Clearwater Dawn

by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  ISBN 978-0-9868288-4-3

  v1.1

  May 2011

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  An Anthology of the Endlands

  by

  Scott Fitzgerald Gray

  • In a lost tomb, a warrior haunted by the deaths of those who once followed him hears an offer of redemption in the voice of an ancient blade…

  • A sword of kings lingers in a forgotten forest, where dwells a timeless spirit of the wood — a creature able to sense the apocalyptic future that unfolds if the blade is ever reclaimed…

  • A prince and princess share a bond of blood and a dark secret, both of which threaten to destroy them when their father is killed…

  • A warrior living under a monstrous curse has his wish for death transformed by a desperate young girl with blood on her hands…

  • A reclusive storyteller finds himself in possession of an axe that promises he will rule the world — whether he wants to or not…

  • The pain of the past haunts a mage sought out by the woman he once loved, who needs his knowledge and power to save the life of the man she loves now…

  • A young exile returns home carrying the weight of betrayal and the stolen sword that is the symbol of his people — a blade with which he will destroy the legacy of the father who tried to kill him years before…

  • A king long thought dead walks his war-torn homeland as a ragged pilgrim, consumed by the sins of his past. But even as he does, the daughter of his greatest knight hunts him, desperate to convince him to take up the crown once more…

  The first Endlands anthology from Scott Fitzgerald Gray, A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales follows a disparate group of heroes and villains caught up with the dark history — and darker destiny — of ancient magic lost to time and memory.

  In the aftermath of the fall of Empire, magic is the ultimate force for tyranny and freedom in the lands of the Elder Kingdoms. Magic defines the line between right and wrong, life and death that compels countless characters to take up a mantle of heroism they never expected to wear.

  However, in the world of the Endlands, even the tales of heroes seldom end as expected…

  This collection includes six all-new short stories, the novella Ghostsong, and the short novel A Prayer for Dead Kings.

  RAZEEN WAS STILL WARM when they found him, the rigor just beginning to set. Dead since dusk, no longer. From across the table, Scúrhand prodded the wizened figure with a scroll tube, the lifeless body rocking like a sapling in the wind.

  The dark-haired mage spat. “Of course,” he said, only to himself.

  Across the tower chamber, Morghan circled warily, his gaze flitting across the destruction that had carried through the room. The subtle weight of the longsword shifted gently in his hands.

  All is lost…

  The voice was the whisper of a silk-lined sheath as it slipped within the tall warrior’s mind. He spun fast like there might have been someone behind him, saw nothing but the walls of ransacked shelves and the dead sage they’d come to see. Scúrhand inspected the bruising at the pale throat where Razeen had been strangled.

  Where it gripped his sword, Morghan’s hand was shaking. He squeezed his fingers shut, forced the tremor from them. Across from him, Scúrhand didn’t see.

  They’d been three days on horse from the Highport before they’d reached the citadel, a narrow track breaking from the eastbound trade road to follow a rising line of scrub and sand along the ocean headland. The eastern sky was already dark when they arrived, the sun gone to a molten line beneath a black haze of storm cloud along the opposite horizon. The pounding of the surf was constant past tall columns of stone, the ruins of ancient battlements staggering their way across the rough beach and into black water beyond.

  In the end, the shroud of darkness and sound had given Scúrhand and Morghan a chance to see the dozen or so figures hidden in ambush position along the road long before they themselves could be sighted. The sentries wore dark leather and helms of blackened steel, scattered behind scrub trees as they watched for any sign of approach. This meant they left themselves open where Scúrhand and Morghan swung wide to the north and around, tethering the horses in a stand of salt pine and approaching unseen, away from the cliffs.

  They moved to within sight of the sentry farthest from the gatehouse, the others unseen but close enough to shout to. Atop a rise, behind a screen of wind-whipped sea grass, they watched for a long while.

  “When I was last here, the sage was far more welcoming,” Scúrhand whispered at last. “Perhaps he heard you were coming this time.” The mage noted that Morghan didn’t smile. “We should endeavor to find out who they are and why they’re here.”

  “Agreed,” Morghan said. “Take this one.”

  “An excellent suggestion,” Scúrhand whispered, “and one whose planning is worth long discussion, ideally back in the city.”

  “Take him.”

  “Or perhaps another city entirely.”

  “You take him or I will, and I’ll be a lot less quiet about it.”

  The mage sighed. He felt for the power that threaded through him, summoned it with a whisper that knocked the sentry into the air and two strides back. He fell with a muffled thud, Morghan already moving.

  Even as Scúrhand followed, however, the warrior slowed to kneel beside the motionless form. He’d seen the mage drop enough sentries in the same way, should have known this one wasn’t getting up anytime soon. As Scúrhand stopped, he saw that Morghan wasn’t checking the pace of blood at the figure’s neck as he’d assumed, but was fingering the insignia on the cloak. A boar’s head sigil was embossed there, black on red, barely visible in the shadows.

  “Who are they?” Scúrhand asked. The warrior only shook his head.

