Sword of Caledor (4 page)

Others had simply deserted, vanishing in the night, never to return. Tyrion did not blame them for that under the circumstances.

Leiber had not vanished. He was just as obsessed with finding the city of Zultec as the twins were. Of course, he had his own reasons. For Tyrion and his brother, Zultec was the last known possible resting place of Sunfang, the mystical blade forged for their ancestor Aenarion by the archmage Caledor Dragontamer during the wars at the dawn ages of the world.

For Leiber, it represented a trove of gold and mystical secrets that he hoped would let him reclaim the ancestral lands he had lost back across the wide ocean. He claimed to have penetrated to the very heart of the city once and to have spent the past few years trying to find a way back.

Tyrion was not sure how much he trusted the man or the remainder of his companions. They were desperate rogues even by the standards of the rough crew you met in the makeshift human camps of the Lustrian coast. They had the look of casual killers. Most of them were descended from the same Norse folk that had raided the coasts of Ulthuan for centuries: big, wild-looking, blond men with braided hair and beards. Their eyes were the blue of painted Cathayan ceramics. Their manner was bluff and fierce. They swore by the names of strange Kurgan and Hung gods. These ominous deities reminded Tyrion of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, and he would not have been surprised to find out that they were related.

All of the humans except Leiber glanced at the two elves as if considering murdering them for their gold and scampering back to the old, decaying port of Skeggi, the only real permanent settlement along the whole coast. No one there would ask them how they came by the money, or what had happened to those who had went off into the jungle with them. Skeggi was a city of pirates and robbers and mad dreamers.

Tyrion was not troubled. There were only five of the humans now and he could handle them himself even without the aid of Teclis’s magic. Providing, of course, they did not cut his throat while he was sleeping. He smiled nonchalantly.

‘You find something funny, sir elf,’ said Leiber. His voice was a harsh croak well suited to his guttural native speech, so unlike the liquid tongue of the elves.

‘No, Leiber, I am merely happy,’ said Tyrion in Reikspiel, the common language the humans used. It was true too. There was something about this desperate venture that gladdened his heart. He was rarely happier than when off on some quest in the company of his wizard twin.

‘You find all of these deaths cause for happiness? I had heard elves were cruel, my friend, but I had not thought to find you to be an example of that.’

‘You are confusing us with our kinfolk, the druchii, whom you call dark elves. The deaths give me no happiness. It is the adventure I enjoy.’

He did not know if he could explain himself to Leiber or whether he should. At times like these, he felt as if he was living out one of the hero tales he and Teclis had loved when they were boys.

It seemed to him that their lives had turned out exactly the way they would have wished them too. He was a warrior who had fought in the service of the Phoenix King and made himself wealthy trading and raiding the coasts of Naggaroth. Teclis had served his apprenticeship in magic under Lady Malene in Lothern and was now a student at the White Tower of Hoeth in Saphery. He was the youngest Loremaster in generations. His twin was widely acknowledged as possibly the most brilliant wizard Ulthuan had produced since the time of Bel Hathor.

He was going to need to be. Both of them knew it was only a matter of time before the daemon N’Kari, the most ancient enemy of their family, returned and attempted to claim their souls. The Keeper of Secrets had very nearly succeeded in wiping out the entire blood line of Aenarion during his attack on Ulthuan a century ago. Only Teclis’s invocation of the power of the Phoenix God Asuryan had defeated him and saved the twins’ lives.

According to Teclis, at least a century would need to have passed before N’Kari could be summoned again, or could reform a body of his own will and emerge from the Chaos Wastes. That time had come and gone. If he wanted to, the Keeper of Secrets could return to this world.

Tyrion felt sure the daemon would not make the mistakes he had made during his last incursion either. Even for an entity as powerful as N’Kari, a direct attack on the shrine of Asuryan, mightiest of the elven gods, had been an act of self-destructive hubris.

The certainty of the daemon’s return was one reason they were seeking Sunfang. A mighty weapon borne by the first Phoenix King, it should be capable of harming even a greater daemon and it would give Tyrion some chance of surviving an attack.

He smiled again somewhat ruefully. By some chance, he meant an infinitesimal chance. He had fought the daemon once and was a good enough warrior to know exactly how little hope he had of beating something like N’Kari, even with a magical weapon. Still, it was better than no chance at all.

‘I wish he would stop smiling like that,’ one of the humans muttered. ‘It makes me nervous.’

Tyrion felt certain that most of the humans had no idea how well he understood their tongue, having learned it in the rougher quarters of Lothern during his long residence in the city. It was a small advantage but any advantage was to be cherished here.

