‘None needed,’ A Ahmud Ki replied. ‘I have a very important favour to ask.’
‘Anything,’ Keeth said.
A Ahmud Ki smiled. ‘I need the castle evacuated immediately.’
Chase, Wahim, Trackmarker and Runner were given the task of keeping watch for anyone coming up the road from the city; Passion, Ella and Crystal organised the Summerbrook villagers and children to set up sleeping quarters in the ruins, while Cutter took Hunter and three volunteers to scour the castle for provisions and water.
A Ahmud Ki called a private meeting with Inheritor and Meg, insisting that Inheritor bring the canvas bag. He led them to the locked doors of the old throne room. ‘With your permission,’ he said, ‘I thought we’d meet in here.’
He waved his hands before the huge, rusted locks on the doors and they and the chains they held fell apart. Another wave made the doors creak open, the rusted hinges protesting loudly after being unused for untold years. A Ahmud Ki stepped into the dark, musty interior and created a light sphere which he levitated towards the ceiling. ‘Come into my past,’ he invited.
The old throne room was a square space, its walls and ceiling intact despite the passage of time. Meg noticed as she entered that the great doors were scarred by fire and weapons—legacies of past lootings and wars. The interior was depressing—grey stone walls, grey floor, grey ceiling. Towards the rear five steps led up to a platform. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she discerned doors outlined in the walls.
‘I redecorated this once,’ said A Ahmud Ki, his voice echoing in the large chamber. ‘There was a throne on that dais for the king, sculpted in the form of a dragon.’ He spun on his heel, his arms gesticulating. ‘The doors there were covered with gold. Purple and gold banners hung from the walls, and the floors and walls were faced with white marble. Andrakis’s Golden Warriors protected the king.’
Inheritor looked at Meg, his face puzzled. A Ahmud Ki saw Inheritor’s expression and approached the Kerwyn king.
‘You’re confused, aren’t you?’ he said, glancing down to see that Inheritor had the canvas bag. ‘Meg hasn’t told you all my secrets.’ He bowed. ‘Allow me to present myself.’
His hands worked an intricate pattern and light surrounded his body. When the light dissolved, A Ahmud Ki was young again, his long Aelendyell silver braided hair restored, his white suit transformed into a flowing black robe. He smiled at Inheritor and announced, ‘I am A Ahmud Ki, former chancellor of King Andrakis, inheritor of the Dragonlords.’
Inheritor’s mouth opened in astonishment but no sound came out. Meg, too, stared, stung by her memories of the naked being she had found pinned to the black dragon statue and her uncertain fear at choosing to release him.
‘You took Erin’s amber,’ she accused him.
A Ahmud Ki turned. ‘No,’ he corrected quietly. ‘He gave it to me.’
She wanted to believe his answer, but her fear warned her that the person she faced was no longer the helpless being she had rescued but the creature she had rescued him from.
‘I know you don’t believe me,’ he said, disappointment in his voice, ‘and I understand. You know more about me than anyone else and I have been painted in an uncharitable way. I can’t deny that because the stories are true—in the main.’
He sighed and walked to the foot of the steps where he stared up at something on the dais. ‘I’ve arranged for the best swordsmith in Lightsword to come here this afternoon,’ he said. ‘He’s an old man, and his craft is out of favour now that peacemakers are plentiful and more deadly than swords, but he can still make a better sword than anyone in the empire.’ He faced Inheritor and Meg. ‘I employed him whenever a ceremonial sword was needed by the government. He’s a true craftsman, and he’s bringing a mould and the metal to reforge Abreotan’s blade.’
‘There’s no kiln,’ said Inheritor.
A Ahmud Ki smiled grimly. ‘You don’t need a kiln when you have magic. Meg can fire the metal.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Meg. ‘I thought you said you could find another answer.’
‘There is no other answer,’ A Ahmud Ki replied.
‘But,’ she began, and then, realising she did not want to voice the answer to her question, she hesitated.
‘I am half-Aelendyell,’ said A Ahmud Ki.
Inheritor gasped. ‘You have the blood ingredient.’
‘Yes.’ A Ahmud Ki fished in a pocket of his black robe and pulled out a thin amber bracelet. ‘And I have this.’
