Kingmaker's Sword (Rune Blades of Celi)

by Ann Marston

I nodded. “No, not yet,” I agreed. “But soon. I have to think where I’ll go and what I’m going to do.”

  “Two days,” he said, holding up the corresponding number of fingers. “Three.” Another finger came up. He shrugged. “Then you think. Now you rest and heal.”

  I nodded again. “Now I rest and heal. And I thank you.” Rest and heal, I thought. Just this short excursion out into the open air had tired me. I didn’t want to admit it, but I needed the time to grow stronger before I set out after Mendor and Drakon. And to think about what I was going to do if this strange, bird-like creature really was the lost princeling Kerri sought. “Mayhap you’ll tell me about your mother.”

  He grinned at me. “Mayhap,” he agreed. “You go and rest now.”

  Even as he spoke, weariness spread through me. I was weaker than I had thought.

  ***

  Grey sky, drifts of grey ash.

  I threw back my head and shouted until my throat was hoarse. “No! No, you cannot make me come here. Your magic cannot hold me.” Rigid with effort, I fought against the ensnarement.

  Then I saw it. A dark haze on the far horizon. Panic leapt in my belly. He was coming, spreading darkness before him as a cloud spreads shadow. I heard his laughter even as I turned to run.

  “You cannot avoid me.” His voice boomed like thunder all around me. “I am stronger than you are now.”

  “No!” I shouted, struggling through the treacle-thick layers of ash. “I weakened you. You have no power.”

  His laugh echoed through my skull. “Then stay and face me, Tyr. Stay and test my power.”

  My limbs were made of wood, clumsy and unresponsive. When I shot a glance over my shoulder, my heart surged in terror. The darkness claimed fully half of the land behind me. Searching tendrils snaked out, reaching for my legs that creaked like a reef-wrecked ship as I floundered through the ash.

  “You are weaker than I, Tyr,” his voice thundered. Black, glowing eyes glittered in the midst of the darkness. “Turn. Turn and meet your death.”

  I brought both my fists up to my head. “No!” I shouted. “You cannot take me. I will not let you—”

  “You have no choice….”

  A tendril of the thick, sticky fog reached out and wrapped itself about my throat. Pain and fever flared like a pine torch.

  XXII

  I came thrashing and gasping out of sleep to find Jeriad kneeling beside the pallet, his hand resting gently on my forehead. My breathing came in great, laboured shudders and my heart knocked against my chest like a blacksmith’s hammer. Sweat rolled in thick, viscous streams down my forehead into my eyes, across my cheeks and throat, and the furs beneath me were disagreeably slippery and wet with it.

  “It be the darkness they put in ye, boy,” Jeriad was saying, his voice soft and gentle. “It be only the darkness. Ye be safe now. Safe here with old Jeriad. Rest ye. Rest ye now.”

  I fell back against the sweat slick furs, my breathing easier now as my heart slowed to a pace nearer normal. Jeriad let his hand slip from my forehead.

  “It be the darkness takes ye to evil places when ye sleep,” he said quietly. “It be the darkness, boy. I be not a good enough healer to banish it.”

  “Darkness?” I repeated blearily. He had mentioned it before, I remembered, shortly after I awoke the first time. Or was it the second? It was too difficult to think properly. My head felt thick, as if it were stuffed with wool. Then I remembered how I had found only a bleak and empty void, a black abyss, when I had tried to reach out for the quiet, healing place within me. Was that what he meant? “What darkness?”

  “Sorcery,” he said. “The black sorcery. They put it there, deep within you, boy. Old Jeriad be not good enough to cut it out of ye. It be taking stronger than my poor magic to defeat it.”

  “Dergus,” I muttered. “Dergus put it there. And I haven’t got the sword to help me now.” Where was my sword now? Did the General have it? And Kerri’s? I shuddered. Two Celae Rune Blades in the hands of a man like the General. Could he pervert their magic to act for him?

  Jeriad rooted around behind him, then turned back to me holding a steaming cup. “Drink this, lad,” he said. He grinned. “Nae, it be not the vile one. This be sweet and soothing. Takes the ache out.” He pushed the cup into my hands. “Drink now. This be helping to keep the darkness at bay. Drink ye, and I be guarding yer sleep for ye.”

  “Is he out there?” I asked. “The black sorcerer? The General? Is he out there now?”

