The Warlord's Domain

by Peter Morwood

  He wiped Widowmaker clean with a strip of cloth torn from the front of Tagen's tunic, which through the manner of his dying the big man had not soiled, then picked his way through the carnage as delicately as a cat in wet grass. The taiken glinted as he raised her blade in salute to Giorl and her still-nauseated husband. "If not for you," he said, and didn't trouble to say the rest. They had all seen, and all heard, and anyway words whether of thanks or of thanksgiving seemed somehow inade-quate right now. "Lady," this to Kyrin, "are you unhurt?"

  She held up a wrist nicked twice during the freeing of it and shook her head. "Nothing else. You?"

  "Not even that. You know the spellstone well enough by now." Widowmaker whispered thinly as he slid her back into her scabbard, and he glanced around the chamber looking for other things than the ragged corpses. "Where does Voord go to play, if not here?" he wondered aloud, and gazed equably at Giorl.

  She met him stare for stare, and after a few moments smiled. "If he's dead, I'm free," she said, and smiled an honest smile which looked a little clumsy through lack of use. "Look for him in the room under the gallery. There'll be no guards anywhere in this wing of the fortress, not now. Not after… whatever it was exploded in the cell. When something like that happens—and it does, now and again, thanks to the Woydach—those who want to live long clear out until they're told it's safe. Down the corridor outside, then left, left again and down. And when you cut his heart out, do it slowly, just for me."

  Aldric blinked, his own feelings about Voord seeming mere annoyance beside the coldly cherished hatred of this small woman. Again he found himself wondering what story she could tell, and again, despite the lack of compunction with which he had executed the Guardsmen—there being no better or more appropriate word for it—he didn't want to know whatever nasty truths were there. Instead he stepped back to let Giorl get past him, acknowledged Ryn's feeble smile with one equally half-hearted, and watched as they made their way to the cell's side-door, and through and out of sight.

  "Kyrin," he said as she peeled the last pieces of cut strapping from her arm and leg, "there was something said about the rest of our gear in the armory. In the corridor outside. If she's right, the place should be deserted. Help me arm."

  Tehal Kyrin, Harek's daughter of Valhol, stood up and dusted herself down, then looked at her lover and her husband-to-be. "Only," she said, "if you then help me…"

  * * * *

  Giorl had been right: the corridors and passageways of the Underfortress were deserted. Aldric and Kyrin found their gear strewn about the armory in various stages of disrepair, but it had been the kind of articles—like clothing—most easily pulled to pieces which had suffered the greatest damage. There had been little mere "investigation" could do an an moyya-tsalaer. The Alban Great Harness had evolved over centuries to withstand more than the curious pokings and proddings of Drusalan Secret Police. There were no secrets to be extracted from the gleaming black-lacquered metal, other than that a man encased in such carapace was safe from all but the most determined attack.

  Aldric felt a deal more comfortable once he was inside it; and more at ease with himself, in a far more subtle way, when his tsepan Honor-dirk was back in its proper place pushed through his weapon-belt, rather than hanging from straps as a self-preserving imitation of less worthy weapons.

  The black dirk had not been beyond arm's length since he had received it from Lord Endwar Santon more than four years ago, except for those times when it had been taken from him by force. All but one of those thieves were now dead. Santon was dead too, in the honorable act of tsepanak'ulleth before witnesses, to atone for his failure in the campaign against Kalarr cu Ruruc. He had been a grim, courteous man who had conducted his entire life as if knowing that the fixation with honor that ruled it would also govern its ending.

  Aldric had been one of the witnesses to Lord Santon's suicide, and for all his own respect for the old Honor-codes and no matter that he wore his own dirk as a mark of rank, he was secretly glad that within himself there was nothing so—fanatical was the only word for it—which would make him put his tsepan to its ultimate purpose. It had threatened often enough: to preserve his own endangered honor, to resolve the intolerable conflict facing him while on task for Rynert the King—when to obey was to be shamed and to refuse was to be dishonored—even to reprove Rynert for the stupidity of his actions. But there had always been a way out that kept the dirk's blade from his chest—provided he looked hard enough. His dark moods aside, Aldric loved life too much to regard the leaving of it with anything but reluctance.

