The Last Witchking

by Vox Day

  “It’s about time,” he said, as Speer blocked his last opponent’s thrust to the side, then exerted his will to cause the sword to twist in the man’s hand, slowing his reaction to Speer’s two-handed riposte. At the last moment, Speer twisted his wrists in order to thump the flat of his blade against the man’s breastplate and grinned as he acknowledged the man’s rueful concession. “The lesson goes well beyond the blade. Never forget that the combination of two arts is often more powerful than anything one can manage with one alone.”

  It was a cold autumn day in Speer’s twentieth year when he descended from the tower that served as his bedchamber and found Cajarc standing at the landing below, staring pensively out the little window that overlooked the little-used road to the village of Stammløse. To his surprise, the Écarlatean was dressed like one of the guards, although over his black leather armor he wore a fine wool cloak with a scarlet lining. He turned around at the sound of the door opening and regarded Speer in an unexpectedly grave manner.

  “Good morning, Lord Dauragh.”

  The sight of the sword he was wearing at his belt caught Speer off-guard. He pointed to the hilt and made a quizzical gesture with his left hand.

  “What is this? Is there trouble with the villagers again?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I assume you are at least dimly aware that the supplies which feed the household, and the young women in whom your seed is planted, are not magicked up by me or the staff.”

  Speer had never given the matter any thought. He assumed that both were either bought from the nearby communities or demanded by virtue of his right as the local lord. But then, this was not Savondir and the reaver clans were not peasants.

  “Of course,” he lied.

  “Well, then, it is time for us to earn our keep. There is a petty king named Hrolf Snaketongue who apparently has had his eyes on a girl from Tønstadr. He fell on the town with a band of his men yesterday, killed three old men, and took the girl, her sister, and twelve other women back to Nidarhälla with him.”

  “And how is that our concern?”

  “Tønstadr is within our protectorate. Once it became clear he was going to lose the war, your father reached an agreement with ten of the local kings and godar. They agreed to keep twenty men supplied here at the castle, and in return we guaranteed the safety of their women and children when they were off reaving. After a few examples were made, no one dared touch their towns, until now.”

  “Why now?”

  “The ships of Tønstadr are still out reaving the coast of Savondir. I imagine when the Snaketongue returned from his own reaving, he realized the men from Tønstadr weren’t back yet and decided to take the opportunity to seize the girl. He’s young and hot-blooded, by the sound of it, and I have no doubt he disregarded the warnings of his elders.”

  Speer nodded. “So you will make an example of him?” He wondered how, considering that Cajarc only had ten armed men at his disposal.

  “No, Lord Dauragh.” Cajarc smiled. “We will make an example of him. It is time you learned how a Witchking makes war.”

  Speer stared at his teacher in dismay. “How many men does this Snaketongue have?”

  “Nidarhälla is not a large town. It’s barely more than a village. He’s said to have six snekkjas, so it is safe to assume he has around two hundred fighting men.”

  “We’re going to attack two hundred men with ten?” Speer said incredulously.

  “Twelve,” Cajarc corrected him, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Ten fighting men and two sorcerers. Just follow my lead, my lord, do as you’re told, and you’ll see why men once said that a single Witchking in battle was worth a thousand men-at-arms.”

  They departed Mordlis by sea, in the small boat shaped like a miniature snekkja that had been made by a shipwright out of Thjovrer. There were five rowing slots per side, a single square sail suspended from a central mast, and it was as seaworthy as any ship in the Isles. Speer had sailed on it only a handful of times. When he went fishing with Cajarc or one of the cooks, they usually used a smaller dinghy. The square sail was black and without device. But there was something strange about it, and it took him some time to realize what it was. Unlike most of the sails he’d seen traversing the rocky coastline over the years, it was unfaded by sun and sea-salt.

