Voyage of the Shadowmoon Read online

  To Trish,

  my favorite reference librarian

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One - VOYAGE TO ZANTRIAS

  Chapter Two - VOYAGE TO HELION

  Chapter Three - VOYAGE TO TOREA

  Chapter Four - VOYAGE TO LARMENTEL

  Chapter Five - VOYAGE TO ACREMA

  Chapter Six - VOYAGE TO NORTH SCALTICAR

  Chapter Seven - VOYAGE TO SICKLE BAY

  Chapter Eight - VOYAGE TO DETENTION

  Chapter Nine - VOYAGE TO THE ABYSS

  Chapter Ten - VOYAGE TO DIOMEDA

  Epilogue

  TOR BOOKS BY SEAN MC MULLEN

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Miral dominated the sky as the deepwater trader docked, an immense green, banded disk at the center of three scintillating green rings. The ship had scarcely bumped against the stone pier when there was a frantic scramble by the sailors and officers to get the gangplank over the side and secured. A thin, short figure wearing a calf-length cloak and carrying a small pack over one shoulder had been waiting beside the mainmast, and relief surged through the crew like a cool breeze on a summer evening as he stepped over the rail and walked from the ship.

  “I’ve faced storms, wrecks, battles, a couple of sea monsters, and even a dinner party with all five sets of my parents-in-law, but I’ve never been so frightened as on this voyage,” confessed the shipmaster to the steersman as they stood watching from the quarterdeck.

  “So what now, sir?” responded the officer as he tied the steering bar.

  “Unload the cargo, load another, and sail on the morning tide. We have seven hours. We can do it.”

  “After two months at sea, sir? The men will want to go ashore and carouse.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that any of them will want to be ashore in the same port as that?” snapped the shipmaster, pointing at the small, dark figure walking away along the stone pier.

  “Ah, yes sir. Point taken.”

  “He casts no shadow in Miral’s light, yet lamplight gives him a shadow,” the shipmaster suddenly observed.

  “I’m more concerned about why eight of our passengers vanished during the voyage. Now all the others want to go straight back to Acrema without setting foot ashore.”

  “Well, it saves us the trouble of advertising for passengers,” said the shipmaster as he set off to supervise the unloading.

  The night sky was clear, and three moonworlds were quite close to Miral: orange Dalsh, blue Belvia, and white Lupan. The color of Verral had been the subject of debate for millenia, but the weight of scholarly opinion favored green. To the people of Verral, Miral was the source of all magic, just as the sun was the source of all life. They knew plants died without sunlight, so the sun, obviously, was the source of life. Experiments to show that Miral was the source of magical ether were a little more difficult; in fact, only one experiment had ever produced results. Sorcerers had observed that the only vampyre on the whole of Verral slept as if dead when Miral was not in the sky. Unfortunately, this vampyre had escaped before further experiments could be performed, and generations of sorcerers had been pursuing him for centuries in order to do those experiments. Quite a few others had been pursuing him merely to try to end his undead life, but seven centuries on the run had honed his survival skills to be as sharp as his fangs. Now he had arrived in Torea.

  “An entire continent, brimming with thieves, bullies, bandits, swindlers, slavers, and minstrels who sing long, boring epics out of tune,” Laron whispered to himself as he stopped at the foot of the pier. “And they are mine! All mine!”

  At an open-air tavern an elderly charmshaper had fashioned a small, scantily clad dancer out of pure ether for the amusement of the drinkers. Nearby, the vintner’s pet dracel was blasting passing moths with puffs of flame, then snapping them up before they hit the ground. As Laron scanned the gathering, an ethersmith snapped his fingers over his pipe, and it began to smoke.

  Plenty of ether here, thought Laron. This venture will be far more pleasure than work.

