Tormented, he snapped awake at twilight. The smells of smoke stung his nose, and the clatter of Dageni steel rang in his ears.
“Nimgabul.” He squinted against the torch held high by the warlord, who stood ominously near the throne. “Why are you here? I wanted to be left alone.”
“Indeed you did,” said the warlord.
He sensed something different about Nimgabul. Gone were the greyness of the warlord’s flesh, the blue veins in his neck, and the roving of his pupils. The light in the Furyon’s gaze was gone, and his flesh looked like white marble, polished by death’s enamel.
“What do you want?” He slid out of the throne.
Bones popped as Nimgabul crooked his neck. “We will stay here?”
“Not for long. A day or two at most. In the morning, we’ll send riders eastward. Tell them to find Daćin, and to discern whether or not the Emperor rides with him. But once more I ask; why are you here?”
“The storm. It comes.” Nimgabul looked to the eastern window, into which the wind howled, carrying the scent of more rain.
“Yes, I see. What of it?”
Nimgabul blinked, but when his eyes reopened, all the color vanished from his pupils. Only the whites remained, stark as virgin snow, empty as the abyss between the stars at midnight. “The time’s come,” the warlord rumbled in a voice that was no longer his own. “Malog speaks, and it says we’re ready. Would that you could hear it, but it will not matter. You lead well enough without the voice. You do its bidding better than any other. So let us continue, Pale One. The Moor’s Eye, the Grae capital, and the rest of the world. They all will burn to ash, and Malog will bless the emptiness that remains.”
Archmyr had no more smirks. For all the terror he had inflicted upon Graehelm, and all the horror his victims had endured, he felt it coming back in spades. Nimgabul was a man no longer, he knew. Only now did he glimpse the wound between the warlord’s breastplate and front shoulder. Somehow, someway, a Grae blade had found its home, carving through muscle and exposing the bone beneath. But Nimgabul showed no pain. As the sun set and the winds invaded every window, the Furyon blinked twice more and drew a last shallow breath.
Nimgabul died in that moment. He became the undeath, a servant of the Orb of Souls, and Archmyr sensed that all the Furyons were exactly the same.
Trials of Niviliath
At dawn upon the great mountain, all was quiet.
The sky was empty but for a few wisps of clouds, painted against the heavens like lazy brushstrokes on a pale canvas. The moon, weary of its trek through the night, plunged beneath the far horizon, and the faintest of the stars winked out, their lights scattered by the rising sun. All things seemed fairer than what they had been.
Morg Umal and his wolves were dead.
Garrett awoke in the first hour after daybreak. He crept from beneath his outcropping of rock and shook the snow from his wolfskin cloak like a shaggy dog. Sluggish from the cold, he rejoined Dank and the others, huddling in their small circle around a tiny, snapping flame. Marlos was here, shivering and muttering, and Saul too, though he was much quieter. But Garrett concentrated most upon Ser Endross. Buried beneath a mound of blankets and sipping from a bowl of broth heated by one of Dank’s cantrips, the last knight of Triaxe looked paler than white marble. His beard was frosted with icicles, his skin cracked and dry like pale glass. He wore his heavy mail like a coffin around his limbs, while his hundred-notched battle axe lay across his knees like a gravedigger’s spade. The winter wolf left its mark on him much worse than on me, thought Garrett. He may well be dead before the night returns.
“You live?” Marlos quipped as he took his seat in the circle. “We thought you might sleep forever. I was about to claim your sword.”
Taking his place among the others, he warmed his fingers over the flame in the center of the circle. Dank had fueled the fire with ragged clumps of Morg Umal’s cloak and strips of the monster’s parchment-dry flesh. The smell was awful, and the violet flames more than a little unnerving. “The blade is Rellen’s,” he said with a grimace. “I mean to give it back.”
Dank chimed while spooning more broth into Endross’s bowl. “The sword belongs to whoever carries it. You’re as fitting as Rellen was, maybe even more.”
