The Doom of Kings: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 1

by Don Bassingthwaite

  The song of the duur’kala peaked as the lower curve of the sun cleared the horizon and morning came to Rhukaan Draal. The three singers turned to face Geth. Ekhaas and Senen continued to sing, but Aaspar looked at him and spoke.

  “Stand,” she said, the word like music. Even her speech was song—how had he not heard that before?

  Geth stood, rising awkwardly. His legs felt like wood at first, then they felt like they were on fire as sensation returned to them in a rush of tingling agony. He twisted and almost fell, catching himself at the last moment—but not before his gaze had turned away, just for a moment, from the duur’kala.

  Smoke rose to the north. Great black clouds of it, twisting high up into the air to be pushed into leaning pillars by the morning breeze. There were other people on the roof, too. Chetiin, Midian, Dagii, Ashi. Munta the Gray. Tariic. Vanii. Haruuc.

  The lhesh wore armor, heavy and spiked, with a helmet to take the place of his crown. Tariic and Vanii wore armor as well. Munta wore a grave expression.

  “Don’t speak!” Aaspar said sharply. “Look at me!”

  Geth turned back to her, the motion bringing new pain into his legs. Aaspar lifted her hand and Geth, instinctively, raised Wrath to match her. The old woman drew breath and began to sing again, her voice blending back into Senen’s and Ekhaas’s.

  The song had changed. It was deep and dark, like a cave that had never seen daylight. There was a longing in it, a reminder of … Home? Friends? Family? Geth found himself thinking of a village in the northern Eldeen Reaches that he hadn’t thought of in years and of a man and a woman who had died long before. But he caught only the edge of the song. Aaspar was singing to Wrath.

  He felt the sword’s response, and new images passed through his vision. Taruuzh with miner’s pick in hand, breaking rocks to expose the dark ore vein of Khaar Vanon. Taruuzh with a hammer before a forge. The song altered slightly and the image shifted to focus on a rod of byeshk, as long as Geth’s forearm and as thick as his wrist, that shone in the forge light as Taruuzh polished its rune-carved surface. A tremor passed through Wrath.

  “Now,” said Aaspar, “turn and point the way!”

  The voices of the duur’kala rose once more, then fell away, but the surging pulse in Wrath remained. With the certainty of a compass needle, Geth turned and pointed the sword south-southwest.

  “There.” His voice was cracked and raw. “The rod is there.”

  Aaspar clicked her tongue in satisfaction, then broke the charcoal circle with a brush of her foot. For a moment, the roof remained silent as if everyone watching Geth were afraid to say anything, then a look of annoyance crossed Aaspar’s face. “It’s over,” she said, turning away. “It worked.”

  Voices broke out all around him with expressions of excitement and thanks. Ekhaas and Ashi were the first ones to reach him. As if the touch of their hands had severed ropes holding him up, Geth drooped back into their arms. Exhaustion, pain, and hunger washed over him. Senen held Wrath’s scabbard, and with her help, Geth guided the sword back into it. His fingers cramped, and he had to will them to open and release the sword’s hilt. The magic of the song was still in the sword—he knew that he could touch Wrath and he would feel the distant presence of the rod once more.

  “I saw the stories of Kuun,” he croaked.

  “I knew you would,” Ekhaas said. “I knew you were listening.”

  “No, it was Wrath—Wrath remembers,” he said, but his dry throat seized and the words just came out as a rasp. Chetiin held out a cup of water. Geth took it with shaking hands and drank eagerly. Before he could try to repeat himself, though, Haruuc stepped in front of him.

  “You know where the rod is? Do you know far?”

  Geth shook his head. “I can feel a direction, but that’s all. It could be in Rhukaan Draal or it could be across the Thunder Sea in Xen’drik.”

  Haruuc’s ears dipped but he nodded. “It is as much as I should have hoped for. Thank you, Geth.” He put a hand on Geth’s shoulder. “I would have given you a week to rest after this, but we don’t have that time. You have a day at most—you must leave tomorrow morning.”

  “What? Why?” Geth asked, then remembered what he had glimpsed and twisted around against the hands that supported him to look at the smoke billowing into the northern sky. “What is that? What’s burning?”

  “The fields on the far side of the Ghaal,” growled Haruuc. “The Gan’duur struck last night. They’re burning crops.”

