Oathbreaker: The Knight's Tale

by Colin McComb

  Seven boys and three girls were clubbed, gagged, and stuffed into black sacks within moments. The twenty men and their burdens were out of the room with such efficiency that none of the other squires had awakened.

  Their destination was Devilsfoot. They were to begin the excruciations.

  Pelagir awoke draped unceremoniously across a saddle, and he could feel the courser moving smoothly underneath him. Its smooth gait told him that it was no natural beast. This likewise told him he was in the custody of a high-ranking officer of the Empire, which in turn suggested any attempt at escape would be noticed and dealt with harshly. Furthermore, he deduced, those squires who had made it to the fourth year—and with a record like his, no less—would be among the most carefully guarded assets of the military, and therefore he was one of the ten squires to have been chosen for the Elite. Thus it was that, like so many who had come before him, he was borne unprotesting and unresisting into Devilsfoot. Thus it was that he came to the place where the humanity had been torn from so many of his predecessors.

  Like the other recruits, Pelagir was blessed and cursed with a memory that rarely failed him. Yet had he been pressed on the matter, he would never have been able to give a clear account of his time in Devilsfoot. The ride to the ancient cavern was brief, not more than twenty to thirty minutes from the dormitory, yet he had never seen the place before.

  His first impression was of the sound, muffled through the heavy sack that covered him. The open air through which they had ridden suddenly became much closer, and the hooves of the metal steeds began to echo from stone walls. The air became warmer, and then hot. At last the coursers halted, and the ten squires, still in their sacks, were pitched to the rough stone floor. A quiet susurrus of clothes, then, as of robed men moving toward them, and a slight clatter as the steel steeds rode back out. And for the first time that night, voices.

  “These kids get heavier every year. Are they feeding ’em more meat or something?”

  “I dunno, but you’re right. They’re building ’em solid these days.”

  “We should install tracks here, put in some carts, something.”

  A third voice, drier: “Or maybe the two of you are just getting old. Stop complaining and pick one of ’em up… and the rest of you, stop dawdling.”

  Rough hands, then, and hot breath through the sack: “I know you’re awake, boy, so mark me well: rest while you can, because you’ll need your strength.”

  The hands on Pelagir then were the kindest he felt for five days.

  Images of an excruciation:

  First come the rituals. The ten, strapped naked to cold steel tables and wheeled under bright lights. In the darkness beyond, an amphitheater and the murmurs of dozens of students. The Archmagus donning a horned mask, black velvet filigreed in white gold and jewels. Ceremonial words in an arcane tongue pour from the Archmagus, delivered in a monotone, and the responses of the students in the shadows. It is a calming intonation, a call-response-call rhythm that soothes and focuses, but the young squires on the table are terrified beneath their carefully impassive faces. The Archmagus’s students, his mages-in-training, file down the stairs and take up the instruments that lie on cloth-covered carts near each of the knights-to-be. Priests wait in the corners, their heads bowed, waiting the call to grant the final blessings on souls departing.

  And then: blood. Pain. Steel.

  Pelagir’s arm, strapped to the table, stripped to the bone, and scalpels moving above it like fireflies. Tiny troughs funneling molten metal into cast channels along his tendons and muscles.

  Agony.

  Legs, feet, arms, neck. His face. His eyes. Screams from nearby tables. Anguish pours. His throat has torn. He can feel metal wires being affixed to his muscles, anchored to his bones.

  The eyes of the Archmagus through the holes in the man’s mask. They glitter with joy above the bloodstained face and gloves. His apprentices, who rush through the chamber.

  Through it all, the quiet, murmured chanting of the apprentices and the quiet sound of metal on flesh. The priests begin to move, looking into his eyes, then the eyes of the others.

  The ceiling of the cavern, the lights beaming down, halos around the heads of the surgeons. Pelagir has moved beyond pain and into a hazy realm. He watches the movements of the Archmagus as a detached observer now, watching the man’s hands move surely through the violations of his body. Each second the young man chooses to live or die, and each second he chooses life. Each choice is an act of will, each one harder than the next.

