THE OBSIDIAN MOUNTAIN TRILOGY
The Outstretched Shadow
To Light a Candle
When Darkness Falls
BY MERCEDES LACKEY AND JAMES MALLORY
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THE OBSIDIAN TRILOGY
BY MERCEDES LACKEY AND JAMES MALLORY
The Outstretched Shadow
To Light a Candle
When Darkness Falls
The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy (Omnibus)
ALSO BY JAMES MALLORY
Merlin: The Old Magic
Merlin: The King’s Wizard
Merlin: The End of Magic
TOR BOOKS BY MERCEDES LACKEY
Firebird
Sacred Ground
DIANA TREGARDE NOVELS
Burning Water
Children of the Night
Jinx High
THE HALFBLOOD CHRONICLES
(written with Andre Norton)
The Elvenbane
Elvenblood
Elvenborn
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Notice
Also By the Authors
Book 1: The Outstretched Shadow
Chapter One - In the City of Golden Bells
Chapter Two - Dark Lightning
Chapter Three - The Books of the Wild Magic
Chapter Four - Music in Chains
Chapter Six - A College of Magicks
Chapter Seven - Magic Unmasked
Chapter Eight - By the Light of the Moon
Chapter Nine - Facing the Outlaw Hunt
Chapter Ten - Hunters of the Dark
Chapter Eleven - Reborn to Magic
Chapter Twelve - Apples and Apparitions
Chapter Thirteen - The World Without Sun
Chapter Fourteen - Storms and Bright Water
Chapter Fifteen - Darkness and Lies
Chapter Sixteen - Revelry and Ashes
Chapter Seventeen - Into Elven Lands
Chapter Eighteen - The City Never Sleeps
Chapter Nineteen - The Fruit of the Tree of Night
Chapter Twenty - A Circle of Silver Fire
Chapter Twenty-one - Beyond the Elven Lands
Chapter Twenty-two - Visions of the Past
Chapter Twenty-three - Allies and Enemies
Chapter Twenty-four - A Pause Before the Storm
Chapter Twenty-five - Battle at the Cairn
Chapter Twenty-six - Storm Wind and Silver Feather
Book 2: To Light a Candle
Chapter One - In the Forest of Flowers
Chapter Two - A Healing and a Homecoming
Chapter Three - The Banquet in the Garden of Leaf and Star
Chapter Four - In Training at the House of Sword and Shield
Chapter Five - Secrets in the City of Golden Bells
Chapter Six - The Room of Fire and Water
Chapter Seven - Discord in the City of a Thousand Bells
Chapter Eight - Prisoners of Darkness
Chapter Nine - The Council of fear
Chapter Ten - The Return of the Dragons
Chapter Eleven - The Road Through the Border Lands
Chapter Twelve - To the Crowned Horns of the Moon
Chapter Thirteen - Ondoladeshiron at Last
Chapter Fourteen - Blood and Sorrow
Chapter Fifteen - At the Siege of Stonehearth
Chapter Sixteen - Ghosts upon the Wind
Chapter Seventeen - On the Wings of Dragons
Chapter Eighteen - The Price of Power
Chapter Nineteen - The Wisdom of Betrayal
Chapter Twenty - The Order of Battle
Chapter Twenty-one - Blood on the Moon
Chapter Twenty-two - Smoke and Storm
Chapter Twenty-three - Journey’s End
Chapter Twenty-four - Shadows of the Past
Chapter Twenty-five - Gifts and Promises
Chapter Twenty-six - Against All Odds
Epilogue
Book 3: When Darkness Falls
Prologue - The Surface of the Mirror
Chapter One - A Thousand Shades of Darkness
Chapter Two - Against All Odds
Chapter Three - The Winter City
Chapter Four - The Smoke of That Grat Burning
Chapter Five - The Best of All Beginnings
Chapter Six - The Stars and the Light
Chapter Seven - The Sword of the city
Chapter Eight - Hare and Hound
Chapter Nine - A Lifetime in a Moon
Chapter Ten - The Xaique Board Underground
Chapter Eleven - To Live in the City of Distance
Chapter Twelve - To Build a Bridge
Chapter Thirteen - To Redeem an Ancient Pledge
Chapter Fourteen - In the Room of Autumn Birches
Chapter Fifteen - The Road to Armethalieh
Chapter Sixteen - The Battle for Armethalieh
Chapter Seventeen - Sealed to the Light
Chapter Eighteen - The Light at the Heart of the Mountain
Chapter Nineteen - In the Temple of the Light
Chapter Twenty - To Honor the Fallen
About the Authors
Copyright
The
Outstretched
Shadow
The Obsidian Trilogy:
Book one
and James Mallory
The
Outstretched
Shadow
Chapter One
In the City of Golden Bells
THE GARDEN MARKET positively thronged with people, clustered around the wagons just in from the countryside. What a fuss over strawberries—you’d think they were made of solid ruby.
