Child of the Sword, Book 1 of The Gods Within (43 page)

Morgin could finally take no more. He
charged one last time, and as before they met and their swords rang
once in passing. But this time Morgin spurred Mortiss on and did
not turn back to charge again. He could no longer hear even the
faintest sound of the battle in the ravine, so he chose a direction
at random and spurred Mortiss to the point of cruelty. He swung his
sword arm wildly about in a desperate attempt to limber it up, and
always behind him he heard Salula’s mocking laughter.

Salula caught up with him after a short
sprint, so he cut hard to the right, then to the left. Right, left,
right, left; he played a game much like the game Rat had played in
the streets of Anistigh, a game of desperation and adrenaline and
fear. Salula gained on him in the straight, but lost distance each
time he cut sharply to one side. Again he used the trees and
Mortiss’ agility, trying always to make a sudden turn within inches
of one, then charging straight for some distance before the next
turn. Behind him he heard Salula’s mount struggling for air, Salula
beating it with the flat of his sword, Salula laughing, sounds that
came closer with each beat of Morgin’s heart. He picked out a tree,
and at the right moment ripped Mortiss reins to the left. He cut
too close; his shoulder brushed the tree’s bark painfully, and it
was that that saved his life, for Salula had anticipated his move
and gone to the other side of the tree to cut him off.

Salula’s sword screamed past his nose and
chopped into the tree’s bark. Chips of wood stung Morgin’s face. He
almost fell from his saddle, but he held on and threw his sword out
desperately as he shot past Salula and it cut into the halfman’s
shoulder. Then Mortiss’ momentum carried them on.

“Ahhh!” Salula screamed almost happily. “Tis
good sport you give, ShadowLord, good sport indeed.”

Morgin’s stomach lurched as Mortiss charged
down an embankment and splashed into a small streambed. It was a
flat and shallow stream, with a rocky bottom and good footing.
Morgin turned Mortiss up it and spurred her madly, swatting her
rump with the flat of his sword. He heard Salula close behind him
doing the same. “Tis a merry chase you lead, ShadowLord,” he
called, and laughed evilly.

The streambed was a mistake. The water was
knee deep. Mortiss nostrils flared, she gasped and coughed as she
fought her way through it, water spraying outward in all
directions. But Salula’s larger horse found the going easier and
gained on them steadily.

Morgin changed his mind. He pulled Mortiss
out of the streambed and up an embankment. Salula halted
momentarily below them. “A merry chase indeed, ShadowLord! But our
moment is at hand.”

Morgin ignored him, charged through the
trees, heard the Kull and his horse crashing through the forest
behind him, laughing insanely. Morgin, crouched low in the saddle,
let Mortiss pick her own way through the trees while he looked back
to gauge Salula’s distance. But the Kull was nowhere to be seen.
Fearing some trick, Morgin tried to look in all directions at once,
and suddenly there were no more trees. The forest had ended, and
Morgin now charged out onto a gray and featureless plain cast in
the dim shadows of the dying sun of late afternoon.

Morgin could not believe his eyes. He let
Mortiss’ reins go slack, and the animal, exhausted and no longer
spurred frantically by her master, slowed to a trot, then a walk,
then stopped altogether. Before him stretched a flat and barren
plain without shape or contour, an arid land of sagebrush and brown
grasses, a land without end. There were no mountains in the
distance, merely a flat sea of land that ended in a thin straight
line of a horizon. Salula and his halfmen had pushed them so far
east that Morgin had finally come to the Plains of Quam.

Salula’s mocking laughter shattered the
stillness. Morgin thought first of running, of giving Mortiss her
head and riding like the wind. But out on the open plain Salula
would just ride him down. “You must learn to face your fears,”
AnnaRail had always told him, so he turned Mortiss slowly
about.

Salula waited calmly astride his horse near
the edge of the trees, his cheeks stretched into that evil smile of
his. “Well, ShadowLord,” Salula growled. His voice was a snarling
whisper that raised hackles on the back of Morgin’s neck. “Our time
has come, Elhiyne. The chase is done, but it was a merry chase, and
you fought well, so it will be an honor to personally lay your soul
at my master’s feet, to tell him that it was I who took your life.
For that is what he wants, Elhiyne: the life and the soul of the
Lord of Shadow. And I always give my master what he wants.”

