The Horse Lord (The Book of Years Series 1)

by Peter Morwood

  “The closest is here,” Gemmel’s finger touched a red dot in the central Jouvaine provinces, “but it’s right on the Empire’s border. Provincial governors have been lax about magic in past years, but with two city-states in rebellion, Imperial law is stringently enforced again.”

  “Rebellion financed by Alban silver?”

  “Another reason why sending you there isn’t a good idea. Being Alban in the Empire is bad enough at the best of times. If anyone discovered you were searching for a sorcerous talisman, you wouldn’t live to see trial. But the ban on use of magic works both ways and it’s blown up in Etzel’s face. Duergar isn’t his only agent, and when a Vreijek overlord caught another stealing documents from his library, it caused much more than gossip.”

  “Altrou, Vreijaur’s an Imperial province. An ally. Even I know that. So why would the Grand Warlord send a thief—?”

  “Because the documents were spellcastings. He couldn’t officially request them because it meant admitting interest in papers so illegal they shouldn’t exist. Theft was the only way and after some, ah, persuasion, the man admitted who was paying him. Etzel barely weathered the scandal, and it lost him so much support it’s a wonder he’s still in office.”

  “What’s the Empire so afraid of? Alba’s lords and kings never approved of sorcery, but they didn’t see any need to pass a law against it.”

  Gemmel poured wine and took a careful sip. Yet again Aldric showed no knowledge of the sorcerer many years ago whose aid to clan Talvalin had turned out far different than what was expected.

  “Perhaps because they’ve never had its full power used against them. I travelled, before I came to Alba. My son Ernol and I wanted to see new countries, and learn new things. Until the day we reached a village in Tergoves province that was being… The Empire’s word is ‘corrected’. You can guess what it entails. There was nothing we could have, should have done, but Ernol played the hero. He rescued several people and killed two soldiers in the process. Small loss. They were butchers, enjoying their work. That afternoon, more soldiers found us.

  “There was a young man with them, in fine armour and costly clothing, who called Ernol over. He was smiling, I remember that. ‘Did you kill my soldiers?’ he asked. He had a pleasant voice, I remember that too. ‘Yes,’ said Ernol. ‘Why?’ he asked, and Ernol told him. ‘They were following their orders,’ the young man said, ‘and are expensive to replace. Can you reimburse me for the loss?’ ‘No,’ said Ernol. ‘I think you can,’ the young man said in that pleasant voice. He was still smiling…”

  Gemmel stared at empty air for several seconds, and Aldric sat very still. He knew what had to be coming next.

  “He was still smiling when he killed my son. I went a little mad. I think I screamed. I know I wept.

  I saw the young man, smiling, wiping his axe, and he was red; his horse was red; the grass and the sky and the sun, all red with the blood of my son and the rage in my brain. I raised my hand. He saw it was empty, and he smiled some more. Then I spoke the Invocation of Fire. He stopped smiling and began to burn.

  “He fell to the ground and he burned until only his armour gave shape to the cinders. I didn’t know he was the Grand Warlord’s second son. I didn’t care that I would make the Empire ban all magic on pain of death. All I knew, all I cared about, was that I killed him too quickly.

  “I didn’t repay him adequately for… For my own, my only son.”

  *

  Aldric stared unblinking at Gemmel for a time, then poured wine for himself and drank it down in a single long gulp. The alcohol’s warmth did little for the icy knot in his stomach. He had only ever seen the studious side of the man he called altrou, even during the violence of sword-training, and had sometimes wondered if Gemmel understood the intensity of his own desire for revenge. Clearly he did.

  Not repay him sufficiently… Those words might have been his own.

  “So where am I—” Now those were his own words, raspy and shrill from a mouth still dry despite the wine. Aldric cleared his throat and tried again. He asked nothing more about what Gemmel had done, because he had heard more than enough. “Where am I supposed to go? And what do I do when I get there?”

  “You go here.” Gemmel pointed to another red dot on the map. “And you come back with Ykraith.”

  “Talismans have names?”

