by J. L. Doty
“As you will,” she said, a knowing smile on her face. They both knew he was wise to her tactics. She asked, “What have you been up to this past year, besides bedding the Balenda?”
News of that sort traveled fast in the castle; she had quite a number of informants tasked with reporting even the most trivial details to her, probably even had someone in SavinCourt that reported to her some time ago. But he was up to the game, so he said, “Mostly just bedding the Balenda.”
She threw her head back and laughed, then said, “Come now, you must have something to tell me.”
He gave her a brief and highly edited summary of his travels with Morgin, and his drifting about with Cort after they’d been separated. He finished, saying, “He’s dead now, and you seem to care little about that.”
She shrugged, poured herself a small goblet of water. “He became more a liability than an asset, and I have other things to worry about.”
“Like the border situation with Penda?”
“Ah, you’ve heard rumors.”
He crossed the room to a window overlooking the inner bailey, stared down at the courtyard below. “More than rumors, I’ve heard a few unsettling details.”
“Like my nomination of Brandon as warmaster of all the Lesser Clans?”
“Aye, and it sounds like you knew exactly how volatile that would make the situation.”
She took a delicate sip of water and said, “Someone has to keep BlakeDown in his place.”
“But why provoke him so? I know you’re not the foolish, old woman some believe.”
“Well I thank you for recognizing that, even if others don’t.”
They sparred back and forth like that for quite some time. Unlike other members of the family, such evasive tactics did not frustrate him. He’d grown up dealing with her like this, knew she enjoyed the competitive interplay of their words, and if one were careful, and willing to put in the time, she did yield up bits and pieces of information. But one had to take the time to put those bits and pieces together carefully. Tulellcoe would later recall every word, and meticulously replay them in an effort to do so.
She dismissed him with some excuse about needing to speak with one of her stewards. But when he opened the door to her chamber to leave, NickoLot stood in the hallway, and she stepped hurriedly in his way to block his path, a tiny thing dressed in black as if in mourning. “Uncle,” she said, and the strength of her voice surprised him.
Standing in the doorway still holding it open, he greeted her, “Nicki!”
She looked him up and down carefully, the kind of look Olivia might use to intimidate, but on Nicki’s face it was really just a cold, piercing appraisal. “Rhianne isn’t dead,” she said. “I know it. And neither is Morgin. He can’t be.”
“Oh really!” Olivia said, sarcasm punctuating every word. “With all your powers, child, where is your proof that they live?”
NickoLot opened her mouth to say something, but hesitated fearfully.
“Exactly,” Olivia said. “I tire of this little fantasy you’re perpetrating. Leave us, and take your childish games elsewhere.”
NickoLot lowered her eyes, turned and walked away in silence.
Tulellcoe frowned and looked at Olivia. The old woman said, “She refuses to accept reality. It’s not healthy.”
He stepped into the hallway and closed the door quietly, his thoughts roiling in turmoil.
~~~
Morgin now recognized the trail clearly as Mortiss carefully picked her way up a twisting track of steep switchbacks. They’d climbed above the tree line that morning, and at this altitude the vegetation was limited to lichen and mosses. Trees and scrub no longer masked the trail with their ever changing growth and regrowth, and near mid-morning he’d passed the last of his memorized features.
Mortiss gave a last burst of effort and climbed up onto a flat shelf of rock, a wide expanse where long ago Ellowyn and the other legion commanders had awaited Morddon in a solemn, silent throng. With them had waited the royalty of the House of the Thane and what remained of the Benesh’ere command. Morgin nudged Mortiss forward slowly to the center of the shelf and dismounted.
The black slash of the crypt’s entrance remained as he remembered it, filled with rocks and small boulders piled there by the angels, and obscured by the shadows Morgin had cast. He marveled that after all these centuries his shadowmagic still remained strong and undiminished.
He let Mortiss wander off to graze; perhaps she would find some of the lichen to her liking. He laid his sword to one side, leaned it carefully against a boulder well out of the way, then set to work removing the stones from the cave’s entrance.
