The Swampling King (The Windwalker Legacy Book 1)

by Ben S. Dobson

Proud of me. When was the last time anyone was proud of me? Josen ducked his head to hide the sudden moisture in his eyes, and quickly wiped them dry. “God Above, old man, I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “And I you. You never seem to be at the Keep when I visit, these days. Or ever, if the rumors are to be believed.” Eian laid a hand on his shoulder. “You can’t hide from your troubles, lad—they always find you again. Tell me, what is bothering you?”

  I wish I could tell you, I really do. But I think you would be less proud if you knew I was saving a swampling from those idiot knights. “Nothing in particular.” Josen made himself grin. “You know me, Eian. Trouble just… follows me. I wouldn’t know what to do without it.”

  Eian frowned. “No jests, now. I do know you, and far too well for that to work.”

  “It’s stupid, really. Just… half-formed thoughts.”

  “You may as well tell me, Josen. I think you know that you aren’t leaving here until you do.”

  God Above, he’s not going to let go of this. Josen let a frustrated breath out through his nose. “You just get more stubborn with age, don’t you?”

  “As stubborn as I need to be. Out with it.”

  Josen sighed. “Fine.” He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to gather his thoughts. He had to tell Eian something, but it didn’t have to be the entire truth. “I’ve been thinking about this purge. About the swamplings.”

  Eian raised an eyebrow. “What about them?”

  “We’ve been killing them for so long. Hundreds of years.” Josen inhaled deeply, bracing himself. “But how do we know we’re doing the right thing? How do we know they’re as bad as we think they are? Has anyone ever tried to talk to them?” Even without the part about the swampling girl, hearing the words come out of his mouth made him wince—they were practically treasonous. He’s either going to laugh, or throw me in a cell.

  In fact, Eian did neither. “Ah. So that’s it.” He shook his head and smiled. “I should have known. You are still younger than I was, but not by so many years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve never spoken about it, but you must have wondered why I stepped down as lord general to command the Royal Swords.”

  “Once or twice.” Not quite a lie, but he’d never thought very seriously about it—it had happened years before he was born. “What are you saying? You left because you had the same questions?”

  Eian nodded. “More or less, yes. After the rebellion, my first duty was to lead dozens of purges in the Swamp. The king wished to focus on a new enemy to distract from the rifts left between the duchies.” There was a distant look in his eye, now, as if he was seeing something Josen couldn’t. “It weighed on me. I began to wonder what god would allow such slaughter. My faith was… shaken, to say the least. The time came when I couldn’t bear it anymore, and I asked your father for permission to resign my post.”

  “And Father let you? That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “King Gerod did what he thought best. If I had stayed, there was a growing risk that I might have… broken. I was a symbol, in a way, of his victory in the rebellion, and the lowborn liked to see one of their own risen so high. He feared the scandal my fall might bring. It would have looked strange for me to simply abandon my position, so he arranged for me to take command of the Royal Swords, and claimed that it was at his request. I was just glad to be somewhere else. I needed time to think. To decide if I still believed.” He refocused his gaze on Josen. “I suppose what I am saying is that I know what it is to doubt. Perhaps the answers I found can be of use to you.”

  “Maybe they can. I… I didn’t know any of this.” Josen looked at Eian’s face—so familiar to him, every line and wrinkle—and tried to reconcile this new information with his knowledge of the man. It wasn’t easy. The Eian Gryston he knew was devout in his faith; he had never missed a service at the Royal Eyrie in all his years with the Swords. “You always seemed so certain.”

  “The people who seem most certain of themselves are often the least. I was younger then, and very concerned with my own pride. It was my struggle—no one else needed to witness it. And by the time you were old enough to notice, I had made peace with the Sky God. My faith was stronger than ever.”

  “Why? What changed your mind?”

