The old man pressed his hands against the back of the hut and forced himself to his feet. He was a good foot shorter than Lupinius, maybe a little more. His gray hair was thin and wispy, floating in an erratic halo around his shaking head.
“I know what you seek,” the old man said, his voice sounding somehow more authoritative than it had just moments ago. “But you will not have it.”
“I will,” Lupinius argued. “Unless you want to join your fellow savages in the Mountains of the Dead.”
“Better that than betray my sacred trust,” the shaman replied.
Lupinius shook his head. “I fail to understand that kind of thinking.”
“That, sadly, does not surprise me at all,” the shaman said.
“You know where it is. I want it. Just tell me where to find it, and I will call off my troops. You’ll live, and so will many of your clan.”
“Even if you found it, it would not bring you what you think it would,” the shaman said. “Give up now before it is too late for you. Go home.”
“I will go home when I have the hoard in my possession, and not before, you old fool,” Lupinius said with a snarl. “This is your last chance to save yourself.”
“No.” The shaman looked Lupinius right in the eye. “It is yours.”
Lupinius lost all patience with the ancient man. He would speak in riddles, but he couldn’t bring himself to answer a simple request. Lupinius raised his sword as high as he could in the small space and brought it down at an angle, slicing through the shaman’s neck. His head spun across the hut, bounced off the far wall, then fell to the floor. Finally, it came to rest, sitting up on its stump, eyes open as if regarding Lupinius even in death. His body had slumped backward against the wall, then fallen over sideways.
Before Lupinius could leave the hut, the eyes blinked once, and the ancient, wrinkled mouth moved. “You think you know what you seek,” the head said. “But you are sadly mistaken. Not as sad as you will be if you find it, however.”
Lupinius recoiled in horror from the unnatural thing, then, scowling, he kicked dirt at the head and hurried from the hut before it could speak again.
Outside, the sounds of battle were dying out. Even the keening of the Pictish women had largely stopped, as most of them were dead. Smoke grayed the sky, blotting out the sun overhead. Rangers moved from body to body, looting anything that seemed valuable, making sure that the wounded were killed. The Aquilonian soldiers seemed less anxious to participate in these activities, but Lupinius had told his Rangers what he wanted from them, and they did as they were instructed.
The whole scene warmed Lupinius’s heart. He almost wished his brother had lived to appreciate it. But then, he wouldn’t have, and his complaining would have soured it for Lupinius.
But he still didn’t know where the hoard was, and there were precious few Picts still alive who might have been able to tell him. His men could spend a week digging through the ashes of all the burned huts. Even then, it could be cached somewhere out in the surrounding forest, and they’d never find it. He moved from hut to hut, trying to glance inside them despite the flames, when he was summoned by one of his Rangers.
“Lupinius!” It was Trey, a Bossonian he had employed for several months.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Over here!” Trey waved him over to where he stood, at the far edge of the hilltop, not too far from the shaman’s hut. He pointed down the hill with his bow. Lupinius had to lean out to look down and see what he indicated.
A dozen feet below the top of the hill, bushes mostly obscured an opening in the ground. From the bottom of the hill, on the west side, no one would ever have known there was an opening there. But from the top of the hill—where normally none but a Pict would stand—it was clear that the bushes only masked a large hole in the ground. Pictish bodies lay in a pile around it.
“A torch!” Lupinius shouted excitedly. Suddenly, he was convinced that the cave was the location of the hoard. He held out his left hand, and after a few moments someone put a torch into it. With that in his left and his sword in his right, he scrambled down the steep slope to the opening. “Get these bushes out of my way!” he demanded.
A couple of Rangers slid down the slope and chopped at the bushes with axe and sword, tugging them away from the cave’s mouth. Now that Lupinius could see inside, he was even more convinced that he had stumbled upon his goal. The cave was deep—he could only see a few feet into it from here, so he guessed it curved just a short way in. And it looked out of place on the slope, as if it had been dug by hand instead of occurring here naturally. The ceiling, walls, and floor were of the same granite as the hilltop itself, which would have made digging it out a complicated, difficult process.
