Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  “Well, they’re not actually broken,” he informed her. “They just … don’t work.”

  “So they’re broken,” said Ganelon, which earned him a scowl from Moog and a sly smile from Sabbatha.

  It had been days, Clay realized, since he’d felt the pull of the daeva’s uncanny allure. So far as he could tell, none of the others were affected by it, either. Gabriel, he supposed, was too focused on Rose to give a damn. Matrick was afraid of her, and the daeva wasn’t exactly Moog’s cup of tea. And Ganelon … well, the warrior wasn’t especially susceptible to enchantment. He could turn down a naked succubus if he had to—Clay had seen him do so, in fact.

  “Well.” The wizard looked to Kit. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe each Threshold requires a keystone without which it will not open.”

  “And let me guess: The keystones are lost?”

  “Indeed they are,” said Moog, “or we’d have been to Castia and back by now.”

  “And we’d have a Heartwyld Horde pouring out of the Threshold in Kaladar,” said Ganelon.

  The wizard bobbed his head. “Well, yes, that too. So it’s probably for the best.”

  Gabriel, who was sitting cross-legged by the fire with Vellichor across his lap, looked over his shoulder at Shadow. “You mentioned Lastleaf might try and open the Threshold near Teragoth. How?”

  “Technically speaking,” said the druin, “not all of the keystones are lost.”

  The claw-broker was kneeling near a breach in one wall of the fortress, striking flint over a charm made of broken twigs. He’d set a number of them around gaps in the perimeter, claiming the smoke (and no doubt a dose of druin magic) would ward off predators. When he looked toward the fire his eyes flashed like an animal’s in the dark.

  Moog craned his neck to look at him. “They aren’t?”

  Shadow finished lighting the last of his charms and trotted back into camp. He gave Gregor and Dane a wide berth as he did so, and Clay wondered if it was because the ettin was a monster or because Dane, having listened to his brother describe the druin’s ears earlier, had giggled and asked, Like a bunny rabbit? To which Gregor had replied, Exactly!

  Shadow settled himself on the ground between Sabbatha and Matrick. His robes were changing colour as he moved, Clay was sure of it now. This close to the fire they were the pale grey of day-old ashes, mottled with shades of blue and pale orange.

  He rifled through one of his dozen satchels as he spoke. “Well, Antica’s keystone was lost when the city was claimed by the sea, and the key to Kaladar’s Threshold was in the hand of that city’s Exarch when a slag drake swallowed him, so we can assume that it, too, was destroyed.”

  A safe assessment, Clay mused. He had seen a slag drake only once, and if asked to describe it he might have said it was something between a giant lizard and a small volcano: skin like fire-glazed stone, and a mouth that opened onto an inferno and belched out globs of magma that could disintegrate steel. So yeah, it was safe to say that particular keystone was (like the Exarch who’d been holding it) long gone.

  Moog leaned forward like a kid at a hearth-fire story. “And the last?” he prompted.

  The druin sighed. He drew forth a handful of what looked like small black seeds, sorting through them with a pale finger. “Teragoth’s keystone is rumoured to be still intact, though setting hands upon it would prove somewhat … troublesome.”

  “How so?” asked Ganelon.

  “Because it is still in Teragoth,” said Shadow, showing his jagged teeth. “But so is Akatung.”

  Matrick blinked. “Did you say Akatung? As in the dragon Akatung?”

  “The very same,” said Shadow. He leaned forward and scattered the seeds on the fire. They popped quietly and gave off a sweet-smelling smoke.

  Moog frowned at that, but his thoughts were elsewhere. “I thought we killed him.”

  “We only injured him,” Clay murmured. He remembered telling the same thing to Pip and his friends in the King’s Head what seemed like an age ago.

  “I put Vellichor through his jaw,” said Gabriel.

  “I cut him open pretty bad,” added Ganelon. “He was holding his guts in when he flew off.”

  Shadow looked suitably impressed. “Well, his … guts, as you say … remained within, I’m afraid. He retreated to Teragoth, where he lairs in the bowels of the shrine to Tamarat.”

  Sabbatha frowned. “But isn’t Teragoth within sight of Castia? Why haven’t they just killed him and taken back the keystone?”

