A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (14 page)

The clan lord, name ever-unspoken and seething venomous in the
pain of dreams, dies shrieking that night, as do all the rest who broke her.
Dying slowly. All of them. The clan lord is last, throat torn out to mark her
last breath, anointing the green-black of his regal robes with blossoms of
blood that are the Darkmoon’s glowering red. Limbs shattered in thirds to mark
the breaking of her once-strong body. The flesh of his sex torn free and eaten
blood-raw as he screams, for the sorrow visited on her, the final words she
whispered to him. Faint through the haze of blood at her lips, all vigor drained
from her as he cradles her tightly in the dizzying tremor of his fear.

“I killed him,” the girl said again, and the sweet timbre of the
voice was no less musical as it crafted the dark confession. Direct in the
manner of one repeating something for the sake of its own acceptance. Even
through the cloak, he felt another tremor of cold and fear thread his pale
flesh.

The girl was younger than he first thought. Too long since he had
walked among his own kind, so that their form and movement were grown foreign
to him.

He had to turn away for a moment. He crouched and pretended to
fumble with something within his meager belongings. His hands were shaking,
fear snaking through him to thread his weakness, tie a knot in his throat that
he could not swallow.

“He threatened my father,” the girl called. “He lusted for my
mother. It is the way among our tribe, and the sword gave him strength and put
the fear into those he hurt.”

“But not you.”

A trembling glance back. The girl shrugged.

They come for him then. His people’s nobility is a razor-sharp
blade too easily rusted, too quick to corruption. Too eager to forget that rank
is born of honor, instead giving honor to rank. Order is their way, and the way
of clan lords to lay claim to unwed maids in the nine days of the full Darkmoon
that are the nights of sacrifice and remembrance. And so they come for him, too
late to stop his wrath and vengeance, but ready to invoke the law to send his
spirit after hers.

Too slow to catch him, though. Never expecting the rage that
fuels him that night, betrayed by fate and blood and clan. And so he betrays
them all in turn, for the sake of the blood-black madness that consumes him.

“The sword was his,” she said again, as if she was trying to
focus the light of her memory on that one specific truth. “He slept with it in
his hut, and no one would go there because they were afraid.”

“When you hate,” he whispered, “you forget how to be afraid.”

The meager relics that were all he possessed were a handful of
coins and polished stones. Totems he had collected on his recent journeys.
Mud-streaked cloth with which he shrouded himself, hiding the vile sight of the
Mockery body. Things temporary and fleeting and mundane, carried for their
inability to trigger the dark memories that stretched behind him. Anything that
threatened to become a memory was cast aside.

“There was blood,” she whispered, the wind echoing the emptiness
in the words. “He threatened my father and he lusted for my mother, and his
sword called to me and I took it and I killed him.”

As from a dream, he wakes once that fateful night. Sees his
village burning, sees his people dead and dying.

Within the vision that the flames make, he sees her face. Eyes
that are the gold of a summer sunrise, warm against the skin.

“Swords do not speak,” he said evenly. He tried to focus, tried
to force the memory away. “You hold a sword in your hand, you can’t help but be
aware that you hold the power of another’s life and death. That by that power,
others might trade life and death with you. But it is your own voice you hear.
Warning you to watch for the simplest incaution, and of what you might become
if you fail.”

“The sword talked to me,” she said again, as if he hadn’t heard
her properly. “The sword looks inside. In his hut, he had pillows and mats of
silk and reed. The sword lay on its own pillow like a bed, next to his bed
where he slept and where I killed him. I seized the sword and I killed him.
There was so much blood…”

He felt the helplessness twisting in him. He fought it, stilled
it with the careful training of thought and mind that had kept him alive this
long. The calm in which he learned to drown himself as he tore himself from the
past. He cleared his eyes of the wetness that came with the Mockery’s weakness.
The girl was watching.

“I touched it and it looked inside him. There was something black
in him, and I knew what I had to do.”

