A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  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 High Winter. 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.”

  Scúrhand felt something change in the warrior’s manner. He thought he saw the darkness shift just slightly.

  “The slavers wore Arsanc’s own black boar. He used the threat of raid to cut away his own lands. Sell the people that paid him fealty. Betray them all.”

  Through the darkness, within the pain that threaded the voice, Scúrhand heard the Morghan he knew. The answer unfolded in his mind, making sense of what he had seen even as it spawned more questions that he ignored for the moment.

  Instead, he asked, “You’ve faced him? This Arsanc?”

  “No.”

  “Stood against him? Incited uprising?” Scúrhand sighed as the warrior shook his head. “You know that vengeance really only works best when the other party has some inkling that they’ve wronged you.”

  “This isn’t about vengeance.”

  In all their names…

  Threading through the warrior suddenly, a shredding pain rose and faded in a heartbeat. Morghan felt something twist inside him, Scúrhand seeing it where he circled closer, wary suddenly.

  “You see something,” the mage said. Not a question. “You’ve seen it since we arrived here. What?”

  Morghan shook his head slowly. “I hear it. The blade has a voice. For me, at least.”

  Where Morghan held the sword out, the mage appraised it, the blue-white damask seeming to shift and flow in the dagger’s pale light. He glanced to the shield, saw a hint of the same pattern in the shimmering steel of its rim. “The arms of Barrend are too-long separated, perhaps. Anxious to know each other again.”

  Morghan only shrugged. “Arsanc had a people who looked to him for protection, and he sold them as chattel. I called for those who would follow me and found six strong enough, six brave enough. If you’d gone with me, you’d be dead along with them.” The warrior’s voice was even. “Arsanc will not hold this blade.”

  Scúrhand was silent again.

  “Can you fly us out?” Morghan asked.

  The mage glanced to the darkness above them. “They’ll be waiting for us. We should regain strength, let them wonder if we’re dead before we surprise them.”

  “They won’t wait. What’s here is too important to them.” Morghan raised the blade. “They’ll kill for this mark…”

  As if in answer, there was a dull crash of thunder from above. Along the lines of the tall arches, dust shook and fell.

  Morghan appraised the flat shadow of the pool bottom above him, faint light rippling beyond it now. “Ectauth expected to pick us up from the water, dead or alive,” he said thoughtfully. “Claim the shield. He’ll be panicking now. Vulnerable.”

  Another blast from above. Scúrhand shook his head. “Of course…”

  As with every other time, it was more a moment of awareness than an actual decision. An acceptance that the fight closing in on them was the only path open. No other options, no alternatives to that final stand. Neither of them spoke as they checked weapons, Morghan unslinging the empty scabbard of his shattered longsword and casting it aside. He fit the new blade to belt and hand, swinging it carefully in ever-wider arcs.

  It was a warrior’s ritual, Scúrhand knowing it from observation. Morghan had been trained to the sword from those first mercenary days of his childhood, and it showed. Each morning, each evening, every moment of respite in campaign or exploration, the warrior checked each weapon he carried for heft and weakness, a blade or bow fought with a hundred times examined as if it might have been brand new.

  Scúrhand’s skill with a dagger had been mostly accidental when he and the warrior first met, and checking that his scabbards weren’t about to fall off was the extent of his preparation for combat. So many showdowns in the three years since then. So many times like that first time, back to back against an ever-shifting sea of foes and running on the timeless instinct to just survive.

  They were older now, stronger. Always in the end, though, there was someone a little stronger, a little better than you.

  Always in the end, it came down to something deeper than strength.

  They shot out through the pool faster than even Scúrhand thought himself capable of flying them both, a half-dozen passes made around the inside of the tomb to build up speed before they climbed. Morghan held tight to the mage, didn’t blink against the shock of cold water that hit him like a body blow, then against the sudden riot of light and frantic bowshot that met them as they emerged into the chasm.

  Morghan had already picked their spot, Scúrhand twisting as they soared. Arrows passed harmlessly by them as he dropped the warrior to the open terrace where the bridge had fallen, Ectauth standing at the fore this time where his force was circled to all sides. Scúrhand stayed aloft, the air a blur before him as the screen of arcane force he summoned up shattered a wall of bowshot that came his way. The silver battle-caster’s voice rang out against the stones, frantically ordering the archers to stand down, but Scúrhand could see that their attention was already fixed firmly on the opposite side of the cavern.

  There, Morghan stepped to the terrace edge, every eye in the Norgyr troop following the slow swinging of the blade in his hand where he held it out over dark water below. The damask pattern of its steel caught the bright light of evenlamps around the room, flaring like the sun on clear water. No one moved.

  Ectauth’s gaze looked to be as dispassionate as he could make it, but Scúrhand noted the anger in the battle-caster’s eyes as he drifted slowly closer. There was no sign of Thiri with him, no time to look for her. “If you wish to parley, speak your piece,” he called.

