A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Read online

  From one of the great roots that hold him fast to rock and soil and the vastness beneath, buds unfurl. Shoots twist forth at his thought, pale green. He flexes them, guides them, feels creeping movement over the slow passage of days. The season swings by. Wind blows, hissing through his upper branches. The heat of summer cracks the few bones the wolves left whole. Fat hornets feast at dried marrow scraps as they nest within the Green Priestess’s splintered ribs, leave a screen of paper walls behind.

  As autumn falls, wolves howl, reminding him what it is he waits for.

  As the cold rains come and the screen of leaves begins to fall, he is ready to set his will within the twisting tendrils. A reach across long days, marching almost into winter, then he is there.

  Tufts of grey grass rise through the eyes and mouth of the Green Priestess’s skull where the wolves discarded it. The Blood Knight’s empty eyes are half-shrouded by creeping violet. He sends shoots through and within both caverns of bone, splitting within the shadows. Cold tendrils spread, touch all the space within.

  He feels day shift to night, reckons off a dozen sunrises before it is done.

  The morning is cold, bright and cloudless and carrying the night-chill of empty sky and white stars. The vines reach the sword, surround it with all his senses.

  He feels the freezing aura of arcane dweomer in that grey steel. The magic of the Quick Ones, drawn from the mana of the unliving world. The newer power whose strength twists counter to the life that is the old magic of him and his kind. He holds it at a distance, lets it twist and expand like the slow unfolding of leaf-showers on the rising wind.

  The priests of the Green Path hold the old magic, or some small fragment of it. The Quick Ones who are so-named for the speed with which they pass through life tame the old magic to themselves, but only as a single stallion is tamed within the larger herd that darkens the grey plains. The old magic of life and green and living things, set against the new magic of stone and mana like oil and water. No convergence of forms. No underlying connection between both magics, but he remembers the Green Priestess falling before the blade in an act of final supplication. Remembers the longing to touch, to hold, to possess that weapon that is the Quick One’s last thought.

  Over the passage of days, he wraps his subtle perception tighter around the sword’s grey blade, sends it up to touch the cold metal of the guard. A single slab of bright steel is forged as an unbreaking cross, wrapped with filament lines of dwyrsilver that gleam a pale grey.

  He feels the life of the Blood Knight, its memory held sharp within that steel now.

  Lotherasien.

  The energies of life are ripples in the world. Points from which time and past and future split off, forged and broken and cast back to the unwrought realm of possibility once more. These are things he senses, feels as he touches a thousand centuries of history all at once. All the infinite futures, shed and split off as singular paths. Like the unseen magic of this place, twisting through him and spreading out to fill the wood as the unseen touch of a world lost to time.

  I am the Imperial Guard, and in my blood runs the honor and duty of the Lothelecan…

  He feels the names unfold again, faint play of words surrounding and supporting them with the history of the fabled and fallen Empire. With the words comes again the shape, the interlocking circles. The shadow of life and spirit that touches and imprints on grey steel.

  It isn’t enough. He feels for the fullness of what it means. The blade’s power of new magic spikes, flares white-hot against his unfelt touch, but he ignores it. He thrusts deeper into the maelstrom of faint impressions, seeking the stronger truth beneath. All the scars of mind and memory set upon the sword by all the hands that ever wield it, by the hands that forge and fight for it. The Blood Knight, last to touch it. The Green Priestess, reaching for it with the last strength of life. Not knowing the dark power promised by that touch.

  He feels the past split open, his faint caress of mind and understanding tearing away the veil of lost impressions. He feels a spider’s web hung with dewdrop spheres of crystal, feels it shredded by the chaos wind that is all those futures denied, splitting off from a single line of the past.

  He feels the Green Priestess, feels the Blood Knight. Feels the cold spirit of the grey blade as sight and voice ringing separately, then as one.

