Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1)

by J. Edward Neill

  “Go,” Archmyr told him. “I’ve slain enough today.”

  “Go?” The champion glanced a final time at the fallen lad. “You butchered him. He was the best of us. I can’t kill you enough times.”

  Archmyr shrugged. “A wiser man than you might thank me. I’ve spared him from what’s to come. Or have you not bothered to look at the sky?”

  The Grae champion did not seem to hear it. Red-rimmed and wracked with hatred, he lunged across the bloody earth and lashed out with his scavenged Dageni blade. Like all the blows that had ever come his way, Archmyr slapped the first one aside, and then some twenty more. He used only one of his swords to defend himself, as if using both would somehow be shameful. “You can’t win.” He backed away after the flurry ended. “Even if you weren’t wounded, it’d take ten of you to kill me.”

  The champion came at him again. The Grae man was quick and creative with his blade, but Archmyr was all that and more. He moved like wind skirling through a forest, ducking and weaving away from every slash, any of which might have cut a tree in half. He rather liked his swords, and so he spared them from being chipped to pieces by the champion’s Dageni blade. Whenever the champion’s black steel whistled, he did not parry, but danced away. It felt too easy.

  “Fight me!” the Grae man panted.

  “I could’ve killed you a dozen times.” He slid aside like a serpent. “There’s no fight to be had.”

  The champion bared his teeth. “I know someone who’d cut that smirk off your mouth. If he were here, you’d not be laughing.”

  “I’m not laughing. And no, he couldn’t.”

  The thunder cracked like a mountain breaking, drawing both men’s attention. Archmyr felt the wind buffet him backward, the feeling not unlike a plunge into frigid water. Whether the battle still raged or everyone else was dead, he could not tell anymore. The storm consumed everything save the tower, the courtyard, and the two men at odds.

  “We all will die,” said the Grae champion, his eyes glazed.

  “Indeed.” Archmyr saw the black clouds curling.

  “You don’t care?”

  “No.”

  “You helped the Furies. Why? You’re not one of them.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  The Grae man’s gaze caught fire again, this time hotter than before. He attacked, and for an instant Archmyr was caught off guard. He felt his focus lost somewhere in the rain, his fearlessness fleeing. He lost ground to a flurry of black-steel strokes. With a wild swing of the Dageni sword, the champion bit one of his swords in half. Emboldened, the Grae man hacked and hewed, lunged and stabbed. Archmyr saw a hundred openings to kill, but his muscles failed to fire. Something’s the matter, he sensed. Where’s my edge?

  A hundred times the champion’s sword rattled against his, notching the steel and corrupting it with black fissures. The Grae man was strong and furious, and full of the rage every fighting man should possess, but even as he drove Archmyr back, the Pale Knight knew the Grae was no real match for him. I could kill him. There, and there, and there, he thought between the ringing of blades. But I didn’t. Why?

  The fight spilled into the gardens. Between rows of dying hedges and crestfallen flowers, Archmyr retreated. Sparks flew and shards of steel danced between raindrops. His boots sank into ankle-deep mud, the earth seeming to want to suck him down to his death. The champion’s strokes slowed, but came closer than ever to killing. Then, an instant after nearly losing his head, Archmyr’s focus snapped back into his swordarm. He parried a brutal overhand stroke and swatted the back of the champion’s hand, breaking several knuckles. The champion’s blade fell into the mud, and Archmyr laid the tip of his sword against the man’s throat. There it is, he said to himself. I found it. Now kill him. Kill him and fly from here. When the Emperor arrives, he’ll think me dead. The world will drown behind me, but I’ll outrace it.

  He pressed his sword point forward and down. The champion went to his knees, a line of blood running down his neck. “I could’ve stopped this war,” Archmyr told him, though he could not say why. “I could’ve ended it before it went this far. All this death is my doing, did you know? I knew what the Emperor planned. And I did nothing. What do you think of that? Tell me before you die.”

