A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales
Read A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Online
Authors: Scott Fitzgerald Gray
When he finally seized the sword, Morghan felt the power
again, spiking in a sensation like the emptiness of unspoken words. A bloodless
rage twisted through him just as the voice had twisted through him before, and
in that instant, in a heartbeat, in the rawness of memory where it clawed at
him from the dark dreams that the day tried to push away, he knew that anything
was possible.
Too many things still to be done.
So many debts to repay.
“Avenge them…”
• In
a lost tomb, a warrior haunted by the deaths of those who once followed him
hears an offer of redemption in the voice of an ancient blade…
• A
sword of kings lingers in a forgotten forest, where dwells a timeless spirit of
the wood — a creature able to sense the apocalyptic future that
unfolds if the weapon is ever reclaimed…
• A
prince and princess share a bond of blood and a dark secret, both of which
threaten to destroy them when their forbidden passion costs their emperor
father his life…
• A
warrior living under a monstrous curse has his wish for death transformed by a
desperate young girl with blood on her hands…
• A
reclusive storyteller finds himself in possession of an enchanted axe that
promises he will rule the world — whether he wants to or not…
• The
pain of the past haunts a mage sought out by the woman he once loved, who needs
his knowledge and power to save the life of the man she loves now…
• A
young exile returns home carrying the weight of betrayal and the stolen sword
that is the symbol of his people — a blade with which he will
destroy the legacy of the father he tried and failed to kill years before…
• A
king long thought dead walks his war-torn homeland as a ragged pilgrim,
consumed by the sins of his past. But even as he does, the daughter of his
greatest knight hunts him, desperate to convince him to take up the crown once
more…
The first Endlands anthology from Scott
Fitzgerald Gray,
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales
follows a
disparate group of heroes and villains caught up with the dark
history — and darker destiny — of nine weapons of ancient
magic, lost to time and mind.
In the aftermath of the fall of Empire, magic is the ultimate
force for tyranny and freedom in the lands of the Elder Kingdoms. Magic defines
the line between right and wrong, life and death that compels countless
characters to take up a mantle of heroism they never expected to wear.
However, in the world of the Endlands, even the tales of heroes
seldom end as expected…
This collection includes six short stories, the novella
Ghostsong
,
and the short novel
A Prayer for Dead Kings
.
An Anthology of the Endlands
by
Scott Fitzgerald Gray
Cover, Design, and Typography
by (studio)Effigy
Cover Illustration by Alex Tooth
Published by Insane Angel Studios
To Colleen, Shvaugn, and Caitlin
For Infinite Patience
Wainamoinen, the magician,
Comes to view the blade of conquest,
Lifts admiringly the fire-sword,
Then these words the hero utters:
“Does the weapon match the soldier,
Does the handle suit the bearer?”
— The Kalevala,
Rune XXXIX
RAZEEN WAS STILL WARM when they found him, the rigor just
beginning to set. Dead since dusk, no longer. From across the table, Scúrhand
prodded the wizened figure with a scroll tube, the lifeless body rocking like a
sapling in the wind.
The dark-haired mage spat. “Of course,” he said, only to himself.
Across the tower chamber, Morghan circled warily, his gaze
flitting across the destruction that had carried through the room. The subtle
weight of the longsword shifted gently in his hands.
All is lost…
The voice was the whisper of a silk-lined sheath as it slipped
within the tall warrior’s mind. He spun fast like there might have been someone
behind him, saw nothing but the walls of ransacked shelves and the dead sage
they had come to see. Scúrhand inspected the bruising at the pale throat where
Razeen had been strangled.
Where it gripped his sword, Morghan’s hand was shaking. He
squeezed his fingers shut, forced the tremor from them. Across from him,
Scúrhand didn’t see.
They had been three days on horse from the Highport before they
reached the citadel, a narrow track breaking from the eastbound trade road to
follow a rising line of scrub and sand along the ocean headland. The eastern
sky was already dark when they arrived, the sun gone to a molten line beneath a
black haze of storm cloud along the opposite horizon. The pounding of the surf
was constant past tall columns of stone, the ruins of ancient battlements
staggering their way across the rough beach and into black water beyond.
In the end, the shroud of darkness and sound had given Scúrhand
and Morghan a chance to see the dozen or so figures hidden in ambush position
along the road, long before they themselves could be sighted. The sentries wore
dark leather and helms of blackened steel, scattered behind scrub trees as they
watched for any sign of approach. This meant they left themselves open where
Scúrhand and Morghan swung wide to the north and around, tethering the horses
in a stand of salt pine and approaching unseen, away from the cliffs.
They moved to within sight of the sentry farthest from the gatehouse,
the others unseen but close enough to shout to. Atop a rise, behind a screen of
wind-whipped sea grass, they watched for a long while.
