by J. L. Doty
It changed tactics, chopped toward the table and bit deeply into the wooden planks, sending a shower of splinters in all directions. Blistering waves of black-hot hatred washed over him, igniting the splinters and scorching his tunic. With a dozen blows the blade dismembered the table into four large pieces, and with the size of its anchor now diminished it began dragging Morgin again in spasmodic jerks across the floor.
At the far end of the Hall BlakeDown backed fearfully up the steps to the periphery as Morgin unlocked his legs and released the last remnant of the table. The sword pulled him in a long skid the length of the Hall, but at the last moment he swung his legs in front of him, got them beneath the sword so that he slid on his heels and butt, and caught his heels on the lowest of the steps beneath BlakeDown. He put his back into it, pulled with all his might, brought the sword to a momentary halt.
He was on his back with his heels locked against the lowest step, stretched to his full length, but the sword slowly started lifting him off his back, like a rigid timber raised as a flagpole. Gritting his teeth, trembling with the strain of holding the blade back, he looked down the length of the sword at BlakeDown, whose eyes were filled with stark terror. Only then did he realize the Penda leader was the sword’s intended prey, and that he could no longer restrain it. Morgin gave one last effort, knowing he could only delay the blade, and through his gritted teeth he growled at BlakeDown, “I . . . can’t . . . hold it . . . I have . . . no . . . power.”
BlakeDown’s eyes widened with fear, but too they widened with a strange mixture of triumph and gladness, and in an instant he backed through the heavy plank door at the end of the Hall, slammed the door shut and threw the bolt loudly into place. Morgin’s strength finally reached its limit; the sword tore from his grip, dropping him on his back, and without the least faltering it buried itself to the hilt in the planking of the door. The blade hesitated for an instant, then pulled itself half way from the door, and slammed back into it with such force the door’s hinges groaned with the sound of overstrained iron.
Morgin scrambled to his feet, shot up the steps, locked his fingers about the hilt. It shot backwards, slamming the hilt into his stomach, knocking the wind from him and driving him out into the center of the Hall where it dropped him painfully on his back. It turned on him, and he screamed as he struggled against it. Then it picked him up, swung him from side to side, tossed him onto the steps of the periphery, and like the time it had cut the Kulls to pieces he could only hold on, and hope his strength would not fail him.
But his strength was not inexhaustible, and soon his battle narrowed to his hands, and the death grip he had upon the hilt, until the world about him receded and he saw only the sword, and the chasm of power it had opened before him.
~~~
Rhianne almost fainted when the storm of power hit the castle. It flooded her soul as if the ground beneath her had split and a volcano of malevolent power was erupting within the castle itself, a power with a consciousness and will of its own, specifically conscious of her and Morgin. For a single moment it tried to attack her, but Morgin held it back. She leaned heavily on a vanity and tried to reassure herself the attack would not come again. And then she realized she was safe only because Morgin held the monster back by taking the brunt of its assault.
She reached the Hall of Wills just as the massed nobility of four clans were pouring from every exit imaginable. The malevolent power she sensed within was like a scar on her soul, and deep within she knew she was probably the only person who could help Morgin. But the panic of the crowd was a current she could not oppose, and they nearly trampled her as they swept past her. Then Olivia appeared, took Rhianne by an arm and stood her ground like a granite monolith on the shore of an ocean storm. “Seal the Hall,” she commanded angrily. “We must seal the Hall, and Ward it against the possibility he may fail. We cannot allow whatever it is he has unleashed in there to turn upon the land. It would devastate the countryside.”
“Let me go,” Rhianne shouted. “Let me go. I have to help him.”
The old woman’s hand arced out of nowhere and resounded loudly against Rhianne’s cheek, stunning her momentarily. “There is nothing you can do, girl. At least not at this time.” She pointed to the barred doors of the Hall. “That battle he must fight alone.”
