The Path of Flames (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 1)

by Phil Tucker

  Up into the air they soared, rising with great swoops as each powerful wing beat forced the wyvern higher. Tharok pressed his cheek against the leather hide, hugged as tightly as he could so that the wyvern couldn’t reach him, its thick neck too short for complete flexibility. Up they flew, and then the wyvern banked hard to the left, falling and losing almost all of its gained height as it sought to dislodge him. He roared, felt himself begin to slip free, and clutched tighter, squeezing as hard as he could with his legs. At the last moment the wyvern righted itself, one wing’s edge catching the ground as it struggled for air once more, and up they went, rising and fighting for altitude. The fire was already falling behind them, a speck of blue light in that awful white valley, and up they went, the wyvern shrieking its fury as it fought for height.

  Tharok moved. He couldn’t allow it to keep ascending to the point where he would no longer be able to breathe, to match its great lungs. He didn’t know if it was consciously trying to knock him free by knocking him out, but he wasn’t going to give it the chance. He allowed the lance to droop through his hand until there were only a couple of feet left before the tip, and then impaled the steak onto its cruel point and pulled World Breaker free. That done, he threw the lance up a couple of times, each time latching his hand lower and lower until he held it by the hilt. Then, carefully, minding the flapping wings and the great, heavy neck, he swung the steak through the night air so that it hung before the wyvern’s great broad head.

  It immediately lunged forward to bite at the meat, jaws clacking shut but a foot from where it hung steaming in the night air. Tharok laughed and lowered the lance’s point, causing the wyvern to follow, losing altitude as it continued to burst forward, throwing itself through the air after its ever-retreating prey. Down they flew, and Tharok narrowed his eyes as he gazed past the lance’s tip at the mountains beyond. He swung the lance wide to the left, and the wyvern followed, screeching now in frustration, eager and furious, and the Five Peaks rotated about them, the stars wheeling overhead. They flew to the left and then straight, so that they were pointed at the mouth of the Dragon’s Breath, then down and out of the Valley of the Dead, out from the home of the gods, to return, sky-borne and bearing the blade and circlet of Ogri himself, down from the highest peaks to the world of the living once more.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was gone past midnight. Lady Iskra Kyferin lay awake atop her bed, her auburn hair undone and strewn across her pillow and covers. The cold night air blew in through the open window. It caused the candle she’d set on the lintel to flare, but it never went out. She lay still, listening to the sound of Otilge, her lady-in-waiting, sleeping in her cot at the foot of the bed. Listening to and feeling the texture of silence that enveloped her pushed her down, oppressed her as never before.

  There had been many nights over the course of her marriage when she’d slept alone in their great bed, lost in its ocean of covers and furs. Nights when she’d lain thinking of her husband, wandering where his campaigns had taken him, to which field or manor house. Whether he was lying alone as she did, or had sought the company of others. Enderl had often preferred to go on extended hunting trips rather than staying home, preferring to bed in an inn or local manse rather than ride all the way back to the castle. All the way back to her.

  And now she was truly alone. He wasn’t out there, larger than life, clad in mail and leather or wrapped in the arms of another woman. He was dead, stinking and merging with the soil if he’d not been buried. Most war dead weren’t; they were left out for the crows and foxes, for beaks and clever milk-white teeth. It was almost impossible to imagine her mighty husband shriveling and rotting away, his basso profundo voice stilled, the strength gone from his hands. It had been years since he’d left his mark on her flesh, but she could remember it still, how he’d grip her upper arm to shake her, how he’d send her stumbling with a push. He’d considered himself a gentleman because he never used his fist. Perhaps he had been.

  Otilge’s breath caught, went silent, and then smoothed back out into her steady, husky breathing.

  Iskra turned her head on her pillow, trying for an angle where she might catch sight of the moon. No luck. She was alone, and suddenly the world was no longer divided between her husband, wherever he might be out there, and herself holding the castle in his name; now she was surrounded by an ocean of night without end, and the castle would stand or fall by her own wit and wisdom. Her daughter and son would live or die by the agility of her mind. There were far too many pieces in motion for her to seek to understand them all, far too many unknown elements. The Agerastians. The Ascendant’s Grace and his Seven Virtues. Who knew how Aletheia would react to its terrible loss?

  There was too much she couldn’t control—so she wouldn’t try. She would take one step at a time, as her father used to say. Take a problem, break it down to the smallest pieces, each irreducible. Then take the first and solve it. Then the next. Don’t look at the whole. Focus on the space before your feet and take that step. That step taken, take the next, and if you proceed in such manner, you shall one day look up, surprised, to see that you have succeeded.

  Iskra sat up. She swung her legs over the edge of her bed and stood, her gossamer gown barely keeping the cold away. Moving silently past Otilge, she took her heavy fur cloak from where it hung on a hook and wrapped it around her shoulders, then stepped up to the window and craned down to look up and out. There it was, the moon, pockmarked and mysterious, waxing toward full, the source of mystery and magic. Iskra stared for ten heartbeats, taking her blessing, and then blew out the candle and slipped from her room.

