The Book of Shane 2 Read online

  Contents

  Conquerors Emblem

  Conquerors Letter

  Title Page

  Map

  The Second Book of Shane: VENDETTA

  Online Game Code

  Copyright

  Note: This story takes place between Spirit Animals Books #6 and #7, and contains spoilers for the series.

  By Nick Eliopulos

  SHANE CLOSED HIS EYES AND SMILED INTO THE WIND. He allowed himself to enjoy one perfect moment of total victory.

  The war was over, and he’d won it.

  For months, he had been seeking fifteen talismans of great power from all across Erdas. Any one of the talismans had the power to change the world.

  Shane had eleven of them. Eleven! And three more were in the hands of his army.

  He whooped, pumping his fists into the air, then felt his balance lurch dangerously and brought his hands back down to grip Halawir’s feathers. He was riding cross-legged on the back of the massive eagle, and every time Halawir flapped his wings, Shane swayed.

  Since leaving his home some months ago, Shane had seen many amazing sights. He had climbed the mountains of Amaya, scaled Zhong’s great wall, and sailed the seas from the rigging of his very own warship.

  But he’d never been anywhere near this high up before.

  It was as if all of Erdas were spread out before him. The sea sparkled below like a shifting landscape of precious gemstones, ringed by two great landmasses. At this height he couldn’t even tell the difference between Nilo and Eura. They were identical swaths of green spreading out to distant mountains.

  But who needed to tell them apart anymore? What was the point of borders, anyway? It all belonged to him now.

  He lifted his hands again, slowly this time, and leaned into the wind, grabbing at clouds that puffed away to nothing in his fingers. The cold wind brought tears to his eyes, but he fought to keep them open.

  “Pleased with yourself?” said Halawir. As a Great Beast, he was able to communicate without actually opening his imposing curved beak. Shane heard the mighty animal’s voice in his head, clear and piercing, and he winced.

  “Yes!” he answered, shouting his reply into the wind. “Yes, I’m very pleased. We’ve won, Halawir. That was it! The Greencloaks are finished.”

  “I confess, you achieved your objective much faster than any of us expected.”

  It was the closest thing to a compliment Shane had ever heard from the bird — Halawir was majestic but pompous, and usually gave Shane the impression that he’d rather be anywhere else than in the company of humans. But the two of them had more in common than Halawir might like to admit.

  They’d both been lying for a very long time, hiding their true natures, like a crocodile hides beneath the surface of the water, waiting to strike.

  In truth, Shane’s infiltration of Greenhaven had gone nothing like he’d intended. Abeke’s friends had exposed him almost immediately. His original plan had involved a lot more sneaking around, and he’d almost been looking forward to spending some time on the island. The days he’d spent on the boat with Abeke had been … Well, they had been a pleasant respite from months of war.

  The fact that Shane’s true identity had been revealed and he’d still been able to get away with all of the Greencloaks’ talismans made his victory all the sweeter.

  “Did you see the look on Olvan’s face?” he called out to Halawir. “When he realized he’d been beaten? Priceless!”

  Halawir opened his mouth and emitted a piercing cry. Shane wondered for a moment if that was his version of laughter — and then the bird veered sharply to the side, nearly throwing Shane off into open air.

  “Hold on, mammal!” said Halawir. Rather unhelpfully, Shane thought. There was not much else Shane could do.

  Halawir dove, dropping several yards in a single second, and Shane felt as if they had left his stomach in their wake. Before he could complain, he saw a sphere of dull gray metal, larger than a coconut, whiz past, arcing above his head. If Halawir hadn’t acted so quickly, it would have smashed right into them. And judging from the speed at which it plummeted back down toward the sea, it was frightfully heavy.

  “Was that … Was that a cannonball?” Shane shouted.

  “We are under attack.”

  Shane followed the arc of the cannonball back to its origin and saw a ship on the sea below. It was long and narrow — a schooner, built for speed. Its sails were bright green.

