The Sigil Blade (43 page)

“Were you the one who tortured Ruach?” Edryd asked him.

“No,” protested Hedryn with a look of awe in his eyes, and pure horror in his voice. The thrall seemed to have no doubt that Edryd could destroy him at any moment. “I would never do something like that.”

“But you wouldn’t stop it from happening either,” Edryd pointed out. “You were there, and you watched it.”

“Do you honestly believe there was anything that I could have done?” Hedryn asked. “It was Seldur who hurt him, and he did it with his master’s encouragement. If you knew anything of Áledhuir, you would know why I could do nothing to help your friend. I am doing everything I can now to make it right.”

The young man appeared to be entirely genuine, and somewhere within Edryd’s heart, something urgently persuaded him that he should trust this thrall. Hedryn had been given so few choices in this life, and the one he was making now, was to put that life in Edryd’s hands.

Hedryn began to look at Edryd strangely. When Edryd caught him at it, the thrall stopped and apologized. “I’m sorry, but Seoras told me that you could hide yourself from shapers, and I was trying to see how it was done.”

Edryd nearly told him not to bother, that the effect was gone, but upon checking, the shroud was firmly in place, perfect and without any flaw as if it had always been there. His heart sank with despair, feeling as if he had taken a great step backwards.

Edryd had to remind himself that he had all but confirmed that it was not the shroud that blocked his ability to shape, and given its sudden unsought return, it seemed clear now that his concealment must have been an ability that was granted by the sword. Reclaiming the blade had repaired the effect. He needed to believe that this could be a good thing, that it could have a purpose.

“I want to thank you for what you did for Aodra,” Hedryn said, interrupting Edryd’s reflections as they walked.

“Don’t you mean to Aodra? Or maybe you mean what I did for you.”

“All three I guess,” said Hedryn. “It is a tricky business pairing a thrall with a draugr. If Seoras thought well of you, he would place you with a draugr that he also thought well of.  The opposite was true too, and it can make a world of difference. In that regard I was fortunate.”

“You’re saying Aodra wasn’t bad?”

“Compared to Áledhuir she was a blessing. She was kind to me. But being tethered to any of them takes a toll. I could always feel her, like there was a window through which I could see into her soul.”

Edryd’s blood froze. This description was too similar to ignore.

“That window went both ways. Being bound to a living mind seemed to stabilize her, but it did the opposite to me. You cannot hide anything, and you can’t shut them out either. I felt her suffering every single day—and I felt her joy when you helped her break free.”

Edryd shivered as he remembered what had happened that morning, and grew angry with the realization that Seoras had bound him not long after they met. The link, tether, or whatever you chose to call it, Edryd was grateful that it was gone.

“I had a sense of you in the link at the end. It works that way you know,” said Hedryn. “Anyway, I’m glad you did what you did, and so was she.”

Edryd didn’t know how to respond, so he said nothing at all. He was feeling unusual. It had started before he had met up with Seoras and Hedryn, but it had only grown stronger since. Though he realized he might be marching to his own death, he felt an unshaken certainty that he was doing the right thing, and that he would have all the support he needed. He cared less and less that Seoras had chosen not to come, but accepting the fact that his master was not going to provide any help, had made Edryd no less curious about the reasons.

“Why do you think Seoras is standing aside?” Edryd asked of Hedryn. “It isn’t like him to be so passive.”

“They must be holding something over him to have backed him down like this,” Hedryn agreed. “And Seoras is more powerful now than I remembered, certainly stronger than he was when I trained with him.”

“He doesn’t fear them then?”

“Collectively he might, but individually, I don’t think he ever was especially afraid of any of the draugar even then. In truth, it might be the other way around.”

“Áledhuir is afraid of Seoras?”

“When you can’t die there are things that can happen to you that are worse than death, like being cut into pieces by an angry shaper and scattered across the landscape,” Hedryn said.

“Or like being drowned at the bottom of an ocean,” suggested Edryd. He also knew another theory for stopping these creatures, but he wasn’t going to mention Logaeir’s thoughts on melting one in a fire.