‘How much further?’ he asked Leiber.

Leiber scratched his chin to make himself look more thoughtful. ‘A few more leagues at most.’

‘You’ve been saying that for some time now,’ said Teclis. His ironic tone was understandable even to Leiber.

‘Finding your way through this cursed jungle is not like sailing a ship, your honour,’ said Leiber. ‘I can’t simply navigate by the stars. Things grow here. Landmarks get hidden. Rain washes away trails. It’s guesswork at best.’

To be fair to Leiber, he had never lied about any of this, or made any bones about the difficulty of finding Zultec. He had been perfectly open about how hard it would be. He had merely claimed that given time they would find it, and he still seemed perfectly confident that it would prove to be the case.

‘So your plan involves wandering randomly through the jungle until we stumble upon Zultec,’ said Teclis. Tyrion gestured for him to stop provoking the human, but self-restraint did not suit his twin’s temperament.

‘No, your highness. We will continue to march westwards until we hit this stream here.’ He produced his grubby tattered map from within his shirt and stabbed his finger at the blue line that marked the position of the watercourse. ‘Then we will turn north until we stumble on the outskirts of the city.’

‘Your confidence is awe-inspiring,’ said Teclis.

‘Look, your honour, you hired me because I had been to the city and could find my way back. You paid for the gear and the guards and the porters and I am grateful. If you want to turn back now, I can’t say as I would blame you. It’s been a hard road and no mistake. But we are so close now I can smell it. And I would advise you to stick with me for just a bit longer and we will reach our goal.’

It was an impressive speech, made more impressive by its delivery. There was a mad conviction in Leiber’s eyes and his voice compelled belief. Tyrion believed him, as he had all along. He was sure his twin did too, but Teclis simply could not resist provoking the man.

‘I am not sure I believe you have ever seen the city,’ he said.

‘I’ve seen it, your honour, and I almost died there when those scaly-skinned lizardmen attacked with their poison darts and their stone axes. I saw Argentes go into the central pyramid and never come out too. I was the only one of our party as did, and I only managed it by fleeing into the jungle and throwing away all my gear. It took me months to find my way back to Skeggi.’

‘I am surprised your map is so accurate then,’ said Teclis.

Leiber spat on the ground but he spoke with the air of a man who does not wish to provoke an argument, ‘I am too, your honour. I did my best to remember landmarks and that stream stayed in my mind. I followed it all the way to the coast from that fork, and we can follow it back if you will stick with me.’

‘We’ve stuck with you through the swamps and the pygmy attacks and the giant bats and the fevers. I see no reason to stop doing so now, when you say success is so near,’ said Teclis.

‘I am very grateful for that, your highness. Now, perhaps we can stop yakking and start walking. We need to get moving if we are ever going to find that treasure and Herr Argentes’s sword that you have spent so long looking for.’

Somewhere far off, something roared. Tyrion wondered if it was coming their way. This did not sound as large as the stegadon, but there was something about the sound that suggested words or at least some form of communication. It was answered from across the jungle. He wondered if it had anything to do with their presence. He supposed he would find out soon enough.

Chapter Two

The rain pattered down lightly on the canopy of leaves, dripping down to turn the track to mud. The birds were subdued and the light was dim. In some ways it felt like they were walking under the greenish surface of the sea. Tyrion’s legs were spattered with runny earth and it was work just to lift them from the sucking, squelching path.

Teclis pushed on through the jungle following Leiber. He had no trouble with the path. His feet seemed to float above it and he left only the faintest imprint in its surface. Such were the benefits of magic, Tyrion thought sourly. He walked beside his brother, ready to intervene if there was an attack. Teclis might be a powerful magician but his reflexes were nothing like as quick.
A dagger in the back kills the mightiest mage
was a proverb in which Tyrion had implicit faith.

He fought to contain his own excitement. After decades of searching it seemed like the end of their quest was finally in sight. They had finally tracked down Sunfang. Or rather his brother had.

Teclis had spent years in the library at Hoeth searching through collections of obscure manuscripts for some clues as to the whereabouts of Aenarion’s lost blade, the legendary weapon forged for him by the Archmage Caledor amid the volcanic fires of Vaul’s Anvil, a companion piece to the armour the mage had made for the first Phoenix King.

Aenarion had put the blade aside once he had taken up the Sword of Khaine and its burden of damnation and ultimate power. He had given it to Furion, one of his most trusted lieutenants who had in turn passed it on to his descendants.

The Witch King of Naggaroth, with his customary hunger for all the possessions of his father, had coveted the weapon. Furion’s family had refused him it. Over the course of time, agents of the Witch King had made many attempts to acquire the blade, and always failed.

