by HDA Roberts
Before I had the chance to become too concerned about the impossibly powerful stranger, Kron and Killian let out great shouts of joy and practically hurled themselves at him, dragging him into a three-way hug, slapping him on the back and laughing all the while.
"Ambrose, where the hell have you been?!" Kron barked once they’d separated, smacking the man on the arm hard enough to make him stagger, still smiling broadly.
The stranger laughed again, his voice deep and almost booming, resonant with the power that seemed to surround him like a second set of clothes.
“You won’t believe it, old friend,” he said, his accent a little strange around his consonants. “I have so much to tell you! But there’s something I must do first.”
He disentangled himself from his friends and made his way towards us in the back row. He bowed briefly to Palmyra and Hopkins before his eyes settled on me.
He offered his hand, and I took it on instinct (manners).
As soon as we made contact, he dropped to one knee.
"My Lord Shadow, how can I ever repay you?" he said.
"Huh?" was my articulate reply.
Chapter 6
"What did you do?" Palmyra hissed out the corner of her mouth.
"Nothing!" I hissed back.
Myrddin (still just assuming, though this was more or less a foregone conclusion by this point) grinned broadly. "So modest! You are the reason I could come back! You see, you killed my jailer! The one who betrayed me, and banished me from my home and my people."
"Vallan?" I asked stupidly (it wasn't like I'd killed anyone else).
"Yes," Myrddin said, darting back to his feet before bowing. "And he was the last thing keeping me away. Thank you, my Lord. If ever I can repay your kindness, you need only ask."
"Just Mathew, please," I said, feeling self conscious.
Wait, I remembered! Vallan's last name was Myrddin! (And what a thing to forget in the first place...)
"Did... did I kill your son?" I asked, suddenly mortified.
Myrddin's smile became even broader. "My father. And good riddance. You have no idea how glad I am to be rid of that Gods-forsaken creature! One thousand, four hundred and sixteen years I was kept away from the land I love, stuck with nothing but a crack in the universe to peer through. And now I'm back, thanks to you."
He shook my hand again, radiating sincerity and pure joy.
God, what a thing to have to go through; being thrown out of your reality and kept away for centuries, only able to watch the world change in ways you couldn't affect or even experience. It would be torture!
Kron cleared her throat, “In case it escaped your attention, this Ambrosias Myrddin,” she said, “whose manners were apparently left behind in his... prison?”
Myrddin nodded and threw her a rather boyish smirk, “Sorry, I’ve been watching long enough that I feel like I know all of you already. My enthusiasm got the better of me!”
Kron shook her head, but she was still smiling. She was the only person I knew who could scold you while still being happy to see you.
"What happened, Ambrose?" Kron asked, distracting Myrddin, who had turned back to me and had been staring with something that looked a lot like frank adoration (which was making me a little uncomfortable). "How did he ‘banish’ you?”
Myrddin’s face scrunched with pain. His smile vanished and his eyes dropped to the ground.
"Not here," he said, looking around himself. "Let's not ruin this lovely day with such a dark story."
He snapped his fingers and a Portal opened, revealing a colossal library. We followed him through.
I was instantly jealous. The room was a hollow cylinder, four stories tall; each wall of each level was packed, floor to ceiling, with book-filled shelves made from a nut-brown wood. Every piece of furniture and shelving I could see was covered in beautiful carving, carefully polished and maintained. The books were clearly handmade, of leather and hand-cut paper. Seeing as how the printing press hadn’t been invented when the castle had vanished, each of those books must have been copied by hand. That meant that I was standing among millions of man-hours of labour, the work of men and women now long dead. It was a humbling thought.
The bottom level was covered in a thick carpet, weaved with a thousand images of battle and armoured warriors fighting monsters. There were a dozen desks in a semi circle opposite a set of huge windows that stretched up half the height of the whole room, letting in a stream of sunlight and providing a spectacular view of the fortress and the lake to the north.
