Dead Man's Steel

by Luke Scull

  ‘They didn’t choose me,’ Sasha said quietly. ‘I volunteered.’

  ‘You what? Why would you do that?’ Cole’s brow creased in puzzlement.

  ‘Why do you think?’ Sasha fixed him with a stare. ‘You, you fucking idiot,’ she finished, when he continued to say nothing. ‘You’re the only thing I have left.’

  He continued to stare at her.

  And then, very slowly, he leaned in, eyes closed, lips pursing together.

  She stopped him six inches from her face, pressing a gentle finger against his mouth. ‘No,’ she said softy. ‘I don’t want this. I’m sorry.’

  The hurt on his face made her want to scream. ‘How can you say that?’ he said, in a strangled voice. ‘After all we’ve been through! We grew up together! We’re meant to be! Even Thanates and the White Lady are together now and she tortured him for a thousand nights! For fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Cole, listen—’ Sasha began, but he was already storming off. She watched him go, heaving a big sigh. Then she turned back to the cave.

  Jerek was watching her from the entrance, his dark eyes revealing nothing. ‘What?’ she demanded.

  The Wolf scowled right back at her. ‘Can’t a man go for a quiet piss?’ he snarled. ‘Fucking kids and your bullshit. Some of us got bigger worries to think about.’

  Sasha considered asking Jerek what he meant, but deep down she already knew.

  The Valley of the Nameless

  ✥

  THERE WAS SOMETHING comforting in the simple act of sharpening a sword. The routine of running a whetstone down a familiar blade. The familiar shape of a well-worn hilt in your palm. The act of sharpening a sword seemed to suggest that everything could endure forever, if only you paid it the right mind and gave it the right amount of care. It seemed to hint that a man, like a sword, would never grow old so long as he kept himself sharp.

  It was all a lie, of course. The fact of the matter was that the world kept on changing. Nothing endured forever, not a sword and especially not a man. Eventually all things broke. All things died.

  He was unwell. That’d been obvious for a while. Lately, though, the pain in his chest had grown worse. He was so damn tired all the time. It might’ve been age – the endless years of travelling and fighting and killing, claiming their price at last. But he knew it was more than that. Brodar Kayne reckoned he had maybe one fight left in him, and it would be the biggest of his life.

  The climb over this latest ridge was the toughest so far. His breath rattled in his chest like the wheezing of his friend Braxus’s bellows back in the day. They were almost at the top now. Soon they’d begin the descent into the unknown – a place the giant, Mighty Oak, had referred to simply as ‘wrong’.

  Mind you, ain’t too much right with anything that’s happened over the last year. Getting to know Brick had definitely been one of the high points. The reunion with Magnar, too, though he wished it had been in better circumstances. He prayed that they might be given time to heal – both physically, and to rebuild the relationship between father and son.

  ‘You’re in pain,’ observed Rana. The sorceress didn’t talk much, though she was forthcoming enough with dirty looks. He knew why and he couldn’t blame her for it. As far as Rana was concerned, he was a cold-blooded killer. A weapon with no other purpose. No better than the greatsword on his back.

  ‘I’m old,’ he said. ‘Pain’s pretty much a given when you’re dumb enough to keep doing this shit at my age.’

  ‘You are not much older than me,’ Rana replied. She might’ve been somewhere just short of her fiftieth winter. She looked a hell of a lot better than he did, that was a fact.

  ‘Age maybe ain’t so much what you have to show in years,’ he said slowly, ‘but what you have to show in the wounds you’ve picked up along the way.’

  ‘I assure you,’ Rana said curtly, ‘I have plenty of scars of my own.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.’ The two of them trudged along in that uncomfortable silence of folk who had been brought into the same vicinity by coincidence rather than design. At least though they weren’t the most awkward pairing on this expedition deep into the heart of demon territory. Just ahead of them, the youngsters, Davarus Cole and Sasha, were pointedly ignoring each other. Jerek and Thanates seemed content enough exchanging grimaces, while at the head of the small party Isaac navigated the tricky terrain with an ease the others could only dream of, his slender arms and legs belying a surprising strength.