  “Grandfather Rat.”

  “Cho. They’re getting too bold. I want you away in case they try to come south of the river.” The lhesh stepped back and put a fist to his chest. “Swift travel and great glory, Geth.”

  He turned and left the rooftop with Tariic, Vanii, and Munta following him. Tariic turned and met Geth’s eyes, saluting him as his uncle had before going down the stairs. Dagii moved to face Geth. “I could have everything ready as early as tonight,” he said.

  The tales he had seen in the night throbbed in Geth’s head. The heroes of Kuun wouldn’t have waited. Neither would he. Geth drew a deep breath, braced himself, and stood. A wave of dizziness came over him, but he fought it back and took Wrath when Senen offered the sword to him.

  “Do it,” he told Dagii. “We ride at dusk.”

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Their first night out of Rhukaan Draal was the most difficult, at least for Geth. Although he’d broken his fast with a tremendous meal and slept through most of the day, the effects of his vigil on the roof of Khaar Mbar’ost lingered in his bones. He swayed in the saddle and kept falling asleep as they rode. More than once he wondered if maybe they should have waited until the morning, but he knew that the stories of the past wouldn’t have let him. They churned inside him, demanding action. The entire party—Ekhaas and Ashi, Dagii, Chetiin, and Midian—felt the urgency to be on the road, though. Haruuc hadn’t returned to Khaar Mbar’ost by nightfall, but reports of events beyond the Ghaal River had: the Gan’duur’s descent on the fields had been swift and thorough. A significant portion of the crops, summer-dry and almost ready for harvest, had burned, and the Gan’duur raiding parties were still roaming the countryside, causing more havoc.

  When they stopped near dawn, Geth all but tumbled out of his saddle. Dagii let none of them sleep for long, however. By midafternoon, they were riding again. It became their pattern to ride through the afternoon and evening and late into the night, sleeping through the dawn and morning hours. As Chetiin explained to Geth, in a land where most of the population was as comfortable at night as during the day, dawn was the least active time and the safest period to rest.

  Geth missed riding with the goblin behind him, but Chetiin had, as he’d said, acquired a mount of his own, one that was almost as silent as he was. While the rest of the party clopped along on Tariic’s magebred horses—or in Midian’s case on his magical pony—Chetiin rode a great black wolf that padded beside them like a shadow. There was a disturbing, malevolent sharpness in the animal’s eyes, and when Ashi commented that first night that she felt like the wolf was watching them all, the snarl that came from its muzzle sounded eerily like speech.

  “She is watching you,” Chetiin said, “and she’d prefer if you didn’t call her ‘the wolf.’ Her name is Marrow. She’s a worg.” He scratched behind his mount’s ears. “Her pack has an ancient alliance with the taarka’khesh. She’s agreed to travel with me as a favor.”

  “How can she run with the horses?” Geth asked. “I’d have thought they’d be terrified.”

  Chetiin produced a vial of slightly milky liquid. “A taarka’khesh preparation. She smells like a horse.” Marrow growled and Chetiin added, “Not that she’s happy about it.”

  Like the landscape between Matshuc Zaal and the Gathering Stone, the ruins of human habitation marked the country that they rode through south of Rhukaan Draal. It lacked, however, the feeling of emptiness and desolation. The fields and orchards that had run wild alongside the trade
road had been tamed, though in many places it wasn’t farmers working the soil, but slaves. Through the long afternoons, the distant crack of overseers’ whips was as common as birdsong. In Matshuc Zaal, the slaves had been goblins, hobgoblins, and kobolds, but Geth was shocked to see humans, dwarves, and shifters in the fields as well. Ekhaas looked ashamed when he asked her about it. “Captives taken during the war or in raids,” she said “If Haruuc were riding this way, you wouldn’t see them. The overseers would hide them until he passed.”

  “He must know they’re there,” growled Geth. “Why doesn’t he free them?”

  “Haruuc holds a sword by the blade,” said Ekhaas. “Promises of plunder—including slaves—were one of Haruuc’s first tools in uniting the clans. Now he’s paying for that. Warlords like Daavn of the Marhaan are hungry for more wealth and he can’t give it to them. He has to balance his desire to show a civilized face to the Five Nations with a need to keep appeased the clans that support him.”