He hardly felt fitting. Feeling as cold and weak as ever in his life, he pulled himself nearer to Dank’s fledgling campfire. His legs ached as he scooted across the snow, and his fingers hurt so badly it seemed a wonder they did not shatter. “Swords cannot cut the cold.” He shivered. “We should leave soon, else we are dead.”
The sun continued its climb. The morning grew no warmer. In the pale, desolate light, he breakfasted on frostbitten bread and half-frozen water. His body hurt like never before, the flesh between his ribs burning with every breath, his skin feeling like paper stretched over a bed of knives.
He said nothing of the pains inflicted by the wolf’s breath, but concerned himself only for Endross, who suffered much worse in silence. When Dank announced the time of leaving was at hand, he forced himself to his feet and went to Endross’s side.
“I need no help,” the knight grunted.
“Let me carry your pack. There is no shame in it.”
“No. Let me be.” Ser Endross shrugged him off and clambered to his feet. “I’m still alive. I’ll not die the same as my brothers, to the wind and cold. I have work to do.”
He will not be swayed. So be it.
Leaving the knight to struggle alone, Garrett shouldered his sword and fell in line as the procession down the mountain began. He slogged through the deep drifts of snow that had fallen overnight, watchful of Morg Umal’s remains. Heaped at the mountain’s edge, the creature’s ribs were exposed, the ice strung like spider’s silk between each bone. He saw blackened flesh, crisp as burning leaves in autumn, frosted lightly and gleaming in the sunlight. He glimpsed the wolves’ half-buried corpses, and shuddered long after they fell out of his sights.
The march continued. A grind to the bottom, he thought. Survive this, and maybe we have a chance. The longer he walked, the more the wind stung his eyes. Swirling snow and tiny daggers of ice sloughed from the surface of the mountain, catching him in tiny blizzards. He knew the cold would not kill him, but the staggers of the others made him wonder whether he and Dank would be the only ones to survive.
Down through the hours he marched, sloshing through thigh-deep snow and treading across frosted stone. Dank took the lead, then Saul with his battlestaff, and then Marlos with all his grumbling. Last in line, he and Endross trailed at some fifty paces, and though he expected the knight to collapse, Endross never wavered. Too proud, he thought of the knight, who used his axe as a makeshift walking stick. And strong. A marvel more of his brothers did not survive the Furyon storm.
The march went on for what felt like forever. The snows became shallower, the wind less brutal, but there were few other comforts. Just as Dank had promised, the path curled around the mountain like a rib, descending toward the valley on the far eastern side. An hour after a lunch of frosted meat and water, Garrett saw trees again, and after a while longer, he trod atop brittle grass instead of snow. The promise of warmth lay ahead, but his pain remained with him. Every footfall thrummed though his bones like a hammer pounding against a bell. His body vibrated with it, and still he said nothing.
Much later, when the winds began to die and the cold became less treacherous, he knew the mountain was near its end. It was late afternoon, and the slopes Dank led them to were green, the snow drifts gone. Descending off the mountain rib and into a forest, he breathed easier than in hours. No monsters here. No wolves with hearts of ice. We may live another night.
He lumbered between the pines and spruces more like a bear than a man, his feet feeling as big as paws, his pack as heavy as an elk slain for supper. He noticed Endross beginning to slow. The knight’s eyelids looked as heavy as curtains of lead, his axe dangling from raw, bruised fingers.
“If you ask, I will carry it for you,�
�� he offered.
“I’ll not ask.” Endross smiled gravely.
“Your armor will be the death of you. It will freeze again tonight, and you with it. You should be rid of it.”
“I’ll keep it.” Endross shrugged. “What else will I fight the Furies in?”
In silence, he and the others walked until dusk. As darkness spread its wings over the day, he trudged into a labyrinth of steely blue spruce, whose branches creaked like the voices of old men, and whose needles whispered like children. The spaces between the trees were small, the grass undusted by frost, and the stars winking down like eyes, watchful and wary. In the dark heart of the wood, Dank lit a torch with a violet flame and called for the procession to end.
“Thank goodness,” groused Marlos. “We thought you’d march us to death.”
