Ironcrown Moon

IRONCROWN MOON

THE BOREAL MOON TALE: BOOK TWO

JULIAN MAY

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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May, Julian - Boreal Moon 2 - Ironcrown Moon

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 by Starykon, Inc. Text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ACE is an imprint of The Berkley Publishing Group.

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First edition: April

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

May, Julian.

Ironcrown moon / Julian May.— 1st ed. p. cm.— (Boreal moon tale ; bk. 2) ISBN

0-441-01244-2 1. Knights and knighthood—Fiction. 2. Kings and rulers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.A942I76 2005 813‘.54—dc

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

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TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

~~~~~~~~~~

FINAL VERSE OF THE BLOSSOM MOON SONG, AN ANCIENT CATHRAN BALLAD

Down in the waters, cold and deep, My true love has gone to eternal sleep.

Long will I wait for his returning, Hoping, my heart afire with yearning.

In Blossom Moon, in Blossom Moon, it will never be.

An unexpected firing happened last night. As is my habit, I had been working long hours on my Boreal Moon Tale, struggling along despite cramped fingers, dimming eyesight, and the daunting magnitude of the writing project I had set myself at a time when most old men are
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content to doze and dream. But I have more reason than most to wish my story told to the world—most specifically to the inhabitants of High Blenholme, island of my birth, whose official Chronicle will no doubt be turned all arsey-versey by my mischievous revelations.

I had laid aside my quill after describing the chain of improbable events leading to King Conrig Wincantor’s establishment of the

Blenholme Sovereignty, thinking this would be an appropriate place to break the narrative and end the first book of the tale. It was very late and bracingly cool, as nights tend to be during midwinter months in southern Foraile, and the air was laden with the sweet scent of moth-jasmine. Oddly—though I did not fully appreciate the fact until later when I went outdoors—the night was almost completely silent.

The usual sounds made by nocturnal birds and insects were absent and the murmur of the nearby Daravara River was muted.

After sanding the final closely written parchment sheet, I added it to the rest and locked the manuscript in the copper box that preserves it from the mice and palm roaches that would otherwise make a meal of it. I rose from my desk, paused to work the worst knots from my aching muscles, and blew out the bright flame of the brass desk lamp, plunging the room into near darkness. A faint illumination came from the lantern that my peg-legged housecarl Borve leaves lit at the far end of the hall to guide me to bed. That was usual.

What was not usual was the odd flickering glow coming through the window that looked northward towards the river. The crescent moon had set early and thick foliage made it difficult to see outside. My first thought was of wildfire, since the light was too ruddy and fitful to be starshine. The rains were late this year and the scrubby hills above the jungle valley were tinder-dry. I made haste to the door, slipped outside onto the veranda, and went down the short flight of steps into my riverside garden so as to have a clear view of the opposite shore.

The northern sky was ablaze with immense rippling curtains and thrusting beams of scarlet, green, amethyst, and flame-gold, so bright that they dimmed the stars, so active and intricate in their movements that every instinct of the beholder seemed to affirm that this was no mere natural phenomenon, but the work of elemental living beings.

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I knew who they were, what they had been—those shining abominations who had fed on pain!

The people of High Blenholme gave them various names: the Beaconfolk, the Coldlight Army, the Great Lights. Their domain is the far north, the arctic barrens and the island in the Boreal Sea from which I had been banished. Never had I seen the Lights during my enforced sojourn on the southern mainland. Early on in my exile, when I had cautiously questioned my manservant Borve about folkloric beliefs in this part of the world, he made no mention of terrible sky-beings in the local pantheon of demons and demigods. Yet here they were, transforming the night of subtropical Foraile into a facsimile of the incandescent heavens above the northland. Was it possible that I was dreaming? I hardly thought so, but it would not be the first time that nightmares provoked by the evil ones among the Beaconfolk had tormented me.

