by Sean Wallace
Swords chimed together like hammers striking the anvil. Dunstan cursed again and parried. Out of the corner of his eye, Riordan saw blood streaming down the inside of the Captain’s arm.
“Surrender,” Maledysaunte said to the King, as Riordan attained the landing.
Aidan laughed, loud and true. “I should be saying that to you, little sister.” He extended the massive sword in his hand, holding it as if it were light as a willow wand.
“I never would have opposed you. I never cared who sat on your father’s throne. I was a bastard, Aidan. But half a century ago, on a day like today, you burned a girl.”
Riordan took a step closer, transfixed. A grunt and the unmistakable slick hiss of steel into flesh interrupted his concentration. He glanced aside to see Dunstan drawing his blade out of his comrade’s belly and flicking the blood from it in a long, spattering arc.
The King turned his head and spat. “Your witchery won’t avail. This is your last mistake.”
Maledysaunte smiled, a long, cool smile that went into Riordan sharp as the dagger in her hand. “You don’t understand, Your Majesty. Even if you kill me, my army is coming. And blood was the price of their raising. Your blood.” Her throat worked as if she swallowed bile. “They’re coming to collect.”
Dunstan staggered forward, weaving across the distance to the girl, his blood spattering the floor. He stumbled.
The sorceress reversed her dagger in her hand and spread her arms wide, as if inviting the High-King to strike her down. “More so than empire, I am your finest creation, High-King. Look at what you’ve made!”
He looked. Long and steadily, unflinching, he met his sister’s gaze. He stepped forward, hand unwavering on his sword.
Riordan dragged himself painful steps closer. Dunstan went to his knees and planted his sword as a prop, trying to haul himself upright. His hand slipped in his own blood. He fell.
Maledysaunte hurled the dagger as Riordan lunged. His sound foot skittered on blood-slick stone and he went down hard, catching himself on the palm of one hand. Aidan had only begun raising his sword to parry when the blade went into his eye.
Riordan shoved himself into a crouch before he froze, unbelieving. His hand went to his mouth. The High-King fell ponderously, like an oak, and Maledysaunte had turned her back on him and stepped over Dunstan’s unconscious form by the time he slumped unmoving. His sword was still ringing on the stones when she passed Riordan.
She hesitated. And did not glance back. “I’ve had time to learn skills other than magic,” she said in chill even tones.
Not knowing what he did, he reached out and caught the edge of her mantle. “You’re the princess. Not the Hag.”
She stopped at the top of the stairs, cloth stretched between them like a flag to be folded. She did not turn her head. “Are the two so different, then?”
A great tingling numbness seemed to have fallen over him. Outside, he could hear the bustle of the refugees, the neighing of horses. Words spilled from his throat. “Are we conquered, then? Will you rule?”
Her laugh was a humorless, gasping thing. “The King has many bastards to duel over his throne.” She turned back to the bard, and came up close, her mantle furling like a wing. She smelled of lavender and mint, and blood.
The sorceress Maledysaunte raised her thumb to her mouth and bit down on it, blood coloring her sharp white teeth. She smiled pitilessly and reached out, crimson wound like ribbons around the whiteness of her hand.
“The dead must be fed for their labors, but someone should live to tell the tale.” She touched him between the eyes with her own red blood. “I won’t be back. Let darkness fall.”
Captain, the women scream and cry
And the walls are breached at last
The Captain can make no reply, me boys,
And the dark is falling fast.
Maledysaunte’s army attacked at sunset, but the sorceress was not among the ranks. Kingless, Captainless, Caer Dun was taken in an hour. By moonrise, all that was left within her walls was the wandering bodies of the dead . . . and a staring, green-eyed bard whom no revenant would touch, for he was marked by their mistress.
The Hag’s army fell to ash at the first touch of the sun.
She stands in her chamber
Weaving her summer
In threads green and golden
Under eaves hung with winter.
