Shadow Born Read online

  SHADOW BORN

  By Martin Frowd

  Book 1 of the Karnos Chronicles

  Copyright © 2019 Martin Frowd.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image sourced freely from www.fanpop.com.

  Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Karin Frowd (1945-2014) who taught me to appreciate reading and always encouraged my writing.

  Also dedicated to my father-in-law, John “Bubbles” Lovell (1954-2015).

  Both gone far too soon.

  No book is written in a vacuum. I couldn’t have made it this far without the support, beta reading and encouragement of my amazing wife Ann Frowd, and of my writer friends K. Caffee, Claire Buss, and the rest of the Sparkly Badgers and Knights of the Sci Fi Round Table writing groups on Facebook and Twitter.

  I would also like to thank all the amazing fantasy and science fiction writers whose works have entertained and inspired me over the years and continue to do so with each new release. There are too many to give each their proper due, but two dozen particular favourites (in alphabetical order) are: Ilona Andrews; Kelley Armstrong; Keri Arthur; Jim Butcher; Rachel Caine; Skyla Dawn Cameron; Joe Dever; Raymond Feist; Yasmine Galenorn; Christie Golden; Simon R. Green; Laurell K. Hamilton; Kim Harrison; William Hertling; Patricia Kennealy-Morrison; Marjorie Liu; Chloe Neill; John Ringo; Lilith Saintcrow; Gail Simone; Rachel Vincent; David Weber; Jaye Wells; and Janny Wurts.

  Finally, to all the bands and artists whose music has inspired and continues to inspire me. Again there are too many to thank them all individually, but in particular, the top ten artists whose songs formed the core of the playlist to which Shadow Born was written are: Taylor Swift; Kelsea Ballerini; Cassadee Pope; Miranda Lambert; Britney Spears; RaeLynn; Carrie Underwood; Lindsay Ell; Morgan Myles; and Kalie Shorr.

  Contents

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  THE PROPHECY OF THE WORLDBREAKER

  ONE: THE SACRIFICE

  TWO: THE WATCHER

  THREE: THE CONCLAVE

  FOUR: IN THE HILLS OF DUSK

  FIVE: THE ISLE OF CROWS

  SIX: CAPTIVE

  SEVEN: THE ANCIENT DEAD

  EIGHT: THE SILENT VALE

  NINE: PROMISES

  TEN: THE NULL ZONE

  ELEVEN: THE WILL OF THE ANCIENTS

  TWELVE: FURIOSA

  THIRTEEN: INVESTIGATION

  FOURTEEN: INQUISITION

  FIFTEEN: ON BLACK WINGS

  SIXTEEN: THROUGH THE STORM

  SEVENTEEN: A BOY AND HIS KNIFE

  APPENDICES

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  The Duskwalker clan of the People of the Bear

  Zarynn, a Gifted boy

  Zaryth, Zarynn’s father, former Chief Hunter, newly dead as the story begins

  Sheynsa, Zarynn’s mother, a leatherworker, newly dead as the story begins

  Zovyth, Chief of the Duskwalker clan

  Zoran, son of Zovyth, new Chief Hunter

  Zarna, Zoran’s woman, near-sister to Sheynsa

  Zanavan, a hunter and crony of Zoran

  The Druid Conclave

  Zakryth, Grand Druid of the Twelve Tribes of the People

  Zarth, Archdruid of the People of the Wolf, Zakryth’s right hand

  Zakaran, Archdruid of the People of the Boar

  Zohal, Archdruid of the People of the Mammoth

  Shavyth, Archdruid of the People of the Hookbeak

  Zenryth, Archdruid of the People of the Rat

  Sharath, tigren, Archdruid of the People of the Tiger

  Zorgyth, Archdruid of the People of the Lion

  Rashath, Archdruid of the People of the Nighthawk

  Sryth, cobren, Archdruid of the People of the Serpent

  Zlyth, Archdruid of the People of the Bear

  Sholvyth, Archdruid of the People of the Vulture

  Ranvyth, Archdruid of the People of the Raven, Zakryth’s left hand and mentor

  Other Druids

  Zorgh, a Druid Master of the Watch

  Rhobyth, a Druid Wanderer of the Watch

  Ryvyth, a Druid Wanderer on circuit

  In the Hills of Dusk

  Glaraz Vordakan, a master necromancer from across the sea

  Vrnx, shade, a lord of ancient Shadzarath

  The Watcher, a mysterious and ancient observer

  Crew on board the Skull in Shadow

  Maarek “Glittergrin”, captain of the Skull in Shadow

  Rathgar Redbeard, dwarf, first mate

  Jelek, second mate and navigator

  Aldrek, Maarek’s nephew, ship’s mistweaver (weather mage)