“He may yet,” said Saul. “Don’t tempt him.”
Marlos dropped his satchel, shrugged off his furs, and stabbed his swords into the soft loam beneath a giant tree. “Let him try. Remember who killed the beast. If anyone deserves a rest, I do.”
Garrett shared no smiles with the others. As Dank, Saul, and Marlos stoked a fire and supped, he hunkered in the deep shadow between two trees and meditated. His mind slipped into the nether realm, his senses fleeing. He thought of Andelusia and Rellen, dwelling long upon the likelihood they were dead. He daydreamed of the Furyon storm, the sky torn to tatters, and the horrors at work across Mormist. His silence was as grim as ever in his life, yet for all his detachment, he kept his gaze firmly upon Endross, who hunkered much the same in the darkness beneath the boughs.
“I’ll not let you go without me.” Endross saw him watching and drew his cowl close.
“I know,” he answered.
“I mean to see this through.”
“As do I.”
Endross gathered his wolfskins tight to his shoulders. He glared up at Garrett, eyes white as the stars. “You know why I’m here.”
“For vengeance.”
“Aye. What about you?”
A long silence, and he answered. “I have no reason that will mean anything to you. I am not angry. I want no vengeance. I only fear what Dank fears. If we do not do this, everyone will die.”
Later that night, long after Endross plummeted into fitful sleep, Garrett sat with the others at Dank’s fire. The hour was well past midnight, and although Saul and Marlos wore their weariness like shrouds about their shoulders, they did not sleep. He knew why. They see the truth now. They fear their deaths. They know none of us will live to see another summer. The silence in the camp was unbearable. With Saul rocking in place and Marlos gazing into the fire, it seemed the sun might rise again without another word spoken, and yet it was Marlos who lifted his head and stared across the flames at Dank.
“You want to say something.” Dank’s arms were folded into his sleeves. “Say it.”
Marlos grunted, “You’ve been to these mountains more than once before, haven’t you? You know the way too well.”
Dank secreted a smile. “It’s true. I walked this place when the great grandfathers of these trees were only just sprouting.”
“Ha,” Marlos snorted. “No man’s so old.”
“How can you be so sure?” Dank replied.
Marlos had no answer for that. It was Saul, poking at the fire with the iron end of his battlestaff, who spoke next. “Dank...how’d you come by that name?”
Dank looked skyward. “It’s not my full name. I use it because the other is so tired of being spoken. It’s been used up, one might say.”
“This relic of yours…” Marlos gazed across the fire. “Are we to take it you’ve hunted it your whole life? For how long? Fifty years? A hundred?”
“Longer,” said Dank. “Much longer, and none of it pleasurable. It’s a draining way to live. Had there been others to do it in my place, I don’t know if I could’ve managed it. I’ve searched for so long. I spent so many years trying to find it, and now at the end it finds me. A sad irony, that.”
Marlos rolled his eyes, but Saul stayed serious. “Let us suppose you are as ancient as you say, and that everything you tell us is the truth. Why us? Why now?”
Dank sighed, and Garrett glimpsed the depths of his sorrow. “Oh, to have more time,” the little man grieved. “But there are some things even I have no power over. The Object of Archithrope chose this era, and for what reason I cannot say. As for you, I didn’t earn your help by anything more than blind luck. The Object has existed for thousands of years. I’m but a ghost haunting the centuries to find it. You’re not the first to help me, and maybe not the last. I’m sorry for your sakes our paths collided.”
“You sound exhausted,” said Saul.
“I am.”
“And sick in your head,” Marlos cracked.
“Perhaps. But here you are all the same.”
Saul and Marlos fell silent. The campfire dwindled, and the clouds crept across the stars, blotting out the bright spaces between the treetops. Garrett chose his moment carefully. He looked upon Dank like the moon over a fallow field, and his words awoke the others from the edge of sleep. “You never said where you were from.”
“Correct,” said Dank.
