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

by J. Edward Neill

  The dream was meant to subdue, she sensed. The lulling of the clouds and the calm of a lifeless world felt utterly appealing, at least for a moment. If not for Helmetless’s companion, who cracked the silence with a roar, she might have drifted to sleep. “No!” His shout felt like a slap to her cheek. “Not real! He works a spell on us!”

  The visions drained from her mind. Her eyes fluttered open, and her heart restarted. She saw poisonous fumes brewing like broth in Revenen’s grasp, black shadows with mouths like vipers. Helmetless returned slowly to consciousness, but his companion hurled his lantern aside and charged Revenen headlong, spear cocked and ready. He took three steps and coiled to throw, but Revenen lashed his legs with shadowstuff and tugged him off balance. The spear missed by a wide margin, clattering uselessly into a mound of bones, and Revenen smiled as its thrower collapsed.

  Helmetless moved faster than she expected. No matter his armor or the bludgeoning he had endured at the claws of the guardians, he bolted down the path toward the Orb. Revenen sent three orbs of black fire streaming at him, but Helmetless ducked and weaved, suffering only a glancing blow to his shoulder. Skulls and bones exploded into flames behind him, the remnants of hundreds turning to ash. The tines of Helmetless’s armor melted, and she swore she saw his skin boiling beneath, but the knight never slowed. Revenen flinched as he neared. She expected Helmetless to slash wildly with his blade, but instead he sprinted right past Revenen and toward the Orb. What is he doing? She slinked away from the burning bones. He is mad. The Orb will take more than a sword to slay.

  And then she remembered the horn.

  She saw Revenen spin to face the Orb, and she thought she glimpsed a moment’s fear flash through his eyes. The Furyon horn stood exactly where she had last seen it. Tall as three men, contorted like a gigantic worm, it laid mere steps from the Orb. Helmetless took ten long strides, flung his sword aside, and mounted the horn with stunning swiftness, climbing its graceless coils like a farmer’s lad skittering up an apple tree. She saw his hands groping in the darkness, seeking something. The mouthpiece. Her heart seized. He means to blow the horn. I know this man.

  Mother of mercy, I have met him before.

  Endross!

  Revenen gurgled something in Archithropian. She crept five steps closer, watching as he conjured two tiny moons of black fire in his claws. Endross’s companion pried himself from the ground and ripped a dagger from his waist. He rushed for Revenen’s back, but the shadow-man exhaled a puff of dust, and a force unseen tore the man from his feet and sent him skidding down the path and into a mountain of bones. All manner of human remains came thundering down atop him. Skulls, ribcages, and a million smaller bones collapsed, and then she saw him no more. Buried, she thought the poor fool. Dead as dirt.

  Revenen exhaled again. Every light in the cavern went out, the candles and the men’s lantern breathing wisps of smoke as they died. The cavern fell into profound silence, as though Malog had blinked and fallen asleep. Revenen wrung the dust from his hands and faced Endross. No matter the darkness, she saw the poor knight fumbling, groping in for the mouthpiece of the horn. There! She wanted to shout at him. Right there, beneath your elbow.

  Revenen knew her mind. She felt his presence pawing at her brain, wheedling and prying all her secrets away. She hated herself for letting him in. She hated her weakness, and she hated herself for ever having forgotten Garrett, Endross, and the rest of her life. Even as Revenen stalked toward Endross, palms fuming with black flame, she felt him plucking her thoughts out like cherries from a tree. “Betrayer,” he said to her mind. “You should’ve helped me destroy these creatures, but no…you watched, and you hoped for them.”

  He looked back at her one last time. She knew once Endross was dead, her Master would destroy her. Evil lived within his eyes, something that had survived the test of the centuries, failing to leave the world when it should have long ago. She quaked, her bones hurting, but she stayed defiant. Wretched thing, she screamed at him in her thoughts. Look at you. A liar. A mass murderer. And now, if the little warlock spoke truly, you are alone.

  Revenen hurled a sphere of flame at Endross. It streaked through the darkness like a burning comet, splitting the air like a mountain breaking. She gasped, and felt her fingers spasm and twitch. It was an instinctive spell she worked, completely unconscious, and yet not at all an accident. The ball of flame exploded and collapsed upon itself, leaving a void in which nothing could live, but it failed to consume Endross and horn. When it burst, it burst far above him. Ashes fell like snowflakes upon him, but he was alive. I made it miss. She knelt, her small spell having sapped her dry. And now Revenen will cook us both.

