A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales (3 page)

When they met up in Yewnyr, the great Free City, Morghan had
carried only the clothes he wore and an ivory-hafted shortsword Scúrhand didn’t
recognize. The wealth and the weapons the warrior spent the previous year
amassing were gone, and there was an anger in him, threading through spirit and
body alike, that the mage had never seen before. On the road to Myrnan, he
loaned Morghan what he could for longsword and mail without complaint. When the
warrior paid him back tenfold after the dungeons of Eltolitinus, he no longer
needed the money but he knew better than to argue.

Only once, in the month of recovery from what Eltolitinus had
done to them, did he ask what happened to Morghan in that year. The warrior’s
stony silence convinced him of the wisdom of not asking again.

There had been a moment within the ruins. Morghan was dressing a
neck wound after a particularly brutal skirmish with Eltolitinus’s undead
hordes. Scúrhand saw the mark. A narrow sequence of three interlocking loops,
barbed like links of spiked chain. It was set in black ink at the warrior’s
shoulder, tattooed with a precision that suggested whoever had done it meant it
to last. Now, where Thiri’s shoulder had been bared by her torn tunic bunched
in Morghan’s fist, Scúrhand saw the same tight knot of jagged line on her pale
skin.

In the ruins of Myrnan, close to the breaking point already, Morghan
had drawn steel against the mage when he caught Scúrhand’s gaze on the black
mark, seemingly ready to kill. He spoke of it much later, only to apologize.
Never an explanation.

From behind and far off came faint footfalls. Scúrhand willed the
dagger’s illumination away, startled suddenly to find Morghan’s bloody hand at
his wrist, squeezing with a strength that the mage had seen break bones.

“Light…”

In the warrior’s voice, Scúrhand heard a need he didn’t
recognize. In the pulsing gleam that the dagger’s lightning conjured again, Morghan
was on his knees. His sword was cast to the side as he pulled out his own
dagger, laying the girl gently to the floor. He checked her breathing as he cut
the legging away to fully expose the wound beneath. A deep gash, dangerously
close to the fast blood.

Morghan motioned to Scúrhand for his waterskin. He flushed the
wound, hacking an edge from Thiri’s cloak to bind it. He motioned again,
Scúrhand digging within his cloak, pulling free a carefully packed glass vial.
A healing draught within it, gleaming pale blue with its own light. The mage
thought to remind Morghan that the two of them might have better need for it
later, but he said nothing as the warrior slipped the vial to the girl’s lips,
checked her suddenly even breathing, her eyes still closed, face ashen.

Scúrhand wasn’t watching, focused only on the footsteps getting
closer. “She’ll have aid soon enough,” he whispered. “Or we could take her.
They might ransom…”

“No.” Morghan’s voice held a dangerously dark edge as he grabbed
up his sword and stood, appraising the girl’s unconscious form. He pointed down
the passageway in the direction that Thiri been running. “Move,” he said.

As they pounded along endless corridors of black stone and dark
stairs, Scúrhand lost track of time, lost track of where the noise of pursuit
was coming from. He was already gasping air, Morghan barely breathing hard.
They hit more patrols twice, Scúrhand taking them out with routine spellcraft,
leaving the Norgyr warriors to slumber or to wander befuddled, stripping their
armor and weapons off as they went.

Against a foe set for the fight, the subtler spellcraft was often
the best offense, Scúrhand had discovered long ago. As he always did when the
stakes were high, he felt the call of the eldritch power in him. The darker
energy of his blood, the birthright of the names he bore. Waiting always for
its chance to be unleashed, but he was content to hold it back for now. It was
more than a hunch that told him he would be needing it later.

Ahead, there was sudden darkness. They skidded to a stop where
the corridor seemed to disappear into empty space.

“Light,” Morghan whispered. Scúrhand obliged.

At the end of the finished passageways they passed through, a
space of raw stone opened up. A blister of shadow, a rough-edged rock dome
rising where the floor suddenly fell away. It was cold there, Scúrhand feeling
it in the air, in the stone at his feet. Across a space of perhaps a dozen
strides, a narrow stone bridge arced into shadow, open space to both sides.