  The citadel consisted of adjoining ramshackle towers leaning at dangerous angles into the ever-present wind. It was a military ruin, built and rebuilt by the succession of petty lords who had claimed this headland in the endless wars that were Gracia’s past. The space within it held two hundred warriors and their arms when it was new built, before the long peace of Empire and the erosion of the sandy bluff had turned its garrisons to fading memories and left it to be claimed by a lone Gnome who valued his privacy. Peace and the passage of time made for much irony in property values, Scúrhand had noted more than once.

  One window lit in the cliffside wall made a gleaming gold beacon against the night. It was there that they’d climbed, out of sight of the sentries below. To be accurate, Morghan climbed, clawing his way up along handholds found and carefully tested in the weathered stone. Scúrhand had an easier time of it, rising effortlessly through the air alongside him. The black cloak he wore was of aristocratic cut but in a style no self-respecting noble had worn in a dozen generations. Scúrhand knew the garment and the dweomer of flight woven into its threads to be older than that by far.

  Though the mage was fairly certain he could have carried the warrior aloft as well as himself, he’d been reluctant to test the supposition with slightly more certain death promised on the rocks below if he failed. Morghan hadn’t seemed to mind, not even breathing hard when they finally pulled themselves through the open shutters of some sort of study. It was there that Razeen had been found.

  The body was draped across a high table, propped in a chair so ridiculously tall that the diminutive figure must have had to scale it like a ladder. He had a selection of scrolls before him that Scúrhand took in at a glance, mundane alchemical texts.

  Morghan was still pacing
the room, listening carefully at each of three exits, stairs leading up and down. Velvet drapes in the same indescribable purple the sage wore had been hung from tall pillars of yellowing marble. The air was heavy with the scent of old parchment and dust.

  From below, loud enough for them both to hear, came the sound of smashing wood.

  “We leave now?” Scúrhand said with little real hope. Again, Morghan didn’t smile.

  Vindicator…

  Morghan took the stairs first. He didn’t have to look back to know that Scúrhand was following.

  Curving columns of black oak rose between levels of shadow above and below as they climbed. A pool of light preceded them, cast from the pulse of lightning that traced the dagger Scúrhand had claimed from the ruins of Myrnan. The Sorcerers’ Isle, legendary across Gracia and the other four Elder Kingdoms and countless lands beyond. During a particularly violent squall that dogged them along the six-day voyage from Myrnan to the Gracian mainland, the mage had christened the blade Storm’s Light. Morghan had spent most of the remainder of the trip offering his opinion of those who named their weapons.

  “A blade’s a tool like any other. You don’t name the plow any more than the oxen that pull it.”

  “I’ve never had an ox save my life,” Scúrhand said. They were sailing through rain past sunset of the last day, the lights of the Highport visible ahead. “This might do that someday.” The mage was doing handwork with the new blade at the rail. In the twilight, the pulse of its storm light shone.

  Now, Scúrhand willed that light to darkness as Morghan waved him back. Where the stairs met an open balcony, they saw a faint light from ahead. Directly beneath them, the undying glow of magical evenlamps was filtered by some kind of latticed ceiling. Narrow beams crisscrossed below an empty space where the stairs turned and climbed once more. There was room enough for Morghan to squeeze through, shifting slowly to spread his weight across the narrow beams. Scúrhand was close behind, perched at the balcony’s edge.

  Through narrow slats, the mage and the warrior watched the movement in the library below. A dozen figures in the same dark leather as the sentries outside worked with a silent efficiency as they tore through the shelves. Already, scrolls and bound volumes were strewn so thickly that they hid the floor. Scúrhand could only stare.

  “That’s a duke’s ransom in lore they’re stepping through,” the mage hissed. “What in fate’s name are they looking for that would make them discard that?”

  Barrend’s Bane…

  Clear in Morghan’s head again, an echoing voice, his own and not his somehow.

  “What is Barrend’s Bane?” Scúrhand whispered, and Morghan had to glance over to the mage’s questioning look to realize that he’d murmured the name aloud.

  A year before, in the midst of a long string of days spent trying to forget, Morghan had seen the boar’s head along the Myrnan docks. A sigil on a cloak, black on red. The image locked into place in his mind, scribed from the searing memory of a lash wielded by an arm that wore the same insignia. The memory of the pain was knife-sharp across his back, his chest.

  The stone-faced warriors who wore the black boar on Myrnan had been led by a woman with hair the color of deep sunset. She and all the others were strangers to Morghan. But over the week that followed, he’d spent a fair percentage of the coin he brought out from the ruins to discover their names and mission. The secrecy that had carried them to the Sorcerers’ Isle was impressive even against the routine secrecy of most of those who sought Myrnan’s hidden riches. In the end, though, all information had a price.

  It was at a weaponsmith’s stall along the muddy tracks of Claygate Keep’s old Portown where Morghan found what he sought. The pale hair and sky-blue eyes marked the smith as Norgyr stock, his accent betraying him as not that long gone from the northlands. The flame-haired woman and her guard had visited him twice while Morghan tailed them, but when it came his turn to step inside the stall, the smith met his inquiries with a sullen silence. Morghan noted the boar’s head marked in ink at the smith’s bare shoulder, a faded clan insignia beneath it.

