The Shadow of the High King

by Frank Dorrian

  He was surrounded. Shapes emerged from the waters on all sides, more and more on each front. The ones behind him surged forward, screaming, hollering, swords and shields raised above their heads.

  Harlin readied, unsure of where to focus, vulnerable whichever way he turned. He braced for the charge from his rear.

  They stormed straight past him.

  Harlin spun, mind wheeling in confusion, watching as two sides slammed into one another, blades stabbing, hacking, shields bashing, fists bludgeoning. Sparks flew as sword met armour, splinters sputtering from rotten shields as their planks were hacked apart.

  ‘Savage cunt!’ a hollow throat roared, ‘die, you bastard! Fucking die!’

  ‘Marcher shit!’ a phlegmy voice answered in the clan tongue. A braided head was lopped from its shoulders, spinning and landing with a plop in a sinkhole. Harlin almost laughed, trying, and failing, to make sense of what was unfolding around him.

  Bodies were chopped open wetly with dull blades, soggy-sounding innards spilling from them like mush as their owners fought to pull them back inside, a multitude of limbs flying and spinning through the air, crudely severed. Harlin backed away, heading for the Sisters, trying to avoid the melee exploding about him. More figures were emerging from the bog all around, blades ready, charging through waters, foul waves and showers blossoming everywhere he looked.

  Something caught his shield and spun him round, a jolt of pain shooting up his arm. Dead eyes, milky white and filmed with grime, stared into him from beneath a helm whose visor was lost to rust long ago. ‘What are you?’ the dead thing snarled at him in the Marcher tongue.

  ‘A savage, dead man.’

  Harlin slammed the rim of his shield into its face, pain bursting through the limb again as the impact jarred up it. Turning as the dead man fell, another two stood watching him. One had recently had its arm severed. Both wore plate armour that was mottled black and orange, pitted and pocked with corruption. They stared at him with something almost like sullen curiosity.

  ‘Savage,’ the one-armed thing said, the word bordering on a question. It heaved a bastard sword in its remaining hand, mostly reduced to bone.

  ‘Kill the fucker,’ the other hissed through a slice in its throat. Harlin glimpsed the one he’d dropped begin climbing to its feet, armour squeaking and grinding. They came for him.

  Water exploded upwards on his flanks as long-haired shapes leapt from the depths, landing atop the armoured corpse-men with the gurgling battle cries of their former clans. Blades rose and fell, stabbing and piercing to a frenzy of curses in their mother tongue.

  ‘Enough!’ a voice roared, so loud it seemed to shudder from the very mountainsides. ‘Enough! Back to sleep, you filth! Sleep!’ It spoke in the clan tongue.

  The dead men looked up for the source of the voice, shrivelled, ruined heads turning curiously, then rose, withdrawing slowly back to the bog water. Some crawled, their legs gone. With hissing groans, they slowed as they waded, forms becoming limp, motions ending, descending slowly, whatever semblance of life that had animated them leaving their bodies. Black waters consumed them again. Silence fell.

  From the haze ahead strode five shadowed forms, halting in a line ten paces from Harlin. ‘Bodah Duhn,’ he uttered. They looked at each other and cackled.

  ‘Yes,’ one spoke, male in tone. The words were of the clans, but the accent was harsh and unfamiliar. It came closer and threw back its hood, revealing long, ashen hair and neat braids framing its mask of bone. ‘We are the ghosts of Luah Fáil, the Dark Men of Hathad Camoraigh, born of your nightmares, here to snatch up your children and make them into stew.’

  They laughed as one, leaning on their spears, doubled by mirth. The dark eyes behind that mask became hard, humour’s light dying. ‘We tire of the chase, Sea Child,’ it uttered, ‘the game is over.’

  ‘Sea Child?’ Harlin frowned beneath his helm, perplexed.

  ‘Your kind are not wanted here, you are not welcome,’ the Bodah Duhn went on, ignoring him. ‘We sent you and your kin fleeing back across the waves, and now you return, alone.’ It came closer. ‘What could you hope to achieve here? What did you ever dream you alone would accomplish? Your day is ended, this land is ours again. A cold moon rises for all your kin, Sea Child – a slow, miserable, fitting end. But you – you will die on my spear like a pig, and the carrion eaters will grow fat on your corpse.’

