Chapter 12 • A Prayer for Dead Kings
(Chapter One — Complete)
An Anthology of the Endlands
by
Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Cover Illustration by Alex Tooth
Published by Insane Angel Studios
Smashwords Edition
An Anthology of the Endlands
by
Scott Fitzgerald Gray
When he finally seized the sword, Morghan felt the power again, spiking in a sensation like the emptiness of unspoken words. A bloodless rage twisted through him just as the voice had twisted through him before, and in that instant, in a heartbeat, in the rawness of memory where it clawed at him from the dark dreams that the day tried to push away, he knew that anything was possible.
Too many things still to be done.
So many debts to repay.
“Avenge them…”
• In a lost tomb, a warrior haunted by the deaths of those who once followed him hears an offer of redemption in the voice of an ancient blade…
• A sword of kings lingers in a forgotten forest, where dwells a timeless spirit of the wood — a creature able to sense the apocalyptic future that unfolds if the weapon is ever reclaimed…
• A prince and princess share a bond of blood and a dark secret, both of which threaten to destroy them when their father is killed…
• A warrior living under a monstrous curse has his wish for death transformed by a desperate young girl with blood on her hands…
• A reclusive storyteller finds himself in possession of an enchanted axe that promises he will rule the world — whether he wants to or not…
• The pain of the past haunts a mage sought out by the woman he once loved, who needs his knowledge and power to save the life of the man she loves now…
• A young exile returns home carrying the weight of betrayal and the stolen sword that is the symbol of his people — a blade with which he will destroy the legacy of the father he tried and failed to kill years before…
• A
king long thought dead walks his war-torn homeland as a ragged
pilgrim, consumed by the sins of his past. But even as he does, the
daughter of his greatest knight hunts him, desperate to convince him
to take up the crown once more…
The first Endlands anthology from Scott Fitzgerald Gray, A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales follows a disparate group of heroes and villains caught up with the dark history — and darker destiny — of nine weapons of ancient magic, lost to time and mind.
In the aftermath of the fall of Empire, magic is the ultimate force for tyranny and freedom in the lands of the Elder Kingdoms. Magic defines the line between right and wrong, life and death that compels countless characters to take up a mantle of heroism they never expected to wear.
However, in the world
of the Endlands, even the tales of heroes seldom end as expected…
This epic-fantasy/sword-and-sword sorcery anthology includes six all-new short stories, the novella Ghostsong, and the short novel A Prayer for Dead Kings.
To Colleen, Shvaugn, and Caitlin
For Infinite Patience
Wainamoinen, the magician,
Comes to view the blade of conquest,
Lifts admiringly the fire-sword,
Then these words the hero utters:
“Does the weapon match the soldier,
Does the handle suit the bearer?”
— The Kalevala,
Rune XXXIX
Downloadable map available free at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/59748479/A-Prayer-for-Dead-Kings
RAZEEN WAS STILL WARM when they found him, the rigor just beginning to set. Dead since dusk, no longer. From across the table, Scúrhand prodded the wizened figure with a scroll tube, the lifeless body rocking like a sapling in the wind.
The dark-haired mage spat. “Of course,” he said, only to himself.
Across the tower chamber, Morghan circled warily, his gaze flitting across the destruction that had carried through the room. The subtle weight of the longsword shifted gently in his hands.
All is lost…
The voice was the whisper of a silk-lined sheath as it slipped within the tall warrior’s mind. He spun fast like there might have been someone behind him, saw nothing but the walls of ransacked shelves and the dead sage they had come to see. Scúrhand inspected the bruising at the pale throat where Razeen had been strangled.
Where it gripped his
sword, Morghan’s hand was shaking. He squeezed his fingers shut,
forced the tremor from them. Across from him, Scúrhand didn’t
see.
They had been three days on horse from the Highport before they reached the citadel, a narrow track breaking from the eastbound trade road to follow a rising line of scrub and sand along the ocean headland. The eastern sky was already dark when they arrived, the sun gone to a molten line beneath a black haze of storm cloud along the opposite horizon. The pounding of the surf was constant past tall columns of stone, the ruins of ancient battlements staggering their way across the rough beach and into black water beyond.
In the end, the shroud of darkness and sound had given Scúrhand and Morghan a chance to see the dozen or so figures hidden in ambush position along the road, long before they themselves could be sighted. The sentries wore dark leather and helms of blackened steel, scattered behind scrub trees as they watched for any sign of approach. This meant they left themselves open where Scúrhand and Morghan swung wide to the north and around, tethering the horses in a stand of salt pine and approaching unseen, away from the cliffs.
They moved to within sight of the sentry farthest from the gatehouse, the others unseen but close enough to shout to. Atop a rise, behind a screen of wind-whipped sea grass, they watched for a long while.
“When I was last here, the sage was far more welcoming,” Scúrhand whispered at last. “Perhaps he heard you were coming this time.” The mage noted that Morghan didn’t smile. “We should endeavor to find out who they are and why they’re here.”
“Agreed,” Morghan said. “Take this one.”
“An excellent suggestion,” Scúrhand whispered, “and one whose planning is worth long discussion, ideally back in the city.”
“Take him.”
“Or perhaps another city entirely.”
“You take him or I will, and I’ll be a lot less quiet about it.” Morghan shifted as if preparing to move, making an obvious attempt to reveal his position where he stood a full head taller than the mage and twice as broad. His mail was plate set within two layers of chain in an arrangement he had designed himself, apparently for the amount of noise it could make when he wanted it to.
Scúrhand sighed. He felt for the power that threaded through him, summoned it with a whisper that knocked the sentry into the air and two strides back. He fell with a muffled thud, Morghan already moving.
Even as Scúrhand followed, however, the warrior stopped to kneel beside the motionless form. Morghan had seen the mage drop enough sentries in the same way, and so should have known this one wasn’t getting up anytime soon. But as Scúrhand slowed, he saw that Morghan wasn’t checking the pace of blood at the figure’s neck as he assumed, but was fingering the insignia on the cloak. A boar’s head sigil was embossed there, black on red, barely visible in the shadows.