  “Greencloaks,” Shane hissed. So they must have managed to get a ship out from Greenhaven to follow him after all. There was an explosion on the deck of the ship, a cloud of smoke, and Shane shouted, “Incoming!”

  He brought his head back around and leaned in low, hugging Halawir’s body as the great bird tilted. For one terrifying moment, Shane’s feet were in midair, his grip on the slick feathers the only thing keeping him from twisting away in the wind — and then Halawir leveled, and Shane came crashing down.

  “Have a care!” Shane shouted. “Lose me and you lose the talismans.”

  Halawir screeched again. This time there was no mistaking the sound for laughter.

  “It’s a sailboat!” Shane cried. “Don’t you have power over the winds?”

  “They have whales pulling the boat,” Halawir answered. “And there is only so much I can do with a rodent tugging at my feathers.”

  Shane ignored the insult. “Then we need to get over land, where whales can’t follow,” he said.

  Halawir made no reply but veered south, toward Nilo.

  Shane gritted his teeth. He had a sword sheathed at his hip — useless from up here. He had nearly a dozen talismans of formidable power — but couldn’t risk sorting through them when it was all he could do to hold on.

  If there was one thing Shane couldn’t stand, it was feeling powerless. He’d had enough of that back in Stetriol.

  But he hadn’t truly been powerless in a long time. Not since he’d drunk the Bile and joined Zerif in his campaign against the Greencloaks.

  “Grahv!” he called. “I need you.” The tattoo that wrapped across his chest and down his stomach flared with light, and then was gone, and Shane caught just a glimpse of his crocodile’s great scaled tail as the animal plunged into the sea below.

  “That will slow them down,” he said. “Grahv is more than a match for a couple of whales.”

  “A momentary reprieve,” Halawir replied. “We can’t allow ourselves to be tracked back to camp.”

  “Why not? Let them come in force,” Shane scoffed. “I took them on single-handedly. What chance would they have against my army?”

  “No chance,” said Halawir. “But creatures who cannot fly are easily surrounded, and we do not have time for a drawn-out siege. Not when we are so close to freeing Kovo.”

  Shane nodded. There was no sense drawing out the conflict just because the Greencloaks didn’t know when they were beaten. “Then you’ll have to lead them away,” he said. “I’ll make my own way home.”

  “Across Nilo?”

  “I’ve got Mulop’s talisman,” Shane replied. “I’ll swim.”

  “Very well,” Halawir said. “But do not tarry. You would not wish to displease Gerathon.”

  “I know that,” Shane spat. His face grew warm despite the blustery wind. “I know that well.”

  Halawir scudded to the coastline, so low that the trees below shook in his wake.

  “Now would be an opportune time,” he said. “While our pursuers are occupied.”

  Shane waited until Halawir was gliding, before the next flap of the Great Beast’s wings brought an increase in speed. They were still going too fast for his liking. They were still too high.

  But Shane was used to doing the best he could with
poor options.

  He let go of Halawir’s feathers and pushed off into the sky.

  Shane dreamed of spiders.

  He was roaming the corridors of the castle where he’d lived as a boy. Everything was just as he remembered — but there were spiders everywhere.

  Big spiders and small spiders. Spiders marked with red diamonds and yellow stripes and brown spots. Hairy spiders and smooth, shiny spiders that appeared wrought from black metal.

  They’d taken up residence in the castle Shane had left behind, and as he made his way through the hallways, he was forced to step through one web after another. He swept his arms out ahead of him, slapping the webbing aside, but it clung to him, and he ended up with strands in his mouth and his hair and tickling at his ears. He was sure some of the spiders themselves were on him too. He couldn’t spare the time to look, but he could feel them skittering across his skin.

  He had to find Magda. When he’d led his forces to war, he’d left his family’s kindly servant behind. For her to have let the castle fall into such a state — something was obviously wrong.

  The webs slowed his progress but couldn’t stop him, and eventually he caught sight of an open door ahead. As he approached, a figure stepped into the doorway from within, blocking his way. It was Magda.