Winter lay thick on the ground around her tower, snow white on her ebony window ledge. A chime like a glass bell resounded on frosty air as the water in a silver basin clouded and then cleared. Maledysaunte looked up from her weaving, brushing a strand of hair still glossy black behind her ear.
She hadn’t heard that sound in fifteen years or longer, since Caer Dun, since her brother’s death. She had almost believed herself forgotten.
Curiosity almost moved her to thrust the shuttle through the warp and walk across the tapestry-carpeted floor to the scrying bowl. Almost. She had become what they said she was, and now they feared her enough to trouble her no longer.
There was a moral there.
After a moment, she shrugged and selected a red handful of threads. The trees will take care of it for me. But she glanced back over her shoulder nonetheless.
True Tam dismounted at the greenwoodside
Tied his mare’s reins up to the pommel
He slapped her flank and he stepped inside
And she went home with an empty saddle.
Riordan shuffled painfully along a deer-trail packed through the snow, leaning on a hewn rowan staff. Pausing at the very edge of the wood, he pulled his many-layered cloak around his shoulders, feeling the winter like ice in every joint. It had been a long few years. He regarded the trees warily, wondering if the branches really were reaching after him.
His mount trotted three steps away and stopped, staring after him as if she could not believe what he meant to do. Her breath frosted on her whiskers, and she nickered softly, as if to say, Get back on, Man. We can still go home.
“There’s a lady in there with a story to tell, Gracie,” the old Harper said, with good humor. “Besides, she didn’t kill me last time. And her mark is on me still. Her creatures should leave me alone.”
Should. You never knew. But if one took no chances, there would be no stories.
Riordan took a breath and stepped into the wintry wood.
All in green did my lady go
All in green went riding
Among the barrows of the silent dead
On a white mare, she went riding.
THE WORD OF AZRAEL
Matthew David Surridge
At the edge of the battlefield of Aruvhossin grew an elm tree. Half its branches were covered in orange leaves. Half were bare and dead. In its shadow, upon a patch of sere grass, sat a man named Isrohim Vey.
Beyond the grass the earth had been bloodied and churned to mud.
Naked to the cold sun were dead men and dead horses and those slowly dying, and scavengers and carrion creatures flitting from one to another. Isrohim Vey sat under the elm, spine against the trunk, a sword driven into the turf by his side, and watched them all. He drew one leg up, as though protecting guts and groin with his thigh-bone. There was a distant terrible pain in his stomach where he had been wounded. Seven kings lay dead on Aruvhossin nearby, and all their armies with them.
The battle had been a day and a night and half a day again. Witchfires had circled Aruvhossin in the darkness, raised by goblinkin slaves of one army or another, burning blue and green and indigo. Dizzy, Isrohim Vey shut his eyes and thought he saw again the stunted things that danced as they died, thought he saw knights charging into a storm of arrows, thought he saw the lipless one-eyed giants whose clubs made the ground tremble, and saw the cloaked Dominies alone or in circles calling on the storms and the powers beyond the storms, and saw his captain die, and saw the last stand of the Anochians, and saw men in armor he’d killed, the Westlander, the kilted Elavhri, and saw necromancers commanding the
dead to rise again and whirl about the field to slay and slay and slay; all the world slain on the field of Aruvhossin, the greater part may be mercenaries like him, brutal and who can say but they deserved this, all this.
Isrohim Vey opened his eyes, and it was noon on the second day of the battle of Aruvhossin, and he was (so he imagined) the only living thing that had seen the battle from the beginning and remained alive; and then Isrohim Vey saw the Angel of Death.
The angel was beautiful and smiled on him, and Isrohim Vey was helpless to tell the depths of that smile or its breadth; if it was a man’s smile, or a child’s, or if it was large as the field of Aruvhossin, or as all the world. Only that the meaning in it was beyond expression and that the power which moved the sun and the other stars lurked in it and rent his heart.
He did not know what the angel was about on that battlefield.
