by J. L. Doty
Baldrak added, “But always on the defense. Never went on the offense.”
Morgin couldn’t tell them why he’d held back, so he grinned at Baldrak and made a joke of it. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
Baldrak frowned for a moment. Then Surnarra roared with laughter. “Got you there, he did, Baldrak.”
Baldrak joined the other smiths in the laughter. “Still, you fought better than I’d expect of a plainface.”
Morgin shrugged and said, “I’ve had a lot of practice recently.”
One of the other smiths asked, “You mean at Csairne Glen? We heard about that.”
“No,” Morgin said, and he described the almost daily gladiatorial contest he’d fought during his captivity in Durin.
“A Kull?” Surnarra asked. “One each day?”
Morgin said, “Not every day. Sometimes they skipped a few days if I had wounds that needed healing.”
A strange silence settled over the smiths as the other smith asked, “And to the death, every time?”
Morgin just nodded.
Surnarra asked, “How many Kulls have you killed?”
Morgin thought about that carefully for a moment. “I’m not sure. I never kept count.” He tried to recall all his many fights over the past few years. “The first two were in Elhiyne when the Tulalane and Valso held the castle through treachery. Then there were six or seven in the sanctum, and a couple more in the castle yard. Then on the Gods Road, maybe ten or twenty.”
He recalled the day he’d broken up the ambush the Kulls had prepared for Tulellcoe and the small company of Elhiyne warriors. And there was the day he killed twelve twelves with the wall of water at Gilguard’s Ford. But he didn’t think these Benesh’ere would count that, because he’d done it with magic. “Maybe fifty, sixty, I don’t know. I’ve never kept count.”
Chagarin looked at him carefully and said, “You’re not telling us something. I watched you consider it, and then decide not to say it.”
Morgin grimaced. “There was one other time, but it was done with magic.” Morgin described the wall of water he’d created with his magic, and how it had swept away twelve twelves. “But I didn’t think you’d count that because of the magic.”
For the longest moment the only sound that broke the silence was the crackling of the open fire. Then Baldrak reached out and calmly took Morgin’s bowl of boiled oats. He handed it to Yim and said, “No man who’s killed that many Kulls eats this kind of fare. Get this man some real food.”
Chapter 7: Without a True Name
The blade haunted Rhianne’s dreams. Always and ever it haunted them. She awoke that morning exhausted and spent, even though she’d slept through an entire night. She decided to remain in bed for a few moments with her eyes closed, and collect her thoughts.
She didn’t understand the sword and its desires. It hungered for freedom, and it constantly pressed her to release it, but she couldn’t allow it the independence it sought. Like a petulant child, it constantly hammered at her; tell an undisciplined child no, and it would wait only a few heartbeats to make the same request again: free me—free me—free me. Remaining vigilant through all hours of the day and night left her exhausted.
The sword demanded everything of her, as it had demanded everything of Morgin before his death. At that thought she despaired; she could not defeat the malevolence in the blade without Morgin. He was meant to defeat it, and she merely to assist him.
She recalled the moment when she’d entered the Hall of Wills after the sword had gone berserk, stepping through the vast doors into a room filled with a fog of stone dust. Morgin had knelt on the floor in the center of the room, both hands wrapped about the sword’s hilt in a white-knuckled grip, the sword buried in the stone of the floor, his head bowed. Oddly, she now recalled that his head and shoulders had been covered in a fine sheen of that stone dust, something she hadn’t noticed at the time.
And she recalled the glimpse she’d had of Morgin’s power, compressed into a white-hot spark to contain the malevolence of the blade. She’d never had a chance to tell him he’d not lost his power, that it was instead consumed by the need to control the hatred within that talisman. She’d never told him, and he’d died thinking himself powerless.
There remained one thing she didn’t understand: now that he was dead, what held the talisman’s power at bay? Certainly, a piece of her was always devoted to that effort, but she alone could not contain such evil. And yet, with Morgin dead, the blade had not devastated the countryside. Perhaps Morgin had left his power behind somehow, left it in the blade as a counterbalance.