In the end, Nathanis, the last descendant of Furion had sailed for the Old World on a trading trip. He had arrived there but never returned with his ship. There were tales of an elven adventurer fighting in the lands of the Empire armed with a magical sword that shot bolts of flame. He had visited the fabled forest of the wood elves and fought alongside wardancers and backwoods archers, eventually making his way down to Tilea and the Border Princes and on to Estonia. The elf had died there but his sword had been taken up by a human, or so the tales told. It had passed from father to son down the fast, fleeting generations that humans experienced.

The power of the blade had made its possessors heroes and mighty champions among humans. It had not brought them luck though. Johan Argentes, the last bearer, had become a landless wandering mercenary.

Tyrion and his brother had spent years following this long trail across the Old World, retracing Argentes’s steps, following up all rumours of his whereabouts. The trail had been lost when Argentes had set sail from Estalia aboard an explorer’s ship bound for the uttermost west. Leiber had been the ship’s captain. It had never returned to its home port and it seemed the trail was lost.

Pure chance had brought word of a shipwrecked captain called Leiber washed up in Skeggi. He had been spotted by a trading captain from House Emeraldsea who knew something of the twin’s quest and remembered the name of the lost ship’s master. It was a very long shot, but the twins had followed it up, taking passage on a trading clipper to the coast of Lustria. They had heard another rumour about a human with a fiery sword who had vanished into the interior, searching for the gold of the lost slann cities.

Eventually they had found Leiber who had witnessed Argentes’s disappearance and been the only survivor, and who brought word of Argentes’s loss, staggering out of the jungle half-mad with hunger, thirst and fever.

He had spent months making a map to Zultec and seeking to tempt accomplices with tales of a hoard of treasure big enough to fire the imagination of a hundred pirate kings.

Leiber had agreed to guide the two elves to Zultec in return for gold and their protection. The three of them had organised this expedition and followed the long trail that had led them to this accursed place.

So far, Leiber had proved to be a bold and reliable companion, but Tyrion was not sure of his friends.

Not that it mattered much at the moment; they were all in the same boat, outnumbered and far from home, seeking a ruined metropolis haunted by the last degenerate remains of the once mighty race of lizardmen who had built the place when the world was young.

Tyrion could not keep from grinning. He was hacking his way through the overgrown jungle in search of a lost alien city, where he hoped to find a legendary artefact from the dawn ages of his people.

‘Why do you have that inane smirk on your face?’ his twin asked.

‘I was just thinking that this was exactly the sort of thing we used to talk about doing back in father’s villa when we were boys.’

Teclis smiled back. It was a slow secret smile, a mere sliver like a quarter moon seen through cloud, but coming from him it was like a belly laugh from any other elf. ‘We’ve come a long way from the mountains of Cothique, brother.’

‘That is something of an understatement.’

‘I like to keep in practice at that. A talent unused rusts.’

‘Of course, I did not imagine the mosquitoes. I thought it would be vampires that tried to drink my blood and dragons that tried to bite me to death.’

‘An old swamp witch back in Skeggi told me that the mosquitoes there once drained a baby of blood while it slept. She swore to me it was true. She had seen it with her own eyes. Of course, she also swore to me that the charms she was selling would make me irresistible to women and a mighty warrior.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

Teclis shrugged. ‘There was no magic in them, brother. Even you could have seen that with your vision.’

‘I have heard it said humans practise a different type of magic.’

‘There is only one type of magic. There are different ways of using it, true enough, but all magic draws its power from the same place and all magical objects radiate a similar aura.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘That would be an excellent idea. If you keep giving me advice about magic, I will have to start giving you my views on warfare and blade work.’

‘Let’s not stoop to absurdities,’ said Tyrion. Leiber gave the sign that it was time to halt for food.

Tyrion slapped the mosquito that had landed on the back of his hand. It exploded in a small burst of blood and flesh, leaving a faint blotch on his tanned skin.

‘How do you do that?’ Leiber asked. It continued to rain, not quite the usual monsoonal downpour that could turn tracks into streams, but a light drizzle that collected on the leaves and overflowed in a million tiny random waterfalls.

They had paused to eat and their lack of motion seemed to be drawing the insects to them. The few remaining humans lay sprawled against the trunk of a huge tree chewing on strips of dried beef. Teclis prepared his drugs, mingling the contents of two silver flasks in an alembic he had produced from inside his pack.

‘Do what?’ Tyrion replied. He looked beyond Leiber into the shadow avenues made by the great trees. He was becoming uneasy and he was not sure why, although he knew enough to trust his instincts in this matter. They had kept him alive in many places where other elves had died.

