Michelle Sagara - Cast in Ruin

Kaylin expected to see words form in that air: ancient words. True words. Instead, light grew, curling in on itself as if it was a trapped, compressed cloud.

The creature drew closer and closer to the boundaries, and as it did, it opened what might—might—have been a mouth, and it began to speak. To Kaylin’s surprise, she recognized some of the language. Not enough to understand it, of course—that would have been too easy. It wasn’t the ancient tongue, though—it was the tongue that the strangers spoke, and were speaking even now.

They were shouting at the creature, and from their stances, it appeared that they were taunting it. Had she not been so much on edge, her jaw would have hit the ground and bounced. Every instinctive reaction she’d developed over the course of her life screamed in protest: this was suicide. Then again, so was standing still, which they were notably all doing.

Had they been anyone else—in particular, people who would understand a word she shouted—she would have started to shout orders of her own. As it was, she reminded herself, firmly, that they had spent most of their lives fighting Shadows in one way or another. If they were standing there while Mejrah was doing a complicated form of magic that would have had the Imperial mages looking down their noses in contempt, they had to have a reason for it.

Tiamaris roared and the men on the ground took up his cry; she thought they were attempting to repeat what he’d said. The timbre of their voices suited their size; it wasn’t Dragon, but it had enough strength behind it not to make a mockery of the word itself. The drumbeats began to pick up speed until all sound was a collision: Mejrah, Tiamaris, the warriors on the ground, and the pounding beat of the skins themselves.

And then, suddenly, there was silence. Light leaped from sky to ground, passing through the raised weapons of the strangers. The blades absorbed light instead of reflecting it, as if they were being anointed.

The Shadow roared; it was not a dragon roar—but it was as loud, as intense, as Tiamaris at his peak. It was also cold and dark enough to devour light and the things that came with it. Kaylin took a step back, although she wasn’t in the front line; the warriors, however, didn’t.

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. She’d 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 hadn’t: they stretched to eight feet in height, growing limbs as they did. For the most part they had two of each—arms and legs—although the little details wobbled if Kaylin examined them for long. They were disturbing because they didn’t 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 that’s what it appeared to be raising. It began to move through the rain of Tiamaris’s 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 he’d been hit; he didn’t 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 she’d actually been walking; she wasn’t.

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 Kaylin’s childhood—and still did—could be killed. They just couldn’t be killed easily, they were so damn fast.

But the Shadows she’d encountered in the High Halls or in Barren, just before Tiamaris’s 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 wasn’t the tenor of the voice, it wasn’t the words—because 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 shouldn’t 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 border—a border defined entirely by eight-foot-tall warriors—black mist cracked and shattered. It had shattered because what it contained was too large: the thing at its center—still speaking—began 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 wasn’t 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 flew—from where, she wasn’t certain—to 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 weren’t 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 shouldn’t be happening. Kaylin knew it. The Tower was active, and it had a Lord; that had been the whole damn point. She backed up—it was that or be trampled—and she saw that the Shadows had changed their formation: they were flowing into the fissure the sword had made, following the damage done.