  He was conscious of Kyrin watching him as he picked up the tsepan, and was half-inclined for the sake of her already-jangled peace of mind to slip it down inside his boot, or give it into her keeping, or do any of the number of things which would be consonant both with honor and with giving her a crumb of comfort. He shook his head, a gesture only for himself and imperceptible inside the helmet. That would have to come later, after he had dealt with Voord. And after that both sword and dirk could be retired to a handsome weapon-rack on the wall of some small house, and he and Kyrin would forget their duties owed to honor and to vengeance and to the simple requirements of keeping alive when they moved in such lethal circles as this, and they would live their lives for each other instead of for everyone else. That was a dream, indeed; but he and she both had seen so many nightmares become real that there was no reason to doubt reality might have some room left over for the small and ordinary. He hoped so, anyway; it would be a sick world otherwise.

  "Ready?"

  "Ready." Kyrin piled up her hair inside one of the Empire's own seisac helmets and settled it until it felt at least not actively uncomfortable. "If being ready is being scared sick."

  Aldric glanced at her and smiled coldly, knowing exactly how she felt. "It is," he said, and meant it.

  The room where Giorl had told them they might find Voord was itself easy to find, whether he was inside it or not, and the look of the door alone was enough to raise Aldric's armor-protected hackles. Its timbers—on the outside—were sheathed in a finger's thickness of clear ice—and there were wide white fans of frost on floor and walls around its edges. Neither of them cared to think how cold the room itself would have to be.

  Kyrin stopped in the corridor outside, well away from that sinister portal, and was reluctant to take a step closer until someone with the authority to do so told her on oath that it was safe. One look at Aldric's face was enough. He might have had the experience and the consequent authority, but he wasn't about to start telling any lies.

  He had talked a little—surprisingly little, for a man who tended to be garrulous in company he liked—about some of his previous encounters with the Old Magic and with the High. It had made uncomfortable listening, and Kyrin had been grateful not to have a part in any of the stories… until now, and the still more comfortable discovery that she was a part of this encounter with the darkness whether she liked it or not, unless she turned and walked away right now, and came to terms with staying away for always.

  She was in love and filled with joy at being so—but she was human enough, and frightened enough, to weigh what she felt for Aldric very carefully in the balance against the chance of such a death as she dared not imagine. Then she drew her Jouvaine estoc from its scabbard slung across her back and poked thoughtfully at the ice, and said. "Well, how do we get in?"

  The way that Aldric looked at her, and the crooked smile he gave to her bold words, made Kyrin wonder briefly just how much of her hurried calculation had been visible across her face. "I have a key here for all locks," he said, and leisurely unsheathed Widowmaker.

  Her blade came from the lacquered wood with a soft whispery song of steel and arched over into one of the ready positions Kyrin had seen him practice with nothing more dangerous than a length of polished oak. It was a length of polished metal now, and the lanterns in the corridor flashed back blue-white from the weapon's edges. "Isileth'kai, abath devhar ecchud," Aldric said to t
he sword, focused for the taking of a single breath and swung full force at the door.

  "Hai!"

  Widowmaker smashed into the nailed, ice-encased timbers in the downward diagonal cut called tar arm'-ach, striking thunderbolt. The door boomed its bass reply to the high vibrating shriek of the taiken's impact and then—perhaps made brittle by the intense cold—made a harsh high crack unlike the rending of wood and exploded into a shower of burned and burning splinters. The few smoking fragments which remained on the hinges swayed slowly to and fro like hanged men, and there was the scent of lightning on the icy air. Lightning… and roses.

  Voord Ebanesj stood quite still in the center of the pattern at the center of the floor, and waited. He had waited for a lifetime, if a lifetime is how long it takes to suffer more pain than a man has any need to bear. His shirt and trews were stained with foul matter which had been leaking stealthily out of him since the silver-gilt stitches of his injuries had pulled through the flesh and left each wound like a mouth—mouths that smiled with ragged open lips, and exhaled the heavy stench of gangrene.