“Once, in the halls of Gryphon, you spoke of the war between Niviliath and Archithrope,” he pressed. “And then, in the days before we crossed Morg’s mountain, you told the tale again. I have thought upon it. If you are as old as you say, you must be of Niviliath. There can be no other answer.”
Dank smiled. “You are a good listener, Garrett.”
“Impossible,” muttered Marlos.
“If something is true, no denial can make it otherwise,” countered Dank.
Saul was more accepting, or at least willing to listen. He leaned close to the fire, which by now was only a pile of fluttering embers. “Just who are you?”
The wind went still. The clouds drifted elsewhere, and the stars glimmered through once more.
Then and there, Dank spoke, and all were compelled to listen:
“I was young, so young. And the war was already a thousand years old. My father used to tell me stories. He had seven brothers and three sisters, but he and I were the last of our family. Some said the war was still young, that the worst was still to come. How could any of us believe it? Every day, we were reminded of how many had died. I would wake on our farm healthy and alive, and most nights I slept peacefully. But there were always the black towers on the horizon, the armies moving, and the Archithropian warlocks stalking. There was no peace that could not be shattered. There were no lives that could not be taken. It was the darkest age the world has ever known, and I was so ignorant as to think I could have no part in it.”
The campfire crackled back to life, though no one had stoked it. By the hiss and pop of the lavender light, Dank delved deeper:
“Father told me it began with a renaissance. The Nivil folk of old had become enlightened, and everything had changed. Artists, artisans, writers, poets, and architects…they awoke and cast off the shackles of their former gods. Father said those were peaceful days, enlightened days. Niviliath became not so much a nation as a grand idea, spreading from city to city. The world had never known such prosperity. It didn’t know what to do with itself.”
“What happened?” asked Saul.
“It was hoped by all that such days might last forever. But then the new peoples came. These new men, like and unlike the Niviliath in so many ways, called themselves Tyberia. They arose in the far northeast, in the lands you now call the Nimis. I remember what one of my teachers used to say. ‘The Tyberians are well-intentioned enough. Is it their fault they prefer to paint with steel instead of brushes? Do they not also have the right to strive for greatness?’ Long before the war, they say Nivil befriended Tyberia. We were neighbors, after all. How could Niviliath reject them? At first, it seemed the two nations would reign harmoniously together. One mighty and one wise, one powerful and one patient.
“But In the end, it was jealousy seized the
Tyberians. Their conquests of the east came to an end, and they had no real foes left to fight. It must’ve begun like a disease, leaping from dwelling to dwelling, poisoning their hearts to make them believe all their limitations were because of the Niviliath. They looked across their mountains and saw a fairer country than their own. They saw green fields, silver lakes, and forests without end. It must have been hard for them. For as tall as their towers were, as grand as their army surely was, theirs was a hard life, and their existence forged by fire and war in place of peace and comfort.”
“Sounds like a war in the making,” muttered Marlos.
“Yes. A war. The only one that ever mattered. It was fated from its beginning to be long and terrible. They say the men of Tyberia assumed Niviliath to be weak, but their assumptions were wrong. After the first Nivil city burned and a few thousand lay dead, the Niviliath fighters gathered by the hundred thousand to grind the Tyberian advance to a stop. And that’s when it truly began. There’s no anger as powerful as a child’s. Upon learning it could not easily have what it wanted, the Tyberians’ hearts were filled with rage. They’d never lost before, and they meant to never lose again.
“I still remember my childhood. It feels like yesterday. I was raised in a valley not far from the war’s original frontier. What might seem bleak to you was ordinary to me. A thousand years of fighting had reduced the forests on the valley’s flanks to ash. I could walk an hour in any direction and play on the streets of cities destroyed hundreds of years before I was born. There were dark towers everywhere, quiet by day, their tops burning with violet flames by night. Father was a farmer, and forbidden to take up the sword. The army needed our harvest, and so we were among the few sheltered from the worst of it. Father hoped the war might end in my lifetime, but he knew better. The worst was yet to come. I was only twelve when Tyberia became Archithrope, and twenty when the first artifact was completed.
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 64