“Who are they?”
Scúrhand asked. The warrior only shook his head.
The citadel consisted of adjoining ramshackle towers leaning at dangerous angles into the ever-present wind. It was a military ruin, built and rebuilt by the succession of petty lords who had claimed this headland in the endless wars that were Gracia’s greatest legacy. The space within it held two hundred warriors and their arms when it was new built. Before the long peace of Empire and the erosion of the sandy bluff turned its garrisons to fading memories and left it to be claimed by a lone Gnome who valued his privacy. Peace and the passage of time made for much irony in property values, Scúrhand had noted more than once.
One window lit in the cliffside wall made a gleaming gold beacon against the night. It was there that they had climbed, out of sight of the sentries below. To be accurate, Morghan climbed, clawing his way up along handholds found and carefully tested in the weathered stone. Scúrhand had an easier time of it, rising effortlessly through the air alongside him. The black cloak he wore over loose leggings and a high-collared jacket was of aristocratic cut, but in a style no self-respecting noble had worn in a dozen generations. Scúrhand knew the garment and the dweomer of flight woven into its threads to be older than that by far.
Though the mage was fairly certain he could have carried the warrior aloft as well as himself, he’d been reluctant to test the supposition with slightly more certain death promised on the rocks below if he failed. Morghan hadn’t seemed to mind, not even breathing hard when they finally pulled themselves through the open shutters of some sort of study. It was there that Razeen had been found.
The body was draped across a high table, propped in a chair so ridiculously tall that the diminutive figure must have scaled it like a ladder. He had a selection of scrolls before him that Scúrhand took in at a glance, mundane alchemical texts.
Morghan was still pacing the room, listening carefully at each of three exits, stairs leading up and down. Velvet drapes in the same indescribable purple the sage wore were hung from tall pillars of yellowing marble. The air was heavy with the scent of old parchment and dust.
From below, loud enough for them both to hear, came the sound of smashing wood.
“We leave now?” Scúrhand said with little real hope. Again, Morghan didn’t smile.
Vindicator…
Morghan took the stairs
first. He didn’t have to look back to know that Scúrhand was
following.
Curving columns of black oak rose between levels of shadow above and below as they descended. A pool of light preceded them, cast from the pulse of lightning that traced the dagger Scúrhand had claimed from the ruins of Myrnan. The Sorcerers’ Isle, legendary across Gracia and all five Elder Kingdoms and countless lands beyond. During a particularly violent squall that dogged them along the six-day voyage from Myrnan to the Gracian mainland, the mage christened the blade Storm’s Light. Morghan had spent most of the remainder of the trip offering his opinion of those who named their weapons.
“A blade’s a tool like any other. You don’t name the plow any more than the oxen that pull it.”
“I’ve never had an ox save my life,” Scúrhand said. They were sailing through rain past sunset of the last day, the lights of the Highport visible ahead. “This might do that someday.” The mage was doing handwork with the new blade at the rail. In the twilight, the pulse of its storm light shone.
Now, Scúrhand willed that light to darkness as Morghan waved him back. Where the stairs met an open balcony, they saw a faint light from ahead. Directly beneath them, the undying glow of magical evenlamps was filtered by some kind of latticed ceiling. Narrow beams crisscrossed below an empty space where the stairs turned and descended once more. There was room enough for Morghan to squeeze through, shifting slowly to spread his weight across the narrow beams. Scúrhand was close behind, perched at the balcony’s edge.
Through narrow slats, the mage and the warrior watched the movement in the library below. A dozen figures in the same dark leather as the sentries outside worked with a silent efficiency as they tore through the shelves. Already, scrolls and bound volumes were strewn so thickly that they hid the floor. Scúrhand could only stare.
“That’s a duke’s ransom in lore they’re stepping through,” the mage hissed. “What in fate’s name are they looking for that would make them discard that?”
Barrend’s Bane…
Clear in Morghan’s head again, an echoing voice, his own and not his somehow.
“What is Barrend’s Bane?” Scúrhand whispered, and Morghan had to glance over to the mage’s questioning look to realize that he’d murmured the name aloud.
A year before, in the midst of a long string of days spent trying to forget, Morghan had seen the boar’s head along the Myrnan docks. A sigil on a cloak, black on red. It was an image he knew, locked into place in his mind. Scribed from the searing memory of a lash wielded by an arm that wore the same insignia. The memory of the pain was knife-sharp across his back, his chest.
The stone-faced warriors who wore the black boar on Myrnan had been led by a woman with hair the color of deep sunset. She and all the others were strangers to Morghan. But over the week that followed, he spent a modest percentage of the coin he brought out from the ruins to discover their names and mission. The secrecy that carried them to the Sorcerers’ Isle was impressive even against the routine secrecy of most of those who sought Myrnan’s hidden riches. In the end, though, all information had a price.
It was at a weaponsmith’s stall along the muddy tracks of Claygate Keep’s old Portown where Morghan found what he sought. The pale hair and sky-blue eyes marked the smith as Norgyr stock, his accent betraying him as not that long gone from the northlands. The flame-haired woman and her guard had visited him twice while Morghan tailed them. But when it came his own turn to step inside the stall, the smith met his inquiries with a sullen silence. Morghan noted the boar’s head marked in ink at the smith’s bare shoulder, a faded clan insignia beneath it.
In the dusky glow of the forge, the warrior pulled his sleeve down to reveal his own shoulder. Then he told a story. When he was done, the dark rage in the smith’s eyes was one he recognized. He gave Morghan a name.
“What is Barrend’s Bane?” Scúrhand asked again, but Morghan was moving. Shifting silently along the lattice of narrow beams, he strained to hear the voices filtering up from below.
“…the vault,” a woman was saying. She was the leader of the searchers to judge by the manner in which she spoke. Her hair was flame-red in the pale light, as bright as it had been when Morghan first saw it in the dawn glow of the Myrnan docks. “Start again, top to bottom. Check every door, every passageway. Search for diaries, journals. What you can’t read, bring to me.”