  Death…

  Once, this is the sword of a warrior-folk on a green isle far to the east, and from the hands of those warriors, the Lotherasien steal it. He hears it named by long-dead voices. Kelastaen. The Kelist Razor, blade of the war-kings. He sends his touch to wrap haft and pommel, feels that impression break off from the faint trace of memory that the Blood Knight’s hands have left imprinted on steel and tight-wrapped white leather that shows no sign of age. But when he tries to seek the reasons for that theft, he finds only shadows and secrecy locked deep beneath an oath whose name he cannot know.

  Death…

  On a day of first frost, brown-black leaves plucked from his swaying limbs by the icy wind, he feels the Empire fall. A moment of long years ago. A time well within his reckoning but beyond his ability to judge by its faint reflection in the Blood Knight’s life as the unseen scars in blade and bone reveal it.

  From the fall of Empire, a thousand years pass backward, and then twice that long again, and he senses a great plain of grassland and wandering watercourse. A pristine land whose air is clear morning mist, pushed by the soft-scented breeze of distant woods. A ring of high mountains, molten-gold sky of the rising sun. On those peaks gleam towers and bridges of ivory white, shapes reflecting the gently twisting lines of trees along the forest slopes beneath them.

  Then something passes his perception and twists away the shroud of light to reveal the shadow beneath. He senses the plain boiling with the shapes of unnatural creatures of stone and metal, feels war unfold and spread and scour the living land like plague. Black fire sweeps across the endless grasslands, white towers shattered and fallen, built again to be torn down once more.

  Death.

  It is the memories of the Blood Knight that thread through him now. Memories of a dark age lost to time but never forgotten by those who sought to hold that darkness from rising again. Against the shadow of those memories, the blade is hidden, found, taken, hidden again. He reckons off this time over which the Lotherasien keep the sword safe. From the day it was claimed from the hands of the last Kelist war-king, he feels the passage of a thousand seasons flash four times past. Old impressions, locked in cold steel and the spirit-memories of all the Quick Ones who die in the sword’s name.

  He senses the sword lost in the aftermath of the Empire’s last war. The great war-king betraying a nation’s birthright and beholden to a darkness that has no name. He senses a shadow pass through the strength of steel, a thousand years turning for the blade with barely any touch of living hands.

  Memories and legends. Over the fast-blurred space of a hundred winter days, the blade is forged within a fallen castle, a shadowed tower of a distant golden land. A force of spellcasters with power enough to lay waste to cities gathers to infuse that power into molten steel. New magic, fell and pure and black as midnight’s storms. A strength in the dweomer of that steel that will keep the grey blade from ever being destroyed.

  Memories and legends. He senses the hands of the king that wields the sword, feels the unreckoned hands of other sovereigns seize it from the dying grasp of the hands before. Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons in a long line, ruling by dint of history and the blood of kings in their veins.

  Against the shadow of those memories, the Blood Knight takes an oath that the blade which cannot be destroyed will stay hidden, far from the hands of those that would wield it. Those that would succumb to its shadow. A pledge that the Quick One will die to uphold.

  The Blood Knight runs with the blade, even as it feels a dark despair course through its mind for the oath that cannot he upheld anymore. The Empire is fallen, and the grey blade is found and stolen ba
ck again. But when he falls as he knows he will, there will be no one to hide it again. In the aftermath of the Lothelecan, the Blood Knights are cast to the winds. Spread as a memory already fading to legend.

  Pledged unto death, the Blood Knight seizes the sword and carries it across dangerous realms to a place of faint legend. A forest where the old magic might be stronger than anywhere else across the world-land the Quick Ones call Isheridar. The shroud of magic that is the legacy of this place, that is his name and birthright. A veil within which the blade might be safe, might be lost for all time.

  The ancient magic of this place will wrap and conceal the dark dweomer of the blade. Or so the Blood Knight hopes as it dies driving the sword into the living ground at his dark and twisted feet.

