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IN THE SHADOW OF GODS

Copyright @ 2017 by A.K. Cunningham

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying or recording, or isn't information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the express written consent of the publisher, A.K. Cunningham, ltd., www.akcunningham.com.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.  This edition published by arrangement with A.K. Cunningham.

Upcoming books of the Tales of Loris

BOOK TWO: THE SPIRE

BOOK THREE: MOUNTAINS OF THE SEA

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

And mouth with myriad subleties.

Why should the world be over-wise, 

In counting all our tears and sighs? 

Nay, let them only see us, while 

       We wear the mask. 

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries 

To thee from tortured souls arise. 

We sing, but oh the clay is vile 

Beneath our feet, and long the mile; 

But let the world dream otherwise, 

       We wear the mask.        

          - Paul Laurence Dunbar

  “REGRETS, SIR, but ain’t she dead?” A large soldier with a thick nose and red hair rubbed his chin and turned his eyes up toward the waiting mountain.
  “No, Kelvin, she isn’t,” his commander, Rougar Fairvew, said. 
  “But how’d you know? We heard—“
  “I know the rumors. She’s my twin. I’d know. Stay here, you and the rest of the men. She won’t like you creeping up on her at the upper monastery.”
  “All due respect, sir, and also saying this as your friend, you should have at least another knight with ya,” Kelvin said, his keen blue eyes peering down at his commander.
  “Good advice, but not taken,” Rougar said, reaching up to pat Kelvin’s thick shoulder. “This one I do alone. Make camp here. If I don’t return in two days, send a runner up to the monastery and break camp.”
  “Yes sir,” Kelvin said. “Your choice.” 
  Rougar sighed. Yes, it was his choice, and his burden. He had to find his sister because he had searched the world, and he thought she was his last chance at discovering where the girl was. And so he leaned on a wooden stick he’d found near Edge 4 of the Racine Mountains and began his trek up toward the top. 
  Getting across Gods’ Rift and into the mountains had been hard enough without the monks’ help.  Climbing was the easy part--at least, it should have been.  He wasn’t young anymore, even if he looked no more than forty. When had his legs started aching?  He hadn’t felt this winded in years. 
   Rougar crossed through tall pines and then across a meadow lined in tall yellow mountain poppies, letting the long grass trail along his legs, leaving shorn seeds behind.  He found a deer trail through the forest, old and gnarled and smelling of streams and dirt.  The trees seemed to lean into him.  They probably did, listening, like in El'Taria. Where else would the woods still be alive but up here, on the holiest of mountains?  Where the shadows of earth were more intelligent than men?  His hybrix ears perked up and his cat’s tail swung. He hummed a tune of obeisance and respect, one he’d learned from an old lover of trees, and he passed without comment through the greenery and darkness. His free hand grasped something around his neck, cold and hard and familiar.
   The sun was lowering behind the lip of the horizon as he slipped out of the forest and onto a well-trodden path. Fairview didn’t like being out in the open on these merchants’ and pilgrims’ trails, but it was the only way.
 

