1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (95 page)

 Fortunately Jermayan…

 Then he took a good look at Jermayan.

 The Elven Knight was leaning on his sword for support, using it as if it were a cane. His hand was pressed to his side where he'd taken the blow from the Centaur's mace, as if it were still fresh and unhealed. His face was pale and set—with pain now, instead of hatred. But Kellen had healed him…

 Then Kellen realized what must be happening. The Demon-magic was very powerful here, powerful enough to undo Kellen's magic, or at least to suppress its effects. At this moment, Jermayan's wound was suddenly as fresh as if Kellen had never worked his Wildmagery and it had only had a few days to heal on its own. At least it was partly healed: it meant that Jermayan wouldn't bleed to death on the spot.

 "I'm sorry," he said aloud. I'm sorry I got the three of you into this. I should have come alone. I'm sorry…

 "Do what you came to do," Jermayan said, his voice harsh with pain.

 Kellen looked back at the sky. In an hour—no more—it would be dark.

 He took off his armored gauntlets and the gloves beneath and set them down on the ground. The chill wind—real or illusion, it hardly mattered— bit into his flesh, numbing his fingers. He flexed his hands, willing warmth and suppleness into his fingers, then reached into the pouch that held Idalia's keystone. He drew it out and unwrapped it.

 This was the first time he'd actually had a chance to take a good look at Idalia's keystone.

 It didn't look like a standard keystone at all. All of them were round or oval, and small enough to fit into the palm of the hand. Even Armethalieh's golden Talismans were flat rune-scribed disks, nothing like this. The last time he'd seen it—by torchlight, at the unicorn meadow in Sentarshadeen—he'd thought it was black. Now it looked as if it were made of the same opaque white crystal Idalia had always used for her keystones.

 It was the size of a small melon. On the outside, it was shaped just like a section of natural mineral crystal, a squat six-sided tube that tapered to a six-sided cone at the end. But inside, the keystone had a different shape. Inside, there was a four-sided cup that tapered to a point inside. It would obviously fit right over the top of the black obelisk he'd already seen. The Wild Magic had known what exactly he'd be facing, even if Idalia hadn't.

 As he held it in his bare hands for the first time, it began to glow softly.

 At that moment, knowledge filled him—the same utter certainty that he felt when he worked a spell of the Wild Magic and gained his knowledge of the Mageprice. Idalia was right; he did know what to do! He felt as if Idalia was standing behind him now, her hand on his shoulder, lending him her strength as she murmured her final instructions into his ear. He knew precisely what he had to do to use this keystone.

 The only problem was that it would require a little preparation.

 He set it back gently into the spell-caul for the moment, and set the silk on the ground, and slowly began to remove his armor.

 "What are you doing?" Jermayan demanded, his voice tight with pain.

 "I can't wear my armor for this," Kellen said. No armor, no weapons, nothing of metal. Anything metallic would attract that power crawling all over the obelisk. He wasn't sure what would happen then, only that it wouldn't be good.

 Not that marching up there without armor and weapons was good, either, but he didn't have much of a choice.

 He was far from being as calm as he felt, or as certain. Releasing Idalia's spell was no longer something he was going to do sometime in the future, it was now, in the next few minutes, after which nobody, least of all him, would ever again be able to say that he wasn't a full-fledged Wildmage.

 If he could do it.

 Doubts flooded his mind as he peeled off pieces of armor and laid them aside. After all, who was he to be attempting this thing? Even without an army, or even a guard of Demons watching the obelisk in the open, he was certain there were things lying in wait around here. Or at the least, there must be some species of alarm that he would set off when he entered the enclosure. Then what?

 A lot of bad things, almost certainly.

 What am I doing here, anyway? What possessed anyone to think I was up to this job, when all I ever do is muck things up? Kellen thought despairingly.