  “Nae, lad. Nae. But he be sitting in the middle of the darkness like a spider in its web, waiting to draw you in. Like a spider. Every time ye fight him, it weakens ye. But it weakens him, too. It weakens him, too. Pray the Duality ye be stronger.” He patted my shoulder. “I be watching. He’ll not be taking your magic.”

  “I don’t have magic,” I mumbled. “No magic.”

  “Sleep, lad. Sleep now….”

  “Why are you doing this for me, Jeriad?” I asked, fighting to keep my eyes open. “Why?”

  He chuckled. “A Tyr once fought for me,” he said. “I be paying a debt I be glad to pay.”

  Heavy lassitude spread slowly through my limbs. Jeriad snatched the cup from my hands as my slack fingers let it fall. I was afraid to go back to sleep. My enemy awaited me in sleep, and the Watcher on the Hill had told me if I died in that dreamscape, I died in the waking world. I could not keep my eyes open. Whether it was Jeriad’s potion, or the darkness within me calling me back to the dreamscape, I did not know. But I slept again.

  ***

  Three times during the night, my enemy drew me into the desolate waste of his dreamscape. And three times Jeriad’s gnarled hand on my brow called me back to wakefulness and escape. The last time he pulled me away from the dreadful grey place and I awoke staring and gasping, it was dawn. He knelt by the pallet, worn and grey as his hair and beard, his eyes sunk further into his head, shining feverishly bright.

  “It be growing,” he muttered irritably. “The darkness be growing in ye. The black one be growing weaker, but so be you. Soon the darkness be too strong. I be unable to call you back.”

  Fever raged through me. My lips were dry and cracked, and my hands shook so badly, I could not hold the cup of water he gave me. He held the cup to my mouth and I drank gratefully. I hardly noticed the taste when he fed me another portion of his vile decoction of snowberry root, willow bark and chalery leaf.

  I fell into a restless sleep. With the coming of dawn, it seemed my enemy lost his power to drag me into his dreamscape. But other fragmented dreams troubled my sleep. Disturbing images of Kerri’s sword glittering bright as she fought by my side and at Cullin’s back in Honandun. Cullin’s face, lit with joy, as he held his youngest daughter for the first time. Kerri with the silver gleam of moonlight glowing in her hair. Cullin patiently teaching a gawky, adolescent boy the intricacies of sword work. Cullin laughing with the sunlight in his hair turning it to molten copper. Dreams of the halls of Broche Rhuidh hung with the dark fir boughs of mourning.

  I awoke once to find Jeriad’s face close to mine, his hands gripping my hair. I stared at him stupidly for a moment, hardly knowing who he was or why he knelt there, eyes like a raptor’s glaring into mine. Scalding pain bathed my shoulder and the foul stench of wound fever filled my nose. My head throbbed and pounded hard enough to blur my vision. Every muscle, every joint hurt with a deep, gnawing ache. I had no strength. There was no inner sanctuary, no safe grounded place, no centre. Lost in a haze of pain and utter, abject weakness, I turned my head away from that fierce, piercing stare. In a startlingly lucid moment, I realized I was dying. I accepted the knowledge with relief. The concept held no fear, only the promise of serenity and the loss of pain.

  “Leave me to die in peace,” I mumbled and my lips cracked and bled with the movement.

  “Nae, lad,” he said fervently, grasping my head between his hands and turning my face back toward him. “Nae. Ye be healing, lad. Healing, I tell ye. It be the dark spell makes ye
think different. Ye must fight it. Fight the darkness.”

  His voice echoed hollowly in my ears. So far away. So very far away. Meaningless noises. I made an irritated sound and tried fretfully to push him away.

  He grabbed my shoulders and shook me so hard, my eyes crossed and my hair flopped, stinging and smarting, into my eyes. It snapped me wide awake and I stared into his face. His eyes glinted furiously under the shaggy mane of grey hair, his mouth set in a savage snarl.

  “You won’t be dying on me, you lout of a Tyr,” he shouted. “Pass this night in safety, and you will win this time. You will fight, Kian dav Leydon ti’Cullin. You will fight.”

  I closed my eyes until the room stopped spinning, then I looked at him again. “Fight,” I muttered. “Aye. Fight….”