‘What is that?’
‘The key to the sword. The person who wields Abreotan’s sword must also wear this.’
‘Where did you find that?’ Meg asked.
‘I didn’t find it,’ A Ahmud Ki told her. ‘Erin created it.’
‘He had another sliver of amber?’ she asked. ‘But I thought—’ and again she stopped, the answer suddenly clear to her. Shock crept along her nerves and she looked at A Ahmud Ki. He met her gaze and she saw the truth in his eyes. ‘Whisper,’ she said.
‘But who will use the sword against the Demon Horsemen?’ Inheritor asked. ‘If you give your blood—’
‘I can’t use the sword,’ A Ahmud Ki cut in. ‘The Elvenaar constructed it so that no magical creature could wield it.’
‘Why?’ asked Inheritor.
‘To ensure it would never be used by a Dragonlord,’ said Meg steadily, still staring at A Ahmud Ki.
‘Then it’s you,’ said Inheritor, looking towards Meg. ‘You’re the—’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Meg said, glaring at him. ‘I’m not a warrior. I wouldn’t last a moment trying to fight a Horseman.’
‘But you will,’ A Ahmud Ki said, walking towards Inheritor. ‘You’re trained for this.’
‘Me?’ Inheritor gasped. ‘How? I don’t know anything about magic.’
‘You’ll learn,’ said A Ahmud Ki, then he turned to Meg. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This isn’t my choice to make. Erin said you would know who should bear the sword.’
Meg nodded. ‘There is no one more suited.’
‘Put the bag down,’ A Ahmud Ki instructed Inheritor, and held the bracelet out to him. Inheritor looked at it warily, then at Meg, and again at A Ahmud Ki. ‘Take it,’ A Ahmud Ki coaxed.
Inheritor lowered the canvas bag to the floor and accepted the bracelet, testing its weight in his hand, surprised by its lightness.
‘It won’t hurt,’ said A Ahmud Ki. ‘Put it on your sword wrist.’
Inheritor slid the bracelet over his hand and onto his wrist. The amber glowed with inner light and vanished. ‘Where did it go?’ Inheritor asked, startled, searching his wrist with the fingers of his left hand.
‘It is now part of you,’ A Ahmud Ki explained.
‘Why?’
‘To imbue you with enough magic to bear the sword.’
‘I don’t feel any different,’ Inheritor said, still exploring his wrist.
‘The bracelet allows you to channel the sword’s energies with your mind,’ said A Ahmud Ki. ‘To all intents and purposes, no one would ever know you were able to use the sword.’ He chuckled at a memory from the distant past. ‘In another time and place you would have surprised even me.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Inheritor argued. ‘You’re asking me to fight the Demon Horsemen.’
‘There’s no one else,’ said Meg.
‘There are thousands of warriors in Ranu Ka Shehaala,’ Inheritor disputed. ‘Why didn’t you choose one of them?’
‘Too late,’ said A Ahmud Ki. ‘You’re the one with the bracelet.’ He grinned at Meg and asked, ‘Will you unlock the bag?’
His grin was disarming. The blood rose to her cheeks and she silently scolded herself for her reaction. ‘I think you should unlock it,’ she said.
He knelt before the beige canvas bag on the floor. ‘I can unravel the locking spells, but I can’t touch what’s inside.’
‘I’ll open it once you’ve unlocked it,’ Meg offered. How many years has it been since
I found it in the Shessian museum? she wondered, and her curiosity spiked in anticipation of finally seeing the legendary hilt.
A Ahmud Ki moved his hands above the bag. Partway through, conscious that Meg was watching his movements, he looked up and said, ‘Habit.’
Seeing Inheritor’s puzzled expression, Meg explained that A Ahmud Ki used the hand gestures because that was how he had first learnt magic. ‘But the magic actually comes from the psychic energy of the mind amplified through the amber,’ she finished.
‘You mean, if you think about what you want to happen, it happens?’ Inheritor asked.
‘Basically.’
‘It’s done,’ A Ahmud Ki announced, standing. ‘Open it up.’
‘You should open it,’ Meg said to Inheritor. ‘It’s your sword.’
