by Tom Lloyd
Lashing out with unnatural speed, the Jester directed a flurry of cuts at Doranei. The King’s Man barely blocked the first in time, only his training saving him as the next slashed down at his knee. He caught the third and chopped at the Demi-God’s arm, his axe glancing off the scales of its armour. He stepped forward into the fight and tried to rip his sword across the Jester’s wrist, but it was already moving back.
He kept on, knowing attack was his best option. With the sword he’d taken from Aracnan Doranei could strike as quickly as his enemy, though his reactions remained mortal. The light-speckled sword cut through the air so swiftly it felt like it had a mind of its own. The Jester tried to batter it from his hand, but Doranei rode the heavy blows, deflecting the last upwards with the axe following close behind. Again the edge was turned by the Jester’s armour, but Doranei pressed in behind it.
With his sword he engaged the Demi-God’s weapon, then hooked his axe into the back of the Jester’s knee, hauling back and slamming his head into the Jester’s midriff. The Demi-God fell onto his back; Doranei stumbled himself, but caught himself in time and swung down at the Jester’s feet. The scale-armour couldn’t resist his sword and he chopped right through the Jester’s ankle, swinging up almost blindly to deflect the inevitable swipe of an injured warrior.
The Jester was lying supine, and the strike was weakened by panic and pain, and Doranei was able to batter away the weak blow. He threw himself forward and hacked his axe at the Jester’s face, and as he felt it bite he followed up with a stab to the armpit that drove deep inside the Jester’s body, which suddenly went rigid.
Doranei rolled back to his feet and looked around wildly for the next threat, but none of the attackers were going for him.
The remains of the squad were cringing in a small knot behind their shields, back to back, spear-heads wavering. Surrounding them were five Acolytes, identically dressed, each with blood on their long blades. But none were bothering to look at the infantrymen; their eyes were all on Doranei and the corpse at his feet.
‘Reckon I’m worthy, then?’ Doranei shouted at them, not caring whether they could understand him or not. ‘This good enough for you – a dead God at my feet?’
Any response was precluded by a burst of magic from Ebarn, long slivers of white that flew like daggers at the nearest of the Acolytes, tearing bloody ribbons across its chest and slicing through the sword arm as the Acolyte tried to parry.
The Acolyte dropped, dead before it hit the ground, and the others broke and sprinted off into the darkness. Doranei looked at the corpses on the ground. Only one looked to have been killed by the soldiers. He’d taken down two; that left five Ebarn had dispatched.
‘Oh Gods,’ Doranei breathed as the sergeant threw down his spear and started to check on the fallen. One youth’s frantic, pained breaths told Doranei the dismal news; another howled as soon as the sergeant touched him. The rest were already dead, among them the youngest of their squad, his neck sliced clean open. Blood no longer flowed from the wound; too much had already run out down his studded jacket into the dry earth beneath.
‘There’s no time, Brother!’ Ebarn warned, running to his side and pointing towards the next picket. ‘It’s a coordinated attack.’
‘I know,’ Doranei muttered, unable to tear his eyes from the boy’s sightless eyes. ‘I just—’
‘Shift yourself!’ Ebarn yelled, giving the King’s Man a rough shove, and when that didn’t work she hauled him around and made him look her in the eye. ‘It was a quick death and you can’t ask for more. He’s in Death’s hands now, and we need to see to the living!’
Doranei sheathed his weapon and started to run towards the next post where, without a mage, they most likely hadn’t been faring so well. ‘We see to the living,’ he repeated.
CHAPTER 35
The hours passed slowly as the weight of his burden grew heavier, eroding his strength with every moment passing, in the saddle, on foot or by the fire while Carel forced him to eat. Isak could feel it happen, and he could do nothing about it.
Though the hours of each day dragged, the days were somehow racing past. News of skirmishes and blood spilled washed over him: riders from the Menin force brought word of bloody battles fought; dutiful updates came from the king, conveyed by the battered remnants of his Brotherhood, though Isak guessed they were mostly sent to monitor his sanity, or what remained of it.
