by Simon Hawke
“Your knowledge of trade is second to none, Lyanus,” Ankhor replied, “but hiring mercenaries is a bit outside your field of expertise. Why, do you disagree with my decision?”
“No, my lord, I know nothing of this Kieran of Draj. I was merely curious… But, as you say, the matter is outside my expertise. Still… I might have been effective in conducting the negotiations. I am sure I could have saved the house some money in concluding arrangements with this man.”
Ankhor smiled. “Oh, I doubt that, Lyanus. And that was no slight to your bargaining abilities. Kieran stated his conditions clearly, and they were absolutely non-negotiable.”
“May I inquire what they were, my lord?”
“One hundred thousand gold pieces for one year of service, with half payable up front and the rest in equal monthly installments.”
Lyanus’s jaw dropped. “One hundred thousand in gold!” he said with disbelief. “But… but that’s outrageous!”
“Yes, it certainly is,” said Ankhor. “And at the end of the first year, the contract is subject to renegotiation.”
“And you mean to tell me you agreed to these incredible demands?”
“I imagine Kieran was no less amazed than you when I accepted his terms,” said Ankhor with amusement. “He expected me to refuse, of course. That was why he named so ridiculous a sum. He had no wish to come out of retirement, especially not to command the guard of a merchant house. This is a man who had distinguished himself in war. However, once he stated his terms and I agreed to them, he had no choice but to accept. Otherwise I could have accused him of dealing in bad faith, and that would have besmirched his reputation. A man like Kieran lives and dies by his reputation.”
“But, my lord…why?” Lyanus said, aghast. “You could easily have hired an entire battalion of mercenaries for such a sum!”
“It is a significant expense, I agree, but we can easily afford it,” Ankhor said. “Besides, if I had hired a battalion of mercenaries, it would not have created the impression I intended.”
“But… I do not understand, my lord,” Lyanus said with a puzzled expression.
“The Merchant Code requires us to be nonpolitical,” said Ankhor, “but we are, of course, very much concerned with politics. One cannot transact business profitably otherwise. I wanted everyone to know that the House of Ankhor will spare no expense in hiring the very best to lead our guard in this turbulent time—a man whose reputation is established and beyond question. We share with the House of Jhamri the responsibilities of policing Altaruk; both houses are headquartered here, and I wanted everyone to know just how seriously we take that responsibility.”
“Lord Jhamri, in particular,” said Lyanus, catching on.
“Precisely,” Ankhor replied with a smile. “My father spent his entire life competing with the House of Jhamri, and it wore him out. They were always bigger, always wealthier, and they always regarded us as upstart newcomers. At social functions, they treated my father as a second-class citizen, as a peasant unfit to rub shoulders with them. Oh, they were unfailingly polite, but their condescending tolerance was a slap across the face. I have never forgiven them that, and I never shall.”
“But you recently signed a partnership with the House of Jhamri,” said Lyanus.
“Because trying to compete with them in the marketplace is pointless,” Ankhor said. “We could never match their resources. Whereas if we join them in partnership, we can take advantage of them. Jhamri thinks he has beaten us. He believes I am more pragmatic than my father, that in allying with his house, I have made a wise decision that ensures our survival and extends his own holdings, since the agreement places him in the preeminent position.
“Well, he is half right, at any rate. I am more pragmatic than my father. I realize that competing with the Jhamris is not the way to beat them. The way to beat them is to join them… and undermine them politically.”
“And Kieran is part of your plan?” Lyanus asked.
“Exactly,” Ankhor said. “I had my agents negotiate with Kieran on behalf of the House of Jhamri, in my new capacity as junior trading partner. His salary will come out of my pocket, of course, but he will wear the red of Jhamri, not the buff and blue of Ankhor.”
Lyanus frowned. “I fear you’ve lost me, my lord. You mean, you have, in essence, given this Kieran as a present to Lord Jhamri’s house? Where is the profit in this? And how can he lead our house guard if he wears the Jhamri colors?”