‘No,’ Inheritor said. ‘You open it.’
Meg felt she should argue, but she had waited so long to see the bag’s contents that she simply bent to pull the padlock apart. She opened the bag and glimpsed the outline of a sword hilt. ‘It’s here,’ she said, and tipped the bag over, letting the hilt slide onto the floor. There was a clatter of metal greeting stone. She stared at the artefact with its heavy, solid grip, its amber colour and the cluster of amber gems, rubies, diamonds and emeralds embedded in its dragon-shaped pommel. It looked too big for a man to hold, the handle of a weapon of mythical proportion. Most of all, she could feel the magic radiating from it, an energy that was like heat, and she knew that she could never touch the sword once it was made whole again.
She glanced at A Ahmud Ki and saw wonder and fear in his face and knew that he was consumed with painful memories of another time. Or was he seeing the immediate future?
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
As A Ahmud Ki had promised, in the late afternoon an elderly swordsmith came to the castle, bringing a mould, metal and his specialist equipment in a horse-drawn wagon. A Ahmud Ki directed the man to the throne room and told him where to set up. Then he left the chamber, saying, ‘I’m going to make sure no one comes up here uninvited.’
Meg followed him into the foyer where she stopped him. ‘Are you serious about…about reforging the sword?’
He looked at her as if he didn’t understand her question, then said, ‘I have the easy part in all this. It’s you that has to make sure Inheritor gets it right. If he fails, there is no more world.’
‘But if you do this, there’ll be no more world for you.’
He chuckled. ‘Who knows? Perhaps your Seers were right about a paradise. I’ve heard plenty of religious men promise it to the masses. Who’s to say that they haven’t been hoaxing us—that there actually is a paradise or something better after we die? Now, there’s a lot to do and not a lot of time left. Do you know how to make a glyph?’
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But I remember the intricacies of the one Mareg used to keep you imprisoned.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m going to create one that locks intruders out of the castle. My guess is that when news of what we’ve done reaches the appropriate authorities, there’ll be Ranu troops up here. But you have to do something for me while I’m constructing it. I need to know how far from here the Horsemen are and from which direction they’re likely to come. Take bird form. Make it something fast, like a falcon. Fly east and find out where the Horsemen are and what kind of pattern of movement they’re following. Will you do that?’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘But it might be three or four days before I return.’
‘I expected that.’
‘What will you do while I’m away?’
‘Guide the swordsmith. He needs to know the exact process the Elvenaar used to create Abreotan’s sword.’
‘You know it?’
‘I memorised it from the Book of Lore. I knew by then that the sword was the only answer.’ He laughed. ‘I still had to try though.’
‘Try what?’
‘I confronted the Horsemen after I left the library,’ he admitted. ‘Erin’s gift of the amber made me confident I could take over Mareg’s role and order them back to Se’Treya.’ He looked down and shook his head, then lifted his gaze. ‘They killed Mareg. Did you know?’
‘No.’
‘The Horsemen told me before they tried to kill me. That’s why I ended up back here—I escaped through a portal.’ He took her hand. ‘If I’d known where you were…’ He left the statement unfinished.
‘It wouldn’t have changed what’s happened,’ she said, looking into his grey eyes. She took her hand out of his, self-conscious that he was a handsome young half-Aelendyell and she was a white-haired woman in her sixties. She noticed his momentary disappointment.
‘Can you do something for me while I’m gone?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Somehow, I don’t know how, you have to convince the Ranu to evacuate the city. If you can get them to leave before the Horsemen arrive, we might just save a few more lives.’
He nodded. ‘I have an idea. I have to think it through a little more yet, but it should work. I’ll tell you when you get back.’
He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. As he straightened he said, ‘If you want to be young again, you only have to think it.’ He winked and walked jauntily away.
How can you be so happy when you know you have to die? she wondered as she watched him disappear into the castle. She looked down at her hands, studying the age-mottled skin, the wrinkles, the dryness. I can be young, she told herself and considered conjuring her youth from the amber. Then she smiled at her vanity and focussed inward.
A Kerwyn magpie climbed into the late afternoon sky and flew east, towards the Ureykeyu Mountains. Anyone watching the black and white bird would have been fascinated by its phenomenal flying speed.
