The Book of Kane (12 page)

It was not a holding such as younger sons plotted murder to possess. In the settled years of King Janisavion, no one thought it unusual that Lonal, duke of Harnsterm, had given command of Altharn Keep to a bastard brother, Vareishei. Presumably Vareishei’s excesses would have soon demanded intervention, even had not civil war and its ensuing anarchy given Vareishei a free hand to indulge his despotic whims. To pass beyond the Altanstand Mountains meant to pass below Altharn Keep; where previous wardens had collected taxes and duties, Vareishei took whatever he desired. As lawlessness spread and caravans grew fewer, Vareishei turned his attentions to the surrounding countryside and villages, extending his depredations to the shadow of Harnsterm’s walls. Lonal at last had led an expedition against his mutinous half-brother. Some of his army returned with tales of red massacre beneath the sombre heights; Lonal never returned at all.

Vareishei might well have claimed lordship of Harnsterm had he long survived his half-brother. Popular ballads had it that Lonal had given Vareishei his deathwound that their skeletons lay locked together in eternal combat upon the field of battle. Those who claimed to have fought in the battle swore that Vareishei had ridden away unscathed. Regardless, Vareishei was not seen again following that battle, and some said he had died of his wounds, and some said lie had vanished from his chamberson a stormy moonless night. Some few hinted that his children might know the truth of Vareishei’s fate but this was never said above a whisper, and often never a second time.

For some years now Altharn Keep had been held by the Vareishei clan. They were four. Wevnor was the oldest son, powerfully built and a man to be feared in battle. Sitilvon, the sole daughter, was of a subtle mind, and her poisons were subtler still. Ostervor, her younger brother, had some of Wevnor’s talents and some of Sitilvon’s, and it was not wise to turn a back to him. The fourth, Puriali, was a half-brother, born to a girl Vareishei had abducted from a lonely mountain cottage; Puriali was the only of his bastards that Vareishei knowingly spared, and some said it was out of love for his mother and others said it was out of fear of her. It may have been out of fear of Puriali, for his mother had guided his footsteps upon darker paths.

As central power and the rule of law fast became a distant memory, much as a cancer victim dimly recalls a life without pain, the Vareishei clan assumed absolute rule of the mountains beyond Harnsterm. Altharn Keep was unassailable; Harnsterm dared not spare more of its own soldiers to defend its holdings. The Vareishei demanded heavy tribute from those they spared, and those they chose not to spare might only beg for a quick death. Where their father had been ruthless, the Vareishei clan were malevolent. The people of Harnsterm looked to their walls and prayed against the evil day when tribute would not suffice.
Kane smelled death long before he came upon the caravan. The fresh mountain breeze brought the musty scent of stale blood, the sweetness of torn flesh, and an acrid stench of burning. Moving silently beneath the stars, Kane’s black stallion stepped from the edge of the forest and onto the weedgrown trail. Once this had been a well-travelled road, but that was in days when corpses did riot dangle from tree limbs to mark the way.

As Kane passed between the rows of the dead, he heardthe sound of hoarse breathing, and paused. One, a boy barely into his teens, was still alive—although, from the blood that yet trickled from his mutilated loins down his legs and into the earth, he would not see the sunrise. Kane cut him down from the limb over which they had bound him. His eyes opened as Kane stretched him out upon the trampled ground.

“The Vareishei?” Kane asked, more to prompt than to question.

The boy answered mechanically, like someone speaking from a trance. “We thought to slip past them under cover of darkness. They caught us at daybreak. They said they would leave us here as warning to those who would cross their domain without paying tribute.”

“And afterward?”

“They carried away all to Altharn Keep. They took my sister.”

“Doubtless to be held for ransom. Now, let this powder dissolve upon your tongue; it will ease the pain.”

The first was a lie, and the last was not, for Kane was seldom needlessly cruel. The artery beneath his fingertips pulsed weakly until he had counted to twenty-seven, then the heart shuddered and stopped.

Remounting, Kane resumed his journey to Altharn Keep. The clods of turf torn by his stallion’s hooves fell soundlessly, for the dead cannot hear.

Puriali absently chewed at a tidbit of raw liver as he searched the girl’s entrails. His surgery was quite precise, for all that his captive had continued to struggle until a moment gone. Her virgin blood made scarlet rivulets across the polished slab of pale-pink marble.

“There is danger for us.”

