The Shadow Within Read online

  Praise for The Light of Eidon,

  the first book of

  LEGENDS OF THE GUARDIAN-KING

  Karen Hancock builds a realistic world of nobles and barbarians, Romanesque arena games and a supernatural battle between good and evil. With Hancock’s latest, inspiration fantasy continues to come into its own.

  —Romantic Times TOP PICK (4½ stars)

  The Light of Eidon is a worthy addition to my fantasy collection in every way. . . . By making religious pursuit one of the driving elements of the main character’s life, she has made it possible to introduce serious discussion of religion within a perfectly logical progression of the story. I was kept as off-kilter as Abramm for much of the story, wondering what really was true and what was not. . . . Christian fantasy is back. I look forward to the next volume of LEGENDS OF THE GUARDIAN-KING with great expectations. Highly recommended.

  —Tim Frankovich, www.christianfictionreview.com

  In the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Karen Hancock has created an exciting allegorical fantasy. . . . Hancock’s writing, often eerie and suspenseful, is rich in sights, smells and sounds. . . . The allegories for atonement and salvation are fresh and insightful. . . . The Light of Eidon is so well done it should attract new readers to the genre.

  —Christian Retailing Spotlight Review

  The Light of Eidon has the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien, the flare of Terry Brooks, the adventure of Tom Clancy, and the sense of destiny of the Star Wars saga. . . . The Light of Eidon speaks to anyone who has faced a seemingly hopeless situation, where God feels the universe away, and those who do evil seem to have all the control. Hancock has a fresh approach to the age-old question: “Where is God when evil prevails?”

  —Randi Durham, Teknofischzone (teknofisch.com)

  Books by Karen Hancock

  Arena

  LEGENDS OF THE GUARDIAN-KING

  The Light of Eidon

  The Shadow Within

  The Shadow Within

  Copyright © 2004

  Karen Hancock

  Cover illustration by Bill Graff

  Cover design by Lookout Design Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400

  Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hancock, Karen.

  The shadow within / by Karen Hancock.

  p. cm. —(Legends of the guardian-king)

  ISBN 0-7642-2795-5 (pbk.)

  1. Kings and rulers—Fiction. 2. Sibling rivalry—Fiction. 3. Brothers—Fiction.

  I. Title II. Series: Hancock, Karen. Legends of the guardian-king.

  PS3608.A698S53 2004

  813'.6—dc22 2004002024

  * * *

  KAREN HANCOCK graduated in 1975 from the University of Arizona with bachelor’s degrees in biology and wildlife biology. Along with writing, she is a semi-professional watercolorist and has exhibited her work in a number of national juried shows. She and her family reside in Arizona.

  For discussion and further information, Karen invites you to visit herWeb site at www.kmhancock.com.

  Cursed is the man who looks to man for strength,

  who relies upon his own hand.

  For the Shadow lives in all; not one has escaped.

  And in it, every man’s hand is turned against himself,

  even against his own life.

  —From the Second Word of Revelation

  Scroll of Saint Elspeth

  Contents

  HOMECOMING: PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  SHIELD AND DRAGON: PART TWO

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  THE MORWHOL: PART THREE

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  KIRIATHAN AND KING: PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  HOMECOMING

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER

  1

  His senses keyed as tightly as if he’d just stepped back into an Esurhite arena, Abramm Kalladorne stood on Wanderer’s quarterdeck with his two liegemen, nervously scanning the leaden waters of Kalladorne Bay. As the white cliffs guarding the bay’s mouth slid silently astern, he wondered if the other men’s stomachs had just done the same little twist his own had. Probably.

  It was one thing to boast of slaying sea monsters and sharing fabulous rewards in the warm, smoky haven of a Qarkeshan tavern, quite another to sail alone past a gaggle of crudely made warning buoys into the quiet, empty waters of what had once been the busiest harbor in Kiriath. Off the port gunwale, a broken mast listed in the spray-plumed rocks at the base of the western headland. With shredded canvas still fluttering from its yardarm, it stood in silent memorial to all the vessels lost to the monster since spring— six of them fully rigged merchantmen weighing over five hundred tons. Large, strong, stable ships.

  Back in Qarkeshan’s own busy international harbor,Wanderer had seemed large and strong herself. Crafted of oak and iron, she floated at just over four hundred ton, with three stout masts and a complement of square-rigged sails now bellying handsomely before the breeze. Plenty strong and safe she’d looked in Qarkeshan.

  Suddenly she had grown small and frail and pitifully inadequate. Suddenly Abramm could not imagine how he had thought her anything but, how he had ever let himself get talked into this harebrained scheme. To think that he and his companions could sail into this bay, brazen as gulls, knowing nothing about their adversary, and strike it dead when all who’d come before them had failed, was not only arrogant but incredibly stupid. And even if he and his companions did not mean to use conventional weapons, it was still stupid. Especially considering that the weapon they did mean to use could get them all lynched for heresy.