On occasion he made jokes, little moments of foolishness Carel would scrutinise for meaning. Sometimes the conclusions were good, and the veteran would nod, satisfied, and continue; at others a sadness would take him and he would sit and stare into the fire next to his young charge, an old man hunched against the autumn winds.
Magnificent views went unremarked-upon. Great clouds of green and blue birds filled the sky as they approached the deep lakes that dotted the plain. The fading sun cast gold and copper light over the rusty flanks of the mountains in the distance. One morning he’d awakened surrounded by ghosts in the pale dawn, which slowly revealed themselves to be towering termite mounds twice the height of a man, covering the grasslands for miles: silent, still monuments stretching off into the distance. Isak felt they were oddly fitting as they trudged on, mile after mile, in pursuit of a battle where there would be no retreat from either side.
Isak watched himself just as carefully as Carel, wondering at the damage done. From time to time he would see the monstrous white-eye he had become, shuffling from one day to the next, and it brought a tear to Isak’s eye, but the threatening flood never arrived. The ache in his heart swelled, but never broke. Something inside wouldn’t let him submit, something inside was too broken to submit.
The power suffusing Isak’s body meant his senses were rarely closed to the Land around him. He felt the brief moments of grief Vesna permitted himself, the fatigue that threatened to consume King Emin; it all drifted on the wind and settled like snow on his shoulders, adding to the burden of the black sword.
And yet—
And yet he had realised it was not his sanity that was fail ing. The kernel of self within his broken and brutalised body remained.
The Skull of Ruling kept him balanced, he knew that, and he held it close as hungrily as an addict. The arm of the scales creaked and groaned, but the balance remained. His mind drifted with the tides of the wind, carried by the clouds above and fogged by the heavy depths of soil below, but something remained apart from it all.
My hunger for the end? A white-eye’s need for victory? The daemons left little of me and the witch of Llehden took more, so how much is left of the boy I once was, the boy Carel loved? Did he die in the Dark Place, or when his memories were torn out? Or was he only ever an imagining – a false echo in my mind?
‘Isak,’ Carel called from his side, slapping the white-eye’s boot as he spoke, ‘you going to sit there all afternoon?’ He took the reins from Isak’s hands. More gently he said, ‘The halt’s been called. Time for lunch.’
‘I’m not hungry.’ The massive charger stood patiently while Isak disentangled himself and slid to the ground.
‘That don’t matter. You’ll eat something while I take Toramin to drink.’ Carel slapped a bruised apple in Isak’s hand along with a lump of bread, then took the reins and tugged on them to urge Isak’s horse into a walk. ‘If Hulf gets more’n the core, you’ll both feel the back o’ my hand.’
Isak looked at Carel, a frayed smile on his face. ‘You realise that hurts you more than me?’
‘Aye, I know – you bloody Chosen and your Gods-granted strength.’ Carel spat and loosened the saddle-strap. ‘Still, it hurts me, and it’ll hurt your dog – so why do that to us, eh?’
Isak didn’t answer, but he sat on the flattened grass at the side of the road, ignoring the soldiers around him, and bit into the apple. Out from the muddle of horses and men Hulf bounded, barrelled into Isak and fought his way into his lap with enough force that he would have knocked over a normal man. Isak took another big bite of the apple and offe
red the remains to the dog, who snapped it eagerly up.
As he ate the bread, Isak ran his fingers through Hulf’s thickening fur and stared blankly down at the dirt road. The dog’s coat had become noticeably thicker in the last month as autumn advanced. The dog’s warm, playful presence was a great comfort, a reminder that Isak was more than ephemeral; it was Hulf as much as anything that kept him in the weary flesh of his body. Lurking at the back of his mind was the sense that he no longer belonged in the Land of the living; the lure of the wind was strong, like he could simply let go and drift away.
Carel fought that with every joke and insult, with his gripes and awkward words of pride and praise, but it was the physical that worked best: Carel’s thumps on the shoulder, Hulf’s feet kicking delightedly in Isak’s lap, the burning muscles when he hacked down a tree for firewood or lifted stones to build a firepit.