Far below them, a pool of black water faintly caught the light of
Scúrhand’s blade and the gleam of lamps where Ectauth’s force was spreading on
the opposite side, shifting into defensive positions along a wide terrace.

Footsteps grew louder behind them. Scúrhand glanced ahead and
back as Morghan stepped up. “Call it,” the mage said.

“We fight here, we’re closed in. We break for the bridge fast
enough, we have a chance.”

“Of course.”

With a snarling cry that he could only hope sounded like
battle-ready rage, Scúrhand soared out across the stone arch, Morghan one
stride behind him. The first hail of arrows hit like black rain, Scúrhand
summoning up the dweomer that sent each dark-barbed shaft splintering off into
empty space. Morghan ran the rough stone of the arch at a speed that made the
mage’s stomach turn, the warrior already shouting tactical directives for when
they hit the other side. Scúrhand only dimly registered them, all his focus
directed to protecting them and hoping that Morghan could avoid looking down to
the dark water below.

Ectauth hit them just past the halfway point, as Scúrhand knew he
would. He sought out the silver-armored battle-caster in the ranks, but there
was no sign of him where he must have been holding back behind the protective
cordon of archers and shield fighters. The flare of spell-force exploded in the
darkness of the chasm nonetheless, smashing into him and Morghan both like a
hammer blow.

He heard the rending of steel, saw the warrior’s longsword sundered.
It was a dweomered blade with the strength of ancient magic, Ectauth’s
spellcraft as strong as Scúrhand had feared. The warrior’s armor and shield,
the mage’s black cloak all flared as they were scoured with eldritch energy,
but they were spared. Morghan cursed as he hurled the broken hilt-end of his
blade toward a well-armored axe-fighter leaping to the attack, its jagged edge
punching through the figure’s neck to unleash a fountain of blood.

Scúrhand touched down along the rough stone ledge that fronted
the terrace, breaking hard right behind Morghan exactly as the warrior had
called it, heading straight for the thickest bulwark of defenders where they
massed behind pillars some dozen strides away. Ectauth missed them completely
with his second attack, sending the full fury of his arcane blood slamming down
into the ledge behind them. Scúrhand felt a moment’s elation that they were
clear, the battle-caster caught off guard by their suicidal charge. No chance
to hit them again as they closed with the dark-cloaked Norgyr forces.

Then he heard the grinding of stone twist through the echo of the
eldritch blast, and the rough ledge beneath his feet gave way. Ectauth had hit
behind them on purpose, judging the relative weakness of the ledge where it was
carved from the rough face of the chamber. The bridge cracked and split behind
it, cutting off escape. Nowhere to run.

Scúrhand found himself admiring the battle-caster’s tactic as the
floor ahead of them cracked cleanly and detached. He hoped he might stay alive
to use it himself some day.

Morghan stumbled as the floor disappeared, his feet churning empty
air as he fell. Then he felt hands on his shoulders, Scúrhand swooping in
beneath him, cape spread like black wings in the shadow. There was a lurch as
the mage fought to hold him against the pull of gravity. Then they were rising
clumsily, the collapsing bridge shunted off into endless shadow below them.

Ectauth hit them dead center with a pulse of spell-fire as they
climbed. The shattered landing was almost within reach, Morghan feeling a blast
of heat and light swallow them both, Scúrhand taking the brunt of it as he
screamed. A razor-point of pain erupted where the mage’s hands gripped beneath
Morghan’s shoulders, the copper ring burning as it swallowed eldritch flame.

Then those hands slipped. The warrior twisted in midair, grabbed
at Scúrhand’s smoldering form as they both fell. All around was motion and
shadow, the black pool circling far below at the edge of vision, no time to
react, no time to think.

Morghan felt for a moment’s desperate instinct, obeyed it without
question even as the thought flitted through his mind that Scúrhand would have
pointed out the futility of his actions if he had been conscious. Through an
endless moment of falling, he pulled the cloak from the mage’s shoulder,
managed to force most of one arm into the sleeve as he willed the dweomer there
to fly with all his will.

It didn’t work. Not enough to send them skyward again at any
rate, though Morghan somehow managed to slow their frenzied flight. He felt a
lurch as they twisted and shot sideways, felt them slowing even as the water
rushed up at them.

