by Mark Smylie
You walk the world in shadows, steeped in secret murder and crimes of state, pollution marring your spirit so men who think themselves your betters can enter the Heavens, while you are condemned to suffer one day in Hell! the ghost of the ancient wizard said. Blood dripped from the dagger in Stjepan’s hand onto the earth at his feet. Why hide in the shadows? Why be a servant, when instead these could be your rewards: golden crowns and laurels upon your brow, legions at your beck and call, kings and queens at your feet, all the trophies of war and lust!
Stjepan laughed drily. “A feeble offer from a ghost: the riches of the material world. Do you think me so easily bought?” he asked.
Oh, but I most certainly do, said Azharad. Anger and hate consume you; love has been burnt from you, burnt away in the pyre that consumed your mother, by years of service to men you secretly hate and who do not deserve your loyalty. The battle around them grew more and more vicious; the world grew darker, with fires raging on the horizon in every direction. Azharad seemed to be feeding off the chaos around him. And a man without love is a man for the taking. A man’s destiny is spun by the Wheels of Fate and written in the Book of Dooms, but I was a Magician-King in the service of Nameless Cults. I worshipped Nymarga the Devil and Githwaine his first and last Worm King, and I strived to read the future in all its possibilities. The Book of Dooms is not fixed; the Queen of Heaven gave men that gift, that they may write themselves a new page. You walk a servant’s path, but I can offer a different one, the path of war and conquest, glowing bright with fire and slaughter. The Sword, held high in triumph! The Sphinx, the source of mystery! And the Riven Tower, earth-shaker, destroyer of the order of things!
Azharad raised his hands up to the Heavens. An Age is ending! And in the fires that are coming, someone will surely walk this path! It could be you, if you wanted it; you need but ask and this path is your path. Free me, and become my captain! Free me, and become my champion! Help me back into the world you hate so much, and I will help you break it!
Stjepan eyed Azharad with a slight smile.
“I have only one thing to ask of you, dread Lord,” he said quietly. “The sword Gladringer . . . where is it?”
Around the bier no one moved.
Arduin stood still staring at the sword, as did Godewyn and Caider Ross. The beautifully made sword glistened to them in the flickering lamplight.
Finally Godewyn and Caider glanced at each other, then at Arduin, and then back to the sword. Godewyn caught Caider Ross’ eye, and gave an imperceptible nod at the sword.
Caider Ross grinned and nodded, and made a quick step forward as if to lunge for the sword lying on the body on the bier.
And Arduin swept his war sword from its place of rest in the crook of his couter and it flashed high in the air in a blur, and then he cut straight down through Caider Ross’ shoulder and into his chest, cleaving the startled man open before he had a chance even to flinch.
Godewyn leapt back against a wall, almost tripping over an urn filled with coins, his eyes wide. “King of Heaven!” he spat.
He stared aghast as Arduin put an iron-shod foot against Caider’s chest and pushed the body back onto the dirt floor of the chamber to free his sword from the man’s ruined ribs and lungs. Arduin turned toward him, a murderous glint in his eyes. Godewyn licked his lips, starting to measure his chances against the Champion of the Tournament of Flowers standing before him in full harness and with bloodied sword raised in challenge.
Azharad paused and looked away from Stjepan.
“Where is Gladringer?” Stjepan repeated.
Azharad looked back at him and stretched out a hand to the Athairi. Free me, bring me back into the World, and I will tell you!
“Do you even know where it is?” Stjepan asked.
Free me, take the hero’s path, and I will tell you where to find it, said the ghost.
Stjepan studied him a long moment. “I think not,” he finally said. “If I help break the World, it’ll be without you.”
Azharad laughed bitterly. Then you are a fool, the ghost said. And he turned and faced Stjepan and raised his mask, revealing a face corrupted by disease and eaten by worms and maggots, his eyes missing, his teeth sharpened into fangs. He moved toward Stjepan, his hideous face opening in a frustrated and terrifying scream.
