The Sigil Blade

by Jeff Wilson

  A crowd of men maneuvered massive stones off to the south of the cottage. They were constructing the cavity for a funeral barrow. Three women were not far away, weaving meadowsweet through the recesses of a funeral pyre that had been built up earlier out of stacks of dead wood. Neither Edryd nor Eithne knew these people, but those present had known Irial it seemed, and they had come to show her the honor and respect that she was owed.

  Edryd felt numb as he entered the cottage. Krin was there, at the larger of the room’s two tables. He was drunk, and it did not appear that he had slept. His left forearm had been heavily bandaged and he had an ugly red cut just beneath his left eye. Upon seeing Edryd and Eithne he moved from his seat, and Edryd was caught unprepared as the large man unexpectedly crushed him in a great enveloping hug. He released Edryd just as quickly, and as Krin pulled away, the Ascomanni captain did not appear afraid to show everyone that he had been crying.

  “Logaeir told me that you did justice for her,” Krin said. “I thank you for that.”

  “Where is Logaeir?” Edryd asked.

  “He will be here before nightfall,” answered a young woman keeping a vigil next to Irial’s room.

  Everyone turned to face her. “This is my daughter, Ruelle,” said Krin, introducing her. Like Krin, she also appeared to have been crying, the strongly sun affected skin of her kind face streaked with tears. Edryd was a little surprised. He hadn’t imagined Krin as a father.

  “I looked to her as a sister,” Ruelle said. “A great many of us did.” This comment made Edryd think of Eithne, the young girl beside him now whom Irial had cared for as a true sister would.

  Edryd took Eithne’s hand, and together they entered Irial’s room. She lay in the bed positioned as she had been the day before. Eithne placed her flowers atop her sister and stood beside the bed. She remained silent for a long while before turning away and running to her room, just ahead of the tears that she could no longer hold back.

  Not knowing how to comfort Eithne, or even himself, Edryd pulled a chair over beside her door and waited. He wished that he too could hide somewhere. A part of him was glad that he was not known to many of these people, and especially glad that they did not know him as the Blood Prince, but he did feel like an intruder here, beside so many people that he did not recognize. It did not feel like the home he had known for the past little while. Krin pulled over another chair and sat down beside him.

  “I knew her for longer than you did, and I will miss her, but I know how you felt about Irial. We could all see it,” he said.

  Edryd was taken aback. Krin was speaking of something Edryd had hardly admitted to himself, but it didn’t matter any longer. It was not something to hide. “She did not return those feelings,” Edryd said. He couldn’t think why she should have.

  “She did care for you,” Krin said. “She held you in the highest possible regard. I think though, that maybe, she thought that you were a little too young.”

  Edryd would have done almost anything to change the subject, but Krin wasn’t the sort to cooperate, and the man was drunk.

  “I was supposed to protect her,” Edryd said, choking back tears.

  “You did everything you could,” Krin said, grabbing a hold of Edryd’s shoulder. “You did everything that anyone could.”

  His friend was trying to help, but it was not working. “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t come here,” said Edryd.

  “No, none of this would have happened,” Krin agreed. “This island would still be under the control of demons and criminals, and my people would be facing the threat of starvation in the winter, persisting on the margin of an ever dwindling supply of food, if you had not come here. Without help from you and your men, our attack yesterday would never have succeeded.”

  “I was not responsible for any of that,” Edryd protested.

  “And neither were you responsible for what happened to Irial. That it might not have happened had you never come to An Innis, does not make it your fault.”

  Edryd understood the truth in Krin’s words, but he wasn’t prepared to accept it. He wasn’t going to be able to forgive himself so easily.

  “If you need anything, if you ever need anything, you only have to ask,” Krin said, grabbing Edryd’s shoulder once more in his broad hand. He gave Edryd a solid reassuring nudge, before releasing his grip and walking away, leaving Edryd to sort through his grief.

