The Riddler's Gift: First Tale of the Lifesong (The Tale of the Lifesong)

by Greg Hamerton

  “Swords! You there?”

  Silence. A brush of cold.

  Garyll halted. He could sense bodies approaching from both sides. By their silence and stealth in the dark, they declared their identity. He closed his eyes and readied himself.

  What has become of my men?

  His ears itched. A word was chanted from close by.

  “Despair.”

  He spun and slashed the air with his sword, but whoever had been there danced out of range. The Shadowcaster had landed his blow. The spell clung to him like the weakness that clings to a drunkard in the morning; no matter how much he wished it gone, the spell remained, leaching strength from deep within his bones. It was the spell he had heard in the whispering wind, but a thousand times stronger. He refused to be swayed by its suggestion.

  Felltang was heavy. He saw how the ice chamber had been a filter, slowing their charge, dividing them. Just as the portcullis had been. The Swords were separated, and the Shadowcasters could come in close enough to work their magic. The Swords were doomed.

  “Despair.”

  His slash was delayed this time. What hope did he have of finding his target in the dark? They were too strong, he was too weak, he was tired of fighting them, too cold to care, too deep within the heart of Darkness to ever escape.

  He recognised the trickery just in time. He reversed his grip on Felltang, and raised the hilt of his sword to his forehead.

  Let me serve Eyri, and be strong.

  “Despair.”

  He waited. He sensed the group of Shadowcasters; they spread out around him, one approached from behind. A damp body odour brushed him. A rustle of clothing told him the man had raised his arms, as if attempting to lift something over Garyll’s head, or to apply a particularly intense spell.

  Without altering his grip, Garyll swung his sword hard, driving the point backwards past his chest. The hold of the Dark essence on his body broke, and Felltang sank almost to the hilt into what had been behind him.

  He leapt forward. He was a whirlwind of fury. Felltang howled, scything through bone and flesh alike. He heard three bodies fall to the floor, and a fourth man was limping away, crying like a wild animal.

  He heard the movement behind him too late. Something smote his helm, hard. The darkness was complete.

  * * *

  When he regained consciousness, he was already screaming. Pain ruled his left arm, raw agony tore through the core nerves of his fingers. Something was being driven into the end of his forefinger, a nail, or a needle. Garyll wrenched his hand away, but his wrist was held in iron. His muscles strained, his back arched against the restraints. He was bound on all four limbs, and there was a fine chain around his neck. A hammer sounded at the same moment that the pain bloomed in his finger. The nail was driven deeper, against the bone. This time he did tear something in his arm, but the pain of ligaments separating in his elbow was nothing.

  His screams were not the only ones he could hear.

  Enter the Inferno, he told himself. Enter the Inferno.

  The skill came to him instantly, despite the years since he’d needed it. To go beyond the pain, he visualised the Inferno, a place where the heat was so immense his clothes became a flash of coals, a fire so cruel that every part of his body was burning, every nerve screamed in multiplied agony. He used his pain to drive his attention deeper into the Inferno, accepting more pain, loading his being with the complete agony he had learned in training. You could only escape the pains of battle, by going beyond them.

  He was the mind within the Inferno, burned clean of his body. Any pain belonged to the flames, no pain could supersede the ultimate torture he knew in that place. In the Inferno, he became the mind of the Swordmaster alone.

  When the hammer struck again, he fed the pain to the fire. He was beyond his body. He couldn’t stop the scream, he didn’t need to—his mind was protected by the Inferno. He had accepted all the pain as his own; the hammer was a lesser pain than what he knew in the fire.

  How hard-won that skill had been to learn.

  His eyes smarted, his vision showing him bleary confusing images. He realised that his head was tied so far back that he was seeing upside down. Torches flared red against black walls which rose into darkness. The hammer sounded again, and the room disappeared for a moment.

  A giant cavern, the torches ranged in a circle. Dark figures, robed and cowled. A soft tap of the hammer, worse than before. He fed it to the Inferno.