  The champion looked up at him. Even rain-streaked and about to die, the Grae man looked noble. Kill him, Archmyr thought. Kill him, kill him, kill him. Do it now, and be quick. I’ve no mercy, remember? He’s another notch on my swords, one small life in ten thousand. Thillria, Davin Kal, Velum, the Dales, Mooreye. Slay this last one and set down my blades forever.

  He hesitated. He told himself one more murder would be an easy thing, but his body betrayed him. His sword point wavered on the champion’s throat. His bones felt weak, his fingers failing. The storm. He glanced upward. Look at it. It’ll consume us. I’m the reason. I let them blow the horn. I drew the maps, made the plan. I promised the Emperor everything. Those few who live will look back at this and say it was my doing. And yet, I wanted this…didn’t I?

  He lowered his sword point. A curtain of rain washed over him, and he backed two steps away. His throat felt constricted, his fingers as though they were made of ice. Every droplet striking his face felt like a dagger cutting to his bones. “Go,” he told the Grae man. “If you’ve a wife, find her. If you’ve children, hold them. This world will die soon.”

  He glanced again to the sky. He never saw the champion slip the dagger from his belt. The lightning flashed, illuminating the bottoms of the clouds, and for a moment he swore he saw faces in the heavens, their monstrous maws open and ready to devour him. A voice in his head cackled, and the champion was upon him. He might have defended himself, but his sword had already slid into the mud. The Grae champion thrust the dagger once into his neck, then twice into the joint between his pauldron and breastplate. He felt the blade’s cold kisses take hold of all his senses, and he collapsed to his knees. The Grae man threw the dagger away and screamed at him for all the horrors he had done, but Archmyr heard little of it. He cocked his neck, straining for a last glimpse of the tortured skies, and then fell limply to the ground.

  He never saw what happened in the moments after his fall. When the Grae riders burst through the gates to retrieve Rellen Gryphon from the blood-bathed courtyard, he was already tumbling into death’s abyss. The Grae left him lying in the mud, shouting at their lord to mount up and flee, but he heard nothing but the rush of shadows as they stuffed his mind to breaking. When the thunder cracked and lightning screamed against Nentham’s tower, he saw none of it. When the rain and blood made a lake around his broken body, he felt nothing.

  He was dead, and well on his way to much darker places than Mooreye City.

  Had Archmyr lived, he might have regretted it, for he never saw the evil that came to be that day. The Grae, slain to half their number, fled the city. In the hours afterward, as the rain washed the streets clean, thousands of Furyons gathered outside the courtyard. Nimgabul stood before them, his eyes white as stars, his body drained of blood from the wounds the Grae had given him. Had Archmyr seen him, he would have known all his suspicions to be true. How many Furyons had died in the battle, no man could say, and yet only the Grae littered the streets. Thousands and thousands of Furyon knights, no matter whether their throats were opened by Grae knives, their bones ground into powder by warhorses’ hooves, or the flesh beneath their armor torn and punctured and burned, stood reverently before Nimgabul, swaying beneath the storm as if in prayer.

  Foul, deathless things, he would have said at the sight of them. The Grae have no hope. The world will be a grave I helped to dig.

  The Apprentice

  It was beautiful, thought Andelusia at the end of her dream. Only the darkness and me.

  I wish it had been real.

  She awoke in a chamber high in the obsidian citadel. Sleep’s grey curtains rolled back, her consciousness calling her back into the living world, and yet her memory of the dream remained sharp as steel.
In it, the sun had been extinguished and the moon torn down from the sky. For eons she had walked in a grey wasteland, never aging, never encountering another living thing. Her ten thousand nights had been starless, and her only sights besides dead, dry earth had been black towers, taller than mountains, with oceans of gravestones at their bottoms. It had been a realm without hope, twisted and suffocated by shadows. When she awoke, she expected to come to consciousness with her heart pounding and her skin beaded with sweat, but she felt only calmness. She liked the dream. She could hardly wait to have another.

  So began the first day of her second month in Malog.