  Edryd realized how selfish he was being. He had been directly responsible for a handful of deaths himself yesterday, but hundreds more had also died, all of them in some way under the name of the Blood Prince. Edryd had much more to answer for than just his failure to protect Irial. There would be other people here who were mourning the deaths of people that they had loved, and many more than that had been hurt. One of those people had been Ruach, injured performing a duty Edryd should have been there to do himself. He was here now, recovering.

  Feeling a guilt that came from not having given thought to Ruach since arriving at the cottage, Edryd rose and walked the short distance to his old room. His friend was sleeping peacefully on the bed as Edryd entered. Ludin Kar, who continued to attend to him, slept too, slumped over in his chair and resting his head on a table beside the bed. Edryd remembered now where he had heard the man’s name before. Ludin Kar was the author of the book that Irial had borrowed from Uleth about the Sigil Order. The man was Aelsian’s friend. That might prove useful in the days to come. Edryd brought a chair in, and grateful for a reason to break away from the people gathered in the open hall, he closed the door behind him, and waited for evening.

  Logaeir did come, along with dozens of others, as darkness fell. Eithne and Edryd walked behind as Irial was placed upon the pyre by a group of women, some of them young and some of them old. Everyone then watched as Irial’s body was consumed in an enormous column of fire and smoke that seemingly towered to an impossible height, reaching straight out into the stars of the night sky. Edryd saw Uleth then, staring at the pyre, with tears falling from his eyes. What Edryd saw might only be an image, but he knew that the pain in those eyes was something real. Uleth did not look back at Edryd, who continued to look on with the strange feeling that that he might not ever see this man again.

  In the morning, the ashes would be placed in the cavity that had been created out of two great stones which supported an even larger monolith that rested flatly atop them. The structure looked something like a giant table. Earth and stone would then be piled up in a mound around the grave, covering the stones over entirely. It was the sort of tribute afforded only to a person of great status.

  As people began to break away and leave, Edryd realized he had given no thought to where he would go now. He couldn’t bear to think of sleeping in the cottage. Logaeir approached and solved the matter before Edryd could begin to worry over it.

  “Aelsian has arranged rooms for you and Eithne aboard the Interdiction,” Logaeir said. “You should head there tonight. It will be as safe a place as can be found for the two of you, and it will be a good place to sort things out in the days to come as well. I will meet with you there tomorrow.”

  Edryd didn’t normally like to accept any of Logaeir’s suggestions, but he was not about to argue with this one. There was nothing but sympathy and sorrow in the Ascomanni strategist’s eyes, and Edryd knew that he had misjudged this man. It wasn’t that he had been wrong in any of his conclusions about Logaeir, but Edryd had not tried to understand the depths behind the facade that Logaeir presented on the surface, and he been too slow to forgive him. Logaeir would never be someone in whom he could completely trust, but he was a loyal ally and friend.

  They gathered a few of Irial’s things and a few articles that belonged to Eithne, and walked together on through the night, enjoying the silence and the stars that shone brightly in the sky. When Eithne grew tired, worn out by the turmoil of the day, Edryd carried her over the remainder of the distance to the harbor. Aelsian was asleep when they arrived, but his men showed them to t
heir rooms aboard the ship.

  Eildach was still holding out, but a sort of normalcy had developed quickly within a few short days. Men and women, and even entire families from the settlements near the Ascomanni encampment, had begun to flow in, many of them returning to a home they had been forced to flee years ago. Order was kept under the banner of the Blood Prince. On this particular subject, seated at a table in the great room aboard the Interdiction, Edryd and Logaeir were having a heated argument that was being ineffectively mediated by Aelsian. Logaeir was losing the argument.

  “They won’t follow me,” Logaeir said again, but somehow his objections were just not getting through.

  “They are already following you,” Edryd said, making the obvious point. “Barely any of them have any idea what I look like. If we keep it that way, when I leave, it won’t undermine you. With the Sigil Corps soldiers backing you up, no one will question it. You could even go on pretending to be the Blood Prince.”

