Doomwalker

by Kathryn Zurmehly

  "A Paladin!" the other shouted, "Ambush! Blasted Lyrican fool! I'm going to cut the tits off your useless goddess!"

  Maryx saw Valen's sword flash as he drew it.

  She had always hated fighting horsemen from the ground. The elf moved as the rider swung, trying to stay outside the space between the horse and the blade. She darted to the rider's left, her dead side, and slashed at an unarmored leg.

  The sword bit into the woman's thigh. She screamed and the air filled with the heavy scent of blood. Maryx followed the strike through, drawing back to avoid catching bone. She let her momentum carry her away from the horse.

  The woman was now bleeding out, tugging madly on the reigns of an animal frightened by the smell of its riders blood. Not armored, not mounted on warhorses...couriers maybe, but to where?

  Maryx turned to help Valen, but found he had his opponent on the ground, his sword against his throat.

  "How?" the man snarled--or boy, rather. Yes, couriers. "How did you know where it would open? We never really know!"

  Valen's brow furrowed. "Where what would open?"

  "It doesn't matter. Your Temple will burn and the true power will take its place, as it should. Search our saddlebags. You'll find nothing." He lunged forward, slitting his own throat on Valen's blade before the Paladin could draw it back.

  They both turned to the other rider, who threw herself from her saddle and feel with a skull-breaking crack.

  "Lyrica's tits!" Valen cursed, causing Maryx's eyebrows to shoot up. He looked at her. "Couriers."

  She nodded. "Where to? And what opened?"

  He used the courier's uniform to wipe off his sword. "Well, we have horses now."

  "If Beriskar has another army, they might be at the city's gates now." The desire to run into the wilderness was very strong now. She'd go north, to the harsh lands on the edges of the Northern Ice Wastes. It was a month or so by horse, if she rode hard through wild places. Unpleasant but livable and most of all remote.

  Valen nodded grimly. "They might." He approached the courier's nervous mount. The animal eyed him warily, but it knew humans meant food and it clearly had no idea where it was.

  Maryx used the dead man's cloak to wipe off her own blade and sheathed it violently. She turned to find the other horse watching, alert and still jittery.

  The Seven damn it all. It wasn't like she wanted to spend months or years camped in freezing cold, eating what she could scavenge or catch, staying constantly alert for some of the more awful things that called the Wastes home.

  It wasn't like she could, anyway. She turned to watch Valen calm his newly won horse with a gentle hand and felt a pang of pity. Doomwalkers did not have happy stories.

  The last ones had killed the gods. They had died in misery after they finished, their own strange weapons turned against them by demons, or so the stories went. Before that, there were shadowy muttered tales about summoning the ice that had wiped out the First Age and other great dark things.

  Maryx supposed that, as much as anyone didn't deserve the fate that was coming to him, it was this Paladin.

  She moved up slowly on what was now her horse, making soothing sounds and bitterly remembering her grandfather's none-too-gentle lessons in horsemanship. Fortunately this was a mare, not the angry stallion she'd been forced to learn how to ride on.

  It took less coaxing than she'd thought it would to get the animal to work with her. Humans were security and the mare knew it. For the sake of completion, she ran through the animal's minimal saddlebags, finding some jerky and hardtack but nothing else. She stripped away the Beriskar colors the saddle as she could and mounted up.

  "It should be a little over a day's ride to get to the Crownvale," she said, "Another day to the city itself."

  "If there isn't an army in the way." He kicked his horse into a trot.

  "So much for optimism," Maryx muttered and followed him down the Great Road.

  6

  Crownshold fit its name.

  The southern forests faded to rolling hills many miles along the Road from the city, and Crownshold was atop on the tallest and broadest of these hills, surrounded by a wide well-tended fields, orchards, and vineyards. No army marched through the spring-warmed valley and life seemed to continue as normal, with spring planting done and summer soon to arrive.

