by JANRAE FRANK
Words and names kept dancing through his mind in an intricate spiral of images he could not understand and feared to mention, feared that even Branch would tell him it meant he was evil or mad or possessed or something worse:
Once there were three brothers: Brandrahoon, the demon-vampire; Isranon, called Dawnhand, Speaker to Spirits; and Waejonan the Accursed, first of the sa'necari, forever damned.
It kept repeating through his thoughts. He dropped to his knees and crawled upon the sand. A wave rolled up the beach, its high fringe soaked him, getting sand into his face and gilding his skin and beard with it. Josh spit sand and bits of water, moving higher onto the rocky beach, into the depths of the substantial crevices, but he could not escape the words. They followed him with visions of death, fire, and burning villages. Another wave, crashing higher, hit him, knocking him face down. Sand coated his face. Josh caught the edge of the rock and dragged himself, by feel alone, around it. He tried to force his eyes open fully but could not get them past the thick crust of sand.
Two destroyed one...
Josh screamed and balled up, almost losing his bottle. "Stop talking to me. Shut up, Abelard!"
Then strong hands seized him, lifting him clear of the strand and he thrashed weakly.
"Josh! Be still, you've got your eyes crusted shut!"
The sot stilled abruptly at the ogre's voice, realizing that the monsters from his alcohol triggered nightmares had not gotten him. Josh felt a rush of simple comfort, followed by a blur of warmth and his frightened desolation faded into a sensation of being a little boy in a parent's arms as he allowed Clemmerick to hold him unresisting. Clemmerick carried him down the strand to Branch's place and Josh heard the bells ring as Clemmerick opened the gates in the tall pole fence.
The ogre knocked on a door. Bluewings, the shaman's granddaughter, let them in and immediately fetched water and soft cloths, and began gently soaking the crusted sand and salt from Josh's eyes. They got some food and water into the wasted mon.
"He was having a vision of some kind, Branch," Clemmerick explained. The ogre, whose mother was a poet and loremaster, took Josh more seriously than the rest of the Vorgeni. "Kept calling a name. Abelard."
Branch shook his head at that. "There are no Abelards left. They are all slain. I knew the last of them."
Clemmerick frowned worriedly. "Could you have mentioned them to him? I know I never have."
"No. Until now, I never mentioned them to anyone. You must not."
Clemmerick considered. "I know the danger accruing to any with that name."
* * * *
In the curve of a deep overhang in the cliff face whose striking formation earned it the name "Dragonshead" lay the ruins of a castle shattered millennia past by fire and magic. Grey moss clothed its broken walls, filling every chink of the surviving stone work. A scruffy carpet of heather and tussocks of stiff grass covered the ground, growing over and around the litter of rocks and collapsing fragments of brick, punctuated by scrub oak, pine and spiky bushes. Once there had been rowans also, the trees whose branches defended against evil, but a decade past they had been stricken with a strange plague and died.
The ruins of Dragonshead lay less than half a day's march of Rowan Castle in the Sharani mar'ajante of Rowanslea. Most people stayed away from Dragonshead. It was a seat of dark power. Even those unattuned to the presence of magic could sense the terrifying hum and writhing of dark energies beneath the ground. Tradition held that a labyrinth of corridors, rooms, and dungeons lay buried beneath Dragonshead with tremendous treasures for anyone with the courage and cleverness to find the lost doorways. No one knew who had carved out this underground citadel, for it was older than the castle that once set atop it, older than Shaurone itself, a remnant of those most ancient days when another pantheon of gods fought the Dark One and lost, leaving the world in ruins. None had ever found it. Or so it was generally believed. But they had been found.
Deep in the earth, at the heart of the citadel beneath the ruins, stood a vast dark shrine built for a rite of hecatomb. The chamber, like the entire citadel, was carved from the living stone itself; smooth, seamless and gray. A single altar slab stood at the center on a raised dais, nine slabs on the next tier down radiated around it in a half circle and in a descending series of tiers came a half circle of eighteen, and then twenty seven, and so it continued until the slabs numbered fully one hundred. Bound victims lay on the central altar and the next nine, their bodies stretched tight, wrists and ankles bound across the blood grooves. Their drug-glazed faces showed no signs of understanding what awaited them. In that much there was mercy, but it was not intended as such. The drugs inhibited the victims' powers, for each was a lifemage and touch healer of great talent stolen by force from their homes. Margren had substituted the drugs for spellcords to hold their powers, since she wanted those powers to rise free with their deaths that she might capture them with their souls.
