A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (8 page)

He focuses. Reaches within himself for the selves he has become,
splitting and shaping them. Seasons pass in a blur, the first taste of frost
touching his fingers. The wind turns from the north once more.

It is the heart of winter, the wolves prowling the deep forest
again, and he is the Blood Knight. He is the Lotherasien in whose doomed heart
burns the fear of what the grey blade is, of what it becomes.

It is the heart of summer, the cicada song a silver haze, and he
is the Green Priestess. He is the holy seeker of the Kingmakers, the name that
is given to the Green Priestess’s path. His is the longing to restore the
greatness promised by the sword that is Kelastaen, the long history reflected
in a razor edge of grey steel. A line of kings once straight as haft and blade,
then broken. Waiting to be restored now with the hated Empire’s fall.

He feels the enmity of these two spirits that die with no
knowledge of each other. Feels a hatred twist out between them, entwined in his
own experience. Caught within the warp and weft of the past unfolding as a
thousand histories touching those minds.

He looks forward then.

Ripples spread out from the blade where the wind sends spiral
clouds of autumn leaves around it. That shroud of red is the color of the Green
Priestess’s hair, falling and spreading like a stain of blood when the storms
come. He feels the shadow spread in echo, senses the future open up within it.

For long years, the sword stays hidden within his shadow. But in
every future, every line of time forced open before him, there comes a time
when he senses a figure step up to the crown of the narrow ridge once more.
When it leaves, it holds the grey blade in its hands.

On each path, the figure’s shape is different, shifting between
all the possible futures that the shadow holds. On each path, a thousand-thousand
blades fit two thousand-thousand hands, all the unreckoned possibilities
branching out from this place, this time. But as far as he follows, he feels
each path lead to the same place of blood and shadow. Black and red occluding
all futures into a dead haze.

From the depths of the spirit heart that has defined him since
the beginning of time, he mourns.

A storm of seasons passes. He loses track of them, senses the
stars sweep past as endless arcs of blue-white fire.

He slips back, senses the Blood Knight fall, claw its way forward,
die, fall, fall and die in an endless cycle. But no matter how many times the
Blood Knight dies, no matter how many ways the grey blade is hidden, no matter
how strong the magic of this place that hides it, he feels the sword reclaimed.

He knows this. The future unfolding before his thought.

As the Green Priestess does, other Quick Ones seek and find the
sword. They die in battalions to track it to this place, seizing it as they
crush the bones of the Blood Knight, the Green Priestess beneath their feet.
The grey blade is taken, its wielder slain, claimed, slain again over endless
lifetimes of the Quick Ones in their endless search.

For untold thousands of undone years, he touches the Quick Ones,
feels their movement along the fringes and boundaries of his realm. He hears
their spirit songs carried on the summer wind, senses the impressions their
lives and minds make on the other creatures of the wood. Ripples of shadow.

Within the spirit of the Green Priestess locked tight inside him
now, a light burns like white fire. He feels it sear him, looks within the fate
of the Green Priestess to feel it flare brighter, scouring the shadow of the
Blood Knight’s oath.

He feels it as the sword is born, senses liquid steel glow the
white of first daylight, poured in a shroud of smoke and shrieking flame. The
weapon’s mold is a slab of perfect black marble broken off from the throne that
once sits within a ruined hall, walls pulled down and overgrown five hundred
years before. The history and power of that throne is drawn within the blade,
and as its white metal cools first to blue, then grey, its heat splits that
great slab asunder, leaves it rent upon this makeshift foundry floor.

A song threads within the lives of the Quick Ones that he hears
for the first time. And over a year of days that are a moment for him and the
earth from which he drinks and the sun that is his heart, he comes to
understand that he is wrong in all that he knows. He is wrong in all he feels
in the long years of observing the Quick Ones and the pattern their short lives
make against the slow passage of seasons.

The Quick Ones move from life to death in a single heartbeat of
the world, and they slay each other with a focus that he has always understood
to mean they embrace death. It has been clear to his reckoning always that the
Quick Ones welcome death’s release, and the chance to become one with the world
from which they arise and to which they return. Death the end and beginning of
the cycle of all seasons.

He is wrong. He knows now. The Quick Ones do not embrace death.

They fear it.

For a season, he ponders.

In the time that another winter approaches, then passes, he
decides.

All the possible futures he perceives. All the endless exchanges
of madness and war that branch off as ripples from this spot.

All the death that surrounds each vision of the blade, each facet
of the future and past splintering like ice. Steel and stone and blood lock
together in a delicate and deadly embrace across the chasm of time. Within the
spirit of the Blood Knight that lives now only within his memory, he senses
shadow that threads through him, freezing all the innermost veins of the liquid
of life.

His is the old magic. But in the space beyond all history, there
lives a magic that is older still.

It is a thing that he and his kind do not dwell on, do not think
about. A thing they turn their senses from, always unknowable. This is the
sword’s magic, he realizes. The deep magic that is older than he, older than
any living thing.

It is the deep magic that forges the grey blade long ago, imbuing
it with the shadow that will scour the world if that magic is ever unleashed.
The deep magic has no equal anymore, no force of life or spellcraft in all
Isheridar that might stand against it.

Except for one.

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.

For the first time, he thinks on how very old he is.

He thinks on the world that is older still, and on the Quick Ones
who partake of so little of that world in the short time given to them. He
thinks about the death they face, and the history that reaches beyond life.

He thinks on the endless death that twists out from this place,
this time, because the presence of the grey blade here creates a single future
that will not be denied. The quest of the Green Priestess, the sacrifice of the
Blood Knight. No difference made. The Green Priestess falls, the Blood Knight
falls, and the rift between these two is never breached. Cut by long years
between them and the door of death that closes off their perceptions.

