A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (6 page)

The sword slipped from her hand, clattering to the stones as she
scrambled back. Scúrhand was close by now, catching the disorientation in her
eyes that he knew would quickly pass. But it was the sword he stared at as
Morghan picked it up.

The warrior turned away, looked to the light above and walked
toward a distant flight of stairs twisting up from the shadows of the cavern.

“It’s done,” Scúrhand said to Thiri. He saw her staring to the carnage
around her, wide-eyed as if waking from a half-remembered dream. “You’re safe,
with us at least. If you’re still here when Arsanc sends another force to
discover what happened to this one, I wouldn’t like your chances.”

She followed him shakily as he followed Morghan in turn. The
stairs led on to a passage he recognized from his previous dealings with the
dead Razeen. The main doors of the citadel were ahead, open now where the
sentinels they first avoided had been called in by Ectauth. The scent of sea
air and the rising sun were beyond.

Scúrhand fought the urge to break for the library, the
incalculable worth of lore still scattered there. When he had searched the
dismembered Ectauth, he found scroll tubes that he slipped to his pack by quick
instinct. Another time for the rest, he thought. He had a more important mystery
to assess at present.

Beyond the doorway, Morghan stood atop a rise of stone a dozen
strides away. He had the sword in hand, was swinging it idly, a dark silhouette
against the sky.

“Vindicator,” the warrior called.

“You?” There was an edge in Scúrhand’s voice. It took him a moment
to hear it, then another moment for him to recognize the fear there. “Taking
vengeance against whom? You blame Arsanc for what happened here? Ectauth?”

“I blame myself. For all of it.”

There was a familiar weariness in the warrior’s voice, but something
else as well. A kind of peace Scúrhand hadn’t heard in all the time since
Morghan returned from the north, but it chilled him now, the mage not sure why.
In any of the previous narrow escapes he had followed Morghan into, fear was
never in short supply. But before he could think on it, Thiri’s voice came from
behind him, stronger than he would have expected.

“You seek vengeance against your own past, you fight a foe you’ll
never defeat.”

Morghan turned to appraise her for a long moment, a darkness
flashing momentarily in his gaze. And then he laughed out loud. From somewhere
below the cliffs, the call of seabirds rang out as if in echo.

The warrior shook his head. “ ‘Vindicator’ is the blade’s name.
He was right,” he said, pointing to Scúrhand. Thiri’s look told him she didn’t
understand, but Morghan only laughed again.

Scúrhand watched, smiling himself after a time. “Are you
absolutely sure you’re quite all here?” He caught Thiri’s eye as he glanced
back, but it was Morghan she moved toward.

“More sure today,” the warrior said. He shrugged as he nodded to
Thiri. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”

There was nothing more to say as they returned to the horses,
just waking from a fitful sleep within the hissing curtain of the wind. They
rested themselves only for a short while before they set off, Morghan with
Thiri behind him, Scúrhand thoughtful as they rode out against the red flood of
dawn.

WITHIN THE WOOD, yellow-green tendrils of creeping
snow-vine thread the eye sockets of a frost-splintered skull.
Old magic
lingers in these secret places of the world,
the Quick Ones say. He hears
their songs. Knows that this place that is his is one such place they sing of.

The skeleton spreads beneath the green shroud of endless
branches. Its fingers of grey bone, still as death, clutch the ice that binds
them. His fingers of black wood shift slowly with a silent wind, scratching
distant sky. Great roots hunch and rise like talons dug deep into freezing
earth, a wide swath that pushes up and out as thick ridges of buckled stone.
Ice-choked rills mark the shattered lines of the land, root-web twisting down
and out through a skin of earth and wood-bark, shrouding the living ground
beneath.

He knows the ancient magic of this place, drinks it deep through
the roots that are his feet. He spreads it to sky and air through the ancient
bare fingers of his blackened arms. He feels the sun, cast along the
edge-precipice of western horizon, jagged gash of crimson flaring beyond cloud
and freezing haze. The dome of dark sky presses down, split by pale dusk like
cracks in the acorn that let frost seep within. He feels white flowers thread
their way between weathered teeth, triggered to life by winter’s first breath.

He knows the reckoning of seasons since the body fell and turned
to bone. Seasons come and pass endlessly for him, each stretched and twisted out
to the next, glistening mirror-moments of time catching each other’s
reflections like raindrops striking still water. For an age, golden grass grows
up and through the skeleton’s weathered bones, fragile mineral of life fissured
and broken, overgrown and swallowed in a heartbeat of passing days.

The bones are of a Quick One, whose kind pass only rarely through
the wood, but who are not of the wood. Born of blood as are all the creatures
of the world, the Quick Ones are set above the world by bright minds, by
spirits that burn like no other creatures’. Quick Ones come in smooth and tall,
scaled and short, the green and grey of forest shadow, the pale rose of first
light at dawn. Sharing shapes
and
colors
with other Beasts and Birds, but standing always tall where their kin of blood
crouch low.