~~~
Salula stopped at the bottom of a steep rise, up which the trail led in a series of sharp switchbacks. He climbed out of the saddle and tied his horse’s reins to a scraggly bush that had managed to send out a few dried and withered shoots among the rocks. With the command in place to keep one hand on the saddle horn, Rhianne was forced to remain mounted. Salula finished with his horse and approached her, stopped beside her horse and said, “You may take your hands off the saddle horn and dismount.”
Not a compelling command, but she obeyed nevertheless.
Using a piece of rope he tied one end around her left wrist, leaving a tether about the length of a man’s arm. He leaned toward her, lowered his voice and whispered in her ear. “I’m leaving your hands free so you can climb. You will follow me. You will say nothing. You will make no noise and utter no sound. You will move only as far as required by my pull on this tether. If I release it, you’ll stay in place.”
Salula drew his sword, and she saw it for the first time, a black shadow of obsidian gloom. She sensed the magic in the blade, some sort of spell-crafting she did not understand.
They started up the switchbacks on foot, Salula leading, she following at the end of her tether. It was an arduous climb in muddy skirts that kept twisting about her ankles, made even harder since she could make no sound, could not utter a grunt or a moan on a particularly difficult stretch of trail. She marveled that Salula moved with absolutely no sound, climbing up the switchbacks in a silence truly unnatural and inhuman.
As they neared the crest of the trail she heard someone above them occasionally grunting with effort. She heard the dull clap of stone against stone. From below it appeared the trail opened out onto some sort of shelf in the side of the mountain.
Salula hesitated about the height of a man from the top of the trail, turned back to her and whispered in her ear, “You can wait here.” He didn’t realize it, but with that non-compulsive statement, he’d broken all of the compulsions he’d laid upon her.
He left her there and climbed slowly, silently to the top of the trail, paused there and peered over its lip. Then he moved forward with that deadly silence only a Kull could affect, and when he stepped onto the shelf above, he disappeared from sight.
Rhianne scrambled upward, trying to do so silently, knowing she could not abandon the poor fellow who now possessed that blade. She managed not to stumble or fall, like some witless maiden, reached the top of the trail and looked over the lip of the shelf. Salula stood no more than an arm’s length from her, crouched, creeping forward silently. At the far end of the shelf a man stooped over a heavy stone, his back to Salula, grunting as he tried to lift the block of granite.
Off to one side she spotted the sword, and that was the oddest thing, for this close her sense of direction to the blade and its power had grown quite acute; and that sense pointed not at the steel sword lying to one side, but at the man grunting with effort to lift the stone.
The man finally lifted the stone with a great effort, and staggering under its weight, he backed out of a strange crease in the rock. He dropped the stone onto a pile to one side of the shadowy crease, then glanced their way, and at the sight of his face, she froze in disbelief.
Looking at Salula, Morgin’s eyes gladdened with joy as he straightened. He said, “France! My old friend, I
thought you dead and gone.”
Morgin opened his arms and walked toward Salula to embrace him. Rhianne climbed desperately up onto the shelf. Her ankles tangled in her muddy skirt as she stumbled toward Salula screaming, “Nooooo! It’s Salula.”
Morgin froze with his eyes wide just as she hit Salula from behind, wrapping her arms around his waist. She let her knees buckle and tried to pull him down or hinder him with her weight, but he snarled, “Let me go,” and her arms opened as the compulsion overcame her. He swung his fist around behind him, and slammed the hilt of his sword into the side of her head.
Chapter 21: The Crypt of the Sunset King
Morgin staggered to a stop when Rhianne scrambled onto the shelf of rock and screamed, “Nooooo! It’s Salula.”
Rhianne! His Rhianne! Alive! Not dead! Filthy and bedraggled, her hair clumped and matted with dirt, wearing a common, homespun dress of course fabric caked with mud. His Rhianne! But as she charged France her words hit him.
Salula! No, it couldn’t be. Salula was dead. But then as Rhianne wrapped her arms around France, his friend growled, “Let me go,” and his words came out in Salula’s voice, the harsh rumbling tones of the halfman Morgin would never forget.
Salula batted Rhianne in the side of the head, and she crumbled to the ground like a rag doll. Then Salula turned to face Morgin, and he realized that nothing of his old friend the swordsman remained in that face.
“Well, Elhiyne,” Salula growled. “Or should I call you ShadowLord? We meet again.”