  ‘Seems odd to be talking about getting old when you’re travelling with an immortal,’ Kayne offered, having searched for something to say.

  ‘Do you think we can trust him?’ Rana asked.

  ‘Don’t reckon it matters. You saw how their weapons cut down the demons north of the Demonfire Hills. If the Fade want to wipe us all off the map, ain’t much we can do about it.’

  ‘I wonder if the men at Red Valley felt the same way. Or all the other men you’ve killed. Men who knew they were no match for the Sword of the North.’

  Kayne’s head sagged. ‘Maybe they did.’

  ‘I hope,’ continued Rana, ‘that if we succeed, and the Fade prince grants us leniency, the future will be decided by men like Brandwyn the Younger and not Brodar Kayne. I wonder what will become of you and your ilk. Where you will stay in a world where your skills are no longer relevant.’

  ‘In the past,’ Kayne muttered. ‘Where we belong.’

  The companions finally crested the summit. They paused for a moment to catch their breath and then went to stand together to gaze out over the valley below. The ground fell sharply, black rock devoid of any semblance of life descending into a deep basin that was wholly obscured by an evil fog. The miasma swirled with unholy lights and crackles of dark energy. Malevolent fingers of alien matter occasionally swept through, only to collapse in giant bursts of sickly green light.

  ‘You want us to climb down into that shithole?’ Jerek rasped.

  ‘What you see is but a ghost of the reality to which the Nameless belongs,’ Isaac explained. ‘It will not harm us. The rift itself is far, far below the earth. When the demons cross over, they crawl their way to the surface. Somewhere below that fog the Herald awaits.’

  ‘How do we kill it?’ Rana asked. ‘My sisters and I were twelve in number, a powerful circle by any standard, yet even we could not destroy the demon when it attacked Heartstone.’

  Isaac looked at each of the companions in turn. ‘You are the most formidable humans these lands have to offer,’ he pronounced. ‘The greatest of mortal wizards; the most powerful sorceress in the north; the carrier of a dead god’s essence; a girl augmented with the powers of my own kind; and two warriors who together have overcome every obstacle placed before them. A grim company, but one united by fate; tied together by Pattern. One that will not quail in the face of a demon lord.’

  ‘Save the poetic shit,’ the Wolf snarled, Isaac’s final utterance obviously having proved one grandiose proclamation too far. ‘How do we kill the cunt?’

  The Fade had the grace not to look put out by Jerek’s interruption. ‘With magic. With sword and axe and bow. Its scaled hide is as strong as chainmail, but it can be pierced. It can be defeated. Follow me, and keep your eyes open – there is no telling what lies ahead of us.’

  They began the climb down, Kayne picking his way slowly over the broken rock in case he fell and knackered his knees more than he already had. The faces of the others were by turns apprehensive and determined. About halfway down, Thanates slipped and Kayne had to place a steadying hand on the arm of the blind mage to stop him plunging to the valley floor below. ‘Reckon you could make this a lot easier on yourself if you turned into a crow,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ replied Thanates. ‘But I wish to conserve my magic for the Herald.’ Kayne nodded at that. Thanates seemed like a good sort for a wizard and in other circumstances he might’ve enjoyed getting to know him. But it was clear that Thanates had only one thing on his mind –
the challenge before them.

  ‘At least you can take to the wing if things go poorly,’ Kayne said, half in jest. Thanates shook his head. ‘A wizard-king of Dalashra does not abandon his comrades,’ he said grimly.

  An hour later they reached the bottom of the valley. The ground was as barren as the rocks above them. There was an eerie green light emanating from the surface that mirrored the light they’d glimpsed on the horizon north of the Demonfire Hills. ‘What happens if the Herald’s not here?’ Kayne grunted to Isaac.

  ‘The Herald must remain in place while the Nameless attempts to cross over,’ Isaac explained. ‘The Herald is its connection to this world. To this reality.’

  ‘And if we kill it, the link will be cut?’

  Isaac nodded. ‘Once the Herald is slain, no more demons will be able to pass into this world.’

  ‘What about those already here?’

  The Fade shrugged. ‘We will deal with them the old-fashioned way.’