  Tendrils of hair, teased free of the warrior’s knot on his neck, lashed annoyingly about his face as he glanced down at Wanderer’s waist and foredeck, where every man had turned out, ready for action. Crewmen lined the gunwales, balanced on the bowsprit, and clung to the rigging. Weathered faces with keen eyes searched the gray swells for the telltale ripple, the rocklike hump briefly breaking the surface, the quick breaching grope of a fleshy tentacle, as fat around as one of Wanderer’s masts. . . .

  They would use the four boats stowed between the two forward masts to engage the kraggin once it was spotted—two eight-man whale hunters and two twen
ty-man longboats. They also had harpoon guns, axes and spears aplenty, two extra masts, and a crew of one hundred fifty crazies—experienced, die-hard adventurers who relished the challenge of facing a creature no one else could slay. And of divvying up the not insubstantial reward money when it was over.

  Assuming anyone remained alive to divvy . . .

  This is insane, Abramm thought. Dorsaddi bravado has pushed me into this, and nothing more. It’s far too late in the day. At the least we should heel out and go around to Stillwater Cove for the night. Get our bearings. Learn something about this monster . . . where it’s been seen, where it hasn’t, how often it feeds, what its habits are. . . .

  But just as he was about to give the order to retreat, his liegeman spoke at his side. “It’s shadowspawn, all right. Can you feel that aura? About as strong a warding as any I’ve ever encountered. Griiswurmlike, but not griiswurm.” Abramm glanced at him, chagrined to realize that was exactly what it was. The all-too-familiar doubts and second thoughts might be his own, but the rising intensity of his anxiety and resistance to proceeding came from outside himself, part of the defensive aura generated by the monster they sought. Abramm’s red-bearded, freckle-faced liegeman, oath-made as of last night, raised a brow in unspoken amusement. “Don’t feel bad, my lord. I was about to suggest we turn back myself.”

  Trap Meridon had always read Abramm’s thoughts with uncanny ease. It was one of the things that had made them such good partners in Esurh’s gladiatorial games—and now made Meridon the invaluable retainer and liegeman he had become. Like Abramm, he had kept the Esurhite beard and warrior’s knot, and the loose trousers, tunic, and ochre-hued overrobe of Dorsaddi custom. So had his brother Philip, Abramm’s other liegeman, standing now on Trap’s offside, squinting across the bay. Both, also like Abramm, wore the deep swarthiness of weeks at sea.

  “It must be awfully big,” Philip said quietly.

  Abramm exchanged a glance with Trap and knew they were all thinking the same thing: Would the three of them alone be strong enough to do the job?

  “Do you suppose it senses us?” Philip asked. He stood as tall as Trap now, though leaner and lankier. Strands of curly auburn hair blew across the sparse silken gold of his young beard as he frowned at the sea and gray sky.

  “Most likely,” his brother replied, bringing up the telescope to examine something off the starboard bow. “Which, unfortunately, may only drive it away.”

  The ship’s captain—Abramm’s old friend Kinlock—stepped from where he had been conferring with the helmsmen to join them by the railing. “We’ll be taking her up the west side o’ the main channel, sir,” he said to Abramm with a bob of his head he evidently intended as a covert salute. “Unless you have objections. Wind’s stiffer there, and the beast is said to prefer the deeper waters.”

  “I leave it to your discretion, Captain,” Abramm said.

  “Aye, Your—er, sir.” He gave another little nodding salute, gestured an okay at the helm, and strode across the deck to disappear down the companionway.

  Of the crew, only Kinlock knew who Abramm really was, though all were intrigued by the contradictions in his person—a tall, bearded, blue-eyed blond in faded Dorsaddi robes and trousers, who wore his hair tied in the warrior’s knot of Esurhite tradition and, for those alert enough to notice, bore a trio of tiny holes along the outer margin of his left ear, silent testimony of combat honor rings no longer worn. He was a northerner who spoke the Esurhites’ Tahg as fluently as any native and came to them with a ship and a challenge and a promise of riches beyond imagining.

  Ten thousand sovereigns and more if they killed the kraggin that had shut down Kalladorne Bay. The captain would get the largest share, of course, his mates after him, and on down the line, with even the lowest-ranking sailor standing to make himself a tidy profit.

  Alone of them Abramm would take no cut.

  He had come out of duty. These were his people this monster was killing, his people who were losing their livelihoods because of it. And where once he would have left it all in bitterness for his brother Gillard to mishandle— he who had wanted rulership so badly he was willing to kill and betray for it—now Abramm found his heart changed. Yes, Gillard might deserve the headaches and burdens of the crown he had snatched, but did the people he misruled?

  “These disasters are entirely your fault, you know,” Abramm’s friend Shemm, king of the Dorsaddi, had told him bluntly back in Esurh. “What do you expect but that a land and its people suffer when their rightful king has deserted them?”

  Because, of course, Abramm was their rightful king, and they both knew it. Even if Kiriath did not.

