by William King
Still, all he had to do was escape and his power would regrow as it always did.
He willed himself elsewhere, trying to plunge into the great Realm of Chaos to bathe in its eternally renewing energies. Nothing happened. He could not escape.
Rage and something else he did not quite recognise filled his mind. Perhaps it was fear. He was trapped within the huge spell the elves had cast. It was preventing him from departing this world for his own.
Even now, some vague sense of self-preservation warned him to keep still, to do nothing, to gather his strength. Around him were beings of awful power, the ghosts of the archmages who had given their lives to weave this spell. They were weaving it still.
His encounter with Aenarion had left him so weakened that he would have no chance if one of those terrible ghosts were to turn its attention on him and the small flaw in the vast matrix of spells he occupied. They could squash him from existence with the barest effort of their will.
It was painful and humiliating for N’Kari to admit his plight to himself, but it had been a long time since he had enjoyed these sensations and he determined to make the best of it.
Now he needed a plan, a way to escape from this enormous trap of a spell without the ghosts noticing him. He needed to wait and husband his power and let his strength regrow until he was himself again.
He did not doubt that it was possible, that he would get out of this place. He was a daemon. Time had little meaning for him, even the strangely altered flow of time within the Vortex. As long as he was careful and did not draw attention to himself he would survive, and he would work out a way to be free.
Then he would enjoy another sensation – vengeance on Aenarion and all of his blood.
CHAPTER ONE
There are those who express wonder that Aenarion was never told that Morelion and Yvraine, his children by the Everqueen, survived. It might have changed the whole course of elven history if he had known. Perhaps he would never have visited the Blighted Isle and drawn the Sword of Khaine. He might never have met Morathi. Malekith might never have been born.
Such speculation is fruitless. What happened, happened. The Sword was drawn. The elves of Nagarythe followed Aenarion into its shadow and into damnation. And the world was saved.
Perhaps because Aenarion was never told that his children were alive.
Many scholars think that once the Sword was drawn, Oakheart and those princes in his confidence were right to keep the knowledge of the children’s survival from Aenarion. They point out what happened to those elves who followed the Phoenix King, and what happened to Malekith who was to become known as the Witch King. By keeping the children apart from their father, they kept them safe from the Sword’s baleful influence.
And thus, from Yvraine, the elves of Ulthuan still have an Everqueen unsullied in her purity, for which we should all give thanks.
Perhaps those who kept the secret from Aenarion had other reasons. Scholars point out that given the ambitions that Morathi had for her son, Malekith, it is unlikely the children would have survived long in Nagarythe where they would easily have been within her grasp. Aenarion’s second wife has become famous for her knowledge of poisons, potions and malefic sorcery. Who knows how long Morelion and Yvraine would have lived had she known of their existence?
Whatever their reasons, by their actions, Oakheart and the princes ensured the survival of Aenarion’s line in two main branches – one line has given us all the succeeding Everqueens unto the present generation. The other line has blessed and cursed Ulthuan with many heirs of Aenarion’s brilliant, tainted blood. In part, they, like their great ancestor, have given the elves as much cause to curse them as to be grateful.
– Prince Iltharis, A History of the Blood of Aenarion.
DELETE ME
10th Year of the Reign of Finubar, Arathion’s Villa, Cothique
Tyrion sat on the edge of the wall of his father’s villa, legs dangling, enjoying the sense of danger. Behind him lay a twenty-foot drop and the one in front of him was even steeper, for the ground sloped away downhill. If he fell from here he might break a limb on the rock-strewn ground below.
The late winter sun burned bright in the clear blue sky. It was cold this high in the mountains of Cothique. His breath came out frosted and he felt the chill through the thin cloth of his tattered tunic and his patched woollen cloak. In the distance, he could see a troop of mounted figures riding up-slope towards the hilltop villa.
Strangers were rare in this part of Ulthuan. Very few people ever came to visit them. Most were passing hunters dropping off part of their kill as a tithe for hunting on his father’s lands. One or two were highland villagers who came to consult his father about a sickness in their family or on some minor matter of magic or scholarship.