He neither perceived nor understood anything of it, or little, beyond the smile. But in that smile was all it was and all he was and all he ever would be. His right hand moved, seeking his sword, finding it. It was a fine sword. He had found it fallen on the field of Aruvhossin late on the first day of the battle. It had served well. Now he felt only the sharpness of its edge cutting his hand.
The Angel of Death smiled on Isrohim Vey, and said a Word.
After the angel had gone Isrohim sat under the elm tree and stared past the field of Aruvhossin. Shafts of sun fell through distant clouds. He was no longer dizzy. He was no longer in pain. He sat, clutching inside himself at the last dregs of the feeling he had been taught when he had seen the angel and the angel had looked on him. He knew he would live. For a time. Live to seek the Angel of Death; live till he saw it once more, and forever.
Live till he knew again the smile and could tell its meaning within his own soul. Just so long, and no longer.
The Dominie peered into the heart of the circlet of amber and crystal.
“The sword is special,” he said. “It has a destiny. Be wary; many will seek to take it from you.”
“The sword is not my concern,” said Isrohim Vey.
The Dominie crossed his study, silver threads glittering in his green cloak, and set the circlet in its space on a shelf between an eggshell painted with a map of the world and a small stoppered glass jar, which held an ink elemental splashing and sulking inside its prison. “Yes; your angel,” said the Dominie. “Angels are powerful things. Some say, more powerful than all the gods of men. They move the spheres of the sky and rule the houses of the days and the nights. They are beyond both destiny and freewill. They hold the keys, you know; the keys.”
“I have seen one.”
“Azrael,” said the Dominie. “You saw the Angel of Death, whose name is Azrael.”
“What do I do now?” asked Isrohim Vey.
The Dominie shrugged. “Go forward, and be blessed.”
“Not enough.”
“What more will you have, then?”
“I want to see the angel again.”
The Dominie sighed. “When you die.”
“I have watched men die. They see no angel. Sometimes, maybe; more often, not.”
“Hum,” said the Dominie. He asked: “What is death, then, to you?”
“Freedom,” answered Isrohim Vey. He looked away from the Dominie. The wizard’s study was close and warm. Though it was day, colored candles burned and cloying scent reeled through the air. “I’ve gone back to the wars since Aruvhossin. I have seen men die, and women, in numbers. I have haunted places of slaughter. But I have not seen the angel again.”
The Dominie tilted his head back and drew a breath through his nostrils.
“Who can divine the ways of angels?” he asked, and half his mouth turned up in a grin. “I cannot say where you should look. Only I suggest this. Go to the Free City of Vilmariy for the Grand Masque at midsummer. On that night all things are upended; the people fill the streets in their guises, and I have heard it said, and do well believe, that their costumings on that night reveal hidden and inadvertent truths.”
“Are there angels in Vilmariy?” asked Isrohim Vey.
“There are angels everywhere,” answered the Dominie.
* * *
It has been said that on the night of the Grand Masque in Vilmariy the veils between the country of the dead and the country of the living weaken; as though the two were never separate at all, but two nations in their solitudes interpenetrating.
Isrohim Vey came to Vilmariy for the first time on that carnival night, and walked among the people in costume and the things in no costume and searched for a sign of truth.
He found a bazaar where witches sold candles and silver jewels; where vampires haggled for spices with goblinkin; where clergymen kept assignations with bejewelled succubi; where a half-mad prince bought, from an old man with a long-stemmed pipe and moonstone eyes, a map to the legendary Fount of All out of which proceeds every created thing. In a park he came upon an elegant dance under faerie lights, where stag-headed men partnered green women crowned with garlands of red leaves, and children of the Ylvain in fashions of old time fenced with blunt copper swords stolen from human barrows. In a cemetery he found a frenzy where the white queen of winter copulated with the red king of war in an open grave, and a flockless shepherd pawed the unlikely breasts of a pirate captain, and skeletons danced a lecherous reel with red-eyed hags.
None of these things, to him, was a sign.