  ***

  Dream. Hallucination. Reality. Madness. All was madness. I was adrift on a sea of insanity where everything boiled and bubbled together with no demarcation between what was real and what was not. It battered me against treacherous shoals that might be sharp as daggers, or soft as snow.

  ***

  Jeriad unwound the bandage from my shoulder and I stared in horror at the open, suppurating wound. Even as I watched, it turned black at the edges and the corruption and putrefaction crept down my arm and across my chest to eat into my heart. I screamed while Jeriad chuckled merrily.

  ***

  The muscles of the Stablemaster’s arm flexed and rippled beneath the sheen of sweaty skin as he brought the willow switch down again and again across the back of the young boy who knelt in the straw before him, wrists lashed to the hitching ring on the side of the stall. With every blow, the Stablemaster muttered, “Stubborn. Wilful. Obstinate….” The boy’s hands made white-knuckled fists and the muscles of his jaw bulged with the effort to keep his teeth clenched to prevent any sound from escaping his lips. He was determined not to give the Stablemaster, or the young lord who watched avidly, the satisfaction of hearing him cry out.

  ***

  The General knelt with his hands plunged deep into the entrails of a man who lay, bound and writhing in agony, on the floor before him. Dark mist throbbing with sullen colour twined around the General’s wrists and arms. The face of the man on the floor was Cullin’s.

  ***

  Jeriad knelt beside me and placed a cold, wet cloth on my forehead. He bent and held a cup to my lips to let the cool, sweet water trickle into my dry throat. “Tyr’s be a stubborn people,” he murmured. “Fight….”

  ***

  Kerri stood with her fists planted firmly on her hips, jaw thrust out, her nose inches from mine. “You are the stubbornest mule ever they hung two legs on to walk like a man,” she shouted.

  I grinned at her. “Why, thank you, sheyala,” I said.

  ***

  I lay spread-eagled and bound, naked in the filthy mud of a sheep pen and Drakon stood over me with dirt-encrusted pincers clutched in his hands. The expression on his face was one of unholy ecstasy as he leaned forward and raised the pincers.

  ***

  Cullin crouched sitting on his heels in the straw of a stable and grinned at me. “Men with red hair like ours are sometimes obstinate,” he said. “We do as we will.”

  ***

  A woman with hair like sunshine and moonlight mixed together plucked a small boy out of the dust beside the pony. “You have to set your will against the pony’s, my wee horseman,” she said, laughing, as she brushed him off. “If you’re determined enough, you will win.”

  ***

  The light of one torch, guttering fitfully in the night, cast deep, flickering shadows across Jeriad’s face as he sat cross-legged beside me, his eyes bright points beneath the shaggy grey eyebrows. Slowly, he climbed to his feet. “I be fetching them, boy,” he said. “You’ll see. I’ll be fetching them for ye.”

  “Don’t leave me alone with him,” I muttered.

  “It be too strong for me, boy,” he said. “My magic be too poor to help.” He slipped through the hide curtain over the door. He was gone and I was alone.

  ***

  With each plodding footstep, ash rose in a fine haze and drifted up to clog my nose and mouth, caking in my throat. The unchanging, sunless sky hung low above my head. The dull light cast no shadows, neither mine nor that of the occasional twisted skeleton of a tree I passed in my aimless walking.

  His sudden laughter rolled like a peal of thunder across the desiccated wilderness. Hopeless despair settled like a leaden cloak on my shoulders, and my knees sagged as I began to sink to the ash and cinder of the ground. But I held myself to my feet and turned. He stood at the crest of a small rise far behind me, a blacker shadow within a dark mist. His sword, held high before him, devoured the wan light and radiated its own darkness. His eyes glittered brightly, the only spark of light in the darkness around him.

  A wave of weakness swept over me. I reached out a hand for balance and found a tree beneath my fingers. I looked at it in surprise. It was only a slender sapling, not much more than a stripped, charred trunk, splintered at the root, and certainly nothing to rely on for support. But it felt solid and firm beneath my hand.

  Then, as I turned back to look at my enemy, a tiny spark of anger kindled somewhere deep within me. Its meagre light glowed, feeble and faint, nearly overwhelmed by the darkness, but it lived. I clenched my hand around the charred trunk.

  By the gods, no, I thought. I will not give up this easily. Even the Mouse would not give up against worse odds. Surely I can do no less than he.