  The sea was relatively calm underneath a storm-grey sky, but Speer’s stomach roiled as if he were seasick. He didn’t think he was afraid, but his belly didn’t seem to have the same confidence in Cajarc’s sorceries that his mind did. He gripped his oar and pulled with the others, seeking to put aside his fears in the strain of the physical activity.

  “Take a break,” Cajarc called from the stern, where he stood manning the rudder. They had made their way out of the fjord in which Mordlis was located and caught the south wind that was bringing the last reavers back from Savondir. Nidarhälla was along the coast to the north, and given the way the sail was now bulging, they would be there before the hidden sun was at its height. “My lord, give up your oar.”

  The other nine men sat back and released their oars as Speer moved out of the way of the spare guard who nodded at him and took his place on the middle starboard seat. Speer held onto the mast with one hand, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as the boat rose and fell with the waves underneath.

  “Hammer and anvil,” the sorcerer told him. “It’s just like the tactics you’ve studied. I will herd them to where they are vulnerable, and you will destroy them. Fire is the obvious choice, but consider that earth is often deadlier. And when you see our men move in, stay your hand. They will be ensorcelled and fearless, so you must be aware of where they are to avoid catching them up in your spells.”

  Speer nodded. His mouth was very dry. He looked at the coastline to their right and saw the wooden palisade of the town of Raegedal as they sailed past it. The palisade looked imposing when seen from the sea below the cliffs upon which it stood, and it guarded a village only half the size of Nidarhälla. He could see how narrow the path up from the harbor docks was and grimaced at the thought of trying to storm the town from below.

  Then he laughed, amused at himself. Such concerns were for lesser men who couldn’t cloak themselves in wind and cloud.

  “Will we put in south of the town and approach by land, or shall we hide the boat and sail into their docks?”

  “You are indeed your father’s son, Lord Dauragh.” Cajarc shook his head. “Always gravitating toward brute force. But it is wiser to resist the urge to hurl things about when the merest touch will suffice.”

  The sorcerer snapped his fingers, and the ten men in black armor pulling at the oars were abruptly transformed into half-naked, underfed thralls. Cajarc himself was unchanged, but when Speer looked down, his own armor had vanished, replaced by what looked like a tunic made from sail canvas. He flicked his chest with his finger and felt the solid, comforting heft of his armor. It was a strange sensation to feel what his eyes could not see.

  He glanced up at the black sail. It was faded and grey now and bore a device that was unfamiliar to him. But it was not hard to decode: The sigil was a horned skull with a forked tongue. Snaketongue, he guessed.

  It amazed him that Cajarc could exert such power, so effortlessly, even on the open sea. It wasn’t that the currents of power were not palpable. Speer could see them in the sky being buffeted by the wind and feel their throbbing pulse deep below the surface of the sea. But they were weak in comparison with those that ran over the land and felt somehow slippery to his mind. They were difficult to grasp and utilize. And yet Cajarc maintained the illusion without any flaws that Speer could see with either his physical or his magical vision.

  Like Mordlis, Nidarhälla was located inside a fjord, and like Raegedal, the town was situated on the cliffs above the harbor. The docks were larger than those of Raegedal, and in addition to the six snekkjas Cajarc had mentioned, there were dozens of much smaller boats, most with masts, tied up along the sprawling harbor complex.

>   There were a few curious looks and some friendly waves. No one in the harbor seemed to notice anything amiss as they sailed uneventfully into the fjord and Cajarc steered the small ship into a berth on the southern end of the docks. One of the men ran a rope through a metal ring on the prow and lashed it fast in a knot that Speer noted could be untied with a single tug. The men began lifting several heavy bags out of a storage compartment in the floor as Speer leaped off the side and onto the wooden dock, followed a moment later by Cajarc.

  “What’s in the bags?” Speer asked.

  “A few things to add to the excitement. Besides, we need some excuse to be walking up to the town.”

  The dockmaster waved them over as they marched toward the well-traveled dirt path that led up from the sea to the town. But he didn’t even bother asking them what nature of goods was being borne by the false thralls after Cajarc smiled ingratiatingly and pressed a pair of silver coins into his hand.