  He feels darkness again, feels it chill him as the first vision wraps around him once more. War on the black plain, the sword in the hands of its first master, whose name is burned away even as the memory shapes it.

  The wind drives leaves turned frost-white and black. He loses track of time passing, of memories playing out like the songs of wind and rain that make up each storm scouring the distant mountains.

  He sees himself now, cast in the final memory of the Blood Knight’s lost gaze as it looks up to the sky. The spread of his own great arms are a welcoming embrace through the Quick One’s eyes, bright sun flaring to whiter light that occludes all else, then is gone.

  On my life, the Blood Knight whispers, and its life is no more.

  Spring blooms again.

  Grey-brown fingers of vine flare green, drinking the life of sun and sky as they entwine the sword, the skeletal shadows still grasping for it. Summer comes, and the Green Priestess is all but gone now within the tall grass and the shroud of sun-touched flowers.

  In his mind, he is moving. Running with blade in hands and across his shoulder, his body not yet stilled by death as it shadows him close, a predator’s step running fast behind him.

  Death.

  This is the song sung by all the memories of the grey blade, and he is joined to them now. Feelings and impressions, a single mind within his. Broad web of past and futures threading through dull steel from molten birth to this space of shade and sheltered wind.

  Within that mind, he feels the great distance between the two lives inextricably bound to this place. The Blood Knight, the Green Priestess. A clash of spirit and purpose.

  He focuses. Reaches within himself for the selves he has become, splitting and shaping them. Seasons pass in a blur, the first taste of frost touching his fingers. The wind turns from the north once more.

  It is the heart of winter, the wolves prowling the deep forest again, and he is the Blood Knight. He is the Lotherasien in whose doomed heart burns the fear of what the grey blade is, of what it becomes.

  It is the heart of summer, the cicada song a silver haze, and he is the Green Priestess. He is the holy seeker of the Kingmakers, the name that is given to the Green Priestess’s path. His is the longing to restore the greatness promised by the sword that is Kelastaen, the long history reflected in a razor edge of grey steel. A line of kings once straight as haft and blade, then broken. Waiting to be restored now with the hated Empire’s fall.

  He feels the enmity of these two spirits that die with no knowledge of each other. Feels a hatred twist out between them, entwined in his own experience. Caught within the warp and weft of the past unfolding as a thousand histories touching those minds.

  He looks forward then.

  Ripples spread out from the blade where the wind sends spiral clouds of autumn leaves around it. That shroud of red is the color of the Green Priestess’s hair, falling and spreading like a stain of blood when the storms come. He feels the shadow spread in echo, senses the future open up within it.

  For long years, the sword stays hidden within his shadow. But in every future, every line of time forced open before him, there comes a time when he senses a figure step up to the crown of the narrow ridge once more. When it leaves, it holds the grey blade in its hands.

  On each path, the figure’s shape is different, shifting between all the possible futures that the shadow holds. On each path, a thousand-thousand blades fit two thousand-thousand hands, all the unreckoned possibilities branching out from this place, this time. But as far as he follows, he feels each path lead to the same place of blood and shadow. Black and red occluding all futures into a dead haze.

  From the depths of the spirit heart that has defined him since the beginning of time, he mourns.

  A storm of seasons passes. He loses track of them, senses the stars sweep past as endless arcs of blue-white fire.

  He slips back, senses the Blood Knight fall, claw its way forward, die, fall, fall and die in an endless cycle. But no matter how many times the Blood Knight dies, no matter how many ways the grey blade is hidden, no matter how strong the magic of this place that hides it, he feels the sword reclaimed.

  He knows this. The future unfolding before his thought.

  As the Green Priestess does, other Quick Ones seek and find the sword. They die in battalions to track it to this place, seizing it as they crush the bones of the Blood Knight, the Green Priestess beneath their feet. The grey blade is taken, its wielder slain, claimed, slain again over endless lifetimes of the Quick Ones in their endless search.

