“This isn’t about vengeance.”
In all their names…
Threading through the warrior suddenly, a shredding pain rose and faded in a heartbeat. Morghan felt something twist inside him, Scúrhand seeing it where he circled closer, wary suddenly.
“You see something,” the mage said. Not a question. “You’ve seen it since we arrived here. What?”
Morghan shook his head slowly. “I hear it. The blade has a voice. For me, at least.”
Where Morghan held the sword out, the mage appraised it, the blue-white damask seeming to shift and flow in the dagger’s pale light. He glanced to the shield, saw a hint of the same pattern in the beaten steel of its rim. “The arms of Barrend are too-long separated, perhaps. Anxious to know each other again.”
Morghan only shrugged. “Arsanc had a people who looked to him for salvation, and he sold them as chattel. I called for those who would follow me and found six strong enough, six brave enough. If you’d gone with me, you’d be dead along with them.” The warrior’s voice was even. “Arsanc will not hold this blade.”
Scúrhand was silent again.
“Can you fly us out?”
The mage glanced to the darkness above them. “They’ll be waiting for us. We should regain strength, let them wonder if we’re dead before we surprise them.”
“They won’t wait. What’s here is too important to them.” Morghan raised the blade. “They’ll kill for this mark…”
As if in answer, there was a dull crash of thunder from above. Along the lines of the tall arches, dust shook and fell.
Morghan appraised the flat shadow of the pool bottom above him, faint light rippling beyond it now. “Ectauth expected to pick us up from the water, dead or alive,” he said thoughtfully. “Claim the shield. He’ll be panicking now. Vulnerable.”
Another blast from above. Scúrhand shook his head. “Of course…”
As with every other time, it was more a moment of awareness than an actual decision. An acceptance that the fight closing in on them was the only path open. No other options, no other alternatives to that final stand. Neither of them spoke as they checked weapons, Morghan unslinging the empty scabbard of his longsword and casting it aside. He fit the new blade to belt and hand, swinging it carefully in ever-wider arcs.
It was a warrior’s ritual, Scúrhand knowing it from observation. Morghan had been trained to the sword from childhood, and it showed. Each morning, each evening, every moment of respite in campaign or exploration, the warrior checked each weapon he carried for heft and weakness, a blade or bow fought with a hundred times examined as if it might have been brand new.
Scúrhand’s skill with a dagger had been mostly accidental when he and the warrior had first met, and checking that his scabbards weren’t about to fall off was the extent of his preparation for combat. So many showdowns in the three years since then. So many times like that first time, back to back against an ever-shifting sea of foes and running on the timeless instinct to just survive.
They were older now, stronger. Always in the end, though, there was someone a little stronger, a little better than you.
Always in the end, it came down to something deeper than strength.
They shot out through the pool faster than even Scúrhand had thought himself capable of flying them both, a half-dozen passes made around the inside of the tomb to build up speed before they climbed. Morghan held tight to the mage, didn’t blink against the shock of cold water that hit him like a body blow, then against the sudden riot of light and frantic bowshot that met them as they emerged into the chasm.
Morghan had already picked their spot, Scúrhand twisting as they soared. Arrows passed harmlessly by them as he dropped the warrior to the open terrace where the bridge had fallen, Ectauth standing at the fore this time where his force was circled to all sides. Scúrhand stayed aloft, the air a blur before him as the screen of arcane force he summoned up shattered a wall of bowshot that came his way. The silver battlecaster’s voice rang out against the stones, frantically ordering the archers to stand down, but Scúrhand could see that their attention was already fixed firmly on the opposite side of the cavern.
There, Morghan had stepped to the terrace edge, every eye in the Norgyr troop following the slow swinging of the blade in his hand where he held it out over dark water below. The damask pattern of its steel caught the bright light of evenlamps around the room, flaring like the sun on clear water. No one moved.
Ectauth’s gaze looked to be as dispassionate as he could make it, but Scúrhand noted the anger in the battlecaster’s eyes as he drifted slowly closer. There was no sign of Thiri with him, no time to look for her. “If you wish to parlay, say your piece,” he called.