“Or like being drowned in the ocean,” Hedryn agreed. “For you or me, the suffering would last only a few minutes. For Áledhuir, he would spend an eternity on the sea floor, cut off from all light with his body disintegrating around him.”

Unless Esivh Rhol had an impossibly deep pool hidden somewhere in the palace, this was hardly any help to Edryd. “Any other weaknesses you can tell me about—any other way to kill one?” Edryd asked.

“I suppose you could say more on that subject than I can,” Hedryn said, shaking his head.

Edryd chose not to tell Hedryn that he knew less and could do less than anyone seemed to believe. Edryd had only one hope. He had the sword. Seoras had been sure it could be used to defeat a draugr, though he had said nothing about how. More than just the sigil sword was needed, Edryd was sure of that much. What was needed was a sigil knight. It was reckless to think he could figure this out as he went, but deadly crisis had opened the floodgates and awakened the sword for him once before. Perhaps it would do so again, and this time he would just have to hope for a better result.

***

The sun had set over the ocean while they were departing, and everything was now dark as the Ascomanni fleet approached An Innis, led by warriors packed into grouped pairs of long boats. The stars were hidden behind thick clouds and the shrouded light of a new moon gave only scant illumination. Logaeir and his men need only remain as silent as possible as they rowed along the shoreline on their approach from the south, and the threat of detection would be minimal.  Another group led by Krin was closing in from the north. The plan for simultaneous surprise attacks, causing as much confusion as possible while securing positions with open berths on both piers, was about to begin. Warships were following well behind the long boats, ready to disembark groups of reinforcements as soon as those larger vessels could be secured to the piers.

Logaeir focused only on his side. There was nothing he could do to help his allies until they won through to the shore and he could unite with them. The majority of the battle would take place later, but the greatest risks came now. If one or both of the initial incursions failed, and they could not secure their positions, it could become impossible to bring in support in sufficient numbers.

There was only one thing that gave Logaeir fear, and that was the pair of draugar that had come to the island the night before. He had prepared with an understanding that there was a real chance that these undead creatures could interfere, but he didn’t have any good contingencies in place should it actually happen. He had ruled out setting one of them on fire. Edryd had been right about that. It would have been a horrible mistake. Tactically, he should have made the rather sound decision to delay the attack until he could confirm that they were gone, but there were now other considerations. It would have comforted Logaeir to learn that one of the two draugar had already fallen, and it would have comforted him more to know that the other one was holed up inside Esivh Rhol’s palace.

As the boats settled in against the pier, Logaeir was the first to scale his way onto the stone surface. Some three dozen men, including eight from his boat, and the remaining men distributed amongst three others, followed him up. There were six key ships on this side that he intended to take, but first they would secure a landing for the
Retribution
.

He and his men began to set upon everyone they encountered. It was an uncomfortable business, but Logaeir was in his element. He had trained under various Ossian masters. Ludin Kar had been the first, giving him a broad formal education. Others had followed, training him in stealth and combat as an agent of their navy. Logaeir had no loyalty to any of them. They had been the means to an end, one that would be fulfilled tonight.

Logaeir did not need to remind himself that there were hardly any innocent men to be found in An Innis. If you worked on a ship’s crew you were working with one of the harbormasters. You were a smuggler, a slave trader, a raider, or some combination of these three.  In every case, you were almost certainly a murdering thug. He knew many of these villains personally, though they would not have recognized him now. He was no longer the reckless boy who had fought for his own survival in this dangerous city.

He had once been on a path where he might have eventually become one of the harbormasters himself. Back then, he believed he was going to be a different kind of leader, one that protected the citizens instead of exploiting them. He had led a band of thieves and he had secured the loyalties of the women who lived on the streets. That was until Esivh Rhol had forced him to flee, unwilling to face any competition in running the latter of those two trades. Logaeir felt grateful for what had happened. Had he remained, he surely would have been corrupted past redemption, becoming as evil as any of the men he was now trying to kill. Fifteen years had aged Logaeir, and few people here would ever know him for the boy who he had once been.

As Logaeir expertly killed unsuspecting men on the pier, he conveniently failed to include in his rationalizations that there were no small number of his own men among the Ascomanni who could be considered neither any worse nor any better than the men they were fighting.