A sonorous chanting filled the chamber, incense heavily layering the air as acolytes marched in slow procession around the altars, waving censers and beating drums. Stonetrolls stood impassively beneath the eaves and one on each end of each tier, guarding them against an intrusion that would not come.
Margren moved to the first one, carrying two daggers in her hands. One she would use in the rite. The other was the unfinished baneblade to be used in only the greatest rites. She laid the silver handled baneblade, thick with runes on the hilt and along the blood groove upon the center of the first victim's body. Then she wielded the second in mystic gestures. A net of black tendrils spread from the rune blade on the mon's stomach. Through his drugged haze he seemed to realize what was happening and strained against his bonds. The effects of the drugs were wearing off faster than Margren had expected; this one was strong, it was fortunate she had chosen to do him first. Then her dagger descended, piercing his heart. He shuddered and lay still. A white glow began along his body, gathering and trying to rise away toward the heavens. The black net caught it and drew it into the blade. Margren smiled, retrieved her daggers, and moved to the next one, a slender blonde mon. She wept as Margren began the rite, and accepted the blade without struggling against it.
One by one Margren took all nine, binding their souls to the blade along with their powers, which the blade would twist to her uses. Then, the baneblade completed, she sheathed it. Finally only a Sharani boy of ten remained, bound to the central altar. Margren paused beside him, tousling his dark hair affectionately, regretfully. "Pity, I couldn't find a substitute for you, you're pretty enough to eat."
He had been a strange child, quietly, almost serenely defiant, vowing that his ma'aram would destroy them all – yet refusing to tell Margren just who his ma'aram was. Torture would have produced her name, but Margren did not want to bring damaged goods to her altar and she could not find another budding lifemage to take his place in a rite that was timed to the moon, stars, and planets. She opened his stomach from groin to breastbone, pulling out his entrails, letting them slither through her fingers as she read them. "Yes," she said. "The victory is ours. Aejys will die."
She ran her fingers through the child's thick hair again. It would have been nice to have kept him and trained him in the bedroom. She sighed, gestured for a thin young acolyte carrying a silver tray that bore a rune-carved chalice flanked by two stoppered bottles. She came to Margren's side, waiting patiently. Margren slashed the child's wrist, letting the artery in the left fill the chalice within an inch of the top. Then she added a dash from each stoppered bottle. She stirred it with her bloody dagger. The contents began to boil, steaming as if heated on a fire. Margren set the dagger aside, taking the chalice in the fingertips of both hands. She spoke to the cup and then drained it. All of her awareness, down to the smallest nerve endings tingled, then shrieked with the painful heat.
The sensations faded as quickly as they came. Margren opened her eyes having not realized she had closed them. A long, languorous, yet triumphant smile spread across her face: The ch
ange would be complete by winter solstice and she would be the most powerful sa'necari, dark mage, and paladin of the death god Bellocar, which had ever existed. Shaurone would fall in a day and the known world would follow.
As she left the altars, a young mon approached with a basin and another with towels. Margren cleaned her hands and the blade. As an afterthought she turned to her acolyte and said, "Show mercy to the boy." Then she walked away, not waiting to watch the blade still the child's heart.
A slender mon approached her as she shed her vestments, his slanted eyes a glowing amaranth, and a wisp of a black beard framed his large, sensual lips. "Farendarc is in Vorgensburg," the Waejontori adept told her.
"Good. Once Aejys is dead we can move on to other things."
* * * *
"Ie. Ie. Ie," Tagalong murmured. "Father of Stone, bear witness, I see him first, I'm taking him out from the back." She smashed her broad stout fist on the table so hard the wood groaned and trembled. She leaned into Brendorn's face and a ray of sunlight falling across her from a parting in the curtains lit her hair to the color of flame.