But it could have been done, if someone had had something that he very much wanted to hide.
Lupinius shouldered past the Rangers and into the opening. He had to crouch a little to go in, walking in a kind of sideways, crablike manner, the torch thrust out before him and his sword alongside. For the first few feet, the way was clear, the walls surprisingly clean, as if even the spiders and rats knew to keep away from the place. Then, as he had suspected, the cave’s passageway hooked sharply to the left. He followed it. Darkness engulfed him as he moved away from the mouth, only his torch keeping it at bay. He began to see strange markings on the walls, red and blue and black representations of natural things—animals, mountains, the sun, the stars, a river. But mixed in with these were others that he couldn’t recognize—a creature that seemed to loom over a mountain like some gargantuan bird, but with ten legs and what appeared to be a long trunk, another that appeared to slither like a snake, but with a fanged head at each end and arms in the middle, and more. Lupinius shivered. First that talking head, now these bizarre images. He didn’t like any of this supernatural nonsense.
He tried to ignore the markings on the walls and concentrate on what waited ahead of him. Untold riches, according to the rumors. Gold and jewels that the Picts had stored for centuries—dug from the earth or stolen from travelers, but with no value to those barbaric people. He had even heard that the hoard had been started because the bones of one of their ancient wise men had turned into gold, after the man’s death—a solid gold skeleton, with sapphire eyes and ruby teeth. Probably just a story, but with these savages, one never knew. Enough wealth, according to the whispers, to buy him real power.
The torch flickered as if from a sudden wind. For one horrific moment Lupinius thought it would go out. But it didn’t. Instead, it roared back to life and illuminated, momentarily, what appeared to be a chamber at the end of the tunnel. Lupinius nervously hurried toward it, the charred wood of his flickering torch providing the only real smell in the cave’s stale air.
His first instinct had been correct. It was a chamber, a vast room with a ceiling that disappeared in blackness that the torch’s glow couldn’t penetrate. The walls had been marked over years—centuries, probably—by torches, by pigment, by tools chiseling pictures into them, so much so that the images were layered thickly over one another so that Lupinius couldn’t make out any of them.
He didn’t waste much effort trying, however, because his attention was riveted on something else.
Near the center of the chamber was a kind of pedestal that looked as if it had been formed of the stuff of the cave itself, like a stalagmite that had been cut off chest high. Blackened human skulls were piled around its base. The weird pedestal glowed with some strange internal luminescence, a soft greenish light that bathed the object that rested on its flat surface.
On top of it, all by itself, as if on display, was a crown.
It was nothing fancy, though easily identifiable for what it was. A circle of aged, brown bones, connected with copper, with an opening for a head. The thing was decorated with enormous, sharp teeth. Lupinius didn’t know what they were from, could hardly imagine an animal with a mouth big enough to accommodate them. From the general shape he believed they had belonged to
a mammal of some kind, not one of the great oceanic predators he’d heard about.
The crown was a barbarous-looking thing, primitive, of course, but somehow he had a sense of great power as he looked at it. The thing made him uncomfortable. At the same time, he knew it had to have value. The shaman’s talking head, the cave, the weird light . . . all indicated that this was an item of great import to the Picts. He hadn’t found a hoard of any kind, but perhaps this was the treasure that had been whispered of.
At any rate, it was here before him, and unguarded. He stepped toward it, reached for it.
“Stop,” a voice commanded in Pictish. Lupinius didn’t know much of the language, but he’d been on the border enough to learn some. “That is not for you.”
Lupinius halted in his tracks, tried to suppress a shiver. He had seen no other person since entering the cave, much less within the chamber. But now a man stepped from the shadows behind the pedestal and plucked the crown from it, putting the bizarre ornament on his own head.