  Ether was intertwined with life—it was magic that could be charmed out of the nothingness. Ethersmiths were the laborers of the magical arts; they were naturally strong in etheric energies, but lacked fine control. Charmshapers were the magical watchmakers, jewelers, and surgeons; they were artisans of life-force control. Initiates combined the talents of charmshapers and ethersmiths, and from level ten and above they were considered to have full sorcerer status. One had to be born with the right talents just to consider becoming a sorcerer, and even then it took long years of study to reach the tenth level.

  As the last month of the year 3139 drew to a close, the people of Verral were unaware that the year to come would change their world more drastically than any other in the whole of history. A handful did know great danger and exceedingly interesting times were ahead, and one of those was Laron. For the present, however, he had more immediate problems. He sauntered over to the open-air tavern and stood at the serving-board.

  “And what might your pleasure be?” asked the vintner.

  “I would like one truly obnoxious and brutal bully,” the vampyre replied in a somewhat archaic accent. He had not been to Torea for two hundred years.

  “Plenty o’ those in Fontarian,” laughed the man, “and what’s more, they’re free.”

  “Wonderful,” Laron breathed with genuine pleasure, as he placed a Diomedan silver coin on the board. “Kindly point one out, if you please.”

  “Er, might I ask why?” asked the now uneasy vintner as he accepted the coin.

  “Because I follow the path of chivalry.”

  “Chivalry?” responded the vintner, who had a feeling he once might have heard the word mentioned somewhere, and now thought he should have listened more carefully.

  “It means spreading happiness in one’s wake,” explained Laron.

  “You mean like a rich drunk with a hole in his purse?”

  “Yes, yes, a wonderful analogy,” replied Laron, scanning the crowd of drinkers and rubbing his hands together.

  Chapter One

  VOYAGE TO ZANTRIAS

  The walls of Larmentel had withstood the invading army of Emperor Warsovran for five months. Stone gargoyles poked tongues and bared buttocks at the besiegers beyond the outer walls, as its nobles sipped wine from glazed pottery goblets shaped in the likeness of the severed head of the invading emperor. Their confidence was justified. Larmentel had stood unconquered for the entire six hundred years since its foundation.

  The city lay at the center of the continent of Torea. It was both beautiful and massive, with a high, crenellated outer wall circling the cisterns, market gardens, and storehouses that supplied its citizens. The citadel wall protected the inner city, where temples, palaces, and mansions built of white stone blocks rose in terraces to look out over the surrounding plain to distant mountains in the northeast. Larmentel was rich as well as powerful, and had been built to be pleasing to behold as well as strong. The warehouses were mighty domed cathedrals to honor prosperity, all built of white stone. They were clustered in the center of the city, as if they were palaces in themselves.

  Einsel and Cypher watched the progress of the siege engines in the predawn light. They were standing just outside the range of a good crossbow in competent hands. Having lost a lot of men to direct assault, and several unwisely rude diplomats to direct negotiation, Warsovran’s commander was resorting to machinery to take the walls. The three siege engines were towers of wooden beams, armored on three sides and crowned by a hinged bridge that would let the cream of Warsovran’s storm climbers charge across and establish a bridgehead on the walls. The three to
wers were rolled forward together, approaching the wall like ponderous, powerful titans.

  “When I see engines such as these, I sometimes doubt the power of our leaders’ brains,” admitted Einsel, who was Emperor Warsovran’s court sorcerer.

  “When I see engines such as these, I always doubt the power of our leaders’ brains,” Cypher replied.

  Both men were dressed in drab armor, with only the colored plumes fixed to the back of their helmets to distinguish them as nobility. After all, there was no sense in calling attention to oneself on a battlefield, where officers and nobles were prime targets for marksmen. Einsel’s armor was ill-fitting, as he was somewhat shorter and thinner than most warriors. Indeed, he reminded many of a child dressed up in his father’s war gear, but nobody said it aloud. This was actually his first time on a battlefield, which was a sign of how desperate the situation had become. On the other hand, Cypher was as concerned about his identity as his safety. Beneath his helmet his face was veiled with maroon cloth, leaving only his eyes visible.