  The Bodah Duhn lunged forward, spear flashing out. Harlin caught the blow on his shield, grunting, pain shooting up his arm, his counter-thrust missing the Bodah Duhn as it sidestepped nimbly, bringing the butt of its spear crashing down on the back of his shoulder. Harlin fought for his balance, the blow leaving his sword arm numb. He spun, bringing his shield up to block a stab from the spear, grimacing as it gripped him with agony. He swung wildly, missing again, his opponent fresh and uninjured, unarmoured and frustratingly agile. ‘Too slow, Sea Child,’ it laughed, its spectating brethren imitating it, ‘you fight like a drunken bear.’

  Harlin found himself on the back foot, hiding behind his shield, seeking an opening to counter, startled by his opponent’s intensity. They fought on, the Bodah Duhn pressing him harder, overly keen as it saw him tire. It became reckless, its arrogance growing, staying within the reach of Harlin’s sword longer before withdrawing, sidesteps and footwork giving way to straight parries and blocks, its feet planted before him.

  It drove him backwards relentlessly, spear flashing out, clipping Harlin’s armour with unnerving accuracy even when turned aside, leaving deep gashes in the leather plates. A quick swipe at the Bodah Duhn missed, and it countered with a two-handed thrust that cost him his footing, slipping in muck and slime down onto one knee. With a splintering crack, the spearhead broke through Harlin’s shield under the Bodah Duhn’s weight, and was wrenched free with a snarl. Harlin could see the Bodah Duhn through the hole left behind, spear poised to strike again.

  The Bodah Duhn roared as it stabbed down at him, splinters and torn flecks of painted leather flying from Harlin’s shield, the spear bursting through the hole it had made. The shot went wide, twisted by the impact with the shield, the spear’s barbed head glancing from Harlin’s helm and slicing a cut along the leather plate covering his right shoulder, its haft trapped atop it.

  Harlin exploded upwards before the Bodah Duhn could twist free, pivoting off to his left and wrenching his shield downwards. Stuck fast, the spear was torn from the Bodah Duhn’s grasp as the creature was dragged forward off balance. Harlin slammed his knee into its face with a wet crunch, the blow’s momentum flinging the Bodah Duhn back to its feet, its mask exploding into a thousand splinters of bone. It staggered back with a howl, hand clutching a grey face that pissed blood from its broken nose. Ignoring the pain stabbing through arm and ankle, Harlin leapt forward, furious curses following him, and slashed his opponent across the belly. The Bodah Duhn sank to its knees clutching its spilling gut, violet eyes wide with horror, nose flattened and leaking. Harlin stepped briskly around it, freeing the spear trapped in his shield. Trying to claw its innards back into itself, it drew a rattling, inward half-scream as Harlin plunged its spear down between its shoulder blades, skewering it and pinning it to the marshy ground.

  Panting, Harlin looked up to where the other three Bodah Duhn stood, spears clutched tightly, eyes glowing like smouldering amethysts behind their masks, shouting, jeering, challenging and gesturing for Harlin to come try them, as their kinsman drew his last, shuddering breath. Three, he thought, there were five, where –

  All went white.

  Harlin was aware of a spear tip aimed at his throat, vision clearing, and that he was laid out flat on his back. He struggled to focus his eyes on the point hovering above him. A sharp thrust, a killing blow, and the butt of another spear turned it aside, thudding into the wet ground beside his head. Pain lanced through Harlin’s skull, burning behind his eyes. His whole body was numb, floppy, the lack of sensation immobilising. Dimly, he knew there was an argument taking place
around him, but he was so adrift, so insensate, it seemed far off, inconsequential.

  ‘…kill him now, he’s taken one of ours,’ a male voice was saying, ‘he’ll take more before he’s through.’

  ‘No, not yet,’ another answered, female. ‘There is a reason he is here, they must have sent him back for something. There must be something special about this one if they sent him alone. We’ll find out, then He can decide what to do with him.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ spanned another, male again. ‘He killed Gidhri, I want to see his insides fed to the Marsh piece by piece.’ Noise. Hawking, spitting.

  ‘No,’ the female one said, ‘there will be questions. We cannot deny the answers, not to Him. You can have your fill of blood once he’s of no use, and not a moment before.’ A warm, rough hand undid the strap of Harlin’s helm and yanked it from his head. He heard a feminine laugh, his temples throbbed with the sound. ‘And besides,’ the female voice tittered, ‘he’s too handsome for you to spoil for me so quickly. He has spirit this one, it is to be admired.’

