The Horse Lord

by Peter Morwood

  "There was a young man with them, unarmoured but in rich robes. He called Ernol over and looked him up and down, smiling pleasantly. 'Did you kill my soldiers?' he asked. 'Yes,' said Ernol. 'Why did you do that?' Ernol told him. "They are expensive to train—can you repay me?' I cannot,' replied Ernol. 'Oh, but you can,' said the young man. And then—then…

  "He slew my only son."

  "I went a little mad. I think I screamed—I know I wept. I saw the young man, smiling, wiping his sword, and he was red: his horse was red; the grass and the sky and the sun were all red with the blood of my son and the hate in my brain. Then I raised my empty hand and spoke the Invocation of Fire.

  "He burned. He sat on his tall horse with a smile on his lips and a naked sword in his hand and he flared and died like dry straw in a furnace. It mattered little to me that he was the Grand Warlord's second son, Etzel's uncle, or that my action would make the Empire ban all magic thereafter on pain of death. All that mattered was that I had killed him too quickly. I had not repaid him in full for the death of my own, my only son."

  Aldric stared unblinking at Gemmel for a time, then poured wine and drank it, not in a careful sip but in a single long gulp though he hardly felt the liquor's warmth through the icy knot in his stomach. He had only ever seen the gentle, studious side of the man he called altrou, and had sometimes wondered whether he knew the true meaning of Aldric's own desire for revenge. It seemed that he did. "Not repaid him in full…" echoed again through the eijo's mind—it might have been his own voice.

  "What am I—" now that was his own voice, raspy and shrill from a mouth the wine had barely moistened. Aldric cleared his throat and tried again. "What am I to look for, then—and where?"

  "There is a talisman which I think will answer my needs best. It's called Ykraith—the Dragonwand."

  "Dragon… ?" Aldric wondered aloud. The word had a Drusalan sound.

  "Firedrake," Gemmel translated. "There's a cavern on the island of Techaur. That's where you'll find it."

  "Where's Techaur?" asked the Alban, squinting at the map. It was a strange thing, drawn on stiff glass-clear parchment with letters much too small to read unaided. The wizard touched a smudge of islands in the Narrow Sea south of Cerenau. Aldric realised what they were and groaned softly. "Not the Ethailin Myl! They're not called the Thousand Islands for a joke!"

  "Even so, they're only five days' sailing from Erd-haven."

  "And how many days finding one particular unnamed lump of rock, eh?"

  "Less than you might think—there are only so many lumps of rock' big enough to contain the size of cavern this is supposed to be. If in doubt, ask one of the local fishermen." Aldric grunted, then found something else to quibble about.

  "Look here, isn't Kerys much closer? Two, three day sailing at most. Why don't I—"

  "Why don't you look at the rest of the map? There's a lot more riding from here to Kerys than there is to Erdhaven—and that much more time for you to be spotted by a spy and dealt with before you have the Dragon-wand."

  "Oh…"

  "Yes, 'oh.' Now, I think it's high time you had a sword of your own. Follow me—unless of course you have a few more objections for me to dispose of." The old man's voice wasn't unkind, more dryly amused, and though Aldric could have mentioned pirates, Imperial Fleet patrol-ships and even water-monsters, he decided to save his breath and follow.

  "This is my armoury," said Gemmel, indicating a door with one hand and fishing in his pocket for keys with the other. As the door hissed open on well-oiled hinges, Aldric caught his breath at the glitter from within. After so long with a wizard, he was prepared for and accustomed to wonders where he least expected them, but the armory was somewhere he had long wanted to see. He saw it now, lit by a cool, pale light pouring from slots in the ceiling, and realised that he was not completely inured to the marvellous after all—which he considered privately was just as it should be.

  He spent a long time simply wandering up and dawn, looking at things. Though he could not put the sensation into words, he felt that there was one particular weapon he should be looking for. The feeling was vague, amorphous, but still strong enough to bring him back to Gemmel empty-handed. The enchanter nodded as if he had expected something of the sort and took a sheathed blade from a locked cupboard on the wall. He locked the door again carefully afterwards, then extended the weapon to Aldric. "Try this," he said. "I think it will suit you."

