The quality and coloration of the female servants at the castle was fodder for speculation and rumors but the only person who really seemed to mind was Urgulana. Her own tastes, it seemed, ran toward petite blonds with lean, almost boyish figures. Once Boric figured this out, he was able to negotiate a compromise with Urgulana that dictated that she was to have final say over the hiring of seamstresses and kitchen staff. It wasn’t long before one could ascertain someone’s function within the castle solely from a one’s hair color, and it was not uncommon to hear within the walls of Kra’al Brobdingdon such odd utterances as “The new gingers are hopeless with cobwebs” or “My soup is cold; fetch me a blond.”
Boric kept very busy over the next several years. When he wasn’t evaluating the staff or officiating over some ceremony or meeting, he was mincing trolls or dodging assassination attempts by his brothers. His brothers’ preferred method was poison; Boric’s food-tasters had such a short life expectancy that they had to be hired from consecutively more distant lands where they were unfamiliar with the notorious nature of the position. Sometimes, however, one or both of his brothers would fall on him in some dark corner of the castle, attempting to cut his throat. Having grown up with the two murderous scoundrels, Boric managed to stay one step ahead of them, but after having lost count of the number of attempts they had made on his life, he finally went to his father to complain. King Toric, unfortunately, seemed to view assassination attempts as a rite of passage for future kings. “Why, one time my brothers locked me in a beet cellar for a fortnight,” he exclaimed. “I survived on nothing but beets and my own urine. I was orange for three weeks.”
King Toric died of a heart attack on Boric’s seventh wedding anniversary. The next day, Boric ascended to the throne and assigned both of his brothers to oversee the pumice mines of Bjill. This engendered a fair amount of goodwill among his subjects, who for the most part considered Yoric and Goric to be haughty, capricious, cowardly, and cruel. Their exile was also welcomed by the rulers of the other Six Kingdoms, who found dealing with the two brothers exasperating. During trade negotiations the brothers would often make ridiculous demands to amuse themselves, such as the time they demanded ten tons of cat hair in exchange for an equivalent weight of pumice. Bjill being the only source of high-quality pumice in Dis, the other kings found themselves in a bidding war, each endeavoring to determine how many tons of cat hair he could come up with on short notice, as well as trying desperately to find a secondary buyer for several million shorn cats. When not one of them could promise more than a few hundred pounds of cat hair, Yoric and Goric stormed out of the negotiations in mock disgust and spent the rest of the night getting drunk and laughing uproariously at their cleverness. In the meantime, thousands of Ytriskians went hungry for the lack of potatoes, which is what they had actually been sent to acquire.
So there was little grieving when Yoric and Goric were exiled to Bjill, and even less when it was reported three years later that Goric had been accidentally abraded to death in a pumice avalanche. To no one’s delight, Yoric lasted much longer, succumbing to the Bjills only a few months before Boric himself died.
Boric spent thirteen years doing the mostly dull and thankless work of ruling Ytrisk. His days were occupied by boring, pointless ceremonies and even more boring and pointless meetings. The cachet of the king was such that people seemed to think progress was being made on whatever issue was bothering them if they could simply get Boric to hear their grievances even if there was absolutely nothing he could do about them. He met with the pumice miners about the horrendous conditions of the mines; he met with the bakers about the price of flour; he met with shepherds about the number of sheep that were falling into crevices (this was before the epidemic of suicide among Ytriskian sheep was widely known); he met with farmers about the lack of rain. The aggrieved contingent would go away feeling better that the matter was in good hands, slowly become more disgruntled over the next several months about the lack of progress being made, and eventually demand another meeting.
The only part of the job he enjoyed was declaring war on Skaal. He did it whenever he could. Sometimes the Skaal would antagonize him by raiding one of the border towns or confiscating a shipment of pumice traveling through their territory, but most of the time he was just bored. Declaring war on Skaal increased patriotism among the people, made them forget about all their other problems, killed off some of the excess population, often resulted in the acquisition of some valuable booty, and — most importantly — relieved Boric’s crushing boredom. It was too bad about the killing, of course, but most of the peasants were probably going to die of plague or starvation anyway. There was a lot of that going around and not much Boric could do about it. And at least he had the balls to lead his troops into battle, not like some kings who kept on attending boring meetings throughout the course of a war.
