A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (15 page)

The crest on his shoulders twisted and flared as it unfolded from
the line of his spine, catching the rain that pounded down harder now even as
its chill numbed the pain. He felt his sight sharpen, saw the faint haze of
storm and red moon’s-light flare like the bright of noon, and the song of wind
and thunder was a symphony to all his senses of sight and scent and sound.

He was on his knees, fighting to breathe through the beautiful agony
of the change to who he was. Who he had been. The life he lost that night. He
looked up, shouted in triumph to the wet sky. He felt his tail thrash behind
him in uncontrolled ecstasy, heard laughter that he realized suddenly was not
his own.

The girl was jumping, dancing as she watched him. Where she had
slipped back to the bog’s edge, her amber eyes were bright with laughter,
sealed against the rain that sluiced the dust from her skin and turned her
scales to a sheen of green-gold in the faint light.

He expected her to be afraid, he realized. He had counted on
that, the deep darkness of his spirit seeking that fear and the pain it carried
with it. Affirming what it was he already knew.

“You are like me,” the girl shouted. She flicked her tongue
through her serrated grin, lashed her tail in the tall grass. Her claws, free
finally of the sword, pawed the ground as she crouched.

Red shadow shimmers across the black-silver surface of the
shallow bog where he claws his way screaming from the darkness of death, then
drinks the foul air of the fen like sweetest nectar. For the nine days that the
Darkmoon’s crimson weight flares full, its light stains the mire around him,
body held fast there, floating in thickening ooze like an errant leaf as the
witching water bathes his wounds, stifles his frenzied screaming, fills his
lungs. Weaves a song of pain and flesh and spirit knitted whole once more.

“I was like you,” he called. The voice that sounded in his ears
was his voice again, the deep-throated hiss within which was held all the music
of the people he had left behind. “I am the Mockery now. Pale and weak.
Helpless within soft flesh and dependent on steel.”

On the ninth day, he rises. He feels the ancient strength of
his people, feels life surge within muscle and bone and spirit. And as he claws
his way from the mire to stand again for the first time, he weeps for what he
has done.

He leaves the water behind. A dozen strides or less and he
feels his flesh dry. Feels the old magic that hides his true form and leaves
him the Mockery that night.

“Now you are both,” the girl said. She hissed with laughter
again, and he did not understand. “My father said that a secret is like the
moni tree that sets only in the company of its own kind. On its own, it withers
and dies, but as a pair, it issues all the best sweet fruits. And so secrets
must come in twos to be properly kept.”

She sprang toward him, slid to a halt in the soft loam. She motioned
him down, and he crouched without thinking. She stretched to come close to the membrane
of his ear.

“We know each other’s secrets,” she whispered. “They will shed
sweet fruit now.”

He was weeping as she scampered off, salt in his mouth as he
properly swallowed his tears.

He understood then.

That morning, he awoke at dawn and prepared the rites that his
people called Ma’atlese. The deepening. He sensed the long road ahead, felt it
calling him with a voice that promised dreamless sleep. Ten years before, he
had betrayed his people in the name of a memory that has burned in him through
endless days of dryness, uncounted nights of pain.

That night, for the first time, he weeps for what he is. The
Darkmoon passes full, leaves him the Mockery. Leaves him solitude-shrouded,
choking on darkness and hatred coursing black in his blood like fever.

The girl made it as far as the edge of the clearing when he
called.

“You know what I have done…”

Lightning flared in the darkness overhead. The girl turned back.
She appraised him for a moment, watched him standing tall in the crash of
stormlight, tail thrashing in the mist.

“You saw it,” he called, and she nodded.

“The sword showed me,” she called. “It sees inside people.”

So many years since then, and this is his fate. To live as the
Mockery until the slow progression of the Darkmoon turns his blood once more.
Lets him transform at the touch of the life-giving water that is his people’s
home. Lets him remember who he was only long enough to feel the pain of losing
that all over again.

“Do not walk the dark road, Lárow,” the girl said, and she was
gone.

He let the cool of the storm thread through him for a time. He
found the cloak where he had discarded it, shuffling to the pit and spreading
it beside the rotting remains of this lord who had lost his life to his own avarice
and a child’s pain. He rolled body and sword onto the cloak with ease, the
eyeless skull grinning where scaled skin pulled away from jagged teeth. He
gathered rocks from a dry rise nearby, lined the corpse with them as he wrapped
it tight.

Then with all the strength of his new form, he hefted the body to
his shoulders, the broken tail emerging from the shroud of the cloak to hang
twisted down his back.