  Speer was glad it was a cool day as they trudged up the steep incline of the path, the dirt of which was packed so hard that it felt like brick under his feet. There were two armed men at the top of the cliff, but neither gave them more than a cursory glance. The town gates were open and Speer glanced nervously around, wishing that Cajarc had given him more detailed instructions, or at least explained even the general outline of his intentions.

  “Wait outside, my lord. The village men will stay inside and fight us and the fires. I leave it to you to deal with the women and children.”

  “How am I to recognize the women from Tønstadr?”

  “You won’t.” Cajarc looked surprised. “We’re here to set an example, not rescue the wenches. If they survive, so much the better, but that’s not our concern.”

  Speer frowned. He'd been under the impression this was a rescue mission.

  “So how am I to deal with them?”

  “As you see fit.” The sorcerer snorted and squeezed his shoulder. “I once saw Lord Mauragh drop the roof of a cathedral on the people gathered there to worship. There must have been a thousand people inside. The question you have to ask yourself, Lord Dauragh, is if you are worthy of calling yourself your father’s son or not.”

  With that, he turned back toward open gates of Nidarhälla, and instructed two of the guards to remain behind with Speer.

  “Cajarc!” he called. “What’s in the bags?”

  “Wood shavings soaked in pitch.” Cajarc laughed at his surprise at the humble nature of the sorcerer’s weapon. “We make our own luck, my lord, and the simplest ways are often best.”

  After the sorcerer, followed by the eight men from Mordlis, disappeared into the town, Speer sighed and made himself comfortable on the dying brown grass. He couldn’t see the sea from where he sat, but he could smell it, and the cries of the seagulls soaring overhead were impossible to mistake. He closed his eyes to help make sense of the structure of the local leys in his head. The strongest one was a powerful channel that flowed from the east, from the very heart of the great island and toward the sea. He reached out and redirected it to him. The warmth of the power of the land rapidly filled his body, and he realized it would be enough to let him do whatever he wanted.

  A wall of fire? An illusion that multiplied his two men into two hundred? An earthquake that would cause the cliff face to collapse? No, none of them struck him as sufficiently lethal…or worthy of one who sought to be his father’s heir. Had his early years living as Per Gnasor’s son enervated him permanently, or was he truly a Witchking?

  He coughed to clear his throat and spit. No sooner had he done so than he saw a sudden glow in the air around him as someone, presumably Cajarc, drew upon the sky leys. Almost immediately, he heard shouts of alarm, soon followed by black smoke rising into the sky in eight different locations. Soon there were screams and shrieks coming from the town, and by the time flames and smoke could be seen on the rooftops, people were beginning to run out of the gates, weighed down with children and their most precious possessions.

  Even if he could not see their fear, the sheer mass of it struck him as if it was an odor coming off of them. He could actually taste it, and the taste was, if not sweet, exactly, at least pleasant. He could feel Cajarc’s manipulations too. He felt their effects on the leys of earth and sky as the sorcerer wove his illusions to confuse the town’s warriors and hurled blasts of intense fire that set their clothes and beards and long hair alight.

  The Écarlatean had also replaced the spell that disguised their guardsmen with another one, one that had the two men standing on either side of Speer trembling, and in one case, visibly drooling, with an eagerness to kill. The two tongueless men from Mordlis kept glancing back and forth between him and the fleeing people of Nidarhälla, waiting for his permission to draw their swords and attack. One of them, the one who wasn’t drooling, was alternately whimpering and growling.

  The crowd of women, old men, and children had grown to nearly one hundred, with more joining them at every moment, when Speer decided the time had come to act. Most of them, seeing only three strangers in the distance instead of a large band of raiders, seemed to believe they were safe outside the palisade and turned their backs to him in order to stare at the smoke rising from their homes.