“That one drops the blade safe to the ground,” Ectauth shouted. “Both of you submit. When we’ve crossed the frontier, you’ll be released to your own fate.”
Where Morghan shifted suddenly, a dagger that hadn’t been in his hand a moment before flashed as it buried itself in the neck of a lone scout coming up almost unseen from the side. The would-be assassin fell noisily.
“Let’s assume the surrender option is off the table,” Scúrhand called.
“Here are our terms,” Morghan shouted over him. “Your lord Arsanc needs a message sent. You can take it or I can, delivered along with your head.”
There was a rustling of bows, Arsanc’s archers eager to begin the bloodletting. Too eager, Scúrhand thought.
“Madmen, fools, and heroes all fit the same grave.” The young voice caught him and Morghan by equal surprise, both wheeling to see Thiri standing alone where she had slipped through the ranks. She was limping, her leg still bleeding. When Scúrhand tried to meet her gaze, she looked away.
Beneath Ectauth’s anger, there was no trace of the uncertainty that Scúrhand heard in Thiri’s voice. This should have been a precision operation, a night of stealth and recovery. The sage’s death was something the girl had already paid for in her conscience, but the battlecaster was thinking only about what he might pay if he failed to deliver the goods whose retrieval he had been charged with. A tension between the two Norgyr spellcasters that Scúrhand hoped desperately he and Morghan could use.
“The message is this.” Morghan called to Ectauth, but his eyes were on the girl. “The right to wield power is earned by deed. Not delivered by proxies, stolen and paid for by murder.”
Ectauth only laughed, Morghan’s glance shifting to where the Norgyr battlecaster stepped forward. “And what deeds have earned you the right to a king’s blade?”
“Arsanc sold his people…”
“The Lord Arsanc made rightful disposition of those who rejected his flag and his will,” Ectauth shouted. “The Lord Arsanc surrendered lands in the name of peace that could not be defended, except by those with a wish to die beneath your banner, mercenary.”
Only because he was watching, Scúrhand saw Thiri’s reaction to the Norgyr captain’s words. Where he’d shifted to keep his shield between the closest archers and himself, Morghan froze.
“I know you,” Ectauth laughed. “All your pathetic pursuit on the Sorcerers’ Isle, you thought you wouldn’t be noticed? Watched in return as you watched us? Your name came easily enough. Then came the memory that one of that same name had led a futile assault from the Lord Arsanc’s lands to the mountain lord’s own halls. A self-styled warlord and his mercenary band taking on a mountain giant garrison. How many made it out alive behind you?”
In Morghan’s hands, the sword called Barrend’s Bane flared blue-white. Then it began.
It should have been over quickly. They were outnumbered, outpowered, the odds too much like those of too many previous fights that Scúrhand had been sure would be his last. He counted eleven figures surging even as Morghan slammed into them, saw Ectauth curse as a bolt of spellfire intended for the warrior struck one of his own lieutenants instead.
In each fight like it, there was always a moment when the tide turned. A point where odds fir
st were evened, then the balance tipped in favor of improbable victory or timely escape. There was no tide this time, though. There was only Morghan, moving with a speed and a fury that drove him through the ranks of Arsanc’s forces like a bloody storm.
He was gaining no ground, though, Scúrhand in the best position to see it from the air. Too many, more coming, a dozen pouring in from above. That was Morghan’s plan, though, and Ectauth’s dark expression showed that he knew it. The battlecaster’s spellpower was focused for maximum destruction, and all but useless now where the warrior fought within the screen of bodies pressing against him.
Scúrhand stayed in motion as he watched, not bothering to waste his own spellpower against Ectauth and the wards of protection he could sense even at the distance between them. The girl Thiri was another issue. But though Scúrhand did his best to draw her fire along with the attention of the archers, in the ebb and flow of the power that passed between them, he noted the uncertainty in the young mage’s tactics.