The smith in his dockside shed had first seen the hidden mark on the shield at Morghan’s back as he and the warrior drank at the hearth.
“You came out of Eltolitinus?” the smith asked gruffly when Morghan’s story was done. “With this?” He touched the shield almost reverently. “I lost count of them that died trying to be you, lad.”
The ruins beneath Myrnan were named for Eltolitinus, the greatest of the many mages who had tried to claim the Sorcerers’ Isle as their own. A demigod of magic to the Aigorani who were the forebears of Gracia, his legend was built on the transformation of the entirety of Myrnan to a vast island-castle three thousand years before. It was the aftermath of the dungeons of Eltolitinus that had pushed Morghan to wander alone. Hoping to bury the memories of the dark month he and Scúrhand and all the others had spent beneath the earth.
In the end, the Norgyr smith told Morghan a story of his own. The legend of Barrend, who was weaponsmith to the magical court of the Sathnari, masters of the Sorcerers’ Isle a thousand years before the island-castle was raised.
Avenge them…
As he watched the soldiers in black tear through the library, the voice in Morghan’s mind was the voice of the smith suddenly. Barrend’s mark is what they seek. Weapons of the old age, secrets of craft long lost. Magics that can’t be made by mortal hand no more.
“Seek the signs of Barrend’s Bane,” the woman called from below.
Those who know it will kill for this mark.
“The lore we seek will be found or we do not return, by Arsanc’s orders.”
As the woman’s voice echoed, Scúrhand saw a sudden darkness twist through Morghan where he watched.
Those who claim it lay claim to the power of kings.
Then the mage saw the warrior fall.
With a groaning crunch, the lattice of the ceiling gave way beneath Morghan’s weight, the first arrows from below nocked and fired wild past him before he even hit the ground. Without a thought, Scúrhand launched himself into the air, cloak clutched tight and spread behind him as he soared silently to the apex of the arched ceiling. There was room in plenty to fly, the library huge, four passageways wending out of it where the great stairs ended their twisting path down.
The figures below didn’t notice him, understandably distracted as Morghan landed with sword in hand and proceeded to carve his way through them. Scúrhand saw three down already, the rest pressing, but the warrior moved with a speed and grace that belied his size.
Then all at once, a pulse of white light wrapped Morghan like a shroud. The warrior’s battle-scarred voice was choked off with a sudden finality. Rigid, he stood locked in a stillness that captured all the fury of his suddenly silenced attack. His eyes were dark between the line of his steel helm and the carefully trimmed beard. His blade was gripped tight, well-muscled arms locked in the midst of a backhand blow, held unwavering where he was frozen fast.
Scúrhand alighted on a section of shelf he hoped was sturdy enough to hold him. He saw the red-haired woman step up, hands still twisted in the complex gesture of the incantation that had taken Morghan out, another spell already on her lips that Scúrhand didn’t want to wait to see the effect of.
“Stand down or die consumed by arcane fire!” he called with what he hoped was suitable bravado. He saw reflexive movement below, bows drawn and arrows nocked with a common bead on his heart, but he was already airborne again. He extended one fist, the plain copper ring there spouting flame to wrap his hand. He saw uncertainty in the eyes of those closest to him, fire flowing up his arm to the shoulder now. Where it billowed around him, the black cape gave him the imposing tone he hoped for, enough to hopefully hide the fact that the ring presented less threat to the foes scattering below him than if he’d simply fallen on them.
It was a relic claimed when he and Morghan first met, happenstance travelers who found themselves fighting at each other’s backs when a cache of unguarded gold they had pursued independently on the frontier turned out to be less unguarded than was publicized. The ring’s power was defensive, its dweomer swallowing the heat of mundane flame and eldritch fire alike, but its presentation proved almost as effective at keeping him out of the thick of combat as any blade might prove within it. Since that day he and Morghan met, the thick of combat was a place Scúrhand preferred to leave for the warrior whenever humanly possible.
On the floor below, the red-haired woman took a step toward him, and in her bright gaze, Scúrhand saw suddenly the youth she was trying hard to hide.
“If you wish to parlay, say your piece,” she said in the Imperial tongue. A tone of authority in the words but no strength in her voice to back it up, barely an apprentice’s age by her look. Her accent marked her as Norgyr even if her ruddy features suggested Vanyr or the Kelist Isles. The guards with her all bore the pale hair and blue eyes of the north where they watched him coldly.
Scúrhand responded in the Norgyr tongue as a hopeful token of concord.
“My partner and I mean no trouble nor harm. On the contrary, depending on your business here, we may find ourselves in a position of mutual benefit.”
“Your partner has a unique way of introducing himself.” Scúrhand caught the dark looks of the three wounded men behind the girl, but the fact that they were merely limping was more than fortune. More times than the mage could count, Morghan had demonstrated a ruthless taste for the blood of those who deserved to shed it. However, Scúrhand had just as often witnessed the warrior’s almost preternatural ability to leave less threatening foes standing, if a little shakily.
“My partner was set upon by your overzealous associates before being given any chance to explain his untimely entrance. Having watched him make it, I assure you that gravity was at sole fault. No one here intends murder. Least of all you.”
The comment wasn’t subtle, but the sudden darkness of the face beneath the rough-cut red hair told Scúrhand it worked. Not much of a gamble, given that of all the magic she could have cast, this one had chosen to simply freeze Morghan in his tracks rather than attempt to kill him outright. But before she could respond, from behind them both, a third voice barked out suddenly.
“Presume to know another man’s intent often enough, and it’ll eventually be the last mistake you make.”
The tone was imperious, edged with a dark smile that Scúrhand could feel even before he saw it. He caught no sign of surprise from the soldiers, but the girl flinched. Scúrhand glanced back, careful not to move too suddenly.
A figure in silver mail strode up through the shadows at the back of the library, a squad of six archers arrayed to either side, shortbows drawn on the mage where he hovered. Scúrhand fought the urge to lift for the ceiling once more, dropping with a flourish instead, the cloak swirling in a calculated display. He managed not to stumble as he touched down.