As if in answer to the old woman’s words Rhianne heard Morgin’s voice raised in a terrified scream, followed quickly by an inhuman growl of hatred as vast waves of power crashed outward from the Hall. A large crack raced down the stone of a nearby wall, as if the power trapped with Morgin in the Hall would escape by tearing down the castle itself.
Olivia cursed and cried out angrily. She turned upon the crack and cast her power at it like a spear, and the stone was once again whole, and again the old woman stood rock still against the forces that reached out against them. Rhianne looked on as the old woman called her power forth. It coalesced about her like a shield, then she fed it into the stone walls of the Hall. She turned upon Rhianne, and her eyes burned with the power in her soul. “Help me, you foolish girl. You’re a grown woman. Don’t just stand there like a child.”
Rhianne obeyed without question, casting first a small spell to calm her reeling thoughts, then moving up to the more demanding task of imitating the old woman. And as she concentrated she sensed others who were far ahead of her—BlakeDown, AnnaRail, JohnEngine, NickoLot, Brandon—already lending their power to the aged stone of the Hall. She joined them carefully, and as she touched her power to the veil they had constructed, she sensed again the special affinity the malevolence within held for her. But she did not retreat, and with the others she settled down to a long and exhausting vigil.
~~~
“There’s a horse waiting for you near the man-gate,” DaNoel told Valso. But then DaNoel hesitated, for he had no recollection of how he’d come to be standing with Valso in the Decouix’s tower prison. He shook his head to clear it, but was careful not to mention his lapse to the prince. The pandemonium in the Hall of Wills was a muffled roar in the distance.
DaNoel tried to reconstruct his memory of recent events: Morgin’s fantastic struggle with the talisman he had unleashed, and his open admission to BlakeDown, within everyone’s hearing, that he had no power. Thinking of that moment in the Hall, DaNoel bit back a shout of triumph. “He never did have any power, did he? It was all in that talisman, wasn’t it?”
Valso, in the midst of sorting and packing the few belongings he wished to keep, looked up and shrugged indifferently. “Does it matter now?”
“No,” DaNoel said joyfully. “No, it doesn’t matter in the least. He’s discredited himself to such an extent that even if he does survive the talisman, some clansman will kill him soon enough.”
DaNoel had a sudden thought. He looked carefully at Valso. “Were you responsible for that?”
“For what?”
“For unleashing that talisman, and at the worst possible time, and in the worst possible place?”
The Decouix prince didn’t answer, but the corners of his mouth curved upward in a satisfied smile, answer enough for DaNoel.
“I assume you’ve provisioned the horse properly?” Valso asked.
“Twelve days trail rations. I’d give you better, but trail rations weigh little and they go far. And once the cry is raised you’ll need to move with all possible haste.”
“Well enough,” Valso said. “I’ve lived on worse.” He finished packing, turned abruptly and walked out of the room. DaNoel followed him down the stairway to Olivia’s veil of containment. The old witch’s spell, so complex and powerful before, was failing quickly as she concentrated more and more of her strength on the struggle to contain the talisman within the Hall. The veil was now tattered and rent in a dozen places, though Valso still needed the help of someone with Elhiyne blood to escape without alerting the old witch.
DaNoel chose a week spot in the veil and enlarged it carefully. He stepped through and Valso followed without hesitation. As DaNoel
closed the veil, the Decouix turned to the guard dozing under DaNoel’s spell and took the man’s sword.
“What are you doing?” DaNoel demanded.
“I need a weapon,” Valso said as he pulled the sword from its sheath and looked it over. “This isn’t much of a blade, but it’ll do until I find better.”
The guard groaned and opened his eyes. He looked at DaNoel, then at Valso, and his hand shot instinctively to his side, but of course his sword was in Valso’s hands.
DaNoel reacted instantly, smothering the man’s consciousness with a hastily constructed spell. “You did that,” DaNoel snarled at Valso. “You woke him on purpose.”
The Decouix shrugged. “You can handle one minor clansman, can’t you?”
“But if I tamper with his memories Olivia will surely sense it, and she’ll trace it to me.”
“Then kill him.”
DaNoel took a frightened step backward. “I didn’t agree to murder.”