Things had been different when his mother was alive, or so Thornberry claimed. The house had been busy then when his parents had arrived to occupy it for a summer season or two, escaping from the heat of the lowlands. Sorcerers and scholars from all over Ulthuan had come to visit it along with his mother’s rich relatives. People had liked his mother and were prepared to travel to even this remote place to visit her.
Tyrion was in no position to know. She had died during the difficult birth of himself and his brother and he had never known a world with her in it. There was one thing of which he was sure – none of the locals except his father could afford a horse, let alone a warhorse.
Tyrion’s eyes were keen as an eagle’s and he could see that the strangers were mounted on steeds even larger than his father’s, caparisoned in a way he had only seen illustrated in books. Most of them were carrying lances. He could not imagine what else that long pole with its fluttering pennon might be.
The truth was he did not want it to be anything else. He wanted them to be knights, glamorous warriors such as he and his brother were always reading about in their father’s old books. He wondered if this were somehow connected with his birthday, which was tomorrow, although his father appeared to have forgotten yet again. He felt somehow that it was. It seemed right.
He sprang up, balanced on the thin lip of the wall, then walked along it to the roof of the stables, arms held out from his sides to maintain balance. He let himself in through the large hole in the slates and dropped down onto the support beam. The dusty, musty smell of the old building filled his nostrils along with the warm animal scent of his father’s horse. He ran along the beam, grabbed the rope he had left knotted round the edge and jumped.
This was always the best part, the long swing to the ground, the dizzying sense of speed as he careened downward and let go, landing rolling in the bales of hay. It always made him smile.
He raced out of the stable, past the startled Thornberry. The wrinkled old elf woman watched him with a look almost of embarrassment on her face, as if young Tyrion’s energy somehow baffled and upset her.
‘Strangers coming,’ Tyrion yelled. ‘I am going to tell father.’
‘Hush, young Tyrion,’ said Thornberry. ‘Your brother is sick again. You will wake him.’
‘My brother is already awake.’
Thornberry raised an eyebrow. She did not ask how Tyrion could know that. Tyrion could not have answered her anyway. He had no idea how it was possible that when he was in close proximity to his brother he could sometimes tell whether he was asleep or awake, happy or sad or in great pain. To tell the truth it always seemed strange to him that others could not. Maybe it was something to do with them being twins.
‘He is now – with you making all that noise,’ said Thornberry. Her tone was grumpy and she was trying to make her face stern but her gaze, as always, was kind. Nonetheless, as always she managed to make him feel guilty.
He raced upstairs, and ran into his father’s chambers.
His father held up a hand for silence. He was standing over his workbench, peering at something through the eyepiece of a magna-scope. ‘Hush, Tyrion, I will be with you in a moment.’
Tyrion stood there
almost bursting from his desire to give the news but he knew his father was not to be hurried when he was about his studies. To occupy himself he gazed round the room, taking in his father’s huge library of books and scrolls, so beloved of Teclis, the jars full of pickled monster heads, and odd chemicals and weird plants from the jungles of Lustria and the rainforests east of Far Cathay.
His gaze was drawn as ever, and no matter how much he tried to avoid it, to the gigantic, terrifying suit of armour that stood on its wire frame in the corner. It looked for all the world like some monstrous golem waiting to be animated. His father claimed that this armour had been forged in the magical furnaces of Vaul’s Anvil for their legendary ancestor Aenarion and that it was broken and dead now, needing magic to bring it back to life and grant it power and make it once again fit to be worn by a hero. Tyrion was not entirely sure of the truth of this but he hoped it was the case.
It was discoloured around the chest and arms where his father had repaired the ancient damaged metalwork with his own hands. In those places the armour did not have the patina of age it had elsewhere.