A hundred thoughts raced through Morgin’s mind. The entrance to the crypt was now almost clear. If he could rescue Rhianne, who lay unconscious on the ground behind Salula, he could climb over the last few rocks in the slash, and gain access to the crypt. But what then?
He glanced toward his sword, sheathed and leaning against a large boulder far to one side. It would be a race between him and the halfman, but Salula had a sword in his hand, and he completed Morgin’s thought for him. “No, Elhiyne. I’ll cut you down before you get there. Then I’ll kill the pretty one behind me, and take that blade to my king.”
He slashed the obsidian blade through the air between them, threw back his head and laughed, an evil caw that sent waves of fear coursing through Morgin’s soul.
He had one chance, and he remembered that Benesh’ere lore told him he must not command the steel, for the steel always commands. So he held out his hand toward the blade, palm open, and he said, “Please, come to me.”
As Salula stepped in and thrust with the obsidian blade, Morgin’s sword teetered toward him, slid out of its sheath and shot across the space between them, the hilt smacking into the palm of his hand. He turned the blade’s momentum into a slashing parry, and a blinding shower of sparks erupted where steel met glass. Salula staggered backward, so Morgin lunged, but the halfman parried, and again the two blades showered them with sparks as they met. They disengaged, separated and stood facing one another in a crouch.
Those two strokes had taught Morgin something. Salula had neither the finesse nor speed of the swordsman, and Morgin had grown since they’d last met, in physical size, maturity, and understanding of his powers. The halfman could no longer count on his advantages of strength, brutality and ruthlessness to win this match. When Morgin met Salula’s eyes, he saw that the halfman also understood these things.
Salula grinned, danced backward a few steps, stepped over Rhianne’s unconscious form, looked down at her and raised his sword high. Morgin screamed and charged as the halfman brought his blade down, clumsily deflected it so it bit into the earth near her head, then slammed into the halfman.
The two of them tumbled to the granite of the shelf, and something bit sharply into Morgin’s side as Salula’s head slammed into the rock. They came to a stop with Morgin on top of the semiconscious halfman, but a sharp lance of pain in his chest prevented him from taking advantage of it. He rolled off Salula, felt blood coursing from a wound in his chest just under his right arm.
Salula groaned as Morgin staggered to his feet, still holding onto his sword, and he saw that the halfman held a blooded, obsidian dagger in his off hand. He tried to raise his sword to strike at the halfman, but a lance of pain slashed through him and he could barely maintain his hold on his sword, let alone strike the halfman down with it. The ground teetered beneath him, he staggered backward into the shadows hiding the entrance to the crypt, stumbled over one of the rocks he hadn’t yet removed and fell deeper into his shadowmagic. He barely managed to climb to his feet as waves of dizziness sent him staggering about in the shadows he’d created centuries ago.
~~~
Morgin staggered into the skeleton king’s crypt, struggling to hold onto consciousness, clutching at the stone wall of the tunnel entrance to stay on his feet. Blood pulsed from the wound in his side, and had already soaked his tunic and breeches all the way to his boots. He had no idea how long it would take Salula to find his way through the shadowmagic obscuring the entrance to the crypt. It would slow the halfman, but not for long, so Morgin probably had only a few heartbeats before Salula found him.
He tried to turn back because his Rhianne was out there, but the ground tilted crazily beneath his feet and he dropped to his knees, then fell forward onto his hands. He tried crawling, no real destination in mind, driven by a stubborn refusal to simply give up and let the halfman have his way. He ended up lying on his chest, the sword still gripped in his right hand, dragging himself through the dust that centuries had deposited on the floor.
The skeleton king still sat upon his throne as Morgin remembered him, unchanged from the first time he’d seen him in this crypt, when he lay dying in the enchanted alcove in Castle Elhiyne. And then later—or was it earlier, centuries earlier—he and Morddon had carefully positioned him in his crypt, using Morgin’s memories to properly lay the king to rest. In life Aethon had been a majestic king, filled with vigor and vitality, while in death he was no more than a skeleton of bones and tufts of hair, seated upon his throne, one skeletal arm resting casually on an armrest, the other on the hilt of the great sword.
