Red Axe, Black Sun

by Michael Karner

  “Kyra?”

  He looked into a masked face, but her aura, posture, even her smell gave her away. He knew her like few else did, and no mask could hide that from him. It was the same with him, he thought: even in a crowd of disguised guests, she could spot him easily.

  “I should ask the same question to you,” he said. “You should have stayed out of harm’s way.”

  Her ebony eyes blinked behind the mask’s eye-slits as she shrugged.

  “No, that was you. I had a commitment to someone, and I wouldn’t leave him alone. I followed him back here into the warzone.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I can guess,” Kyra replied.

  Dryston looked around and took her under the arm to lead her into a side wing of the building. He pulled her close once they had vanished behind a pillar.

  “Did you find him?” Dryston asked.

  Kyra looked up at him in an uncertain but smitten way. The mask made her unsure if he was being furious or concerned.

  “I did,” she stammered into his clear blue eyes. “He got lucky and ended up recounting the tales of various fights.”

  Dryston nodded. “He really is one lucky bastard.”

  Kyra tried to get away, but something pulled her into that hypnotic stare. “What about you, what are you even doing here?” she asked, mesmerized. “Word has it they have charged you with accompanying King Tancred on a special mission. They must have given you a lot of money for you to accept to this.”

  “Well, they would be very mad at me if they knew that I was here now,” Dryston said. He put on a sly smile and ran his hand up to Kyra’s elbows. The brush on her skin gave her a tingle through her upper body. “I could put it to you in other ways to make it sound more impressive, but the bottom line is, I abandoned the king to come here. I have only bad news for you, Kyra. I have been poisoned by the men following us after rescuing Skadi.”

  “What?” Kyra blurted out. “What kind of poison is it?”

  “It is a poison designed to kill in a slow and miserable way,” Dryston answered. He traced the tips of his fingers from the back of her elbows over to her inner forearms, following her veins like the poison in his bloodstream. “I understand now why they prefer it instead of a quick one. It makes you overthink your life, panics you into thinking of the time you still have running out, and results in you ultimately killing yourself when you give in to the urge not to starve. It makes you curse them, and in my case even regret it that you killed them, and together with them also your own chance of a cure. You begin to envy those you sent to hell when you hear their laughter. Now, with them dead, my only chance is to retrieve the antitoxin from Cairn-breaker himself.”

  “This is because of me.” Kyra sobbed, letting her head and shoulders sink.

  Dryston touched her at the chin and lifted her face up. “It’s not. I feared that you would think that, if you found out what happened to me, so I’m glad we met now and I can tell you right to your face. It is not your fault. It’s the fault of the one who tainted me, and I already made him pay for it in advance. Fate just decided to turn and make it come back to me.”

  “If you hadn’t gone after me, this wouldn’t have happened,” Kyra said.

  “Right, and Cormack would still be alive, and I wouldn’t be a dead man. But if we hadn’t been there that night you went to Skybridge, both you and Skadi would possibly be dead. It is a trade-off I would repeat every given day.” He brushed her long hair out of her face behind her ear and gently held her neck to allow his face to get closer to hers. Their eyes locked suddenly, like it was something unexpected.

  “You see, every decision bears another alternate reality,” he said. “In another, you wouldn’t have come back for Connor, wouldn’t have met me here, and never would have heard of me again, living in doubt about what happened between us until you decided to forget me. In another one, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to see you now, tell you what I was about to tell you, and hold you in my arms a last time, brush through your hair and see your face.” He closed in and placed his lips close to her neck, breathing over her sensitive skin for a moment. Then he kissed her softly. His low voice was now only a whisper in her ears. “We are fortunate to live in this reality where we are both connected and have the opportunity to say everything to each other we always wanted to say, instead of living our lives side by side without having the courage to speak honestly about how we feel. Having my life taken away before my eyes made me realize this.”

