Volkhavaar

by Tanith Lee

Genres: Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure; Dark Fantasy; Paranormal; General Fiction

Synopsis

Now for the first time in e-book, a dark fantasy tale from a master of the genre.

Kidnapped from her home at a young age, Shaina has been enslaved for most of her life. Now sixteen, she’s been bought and sold, growing wiser and more resilient with each new trial she must endure. Her current enslavers are an older couple living in a small farming village, a quiet place—until the arrival of a magnificent troupe of traveling players, led by the great Kernik, the Clever Showman and Prince of Conjurers.
 
Kernik and his troupe enchant the village with their grand performance, only to disappear under the cover of night. The next morning, everyone has mysteriously forgotten the troupe—except for Shaina. Helplessly smitten with one of the handsome actors, Dasyel, Shaina seeks the help of the witch Barbayat, who offers to teach her how to separate her soul from her body. Shaina’s soul can search for Dasyel while her body remains.
 
But Kernik is no ordinary showman. He’s truly the dark magician Volkhavaar, drawing his powers of illusion from Takerna, the evil god of night and shadows. He plans to subjugate the great city of Arkev, to force its citizens to worship Takerna and strengthen his powers further. And Dasyel is under his control. In order to save Arkev and free Dasyel from Volkhavaar’s thrall, Shaina must fight Volkhavaar’s illlusions with the strength of her soul, defying his tyranny of hatred with the power of her love.

