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Shadowmagic
John Lenahan
A Lord of the Rings for the 21st century. Only a lot shorter. And funnier. And completely different.Conor thought he was an average teenager. OK, so his father only had one hand, spoke to him in ancient languages and was a bit on the eccentric side but, other than that, life was fairly normal. Until, that is, two Celtic warriors on horseback and wearing full armour appear at his front door and try to kill him. After that, things get pretty weird.Shadowmagic is a fantasy adventure for young adults (although grown ups will like it too). Written by one of the most popular magicians in the country it brings a fresh approach to the genre and will have a broad appeal beyond the fantasy sections.
SHADOWMAGIC
JOHN LENAHAN
Copyright (#uc0a8941f-ae3a-5903-b013-0752c14d767d)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by The Friday Project in 2008
Copyright © John Lenahan 2008
John Lenahan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9781905548927
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007341054
Version: 2016-08-11
For Finbar, of whom I am exceedingly proud.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#uc403e064-6228-539e-a016-9ccb77e3e7db)
Copyright (#u9d4ae323-fe41-5985-b27c-069e68ca14d8)
Dedication (#u7ef2561f-dd70-5f95-8026-0b2ca99879eb)
Chapter One - Aunt Nieve (#u7ad137a1-add7-591d-b73b-906305321605)
Chapter Two - Uncle Cialtie (#u4bfc7f26-f326-58af-a0b5-fd0f432e6eda)
Chapter Three - Mom (#ua7f8f2a1-3f55-52b2-a14c-61a2928d23a7)
Chapter Four - The Yewlands (#uf7557318-9666-5e2d-ba8d-d14bbedb53bc)
Chapter Five - Rothlú (#u95475e00-c3f7-5ed7-9a51-fbdaae02a4c8)
Chapter Six - Fergal (#u1d1b7e9a-a001-5ffd-9fd0-6c972e6408ea)
Chapter Seven - Brownies (#ud22427a9-d275-5cce-abde-2852be7682e3)
Chapter Eight - Araf (#u1de73fc5-04c9-5e2c-a46c-4132a4b39513)
Chapter Nine - Essa (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten - Gerard (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven - The Dahy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve - Acorn (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen - The Hazellands (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen - Lorcan (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen - The Reedlands (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen - Big Hair (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen - The Druid Table (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen - The Race of the Twins of Macha (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen - The Castle Beach (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty - The Shadowcasting (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One - Aunt Nieve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two - The Army of the Red Hand (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three - The Return of the Hazellands (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four - The Evil Eye (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five - Mother Oak (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six - Born Ready (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Aein (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Choosing (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine - The Truth, a Second Time (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty - A Time to Bend (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One - A Decision (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two - Goodbyes (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter OneAunt Nieve (#uc0a8941f-ae3a-5903-b013-0752c14d767d)
‘How come you never told me I had an aunt?’ That was the first thing I said. I know, my first question should have been, ‘Are you alright, Dad?’ He didn’t look alright. The light was awful, but I could see blood on the side of his face. I’m amazed I didn’t say, ‘What is that smell?’ because it sure stank in there. I’m not talking about a whiffy locker room smell, but the kind of stench that can make it possible to see your breakfast a second time around. Or most obviously I guess I should have asked, ‘Where are we?’ or, ‘Why are we chained to a wall?’ But instead, the first question I asked when I regained consciousness was about genealogy.
‘Well, Conor,’ Dad croaked, not even looking at me, ‘the first time you met her, she tried to kill you.’
She had, too.
I was sitting in the living room watching crappy morning television. I was dressed, shaved and ready to go. You had to be with my father. It wasn’t unusual for me to run out of the house two minutes behind him and find that he had left without me.
‘Are you ready?’ he called from the bedroom–in almost Modern Greek.
That was a good sign. It was a simple matter to gauge my father’s moods–the older the language, the worse his frame of mind. Greek wasn’t too bad. I shouted back, in the same language, ‘Born ready!’ I had learned a long time ago that I had to speak in the language of the day, or else he would ignore me completely.
He came out of his bedroom in a white shirt with a tie hanging around his neck. ‘Could you do this for me?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
Tie tying was one of the very few things that Pop found impossible to do with just one hand. Most of the time I didn’t think of Dad as having a handicap at all–I know a lot of two-handed men much less dexterous than him, and anyway, I was happy to do him a favour. I was just about to hit him up for a bit of cash, so that tonight I could take Sally to a nice restaurant, as opposed to the usual crummy pizza joint.
‘What’s with the tie?’ I asked.
‘The dean wants me to smarten up a bit. There is some famous ancient languages professor visiting who wants to talk about my theories of pronunciation. As if I don’t have anything better to do than babysit some idiot.’
That question was a mistake on my part. He said that last sentence in Ancient Gaelic. That was the language he used when he was annoyed or really meant business–it was almost as if it was his mother tongue. I’m not talking about Gaelic, the language of the Irish, I’m talking about Ancient Gaelic, a language found only on crumbling parchments and in my house.
‘Aw c’mon, Pop,’ I said as chirpily as I could, ‘maybe this professor is a beautiful she idiot, and I can finally have a mom.’
He gave me a dirty look, but not one of his more serious ones, and tucked the bottom of his tie into his shirt.
I plopped myself down on the sofa. I could hear Dad humming some prehistoric Celtic ditty as he brushed his teeth in the bathroom. A fight broke out on the television show I was half-heartedly watching: two women were pulling each other’s hair and the studio audience was chanting the presenter’s name.