He was silent for a long while. He felt an ache in the weak shoulders,
the frail body’s signal that he had stood for too long. “And now?”

“Now I don’t want to do it again,” she whispered. “I saw you
sneaking, because you are not of this place. You will not stay here. You could
use a sword like this. You can take it far away where it will not call to me.”

The wind was rising. He thought he caught the scent of the
distant sea, another memory he tried to crush, felt it slip out of reach,
hanging there. He shivered again, not from the cold.

“Show me this lord of yours.”

On that first long trip south as a hired blade, he had watched
over a caravan carrying a fortune in gold to be exchanged for illicit magics of
Ajaeltha’s self-styled southern empire. Through all those long months of the
desert, he felt the memory of his birthplace. Felt the hunger for that lost
land burn in him like the heat of the Ajaelthan sands.

Then on the night they were to return, he heard the night wind
call her name. The Darkmoon was waxing, filling out within the reddening shadow
of the sky.

That night long ago, he had turned his back on the way home and
sought the dark road, slipping away from the caravan and the others who had
come to trust him with their lives and who had never learned his real name.

She led him now on a roundabout route through the bog, racing
easily through the tall grass even with the sword dragging behind her. He was
winded keeping up to her, stumbling on legs not made for this soft ground. The
body lay in a shallow pit roughly hacked out beneath a bank of black peat. He
saw the rough edges, knew that the girl had dug it with her bare hands.

Whatever regal bearing this so-called lord managed in life, it
was far beyond reach now. He gagged at the scent, needed to move upwind. Another
of his weaknesses. The girl barely seemed to notice it. The body was face down,
a bloated mass of green-black flesh stained red where the denizens of the swamp
had been at it. Three days since the girl dumped it here, he reckoned. Three
days it took her to work up the courage to talk to the monster he was now. A
monster so weak, so base, that it would need this blade to match the strength
of normal folk.

As from a dream, he wakes twice. Sees himself reflected in
black water, falling. Cut down by the madness he unleashed.

These nine slow days, the red Darkmoon hung full in the sky as
the bright Clearmoon pulled steadily away from it along the far horizon. On
this ninth day, he awoke at dawn and prepared the rites that his people called
Ma’atlese. The deepening. As he had every other morning of his watch, he sensed
the long road home that he had turned his back on, felt it calling him with a voice
of firelight and friend-song and laughter and fresh fish roasted on low coals.

Betrayer and betrayed.

Where he looked for the road that lay ahead now, all was
darkness.

He is young then, and he bears both the name and form he was
born with. She is named Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his people’s
tongue.

He blinked back the memory, locked the Mockery’s soft teeth to
stifle the sudden rush of breath.

She lives long enough to whisper words in his ear that he
cannot hear for the coursing storm of rage. Ears only for the blood pounding in
his chest, for the fury burning forge-hot in the tight-squeezed space of heart
and mind.

As he appraised the body, he felt her eyes on him, knew she was
wondering why he brought her to this place.

“Leave it here,” was all he said.

His people’s ways are the old ways. But in the golden mire of
the fen that is his people’s home, there lives a magic older still.

“That ends it,” he said. “For both of you.”

The girl shook her head, didn’t understand.

He spoke evenly. He found the words in her own tongue, which had
been his tongue once. The Mockery’s voice was clumsy in all but its most common
speech, but that speech had no words to fully capture what he must say.

“With his life, he has been made to pay. With the pain of your
heart, you have paid, but your mind and conscience will try to make you pay
again as long as this blade stays in your hands. Don’t let them.”

He reached within the cloak, felt for the pouch he knew was
there. He drew it forth, slipped its weight to the girl’s grasp. The golden
eyes narrowed in suspicion, her hand flinching to feel the shift of coins
within weathered canvas. It was copper and silver, the cold currency of the distant
towns. He carried the gold of the cities as well, but the girl’s family would
have no more way to spend it than he would. These folk, a village this size, so
far from the trade roads, meant that the girl’s father had likely never worked
for coin. This gift of his was more wealth than her family would earn in a
lifetime.