‘Isak?’ Vesna was standing over him with his usual look of concern. The ruby teardrop embedded in his cheek seemed to tinge that with an air of despondency, but Isak knew the Farlan hero well enough to dismiss that thought.
‘My friend,’ Isak replied as brightly as he could manage, ‘how are you?’
The question seemed to startle Karkarn’s Mortal-Aspect. ‘Me? I’m fine – I won’t pretend it’s not annoying to have my God root through my mind, but having the bastard’s blood in my veins means I don’t tire easily.’ He gestured at the soldiers all around, men and women from the Kingsguard and Palace Guard. ‘We’re pressing them hard, as fast a pace as the baggage can manage, and it’s taking its toll.’
‘I thought the enemy were getting further away?’
‘They are.’ Vesna crouched at Isak’s side to let Hulf lick his fingers. ‘They’re getting supplied as they travel – for a retreat, someone’s planned it bloody well.’
‘Ruhen always planned on heading this way, his preachers must have struck quiet deals over the last few months. The battle becomes irrelevant if he gets Aenaris to Aryn Bwr’s fortress, to the barrow where Aryn Bwr first discovered the Crystal Skulls.’
‘So do we need to push harder, or get the Menin to delay them?’
‘We have time,’ Isak said. ‘They’ll slow down once they’re out of lands Ruhen controls.’
‘It’s a shame the Chetse won’t try to stop them, but if anyone’s going to have a problem there, it’ll be us.’
‘Aye – what fool invited a Menin army along?’
Vesna smiled. ‘I’m sure he had his reasons, whoever he was.’ He hesitated, as if wary of asking what was on his mind, then said, ‘Isak, do you know what it will take to kill Ruhen? Zhia gave him Aenaris, correct? The Key of Life? If it has the power to create dragons – if it’s the match to Termin Mystt – how can you be sure you can kill Ruhen with it?’
‘Termin Mystt’s more than enough to kill a shadow, a child too,’ Isak said with a frown, ‘more than enough to kill a God.’
‘But he’ll unleash all his power to stop you – power beyond imagination, beyond control – so how does that confrontation happen without tearing the Land itself apart? What will be left? Karkarn has told me something of the Great War, of the Last Battle that ended it all. The City of Ghosts is a place where the balance was broken, where the border between this Land and the place of Gods and daemons was fractured by the magic unleashed. Crystal Skulls alone didn’t manage that; it was the Keys of Life and Magic, wielded by opposing sides!’
‘Ifarana was her name,’ Isak said, as though in a trance. ‘She was Life herself. Death too bore a name once, when He was not Chief of the Gods alone but ruler in tandem.’
‘And they killed her for betraying her own kind!’ Vesna hissed, red light flickering in his eyes.
‘Was it betrayal, or compassion? Are you so certain of Karkarn’s memories? Do you believe the other Gods were blame less in a war that saw the creation and obliteration of entire species? Think of the fall of Scree, the fanaticism that swept the Land this past year – the rage of Gods is a blind and savage thing, and only fools trust in it. When I stripped the Menin lord of his name I discovered something I hadn’t expected: the Gods themselves feared what I was doing, and what it might mean. And it wasn’t just the drain of their strength they were afraid of. History has taught them the folly of their own rage, my friend; they know that’s a force as uncontrollable as any.’ He leaned forward and gripped Vesna’s arm with his black hand.
The Mortal-Aspect stared down in horror at it, aghast at the hurricane of power he could sense, on the cusp of manifesting.
‘Gods and mortals: we’re no different when rage takes us,’ Isak continued urgently. ‘We can’t be trusted, and we can’t be reasoned with. Our worst comes out and no amount of guilt afterwards can make up for what’s done. History is written by the victors because facing the full horror of such shame tears one’s heart apart.
‘You’re a man of conscience and compassion, my friend. Are you sure you want a part in this, and all it entails? More important, maybe: I may not have much humanity left, but how can I share this with those I love so dearly?’
‘Anyone else still find those buggers creepy?’ General Daken stared towards the knot of undead soldiers twenty yards away, just beyond the perimeter marked out by Amber’s bodyguards.
