A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  “I will sell it to you,” she said, and there was an even tone to her voice that told him this is what she was wanting to say, what she had practiced, waiting for her chance to approach him. Beneath the words, he felt the unease. A sadness that told him the girl held other words still unspoken that were more important by far.

  “They say that your kind carries gold and silver,” she said. “They say you covet it above all else. I see your knives, but they are not strong. You could use a sword like this.”

  “Because I am weak? Misshapen?” He took three steps toward her, felt himself lurch as the sharpness of an unseen stone cut the cracked flesh of his foot. The golden eyes were impassive.

  “You are ugly,” she agreed in the matter-of-fact appraisal of the innocent. “But it is not your fault. The sword told me.”

  He felt a chill that was not the wind. He wrapped the cloak tighter around himself. “What is your name, child?”

  “Hoi’ul,” she replied. “It means green.”

  “It means more than that,” he said. “Hoi’ul is the green of spring’s first leaves, wet with sunlit dew.” To her look of mild surprise, he said “I know your people’s tongue, child.”

  “What is your name, then?”

  He had practiced his answer to the question for all the long years of his new life, but he faltered now for the first time.

  “I am called Lárow,” he said.

  The girl laughed, a musical sound. “I know your people’s tongue,” she said. “Lárow is not a name. It is what your kind call the leaders of the silver-slave gangs. ‘The boss.’ ”

  He was silent a while. The Darkmoon was cresting the trees now, fighting to stay afloat on a torrent of thin cloud boiling in from the distant sea. “That is what I am.”

  “But what is your name?”

  He heard the wind, hissing in the ears set low on his head as lumps of gristle. “My name is gone. My story is gone. What I am now is what I do. I am Lárow.”

  “All folk have a story.”

  She is fighting to breathe when he finds her, fighting to shed the last tears that mask the sight of him as she dies in his arms. He sees only darkness, feels the dank must of water and rot that claims her body as she slips into the fen and away. And he rages then with the fury of all his ancestors. Pushes into the rope-vined trees with a strength that shatters branches, drives his footsteps at a silent run, clears the path between him and bloody destiny.

  In his memory, he saw the eyes that had been the bright amber of the girl’s own gaze cloud over. She looked down to the sword still leaning against her, appraised it as if she had forgotten it was there. He felt the pain of heart and memory, felt his vision blur. Grasping for words, for some distraction.

  “What is your story, Hoi’ul?”

  She looked up again, and the weight of that golden gaze drove into him like a mailed fist. The wind picked up, clawing the clouds as twisting shadow scoured the trees.

  “The sword belonged to a lord named Voosal’hal. I killed him.”

  He is young then, and he bears both the name and form he was born with. She is named Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his people’s tongue.

  For the nine days that the Darkmoon blossomed full against the fading dusk, he had lived in this isolated arm of a larger spread of swampland, its scent and the low whistle of night wind in the reeds speaking to him of the home he made himself forget. He came here alone, moving always in the shadow of dusk and dawn to hide from those who might see him. Those who would react with fear and distrust to the Mockery-face he had learned to hate.

  He had found the village after nightfall. At the edge of the larger watercourse that lost itself in the mire where he rested, then trickled to a muddy wash twisting south and east to meet the sea. He passed by once, was drawn back to gaze at the small cluster of huts and stockade pens rising from the wetlands. Shallow-bottomed swamp boats rocked gently at a dock of sweetly rotting redwood, bells glimmer-singing along their prows to ward off the spirits of the night. He smelled roast meat, saw the firelight at shuttered windows. He heard the music of laughter, sensed the warmth within as he passed by again, unseen.