This or any pit dug in the soft loam of the swamp would leave the
body too long to the beasts of land that would come back this night, and to
those who would come after. For the girl’s sake, it could not be found.

This lord had been an elder bull, the body twice his own weight,
yet he carried it effortlessly. He imagined the girl dragging it here in the
dead of night, a feat that he would have been hard-pressed to match at her age.
This was the strength of his memory, of the dark dreams that called to him with
the voice of the past. Dreams that took him in the deep night and told him his
daylight life was the real dream. Dreams that snatched away that feeble hope
and left him broken once more when morning came. Left him the Mockery. Left him
the prisoner of his own weakness, and of the pale skin so soft that the dullest
blade could cut it.

He took the body back to the swamp and set it adrift, then
watched it sink in a stuttered haze of lightning, the weight of stone and sword
dragging it down. The body would be consumed by morning, shroud and blade lost
eventually in the depths, for a while at least. Someone would find the sword
eventually, he knew, though it would not matter by then. Such things never
stayed hidden for long.

He flipped one of the knives he had snatched up at the girl’s
first approach, felt the supple movements of his fingers shift it easily. As he
had before her presence stopped him, he set the jagged blade to his neck. He
knew how easily it would have bitten into the soft flesh of the Mockery just a
short while before. Had thought of nothing else for nine days.

He held it there for a long while, felt it warm, harmless set
against the strength of scaled skin.

He felt the rain stop. Felt his flesh dry and contract, weakening
with each breath of cold wind that stole the life-giving moisture away. He felt
the pain of the transformation, felt the pain of the blade where it pressed in,
the leathery skin of his neck fading to the weakness of pale flesh once more.

He caught his reflection in the water as it stilled with the
passing of the storm. He saw the face of the Mockery staring back at him.

She is named Szirha’mun, which was the Darkmoon in his
people’s tongue, and he watches her die. One last time.

He reached down, slipped his other hand into the embrace of its
own reflection. Watched as his skin shivered and rippled and stretched green
once more. One moment of memory.

Slowly, he pulled his hand back. Slowly, he lowered the blade to
his side.

She had been named Szirha’mun, which is the Darkmoon in his
people’s tongue. So it was that he dreamed her always watching him over nine
days of blood-red shadow that were the nights of sacrifice and remembrance.
Those nights when he could be himself once more.

It didn’t take him long to pack up. He had the gold that ten
years on the desert caravans earned him. More than enough for the tall ships
that set sail from Deema and Ebondar, but he would work again if he needed to.

He watched the sky change as the Darkmoon set, a trace of blood
at the horizon fading with the dawn. Bright now where the long road home was
waiting.

IT WAS THE BLADE of Ngrehim, forged by Dugaam in the name
of Jhanasaath, Bladelord of the Carbáin, slayer of Moiriar, destroyer of
Sollyra
,
destined ruler of all the world. Or at least that’s what it said to Hjorn when
he brushed up against it in the back of Garna’s wagon.

I can grant thee the power thou seekest…
the axe
whispered.

Hjorn blinked.

Garna was the best wagon trader between Jandich and Cunoch on the
great river, and no matter how often you looked through his overflowing wares,
you were bound to find something you’d never seen before. But even within the
carefully racked stacks of Gorbeyna pottery, cast-off Ilvani leather,
oil-polished armor shards, and bones of questionable vintage, a talking axe
that promised you the power you seek was unusual.

Hjorn blinked his black eyes again, stroking the russet beard
that ran nearly to his knees, hanging as long braids set with links of silver chain.
“That’s unusual,” he said.

At the head of the wagon, Garna looked up from the ledger he was
poring over. He furrowed his brow, pocked skin the grey-green of a dangerously
overripe cheese. From his dismissive glare, it was clear that the trader hadn’t
heard the axe talking.

“That’s quite unusual,” Hjorn said. Garna’s pair of withered mountain
ponies glanced back where they cropped the short scrub grass that clung to the
trail.

Hjorn had the wagon to himself. He was Garna’s only regular
client on this isolated stretch of switchback, but his coin was good and the
Gorbeyna had made his two-season stop on this high pass between the mountain
villages for years. Hjorn had the pass to himself, had the mountain to himself.
He liked the solitude. He liked the peace that carried in the empty echo of his
sky. Still, when that silence pressed down as it did sometimes in the night,
Hjorn had more than once found himself thinking that it would be nice to have
someone to talk to.

He talked to Garna twice a year when the cart came, but the wizened
Gorbeyna met most attempts at conversation with only the sullen silence and the
poison glare well known among his kind.

“How much?” Hjorn asked him now, because it was one of the few
phrases the trader did respond to.