If the shaman in the hut above had been old, then this man was positively ancient. Long strands of thin silver hair hung in thatches from his head, like tufts of grass sticking out of an otherwise bare desert landscape. His pale, gray flesh looked paper-thin, and even in the torchlight Lupinius could see blue veins beneath it. He was so frail and stick-thin that Lupinius was amazed that his legs could support his body, or his neck hold his head upright. The fact that his voice carried such authority was frankly amazing. He wore a tunic that had deteriorated until it was little more than a few strips of rotting fabric hanging from his frame, and he carried no weapons that Lupinius could see. His bulging eyes blinked rapidly in the torchlight.
Lupinius raised his sword so the ancient one could see it. “Are you going to stop me?”
The man stepped closer. Lupinius could tell that he didn’t like the torchlight—he had probably spent so many years here in the dark that it nearly blinded him. But he came on nonetheless, his hands hooking into jagged-nailed claws. Lupinius could smell his acrid stench over the torch’s smoke.
“If you do not leave,” the man warned, “you will regret it.” His threat reminded Lupinius of the shaman’s. So many empty words, spoken by men too old to back up their promises with action. The magic he had already seen was the only aspect of this that gave him pause. But he had come this far . . .
Setting the torch on the bare stone floor, Lupinius reached for the crown. “You do not frighten me, old man,” he said. “I’ll just take the thing from your head instead of from its resting spot.”
As soon as he spoke, the old man rushed him. Lupinius lifted his blade, but in the dark the man evaded it. He dug his deep clawed hands into Lupinius’s upper arm and neck. Pain shot through Lupinius, and he wondered if the ancient one’s fingernails carried some kind of poison. He released the crown and smashed his left fist into the old man’s face. Lupinius heard a grunt of pain, but the man didn’t release him.
The sword was useless at such close quarters. Lupinius opened his hand. The weapon fell with a clatter to the rock floor. He tried to pry the old man loose with both hands, but the Pict only increased his grip, his powerful claws tearing agonizingly into Lupinius’s flesh. Lupinius felt his own blood running down his chest and arm and knew that if he couldn’t shake the strange old man off, he would fall eventually from loss of blood.
A thought struck him. He risked destroying the crown, but at that point it would be a small price to pay to rid himself of the oversized leech clinging to him. He hurled himself toward the stony pedestal, with the old man between him and it.
They slammed into the pedestal with such force that Lupinius heard the crunch of bone over the old man’s pained wailing. The old man’s horrible grip released partially, and Lupinius drew back and plowed into the pedestal again, grinding the old one between. The man let out another cry of pain, but Lupinius kept up the pressure. Finally, the old man’s claws released him altogether.
Lupinius shoved the Pict away from him and scooped up his sword. The ancient one crouched, curled and broken, on the floor, not far from the guttering torch. The weird crown still ornamented his head, but he didn’t look like royalty—just like a half-blind man who had taken incredible punishment and yet somehow clung to life.
Not for long. Lupinius drew himself to his full height, ignoring his wounds and the blood that dried on him, and swung his long blade, slicing through the old man’s withered neck. Head and crown thumped to the floor. For a moment, Lupinius was afraid this head, like the shaman’s, would start talking to him.
It didn’t.
He gave it a minute, just to be sure. The head was silent, wide, bulging eyes staring into the darkness above, unblinking at last. Then, before Lupinius’s startled eyes, it began to shrink in on itself, to wither, as if all the years the old man had lived were suddenly catching up to him all at once. The man’s flesh rotted from his bones, which themselves crumbled to dust, and the dust itself formed into wormlike patterns that slithered away into minute crevices in the earth. Less than a minute from when he had slain the man, there was no sign in the chamber that he had ever existed. Fighting back his disgust at the unnatural, Lupinius lifted the strange crown from the bare dirt on which it now rested.
If this was the only treasure he would realize from this adventure, so be it. There was always a place to sell magical objects like the crown. He would take whatever he could get.
9
ALANYA COULDN’T BELIEVE what she was hearing.
She had feared the worst, watching the column of soldiers returning from their raid on the Bear Clan village and not seeing her father among them. Finally, she saw him, but laid across his saddle like downed game, not sitting upright like the man that he was. She heard Donial gasp beside her and knew that he had seen it, too.