Ankhor smiled. “You have an excellent mind for detail, good Lyanus, but a poor one for intrigue. Lord Jhamri will see my employment of Kieran on his behalf as a gesture to ingratiate myself with him. It is just the sort of thing a man in my position would be expected to do.
“After years of competition, he has finally brought the House of Ankhor to its knees, and in my new position as his subsidiary trading partner, it would seem perfectly logical for me to curry favor with him as evidence of my good faith. After all, my father was his enemy, and as his supposedly weaker, more pragmatic son, whose primary interest is in enjoying a self-indulgent lifestyle, I will play up to his expectations by trying to prove myself his friend. He will, of course, have no idea how much I am paying Kieran, and it would be impolitic of him to ask. And a condition of my contract with Kieran is that he not reveal the amount of his salary.
“However,” Lord Ankhor continued, “at the proper time, I shall allow that information to leak out. Meanwhile, Kieran will command my house guard because Lord Jhamri will insist on it, especially now that I have tragically lost Captain Varos. The fool could not have gotten killed at a better time. Lord Jhamri already has a captain for his house guard, and it would not be practical to demote him in Kieran’s favor, especially when he has done nothing to deserve it.
“No, he will magnanimously offer Kieran to me, to command my own guard, but I will insist that Kieran wear the Jhamri red and act as the nominal co-commander with Jhamri’s own captain. A merely titular appointment, with no real authority behind it. The two units will continue to remain separate. At the same time, Jhamri will have the satisfaction of having all of Altaruk see the commander of the Ankhor House Guard wearing his colors, a clear sign to everyone of who is in control. He will think he has outmaneuvered me, and I will be seem to have placed myself at a considerable disadvantage for the sake of public safety.”
“Very shrewd, my lord,” Lyanus said. “If, indeed, it comes out as you predict.”
“Rest assured, it will,” said Ankhor. “These recent outbreaks of violence in Altaruk have steadily been growing worse, and everyone is greatly concerned. The Alliance has always maintained a strong presence here, because the defilers have never had much influence.
“However, defiler numbers have been growing, and the Alliance is stepping up efforts to eliminate them. Each faction tries to spy out the other, and Altaruk has become a hotbed of intrigue. If things keep up at this rate, we shall soon be caught squarely in a full-scale mage war. And that would be very bad for business.”
“And you have a plan to prevent this conflict?” asked Lyanus.
“Oh, I always have a plan, Lyanus. Kieran is only the first part of that plan. The public part, for there is also another, very private part. The first part is the fire I light under the House of Jhamri, and the second is the ice.”
“The ice, my lord?” Lyanus asked, puzzled.
“Yes, an ice that will freeze the very soul, Lyanus,” Ankhor said with a smile so warm and pleasant that it sent a chill through the old minister of accounts.
Lyanus had learned to watch his young master’s eyes when he smiled. This time, they were terrifying—dead and flat, devoid of emotion. In that moment, Lyanus wondered if Ankhor had a soul. “I… I do not understand, my lord.”
“All in good time, Lyanus,” Lord Ankhor replied as he turned back to the window to watch the merchant plaza burn. “All in good time.”
Chapter One
It was almost dawn on the Great Ivory Plain, and the twin moons cast a gho
stly light on the seemingly endless expanse of sparkling, hard-packed crystal. As the night wind shifted, blowing from the east, Sorak seemed to hear the tormented cries of the lost souls wandering the streets of Bodach, whose crumbling spires rose in the distance, barely visible in the bright, silvery moonlight.
Perhaps it was his imagination. Surely not even an elfling could hear across fifty miles of desert. And yet, tricks of the wind could sometimes carry sound far out in the trackless wastes of Athas, especially here where nothing grew, here on the shimmering crystal plain. As the desert breeze blew across the silt basins to the east, rustling through the palm fronds of the oasis, Sorak was almost certain he could hear the faint sounds of a tortured wailing, a chorus of ululating voices that chilled him to the bone. It was a sound he had hoped never to hear again.