Valso shook his head sadly. “Treason is acceptable, eh, but not murder?” The prince turned his back on DaNoel, pulled the tower door open just a crack and looked carefully outside. He turned back to DaNoel. “I’d really like to stay and discuss your strange code of honor, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time. We’ll meet again, Elhiyne.” And with those words Valso slipped through the door and was gone.
DaNoel turned toward the guard. He struggled to find some other way of handling the man: a bribe perhaps. But Olivia had chosen her guards for their personal loyalty to her. Reluctantly DaNoel pulled his dagger, hesitated for an instant, then drove it between the man’s ribs into his heart, though even then it took some moments for the guard’s spirit to depart fully.
DaNoel cleaned his dagger carefully on the man’s tunic and returned it to its sheath, then checked the man one last time to be certain he was truly dead. Satisfied, he stood, turned to leave, but his heart almost stopped at the sight of NickoLot standing in the tower door, looking at him oddly. “What’s going on here?” she demanded, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.
DaNoel said, “The Decouix escaped. Killed this guard on his way out.”
NickoLot’s eyes narrowed further. “You’re lying.”
DaNoel looked at her carefully. “Lying about what?”
“I don’t know, but I do know you’re lying.”
“And what did you see with your own eyes, little sister?”
“I didn’t have to see it with my eyes. You’re tainted with the scent of the Decouix’s power. What have you done here?”
DaNoel reached out and gripped her viciously by the throat. “I’ve done nothing. I’ll deny any accusation you make, and since you can’t prove it, you’ll only hurt mother and father if you speak out.”
He threw her to the floor in a heap of petticoats. “Little girls should not interfere in the affairs of men,” he growled, then walked quickly out of the tower to raise the alarm for the Decouix. He’d better do everything he could to appear innocent just in case the little bitch did speak up.
Chapter 2: The Child of Indwallin
With experience Morgin had become quite adept at recognizing the texture of his dreams, and knowing almost instantly when he had awakened in one. But this was different, for memories of a past from within this dream clouded his mind with hatred and pain and exhaustion, as if he had been part of it for years. For quite some time he walked down a muddy, dirt road beneath a dark and gray sky, carrying an unsheathed sword in his right hand, concentrating on his footsteps only enough to avoid the muddiest of the potholes, and thinking instead of the small Benesh’ere village in which he’d been born, and of the days he’d spent helping his mother Eisla at the forges as she shaped the finest of Benesh’ere steel, and of the warm nights when his father Binth taught him the notes of the pipes, while Eisla looked happily on . . .
Morgin stopped in the middle of the road in mud up to his ankles. He shook his head and shouted, “No!” He looked up at the dark clouds above him. “I am not Benesh’ere, and I was not born in a village named Indwallin. My mother was not named Eisla and she did not pound steel at the forges, and my father was not Binth and he did not play the pipes.”
He was shaking with fury, so he took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. He looked quickly at his sword—it was his sword—and at the hand holding it—but not his hand. He looked carefully at both hands, for they were rough, scarred hands that had seen long days of hard fighting, and long nights of swinging a hammer at the forges. Dirt had ground its way deep into the skin about the nails, and in places untended blisters had finally grown over into hard, knobby calluses. But the thing that made them most obviously not his hands was the color of the skin beneath the dirt and grime, a white so pale it reminded him of bones long bleached in a hot desert sun, the white of the skin of the Benesh’ere. He shook his head to clear it, and became aware of shoulder length, coal black hair that had not been washed in many a day.
He took hold of himself, acknowledged that he was dreaming again, though this dream had not the misty and dreamlike sense of unreality of his past dreams, but seemed instead very real, too real. And in it he haunted the soul of a Benesh’ere warrior named Morddon, though it was the whiteface warrior who commanded this body, while Morgin seemed to be only a passenger along for the ride.
He looked about, found that this dream had deposited him in the midst of nowhere, standing alone in the middle of a long and narrow road that wound its way through a hilly and green countryside before disappearing over the next hill. The strange memories that swirled through his thoughts told him that in this dream he had been walking for some days now, and his muscles complained that he had covered many leagues with little rest.