Stjepan sat up with a start to discover he had been lying against the lid of the iron casket as it rested on the sloping sides of the pit. He breathed deeply, and then winced at the pain of Godewyn’s blow. He tried instinctively to bring his hand to the back of his head and when that didn’t happen he realized that his hands were tied behind his back.
And then he froze as he became aware that above him someone was walking along the lip of the funneled pit, just as Azharad had been circling him in his dream.
“Azharad,” said Stjepan with a tired sigh. “Even awake my answer is the same.”
“No. Not Azharad,” came Annwyn’s voice.
Stjepan rolled a bit onto his side on the sloping wall of the pit and looked up and over his shoulder; it was indeed Annwyn, walking around the chamber above him. She wore golden serpent bracelets, ornate anklets and arm torques and a jeweled necklace, and little else except the moving, pulsing map. She trailed her damask robes behind her.
He frowned, staring at her, his mind still groggy and shaken.
“Where’s Erim? The others?” he asked.
“I fear they’ve all gone and left us. But then, what’s happening here no longer concerns them. It is just you and I, here, alone in the dark. The map, and the map reader,” she said.
Stjepan turned away from her. “I think I dreamed this moment,” he said quietly. He began to surreptitiously struggle against his bonds.
“A pleasant dream? The two of us giving rise to something new, here, in this place, beneath the earth,” said Annwyn with a tone of hope.
“I don’t think so,” he said. His head hung low in resignation, but his voice was sharp and clear. “It is time for this charade to end, Annwyn. The map has placed a compulsion upon you. You’ve become a pawn of the Nameless Cults, and I will aid you no further.”
Arduin and Godewyn circled each other around the bier and the body and its sword, slowly and calmly. Godewyn looked down at Caider Ross’ body as he stepped over it, and a dark cloud of anger passed over his face. His nostrils flared and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a vicious snarl as he hefted his broadsword in his left hand and his axe in his right. But some part of him raised a warning flag. Careful, careful, he thought. This one’s a born killer, trained from birth to take men apart with a sword, and he clearly hasn’t lost a step since they named him a Champion of the Tourneys . . .
“You know why they call me Red-Hand?” Godewyn asked Arduin suddenly with a grin. “I was given that name when I was but fourteen, when a local bard sang a song about the revenge I took on a man that had stolen from me. I was already well on a path steeped in other people’s blood and misery, and I’ve never looked back. When I die, the men and women I’ve killed will be lined up at the Place of Judgment waiting for me, whole flocks of them, a full fucking chorus of the unhappy, untimely dead waiting to greet me with their moans and wails.”
“I look forward to sending you to them, then,” said Arduin with gritted teeth. “It’s high time, I think, that you take your place in whatever Hell is waiting for you.”
“Ah, it won’t be that easy, my Lord. You’re hardly the first to try, and I don’t think you’re gonna be the last. After I kill you, I’m gonna take that sword and I’m gonna find that cursed little shit Gilgwyr,” said Godewyn. “I’ll cut him limb from limb, slice his lying tongue out and feed it to him.” His grin got wider and meaner. “Then I’m gonna find your sister and I’m gonna stick her with the sword in my pants, and make her scream like you never could.”
Arduin shook with rage. “You . . . you . . . you . . . you . . .” he stammered, until words utterly failed him and all that was left was a blinding hunger for death.
They stopped circ
ling and lunged for each other, blades crossing.
Annwyn laughed as Stjepan staggered unsteadily to his feet, his hands tied behind him, and turned to look up at her walking her circle around the lip of the pit.
“Is that what you think when you look at me? The others . . . when they looked at me . . . when they looked at me, they first saw this form,” she said as she dropped the damask robe to the earth behind her, and let her hands run over her body, over her hips and sides and up her breasts. “. . . This flesh, this skin . . . And then they saw the map.” She looked at him with curious eyes, and she began to walk down into the pit, taking a long circular spiral down its sloped, funneled walls, slowly getting closer and closer to him as she spoke. “But not you. When you look at me, you see the map first. In fact, it’s all you see. You don’t see my form, my flesh, my skin. You don’t see me, you don’t see what I am becoming.”
