“W
here do we take him?” Orne asked when they were back in the street. “The keep? Or the western gate?”
Croy tried to think. He must keep the king alive, at any cost—that was Hew’s order. But where did safety lie? It was impossible to say without better information.
Lady
, he prayed silently,
give me a sign
.
He got it—though he would gladly have taken her silence instead.
A berserker came howling down the street toward him. The man was naked and covered in wounds—shallow cuts across his face and chest, deep gashes in his legs. He held an axe in either hand.
Perhaps the berserker hadn’t even seen them in his fury—he didn’t turn to engage them, instead looking as if he would run right past the two knights in his fury. Croy whipped Ghostcutter from its sheath and cut the barbarian’s throat without resistance. The berserker fell, but behind him, perhaps only a street away, Croy could hear more of them whooping and laughing for the joy of battle.
The choice was made for them. There was no way they could reach the keep, not if they had to hack their way through Mörg’s entire army to get there. Instead they must make for the gate and leave Helstrow behind. Croy and Orne picked up the litter and hurried as fast as they could for the western gate. It wasn’t far, only a dozen streets or so, but in full armor and carrying the king, they made slow going of it.
Before they’d covered half the distance, the barbarians spotted them. A great howl went up and the knights had to duck down a side passage or be overrun.
Taking a winding route, trying to stay ahead of their pursuers, they covered the distance somehow. Croy was past rational thought at that point—he was only aware of his feet, and of the sounds of murder and butchery all around him. He had to do everything in his power to save the king. That was his duty. If he was cut down before he reached the gate, the Lady could ask no more of him. But he would not stop. He would not consider the possibility of hiding or of not taking another step.
When the gate appeared before him, he realized he had a new problem. It was sealed. As it had been for ten days.
“Put him down over there,” Croy said, and when it was done, he went to the massive bar that held the iron gates closed. There was no portcullis on this side, but the wooden doors closing the gate were made of massive planks of age-hardened wood reinforced with thick metal fittings. The bar of the gate was a rod of iron thicker than his wrist. “Help me,” he said.
“No,” Orne told Croy. “You have to get it open yourself.”
Croy turned around in a rage, but then he saw Bloodquaffer in Orne’s hand—and a crowd of barbarians in the street behind him. Orne ran to meet the invaders, his Ancient Blade whistling as it swooped around and around in the air.
This was it, then. This was the foretold moment—the moment Orne was to die.
Croy decided he would make that death mean something, at any cost. Struggling with the iron bar, he put all his muscles into moving it until he felt something tear in his back. The bar came loose from its brackets and crashed to the ground with a noise so loud it jarred his bones. He pushed hard on the gate until it started to swing open.
Only then did he look back.
Orne was lost in the melee, but he could see Bloodquaffer rise and fall and slash and spin. Never had Croy seen a man fight so desperately, never had he watched a sword move so fast. Heads, arms, and fingers bounced and spun in the air as Bloodquaffer took its due. But with every barbarian the sword cut down, a dozen axe blows came at Orne, while spears jabbed at him through every opening and arrows seemed to float on air above him. The barbarians didn’t seem to care if they struck or killed their own numbers in the confusion, only that they took down the doomed knight. Blood pooled between the cobblestones and ran in the gutters, but they fought on.
Croy longed to go and help his friend—but he dared not. He bent to pick up the king and throw his sleeping form over one shoulder.
It was then he heard a booming, horrible laugh that he knew all too well. Striding through the crowd of barbarians, Mörget came to challenge Orne.
“No,” Croy said, staggering under the weight of the king.
No, it could not be. Mörget could not still be alive. He’d been under Cloudblade when it fell. It was Mörget’s own hand that set off the explosion that leveled the mountain. Not even Mörget could have survived that.
Yet here he was.
Mörget—the biggest man Croy had ever seen. The fiercest warrior he’d ever known. The son of Mörg, and himself a chieftain of many barbarian clans. Mörget’s face was painted half red like those of the berserkers, but he was more dangerous than any of those insensate warriors.