  Thus, after two years of slavery to the Esurhites, and four more spent living among the Dorsaddi in their rugged canyonland fastness, the SaHal, Abramm had come home. Reluctantly, to be sure, for he still had no idea how to go about claiming this inheritance of his, least of all from a brother who’d as soon kill him as look at him. It could well ignite a civil war that would be the fish that sunk the ship for Kiriath. Then what good would his return be?

  But, believing it was Eidon who’d sent him, that this was, in fact, the destiny Eidon had prepared for him, Abramm had to believe Eidon would make him a way. Slaying this kraggin might be the first step.

  And if, instead, the beast slew him, well, then he wouldn’t have to worry about the other. Right now that looked like a very real possibility, for if he had no idea how to go about claiming his inheritance, he had even less of a plan for how they were going to kill the beast, nothing beyond the vaguely shaped hope that it was indeed the shadowspawn legend made of it. If so, and they could provoke it to engage with them, they hoped to use Eidon’s Light to slay it.

  Unfortunately, Trap was the only one of them who had killed spawn larger than a dog and the only one of them who could throw any significant amount of Light. Philip had only mastered the thinnest threads, and those at close range, while Abramm still required direct contact to release the Light at all. Their only chance was for all three of them to get a spear into the beast, then let loose with the Light all at the same moment.

  Just contemplating the logistics of arriving at that moment made Abramm’s thoughts snarl and his head hurt. They’d had little choice but to take it one step at a time, the first being to get back to Kiriath and Kalladorne Bay. The second, now facing them, would be to draw the kraggin from its deep-channel lair, a task complicated by the fact that their very presence could well drive it deeper into hiding.

  Abramm scowled at the gray tableau of sea and sky, doubt intensifying the ever-rising desire to turn back. Doggedly he held his tongue and continued to search, the hair dancing around his face and the breeze tugging at beard and robe.

  “Huh,” Trap grunted. “What do you make of that?” He pointed to a distant shape off the starboard bow, and Abramm brought up his own glass.

  “Looks like a whaler,” he said, squinting at the battered, poorly rigged two-master silhouetted against the lavender haze of the bay’s distant end. A likely candidate for monster hunting, it stood at anchor, most of its sails reefed, with only a bit of jib set to keep it stable.

  “Yes. But what’s that to starboard of it?”

  Abramm shifted the glass, his loose sleeves stuttering in the wind. The second vessel was harder to see. Long, low to the water, and white, it looked like—

  “A barge?” What the plague is a barge doing that far out in the bay? He shifted his stance for more stability and squinted harder, perceiving now the tiny white manforms that encircled what appeared to be a burning, brokenoff mast at its midst. Had the vessel already been attacked? No . . .

  The chill that rippled up the backs of his arms had nothing to do with the cool of the breeze. “Khrell’s Fire!” he muttered. “What incredibly bad timing.”

  “It is Guardians, then,” said Trap.

  “Guardians!” Philip cried. “What are they doing out here?” He snatched the spyglass from his brother to have his own look.

&n
bsp; “Probably trying to drive the kraggin away with their Holy Flames,” Abramm replied.

  “But, my lord,” the youth protested, “won’t the Flames just draw it to them? I mean, if the beast really is spawn?”

  “It might,” Abramm agreed gloomily.

  Philip missed entirely the significance of Abramm’s tone. “Well, then we’ve got our bait right there!” He looked from Trap to Abramm, his enthusiasm fading into confusion. “Didn’t you just say it wouldn’t come up for us?”

  “Aye,” said Abramm. “But I can’t see how a flock of Guardians as witnesses to what we do will bring anything but trouble.”

  Philip’s expression turned grave. He glanced across the water toward the dark blot that was whaler and barge, and Abramm could see his mind working. Tales circulating in Qarkeshan—many told firsthand—had painted a grim picture of the religious persecutions going on in Kiriath at present. After— if—Abramm and his liegemen slew this monster, and if it was clear they’d used Terstan power to do it, he had hoped their fellow crewmen would be well enough disposed toward them not to make trouble. That would never happen with a pack of Guardians in their midst, shrilling hysterical condemnations at the merest hint of “evil Terstan magicks.”

  Still, Philip was right—this was a perfect opportunity to engage the kraggin.

  By now Captain Kinlock had been alerted to the presence of barge and whaler and came to ask if Abramm wanted to pay them a visit. Shortly Wanderer’s bow was angling east of its former track. The ship rose and fell in long graceful swoops, her hull creaking and groaning around them as she made her way up the bay. Water slapped the hull as a small jib sail forward flapped a rapid staccato and the breeze played a high sweet song through the rigging. Out on the bay nothing moved save a distant trio of pelicans, skimming low over the waves near the western shore.

  Anxiety corkscrewed in Abramm’s belly, igniting a restlessness that made standing still an agony of suspense and self-discipline. Again and again, he was swept with the premonition of imminent disaster, followed by the nearly irresistible compulsion to call off the affair and run for port in Springerlan, the royal city now visible as a sprawling patchwork at the bay’s end.