  Marag, ship’s quartermaster

  Varzag, a sailor

  Kitithraza Stalks-the-Wind, felis, a sailor

  Passengers on board the Skull in Shadow

  Anjali, apprentice to Glaraz

  Farouk, apprentice to Glaraz

  Zorn, a Gifted boy, twin brother of Zonn

  Zonn, a Gifted boy, twin brother of Zorn

  Zoss, a Gifted boy

  Zovyn, a Gifted boy

  Zaryk, a Gifted boy

  Zonna, a Gifted girl

  THE PROPHECY OF THE WORLDBREAKER

  When hunter burnt by red eye be

  As falling dragon plunges into sea

  Comes then breaker by shadow’s fire driven

  From the stony fields riven

  Born to the people, raised far away

  Returning on the darkest day

  Steeped in the lore of those who came before

  With power to conquer shadow’s core

  Deathless, timeless, master of fate

  Stands defiant before the gate

  Only once his blood is spilled

  Shall the empty throne be filled.

  ONE: THE SACRIFICE

  The boy stood beneath the blazing sun. Not yet midday, it was already hot, as every day of this summer had been on the plains. The sun moved inexorably toward its midday peak overhead. When it reached that peak, the boy knew, he would die.

  Sweat dripped down his forehead and ran into his eyes, mingling with the silent tears of fear, anguish and pain. The iron manacles bit cruelly into his wrists, attached to chains that pulled his arms taut above his head, securing him to the iron stake driven deep into the ground behind him. More chains of strong, precious iron were wrapped around his ankles, binding them to the stake, rendering moot any hope of escape. Naked, he burned in the hot sun, his leggings and tunic of soft hide still crumpled on the bare dusty rock of the execution ground where they had been tossed after being torn from his young body. His sandals lay beside them, and the heat of the sun warmed the bare rock underfoot to painful levels, tormenting his bare feet.

  Off to his left, the men gathered, perhaps two score in number, clad in leather and hides. Each man took a stone from the pile that had been brought here at dawn, as custom demanded. Rough black ebonstone, quarried from the Hills of Dusk, each boulder was the size of a man’s head. The People of the Bear had little use for the midnight-hued, almost unbreakable ebonstone in their daily lives, and so boasted no stonemasons of great talent, preferring instead the more readily workable flint, occasionally bronze, or the rare and thus precious iron. Among the boy’s kindred, ebonstone was used only for executions.

  Off to his right stood the women of the clan, in their garments of hides and grasses, silent as the Law demanded. Their place in this matter was to bear witness.

  Behind the men stood the Druid, a towering figure of doom in his long brown robes, belted at the waist by a sash of the same hue, his face hidden beneath his hood, his hands concealed by long sleeves. Only his bare feet were visible beneath the hem of the dark brown silk – a luxury owned by none among the boy’s kindred. Hatred struggled with pain in the boy’s mind as he gazed at the tal
l robed Druid, servant of the dark and cruel religion practiced by most of the People of the Bear – the religion that had killed his parents, and that would soon bring about his own death. Tears ran freely down the boy’s face as he remembered how that Druid had discovered his parents at their rites, at the peaceful worship of the Protector. How the men of the clan, roused to frenzy by the Druid, had dragged his parents from their yurt into the night and butchered them like animals, ignoring his mother’s screams for mercy and his father’s desperate prayers to the Protector.

  How the Power had flared in him, unchecked, and obliterated the bloodied, mutilated corpses of his murdered parents and their blood-maddened killers alike, before the men had overpowered him and dragged him from the grassland to this barren place to face his own doom.

