A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  There was no one else around, but he thought he heard distant shouts from farther down the mountainside. He was wary as he worked, but no one showed up for the better part of the afternoon as he carefully laid a series of tripwire snares along the path. They were of a design he had shaped himself over long years of hunting, and of convincing the mountain cats to take their own hunting away from his house and his ravine. Each was anchored with a thick-twisted trunk, bent low to the ground and holding enough spring strength to stun a horse in its tracks. He hid each loop of rope with a mulch of mold and broad blue-weed leaves when he was done.

  With the axe’s magic, Hjorn jaunted back to the porch and waited the time it took for the first screams to be heard over the river’s echoing roar. He saw the trees shake where whoever was coming for him was tossed left and right. Hjorn hoped it would make them think twice about another assault. They came again at dawn to tell him he was wrong.

  For four days, he watched as the Gorbeyna and the Hogorba and their huge reeking Birgard barbarian-cousins of the western mountains threw themselves at the cliff face but were turned back. On the fifth day, he heard shrieks and the clash of swords before dawn, and the horde gave ground to mud-streaked Tallfolk of the hills, who howled and fired a hail of heavy stone-tipped arrows at the porch for the better part of the afternoon.

  The next morning, individual warriors sent ropes and steel hooks up to the porch, which Hjorn dutifully cut free with the axe as he protected himself from arrows by sliding beneath his kitchen table like it was a turtle’s shell. The day after that, the mountain tribes squabbled with a mercenary band of hulking Tallfolk and the more graceful Ilvani for the right to assault Hjorn’s house. Two stealthy rogues clambered up the cliff face but were driven back with hails of arrowheads that Hjorn collected from the scores sent against him the days before. He had no way to shoot them, but carefully dropped from the top of the tall cliff in clusters, they picked up a healthy amount of momentum by the time they hit.

  He was dozing the following dawn, when a two-score strong force of Tallfolk warriors in full armor and on horseback announced their presence with trumpets and sent the mercenaries scattering. How they made it up the switchback trail, Hjorn was afraid to even guess. They charged from the tree line with lances at the ready, but then circled around aimlessly when they saw the bluff rising before them.

  Hjorn was getting angry now. It had been a long while since he slept more than a few fitful winks at a time, forced to stay on his guard through night and day. The faintly heard voice of the axe was a constant dark droning in his mind.

  “Go home and leave me alone!” he yelled to the riders circling threateningly below him, but a hail of arrows and insults drove him off the porch and inside. He grabbed the axe from the mantle, ignoring its vicious curses as he jaunted into a poplar bluff a day’s walk down the trail. He jaunted back a short while later with an enormous hornets’ nest in hand that he pitched off the edge of the porch. The vicious insects had no time to notice that they had even been moved until they smashed into the riders and their mounts at high speed.

  For another week, they came. For another week, Hjorn carried out hit and run attacks on the growing number of warriors and mercenaries amassing below his front door. Using the power of the axe, he shifted between his home and the wilderness around the bluff in search of increasingly ingenious ammunition.

  When the Ilvani war-mages came, they blasted his porch and front door with fire and lightning, but the stones that Hjorn had laid using the ancient craft of his people held fast. In response, he collected boulders from the shattered rockslide wall that was as close as anyone could come to the dark chasm where the river disappeared. He dropped them from the edge of the porch, sending them down the bluff with a sound louder than the spells that had scorched his walls.

  He jaunted into the camps of some sort of doglike creatures that walked on two legs, leaving with them a brace of skunks he plucked from their twilight dens in a distant meadow. Over long days and sleepless nights, he countered the fury of the horde below him with his best ideas, but Hjorn’s ideas were beginning to run out. The axe’s voice was growing more and more erratic in his mind. It had moved beyond threats aimed at him and was shrieking about how it wanted to kill everyone, everywhere, just because.

  Or were those his own thoughts he was hearing? Hjorn wondered suddenly. It was getting hard to tell.