Myrddin rang a little bell and gestured us over to a set of chairs and settees around a coffee table (though what they would have called it in a country that hadn’t even heard of coffee, I don’t know).
An older man came in. He reminded me of my butler; he had that same neat, calm competence about him, even if he was dressed like a warrior monk, with a brown robe over chainmail, and an enchanted mace hanging from his belt.
"Lord?" he said.
"Tea for our guests," Myrddin replied. The man bowed and strode away.
Myrddin leant back in his seat, steepling his long fingers in front of him. "I rehearsed this conversation a thousand times in my head, in the hopes that I'd get to have it one day... and now that you're all here, I don't know how to start."
Kron and Killian smiled at their old friend.
“Take your time,” Kron said softly.
Myrddin nodded and took a breath.
"My Prison was well made, but, as I said, I managed to shove and push until I could see out just a bit. I've watched you as much as I could over the years, seen the great things you've done," he said, looking at each of us in turn. "In my darkest, loneliest hours, you gave me hope, my lords and ladies. You kept me going in the long years of my exile."
Palmyra and Hopkins looked embarrassed; they even blushed a little.
Personally, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of unexpected praise, but I wasn’t going to let my paranoia wreck this reunion for Kron and Killian. Besides, I trusted them, and their reaction said that Myrddin was good people. If he really was on the level, then this could be a very good thing; another powerful good guy around the place could make all the difference (especially if he thought he owed me a favour).
Myrddin’s monk-butler came back with the tea, and it tasted... horrible. I didn’t like tea at the best of times, but this wasn’t so much tea as brown water that tasted vaguely like mud. And not even good mud, the kind of mud that occupies the bottom three centimetres of a compost bin. I could see that Palmyra and Hopkins were struggling as much as I was with the... liquid, but we were all too polite to say anything.
“Sorry about the fare. We haven’t had the chance to shop yet, so all our ‘food’ is recycled,” Myrddin said.
Oh God, recycled from what?!
He sipped his ‘tea’ with every sign of relish before settling again.
“Let me think... the last time I spoke to you, it was... just after Ingrid’s funeral, wasn’t it?" Myrddin said.
Kron nodded, "A dark day."
Myrddin smiled sadly. "She was the last of my brother and sister Primals,” he explained to the three of us who hadn’t been there. “She died facing a Summoner up near the Wall. As with the others, her powers weren’t reborn, as they should have been. Instead, they transferred to me. My father... he and I had been butting heads for the hundred years or so before that. I think he was jealous, truth be told, and that only got worse as the Primals died, and their powers merged with my own.”
He paused, closing his eyes; his shoulders slumped as if his memories were weighing him down.
“Things between us got bad after Ingrid, devolving into constant skirmishes, my Wardens against his acolytes. He never won much... until he struck a deal with Adriata.”
Adriata? The Unseelie Queen? That sounded... off. While she was precisely the sort to engage in complicated revenge plots, especially if there was something in it for her, the idea of that woman going after someone like
Myrddin, with his power... it wasn’t quite right.
"Why?" Palmyra asked, "What was her stake?"
"She was under the impression, one provided by my father, that I deliberately stole the other Primal powers. I tried to explain, over and over, that they came to me through no fault of my own, but she wouldn't believe me."
"That bitch," Kron snarled. "If she hadn't cut herself off from us, I'd bloody kill her!"
And that was the big reason why I thought it was peculiar that Adriata had gotten involved. Any attack on Myrddin would be like poking those two bears as well, and even fourteen hundred years earlier, those would still have been the two Archons you didn't mess with.
And what was all this about stealing the other Primals' powers? As far as I knew, that was impossible (but then I had been seeing a lot of ‘impossible’ lately).
"Why would they even think that?" Hopkins asked.
Myrddin sighed, looking over at a shelf with a black box on it. He stood and picked it up, almost reverently.
“Because I had this,” he said.