  The look on her face was grave. “You may not enter, my prince.”

  “I’m not a prince,” Shane said. “I’m the Reptile King.” He pulled his collar aside to show her the crocodile tattoo, but it was completely obscured by spiderwebs.

  Shane looked up at Magda, and he caught a glimpse of something beyond her — a human figure on the bed. A girl …

  “Who is that?” Shane asked.

  “Don’t look,” Magda said, but without any emotion in her voice. “Don’t look.”

  The shadows in the room shifted, and Shane thought he might get a better look at the figure. But then he realized it wasn’t shadows obscuring his view but spiders, a whole sea of spiders, swarming over every surface of the room. Was there even a girl on the bed, or only a thousand spiders in the shape of a girl?

  The spiders were on Magda too, Shane realized. How had he not noticed before? They were crawling all over her. Most of them were small, skittering in and out of view. But clinging to her arm was a massive specimen, black and yellow, and it was sinking its fangs into the pale flesh of her arm.

  Shane tried to scream for her, but the name on his lips was …

  “Drina!”

  Shane awoke in a sweat, to find his vision filled with green.

  He was on his back, staring up into the canopy of a forest.

  His back hurt. His head hurt. He had a nasty cut on his forearm, no doubt from plummeting through the trees. But when he brought his hand to the pocket of his leather tunic and the talismans were still there, he let out a sigh of relief.

  He sat up and took them from his pocket for the first time. Each talisman was a pendant in the shape of an animal — a Great Beast — and each bore a portion of the beast’s power. There was an eagle wrought in bronze that bore a striking resemblance to Halawir, and a delicately detailed swan carved from marble. The wolf and the lion were made of precious metals, silver and gold, but the most beautiful to Shane’s eye was the leopard of amber. It seemed to glow with its own inner light.

  Shane was slow to realize there was no octopus. No octopus, and no ram either.

  He checked his pocket again, but he knew he wouldn’t find them there. He scanned the ground around him, but the talismans had all been one great tangled mass in his tunic. There would have been no way for one or two to slip loose. Which meant …

  Which meant he’d left two behind. In the hands of the Greencloaks.

  Shane leaped to his feet and screamed. He kicked at the dirt and paced in a tight circle, clenching his fists. He wanted to hit something, but there was nothing in reach but the trees.

  There was no use going back. Even if he could get to Greenhaven again, it wasn’t worth the risk. He had nine talismans, and he’d left Zerif with three. He just had to hope that twelve were enough to breach Kovo’s prison. With Kovo released, Shane’s obligations to Gerathon would at last be fulfilled. And he, Shane, would rule over a new world order free of the tyranny of the Greencloaks.

  Shane took stock of his possessions. He had his sword, a stoppered vial of Bile that had somehow not shattered when he’d fallen from the sky, and the talismans. Nothing else but the clothes on his back and the tattoo that had reappeared on his chest.

  He thought grimly that it said something significant about his life that he was lost in the wilderness with Gerathon’s Bile in his pocket, but no drinkable water.

  He put away all the talismans except one: a falcon made of copper. He gripped it in his hand and found a tall tree with low branches. Shane had grown up a prince in a castle, but he was far from pampered, and the past year had made him strong. He climbed the tree quickly, his movements confident, and in a matter of seconds he broke through the canopy to the infinite expanse of blue beyond it.

  Shane slipped the Copper Falcon’s cord around his neck, and instantly his eyesight sharpened.

  “Wow,” he said. So this was what it was like to see the world through Essix’s eyes.

  He could see a drop of water on a leaf three trees over. He could see a distant dragonfly, its wings buzzing madly as it rose above the trees. And there, far off across the ocean, he could see an eagle — a massive eagle made small by distance, pursued across the ocean by a ship. Their ploy had worked.

  He turned in the other direction. The Conquerors’ camp was too far even for his keen eyes to see. If he could fly or swim, he’d be there in no time. On foot, it would take him days.

  He sighed, climbed down to the forest floor, and started walking.

