Michael A. Stackpole

by A Hero Born

  Roarke hesitated, then stood. He picked up the Fistfire Sceptre and mounted the steps to the exit tunnel. I watched him stop and talk to the others, then they joined him and left me alone in the hall of the dead.

  I walked over and picked up the vindictxvara Kothvir had so lovingly crafted to destroy me. I wiped it clean on his fur, then slid it through the loincloth’s belt. Carrying the staff in my left hand, I stepped past Kothvir’s body and knelt on one knee beside Cruach.

  The hound looked at me, and 1 bit my lower lip to keep it from trembling. I reached out and scratched him behind his left ear. “There’s never been as good a companion to a Chaos Rider as you have been, Cruach. The Bharasfiadi will have nightmares about you. Thank you for waiting for me.”

  He twisted his head around and licked at my hand. His tongue felt as soft as silk, but even that simple motion drained him of strength. His head sank back down, and he looked at me as if to ask forgiveness for his failing.

  “You’ve not failed, Cruach.” 1 stood and grasped the Staff in both hands. “You and 1, we’ve just started. The Bharashadi will have nightmares about the both of us, nightmares to torment them for eternity. Anything that wants to get out of here will have to go past us. And between us, my friend, nothing gets past.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the seductive caresses of whatever Emeterio had placed in his staff for intelligence. As it had done before, it offered me incredible power. It would do for me whatever I wanted. It existed to serve, and it acknowledged me as its master. I have done what was necessary to oppose the Sceptre. What will you have me do for you, Master?

  I brought the staff parallel to my waist and wrapped my right hand around the shaft. I willed the staff to show me a complete map of the Necroleum. It complied instantaneously, and I saw level upon level of caverns just like this one burrowed into the mountain. Each chamber had multiple links to others of them, making the mountain a virtual hive of Bharashadi dead. Our estimates of a hundred thousand dead Bharashadi waiting to be resurrected were as optimistic as they were wrong.

  “It’s grand guardian duty we will be doing, Cruach.” 1 thought of Evadne, my mother, not grandmother, and how I would break my promise to her concerning my return. Likewise the promises both Cardew and Lachlan had made to Marija. “Forgive me.”

  I thrust the Staff of Emeterio over my head and tightened my grip upon it. I let anger seize me. I let my fury with the Bfiarasfiadi and the grief over the deaths of so many pump through my body. I gathered every curse and indignity and mortification 1 had known in two lifetimes and used their venom to ignite a fire in my belly.

  Fueling the staff with raw emotion, and wielding it with the careless abandon of someone unschooled in the ways of magick, I forced it to project all of its might outward. My flesh tingled as red and blue energies fused together into a roiling purple ball of fire. It expanded in stages, swallowing up the Bfiarasfiadi bodies and using the energy in them to grow further.

  In a handful of heartbeats it filled the whole of the cavern. I felt resistance, as if the magick could go no farther, but the very idea of failure infuriated me even more. This will be done! I ground my teeth and pushed.

  By the strength of my rage and the force of my will, I sought to bring down the mountain above the Necroleum. The earth resisted, but I remained steadfast. My arms quivered, but I held them aloft nonetheless. I will not be defeated.

  I heard it first, then opened my eyes. Looking up, up through the purple fire, I actually saw daylight through the cracks above me.

  “I have won!”

  The cracks widened and rocks fell as the magick finished its task, then the dying mountain crushed me.

  30

  this is death?

  The question occurred to me because the experience was not at ail what 1 had expected. Yes, given the way I died I expected lots of pain, but it was the wrong type of pain. A mountain dropping down to crush you should have a heavy, suffocating sensation to it. Instead I felt as if the energy net Vrasha had created had returned. Made of razor-sharp blades, it sliced me into a thousand thousand little bits.

  I decided that having that much pain linger forever also made a weird sort of sense, so I prepared myself for eternal torment. Inexplicably, my discomfort faded except for the pain in my shoulders and the stitch in my side. I felt as if I were floating, but my hands ached from holding so hard on to the Staff of Emeterio. That puzzled me, and I wished I could have seen my hands, but the darkness let me see nothing.

  Then I felt hot breath on the back of my neck and I

  4 I 3

  opened my eyes. I found myself dangling by my hands from the Staff of Emeterio. Bracketing my hands 1 saw other, far larger and decidedly stranger hands. I released, hit the ground, and rolled away forward. Regaining my feet, I turned and faced Fialchar.

  The sorcerer’s black eyepits absorbed my stare. “I gave you permission to borrow my staff, not bury it.”

  “So you did.” 1 glanced over at the huge crystal ball floating in the center of the room. In it I saw a cloud of dust settling in the region of the Necroleum. Black specks—vultures—circled and slowly descended to snap up any carrion exposed by the collapse. “You did let me borrow it, but in that you broke the agreement you and i made over twenty years ago.”

