The Demon Lord
Peter Morwood
The Book of Years Series, Part Two
© Peter Morwood copyright 1984, 2017
Peter Morwood has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in the UK in 1984 by Century
This revised edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PREFACE
“…and did take enseizen of Dunrath-fortress, where was yslayen HARANIL, most Honourable of LORDES, and with him nygh-all of clan TALVALIN.
…which Exile was of four yeares. Upon his returning to Dunrath in company with RYNERT-KING and an hoste both of Horse and Foote, LORDE ALDRIC did by dyveres secret ways make essay to come unto ye citadel thereof, wherein was ye Necromancer Duergar Vathach. And there by poweres enstryven of that good Enchanter Gemmel, the same that did give him comfort in tyme of sore Distress, LORDE ALDRIC did bring Deathe most well-deserved to his foe and thus ykepen oath unto his Father HARANIL. And by HEAVENES grace (it is said) he did vanquish Kalarr cu Ruruc, who first fell and was yslayen at Baelen Fyghte but was restored unto lyfe for endoen of great Evill to this lande of ALBA…
Yet took LORDE ALDRIC no delight in Victory, enhaven rather exceeding Sadness that all folke of his Blood were no more, and to ye KING made declaration of soche sorrowful Memories as were in Dunrath. Now to the wonderment and great Amaze of all then setten him forth into ye Empyre of Drusul to find forgetfulness.
But some privy to ye KINGES counsels noise abroad that this LORDE was bidden thence for his own Honoures sake…”
Ylver Vlethanek an-Caerdur
The Book of Years, Cerdor
What is life, except
Excuse for death, or death but
An escape from life?
kailin-eir Aldric-erhan, ilauem-arluth Talvalin
PROLOGUE
The forest was immense, stretching from the Vreijek border to the eastern edge of sight in a single unbroken sweep of trees, defying belief by size alone, yet enforcing that same belief with its own huge reality. It wasn’t a part of the Imperial province known as the Jevaiden; it was the province. Few people lived there, for all the lush, abundant growth. A thin fringe of humanity dwelt along the edges, and some scattered villages had sprouted up a small way within, but nothing more. The forest’s reputation didn’t invite visitors.
Except, on this day, for two impudent, intrusive specks.
Though it was near midsummer and early evening, the forest was already growing dark. Thick, rain-swollen clouds overlaid the sky with their grey blanket, choking all heat and light from an invisible sun. Under the shadow of the trees, where a tang of pine resin scented the air, it was cool and still. Then a crash and clatter shattered that stillness as horses came at a gallop through the bracken into a clearing, where they skidded to a snorting, stamping halt.
There were two horses, a pack-pony, and two riders. One of them wore the greens and russets of a forester, his high-coloured face crossed by the crescent sweep of a heavy moustache. It was a cheery face, the sort where smiles were frequent, but not now. He was irritable, out of breath and in a mood where those smiles were far away.
“Satisfied? Content we’ve shaken them? If they were ever there at all.”
The other man said nothing. Wearing stark, unrelieved black and looking on his black horse like a part of the oncoming night, he gestured for silence and rose in his stirrups, head cocked to listen for sounds in the forest that were not sounds of the forest.
A crow cawed mocking comment and spread dark wings as it launched from a branch above him in a clattering flight across the clearing that ended violently. The horseman jerked a weapon from his saddle holster, tracked the bird for a moment and transfixed its body with a dart. It changed in mid-flight, as he suspected it might, but only from a living creature to a bundle of black feathers flung against a tree trunk near the ground.
“Lady Mother Tesh! It was a crow, Aldric! Only a crow!”
“I see that.” Aldric Talvalin’s voice was quiet compared to his excitable companion. “But I don’t like crows.” As he dismounted to recover his missile, the telek spring-gun still gripped in his left hand hushed any further criticism. So did the quick impatient glance from his eyes. They were halfway between grey and green, and they betrayed nothing of the thoughts behind them. If a man’s eyes were the windows to his soul, as philosophers claimed, someone had closed these shutters long ago. A long white scar ran down one cheek, reason perhaps for the weary cynicism he wore like a mask. Only those who knew him better knew the real reasons, far more than a scar and far harder to explain in a few words.
“And Youenn,” he continued in the same soft voice, “I won’t tell you again. Within the Empire I’m no longer Aldric Talvalin.”
He was no longer so many things, despite regaining all of them with a great deal of blood. He had spilled it with the taiken longsword hanging at his hip, but plenty was from his own veins. Aldric could still feel the echoes of pain deep inside him, from hurts to both body and spirit. He had been clan-lord, Ilauem-arluth Talvalin, for so short a time it seemed only a dream, like the others he sometimes drowned in wine to let him sleep.
Lord of a clan which no longer existed, master of a citadel where every stone reminded him of things he would rather forget, and would have forgotten, given time. But no-one had given him that time. Instead he had been sent here to keep them by proving his allegiance, by proving he was trustworthy, by obeying his lord the king.
By killing a man he had never even met.