Stjepan stood at the base of the pit, his boots in muck and dead maggots, and he looked into her clear blue eyes. “I see full well what you’ve become,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “I want you to look at me. Not at the map, look at me.”
“I see you better than you think, Annwyn, and you are not yourself,” he said.
“I am more myself than I have ever been,” she said with a smile. Stjepan said nothing, watching her warily as she got closer.
Annwyn reached the floor of the pit and walked around him and the casket, carefully stepping so that she did not enter the muck and dead maggots pooled at the pit’s lowest point in front of the open casket. As she passed behind him, her hand reached out to touch him on his bare shoulder. Her finger trailed across his back, tracing a line on his skin from one shoulder to his spine to his other shoulder. “All these days and nights you’ve looked at me. It’s only fair that you show me your form, your flesh, your skin,” she whispered in his ear. “Let me see you. And then we can finish what we’ve started.”
She turned him around. She looked down across his smooth chest, her eyes coming to rest on the rings in his nipples, then down across his flat, muscled abdomen. She could smell sweat and sun-burnt copper skin and the heat rising from his body.
“You and me and the map, alone under the earth,” she said, looking up into his eyes with a knowing smile.
She started to undo the buttons on his breeches. She slid her hands under the waist of his breeches, separating it from his skin, sliding her hands behind him to glide her fingers over his firm buttocks. She crouched in front of him, and as she did so, she pulled her hands down and with them his breeches, and she smiled in delight at what she found rising to greet her.
Godewyn and Arduin threw themselves at each other in a fast, dizzying clash of arms, each surprising the other with their speed and skill. Holding his war sword with both hands in the Aurian longsword style, Arduin delivered three fast killing strokes to the head and body of a rapidly and desperately backpedaling Godewyn, only to have each either turned aside by broadsword parry or find empty air where the big man should have been, and then found himself ducking a blow from Godewyn’s axe that would have taken his head off had he been a hair slower.
They separated, eyeing each other warily and perhaps a bit more respectfully. The next time they approached each other with quick feints and little jabs, tests to see speed and reflexes, dueling around the bier slowly at first, then with increasing vigor as they began to take each other’s measure. Arduin fought like a champion sportsman, confident in the protection of his full steel harness; Godewyn like a veteran street fighter using guile and speed and sheer bravado. Godewyn quickly realized that his broadsword and axe were ill-suited against Arduin’s steel harness; without a sharp pointed tip to drive through a bit of mail or under a joint in the armor, his only chance lay either in a shot to Arduin’s bare, blond head, or to batter the armor until he crushed it in on the flesh beneath it. But the axe head was too lightweight, and Arduin had been trained to wear and fight in a full harness since he was eight, and he used the armor like a shield to deflect and turn Godewyn’s blades, never taking a blow flat to the surface, and managing to keep his opponent well away from his head and face.
Godewyn felt a rising frustration and sinking desperation as his blows caromed off the curves and planes of the hard armor shell. He sent a series of sharp, hard blows right at Arduin’s head from both sword and axe, hoping the flurry would overcome Arduin’s defenses, but the knight parried them deftly with his war sword and counterattacked, sending Godewyn spinning back to escape his onslaught. Godewyn managed to punch his broadsword out and across Arduin’s stomach in a move that would have gutted an unarmored man, but all he did was ring the armor like a bell and the knight’s cuirass didn’t even dent.
Although they were well matched, Arduin was gaining the upper hand.
Stjepan lay on the iron casket lid, his hands still tied behind him, his boots braced in the black muck at the bottom of the pit. Annwyn’s shapely ivory legs straddled him and the casket lid, her feet digging into the slopes of the funneled pit, and she ground her hips down onto his lap, one hand clutching the back of his bloodied head, the other braced against the casket lid above him.
Her head went back, wide-mouthed in pleasure as she gasped and moaned at the sensations of being filled. She laughed as she ground against him, running her hands over his skin then back to grasp his hair.
She leaned back and thrust down onto his lap, harder and harder.
