William King - Shadowblood

Excitement filled Rik. He had long envied her the gift that let her come and go seemingly unstoppably and without passing through the space between. The former thief in him appreciated how useful that talent could be and all the manifold uses he could put it to.

“I am willing to try,” he said.

“You should just do,” she said. “The secret and the ability is in your blood. It should come to you like breathing does to a baby.”

“After a sharp smack on the bottom?” he asked.

“Spare me the feeble jokes,” she said. “This is not the time. Of all the things I have to teach you, this is the one you most need to master. It is a power that may save your life and mine in the days to come.”

The seriousness of her tone affected him and he gave his full attention to what she said. He let himself relax and reach out with the other senses she had taught him to access. The night grew quieter, as if he had only a limited store of awareness available to his brain, and what he gained by concentrating in one area, he lost in another. The shadows became clearer to his sight and more than that, he became aware in some strange way, of what they contained. They were more vivid to him than objects he could see. He perceived them as if by an odd admixture of sight and touch, a mingled awareness of their weight and mass as of their shape and size.

He found that if he concentrated, he could pool his perceptions within one shadow, and become aware in much greater detail of all that was within it, although at a loss of his awareness of what was going on in the surrounding shadows. It was like concentrating on something through a magnifying glass. He was still conscious vaguely of what was happening elsewhere, as a man would be of objects moving in his peripheral vision. With an effort he could wrench his perceptions from shadow to shadow, moving it further and further away until he reached the limit of his ability perhaps a few hundred strides away.

He allowed his mind to jump to the fireside where Asea and Karim huddled over the rabbits they were stewing. He was aware of their conversation in part as if he was overhearing it and in part as if the very outlines of the words in the air were pressed into his thoughts. In some ways it was an experience similar to the ones he had undergone when he had taken some of the wizards drugs that Asea had given him.

Asea shivered as Rik concentrated his awareness on her, and Rik wondered if her sorcerer’s senses were so keen that she knew that she was under supernatural observation. According to what Tamara had told him, some people had a talent for that. Why not? Rik himself could detect a shadowgate being opened.

Rik wrenched his awareness back closer to hand. Aware that Tamara was shaking him by the shoulder and talking loudly in his ear.

“You’ve got to be careful of that,” she said. “You can get lost in the seeking, and waste hours shifting your consciousness from shadow to shadow.”

“How long was I out?”

“A few minutes.” It had happened before but not for so long, and Rik could see the danger at which she hinted. He had no idea how much time had passed since he had started the process, but he would not have guessed it was that long. It seemed there were subtle dangers in shadow magic, and that it was like a drug in more ways than one.

“Now,” said Tamara, “concentrate on the shadow beneath that tree on the far side of the clearing.” Rik did so, throwing his perception forward to the deep pool of darkness Tamara had indicated. Immediately he was aware of the shape of the ground around him, and mass of the tree above.

It was like being two people, divided, with one part of him living breathing flesh standing beside Tamara, the other a shadow outline in the place he perceived, and it came to him then that it was so. Somehow he had sent his shadow into the distance. He knew that if he looked down at his feet now, there would be no shadow there.

“Good,” Tamara said, her voice seeming to come from a great distance away.” You have completed the first part of the sending. Now you must complete the second. You must open the way.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” he asked. Forcing each word from his lips was like lifting a very heavy weight. He would not have believed how much the effort would cost him if he had not experienced it.

“Let yourself feel the space around your shadow-self. Be aware of it, as you would be of water around your hand if it were plunged into a pool.”

“I am doing that.”

“If you concentrate hard, you will become aware of something else, of a sensation of things underlying what you can feel, of a somehow distant chillness.”

He was immediately conscious of what she meant. It was as if his shadow were on the outside of something, part of the final layer of skin on an onion, and he was aware of something beneath, a different space, a tunnel into elsewhere. It was like rapping with his hand on a secret panel and becoming aware of the echo beneath. He could feel the energy there as he sometimes could when he was working sorcery.

“Do you have it?” Tamara asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“Tear a hole between your shadow self and the shadow realm.”

“Are you sure that is wise?”

“Wise or not, it’s the only way you will open the gate.”

“Is this how you do it?”

“It is how I did it originally. Now the whole process is so smooth that I don’t really notice how it’s done. But everyone and everything has to start somewhere.”

Rik tried to do as she said, but found that he could not. He simply had no idea of what he was doing. It was like asking a blind man to paint. He tried though and he kept trying until his frustration built. He felt obscurely humiliated that Tamara was here to witness this and angry with her as if she were deliberately asking him to do the impossible to make him feel foolish.

She sensed this, and he could almost picture her sardonic smile when she said, “It’s not always about you. I am trying to teach something in weeks that it took me years to learn.”

“I appreciate the effort,” he said. “I could only wish for more success.”

“Observe,” she said.

He felt another presence close to his shadow-shape and he knew it was hers. A tenebral hand reached out to cover his, and he felt that other presence guiding him through what had to be done. Suddenly there was a small gap, through which chill energy poured, widening itself. Within moments, it had suffused his shadow self.

He sensed the ebb and flow of secret energies, and then as if a key had turned in a lock, the parting of the veil that separated the Shadow world from his own. There was a sense of immense coldness and of alien presences whispering on the edge of the world, of things looking in from somewhere else. For a long moment his grasp on reality teetered. The way was open.

Tamara’s presence guided part of the shadow-self back to him, to where his shadow should have been and suddenly it was there, his shadow, in two places at once. More than that, there was a connection, a corridor between them that ran from one place to the other.

“Step forward into your shadow,” she said. “But be very careful, hold the opening at the other end open, otherwise you may be lost. I will do my best to guide you but do not rely on me being able to save you if things go wrong.”

What did she mean by that exactly? Was this the moment of crisis at last? Was this where treachery would occur? He told himself not to be so stupid. If she had planned to kill him she could have done so a hundred times before now. Ah, but this way she would have an explanation to give Asea. It would not be her fault if something went wrong with the way he cast the spell. He would be entirely to blame himself. He paused for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Stay or go?