  “Because Akatung is immensely powerful,” said the claw-broker. “And they dare not risk his ire. Castia’s walls are high and strong and well defended—which is why neither the dragon, nor Lastleaf’s Horde, have breached them. But if provoked, Akatung would wreak havoc on their lesser settlements, and so they have an uneasy truce.”

  Both of the ettin’s heads yawned at once. Clay caught a whiff of Dane’s fetid breath and pretended to scratch at something just under his nose. “Good night, Gregor,” Dane muttered.

  “Night, Dane,” said his brother. They promptly fell asleep on their back, snoring into one another’s faces.

  Gabriel looked off into the surrounding darkness. Shadows pooled in the hollows around his eyes. “So the keystone is part of Akatung’s hoard?”

  The druin spread his hands. “Presumably. Few have seen a dragon’s hoard and lived to speak of it.”

  Few indeed, thought Clay. He’d known someone who had. One of their old bards had signed on without telling them she’d stolen something precious from Akatung’s hoard. They found that part out the hard way, when the dragon came at them out of nowhere like a typhoon with scales. They’d managed to drive it off, mortally wounding it in the process. Or so they’d thought.

  The bard had died, of course. As bards tended to do.

  “It is evident, I suppose,” Shadow went on to say, “that if Lastleaf should manage to coerce the dragon into relinquishing Teragoth’s keystone …”

  “He could put a Horde in the heart of Grandual before anyone could stop him,” finished Matrick. The ruins of Kaladar were within a day’s hard ride from Brycliffe Castle; Agria’s capital city would very probably be their first target.

  “Tell me about Lastleaf,” said Gabriel to the druin. “When I met Vespian he was hunting his son. He said Lastleaf stole something from him. Something dangerous.”

  Shadow pursed his lips. “Tamarat.”

  Gabe paused. “The goddess?”

  “The sword,” said the druin. “Named for the lost goddess of druinkind. And yes, Lastleaf took it from his father. He carries it still, in a bone-white scabbard upon his back.”

  Clay remembered seeing the sword at Lindmoor, and again in the gorgon’s manse. Of the three blades borne by the druin, it was the only one Lastleaf had not yet drawn.

  “What’s so special about this sword?” Clay asked, sharing a pointed look with Gabriel. “The Archon seemed pretty desperate to find it.”

  Shadow was watching the fire. Its light wavered in his eyes, gleamed on his teeth as he spoke. “Vespian was, among other things, a powerful sorcerer, and an unparalleled craftsman. He created weapons of formidable power, most of them swords. You have met Lastleaf, I assume? You’ve seen the other blades on his back?”

  “We have,” said Clay, who’d been curious about the druin’s trio of scabbards since the Council of Courts.

  “One is called Scorn,” said the druin, “which the Archon fashioned for Lastleaf when he came of age. It is a … volatile weapon, capable of great destruction. The other is Madrigal, the singing sword, a gift from Vespian to the Exarch of Askatar.”

  “And the Exarch of Askatar … gave it to him?” Matrick asked, though his tone suggested he knew better already.

  “Her name was Nyro, though after the Dominion fell she was called Sourbrook. She was one of Vespian’s most capable scouts, and one day—this was several hundred years ago, mind you—she found what the Archon had sent her to look for. She tried to capture Lastleaf,
but instead he killed her, and took her weapon for himself.”

  Clay remembered that second blade, Madrigal, ringing like a bell when Lastleaf had drawn it in the Maxithon. He wondered how many other of the Archon’s weapons had survived the Dominion’s fall, and whether Ganelon’s axe wasn’t one of them.

  Shadow reached up to scratch the back of one tall ear. “Vellichor, of course, remains his most remarkable creation. It was used, as you are no doubt aware, to shape a door through which the druins, my ancestors, escaped the ruin of their own realm.”

  Clay had never known whether or not to believe that was true, though he could think of no better explanation for the world he so often glimpsed through the flat of Vellichor’s blade. He found himself unable to doubt it any longer.

