by Mark Smylie
Annwyn spoke weakly from behind the arc of barrow warriors and Ghúl, her voice floating down to him as if from far away. “I asked you to look at me. But you didn’t. No one did . . . no one knew my measure, no one thought me capable of anything but sorrow. Poor despondent Annwyn, cloistered away for so long that I scarce remembered I was alive, and yet all that time, I read, I read the books that I paid the old women to bring me, books with silly, pretty covers, and I learned and I practiced the arts of magic hidden within them.”
“Annwyn, what have you done?” Stjepan asked. “What have you done with the spirit of Azharad?”
Her voice gained in strength and surety. “When Harvald cast his Sending, he thought I would be an easy vessel to compel . . . but he did not know what I was capable of. I fought his spell, and beheld the map and its purpose, to allow the Nameless Cults to one day return Azharad to this world! And so I dreamed this charade, a subterfuge of skin and body, to foil their plans; to escape the prison my father and my brothers had made for me at last; to remake my place in the World!”
“What have you done? Show yourself, Annwyn!” Stjepan cried out.
The Ghúl and the barrow warriors parted, and Annwyn appeared behind them, naked but for the glint of gold and gems at her wrists and ankles and neck, poised and imperious, looking down at Stjepan in the pit. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, without a trace of the map upon her, an image of perfection. She held out her arms to her sides, and the Ghúl began to slip her dark damask robes back upon her body. She tucked her arms into its sleeves, and allowed the robe to slip down off her bare shoulders. She did not bother to close it about her, leaving her breasts and belly and a finely turned leg exposed to the flickering lights of candle and lamp.
“Do you think me some fresh evil, with all the powers and knowledge of a wizard’s bound spirit at my command?” she asked, with a voice rich with laughter and spite. “That is the self-serving thinking of the Sun Court that burned your mother at the stake: to divide always the World in two, a single bright light and a single malignant dark. You are too long from the woods of your birth, Athairi, that you forget the lessons of the Queen of Heaven and of Night! The World is not lit by a single bright light, but by a hundred hundred stars, both bright and dim, and the dark is not a single hue, but a hundred hundred shades of gray and black and blue. And between them, the Known World is a riot of color.”
Stjepan looked up at her, and he breathed heavily, still trying to catch his breath. “I wish I could . . .” he started to say. “I truly wish I could . . . But I can’t let you leave, not with Azharad’s magics at your command . . .”
Annwyn studied him for a moment. “But then I was never to leave here alive, was I, Black-Heart?” she asked quietly.
Stjepan looked down at the earth, and gave a wry chuckle, and looked up at her with a small smile.
“I am no threat,” she said softly. “I despise the world we came from, the petty doings of the High King’s Court, but that does not mean I wish to see the World ended, for theirs is but a small and miserly part of it. I wanted to remake my place in the World, and I have done so: my world is different, my world has changed. I have become myself. No, you need not worry, for my role in the wars and chaos to come will be but a small one . . .” She studied him again for a moment, as if seeing something about him for the first time. “But if you have the courage, bear this message back to your masters: I will find my own way in the world, and they will disturb me at their peril.”
Stjepan closed his eyes, and then he nodded. As Annwyn turned to leave the chamber, one of the Ghúl offered her the pieces of the horned mask of Azharad. The top part of it had survived in more or less one piece, the horns spiraling up out of the forehead plate, and she lifted it up out of the Ghúl’s hands and contemplated it.
“Annwyn!” he cried, his eyes flying open.
She looked back down at him.
“How can I know you’re really you?” he asked.
She smiled then, a secret kind of smile, and it seemed to him for a moment that she looked down at him with genuine affection. A look of affection that turned to sadness, to longing, to pity.
“You can’t,” she said.
She turned to the barrow warriors and gave voice to a command. “Ne tuattha tem.” And then Annwyn turned and walked out of the high-domed chamber with barrow warriors for escorts and a trailing pack of the Ghúl.
“Annwyn! Annwyn!” Stjepan shouted desperately. He hefted the pickaxe in his hands.