‘Turn that damn television off,’ he shouted, ‘or I’ll put a crossbow bolt through it!’
I quickly switched off the TV–coming from Dad this was not an idle threat. He owned a crossbow–as well as a quarterstaff, a mace and all sorts of archaic weaponry. If it was old, he had it. Hell, he even made me practise sword fighting with him every week before he gave me my spending money.
This gives you an idea of what life was like with my father–the mad, one-handed, ancient languages professor Olson O’Neil. People said that he lived in the past, but it was worse than that–it was like he was from the past. It was cool when I was a kid, but now that I was older, I increasingly thought it was weird–sad, even.
That Dad embarrassed me from time to time wasn’t really the problem. Now that I was starting to get a few whiskers on my chin, what really got me down was that he seemed disappointed in me all of the time and I couldn’t figure out why. I was doing well at high school. In a week I would graduate, OK, not at the top of my class, but pretty up there. I had never really been in trouble. My girlfriend didn’t have pink hair and studs through her nose, or eyebrows, or even her bellybutton. Dad liked Sally. It seemed as if he wanted me to be something–but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell me what.
A knock came on the front door that was so loud, it made me jump to my feet. Now, weird is what my life is these days, but here is where all the weirdness began.
We live in a converted barn outside of town with a regular-sized front door that is cut into two huge barn doors. When my father answers a knock, he always peers through a tiny hatch to check who’s out there. I, on the other hand, like to undo the bolts and throw open the two big doors. It shocks visitors and it has the added effect of annoying Dad. I don’t do that any more.
I dramatically swung open the two doors and found myself face to face with two of the biggest, sweatiest horses I had ever seen. Riding them was a man in full King Arthur-type armour and a woman in a hooded cloak. With hindsight I wish I had said something clever like, ‘The stables are around the back,’ but to be honest, I was too gobsmacked to speak.
When the woman pulled back her hood, she took my breath away. She was astonishingly beautiful, with a wild mane of amber hair. She seemed to be about five or ten years older than me–twenty-five, twenty-seven maybe, except something about her made her seem older than that.
‘Is this the home of Oisin?’ she asked.
‘There is an Olson here, Olson O’Neil,’ I stammered.
She considered this for a second and took a step into the room–or, I should say, her horse did. I had to back away to stop from being trampled.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded.
She looked around the room and her eyes stopped on an oak fighting stick that was mounted on the wall. A look of satisfaction crossed her face. ‘I am his sister,’ she said.
I started to say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and then two things struck me. One was that she was speaking in Ancient Gaelic–I was so stunned by the appearance of those two that I hadn’t noticed it before. The second was her eyes–she had Dad’s eyes, and nobody had dark peepers like my father.
‘Dad!’ I called out. ‘There’s a woman out here who says she’s your sister.’
That is when all hell broke loose. Dad came charging out of the bathroom screaming at the top of his lungs, with toothpaste foaming out of his mouth like a rabid animal. He grabbed the war axe off the mantel, which I always assumed was there just for decoration, and hurled it at his sister. She pulled her head back just in time to avoid getting a quick nose job, but her companion wasn’t so lucky. The flat side of the axe hit him square on the shoulder and knocked him from his saddle. The rider desperately tried to stay on his mount. The horse made a horrible sound as he pulled a handful of hair out of its mane, but it was no good. He hit the ground with a crash of metal and then, as if being attacked in my living room by equestrians wasn’t surprise enough–he disappeared–he just vanished! One second I was watching the Tin Man falling through the air, arms and legs flailing in all directions, and the next second he was gone–poof! In the space where he should have been, was a pile of rusted metal in a swirl of dust.
Dad shouted, ‘Conor, watch out!’ I looked up just in time to see a spear leaving my aunt’s hand–and it was heading directly for my chest. Then everything seemed to go into slow motion. I remember looking into my aunt’s eyes and seeing what almost looked like pain in them, and I remember turning to my father and seeing the utter defeat on his face. But what I remember the most was the amazing tingling sensation that I felt all over my body. An amber glow seemed to cloud my vision, then I noticed the glow cover me from head to toe and then encircle the spear, just as it made contact with my chest. The spear hit me, I fell over from the force of it, but it didn’t hurt. For a second I thought, That’s what it must be like when you receive a mortal wound–no pain. Then I saw the spear lying next to me. I felt my chest and I was fine.
Dad sat me up. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
I wish I had a picture of my face at that point–I could feel the stupid grin I had pasted on it. A horn blew–Dad and I looked up in time to see my would-be assassin galloping away from the door.
‘Can you stand?’ Dad asked.
I remember answering him by saying, ‘That was very strange.’ I was kind of out of it.
‘Conor,’ he said, helping me to my feet, ‘we have to get out of here.’
But it was too late. Two more riders, this time in black armour and on black horses, burst into the room. Tables and chairs went flying in all directions. Dad grabbed my hand and we tried to run out the back, but before we could take more than a couple of steps I saw, and heard, a black leather whip wrap around my father’s neck. I tried to shout but my voice was strangled by the searing pain of another whip wrapping around my own throat.
The next thing I remembered, I was chained to a dungeon wall talking to my father about the family tree.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Nieve,’ Dad said, without looking at me.
I was about to ask, ‘Why does she want to kill us?’ when I felt something crawl across my ankle. It was a rat–no, I take that back–it was the mother of all rats. I’d seen smaller dogs. I screamed and tried to kick it away. It moved just out of reach and stared at me like it owned the place. Just what I needed, a super-rat with an attitude.
‘Where the hell are we?’ I yelled.
‘We are in The Land,’ Dad said in a faraway voice.
