The Skaar Invasion Page 5

  “You need to apply common sense; remember when you had some? It served you well over the years. I should know. I’ve been watching you make use of it. You and I are not so different, you know. I was like you once, rash and bold. Clinging to my precious principles. Led me to a rather lengthy period of rethinking my life. Which in turn led me to end up like you.”

  Drisker thought. To end up like me. Trapped in Paranor? For a second he couldn’t think what the voice was talking about. Then he remembered. All those hours spent reading the Druid Histories. Just ancient legends and useless information from times dead and gone, the other Druids had scoffed. Nothing there will help you with the present. Studying the world around you is all that matters. There is nothing to be learned by studying what’s over and done with.

  Except that those who fail to pay attention to the past are doomed to repeat it.

  “Cogline,” he said softly. “Is it really you?”

  “Not really. Because I haven’t been me for a rather long time. Only a shadow of myself.”

  A transparent figure detached itself from the wall, oozing through the stone in lines and shadings until at last it was standing before him—an old man so worn and weathered, so wrinkled and gaunt, even in his present ghostly form, that he almost wasn’t there at all. What there was of him was stooped and gnarled and skeletally thin, more an approximation than a representation of the man he had been when he was alive. Or so Drisker assumed, because Cogline had been dead for centuries, gone into the netherworld, another of its shades. No one had seen or heard from him since Walker Boh had used the Black Elfstone to bring Paranor back the last time it was banished from the Four Lands before facing the Four Horsemen in a battle that had claimed Cogline’s life.

  Drisker now remembered the story of how the old man had been trapped inside the Keep after he had sacrificed himself to Rimmer Dall and the Shadowen in order to save Walker, there to remain until the Keep’s return.

  And now, for reasons Drisker could only guess at, here he was again, returned in this half-life form.

  “I suppose I must look a bit undernourished,” the old man observed, glancing down at himself. “But all things are finite, and I probably don’t have all that much time left.”

  “Do shades have finite lives once they reach the netherworld?” Drisker asked, intrigued. “I thought shades simply lived on in ghost form.”

  “Well, now you’ve learned something new, haven’t you? Think about it. All those shades take up space. Where do you put them? Eventually some have to give way to allow for new ones. When they do, they simply vanish. Poof. Gone in a moment’s time.”

  “And what happens then?”

  Cogline shrugged. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I will soon know the answer, but you will have to wait awhile. Which brings us to your present situation and the more pressing question of how long that wait might be.”

  “Can you help me get out of the Keep?” Drisker asked.

  “Well, shades don’t really help anyone, do they? You must know that much from the way living and dead Druids must meet at the Hadeshorn to converse. The living always desire answers from the dead, but the dead can’t provide them. They can only hint or suggest or riddle. It is the way of things.”

  “So you can’t help me?”

  “I didn’t say that. I can try to help you. But mostly you are going to have to help yourself.”

  Drisker sighed. “So far I haven’t had much success. I’ve been trying for days and nothing works. Surely you can tell me something that would put me on the right track?”

  Cogline shrugged, and when he did so his entire body shivered as if threatening to disappear. “You might try checking your pockets to see if there isn’t something there that would prove useful.”

  “I already checked my pockets. I did that right away, just to see if I still had the Black Elfstone. I didn’t. Clizia Porse took it from me when she left me here to die. All I have is the scrye orb.”

  Cogline looked decidedly disappointed. “You should check again. Maybe you missed something. In our tendency to be certain about what might or might not be true, we sometimes persuade ourselves things are different from reality. I wonder if it could have happened here?”

  “I don’t see how.” Drisker was irritated now. All this back-and-forth talk was leading nowhere. He shook his head. “All right, I’ll make another search. But I hope this isn’t a game you’re playing. Because I am not interested in games!”

  The shade said nothing. It simply waited, head cocked. There was a curiously intense look on its face, readable within the shimmering of its features. Drisker stared at it, momentarily fascinated, and then began rifling through his empty pockets, reaching deep, fumbling around, finding the scrye orb and continuing to dig deeper.

  “Nothing,” he muttered, still searching. “Just the scrye orb.”

  “Hmmm. Well, then, at least we have eliminated one possibility.” Cogline scratched his ghostly head. “Perhaps when you have finished rummaging about, you should check the chamber where the talismans curated by the Druid order are stored.”

  “So that I can discover it isn’t there, either? I know what’s in that chamber. I’ve cataloged it all myself, personally!”

  “Have you anything better to do with your time?”

  “Wasting it like this isn’t helping!”

  “But what if you’re not wasting it?”

  Drisker was about to offer a fresh retort when suddenly he froze, his hand still buried deep inside his pocket. His fingers explored carefully, and a shocked expression crossed his face. Then he slowly withdrew his hand.

  In his palm lay the Black Elfstone.