  Revenen whipped his spectral robes, sloughing off a cloud of gravedust. His anger lasted long enough for Endross. The old knight found the mouthpiece, and his lips pursed upon it. Even before Revenen’s robes finished settling on his ghostly shoulders, the old knight blew thrice into the horn.

  She winced at the awful noise.

  The horn’s blasts wounded her ears, sounding like dirges made for dead men, doubtlessly heard by every creature within a day of Malog.

  She fell to a knee, deafened by the sound, the blast feeling like it might blow her apart like a pile of leaves. Three times. She clamped her eyes shut against the pain. Endross knows. He is the only one who could have known. All his brothers are dead.

  The last note ended. Silence reigned in the aftermath. A modest breeze gnawed at her skin, giving her a few bumps of gooseflesh. Is that it? She wondered. No. There must be more.

  She stood and backed away, sensing the storm before she felt it. The bones of the sacrificed were first to take flight. All around the Orb, a fell wind lifted them into the air, where they writhed in a morbid dance. The wind grew colder. Her robes were caught up in it, threatening to tear away and leave her to die naked. Just before she turned to run, she saw Revenen move to slay Endross, but the violet lightning crackled, the wind hissed, and the shadow-man’s killing spell was stripped right out of his palm.

  She wanted to help Endross. I have no chance, she lamented. The storm is already carving him up. Guilt-ridden, she fled for the stairs. Flying bones and shards of obsidian screamed across her path, some of them biting into her legs and arms. She kept her feet moving. The stairs were a hundred steps away, then fifty, but for every two steps she took, the wind sucked her back one. She glanced back to the Orb again. She swore she saw Endross’s body still clinging to the horn, impaled in a hundred places. Revenen knelt on the path. No bones or shards could harm him, but he looks wounded all the same.

  Another ten steps toward the stairs, and she could but crawl against the wind’s savage pull. The mountains of bones were almost gone now, and the air filled with a macabre ballet of smiling skulls and snakelike spines. She panted as she pried herself forward, her breath frosting the air. She felt raindrops beading on her back, or is that ice? She crawled still harder. The cracks in the obsidian floor became like crevices in a mountainside. She dug her fingers into each one, hauling her body forward.

  She heard a shout behind her. Endross? Revenen? She tried to look, but the cavern’s heart had turned blacker than night, the wind whipping everything in circles around the Orb. Pieces of the Orb broke off, adding to the carnage. She heard the shout again, this time closer. She glimpsed the shadow of a man, not two steps away, striding against the wind. Black armor. Every plate dented. Helmet lost, but not Endross. Bushy beard. Brown as dirt. I know this one too! She let Saul come to her. That he had survived the mountain of bones amazed her, but that he was here instead of Graehelm set her mind to spinning. She entwined her fingers with his and tugged him forward. Where her strength came from, she did not know. All that mattered was that she and he reached the bottom stair and began to climb.

  A moment’s lull in the storm, a crack of thunder splitting the air behind her, and she and Saul made headway up the stairs. The worst was yet to come. The maelstrom roared, drowning all other sounds, and the insides of the cav
ern began to break apart. Shards of obsidian splintered and became glass. Clouds of killing dust tore through the air, skeletonizing the bodies of the recently slain. No sooner did she and Saul reach the entrance to the grand vestibule than pallid lightning, cackling gleefully, rent the stairs to pieces behind her. A storm of dust, bone grit, and tiny needles of obsidian glass chased her out into the vestibule, stinging her shoulders and neck in a hundred places.

  Somewhere in the darkness beyond the cavern, she skidded and fell. Her cheek smacked against the floor, the fragments of destroyed guardians biting into her flesh. Saul toppled right beside her. Half his Dageni armor was torn away, and his flesh filleted with many more slivers of obsidian than hers. She and he lay helpless on the floor, curled like babies as plumes of debris washed over them. She heard the wind ravaging the cavern, winnowing stone from stone, weathering thousands of years of obsidian in the span of a few heartbeats. She knew what was happening, even if she could not see it. The citadel was shaking, the floor cracking, and the foundations of the Orb cavern breaking apart. Her Master had not told her, but below the cavern laid an abyss, into which the floor began to fall. For a few moments, Endross and Revenen were stranded together upon a dwindling island of rock, clinging to the room’s last remnants. Then the world crumbled beneath them, casting them both into the void. Last of all to shatter was the Orb. She heard it when it died, wailing in her mind. When its shell cracked and splintered, spilling out the nether matter inside, she heard a million voices in a thousand languages cry out.