"Sometimes, Tagalong," Brendorn smiled, relief and hope showing in every angle of his face, "the best kind of friend a paladin can have is anything but another paladin."
Tagalong nodded. "Aejys don't backstab ... even to save her life. Don't mean I won't. I'm no puddin' head paladin," she bristled. "Not goin' ta let some butchersmate take out my best friend. Period. End of story. Yeah, uh huh." Then she added abruptly, "But I want one thing fer ya ta understand. That's ya don't mix it up with this piece of fucked shit. Ya and I both know that sword at yer side is a lie and a fraud, fer appearances only. If ya encounter him, ya gotta rabbit and yell. This household has been handlin' far worse things than Farendarc fer two years now. Ya leave him ta us. Promise me."
"I'll try..."
Tagalong gave him a hard assessing look, heavy on the dubious side. "If anything happened ta ya now, it'd break Aejys heart fer sure. Promise ya won't do anything foolish."
"I promise."
"And if there's time I'll find me a red raven."
"A what?"
Tagalong showed him a sneering grin. "Between me and the doorpost."
* * * *
Isranon ignored the stares he always drew as he strode to the farthest end of Dragonshead and emerged into the air to stand in the windswept night, sucking air to still the shaking in his body and awareness. The moment he learned of the rite Margren intended, Isranon had headed for the surface to be as far from it as possible. The energies always leaked out, despite the heavy shielding in the Chamber of Hecatomb. Where others of his kind, other sa'necari – Isranon tried not to focus on the fact that he was one of them – drank in the victims' suffering and terror like psychic wine, it made him nauseous. Sometimes he handled it better and sometimes worse. So much depended on what had happened already the day he encountered it, what his reserves of self control were like.
He could not bear to be within sensing or hearing distance of others' suffering when he could no do nothing to affect it. There was so little he could do to affect it. Mostly Isranon chose his dead father's path of passive resistance among the monsters, as he did now, but he would defend himself if forced – in that much he differed from his father's beliefs and he had that from his godfather, the lycan lawgiver, Nevin.
Isranon moved deeper into the ruins, finding a tree sheltered spot and settled cross-legged. He took out his flute from a oiled case that hung around his neck and began to play. The sound soothed his heart. He was Isranon, son of Isranon, son of Isranon, all the way back to Isranon called the Dawnhand, speaker to spirits.
His broad shouldered, sturdy body bore many agèd scars beneath his robes that refused to be healed away, no matter how many times he fed – scars from the times he had offered himself in the place of others when the more violent of his sa'necari brethrens wished to punish their cattle out of hand and he could not bear to witness it. They thought he liked pain, when actually he could not bear to witness the suffering of the helpless when he knew himself strong enough to endure their rough handling, being one of their own.
And he endured it always without a sound, giving them no satisfaction in their violence, no gift of terror to soak up and savor. Physical pain and the anguish of the spirit were not the same. What he could not understand was why, when blood should have healed all – why did he scar when the others did not? Even for one who had chosen not to cross the line into full darkness with the rites, blood still should have healed all. They dared not go too far with him because he belonged to the prince. But, in a world steeped in treachery, there would come a time when the prince would not be looking – and Isranon watched his back. Yet he refused to deny his name or take a life out of appetite or rite to increase his powers and only Mephistis' patronage had kept him alive for the last three years.
A nibari stole into the shelter with him, settling against him. She pushed under his arm so that her head lay on his lap, turning slightly to offer him her neck. Rose was tiny, but nicely filled out at breast and hips. Her hair spread in a light brown wealth across him. The nibari, often derisively called nibblets, were the main cattle intended for light feeding; genetically altered humans been bred for docility. Then there were the depnanē, those marked for death in the rites or complete consumption – most often captives taken from villages and other places or purchased as slaves.
Isranon glanced down at her and then away. "You should go back, Rose," he told her. "The rougher ones tend to single out any they think I favor."
"But you're hungry, I sensed it when you passed me."