  The clan lord, name ever-unspoken and seething venomous in the pain of dreams, dies shrieking that night, as do all the rest who broke her. Dying slowly. All of them. The clan lord is last, throat torn out to mark her last breath, anointing the green-black of his regal robes with blossoms of blood that are the Darkmoon’s glowering red. Limbs shattered in thirds to mark the breaking of her once-strong body. The flesh of his sex torn free and eaten blood-raw as he screams, for the sorrow visited on her, the final words she whispered to him. Faint through the haze of blood at her lips, all vigor drained from her as he cradles her tightly in the dizzying tremor of his fear.

  “I killed him,” the girl said again, and the sweet timbre of the voice was no less musical as it crafted the dark confession. Direct in the manner of one repeating something for the sake of its own acceptance. Even through the cloak, he felt another tremor of cold and fear thread his pale flesh.

  The girl was younger than he first thought. Too long since he had walked among his own kind, so that their form and movement were grown foreign to him.

  He had to turn away for a moment. He crouched and pretended to fumble with something within his meager belongings. His hands were shaking, fear snaking through him to thread his weakness, tie a knot in his throat that he could not swallow.

  “He threatened my father,” the girl called. “He lusted for my mother. It is the way among our tribe, and the sword gave him strength and put the fear into those he hurt.”

  “But not you.”

  A trembling glance back. The girl shrugged.

  They come for him then. His people’s nobility is a razor-sharp blade too easily rusted, too quick to corruption. Too eager to forget that rank is born of honor, instead giving honor to rank. Order is their way, and the way of clan lords to lay claim to unwed maids in the nine days of the full Darkmoon that are the nights of sacrifice and remembrance. And so they come for him, too late to stop his wrath and vengeance, but ready to invoke the law to send his spirit after hers.

  Too slow to catch him, though. Never expecting the rage that fuels him that night, betrayed by fate and blood and clan. And so he betrays them all in turn, for the sake of the blood-black madness that consumes him.

  “The sword was his,” she said again, as if she was trying to focus the light of her memory on that one specific truth. “He slept with it in his hut, and no one would go there because they were afraid.”

  “When you hate,” he whispered, “you forget how to be afraid.”

  The meager relics that were all he possessed were a handful of coins and polished stones. Totems he had collected on his recent journeys. Mud-streaked cloth with which he shrouded himself, hiding the vile sight of the Mockery body. Things temporary and fleeting and mundane, carried for their inability to trigger the dark memories that stretched behind him. Anything that threatened to become a memory was cast aside.

  “There was blood,” she whispered, the wind echoing the emptiness in the words. “He threatened my father and he lusted for my mother, and his sword called to me and I took it and I killed him.”

  As from a dream, he wakes once that fateful night. Sees his village burning, sees his people dead and dying.

  Within the vision that the flames make, he sees her face. Eyes that are the gold of a summer sunrise, warm against the skin.

  “Swords do not speak,” he said evenly. He tried to focus, tried to force the memory away. “You hold a sword in your hand, you can’t help but be aware that you hold the power of another’s life and death. That by that power, others might trade life and death with you. But it is your own voice you hear. Warning you to watch for the simplest incaution, and of what you might become if you fail.”

  “The sword talked to me,” she said again, as if he hadn’t heard her properly. “The sword looks inside. In his hut, he had pillows and mats of si
lk and reed. The sword lay on its own pillow like a bed, next to his bed where he slept and where I killed him. I seized the sword and I killed him. There was so much blood…”

  He felt the helplessness twisting in him. He fought it, stilled it with the careful training of thought and mind that had kept him alive this long. The calm in which he learned to drown himself as he tore himself from the past. He cleared his eyes of the wetness that came with the Mockery’s weakness. The girl was watching.

  “I touched it and it looked inside him. There was something black in him, and I knew what I had to do.”

  He was silent for a long while. He felt an ache in the weak shoulders, the frail body’s signal that he had stood for too long. “And now?”

  “Now I don’t want to do it again,” she whispered. “I saw you sneaking, because you are not of this place. You will not stay here. You could use a sword like this. You can take it far away where it will not call to me.”