“When I was last here, the sage was far more welcoming,” Scúrhand
whispered at last. “Perhaps he heard you were coming this time.” The mage noted
that Morghan didn’t smile. “We should endeavor to find out who they are and why
they’re here.”
“Agreed,” Morghan said. “Take this one.”
“An excellent suggestion. And one whose planning is worth long
discussion, ideally back in the city.”
“Take him.” Morghan idly checked the longsword and dirk that were
the only weapons he carried, his bow and quiver left behind him in the
darkness, lashed to the saddle of his horse.
“Or perhaps another city entirely,” the mage said hopefully.
“You take him or I will, and I’ll be a lot less quiet about it.”
Morghan shifted as if preparing to move, making an obvious threat
of revealing his position where he stood a full head taller than Scúrhand and
twice as broad. His mail was plate set within two layers of chain in an arrangement
he had designed himself, apparently for the amount of noise it could make when
he wanted it to.
The mage sighed as he felt for the power that threaded through
him, summoning it with a whisper that knocked the sentry into the air and two
strides back. He fell with a muffled thud, Morghan already moving. Too quickly,
Scúrhand realized. Too ready for a fight that neither had known to expect. And
even as the mage wondered what that might mean, the warrior dropped to kneel
beside the motionless form.
Morghan had seen Scúrhand’s magic drop enough sentries in the
same way, and so should have known this one wasn’t getting up anytime soon. But
as the mage slowed, he saw that Morghan wasn’t checking the pace of blood at
the figure’s neck as he assumed, instead fingering the insignia on the cloak. A
boar’s head sigil was embossed there, black on red, barely visible in the
shadows.
“Who are they?” Scúrhand asked. The warrior only shook his head.
The citadel consisted of adjoining ramshackle towers leaning at
dangerous angles into the ever-present wind. It was a military ruin, built and
rebuilt by the succession of petty lords who had claimed this headland in the
endless wars that were Gracia’s greatest legacy. The space within it held two
hundred warriors and their arms when it was new built. Before the long peace of
Empire and the erosion of the sandy bluff turned its garrisons to fading
memories and left it to be claimed by a lone Gnome who valued his privacy.
Peace and the passage of time made for much irony in property values, Scúrhand
had noted more than once.
One window lit in the cliffside wall made a gleaming gold beacon
against the night. It was there that they had climbed, out of sight of the
sentries below. To be accurate, Morghan climbed, clawing his way up along
handholds found and carefully tested in the weathered stone. Scúrhand had an
easier time of it, rising effortlessly through the air alongside him. The black
cloak he wore over loose leggings and a high-collared jacket was of
aristocratic cut, but in a style no self-respecting noble had worn in a dozen
generations. Scúrhand knew the garment and the dweomer of flight woven into its
threads to be older than that by far.
Though the mage was fairly certain he could have carried the warrior
aloft as well as himself, he’d been reluctant to test the supposition with
slightly more certain death promised on the rocks below if he failed. Morghan
hadn’t seemed to mind, not even breathing hard when they finally pulled
themselves through the open shutters of some sort of study. It was there that
Razeen had been found.
The body was draped across a high table, propped in a chair so
ridiculously tall that the diminutive figure must have scaled it like a ladder.
He had a selection of scrolls before him that Scúrhand took in at a glance,
mundane alchemical texts.
Morghan was still pacing the room, listening carefully at each of
three exits, stairs leading up and down. Velvet drapes in the same indescribable
purple the sage wore were hung from tall pillars of yellowing marble. The air
was heavy with the scent of old parchment and dust.
From below, loud enough for them both to hear, came the sound of
smashing wood.
“We leave now?” Scúrhand said with little real hope. Again, Morghan
didn’t smile.
Vindicator…
Morghan took the stairs first. He didn’t have to look back to
know that Scúrhand was following.
Curving columns of black oak rose between levels of shadow above
and below as they descended. A pool of light preceded them, cast from the pulse
of lightning that traced the dagger Scúrhand had claimed from the ruins of
Myrnan. The Sorcerers’ Isle, legendary across Gracia and all five Elder
Kingdoms and countless lands beyond. During a particularly violent squall that
dogged them along the six-day voyage from Myrnan to the Gracian mainland, the
mage christened the blade Storm’s Light. Morghan had spent most of the
remainder of the trip offering his opinion of those who named their weapons.
“A blade’s a tool like any other. You don’t name the plow any
more than the oxen that pull it.”
“I’ve never had an ox save my life,” Scúrhand said. They were sailing
through rain past sunset of the last day, the lights of the Highport visible
ahead. “This might do that someday.” The mage was doing handwork with the new
blade at the rail. In the twilight, the pulse of its storm light shone.
