Kublan’s decline following Edoora’s death also created conflict with his only son.
Tolak grew up the son of a hero. He was raised in the brightness of the idealism that put his father on the Peacock Throne. But when he grew old enough to truly understand, he could see the creeping darkness in his father’s disposition.
Tolak pleaded with his father to change. When Kublan did not, Tolak began criticizing his broken promises and his drift toward tyranny. He condemned him for turning a blind eye to both the debaucheries of the highborn and to the suffering of the peasants. Even within the walls of the castle such outspoken criticism was unthinkable, but Tolak went beyond. He was outspoken in his criticisms in the taverns and soon enough in open court.
“Treachery!” Kublan’s counselors shouted. “Your son speaks treason. He aspires to the Peacock Throne. He will take your place and cast you into prison. He will burn a pauper upon a pyre and tell the people you have died. And then he will take your life!”
Kublan’s great fear of a rebellion came from a simple fact. He was himself a rebel who sat on the throne by treachery.
The rift between Kublan and Tolak became a chasm that neither man seemed able or willing to cross.
In the summer, annum 1066, Age of Kandelaar, a parchment bearing the seal of the king and purportedly written by his hand—though more likely dictated by the Raven to the king—was posted in the markets and copies were sent across the land.
‘‘Witness an extreme act of magnanimity and benevolence by Orsis-Kublan, His Greatness, Omnipotent Sovereign and King.
“Were Tolak not blood of my blood, his body would be torn asunder and his head put on a spike, and when the fowls had finished eating the flesh from his skull, it would be left as a warning to any who agreed with his condemnations or dare revile the great sovereign appointed by the gods to rule over them.
“By royal decree, Tolak, son of Orsis-Kublan, His Greatness, Omnipotent Sovereign and King, is hereby renounced and shall no longer be recognized as the son of the king, neither a prince nor heir to the Peacock Throne. He shall henceforth be banished to the prison at Stókenhold Fortress, where he shall be in exile from the royal house until his death.
“Hereafter, Kadesh-Cor, son of Tolak and grandson of Orsis-Kublan, His Greatness, Omnipotent Sovereign and King, shall be named Baron Magnus of Blackthorn, prince of the North, and heir to the Peacock Throne.”
“I’ve not spoken to him since that day,” the king mumbled aloud.
“M’lord?” Maharí asked. Her long dark fingers kneaded the knotted muscles of his neck.
“Nor shall I!” The old man coughed at the bitterness caught in his throat. “He is dead to me! Kadesh-Cor is my child. It is my grandson whom I love and trust.”
“And he loves you with a loyal heart,” Maharí said, leaning down until her lips lay lightly against his ear. “As do I,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 11
The woman Borklore had desired only moments before had become a frightful warrior clad in a breastplate and a cloak the color of blood.
Fierce men wearing iron helms and armor appeared from the rocks and stood beside Drakkor. Each of them held a two-handed sword.
In the years following his encounter with the storyteller Aáug, Drakkor gradually unraveled the secrets of the stone he possessed. Quite by accident, he discovered it had the power to blind men’s eyes and twist their minds. It demanded an intense concentration of mental prowess, always to the point of pain. It took him a long time to master the mystical power of the stone, but with it gripped tightly in his hand and with an intense focus, he learned to project his mind into the mind of another. Once inside, his thoughts became their thoughts. Over time, he discovered he could also control the visual perception of anyone who looked at him, forcing them to see only what he wished them to see. The price of such power was pain, but for Drakkor, it was a price willingly paid.
Captain Borklore swayed on his feet. Drakkor held the man’s eyes, his smile cold. He knew about the captain, his strengths and his weaknesses. One of Drakkor’s outlaws had once been Borklore’s soldier and told Drakkor the captain was a man of such pious chivalry that he would do anything to avenge a woman violated by villainous rogues.
His strength is also his weakness. The thought amused him.