  Drisker stared. “I don’t understand,” he said quietly, looking up at Cogline. “How did this happen? How could it have happened? It wasn’t there earlier. I would swear it wasn’t.” He glanced down, frowning. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”

  “There is so much to explain,” the shade replied. “There are answers to be had to all your questions, Drisker Arc, although not all of them might be ones you will be happy to discover.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Drisker replied. As maddening as Cogline was, he was clearly the only one who knew the story behind what had happened to the Elfstone. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I was about to do so. Let’s begin with my recent past. I have been living in Paranor since before you became Ard Rhys. I was always fond of it there. Spent considerable time in it back when Walker Boh was struggling to accept his destiny. The netherworld was never for me. So when you left and Ober Balronen became Ard Rhys, I knew what lay ahead. The current Druid order was rotten clear through, made that way by the machinations of Balronen and his associates and their foolish indifference to the danger they were facing. But while a shade can observe, it can neither change the future nor interfere with the present.”

  He paused. “Mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  The shade made a dismissive gesture. “I was here when the Keep fell. I watched them die, all of them—all of the Druids trapped inside save Clizia Porse. But she had betrayed them, and she would betray you, as well. While you clearly distrusted her, I knew that alone would not be enough to save you. Your nature was to give the benefit of the doubt while hers was to take advantage. She would gain your help, then steal the Black Elfstone once you retrieved it and leave you to die. I could not stand by and watch it happen—it would put an end of the Druid order for good, destroying everything that had been established by Galaphile all those years ago.”

  Drisker nodded slowly. All those years ago. Thousands of years of Druid efforts expended to save the Four Lands. “So you did something, didn’t you? Even though you weren’t supposed to be able to do so?”

  Cogline shrugged. “Shades cannot impact the lives of the living, but they can cause disturbances in other, smaller ways. Lengthy
occupation of a place gives a shade a small amount of power over it. I discovered, quite by accident some years back, that my long tenure as a resident of Paranor had given me the ability to change things now and again without having to touch them. A sort of teleporting or rearranging, I suppose you would call it.”

  He looked off into the gloom of the Keep, as if remembering. “When I saw you go down, disabled by Clizia’s magic, I knew what I had to do. I waited until she had removed the pouch with its Elfstone inside and then I—how shall I put this? I swapped what she had for something else. I waited until she had pocketed the Elfstone and was bending over you, and then I swapped the Stone for something else. Then I waited.”

  “For me to wake?”

  The shade managed to look embarrassed. “Not exactly.”

  “What, then? Why did you wait to tell me about the Elfstone?”

  “Rather unfortunately, I could not seem to find where I had put it. Or caused it to be put. I have trouble remembering things sometimes. The passing of the years does that to you—even if you are a shade. Then this morning, I remembered and transferred the Stone back into your pocket.”

  “And played games with me!”

  “Drisker,” Cogline said in an admonishing tone. “It’s what shades do. You know this, so don’t act so surprised. What matters now is you have the key to the door that bars your way back into the Four Lands. All is well. Except…”

  Drisker felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Except what?”

  “Except for one small complication that will surface sooner or later, so you might as well know about it now. We ought to visit the archives so you can see for yourself. Come along. Follow my lead.”

  He started off at a rapid glide, hovering just off the stone flooring. Reluctantly, Drisker followed, trudging after him as they passed down numerous hallways and descended several sets of stairs to the lower levels of the Keep. As he walked, Drisker kept one hand firmly fastened around the Black Elfstone and its pouch where they lay nestled inside his pocket. Shades were mercurial in their behavior, and there was nothing to say that Cogline might not choose to move the talisman about yet again—perhaps just for sport.

  When they reached the archival chamber, Drisker triggered the locks and listened to them release, one by one. As he stepped inside, Cogline simply passed through the stone—as if to demonstrate how much easier everything was for a shade. The Druid ignored him, moving to the center of the room. “Well?”

  Cogline shuffled his feet. “Clizia took something else that wasn’t hers. From here, in the archives. She did so when you were otherwise occupied. It was a quick and furtive theft. She obviously knew what she was looking for and where to find it. I saw her commit her crime, of course. If I could have, I would have transferred that artifact out of her possession, as well, but there are limitations to what we can do as shades, and I did not yet know for sure that she would succeed in her efforts to take the Black Elfstone from you. So I knew it was better to concentrate on preventing that.”

  He pointed to a small cubicle set into the wall in a shadowed area where the light did not quite reach. Drisker peered at it and saw that the door was cracked slightly open. He tried to remember what it had contained. “What was in there—”

  “Have a look,” the shade said, interrupting him. “See if you can remember.”

  Drisker crossed the room, knelt to open the door all the way, and reached inside. “So she took whatever was in here, did she? I can’t seem to recall…what was…”

  He trailed off, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “No,” he whispered.

  Cogline nodded slowly, his entire body shimmering with the movement. “I’m afraid so.”