  Kayne’s hands tightened on his greatsword. The pain in his chest was bothering him again, a sharp and unpleasant sensation akin to an invisible hand twisting his insides. He needed to vomit. He needed to piss. He tasted bitterness in his mouth and realized he needed a drink. All things considered, he was eager for the fighting to commence, if only so he could forget his aches and pains and concentrate on the one thing he was good at.

  He saw Rana watching him. The sorceress knew the truth. She’d known it all along.

  I’m a killer. A reaper, not a sower. Ain’t never brought nothing good into this world.

  That was a lie, he realized. He’d brought Magnar into the world. And he’d brought his love for Mhaira, who in return had made him a better man than he had a right to be. He owed it to her not to feel sorry for himself. To make the best of what he could in the time he had remaining to him. He smiled back at Rana, who seemed confused by his abrupt change in manner.

  The intensity of the green glow increased as they delved deeper into the valley. Above them, the strange fog continued to broil and flash crazily, lit by all manner of phantasmal energies. It became impossible to tell the time of day. At one point they encountered a demonkin. The fiend was easily dispatched by Kayne’s greatsword and Jerek’s axes. As they were nearing a pool of purplish water, however, a pit suddenly opened in the ground ahead of Davarus Cole. The youngster leaped back with a yelp as a sickly green radiance burst from the hole. Moments later, a pair of clawed feet reached out and gripped the earth, dragging the blink demon from the rift and out into the world of men.

  Isaac moved like quicksilver, his hand-cannon sending a projectile into the demon’s central eye with a bang that reverberated through the valley. The demon’s paws slid from the earth as it fell lifelessly back into the rift, tumbling from sight.

  Kayne walked to the edge of the pit and stared cautiously down. The hole seemed to go on forever.

  ‘Take care,’ warned Isaac. ‘You do not wish to fall into the realm of the Nameless. I suspect it would be a fate very much worse than death.’

  They continued on. The sense of unease grew stronger, the fog overhead more erratic. They narrowly avoided an encounter with a gigantic swarm of the flying demons they’d first seen back in the ruins of Watcher’s Keep, taking cover behind an outcrop of boulders veined with the same shiny substance that had fallen from the sky and torn up the earth during the unnatural storm the previous night.

  When it finally seemed like they could go no further, Sasha slowed and raised a hand to her eyes, shielding them from the luminescence that bled from all sides of the valley. Kayne heard that odd clicking sound again. It seemed like it was coming from Sasha’s skull. Davarus Cole glared at her. Behind the anger was a great and terrible hurt.

  Kayne had seen something similar in Magnar’s eyes, the night he’d refused his son’s request to fly north with the small party. ‘What’s wrong, lass?’ he asked, wondering again what had occurred between the two youngsters.

  ‘There’s something out there,’ Sasha said, dread in her voice. ‘Something huge.’

  The Herald

  ✥

  ‘THE HERALD?’ WHISPERED Brodar Kayne.

  Sasha stared and for a long while said nothing, the sheer horror of the apparition in the distance robbing her of the ability to speak. The demon lord was even more nightmarish in the flesh than its living memory aboard the Seeker had hinted at. It crouched in a shallow depression, its gigantic bat wings wrapped tightly around its body, twenty feet of scaled, fiendish monstrosity that made her stomach lurch to gaze upon. Though it wasn’t on the same colossal scale as the dragon that had attacked them in the skies above the Purple Hills, there was an ineffable wrongness about the demon that poked at primal fears even the sight of the great wyrm had not agitated.

  ‘The Herald,’ she whispered, finally finding her voice. ‘It’s kneeling, with its wings folded around it. I don’t think it knows we’re here. It seems like it’s sleeping.’

  Isaac nodded. ‘It is communing with the Nameless,’ he said. ‘We have stumbled upon it when it is at its most vulnerable. Let us not waste this opportunity.’

  ‘How much further?’ Kayne grunted. The old barbarian appeared utterly exhausted. Sasha looked at the demon lord far in the distance.

  ‘Another hour, maybe.’

  ‘Then we had best hurry,’ replied Isaac grimly.