  One morning, there was a great battle in the camps below, various factions laying into each other with fire and steel as if the horrific vengeance that the axe screamed for had overwhelmed them. When it was done, the day was passing and the woods were in flames. Bodies littered the foot of the bluff, the Tallfolk and the Gorbeyna and Hogorba and Ilvani and Doglings slinking away into the twilight shadows of the trees.

  Two figures stood alone, both of the Tallfolk. One was an armored warrior, pale of face and dark of eye, his gore-flecked black mail glowering crimson in the light of the setting sun. The other was a mere boy, some sort of squire or page by Hjorn’s view. He carried an oversized pack on his back. A battle standard showing a white horse rampant on a field of blue fluttered atop a long pole leaning on his shoulder.

  With calm determination, the warrior walked to the foot of the bluff. Slowly, methodically, he began to ascend, the greatsword that was near as tall as he was slung to a back scabbard. Despite the weight of weapon and armor, he clambered up the cliff like a shadowed spider. His squire stayed below, watching with wide eyes and gamely waving the knight’s banner aloft to catch the twisting breeze.

  Over the previous weeks, Hjorn had learned a hundred different ways by which he might have dispatched this new threat. But as he heard the axe’s voice murmuring dark benedictions in its unknown tongues, he understood something suddenly. A thing he silently cursed himself for not having realized before.

  Though he still couldn’t understand the axe’s words, he knew their meaning now. The blade was calling for a new master. One worthy of its dark ambition. All the fighting, all the bloodshed, and he could have ended it at any time if he had only known it sooner.

  Hjorn was no hero. He wasn’t his grandfather, standing in the firestorm of Fignarmald like a resolute wall of sinew and steel.

  He was tired. He stood and watched the warrior climb.

  As the armored figure clambered over the ledge where the stairs were once attached, he drew the greatsword in a fluid motion. He swung it one-handed in a wide circle before he let it come to rest before him, tip down as he clutched grip and pommel to his armored chest. He pulled his helm off, tossing it aside as he shook his head, a thick mane of black hair rippling like dark cloud against the sunset. He appraised Hjorn with glaring eyes.

  “You are an unclean scion of a darkling race,” the knight said in a commanding voice, and Hjorn’s eyes narrowed because he wasn’t entirely sure what ‘scion’ meant. “You have sullied a great blade of power with your touch, and you will pay.”

  In the words, Hjorn heard a thread of nobility and grace, all but lost now within the dark voice that twisted through his mind and the warrior’s alike.

  Kill him, the axe whispered.

  “Your life is forfeit,” the warrior said.

  Vengeance left sleeping cold for over five thousand years is thine, and in the name of Immaru and Rasilnar which is the Shrike which is the Butcher Blade, thou wilt rule the world!

  “I will rule the world…”

  “Great,” Hjorn said. “Here.”

  He took a single step forward. He spun the axe so that the haft was held out toward the warrior. He sensed a moment’s uncertainty in the knight and the axe alike.

  “Take it,” Hjorn growled. “I don’t care anymore. Rule whatever you want.”

  Kill him! the axe screamed, and its voice was a dark pain rooting deep in Hjorn’s skull. Thou wilt kill him for ignorance and impudence and leave his bloated corpse for the crows!

  “Treachery!” the warrior screamed, but his hand shot out to grasp the black leather of
the haft. Hjorn felt the strength in that grip as he was yanked forward, stumbling to one knee as the knight hefted the axe high with his free hand.

  Thou art the chosen one! Thou art the master of blades and the heir to Jhanasaath, and the power of ages dwells in this steel!

  “I am the chosen one!” the warrior screamed, and his voice was the axe’s voice suddenly, twisted through with an evil whose darkness echoed down an endless well of years and longing.

  “So just take it then. Go!”

  But the knight only flung the greatsword aside as if it weighed nothing, letting it clang to the stones of the porch as he raised the axe above Hjorn’s head in preparation for a killing stroke. Hjorn stared, wide-eyed. Where the blade caught the last light of the sun, its edge gleamed red like the madness in the dark knight’s eyes.