  All the souls it drank, she knew. Free at last.

  The world shook a final time, the entire citadel groaning under the strain.

  Afterward came darkness absolute, and a feeling like death washing over her.

  Ashes

  “Sire.” Sarik pushed the flap of Daćin’s tent open. “The Emperor sends for you. The Grae are here.”

  It was the seventh dawn since the destruction of Mooreye. Daćin hunkered alone on the floor of his tent, sipping cold soup from a cold kettle. His fingers felt half-frozen, his bones heavy as bars of lead. Red-rimmed and exhausted, he set the kettle down and waited for Sarik to say something else, but there was nothing save silence. The grey-faced lad was Chakran’s squire now, and like the rest of the Furyon legion had little breath left in his lungs. Sarik tilted his neck, seeming to want to ask a question, but then the tent flap fell shut.

  Daćin was alone once again.

  The battle will begin soon, he thought as he lifted the kettle back to his lips. Sarik’s only the first. There’s no avoiding it. Chakran will send more until I come out.

  Savoring a last few moments alone, he drained the rest of the kettle and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He remembered how it used to be, in the days before this. In the early days of the war, luxuries had been many. Fresh meat, choice meads, and fine Furyon spices had been his whenever he wanted them. He and his men had eaten like kings, feasting on foods delivered from the homeland and pillaged from the Grae cities in Mormist. But now was different. Anymore, his was the only tent with food, and his cistern the only one filled with water. For what use is food and drink to men who don’t breathe? He slugged a goblet of rainwater and hurled it aside. I’m the only one still alive.

  Still clad in his black nightclothes, he pushed his way into the morning. If the hour was truly dawn, the sky told otherwise. The heavens were tortured, the clouds stacked in the sky like the founding stones of a thousand black towers. From each cloud, lashes of lightning sprang out, forking through the air like the swords and spears of warring men. He watched for a while, until his eyes burned with the wretched sight. When he could stand no more, he retreated into his tent. Sarik was long gone, so he dressed himself. He tugged his leather jerkin snugly to his chest and snapped each Dageni plate into place, fitting the pieces of dark metal together like a jigsaw. When he emerged from his tent a second time, his armor clung to his body like a second skin, the tines jutting upward as though wanting to prick the sky. He kept his bastard sword sheathed upon his back and his helmet tucked under his arm, but left his shield lying in the grass. The little buckler felt paltry compared to the device he had lost at Gholesh. Whose loss the Emperor still mocks me for.

  The prairie awaited him. Its grasses were black and twisted by the Furyon presence. In the background, Mooreye City lay in ruin. While marching to the Emperor’s pavilion, he looked upon that which Archmyr had so merrily destroyed. Most of the city’s towers were gutted by fire. Every gate was shattered, and every street, alley, and thoroughfare clogged with Grae corpses. Hardly a soul remained after the Pale Knight’s invasion, least of all the Pale Knight himself.

  He almost wished Archmyr had survived the battle, that he might ask the damnable Thillrian if destroying the lords of Mooreye had been his idea or a plot of the Emperor. In the end, he supposed it did not matter. Nearly all the Furyons had survived, and now that his host and Archmyr’s were joined, no fewer than a hundred thousand knights stood ready for battle, flocking like starving crows upon the lowlands west of the city. As he cut into their midst, they hardly acknowledged his arrival. They act as though they don’t know me, he thought.

  Perhaps it’s true.

  He came to Chakran’s tent. The huge, black canvas bore no standards today, nor had it since the Emperor’s arrival. Its top sagged, its sides were stained with mud, and its guards leered at him as though he were a Grae assassin, not the commander of the Furyon legion. When he entered, the gloom was heavy, the only light that of a small lamp and three fat, smoking candles. Chakran sat in a black wicker chair, looking less dead than the others, but still grey-faced and gaunt as a corpse. The only other soul therein was Nimgabul, the Emperor’s new champion, whose eyes were pale as moons and whose body still moved despite having bled out many days ago.