“Lady Mistress,” Braunye said. “We have a busy day ahead of us.”
Rhianne opened her eyes, lay for a moment and savored the quiet of early morning.
~~~
Morgin and everyone in the camp bedded down right after dinner. They’d get a few hours’ sleep, then rise in the early evening and head out onto the sands.
Shebasha visited him in his dreams regardless of when he slept. “When will you reveal yourself?” she asked him.
“What do I have to reveal? That I’ve been a fool; a fool about Rhianne, a fool about Olivia, a fool about Valso and everyone else?”
Shebasha lifted a hind paw and scratched her chin. “All you mortals are fools; it’s just that some of you are more foolish than others. Give me your name, mortal. Give me your name and I’ll give you a boon.”
Morgin had nothing to lose, so he opened his mouth to say his name, but nothing happened. His tongue wouldn’t move, his lips wouldn’t move.
Shebasha smiled and licked at a paw. “You can’t speak a false name in this dream, mortal.”
Morgin understood now. Out of pure reflex he had tried to tell her his name was Morgin. But that was not a true name. The demon ElkenSkul had given him his true name, though now, after listening to Toke, he doubted even that. As an experiment, he opened his mouth to speak the name AethonLaw, but again his tongue would not move, his lips would not move. He managed to utter only a crude grunt, and that confirmed his suspicion.
Shebasha laughed and stood. “The only place where you are truly a fool, mortal, is that you do not know your own name.”
A very young Aethon appeared beside her. “Lord Mortal,” he said, greeting Morgin. He glanced at Shebasha. “I told him to seek out The Unnamed King.”
“Hm!” she said. “That would be wise.”
Morgin’s frustration grew with each word they spoke. “I would gladly seek him out, but I don’t know how.”
Shebasha looked at Aethon and said, “Sad, is it not?”
Aethon agreed, and then both of them turned their backs on him and walked away.
Morgin jumped to his feet and shouted after them. “Now wait, damn you. I’ll go to the Unnamed King, but how do I find him? How do I find a myth, a legend that doesn’t exist?”
He tried to follow them, but they ignored him and continued walking, and slowly they dissipated into the oncoming night. He stood there on the sands of his dreams pondering their words. To find the Unnamed King, where would he go? Certainly not in any of the clan territories, nor in Aud. Perhaps in Kathbeyanne, but that didn’t feel right either. And then he suddenly realized what an idiot he’d been. The Unnamed King was also known as the King of Dreams; he would not find such a king on the planes of mortal men, nor on any of the twelve levels of existence. No, the King of Dreams would only be found in a dream. But how could he search in his dreams when he had no control over his dreams? He knew of no magic to give him that control, and it frustrated him that all he could do was stumble along hoping to somehow find the Unnamed King by pure luck.
He dreamt next of Aethon’s tomb, looked upon the crypt and studied the tableau carefully as he remembered it: the skeleton king seated upon his throne, one skeletal arm resting casually on an armrest, the other on the hilt of the great sword. But as before there was some flaw in that picture, and it took him some time to realize exactly what. The first time he’d glimpsed
the ancient crypt he’d been lying in the enchanted alcove in Castle Elhiyne, dying from a Kull crossbow bolt he’d taken in the chest. Then one wall of the alcove had shimmered and opened into the tomb. The skeleton king had been there on his throne with his magnificent sword, and all the arms and armor and trappings of a great king. And there’d been the body of a dead warrior lying on the floor of the tomb in front of the throne, a warrior dressed in simple garb and still clutching a plain and unadorned sword, very unlike the grand accouterments of such a king’s tomb. And because Morgin had dropped his sword in the hall outside the alcove, the king had taken that dead warrior’s sword and given it to him. But now, in his dreams, no warrior lay at the feet of the skeleton king, and the floor in front of the king’s throne remained empty.
Baldrak shook Morgin out of his dream. “Come on, Elhiyne. We’re going out onto the sands.”