Aldric felt dampness on the palms of both his hands as he mounted his horse again and returned the telek to its holster. The knowledge shamed him yet he couldn’t help it, for he loathed this place. He realised that in the first moment he set eyes on its green sprawl beyond the town of Ternon. He loathed its silence, its claustrophobic gloom, and most of all he loathed the memories it brought flooding back. Once, not long enough ago for comfort, he had fled like a hunted animal through a forest much like this, and it mattered not at all that the pursuers existed only in his imagination. Aldric had avenged the terror of that flight a thousand-fold and sworn never to hunt any living thing again except for food, but the memories remained, festering in the secret places of his mind like wounds that refused to heal.
“There was no reason for that dash through the woods.” Youenn Sicard said, returned to an old complaint. “Few people travel in this part of the Jevaiden, and almost any road will be empty.”
“ ‘Almost’ isn’t enough. We were being followed, and I’m still not sure if…” His voice trailed off and a frown drew his brows together as he twisted in his saddle, reaching for the telek again.
Then he kicked one foot from its stirrup and threw himself sideways. An instant later something flicked through the space where he had been, tugged for an instant at his left arm, and made a noise like a carpenter driving a nail as it slammed into the trunk of a tree.
Time seemed to run slow. He had sensed the arrow being aimed at him before he heard the sound of it being loosed, yet barely avoided its flight. The black leather of his jerkin sleeve and the white linen shirt beneath both parted as if slit by a razor, and for just a second the thin pink line across his bicep looked no worse than the scratch from a thorn.
Then it split apart and bloo
d went pulsing down his arm.
“Get down!” His urgent warning was partly a yell of pain because the wound hurt with all the focused intensity of a hot wire run through the torn muscle. The shock of seeing his own flesh laid open could freeze a man for long enough to let the next blow kill him. It could also freeze a man who saw it happen, and Youenn gaped in startled disbelief while his horse jibbed as the blood-smell reached its nostrils.
Another arrow followed the first, and this one made a piercing squeal. The whistle attached to it was a signal-device, but it was just as useful for frightening horses. Youenn’s untrained steed, already spooked, bucked until all he could do was clutch reins, saddle and mane as he fought to keep his seat.
Five riders burst through the ferns and bracken at the far end of the clearing. They wore masks and looked like bandits, but Aldric had never heard of bandits who rode in light cavalry skirmish order with guard-hounds bounding at their heels. Three carried bows already raised and drawn, and in the same instant he saw them, they loosed.
The triple hiss as the arrows passed over Aldric’s head was bad enough. The sound afterwards, heard clearly despite the baying hounds, was far worse. It was the thudding slap of three impacts so close together as to seem just one, and he knew with grim familiarity what he would see when he glanced back.
Youenn Sicard stared down with dull surprise at his chest and its fine new crop of feathers. At such close range the arrows had driven fletching-deep, and as he sagged forward Aldric saw how his back sprouted quills as though they were pens and he their inkwell. Youenn’s eyes met his with a puzzled question in them. His mouth opened to ask it but only blood came out, and Youenn Sicard pitched headlong to the ground.
There was no point in any shout of denial, Aldric had seen death too often not to recognise its presence now. He slammed heels against his black courser’s flanks and with the pack pony in tow charged towards his startled enemies. If the four men knew anything about Alban horselords they might have expected it, but they expected panic and flight, not attack. He was on top of them before their minds processed the new information. His taiken longsword left its scabbard with almost-unnatural speed, and as he passed between the foremost pair Aldric cut right and left in a gleaming figure-eight that emptied both saddles.
The remaining riders flinched away, a hound screeched as it went down under the black courser’s pounding hooves, then he was through and vanishing into the same forest shadows from which they had emerged just thirty seconds earlier. A single hasty arrow came after him, rattling harmlessly out of sight among the branches, and there was a brief thudding of hoofbeats in his wake that stopped almost as soon as it began.
He guessed why. His trail was clear, easy to follow and easily followed – too easily, at least for men who had just seen what might happen if they caught up with him. They loved life too much for that. There would be no pursuit. They would leave him to the forest.
Aldric slackened his pace at last, sweaty with exertion and a little unsteady from shock. Few were able to simply shake off the effects of a wound, and those who could were either battle-frenzied or so gravely hurt that the wound acted as its own soporific drug. This arrow-cut was slight by comparison and hurt like hell because of it. He remembered the last time, running through another darkening forest with another arrow-injured arm. Then he had been on foot, and the wonder here was that no low branches swept him from his saddle. There were no sounds behind, nor to either side, nor ahead of him, and he grinned a hard little grin that was mostly just clenched teeth. He had lost them.
Then Aldric remembered Youenn Sicard, and the grin turned sour as it faded. Not only because the man was dead, though that was dismal enough. Without a guide, with no idea of where to go from here, he hadn’t just lost his pursuit.
He had lost his way as well…
CHAPTER ONE
The mist that silent morning shifted like a living thing in the darkness before dawn, insinuating pale tendrils of chilly intimacy between the trees. Sluggish coils eddied away as Evthan eased from the high bracken, flowing back to wrap him in a clammy embrace. The hunter shivered as he knelt to study the vapour-shrouded ground, then his eyes narrowed and he paused, listening.
