The Warlord's Domain (32 page)

Voord looked at him, not making any move. He could hear the soft lament of the Song of Desolation, and sense the coming of Issaqua as a man might sense the sun’s position through an overcast of cloud. And he could sense that Talvalin was not especially impressed; instead the armored man was reacting with what looked like familiarity to the ikon of the misty rose that hung in the air at Voord’s back.

“Oh, Voord, Voord, you’ll have to do better than
that”
The too-controlled voice with its hateful Elthanek burr was mocking him and making light of everything he held in esteem. “I’ve pruned roses before, in Seghar. You might know the place…”

Voord’s mouth quirked at the inference. Sedna ar Gethin again, no matter how distant the connection. He stared balefully at Aldric. “I know it,” he said, “as I know you.”

“As you know your own reflection,” said Tehal Kyrin, stepping into view behind Talvalin, unharmed, armored and carrying a bared sword. “Because you and he are each other seen in a dark glass. But he had all that you lacked—and still does. That’s why you hate him so, Commander Voord. Deny the truth, man.”

Voord glared hatred at her and shrugged in resignation though the movement sent agony lancing through him. “What truth?” he said. There was a buzzing in his ears as the Song of Desolation faded, becoming no more than the sound of an insatiable hunger waiting to be fed with what he had promised it. “The only truth is that which brought you two here with weapons drawn. Killing is truth. So kill me.”

It was an invitation which needed no repeating. Voord saw the black-hilted longsword shifted from a single- to a double-handed grip, and he saw, too, the expression on the Alban’s face as he took three steps forward and one to the right. The pupils of his eyes were as wide and dark as those of a hunting cat, and there was no mercy in them.

“As you wish,” said Aldric. Widowmaker rose to poise behind his shoulder for an instant, and then came scything down.

“Hai…”

Aldric snapped one step sideways and froze in low-guard ready position for an instant, then relaxed. The form
achran-kai
, the inverted cross, comprised two strokes—one horizontal through the target’s upper chest and the second a vertical directed at the crown of the head. He had never yet needed to complete the second cut, and he did not need it now. If the horizontal sweep connected, it was not a cut from which opponents walked away.

Its impact had thrown Voord off his feet so that he lay on his back, arms and legs widespread. For all that he had been opened like a sack of offal there was hardly any blood on the
taiken
blade, as if the dead man’s body had none left to spare. Only a small and stealthy puddle formed beneath the Warlord’s body as it stared through sightless eyes toward the ceiling.

And then Voord’s corpse reared from the bloodied floor and screamed a dreadful blubbering scream that came less from its mouth than through the huge straight slit across its chest. Issaqua the Bale Flower expanded with that awful undying shriek as a man’s chest might expand upon inhaling some sweet scent, and as its own reeling perfume flooded the icy air the demon rose swelled out to the monstrous proportions Aldric had seen before in Seghar.

Almost as if it’s feeding on his pain
... The Alban stared grimly from devourer to devoured, then shook his head and spat sourness from his mouth.
No, not almost Of course it is .
. .

He staggered as the marble pavement underfoot rose and fell in a motion like that of a massive wave, flexing the inlaid tiling under it shattered. Part of the chamber’s outer wall cracked across and across, then fell down with a slithering crash so that snow came swirling in. Two great chunks of stone tumbled in as well, looking like gross snowflakes until their impact against the armor guarding Aldric’s legs—for no snowflakes could crush proof metal quite like that. He barely noticed, for the perfume of the rose grew more and more intense until their senses swam with it as though with
ymeth
dreamsmoke…

Voord continued to scream. Aldric looked once, then winced and turned away. And still the screaming went on, and on, and on…

“He’s dead!” Kyrin’s voice came hard to his ears, fighting through a sound like a million buzzing flies. “He’s dead! You
killed
him—so why won’t he die… ?” She was near to screaming-point herself. “
Aldric
! Leave him. Take me away from here!” She tugged at the icy metal that sheathed his arm, trying to drag him toward the door. Great white flakes of snow slapped against her face, and Voord’s howling hammered at her sanity. “Finish it! For sweet mercy’s sake, kill him and get us out of this place!”

