Stolen Crown

by Dennis L McKiernan

“But I like my life here, tending pigs, herding cattle, fishing, hunting, running through the woods, training with the Dylvana, living a good life.”

  “It is your duty to be King,” snapped Gretta. “Let’s have no more of—”

  “Gretta,” said Conal. “This is all new to the boy. Give him time to come to terms with the facts.”

  A silence fell upon them all, but then Reyer said, “This is why we are schooled in courtly manners.”

  “I’m not going to have to call you ‘my lord,’ am I?” asked Alric, grinning.

  Reyer smiled back at his blood-sworn brother, and then drew out a long “May-be.” Then they both laughed.

  But Conal looked sternly at Alric and said, “Lad, you will call him ‘my lord’ when the time comes, as shall we all.”

  “Aye, Da,” replied Alric, chastened.

  “But not in private,” said Reyer. “None here shall call me that in private. It would just make me feel the goose.”

  Gretta beamed proudly at Reyer and Alric and said, “But in public you shall call each other ‘my lord.’”

  “I am a pig farmer and not a lord,” said Alric.

  “You are Harlingar,” snapped Gretta. “Your father—” Of a sudden her voice chopped to silence, and she said no more.

  Both Alric and Reyer glanced from Gretta to Conal and back, but neither adult gave further word to Gretta’s outburst.

  Finally, Alric shrugged and looked at Conal and said, “Do I call him Rígán or Reyer?”

  “Rígán,” said Conal. He swung his gaze to Reyer. “We will not use your real name until the right time. Instead, you’ll be Rígán till then. It might keep you safer.”

  Driu added, “And we will not bow nor otherwise recognize you as High King until that time.”

  Reyer reluctantly nodded, and then asked, “When will be the right time?”

  “A few years from now,” said Driu.

  “When you take command of the Northern Alliance,” said Conal.

  Again Reyer looked at the ring and then up at Alric. “I am to lead the army in a march upon Caer Pendwyr.” His words were a statement—not a question.

  “That’s why we are practicing at arms and learning strategy and tactics,” said Alric, looking at Conal.

  “Training in warfare,” said Conal, nodding in agreement. “Preparing for the day.”

  Tears welled in Gretta’s eyes and spilled down her face.

  Alric then turned to Reyer and said, “Vanadurin have ever ridden to the High King’s aid, and I will be no different.”

  “Then we ride together,” said Reyer, and in that moment both he and Alric seemed well beyond their years.

  Gretta looked from one child to the other and then back again, and she burst into sobs and rushed from the room.

  Conal watched her go, pain in his gaze.

  Reyer started to rise, but Driu laid a hand on his arm; her gesture kept both lads in place. “She has known this for nine years, Rígán, Alric. Nevertheless, it still comes as a blow. No mother likes to see her children stand in harm’s way, yet you have little choice but to do so.”

  • • •

  “I THOUGHT I WAS GOING to be sick,” said Alric, as he and Rígán, under the shade of the oaks, shoved upon the fat sow, trying to get her off her side and to her feet and to move her back to the gap in the fence and toward the sty.

  Straining, Rígán grunted, “Up, Molly, up.”

  They both paused, and Rígán said, “Sick?”

  “When I feathered that—that tinkerman,” said Alric. In spite of the adulation he had received from their would-be rescuers and Tessa and later from the farmhands, it was the first Alric had said about the killing.

  “Well, I’m glad you did so, else we’d both be throat cut.”

  “The thing is, Rígán, I almost shot that girl, too.”

  “Caleen,” said Rígán.

  “Uh-huh, Caleen.”

  “Good thing you didn’t,” said Rígán, grinning, “else she wouldn’t have been breathlessly hanging on to everything you said after.”

  “Pfaugh!” snorted Alric. “It was you she looked at all googly-eyed.”

  “Girls,” said Rígán.

  “Girls,” agreed Alric.