Perhaps—to some—they were. Certainly the number of superior kitchen servants that filled the streets of the Garden Market, their household livery enveloped in spotless aprons, pristine market baskets slung over their arms, suggested that the gourmets of the City treasured them as much as if they were, indeed, precious gems.
Kellen Tavadon supposed it was all a matter of taste. The strawberries were said to be particularly good this year, and there must have been a hundred people waiting impatiently for the three ox-carts in from the country to unload the second picking of the day, great crates full of the tender fruit, layered in fresh straw to keep from bruising the delicate flesh. The air was full of the scent of them, a perfume that made even Kellen’s mouth water.
“Out of the way, young layabout!”
A rude shove in Kellen’s back sent him staggering across the cobbles into the arms of a marketplace stall-holder, who caught him with a garlic-redolent oath just in time to keep him from landing face first in the cart full of the man’s neatly heaped-up vegetables. Behind Kellen, the burly armsman dressed in purple-and-maroon livery and bearing nothing more lethal than an ornamental halberd dripping purple-and-maroon ribbons shoved another man whose only crime was in being a little too tardy at clearing the path. This victim, a shabby farmer, went stumbling in the opposite direction, and looked far more
cowed than Kellen had. A third, a boy picked up by the collar and tossed aside, saved himself from taking down another stall’s awning by going into the stone wall behind it instead.
All this rudeness was for no greater purpose than so the armsman’s master need not be jostled by the proximity of mere common working-folk who had been occupying the space that their superior wished to cross.
Kellen felt his lip curling in an angry sneer as he mumbled a hurried apology to the fellow who’d caught him. Damn the idiot that has to make a display of himself here! He picked a fine time to come parading through, whoever he is! The Garden Market couldn’t be more crowded if you stood on a barrel and yelled, “Free beer!”
Then again—maybe that was the point. Some people couldn’t see an opportunity to flaunt their importance without grabbing it and wringing every last bit of juice out of it.
Father, for instance …
Kellen turned just in time to see that the Terribly Important Person in question this time was High Mage Corellius, resplendent in his velvet robes and the distinctive hat that marked him as a High Mage and thus a creature of wealth, rank, and power. Quite a hat it was, and Corellius held his scrawny neck very upright and stiff supporting it—a construction with a square brim as wide as his arm was long that curled up on the right and the left. It had three gold cords that knotted around the crown and trailed down his back, cords ending in bright golden tassels as long as Kellen’s hand. Corellius’s colors were purple and maroon, and they suited him vilely. Not only did the shades clash, they made him look as if he had a permanent case of yellow jaundice, which condition was not at all improved by the wattles of his throat and the mottled jowls hanging down from his narrow vulpine jaw. His beady little eyes fastened on Kellen just long enough for Kellen to be certain the smirk on the thin lips was meant for him, then moved on, recognizing Kellen and dismissing him as a thing of no importance.
Kellen flushed involuntarily. Which I am, of course. Father’s position and glory hardly reflect on his so-disappointing son. And if I were as properly ambitious as I’m supposed to be, I wouldn’t be wandering about in the market in the first place. I’d be at my studies.
The official ranks of Magecraft progressed from the Student at the very beginning of the discipline, through Apprentice, to Journeyman, to Mage, to High Mage. Kellen, as a student, was beneath Corellius’s notice under the usual circumstances. But Kellen was no ordinary Student. Not with the Arch-Mage Lycaelon—head of the High Council, and therefore Lord of all the Mages in the City—as his father.
Kellen glowered at the High Mage’s back. There was no doubt in his mind Corellius had recognized him, even dressed as he was. How could he not, considering who Kellen’s father was?
“That’d be a High Mage, then?” asked the stall-holder, conversationally. “Don’t suppose ye know which one?”
Kellen shrugged, not at all inclined to identify himself as someone who would know High Mages on sight. He’d worn his oldest clothes into the City for just this reason.
“Maroon and purple, that’s all I know,” he replied untruthfully. “Don’t know why a High Mage would be barging through the Garden Market, though.”
“Wondered that myself.” The stall-holder shrugged, then lost interest in Corellius and Kellen, as a housewife squeezed out of the press, positioned herself under the man’s red-striped awning, and began to pick over the carrots.
Kellen moved on, taking a path at right angles to Corellius’s progress. He didn’t want to encounter the High Mage again, but he also didn’t want to fight his way through the wake of disturbance Corellius had left behind him. The Garden Market, with its permanent awnings that were fastened into the stone of the warehouse buildings behind them and unfurled every morning, was full every day, but other markets were open only once every Sennday, once a moonturn, or once a season. The Brewers’ and Vintners’ Market was open today, though, over in Barrel Street, for instance. The brewers were in with Spring Beer today, which, along with the new crop of strawberries, probably accounted for the heavy traffic here in the Market Quarter.