Croy had called Mörget brother once. They had fought together against a demon, and Croy had marveled at the strength in the barbarian’s massive arms and the sheer delight Mörget took in hacking and slashing and killing. The man had terrified him even when they were on the same side.
But Mörget had betrayed him—had betrayed everyone who went into the mountain with him. Even before the barbarians declared war on Skrae, he and Mörget had become sworn enemies. If he’d thought Mörget still lived, he would have been honor bound to do nothing until he had tracked him down and slain him in single combat. Slain him and taken from his treacherous hands the sword called Dawnbringer.
Mörget waded into the fight, an axe in one hand, the selfsame Ancient Blade in the other. The throng of barbarians drew back and Croy saw Orne in the sudden clearing. The knight had lost half the armor from his left arm and his helm torn from his head. But Orne’s face was perfectly calm, resigned to his fate.
He brought Bloodquaffer up, ready to parry Mörget’s axe stroke.
Mörget was as big as a horse and his arm was like a tree trunk. The axe came around in an arc, a blow as fast and inescapable as an avalanche.
Orne took the perfect stance and gripped Bloodquaffer’s hilt in both hands. He braced himself in perfect form. How many times had he stood like that, ready to take a blow that could have killed a normal man? Orne was a knight and an Ancient Blade. A warrior of incomparable skill.
He could no more have stopped the axe blow than he could have held back the ocean at high tide. The axe would have cut him in half if that had been Mörget’s intention. Instead it cut right through Bloodquaffer’s blade.
The end of the serrated sword spun in the air for a moment, then dropped to clatter in the street. Orne was left holding a hilt and a foot of severed iron.
Impossible, Croy thought. Swords could be broken, of course. A strong enough man could shatter even dwarven steel, and Mörget was the strongest man Croy had ever seen. Yet—Bloodquaffer was no ordinary sword. The Ancient Blades were eight hundred years old. They had been forged by the greatest smiths of their day using techniques long lost to modern metalcrafters. They had been imbued with potent magics and blessed by priests of both the Bloodgod and the Lady, back when the people of Skrae worshipped them both equally. The swords were sacred, and they were supposed to be eternal. In all those centuries, none of them had ever been broken. Yet Croy saw it with his own eyes. Bloodquaffer shattered as easily as a piece of poorly forged iron, and with it eight hundred years of tradition.
It was like the world had come to an end.
It was like everything he had ever known was proved wrong.
Even Mörget looked surprised at what had happened. But he did not slow his attack. The axe smashed against the cobblestones, carried onward by its inexorable momentum, and then Mörget’s sword arm swung around, his own Ancient Blade held straight outward in a perfect form.
Orne did not flinch as Dawnbringer’s chopping stroke took off his head.
His time, at last. As had been foreseen.
Croy longed to howl out in injustice, to call to Mörget to try his hand and his axe against Ghostcutter next. He burned with the need to avenge Orne’s death and strike down the barbarian as his vows required. Every particle of his being and every shred of his soul needed that, needed to see the battle through.
Yet he had taken a vow, another vow he could never break. He must save the king, no matter what he personally desired. His battle with Mörget would have to wait.
Croy did not waste another moment. He hurried through the open gate and pushed it quietly closed behind him. If the barbarians had seen him, they would come howling for his blood next. They would give chase.
They would kill him, and the king.
He could do nothing but keep running.
He tried to be quiet, willed himself not to be seen as he hurried down the road to the west, outside of Helstrow’s walls. He did not stop until he reached a copse of trees well outside the fortress-town’s precincts, a place where he thought he might hide long enough to catch his breath. He laid the king down in a sward of soft grass and looked back the way he’d come, his eyes unblinking.
Looming above the walls of Helstrow, he could see the keep and the palace. Both of them were burning.