  They'd ridden a whole day through this bounty before they'd seen the city. They had spotted it before the sun’s first rays had peaked over the horizon, its great rounded wall appearing like an abnormal blackness and huge bonfires blazing on its seven great towers.

  Spines, really, Maryx thought, or spikes. They were not round as many castle towers were, but jabbed up knifelike into the sky. The city looked like a crown, placed upon its commanding hill by the Tribunal. Here and there, small villas and complexes dotted the land around it like scattered jewels.

  She had been here from time to time with fair frequency, but it was always impressive.

  The pale light of dawn revealed the walls to be some kind of yellow-gold stone, not something she’d seen anywhere else. It was the pride of the Holdings, fed by the incredible fields around it and the great warm springs beneath it, supplied by the Great Road that emanated from it like spokes on a wheel in all four directions. It was an interesting place, with a pride of its own and more layers of intrigue than an onion, as well as great number of baths and a lot of taverns with good food and better drink. She’d enjoyed every visit.

  Valen approached the gate confidently, not bothering to join the small line of merchants and travelers. Maryx trailed cautiously in his wake.

  He paused as they neared the gate and waited for her to catch up. "I’ll get you in without trouble. I can usually get them to bend."

  Based on the dirty looks the men and women in the slow-moving line were giving them, this was true. “I’ve never come through the gate before.” She was glad she had her cloak’s hood up, torn as it was. The looks would have been dirtier if they could see her ears and even Valen’s Paladin status would not have gotten her through the crowd, let alone the gate.

  His brow furrowed. she wanted to laugh at the expression. “The only way in is the gate.”

  She mulled over that one for a moment. “Yes, of course it is.”

  He gave her his own dirty look and shook it off a moment later, touching his sunburst brooch as if asking for guidance, then led her up to the gate proper. Maryx resisted the urge to tug on her hood.

  She looked up, and noticed a seven-pointed star etched on the stone above the gate. It was time-worn and subtle. Strange. That was an old elven symbol for protection. Well, the city was old, but near as she knew it was human through and through.

  A Crownsguard sergeant, wearing a tabard in the city's sage green, was watching his men argue with a merchant with the dead stare of a man losing his soul to boredom. He broke out of it as Valen neared.

  “Paladin Longshanks!” he said, nodding respectfully and grinning. Maryx cocked her head at the nickname. Valen returned the nod, pausing his horse for a moment, then made to keep riding. The guard held up a hand for him to halt and he did, confused. The sergeant's grin faded. “I apologize. There’s…well, there’s a war going on. Or at least an army on the march."

  “I’ve heard,” Valen said. His horse shifted under him, overwhelmed by Crownshold and no doubt his rider’s nerves.

  “I need to…well, I need to know your business. And that of your companion.” He gestured to Maryx, who nodded and hoped her eyes looked a human sort of blue in her hood’s shadow.

  She already liked this way of getting into the city much better, even with the guards.

  “I am bringing a message to the Temple.” Valen didn’t merely say this, he intoned it. Even Maryx, who had heard Hierarchs deliver nigh-divine guidance to hundreds from crystalline towers and who had been entertained by Valen’s hair for days, was impressed.

  “Of course. Your companion?”

  “The same.” He followed that up with a steely stare. />
  “Then you may enter with the blessing of the Crownsguard.”

  Valen gave an approving nod and spurred his fidgety horse forward. Maryx matched his pace as they entered the busy streets of Crownsguard, the city with no lord, home of the Temple of the Tribunal.

  Maryx kept an eye on the crowds bustling about, men and women of many skin and hair colors and wearing far more colors than even that, carrying all sorts of things. The occasional wagon or carriage crept through, sometimes throwing out curses in one of five human languages.

  "I'm impressed," she told Valen as they made their way slowly toward the interior of the city, "You have just broken a law of the city as old as its walls, I believe."

  He gave her a level look. His eyes had a simmering cinnamon hue and annoyance made them blaze, she thought, amused. "Apparently you didn't need my help."

  "I preferred having it. Despite the opinions of many Crownsholders, the sewers here do in fact stink and are full of rats."