The entire camp had already shifted into frantic activity. In a very short time they broke down the tents and packed everything onto strange little pack animals akin to donkeys. The whitefaces called them chakarras. They were smaller than Benesh’ere warhorses, but like them they had large, broad hooves that didn’t sink far into the sand. Packed up and ready to go, the entire camp moved out on the sands walking into the night.
~~~
The Benesh’ere had about one thousand horses for mounted warriors, but only outriders and scouts who ventured out ahead of the main column rode. Most of the warriors walked with their mounts as part of a long, winding train of people and livestock. The moon hung in the sky at three-quarters, approaching full, and out on the yellow-white sand it lit up the night as if it were merely a shadow in the light of day.
Morgin trudged along with the smiths. Walking in the sand was difficult and exhausting, but they set a pace for the weakest of the Benesh’ere—old whitefaces and young children—so Morgin managed to keep up.
Chagarin joined him and walked beside him, some sort of bundle tucked under his left arm. “You’ll develop the right muscles for the sand, soon enough. But until then you’re going to be mighty sore, come morning.”
Chagarin retrieved the bundle from under his arm, and by its shape Morgin knew it must be a sword wrapped in oiled cloth. Chagarin unwrapped the blade and held it out to Morgin. He took it, recognizing it immediately, and as they walked he threw a questioning look at Chagarin.
“Baldrak told me you know this blade.”
Morgin shrugged. “Or one very much like it. But I left it back in Durin.” And then he recalled that while he had left it in Durin, Rat had brought it to him that night out on the sands with Shebasha. “No,” he said, “that’s wrong. I forgot. I lost it out on the sands the night the sand cat attacked us.” He wasn’t about to try to explain how Rat had brought it to him in a dream. Let Chagarin think he’d carried it out onto the sands.
“That explains it,” Chagarin said, nodding. “One of our outriders must have found it in the sand. They always turn derelict blades like that over to us smiths.”
Chagarin held his hand out palm up. Morgin hesitated, wanted nothing more than to be done with the cursed blade, wanted to give it to Chagarin and never see it again. But he couldn’t abdicate his responsibilities that way, for the burden of its power was his and his alone.
At his moment of hesitation, Chagarin’s eyes narrowed. Morgin had no choice but to give up the blade at that moment, so he reversed it and handed it to the smith. But in his soul he made sure it knew that as long as it haunted the Mortal Plane, it would not be free of him.
Chagarin looked at it thoughtfully as they trudged through the sand. “Baldrak also told me you said this blade chose you, not you it.”
Silence hung between them for a long moment, then Morgin said, “I was just speaking gibberish. I really don’t know what I meant by that.”
Chagarin continued to look at the blade. “It’s unusual for a blade to make such a choice. But it’s been known to happen.”
He wrapped the blade again in the oiled cloth, all the while looking only at Morgin. “But I wonder how you knew it chose you. Most men are not close enough to the steel to sense such things.”
With that, he turned and drifted off into the moon-lit night.
~~~
At dawn the Benesh’ere stopped and set up their tents. They didn’t circle together into one large defensive perimeter, but grouped into smaller encampments that stretched into the distance among the dunes. Several thousand whitefaces strung out in a long line over the distance of more than a league would take too long to reassemble each night.
The smiths didn’t set up shop. Baldrak told Morgin the worst they might expect would be the occasional thrown shoe, or broken piece of tack, nothing that couldn’t wait for them to get to the lake. They’d spend another night on the sands, and when they reached the Plains of Quam they’d shift back to sleeping at night and marching by day. Two days on the plains, then two days of travel through the forests just south of SavinCourt would bring them to their traditional camp on the east shore of the Lake of Sorrows.
Morgin could barely stand, and walked like an old man. Walking in the deep sand used his muscles differently than walking on hard ground. Baldrak laughed and said, “It’s a shame you’ll get your sand legs just as we’re leaving the sands. When we return to Aelldie from the lake, we all suffer like that after a full season on hard ground.”
With the reversal of their days the smiths had their hour of sword practice in the early morning, just after setting up their tents and before dinner. Morgin again participated, this time paired off with Surnarra who had a distinctively different fighting style from that of Baldrak. Surnarra waded in with heavy blows, where Baldrak had been more surgical with his strikes.