 When he'd found the three Books of the Wild Magic in the Low Market, he'd had a home and a family and a bright future available for the asking. He'd thrown away all three for stubbornness and willful pride. He was probably never going to see Armethalieh again, and the longer he was away from it, the more he realized how much he missed the City.

 No, not the City. He missed what the City could have been—a place of justice, and honor, and law. He missed the fact that he'd used to believe that it was. He missed the sound of the City bells on a winter morning, and spice-bread and hot black tea, the small good things that you couldn't get anywhere else. Suddenly he missed them very much.

 Sentarshadeen was gorgeous, but—it was full of Elves, who weren't the most comfortable of neighbors. Merryvale—well, there probably wasn't much left of Merryvale now, even though Idalia hadn't been able to get any news of it. He longed for the company of simple, uncomplicated humans (and Centaurs) with a kind of craving.

 And in a way, he longed for his old life, as well, and the days when his only responsibilities were to be the good son and student his father wanted.

 And most of all, at that moment, Kellen realized that the more he learned about the Wild Magic, the more he realized that it really was truly a dangerous thing. Beneficial, yes, necessary, yes, but not a tame magic, one with the consequences all laid out in advance, where you could see them before you acted. The Wild Magic demanded belief, a faith that the world's needs were more important than your own comfort and safety, and far more important than your own peace of mind.

 And that—well, that implied that it could be dangerous to him one day. Someday—and maybe that day was now—it might very well ask a Mageprice of him that would kill him, cripple him, or change him beyond recognition, and the Wild Magic wouldn't care, because it couldn't care, any more than a general could care about whether or not one of the individual soldiers in his army got hurt in war. The general knew that the war itself was worth fighting, that was all. The Wild Magic would bargain whatever it needed to, for the greater good of all—and some would fall in seeing that greater good accomplished. Wonderful if you were one of the survivors, but pretty hard on the ones who weren't.

 Piece by piece, Kellen removed his Elven armor and set it aside, as carefully as if he were certain he would be coming back for it. And as he did, a second set of thoughts occurred to him, no more comforting than the first. In neutralizing this spell—if he had the strength, the luck, the will—he would be placing himself—not Sentarshadeen, not Idalia, but him, Kellen Tavadon—in direct opposition to the Prince of Shadow Mountain. The Demons, the Endarkened, the creatures that haunted his innermost fears, the monsters that frightened even Jermayan and Queen Ashaniel, that terrified Vestakia, would be hunting him.

 He'd stood up to the Arch-Mage of Armethalieh—his own father— and the consequences of that had been grim enough to make him wary of the penalties of rash defiance. The full cost of that act was one Kellen was only barely coming to realize, one that he was going to face for the rest of his life. What would be the price of making a personal enemy of the Prince of the Demon Legions of Hell and his allies?

 Kellen stood shivering in his underpadding and leather socks. He picked up the keystone again. The crystal was warm in his hands, the only warmth in all the world. It seemed to pulse with sleeping life.

 He hesitated, glancing up at the fog of green lightning around the obelisk.

 He was afraid. He had to acknowledge that. In fact, he was terrified. Not because he didn't know what would happen, but because he was fairly sure he did. No matter what was to come, it was going to be bad. The only question was, how bad?

 For a moment Kellen felt nothing but panic and despair that held him frozen in place where he stood. He felt the hatred here, in a way that was hard to articulate. The things that had created this place, the emotion they had for everything that was not them was so malevolent that the word hatred didn't begin to describe it. Even if he succeeded here—and there was no guarantee of that—nothing would be over. All the four of them would have done was end the drought in the Elven lands and alert Shadow Mountain to the fact that the Elves knew the Endarkened were moving against them and preparing to strike at the World Above once more. Shadow Mountain would still be as powerful. The Elves would still be as weak. Armethalieh would still be as blind and arrogant, thinking of nothing but itself.

 Nothing much would change for anyone, except for Kellen. He would have made powerful enemies, enemies that would not stop until they had taken their revenge for what he'd done here today. Was even Sentarshadeen strong enough to protect him? Would they, if they could?

