Death Angel's Shadow

eBook Version: 3.0

Death Angel's Shadow

Karl Edward Wagner

And when I turned, no face I saw,

For the shadow was my own,

Death Angel's Shadow.

Since it was obvious that the man was dying, the crowd of watchers had split apart, leaving only the curious or those fascinated by the presence of death. Certainly no man could live with so ghastly a wound; the wonder was that the mangled servant had survived as long as he had.

Outside, the blizzard gathered howling force with each minute--a fury of white crystalline coldness whose blasts penetrated the thick stone walls, raced through dark hallways and billowed the heavy tapestries. Its coldness forced entrance deep within the castle, into this crowded room where an attentive circle of eyes stared down at the thing that gasped futilely in its pool of spreading crimson.

He was one of the baron's servants, a very minor member of the household, whose usual task bad been to care for the stables. The blizzard had come with the nightfall, storming suddenly out of the west as the sun was dying. When its first stinging gusts had hit, the court had been filled with scurrying servants, struggling to secure the animals and material within the outbuildings. One man had stayed behind the rest to complete some errand--none remembered what. His scream of terror had almost gone unheard by the last of those stumbling back to the castle gate. But several men had staggered through the near darkness and blinding winds to the darker figure lying in whirling white. They had borne his mangled body into the castle with panic-sped steps, for no man had seen that which had attacked the human with such savage suddenness and vanished again into the blizzard.
The victim lay close to the fire, partially lifted from the stone floor by an improvised pillow of rags. His eyes gaped blankly in stark horror, and scarlet bubbles broke occasionally from his stack lips. Relentless fangs had shredded the flesh about his throat and chest, foiled in their attempt to sever the carotids only by the heavy fur cloak and the intervention of a protecting arm. This much could be determined from scrutiny of the dying man, whose silence had been unbroken since that one shriek of mortal terror. Several had pointed out that the servant probably could not speak even should he come out of shock, for the awful wreckage of his throat would make speech most unlikely.

There seemed to be no end to the flow of blood that streamed through the rough bandages to glisten on the stones. The one who usually tended only to injury to livestock had been called to help--the baron's physician and astrologer could not be found, assuming he would have bothered. The horse surgeon knew it was hopeless of course, but for appearances he made a few half-hearted attempts to forestall imminent death.

The servant uttered one great, wet cough that merged with a final spasm. The horse surgeon considered the limp wrist, critically pried up one eyelid, and shrugged. "Well, he's dead," he proclaimed needlessly. There was disappointment among the watchers, who had hoped to learn from the victim of his assailant's nature. Over them lay a clammy atmosphere of gnawing fear, and several argued louder than necessary, asserting that a wolf, or several wolves, possibly a snow cat had been the killer. Some had darker suspicions as well, for this frozen land of Marsarovj had its legends.

A sudden hideous movement halted their slow withdrawal! The corpse had lurched upward from the slippery stones! Supporting itself with its arms, it sat half-upright and glared at them with wide and sightless eyes. Red slobbering lips fought to form words.

"Death! I see him! Out of the storm he comes for us all!" blubbered that thing which should not speak. "Death comes! A man! A man not man! Death for all!"

The corpse toppled hollowly back upon the stones, now silent.

"He must not have been quite dead," offered the surgeon finally, but not even he believed that.

Kane at last was forced to admit to himself that he was totally lost, that for the past hour he had been without any sense of direction whatsoever. He kicked his plodding horse onward, cursing the fate that had set him abroad in this frozen wasteland during what seemed to be the worst blizzard in his long memory. The shaggy steed was close to floundering with exhaustion, for even its rugged north-bred endurance had been overtaxed by the days of flight which had left them lost in this fantastic ice storm.

Two impressions filled Kane's weary mind. One was a sensation of unbearable, soul crushing cold--cold accumulated during the days of travel through the wintered land and now multiplied by this needled wind of ice. The chill sought for him through the thick folds of heavy fur that surrounded him, and Kane knew that when he stopped moving, he would quickly freeze to death.

The second impression was one of awful necessity to outdistance his pursuers. They had dogged his trail relentlessly for the long, cold days, penetrating every trick this master of deception had employed to hide the signs of his progress. But then with the last powers of the priests of Sataki, his pursuers had little chance of missing a trail that no human eye could discover.

Since noon Kane had often been able to catch sight of them, so close had they gained on him. Knowing that they would almost inevitably overtake him by nightfall, he had welcomed the sudden blizzard when it had come. Although he doubted if even this could cover his tracks from the ken of those grim hunters, he hoped to gain invaluable time--possibly to recover his lead over them. But the storm had become a screaming nightmare of white in which Kane had lost his way completely, and now frozen death joined with those others who sought to bring down the ice-encrusted man who slumped forward in his saddle.

Many days behind him and to the southeast lay the independent principality of Rader, once the northmost province of the old Serranthonian Empire, but now broken away in the collapse of the Empire which had followed the extinction of the line of Halbros-Serrantho. Rader had become a frontier backwater after the dynastic wars had destroyed the strength and wealth of the central states and had created a band of desolation cutting Rader off from the civilization to the south. Law had been lost in the imperial disintegration and never restored. In obedience to ancient principle, brute power shaped chaos into a more orderly framework, and Rader had been ruled for the past century (when it was ruled at all) by a variety of warlords. It had been a motley succession, for the land was of little value or importance. Thus its rulers had usually been petty and relatively unambitious men--old nobility, adventurers, robber barons, and the like.

