by William King
Tyrion lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, tired and excited. All around him he sensed the presence of the strangers in the house. Some of them were still awake, talking in low voices so as not to disturb the others. Tyrion, who knew every night noise of their very quiet house, was disturbed by the sound. He had read of ship’s masters who knew there was something wrong with their vessels because of a faint, unfamiliar creaking. He suddenly understood how that could be.
He made himself relax. His breathing became deeper and slower and he closed his eyes. He became aware that a vast weight pressed down on him. He felt as if all of the breath was being crushed from his lungs. He had to force air into them. He tried to sit up but his body was weak and would not obey him. He burned as with a dreadful fever and ached all over as human victims of plagues were said to. He opened his eyes but the room was unfamiliar to him. There was a bell on the table for summoning assistance and a flask of the cordial his father had prepared to ease his sickness.
He reached for it, but his limbs felt wasted and numb. They refused to obey him with their customary alacrity. He forced more air into his lungs but it was a struggle. He opened his mouth to call for help but he could not force the words out. He knew he was dying and there was nothing he could do about it.
Suddenly his eyes snapped open and he was back in his own room, his own body. It had been a dream, but not just any dream. He got up from the bed and raced through the house to where Teclis lay, burning with fever, struggling to breathe, desperately reaching for his medicine. Tyrion moved over to the bed, poured some of the cordial and helped his brother to drink.
Teclis swallowed the medicine like a drowning man, a look of strange revulsion on his face that Tyrion understood. What must it be like to feel like you are drowning and have to force yourself to drink?
‘Thank you,’ said Teclis at last. His breathing had become more regular. The rasping sound coming from his chest had died away. His eyes were no longer bright with panic.
‘Shall I call father?’ Tyrion asked.
‘No need. I am all right now. I think I shall sleep.’
Tyrion nodded. His brother looked terribly frail and wasted in the beams of moonlight coming in through the gap in the shutters.
‘I shall sit a while,’ he said. Teclis nodded and closed his eyes. Tyrion watched silently and wondered whether his twin was dreaming about being him. He hoped so.
It would be the only experience of good health Teclis was ever likely to have.
Tyrion moved silently through the house, unable to get back to sleep now that he was awake. Night noises seemed determined to keep him up. Downstairs he could hear his father and Korhien talking quietly of old times as they sat beside the dying fire. Lady Malene was locked in her chamber. Teclis had finally drifted into fitful slumber.
Tyrion found himself inevitably drawn to his father’s work room, filled with curiosity as he sometimes was, and half-lost in a waking dream of adventure and glory and things that might yet come. Visions of grim knights and silken princesses and mighty kings filled his mind along with great ships, huge dragons, proud warhorses. He saw himself in palaces and on battlefields. He pictured jousts and sword fights and all manner of adventures with himself as hero. Sometimes Teclis was with him, a proud mage from the storybooks.
Beams of moonlight came in through the crystalline window, illuminating the huge armoured suit that was his father’s life’s work. Not for the first time, Tyrion thought how strange it was that this room should have windows of precious crystal when Teclis’s did not. When he was younger such thoughts had never troubled him. The world was the way it was and he had neither required nor expected any explanations from it. Now he found himself questioning things more and more.
In the moonlight the armour looked like a living warrior, tall and lithe and deadly. He approached it as he would a great cat he was hunting, padding in on silent feet till he stood before it, looking up at the massive helmet, measuring himself against the titanic figure of the elf who had once occupied it and finding himself insignificant and all his dreams of glory tiny, meaningless, insect things.
At this moment Tyrion had no trouble believing his father’s theories. It seemed perfectly possible that Aenarion had once worn this damaged armour. Even without the magic that would give it life, there was a power about the thing. Its simple presence spoke of an earlier, more primitive age when mortal gods strode the earth and made war with foes the likes of which no longer existed in the modern world.
The metalwork was beautiful but it lacked the sophistication and loveliness of much later elven armour. It had been forged by masters in an age of war. The elves who had made it had other things on their mind than the creation of an object of beauty. They had been making a weapon for the solitary being who stood between their world and utter destruction.
‘What were you like?’ he asked himself, trying to picture Aenarion, to imagine what it must have been like to walk the world in that ancient time of blood and darkness. It was impossible to imagine a being of flesh encased in this suit of armour. It was easier to picture a creature of living metal such as some claimed the Witch King now was. Yet Aenarion had lived and breathed and fathered children, from one of whom Tyrion was descended. There was a link of blood and bone and flesh between himself and the one who had once worn this armour.
He reached out and touched it as if by doing so he could reach across the ages and touch his distant ancestor. The metal was cold beneath his hand and there was no life in it, no sense of presence other than that the armour itself possessed.
He felt obscurely disappointed. There was no echo down the ages from the avatar of the godhead who had saved his people. And he felt obscurely relieved that he had disturbed no ancient ghost, felt no ancient power. Perhaps it was true as some scholars now claimed that the great magics had departed from the world and that the high elves were but pale shadows of what they had once been.