Probably accounts for Corellius, too. Kellen knew the High Mage’s tastes, thanks to overheard conversations among Lycaelon and his friends. Corellius might pretend to favor wine, a much more sophisticated beverage than beer, but his pretense was as bogus as—as his apparent height! Just as he wore platform soles to his shoes, neatly hidden under the skirt of his robe, to hide his true stature, his carefully cultivated reputation as a gourmet concealed coarser preferences. His drink of choice was the same beer his carpenter father had consumed, and the stronger, the better. He might have a reputation for keeping an elegant cellar among his peers and inferiors, but his superiors knew his every secret “vice.”
They had to: only a convocation of High Mages could invest a Mage into their exalted ranks, and it behooved them to know everything about a potential candidate. Little did Corellius know that a frog would fly before he was invested with the rank he so coveted. The High Mages would have understood and accepted a man who clung to his culinary roots openly—but a Mage who dissembled and created a false image of himself might find it easy to move on to more dangerous falsehoods. So Lycaelon said—loudly, and often.
So Kellen steered clear of the Brewers’ and Vintners’ Market. Corellius would be in there for bells, tasting, comparing, pretending he was buying for the table of his servants, while brewers fell over themselves trying to impress him and gain his patronage. And as long as the Mage dallied in the market, no one else would be served, which would make for a backlog of a great many impatient and disgruntled would-be customers.
But they would just have to wait. This was the Mage-City of Armethalieh and only another Mage, senior in age or higher in rank, could displace Corellius from his position of importance. Mages had built it, Mages ruled it, and Mages were the only people of any real consequence in it, though it had nobility and rich men in plenty.
It didn’t matter if Armethalieh traded with the entire world and held rich merchants within her walls, or that she could boast nobles whose bloodlines went back centuries, some with more wealth than any ten merchants combined. When it came to power and the wielding of it—well—Mages were the only men who had it, and they guarded their privileges jealously.
Not that they didn’t earn those privileges. Magick infused and informed this City, often called “Armethalieh of the Singing Towers” for all of the bell spires piercing the sky. Magick ensured that the weather was so controlled that—for instance—rain only fell between midnight and dawn, so that the inhabitants need not be inconvenienced. Magick kept the harbor clear and unsilted, guided ships past the dangerous Sea-Hag’s Teeth at the mouth of it, and cleansed the ships that entered it of vermin. There was magick to reinforce any construction, so that (in the wealthiest parts, at least) the City looked like a fantastic confection, a sugar-cake fit for a high festival. The City stretched toward the sun with stonework as delicate as lace and hard as diamonds, be-towered and be-domed, gilded and silvered, jeweled with mosaics, frosted with fretwork. Things were less fanciful in less exalted quarters, but still ornamented with gargoyle downspouts and carved and glazed friezes of ceramic tiles. Magick reinforced these, too, and nearly every block boasted its own bell tower, with still more magick ensuring that all of the songs of the towers harmonized, rather than clashed, with each other.
Magick set the scales in the marketplace and ensured their honesty. Magick at the Mint guaranteed that the square coins of the City, the Golden Suns of Armethalieh, were the truest in the world, and the most trusted. Magick kept the City’s water supply sweet and uncontaminated, her markets filled with fresh wholesome food at every season, her buildings unthreatened by fire. There were entire cadres of Mages on the City payroll, dedicated to magick for the public good. If they were well paid and well respected, they had earned both the pay and the respect. Even Kellen, no friend of Mages, had to admit to that. Life in the City was sweet and easy.
As for the private sec
tor, where the real wealth was to be made, there were far more opportunities for a Mage to enrich himself. There was virtually no aspect of life that could not be enhanced by magick. Domestic magick, for instance. If you had the money, you could hire a Mage to thief-proof your house or shop, to keep vermin out of it, to keep disease from your family, and to heal their injuries. If you had the money, you could even hire a Mage to create a winter-box where you could put perishables to keep them from spoiling. And there were even greater magicks to be had—magicks that melded brick-and-mortar into a whole more solid than stone and harder than adamant. Magicks that kept a ship’s sails full of favoring wind no matter what the real conditions were. Money bought magick, and magick made money, and no matter how lowly born a Mage was—and the Magegift could appear in any family, regardless of degree of birth (Corellius, for example)—he could count on becoming rich before he was middle-aged. He might become very rich. He might aspire to far more than mere wealth, if he was powerful enough: a seat on the High Council, and a voice in ruling the City itself.
Most important of all of the folk of the City were the Mages, and the most important of all the Mages were those High Mages who formed the elite ruling body of the City, the High Council. They were considered to be the wisest of the wise; they were certainly the most powerful of the powerful. If there was a decision to be made about anything inside the walls of the City, it was the High Council that made it.
And that was what stuck in Kellen’s throat and made him wild with pent-up frustration.
If there is a way to fetter a person’s life a little further, it is the High Council that puts the pen to the parchment, Kellen thought sourly as he made his way past the Tailors’ Mart and the stalls of those who sold fabric and trimmings. His goal was the little by-water of booksellers, but he would have to make his way through most of the markets to get there, since Corellius was blocking the short route.