  “You did, in a way.” Eian smiled fondly at him. “You were always… spirited, even when you were very young. So full of life. And always in some kind of trouble. I swear by the Above, there wasn’t a thing in the Keep you couldn’t find a way to break.” He chuckled. “But for all that, you were a good boy. The other children all looked up to you, the sons and daughters of every duke who came to visit—your brother, more than anyone—but you never took advantage of it. You always encouraged them, saw the best in them, watched out for those the others would tease.”

  Josen shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with the praise. “That’s… fine, I suppose, but I don’t see where it convinced you that you should go back to killing swamplings.”

  “There was no single great revelation,” Eian said. “I just came to look at the world in a new way. The Convocation tells us that the Sky God gave of himself to grant form and life and soul to the corrupt earth, until only the three aspects we worship today remained. There is a part of him in all things, in all of us. I doubted that, for a long time. But I could see him in you, and I began to see him elsewhere as well.”

  “You sound like my mother,” said Josen. “If I came to her with a skinned knee, it was the Sky God’s plan. All as the Wind wills it, and so on.” And so was her death, to hear her talk of it. That had been the hardest thing. Near the end, she had wrapped herself so tightly in her belief that no amount of pleading could unravel it.

  “Your mother was always very strong in her faith. We spoke of it often, before she passed.” Eian smiled, but his eyes were sad. “She helped me to see things as I do now. She always believed you were a blessing from the Above.”

  Josen laughed bitterly. “Well, that doesn’t do me any good. I loved my mother, but she believed a lot of things she shouldn’t have. She wasn’t exactly well. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.” The lowborn had been told that some illness had claimed Elda Terene’s life, but Eian knew the truth.

  Eian frowned. “You mustn’t let her death tarnish everything that came before. She thought her son a gift, a sign of something greater. Is that so unreasonable?”

  “I’m sorry, Eian, but if the Spirit of All is in me, I’ve never felt him. I can hardly go a day without making some kind of idiot mistake. You chose the wrong inspiration. You both did.”

  “You misunderstand me. Neither of us placed our faith entirely on your shoulders. You were one example of many. That any of us have form and thought, the capacity to choose kindness over cruelty—I cannot explain where any of that comes from if not the Spirit of All. Or take these duchies we live in: scattered mountain peaks, some that no man could climb with the supplies to build a city. They make no sense unless the stories of the Rising are true. And what makes the air move in such perfect currents for our baskets, if not the Wind of Grace? I realized that I had been blind to such obvious miracles. When Arnest Fairsky died, your father asked me if I was ready to serve as lord general once more, and I returned with the understanding that the god who created this world would not ask what is not necessary.”

  “And it is necessary to slaughter swamplings?”

  “I know it is… hard to accept,” Eian said. “You must believe that I take no joy in it. But the swamplings are not innocents. They attack patrols in the Swamp, raid our outposts and caravans and trade barges, steal the supplies the duchies need to survive. They revere Dalleon Deepwalker and call forth Deeplings in his name. The Knights of the Storm are sworn to protect the Nine Peaks, and we do what we must to uphold that duty. The purges are… bloody, but if they have prevented even one Deepling from harming someone dear to me, I cannot regret my part in them. Sometimes the Sky God asks us to bear a heavy burden because
not to bear it would be heavier still.”

  “And if the swamplings weren’t a danger, would we really stop killing them?” Josen dropped his head and pushed his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t share your faith. I can’t.”

  “Of course you can’t. My faith is not yours. You must find your own, as we all must.”

  “I don’t see whatever it is that you do,” said Josen, meeting Eian’s eyes again. “It’s not that I don’t believe in the Sky God. I suppose he must have created the world—I have no better story. But where is he now? I’ve never seen a miracle. The chastors talk about the true eagles that used to protect us from the Deeplings, but I think I would have noticed an eagle with a forty foot wingspan. By the Above, Eian, the Windwalkers were supposed to be able to fly. Why aren’t we all soaring around like birds? If the Sky God cares so much, why doesn’t he stop the Deeplings? It seems to me that we’re fighting in the name of a god who doesn’t even care anymore, over things that happened so long ago we can barely remember them.”