The men guarding this pier, and those protecting the ships, had overcome their initial confusion, and the first group of four was charging his men now. As they rushed forward in haste, Logaeir deftly slipped between them, getting in behind and hacking at their calves, sending them to their knees. The Ascomanni fighters nearest to him finished the men off. They had not faced any serious opposition yet, and it was all working out almost too smoothly, but that would start to change when the enemies began to mass in larger numbers.

Logaeir began to hear cries across the water on the other pier as well. Men were dying. From the sounds he could make out, Logaeir had a pretty good understanding of how things were going. They were going extremely well, and his plan was unfolding flawlessly.

Chapter 22

Shaping the Dark

E
dryd, accompanied by Hedryn, crossed the paths of troubled men and women as they travelled. They heard at first the whispers, and then later the shouts and cries, of frightened citizens circulating rumors of violence on the piers. Perhaps the fighting had drawn off some of the Ard Ri’s men. Whatever the reason, the way was open and there were no guards to deny him entrance when Hedryn and Edryd reached Esivh Rhol’s palace. Concluding this meant that he was being invited in, free to enter but perhaps not so free to leave, Edryd obliged. He could think of no good reason to trust the thrall, so Edryd was relieved when Hedryn readily agreed to remain behind, promising to keep the entrance clear. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Hedryn was of course wise enough to be afraid of facing Áledhuir.

The place was to all appearances, deserted, and Edryd went unchallenged as he moved through the sprawling complex. Some of the Ard Ri’s forces might have been away defending the piers, but the complete absence of resistance confirmed Edryd’s suspicions. The way lay open, but he was only working his way further into a trap from which he was not meant to escape.

Edryd’s anger had not lessened. The feeling of calm was at a peak, but it did not quiet an anger buried beneath the surface, demanding an opportunity to be expressed. His awareness was heightened beyond anything he had yet experienced, sharply enhanced by focusing his abilities through the sword. Aided by the calm and clarity that came with this coexistent affiliation, Edryd knew that a group of guards had taken up positions blocking the path by which he had come.

He could sense too that most of the building really was deserted, apart from two distinct concentrations of men and women. Edryd navigated his way down a hallway that took him towards the group that included the draugr Áledhuir and his servant Seldur. Esivh Rhol would surely be there as well. If the circumstances were less dire, Edryd might have stopped to wonder how he was seeing everything so clearly. Something had opened within, providing unexpected aid that augmented Edryd’s mind and soul in a way that he did not understand.

He knew the positions of everyone in the room before he ever entered, and when he did step through to confront the waiting enemies, Edryd fixed his eyes on Esivh Rhol, who was seated in a large ornate chair at the end of a long wooden banquet table.  Two men were hidden against the wall behind hanging tapestries at the opposite end of the room, nearest to where Edryd stood. Another guard left his position along the wall and moved to secure the doorway immediately to Edryd’s left, and two more guards on the other side of the table stood nervously, with bolts loaded into the crossbows cradled across their chests.

There were also two guards with drawn swords casually held at their sides, flanking Esivh Rhol’s chair. Áledhuir towered behind them in a corner, leaning on an enormous, heavy, two handed sword that was as long as anyone else in the room was tall. Áledhuir’s thrall could be seen emerging from a room behind Esivh Rhol’s chair, and taking up a position beside his master.

Esivh Rhol broke the silence. “Seoras said we need not send anyone for you. It seems he was right, you came of your own accord.”

“He didn’t share with you what I was going to do when I got here, or you wouldn’t have let me come this far,” Edryd said.

He didn’t get to expand on this threat. At the sound of Edryd’s voice, the guards hidden behind him left their concealment. They were rushing toward their target with thick wooden clubs upraised, ready to knock him down and pound him into submission. Edryd did not turn around. He drew both of Aodra’s knives, and guided by the position of the patterns his attackers produced as they disturbed the flow of the dark, he struck hard. They fell, knocked back by the impact, crystalline weapons buried hilt deep in their chests.