Morgin thought of all the times he had faced
death in the past days, and of how luck had always come to his aid.
But there was no luck here, only his skill with horse and sword
pitted against that of Salula. Salula understood that too, and by
the grin on his face it was obvious that he knew as well as Morgin
whose skill was the greater. If only Morgin had some magic to aid
him. But exhausted and almost fully spent, he had no strength to
summon the arcane. So with nothing to lose, Morgin wished for a
quick and painless death, slapped Mortiss’ flank with the flat of
his sword and charged at the halfman.

Salula laughed, then charged at Morgin. They
raced toward one another, bent low in their saddles, sword points
held out and forward. Mortiss’ hooves thundered on the hard, dry
ground with a beat that matched the pace of Morgin’s heart. He
sensed in her courage far beyond his own, and that shamed him.

He and Salula met. Their swords crashed
together. The force of the blow ripped the sword from Morgin’s
hand. It wrenched his arm painfully out and back, and almost pulled
him from his saddle. Agony shot up his sword arm and into his
shoulder, and the arm was suddenly useless. With his good hand he
dropped the reins and grabbed for the saddle horn just to stay
mounted. He struggled to sit upright, while streaks of pain shot
through his arm from the wrist to the shoulder. Blood welled from a
slash on his forearm where Salula’s sword had touched him.

He retrieved Mortiss’ reins, brought her to
a stop, then spun her about to face Salula for the last time,
unarmed and without hope.

Salula still rode away from him, and was
taking his time to confidently and easily bring his mount to a
stop. He sat upright in his saddle, so sure of himself that he
didn’t even bother to turn and look back at Morgin. He brought his
horse slowly from a gallop to a trot, then stopped altogether, and
sat there astride it with his back to Morgin as a clearly intended
insult.

Salula’s horse took a few meandering steps,
as if it was wandering aimlessly without the guidance of its
master. It bent its head to nibble on some prairie grass, then
turned casually to one side.

Suddenly, now in profile, Morgin saw his own
sword buried to the guard just below Salula’s chin. The hilt
protruded upward from Salula’s shoulder and forced him to hold his
head cocked slightly back. Like Morgin the Kull had been bent low
in the saddle, and Morgin’s sword had traveled down the length of
his torso and impaled him from neck to waist.

Morgin’s eyes shot down to his bloody right
hand. On it, mixed with his own blood, was a thick grayish-red
stain.

He looked back at Salula. The Kull’s sword
hand opened almost casually and his sword fell to the ground. Then
the Kull reached up with both hands and grasped the hilt of
Morgin’s sword where it protruded upward from his neck. He held
them there for a moment, as if praying to the
gods
for
mercy, then he dropped them to his sides, and Salula, supreme Kull,
captain and commander of all Kulls, toppled from his saddle to lay
dead upon the Plains of Quam.

Morgin sat atop Mortiss in the dying light
of dusk unable to believe what he’d just done. His eyes welled with
tears, but he choked them back. He wiped the grayish-red stain from
his hand, smeared it on his breaches.

Shakily he dismounted. He tore some cloth
from his blouse to bandage his arm and thigh. His eyes welled with
tears again. They blinded him and this time would not be stopped.
Finally, he crossed his legs and sat down on the plain. He buried
his face in his hands, and with Mortiss standing silently over him,
sobbed openly, wishing he were a child again so that he might do so
without dishonor.

Morgin spent the night seated on the plain
wrapped in his blanket with Mortiss’ reins tied to his wrist. Not
that she would wander off, but he needed the comfort of her
nearness as he drifted constantly between the world of the dark
plain at night and that of his dream. His dream was not the kind of
dream borne of sleep, for sleep never came. Instead he sat
conscious and awake for a while, shivering with more than the cold
of the night air, then he’d skip suddenly into dream. And he always
entered it at some random point in the sequence of events all part
of the same whole. At least the dream was taking on a certain
terrifying consistency; the bits and pieces of it were slowly
falling into place, and understanding now seemed only just beyond
his grasp.