“I am Naethdraca, called by some the Stormhand.” It was the common translation of Scúrhand’s patronymic that he never used himself, but which he had long practiced speaking with just a hint of menace. “That is Morghan. Our business here is research, nothing more.”
He felt his dark features appraised as he let his long hair hang to cover them. The girl and the newcomer ignored the theatrics, but a look of sudden unease among the troops behind them told Scúrhand they had done the trick. He saw more than one figure glance to the dragon stitched in gold at the edge of his jacket collar, the mark of his given name. Naethdraca, the War Dragon who had been a grandfather he never met. They were old names, both promising power that the mage had yet to fully live up to.
“Ectauth,” the mailed figure offered by way of a name, blue eyes ice-bright beneath a shock of pale hair. “My overly talkative servant is Thiri.” Scúrhand nodded to the girl, her green eyes the color of wet leaves in the glow of the evenlamps. “Our business here is none of yours.”
“Nor would I seek to know it,” Scúrhand said evenly. “But if it please you, accept my services. I could not help but overhear that you search for some key within the lore here. Lore in which I am well versed. If my skills and knowledge can in some way smooth over the potential for conflict, they are yours.”
Ectauth made to speak, but the girl Thiri cut him off. “Take the mage up on his offer, my lord. The sage’s death has cost us time.” She appraised him carefully, Scúrhand patient, ignoring the silver warrior’s dark look. There was an odd dynamic here, one he wasn’t quite certain of. The girl’s skill with the spellcraft that held Morghan fast was good enough, but her demeanor marked her as a scholar, not a warrior.
Ectauth was another matter, though. The careful set of the armor, no weapon at his waist. Mail sleeves cut back of the wrist so that the movement of his hands would be unobstructed. He was a combat mage. A battle-caster of the Norgyr, his magical craft was focused and honed as a weapon. Whatever information might be hidden here, whatever this group had come in search of, it would be beyond Ectauth, leader though he was. He was thus obliged to depend on the girl’s scholarly arts, Scúrhand decided. An obligation bound to rankle a combat mage.
“I expect you intended only to threaten the sage,” Scúrhand said carefully. Another speculation, but a correct one from the reaction in the pale blue eyes. “Let us take the arrival of my companion and I as fortune, then. Or at the very least, let us get on with our research and leave you to yours.”
Where he stood, Morghan watched and heard it all, motionless within the grip of Thiri’s spell. His intact senses focused past the paralysis that the warrior suspected felt far too much like death would someday, and which was fading with each slow step Ectauth took around him. For all Scúrhand’s postured tact, Morghan knew that the mage’s words were also designed to fill up as much time as possible, allowing him to fight the effect of the spell that bound him.
From the start, the warrior had still been able to feel the sword against his fingers, the faint warmth of life pushing through his arms even as he forced himself to keep the blade steady in its interrupted stroke. As Ectauth considered Scúrhand’s words, Morghan could feel sensation return to his legs as well, fought to stay steady. Thiri was watching him, though, where she paced around him. Cautious of any first sign that her binding was close to the breaking point.
The shield was slung to Morghan’s arm, and he could see the faintest sign of the green eyes straying down to the mark there as the Myrnan smith’s had. A thing that only one who knew of it would notice, the dark rune all but invisible.
Those who know it will kill for this mark.
Morghan couldn’t shift his eyes without giving away that the spell’s effect had passed, but at the edge of his vision, he saw the look of shock on the girl’s face.
Ectauth saw that look, too. He saw the black rune that inspired it. With a shout, he twisted his fingers in a silent summoning of spellpower, a blade of white light suddenly erupting in his hand to stab for Morghan’s heart. The warrior was already moving, though, finishing the stroke he had held motionless, driving the battle-caster’s eldritch blade wide and catching him hard on the backswing as he wheeled away.
Morghan managed to fall back toward tall shelves at the closest corridor, protecting him from the first volley of arrows. Scúrhand took to the air to twist away from the knot of blades that erupted around him. As he sailed toward Morghan, he heard Ectauth’s voice.
“Kill them both!”
“Call it,” Scúrhand shouted.
Morghan appraised the mass of figures circling, another volley of arrows hissing past as he pressed back.
“Run,” he said.
They ran. Out and down the narrow course of a winding stair, then into the shadow of uncounted corridors beyond. By an instinct Scúrhand couldn’t name but was grateful for, Morghan lost their pursuit faster than he had any right to hope for. From shadow to darkness to shadow again, they ran blind through a maze of stairs and corridors where Ectauth’s forces were already exploring ahead of them.
More than once, they tripped across patrols with no warning, the soldiers of the black boar left incapacitated by Scúrhand’s spellcraft. The guards came by pairs, mostly. A squad of six once, but where the mage came up short against them, Morghan’s sword was a blur of red and grey that made up the difference. No quarter given, the warrior slipping into the well-honed reactions of a lifetime at the blade.
Scúrhand was slower than the warrior, but Morghan kept himself and his armor between the mage and pursuit. He lost track of the turns they had taken, empty and crumbling chambers flashing past to both sides, when he had to signal Morghan to stop. In a five-way staggered intersection, he fought to slow his breathing. Morghan stepped far enough away to listen for any sign of pursuit, but there was only silence above and behind them.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” the mage whispered. Morghan shook his head. “Just checking.”
“Traffic through here, though,” the warrior said. He bent low to the floor, traced the dust with one hand, Scúrhand trying in vain to read the faint tracks there. All around them, pale light glowed from the frames of arched doorways, intact here. Marking off the deadly traps of Razeen’s workrooms and archives, which Scúrhand would have struck any bargain to peer into under other circumstances.
“Where do you think…” the mage began, but then Morghan was on him, one hand pushing him to the wall while the longsword came up in the other. Scúrhand registered the footsteps racing toward them only an instant before he saw motion in the dark intersection, five figures on top of them. Morghan’s blade slashed out even as Scúrhand stumbled back.