  “Of course they do. Horses have names, dogs and cats and swords have names, why should significant artefacts of the Art Magic be otherwise? You already speak of the Echainon Spellstone with respect, so do the same with this. It’s called the Dragonwand.”

  “Dragon…”

  “What you Albans call a firedrake.” Gemmel didn’t look up from the map and missed the expression on Aldric’s face. He knew well enough what a dragon was, and the echoed word was less a question than audible dismay at being sent to find anything named for one.

  “What does this, this Dragonwand do?” For a moment he thought Gemmel was refusing to answer, then realised the enchanter was merely considering how to explain in a way Aldric could understand.

  “I’ve told you more than once how a spellstone focuses the energy of a spells,” said Gemmel after a moment. “A spellstave enhances it. You can throw a stone or arrow a certain distance. Using a sling or bow makes them go further, strike harder, be more accurate…”

  “It’s a weapon?”

  “It’s many things.” Aldric knew that tone of voice. The subject was closed.

  “So where am I going?”

  “Techaur Island.” The wizard indicated a broad swathe of blotches in the Narrow Sea south of Cerenau, more like ink spattered from a clumsily-trimmed quill than anything else. The red dot of the talisman was as large as any of them.

  “Altrou, those are the Thousand Islands. They weren’t given the name for a joke!”

  “They’re only five days’ sailing from Erdhaven.”

  “And how many days finding one particular nameless lump of rock?”

  “It’s not nameless, it’s called Techaur. Ask one of the local fishermen. Any ‘lump of rock’ big enough for a name and a cavern like the one in the record will be big enough to find without much trouble.” Gemmel looked thoughtful. “If there’s going to be trouble, that’ll come afterwards.”

  “But look, altrou, Kerys is much closer. If I took a ship from there it would be a two-day sail at most. Why don’t I—”

  “Why don’t you look at the rest of the map? There’s much more riding from here to Kerys than there is to Erdhaven. Much more time for you to be spotted. Much more time for you to be dealt with.”

  “Oh…”

  “Yes, ‘oh.’ Now, you already have tsepan and taipan, but you still need the third of the Three Blades. One to own, not to borrow. Or have you any more objections for me to dispose of?”

  Aldric could have mentioned pirates, Imperial Fleet patrol-ships or even water-monsters. Instead he twitched his mouth into a brief, humourless smile and saved his breath.

  *

  “My collection,” said Gemmel, and stepped aside as ponderous double doors slid open, releasing a faint waft of cold, dry air and a metallic scent. Aldric was well-accustomed to the unusual after so many years in a wizard’s company, but he had long wanted to see this armoury. He saw it now, rack upon rack of oiled and glinting steel lit by cool, pale light, and realised he wasn’t completely inured to marvels after all.

  He wandered up and down between the racks, casting a critical eye over enough weapons to outfit a legion of retainers. Most of them, even the strangest, could be identified as sword or axe or spear, while others left him as puzzled as any country yokel in a Hall of Curiosities. They were weapons because they were in an armoury; what they did and how they did it was a mystery.

  There was a nagging sensation that he should be looking for something in particular, and the lack of it brought him back to Gemmel empty-handed. The enchanter nodded as if expecting it.

  “Here,” the wizard said, holding out a long, flat box.
“This is what you hoped to find.”

  The box contained what Aldric expected, a taiken longsword, and he bowed before he touched it to honour gift and giver. Heavy waxed linen protected the bare tang, while the blade was covered by a black scabbard relieved by delicate filigrees of silver. Recesses to either side contained the parts of its hilt, each cradled in a shaped nest of quilted satin and dark not with enamel or bluing but because of the metal itself. Even the long grip was black, bound in braided wire to the halfway point, then finished with a skin of leather over twisted cords.

  No new-given taiken was drawn for the first time except under the light of Heaven, and Aldric contented himself with easing a handspan of blade from the scabbard. He half-expected it to be black, like swords in storybooks, but instead there were serpentine patterns of smoky blue-grey within the metal, shifting like mist on water between edges bright as mirrors.