But while the dream came together, the
reality of his conscious world slipped relentlessly away from him.
Between snatches of dream an undesired flood of power washed over
him, a pool of magic that had entered the Mortal Plane unbidden,
and that clung to him now with a rabid tenacity he could not
defeat. It poured through him in waves. It turned his stomach when
it crested, left him trembling with fatigue when it ebbed. At one
point it reached such intensity that it attracted a cluster of
small spirits from the netherworld. They hooted and shrieked about
him for a while until he tired of their antics and swatted them out
of the Mortal Plane with a flash of power that even Olivia would
have envied. Such power frightened him, but before he had time to
really consider its implications, he drifted again into his
dream.

The first hint of dawn came as a faint
lightening of the black night sky. Each time he returned from the
world of his dream the sky seemed lighter, until finally it took on
a deep blue hue and separated itself from the black earth by a
thin, dark line. In his life Morgin had never seen such a
featureless and straight horizon. The sight of it was an anchor
that held him in the world he hoped was reality. He clung to that
horizon desperately while the sun rose and the sky brightened
further. Then, like a candle extinguished in the night, his power
left him without warning and he was again free. He looked carefully
at the land about him. He had always wanted to see the Plains of
Quam, and now he wanted nothing more than to rip the memory from
his mind.

Salula’s horse had wandered off in the
night, though Salula still laid not far away, a gray-black crumpled
heap among the brown brush and grass. Morgin stood, stretched
painfully and yawned. He checked the makeshift bandages on his arm
and thigh. He did a quick and sloppy job of rolling up his blanket,
fastened it to Mortiss’ saddle, then turned to Salula. It was time
to retrieve his sword.

He approached Salula slowly, fearful lest
the halfman be not truly dead. But Salula lay on his back with his
eyes open and unseeing, and in death he wore no less of an
expression than he had in life. Morgin looked at him and winced at
the lump that formed in the pit of his stomach.

Morgin’s sword was buried to the hilt in a
spot just above Salula’s collarbone. Morgin bent over painfully,
took careful hold of it and pulled. Nothing happened. He pulled
harder, then harder still, until he began dragging Salula across
the ground. In the end he was forced to sit down near Salula’s
head, an agonizing exercise since his wounded leg had begun to
stiffen. He planted a boot on each of Salula’s shoulders, gripped
the hilt of his sword with both hands, and put his back into the
job of pulling with all his strength.

The sword slid free with a sickening scrape.
At the same instant a growl erupted from Salula’s throat; blood
gurgled from his mouth and he sat up with his back to Morgin. He
twitched and thrashed about and screamed his anger and hatred at
the heavens.

Morgin instinctively brought his sword about
in a long flat arc. It bit into Salula’s neck and lodged there
momentarily. He pulled it free and hacked at the halfman again, had
to chop at the Kull’s neck three times before the halfman’s head
literally jumped from his shoulders, then hit the ground still
screaming, bounced once, came to rest with its eyes on Morgin and
its lips twitching a nether cry of hatred. The air filled with
Salula’s taint.

Morgin scrambled to his feet, limped to the
screaming head, hacked it in two with his sword. It still screamed
at him, and it laughed Salula’s laugh. He chopped at it again and
again, and each time his sword touched the head Salula’s voice
dwindled, but it refused to die. He smashed the pieces with his
boots, ground them into the dirt, and yet Salula’s laugh still
drifted about on a nether wind. It was an ethereal cry of hatred,
an oath of revenge, and it did not stop until Salula’s head was
nothing more than ichor dripping from Morgin’s boots, though
Salula’s evil still clung to the air.

Morgin wiped the gray-red stain from his
sword and boots on some prairie grass, then slid his sword into its
sheath, and it was only when the hilt slammed home that the last
essence of Salula dissipated, as if somehow the sword itself drew
his spirit into this world.

Mortiss stood nearby, nibbling on some small
flowers as if what had just happened were no concern of hers.
Morgin limped over to her, climbed painfully into the saddle, but
before he rode on, he extinguished the shadows that enveloped him,
for he feared what would become of him if he lived forever in
shadow.