  “I am the master of blades and keeper of the Shrike, and its power is mine!”

  “Suit yourself,” Hjorn said.

  Still on one knee, he shot up a heavy-fingered hand to slow the axe’s descent. Not enough to stop it, but in his instant of contact with the haft where it joined the blade, Hjorn thought of a place he knew well. It was a place he saw each morning when he stepped onto his porch to breathe in the cool air of the early dawn, and that he saw each night as he watched the sun set through the haze of mist.

  He concentrated on that place even as the descending axe twisted from his grip. With the blade a finger’s breadth from his face, he felt the beginning of the quick lurch as the weapon jaunted. A sensation as familiar to Hjorn now as sight and touch after weeks of sending himself hither and yon across the mountains. At his direction, the axe carried the warrior out a hundred paces into empty air, high above the whirlpool where the river coursed away beneath the mountain and into shadow.

  The dark knight screamed all the long way down, but his was the only voice Hjorn heard.

  He stood in the familiar roar of the river for a long while. Along the edge of the woods below, he saw the last straggling camps of those who were defeated by the dark warrior pack up and leave. In the touch of the wind, where he had heard the axe’s dark voice for long days now, there was only silence.

  Carefully, Hjorn kicked the helmet, then the greatsword to the edge of the porch and over, watching as they tumbled noisily down the cliff and disappeared into the dark below. He hadn’t heard the sword talk, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  He turned back to the house, more tired and sad than he had ever been. Then he stopped.

  Hjorn stepped to the edge of the porch again. Below him, alone in the twilight, the young squire stood at what would have been the perfect location to watch the dark knight drop to his death. The standard had fallen at his side.

  Hjorn made his way carefully down the cliff with a lantern, dropping the last short distance and dusting himself off. He walked over to the squire, stopping awkwardly a few strides away. The boy was even younger than he had looked at first glance. Still a few years from the start of a beard, or what passed for one among the Tallfolk. He continued to stare out where the rising mist was lost now to darkness, bright eyes pale with fear.

  “Sorry,” Hjorn said after a few moments, but the squire was silent. “You bound to the black-haired guy?”

  The boy nodded.

  “He your kin?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Friend?”

  No.

  “You’re not working for him anymore. You got someplace to go?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Any family?”

  Hjorn saw tears welling. He tugged at his beard, perplexed for a moment.

  “Do you like stories?”

  Slowly, the boy looked up. He held Hjorn’s gaze for a long while.

  Hjorn felt a point of bright pride welling up inside him. He stood tall.

  “I have a guest room,” he said.

  In the ruins of the attackers’ camps, Hjorn found a brace of grouse fresh killed, cleaned, and left behind. He washed them with clear water from the oversized pack of the squire’s, then slung that pack on his belt. He lifted the boy to his shoulders, felt him cling tightly as he climbed.

  He got the fire going with the last of the wood and a couple of bundles of broken arrows for kindling. He had been stuck on the porch for too long, would walk down to the pine grove tomorrow. Also, he had stairs to fix.

  Hjorn cooked grouse for dinner and he told the story of the trickster-warrior Roinara. She had walked alone into the Fane of Last Light, bargaining with the dead heroes who dwelt there for the mortal life of Prince Glinus the Forgotten.

  The boy clapped and clapped when Hjorn was done.

  As he went to sleep that night, the young squire comfortable in the guest room, Hjorn realized for the first time that he was wrong before when he talked to the axe. When it offered him its dark pact the first time and all the times thereafter. Now, Hjorn thought. Only now, he had everything he needed.

  THE TIMES HE JOURNEYED to the Free City, he stayed in a series of rented rooms in a dozen different wards as a matter of longstanding habit, because there were people who sought his counsel from time to time, and he was determined that it should not be so easy to find it. There had been messages this trip, left in the Smooth Swan and the Wild Godling and the Wyvern’s Eye where he was known, but these were from a month or more ago, it having been three months before that and High Spring the last time he passed through the Thirty-League Gate.

