Unbroken Chain

CHAPTER THIRTY

Vedoranstood in the half-ruin of the old house and tried to keep from killing Traedis where he stood.

“You betrayed me,” he said. “Ashok lives.”

“Not for long,” Traedis said. “My brethren are confident that he will not survive the ordeal. Uwan has too much faith in Tempus and in Ashok. Ashok will fade, and it will be but the first of many blows we strike against Tempus and Uwan. Be patient, Vedoran, and you will have the satisfaction you crave.”

“You don’t know Ashok,” Vedoran said. “If there is a way, even the slightest hope-”

“There is none,” Traedis said, growing agitated. “I am a servant of Beshaba and I know the face of hopelessness. You’ve won your battle against Ashok. His guilt and shame eat at him, and the shadows will do the rest of the work. You must trust me.”

“That was my mistake,” Vedoran said. He turned to leave. “You won’t see me again.”

Ashok passed the rest of the day and the next in darkness and silence. He awoke on the third day, but it may as well have been the fifth. He was numb again and had no sense of himself beyond the breath moving his chest. The blood had drained from his arms, and his legs wouldn’t move no matter how much he tried to shift his position.

Once, wakeful, he bit his lip. He needed to taste the blood in his mouth, to feel something. He found an already festering wound. The pain and infection shuddered through his body, and Ashok wondered how many times he’d woken with the idea as if it were new. He sweated fever, and chills wracked his body. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst came when he began dreaming.

He stood chained in his cell, blind, yet somehow he could see. His father and brothers walked through the wall and stood in the corner of the cell.

Ashok stared at them. Shadows swirled around them and grew faces and emaciated hands that plucked at their arms and legs. They ignored them and stared back at Ashok. Whispering to each other, they pointed at him.

Ashok couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he saw the condemnation on their gaunt, dead faces. He strained toward them and was shocked when the chains fell away from his arms. The shadows swallowed the cage bars and the cave until Ashok walked in a void toward his family, who continued to talk to each other as if he wasn’t there.

“Why have you come here?” Ashok demanded. “Speak!”

His father stepped apart from the rest and took some of the living shadows with him. They scurried around his feet and laid their heads against his boots. Ashok tried not to look at them and their ratlike movements.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” his father said.

“For a long time,” said his brother Lakesh, stepping forward with shadows caressing his hair.

“You’re dead,” Ashok said. “There’s nothing left for you here.”

“You’re still here,” his father said. “We have no other link, no other amusements, and no god calls us from the void.”

“You have to go,” Ashok said. He backed away, but the void was limitless, black, and swirling. It was madness to watch it, for above and below him the faces swelled out of the shadows and reached for him.

“Where else can we go?” Reltnar said as he stepped out of the shadows to join Ashok’s brothers. “What place would have us?”

“You’re in my mind,” Ashok said. “You’re not welcome here.”

His father laughed. “How do you know this is your place?” he said. “How can you know you haven’t crossed over to our domain, the nothingness after sleep?”

Ashok recoiled. Was it over then? Had he already lost his soul to the shadows? “Father,” he said, “you, all of you didn’t fade. You were killed.”

“You killed us,” Reltnar said, and a shadow skull nuzzled against his neck. He batted it away like a fly. “No god calls us home.”

“No one wants us anymore,” Lakesh said, “so we’ll stay with you.”

“No,” Ashok said. He looked down and saw the shadow figures swimming up toward him through the void. They reached for his boots, and he danced away from them. He smelled foul breath and in the distance heard the constant Shadowfell wind. “I don’t belong here,” he said.

“You were always going to end up here,” his father said in a mock-soothing voice. “Didn’t you ever think of that?”

“I …” Out of the corner of his eye, Ashok saw a figure dressed in black striding through the void. The shadow was just as small and emaciated as the rest, yet it stood apart from its brethren. Silver light outlined its body, and when it came near Ashok saw the other shadows shy away from the light and the waves of heat emanating from its body.

“What is it, son?” his father asked.

“I saw something,” Ashok said. He looked again, but the figure was too far off for clarity. “We’re still in the Shadowfell,” he said. “I can hear the wind. But I’ve never seen this place before.”

“This is the veil between one life and the next,” Reltnar said. “You can’t see beyond it.”

“Then who are these?” Ashok said, swiping at the shadows that were clinging to his clothes and hair.

He searched for the figure in black, and found it still walking toward him, though it might have been a mile or a century distant. But its course was set to intercept them, and it walked patiently, unhurried by shadows. Ashok felt the urge to go to meet the figure, but he did not want to be cast off like one of the ghastly shadows.

“They are waiting here,” his father said. He put his hand through one of the shadow skulls and shook until the thing dissolved into smoke. “No god calls them home.”

Ashok saw a vision of himself as a grasping shadow-thin, lifeless and pathetic. He wished he could see himself. He held up his hands, but they appeared normal. The pain in his lip felt real.

“Give it time,” his brothers said, their voices mingling. “You haven’t been here long enough.”

Ashok felt hysteria creeping in with the shadows. They were all over him, and he couldn’t take a breath that was not foul. Dead things and cold hands all over his skin-he cried out, and his father and brothers mockingly cried out with him. His own voice was lost in the chorus and laughter.

“Damn you,” he told his father, and allowed the hatred to course through him. “If you’d listened to me, none of this would have happened. You might be alive. Our enclave might have flourished.”

“To what purpose?” Reltnar said. “Didn’t we survive? Didn’t we live by our own will, as you have done?”

“It’s not enough,” Ashok said, but they couldn’t hear him over their own laughter. “Damn you all, it wasn’t enough. All you cared about was yourselves.”

Suddenly, the laughter stopped. Into the ensuing silence walked the figure in black with its tail of silver light. It walked into the space between Ashok and his family. His father and brothers stared in awe.

Ashok recognized the figure then, and a wave of profound relief washed over him. The figure turned and walked to his side, away from his father and brothers, and cleared the shadows that clung to Ashok.

“Ilvani,” he said.

The witch smiled. “I told you I’d come with you when you went to the Veil,” she said.