  “The Hand of the Blood Prince,” Logaeir said. It was as far as he was prepared to go.

  Edryd tried to shift his chair, but it wouldn’t move. It was locked in place, as was the table and most of the other chairs around it. He found Logaeir’s latest proposal to be even more alarming than the idea of allowing the man to continue impersonating him as he had done more than once before. Edryd had an unpleasant mental image in his mind of one of his hands moving about of its own volition, doing all sorts of things he wouldn’t want it to do and dragging the rest of his body along behind it.

  “The Regent of An Innis, and leader of the Ascomanni,” Edryd offered instead. He wanted Logaeir to assume more responsibility and act under his own name and reputation instead of falsely pretending that he was carrying out Edryd’s wishes. Logaeir seemed to consider this. The suggestion might possibly even have appealed to Logaeir on some level, but the man did not like to be out in front. He preferred to pull the strings, rather than be the puppet.

  “Alright, but it is to be understood that you are the rightful ruler of the island, and the King of the Ascomanni. I merely speak and act on your behalf,” Logaeir said.

  “No,” Edryd said, rejecting the suggestion but offering a modification. “You speak on your own behalf, but you have my support.”

  Logaeir wasn’t pleased. He would have preferred to make Edryd stay here, at least for a little while, and failing that, he wanted to represent himself as the being an extension of the Blood Prince’s will, but he seemed to accept that Edryd’s current offer was as much as he was going to be able to bargain for.

  Edryd, for his part, was pretty certain that Logaeir was going to call himself the Hand of the Blood Prince regardless of anything Edryd might do to try and stop him. Having reached an understanding, Logaeir took his leave from the two other men, muttering something under his breath.

  “I’m going to make one last trip into An Innis to say a few goodbyes,” Edryd said to Aelsian. “I will be back in a couple of hours.”

  “We’ll be ready to leave when you return,” Aelsian promised.

  Edryd felt a twinge of guilt as he passed his cabin. Eithne was inside, which was pretty awkward all around and had forced him to sleep outside the door, but this was where she felt safe. The cabin Aelsian had given to her had been given back to the Officer she would have otherwise been displacing. Edryd knew she would want to come with him into town, but it was impractical and still too dangerous.

  He made as direct a path as he could to Uleth’s home. Edryd didn’t know what he hoped to find, apart from Uleth, but he was determined to seek the man out. He thought he had come to the wrong place when he arrived at the heavy wooden door, which hung open now on its hinges. The garden looked the same as ever, with robust growths of carefully cultivated plants, but the home was in complete disrepair. It did not look as though anyone lived there. Edryd could see gaps in some of the walls where the structure was falling down. Surely more than this had to have been real. Edryd stepped inside the open doorway. The hallways were filled with rot and mold.

  Edryd turned into the library. This room appeared to have been well sheltered from the elements and contained numerous shelves of books. A young man, Edryd supposed he must have been one of the Ascomanni, was packing books into a couple of folded cloths. Edryd feared that the library was being looted, but the young man seemed untroubled and did not act at all like someone caught in an act of theft. He explained to Edryd when he was asked, that he had been paid to move all of the books to the palace. Edryd left then, and rejected the idea of looking for Uleth at the palace or anywhere else. He somehow knew that he would not be able to find the man. Edryd turned instead onto a path that would take him to the Broken Oath. The inn wasn’t far away.

  He didn’t have a good reason to be going there. Edryd didn’t know Greven especially well, or anyone else that he might be likely to see inside, or at least not enough that they warranted a formal farewell. He realized as he walked that he had just needed to see the rapid improvements that were taking place, made quite plain by the number of shops that were opening up and the bustle of people moving about. An Innis was a different place, and it did Edryd good to think that his choices had contributed to and brought about things other than just suffering and death.