His half-sister licked her lips. “Do you actually give credence to augury such as this?”

“Not really, Sitilvon,” murmured Puriali. “But know that it pleases me. And you.”

Puriali wiped his hands against his trouser legs, mingled red with less certain stains its as he stayed upward into the night skies enclosing the tower’s summit. “Merely a supportive exercise. The stars cannot lie. They warn of death.”

Wevnor snorted and tightened his fist about swordhilt. Ostervor shifted his feet and considered his wine cup. The brothers were both tall and black-bearded, though Wevnor’s meaty shoulders would have made two of Ostervor; their sister might have been a clean-shaven twin of the younger brother. Puriali, who somewhat favored his mother, was shorter, slighter, with a spiky shock of reddish hair and face too pockmarked to grow a full heard. The two brothers wore leather trousers and stained hacquetons , having shed their mail. Sitilvon had thrown a fur cloak about her ankle-length gown, but Puriali stood bare-chested despite the chill mountain wind.

“The stars cannot lie,” Puriali repeated.

“Another thief?” Wevnor laughed and nudged his sister. “I hope better sport than the last.”

Ostervor did not share their mirth. “I have heard certain reports that Josin’s bereaved mistress has made inquiries about Kane.”

There was no more laughter.

“Kane may well be dead,” Wevnor scoffed finally. “Nothing has been heard of Kane in years now. Some say he’s fled the land; some say he’s grown old and left his trade.”

“And some say he’s withdrawn solely to perfect his art,” Ostervor said.

“Whatever arts they may be,” added Puriali.

“Does it matter?” sneered Sitilvon. “Kane or any other foe—if they come against us, they die. If the stars give us warning, then let us heed them. Let him enter Altharn Keep, if he dares. Others who have tried have scarcely outstayed then welcome.”

Puriali pointed upward. “Look.”

As if swept over by a black wave of mist, the stars had vanished. Only a pallid sickle of moon interrupted the absolute darkness that enclosed Altharn Keep.

Wevnor hunched his broad shoulders and blew upon his hands. Beneath the flaring cressets, frost sparkled upon the massive stones of the merlons . The eldest Vareishei scorned cloak or gauntlets as he continued to pace the darkened battlements of Altharn Keep. Save the measured challenge of an unseen sentry, the thin scuff of his boots marked tile only sound of his progress.

Altharn Keep controlled the gorge through the Altanstand Mountains from atop a high cliff, beneath which a narrow roadway crowded passage between sheer walls of stone arid thunderous white-water rapids. More than two-thirds of the fortress walls rose above a breathless precipice falling several hundred feet onto the eroded boulders where the river pounded through its bend. Approach to Altharn Keep’s heavily fortified entrance curled along the steep ridge that completed its perimeter. Armies had attempted assault along this slope throughout the ages, and their bleached bones could be found entangled in the thickets of heather and rhododendron.

No one in memory had forced the gates of Altharn Keep. Guards had always maintained harsh vigilance over those who were permitted to pass through its gates, and with the deepening civil chaos their attentions only grew less restrained. Josin had managed to scale tile walls with a climbing rope, but this initial success had not repaid him. It was always possible—just possible—that an intruder might attempt to enter Altharn Keep by ascending the sheer face of the escarpment and scaling the less well-guarded battlements that crested the precipice. Over the ages a few rash fools had attempted this, and where the river had rolled their shattered bones no one knew.

Wevnor, while he might not be his siblings’ equal in guile, was never one to misjudge an enemy, and he did lot discount the tales he had heard of Kane. Thus, Wevnor permitted himself a thin smile of vindication when he heard the soft clink of metal against stone.

With surprising stealth for a man of his bulk, Wevnorclosed upon the source of the sound: a darkened stretch of the parapet, a hundred feet or more between sentry posts, guarding the most treacherous face of the precipice. Only an eye alert to discover that which the mind knew must be there would have seen it: a steel grapnel lodged against one crenel.

“I would have expected no less of you,” Wevnor said softly, even as his broadsword swung downward through the darkness and parted the taut cord of knotted silk. The cord sang like a snapped bowstring, the slack grapnel fell the parapet with a tiny clatter, and the rush of the river swallowed the sounds of whatever might have fallen far below.

Wevnor sighed and straightened.

He heard again the soft scrape of metal against stone.

Wevnor turned. The sickle moon, the distant cressets, together they gave light enough to see the hulking figure in black, idly touching the tip of his broadsword to the battlement. Eyes of the coldest blue caught the wan light as chillingly as did the frost.