The Quick One fallen at his feet had been smooth-skinned, had
borne a shell of steel long years before. That shell has long ago turned to
rust in his slow senses, fused with bone and rock, flaked finally to nothing. Steel
is a secret of the Quick Ones, who collect the soft stones of the open desert
to burn and hammer to a cutting brightness.

From the day when the Quick One fell, only the sword is left
behind.

He knows blades from the past. He feels axe and adze raised
against the groves around him when he is young. Even in that ancient youth,
though, his visage and power drove the Quick Ones from the wood. In later
years, they did the task themselves with dark legends and warning tales, felt
through the touch of those few who once walked within his shadow. Warriors,
mostly, avoiding the wyrms that prowl the dry wastes and the mountains that are
the lands within which the wood is set. The old magic that lingers here is
thing that the Quick Ones do not understand, and so their fear builds on the
dread rumors of this place that is his.

His perception is all the living things he touches through the
roots that bind him to the land. His perception is all the living things that
touch him in return. In the touch of those that once came with offerings of
sacrifice and totem, blood and bone, he feels the world. Memory made and
unmade. Taken in to become part of the time that is his.

Along the highest of the narrow ridges outthrust from the great
roots that are his feet, the sword is a steel-grey spike buried in white stone.
Its edges are straight like the line-paths of shooting stars, tall even with
two-thirds of its length swallowed by the earth. Vine-twined and silver-bright
in winter. Flanked by flowers in summer whose sun-white cups catch each day’s
dew, wind whistling razor-clear through crown of haft and hilt.

Few Quick Ones have come here since even long before the sword
fell. The world outside the wood is changing. No shelter sought at his twisted
feet, in cool shade where ever-stretching fingers spread their net of green.
The grey blade stands unchanged beyond that green, untouched by winter and
summer, never rusted, never weathered.

Midway along the ridge, shrouded and all but unseen within the
green, a cloak of black leather survives the same long cycles of bitter cold,
blinding heat. Lost now, covered with layer-years of leaf and mold, creeping
tallgrass kept at bay in a twisted circle all around. None see it. None watch
the blade mark out the passage of years by the shadow of the sun, moving from
horizon to height to horizon again as it circles slowly around the sky.

With no warning, he feels the shadow cast by the blade flicker in
the last light of a winter’s day. A shift of time touches it, twists through
him like bitter wind across the white-black etching of his skin.

The world changes.

Something catches his indistinct attention then.

Movement twists beyond the trees that grow to the line of his
roots and stop there in a reverent grey-green wall. The howling of wolves, an
echo of rasping breath tracing through snow-shrouded silence. An instant later,
a Quick One bursts out from frosted shadow, skin limned with a bloody light
within the haze of sunset as it runs. A dozen paces behind it, three wolves
crash through the screen of trees, flanks winter-lean. Fierce voices lash the
air, blood at their tongues.

The Quick One sees him there, twisted-trunk wall of shadow
against the sky. And in the touch of its desperate life that unfolds through
freezing air, he feels a recognition that he does not understand. The Quick One
hungrily sucks air, struggles ahead on feet wrapped in leather and fur, red
tracks staining the unbroken white of the ground.

He feels the Quick One’s mind as a blur of fear and shadow. Feels
thoughts and future trace out as rippled lines. One step ahead of death’s
pursuit across a bloodied crust of snow, it will leap to his lowest branches,
his trailing fingers, thick around as the Quick One’s legs. It will climb to
safety, rest in resin-scented shadow, cling tight to his blistered skin. He
feels that future, as he feels all futures. Feels wolves circle, howl to the
black sky, eventually slink off to seek easier prey. Answering the hunger of
empty stomachs, starving white eyes.

A dozen strides away, the Quick One sees the blade.

The world changes.

The figure lurches, slowing. Stares in wonder. Recognition. Fear.
It looks back behind it, sees the wolves but its eyes are glazed, blue like
summer sky beneath a dirty shroud of sun-red hair.

The ripples of the future twist through him, then are gone.
Swallowed by shadow. In its moment’s hesitation, the Quick One has turned from
him, turned from the future in which it climbs to safety. He feels those
almost-moments fade, shred like morning mist beneath bright sun.

The Quick One runs again, bolts for the narrow ridge of ice and
stone, but the wolves are already there. It stumbles on the snow-shrouded skull
of the one who is there before, falls to its knees and claws forward, thrusts
gloved hands toward the blade even as the wolves hit.

Forgive me…

He feels words slip into chill air. Feels the screaming start and
finish in an unmarked moment of time.