  Speer drew more from the strong land ley and reached within himself to find the despair he had known in his solitary flight from Pretigny, the horror he had felt when watching his childhood home burn, and the deep and endless loneliness that had been his fate since coming to Mordlis. Then he raised his arm and cast it forth from him like a vast spiderish web of darkness that swept over the unresisting villagers like a wave. He could see their bodies sway underneath its maleficent force as it amplified their already considerable fear. Several of the weaker ones could not stand it: children and old women fell silently to the grass, rendered catatonic by the shadow that assailed their souls.

  He stood there calmly, channeling the power of the land through him, transforming it into darkness and despair that swallowed up the escapees from the burning town and held them firmly in its net. He waited, listening to the cries of the entrapped and the shouts of the desperate warriors as they were struck down one by one by Cajarc and his men, until he counted nearly two hundred townspeople caught up in his sorcery.

  The sense of control intoxicated him. He gloried in the sensation of magic flowing through him, in the sight of the crowd bending to his will. For the first time, he began to understand the terror of the the name Witchking and he reveled in it.

  Still holding them fast, he used his other hand to draw upon the sky leys, and from them he created a false but powerful wind that blew west, toward the sea. It buffeted the villagers, knocked many of them flat, and sent several of the smaller children tumbling over and over toward the cliffs. Soon the sobs of despair turned to helpless screams as the first child fell from the heights toward the rocky shore below, followed by another, and then a third.

  “Now,” Speer told the two trembling men beside him.

  Without tongues, they could not speak, but they snarled wordlessly in response and began rushing toward the large mass of people stumbling and slipping backward before the evil wind. They were only two against two hundred, and yet so frightened and helpless were the ensorcelled townspeople that a keen of sheer animal terror went up, and every man, woman, and child still on his feet fled from them, their shrieks as wordless as those of their assailants.

  Their eyes unseeing, their minds unthinking, they ran without hesitating right over the edge of the cliff and plunged to the rocks on the shore of the sea.

  There were some who did not run and did not fall, having already collapsed or being too overcome with fear to move, even with the encouragement of the magical wind. But soon the two men of Mordlis were among them, chopping and stabbing, and the dry brown grass was slick and red with blood by the time they finished their butchery.

  Speer exhaled, released both magical currents, and sat down again on the grass. He felt both exhausted and exhilarated
. And, for the first time, he felt that he might truly be worthy of assuming his father’s terrible mantle. He closed his eyes and relaxed, ignoring the occasional prickles of the broken grass beneath him. He heard the two guards return, and given the unhurried nature of their footfalls as they took up their positions on either side of him again, he judged their bloodthirsty madness was well slaked.

  After a time, he heard someone approaching. He opened his eyes and saw Cajarc stalking toward him, followed by seven of the eight guards who had accompanied the sorcerer in his attack on the town, as well as twenty young women with ropes around their necks and a tall man who was bound and blindfolded. The tall man was bleeding from three wounds to his arms and had the beginnings of a massive bruise on the left side of his face.

  “Did you do nothing but sit there?” the sorcerer said angrily.

  It amused Speer to realize that Cajarc hadn’t felt the manipulations of the magical currents. But then, fighting six ships’ worth of reavers would tend to be somewhat of a distraction for any sorcerer, no matter how skilled.

  He smiled dreamily at his teacher. “Did you not tell me the simplest ways are often best?”

  Cajarc frowned and looked at the two guards, noting that their armor was covered with blood. One of them lifted his chin, indicating the direction of the sea. Signaling for the others to remain, Cajarc walked across the field, gingerly stepping over the occasional body, and stopped at the edge of the cliff. He spent a long moment looking down in silence at the mass of human wreckage below.

  When he returned, there was a measure of approval, even respect, in his eyes that had not been there before. He bowed, without irony, as Speer slowly rose to his feet.

  “My lord, you must forgive me if I have ever doubted you. You are most truly the son of Ar Mauragh.”

  Speer waved the apology away indifferently. “Is this man the so-called king?”