Soon, the sun would rise and the living dead of Bodach would slink back to their hiding places in the ruins. The wind would cease to bear their fearsome wails across the desert, and the city of undead would fall silent as the sands swirled through its deserted streets and plazas. A deceptive stillness would once again descend upon the Great Ivory Plain as the dark sun baked its crystal surface with temperatures high enough to boil blood.
During the day, Bodach seemed merely an abandoned city on a narrow spit of land jutting into the great silt sea—the isolated, crumbling ruins of a once great civilization that had flourished upon Athas in an age when the world was green and the sea filled with water, not with brown and swirling silt. But at night, horror stalked Bodach, and those who fell victim to the city’s undead rose again to join their ranks, doomed by an age-old curse to spend eternity protecting the lost treasure of the ancients.
What Sorak had found in the city of undead was of greater value than any material treasure. He had found a gateway into Sanctuary, the refuge of the Sage, and it was there that he had learned the answers to the questions that had plagued him all his life. It was there that he had found himself, and in the process, came close to losing everything, even his life.
As he stood upon the low and rocky ridge that sheltered the oasis at the edge of the great salt plain, Sorak glanced back toward Ryana, sleeping in her bedroll by their campfire. Together, they had survived the city of undead, and their journey to find the Sage had taken them from their home in the forests of the Ringing Mountains all the way across the harsh and foreboding desert Tablelands. Along the way, they had fought marauders and mercenaries, half-giants and defilers, corrupt aristocrats and paid assassins, and a host of undead warriors. They had even defied the wrath of the Shadow King, Nibenay, himself. They had come a long way from the beginning of their quest and had both sacrificed a great deal to follow the Path of the Preserver. Their lives had changed immeasurably since they had set out on their journey, and as Sorak stood there, the cool night breeze ruffling his long, dark hair, he thought back to how it all had begun.
* * *
From childhood, he had been a tribe of one—a half-breed with a dozen personalities, some male, some female, each with distinctive attributes. A wandering pyreen had found him half dead, alone out in the desert. When the shapechanger realized that his ordeal had fragmented his young mind, she had brought him to the villichi convent, nestied high in an isolated valley of the Ringing Mountains.
The villichi were a sisterhood of warrior priestesses who had vowed to follow the Way of the Druid and the Path of the Preserver. They were women born with fully developed psionic powers, mutants ostracized from their communities. They were taller than most women, broad shouldered and long limbed, and most were marked with albino features—snow-white hair, eyes ranging from palest green or gray to pink, and pale, almost translucent skin that burned easily in the hot Athasian sun. Each year, robed villichi priestesses went out on pilgrimages to search for others of their kind, but never in all the history of Athas had there been a male villichi. In all the years the convent had existed, no male had set foot in its walls.
Though he was male, Sorak was accepted by the high mistress of the convent, both out of her reverence for the pyreen and because she had detected his inborn psionic powers. He was not only an elfling, born of a forbidden union between halfling and elf, he was also a tribe of one, a condition so rare that it was known only among villichi. He was an outcast, as were most villichi, and if he was not villichi himself, then he was as close to being one as any male had ever been. The high mistress took him in and named him Sorak, an elvish word for a nomad who travels alone.
Sorak grew up among the villichi sisterhood. One of them, Ryana, a villichi girl his own age, became his closest friend. They grew up together, played together, trained together in the exotic warrior arts of the villichi, and studied the Way of the Druid. But as they grew older, youthful friendship and affection gave way to love and sexual attraction. And Sorak found himself tormented, torn between his own desires and those of his other personalities.
The female personalities residing in him could accept Ryana as sister or friend, but not as lover, so Sorak left the convent to seek out his destiny and discover the truth of his origins. But Ryana would not be parted from him. When she found out that he had left, she broke her villichi vows, fled the convent in the middle of the night, and followed him out into the desert.