  A masked face came into his wavering vision, upside down. A hand removed it, revealing a lean female face. The woman’s skin held a dull grey tone, and she smirked as she crouched over him. Her violet eyes glowed softly, the light catching on ashen hair tied back and braided at her temples.

  ‘You’re coming with us to Morbha, Sea Child,’ she said in the Marcher tongue. She pressed a hand to his forehead and the world went black.

  When Harlin came too he found himself in a kneeling position, his hands bound firmly behind his back with some rough material that hurt terribly to struggle against. He was in a wide, circular chamber, carved from dark stone, its ceiling rough and spiked with stalactites glittering in the light of pale-burning torches. Pillars carved from the same stone formed a kind of inner circle, casting long, wavering shadows upon the walls behind them. Harlin was knelt in their centre.

  He looked about, confused, seeing dark figures roaming through patches of light and shadow, lithe phantoms slinking between pillars, others hovering just on the edge of sight, vanishing when his eyes turned towards them as if they had never been. Echoing voices whispered back and forth from one end of the chamber to the other, too quiet to decipher, secretive, a hushed, chittering choir, their unseen mouths nibbling at his ear chillingly. He struggled. ‘Be still, worm,’ a rough voice grunted from behind, a kick to the arse stilling him.

  They had brought him to a throne room, he realised, seeing a tall chair before him. Carved from some kind of dark, glassy stone, the weak light broke upon its sharp edges into a myriad of dull rainbow colours. It glowered at him from its rough-cut dais, cloaked and wreathed in shadows against the torchlight. A Bodah Duhn approached the seat, hunched in its murky cloak, and lit a pair of braziers either side of it. They did little to dispel the dark haze surrounding it, their light seeming only to catch upon the sharpest of its edges, leaving all else tenebrous and imperceptible. It was carved with unfamiliar shapes and patterns that caught the eye undesirably, swirls and whorls, weaving vines. The shadows it crouched in seemed to emanate from between the patterns running along its arms and backrest.

  A hush descended over the place, all movement ceasing, and Harlin saw the lurking Bodah Duhn form neat lines along the curved walls, dropping to their knees. Across the room, behind the throne, stone doors rumbled open slowly on grinding hinges, revealing a rectangular abyss that seemed somehow lighter than the throne before it. A foul smell drifted into the room. Rot, sweat, filth, shit. Harlin heaved, and took another boot to the arse.

  A palanquin entered, borne on the shoulders of Bodah Duhn whose heads were bowed low in reverence, long hoods swaying as they moved perfectly in time with one another. Its curtains were rancid, stained rags, cut from plain roughspun cotton, ragged and decaying. The smell came from something within it, making Harlin wince as it passed by. It was lowered before the throne, the bearers moving to attend to something inside that drew heavy, wheezing breaths. The odour grew stronger, made Harlin retch, felt like sickly fingers reaching down the back of his throat. The palanquin was hoisted again, visibly lighter, and taken away around the other side of the throne, the stone doors closing noisily as it slipped between them.

  Something sat upon the throne. Harlin could not tell what it was, other than it was once a man, or should have been a man, and that it was a broken thing, deformed and crippled. Stunted, clubfooted legs dangled uselessly over the edge of the throne, where a torso, that was in places muscular, in others bloated and diseased looking, sat writhing. It was mottled black all over, patches of pallid flesh glistening in places like scars. One long, wiry arm gripped the throne’s armrest with a gnarled hand, its nails like talons. The other rested uselessly, flabby, stunted and weak-looking, atop a swollen gut. Its head was thrown back in pain, a tormented noise escaping its throat as a spasm wracked its body.

  Harlin stared aghast for a fleeting moment, before the fingers of its stench made him hurl. He forced himself to swallow acid vomit from an empty stomach.

  The thing’s convulsion ended after several heartbeats, and it lowered its face to Harlin. A dread weight suddenly sat atop him, and drove all resistance from him, his jaw slackening, eyes widening helplessly. He saw a band of iron circling its head tightly, obscuring its eyes, digging into what little flesh remained clinging to its skull. Something told Harlin the creature didn’t need eyes to see him, even with the iron band the feel of its gaze was like an anvil sat between his shoulders.

