by Ian Irvine
Immersed in these worries, he did not take in the gathering storm or notice the acrid smell of ozone. He wasn’t paying attention when the chancellor signed the paper, nor when Lyf suddenly checked over his shoulder. Rix was only roused by the lightning bolt striking the top of the temple and the slowly growing shimmer that he should have recognised instantly.
He had first envisioned it months ago, with his hand on Maloch’s hilt. He had painted it on the wall of the observatory in Garramide. He had ridden all the way to the sinkhole in that lunatic attempt to recover what he had believed to be Grandys’ petrified body. So why did it take so long for him to recognise the man himself? Perhaps he did not want to believe that a petrified man could come back from the dead.
Rix had always been afraid of magery, and now the fear rose in him until it was paralysing. How could a man turned to stone come back to life? Surely the act of petrifaction would destroy every organ in his body. He was rising from his chair, trying to understand, when Grandys caught the movement.
“Who the blazes are you?”
“I’m Rixium Ricinus.”
“Ah,” said Grandys, rubbing his huge, opal-armoured nose. “You crushed the enemy at the siege of Garramide. Come, I need a bold captain.”
As if from a great distance Rix heard Glynnie cry out and he remembered, with a shiver, the night he had been studying the mural upstairs at Garramide. He had been agonising about his own leadership failures and wishing he’d had Grandys’ brilliance as a warrior and a leader. The figure on the wall had seemed to speak to him, Follow me, and at the time Rix had wanted to. But not for anything would he follow this coarse, brutal man.
“No thanks,” said Rix.
“It’s an order, not a request.”
The man’s arrogance was breathtaking and, despite Grandys’ size and presence and overwhelming power, Rix wasn’t taking it.
“Be damned!” he said recklessly. “I’m no one’s man but my own.”
Grandys swelled until his crusted skin creaked. Then his opaline eye fixed on the sheath on Rix’s hip. And the wire-handled sword.
“Maloch is mine!” he roared. “Give it to me.”
Grandys was on the other side of the great conference table but he simply barged through it, knocking everyone aside. His armoured skin shattered the timbers and sent splinters flying in all directions.
Maloch shook wildly, rising halfway out of its sheath as it had at the Abysm. Rix took a firm hold of the hilt, turned towards Grandys, then hesitated. How could he attack his own ancestor, the first of the Five Heroes and the founder of Hightspall? He put up the blade, not knowing what to do, then remembered Swelt’s dying words. Grandys was sterile. He’d had no descendants. It also meant that Rix wasn’t Herovian. It came as a profound relief. Rix whirled and attacked.
“Maloch!” said Grandys. “Obey my command! Strike him down.”
The sword twisted so violently in Rix’s hand that he could not hold it, then struck at his face. He ducked and tried to turn the blade away. It struck again, opening a long gash across his forehead.
Blood flooded into Rix’s eyes, half blinding him. The sword twisted from his hand, arched upwards and, with a roar of triumph, Grandys caught it.
An arm went around Rix’s shoulder, steadying him.
“How did he get free?” said Rix.
“Perhaps he got enough help from Maloch after all.” It was Tobry.
“But how the devil did he know to come here?”
“All Hightspall knows about the peace conference. Wipe your eyes.” Tobry pressed a rag into Rix’s hand. “Grab another sword. I’ll keep him at bay betimes.”
Rix’s head was throbbing. He cleaned the blood out of his eyes and tied the rag around his forehead, across the gash. When he could see again, Tobry was advancing on Grandys, sword in hand. Tobry was a fine swordsman, no doubt of it, but Grandys had been a master. With Maloch and its protective magery, he could kill Tobry with a single blow.
“Tobe, wait.”
Wrenching a sword out of a guard’s hand, Rix leapt after Tobry. They fought side by side for a minute or two, and even kept Grandys at bay, but he was grinning broadly. He was toying with them. He had been a great magian as well as an invincible warrior, and with Maloch in hand his magery was greatly enhanced.
