True World, and some wizards suspected that a man might have shadows of himself on each of those worlds.
Somehow, Fallion suspected, he had bound Talon to her shadow self.
“Nightfall is coming,” she said. “The…wyrmlings will come with it. We have to get away, get to safety.”
Fallion couldn’t imagine any place safer than the castle, even in its poor repair. Nor did he know what a wyrmling was. But this world was in ruins. And the wyrmlings were the cause.
There is a rule to war. The first rule, Fallion had been taught, was to know your enemy.
“What are wyrmlings?” he asked.
“Giants.”
“Like you?”
“Larger than me,” Talon laughed. “I am human, bred to be one of the warrior clan, large and fierce. My ancestors were bred to be this way, much as you breed dogs of war to increase their size, their viciousness. And though I am larger than a human of feral stock, the wyrmlings are more than a head taller than me, and outweigh me by hundreds of pounds. We are but feeble imitations of the wyrmlings. And we true humans are almost all gone. There are fewer than forty thousand of us left.
“The wyrmlings hunt by night,” Talon explained, “for they cannot tolerate light. They eat only meat, and they worship the Lady Despair.”
“I see,” Fallion said.
“No, not really,” Talon answered. “There’s more to tell, and it will take hours to do so. But first, we must get away from here.”
“Where do we go?”
Talon peered into the distance, closed her eyes in consternation. “I can’t remember… It’s like a dream. I see the place, but I can’t put a name to it.”
“Then give yourself a moment to wake,” Fallion said.
Talon peered into the distance for a long minute. “Luciare. The fortress is called Luciare.”
“Where is it?” Fallion asked.
Talon closed her eyes, concentrated. She could see her mother and father there. Borenson was much the same in both worlds she decided, but Talon’s mothers were not the same woman at all. How would that work? she wondered. Where is my father-in Luciare, or back in Landesfallen? And what of my sisters and brothers?
She wanted to find them, make sure that all of them were well, that they had survived this transformation. But the world had shifted, and she was on strange ground.
Talon shook her head. “I’m not sure. Everything’s…wrong. I’m not sure I’ve even been here before. She nodded to a distant peak to the south, one with a distinctive hump upon the eastern flank. “That could be Mount Shuneya. That means that Luciare would be west, west by southwest, maybe-a hundred miles, or a hundred and twenty. We can’t make it tonight, or even tomorrow…”
They wouldn’t be able to make it even in four days, Fallion suspected, not with him in his current condition. But he could hear the urgency in Talon’s voice.
He looked up at her and wondered, Why don’t I have a body like hers? Why didn’t I combine with my shadow self?
Instead he felt frail, worn.
This whole place is a snare, Fallion realized. The one who set it couldn’t know for sure when I would come, or even if I would come. But now that the wire has been sprung, the hunter will be upon us. Fallion suspected it, and Talon seemed to feel it in her bones.
“How long before the wyrmlings get here?” Fallion asked.
“They have fortresses nearby, within thirty miles,” she said. “And there might be hidden outposts even closer than that. If the local commanders know to watch this place, they’ll come tonight. Even if Lady Despair has to send assassins from Rugassa, they could be on our trail by dawn.”
So, Fallion thought, a race is on.
“We’ll have to keep under the cover of trees, lie low in the woods during the night, and run through the days…”
“How do you know all of this?” Fallion asked. “How can you be sure?”
A look of confusion washed over Talon’s face, and she shook her head. “My father, the man you know as Sir Borenson, is…Aaath Ulber-High Guard. I…we are Warrior Clan.”
So Fallion felt even more convinced. Talon hadn’t merged with some beast. She had merged with her shadow self, with the woman she had been on this world.
Are all of them so large? Fallion wondered. It would explain the strange ruins, so high and soaring. But no, Talon had been but a girl, and had been diminutive at that. The humans of this world wouldn’t all be so large. He suspected that most would be larger.
I’ve brought us to a land of giants, he realized, giants that have almost been destroyed by the wyrmlings.
A sudden fear took him. Whatever was coming, he didn’t think that he could fight it. He’d fallen into a trap. He had been forced to join these two worlds together, and he saw the ruin that had followed.
He could not fix what he had done. He had no idea how to un-bind the two worlds.
And he suspected that his Queen of the Loci was rejoicing in what he had done.
Perhaps the best way to thwart her plan, he considered, is to continue my journey to the Mouth of the World and finish binding all of the shadow worlds all into one.
But he considered the damage he had done, and wondered now at the wisdom of that.
If he bungled this further, he could destroy the world, not heal it.
And there was a second worry. Perhaps that proposed course of action was exactly what the enemy wanted.
Talon turned to Fallion, gave him a calculating gaze. Then her eyes snapped to Jaz who was still feebly making his way across the courtyard below, too weak to keep pace.
Fallion marveled at the change in Talon. She looked vibrant, energized.
“How soon can we be ready to go?” she demanded.
“I’m ready now,” Fallion lied, feeling too fragile for a forced march. “But you’ve been asleep for hours. We thought that you would die. The question is how do you feel?”
She smiled, showing her overlarge canines. “Never better,” she said, a tone of wonder creeping into her voice. She peered down at her hand again, clenched it and unclenched, as if realizing it was true. “I feel like I could crush rocks in these hands.”
“I think you’re right,” Fallion said. “You nearly crushed me.”
THE COUNCIL
A king who is weak and ineffective is a kind of traitor, and bringing such a man down can be an act of patriotism.
Alun struggled up toward Caer Luciare, his mouth agape.
There were trees everywhere, huge firs on the skirts of the mountain, white aspens along its top. They had grown in an instant, appearing as if in a vision, their shimmering forms gaining substance.
He had seen them as he fainted, and when he woke, aching and weary, everything had changed. The sun was still up, marvelously drawn back in the sky, and the hills were full of dust clouds and birds.
Daylan Hammer was nowhere to be seen.
Wanderlust had stayed at Alun’s side, and once he got to his feet, the dog set out on Daylan Hammer’s trail again. The dog was able to track him through the thick sod, heading straight for Caer Luciare.
But as Alun neared, he peered in stunned silence at the devastation. The fortress was in ruins. The mountain it had rested upon had dropped hundreds of feet in elevation, and with the drop, the whole structure of the