  It had begun when he had been preaching his theories to Tagen and feeling so very pleased with his own cleverness. Why then, he didn't know; all need to know the reasons behind happenings was lost in the limitless world of pain caused by the happenings themselves. Voord had cried with the agony at last, made all the noises he had heard in the white-tiled bloody chamber, even pleaded for release to a tormentor three weeks beyond hearing him. Yakez Goadec ar Gethin had gone willingly and open-eyed into the darkness to give his sorcery such power, and there was nothing on the breathing side of the gulf of Hell that Voord knew could stop it. Except perhaps for the spellstone of Echainon, mounted in the pommel of Aldric Talvalin's hungry sword.

  The door of the chamber blew apart in a billow of smoke and sparks and slivers of charred wood went skittering across the frozen floor. The smell of burning fought with the perfume of roses and mingled briefly in an amalgam that was like the scent of funeral cremation.

  Aldric stepped across the threshold, and his sword was burning blue.

  Voord looked at him, not making any move. He had never seen the Alban in his own armor before, only that loaned to him by the Drusalan Empire, and had never realized just what an air of menace the Great Harness gave its wearer. Talvalin was just a silhouette against the doorway, blacker than the shadow that stretched out before him, but as the candles within the chamber were caught and flung back from the lacquered surfaces of helmet and plate, mail and lamellar cuirass, he glittered in the darkness as if coated in frost.

  The Alban paused just inside the room, his breath pluming grew in the cold air, and looked from side to side as if searching for something. "No guards, Woydach?" he asked. "Now that was most unwise."

  Voord looked at him, not making any move. He could hear the soft lament of the Song of Desolation, and sense the coming of Issaqua as a man might sense the sun's position through an overcast of cloud. And he could sense that Talvalin was not especially impressed; instead the armored man was reacting with what looked like familiarity to the ikon of the misty rose that hung in the air at Voord's back.

  "Oh, Voord, Voord, you'll have to do better than that" The too-controlled voice with its hateful Elthanek burr was mocking him and making light of everything he held in esteem. "I've pruned roses before, in Seghar. You might know the place…"

  Voord's mouth quirked at the inference. Sedna ar Gethin again, no matter how distant the connection. He stared balefully at Aldric. "I know it," he said, "as I know you."

  "As you know your own reflection," said Tehal Kyrin, stepping into view behind Talvalin, unharmed, armored and carrying a bared sword. "Because you and he are each other seen in a dark glass. But he had all that you lacked—and still does. That's why you hate him so, Commander Voord. Deny the truth, man."

  Voord glared hatred at her and shrugged in resignation though the movement sent agony lancing through him. "What truth?" he said. There was a buzzing in his ears as the Song of Desolation faded, becoming no more than the sound of an insatiable hunger waiting to be fed with what he had promised it. "The only truth is that which brought you two here with weapons drawn. Killing is truth. So kill me."

  It was an invitation which needed no repeating. Voord saw the black-hilted longsword shifted from a single- to a double-handed grip, and he saw, too, the expression on the Alban's face as he took three steps forward and one to the right. The pupils of his eyes were as wide and dark as those of a hunting cat, and there was no mercy in them.

  "As you wish," said Aldric. Widowmaker rose to poise behind his shoulder for an instant, and then came scything down.

  "Hai…"

  Aldric snapped one step sideways and froze in low-guard ready position for an instant, then relaxed. The form achran-kai, the inverted cross, comprised two strokes—one horizontal through the target's upper chest and the second a vertical directed at the crown of the head. He had never yet needed to complete the second cut, and he did not need it now. If the horizontal sweep connected, it was not a cut from which opponents walked away.

  Its impact had thrown Voord off his feet so that he lay on his back, arms and legs widespread. For all that he had been opened like a sack of offal there was hardly any blood on the taiken blade, as if the dead man's body had none left to spare. Only a small and stealthy puddle formed beneath the Warlord's body as it stared through sightless eyes toward the ceiling.