  I wrenched at the slender tree trunk. It came away easily enough from its shattered and splintered base. I broke the branching tip under my foot and was left with a staff half again as long as my outstretched arms. When I tested its strength, the charred bark crumbled against my palms, but the staff did not break

  My enemy approached slowly. He did not move cautiously, but as a man might who wished to prolong a long-anticipated and enjoyable event. He laughed again.

  “A flimsy weapon,” he said. “Do you think that twig will stop this?” He brandished his sword. A spurt of thick, black shadow erupted from the tip and eddied around his arm.

  The spark of anger found more fuel. It cut a tiny crack into the heavy darkness Dergus had woven in me, and let a small trickle of strength ooze out.

  “If I’m to die, I’ll die fighting you,” I said quietly. “I’ll not kneel meekly to your sword.”

  He was now close enough to see his features clearly through the swirling darkness around him. “Look at your shoulder,” he said, smiling confidently.

  Even as he spoke, I felt the pain and smelled the putrefaction. The little spark wavered and flickered. I tightened my grip on the staff, concentrating on the spark. I fed the pain to it to fuel it.

  The staff twisted suddenly in my hands, snaking and writhing to wrap itself about my arms. I held a serpent that wound its coils around my wrists. Flat, lifeless yellow eyes, slitted with black, glared above a wide, red mouth holding dripping fangs. Fear bloomed in my belly for an instant. My heart hammered wildly against my ribs. I took a quick, unsteady breath, then fed the fear to the spark, too.

  Quickly, I slipped my hand along the cold loops of sinuous muscle to grip just under the flat, triangular head. Venom dripped from the needle-like fangs, but I held the head harmlessly away from my flesh as I looked back to my grinning enemy.

  “Can you not win against me, even in a place of your own making, unless I am crippled and weaponless?” I asked softly.

  “You are powerless against me,” he cried.

  I looked at the sleek, evil head of the snake in my hands, then down at the suppurating wound in my shoulder. “By all the gods,” I muttered. “I will not let you win so easily. In the name of the Duality, I won’t.” The spark became a small ember, burning brighter and stronger. The serpent stiffened in my grip, straightened slowly, became a charred staff again. The wound in my shoulder closed to the half-healed state I knew it to be back in Jeriad’s hidden chamber. And carried on the breeze,
faintly from somewhere, came the barely perceptible scent of something green and growing. I looked back at my enemy, saw lines of strain in his face, and I laughed.

  “The Tyr have always been a stubborn race,” I told him. “And I as much as any of them.”

  He grinned, a ghastly stretching of lips away from teeth. “Then you will die stubborn,” he said. “But die you will.”

  He closed the distance between us in one lithe bound, his sword moving across his body in a wide sweep. I swung the staff around and caught the blade near the hilt. The blade narrowly missed taking my fingers off as it slid along the wood, spraying chunks of blackened bark as it went.

  He pulled the sword free and I leaped back, holding the staff level in front of me, watching his hands. They would tell me which way he planned to come against me next.

  The overhand blow aimed at my head nearly caught me by surprise. I lifted the staff, angled sharply, and the blade chopped into it a handsbreadth beyond where I gripped it. A chunk of the wood spun off into the ash.

  I smelled it again. Only the barest trace of something green and growing wafted on the breeze—something alive in the midst of this wasteland. I snatched a quick glance around and saw a patch of grass, not much bigger than my own footprint, five or six paces behind me.

  Hope flared, and a tiny curl of flame wavered up from the ember within me. I ducked under my enemy’s next swing, and rammed the truncated end of the staff against his knees. He staggered back and I spun to run for the small patch of green. Even as I reached it, it widened to give me room for both my feet.

  He sprang after me, sword raised. The thrust tore through the fabric of my shirt. The cold steel sliced along my ribs and I saw the bright blood well up. It splashed to the ground, and the few blades of grass beneath my feet curled and crisped, turning brown and lifeless as they flaked into ash. I barely had the strength to slam the staff against the hilt of his sword to deflect the next blow. We stood, chest to chest, separated only by the flimsy staff and the chill, dark metal of his sword blade. He struggled for a moment, then suddenly pushed hard and I fell away from him. He caught the staff with the tip of his sword. The force of his blow tore it out of my hands, shattered into three pieces as it fell uselessly to the ground.