  The Archmagus’s hands, inside his skin, manipulating him. His fingers jerking open and closed. His legs twitching. Sutures and bandages, soaking through with a deep crimson.

  The chamber quiets. At two of the other tables, legs drum out a final beat as their owners succumb. From the seven remaining, Pelagir hears quiet and rasping moans. The Archmagus’s apprentices wheel their patients from the room. The priests murmur their benedictions above the bodies of the dead and depart.

  Behind them, pools of blood glisten wetly under the lights. Shiny metallic things crawl from slats behind the walls and suck these pools efficiently from the floor, then scurry back to their holes to await the next experiments.

  And then came the graduations.

  The first was private, and hardly a ceremony, held in the recovery room of the Tower of the Archmagus, one week after the ordeal. It was a dim room, with shutters on the high windows and a stout oak door at the head of the stairs. The eight young knights could hear the wind and birds outside with incredible clarity, and even the soft lights mounted high above them seemed almost too bright for comfort.

  The new knights were healing quickly, far more quickly than they had ever seen their bodies heal before. They had been ordered to remain in their beds for a week by Lieutenant Caltash, who had appeared in his shining armor before his new compatriots. He kept his helmet tucked under his arm as he delivered this order, and the cast of his face brooked no dispute. He took no questions as he stepped about the room inspecting the wounded, but he did place a mailed hand on each shoulder in welcome before he left, and he gripped Pelagir’s a little harder than the rest. And he told them two secrets:

  “You are no longer competitors. You are companions. Look into yourselves and find the lessons the pain has taught you. You have been bound together in pain, and you are now entwined. Your old lives have fallen away. You are new beings now, and what came before is dust. You are no longer human, and your kind exists only in the knighthood. Remember this when humans try to oppose you.

  “Your second secret is this: you have gifts within you that you will discover, yet behind all those gifts, you will find joy only in dealing death. Since you have survived the excruciation, your human emotions have been buried deep within you. Should you try to recover them, you will surely die.”

  The lieutenant left the knights to their silence, and they began to talk among themselves shortly thereafter, as he knew they would.

  The second graduation came at the expiration of the week, when the Archmagus himself came to their room, trailed by a pair of magi. The Archmagus was a wiry man with wiry hair, black and shot through with strips of iron. He wore a steel, grilled mask across the lower portion of his face—vanity, it was said, a cover for the horrific burns he had received while defending the tower on Clarkeshill from the sky reavers—and over it his hard, calculating eyes shone at the newly minted knights.

  “You are more than human now. More than us. Through my art and my craft, you are faster, stronger, and you heal more quickly. You have been enhanced, from bone to muscle to sinew. Your eyesight and hearing have likewise been improved. We have done this for you, as we have done for your chapter since the founding of the Empire. Because of us, you have entered into the halls of the legends. Because we have done this for you, you will remember us. You will remember that your first loyalty is to the Empire. Your second is to your commander. But remember by all you hold dear that your third loyalty is to the Guild of the Magi,
for without us you would be merely human.

  “You can get out of bed now,” he said. “Your commander is coming to see you, get the measure of the new improvements. I want you standing for him, and you’ll want to be used to your abilities before he comes.”

  The Archmagus turned, paused, and turned back. “One more thing. Tell my apprentice Trellaise what sort of weapon you prefer. She will make one specifically for you, and it shall become your salvation.”

  He swept from the room, and that was their second graduation.

  The third came a week past that. They had been exercising their new abilities (under close observation from their commanders and from the magi who had operated on them) during this week, sparring with one another, and testing their limits—by catching arrows, among other things. It had taken them some time to adjust to their hugely advanced strength and speed. At first, they fell frequently, but they quickly learned to balance themselves. They moved in a near-constant blur until Trellaise informed them that such movement reduced their healing factor and would eventually place such strain on them that their sinews might snap, which would require an operation similar to the excruciation to repair them. They began practicing ordinary movement immediately.