His stomach growled, but he tried not to think of food. He had no cloak, and the clouds above looked as if they might burst at any moment. His only possessions in this dream were the begrimed tunic on his back, the dingy leather jerkin about his shoulders, a pair of loose fitting breeches made of a rough and coarse material, an old, scuffed pair of calf-high brown boots, and the unsheathed sword in his hand, but no sheath. A dozen small cuts and bruises distributed uniformly over his body brought back memories of the confusion of a large battle, and a gray and dingy bandage high on his left arm was marked by a red stain some days old. His memories told him a sword cut had recently opened a fresh wound there, and he was lucky it had been a glancing blow, for otherwise it would have taken off his arm.
He looked again at the sword, and there was no doubt it was the sword he knew, though wholly unlike the sword he remembered. Plain and functionally unadorned, it bore no baubles and would never be a pretty blade. But it now lacked the centuries of tarnish that couldn’t be wiped away in Morgin’s time, and it lacked many of the scars of battle he remembered, the nicks and scratches he knew so well. It might now be only a few years old, not centuries. But he knew this blade for a certainty, for in this dream he had an awareness of the steel that defied understanding or analysis, as if the steel were a living thing, an old friend that spoke to him of a place called Indwallin, and a woman called Eisla the SteelMistress, and a man called Binth the Pipist. Both names touched his heart with longing, and with sorrow. “No!” he shouted again. “Those are lies.” But he could not refute the pale whiteness of his skin, or the black cascade of hair that streamed over his shoulders.
He shrugged. At least he had the sword, and that gave him some small feeling of confidence, though that also frightened him a little too. It didn’t appear the dream was going to end in the next instant, and just standing there waiting for it to end seemed ridiculous, so he resumed his walking, though he had no idea what lay at the end of this road.
Later that day it began to rain, a steady drizzle that continued through the afternoon and into the approaching night. It plastered his hair down against his shoulders, soaked his clothing to the skin and chilled him to the bone. But luck was with him, for just as the last of the gloomy day turned into an even gloomier night, he spotted an old animal shelter som
e distance off the road.
Someone had tended the surrounding fields at one time, but the shelter had been abandoned long ago and was now riddled with leaks, though he managed to find a dry corner and there he curled into a tight ball. He didn’t expect to sleep well, for his clothes were wet through and through; there was no hope of lighting a fire, and the chill of the rain reached into his soul. But the constant roar of the rain pounding on the roof of the shelter pulled him toward sleep, and he drifted slowly into a light doze where he was still half-conscious of his surroundings.
A faint movement—just a flicker of motion—in one corner of the shelter brought him to full wakefulness. His Benesh’ere reflexes startled Morgin, for like a cat he rose from a tightly curled ball on the floor to a full upright stance in one fluid motion. He stood in a crouch and faced the corner where he’d sensed the movement, though he couldn’t have seen it for there was no light in the dark interior of the shelter on such a black, stormy night.
The Benesh’ere warrior in him tensed, ready for a fight, but recognizing the being in the corner as a shadowwraith Morgin tried to reassure him with his memories. Facing it, the being’s name came to him. “Soann’Daeth’Daeye,” he whispered. “Why do you haunt my dreams?”
The being spoke, but its words touched his ears as if they were no more than the sigh of a gentle wind. “Beware, oh King of Dreams,” the wind sighed. “Beware that which comes from beyond these walls.” And then the being was gone, and Morgin’s senses told him he was alone in the shelter.
By touch he examined the corner where the being had crouched, and while he was doing so its words finally registered on his consciousness. He stood erect for a moment, waited and listened, but heard nothing beyond the pounding of the rain on the roof. But conscious of the warning, he crossed the floor of the shed and slipped out through the door into the open field, fearing the shelter might become a trap with no escape. He pressed his back against a nearby tree, tried to become part of its nighttime silhouette, and waited, though not for long.