A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (5 page)

Scúrhand was silent again.

“Can you fly us out?” Morghan asked.

The mage glanced to the darkness above them. “They’ll be waiting
for us. We should regain strength, let them wonder if we’re dead before we surprise
them.”

“They won’t wait. What’s here is too important to them.” Morghan
raised the blade. “They’ll kill for this mark…”

As if in answer, there was a dull crash of thunder from above.
Along the lines of the tall arches, dust shook and fell.

Morghan appraised the flat shadow of the pool bottom above him,
faint light rippling beyond it now. “Ectauth expected to pick us up from the
water, dead or alive,” he said thoughtfully. “Claim the shield. He’ll be
panicking now. Vulnerable.”

Another blast from above. Scúrhand shook his head. “Of course…”

As with every other time, it was more a moment of awareness than
an actual decision. An acceptance that the fight closing in on them was the
only path open. No other options, no alternatives to that final stand. Neither
of them spoke as they checked weapons, Morghan unslinging the empty scabbard of
his shattered longsword and casting it aside. He fit the new blade to belt and
hand, swinging it carefully in ever-wider arcs.

It was a warrior’s ritual, Scúrhand knowing it from observation.
Morghan had been trained to the sword from those first mercenary days of his
childhood, and it showed. Each morning, each evening, every moment of respite
in campaign or exploration, the warrior checked each weapon he carried for heft
and weakness, a blade or bow fought with a hundred times examined as if it
might have been brand new.

Scúrhand’s skill with a dagger had been mostly accidental when he
and the warrior first met, and checking that his scabbards weren’t about to
fall off was the extent of his preparation for combat. So many showdowns in the
three years since then. So many times like that first time, back to back
against an ever-shifting sea of foes and running on the timeless instinct to
just survive.

They were older now, stronger. Always in the end, though, there
was someone a little stronger, a little better than you.

Always in the end, it came down to something deeper than
strength.

They shot out through the pool faster than even Scúrhand thought
himself capable of flying them both, a half-dozen passes made around the inside
of the tomb to build up speed before they climbed. Morghan held tight to the
mage, didn’t blink against the shock of cold water that hit him like a body
blow, then against the sudden riot of light and frantic bowshot that met them
as they emerged into the chasm.

Morghan had already picked their spot, Scúrhand twisting as they
soared. Arrows passed harmlessly by them as he dropped the warrior to the open
terrace where the bridge had fallen, Ectauth standing at the fore this time
where his force was circled to all sides. Scúrhand stayed aloft, the air a blur
before him as the screen of arcane force he summoned up shattered a wall of
bowshot that came his way. The silver battle-caster’s voice rang out against
the stones, frantically ordering the archers to stand down, but Scúrhand could
see that their attention was already fixed firmly on the opposite side of the
cavern.

There, Morghan stepped to the terrace edge, every eye in the Norgyr
troop following the slow swinging of the blade in his hand where he held it out
over dark water below. The damask pattern of its steel caught the bright light
of evenlamps around the room, flaring like the sun on clear water. No one
moved.

Ectauth’s gaze looked to be as dispassionate as he could make it,
but Scúrhand noted the anger in the battle-caster’s eyes as he drifted slowly
closer. There was no sign of Thiri with him, no time to look for her. “If you
wish to parley, speak your piece,” he called.

“That one drops the blade safe to the ground,” Ectauth shouted.
“Both of you submit. When we’ve crossed the frontier, you’ll be released to
your own fate.”

Where Morghan shifted suddenly, a dagger that hadn’t been in his
hand a moment before flashed as it buried itself in the neck of a lone scout
coming up almost unseen from the side. The would-be assassin fell noisily.

“Let’s assume the surrender option is off the table,” Scúrhand
called.

“Here are our terms,” Morghan shouted over him. “Your lord Arsanc
needs a message sent. You can take it or I can, delivered along with your
head.”

There was a rustling of bows, Arsanc’s archers eager to begin the
bloodletting. Too eager, Scúrhand thought.

“Madmen, fools, and heroes all fit the same grave.” The young
voice caught him and Morghan by equal surprise, both wheeling to see Thiri
standing alone where she had slipped through the ranks. She was limping, her
leg still bleeding. When Scúrhand tried to meet her gaze, she looked away.