The wolves feed until long after the pale Clearmoon rises, sets
again. More wolves come, following the faint scent of offal on the frozen wind.
He feels their voices, feels them fight for the life they take from the
dismembered body, but his thoughts are gone from the moment, gone from this
place.

He is in the past. He remembers when the first Quick One falls.

It is warm. He remembers the moment of it. Feeling and fear as
the Quick One crawls forward from the thick shadow of the closest trees. The
sun is high, the red of the Quick One’s life marking its path back across the
green as that life drains away.

That first Quick One finds its way beneath him, lingers within
his shadow for an unmarked moment of time. Its eyes are bright, taking in the
wonder that is the wood. Cicada song is a silver haze, but against the chill of
death, the Quick One wraps a cloak of black leather tight despite the heat of
sun and air. The black leather is clasped at its neck, pinned with metal in the
circle-shape of three twisted lines, linked and intertwined. Sharp-edged like
the unsheathed blade in its gloved hands.

It crawls up and along the ridge, scrabbles across the mounded
crowns of white stone thrust up through grass and vine. It weeps in the honey
scent of flowers gold and white as it moves to the edge, to that highest point
that marks the unseen vortex of the old magic that threads through this place.

That first Quick One lies there, weeping. It has no strength
left. It rises all the same. He feels dying fingers drive the grey blade down,
down, striking the crown of white rock with a scream of dweomered steel.
Sending it deep within a sheath of stone and black soil.

He feels the clasp that holds the cloak rend as the figure falls,
dead weight tearing it free. Unhooked, the cloak touches the rising wind,
pulled back to twist like broken wings along the ground.

On my life,
the Quick One whispers. Then impression and
memory and deed are done.

Cold metal cuts deep, slices through leather gauntlet, finger
flesh and bone as the Quick One dies.

Its hands are tight around the blade of the sword. Clinging vines
wrap its dark metal with a longer grip as the land brightens, darkens, fades.

A ripple in the long line of time twists through him. A moment
whose power he feels but does not understand. But it passes, disappears in the
name of new moments, new days, new seasons.

Time shifts. The world changes.

Winter again. Now. Bone and sinew spread in the flat-pounded
circle of blood-streaked snow, all that remains as the last of the wolves slip
away to the wood and he is alone once more.

Memory twists through the silence of his senses. Faint resonance.
A shimmer though black air and white ground. In the lingering energy of the
Quick One’s death, he reads the impressions of a life, feels names and memories
flit unfiltered through his mind.

Holy woman. Priestess of the Green Path.

The days slip past. Light to dark again a dozen times by the time
he absorbs those names, makes them part of his understanding.

For the first time, he reckons the seasons back to that
bright-sun day when the first Quick One falls. A different creature than this
second Quick One, whose blue eyes are plucked out by the crows at dawn. The
second Quick One is slight, fair of hair and flesh. The first is taller,
thicker, eyes dark, skin dark beneath its metal shell.

The first Quick One has a mark at its shoulder, revealed when the
carrion cats dig in through the seamed metal skin, burst it blood-bright from
the inside. The same mark as the clasp that holds the cloak, and which breaks
and fades away in time to rust. But this second mark is carved into blackening
flash. Burning with a red glow that pulses and fades in slow rhythm.

The same circle-shape of bright-edged lines. Three crescents all
interlocking, set at their edges with straighter shapes, sharp like the razor
edge of the grey blade thrust deep into rocky ground as the first Quick One
dies. Only when all its flesh is gone, bones all that remains, does the magic
of blood-red mark fade beyond the threshold of his senses.

The bright Clearmoon in the sky those nights is the crescent
whose shape echoes the bright marks at the Quick One’s shoulder. It swells to
full as he thinks, then wanes again, days turning colder in a haze of hoarfrost
and grey skies. Snow falls to shroud red ground with white. Then the bones of
the flame-haired Green Priestess are gone to all senses but memory.

He remembers the future of the Quick One who is the first to die.
That day, he feels the mind of the steel-shelled figure, a blur of fear and
shadow. He feels future-lines twist out from the Quick One’s staggering steps,
spread like ripples in the unseen shroud of the old magic where it circles him
like an endless storm.

He hears names then, as he hears names now. He casts himself
back, digs deep as days lengthen one by one and snow melts to rivulets of blue
water curling between the roots of his feet, eddying along the rills and away.
The bones of the Green Priestess are kissed by the sun, last remnants of flesh
scoured by the first flies and stripped clean by the warmer day when he finally
recalls the name.

Lotherasien.

The Quick One who died and thrust the sword deep into stone and
ground names itself thus. Names its place and purpose as a knight of the Blood
of the Commonwealth, and in the last will and purpose of that dying mind, this
name is all the Quick One is and was and will ever be.