It was his father’s life work to make the armour whole again. He had dedicated a lifetime of scholarship to it, ever since he had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his father before him and so on back into the mists of time. Family lore had it that the armour had been presented to their ancestor Amarion, by Tethlis himself, as a reward for saving the life of his son. It was their family’s most precious heirloom.
As far as Tyrion knew his father was the first of his line who had tried to remake the armour. So far his efforts had proved fruitless. There was always just one more thing needed, one more piece of rare metal, one more fabulous rune to be re-discovered and re-inscribed, one more spell to be re-woven. Many times Tyrion had heard his father claim that this time, he would do it, and always he had been disappointed. It had cost his father his not-inconsiderable fortune and his life’s energy and it was still not complete.
Tyrion studied his father now and realised how frail he was. His hair was fine as spun silver and white as the snow on the peak of Mount Starbrow. A mesh of wrinkles spun out from his eyes to cover most of his face. The purple veins stood out thinly on his hands. Tyrion looked at the smooth skin of his own hands and saw the difference at once. A life of failure had aged his father prematurely. Prince Arathion was only a few centuries old.
‘Tell me what you came to say, my son,’ said his father. His voice was calm and gentle and remote but not without a certain mocking humour. ‘What brought you into my workroom without even knocking?’
‘Riders are coming,’ Tyrion said. ‘Warriors mounted on warhorses.’
‘You are certain of that?’ his father asked.
Tyrion nodded.
‘How?’ His father believed that observations had to be tested and justified. It was part of his method of scholarship. ‘Not just book learning’ were his watchwords.
‘The horses were too large to be normal mounts and the riders carried lances with pennons on them.’
‘Whose pennon?’
‘I do not know, father. It was too far away.’
‘Might it not have been more useful, my son, to wait until you could see it? Then you might have been able to tell me more about who the strangers were and what their purposes might be.’
As always Tyrion could not help but feel that he was somehow a disappointment to his gentle, scholarly father. He was too loud, too boisterous, too active. He was not brilliant like Teclis.
His father smiled at him.
‘Next time, Tyrion. You will do better next time.’
‘Yes, father.’
‘And fortunately I have a spyglass here in my study that will allow me to find out the information you missed, despite the fact these aged eyes are not as keen as yours. Run along now and tell your brother. I know you are dying to give him the news.’
Teclis lay in the great four poster bed, covered in piles of threadbare, patched blankets. The room was so shadowy that it was impossible to see how moth-eaten the bed’s canopy was and how old and rickety the room’s furnishings were.
Teclis coughed loudly. It sounded as if a bone had come loose inside him and was rattling round in his chest. He twisted in the tangle of covers and looked up at his brother with bright feverish eyes. Tyrion wondered if this time Teclis was really going to die, if this illness would be the one that would finally claim him. His brother was so weak now, so feeble and so full of pain and despair.
And selfishly Tyrion wondered what would happen to him then. He felt the echoes of his brother’s pain and his weakness. What would happen when Teclis went on the dark journey? Would Tyrion too die?
‘What brings you here, brother? It is still light out. It is not yet reading time.’
Tyrion looked guiltily at the copy of Maderion’s Tales of the Caledorian Epoch that lay on the chipped table beside the bed. He walked over to the windows. The drapes were fusty and smelled of mould. Cold air whistled in through gaps in the shutters, despite the torn shreds of sacking he had stuffed into the gaps. There was no place in the old villa where Teclis could escape the cold that seemed to leech all vitality from him.
‘We have visitors,’ said Tyrion. Interest flickered in Teclis’s eyes and for a moment he seemed a little less listless.
‘Who are they?’ The tone was a dry echo of their father’s, as was the question itself. Tyrion wondered at the resemblance. For all his weakness Teclis was very much their father’s son, in a way that Tyrion never felt himself to be.
‘I don’t know,’ he was forced to admit. ‘I did not wait to check their heraldic banners. I merely ran in with the news.’ He could not keep the sullenness from his voice even though he knew his brother did not deserve it.