  “If he ordered them to free their slaves, they’d turn against him faster than the Gan’duur have,” said Midian.

  Ekhaas scowled but nodded at the gnome’s blunt assessment.

  They traveled more slowly than they had along the trade road. They still followed roads, but the byways were old and not well-maintained. It was only a little better than riding across open country. At least they didn’t always need to camp rough. On several nights, Dagii led them to the stronghold of one or another clan. Sometimes the strongholds were large and sometimes they were small, but they always welcomed Dagii and the rest of the party with grace and honor. The first few times they found shelter in a clan stronghold, Geth assumed their welcome came because they traveled under Haruuc’s banner, but then one night he happened to let his hand rest on Wrath as Dagii and the local warlord exchanged greetings.

  “We come with peace in our hearts and our blades in their sheaths,” Dagii said in a phrase that sounded like ritual. “We ride on behalf of Lhesh Haruuc, who asks you to take us in as your guests for a night.”

  The warlord, a powerfully built hobgoblin wearing the crest of a sundered shield, laughed at the ritual. “The lhesh might ask, but I’ll take you in because you are the one at my gate, Dagii. Welcome, brother!”

  “Brother?” Geth asked Chetiin.

  “It’s an old courtesy between friendly clan chiefs.” When surprise passed across Geth’s face, Chetiin’s ears twitched up. “You didn’t realize? Dagii is chief of the Mur Talaan.”

  “I didn’t know that. I thought he was just a member of the clan, the way Tariic’s a member of the Rhukaan Taash.” Geth stared at Dagii’s back as he followed the local warlord into his stronghold. “What does his clan do while he’s serving Haruuc?”

  “The Mur Talaan is a very small clan. It was never big and war made it smaller. I wouldn’t ask him about it—it’s a private matter to him. What’s left of the clan gets along well enough without his interference.”

  “Where is Mur Talaan’s territory?”

  “Rhukaan Draal.”

  Geth looked at the goblin in amazement. Chetiin shrugged. “The Cyran town that Haruuc conquered to build Rhukaan Draal was at the edge of Mur Talaan territory. Fenic, Dagii’s father and the first of Haruuc’s shava, ceded it to Haruuc as a place that would be neutral to all the clans of Darguun. Over time, the rest of their territory was lost, but the land beneath Rhukaan Draal still technically belongs to the Mur Talaan, even if the lhesh controls the city. It brings them—and Dagii—a great deal of honor, although very little else.”

  “If a human clan owned all the land under a city the size of Rhukaan Draal, they’d be as wealthy as a dragonmarked house.”

  Chetiin’s ears twitched again. “Can you imagine trying to collect rents or taxes in Rhukaan Draal?”

  “I guess not.” Geth glanced again at Dagii, still talking with the local warlord, and tried to imagine the warrior who wore Haruuc’s crest as a warlord in his own right. Maybe the responsibilities of a clan chief were the reason he seemed so stiff.

  As they traveled farther from Rhukaan Draal, roads became paths and the strongholds of warlords became increasingly far apart. Territories were larger and some areas were simply unclaimed by any warlord. Bandits roamed these areas—and local strongmen who were simply bandits settled down and gone to seed. When they camped under the moons, they posted watches; when they stayed under a roof, it was less Dagii’s invocation of Haruuc’s name that earned them hospitality than Ekhaas’s promise of stories told with the skill of a duur’kala.

  Several times a day, Geth drew Wrath and held it out before him to be certain they were still on course, still heading south-southwest. On the tenth night of their journey, the same night that the last path ended at the long burned remains of a farmstead, they reached the eastern foothills of the Seawall Mountains. The hills were far more rugged in the south than they had been in the north at the Marguul Pass—and for the first time they discovered the weakness in Wrath’s ability to point to the distant Rod of Kings.

  “Grandfather Rat’s naked tail.” Geth stared along the length of Wrath as if closer inspection might somehow change the fact that the twilight blade pointed straight at the sheer rock face of a long escarpment.

  “It points directly to the rod, doesn’t it?” said Ashi. “No matter what’s in the way. Rond betch.”

  “We’ll find a way up or around,” Dagii said grimly. He turned his horse to the south and urged it onward.