 Would he want them to? Could he live with being the reason why Shadow Mountain brought their agents, their armies, against the Elves of Sentarshadeen?

 He looked down at the keystone. He held his future in his hands. He could drop it and run. It would break. If not here, then he could do it once he got to the other side of the cairn, where the others wouldn't see. He could throw it off the side of the cairn. Then he wouldn't have to make this choice. He wouldn't have all the Demons of Shadow Mountain after him personally. He could sneak down the far side, get back to Armethalieh somehow. Lycaelon would forgive him—especially if he renounced the Wild Magic and told him everything he knew about the trouble among the Elves and in the border lands.

 Oh, he could see it so clearly: he could become his father's favored son again; there'd be some tale put about of his having been sent out as a special agent, and he'd be safe, safe, safe . .

 But then he looked at Vestakia. She'd struggled to her feet, clutching at Shalkan's shoulder for support. Vestakia had lived every day of her life on the run from the Prince of Shadow Mountain—not hypothetically but really—she'd been fathered by a Demon but had never given up the fight to be human. He looked at Jermayan, who hated Demons with every fiber of his Elven soul, but stood beside a woman who looked like one, who had been fathered by one, and did so now because he trusted Kellen.

 Both of them—and Shalkan—were counting on him to keep his part of the bargain he'd begun when he first began to read The Book of Moon. He couldn't back out now. This was his price. He wouldn't refuse to pay it.

 Maybe I'll die here, Kellen thought in a kind of grim hope. Compared to being the target of the entire race of Demons, death didn't seem terribly bad. Death—or failure—if he died trying, surely Jermayan would take up the stone (if it was still intact) and see the task to its end. Surely, now that he knew what to do with it, it didn't require a Wildmage to actually put it in place!

 He clutched the keystone tighter, imagining it cracking in his hands— accidentally!—knowing that even amid the guilt and horror he would feel nothing so much as relief at the choice and responsibility that would be taken from him in that moment. I'm only a boy! I'm only seventeen! a voice deep within his mind shouted despairingly. I've never done anything special in my life! I'm not ready for this!

 Part of him yearned desperately to believe that, but even if it were true, it couldn't be allowed to make a difference now. Ready or not, able or not, he had to do what he had come here for, because so very much depended on him.

 He turned away from the others and began to walk slowly across the broken wasteland toward the cairn. Taking the first step was the hardest thing he'd ever done, and it was only after he'd begun to walk that Kellen realized he hadn't even said good-bye. But he knew that if he stopped, or turned back, or spoke, he would never have the strength to start walking again, and so he gritted his teeth and kept walking. If he got back, he'd be able to explain. If they all died here, it wouldn't matter.

 He had not gotten more than twenty paces away before the first attack struck him.

 Only it wasn't the first attack, was it? They'd been under attack from the moment they set foot on the mountaintop, Kellen realized. Why else would he even have considered betraying his friends and going back to Armethalieh?

 It was terrifying to realize he couldn't even trust his own thoughts!

 I won't give in, he told himself stubbornly. I WILL take the keystone to the top of the cairn. I WILL do what Idalia trusted me to do. I WILL…

 The next attack was subtle as well, though now Kellen was suspicious of everything. It began with pain, but not intense pain, only the dull aching of every muscle in his body. As if he were in the throes of a fever, except that he was so cold… as if he had been beaten from head to toe. But the pain increased the nearer he drew to the cairn. His real injuries hurt far more than they should have. Each step was an agony, as if his muscles were filled with lead. Each impact of his foot against the ground jarred his bruises into sullen life, until his whole body ached like a rotten tooth, and he trembled with pain as much as cold.

 Though he knew his friends were only a few yards away, that if he turned and looked back he could still see them, Kellen felt utterly alone, as if when he had taken that first step he had somehow passed into a place where they could not follow.