by William King
“We could stand here all night reciting old wrongs,” said Kormak.
“Some not so old,” Aisha said. “But you are right. The time has come for plain speaking between us, Sir Kormak.”
“Why are you here, following the barrow openers?”
“I am concerned by what they might do.”
“How so? This is not your land. How could what happens here affect you? You have come a very long way to involve yourself.”
“The same could be said of you.”
“I am here because of oaths I swore and the duty I must perform.”
“Perhaps I am here for the same reason.”
“You are not a Guardian.”
“Other people than your Order oppose the Shadow, Sir Kormak. If that were not so it would have swallowed this world a long time ago.” She took out the amulet she had taken from the dead ranger, looked at it reflectively then seemed to come to some sort of decision. She produced a second amulet, identical to the first.
“I am a Watcher, Martin was one too.”
“I thought they were just another northern hill-clan.”
“They use the name because it is their function to watch the Cursed Lands and the Barrow Hills. There are other watchers elsewhere. They follow the Old Faith but they are sworn to oppose the Shadow.” Kormak considered her words. He had heard tales of such things. A secret society was very much the Lunar way.
“A Watcher— what do you watch for?”
“The coming of evil. Shadowfall.”
“Why are you here now? It is more than that, isn’t it? There is some connection between you and this necromancer, Morghael.”
From her expression Kormak could see that his shaft had hit true. “You know him, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know him?”
“He is my brother.”
That took Kormak aback. She smiled. “I can see there are some things you do not know. My brother is a necromancer and a very powerful one. The gift for sorcery runs strongly in my family. It always has.”
“He is a necromancer and you are not.”
She gestured to the wolf. “I followed a different path and that is the core of the thing.”
“How so?”
“My brother and I were both Watchers, as was our father before us. Our family were entrusted with the safekeeping of certain objects and scrolls. My brother read the wrong books, became obsessed with the darker paths. He stole from the Order and used the knowledge he had wrongly gained to build his army. Word came to us that he had fled north. I came to try and stop him.”
“On your own? When he had his men and his undead creatures to protect him?”
“I have counter-spells against the undead. You saw me work one back in Hungerdale. And I had hoped to raise the Watchers of this land, but my brother had obviously thought of that.”
“How so?”
“He lit a signal fire at the agreed meeting place, the place where we first met. A Watcher is always somewhere near there in case of need. Morghael lured Martin there and killed him. Martin would have been my contact with his kin. Now if I encounter them it will be accidental.”
“There must be fallbacks.”
“There are but it would take too long to use them.”
“The creatures with your brother, what are they?”
“Some of them are his acolytes no doubt. Some of them are things he found in the old tombs of Kasuliyan and called back from beyond.”
“It was one of those things that drove Lucas and his brothers away then. The thing they riddled with arrows but could not kill.”
“Yes.” Kormak found he was a little angry.
“Why did you not tell me this before?”
“I did not trust you.”
“You did not trust me?”
“Ah, I see, only you have the right to mistrust other people. We are all supposed to be able to see how righteous you are by your mere appearance. I have news for you, Sir Kormak; your Order is known to be a corrupt one. And perhaps you don’t understand what you are to many of my people. You are the mailed fist of the Sun, your god’s executioner.”
Kormak turned this over in his mind. She had a point.
She pressed her advantage. “Did you trust me when first we met? Do you trust me now, for that matter?”
“I trust you a little more since we’ve had this conversation,” Kormak said.
“And I have had some time to observe you,” she said. “Perhaps we can both be a little more trusting.”
Kormak looked at her. She seemed very serious. He was not sure how to take her.
“Have I answered all of your questions to your satisfaction, Sir Kormak, or do you have any more.”
“The Tinkers - what is your connection with them?”
“They are distant kin. They trade in goods and information. The Spymasters of your Order know this. It seems to me that I have given you a great deal of information and not gotten a great deal in return.”
“What do you wish to know?”
“Will you really kill Morghael when we meet him?”
“Yes. I don’t have any choice given what he has done. Does that trouble you?”
“I welcome it.”
“That’s not a very filial sentiment?”
“Morghael betrayed a trust that has been in our family for centuries. He betrayed me. He betrayed our father. He will work great evil. He is doing so already. Can you not sense it? Already the Shadow is wakening in this land. It has been dormant a long time. It is rising now.”
Kormak thought of the lights he had seen in the Barrow Hills, of his own sense of gathering doom, and he could see she was right.
“What has he done?”
“He is calling the Black Sun to rise again over Forghast.”
“How will he do that? The tomb was sealed and cannot be opened.” He wondered if she knew about the keys; pretending ignorance was the easiest way to find out.
“There is a way,” said Aisha.
“Somehow I knew you were going to tell me that.”
“The Defiler planned for his defeat. He knew he was going to be sealed in his tomb. Before the Solari besieged Forghast three of his lieutenants fled the city, each with one of the keys to his tomb. They were to return when the time was right and free him.”
