Shadow Read Free Page B

off the Road, rather than leave him to be trampled by a horse or wagon. The traveller was so courteous he didn’t bother to rob what must have seemed a corpse, albeit one armed with a sword and knife. One which in life had twice won a warrior’s highest honour, Valour’s Helm. To be feared, as corpses went …
    Whether Anfen got to his destination or not hardly mattered. Death if he did, death if he didn’t. He wanted the slow death he’d earned, wanted to feel every slow second of it, for his flesh to burn. He’d been walking toward it since his first infant steps lurched across the kitchen floor to grasp his mother’s shin for balance. Those steps just as unsteady as these steps now.
    His staggering legs weakened against the invisible push, his body lurched, he head-butted the ground. White lights flashed. Before he blacked out, for some reason he heard his mother’s merry laugh showering her joy down on him, her praise and encouragement for his clumsy steps across the kitchen floor, a little toy sword in his hand which his father had carved. My little soldier, she’d called him, my little soldier.
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    â€˜Why is it you wish to die, warrior?’ said a voice behind him.
    Since he’d raised his pained body back upright and sent it forward again, the Road had been his alone. The sky, the whole world, was a deep shade of twilight he’d never seen, the landscape black silhouettes against it. Silence had snuffed out the wind, bird calls, nearly everything but his scuffing boots. That was until the slow clip-clopping hooves began behind him, carrying a rider he knew wasn’t really there.
    Anfen didn’t want to turn and look at a phantom whose existence (he realised) marked his final parting with sanity. But this quiet was nice. So was the ghostly and somehow patient clip-clop, clip-clop, its rhythm keeping perfect time. Such calm he’d seldom known, such eerie peace. Where had the world gone? All he recognised was the Road and the distant fang-shaped peaks black against the sky.
    Here and there in the gentle blue-black light were what looked like gems hung in the air: clusters of glimmering diamonds. Some were tiny, some the size of boulders suspended far above and distant. The sight disturbed him; why had his mind conjured these strange and beautiful objects? He had no wish or need for beauty.
    But ah, such precious quiet.
    The Road’s southward push had always been there, he reflected as he laboured into it. It was why the clouds went south down the world’s middle. Since the Wall came down, it had changed, got stronger, it had … But he lost the thought, for the horseman behind him spoke again: ‘There is rage and grief in you. For he who names himself the Arch Mage. But you were not cheated, warrior. You were elevated. Your function was performed. As was his. It is now done.’
    Anfen’s hoarse croak was barely audible. ‘You mean my choices weren’t my own. If they weren’t, they never have been. Are they mine now, or not?’
    â€˜That is not what I mean, warrior. Your suffering is needless.’
    â€˜It will end soon enough.’
    â€˜Shed this part of you as you would toss aside a rusted blade and find a new one, far keener,’ said the voice.
    â€˜What’s the difference? I’ll go to the same place.’
    There was just the slow clip-clop of hooves for a time. ‘Where do you go to, warrior?’
    â€˜I’m going—’ he began, but felt no need to explain to a shadow, a figment of delirium, that he was going to the underground cavern where Stranger took him. He’d nicked his passage in and out on the walls, so he’d surely find it. If he made it there alive – somehow he thought he would – he’d kill one of the newly replaced unfortunates who were, presumably, held this minute in the clutches of those pincer-things, those burning hot shackles. He’d lay the