  The tears flowed uncontrolled now, as the boy remembered his parents. He remembered his father, the finest hunter in their clan, a master of the spear; so quiet and stealthy on the grassy plains, yet so full of laughter among the yurts of the People. He remembered his mother, with her long black hair and her laughing smile. Both were always so full of life and joy, though they shared a deep secret – that they gave their faith to Heldor the Protector, God of the innocent, rather than the dread Kelnaaros, Lord of Tyranny and King of Demons, the God of the Druids – the God of the People of the Bear. But now that secret was exposed, and the wind had taken the ashes of his beloved parents where his own uncontrolled Power had burned their corpses and their living killers. Now it was his turn to die.

  ◆◆◆

  The Druid stood beneath the blazing sun. Not yet midday, it was already hot, as every day of this summer had been on the plains. The sun moved inexorably toward its midday peak overhead. Soon this regrettable necessity would be over.

  The Druid watched the men collect their stones. The men and women of the Duskwalker clan of the People of the Bear were almost pathetically eager to please their betters, he reflected. Or perhaps, they were following his orders so slavishly to prove themselves innocent of the heresy that had reared its head among them? It mattered little whether one ruled through fear or through awe, he thought, just as long as one ruled. And whatever the chieftains of the Twelve Tribes thought – small-minded men who were permitted a small measure of authority in things of no real importance – the Druid Order, and the Conclave that governed it, was the true ruler of these lands.

  Once again, the Druid silently cursed the Conclave policy that left the smaller clans of the People without a permanent Druid of their own. Had this clan had a Druid in residence, the abomination that he had uncovered last night, on a routine seasonal visit, would have been exposed years ago: the late chief hunter of this clan, and his woman, could never have hidden the truth of their perverted faith for so many years, let alone raised their son in the same. The boy could have been taken from his accursed heretic parents as an infant and trained by the Order to harvest the benefits of his Gift. Granted, the heretics would still have had to die, but an infant son could have been made to forget in time. But because this clan was deemed too small, it had merely shared the attentions of travelling Druids with other small clans, hosting a Druid perhaps only for a day or three of each season. Thus, the hunter and his woman had been able to conceal what they were – what they worshipped – for so long. Now, thanks to the heresy having gone unchecked so long, the boy would have to die. Having reached his eighth summer, he was too old for the Order to mould him into what they needed – and it was unthinkable to let a Gifted one live, outside of the Druid Order. The Law forbade it, and the Histories gave good reason why.

  The Druid’s iron willpower prevented him from shuddering within his robes as his heightened senses, attuned to the mystical for years, felt the raw untrained strength of the Gift within the boy. Only the boy’s lack of training had saved the rest of the clan, for with such power, had he the control, the brat could easily have ignited every yurt within miles, and every living person, rather than only the men who had cut his heretic parents’ throats.

  The chief of the Duskwalker clan parted from the knot of other stone-bearing men and moved back to stand beside the Druid. Clad in the same leathers and hides as his hunters, only the ornate bracers on his arms, fashioned from precious doomwolf-hide chased with even more precious iron, marked him apart from the men he led. Zovyth, his name was, the Druid recalled. A canny warrior, by all accounts, with the bandy-legged gait of a man as comfortable in the saddle as on foot, though his hair and his thin moustache were grey now and his face was lined with age and scarred with the relicts of old wounds. It was a harsh life on the plains, for all but the Druid Order, and few of the People outside the Order survived long past their fortieth summer.

  “Are your men ready, Chief Zovyth?” the Druid asked formally.

  “The men of the Duskwalker clan stand ready, Druid Ryvyth,” the clan chief replied in an equally formal tone, speaking the words laid down by thousands of years of the Law for occasions such as this one. “In life and in death, we shall not fail the Dark King.”

  You have already failed. The Druid said nothing, irritated though he was. Sept chiefs were the lowest-ranking of the People permitted to address a Druid by name – a rare privilege which they shared only with their overlords, the chieftains of the Tribes – and could be awkward enemies for a mere Druid Wanderer like himself, even if inconsequential for his masters.