Meg relished the wind in her face as the green landscape raced below, but even enveloped in magic she was wary of flying too fast for her fragile magpie body. Realising that these mountains rose higher than those separating the old Kerwyn kingdom from Shesskar-sharel, she added a warming spell to her aura and headed away from the sunset. Her mind was full of the day’s events, not least A Ahmud Ki’s unexpected return and strange acceptance of his fate. She wanted to know exactly what had transpired in the old Khvech Daas library to make Erin sacrifice himself and his sister and hand over the amber to A Ahmud Ki. Surely, in his self-imposed exile, Erin was safe from the Horsemen. Or had he known that eventually they would find his solitary paradise and destroy it and him as easily as they were reducing everything in the mortal realm to dust?
Neither could she fathom the dramatic change in A Ahmud Ki. From what she had read, and what she had observed in their time together, even with the love she felt for him, she recognised an element in him that could not be trusted, driven as it was by a lust for power. She wanted to believe that the old records, the writings of the Andrakian drycraefter and King Dylan and a host of others, that documented his treachery were exaggerated, biased against him, wrong, but she also knew they must have been grounded in some fact. Now that his magical power was restored, it seemed utterly incongruous for him to relinquish it so meekly, so willingly. And yet that was what she had seen and heard that afternoon: a changed person willing to sacrifice himself to save others.
She wanted him to be what he seemed to have become. But she didn’t want him to die. Not now.
His instructions passed on to Inheritor, Chase, Cutter and the others, and the outer castle wrapped in a warding spell designed to prevent access from outside, A Ahmud Ki stood on the remaining portion of the western wall to watch the sun flatten and melt against the peaks of the Great Dylan Ranges. Years before, when he rode into Lightsword as the conquering Ranu president, he had taken the time to come to the castle and stand on this ancient wall to survey the land that he had known a thousand years before. Much had changed and yet much was also the same. The old plains of Ky, once sparsely populated with farms, were dotted with towns and villages, and the mountains that were called the Andrakians were now
the Great Dylan Ranges. More people, different names, but the same land. He imagined he could hear the voices of the Aelendyell and Elvenaar spirits in the soft breeze, whispering the secrets he’d sought after so passionately in his youth. Ghosts. His world was populated with them. He was a ghost.
He conjured a tiny light sphere, willing it to change through the colours of the rainbow as he stared at it. And made it vanish. With a wave of his hand, he could obliterate the city directly below him. He could call down a thunderstorm or conjure enough light to outshine the wire-lightning globes winking into life along the wider streets. He could give life and he could take it away. He was A Ahmud Ki, the seeker of power, as his name was translated in Ranu, successor to the immortal Dragonlords. ‘Where are you now, Mareg?’ he whispered to the air.
The western sky bled from the bruised clouds to the mountain peaks and gold darkened to amber, and amber deepened to vermilion. Birds flocked to their roosts against the bloody backdrop. I am full of blood, he thought and a bitter smile formed on his lips. Half-Aelendyell. ‘I cursed that part of my blood,’ he murmured. ‘I took revenge on it.’ He laughed. Now it takes revenge on me.
He sank to sit cross-legged on the parapet, his back against the stone, turned to the east. Stars already glittered in the higher reaches; in an hour or so the moon would rise. He’d forgotten just how beautiful the world could be. Not that he’d been too busy to see it; he’d had many quiet moments. It was just that he’d never seen it before through the eyes of someone looking at it for the last time.
Suspended in time for a thousand years in Mareg’s prison had made him understand just how brief and precious life was, but when Meg released him he had resented being taught that lesson. After all, he was A Ahmud Ki, destined for greatness. Mortality was the least of his concerns. Coming to terms with the loss of his magic, learning that the rules for magic had all been misguided, realising that his release from Se’Treya came with the burden of growing older—all these sudden and unwanted lessons threatened him. He admitted now that his return to Se’Treya when he could have stayed with Meg had been another desperate attempt to escape ordinariness. If chance hadn’t led him back to Yul Ithrandyr and the pathway to the Ranu empire presidency, what would he have done? I wouldn’t be here, he decided.
The Demon Horsemen Page 39