  For untold thousands of undone years, he touches the Quick Ones, feels their movement along the fringes and boundaries of his realm. He hears their spirit songs carried on the summer wind, senses the impressions their lives and minds make on the other creatures of the wood. Ripples of shadow.

  Within the spirit of the Green Priestess locked tight inside him now, a light burns like white fire. He feels it sear him, looks within the fate of the Green Priestess to feel it flare brighter, scouring the shadow of the Blood Knight’s oath.

  He feels it as the sword is born, senses liquid steel glow the white of first daylight, poured in a shroud of smoke and shrieking flame. The weapon’s mold is a slab of perfect black marble broken off from the throne that once sits within a ruined hall, walls pulled down and overgrown five hundred years before. The history and power of that throne is drawn within the blade, and as its white metal cools first to blue, then grey, its heat splits that great slab asunder, leaves it rent upon this makeshift foundry floor.

  A song threads within the lives of the Quick Ones that he hears for the first time. And over a year of days that are a moment for him and the earth from which he drinks and the sun that is his heart, he comes to understand that he is wrong in all that he knows. He is wrong in all he feels in the long years of observing the Quick Ones and the pattern their short lives make against the slow passage of seasons.

  The Quick Ones move from life to death in a single heartbeat of the world, and they slay each other with a focus that he has always understood to mean they embrace death. It has been clear to his reckoning always that the Quick Ones welcome death’s release, and the chance to become one with the world from which they arise and to which they return. Death the end and beginning of the cycle of all seasons.

  He is wrong. He knows now. The Quick Ones do not embrace death.

  They fear it.

  For a season, he ponders.

  In the time that another winter approaches, then passes, he decides.

  All the possible futures he perceives. All the endless exchanges of madness and war that branch off as ripples from this spot.

  All the death that surrounds each vision of the blade, each facet of the future and past splintering like ice. Steel and stone and blood lock together in a delicate and deadly embrace across the chasm of time. Within the spirit of the Blood Knight that lives now only within his memory, he senses shadow that threads through him, freezing all the innermost veins of the liquid of life.

  His is the old magic. But in the space beyond all history, there lives a magic that is older still.

  It is a thing that he and his kind do not dwell on, do not think about. A thing they turn their senses from, alw
ays unknowable. This is the sword’s magic, he realizes. The deep magic that is older than he, older than any living thing.

  It is the deep magic that forges the grey blade long ago, imbuing it with the shadow that will scour the world if that magic is ever unleashed. The deep magic has no equal anymore, no force of life or spellcraft in all Isheridar that might stand against it.

  Except for one.

  Old magic lingers in these secret places of the world, the Quick Ones say. He hears their songs. Knows that this place that is his is one such place they sing of.

  For the first time, he thinks on how very old he is.

  He thinks on the world that is older still, and on the Quick Ones who partake of so little of that world in the short time given to them. He thinks about the death they face, and the history that reaches beyond life.

  He thinks on the endless death that twists out from this place, this time, because the presence of the grey blade here creates a single future that will not be denied. The quest of the Green Priestess, the sacrifice of the Blood Knight. No difference made. The Green Priestess falls, the Blood Knight falls, and the rift between these two is never breached. Cut by long years between them and the door of death that closes off their perceptions.

  There stands a future beyond which he cannot feel. There stands a place that seethes with the noise of storm wind across the dry grasslands, that burns with the heat of the unseen earth that will consume all the wide world in the end.

  This is the end of each future in which only death unfolds each time the grey blade is seized, claimed by another that will turn its power to destruction in the name of the hunger that the deep magic brings.

  All futures save one. An impossible place where the Green Priestess and the Blood Knight are made to see the things each knew. Things the other should have known.

  He reaches deep within himself.

  He summons all the old magic that is in this place. He creates a moment beyond which he cannot stretch his endless thought. A moment beyond all the long centuries of his awareness and the farthest expanses of all the futures he can touch. A single future that he will shape. A possibility that is all he is. All he can be.