  To avoid getting lost, Shane kept the coastline in view. To avoid being seen, he walked just within the tree line, where the forest gave way to Nilo’s beaches. That meant weaving among the trees — there was no natural path. It was slow going, but it was prudent. And Shane had no great desire to plunge deeper into the forest, where the trees grew so thick they blocked out the sky.

  Soon the choice was taken from him. The sandy beaches gave way to pebbles, and then to great rocks, and the ground sloped up steeply so that the only way to follow the coastline would be to scale sheer cliffs. He might have managed it with the Granite Ram of Arax … but that was one of two talismans still under Greencloak control.

  So Shane stepped deeper into the forest.

  Here, at least, there was water from the occasional freshwater streams. He had no water skin, so he was forced to drink as he went, and frequently. The air was muggy beneath the trees, and Shane was soon sweating. Berries grew in clusters wherever water touched the soil, but they were unfamiliar to him and he deemed them not worth the risk. With each passing hour, however, his hunger grew.

  To distract himself, he decided to familiarize himself with the talismans, careful to use only one at a time. Used together, the talismans exerted control over something called the Evertree. The three Great Beasts who backed Shane had been guarded in their descriptions of the mysterious tree, but one thing they had made abundantly clear: The Evertree was the key to curing the bonding sickness that had swept over Stetriol like a plague. The tree had suffered some kind of damage in the last great war — this was where bonding sickness had come from — and all fifteen talismans would be needed to heal it. Using a handful of the talismans at once, however, would more likely cause the tree more damage, and Shane wouldn’t be responsible for that.

  He knew Cabaro’s lion was supposed to bestow its wearer with a ferocious roar. He decided not to try it out, for fear of drawing unwanted attention. Same for the Slate Elephant of Dinesh, which would dramatically increase the size of his spirit animal. Even if there were room among the trees for an elephant-sized crocodile, it wouldn’t help him blend in.

  Jhi’s Bamboo Panda made him feel suddenly refreshed. The ache he felt from his fall disappeared
the moment he placed the charm around his neck, and didn’t return when he removed it again. Halawir’s talisman allowed him to nudge the air around him, the way his hand might divert the water in a stream. The Silver Wolf of Briggan sharpened his senses of smell and hearing just as the Copper Falcon had sharpened his eyesight. The effect was almost overwhelming in a forest teeming with unseen life and activity. Kovo’s Obsidian Ape likewise enhanced his vision, but in a subtly different way than the falcon did. Shane couldn’t quite put his finger on the difference. He examined a tree trunk in the distance, and it came into sharp relief. He could see the lichen growing upon its bark, the stress points where it might be felled with a single well-placed ax blow. Something about the effect was unsettling, and Shane removed the pendant and stuffed it back into his tunic.

  In the end, he opted to wear the Amber Leopard of Uraza. It bestowed a feline grace to his movements, allowing him to move more quickly through the trees and avoid the knotted roots that tried to trip him up every dozen yards. It made him feel at ease in this Niloan jungle Uraza had once called home.

  It was simply the most practical choice, he told himself.

  Night was falling when Shane at last came upon a village.

  The forest was so thick with trees that its daytime was like a green-tinged twilight. Shane thought he’d lose track of day and night entirely, but it wasn’t so — the forest was definitely getting darker, and the tenor of animal sounds was shifting as nocturnal frogs and insects overtook the birdsong that had accompanied him throughout his long afternoon hike. He knew it would be wise to stop soon.

  When he saw the trees parting ahead and a cluster of huts in the clearing beyond, his heart soared … and his stomach grumbled. But his relief was short-lived. The torches at the outskirts of the village were cold; there was no light beyond what the dusk provided, and no human sounds among the chirp and wail of the insects.

  Shane stepped into the clearing and knew at once that this village was a carcass — a dead remnant of a thing once living. Half the huts were burned out, their walls black and blistered and their thatched roofs collapsing. The wooden benches ringing the central fire pit had been knocked over and the animal pens hacked apart, fences swung wide.