“By the gods, what manner of evil is this?” the captain gasped from exertion and shock.
“What is evil to one is a blessing to another,” Drakkor replied.
Borklore stiffened. “I command you in the name of the king to retreat and stand aside.”
A whisper of amusement rippled among Drakkor’s men. He laughed aloud.
“So the tavern gossip is true?” Drakkor raised an eyebrow and recited the disparaging adage. “The courage of a kingsrider is only surpassed by his arrogance, and his arrogance only by his ignorance.”
“You are a fool! Do you imagine these few can withstand a hundred of the king’s finest warriors? I have but to cry out and there will not be enough left of you or your loathsome band for the birds to fill their bellies.”
“Perhaps an arrow will puncture your throat before such a cry can be made.”
“Give me leave to do it now, Raja,” the smallest of the archers said, his bow drawn, an arrow aimed at the captain’s throat.
The captain jutted his chin forward as if daring the archer to release. “Raja? He calls you a king. Ha! You are a rogue and a thief!”
“He is Drakkor, Blood of the Dragon,” the archer hissed and pushed the point of the arrow into Borklore’s neck. It punctured the skin, drawing a rivulet of blood.
“Blood of the Dragon!” Borklore spat. “A scum who aspires to greatness by adorning himself with a meaningless title.” His words dripped with contempt. “More likely the blood of the pig!” He was about to say more, but another jab of the arrow forced him to swallow his words.
“He is the future king,” the archer chided. “Say, ‘Hail, lord prince and future king.’” The archer tightened his grip on the bow and gouged the arrow deeper into the captain’s neck.
Borklore choked and dropped to his knees to keep the arrow from puncturing his neck any deeper. He spat again, defiant. “Do as you will to me. You are all dead men!”
Becoming a commander in the king’s elite army of kingsriders required courage. Death rode with them on every campaign. It was not if they would die in battle, it was when and where and by what circumstance. Being killed by an arrow at point-blank range with a hundred armed kingsriders a shout away was not a death that inspired songs to be written and tales to be told. Courage challenged death. It didn’t die on its knees.
Drakkor signaled the archers, and they lowered their bows. He picked up Borklore’s black wool cape and laid it across the captain’s shoulders. “Have you no curiosity, Captain? Do you not wonder why you are yet alive?”
Drakkor stood on a ledge of rock the height of a horse’s head above the floor of the narrow canyon. The kingsriders were assembled below him.
An archer had shot an arrow into the midst of the waiting march with a parchment and feathers from the plume of Borklore’s helm. The message promised no harm if they would leave their horses and come afoot into the canyon to parlay with the bandits. If they did not comply, their captain would be killed at sundown.
Borklore knelt on the rocks at Drakkor’s feet. His face was close to Drakkor’s boots. He was stripped to the waist with his hands tied behind his back and tethered to his feet. The archers stood in a semicircle behind him with their arrows pointed at his head, heart, and groin. Warriors were on either side with double-handed swords.
“Again!” the little archer said. “Go on! Do it again!”
The captain dragged his tongue across the dusty leather of Drakkor’s boot.
The air hung heavy with hate. Murmurs of outrage from the kingsriders over the humiliating treatment of th
eir commander reverberated from the walls. The sun was going down. A streak of golden light slipped below the scud of clouds that hovered over the mountains of Oum’ilah and fell on Drakkor’s back. The flowing red of his cloak rippled in the breeze like a flame.
“I am Drakkor, Blood of the Dragon,” he said, his voice forceful but quiet. “Hear me well, noble riders of the king. You have come to kill me and these good men whom I have sworn to protect. I have been cursed by your king, but he is the one the gods should damn!”
A rattling protest of anger and contempt erupted. The kingsriders had kept their weapons, and despite Drakkor’s warning, some drew their blades.
The archers tightened their pull and moved closer to the captain.