The Sleeping King
T
here was a place in the Free City of Ness where drovers brought their sheep to pasture while they waited to be taken to market. A pleasant common of green in the midst of a boisterous and noisy city. It was not particularly safe at night (no place in Ness truly was), yet for its idyllic calm, it had become somewhat fashionable, and some of the richest men of Ness built villas on its edges, pleasure palaces where they could get away from the endless flow and ebb of commerce.
In the middle of this sward there stood a wide swath of rubble and burnt timbers that no one had ever fully cleared away. It marked where the grandest of those houses once stood. Everything of even remote value had been gleaned from the spot, but no one wanted to build anew there and even the sheep gave it a wide berth.
It had been the house of Hazoth, the sorcerer. It was the place where that great man had been dragged down into the pit by his own enslaved demons. It was also the place where Cythera was born, and where Coruth the witch had been imprisoned for many, many years.
Coruth was probably the first person to set foot inside its ruins since the night it came down. It never occurred to her to do so before—she had been glad enough to get away from the place—but sometimes a witch had to go where others feared to tread.
That day she looked mostly like an old and bent woman, because that was how she felt most of the time, and no one was watching, so she didn’t have to take the trouble to appear as an imposing figure. Her robes were black and shapeless and unremarkable. Her iron-colored hair was bound back with a bit of cheap ribbon. She walked with a measured step that suggested some of her great age, though she retained enough vanity not to use a walking stick.
It was not difficult to find the place where Hazoth died. The very ground there cracked open to admit him, and while the earth had smoothed itself over, finding its own level, not even weeds would ever grow there again. Coruth paced out the patch of utterly barren ground to find its center, then sat down on the dirt and let the sun warm her for a while before she did anything else.
“She’s your daughter too,” Coruth said finally. Hazoth couldn’t hear her, of course. He was dead. But some things needed to be said even if there was no one there to hear them. “You were a terrible man, a right bastard, frankly. One of the worst. But it was your seed that put her in my womb, and I figure you have a right to know what’s going to become of her. It isn’t pretty.”
A soft breeze stirred the grass at the edge of the barren patch. Each individual blade fluttered, rubbing against its neighbors. A cricket looking for a meal approached the place where Coruth sat, then reconsidered and turned away. No human being was in sight—and definitely not in earshot.
“She’s going to learn magic, one way or another. She’ll gain the kind of power you and I work with, maybe even more. I’m going to have to train her. It’s the only chance she’s got. And you, of all people, know what that means. I’ve seen her future and it can go one of two ways. Normally when I see the future, I know it’s bound to happen. That there’s no changing it. I do my best to look surprised when it comes to pass. And being a witch, well, that means when I see something unpropitious, something I don’t like, it’s just too bad. More times than not I have to go along and help make it happen anyway. This time, though, I see two possibilities. One is she becomes like me. A witch. Old and alone and bitter, but the world is better for it. The other chance is she becomes a sorcerer like you, and every horror of the pit can’t match what happens next. I can’t let that come to pass. There’s still time for her to pick which path she’ll walk. Do you know how rare that is? How infrequently I get this chance to make the future a better place?”
A cloud passed briefly across the sun, one of those thin insubstantial clouds that can’t block out all the light. A chill breeze ruffled her clothes, but soon enough the cloud passed by and the sun returned. Coruth tilted her head back and let the heat sink into her face.
“It’s going to cost me. Especially now, when I’m needed for other things. I don’t suppose you care, but Helstrow fell today to the barbarians. I’m going to have far more work than I can handle. As if that’s something new.”
In the distance she could hear a cowbell chiming, as a herd of animals was brought down to the common.
“Sod this,” she said. “I’m getting stiff, sitting here talking to you. I just thought you had a right to know about Cythera. A father should know these things.”
It hurt her old joints to stand up, but she did it without making too much noise. She started away from the barren patch of earth, intending to head home and begin her preparations. But then she glanced around slyly to make sure no one was watching, and headed back.
The patch of dirt was the closest thing Hazoth had to a grave. She hitched up her skirt and pissed all over it, cackling the whole time. And then she went home.