  FIVE

  Before the last stones of Paranor’s ancient walls had faded, Clizia Porse was well away from Paranor’s graveyard and its few Skaar survivors and traveling south toward Varfleet. It wasn’t where she wanted to end up, but she had contacts with people who could provide her with the supplies and transportation she needed. After all, she had been forced to abandon most of her possessions in Paranor, leaving with little more than the clothes on her back and a sizable number of credits in her pocket. At present, she was traveling with a goods caravan come down out of the villages and farmland west of the Mermidon—a collection banded together for safety against the raiders that had plagued foot and wagon traffic along the river for years. If she had been thinking more clearly, she would have arranged transport from somewhere closer to the Keep, but at the time she had been more focused on her plans for disposing of Drisker Arc.

  Drisker, after all, was the sort of man you needed to pay close attention to if you planned to kill him.

  That she had deceived the former Druid so utterly was something of a triumph—and a rigorous test of her acting abilities. She had to be entirely convincing in her insistence that they work together to protect the Druid legacy and the Keep. She had to pretend she knew nothing of Ober Balronen’s increasingly erratic behavior or why Ruis Quince had acted so recklessly when confronting the Skaar, when in fact she had been the cause of both. That she had not been instrumental in advocating for the young Skaar spy Kassen to be allowed into the Keep so he could set the stage for its fall. That her intentions for the future of Paranor were in keeping with Drisker’s own. If he had suspected the truth about any of this, he would have dispatched her so quickly she might not have even seen it coming. Drisker was trusting but unforgiving of betrayal. If he hadn’t been so passionately committed to saving Paranor and evicting the Skaar from her corridors, he might not have been caught off guard so completely.

  But whatever had undone him—whatever the nature of his failure to recognize her intentions, whatever blindness he had developed to her larger, more personal goals—it had cost him his life. He might survive the deadly passing of the Guardian through Paranor’s halls (although she seriously doubted it) or even linger on a few years afterward living off supplies that would normally provide for an entire Druid order and would be more than enough to sustain him. But in the end he would succumb. Drisker was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.

  Not while she had possession of the only magic that could allow him to escape his prison.

  Which left her free to pursue her own goals without interference.

  “Soup, Grandmother?”

  A young boy held out a bowl of steaming liquid and a spoon. She took both with a nod and leaned back against the wagon wheel. The traders and their families had been more than kind to her, not even asking who she was or where she had come from. They had picked her up close to Paranor the day before, seeking transport to Varfleet and willing and able to pay for it. She could have gotten where she was going more quickly by air, but she was content to travel slowly and disappear into the populace of the Borderlands while she pondered the path she had set herself upon—one that had begun with the destruction of Paranor and would lead to a rebuilding of the Druid order in a way that would better suit her own purposes. Her journey was just beginning, and it would be a long one. But even though she was old and her years were numbered, she had the time to do what was needed and the patience to let it all play out properly. Rushing was never a good idea. Rushing caused mistakes, and mistakes could undo you.

  She sipped her soup and thought briefly of the now demolished Druid order and how things might have gone differently if Drisker Arc had stayed on as Ard Rhys. As a leader, he was both capable and wise, but his inability to recognize fault in others was crippling. He wanted to believe the best of people, while she knew well enough that it was the worst that always surfaced sooner or later. She had seen the rise of Ober Balronen coming long before Drisker, and realized that if she was to change the direction of the order, she had to make an unappetizing alliance with him. She hated doing so—hated choosing Balronen over Drisker—but the latter simply wasn’t strong enough to survive what was coming.

  F
rom then on, she had manipulated and deceived relentlessly, waiting for her chance to make the changes she had deemed necessary. In the beginning, she had only intended to rid the order of Balronen and one or two others. But when the Skaar had invaded, she seized upon the opportunity they presented and switched from ridding herself of a few Druids to ridding herself of the lot. A clean slate was always best, and this next time around she would hand-select the members of the new Druid order.

  Her Druid order, with herself as Ard Rhys.

  She finished the soup, and when the boy passed by again she handed him the empty bowl. In two more days, they would reach Varfleet, and she would find lodgings and begin planning for the future. Alliances must be formed, agreements must be reached, and the groundwork must be laid for what in five years would bring about the return of Paranor and the forming of the new Druid order. The whole process, she suspected, would take at least five years. So for now, she must bide her time.

  Although there were a few tasks she must carry out fairly quickly.

  She knew Drisker had taken books of magic from Paranor—books he had compiled on his own—and she wanted them. So first she must go to his cottage in the village of Emberen, which was north of Arborlon, up along the southern boundaries of the Streleheim. That way, his knowledge could live on through her.

  There was also the girl. Tarsha. His student. She smiled, thinking of her. That girl was more than some callow acolyte. She possessed serious magic of her own; Clizia had sensed it the moment she had looked into her strange lavender eyes. You didn’t get to be as old as she was if you couldn’t recognize magic. Tarsha Kaynin could become a valuable ally if properly persuaded, and there were ways to make that happen.

  Finally, there was the matter of what to do about the Skaar. She couldn’t very well ignore them, or await the inevitable. She had to make contact with them and persuade them to support her when the time came. The rest of the Four Lands might believe the Skaar were nothing more than a temporary distraction, but Clizia saw things differently. In her judgment, the Skaar were here to stay.