“Three? It makes sense, I suppose. If something happened to one of them, the other would have the key.”
Aisha shook her head. “It was not that at all. He did not trust any of his people and they did not trust each other. He picked three who hated each other, who would not form a cabal against him. Each of them needed to be present with his key to open the ziggurat.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because he made them promises, could grant them power, would raise them above all his other minions.”
“What stopped them from doing it?”
“One of them was intercepted by our agents. They took his torc and condemned him to death. No one knew what happened to the others. It was commonly assumed that they died and that the torcs were lost with them.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Perhaps. It is also possible the torcs were passed on. They were objects of great power in and of themselves. Necromancers would find them useful.”
“That’s not all is it?”
“They were objects of power like I said, imbued with the potent essence of the Shadow. They would corrupt whatever was around them.”
“You think they caused their owners to become tomb wights, to come into being where they were buried.”
“If their owner was a necromancer and he had the torc in his possession, it is a not unlikely occurrence.”
Kormak had already worked out another part of the story or so he thought. “The torc your Order captured— that was in your families possession, wasn’t it?”
Aisha nodded. “My ancestor Torael was the one who took it. It was passed down the generations, kept in a lead-lined box, made of heartwood w
ith Elder Signs worked in its surface in truesilver. My brother stole it when he murdered our father. It was the power of the torc that let him raise his first army. I think he was able to use its power to find the other ones.”
“Sympathetic magic?”
“There would probably be a resonance between such objects, given how they were created and by whom. The wards on the barrows would have shielded them for a long time but magic weakens and even Elder Signs get eroded by time. It’s quite possible that the Old Ones back in Elderdale might have helped him. They would have a lot of knowledge of this land. In any case, Morghael was obsessed with these things and he was a great scholar. If anyone could locate them, it is him.”
“So by now, he has not one but three of these mystical artefacts and can draw on their power.”
“I believe so.”
“We need to stop him.”
“If we can, Sir Kormak. If we can.”
Green witchfires were rising in the distance, emerging from the pools of mist. He was reminded of the eyes of the vermin pack, but these were larger, by far. He hoped that did not mean they were more of a threat. He could not help but notice that they glowed the same shade of baleful green as the Great Comet.
As he watched they began to drift towards the tower. They bore a resemblance to shadows cast on the mist itself, vague outlines of human beings and other things. It was as if glowing figures within the fog were casting their outlines on the billows.
“What are they?” Kormak asked.
“Products of the curse,” Aisha said.
“Ghosts?”
She shrugged and drew her cloak tighter around her lovely shoulders. The figures moved closer, as the mist billowed forward to surround the tower. It stopped at the very edge of the pool of light cast by the watchstone. The eerie, glowing figures moved within it. Outlines of people, garbed in flowing robes, and strangely cut clothes, and sometimes what looked like the armoured shapes of shield-bearing warriors.
“They cannot harm us as long as we stay within the tower,” Kormak said.
“They may not be able to harm us even if we go out there,” said Aisha. “They may only be shadows.”
“I have seen men killed by shadows before,” said Kormak.
“You’ve led an interesting life.”
Shae was whimpering. “I think he agrees with me, about the danger of those things,” Kormak said.
“There’s a first time for everything. If you don’t mind I will go below and get the others,” she said. “We’ll all be safer up here in the wardstone’s light.”
She walked below, taking Shae with her. Kormak stood there alone for a time watching the legions of the long dead move through the fog around them. He wondered what they felt, if they felt anything, or whether they were merely the echoes of men long gone from this haunted land. He wondered if he died here whether he would end up like that.
In the end he gave up wondering and went below to hurry the others along.
They sat round the watchstone, getting ready to face the night. The parapets partially sheltered them from the wind. Rain pattered and dripped. Kormak watched drops cause ripples in a puddle. The wolf looked up at him, the watchstone light reflected in the mirrors of its eyes.
All of four of them chewed hard-tack and tried to warm themselves. None of them looked comfortable. None of them wanted to go below just yet, out of the charmed circle of illumination, even if that would take them out of the rain. All of them were aware of the eerie ghost lights hidden from their line of sight by the walls. Below them, on the bottom floor of the tower, the horses whinnied nervously. Something about the magic of the tower obviously calmed them enough to keep them there.
“Tell me about your brother,” Kormak said. She had already told the others some of what she had told him. “What’s he like?”
“A corrupt noble and you either know about them or you don’t.”
“Can necromancers really bind the walking dead to their will,” Brandon asked. It was the part about binding them that impressed him. If you lived on the fringes of these hills there was nothing unusual in the idea that the dead might walk.
“I believe so, although it’s not really my field of expertise,” said Aisha.
“Why are you really chasing him?” Sir Brandon asked. Kormak had not told him about the Watchers. “What are you really after?”