‘You always hit the buzzing little bastards. Does not matter how bad the light is, whenever one of them bites you, you kill it.’

‘So?’

‘You
always
kill them. Always. I have never seen you miss. I have never seen you even come close to missing or look like you are making any effort. Sometimes I never even notice the bloodsuckers until the bites swell and when I do try and hit them, the little swine are too fast for me. But they are never too fast for you.’

‘That is because I am an elf and you are a human.’ Even as he said it, Tyrion realised he was making a mistake. It was the sort of failure of diplomacy he would not normally have let happen. His only excuse was that he was tired and his mind had been on other things.

‘And you think elves are better than humans?’ There was an edge to Leiber’s words that Tyrion could not miss. There had been a lot of deaths and a lot of fear lately and they still had not found what they were looking for. Such situations had a way of becoming slowly explosive. He knew this from bitter experience with his own kind. It seemed things were no different with humans. He tried to defuse the situation with a joke.

‘Apparently we are when it comes to swatting mosquitoes.’

Leiber made a rueful grimace and took a pipe from out of the pouch on his waistband and then a flint. He walked over to Teclis’s magically created fire and lit the tobacco that he had stuffed into the bowl of the pipe with a wooden spill. He continued to look into the distance for a long moment, puffing away and then letting the smoke billow out in two streams from his nostrils. Once he had done that he turned to look Tyrion in the eye and said, ‘That is not what I meant and you know it.’

Tyrion felt his own temper rise in a way it would not normally have done. It was the heat and the humidity, he told himself, but there were other things involved as well. He was not used to being talked to this way by humans.

Did this man seriously think that there was any comparison between an elf and a human? Both races had a head and two arms and two legs. In some ways they looked quite similar. But elves lived longer, knew more, did not fall sick, and were not prey to the numerous superstitions that humans were. They were faster, more agile, more intelligent, more beautiful; superior in every possible way.

Leiber was less than a third of Tyrion’s age but already he was starting to look decrepit. His skin was lined. Some of his teeth were missing. The way he squinted told Tyrion that his eyesight was not what it had once been. He looked like an elf might look after half a millennium had passed, and only if the elf were very unlucky.

Of course Tyrion thought he was better – he was just too polite to rub it in. Leiber seemed to be questioning his right to think that way which was, to say the least, impertinent of him.

For a moment Tyrion saw the relationship between all of his people and all of the humans reflected in the way that he thought about Leiber and Leiber thought about him. He wondered if it was worthwhile trying to put his own thoughts into words and explain them to the man, but he realised that it could do no good, could cause only friction. Leiber would simply take it as an insult. Perhaps he would be right to.

After all, the elves were a dying race and it looked like humans would inherit the world. Their civilisation was becoming more powerful by the year, spreading across the globe in an irresistible wave. Already there were probably more humans in the city of Lothern than there were elves, and Lothern was by far the most populous city in elvendom.

He told himself that the ability to breed quickly and irresponsibly was not exactly a sign that the humans were the equals of the elves. They could not create art the way the elves could. They did not know magic the way the elves did. They were not the intellectual equals of the people of Ulthuan.

But did that really matter in the eyes of the gods?

The elves were becoming extinct. The humans were not. Did that mean they were simply better adapted to living in this new and dreadful world? Did it mean that their gods were more powerful than the elven gods? Did it mean anything at all or was he simply speculating uselessly?

This was not really any of his business. He was a warrior not a philosopher. It was his duty to guard his people and he would do that to the best of his ability until the day that he died. He did not have any answers. He would need to leave that to people like his brother. And he was not sure that Teclis could get any better answers than he could himself.

‘Do you think that we are better than you?’ Tyrion asked, because he could not think of anything else to say.

‘You are certainly better than we are at killing mosquitoes, your honour, that’s for sure and I suspect that
you
are much better at killing almost anything. You have that look about you. And you’re a damn sight prettier than I am, that’s for sure. But I am not sure that you’re a better man than me.’

‘I am not a man at all,’ said Tyrion.

‘That’s not what I meant. Are you braver than me? Are you morally superior? Or were you just born luckier? I sometimes think that the noble in the big castle on the hill is not a better man than the peasant he looks down on. He was just born into better circumstances – ones that ensured that he got better food, a better education and better training with weapons, as well as the weapons themselves.’

Tyrion could see that Leiber was talking about something he had given a lot of thought to. This was a matter that had deeply troubled the human for a long time. He was not really talking about the relationship between men and elves anymore – he was talking about the way humans lived, the way he himself had lived.