  In the dusky glow of the forge, the warrior pulled his sleeve down to reveal his own shoulder. Then he told a story. When he was done, the dark rage in the smith’s eyes was one he recognized. He gave Morghan a name.

  “What is Barrend’s Bane?” Scúrhand asked again, but Morghan was moving. Shifting silently along the lattice of narrow beams, he strained to hear the voices filtering up from below.

  “…the vault,” a woman was saying. She was the leader of the searchers to judge by the way she spoke. Her hair was flame-red in the pale light, bright as it had been when Morghan first saw it in the dawn glow of the Myrnan docks. “Start again, top to bottom. Check every door, every passageway. Search for diaries, journals. What you can’t read, bring to me.”

  The smith in his dockside shed had first seen the hidden mark on the shield at Morghan’s back as he and the warrior drank at the hearth. He told a story of his own, of Barrend who was weaponsmith to the magical court of the Sathnari, masters of the Sorcerer’s Isle a thousand years before the island-castle was raised.

  “You came out of Eltolitinus?” the smith asked gruffly when his story was done. “With this?” He touched the shield almost reverently as Morghan nodded. “I lost count of them that died trying to be you, lad.”

  The ruins of Myrnan were named for Eltolitinus, who legends said had transformed the entirety of Myrnan to a vast island-castle three thousand years before. A demigod of magic in centuries past. The greatest of the many mages who had tried to claim the Sorcerers’ Isle as their own. It was the aftermath of the dungeons of Eltolitinus that had pushed Morghan to wandering alone, hoping to bury the memories of the dark month he and Scúrhand and all the others had spent beneath the earth.

  Avenge them…

  As he watched the soldiers in black tear through the library, the voice in Morghan’s mind was the voice of the smith suddenly. Barrend’s mark is what they seek. Weapons of the old age, secrets of craft long lost. Magics that can’t be made by mortal hand no more.

  “Seek the signs of Barrend’s Bane,” the woman called from below.

  Those who know it will kill for this mark.

  “The lore we seek will be found or we do not return, by Arsanc’s orders.”

  As the woman’s voice echoed, Scúrhand saw a sudden darkness twist through Morghan where he watched.

  Those who claim it lay claim to the power of kings.

  Then the mage saw the warrior fall.

  With a groaning crunch, the lattice of the ceiling gave way beneath Morghan’s weight, the first arrows from below nocked and fired wild past him before he even hit the ground. Without a thought, Scúrhand launched himself into the air, cloak clutched tight and spread behind him as he soared silently to the apex of the arched ceiling. There was room in plenty to fly, the library huge, four passageways wending out of it where the great stairs ended in their twisting path down.

  The figures below didn’t notice him, understandably distracted as Morghan landed with sword in hand, carving his way through them. Scúrhand saw three down already, the rest pressing, but the warrior moved with a speed and grace that belied his size.

  Then all at once, a pulse of white light wrapped Morghan like a shroud. The warrior’s battle-scarred voice was choked off with a sudden finality. Rigid, he stood locked in place, blade gripped tight in the midst of a backhand blow, held unwavering where he was frozen fast.

  Scúrhand alighted on a section of shelf he hoped was sturdy enough to hold him. He saw the red-haired woman step up, hands still twisted in the complex gesture of the incantation that had taken Morghan out, another spell already on her lips that Scúrhand didn’t want to wait to see the effect of.

  “Stand down or die consumed by arcane fire!” he called with what he hoped was suitable bravado. He saw reflexive movement below, bows drawn and arrows nocked with a common bead on his heart, but he was already airborne again. He extende
d one fist, the plain copper ring there spouting flame to wrap his hand. He saw uncertainty in the eyes of those closest to him, fire flowing up his arm to the shoulder now. Where it billowed around him, the black cape gave him the imposing tone he’d hoped for, enough to hopefully hide the fact that the ring presented less threat to the foes scattering below him than if he’d simply fallen on them.

  It was a relic he’d claimed when he and Morghan first met, happenstance travelers who found themselves fighting at each other’s backs when a cache of unguarded gold they’d pursued independently on the frontier had turned out to be less unguarded than was publicized. The ring’s power was defensive, its dweomer swallowing the heat of mundane flame and eldritch fire alike, but its presentation had proved almost as effective at keeping him out of the thick of combat as any blade might prove within it. Since that day he and Morghan met, the thick of combat was a place Scúrhand preferred to leave for the warrior whenever humanly possible.

  On the floor below, the red-haired woman took a step toward him, and in her bright gaze, Scúrhand saw suddenly the youth she was trying hard to hide. “If you wish to parlay, say your piece,” she said in the Imperial tongue. A tone of authority in the words but no strength in her voice to back it up, barely an apprentice’s age by her look.

  Her accent marked her as Norgyr even if her features didn’t. Not like the others, pale hair and blue eyes watching him coldly. The mage responded in the speech of the northlands as a hopeful token of concord. “My partner and I mean no trouble nor harm. On the contrary, depending on your business here, we may find ourselves in a position of mutual benefit.”