Aethon’s hand seemed oddly indistinct, as if the bleached white bones of his fingers were changing, fleshing out. Morgin’s eyes moved to the crowned skull, a grinning white mask of death framing eye sockets of black shadow. The skeleton moved; its head turned; the eyeless pits looked upon Morgin, then looked past him.
Morgin turned his head and looked back, following the skeleton king’s gaze. The wall of the crypt now opened into the enchanted alcove in Elhiyne, and there he saw his own past as he lay there dying from a Kull crossbow bolt through the chest. When Valso and the Tulalane had occupied Castle Elhiyne, he’d tried to sneak in with the help of his shadows, but Valso had discovered him and the Kulls had given chase. He’d stumbled into two halfmen in an empty corridor, one had put a crossbow bolt through his chest, and he’d crawled into the alcove to die. Back then he’d thought the connection between the alcove and the skeleton king’s crypt was merely a figment of a dream. But now he understood that the gods twisted time and reality to suit their purposes. The skeleton king would heal that Morgin from the past, and he and Nicki would kill the Tulalane in the sanctum, Olivia would accuse him of cowardice, and he’d ride against Illalla’s army, ride to meet MorginDeath at Csairne Glen. And now, more than two years later, he found himself dying again in Aethon’s crypt, looking back upon his own death in the past.
With his last bit of strength, he turned his head and looked once again upon the skeleton king. Aethon’s flesh continued to form; the face filled out: a young face he and Morddon remembered well, strong, handsome. The eyes were no longer pits of shadow but pools of sorrow and mercy, and Aethon was once again a king of life and health, seated upon his throne dressed in a suit of golden mail and glimmering silk and rich leather. The tapestries on the walls shone with the brilliance of their colors again, and the assorted trappings of arms and armor were clean and bright once more.
Something turned over i
n Morgin’s chest. He coughed up a mouthful of blood, saw himself as if from a great distance lying helpless on the floor of Aethon’s crypt. He had many regrets: that he wouldn’t be there to save Rhianne from Salula, that he couldn’t save his friend France from Salula. But most of all he regretted that he wouldn’t be there to see that untamed lock of hair once more escape the tangle of tresses atop Rhianne’s head. With his last breath, he regretted that most.
~~~
Aethon watched in sadness as his friend, Lord Mortal, died once more, still clutching his simple and unadorned sword. He could never think of him as Morgin, for that was not a real name. Hopefully, someday in the future or the past, the poor fellow would find his true name.
Aethon waited, and in a few heartbeats, Lord Mortal’s corpse decayed into ruin. Aethon looked across the crypt to the enchanted alcove where the fatally wounded Lord Mortal of two years ago had stumbled in to die the first time. Just a moment ago for the older Lord Mortal at his feet, two years ago for the younger Lord Mortal in the enchanted alcove; all the same in this place where the gods had brought the past and present together.
He stood, and slowly crossed the floor of the crypt, entered the enchanted alcove in which the younger Lord Mortal had died. He knelt beside him and mourned him briefly, then he placed a hand gently on the mortal wound in his chest, a wound from which the pulse of life had ceased. With both hands he lifted the younger Lord Mortal’s lifeless form, holding him tightly against his own breast. Looking old and sad, he closed his eyes and bowed his head, whispering softly, “Forgive me, mortal, for what I must do.”
After a time, he laid the younger Lord Mortal gently on the dust-covered floor of the enchanted alcove. The wound in the young man’s chest had disappeared, though dried blood still caked his tunic. He turned back to his throne, noticed that the older Lord Mortal lying on the floor of the crypt was now no more than a skeleton dressed in rags, the bones of his hand still clutching the plain and unadorned sword. As he walked past him, he had a thought and looked back to the younger Lord Mortal lying in the alcove with no sword or weapon. The younger Lord Mortal would need a sword, while the older one was done with that blade. So he bent down carefully over the older Lord Mortal and removed the simple, unadorned sword from his skeletal grasp, then returned to where the younger Lord Mortal lay in the alcove. He stooped down, placed the sword’s hilt in the young man’s hand and curled his fingers about it. “You will need this, Lord Mortal,” he said. “May it stand you in good stead.”