The headless corpse leaned upright in the standing casket, a few feet behind her, a mute witness to their coupling.
Godewyn knew he was losing his duel with Arduin, he knew it in his bones, and grew angry at the unfairness of it all. In skill they were perhaps well matched, but the knight’s superior harness was all the difference that he needed. It changed the way the knight fought, the way he could afford to take risks, and there was nothing Godewyn could do about it.
Arduin slammed his war sword across Godewyn’s right arm, biting deep into the brigandine sleeve’s leather and plates and sending a shock of pain up and down the arm, and Godewyn dropped his axe with a sharp cry. Godewyn backed away from him and almost toppled over several urns filled with grave goods into one of the arched crevices that ran the length of the sides of the room. He had to put out his right hand into the crevice to brace himself against the fall.
Triumphantly, Arduin grinned and leapt in for the kill, but Godewyn had put his hand on top of a small pile of coins, and his fingers closed around them and he hurled a handful of gold coins, glinting in the lamplight, right into Arduin’s face. It was just enough to distract the knight, and Godewyn’s broadsword snaked out to slap Arduin’s sword from his grasp, and it flew across the small chamber.
Arduin leapt back, unarmed.
And now it was Godewyn who wore a jackal’s grin of triumph.
Arduin measured with his eye the distance to his war sword on the ground, and he knew in an instant that he couldn’t get to it before Godewyn could get to him. Grimly he looked at Godewyn and raised his hands to beckon him forward in defiance: come and get me if you dare.
Annwyn leaned back further, arching her torso as she ground down against him, and Stjepan could see the whole of the map swirling on her skin. His body shuddered at the sensations of her tightness slipping wetly up and down upon his shaft, and he groaned and thrust his hips up at her, his eyes fluttering. And then suddenly his eyes were wide open with surprise; he frowned and stared, mouth open in confusion, but no, he was correct, there was a new set of letters and runes swirling on her skin, letters he had not seen before. He looked up at her; she was in the throes of passion, her head thrown back and her sweetly parted lips issuing wordless, insensible sounds, and he was uncertain if she was even aware of what was appearing on her writhing body.
Godewyn switched his broadsword to his right hand and lunged at Arduin, but the knight hurled himself across the bier, knocking the corpse that lay upon it off and onto the floor.
The masked head of the body b
ounced into a corner of the chamber, and came to a rest as if watching the proceedings.
Godewyn made to come around the bier, broadsword raised high in both hands for a quick chopping deathblow, but he skidded to a halt and froze.
Arduin slowly stood, holding the beautiful sword that had been on top of the body in his right hand, a look of cold disdain on his face as he contemplated his opponent.
“Ah, fuck me,” Godewyn cursed.
Annwyn leaned forward until she was coiled about him and they were in an embrace. She stared down into his eyes, her golden hair falling about his face like a veil. She grabbed him by the hair, looking at him imploringly, and his final reserves crumbled and despite his hands tied behind his back he began thrusting up into her, faster and harder, pushing toward climax, and she thrust her hips and pelvis down against him.
She began to laugh as his pace increased, a laugh of joy, of pleasure and delight, of discovery and surprise. He thought it was one of the most incredible things he’d ever heard in his life.
And suddenly he went stiff against her, arching his back and hips off the casket lid to lift her bodily into the air, and she wrapped her legs around his and ground herself down onto him, riding his orgasm.
The masked head sat in its corner, its blackened, sightless eyeholes given a grand view of the final confrontation between Arduin and Godewyn. Breathing heavily, they contemplated each other with a mix of wary respect and condescension and hatred.
“Hardly seems right that a sword of legend, once wielded by the hands of kings and great heroes, would need to be used on the likes of you,” said Arduin, raising the sword up in both hands and contemplating its gleaming length.
“No,” Godewyn said with resignation. “No, it don’t seem right at all.”
Arduin leapt forward and slashed downward for Godewyn’s head. Godewyn brought his broadsword up for a parry to sweep the blow aside, and when the two blades connected the sword from the bier shattered into pieces.