  He gave a short laugh in spite of himself.

  "Though I do have a question," Maryx said, watching the progression of some Tribunal god's pilgrims. They were wearing blue and carried poles that held a great blue flowing piece of fabric above their heads. It rippled elegantly and the fabric shimmered in different shades of blue and green with the motion. Streaming behind it were paper kites made to resemble fish. Children stopped to gawk, causing the crowd to slow more, but she did not blame them.

  She looked over to see that he was staring straight ahead, paying no attention to the pilgrims with their canopy. "Do the guards here often call you Paladin Longshanks?"

  He frowned at that. "Oh. That. My brother called me that when we were initiates and it...got around. It's the worst when the priestesses use it."

  Maryx laughed. Valen looked both sheepish and annoyed, which was honestly a welcome break from his grimness.

  Thought the grimness was wiser, undeniably. At the moment, with no sign of an army at the gates but rumor and the many sights of Crownshold before her, it was hard to hang onto. Or, rather, she would rather not hang onto it.

  “I hate the way things are done here,” Valen said out of the blue, evidently not able to let the shadows go away for long.

  “Really?” She watched the rippling canopy turn a corner.

  He followed her gaze. “Not that. The…Temple things. This way.”

  They executed a sort of dance with a scrawny, squinting boy who seemed to be picking up horse dung from the street and hurried down a less crowded street towards the Temple.

  It was more a Temple complex, a multitude of buildings with gleaming roofs all surrounded by the same ornate wall. No building in the city was nearly as tall as the city’s great wall, but only the meeting house of the Lords’ Council was taller than the Temple buildings. There was a shrine to each member of the Tribunal and those gods requiring formal clerical training had their assorted academies and monasteries within the Temple wall as well. Rich and powerful men had paid for even further monuments and altars across in the complex.

  Maryx had never been inside. With the possibility suddenly in front of her, she was surprised by how much she never wanted to be. She pulled up as they reached the main square in front of the Temple’s grandiose entrance. Not a gate, of course, because the shrines of the gods were always open to supplicants.

  Valen turned and she was surprisingly gratified by the trace of injury she thought she saw on his face. “Deliver your message. I will not be setting foot inside that wall. When you’re done, find me at a tavern called Belarael near the northwestern corner of the Temple wall.”

  “Belarael? The elf from the story?" She nodded. "An elven tavern in the city?”

  “There are no elves allowed in Crownshold, don’t you know?” He glared. “Deliver your message. Your goddess has been demanding it all the way here.”

  He nodded and turned to ride through the gates. Maryx watched him for a moment. Her obligation said she had to stay with him on his road, but she opted not to view it as a strictly physical requirement right now. If she didn’t see him by sunset, she’d go hunt him down.

  She steered her horse forcefully towards the Belarael. The nervous animal wasn’t liking the city and she resolved to sell her off soon. It would be - for a time- a calmer life for the horse than it had known before. The animal might well be ruined by whatever magic had gone on, but you could sell anything in Crownshold.

  She needed a drink. Then a bath, then new clothes.

  The Belarael was in a decent part of the city, being near the Temple, and rarely crowded. The owner was involved in every manner of gilded criminal enterprise and was known to consider the name of the tavern- the same as an old elven hero known for killing humans- to be a great joke.

  It was the only refuge she had here. It might also be a place to get answers about some of her questions, perhaps the only place in the world. The older Scouts were chattier about some subjects than anyone in Aeldamarc.

  Elven Scouts tended to dash through the city, collecting rumors if they could, but the hostility was heavier here, and most of them were better at being elves than she. Still, if any of them were within the walls, they’d be there. With luck, it would be Ryl. He was older and more talkative about than most.

  She dropped her horse and a copper coin with a boy at a nearby stable, then headed into Belarael tavern. Carefully tended lamps with frosted glass lit the tavern warmly. The walls were covered in tapestries of elven legends as understood by humans, and every piece of furniture was carved with the elegant curving lines found on elven ruins.

