For the Killing of Kings

by Howard Andrew Jones

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just say something that indicates you agree with what I’ve said. Go on.”

  “Um. Well.” She stared down at the disgusting creature, who smelled even worse at close range, especially after being cut open. “I agree that he didn’t seem especially bright. He wasn’t good at listening, either.”

  “Echo the compliment,” N’lahr instructed quietly.

  “Oh.” Why hadn’t they told her that to start with? “I have to admit he did seem brave. You’d have to be brave to challenge Kyrkenall the Eyeless.” More likely idiotic, but she knew now she was supposed to be kind.

  “Now drink.”

  She did, and found it a cloyingly sweet berry wine with no kick. She passed it on to the commander.

  “To the undisputable bravery of Vorn,” N’lahr said, and downed a drink. He passed it back to Kyrkenall. Either the stiffness in his left arm had finally cleared up, or the swordsman had grown better at concealing it, for the movement appeared effortless. The archer capped the winesac, and the three walked back to their horses.

  Elenai felt strangely moved, though confused.

  “Is that awful wine what you used to bring to my tomb?” N’lahr asked.

  “Awful?” Kyrkenall climbed into his saddle.

  “Next time bring something I like.”

  “You didn’t complain so much when you were dead.”

  After a brief pause, N’lahr added, “He was right, you know. That last bit didn’t properly rhyme.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Kyrkenall asked with mock injury. He urged his mare forward.

  Elenai gathered the lead lines and followed them both. The wind came up almost as soon as they crossed the bridge to climb into the hills beyond. The clouds were piling up. A storm was probably a few hours away. Elenai finally decided that she had to have an answer. “Why did you honor the kobalin? He wasn’t famous, was he?”

  Both men glanced over their shoulders at her, and she wondered if they’d forgotten she was there. “You should honor bravery,” N’lahr said, “even in a foe.”

  “But we didn’t drink over the dead Altenerai.”

  Kyrkenall all but spat his answer. “They lied, cheated, ambushed, and murdered. The kobalin announced his presence and offered challenge. I honored him accordingly.”

  That still didn’t quite explain away the ceremony. “When you drank to the dead tower guards you weren’t nearly as formal as you were about Vorn.”

  “The kobalin are a formal people,” N’lahr said.

  Formal? “I don’t understand, Commander. The kobalin are mad, aren’t they? I mean, what sane being would lie in wait by a bridge and challenge all comers?”

  “They drive the crazy ones from their lands,” N’lahr explained. “They have tribes and traditions, and those who can’t obey get kicked out. And sometimes the best of them journey out to prove themselves against us, or the Naor.” He paused for a moment, then added: “They aren’t so bad as you think. I made overtures to some of their tribes, once, to see if they wanted to join the fight against Mazakan.”

  “You were going to ally with kobalin?”

  “Neither the kobalin nor the Naor are stage-play villains.”

  She thought she’d been stunned before. “The Naor are savages!” You could excuse the kobalin a little because they weren’t fully human, and because they did have a strange but fixed sense of honor. The Naor were “human,” but couldn’t claim to hold even to the bizarre codes of the kobalin. They sawed hearts from their living foes and piled their heads in great heaps. They treated women as chattel, and some even cut the tongues from girls’ heads so they could never speak. Even their words were warped, some tribes speaking with such profound distortion they might as well be talking gibberish.

  “I hope you don’t underestimate them,” N’lahr said.

  “No, sir. I hate them, but I don’t underestimate them.”

  He gave her a long glance from under dark brows. “Be careful with hate. It’s a potent blinder.”

  The conversation ended with a rattle of reins as N’lahr moved ahead. Elenai simmered at the rebuke but was afraid that she’d already said too much. She knew better than to underestimate an enemy. At least, she thought she did. She remembered something Decrin had once told the squires about N’lahr; that he’d rarely wasted words, implying those he did speak were valuable. She realized that this was the longest exchange they’d had where he wasn’t questioning her knowledge of current events in Darassus.