With a single blow from Maloch, Grandys hacked both their blades in two. He focused on Tobry, his eyes narrowing to points as if trying to peer inside him, then his cruel mouth turned down.
“A bag of gold for anyone who cuts out the obscenity’s black livers,” he bellowed. “Take the shifter down.”
“Tobry, look out!” Tali screamed as a dozen of the chancellor’s guards, evidently mesmerised by Grandys’ reappearance, stormed towards Tobry.
“Fly, Tobe,” Rix hissed. “We’ve got to live to fight again.”
Tobry ran ten steps to the edge of the temple, dived out over the low cliff into the water, and disappeared. As he did, Rix saw Holm’s grey head appear over a rock outcrop, then duck down again. Grandys studied Rix for a moment. “I’ll deal with you in a minute.” He turned away.
Lyf was standing on his crutches, staring at his enemy. A malevolent smile crossed Grandys’ opaline face.
“You destroyed Tirnan Twil,” he said quietly. “And my Herovian heritage.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” said Lyf. “The gauntlings went renegade.”
“You created them. For my blood-price, I’ll accept your king-magery.”
Lyf laughed hollowly. “It was lost when you walled me up in the catacombs. When I died, it had nowhere to go.”
“It went somewhere,” said Grandys, “and you know where.”
Lyf paled, then extended his right hand towards Grandys, attacking with ferocious flashes of magery. To Rix, it seemed that Lyf was drawing on all the power of the pearls, attempting to overpower his enemy by sheer force. Rix held his breath. He did not want Lyf to win, yet how could Grandys be any better?
The attack failed, for the force never reached its target. Maloch’s protective magery diverted the flashes towards the rear of the temple, shattering several columns and causing the corner to collapse in a great tumble of blocks and cylinders of limestone.
Grandys folded his arms, smiling contemptuously, then leapt twenty feet across the temple and struck, wounding Lyf in the shoulder, then the chest. Lyf screamed as the accursed blade parted his flesh. Maloch struck again, shattering the little heatstone case and scattering ebony pearls across the marble flagstones. Grandys swooped on the bouncing pearls, caught two and held them up, roaring in triumph.
Lyf let out a shriek of dismay, called the other two pearls to his hand, then dropped his crutches and fled across the sky, trailing blood. His guards and generals, and the three matriarchs, stared after him, unable to comprehend how the reversal could have come about so easily. Neither could Rix. This changed everything.
The wizened, hunchbacked chancellor approached, extending his hand to Grandys. If they joined forces, could they turn the war Hightspall’s way?
“That was well done, Lord Grandys,” said the chancellor, gesturing to his own party. “If you would come this way, we have much to talk about.”
Grandys looked the chancellor up, looked him down, then spat on his black boots. “I have only one policy, and it is war. War until the enemy have been eliminated from the world.”
Turning his back on the apoplectic chancellor, Grandys checked the temple, evidently decided that all threats had been eliminated, then focused on Rix again.
“Since Maloch allowed you to use it, you must be my kinsman.” He touched Rix on the chin with the sword. “Follow me.”
This time Rix felt a compulsion to do so, but he fought it, just as he had fought the compulsion Lyf had put on him as a child, through the heatstone in Rix’s salon in Palace Ricinus.
“Nope,” he said, as insolently as he could manage.
Grandys pointed Maloch at Rix’s heart. “With the magery of this sword, I command y
ou to follow.”
The spell struck Rix like a physical blow, so hard that he almost went over backwards and his knees turned to water. It was all he could do to stay upright, and he could feel the command beating at him, undermining his free will and trying to take control of him.
Few men could have fought such a spell, but Rix had spent the second ten years of his life fighting Lyf’s compulsion, and the struggle had developed an inner strength in him, a resolution that no one not forged in such fires could have had. He drew on every ounce of that strength now, directed it against the command, and broke it.
“Ugh!” grunted Grandys, as if he had taken a painful blow to the midriff. His opaline cheeks flashed red and black. He pointed Maloch again and, groaning with the effort, repeated, “I command you to follow.”