Release date: April 5, 2022

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 221

Sample

1
The sun in his golden chariot had driven almost to the last meadow of the sky. Presently, the six yellow horses who pulled him would snort the rose-pink smoke from their nostrils, and gallop behind the horizon. Then the twilight would come like a dark widow and throw her veil across the heaven and the earth, but long before she did, Shaina, the slave would be back in the valley below with her master’s goats.
Shaina did not take the goats up to the mountain pasture every day in the spring. Young Ash, the master’s son, was supposed to do it, but Young Ash got drunk every fourth or fifth night, and so every fifth or sixth day, while Young Ash lay groaning under his bearskin blanket, invoking all the demons of the house to have pity on him, Old Ash’s wife would call the slave and send the goats with her.
Shaina was never displeased at this task. Her owners did not like her to sit idle on the slope, and gave her the washing and the mending to take with her, which meant a heavy basket to carry up and down on her back. She must keep both eyes on, and both hands ready for the goats, who in goat fashion were all mad, and anxious to prove themselves so. Nevertheless, it was good on the mountain, sprinkled with the little flowers of spring and alive with the rushing silver of streams swollen in the thaw. The surrounding peaks were very close, each with its own shape and color, yet all continually changing under the moods of the sky, now dagger bright as the light sharpened them, now transparent with mist and distance, and now like stationary clouds. To the village, every height had a character and a name—Elf Roof, Cold Crag, Black Top. Some were blessed, some feared. But, whatever else, to sit working in their shadow was far better certainly than to be shut in the sooty house, among Old Ash’s wife and the cook-pots with, for variety, the shouting dog in the yard, and the children who threw pebbles at her. Generally, after a day on the slopes, Shaina would return refreshed, almost gladdened, to the village.
Yet this sunset, as she came down the winding stony track, basket on back, goats milling about her and the air like a song, there was growing in the slave a curious melting sadness.
It did not come as a stranger to her, this melancholy. For the past ten months it had approached and withdrawn, each time a fraction nearer, a fraction sweeter and more bitter in her heart. Shaina found she could give it no name.
It was not the harsh, grim sorrow of her slavery; she had grown used to that. Strong and proud and young she was; she had come very quickly to courage and determination: ‘I will not be slave forever, and if I am to be a slave, I will hold my head higher even than the Duke’s daughter at Arkev.’
Dark cruel men had snatched her from her home when she was six years old. She could remember little now of that wild passage, smoke and fire behind, terror before. A great sea had flung their ships on to a rocky shore, and she had come in chains and barefoot, with bleeding soles and weeping eyes, to the Korkeem, the place where she was to grow. Here she forgot her country, all but a ghost of it, only the voices of her ancestors, her race, reminded her, and sometimes her dreams. Her land was warm and this land cold, but this cold land became her land, and its ways, her ways, because she could recall no others. Only her pride she kept, the heritage that was somehow part of her bones and could not desert her. And though she was Old Ash’s slave, she had not been his slave always, and had seen more of her adopted world than the villagers who walked freely. At seven she had been sold, and again at ten, and into Old Ash’s service when she was sixteen. Journeying between these slave markets, she had observed three villages and one town, and even passed near the sun-and-moon city of Arkev, where the Duke ate roasted swans in a white palace whose every tower had a hat of yellow metal. Old Ash and Old Ash’s wife had ventured perhaps as far as Kost on market day. As for Young Ash, the tavern over the hill in the next village was the farthest he had ever been.
So Shaina had her pride, her travelled superiority, a little homesickness, and much resilience, and thus did not understand the sadness that came at sunset on the mountain.
A mirror, maybe, might have taught her, but the bronze mirror in the house was warped and dull, and besides, a slave had little time for such looking. A stream might have taught her, if it had stood still long enough to be a mirror, but the streams of the Korkeem were always busy rushing and ruffling in the spring, and in the winter frozen to marble. Her hair was shining black as midnight with stars in it and long and thick as the tails of horses, her eyes were the color of oak leaves in autumn an hour before the wind gives them wings. She was straight and slim, and she did not look like a slave nor walk like one. Indeed, perhaps the Duke in sky-worshipping Arkev would have been pleased to see his clumsy daughter carry herself as Shaina did, basket and goats and all.
There was a point, quite far down the slopes, where the track ran round a big rock. In the side of this rock someone had carved, centuries before, the image of a demon or a mountain deity, which the villagers always politely addressed when passing. Shaina, too, had got into the habit of nodding to the idol, and wishing it good-day or good-evening, for in this country of devils, sprites and goblins, you could not be too careful. The goats also behaved oddly when they went by, bleating and butting worse than usual. This sunset, however, reaching the rock, they all abruptly bunched together and fell uncharacteristically silent, rolling their eyes. Shaina looked up, nevertheless, to say her expected phrase to the carving, and it seemed to her that somehow it had a more definite appearance than usual, as if it had mislaid some of its years. But she dismissed this fancy, spoke her greeting, and tried to urge the goats on. When they would not budge, she pushed a way through them and emerged on the other side of the rock.
The sky was gradually darkening now and it was chill, but in the shadowy evocative grey-rose light the slopes were empty and the lamps of the village beginning to appear below. Only one thing was changed; a small boulder, which must have rolled down from higher up, had lodged itself in the middle of the track.
“See,” Shaina said to the goats, “it’s only a stone. Is it a stone you’re afraid of, silly ones?”
The goats shook their beards at her and kept otherwise quite still.
“Don’t, you know,” said Shaina, “that when the night comes over the mountains the dwarfs will pop from holes and carry you off?”
But the goats stared her out, and presently Shania thought she would have to move the terrible boulder. So she walked up to it briskly, to show the goats there was nothing to fear. Just then the boulder gave a sort of shift and a lift and turned its head and looked at her out of two black eyes.
Shaina stopped still herself at that, but she said nothing since it seemed wiser to remain silent.
“ ‘Not everything that walks is a man,’ ” said the boulder conversationally, “ ‘and not everything that lies quiet is a stone,’ as the wolf remarked when the serpent bit him.”
“So I see,” said Shaina.
And so she did, for the boulder was none other than a strange grey-looking old woman in a mossy bundle of shawl, with a puckered grey old face and eyes like black knife points poking through it.
“You are the slave from the village,” said the old woman. “You have crossed other soil than this and drawn water from other wells. You are ready for something. Do you know for what?”
“I am ready to go back to my master’s house, Mother, or I shall be beaten.”
“The rod strikes the back not the heart,” said the old woman implacably. “Your heart, my fine high and mighty slave girl, is ready to be hurt. You stand there as if you carried velvet on your back instead of washing, and had silver rings on your ankles. I tell you, before tomorrow is over and done, you’ll come like a beggar to me, and offer me the blood in your veins and the marrow in your bones, in exchange for my help.”
Shaina felt herself go pale, for she was frightened by the old woman, not so much her peculiar words as the way she said them and the quite inexplicable expression on her face. But when Shaina was afraid, something like iron came into her. She answered firmly.
“If I am to come begging your help, then who shall I say I seek?”
“Ask in the village, slave maiden. Ask anyone. Tell them you met a stone that talked on the mountain, and that the stone was grey and it had black eyes. And now, you and your goats may pass on. Look, there is the way.” Shaina looked irresistibly where the old woman pointed. The dark was coming down into the valley like wine into a bowl, and the lights blazed from the narrow windows of the houses. Then it seemed the houses were in motion and the lights flying like yellow bees from one window to another. Shaina’s eyes dazzled, her head sang, and the mountain danced under her feet. “Ask in the village who it is that lives westwards on Cold Crag. And then find a bandage for your heart, since before the night is quite finished, someone’s look will go straight through it like a sword.”
All the goats began to bleat and thrust at Shaina. She caught hold of their rough backs to steady herself, and their golden eyes flashed in a great circle. Next she looked round, and there was no old woman on the track and no boulder either.
“See how foolish it is to stop on the way,” said Shaina to the goats. They laughed mournfully. Both they and she knew she had been conversing with a familiar of the mountain.
When she clapped her hands, the goats ran in a woolly tide for the village, and Shaina ran after them as fast as she was able.