He stood there for a long moment, enjoying the cold and the odd sense of being linked with ancient glories and terrors that could not touch his life. It was thrilling to imagine the time of Aenarion but he was happy too that he would not have to confront the horrors the first Phoenix King had been called upon to face. He was safe within the walls of his father’s house and nothing could touch him.
Somewhere off in the night something screamed, a hunting cat that had found prey perhaps or maybe one of the monsters that sometimes made their way down from the Annulii. A trick of the moonlight made it seem as if a mocking smile twisted the armour’s helmet-face and for a moment Tyrion thought of ghosts and deadly destinies.
Then he shook his head and dismissed his fears and padded softly to his own bed.
N’Kari dreamed. He relived the ancient days of glory when he had led the horde of Chaos that had come so close to conquering Ulthuan. He saw himself lolling on a throne made of the fused bodies of still-living elf-women and giving orders for the sacrifice of a thousand elf-children. He saw himself storming ancient cities of carved wood and putting them to the torch. He relived inhaling the scent of the burning forests as if it were incense as he devoured the souls of the dying. He saw again his first battle with Aenarion in the burned-out ruins of that ancient city and found himself once again facing that terrible blade. Something about that image brought him, shuddering, back into the present.
All around him the fabric of the Vortex flowed in a way that would have been incomprehensible to anyone but a daemon, a mage or a ghost. It was like being trapped in an infinite labyrinth of light.
He needed to escape. He needed to break out of this place.
He forced himself to think, to concentrate on his plans. It was too easy to lose track of time in this place, to lose himself in his far too vivid dreams. He had slowly become himself again. Over the long millennia he had gathered power. He had found holes in the fabric of the Vortex. He knew where it was deteriorating. He knew where he could break out when the time came.
The time was almost right. The
stars were in the correct position. The power was within his grasp. Soon he would escape from this sterile, dull, haunted place and write his name in blood on the pages of history.
He would take vengeance on all of the line of Aenarion.
chapter Four
‘What do you know of the Art?’ Lady Malene asked.
She had knocked this time before entering Teclis’s chamber. She still looked around distastefully though, then went over to the windows and threw the shutters open, letting in fresh air and the unaccustomed sunlight.
It was morning then, Teclis thought. He had lived through another night.
‘Just what I have read in my father’s books of theory and what I have picked up from talking to him. He will not let me read his spellbooks yet.’ Teclis coughed and could not stop coughing. His lungs felt full of something and made a horrible wheezing sound.
Malene looked at him with distaste. She was not used to being around the infirm. Few elves were. It made him want to limp away and hide.
‘One of the things your father and I have been talking about is your education,’ she said at last. ‘He feels that you would be better apprenticed to one such as I than to him. He says your gifts are more suited to an active school of magic. You are sixteen today. You are of an age to begin proper study of the Art. If you wish to be taught.’
Teclis looked at her with wonder. He tried to push himself upright. The effort made his shoulder ache and left him feeling exhausted. Even that could not dim his excitement. Was it possible that Malene really would teach him to work magic? He forced himself to look her in the eye and say, ‘I want to learn all you can teach me.’
‘That may take a very long time,’ she said.
‘We are elves. We have time.’
‘I am not sure you do.’
‘You do not want to waste your time teaching one who might not live to be grateful for it, is that it?’ Teclis could not keep his bitterness from showing. He felt as if someone had shown him a treasure he had desired all his life and then snatched it away.
Lady Malene shook her head. ‘No. I will teach you what I can, in whatever time you have to learn it, once the Seers have pronounced you fit to be taught.’
‘So I must await their permission?’ He could not keep the sourness out of his voice. Another barrier between himself and his heart’s desire. ‘That is not fair.’
He wanted so hard to be a mage. He knew he could never be like Tyrion, swift and strong and certain, but he felt he had it in himself to be a mage like his father. He could see the winds of magic perfectly when they blew and felt the tug of power whenever his father used the slightest of cantrips.
‘There are certain secret societies and cults who believe that one of the Blood will draw the Sword of Khaine and bring about the end of the world,’ she said this as if she was imparting a great secret.
‘It won’t be me. I want to be a mage. What use have I for a sword?’
She smiled at that and her face was lovely for a moment but then it became serious again. ‘The Art can be a terrible weapon and a mage under the Curse of Aenarion can be a terrible foe.’
Teclis cocked his head to one side. ‘There have been such then?’
‘Of course.’
‘How is it that I never read of them?’
Lady Malene’s smile showed her amusement at his arrogance. ‘So in your sixteen years, you have become acquainted with everything written in seven millennia of asur history? You are quite the scholar.’
Teclis felt his face flush and he started to cough again. The spasm wracked his body painfully. He realised how foolish and arrogant he must sound to Lady Malene, when really he was just frustrated. ‘I have not. But I want to. Where can I find these books?’
She reached out and ruffled his lank hair. It was a gesture of affection that surprised and touched him as well as embarrassed him. He was not used to such things. He looked away. ‘You will not find them here, or in any library outside of the Tower of Hoeth. It’s the sort of knowledge that the Loremasters keep to themselves.’
