin swung his gaze to their right where his peripheral vision had registered a

dark area along the rock wall. Now, motioning with his head, he led the Magic Man

toward its smudgy outline.

They inched along the narrow ledge upon which they had stopped their descent

and soon the dark area took on definition. As Ronin had hoped, it was a cave of

some considerable size and within its mouth they found a semblance of shelter from

the wind and the cold.

Borros sighed deeply as he pulled off his hood. His hairless skull, faintly gleaming

in the dim light, seemed peculiarly fitting for this foreign and forbidding place; its

singular saffron color could almost have passed for the patina of age.

Ronin went away from the rough rock walls to the lip of the cave. Below him the

cliff dropped precipitously. Beneath the heavy fall of new snow clinging to the rock

with an almost sentient tenacity there must be a way down to the ice sea. He could

just make out a sliver of its surface sparkling in the lowering light. But from what he

could see, there was no way of knowing, therefore no practical way down. Laterally

there was only the mean ledge along which they had come. Farther to the right it

disappeared into the rock face only meters from where he stood. He kicked at the

snow, left plumes arcing out into the wind as he returned to the twilight of the cave.

Borros was agitated. "What are we to do?" he asked Ronin as he stalked back

and forth. "We must continue the descent Already men from the Freehold will be

searching for us."

Ronin's mouth moved into the semblance of a brief, chill smile. "Do you really

believe that they would allow anyone onto the Surface? They must think that we shall

perish out here."

The Magic Man's eyes darted from the cave's opening to Ronin's face, back

again. "You do not know Freidal. Or Security. My escape—" His eyes flicked back

to the cave's mouth. "He will kill me if he catches me." His gaze passed across

Ronin's face again like clouds across the face of the sun. "You also. If he finds me,

he finds you."

"No one is after us," Ronin said flatly.

Borros pulled his hood up over his bald skull. "You are wrong but it makes no

difference. Even if Freidal was not coming after us, we would still have no choice.

We must descend to the ice sea. We cannot survive long here."

"Better to die on the way down than here in the cave," Ronin said sardonically.

Borros shrugged. "Are you coming?"

He did not answer immediately but walked away from the light, into the cave's

dank interior, smelling the acrid odor of raw minerals and rock dust, hearing the

whistling of the wind diminish. Yet there was sound.

Far back in the cave he dimly heard the Magic Man's strident call but he ignored

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SHALLOWSOFNIGHTSunsetWarriorBook2ByEricVanLustbader ShallowsofNightERICVANLUSTBADERDOUBLEDAY&COMPANY,INC.GARDENCITY,NEWYORK1978Allofthecharactersinthebookarefictitious,andanyresemblancetoactualpersons,livingordead,ispurelycoincidental.FirstEditionISBN:0-385-12968-8LibraryofCongressCatalogCardNumber7...

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