Together, they sought the Sage, the reclusive and mysterious preserver wizard who had embarked upon the long and arduous course of metamorphosis into an avangion, the only creature capable of standing against the power of the dragon kings. Only the magic of the Sage was great enough to help Sorak discover his past, and only preserver magic, which did not destroy the dwindling natural resources of Athas, could cure him of his rare condition. To accept the help of a defiler would have violated everything he had been raised to believe, and would have doomed him to forsake forever the Path of the Preserver. However, in searching for the Sage, Sorak had attracted the attention of the dragon kings and their defiler minions, who regarded the preserver wizard as the sole threat to their power.
In Bodach, Sorak and Ryana faced not only an army of undead, but the murderous champion of the Shadow King, a ruthless killer named Valsavis. They prevailed, but only at great cost. Guided by Kara, a pyreen known as the Silent One, they had found the gateway into Sanctuary in Bodach. It was a magical doorway into another time and place, in an age when Athas was still green. That was the secret of the Sage, and it was why none of the dragon kings had ever been able to find him. They sought him in the present, but he had used his magic to find a refuge in the distant past.
In Sanctuary, Sorak found the answers he had so long sought. He had already deduced that the Sage was the same person once known as the Wanderer, who had chronicled his peregrinations across Athas in a book known as The Wanderer’s Journal. What he had not known was that the preserver wizard was his grandfather.
The Sage cast a spell on Sorak, which enabled him to see into his past. He discovered who his parents were, and what his truename was, and what had become of his people. Through the magic of the Sage, Sorak saw how the Moon Runner tribe of elves had been destroyed by a necromancer called the Faceless One, a defiler wizard hired by Sorak’s halfling grandfather.
However, finding out those answers both set Sorak free and severed him from the only security he had ever really known. The voices of his multiple personas would never speak to him again. The wise, maternal Guardian; the stoic Ranger; the calculating Eyron; the brash and irrepressible Kivara; the beastlike Screech; the gentle, childlike Lyric; and the others… all were gone now. They had joined with the Sage, living on inside him as he entered the next stage of his transformation. The act that empowered the Sage’s evolution also healed Sorak’s fragmented personality, and now Sorak was left feeling more alone than he had ever felt before.
“All living creatures are alone, Sorak,” Ryana told him afterward in an attempt to ease his pain. “That is why they mate and bond in friendship.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied. “But it is one thing to know it, and still another to experience truly
being alone for the first time. I have never known the feeling. For as long as I can remember, I have had the others with me. Now, I feel their absence, the emptiness in my soul. It feels as if a part of me is missing.”
Nor was his multiplicity the only thing he lost.
When he had left the convent, High Mistress Varanna had given him a gift, a wondrous sword named Galdra—the enchanted blade of elven kings. It had been entrusted to her safekeeping by a pyreen elder, who had received it from the hand of Akron himself, last of the ancient line of elven kings. Sorak had not known the nature of the blade’s enchantment when he had received it, but he learned that it would cut through anything, and that other blades would shatter upon contact with its elven steel. He knew, too, that if Galdra fell into the hands of a defiler, its magic blade would shatter—and that was precisely what happened when he fought Valsavis, champion of the Shadow King. When Valsavis seized the sword, a blinding explosion of white light shattered the enchanted blade. Now, all that remained was the hilt and about a foot of broken blade. Of the legend once engraved on it in ancient runes—“Strong in spirit, true in temper, forged in faith”—only the elvish symbols for “Strong in spirit” now remained. A defiler’s hand had touched it, and the enchantment was broken.
* * *
As he stood alone upon the rocky ridge in the first orange-tinted light of dawn, Sorak drew the broken blade from his belt and held it up before him, staring at it as it gleamed with a faint blue eldritch light, the remaining trace energies of the enchantment. Why keep it? It was useless as a sword, and Sorak bore Valsavis’s iron sword now, anyway. But Ryana had insisted that the legend of Galdra still stood for something and could be of use to them. Sorak grimaced wryly as he thought of it.
It was said in the songs of elven bards that whoever bore the sword Galdra was fated to become the Crown of Elves, the ruler who would once again unite the scattered tribes under one king. In his travels, Sorak had encountered elves who had believed that he would be that king, but he wanted no part of any elven crown.