He felt the moment stretch, blind in the near-darkness that crippled his ability to target his magic with any accuracy. However, he knew better than to raise a light. Morghan was at his best in the shadows, able to pick out his targets with an uncanny ease. Scúrhand heard strangled cries, caught the movement of blood-dark steel in the half-light as five bodies fell.
“Light,” the warrior hissed. Scúrhand set his dagger’s lightning to life as he pressed back, the storm glow illuminating the landing and the stairs around them. Four Norgyr guards were beyond any aid he could give them, Morghan taking no chances in close quarters. The fifth figure was still moving, however, trying to crawl back into the retreating shadows. Morghan was there first, lifting the body as if it weighed nothing, slamming it back to the wall with a force that stunned it, head lolling forward as the figure went limp in his grasp.
“Blood and moons…”
It was the girl. Thiri. Scúrhand saw the gash where Morghan’s blade had cut her leg almost to the bone. He noted the pool of blood spreading, the pallor of her face where the red hair framed it. Then he glanced to Morghan, following his gaze to the girl’s shoulder. He realized that it wasn’t the recognition of the young mage that had inspired the warrior’s look of absolute shock.
Even before they stumbled out through Eltolitinus’s ruined gates and gave thanks to sky above and ground below for their lives, Scúrhand had recognized a darkness lurking in Morghan that hadn’t been there when they parted a year before on the Norgyr frontier. He had gone east then, Morghan catching up to him as promised by the time winter turned. But in that lost year, something had happened to the warrior.
When they met up in Yewnyr, the great Free City, Morghan had carried only the clothes he wore and an ivory-hafted shortsword Scúrhand didn’t recognize. The wealth and the weapons the warrior spent the previous year amassing were gone, and there was an anger in him, threading through spirit and body alike, that the mage had never seen before. On the road to Myrnan, he loaned Morghan what he could for broadsword and mail without complaint. When the warrior paid him back tenfold after the dungeons of Eltolitinus, he no longer needed the money but he knew better than to argue.
Only once, in the month of recovery from what Eltolitinus had done to them, did he ask what happened to Morghan in that year. The warrior’s stony silence convinced him of the wisdom of not asking again.
There had been a moment within the ruins. Morghan was dressing a neck wound after a particularly brutal skirmish with Eltolitinus’s undead hordes. Scúrhand saw the mark. A narrow sequence of three interlocking loops, barbed like links of spiked chain. It was set in black ink at the warrior’s shoulder, tattooed with a precision that suggested whoever had done it meant it to last. Now, where Thiri’s shoulder had been bared by her torn tunic bunched in Morghan’s fist, Scúrhand saw the same tight knot of jagged line on her pale skin.
In the ruins of Myrnan, close to the breaking point already, Morghan had drawn steel against the mage when he caught Scúrhand’s gaze on the black mark, seemingly ready to kill. He spoke of it much later, only to apologize. Never an explanation.
From behind and far off came faint footfalls. Scúrhand willed the dagger’s illumination away, startled suddenly to find Morghan’s bloody hand at his wrist, squeezing with a strength that the mage had seen break bones.
“Light…”
In the warrior’s voice, Scúrhand heard a need he didn’t recognize. In the pulsing gleam that the dagger’s lightning conjured again, Morghan was on his knees. His sword was cast to the side as he pulled out his own dagger, laying the girl gently to the floor. He checked her breathing as he cut the legging away to fully expose the wound beneath. A deep gash, dangerously close to the fast blood.
Morghan motioned to Scúrhand for his waterskin. He flushed the wound, hacking an edge from Thiri’s cloak to bind it. He motioned again, Scúrhand digging within his cloak, pulling free a carefully packed glass vial. A healing draught within it, gleaming pale blue with its own light. The mage thought to remind Morghan that the two of them might have better need for it later, but he said nothing as the warrior slipped the vial to the girl’s lips, checked her suddenly even breathing, her eyes still closed, face ashen.
Scúrhand wasn’t watching, focused only on the footsteps getting closer.
“She’ll have aid soon enough,” he whispered. “Or we could take her. They might ransom…”
“No.” Morghan’s voice held a dangerously dark edge as he grabbed up his sword and stood, appraising the girl’s unconscious form. He pointed down the passageway in the direction that Thiri been running. “Move,” he said.
As they pounded along endless corridors of black stone and dark stairs, Scúrhand lost track of time, lost track of where the noise of pursuit was coming from. He was already gasping air, Morghan barely breathing hard. They hit more patrols twice, Scúrhand taking them out with routine spellcraft, leaving the Norgyr warriors to slumber or to wander befuddled, stripping their armor and weapons off as they went.
Against a foe set for the fight, the subtler spellcraft was often the best offense, Scúrhand had discovered long ago. As he always did when the stakes were high, he felt the call of the eldritch power in him. The darker energy of his blood, the birthright of the names he bore. Waiting always for its chance to be unleashed, but he was content to hold it back for now. It was more than a hunch that told him he would be needing it later.
Ahead, there was sudden darkness. They skidded to a stop where the corridor seemed to disappear into empty space.
“Light,” Morghan whispered. Scúrhand obliged.
At the end of the finished passageways they passed through, a space of raw stone opened up. A blister of shadow, a rough-edged rock dome rising where the floor suddenly fell away. It was cold there, Scúrhand feeling it in the air, in the stone at his feet. Across a space of perhaps a dozen strides, a narrow stone bridge arced into shadow, open space to both sides.
Far below them, a pool of black water faintly caught the light of Scúrhand’s blade and the gleam of lamps where Ectauth’s force was spreading on the opposite side, shifting into defensive positions along a wide terrace.
Footsteps grew louder behind them. Scúrhand glanced ahead and back as Morghan stepped up.
“Call it,” the mage said.
“We fight here, we’re closed in. We break for the bridge fast enough, we have a chance.”
“Of course.”