Boric was popular among the other kings (except for King Corbet, who ascended to the Skaal throne shortly after Boric became King of Ytrisk). Part of this was goodwill engendered by Boric’s father. Toric had been an honorable man and generally well liked, although his wife, Gulbayna, was considered uncouth and was nearly as difficult to look at as Boric’s own wife, Urgulana. Fortunately, Boric seemed to take after his father both in looks and bearing. To Boric’s dismay, though, his mother decided to take on the role of a sort of goodwill ambassador to the other kingdoms after his father’s death; she did so much damage to Ytrisk’s reputation abroad that Boric had to form a special diplomatic corps to follow behind her on her travels and apologize. Her death, five years after Toric’s, created an international incident that nearly caused King Jeddac of Blinsk to break off all trade with Ytrisk: having gorged herself on the poisonous crayfish of Lake Blinsk, she fell into a well and rotted there for three days, sickening several hundred Blinskians. Only the finesse of Boric’s diplomatic corps kept Jeddac from refusing to send any more salt or copper (the chief exports of Blinsk) to Ytrisk.
The resolution of the Gulbayna Incident — as it was called — was good news for Boric, because Ytrisk was still embroiled in an on-again, off-again war with Skaal and couldn’t afford to deal with a trade war with Blinsk at the same time. Relations between Skaal and Ytrisk improved a bit after King Corbet died in one of the many Skaal invasions of the southern part of Ytrisk, about a year after the death of Boric’s mother. Corbet had never completely gotten over his humiliation at the hand of Boric, and he always seemed to inject personal sentiment into the age-old conflict between the two countries. King Celiac and King Toric had always been at each other’s throats too, but it was never personal. Declaring war on each other, burning each other’s crops, and stealing each other’s cattle was just what kings did. There was no call for bringing emotions into it the way Corbet did. It was unprofessional.
So it was a relief to Boric when Corbet was killed by a chance hit by an Ytriskian arrow in what was called by Ytriskian historians The Fourteenth Battle of Plik. The battle had no conclusive result (in keeping with the spirit of the thirteen previous battles of Plik), but the death of Prince Corbet at first threatened to escalate the hostilities between the two kingdoms even further: although Corbet had clearly been seen to fall from a parapet with an arrow lodged in his throat, his body was never found. The Skaal accused the Ytriskians of stealing the corpse, but the Ytriskians pointed out that this was obviously impossible: they’d have had to send men a hundred yards behind enemy lines and surreptitiously drag the corpse across an active battlefield. If they had men capable of such a feat, surely the Fourteenth Battle of Plik would have ended more decisively. The mystery of the missing corpse was never solved.
This was not the last strange occurrence revolving around the death of one of the kings of the Six Kingdoms. King Loren of Avaress, moments after being severely mauled by a wild boar in the southern reaches of the Thick Forest, got to his feet and staggered off into the woods, never to be seen again. Similar rumors surrounded the deaths of some of the other kings over the next several years. Boric dismi
ssed it all as old wives’ tales. He didn’t know what had happened to Corbet’s body, but then he didn’t know where the sun went when it set over the Sea of Dis, what lay beyond the Wastes of Preel, or why potatoes were so damned expensive. It wasn’t his job to figure everything out. It was hard enough just sitting through the meetings.
