A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (7 page)

He remembers now.

Twenty-one full cycles of the sun, carefully reckoned, reckoned
again. Brief pulse of time and time passing, barely visible within the record
of his endless memory. Back to times before time, seasons without end that
flare, pass, fade before him.

The Blood Knight is running, but no wolves follow this day. Only
staggering footfalls, tracing back beyond the edge of the grove and past him.
His long fingers trace the air as gently hanging curtains of green leaves,
drinking rain and sun as the figure falls.

He feels the Blood Knight’s desire then. Its eyes are set on the
edge of the ridge that crests beneath his outstretched arms. It feels the
ancient life that steeps these stones, the power of this place that is the
power of earth, of heat and deep magic pulsing within the earth.

The power of the sword fights against the old magic that is here.
The power of the sword knows what is coming.

To hide the sword is the vow the Blood Knight has made, but the
strength that is its will and purpose is nearly consumed by the sword. Nearly
consumed by the ancient hunger that is the birthright of the great grey blade.
A power that pulses like the red flow of life that marks Beast and Bird and
Quick One alike. A power all but drained from the Blood Knight as it collapses
at his feet.

Twenty-one years ago, the sword is the fulcrum around which the
Blood Knight’s life ends. The momentary distraction of life and death so
quickly embraced by earth and time.

Twenty-one years later, the grey blade calls the Green Priestess
through the gate of life to death, and he feels a darkness spreading out from
the great sword, twisting through the wood around him.

He ruminates while the dull bruise-light of the Darkmoon trails
behind its brighter brother, blooming to its fullness over long nights, fading
again. He feels the blood-black shadow the blade casts upon the open space
around it.

He tries to understand this thing, but he cannot.

Twenty-one years ago, the Blood Knight’s goal is to bury the
sword in the ridge of stone and earth that thrusts out at his gnarled feet. The
old magic that is the magic of this place is a thing the Blood Knight feels, a
thing it seeks over the endless leagues and hardships that bring it here. The
desire to lose the grey blade in this place that is his. To see it hidden for
all time.

He feels that desire reaching for him, feels it twist through his
awareness with an acuity that slows all thought for two seasons. Then winter is
done, and other things must be thought on, and only in the passage of time has
that long-ago day now come back to him.

The Blood Knight dies in anguish as its goal is met. Embracing
the death it sought. And as he feels that death resonate again, he casts back
through time and memory to taste the sorrow that died with the Quick One that
day.

Through the spring and into the close days of the long sun, he
thinks. Then finally, he decides.

From one of the great roots that hold him fast to rock and soil
and the vastness beneath, buds unfurl. Shoots twist forth at his thought, pale
green. He flexes them, guides them, feels creeping movement over the slow
passage of days. The season swings by. Wind blows, hissing through his upper
branches. The heat of summer cracks the few bones the wolves left whole. Fat
hornets feast at dried marrow scraps as they nest within the Green Priestess’s
splintered ribs, leave a screen of paper walls behind.

As autumn falls, wolves howl, reminding him what it is he waits
for.

As the cold rains come and the screen of leaves begins to fall,
he is ready to set his will within the twisting tendrils. A reach across long
days, marching almost into winter, then he is there.

Tufts of grey grass rise through the eyes and mouth of the Green
Priestess’s skull where the wolves discarded it. The Blood Knight’s empty eyes
are half-shrouded by creeping violet. He sends shoots through and within both
caverns of bone, splitting within the shadows. Cold tendrils spread, touch all
the space within.

He feels day shift to night, reckons off a dozen sunrises before
it is done.

The morning is cold, bright and cloudless and carrying the
night-chill of empty sky and white stars. The vines reach the sword, surround
it with all his senses.

He feels the freezing aura of arcane dweomer in that grey steel.
The magic of the Quick Ones, drawn from the mana of the unliving world. The
newer power whose strength twists counter to the life that is the old magic of
him and his kind. He holds it at a distance, lets it twist and expand like the
slow unfolding of leaf-showers on the rising wind.