  “That one drops the blade safe to the ground,” Ectauth shouted. “Both of you submit. When we’ve crossed the frontier, you’ll be released to your own fate.”

  Where Morghan shifted suddenly, a dagger that hadn’t been in his hand a moment before flashed as it buried itself in the neck of a lone scout coming up almost unseen from the side. The would-be assassin fell noisily.

  “Let’s assume the surrender option is off the table,” Scúrhand called.

  “Here are our terms,” Morghan shouted over him. “Your lord Arsanc needs a message sent. You can take it or I can, delivered along with your head.”

  There was a rustling of bows, Arsanc’s archers eager to begin the bloodletting. Too eager, Scúrhand thought.

  “Mad
men, fools, and heroes all fit the same grave.” The young voice caught him and Morghan by equal surprise, both wheeling to see Thiri standing alone where she had slipped through the ranks. She was limping, her leg still bleeding. When Scúrhand tried to meet her gaze, she looked away.

  Beneath Ectauth’s anger, there was no trace of the uncertainty that Scúrhand heard in Thiri’s voice. This should have been a precision operation, a night of stealth and recovery. The sage’s death was something the girl had already paid for in her conscience, but the battle-caster was thinking only about what he might pay if he failed to deliver the goods whose retrieval he was charged with. A tension between the two Norgyr spellcasters that Scúrhand hoped desperately he and Morghan could use.

  “The message is this.” Morghan called to Ectauth, but his eyes were on the girl. “The right to wield power is earned by deed. Not delivered by proxies, stolen and paid for by murder.”

  Ectauth only laughed, Morghan’s glance shifting to where the Norgyr battle-caster stepped forward. “And what deeds have earned you the right to a king’s blade?”

  “Arsanc sold his people…”

  “The Lord Arsanc made rightful disposition of those who rejected his flag and his will,” Ectauth shouted. “The Lord Arsanc surrendered lands in the name of peace that could not be defended, except by those with a wish to die beneath your banner, mercenary.”

  Only because he was watching, Scúrhand saw Thiri’s reaction to the Norgyr captain’s words. Where he had shifted to keep his shield between the closest archers and himself, Morghan froze.

  “I know you,” Ectauth laughed. “All your pathetic pursuit on the Sorcerers’ Isle, you thought you wouldn’t be noticed? Watched in return as you watched us? Your name came easily enough. Then came the memory that one of that same name led a futile assault from the Lord Arsanc’s lands to the mountain lord’s own halls. A self-styled warlord and his mercenary band taking on a mountain giant garrison. How many made it out alive behind you?”

  In Morghan’s hands, the sword called Barrend’s Bane flared blue-white. Then it began.

  It should have been over quickly. They were outnumbered, outpowered, the odds too much like those of too many previous fights that Scúrhand had been sure would be his last. He counted eleven figures surging even as Morghan slammed into them, saw Ectauth curse as a bolt of spell-fire intended for the warrior struck one of his own lieutenants instead.

  In each fight like it, there was always a moment when the tide turned. A point where odds first were evened, then the balance tipped in favor of improbable victory or timely escape. There was no tide this time, though. There was only Morghan, moving with a speed and a fury that drove him through the ranks of Arsanc’s forces like a bloody storm.

  He was gaining no ground, though, Scúrhand in the best position to see it from the air. Too many, more coming, a dozen pouring in from above. That was Morghan’s plan, though, and Ectauth’s dark expression showed that he knew it. The battle-caster’s spellpower was focused for maximum destruction, and all but useless now where the warrior fought within the screen of bodies pressing against him.

  Scúrhand stayed in motion as he watched, not bothering to waste his own spellpower against Ectauth and the wards of protection he could sense even at the distance between them. The girl Thiri was another issue. But though Scúrhand did his best to draw her fire along with the attention of the archers, in the ebb and flow of the power that passed between them, he noted the uncertainty in the young mage’s tactics.

  His own first salvo was ice and fire, but she countered it with an ease that astounded him. In response, she filled the air around Scúrhand with darkness and mist that kept him moving, prevented him clear line of sight to the battle below. She was focusing on harrying him, he realized. Ignoring Ectauth’s shouted orders to target Morghan, the battle-caster trying in vain to break through the press of bodies.

  Shadow blurred Scúrhand’s vision, Ectauth unleashing spell-fire in close quarters even as Morghan slipped back and three more of the battle-caster’s own warriors were cut down. The pulse of light and flame suspended the melee into motionless moments, frozen images.

  In one of those moments, Scúrhand saw the snarling Ectauth finally break through. He tried to shout where Morghan spun in the mortal dance his wrath made, but the mage had no voice to overcome the screams of the dying and the steady crash of steel that surrounded the warrior where he fought.