  ‘Welcome, Harlin, of Clan Faolán,’ it drawled slowly, through a lipless mouth of gnarled, yellow teeth. It spoke the Marcher tongue with a hissing lisp, its voice reverberating through Harlin’s gut, through the ground beneath him. It wheezed suddenly, in something that might have been a laugh but caused it further pain, lurching forward in its seat. Attendants stood nearby in shadows moved suddenly, as though fearing it might tumble from the throne. It leaned back and waved them away with its clawed hand.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ it hissed, voice betraying agony. ‘I know your name, boy, and I know a great many things, besides, and not just of you. Though some things escape me, I find, as time passes me by. Does this tongue please your ear, Sea Child – it is your preferred one, is it not?’

  Harlin sat dumbstruck, staring open mouthed. ‘Who –’ he began, shaking his head, the words failing him. It made a sudden heaving, retching noise that made him jump, and then realise it was laughing again, harder than before.

  ‘I,’ it said slowly, ‘am Corrom Duhn. I think you have heard of me before now.’ It laughed again. ‘I was born a crippled, twisted thing, they say – it has been so long now, the memories begin to fade – and so your people called me the Dark Crooked One, and feared my shadow in all that bodes ill for them, though now my name is but a word for them to scare their children with.’

  Harlin sat in silence, mind empty, and felt the great weight upon him intensify, become colossal. It bent him double, till his nose was pressed into the ground and every bone in his body felt about to snap. Some kind of Weaving was at work upon him, its strength monstrous, beyond anything Ceatha and Radha had unleashed upon him. A choked cry of pain escaped from between his clenched teeth.

  ‘And now, Harlin, the Black Wolf,’ said Corrom Duhn, ‘you will tell me why you have come to my island.’

  Chapter 17

  As the Seams Break

  ‘Lord-Captain Arnulf Berlunt, of the Blackshield Dogs fighting company, Lord of Celdarin’s Shield and the Valley of Dead Kings.’

  The mercenary lord swept into the pavilion as the herald finished his announcement, followed by ten of his hulking, black-clad northern thugs. He carried an air of authority that even King Aenwald had to admit was impressive, imposing, even. The silver-haired man’s cloak flowed like a ribbon of black ink behind him, settling around his shoulders as he drew up before where the King was seated. He bowed shallowly. His men did not imitate him. Aenwald raised an eyebrow at that, taking a mental note of their insult. He waved a hand
to dismiss the court herald and scrutinised Arnulf from head to foot.

  ‘So,’ the King said at length, pursing his lips. ‘The last son of House Berlunt, Arnulf – son of Lothan. Descended to mercenary work after the fall of your House, now stooping lower still to base treason, murder and theft. The last time I saw you I was handing you a chest of coin for crushing Easthold at my behest. It seems this dog bites the hand that feeds, like so many others that snuffle at my feet. What have you got to say for yourself then, eh? Explain. Now.’

  There was something uncomfortable about meeting Arnulf’s gaze, Aenwald noticed. He forced himself to keep his stare locked with Arnulf’s, aware of the effort it was taking to keep his face looking furious. Though that became easier when the mercenary simply shrugged.

  ‘I thought it was time my men and I had a home of our own,’ he said placidly, ‘seeing as we have none to call our own, at Your Majesty’s word.’

  ‘And so you made it in the fucking Shield,’ Aenwald roared, slamming a fist on his chair’s armrest, seeing men shift uncomfortably at the volume of his voice. ‘In my greatest fortress! My cousin’s seat! Caermark’s ward against those southern pigfuckers! How fucking dare you, Arnulf. And you come here so smugly, so surely, calling yourself Lord of the Shield and the Valley, while the true lord of those lands sits at my right hand suffering every offence you can muster.’ He gestured to where Lord Rebacht sat to his right, podgy face turning red like a steaming kettle.

  ‘The bastard killed my son,’ the lord seethed, ‘my firstborn son. Give me his head, my King, I claim my right to vengeance on this –’ he searched for the right insult for a moment ‘– cock-swallowing knave. Give me the axe and I’ll do the job myself Your Majesty, and with pleasure.’

  ‘Shut your fucking mouth,’ the King spat, eyes not moving from Arnulf’s.