Until some few days before, Rader had been ruled by the hated exile Orted Ak-Ceddi, onetime bandit leader turned Prophet of Sataki. Under his fanatical command, the dark cult of Sataki had exploded from obscurity into a crimson wave of terror that had overwhelmed the forest land of Shapeli far to the south and had very nearly broken forth to hurl its legions upon the southern kingdoms. But his power had at last been smashed, and Orted had fled the ruins of his Dark Crusade with only a few of his most loyal followers. Safe in the obscurity of this northern backwater, Orted had seized control of Rader with the last remnant of his former strength and had settled down to ponder the tangled riddles of fortune and power.

To Rader had come Kane in the night. As the mercenary general of the Prophet's cavalry, Kane had both been creator of the fighting arm of the Dark Crusade as well as the cause of its ultimate failure. Treachery on Kane's part had first sundered the Sword of Sataki, but Orted's final insane double-cross had brought on disaster for them both. Orted had escaped the ensuing slaughter of his followers, but Kane was trapped by the victorious army of Jarvo. To avoid capture by his enemies he had entered that unhallowed interdimensional corridor cursed by ancients as the Lair of Yslsl. The torments he encountered within Yslsl's cosmic web of soulless horror were such that it might have been better to have accepted the mere physical torture and death from those he had thus escaped.

But Kane at length accomplished that which no other man could have done. He emerged at the one other place on this world where the Lair of Yslsl impinged. It took him over a year to recover from the ordeal he suffered therein, but when he did recover he set out to kill the man who had driven him within the crawling passages of that elder world nightmare. The trail to Rader had taken him from one end of the known world to the other--a trail that twisted, forked, vanished, and reappeared again. But he followed it with a singleness of purpose unfamiliar even to Kane.

And almost four years after the massacre of the Satakis at Ingoldi, Orted Ak-Ceddi found himself alone in his chambers confronting Kane. The brief, vicious struggle ended most satisfactorily for Kane, who was able to present Orted with a curious gem-like crystal derived from the venom of the now extinct tomb worm of Carsultyal. Embedded in his flesh, the paralyzing venom seeped through Orted's writhing form and silently commenced an ineluctable disintegration of every nerve in his body, working from the tiniest to the largest cords. Kane was forced to cut short his enjoyment of the fantastic contortions of Orted's death throes, when the Prophet's guards finally broke into the chamber.

He had vaulted through the hidden passage by which he had gained entrance to Orted's private chambers--the Prophet had not been able to learn all the secrets of his sanctuary--and fled the city before any organized search could be formed. Since that night Kane had been pushing steadily into the northern wastes. But his pursuers were the last of Orted's fanatics, and Kane knew that only death would halt their relentless pursuit of the slayer of their Prophet. Their fanaticism coupled with the few sorcerous devices left to their dying cult had brought them within sight of their quarry after hard days of searching. And then the blizzard had given Kane respite.

His horse stumbled over some buried obstruction and half-fell to its knees. Kane fought to hold his saddle, noticing the crackle of ice encrusted on his cloak. Gritting teeth he lurched from his mount and helped the exhausted beast erect. The agony of forcing his nearly frozen limbs into action racked his powerful frame, and he swayed on his benumbed feet, clutching the neck of his gasping horse for support.

"Easy, boy," he murmured through his ice-hung beard. "Let you rest just a minute." But only a minute, he told himself, and stamped his frozen boots, wearily brushing off the crust of ice that enclosed his body. A bed of snow beckoned him to its softness, but he hurled aside its temptation. He would not accept defeat this easily. He had cheated death time beyond comprehension, and if he lost here in the storm, his adversary must take him not gracefully, but struggling blindly onward past the extremes of his power. That this frozen elemental fury should be his doom infuriated Kane, and he glared defiantly into the scouring wind. Frustration. His enemy now was utterly intangible--a cosmic entity that heedlessly had engulfed him--whose massive presence now tore at him, smothered his life fire. In no way could he even force his destroyer to take notice of his existence.

Yet it was no ordinary storm, of this Kane was certain. It was too sudden, too violent to be natural; Kane had never encountered anything its equal even on several excursions much farther to the north. It was a witch storm perhaps, for its abrupt ferocity hinted at sorcery. But why any sorcerous power should summon such a blizzard in this wasteland, he could not begin to guess. Surely the Satakis had not evoked it, for it had cheated them of their prey.

The horse whinnied fearfully, and Kane decided he had rested as long as he dared. As he remounted, his steed started in fright. Kane sought to soothe the beast, thinking at first he had somehow startled it in mounting. But the horse was genuinely alarmed, he quickly noted--its nostrils flared and eyes widened in fright. Soon Kane too sensed a presence, an awareness of alien scrutiny. He gave the horse his head, and the animal bolted forward recklessly through the storm. For a tense interval Kane felt the sensation of pursuit, of some entity reaching for him with awful hunger; then the feeling slacked off.

As soon as he felt clear he slowed his mount's headlong flight to a safer pace. "What in the name of Temro was that!" he muttered. At first he had thought his pursuers had blundered upon him, but the horse's reaction and his own sensations dispelled that impression. He had seen nothing, heard nothing--for the howling storm had effectively blotted out and muffled both vision and sound. Yet Kane and his horse had both definitely sensed the presence of something, and Kane knew better than to doubt such extrasensory evidence. The strange workings of his inner mind were not unfamiliar to him, unnatural talents utilized and strengthened throughout his amazing career. And Kane was certain that some form of horrible death had been very close to him in the storm.

Now be strained his senses against the blizzard, while the horse plodded dismally through the rising drifts, his sudden surge of energy dissipated. For a long time there was nothing, until Kane seemed to hear a wild howling that was not of the wind. He inhaled carefully, drawing the frozen air deep into his lungs. Faintly he began to catch the scent of wolf on the stormwind. The horse too caught the scent, and he snorted fitfully.