Shadowlith (Umbral Blade Book 1) Read online

  SHADOWLITH

  Book One of the Umbral Blade

  STUART THAMAN

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Shadowlith

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Map

  Prologue

  1. A Vow

  2. Relics

  3. Sharp Things

  4. Truth

  5. Escape

  6. Hunting

  7. A Trade

  8. Velnwood

  9. Karrheim

  10. Kings from the Past

  11. An Army

  12. Blood

  13. Transformation

  14. Westhaven

  15. Discovery

  16. Shadows of Doubt

  17. The Blightstone Gate

  18. The Red Mountains

  19. Death

  20. Survivors

  21. Glory

  22. Downfall

  23. Commission

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stuart Thaman

  PRAISE FOR SHADOWLITH

  "Just when you think you know where the story is headed, the plot will twist you in another direction. A roaring fantasy adventure that will keep you on the edge of your seat."

  - J. J. Sherwood, Author of Kings or Pawns

  "Shadowlith has a dash of Sword and Sorcery that goes along great with modern fantasy. Its chapters are fast and the stakes are high, and you won't be away from the action for long. The timing is that of a good thriller, and it has a curb-stomping of a climax."

  - Hugo Huesca, Author of Rune Universe

  COPYRIGHT

  Shadowlith

  Copyright © 2017 by Stuart Thaman

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are works of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-942212-78-2

  Hydra Publications

  Goshen, KY 40026

  www.hydrapublications.com

  DEDICATION

  For everyone who lives in the shadows.

  THE MAP

  PROLOGUE

  “We’ve found it, my lord,” an old soldier said. He had been nearly fifty when he had agreed to help Hademar on his quest, but that was twelve years ago. Now, his white beard grew out of control, and all the hair on the top of his head was long since departed. Still, he was Hademar’s closest advisor, and that brought a smile to his face. He enjoyed serving the king, mad as the man had become, and he enjoyed the respect he had earned from the men under his command.

  “Take me to it, Ingvar,” Hademar said. They both wore the dirt of a decade’s worth of exploring, interrogating, and killing on their blue and white tabards.

  Torch in hand, Ingvar led the king away from their warband, deeper into the massive system of caves they had been exploring for half a year. At each turn they took, charcoal markings which corresponded to the crude maps they had been drawing identified each tunnel. Ingvar had to stop once to consult the directions one of his underlings had written, but they reached their destination within an hour.

  The two men emerged from a narrow passage onto a recently built wooden platform which overlooked a large subterranean lake. The sides of the lake were lined with salt, and the whole cavern smelled strongly like the ocean, though a stench of rot lingered just beyond the brine. “Where is it?” Hademar demanded. “Where is the tower?”

  “There,” Ingvar said quietly as he lit a lantern he had left on the platform. When he focused the light, he could see a stone tower rising up from the underground lake only twenty or thirty yards from where the two stood.

  Tears welled in the king’s eyes. “Everyone said it wasn’t real,” he whispered.

  Ingvar nodded. “Our men are constructing a boat as we speak. It should be ready tonight,” he explained.

  “If I knew how to swim, we wouldn’t need the boat,” Hademar replied.

  “I’ll send a handful of soldiers first,” Ingvar added. “If it is safe, you may cross as well.”

  “No!” Hademar bellowed, his emotions turning from joy to rage in an instant. The solitude, darkness, and hopelessness of the caves had taken their toll on Hademar’s mind. The man had become unstable, though his general sanity had been something Ingvar had questioned long before they had gone underground.

  “Sir-” Ingvar said, but the king cut him off.

  “I will go!” Hademar raged. “I found it! I found the clues! I made sense of all the old legends, no one else!”

  Ingvar could only smile. “Certainly, my lord.” There was no use arguing with the crazed king. Once a notion had taken hold in Hademar’s mind, nothing would ever dislodge it. Their twelve-year journey was testament enough to that fact.

  Several hours later, three soldiers made their way down to where Hademar sat on the wooden platform. At the king’s side, Ingvar was asleep with his head resting against a stone. The sight of the small canoe carried between the three soldiers brought another bout of elation to Hademar’s broken mind.

  “Your boat, my lord,” one of them said. The men looked tired, each with a wild, unkempt beard, and eyes that showed how delirious they were from their lack of sleep.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the king quickly replied. “Lower it down at once!”

  Rubbing the weariness from his face, Ingvar got to his feet to help the soldiers. The lake was only a short distance below them, but lowering the boat carefully still proved difficult in such a small space.

  “We haven’t made a ladder yet,” one of the haggard men said with a hint of defeat lacing his voice.