Again, as their blades clashed, Morgin sensed where Surnarra’s blade would strike an instant before it did so, and he fared rather well. It wasn’t prescience; of that he was certain, for he’d been trained in sword magic, trained to use his power to strengthen his arm, but most importantly to speed up his reflexes and his perception of his opponent’s moves. Such quickness of perception often felt like prescience, but any experienced wizard knew the fallacy of that. Again, he lost more than he won, but the exercise renewed his hope that his magic had decided to return.
That night, as he trudged through the sand in the long column of the Benesh’ere, he sensed something arcane approaching. He turned about and saw Toke headed his way, with ElkenSkul hovering just over his shoulder. When Toke caught up with him he matched Morgin’s pace, and merely walked beside him in silence.
Morgin didn’t wait for Toke to spout his riddles. He simply asked, “What do the extra marks in my name mean?”
“Ah,” Toke said, looking up at the moon above. “A good question, that.”
Morgin looked at the faint shimmer hovering just over the old man’s shoulder. “Surely, the namegiver knows the answer.”
“No, young man, I wouldn’t assume that.”
“You can’t mean the namegiver doesn’t know the meaning of the symbols he scratches?”
Toke shrugged. “It is but a demon spirit, Elhiyne. I don’t think it understands the concept of a name in the same way we do.”
“Why is it also called soul taker? My grandmother called it soul taker.”
“Now that, I do know. You see, without a name, do you truly have a soul?”
Morgin shook his head sadly. “Riddles! You and that damned sand cat give me nothing but riddles.”
“Sand cat? Is it Shebasha you speak of?”
“She haunts my dreams just as you haunt my waking hours, and both of you haunt me with riddles.”
Toke rubbed at the whiskers on his jaw. “Interesting! I’ll have to ponder that.”
Toke turned and walked away into the night.
Chapter 8: The March
The sharpness of the border between the sands of the Munjarro and the Plains of Quam surprised Morgin. In the space of only a few hundred paces they went from trudging through bottomless sand, to walk
ing on a layer of sand only a hand’s width deep, then to walking on the hard prairie dirt. And there they walked into a wall of mist, a light fog that clung to the ground and limited vision to a few hundred paces. Morgin remembered the plains well: a flat and barren land without shape or contour, broken only by clumps of sagebrush and brown grasses. The last time he’d visited the plains, he’d killed Salula.
Morgin noticed the difference in the temperature immediately. As the sun rose and climbed above the flat horizon, out on the sands, at this early hour, the temperature would be rising quickly. But here, it still held onto a hint of the spring night chill, which made the daylight hours bearable. It didn’t burn off the mist, though he saw the clear, blue sky above so the layer of fog couldn’t be too thick. To shift their sleeping schedule back to nights, they continued marching.
A subtle difference arose in the Benesh’ere when they crossed that border between the oven of the sands and the horizonless prairie: a certain wariness descended upon them all, and everyone now carried arms. Out on the sands, a warrior might wander about the camp completely unarmed, or perhaps with no more than a utilitarian knife on his or her belt. Now, however, everyone—warrior, wife, debtor, old man, old woman, even small children—everyone carried a sword or a spear of some kind, many with a fabled Benesh’ere longbow and a quiver of arrows strapped to their back. And now, none wore the broad-brimmed straw hats beneath their hoods. Clearly, the whitefaces were preparing for some sort of battle or fight, and the straw hats would only hinder a fighter’s ability to look quickly from side to side.
As they crossed onto the prairie, the leading edge of the column slowed slightly, bunching it up so they now walked about twelve abreast, whereas on the sand it had been no more than single or double file. Quite a few of the warriors with horses mounted up and rode out in squads of twelve, clearly outriders patrolling the column’s flanks.
They stopped to set up camp around midday, and Morgin noticed another difference: the encampments were much larger. On the sands they’d clustered into small groups of one or two twelves, but the encampment he worked in now was more like one hundred twelves, with perimeter sentries posted.