  Then Michael Fellsfield broke his arm throwing a boulder as large as his torso, which prompted another angry rebuke. They were informed that though they were strong, they should give their bones time to adjust to these new muscles, and work their way up to such feats. Michael (who the others called “the Fortunate”) was given a tight dressing to ensure the bone knitted properly; there was no splint, and he was healed before the week was through. In the meantime, the others trained fervently in order to speed the adjustment.

  Of the eight, Kelvin was the most charismatic, Michael the most adventurous, Tarrason the most ambitious, and Allan the most naturally talented. Kildare was the strongest, though not by much, Sonia the fastest, and Lyral the brightest. Pelagir was strong and fast and bright, too, but his talent lay in the nearly bottomless reservoir of endurance—or possibly obstinacy—that his father had built unwittingly.

  But as talented as these new knights were, something inside of them had broken during the excruciation, as it had broken for all those before them. Neither did they cry or show emotion of any sort. Where before they were tough, now they were hard and empty.

  They barely noticed what they had given away.

  Caltash came among them then, with others of the Elite, and they trained the newcomers to marry their speed with their minds, and of secret techniques in unarmed combat. Each of them, Caltash said, would develop a unique fighting style; these new techniques would provide a cornerstone for each style. By the time of the final graduation, a month later, the newest Elite had developed formidable killing talents.

  Their final graduation, then, was an actual ceremony, an induction into the Fellowship of Knights Assembled. The ceremony took place in the vast courtyard of the Knights’ Hall in the Imperial Palace, and half the knighthood was in attendance.

  It was a bright blue day, and errant gusts snapped the pennons on the grandstand. The commander, Sir Ellionn Carderas, stood atop the podium, gazing with sharp eye upon all the knights of Pelagir’s class who marched before him: the Lesser, the Faithful, and the Elite. They gleamed in their armor, and their feet beat a thunderous cadence on the hard-packed ground. They formed into neat rows before the dais and stood at military attention as he spoke to them of duty, honor, and their service to the Empire.

  And then he called forth the newest of the Elite. They came and stood directly in front of him as attendants placed slim boxes behind the commander. Carderas unlatched the first case and reverently lifted out a gleaming metal spear. Hints of red glittered from it in the sun, chasing each other up and down the shaft. The commander held it aloft, letting the assembled warriors view it, and called out, “Sir Michael, of the Order Elite, Class of the Hawk!”

  Michael stepped forward and extended his hands. Carderas laid the spear across Michael's hands, and when he released it, Michael jerked slightly, his hands clamping down hard on the shaft of the spear. He bowed slightly to the commander over the spear, and blood welled between his fingers as he stepped backward to his place in the line. This process repeated for the other six—swords of varying size and shape for Kelvin, Sonia, Lyral, and Tarrason, a wickedly flanged mace for Kildare, and a morning star for Allan.

  When it came to be Pelagir’s turn, Carderas lifted forth a greatsword five feet long. He lifted it to the sky: “Sir Pelagir, of the Order Elite, Class of the Crown!” The others restrained themselves, but their surprise was obvious—Pelagir had become one of the King’s Chosen, one of the king’s bodyguards, spies, and assassins, ordinarily a slot reserved for a knight who had proven himself over years.

  Pelagir bowed and took the hilt of his weapon, and pain entered him again. It was if thorns shot from the grip, sliding into his tendons and veins, and the blade hummed in his grasp. The red tint in the blade became more pronounced as the sword fed on Pelagir’s blood and bound the two together. Even as Pelagir sheathed his weapon, he found that he understood its workings and its power, as if the knowledge had been implanted into his mind. And he realized that this blade was now his honor.

  The Elite stepped back into formation. Carderas drew his sword and saluted the class with it, then swept the weapon toward the great gates. The Knights Assembled marched through them and into their new assignments.

  That was the fourth graduation, and for a brief time, Pelagir felt united with his fellows.