NINETEEN
Boric made his way to the edge of the roof and lowered himself through a window. The library occupied six large rooms in a temple-like building. Boric understood that it was essentially a diminutive replica of the original Library of Avaress, which had been burned during the riots after the Fall. The original library had been a vast structure with dozens of rooms, each containing thousands of volumes — most of which had been lost in the fire. Many of the books in the new library had singed covers, and one entire room was filled with fragments of books that still needed to be reassembled and bound. There were desks where scribes could work, filling in gaps of books from copies, many of which had been borrowed from the libraries of the other five kingdoms. Boric himself had recently given approval for a temporary trade of some fifty volumes from the Brobdingdon Library to Avaressa. The process of recovering knowledge that had been lost in the Fall was laborious and time consuming; it had been going on since the Rise of the Six Kingdoms and, given the paltry resources dedicated to it, would probably take another hundred years. Even then, it would be incomplete: there had been only one copy of many of the books that were destroyed.
Boric spent the rest of the night poring through ancient books, looking for information on the Seven Blades of Brakboorn. It became clear in short order that he was not going to find a book entitled Breaking the Curse of the Seven Blades of Brakboorn. The blades were only mentioned in a handful of relatively recent volumes, and the information was scant. Most of it Boric already knew, and there was no mention of any sort of curse. This told him something, though: the blades had almost certainly been created after the Fall, after the library burned.
He next turned his inquiries toward Brand, the mysterious stranger who had given him the sword, but found nothing at all. As far as the Library of Avaress was concerned, there was no “Lord Brand,” nor any other person of any importance named Brand in the Land of Dis. So was he someone else, traveling under an assumed name? But the witch had told him that Brand was forming a seventh kingdom beyond the Wastes of Preel — and she had used that name, Brand. So if it was an assumed name, it was one that he had stuck with for twenty years.
Boric was startled by the sound of a door opening in the next room. Looking up, he saw that the first light of dawn was filtering through the windows. He hastily grabbed up all the books on the table in front of him and retreated to a dimly lit storage-room. With any luck, he could remain there undiscovered until nightfall.
He had managed to retrieve books on a great variety of topics and, having a full day to kill, he read extensively in several of them. What he found was that no matter where he started — metallurgy, history, magic — the thread eventually dead-ended in the same place: in Quanfyrr, home of the elves.
The elves, a reclusive and disagreeable people, were thought to live somewhere in the heart of the Thick Forest,[9] to the east of the Dagspaal range. No one knew exactly where, because the elves rarely left the forest and humans rarely entered it — and even more rarely exited. Xenophobic and self-sufficient, the elves almost never traded with merchants from the Six Kingdoms; their only known export was evil talismans. In fact, if it weren’t for the occasional appearance of some accursed artifact of one kind or another, the powers that be in the Six Kingdoms might have dismissed elves as mythical creatures.
For the most part, elves are a flighty and impractical people who spend their time singing songs of a mythical golden age when elves ruled the land of Dis and reflecting on abstract philosophical questions,[10] but occasionally some mischievous elf will get it into his head to design an evil talisman of some sort — generally a ring or sword, but sometimes a more mundane object like a shovel or pair of britches. The quasi-historical ancient myths of the Old Realm relate one instance in which the Lands of Men were nearly overrun by a great army of shit trolls commanded by a peasant who had come into possession of an accursed chamber pot. The latest instance of havoc caused by someone running amok with an evil artifact of elven design,[11] occurring just before the Fall of the Old Realm, prompted King Calapus to send an envoy to the Thick Forest to impress upon the elves the importance of keeping better tabs on their “malevolent talismans.” The elves were at first quite agreeable, swearing that no evil artifacts had been unaccounted for, promising not to create any more of them, and pledging to give the king’s servants full access to the forest to see for themselves. Of course, the Thick Forest is unaccountably vast and mostly impenetrable; the king’s inspectors were completely reliant on the elves to guide them to sites where evil artifacts might conceivably be stored. The elves sent the inspectors on a merry wild-goose chase through the forest that lasted nearly a year before Calapus lost patience, recalled the inspectors, and sent an army to subdue the forest. Five years later, having accomplished nothing but the decimation of his own army and the burning of several thousand acres of forestland, Calapus declared that his point had been made and withdrew his troops. A month later Calapus was beheaded by a mob in Avaress and the Old Realm fell apart.