  The mountain of chiseled obsidian felt more like home than any other place, for she remembered nothing of her former dwellings. She awoke to the stark sight of her bedchamber, her grotto with obsidian walls and a floor as cold and polished as black ice. Light as air, she sat up from her bed of stone and stretched her arms as though she had slept the night in a sea of soft pillows. Her nightclothes hung from her perfect frame, dancing with the wind invading the room’s lone window. The black gossamer robes clung to her shoulders, her breasts, and her hips like water, crisp against her skin as snow. So comfortable. Though I wish I were naked, she thought. If master would allow it, I would be.

  Her raiment was black, her dreams full of dark desires, but starkest of all the changes claiming her was her countenance. When she dropped her hood over her brow, her ghostly flesh was cast into shadow. Her lips were black as night, and her skin the color of a sullen, sickly moon. She gazed across the hard, slick floors, and her eyes were the shade of oil, within which no light survived. She pushed back her hair, and the inky strands fell upon her shoulders like frozen shards of a winter’s midnight. As she padded away from her bed and glimpsed her distorted reflection against the obsidian wall, she smiled. She rather liked her newer, darker self. This is the me who always should have been.

  Quiet as death, she lingered and stretched in the center of the room. Another morning, she felt grateful. More studying. More spells. Send for me, my Master, and soon.

  She shut her eyes and listened, wanting to hear her escort’s footsteps beyond the door, but catching only the sounds of the rain falling beyond her window. Ceaseless, the rain blurred the borders between day and night, but she knew the hour well enough. Just a bit after dawn. They will come for me soon. Be patient.

  A while longer of listening to the rain, and she stretched and curled into a recess in the wall, above which the room’s only light flickered. The lantern’s light was pale and lavender, never dimming no matter the hour. In its wan glow, she cracked open a ragged tome whose pages were made of skin, and whose ink looked like the blood of men a thousand years dead. The book was heavy, its pages cold to the touch, and the dust wafting from each page smelling subtly charnel. She had no table to sit and read at, and so she propped the old tome atop her thighs and settled comfortably against the wall. My old friend. She brushed her fingertips on the book’s cover. Master told me I should learn you in and out. With patience comes knowledge, he says.

  With knowledge comes power.

  She cracked the cover open. Dust drifted out like fingers eager to stroke her cheek, the powders of yesteryear thick even though she had many times swiped it away. The book was one of many Revenen had given her, but remained by far her favorite. The language therein was no tongue she was supposed to know, and yet was legible to her in a way that left her exhilarated after every page. Easy, she thought as the blood-inked characters on the first page unraveled to her mind. That is why Master loves me. No other but he and I can read it. As though gazing upon a lover, she settled into the first page, her most cherished. Revenen had made her memorize it, and she had done so willingly.

  It began:

  Of this earth, all things shall be ours. The skies, the sea, the stones. Ours. The living, the dead, the last breaths of those between. Ours. We are the dawn and the dusk. We are the stars watching, the hammer and the anvil, the light and the dark. Ours is eternal. What small creatures shall come after us will be our children, but never our equal. Our power is our own. Our secrets are forever kept. Ours is the will to create and destroy. No others may possess it. No dwellers of any world may usurp us. We are eternal, the spirits of the night. All things shall be ours. Forever.

  If the words flowed easily from the page, it no longer surprised her. Revenen had told her she was special, that Tyberian blood flowed in her veins, and that hers was the rarest breeding. ‘Queen of fire,’ he had called her. ‘A woman with a warlock’s blood.’ Her master had told her the phrases in this particular book were written by the architects of Tyberia, and that the tome was full of parables meant to ease its readers into understanding Tyberia’s powers. But Master says many things. These words were not written by men. Perhaps the ones who whisper in my dreams wrote them. Perhaps Tyberia merely translated it.

  She immersed herself in the book for a time. She read of grand men, grander warlocks, and of wars fought nobly. She believed some of it, and savored the rest as pleasant fantasy. And then her daydreams faded. The wind ruffled her robes and induced a rare shiver. Rising from her nook, she felt drawn to a faint noise slipping into her window. She sprang up to see what it could be. Her room was so far above the desolate Furyon plain it was often hard to see what passed far below, but of late her vision felt sharper. The clouds and rain were no impediment to her anymore.

  When she gazed out the window and squinted, she saw everything.