  The young eijo bowed politely, as was the custom when receiving the gift of a sword—though in truth it was just a blade, cased in a black battle scabbard chaped, clasped and throated with silver. Its tang was shrouded in a binding of soft leather, with the parts of the proper hilt in a box which Gemmel set out on the armoury work-bench—a metal box enamelled in deep blue shot with silver stars, its edges ornamented with designs of significance. How significant, Aldric was soon to learn. Within, each piece was cradled in its own nest of quilted satin; the metal was black and shiny, not because of lacquer or enamel but because the steel itself was jet black. Even the strips of tooled leather braided crisscross on the long grip were black, relieved only by an underlay of silver wire.

  The weapon was a taiken of exquisite quality, and with sensuous care Aldric revealed part of the straight blade. By tradition no taiken was ever drawn by a new owner for the first time except under the light of Heaven, and he contented himself with a mere handspan of the mirror-burnished metal. It flashed under the harsh artificial lights. Smoky blue-grey lines of incredibly hard steel outlined the cutting edges, shifting in a constant play of reflected shadow as he turned the longsword this way and that. Slightly embarrassed to find his hands trembling, Aldric ran the shining blade home with the gentlest of pressures and unwrapped the leather binding from its tang.

  This was the only part of the blade where writing was permitted; any other decoration was limited to stylised or abstract engraving. As they scanned the precise, beautiful uncials, flowing as elegantly as if they were penned and not gouged from the unpolished grey metal, Aldric's eyes narrowed and he glanced at Gemmel for a nod of confirmation before staring more intently at the graceful letters. Both they and the language they constituted were in an old form of the Alban High Speech, so that he had to work at the translation—and even when the meaning was clear, his mind found it hard to accept.

  "This can't be true!" he breathed.

  "The words are true," intoned Gemmel quietly. "It is fitting that this ancient evil should be matched by this ancient blade."

  "Forged was I of iron Heaven-born," Aldric read, half to himself. "Uelan made me. I am Isileth."

  The weapon Aldric held was almost two thousand year old, older than the coming of the Horse Lords, and though the hilt had been changed many times as fashion and need dictated, the blade itself had a lineage few clans could match. Clan Talvalin did, on the Elthanek side. Aldric did.

  The ribbon of steel was too hard to bend, too flexible to break, and the legends said its edges had only once been honed, and then still wet from the quenching bath. A named blade, its formal title was Isileth; but down the years and in the stories it had become known by a simpler, sinister, more accurate epithet: Widowmaker.

  Aldric secured the complex hilt, noting absently the quillons deeply forked for parrying or snapping an opponent's blade, and seeing that there were indeed loops to guard his fingers. He locked the pommel in place, lifted the taiken, then knelt and pressed the cool smoothness of its lacquered scabbard to his brow. Gemmel bowed slightly, acknowledging his foster-son's courtesy. There were words to say when accepting such a gift, but Aldric could not remember them—and anyway they were probably insufficient to describe his state of mind. Instead he pulled the scabbard on its shoulder-belt over his head in silence and settled it on his left hip, withdrew the long-sword's safety-collar a bare half-inch and then sheathed it with a solid click.

  "I'll have your horses and armour ready by tomorrow," said Gemmel, interrupting the eijo's reverie as gently as he could. Aldric cam
e out of his waking dream with a start.

  "I'll pack my travelling gear," he said quickly. "There are things I don't want to forget." The enchanter looked at him curiously.

  "I don't think there's anything I've overlooked."

  Aldric smiled a small, enigmatic smile which told Gemmel nothing. "Probably not…" was all the young man said.