There stands a future beyond which he cannot feel. There stands a
place that seethes with the noise of storm wind across the dry grasslands, that
burns with the heat of the unseen earth that will consume all the wide world in
the end.

This is the end of each future in which only death unfolds each
time the grey blade is seized, claimed by another that will turn its power to
destruction in the name of the hunger that the deep magic brings.

All futures save one. An impossible place where the Green
Priestess and the Blood Knight are made to see the things each knew. Things the
other should have known.

He reaches deep within himself.

He summons all the old magic that is in this place. He creates a
moment beyond which he cannot stretch his endless thought. A moment beyond all
the long centuries of his awareness and the farthest expanses of all the
futures he can touch. A single future that he will shape. A possibility that is
all he is. All he can be.

The Blood Knight’s dedication burns bright in the dead heart of
every oath ever uttered in the Empire’s name, and in the knowledge of a
darkness hidden from the world at the cost of blood and in the name of the
common good. In the name of the commonwealth of the Lothelecan, gone now.

The Green Priestess’s hope flares within a shroud of white-hot
anger and defiance at the Empire that steals the Kelist Razor away, and the
death that shreds the dream of reclaiming the sword becomes the sword, because
death and the grey blade are one, the knotted cord of life tearing before its
edge like rotted gauze.

He feels spring turn as he begins it, and by the time of deep
summer, he feels nothing at all.

There stands a place that seethes with the noise of storm wind
across the dry grasslands, that burns with the heat of the unseen earth. This
is the future beyond which he cannot feel.

In the blindness of that last moment, he understands what it
means.

• • •

She awoke in the spring, lurching to life in a wave of
pain and bright blindness. She heard wind and water, twisting over her, flowing
beneath her, impossibly loud. The sun was high above her, stabbing her eyes as
she reflexively turned away. Rolling to her side on her bed of soft grass, she
froze suddenly with a guttural fear, seeing the sloping edge of the broad and
crumbling ridge she rested upon. She felt a pounding pain in her head, felt a
spell of dizziness take her that caused her to seize the very ground beneath
her, hold it tight.

She saw the sword then.

It stood where her memory placed it, buried to more than half the
length of its broad blade in a crest of white stone, as if it had been plunged
there to cool its final forging. A vision came back to her in a rush of cold.
She remembered running, remembered wolves behind her. She lurched to her feet
in sudden fear, half-fell, half-stumbled back and away from the edge of the
ridge. She felt her heart race in the expectation of jaws clamping hard against
her legs, tearing flesh and muscle, pulling her down. She screamed with the
memory, and then it was gone. Just a dream.

She looked down to see herself, staring in shock. She stood naked
as her birth, wrapped only by the crumbling tendrils of  dead vines. She
brushed them away in frantic fear, felt her pale skin drink the heat of the sun
that slowly sent the chill away. Before her, in the space where she had lain,
were spread fragments of leather that she knew with unknown certainty were all
that was left of the armor she once wore. She picked up a section of
breastplate and rusted buckle with shaking hands, felt it crumble with the rot
of endless years.

She remembered running, remembered seeing the sword even as she
sprinted for safety and felt herself stumble at that long-dreamed-of sight.

She remembered running, remembered the sword’s great weight in
her hands as she drove it down to shatter the rock and tear the soil that would
sheathe the blade until the end of time.

She blinked, felt both sets of memories twist past each other in
an impossible embrace. The sword was three strides away from where she fell.
The sword was where she left it, thrust down as a vine-strewn offering into the
earth itself.

Above and around her, a whisper traced the still air.

She wheeled, stumbling again as she looked up, but all she saw
above and around her were the skeletal arms of an ancient oak. Its heavy
branches were dead black, leaves hanging dark and slicked with grey mold. The
size and spread of the tree spoke of incalculable age, its great base as wide
across as a castle tower, countless trunks splitting off from it to spread like
a vast wall. Around her, great roots furrowed the ground, touched by rot where
winter had peeled their ancient bark away.

In a shudder of memory, she saw the great tree spreading above
the snow, black branches limned with frost. She felt her heart twist with that
memory, felt a sudden spike of pain and longing for the mission that set her
against the will of a dead Empire. She felt her sight clouded by the dead eyes
of the knight who was pledged to die in the defense of that Empire, and who had
tried to stop her mission even before she was born.

Around her, inside her, she felt the old magic sing.

This was the magic from which life sprung, coursing now in every
breath, in the space where that breath became the wind, in the wind’s caress of
golden leaves and the white bark of the lesser trees that spread out and around
the open space of ridges and ravines above which the great oak had climbed. She
felt it in the burning heart of the sun that was the source of all life,
watching its twisting shadows across the grove around her.

She felt a fear she didn’t understand.

Old magic lingers in these secret places of the world,
the
high priests said.

She found a black cloak with which she covered herself. It lay
half-hidden beneath a layer of loam and dead leaves, but she knew it was there,
had always known it. Two strides from where the cloak was fallen, she saw the
same dead vines that had clutched at her twisting through an ancient skull.

She remembered everything. Remembered nothing. All the hope that
brought her here, that had carried her across half a world. She was one of
hundreds, scouring the farthest corners of a dozen kingdoms in search of a
legacy stolen from her people twelve hundred years before.

She was one of hundreds taking the oath of blood to defend an
Empire against the rise of ancient evil that spread like a dark stain from the
deeps and legends of the past.

She was the last of the Lotherasien, following ancient portents and
the shadowed signs of divination to the dark wood. Last of a fated handful who
had sworn to die in order to bury the dread blade beyond all thought and
memory. Out of the reach of any who might seek it.