by Tim Jones
Dinazhe screamed, his mouth open in a perfect 'O'. Kendik could see magic flowing out of him, streaming in blue light towards the portal. Suppressing a twinge—a faint, fleeting twinge—of pity, Kendik took two steps, seized Dinazhe's arms, braced himself, and swung the Nethermancer off his feet, flinging him towards the Horror and the portal beyond.
But as he flung Dinazhe towards the retreating Horror, so he felt himself seized in the dying man's grasp. Kendik brought up his right leg and kicked the Nethermancer hard in the gut. Dinazhe lost his grip and fell away from Kendik, towards the Horror. The beast was almost through the portal now, but its eager tentacles still reached out for the Nethermancer, dragging him out of Barsaive towards the Horror's home dimension. Dinazhe screamed again, but there was barely enough air left in the room for the sound to carry. He reached out his hands imploringly towards Kendik. Kendik fell to his knees, dizzy from lack of oxygen. He saw a tentacle, intimate and confidential, encircle Dinazhe's neck. The Nethermancer looked at Kendik, and their eyes locked, Dinazhe's black eyes boring into Kendik's brown ones. The Horror dragged the Nethermancer closer to the portal, and Dinazhe opened his mouth in soundless agony. Then, with a flash of light from some color outside the spectrum, the portal closed. Horror and Nethermancer were both gone. Kendik remained, passed out on the cold rock floor.
Someone was slapping his face and shouting his Name. The door to the room was open, and air—stale, humid, smelling of eons under the earth, and indescribably sweet—washed over him.
"He's awake!" said Anarya, and kissed him. He half responded, then slumped back to the floor again, enjoying the sensation of being, however marginally, alive.
"The door shut right in front of our faces," she continued, "and then we could hear shouting, and we didn't know —"
"The dead came then. Trying to get in," said Atlan.
The reanimated dead of Kaer Volost—not many, this far down in the kaer, but enough—had shambled into view, and stood scrabbling at the door, trying to get at whatever was within. Then Anarya and Atlan had heard the portal opening, more screaming, and a sudden silence, broken only by the patter of untenanted bones falling to the floor beside them. Whatever had been holding the door in place failed, and they had burst into the room, to see Kendik lying, pale and motionless, on the floor.
Kendik lay still and listened. He was grateful to his friends for saving him, but they seemed dim and insubstantial, almost ghosts themselves. Next to the universe he had glimpsed beyond the portal, nothing in this world seemed entirely real. A part of him wished that he had gone through the portal himself.
He sat up and shook his head, then took stock. He was bruised, bloodied, burned, mortally tired, cold, and ravenous. He was miles underground, relying on others to help him return to the surface. He was the uneasy ruler of a rebellious town in a turbulent region, and who knew what might have happened in Borzim since he left?
But he had won. He had defeated Dinazhe.
Wincing, he got to his feet. "Do you reckon we could find some food around here?" he asked.
In due course, they found Dinazhe's personal quarters, and in them, food and a hotpot to warm it, and wine and goblets to drink it. There, in the depths of the kaer, they sat, enjoying each other's company and the pleasures of stomachs filled and wounds tended. Though Kendik knew that his path and Anarya's might soon part, it was enough for the moment to enjoy her presence next to him, her warmth against his side.
"Servants up there," said Atlan.
Kendik had almost forgotten about the old couple. He imagined them, cold and frightened in the farm cave.
"Guess we'd better let them know what happened," he said.
Stiff and sore, cut and bruised, Kendik, Anarya, and Atlan rose to their feet and began the long journey out of Kaer Volost.
Epilogue
Lord Kendik stands on his balcony and looks out over his city. Though it is a fine, still morning, the air is thick with the smoke from his subjects' fires, and clamorous with the noise of their building and their making, their fighting and their dying. The city is crammed up against its walls, and in one part—the northern part—he has just ordered that a new wall be built, extending outwards from the present one, and ultimately replacing it. That will mean clearing the slums that have grown up north of the existing wall. Many inhabitants of those slums will protest their eviction. Some will be hurt. A few will die. It is a project he does not relish, but is prepared to embark upon.
He remembers a day, several years ago now, when he slept in a tent outside those walls and evaded death by inches. In sweeping away the hovels and the shacks that have grown up there, more numerous by the year, he will also be sweeping away another old memory, a memory it is no longer pleasant to recall.
And as for the gibbets outside the wall: well, there will always be places to build gibbets.
The t'skrang. He muses for a moment about the t'skrang, out there across the plains. It has cost money and lives, but he has ensured that Borzim has kept to the letter of its treaty with the House of the Wheel, and avoided warfare with the Ishkarat— though he knows there are forces on both sides that itch for battle. The time is not yet right. Let Vulumensthetika launch her long-delayed rebellion, let Ishkarat swords sever their link with Iopos; then will be the time to strike, to drive the t'skrang from the plains and send them scuttling back across the lake to Axalekso. After that, let the shivalahala on her island dream uneasy dreams of the might of Lord Kendik.
For a moment. a shadow passes over him, a shadow of memory and fear. He cranes upwards, looking for danger. But it is only a cloud.
He looks out over his city and believes that nothing escapes his gaze. But as his mother would tell you if you sought her out (for she has returned to her home village, and no longer travels much), he remains, in many ways, an unobservant boy. This heavy medallion that hangs around his neck, for example, this medallion which he clutches for solace in times of doubt and danger. Once he wore two medallions around his neck—the medallion he bought on a whim from a dusty shop on the Street of Apothecaries, and Lord Tesek's medallion of office. Long ago, they fused into one, but Kendik has never noticed.
