A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  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 spell-force 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 spell-fire 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 a
nd 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 southlands, 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.

  Morghan’s eyes narrowed. “The Imperial Guard?” He had little interest in history, but it was a name that even he had heard. 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. “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,” Scúrhand said carefully. “The one the girl spoke of. This one you seem to know, who is he?”

  “Just a name.”

  “Indeed. The Freelo
rd 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.