   It was then that the Shadow Workers leapt. They ambushed him as he began to jog up the trail. They caught him by surprise--the most unlikely of things.  Surprise. They were good Shadows, men or women high in the Shadow Guild.  If they could use the mountain’s shadows, he doubted he would survive. Even he dared not use them.
   He drew his sword and pulled a long dagger with his other hand. Three were on his left in front of him, and one at his back, with the advantage of the setting sun behind him and cliff rubble to stand on. They attacked together in quiet, rhythmic formation. He was relieved to see they were using their own shadows, like him.
   Fairview had honed his own shadow skill to an art.  His was a half-buried one—shadow casting and shaping. Few knew how to do it anymore.  He formed a net and crouched, spinning, catching the Shadow behind him under the net and knocking two in front of him to the ground with the net’s spiked iron billets.  He grinned with some fury, an old and simmering thing inside him.  
  “Who sent you?” He growled as he brought down his sword on one man and swiped his dagger across a woman’s throat nah, killing both. Despite their skill, they weren't his match. He had decades, centuries, of killing; not that they would know. Blood and filth filled the air as he kicked one aside—how many had he killed in his long life?—and positioned himself. 
  The third man, larger than Fairview but less agile, had no expression but an empty mask. He doubted he would get him to talk. Fairview danced with the man and found him slow. He parried and pried and grinned, then found an opening to thrust his sword up and under and through. More crap, more moaning. Killing was ever a mean business.
  Panting, he turned to the Shadow behind him, laying on the ground in the rubble under his net.  Once the net touched ground it stayed, pinning a short thin man to the ground.
  “Who are you working for?” Fairview said.  
  “You know you’ll have to kill me,” the man under the net hissed.
 Fairview cocked his head to the side.
  “I know you,” he said, wiping his face. His shadows pulled back and he peered down at the man, using his foot to press his face against the shale.  “Nobu Elko. From Syssaria.” 
The man was quiet, his deep brown eyes stony pools.
   “Ahh, the Pentagon monks, then. I’m flattered,” Fairview said.  The man gave no indication he’d heard.
With almost no noise, an arrow whirred past Fairview and buried itself in Elko’s eye.  Fairview whirled and pulled his shadows to him, a cloak in the deepening autumn twilight.
  “You were taking too long, brother.  I know who they are and why they’re here.”
   “Deon? Thank Arthon, you’re alive.”
   “Don’t thank Arthon up here unless you want a rock fall,” she said.
     He breathed in deeply, the sharp mountain air. He always craved more breath up here, more oxygen. His chest contracted and opened.  So, she was alive. 
   He looked around at the fallen bodies. They were so near the upper monastery. Where were the monastery guards? 
   He cocked a questioning nod toward his sister as he cleaned his long sword and re-sheathed it on his back, and put his dagger away.  
   “We've been watching them, wanted to see how far the Pentagon’s would go. They're moving against us, though this is the first real attack. I pulled the guards from here to handle it myself.”
   “Why didn't you step in?” he asked, grinning.
   “I did,” Deon said. He could hear a smile. “ I knew you could handle yourself.”
   He snorted. “Thanks, sister. What about ablutions for the bodies?”
   “Others handle the dead. They're coming.”
   His ears perked up, having lain flat during the fight, and listened for the sound of movement. Nothing but the air around Deon, then something. Ah, footsteps above, on the cliffs, moving towards them.
   “So brother, to what do I owe the pleasure?” she said, in a more serious tone.
 Rougar stepped back onto the trail and walked with her through the narrow slice of rock, leaving the stench of sweat and blood behind. Not today. Again. He would not die today.
   He could only see a blurred outline of his sister as she led him up the trail, and it wasn't due to darkness. She was a Shadow Monk. Racine monks were rare, Deon one of the oldest and best among them. The Racines studied and talked to the shadows, trying to learn the mysteries of the world’s creation. Their sect was distinct; they held their secrets close. Some said they guarded a weapon; others technology; and still others portals to other worlds. Rougar thought they guarded books. Old books.
   He could feel his sister’s presence, though, smell the dirt of mountain tunnels on her robes, sense the hand close to his.
   “We Fairviews have a tendency to do that—to live. Our lives stretch us, you in your way and mine in mine. The gods have not seen fit to take us off the rack yet,” Deon said. “Now why do you only visit me when you need something?”
   “You know?”
   “I see her but not clearly. She is heavy in the shadows, for one so young. They guard her. Or else she’s shielded another way.”
   Fairview nodded. “And what do you hear from the Pentagons about her? Anything?”
   “They’re trouble makers, always have been.  Worshipping a false god… They don’t care. They don’t see it, not yet. They just want the girl gone so the El’Tarians won’t return. You know my mind on them.”
“They’re surely in league with the Regent.”
“No one’s in league with the Regent—“
“And everyone is,” he finished.
“One of her messengers rode through the lower abbey two days ago. I accepted a message for you.”
   He grinned wryly. “What does she want this time? I assume you read it.”
“Of course. Some business near the capital. Unworthy of your skills. Come inside and read it yourself.”
“Lead the way.” He found his twin sister’s shoulder, bony and hard as stone under his hand. “I’m glad I found you.”
“You mean, before you tore the place apart.”
“Yeah.  Something like that.”
   Fairview laughed and heard an answering chuckle. They stumbled toward the outline of a high, slate roof. His twin’s hand touched his. It was warm.