  Spells of warding and watching that he had placed on the single door and the dark stairs to the Urorfidith-ward loft confirmed no one passing by that he would have recognized by face or name, just as the landlord confirmed no visitors asking after him. No one skulking about with vaguely transparent inquiries regarding the dark-haired mage under any of the names he traveled by. So it was that he was pulled surprised from the haze of a dark sleep by the distant sound of the spell-locked outside door split from shattered hinges in the dead of night, and pounding footsteps along the dark hall that cleared his head in a heartbeat of all his unremembered dreams.

  He slipped naked from the bed, felt the chill where the fire had died as he pressed back to the wall and was ready, the incantation on his lips by instinct, sent across the chamber with a snarling twist of both hands and hitting the intruders hard where they smashed through the dark oak of the foyer. He counted a half-dozen at a quick glance, armed and all in uniforms of dun and rust-red, save for the leader in a cloak of sable that hid his face and form as he toppled and fell.

  It was an old spell and common enough, one of the first he ever mastered, but made more potent since then with special flourishes all his own. It dropped them now without a sound. Then a seventh appeared, last in from the shadows. Blade drawn as he avoided the worst of the spell’s effect, faltering but not fallen. The mage made a twisted flick of callused fingers, a pulse of unseen force unleashed that cracked the figure’s head back against the wall like a warrior’s backhand blow.

  The guard collapsed alongside all the rest. With a word, the mage threw light to the air, let it spread to scour the shadows and mark the bodies cast down in the eldritch slumber whose dreams they would try in vain to forget.

  In the pale gleam of that light, he saw the spill of golden hair from the woman who had been first in, the black hood thrown back to let it fall free.

  She hadn’t been leading them. The shouting in the dark-paneled corridor. They were chasing her, he realized numbly, because his thought was seized in the iron grip of a recognition and a memory he tried vainly to shunt away to the shadow where it had lain for so long.

  He listened now, forced himself to focus away and out from the circle of light where he stood. He had first chosen the loft in the upper reaches of the university quarter for the raucous isolation he tried to ignore now, the halls and taverns and campuses below and around him an unsleeping city within a city. Within the silence that was the alternative, he had never been able to sleep. Voices and music rang out from beyond the ruined door now, echoed fro
m the unseen terrace behind him, the same as every night. But no sound of pursuit from either side.

  The rooms were part of a high terrace that clung to the upper tiers of the old Ilvani quarter, reached by stair and bridge from across and above a broad courtyard of sculpted white stone and restless trees. It was two storeys up along the closest approach, and the fact that he heard only the mundane sounds of the street below told him that the guards and the woman who was their quarry had all made that climb unobserved, quiet under cover of night.

  The same badge marked all their shoulders. He saw it, gaze focused there to force his eyes from her face. A red hammer entwined with fulvous ivy, a noble’s standard, but even unrecognized as it was, he would have known this was a noble’s guard detail by the cut and crispness of their cloth. A long way from home, but no dirt from the road on them. No stain of damp from the rain that had been falling for most of the past week where the winds of autumn pushed in from the distant eastern seas.

  He gently lifted her with one bare foot under the shoulder, turning her. He saw her face emerge full from shadow, saw the narrow line of the mouth he had kissed for the first time when he was twelve years old.

  He stared for a long moment, then turned away. He occupied himself at the bookshelves, finding what he looked for despite his state of distraction. He pulled on tunic and leggings, a high-collared jacket. Slowly. He needed to not look at her for long enough that when he turned back finally, he saw her face again as it was, not as it had been. The elegant line of cheek and jaw possessed a regal edge that it had not worn ten years before.

  No, he thought darkly. Eleven years now.

  A weariness to the set of the face. Lines of worry there that hid the memory of the easy smile of youth, even slackened by magical slumber. The half-open eyes were unchanged, the perfect sky blue of a thrush’s egg that he had almost managed to forget.