That medallion never—or almost never—leaves his neck. He does not remove it when he washes, nor when he sleeps, nor when he rides to battle, or visits, incognito, the prison. He does not take it off when he makes love to his wife, the mother of his two children. There is only one person for whom he removes it, and that is Anarya Chezarin—a Swordmaster, an adventurer, the scourge of evil and of Horrors—on those few occasions, once a year at most, when she returns to Borzim. She has taken a dislike to the medallion for some reason, and insists that he removes it before she will come to his arms.
His wife knows better than to ask questions. A modest young woman, she has made a most advantageous match for herself and her family, and if her husband is from time to time absent from their bedchamber, who is she to complain? If he does not love her, he is, at least, solicitous of her welfare, for she has borne him heirs.
But Anarya knows him, and loves the boy he was, and the man he has become. She marks how he has changed, but ascribes those changes to the stresses of running a city and a kingdom. It is a life she cannot imagine and does not wish to share, for her desire is to ride free, alone or with chance companions of the road, and go where adventure takes her, till death or crippling age should cut her down. She is one woman now, and whole; and though she loves her Kendik still, she is not blind to his slight paunch, the first thinning of his hair, the load on his shoulders that comes, as she thinks, from bearing the crown.
Besides, not all of Kendik's absences from the bedchamber result from the news—brought to him by the faithful, though faintly disapproving, Kullik—that Anarya Chezarin has returned to Borzim and wishes to entertain Kendik in her quarters near the East Gate. Sometimes, he is abroad in the night because he does not sleep well. He has dreams, vivid dreams, dreams in which dark magics blast the flesh from his bones while his True patte
rn changes to something cold, and curdled, and strange. Dreams in which he is consumed by ravening Horrors, or brought to justice before creatures who sit immobile, vast, and cowled.
He has never seen those worlds, or met those creatures. But I have, I who bound myself to Kendik the moment he put on the medallion bearing my mark that he bought in the Street of Apothecaries, and I am always eager to share.
They think they know magic, these Name-givers. Wizards, Elementalists, Illusionists, most of all Nethermancers: they think they know what they are dealing with, know how to tame it and use it for their ends. They know nothing! Had they been in this world when the magic was at its height, when I and all my brethren gathered to reap its bountiful harvest, they would have known magic indeed; and they would have died shrieking that knowledge, a moment thereafter.
But they would not have noticed me. In the company of my mighty peers—crazed Artificer, potent Verjigorm, subtle Ysrthgrathe—I was a small thing, who scuttled about unnoticed, feeding off the scraps they left. Feeding, and learning. I knew that I could never match them for power or for appetite, but perhaps I could exceed them for cunning.
For the world was changing, and they were slow to notice. The magic was declining. Before long, the Horrors who needed the most magic to maintain themselves were winking out of existence like dying stars, returning to the astral plane. More and more of us were forced to leave this plane, and as the fate of Dinazhe's slimy pet R'zathcethel shows, too much magic is now as great a threat to us as too little. I have limited my needs, and remained in the background, and thus have I stayed in this world, feeding little, planning long. My brethren require the stronger emotions—anguish, torment, rage—but my staple diet is sadness, resignation, depression, despair: emotions which are only ever a Name-giver away.
Now Kullik comes out onto the balcony: the aged, faithful retainer. There is some matter of state for Kendik to turn his attention to. Go, Lord Kendik. Attend to the cares of your realm. They are real enough; it is not only my burden around your neck that drains you. In my way, I have grown fond of you. I look forward to our nightly meeting in your dreams.
My true skill is to remain unnoticed. Kendik has no idea that I have bound him to me. Though he wakes at times sweating and confused, he does not remember the dreams that have woken him. As for Kendik's steadfast refusal to play the lute, or sing, or draw, or paint: who would dare to demand such things of a King?
It would take a powerful magician indeed to detect me. Hathilt could do it, perhaps, were he looking hard enough; but he is many leagues away in the service of his King. Certainly, I have nothing to fear from the palace Wizard, Devlit. Healing bones and mending pots are about his level, though he still spends hours poring over Dinazhe's old scrolls, his mind too clouded by fear and longing to understand the implications of what he is reading.
His studies will be in vain. Though there is two fingers' width of magic left in the world, it is not destined to remain. Someone or something—I do not know who or what—is keeping it there beyond its time. Soon enough, it will all be gone, and the world will be a barren place indeed. No Horrors then, none except those the Name-givers construct for themselves out of fear and greed.
Perhaps I simplify. In places where the magic was especially strong, the echo of it will linger. Though they will no longer bear the title, or know what it means, Name-givers who walk through these places will feel the hairs rise on the backs of their necks: a deserted palace, an abandoned tower, a cave where, long ago, people might once have sought shelter. I will seek out such places, and I will wait there, wait out the long years of emptiness until the magic comes again. It will be a dull existence, feeding on a morsel of pain here, a thimbleful of anger there, but I have taught myself to be patient.
And the magic will come again. These things go in cycles, though the cycles are achingly slow. The descendants of these swarming humans will have long forgotten magic by then, and will raise up temples to themselves, spurning old ways and old gods. But when they least expect it, the magic will return in all its glory, and transform this world. Then it will be my world, and the returning Horrors—crazed Artificer, potent Verjigorm, subtle Ysrthgrathe—will not enter it without my permission. I am sure they will be eager to do my bidding.
After all, they will be very hungry, and we all have to eat.