  “The true eagles will come again,” said Eian. “And there will be another Windwalker.” His brow furrowed just briefly, and then he recited, “When he is needed most, the last Windwalker will rise in the Deepwalker’s place, making nine once more, and he will bear the eagle’s eyes as those before him did. And to a true and just king, he will show the path to salvation.”

  “Impressive,” Josen said. And it was. Few could quote full passages from the Word of the Wind—it was written in the Highspeech, incomprehensible to anyone outside the Convocation. Only the most devout—his mother among them—bothered to memorize translations from the chastors’ sermons. Impressive, but not at all what he needed just then. “Try it in the Highspeech. Maybe that will change my mind.”

  Eian frowned. “I only wanted to—”

  “I know you mean well, Eian, but I need more than scripture and blind faith to feel right about this.”

  Eian was silent for a time, looking back at Josen with a frown. Then, he stood. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  “What? If you want me to watch the sunset as proof of the Sky God or some such thing, it’s not going to work.”

  “Just come, lad.” With that, he strode out the door.

  Josen stayed in his seat for moment, then stood with a sigh and hurried behind. He caught up halfway down the corridor and followed Eian up a nearby stairway and then out a door to the exterior of the Stormhall, where a narrow bridge breached the gap between the fortress and the Greenwall.

  From the outside, the Stormhall was an imposing structure—broad and solid, a rectangular stone monolith stretching hundreds of yards along the Greenwall in either direction. Great grey banners emblazoned with swords of blue lightning flew at intervals all along the length and width of the roof, opened to full extension by the ever-present wind. Stone bridges crossed the gap between the wall and the upper level of the fort every fifty yards, so that the knights had easy access to the ramparts.

  Looking out over the wall from the upper levels of the Stormhall made Josen’s stomach clench and his head spin. He was used to the height of the Queensmount; the Raised Plains were so low to the mist that they were very nearly submerged in it. For a moment, Josen felt like all of Greenwall was a huge raft, just barely bobbing above the surface of a dark grey sea that stretched all the way to the edge of the world. Overcome, he braced his hand against the doorframe, afraid to follow Eian over the narrow bridge to the wall until he had mastered his dizziness.

  The sun was half-sunk behind the horizon—which looked uncomfortably close from this height—and evening’s chill was quickly descending, aided by a cold wind from the north. He considered retreating inside to find an overcoat and escape the view for a few moments longer, but he didn’t want to fall behind; Eian wasn’t stopping to wait. Holding his breath and taking short, careful steps, Josen crossed over the bridge, then hurried after the lord general.

  He tried not to look at the mist as they walked, focusing instead on the fields inside the wall. Only see a fraction of the duchy was visible past the edge of the Stormhall, but he’d seen it all before. Compared to the Plateaus, Greenwall was positively rural. The nine-tiered eyrie was the only structure besides the Stormhall that rose much higher than the wall. Even the Falloways’ manor was no more than three floors, and lightly fortified, relying on the Greenwall itself for protection. A small town surrounded the manor—a cluster of homes and shops along a few wide streets—and beyond that there were only scattered cottages spread randomly across the sprawling farmland. And the windmills, of course. Dozens upon dozens of brightly colored windmills, pumping water and grinding grain. They were a common sight in the Peaks, but no duchy had quite so many as Greenwall. All told, it was a pretty view but not an exciting one—and he vastly preferred it to what lay in the other direction.

  They walked along the wall for a short distance, past another bridge back to the Stormhall. Two knights manning a thunderbolt with an arm-span wider than Josen’s saluted them as they passed; Eian responded with a nod, but kept moving. A few yards beyond, he descended a set of stairs to ground level.

  “Where are we going, Eian?”

  “Here.” Eian turned at the bottom of the stairway, toward a double cellar door set into the ground between the wall and the fort. “Get the other side.”

  Josen pulled open one side of the hatch and Eian the other. Behind the doors, a dark staircase led down into the earth. A lantern and tinderbox sat on a small shelf just inside; Eian picked them up, lit the lantern, and started down the stairs.