The priests of the Green Path hold the old magic, or some small
fragment of it. The Quick Ones who are so-named for the speed with which they
pass through life tame the old magic to themselves, but only as a single
stallion is tamed within the larger herd that darkens the grey plains. The old magic
of life and green and living things, set against the new magic of stone and
mana like oil and water. No convergence of forms. No underlying connection
between both magics, but he remembers the Green Priestess falling before the
blade in an act of final supplication. Remembers the longing to touch, to hold,
to possess that weapon that is the Quick One’s last thought.

Over the passage of days, he wraps his subtle perception tighter
around the sword’s grey blade, sends it up to touch the cold metal of the
guard. A single slab of bright steel is forged as an unbreaking cross, wrapped
with filament lines of dwyrsilver that gleam a pale grey.

He feels the life of the Blood Knight, its memory held sharp
within that steel now.

Lotherasien.

The energies of life are ripples in the world. Points from which
time and past and future split off, forged and broken and cast back to the
unwrought realm of possibility once more. These are things he senses, feels as
he touches a thousand centuries of history all at once. All the infinite
futures, shed and split off as singular paths. Like the unseen magic of this
place, twisting through him and spreading out to fill the wood as the unseen
touch of a world lost to time.

I am the Imperial Guard, and in my blood runs the honor and
duty of the Lothelecan…

He feels the names unfold again, faint play of words surrounding
and supporting them with the history of the fabled and fallen Empire. With the
words comes again the shape, the interlocking circles. The shadow of life and
spirit that touches and imprints on grey steel.

It isn’t enough. He feels for the fullness of what it means. The
blade’s power of new magic spikes, flares white-hot against his unfelt touch,
but he ignores it. He thrusts deeper into the maelstrom of faint impressions,
seeking the stronger truth beneath. All the scars of mind and memory set upon
the sword by all the hands that ever wield it, by the hands that forge and
fight for it. The Blood Knight, last to touch it. The Green Priestess, reaching
for it with the last strength of life. Not knowing the dark power promised by
that touch.

He feels the past split open, his faint caress of mind and
understanding tearing away the veil of lost impressions. He feels a spider’s
web hung with dewdrop spheres of crystal, feels it shredded by the chaos wind
that is all those futures denied, splitting off from a single line of the past.

He feels the Green Priestess, feels the Blood Knight. Feels the
cold spirit of the grey blade as sight and voice ringing separately, then as one.

Death…

Once, this is the sword of a warrior-folk on a green isle far to
the east, and from the hands of those warriors, the Lotherasien steal it. He
hears it named by long-dead voices.
Kelastaen
. The Kelist Razor, blade
of the war-kings. He sends his touch to wrap haft and pommel, feels that
impression break off from the faint trace of memory that the Blood Knight’s
hands have left imprinted on steel and tight-wrapped white leather that shows
no sign of age. But when he tries to seek the reasons for that theft, he finds
only shadows and secrecy locked deep beneath an oath whose name he cannot know.

Death…

On a day of first frost, brown-black leaves plucked from his
swaying limbs by the icy wind, he feels the Empire fall. A moment of long years
ago. A time well within his reckoning but beyond his ability to judge by its
faint reflection in the Blood Knight’s life as the unseen scars in blade and
bone reveal it.

From the fall of Empire, a thousand years pass backward, and then
twice that long again, and he senses a great plain of grassland and wandering
watercourse. A pristine land whose air is clear morning mist, pushed by the
soft-scented breeze of distant woods. A ring of high mountains, molten-gold sky
of the rising sun. On those peaks gleam towers and bridges of ivory white,
shapes reflecting the gently twisting lines of trees along the forest slopes
beneath them.

Then something passes his perception and twists away the shroud
of light to reveal the shadow beneath. He senses the plain boiling with the
shapes of unnatural creatures of stone and metal, feels war unfold and spread
and scour the living land like plague. Black fire sweeps across the endless
grasslands, white towers shattered and fallen, built again to be torn down once
more.