  The wind was rising. He thought he caught the scent of the distant sea, another memory he tried to crush, felt it slip out of reach, hanging there. He shivered again, not from the cold.

  “Show me this lord of yours.”

  On that first long trip south as a hired blade, he had watched over a caravan carrying a fortune in gold to be exchanged for illicit magics of Ajaeltha’s self-styled southern empire. Through all those long months of the desert, he felt the memory of his birthplace. Felt the hunger for that lost land burn in him like the heat of the Ajaelthan sands.

  Then on the night they were to return, he heard the night wind call her name. The Darkmoon was waxing, filling out within the reddening shadow of the sky.

  That night long ago, he had turned his back on the way home and sought the dark road, slipping away from the caravan and the others who had come to trust him with their lives and who had never learned his real name.

  She led him now on a roundabout route through the bog, racing easily through the tall grass even with the sword dragging behind her. He was winded keeping up to her, stumbling on legs not made for this soft ground. The body lay in a shallow pit roughly hacked out beneath a bank of black peat. He saw the rough edges, knew that the girl had dug it with her bare hands.

  Whatever regal bearing this so-called lord managed in life, it was far beyond reach now. He gagged at the scent, needed to move upwind. Another of his weaknesses. The girl barely seemed to notice it. The body was face down, a bloated mass of green-black flesh stained red where the denizens of the swamp had been at it. Three days since the girl dumped it here, he reckoned. Three days it took her to work up the courage to talk to the monster he was now. A monster so weak, so base, that it would need this blade to match the strength of normal folk.

  As from a dream, he wakes twice. Sees himself reflected in black water, falling. Cut down by the madness he unleashed.

  These nine slow days, the red Darkmoon hung full in the sky as the bright Clearmoon pulled steadily away from it along the far horizon. On this ninth day, he awoke at dawn and prepared the rites that his people called Ma’atlese. The deepening. As he had every other morning of his watch, he sensed the long road home that he had turned his back on, felt it calling him with a voice of firelight and friend-song and laughter and fresh fish roasted on low coals.

  Betrayer and betrayed.

  Where he looked for the road that lay ahead now, all was darkness.

  He is young then, and he bears both the name and form he was born with. She is named Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his people’s tongue.

  He blinked back the memory, locked the Mockery’s soft teeth to stifle the sudden rush of breath.

  She lives long enough to whisper words in his ear that he cannot hear for the coursing storm of rage. Ears only for the blood pounding in his chest, for the fury burning forge-hot in the tight-squeezed space of heart and mind.

  As he appraised the body, he felt her eyes on him, knew she was wondering why he brought her to this place.

  “Leave it here,” was all he said.

  His people’s ways are the old ways. But in the golden mire of the fen that is his people’s home, there lives a magic older still.

  “That ends it,” he said. “For both of you.”

  The girl shook her head, didn’t understand.

  He spoke evenly. He found the words in her own tongue, which had been his tongue once. The Mockery’s voice was clumsy in all but its most common speech, but that speech had no words to fully capture what he must say.

  “With his life, he has been made to pay. With the pain of your heart, you have paid, but your mind and conscience will try to make you pay again as long as this blade stays in your hands. Don’t let them.”

  He reached within the cloak, felt for the pouch he knew was there. He drew it forth, slipped its weight to the girl’s grasp. The golden eyes narrowed in suspicion, her hand flinching to feel the shift of coins within weathered canvas. It was copper and silver, the cold currency of the distant towns. He carried the gold of the cities as well, but the girl’s family would have no more way to spend it than he would. These folk, a village this size, so far from the trade roads, meant that the girl’s father had likely never worked for coin. This gift of his was more wealth than her family would earn in a lifetime.

  “Never show it all at once. Spend it only among strangers, the traders along the river roads. Never among anyone who might question your getting of it.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because when we sleep, we travel,” he said. “When we dream, we come to the place where each new day’s journey starts. At this place, there stands the light road. There stands the dark road.”