There was a moment of crushing impact, then a moment of numbing
cold. There was a darkness that Morghan fought hard, but it took him anyway in
the end.

When he awoke, he was sprawled on cold stone, no light to betray
any detail of place or position. The fact that he was soaked to the skin was
the only reason he didn’t wonder idly if he was dead, the ice water of the
black pool still clinging to him. He felt the pain in his side that told him
he’d broken ribs, senses reeling as he fought to stay awake. He gave vague
thanks to fate that his limbs were whole as he rolled to sitting, then began
the slow shifting through the blackness to find Scúrhand’s motionless body
where it lay three strides away.

He checked the mage’s blood, found a reassuring tremor of life at
his neck. Another moment’s grasping and he had the dagger free from its
scabbard, awkwardly willing its storm-light to life. A quick turn to all sides,
making sure they were alone. The vaulted space around them ran to dark walls on
all sides, empty save for the rubble of the collapsed bridge where it spread in
chalk-white drifts.

In Scúrhand’s wet cloak, Morghan found a second and last draught
of healing. He forced it between the mage’s lips and saw his breathing grow
less erratic. He remained unconscious, though. Some injury beyond the physical,
or the taint of death magic in Ectauth’s spellcraft. Nothing to do but wait.

In the dagger’s bleaching light, Morghan reached for his
longsword before he remembered it was gone. Taken from the ruins of
Eltolitinus, the ancient blade had seemed destined for Morghan’s hand when he
claimed it. A sign of a new beginning after all that had come in the long year
before. Broken now, just as every blade broke in the end.

Around him, Morghan recognized the lines of a tomb with uneasy
familiarity, but where six stone vaults stood spaced between the buttresses,
their tiers were empty. An equal number of columns circled the center of the
chamber, but there was no sign of stairs. No ladders, no handholds, no door or
other egress above. No means of exit apparent, no sign of the emptiness ever
having been disturbed.

Then above, he saw the buttressed ceiling, and a dark plane of rippling
shadow that he realized with a shock was the bottom of the ice water pool they
had plunged through. Morghan stared in disbelief for longer than he liked, the
water held there somehow by strength of sorcery. Deep enough to cushion the
fall from above, then to slow them for the second leg of the fall to the floor
below.

He had to assume that up through the pool offered an escape as
straightforward as their entrance had been. He tried not to think about what
happened if the unseen spellpower that held the water up also prevented them
from passing through it again.

Even sharper than the ache in his side, he felt the pain at his
shoulder where the black tattoo still burned even after a year. He felt the
dark memories that dogged his sleep and that he had spoken of to no one, conscious
of the questions always lingering. That spring, when he followed Scúrhand to
Myrnan at last, he had tried to turn his back on the dreams that pursued him
out of the frontier.

People who had followed him, dead now. Their faces still with
him.

Too many times, he had dreamed of the Sorcerers’ Isle. Too much,
he dreamed of the darkness of Eltolitinus.

The ruins of Myrnan were a knacker’s bone mill through which
would-be heroes were ground. Too many lives spent dreaming of places like it.
Too much wealth to be had in the catacombs and tombs that underlay the lost
Empire and the empires that fell before it. But even after the thirty centuries
since the island-castle was lost, no place in the Elder Kingdoms, perhaps in
all the world, held as much lore and wealth of the ages as Myrnan. Rumors spoke
of the farmers of the Sorcerers’ Isle too frequently tilling some relic, some
blade or other item of arcane power, up from the dead past with the passage of
a plow.

Their group had gone in as twenty-one. Only eleven came out
again. Morghan had learned the names of most of those who were lost only the
night before they took the Black Stair down beneath the earth. All the dreams
that had carried them to the Sorcerers’ Isle, all their ambition lingered now
only as dust and the memories of those who
survived
.

Too many dead in the name of unearthing the past and the secrets
it held.

Avenge them…

In his head, the unknown voice resonated with a sudden
familiarity that made Morghan realize he had all but forgotten it in the chaos
of the levels above.

He had too much left to do.

That was the thought that tore at him now. Out from the dark
dreams came the memories of the slave caravan that had set out from the foot of
the Ceilamist Mountains and wound its way through frost and forest to the
barbarian kingdoms of the untamed Jharlaash.