Death.

It is the memories of the Blood Knight that thread through him
now. Memories of a dark age lost to time but never forgotten by those who
sought to hold that darkness from rising again. Against the shadow of those
memories, the blade is hidden, found, taken, hidden again. He reckons off this
time over which the Lotherasien keep the sword safe. From the day it was
claimed from the hands of the last Kelist war-king, he feels the passage of a
thousand seasons flash four times past. Old impressions, locked in cold steel
and the spirit-memories of all the Quick Ones who die in the sword’s name.

He senses the sword lost in the aftermath of the Empire’s last
war. The great war-king betraying a nation’s birthright and beholden to a
darkness that has no name. He senses a shadow pass through the strength of
steel, a thousand years turning for the blade with barely any touch of living
hands.

Memories and legends. Over the fast-blurred space of a hundred
winter days, the blade is forged within a fallen castle, a shadowed tower of a
distant golden land. A force of spellcasters with power enough to lay waste to
cities gathers to infuse that power into molten steel. New magic, fell and pure
and black as midnight’s storms. A strength in the dweomer of that steel that
will keep the grey blade from ever being destroyed.

Memories and legends. He senses the hands of the king that wields
the sword, feels the unreckoned hands of other sovereigns seize it from the
dying grasp of the hands before. Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons in a long
line, ruling by dint of history and the blood of kings in their veins.

Against the shadow of those memories, the Blood Knight takes an
oath that the blade which cannot be destroyed will stay hidden, far from the
hands of those that would wield it. Those that would succumb to its shadow. A
pledge that the Quick One will die to uphold.

The Blood Knight runs with the blade, even as it feels a dark
despair course through its mind for the oath that cannot he upheld anymore. The
Empire is fallen, and the grey blade is found and stolen back again. But when
he falls as he knows he will, there will be no one to hide it again. In the
aftermath of the Lothelecan, the Blood Knights are cast to the winds. Spread as
a memory already fading to legend.

Pledged unto death, the Blood Knight seizes the sword and carries
it across dangerous realms to a place of faint legend. A forest where the old
magic might be stronger than anywhere else across the world-land the Quick Ones
call Isheridar. The shroud of magic that is the legacy of this place, that is
his name and birthright. A veil within which the blade might be safe, might be
lost for all time.

The ancient magic of this place will wrap and conceal the dark
dweomer of the blade. Or so the Blood Knight hopes as it dies driving the sword
into the living ground at his dark and twisted feet.

He feels darkness again, feels it chill him as the first vision
wraps around him once more. War on the black plain, the sword in the hands of
its first master, whose name is burned away even as the memory shapes it.

The wind drives leaves turned frost-white and black. He loses
track of time passing, of memories playing out like the songs of wind and rain
that make up each storm scouring the distant mountains.

He sees himself now, cast in the final memory of the Blood
Knight’s lost gaze as it looks up to the sky. The spread of his own great arms
are a welcoming embrace through the Quick One’s eyes, bright sun flaring to
whiter light that occludes all else, then is gone.

On my life,
the Blood Knight whispers, and its life is no
more.

Spring blooms again.

Grey-brown fingers of vine flare green, drinking the life of sun
and sky as they entwine the sword, the skeletal shadows still grasping for it.
Summer comes, and the Green Priestess is all but gone now within the tall grass
and the shroud of sun-touched flowers.

In his mind, he is moving. Running with blade in hands and across
his shoulder, his body not yet stilled by death as it shadows him close, a
predator’s step running fast behind him.

Death.

This is the song sung by all the memories of the grey blade, and
he is joined to them now. Feelings and impressions, a single mind within his.
Broad web of past and futures threading through dull steel from molten birth to
this space of shade and sheltered wind.

Within that mind, he feels the great distance between the two
lives inextricably bound to this place. The Blood Knight, the Green Priestess.
A clash of spirit and purpose.