  Other figures were tied to altars in the same manner that he was. Wrists and feet iron-bound, heads drawn back off the end of the raised stones.

  He couldn’t see his own torturer, but he could feel the man shift his attention to another finger. It had to be a man, the grip was too rough for a woman’s. A fresh nail slammed into him, finding bone on the first blow.

  When his vision cleared again, Garyll saw a tall figure approaching with rapid stride; cowled like the rest, yet different. The man’s presence reached out ahead of him, making him both familiar and fearsome. He knew the man’s power in an intimate way he couldn’t define.

  A crawling sensation surged through Garyll’s body, beginning from high on his chest. Despite the separation of his attention in the Inferno, the crawling invaded his mind when it was done with his body. It was a searching, terrible touch, more alarming to Garyll for where it had reached than for what it did. The shield of the Inferno had never failed him before. Yet this man had gone beyond it with ease—he was inside him, too close to block, an adversary who stood behind him instead of in front.

  He is the shadow and I am his caster.

  The words were not his own, yet they sounded in his mind, and urged him to repeat the litany. He was going mad. Garyll reeled and lost concentration. The pain of his shattered fingers roared through him.

  Enter the Inferno.

  That was his own thought, he was sure. But there was another inside him. He coughed, and felt a small pressure against his throat, a cold weight.

  I am the shadow and he is my master.

  Black robes touched Garyll’s face.

  “You were told to rouse him, no more!”

  The voice was familiar from his first visit, that of Cabal of Ravenscroft. The Darkmaster.

  A strangled sound came from where Garyll’s torturer had been.

  “This is the Swordmaster, you fool!” the Darkmaster said. “Do you know nothing of his training? He will not give in to pain. You have already escaped the torture, haven’t you, my dear Glavenor?” The robes slid by, and a pale face came close.

  Cold eyes regarded him in a way that was both predatory and familial. Garyll saw too much in those steady orbs; they were too deep with understanding, with hunger, with power and possibility.

  “No, not to pain. But he will give in.” The Master rose.

  “I thought only to prepare him for you, Master. Is he not more receptive this way? It has worked on many of the others.” The nails in Garyll’s left hand were flicked once.

  “Leave him! This one is more use to me whole than broken.”

  “Yes, Master.” The torturer sounded disappointed, but his footsteps passed away to the left, and the nails were not struck again. A new scream told Garyll that the torturer had found someone else to work upon.

  My men, where have I led my men?

  “Pain is not his greatest fear,” said the Darkmaster, close by. “No, I have something special for the Swordmaster.”

  The hand that pushed Garyll’s hair from his brow was as smooth as the skin of a snake.

  “Gabrielle!” the Darkmaster called out. A woman approached. As she neared, she blocked the light from the nearest torch with her body. All Garyll could see was her outline.

  “See that Glavenor finds his way in the dark. He hungers for it already, though he doesn’t know it, and it is hidden deep. He is strong, he is righteous, you shall work both from him, or you shall lose your rights as Vortex.” Garyll saw the woman stiffen, but she said nothing.

  “I ne
ed him at dawn, ready to take the Devotion. You may use whatever essence you have need of.”

  Gabrielle bowed low to the Darkmaster, as if he had bestowed a great honour upon her.

  To use essence must be a reward, Garyll realised. But he had heard the words as clearly as she—the Vortex would lose her rights if she failed in her task. He began to feel that the worst of his torture had yet to begin.

  She began with the spell of Despair, so concentrated and cold that he could not draw a breath for a long time thereafter. Without Felltang in his hand, without foes to face, it was difficult to find the battle rage that had shielded him before. The woman carried on and on. He knew that he lost something of his resistance with every iteration of her spell, and he knew that she knew it too.

  She talked to him, a soft, smothering attention like oil laid thick upon water. He drowned in her words, and where they led him. She offered him a way out of his misery, though he knew it was a false trail. He vowed to ignore her.