The clasps were silver and shining; he clicked them open after what I felt to be an unnecessarily dramatic pause.
There was a knife inside. It was nondescript, really; it looked like any other knife made in the year 500. The blade was about eight inches long, highly polished, with a short cross-hilt, the handle wrapped in high quality wire. It reminded me of a misericorde, which wasn't in general use until about four hundred years after Myrddin’s banishment, but it had that same look, a knife made to slip between armour plates and kill a man as efficiently as possible.
That’s what it looked like, but I knew the instant I laid eyes on it that this was no ordinary blade. I could feel it, almost down to the marrow of my bones, a kind of soft resonance that filled the room like a beacon. I cast Mage Sight, and had to stop myself flinching away from it because, whatever that thing was, I didn't think it was a knife, at all.
It just chose to appear as one.
I didn’t even think it was really a solid object. As far as I could tell, it was pure energy, packed, compressed and bound down into a solid shape. Beyond that, I couldn’t really say much, it was too complex. There were traces of... something, though. Like White Magic, but more concentrated and altered in some exotic manner. I had absolutely no idea what it would do to the person it stabbed, but with that sort of energy flowing through it, almost anything was possible. White Magic was like the Black in a way, it could bend the rules of the universe.
Kron and Killian sat back in their seats, subconsciously pulling away from it. The rest of us leaned forwards.
"Is that what I think it is?" Killian asked breathlessly, his voice suddenly tense.
Myrddin nodded, "Heaven's Tear, Kane's Folly, Fate's Scissor, call it what you will. I call it the Gods' Blade."
Even Kron was looking nervous, which worried me even more. Our host closed the box and placed it on the table in front of us.
"Because I had this, they accused me of killing my brothers and sisters," he said sadly. "But it wasn't me, I swear it! I loved them all, I could never!"
His eyes were wet, and my heart went out to the poor man; he'd lost so much.
“We’d never believe that, Ambrose; you don’t need to convince us,” Kron said; Killian nodded his agreement.
"What is it?" I asked. “Aside from a knife?”
Kron swallowed loudly, “It is the one reliable method in existence to strip any creature of its powers, even a Magician. That knife is an agent of fate itself, capable of slicing through any defence, Magical or mundane. Not even Archons are safe from its bite. As far as we’re aware, it is beyond ancient, it may well have been the very first murder-weapon, wielded by Cain to slay Abel.”
She turned back to Myrddin, “No wonder they thought it was you."
Myrddin nodded.
"I can’t blame them for that, and I do believe that the knife was responsible for the transfers," he said softly. "When my Circle... died, I felt it through our bond, and the Blade... responded. I think it wanted to help me mourn, to make sure that I didn't lose all of them, so it did the only thing it could, it gave me their power. I tried to stop it, I tried to bury it. I even threw it in the lake at Avalon, but it didn't work, it always came back to me."
He pushed the box forward on the table between us.
"I should have asked this long ago, when it still might have made a difference, but I was too proud, too stubborn. It took a long time to learn my damned lesson, but I have, and now I’m asking, could one of you please take it? Perhaps your powers and resources could provide some clue as to how I might, at long last, give my powers back?"
"You want to give them back?" Killian said. "But you can do so much good!"
"They aren't mine, old friend. They belong to the next generation of Primals, good men and women who were never empowered because their abilities were stuck in my unworthy heart."
He seemed like such a good man... but he did rather have a point. Even if he’d been stuck in a side-dimension, six other high-powered Magicians could have been very useful in the last few years. Not that I was going to say that; even I can be tactful from time to time.
"Well I'm not taking it," Killian said, poking the box further away from him with his teaspoon.
"Don't look at me!" Kron added.
"Don't worry, you two. I have someone else in mind. Someone who might be uniquely qualified to help me," Myrddin said, turning his amber eyes in... you, guessed it, my direction.