  On the side of the hill, just off the road, the lights of a tavern blazed into the early spring night. The dull murmur of a hard-working crowd crept through the open windows, and the child nestled in the crook of Pelagir’s arm stirred restlessly. He guided his steed to a copse of trees nearby and dismounted. He watched the tavern for a few minutes, his eyes flickering from the windows to the doors, through which flowed a stream of customers. He loosened his sword in its scabbard, ran his fingers through his hair, and strode toward the tavern.

  He pushed open the doors to a wash of noise and the smell of old beer and sawdust.

  The Taverner’s Tale

  One account of Pelagir’s encounters with civilization, as told by Kilroy, former proprietor of the Half-Eagle Tavern and Inn. Recorded by Winthorn, Knight of the Order Faithful, Class of the Rose, Rank Five.

  You want to know about the man who burned my tavern? The man who destroyed my livelihood and left me homeless and begging? The man who stole my right hand from me and left me for dead? All right. I see the darkness in your eyes, like the kind he had, and I’m not fool enough to try to gull your kind twice.

  ’Twas a dark night, and the clouds were rollin’ across the moon. The tavern was full that evening, the rough customers who make up most of my trade drinking and quarrelling and chatting up the ladies who use the upper rooms—and I don’t know what their business is up there, lords, I just rent ’em the rooms—and it seemed like it was going to be just another busy night at the Half-Eagle Tavern. Figured that meant I was out at least a dozen mugs, two tables, five chairs, and three squares of tar paper in the window-holes. Good thing it was a busy night—it’d more than make up for the damage they’d be doing.

  Of course, I’d be paying all the taxes on my take. Never missed a collection yet, sirs, so don’t you be eyeing me up like that. I keep a good running tally in my head of what I make and what I spend. I’ve got a good memory.

  Anyway, like I was saying, the night was shaping up to be a good one. It was windy enough that the nip was in the air and people’d want to be out of the cold, but not so cold that they’d want to stay in their drafty houses when I had a fire roaring. Perfect tavern night, in other words, and most of the drinking part of town was visiting. It was a good night for old feuds to flare up. Or for new feuds to come calling.

  I recognized him for trouble the moment he walked in. No one in their right mind brings a baby into a roadhouse unless they’re desp
erate and in need of something. The sorts of people who usually come into my place, well, they can smell that desperation. This is a hard-working town, lords, and the folks around here don’t take well to strangers, and since no one saw him coming in, no one thought anything of it. Now, he was carrying a sword at his side and a knife at his other, but begging your pardon, being on the road to Terona we see plenty of fops who think a sword’s for decoration, if you get my meaning. Besides, he was dirty and his clothes were rumpled and sweat-stained but obviously good quality. That made him a natural target. Likely on the run, not wanting to call official attention to himself, and probably with a fat purse for an enterprising lad.

  Some of the local boys like to try these would-be nobles out. When their target’s a dirty, tired-looking rich man carrying a baby, well, the pickings start to look a lot easier, if you catch my meaning. They don’t kill the unlucky ones, but they do leave the travelers wishing they’d taken a different route.

  I watched them size up the stranger out of the corners of their eyes, and I added a few more repairs to the carpenter’s bill come morning. I ain’t a hero, and I ain’t going to stop ’em from a bit of fun.

  He got himself a table by the fire, ordered some warmed milk for the little baby, who was starting to get a little cross, and some bread and meat for himself, with water to drink. That provoked a few sniggers from the boys at the nearby table, but they died quick enough to keep him from getting suspicious. I brought all this out to him.

  It started innocently enough, but I knew what was happening. I kept looking up to see when it was going to start, see if I could guess what was coming next. I must have looked up four or more times between the intended victim and the thugs. These things develop a sort of pattern, you see, and it usually starts with a spilled drink, a couple of “accidental” shoves, and if the target don’t take the bait, why, it just becomes a little more obvious. This man, I figured he’d be taking offense with the first or second spill, especially if it involved the baby.