  She laid one hand against his throat, pressing the cold object there deeper into him. That cold place beneath her hand never warmed. The crawling sensation returned, and her voice became a commanding force, binding his mind to the borders she set. He could do nothing but follow in the flow of her current, and break through the walls of his own principles as she chose to lead him beyond. Her will coursed through his veins, and sought out things he had repressed and forgone long ago.

  He would not speak at first, later he dared not, for what he might admit. Just by Gabrielle’s suggestions, and where her mind led his, the worst parts of his being were brought to the surface, where they collected, swelled and erupted across his mind, staining the walls with their poison.

  His own weaknesses responded to what she described; the exhilaration of beating a man in a fight, the solace of numbing drunkenness after having to execute a convicted criminal, the ambition to prove himself stronger than all other men, his lust for hard sex, harder than any woman he had known could give, hungers like these that had never been sated and, he tried to promise himself, never would be.

  He sucked his cheek inwards and bit down on it, hoping the reminder of pain would clear his thoughts. It only made the visions worse, filling them with the taint of his own blood, and a lust for more.

  Time stretched onwards in interminable darkness. She taught him how pain could be pleasure. She taught him how the men who could forego their principles could live fulfilled. She showed him that he was no better than those he had judged, how they had followed the same hungers he knew, his own hunger, allowed to rise.

  It was many, many hours until he drifted from her towards exhaustion. Yet Gabrielle was not done, and she moved the torturer’s nails absently. He dived for the purity of the Inferno in his mind, yet she used even that against him, casting a spell of weakness to drive him toward sleep again. He ran from her in his mind, yet she was always with him.

  She was too close to him, her hand on his throat created too strong a link, as if she could use that place to see into his soul. He had long ago guessed it was the stone of the Shadowcasters, chained on his neck. It bound him into their network of Dark like a bond of blood. It laid his thoughts open to the one who touched him. It made him believe he was in an infinite space, a dark place, where a voice, his voice, repeated a mantra.

  I am the shadow and he is my master.

  He is the shadow and I am his caster.

  Sometimes he denied it, in the way that he had denied the whispers in the wind. Sometimes he forgot to ignore it. Sometimes he had to grind the words apart in his teeth, before his lips could betray him.

  From time to time a man nearby was unshackled, and taken away. The screams, which had filled the chamber with a cacophony, became fewer and fewer, until all he could hear was his own laboured breathing, Gabrielle’s voice, and somewhere at the limits of awareness, a soft weeping which had lasted for hours. He forgave that man, whoever it was.

  He found one island in the sea of despair, a place he retreated to at last. Tabitha Serannon. If there was one pure sanctuary in all the world, it was the innocent feelings he had for Tabitha, and the beauty she represented in his soldier’s life. He let everything go, knowing he would not need any of his weaknesses, if he could remain on the island, in the protection of hope. He had been shown he was not good, he could not believe in himself. But he could believe in Tabitha being good. He repeated her name, and held onto the hope she represented. There was one thing good in the world.

  Tabitha.

  “What was that, my dear?” Gabrielle’s voice was soft, smooth, as venomous as ever.

  Garyll shut his mouth. He hadn’t meant to whisper aloud. He took Tabitha into the Inferno with him, and went to the core of his being, where the Vortex Gabrielle couldn’t reach. At last, he fell from consciousness, in a plunge that avoided sleep and found the emptiness beyond.

  * * *

  The snap of his chains brought him around. He had been moved to a new place, upon the battlements, beneath a freezing grey dawn. He was weak, so terribly weak, as if all of his will had been reamed out of his body, all of his resistance taken with the last of his body-heat. He had never known such a cold, it was the cold of the dead, though his heart beat slowly within him.