Not long before dawn he saw, leaving the grounds of a rich estate where noblewomen in the guise of constellations mingled with Svar Kings from under the earth, a woman dressed as an angel. This was high up the triple-peaked hill on which Vilmariy is built. Isrohim Vey followed the woman down into the heart of the city, along thoroughfares where dukes and outlaws and satyrs lay drunk in the gutters, and then into a maze of alleys. Nor was he the only one who followed her.
Behind him he knew there were others. When the angel slipped in the dark, and kicked at a man with a hyena’s head asleep in his own piss, that was when they rushed forward. For a moment Isrohim Vey was caught up in a storm of devils.
Then they were past him, and had reached the angel. Three men dressed as devils to her one. The devils fought with sword and dagger while the angel had only a slim steel rapier. But she was swift as wrath, and they could not touch her. Isrohim Vey drew the sword he had found on the field of Aruvhossin. With his first strike he broke a devil’s back. His second thrust threw another against a wall. Then he had to parry; and again; and again. A dagger entered him. Then the devil facing him fell and the beautiful blood-drenched angel smiled at him.
It was not the smile he had looked for. But, he thought, dazed, it will do for now.
“Who are you?” Isrohim Vey murmured, as his legs gave way and he fell to his knees.
“I am Yasleeth Oklenn,” said the angel, “the greatest dueling-master of this or any other time; and, sir, you have aided me, and for this I owe you a favor; the which I shall discharge now, in saving your life.”
“That is well done,” agreed Isrohim Vey.
Three years later, with much having passed between them, he prepared to leave Yasleeth.
At the very end, she said to him: “You’re the greatest student I ever had. You’ve learned all I have to teach of the cunning old man called death. Why go, when you might stay with me, and be rich?”
“Because there is more to know of death,” he said, “and I must find it out.”
“Death is simple,” she said.
He could not argue. He went, nevertheless.
So Isrohim Vey wandered the wide world. He had to fight, often, either to earn his way or simply to survive the bad bandit-haunted roads between cities and fortresses.
Sometimes men sought him out to fight him and take his sword. Sometimes, before he killed them, they mentioned that they had been sent by Nimsza, a Bishop of the Empire Church.
Eventually Isrohim Vey went to the land of Marás, where, in the nave of the Obsidian Cathedral, he slew the Black Bis
hop called Nimsza; and, taking up Nimsza’s ring, spoke with the demon Gorias that Nimsza had commanded in life.
“It may be true,” Gorias purred, “that demons know something of the ways of angels.” Gorias held Nimsza’s soul between its claws, and was content.
“Tell me of the Angel of Death,” said Isrohim Vey.
“Azrael cannot be evaded,” the demon said.
“I do not want to evade the angel,” said Isrohim Vey. “I want to find him.”
“It is, of course, an error to refer to an angel or demon as male or female,” observed Gorias thoughtfully. The soul it held wailed a tiny shriek that never ended nor wavered. “However, language on these planes is crude, and incapable of suggesting our essence. I will tell you this: understanding of the Death Angel will come with the right death, when the world turns upside down.”
“Explain.”
“I cannot. My understanding is not as yours, filtered through reason. Like angels, demons know only what they know. Order me to come with you, if you like. Command me to aid you. With your nameless sword, and my aid, you can become the conqueror that the Black Bishop dreamed of becoming. We will topple empires and you will crush the nations of the world beneath your boots. I have power to do that.”
“No.”
“Otherwise, pain will come to you. Through me the way to a life of ease. You have the ring that is my weakness; command me.”
“No.”
“I can give you to Azrael,” said Gorias. Isrohim Vey said nothing. “You will know the smile you seek,” said the demon. “Command me.”
“Then you will have my soul,” said Isrohim Vey.
“But you will have your angel,” said the demon Gorias.
“I will say this to you,” said Isrohim Vey, and spoke the Word of Azrael.
Gorias shrieked and fled to the thirteen hells.