Again Rix tried to fight the spell, but this time it was stronger. Too strong, for he had given his all the previous time and had nothing left.
“Rix?” Glynnie shouted. “He’s ensorcelled you. You’ve got to fight him.”
He wanted to, but Rix could not. It was over. He lurched across on rubbery knees and stood behind Grandys.
“I always win,” said Grandys.
He leered at Tali, who was standing on the red circle holding Rannilt’s hand and looking as dazed as everyone else. “I have great need of a woman,” said Grandys. “You will come to my bed tonight.”
Rix felt his outrage rising like a thunderhead, but he could do nothing about it. Tali wouldn’t be able to resist his magery either. No one could.
Her jaw knotted. The sinews stood out in her neck and she let out a great groan, then cried, “I will not.”
Grandys looked at her in astonishment, as though such a rejection had never happened before. “Who are you?”
“I am Pale,” she said proudly.
He frowned, and Rix gained the impression that Grandys was trying to remember where he had seen her before. Tali was trembling all over.
Then Grandys’ lip curled. “You’re an unworthy slave. The command is revoked. Follow me, Ricinus. We’re riding to war.”
He mounted the largest horse there, ordered Rix to take another, then rode away, leaving a shattered silence behind him.
As Rix followed numbly, he could see the terror in Glynnie’s eyes. It was mirrored in his own, for he was starting to realise what a brute Grandys really was. Rix kept fighting the command spell, but it did not relinquish its hold for an instant.
PART THREE
BLOOD OATH
CHAPTER 71
Rix looked sideways at the man who was now his master, and shuddered.
No one would have called Axil Grandys handsome. He was a huge, fleshy man with a red, bloated face, lips as swollen as a burst blood plum, and fists the size of grapefruits. He was boastful, swaggering, supremely confident in everything he said and did. And, Rix had read in one of the books Swelt had given him, that Grandys’ appetites were prodigious. All of them.
A mile up the road from Glimmering he dragged Rix’s horse, and Rix, sixty yards to a rock platform that looked out over the lake. To the south-west, twenty-odd miles distant, the trio of volcanoes called the Vomits fumed and flowed. South-east only a handful of miles away, a scatter of lights were all that remained of the city of Caulderon, which Lyf’s armies and his Hightspaller slaves continued to tear down.
In every other direction, there were no lights.
Grandys took Rix by the throat, heaved him off his horse and forced him to his knees on the brink of the platform. It was several hundred feet down to the water.
“Swear to me, and me alone!” bellowed Grandys, putting Maloch to Rix’s throat. “Swear or die.”
The sword was quivering, Rix’s no longer. Grandys was its master and, no matter what loyalty it had offered to Rix before, no matter what protection it had cast over him, it would quench its blood thirst on him without a second’s thought.
He was so sickened at being forced to follow this brute that part of him wanted to take Grandys’ second alternative. A part of Rix had craved death ever since the chancellor had forced him to choose between loyalty to his country and betraying his parents. Death meant an end to pain, an end to torment.
Another part longed to be relieved of the burden of responsibility he felt so unsuited to, and simply follow a great leader. Grandys’ command spell found the conflict between the two and twisted the knife. Rix, in his turn, twisted to avoid it. What if he hurled himself at Grandys and dragged him over the edge?
The fall would certainly kill Rix, but would it kill a man who had been stone and was now a stone-armoured man? Rix wasn’t sure it would.
“Swear a binding oath to serve me, unto death,” said Grandys.
Reluctantly, but under his sorcerous thrall, Rix swore.
“What do you know about Lyf’s king-magery?” said Grandys that afternoon. They were still riding north up Nusidand Peninsula, which extended into Lake Fumerous for seven miles.
“I know little about any kind of magery,” said Rix thoughtlessly, “and want to know less.”
Grandys’ backhander lifted Rix out of the saddle and the impact with the ground drove the breath out of him.
“I’ve got to have it,” said Grandys. “Tell me all you know.”
Rix spat out blood. He’d bitten his tongue. “You rotten mongrel. I’m going to kill you for that!”