The guard who had moved to cover the door backed through the archway, fumbling at the hilt of his sword, trying to draw the weapon from his belt. Edryd ignored him. It took the two arbalest wielding enemies a second to react, and when they finally did, they both fired wide. Edryd had been prepared to either evade or deflect the bolts, but there had been no need. The guards would not be able to fire again. It would take thirty seconds or more for either of them to reload, but only a couple to draw the small deadly axes belted at their sides. Edryd was not going to give them even that much time. He leapt onto the table, and in a move that none of the guards could even follow, he had his hand on the hilt of his sword and he cut through the knotted cloth that had held it in place beneath his coat. The wide arcing length of the sigil blade cut through the throat of the first guard and a second stroke cut deep into the neck of the second.

Half of his opponents were dead or out of the fight, but they were none of them amongst any of the enemies that really mattered. Esivh Rhol had retreated as far back as he could into his chair, paralyzed with fear. Neither Áledhuir nor his thrall had left their positions in the corner. The draugr had simply stood and watched with almost passive interest. He stepped forward now and raised his impossibly large weapon as high as he could—the ceilings were high but not tall enough to allow the draugr to raise the weapon all the way above his head—and in one sudden instant the towering monster brought his weapon down atop the table.

The entire near end of the table was obliterated by the impact. Edryd leapt clear before it collapsed, but the draugr, his thrall, and also Esivh Rhol and his two remaining guards, were all covered in shards of splintered wood. Áledhuir retreated backward into the corner. He did not intend to engage Edryd directly yet. He had just wanted to create some space in which the others could fight. He said something unintelligible in a low rumble that only his thrall understood. In response to his master’s command, Seldur stepped into the middle of the room and waited for Edryd to advance. The two swordsmen protecting Esivh Rhol used this as an opportunity to skirt their way past Seldur and escape, following the lead of the first guard who had been covering the door, but was now long gone. No one made any effort to stop them.

Edryd moved forward to meet the thrall’s challenge, and acting upon an insight that was not his own, he understood that he needed to take the initiative. For the first time in his life, Edryd consciously took hold of the dark and began to shape it into a pattern. His first swing was blindingly fast, carried enormous force, and was incredibly clumsy. Seldur managed to block but he should have evaded and used the opening that followed to counter. Instead he was driven back a step, staggered by the force behind the attack.

Edryd’s second strike was better, more precise and delivered with improved control. His third and fourth efforts were better yet as Edryd incorporated the knowledge and experience gained from working with the speed and power of his own attacks. The thrall was unable to respond, stretching the limits of his skills just trying to ward himself and absorb the impacts. The uneven footing became a weapon for Edryd. Backpedaling precariously through large splintered boards that remained in the aftermath of Áledhuir’s destruction of the table, Seldur could not retreat safely. The thrall stumbled, his heel catching awkwardly on the remnant of a broken table leg, compromising his balance and sending him to the ground. Seldur dropped his sword as he instinctively stretched out his arm to break his fall.

Edryd reacted instantly, but his finishing strike never landed. Áledhuir had intervened to protect his thrall. The sigil blade drove a notch an inch deep into the Huldra greatsword, and remained locked in place, bound up by some artifice of the towering draugr’s making, shaping the dark with a skill and knowledge that Edryd could not counteract. The two of them struggled, pitting raw strength and raw power against one another.

Seldur broke the stalemate. Recovering quickly, he rose up beneath Edryd, striking upward with the palm of a bare blackened hand. Edryd recognized the technique. It had nearly killed him once. Remembering anew the painful bruising it had left behind and the long weeks it had taken him to recover, Edryd understood it perfectly for what it was now. He could see the components clearly. One part of the pattern protected Seldur’s hand, and the rest was a buildup of raw compressed power that would be expended painfully into his chest once it made contact.

A flash of external insight transferred a crucial piece of knowledge into Edryd’s mind. Seldur’s attack, could with little difficulty, be turned against him. Edryd touched the dark, reshaping the pattern that protected Seldur’s hand, shredding the thrall’s simple warding in the process. It then took only the slightest of pressure against the compressed forces Seldur had bound together in order to release them. The result shattered every bone in Seldur’s hand. The thrall screamed in agony, rolling on the ground clutching at his useless hand as it began to swell.