Still less did it seem they should be able to manifest themselves here, so far south! Their once-mighty powers were circumscribed now, pent-up and curtailed so that the pain-eating predators among them might no longer slake their obscene appetites upon humans and other ground-dwelling beings. And yet I seemed to feel something reaching for me, grasping my poor pounding heart with claws of ice and slowly—so slowly—tightening its grip. The chest spasm was tentative and entirely bearable, but my feeble old legs now refused to support my body and I subsided onto my knees, eyes still locked on to that dreadful blazing sky.

I have said that the night was strangely quiet. I was aware of this anomaly almost at the same time
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that I realized it was not quite true. A

ghostly sound was discernible at the very limit of audibility, a sibilance that ebbed and flowed like surf, all the while overlaid with a complex rustling that almost resembled speech. I had first heard its like some sixty years ago, as I lay dying on the Desolation Coast of Tarn. The Coldlight Army had blazed above me then in all its awful strength, jeering at my mortal frailty, ridiculing the notion that a pathetic creature such as I might be able to frustrate its devilish entertainment.

“But I survived in spite of you!” I managed to croak, shaking a fist at them. “I used your own twisty rules of magic to thwart your schemes. Do you want to know how? It’s simple: I never told you my true name! I’m Snudge, but I’m not

Snudge. What d’you think of that, Lights?”

Above me the luminous draperies and glorious colored beacons flared in response to my puny effort at defiance. The faint crackling sound intensified momentarily and I felt a crushing agony behind my breastbone. The pang subsided almost at once and I slowly exhaled, sagging back onto my heels, then sprawling sideways to rest against the trunk of a small tree, my eyes shut tight to banish the sight of the inhuman torturers.

Was the pain really of their doing, or was my aging heart simply giving out at last as I dreamed of my old enemies? I waited motionless, in fearful anticipation of a more violent attack that would finish me; but none came, and at length I relaxed, reassuring myself that the lethal capabilities of the Lights were indeed extinct. They could do me no serious harm. I, Deveron Austrey, nicknamed Snudge, would live.

I opened my eyes, and saw that the sky was empty except for the rich expanse of southern stars.

==========

Growing up as Prince Heritor of Cathra, the richest and most powerful of the island realms, Conrig idolized his remote ancestor Emperor

Bazekoy, the towering personality who first vanquished the great Continental nations of Foraile, Andradh, and Stippen, then set out to wrest control of Blenholme from the Salka and the other nonhuman monsters who had inhabited the place since the dawn of time. The year that Bazekoy’s conquering army sailed up the River Brent marked the beginning of the Blenholme Chronicle.

After a long and glorious life, the emperor chose to return to the island to die—influenced, according to legend, by a dream of Great

Lights. Over a thousand years later his remains, interred in Zeth Abbey, were destined to play a strangely influential role in the life of

Conrig’s father, King Olmigon of Cathra—as I have already described in the first volume of this Boreal Moon Tale.

Conrig’s own reign began in Chronicle Year 1128, with a triumph and what seemed to be an appalling tragedy. A great sea-battle and a climactic storm in Gala Bay resulted in the defeat of King Honigalus Mallburn of Didion and forced that ill-fated monarch to accept vassal status in Conrig’s new Sovereignty of High Blenholme. As a condition of Didion’s surrender at Eagleroost Castle, in a move that

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Honigalus.

Although I was only sixteen years of age at the time, I was already closely attendant upon Conrig and serving unofficially as his Royal

Intelligencer by virtue of my secret wild talents. Thus I was one of the horrified witnesses who saw Maudrayne calmly put her name to the bill of divorcement, then throw herself off the castle battlements into the wintry sea forty ells below.

I was also a member of the large party who subsequently combed the ice-covered shore rocks for Maudrayne’s body. My uncanny seekersense was then extremely powerful; nevertheless, I was unable to detect any trace of the poor suicide. In the days that followed, both the Brothers of Zeth and Conjure-Queen Ullanoth of Moss utilized their magical talents to hunt for the woman Conrig now termed the Princess Dowager, scrutinizing not only the shoreline but also the interior regions of the island, on the improbable chance that she had somehow survived. The searchers found nothing. It was decided that the body must have been carried far out into Gala Bay, to be lost in the frigid depths.