Now, Scúrhand willed that light to darkness as Morghan waved him
back. Where the stairs met an open balcony, they saw a faint light from ahead.
Directly beneath them, the undying glow of magical evenlamps was filtered by
some kind of latticed ceiling. Narrow beams crisscrossed below an empty space
where the stairs turned and descended once more. There was room enough for
Morghan to squeeze through, shifting slowly to spread his weight across the
narrow beams. Scúrhand was close behind, perched at the balcony’s edge.
Through narrow slats, the mage and the warrior watched the
movement in the library below. A dozen figures in the same dark leather as the
sentries outside worked with a silent efficiency as they tore through the
shelves. Already, scrolls and bound volumes were strewn so thickly that they
hid the floor. Scúrhand could only stare.
“That’s a duke’s ransom in lore they’re stepping through,” the
mage hissed. “What in fate’s name are they looking for that would make them
discard that?”
Barrend’s Bane…
Clear in Morghan’s head again, an echoing voice, his own and not
his somehow.
“What is Barrend’s Bane?” Scúrhand whispered, and Morghan had to
glance over to the mage’s questioning look to realize that he’d murmured the
name aloud.
A year before, in the midst of a long string of days spent trying
to forget, Morghan had seen the boar’s head along the Myrnan docks. A sigil on
a cloak, black on red. It was an image he knew, locked into place in his mind.
Scribed from the searing memory of a lash wielded by an arm that wore the same
insignia. The memory of the pain was knife-sharp across his back, his chest.
The stone-faced warriors who wore the black boar on Myrnan had
been led by a woman with hair the color of deep sunset. She and all the others
were strangers to Morghan. But over the week that followed, he spent a modest
percentage of the coin he brought out from the ruins to discover their names
and mission. The secrecy that carried them to the Sorcerers’ Isle was impressive
even against the routine secrecy of most of those who sought Myrnan’s hidden
riches. In the end, though, all information had a price.
It was at a weaponsmith’s stall along the muddy tracks of
Claygate Keep’s old Portown where Morghan found what he sought. The pale hair
and sky-blue eyes marked the smith as Norgyr stock, his accent betraying him as
not that long gone from the northlands. The flame-haired woman and her guard
had visited him twice while Morghan tailed them. But when it came his own turn
to step inside the stall, the smith met his inquiries with a sullen silence.
Morghan noted the boar’s head marked in ink at the smith’s bare shoulder, a
faded clan insignia beneath it.
In the dusky glow of the forge, the warrior pulled his sleeve
down to reveal his own shoulder. Then he told a story. When he was done, the
dark rage in the smith’s eyes was one he recognized. He gave Morghan a name.
“What is Barrend’s Bane?” Scúrhand asked again, but Morghan was
moving. Shifting silently along the lattice of narrow beams, he strained to
hear the voices filtering up from below.
“…the vault,” a woman was saying. She was the leader of the
searchers to judge by the manner in which she spoke. Her hair was flame-red in
the pale light, as bright as it had been when Morghan first saw it in the dawn
glow of the Myrnan docks. “Start again, top to bottom. Check every door, every
passageway. Search for diaries, journals. What you can’t read, bring to me.”
The smith in his dockside shed had first seen the hidden mark on the
shield at Morghan’s back as he and the warrior drank at the hearth.
“You came out of Eltolitinus?” the smith asked gruffly when
Morghan’s story was done. “With this?” He touched the shield almost reverently.
“I lost count of them that died trying to be you, lad.”
The ruins beneath Myrnan were named for Eltolitinus, the greatest
of the many mages who had tried to claim the Sorcerers’ Isle as their own. A
demigod of magic to the Aigorani who were the forebears of Gracia, his legend
was built on the transformation of the entirety of Myrnan to a vast
island-castle three thousand years before. It was the aftermath of the dungeons
of Eltolitinus that had pushed Morghan to wander alone. Hoping to bury the
memories of the dark month he and Scúrhand and all the others had spent beneath
the earth.
In the end, the Norgyr smith told Morghan a story of his own. The
legend of Barrend, who was weaponsmith to the magical court of the Sathnari,
masters of the Sorcerers’ Isle a thousand years before the
island
-castle
was raised.
Avenge them…
As he watched the soldiers in black tear through the library, the
voice in Morghan’s mind was the voice of the smith suddenly.
Barrend’s mark
is what they seek. Weapons of the old age, secrets of craft long lost. Magics
that can’t be made by mortal hand no more.
“Seek the signs of Barrend’s Bane,” the woman called from below.
Those who know it will kill for this mark.
“The lore we seek will be found or we do not return, by Arsanc’s
orders.”
As the woman’s voice echoed, Scúrhand saw a sudden darkness twist
through Morghan where he watched.