Shadow Star Read online

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  SHADOW STAR

  A Bantam Spectra Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam Spectra hardcover edition published November 1999

  Bantam Spectra paperback edition / October 2000

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 1999 by Lucasfilm Ltd. and TM. All rights reserved.

  Used under authorization.

  Maps by Jim Kemp & Anita Karl/Compass Projections.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-33250.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  ISBN 9780553572889

  Ebook ISBN 9781984800046

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Twelve Great Realms

  Map

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Coda

  Dedication

  Published by Bantam Books

  About the Authors

  A Crown not made for Crowning,

  A Throne that ne’er be Filled.

  A Kingdom not of People,

  But of Twelve Crowns Royal.

  The Wheel of Fortune Turns,

  Time rests heavy on the brow

  The Wings of Fate bring fire and flame

  Or can Peace be r’stored by Thou?

  Alone and lost, through desert and wood

  With nothing of her own, no place to call home,

  Wanders the Thirteenth Crown

  For the Thirteenth Throne

  Dominion ever offered, but never claimed.

  Born in the Hear of Darkness

  Forever Touched by the Shadow

  That ever seeks to Claim her

  The Voice from the Wilderness

  The Dream Undying

  The Hope Reborn

  Twelve steps around the Circles Three.

  No one to save her, Will no one aid her?

  Twelve Realms in Conflict, Twelve Hearts to Win.

  No one to save her, Will no one to aid her?

  Twelve links in the Timeless Chain,

  That must be bound

  The World to save

  Will no one aid her?

  Only one to save her.

  —a song sung in the pubs of Sandeni,

  in the aftermath of the Shadow War,

  attribution unknown

  Thorn Drumheller stood in the heart of glory, yet all about him was desolation.

  “Elora Danan,” he breathed, in a voice so faint and broken it wouldn’t have done justice to a ghost, “what have you done? What have you done?”

  The air was still, but not with any absence of wind. To Thorn it was as if all life, all vitality, had been torn from it. The same held true for its scent. When he had arrived in this most sacred place there had been an edge to every breath, so keen a sensation he feared it would sear his lungs. He had never tasted air so pure, and yet so richly textured. It was a pale comparison, he knew, but he was most strongly reminded of wandering through a stand of old-growth forest, amongst trees whose lives were measured more in centuries than simple years. All that those venerable trunks had seen, all the earth that sustained them had felt, all the history of the beings that called that grove home, was wrapped up in that heady mixture.

  Here, was nothing.

  So simple a word, nothing. He never imagined it could be so terrible.

  The sand beneath his feet had sparkled before, its grains scattered thick with shards of crystalline fire that glittered with a radiance all their own, like the embers left from a celestial hearth. The same held for the rock of the escarpment that ringed the caldera, this bowl of a volcano as ancient as it was huge. The crater was more than Thorn could grasp. He simply didn’t know numbers big enough. It would take him days to walk from where he knelt to the wall of jagged, saw-toothed peaks that surrounded him, yet even so the ridgeline towered higher than most of the mountain ranges he had seen, including the fabled Stairs to Heaven.

  There had been fire in that stone, pulsing as fiercely as the blood did through his own body.

  Now, nothing.

  Atop every summit of that promontory had stood a dragon, and the memory of that sight sent chills along Thorn’s spine. He was a Nelwyn, born to one of the lesser races of the Realm of Lesser Faery, whose role in the scheme of things was said to be as modest as their stature. For most of his days he’d been a farmer, a simple, structured life for what seemed a simple, structured man. He had a wife he loved, two children he adored, and believed himself content. Dragons were the stuff of legends and adventures and that had no truck with Nelwyns.

  Until one came to him fifteen years ago in the dead of night, in what he thought then was no more than a dream—for that was how dragons, creatures wholly of the Circle of the Spirit, visited those races who lived on the more physical planes of existence—to steal him from hearth and home and set his feet upon the path that ultimately brought him to this place. He had never ridden the back of a dragon before that night. Now he wondered if he ever would again.

  Here was where they lived, the seat of wonder and imagination. Here, according to all the stories and beliefs of all the races of all the Twelve Great Realms, anything was possible. If Creation had a soul, this was said to be its home, and the dragons were its embodiment.

  Only the dragons were no more. Thorn had seen them slain.

  And now, the killer was walking straight toward him.

  She didn’t look the part, and that had nothing to do with her dancer’s costume. Her skirt hung low on her hips, generously cut to allow the fullest range of movement, while a bandeau top covered her breasts; both were dyed a scarlet so dark it seemed almost black, the color of night-washed blood spilled in passion, that formed a stark and dramatic contrast to the gleaming silver of her skin. There was no outward warmth to her appearance. She resembled none of the races he knew, not her own Daikini nor any of the myriad tribes of Faery. It was as though someone had captured the essence of moonlight, wrapped it in human form, and given it life.