A line of barrow warriors remained, looking down at him from behind their helms and shield and pointed spears and swords, silent and unmoving.
Annwyn and her grisly entourage moved through the barrow that had been built for her. She walked at a stately pace, holding her chin high with royal hauteur, bearing a horned half-mask tucked in the crook of her left arm, trailing a damask robe behind her as her train. The barrow warriors walked before and behind her, her royal guard, and the Ghúl trailed behind them. The corpses of her courtiers, awakened now to new purpose, emerged from dark chambers and passages as she walked past them, bearing with them the treasures and offerings of the barrow and joining in behind her, forming the beginnings of her new court.
Stjepan steeled himself, then charged up the side of the pit, but one of the waiting barrow warriors stepped forward with surprising speed and swung its shield up and into his face, catching him square in the jaw. He went flying into the air, blood arcing in a high arc from his mouth, and he fell back into the pit below him. He landed heavily in the muck in front of the open casket.
Annwyn and her growing entourage arrived in the chamber of the three biers, and there she found Azharad’s brides awaiting her as her new handmaidens. They bowed to her, and fell in behind her amongst her courtiers. They all turned and entered into the chamber with the well, and some of the Ghúl and some of the barrow warriors immediately went ahead and began to descend into the dark hole.
The body of the young squire and the two bodies suspended over the hole had been made into a feast, and reduced to carcasses of bone and gristle and scraps of flesh. Ignoring the body of Too Tall, Annwyn looked up with sorrow at what had once been Malia Morwin. She reached out and gently stroked what was left of the ruined, unrecognizable face and hair of her handmaiden. Her expression was cryptic and inscrutable.
Then she looked down at the hole into the earth, a secret smile playing on her beautiful face.
“There’s always another way out,” she said quietly to herself.
Some of the Ghúl linked their bodies together to form a writhing throne for her to sit on. She took an offered hand and gracefully stepped up to sit upon the throne of bodies, leaning back in regal comfort. And then the entire mass of Ghúl lifted her up, and then slowly climbed down into the hole, with her seated upon them and gazing around to look at the chamber as though in final farewell.
The barrow warriors begin clambering down after her.
Stjepan struggled to remain conscious, staring up at the empty casket, looming like a dark and empty door into nowhere. And then mercifully the darkness took him.
Erim came hobbling up the hillside to the barrow entrance beneath the starlit skies. Dirt and dried blood was smeared into her clothing, her skin. She had poultices bandaged upon her left thigh, and across her belly and back, and had pulled on a linen arming doublet that had belonged to one of the squires. She had her cut-and-thrust rapier and point daggers strapped to her waist, a loaded crossbow in her hands, a quiver of quarrels slung over her shoulder. Though she could walk, she was already breathing heavily from the strain. She stood at the top of the steps, undecided, uncertain.
“Fuck,” she said.
The entrance of the barrow yawned black before her.
Beneath the earth everything was as black as pitch. Until the blackness was finally illuminated by the sparks from a white-blue torch that bloomed into full flame, revealing the half-eaten face of Gilgwyr staring up at nothing out of the muck.
Stj
epan held up the torch, looking around groggily. He was bleeding from his mouth, and he winced as he gingerly tested his jaw and his skull. He rummaged around in the bags and equipment laying strewn about the dug pit, and found a water flask. He poured some water over his head, matting his hair, and then drank a huge swig of it, and then drank again, and again, eventually draining it dry. He looked around, studying the bodies in the pit with him. He spotted the ancient book that Leigh had revealed, and he tossed the empty flask aside as he walked over to it and picked it up. He placed it carefully beside his satchel.
He screwed the torch into the earth in the side of the pit so that it was upright and burning, and he grabbed up a shovel. He first went to Leigh’s body, and used the shovel to push through the Magister’s robes and clothes. But whatever he was looking for wasn’t there, and he grunted. He turned toward the upright and empty casket.
He stared at it a moment, running over the images in his mind, the letters and symbols moving over Annwyn’s skin while she had writhed above him in coitus, translating in his head the words he had seen.