  Spellpower pulsed in the battle-caster’s hand, a twisted whip of smoke and shadow lashing out, coursing through Morghan as brands of piercing black flame. Scúrhand heard the warrior cry out. But then even in the moment that it should have taken for Ectauth to finish him, the battle-caster’s sudden scream rose as a dark echo of Morghan’s own. Tendrils of black fire wrapped tight in his fist flickered and flared out as twin bolts of white light tore through his armor and convulsed him as if he’d taken a blade in the back.

  Morghan reacted without seeing, screaming with pain as he twisted back and around and drove the blue-white blade through the battle-caster’s throat.

  From the air, Scúrhand could only stare to where Thiri stood, eyes wide as if somehow only just realizing that her spellpower had put her captain down. Then she was moving even as cries of treachery arose from the warriors closest to her, a surge of shock and anger rising as she ran to Morghan’s side.

  The dagger the girl drew told Scúrhand that her spellpower was close to spent. She unleashed a last barrage of magical force against a howling axe-fighter who struck from the side, and who fell to Morghan’s blade as the warrior spun past in a blur of blood and steel.

  Then four more were on them, Thiri slashing awkwardly at the closest attackers as they pushed in. Scúrhand laid down three points of arcane shielding around them, but the fight was too fast. He could see Morghan shouting, could feel the words without hearing, telling the girl to run.

  She didn’t.

  Where a pair of archers erupted from the shadows, she spun toward them. Four arrows that would have claimed Morghan unleashed a shroud of blood as they tore through her.

  Afterward, when he looked back on it, when he tried to remember, Scúrhand couldn’t summon up the images that should have recalled for him what happened next.

  In his head, he thought he heard a scream. A voice that was Morghan’s but not Morghan’s somehow. He saw arrows fly, saw the shield the warrior had borne from the Myrnan ruins seem to pull them from the air as he fought with a ferocity Scúrhand had never seen before. And through the fury of the warrior’s movements, the mage imagined for a moment that he could see a blue-white light in Morghan’s eyes. A glow to match the steady pulse flaring now from the damasked heart of the blade as it bit deep again and again.

  Scúrhand couldn’t see the moment when Ectauth fell in the chaos, but he was dead with the rest of them when Morghan finally slowed. The warrior’s armor was flecked red with gore, breath white on the air, the cold of the chasm chamber deeper now. He wiped his face and arms with Ectauth’s black cloak. He didn’t wipe the blade as he slipped it to his belt. Didn’t need to, no blood clinging to the blue-white steel.

  “What in fate’s name was that?” Scúrhand was crouched in the shadow a short distance away, faint light showing above through narrow windows he hadn’t noticed before. Dawn breaking outside. He briefly considered holding the question for a better time, realizing in the end that he had no idea what that time would look like.

  “That was staying alive.”

  Where Thiri had fallen, Morghan knelt at her side. Her skin was white as ice and blood-streaked, the arrows fanning out across her chest. But even as Morghan fumbled bloody fingers at her neck, Scúrhand called out to see the faint movement of the black shafts.

  “She’s breathing…”

  Morghan felt the blood weak at her neck, saw the steel-edged hunting heads where they punched out through her back. He had the skill to bind the wounds, but there was no point. The girl was at the edge of death, no way to pull the arrows
without only hastening the end.

  “Search Ectauth,” he whispered to Scúrhand, fear in his voice. “He’ll have healing…”

  “I did. Nothing.”

  Save her… whispered the breathless voice of vengeance as it threaded through his mind, and Morghan’s vision blurred suddenly, eyes burning.

  He remembered Eltolitinus. He remembered the faces of the others and saw the dread in their eyes that was their last sight before the final darkness, as they were consumed body and soul. He remembered the mountain giant’s halls, heard the howling of wolves and the screams of those who had followed him. All the ones he couldn’t save.

  “Save her,” he whispered, and he felt the words twist in him like a thing closer to prayer than any oath the warrior had ever spoken.

  He felt the metal of the bastard sword grow warm beneath his gore-streaked hand.

  Without thinking, he grasped the girl’s fingers, forced them closed around the haft. He felt her shudder, saw color twist through her cheeks as he quickly snapped the shafts that pinned her, grasped each in turn and pulled. In the dark sleep of pain, she screamed, but even as she did, Morghan saw the wounds close over as she consumed the healing power held in that blade of damasked steel, the blood-streaked skin smooth again as her eyes snapped open.

  The sword slipped from her hand, clattering to the stones as she scrambled back. Scúrhand was close by now, catching the disorientation in her eyes that he knew would quickly pass. But it was the sword he stared at as Morghan picked it up.

  The warrior turned away, looked to the light above and walked toward a distant flight of stairs twisting up from the shadows of the cavern.

  “It’s done,” Scúrhand said to Thiri. He saw her staring to the carnage around her, wide-eyed as if waking from a half-remembered dream. “You’re safe, with us at least. If you’re still here when Arsanc sends another force to discover what happened to this one, I wouldn’t like your chances.”