It was obvious he had not considered the possibility that he might give offence, or, if he had, he simply did not care. It looked like he had been at the flask again. This time he had not offered it to anybody, not even Kormak. He had been drinking quite steadily all through the ride.
“I want him stopped. If he gains sufficient power, no place will be safe. He dreams of resurrecting ancient Kharon, of reuniting its fallen provinces, of being the greatest ruler since Gengiz.”
“And this mask of the Defiler will make all that possible?” Brandon asked.
“All that and more.”
“How can that be?”
“The Mask is a relic of the greatest necromancer who ever lived. According to the stories it was the source of his power.”
Kormak felt something moving overhead. He looked up and saw something huge and bat-winged moving through the gloom. It was only there for a moment and then was gone. It obviously did not want to fly too close to the tower and its warding light.
“What was that?” Sir Brandon asked.
“Old One,” Kormak said. “And I think I know who.”
“One of the Twins,” Aisha said.
“The brother,” Kormak said.
“It was moving north,” Lucas said. “Towards the Tomb Palace.”
Kormak nodded.
“I think one of the Old Ones has decided to take sides,” Aisha said. He noticed she did not bother to hide the gesture of reverence she made when she said the words Old Ones. He wondered if he was making a mistake trusting her.
He would soon find out.
In the morning mist covered the hills. It flowed all around them. Kormak could only see out to a few strides ahead. It was cold. The breath coming out from his mouth seemed to join the fog and make it stronger. The glowing shadows of the previous night were gone but he could not see more than a stone’s throw from the tower.
Around him, the horses whinnied and Shae give a low bark. Kormak studied their surroundings for any sign of the vermin pack or something like it, but he could find none. It seemed they did not dare come close to the Watchtower. Perhaps it would be different further along the route.
“It does not get any easier, does it?” Lucas said. "I never thought I would miss the rain but I'm starting to."
"I just hope that we don't miss what we're looking for," Brandon said.
"I don't think there's much chance of that," Kormak said. "We're looking for ancient Forghast. It was a huge city.”
"I think this mist is an improvement," Brandon said after some thought. "At least I don't have to look at the bloody hills and the bloody ruins anymore."
Breakfast was some dried meat and waybread. After that they mounted their horses and continued along the road. No one rode too fast in case they came across an obstruction. It would be all too easy for a horse to fall and break its leg. Kormak was worried that time was growing very short, that the ancient evil around them was very close to breaking out.
As the morning wore on, the mist evaporated and the hills around them became visible once again. Huge rocks dotted the hillside and there were abandoned houses everywhere. They rode through a land that had once been densely populated – that much was obvious.
There were no people now but the evidence of former occupation just made the place seem all the emptier. There was a loneliness about all this emptiness that was deeper and more stark than it would have been had there been no signs of habitation at all. It was a reminder that human presence in the Cursed Lands was a temporary thing and that the land could easily swallow an entire kingdom, leaving only shattered reminders that people had once lived here. W
ar and plague and sorcery had destroyed the kingdom of Kharon. It made Kormak all too aware of how temporary all human life was and that got him thinking about the Old Ones.
Malion was out there now, hiding from the sun, possibly in one of those ruined buildings, most likely in the city towards which they rode. There was no good reason for the Old One going there Kormak could think of. Either he intended to warn Morghael or he had some other nefarious purpose.
Aisha rode up beside him, Shae trotting at the heels of her pony. She had a heavy cloak drawn tight around her shoulders and her dark hair peeked out from beneath the hood. “It is cold here,” she said. “Cold as one of the tombs in Kheshan.”
“You’re a long way from Kheshan,” he said. “It is a lot warmer there.”
She nodded. “You say you have been in the Southlands. Why was that?”
“I was sent to recover a blade. One of the brothers had gone missing there.”
“A Guardian?”
“Yes. Only Guardians carry dwarf-forged blades.”
“You found him?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to talk about it do you?”
“That’s observant of you.”
“Your Order always sends someone to reclaim your blades.”
“Dwarf-forged blades are not so common. The dwarves will not make new ones now. They say they fulfilled their side of the bargain and we no longer have the means to pay them.”
“You have talked to the Servants of the Old Ones?”
“They would not thank you for calling them that. They prefer to be called the People of the Stone.”
“Still, no matter what they like to be called, you have talked with them.”
“Yes.”
“What were they like?”
“I don’t know. The chamber was deep beneath the mountain and they allow no light.”
“I have heard it said that they have grown monstrous during their long time in the dark. That they do not want the eyes of anyone gazing upon them.”
“You won’t hear it from me. I caught no sight of them. I heard only their voices.”
Kormak paused for a moment, recollecting the strangeness of it, the way those inhuman, beautiful voices had echoed round the cavernous chambers. “It sounded like they were singing,” he said. “They did not sound like dwarves. I mean they did not sound small. Their voices were deep and thunderous. It was like listening to a giant.”