  The last thing Sasha wanted to do was get any closer to the Herald than she was already. But as her augmented vision returned to normal and the grim little company made their way towards the centre of the valley, she caught Cole looking at her and reminded herself why she had volunteered for this suicide mission.

  I have to keep him safe. Whatever he feels towards me now, whatever words were exchanged outside the cave last night, he’s the reason I carry on fighting. The only thing I have left.

  Cole scowled and looked away and she sighed. One day, she would tell him the truth. She glanced at Jerek and noted how he hung back to keep pace with Kayne.

  Perhaps some truths are better left unspoken.

  The last stretch of their march took them gradually down into a vast basin. As they walked, skeletal remains began to speckle the dark rock beneath their feet. They grew more numerous the further the group pushed on, until their boots were crunching over bone.

  Isaac was the first to spot the demon lord. The Fade raised an ivory hand. ‘Slowly now,’ he said. ‘We are almost upon it.’

  Surrounding the Herald was a sea of bones, human and giant and those of creatures larger still – great cave bears and even a few that appeared to have once belonged to some kind of giant fish.

  ‘Those are whale bones,’ Sasha whispered. ‘The Herald must have hunted them in the Frozen Sea to the north. How many creatures have died beneath its claws? Thousands? Tens of thousands? The demon kills everything it comes across.’

  ‘Even the local wildlife has some measure of potentiality to be harnessed,’ Isaac explained. ‘The Herald spent decades – centuries – harvesting life in order to bring others of its kind into this world in order to anchor the Nameless to this reality. I only wish we had learned of its presence before things were allowed to progress this far.’

  ‘Fucker’s huge,’ Jerek growled. His axes were in his hands, his dark eyes narrowed to slits as he stared at the demon towering above them.

  ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall,’ Cole said grimly. He turned and spat, almost hitting Isaac in the face by accident.

  ‘Bullshit,’ the Wolf rasped. ‘They bigger they are, the harder they hit. The harder they are to put down.’

  ‘It is a formidable opponent,’ said Thanates. ‘But I have fought a dragon and survived. Let us see how it fares against a wizard-king of Dalashra.’ He spread his palms and black fire flickered down his arms to dance around his fingertips.

  The presence of the forbidding mage opposite gave Sasha some small hope. She had witnessed him battling the White Lady almost to a standstill. If this mightiest of mortal wizard
s could stand toe to toe with a Magelord, perhaps they might yet have a chance against the Herald.

  Isaac drew his hand-cannon with one hand and his crystal sword with the other. ‘Before we attack, we must first trap the demon,’ he said to the wizard-king, and to Rana beside him. ‘Use your magic to incapacitate rather than kill. If the Herald takes to the skies, our task will become doubly difficult.’

  Rana turned to Thanates. ‘Do you know anything of circle magic?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve heard rumour of it,’ the wizard replied. ‘A pooling of magic, in order to achieve effects greater than would otherwise be possible.’

  Rana held out a hand. ‘I will show you how,’ she said. ‘You must direct the spell. Your power is twice that of my own.’ Thanates took her outstretched fingers in his gloved fist, and together wizard-king and Highland sorceress began exchanging whispered words. Sasha and the others waited patiently, exchanging meaningful looks – all except her and Cole. He refused to meet her gaze.

  ‘We will begin our spell now,’ growled Thanates. ‘Move quickly once the demon is trapped and bring every weapon you have to bear against it. I do not know how long our magic will hold.’

  Together, Thanates and Rana began to chant. The tang of magic rippled through the air. Ahead of them, the surface of the vast pit of bones vibrated, clinking together, creating an eerie tune that drifted through the valley like a ghostly lullaby. The Herald shifted and then straightened to its full, colossal height, its gigantic wings folding back to reveal a reptilian body covered in large black scales. Tiny bones stuck between the scales fell away as the Herald shifted its dark bulk. A trio of sinister eyes flickered open and Sasha felt utter terror grab hold of her. They seemed to strip away her sense of self, exposing her soul – all the rawness, all the ugly truths of the things she’d done writhing up like a host of maggots bursting from a corpse. Cole was similarly affected. Magebane shook in his trembling hand.