Áledhuir released the pattern that had been holding Edryd’s sword locked to his own, and in a fit of disgust, drove his weapon through Seldur’s head, pinning the thrall’s lifeless body to the ground, and leaving the point of his great blade buried inches deep into the stone floor.

The opportunity was there, and Edryd did not waste it. He struck immediately, before there was any time for Áledhuir to free his weapon from the floor. Edryd swung the sigil sword at the corner of the creature’s neck. The attack sliced through the bunched cloth where Áledhuir had lowered the hood of his cloak, but it glanced off of the draugr’s hardened skin. The creature’s armored exterior had proven stronger than even the sharpened metal of the sigil blade.

“You cannot kill me, Son of Elduryn,” the draugr said. Pure hatred radiated from the creature as the words tumbled up his throat and through his decaying mouth.

Edryd struck once more, the sigil blade alive now with a profusion of intense white light. He smoothly pushed the weapon straight through Áledhuir’s chest, right where Edryd supposed the creature’s heart would have been. But this creature had no living heart. What had once been Áledhuir’s heart had been transformed by arcane means into an object of solid metal. The same was true for the veins that had once carried blood throughout his body. He had no vital organs, only empty cavities where such things had once been. He was the morbid shell of what had once been a living breathing Huldra.

As he bound Edryd’s sword to the metal inside his body, Áledhuir laughed. Or at least Edryd thought it might be a laugh, he couldn’t tell. “You are as reckless as your father was,” said Áledhuir. “His interference destroyed my people. You must content yourself in the next world with having achieved far less.”

Áledhuir effortlessly freed his sword, extracting it from the stone floor and the ruinous divided remainder of Seldur’s lifeless head.  Áledhuir began to raise the weapon in preparation to strike, giving Edryd two obvious choices. He could abandon the sigil blade and retreat, or he could remain there and die. Edryd tried a third desperate option instead.

Reaching out for the dark, he began to shape. Edryd formed a simple pattern he had seen Seoras use before, a method for creating a flame. The technique produced heat, and nothing more. A flame came only if the heat could be made intense enough to ignite something. Edryd focused the pattern through the sigil blade, infusing energy directly through it into the veined metal structures that were embedded within Áledhuir’s body.

The draugr did not immediately appreciate what was happening. His long dead body did not feel physical pain. He recognized the danger only when his flesh began to smoke, burning from the inside. Áledhuir tried to interrupt the energies flowing into him, and he tried to disrupt Edryd’s shaping, but he lacked the strength to do either. He was not as strong as Edryd. It was too late anyway. Moments later the sigil sword came free as the creature’s chest deteriorated into a red hot circular mass of molten metal and disintegrating flesh. Edryd, without taking any pause to wonder at what he had done, swung the sigil blade once more, cleanly passing through the weakened torso of the creature.

The draugr’s riven body was split into two pieces. The creature’s hips and legs remained upright, like some kind of monstrous statuary. Áledhuir’s head, along with his arms which were still connected to what was left of his shoulders, fell to the ground. Disturbed, Edryd delivered a kick, pushing the set of legs over. There was no blood, just a spray of molten metal that rapidly cooled on the stone floor beside the ashen remains of burnt flesh.

“Finish what you started, Son of Elduryn!”

Edryd was startled at hearing his collapsed enemy speak. He couldn’t think how Áledhuir produced these words without the help of lungs to compress any air. It soon came to him. Áledhuir had had no lungs to begin with. He spoke by means of subtle shaping, pushing currents of air through his throat. This creature, though horribly broken, was still dangerous.

“To what end?” Edryd said. “Do you think that I owe you such mercy, that I should choose to release you from your ruined body?”

“I will become as Aodra was,” Áledhuir threatened. “I will haunt you to your death.”

“I should leave you here then, as nothing more than two broken halves of one dead and useless body, sealed up forever where you can do no harm.”

If Edryd doubted that the defeated creature was still a threat, that notion was dispelled when Áledhuir began to shape a powerful rage filled pattern. The creature was trying to replicate what Edryd had just done, continuing a process that had ceased before its ultimate completion. Edryd was unsure what would happen if Áledhuir succeeded, but he was reluctant to move close enough to do anything about it. He observed from where he stood, studying what he saw.