“You want to,” grinned Grandys. “But you never will. I control you, body and soul. Now speak!”
“The dying king has to go through the death rituals so the king-magery can be released and pass to his successor. But no Cythian knew what had happened to Lyf, or how he died, so he couldn’t be given the rituals, and the king-magery wasn’t passed on.”
“I know all that,” snapped Grandys. “What happened to it?”
“No one knows. It left Lyf when he died —”
“That’s why we walled him up to starve to death,” Grandys grated. “To get the king-magery when death released it. We had everything ready to catch it, but it vanished. Tell me about the ebony pearls. Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know,” said Rix.
Grandys stalked away, tore up an orange flower that had been foolish enough to emerge in winter, and shredded it in his hairy, sweating fists.
“I’ve got two ebony pearls,” he said, “and Lyf has two. Plus another, weaker kind of magery, some bastard leftover from the lost king-magery, I assume. But I’ve got Maloch. We’d be evenly matched, save that he commands vast armies, and all I have is you.” He raised a fist to the sky. “But I will have my army, and his black pearls too. Then I’ll hunt down king-magery and have it all.”
“Why do you want it… Lord Grandys?” said Rix, feigning politeness. He wanted to spit in Grandys’ face.
“It’s a higher order of magery, and the key to the land. With king-magery I can create the Promised Realm we came all this way to find. But first I must have allies.”
He dug the spurs into his mount’s bloody flanks and spurred off. Rix followed, hating his master more each time Grandys opened his mouth. What did he mean by create the Promised Realm? Tobry had told Rix dark tales about Grandys’ conquest of ancient Cythe, and could not bear to think about what he intended now.
They galloped until Grandys’ horse fell dead under him. He dragged Rix off his mount, swung into the saddle and ordered him to run behind like a dog. Rix did so, for the command spell would not allow him to do otherwise, but every step of the way he imagined how good it would be to knock the brute off his horse, batter him senseless and choke him to death.
Hours later, at a town in the north, Grandys swaggered into the stables and came out leading six magnificent horses. He did not say how he had obtained them, but there was no outcry or pursuit. They mounted the strongest beasts and galloped into the mountains for hour upon hour, leading the others. Grandys had no map, nor needed one. He knew where he was going, but did not say.
On a windswept peak with a bare, flat top he slowed his h
eadlong pace and began to pick his way between grey rocks. There was little snow; it had all been scoured away by the wind.
“Ah!” he said, spurring up a gentle rise in the moonlight.
An oval chasm yawned before him, a black abyss, but Grandys kept riding full tilt towards it, spurring his horse on even though it was tossing its head, right to the brink. The horse reared up on its back legs, whinnying in terror. Grandys stood up in the saddle, waving Maloch above his head and bellowing with laughter.
The horse dropped to four legs. The wind, which was whistling across the rocks, died away. Rix looked down into the hole, which was pure black even though the rocks it passed through were grey. It was the Abysm, though not the branch of it he had been to near Garramide.
Grandys extended Maloch down into the Abysm. Yellow flickered and shimmered around the blade.
Rix swallowed. He knew what was about to come, and prayed it would fail.
“My friends,” Grandys said, speaking downwards in a penetrating voice, “two thousand years ago, as a persecuted people, we took ship from Thanneron to sail to the far side of the world in search of our Promised Realm. We won a glorious realm for others, but we did not find the special place our Immortal Text had promised us. Now our time has come. Even as I stand on the brink of this Abysm, so too we stand within an arm’s reach of the home we’ve yearned for so long.”
Was that a tear running down Grandys’ coarse, bloated cheek? Rix could not credit it.
“Come forth!” Grandys cried. Fire blasted from Maloch’s tip, down the Abysm.
In the depths, Rix saw reflections in four places. The reflections twinkled and shimmered and grew until they became four stone figures, no, four people now, slowly rising.
Four Herovians, later renamed Four Heroes.
They reached the top, suspended there by Grandys’ magery. They did not look like heroes – not as the history books, the legends and tales of Hightspall had made them out to be.