  And then Voord's corpse reared from the bloodied floor and screamed a dreadful blubbering scream that came less from its mouth than through the huge straight slit across its chest. Issaqua the Bale Flower expanded with that awful undying shriek as a man's chest might expand upon inhaling some sweet scent, and as its own reeling perfume flooded the icy air the demon rose swelled out to the monstrous proportions Aldric had seen before in Seghar.

  Almost as if it's feeding on his pain … The Alban stared grimly from devourer to devoured, then shook his head and spat sourness from his mouth. No, not almost Of course it is . . .

  He staggered as the marble pavement underfoot rose and fell in a motion like that of a massive wave, flexing the inlaid tiling under it shattered. Part of the chamber's outer wall cracked across and across, then fell down with a slithering crash so that snow came swirling in. Two great chunks of stone tumbled in as well, looking like gross snowflakes until their impact against the armor guarding Aldric's legs—for no snowflakes could crush proof metal quite like that. He barely noticed, for the perfume of the rose grew more and more intense until their senses swam with it as though with ymeth dreamsmoke…

  Voord continued to scream. Aldric looked once, then winced and turned away. And still the screaming went on, and on, and on…

  "He's dead!" Kyrin's voice came hard to his ears, fighting through a sound like a million buzzing flies. "He's dead! You killed him—so why won't he die… ?" She was near to screaming-point herself. "Aldric! Leave him. Take me away from here!" She tugged at the icy metal that sheathed his arm, trying to drag him toward the door. Great white flakes of snow slapped against her face, and Voord's howling hammered at her sanity. "Finish it! For sweet mercy's sake, kill him and get us out of this place!"

  Aldric remained where he was, staring at Issaqua, the scent of roses in his nostrils and the sounds of dying in his ears. "Kill him?" he said, the words more read from his lips than heard. "How? With what? Widowmaker can't. Not then, not now. He's a toy now, for that thing to play with. It needs to have a death…"

  Kyrin saw the pallor in his face within the shadows of the helmet, saw the anger and the revulsion and the shame, and suddenly she was afraid—afraid for herself, but most of all afraid for him. "Use the sword again, and this time use the spellstone too," she said quickly and too loudly. "Do it now."

  "No." Aldric swung Widowmaker up from where her point was braced against the snowy floor, and stared somberly at the weapon's long blade. "Not that way, and most especially not with this." The gray menace hung about the taiken stil
l, flowing like a chill air from her bitter edges, a need for slaying that was at once terrible and yet no more than a sense of purpose and an awareness of function.

  "Enough killing for you," he told the sword gently, regretfully. He went down on one knee and braced Widowmaker flat across the other, closing his left hand on her naked blade span down from the point. The edges bit at once so that his own blood, steaming slightly in the winter air, mingled with Voord's on the shining steel… as if they were becoming brothers rather than merely reflections of each other.

  As he leaned into the work and the blade arched back on itself, whatever else he might have said was changed to a quick, shallow gasping. Widowmaker twisted in his grasp like something living, something trying to break out of a strangling grip. Like something trying to stay alive… Aldric's face went white as bone, and sweat dripped from it almost as swiftly as blood ran from the sword.

  Then Isileth, called Widowmaker, snapped in two, Aldric tried to release the broken shard of blade locked in his fingers, biting back an anguished whimper as sinew and tendon refused to obey him anymore. The palm of his left hand had sheared clean away, and all that remained of his Honor-scars spattered blood across the broken milk-white marble of the floor. While the remnant of the hand…

  Had become a twisted claw like Voord's.

  The piece of sword-blade came free at last and fell with a harsh belling to the ground near his feet. It was a clumsy, messy, painful business trying to open laced lamellar armor with one hand, but he managed at last.

  Voord's screams were growing ragged now, but there was still no sign of an end to his long dying, if while Issaqua remained there would ever be an end to it Worst of all, he was denied even the refuge of insanity, for there was still intelligence in his bulging, bloodshot eyes when Aldric steeled himself to look that way.