His own first salvo had been ice and fire, but she had countered it with an ease that astounded him, then filled the air around Scúrhand with darkness and mist that kept him moving, prevented him clear line of sight to the battle below. She was focusing on harrying him, he realized. Ignoring Ectauth’s shouted orders to target Morghan, the battlecaster trying in vain to break through the press of bodies.
Shadow blurred Scúrhand’s vision, Ectauth unleashing spellfire in close quarters even as Morghan slipped back and three more of the battlecaster’s own warriors were cut down. The pulse of light and flame suspended the melee into motionless moments, frozen images.
In one of those moments, Scúrhand saw the snarling Ectauth finally break through. He tried to shout where Morghan spun in the mortal dance his wrath made, but the mage had no voice to overcome the screams of the dying and the steady crash of steel that surrounded the warrior where he fought.
Spellpower pulsed in the battlecaster’s hand, a twisted whip of smoke and shadow lashing out, coursing through Morghan as brands of piercing black flame. Scúrhand saw the warrior cry out. But then even in the moment that it should have taken for Ectauth to finish him, the battlecaster’s sudden scream rose in dark echo, and the tendrils of black fire wrapped tight in his fist flickered and flared out as twin bolts of white light tore through his armor and convulsed him as if he’d taken a blade in the back. Morghan reacted without seeing, screaming with pain as he twisted back and around and drove the blue-white blade through the battlecaster’s throat.
From the air, Scúrhand could only stare to where Thiri stood, eyes wide as if somehow only just realizing that her spellpower had put her captain down. Then she was moving even as cries of treachery arose from the warriors closest to her, a surge of shock and anger rising as she ran to Morghan’s side.
The dagger the girl drew told Scúrhand that her spellpower was close to spent. She unleashed a last barrage of magical force against a howling axe-fighter who struck from the side, and who fell to Morghan’s blade as the warrior spun past in a blur of blood and steel.
Then four more were on them, Thiri slashing awkwardly at the closest attackers as they pushed in. Scúrhand laid down three points of arcane shielding around them, but the fight was too fast. He could see Morghan shouting, could feel the words without hearing, telling the girl to run.
She didn’t.
Where a pair of archers erupted from the shadows, she spun toward them. Four arrows that would have claimed Morghan unleashed a shroud of blood as they tore through her.
Afterward, when he looked back on it, when he tried to remember, Scúrhand couldn’t summon up the images that should have recalled for him what happened next.
In his head, he thought he heard a scream. A voice that was Morghan’s but not Morghan’s somehow. He saw arrows fly, saw the shield the warrior had borne from the Myrnan ruins seem to pull them from the air as he fought with a ferocity Scúrhand had never seen before. And through the fury of the warrior’s movements, the mage imagined for a moment that he could see a blue-white light in Morghan’s eyes. A glow to match the steady pulse flaring now from the damasked heart of the blade as it bit deep again and again.
Scúrhand couldn’t see the moment when Ectauth fell in the chaos, but he was dead with the rest of them when Morghan finally slowed. The warrior’s armor was flecked red with gore, breath white on the air, the cold of the chasm chamber deeper now. He wiped his face and arms with Ectauth’s black cloak. He didn’t wipe the blade as he slipped it to his belt. Didn’t need to, no blood clinging to the blue-white steel.
“What in fate’s name was that?” Scúrhand was crouched in the shadow a short distance away, faint light showing above through narrow windows he hadn’t seen before. Dawn breaking outside. He had briefly considered holding the question for a better time, realizing in the end that he had no idea what that time would look like.
“That was staying alive.”
Where Thiri had fallen, Morghan knelt at her side. Her skin was white as ice and blood-streaked, the arrows fanning out across her chest. But even as Morghan fumbled bloody fingers at her neck, Scúrhand called out behind him, could see the faint rise and fall of the black shafts.
“She’s breathing…”
Morghan felt the blood weak at her neck, saw the steel-edged hunting heads where they punched out through her back. He had the skill to bind the wounds, but there was no point. The girl was at the edge of death, no way to pull the arrows without only hastening the end.