  Finally he unwrapped the linen binding from its tang to see what was written there. By custom and practice the visible decorations on a taiken blade were thunderbolts, mythic beasts or abstract sweeps and curls. Names, boasts, curses or tallies of the dead lay out of sight beneath the grip. Aldric’s eyes narrowed as he scanned the graceful letters, flowing as if written by a pen rather than chiselled from the grey metal. They and their language were an archaic form of High Alban, so old that he had to work at the translation and hard to accept even when he understood it.

  “This can’t be true.”

  “It is,” said Gemmel. “An ancient blade to match an ancient evil.”

  “Forged was I of iron Heaven-born,” Aldric read, half to himself. “Uelan made me. I am Isileth.”

  Gemmel had no reason to deceive him, so this taiken from the stories was almost two thousand years old, older than the coming of the Horse Lords. Hilt and guards would have changed many times as style dictated, but the blade itself, one of the first to be straight and fully double-edged, had a lineage few clans could match.

  Clan Talvalin did, on the Elthanek side, and so did Aldric.

  The ribbon of steel was supposedly too hard to take a bend yet too flexible to break, and those same stories claimed its edges had been honed just once, still wet from the quenching bath. Its name was indeed Isileth, Starsteel, but it also had a more sinister title: Widowmaker. Many named-blades had dark deeds in their history, shadows like the smoke-grey snakes writhing in their bright blades, and until it vanished from history after the last Clan Wars, Isileth Widowmaker was no exception.

  Aldric secured the complex hilt, its quillons curved and forked for trapping an opponent’s blade and extending into loops to guard his fingers, then locked the pommel in place and pressed the silver-mounted scabbard to his brow. There were stilted traditional words to say when accepting a sword, but he couldn’t remember them, and for this sword they would have been inadequate.

  Instead he pulled the scabbard’s cross-strap over his head and let the taiken’s weight rest against his left hip for the first time in years. Thanks to the half-mythic reputation of this sword it was both familiar and strange, comforting yet eerie.

  “I’ll have your horses and armour ready by tomorrow,” said Gemmel, and Aldric came out of his waking dream with a start.

  “I’ll pack my own travelling gear,” he said. “And my personal kit.”

  “I don’t think I’ve overlooked anything.” Gemmel wasn’t offended, just a little curious.

  “You haven’t, altrou. I want to make sure I don’t either.”

  *

  Aldric shook his head, put down the scissors and brushed away a last few clippings. Despite many haircuts over the past years, this was the first to renew his eijo-crop with such severity. There was no reason to do it, but many things had been done without reason and this was far from the least.

  His clothing was restricted to essentials chosen for function not fashion and, apart from white shirts and linen, everything was serviceable black or deep blue with just a touch of silver to relieve their gloom. Some garments – Aldric pulled three sheathed knives from their hiding-place behind his bed – were more serviceable still. Neither his family nor, he guessed, his foster-father would approve of these Three Blades, since even venjens-eijin were expected to carry all their weapons in plain view. In a perfect world, perhaps. This was not.

  One, a balanced throwing-knife, had a sheath inside one of his long riding-boots. Another was a thin stiletto slipped into the lining of his jerkin’s left sleeve. The third was most dubious of all, a T-shaped punch dagger whose scabbard hooked to loops he had sewn beneath all his shirt-collars. It was dishonourable, an assassin’s weapon – and a possibly fatal surprise for anyone who thought him unarmed. That, Aldric reflected as he settled the tiny knife against his spine, was justification enough.

  His old shortsword hung from one side of a new double weapon-belt with Isileth on the other, until he drew the long blade up across his back and checked the look of it in his mirror. Then he hesitated for a long time, staring at his tsepan and hating it, hating what it meant, and most of all hating the cowardice prompting him to leave it behind. But finally it went onto his belt, and his Three Blades were complete for the first time in too long. With a final glance around what had been his second home, he picked up his saddlebags and closed the door.

  Gemmel was waiting near the armoury, and without comment about Aldric’s re-shortened hair he led the way to a flight of stairs. There was a stable scent of hay and horses and sure enough, past the wide doorway at the top stood a pack-pony laden with unmistakable boxes of cased armour.