With a snarling cry that he could only hope sounded like battle-ready rage, Scúrhand soared out across the stone arch, Morghan one stride behind him. The first hail of arrows hit like black rain, Scúrhand summoning up the dweomer that sent each dark-barbed shaft splintering off into empty space. Morghan ran the rough stone of the arch at a speed that made the mage’s stomach turn, the warrior already shouting tactical directives for when they hit the other side. Scúrhand only dimly registered them, all his focus directed to protecting them and hoping that Morghan could avoid looking down to the dark water below.
Ectauth hit them just past the halfway point, as Scúrhand knew he would. He sought out the silver-armored battle-caster in the ranks, but there was no sign of him where he must have been holding back behind the protective cordon of archers and shield fighters. The flare of spellforce exploded in the darkness of the chasm nonetheless, smashing into him and Morghan both like a hammer blow.
He heard the rending of steel, saw the warrior’s longsword sundered. It was a dweomered blade with the strength of ancient magic, Ectauth’s spellcraft as strong as Scúrhand had feared. The warrior’s armor and shield, the mage’s black cloak all flared as they were scoured with eldritch energy, but they were spared. Morghan cursed as he hurled the broken hilt-end of his blade toward a well-armored axe-fighter leaping to the attack, its jagged edge punching through the figure’s neck to unleash a fountain of blood.
Scúrhand touched down along the rough stone ledge that fronted the terrace, breaking hard right behind Morghan exactly as the warrior had called it, heading straight for the thickest bulwark of defenders where they massed behind pillars some dozen strides away. Ectauth missed them completely with his second attack, sending the full fury of his arcane blood slamming down into the ledge behind them. Scúrhand felt a moment’s elation that they were clear, the battle-caster caught off guard by their suicidal charge. No chance to hit them again as they closed with the dark-cloaked Norgyr forces.
Then he heard the grinding of stone twist through the echo of the eldritch blast, and the rough ledge beneath his feet gave way. Ectauth had hit behind them on purpose, judging the relative weakness of the ledge where it was carved from the rough face of the chamber. The bridge cracked and split behind it, cutting off escape. Nowhere to run.
Scúrhand found himself admiring the battle-caster’s tactic as the floor ahead of them cracked cleanly and detached. He hoped he might stay alive to use it himself some day.
Morghan stumbled as the floor disappeared, his feet churning empty air as he fell. Then he felt hands on his shoulders, Scúrhand swooping in beneath him, cape spread like black wings in the shadow. There was a lurch as the mage fought to hold him against the pull of gravity. Then they were rising clumsily, the collapsing bridge shunted off into endless shadow below them.
Ectauth hit them dead center with a pulse of spellfire as they climbed. The shattered landing was almost within reach, Morghan feeling a blast of heat and light swallow them both, Scúrhand taking the brunt of it as he screamed. A razor-point of pain erupted where the mage’s hands gripped beneath Morghan’s shoulders, the copper ring burning as it swallowed eldritch flame.
Then those hands slipped. The warrior twisted in midair, grabbed at Scúrhand’s smoldering form as they both fell. All around was motion and shadow, the black pool circling far below at the edge of vision, no time to react, no time to think.
Morghan felt for a moment’s desperate instinct, obeyed it without question even as the thought flitted through his mind that Scúrhand would have pointed out the futility of his actions if he had been conscious. Through an endless moment of falling, he pulled the cloak from the mage’s shoulder, managed to force most of one arm into the sleeve as he willed the dweomer there to fly with all his will.
It didn’t work. Not enough to send them skyward again at any rate, though Morghan somehow managed to slow their frenzied flight. He felt a lurch as they twisted and shot sideways, felt them slowing even as the water rushed up at them.
There was a moment
of crushing impact, then a moment of numbing cold. There was a
darkness that Morghan fought hard, but it took him anyway in the
end.
When he awoke, he was sprawled on cold stone, no light to betray any detail of place or position. The fact that he was soaked to the skin was the only reason he didn’t wonder idly if he was dead, the ice water of the black pool still clinging to him. He felt the pain in his side that told him he’d broken ribs, senses reeling as he fought to stay awake. He gave vague thanks to fate that his limbs were whole as he rolled to sitting, then began the slow shifting through the blackness to find Scúrhand’s motionless body where it lay three strides away.
He checked the mage’s blood, found a reassuring tremor of life at his neck. Another moment’s grasping and he had the dagger free from its scabbard, awkwardly willing its storm-light to life. A quick turn to all sides, making sure they were alone. The vaulted space around them ran to dark walls on all sides, empty save for the rubble of the collapsed bridge where it spread in chalk-white drifts.
In Scúrhand’s wet cloak, Morghan found a second and last draught of healing. He forced it between the mage’s lips and saw his breathing grow less erratic. He remained unconscious, though. Some injury beyond the physical, or the taint of death magic in Ectauth’s spellcraft. Nothing to do but wait.
In the dagger’s bleaching light, Morghan reached for his longsword before he remembered it was gone. Taken from the ruins of Eltolitinus, the ancient blade had seemed destined for Morghan’s hand when he claimed it. A sign of a new beginning after all that had come in the long year before. Broken now, just as every blade broke in the end.
Around him, Morghan recognized the lines of a tomb with uneasy familiarity, but where six stone vaults stood spaced between the buttresses, their tiers were empty. An equal number of columns circled the center of the chamber, but there was no sign of stairs. No ladders, no handholds, no door or other egress above. No means of exit apparent, no sign of the emptiness ever having been disturbed.
Then above, he saw the buttressed ceiling, and a dark plane of rippling shadow that he realized with a shock was the bottom of the ice water pool they had plunged through. Morghan stared in disbelief for longer than he liked, the water held there somehow by strength of sorcery. Deep enough to cushion the fall from above, then to slow them for the second leg of the fall to the floor below.
He had to assume that up through the pool offered an escape as straightforward as their entrance had been. He tried not to think about what happened if the unseen spellpower that held the water up also prevented them from passing through it again.