Somewhere in the gloom a bird burst into song and Evthan’s eyebrows drew together at this ill-timed intrusion. They were thick brows that met above his hawk nose in a single bar, even without the frown to join them. He was the best hunter and tracker in the Jevaiden, commanding high fees from the noblemen who came here in late summer seeking game. They often said the lanky Jouvaine could think like a beast, and right now his attention was focussed what he had seen in the damp turf. With an arrow nocked to his bow, he slipped back into cover even more quietly than he had emerged.
Evthan wasn’t afraid. Just very cautious.
There was a clearing ahead, edged by a stream running down from the edge of the Jevaiden plateau, where deer often came to drink, and at first it seemed empty until the hunter realised it was as full of fog as a cup might be of milk. Even nearby trees were mere scribbled sketches on a shifting grey canvas, and he was uncomfortably aware that anything at all could lie unseen beneath them.
Even the Beast.
His mouth twisted, sneering at a half-formed hope. It wouldn’t be his luck to have that target for his arrow here today, in the same way as it hadn’t been his luck this month or more. That was why Darath had sent him out to find help, another hunter, someone who could find the Beast and kill it. The headman didn’t know how much that command had wounded Evthan’s pride. Or perhaps he knew all too well, since Darath’s family hadn’t been spared their visit from the Beast.
Evthan remained hidden in the undergrowth while the eastern sky brightened towards sunrise and a faint breeze thinned the fog. That small movement of the air brought a prickling of woodsmoke to the hunter’s nostrils and he set his brooding aside. His fingers took up pressure on the bowstring as silhouettes emerged in the clearing, soft unreal forms still half-veiled by the mist. Evthan’s held-in breath sighed out between his teeth. Tethered to the roots of a long-fallen tree, a packhorse and a sleek black courser unconcernedly cropped the grass.
A young man in leather breeches and high boots was rummaging in one of the pack-saddles. His fine white linen shirt clung to his body as if not yet dry after a recent washing, and occasionally he flexed his left arm a few times, wincing as he did so. At last he shrugged and got dressed in more leather, then in metal. First was a heavy jerkin with quilted padding at shoulders and elbows, reinforced still further with sections of mail. Over that went scaled leggings, lamellar body armour laced in blue and white, and sleeves of more mail and polished plate.
When the last strap was tight he picked up the sword propped against a nearby tree trunk and knelt to face the dawn, gazing full at the risen sun without concern for its glare. The drifting skeins of mist had become a haze of glowing gold, and countless points of light reflected from the polished black metal of armour. At last he bowed his head for a moment before he rose to tend his horses.
*
Aldric had suspected for some time that all wasn’t as it should be, and he trusted such warnings more than ever when they pushed into his mind. The watcher, whoever he might be, hadn’t used his advantage of surprise and if he was an enemy, that mistake would be fatal. Literally.
But what if he was a friend…?
Aldric dismissed that notion. He had no friends in the Jevaiden, not since Youenn Sicard was killed by the ‘bandits’ whose motives had nothing to do with simple robbery. Real bandits would likely have known their target carried only the Empire’s worthless silver coins. Five hundred florins should have made him a wealthy man, but not now, and that was what sickened him about Youenn’s death. If, despite all appearances to the contrary, the attackers had been mere thieves, the Vreijek guide had died for nothing.
That was why the half-seen shadow in the forest made him so nervous. There were so few honestly dishonest reasons for an ambush, only intrigue an
d assassination. And counter-assassination, said a small voice in the silence at the back of his mind. For all the elaborate secrecy surrounding it, he couldn’t shake a suspicion that someone realised what King Rynert had commanded him to do.
Aldric felt a bead of apprehensive sweat crawl from his hairline, and beneath the armour his back was growing damp. Despite the salve and bandage covering it, the arrow wound in his left arm stung as salty perspiration bit the raw flesh like acid. Acting calmly required conscious effort, for there was nothing calm about the memories of past events which tumbled through his skull. They weren’t memories of his dignified rejection of the Talvalin lordship, a pretty little scene played out for witnesses, but the reality between himself and King Rynert that had taken place in private a mere half-hour before.
*
“Mathern-an arluth, I’ve regained this fortress at no small cost, and now you say I have to leave again. I have a right to hear your reason.”
There was more outraged protest in Aldric Talvalin’s voice than proper courtesy permitted, but Rynert let it pass. They were alone in the great hall of Dunrath-hold, in the donjon at the citadel’s heart, and the king’s footsteps echoed in the emptiness as he paced to and fro.
“Aldric-an,” he said, “the only reason I need give is that I am your lord.” Several silent seconds passed. Aldric had heard that same reason from his father years ago, but hearing it from Rynert was no easier, even though it remained stark truth. “There is another way of viewing this, of course,” the king continued. “Despite your youth you are a high-clan lord, and ilauem-arluth Talvalin deserves at least the privilege of respect due his rank.”
“I thank you for that, mathern-an.” Aldric inclined his head. There was nothing that a quick glance could read from the thoughts which drifted in the hazel depths of Rynert’s eyes, while good manners – and simple caution – forbade staring.
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