  The courser in the stall beside it was midnight black and gleaming. Its harness and saddle were black leather bossed and inlaid with silver, with a short-bow, full quiver and pair of holstered telekin strapped to either side. The ornamental tassels were silver-shot blue, Talvalin colours too understated for an idle glance, and the shield behind them was uncrested black. The beast was Andarran, a graceful, fine-boned breed extinct this hundred years or more, surviving only as drawings and wistful words in old books. Any horse with even a trace of that bloodline was valued above all others, and now Aldric found himself looking at a purebred.

  “Its name is Lyard,” he heard Gemmel say as he made his saddlebags fast. The words barely registered. He had an overpowering sensation of having slipped unnoticed into a harper’s tale, one as solid as the warm horseflesh under his hand or the cold sword on his back.

  He led the Andarran courser forward, secured the pack-pony’s reins to a stirrup leather, then glanced around for the way out. Gemmel noticed his enquiring look, and touched a panel to set the back wall of the stable grinding ponderously open. A breeze whirled in, bringing birdsong and the scent of the open air, and Aldric stepped back into a world which should have seemed real, except he could no longer decide what was real any more.

  Gemmel watched the Talvalin kailin-eir with his son’s face rise to the saddle in a single easy swing and moved out behind him into the watery sunshine. “I’m sorry the weather isn’t more pleasant,” he said. Aldric didn’t care. He had never appreciated landscapes before, but this was the first he had laid eyes on in far too long and he drank it in.

  “Prices have changed since I last paid them attention, but a thousand marks should suffice.” Gemmel held out two leather wallets. “This one has five hundred in gold deniers, the other has the same in silver.” Aldric had repeated his store of thanks so often that he no longer knew what to say, so he just nodded and took the wallets, heavy and clinking pleasantly even though their tops were laced down tight. “If it’s not enough, and you hurry, you can win more at the Erdhaven Spring Festival. You’re a Talvalin, the clan-lord’s son, better suited for this task than anyone else—”

  “And one day you might even tell me why?”

  “One day I might. Now remember…” A tiny smile tugged at the corners of Aldric’s mouth; it was typical of Gemmel to give another lecture when all had already been said. “Touch nothing but the Dragonwand, no matter how tempting. Watch out for spi
es, they won’t all be human. Trust nobody, especially after dark. And if you’re spoken to from an unexpected quarter, reply with all the courtesy you would give to… Do you remember how you spoke to your grandmother?”

  “No. She died the year after I was born.”

  “Ah. Then… Then just mind your manners. And Aldric—”

  “Yes?”

  Gemmel shyly rubbed the toe of his boot into the grass. “I was only going to say, come back safe.” Aldric smiled, bowed, and with a rush of warmth the wizard realised it wasn’t gratitude to a benefactor but the small nod of son to father.

  “I’ll do my best. Tau k’noeth-ei, altrou-ain.” He twitched Lyard’s reins and cantered off into the sunrise while Gemmel watched him go.

  “And you too, my son.”

  When Aldric looked back he saw only an empty hillside, and grass rippling in the breeze. But he waved anyway.

  *

  Duergar Vathach read the words on a ragged scrap of parchment for the third time as if hoping they might have changed their meaning. They had not. There was nobody in the locked room to comment on the pallor of his face, nor the way his fingers became white-knuckled fists that clawed the pendant sword-hilt from around his neck. Links of broken chain scattered across the floor with a multiple laughing tinkle as the hilt crashed against a wall.

  Cradling his sweat-slick head in both hands, Duergar mumbled incoherently to himself. He had long been troubled by the way cu Ruruc showed neither caution nor respect but amusement whenever he saw the talisman which supposedly controlled him. Then there were all those searchers sent into Baelen Wood. He hadn’t realised what cu Ruruc sought until a year ago, when some now-forgotten errand brought him to the Hall of Archives in Dunrath’s great library. There were relics of the Clan Wars hung up among the books and rolls of parchment: tattered banners, broken shields – and old-style taikenin with the chains and bands for securing each sword to its owner’s wrist.

  Bands which would be in contact with the wearer’s cooling flesh long after death-slack fingers had released the weapon’s hilt…