  She fell quiet at the rear as they wound into the hills, turning over everything they’d said, under a downpour that didn’t seem to incline her two Altenerai toward slowing. The wet march through indistinct ups and downs magnified her sense of disorientation. Comrades and heroes were enemies, and enemies deserved honor, and the queen was ignoring the laws.…

  Madness made real.

  As the day wore on, the sun returned and the hills flattened somewhat into drier grassland ringed by distant peaks. They spotted a handful of isolated homesteads built upon the slopes. A few sent streams of smoke into the sky, and she thought of cook fires and cozy hearths and wondered why she had so craved a military life. She had plenty of time to note every sore, stiff, chaffing, damp, hungry ache as she watched the presumably simple comforts slide by.

  As the afternoon aged into maturity, they neared a large ruined settlement spread along the base of a valley. Crops grew wildly in the abandoned fields among weedy trees and wild plants. Here and there were burned-out support timbers and collapsed piles of masonry. What must have been streets were little more than animal trails.

  Kyrkenall rode straight down the center of the path, his black eyes studying all that they passed with great care. Elenai had seen the Naor in action and steeled herself for signs of their passage. When she saw no skull mound it occurred to her that the Altenerai would have made certain all remains were buried or burned. Broken weapons, too, were absent.

  All in all, it seemed an idyllic place, complete with fertile and well-watered soil. “Why didn’t anyone come back here?” she asked.

  “It’ll be years before there are enough people to reclaim all the ruined land,” Kyrkenall answered. “And even then a massacre like this leaves a stain that doesn’t fade for generations. You can feel it, can’t you?”

  Elenai blanched. At the end of primary education, when she’d been ten, a young instructor had taken those believed of magical talent to a battle site. To prove themselves. A more experienced instructor would have known better.

  Some traditions taught that spectral remnants were merely a kind of traumatic energy echo inscribed into the soil or that actual souls were trapped where they’d died terrible deaths. Whatever remained, Elenai had seen a half dozen of them staggering through the ruins of an Arappan village razed by the Naor. She had never forgotten the sight of the little girl with the missing face. It had been small recompense when the instructor realized his mistake and ushered them away with apologies and promises of sweets; he left his post soon after.

  She had no intention of looking ’round the inner world now. She had enough nightmares. “I think I do feel it,” she told Kyrkenall, which wasn’t really a lie, because she could well imagine what she’d see if she stretched her senses any further.

  They reached the end of the ruins, and the old road devolved once more into a track through wilds that had once been farmed. Here and there she saw clumps of good wheat growing amid the regular grasses, rippled now by fingers of the wind.

  They rode on and up, and Kyrkenall broke his silence to tell her they were only two valleys away from the settlement where Belahn lived. Elenai could hardly wait to get out of the saddle.

  As they crossed over the broad crest of a scrub-covered hill they caught sight of a trio of riders downslope from the green-brown heights of the valley’s far side. The one in vanguard pointed their direction even as a column of troops climbed into view behind him.

  Elenai felt her lips curling in disgus
t as her heart rate sped. Naor. Each wore a leather-topped helm with a nasal bar, and a heavy overshirt of banded leather. Their clothing otherwise was of different shades of blue or brown or beige, and their skin was pale and ruddy beneath shaggy beards. They bore no banners, and from this distance she couldn’t see enough detail to determine whether these were one of the three clans responsible for the devastation in her own region of Arappa. It scarcely mattered; all Naor were equally bad, except those few who were a little worse. She could make out the straight tips of bows standing over their shoulders. The Naor never took the time or developed the skill to craft recurved bows.

  “A whole lot of Naor,” Kyrkenall announced resentfully. “A humping regiment of Naor, raiding into The Fragments. Shit. This is just what we needed.”

  “Do you think they’ve attacked Belahn’s village?” Elenai asked.

  “Wyndyss is still to our north. But it looks like that’s where they’re headed. Damn ’em to the deepest shifts!”

  The commander’s narrow face had grown grim. His voice was distant, nearly emotionless. “It looks like an exploratory column. They’re traveling light for this far in. Only a few extra mounts. No supply wagons.”

