A Hero Born

by Michael A. Stackpole

  My right arm hung limp at my side and felt numb, except where someone had poured molten iron into my marrow. 1 gently probed the wound on my wrist with the fingers of my left hand, but the cold had completely numbed them. Even so, as I moved them over my arm and jacket, I could feel them catch and tug in the holes the spell had burned in the jacket. From the weight at my right elbow and the way the cold cut through my upper arm, I had to assume my garment had been similarly burned through at the shoulder, allowing the soaking sleeve to catch at my elbow.

  In the darkness, with sewer water still in my nostrils and my body rapidly losing all feeling, I knew I was not going to last long. It did not matter that I could not see my wounds. I knew that my arm had not fallen completely off, but it might as well have for all the use it seemed to be. I could have easily been bleeding, but I had no way of telling, which scared me. I realized that my survival now depended more upon my ability to find warmth and help than it did on anything I could do alone.

  Trying to be as quiet as possible, I waded back through the icy water toward where I heard the stream from the palace flowing in. I climbed out of the channel and onto a narrow walkway. I wanted to rest against it, but that would have meant leaning on my right shoulder, which 1 didn’t think was a good idea. Setting one foot before the other, I worked my way up on the stairway serving as catwalk along the palace tunnel. I quickly learned that every dozen steps I had to duck my head to avoid the arches with which the tunnel had been strengthened at those points. Having icicles rain down upon my shoulders was a torment 1 could do without.

  1 focused myself on one thing: walking. It was both surprising and terrifying to realize how difficult such a simple and vital task had become. I had no way to judge how far up I had gone or had yet to go, but I knew I would see the hole in the treasury wall when I reached my goal. The possibility that the Emperor had immediately summoned a sorcerer to seal it again did occur to me, but I couldn’t see Thetys doing that without first sending rescuers out for me. I clung to that hope because if he had magickally repaired the wall, I was dead, and dying struck me as the last thing I wanted to do to greet the new year.

  Four arches from the hole I met Kit and the Warlord on their way down. “Is that you, Locke?”

  “Y-yes, my lord.”

  Drustorn shouted back up the tunnel. “We have him!”

  The expression on Kit’s face when I entered the circle of light cast by the torch he carried told me I looked as bad as I felt or worse. It seemed that the light from his torch increased the burning sensation in my arm. The resultant pain caused my fingers to jerk and twitch, which let me know I’d not lost use of them, and let me feel the weight of the ring again.

  “Locke! What did you run into down there?”

  “The thing that killed your wolves. A Chademon. Here. In Herakopolis.” I reached up with my left hand, batted away icicles, and steadied myself on an arch. “It stole something. It got away. I’m sorry.” My knees buckled.

  The Warlord caught me with surprising ease and looped my left arm over his shoulders. “Easy, Locke, easy. No reason to be sorry. We have troops scouring the city, and the squads have magickers with them. We will find him.” He glanced at Kit. “Head back up and get a litter and some bearers.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kit winked at me. “Be back in a heartbeat.”

  I tried to return the wink, but my eyelids didn’t seem to want to work right. “Thanks.”

  Garn Drustorn brought his right arm around my back and got a good grip on the waistband of my pants over by my right hip. “Let me take some of your weight. It’s not too far now.”

  “Sorry about the wet.” 1 frowned as we started forward, and the Warlord ducked the arch. “Would have gotten the demon but for the other two thieves. They slowed me down.”

  “Not thieves, Locke, but Black Churchers. Three or four are still alive.” He grunted as I slipped, and he held me up. “Surprisingly enough, even one of yours lived.”

  1 wanted to ask him what he meant by that remark, but I had no chance before we arrived at the hole and stepped through into the treasury. The Emperor and his brother looked at me with a hint of terror in their eyes, and i knew it came from more than just my appearance. The second 1 focused on the scene and was able to sort out what the flickering shadows gave me in tantalizing glimpses, 1 understood both the Warlord’s comment and their incredulous stares.