  She moved with the sleek and arrogant ease of youth, propelled by muscles that had yet to suffer the touch of time or injury. Despite all she had endured in her sixteen years, there remained an air of innocence about her, the same sense of renewed hope and possibilities to be found in a highland meadow washed by the first gentle rains of spring.

  There was pride to her step as she approached, and such a look of joy and w
onder on her face that Thorn questioned if she was mad, or hoped in some small and hidden part of himself that he was instead, that this would turn out to be no more than the most awful of nightmares.

  By his side, Khory Bannefin stirred, the timbre of each breath making plain to him how badly she’d been hurt. They had come to this hallowed ground—the Princess, the Warrior, and the Mage—to try to save the dragons from a sorcerer who’d sought to claim their power for his own and through it dominion over all the Realms, who’d set himself as Elora’s sworn enemy almost from the moment of her birth.

  In that, they had succeeded. The Deceiver had been driven from the field without his prize. But to Thorn, the terrible cost had made their struggle and sacrifice a mockery. Victory had burned to bitter ashes in his grasp. A battle had been won, and as a consequence perhaps all the world lost.

  “Elora Danan,” he called again in a hoarse cry whose passion flogged him to his feet to face her, “what have you done?”

  “What was necessary,” she replied.

  “You killed them. You killed them all.” His words described the act but they could not do justice to the enormity of the crime. Neither language, nor even emotions, existed that could properly do so.

  “It was that, Drumheller, or let the Deceiver claim their souls and power.”

  “You were born to be the Savior of our world.” The accusation tumbled from him in a torrent, like water from a burst dam, and he had neither strength nor will to stop it. “Why is it all you do is harm?”

  She blinked, and staggered stiff-legged to a stop, as though he’d physically struck her. In the whole catalog of responses he expected to his indictment, there was no listing for tears. They came suddenly, without preamble, a stark reminder of just how young the Sacred Princess was, still far more girl than woman. Her eyes grew round and the cords of her neck stood out from the effort it took to keep from bursting into sobs.

  She stood very straight, to her full height, like a sapling that had taken a terrible shock but was determined not to be uprooted, no matter what. When she spoke at last, her voice was low, its cadence measured.

  “You’re hurt, the both of you,” she said quietly, ignoring both his words and the tone of voice that sharpened their cutting edge. “Let me help.”

  “Works for me,” Khory said before Thorn could speak. “I could use some.”

  A belt of tooled leather decorated with intertwined knot-work encircled the waist of Elora’s skirt, fastened by a buckle that blended iron and silver and chips of lapis lazuli in a design that Thorn for all his knowledge didn’t recognize. From the belt on either side of her hung a pair of well-worn leather pouches. Elora had made the bags herself under Thorn’s tutelage, the first things the young Princess had ever produced by her own hands. The magic in them came later.

  She knelt beside Khory, moving gentle hands across the older woman’s body to determine the scale and scope of her injuries. Thorn remained standing, a body’s length distant, leaning heavily on his quarterstaff. Khory and their foe had gone toe-to-toe in single combat, a display of swordfighting skill that even memory couldn’t do proper justice to. It was no duel of finesse or elegance. Neither gave the slightest ground, the one found wanting would be the one to fall.

  It should have been the Deceiver. Khory managed to disarm him but before she could follow up that advantage with any kind of killing stroke, their foe struck out with a casual sideswipe of the arm that struck Khory like a hammerblow, sending her crashing into this jumble of rocks hard enough to break bones.

  Then, it had been Thorn’s turn to enter the fray. Where Khory fought with steel, he used magic, lashing out with all the sorcery at his command. He clapped fire from his hands and when that didn’t work summoned the sand to life beneath the Deceiver’s feet to entomb the fiend. He called lightning and hurled all the raw elements of nature into the fray, mixing spells with a madcap invention that defied sanity and had no regard for the consequences.

  In this haven where dreams could be made real, for good and ill, Thorn found no limit to his abilities. He gave full vent to a lifetime’s rage, to grief, to hatred. He conjured lances of solid air and laced their cores with poison, before handing them over to creatures so foul and vile that the sight of them alone would have been sufficient to shrivel the souls of ordinary folk. He summoned forth the darkest aspects of himself and sent them forth to battle, without restraint, without mercy. He went willingly to the place within himself where no decent, moral, sane man would go and let loose the parts of him that could do evil.

  All for nothing.

  The Deceiver could not be killed, could not even be harmed, with his own weapons.

  That left Elora alone to face him.