  “I thought about this when we had the fugitive in the surgeon’s house and we had to decide about his fate,” Kyra said. “Sometimes in our life, when things go wrong, we have to trade one soul for another.”

  “Sometimes, that seems to be the only way out,” Dryston said. “I would lie if I said that I did everything with you how I wanted it.” He wandered over from the side to be directly in front of Kyra. Their lips touched automatically, without even kissing yet. Kyra let out a sigh. “But I will never forget you. If there is a life after death, I will wait for you and want to be there with you. If there is freedom of souls, in a place where our souls are taken, and if no bounds hold us back from traveling and we have an eternity, I will take you through the universe to see all stars of the entire creation.”

  Kyra was stirred to tears.

  “It would be my honor to go with you,” she said. “That’s what I always believed somehow.”

  Dryston put his lips on hers, slowly closing the tiny gap between them even more, until they were pressed together.

  She couldn’t help but bite into them and never let them go. “And what if there is nothing?” she asked.

  “Then this is all we have, and the time spent with you was everything I could ask for. It was my pleasure, Kyra.”

  THEIR CONVERSATION WAS INTERRUPTED by a tumult. Bouncers tumbled back from their places guarding the doors that were pushed back. Barbarian warriors breached barricaded doors and windows. Their silhouettes were clad in the dim morning light that fell more and more through the broken cathedral.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  OLD TOWN UNDERWORLD

  ARGIS CAIRN-BREAKER STOOD UP and strode through the scattering crowd to oppose them. His hand instinctively went to the grip of his weapon. He let go once his senses set in and he realized that it would end everything in a premature bloodbath. This was the moment he had to prove his temper. He looked around the incoming warriors, throwing his guests down and keeping them in check by force. He saw his home vandalized, vases shattered, and statues toppled. They wanted to provoke him and end this before it began.

  The invaders made space for their warlord. Jarnsaxa arrived at a smart pace, visibly thankful that she was able to relocate her troops from another hotspot to where she needed them.

  “You make it easy for me by keeping Godsmite detained,” Argis jested.

  Jarnsaxa kicked him in the back of the knee and sent him to the floor. He rose again quickly.

  “Make yourself at home,” he invited her, this time without laughing.

  The sorceress stepped up from behind him.

  “It wasn’t him, Jarnsaxa,” she began, quickly joining the warlord. “But he knows who did it and stood behind it.”

  “Where is he?” Jarnsaxa demanded.

  “The murderer is not here,” Argis replied. “I will tell you, in time, but first we have a world to save.” He looked to the necromancer, earning a consenting nod, and adressed the whole crowd. “Follow me!”

  ARGIS CAIRN-BREAKER had it all figured out. He would show the Kolanthel the way to the secret underground weapon, receiving the antidote this bounty-hunter needed from him to trade for the girl with his name tattooed on her back. And he would buy himself free by leading all to the rescue, releasing Godsmite, and making him available to take a stand with them. Because this his seers had seen. Godsmite would rescue them. He was the key.

  THEY WOKE HIM in the middle of the night. At least, that was what he thought. The damp cellar chamber som
ewhere in Skybridge, previously only used for the most durable food reserves and enclosed spirits, that had served as his cell since his detention, opened. Two men stood at the open hatch, hesitant to climb down to him, be it because of his notoriety or the washed up earth and rats since the last flood.

  “Time to get up,” one of the men said.

  Godsmite got up and looked up to the exit, suspicious of it being just a trick they played with him. He then continued to walk up the small steps one at a time.

  Godsmite emerged out of the cellar and stretched his back to full height. He grinned as he considered the two men and held up his shackled wrists.

  “Enjoy the fresh air,” the other said.

  The barbarian king wrinkled his nose as he felt rain trickling down his face. He looked up at the dark sky.

  “Is it night or day?” he asked.

  The guards exchanged glances.

  “It’s day.”