  “You mean they’re riding ahead for an even larger group?” Elenai asked.

  “Most likely,” Kyrkenall answered.

  As they sat watching, one of the Naor scouts turned his horse and galloped back toward the main body of the column. Elenai felt certain he was reporting his glimpse of the Altenerai.

  “What are we going to do?” Elenai asked.

  N’lahr answered. “Delay them. Warn Belahn. Ready a defense.”

  Kyrkenall was already pulling his bow from his saddle holster. Like all horn bows, remaining strung for long periods did little harm to the weapon.

  “Aren’t you out of range?” Elenai asked.

  “Aye, typical range for a hornbow is about five hundred yards. But Arzhun’s no normal bow.” He added, “Even still, this is a trick.” He signaled his mount to “firm” and the dun stiffened her legs, becoming rock still. Kyrkenall rose in his stirrups, put arrow to string, breathed in and out three times, then said quietly: “‘So soon it seems that they forget to ward themselves from all I know. Thus lightning falls.’”

  He quoted Selana again, from her third play, The Fall of Myralon.

  One of the distant mounted scouts stirred nervously.

  “That one, I think.” Kyrkenall moved, swaying gently, almost as though he had become one with the wind, then let fly.

  The arrow arched out over the wide valley, high into the air. She watched in confusion. Even if Arzhun were the finest bow ever made, how could it send an arrow a distance four or more times greater than any other?

  The arrow drifted wildly in the wind, yards off course, seeming to hang suspended in the sky. And then it dropped like a hawk in dive, honing in with astonishing accuracy. The scout stiffened in pain as an arrow sprouted in his leg. His horse bucked.

  Elenai gaped. It had been an amazing shot, even for the greatest archer in all the realms.

  Kyrkenall stood in his stirrups and shook the black bow as his ululating war whoop rang across the valley. Every one of the dozens of Naor coming up over the hill turned to look at him.

  N’lahr let out a single bark of laughter and lifted his sword so that the sun shone upon it.

  Elenai grinned as they retreated around a bend in the hill. “That was incredible! I can’t believe you made that shot!”

  “I was aiming for his head,” Kyrkenall said, “but I’m glad you approve.”

  “Why did you do that, though? Did you want them to chase us?”

  “Apart from shooting a Naor riding through our lands—which is seldom a bad idea—I let it be known I was the one doing the shooting. Now they’ll be nervous to follow, because they might expect me to lie in wait and pepper anyone who comes after.”

  “And they might think us scouts for a larger force,” N’lahr explained. “Another reason for them to delay, which will buy us time.”

  “Are we going to lie in wait and shoot them?”

  Kyrkenall answered. “No, we’re going to ride like the wind to Wyndyss.”

  N’lahr simply clicked his tongue and urged his horse into a faster pace.

  They rode at a strong clip, trailed still by the spare mounts. Keen-eyed Kyrkenall brought up the rear, watching for pursuit.

  N’lahr warned her to “mind the drops.” In a short while Elenai knew what those enigmatic words meant. He led them into high, rocky terrain, a place where the Gods had tired of making gentle, rounded things. Far, far below lay delicate little canyons with their sparkling streams between steep outcroppings.

  Neither N’lahr nor his unfamiliar mount seemed perturbed by the astonishing sheer drops that lay on the left hand, though they had to slow. Elenai had never really thought herself worried about heights, but then she’d never been quite so high before. The world below seemed a faerie land populated by miniature versions of the plants and creatures she knew.

  Her new horse proved heartier than she. Like the others they’d taken from the Chasm Tower, he was a Penarda, that Kaneshi breed famed for speed, stamina, and intelligence, and he was as equable as the animals in the Altenerai stables, if not as calm before enemies. He probably hadn’t been trained by Sharn, the Altenerai stable master. The chestnut moved confidently, finding sure footing no matter the narrowness of the trail. A couple of the spare mounts proved troublesome, however, balking and slowing their progress. At N’lahr’s advice, she cut them free, to neigh and stamp in protest while the steadier horses moved on. Though scared to proceed, they seemed more frightened to be left and eventually followed, catching up when the trail widened.