“Dig . . . and dig again,” he said to himself.
With great effort he pushed against the upright iron casket, knocking it over onto its back. And then he started digging into the ground on the spot where it once stood.
Stjepan walked out of the barrow into the light of the morning of the 5th of Ascensium. He had the ancient copper-bound book of Leigh clutched in his left hand, his satchels and his brace of sword and dagger slung over his shoulder, and an old, scabbarded sword covered in dirt in his right.
“Don’t move,” came a voice.
He stopped in mid-stride and froze.
“Turn around,” came the voice. “Slowly.”
He turned slowly and looked up. Erim sat perched on the hill slope right above the entrance of the barrow, pointing a loaded crossbow down at him.
“Where’s Gilgwyr?” she asked.
“He’s dead,” Stjepan said. “He got . . . eaten.”
“How about Leigh?” she asked.
“Him, I killed,” Stjepan said.
Erim studied him for a moment. “Is there anyone else coming out?” she asked.
Stjepan thought about it for a moment, and then glanced down to look deep into the entrance of the barrow. He looked back up at her. “No. I think I’m it.”
She looked at the dirt-covered sword and scabbard that he carried in his hand. “Is that the sword?” she asked.
“Gladringer. The sword of the High Kings, forged by the magician-smith Gobelin, of the Bodmall clan,” he said quietly. He looked down at it, and then back at her. “Here, catch.”
He softly tossed the sword high into the air to her, and the pommel caught the glint of the sun as it arced through the air. She caught the sword by the scabbarded blade in her left hand, still pointing the crossbow at him with her right.
She looked at Stjepan with a frown on her face, and then at the sword, and then back at him. “What . . . you’re just giving it to me?” she asked.
Stjepan smiled. “Always distracted by the bright bauble. Things are never what they seem. Yes, it’s yours, if you want it. It should be in the hands of a true swordmaster. And I got what I came for.” He looked down at the book in his left hand.
“What, that book?” she asked, incredulous.
“The missing copy of the Libra de Secretum Malifiri de Nymargae, taken from the Library at the University,” he said reverently. “It’s one of the rarest books in the Known World. The Magisters always suspected that Leigh had stolen it after they discovered it was missing, but a true enchanter, as Leigh was, has any number of tricks to hide something away, and it was hard to flush it into the open.”
Erim stared at him, her mouth hanging open. “All this for a fucking book? This is Gladringer, the lost sword of the High Kings!” she said. She deftly changed her hold on the sword to take it by the grip and she flicked her left wrist with a snap and the scabbard flew off the sword to land in the grass, revealing the length of the sword’s blade to the morning light. It was a twin to the cursed and false blade that they’d first found: broad, double-edged watered steel that tapered to a sharp point, with curved quillons and a large round wheel pommel inlaid with swirling, intertwined designs in silver and gold. But she could feel that the leather on the grip of the hilt had decayed over time, sealed beneath the cold earth, and the blade looked like it needed to be polished, and for a moment doubt entered into her.
“Aye. One of the greatest swords in history,” said Stjepan, eyeing it with a proud smile. “That sword killed Githwaine, the Last Worm King. It pierced through his glamours, and his wards, and his armor, and into his dark, black heart, and ended him. Upon its blade are secretly etched the Riven Runes of weapons, and motion, and death, and victory, and strength. If you could see them, the enchantments on that blade would blind you with their glory and their power. And if you want, I’m sure that sword will lead you to whatever fate you think you seek.”
Then he shrugged. “But a single enchanted weapon, even a great one, can’t change the fate of the state, of the nation, of the world. We survived for centuries without it. The Thrones of the Middle Kingdoms are stolen and missing, the lines of the Dragon King scions of Islik are ended, and yet here we are. We endure. The Kingdoms endure. For the Middle Kingdoms are not threatened or saved by weapons, but by words, ideas, temptations, desires, magics; the words that inspire people to turn from one path to another, the words that fill them with faith, or take it away from them, that threaten their sense of who and what they are.” He held up the copper-bound book. “Such as are contained in this book. A book written by the Devil Incarnate.”