  Before Ingvar could answer, the king stepped off the end of the platform and dropped into the boat below, sending a wave out from him in all directions.

  “My lord!” Ingvar yelled. “You need a torch!”

  The king looked back at the four men on the platform, fire dancing in his eyes. “Bring it yourself,” he commanded.

  Ingvar let out a sigh as he turned to the others. “Get a ladder down here as quickly as you can,” he said. “And find the best archer we have. I don’t know what’s in that tower, and I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Yes, sir,” the highest ranking soldier of the three replied.

  “Catch,” Ingvar said to the king. He dropped their torch down into Hademar’s outstretched hand. Hardly believing what he was doing, Ingvar swung his legs over the side of the platform and dropped down, landing with a thud in the back of the canoe.

  “We don’t have paddles or oars,” he remarked after a quick inspection of their hastily constructed craft. He brought up the ropes they had used to lower the boat and coiled them at his feet.

  “Use your hands,” the king said as though the answer should have been obvious. He rolled up his sleeve and dipped a hand into the salty water, paddling the boat slowly toward the tower.

  “As you command,” Ingvar said with a sigh. Steadily, the boat began to move forward. He only paddled with one hand as his other held their only light source, and he kept his eyes focused on the water. The lake unnerved him, and for some reason, the water was warm to the touch. Though the water was clear, he had no idea what might be lurking just beyond the edge of their light.

  When the two reached the strange tower, Had
emar grabbed the stones to pull their canoe around to the other side. A small entrance, perhaps large enough for a child to stand, presented itself.

  “There’s nowhere to tie the boat,” Ingvar said.

  The king didn’t face him when he spoke. “Just let it sit, there’s no current.” He placed a foot on the floor of the tower and tested it with his weight. When it held, he pulled himself from the canoe and turned to take their torch.

  The two men had to crawl up the carved stairwell, but Hademar was relentless. According to the legends they had deciphered from centuries-old scrolls, the tower was supposed to contain a single book, an ancient tome bound in human skin.

  Up and up the two climbed until they were at the pinnacle of the underground tower. Where the stairs ended just a few feet below the cavern’s ceiling, there was a small, open space with a locked chest. Hademar nearly collapsed from the intensity of the moment. His eyes were wide, and he could barely breathe. Since his wife’s death, he had thought of nothing but her return. The idea of her resurrection had fully consumed his every thought, and now he was one step closer to holding her again.

  “You did it, my lord,” Ingvar said quietly. Part of him had never expected to find the famed tower or the book at all. The rest of him wasn’t sure he wanted the king to find it.

  Hademar took the torch and held it above the chest. With only a few feet between his body and the rough ceiling, it was almost impossible to get a good look at the crate. He had to lie on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, and crane his neck to see the top of the wooden box. There, inlaid in gold and red, was a symbol he had seen many times before: a horse on its hind legs in front of a field of fire. It was the symbol of Alistair the Fourth, and it meant Hademar had indeed found the next clue.

  Using the bottom of the torch as a hammer, Hademar struck the lock on the front of the chest. Embers flew all over the top of the tower as he worked. He had read several scrolls detailing the believed location of the chest’s key, but he didn’t have the time for another twelve-year journey. There was still a final object to locate beyond the book, and he wanted to have at least some youthful vitality left when he finally saw his wife again.

  After several more strikes, the lock began to give. The salty air had rusted the metal mechanism greatly over the years. Finally, the lock broke free and fell. Hademar threw it from the tower, cackling with excitement as it splashed into the water below.

  His eyes huge with anticipation and madness, the king lifted the box’s iron-bound lid. A puff of dust escaped the chest which made him cough. When the hazy cloud dispersed he saw the book contained within, resting on a pillow of rotten straw and strips of old cloth.

  He gingerly took the item from the chest and traced his fingers over it, feeling the ancient human leather against his own skin. Hademar opened the book to a random place in the middle, listening to the pages crinkle as he turned them, and smiled. The book was blank as he had expected from the legends, but he could still feel its power.

  “Finally,” Hademar sighed. With the torch in one hand and the book in his other, he crawled back into the staircase so he could further investigate what he had discovered.

  “I suppose we will be leaving Nevansk?” Ingvar asked, hopeful to return to Vecnos, though he feared he might not ever see his hometown again.

  “To the Red Mountains!” the mad king hissed maniacally. “We leave at once!”

  A VOW

  From a cushioned window in the plush library of his family’s palatial estate, Alster watched his older brother practicing maneuvers with a sword. “I wish I could train with them,” he said longingly. The Lightbridge estate was huge, and a group of twenty or so aspirant soldiers practiced alongside Jarix.