  The towers were almost close enough to drop their bridges onto Larmentel’s walls when the thing appeared, a delicate-looking structure of beams and ropes, rather like the head and neck of a gigantic wading bird. It hoisted a huge beam of wood with stylized eagle talons on one end, and lowered it between the middle tower and the wall. Moments later two similar cranes stopped the two other towers in exactly the same way.

  “The problem would seem to be that the honorable profession of applied engineering was invented in Larmentel’s university,” Cypher said.

  “Ah, the University of Larmentel, I did my degree in etheric shaping there,” sighed Einsel, whose mind had drifted away from the battle. “A truly lovely place.”

  Larmentel contained one of the five universities in Torea, but rather than being all dingy halls and overgrown, rambling colleges, the University of Larmentel was a cluster of slender, graceful towers joined at several levels by suspension walkways.

  “I can see its towers from here,” said Cypher. “Who would think that they are more deadly than all the spears of an army?”

  “Did you know that the towers were meant to symbolically put learning above everyday life?” asked Einsel. “Some of the finest scholars in Torea’s history were taught within them. The university shares the citadel with the royal palace—it’s that great pile of domes, balconies, and towering archways. Part of the palace is set aside for citizens of Larmentel to visit, so anyone can walk the balconies of royal splendor and fancy themselves to be kings and queens for a few moments as they look out over the city to the plains beyond.”

  “Beautiful towers, but deadly,” said Cypher.

  “True. Even though they hide no weapons, and they are not even fortified.”

  “Indeed. The engineers trained therein are better than ours.”

  As if to confirm his words, an immense dragon’s head on a long green neck appeared, dangling from another spindly crane. The mouth trailed smoke as it was swung over the wall, to reach out past the middle tower. The head swiveled, and a stream of smoky fire poured out of the dragon’s mouth and into the open and undefended back of the tower. The two hundred storm climbers and archers within were set ablaze within seconds by the cascade of lamp oil, pitch, and sulfur. The tower was blazing and beyond recovery as the dragon head turned toward the next tower. The engineers controlling it need not have bothered, for those inside were already flinging their weapons away and leaping for their lives.

  A torrent of flame poured into the back of the next tower, while those who had been pushing the third tower forward were now straining to pull it back away from the wall. Grapples had already been flung out over the wall, however, and the tower was immobilized. The dragon head slowly moved back toward the tower, which by now had been completely abandoned. Moments later it had become a pyre of bright flames, like its two companions.

  “Only those storm climbers and archers who began fleeing when the first tower was burned have survived,” Einsel pointed out.

  “Cowards,” sneered Cypher. “War is for heroes.”

  “War is the way that gods breed cowards,” said Einsel.

  “How so?”

  “Cowards are less likely to die, so they survive to breed.”

  “They go home conquered.”

  “The cowards of both sides go home alive, which is what I hope to do. There they breed. Only the victorious heroes do that.”

  As they stood watching the rout of their own forces, a despatch rider came up at a canter and reined in.

  “Most Learned Rax Einsel, your presence is required by Commander Ralzak,” he called. “And sir, are you the one known as Cypher?”

  “That is my name.”

  “Commander Ralzak requires your presence as well.”

  The young officer continued on as Einsel and Cypher returned to their horses.

  “Ralzak must be growing desperate,” said Einsel. “He despises his sorcerers even more than his engineers.”

  Agarif Ralzak was Warsovran’s commander-in-chief. He had watched his siege engines and storm climbers thrown back from Larmentel’s beautiful but solid outer walls in every attack so far, and those defeats had cost him dearly. The kingdoms of the southwest had been biding their time to see whether Larmentel would fall to the invaders’ onslaught, but now they were beginning to lose their fear of Warsovran’s forces, and to rally. Sitting on the thick Vidarian rug in his tent, Ralzak read the reports of his diplomats and spies while Silverdeath stood beside the open flap, gleaming with the sheen of quicksilver and somehow seeing through blank, reflective eyes. The walls, terraces, domes, towers, and spires of Larmentel were plainly visible in the distance, blushing red with the sunrise.