  They led Godsmite on, down a street he had never been before. The stars had aligned like predicted. The sun was covered entirely, and gods knew how many stars stood behind in the same line back to the end of the universe. Static lay in the air, together with a silence no one wanted to disturb. This was the final hour, and Godsmite had already overslept. His legs and head felt heavy. The effects of the battle didn’t go by unnoticed.

  He observed his new guards had changed from the previous hours. They were men he didn’t know, lictor henchmen sent in by Freya to not let any member of his own company close to him.

  “Have they found him?” Godsmite asked.

  “You will see,” one of the guards said.

  They shoved him forward, holding him at his elbows.

  “Can’t I be picked up by my own men?” he asked, earning only a grunt.

  Fighting side by side should have bound them together, but in this case, the wedge between Jarnsaxa’s warband and Freya’s henchmen had been driven deeper. It had seperated them visibly into two camps, and the tensions grew with the uncertainty of every passing moment of this midnight hour and another suspect’s absence.

  “Where are we going?” Godsmite asked.

  Neither of the guards answered him this time. They walked down a lone alley in Old Town, wary of every corner they passed. Propaganda-leaflets of the Kolanthel fluttered past. The sun’s rim appeared thin around the moon’s side and touched the surroundings in a new dawn. Only this time, it was of dark red.

  Other Vacomani soldiers awaited them at a wide-branched tree, its trunk as wide as a barrel. Their watch was distracted by the sky phenomenom.

  “Don’t look into it,” one of the men warned. “It may blind you.”

  They turned to Godsmite and his guards once the barbarian king approached.

  The prisoner looked up the gnarly tree in front of him and screwed up his face.

  “You got to be kidding me,” Godsmite growled.

  Freya’s men led him around the tree. The bark was scorched and splintered on its backside by lightning and broken open like the back of a cracked skull. Inside the damaged trunk there was a hidden hatch on the ground. The soldier opened the rusty-handled entrance. A vertical tunnel gaped at Godsmite, strewn with roots and climbing aids.

  “We’re not.”

  He pointed down the hole, leaving Godsmite the advantage.

  “It’s for the best of us all,” he added, nudging him to enter.

  THE SECRET ENTRANCE must have been one of several strewn throughout the city. Another was known of inside the cellar of an abandoned haunted house, and a third at the ground of a polluted well. Whoever installed them made sure no one approached these entrances accidentally. And if someone did, there were appropriate safety devices in place. The first stage was intimidation. Bloodied handprints marked the walls of the narrow corridor. Animal carcasses, bones, and devices that made unnerving noises, scratching and clanking on stone. But these were no different from any caves in the wild inhabitated by primitive tribes. It would turn the stomachs of city people, but not someone who had survived against nature like the barbarian king had. What rocked him was the second stage, though.

  Ancient, non-human devices whose presence made him sick, although he was told they had been deactivated and switched to sleep mode. The mere sight of those stones, or artifacts, whatever advanced enchantments they possessed, made him nauseous. They were standing at every turn of the underground passage, humming constantly. A pale fire, as far as that could exist, seemed to burn in them and sent drifting smoke from their surface. They were scribbled on with aggressive zigzag lines, a language of a culture long buried underneath the present city.

  “Heater stones,” a man behind Godsmite told him. “I’ve seen such kind used in Miridhall from the hot water vents underneath to make the long winters comfortable. They would make life pretty uncomfortable down here, if they weren’t deactivated.”

  “Uncomfortable as in, our flesh burned from our bones,” Godsmite assumed. “Why are they deactivated?” he asked warily. “And more importantly, when will they restart?” he added, looking at the numerous thermal traps.

  “We have reached an armistice with the inhabitants of this place,” Godsmite was told.

  “Uh huh,” he growled. He studied the construction of support bars that held the tunnel ceiling in place as he passed through, installed in a way that could make them destabilize with a network of chains that was steered from another place. “I hope they know we’re coming.”