  Aldric limited his selection of clothing to essentials, functional rather than fashionable. Apart from the white of shirts and linen, everything was unrelieved black—and some garments were even more functional than their tailor had originally intended. Upending a boot, the Alban shook three sheathed knives from their place of concealment. Neither his family nor, he guessed, his foster-father would have approved of them, since even venjens-eijin were expected to have a modicum of honesty and carry their weapons in plain view. He intended to do no such thing. One, a balanced throwing-knife, buckled round his calf where it was hidden by the long moccasin boots he favoured. Another was a thin stiletto strapped to his left forearm, hilt foremost under the shirtsleeve. While the third…

  That was the most dubious of all. It was a T-shaped punch dagger whose scabbard hooked to the loops he had secretly sewn inside all his collars. It was dishonourable, an assassin's weapon—and a possibly-fatal surprise for anyone who thought him unarmed. That, Aldric reflected as he settled the tiny knife against his spine, was justification enough for him. Fitting Isileth carefully to one side of a new double weapon-belt, he bowed very slightly, very privately, before slotting his tsepan into place. Then quite quickly he gathered up his clothes and left the room, pausing only once to look back at what had been home for three years. Then he closed the door with a sudden, final movement.

  In the armoury he packed his saddlebags and waited for Gemmel. When the old enchanter appeared, he strode without pausing straight for the wall which shot up smoothly into the ceiling at his approach, revealing a dusty flight of stairs lit with the yellow dance of live flames. In the dust were traces of feet coming and going, with the latest so recent that nothing had yet dimmed the shiny stair. Aldric smelt the odours of hay and horses. Beyond a green door was his pack-horse, already partially loaded with cased armour—but the youngster made at once for the stall beside it.

  Within was a courser, midnight black and gleaming. It was harnessed in black leather bossed and inlaid with silver, saddled in black leather with tassles of silver-shot blue—the Talvalin colours, but too subtle for the idle glance—and geared with bow and quiver, holstered tele-kin and a cased shield. The beast was Andarran, a purebred stallion of a breed extinct this hundred years or more, and his value was beyond price. "The horse's name is Lyard," he heard Gemmel say as he made his saddlebags fast. Aldric's mind was whirling, despite his efforts to control it. There was an overpowering sensation of having slipped unnoticed into a harper's tale, and reality was something harder to grasp than the horse at his shoulder or the sword at his hip.

  He led the war-horse forward and secured the pack-pony's reins to a stirrup leather, then glanced around for the way out. Gemmel noticed his enquiring look and gestured with one hand, at which the back wall of the stable ground ponderously open. A breeze whirled in, bringing with it birdsong and the smell of the open air. Walking beside his charger, Aldric stepped back into a world which should have seemed real—except that he was no longer sure just what was real.

  Gemmel watched as the warrior with his son's face reached the saddle in a single easy swing, then stepped out behind him into the watery sunshine. "I'm sorry the weather isn't more pleasant," he said apologetically. Aldric didn't care. He had never really appreciated landscapes before, but this was the first scenery he had laid eyes on in far too long and he drank it in.

  "This is gold, this silver," the enchanter said, and held out two leather bags. "Six hundred marks should be enough, I hope. If not, and you hurry, you can earn -something at the Erdhaven Spring-Feast. Now remember, don't touch anything but the Dragonwand, no matter how tempting. Watch out for spies—and they won't all be human. Trust nobody, especially after dark."

  A tiny smile tugged at the corners of Aldric's mouth; it was typical of the old man to give a lecture when all had been already said. "And Aldric…" the words hesitated.

  "Yes?"

  Gemmel shyly rubbed the toe of his boot into the grass. "I was only going to say, come back safe." Aldric smiled and bowed. With a rush of warmth the wizard realised it was the small, informal nod of son to father.

  "I'll do my best. Tau k'noeth-ei, altrou-ain." He twitched the stallion's reins and cantered off into the sunrise. Gemmel watched him go.

  "And with you also, Aldric… my son." Then he turned away.

  When Aldric looked back he saw only the grass—but he waved anyway.

  Behind a securely locked door, Duergar Vathach read the words on a ragged scrap of parchment for the third time, as if hoping they might have changed their meaning. They had not. There was nobody in the room to see how pale his face had become, nor how his fingers trembled before they clenched into white-knuckled fists that clawed the pendant sword-hilt from around his neck. Links of broken chain scattered across the floor with a multiple laughing tinkle, and then the hilt itself went crashing against a wall.