  “That day may yet come,” the old tutor replied from across the table. “However, we should return to your studies, yes?”

  Alster hated the tutor, or at least he resented the tutoring itself. The old man was profoundly intelligent, of that Alster had no doubt, but the boy wanted to spend his days outdoors with his brother, preferably training with the military recruiters who arrived each day by sunrise.

  “Shall we continue?” the tutor inquired once more, pulling Alster from his momentary daydream.

  Alster let out a sigh. He turned idly through the pages of the book in front of him, a recounting of an unimportant history, and tried to formulate a way to get out of his lesson.

  “I don’t feel so well today,” Alster said after a moment. “We should stop.”

  It was the tutor’s turn to breathe a sigh. “I don’t believe you,” the old man replied. “You are simply bored. I volunteer my time with you on your mother’s behalf because she was a good friend to me once. No one pays me to be here day after day. In fact, it took Palos a great deal of convincing just to allow me to stay here as your tutor. Do not scorn her memory by scorning your lessons.”

  The boy nodded. It was no use lying to the perceptive teacher, he had tried dozens of times before, so he decided honesty might work better. “I just want to go outside,” he said, returning his gaze to the window.

  The tutor snatched a thin cord from the window frame and used it to close the shutters on the outside. The room darkened considerably with only a few candles flickering in their sconces nearby. “The moment you have finished your work, you may do whatever pleases you,” the man said sternly. “In the meantime, your studies are more important.”

  “Did Jarix have to learn all of this?” Alster asked with a hint of indignation.

  “He has his own tutors, I am sure, though your brother’s pursuits are far different than your own, Alster,” the tutor said. “You have different bodies and different minds, each attuned to their own natural abilities.”

  It was an argument Alster and the tutor had been through many times before, though neither of them found it very satisfying or conclusive. “I was not given this body,” he protested. “I was not born a cripple.” Alster looked at his misshapen legs like a hunter might view a dying beast.

  The tutor shook his head, stroking his white beard all the while. “Fate has dealt you a cruel hand, Alster, I have no doubt of it. How you play that hand is up to you.” His old eyes burned with ageless vigor and locked onto Alster’s pitiful expression, refusing to let go. “What your father did to you, accident or not, was a great act of cruelty. You may either rise above your injuries and succeed, or you may waste away at this window until you die. The choice is yours.” He pointed to Alster’s chest as he spoke, driving home each of his final words with a sharp poke to the boy’s chest.

  Alster slowly took in the tutor’s unexpected burst of emotion. He knew he should want to learn; he just couldn’t find the motivation no matter how hard he tried. “At least give me something other than books to read,” Alster finally said. He had enjoyed some of the books he had read before, especially the few volumes in the library which concerned the Lightbridge family history, but most of the others only bored him.

  The tutor gently closed Alster’s book and slid the leather-bound volume into its place on a shelf next to the window. “Fine,” the man began. “I have a different sort of task for you to perform today.”

  “Good.”

  The old man cleared his throat. “Since we were supposed to learn about one of the ancient wars, The First Conquest of the Shades, a war in which your ancestors, the Lightbridge family, was quite heavily involved. See if you can find me a relic from that time period. I know of at least two or three such artifacts in the estate, so retrieving one should not prove to be very difficult.”

  Alster nodded. He tried to hide his grin, but excitement was plastered clearly on his face. “I’ll find something by tomorrow,” he said eagerly.

  “That isn’t all,” the tutor interrupted, waving his finger. “You must learn the history of the artifact as well. It is never enough to simply acquire an object, even one of great value. You must learn why the object is important. Do you understand?”

  Alster hobbled from his chair with al
l the strength he could muster, shifting his weight from his crippled bones to his walking stick with every painful step.

  The estate’s archive, a multi-floor structure extending from the main building’s southern wing, was large enough to be considered a palace on its own. Alster enjoyed spending time in the library, but the archive was something else altogether. Thousands of books and scrolls important to his family’s vast history called the archive home, and it also housed precious artifacts and relics from time immemorial.

  It had taken Alster considerable effort to convince the caretaker to let him enter the archive unaccompanied, and his eyes were filled with wonder once he stepped inside. He had only seen the inside of the archive on a handful of previous occasions, usually when passing through it on his way to the family crypt for a funeral or some other religious service. His brother used to tease him and threaten to lock him in the crypt when they were younger, but Alster was sixteen now, and the two rarely spoke on account of their vastly separate daily activities.

  Alster tiptoed past a row of marble busts. He knew no one else was in the archive, but he still felt an overwhelming need for secrecy. He was, after all, intent on stealing something, though what that something might be still eluded him.