  The fourth floor of the keep was hers and her family’s alone. Four slender towers were affixed around the keep, three containing bedrooms, the fourth their private chapel. The central room was the family solarium, where they could retreat from public view when duty allowed. Lord Kyferin had made of it a gallery of his victories, and she’d yet to take the trophies down; walls were covered with the mounted heads of beasts, including a massive mountain kragh that Enderl had slain alone. Another wall was drenched in iron and steel weaponry. The tapestries were dedicated to the hunt, so that she felt the room was a hunter’s lodge more than a family space. Tomorrow, she vowed. This all comes down tomorrow.

  She slipped out into the stairwell as quietly as a wraith and hurried past the Lord’s Hall, past the guard floor, to the kitchens and servants’ rooms. Pulling her cloak tightly about her neck, she pushed open the keep door just enough that the iron hinge wouldn’t scream, then caught it an inch from the jamb so it wouldn’t slam. Then she turned and looked up at the moon in the depths of the black night sky, so bright it drowned out the stars. The air was cold, so she didn’t linger; she hurried down the steps, her footfalls so soft and silent that the sentries atop the drum towers didn’t mark her passage. She continued through the arch and out onto the drawbridge, through the barbican, unnoticed by the men in the guard room beyond the murder holes.

  Was it this easy to traverse the castle at night? She would bring the matter to Brocuff’s attention. Two soldiers were posted at the other drawbridge, standing guard at the barbican’s entrance. She slowed in the tunnel and studied them. They were still as statues, each holding a spear. Not talking. Not leaning against the wall. Good men.

  “Soldiers,” she said, pitching her voice to carry. They both stiffened and turned, and she saw their eyes widen at the sight of her. Before they could speak, she swept out past them onto the drawbridge. “Stay at your posts.”

  The bailey was abandoned. The men and women who ran the castle were sleeping off the day’s toil in anticipation of a lifetime’s more to come. She trod down the stone ramp, then turned toward the Wolf Tower. The soft dirt of the bailey floor was frozen into iron ridges that radiated cold through her slippers. Moving quickly, she traversed the bailey to the tower door. To her left she could hear the soft whicker of a horse in the stable. The stable boys would be asleep in the loft above, buried down in the hay like
so many dormice. For a moment she envied them their lack of responsibilities and care, and then chided herself for her assumptions. What did she know of a stable boy’s woes?

  The black tower door was shut fast against the night. She considered rapping her knuckles on the planks but simply pushed it open instead. The hinges groaned in protest, but then she was through and inside. She closed the door quickly and turned blindly to the interior. It was pitch dark. No torch was burning on the ground floor, and no gaoler was sitting watch. It was a barren room, the flagstones bare. She knew through memory that a staircase wound up along the inside of the wall to the second floor, where soldiers would be asleep, and then up again to the third, where military supplies lay in wait for some future attack. One more flight of stairs would bring her to the curtain wall parapet and the sentries who paced its length.

  But her business was here in the dark depths of the Wolf Tower. She stepped forward to the center of the room where the iron grate was buried in the stone and lowered herself into a crouch to listen.

  Silence came from below.

  She knew that the prisoner was fed. Three years he’d lived in that square room below. Her Lord husband had sworn that the man would die down there, would rot away until he was forgotten, until only his bones, hair, and teeth remained to be thrown over the wall into the moat. She knew Ser Tiron was alive, or else the soldiers would have told her. But that silence… There was no sound of soft sleep. No snores, gentle or otherwise. It was an active silence, aching in its acuity. The ground floor was as dark as a tomb, but the space between the iron bars might as well have led through the Black Gate. She couldn’t make out a thing.

  “Ser Tiron?” Her voice was a breathless whisper, and she felt herself again a little girl in her father’s palace, so unimaginably far away. A young girl, scared of the dark, and for that very reason determined to face it.

  A sound came up from below. A shift on stone. She heard a croak, a rough cough, then a hoarse voice. “Iskra. What do you want?”

  She shivered. The cruel familiarity in his voice was unnerving. She should correct him, demand that he call her Lady Kyferin, but after what they had been through, to do so felt petty. She imagined Ser Tiron’s hard face looking up at her. His black beard and hair would have grown wild over the past three years, and his face would be pale, but those black eyes—she knew they would not have lost their glimmer.

  “My Lord is dead,” she whispered, not knowing why she was volunteering that information.

  “So I heard.” His voice was growing stronger, more sure, as if he were becoming familiar with it once more. “It’s rare that I hear such good news.”

  She opened her mouth to retort, then bit her lower lip. She stared down at the dark, down to where he must be looking up at her. Could he make out her outline in the gloom? His eyes must have grown terribly sharp after so many years of darkness.

  “The Black Wolves died with him—all but Ser Wyland. Kyferin Castle stands undefended.”

  He grunted. “There were some good men amongst the Wolves.” He paused. “I’m sorry to hear of their deaths. Some of them.”

  Iskra hesitated. Her need was there, but the words would not come.

  “What do you want, Iskra?” His voice was harsh, almost amused. “Why have you come down here to tell me this?”

  “I want you to serve me,” she said, “I want your oath. For you to swear on your honor to protect me and mine.”