He hefted the axe, holding it high so that the sun gleamed along
the bright steel filigree that traced its way along the leather of the haft. It
was a weapon of war, double bladed and razor sharp, though the style of its casting
was old. Hjorn swung it once, twice, the weapon’s weight growing quickly
familiar to his hands.

He felt a guilty thrill as a story slipped within his mind.

With the axe in hand, he was his grandfather suddenly, at the
battle the clan-singers called Fignarmald. In the depths of the burning mountain
Rodangrim, he stood alone against a horde of Darkfolk and dragons, his family’s
battle flag flying proudly above him. Then Hjorn felt a twinge in his shoulder
where his gout was still acting up with the slow fading of winter.

The story went away with the sudden pain. The Gorbeyna appraised
the axe where Hjorn set it back down, wincing.

“Could get a pretty price for it in Galindo. Ninety argryns.”

“Galindo is dirt farmers and woodcutters that couldn’t scrape up
that much silver if the old gods came collecting.”

“Jandich, then,” Garna said dismissively. “The city.”

“They’ll string you up in Jandich to find out who you stole it
from.”

Garna scowled. “Found it on a dead guy in the Helexia hill woods.
Nice and legal.”

“Five chrysans.” Hjorn’s coin was the old gold favored by his people,
and the offer was more than Garna would earn in any of the villages on either
side of the pass.

“Six.”

Thou wilt rule the world…
the axe said.

Hjorn shrugged as he paid.

It was a long walk back to the small stone house that Hjorn had
raised above the narrow cut of a river that had no name. As he made his way, he
swung the axe jauntily over his shoulder, letting his hand rest casually on the
haft as he had seen the warriors do when he was a boy. In the clanholds of the
Duncamb, the young and the old, the crafters and miners and hearth keepers all
turned out to line the wide, dark boulevard before the gates, watching the
guards of the Rohizum heading off to their dangerous patrols of the darkness.

When he was young, Hjorn dreamed of making that march himself.
However, hammer and handbow had never felt as right in his grasp as did pick
and shovel. From the time he was apprenticed to the master diggers of the
anthracite seams that rooted their way deep, deep into the mountains, he forgot
about that dream. But today, with the axe in his hand, he felt it fresh in his
mind as he hadn’t for a long while.

He walked in silence, suddenly awkward as he thought about what a
person should say to a talking axe. Living alone on his mountain, he was sadly
out of practice.

“Do you like stories?” he asked finally.

I will tell thee stories of greatness,
the axe replied,
which wasn’t really what Hjorn had asked. However, he said nothing as the
weapon’s voice in his head began to speak.

In the white fire of Andolin was I forged,
the axe began.
Then it went on for a long, long time. And though Hjorn was interested at
first, and then just listened politely for a while, his attention began to flag
after the first thousand years or so of the axe’s long and bloody history. From
the strength of its haft and the edge on its steel, he wouldn’t have thought
the blade to be that old, nor to have undertaken the number of battles it
claimed.

For the first time ever, Hjorn found himself wishing that the
long walk back to the small stone house was quicker.

At the midpoint of the climb, a rise of rock offered up a view
of  his distant front porch, from which he could look out upon the edge of
the bluff where the nameless river tumbled out over rocks to drop to the foot
of the narrow ravine below. In the spring and fall, the sun would set there,
dropping down behind the cloud of spray and turning the sky the color of bright
copper. Within the ravine, the river disappeared into a whirlpool that plunged
down into the unseen depths of the mountains. He liked its howling sound, which
reminded him of the wind in the high peaks but which wasn’t as cold.

In his head, the axe had killed another in a long line of kings
and been passed to yet another’s hero’s hand, but all the names began to sound
the same to him. It was a complicated tale that the axe told him, and not for
the first time, Hjorn wished that his own story was more interesting than it
was.

Hjorn loved his ravine, his river, his sky because he was
different than his kin. Since he was a boy, he had loved the scree slopes in a
way that marked him as odd by most of his folk, their hearts held enraptured by
the mountains’ depths but not their heights. Even before he left his parents’
house, Hjorn always used his leave time from the mines to follow the trade
trails out toward the Duncamb Pass that bore his people’s name, where he would
sit to while the day away watching the sun and sky.

For all his young life, Hjorn had worked and saved away the coin
he earned, and kept safe what his parents left him. And when he had enough, he
bade his folk goodbye and left the caverns. He made his own walk down the dark
boulevard before the gates, a well-stuffed pack and his tools strapped to his
back. Only his close kin were there to see him off, but their shouts of
well-wishing had a hollow quality as he passed through the darkness that last
time.