“Stand easy!” Borklore shouted. “Stand easy.” His voice trembled. His tongue flicked across his lower lip, still smudged with the dirt of Drakkor’s boot. Courage toasted by a tankard of ale in the tavern was very different from the courage it took to kneel in front of your men and lick the boots of your enemy.
“You think me your enemy, but you are wrong. The king is your enemy!” Drakkor bellowed. “He entices you with flattering words, but he cares nothing for you. He knows nothing about you—who you are or where you came from or what matters in your lives. Each of you is a man equal to your king, but you lack the courage to believe. You are persuaded that what you do here is noble and honorable, but think on this! You who chose to die this night in this desolate place will not be remembered by your king or your captain or any man. The birds will eat your flesh, and the dogs will find your bones, and there will be no songs of valor or poems of bravery. It will be as though you never lived.”
The threat of death settled over them like darkness stumbling into the edge of night.
“I am not your enemy,” Drakkor repeated. “You believe only what you have been told. I do not wish to take your lives. I wish you to live as free men, as I am free. As my men are free. I wish for you a new world, patterned after the world of ancient days.”
A buzz of contention erupted like a hive of black wasps as reluctant voices collided with hard-line loyalists.
“The time of changing has come,” Drakkor continued. His hand rested on the hidden stone of fire. “The time of the prophecy is here, when the wrath of the old gods shall sweep the earth and the time of kings will be done away with. We shall take their royal bread and leave them crusts. We shall restore the ancient ways, and men such as you shall take your rightful place, not as servants or soldiers, but as princes of glory in the splendors of the earth and the pleasures of the flesh.”
Drakkor allowed the words to hang in the darkening gloom. He reached down to where the captain knelt. He gripped him by a fistful of dark hair and pulled his chin up. The rattle and commotion fell silent. The only sound was the faint shuffling of the horses below and the eerie screech of blood bats emerging at the trailing edge of twilight.
Drakkor spoke to Borklore in a hoarse whisper. “I do not wish to spill your blood. I wish for you and your kingsriders to join me and wield your swords in the coming kingdom of promise, the kingdom of prophecy, where there is no wrong, and men like these shall never die.” Then, turning to the men, he raised his voice. “You who vow to stand with us and swear the ancient blood oath shall be given our great secret, the fruits of the sacred tree, and the power to be as the gods.”
The murmuring stopped. The rattling of arms quieted, and all but a few kingsriders stood spellbound by the promise and the strange power the man held over them.
Drakkor tightened his grip on the captain’s hair until the man winced. “Let it begin with you, noble captain,” he said, then shouted again to the men. “Is your captain a man of honor and courage? A man of intelligence and wisdom?”
The answers tumbled out in a cacophony of praise and adulation. The captain’s eyes were hopeful as Drakkor twisted his head and forced him to face his men.
“And will you spare your blood and follow him into the kingdom we must make anew?”
“No!” the captain screamed before any of his men could respond. “Do not listen! He is a liar, a sorcerer, the seed of evil. Kill him. I command you in the name of the king—kill them all!”
The sound of swords sliding from their scabbards, mauls taken up, and pikes swiveling forward sounded like the pelting of ice driven into iron by the fierceness of the wind. Loud as it was, the sound of it was swallowed by the bawling rage of men who began yelling to bolster their courage. Then it stopped.
A hundred shocking gasps of disbelief were as a single breath. Every man saw it at the same time.
Drakkor seized a great sword and in a single slash severed the captain’s head from his body. It thumped to the dirt and wobbled to the feet of a kingsrider about to charge. The man stepped back in shock. As if the thump of the captain’s head was a signal, a rain of flaming arrows ignited the darkening sky. Drakkor’s archers aimed for any unprotected part of the kingsriders’ bodies—legs, arms, necks, and faces.
Flaming arrows left a trail of burning oil. Wounded men were set on fire. Men collided in confusion, dropped their weapons, and floundered to escape the deadly pikes and the hail of fire.