  Rígán looked about and stepped away, to return moments later with a finger-thick stick. He showed the stick to the sow, and she eyed the lad with suspicion. “Up, Molly, up, or else.” Replete with acorns, she grunted but otherwise did not move, though she did keep an eye on the stick. “All right,” said Rígán, and with a Whap! he struck a sharp blow to her rear. Squealing, Molly bolted to her feet and took off running the wrong way.

  After a long chase, they finally got Molly headed the right way. And as they followed the sow through the broken fence and toward the sty, Alric said, “She is pretty, you know.”

  “Molly?” asked Rígán.

  “No—no, you dolt, Caleen.”

  “Oh. Right. And yes: she is pretty.”

  They walked on a bit farther, and finally Alric said, “Girls.”

  “Girls,” agreed Rígán.

  And they continued on in silence, each one’s thoughts his own.

  21

  Assassins

  Some twenty-four hundred miles across the indigo waters of the deep blue Avagon Sea nearly due south from Caer Pendwyr lies the city of Sabra. It is a principal port city, but it also rests on the edge of the great desert known as the Mighty Karoo. If one journeys from Sabra and bears south-southwest across the hot shifting sands and salt-encrusted wadis, then some sixteen hundred miles as a crow flies a traveler would fetch up against the walls of the Red City of Nizari. But if one were to make this trek from Caer Pendwyr to Sabra to the Red City, the actual journey across both the ocean and the desert would be much longer than that which any bird might fly, for ships must tack in the shifting winds to fare the ocean waves, and camels must stride from various water holes to verdant oases to deep-sunk wells to survive the crossing of the ever-changing dunes to reach that distant goal.

  Nizari itself lies at the foot of a rust-red mountain, the bastion guarding the mouth of a pass running through the range to the west. And that is why the Sultans of Hyree claim the city, for it sits across the principal trade route through the Talâk Mountains—the corridor providing passage between the harsh Karoo and the green realm of Hyree—and caravans and other travelers pay a toll to greatly shorten their journeys this way. These tolls are one of the measures the city uses to maintain its coffers, yet it is not the principal means.

  The city consists of crimson buildings clutched against dark, ruddy mountains, and a high red wall encircles the town entire.

  Individual structures are made of bloodred rock carved from the range behind, and for the most part are flat-roofed buildings, though here and there pitched-roof edifices stand. Jutting up among the constructions are scattered high, slender minarets or soaring obelisks. Here and there long stairways rise up and tilt down and the streets fare past merchants’ shops and through bazaars and across alleys reeking of garbage and sewage, over open squares, past community wells, among dwellings rising high to either side. And everywhere there is noise—shrieking children at play; haggling storekeepers and customers arguing; strident mothers shouting for sons and daughters; drovers cursing pack camels, the beasts hronking in return; merchants hawking their wares—the city awash in a hubbub.

  The arrangement of the whole seems to follow no regular pattern, for the city streets twist and jink throughout, the red brick roads slanting this way and that, lanes and alleyways shooting off at odd angles, jerking ’round sharp corners to disappear beyond seeing, the entirety a maze, like runs in a rat’s warren. And this jinking and twisting tortuous tangle reflects the immoral fiber of the city.

  Dominating all is an adjoining citadel, its scarlet dome rounded and coming to a tall spire,
the whole of it onion-shaped . . . or perhaps shaped like the abdomen of a dreadfully poisonous malevolent red spider. The dome is set in the center of a massive rectangular building, which itself sits in a wide courtyard. It is from here the heart of evil beats. The fortress is walled about with looming battlements—twice as high as those surrounding the town as a whole—and one of the high ramparts of the fortress abuts against and towers above the southwest wall of the city.

  And just outside the citadel bulwark lies the Ahmar Madrasi—the “Red School.” It is in that place where the students are trained in the arts of assassins—stealth, poisons, silent kills, and the like. These courses are deadly, and those who survive to graduate are called Sukut Khayâlîn—Silent Shadows. Only the Kinzuru-na Gakko—the “Forbidden School”—of Ryodo produces assassins equal to or perhaps even better than those of Nizari. Even so, the principal industry of the Red City is the training of these Khayâlîn, and the hiring of them to those in need . . . that and the selling of toxins and venoms, common and exotic alike. Whether hired or bought, assassination is a means by which jealous lovers and heartless others remove a rival or someone thwarting their desires, and it is especially used as a recurrent tool of callous and wicked statecraft, be it against the many or the few or, more likely, against but one.