  It was Marrow who eventually found a way up the escarpment, sniffing out a narrow trail apparently used by wild game to reach a pool at the escarpment’s base. The worg was able to bound up the trail with little difficulty, but the rest of them—with the exception of Midian, who simply dismissed his pony and tucked the silver horseshoe back into his pack—had to dismount and lead their horses up. By the time they reached the brow of the escarpment, dawn was breaking.

  The ground above the escarpment was no less rugged than that below. When Geth held up Wrath again, the sword pointed to a hill that was only a little less steep than the escarpment. If they’d been able to travel as the sword pointed, the even harsher slopes of the gray mountains were only a day’s ride away.

  Dagii’s ears folded back. “We travel by daylight from now on,” he said. “We need to be able to see what’s coming so we can avoid it.”

  The rest of them replied with grunts and groans of exhaustion, although Midian added, “At least we know the rod is in the mountains.”

  “How do you see that?” Geth asked.

  “The sword points up. If the rod was somewhere beyond the mountains, it wouldn’t. We’re going to be climbing.”

  Geth groaned again.

  Vounn told herself that she had done what she could. More than she should have, perhaps. When, after days of shouting about her desire to leave Rhukaan Draal, Ashi had come to her with a simple and reasonable argument—that allowing the bearer of the Siberys Mark of Sentinel to aid in the search for the Rod of Kings would certainly bring influence to Deneith, not just with Haruuc but with his successors—Vounn had almost been too overwhelmed to resist agreeing on the spot.

  She had resisted, of course. Very little got the better of her. She’d turned the issue over in her mind, considering it from all sides. She had a strong suspicion that Ashi didn’t really believe in what she was saying and that, to her, it was just another attempt to get Vounn to let her follow her friends. Her charge was, though, correct for a change. Her participation in the quest would reflect very well on Deneith. The look of surprise on Ashi’s face when Vounn had finally agreed was almost amusing.

  She had changed her mind as she watched Ashi ride out of Khaar Mbar’ost, but it had been too late then. Ashi was gone like a bird from the nest. Most of the time she could accept that. Vounn just hoped that she would never have to explain the loss of the Siberys Mark to the patriarch of House Deneith.

  And while she waited for Ashi’s return, there were other duties that Breven d’Deneith expected of
her.

  The warlords of Haruuc’s court were more than eager to become acquainted with the envoy of House Deneith, but there was one clan that defied all of her efforts. Senen Dhakaan of the Kech Volaar refused to meet with her, in spite of the secret knowledge that they shared. Formal requests were rebuffed. Casual approaches were ignored. The warriors of the Dhakaani clans were famous for their skill at fighting in formation, but Deneith had never found enough influence with the proud, independent clans to hire their warriors as mercenaries. If Vounn could bring the warriors of the Kech Volaar into Deneith’s legions, it would be a triumph.

  From what Vounn could see, though, the Word Bearers might have deigned to ally themselves with Haruuc, but their attitude toward Deneith had changed no more than a mountain in a day. So she went to Haruuc.

  Aruget followed her, of course. Vounn would have preferred to have a Deneith mercenary guarding her, but she’d accepted Haruuc’s offer of hobgoblin guards gracefully. At least they knew the lhesh’s fortress and the city, and Aruget, at least, had proved that he understood when to keep his mouth closed and obey orders.

  She found Haruuc alone, brooding over a great map laid out on a table in a room with more maps hung on the walls. Vounn paused a respectable distance away from the table and dropped into a curtsy. “Lhesh,” she said.

  He raised his head and looked at her with weary eyes. “Lady Vounn.”

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “You’re a welcome change from the disturbances of the Gan’duur.” He forced energy into his face and beckoned her closer. “Look at this. Tell me what you see.”

  Vounn looked down at the map. Bright colors stood out on a faded background—the basic map had been created many years ago and updated several times. It showed Rhukaan Draal, its outskirts drawn and redrawn as the city expanded, and the surrounding area. The Ghaal River with its cataracts and the road leading north to the Gathering Stone were easy to recognize. The map also marked hills, streams, ravines, farmholds, and lanes. Simple wooden markers painted red, black, or white had been placed atop it, mostly to the north of the city. The black markers lay in scattered patterns atop farmholds, the red in a sweeping arc, the white in widely scattered clusters.