Even sharper than the ache in his side, he felt the pain at his shoulder where the black tattoo still burned even after a year. He felt the dark memories that dogged his sleep and that he had spoken of to no one, conscious of the questions always lingering. That spring, when he followed Scúrhand to Myrnan at last, he had tried to turn his back on the dreams that pursued him out of the frontier.
People who had followed him, dead now. Their faces still with him.
Too many times, he had dreamed of the Sorcerers’ Isle. Too much, he dreamed of the darkness of Eltolitinus.
The ruins of Myrnan were a knacker’s bone mill through which would-be heroes were ground. Too many lives spent dreaming of places like it. Too much wealth to be had in the catacombs and tombs that underlay the lost Empire and the empires that fell before it. But even after the thirty centuries since the island-castle was lost, no place in the Elder Kingdoms, perhaps in all the world, held as much lore and wealth of the ages as Myrnan. Rumors spoke of the farmers of the Sorcerers’ Isle too frequently tilling some relic, some blade or other item of arcane power, up from the dead past with the passage of a plow.
Their group had gone in as twenty-one. Only eleven came out again. Morghan had learned the names of most of those who were lost only the night before they took the Black Stair down beneath the earth. All the dreams that had carried them to the Sorcerers’ Isle, all their ambition lingered now only as dust and the memories of those who survived.
Too many dead in the name of unearthing the past and the secrets it held.
Avenge them…
In his head, the unknown voice resonated with a sudden familiarity that made Morghan realize he had all but forgotten it in the chaos of the levels above.
He had too much left to do.
That was the thought that tore at him now. Out from the dark dreams came the memories of the slave caravan that had set out from the foot of the Ceilamist Mountains and wound its way through frost and forest to the barbarian kingdoms of the untamed Jharlaash.
Now, as then, he hadn’t been afraid to die. Not exactly.
Among the Vanyr, it was said that all life, all the world was the balance between dark and light, between good and malice. That great western realm of the Elder Kingdoms was a land whose folk had clashed with the brutality of Norgyr northward and the cunning of Ajaeltha to the blistering south for four millennia, and which had never been conquered.
At nine years old, Morghan had been taken in by a mercenary band in the northern borderlands, his parents barely a memory even then. He held a dagger for the first time. He’d been shown how to kill with it, quick and dirty. Over a fire the night before the young Morghan fought his first sortie, a one-eyed veteran watched for a long while. And seeing the fear in him, the warrior quietly told the boy to not be afraid.
We hide from the darkness all our lives, though darkness takes us all in the end. But those who embrace the dark, those who meet death and are not afraid, can face that end with power, for we know the voice of death when we hear the shadow speak.
The memories he carried now were all that remained of those who had followed him.
We face the dark without fear, the old warrior said. We who know the name of the night.
He had too much left to do.
Vindicator…
He saw the blade then.
Beyond one pillar indistinguishable from all the others, unseen until he circled slowly around it, a figure sat. The mummified warrior was in chain shirt and helm, dead for longer than Morghan cared to guess. The clothes and the leather of belt and scabbard were shredded and split with dry rot and age. The figure sat upright, back to the pillar, legs crossed and head bowed as if deep in the throes of some endless contemplation. The sword in its hands flared in the dagger’s pale light.
It was a hand-and-a-half blade, tapered wide to the base, and hilt-wrapped with pale leather showing no sign of age. The guard was black steel in the shape of what looked like the teeth of some creature Morghan was glad he’d never met. It curved opposite directions at either end, no sign of where it ended and the steel of the blade began. Down the center of that blade, a damask pattern caught the light in blue-white lines. The dust that clung to it was spread evenly, but even as Morghan touched the blade, he watched it slough off like gently falling snow.
In the center of the pommel, he saw the mark of Barrend. The same sigil that his shield bore where the Portown weaponsmith had shown it to him. A black rune that seemed to swallow the light.
Avenge them…
The voice had been calling to him since he set foot within the citadel, but there was a clarity to it now that left no doubt where it was coming from. And where it almost seemed his own voice at the outset, his own thoughts tripping him up as they sometimes did, Morghan felt the words of the blade now as a metallic echo in his mind.
He crouched low, appraising the body carefully for a long while. “Barrend’s Bane,” he whispered, and as he spoke, he felt a faint twist of power thread through him. He ran a callused thumb along the blade, felt its razor edge draw blood. The dead figure’s hands had kept their grip, fingers locked tight to hilt and guard where Morghan was forced to snap them off, one by one.
When he finally seized the sword, Morghan felt the power again, spiking in a sensation like the emptiness of unspoken words. A bloodless rage twisted through him just as the voice had twisted through him before, and in that instant, in a heartbeat, in the rawness of memory where it clawed at him from the dark dreams that the day tried to push away, he knew that anything was possible.
Too many things still to be done.
So many debts to repay.
Avenge them…
“The black mark, on the girl’s arm. What is it?”
Morghan started, spinning back to where Scúrhand was rising shakily.
“Not important,” the warrior said as he handed the dagger back, tried to mask the tremor in his hand. He didn’t ask after Scúrhand’s return to consciousness. No other pleasantries between them. Not necessary anymore.
Morghan raised the new blade carefully, felt its balance send the subtle signals of control through his arm.
“What is this place?” he asked as he began to swing the sword in long arcs, working to assess its subtleties, adjusting to them. Working on a level below thought, below consciousness. The sword seemed almost weightless in his hands, shifting like something alive.
“Old,” was all Scúrhand said. He was pacing slowly, still finding his strength as he circled along the walls. “Older even than the citadel, judging by the stonework here. The one built first, then the other raised above it.”
“What was that one’s story, do you think?” Morghan gestured to the figure, slumped in shadow now.
“In a tomb, one shouldn’t be surprised to find the dead,” Scúrhand said. The dagger was still the only light, shadow lurching around them each time he swung it to scan to either side.
“No dead here except him, though. And usually you arrange to be laid down, not sit.”
Morghan saw the mark then. At the figure’s shoulder, a faint red glow flared through a dark shroud of rusted chainmail links. He stepped back instinctively, the bastard sword up before him as if he expected the figure to suddenly rise.