  Ralzak looked from the city to Silverdeath. Silverdeath had the shape of a man, and was wearing Warsovran’s band-plate armor and battle-ax over a black tunic. In the five months since he had become Silverdeath’s master and assumed command over Warsovran’s forces, Ralzak had been afraid to use his strange new warrior. For three years Warsovran had devoted fifty thousand slaves and ten thousand men-at-arms to digging it out from under a rockslide in the Seawall Mountains. Thus whatever it was, it had value and probably immense power, but Ralzak was just as unhappy fighting alongside the unfamiliar as against it.

  When discovered, Silverdeath had had the form of a strange metal tunic of circles, hooks, and mirror facets, but when Ralzak had helped Warsovran to put it on, the fabric had melted and flowed to become a skin of flexible metal that covered the emperor completely. What remained of the emperor was his shape alone. A hollow, ringing voice had declared that its name was Silverdeath, and that it was ready to do Ralzak’s bidding.

  Ralzak was totally unprepared for this magical warrior. He hurriedly announced that Warsovran was wearing a new type of armor, and everyone but Ralzak thought Warsovran to be alive and still in charge within his fantastic skin of living metal. His famed judgment and acumen were gone, however, and the alliances that had been formed by the brilliant and charismatic emperor were rapidly weakening. Warsovran was now only a figurehead, and he gave no commands. For the past five months Ralzak had been discovering that he, too, was not Warsovran’s equal.

  “I never asked to become the supreme commander,” Ralzak confided to Silverdeath. “I’m just a soldier. I know my place and my place is not here.”

  “Agreed,” replied Silverdeath in a flat, metallic voice.

  Is it mocking me? Ralzak wondered helplessly. “Defeating a few of the homeland’s neighbors, expanding our borders to advantage, that was my forte. Conquer a continent? I know neither why nor how. What would you do?”

  “I cannot advise. I am only to be used.”

  Ralzak had heard those words before. He considered carefully, looking back to Larmentel. The city had to fall, but he did not need its people or wealth. Nor did he want the luxury of its mansions and towers for his own dwellings. In his own way he was a simple man, fond of life in the field with his troops, and politically u
nambitious.

  “Can you destroy my enemies?” asked Ralzak, gazing over at Larmentel again.

  His voice was muted, as if he were just muttering his thoughts aloud. Silverdeath regarded him with the blank, metallic sheen of its face.

  “The feat is at the limit of my powers,” Silverdeath explained in its flat yet ominous voice.

  “So, you can do it,” replied Ralzak.

  “Yes.”

  Ralzak stood up and glared out through the tent flap at the distant walled city. “Larmentel is the strongest city in all Torea. With Larmentel gone, my other enemies are mere chaff to be swept up and burned. How quickly could you break Larmentel?”

  “In minutes.”

  Ralzak turned and blinked, his lips parted slightly. Silverdeath remained impassive. The metallic sheen that enclosed the head of what once had been Ralzak’s master had the outline of human form, and Ralzak wondered if the man beneath was still aware of what was happening.

  “So when can you, ah, strike?” Ralzak asked tentatively, when the silence began to lengthen.

  “Now,” replied Silverdeath, taking a step toward the tent flap.

  “No, no,” Ralzak said, with a hurried wave of his hands. “I want my troops positioned, ready to take whatever advantage you can give them.”

  “Not necessary,” Silverdeath assured him.

  “I still want to be prepared in my own way before you strike,” Ralzak insisted.

  “I am yours to command,” replied Silverdeath.

  Ralzak considered the incredible offer as he began pacing before the flap of his tent, favoring Larmentel with a scowl at every pass. What was there to lose? Silverdeath had said that conquering the city was at the limit of its abilities, so it would be exhausted and harmless when done, regardless of whether or not Larmentel had fallen. At last he beckoned to Silverdeath and they went outside together. Cypher was there, still wearing nondescript robes and armor, with his face obscured. Einsel stood beside him, looking fearful.