“Well, aren’t you the philosopher,” she snorted, and then laughed, her eyes narrowing. “A lot of maps in that book, eh?”
Stjepan laughed. “Yeah. A lot of maps,” he said with a small smile.
She stared at him for a long moment.
“How do I know it’s really you?” she asked wistfully.
“No glamours here, Erim,” he said, shaking his head.
She picked herself up, and walked slowly down the hill around the entrance to the barrow, keeping the crossbow trained on him. She stopped a few yards away.
“How do I know it’s you?” she asked again.
Stjepan opened his mouth, paused, then shrugged. “You don’t.”
Erim took a deep breath.
She walked toward him slowly, crossbow pointed at his chest.
She lowered it, and they embraced gingerly, each wincing from their wounds.
The late afternoon sun was starting its descent. The carriage and the two wagons had been pushed and partially disassembled and set in the middle of the campsite as the base for a great bonfire, and piled with the tents and just about anything that would burn and with the bodies of the dead: what was left of Malia Morwin, the squire Wilhem Price, Caider Ross, Garrett “Too Tall” Akins, “Handsome” Pallas Quinn, Giordus Roame, big Cole Thimber, Lord Arduin Orwain, Sir Lars Urwed, Sir Colin Urwed, Sir Helgi Vogelwain, Sir Holgar Torgisbain, Sir Theodras Clowain, Sir Theodore Lis Cawain, the squire Brayden Vogelwain, Leigh, and Gilgwyr, either their whole bodies wrapped in cloth, or bags of body parts where the Ghúl had not left enough in one piece.
Stjepan splashed lamp oil over the improvised pyre.
Erim held some horses ready for herself. She had Cúlain-mer and Ironbound and a spare packhorse; each was loaded with gear and grave goods packed into saddlebags and satchels. She wore the high-necked gorget and partial pauldrons from Arduin’s garniture over a quilted arming doublet, and his cuisses and knee poleyns were strapped to her legs above her black boots. The rest of his armor had been packed onto the spare packhorse. Her sword brace now bore a different sword next to her daggers rather than her familiar cut-and-thrust rapier.
Cúlain-mal waited patiently for Stjepan, along with a small herd of horses and mules, over thirty of them: knight’s destriers, spare riding mounts, draft horses, burros, all s
tanding about in the tall grasses and weeds and occasionally grazing on them.
Stjepan stood back from the improvised pyre and tossed the bottle of lamp oil aside. He lit it. The fire started to crackle and pop, smoke slowly rising as the flames started to take hold of the wood.
“So who do you really work for? The Magisters at the University? The High Court? The High King himself?” asked Erim.
“Do you really want to know?” Stjepan asked her as he looked at the flames.
Erim studied his profile for a moment, then shook her head.
“What are you going to tell them when you get back?” she asked finally. “Whoever they are.”
“Don’t you mean when we get back?” he asked, turning to look at her.
“No. Time to start over again, I think, someplace different with new faces and new names. Someplace where this sword can be of service,” she said, conscious of a peculiar weight on her hip. She paused. “Some place where I can be of service. Do you mind being sole survivor?”
“Nah,” Stjepan said with a shrug. “Makes for a better story.” He eyed her for a moment. “Stick with me to Aberdelan, at least, will you? If the Lamb is there and we decide to go into the Devil’s Tower, we could use you and that sword.”
“Yeah, why not,” she said.
Stjepan smiled.
He turned back to the rising heat of the pyre and started to pray.
Dawn Maiden. Awaken!
Bright Star. Awaken!
Sun’s Herald. Awaken!
And announce . . .
He stopped, mouth open, and stared up past the rising smoke, up the hill toward the barrow.
Ravens and vultures by the hundreds were taking wing and lifting up into the sky from the top of the hill above them. The great, dark swarm flew about the top of the hill in an expanding circle, until eventually they flew directly overhead and then off to the north and a line of distant mountains.