  “In this new world, however, we found ourselves afflicted by a most paradoxical curse: We were immortal, insofar as we could not die except by violence, and yet our mothers could give birth to but a single child. Our numbers began to dwindle. One by one we burned out, or were snuffed like candles in the wind, our entire race destined one day to flicker into smoke and disappear forever. But such, alas, is the fate of every fire.” The druin smiled sadly. “Consequently, druin children are especially precious, and so Vespian was overjoyed when his wife, Astra, announced she was with child. In time she gave birth to a daughter.”

  “Hold up,” Sabbatha said. “Is Lastleaf not Vespian’s son? How could he have two children? Did he have two wives?”

  Kit threw up his hands, exasperated. “Good luck telling a story around this one,” he said to Shadow. “Constant interruptions! No patience at all for dramatic exposition.”

  The druin’s ears slanted sideways, thoughtful. “To be fair: She is mortal, while we are not. Her candle is burning down much quicker than ours.”

  The ghoul put a finger to his bloodless lips, pondering. “Fair point,” he said.

  “Go on,” urged the daeva, and when Kit shot her a glare she raised her hands. “What? You heard him! My candle’s burning and all that.”

  Shadow went on. “Sadly, Astra perished shortly after giving birth to her daughter. It is rare among our kind, but not unheard-of. The Archon was beside himself, driven mad by grief, despairing of an eternity without his beloved wife by his side. And so in despair he did a thing—a terrible thing—that has shaped this realm forever after and may yet see it destroyed. He forged a final sword.”

  Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “Tamarat.”

  “Not since Vellichor had Vespian invested such power into a weapon, and I believe he paid a dearer price in the making, for he was … changed afterward. Darker, as you will see. For this new blade’s purpose was singular, and singularly evil: If used to take the life of a druin—and only a druin—it could resurrect the woman for whom it had been made.”

  “Bugger me beardless,” Moog hissed. “Necromancy!”

  “Indeed,” said Shadow. “And in the grip of madness, resentful of what the child’s life had cost him—and perhaps, it must be said, to keep the nature of this abhorrent new weapon a secret—the Archon used the sword upon his infant daughter—”

  “Liar!” Gabriel’s hand leapt instinctively to Vellichor’s hilt.

  “Let him finish!” barked Ganelon.

  Gabriel looked beseechingly toward Clay, who wished to hell he could unhear what he’d just heard about a druin he’d thought a noble man, could do nothing but shrug. “We should hear him out, Gabe.”

  For a long, charged moment it looked as though Gabriel might actually draw his sword, but at last he took a calming breath and withdrew his hand, clasping it firmly with the other. “Go on,” he told the druin.

  “Astra, needless to say, was also changed. She despised Vespian for having sacrificed their daughter. She grew despondent, and within months of her resurrection she could no longer suffer the burden of grief, and so took her own life. But Vespian … Vespian brought her back. And when she killed herself once more, he used his cursed blade to revive her. Again and again she was revived, until …” He broke off.

  “Until?” prompted Sabbatha.

  “What came back was not Astra. Not anymore. The woman who wore her flesh was colder now, indifferent to beauty, or sorrow, or love. She became preoccupied with necromancy, and began to practice it without compunction. At first she revived only trivial things: flowers, birds, insects. The druins themselves are typically immune to such magic, which is why Tamarat exists in the first place, but before long she was bringing beloved servants back from the grave, or raising a slave who had collapsed dead from exhaustion.

  “By now, Astra’s erratic behaviour and the Archon’s willingness to sacrifice his people was causing unrest throughout the Dominion. Soon after, Vespian lost his hold on the Exarchs. They rebelled against him, against one another, and so began the war that would spell the end of druinkind. But in the meantime, miraculously, Astra announced she was expecting a second child.”

  Sabbatha, of course, cut in. “But you said—”

  “One child per life.” Shadow raised an admonishing finger. “And it would seem undeath counted as her second. She gave birth to a son.”

  “Dear fucking gods …” Moog was holding his head as though he feared it might crack apart.

  The claw-broker nodded. “The boy grew up sickly and strange, an outcast from the moment he was born. Who both loved and feared his mother, yet despised his father for the evil he had wrought. Who stole Tamarat from Vespian and fled into the Heartwyld, that the cycle of his mother’s horrid half life might finally be broken.”

  Gabriel’s eyes were downcast, fixed upon the sword he’d inherited, the blade itself a shard of a shattered world.