Thou wilt name me,
the axe said as Hjorn made the final
turn that led to the great wooden staircase he had built along the side of the
bluff. This was a great out-thrust horn of stone, studded with jack pine and
juniper that clung tenaciously to the rock. When the wind blew, the trees
whistled an off-key tune that Hjorn liked to hum along to.

“Excuse me?” he said.

Thou wilt name me,
the axe said again.
When I was
carried in the Duranholds of Dugaam,
I was Rasilnar the
Deathcleaver, but I have claimed and forgotten five score names besides. In
Galgaila, I was Immaru, the Blade of Gods. In Liryan, I was the Shrike, the
Butcher Blade, before I was lost to the ages and mortal sight and found again
by thy hand.

The axe didn’t speak in words. Not really. Rather, it seemed to
Hjorn that he heard the axe’s feelings and such in his head, and that his head
was turning those feelings into words. If other people heard the same feelings,
no doubt their heads would speak them differently, he thought.

Hjorn stared, uncertain. He was anxious suddenly. He had never
needed to name anything before. “Deathcleaver is nice,” he said awkwardly.

Thou must name me…

Hjorn hadn’t even named his house, though the way of his folk was
to christen their great underground estates. He hadn’t named the river that
wasn’t on any map that he had ever seen, nor had he named the bluff or the
mountain or anything else.

Name me!

“Steelblade!”

The axe was silent a long moment. Where it rested on his
shoulder, Hjorn thought he could feel its disappointment.

“Killer Steelblade,” he added. “The Terrible. That’s a good
name.”

He swung the axe off his shoulder, slashing it from side to side
in what he thought was a threatening way. He felt the twinge of the gout again.

The axe said nothing more as Hjorn climbed the steep stairs,
their log planks painstakingly cut and planed over the long months when he
first found his bluff and its sunset sky. He was as skilled at rock climbing as
all his kin, but he liked stairs. He liked their straight edges and their
smooth lines, and the fact that they were a thing he had built with his own
hands. He was proud of the things he could build. He was proud of his house and
his view of the sunset through the mist of the river where it boiled away into
the caves below.

On the stone porch, Hjorn sat beneath the twilight sky. These
were frontier lands, the stony wilderness of the northern slopes of those mountains
the Tallfolk called the Shieldcrest, but which were Tharseen, the Great Peaks,
to Hjorn’s folk. These territories showed up on the maps of the Tallfolk but
were all but unclaimed by the distant dukes of Gracia, only a few tenacious
villages marking the track that wound its way between the great mountain passes
of Duncamb and Olmades. These were Dwarven lands and Gorbeyna, the frequently
warring clans of both peoples living in their ancient warrens deep, deep in the
darkness.

Hjorn’s house was far from that darkness, set upon its isolated
granite shelf and looking out over the steep slopes below. Far south and east
were his own folk, who he turned away from in order to dwell beneath the sun.
He loved the sun, though it burned his skin sometimes when the weather was hot.
He wore a straw cap on such days to keep his eyes shaded, but the sun was cool
today.

That long first summer when his wanderings had led him here,
Hjorn built the house with his own hands, cutting and laying the stones in
carefully squared lines. He built a guest room, because he always imagined that
someone would visit him some day. But through all the long years that he had
retired to this place and watched the sky from his porch each night, no one
ever came.

Because the axe was still silent, Hjorn talked to it now.
Tentatively, he told it some of his stories, the favorite tales of the
clan-singers and the hearth-rites that were the memory of his mother’s sweet
voice in the darkness. Hjorn knew the old stories because he told them to himself
in the quiet evenings as the fire burned low. He told the stories to himself
because he had no one else to tell them to anymore.

While he lived in the mountain halls of his kin, he told stories
to his grandfather and he listened to those his grandfather told. Those were
real tales, he knew. Stories of far-off war with the Gorbeyna of Kiengiraka,
and of legendary heroes delving deep beneath the mountains of the Shieldcrest,
pursuing great wealth and even greater danger in the darkness.

The stories Hjorn told only to himself were often tales of
history and lore and his people’s long travails within the earth. However, more
and more often since he had come to his bluff and built his house above the
river that had no name, Hjorn’s stories were those he made up himself. Tales
and songs of the mountain slopes, and of the wide world under the sun that he
had first heard of in his grandfather’s songs but explored now each day in his
imagination and his dreams.

He liked to remember the old days, before his grandfather died.
He had so few reasons to remember now.

He told the axe the story of the sleeping curse that claimed the
life of the Ilvani princess
Lealyan,
but it seemed unimpressed.