Beneath Ectauth’s anger, there was no trace of the uncertainty
that Scúrhand heard in Thiri’s voice. This should have been a precision
operation, a night of stealth and recovery. The sage’s death was something the
girl had already paid for in her conscience, but the battle-caster was thinking
only about what he might pay if he failed to deliver the goods whose retrieval
he was charged with. A tension between the two Norgyr spellcasters that
Scúrhand hoped desperately he and Morghan could use.

“The message is this.” Morghan called to Ectauth, but his eyes
were on the girl. “The right to wield power is earned by deed. Not delivered by
proxies, stolen and paid for by murder.”

Ectauth only laughed, Morghan’s glance shifting to where the Norgyr
battle-caster stepped forward. “And what deeds have earned you the right to a
king’s blade?”

“Arsanc sold his people…”

“The Lord Arsanc made rightful disposition of those who rejected
his flag and his will,” Ectauth shouted. “The Lord Arsanc surrendered lands in
the name of peace that could not be defended, except by those with a wish to
die beneath your banner, mercenary.”

Only because he was watching, Scúrhand saw Thiri’s reaction to
the Norgyr captain’s words. Where he had shifted to keep his shield between the
closest archers and himself, Morghan froze.

“I know you,” Ectauth laughed. “All your pathetic pursuit on the
Sorcerers’ Isle, you thought you wouldn’t be noticed? Watched in return as you
watched us? Your name came easily enough. Then came the memory that one of that
same name led a futile assault from the Lord Arsanc’s lands to the mountain
lord’s own halls. A self-styled warlord and his mercenary band taking on a
mountain giant garrison. How many made it out alive behind you?”

In Morghan’s hands, the sword called Barrend’s Bane flared
blue-white. Then it began.

It should have been over quickly. They were outnumbered, outpowered,
the odds too much like those of too many previous fights that Scúrhand had been
sure would be his last. He counted eleven figures surging even as Morghan
slammed into them, saw Ectauth curse as a bolt of spell-fire intended for the
warrior struck one of his own lieutenants instead.

In each fight like it, there was always a moment when the tide
turned. A point where odds first were evened, then the balance tipped in favor
of improbable victory or timely escape. There was no tide this time, though.
There was only Morghan, moving with a speed and a fury that drove him through
the ranks of Arsanc’s forces like a bloody storm.

He was gaining no ground, though, Scúrhand in the best position
to see it from the air. Too many, more coming, a dozen pouring in from above.
That was Morghan’s plan, though, and Ectauth’s dark expression showed that he
knew it. The battle-caster’s spellpower was focused for maximum destruction,
and all but useless now where the warrior fought within the screen of bodies
pressing against him.

Scúrhand stayed in motion as he watched, not bothering to waste
his own spellpower against Ectauth and the wards of protection he could sense
even at the distance between them. The girl Thiri was another issue. But though
Scúrhand did his best to draw her fire along with the attention of the archers,
in the ebb and flow of the power that passed between them, he noted the
uncertainty in the young mage’s tactics.

His own first salvo was ice and fire, but she countered it with
an ease that astounded him. In response, she filled the air around Scúrhand
with darkness and mist that kept him moving, prevented him clear line of sight
to the battle below. She was focusing on harrying him, he realized. Ignoring
Ectauth’s shouted orders to target Morghan, the battle-caster trying in vain to
break through the press of bodies.

Shadow blurred Scúrhand’s vision, Ectauth unleashing spell-fire
in close quarters even as Morghan slipped back and three more of the battle-caster’s
own warriors were cut down. The pulse of light and flame suspended the melee
into motionless moments, frozen images.

In one of those moments, Scúrhand saw the snarling Ectauth finally
break through. He tried to shout where Morghan spun in the mortal dance his
wrath made, but the mage had no voice to overcome the screams of the dying and
the steady crash of steel that surrounded the warrior where he fought.

Spellpower pulsed in the battle-caster’s hand, a twisted whip of
smoke and shadow lashing out, coursing through Morghan as brands of piercing
black flame. Scúrhand heard the warrior cry out. But then even in the moment
that it should have taken for Ectauth to finish him, the battle-caster’s sudden
scream rose as a dark echo of Morghan’s own. Tendrils of black fire wrapped
tight in his fist flickered and flared out as twin bolts of white light tore
through his armor and convulsed him as if he’d taken a blade in the back.