If anyone knew how to break the curse of the Blades of Brakboorn, it was the elves. The damned elves, thought Boric. He had always hated the elves. Everyone hated the elves. When he was King of Ytrisk, Boric had repeatedly tried to open lines of trade with the elves to get his hands on some of their wares — like more of the rope that he had used to kill the Ogre of Chathain, which had been a gift to his father from one of the officers who had led the assault on the Thick Forest. But the elves always spurned him, insisting that they had no need of “shoddy goods that aren’t designed to last a human lifetime, let alone an elven one.” He’d have led an invasion of the forest himself if he hadn’t been certain that it would be suicide, and a pointless suicide at that. The only thing he had returned with from that meeting was a headful of elven songs that were as catchy as they were self-aggrandizing and insipid. Even now, he could barely think of the elves without finding himself humming one of their puerile tunes. The worst of them all was the “Elven Creation Hymn,” which went:
Ten thousand years ere and ten thousand years more
The spirits of Dis began their great charge
Casting leaves to the sky and dirt on the floor
A forest to make, both wondrous and large
They filled it with birds and with rocks and with plants
And with boars and with elks and with all manner of bugs
With bees and spiders and a billion or so ants
Scurrying under moss carpets and lichenous rugs
The forest, they saw, was a fine piece of work
Having trees and shrubs and plenty of deer
Devoid of all filth and all rubbish, humans and orcs
But what race can we find who deserves to live here?
Elves, elves, we are the best
Elves, elves, forget the rest
Elves, elves, casting our spells
Elves, elves, ringing our bells
And so on. It was enough to make one want to stab oneself in the head — assuming one weren’t already a walking corpse.
Going to the elves meant heading deep into the mostly uncharted Thick Forest. But what other option did he have? He reflected that if the elves refused to help him, he could at least wreak some vengeance on them. Formidable as they were, the elves were unlikely to have any defenses against the undead, he thought. And even if they did, maybe he could at least manage to slaughter a few dozen of them with Brakboorn. The thought would have warmed his heart were it not an inert, rotting chunk of flesh.
When the sounds of footsteps and pages turning ceased outside the storage room door, Boric ventured out into the library again. The building was dark. He went down to the first
floor and opened the door. The streets were empty except for a stray dog who growled menacingly at him. Boric growled back and the dog ran away, whimpering.
Boric skulked down side streets and alleys, avoiding any sign of life. Most of the citizens were in bed, but lamps still burned in some houses and shops, and city watchmen patrolled the streets in pairs. He made his way to the city wall and began to climb. Scaling the wall was arduous but not impossible; the masons hadn’t coated the inside of the wall with stucco as they had the outside: the wall was intended to keep barbarians out, not to keep the citizens inside. He was already halfway up the twenty-foot wall when he felt a pinprick in his lower back. Trying to focus on not losing his grip with his charred, skeletal right hand, he ignored it and continued climbing. The pinprick was followed by another, and another. Scowling, he turned to see a lone archer standing in the street some fifty feet away. He was stringing another arrow. Already three of them protruded from Boric’s back.
“Can you stop that?” Boric called down to the man. “I really need to concentrate here.”
The archer let loose another arrow, skewering Boric’s good hand.
“Not helping,” said Boric, waving his hand in a vain attempt to dislodge the arrow, the head of which protruded three inches from his palm.
“Just doing my job,” said the archer, stringing another arrow. “No one’s allowed to climb the wall after dark.”
“So if it was daytime, I could climb to my heart’s content?”
The archer thought for a moment. “No one’s allowed to climb the wall. If it was daytime, you’d get a warning first.” He loosed another arrow, which lodged in Boric’s left thigh.
“Can you stop that for a moment?” Boric asked. “Let’s think about this rationally. The wall is meant to keep people out, right? Barbarians and such?”
“Lot of strange rumors going around,” said the man. “Talk of spies and wraiths and goblin armies. Can’t take any chances.” He pulled another arrow from his quiver.
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