  “So hale,” Chakran chuffed as he approached. “You’re the best of us, and you look it still.”

  “Sires,” he cut to the heart of it. “Sarik came to me. He says the Grae are coming.”

  “Yes.” Chakran smiled. “Their king’s with them, did you know?”

  “I hadn’t heard.”

  “We thought not to disturb you. It hardly matters now. We’ve thrice their numbers, and the storm besides.”

  “Perhaps they mean to surrender.” He knew the Grae would not, but suggested it anyway.

  “Perhaps, but the slave wagons are full,” the Emperor gloated. “Malog needs no more, at least for now. If the Grae lay down their arms, they’ll make themselves easier to kill.”

  No strategy. No captives. Just kill, kill, kill. The sum of Chakran’s remarks seemed clear to him. I’ve no purpose anymore.

  Next to speak was Nimgabul, whose voice was as dead and dry as wind whistling through a hollow tree. “Commander, how is it you look so well?” the dead man asked. “Some say you look fresh as a Grae babe, cut fresh from its mother’s belly. Your cheeks…so flush with life. Your eyes…bright as the sun. It hurts me to look upon you.”

  He had never liked Nimgabul, who came from Malog. The warlord had always been callous, and seemed doubly so now that he was dead. “What are you saying?” He glared at the pale, cold creature before him.

  “Only that we wonder; are you well?” Nim questioned. “You’re estranged from your men, not unlike the Pale Knight before he died.”

  “I’m nothing like Archmyr.”

  Chakran cleared his throat with a sound like the crackle of burning paper. “What Nim means to say is; we’re concerned, Daćin. Your brothers have embraced the change of Malog, but you are known to resist it. Nim points out that the Pale One’s death was due to his lack of faith. The Thillrian shan’t be missed, but we rather liked our Daćin. We wouldn’t have an errant Grae arrow end his life.”

  He thought hard on the right thing to say. He had no answer for why he was unchanged, for why every other Furyon in the legion had become a haunted, inhuman husk, and apparently immortal. “You think me unfaithful?” he asked. “Like Archmyr? You think I’ve not
stared into the clouds long enough or stood and smiled with a Grae blade dangling from my belly like so many of the others? Is this what my victories have earned me? Your distrust? Your disdain?”

  Chakran slitted his eyes. Only the whites shined, gleaming like lanterns atop dark water. “We only wonder why…and how. You’re unlike us, my son, to be so…healthy. Tyberia’s hour is here, and we’d not have a stranger walk among us.”

  If ever the lad Sarik had proven useful, now was the time. The squire burst into the pavilion, a helmet in his hands and a sleek black sword at his narrow waist. Daćin felt the weight of the Emperor’s attention lift. “Sires,” Sarik dared to interrupt the Emperor, “the Grae draw nearer. Our swords are hungry.”

  “Attack positions?” Daćin could not help himself.

  “Five divisions.” Sarik’s jaw creaked when he talked. “Horses and Grae men spread thin. They come from all sides.”

  They’ve grown wise to our sorcery, he thought, but did not say. We’re fools for camping out here in the open.

  He stepped aside as Chakran jerked out of his chair. The Emperor was already dressed for battle. His gauntlets were in place, his red skullcap atop his head, and his massive sword strapped to his back. “Daćin, you’ll stay close to me,” he commanded with a glare. “For this battle, Nim will command in your place. Your existence is a tenuous one, my son. Kill enough Grae this morn, and live to see tonight. Fail to prove faithful, and nothing I say will keep Malog from your throat.”

  He had never expected that. All he had ever done, he had done for love of Furyon, for Chakran. Wounded, he looked to Sarik, who stared at him, and then to Nimgabul, who had eyes for nothing. Three months ago, they worshipped me. Look at them now. Chakran could gut me, and by tomorrow they’d forget.

  Chakran clapped his palm atop Nimgabul’s shoulder. One of the warlord’s Dageni tines punctured the Emperor’s gauntlet, drawing blood, but neither man seemed to notice. “Brother Nim, killer of killers, today is your day,” the Emperor said. “The Moor’s grave is your victory, and the death of the Dales wisely done. Tell me, my finest knight, are you ready? Today we lay our swords at Tyberia’s feet. Tonight we dance at her coronation.”