Taking out the archers was the kingsriders’ only hope, but they dared not stand in one place long enough to take aim. Those of the king’s archers who stood steady to draw a bead were struck by arrows from the heights. Drakkor’s bowmen were concealed in the cracks and crags of the cliffs and hidden by the looming darkness.
Drakkor’s swordsmen killed those few who escaped the fusillade of arrows and tried to climb the rocks.
Drakkor returned to his ledge above the fray, raising a flaming arrow high in his hand. He shouted with a voice of thunder. “I can spare your lives!” The flame illuminated half his face; the other half merged with the darkness. The remnant of his torture at the hand of the sorceress so many years before was now a black hole of shadow on his face.
“Stand with us and live,” he said, raising his voice above the sounds of battle. “Cross that line and be free.” He pointed to an open area below.
The first kingsrider to surrender was a badly burned swordsman with the broken shaft of an arrow in his arm. He dragged his sword with his wounded arm. When he reached Drakkor, he looked up and pounded a fist across his heart. The salute of loyalty.
“I am Lliam Rejeff. My sword is yours.” The kingsrider bowed his head and took his place as a conscript in the army of the Blood of the Dragon.
The battle turned as others surrendered. A few paused on their knees beside their wounded comrades, but more of them simply stepped over the smoking bodies of the dead and laid down their swords. An officer grabbed a man to stop him from such treachery, but another kingsrider killed him with a short sword and joined those turning traitor to the king.
Drakkor called for his archers to climb down and sent a runner for the horses. Of the entire march of kingsriders, more than half were dead or would be dead by morning from their wounds. Thirty-one pledged their swords to Drakkor.
Five refused to surrender. They were dragged forward one by one, forced to their knees by the archers and beheaded by Drakkor. As the fourth of the loyal kingsriders was dragged forward and pushed to his knees, the horses arrived. In the commotion, the last of the kingsriders, an archer named Ablon, sprang to the back of a horse and whirled its head about. The courser lunged forward with the archer low on its neck.
He was little more than a dark shape racing in the failing light, but as he was about to disappear behind the canyon wall, an arrow slammed into his neck.
Drakkor looked to see which of his men had made the remarkable shot. None of them had. The commander of the king’s archer had already drawn his bow with his second arrow nocked when the horse and its fatally wounded rider disappeared from view.
“Meshum Tirbodh, m’lord,” the archer said and pounded a fist across his heart.
&
nbsp; Drakkor smiled. His army had doubled in size in the space of an hour.
He swept his gaze from one man to the next, locking eyes with each one. The air was thick with the smell of death. Satisfied at last, he slipped a short knife from its scabbard and dragged the blade across his hand. Blood filled the wound. “Those who would follow me, step forward and swear an oath by taking my blood into your bodies.”
“And they who will not swear the oath?” his swordsman asked.
Drakkor answered by rolling Borklore’s head face up with the toe of his boot.
CHAPTER 12
The high priest opened the doors. The man standing under the arch was the largest human being Ashar had ever seen. As a child, in the days before he was left at the temple, his mother told him stories about the giants who lived in the north and rode on the backs of monsters.
I never imagined giants were real. Are giants even human? Stop! Concentrate!
The giant gestured, and Ashar followed the enormous man into the room. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the brightness of the open court to the gloomy darkness of the chamber, and he stumbled on the steps. The giant gripped his arm to steady him. His fingers went all the way around Ashar’s bicep. The width of his hand covered all of Ashar’s upper arm.
If there are giants, what then of monsters?
The doors closed behind him. Ashar stood at the edge of a new life.
There were no windows. The chamber was illuminated by thirteen candelabras fastened to the walls. Each was a pyramid of double-wicked candles. He was ushered to the center of the room. The floor was concave to ensure that the head of the person appearing before the Council of Blessed Sages was lower than the shortest among them. Ashar knew that some of them were very short. He had never met Blessed Sage Kurgaan but had seen him about the grounds and knew he was a Mankin.
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