  Over years, over centuries, more creatures than could be counted are lost in the golden mire of the fen that is his home, his people’s home. Over years, over centuries, lost and dead, pulled down and trapped in the place between, held in the muck and mire of the witching water lapping at the ruins of ancient castles that were the signpost-bones of long-forgotten history.

  “I understand,” the girl said softly. Her hands on the sword were trembling.

  “No,” he said. “Because folk think that the difference between the light road and the dark road is the destination. But all roads lead to the place that fate and choice take them. It makes no difference in the journey.”

  On the air, the storm that the day had promised was finally stirring. Even his weak senses caught its scent, and the faint aura of distant thunder that brightened the sky.

  “Once you step down the dark road,” he said, “you can no longer see the path back. On the light road, when you look back, you always see the way you came.”

  “What if you are afraid to look back?” she said quietly.

  He dies in the witching water that night. Embraces the clutching-claw darkness that is the sweet shroud of forgetting that he craves above all else, with which he might burn away the final memory of her face as she touches her tongue to his tear-streaked lips and dies.

  Black water. The red moon hanging heavy and full within a sea of cloud that twists on the wind like ripples of blood.

  “Set the blade atop the body,” he said, and she did.

  Countless creatures were lost in the fen, but few of his kind. Tough, hardened by life along the black and gold of the witching water. The dead here are the Mockeries that rise to rule the isle from within the weakness of their soft, fat flesh. Drawn to the fen by the light of gold and silver, coveted above all else. Drawn to drown and die there by the score, by the hundreds as their softness is shredded by tooth and claw, choked to stillness by vine and black water, swallowed whole by magic dark and old.

  “Go now,” he said, and she did.

  Dead and not dead, drawing life from the old magic that reshapes and reforms him. Like raw clay clumped to the base form of nature, slowly sculpted by fate’s laughing hand to final shape. Body shattered. Soul suffusing into the witching water to be reborn.

  He felt the first drops of rain strike from the hiss
ing sky. Grey cloud overhead was a billowing shroud that swallowed the stars, but still the Darkmoon on the crest of the empty horizon blazed bright, filling his sight and his mind as if he might drown within it.

  The curse was a thing he could not talk about. A thing not of his making, not of his control. The curse had saved him all those years ago. The curse had let him live past the point when he should have died, had brought him now to a place where he wanted to die, where that thought had gripped him time and time again. And each time, he heard her voice from that night long ago, when he clutched her dying form tight to his breast and wept for both their pain.

  We are born of earth and fen, blood and water, fire and bone. We are the journey, not its end, and we will go together in memory where we cannot walk in body and mind.

  From the black sky, the rain advanced as a chill curtain. He felt it hiss through the grass, racing toward him as a striking serpent. He closed his eyes, let it fall across him. He felt his soul drink the life-giving wetness that he needed, felt the pain and the strength tear through him as it always did.

  Always look back, she told him, and he had turned her words to silence and let the madness take him that last night of both their lives.

  Do not walk the dark road…

  In a sudden and endless agony, the body of the Mockery that was his rebirth was shredded away by the storm of blood and bone that erupted inside him. He felt the soft flesh of weakness turn to scaled strength, felt the muscles of arm and back, leg and shoulder ripple and twist like knotted whipcord. He knew the exquisite ache as bones broke and reknit, as his joints twisted and thickened. He felt his face and maw reshaped as his swelling tongue laughingly flicked through a screen of razored teeth thrust from bleeding gums. He felt the weak fingers harden to talons, tearing out through the last vestiges of soft flesh with a strength that could lay open the deadly bog-drake from heart to head with a single strike.

  The crest on his shoulders twisted and flared as it unfolded from the line of his spine, catching the rain that pounded down harder now even as its chill numbed the pain. He felt his sight sharpen, saw the faint haze of storm and red moon’s-light flare like the bright of noon, and the song of wind and thunder was a symphony to all his senses of sight and scent and sound.