Morghan reacted without seeing, screaming with pain as he twisted
back and around and drove the blue-white blade through the battle-caster’s
throat.

From the air, Scúrhand could only stare to where Thiri stood,
eyes wide as if somehow only just realizing that her spellpower had put her
captain down. Then she was moving even as cries of treachery arose from the
warriors closest to her, a surge of shock and anger rising as she ran to
Morghan’s side.

The dagger the girl drew told Scúrhand that her spellpower was
close to spent. She unleashed a last barrage of magical force against a howling
axe-fighter who struck from the side, and who fell to Morghan’s blade as the
warrior spun past in a blur of blood and steel.

Then four more were on them, Thiri slashing awkwardly at the
closest attackers as they pushed in. Scúrhand laid down three points of arcane
shielding around them, but the fight was too fast. He could see Morghan
shouting, could feel the words without hearing, telling the girl to run.

She didn’t.

Where a pair of archers erupted from the shadows, she spun toward
them. Four arrows that would have claimed Morghan unleashed a shroud of blood
as they tore through her.

Afterward, when he looked back on it, when he tried to remember,
Scúrhand couldn’t summon up the images that should have recalled for him what
happened next.

In his head, he thought he heard a scream. A voice that was Morghan’s
but not Morghan’s somehow. He saw arrows fly, saw the shield the warrior had
borne from the Myrnan ruins seem to pull them from the air as he fought with a
ferocity Scúrhand had never seen before. And through the fury of the warrior’s
movements, the mage imagined for a moment that he could see a blue-white light
in Morghan’s eyes. A glow to match the steady pulse flaring now from the
damasked heart of the blade as it bit deep again and again.

Scúrhand couldn’t see the moment when Ectauth fell in the chaos,
but he was dead with the rest of them when Morghan finally slowed. The warrior’s
armor was flecked red with gore, breath white on the air, the cold of the chasm
chamber deeper now. He wiped his face and arms with Ectauth’s black cloak. He
didn’t wipe the blade as he slipped it to his belt. Didn’t need to, no blood
clinging to the blue-white steel.

“What in fate’s name was that?” Scúrhand was crouched in the
shadow a short distance away, faint light showing above through narrow windows
he hadn’t noticed before. Dawn breaking outside. He briefly considered holding
the question for a better time, realizing in the end that he had no idea what
that time would look like.

“That was staying alive.”

Where Thiri had fallen, Morghan knelt at her side. Her skin was
white as ice and blood-streaked, the arrows fanning out across her chest. But
even as Morghan fumbled bloody fingers at her neck, Scúrhand called out to see
the faint movement of the black shafts.

“She’s breathing…”

Morghan felt the blood weak at her neck, saw the steel-edged hunting
heads where they punched out through her back. He had the skill to bind the
wounds, but there was no point. The girl was at the edge of death, no way to
pull the arrows without only hastening the end.

“Search Ectauth,” he whispered to Scúrhand, fear in his voice.
“He’ll have healing…”

“I did. Nothing.”

Save her…
whispered the breathless voice of vengeance as
it threaded through his mind, and Morghan’s vision blurred suddenly, eyes
burning.

He remembered Eltolitinus. He remembered the faces of the others
and saw the dread in their eyes that was their last sight before the final
darkness, as they were consumed body and soul. He remembered the mountain
giant’s halls, heard the howling of wolves and the screams of those who had
followed him. All the ones he couldn’t save.

“Save her,” he whispered, and he felt the words twist in him like
a thing closer to prayer than any oath the warrior had ever spoken.

He felt the metal of the bastard sword grow warm beneath his
gore-streaked hand.

Without thinking, he grasped the girl’s fingers, forced them
closed around the haft. He felt her shudder, saw color twist through her cheeks
as he quickly snapped the shafts that pinned her, grasped each in turn and
pulled. In the dark sleep of pain, she screamed, but even as she did, Morghan
saw the wounds close over as she consumed the healing power held in that blade
of damasked steel, the blood-streaked skin smooth again as her eyes snapped
open.