  Fialchar’s quicksilver lips flowed back between his teeth. “That agreement was between your father and me.”

  “Please, do not mistake my earlier confusion for stupidity. You know I am Cardew. You caused me to age backward by transporting me to a place in Chaos where time runs in reverse. You probably planned to take me and raise me in your image. You would have used me against the ‘Empire, which would have been the ultimate victory in your eyes. Jhesti thwarted your plan when he rescued Roarke and me.”

  I smiled casually. “The memories return slowly, but I recall the deal we had struck. You and 1 would play a game of chess—one move a month—and the winner would be able to ask any one thing from the other. The loser would have to comply. You told me early on you would ask for my son, Geoff. I never told you what I would demand, and your curiosity kept you at the game until 1 had you one move from checkmate. At that time you refused to allow me back into your lair because you knew my next move would win the game.

  “This I did not mind at all, for that meant you left me and my people alone as we fought Kothvir and his Bharashadi.”

  “Far be it from me to interfere with a man performing an act of sanitation.” Fialchar’s eyes began to smoulder. “Your demand for the Staff of Emeterio could hardly have been covered in the agreement we reached concerning the game, i recovered it well after the game had been finished.”

  “No, Fialchar, the game was finished two days ago when I made the last move. The Staff of Emeterio could be mine if I demanded it. Your kind offer of letting me borrow it circumvented my demand, and reveals to me how much it means to you.” i walked over to the gold ring surrounding the crystal ball and touched the globe with my right hand. The scene shifted slightly and showed me my compatriots safely up the canyon with a blue wall conjured by Roarke and Taci shielding them from the cavern debris. “1 won the game, and I mean to have my prize.”

  Fialchar casually swung the staff in my direction. “And if 1 use this prize to destroy you?”

  “You won’t.”

  “And how can you be certain of that?”

  “As I said, the memories return slowly. You could have killed me after I had destroyed Kothvir, but you did not. You took me away from him to frustrate his desire to end my life. You did that because you decided he was unworthy of being my slayer.”

  Little tongues of flame singed his eyebrows. “You flatter yourself.”

  “Do I? You could not then and cannot now abide the idea that I beat you in a game of chess. I even started with the Imperial side, which conceded to you the first move. You took me back to infancy to remake me so the person who beat you would never have existed. But I do exist, and I beat you.”

  As I spoke i r
ealized that I had, in fact, been remade in my own image. The Emperor’s conspiracy to have me grow up again in the same environment that had nurtured me originally succeeded on a basic level. It pushed me in the directions I had gone before, and quite well could have accomplished their goal except for one thing.

  They trusted Audin too much.

  He believed in his heart that he had failed both Driscoll and me. He had agreed I would come to the capital with the same rank badges I had held when I first traveled there decades before, yet he could not allow me to travel from him carrying the same seeds of destruction. While I only tested out as an Apprentice, I had the skills of a Sworder. Likewise my ability at chess far exceeded what an unranked person should have known.

  Evadne had seen it when I arrived more slender than before. She knew Audin had violated the agreement, had strayed from the plan, but she said nothing. 1 think she. too, hoped I would overcome that which had doomed me before. She played her part, but also let me play the part that my reeducation had written for me.

  I slowly began to smile as I realized how true had been the words I spoke to Kothvir after he struck me with the vindictxvara. Because of my grandfather, because Kit was not Driscoll, because of a hundred thousand other factors, I might have been Cardew in body, but I was not Cardew in spirit. The vindictxvara had been forged to capture Cardew’s essence and destroy it, but the blade could not find it in me. Cardew had been supplanted by Lachlan.

  I opened my hands and turned to face the sorcerer. “I offer you a choice. You may, if you choose, surrender the Staff of Emeterio to me. Or, you may heal my companion Tyrchon of the wound he received from a vindictxvara and grant my company and me safe passage to the Empire.”

  Fialchar let the staff hang in the air. “You ask of me two things whereas our bargain only allowed you one. Your safe passage with the Fistfire Sceptre or the well-being of Tyrchon, not both.”

  “Safe passage or the staff, your choice.” I folded my arms across my chest. “I’ll offer you something else for Tyrchon.”

  “You have nothing I want.”

  I smiled. “You’d deny yourself another chance to play me?”

  The Staff of Emeterio dropped a half inch as Fialchar’s concentration wavered. “Are the stakes the same as before?”

  1 narrowed my eyes. “Geoff is far too old to suit your plans.”

  “This I know, but I also know you will have another son.” The staff floated to Fialchar’s necrotic hand. “Is Lachlan now as brave as Cardew was then?”

  “Braver. If I lose, you can take me back to the place where I became younger, and you will have me as your toy.”

  “Satisfactory. Your friend will be healed, but whether or not he or your other companions make it back to the womb will be entirely up to them.”