“Search Ectauth,” he whispered to Scúrhand, fear in his voice. “He’ll have healing…”
“I did. Nothing.”
Save her… whispered the breathless voice of vengeance as it threaded through his mind, and Morghan’s vision blurred suddenly, eyes burning.
He remembered Eltolitinus, remembered the faces of the others and saw the dread in their eyes that was their last sight before the final darkness, as they were consumed body and soul. He remembered the mountain giant’s halls, heard the howling of wolves and the screams of those who had followed him. All the ones he couldn’t save.
“Save her,” he whispered, and he felt the words twist in him like a thing closer to prayer than any oath the warrior had ever spoken.
He felt the metal of the bastard sword grow warm beneath his gore-streaked hand.
Without thinking, he grasped the girl’s fingers, forced them closed around the haft. He felt her shudder, saw color twist through her cheeks as he quickly snapped the shafts that pinned her, grasped each in turn and pulled. In the dark sleep of pain, she screamed, but even as she did, Morghan saw the wounds close over as she consumed the healing power held in that blade of damasked steel, the blood-streaked skin smooth again as her eyes snapped open.
The sword slipped from her hand, clattering to the stones as she scrambled back. Scúrhand was close by now, catching the disorientation in her eyes that he knew would quickly pass. But it was the sword he stared at as Morghan picked it up.
The warrior turned away, looked to the light above and walked toward a distant flight of stairs twisting up from the shadows of the cavern.
“It’s done,” Scúrhand said to Thiri. He saw her staring to the carnage around her, wide-eyed as if waking from a half-remembered dream. “You’re safe, with us at least. If you’re still here when Arsanc sends another force to discover what happened to this one, I wouldn’t like your chances.”
She followed him shakily as he followed Morghan in turn. The stairs led on to a passage he recognized from his previous dealings with the dead Razeen. The main doors of the citadel were ahead, open now where the sentinels they’d first avoided had been called in by Ectauth. The scent of sea air and the rising sun were beyond.
Scúrhand fought the urge to break for the library, the incalculable worth of lore still scattered there. When he had searched the dismembered Ectauth, he found scroll tubes that had been slipped to his pack by quick instinct. Another time for the rest, he thought. He had a more important myster
y to assess at present.
Beyond the doorway, Morghan stood atop a rise of stone a dozen strides away. He had the sword in hand, was swinging it idly, a dark silhouette against the sky.
“Vindicator,” the warrior called.
“You?” There was an edge in Scúrhand’s voice. It took him a moment to hear it, then another moment for him to recognize the fear there. “Taking vengeance against whom? You blame Arsanc for what happened here? Ectauth?”
“I blame myself. For all of it.”
There was a familiar weariness in the warrior’s voice, but something else as well. A kind of peace Scúrhand hadn’t heard in all the time since Morghan had returned from the north, but it chilled him now, the mage not sure why. In any of the previous narrow escapes he had followed Morghan into, fear had never been in short supply. But before he could think on it, Thiri’s voice came from behind him, stronger than he would have expected.
“You seek vengeance against your own past, you fight a foe you’ll never defeat.”
Morghan turned to appraise her for a long moment, a darkness flashing momentarily in his gaze. And then he laughed out loud. From somewhere below the cliffs, the call of seabirds rang out as if in echo.
The warrior shook his head. “ ‘Vindicator’ is the blade’s name. He was right,” he said, pointing to Scúrhand. Thiri’s look told him she didn’t understand, but Morghan only laughed again.
Scúrhand watched, smiling himself after a time. “Are you absolutely sure you’re quite all here?” He caught Thiri’s eye as he glanced back, but it was Morghan she moved toward.
“More sure today,” the warrior said. He shrugged as he nodded to Thiri. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
There was nothing more to say as they returned to the horses, just waking from a fitful sleep within the hissing curtain of the wind. They rested themselves only for a short while before they set off, Morghan with Thiri behind him, Scúrhand thoughtful as they rode out against the red flood of dawn.
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