  THE BARBARIAN KING bested the urge to ask who they were. He knew his success wouldn’t depend on the nature of others, but only on himself. It was irrelevant, as he would learn their identities soon enough. The entrance tunnels from the hidden places troughout the city were simply links to a more complex infrastructure. They led to tombs, sewers, halls, and underground roads. These were the remains of the ancient city on which Skybridge was built. It had been buried or built beneath the surface altogether. No one knew for sure. It was only said that Godfrey had used the roads as sewers and the buildings as prison cells of this ghost town. Now, war had emptied the penal colony and left no traces of its original residents. Its denizens had faded away to the last enclave. They called themselves priests, yet no one remembered what they believed in. Important was only what they guarded.

  DRYSTON OF DECIA regarded the gnomes awaiting them in the sparsely lit vault of an aqueduct. Their faces and posture told him that they loathed this place and their existence. Remnants of a maybe once noble priesthood, they now lived in solitude and paranoia, surviving on the reserves of their lost culture and having mastered every aspect of recycling. And they should hold the key to his salvation? There were only a handful, and most of them were female. The guardians Cairn-breaker had been talking about. It hadn’t been easy to convince the pariahs of collaboration. Ultimately, Dryston concluded, this alliance was only possible because the priests had the temperature system of the underground passages in their hands. The heater stones would reactivate at their discretion and the first hint of betrayal. Then, drinking water, sewage gases, and living beings unfortunate enough to be in their proximity would begin to evaporate.

  The pariahs had begun with their own means of fending off the eclipse of the sun. Stretched out through most corners of the aqueduct, their weapon was beginning to leave stasis. It was still coated in icicles and frost crystals from its long hibernation. They were going to wake it, and even they weren’t planning on taking the weapon out of the aqueduct; its priests were content with being protected in its vicinity.

  “DRYSTON,” his old friend Gabriel Werdum shook him out of thinking.

  “Gabriel,” Dryston said. “What happened with the crypt?”

  The necromancer let out a deep sigh that destroyed the confident face he was trying to show. “I went down with Thaena and Taric. Something had awoken. It was the dead buried there; something breathed life into them and let them rise from their graves.”

  “And that something was not from you?” Dryston asked.

  “No, you’
ve got to believe me,” Gabriel said. “I was as shocked as the next guy, who’s not been studying the dead for his whole life. I had a hunch about what we were dealing with when we came to the crypt all those years ago. I found out more in the course of our stay, but this I couldn’t have foreseen. I wouldn’t have put those children in danger.”

  “You tell me you had a hunch,” Dryston said. “That’s not what you told me when we settled down there. Now, this hunch turned out to be true, hm?”

  “It’s not like that,” Gabriel said. “My primary goal has always been to decipher the scrivelings in this crypt to warn us of this star alignment. I knew the cult that is buried there delved into the same mysteries: astronomy, star divination, and demon trial.”

  Dryston looked at him doubtfully.

  “Yes, they worshipped demons,” Gabriel Werdum told him. “It was a group around a wealthy matriarch, Mother Goulcrest, and her longtime companion, who really thought the praising of otherworldly demons would be the only thing that saved them if the end came near. Now, all I know is that the coming of that long awaited constellation to which they dedicated their lives, stirred them up. I have seen that happening before in the dark forbidden arts, but in single individuals for a short span of time. Not in a whole revived community for a span that lasted long enough to drive us out of our home.”

  “What are you trying to say, Gabriel?” Dryston wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  “I’m saying that there was an immense power reaching out to them, only a few hours before the occurance of the constellation.”

  DRYSTON LOOKED AROUND. Everyone important was assembled in the vault. Kyra, Skadi, Cairn-breaker, Godsmite. He unfastened his axe and loosened the grip in his hand. They were close to the fulfillment of the deal, but time was running out for Dryston. His life ran out like the sand of an hourglass. If anything went wrong, he would take Argis down with him. This he promised to Skadi. He would make his contribution to the execution of the list. Cairn-breaker’s goons Thaena referred to as the Wild Hunt were present, but so was Ornsdottir with a warrior retinue.