  From the seventh through the eleventh year of the Usurper’s reign, Arkov sent individual Garian killers disguised as workaday tradesfolk to the island of Kell, seeking to end the life of a single boy. . . .

  . . . For Arkov was threatened by the very existence of the child . . .

  • • •

  WRINGING HIS HANDS, Baloff stood before his master. “How many must we kill to slay just one?”

  “As many as it takes,” snarled Arkov.

  “But, my King, our agents have butchered lad after lad without success. None have borne the mark of the griffin. And now all the Kellian ports are forbidding entry to tinkers and shoemakers and other traveling trades. And all wayfarers are looked upon with suspicion, even though many are well known by those of the isle.”

  “Idiot! You think I don’t know that?”

  Baloff took a step back, for when his master was in such a mood . . .

  Arkov ground his teeth and shouted, his voice echoing off the walls of the throne chamber: “Is there no one in my entire kingdom who isn’t a ham-fisted fool?”

  “It seems there are none in Garia,” said Baloff, and then blanched when he realized he had said it aloud.

  Arkov gripped the arms of the throne so tightly his knuckles turned white. But of a sudden he slapped his hands down on the armrests and burst out laughing.

  Baloff loosed his pent breath and smiled in return.

  “I am beginning to think you are right, Baloff, just as said my agent in Sj-Sjo—”

  “Sjøen?” supplied Baloff.

  “Yes. Sjøen.”

  Looking inward, Arkov shook his head and growled, “Incompetent fools.”

  Baloff nodded and said, “They’ve left a trail of corpses across the scapes of Kell, a number of the boys not even the right age. Some of our agents have been caught by mobs and beaten to death or hacked to pieces. Gutted, quartered, hanged, burned.”

  “Serves them right, the bunglers.”

  “Sire, they have pointed the finger at you.”

  “Baloff, we will continue to claim my innocence, and say I am an easy target.”

  “Still, my King, we need to succeed. The child will be fifteen within a year or two, and he will then be announced, even crowned by the Northern Alliance.”

  “You assume there is such a child,” said Arkov.

  “So said Mosaam bin Abu’s unnamed Seer,” replied Baloff.

  “Actually it was only Abu’s word we took for truth,” retorted Arkov. “For all we know, that ebon bastard lied about the Mage.”

  Baloff remained silent, not wishing to gainsay his King.

  But then Arkov sighed again and said, “Still, in our most recent message, our agent in Sj-Sjøen says that two boys are being trained in courtly manners.”

  “Aye, my King. And they are being taught by a lady who has spoken of Caer Pendwyr. And she did come to Sjøen with two babes—two toddlers—which would make them of the right age.”

  Arkov nodded and said, “Send for Abu.”

  “My lord?”

  “Are you deaf? I said send for that dark snake Abu.”

  Baloff frowned in puzzlement, and Arkov said, “I intend to have him hire assassins from the Red City. Surely they will succeed where others have failed.”

  Baloff groaned, for they were being drawn further and further into the debt—or perhaps the clutches—of the men of the South.

  • • •

  THAT EVENING, in this, the tenth year of the Usurper’s reign, two dusky birds took to the air from the Chabbain embassy: one—a Grimwall Corvus—winged north toward a hidden tower, its message triumphant; the other—a black gull—winged south-southeast across the sea, its message a command.

  It took a sevenday for the Grimwall Corvus to deliver its coded slip to the dark tower, but the Black Gull was on the wing for nigh a fortnight altogether. When it finally came to rest in the port of Sabra, an agent there read the message and then transferred it to another bird—a desert kite—and that carrier headed south-southwestward to land at the scarlet, onion-domed fortress a tenday after.