  By evening they were once more in a long lower valley, and N’lahr informed her they were nearing Wyndyss. Kyrkenall caught up, his mouth twisted in consternation.

  “How many are following?”

  “Oh, we’re clear of the Naor. We lost them a long while back.”

  “Altenerai,” N’lahr said flatly.

  “You were supposed to let me say it.”

  Elenai felt her heart spurring to gallop. So at long last the Altenerai had found their trail. Or, more like, finally caught up to the trail they’d long pursued.

  “When the Naor noted six in blue hot after our own line,” Kyrkenall continued, “they veered off. I suppose some of our pursuers might be exalts. They’ve got squires, too. And a whole lot of spare horses.”

  “How far back?” N’lahr asked.

  “Only a few hours. There’s no point in trying to lose them. I’m sure the lead was Tretton.”

  N’lahr frowned as he shifted in his saddle.

  “But we’ll get to Wyndyss before them, right?” Elenai asked. “And we can get fresh horses there, and turn off this hearthstone.”

  “Sure,” Kyrkenall said.

  She wished his tone were more reassuring. “Do you think Belahn’s going to believe us?”

  “Kind of hard not to be convincing when we’ve got someone returned from the dead,” Kyrkenall pointed out.

  “But what will he think if the rest of the Altenerai come riding up right after we meet him? Will he listen to us quickly? Is he … reasonable?”

  “In some ways, he’s the most well-balanced of us,” N’lahr said, with an intriguing hint of sentiment. “He has a wife, children, grandchildren. He’s had a distinguished career in the corps, but it’s not his whole life. Nevertheless, I suggest we hurry so we have time with him before the others.” He touched heels to his horse’s flanks and galloped deeper into the valley.

  He slowed as the ground rose into rocky prominence to right and left, creating a narrow defile just beyond a well-built tower of black basalt.

  “What’s wrong?” Elenai asked, breathing hard. Her damp horse was puffing beneath her.

  “This pass to Wyndyss used to be wider.”

  Elenai cast around for an explanation, given there were no visible signs of a catastroph
e. “Could Belahn have altered it, with magic?”

  “Looks like,” Kyrkenall offered with a serious expression as he reined up next to her. The commander guided his horse straight for the tower.

  Elenai eyed its blank windows in concern. There was no movement save the low wind shaking trees on the surrounding mountainsides. An owl hooted, whistling down the twilight as if to emphasize the desolation.

  N’lahr dismounted before the tower and tested the weathered oaken door. It yielded to his hand. With a glance back in their direction, he headed in. Elenai listened to his footsteps scuffing the stairs, and after a time she saw him walk out onto the crenelated height three stories above. He stood there for a time before retreating.

  When at last he emerged, he climbed immediately into the saddle. “Empty,” he said. “Looks like it’s been abandoned for months.”

  “Do you think the Naor have already been here?”

  “No skull mounds,” was the succinct answer.

  Kyrkenall followed N’lahr into the defile, and she went after.

  It proved scarcely wide enough for two wagons to roll side by side, and darker than N’lahr’s tomb. The bowman kept shifting his gaze between the height, some thirty feet overhead, and the lighter opening. Elenai was acutely aware of their vulnerability. There was no way to see, or counter, any attack that might drop on them from above, and she felt her tension ease only when they emerged safely into the dying light of a valley beyond.

  Once there she gasped in wonder.

  The wide, verdant basin before them was a paradise. To their north, twin waterfalls cascaded from the mountain heights, sending spray flying. The water was diverted into streams that flowed through terraced rice paddies stacked on the steep hillsides. Reflecting pools and shade trees were sprinkled regularly among them.

  A little river gathered from the irrigation effluence and flowed past the valley entrance before winding east along a well-tended orchard with trees carefully trimmed to resemble one another. The wildflower-bordered road before them crossed the river via an arched stone bridge and led through pasture and grain fields to a small walled village tucked along the sheer cliffside at the valley rear. Gabled slate roofs caught the last slanting rays above well-tended wattle and daub houses, some three stories high.