Aldric remained where he was, staring at Issaqua, the scent of roses in his nostrils and the sounds of dying in his ears. “Kill him?” he said, the words more read from his lips than heard. “How? With what? Widowmaker can’t. Not then, not now. He’s a toy now, for that
thing
to play with. It needs to have a death…”

Kyrin saw the pallor in his face within the shadows of the helmet, saw the anger and the revulsion and the shame, and suddenly she was afraid—afraid for herself, but most of all afraid for him. “Use the sword again, and this time use the spellstone too,” she said quickly and too loudly. “Do it now.”

“No.” Aldric swung Widowmaker up from where her point was braced against the snowy floor, and stared somberly at the weapon’s long blade. “Not that way, and most especially not with this.” The gray menace hung about the
taiken
still, flowing like a chill air from her bitter edges, a need for slaying that was at once terrible and yet no more than a sense of purpose and an awareness of function.

“Enough killing for you,” he told the sword gently, regretfully. He went down on one knee and braced Widowmaker flat across the other, closing his left hand on her naked blade span down from the point. The edges bit at once so that his own blood, steaming slightly in the winter air, mingled with Voord’s on the shining steel… as if they were becoming brothers rather than merely reflections of each other.

As he leaned into the work and the blade arched back on itself, whatever else he might have said was changed to a quick, shallow gasping. Widowmaker twisted in his grasp like something living, something trying to break out of a strangling grip. Like something trying to stay alive… Aldric’s face went white as bone, and sweat dripped from it almost as swiftly as blood ran from the sword.

Then Isileth, called Widowmaker, snapped in two, Aldric tried to release the broken shard of blade locked in his fingers, biting back an anguished whimper as sinew and tendon refused to obey him anymore. The palm of his left hand had sheared clean away, and all that remained of his Honor-scars spattered blood across the broken milk-white marble of the floor. While the remnant of the hand…

Had become a twisted claw like Voord’s.

The piece of sword-blade came free at last and fell with a harsh belling to the ground near his feet. It was a clumsy, messy, painful business trying to open laced lamellar armor with one hand, but he managed at last.

Voord’s screams were growing ragged now, but there was still no sign of an end to his long dying, if while Issaqua remained there would ever be an end to it Worst of all, he was denied even the refuge of insanity, for there was still intelligence in his bulging, bloodshot eyes when Aldric steeled himself to look that way.

Enough intelligence at least to recognize what the eyes saw, and enough skepticism not to believe it.

Kyrin believed it. She saw the black
tsepan
leave its sheath and Aldric kneel awkwardly in First Obeisance on the churned, snowy, bloody floor, and believed implicitly not only in what she saw but that it would be carried through. She began to cry the bitter tears of loss, yet made no move to prevent Aldric from completing what he had chosen to do.

“It needs to have a death,” he had said, and without needing explanations Kyrin guessed his hope—that a death offered willingly would tip the scales. He had taken responsibility for Voord, for what had happened to him and—for all she knew—for what the
Woydach
had done to them both. It was his choice, and his right.

The
tsepan
went in beneath his breastbone at a steep angle, and Aldric’s face was wrenched into a grimace of pain. Blood poured out through his fingers and as he coughed, darkened his teeth and chin. He swayed a little, and only now that strength of will was of no more account did he look toward Kyrin, pouring all into the look that he would have said aloud had he been able.

Voord’s screaming stopped abruptly.

In that silence, Aldric Talvalin smiled at some small private victory; then he slumped on to his side as gently as if falling asleep, and lay still…

I
miss her. I wish she was here, too. But you always pass the door alone
.

Alone and naked. Aldric wore nothing but the marks collected over the course of a quarter-century. Most were not even welted scars, merely the pale traceries of wounds that were all the spellstone of Echainon left in the wake of its healing. Only the puncture beneath his breastbone was worthy of note, and that because it was where his life had drained away.