  Ser Tiron laughed, a grinding, gravely sound. “Do you, now? So, tonight’s entertainment is to be a comedy?”

  “You will rot down there if you do not,” she hissed. “Don’t doubt it.”

  “Oh, I made my peace with my fate the night Enderl broke Sarah’s neck.” It was if he had drawn a blade. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  Iskra felt his words in her gut like a blow. “He was wrong.” Her words were but a whisper.

  “What was that?” She heard him shift again. His tone was cruel. “Did you say something?”

  “He was wrong,” she said again, louder. She sat straighter, hands in her lap, not looking down; instead, she looked blankly at one of the invisible walls. “He was wrong in what he did.”

  “Was he, now? It’s taken you three years to come to that decision? Three years to decide that he was wrong in raping my wife and killing my son?” There was a long pause. “That’s quite generous of you.”

  “You attacked him. You attacked me. You tried to kill my daughter.” Her words were steel.

  “Yes, and it’s my sincere regret that I wasn’t able to bring him the same pain he brought me. Not that I think he would have minded as much. I truly loved my Sarah. Do you think Lord Kyferin loved you?”

  Iskra began to rise. She shouldn’t have come here. What had she expected? Then she stopped, thinking of her daughter, of her son. Pride was a luxury she could no longer afford, so she sank back down. “No. He didn’t. You know that. I know that. It’s why he did what he did.”

  There was silence from below. He seemed to be considering her words. “True. That, and he was an inhuman monster. I hate him, Iskra. By the Ascendant, no man should be able to feel as much hatred as I do. You don’t know what it does to you. How it consumes you. Destroys you.” His voice had grown raw. He stopped. She listened, waiting. “Did he suffer, at the end? I’ve not heard how he died. Was it badly?”

  “Magic,” she said, voice hollow. “The Agerastians fielded Sin Casters. They destroyed the Grace’s army.”

  “Magic?” For the first time she heard surprise in Ser Tiron’s voice, and it came from closer, as if he’d stood.

  “Magic,” she said again. “The world is changing, ser knight. Faster perhaps than I can understand. My castle is undefended. Lord Kyferin is dead. Danger rides to greet me within the week. I need good men at my side. You were once one such. If there is anything left of that man I once so admired, I need him by my side. I need your oath. I won’t waste you down here any longer. Swear to me. Put the past behind, just as I am doing. Swear to me, and step back into the light.”

  Silence again. Iskra sat still, hands clutched together. She stared into the dark so fiercely she thought she might pierce it.

  “You call me a good man.”

  “I do. I understand why you did what you did.” It was hard to pry the words from her throat. That they were true made it only marginally easier. “I might have tried the same in your position.”

  “I’m not a good man, Iskra.” The voice was hard. Cruel. “What goodness I might have had in me died with Sarah. You pull me out of this hole, you’ll be bringing a beast into the world.”

  Iskra nodded mutely. Her hands were tightly locked. “You were always a man of honor. Is that gone too?”

  “My honor died when I attacked Lord Kyferin. You know that.”

  She didn’t know what to say. The silence unspooled between them. She could hear her heart beat. Her mouth was ashen. She’d admired him greatly, once. It felt like a lifetime ago. She had watched him covertly whenever he came to the castle, had secretly cheered for him in the many tournaments her husband had held. Ser Tiron had been Enderl’s most dangerous Wolf. Dark and intense, he had simmered with a violence that was barely restrained by his chivalric code. He had been everything she had once thought Enderl to be, back when she had been a naive young girl in Sige, for more than anything, he had loved his wife and son.

  And one night, Enderl had noticed her admiration.

  “You’ve known pain I can’t understand.” Her voice faltered, and she took a deep breath and tried again. “It’s your pain, and I don’t want any part in it. But you’ve also known love. You had your time with Sarah. You had light and laughter and the Ascendant knows what else, because I don’t. I’ve never had any of that. I’ve never known that kind of happiness, that love. I’ve only ever known Lord Enderl Kyferin, his ways and his habits. His… desires. The first years were the worst, but once I became pregnant I managed to keep him away. But that only drove him to other women. Does it m
ake me evil to say I was glad they suffered instead of me? Maybe. But after I bore him a daughter, he came back. He’d not grown any gentler. Eventually I was blessed with Roddick, and again he left me alone. All this time, I’ve had to live with him. Respect him. Treat him as my Lord, each and every day since I arrived at this damn castle over twenty years ago.”

  She stopped. She realized she was leaning over the grating, clutching its iron bars with both hands. She was shaking. She pulled away, took a shivering breath and closed her eyes. “We’ve both suffered because of him. But he’s dead now. He’s gone, so I’m asking you: Put your pain aside. Please. Come back. Be a knight once more.”

  Iskra felt spent. Hollow. She’d never spoken those words to anybody. Never admitted them. She’d held them pent up within her soul for almost two decades. To unburden herself like this, to confess to this dark hole, had drained her more than she could have guessed. She felt as light and frail as an autumn leaf. She lowered her head and pressed her face into her hands.

  “All right.” His voice was low and rough and ugly. “I’ll come out of this hole. I’ll fight for you. But on one condition.”