  The three men I had killed lay sprawled out in most unnatural positions. The first lay on his side with his left hand jammed in his right armpit, but the torchlight washed gold into the wet slickness on his right flank. The second man had fallen backward over a chest. His arms flung wide and his head lolling toward the ground accentuated the dark slice through his throat. The third man had ended up on his belly, with his head cranked back abnormally far as it rested on the hilt of the dagger protruding like a steel beard from his chin.

  My mouth went dry. Oh, Grandfather, look what you did. You trained me to be a swordsman, but I have become a butcher.

  As I looked at the dead men, two parts of me started to battle. I had been raised on heroic tales of my father, my uncle, and others who had won fame by defeating the enemies of the Empire. Storytellers were able to paint gorgeous and glowing accounts of epic battles with their poems and songs, yet none of them carried with them the dark side of having killed. I had, with one casual cut, reduced a person from being human to being a lump of meat. The fact that any one of these men might have had friends and lovers and children and family to mourn him meant little in comparison with the transmogrification I had caused to happen.

  By the same token I knew that I had only consigned their souls to the Deathbird. There they would be beaten clean by the hammer Purifier until the Sunbird would again bring them to the world. 1 had not so much ended their lives as 1 had started them on a journey that would avail them of a better fate. What I had done was not a tragedy at all, but a continuation of life.

  Pain pulsed in from my arm, and 1 realized that both views were weights on the ends of a balance pole. 1 sought the fulcrum upon which the pole rested and saw that the latter view made life worthless, while the former made it so sacred that death could be seen as preferable to action that might prevent the deaths of others. Pacifism for the sake of pacifism in the face of tyranny became the utmost in selfishness and arrogance, which made it just as evil as inciting or committing wanton slaughter.

  These men had embarked on a mission that quite probably would bring horror and death to the Empire.

  They had attacked me, and 1 had defended myself. Members of the Church of Chaos Encroaching, they willfully plotted against the Empire and had been placed under a ban that would kill them if they were caught. 1 had every moral, legal, and ethical reason to kill them. I still did not like what I had done, and felt pleased that it made me uneasy, but 1 also knew there were times that conflicts could be solved by no other method.

  To my right the massive bronze doors to the treasury had been opened, letting light from the marbled hall outside flood the room. The Chamberlain stood guard at the doorway, a dark frown marking his displeasure at the scene he surveyed. Squads of soldiers entered the vault beneath his baleful gaze and escorted the wounded Black Churchers away to the palace dungeons.

  Another group of soldiers came in with a litter and set it down next to me. I started to wave them off, but my right arm barely moved at all, and, for the first time, the growing pain made me dizzy. The Warlord eased me down onto the white canvas, and his image split into two.

  Then my head hit the canvas and blackness again shrouded my sight.

  1 came back to consciousness with the tingle of a spell rippling over me. An old man, with bald pate and craggy wrinkles on his face, slowly straightened up, then smiled at the Emperor. “He’s back with us, Majesty, as 1 said he would be.”

  “I did not doubt you, Sava, but merely wondered at how long Locke’s return would take.” Good-natured sarcasm underscored Thetys’s words.

  “Haste i
s not the handmaiden of efficacy, Highness.”

  “Nor is sloth, Sava.”

  Their verbal sparring gave me a moment or two to collect myself. I was not cold, and, in fact, the roaring blaze in the fireplace to my left was making me feel downright hot. I twisted around and pulled myself up into a sitting position on the daybed, then tried out a smile. It seemed to work, as did the rest of my body, including my gauze-wrapped right arm—a vast improvement over the state of affairs I last remembered.

  The Emperor gave me a warm smile. “I was worried when you collapsed in the treasury. Sava says you will recover fully.”

  1 looked over at the old man and saw he wore the rank badge of a full Mage, as well as the badges of the Healing and Construction schools of magick. “Thank you for your work.” 1 smiled and flexed the fingers of my right hand. “1 feel no pain.”