‘You have been to Hoeth?’
She nodded.
‘You have seen the library?’
‘I have seen the parts of it I was allowed to see.’
‘Allowed?’
‘The library is a vast, strange place, like the Tower itself. There are sections that some people never see and yet others can visit every day. Sometimes, a mage will find a chamber full of books just once in his life and never be able to find the way back. The library is part of the Tower and the Tower has a mind, of sorts, of its own.’
‘It sounds wonderful and terrible at the same time,’ said Teclis.
‘I do not think the mages who built the Tower entirely understood what it was they were creating. I think the spells they cast had unforeseen consequences. It is often the way with magic.’ She sounded a little sad when she said that, as if she had direct personal experience of such a thing. ‘A thousand years in the building, a millennium of work by hundreds of the greatest mages of the elf people. Webs of geomantic power spun within webs of geomantic power, monstrously powerful spells layered upon monstrously powerful spells, built in a place that was already sacred to the God of Wisdom and a font of awesome power. It is the greatest work of the elves, I think it will most likely endure after we have gone. I sometimes think that it will endure the wreck of the world and that it was intended to do so.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I believe the Tower is a vault as well as a repository of knowledge. When the elves are gone, it will still be there, preserving our knowledge, all that we are, all that we were, all that we will be. There was never a place like it built before and there never will be again. Bel-Korhadris, its architect, was the greatest geomancer since Caledor Dragontamer and I doubt there are any living now who can fully compass his design or his intention.’
Her words started a great blaze burning in Teclis’s heart. A desire to look upon this place and to walk through its library and penetrate its secrets, insofar as he might, filled him. He had never heard of anywhere so attractive. He wondered if they might take him there, even in the meanest capacity, as a sweeper or scribe or a warden. He felt like he would do anything required to look upon this place and be part of it.
‘My father never talked of the Tower as you do,’ he said. He had never heard anyone talk of any place with such passion. She sounded like his father when he talked about the dragon armour of Aenarion or Tyrion when he talked about warfare.
‘All elves who see it, see it slightly differently. All elves who go there experience it slightly differently. I am not so sure your father’s experience was as pleasant as mine. Or it may be that he does not like to talk about it the way I do. Some people are secretive that way. In general I do not speak of my time there much. It is odd that I feel compelled to discuss such a thing with you, Prince Teclis. I wonder why that is?’
Teclis could not answer because he did not know. He did feel that in Lady Malene he had found a kindred spirit. Perhaps she felt the same. ‘Why did you ask me what I know of the Art?’
‘Because there is a very great power within you. I can sense it, your father has sensed it, any mage with the Sight can sense it. If you live and are not accursed you may become a very great wizard one day.’
‘Will I get to see the Tower of Hoeth?’
‘Most assuredly.’
‘That would make me very happy,’ said Teclis and once more he fell into a long fit of coughing until he felt like he was almost unable to breathe.
‘Poor child,’ said Lady Malene. ‘Not much has given you happiness, has it?’
‘I do not want your sympathy,’ Teclis said at last. ‘Only your know-ledge.’
‘I may be able to give you more than that.’
‘Really?’
‘I may be able to help you with what ails you.’ Teclis looked at her disbelievingly.
‘That would be a gift beyond price,’ he said.
‘Well, i
t is your birthday after all.’
‘Yes, it is,’ he said, surprised. He had not expected to live to reach sixteen years of age.
‘I make no promises,’ she said. ‘I will see what I can do.’
She left the room. For the first time in a very long time, Teclis felt like crying. It was odd. He had thought there were no tears left in him.
‘I have a birthday gift for you, doorkeeper,’ said Korhien. Tyrion looked at the giant warrior, not sure whether he was being mocked. He glanced around the courtyard but all of the soldiers who had come with Lady Malene were busy about their own business. If this was a joke no one could see him being the butt of it.
Korhien loosed the belt and scabbard at his waist, folded the leather strap neatly and handed the equipage over to Tyrion.
‘What do you want me to do with this?’ Tyrion asked.
‘It is yours,’ said Korhien. ‘Unsheathe the blade.’
Tyrion’s heart leapt as he obeyed the White Lion. He drew the longsword from its scabbard. It was a true elven blade, long and straight and keen edged and it glittered in the mountain sunlight. Runes were etched in the metal. A blue sunstone inscribed with a dragon glinted from the pommel. He held it easily in his hand although it was heavier than he had imagined such a thing would be.
‘I cannot take this,’ said Tyrion, although he very much wanted to keep it. He was too proud to accept such an expensive and beautiful thing from a stranger. It was a charity he did not require. He might be poor but he was of a most ancient lineage. His father had taken the time to instil that knowledge in him.
He slid the blade back into the scabbard and presented it, hilt first, scabbard held over his left forearm back to Korhien. Tyrion felt the wrongness of his words even as he said them. He knew that in some way he was insulting Korhien but at the same time he did not want to be beholden to any elf for something as important as his first sword.