  He knew he was alive, because his damaged fingers throbbed with every heartbeat, and because the air scraped down his throat as he drew breath. Someone stood beside him. Garyll didn’t need to look to know who it was. The man’s presence filled him with dread. He knew the fear was fuelled by the motes which flickered between them in a lazy spell, but he had lost the strength to deny the fear. He had only enough strength to notice how his courage was being ground like soft flesh between two immense, dark boulders.

  His wrists were shackled behind him, his ankles likewise, and both were connected on a chain to a ring set in the stone. The chains were short, forcing him to remain where he was, on his knees. Even so, he could see over the rim of the spiked battlements. Some forty Swords were collected in disarray on the plain below. They seemed to be waiting for something. With a start Garyll recognised them as the group who had been ordered to retreat, after the portcullis had separated their force. The men on the field below were probably waiting for him to return. They knew nothing of the terrible things that had occurred within the Keep. They had not yet been caught.

  There was a fine chain around Garyll’s neck, and a weight beneath his chin. The crawling sensation hadn’t left his body, the cold only made the touch of Dark more intense and his nerves more sensitive to it.

  “It only hurts because you resist,” explained a slithering voice.

  The Darkmaster stepped out in front of Garyll, regarding him coolly. He produced a sword and laid it on the stone. The sword glistened, its blade as keen as a razor. Garyll eyed Felltang with longing. It was a wasted thought, he knew. He was chained with iron, the blade would be of no use. He doubted he could swing it even if he were unfettered, he was so weak.

  “Behold the symbol of your station in life; a weapon, made only for killing other men. What have you brought to the world, what have you created? You have only killed, in your time.”

  Garyll heard the truth, and it drew his spirit ever deeper.

  “How many more deaths shall you be responsible for?”

  Garyll stared at the stone between his knees. The Darkmaster gripped his hair, and tilted his head back again.

  “Look out there, at the poor soldiers you led to Ravenscroft, so easily fooled by a word from one of their turned comrades. They believe the Keep conquered, and wait for you to lift the portcullis.” The Darkmaster bent close, holding Garyll with the intense hunger that shone behind his eyes.

  “Are you ready to save their lives?”

  Coldness bit into him.

  “Accept me as your Master. They shall be spared.”

  I am the shadow and he is my master.

  He is the shadow and I am his caster.

  Garyll ground his teeth.

  The Master regarde
d him for a moment, then chuckled. There was no humour in the laugh, only disdain. “Oh, you will fall, have no fantasies about that. The mightiest always fall, and they fall the hardest.”

  “A demonstration, if you will,” the Darkmaster added, indicating the plain below. “Remember, I offer you the power to spare them.”

  Cabal lifted a dark orb from his own neck, a large crystal, the size of a child’s fist. He set his lips against it, then released it and spoke two words.

  “Darkswords, advance.”

  Garyll heard the command echoed within the stone on his own neck. It came with a wave of coercion. He tried to stand despite his fetters, so strong was the urgent need to respond. The Swords who were already gathered on the plain appeared attentive, some raised their hands in greeting. Then Garyll saw what they had—a tight formation of men marching out from the Keep. Men wearing the burnished mail of the King’s armoury. His men. His Swords, though Cabal had called them something else; Darkswords. It was worse than he had imagined. Close to fifty men. He knew what they bore on chains around their necks.

  “Fight the Dark! Resist! Stop!” he shouted over the battlement. But his voice was hoarse from a night of screaming, and the cold. Cabal wove a spell of motes, and threw the delicate lace over his head.

  “Silence.”

  Garyll guessed his words would not reach far, but he shouted nonetheless. The Darkmaster smiled, a sad, indulgent gesture.

  “It is too late to turn them back. They are already mine.”

  The Darkmaster spoke to the plains below, where the two groups of soldiers would soon meet. “Your fine, loyal rear-guard are true to the King. But those they face have a new master. Shall we see who is stronger?”

  The Swords who marched from the Ravenscroft hunched as if bearing a heavy weight. Despite their stance, they looked poised for action. The others had no idea of who approached.

  Not Swords, against fellow Swords!