  “Which does not mean you are healed yet.” Sava clasped his hands together tightly. “You were very lucky, young man.”

  “You would not say that had you been the one down in the sewers, Master Sava.”

  “Ah, but knowing what I know of magick, Master Lachlan, 1 would.” The Mage lifted the lower-sleeve portion of my jacket from a spindly-legged table. “If there is a luckier man in the capital today, more than one gambler will be bankrupt before tomorrow.”

  The sleeve, as 1 had guessed down in the sewers, had been burned away, but I had not been prepared for the scorched brown of the unburned portions. The spell that hit me had been incredibly hot because it had managed to scorch fabric that had been sopping wet. I moved my right arm around gingerly and didn’t even want to think about what it must have looked like before Sava worked his magick.

  “It was bad, yes?”

  “Suckling pigs on a spit have been less roasted.” A wry grin twisted the old man’s lips. “The spell used on you was quite powerful and should have burned right through you. I am not sufficiently versed in combat magick, and certainly not in any varieties used by the Black Church, but I would guess your foe used an energy focus. What did you see?”

  1 sensed from Sava’s use of the term “Black Church” that he had not been told the thing I had been chasing was a Chademon. I decided the Emperor had determined the man did not need to know everything, and I respected Thetys’s wishes on that score. “He gestured at me with his right hand. I saw a spark, then it grew into a red triangle about a foot on each side. It spun through the air at me. I parried it with a shortsword, but the blade fragmented. The spell then hit me. It did feel hot as it came toward me and burned when it hit.”

  The Mage nodded slowly. “As I thought. He focused the energy of his magick down into a physical manifestation: the triangle. That was his mistake. The sword, which was cold from the water, and your clothing, soaked in cold water, bled off enough of the heat energy to mute its effects on you. The fact that you were able to parry it suggests it was hastily cast and not as strong as it should have been. You are luckier yet that he was lazy.”

  I reached up and touched the gauze wrapped around my shoulder. “What have you done to me? I assume your magick is the reason I feel no more pain “

  “True. The burns were serious but treatable. There was blistering, and the burns were all deep enough to weep, but you had very little charred tissue to clean away.” Sava rubbed his jaw. “I used one spell to sterilize and cleanse the wound, then another to numb it. I also did something to speed up healing and lessen the chances of a scar. You will have to change the bandages on the wound and pack it with salve to finish the healing process. In two weeks your arm should be back to normal.”

  I gave Sava a big smile. “Again, you have my thanks.”

  “And you are most welcome, Master Lachlan. One caution, however.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do not fall into the trap of thinking yourself invulnerable to magick because you survived this attack. By rights you should not have survived at all.” The old man’s voice turned hard, and I heard bitterness in it. “The person you faced did an inexact casting down there. With a second or two more taken in his spell-work, he could have focused the spell on you, foregoing the triangle. He would have roasted you from the inside out, and the last thing you would ever have done was vomit fire. This is not a horse that threw you or a dueler who drew first blood. He should have killed you outright, and might well do that if you meet again.”

  I met his intense gaze. “I hear what you say, and I will heed your advice. Perhaps you would have done better to leave me my pain to remind me of the wisdom in your words.”

  He shook his head. “I have been assured you are wise enough that such action was not needed.” He bowed to me and to the Emperor, then took his leave from the small sitting room that had become a temporary infirmary.

  The Emperor drew a chair across the line of firelight coruscating off the white marble floor and seated himself opposite me. “Lieutenant Christoforos said you told him you saw a Chademon down in the sewers. The Warlord and the lieutenant were too distracted to see what you saw, and I must confess I saw little beyond the Black Churchers. My brother said he saw something dark dart through the hole, but he only saw it at the last. Are you sure what you told your cousin is the truth?”

  I nodded solemnly and pulled the sheet up to mid-chest with my left hand. “As certain as I am that you are the Emperor, that is how certain 1 am that I saw a Chademon. A Bharashadi sorcerer, in fact. You have my word on this.”