‘Aside from the fact they’re not much more than preserved corpses?’ Nai asked. ‘Not especially.’
The six figures were dressed in mismatched pieces of armour and ragged clothing as faded as their own grey skin. Nai had taken a closer look that morning, before anyone but the sentries had risen. Though the drifting song of daemons and spirits was strongest around dusk, most mornings Nai awoke to the sound of distant voices, his senses long since attuned to the daemons he and his former master had treated with.
Up close to the Legion of the Damned, Nai had seen nothing but withered limbs and jutting bones, skin turned to leather, emptiness in their cold eyes. Only when he embraced his magic did Nai find much more than a dead body inexplicably standing; only then did the warrior notice him, shifting the pitted, rusted axe a fraction.
Daken ran a hand over his shaved head. ‘Aye, well, you’re used to shit like that, necromancer. Us normal folk, we prefer our dead things to stay still.’
‘In their defence,’ Amber said in a rumbling voice that took Nai by surprise, ‘they’ve not moved all night.’
‘And that’s also more’n a bit weird. They ain’t moved an inch; they’re in the exact same damn position since I turned in for the night.’
‘Hold on a moment,’ Nai interjected, ‘since when have you been considered part of “normal folk”, Daken?’
The broad white-eye smirked. ‘Since I started to keep bad company,’ he said, looking at Nai and Amber in turn. He pulled out a flatbread, smeared it in oil and as he proceeded to eat it, turned his attention back to the Legion of the Damned.
Daken had ridden in to the Menin camp just as the sun went down, bringing Amber news of the enemy’s progress before tackling what little beer remained to them.
The Devoted armies had met and merged not far from where the Menin now camped; the unwieldy mass tens of thousands strong had barely stopped as it entered Chetse lands. They guessed there’d been no confrontation; the Chetse had lost many of its best in the past year, and the Devoted troops alone numbered seventy thousand, and they were backed by a protective curtain of perhaps twenty thousand of Ruhen’s ragged, exhausted followers, whose burning faith would not let them turn back.
It had been too late last night for Daken to return to his own men, camped several miles ahead near the Chetse border, but Nai had been glad of the ebullient white-eye’s company; Even Amber reacted to his natural charisma.
The enemy avoided even skirmishes now, except when Daken’s cavalry could force a fight on them, and the lack of violence was taking a toll on Amber. Without the savage struggle of battle to energise him, he was almost as lifeless as the Legion, who stood close at hand and watched over their ally.
‘They don’t interfe
re with your appetite then,’ Amber commented after Daken had lapped the last of the pale oil from his fingers.
‘Takes more’n creepy for that,’ Daken declared. ‘I’ve got a reputation to maintain after all.’
‘What’s being a mad axeman got to do with breakfast?’ Nai wondered aloud.
Daken waved an admonishing finger towards him. ‘An empty stomach’s good enough reason t’ kill, best there is – but so’s interrupting me when I’ve got a face-full of anything sweet!’ The white-eye laughed coarsely. ‘I’m a man o’ many reputations, as many as Morghien’s got spirits buzzing round his head. If I fell today, it wouldn’t be just mercenary captains who’d doff their caps and mourn. Whores and chefs alike would grieve my passing!’
‘A fool and his money, eh?’
‘A connoisseur!’ Daken protested, ‘a man of appetites and enthusiasm – show folk with taste some quality to appreciate and we’re faster’n any fool to hand over our money. Difference being, fools never learn and I make damn sure I’m paying attention while I’m enjoying myself.’
‘No likely the courtesans of Narkang will celebrate one fewer rival while your whores and chefs weep.’
Daken hauled himself up and began to brush down his horse, readying the beast for the day to come. His clothes were torn and dirty; the shadow of a bruise was still visible on his cheek, but he tended to his horse rather than himself. ‘Fucking necromancers,’ he said with a smile, ‘always missing the point.’
‘Which is?’ Nai asked as he readied his own meagre possessions. Amber remained where he was, watching the two of them with a faintly curious expression; Nai thought he looked like a man trying to remember what it was to have friends and comrades.