  The dragons cheered her as their champion. And then, by her hand, they all died.

  Thorn hobbled in a slack-footed circle about the axle of his quarterstaff with the gingerly movements of a man ten times his age, as his eyes followed the line of the escarpment against the fading sky. When they’d arrived, every peak had been topped by a dragon, more than he could count, more than he’d ever imagined. Yet it seemed now as if they had never been, their forms and features as insubstantial as gossamer in his mind’s eye. Try as he might, he couldn’t recall a single one in detail.

  “The light is going,” he said.

  There’d been no sun in the sky, no obvious source of light at all, natural or artificial, yet the scene had been lit as brightly as full day. He’d accepted that without question, assuming that this magic place was sustained by wizardry. Now that the heart of that magic had been obliterated, it stood to reason its secondary enchantments would as quickly fade. Thorn could still see clearly but that was confined to what lay close at hand. Beyond, the overall impression most resembled twilight. There was no color to his surroundings, the shape and substance of the great crater was defined now solely in shades of gray. Indeed, while the cliffs themselves could still be perceived, he had to strain to tell where rock ended and sky began.

  “We have time,” Elora assured them, with certainty.

  “And then what?” He hated the faint whine of despair in his voice but had no fight left in him to drive it away.

  Elora looked up at him, as did Khory, both of them struck by his uncha­racte­risti­cally bleak tone. Two pairs of eyes, one shot through with flashes of cobalt fire that reminded him strangely of the sparkles he’d seen here while the dragons yet lived, the other a vibrant jade. One still smarting with pain, the other flaring with suppressed anger at him for having caused it.

  “They were dying, Thorn,” Elora said, and he shook his head to deny her. Every fool knew dragons were as eternal as the world, that’s why they always stood first among the pantheon of the Great Realms. Yet even as that bitter thought swept past him like an undertow, he felt another part of himself retort with a sardonic grin, the question is, he heard himself say, are we fools? To accept the world as it seems and never try to determine what it truly is?

  “It was their time,” she continued. “It would have happened regardless, whether we came or not.”

  “So you say!” A challenge. He didn’t want to hear her, refused to believe. Too many certainties in his life had proved to be false, too many beliefs upended and cast to the winds of chaos. This last was more than he could endure.

  Her gaze moved up and past him, toward the peak that had served as the perch for the Lord of this host. He didn’t try to follow; he couldn’t bear to behold only gathering darkness.

  “Calan Dineer told me.”

  He knew the name, but now it was his turn for his eyes to burn with hot tears as he found no face in memory to match it.

  Again, he shook his head, in a vain attempt to deny their loss. “They were the ideal, Elora, the representation of all our hopes and dreams!”

  To his surprise, Khory interrupted him. She had always been a woman of few words, husbanding speech
as she would any other finite and valuable resource, choosing to use them like her swords, to best effect.

  “Dreams perhaps, Drumheller,” she said in a clear alto, a step lower than Elora’s voice but nowhere near as husky. “But the Danan is our hope. Has been from the start.”

  “So spake prophecy.”

  “Every prophecy, mage, of every race we know of, whether Daikini or Faery, dragon or demon. All the stories tell of a time of great change, when the hearts and souls of all the Realms will be put to the test. And a Sacred Princess will stand forth as Savior.”

  “To lead the Realms into a new era of peace and harmony,” Thorn finished for her, and again his rage got the better of him. His words emerged like bludgeons and though Elora didn’t flinch from them they still had impact. Thorn made a dismissive snort.

  “No one said it would be easy,” Khory offered, one veteran campaigner to another, while Elora offered the beginnings of a comforting smile, her hand reaching out toward his shoulder. He refused to acknowledge either.

  “Someone should have mentioned it would be so hard,” Elora said to Khory, turning her back on the man who’d been her mentor and protector almost from the day of her birth. “That, I would have appreciated.”

  Still on her knees, she worked close beside Khory. Even in the phantom light that remained to the caldera, Thorn could see how pale their companion had become. The resilience had fled from Khory’s golden skin. Her flesh lay in folds so stiff over the distinctive points of chin and jaw that they threatened to crack with every change of expression or gesture. He needed no physical contact to tell him how dry it had become to the touch as well, or how chill.

  “The Deceiver hurt you pretty badly,” Elora told her.

  “Trust me, this I know.”

  “We won’t leave you,” Thorn said unnecessarily, discomfited by the realization that he didn’t altogether trust Elora to say it for him.

  “But as you are,” the young woman said, taking no outward offense at his remark, “we can’t afford to take you.”

  “Deceiver won’t be giving up, that’s certes,” agreed the warrior. “We’ve a long road back to Sandeni; somewhere along the way, he’ll be waiting.”