  ◆◆◆

  The black-robed man walked beneath the blazing sun. Not yet midday, it was already hot, as many summer days were on the plains, but the heat was still less than that of his faraway desert homeland and bothered him not at all. The sun moved inexorably toward its midday peak overhead. If it reached that peak, he knew, he would be too late.

  Once again the outsider cursed the Druid Order’s rigid policies, their hidebound insistence on killing any Gifted they could not use, thus making his task all the harder and forcing him to hurry – although, he admitted silently, he could understand their reasons, given the history of this harsh, unforgiving land, so like and yet so unlike his own faraway home, and its people’s constant struggle for survival.

  He strode swiftly over the grasses, fast approaching the execution site. Ahead, he could hear some sort of commotion, and hoped that the tradition-bound Druids had not chosen today to make an exception to their rigid ceremonial requirements and start ahead of schedule.

  ◆◆◆

  “The sun approaches its peak, Chief Zovyth,” the Druid observed, still not deviating from the prescribed formula. “Let the Law be honoured, and sacrifice carried out.”

  Chief Zovyth turned to the men ranged in front of him, waiting expectantly for his signal, and raised his left hand to the sky. “Let the chief hunter cast the first stone.”

  A younger man, hair and eyes black as night, detached himself from the throng and took a step toward where the boy stood chained. Zoran, the Druid recalled the name. Zovyth’s eldest son, one day to be clan chief in his father’s place, and newly blooded as chief hunter, following the death of his predecessor – the man Zaryth, the heretic whose death the Druid had ordered the night before.

  Blood caked young Zoran’s long hair and the tips of his thin moustache, and marked three lines down his left cheek, from his ceremony of advancement to his new position, only hours before. As he stepped out from the cluster of hunters, every hunter’s eye was on him – some in admiration, some in barely veiled jealousy, particularly from the older men who might have coveted the position for themselves following the heretic Zaryth’s execution, had the choice not been Chief Zovyth’s alone. Among the women, crones and young alike, murmurs began.

  “As chief hunter, I cast my stone against Zarynn, son of Zaryth, declared heretic and traitor to the People. As the Dark King and all His demons are my witness, I follow the Law,” the young man declaimed, picking up his part in the ritual from where his father and the Druid had left off. The murmurs among the women became louder, but the men paid them little heed. With a cruel sneer twisting his face,
the new chief hunter walked a few more paces to look the chained boy in the face, as if to taunt him one last time, and then drew back his right hand, holding his black stone, preparing to hurl it.

  The murmurs became a loud commotion. From the watching ranks of the women of the clan, one young woman burst forth, to stand blocking Zoran’s throw. Zarna, the watching Druid remembered her name from earlier introductions, Zoran’s own woman. Young, slim, dark of hair and eye like her man, and attractive – perhaps eighteen summers, the Druid thought – she stood in her man’s path, but her eyes were on the Druid, recognising where true power stood, as she spoke.

  “He is but a boy,” she pleaded. “He knows not what he has done. Spare him, Exalted, I beg of you!”

  Quick as a snake, Zoran backhanded her across the face with his empty hand, his own face twisted in fury as he knocked her to the bare rocky ground. Dropping the stone that he carried, Zoran flung himself to his knees before the Druid, who had remained silent and motionless throughout this exchange.

  “Forgive my woman, Exalted,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “She is but female, and thus weak. She knows not of the greater Law but only of the lesser...”

  “Often did I watch over him,” Zarna argued, picking herself up off the rocky ground, “when Sheynsa was at the leatherworking. He has but eight summers; he is no more an agent of the Enemy than any here! I beg you again, Exalted, spare him.”

  The Druid had stood quietly through the interruption thus far, but the mention of the name of the late heretic, the boy’s mother, captured his attention, even as Zoran’s face darkened further.

  “Heresy has cast its stain on this clan for too long,” the Druid pronounced grimly from beneath the deep, concealing hood of his robe. “It shall not continue. The boy Zarynn, son of Zaryth, is sentenced to die this day, and none shall gainsay the sentence of the Order. If you are a true follower of our Dark King, girl, you will accept the will of His Druids and be content.”