  Edryd stepped inside the Broken Oath. The structure itself and the furnishings inside it had not been changed, but it did not feel like the same place. It was busier than ever and was serving a more varied collection of customers. There were crowds throughout, which made the one exceptional bare spot incredibly obvious. The patrons of the inn were keeping a healthy distance from the man in black robes who was sitting against the back wall.

  Edryd felt sick. He hadn’t seen his former teacher since the night of the attack, and he hadn’t expected to see him now either. Seoras watched him enter, apparently having waited far longer than he would have liked and clearly angry that Edryd had declined his invitation to meet him near the ruins. Edryd walked past Seoras without acknowledging him, passing him on his way towards the inn’s back door. Without a word, Seoras stood and followed Edryd out.

  Standing with his back to the inn, Edryd surveyed the wreckage of the well in the middle of the courtyard. He wondered when someone would get around to repairing the damage he had caused while fighting with Cecht and Hagan that first night in An Innis. There were a handful of people behind the inn, but nothing compared to the number of people inside or the groups out in the street in front. Edryd couldn’t trust that their presence would afford any protection from an angry shaper of the dark.

  “You have no regard,” Seoras said from behind Edryd.

  Edryd couldn’t understand why Seoras could think that he would, but he didn’t say so. He was about to find out what the man wanted.

  “Let’s take this somewhere else,” Seoras said. This somewhere else, his voice seemed to imply, was going to be a suitable place for a fight, a parting duel that could well leave one or both of them dead. Edryd had been carrying the sigil sword at his side for a few days now, having kept it close from the moment Seoras had returned it to him, but in that time it had exhibited no unusual attributes. There hadn’t, however, been any occasions to put it to the test. It might well aid him only when there was a need, or it might continue to remain a simple piece of metal when it mattered most. Either way, Edryd could see that an occasion had come which would settle that question.

  They walked together in silence, working their way towards the estate that had recently been restored to Giric Tolvanes. It was the place where Seoras had lived while training men, Edryd among them, to bend flows of pure æther to their will. Seoras had never had a more frustrating student than Edryd, and he wasn’t ever likely to have another anything like him.

  As they neared the property, Edryd saw that the gates had been pulled down. Seoras had been right when he had predicted that Tolvanes would have trouble holding onto the place on his own.

  “What happened?” Edryd asked.

  “Tolvanes was among those who onc
e participated in the profits gained from enslaving the most vulnerable citizens of An Innis,” Seoras explained. “When the Ascomanni attacked, there was a reckoning for people like him.”

  Edryd took this to mean the old man was most likely dead, but he didn’t try to confirm it. He kept quiet as they walked into the practice yard. The place was empty and deserted despite the fact that it was clearly a valuable property. The years Seoras had spent here, housing draugar and training thralls, had established the type of reputation that would keep people away for a while.

  On the assumption that Seoras was about to initiate a fight, Edryd began to make preparations. He strained to concentrate all of his focus on measuring the shifting currents of the dark and differentiating between the patterns that he could perceive. He could feel the sigil sword belted in place at his side. It was not quite cooperating, but it felt ready, as if it were cautiously aware of all that took place. There was something else unusual. Something he really ought to have noticed before. He was having trouble picking out the normally obvious pattern that Seoras generated. It was there, but it was indistinct, confused, and unstable.

  Seoras noted the surprise on Edryd’s face. “I showed you this once before,” he said, calling to mind the time Seoras had hidden himself while he listened as Edryd spoke to Ruach outside the cottage. “I have made improvements. Though it is not the equal of your shrouding, and it is nowhere near close to what I need it to be, it isn’t bad at all if you consider how little I had to go on,” he boasted.

  “I don’t understand. Is this what you wanted me to see?”

  “It would have been if I could make it work, in which case I would have wanted you to not see it,” Seoras answered. “I’m asking you to show me how to do this correctly.”

  “Why would I, even if I could?” Edryd asked. “You could have helped me when I came to you, but you did nothing.”

  “I need you to teach me,” Seoras said, ignoring the uncomfortable question. “I am tethered. I cannot escape him if you do not help.”