She ran to the column then, her eyes filling with tears, and a couple of Lupinius’s Rangers saw her coming and blocked her way. They grabbed her arms and wrestled her to the side as the column continued riding into the fort and toward the parade ground. One of the Rangers tried to whisper reassuringly, but Alanya could only hear the rush of blood in her ears and the steady drumming of hooves on solid earth.
Now, an hour later, she and Donial were in Lupinius’s study. Their uncle had poured them each a mug of wine, and when he spoke, his voice was steady and sympathetic. “I know this will be a hard time for you,” he said. “Hard for all of us. You love your father, as I love my brother. But he has been taken from us, and we all will need to rely on each other instead.”
“Can you tell us how it happened, Uncle?” Donial asked. That was just like him, Alanya thought disgustedly. His father was dead, and he wanted the horrific details. As if he weren’t the one ultimately responsible.
Lupinius seemed to understand how she felt and spared them the worst of it. “Your father fought bravely and well,” he said. “The Picts gave a savage defense, and many of us fell to them. But Invictus fought ferociously, and a number of the enemy died beneath his sword. Finally, though, he was battling the village’s shaman, a very powerful sorcerer. The shaman held him off with barbarous magic until several other Picts could surround him. I tried to offer aid, but was busy fighting through half a dozen myself. Before I could reach him, I saw him fall to their attacks. Courageous to the end, the ground around him was littered with Pict bodies.”
Donial looked like he took some solace from that description, but Alanya didn’t believe it. Her father had respected the Picts, and especially their holy men. She had heard him speak of the Bear Clan shaman as if he were an old friend. He would have been trying to stop the battle, not trying to kill them.
“But we were victorious in the end, right?” Donial asked. We, as if he had been there himself, Alanya noted, fighting alongside them.
“Of course,” Lupinius said. His tone of voice made it seem a foregone conclusion. “The Bear Clan is no more. They will never trouble Aquilonia again.”
She shivered at Donial’s visible d
elight. His smile grew wide, his eyes sparkling. But then another terrible thought gripped her. Her shiver became more pronounced.
If the Bear Clan was completely wiped out, then what of Kral? Him, too? She couldn’t come out and ask Lupinius. It had been her meetings with Kral, after all, that had prompted the raid in the first place. “No survivors?” she asked, hoping the question was vague enough not to arouse suspicion.
“No survivors,” Lupinius confirmed, with a self-satisfied light in his dark eyes. “Our forces were very efficient.”
He talked on, mostly answering Donial’s probing questions about the battle, but Alanya barely heard. Her father and her new friend, both killed in a conflict of which she had been the cause. Tears welled in her eyes once again, and she sat silently, her hands pressed into fists so tight that her own fingernails dug into her, until Lupinius excused them both.
DONIAL HAD NOT wanted to believe that Lupinius would lie to them. He still didn’t, not completely. In the haze of battle, he reasoned, people sometimes made mistakes, or thought they saw things they really didn’t.
Trouble was, Alanya was right. She had pointed out that their father knew the Bear Clan shaman and liked him. Given Invictus’s charge from King Conan, he would more likely have been trying to negotiate a peace with the shaman than trying to kill him. All of that rang true, and the idea that their father would do battle with a wizened old man, such as he had described the shaman, was beyond the realm of the possible.
It had taken her most of the evening, and lots of shouting and tears, to convince him. But finally she had done so. He had gone to bed that night but barely slept, instead tossing and thinking over the things she had said. In the morning, he had agreed to her request.
Which was why they were waiting together outside the office of Governor Sharzen.
Alanya had put on one of her nicest dresses, long and green, with a beribboned waistline and hem. Her blond hair was pulled back and tied with a red ribbon that matched those in her dress. She was clean and fresh-looking. She had persuaded Donial to go to the public bath himself, and his dark hair was freshly washed, his white tunic clean and unripped. Alanya said they looked presentable, and that was the important thing.
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