“Your sentry,” said Kane.

“Damn you!” said Wevnor, and lunged.

Wevnor’s only emotion, as Kane’s blade checked his own downward stroke, was one of rage. While Kane’s physical presence was formidable, Wevnor was himself a man of overawing stature, and he had never seen his equal in swordplay. Their broadswords warred together as if the storm gods gave battle above the clouds—flickering sudden explosions of bright sparks, shattering the night’s stillness with tearing clangour of steel against steel. Driving against each other, their powerful two-handed blows jarred through muscle and bone with stunning force, all but smashing swordhilts from nervelessfists.

Wevnor’s breath shook in hoarse gasps, and, as he began to listen for the clamour of onrushing guardsmen, he knew that he felt fear. And with that knowledge, Wevnor’s desperate parry failed by a fraction of a second, and Kane’s blade drove into his shoulder with crushing force.

Even the best mail cannot withstand stress beyond its limits; enough links held to save dismemberment, but Kane’s sword bit deep into Wevnor’s flesh with bone-shattering force. Wevnor’s blade rang against the parapet, even as he was driven to his knees. Numbing, sickening pain racked him, and he knew instinctively that in another instant would be surcease.

Kane, however, disdained the killing blow. Weaponless, his hands reached out for Wevnor.

“Wevnor, come with me.”

Ostervor held his breath, gradually increasing the pressure of his shoulder against the black oak panel. He felt his bones begin to creak in protest, then the section of wall pivoted inward, corroded hinges rasping under their first movement in more than a century. Cobwebs hung with the dust of another’s ancestors curtained the aperture but the darkness within welled outward with the cold breath of frosted night beyond.

Ostervor smeared sweat from his forehead with a dusty forearm, considering the three depressed inlays in the parquetry of the chamber’s floor. Reputedly haunted, the north wing of Altharn Keep had remained untenanted throughout living memory. Ostervor, who had long ago mastered the hidden passageways that crept through the other sections of the fortress, congratulated himself upon his having solved this final mystery. The doggerel inscription upon the chamber’s mantle—O
ne for the Bold, Two for the Gold, Three for to Hold
—had seemed nonsensical to generations of inhabitants. Recent perusal of a centuries-old journal in Altharn Keep’s mouldering library had provided Ostervor the essential clue, with its archaic pun on
bold
and
hold
in reference to the coat-of-arms stylized in the parquetry. Other allusions as to the treacherous pitfalls within the north wing’s secret ways had determined Ostervor to pursue its exploration after appropriate deliberation. However...

Ostervor did not discount his half-brother’s premonition of doom, no more than did he dismiss his own spies’ reports that Josin’s mistress had sought out Kane. Granting Kane a cunning almost equal to his own—if the lurid tales bore any credence—Ostervor hardly expected their nemesis to present his shield at the fortress gate. Given Kane’s reputation—even allowing for the inevitable exaggerations and embellishments—Ostervor assumed that the assassin would seek to enter Altharn Keep by stealth of the most devious sort. The ancient citadel was honeycombed with hidden passageways, all of which (now that the north wing had given up its secrets) were intimately known to Ostervor. It would be a fatal underestimation of their enemy to assume that Kane would not be privy to these secret ways as well.

Nonetheless, it quite unnerved Ostervor to discern recent footprints etched upon the passageway whose dust should not have been disturbed in more than a century.

Ostervor hesitated, scowling at the damp bootprints that strode boldly through the smear of light his candle shed. He had already seen to the citadel’s other hidden passages, most of which were known only to himself; a score of deadly traps—six of his own devising and installation—meant certain death for any intruder. Yet, here in this passageway whose secrets Ostervor himself had only lately mastered, another had already gained entry.

Ostervor touched a finger to one bootprint , recovering a fragment of lichen, flakes of frost still melting upon it. The intruder had passed this way only a moment before. Ostervor pulled off his boots and unbuckled his sword. The narrow passage was no field for swordplay, and the heavy dirk that he now drew had served him well in close quarters many times before. He placed his candle upon the floor outside the pivoted doorway. Silently, unseen, Ostervor would follow Kane through the north wing passages, trusting to his own fragmentary knowledge of its pitfalls. Kane, obviously, could not attempt their traverse in darkness; he must show a light, and then Ostervor would creep upon him from behind.