  • • •

  YET FOLLOWING THE ORDERS in the message capsule, it was a full two years ere, from the port city of Khalísh in Hyree, three lateen-sailed ships, their canvases crimson, set out in darkness along the southern arm of the Straits of Kistan, heading northwesterly. The passengers were highly trained . . . eradicators. Their destination: a modest seaside village on the Island of Kell.

  22

  Arms

  Cleaving, Slashing, Bashing, Piercing, Burning: These Are the Things That Mithgarian Weapons Do. From Axes to Swords to Maces and Morning Stars and Flails, to Poniards and Arrows and Quarrels and Long-Knives, to Fireballs and Stones and Other Such Missiles Hurled from Trebuchets and Catapults and Ballistas.

  Yet these are not the only ways of death in war and battle, for there is also strangulation by garrotes and nooses and choke holds and even bare hands; and there are poisons and venoms and other such toxins smeared on blades and points and even vile potions slipped into food and drink; devastating plagues and other diseases are sometimes used against a foe by sending the ill and infected into the enemy ranks.

  One can also drown an enemy by breaking dams or rerouting streams to send wild and rushing waters raging over the foe. Likewise, landslides and rockfalls and loosed log piles and burning brushes and other such can thunder down on the adversary, and even wild or tamed herds are stampeded to trample the enemy underfoot, as do well-trained warhorses.

  These and other things are merely the earthly means of inflicting fatality upon enemies, for in Mithgar there are also death-dealing castings and spells, should one be a Mage.

  Yet for the most part, great wars and large battles come down to arrow flights and missile castings and the combat of one on one, with foe facing foe and eye looking into eye, whether it be ahorse or afoot, where lances and spears and swords and maces and morning stars and axes pierce and slice and hack and slash and crush, and blood spurts and flies wide and bones break and brain matter splatters and intestines spill and lopped limbs flop and severed heads tumble aimlessly o’er the rough ground.

  And all of it with men and horses screaming midst the clang and clangor of steel on steel and shrieks of fear and shouts of battle and cries of shock and pain and calls for aid and the unheard sighs and whimpers of the dying.

  At times the outcome is decided by sheer numbers, though often it is simply the overmatching skills of one side that defeats the other, and still at other times it is the strategy and tactics that determine the winners and losers, w
hether it be by flanking move or ambush or feint or coming upon the foe unawares.

  Strategy, tactics, weaponry, and skills: these are the tools of war. . . .

  . . . And in a forest clearing nigh the edge of a farm upon the island of Kell, two lads, of ages nearing fourteen, were given new metal swords. . . .

  • • •

  RÍGÁN THUMBED THE EDGE. “I say, Armsmaster, this isn’t even sharp—just like the one I gave up.”

  “Mine’s dull, too,” complained Alric, gazing at his sword and then Rígán’s. “These are no better than the wooden training swords we used as children. In fact, those might have been even sharper than these.”

  Halon smiled and said, “I wouldst not have ye lop off a hand or e’en a finger of the other, and that goes for me as well. And think on this, too: whether clad in leather, chain, scale, or plate, oft the foe dies of battering, whether or no the weapon striking is sharp-edged or dull.”

  “Huh?” said Alric.

  “The armor,” said Rígán. “If the sword doesn’t cut through the armor, then the blade is no better than hitting the enemy with a warbar.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Alric, grinning at Rígán, then turning to look at the Dylvana armsmaster for confirmation.

  Seeming to be no more than a slender, dark-haired youth, though he was millennia old, Halon turned up a hand and raised an eyebrow in equivocation and said, “Rígán is right, and yet he is wrong.”

  Rígán’s eyes flew wide in puzzlement. “I am? How so?”

  “Well, lad, tell me this: what is a warbar?”

  As if reciting a litany, Rígán said, “There are a number of so-called great weapons, most of which are two-handed in wielding. The exact number is in dispute, but among them and well recognized are the battle axe and war hammer, favored by the Dwarves; the lance and the spear, favored by the Vanadurin; the great sword, favored by many; the flail, and the warbar, favored by the—” Rígán’s recitation stopped well short. “Oh, I see. The warbar is a Troll weapon.”