“Never show it all at once. Spend it only among strangers, the
traders along the river roads. Never among anyone who might question your getting
of it.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because when we sleep, we travel,” he said. “When we dream, we
come to the place where each new day’s journey starts. At this place, there
stands the light road. There stands the dark road.”

Over years, over centuries, more creatures than could be
counted are lost in the golden mire of the fen that is his home, his people’s
home. Over years, over centuries, lost and dead, pulled down and trapped in the
place between, held in the muck and mire of the witching water lapping at the
ruins of ancient castles that were the signpost-bones of long-forgotten
history.

“I understand,” the girl said softly. Her hands on the sword were
trembling.

“No,” he said. “Because folk think that the difference between
the light road and the dark road is the destination. But all roads lead to the
place that fate and choice take them. It makes no difference in the journey.”

On the air, the storm that the day had promised was finally
stirring. Even his weak senses caught its scent, and the faint aura of distant
thunder that brightened the sky.

“Once you step down the dark road,” he said, “you can no longer
see the path back. On the light road, when you look back, you always see the
way you came.”

“What if you are afraid to look back?” she said quietly.

He dies in the witching water that night. Embraces the
clutching-claw darkness that is the sweet shroud of forgetting that he craves
above all else, with which he might burn away the final memory of her face as
she touches her tongue to his tear-streaked lips and dies.

Black water. The red moon hanging heavy and full within a sea
of cloud that twists on the wind like ripples of blood.

“Set the blade atop the body,” he said, and she did.

Countless creatures were lost in the fen, but few of his kind.
Tough, hardened by life along the black and gold of the witching water. The
dead here are the Mockeries that rise to rule the isle from within the weakness
of their soft, fat flesh. Drawn to the fen by the light of gold and silver,
coveted above all else. Drawn to drown and die there by the score, by the
hundreds as their softness is shredded by tooth and claw, choked to stillness
by vine and black water, swallowed whole by magic dark and old.

“Go now,” he said, and she did.

Dead and not dead, drawing life from the old magic that
reshapes and reforms him. Like raw clay clumped to the base form of nature,
slowly sculpted by fate’s laughing hand to final shape. Body shattered. Soul
suffusing into the witching water to be reborn.

He felt the first drops of rain strike from the hissing sky. Grey
cloud overhead was a billowing shroud that swallowed the stars, but still the
Darkmoon on the crest of the empty horizon blazed bright, filling his sight and
his mind as if he might drown within it.

The curse was a thing he could not talk about. A thing not of his
making, not of his control. The curse had saved him all those years ago. The
curse had let him live past the point when he should have died, had brought him
now to a place where he wanted to die, where that thought had gripped him time
and time again. And each time, he heard her voice from that night long ago,
when he clutched her dying form tight to his breast and wept for both their
pain.

We are born of earth and fen, blood and water, fire and bone.
We are the journey, not its end, and we will go together in memory where we
cannot walk in body and mind.

From the black sky, the rain advanced as a chill curtain. He felt
it hiss through the grass, racing toward him as a striking serpent. He closed
his eyes, let it fall across him. He felt his soul drink the life-giving
wetness that he needed, felt the pain and the strength tear through him as it
always did.

Always look back,
she told him, and he had turned her
words to silence and let the madness take him that last night of both their
lives.

Do not walk the dark road…

In a sudden and endless agony, the body of the Mockery that was
his rebirth was shredded away by the storm of blood and bone that erupted
inside him. He felt the soft flesh of weakness turn to scaled strength, felt
the muscles of arm and back, leg and shoulder ripple and twist like knotted
whipcord. He knew the exquisite ache as bones broke and reknit, as his joints
twisted and thickened. He felt his face and maw reshaped as his swelling tongue
laughingly flicked through a screen of razored teeth thrust from bleeding gums.
He felt the weak fingers harden to talons, tearing out through the last
vestiges of soft flesh with a strength that could lay open the deadly bog-drake
from heart to head with a single strike.