  Maryx glanced around and grinned to herself as she saw the back of a blond male head, pointed ears in clear evidence. She threw her hood back, earned a few wary looks from other patrons, and circled around to the table.

  Ryl lifted his tankard to her as she sat down across from him. His expression was neutral, as usual. “You walk heavier than you should.” He looked no older than Valen, but he had been a scout for about a century and alive for at least four. She could see the years in his malachite eyes.

  “It’s not like you to sit with your back to the door,” she said. A serving girl came over and took Maryx’s order for wine, bread, and olive oil.

  “Sometimes I feel like throwing caution to the wind. What brings you to Crownshold, Maryx? You missed the last meeting with the Hierarchy.”

  She shook her head. It was strange to see another elf after so long. It had been two years, at least, since she’d seen another scout. “Tying up loose ends.” She should tell him about finding an Immor, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “My assignment was keeping an eye on politics between the Holdings.” The Hierarchs had long ago forgot the scale of the human Holdings, so her task was nearly impossible, but she was reconciled to that.

  “Ah. Yes. Well, war is coming. It was due. That’s more than you’ll normally have to report.”

  “It is. Crownshold seems to be going along just fine, though.” She nodded to the tavern. It was never a truly bustling place, but it wasn’t empty. No one seemed fearful.

  “This city thinks itself immune as long as the walls stand.” He shrugged. “We’ll see. From afar.” He looked at his now empty tankard. The serving girl swung by and replaced it with a new one. “I have been assigned to Mulvane. I need to be there yesterday.” He took another drink.

  Maryx grimaced. Mulvane kept coming up. Mulvane Holding had the wonderful traits of being both remote and insane. Lord Mulvane was a raving lunatic who had renounced his title upon taking it, slaughtered many of his nobles, given their land and wealth away to his subjects, then announced that he was now to be known as the Voice of the People.

  In recent years, the Temple had encountered open hostility and merchants had stopped going there, as their property was likely to be confiscated. Elves...Mulvane was not a good place for elves. Since the rumor was that the place was going through a famine, it was not a good place for humans, either. It’s problems had stayed within its distant border
s largely and the other Holdings had let it be.

  Her drink and food arrived, a welcome symbol of civilization. “Do the Hierarchs know the place is a madhouse?”

  “A starving madhouse. Yes.” He took another drink. “It is a death sentence, but being a scout is a death sentence.” He gave her a bitter grin. The pointed eyeteeth jolted her slightly. “Salt upon the wound: they’re taking scouts back.”

  “What?”

  “The word went out that all scouts were summoned to a meeting at the crossing.” Maryx shrugged with her uninjured shoulder. A scout sometimes did not hear about a summons. “Fifteen of us met there. The rangers appeared out of the woods on the Aeldamarc side, ready to fill us with arrows if we cross.” He tapped the side of his tankard, scowling deeply. “Then three Hierarchs arrived. I think one of your brothers was among them.”

  Maryx shrugged again. Her family had cast her off effectively before she’d been born. It had meant little for a long time and meant less now. “What did the Hierarchs want?”

  “They offered…an end to exile for the male scouts.” He drained his tankard. “If they cut out their tongues before them.”

  Maryx stared at him silently for a minute. “How many did it?”

  “Three.” The serving girl dropped off yet another tankard for him. “Then the Hierarchs gave us new assignments. I am to go to Mulvane and report at the border next spring.”

  Maryx took a deep drink of her wine. “They must be desperate for...studs. Taking scouts back into the borders...very desperate. There were no children of age to take the Oaths when I left and there were going to be none the next year, or the year after.”

  Ryl shrugged and stared into his tankard. “I wonder if my wife would have had me back less a tongue.” He sighed and looked back at her. “Do you need help finding something in the city?”

  She swirled her wine cup. “We’ll see. This may not be a safer place than Mulvane for long, you know.”

  “But it is for now.”

  She drummed the fingers of her right hand against her sword hilt under the table. “You may be able to help me with something else.”