Nothing can ye bring, and nothing bear away; skin was thy sufficient dress in the beginning and sufficient shall it be at the end; naked come all into the world, and naked all depart
... And it was in the face of this truth, written in the oldest of old books, that the corpses of dead clan-lords were clad in their finest before their bodies were committed to the fire… Aldric would have laughed aloud except that laughter in this place seemed less than proper.

It was dark beyond the door, that Door which the books said only ever opened in one direction, only admitted and never released. The air, if air it was, felt neutrally warm against his bare skin, and still, and very quiet. It was the sort of place where if voices were heard at all they would be mannerly murmurs and nothing louder. But there were no voices. No other people. Only himself… and one other.

That other’s eyes were squeezed tight shut, so that he might as well have been alone. Aldric wondered why. He thought that he might know this other man, if he could just recall his name, and any companionship would be better than none at all. By the look of him he would have tales to tell; the long straight slash of a swordstroke had ripped his bare chest from one armpit to the other, there were other brutal scars on face and body and something had mangled his left hand until it was no more than a claw of bone and leather.

Just like Aldric’s own…

“Voord,” he said, remembering at last. Remembering all of it. The
Woydach’s
eyes opened and Aldric smiled at him as calmly as he would at his best friend. Or at Kyrin herself.
Oh God, how I miss her. But she understood what it was I had to do. She understood me. That’s why I miss her so much
.

“Talvalin… ?” Tentatively the smile was matched and mirrored, until at last it reached Voord’s eyes and warmed them as they had not been warm this dozen years. All at once those eyes flinched away from Aldric’s steady gaze, as if embarrassed—or ashamed. “Talvalin, finish with me. Do it now… while I have the courage.”

Aldric’s left hand, crippled now and cradled in his right, was clenched shut in an attempt to contain the blood-flow in his fist. It wasn’t successful. When he reached out to touch Voord’s forehead with fingertips that left dark smears in their wake, there was no mockery in what he did. It was simply that there was blood everywhere. His blood… this once, his blood alone. “
Woydach
Voord,” he said, not caring that titles of rank were no more carried here than the badges and regalia that marked them, “I think it’s been done already.”

Voord stared in disbelief at the blood and the evidence of pain. “You… you did this. For
me
?”

“Voord,” Aldric said softly, not knowing his once-enemy by any other name and here no longer needing to know, “it counts for very little What value is a fight that’s easy to give? Killing has been the easy way for both of us; it always was. Living in peace—with the memories we share—would have been the hard part. That alone would have made it worth doing… for both of us. A pity that we missed the chance.”

No matter what Kyrin had said, while they lived neither would have been able to accept the other as a brother beneath the skin. There was too much hatred and brutality between them for anything that might have led to understanding or forgiveness. And now, for all the words that might be said concerning dark and light, right and left, good and evil, none of it had any value anymore.

There was a smell of lancemint leaves in Aldric’s nostrils and just for a moment that clean astringence made his gorge rise, made him—almost—thrust Voord away as the memories of lancemint-sweetened breath and the last time he had smelled it came flooding back, heavy with pain and self-disgust and loathing for the man who might have been a friend. Then he saw the tears streaming down Voord’s face and the old hurts twisting at his features, and knew that this time and for always he had won.

Lancemint leaves. And roses…

As that too-sweet, too-rich perfume cut sickeningly through the sharp scent of mint, Aldric blinked rapidly and for the first time paid some small attention to what surrounded him.

At first there was nothing. Utter nothing. No shape, no color, no sound, neither above nor below nor before, nor behind, nor to either side. Only the stillness and that cool warmth which was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, no more felt against his skin than skin is felt against the flesh beneath it. Skin which for no reason at all was hackling like the back of a frightened cat…

And then the reason became all too plain. Voord began to scream again, and this time his screaming was edged with the knowledge that he was beyond even the release that comes with death…

Kyrin cradled the body on her lap and stared down at its still face. There were no more tears, not now; she had been shocked beyond weeping when the
tsepan
drove home, when the blood flowed, when Aldric really, truly gave up his own life as honor’s price for an enemy’s clean death. There had always been the hope that the gesture alone would be sufficient, right up to the moment when he fell over and the quick, shallow movement of his breathing fluttered to a stop.