  Down through the vast gloom she gazed, onto the road leading northward into Malog. She saw tiny torchlights nearing, and the shadows of the men carrying them. Visitors. She propped her elbows on the glossy stone. They come to the gates. But why? Between the pinpricks of torchlight, she counted scores of Furyon knights on horseback, their steeds wading through the shallow waters swirling atop the road. Horse-led wagons rolled slowly along behind them, an iron cage in each one. Farther back, some fifty more knights marched on foot, and behind them many hundreds of people whose hands and ankles were bound by ropes and chains. The chained ones were not Furyons, she knew. Their hair was light as wheat, and their raiment not like any she knew. Slaves, she realized. From beyond the sea.

  The entire caravan passed into the citadel and beyond her sight, and she was left to wonder.

  Not long afterward, as she sat by her window and savored the sensation of the mist beading upon her face, she heard her iron door rattle on its hinges. Three knocks, always like thunder, she thought as she trod barefoot across the floor. As she stood, gaze locked on the door and fingers folded peaceably, the door swung open and her escort entered. He was armored and masked as usual, no trace of flesh visible. He looked more machine than man, as though the smiths of Malog had smelted his body from the walls of the citadel.

  “Unk ka, ta Revenen,” he grunted at her.

  Go below. Find Revenen, she translated. “Dae kamm mael?” she asked. By myself?

  “Faen,” he said brusquely. “Ulrae.”

  Yes. Quickly.

  She doubted him. But when he moved aside and set his back against the wall, she took one tentative step past him, then another. The cold, glasslike floor of the great space outside her room kissed her bare feet adoringly. The door clanged shut behind her, but the Furyon remained. He really means to send me alone, she found it hard to fathom. Master must be beginning to trust me.

  “Ae mohk tulrah?” she asked to be sure.

  “Faen,” he said again.

  She asked nothing else. Alone, she tiptoed into the gargantuan hallway beyond her room. The vast tunnel was among the citadel’s main arteries, she knew, winding up and down throughout the entire fortress. When the Furyon did not follow her, she slipped into its shadows, vanishing like a spider within the webs of Malog.

  Down, down she wandered. The familiar comforts of her grotto fell away, the grand tunnel devouring her as a serpent might a mouse. I remember the way, she convinced herself. At least…I think I do. One thing she knew for certain; the inner passages of
the black citadel were labyrinthine. Never touched by sunlight, they wound from lofty top to dismal bottom, a network of veins, capillaries, and vast empty arteries. I could walk for a year and see only a small part of it. Thinking she had memorized the way to the Orb chamber, she followed the tunnel down, always down. When it curved and began to ascend again, she chose an even grander tunnel to cut into, one whose walls were ribbed like the body of a worm, but whose floor was smoother than any surface in the world. The occasional candle flickered along the way, markers Master left to help me find the way, but these she snuffed with a flick of her wrist and a word of darkness Revenen had taught her.

  She walked for nearly an hour, and after twenty turns and several thousand steps she came to understand she was lost. This is a test, she began to believe. He wants me to find the way by myself. The prospect sent a chill up her spine, but rather than turn back, she embraced it. There were no torches, no lanterns, and no windows to let the grey sunlight peer in and light her way. It did not matter. Unaware of the utter darkness she walked in, she fluttered along every path with ease, her gaze penetrating all things. She danced like a child through a hundred gloomy hallways, mimicking the forgotten days when she did likewise in the woods of Cairn. She flitted like a spirit through tunnels no man had ever entered, hardly noticing how seldom her feet touched the floor. Hers were the softest steps, and the swiftest. She blended lithely into the blackness, striding so silently that if anyone had passed her, they might not have known she was there.

  On she went, at one with the dark. She passed at least a thousand doors, some small, some huge, and some so wide they seemed made for creatures other than men. The many rooms she glided past were so vast and vacant that when at last she happened upon a chamber seeming less than empty, she halted at its entrance. What is this? Like a mouse, she crept into the doorway. I feel a breeze. I hear a noise. Is this someplace Master meant for me to find? Or something else?