  Cradling his sweat-slick head in both hands, Duergar mumbled incoherently to himself. He had long been troubled by the way cu Ruruc showed neither fear nor respect, but ill-concealed amusement, whenever he saw the talisman that supposedly controlled him. And there was the way he had sent out spies to find and bring him… something.

  Duergar had not known what cu Ruruc sought until a year ago, when some errand had brought him from Dun-rath's great library into the Hall of Archives next to it, a place which housed both writings and objects from past history. There he had seen old taikenin, relics of the Clan Wars—and seen too, for the first time, the chains and bands which held each sword securely on its owner's wrist. Bands which would remain in contact with the wearer's cooling flesh long after death-slack fingers had released the finest sword-hilt…

  It had taken Duergar ten months to confirm his nightmare. Ten months of frantic, furtive searching through every document in a fortress all too well supplied with scribbled scraps of information. He had not known what he was looking for, only that he would know it if he found it. As indeed he did.

  The evidence was not dramatic; rather, its insignificance was more redolent of some black joke. A bill. A coppersmith's bill, stuffed out of sight and out of mind in a heap of ledgers, destined to be discarded but instead forgotten until Duergar found it; after an interval of some five hundred years.

  "… from a kailin of Ut Ergan citadel, retainer to Kalarr-arluth, two markes of silver for ye ensetting of a jewel (this blue and most fair) under bronze on his swordes clasp against losing of ye same, it being a luck-token ygiven of his horde …" Any sorcerer of intelligence knew that one of the seven Echainon spellstones had vanished from all wizards' knowledge during or before the Alban Clan Wars—and to Duergar's frantically working mind the words he read had only one possible meaning. He was aware, too, that if Kalarr learned that his secret was discovered he, Duergar, would die. But if he, Duergar, was able to retrieve the wrist-band, then when cu Ruruc made his move the other sorcerer would get the shock of both his lives. And if the Echainon spellstone was still "ensetten under bronze" on the sword clasp, then he would be no longer needed.

  But if Kalarr should regain the wrist-band and the stone… Duergar's mind quailed at the consequences. It explained many of his suspicions about cu Ruruc, and he had no doubt that his so-called ally was also searching for Aldric Talvalin. Except that if Kalarr felt unable to bring the kailin back, then rather than risk the stone falling into someone else's hands he would obliterate everything. Duergar had to reach both it and Aldric first…

  With the strength of extreme fear he dragged his laden desk aside and began to draw a symbol of great power across the wooden floor…

  In the four days' riding since he had left Gemmel, Aldric
had encountered no more than a dozen people—but he had already discovered that his status of eijo was accorded more respect than a kailin of the same age. Reaction was the same in every case: first a curious glance towards the sound of hoofs, then a narrow-eyed survey of the covered shield, the apparently uncoloured trappings, the tsepan from which Aldric had prised his clan crest, the cropped hair and the faintly sinister air lent by his scarred cheek. And then the bow, invariably low, formal—and performed with a timidity the young man at first found rather shocking.

  An eijo, whether with hair unbound to indicate his lordless state or like Aldric's, cropped to mark an oath-taken purpose, was outside the law and without protection from House or Clan. He had only himself to rely on—which made the eijo a menacing individual and one for lonely travellers to be wary of. While Aldric was comfortable in the presence of yeomen and peasants— regardless of whether they were comfortable with him about or not—he avoided large towns and the occasional kailin he met on the road. When encounters were unavoidable he matched their bows precisely, neither offering nor expecting much respect. When they were low-clan and inferior, as most were, even that rankled.

  It was another fortnight before the huge forest of Guelerd began to darken the horizon ahead of him. The place had a well-deserved reputation as a stronghold for ruffians and bandits despite the efforts of King Rynert's father, and what few steadings Aldric passed were large and well-fortified. Rumour had it that only fools and foreigners rode through Guelerd unescorted; a rumour the young man smiled at, since he had seen no trace of hostility all day. It did not occur to him that a full-armed eijo on a warhorse was not the most inviting of prospective victims.