‘Father has been subjecting you to inquisition again, I see,’ said Teclis and was wracked by another long, horrible paroxysm of coughing. Laughing was sometimes a mistake in his case.
‘He makes me feel stupid,’ Tyrion confessed. ‘You make me feel stupid.’
‘You are not stupid, brother. You are just not like him. Your mind runs in different channels. You are interested in different things.’ Teclis was trying to be kind, but he could not keep a certain satisfaction from his voice. His twin was eternally conscious of his physical inferiority. His sense of intellectual superiority helped balance that. Normally it did not trouble Tyrion but today he felt unsettled and insecure. It did not take much to put him off-balance. ‘Battles and weapons and such are what interest you.’
The tone of his brother’s voice let him know exactly how unimportant he considered such things in the great scheme of things.
‘One of the riders at very least is a warrior. He carried a lance, and his armour shone brightly in the sun.’
At first Tyrion thought he was making up the latter detail but even as he said it he realised it was the truth. He had observed more than he thought. It was a pity his father had not questioned him about that detail.
‘And what of the other riders?’ Teclis asked. ‘How many were there?’
‘Ten with lances. One of them without.’
‘Who would that be?’
‘I don’t know, a squire perhaps or a servant.’
‘Or a mage?’
‘Why would a mage come here?’
‘Our father is a wizard and a scholar. Perhaps he has come to consult him and the warriors are his bodyguard.’
Tyrion saw that Teclis was twisting events to suit his own views and fantasies. He wanted one of those riders to be a scholar and the others, the warriors, to be in the inferior position. It stung. He felt like he should say something but he could not think what, then Teclis laughed.
‘We really are country mice, aren’t we? We sit in our rooms discussing strangers who may or may not be coming to visit us. We read of the great battles of the Caledorian Age but some horsemen in search of a night’s shelter are a source of great commotion to us.’
Tyrion laughed, glad
that he was not going to have to argue with his brother. ‘I suppose I could go and ask them what they want,’ he said.
‘And rob us of a delightful mystery and the anticipation of its solution?’ Teclis asked. ‘We shall have those soon enough.’
Even as he said the words, the great gate bell rang. There was something ominous in its tolling, and Tyrion could not help but feel that it heralded some massive change, that for some as yet unknown reason, their lives would never be the same after today.
The great bell tolled again, as Tyrion raced down into the courtyard. He got to the gate at the same time as Thornberry. They stood facing each other for a moment, each waiting to see what the other would do.
‘Who goes there?’ Tyrion shouted.
‘Korhien Ironglaive and Lady Malene of the House of Emeraldsea and her retinue. We have business with Prince Arathion.’
‘And what would that business be?’ Tyrion asked. He was overwhelmed by the glamour of those names. His father had talked of Korhien. House Emeraldsea were kinfolk of his mother’s, merchant princes of the great city state of Lothern, where the twins had lived when they were small children. What could they possibly want here?
‘That is for me to discuss with Prince Arathion, not his doorkeeper.’ The elf’s voice sounded impatient. There was definitely something martial about it. It had the clarity of a great bronze horn intended to ring out over a battlefield.
‘I am not his doorkeeper, I am his son,’ Tyrion replied to show he was undaunted, even though he was a little.
‘Tyrion, open the gate,’ said a gentle voice from behind him. Tyrion turned, surprised to see his father there. He was wearing his finest over-cloak as well, and a torque of intricately worked gold on which were set certain blazing mystical gems. ‘It would not do to keep our guests waiting. It is uncouth.’
Tyrion shrugged and put his shoulder against the bar of the gate. It raised easily for he was very strong for his age. He stepped back as the gates swung open and found himself looking up at the mounted strangers. One of them was the tallest elf male Tyrion had ever seen, as tall and broad as he was, with a great axe over his back and a sword strapped to his side. In his hand he did indeed hold a long lance. Over his shoulders was a cloak made from the hide of a white lion. Tyrion was thrilled. He had never met a member of the Phoenix King’s legendary bodyguard before. What could such a one want here?