Scúrhand saw. He followed Morghan’s gaze to the corpse, staring for a moment before he stepped up to kneel at its side. He felt the warrior’s blade follow his movement, ready.
“Unless the one you have to arrange to bury is yourself,” the mage said thoughtfully. He carefully pulled away the screen of mail to reveal a mark still etched in the leathery flesh beneath.
It was a shape Morghan had never seen before. Three part-circles turning around each other, interlocked like a harrier’s claws. At their ends, three scalloped blades were nocked, their edges locked into a triad. The symbol pulsed with a blood-red gleam, rising and fading in a steady pattern like the beating of a dying heart.
Vindicator…
The warrior felt the voice as much as he heard it now. A presence pressing in on him, threading through his hands where they wrapped the haft of the bastard sword tightly. He felt that red glow burn his eyes suddenly, felt the pain of the slave brand at his neck. Three loops, interlocked. Their shapes were wholly different, but he felt the two sigils reflected in each other in a way he didn’t understand.
“What is it?” he hissed.
“Was, not is,” Scúrhand said. “Lotherasien. But he’s as dead as he looks, I assure you.”
Morghan’s eyes narrowed. “The Imperial Guard?” He had little interest in history, but it was a name he knew. For the fifteen hundred years that the Empire of the Lothelecan held sway across the continent, the Lotherasien were the force by which they ruled. Elite troops, legendary in their dedication, falling to shadow just as inevitably as the Empire had in the end. Fallen to the unnamed cataclysm that turned the distant capital of Ulannor Mor to a sheet of black glass. Another bit of history that even Morghan had heard.
“Why is he here?”
Scúrhand said nothing in answer, but he glanced back to the sword in Morghan’s hand.
“Is that the blade they seek?”
Morghan only shrugged. Scúrhand was thoughtful a long while. “So long as we hold it, negotiations might go in our favor…”
“They won’t have it,” the warrior said.
Scúrhand laughed. “This is hardly the time for trophy hunting…”
“Arsanc will not hold this blade while I live!” Morghan’s cry cut the silence, cut the cold. The smile died on Scúrhand’s lips, no sound now except the warrior’s breath, visible in the chill air. Morghan looked up to see the mage’s gaze fixed on the guard of the blade, the black mark there.
“This Arsanc,” he said carefully. “The one the girl spoke of. This one you seem to know, who is he?”
“Just a name.”
“Indeed. The Freelord of Thorfin in Norgyr goes by that name.”
Morghan wouldn’t meet his friend’s gaze. “And when did the politics of the northlands become one of your endless fascinations?”
“When politics crosses over into history, I pay attention. Arsanc of Thorfin was poised to become High King of Gracia, five years past. The height and end of the Wars of Succession that restored Gracia to monarchy and sanity. A long fall from grace for him since then, or so they say.”
“Do they.” Not a question. A spark of anger in the warrior now as Scúrhand pulled history from memory.
“He was killed even as he tried to claim the throne,” the mage said thoughtfully. Remembering. “Gone for a time, then brought back to the light. Or so they say.”
Morghan said nothing, but Scúrhand saw the uncertainty in the flicker of the warrior’s eyes as he looked away.
“He controlled all the northlands once. Threw it away for the sake of wanting more. Reclaimed Thorfin after a time, or most of it. You fought in Reimari, you said. The battles for the borderlands. Those were Arsanc’s lands you were warring for, after he’d lost them.”
Morghan glanced back quickly. The look in his eyes told Scúrhand he hadn’t known any of it, and that he was angrier now that he did. He shrugged coldly.
“My interest is more recent.”
“Recent enough to have brought us here,” Scúrhand said, understanding suddenly. “You knowing that this force of Arsanc’s would be here to meet us. Yet you asked me of Razeen, said you sought the lore and history of the shield. That maker’s mark. But that quest meant nothing, didn’t it? A ruse to keep my company.”
Morghan stood in dark silence a moment. “Can you fly us out?”
“I can fly myself out,” Scúrhand said. He pulled the black cloak tight around him as he paced away.
Twelve days into the nightmare of Eltolitinus, Morghan had done his closest dance with death. Twelve days in, fate only knows how many levels deep into the ancient dungeons of Myrnan that were once the foundations raising up the entire Sorcerers’ Isle in towers of white stone. In a dead garden of onyx trees, he was scouting with three mercenaries of the Vanyr, battle-hardened and senses sharp as slivered glass. He was leading, not watching behind as they were cut down by living shadow that seeped from the stones.
Morghan had tried to fight his way through to them, only to fall beneath the paralyzing cold of living death, nearly consumed. Scúrhand saved him, pulled him up from a narrow well of black where the shapeless forms of the three who had already fallen tore at him with taloned fingers, their faces, their bodies shredded by a darkness with no end.
In their names… the sword whispered to him. Morghan started, stumbled back even before he realized he was moving. With effort, he loosened his grip on the pale leather of the haft, knuckles white where his fingers were locked tight.
“When I left you in Einthra a year past, I traveled north.” Against the silence, Morghan heard his own voice, uncertain. Across the chamber, Scúrhand turned back, the warrior pale at the fading edge of the dagger’s glow. “I took up a call to arms. Mountain giants of the Ceilamist raiding farmsteads, sweeping down as far as the Thorann wood.”
“Thorann in Thorfin. Those are Arsanc’s lands.”
“Those were Arsanc’s lands. He abandoned the frontier two days past midwinter. Didn’t want to commit the resources necessary to defend it. Homesteaders, farmers. I told myself I could save them.”
In the mountains of Jharlaash, in the blackness beneath Myrnan, Morghan had learned the name of the night. But rather than quelling the warrior’s fear, that name had scarred him. Cut him through flesh, bone, and spirit. Filled his dreams with the faces of those who followed him and were gone now.
Scúrhand was silent a while. “The girl. Thiri.”
“She bears the slave mark. One of those given up, cleared from the mountains. Marked for sale to Jharlaash along with me. Arsanc must have found some worth in her. Bought her back.”