"No," I said instantly. "Hell no! If Adriata went to war with you because you had it, I can't imagine the tower of crap that would drop onto my head if it became known that I was even in the same county as that thing. No, no, nope."
"You have the Grimoire, my lord," Myrddin said, poking that dreadful box in my direction. "If the information exists anywhere, it is in there."
How did he know about the Grimoire? Ah, right... damned extra-universal Peeping-Toms...
Hopkins smirked and patted my shoulder affectionately.
"Dumb Shadowborn," she said proudly.
"You say one thing, but your tone says another, it's very confusing this early in the day," I complained. Wait, what time was it again?
Myrddin picked up the box, pulled the knife out, and held it carefully by the handle while wrapping the blade part up in a thick red cloth.
"Mathew?" he said.
"Yes?" I replied suspiciously.
"Catch."
He tossed it to me underhand, and like an idiot, I caught it.
There was a flash of white light that quickly turned to a dark purple. I tried to drop the thing, but it was like my hand was locked around the handle.
"What do I do?!" I barked (alright, squealed), but nobody seemed to have the first clue.
I stood and tried shaking it away, but all that did was cause the wrapping to fly off and reveal a blade that was changing shape before my eyes. It widened and became slightly curved, ending in a wicked point; it was now also jagged along the upper edge, making it look truly vicious. The metal turned black, and the texture changed so that it was more like onyx than steel; the wire of the handle shifted under my hand, taking on the consistency of supple leather.
Nobody dared get near me while I was flailing, for obvious reasons, but it didn’t take long for the knife to stop shifting in my grip and I was finally able to drop it. It sank into the stone floor, up to the hilt, decapitating an embroidered warrior in the process of slaying a dragon.
"Sorry," I said sheepishly, gesturing at the carpet.
"Not the first time it's been abused," Myrddin replied good-naturedly.
"What did you do?" Killian said, suddenly on his feet, glaring at Myrddin, his eyes furious; the others didn’t look any happier.
"I found the blade a new owner," Myrddin replied casually. "Archons are instruments of fate as well. The blade could easily have bonded to any of you. Lord Shadow just happens to be the one with the greatest chance of helping me break its curse
."
I poked the knife with my foot, but it didn't change any further.
Hopkins gingerly picked it up... and it didn't change.
"But of course," Kron said, rubbing her eyes.
Hopkins handed it to Palmyra and, yet again, it refused to change.
"This doesn't mean anything good, does it?" I asked as she passed it to Killian with the same result.
"Ambrose?" Killian growled.
The Primal was looking distinctly shifty, the prick.
"The blade isn't entirely of our reality," Myrddin said. "If it's conformed to you, then it's anticipating your use of it. It's like a warning."
"I swear, there is just no upside to my leaving the house," I muttered.
Killian offered the knife back to me. I shook my head. He waggled the knife. I shook my head harder. Hopkins rolled her eyes, put the damned thing back in its box and stuffed it down my trousers.
"Hey!" I protested, dragging the wretched thing out before it could squash something important.
"It's your problem now," Hopkins said. "Man-up already."
"You and I both know that manning-up is not my thing! Denial, prevarication, hiding until the bad things are gone... those are my things!"
Killian sniggered. Kron groaned. Myrddin looked at us like we were insane.
"Sorry, Ambrose," Kron said. "Kids today."
I muttered mutinously, but sat back down with the others, dropping the box on the sofa next to me.
"You were saying?" Killian said, his eyes flicking to the container from time to time.
"Yes, we did get a bit sidetracked, didn't we? Where was I? Oh, yes! Between them, and their combined forces, Adriata and my father were able to drive me back behind my walls, at which point they started building my prison. It was ugly. They came at me from all sides. I barely managed to drive off one attack before another began. They slaughtered most of my Wardens while I was distracted trying to hold back their curse, and then progressed with the curse when I moved to save who was left. I threw everything I had at them, but there were too many, and they were too strong..."