  “This story …” Matrick was rubbing the grey-shot whiskers on his chin. “It’s familiar, isn’t it? Like I’ve heard it before somewhere, only told in a different way.”

  “Or sung,” said Kit enigmatically, as if he’d already reached the conclusion Matrick was grasping for.

  Shadow’s smile was that of a benevolent father, or a kindly priest, which made what he said next all the more ironic. “I imagine you have. Indeed, you already know the names of Vespian’s ill-fated children. The daughter, Glif. The son, Vail.”

  Glif … Vail

  Clay felt his mouth go dry. A hollow he hadn’t known was inside him yawned open, wide as an abyss, deep as the fathomless dark between stars, as his mind, reeling, gave names—druic names—to Grandual’s so-called gods.

  Vespian, the Summer Lord. Astra, the Winter Queen. Glif, the Spring Maiden. Vail, the Autumn Son, known also as the Heathen.

  The Heathen …Lastleaf.

  “No,” he heard himself groan, as something in the fire snapped and gave off a puff of drifting smoke.

  Clay had never been a particularly religious man. He offered prayers infrequently, and to no one in particular. But to learn that the gods of your people were not only a myth, but a myth derived from the sordid lives of an elder race that had once kept them as slaves … Even the most pragmatic mind would baulk at reconciling such a thing.

  A long silence descended on the camp, as each of them digested—or tried to, anyway—the implications of Shadow’s story.

  Moog sniffed, sat up, and peered into the dark outside the circle. “Does anyone else smell that?”

  “Smell what?” Gabe asked, stirring from a stupor of his own.

  Sabbatha stifled a yawn. “The ettin farted, I think.”

  Moog shook his head. “No, it’s something I … I can’t put my finger on it …”

  Gabriel laid his hands flat upon Vellichor’s scabbard. “Even so,” he said finally. “Lastleaf has gone too far. We can’t allow him to destroy Castia. And if he opens that Threshold he could threaten all of Grandual.”

  Shadow nodded. The druin appeared to be deep in thought as well. “As you say.”

  Something else cracked in the fire, and another plume of smoke went up, blue-green against the black of night. Matrick, Clay saw, was asleep where he sat, chin-to-chest a
nd already drooling.

  Suddenly, Moog stood up. “WINKFLOWER!” he shouted. “UP! WAKE UP!” He snatched up a spoon and a copper pot and started banging them together, striding in a circle around the camp.

  Matrick jolted awake, knives spinning into his hands. Sabbatha, too, had drifted off, and now looked around wild-eyed. Gregor and Dane slept on, unperturbed by the sudden clamour.

  Gabriel sat up, blinking. “Moog, what the—”

  “It’s him!” Moog pointed at Shadow. “The seeds he threw on the fire! Winkflower! I knew it! I knew I knew that I knew it! He’s trying to kill us!”

  Shadow spread his hands. “The seeds are harmless,” he declared. “I only thought you could use a restful sleep.”

  Ganelon stood like a dark tower rising. He had Syrinx in hand—glowing now, whispering unfathomable words to the forest night—and shook his head to clear it of the druin’s spell. “Like hell you did.”

  The claw-broker remained seated, though Matrick and Sabbatha both edged away from him. And then Shadow grinned, sharp teeth painted red by the fire.

  “Very well,” he said. “But you should know I had not planned on killing you. I only sought to take what was rightfully mine.” The druin’s nature was changing rapidly, like spring turning to winter without all the fun stuff in between. His eyes had settled on Gabriel, who was first among them to comprehend the druin’s intent.

  “You mean Vellichor?”

  “It should not belong to you, human. That sword was never meant for mortal hands. The Archon made a grave mistake when he placed it in yours. You have no idea what it is you are holding.”

  “Why don’t you tell me then?” said Gabriel. He wore a sneer that Clay recognized from way back—the one he used to put on whenever some villain waxed poetic about their plan to destroy this town, or assassinate that queen, or summon some unholy demon from the icy depths of hell.

  “It is a key,” said Shadow, and Clay saw Gabriel’s sneer wilt just a fraction. “Lastleaf said that Vellichor is our only means of going home, to return at last to our own world.”