  “I do not doubt you, Locke, I merely want to determine how massive a disaster we have here. It had the Fistfire Sceptre?”

  “It’s missing from the treasury?” I shook my head. “An obvious question, which you wouldn’t have asked if you had found it in there. Was it a sceptre made of gold, with a black pearl clutched in a fist at one end?”

  Thetys nodded mutely.

  “That was it, then.” I slammed my left fist into the daybed. “I should have known and found a way to stop him.”

  “You did what you could—which was all anyone could have done.” Thetys leaned forward, and the firelight winked from the sapphire in his coronet as he rested his elbows on his knees. His eyes focused elsewhere as he quickly assessed what I had told him and determined the extent of what it meant.

  I knew the very concept of a Chaos creature possessing an item that could stop Fialchar terrified me as much as the idea of someone’s slipping the leash on a vicious dog and sending it after children. I realized that 1 defined this threat as one directed against my grandmother and Marija and others I knew and loved. For the

  Emperor, the threat was one that could destroy a nation that looked to him for leadership and security.

  That is a burden that would crush me utterly and completely.

  Finally the Emperor looked up at me. “This is not an auspicious way to begin a new year, is it?”

  “No, Highness.”

  “Well, sitting here is going to make it no better. Garn and Christoforos have found the sorceress who detected the Chaos magick out in Menal. They are with her in the sewers to determine if the spell used against you was cast by the same creature they found in Menal. My brother is gathering those advisors I can trust with the enormity of this problem. We will have a council of war to determine what we can and must do to resolve this situation. You and your cousin, because of your parts in this, will join us.”

  I shook my head. “Majesty, Christoforos is a good choice because he’s smart and has practical experience. I’m just a Garikman who will be as lost in your councils as I’ve been in Herakopolis.”

  “I appreciate your modesty, Locke, but what I need now is your intelligence. Garn has told me how you deduced the origin of the vindictxvara your cousin found, and your conviction that you saw a Chaos demon in the sewers has not wavered even though we all know that is impossible.” Thetys looked at the door through which Sava had exited the room. “The reason he thinks you were attacked by a Black Churcher is because he would never accept the idea that a Chademon has penetrated the Ward Walls. That kind of un
willingness to explore such possibilities will hamper us, so having someone whose mind is not cluttered with preconceived notions will not be a burden.”

  “I appreciate that, Highness, but…”

  “Do not even begin to imagine refusing to help me,

  Locke. 1 charge you with the duty of making us prove our assumptions as we discuss things. I don’t mean you should assume no facts are true, but our conclusions need to be supported. If we cannot prove what we believe, any plans we make to deal with things will be fruitless.” He nodded once. “This all means, of course, that we have a lot of work to do and much to introduce you to.”

  He stood slowly and scratched at his throat. “I have seen to it that your grandmother and her attendant have found their way home without incident. Both are well and have been assured that you and Christoforos are doing my bidding, if you feel up to it, I would like to show you a project started before my father’s reign. It will, I assure you, be very important, and I would like your thoughts on it.”

  I pulled the sheet closed around my body and swung my legs over the edge of the daybed. “As you have noted, I am yours to command, Highness.”

  “Excellent. Follow me.”

  Thetys led me from the small room, and immediately the palace floor started sending a chill back into my body through my bare feet. The Emperor dispatched a servant to find me suitable clothing while we headed off into the palace wing that had been built by Garik’s greatest artisans. It might have been my imagination, but this Garik wing of the palace seemed friendlier and less hostile to me.

  We descended one broad set of stairs, then turned the corner into a dark corridor and came to a metal gate not unlike the lattice door inside the treasury vault. The Emperor pressed his hand to it and muttered a couple of words. I saw him shiver for a second, then the door swung back revealing some very steep steps leading down.

  “Is that lock a leechspell? “

  Thetys nodded. “It is more difficult to open than conventional locks and were a spy to use the incorrect I rigger-phrase, the result would be quite horrible.”