  An odd mixture of dread and something like desire grew in Josen’s chest as he descended behind Eian. There was a whisper at the back of his head, still too quiet to make out words, but somehow as sweet as anything he’d ever heard. It pulled at him until he wasn’t sure he could stop his feet if he’d wanted to—he had to see whatever lay below, and yet he was terrified of what it might be.

  At the bottom of the staircase, the lantern illuminated a large cellar with a dirt floor, and two mounds covered in canvas sheets, both stained with black splotches that Josen couldn’t identify. One was perhaps the size of a large dog, the other… much larger. As big as a merchant’s wagon without its wheels, though Josen suspected it was something much worse than that.

  “What… what are they?” He didn’t want to know the answer, and at the same time he wanted it more than anything.

  “Take this.” Eian handed him the lantern, then stepped forward and pulled the sheet from the smaller mound.

  It was like nothing Josen had ever seen—like a dog-sized rodent had mated with some shelled insect. Unnatural and impossible, yet there it was. It lay absolutely still, apparently dead, but even so the wrongness of it was invasive; it felt physical, like being stabbed in the gut. His stomach heaved painfully, and suddenly he was vomiting its contents onto the dirt floor. “Lord of Eagles,” he gasped as he straightened up again. “Is that a Deepling?” He wiped his mouth clean with the back of his hand.

  “This is the monster that nearly killed Shona yesterday. It will be burned tonight, but I thought you should see it before that.

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” His belly still roiled, but he couldn’t look away.

  “Because I wanted you to experience it the way most do the first time they see a Deepling. There’s no preparing for it.”

  Josen’s eyes shifted to the other, larger heap. “Then that must be… Why are you showing me this, Eian?”

  “So that you can understand what we are fighting against.” As he spoke, Eian drew the sheet off of the second mound.

  Josen heaved again, but there was nothing left to come up. This one was worse, and he hadn’t thought that possible. It looked like a giant beetle whose shell had somehow grown around a man, but a closer look showed that the human-shaped torso was not a man’s at all. Its head was eyeless above a gaping maw surrounded in mandibles; its arms ended in long serrated blades. It could have been something from a nigh
tmare. The chastors taught that the Deeplings were created by the King in the Deep, born of the corrupt earth far below the surface where even the Sky God could not reach. Looking at the creatures now, Josen could believe that. They certainly couldn’t have been made by anything with a soul.

  “I cannot make you believe in the Sky God,” Eian said, “but I can tell you this: I know of no better way to stop these monsters. We have spared the swamplings a true purge for years, and this is how they repay that mercy. If we let it pass, let them believe there are no consequences for attacking us, they will send the Deeplings again, and again. We cannot hold against that for long. The Nine Peaks will fall.”

  Josen couldn’t stop staring at the beetleback. “I knew they were terrible, but I never thought… I don’t know how you can bear to go near them, let alone fight them.”

  “I have to. Any man or woman who wears the grey makes that promise. If we don’t, who will?”

  “I can’t… why can’t I make myself look away?” Even as he spoke, Josen felt himself moving toward the creatures—one step, then another. The voice was clearer in his head now, soft and sweet, like a lover’s whisper. Come to me, it said. I can break your chains. I can set you free. It was very faint, but even so, he stopped moving only when Eian stepped forward and grabbed his arm.

  “The Voice of Corruption. The Word says that the King in the Deep reaches his influence out through their blood. This is only a pale shadow of the true voice—it fades after they die. Cer Eldon will be taking you through some of our methods to resist it over the next few days. Do you understand now why we cannot stop fighting this war?”

  God Above, did I let that girl go just to summon more of these? Josen still couldn’t quite believe that—someone who willingly dealt with such beasts should have felt more wrong, it seemed to him. But he couldn’t argue against stopping the Deeplings. He had no better solution to offer, and they were too awful to ignore. And wasn’t defending the swamplings as good as calling Eian a murderer to his face? The man has devoted his life to protecting the Nine Peaks, and I’ve given it all of ten days’ thought. He has to know better than I do.