Isranon wanted to deny it, but Rose was right. He could feel his fangs pricking his tongue. They were fully descended. He counted it good that sa'necari were so randomly fertile since they were the vilest feeders on death imaginable, even worse than the vampires. He hated his own kind. Waejonan had forced the sa'necari state upon the descendants of Isranon Dawnhand as the price of sparing their families and eventually it had altered their genes so that they had begun to be born sa'necari as it was with the other lineages. For those who came to style themselves the Dark Brothers of the Light it was considered a curse. They had fled into hiding, and were hunted down as heretics for living in peaceful symbiosis with their nibari and other races.
He brushed her hair from her neck, turning her in his arms and broke the skin, drinking gently. In the shadows, a figure watched. The newcomer was tall, broad shouldered and wore his hair slicked back to the base where it was braided into a wealth of tiny braids. After a while, the mon walked on.
* * * *
The L-shaped stable of the Cock and Boar dominated the northeast corner of the courtyard quad. Large double doors faced south with a small postern door on the west side. The four roomy box stalls squared the four corners and another four lined the west wall. The place smelled of hay and animals. The smaller stalls contained the various mounts of the inn's guests and animals held over for shipment to foreign ports. Hay covered the flag-stoned floor and bales stood piled in two of the box stalls as well as stacked in the loft. Brendorn glanced about for Clemmerick who lived in the loft and cared for the place and its animals. He had discovered that if he asked anyone who was not of Aejys' household where to find Josh he usually got a reply of "You mean the Sot? I don't know. Sleeping one off someplace." So he had gone looking for Clemmerick. When the sylvan could not find him, he walked to Gwyndar's large box stall and leaned over the door. The young half-breed peered in. He saw the sot's hunched figure half buried by the straw as if hiding. As soon as Clemmerick had gotten him back from Branch's, Josh had headed for the barn.
"Josh?"
"Go 'way," Josh snarled crossly.
Brendorn flipped the catch and entered, securing the door behind him. He knelt in the straw, brushing it aside until he could see the sot's face. Josh winced and tried to burrow deeper, but each time Brendorn patiently dug him out again. "I want to talk to you. Aejys is rather fond of you."
; Josh did not reply. He was thoroughly drunk and still drinking. Straw thatched his brown head and bristled from his beard alongside driblets of whiskey. Sweat and spilt booze stained his shirt in a rancid mess. He was sweating hard despite the night's cool air, sweating whiskey through every pore.
Brendorn got closer on his hands and knees. "You shouldn't drink so much. You'll be sick before morning."
"Don't matter. Don't care," Josh gave him a look that would have been savage if he had been sober. Instead it was slightly peculiar, very odd, and in no way threatening.
"You don't like me," Brendorn spoke gently, taking the bite out of his words.
"Nah, I don't." Josh took another swig, capped the flask, and shoved it behind him as if afraid Brendorn would take it away.
"Why? We haven't even spoken until now." Brendorn settled cross-legged beside Josh.
"Yer Aejys husband."
"Ah," Brendorn nodded thoughtfully, remembering how often it had seemed as if half the realm were in love with her. "So you are in love with Aejys."
"That's straight. Best woman ever was. Traded me nightmare for nightmare."
Brendorn sensed the meaning of Josh's words and the realization stunned him. "She told you about Bucharsa?"
Josh nodded solemnly. "Traded me nightmare for nightmare. Took guts."
"She hasn't spoken to anyone else about it. You must be special to her."
Josh brightened. "Think so?"
"I do. Will you share with me what happened there? Then I can help Aejys."
"Why?" Josh glared suspiciously, moving away from Brendorn. Belatedly Josh saw his flask lying between them. "Why didn't she tell ya?"
Brendorn picked up Josh's flask.
"Thas mine."
"I know," Brendorn extended it to him.
Josh regarded Brendorn with an odd intensity, measuring him with that inner eye awakened by booze and the holadil, the sylvan drug that would never leave his system. For a fleeting moment Brendorn felt like a pinioned bird beneath that gaze. The skin on his neck prickled as he felt a pure ethereal power rise around him. He could smell power, taste it as a dry metallic sourness on his tongue.