  “Companions?” Images of Xoayya and Nagrendra flashed through my mind. “Who else?”

  “You have many companions who have been left behind in Chaos over the last forty years. I could not name them all, primarily because they are of no interest to me.” Fialchar’s face, alt silver and ivory, approached a benign expression. “If you win our little game, what will you ask of me?”

  1/ you won’t answer my question, why would I answer yours?

  “And destroy the suspense? No, you wouldn’t like that. I will think of something as we go along.” I smiled at him and bowed. “Good day, Lord Fialchar. i shall convey to the Emperor how helpful you were in this affair.”

  I backed out of his sanctum, and he filled the doorway to watch me go. “So cocky, little mortal. You leave because I choose to let you leave. Hereafter you will be nothing more than a fly caught in my web.”

  I nodded solemnly. “I hope the webmaster remembers that sometimes the buzzing in his web is that of a spiderhawk wasp. If he doesn’t, he could be in for a nasty surprise, and you don’t strike me as the type to like surprises.”

  The Emerald Horse, still as stubborn, prideful, and arrogant as ever, came when I whistled and carried me away from Castel Payne. I told him to find Roarke and the others, and he did so with a minimum of difficulty. We sailed over them, then slowly spiraled down toward the red earth as they came around a bend in the trail.

  “Hail and well met, my friends.”

  Roarke, in the lead on his flying disc, laughed aloud and waved the others forward with a flourish of the Fistfire Sceptre. “You see, 1 told you he wasn’t dead.”

  The smiles and laughs from my companions made me feel very good. Kit, on his devil-ram, rode forward. He looked a bit worse for his experience, with a cut on his forehead, but he seemed healthy nonetheless.

  “I was glad to see, Kit, that Vrasha’s magick did not kill you.”

  “Eirene and I would have died, but our mounts are well suited to dealing with broken terrain and leaping clear of landslides.” Kit swallowed hard. “Roarke told us some very strange things. Are you my uncle or my cousin?”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “By blood and kin reckoning I am your uncle, but in truth I am Lachlan. I am really no more Cardew than an actor playing him in a theatre might be. While I remember many things that he did, I am not he.” I gave him a brave smile. “If you wish, though, I will tell you as much as I can remember about your father.”

  Kit took my forearm and grasped it firmly, “i would like that, Locke, very much.”

  We broke our grip and Kit rode on past. Eirene followed him closely, and they rode two abreast where the trail allowed. Behind them came Bishop Osane, Donla, and finally Taci. The entire road company looked weary, but victorious smiles lit every face.

  Roarke drifted over to me. “So, Lord Disaster has his staff back again?”

  “And we have free passage to Wallfar.”

  Eirene looked back. “We will have to detour to get Tyrchon.”

  1 shook my head. “Lord Fialchar and I made an accommodation concerning him. It means Tyrchon will again be alone in Chaos, but that is a state he seems uniquely able to handle.”

  Roarke frowned. “What did Fialchar demand of you for that concession?”

  “Nothing I hadn’t granted him before.” I shrugged. “The trade seems fair. We have the Fistfire Sceptre and the Bharashadi threat is diminished if not destroyed.”

  The magicker nodded. “We definitely seem to have won the better of the deal.”

  “Even with Hansen, Xoayya, Nagrendra, and Aleix dead?”

  “And Cruach.”

  1 nodded as the lump in my throat choked off words. And Cruach.

  Roarke forced a brave smile onto his face. “I think so, Locke. This mission was a gamble, but we accepted it. Some of us left our money on the dice table, and the rest of us walk away winners.”

  I kicked the Emerald Horse gently in the ribs and started him after the others. “A gamble it was, and against tough odds, too. I never thought we would survive, much less succeed. Did you?”

  Roarke gave me a sly grin. “Survive, certainly. Succeed, I never had any doubt.”

  “What?” I narrowed my eyes and watched him closely. “We had the Bharashadi after us. We had to get Lord Disaster’s most powerful tool away from him. We had to locate the place most sacred to the Bharashadi and destroy it while they were raising an undead army of millions? And you had no doubt about the outcome?”

  “Of course not, Locke.” He laughed lightly and brandished the sceptre triumphantly. “Things like that happen in Chaos.”

  I returned to my grandmother’s home in midafternoon and told James I would be leaving the next morning for Chaos. Since the night of the ball he had been anticipating this notification, but I think he had expected more time when I told him. He immediately headed off to take care of errands, telling me, “Master Lachlan, do not fear. It may have been years since I prepared your father for an expedition, but I remember what must be done quite well.”

  Earlier in the week I had drawn what supplies I thought I would need from the Imperial Armory. For me that came down to a suit of strip-scale armor, greaves, bracers, gloves, helmet
, and face mask. I knew my

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